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  <row Id="1" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:20:34.290" Score="35" ViewCount="1180" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any proof that Svidrigailov actually committed murder in &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt;, of either Philip (his servant) or Marfa Petrovna (his wife)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By proof, I mean either a nuanced passage I might have missed in the actual book, some sort of letter or manuscript by Dostoyevsky, or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T18:40:59.093" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T18:40:59.093" Title="Is there anything that definitely confirms that Svidrigailov actually committed murder in &quot;Crime and Punishment?&quot;" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:25:47.547" Score="34" ViewCount="3087" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare&amp;#39;s_plays#Shakespeare_and_the_textual_problem&quot;&gt;well known&lt;/a&gt; that Shakespeare had no part in publishing the text of his own plays - indeed, many of them were only published posthumously. I've read that a significant proportion of his plays came to press by way of actors in his company, hoping to earn a little extra money, stealing copies of his scripts and smuggling them out to publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also read that the only parts of the scripts published today which were actually written by Shakespeare are the &lt;em&gt;lines&lt;/em&gt; - not the stage directions, nor the setting descriptions. Unfortunately, I don't have a reliable source for this claim. Is it true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do any of the stage directions in modern publications of Shakespeare plays originate from the man himself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T16:40:18.023" Title="Did Shakespeare write his own stage directions?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:29:14.640" Score="27" ViewCount="7811" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the recent adaptation of Lemony Snicket's &lt;em&gt;A Series of Unfortunate Events&lt;/em&gt;, the character Arthur Poe is portrayed with a consistent cough.  This is never touched on in the Netflix series, but is it explained why he has this cough in the books at all?  If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T05:51:57.980" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T05:51:57.980" Title="Why does Mr. Poe cough so much?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;lemony-snicket&gt;&lt;a-series-of-unfortunate-events&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="37" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:30:46.127" Score="26" ViewCount="15961" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;, there is an extensive caste system.  However, Lenina's caste is never explicitly pointed out.  She is important to many of the male characters in the book, each belonging to a different caste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What caste is she and what proof is there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T23:17:31.870" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T23:17:31.870" Title="In Brave New World, what caste is Lenina Crowne?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="299" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:31:36.920" Score="32" ViewCount="994" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently (slowly!) working through the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. Three of his stories are detective tales featuring Dupin, a possible inspiration for the more famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes: &quot;The Murders in the Rue Morgue&quot;, &quot;The Mystery of Marie Roget&quot;, and &quot;The Purloined Letter&quot;. Despite each being able to function as a stand-alone story, these three tales are clearly set in the same 'universe', linked by featuring the same characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are these the only Poe stories which are thus 'linked'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any more of his stories which connect to each other - perhaps by including some of the same characters, or the same fictional locations, or by one of them referring to the events of another - in such a way as to make clear that they're intended to be set in the same world? If so, what is the full list of such linked stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T19:35:32.300" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T19:35:32.300" Title="How many of Poe's stories are interconnected?" Tags="&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:38:20.973" Score="22" ViewCount="2550" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the fairy tales collected by the Grimm's have a moral. Is a moral lesson a requirement for fairy tales?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T15:41:05.477" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T00:51:40.350" Title="Is a moral lesson a requirement for fairy tales?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;moral&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="9" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:45:11.653" Score="58" ViewCount="23942" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the Victorian era, a writer couldn't deliberately create an openly (or even quietly) gay couple for public literary consumption. But gay people existed, and had romances. Arthur Conan Doyle knew Oscar Wilde and got on with him very well, and Wilde was not exactly shy and retiring about his tastes, so that's at least some evidence that Conan Doyle personally wasn't homophobic even by Victorian standards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes and Watson live together for many of the Sherlock Holmes stories. When Dr. Watson marries, he'll drop everything to rush to Holmes's side for an adventure at the slightest request. They refer to each other frequently with affectionate terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my dear fellow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my dear Watson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;my friend and partner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an ideal helpmate [synonym for &lt;em&gt;spouse&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the best and wisest man&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the man whom above all others I revere&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's not even getting into how Watson faints when Holmes reveals that he's not dead in &lt;em&gt;The Empty House,&lt;/em&gt; or the show-stopping breakdown Holmes briefly has when Watson is shot in &lt;em&gt;The Three Garridebs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also related to Wilde, in &lt;em&gt;The Three Students,&lt;/em&gt; Watson says, &quot;It was in the year '95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great University towns.&quot; Wilde's trial for being gay was in 1895, and many gay Londoners suddenly found a reason to take a trip out of the city for a while. I can go on for a while, but the upshot is: there's plenty of subtext and room for interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is there clear evidence, or even strong circumstantial evidence, that Conan Doyle was intending to write The Great Detective and his faithful biographer as a gay couple?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T23:43:48.273" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T07:11:21.663" Title="Did Arthur Conan Doyle code Holmes and Watson as a gay couple?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="12" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="157" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:53:36.127" Score="12" ViewCount="669" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt;, Ike Boone gets his license to practice law revoked. Do we ever find out why? Is this mentioned in &lt;em&gt;The Activist&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:29:53.123" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T18:48:17.953" Title="Do we ever find out what Ike did to have his law license revoked?" Tags="&lt;john-grisham&gt;&lt;theodore-boone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="13" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="20" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:54:15.803" Score="44" ViewCount="7004" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; is one of Ray Bradbury's most famous works and possibly one of the most famous books in modern times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my experience most people who read the book believe that Bradbury was warning of the dangers of state-sponsored censorship (i.e. the book burning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Bradbury intend for this to be a moral/message of the story? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Has he commented on the matter at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="114" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T23:26:48.890" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T10:56:04.033" Title="What message is Bradbury trying to convey in Fahrenheit 451?" Tags="&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="14" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:54:33.130" Score="8" ViewCount="289" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edith Hamilton is probably the most famous modern-day writer of Greek myths, but how did she become interested in transcribing these myths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="44" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T10:50:48.170" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T10:50:48.170" Title="How did Edith Hamilton become interested in transcribing her famous Greek myths?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;edith-hamilton&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="15" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="30" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:57:49.867" Score="30" ViewCount="11544" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;, Atticus kills a mad dog. He does it with one shot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some more symbolism to this or is it just an event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T11:33:45.370" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T02:43:53.213" Title="What is the symbolism of Atticus killing the mad dog?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="16" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2017-01-18T17:59:48.827" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some fairy tales don't have morals, and lots that do have morals that aren't that useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the Grimm brothers wrote many amoral stories, and many (not just the Grimm's) are believed to be jabs at the government or royalty at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Possible)* Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Snow White is based on Margarete von Waldeck, a girl with a horrible relationship with her stepmother, from Germany in a town where children (&quot;dwarves&quot;) were exploited in the coal mines.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cinderella is based on Rhodopis, and the story of Cinderella goes back well before the fairy tale. Rhodopis was a slave, Charaxus fell in love with her, and bought her freedom. He received an angry poem from his sister.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dick Whittington and His Cat is based on Richard Whittington who became a successful textile trader, who had a cat. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yp7st.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;See this image&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hansel and Gretel could be based on the famine of 1315-1317, or it could be based on the story of Katharina Schraderin, a baker who in the 1600s, made a ginger bread cookie so nice that a jealous male baker accused her of being a witch. She was driven from town but angry neighbors brought her back to her home, and burned her to death in her own oven.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Pied Piper of Hamelin could actually be a true story in itself. The story is set in 1284. The town of Hamelin actually exists, and there are records of 1300 AD of a stained glass window in the church showing a piper leading children out the village. At the time, stained glass windows were a way of showing current events and remembering them. There is also a manuscript from 1440/50 AD that says that in 1284, in the town of Hamelin, 130 children were taken away by a piper and never heard of again. Although there are no rats mentioned, there could have been a rat infestation at the time, and the stories could have been merged. As for why the children were taking away, there are several theories. The rats could represent a plague that killed the children, the piper could have been a paedophile or murderer that took the children, or maybe just a child trafficker.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples show that fairy tales weren't written to have a moral that children could learn, but storied of real life events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* - These are suspicions that haven't and cannot be proved&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T20:36:12.107" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T20:36:12.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="17" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:04:18.170" Score="9" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In certain franchises/shared universes, there are well known mechanisms for ensuring internal consistency (E.g. Star Wars has LucasFilm's Holocron/LSG).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Weber's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorverse&quot;&gt;Honorverse&lt;/a&gt; is a shared universe of books/stories, where other writers participate as well as Weber himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a mechanism that Weber uses for ensuring the universe's internal consistency? (Database? forum? specific set of people? his own memory?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:05:47.730" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:05:47.730" Title="What mechanism does David Weber use to ensure internal consistency of works in the shared Honorverse?" Tags="&lt;writing-process&gt;&lt;david-weber&gt;&lt;honorverse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="18" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:05:05.883" Score="12" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Fall of the House of Usher&lt;/em&gt;, Madeline Usher is put in the vault for a week, without food or water, in a coffin. This is in addition to the fact that she had been sick, and so wasn't at her healthiest then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did she survive without food and water?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T10:20:41.490" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T10:20:41.490" Title="How did Madeline Usher survive without food or water?" Tags="&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="19" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:06:06.617" Score="24" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a terminology conflict here. &lt;a href=&quot;http://fairytale-studios.com/what-makes-a-fairytale-a-fairytale/&quot;&gt;A &lt;em&gt;fairy tale&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/a&gt; a fantastical adventure, set in an indistinguishable far-off place and time, in which a good character goes through hardship and comes out with a good/happy ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;fable&lt;/em&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taleswithmorals.com/&quot;&gt;Aesop's fables&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.surfturk.com/mythology/fairytaleelements.html&quot;&gt;is&lt;/a&gt; likewise a fictional tale, but is usually shorter and &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; illustrate a moral point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taleswithmorals.com/aesop-fable-androcles.htm&quot;&gt;Androcles fable&lt;/a&gt; illustrates that &quot;Gratitude is the sign of noble souls&quot;; or the fable of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.taleswithmorals.com/the-mischievous-dog.htm&quot;&gt;Mischevious Dog&lt;/a&gt; illustrates that &quot;Those who achieve notoriety often mistake it for fame.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="40" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:06:06.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="20" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:07:52.647" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book deals with a lot of themes about censorship, so naturally you would think censorship is one of his main points or themes he is trying to convey in the book. Strangely enough, censorship was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; what he intended the book to be about. According to Bradbury, the book is about media and how it dumbs down the nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't worried about freedom, I was worried about people being turned into morons by TV. We've never had censorship in this country, we've never burned books...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids. All the popular programs on TV, the competition programs, they don't give you anything but factoids. They tell you when Napoleon was born, but not who he was. So it doesn't matter about the date. You should never memorize dates, to hell with it. So we moved into this period of history that I described in Fahrenheit 50 years ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.raybradbury.com/at_home_clips.html#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bradbury on Censorship/Television&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, he even gets angry when readers insist the book is about censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weller: have you encounted academic misinterpretation of your work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradbury: I was lecturing at Cal Fullerton once and they misinterpreted Fahrenheit 451, and after about half an hour of arguing with them, telling them that they were wrong, I said, &lt;strong&gt;“Fuck you.”&lt;/strong&gt; I've never used that word before, and I left the classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rRmlA33pEcsC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Listen+to+the+Echoes:+The+Ray+Bradbury+Interviews&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=TApnVZO5As6KyASe54GgAQ&amp;amp;ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Listen%20to%20the%20Echoes%3A%20The%20Ray%20Bradbury%20Interviews&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Listen to the Echoes&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though a lot of the book seems to be about censorship, you can see elements of &amp;quot;Media dumbing people down&amp;quot; in it. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Montag has trouble getting along with his wife because she is consumed with media. TV, telephone, plays, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clarisse seems to be one of the few characters that isn't caught up in the cycle of endless consumption. She plays outside, and is very curious. Beatty says about her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty smiled. &amp;quot;Here or there, that's bound to occur. Clarisse McClellan? We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle. We had some false alarms on the McClellans, when they lived in Chicago. Never found a book. Uncle had a mixed record; anti?social. The girl? She was a time bomb. The family had been feeding her subconscious, I'm sure, from what I saw of her school record. &lt;em&gt;She didn't want to know how a thing was done, &lt;strong&gt;but why&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. That can be embarrassing. &lt;em&gt;You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up very unhappy indeed&lt;/em&gt;, if you keep at it. The poor girl's better off dead.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beatty directly states that the firemen came about when the nation started caring more about quick and shallow consumption (TV) than deep, slow, meaningful consumption (books). Here's a pretty long quote where Beatty is talking to Montag about the origins of the firemen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty puffed his pipe. &amp;quot;Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only need understanding, to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of our profession. They don't feed it to rookies like they used to. Damn shame.&amp;quot; Puff. &amp;quot;Only fire chiefs remember it now.&amp;quot; Puff. &amp;quot;I'll let you in on it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mildred fidgeted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty took a full minute to settle himself in and think back for what he wanted to say.  &amp;quot;When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its own. Then--motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Montag sat in bed, not moving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And because they had mass, they became simpler,&amp;quot; said Beatty. &amp;quot;Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population. Films and radios, magazines, books leveled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think so.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. &amp;quot;Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera.  Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Snap ending.&amp;quot; Mildred nodded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs.  Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: 'now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.' Do you see?  Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:17:59.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="21" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="26" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:08:37.660" Score="48" ViewCount="12598" Body="&lt;p&gt;I periodically see Jack London's &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; on banned book lists, but I'm not sure why it would be – it doesn't seem that controversial.  I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics/reasons&quot;&gt;ALA's page cataloguing the reasons given for banning many classics&lt;/a&gt;, but all that appears for &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Banned in Italy (1929), Yugoslavia (1929), and burned in Nazi bonfires (1933).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was the book banned/burned in these countries?  Assuming it was on the basis of the text itself, and not merely the author, which particular passages of the book were seen as especially problematic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-19T16:20:10.503" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T16:20:10.503" Title="Why was The Call of the Wild banned?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;the-call-of-the-wild&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="22" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4916" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:09:26.510" Score="18" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Strugatsky&quot;&gt;Strugatsky brothers&lt;/a&gt; were affected by the censors overseeing the publishing of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did those experiences reflect in their books?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is about the censorship experience being part of the content, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the changes made as attempt to pacify the censors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T03:21:47.303" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T22:54:34.247" Title="How did the Strugatsky Brothers' experience with Soviet literary publishing censorship reflect on their books?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="23" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="38" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:10:18.427" Score="25" ViewCount="1408" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are well known for authoring multiple collections of traditional folk tales in the late 18th/early 19th century.  Their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales&quot;&gt;first major collection of stories&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1812. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when did they start collecting them and what prompted their interest in German folklore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:22:05.383" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T16:21:54.143" Title="When and why did the Brothers Grimm start collecting fairy tales?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;brothers-grimm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="24" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="29" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:10:36.317" Score="26" ViewCount="1795" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series, there is platform 9 &amp;frac34; in Kings Cross Station. You travel through this place to go to a magical place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Platform 13&lt;/em&gt;, by Eva Ibbotson, (which is older than Harry Potter) the Gump is a magical thing that you go through to a magical place, located in Kings Cross Station. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Platform_13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book has gained extra significance as many readers find it similar to the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, as the first book of that series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997, three years after this book was published. (They both mention a platform on Kings Cross Station, in London, that leads to a different world.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Rowling base platform nine and three quarters on The Gump?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:29:22.817" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:29:22.817" Title="Did J. K. Rowling base platform 9 3/4 on the Gump?" Tags="&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-secret-of-platform-13&gt;&lt;eva-ibbotson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="25" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:14:24.030" Score="23" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Foucault's Pendulum&lt;/em&gt; by Umberto Eco was originally written in Italian. Most of the book was translated to English, except for the parts that weren't in Italian to begin with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that decision; however, at other places in the book, specific phrases, sentences, and words are left in their original Italian. Is there diegetic significance to those phrases? If not, by what method was the book translated that led to certain untranslated words &amp;amp; phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T11:54:27.290" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T11:54:27.290" Title="In Foucault's Pendulum, by what method does the translation choose to keep or translate Italian?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;foucalts-pendulum&gt;&lt;umberto-eco&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="26" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:17:25.177" Score="47" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It, and other London works, promoted individualism and attacked totalitarianism.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go back to the plot of &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt;. Rereading it, there are a few main incidents that jump out at me as part of a larger trend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Buck's attack in Seattle on the &amp;quot;stout man, with a red sweater&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/CallOfTheWild/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; who threatens him with a hatchet and club.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His rivalry with Spitz for the lead of the sled dog team and his eventual victory and deadly overthrow of the lead dog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His attack on the Yeehats in revenge for their murder of John Thornton.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His eventual life with the wolves as a free dog.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a common pattern here: fighting back. For a sled dog, life in the Yukon means fighting for your position and sometimes your life, as per The Law of Club and Fang. Additionally, abuse by masters requires self-defense. Buck quickly learns that he needs to protect himself if he wants to survive. In a way, Buck symbolizes the author himself. In his essay, &lt;a href=&quot;http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/WarOfTheClasses/socialist.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How I Became a Socialist&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, London wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a rampant individualist. It was very natural. I was a winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individualism is terrifying for those in power. Individualism leads to fighting back against injustice, and that in turn can lead to revolution. In the 1920s - two decades after &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; was published - Italy and Yugoslavia were ruled by dictators, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benito Mussolini&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_I_of_Yugoslavia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander I&lt;/a&gt;, respectively. For both, rebellions would serve as their downfall later in their reigns, after various periods of time. &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; could inspire revolution, and so was dismissed as &lt;a href=&quot;http://world.edu/banned-books-awareness-call-wild/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;too radical&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Banning it was a natural extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ban on &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; was not an isolated incident. Since his rise to power, Mussolini took decisive action against writings of all kind. As Guido Bonsaver's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=EJSrVdbAHwQC&amp;amp;dq=Censorship+and+Literature+in+Fascist+Italy&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; explains, the dictator first targeted journalists, newspapers and periodicals in the 1920s. He only engaged in large-scale book-banning campaigns starting around 1931. Now, lest you think that the characterization of &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; as too radical is preemptive, let me note that London's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iron Heel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (as well as various works by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Gorky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maxim Gorky&lt;/a&gt;) were gathered and favored by anti-Fascists in Italy (p. 37). In other words, Mussolini had good reason to believe that London's works were actually inspiring revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less familiar with &lt;em&gt;The Iron Heel&lt;/em&gt;, but I'll take a shot at analyzing it. It focuses on a period stretching from 1912 to 1932 - really, leading up to and encompassing Mussolini's rise to power and early years. Socialism managed to become popular on both the United States and Europe, eventually leading to essentially the overthrow of governments. Once again, we see a popular uprising attacking the &lt;em&gt;status quo&lt;/em&gt;, be it fascism or otherwise. This would be rightly worrisome for Mussolini and, later, Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iron Heel&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; were not the only of London' works to essentially oppose the Nazi regime, even after his death in 1916. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sea-Wolf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sea-Wolf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1904, was written - according to London in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=i3KmAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=an+attack+on+superman+philosophy+Jack+London&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Letters of Jack London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (p. 1513) - to attack the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Übermensch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;super-man&amp;quot;) philosophy espoused by, among others, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friedrich Nietzsche&lt;/a&gt;. (London's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Eden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin Eden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; also was strongly critical of the same ideas.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;The Sea-Wolf&lt;/em&gt;, the embodiment of Nietzsche's super-man is Wolf Larsen, the captain of a schooner named the &lt;em&gt;Ghost&lt;/em&gt;. Larsen is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Extremely smart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strong, and not afraid to use intimidation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Savage.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see plenty of parallels between the life of the protagonist (Humphrey van Weyden) on the &lt;em&gt;Ghost&lt;/em&gt; and Buck's struggle for survival in &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt;. It's an environment not suited for the weak or meek, where both the captain and crew can turn against you. While van Weyden is favored by Larsen, especially after not taking part in a mutiny, he is clearly a rival of the captain, just as Buck was a rival of Spitz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference here is that Larsen is truly a super-man - and he is portrayed as cruel and cold. Essentially, the book would later be used to attack the Nazis' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;master race&lt;/a&gt; doctrine. Add on the indirect promotion of individualism and socialism, and London becomes a cocktail for revolution against the dictatorships of Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:55:34.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="27" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="21" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:18:55.687" Score="35" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because of the author's socialist views.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/censorship/bannedbooksthatshapedamerica&quot;&gt;Banned Books Week&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Generally hailed as Jack London’s best work, &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; is commonly challenged for its dark tone and bloody violence. Because it is seen as a man-and-his-dog story, it is sometimes read by adolescents and subsequently challenged for age-inappropriateness. Not only have objections been raised here, the book was banned in Italy, Yugoslavia and burned in bonfires in Nazi Germany in the late 1920s and early 30s because it was considered “too radical.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&amp;amp;address=208x13275&quot;&gt;forum thread&lt;/a&gt; cites the University of Pennsylvania as saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being 'too radical.' Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;original source&lt;/strong&gt; for this claim might be &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; from the University of Pennsylvania website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and that same year Yugoslavia banned all his works as being &quot;too radical&quot;. The Nazis also burned some of his socialist-friendly books like The Iron Heel along with the works of many other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other pages also support the same conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;London's story of a dog who lives the life of a pampered house pet until he gets a job pulling a sled was banned in Yugoslavia and Italy because of the author's socialist views. The book was also burned by the Nazis in 1933.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2012/1003/30-banned-books-that-may-surprise-you/The-Call-of-the-Wild-by-Jack-London&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Banned because it was &quot;too radical&quot; and because of the author's infamous reputation for being a supporter of Socialism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://prezi.com/3-sj8cp1mo6d/the-call-of-the-wild-a-banned-book/&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T17:26:24.893" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T17:26:24.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="28" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="42" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:19:02.810" Score="18" ViewCount="43682" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt; is a very large epic science-fiction series by Orson Scott Card. To quote wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It currently consists of fifteen novels, thirteen short stories, 47 comic issues, an audioplay, and a film.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With so many books, it's overwhelming to know where to start. Especially since the books are not all in chronological order, and are still being written today. The books that are currently out (in release order) are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Speaker for the Dead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Xenocide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Children of the Mind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ender's Shadow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Hegemon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shadow Puppets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Giant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A War of Gifts: An Ender Story&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Ender in Exile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shadows in Flight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Earth Unaware&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Earth Afire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Earth Awakens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Swarm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;em&gt;The Hive, The Queens, Shadows Alive&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Fleet School&lt;/em&gt; are planned to be released in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the chronological order of this series? And more importantly, what order should I read them in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="39" LastEditorUserId="39" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T21:30:41.707" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:35:21.707" Title="What order should I read the &quot;Ender's game&quot; series in?" Tags="&lt;enders-game&gt;&lt;orson-scott-card&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="29" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="24" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:19:15.807" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;If she did, she hasn't admitted it. In her writing on Pottermore she states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;King's Cross, which is one of London's main railway stations, has a very &lt;strong&gt;personal significance for me&lt;/strong&gt;, because &lt;strong&gt;my parents met on a train&lt;/strong&gt; to Scotland which departed &lt;strong&gt;from King’s Cross station.&lt;/strong&gt; For this reason, and because it has such an evocative and symbolic name, and because it is actually the right station to leave from if you were heading to Caledonia, &lt;strong&gt;I never knew the slightest indecision about the location of the portal that would take Harry to Hogwarts, or the means of transport that would take him there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/kings-cross-station&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King's Cross Station&lt;/em&gt; by J.K. Rowling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis is mine, but she says that her own life experiences were the inspiration. As far as it being a hidden platform, the whole Wizarding society is hidden, so naturally their train platform would be as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowling has been known to shrug off influences in the past as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam Howells for the Sunday Mirror: Is there a certain person, author or childhood experience that influenced your talent and style of writing in children's books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JK Rowling: I do not think there is a single author. I have said before, there is a writer called Elizabeth Goudge who wrote The Little White Horse. She described in minute detail the food everyone ate. The fact that the feasts at Hogwarts are fulsomely described I think. I think the fact I know what my characters are eating, I do not know what that says about me. &lt;strong&gt;I can't think of anyone who has really, you know, directly influenced it, more than that, really, sorry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/themes/opinions.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edinburgh &amp;quot;cub reporter&amp;quot; press conference, ITV, 16 July 2005&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And oddly enough J.K. Rowling isn't that into fantasy books...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Did you write Harry Potter because you like fantasy books, or just because the idea came to you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J.K. Rowling responds: The latter. In fact, I am not a great fan of fantasy books in general, and never read them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2000/1000-scholastic-chat.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;About the Books: transcript of J.K. Rowling's live interview on Scholastic.com,&amp;quot; Scholastic.com, 16 October 2000&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:57:40.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="30" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:25:22.553" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;This scene is meant to reveal more about Atticus to Scout.  When he kills the mad dog--and does so expertly, with one shot--it shows Scout that there is more to him than a lawyer and a father.  He knows how to shoot and he's good at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Take him, Mr. Finch.” Mr. Tate handed the rifle to Atticus; Jem and I nearly&#xA;  fainted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This illustrates my point well; Jem and Scout have no idea about him, really.  This also develops Atticus's character for the reader.  He can shoot and he's good at it, but he hates to and he hasn't in thirty years.  It can also be seen as &lt;a href=&quot;http://tkambehindthestory.weebly.com/the-mad-dog-as-a-symbol.html&quot;&gt;a symbol for the entire Tom Robinson trial&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T18:25:22.553" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="33" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:29:23.097" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;She grew up loving ancient Greece and its culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an excerpt of an interview, I cannot copy paste (it's an image) but &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=n6dFzH1D0EkC&amp;amp;pg=PA218&amp;amp;lpg=PA218&amp;amp;dq=Edith%20Hamilton%20on%20Greece%20interview&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=-KUax7q0LX&amp;amp;sig=3FQiaC6TsPHHcll120_s2sDyP44&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwirrdv6uMzRAhVp5YMKHRvGAMEQ6AEILjAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Edith%20Hamilton%20on%20Greece%20interview&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T18:53:18.200" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:53:18.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="37" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:38:21.383" Score="29" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Gamma or Beta, but likely Beta.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 4, Lenina expresses her disgust for the Gammas as she passes by Gammas boarding monorails after work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My word,&amp;quot; said Lenina, &amp;quot;I'm glad I'm not a Gamma.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when talking with Henry, it's clear that she is not an Epsilon - and likely an Alpha or a Beta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad I'm not an Epsilon,&amp;quot; said Lenina, with conviction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And if you were an Epsilon,&amp;quot; said Henry, &amp;quot;your conditioning would have made you no less thankful that you weren't a Beta or an Alpha.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lenina's character throughout the book is consistent with that of someone from the upper classes. She expresses clear disdain at the lower classes, while still docilely going along with the way the World State wants things to go (remember, she uses soma). While many Alphas fit that profile, Lenina's less-imaginative attitude seems to fit a Beta more than an Alpha. It's true that all the major characters in &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; are Alphas and Betas, and so we don't know what Gammas, Deltas or Epsilons really think, we should still be able to extrapolate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like Lenina is a Beta. However, when talking with Fanny while getting dressed (Chapter 3), Lenina is quite clearly wearing green - the color of Gammas! The following excerpt from the conversation between the two is interspersed with a history lesson from Mustapha Mond and the sound of sleep-teaching. All emphasis is mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Do I look all right?&amp;quot; Lenina asked. &lt;strong&gt;Her jacket was made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur; at the cuffs and collar.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Eight hundred Simple Lifers were mowed down by machine guns at Golders Green.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Green corduroy shorts&lt;/strong&gt; and white viscose-woollen stockings turned down below the knee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Then came the famous British Museum Massacre. Two thousand culture fans gassed with dichlorethyl sulphide.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;green-and-white jockey cap&lt;/strong&gt; shaded Lenina's eyes; &lt;strong&gt;her shoes were bright green&lt;/strong&gt; and highly polished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that this an oversight on Huxley's part (though the outfit is mentioned once later). I think it's also possible that Lenina decided to dress a bit nicer - after all, she's going out with Henry Foster (to Fanny's dismay). She may not even have been wearing the same green as the Gammas; her jacket is &amp;quot;bottle green&amp;quot; while their clothes are &amp;quot;leaf-green&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let's take Lenina's job into account. She works as a technician at the Hatchery - a position that needs some intelligence and skill, but is, for the most part, repetitive and monotonous. An Alpha would not be needed to do such work, but a Delta or Epsilon could not do it, and even a Gamma might not be a good choice. The skill needed seems to point to Lenina being a Beta. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/41/71&quot;&gt;as Gallifreyan pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, Linda is also a Beta, and presumably had a job similar to Lenina's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Lenina's comments, personality and job all point to her being a Beta of some sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:51:54.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="38" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="23" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:43:00.913" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, if anybody fancies reading these fairy tales, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0553382160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a good copy of it. It's mostly translated from the final edition of the original Brothers Grimm books, but with a small part from the first edition.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start, the Brothers Grimm grew up in a well-to-do family in Hanau, Germany.  Jacob was born in January 1785 and Wilhelm in February 1786, but their father (a jurist) died in 1796, when the brothers were only 10 and 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With his death, the family plunged into poverty.  With the aid of their aunt, Jacob and Wilhelm were able to attend a very good school in Kassel however. Some scholars speculate that Jacob and Wilhelm's low status in society drove them to be the best they could be, to &quot;prove something&quot; to their high-born peers.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; This school, called the Friedrichsgymnasium, focused primarily on languages and music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After graduating they attended the University of Marburg, where the Brothers' studies of folklore really took off. Under their law teacher, they started studying medieval folklore extensively.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After graduating, Jacob went back home to support the family in 1805. They had been living in &lt;em&gt;extreme&lt;/em&gt; poverty.  He found a full-time job soon after, in 1808, as a court librarian in Westphalia. Wilhelm joined him soon after. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The position didn't pay much, but it afforded ample time for research. Jacob published 13 books from then until 1830, some in combination with his brother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between 1812 and 1864, 17 editions of &lt;em&gt;Kinder- und Hausmärchen&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Children's and Household Tales&lt;/em&gt;) were published, and have been reprinted countless times since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The present translation is based in part on the first edition of the KINDER– UND HAUSMÄRCHEN published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815. The first 211 tales in this translation are based on the seventh and final edition published in 1857.  (preface, &lt;em&gt;The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2: Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: from enchanted forests to the modern world. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;3: Grimm, Wilhelm, Jacob Grimm, Jack Zipes, and Andrea Dezsö. The original folk &amp;amp; fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm: the complete first edition. Princeton: Princeton U Press, 2014. Print.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T16:21:54.143" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T16:21:54.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="39" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:44:11.057" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, yes! Shakespeare wrote a number of stage directions, though they were never exactly... thorough. For example, at the opening of Hamlet, Shakespeare writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stage directions written by Shakespeare are usually like this: short, sweet, and to the point, if present at all. The reason for this is pretty simple: he didn't really need to write down stage directions when he himself was the director! Most of the time, they appear to be more... notes, or reminders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually puts a number of... stranger and odder stage directions into a more interesting light. There are stage directions like: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Exit pursued by a bear&lt;/em&gt; (A Winter's Tale)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Enter a messenger with two heads and a hand&lt;/em&gt; (Titus Andronius)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it appears that much of the time, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xIllustrations.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the company itself wrote in stage directions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After writing out a manuscript, Shakespeare (or a professional scribe) made a copy of it in which obvious errors were corrected. The two versions had special names: the original manuscript was the &quot;foul papers&quot; because of the blots and crossouts on it. The new version was called a fair copy. It was submitted to the Master of Revels, a government censor who examined it for material offensive to the crown. If approved, the fair copy became known as a prompt copy, which the actors used to memorize their lines. The acting company bought the prompt copy, gaining sole possession of it, after paying the writer. &lt;strong&gt;The company then wrote in the stage directions (exit, enter, etc.).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that Shakespeare wrote in some small (and often humorous) stage directions as reminders, and then the remainder of the stage directions were filled in by the publisher before being passed to the actors for memorization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T16:40:18.023" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T16:40:18.023" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="40" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="224" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:50:13.960" Score="23" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/25/90&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many translated works (the first to come to mind are translations by Richard Pevear and the English versions of Isaac Bashevis Singer's writings) there are elements of the original language which is kept, while the bulk of the text is rendered into translation. Why is this done and what purpose does it serve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="90" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T23:10:07.770" Title="Translation: Why are parts of the original language kept?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="41" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:51:22.910" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My speculation is &lt;strong&gt;Beta&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excerpt from the Director's conversation with Bernard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I had the same idea as you,&amp;quot; the Director was saying. &amp;quot;Wanted to have a look at the savages. Got a permit for New Mexico and went there for my summer holiday. With the &lt;strong&gt;girl I was having at the moment&lt;/strong&gt;. She was a &lt;strong&gt;Beta-Minus&lt;/strong&gt;, and I think&amp;quot; (he shut his eyes), &amp;quot;I think she had yellow hair. Anyhow she was pneumatic, particularly pneumatic; I remember that. . . .&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Emphasis mine &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Director is talking about Linda, and not Lenina. Yet, it is safe to assume, given the way Linda and Lenina are treated and even described by surrounding men, that they were of the same class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Linda says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm a Beta; I worked in the Fertilizing Room; nobody ever taught me to do anything like that. It wasn't my business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:17:43.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="42" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:55:15.090" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my personal opinion, the best order would be the publishing order. It's the order they were written in and for the most part is pretty straight forward. The main stories, in order of publication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speaker for the Dead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Xenocide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Children of the Mind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ender's Shadow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Hegemon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow Puppets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Giant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the in-universe chronological order is a bit different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ender's Shadow&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Hegemon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow Puppets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow of the Giant&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Speaker for the Dead&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Xenocide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Children of the Mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, it's up to you. This list also doesn't include the &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; other books in the same universe, it's just the main ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:35:21.707" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:35:21.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="43" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2038" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:57:09.733" Score="18" ViewCount="2883" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a somewhat popular theory about &lt;em&gt;The Kingkiller Chronicle&lt;/em&gt;, which is that the name &amp;quot;Denna&amp;quot; derives from the use of denner resin, and its addictive properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory branches two directions: the first speculates that the name is supposed to be symbolic, rather than textual. Denna is an addictive person for Kvothe to be around, and causes long-term detrimental effects to his mental health and well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second theory states that Kvothe is an unreliable narrator, and since it's well-established already that Kvothe has an unfortunate tendency to embellish his stories, it's plausible that Kvothe simply has a denner resin addiction. Consequently, he'd be personifying that addiction in Denna. Curiously, this seems to have some more support: from Kvothe's extended poverty despite wealth, to the fact that seemingly every time he loses wealth, Denna leaves him (though this is never portrayed in a cause-effect way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there textual reasons to believe either of these theories are true? (Or, alternately, are there good reasons to disbelieve them?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T18:46:01.737" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T18:46:01.737" Title="Is this hypothesis about the significance of the name &quot;Denna&quot; in the Kingkiller Chronicle supported by the text?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;patrick-rothfuss&gt;&lt;the-kingkiller-chronicle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="44" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="45" CreationDate="2017-01-18T18:59:54.940" Score="18" ViewCount="886" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a trope that I've seen sometimes in comic books. I haven't seen it in prose fiction yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, we see a character who provides comic relief become highly capable for a single issue or chapter. Examples include a few Donald Duck stories, or Lambik from Suske &amp;amp; Wiske (Spike and Suzy).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon usually happens when the story requires a strong character to get something done; the character who provides comic relief is a logical choice as they can afford to be somewhat inconsistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for this trope? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T00:49:09.463" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T00:49:09.463" Title="Is there a name for a comic relief character that temporarily becomes highly capable?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="45" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="44" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:08:16.993" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most related trope would probably be &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass&lt;/a&gt;, when a minor character with no apparent skills turns out to be a super-secret ninja-assasin in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A subtrope of this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TookALevelInBadass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Took a Level in Badass&lt;/a&gt;, which is seems to be pretty much what you're looking for. This is when a character pretty much suddenly develops a cool power, though it can be temporary or permanent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also could be &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BewareTheSillyOnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beware the Silly Ones&lt;/a&gt;, where a goofy villain turns out to be your worst nightmare. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://undertale.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Undertale&lt;/a&gt; genocide route &lt;a href=&quot;http://undertale.wikia.com/wiki/Sans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;boss&lt;/a&gt; is a good example of this. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BewareTheNiceOnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beware the Nice Ones&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BewareTheQuietOnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beware the Quiet Ones&lt;/a&gt; are also similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Warning: All but 2 links are TV tropes links. &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/609/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Click at your own risk...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T18:11:21.073" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:11:21.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="46" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="48" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:11:08.510" Score="16" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a film &lt;em&gt;The Danish Girl&lt;/em&gt; based on the fictional novel of the same name by David Ebershoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The film has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Danish_Girl_(film)#Ban&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;banned in some countries&lt;/a&gt; on grounds of moral depravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the novel been banned in some countries as well? If not, was the novel less controversial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T11:26:37.737" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T11:26:37.737" Title="Has The Danish Girl novel been banned in any countries?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;david-ebershoff&gt;&lt;the-danish-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="47" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="51" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:18:30.480" Score="19" ViewCount="687" Body="&lt;p&gt;J.R.R Tolkien famously created his world and then created the stories he put in them.  He was a professor, historian, and linguist by profession, and his writing style in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; is very history-like.  How much real experience did he have in writing before he began writing things in his world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:36:23.783" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T18:36:23.783" Title="How much experience did Tolkien have in writing?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="48" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="46" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:25:16.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure the answer is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From checking the internet, it seems that the film was but the book wasn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some sources that might help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Books banned by governments- Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_commonly_challenged_books_in_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Most commonly challenged books in the US - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.postdesk.com/banned-books-list-reasons-why-censorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Banned books and list of reasons why - Postdesk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.banned-books.org.uk/all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Banned books - banned books org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ctrl - F 'danish' comes up with nothing on any of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether or not the novel was less controversial, I don't think that even if it wasn't it would have been banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books are less likely to be banned. As long as they aren't religious in religion sensitive countries, then very few books are banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are probably quite a few transgender books, but a film is different from a book. A film is a visual and some countries may not want these images shown, but very few countries will ban (non-religious) books, because with writing you can imagine it, whereas a film you are given the images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T19:32:16.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:32:16.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="49" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:25:41.900" Score="11" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically speaking, Dan Brown's Langdon books are part of a series in a common universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at first glance, they don't seem to be all that related to each other - more like Fleming's 007 than Harry Potter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you required to read any of Langdon books by Dan Brown to properly understand and enjoy the next ones?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, is there important information in any of the earlier books that the reader of later books would find necessary to increase their understanding/enjoyment (assuming they aren't afraid of spoilers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T17:17:26.603" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:13:33.753" Title="Are you required to read any of Langdon books by Dan Brown to properly understand and enjoy the next ones?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;dan-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="50" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="54" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:26:28.123" Score="12" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am being inspired by George R.R. Martin and his &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; series which is currently at 24 years (&lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt; was released in 1996) since the publication of the first work in the series and will only grow as the series is not finished and is being constantly delayed by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What series in fiction has the longest time frame between the release of the first work in the series and completion of the series?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers should be limited based on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fictional work of &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. not a film or television series, or novelizations based on the same)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Installments written by the same author as the first work&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Be a completed series&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can be different story lines but must be in the same &amp;quot;universe&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Must be the same medium as original publication (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; was published as novel series, but &lt;em&gt;Fantastic Beasts&lt;/em&gt; is a film series)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T17:45:44.293" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T19:23:41.773" Title="What fictional series has the longest release to completion?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="12" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="51" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="47" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:27:18.073" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;He wrote some (fiction) stories before LOTR, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father_Christmas_Letters&quot;&gt;The Father Christmas Letters&lt;/a&gt; were written for his children, he wrote them pretending to be Santa.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roverandom&quot;&gt;Roverrandom&lt;/a&gt;, a children's book about a dog and a wizard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Giles_of_Ham&quot;&gt;Farmer Giles of Ham&lt;/a&gt;, a comical fable about a farmer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also wrote more stories after LOTR, in addition to a couple (non-fiction) research papers before that. So he wasn't entirely new to writing in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:27:18.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="52" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:30:30.890" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The children remembered Mr. Poe because he always had a cold and was&#xA;  constantly excusing himself fromthe table to have a fit of coughing in the next room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top quote is from Book 1 (&lt;em&gt;The Bad Beginning&lt;/em&gt;) and the next is from Book 2 (&lt;em&gt;The Reptile Room&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The driver of the car was Mr. Poe, a family &#xA;  friend who worked at a bank and always had &#xA;  a cough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems he is just sickly, and is constantly at a state of having a cold--which seems like a rather unfortunate event to me.  Or he has constant year-round mild allergies and hasn't found a fix for them yet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:30:30.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="53" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="56" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:30:46.137" Score="5" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1960s there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=outer%20limits%20comics&amp;amp;tbm=isch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Outer Limits&lt;/em&gt; comics&lt;/a&gt; published every few months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many comics were published in total and across which period? Was it between 1964-1969?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T19:51:24.217" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:51:24.217" Title="How many The Outer Limits comics were published in the 60s?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="54" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:32:07.293" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars%C3%A8ne_Lupin&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arsène Lupin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; adventure novels were published between 1905 and 2012, all written by author Maurice Leblanc. The final work was found completed in 2011 by chance and subsequently published years posthumously. For a grand total of &lt;strong&gt;107 years&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blandings_Castle&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blandings Castle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a group of works in a shared universe by author P.G. Wodehouse, that spans a timeframe of &lt;strong&gt;62 years&lt;/strong&gt; finishing at the author's death. From 1915-1977. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea&quot;&gt;Earthsea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is currently sitting at &lt;strong&gt;50 years&lt;/strong&gt; with published works starting in 1964 and ending in 2014, with no confirmation that Ursula K. Le Guin is finished with this world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Thomas_Covenant&quot;&gt;The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are probably in the top as a completed series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First started with &lt;em&gt;Lord Fouls Bane&lt;/em&gt; in 1977, and it has finally concluded with &lt;em&gt;The Last Dark&lt;/em&gt; in 2013 giving it a total of &lt;strong&gt;36 years&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T14:09:56.597" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:09:56.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="55" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:32:37.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld&quot;&gt;Discworld&lt;/a&gt; isn't one main storyline, but it started in 1983 and ended in 2015, so 32 years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time&quot;&gt;The Wheel of Time&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; one main storyline, clocking in at 23 years (1990 - 2013).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riftwar_Cycle&quot;&gt;The Riftwar Cycle&lt;/a&gt; is from 1982 to 2013, at 31 years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the king of them all is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanth&quot;&gt;Xanth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, with 39 years and counting!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By Piers Anthony, this series started in 1977 and a book is planned for this year also, in April. That will be year 40.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannara&quot;&gt;Shannara is also 39 years, but it doesn't have a new one coming out as far as I know.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:32:37.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="56" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="53" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:34:28.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;18 issues total. (I looked up full sets of the comic) The last was written in October of 1969. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:34:28.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="57" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:35:29.340" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we aren't restricting it to completed series, Larry Niven's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kzin&quot;&gt;Kzinti&lt;/a&gt; started in 1966 and were still going as recently as 2012, so &lt;strong&gt;46 years&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;51 years&lt;/strong&gt; depending on whether you're counting 2017. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:35:29.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="58" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:35:46.120" Score="23" ViewCount="1650" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; series, Sauron, and characters allied with Sauron, are frequently associated with the colors red, yellow, and black. For example, here is a description of the Haradim -- a group of men allied with Sauron -- from &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They the are fierce. They have &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; eyes, and long &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; hair, and &lt;strong&gt;gold&lt;/strong&gt; rings in their ears; yes, lots of beautiful &lt;strong&gt;gold&lt;/strong&gt;. And some have &lt;strong&gt;red&lt;/strong&gt; paint on their cheeks, and &lt;strong&gt;red&lt;/strong&gt; cloaks; and their flags are &lt;strong&gt;red&lt;/strong&gt;, and the tips of their spears; and they have round shields, &lt;strong&gt;yellow&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; with big spikes. Not nice; very cruel wicked Men they look. Almost as bad as Orcs, and much bigger. Sméagol thinks they have come out of the South beyond the Great River’s end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: the eye of Sauron is described in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;rimmed with &lt;strong&gt;fire&lt;/strong&gt;, but was itself glazed, &lt;strong&gt;yellow&lt;/strong&gt; as a cat’s, watchful and intent, and the &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothingness.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could list more examples of this, but suffice it to say, the more you read the story, the more obvious this pattern becomes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T21:27:08.003" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T18:10:56.593" Title="Why are Orcs associated with the colors red, yellow, and black in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="59" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="47" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:36:31.503" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien started writing while on the Western Front. He wrote down his war experiences of the Great War down in &lt;em&gt;Lost Tales&lt;/em&gt; according to his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/&quot;&gt;biography on the Tolkien Society.&lt;/a&gt; (Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; “… in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing – he read &lt;strong&gt;The Fall of Gondolin&lt;/strong&gt; to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien did &lt;em&gt;publish&lt;/em&gt; a vocabulary book (A Middle English Vocabulary) and translated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Gawain_and_the_Green_Knight&quot;&gt;Sir Gawain and the Green Knight&#xA;&lt;/a&gt; before writing the Hobbit. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/books-by-tolkien/&quot;&gt;The Tolkien Society: Books by Tolkien&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Book of Lost Tales I &amp;amp; II were published after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:36:31.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="60" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="292" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:36:38.023" Score="13" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did James Bond ever experience doubts about having to end people's lives in Fleming's novels? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm talking about doubts in general, existential, level, regarding the fact that he had to end lots of people's lives regularly as part of his job; not a specific &quot;oh, this particular person deserved to live because reasons&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T14:21:43.403" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:47:44.490" Title="Did James Bond ever experience doubts about having to end people's lives in Fleming's novels?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ian-fleming&gt;&lt;james-bond&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="61" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="66" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:38:31.100" Score="14" ViewCount="1243" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://the39clues.scholastic.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series is written by a whole lot of authors, like Rick Riordan, Gordan Korman, Jude Watson, Margaret Peterson Haddix, etc. Each person writes a book, and then someone else writes the next book, with some authors coming back to write more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do they decide together what will happen, such as who dies, where Amy and Dan go, etc?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:43.377" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:48:27.387" Title="How did the authors of The 39 Clues decide on a plot outline?" Tags="&lt;the-39-clues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="62" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="58" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:40:03.947" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn’t coincidental. In Margaret Sinex’s fantastic paper titled “Monsterized Saracens, Tolkien’s Haradrim, and Other Medieval ‘Fantasy Products’” (appearing in the 2010 Volume 7 edition of the Tolkien Studies journal), she notes how these colors were used by medieval Europeans to depict Jews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from Debra Strickland’s book &lt;em&gt;Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both yellow and red are colors that feature consistently in pejorative images of Jews, and both colors had contemporary associations with criminals and other social undesirables including Jews themselves once they were forced to wear the yellow badge of infamy in certain regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s an example of this from the Lorenzkirche (Church of St. Lawrence) in Germany. In this stained glass picture, several Jews are shown worshiping the golden calf (i.e. being idolatrous). Notice how one of the ways the figures are identified as Jewish is through their yellow hats and clothing. (For a more detailed analysis of this picture, consult Sinex’s paper or Strickland’s book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/13ljY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/13ljY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of Jews with yellow hats and clothes worshiping the Golden Calf. There are also some red elements in the picture (a pair of pants, a hat)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/art/stainedglass/misc/16.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Photograph by George P. Landow.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien was a medievalist, so this is yet another example of him incorporating medieval literature and art into his writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170511183139/http://taxicrash.github.io/2016/05/11/tolkien-race/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This answer was taken from my blog post on race in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T18:10:56.593" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T18:10:56.593" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="63" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="58" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:41:07.923" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;These colours are generally considered 'evil' and frequently are associated with evil characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Black&lt;/strong&gt; is easy to explain. Humans have an instinctive fear of the dark, and blackness inbuilt since the time of the cavemen. Death can be found in the dark, so black is considered evil. For instance 'the dark side'&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Red&lt;/strong&gt; is associated with danger or poison. It is also similar to the colour of blood, associated with pain and death&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yellow&lt;/strong&gt; is also considered evil, but not as often. It is also associated with gold, which in fantasy books, often leads to fights, fatalities, goblins or dragons. It can also be for danger. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Tolkien is indirectly telling us that the orcs are evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T01:46:31.807" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:46:31.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="64" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="229" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:41:38.163" Score="21" ViewCount="1641" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often, in a large novel, a character would have a character development arc, which is considered an integral part of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Sherlock Holmes canon consists mostly of smaller stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there a cross-story character development arc for Holmes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T20:47:19.080" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:47:19.080" Title="Did Sherlock Holmes have a character development arc across Arthur Conan Doyle's books?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="65" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1652" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:43:14.513" Score="6" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues, The Clue Hunt: In Too Deep&lt;/em&gt;, Irina Spasky dies in a fire set by Isabel Kabra rescuing Alistair Oh and Amy and Dan Cahill. (Chapter 25, pages 196-198)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why didn't she just jump from the roof? She was &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; the roof, having vaulted up there to save the others. She would have had a much better chance of living if she had jumped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did she decide not to jump, and instead stay on the roof as it collapsed?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T00:25:28.323" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T00:25:28.323" Title="Why did Irina choose to die in the fire and not jump?" Tags="&lt;the-39-clues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="66" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="61" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:44:05.487" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 39 Clues series is currently maintained by Scholastic, with them choosing the next author. The storyline is pre-decided, and each author writes the next part of the plot.  For example, Scholastic came up with the outline and Rick Riordan fleshed out the main storyline and wrote the first book, &lt;em&gt;The Maze of Bones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190819033843/http://www.scholastic.com/internationalrights/pdfs/39cluesFAQ.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See here for a slightly old (but still accurate as far I as can tell) explanation.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a quote from that page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is writing The 39 Clues books?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rick Riordan, #1 NYT bestselling author of the Percy Jackson series, kicks off the action with the first book, MAZE OF BONES, which introduces the main characters, sets the tone for the series, and reveals the first big clue. &lt;strong&gt;Riordan is also the architect of THE 39 CLUES story arc; he’s created the entire plot outline for the central mystery.&lt;/strong&gt; Millioncopy selling author Gordon Korman (Island, Everest, Dive) has written Book 2.&#xA;Acclaimed author Peter Lerangis (The Watchers, Antarctica, Spy-X) will write Book 3. Jude Watson, New York Times bestselling Star Wars Series author will write Book 4. Patrick Carman, author of the internationally bestselling Land of Elyon series, will write Book 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T20:48:27.387" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:48:27.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="67" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:48:08.160" Score="12" ViewCount="3645" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; contains an absurd amount of biblical references, one of which being the titular character. The creature is obviously supposed to be some kind of demon or devil, but is this a specific reference to a specific religious creature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the Lord of the Flies have any kind of religious reference more specific than just the Devil?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T17:39:15.407" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:32:52.653" Title="Did the Lord of the Flies have any kind of religious reference more specific than just the Devil?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="68" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:50:53.670" Score="15" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that Dostoyevsky as a person didn't like Jews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there clear evidence of that in his books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd prefer evidence of things that arise above things that were commonplace normal stereotypes in Russian society of the time, such as Pushkin's Jewish moneylender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:10:59.147" Title="Is there evidence of anti-Semitism in Dostoyevsky's books?" Tags="&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="69" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:53:48.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of 3 other references, just in the very first bit of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The island could be considered to be Eden from the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;snake-thing&quot; could be a reference to the serpent who tempted Adam and Eve&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(a bit of a stretch but sorta) Ralph's removal of his clothes to bathe could be related to baptism/the fact that Adam and Eve didn't start with any clothes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T19:53:48.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="70" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:53:54.220" Score="12" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beginning, or less talented, writers often consciously or subconsciously imitate the style of earlier creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are any works by Pushkin (past the age of 20) known to copy someone else's style, especially on purpose - as a tribute, or any other reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I want to exclude parodies where the copying was done for satirical reasons).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T18:10:01.837" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T20:48:25.087" Title="Did Pushkin ever deliberately copy the style of anyone else?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;alexander-pushkin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="71" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:54:21.167" Score="24" ViewCount="13495" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1984, London is the chief city of the province Airstrip One (which consists of the UK), which is a part of the superstate Oceania. Is there a reason why it's called Airstrip One?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T09:05:31.240" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T13:53:50.477" Title="Why is the UK called Airstrip One?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="72" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="83" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:54:41.670" Score="14" ViewCount="3390" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the symbolism of the name Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/albus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albus&lt;/a&gt;' means white&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dumbledore&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dumbledore&lt;/a&gt;' is a type of bee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this representing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T16:18:26.977" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T16:18:26.977" Title="Symbolism of Albus Dumbledore's name in Harry Potter" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="73" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1781" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:55:37.100" Score="24" ViewCount="1338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Vladimir Nabokov ever indicate on record whether he intended &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; to be read non-linearly, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; jumping to each line reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend and I read the book together last summer. He read the book as one normally would (sequentially, pagewise). Me, I'm a little pedantic about reading every footnote and endnote, so I ended up chasing the line references all over the book, jumping multiple levels down before &amp;quot;resurfacing&amp;quot; (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth-first_search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;depth-first search&lt;/a&gt;). One cool effect of this was that I was able to skip larger and larger swaths of pages as I neared the end, since I'd already read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So obviously, my friend and I had completely different experiences. My experience seemed to have more clarity about the story from the beginning, and also it was interesting not having a sense of when the book would end, despite holding a physical copy. Meanwhile, my friend's experience seemed more surreal, fragments and ideas not fitting into any storyline until much later, entirely dependent on what his memory held on to, making a Joyce-like impressionist effect. I envy I'll never experience this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Nabokov probably wouldn't declare there's a &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; way to read his book. But I'm curious whether he hinted his intention for readers in any note or interview. Or if not, whether there are now any professional opinions on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T19:30:13.793" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T19:30:13.793" Title="Was Nabokov's Pale Fire intended to be read non-linearly, i.e. jumping to each line reference?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;&lt;pale-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="74" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:56:24.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire book can be seen as an allegory for the Bible.  It has a startlingly large number of allusions to Jewish and Christian myths and stories.  Here are some of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The island, in the beginning, is a parallel for the Garden of Eden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ralph's first act upon reaching the island is to take off his clothes and jump into the water.  This symbolizes the nakedness of Adam and Eve and the Christian rite of Baptism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The boys then form a society out of this, like the human race forming out of Adam and Eve&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack and Ralph can be seen as Cain and Abel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The beastie, which the boy with the birthmark refers to as a snake-thing, like the snake of Eden leading to original sin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obviously, the whole &quot;Lord of the Flies=Satan&quot; thing, as well as the translation of Beezlebub into Lord of the Flies.  The Lord of the Flies might also represent the snake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, Satan does not bring about the &quot;original sin.&quot;  Instead, the evil is found within the residents of Eden.  Thus Golding is proclaiming against religion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simon as Christ. This is a bit of a stretch, but sort of makes sense when you think about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; tries to demonstrate that the Bible was wrong; that men have always had evil inside of us, and that it was not the snake's fault, that is just human nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't hurt that the whole thing comes from World War II, in which Golding fought; this is probably where he got those ideas about human nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T22:14:52.590" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T22:14:52.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="75" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:56:33.873" Score="9" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Urantia_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page about &lt;em&gt;The Urantia Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the author is unknown. On the &lt;a href=&quot;http://truthbook.com/urantia-book/the-authors-of-the-urantia-book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; it's said the authors include universe beings (such as archangels, chief of Seraphim, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However somebody had to write the book. Is there any evidence pointing to who did it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T10:27:11.353" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T02:43:39.490" Title="Who wrote The Urantia Book?" Tags="&lt;apocryphal-works&gt;&lt;the-urantia-book&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="76" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2177" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:56:51.107" Score="14" ViewCount="2524" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R. A. Salvatore's books &lt;strong&gt;The Legend of Drizzt&lt;/strong&gt; series, the main character Drizzt Do'Urden is a Drow, a species in Forgotten Realms that live underground and far cousins to elves.  Drow have characteristically red eyes.  However, Salvatore decided to give Drizzt purple eyes.  What was behind the decision to give Drizzt purple eyes instead of the standard red eyes for Drow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T18:11:43.327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T18:06:53.627" Title="Why are Drizzt's eyes purple?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;legend-of-drizzt&gt;&lt;r-a-salvatore&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="77" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:57:26.870" Score="19" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prior to Russo-Japanese war and Teddy Roosevelt's efforts to end it, I don't recall USA being overly involved with Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, was that reflective in American literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How wide/common was the exploration of Japan's culture in American literature before 1905?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:10:07.760" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:10:07.760" Title="How wide was the exploration of Japan's culture in American literature before 1905?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="78" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:57:35.413" Score="9" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Goosebumps&lt;/em&gt; series, are any of the books, except for the sequels, connected to each other? I.e. characters appearing in another book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, if Slappy the dummy appeared in the book about the girl turning into a bird, that would be a definitive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T19:30:37.490" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T19:30:37.490" Title="Are the Goosebumps books connected in any way?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;goosebumps&gt;&lt;r-l-stine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="79" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:59:25.277" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Albus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you state, Albus translates to &amp;quot;white&amp;quot;, which was a nod to alchemy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colours also played their part in the naming of Hagrid and Dumbledore, whose first names are Rubeus (red) and Albus (white) respectively. &lt;strong&gt;The choice was a nod to alchemy,&lt;/strong&gt; which is so important in the first Harry Potter book, where 'the red' and 'the white' are essential mystical components of the process. &lt;strong&gt;The symbolism of the colours in this context has mystic meaning, representing different stages of the alchemic process&lt;/strong&gt; (which many people associate with a spiritual transformation). Where my two characters were concerned, I named them for the alchemical colours to convey their opposing but complementary natures: red meaning passion (or emotion); &lt;strong&gt;white for asceticism;&lt;/strong&gt; Hagrid being the earthy, warm and physical man, lord of the forest; &lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore the spiritual theoretician, brilliant, idealised and somewhat detached.&lt;/strong&gt; Each is a necessary counterpoint to the other as Harry seeks father figures in his new world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/colours&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colours by J.K. Rowling&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J.K. Rowling just imagined him as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did you decide what to name your characters and places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I collect unusual names. I have notebooks full of them. Some of the names I made up, like Quidditch, Malfoy. Other names mean something -- Dumbledore, which means &amp;quot;bumblebee&amp;quot; in Old English...seemed to suit the headmaster, because one of his passions is music and &lt;strong&gt;I imagined him walking around humming to himself.&lt;/strong&gt; And so far I have got names from saints, place-names, war memorials, gravestones. I just collect them -- I am so interested in names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/0399-barnesandnoble.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barnes and Noble interview, March 19, 1999&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:48:29.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="81" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T19:59:26.103" Score="13" ViewCount="12934" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that various characters represent real Soviet figures. Who does Mollie, the horse sympathetic to the humans, represent? Is she just a generic non-Soviet sympathizer or does she represent any other major figure in reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T13:26:31.717" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:33:47.870" Title="Who does Mollie represent in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="83" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:01:23.593" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last name is actually not that fancy. As this old interview with Rowling states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did you decide what to name your characters and places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I collect unusual names. I have notebooks full of them. Some of the names I made up, like Quidditch, Malfoy. Other names mean something -- &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore, which means &amp;quot;bumblebee&amp;quot; in Old English...seemed to suit the headmaster, because one of his passions is music and I imagined him walking around humming to himself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; And so far I have got names from saints, place-names, war memorials, gravestones. I just collect them -- I am so interested in names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/0399-barnesandnoble.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barnes and Nobles Interview with J.K. Rowling (1999)&lt;/a&gt;; Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:57:51.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="84" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="68" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:01:27.697" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not well acquainted with most of Dostoevsky's writings, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Dead_(novel)&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; stands out as a controversial case. In it, we see the character Isay Fomitch Bumstein, who worked as both a jeweler and a pawnbroker (close enough to the stereotypical Jewish moneylender). Apart from his job, Dostoevsky's physical characterization of Bumstein is not quite flattering. &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/studentpapers/Anti-semite.shtml&quot;&gt;This short essay&lt;/a&gt; puts together some criticisms of the jeweler's appearance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Goldstein states, &quot;The caricature quality of the portrait is potent, and the intention of the author is unmistakably clear: to laugh at the little Jew and provoke laughter at his expense.&quot;6 Dostoevsky reminds us that Isay Fomitch is a &quot;skinny, feeble, puny man of around fifty...with a white body like a chicken's&quot; (IX, pg. 105). Immediately after drawing this image, Dostoevsky marshals a series of moral traits which stigmatize Isay Fomitch and to a certain extent, the larger Jewish nation. He calls attention to Isay Fomitch as &quot;a most comical mixture of naiveté, stupidity, craft, impudence, good nature, timidity, boastfulness and insistence&quot; (IX, pg. 106).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter X, Bumstein's first arrival to the prison actually involves moneylending, as he is intimidated into letting a convict pawn his (worthless) raggedy clothing. It would be wrong to characterize Dostoevsky's treatment of the main as wholly repugnant, but it falls squarely into the category of &quot;clear evidence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the essay points out, we also see some anti-Semitic tones in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. While there are some minor side references to Jews in the moneylending business (again, a negative stereotype), there is one passage where a character suggests that some believe that Jews kill and eat children. While there is no clear indication that anyone treats this claims as anything but ridiculous, there is certainly no clear rejection of the general tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, you see the moneylending stereotype perpetuated on several of Dostoevsky's works. But there are additional negative characterizations - the overt characterization of Bumstein as a fool and the references to savage Jewish rituals - that seem to at least waggle some eyebrows at the phrase &quot;anti-Semitism&quot;, if not point to it directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T20:10:59.147" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:10:59.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="85" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:03:47.787" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There wasn't much development. Most of the stories are short stories, and they rely upon the relationships established for the series - Holmes as the genius, Watson as the storyteller and the person to whom Holmes explains. And occasionally Lestrade as the failing regular police, to show why Holmes is needed in the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did try to get rid of the character; having Holmes murdered by Moriarty, and by telling us that Holmes retired to become a beekeeper in &quot;His Last Bow&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preface to &lt;em&gt;The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; is telling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived  their  time,  are  still  tempted  to  make  repeated  farewell  bows  to  their  indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the main character became stuck in his role early on, to the point that the writer himself considered it monotonous. If Sir Arthur Conan Doyle could have broken this &quot;monotony&quot; by adding character development, he probably would have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:03:47.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="86" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="72" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:05:17.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quote from Rowling herself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many of the names are invented, for example &quot;Quidditch&quot; and &quot;Muggle.&quot; I also collect unusual names, and I take them from all sorts of different places. &quot;Hedwig&quot; was a saint, &quot;Dumbledore&quot; is an old English word for &quot;bumblebee,&quot; and &quot;Snape&quot; is the name of a place in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albus is also interesting.  It's probable she just liked the word; Albus might have something to do with white=good.  It also could be a reference to Gandalf the White.  Albus can also mean wise, and could be a reference to Merlin (Albion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Percival is the name of Albus's father.  No idea where Wulfric and Brian are from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:05:17.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="87" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="95" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:06:45.443" Score="24" ViewCount="6122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade_(poem)&quot;&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade&lt;/a&gt; is an 1854 narrative poem at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it glorify war or criticize it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T13:44:00.130" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T06:02:56.443" Title="Does &quot;The Charge of the Light Brigade&quot; glorify war or criticize it?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="89" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="81" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:11:02.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://animal-farm.fandom.com/wiki/Mollie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mollie&lt;/a&gt; represented the Russian bourgeoisie.  She likes being pampered and fled Russia after the revolution.  She now reminisces of her wealthier days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she leaves,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“none of the animals ever mentioned Mollie again”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is unpleasant and demands sugar and ribbons too much; unused to the harder life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T13:33:47.870" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:33:47.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="91" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:12:08.497" Score="16" ViewCount="3076" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked this question on the old literature site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/16127/what-do-the-other-farmers-symbolize-in-animal-farm&quot;&gt;it got migrated to the science fiction and fantasy site&lt;/a&gt;, and then was later closed as off-topic. I figured that I might as well ask the question here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember reading somewhere that Mr. Pilkington, Frederick, and the other farmers in Animal Farm symbolized different countries, but I forgot which country they each symbolized. Is that true, and if it is, can someone remind me which countries the individual farmers symbolized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:31:31.910" Title="What do the other farmers symbolize in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;animal-farm&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="92" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:13:17.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem appears to glorify war with its talk of bravery and talk of honouring the light brigade. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the second to last stanza appears to contradict this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While horse and hero fell. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  They that had fought so well &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Came through the jaws of Death, &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Back from the mouth of hell, &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  All that was left of them,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Left of six hundred. &lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem both honors their bravery, but notes that their bravery got them killed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://letterpile.com/poetry/Tennyson-The-Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade-Honour-and-Glory&quot;&gt;To quote this article&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Tennyson's soldiers are bold, heroic, glorious, honourable, noble and dead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:13:17.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="93" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="108" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:13:25.280" Score="33" ViewCount="27414" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book 1984, being about suppression of information itself, was banned in the USSR for being anti-communist, but it also was banned in the USA for being pro-communist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any analysis where this apparent contradiction is explained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:46:11.957" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T02:05:40.363" Title="George Orwell's 1984 banned for contradictory reasons?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="94" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:14:40.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Guardian's poetry critic, Carol Rumens, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jan/20/poem-of-the-week-charge-light-brigade-tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's neither&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think it sets out to glorify war, but it's certainly not a protest. It recreates the sabre-flashing excitement of warfare, even in the ironical context of bare sabres against guns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-30T11:58:04.427" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T11:58:04.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="95" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:15:57.047" Score="23" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade glorifies the warriors, not the war.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the poem, we see exaltation of the soldiers for their bravery. They are described as brave, bold, and having &quot;fought so well&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the second stanza reveals that the poem's writer considered the charge a farce:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not tho' the soldier knew&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some one had blunder'd:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs not to make reply,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs not to reason why,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs but to do &amp;amp; die,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem describes the act as charging &quot;Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell &quot; and describes the reaction to the charge as all the world wondering. This shows a disdain for the commands leading to the charge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:15:57.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="96" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:16:18.630" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It glorifies the six hundred while criticizing the leaders of the charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some quotes highlighting it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'All in the valley of Death' - Shows the mistake sending soldiers to their deaths&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Someone had blundered.' - Shows the mistake&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell' - shows how they were blindly sent to their deaths&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And glorification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Boldly they rode and well,' - praises them&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'While horse and hero fell.' - calls the heroes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Honour the charge they made! Honour the Light Brigade, Noble six hundred!' - calls for honour and praise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:16:18.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="97" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:16:38.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When can their glory fade?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O the wild charge they made!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the world wondered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Honour the charge they made,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Honour the Light Brigade,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noble six hundred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza, I think, makes it clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While horse and hero fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They that had fought so well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Came through the jaws of Death, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also there when they are described as having sabres.  This is a pretty honorable thing, to charge cannons with sabres, and they are a weapon of noblemen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think he is glorifying soldiers but not war, as in the end, they do die because of this horrible thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:16:38.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="98" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="87" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:17:07.920" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is too black-and-white. The poem is not about war, but about an event.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem praises the courage of the soldiers, who obey even if it means certain death. It is like a requiem for these brave men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also criticizes the failure of the officers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Forward, the Light Brigade!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was there a man dismay'd?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not tho' the soldier knew&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Someone had blunder'd:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs not to make reply,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs not to reason why,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Theirs but to do and die:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into the valley of Death&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Rode the six hundred.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above all, however, it praises the suicidal courage: the opening line of the last couplet is clear about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When can their glory fade?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O the wild charge they made!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:17:07.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="99" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:18:38.587" Score="22" ViewCount="22027" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that various characters represent real Soviet figures. Who does the cat, who is fond of shirking physical work but enjoys reaping the rewards, represent? Does the cat even have any significance in the novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T09:41:39.513" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T18:11:14.200" Title="Who does the cat represent in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="91" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:18:51.770" Score="17" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Jones symbolizes Tsar Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia. He oppresses the animals, but is overthrown.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Pilkington symbolizes England and the USA. They are frightened of the revolution.  He has a larger, but more unkempt farm compared to Frederick.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Frederick is possibly Germany, as he's described as abusing his animals and is on bad terms with Mr. Pilkington.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:18:51.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="115" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:19:18.430" Score="7" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of connections to King's other works in The Dark Tower. Most notably Salem's Lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other connections are there, no matter how big or small?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T18:11:07.780" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T18:11:07.780" Title="What are the Stephen King connections in The Dark Tower series?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;the-dark-tower-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="109" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:20:07.257" Score="23" ViewCount="2902" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act 2 Scene 2 of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; there is this line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What hands are here? Ha! They pluck out mine eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone two days ago told me this is a reference to a different piece of literature. I didn't know how to spell the name of the reference so didn't write it down, and have forgotten what the reference was. I have no idea which piece of literature it is referencing, and wish to find out. This specifically refers to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They pluck out mine eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T08:18:40.177" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T02:13:50.387" Title="What reference is Shakespeare making in Act 2 Scene 2 of Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1066" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:23:07.260" Score="14" ViewCount="856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read Jean Rhys's &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; without ever having heard of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. I didn't see even it was a prequel to another work, because I try to avoid spoilers on the back of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, if anything, would I have missed while reading &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;? For example, were there references to characters who are also in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;? Or direct allusions to events that would happen later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my reading, I felt the book lacked depth, and I wonder if it's because there was a whole other thread to the plot that I was completely missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T06:52:17.753" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:46:16.753" Title="Would a reader of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea miss anything essential without knowing about Jane Eyre?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;wide-sargasso-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:23:15.957" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly the Bible? From &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/matthew/18-9.htm&quot;&gt;Matthew 18:9&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eye, rather than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:23:15.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="99" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:23:26.640" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cat does have significance, but it's hard to say who exactly she represents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She skulks around and doesn't do any work, votes for both sides, and makes people satisfied enough that she never actually &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the behaviour of&#xA;  the cat was somewhat peculiar. It was soon noticed that when there was work&#xA;  to be done the cat could never be found. She would vanish for hours on end,&#xA;  and then reappear at meal-times, or in the evening after work was over, as&#xA;  though nothing had happened. But she always made such excellent excuses,&#xA;  and purred so affectionately, that it was impossible not to believe in her good&#xA;  intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like she represents the unhelpful people of society, the thieves and criminals and people who profit over other people's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's someone of that kind in every society, who has no interest in the politics and leaves in the end. This cat represents all of those people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;everyone,&#xA;  indeed, except the cat, who had suddenly disappeared just before Napoleon&#xA;  ordered the animals to assemble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T08:08:13.683" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T08:08:13.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="99" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:24:26.267" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20190319041225/http://thecatanimalfarm.blogspot.com:80/2012/02/animal-farm-who-is-cat.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;words of Jesse McDevitt-Irwin&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suggests that she could represent the educated of Russia, more specifically, the educated who did not believe that communism was the correct path. She also skips out on work, which could mean the educated because they did not do physical nature. One more clue is the nature of a cat on a farm: the cat performs a service (rodent control) and receives benefits (milk, shelter). This further implies that the cat was privileged under the Czars, which further implies the wealthy, educated class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T18:11:14.200" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T18:11:14.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="93" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:27:01.940" Score="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reality is that, from the perspective of a pro-government stance, 1984 promotes the idea that the government shouldn't be involved in your private lives, and that it's a quick step from government monitoring to government abuse and overreach. It promotes civil disobedience, and fighting for human rights and liberties in your own personal way. It promotes skepticism of government action: that the things governments do to purportedly help you actually hurt you in subtle ways. It promotes the idea that wars are simply fought because frivolous wars are good for social order, structure, and economy. It promotes the idea that the government not only wants to, but &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt;, control and influence what you see and hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No pro-government ideology wants to promote those ideas within its own culture. It's no surprise they were banned - in Russia and certain places in the US for roughly the same reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Russia, the &quot;anti-communist&quot; reason makes a whole lot of sense. 1984 is really less about capitalism and communism, and more about &lt;em&gt;totalitarianism&lt;/em&gt;. Russia, at the time, held many of the structural and cultural problems that 1984 hyperbolized and fought against. Russia, logically, banned imports of the book for roughly this reason. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, importantly, the US did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ban these books in the same &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; Russia did. It wasn't sweeping, national, and unilateral: it was usually very local to specific school districts, and affected far fewer people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1984 was published in the US at about the time of the second world war, in the year 1949. This was around the time when the US was at war with and/or gearing up for war with communist nations. The red scare was still very real, and proxy wars with communist nations were about to become the new hit fad. This was a time when &quot;commie&quot; was an insult and McCarthyism was alive and well. If you wanted to get a book banned, all you really had to do was suggest that it was a) going to have some serious influence, and b) promoted communism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of the US, it was usually individuals or small groups of individuals responsible for local bans. These bans were often raised, for example, by parents against school districts. The US itself can't ban books (with love: the First Amendment), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://nwsidebar.wsba.org/2014/09/26/banned-books-week/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequently overturns school boards&lt;/a&gt; on this point (it's a blog, but it's a case law blog). Instead of a national law, specific school boards, like the one in Jackson County, FL, banned the consumption of these books. (It's also on the ALA's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequently-challenged books list&lt;/a&gt;.) So it was on a far more individual, county-to-county basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T08:21:14.337" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T08:21:14.337" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:28:26.183" Score="21" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's a Biblical reference.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noting that Macbeth is speaking of his own hands, and his own fears, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is ’t with me when every noise appals me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is clear that this is an allusion to Matthew chapter 18, which speaks metaphorically of removing one's own bodyparts if they should bring you to sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wherefore if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off, and cast them from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life halt or maimed, rather than having two hands or two feet to be cast into everlasting fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth fears that his actions, which have led to terrible bloodshed (most notably in the murder of Duncan), have rendered him irredeemable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T20:28:26.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9082" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:31:05.370" Score="16" ViewCount="13589" Body="&lt;p&gt;This spawns off an argument that my friend and I had. I had always assumed that he had, however my friend disagreed. The main point I cited, Piggy's attempt to console Ralph while also trying to absolve himself of guilt, was interpreted by her as him just being a nice friend. Is there any piece of evidence besides the conversation mentioned? Quotes from Golding or quotes from the book are ideal over speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Piggy participate in the killing of Simon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T02:35:45.730" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T16:55:41.723" Title="Did Piggy participate in the killing of Simon?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="110" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:33:16.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the last mention of Piggy before Simon's death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the&#xA;  brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The circle of chanting boys becomes a horseshoe that Simon - the &quot;beast&quot; - stumbles into. Simon breaks through the ring and falls off the rock onto the beach, and the &quot;crowd&quot; surged after him, killing Simon in a frenzy &quot;of teeth and claws&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy and Ralph were in the circle, but they may or may not have taken part in the death of Simon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T12:19:17.197" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T12:19:17.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:33:35.563" Score="74" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They cared deeply about each other as friends, but there was never anything romantic in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Holmes was asexual.&lt;/strong&gt; He wasn't just uninterested in women, he was uninterested in &lt;em&gt;romance&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All emotions, and [love] particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer--excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained teasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;A Scandal in Bohemia&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[...] love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 12&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Watson was heterosexual&lt;/strong&gt;, and indeed married during much of his friendship with Holmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I listened to the words and realised what they meant, a great shadow seemed to pass from my soul. I did not know how this Agra treasure had weighed me down until now that it was finally removed. It was selfish, no doubt, disloyal, wrong, but I could realise nothing save that the golden barrier was gone from between us.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Thank God!&quot; I ejaculated from my very heart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She looked at me with a quick, questioning smile.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why do you say that?&quot; she asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Because you are within my reach again,&quot; I said, taking her hand. She did not withdraw it. &quot;Because I love you, Mary, as truly as ever a man loved a woman. Because this treasure, these riches, sealed my lips. Now that they are gone I can tell you how I love you. That is why I said, 'Thank God'.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Then I say 'Thank God', too,&quot; she whispered as I drew her to my side.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whoever had lost a treasure, I knew that night that I had gained one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 11&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department,&quot; said Holmes, with a smile, when the dwindling &lt;em&gt;frou-frou&lt;/em&gt; of skirts had ended in the slam of the front door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Watson frequently encouraged Holmes to show an interest in women&lt;/strong&gt;, including while they were alone - a thing he would hardly have done if they were intended to be a homosexual couple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;No, indeed!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You'll be interested to hear that I'm engaged.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;My dear fellow! I congrat-&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;To Milverton's housemaid.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm sure there were more examples of this, but none are coming to mind just now)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found a very interesting, lengthy, and rather heartfelt &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sherlockian-sherlock.com/sherlock-was-not-gay-homosexual.php&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; from the Sherlockian Sherlock fan site, which goes into this issue in some detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Guessing the sleuth’s sexual preference is not a novel thing, despite of the fact that in the original Canon dr. Watson is married three times, and even Holmes remarks in The Second Stain that his friend knows a lot about women („Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department.”) [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Roger Johnson, editor of the Sherlock Holmes Journal, observed that in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories &quot;Watson is something of a ladies' man, but a faithful husband to his wife. And Holmes is essentially asexual, with no erotic interest in women or men.&quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Doyle’s detective was not homosexual, and he did not changed this later, when he was rich and famous, though he could have written stories under a pen name. He was not too interested in erotic themes, but love between men and women often appears in his works. With the figure of Sherlock Holmes he wanted to focus on spiritual values. Some may think it odd that Holmes does not have any romantic relationships, but he explains in the Canon that thinking and his profession are the most appreciated things in his life, and he thinks emotions like love would only withdraw him from them. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Legendary Sherlock Holmes actor Jeremy Brett, who lived together with a male partner for a while, said that there was a genuine friendship between Holmes and Watson, but nothing more. Sadly in the modern age relationships changed so enormously that most people simply cannot understand how such kind of friendship can exist. Jeremy Brett had a humane and fair attitude to the topic. It was clear to him that Doyle did not want gay characters, and he respected this. In his interviews he always emphasized that the relationship of the duo was devoid of any romance, what they felt for each other was honest friendship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T01:06:22.807" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T01:06:22.807" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:35:24.480" Score="13" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;The gay-oriented book &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Earthly Powers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1980)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;was narrated by an 81-year-old successful, homosexual writer, Kenneth Toomey, a figure &lt;a href=&quot;https://greencardamom.github.io/BooksAndWriters/burgess.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;loosely based on W. Somerset Maugham&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seems that many of the scenes were of a more personal nature. At least one source has claimed he was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literature-study-online.com/essays/burgess.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a closet homosexual&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of himself, in the Guardian, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/mar/04/anthony-burgess-on-journalism-1992&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burgess wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I published a novel about contemporary Russia at the time of my disgrace, and this was reviewed at some length in the New Statesman – I will not say by whom – and considered as a literary demonstration of my homosexuality...&#xA;  I never had to prove homosexuality, which would have been difficult for one who is boringly normal. I offer this anecdote &lt;em&gt;to prove nothing&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the novel, the narrator of the story, Kenneth Toomey,  penned a self-described “bad” first novel, &lt;em&gt;Once Departed&lt;/em&gt;, in which he claimed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I told no one that I could bring myself to compose the more intimate scenes only by imagining them as homosexual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a twist on “Art imitating Life”, or maybe “Life imitating Art”, did Burgess write Earthly Powers out of his personal experiences or his private desires for an alternative life-style? Or was he imagining his homo-erotic encounters in the book by doing a reverse of   Toomey's technique from “Once Departed”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any real evidence to support the theory that the book was based on the life of Willie Maugham, and not on Burgess' own life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T02:15:02.280" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T12:59:51.003" Title="Was &quot;Earthly Powers&quot; actually based on Burgess' private, and secret life?" Tags="&lt;anthony-burgess&gt;&lt;earthly-powers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="110" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:39:50.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Simon's death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sticks fell and the mouth of the new circle crunched and screamed. The beast was on its knees in the centre, its arms folded over its face. It was crying out against the abominable noise something about a body on the hill. The beast struggled forward, broke the ring and fell over the steep edge of the rock to the sand by the water. At once the crowd surged after it, poured down the rock, leapt on to the beast, screamed, struck, bit, tore. There were no words, and no movements but the tearing of teeth and claws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Presently the heap broke up and ﬁgures staggered away. Only the beast lay still, a few yards from the sea. Even in the rain they could see how small a beast it was; and already its blood was staining the sand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy tries to justify it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was dark. There was that––bloody dance.There was the lightning and thunder and rain.  We was scared!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] &amp;quot;Anything might have happened. It wasn't––what you said.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;Ralph&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't you understand, Piggy? The things we did–––&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'we' here indicates they took part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a possibility that the 'we' actually means the boys, and they didn't take part however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T12:19:35.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="101" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:41:03.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of them. By the end of &lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt;, it is revealed that the story takes place&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; in a vast multiverse, in which every book by Stephen King -- and possibly every story ever told -- is a separate universe linked together at the Dark Tower. So, even Stephen King stories not explicitly linked still take place in the same multiverse, and may even have been written by the Stephen King we meet in the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for a list of every explicit reference, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King_works_related_to_The_Dark_Tower_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia had a good list going that you can edit&lt;/a&gt;, but this has been deleted. I'm leaving that link in just in case someone recreates that page, but otherwise you can read the list &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161116023558/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King_works_related_to_The_Dark_Tower_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on archive.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T19:10:49.783" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T19:10:49.783" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:47:41.780" Score="12" ViewCount="1291" Body="&lt;p&gt;DFW has a peculiar writing style. For example, in his essay, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.ics.purdue.edu/%7Edrkelly/DFWAuthorityAndAmericanUsage2005.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Authority and American Usage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he makes use of a colloquial form of writing which is often repeated in his other essays. An example of this concerns his use of footnotes — the essay has 81 of them, and sometimes even footnotes have footnotes. This makes the essay something of a wild ride to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example more localized to &lt;em&gt;Authority and American Usage&lt;/em&gt; is the colloquial use of titles. Though they draw an ironic point, it's very typical to see this in DFW's writing elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THESIS STATEMENT FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COROLLARY TO THESIS STATEMENT FOR THE WHOLE ARTICLE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;INTERPOLATION POTENTIALLY DESCRIPTIVIST-LOOKING EXAMPLE OF SOME GRAMMATICAL ADVANTAGES OF A NON-STANDARD DIALECT THAT THIS REVIEWER ACTUALLY KNOWS ABOUT FIRSTHAND&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ANOTHER KIND OF USAGE-WARS RELATED EXAMPLE, THIS ONE WITH A PARTICULAR EMPHASIS ON DIALECT AS A VECTOR OF SELF-PRESENTATION VIA POLITENESS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and so on and so forth. (This essay is a treasure to read.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's even, in some other places, gone so far as to embed footnotes inside of boxes inside pages, and putting more footnotes inside those boxes, up to three or four layers deep, such as in the essay, &lt;em&gt;Host&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did DFW ever write about where he drew inspiration for his style? Was this sort of colloquial-academic prose unique to the way he writes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T13:12:56.077" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T13:12:56.077" Title="From where did David Foster Wallace draw inspiration for writing style and technique?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;david-foster-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="122" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:51:54.090" Score="-5" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1338116789&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantastic Beasts Character Guide&lt;/a&gt;, there's a section that contains most of the animals that were shown in the movie.  However, curiously, the Obscurus is missing from the book, despite its importance to the story of the movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was the Obscurus omitted from the character guide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T23:39:27.543" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:45:45.643" Title="Why was the Obscurus omitted?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:54:16.253" Score="14" ViewCount="6777" Body="&lt;p&gt;Benjamin is the old, irritable donkey who doesn't care who's in control, because he says that work will be the same either way. He is one of the few on the farm who can read, and who still remembers the original commandments. He has an unlikely friendship with Boxer as well. Does Benjamin's character represent a real figure, person, or group of people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T09:41:42.930" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T01:18:17.687" Title="Who or what does Benjamin the donkey represent in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="129" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:59:37.910" Score="12" ViewCount="31811" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the nickname the March sisters in &lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; use for their mother and I'd like to know its meaning and significance. After some research, it seems Louisa May Alcott used the nickname Marmee for her own mother in some of her letters, so I'm wondering if this was popular during the time period or if it was specific to Alcott's family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T07:08:51.327" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T07:08:51.327" Title="Why do the March sisters call their mother Marmee?" Tags="&lt;louisa-may-alcott&gt;&lt;little-women-series&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="121" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1290" CreationDate="2017-01-18T20:59:56.790" Score="10" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not so long ago I saw the film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Zembla_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nova Zembla&lt;/a&gt;, a fictionalized retelling of the voyage as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_de_Veer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerrit de Veer&lt;/a&gt;'s diary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_de_Veer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, there is only one mention about his published diary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Map of the discovered West coast of Novaya Zemlya, from &lt;strong&gt;de Veer's published diary (1598)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any known facts about how or where (place or publisher) he published his diary so that it became famous which led to the adaptation of the film?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T10:53:04.257" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T10:53:04.257" Title="Where did Gerrit de Veer publish his diary?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;gerrit-de-veer&gt;&lt;diary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="117" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:01:09.800" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; there...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1338116789&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt; preview of the book, on page 122 there is a chapter on &lt;em&gt;The Obscurus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CGRDF.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CGRDF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of the table of contents. There is a chapter labeled &amp;quot;THE OBSCURUS&amp;quot; on page 122&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking why it's not included in the' beasts' section, probably because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not strictly a beast. It's the magic of a wizard that was suppressed and is &lt;em&gt;sort of&lt;/em&gt; a beast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a larger topic. These things are completely new. We know nothing about them, so we need some more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:45:45.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:03:19.230" Score="11" ViewCount="850" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/two-friends&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two Friends&lt;/a&gt; by Guy de Maupassant, the two men wish to go fishing in a warzone and are allowed to do so by the colonel who controls the checkpoint between the safety of Paris and the warzone outside of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An hour later they were walking side by side on the-highroad.&#xA;Presently they reached the villa occupied by the colonel. He smiled at&#xA;their request, and granted it. They resumed their walk, furnished with&#xA;a password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding passage in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46470/46470-h/46470-h.htm#ch_15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French version, &amp;quot;Deux amis&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Une heure après, ils marchaient côte à côte sur la grand'route. Puis ils gagnèrent la villa qu'occupait le colonel. Il sourit de leur demande et consentit à leur fantaisie. Ils se remirent en marche, munis d'un laissez-passer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing full well they might die at the hands of Prussian soldiers, why does the colonel allow them to leave Paris?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T12:52:30.550" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T12:52:30.550" Title="In de Maupassant's Two Friends, why does the colonel allow the two men to go into a warzone?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:09:08.433" Score="11" ViewCount="3786" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Bet&lt;/em&gt; by Anton Chekhov, the lawyer voluntarily accepts to stay in prison for 15 years, instead of the original agreed upon 5 years. Here's the relevant passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The death sentence and the life sentence are equally immoral, but if&#xA;  I had to choose between the death penalty and imprisonment for life, I&#xA;  would certainly choose the second. To live anyhow is better than not&#xA;  at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lively discussion arose. The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he&#xA;  struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's not true! I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If you mean that in earnest,&quot; said the young man, &quot;I'll take the bet, but I would stay not &lt;strong&gt;five but fifteen years&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Fifteen? Done!&quot; cried the banker. &quot;Gentlemen, I stake two million!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!&quot; said the young man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the lawyer do this? He's not gaining any monetary reward, so I really can't see his motivation for opting to stay in prison an extra 10 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T01:30:03.980" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T18:49:25.877" Title="In The Bet, why does the lawyer willingly stay fifteen years instead of five years for no extra reward?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="125" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="445" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:13:39.807" Score="15" ViewCount="1301" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_to_Byzantium&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; of W.B. Yeats' &quot;Sailing to Byzantium&quot; is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats's &quot;Sailing to Byzantium&quot; describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last couplet of the poem is apparently about the afterlife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once out of nature I shall never take&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My bodily form from any natural thing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of hammered gold and gold enamelling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or set upon a golden bough to sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To lords and ladies of Byzantium&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of what is past, or passing, or to come.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Aenaeas and the Golden Bough is about him entering the underworld, to meet his late father in Elysium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So both have a theme involving an eternal afterlife. But Aeneas' golden bough is an offering, a tool to enter the underworld without dying oneself. Yeats' golden bough is where he sits down, possibly in a timeless existence.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;golden bough&quot; a passing reference to the story of Aeneas, to enhance the theme; or is there a deeper symbolism? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T16:25:05.400" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T16:25:05.400" Title="How does the golden bough in &quot;Sailing to Byzantium&quot; relate to the story in the Aeneid, if at all?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="813" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:16:53.757" Score="8" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper Fforde's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursday_Next&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; series is a sort of fantasy about literature.  Much of the story line about the books and literary characters that appear in this series is obviously made up, but there is at least one clear reference to real-world literary studies: a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasperfforde.com/qaww.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recurring argument over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays&lt;/a&gt;.  Are there other debates over historical authorship of literary works in the real world that are referenced in this series? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there are too many to list, please restrict this question to the first book in the series, &lt;em&gt;The Eyre Affair&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T08:18:18.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T08:18:18.153" Title="Are there any debated authorship references in Thursday Next series?" Tags="&lt;jasper-fforde&gt;&lt;thursday-next&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="124" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:21:21.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most likely reason is this is simply just because of pride. As you mentioned, the lawyer isn't receiving additional compensation, but I personally think that the lawyer got fired up in the heat of the argument. Being as reckless and young as he was, only 25, I'd say that his pride went before his common sense and he desperately wanted to prove that imprisonment was better than the death penalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T21:21:21.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="130" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:25:22.373" Score="3" ViewCount="3805" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Prisoner of Azkaban&lt;/em&gt;, Albus Dumbledore hands Hermione the '&lt;a href=&quot;http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Time-Turner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Time-Turner&lt;/a&gt;', which they use to &lt;a href=&quot;http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Rescue_of_Sirius_Black_and_Buckbeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free Buckbeak&lt;/a&gt; and later on to rescue Sirus Black. One spin on the Time-Turner equals one hour travelling back in time.&#xA;What prevented Dumbledore and Hermione from using the Time-Turner to kill Voldemort?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why didn't they use the time turner for good?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="114" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-05-13T04:10:21.867" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T10:37:13.197" Title="Why didn't Hermione or Dumbledore use the Time-Turner to defeat Voldemort?" Tags="&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:26:49.393" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It seems to be just a different spelling of &amp;quot;Mommy&amp;quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://sdsulittlewomen.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/cracking-the-marmee-mystery/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; written by someone involved with the musical &lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was asked by one of the assistant stage managers why the girls refer to their mother as “Marmee”.  To be honest, this question has haunted my mind for a few years and finding the answers was much harder than I expected, so I put the quest for the answer to rest.  I called my great-grandmother, “Mamaw” and there are hundreds of different terms for mother that is used all over the United States.  So, &lt;strong&gt;Marmee isn’t necessarily anything odd or unique from that day, one would assume.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book, the girls do address Marmee as “Mother” on several occasions along with “Marmee”.   In the musical, it is only the latter.  As I was browsing the internet, I was trying to research nicknames for mothers back in Alcott’s time and I bumped into a dialect website.  In the beginning, Brandon, the director, wanted me to look into dialects from the time period…but trying to find accurate answers for 1860’s Concord proved to be challenging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Alcott’s time, and &lt;strong&gt;in the time set in the book, Alcott most likely spoke with an Eastern Massachusetts accents, meaning that it was non-rhotic..aka…she dropped her r’s.&lt;/strong&gt;  Sounding similar to a Boston accent, this is just a theory.  And then it hit me.  Drop the r from Marmee and &lt;strong&gt;you have a different way of spelling Mommy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A letter published in the New York Times &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/books/review/marmee-dearest.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;subscribes to the same theory&lt;/a&gt;, and provides even more supporting evidence (again, emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wineapple mentions the unusual nickname — “ ‘Marmee,’ as her daughters called her” — but does not discuss its pronunciation. The Alcott (and March) girls, New Englanders all, &lt;strong&gt;would have pronounced the “r” as “ah” when they referred to their mother. In other words, they called her “Mahmee” — or “Mommy”!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the archivist of the town of Brewster, Mass., I have found many other examples in old letters and other papers of the New England r/ah pronunciation. &lt;strong&gt;The more usual parental nicknames “Ma” and “Pa” are sometimes written “Mar” and “Par,”&lt;/strong&gt; and in a reverse instance, the once common first name “Desire” was often written, even in official documents, as it was evidently pronounced: “Desiah.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is enough to conclude that it was a common thing, not just in Alcott's family, and - when you take accent into account - not so strange either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T21:26:49.393" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:27:09.850" Score="22" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Time Turners can't go back that far.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J.K. Rowling has said that it's impossible for those 1-hour Time-Turners to go back farther than 5 hours. (See quote below.) So: &lt;strong&gt;She can't.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're asking about making sure he doesn't come &lt;em&gt;back&lt;/em&gt;, how would she do that? She can't do anything that would prevent him from coming back, as she doesn't have the power to be anywhere that it would make a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/time-turner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pottermore&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As our investigations currently stand, the &lt;strong&gt;longest period&lt;/strong&gt; that may be relived without the possibility of serious harm to the traveller or to time itself is around &lt;strong&gt;five hours&lt;/strong&gt;. We have been able to encase single Hour-Reversal Charms, which are unstable and benefit from containment, in small, enchanted hour-glasses that may be worn around a witch or wizard’s neck and revolved according to the number of hours the user wishes to relive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a Time-Turner that could go back years, but they didn't know that existed until the time of &lt;em&gt;The Cursed Child&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;J.K.R. has also commented on the issue of traveling back in time to change things:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Also from Pottermore, same article&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went far too light-heartedly into the subject of time travel in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While I do not regret it (Prisoner of Azkaban is one of my favourite books in the series), it opened up a vast number of problems for me, because after all, &lt;strong&gt;if wizards could go back and undo problems, where were my future plots?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I solved the problem to my own satisfaction in stages. Firstly, I had Dumbledore and Hermione emphasise how dangerous it would be to be seen in the past, to remind the reader that there might be unforeseen and dangerous consequences as well as solutions in time travel. Secondly, I had Hermione give back the only Time-Turner ever to enter Hogwarts. Thirdly, I smashed all remaining Time-Turners during the battle in the Department of Mysteries, removing the possibility of reliving even short periods in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;And I'm sure that everyone is familiar with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYWT5Q_R_w&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Harry Potter Should Have Ended&lt;/a&gt;, which is basically this scenario...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T10:07:57.073" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="141" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:27:33.217" Score="14" ViewCount="1658" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that &lt;em&gt;Go Set A Watchman&lt;/em&gt; takes place after &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;, we would think that we should read it second. However, &lt;em&gt;Go Set A Watchman&lt;/em&gt; was probably a first draft of &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;. I am not really sure in which order they should be read given these two pieces of conflicting information. Which of these should be read first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T11:33:38.673" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T11:33:38.673" Title="Should Go Set A Watchman be read before To Kill A Mockingbird?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;go-set-a-watchman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:28:03.363" Score="15" ViewCount="2038" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winston Smith lives in London, a city in the superstate of Oceania. As shown in &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/1984_fictitious_world_map_v2_quad.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt;, Oceania consists of all of the Americas, the United Kingdom, and Australia. In the modern world today, Oceania refers to the region of the world that includes Australia, New Zealand, etc. Why, then, would Orwell choose Oceania as the name for a superstate that includes North America, South America, and a part of Europe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T21:24:55.753" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T21:24:55.753" Title="Why is the superstate Winston lives in named Oceania in 1984?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:30:13.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/time-turner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pottermore says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All attempts to travel back further than a few hours have resulted in catastrophic harm to the witch or wizard involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was longer-range time-turner but it was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; available to the characters during the events of Harry Potter books 1-7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T11:00:11.650" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T11:00:11.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:50:00.957" Score="12" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Thursday Next series, there is an author named Daphne Farquitt. She is a prolific and popular writer, although all her books are pretty much the same unimaginative love stories. (With one exception, where the plot was accidentally changed during one of Thursdays adventures in BookWorld).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been some &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasperfforde.com/phorum/read.php?1,99940,99940&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; if Daphne Farquitt is based upon a real person; consensus seems to be that she represents a &lt;em&gt;type&lt;/em&gt; of writer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; This is perhaps evidenced by the fact that in &quot;One of our Thursdays is Missing&quot;, she has her own part in BookWorld, implying that she is a genre of her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is described as &quot;a recluse's recluse&quot;; she is literally never seen in the series.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Fforde has surprised us earlier with characters turning out to be someone else. But Daphne Farquitt is an extremely prolific writer;&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; she was someone else, it would have to be someone with lots of time on his or her hands.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, do we know why Daphne Farquitt is never seen?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is it possible that she is the secret identity of another character in the series; is there any evidence to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:11:27.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:22:12.950" Title="Why is Daphne Farquitt never seen?" Tags="&lt;thursday-next&gt;&lt;jasper-fforde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="146" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:54:07.880" Score="13" ViewCount="1084" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the long poem by Samuel Coleridge, &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;, the mariner talks about an albatross being chained to his neck:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of the cross, the albatross &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  About my neck was hung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't really make much sense though. Assuming it was literal, who chained the dead bird to his neck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/549.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to the poem.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T16:11:50.853" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T01:02:14.753" Title="Who chained the albatross to the mariner's neck?" Tags="&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2017-01-18T21:58:55.803" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming he did it himself in Part 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;God save thee, ancient mariner!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the fiends, that plague thee thus!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why lookst thou so? With my crossbow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I shot the albatross&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems he shot the albatross then hung it round his neck as a trophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T21:17:18.827" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T21:17:18.827" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="177" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:02:29.997" Score="16" ViewCount="1334" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading T. S. Eliot's poem &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read for free online&lt;/a&gt;) and one particular line stuck out at me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions. Is there any symbolism associated with the food &quot;hot gammon&quot;? And what's up with the phrase &quot;to get the beauty of it hot&quot;? Since the passage this quote comes from discusses adultery, is it possible that the phrase &quot;get the beauty of it hot&quot; is referring to something other than the hot gammon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T01:58:07.343" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T01:58:07.343" Title="Symbolism of &quot;hot gammon&quot; in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="28" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:03:45.387" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Orson Scott Card said something about this (shame&lt;s&gt;less&lt;/s&gt;fully stolen from &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/1346/57642&quot;&gt;this answer on SFF&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read them in the order written - Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind, then Ender's Shadow, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant. Or you can read them in chronological order of story beginnings, which is Ender's Shadow, Ender's Game, Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in truth &lt;strong&gt;it doesn't matter&lt;/strong&gt;, except that you should &lt;strong&gt;read Xenocide right before Children of the Mind&lt;/strong&gt;, since they are really two halves of a single continuous story. In most of my books, I include all the information you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis added by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T04:58:24.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="139" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:04:42.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper Fforde's &lt;em&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/em&gt; series is a series of books set in an alternative history England. The first series is set in an alternative 1980's; the second series is set in an alternative 2000's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist and titular character, Thursday Next, is a &quot;literary detective&quot;. In her world, literature is taken very seriously; for example, there are people who go door-to-door to convince people that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books are full of literary references and jokes, and a large part of the stories play &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; other books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T23:29:14.557" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:29:14.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="140" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:04:42.190" Score="0" Body="For questions about Jasper Fforde's &quot;Thursday Next&quot; series. Use in conjunction with [jasper-fforde]." OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:23:10.450" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:23:10.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="131" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:05:42.713" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Definitely read &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; first. Although &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; reads more as a first draft of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;, without reading Mockingbird, much of the bigotry Atticus displays in Watchman will not be unusual. In Mockingbird, Atticus is portrayed as a hero defending the underprivileged blacks, and in Watchman, that illusion of him is completely shattered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're both great reads, but reading &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; first allows you to have a greater conceptual understanding and appreciation for &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T13:34:18.060" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:34:18.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="143" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:08:43.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:08:43.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:08:43.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="144" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:08:43.710" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding a specific poem or poems in general." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T23:13:11.810" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:13:11.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:10:22.190" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the verse in additional context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah! well a-day! what evil looks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Had I from old and young!&lt;br&gt;Instead of the cross, the albatross&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  About my neck was hung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the albatross there? Well, it is evidently taking place of &quot;the cross&quot;. In the first two lines of this stanza, he speaks of how the people give him &quot;evil looks&quot;, that is, disapproving ones. They do this, of course, because they killed the albatross. This was a maritime symbol of good luck. Now, since it has been slain, the mariner most likely willingly put the bird across his neck. I'm not so sure &quot;chained&quot; is the correct word. Whether or not is literal, I'd say, is besides the point. When reading poetry, you read not to read an account of what happened, but rather try to read into the meaning of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the bit about the cross. This text has evidently some type of Christian background. Not to say that it is a Christian poem; the two mentions of Christ's name, on lines 123 and 488 are not so much as invoking Christ as speaking his name. Now, let's take &quot;the cross&quot; to mean the Christian cross. This is a symbol of faith. To say that the slain albatross displaced the cross on his next (or as would be customary to be found on his neck) is most likely a statement about faith: that instead of having faith, the mariner &quot;believes&quot; for the lack of a better term, in luck. So perhaps this albatross could be said to be a statement of faith (rather, the lack thereof).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of said albatross being dead, however, leaves something to think about...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:10:22.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="147" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:16:24.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; is a 1945 novel by George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair). It is allegorical, telling the story of the 1917 Russian Revolution by analogy with a fictional story of revolution among the animals on a farm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T20:21:22.157" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T20:21:22.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="148" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:16:24.797" Score="0" Body="For questions about Animal Farm, a satirical novel by George Orwell. This tag should be used in conjunction with [george-orwell]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T20:21:22.157" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T20:21:22.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="134" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:22:12.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Daphne Farquitt may be a pseudonym, either an anonymous writer like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Ferrante&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elena Ferrante&lt;/a&gt; or a collective pseudonym used by a group of writers, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolyn_Keene&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carolyn Keene&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Dixon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franklin W. Dixon&lt;/a&gt;. Her last name is reminiscent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Farquaad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Farquaad&lt;/a&gt;, and may similarly be intended to sound dirty. Being her own genre might suggest that &quot;she&quot; acts like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_%26_Boon#Critical_opinion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mills &amp;amp; Boon&lt;/a&gt; in the &quot;Next&quot; universe. &quot;She&quot; might even be from the BookWorld, which would explain all the free time she has!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there's no canon answer yet for who is operating behind this pseudonym, but given Jasper Fforde's style, I completely agree that it's bound to be someone we've already met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:22:12.950" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="150" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:22:57.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:22:57.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:22:57.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="151" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:22:57.337" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Jonh Grisham (born 1955) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T20:34:14.273" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T20:34:14.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="132" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:27:27.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always assumed it was because it touched &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean#Oceanic_divisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;every single ocean&lt;/a&gt; in the world:  Pacific (US), Atlantic (US), Indian (Australia), Southern/Antarctic (Australia), and Arctic Oceans (Canada). You can also think of it as covering every ocean (but missing all the largest seas!), although Eurasia and Eastasia would dispute the Pacific and Eurasia would dispute the Atlantic and Arctic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T16:00:30.000" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T16:00:30.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="153" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:29:54.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Orwell&lt;/a&gt; (1903-1950; real name Eric Arthur Blair) wrote political satire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His most famous novels include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a satire on the Russian Revolution of 1917, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a vision of a dystopic society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His non-fiction includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Road to Wigan Pier&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a study of the lives of the working classes in Lancashire and Yorkshire; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Down and Out in Paris and London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a study of the lives of the working classes in Paris and London; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homage to Catalonia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an account of Orwell's experiences participating in the Spanish Civil War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:56:41.983" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:56:41.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="154" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:29:54.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author George Orwell (1903 – 1950) or his life as a writer. Orwell is best known for the novels 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' and 'Animal Farm'." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:56:41.983" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:56:41.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="155" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:30:40.510" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:22:24.310" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:22:24.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="156" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:30:40.510" Score="0" Body="Questions about George Orwell's dystopian novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', first published in 1949. Use this tag with the [george-orwell] tag. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:22:24.310" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:22:24.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:32:10.827" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems there's no textual evidence as to why his license was revoked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing we have is this, from &lt;em&gt;The Accused&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Listen to me, Theo. A long time ago, I was a successful lawyer in Strattenburg, had an office just down the hall from your mother, had lots of clients, and life was good. &lt;strong&gt;Then the cops showed up and started asking questions. I didn't have all the answers. They came back with more questions, then more.&lt;/strong&gt; I couldn't believe what was happening and I slowly realized I was headed for trouble, but I couldn't stop it. Once the criminal justice system starts moving against you, it's hard to stop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to hint at some form of legal malpractice, but we don't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T22:35:11.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:35:11.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="160" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:42:49.593" Score="10" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love how Adjoa Andoh narrates the audiobook version of Ann Leckie's &lt;em&gt;Imperial Radch&lt;/em&gt; trilogy, especially her pronunciation of Radchaai words and her singing. Did Leckie give Andoh those pronunciations and tunes, or did Andoh come up with them on her own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:30:24.750" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:31:20.550" Title="Did Leckie consult with the audiobook narrators on pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;audiobook&gt;&lt;ann-leckie&gt;&lt;imperial-radch&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="159" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:42:49.593" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andoh seems to have come up with the pronunciations and tunes in the UK &lt;em&gt;Imperial Radch&lt;/em&gt; audiobooks on her own. The pronunciations used by American narrator Celeste Ciulla, however, are from Leckie herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ann Leckie &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.annleckie.com/2015/08/07/a-brief-note-about-the-audio-versions-of-the-ancillary-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;talks about this&lt;/a&gt; on her blog, where she says that she was given the opportunity to choose Andoh out of a lineup for the UK audiobooks but wasn't asked to consult with Andoh the way she did with Ciulla:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Recorded Books] set up a phone call with me to go over pronunciations, so Celeste Ciulla pronounces everything the way that I would. Any tunes, however, are her own and not mine–I didn’t provide music!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I love [Andoh's] voice and what I’ve heard of her reading. Nobody consulted me about pronunciations, though, so they’re different from the US one. And once again, I didn’t provide any tunes (I don’t have any, really, except for the “real” songs)[...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:31:20.550" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:31:20.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="165" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:48:16.453" Score="15" ViewCount="6120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ray Bradbury's &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; is written with many recurring symbols. After reading the book, I never thought that the mechanical hound was one of them, though my friend told me otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the mechanical hound signify anything in Fahrenheit 451?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T23:28:39.783" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T20:35:45.703" Title="Did the mechanical hound signify anything in Fahrenheit 451?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="161" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:55:05.167" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hound represents the government's control and advanced technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, dogs served the firemen. They sniffed out the injured or weak. However, in this dystopia, the dog has been made into a watchdog of society, punishing those who don't obey the rules set by the government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T22:55:05.167" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="283" CreationDate="2017-01-18T22:58:45.917" Score="13" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently in the process of reading &lt;em&gt;Cyrano de Bergerac&lt;/em&gt; (translated by Charles Renauld). There, an introduction is made by Adolphe Cohn, said to be the Professor of the Romance languages and Literatures in Columbia University. &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=41949&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can find a copy on Project Gutenberg, here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;hellip; for it is in the nature of great literary works that they consist of a combination of what is purely human with what belongs to the time and place where they have their birth. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;hellip; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the faithfulness of his rendering those acquainted with the French language will easily judge, as they can have under the same cover the English of the translator and the French of the dramatist, and they will thus, it is hoped, acquire a clear and adequate conception of the beautiful picture, which, thanks to Edmond Rostand, has restored the life and brilliancy to the somewhat faded features of that eccentric philosopher, poet, hero and gentlemen, Savinien Hercule de Cyrano Bergerac. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Adolphe Cohn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, he says here that, in order to have a good translation, the translator must be proficient in both the source and target languages, along with an understanding and familiarity of the setting, etc. of the source play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these are some general translation tips, and while I think it does help to ensure a more correct play, I wonder what has been lost in, for example, the translation from English to French. I know that in some cases (e.g. the Bible), certain mappings of words are not perfect; the specific Biblical case would be four different Greek words mapping to &quot;love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other works that come to mind would be Dante's &lt;em&gt;La Commedia Divina&lt;/em&gt; (Divine Comedy; Italian to English), many early philosophical works (e.g. those of Plato and Aristotle), and generally any early work of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question remains: What are the challenges in translating a work to, say, English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="89" LastEditorUserId="89" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T18:15:52.773" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T18:48:06.687" Title="What are the challenges in translating a work of literature?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="164" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="172" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:04:10.810" Score="8" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read that many critics have been dissatisfied with the modern titling of XXII from &lt;em&gt;Spring and All&lt;/em&gt; by William Carlos Williams as &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot;. Neil Easterbrook was displeased with the titling because he felt that it set the reader up to read it from a different frame of mind. What did he mean by this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T03:06:39.123" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T03:06:39.123" Title="Why are some people dissatisfied with the titling of &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="161" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:08:35.787" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a symbol of how good, useful tools we grant to or accept from our government can quickly and easily become tools of oppression. As an example, some would argue that modern US equivalent of this might be the NSA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mechanical Hounds were, as Easterly Irk notes, a useful invention, originally. They've found people who might be injured or unconscious. They were good tools. However, as time went on, they grew increasingly oppressive. The government took the technology, what started out as a strong positive influence in the world of Fahrenheit 451, and encouraged its use for illicit purposes, abusing it to suppress free thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="133" LastEditDate="2017-01-18T23:13:50.887" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:13:50.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:09:40.300" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some books, such as &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, or other poems, which take advantage of a specific meter, it can make a very significant difference in the feeling it gives the reader and can lead to a very different meaning. However, in most novels, translation has less of an effect on the meaning because word choice is less important. Anecdotally, for example, I have talked to people who have read the Inkheart Trilogy in the original German and in English and they say that there was very little difference. It also tends to have more of an effect when the difference between the two languages is greater because they may not have equivalent words for certain concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:09:40.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="187" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:19:10.090" Score="12" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Little Prince meets some animals that can talk: for example, a fox and a snake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, we know&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt; that they can't actually talk, but do they really exist or are they just figments of the Little Prince's imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T13:30:19.263" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T13:30:19.263" Title="Are the talking animals real or figments of the Little Prince's imagination?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-little-prince&gt;&lt;antoine-de-saint-exupery&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="169" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:19:56.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While works of literature are normally written in just one language, they are often translated into many others. When translating a work, specific word choices can change the meaning of sentences, and it is often important to preserve the author's original intent. Additionally, there may be interesting reasoning behind the decisions to translate or not translate a work into a certain language, or to keep part of the text in the original language. Questions using this tag can focus on any of the above issues or on something else related to translations of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T17:46:32.260" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:46:32.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="170" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:19:56.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about translations of works, including how meanings and word choice differ in different languages, and the impact and reasoning of different translations." OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:54:18.313" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:54:18.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="173" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:24:32.167" Score="8" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was thinking of this when I read Nineteen-Neighty-Four, a fanfic with My Little Pony ponies in a 1984-ish world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Parodies can be really successful as a way of challenging another work, or the ideas in it. If they're well done, they might also stand on their own as an original work and the one they parodied might be lost in history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works that challenged another's work is for example August Strindberg's response to Ibsen's &lt;em&gt;A Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has a parody of a work of literature ever become more successful than the original work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:53:06.860" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:53:06.860" Title="Has a parody of a work of literature ever become more successful than the original work?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-01-19T00:12:10.617" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="164" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:42:43.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The new title spoils the minimalist effect of the poem.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, for reference, the text of the poem itself is simply this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so much depends&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;upon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a red wheel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;barrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;glazed with rain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;beside the white&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;chickens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3190244?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actual article by Neil Easterbrook&lt;/a&gt; which you and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; are referring to. (That link goes to a JSTOR page, where you can't see the full PDF without paying, but I could get hold of it.) The relevant paragraph is as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presented within this semantically predetermined package, readers (students) feel the key to the text is held by an initiate authority (the editor or professor), who then dispenses with the text by authorizing a reading. As such, a &amp;quot;self-contained and teachable&amp;quot; fragment is free to be subjected to virtually any sort of interpretative speculation. Treating individual poems like &amp;quot;gears . . . disrelated to the mathematics of the / machine&amp;quot; (P 119), anthologists usually fall back on other than textual or contextual explanations, frequently footnoting one of Williams's infamous dicta-such as &amp;quot;no ideas but in things&amp;quot; (P 9)-in an effort to resolve interpretative dilemmas, even when the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; context served to leave the dilemma intact and the text suspended between possible solutions. For example, changing the title from &amp;quot;XXII&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&amp;quot; gives the text a specific, specifically different frame. &lt;strong&gt;As &amp;quot;The Red Wheelbarrow,&amp;quot; even the text's fragmented compound noun is fused into some different thing: literally, its syncretic counterpart becomes a minimalistic poem about a particular object, and figurally, it becomes a gloss on the perceptual horizon, a synecdoche for the pre-problematized experience Husserl called the &amp;quot;natural attitude&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;16&lt;/sup&gt; and Heidegger the &amp;quot;pre-original&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pre-understanding.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;17&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to confess I don't know the meanings of all those words, but what I think this is saying is that the original effect of the poem - its minimalism, its simple beauty - is lost when it's given a real title (rather than just a number), especially one with a four-syllable word in it. As &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/wheelbarrow.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this analysis&lt;/a&gt; from the University of Illinois describes the poem (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No title, without punctuation, minimal diction, tilling rhythm, and modestly internal rhyme&lt;/strong&gt; (depends/upon, wheel/barrow, beside/white/chickens): it’s not much of a poem, an English formalist might object. What makes it tick? What catches in the eye, cocks the ear? Three modest prepositions—upon, with, beside--place these barnyard minims in visual apposition, or a kind of contingent spatial rhyme, as in Alexander Calder’s counter-gravity-balancing mobiles. Syllable to syllable the ear rolls (wheels) iamb upon trochee, the eye composes (glazes) red with white, as the mind centers (depends) on a barrow beside the chickens. &lt;strong&gt;It’s elemental—a figure / ground design scanned in twenty-two slim syllables.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By giving the poem a proper title, rather than its original &amp;quot;XXII&amp;quot;, some of this &amp;quot;elementary&amp;quot; nature is lost. This is what the critics feel spoils the intended effect of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:42:43.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="171" CreationDate="2017-01-18T23:56:56.400" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the didactic poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_How_He_Gained_Them&quot;&gt;The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Southey is now known only to dedicated fans of Southey or of Victorian poetry, but the semi-nonsense poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Are_Old,_Father_William&quot;&gt;You are Old, Father William&lt;/a&gt; created by Lewis Carroll as a parody of it has become much better known thanks to the enormous success of his Alice stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the two poems is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old, father William,&quot; the young man cried,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The few locks which are left you are grey;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now tell me the reason, I pray.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the days of my youth,&quot; father William replied,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I remember'd that youth would fly fast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And abus'd not my health and my vigour at first,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That I never might need them at last.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old, father William,&quot; the young man cried,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And pleasures with youth pass away.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet you lament not the days that are gone;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now tell me the reason, I pray.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the days of my youth,&quot; father William replied,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I remember'd that youth could not last;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I thought of the future, whatever I did,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That I never might grieve for the past.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old, father William,&quot; the young man cried,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And life must be hast'ning away;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are cheerful and love to converse upon death;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now tell me the reason, I pray.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am cheerful, young man,&quot; father William replied,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Let the cause thy attention engage;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the days of my youth I remember'd my God!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And He hath not forgotten my age.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Carrollian parody:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old, Father William,&quot; the young man said,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And your hair has become very white;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet you incessantly stand on your head—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you think, at your age, it is right?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In my youth,&quot; Father William replied to his son,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I feared it might injure the brain;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why, I do it again and again.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old,&quot; said the youth, &quot;As I mentioned before,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And have grown most uncommonly fat;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pray, what is the reason of that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In my youth,&quot; said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I kept all my limbs very supple&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By the use of this ointment—one shilling a box—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Allow me to sell you a couple?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old,&quot; said the youth, &quot;And your jaws are too weak&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For anything tougher than suet;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pray, how did you manage to do it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In my youth,&quot; said his father, &quot;I took to the law,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And argued each case with my wife;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has lasted the rest of my life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You are old,&quot; said the youth, &quot;one would hardly suppose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That your eye was as steady as ever;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What made you so awfully clever?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have answered three questions, and that is enough,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Said his father; &quot;don't give yourself airs!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-18T23:56:56.400" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="386" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:00:21.617" Score="23" ViewCount="556" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I pass, like night, from land to land;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I have strange power of speech;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   That moment that his face I see,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I know the man that must hear me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   To him my tale I teach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the last stanzas from &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;.  It describes how he was cursed to wander the earth, telling his story to whoever he meets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he have to do that forever? The title of the poem &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; call him the &quot;ancient&quot; mariner. Is he cursed with immortality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:37:18.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:37:18.747" Title="Is the mariner immortal?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="175" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:06:56.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A symbol is used in a work of art to represent another concept. You should use this tag if the questions concerns a symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of questions that would belong to this tag are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;code&gt;symbol x&lt;/code&gt; symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;code&gt;object x&lt;/code&gt; a symbol?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T11:18:48.467" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T11:18:48.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="176" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:06:56.630" Score="0" Body="Questions concerning symbolic features in a work of literature. Both symbols and the things they represent can be either tangible or intangible. Not to be confused with the [motif] tag or [meaning] tag. This tag is not to be used for questions about Symbolism as a movement in (mainly French) literature, unless such questions are about the use of symbols. See the tag wiki for more information." OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T13:47:22.807" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T13:47:22.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="137" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:08:47.540" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the paper &quot;Gloss on 'Gammon' in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, II, Line 166&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831482&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on JSTOR&lt;/a&gt;), Sukhbir Singh points out that the word gammon has two meanings. Gammon can refer to a type of food, specifically the cured hind leg of a hog. But gammon is also a verb meaning &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gammon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;to make pretense&quot; or to say deceitful things&lt;/a&gt;. On a very basic level, the use of the word gammon is a pun referring to both the dinner and the implied affair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pun goes a bit further. Gammon was thought to be an aphrodisiac, so the word gammon is yet another reference to sex. And Eliot refers to sexuality again by describing the gammon as &quot;hot&quot;; hot refers to sexual desire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two lines make a comparison sexual desire and hunger for food. Singh makes the argument that this comparison supports the theme in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; of humanity's degeneration. If you want to learn more about that, I would encourage you to check out Singh's paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T18:03:49.120" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T18:03:49.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4714" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:08:59.667" Score="9" ViewCount="1096" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Shakespeare is famous for using many words in his plays which were new introductions to the English language. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare Online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English language owes a great debt to Shakespeare. He invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, other sources claim that many of the words often thought to have been coined by Shakespeare were in fact already in use before his time. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/words-shakespeare-didnt-invent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that at no point did the editors of the OED say &amp;quot;We have X entries for which Shakespeare is the earliest known user; therefore he invented X number of words.&amp;quot; [...] As lexicographers have gained access to electronic databases the number of words for which Shakespeare is the first recorded source has shrunk dramatically. Yet we still are regularly informed that &amp;quot;Shakespeare coined the word X&amp;quot; in formats ranging from Internet lists to academic papers. So in the spirit of lexical clarity—or, if you prefer, punctiliousness—we present you with a list of words that people love to say were invented by Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I remember reading that some words which appeared in Shakespeare plays caused problems for the typesetters when the plays first went to print, due to their unfamiliarity. So it does seem to be definitely true that he invented at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it must by now be impossible to tell in many cases whether or not a given word in one of Shakespeare's plays had ever been used in English before him, I'm hoping that it will be possible to come up with at least a ball-park figure, somewhere between none and 1700.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Roughly how many of the words in Shakespeare's plays were new additions to the English language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T15:26:26.373" Title="How many of Shakespeare's words in his plays were new?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="186" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:20:35.807" Score="10" ViewCount="2842" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Hardy Boys&lt;/em&gt; books are a bunch of mystery novels, written by Franklin W.  Dixon. They all focus on the Hardy Brothers, Frank and Joe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some of the series, but not all of them (especially not the paperback ones), and I'd like to know if I can read them while skipping lots of the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Do I need to read them in order?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T14:59:36.887" Title="Do I need to read the Hardy Boys books in order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;hardy-boys&gt;&lt;franklin-w-dixon&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="180" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:21:41.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973), better known as J.R.R. Tolkien, was an English author, and professor of Anglo-Saxon and of English language and literature at the University of Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In literature, his influence on the fantasy genre has been profound. The influence of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and other works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_legendarium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his legendarium&lt;/a&gt; can be seen in nearly every fantasy novel written since. Tolkien's tales of Middle-Earth were initiated by his attempts to create a system of &quot;English mythology&quot;, although they eventually became something quite different, albeit inspired by various systems of real-world mythology, particularly Germanic and Norse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T00:40:33.537" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T00:40:33.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="181" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:21:41.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author J.R.R. (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien or his life as a writer. Tolkien is best known for 'The Lord of the Rings', 'The Hobbit', 'The Silmarillion' and the other works making up the Middle-Earth legendarium." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:53:41.387" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:53:41.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:23:20.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing introduced in the first few books that you need to know in the later ones.  Everything you need to know--i.e., character names, professions, hobbies, appearance etc. are reintroduced in each book.  You certainly may read them in order, and it doesn't hurt--as a 7-year-old, I demanded that my parents buy me only the next one in the order--but you don't have to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:23:20.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:23:27.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;No.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the &lt;em&gt;Hardy Boys&lt;/em&gt; books are separate storylines. They sometimes reference the previous books, but never give away the &amp;quot;solution&amp;quot; or too much of the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:23:27.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2910" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:24:43.693" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love the illustrations in Willy Ley's &lt;em&gt;Exotic Zoology&lt;/em&gt;, which appear to be line art. Sadly my copy is a battered library-discard; either the front matter never attributed the artist or it was on a page that's now missing. Wikipedia and Goodreads say the artist was Olga Ley, but they don't offer any particular citation for the information and I can't find her name in searches of any of Wikipedia's reference links--so I don't know how much they suffer from ambiguous &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/978/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;citogenesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who illustrated &lt;em&gt;Exotic Zoology&lt;/em&gt; and how do we know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T11:30:20.557" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T09:13:56.463" Title="Who illustrated &quot;Exotic Zoology&quot;?" Tags="&lt;illustrators&gt;&lt;attribution&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:25:04.603" Score="33" ViewCount="2856" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Orwell's &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, O'Brien knows well that Julia and Winston are enemies of the Party when they come to his house to pledge their allegiance to the Brotherhood. Why doesn't he immediately arrest them then? In the novel itself, there's quite a gap between the actual arrest and the original meeting between Winston and O'Brien. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T10:30:41.127" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:26:31.310" Title="In 1984, why did O'Brien wait so long?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:27:26.907" Score="17" Body="&lt;h1&gt;You don't need to read them in any order.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Overall advice&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting thing about &lt;em&gt;The Hardy Boys&lt;/em&gt; is that the writing style has changed over time. I don't know just how many ghostwriters have been used since their beginning in 1927, but it's got to be quite a few (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hardy_Boys#Ghostwriters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; suggests it's more than a dozen, often collaborating). Combine that with the fact that America itself has changed, and you see that the overall dynamics of the pair and of the plots are far from regular. Nowadays, some of their books have them fighting terrorists. That would not have been happening 60 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several subdivisions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hardy_Boys_books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;all the books that have been written&lt;/a&gt;. My argument is that most divisions, from a pure reading point of view, are superficial &lt;em&gt;compared with the overall trends&lt;/em&gt;. You don't have to worry about reading, say, the entirety of &lt;em&gt;Undercover Brothers&lt;/em&gt; to move on to the next period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pick a point and start there. In general, read from that point forward in time, but feel free to jump backwards and forwards.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try not to read one book that's more than, say, twenty years older or younger than the last one you read if you care about style. Over that time, it will have changed - a lot - as will the overall story arc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each book is largely self-contained. You'll know &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; of what you need to know just by reading it cover-to-cover.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your only problems could really come if you drastically jump around - and that won't impact your consumption of an individual book's plot. However, you'll be a little bit confused at how the story arcs have evolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My experience&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I grew up in the 2000s, reading the revisions of the original series. The revisions &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; dated back to the 1970s or 1980s, if I remember correctly. I started at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_Treasure&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tower Treasure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - the first one - and got maybe 20 books in. I thought the continuity was rather smooth. There were a few inter-book references, but I didn't have to remember all the details of the previous one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then made a jump to one of the newer books, and it was a bit of a shock. The style was very different, and the plot had changed from some small-scale crimes to pretty heavy stuff. I regret having taken that chronological jump; it made me lose interest in the series a bit. Thinking back, I may have gone to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_Brothers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Undercover Brothers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series, actually, which deals with much more delicate and violent material. The first one I read contained a car bomb as a plot point, which was a bit shaky for 10-year-old me. It was not a wise choice to make that switch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:58:23.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="167" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:29:45.483" Score="12" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Most likely real, by the laws of the fantasy world.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is a fictional book, but in-universe they are real. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They teach him (true) facts about the world. The fact that they teach him is pretty obvious, but think about it: how would he learn new information from himself? If they were figments of his imagination, they wouldn't know any more than him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For a slightly better argument, note that the pilot sees the snake at one point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There before me, facing the little&#xA;  prince, was one of those yellow snakes that take just thirty seconds to bring your life to an end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, he didn't see (or hear) it talking, but it was at least &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T15:18:49.173" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T15:18:49.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="184" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:33:01.823" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_Zoology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, the illustrator is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1286172.Olga_Ley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olga Ley&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:33:01.823" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:33:18.620" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely he wanted to crush Winston's spirit. Look at it this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Winston has an affair with Julia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He begins to think there's a chance of a successful rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He's finally feeling good about life.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;BOOM!&lt;/em&gt; all his dreams are crushed when he's arrested, especially &lt;em&gt;knowing&lt;/em&gt; that he was observed. The Party doesn't just want to stop him, they want to crush his spirits also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He could also have been seeing if Winston and/or Julia would lead him (O'Brien) to more traitors, to stop them also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:32:39.083" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:32:39.083" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="193" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:42:23.707" Score="22" ViewCount="1269" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty well known that Mark Twain was rather vitriolic against Jane Austen, saying things like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I go so far as to say that any library is a good library that does not contain a volume by Jane Austen. Even if it contains no other book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'd like to know if, in his criticisms of her, he ever provided actual substantive criticisms of her books.  Preferably more specific than &amp;quot;she's a terrible writer&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I hate all her characters.&amp;quot;  Did he give real reasons for his dislike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:52:06.950" Title="What specific criticisms did Mark Twain make against Jane Austen's books?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="78" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:44:43.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;There are no recurring characters, except in the sequels and spin-offs.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, as you noted with &amp;quot;except for the sequels&amp;quot;, there are recurring villains such as Slappy the dummy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the spin-off series of &lt;em&gt;Goosebumps HorrorLand&lt;/em&gt;, there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; recurring places/enemies (such as the park itself).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the plain &lt;em&gt;Goosebumps&lt;/em&gt; series, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:44:43.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:46:27.003" Score="9" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Of Mice and Men&lt;/em&gt;, I never understood why it was necessary for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; George to kill Lennie,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when George simply could've pulled some sort of diversionary tactic and falsely led the rest of the lynch mob somewhere else in the forest. By the time the lynch mob realized it was a false clue, George could've snuck back to him and have been on his way to the next town. Is the reason it was necessary for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Lennie to die &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because the lynch mob was already too close to the pair of them for them to escape?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T08:47:17.407" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T11:17:53.623" Title="Why did George have to kill this character?" Tags="&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;of-mice-and-men&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="190" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:52:06.950" Score="20" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She [Jane Austen] makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twainquotes.com/Austen_Jane.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He hates all her characters because of a specific reason: they don't feel believable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twain also criticized other classic authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, saying he committed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vqronline.org/essay/barkeeper-entering-kingdom-heaven-did-mark-twain-really-hate-jane-austen&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).  Maybe Mark Twain was just a weirdo, or maybe he had some legitimate complaint with Jane Austen's characters and their believability.  On the same site we see this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think he truly, actually, thought that Jane Austen's characters were one-sided and not believable enough to be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T00:52:06.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:53:44.120" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while, but my recollection is that the idea was that Lennie 1) was ultimately dangerous and 2) killed a woman, albeit unintentionally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lennie liked to pet rabbits because they were soft, but he killed them because he didn't understand nor could he control his strength. He did the same with the puppy he was given. Lennie simply didn't have the mental capacity to be gentler &amp;mdash; imagine a three-year-old with the strength of Mike Tyson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When George realizes Lennie has killed the woman whose hair he was &quot;petting,&quot; like the small animals, he knows that Lennie will be easily caught and tried for murder. The trial will be terrifying for Lennie, who can't understand what's happening, and his death will be frightening and possibly painful. Or worse, he'll simply be lynched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George puts a bullet in his head out of kindness, both for Lennie so he doesn't suffer and for anyone else who might be hurt by Lennie's accidental maulings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T03:25:44.553" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T03:25:44.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="195" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="207" CreationDate="2017-01-19T00:56:17.233" Score="9" ViewCount="6443" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; series by Brian Jacques is pretty long: ~40 books, iirc. They all focus on different characters, but there are lots of people that appear in lots, such as Martin the Warrior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do I have to read the Redwall books in any specific order?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T08:28:14.303" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T08:28:14.303" Title="Do I need to read the Redwall books in any specific order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:02:01.190" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;It foreshadows the death of Ewell in a way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the dog, who has been around for a long time, becomes a real threat to the children, the shooting skills of Atticus, which haven't been seen for many years, reveals itself to deal with the threat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Bob Ewell, who also has been around for a long time, becomes a real threat to the children, Boo Radley, who hasn't been seen for many years, reveals himself to deal with the threat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T01:02:01.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="197" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="210" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:06:59.600" Score="15" ViewCount="730" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who's ever read Victor Hugo's immortal masterpiece &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; knows that it's a &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; read... mostly because Hugo goes on a bunch of random tangents in the middle—on such topics as the battle of Waterloo, Paris and its urchins, a certain convent, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact the book opens with about 70 pages describing the Bishop before even introducing the main character, Jean Valjean.  I know he was a crazy genius and everything, but what exactly was the purpose of these tangents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he wanted to comment on the battle of Waterloo, why not separately write an essay on the battle and save me an hour of time when I'm trying to read &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T10:15:25.050" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T10:15:25.050" Title="Why all those tangents in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:07:52.247" Score="5" ViewCount="2152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Troy the antagonist of the play &lt;em&gt;Fences&lt;/em&gt;? The antagonist is, by definition, the opposer to the protagonist, who is also Troy. However, Troy often acts against his own beliefs (i.e., sending Gabe to the hospital for money). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Troy the main person standing in his own way?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T01:52:15.643" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T01:52:15.643" Title="Is Troy the antagonist in &quot;Fences&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;august-wilson&gt;&lt;fences&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="199" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:09:05.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series by Joanne Kathleen Rowling is the best-selling book series of all time, and has been adapted into eight blockbuster films which form the second-highest-grossing film series of all time. The 7 books in the series are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone&lt;/em&gt; (1997)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets&lt;/em&gt; (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban&lt;/em&gt; (1999)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire&lt;/em&gt; (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that questions about the films are off-topic for this site (except as they relate to the books) and should instead be taken to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://movies.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy&lt;/a&gt; Stack Exchange sites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T00:31:00.527" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T00:31:00.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="200" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:09:05.437" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the 7-book young-adult series by J. K. Rowling. Use this tag with the [j-k-rowling] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:11:20.233" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:11:20.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="203" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:26:37.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt; was not only an author of plays and poems but also an &lt;strong&gt;actor&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;shareholder&lt;/strong&gt; of the theatre company with which he was associated. As a dramatists, he wrote tragedies, histories (a genre that he reinvented), comedies and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_late_romances&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;romances&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; or tragicomedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;histories&lt;/strong&gt;, which were all written before 1601, include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_II_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_V_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;strong&gt;comedies&lt;/strong&gt;, which were all written before 1602, include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night%27s_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Night&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;strong&gt;tragedies&lt;/strong&gt; include early works such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Andronicus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and the four great tragedies of his mature period: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othello&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The &amp;quot;romance&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was probably the last play that Shakespeare wrote on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a &lt;strong&gt;poet&lt;/strong&gt;, Shakespeare wrote the popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_and_Adonis_(Shakespeare_poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venus and Adonis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Lucrece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rape of Lucrece&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_sonnets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cycle of 154 sonnets&lt;/a&gt; and a number of other longer poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using this tag, please add the tag corresponding to the work itself as well, if it exists. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/hamlet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;hamlet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/macbeth&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;macbeth&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;macbeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/romeo-and-juliet&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;romeo-and-juliet&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;romeo-and-juliet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-merchant-of-venice&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-merchant-of-venice&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-merchant-of-venice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-winters-tale&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-winters-tale&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-winters-tale&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T19:33:08.963" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T19:33:08.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="204" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:26:37.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Shakespeare (1564 –  1616), the legendary playwright and poet known as &quot;The Bard&quot;, or his life as a writer and theatre shareholder. For questions about his plays, add a tag for the play (e.g. [hamlet]); for questions about his sonnets, add the tag [poetry]." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:10:06.440" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:10:06.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="205" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:29:31.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; was written in 1954, by William Golding. The  book focuses on a group of boys who are stranded in an island, and turn to savagery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T09:58:57.230" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T09:58:57.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="206" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:29:31.973" Score="0" Body="For questions about William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies. Use this tag with the [william-golding] tag. " OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T14:37:07.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T14:37:07.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="195" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:35:45.857" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I've already &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/134473/31394&quot;&gt;posted about this&lt;/a&gt; on another SE site. Let me try to go into even more detail here.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two obvious possibilities for the ordering: &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Publication_Order&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;publication order&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Redwall_Chronological_Order&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in-universe chronological order&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. These do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; agree, but in most cases where they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; agree, they should probably not be contradicted (i.e. if book A comes before book B in both of these orderings, then you probably do need to read A before B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it's important to note that there are various subsets of &quot;the Redwall books&quot;, which form loosely connected series within the wider universe. These are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the Martin stories&lt;/strong&gt; - set during the time of the legendary mouse Martin the Warrior, who makes ghostly appearances to help Redwallers in almost all the later books. These are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin the Warrior&lt;/em&gt; (covers Martin's history before coming to Redwall)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt; (covers the establishment of Redwall itself)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Legend of Luke&lt;/em&gt; (the core story here is about Martin's father Luke, and set before either of the other two; but it has a sizeable framing story featuring Martin shortly after the establishment of Redwall, so I think it merits coming third in this list, with the main Luke story being treated as a flashback)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I would recommend reading them in this order, but it's not really important. &lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt; was published first, and could definitely be read first, but then of course you'd have to view &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; the other two as primarily flashbacks.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the Mariel stories&lt;/strong&gt; - set long after Martin the Warrior and long before Matthias, during the time of Joseph the Bellmaker. These are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mariel of Redwall&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bellmaker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Read them in this order.&lt;/strong&gt; They form a unified two-part story, the tale of Joseph the Bellmaker and his daughter Mariel.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the badger stories&lt;/strong&gt; - I've lumped these together because they're all focused primarily on badgers and/or Salamandastron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord Brocktree&lt;/em&gt; (set long before Martin and Redwall)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Outcast of Redwall&lt;/em&gt; (set between Martin's time and Mariel's)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt; (set between Mariel's time and Matthias's)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Read these in any order you want. They're not connected to each other, are set many years apart, and don't even have to be read together (I've simply grouped them loosely together because they share a common theme).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the main series&lt;/strong&gt; - starting with Matthias and continuing on from there, these books comprise the majority of the entire list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mattimeo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Pearls of Lutra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Long Patrol&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Taggerung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Triss&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loamhedge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rakkety Tam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;High Rhulain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eulalia!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doomwyte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sable Quean&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rogue Crew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Read the first six of these in order.&lt;/strong&gt; They're linked very clearly one to the next by common characters: Matthias is the hero of the first, he and his son the heroes of the second, his grandson features prominently in the third, Tansy is the heroine of the third and features prominently in the fourth, and the last three are linked by Cregga.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last eight are linked loosely if at all (for example, the Taggerung is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Triss&lt;/em&gt; as a distant ancestor of Skipper). I would recommend reading these in order, but you won't lose out on much if you don't, or if you skip some of them entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having divided the Redwall books neatly into subseries and discussed ordering within each of them, the question remains  of how to order the subseries relative to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publication order would require mixing them all up so that you never read an entire subseries in one go. You could do that (especially with the three badger stories), but I don't recommend it - it would decrease your appreciation for each subseries by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chronological order isn't the best idea either. You'll appreciate the Martin stories better once you've already been introduced to the world of Redwall and the mythos of Martin the Warrior. Frankly the best place to start is probably where Brian Jacques himself started: with the very first published story, &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;. Although he hadn't quite worked out his world in detail by then, and some things you read there will jar with later books, it's an excellent introduction to the universe of Redwall, and definitely doesn't assume any knowledge from &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of the other books (including those set chronologically before it). So here's the optimal overall order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Matthias series&lt;/strong&gt; (6 books to introduce you to the world);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Martin series&lt;/strong&gt; (3 books to fill in the legend of Martin);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mariel and badger series&lt;/strong&gt; (a 2-book series and three single books, to be read in any order - think of this as expanding the universe and filling in extra details around the main story);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the final eight books&lt;/strong&gt; (if you're really into Redwall and want even more).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T08:27:58.797" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T08:27:58.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:38:44.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unknown for sure, but it most likely refers to either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mensheviks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mensheviks&lt;/a&gt;, a non-communist party in Russia, because he's another viewpoint from the pigs but is mostly ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He also could be the older population of Russia, because he is old and skeptical.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He could also just be the skeptical people, who don't believe communism will really help them much.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He could be the Jews, who weren't helped really at all by communism.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, he could be Orwell (inserted into the story, not really fitting the allegory). Just along for the ride, not really in favor of communism/the pigs either.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T01:38:44.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:39:30.357" Score="10" ViewCount="987" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt; by J.D. Salinger in any way based on Salinger's earlier life, like the works of Charles Dickens?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T01:44:22.157" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T21:28:49.107" Title="Was Catcher in the Rye autobiographical?" Tags="&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;&lt;catcher-in-the-rye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="197" CreationDate="2017-01-19T01:53:48.730" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norman Denny has this to say in the introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/norman-denny/15876/&quot;&gt;his translation of &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hugo [...] had little or no regard for the discipline of&#xA;  novel-writing. He was wholly unrestrained and unsparing of his reader.&#xA;  He had to say everything and more than everything; he was incapable of&#xA;  leaving anything out. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One reason for [so many digressions] is that it was written over a period of nearly&#xA;  twenty years. A first unfinished novel entitled &lt;em&gt;Misères&lt;/em&gt; was written&#xA;  during the three years from 1845 to 1848; it was then put aside for&#xA;  twelve years, to be completed in 1860-62 as &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About Waterloo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hugo, as he tells us, had tramped over the battlefield, presumably&#xA;  when he was living in Brussels in 1853; he had studied maps and&#xA;  army-lists and such professional records as were available to him, and&#xA;  out of this he concocted his own elaborate and poeticized layman's&#xA;  version of an event [...]. This is the largest of the digressions, and&#xA;  it is reasonable to assume that the bulk of it was written long before&#xA;  Hugo returned to his novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About &lt;em&gt;Parenthèse&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hugo's publisher, Lacroix, feeling that this would be trying the&#xA;  reader's patience altogether too high, urged him to take it out; but&#xA;  Hugo refused, as it seems for purely personal reasons: his cousin&#xA;  Marie, to whom he was attached, had taken the veil in 1848.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denny then proceeds to drop some of these digressions to appendices in his translation, making his &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; a far more pleasant prospect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T01:53:48.730" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:21:49.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The human body can survive for a pretty long time without food or water.  A famous example, Mahatma Gandhi, survived 21 days with only small sips of water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that's with a bit of water. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-the-average/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Scientific American&lt;/a&gt;, the human body can last (on average) around a hundred hours without water, at the far end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this depends on the temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors.  Madeline was put into a tomb underground, where I assume it was cold and damp.  There was a storm outside, so that wouldn't help. Maybe she was in a tomb instead of an actual coffin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Madeline's body had been placed in a coffin, Usher and I alone carried it to it's temporary tomb. This was a vault, or compartment, in the foundation walls of the mansion. It was small, &lt;strong&gt;damp&lt;/strong&gt;, and without any light. It was directly under the room in which I was staying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's highly unlikely she'd be able to survive without &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; water for 7 days, even in those conditions however. It's more likely that there was a small trickle or pool of water in the tomb and that she wasn't confined to a coffin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Not really feasible, she had to have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; water. Either Poe made a mistake, this is a different universe, or Madeline became some sort of zombie who didn't need water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T21:31:17.237" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T21:31:17.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="214" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:25:23.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the fiction genre in general, not to be used for specific works of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T02:06:08.377" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:06:08.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="215" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:25:23.347" Score="0" Body="For questions which are explicitly about the fiction genre as a whole." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T02:03:07.833" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:03:07.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="216" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:26:59.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T02:26:59.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T02:26:59.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="217" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:26:59.323" Score="0" Body="For questions about the author, inspirations, or other out-of-universe questions about a work." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T22:51:45.083" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T22:51:45.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="218" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:27:39.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T02:27:39.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T02:27:39.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="219" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:27:39.070" Score="0" Body="For questions which are explicitly about the author of the work. Do not use this tag unless your question directly relates to some literary aspect of an author's life (motivation for writing, beliefs that impacted writing, etc.) " OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T07:30:09.493" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T07:30:09.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="238" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:35:17.853" Score="7" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;J. D. Salinger is a well-known 20th century author, most notably of &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was fairly prolific, writing many stories.  Do any of these stories share the same universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:18:12.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:18:12.153" Title="Do any of J. D. Salinger's short stories share locations or characters?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="287" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:38:41.933" Score="21" ViewCount="1923" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1984, O'Brien expects Winston to know what Room 101 is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that Room 101 is more torture, but why would O'Brien expect Winston to know that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What is in Room 101?’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The expression on O’Brien’s face did not change. He answered drily: ‘You know what is in Room 101, Winston. Everyone knows what is in Room 101.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You asked me once,&quot; said O'Brien, &quot;what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T18:54:39.970" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:59:23.883" Title="In 1984, why does O'Brien expect Winston to know what Room 101 is?" Tags="&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="225" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:40:51.163" Score="12" ViewCount="1064" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Little Prince&lt;/em&gt;, the titular little prince lands on Earth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long was he there?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, the prince left on the 8th day of the pilot being lost in the desert. I don't know if the prince landed the same time the pilot crashed. Did he? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long was the prince on Earth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T13:31:17.927" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T13:31:17.927" Title="How long was the Little Prince on Earth?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-little-prince&gt;&lt;antoine-de-saint-exupery&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="71" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:42:20.117" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure it's &lt;strong&gt;a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States&lt;/strong&gt;. Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere &amp;quot;airstrip&amp;quot; for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (&lt;em&gt;War is Peace&lt;/em&gt;) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With &lt;strong&gt;the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States&lt;/strong&gt;, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also fit with Orwell's generally anti-American attitude. &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; has no mercy: it rips into the Soviet system of 'communism' but &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; into the west, the US and Britain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Mark notes in a comment, the name &amp;quot;Airstrip One&amp;quot; is also a clear reference to the way Britain is sometimes referred to in real life as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsinkable_aircraft_carrier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unsinkable aircraft carrier&lt;/a&gt; for the United States. (This phrase likely dates back further than the publication of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;; one of Wikipedia's citations is to &lt;a href=&quot;http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,856644,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Time Magazine article&lt;/a&gt; from 1950.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other relevant quote I've found is this from Chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the names of countries, and their shapes on the map, had been different. Airstrip One, for instance, had not been so called in those days: it had been called England, or Britain, though London, he felt fairly certain, had always been called London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... which confirms that Airstrip One is indeed the country we now call Britain or England. But very little is known about life in the world outside of London in &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, beyond broad generalities, so it's unlikely that there's a canonical answer to this in-universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T03:02:29.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="40" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:43:53.373" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The purpose of keeping parts of the &lt;em&gt;source langue&lt;/em&gt; no-translated, or using some variant or dialect of the &lt;em&gt;target language&lt;/em&gt; for some elements (eg: dialog, a  specific character talk, ...), depends on the work, its creators (author, translator), and the languages involved. But, here is some general reasons and uses that I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The original text, is based on a cultural reference that doesn't have an equivalent in the &lt;em&gt;destination language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the text represent a title. or an honorific (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_honorifics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese honorifics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it's a location name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it is a maxim a motto, or a proverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: &quot;Carpe Diem&quot;, &quot;Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno&quot;, or: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“...L’amour fait les égalités, et ne les cherche pas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- The Red and the Black, Stendhal (Henri Beyle), translated by Charles Tergie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;it hold a mythological, spiritual, or religious meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: &quot;chants&quot; and &quot;prayer&quot;, are rarely translated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the text is constituted of poem verses, it is a poetic prose, or it sound way more elegant in its &lt;em&gt;source language&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Vous qui pleurez un passé plein de charmes, Et qui traînez des jours&#xA;  infortunés, Tous vos malheurs se verront terminés, Quand à Dieu seul&#xA;  vous offrirez vos larmes, Vous qui pleurez!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.planetebook.com/ebooks/The-Three-Musketeers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The-Three-Musketeers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the &lt;em&gt;original text&lt;/em&gt; is in a variant of the &lt;em&gt;source language&lt;/em&gt; other than the standard one, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g: countryside language or a spoken unofficial language.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the author or translator opted for this trope: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bilingual Bonus:&lt;/strong&gt; A hidden message in a foreign language. This ostensibly makes these&#xA;  messages available only to bilingual and international audiences. The&#xA;  extra can be anything from a plot-relevant point to additional&#xA;  dialogue to a random gag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BilingualBonus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tvtropes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="156" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T23:10:07.770" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T23:10:07.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="222" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:48:48.373" Score="17" Body="&lt;h1&gt;One Year.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Near the end, the Little Prince journeys to the wall and has an encounter with a snake - the same snake, I believe, that he met when he first arrived on Earth. He wants to meet death by its venom. The narrator saves him, and after some brief discussion, the prince looks up at &quot;his star&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But he said to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tonight, it will be a year . . . My star, then, can be found right above the place where I came to the Earth, a year ago . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a short conversation, the prince lets the snake bite him, and dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not totally certain what the Little Prince means by &quot;my star&quot;. I've considered that it could be the asteroid that the narrator believes is asteroid B-612 - and that may be correct, as he tells the snake when he arrives on Earth that he can see &quot;his planet&quot;. I don't, however, have anything to back this up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French text is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mais il me dit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cette nuit, ça fera un an. Mon étoile se trouvera juste au-dessus de l'endroit où je suis tombé l'année dernière...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T03:12:52.300" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T03:12:52.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="132" CreationDate="2017-01-19T02:55:14.207" Score="14" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia are all named for their geographical features.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best description we have of the three superpowers and their geography comes from Chapter III (&lt;em&gt;War is Peace&lt;/em&gt;) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 2, Chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see, then, that Oceania is an entirely apt description for this superpower which consists mostly of ocean, just as Eurasia is an apt name for the one which covers most of the continents of Europe and Asia, and Eastasia for the one which is geographically smallest and tucked into eastern Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YkHUW.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YkHUW.png&quot; alt=&quot;map&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(image courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1984_fictitious_world_map_v2_quad.svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oceania's oceans are also its major military advantage in the eternal war between the three nations, and the asset which makes it essentially unconquerable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the three super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces, Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T14:17:51.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="185" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:08:11.607" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as Riker's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/189/17&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, which focuses on why O'Brien would wait so long &lt;strong&gt;from the point of view of crushing &lt;em&gt;Winston&lt;/em&gt; specifically&lt;/strong&gt;, there's also a different motivation which applies regardless of whether a personal victory over Winston is really seen as an important goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's common practice, for an intelligence officer who's detected one or two possible targets to entrap, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to detain them immediately but to wait and observe them &lt;strong&gt;in case they lead him to more subversives&lt;/strong&gt;. Why stop at a single rogue element if you might be able to catch a whole nest of them? Knowledge of a single person's rebelliousness is an asset, but only as long as that person doesn't know you know: as soon as you capture them, they become nothing but another imprisoned soul, and no use in helping you to find more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(This answer is partly inspired by DVK's answer to the related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/66025/31394&quot;&gt;Why doesn't Mr. Charrington turn Winston in earlier?&lt;/a&gt; on another SE site.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:26:31.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:18:42.147" Score="9" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading Charles Robert Maturin's &lt;em&gt;Melmoth the Wanderer&lt;/em&gt; I couldn't help but notice that &lt;strong&gt;Isidora's fate largely resembled Gretchen's&lt;/strong&gt; in Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt; and especially the endings of both storylines are largely similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the obvious connection of Melmoth's tale being a Faustian tale itself and from their nature as innocent girls seduced by the protagonist, the parallels between Isidora and Gretchen are quite direct. Both ultimately conceive an illegitimate child from him and end up in the dungeon for their involvement with Melmoth/Faust, losing their child (although Isidora's part in the child's death is less direct, or at least more ambiguous). Both are visited in their cell and tempted a final time by their respective lovers to join them in freedom, but ultimately choose heavenly redemption instead. This scene itself struck me as quite a resemblance beyond just the obvious similarities of Melmoth and Faust making deals with the devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder &lt;strong&gt;if that part in &lt;em&gt;Melmoth the Wanderer&lt;/em&gt; took a direct inspiration from or is even a reference to Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt; in particular&lt;/strong&gt;, or if it is actually relying on older and more general elements of the Faustian legend that Goethe also took inspiration from, or if it is just a downright coincidence altogether. Is there any more information on this? Has the author maybe commented on it or has someone already done a more extensive analyisis of the evolution of the stories? Or am I maybe missing other elements that substantiate the connection even clearer (or refute it altogether)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T21:43:48.527" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:43:48.527" Title="Was Isidora's fate in Melmoth the Wanderer directly inspired by Faust?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;faust&gt;&lt;charles-robert-maturin&gt;&lt;melmoth-the-wanderer&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="64" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:28:12.060" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible case of character development is in &amp;quot;The Adventure of the Three Garridebs&amp;quot; when Holmes, for the first and only time in all the canon, is shown to care for his fellow man. This may be more &lt;em&gt;revealing&lt;/em&gt; the character that's always been hidden beneath, rather than a &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; in character, but from an out-of-universe point of view at least, I think it counts as character development:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was worth a wound - it was worth many wounds - to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite a change from the utterly cold, logical, even ruthless man we've seen in Holmes in all the other stories - the man who disdains any distraction from the pursuit of pure reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T03:28:12.060" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="230" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:35:22.470" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions which relate to the written work &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; by J.R.R. Tolkien, which consists of three subsidiary novels - &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; - but was considered by its author to be a single unified book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; use this tag for questions about non-written works relating to &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, such as video games or Peter Jackson's film series, unless the question also relates directly to the books. These non-written materials are not part of this site's scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T02:06:35.523" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:06:35.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="231" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:35:22.470" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Lord of the Rings, the fantasy epic by J R R Tolkien which has influenced nearly all works of fantasy written since its publication." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T11:04:28.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T11:04:28.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:42:04.903" Score="9" ViewCount="2018" Body="&lt;p&gt;A passage from the fifth part of the poem &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dayadhvam: I have heard the key&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Turn in the door once and turn once only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We think of the key, each in his prison&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure how to interpret this passage. For example, what does it mean to say &quot;thinking of the key, each confirms a prison&quot;? I get that the sound of the key turning represents the locking of a prison door. But I'm not sure how this passage fits into the larger meaning of the poem. Any insight would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T14:21:31.960" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T03:03:19.753" Title="Understanding the key in The Waste Land" Tags="&lt;the-waste-land&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T03:45:46.197" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a series of still images (comic). I believe it's quite old, probably from between 1960-1980. It's about Huey, Dewey and Louie. Two of them are being sort of rowdy, fighting, doing mischief, etc. and messing up their clothes. Then someone says (roughly) that one of the brothers has a girlfriend and that it's easy to see who it is. Then in the last panel we see that one of the brothers is sitting with very neat clothes and acting very innocently. Then they say that he is the one with the girlfriend. I've been trying to find this cartoon, but without luck. Can anyone help point me to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-04-07T23:38:55.067" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T23:38:55.067" Title="I'm looking for a comic where Huey, Dewey or Louie has a girlfriend" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2017-01-19T04:09:38.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;T.S. Elliot is trying to communicate a very subtle point, in something of a reverse order, and there are a couple possible interpretations of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is a tirade on selfishness, portraying the harm it does to oneself. The key line here is actually the last one: &lt;em&gt;Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.&lt;/em&gt;  The prison could be one of the mind: we're each trapped within our own prisons, and in thinking of the key, we confirm that we are trapped in it. We each hear the key, in our own prisons, without giving thought to the others who are also trapped in the same. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's also a commentary on the way poetry and literature as a whole locks itself into a cage of introspection. After a little digging, I found a good reference. Steven Colbrun, in &lt;em&gt;Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale&lt;/em&gt; (somewhat oddly) writes on this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We think of the key, each in his prison, / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison,&quot; wrote Eliot a half-century back, on the way to his conversion to Christianity. But consider how much of our literature, our high literature especially, and most especially our high poetry, confirms the prison. &lt;strong&gt;We are instructed perhaps in its interior decoration, but not encouraged to seek escape.&lt;/strong&gt; ...If each in his cell believes himself locked up forever, the last thing he wants to hear from a neighboring cell is the noise of scratching, poundings, screamings for the jailer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, this point isn't necessarily contradictory with the notion that our prisons are ones of selfishness. We get caught in our own webs of thinking, and stop listening to what's going on around us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just a couple possible interpretations. Either way, the passage certainly is on the topic of self-imprisonment and self-centeredness: that once we fall into that well (&quot;Turn in the door once...&quot;), you can no longer get out of it - not because you're incapable, but because of... some external reason that varies depending on your reading of the poem. Your perspective, and how you view the rest of the poem, should influence where you go from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T04:09:38.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="235" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T04:12:48.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about the 1943 novella &lt;em&gt;The Little Prince&lt;/em&gt; by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not use it for questions about non-written adaptations of this work, e.g. films or radio plays, as these are not on-topic for the Literature site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T01:59:34.333" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T01:59:34.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="236" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T04:12:48.017" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the novella &quot;The Little Prince&quot; by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Use in conjunction with the [antoine-de-saint-exupery] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:18:17.457" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:18:17.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T04:30:04.993" Score="13" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;On First Looking into Chapman's Homer,&quot; John Keats writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oft of one wide expanse had I been told &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;    Yet never did I breathe its pure serene&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Till I heard Chapman speak it loud and bold&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Chapman's translation the first time Keats had read Homer whatsoever?  Or had he been exposed to other English translations and/or the original Greek, and Chapman was simply the first time he appreciated Homer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T10:04:37.550" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T10:04:37.550" Title="Had Keats read any of Homer's works before reading Chapman's translation of them?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="220" CreationDate="2017-01-19T05:23:08.367" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arguably, all of Salinger's published stories share the same &quot;universe,&quot; which is his own.  That said, specific overlap in characters in currently-published works is limited to the stories and novellas that revolve around the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_family&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glass family&lt;/a&gt;.  In publication order, they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Perfect Day for Bananafish&quot; (1948), starring Seymour Glass and his wife Muriel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut&quot; (1948), in which Walt Glass is prominently mentioned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Down at the Dinghy&quot; (1949), featuring Boo Boo Glass Tannenbaum&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Franny&quot; (1955), starring Franny Glass&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenter&quot; (1955), starring Buddy Glass, and featuring many other members of the family, set at Seymour &amp;amp; Muriel's wedding&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Zooey&quot; (1957), starring Zooey Glass, featuring many other members&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Seymour: An Introduction&quot; (1959), narrated by Buddy, but revolving around Seymour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Hapworth 16, 1924&quot; (1965), which largely consists of a letter written by a 7-year-old Seymour&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all anthologized and widely available, except the last one, which has never been published outside of the June 19, 1965 issue of &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;.  (It's easy to find in a library with a decent periodicals collection, however, and it's available to current subscribers of the magazine online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a trio of stories that were published in the &lt;em&gt;Saturday Evening Post&lt;/em&gt; in 1944 and 1945, all of which have the same main character (Babe Gladwaller); these stories have a &quot;false&quot; overlap with &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt; in that there's a character named Holden Caulfield, but it's not the same person as the main character of &lt;em&gt;Catcher&lt;/em&gt;.  None of these stories are currently in print. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="181" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T14:40:57.503" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:40:57.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="241" CreationDate="2017-01-19T05:37:45.220" Score="22" ViewCount="8663" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I've read it, maybe 20 years. Of course, Odysseus survives, but does anyone else? How many sailors did he start with, and how many made it home with him (or safely departed along the way)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T09:46:52.490" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T17:41:51.510" Title="How many sailors from Odysseus' crew survived the Odyssey?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="282" CreationDate="2017-01-19T05:45:43.520" Score="17" ViewCount="11775" Body="&lt;p&gt;In J.D. Salinger's &lt;em&gt;A Perfect Day For Bananafish&lt;/em&gt;, Seymour, the main character, talks about a bananafish. He tells a little girl about the bananafish.  The little girl says she sees the fish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the bananafish and what does it represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="189" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T18:51:53.567" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T15:58:07.210" Title="What is the bananafish? What does it represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="239" CreationDate="2017-01-19T06:12:22.043" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire crew died, excepting Odysseus, fairly early in the Odyssey at the hands of Zeus by request of Helios. Pretty early on, Odysseus warns the crew not to eat the sheep on Helios' island (XII 417-422, Robert Fagles):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘My friends, in our ship we have meat and drink,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so let’s not touch those cattle, just in case&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that causes trouble for us. For these cows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and lovely sheep belong to Helios,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a fearful god, who spies out all there is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and listens in on everything as well.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but they do. So Zeus blows Odysseus' ship to smithereens (XII 544-549, Fagles):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The blow from Zeus’ lightning made our boat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  shiver from stem to stern and filled it up&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with sulphurous smoke. My crew fell overboard&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and were carried in the waves, like cormorants,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  around our blackened ship, because the god&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  had robbed them of their chance to get back home.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody had left Odysseus' crew up until this point, so it appears the entirety of the crew was killed (or deemed too insignificant to bother mentioning as alive). It's also only through divine intervention that Odysseus lived at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It ends up being Alcinous, King of the Phaecians, who orders a ship to take Odysseus back to Ithaca. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how many crew members Odysseus had at the outset, the exact number is never conveyed by the poem. The Odyssey was largely a word-of-mouth story. It's speculated that Homer wasn't really the author of the Odyssey, and merely compiled the story. If ever a number of crew members was written down, Homer didn't transcribe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T07:50:54.423" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T07:50:54.423" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="242" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="270" CreationDate="2017-01-19T06:17:14.547" Score="-1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;em&gt;The Passage&lt;/em&gt; - Justin Cronin. The series was great, but I haven't heard much about Jeanette (from what I can remember).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really want to know if she's special like Amy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is was Jeanette anything more than Amy's mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="127" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T18:56:20.403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T18:56:20.403" Title="Who is Jeanette?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;the-passage&gt;&lt;justin-cronin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="285" CreationDate="2017-01-19T08:10:46.187" Score="13" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, the crew of the Dawn Traders lands on the island of Ramandu, who is a retired star&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am a star at rest, my daughter,&quot; answered Ramandu. &quot;When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Coriakin, the magician, is also a star with an island, but apparently he did something to get punished, so I'm not sure if he counts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, not quite the same,&quot; said Ramandu. &quot;It was not quite a rest that he was set to govern the Duffers. You might call it a punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;do all retired stars get private islands?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;The expression used by Eustace. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T12:51:44.587" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T12:51:44.587" Title="Do all old stars get their own private island and a magical buffet table?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:13:35.980" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Margaret Peterson Haddix's &lt;em&gt;The Shadow Children&lt;/em&gt; series, it's a dystopian world where people aren't allowed to have more than two children. It appears as if it's set in the future of our world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When are they set?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T15:07:21.610" Title="When is the Shadow Children series set?" Tags="&lt;the-shadow-children&gt;&lt;margaret-peterson-haddix&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:16:23.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A dystopian series by Margaret Peterson Haddix in which people are not allowed to have more than two children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T02:09:31.353" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:09:31.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:16:23.867" Score="0" Body="A dystopian series by Margaret Peterson Haddix in which people are not allowed to have more than two children. " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T02:09:27.580" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:09:27.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:22:18.230" Score="15" ViewCount="3435" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cormac McCarthy is famously tight-lipped as to his own interpretations of his work. Nevertheless, there are some clear themes in his novel Blood Meridian: human propensity to violence and the efforts of religion and philosophy to make sense of that violence and develop something good in the face of overwhelming bleakness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least, that was the message I took away up until the end of the book, before reading the one-page epilogue. On the surface the novel is a straightforward narrative of a gang of outlaws in the wild west. The epilogue, however, becomes suddenly esoteric. It described a figure moving across a plain full of holes and using an odd and un-named tool to make fire in the holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning and purpose of this epilogue appears to have puzzled a large number of readers. Is there any kind of academic or critical consensus on what it might represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T09:42:06.630" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T12:45:12.420" Title="What is the meaning of the epilogue in Blood Meridian?" Tags="&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;blood-meridian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T09:54:27.733" Score="10" ViewCount="475" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long ago, I noticed that there was a parallel between &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; in the characters of the Thénardiers and Gollum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gollum has the One Ring at the start of the tale in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, but it wasn't his. The Thénardiers had Cosette, but, of course, she wasn't theirs. The One Ring was taken from Gollum, and Cosette was taken from the Thénardiers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gollum pretended to help Sam and Frodo, while really intending to betray them. Éponine pretends to help Marius, while intending to have him die. Monsier Thénardier also makes false pretences while intending to rob Valjean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, Gollum had a major (if unintentional) role in the final destruction of the One Ring, just as Monsieur Thénardier was the unwitting reason behind repairing the relationship between Cosette and Marius and the ailing Valjean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I reading too much in this? If not, is the parallel deliberate - Tolkien paying tribute to Hugo, or both of them deriving from an older tradition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T00:12:46.050" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T00:12:46.050" Title="Was there a deliberate parallel between the Thénardiers and Gollum?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="251" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="257" CreationDate="2017-01-19T10:52:40.977" Score="20" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dostoevsky's &lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt;, the main character is Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin. Sometimes the word &quot;prince&quot; almost seems an honorary title, &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Here you all are now,&quot; the prince began, &quot;looking at me with such curiosity that if I don't satisfy it, you may well get angry with me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But usually it's mentioned casually, and the other characters certainly don't treat Prince Lev as some kind of royalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What were princes, and about how many were there (100? 100,000?) in those times? Were they respected for this title? Or was it mostly an empty salutation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T00:31:32.787" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T00:31:32.787" Title="What was a &quot;prince&quot; in Dostoevsky's times, i.e. mid-late 19th century?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-idiot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="277" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:16:13.413" Score="9" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt; Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, leaves his city in the charge of a judge while he goes on a &quot;diplomatic mission&quot;. It transpires that he has not, in fact, left the city at all but has disguised himself as a monk and remained to spy on the actions of his courtiers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it has always bothered me that during the course of the play, the disguised Duke interacts with several characters who know him well. It seems to be stretching the bounds of credulity to believe that they would not recognize him in his relatively thin disguise. Yet none do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This motif, of a disguised character interacting with people close to them without being recognized, recurs in other literature of the period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something audiences in Shakespeare's day would simply have accepted? If so, why? And if not, why was/is it not viewed as a problem with the narrative of the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:09:07.307" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:09:07.307" Title="Did Shakespeare's audience believe Measure for Measure to be realistic?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;realism&gt;&lt;measure-for-measure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="253" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="254" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:21:56.950" Score="9" ViewCount="1068" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that the word &quot;diegesis&quot; is an important term when discussing literature and literary value. Where does it come from, and what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:47:30.243" Title="Where does the word &quot;diegesis&quot; come from, and to what elements of a story, specifically, does it refer?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="253" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:21:56.950" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;diegesis&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/9973/summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek in origin&lt;/a&gt;, and comes from the old Greek &lt;em&gt;διήγησις&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;to narrate.&quot; In a sentence, it means the narrative or plot of a text, as told through a narrator. (This is in contrast with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mimesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which occurs when the viewer is &lt;em&gt;shown&lt;/em&gt; the story.) From that paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the term diegesis [has a] schoolbook definition as a simple and unembellished narrative of events, preferably in chronological sequence, with a claim—whether substantiated or not—to inherent plausibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a little subtlety in this definition. Diegesis refers specifically to the narrative elements of the story as they should be viewed from within the story through the narrator. That narrator can be any narrator of the current text: omnipotent, outside the world, inside the world, first person, third person - if the story is narrated, it's diegetic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/763970.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is a worthwhile essay&lt;/a&gt; on where people have drawn the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since diegesis concerns the division between shown and told elements of a story, it's particularly useful when talking about movies. The straightforward example is that a movie's dialog &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; diegetic, but a movie's &lt;em&gt;musical score&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; diegetic. Even though both are textual, and hold influence over the audience, only one of the two holds influence over the characters. In movies, the result is that there are diegetic and non-diegetic sounds: something like a bowl crashing into the ground is the former, while something like an opening score is the latter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's also useful in written texts. This becomes important when talking largely about external versus internal presentation, particularly in experimental literature. Here are a few examples of where and why this matters in literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;The Unfortunates&lt;/em&gt; comes in a wooden/cardboard box, with quotes printed on various sides. The chapters of the book are provided in unbound leaflets; you, the reader, quite literally mix the chapters together in random order. The diegesis of this story is, therefore, everything that you read, &lt;em&gt;in the order that you read it.&lt;/em&gt; (This has the odd effect of making the story very personal to you. )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the fact that the chapters are shuffled, or the particular order in which they appear, or the fact that the book comes in a box, or where on the box the quotes are printed, are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; diegetic elements. It's only the actual order the text ends up in that matters, as this is what the narrator of the story conveys to you.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt;, Danielewski plays around with page formatting quite a lot (not really spoilers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyXKEm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oyXKEm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a page from *House of Leaves*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YvkG8m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YvkG8m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a page from *House of Leaves*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of &quot;diegesis&quot; is actually quite pertinent to understanding this book. In the first example, that letter is printed exactly as it would have appeared to the character who read it. The fact that the character - that narrator - is including it in that form, makes it diegetic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second example, however, it is arguable (without getting into the nuance of the book) that it appears only as you, &lt;em&gt;the reader,&lt;/em&gt; would see it. This would make the element &lt;em&gt;non&lt;/em&gt;-diegetic - it's conveying something about the story that is shown, not told, and has no narrator associated with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Covers of books aren't usually diegetic elements, but in many cases, they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; matter to how a book should be interpreted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Illuminated manuscripts are filled with non-diegetic elements - things that the characters or text of the book would have no ability to describe, but which are written in the book anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The entire physical design, especially font and font sized used, the way the book is typeset, etc. are all elements contributing to the way a story is perceived by the reader. These non-diegetic elements can say a lot about the text itself, because the way a text is presented is often important to our understanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a point that's deceptively complicated, and has had significant impacts primarily in visual media. However, its roots are in literature, with Aristotle, which makes it broadly applicable to experimental literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T01:47:30.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:47:30.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="256" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:23:19.573" Score="28" ViewCount="5560" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &quot;The Final Problem&quot;, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made the decision to kill off Sherlock Holmes (although he did bring him back again in the story of &quot;The Empty House&quot;). This was met with great disapproval from the fans, who didn't want to see their favorite detective dead.  Why did he decide to kill off his most famous character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:29:08.233" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:29:08.233" Title="Why did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle decide to kill off this character?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="255" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:23:19.573" Score="40" Body="&lt;h1&gt;He simply got tired of writing about Holmes, and he wanted to focus on his other writing.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to quote from a book called &lt;em&gt;The Best of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, by Wordsworth Classics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even before the ink was dry on the manuscript of 'The Copper Beeches' its author &lt;strong&gt;had wearied of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, by the end of 1891 he had written to his mother,one of Sherlock's greatest admirers, stating that he was thinking of &lt;strong&gt;'slaying Holmes in the last [story]. He takes my mind from better things.'&lt;/strong&gt; His mother prevailed upon him to change his mind, which for a time he did. &lt;strong&gt;The 'better things' to which Conan Doyle referred were his historical novels, which he considered to be 'serious literature' compared with his catchpenny detective stories.&lt;/strong&gt; Also, on a practical level, &lt;strong&gt;churning out twelve ingenious plots in a year was hard, demanding labor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we see that he was getting burnt out, and he wanted to do other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conan Doyle's disenchantment was growing&lt;/strong&gt; when he was approached by the editor of &lt;em&gt;The Strand&lt;/em&gt; for a further twelve stories. In order to put him off he asked for what he considered to be a ridiculously high fee of fifty pounds a story, fully expecting to be turned down...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After he killed him off, the fans weren't so happy. One lady even sent him a letter calling him a brute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conan Doyle's reaction [to the criticism in response to him killing Holmes] was somewhat different. Maybe with that letter of abuse from that irate lady in mind, he expressed grim satisfaction: &lt;strong&gt;'Thank God, I've killed the brute.'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he felt that it was too much work and he was too tired of writing Holmes stories, so he killed him off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why did he bring him back in &lt;em&gt;The Empty House&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, before he decided that Holmes wasn't dead, he heard a story in 1901  that made him think about a family who was being haunted by a dog...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For years he disregarded all pleas to resurrect Holmes, but in 1901 when he heard a friend's account of some legends of Dartmoor he conceived a mystery story about a family supposedly haunted by a spectral hound. He was very pleased with the idea of this story, which in a letter to his mother he described as 'a real creeper'  - a phrase he was later to repeat when selling the story to Greenhough Smith of &lt;em&gt;The Strand&lt;/em&gt;. In developing the plot, Conan Doyle realised that he would require a detective hero to be involved with the strange events and eventually to solve and explain the mystery. He was sensible enough to see that there was little point in creating a new character for this task when he already had one he'd made earlier: Sherlock Holmes. So, one suspects, with some reluctance, Conan Doyle converted his ghostly-dog saga into a Sherlock Holmes adventure and called it &lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;. However he was adamant that this story did not herald a permanent return - Sherlock Holmes was still dead - and that this investigation took place prior to Reichenbach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he brought back Holmes for a short while, but it was set before he died. The fans reacted...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that Sherlock Holmes had appeared in print once more, readers and publishers alike hoped that the author could be persuaded to relent and drag the fellow up from his watery grave for more adventures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 1903, Conan Doyle was a much more relaxed and confident man and the idea of writing further detective stories was no longer abhorrent to him, so when the New York publisher of &lt;em&gt;Collier's Magazine&lt;/em&gt; offered him four thousand dollars per story he at last gave in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt; He stopped because he was worn out of writing Holmes stories, and he started again because he was no longer as burnt out.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:30:02.960" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="251" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:25:51.977" Score="19" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Something like a duke, and the title wasn't all that special.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English word &amp;quot;prince&amp;quot; is translated from the Russian &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knyaz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;knyaz (князь)&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which could be used either to denote a member of the royal family or more commonly a member of the nobility. Men directly related to the Tsar were usually called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velikiy_Knyaz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Velikiy Knyaz or Grand Prince&lt;/a&gt; instead. &amp;quot;Knyaz&amp;quot; can also be translated as &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;duke&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, which would probably give a more accurate idea of Prince Myshkin's status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the Tsardom of Russia gained dominion over much of former Kievan Rus', &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velikiy_Knyaz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Velikii Kniaz (Great Kniaz)&lt;/a&gt; Ivan IV of Russia in 1547 was crowned as Tsar. From the mid-18th century onwards, the title Velikii Kniaz was revived to refer to (male-line) sons and grandsons of Russian Emperors. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kniaz [...] continued as a hereditary title of Russian nobility patrilineally descended from Rurik (e.g., Belozersky, Belosselsky-Belozersky, Repnin, Gorchakov) or Gediminas (e.g., Galitzine, Troubetzkoy).&lt;/strong&gt; Members of Rurikid or Gedyminid families were called princes when they ruled tiny quasi-sovereign medieval principalities. After their demesnes were absorbed by Muscovy, they settled at the Moscow court and were authorised to continue with their princely titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the 18th century onwards, &lt;strong&gt;the title was occasionally granted by the Tsar&lt;/strong&gt;, for the first time by Peter the Great to his associate Alexander Menshikov, and then by Catherine the Great to her lover Grigory Potemkin. After 1801, with the incorporation of Georgia into the Russian Empire, &lt;strong&gt;various titles of numerous local nobles were controversially rendered in Russian as &amp;quot;kniazes&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Similarly, many petty Tatar nobles asserted their right to style themselves &amp;quot;kniazes&amp;quot; because they descended from Genghis Khan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found a good figure for how many &lt;em&gt;knyazi&lt;/em&gt; there were in Russia around the time when &lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt; was set, but given the size of Russia, the variety of places a man could pick up this title, and the generally large families of the Russian aristocracy of the time, I would expect at least thousands. This is supported by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%BA%D0%BD%D1%8F%D0%B6%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%85_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%A0%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%B8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; listing hundreds of Knyaz &lt;em&gt;families&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our hero Prince Myshkin isn't a royal figure, or one of the highest nobles in the country. He's more like a son of a decaying aristocratic family which has lost most of its money. This is also quite apparent from the text of the novel, IMO - the word &amp;quot;prince&amp;quot; is thrown around quite casually, and he's never treated with special reverence due to his title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T03:19:23.983" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="249" CreationDate="2017-01-19T11:39:08.363" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're reading too much into it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gollum has the One Ring because the One Ring &quot;wants to be found.&quot; It was at the bottom of a lake for a long time and wanted to get back to Sauron. Fantine &lt;em&gt;gave&lt;/em&gt; Cosette to the Th&amp;eacute;nardiers so they could care for her, and regularly sent money for her care. This is why she sells her hair &amp;mdash; money for the alleged medicine. The One Ring tries to go with Bilbo to continue to get back to Sauron (it has a certain amount of intent), while Cosette is rescued by Valjean. She's a child and has no agency.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sm&amp;eacute;agol&lt;/em&gt; didn't intend to betray Sam and Frodo; &lt;em&gt;Gollum&lt;/em&gt; did. There's a split personality at work which doesn't exist in &lt;em&gt;Les Miz.&lt;/em&gt; &amp;Eacute;ponine is in love with Marius and doesn't want him to die. (At least, not from what I remember; I haven't read the book in 30-odd years.) M. Th&amp;eacute;nardier is a thief and a scoundrel and will rob anyone; Valjean is not a particular target. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Any role Th&amp;eacute;nardier had in repairing relationships was a contrivance of the plot. Gollum's death was more thematic, showing how the One Ring utterly corrupted and destroyed the poor soul. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T11:39:08.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="245" CreationDate="2017-01-19T12:58:34.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's deliberately left unclear, but maybe ~2020.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ms Haddix used to have the answer to this question published among the FAQ on her website (you can still see a snapshot of the page &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20150301155041/http://www.haddixbooks.com/books/hidden_faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; using the Wayback Machine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the setting of Among the Hidden?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You may have noticed that I never actually gave an exact time and place for the story. I didn’t just forget to—I did this on purpose. I wanted readers to think about whether this is something that could happen in the United States, if there were droughts and famines and an extreme change in the government. But I didn’t want to come out and say that, partly because all the explanation would have bogged down the story, and partly because I thought a lot of people would think, “Nope, that could never happen here!” and then dismiss the whole book. So I wanted to make readers think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could have given an exact year—I was picturing everything as happening twenty or thirty years in the future. But it’s always bothered me that the book 1984 lost some of its effect after 1984 came and passed, so I didn’t want to be that precise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the author imagined it as being 20-30 years on from when she wrote them (the late 90s to early 2000s), but she didn't want readers to think of it that way, but rather as a vague 'future time'.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I don't know of any indicators in the text itself which point to a particular year or period. However, even if there are such indicators, I would consider them to be of lesser value than the author's statement in this case. Given that she &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; not to set a precise date for events in the book, it follows that if anything in the text does suggest one, it must be a mistake or accidental, and therefore unlikely to be as consistent with other things as if it were calculated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, for example, there was a mention in the text of the centennial anniversary of something that happened in 1960, I wouldn't take this as evidence that the book is set in 2060, but rather as an unplanned oversight or even a mathematical mistake (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/143316/31394&quot;&gt;it has happened with other authors&lt;/a&gt;). It's more important that the author had &quot;twenty or thirty years in the future&quot; (i.e. ~2020) in her mind while writing - this might have influenced the text in other, more subtle and more deliberate, ways, while anything which definitively dates it would only be by mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I feel that for this particular question, and given what exactly the author has said, authorial intent is the best lens to be using, rather than examining the text for (inadvertent) hints and clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T20:38:02.233" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T20:38:02.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-01-19T13:23:06.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie's detective stories about &lt;strong&gt;Hercule Poirot&lt;/strong&gt; were published between 1920 and 1997, for &lt;strong&gt;77 years&lt;/strong&gt;.  Some of the books are novels, some are short story collections.  Each of them can be read as a stand-alone story, but they often make references to previous stories, and share at least the main character Hercule Poirot and often other characters, with consistent characterizations.  The series was &lt;em&gt;completed&lt;/em&gt; in 1975 (55 years after the publication of the first story) by &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;, which is the last story in the in universe chronology, and shows the end of Poirot's detective carrier.  Three books were published much after this posthumously from Christie's notes though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie also has another long-running series of detective books, about &lt;strong&gt;Miss Marple&lt;/strong&gt;, which were published from 1927 to 1976, so for &lt;strong&gt;49 years&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T13:28:53.777" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T13:28:53.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="266" CreationDate="2017-01-19T13:52:38.127" Score="7" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conrad's novel &lt;em&gt;The Secret Agent&lt;/em&gt; is a critique of the way authoritarian tendencies react to the perceived threat of terrorism. The story it tells is, in most respects, extremely bleak. There are, however, a number of flashes of dark humour. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The pathetic nature of the majority of the anarchists, contrasted with their firey words and attitudes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The actually dangerous nature of The Professor, contrasted with his feeble appearance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That the cell of &quot;dangerous&quot; anarchists is lead by a double-agent.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The police constable seeking approval for his grisly work shoveling human remains while his superious look on, appalled.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This black comedy seems incongruous to the overall tone of the novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it deliberate on the part of the author? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What purpose does it serve in highlighting the novels themes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="10" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:04:30.690" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:04:30.690" Title="Are the comic elements of Conrad's The Secret Agent intentional?" Tags="&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-01-19T13:56:06.913" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isaac Asimov's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_series_(Asimov)&quot;&gt;Robot novels and short stories&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_Empire_(series)&quot;&gt;the Galactic Empire series&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Series&quot;&gt;the Foundation series&lt;/a&gt; were all established to be in the same universe by &lt;em&gt;Foundation's Edge&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Foundation and Earth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Prelude to the Foundation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Forward the Foundation&lt;/em&gt;. The first of the &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; short stories seems to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_(short_story)&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robbie&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1940&lt;/a&gt;, and the last of the &lt;em&gt;Foundation&lt;/em&gt; novels written by Asimov, &lt;em&gt;Forward the Foundation&lt;/em&gt;, was published posthumously in 1993, spanning &lt;strong&gt;53 years&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T13:56:06.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="264" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:06:39.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the comic effect is intentional. Strong evidence of this is provided by the fact that the author's other political novel, &lt;em&gt;Under Western Eyes&lt;/em&gt;, also contains elements of black comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is evidence that Conrad was purposefully illustrating a theory of comedy advanced by the philosopher Henri Bergson. This can be surmised as a &quot;comedy of the ridiculous&quot; in which humour springs from the clash between rigid structure and the innate human desire to live freely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bergson wrote his theory before Conrad's novels, and it was widely known in literary circles of the time. In his novel, &lt;em&gt;Chance&lt;/em&gt;, a conversation about comedy between the character Marlow and the narrator would seem to offer a neat encapsulation of Bergson's ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But don't you know that people laugh at absurdities that are far from being comic? Didn't you read the latest books about laughter written by philosophers, psychologists?&quot; ..... &quot;They say&quot;, pursued the unabashed Marlow, &quot;that we laugh from a sense of superiority. Therefore, observe, simplicity, honesty, warmth of feeling, delicacy of heart and of conduct, self-confidence, magnanimity are laughed at, because the presence of these traits in a man’s character often puts him into difficult, cruel or absurd situations, and makes us, the majority who are fairly free as a rule from these peculiarities, feel pleasantly superior.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, Conrad is using comedy in &lt;em&gt;The Secret Agent&lt;/em&gt; to further reinforce his point about the dangers of over-regulating society. The source of the humour is the contrast between structure and freedom and we laugh because we see how pointless that structure is in the face of the human desire to live spontaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Henri Bergson and British Modernism by Mary Ann Gillies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:04:17.257" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:04:17.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:31:25.617" Score="14" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the many short stories by Saki, I found &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt; to be one of the darkest. While many of his stories are morbid, &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt; has a young boy &lt;em&gt;praying&lt;/em&gt; for the death of his guardian to something he imagines to be a god. &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; are tales which honestly talk about the darkness in children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; was motivated as a counterpoint to another work.&#xA;What inspired &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T10:16:38.763" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:09:20.467" Title="What inspired the writing of Sredni Vashtar?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;saki&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:36:48.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T14:36:48.057" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:36:48.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:36:48.057" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Hector Hugh Munro (1870 – 1916), when writing as Saki, and his life as a writer. Do NOT use for questions about Hector Hugh Munro that are unrelated to his pseudonymous personality, Saki." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T18:07:39.757" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T18:07:39.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="242" CreationDate="2017-01-19T14:51:52.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. She was just Amy's mother, nothing special.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had a habit of going out and coming back with men, having a one-night-stand with them. One night, a college frat boy tried to take her where she didn't want to go, and she killed him.  After this, she dropped Amy at the convent, telling Lacey (who answered the door) that she was going to be right back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T14:51:52.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="271" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:05:18.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes started off as a fictional detective in a series of four novels and fifty-six short stories published by Arthur Conan Doyle between 1887 and 1927. These sixty works comprise what is known as the &quot;canon&quot; of Sherlock Holmes, but there have been many hundreds of stories about him, and other characters either from Doyle's stories or elsewhere, written by dozens of other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle's Holmes stories were not the first instance of detective fiction (they are predated, for instance, by Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories), but they are surely one of the most influential, with Holmes frequently being believed to be a real person. According to the Guinness Book of Records, he is also the &quot;most portrayed movie character&quot; of all time - this reflecting the extreme and enduring popularity of the character even beyond the realm of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sherlock-holmes.org.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherlock Holmes Society of London&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T00:38:26.840" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T00:38:26.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="272" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:05:18.390" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the Sherlock Holmes series of novels and short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle or any other literary work featuring this character. For questions about the original Doyle stories, use the [arthur-conan-doyle] tag as well." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T00:38:26.840" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T00:38:26.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="273" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:07:07.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:07:07.333" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:07:07.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="274" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:07:07.333" Score="0" Body="Questions about the order in which a sequence of related works should be read. In particular, where the chronological order of release may not match the order of events within the related works." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:27:33.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:27:33.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="306" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:29:55.020" Score="23" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Goldman's &lt;em&gt;The Princess Bride&lt;/em&gt; is famous (among other reasons) for a literary device it employs - it pretends to be an abridgment (or &amp;quot;the good parts version&amp;quot;) of a longer work by S. Morgenstern, and Goldman's &amp;quot;commentary&amp;quot; asides are constant throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Morgenstern and his book do not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was pretending to be an abridgement of a made-up work invented by William Goldman&lt;/strong&gt; as a literary device for published literature? If not, where did it originate and what is its history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T11:18:58.567" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T11:18:58.567" Title="Was pretending to be an abridgement of a made-up work invented by William Goldman?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;the-princess-bride&gt;&lt;william-goldman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="284" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:37:49.720" Score="12" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Tolkien ever include any internal monologue from the perspective of an animal? That is to say, a scene where he shows an animal talking to itself inside of its own head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T18:11:15.960" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T03:51:18.117" Title="Is there any animal internal monologue in The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="252" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:39:33.687" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the advantages of setting it in &quot;Vienna&quot; is that the audience could believe that &quot;that's the way those foreigners do it&quot;. It gave the audience some distance from reality: they would accept it without having to question whether it was realistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It certainly does push the bounds of &quot;suspension of disbelief&quot;. Foreigners may be foreign, but surely they'd recognize somebody with a light disguise, wouldn't they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that Shakespeare's audiences were also primed with the fact of one actor playing multiple roles already. The same actor wearing different clothes was a different person. Sometimes they'd even be playing &quot;brothers&quot; and were expected to look alike: the Ghost and Claudius were likely played by the same actor. With preparation like that, audiences might well accept the conceit, even though they would certainly never expect it to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was just part of reality, the way you accept multiple camera angles in movies even though real life never works like that. It's not that you see it and dismiss it; you accept it at a deep level without having to question it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least Measure for Measure makes a stab at explaining one substitution: the assignation with Marina happens in the dark, with no talking. Maybe Shakespeare shouldn't have bothered: it just calls attention to the use of the conceit in other places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:39:33.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="281" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:40:52.633" Score="30" ViewCount="1306" Body="&lt;p&gt;A famous phrase attributed to Sherlock Holmes is &quot;&lt;em&gt;Elementary, my dear Watson&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;Elementary, dear Watson&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this phrase ever occurred in a Sherlock Holmes book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If yes, in which novel or story does it exist? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If no, then have there been any closely related or similar phrases at all? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T19:01:29.273" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T08:11:29.823" Title="Has the phrase &quot;Elementary, my dear Watson&quot; ever truly appeared in a Sherlock Holmes book?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1686" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:41:11.593" Score="21" ViewCount="531" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/190/what-specific-criticisms-did-mark-twain-make-against-jane-austens-books&quot;&gt;excellent answer by @CHEESE&lt;/a&gt; linked to a Mark Twain's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SPOILER ALERT:&lt;/strong&gt; That essay is extremely critical of Cooper's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did later literary analysis largely agree with Mark Twain's criticism of Cooper or largely contradict it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T18:14:12.103" Title="Did later literary analysis agree with Mark Twain's criticism of J.F. Cooper?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;james-fenimore-cooper&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="278" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:45:27.723" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.snopes.com/quotes/signature/elementary.asp&quot;&gt;Snopes says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nope.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some sense it seems a bit odd to claim that a fictional character&#xA;  never uttered a specific phrase, since fictional characters aren't&#xA;  real and therefore can't &quot;say&quot; anything (or, conversely, they can be&#xA;  made to say whatever words someone wants to put in their mouths). In&#xA;  this case, when we refer to the words &quot;spoken&quot; by the character of&#xA;  Sherlock Holmes, we mean the dialog assigned to him in the literary&#xA;  works in which he appears that are considered canonical — that is, the&#xA;  Sherlock Holmes novels and stories authored by Arthur Conan Doyle&#xA;  himself, not imitative or derivative works (such as movies, television&#xA;  programs, radio dramas, stage plays, pastiches, and parodies) written&#xA;  by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The actor William Gillette is often credited with originating this&#xA;  phrase in a slightly longer form in the 1899 stage production Sherlock&#xA;  Holmes (for which he both wrote the script and played the lead role),&#xA;  during which he (as Holmes) reportedly uttered the line, &quot;Oh, this is&#xA;  elementary, my dear Watson.&quot; However, a 1999 biography of Sir Arthur&#xA;  Conan Doyle indicates that it is unclear exactly when (if ever)&#xA;  Gillette actually spoke this line on stage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Many of Gillette's inventions and mannerisms were absorbed into the&#xA;    Holmes mythology. He may have been the first to utter the words&#xA;    &quot;Elementary, my dear Watson,&quot; though the line does not appear in any&#xA;    published version of the script — nor in any story by Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the closest line in Conan Doyle's works would be from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834-h/834-h.htm#link2H_4_0007&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Crooked Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson,&quot; said&#xA;  he. &quot;When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long&#xA;  one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used,&#xA;  are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy&#xA;  enough to justify the hansom.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Excellent!&quot; I cried. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Elementary,&quot; said he.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T15:59:36.250" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T15:59:36.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="278" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:54:34.350" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Elementary, my dear Watson&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; with the same arrangement of the words, has never been expressed even once in any Sherlock Holmes story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest you can get, however, seems to be in the story titled &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Crooked Man&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I have the advantage of knowing your habits, &lt;strong&gt;my dear Watson,&lt;/strong&gt;” said he. “When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Excellent!” I cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Elementary,”&lt;/strong&gt; said he. “It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Interesting, though elementary,”&lt;/strong&gt; said he, as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. “There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first, or what seems to be the first occurrence of the exact phrase, appears to have been in the newspaper &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Richmond Times Dispatch&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; in 1909:&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possibility of signaling to the planet Mars is merely a question of elementary mathematics.… It is such a simple little problem that any one should be able to take a pad and pencil and work it out in ten minutes. “&lt;strong&gt;Elementary, my dear Watson,&lt;/strong&gt;” as Sherlock Holmes was wont to say. “Elementary.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very close phrase was said even earlier, by the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Northampton Mercury&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; in 1901, however, it was actually in a parody of Sherlock Holmes, with the characters named &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Shylock Combs&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Poston&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One winter’s morning, a few years after my marriage, I was lying by my hearth, smoking a red herring, and nodding over the Encyclopedia Britannica, for my day’s work had been a hard one. Since first meeting Shylock Combs my practice as a doctor had, as a matter of course, rapidly declined. My presentation clock had chimed 4.47 a.m., and I was in the act of blowing out the gas when I heard the clang of my front door speaking tube. Thinking it must be the milkman I went into the hall, opened the door, and, to my astonishment, Shylock Combs stood upon my step. “Ah, Potson,” he said; “I hoped I should not be too early to catch you. I perceive the wind has changed round to N.N.E. by S.W. again.” I was astounded, as he had not had time to observe the thermometer in my bedroom. He noticed my amazement and smiled that wonderful smile of his. “&lt;strong&gt;Elementary, my dear Potson,&lt;/strong&gt;” he said; “I observed the left-hand side of your moustache inclined about 47 5/8 degrees towards the west, and coming as I did from Butcher-street I at once deduced from which quarter the wind was blowing.”&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all emphasis is mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; August 27 2013, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/08/sherlock-holmes-never-said-elementary-dear-watson/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Today I Found Out&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;sub&gt;August 24 1909, The Times Dispatch, “Signaling to Mars: An Elementary Problem, Says Professor Pickering, of Harvard”, (Acknowledgment to Rochester Post-Express), Quote Page 6, Column 7, Richmond, Virginia. (Chronicling America) &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 &lt;sub&gt;November 15 1901, The Northampton Mercury, Sherlock Holmes’s Latest!, Quote Page 6, Column 3, Northamptonshire, England. (British Newspaper Archive) &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T08:11:29.823" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-01-21T08:02:03.830" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="240" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:58:38.063" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bananafish represents Seymour, and all the other returning soldiers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, they swim into a hole where there's a lot of bananas. They're very ordinary-looking fish when they swim in. But once they get in, they behave like pigs. Why, I've known some bananafish to swim into a banana hole and eat as many as seventy-eight bananas.&quot; He edged the float and its passenger a foot closer to the horizon. &quot;Naturally, after that they're so fat they can't get out of the hole again. Can't fit through the door.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sybil said, &quot;What happens to them?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What happens to who?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The bananafish.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh, you mean after they eat so many bananas they can't get out of the banana hole?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes,&quot; said Sybil.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Well, I hate to tell you, Sybil. They die.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why?&quot; asked Sybil.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Well, they get banana fever. It's a terrible disease.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This represents Seymour pretty accurately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He and other soldiers came into war as ordinary men, like the bananafishes were ordinary when they went into the hole.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the hole (war), they became full of horror and/or pleasure at fighting, like the bananafishes eating the bananas and becoming full of.. well.. bananas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They became trapped inside the hole (war) and diseased. In the case of the soldiers, in more ways than one.  They became full of literal diseases, because the trenches are a nasty place, but they also became mentally ill.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T23:40:39.067" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T23:40:39.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2017-01-19T15:59:35.623" Score="15" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many works of literature derive a lot of value from implied context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cultural norms. Idioms. Insider jokes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially a big factor in a book which contains elements of humor (especially parody) - but not necessarily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When translating, this layer of implied information is frequently irrevocably lost - both due to the new audience's unfamiliarity with cultural norms and idioms and references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have observed this frequently. Russian translations of &quot;Ivanhoe&quot; almost entirely missed out on anti-semitic and general religious angle associated with Rebeccah and Isaac characters, despite that being an important part of the work. Much of &quot;Three Musketeers&quot; translations suffer from readers being unaware of the actual role and impact of Cardinal Richelieu, his sociopolitical reasons for prohibiting duels (which was a driving plot), and French perspective on Britain around 30-year-war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (who were intimately familiar with the issues, due to their side work as professional translators and interpreters - Japanese and English iirc) poignantly covered some of the issues involved in &quot;Ugly Swans&quot; novel, whose protagonist is a successful writer, and in the course of the novel is shown to work with a Japanese translator of his books, trying in vain to explain Russian idiomatic expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Linguistic nuances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better quality literary works don't just contain information - their use of language matters greatly. The writer's style and language use is extremely difficult to relay when translating, even for a true well-meaning expert.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Language concepts and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot;&gt;linguistic relativity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is getting into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain things simply come packaged with the language, including mental concepts. A well publicized research&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; even showed that concepts of tense can influence economic behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relativity is again lost when translating, unless care is taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[1] - The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from&#xA;Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets; M. Keith Chen&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Difficulty in translating specific words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's the lesser of the problems, but even when translating my own internal thoughts between English and Russian (i'm fluent in both) I frequently get stumped when trying to translate a pithy term that's lacking in another language. Partly, that's also due to implied concept.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T16:18:35.640" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T16:18:35.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="276" CreationDate="2017-01-19T16:10:28.490" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes. When leaving the Shire, the hobbits disturbed a fox:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3: &amp;quot;Three is Company&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T17:39:04.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="244" CreationDate="2017-01-19T16:17:49.963" Score="10" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Not really private islands, and they don't really retire either.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a star is old enough and has lost enough power, it can go to one of the islands on the Eastern Ocean.  While there, it recovers its strength and becomes young again by eating &amp;quot;fire-berries&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth's eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Chapter XIV: The Beginning of the End of the World&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when he's recovered, he'll go back to being in the sky. It's kind of like a sabbatical for stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, stars can come down for other reasons and still be fully able to fly in the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of. And in this world you have already met a star: for I think you have been with Coriakin.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Is he a retired star, too?&amp;quot; said Lucy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, not quite the same,&amp;quot; said Ramandu. &amp;quot;It was not quite as a rest that he was set to govern the Duffers. You might call it a punishment. He might have shone for thousands of years more in the southern winter sky if all had gone well.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not really a retirement, it's more of a temporary break. And the last quote implies that stars prefer to be in the sky versus on the ground, because Coriakin was punished with coming down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those who don't remember, the duffers were the (for a time) invisible and one-legged creatures.  Coriakin was supposed to be guiding them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's also unknown what punishment merits a star coming down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What did he do, Sir?&amp;quot; asked Caspian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My son,&amp;quot; said Ramandu, &amp;quot;it is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit. But come, we waste time in such talk. Are you yet resolved? Will you sail farther east and come again, leaving one to return no more, and so break the enchantment? Or will you sail westward?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T16:17:49.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T16:36:36.670" Score="14" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lord Byron's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_of_a_Novel&quot;&gt;Fragment of a Novel&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is an unfinished story about a vampire. (It's not clear from the story that the man is a vampire, but at least according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wizzley.com/byron-and-polidori-the-dawn-of-western-vampire-literature-2/&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;, Byron said that the man would have arisen from the dead to feed on the upper class.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sources influenced Byron's writing? Wikipedia and the site I mentioned above quote Byron mentioning a story recorded by Honest Tournefort, who apparently recorded some vampire folklore. Are there any known sources that Byron used for his story other than folklore and his own imagination? Byron's story and John Polidori's novella based on it, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre&quot;&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, don't seem to have much in common with the vampire folklore I have heard about. Was Byron influenced by any previous fiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="21" LastEditorUserId="21" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T18:11:17.897" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T00:44:26.147" Title="What sources influenced Byron's &quot;Fragment of a Novel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;lord-byron&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2017-01-19T17:15:36.903" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially, Winston has no idea what room 101 is. However, because Winston realizes how people would rather die than go to room 101, O'Brien expects Winston to think the worst possible torture appartus was contained within the room. For each person, this worst form of torture would be different, and so for Winston, O'Brien expected Winston to believe room 101 was filled with rats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Orwell paints Winston as not knowing what is in room 101, I'd say that subconsciously at least, Winston knew what he would meet in room 101 (even if he didn't say it out loud to O'Brien).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T17:15:36.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="319" CreationDate="2017-01-19T17:19:06.440" Score="12" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's known in &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; that Room 101 contains your worst fears; it's the ultimate torture/emotional breakdown technique. However, assuming each prisoner has a different fear, Room 101 would have to continuously be modified specifically for each new prisoner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the Party get around this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the novel it seems that a few people each day are sent to Room 101 (that could be a false recollection, though). I doubt the room could be redone that quickly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there several Room 101s? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a whole group of people working on remodeling the room for each new prisoner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T03:21:08.000" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T03:21:08.000" Title="How does Room 101 reset for each person who enters?" Tags="&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="290" CreationDate="2017-01-19T18:48:52.167" Score="16" ViewCount="1132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was the room named after anything significant? It seems odd to me that he would name such an important piece of the novel after nothing, but maybe I am just looking too hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T02:01:36.973" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T02:01:36.973" Title="Was there a reason Room 101 was called Room 101?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="289" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:13:03.090" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Room 101 is named after a conference room at Broadcasting House. Orwell used to sit through boring meetings there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it was to be demolished at the BBC, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Whiteread&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rachel Whiteread&lt;/a&gt; made a plaster cast and it was displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, from November 2003 to June 2004.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gIqJb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gIqJb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a plaster cast by Rachel Whiteread of Broadcasting House.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Room_101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20070105132434/http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/room-101.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BBC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170128222559/http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/resources/reports/artistcommissions/bbc_broadcasting_house.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Public Art Online&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://login.thetimes.co.uk/?gotoUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thetimes.co.uk%2Ftto%2Fnews%2Fuk%2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Times&lt;/a&gt; (You'll need an account for The Times)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T14:08:51.090" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T14:08:51.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="60" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:32:51.987" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before setting out on this search, I first looked at a compendium of James Bond lore entitled &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Amazing_Extraordinary_Facts_James_Bond/Kk5HYAAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazing and Extraordinary Facts - James Bond&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Michael Paterson, to confirm if such &amp;quot;existential&amp;quot; inner dialogue existed in the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . He was often exhausted, wounded or traumatized; he lacked humour, and occasionally even confidence. He felt periodic melancholy with his role and sometimes doubted whether the West had any right to feel morally superior to is communist enemy. He even, in one novel, 'shredded his nerves' with worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interest piqued with the mention of &amp;quot;periodic melancholy with his role&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;sometimes doubted whether the West had any right to feel morally superior&amp;quot;, I went to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://novel12.com/author/ian-fleming-269.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complete library of Fleming's Bond stories&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After scanning the library, I can say that he did at times express doubts, and even regret, but mostly he tried to suppress these feelings as they would only interfere in the performance of his duties.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will present the pertinent passages in the same order in which the books were published; however, the most telling information probably comes from &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Goldfinger&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1959).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From Russia with Love&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1957), Bond begins thinking over his youth, and the changes he has gone through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what would that youth think of him, the secret agent, the older James Bond? Would he recognize himself beneath the surface of this man who was tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, in &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Goldfinger&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1959), it is mentioned several times that he does not actually enjoy killing, that it is his duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was part of his profession to kill people. He had never liked doing it and when he had to kill he did it as well as he knew how and forgot about it. As a secret agent who held the rare double-O prefix - the licence to kill in the Secret Service - it was his duty to be as cool about death as a surgeon. If it happened, it happened. &lt;em&gt;Regret was unprofessional&lt;/em&gt; - worse, it was death-watch beetle in the soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, he tries to rationalize his role as an assassin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was too tense, too introspective. What the hell was he doing, glooming about this Mexican, this capungo who had been sent to kill him? It had been kill or get killed. Anyway, people were killing other people all the time, all over the world. People were using their motor cars to kill with. They were carrying infectious diseases around, blowing microbes in other people's faces, leaving gasjets turned on in kitchens, pumping out carbon monoxide in closed garages. How many people, for instance, were involved in manufacturing H-bombs, from the miners who mined the uranium to the shareholders who owned the mining shares? Was there any person in the world who wasn't somehow, perhaps only statistically, involved in killing his neighbour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then he suppresses these feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bond's lips turned down. Cut it out. &lt;em&gt;Stop being so damned morbid&lt;/em&gt;. All this is just reaction from a dirty assignment. You're stale, tired of having to be tough. You want a change. You've seen too much death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You Only Live Twice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1964), following the murder of his wife Tracy, Bond suffers a type of emotional breakdown. It is of a type that we would easily recognize today--a result of too much repression of emotions, and probably regrets over his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He felt like hell and knew that he also looked it. For months, without telling anyone, he had tramped Harley Street, Wigmore Street and Wimpole Street looking for any kind of doctor who would make him feel better. He had appealed to specialists, GPs, quacks - even to a hypnotist. He had told them, 'I feel like hell. I sleep badly. I eat practically nothing. I drink too much and my work has gone to blazes. I'm shot to pieces. Make me better.' And each man had taken his blood pressure, a specimen of his urine, listened to his heart and chest, asked him questions he had answered truthfully, and had told him there was nothing basically wrong with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Man with the Golden Gun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1965), it is mentioned twice that he does not enjoy killing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was all very fine to be told to “eliminate” the man, &lt;em&gt;but James Bond had never liked killing in cold blood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then again...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Bond got into the car behind Scaramanga and wondered whether to shoot the man now, in the back of the head--the old Gestapo-K.G.B. point of puncture. A mixture of reasons prevented him--the itch of curiosity, &lt;em&gt;an inbuilt dislike of cold murder,&lt;/em&gt; the feeling that this was not the predestined moment, the likelihood that he would have to murder the chauffeur also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then in the last story &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Living Daylights&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1965),  Bond refrained from killing his target in an unusually merciful stay of a licensed execution. There is no adequate rationalization given: possibly he had finally found a way of reconciling his past with his future, or more likely, Fleming was looking to give more dimensionality to his most famous creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T20:47:44.490" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T20:47:44.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="298" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:35:49.560" Score="-1" ViewCount="450" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did a specific person inspire Lord Byron's poem &amp;quot;She Walks in Beauty&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She walks in beauty, like the night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of cloudless climes and starry skies;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Byron's poem is a classic. Did someone special inspire it, and if so, who?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="153" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T16:34:09.477" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T16:34:09.477" Title="Did a specific person inspire Lord Byron's poem &quot;She Walks in Beauty&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="294" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1313" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:36:18.610" Score="13" ViewCount="2804" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the later books in &lt;em&gt;The Series of Unfortunate Events&lt;/em&gt;, the sugar bowl becomes a cryptic macguffin -- everybody's after it, everybody mentions how important it is, but nobody explains why. There are implications that the sugar bowl would destroy Count Olaf, or exonerate Lemony Snicket, or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot proceeds, and the sugar bowl is fought over, and at very last it is hidden away in a safe location, albeit under tragic circumstances -- but, very pointedly, we never get to see what is inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is strongly in line with the series' themes of uncertainty, complexity, and never being able to act with complete information. It makes perfect sense that there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no answer; that Handler didn't come up with an answer to &quot;what is the sugar bowl &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt;&quot; because that would be 100% beside the point of the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, Handler builds it up so evocatively, puts such tremendous weight upon it and seems to sprinkle the series with oblique clues and references, that there &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be an answer to be found. Even if the books don't actually give us enough information to puzzle it out, there might &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; be an answer that Handler has come up with, and is, at least, consistent with what we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does an answer exist?&lt;/strong&gt; Has anyone made a strong, plausible claim to uncovering it? Has Handler gone on the record anywhere, saying there is or isn't a solution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm less interested in what the answer &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; (although, sure, that too); what I'm interested in is whether an answer exists at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T19:55:08.163" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T15:03:25.317" Title="Does an answer to the Sugar Bowl mystery exist?" Tags="&lt;a-series-of-unfortunate-events&gt;&lt;lemony-snicket&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:48:08.290" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://snicket.wikia.com/wiki/The_Sugar_Bowl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lemony Snicket Wiki&lt;/a&gt;: (You can skip to the bottom if you don't want to read)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many clues and hints about the sugar bowl and what it is, but &lt;strong&gt;Lemony Snicket does not reveal its secret at all in the series&lt;/strong&gt;, leaving an element of suspense for the readers. The Slippery Slope indicates that the sugar bowl contains something that proves Lemony Snicket innocent of arsons committed by Count Olaf; The Penultimate Peril implies that Lemony Snicket has gained possession of the bowl. If this is the case, Snicket may have gone on to use the sugar bowl to clear his name; The Beatrice Letters reinforces this, as by the time its later segments take place, Snicket is apparently able to publicly rent an office and have mail delivered there, something he would be unable to do as a wanted fugitive.  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;...&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is most likely that the sugar bowl is merely a MacGuffin&lt;/strong&gt;, a plot device whose contents of it are actually completely irrelevant and whose function is simply to be a much sought-after object that motivates characters and drives the story along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been told not to quote so here is a summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is most likely that the Sugar bowl is nothing, just an object that Snicket uses to create suspense and he never intended it to actually have anything in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are hints however which Snicket gives however, which points your imagination in a certain direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slippery Slope indicates it contains something proving Snicket innocent of arson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Penultimate Peril indicates Snicket is in possession of the bowl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beatrice Letters backs this up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Penultimate Peril indicates that it has something to do with the Baudelaires and Snickets history&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T20:22:01.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T20:22:01.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="293" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:52:04.707" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was written in response to seeing his cousin, Lady Wilmot Horton, at a ball.  She is his cousin by marriage, through a man named John Wilmot, governor of Ceylon..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(3) These stanzas were written by Lord Byron, on returning from a ball-room, where he had seen Mrs. (now Lady) Wilmot Horton, the wife of his relation, the present Govern of Ceylon.  On this occasion Mrs. H. had appeared in mourning, with numerous spangles on her dress – L.E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nEoJAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=254&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Works of Lord Byron: Reprinted from the Last London Edition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T19:52:04.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-19T19:55:50.723" Score="22" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few connections between Poe's works, generally via one story being directly or indirectly referenced in another one published later. However, there are two instances of multiple stories having the same universe, and sometimes the same characters: &lt;em&gt;A Predicament&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;How to Write a Blackwood Article&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Landscape-Garden&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Domain of Arnheim&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Landor's Cottage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1. &lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Conqueror Worm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1838, Poe published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligeia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story about a man struggling to come to terms with the illness and then death of his first wife (Ligeia), and then the death of his second wife in the same manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five years later, Poe published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_Worm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Conqueror Worm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an extremely dark poem focusing on the inevitability of death, likely largely drawn from his own experiences with mortality - as was the case with much of his works; Poe drew quite a lot of inspiration from the lives and deaths of those he loved. Two years later, in a republication of &lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt;, he added &lt;em&gt;The Conqueror Worm&lt;/em&gt; to it - written, or rather spoken in a fit of madness, by Ligeia herself. Shortly after finishing speaking the poem, she dies, after a brief addendum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two works obviously do not take place in the same universe; one is simply a part of another. However, I feel that such a connection is worth including. This was the only other explicit connection I could find between Poe's works (though the characteristics of Dupin are not limited to that character alone). The theme of humans facing the horror of death does permeate much of Poe's writing, and it is perhaps a large part of his legacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why Poe included the poem in the revised version of &lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt; - well, there are many interpretations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_Worm#Role_in_.22Ligeia.22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia states&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it emphasizes the finality of death, it calls to question Ligeia's resurrection in the story. Also, the inclusion of the bitter poem may have been meant to be ironic or a parody of the convention at the time, both in literature and in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly a valid interpretation - and one I agree with, because, to be frank, &lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt; is really about whether or not death can be overcome. Granted, &lt;a href=&quot;http://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&amp;amp;context=etd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some feel that Ligeia &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; in fact conquer death&lt;/a&gt;, but the same basic reasoning is used: Poe included the poem to just emphasize the human struggle with mortality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an interesting side note, the name &amp;quot;Ligeia&amp;quot; also appears in Poe's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Aaraaf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Al Aaraaf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1829).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. &lt;em&gt;A Predicament&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;How to Write a Blackwood Article&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You brought up &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Predicament&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pair of short stories&lt;/a&gt;, published together under different names in 1838. Both have the same protagonist, who refers to herself as the Signora Psyche Zenobia. The plots are otherwise remarkably bizarre and separate from one another; the former is about the odd decapitation of said protagonist, while the latter is something of a social commentary on horror and suspense writing, which was of course Poe's specialty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm interpreting them correctly, &lt;em&gt;A Predicament&lt;/em&gt; is the story of how the Signora Psyche Zenobia &lt;em&gt;inadvertently&lt;/em&gt; (I believe) carries out her assignment from &lt;em&gt;How to Write a Blackwood Article&lt;/em&gt;: to die and record her thoughts on the matter. The details I leave to anyone who wishes to read the stories in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Poems written as &amp;quot;Tamerlane&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another peculiarly connected group of poems. You may know of Poe's 1827 poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamerlane_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tamerlane&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in his collection entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamerlane_and_Other_Poems&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tamerlane and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1827). What's curious is that Poe actually signed some of his poems as &amp;quot;Tamerlane&amp;quot;, for reasons I cannot explain. They include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/to03a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;To --&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (also known as &amp;quot;Sleep on&amp;quot;), published in 1833 in the &lt;em&gt;Baltimore Saturday Visiter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom1p060.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fanny&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in the same periodical a week later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been unable to figure out if there is any reason behind Poe's choice of pseudonym, or if he intended these poems to be additions to &lt;em&gt;Tamerlane and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt;. They are not strictly stories, but I felt it might be interesting to include them, given that &lt;em&gt;Tamerlane&lt;/em&gt; itself is a long enough epic poem to be on the same level as a story. It is possible that Poe intended the connection to be similar to that between &lt;em&gt;Ligeia&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Conqueror Worm&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;4. &lt;em&gt;The Landscape-Garden&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Domain of Arnheim&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Landor's Cottage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1842, Poe published &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lndscpa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Landscape-Garden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which he subsequently extended greatly into &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/info/pt041.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Domain of Arnheim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1846-1847). The original short story centers around a (very wealthy) young man named Ellison, who wants to shape the landscape like an artist, with the country his canvas. The newer version actually explains how Ellison goes on to create Arnheim, a castle that fulfills his vision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we have a tenuous connection with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lndrb.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Landor's Cottage: A Pendant to The Domain of Arnheim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Though neither Ellison nor Arnheim itself are mentioned by name in this story, it becomes obvious that this story is set in the same universe as the previous two - just later in time. The unnamed narrator is walking through rural New York State, and comes across what remains of Ellison's creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this may finally be what you were looking for: multiple stories set in the same universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T14:41:44.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="506" CreationDate="2017-01-19T20:07:43.890" Score="15" ViewCount="1453" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read Dan Simmons' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_Cantos&quot;&gt;Hyperion Cantos&lt;/a&gt;, composed of the books &lt;em&gt;Hyperion, Fall of Hyperion, Endymion,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Rise of Endymion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series pays considerable homage to the life and works of the 1800s poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats&quot;&gt;John Keats&lt;/a&gt;, and its titles correspond to three poems &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats_bibliography&quot;&gt;by the very same author&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(poem)&quot;&gt;Hyperion&lt;/a&gt; (abandoned by Keats partway through), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Hyperion:_A_Dream&quot;&gt;Fall of Hyperion&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endymion_(poem)&quot;&gt;Endymion&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard it said that these Hyperion Cantos novels mirror the content and story beats of the corresponding Keats poems, with characters and events being at least vaguely analogous to events in the poems themselves, and with the novel Hyperion even ending at roughly the same point the abandoned poem Hyperion ends. &lt;strong&gt;Is this true?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am considering picking up the original Keats poems themselves to read them and explore the comparisons myself, but before I do, I want to know if I should even be looking for these in the poems, or if it's a red herring I should dismiss out of hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T13:00:36.457" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T13:00:36.457" Title="Was Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos based on the story beats of the same Keats poems?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;dan-simmons&gt;&lt;hyperion-cantos&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T20:41:36.543" Score="10" ViewCount="1938" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Content Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Discussion of the sexual assault of a minor, and &quot;evidence&quot; of the innocence or guilt of possible suspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Atonement&lt;/em&gt; revolves around Briony, who as a child is the only witness to Lola being raped. Briony doesn't get a look at the rapist, but she's convinced it was poor neighbor Robbie - and testifies as much to the police. Meanwhile, the book clearly implies the true rapist is Paul Marshall, the chocolate manufacturer who Lola later, achingly, marries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by the end of the book, we learn that we are not reading a neutral narration of the events -- the entire book is revealed to be written by Briony, out of her guilt over accusing Robbie. And an unreliable one as well; she says how she's made changes and touches and written it from memory at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all very tragic -- except now we need to reassess everything we thought we knew about the actual incident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The signs we &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; were a clear implication of Marshall - scratches on his arm, lavishing attention on Lola - are no longer subtle authorial hints; they're tiny shreds of unreliable evidence that don't make sense for Briony to have remembered with any measure of certainty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The signs we saw of Robbie's affability - e.g. the justification of clumsiness for sending Briony's sister a lewd letter - are now entirely fabricated.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As far as I can tell&lt;/em&gt;, this casts the story in a rather different light. While Briony has undoubtedly done Robbie wrong by perjuring herself, the book's assumption that Robbie is innocent and Marshall is guilty doesn't seem to have any concrete support. Unless I've missed something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any reliable evidence that Briony was actually witness to, as to who the rapist was?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-01-19T21:07:55.253" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T21:07:55.253" Title="Is there any evidence of who assaulted Lola in &quot;Atonement&quot;, given the final reveal?" Tags="&lt;ian-mcewan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="275" CreationDate="2017-01-19T20:54:40.317" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much of J.R.R. Tolkien's work is presented as an abridgment/translation of the &quot;original&quot;, usually in Elvish. Much of The Silmarillion is presented as a gloss of epic poems, some of which Tolkien partly wrote, and Lord of the Rings is supposed to be a translation of the Red Book of Westmarch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dune is similarly a re-telling of stories from books, many of which are excerpted as chapter headings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fictional diaries are a very old device; just off the top of my head is Nikolai Gogol's 1835 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Madman_%28short_story%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diary of a Madman&lt;/a&gt;. These are at least tacitly abridged, as they rarely contain a lot of the dull day-to-day stuff in real diaries. Similarly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;epistolary novel&lt;/a&gt; (collections of fictional letters, again at least tacitly edited) is an old device, dating back at least to the 17th century. (The original novel of Dangerous Liaisons was such an epistolary novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The device is undoubtedly much older; medieval examples wouldn't surprise me. But I do know that Goldman wasn't unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:20:52.410" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:20:52.410" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="317" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:02:08.133" Score="18" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/275/was-pretending-to-be-an-abridgement-of-a-made-up-work-invented-by-william-goldma#306&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which asks about the history of one work claiming itself as an adaptation or abridgment of another. In &lt;em&gt;The Princess Bride&lt;/em&gt; by William Goldman, the author claims that it is an abridgment of a work by the non-existent S. Morgenstern. Why does he do this? What effect does it have on the understanding of the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T22:33:35.197" Title="To what effect does Goldman claim The Princess Bride is an abridgement?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;the-princess-bride&gt;&lt;william-goldman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:36:43.217" Score="-1" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was magic realism started with literature or was it created in other arts before literature? For example,  &lt;em&gt;One Hundred Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt; is a magic realistic book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was &lt;em&gt;One Hundred Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt; the first to use this trope? If not what book was then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by magic realism I mean the literary genre that incorporates fantastic or mystical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastEditorUserId="221" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T09:18:37.557" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T09:18:37.557" Title="Did magic realism begin in literature?" Tags="&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-20T02:12:46.230" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="517" CreationDate="2017-01-19T21:44:17.410" Score="2" ViewCount="1658" Body="&lt;p&gt;The penultimate book of the Kingkiller Chronicle trilogy was released in March 2011.  It has been nearly six years and the final book still has no expected release date.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Patrick Rothfuss gone on record anywhere about why the last book is taking so long to finish?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, what reasons has he provided?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T03:52:44.333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T03:52:44.333" Title="Why has the final book for The Kingkiller Chronicle taken so long?" Tags="&lt;patrick-rothfuss&gt;&lt;the-kingkiller-chronicle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:07:47.617" Score="15" ViewCount="1509" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hero with a Thousand Faces&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1949), Joseph Campbell argues that many myths follow a typical pattern involving the hero's departure from familiar surroundings to a unfamiliar setting, ultimately culminating in some sort of epic battle or otherwise reaching some seemingly insurmountable goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this same type of myth applied to all sorts of other fictional works (perhaps even over-used to some degree) from classics to contemporary, and from western and eastern literature as well.  Its ubiquity across cultures suggests some sort of universal appeal.  Has there been any academic research suggesting a reason for the ubiquity of the hero's journey in literature across the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="232" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T21:15:29.423" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T21:18:43.583" Title="Why is the hero's journey so ubiquitous across world literature?" Tags="&lt;motif&gt;&lt;joseph-campbell&gt;&lt;the-hero-with-1000-faces&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:13:41.337" Score="3" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there are 2 lines in The Hidden Oracle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fall of the Sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The final verse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well obviously, the fall of the Sun refers to Apollo becoming mortal. but what about the final verse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A theory;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It refers to the lack of oracles. There would be no prophecies because of Apollo. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't make sense, as even before the Grove of Dodona was tamed, it gave prophetic lines. Something about Indiana and seemingly random stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="65" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T05:49:21.190" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T07:03:45.300" Title="What do these prophetic lines in The Hidden Oracle mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;rick-riordan&gt;&lt;the-trials-of-apollo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="313" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:16:26.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We don't know.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning hasn't been revealed in any of Rick Riordan's books so far. This might be explained in &lt;em&gt;The Dark Prophecy&lt;/em&gt; (the second book in the series); we'll have to wait and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speculation part&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It refers to the last trial of the gods and their allies - first they had the titans, then Gaea, and now the triumvirate. After this, they will either be defeated or won't have any troubles for now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Speculation 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, this is Python speaking. He saying &lt;em&gt;The fall of the sun&lt;/em&gt; (i.e, Apollo), &lt;em&gt;the final verse&lt;/em&gt; - like, this is the end, it's over, you're going to die now, mwahahaha. He's just being a scary evil dude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T22:10:10.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="308" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:24:32.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to put in a vote for Shakespeare's play, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night&amp;#39;s_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1595/1596). Here's how it fares against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism#Characteristics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;characteristics listed&lt;/a&gt; on the Wikipedia page for Magical Realism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fantastical elements: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real-world setting: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, if a historical one. The Wikipedia page says &quot;In the binary world of magical realism, the supernatural realm blends with the natural, familiar world&quot;, which &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; applies. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Authorial reticence: &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, all the magic is pretty clearly explained within the rules of its universe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plenitude: &lt;strong&gt;Maybe&lt;/strong&gt;. I think the big wedding at the end counts, and maybe all the running around in the forest, but it's not the same kind of plenitude that Magical Realism has, as far as I know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hybridity: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Arguably, Bottom's time as a donkey-head doesn't count, since he enters a magical world and then returns from it, but magic clearly affects the four lovers and their eventual lives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Metafiction: &lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;. It has a play-in-a-play, in which we watch and listen to an audience commenting on the play they're watching. Also, it ends with a magical creature offering us magical assistance when required. Can't say meta-er than that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heightened awareness of mystery: &lt;strong&gt;Maybe&lt;/strong&gt;. Heightened state of reality? Yes, given all the stakes: people duelling to the death, heartbroken people rejected by those they loved, and so on. Heightened awareness of magic? I don't think so: nobody really notices what the fairies are up to as far as I can recall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Political critique: &lt;strong&gt;Maybe&lt;/strong&gt;, based on the complex relationships between the two royal couples, but these are sorted out and all's well that ends well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T22:24:32.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:29:28.823" Score="8" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;U2's song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_the_Blue_Sky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Bullet the Blue Sky&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was inspired by Bono's trip to El Salvadore in 1986, and America's role on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Salvadoran Civil War&lt;/a&gt;. As Bono said in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/see-bono-talk-u2s-bullet-the-blue-sky-origins-in-new-video-20160520&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And it upset me as a person who read the Scriptures, to think that Christians in America were supporting this kind of thing, this kind of proxy war because of these Communists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with certain other U2 songs, the band used religious allusions and imagery, possibly as a way to combat those feelings. In this song, there is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_wrestling_with_the_angel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacob wrestling with the Angel&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jacob wrestled the angel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the angel was overcome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Bible, the story is often interpreted as Jacob wrestling with God (though this is not universally accepted). I assume that in this case, Jacob and the angel represent different sides of fighters in the Salvadoran Civil War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the case, which side does each character represent, and why did U2 choose to represent each side as each specific figure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This is a test question for &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/67/71&quot;&gt;song lyrics&lt;/a&gt;. I'm hoping we'll get others, so we can have a more extensive meta discussion later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T09:20:36.737" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T09:20:36.737" Title="In &quot;Bullet the Blue Sky&quot;, what is the symbolism of Jacob and the angel?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;u2&gt;&lt;the-joshua-tree&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="307" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:33:35.197" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The abridgment is part of the overall frame story. The frame story is very different in the book than in the film. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book's frame story is very cynical. It's about the disillusionment of children growing up, and the business of fairy tales. The &quot;abridgment&quot; is one element of that: his realization that the story that was read to him was not, in fact, the actual story. The actual story was long and boring. His &quot;father&quot; concocted a fairy tale out of a supposedly true story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fictional &quot;Goldman&quot; (who is biographically different from the real Goldman, who has two daughters rather than one son) is a rather bitter person, and that's parallel to his realization that the book is so different from what he remembers. He's also cynical about love: in the frame story, he attempts to cheat on his wife (and is shot down). The &quot;true love&quot; of Buttercup and Westley contrasts with the reality of &quot;Goldman's&quot; love life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's rather remarkable that the movie excised this element and took the inner fairy tale at face value, completely rewriting the frame story. Such a change would seem to have a low chance of working, and yet it's arguably a considerable improvement on the book. The book's cynicism verges on misogyny (or &quot;stomps right into&quot;), and that does not bear the test of time well. The film doesn't exactly pass the Bechdel test, either, but it makes an uplifting story out of one that's fundamentally a downer. That's pretty amazing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T22:33:35.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T22:35:36.010" Score="9" ViewCount="4006" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many great works of literature written in the form of an epistolary novel. However, many of those stories could have also been told in a more traditional novel form. What effect does the epistolary novel format have on how novels are interpreted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, an epistolary novel is a novel written showing various documents that tell the story with little to no other narration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="1816" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T17:58:39.183" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T12:36:28.600" Title="What effect does an epistolary format have on our understanding of the book as a reader?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;epistolary-novel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="288" CreationDate="2017-01-19T23:11:33.277" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems it was indeed a false recollection, my mistake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cold-faced young officer stepped into the cell. With a brief movement of the hand he indicated Ampleforth. &quot;Room 101,&quot; he said...What seemed like a long time passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two pages later,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Parsons used the lavatory, loudly and abundantly. It then turned out that the plug was defective, and the cell stank abominably for hours afterwards. Parsons was removed. More prisoners came and went mysteriously. One, a woman, was consigned &quot;Room 101,&quot; and, Winston noticed, seemed to shrivel and turn a different color when she heard the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, two pages after that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a small gesture the officer indicated the skull-faced man. &quot;Room 101,&quot; he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all seems to imply that at the very least a 5-6 hours, which I'd assume is enough to reset and remodel the room, passed between each of these prisoners being sent to Room 101. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T23:11:33.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="327" CreationDate="2017-01-19T23:17:13.080" Score="9" ViewCount="2170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Room 101 is a torture room based on your worst fear. In Winston's case, it's quite easy to find his worst fear (rats) because he is caught by the telescreen admitting to Julia that he hates rats when they see one in their private room. However, I'd assume that for many of the other prisoners, it might be significantly more difficult to discern their worst fear. If no incidents similar to what happened to Winston occur for any of the other prisoners and/or the prisoner isn't caught admitting they're scared of something in front of a telescreen or the Thought Police, how can Room 101 function as intended for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T00:05:39.643" Title="How does the Ministry of Love know your worst fear?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="312" CreationDate="2017-01-19T23:29:14.033" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/1232/62&quot;&gt;This answer is essentially a re-post of my answer to the same question from the Mythology Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Joseph Campbell is very popular with the general public, there are a number of significant flaws in his theory that people tend to ignore. &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/1232/62&quot;&gt;To quote from Alan Dundes, a professor of Folklore and Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My  sole  point  in  mentioning this disheartening  incident is to  suggest that for  many  members of the literate public, the  study  of folklore means precisely Campbell and his writings. Yet professional folklorists  have said very little about the huge corpus of Campbelliana.  I do not know if  any  of his many books were ever even reviewed in JAF.  Is this a case of &quot;silence gives assent&quot;?  Very likely more people were introduced  to the  subject  matter of folklore by  the writings  of  Campbell or the PBS television series of lectures by  him than by any  other source. And yet we folklorists have said little or nothing about him and his theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dundes makes a number of criticisms of Joseph Campbell. One of these is of his assumption that myths are universal, which, as Dundes quickly proves, is not the case. To quote from Dundes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has  long  been a  popular fantasy among  amateur students of  myth  that all peoples share the same stories. This is  clearly  an  example  of wishful thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of myths that Joseph Campbell claims to be universal but which are not are include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The flood myth, which is &quot;absent from sub-Saharan Africa&quot; (Dundes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;virgin-birth&quot; motif, which is only present in three separate myths, and is absent from &quot;Africa... Siberia, Polynesia, ... Melanesia, ... Australia and New  Guinea&quot; (Dundes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;belly of the whale&quot; motif: this &quot;motif&quot; is only present in the old testament (Dundes). The only other example Campbell cites of a &quot;belly of the wale&quot; motif -- the story of Red Riding Hood -- is a horrible example. Red Riding Hood is only swallowed by a wolf in the written version of the story; in the oral version of the story &quot;the  girl  is not swallowed by  the wolf at all... Instead she  escapes through  a clever ruse  by pretending to need to go  outside to defecate&quot; (Dundes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it would be safe to say that Joseph Campbell's arguments that the monomyth is &quot;universal&quot; aren't very sound. If you are interested in reading more, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/1232/62&quot;&gt;Dundes' article is available on JSTOR&lt;/a&gt;, which you can usually access for free from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/libraries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;public library&lt;/a&gt;. Dundes has other criticisms of of Campbell, but they aren't relevant to the question asked by the OP.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recently wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@taxicrash/the-monomyth-so-incorrect-it-s-dangerous-fffea85a9640#.ailnms8e8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post about Joseph Campbell that might interest you&lt;/a&gt;. It elaborates on the points that I made in this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:19.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-19T23:29:14.033" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-19T23:29:42.980" Score="7" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often said that Heathcliff makes for the perfect example for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Byronic Hero&lt;/a&gt;.  Did Emily Brontë purposely write him that way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T19:13:55.280" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T19:13:55.280" Title="Was Heathcliff intentionally made a Byronic Hero?" Tags="&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;wuthering-heights&gt;&lt;emily-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="320" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:00:04.283" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Thought Police know everyone intimately.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is strongly hinted at all the way back in the very beginning of the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. &lt;strong&gt;It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.&lt;/strong&gt; But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. &lt;strong&gt;You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 1, Chapter 1 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We find out towards the end of the novel that they've been watching Winston for &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt;, analysing everything he did and just awaiting the right moment to strike. Why should he have been singled out for special attention? Sure, he'd had rebellious thoughts, but so had everyone who found themselves in the hands of the Ministry of Love. It stands to reason that they've been watching &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; those people - and probably all people everywhere, just as the above quote suggests - just as closely as they watched Winston. Closely enough to know everyone's habits, everyone's secrets. By watching people that closely, you find out &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; about them, which naturally includes their worst fears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knew now that for seven years the Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 3, Chapter 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T00:05:39.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1584" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:00:08.157" Score="9" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, Rilian, while enchanted, said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Though under Earth and throneless now I be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Yet, while I lived, all Earth was under me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From which it is plain that some great king of the ancient giants, who lives&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; buried there, caused this boast to be cut in the stone over his sepulcher;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And before, when they are traveling to the Underworld:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That is old Father Time, who was once a king in Overland,&quot; said the Warden.  &quot;And now he has sunk down into the Deep Realm and lies dreaming of all the things that are done in the upper world. Many sink down, and few return to the sunlit lands. They say he will wake at the end of the world.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Time fits the description of the scene that Rilian gave: He's a giant, he was a king, and he is located under the carving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Father Time the one to have the message carved in the stone?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Yes, it says &quot;lives buried&quot; in my version.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T02:19:25.140" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T02:19:25.140" Title="Is the giant who carved the &quot;Under Me&quot; line Time?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="332" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:00:18.597" Score="13" ViewCount="763" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lewis Carroll's &quot;Jabberwocky&quot; was, at the time it was written, even more nonsensical than it seems today, because some of the words which Carroll invented for it have since passed into common usage in the English language. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/chortle#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chortle&lt;/a&gt;, invented by Carroll for &quot;Jabberwocky&quot; as a portmanteau of &quot;chuckle&quot; and &quot;snort&quot; - or indeed the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/portmanteau#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;portmanteau&lt;/a&gt; itself, in its linguistic meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many other now-standard English words were originally coined by Lewis Carroll?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm only talking about words which are now widely used, accepted as standard, and appear in most dictionaries. I know that many of the nonsense words of &quot;Jabberwocky&quot; (brillig, wabe, etc.) have canonical definitions as given in &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt; itself or by Carroll, but most of them are still considered to be just that: nonsense words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T15:08:32.720" Title="How big an impact did Lewis Carroll have on the English language?" Tags="&lt;word-coinage&gt;&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:17:21.153" Score="18" ViewCount="6539" Body="&lt;p&gt;In T. S. Eliot's poem &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), the &quot;Phoenician Sailor&quot; (an image on a tarrot card) is described as having pearls for eyes in lie 48:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This detail is presumably important, because it is repeated later on in the poem on line 125:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; “Do&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nothing?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; I remember&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Those are pearls that were his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight as to what this means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:30:48.437" Title="Significance of the Phoenician Sailor having pearls for eyes in The Waste Land" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1008" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:20:31.567" Score="8" ViewCount="2485" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Winston and Julia are arrested at the end of Part 2 of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, Winston speculates dully that they may have overslept in the room above Charrington's shop, and that it is now the morning instead of the evening:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He noticed that he badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But the light seemed too strong. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening? He wondered whether after all he and Julia had mistaken the time — had slept the clock round and thought it was twenty-thirty when really it was nought eight-thirty on the following morning. But he did not pursue the thought further. It was not interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 2, Chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, at the start of the next chapter, he is resigned to the fact that he will never know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be twenty-four hours since he had eaten, it might be thirty-six. He still did not know, probably never would know, whether it had been morning or evening when they arrested him. Since he was arrested he had not been fed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 3, Chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any further evidence for whether they were arrested in the morning or the evening?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T02:24:08.917" Title="Did Winston and Julia oversleep?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="329" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:43:55.520" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I could only find 7 words from Lewis Carroll's works in my copy of the Oxford Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Burbled&lt;/strong&gt; — to bubble or gurgle (or a combination!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And burbled as it came!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chortled&lt;/strong&gt; — a muffled laugh/snort combination&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He chortled in his joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Galumphing&lt;/strong&gt; — galloping in a triumphant manner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He went galumphing back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gimble&lt;/strong&gt; — to grimace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tulgey&lt;/strong&gt; — thick, dense, or dark&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vorpal&lt;/strong&gt; — sharp or deadly, not common in mainstream english but quite common in RPGs and the fantasy genre&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these are from &lt;em&gt;Jabberwocky&lt;/em&gt;, you can read the full text &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jabberwocky.com/carroll/jabber/jabberwocky.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Portmanteau&lt;/strong&gt; — multiple words fused into one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You see it's like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Humpty Dumpty in &lt;em&gt;Alice through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Curiouser&lt;/strong&gt; — more curious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Curiouser and curiouser!” Cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Alice in &lt;em&gt;Alice through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this one counts, as it's regarded as a nonsense word by most dictionaries. Best to include it for the sake of completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T15:08:32.720" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T15:08:32.720" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1183" CreationDate="2017-01-20T00:45:03.777" Score="7" ViewCount="760" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hyperion and Endymion are poems by the famous poet John Keats, both based on Greek mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyperion talks about the Titan's despairing after their defeat by the Olympians, and was written in 1818-1819. Endymion is based on the myth of Endymion, where the moon goddess Selene falls in love with him, a king and son of Zeus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these poems supposed to be related to each other? They both cover Greek mythology, which prompted my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="43" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T01:20:04.923" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:32:29.077" Title="Are Endymion and Hyperion by John Keats intended to be related pieces?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="388" CreationDate="2017-01-20T01:00:19.590" Score="15" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was in high school, Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, Homer's &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, and Virgil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; were taught as a trilogy of sorts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Virgil the first Roman to refer to Odysseus as 'Ulysses' or was there another (recorded) author before him who did so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T13:07:58.043" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:25:07.540" Title="Who first referred to Odysseus as Ulysses?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;virgil&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T01:17:17.770" Score="7" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read J.K. Rowling's &lt;em&gt;The Casual Vacancy&lt;/em&gt;. An issue I have with it is that I couldn't see a clear climax. It just felt like a bunch of unhappy people making everyone around them unhappy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone point it out to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="188" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:54:36.690" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T08:17:06.540" Title="Where's the climax of J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;the-casual-vacancy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T01:36:01.907" Score="23" ViewCount="77827" Body="&lt;p&gt;The canonical Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle comprise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;four novellas:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fifty-six short stories, separated into five collections:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (12 stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (11-12 stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (13 stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt; (7-8 stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (12 stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were published between 1887 and 1927, and set between around 1800 and 1914. Some of them are set during the period when Holmes and Watson lived together at 221b Baker Street, and others during the period after Watson's marriage when they saw less of each other. But the cutoff point in-universe between these two periods is roughly marked by &lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;, when Watson meets his wife, and this was only the second story to be published; so clearly the chronological and publication orders do not agree. Still other stories are set much earlier, before Holmes and Watson met (e.g. &quot;The Adventure of the &lt;em&gt;Gloria Scott&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, Holmes's first case) or much later, after Holmes retires (e.g. &quot;The Adventure of the Lion's Mane&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: given all these complications, &lt;strong&gt;in which order should one read the complete Sherlock Holmes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some suborderings are obvious: for instance, &quot;The Final Problem&quot; should be read directly before &quot;The Adventure of the Empty House&quot;, and &quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot; should most likely be read first despite not being chronologically first in-universe. But has anyone worked out a complete list of all the Sherlock Holmes stories, in an order in which they can best be appreciated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publication order?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In-universe chronological order?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T08:25:06.970" Title="In which order should the Sherlock Holmes stories be read?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="343" CreationDate="2017-01-20T01:51:10.487" Score="25" ViewCount="6097" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just saw this post: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/326/was-heathcliff-intentionally-made-a-byronic-hero&quot;&gt;Was Heathcliff intentionally made a Byronic Hero?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not being familiar with literary terminology, I have no idea what a Byronic Hero is. I had read &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt; long ago (it was, IIRC, the &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; English book I ever read), and from what I remember, Heathcliff, while certainly one of the main characters, wasn't very &quot;heroic&quot;. Words to describe him would best be lifted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/46084/polite-synonyms-for-a-hole-ish-behavior&quot;&gt;this ELU question (Polite synonyms for “a——hole-ish” behavior)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes a &quot;Hero&quot; Byronic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:48:26.897" Title="What is a Byronic Hero?" Tags="&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:06:47.213" Score="23" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Begin your Holmesian adventure with short stories from &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;. Continue with the early novels before moving on to the later short stories. End with &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; and then &lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;, to see Holmes (and Doyle) at his finest. The order is, for the most part, chronological.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phase 1: Start with short stories from the first two series.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classic Holmesian tale involves elements of deduction from seemingly nonexistent details, whether they be a piece of fabric or a burn mark. To understand the way Sherlock Holmes thinks, you need to read one of these to catch a glimpse of his methodology. Holmes is not just a man; he is a character for study, and his depth is what puts Doyle above so many other writers in detective fiction. He's inscrutable, irrepressible, and always unpredictable, and you cannot just pick up, say, &lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt; and understand the complete persona of Sherlock Holmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short stories are, of course, the best place to start. In 20 or so pages, you can see an example of the sleuth's mind and personality, while getting to used to observing him work, through Watson. While there's no typical story, I'd recommend starting with one from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Identity&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Case of Identity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; would be my pick, as it begins with some marvelous deductions by Holmes and ends with a resolution nobody could have seen coming - yet at that point, you see the pieces fall into place as clear as day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be tempted to start with the story published first in that collection, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Scandal_in_Bohemia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Don't. It is an outlier in the Holmesian saga, an unusual and compelling tale that I think is best appreciated only after you get to know the detective. It shows parts of his personality that are only rarely apparent elsewhere - love, even - and involves a case unlike any other. It is atypical, and while it might interest you, I'd recommend starting with something more ordinary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Memoirs_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are rather similar in style, I feel, and so the stories can be read in various orders. There is extremely little overall plot change within them, and while in a certain story Holmes may reference past cases, they are largely self-contained. Doyle's style is roughly constant, if memory serves. This collection can be picked up and put down at any point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would, however, advise reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Problem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; last out of all of them - for continuity's sake - as you acknowledged in the question. It is perhaps one of the most important short stories in the initial arc. I also happen to like reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Naval_Treaty&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Naval Treaty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; directly before this, because I love it, but it's not mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phase 2: Mix something else in  - &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Four&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a while, you may get bored. Each short story will challenge you, but the format can get tiresome after 24 of them. I encourage you to try one of the longer standalone works. I would prefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Four&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which go into Holmes' methodology in more detail and present a story arc - which you don't see as much in any of the short stories. Both of these books were published before any of the short stories, but they can be challenging to slog through. I'd wait until you're comfortable with the style before going on to these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest mixing them in after reading perhaps ten or twelve short stories - or earlier, if you want. But read them in one sitting. &lt;em&gt;Do not start one and then go back to the short stories.&lt;/em&gt; Confusion may follow. I also happen to think that there are many cases where reading a book from start to finish is the best way to appreciate it, and this is one of those times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phrase 3: Go back to the new short stories.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: Re-read &lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;, to refamiliarize yourself with it and see how the arc it begins evolves into the next series.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle, feeling extreme pressure by fans, brought Holmes back from the dead after killing him off - in a fashion many may know about, but which I'm not going to reveal. He eventually published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Return_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, another series of short stories. In my mind, these are worse than the original two collections (after all, there was an 11-year gap between this and the originals!). They feel forced, and the plots get ever more intricate, astonishing, sensational and, quite frankly, hard to believe. I find some unsatisfying; at any rate, I can tell the difference in style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to read these 13 together, as a group (start with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Empty_House&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Empty House&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Holmes' return). Don't mix them in with the other two collections; there's just something &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. Maybe others disagree. At any rate, quality aside, I do feel like &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; was written with suspense in mind, not the pure intellectual investigation. My same criticism holds for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Last_Bow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case-Book_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. However, I don't remember them all as clearly as I remember the first three series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Phrase 4: Finish up the novels.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Valley_of_Fear&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It's likely my least favorite of the four novels - again, I think suspense plays a bigger role than pure mystery - but it's still worth a read. I'd recommend reading it last, so you keep a rough chronological order for the novels, but I think it lacks a sense of closure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finish off your Holmesian adventure with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Doyle wrote this to fight off the clamor of fans when Holmes was &amp;quot;dead&amp;quot;, and so it was a throwback, in a sense, but it is quite self-contained. Doyle creates a unique cast of characters - none too hard to believe, in fact - and keeps suspense &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; intellectual mystery in a good balance. It does have a sense of closure, which &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; does not, even though it is not part of the larger canon. It can be read apart from everything else, of course, but you really should know Holmes, in all his full glory, to appreciate his struggles in this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here's my recommendations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, in no particular order. Mix and match from the two as you wish.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt; - again, in no real order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, in any order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat chronological - which makes some sense; I think Doyle's best work was at the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T18:16:39.653" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:11:28.420" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Byronic heroes were based off of Lord Byron's epic poem &lt;em&gt;Child Harold's Pilgrimage&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;According to Lord Macaulay in Rupert Christiansen's &lt;em&gt;Romantic Affinities: Portraits From an Age, 1780- 1830&lt;/em&gt;, this is a description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Byron later wrote other works with heroes of a similar mold and his influence was seen during the Romantic movement and lasts through to modern works as well (ie the Phantom in &lt;em&gt;Phantom of the Opera&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:11:28.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:15:43.600" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's complicated, but a Byronic hero tends to be &lt;strong&gt;rebellious&lt;/strong&gt;, a &lt;strong&gt;loner&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;darkly romantic&lt;/strong&gt;, and often an &lt;strong&gt;antihero&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/literature-glossary/byronic-hero.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shmoop&lt;/a&gt;'s literature glossary has a short description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cooked up by the &amp;quot;mad, bad, and dangerous to know&amp;quot; Lord Byron, a Byronic hero is an antihero of the highest order. He (or she) is typically rebellious, arrogant, anti-social or in exile, and darkly, enticingly romantic. Did we mention Byronic heroes tend to also be kind of hot? Yeah, that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ByronicHero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; has a much longer description, with a long list of defining characteristics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Byronic Hero is a type of character popularized by the works of Lord Byron, whose protagonists often embodied this archetype, though they existed before him, it became prominent during Romanticism. Sometimes an Anti-Hero, others an Anti-Villain, or even Just a Villain, Byronic heroes are charismatic characters with strong passions and ideals, but who are nonetheless deeply flawed individuals who may act in ways which are socially reprehensible because he's definitely contrary to his mainstream society. A byronic hero is on his own side and has his own set of beliefs which he will not bow nor change for anyone. A Byronic hero is a character whose internal conflicts are heavily romanticized and who himself ponders and wrestles with his struggles and beliefs. Some are portrayed with a suggestion of dark crimes or tragedies in their past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The following traits are very characteristic of Byronic heroes and may be helpful in identifying them:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is usually male (though female examples are not unheard of) and is always considered very attractive physically and in terms of personality, possessing a great deal of magnetism and charisma, using these abilities to achieve social and romantic dominance. One mark against him personality wise, however, is a struggle with his own personal integrity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is very intelligent, perceptive, sophisticated, educated, cunning and adaptable, but also self-centered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is emotionally sensitive, which may translate into being emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is intensely self-critical and introspective and may be described as dark and brooding. He dwells on the pains or perceived injustices of his life, often to the point of over-indulgence. May muse philosophically on the circumstances that brought him to this point, including personal failings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is cynical, world-weary, and jaded, often due to a mysterious Dark and Troubled Past, which, if uncovered, may reveal a significant loss, or a crime or mistake committed which still haunts him, or, conversely, that he may be suffering from some unnamed crime against him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is extremely passionate, with strong personal beliefs which are usually in conflict with the values of the status quo. He sees his own values and passions as above or better than those of others, manifesting as arrogance or a martyr-like attitude. Sometimes, however, he just sees himself as one who must take the long, hard road to do what must be done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His intense drive and determination to live out his philosophy without regard to others' philosophies produces conflict, and may result in a tragic end, should he fail, or revolution, should he succeed. Because of this, he is very rebellious, having a distaste for social institutions and norms and is disrespectful of rank and privilege, though he often has said rank and privilege himself. This rebellion often leads to social isolation, rejection, or exile, or to being treated as an outlaw, but he will not compromise, being unavoidably self-destructive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent defining example, although not from literature per se, would be Captain Malcolm Reynolds from the cult TV series &lt;em&gt;Firefly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:15:43.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:25:45.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;HDE's great answer is much more detailed than mine and has more reasoning for each of his reading order choices, but with that in mind, I thought I'd chime in.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read all of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I'd say to have a full appreciation for the literary masterpiece Doyle created, an absolute beginner to the series should start with &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, in which Doyle is in the prime of his writing ability. Reading it first will give you a good feel for his writing style as well as what to expect from other Sherlock stories. My favorite story within that collection is &lt;em&gt;The Speckled Band&lt;/em&gt;, which I'd consider to be one of the best Sherlock stories Doyle ever wrote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd personally follow that with &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;, because it really allows you to appreciate how far Doyle advanced in terms of pure writing ability from his first to his last story. While you're at it, I'd opt for reading both &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;, as they both contain similar literary technique and the plot isn't half-bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rest, I really don't see a large difference in the order you read them in, but my personal preference would be to go from &lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;. That progression, I think, at least, provides a good sense of natural continuity (well, as naturally continuous as you can get with Sherlock Holmes). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd finish with &lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt; and complete your Sherlock experience by finishing with &lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sign of Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is of any significance to you, this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sherlockian.net/&quot;&gt;Sherlock fan site&lt;/a&gt;, has this recommended reading order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A complete beginner should probably start with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, either the whole book at one whack or a couple of selections, particularly &quot;The Speckled Band&quot; and maybe &quot;The Boscombe Valley Mystery&quot;. Those are among the best and at the same time the most characteristic of the stories. After the Adventures, maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles, and after that, whatever. Reading the stories in order is a very bad idea because the first one in particular, A Study in Scarlet, was written when Doyle was young and still learning, and is not by any means either strong or typical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:25:45.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:47:56.027" Score="12" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading the book &quot;The Unfortunates,&quot; you are directed by the book's instructions to literally mix the chapters together, excepting the first and last chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This creates an interesting phenomenon, where the story becomes very personalized to you. Additionally, somewhat oddly, it appears that the story works and flows well no matter how you shuffle it around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each part of the story is a short vignette, but it's not as though nothing happens in these sections. They're only vaguely disjoint, and it actually surprised me on many occasions when sections seemed to flow straight into each other. This is more than coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What techniques were employed in this book to make it so easily readable in random order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:14:40.807" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:14:40.807" Title="What techniques were used in &quot;The Unfortunates&quot; in order to allow the story to be read in random order?" Tags="&lt;the-unfortunates&gt;&lt;b-s-johnson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="341" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:48:26.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reference.com/art-literature/characteristics-byronic-hero-2e86ad632af20bc#&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt; has a pretty good explanation: (emphasis mine to highlight key traits)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Byronic hero is characterized as being arrogant, violent, reckless, seductive, traumatized and self-serving.&lt;/strong&gt; Developed by 19th-century poet Lord Byron, this type of character &lt;strong&gt;rejects social norms and exists as a form of antihero, or a protagonist lacking conventional heroic qualities.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Romantic writer Lord Byron was frustrated with the types of heroes&#xA;  found in traditional and Romantic stories. Through creating the&#xA;  Byronic hero, he aimed to make heroes &lt;strong&gt;more accessible and&#xA;  psychologically complex.&lt;/strong&gt; The Byronic hero is similar to the Romantic&#xA;  hero in that he is &lt;strong&gt;imperfect&lt;/strong&gt; and often &lt;strong&gt;isolated from society&lt;/strong&gt;, but&#xA;  Byron's version is much more extreme. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Byronic heroes&#xA;  are known for their &lt;strong&gt;intelligence, cynicism and self-awareness.&lt;/strong&gt; They&#xA;  are usually &lt;strong&gt;emotionally or intellectually tortured.&lt;/strong&gt; Two of the most&#xA;  famous examples are Heathcliff in Emily Bronte's &quot;Wuthering Heights&quot;&#xA;  and Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen's &quot;Pride and Prejudice.&quot; Ian Fleming's&#xA;  James Bond and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby can also be considered&#xA;  Byronic heroes. This type of character remains popular in contemporary&#xA;  literature and entertainment. Since the development of the Byronic&#xA;  hero, the classic, idealized hero has become less common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T02:48:26.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="699" CreationDate="2017-01-20T02:54:36.950" Score="13" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that the &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt; may predate the stories of Noah told in Abrahamic works. Is there any evidence to support which story came first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-03-28T23:10:20.627" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T12:48:30.313" Title="Which flood story was first?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:18:51.953" Score="8" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Pearl&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4, when Kino is trying to sell his massive pearl in the village market, it's revealed that all the pearl buyers work for one man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. [...] Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands, and the men who sat in their offices and waited for Kino knew what price they would offer, how high they would bid, and what method each one would use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Kino refuses to sell, he is attacked, his home and canoe are destroyed, and he is followed into the mountains.  I'd like to know if any of these attackers are meant to be linked to the &quot;one pearl buyer.&quot;  Does Steinbeck implicitly or explicitly make this connection anywhere in the book, or in other writings?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put another way: is Steinbeck attempting to emphasize the corruption of the pearl monopoly (at least one attacker from there)?  Or the general jealousy and hatred throughout the community (attackers working independently)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:34:30.250" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:34:30.250" Title="Are any of Kino's attackers directly linked to the one pearl buyer?" Tags="&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;the-pearl&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="351" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:25:22.490" Score="14" ViewCount="1624" Body="&lt;p&gt;Japanese is traditionally read in an up-to-down column, then jumps right-to-left to the next column. But all the manga I've ever seen reverse that order for panel flow, so we go from panel to panel across a row right-to-left and then jump to the next row down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the reading direction different for manga panels than for the Japanese written orthography?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T13:57:43.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T13:57:43.203" Title="Why are manga panels read differently than Japanese text?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;manga&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="350" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:41:31.430" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two traditional ways of writing in Japanese - in regular writing, it often &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; go vertically, but it &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; also go right to left in regular writing, too. The vertical form of writing is called tategaki (縦書き), and the horizontal form is called yokogaki (横書き). Vertical writing is largely used in printed novels, newspapers. Horizontal writing is largely useful in contexts where words from other languages need to be embedded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note, however, that manga &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; use both vertical and horizontal text. The reason why mostly comes down to available space and framing. Being able to write both directions and still be understood confers a lot of opportunity to better utilize the page. You can push descriptions in a horizontal panel to the sides, where they can be written in a vertical column, and write horizontally where appropriate in horizontal and vertical panels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direction of text is also a good aid to determine where you should keep reading - while only occasionally used for this purpose, it can easily serve as a guide for the reader's eye. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why do the panels go in the order they do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The long and short of it is that the direction books are typically read in manga, mixed with the directions that text are read, give rise to the panel direction order. Yokogaki is read top to bottom, which leads to the vertical row-based panel reading method. Tategaki, the dominant writing method, is read &lt;em&gt;right to left&lt;/em&gt;, which does two things to the reading order. First, it makes it so that the book's pages themselves are read from the Western &quot;back&quot; to &quot;front.&quot; Second, it makes it so that the &lt;em&gt;panels themselves&lt;/em&gt; are read right to left. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TpfCXm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TpfCXm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a page from a manga&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this page, the eye tracks the left to right text in panel 1. In panel 2, the eye is now tracking vertical columns, but is doing so &lt;em&gt;right to left&lt;/em&gt;. By the time you reach the end of the panel, you're visually adjacent to the next panel you want to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2c9kgm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2c9kgm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a page from a manga&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the way manga are written tends to expect you to track the writing on the page in an entirely different way. That motivates the use of right-to-left panels, because the columns of text move that direction. However, they're still read top to bottom, because both horizontal and vertical text are mixed together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why does it goes right to left and then top to bottom rather than the other way around? This is likely simply because tategaki is the dominant writing method in manga and Japanese graphic novels. Because it's more common, the page layout tends to favor it, simply for ease of reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T01:50:55.467" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:50:55.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="286" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:45:54.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Byron's &amp;quot;Fragment of a Novel&amp;quot; was based on Polidori's &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which in turn was based on a story told verbally by Byron as part of the same competition which produced &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of the competition is all too familiar to enthusiasts of horror literature. In the summer of 1816, Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Polidori were stranded together for a few days in the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, until the thunderstorms blew over. The game - a contest in telling ghost stories - was intended to be a match between Shelley and Byron, despite being open to all four ... but it was Mary Shelley and Polidori whose works, &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt;, have been better known up to this very day. &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt; went on to inspire Edgar Allan Poe and Bram Stoker himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/louxsie/polidori.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this detailed essay&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was it then that inspired Polidori to create a short story which so many other writers right up to the present day – whether they realise it or not, taking their inspiration direct from Bram Stoker without being aware of his own influences – have admired and sought to emulate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is Byron. &lt;strong&gt;'The Vampyre', to give it its proper credit, was inspired by a tale told earlier in the evening by Byron, one which was very much later published as 'A Fragment', and which bears startling theoretical and literary similarities to Polidori's piece.&lt;/strong&gt; The influence of Byron was such that when 'The Vampyre' was originally published in 'The New Monthly Magazine' in April 1819 it was attributed to him. The rift between the two men having widened in the interim few years however, Byron denied all authorship and a month later Polidori stepped out of the shadows and claimed it for his own whilst admitting the influence of his great friend in its conception. &amp;quot;I beg leave to state that your correspondent has been mistaken in attributing that tale in its present form to Lord Byron. The fact is that though the groundwork is certainly Lord Byron's, its development is mine.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt; was published on 1 April 1819 while &amp;quot;Fragment of a Novel&amp;quot; was published together with Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazeppa_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mazeppa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on 28 June 1819.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.praxxis.co.uk/credebyron/vampyre.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speculated&lt;/a&gt; that Byron wrote &amp;quot;Fragment of a Vampire&amp;quot; as a sort of counterstroke to Polidori's publication of &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt;, trying to prove himself and distance himself from association with the latter work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On its publication &amp;quot;The Vampyre&amp;quot; was widely attributed to Byron, much to his irritation, and as a form of self-defence maybe, he lost no time in quickly publishing his own &amp;quot;Fragment&amp;quot;, in which the vampire elements to be found in Polidori’s work are noticeably missing - perhaps eradicated to make the story as removed from &amp;quot;The Vampyre&amp;quot; as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T00:44:26.147" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="348" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:55:49.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's unknown, but it appears that although &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt; was written first, the Pentateuch (part of the Bible containing the creation stories) has the first description of the flood story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Idaho University &lt;a href=&quot;http://webpages.uidaho.edu/engl257/Ancient/epic_of_gilgamesh.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The oldest existing versions of this poem date to c 2000 BC, in Sumerian cuneiform.  The more complete versions date to c. 700 BC, in the Akkadian language.  The standard, first &quot;complete&quot; version, which includes the flood myth, is dated to c. 1300-1000 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Oldest version of the poem is from around 2000 BC, the first version to depict the flood is around 1300-1000 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The City of God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Saint Augustine (best reference I can find), Moses is told to have been born in 1400 BC and died in 1201 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Augustine also pens Moses as the author of the whole Pentateuch, so the flood story was written by him at some point during his lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Biblical flood story was written from around 1430-1201 BC, whereas the first version of &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt; to contain the flood story was written from 1300-1000 BC. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's possible either way, but it's most likely they were written somewhat concurrently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that it's unknown for sure whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch, but since the end of Genesis/beginning of Exodus (the first 2 books) discuss Moses, it's necessarily at this time period or after. (IIRC there is a 50 year gap between the books however)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T04:01:12.323" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T04:01:12.323" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="355" CreationDate="2017-01-20T03:59:18.893" Score="30" ViewCount="3106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edgar Allen Poe's poem &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; has the narrator mourning the loss of his love Lenore. But it's actually not entirely clear to me if Lenore merely &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt; the narrator (for whatever relationship-related intricacies) or if she is &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt; altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the eponymous raven appears, the narrator repeatedly asks him if he will ever see Lenore again, to which we know the Raven's answer isn't particularly satisfying. But still, it's unclear to me if he is talking about an actual real meeting and return of Lenore to him, or the chance of reuniting with her in the afterlife, or even the chance of her returning from the dead. It's all left ambiguous to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while getting along in the English language rather well, I'm not a native speaker and I won't deny that some parts of the poem might go beyond my understanding. So did I just miss something more obvious in the text? Or is it only secondary information that gives a really conclusive answer on the matter? Or has it never been resolved at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Lenore actually dead or did she just leave the narrator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T12:31:46.183" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T11:11:02.777" Title="Did Lenore merely leave or is she dead?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;the-raven&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2017-01-20T04:04:48.850" Score="25" Body="&lt;h2&gt;She's dead.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Poe writes himself in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philosophy of Composition&lt;/a&gt;, an essay about competent poetic writing based on his own analysis of &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; (full text available &lt;a href=&quot;http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHYPER/poe/composition.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had now gone so far as the conception of a Raven, the bird of ill-omen, monotonously repeating the one word &amp;quot;Nevermore&amp;quot; at the conclusion of each stanza in a poem of melancholy tone, and in length about one hundred lines. Now, never losing sight of the object- supremeness or perfection at all points, I asked myself- &amp;quot;Of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;Death&lt;/strong&gt;, was the obvious reply. &amp;quot;And when,&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?&amp;quot; From what I have already explained at some length the answer here also is obvious- &amp;quot;When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: &lt;strong&gt;the death then of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted, however, that the authenticity of &amp;quot;The Philosophy of Composition&amp;quot; has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition#Authenticity&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;called into question&lt;/a&gt;, with one biographer describing it as &amp;quot;a rather highly ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization than literary criticism.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(Hat-tip to BESW for informing me of this.)&lt;/em&gt; So, although other critics do believe &amp;quot;The Philosophy of Composition&amp;quot; is what it pretends to be, we must acknowledge that it's not &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; reliable as a source, and look additionally to the poem itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nameless here for evermore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only the angels that speak her name now, and &amp;quot;here&amp;quot; (in the mortal world?) she is nameless for evermore. This suggests she's with the angels, i.e. dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker believes the raven has come from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pluto&lt;/a&gt;, and asks it about Lenore. This suggests she too is there, in the &amp;quot;Plutonian&amp;quot; land of the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He speaks of seeing Lenore again only in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aidenn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aidenn&lt;/a&gt;, or Paradise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these quotes &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; confirms that Lenore is dead - she could be gone and yet the speaker hopes to see her again when both are dead - but it's at least strongly suggestive. Together with the Philosophy of Composition, I'd even venture to say it's conclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T04:21:12.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="417" CreationDate="2017-01-20T04:41:57.597" Score="26" ViewCount="1581" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read that Poe's been accused of lifting significant elements from many authors including Elizabeth Barrett, Charles Dickens, Leo Penzoni, and Thomas Holley Chivers (and &quot;unknown,&quot; of course). Since Poe himself was famous for accusing more successful poets of plagiarism, I'm inclined to think some of this is just tit for tat. Still, I'd like to know if there's anything even close to a definitive answer for any of these accusations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say confidently that Poe did or did not plagiarise someone else's work when writing &quot;The Raven&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T13:57:40.467" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T19:54:05.997" Title="Did Poe plagiarise someone else's work when writing &quot;The Raven&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;the-raven&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="406" CreationDate="2017-01-20T04:53:03.963" Score="10" ViewCount="3862" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/All_religions_are_one&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;All Religions are One&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, William Blake develops an argument around a concept called &amp;quot;the Poetic Genius&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the modern, surface meaning of the words, the Poetic Genius would seem to be the faculty of creating and/or appreciating and understanding poetry, or perhaps more broadly literature in general. But Blake also seems to identify the Poetic Genius with the soul and with a monotheistic God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Blake actually mean by &amp;quot;the Poetic Genius&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T17:34:22.423" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T17:34:22.423" Title="What is &quot;the Poetic Genius&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T04:55:32.617" Score="16" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somebody read to me from a book about Allingham long ago that she would &quot;polish her prose until it shone over-bright&quot; and then dictate it to her husband to reduce it to a more readable vernacular. I think it was a line from a biography describing an interview with surviving relatives. I've repeated this line many times, and then recently went to track down its source again--and I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; find was this line by Allingham herself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which has the gist of the quote I remember, but doesn't mention dictating to her husband, is in her own voice rather than a third party, and doesn't use the phrase &quot;shone over-bright,&quot; which I remember quite clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, where did that description of her writing process come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:48:07.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T18:48:07.000" Title="Who said that Allingham &quot;polished her prose until it shone over-bright,&quot; and where?" Tags="&lt;margery-allingham&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:25:10.853" Score="14" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Youngman Carter painted beautiful bespoke art for the covers of Margery Allingham's mystery novels, and his style became associated with her work. Why don't the modern reprints of the Campion novels use her husband's art?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T17:17:08.550" Title="Why don't the modern printings of Campion novels use the original artwork?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;illustrators&gt;&lt;margery-allingham&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="438" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:32:56.273" Score="8" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last book of the Hunger Games trilogy, several things happen which make me think that the moral (or conclusion) of the story is that things never change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Hunger Games are to continue, just with Capitol kids.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Katniss shoots Coin because Coin is another Snow.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Snow escapes execution by dying in his own way.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many characters are dead who may have been alive if it weren't for the revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in thinking that the conclusion is that the revolution was considered by Collins to have been a change from one form of suppression to another? That in the end nothing had changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T18:25:58.427" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:25:58.427" Title="Moral of the Hunger Games Trilogy" Tags="&lt;moral&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:34:23.267" Score="10" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having encountered a number of references to Cthulhu in various places over the years, I would like to explore the various works based in the Cthulhu mythos. Out of curiosity, I had read &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Call_of_Cthulhu&quot;&gt;The Call of Cthulhu&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; some time ago, but I don't know much about Lovecraft's other works or where to go next. It's my understanding that other authors have also contributed to the Cthulhu mythos and that it has a number of short stories as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would you recommend going about exploring this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given so many short stories, I hope answerers will recommend anthologies which collectively include all the stories they recommend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T16:16:52.273" Title="How do I get started with the Cthulhu mythos?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;&lt;cthulhu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:37:08.107" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Waugh's early novels, especially &lt;em&gt;Vile Bodies&lt;/em&gt;, are notable for a &quot;cinematic&quot; style of pacing, with relatively short segments of narrative being &quot;cross-cut&quot; to build tension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Waugh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; that he spent time in Hollywood trying to get a film production of &lt;em&gt;Brideshead Revisted&lt;/em&gt; made, but it's unclear from the article whether he was there merely in the capacity of the owner of the rights, or actually working as a writer for the studio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Waugh write any screenplays, either working for a studio or on his own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T05:00:06.803" Title="Did Evelyn Waugh ever attempt to write a screenplay?" Tags="&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="987" CreationDate="2017-01-20T05:59:20.447" Score="20" ViewCount="1002" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tennyson's poem &amp;quot;The Lady of Shalott&amp;quot; there is the following verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There she weaves by night and day&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A magic web with colours gay.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She has heard a whisper say,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;A curse is on her if she &lt;strong&gt;stay&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    To look down to Camelot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She knows not what the curse may be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And so she weaveth steadily,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And little other care hath she,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    The Lady of Shalott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now part of her curse, as I understand it, is that she cannot leave Shalott, and cannot look out the windows because she may see Camelot. So why is it stay? She has to stay! Shouldn't it be stray? As in her eyes stray to look out the window to Camelot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T07:26:48.250" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T07:26:48.250" Title="Why does the Lady of Shalott stay instead of stray?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="366" CreationDate="2017-01-20T06:06:51.227" Score="19" ViewCount="2692" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems Tennyson wrote two versions of &amp;quot;The Lady of Shalott&amp;quot;. They are quite similar but have some big differences, for example, the first stanza of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1832 version&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On either side the river lie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Long fields of barley and of rye,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That clothe the wold and meet the sky;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And thro' the field the road runs by&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      To many-tower'd Camelot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The yellow-leaved waterlily&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The green-sheathed daffodilly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tremble in the water chilly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      Round about Shalott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the first stanza of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45360/the-lady-of-shalott-1842&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1842 version&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On either side the river lie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Long fields of barley and of rye,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That clothe the wold and meet the sky;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And thro' the field the road runs by&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      To many-tower'd Camelot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And up and down the people go,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gazing where the lilies blow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Round an island there below,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      The island of Shalott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the later one the final version of the original? Or are they two separate versions meant to both be different poems about the same subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T08:30:04.050" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T08:30:04.050" Title="Which is the 'correct' version of &quot;The Lady of Shalott&quot; and why are there two?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T06:22:34.437" Score="13" ViewCount="2038" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Llano_en_llamas#Nos_han_dado_la_tierra_.28They_gave_us_the_land.29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nos han dado la tierra&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;They Gave Us the Land&amp;quot;) is a dismal portrayal of the Mexican government's land reform in the mid-20th century.  A group of men are given a barren wasteland by an official, and as they walk through it they discuss how completely worthless it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But near the end, it's suddenly revealed that one of the men is carrying a hen under his coat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hadn't noticed Esteban very closely.  Now that he's speaking I notice him.  He's wearing a coat that reaches down to his navel, and under his coat something that looks like a hen's head is peering out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Yo no me había fijado bien a bien en Esteban. Ahora que habla, me fijo en él. Lleva puesto un gabán que le llega al ombligo, y debajo del gabán saca la cabeza algo así como una gallina.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When pressed, Esteban explains why he is carrying the chicken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I brought her along to take care of her.  Nobody was left at my house to feed her; that's why I brought her.  Whenever I go anyplace very far I take her along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;la traigo para cuidarla. Mi casa se quedó sola y sin nadie para que le diera de comer; por eso me la traje. Siempre que salgo lejos cargo con ella.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is – what relevance does this chicken have?  Is it meant to show the poverty or loneliness of the men somehow?  Why include it in the story at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;English quotations from &lt;em&gt;The Mexico Reader&lt;/em&gt; (2002), 468–69.  Spanish from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=RH9UUph_rHgC&amp;amp;pg=PA11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toda la obra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T12:49:05.780" Title="What's the point of the hen in Juan Rulfo's &quot;They Gave Us the Land&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;juan-rulfo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="364" CreationDate="2017-01-20T07:39:30.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 1842 version is the more well-known version of this poem, and it most certainly is a revision of the first version. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.uiowa.edu/display/vicwik/Tennyson&amp;#39;s+Lady+of+Shalott&quot;&gt;University of Iowa&lt;/a&gt; (starting at &quot;The Two Versions&quot;) conducted a thorough analysis of why Tennyson might have thought it necessary to make the changes he did. I'll give a rough summary, but many of the details are listed on that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the reasons for the changes largely come down to Tennyson potentially wanting to change how the poetic observer sees Shalott. The 1833 version focuses much more on the natural environment, whereas the 1842 version seems to focus much more on Shalott itself. One of the examples that page uses is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The yellowleavèd waterlily,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The greensheathèd daffodilly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tremble in the water chilly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Round about Shalott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was replaced with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And up and down the people go,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  gazing where the lilies blow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the poem, Tennyson seems to want to &lt;em&gt;insert more&lt;/em&gt; ambiguity about what, exactly, the story is surrounding her. The story becomes less straightforward, and what happens to her loses some definition in favor of narrative. The ultimate effect of this is to change the meaning and tonal feel of the ending of the piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a good deal more examples of this (which I won't repeat here - see the link above), and it does seem to be the primary reason for the edit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T07:39:30.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T08:13:10.000" Score="6" ViewCount="2531" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old Major, the elder pig in &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, seems to have a different role than the younger ones. I believe he has a different view, but after he dies, the young pigs don't follow his legacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user227" LastEditorDisplayName="user227" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T11:20:41.477" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T11:27:05.013" Title="What does Old Major in Animal Farm represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T08:55:28.690" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob Dylan's album &lt;em&gt;Modern Times&lt;/em&gt; has many passages famously inspired by (some say plagiarised from) the poetry of Henry Timrod. Do any of Dylan's earlier works also clearly reflect the influence of Timrod?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T23:55:17.440" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T23:55:17.440" Title="Did Timrod inspire Dylan before 'Modern Times'?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;bob-dylan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="361" CreationDate="2017-01-20T09:53:53.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To start getting involved, I would read the original author's works before moving onto anyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft&lt;/em&gt; frequently appears as a free download for Kindle.  If you prefer the printed word, it is available in paperback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stories appear in the anthology in an order that is not the chronological published order.  However, reading them in the order as presented is a perfectly good way of getting into the mythos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T16:16:52.273" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T16:16:52.273" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="123" CreationDate="2017-01-20T09:54:46.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;M. Morissot and M. Sauvage (note: they both have the sound &quot;so&quot; in their name, meaning &quot;sot&quot;, or &quot;stupid&quot; in French) first have several glasses of absinthe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ils ( . . . ) burent ensemble une absinthe. ( . . . )&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  « Une seconde verte, hein ? » M. Sauvage y consentit : « À votre disposition. » Et ils pénétrèrent chez un autre marchand de vins.&#xA;  Ils étaient fort étourdis en sortant, troublés comme des gens à jeun dont le ventre est plein d’alcool.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translation:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They had an absinthe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Up for a second green?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  M. Sauvage agreed: &quot;As you wish.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And they entered in another liquor store. They were strongly stoned as leaving the store, like hungry folks with the guts full of alcohol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time they are drunk, hence they are adventurous and over confident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Si on y allait ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Où ça ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – À la pêche, donc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Mais où ?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Mais à notre île. Les avant-postes français sont auprès de Colombes. Je connais le colonel Dumoulin ; on nous laissera passer facilement.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translation:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, shall we go?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Where to?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Fishing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – But where?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – To our island. French outposts are near Colombes. &lt;strong&gt;I know colonel Dumoulin; I will let us pass.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M. Morissot and Colonel Dumoulin know each other, so colonel Dumoulin accepts as a favour to M. Morissot. When he sees these two friends looking brave by the alcohol, the situation seems funny to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another detail is that at this moment, the Prussians are up in the hills, and the fishing spot is hidden, so they don't expect to be caught:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;M. Sauvage, montrant du doigt les sommets, murmura : « Les Prussiens sont là-haut ! »&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;M. Sauvage, showed the up hils, and whispered: &quot;The Prussians are up there!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They take precautions to go to their fishing spot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Et ils descendirent dans un champ de vigne, courbés en deux, rampant, profitant des buissons pour se couvrir. ( . . . )&#xA;  Une bande de terre nue restait à traverser pour gagner le bord du fleuve. Ils se mirent à courir ; et dès qu’ils eurent atteint la berge, ils se blottirent dans les roseaux secs.&#xA;  Morissot colla sa joue par terre pour écouter si on ne marchait pas dans les environs. Il n’entendit rien. Ils étaient bien seuls, tout seuls.&#xA;  Ils se rassurèrent et se mirent à pêcher.&#xA;  En face d’eux l’île Marante abandonnée les cachait à l’autre berge. La petite maison du restaurant était close, semblait délaissée depuis des années.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translation:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So they descend into a wine yard, bending, crawling in the bushes. A narrow open land was to cross to go to the river shore. They ran, and when they ended at the shore, they hid in dry reeds. Morissot listened to the ground to hear if someone was walking around. He heard nothing. They were alone. They relaxed and started to fish. In front of them, the Marante Island, abandoned, hid their spot. The little restaurant house was closed, looking abandoned for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two friends are over confident from drinking, and the colonel personally knows one of them. Also, the Prussians are up in the hills and the fishing spot is hidden so they think they could be safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user227" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T12:26:22.483" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T12:26:22.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="371" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="372" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:09:57.437" Score="21" ViewCount="13278" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I want to read Tolkien's text aloud, or appreciate the rhythm and rhyme in his poems, I find it distracting not to know how names including these characters (and similar ones) were meant to be pronounced. Unfortunately I only have the main books in e-book format; if this is answered in some background material I would highly appreciate a summary or even a literal quote thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am in particular interested in these letters, from which I assume it would be more or less straightforward to generalize to others reusing the same accents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ä&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Eärendil&lt;/em&gt;): I suspect umlaut (German) or separation of sounds (French) or both, but I'm having a hard time in making the first verse trochaic (in accordance with the rest of the poem) in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eärendil was a mariner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that tarried in Arvernien;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he built a boat of timber felled&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in Nimbrethil to journey in [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;û&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Nazgûl&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Khazad-dûm&lt;/em&gt;): I'm pretty sure that this is just the sound I know as &quot;u&quot; (sounds like the /oo/ in /doom/):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The shadow lies upon his tomb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's the difference to &quot;u&quot; then?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;é&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., &lt;em&gt;Sméagol&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Éoden&lt;/em&gt;): here I only have the pronunciation they adopted in the movie adaptation, the problem of which is that it plainly ignores any diacritics and says &quot;Smeagol&quot; in English pronunciation. I very much doubt that is what was intended. Similarly to the above, how to differentiate &quot;é&quot; from &quot;e&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="205" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T15:11:19.657" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:11:19.657" Title="How to read é, ä, û?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="371" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:25:42.343" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien answers these questions in the appendices of the physical copies of many of the original books. (Some editions of the books don't include the pronunciation guides, but most do.) A more detailed pronunciation guide, however, appears in the back of the Silmarillion, which was kindly reproduced &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethosinterrupted.wordpress.com/2009/08/23/a-pronunciation-guide-to-the-works-of-j-r-r-tolkien/&quot;&gt;by this blogger&lt;/a&gt;. You can also find some more details on &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Elvish#Pronunciation&quot;&gt;the Tolkien Gateway&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your specific questions, answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You're correct about the dieretic marks. They split words into two syllables around a vowel pair. However, more generally, you should read dipthongs - especially in Elvish - this way, even without this mark; the mark is largely for convenience. Eärendil, believe it or not, is occasionally spelled Ëarendil - they're the same.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;û&lt;/strong&gt; is pronounced as in &lt;strong&gt;boom&lt;/strong&gt;, as you've listed in your question; however, it extends the sound. Think, &quot;NAZ-goo-ool,&quot; instead of &quot;NAZ-gool,&quot; and you'd be close to the right sound. (It's not perfect, because it doesn't actually split into two syllables like that, but it's closer to that length.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sméagol is actually pronounced somewhat incorrectly in the movies. The 'é' sound has more of an &quot;ay&quot; than an &quot;ee,&quot; and as it's a dipthong, it also splits into two syllables. Where the movies say &quot;SMEE-gul,&quot; it should really be something more like &quot;SMAY-ah-gol.&quot; And, as with the û in Nazgûl, the vowel is slightly extended. However, it's not extended &lt;em&gt;quite&lt;/em&gt; as much as û. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Useful for reading the above reasources: if you're familiar with IPA: e is [ɛ], é is [ɛː], and ê is [ɛːː]. Each &quot;ː&quot; adds a little bit of extension; a &quot;::&quot; feels almost, but not quite, like two syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T10:34:31.237" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T10:34:31.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:26:43.657" Score="5" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Fowler's &lt;em&gt;Wit's End&lt;/em&gt; (also published as &lt;em&gt;The Case of the Imaginary Detective&lt;/em&gt;), we see a flashback where Addison is abducted at age three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a strange scene. There are three people involved; she isn't mistreated; she's let out to play in the garden, and her parents find her there immediately. It seems... &lt;em&gt;weird&lt;/em&gt;, for an abduction; I'm not seeing any of the motivation or the secrecy I'd expect from the abduction of a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is any explanation given for the events in this scene? Are we meant to understand who took her, or why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:47:49.543" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:47:49.543" Title="Who abducted Addison in &quot;Wit's End&quot;?" Tags="&lt;karen-joy-fowler&gt;&lt;wits-end&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="371" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:36:10.700" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For vowels the letters &lt;em&gt;i, e, a, o, u&lt;/em&gt; are used, and (in Sindarin only) &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;. As far as can be determined the sounds represented by these letters (other than &lt;em&gt;y&lt;/em&gt;) were of normal kind, though doubtless many local varieties escape detection. That is, the sounds were approximately those represented by &lt;em&gt;i, e, a, o, u&lt;/em&gt; in English &lt;em&gt;machine, were, farther, for, brute&lt;/em&gt;, irrespective of quantity.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Sindarin long &lt;em&gt;e, a, o&lt;/em&gt; had the same quality as the short vowels, being derived in comparatively recent times from them (older &lt;em&gt;é, á, ó&lt;/em&gt; had been changed). In Quenya long &lt;em&gt;é&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ó&lt;/em&gt; were, when correctly pronounced, as by the Eldar, tender and 'closer' than the short vowels.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sindarin alone among contemporary languages...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Sindarin long vowels in stressed monosyllables are marked with the circumflex, since they tended in such cases to be specially prolonged, so in &lt;em&gt;dûn&lt;/em&gt; compared with &lt;em&gt;Dúnedan&lt;/em&gt;.  The use of the circumflex in other languages such as Adûnaic or Dwarvish has no special significance, and is used merely to mark these out as alien tongues (as with the use of &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; is never mute or a mere sign of length as in English. To mark this final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; it is often (but not consistently)  &lt;em&gt;ë&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:41:29.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="375" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:36:34.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a Scottish-born author, best known for his stories about the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, which have shaped the genre of detective fiction ever since. His other works include the Professor Challenger stories, most famously &lt;em&gt;The Lost World&lt;/em&gt;, and also stage plays including &lt;em&gt;Waterloo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The House of Temperley&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T12:21:18.980" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T12:21:18.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="376" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:36:34.150" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:41:52.450" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:41:52.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="379" CreationDate="2017-01-20T10:59:21.853" Score="8" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a child, reading &lt;em&gt;Bridge to Terabithia&lt;/em&gt;, I was horrified when &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Leslie died&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an older reader now, I wonder whether her death was necessary to the development of Jessie. Was her death for a purpose, or was it just the author giving a sence of mortality to her characters? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T13:22:00.493" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T13:22:00.493" Title="Was this character's death symbolic in Bridge to Terabithia?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;bridge-to-terabithia&gt;&lt;katherine-paterson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T11:02:10.820" Score="17" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Jasper Fforde's &quot;book world,&quot; Miss Havisham is a speed demon who races cars with Mr. Toad. This seems... out of character, based on my understanding of her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just funny because it's unexpected, or is there a joke or reference I'm not getting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T14:31:14.657" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T14:46:45.900" Title="Why does Miss Havisham drive fast cars?" Tags="&lt;jasper-fforde&gt;&lt;thursday-next&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="377" CreationDate="2017-01-20T11:04:34.093" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, because &lt;em&gt;Bridge to Terabithia&lt;/em&gt; was written in response to a genuine event. Author Katherine Paterson wrote the book after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_to_Terabithia_(novel)&quot;&gt;her son's best friend was struck by lightning and killed&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is a reaction to mortality, but it's not symbolic. It's a way to try to process how unfair life can be, and how to cope with the aftermath of such an event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T11:04:34.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="367" CreationDate="2017-01-20T11:17:44.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Old Major is generally accepted to represent Karl Marx as he is the originator of the ideas behind the reformation on the farm. However, he plays a minimal role in their implementation and their image is later used only to prop up diluted versions of their ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T11:17:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T11:55:30.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used on questions about poetry in general, or about any specific poems which are too short to merit their own tag. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/487/17&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For questions about short works, use the author tag with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/short-stories&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-stories&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-stories&lt;/a&gt;. New users will be able to tag their questions appropriately even if there've been no previous questions about precisely the same work, and we won't be overrun by thousands of overly specific tags. (Tags for specific, perhaps especially noteworthy, short works are optional but not encouraged.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T12:34:32.047" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T12:34:32.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T11:55:30.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about poetry in general or about any specific poem. Please use this tag with the appropriate author tag, and, if applicable, a language tag (such as [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T13:46:39.523" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T13:46:39.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="471" CreationDate="2017-01-20T12:04:01.463" Score="12" ViewCount="647" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love &lt;em&gt;The Scarlet Letter&lt;/em&gt;, but I surprised to find out that I did not even know what it was supposed to represent. Its significance seemed to change throughout the book. Is there one central symbol the brooch was supposed to symbolize, or did it have its own symbolic character arc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:51:52.303" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:51:52.303" Title="What does the physical Scarlet Letter represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;&lt;the-scarlet-letter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="391" CreationDate="2017-01-20T12:44:14.590" Score="1" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Castle on a Cloud&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Les Miserables&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a room that's full of toys,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are a hundred &lt;strong&gt;boys and girls&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's translated from French, but why isn't it &lt;strong&gt;girls and boys&lt;/strong&gt;?  There are rhymes throughout the rest of the song.  Was this intentional (and if so, why?) or are the translators just stupid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:56:10.573" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:56:10.573" Title="Why don't these lines rhyme in Les Miserables?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;les-miserables-musical&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2017-01-20T13:20:01.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure it's nothing to do with the translation. Flipping the order of words isn't even worth an eyeblink when you're translating prose. It would have been just as easy for the creators to work from an English translation of the novel if they weren't porting the French musical lyrics, and in any case, considering every other rhyme in the musical works that I recall, this might be just a choice to be a little off. I agree that the line &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; end &quot;girls and boys,&quot; but &quot;boys&quot; is still there, so the rhyme is preserved, even if it scans oddly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T13:20:01.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="174" CreationDate="2017-01-20T13:26:20.230" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It seems so, yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the game played between Death and Life-in-Death, in which the latter wins the soul of the Ancient Mariner while the former claims all his crewmates, the Mariner is left all alone upon the ship. He is driven to distraction by the corpses, but says he &lt;strong&gt;cannot die&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fear not, fear not, thou Wedding-Guest!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This body dropt not down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And a thousand thousand slimy things&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lived on; and so did I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet I could not die. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part IV&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that he goes &lt;strong&gt;at least a week without water&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink&quot; comes earlier, in Part II, and he only manages to drink at the start of Part V). This too suggests that he's supernaturally unable to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T13:26:20.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2017-01-20T14:57:00.293" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full sentence of these two lines is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A curse is on her if she stay to look down to Camelot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation of this verse to modern prose would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She will be cursed if she keeps looking at Camelot and not on her weaving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore she focuses on her weaving intently, but gets captivated by the reflections of the outside world in her mirror. And of course she eventually looks out and becomes cursed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: She started looking at Camelot, she's cursed if she doesn't stop that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T14:57:00.293" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2017-01-20T14:57:49.543" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ulysses is the Latin form of the Greek Odysseus, stemming from the Sicilian or alternate Latin form Ulixes.  The first instance of these forms in literature that I can find is in the &lt;em&gt;Odusia&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livius_Andronicus#Odusia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Livius Andronicus&lt;/a&gt;.  This is an early translation of the Odyssey (third century BC).  The only parts of it that survive are 46 lines from 17 books of the Odyssey, but this is one of those lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inferus an superus tibi fert deus funera, Ulixes? &#xA;  (Od. 10, 64)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the surviving text of the Odusia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livius_Andronicus#Odusia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacuvius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Pacuvius&lt;/a&gt; was an early Latin dramatist who probably used Ulysses.  Though I'm not sure, he wrote many of his plays on Greek topics, and the translations of his works I found use the name Ulysses.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question: &lt;strong&gt;Livius Andronicus&lt;/strong&gt; was the first writer I can find who used a form of the Latin name of Odysseus, and Virgil was not the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T19:25:07.540" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T19:25:07.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="396" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:14:27.217" Score="16" ViewCount="371" Body="&lt;p&gt;Authors tend to pull a lot of ideas or write stories based on other works. After reading the novel &lt;em&gt;Battle Royal&lt;/em&gt;, I saw lots of similarities between it and the Hunger Games. Do we know of anything that Suzanne Collins based &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T10:44:04.007" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T10:44:04.007" Title="What did Suzanne Collins base the Hunger Games on?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="397" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:16:16.813" Score="20" ViewCount="1878" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand why it was banned in the USSR, because it's pretty blatant satire of the USSR. It's also still banned in North Korea for the same reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why was it banned in the United Arab Emirates and Kenya and censored in Vietnam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was also briefly banned from 1943-1945 by the Allies of WWII, but I'm fairly certain that's due to the governments of the Allies not wanting anti-Russian (another partner in the Allies) sentiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T14:16:00.870" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T14:16:00.870" Title="Why was the book Animal Farm banned in non-communist countries?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:19:31.110" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;That wouldn't follow the rhyme scheme of the other verses, which follow the scheme ABCC. The next verse is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a lady all in white,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Holds me and sings a lullaby,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She's nice to see and she's soft to touch,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She says &quot;Cosette, I love you very much.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extra rhyme is unnecessary. Further, &quot;toys&quot; and &quot;boys&quot; are a very simple, sing-songy rhyme, out of keeping with the overall tone of the musical. That could be justified for this particular song (a little girl's fantasy of joyful childhood), but there's an undercurrent of despair as well that could be undercut by that kind of rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's already a very free translation from the French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dans une maison pleine de jouets,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Où les petites filles de mon âge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cousent les toilettes de leurs poupées&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Et ne font jamais le ménage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a house full of toys&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where little girls my age&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sew the dresses for their dolls&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And never clean the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Boys&quot; isn't present there at all; &quot;filles&quot; is definitely just &quot;girls&quot;. But they've introduced a slant internal rhyme into the line, and that is in keeping with the rest of the play. The key motif of the whole show is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you hear the people sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Singing the songs of angry men&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;ng&quot; slant is in there several times, but I want to call attention in particular to the rhyme between &quot;sing&quot; and &quot;angry men&quot;, with the stress on ANG followed by two syllables of lower stress. It falls in nearly the exact same place in the line as &quot;toys&quot; and &quot;boys and girls&quot;. That's a much more sophisticated rhyme structure, complicated enough to make up for the trite rhyme between &quot;toys&quot; and &quot;boys&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That structure isn't present in the original French, but it's in keeping with the rest of the tone of the play. Instead of Hallmark card rhyme, they've created a more intricate structure worthy of the (depressing) material of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T15:55:48.350" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T15:55:48.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="392" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:22:24.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short story is a prose piece of fiction, generally short enough to read in a sitting easily. The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/short-story&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-story&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-story&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used on questions about short-stories in general, or about any specific short-stories. From this &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/a-proposal-for-poetry-and-short-stories&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about short works, use the author tag with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/poetry&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;poetry&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/short-stories&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-stories&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-stories&lt;/a&gt;. New users will be able to tag their questions appropriately even if there've been no previous questions about precisely the same work, and we won't be overrun by thousands of overly specific tags. (Tags for specific, perhaps especially noteworthy, short works are optional but not encouraged.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:11:40.157" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:11:40.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="393" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:22:24.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about stories with a fully developed plot, themes, and characters, but significantly shorter and less detailed than a novel.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T13:47:00.063" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T13:47:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="394" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:23:14.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T15:23:14.637" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T15:23:14.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="395" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:23:14.637" Score="0" Body="For questions asking why a book was (not) censored or what was it (not) censored for." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:42:42.467" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:42:42.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="389" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:41:03.270" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;She was inspired by a combination of &lt;strong&gt;the classic myth of Theseus&lt;/strong&gt; (in which Athens similarly sends a selection of young men and women to Crete as a 'tribute', the difference being that none of them survive), &lt;strong&gt;reality TV shows&lt;/strong&gt; (many of which involve people being humiliated, albeit not murdered, for the entertainment of the masses), and &lt;strong&gt;her second-hand experience of war&lt;/strong&gt; (both from watching television coverage and hearing about it from her veteran father).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has addressed this at length in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slj.com/2008/09/interviews/under-cover/a-killer-story-an-interview-with-suzanne-collins-author-of-the-hunger-games/#_&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thanks to a cruel futuristic government, 24 children are chosen by lottery to compete in the annual Hunger Games—a fight to the death that’s televised live. How did you come up with that idea?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s very much based on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, which I read when I was eight years old. I was a huge fan of Greek and Roman mythology. As punishment for displeasing Crete, Athens periodically had to send seven youths and seven maidens to Crete, where they were thrown into the labyrinth and devoured by the Minotaur, which is a monster that’s half man and half bull. Even when I was a little kid, the story took my breath away, because it was so cruel, and Crete was so ruthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You’re not kidding.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message is, mess with us and we’ll do something worse than kill you—we’ll kill your children. And the parents sat by apparently powerless to stop it. The cycle doesn’t end until Theseus volunteers to go, and he kills the Minotaur. In her own way, Katniss [the heroine of The Hunger Games] is a futuristic Theseus. But I didn’t want to do a labyrinth story. So I decided to write basically an updated version of the Roman gladiator games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What inspired you to write it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One night, I was lying in bed, and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there’s a group of young people competing for I don’t even know; and on the next, there’s a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines between these stories started to blur in a very unsettling way. That’s the moment when Katniss’s story came to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did those programs speak to you so deeply?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid, my dad fought in Vietnam. He was gone for a year. Even though my mom tried to protect us—I’m the youngest of four—sometimes the TV would be on, and I would see footage from the war zone. I was little, but I would hear them say “Vietnam,” and I knew my dad was there, and it was very frightening. I’m sure that a lot of people today experience that same thing. But there is so much programming, and I worry that we’re all getting a little desensitized to the images on our televisions. If you’re watching a sitcom, that’s fine. But if there’s a real-life tragedy unfolding, you should not be thinking of yourself as an audience member. Because those are real people on the screen, and they’re not going away when the commercials start to roll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T15:41:03.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="390" CreationDate="2017-01-20T15:43:32.573" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;UAE&lt;/strong&gt; banned it because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;it contained text or images that goes against Islamic values, most notably the occurrence of an anthropomorphic, talking pig.&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments&quot;&gt;from Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnam&lt;/strong&gt; has the book censored due to its involvement with communism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kenya&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/1991-01-31/news/9101310916_1_kenya-animal-farm-novel&quot;&gt;likely has it banned due to the nature of the book&lt;/a&gt;, it: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;criticizes corrupt leaders who amass wealth and abuse political&#xA;  power. Kenya, a one-party state, has been increasingly sensitive to&#xA;  potential sources of criticism since calls for a multiparty system&#xA;  began a year ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:33:02.153" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:33:02.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="362" CreationDate="2017-01-20T16:33:22.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1856192237&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evelyn Waugh: a Biography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, a biography of him written by Selina Hastings, he did write plays if not screenplays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to her, Waugh performed plays as a child: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he and the other schoolyard children performed plays, usually written by Waugh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(pp 30-32)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now these aren't screenplays, but it does show he had some experience with plays in general. (though yes, films often do have more cuts and scene shifts than physical plays)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T05:00:06.803" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T05:00:06.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="400" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T17:56:47.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;HP Lovecraft wrote the majority of his stories in the 1920s, and was greatly influenced by contemporary scientific breakthroughs,  as well as his aversion to sea food, and the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Lord_Dunsany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Dunsany&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his most notable works include Call of Cthulhu,  and his series of stories around Randolph Carter. He later inspired a wider mythos named after the elder being Cthulhu, which are found under &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/cthulhu&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;cthulhu&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;cthulhu&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overarching theme of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his works&lt;/a&gt; included the idea that human beings are insignificant in the universe (personified by various uncaring elder beings), known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/48384&quot;&gt;'Cosmic Horror'&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T22:51:39.753" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T22:51:39.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="401" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T17:56:47.057" Score="0" Body="Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction." OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T22:51:23.807" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T22:51:23.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="402" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T17:58:26.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/h-p-lovecraft&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;h-p-lovecraft&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;h-p-lovecraft&lt;/a&gt;, dealing with the cosmic horrors, the &quot;Great Old Ones&quot;, that exist in this universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ongoing theme in Lovecraft's work is the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of these cosmic horrors&amp;mdash;a loose pantheon of ancient, powerful deities from space who once ruled the Earth and who have since fallen into a death-like sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many different creations have been set within the mythos, both explicitly and implicitly (many works may just feature a few side references).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T22:51:51.373" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T22:51:51.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="403" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T17:58:26.990" Score="0" Body="The Cthulhu Mythos is a shared fictional universe, based on the work of American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, dealing with the cosmic horrors, the &quot;Great Old Ones&quot;, that exist in this universe." OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T22:51:48.167" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T22:51:48.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1123" CreationDate="2017-01-20T18:12:05.417" Score="11" ViewCount="17117" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Saga&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Commonwealth Saga&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of Peter F. Hamilton is comprised of several novels spanning centuries, characters and planets. Unfortunately, the publishing order does not concur with the in-universe order. What is the recommended order that will make for the most coherent experience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T18:48:40.203" LastActivityDate="2019-07-02T22:49:36.390" Title="Which order is recommended for the &quot;Commonwealth&quot; novels?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;peter-f-hamilton&gt;&lt;commonwealth-saga&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="413" CreationDate="2017-01-20T18:12:08.363" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember when Erma Bombeck's &quot;The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank&quot; came out.  Everyone was talking about and sharing copies of the book. It was probably the first non-Scifi work that got my attention. When her next work &quot;If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?&quot; came out, we all had to read it as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know she had a column and a couple of books that where published prior to the The Grass... but I don't recall them getting the wider audience that followed the The Grass...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did &quot;The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank&quot; promote her to name to general recognition? If so what was her following prior to that?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:52:16.950" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T01:57:27.930" Title="Erma before the greener grass" Tags="&lt;erma-bombeck&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="357" CreationDate="2017-01-20T18:41:52.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Genius&quot; in the classical sense means &quot;spirit&quot;. It's distantly related to the word &lt;em&gt;genesis&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &quot;birth&quot;, as well as to words like &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; &quot;kind&quot;, genre, and gender. Another related term you might here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius_loci&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius loci&lt;/a&gt;, a protective spirit of a place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little hard to wrap all of those terms into one concept, but you can see where it's going. They're all in the vein of referring to the thing that makes something individual: its birth, its kind, its spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the sense in which Blake means the term: the true spirit of a human being, derived from the sense of poetry. Poetry here is used as a stand-in for knowledge in its pure essence, the &quot;true&quot; meaning of words, setting aside the confusion that human beings layer on the in the same way that the difference of bodies obscure the spirit in which all human beings are one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sense is that poetry gets its power from being closer to true meaning than prose. That's a little hard to feel today, perhaps, but you've certainly felt the way a song can move you. Poetry had that same feeling for Blake and other romantics: there's a &quot;rightness&quot; to it which moves you in ways that go beyond the simple surface meanings of the words and grammar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;Poetic Genius&quot; is that spirit which binds all humans, the Platonic truth, of which every philosophy and religion is a noble but flawed shadow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T18:41:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="408" CreationDate="2017-01-20T19:48:36.273" Score="14" ViewCount="822" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 24, when Tyrion Lannister visits Winterfell on the way back from the Wall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Any man of the Night’s Watch is welcome here at Winterfell for as&#xA;  long as he wishes to stay,” Robb was saying with the voice of Robb the&#xA;  Lord. His sword was across his knees, the steel bare for all the world&#xA;  to see. Even Bran knew what it meant to greet a guest with an&#xA;  unsheathed sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did it mean to do so? Is this a point of medieval Western tradition of hospitality that's being referenced here, or something internal to the Seven Kingdoms that's as yet unexplained?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-30T13:20:53.720" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T21:44:16.993" Title="What does it mean to greet a guest with an unsheathed sword?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="407" CreationDate="2017-01-20T19:58:25.480" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a sign of hostility.  Times are hard between the Starks and Tyrion at this time, since Tyrion is suspected for trying to murder Bran earlier in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scene that follows between Rob and Tyrion is filled with hostile comments, glares, and movements.  This is hinted at in the unsheathed sword quote; the hospitality laws are very important in Westeros, and so greeting with an unsheathed sword is like saying &quot;I want to kill you, but unfortunately it's illegal.&quot;  Here's a quote from later in the chapter, after Tyrion gives Bran a pretty awesome gift:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Is this some trap, Lannister? What’s Bran to you? Why should you want to help him?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the very quote in your answer hints at this.  Saying that any man of the Watch is welcome is all but slamming the door in Tyrion's face, since Tyrion is not of the Watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/63418/51142&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on Scifi.SE for this material!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lord with a bared sword across his knees is making a traditional sign that he is denying guest right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/Concordance/Section/2.3./&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Guest_right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guest right&lt;/a&gt; is sacred in Westeros, and Robb later sheathes his sword, inviting Tyrion in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robb Stark finally sheathed his sword. “I . . . I may have&#xA;  been hasty with you,” he said. “You’ve done Bran a&#xA;  kindness, and, well . . .” Robb composed himself with an&#xA;  effort. “The hospitality of Winterfell is yours if you wish it,&#xA;  Lannister.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T14:24:47.973" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="412" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:21:33.240" Score="18" ViewCount="3886" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always been curious how names and words are created in literature. Having finished the main Dune books last year, I was thinking how the term &quot;Kwisatz Haderach&quot; came about. Did Herbert make it up, or does it have some history or explanation to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="86" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T15:52:41.283" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T20:53:18.020" Title="Where did the term Kwisatz Haderach in Dune originate?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;&lt;frank-herbert&gt;&lt;dune&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:26:58.343" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book Skin Games, the currently latest book in The Dresden Files, Harry intentionally withholds information from the reader for a surprising reveal later in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this the first instance of Harry intentionally withholding information from the reader, or has this happened before, albeit probably in more subtle ways?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:01:38.743" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T08:17:14.367" Title="Was Skin Games the first where Harry withheld information?" Tags="&lt;jim-butcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="409" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:27:51.243" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's from the Hebrew phrase &quot;Kefitzat Haderech&quot;, which literally means &quot;contracting the path&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is even more likely considering &quot;Kwisatz Haderach&quot; means &quot;Shortening of the Way&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://dune.wikia.com/wiki/Chakobsa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chakosba&lt;/a&gt;, a language in Dune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:09:42.603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:09:42.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="409" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:28:19.223" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kefitzat_Haderech&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kefitzat Haderech&lt;/a&gt; is a Jewish phrase that means &quot;contracting the path&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herbert defines Kwisatz Haderach as &quot;the Shortening of the Way&quot; (Dune: Appendix IV), clearly meaning to reference the Hebrew here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1391/which-names-and-terms-in-the-dune-series-come-from-hebrew-inspired-phrases&quot;&gt;this answer on SFF&lt;/a&gt;, a large quantity of names in &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt; are inspired by words from Semitic languages such as Hebrew or Arabic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T00:07:58.627" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T00:07:58.627" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="405" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:42:23.533" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161213210214/http://www.ermamuseum.org/life/default.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Erma Bombeck&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; began writing for a local paper in 1964. Her editor sent some samples of her column, &quot;At Wit´s End&quot;, to the Newsday newspaper syndicate and..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three weeks after her first column appeared in the Dayton Journal-Herald, Erma signed a short-term contract with Newsday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her popularity grew quite rapidly and by the end of 1965,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thirty-eight papers were buying her 400-500 word columns by the end of the first year. Five years later &lt;em&gt;&quot;At Wit's End&lt;/em&gt;&quot; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;was a staple in 500&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1967 she published a compilation of her columns, called by the same name, &lt;em&gt;&quot;At Wit´s End&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1969, she was asked to provide a monthly column -- &quot;Up the Wall&quot; -- for Good Housekeeping magazine, a service she continued for six years. Periodically she wrote for other magazines, including Reader's Digest, Family Circle, Redbook, McCall's and even Teen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still remember some of her household hints such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;to see if the spaghetti is cooked, throw some at the wall over the stove; if it sticks, it is done. If it isn´t, it will fall down behind where no one will ever see it anyway.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the beginning of the 1970s, she was widely quoted and admired, and remains an inspiration to many aspiring writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161213210214/http://www.ermamuseum.org/life/default.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditorDisplayName="user59" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T01:57:27.930" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T01:57:27.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="414" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:43:05.867" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an extremely influential author and man of mystery, with short stories published in a very wide variety of genres, from gothic horror through mystery and adventure to slapstick comedy. Some of his more famous works include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Raven&quot;, a dark poem on whose construction he wrote the essay &lt;em&gt;The Philosophy of Composition&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3 Dupin stories, which inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and thence the entire genre of detective fiction;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;various chilling pieces of horror, such as &quot;The Masque of the Red Death&quot; and &quot;The Fall of the House of Usher&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:26:28.530" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:26:28.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="415" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:43:05.867" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 19th-century author Edgar Allan Poe and his writings, which include both poetry and short stories, some of which have had widespread influence in their genres. Questions about his poems and short stories should be tagged [poetry] and [short-stories] respectively." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:26:28.530" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:26:28.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:51:42.697" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an allusion to Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu//tempest/tempest.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Act I, scene ii&lt;/a&gt;.  Ariel sings to Ferdinand, in order to deceive him into thinking his father has been drowned in a shipwreck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ARIEL sings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Full fathom five thy father lies;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of his bones are coral made;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Those are pearls that were his eyes:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nothing of him that doth fade&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But doth suffer a sea-change&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into something rich and strange.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Burthen Ding-dong&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="21" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:23:58.013" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:23:58.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:54:10.540" Score="25" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several major accusations that Poe plagiarized &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; from a number of different works, many in other languages. However, those claims have little to no evidence to back them up, and they have been dismissed by most as being attempts at attention. We have no reliable evidence of any sort that Poe committed plagiarism here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the late 19th century, one major but unsubstantiated claim was made against Poe, saying that &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; was either taken from (or inspired by) two an older work: &lt;em&gt;The Parrot&lt;/em&gt;. In 1878, Colonel John A Joyce included &lt;a href=&quot;http://landmarks.allenbrowne.info/John%20Joyce/Penzoni&amp;amp;Poe.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a short section&lt;/a&gt; in his book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924022108660&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, that claimed that he had spoken with an Italian named Leo Penzoni. Penzoni told him that his grandfather (often also called Leo Penzoni) wrote a poem entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://landmarks.allenbrowne.info/John%20Joyce/Parrot.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Parrot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; seven decades before, and published it in &lt;em&gt;The Milan Art Journal&lt;/em&gt; in 1809. Here is the first verse, in the English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sit and pine so weary&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in midnight sad and dreary.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over long forgotten volumes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of historic love-lit lore;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And while winking, lonely blinking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I thought I heard while thinking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A rush of wings revolving above&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;my oaken door,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;What's that,&amp;quot; said I, disturbing my&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;melancholy sore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Tis my lost one, sweet &amp;quot;Belmore&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the first verse of &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;            Only this and nothing more.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar connections can be found throughout the rest of both poems. It would seem, then, that Poe indeed plagiarized from Penzoni. There are, however, three major problems with Joyce's claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No records of &lt;em&gt;The Milan Art Journal&lt;/em&gt; were ever found.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poem was written in Italian, according to the younger Penzoni, meaning that certain liberties could have been taken in the translation of &lt;em&gt;The Parrot&lt;/em&gt;. It seems more likely that Joyce wrote the &amp;quot;translation&amp;quot; in English, and possibly translated it &amp;quot;back&amp;quot; to Italian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no evidence that Poe was in Milan at the time—he was busy being born—or in future years, or that he was even aware of the journal's supposed existence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there's no evidence to back up Penzoni's story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found bits and pieces pointing towards another—more damning if it's true—possible target of plagiarism. I originally found them made in &lt;a href=&quot;http://wretchedpoe.blogspot.com/2012/04/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://griswoldsledger.blogspot.com/2014/04/jefferson-tiberius-faulkmore.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;. They state that a poet named &lt;em&gt;Jefferson Tiberius Faulkmore&lt;/em&gt; wrote a poem entitled &lt;em&gt;The Magpie&lt;/em&gt; in 1829, publishing it in &lt;em&gt;The Hartford Cabinet of Literature &amp;amp; Science&lt;/em&gt; (supposedly later the &lt;em&gt;Hartford Literary Journal&lt;/em&gt;), a year after his death. According to the stories, the story was brought to Poe's attention in 1842 by a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswald, and Poe wrote him &lt;a href=&quot;http://wretchedpoe.blogspot.com/2014/04/from-archives-never-before-seen-piece.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a letter&lt;/a&gt; in return. It included this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of particular interest in the Cabinet was Faulkmore’s “Magpie”, which is as fine a poem, in both the style of its versification &amp;amp; expression and its originality, as I have recently encountered. I wonder at its omission from your “Poets of America”.  That it has been published just once, years ago, and forgotten is as unfortunate for the public as it must have seemed for the poet.  Are you certain that it has not seen publication elsewhere?  Do you know what became of Faulkmore?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want my opinion, these claims are absolute rubbish. I can find no independent verification that &lt;em&gt;The Hartford Cabinet of Literature &amp;amp; Science&lt;/em&gt; or even Faulkmore or Griswold themselves ever existed. I include it here only as a curiosity; I'd be interested to see if anyone can find something truthful on them. I suspect not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more academic study of certain claims is included in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002615?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Outsourcing &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;: Retroactive Origins&lt;/a&gt;, by Eliza Richards (the same paper is the source of the next few anecdotes and quotes about plagiarism). It seems to be acknowledge that Poe took the rhythm of &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Geraldine's Courtship&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1845. Even Poe stated this outright:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Ingram, Thomas Buchanan Read informed Robert Browning that Poe had said that his entire poem was suggested by Barrett's single line &amp;quot;With a murmurous stir uncertain, in the air, the purple curtain.&amp;quot; Poe advertised rather than hid Barrett's influence by discussing her poem in a Broadway Journal review just weeks before &amp;quot;The Raven&amp;quot; was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/371/511.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text&lt;/a&gt;, the similarities between the two works does appear, in rhythm if not wording. There were certain other—though less substantial—cases where Poe may have been inspired by another work. Thomas Holley Chivers, in 1850, claimed that Poe stole the meter from &lt;em&gt;To Allegra Florence in Heaven&lt;/em&gt;, written for his young (dead) daughter. Here is an excerpt from &lt;em&gt;To Allegra&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holy angels now are bending&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To receive thy soul ascending&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up to Heaven to joys unending,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And to bliss which is divine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another poet, Henry Hirst, claimed that Poe stole inspiration for &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; from his &lt;em&gt;To a Ruined Fountain in a Grecian Picture&lt;/em&gt;. I'm a bit more skeptical that there is any significant similarity between the two, save the inclusion of a raven:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forms of chiefs and maidens bright&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whom the never-dying raven&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hath forgotten, nameless even&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the poet's lay of might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there were two independent and somewhat ridiculous claims: That Poe actually translated, word for word, an ancient Chinese poem by Kia Yi (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hddEAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;dq=kia+yi+poem&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chinese Legends and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), and that he translated an unknown Persian poem (whose very existence I have yet to confirm). In both cases, he supposedly copied them verbatim and published the poem under his own name, as &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;. The interesting part about the claim about Kia Yi's poem, &lt;em&gt;Fu-Niao&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Bird of Fate&lt;/em&gt;), is that it mentions that month of November - a month that, as far as I know, was not used by the Chinese in 200 B.C.! It could be a translation change, but it could also indicate that liberties have been taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, there have been a wide variety of people saying that they—or someone else—wrote &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; before Poe did. However, all of them suffer from some or all of the following problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no records of the originals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no explanations as to how Poe came across them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are often only passing similarities between the poems and &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, then that the available evidence indicates that Poe did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; plagiarize &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T19:54:05.997" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T19:54:05.997" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="420" CreationDate="2017-01-20T20:54:49.483" Score="-6" ViewCount="3511" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; series Sméagol/Gollum murders his friend Déagol for the ring.  It is also stated that Déagol found the ring in Gladden Fields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the ring get there? And which book this is described in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10" LastEditorUserId="10" LastEditDate="2017-01-20T21:05:33.153" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T15:13:02.340" Title="How does the ring end up where Déagol found it?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="418" CreationDate="2017-01-20T21:00:02.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isildur's fault. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Isildur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lotr wiki&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isildur put on the Ring though it pained him and headed for the Anduin. He removed his armor and waded into the River intending to try to cross it. The current was strong and despite his great strength, it pulled him toward the marshes of the Gladden Fields. Then the Ring left Isildur's finger and was lost in the waters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The One Ring remained in the Gladden Fields until Déagol found it in TA 2463.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:00:02.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="418" CreationDate="2017-01-20T21:07:42.127" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Helmar is correct, but here it is from Gandalf's mouth in the &lt;em&gt;Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; Chapter 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘But the Ring was lost. It fell into the Great River, Anduin, and vanished. For Isildur was marching north along the east banks of the River, and near the Gladden Fields he was waylaid by the Orcs of the Mountains, and almost all his folk were slain. He leaped into the waters, but the Ring slipped from his finger as he swam, and then the Orcs saw him and killed him with arrows.’&#xA;  Gandalf paused. ‘And there in the dark pools amid the Gladden Fields,’ he said, ‘the Ring passed out of knowledge and legend; and even so much of its history is known now only to a few, and the Council of the Wise could discover no more. But at last I can carry on the story, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-20T21:07:42.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2535" CreationDate="2017-01-20T22:09:59.610" Score="11" ViewCount="2000" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not go gentle into that good night&lt;/em&gt; by Dylan Thomas, he begins with &quot;Do not go gentle into that good night&quot;. He also uses this as one of two alternating refrains. In this poem, what does the &quot;good night&quot; symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T19:59:48.443" Title="What does the &quot;good night&quot; symbolize in Dylan Thomas's &quot;Do not go gentle into that good night&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;dylan-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="896" CreationDate="2017-01-20T22:43:50.180" Score="11" ViewCount="1079" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Just_To_Say&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;This is Just to Say&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by William Carlos Williams, the speaker appears to deliver an apology for stealing the plums of the person at whom the poem is targeted. I have heard some people analyze this poem as being truly about plums. However, I have seen others analyze this poem as being about murder or sexual assault. What is the poem truly about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the text of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have eaten&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the plums&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that were in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the icebox&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and which&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  you were probably&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  saving&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  for breakfast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Forgive me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they were delicious&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so sweet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and so cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T14:15:18.957" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T23:52:17.270" Title="What is &quot;This is Just to Say&quot; about?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2017-01-20T22:47:20.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is hinted at in a few places in the poem, in particular &quot;rage, rage against the &lt;em&gt;dying&lt;/em&gt; of the light,&quot; and &quot;Grave men, near death&quot; in the second-to-last stanza, as well as &quot;Though wise men at their end know dark is right.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the real proof is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20121127042748/http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/dylan-thomas/pages/do-not-go-gentle.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.  The first line of the article is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thomas' poem for his dying father, exploring the themes of grief and death&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this poem, Dylan Thomas urges his father to not go gently into that good night and to rage, rage against the dying of the light--to survive, to fight death.  He's in essence saying &quot;don't die on me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T21:48:34.963" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T21:48:34.963" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="442" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:00:44.547" Score="4" ViewCount="1155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot; by William Carlos Williams, there is no specific mention of any person. However, he wrote that the poem &quot;sprang from affection&quot; for an old man named Marshall, to paraphrase. How does this affection for Marshall come through in the poem? Is it visible in the subtext of the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T16:21:42.263" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T23:17:28.187" Title="How is William Carlos Williams's affection expressed in &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="427" CreationDate="2017-01-20T23:33:56.307" Score="27" ViewCount="12177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just begun reading &lt;em&gt;The Handmaid's Tale&lt;/em&gt; and I'm a bit distracted by the usage (or non-usage) of quote marks in the version I have (ebook).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second chapter, the handmaid is describing her arrival at the house and her initial meeting with the lady of the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oetrh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oetrh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;excerpt from The Handmaid&amp;#39;s Tale&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the version of the book I have, none of this dialogue between the two women uses quote marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later on, when talking with another handmaiden, there are quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kGfqL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kGfqL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;excerpt  from The Handmaid&amp;#39;s Tale&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a part of the printed version of the book or is this a scan error like some of the misspellings I see scattered about? In general, there aren't any missing characters, so it seems unlikely that they are so consistently missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is intentional on the part of the author, is there any explanation for this choice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T09:51:17.730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T09:51:17.730" Title="Are quote marks used selectively in &quot;The Handmaid's Tale&quot; or do I have a bad scan of the book?" Tags="&lt;margaret-atwood&gt;&lt;the-handmaids-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="426" CreationDate="2017-01-21T00:10:21.537" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;After doing a fair bit of digging on the question, I think I've come to an answer, and it's one supported by a couple sources: &lt;strong&gt;Quotation marks denote &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; dialog. Absence of quotation marks denotes dialog &lt;em&gt;in memory.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; She uses quotes when she's writing about dialog in the present, as it's happening. When the dialog is happening in the past, however - i.e. in her memory - &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; the quotes are missing. In the example you've posted here, the quotes occur around the block you've selected in the present tense, but not the block in the past tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a reasonably well-noted and very intentional part of the book. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ukessays.com/essays/english-literature/linguistic-approach-of-margaret-atwoods-handmaids-tale-english-literature-essay.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this reference&lt;/a&gt;, and while debatably authoritative, it does concur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the novel, when the main character, that is, the narrator is reproducing a speech which took place in the past she uses direct speech without quotation marks...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas when Offred is repoducing a conversation which is taking place at the time of the narration, she uses direct speech within quotation marks...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found &lt;a href=&quot;http://wh.rutgers.edu/creativecwriting/student-writing/353-jacqueline-pelliccio-language-of-oppression-in-the-handmaid-s-tale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a far more authoritative source&lt;/a&gt;, Jacqueline Pelliccio from Rutgers University, who notes that the absence of quotation marks in characters' memories are indeed intended to cast doubt on the integrity of the dialog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the confines of quotation marks, some of the character dialogue becomes integrated right into the storyline of the novel, mixing individual characters’ ideas with opinions of the narrator as well as with larger themes of the novel as a whole. The potential of a message to have different speakers allows for multiple interpretations of the passage, all of which may be important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Those in positions of authority use language to limit the ideas of the subordinates as a way to ensure stability in the system of power. ...Luke asks her a question he intends to answer himself, “Do you know what it came from? Said Luke. Mayday? . . . It’s French, he said. From m’aidez. / Help me” (Atwood, 44). There are no parentheses around Luke’s speech so the reader cannot formally tell where it ends, therefore “Help me”  can be taken as Luke speaking to his wife, the narrator addressing the readers, or Offred pleading to her past self.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This methodology consistently gives passages multiple meanings, where one could easily gloss over it without any recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that this may have been done to tie memories more closely to the narrator, rather than conveying them as independent scenes. The lack of quotation marks is for depicting personal thoughts and feelings, as well as dialog as it appears in her memory. This would fit well with one of the book's underlying themes of gaslighting. Memory is unreliable, and is in the eye of the beholder. Quotation marks are a sign that what's being written is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what's being said, and removing them when the narrator begins to discuss memories is a subtle way of instilling doubt: it's just her word, only. There is no record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T00:37:18.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="429" CreationDate="2017-01-21T00:12:01.503" Score="9" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most if not all of Thomas Hardy's novels are set in the fictional(ish) English region of &lt;strong&gt;Wessex&lt;/strong&gt;. He uses many real towns and locations as settings, but gives them fictional names: for instance, Oxford becomes &amp;quot;Christminster&amp;quot; and Dorchester becomes &amp;quot;Casterbridge&amp;quot;. (Both of these towns are in Wessex, which shows how massive that region must be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My edition of &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; includes a lengthy table mapping real locations to the fictional names they're given in the books. Presumably most of these correspondences can be deduced directly from the text of the novel, by looking closely at the spatial relationships between different locations therein. Some of them also include wordplay which makes the connection obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interestingly, another of my Hardy books (possibly &lt;em&gt;The Mayor of Casterbridge&lt;/em&gt;) includes a map of the region of Wessex, divided into subdomains with names such as Near Wessex, Outer Wessex, and East Wessex. (I'm guessing here, since I can't remember the exact phrases, but most of them were in the form &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; Wessex&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how canonical is this map? Or more generally, &lt;strong&gt;what canon information is available on the exact boundaries of Wessex within the real England?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Hardy himself ever draw a map of his Wessex, or write out a table of correspondences between real places and the names he used for them in his books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T14:45:48.380" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:33:46.240" Title="Is there a canonical map of Thomas Hardy's Wessex?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="428" CreationDate="2017-01-21T00:49:55.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't a direct relationship, but here's a map drawn by Bertam Windle based on his correspondence with Hardy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Wessex.png&quot; alt=&quot;map&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Windle's book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wessexofthomasha00windrich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wessex of Thomas Hardy&lt;/a&gt;, regarding Thomas Hardy's input into the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without Mr. Hardy's generous assistance, these pages must have been much less complete than it is hoped they will be found to be. Nor, without the same generous assistance, would the writer have been able to speak with such certainty as the to the identification of certain of the spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. C. A. W.  [Bertram Coghill Alan Windle]&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Weatherbury, Harborne,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;July 30th, 1901.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is also a list of place names and their equivalents, taken from the book linked above: (warning - really long)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wessex - Name - Region of Wessex Actual Name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abbot's-Cernel - South Wessex - Cerne Abbas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abbotsea - South Wessex - Abbotsbury&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aldbrickham - North Wessex - Reading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alfredston - North Wessex - Wantage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anglebury - South Wessex - Wareham&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bramhurst - West Wessex - Lyndhurst&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Budmouth - South Wessex - Weymouth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Casterbridge - South Wessex - Dorchester&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chalk - Newton South - Wessex Maiden Newton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chaseborough - South Wessex - Cranborne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Christminster - North Wessex -    Oxford&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cliff - Martin Outer - Wessex Combe Martin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cresscombe - North Wessex - Letcombe Basset&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Downstaple - Lower Wessex - Barnstaple&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Durnover - South Wessex - Fordington&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emminster - South Wessex - Beaminster&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evershead - South Wessex - Evershot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exonbury - Lower Wessex - Exeter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Falls - Park Outer - Wessex Mells Park&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fountall - Outer Wessex - Wells&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Havenpool - South Wessex - Poole&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isle - of Slingers - South Wessex Isle of Portland&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ivell - Outer Wessex - Yeovil&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kennetbridge - North Wessex - Newbury&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kingsbere - South Wessex - Bere Regis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knollsea - South Wessex - Swanage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lulwind - Cove South - Wessex Lulworth Cove&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lumsdon - North Wessex - Cumnor&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marlott - South Wessex - Marnhull&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marygreen - North Wessex - Fawley&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Melchester - Mid Wessex - Salisbury&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mellstock - South Wessex - Stinsford and Higher &amp;amp; Lower Bockhampton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Overcombe - South Wessex - Sutton Poyntz&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Port - Bredy South - Wessex Bridport&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Po'sham - South Wessex - Portesham&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quartershot - Upper Wessex - Aldershot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sandbourne - Upper Wessex - Bournemouth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shaston - South Wessex - Shaftesbury&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sherton - Abbas South - Wessex Sherborne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slingers - South Wessex - Isle of Portland&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solentsea - Upper Wessex - Southsea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stancy - Castle Outer - Wessex Dunster Castle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stoke - Barehills Upper - Wessex Basingstoke&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Street - of Wells - South Wessex Fortuneswell&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stoke - Barehills Upper - Wessex Basingstoke&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Toneborough - Outer Wessex - Taunton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trantridge - South Wessex - Pentridge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weydon-Priors - Upper Wessex - Weyhill&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wintoncester - South Wessex - Winchester&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the e-copy of the book on &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt; and the image were from the University of California.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:33:46.240" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:33:46.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:42:38.783" Score="12" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some Answered Questions&lt;/em&gt; was first published into English in 1908, but was &quot;extensively retranslated&quot; in 2014. Why was a retranslation needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume it has to do with the dual origin of the English and Persian interview notes, and the relative (un)reliability of the English source. That'd mean the new edition draws on both the Persian and English originals but I can't find any confirmation of this--and if it's so, why didn't they also retranslate the 1908 French version? It's a semi-authoritative religious text, so this sort of thing does matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T16:20:55.487" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T16:20:55.487" Title="Why did &quot;Some Answered Questions&quot; get re-translated?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;abdul-baha&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="354" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:43:29.033" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LENORE IS DEAD.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following confirms that Lenore is dead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The narrator expresses grief for the &quot;lost Lenore&quot;  Lost is defined as &quot;something that cannot be recovered.&quot;  Lenore cannot be recovered, proving that she is dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The angels have named a rare and radiant maiden that of Lenore.  This is an obvious reference to Lenore being dead due to the mention of angels naming her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The narrator wants respite from the memories of Lenore.  He begs the angels in heaven (the same ones who named Lenore) to help him relieve him of his memories.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that Lenore will never again sit in the chair in which the narrator inhabits with it's cushioned seat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The raven continually proclaims &quot;Nevermore.&quot;  Nevermore is defined as &quot;at no future time; never again&quot;  This should be self-explanatory as to the fate of Lenore as well as the narrator's state of mind at the end of the poem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Lenore were still alive, the narrator would have mentioned finding her again.  He is so consumed with her loss, that if she were still alive, he would certainly be searching for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="240" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:43:29.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="365" CreationDate="2017-01-21T01:49:34.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It serves to demonstrate the loneliness that the men, Esteban in particular, feel because of the Revolution. The men feel lost and disillusioned, and Esteban feels alone and isolated. The presence of the hidden hen is to show that Esteban wants to show compassion to something or someone in the aftermath of the Revolution. The hen is his own, from his yard, and Esteban dearly protects it as the men make their trek. He holds the hen by its legs to prevent it from hitting its head on the rocks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hen is Rulfo's way of making a subtle jab at how the Revolution promised the peasants fertile, arable land, but instead delivers only a dry wasteland, which is essentially worthless for farming (which was the whole reason the Mexican Revolution occurred).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T01:49:34.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T02:13:06.480" Score="20" ViewCount="2512" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://teachersandwritersmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Cisneros-Abuelito-Who-Poem-and-Bio.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abuelito Who&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Sandra Cisneros, the symbolic meaning of one line is quite confusing. The narrator is referring to her grandfather (&lt;em&gt;abuelo&lt;/em&gt;), and she says he:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who used to laugh like the letter k&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not exactly sure what this means; does this mean his laugh was common and good-natured, or rather cold and rare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T20:42:49.527" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T20:29:21.807" Title="What does it mean to laugh like the letter k?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sandra-cisneros&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2017-01-21T02:13:06.480" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means his laugh was a hearty, good-natured laugh. There are really two ways you could've pieced this together: one, realize that the letter &quot;k&quot; is a common part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inherently_funny_word&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inherently funny words&lt;/a&gt;, which are simply words that can make people laugh without any other context. According to Wikipedia, &lt;em&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the concept that some words, &lt;strong&gt;especially those with a k sound, are inherently funny&lt;/strong&gt; is a common trope stated in many fictional works. In the Neil Simon play The Sunshine Boys, for example, a character says, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Words with a k in it are funny&lt;/strong&gt;. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. &lt;strong&gt;All with a k&lt;/strong&gt;. L's are not funny. M's are not funny&quot;. Similarly, the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode &quot;The Outrageous Okona&quot; features Joe Piscopo as a comedian who, in attempting to teach the android Data the &lt;strong&gt;concept of humor, refers to words ending in a k as funny.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second clue that gave it away was the context of the poem. In it, the narrator talks about how her grandfather used to spend time with her and have a deep, personal relationship with her. This is when the author brings the laugh sounding like the letter &quot;k&quot;. Now, however, he is distant and so tired all the time, so much so that it feels as if he's not even there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T02:13:06.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="360" CreationDate="2017-01-21T02:23:43.123" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've misunderstood a few minor aspects and one whopping big major aspect of the ending and moral of the &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; series. I'll get the most important point out of the way first.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The 76th Hunger Games with Capitol children almost certainly never happened.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand this, we have to consider what Katniss's motivation was for supporting Coin's plan. Let's have a look at the relevant passage again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was it like this then? Seventy-five years or so ago? Did a group of people sit around and cast their votes on initiating the Hunger Games? Was there dissent? Did someone make a case for mercy that was beaten down by the calls for the deaths of the districts’ children? The scent of Snow’s rose curls up into my nose, down into my throat, squeezing it tight with despair. All those people I loved, dead, and we are discussing the next Hunger Games in an attempt to avoid wasting life. &lt;strong&gt;Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change now.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I weigh my options carefully, think everything through. Keeping my eyes on the rose, I say, “I vote yes…for Prim.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Haymitch, it’s up to you,” says Coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A furious Peeta hammers Haymitch with the atrocity he could become party to, but I can feel Haymitch watching me. &lt;strong&gt;This is the moment, then. When we find out exactly just how alike we are, and how much he truly understands me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I’m with the Mockingjay,” he says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 26 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, note that this is pretty much the only place in the entire trilogy where Katniss's thought processes aren't described in detail. Usually we know exactly what she's thinking and why she's thinking it - if anything, these things will be &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt;explained. But here, the author suddenly hides Katniss's inner monologue from us, telling us only that she &quot;weigh[s her] options carefully&quot; and &quot;think[s] everything through&quot;, which is about as vague as you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's already enough to hint to us, the reader, that her motivation is something more than she's showing. Then there's the &quot;Keeping her eyes on the rose&quot; bit, which suggests she has something to hide - she doesn't want to meet Coin's eyes. And finally, her interaction with Haymitch. This is the moment when &quot;we find out [...] how much he truly understands me&quot;. If she doesn't have anything to hide from the others in the room (specifically Coin), then why not state her motives aloud rather than relying on Haymitch's deep understanding of her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This, then, is the moment when she decides to kill Coin.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It fits with the rest of the chapter. After her encounter with Snow in the conservatory, Katniss spent several pages agonising over whether it was the Capitol or District 13 who caused the death of her sister. She tried to go to Haymitch for advice, but ended up walking out instead. And right here in this meeting, she comes to the final, despairing, realisation that Coin is hardly any better than Snow. Which of them it was who dropped the bombs on the children hardly matters; it's now 100% clear that Coin is the &lt;em&gt;kind of person&lt;/em&gt; who would do such a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does she agree to the final Hunger Games with Capitol children? Well, given that she's already decided to kill Coin, it doesn't really matter which way the decision goes; once the new president is dead, everything is up in the air again, especially since she's going to die before publicly announcing the new Hunger Games. Katniss's only goal now is to keep Coin unsuspecting, and the best way to do that is to agree with her suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Katniss &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; support the idea; she only agreed in order to lull Coin into complacency.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;That deals with your first bullet point. The rest are easier to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Katniss does indeed shoot Coin because she's come to the conclusion that Coin is just another Snow. Panem under Coin might have been little better than Panem under Snow. But that doesn't mean the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; Panem seen at the end of the series is so bad. Both Snow and Coin are dead, their reigns over.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Snow escapes execution, yes, but it's unclear whether he died by choking on his own laughter or by being crushed by the angry crowd. Either way, it doesn't make much of a difference. He died a humiliating death, not a glorious one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many characters died who might not have done if it weren't for the revolution, yes ... but if it weren't for the revolution, their lives would have had little meaning anyway. They would have been, as Peeta so famously put it, just pieces in the Games (literally or figuratively: even people not involved in the Hunger Games were nothing but pawns to be manipulated by people like Snow and Coin). The brutality and inhumanity of war is certainly a theme in the HG series; its futility, not so much. Which leads me on to the final point ...&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Life did get better in Panem at the end of the series.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already written &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/115676/31394&quot;&gt;an extensive analysis&lt;/a&gt; of this elsewhere. The incorrigibly upbeat yet endlessly cynical Plutarch Heavensbee gives a mixed assessment of the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Are you preparing for another war, Plutarch?&quot; I ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, not now. Now we're in that sweet period where everyone agrees that our recent horrors should never be repeated,&quot; he says. &quot;But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction. Although who knows? Maybe this will be it, Katniss.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What?&quot; I ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The time it sticks. Maybe we are witnessing the evolution of the human race. Think about that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 27&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Plutarch is not necessarily to be believed or trusted, of course, so from an in-universe point of view, this doesn't tell us or Katniss a great deal. But if we interpret this as the author speaking to us, the readers, through her characters, it becomes a sort of brief analysis of the outlook on the future of Panem. Perhaps things really will get better this time, or perhaps it's just a brief lull before another downhill slide of the society. Only time will tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And once time has passed, or at least a few years of it, the improvements in people's lives are apparent and enormous. They work together, using both Capitol technology and their own physical abilities, to make Panem a decent place to live. Instead of slaving their lives away in the mines, the population of New Twelve are preparing to build a medicine factory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're not alone. A few hundred others return because, whatever has happened, this is our home. With the mines closed, they plow the ashes into the earth and plant food. Machines from the Capitol break ground for a new factory where we will make medicines. Although no one seeds it, the Meadow turns green again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 27&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And going even more years into the future, by the time Katniss and Peeta's children are growing up, not only are the Games merely a distant memory, but the old way of life is so far removed from the new era that Katniss fears her children will be &quot;frightened to death&quot; even to hear about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The questions are just beginning. The arenas have been completely destroyed, the memorials built, there are no more Hunger Games. But they teach about them at school, and the girl knows we played a role in them. The boy will know in a few years. How can I tell them about that world without frightening them to death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, epilogue&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems clear that the new Panem really is a more pleasant and prosperous place than the old Districts, while presumably being less comfortable and cloistered than the old Capitol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Coin &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have been another dictator like Snow, but she was killed and Paylor apparently turned out to be a more benevolent leader for the new Panem.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/26483/31394&quot;&gt;Did they actually hold the 76th Hunger Games?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/8991/31394&quot;&gt;Why did Katniss agree with President Coin?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/114315/31394&quot;&gt;After everything Katniss did in The Hunger Games books, did their world improve?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T02:23:43.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="331" CreationDate="2017-01-21T03:04:38.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's impossible to know.&lt;/strong&gt; Orwell describes this entire situation with various statements that contradict each other, so it's not possible to get a definitive answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support that Winston was arrested in the morning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney pots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests the sky as blue -- which only would've been possible in the day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies the woman is hanging clothes on a clothes line to dry them as the sun comes up. (This could instead suggest the woman is taking down the clothes, implying it's night.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the light seemed too strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another line suggesting that the light outside is too bright and illumines to be day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support of him being arrested in the evening:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sun sets during the night. (But this could also refer to the sun rising.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It seems to have got colder.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally, London is coolest during the nights, especially during the summer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other pieces of evidence that are ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he woke it was with sensation of having slept for a long time, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Rand al'Thor pointed out, the fact that this clock was old-fashioned could mean he was arrested in either the morning or the evening, at either 8:30 AM or 8:30 PM. Winston has the feeling of sleeping for a long time, suggesting he could be arrested in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, however, Orwell is vague and undescriptive as to what time of day Winston was arrested by providing bits of information that are ambiguous and can support both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T03:48:42.163" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T03:48:42.163" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2017-01-21T03:57:48.507" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The exact quote you're alluding to is presumably this one, cited at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot;] sprang from affection for an old Negro named Marshall. He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle deep in cracked ice packing down the ﬁsh. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; that affection get into the writing? Where's the connection between the old Marshall and the poem? For reference, the full poem is only 16 words long and goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so much depends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  upon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a red wheel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  barrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;glazed with rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;beside the white&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  chickens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Maybe Williams was talking nonsense.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not unknown for authors, including poets, to just make stuff up when talking later on about the inspirations for their work. I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/article/192243&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; (mostly hidden behind a paywall, sorry - I'll include lengthy quotes here) which speculates that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Williams' desire, late in his life, to say that his &quot;affection for the old man somehow got into the writing&quot; suggests his muse had trouble digesting Marshall and the black working-class experience he represents. Undoubtedly, Williams has a genuine affection for this man and sympathy for his plight that &quot;somehow&quot; get into the poem. But the question to ask is how they got there, because the poem, and Williams' lifelong relationship with it, would suggest that &lt;strong&gt;every effort was made to erase from the poem not only Marshall but, perhaps more importantly, Williams' feelings for him.&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Williams sought different titles for the poem, &lt;strong&gt;little or no regard seems to be given to Marshall's role in the poem and even less to the black working-class experience he represents.&lt;/strong&gt; Nonetheless, in so far as the title, &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow,&quot; works to make the poem's &quot;a red wheel / barrow&quot; the wheelbarrow upon which so much depends, one could argue the definite article indicates its owner. In a certain way, it does, although the owner is usually read in terms of some abstraction—mankind, primitive man, rural life—not in terms of a historically specific individual. More than Marshall or these other owners, though, what the title's definite article indicates is Williams' ownership or authority, stating in effect: here is the red wheelbarrow I discovered and turned into &quot;a red wheel / barrow.&quot; As Williams removes the poem from Spring and All and finds new contexts for it, he seeks to establish both his authority to speak for it, and, more importantly, its authority to speak for him. &lt;strong&gt;At some points in this process the emotional significance of Marshall all but disappears.&lt;/strong&gt; At other points, however, Williams opens the poem up to the sort of symbolism and sentiment—those &quot;extraneous comparisons, similes, [and] overweening autobiographies of the heart&quot; that Zukofsky praised Williams for avoiding in Spring and All—that allow the figure of Marshall to appear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's be honest, there isn't really much &lt;em&gt;room&lt;/em&gt; among those mere 16 words for &quot;affection&quot; or any other emotion to shine through very strongly.  This seems to be the best anyone's been able to come up with (from the same source as above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Combined with the thematic and color associations Perloff draws out, perhaps one could see Williams' admiration for the red wheelbarrow's black owner as lifting the poem's technical virtuosity into a whole other realm of social commentary and irony. The comment that &quot;so much depends / upon&quot; the wheelbarrow could be an acknowledgement of the precarious nature of Marshall's life of manual labor. And the vibrant red of the wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater could embody Marshall's blood, sweat and tears, silently condemning &quot;the white / chickens&quot; beside it. However, if these feelings are in the poem, they can only begin to emerge with the discovery of Marshall thirty years later in William's account of the poem in his article for Holiday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T03:57:48.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1639" CreationDate="2017-01-21T04:40:43.210" Score="8" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Jo's Boys&lt;/em&gt; in chapter 5, it is stated, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack and Ned sent regrets and best wishes, and no one mourned their absence; for they were among what Mrs. Jo called her failures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were these two in particular considered to be failures? From the second chapter of &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt; (as well as other incidents in the book), we know that Jack is a greedy dastard, so I'd expect that vice to be what Jo is disapproving of. In Ned's case, chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt; says he is a bully. But are we expected to believe that he continues to be a bully?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 15 of &lt;em&gt;Jo's Boys&lt;/em&gt;, it is stated, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...while good-hearted Ned traveled all the way from Chicago to press their hands and say, with a tear in his eye: ‘I was so anxious to hear all about the dear old boy, I couldn’t keep away.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text describes Ned as kind-hearted, so one might expect that he has improved somewhat. For that matter, the other times Jack is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Jo's Boys&lt;/em&gt; don't seem to paint him negatively. So why does Jo consider them failures? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T07:08:19.757" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T07:08:19.757" Title="Why did Jo consider Ned and Jack to be failures?" Tags="&lt;louisa-may-alcott&gt;&lt;little-women-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="478" CreationDate="2017-01-21T06:41:29.937" Score="18" ViewCount="999" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking back on Macbeth, and I'm wondering something that's piqued my interest again. There's a very well-known scene in Macbeth: the blood-spot scene, the hand-washing scene, and other such names. In it, Lady Macbeth goes... somewhat insane:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why, then, 'tis time to do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before this point, though, I'm struggling to figure out whether Lady Macbeth was foreshadowed to break under stress. She's mostly been removed from the focus of the play at this point, but Shakespeare draws our attention back to her with the intent to communicate that she, too, suffers for her crimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was any breakdown of sanity foreshadowed or hinted at earlier in the play? Is there something I just missed, or is this supposed to be as sudden as it is in practice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T19:02:13.317" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T19:02:13.317" Title="Did Lady Macbeth communicate signs of her instability prior to the blood scene?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="125" CreationDate="2017-01-21T08:10:55.810" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it does refer to the episode from &lt;em&gt;The Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;. I say this with confidence because there are many classical references. First, there is the name Byzantium, the Latin name for the city (Greek: Byzantion). Next, there is a reference to Grecian goldsmiths, which is not surprising, as the city was Greek from about 660 BC to the 2nd century CE. Additionally, there is the idea of body-soul duality, which is a Platonic idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is contemplating what will happen to his soul once he departs this life. &quot;Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing&quot;. He goes on to say that he might live on through human artifice, such as the &quot;hammered gold&quot; or &quot;gold enamelling&quot; of Grecian goldsmiths. This is one view of eternal life. But another thought occurs to him. Perhaps some &quot;golden bough&quot; will take him to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The golden bough evokes the underworld, and in particular, the Elysian Fields. The idea of the narrator telling lords and ladies of &quot;what is past, or passing, or to come&quot; reminds me of the story that Anchises tells Aeneas, explaining how life came to be, and what their descendants will go on to do. This speech takes place in the Elysian Fields. Anchises starts by describing the spirit inside every body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The seeds of life—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  by earthly limbs and flesh that's born for death.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That is the source of all men's fears and longings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heavens' light,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  shut up in the body's tomb, a prison dark and deep. (Aeneid VI:843-848)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thematically similar to the poem, don't you think? If the narrator is searching for a spiritual life, then it's not surprising that he mentions the golden bough. The golden bough gives Aeneas not just passage to the underworld, but also a chance to receive spiritual advice from his father. I think the narrator sees the bough as a talisman through which his dream of a spiritual life may be realized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T20:44:16.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T20:44:16.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T11:59:11.887" Score="18" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was Arthur Conan Doyle influenced by any particular forensic techniques or methods used in his time? Were there any specific ones utilized a lot in the Sherlock Holmes series? And if so, what were they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="220" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T02:45:40.503" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T02:45:40.503" Title="How much did forensic science at the time of Sherlock Holmes' publication influence it?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T12:28:25.120" Score="9" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a uncontested and well known fact that Tolkien was a linguist, and he wrote Middle-Earth as a setting for his languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what interests me is whether the approach he took was out of the blue, or &lt;strong&gt;was he building on existing literary tradition&lt;/strong&gt; as far as the author making up a new language, and &lt;em&gt;heavily&lt;/em&gt; relying on it as part of a literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T15:15:44.587" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:38:56.290" Title="Was J.R.R. Tolkien building on a past tradition when relying heavily on languages he made up?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="627" CreationDate="2017-01-21T12:45:29.827" Score="11" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the foundational novel of their Noon universe, &lt;em&gt;Noon, XXII century&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Полдень, XXII век&lt;/em&gt;), published in 1961, the Strugatsky brothers &amp;quot;predicted&amp;quot; the notorious &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984#1984.2F85_Championship_match&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kasparov-Karpov World Chess&lt;/a&gt; rivalry and championship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Задача получила название «&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%91%D0%BB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Буриданов баран&lt;/a&gt;». С молодого мериноса был снят биологический код &lt;strong&gt;по методу Каспаро-Карпова&lt;/strong&gt; в тот момент, когда этот меринос находился между двумя кормушками с комбикормом. Этот код в сочетании с некоторыми дополнительными данными о баранах вообще был введен в КРИ. От машины требовалось: а) предсказать, какую кормушку меринос выберет, и б) дать психофизиологическое обоснование этого выбора.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=a5lDDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT1486&amp;amp;lpg=PT1486&amp;amp;dq=%22%D0%A1%20%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%20%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B0%20%D0%B1%D1%8B%D0%BB%20%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%20%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=GS7xLrAXpr&amp;amp;sig=y6LkI9aZnDHX65HfcsPki46WQRY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjjqKn7n9PRAhVD5CYKHcRMC1UQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22%D0%A1%20%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%20%D0%BC%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B0%20%D0%B1%D1%8B%D0%BB%20%D1%81%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%20%D0%B1%D0%B8%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9%20%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Google Books link&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Стругацкий А.Н., Стругацкий Б.Н., &amp;quot;Полдень. ХХII век&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;ЧАСТЬ ЧЕТВЕРТАЯ. БЛАГОУСТРОЕННАЯ ПЛАНЕТА&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;3. ЗАГАДКА ЗАДНЕЙ НОГИ&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The task was called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buridan's sheep&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; A young male sheep had his biological code taken &lt;strong&gt;using Kasparo-Karpov method&lt;/strong&gt; at the moment when the Merino was between the two feeders. This code, combined with some additional generic data on the rams, was fed to KRI system. The task was: a) to predict which the feeder Merino would choose, and b) give a psycho-physiological rationale for this choice.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;em&gt;A.N. Strugatsky, B.N. Strugatsky, &amp;quot;Noon, XXII Century.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Part Four - comfortable planet.&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;3. The mystery of the hind legs&amp;quot;. Translated by myself&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the authors ever comment on that &amp;quot;prediction&amp;quot;? Did they take credit for it, Nostradamus-style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T14:53:18.097" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T14:53:18.097" Title="Did the Strugatsky brothers ever comment on &quot;predicting&quot; the Kasparov-Karpov World Chess rivalry?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="446" CreationDate="2017-01-21T12:49:22.000" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doyle makes Holmes notoriously good at analyzing &lt;strong&gt;footprints&lt;/strong&gt; to determine the gender, age, and in some cases, the motivation for the exact path taken by the possible culprit. Footprints have been used in a similar way in real forensive investigations as far back as the nineteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second method I can think of that Holmes makes extensive use of is &lt;strong&gt;handwriting analysis&lt;/strong&gt;. This plays a prominent role throughout the entire series, as Holmes is able to tell the age, gender, and dominant hand of the person writing the document. In many cases, he can determine the type of ink used, the native language of the writer, and how similar two pieces of handwritten work are. Victorian society placed a high emphasis on handwriting, which is why several law enforcement agencies use handwriting analysis before the time Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes. Holmes definitely makes extensive use this technique, although Doyle does overexaggerate it quite a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.oup.com/2013/09/six-methods-forensic-detection-sherlock-holmes/&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;, Sherlock also decodes &lt;strong&gt;ciphers&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes solves a variety of ciphers...In &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; Holmes has a man planted inside Professor Moriarty’s organization. When he receives an encoded message Holmes must first realize that the cipher uses a book. After deducing which book, he is able to retrieve the message...Holmes’s most successful use of cryptology occurs in The Dancing Men. His analysis of the stick figure men left as messages is done by frequency analysis, starting with “e” as the most common letter. Conan Doyle is again following Poe who earlier used the same idea in The Gold Bug (1843).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T13:09:13.670" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T13:09:13.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="452" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:09:53.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T14:09:53.793" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T14:09:53.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="453" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:09:53.793" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) or his life as a writer. He is most known for his short stories and his best-selling novel 'The Catcher in the Rye'." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:12:18.267" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:12:18.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="454" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:12:15.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T14:12:15.777" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T14:12:15.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="455" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:12:15.777" Score="0" Body="For questions about Ray Bradbury's dystopian, science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451. Use in conjunction with [ray-bradbury]." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:47:03.967" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:47:03.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="456" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:18:23.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, a play by William Shakespeare set in Scotland. It is sometimes classified as a tragedy and sometimes as a history play. In the acting profession it is considered to be unlucky, and some actors refrain even from saying its name, calling it only &quot;the Scottish play&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T15:11:16.893" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:11:16.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="457" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:18:23.117" Score="0" Body="For questions about Macbeth, a play by William Shakespeare. Note that this is a work tag and not a character tag for the man Macbeth. Use in conjunction with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:13:58.007" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:13:58.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="458" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:26:28.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T14:26:28.607" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T14:26:28.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="459" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T14:26:28.607" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881), the Russian journalist and author of such works as 'Crime and Punishment' (1866), 'The Idiot' (1868–1869) and 'The Brothers Karamazov' (1879–1880). Use this tag with the tag [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T21:01:50.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T21:01:50.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:01:53.270" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Raymond Richard Martin&lt;/a&gt; (born in 1948), usually known as George R. R. Martin, is a US author who has written a variety of novels, short stories, and even screenplays, but is best known for his ongoing fantasy series &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; have been published so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_of_Thrones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1996)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clash_of_Kings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clash of Kings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Storm_of_Swords&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Storm of Swords&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Feast_for_Crows&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Feast for Crows&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dance_with_Dragons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining parts are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winds_of_Winter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winds of Winter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#A_Dream_of_Spring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dream of Spring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of other publications are set in the same fictional world as &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_Dunk_and_Egg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tales of Dunk and Egg&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (containing three novellas set some 90 years before the events of the novels)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Queen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Princess and the Queen&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (published in the anthology &lt;em&gt;Dangerous Women&lt;/em&gt; in 2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rogue_Prince&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Rogue Prince&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (published in the anthology &lt;em&gt;Rogues&lt;/em&gt; in 2014)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sons_of_the_Dragon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Sons of the Dragon&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (published in the anthology &lt;em&gt;The Book of Swords&lt;/em&gt; in 2017)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George R. R. Martin has published several other books and short stories, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_for_Lya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Song for Lya&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1976; collection of short stories)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_the_Light&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dying of the Light&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1977; his first novel)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fevre_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fevre Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1982)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George R. R. Martin his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.georgerrmartin.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his own website&lt;/a&gt;, which, among other things, hosts a blog called &lt;a href=&quot;http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Not a Blog&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:15:42.527" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:15:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:01:53.270" Score="0" Body="Questions about the author George R. R. Martin and his works, the most famous of which are the novels in the fantasy series 'A Song of Ice and Fire'." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:15:42.527" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:15:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:20:48.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joanne Kathleen Rowling, usually known as J.K. Rowling, is a British novelist and the author of the internationally bestselling &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series. Use this tag for literary questions about either the author herself or any of her works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:32:45.713" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:32:45.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:20:48.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British author J.K. Rowling (born 1965) or her life as a writer. She is best known for the immensely popular Harry Potter series." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:27:03.133" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:27:03.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="464" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:22:50.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T15:22:50.287" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:22:50.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="465" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:22:50.287" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the works of Ray Bradbury, the American science-fiction author of Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T15:38:56.757" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:38:56.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="466" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:25:19.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T15:25:19.373" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:25:19.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="467" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:25:19.373" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding an author's use of various literary techniques and other stylistic elements to allow the reader to better interpret and appreciate the work of literature." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T16:24:04.427" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:24:04.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="468" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:27:09.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Keats&lt;/a&gt; (1795 – 1821) published poems in magazines and in three books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt; (1816),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Endymion&lt;/em&gt; (1818),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt; (1820).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keats is well known for his 1819 odes, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode to a Nightingale&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_a_Grecian_Urn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_Melancholy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on Melancholy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T20:32:03.317" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T20:32:03.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="469" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:27:09.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795 – 1821) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T20:32:03.317" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T20:32:03.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="479" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:29:25.480" Score="10" ViewCount="547" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kenneth Grahame's masterpiece, &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;, describes the adventures of five friends, four of whom are, apparently, bachelors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can infer that Mole was a bachelor since (1) he did his own spring-cleaning, and (2) his larder consisted of only a tin of sardines, some captain's biscuits, and a bottle of Old Burton ale (see chapter 5: &lt;em&gt;Dulce Domum&lt;/em&gt;). This is pretty basic fare, and typical of any young fellow living on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author makes it quite clear that Badger was a lifelong bachelor. Besides, he obviously had little time for domesticity since, it has to be said, his home and personal attire, although comfortable, were rather shabby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toad, who was rich, could easily afford to employ servants, although they are never mentioned directly. In any case, one could imagine that he would have had not the slightest idea of how to boil an egg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otter, who is not too much involved in the story, was happily married and had already started a family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves the Water Rat. Ratty's larder was obviously well-stocked, since he could put together a fine &lt;em&gt;alfresco&lt;/em&gt; meal at a moment's notice (see chapter 1: &lt;em&gt;The River Bank&lt;/em&gt;). Ratty's picnic hamper contained:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;coldchickencoldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssandwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You get the idea. I can't imagine a bachelor, living on his own, having such a comprehensive range of victuals to hand. However, here's the killer (see chapter 11, &lt;em&gt;'Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears'&lt;/em&gt;, which takes place mostly in Ratty's home):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Toad was simply wild with jealousy, &#xA;  more especially as he couldn't make out for &#xA;  the life of him what the Mole had done that &#xA;  was so particularly clever; but, fortunately for &#xA;  him, before he could show temper or expose &#xA;  himself to the Badger's sarcasm, the bell rang &#xA;  for luncheon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if the bell rang for luncheon, then someone must have rung it, and I don't think that it was the pizza delivery boy. So, here's my question: did Ratty have a housekeeper (or was there some other domestic arrangement of which we can only speculate), or is there something that I have missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T16:05:47.713" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:04:31.527" Title="Did Ratty have a housekeeper?" Tags="&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;&lt;kenneth-grahame&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="383" CreationDate="2017-01-21T15:49:01.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scarlet letter has many meanings in the context of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning, it represented a sin and crime committed. As the story (and Hester) move on though, it becomes a symbol to be proud of (at least in Hester's mind):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter 'A.' It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scarlet Letter&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter II&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As time passes, the letter changes in meaning. Some people &quot;refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification&quot;.  The A comes to mean &quot;able&quot; in their minds. (Chapter XII)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, the letter becomes somewhat sacred:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[it has] the effect of the cross on a nun's bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril. Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scarlet Letter&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter XIII&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the letter started as a badge of sin, but due to Hester's actions later it became something, if not to be proud of, not to be ashamed of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T15:49:01.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="367" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:09:01.003" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always thought of Old Major as representing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vladimir Lenin&lt;/a&gt;. Old Major is the figure with the vision and ideology who inspires the other animals and kicks off the revolution, then dies and leaves the actual shaping of the new state to his successors, Snowball and Napoleon, who vie for control. This parallels Lenin's death leaving control of the Soviet Union to his two successors, Trotsky and Stalin, both of whom claimed to be the true heir of Lenin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snowball, who comes up with a plan to build a windmill and then is exiled from the farm by Napoleon, represents the more intellectual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Trotsky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leon Trotsky&lt;/a&gt;, while Napoleon, who creates a police state, exiles Snowball, consolidates power in the hands of the pigs, and corrupts the original philosophy by working with humans, represents the militaristic and anti-intellectual &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Stalin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parallel is not exact, as Lenin lived long enough to carry out his revolution and spend a brief time ruling the Soviet Union, whereas Old Major dies before the revolution starts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:09:01.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="476" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:28:05.620" Score="5" ViewCount="1505" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, the title doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with the book content itself. The chapter titles are seemingly all knitting related, and I know the cleaners use wool pads to clean the lenses when someone does a cleaning, but that seems like such a minor thing to hinge a title on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other significance to the title that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T13:56:20.290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:56:20.290" Title="What is the significance of the title of the book Wool?" Tags="&lt;wool&gt;&lt;hugh-howey&gt;&lt;title&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="470" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:28:20.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Quite likely not.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go all the way back to the picnic in Chapter 1, when Mole and Rat are discussing how Rat lives by the river:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Mole] ‘And you really live by the river? What a jolly life!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Rat] ‘By it and with it and on it and in it,’ said the Rat. ‘It’s brother and sister to me, and aunts, and company, and food and drink, and (naturally) washing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate that Rat treats the river as a friend, or perhaps family. He's a boater, and loves to explore it. He even seems to indicate that it gives him much of what he needs to live. The Mole thinks this must be rather boring - after all, he prefers to venture out at times (though he likes the security of his own hole very much, thank you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But isn’t it a bit dull at times?’ the Mole ventured to ask. ‘Just you and the river, and no one else to pass a word with?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No one else to—well, I mustn’t be hard on you,’ said the Rat with forbearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No one else to pass a word with&amp;quot; seems to indicate that Rat doesn't talk with anyone at all - likely including any servants or a housekeeper he could manage to fit in his home (which is, compared to Toad Hall, quite small).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, it seems that Rat's picnics come from his own effort, not someone else's. After talking with Otter, the subject of the conversation with Mole swings back to food:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well, well,’ said the Rat, ‘I suppose we ought to be moving. I wonder which of us had better pack the luncheon-basket?’ He did not speak as if he was frightfully eager for the treat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Mole ends up being the one doing the packing, but the passage is still strongly suggestive that Rat is, at the least, &lt;em&gt;capable&lt;/em&gt; of collecting his own food from his pantry. Additionally, from Chapter 2 we learn that Rat does do various household chores:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During his short day he sometimes scribbled poetry or did other small domestic jobs about the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:54:44.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="475" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="480" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:31:02.077" Score="6" ViewCount="484" Body="&lt;p&gt;The silo is very large, with more than one hundred floors. There are people whose whole jobs are to transport things up and down through the silo itself. I feel like with everything else they created, they'd find elevators useful. (Especially because the climb can take days, depending how far you need to go, which is part of the plot in one part.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an in-universe reason for why they went with just stairs? (Maintenance concerns, maybe?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T18:24:03.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:24:03.173" Title="Why are there no elevators in the silo in Wool?" Tags="&lt;hugh-howey&gt;&lt;wool&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:33:39.240" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WARNING&lt;/strong&gt;: this answer may contain spoilers!&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The author has actually &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hughhowey.com/bob-barker-i-apologize/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explained this himself&lt;/a&gt; on his blog:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I got a lot of grief from trusted advisers over the title of WOOL, back when it was just a single novelette and no one had read it. My science fiction professor and friend Adam Griffey told me it was a dumb title. As did a good friend of mine in my writing group in Boone. But my thinking was twofold: &lt;strong&gt;The first reason I went with this title was that it held a hidden meaning that gave away the twist at the end of the story (the wool being pulled over Holston’s eyes)&lt;/strong&gt;, but this hint is so subtle and can be interpreted in so many ways that you can tell people this meaning and they still won’t guess the final scene. It was an artistic choice (if writers are allowed to consider themselves artists) that made me enjoy publishing the work just a little more. The second reason I went with the title of WOOL was that &lt;strong&gt;I felt it would pop in a sea of traditional SFF titles (my other works included). It was simple and short. It was a common word amid a sea of uncommon and made-up words. And it’s fun to say!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Hugh Howey (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less canonically, one &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wool-Trilogy-Hugh-Howey/dp/0099580489&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon reviewer&lt;/a&gt; has commented that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I love the title, which takes on more than one meaning as the layers of the story are uncovered. I loved the gradual reveal of the truth of the lives the characters are living and the way I can picture the silo and the long, long walk from one end to the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main reason for the title appears to relate to the characters having the &lt;em&gt;wool&lt;/em&gt; pulled over their eyes, which is gradually removed as the story goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T16:33:39.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="494" CreationDate="2017-01-21T16:50:43.797" Score="10" ViewCount="841" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page for literary awards lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards#International_awards&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;inauguration dates for international awards&lt;/a&gt;, and of those the earliest of those is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel Prize&lt;/a&gt; in 1901. However, I don't know about non-international awards, nor does the page for the Nobel Prize indicate it is the first prize in literature. Apparently the oldest prize for British literature is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tait_Black_Memorial_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Tait Black Memorial Prize&lt;/a&gt; from 1919.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what is the oldest literary award given on a regular basis (international or not, not necessarily still running)? Was there anything before the Nobel Prize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T21:03:46.163" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T21:08:22.323" Title="What is the oldest literary award?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="444" CreationDate="2017-01-21T17:00:47.803" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh, yeah, she's clearly unstable from the moment we meet her. Even better, she &lt;em&gt;chooses&lt;/em&gt; to be unstable. In her very first appearance, she calls on supernatural forces to remove all traces of compassion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come, you spirits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stop up the access and passage to remorse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That no compunctious visitings of nature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wherever in your sightless substances&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You wait on nature's mischief!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She knows that she has compassion, and wants it gone. That presages both her viciousness and her breakdown over the consequences. This isn't the speech of somebody entirely in her right mind, right from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another particularly horrifying sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have given suck, and know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would, while it was smiling in my face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dash'd the brains out  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a huge amount to be made of this. There are no other references to the Macs having children, and in particular no sign that Mac was planning to leave the throne to his family. She must have lost a child: a common enough occurrence at the time, but don't be misled into thinking that they were unaffected. In performance, there's a huge well of grief to be had there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to point out one other line, kind of unassuming, but highly effective in performance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Things without all remedy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should be without regard: what's done is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context it's very easy to see that as simply callous, telling Mac to man up. But there's an undertone that says, &quot;OK, maybe we screwed up, but it's finished and we can't fix that so there's no point in feeling guilty&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the strongest presage of the mad scene: she does feel the guilt, just as she knew she would. It's reflected in her final line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To bed, to bed! there's knocking at the gate:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What's&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  done cannot be undone.--To bed, to bed, to bed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's re-living the moment (thus, the knocking at the gate, introducing the Porter scene). And she repeats her line, this time desperate to forget. She cannot, and soon she will be dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T22:34:02.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T22:34:02.193" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="470" CreationDate="2017-01-21T17:04:31.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably not.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some textual evidence for this throughout the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they got home, the Rat made a bright fire in the parlour, and planted the Mole in an arm-chair in front of it, having fetched down a dressing-gown and slippers for him, and told him river stories till supper-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would the Rat be making a fire himself if he had a servant to do such things for him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the winter time the Rat slept a great deal, retiring early and rising late. During his short day he sometimes scribbled poetry or did other small domestic jobs about the house&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, the Rat would be unlikely to be doing his own odd jobs if he had a housekeeper or butler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the specific quote you mention from Chapter 11: the Rat hadn't been involved in the conversation for some time before &quot;the bell rang&quot;, so it's quite plausible that he simply went out of the room to see about the food, leaving the others talking, and rang the bell himself to let them know it was ready.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As well as finding specific quotes, we can answer this question by a more general character analysis. All four animals play different roles in the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mole is the young innocent &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AudienceSurrogate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;audience surrogate&lt;/a&gt; who knows little about the Riverbankers or the Wild Wooders. He could be equated with a young man, perhaps in his early twenties, who's spent most of his life indoors and is just beginning to learn about the outside world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Badger is the wise old recluse, heard about for a while as a distant and faintly scary creature before he's finally introduced. He corresponds to an old bachelor who has a few close friends whom he'll defend to the death, disdains all other company, but has plenty of wisdom to share.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Toad is the young 'jock', impulsive and foolish, with a great deal of goodwill but not much common sense. He's definitely the last scion of a rich family, a young man brought up in luxury who likes to show off but still somehow manages to be liked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rat is the worldly and practical one, endlessly good-natured and second only to Badger in his knowledge and experience. The first part of the book is about him teaching Mole the practical skills of living on the riverbank: swimming, rowing, knowing the ways of the woods and the other animals, and so on. He corresponds to a middle-aged gentleman, sociable, competent, and physically active, who gets on well with all his neighbours and knows everything about the area.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone like that is usually not only &lt;em&gt;capable&lt;/em&gt; of cooking their own meals, doing their own housework, and so on, but actively takes &lt;em&gt;pleasure&lt;/em&gt; in it. &lt;strong&gt;Rat is not the sort of person who would be likely to employ a butler or housekeeper.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In analysing this book, we must remember that it was meant to be a sort of parody of Edwardian England. The anthropomorphised animals can all easily be identified with particular types of people in that time and place in the real world. Once we can identify how a character was designed and whom they might correspond to, it becomes much easier to analyse their personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:04:31.527" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="475" CreationDate="2017-01-21T17:23:07.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Spoilers from Book #3&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm including a spoiler warning since this goes over all three books. Turn back if you don't want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Well, Silo One has elevators and no stairs. The rest has stairs and no elevators. The reason I took from the books is that the no-elevator-reason stems from two things. Slow down communication, uprisings and all of those in the silos for one. Thus, reason one is simply controlling the people.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; However, the author replied on his blog to such ideas as follows.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; &lt;blockquote&gt;The real reason is more nefarious than that. - Hugh Howey&lt;/blockquote&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hughhowey.com/this-is-how-i-picture-it/#comment-5626&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; The reason is that the Silos Two to Silo Fifty can be terminated remotely by releasing some airborne killer, the white smoke. That smoke is designed to propagate via the stairs. Reason two is killing the people.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;And then she saw the white clouds like smoke higher up. Maybe from the Mids.&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; [...]&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; More screams This time from those nearby, those spilling down the stairwell, the few who had made it. [...] And the white smoke, it descended down the stairwell like a hammer.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; (Dust)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; Silo One on the other hand has no stairs so that nobody notices how big the concrete levels in between are. For the new world order no one can know what happened. The same termination method would make Silo One people very uncomfortable, thus it's rigged to blow. Explanation from the engineer (Donald) in &lt;em&gt;Dust&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&amp;quot;We're rigged to blow,&amp;quot; Darcy said. &amp;quot;There's the same mass of concrete between every level.&amp;quot; Donald nodded. This kid was fast. &amp;quot;If they let us walk up a flight of stairs, we'd see. We'd know. [...]&amp;quot;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:04:51.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="473" CreationDate="2017-01-21T17:32:46.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning. Major spoilers ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another reason than the one Rand al'Thor provides. And it's an in-universe explanation too. It's also starting to be in our faces all the time in the later books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lukas stood up straight. “I am the head of this silo. Silo eighteen of World Order Operation Fifty. [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Dust)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Notice something? &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;orld &lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;rder &lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;peration Fifty (in Latin &lt;strong&gt;L&lt;/strong&gt;). The title is also the acronym of the in-universe operation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also confirmed by the author. Have a look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hughhowey.com/george-r-r-martin-and-crippling-self-doubt/#comment-916&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this ping pong&lt;/a&gt; on the authors blog with an inquisitive asker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here’s my guess for the WOOL acronym. In book five, when Lukas is talking to Sil0 1 he’s welcomed to “Operation Fifty of the World Order”. The Roman numeral for fifty is “L”, so the acronym would be “World Order, Operation L”. How’d I do Hugh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answered by the author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe you’re the first to find and share the quote. I’d say you did pretty damn well!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastEditorUserId="67" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T17:50:47.740" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T17:50:47.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1101" CreationDate="2017-01-21T18:26:39.333" Score="8" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because of &lt;em&gt;Catch 22&lt;/em&gt;'s twisted timeline, while reading it, several times I had the distinct impression that what seemed to have happened so far in the past was different from what apparently happened in the past of the current point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(apparent past)&#xA;-------------------+-- (present)&#xA;-------------------/&#xA;(story of the past)&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could never quite put my finger on a specific problem. Are there any internal inconsistencies in Catch 22, or was I just confused by Heller?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T11:53:45.920" Title="Are there any internal inconsistencies in Catch 22?" Tags="&lt;timeline&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14" CreationDate="2017-01-21T18:52:42.163" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can trace out some possible answers to this by examining the history of her life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Her father encouraged her interest in the classics from an early age.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My father was well-to-do, but he wasn't interested in making money; he was interested in making people use their minds&amp;quot;; thus, her father guided her towards the Classics, and, when she was seven years old, he began teaching her Latin, then French, German, and Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Hamilton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, sourced to &lt;a href=&quot;http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9406EEDB1430EF3BBC4953DFB0668388679EDE&amp;amp;legacy=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;her New York Times obituary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She was dissatisfied by the teaching of classics in her university lectures.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Hamilton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;her sister&lt;/a&gt;] Alice, Edith was extremely disappointed with the lectures she attended. The lectures were thorough, but lost sight of the beauty of literature by focusing on obscure grammatical points. &amp;quot;Instead of the grandeur and beauty of Aeschylus and Sophocles, it seemed that the important thing was their use of the second aorist,&amp;quot; she said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7Llyixb94lcC&amp;amp;pg=PA74&amp;amp;lpg=PA74&amp;amp;dq=Instead+of+the+grandeur+and+beauty+of+Aeschylus+and+Sophocles,+it+seemed+that+the+important+thing+was+their+use+of+the+second+aorist,+alice+hamilton&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=kfGRwYxfnB&amp;amp;sig=V9YMMXDAu1dsoHBlorQbwTL7iag&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjrs-_88NPRAhVFAcAKHdzwAqoQ6AEIIDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Instead%20of%20the%20grandeur%20and%20beauty%20of%20Aeschylus%20and%20Sophocles%2C%20it%20seemed%20that%20the%20important%20thing%20was%20their%20use%20of%20the%20second%20aorist%2C%20alice%20hamilton&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-speaking Universities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, sourced to her sister's autobiography &lt;em&gt;Exploring the Dangerous Trades: the Autobiography of Alice Hamilton, M.D.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She encountered the tales of ancient Greece when she was young, and loved them throughout her life.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I came to the Greeks early,&amp;quot; Hamilton told an interviewer when she was 91, &amp;quot;and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon retiring, she moved to New York City and wrote and published various articles about Greek drama. Although she was long recognized as the greatest woman classicist, she was 62 when she published her first book, The Greek Way, in 1930. For 50 years before that her &amp;quot;love affair with Greece had smoldered without literary outlet&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Hamilton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, sourced to &lt;a href=&quot;http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9406EEDB1430EF3BBC4953DFB0668388679EDE&amp;amp;legacy=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;her New York Times obituary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting all of this together, we can work out a rough outline of the story. Her father got her interested in the ancient Greeks and their works in the first place, and she never lost her abiding love for them. But she was sometimes frustrated at how poorly they were taught in the west, and this inspired her to create better retellings of them so that others could appreciate them as well as she even without being able to read ancient Greek. As we know, she was successful - her books being used to this day for teaching youngsters about ancient Greek mythology and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T18:52:42.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2017-01-21T20:11:28.857" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academie-francaise.fr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Academy&lt;/a&gt; (Académie française) beats the Nobel with several prizes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-prix-et-fondations-prix-litteraires-prix-anciens/prix-anciens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the lists here&lt;/a&gt;, none of which are still running. I've only included the ones I'm sure are for literature (end dates from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_prizes_awarded_by_the_Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Bordin, 1835-1988&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Botta, 1875-1985&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Calmann-Levy 1892-1987&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Estrade-Delcros, 1896-1986&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Jules Favre, 1886-1989&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Marcelin Guerin, 1872-1976&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Maillé-Latour-Landry, 1839-1984&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Narcisse Michaut, 1892-1989&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Alfred Née, 1893-1988&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Jean Reynaud, 1879-1979&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Saintour, 1889-1989&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Sobrier-Arnould, 1891-1984&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prix Vitet, 1873-1989&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were each given out from annually to once every five years. Descriptions and more information are given on the website, next to each awarded. There are too many for me to list all the descriptions here, and I also don't know French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I cannot confirm that these are the oldest literary awards in the world&lt;/em&gt;. However, they are major awards that predate the Nobel Prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T20:35:19.597" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T20:35:19.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T20:31:32.030" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read and heard people read many different versions of &quot;First They Came ...&quot; and according to the Wikipedia article, it was originally published in English by Milton Mayer. This led me to wonder if the poem was first written out in full in German, which I have asked in another question. Here I was wondering, how the various differences evolved. The version I have heard is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Jew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Communist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Catholic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version on Wikipedia is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Socialist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Trade Unionist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because I was not a Jew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Stanza break]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did these differences evolve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T02:15:47.157" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T02:15:47.157" Title="How did the text of &quot;First They Came ...&quot; evolve?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;martin-niemoller&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="740" CreationDate="2017-01-21T20:37:41.437" Score="5" ViewCount="3149" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/487/how-did-the-text-of-first-they-came-evolve&quot;&gt;in another question&lt;/a&gt;, I have seen inconsistencies in the recounting of the poem, &lt;em&gt;First They Came ...&lt;/em&gt;. This led me to look it up and find out that the English poem comes from a collection of interviews. I understand that it is based on speeches, but was it ever delivered as a poem in German? Was that prior to its English publication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T02:15:06.807" Title="Was &quot;First They Came ...&quot; a poem in German?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;martin-niemoller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="943" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:04:18.157" Score="9" ViewCount="1431" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix A, there's this quote about female dwarves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dís was the daughter of Thrain II. She is the only dwarf-woman named in these histories. It was said by Gimli that there are few dwarf-women, probably no more than a third of the whole population. They seldom walk abroad except at great need. They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do the females have beards too, as 'the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T06:41:06.587" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T18:15:02.030" Title="Do the female Dwarves in Tolkien's Legendarium also have beards?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="492" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:04:55.367" Score="-8" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorem ipsum&lt;/a&gt; is a popular filler text. Have any literary critics or scholars analyzed it as a poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of Lorem ipsum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:42:09.280" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T14:02:55.430" Title="Has Lorem ipsum ever been analyzed as a poem by literary critics or scholars?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="491" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:09:14.587" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;No.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text isn't even real latin; it's been edited to make &lt;em&gt;no sense&lt;/em&gt;. It's literally nonsense text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (citing  &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lipsum.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorem Ipsum - All the facts - Lipsum generator&lt;/a&gt;&quot; from www.lipsum.com)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been scrambled and has parts removed of added, so that it doesn't make sense. Here's a translation from Wikipedia&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great To take a trivial example, which of us ever laborious physical exercise, except to obtain some advantage from it? But who find fault  chooses to enjoy a pleasure one  avoids a pain produces no blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;Here's from &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/Lorem%20ipsum%20dolor%20sit%20amet%2C%20consectetur%20adipiscing%20elit%2C%20sed%20do%20eiusmod%20tempor%20incididunt%20ut%20labore%20et%20dolore%20magna%20aliqua.%20Ut%20enim%20ad%20minim%20veniam%2C%20quis%20nostrud%20exercitation%20ullamco%20laboris%20nisi%20ut%20aliquip%20ex%20ea%20commodo%20consequat.%20Duis%20aute%20irure%20dolor%20in%20reprehenderit%20in%20voluptate%20velit%20esse%20cillum%20dolore%20eu%20fugiat%20nulla%20pariatur.%20Excepteur%20sint%20occaecat%20cupidatat%20non%20proident%2C%20sunt%20in%20culpa%20qui%20officia%20deserunt%20mollit%20anim%20id%20est%20laborum.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt;, translating your example text in the question:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod and vitality, tempor ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Over the years come, who nostrud aliquip advantage from it, but for to work, exercise, school district. Duis cillum, however, want to be a pain in the pleasure of football irure flee from pain to find produces no resultant. Excepteur blinds are not cupidatat proident, it is soothing to the soul, that is, they deserted the general chapter be at fault who fulfill an office of their labors.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original text was from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_finibus_bonorum_et_malorum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy book&lt;/a&gt;, and they took the text from a part on Hedonism and was then edited. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not a poem at all&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit based on the edit of the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Probably not&lt;/strong&gt;, as there would be no sense in analyzing it as a poem since it fairly obviously &lt;em&gt;wasn't intended to be a poem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Actually, they gave the translation of the text before it  was edited no make it nonsense, and had bolded the parts used. I just copied the bolded part.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T14:02:55.430" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T14:02:55.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2036" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:22:45.497" Score="16" ViewCount="5076" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Frost's poem &quot;The Road Not Taken&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44272&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), the narrator gives two contradictory reasons for taking a particular fork in the road. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of the poem, the narrator emphasizes that both roads are essentially equal. The narrator specifically states that both roads were traveled about equally, i.e. &quot;Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same&quot;. And the narrator also describes the roads as being more or less equal, i.e. &quot;And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's confusing is that, at the end of the poem, the narrator contradicts all available evidence and states that &quot;I took the [road] less traveled by.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T21:34:15.290" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T13:55:19.690" Title="Why does Robert Frost contradict himself in &quot;The Road Not Taken&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:26:57.047" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia&quot;&gt;The ancient Greeks gave out awards/prizes for plays at the festival of Dionysia&lt;/a&gt;. I think that would probably qualify as the oldest literary award that we have a historical record of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T21:26:57.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="495" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="687" CreationDate="2017-01-21T21:57:19.607" Score="4" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I've decided to ask this question here, in light of the consensus that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/67/are-songs-and-poems-on-topic&quot;&gt;songs seem to be on-topic&lt;/a&gt;. I've tried to keep it to lyrics because there's been some debate about whether the music of a song is on topic or just the words.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cahalen Morrison and Eli West released an album called &quot;Our Lady of the Tall Trees.&quot; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYQlhLEJ5jc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;titular song&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songlyrics.com/cahalen-morrison-eli-west/our-lady-of-the-tall-trees-lyrics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyrics&lt;/a&gt;), however, contains a somewhat unclear purpose. I'm having trouble determining if the song is intended to just be as carefree and jovial as it sounds, or if there's some deeper meaning that I'm missing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This starts with a pretty simple question: &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt;, exactly, is the Lady of the Tall Trees? The song doesn't really seem to want to go into any level of detail. All it has to say about this topic is...:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Our lady of a lot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Said our lady of this and that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And other things that we forgot  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Our lady of the not&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wraps herself in rice and greens&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And other fancy things she bought&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes the song somewhat difficult to understand, particularly when it comes to any point that the song might be trying to make surrounding who she is and what she's doing. On the other hand, I could be trying to read a song that just seems to be quietly jovial, and nothing more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should I be understanding who the Lady is, and what does it mean to the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T16:44:26.497" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T02:14:28.320" Title="In &quot;Our Lady of the Tall Trees,&quot; who is the Lady, and what is the song trying to say about her?" Tags="&lt;cahalen-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:10:56.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in a commentary somewhere that Frost effectively pulled a fast one with this poem, inasmuch as he appears to engage in weighty thought about making a life-changing decision, whereas in fact, he couldn't care less and makes what is almost a random choice. If he had been honest, the subject of the poem would have been his indifference to the actual choice, rather than the choice itself, to which he gives more importance than it actually deserves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, my library is in a complete mess, and I cannot find my poetry books. If I can locate the relevant volume, I'll add more material. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T22:10:56.503" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:16:15.867" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;First let's take a quick look at what Robert Frost himself said about this poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“One stanza of “The Road Not Taken” was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England. [It] was as found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, &lt;strong&gt;whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.&lt;/strong&gt; And so I . . . sent it to him in France, getting the reply, ’What are you trying to do with me?’”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Robert Frost (&lt;a href=&quot;https://frostplace.wordpress.com/2016/04/07/the-road-not-taken-frost-on-world-war-i-leaving-england-and-edward-thomas/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;; emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man he was referring to was his good friend Edward Thomas. It seems that Frost's intended meaning in writing this poem was to poke fun at those who agonise over inconsequential decisions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frost insisted that Thomas was overreacting, and told his friend that he had failed to see that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. But Thomas saw no such fun, and said so bluntly, adding that he doubted anyone would see the fun of the thing without Frost to guide them personally. Frost, in fact, had already discovered as much on reading the poem before a college audience, where it was &quot;taken pretty seriously&quot;, he admitted, despite &quot;&lt;strong&gt;doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling&lt;/strong&gt; . . . Mea culpa.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/29/robert-frost-edward-thomas-poetry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;; emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's bear this in mind while examining the poem itself.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The first stanza already establishes that the narrator (based on Edward Thomas) is &lt;strong&gt;agonising&lt;/strong&gt; over the simple decision of which road to choose while out for a stroll in the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and third stanzas already introduce &lt;strong&gt;contradictions&lt;/strong&gt; in the narrator's thought processes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And having perhaps the better claim,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the road chosen is less worn than the other - it has a &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; claim because it &quot;wants wear&quot;, thus presumably wants it (in the old-fashioned sense of needing or lacking it, not desiring it) more than the first road.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though as for that the passing there&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had worn them really about the same,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And both that morning equally lay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In leaves no step had trodden black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly the narrator is contradicting their earlier statement: the road chosen isn't less worn than the other after all; they're both worn the same amount, and equally covered in untrodden leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth stanza is all about the narrator's &lt;strong&gt;regret&lt;/strong&gt; over their choice. It's clear from the Frost quote above that this regret is not intended to be entirely rational - that the narrator would have felt the same regret regardless of which road they'd chosen. At this point, they go back to thinking the road they chose was less worn, because creating a difference between the two choices (even if it's a fairly meaningless one) enables them to persuade themselves that one was worse than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I took the one less traveled by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that has made all the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, sure, mate. It was &lt;em&gt;such&lt;/em&gt; an important decision, and you flunked it. Even though you couldn't decide even at the time whether the road you chose was less worn or equally worn as the other, in retrospect you're &lt;em&gt;sure&lt;/em&gt; it was less worn and that that's ruined your life. Congrats. &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;/s&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;To simplify the analysis, I'm going to rewrite the essential details of the poem in clearer language which makes the moral more obvious. (I'm aware that this may be a controversial thing to do.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had to choose what path to take.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh! So hard! I couldn't decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let's try this one - it's less trodden.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No, actually, it's equally trodden.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh, whatever. I dunno.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now in the future I can say:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What an idiot! I went wrong,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I picked the path less trodden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking the narrator's frame of mind into consideration, it's not really that much of a contradiction. Whatever differences there are between the two paths are basically irrelevant, and the narrator is making a big deal out of nothing. It doesn't &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; whether the chosen path is less worn or not: the point is that the narrator &lt;strong&gt;thinks it is&lt;/strong&gt; when that helps them make their decision, then &lt;strong&gt;thinks it isn't&lt;/strong&gt; because &quot;eh, who cares&quot; (and maybe it actually isn't), then &lt;strong&gt;thinks it is&lt;/strong&gt; again because that enables them to agonise and torture themselves with regret afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T12:14:41.777" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T12:14:41.777" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="500" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="613" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:16:55.340" Score="11" ViewCount="46717" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt;, Jonas and Gabe head down through the snow to a place where there is music. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Downward, downward, faster and faster. Suddenly he was aware with certainty and joy that below, ahead, they were waiting for him; and they were waiting, too, for the baby. For the first time, he heard something that he knew to be music. He heard people singing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ending is kind of confusing. What happened? Did he travel back in time, as implied by the line 'of space and time'? Where did they end up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did they go and how did they get there?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T19:13:17.487" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T22:23:42.357" Title="What happened at the end of The Giver?" Tags="&lt;lois-lowry&gt;&lt;the-giver&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:25:50.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Frost is alluding to the fact that people believe what they want to believe, especially in hindsight. This has some connection with the principle of uncertainty in psychology, which is that we require enough certainty in order to make a decision. Sometimes we see certainty which isn't really there, just to help us make a decision. I think it was Bertrand Russell who lamented that the intelligent are full of doubt and the stupid are cocksure. That's because there's more uncertainty in life, and our decisions, than we would like to admit. Frost imagines himself telling an audience, &lt;em&gt;ages and ages hence&lt;/em&gt;, that he travelled this road because it was the road less travelled. But I think Frost is intending to be ironic. He is saying that one day he will feel sure of his decision, even though he was never really sure. Is hindsight really 20/20, or does it just obscure the truth so that we may reach a comfortable feeling of certainty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T22:25:50.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:31:47.383" Score="10" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Nose&lt;/em&gt;, an opera by Demitri Shostakovich, Shostakovich combines many of Nikolai Gogol's stories, including &lt;em&gt;The Nose&lt;/em&gt;, for which the opera is named, into a single story. Had previous critics or writers analyzed the works of Nikolai Gogol as a single story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-02T14:26:51.087" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T19:04:20.430" Title="Had people related the work of Gogol before &quot;The Nose&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;nikolai-gogol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="504" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:44:48.060" Score="-1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt;, John Grisham mentions several laws, such as about putting flyers on poles, drunk driving, and other random laws. How accurate are these? Are real laws, anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Theo pressed on, &quot;The law clearly states that permits must be approved for posters and flyers dealing with politicians and people who are running for office, but not for anything else. These flyers are legal as long as they are taken down within ten days. That's the law.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Abduction&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What was his BAC?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;His blood alcohol content.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh, that. Does point zero nine sound right?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes. The limit is point zero eight, so he's in trouble. First offense?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why heavens yes, Theo...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Some of the cops like to scare people. Your brother will not get ten days. He'll pay a fine of six hundred dollars, lose his license for six months, go to driving school, and a year from now his record can be expunged. Did he spend the entire night in jail?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes. I can't imagine...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Then there's no more jail time... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kid Lawyer&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 22&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T23:04:21.540" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T23:04:21.540" Title="How accurate are the laws in Theodore Boone?" Tags="&lt;john-grisham&gt;&lt;theodore-boone&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="503" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:58:40.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the laws discussed in the &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt; books, such as drunk driving or putting flyers on poles are handled on the local level and therefore the laws will vary. However, in many jurisdictions there are laws for such things. The laws for posting signs will generally be set at the state, county, and municipal levels. The best example is putting signs on posts, which in most states is legal for a certain length of time and after that length of time it must be permitted, which fits with the description of the law in &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T22:58:40.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="503" CreationDate="2017-01-21T22:58:48.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you only mention 2 laws in your question (at the time of writing this answer), I'll address those 2 laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Drunk driving is often referred to as driving under the influence of&#xA;  alcohol, or DUI, but can also be known as as driving while&#xA;  intoxicated, or DWI, or by similar terms. Regardless of the language&#xA;  used, it is a crime in every state, and one that often comes with&#xA;  significant penalties.  -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Felony-DUI.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For posting flyers on telephone poles in New York City:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is illegal for any person to paste, post, paint, print, nail, or attach or affix by any means whatsoever any handbill, poster, notice, sign, advertisement, sticker, or other printed material upon any curb, gutter, flagstone, tree, lamppost, awning post, telegraph pole, telephone pole, public utility pole, public garbage bin, bus shelter, bridge, elevated train structure, highway fence, barrel, box, parking meter, mailbox, traffic control device, traffic stanchion, traffic sign (including pole), tree box, tree pit protection device, bench, traffic barrier, city-owned grassy area adjacent to a street, hydrant, or other similar public item on any street. -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/dsny/about/laws/posting-and-graffiti-laws.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further addressing your quote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is illegal for any person to affix or attach any sticker or decal on a public or private building or structure. There is a rebuttable presumption that the person whose name, telephone number, or any other identifying information appears on any sticker or decal is in violation. Every sticker or decal shall be deemed a separate violation. Anyone found to have violated this provision, in addition to any penalty imposed, shall also be responsible for the cost of the removal of the unauthorized sticker or decal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used New York City as an example, but these regulations really just vary from place to place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T23:04:15.253" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T23:04:15.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="300" CreationDate="2017-01-21T23:42:24.220" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly confident that &lt;strong&gt;the parallels are present, intentional, and real.&lt;/strong&gt; Some portions, however, are about as clear as mud. You'll have to decide for yourself what exactly these parallels are and what they mean. I imagine writing &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; out would take a Hyperion-length book, and the only true answer would be one by the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about this at all starts with a structural consideration: &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; (Simmons) is written in the style of the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, whereas &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; (Keats), although a fragment, seems to be written as a relatively linear tale, dotted with encomia and philosophical considerations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This difference alone might give reason to be skeptical of a total structural parallel. However, the structure of Simmons' story seems to permit some deeper connection. Simmons' &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; follows a pattern where there's a non-narrative sequence of events, and then it delves into a story. &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; the poem seems to go down a related path: each book starts with a section that sets the scene, and then people very often tell stories or discover history together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Rather than write much of the Keats summary myself, I'm going to quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.keatsian.co.uk/keats-poetry-hyperion.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; about Keats' poem, all emphasis mine. I also feel the need to note at this point that it's been a couple years since I read either book or poem in significant detail, and I'd encourage you to draw your own conclusions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Book 1 &lt;strong&gt;opens &lt;em&gt;in media res&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with the deposed god Saturn mourning the loss of his empire to Jupiter. Thea, another of the Titans and sister/wife to Hyperion, attempts to comfort him, but, also despairing, she can only weep at his feet. &lt;strong&gt;Saturn rouses himself to renewed resistance and is led by Thea to where the other fallen Titans are assembled.&lt;/strong&gt; The second part of Book 1 focuses on Hyperion, still unvanquished and defiant but &lt;strong&gt;apprehensive and suffering from premonitions of death and disaster, preparing to go to the aid of Saturn.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simmons' &lt;em&gt;prologue&lt;/em&gt; seems to take something of a different turn than the poem. It opens with the Consul receiving a message from Meina Gladstone. Unless we're supposed to view the Consul as connected to a deposed Saturn, and Meina as the sister/wife to Hyperion, I find this to be an unlikely comparison. While under some lines of thought Meina could be analogous to a Titan, the Consul is certainly not portrayed in the manner of a deposed god. I'd suggest that the prologue isn't intended to make a parallel to Keats' poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chapter, however, follows &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what's happening in that section. The Consul wakes up from cryogenic sleep. Het Masteen is there, and informs him that the other pilgrims are aboard the Yggdrasil. I'm not sure how that could possibly be a closer parallel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first &quot;chapter&quot; of Simmons' novel &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; also appear to actually end &quot;[focusing on Hyperion],&quot; in a tone &quot;apprehensive and suffering from premonitions of death and disaster.&quot; Recall that Hoyt's story ends with a discussion of continuous resurrection and crucifixion on a Tesla tree - something that is, in and of itself, foreshadowing. This suggests that maybe we're not supposed to consider the prologue in the story as part of the parallel to Keats' Hyperion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this point, I'd consider the question of &quot;who is Saturn, and who are the Titans?&quot; to be somewhat unanswered. But the possibility for a parallel in the generic is there. I also think it's more likely that no single specific person or group was intended to represent any specific person or figure in the poem, and that facets of the Pilgrims and facets of the people in the stories told are supposed to present comparative ideas only. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second chapter of the story presents a much more clear parallel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Book 2 describes the council of the deposed Titans, as they attempt to come to terms with their new powerlessness...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the opening of chapter 2 of Simmons' &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; describes the pilgrims' journey through the capital city named Keats (which is definitely a total coincidence with no meaning). The Consul encounters Theo Lane, and has a discussion about how the city of Keats has grown and changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The speech given by Oceanus is the most positive; he urges his fellow Titans to come to terms with change as an inevitable part of the natual process, and ends by praising the beauty of his own supplanter, the new god of the seas, Neptune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structurally, these conversations are very similar. Lane is pushing the Consul not to go on the pilgrimage, and the Consul rejects it, describing the pilgrimage in a very similar way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kassad spends the rest of the chapter recounting his story; this seems to mirror the rest of Book 2 of the poem: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Her lament declares the uselessness of philosophical arguments in dispelling grief&lt;/strong&gt;, but also comforts Oceanus's wisdom when she &lt;strong&gt;describes the beautiful music with which the earth greeted the arrival of&lt;/strong&gt; Apollo, &lt;strong&gt;the new god of song&lt;/strong&gt;. Enceladus does not agree and urges them all to challenge the enemy, &lt;strong&gt;reminding them that Hyperion is still unfallen. Hyperion himself arrives&lt;/strong&gt;, but he has now accepted defeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This honestly exactly mirrors the pacing of the story. Kassad's story starts out as a militaristic reminder that philosophical arguments won't really help that much in the face of this kind of struggle. It then sidetracks into the arrival of Moneta, and his relationship to/with her, in a way that could only be uncomfortably described as pretty close to divine and divine intervention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, Kassad's story ends after the Shrike arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book 3 gets a little less clear again, but I think the parallel is still there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The brief, fragmentary Book 3 describes the valley where Apollo, who will be the new sun god, is coming into his powers. Mnemosyne, herself a Titan, the goddess of memory and mother of the nine Muses, presides over the initiation ceremony. Apollo, whose poetic associations are emphasized by his possession of a lyre, reads a 'wondrous lesson' (book 3, line 112) in her face, and 'Knowledge enormous' (Book 3, line 113) transforms him into a god. Book 3 breaks off with his assumption of godhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simmons' chapter 3 opens with the destruction of Naiad (also definitely not a meaningful name worth thinking about), being burned to ashes. It's a little confusing, and this is where the parallel starts to break down. Coincidentally, this is also where the poem by Keats ends. The closest parallel here has to do with &quot;the nine Muses&quot; in Sad King Billy's City of Poets. Silenus in this appears to mirror the path of Apollo: he writes endlessly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ending, however, appears to be more of a meta-point: Silenus' tale ends with the destruction of the &lt;em&gt;Cantos&lt;/em&gt;, and he wishes to return only to complete his unfinished work. This is plainly a reference to &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; itself going unfinished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the pattern go on past here? I'm not sure. It's hard to say, what with the poem itself being unfinished, and it being so many years since I've read either in much detail. It does leave open a pretty important question: what about the remaining three and a half chapters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think this definitively answers the questions: &lt;strong&gt;there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; some kind of parallel here, though the book as a whole likely &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; end when the poem does.&lt;/strong&gt; The exact way to interpret this might just not be clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-01-21T23:51:40.263" LastActivityDate="2017-01-21T23:51:40.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-21T23:49:31.407" Score="5" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Scandal&lt;/em&gt; by John Grisham, Theodore Boone finds out that cheating occurred in the administration of annual standardized tests. It is common knowledge that such cheating scandals occur on a fairly regular basis. Is it known whether John Grisham based his cheating scandal in &lt;em&gt;The Scandal&lt;/em&gt; on a specific cheating scandal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T15:35:03.527" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T15:35:03.527" Title="Did John Grisham base The Scandal on a specific incident?" Tags="&lt;john-grisham&gt;&lt;theodore-boone&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="606" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:12:34.257" Score="8" ViewCount="6880" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt; book series by John Grisham takes place in the fictional town of Strattenburg, Pennsylvania. Is Strattenburg, Pennsylvania based on a real town?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:37.997" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T00:17:53.170" Title="Is Strattenburg, Pennsylvania based on a real town?" Tags="&lt;john-grisham&gt;&lt;theodore-boone&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="512" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:14:29.480" Score="9" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; series is full of talking animals. The main characters are usually mice or badgers. We see many examples of animals that are sentient; there are mice, shrews, sparrows, crows, cats, owls, hawks, ferrets, stoats, weasels, rats, rabbits, snakes, squirrels, hedgehogs, moles, otters... We see that even the &lt;em&gt;bees&lt;/em&gt; are sentient, as the shrews learn their language to argue with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Geurrilla Shrews are out collecting honey from the bee folk; they have struck up a great friendship with the bees, even learning their language so that they can argue with them&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, the epilogue&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any animals that are not sentient?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T09:44:57.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T09:44:57.890" Title="Are there any species that are not sentient?" Tags="&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="510" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:20:59.637" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The horse&lt;/strong&gt; Cluny drove to Redwall Abbey comes to mind. In Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, he makes his way to the abbey with 500 soldiers, on a (stolen) hay cart pulled by a horse driven to panic by a whip. It eventually stops moving out of sheer exhaustion, and so Cluny orders Skullface, a henchman to get it moving again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Skullface performed a frantic leap. He landed on the horse’s back. The terrified animal did not wait for the rat to bite. As soon as it felt the loathsome scratching weight descend on its exposed haunches, it gave a loud panicked whinny and bucked. Spurred on by the energy of fright it careered off like a runaway juggernaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no indication that the horse has any sentience; while it's not out of the question, there is nothing to suggest that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Methuselah, in his recollections of sightings of rat-induced mayhem in the period leading up Cluny's assault on the abbey, noted that several other farm animals had been attacked by the band (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have gathered intelligence of other incidents: a farmhouse set alight, later that same year . . . &lt;strong&gt;piglets&lt;/strong&gt;, an entire litter of them eaten alive by rats . . . sickness and disease spread through &lt;strong&gt;livestock herds&lt;/strong&gt; by Cluny’s army. There was even a report brought to me two years ago by a town dog: an army of rats stampeded &lt;strong&gt;a herd of cows&lt;/strong&gt; through a village, causing chaos and much destruction.” [said Methuselah]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the horse, there is no evidence to suggest that these farmyard creatures have sentience. This might be indicative of a pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were also various monsters in certain books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;High Rhulain&lt;/em&gt;, the monster &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Slothunog&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Slothunog&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, later killed by Cuthbert Blanedale, also appears to lack sentience. If I remember correctly, it was used by the feline warloard Riggu Felis to intimidate the slaves on Green Isle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Mariel of Redwall&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Skrabblag&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Skrabblag&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a murderous scorpion enslaved by Gabool, is another candidate, plays an important role at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt;, Martin, Dinny and Log-a-log meet a large crab in &lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt; that proved dangerous, but I don't remember for sure if it was sentient or not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Deepcoiler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deepcoiler&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; makes an appearance (it is also mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T00:56:38.953" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T00:56:38.953" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="510" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:24:06.493" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Horses&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Horse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;horse&lt;/a&gt; in the first book, &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;. It seemed to be just a brute animal, used to pull the cart carrying Cluny the Scourge and his horde, without any intelligence. It certainly never spoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fish&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the characters eat fish throughout the books, so we can safely assume that (with a few notable &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exceptions&lt;/a&gt;) fish are not sentient or considered as 'people' in the world of Redwall. From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwall.org/faq.php?page=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt; on Brian Jacques's website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why do the Redwall creatures eat fish, but do not eat any other animals?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to have a fish as Matthias' first triumph in Redwall and then I just continued the tradition. No deep meaning I just did!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Assorted monsters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 'monsters' appearing in various Redwall books whose main purpose in the story is to be extremely fearsome and eat smaller (sentient) animals. Very few of these displays any sort of sentience, or the power of speech. So perhaps creatures such as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Deepcoiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deepcoiler&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://redwall.wikia.com/wiki/Slothunog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siothunog&lt;/a&gt; (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/511/17&quot;&gt;mentioned&lt;/a&gt; by @HDE226868) should also qualify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T00:38:52.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2471" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:27:48.063" Score="10" ViewCount="3028" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame's magisterial work, the first half of the book is mostly given over to the adventures of Mole and Ratty (although we are introduced to Badger and Mr. Toad). It ends quietly in chapter 5 (&lt;em&gt;Dulce Domum&lt;/em&gt;), with Mole (accompanied by Ratty) finding his old and long-neglected home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second half of the book, quite rightly, deals with the amazing (and I suspect highly embellished) adventures of Mr. Toad, of which I am sure you are entirely familiar. However, embedded in these stories are two highly reflective chapters, &lt;em&gt;The Piper at the Gates of Dawn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Wayfarers All&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 7 (&lt;em&gt;The Piper at the Gates of Dawn&lt;/em&gt;) deals with Mole and Ratty's frantic search for Otter's missing son, Portly. They eventually find him on an island, sleeping at the feet of the demigod, Pan, who Grahame personifies as the protector of animals, and they give him due worship. This indicates that the animals follow a far more ancient religion than the Christianity hinted at in chapter 5 (&lt;em&gt;Dulce Domum&lt;/em&gt;). Ratty is thoroughly taken up with the experience, so Mole rows him and Portly back home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 9 (&lt;em&gt;Wayfarers All&lt;/em&gt;), deals with Ratty's restlessness, and his desire to expand his horizons, and explore a world of which he has little knowledge. He chances on another rat (a true rat, rather than a water vole), and they strike up a conversation. The rat is actually a sailor who has decided to give up the sea and settle down, but he regales Ratty with tales of far-off lands, and Ratty decides that this is the very life for him, and tries to abandon his home (and his friend) and take to the sea. Fortunately, Mole realises that something is wrong and manages to rescue him from his mania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, what are these chapters for? Why did Grahame write them? Are they just intermezzi in a three-act comic opera about Toad, or is there some other significance? As a child, I found &lt;em&gt;The Piper at the Gates of Dawn&lt;/em&gt; utterly enchanting, but &lt;em&gt;Wayfarers All&lt;/em&gt; bored me, and I usually skipped it. Now that I am well into my middle-age, I can see the relevance of it, and I wish that I had been more adventurous in my youth, but when I was a child, its meaning was lost on me, so what is it doing in a book intended for children?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related (and perhaps more important) question is: are there any parallels in adult fiction, preferably (but not necessarily) pre-dating this book (first published in 1908)? If so, what purpose do they serve, apart from providing a counterpoint to more exciting chapters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T12:13:30.507" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T12:13:30.507" Title="The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and Wayfarers All" Tags="&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;&lt;kenneth-grahame&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="514" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:51:42.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Series&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Redwall series, by the late British author Brian Jacques, consists of the following novels (listed in publication order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Redwall (1986)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mossflower (1988)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mattimeo (1989)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mariel of Redwall (1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Salamandastron (1992)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Martin the Warrior (1993)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Bellmaker (1994)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Outcast of Redwall (1995)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pearls of Lutra (1996)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Long Patrol (1997)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marlfox (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Legend of Luke (1999)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lord Brocktree (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taggerung (2001)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Triss (2002)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Loamhedge (2003)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rakkety Tam (2004)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High Rhulain (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eulalia! (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doomwyte (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Sable Quean (2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Rogue Crew (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this tag does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; refer specifically to the first book, &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, nor to the place named Redwall. This tag is to be used on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; questions concerning these novels or the universe in which they are set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Setting and characters&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Redwall novels are inhabited by animals - main characters often include foxes and/or sea rats, generally labelled as &quot;vermin&quot;, who are often the antagonists, and mice, badgers, squirrels, otters, shrews, and hares. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mice often appear in the abbey &quot;Redwall&quot; after which the series is named. Redwall has strong walls made of red stone; hence the abbey's name. The abbey generally has an Abbot or Abbess who leads the abbey, a badger mother, who takes care of the Dibbuns, or the young of the abbey, a friar who is a cook, a recorder/scholar who lives in the gatehouse, and a warrior, who protects the abbey in time of need. The warrior often wields Martin's sword, a sword descended from the first warrior, Martin. Martin often appears in dreams and guides those in distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badgers often appear in the mountain stronghold of Salamandastron, served by fighting hares. They defend the country from vermin. Badger lords, who rule the mountain, are often afflicted by bloodwrath, which makes their eyes go red, and they become more powerful and angry then normal - almost unstoppable. Bloodwrath in badgers is reminiscent of berserkers in Viking lore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Squirrels and otters, while they sometimes appear in the Redwall abbey, also appear in various forests, especially the Mossflower, the forest near Redwall abbey, or waterways. Shrews form bands known as Guosim, which is an acronym standing for &quot;Guerilla union of shrews in Mossflower&quot;. While often argumentative, shrews are very skilled with boats and waterways and are very loyal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T03:18:49.817" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T03:18:49.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="515" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T00:51:42.840" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the series of 22 novels by the late Brian Jacques set in the world of Redwall. Note that this tag does NOT refer specifically either to the location Redwall or to the first book in the series, entitled &quot;Redwall&quot;. Use in conjunction with [brian-jacques]." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:16:09.210" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:16:09.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:12:57.673" Score="8" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first book of &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Here There Be Dragons&lt;/em&gt;, Stellan Sigurdsson is told to have smoked a special mix of cinnamon and tobacco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, I can.  It's a tobacco of some kind.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;A cinnamon tobacco,&quot; said John. &quot;A special mix.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later, in &lt;em&gt;The Shadow Dragons&lt;/em&gt; (book 4), he's mentioned as smelling of chocolate tobacco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An instant later he could smell that familiar chocolate-tobacco mixture, as his old mentor and teacher stepped down from the frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an error (possibly in my copy only) in the book?  Or is he mentioned as smoking both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:48:49.570" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:48:49.570" Title="Does Stellan smoke cinnamon tobacco or chocolate tobacco?" Tags="&lt;continuity&gt;&lt;imaginarium-geographica&gt;&lt;james-a-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="309" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:23:09.830" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rothfuss doesn't know, and Rothfuss doesn't want to guess. He's received a lot of damaging comments about this, and -- believe it or not -- a Reddit AMA on /r/books is actually the authoritative source here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rothfuss, about a year ago, asked &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; a question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38pdo9/im_patrick_rothfuss_word_doer_charity_maker_and/crwtn9i/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of his AMAs&lt;/a&gt;, which I'll transcribe here for convenience. The empahsis is mine - you can just read the bold lines to get the gist of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hey there Pat, I really love the first two books in your series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it takes time to produce quality books (especially books of the size you tend to write, which are easily 2-3 times larger than many other novels). But still, I'm quite eager for the third book. &lt;strong&gt;Do you happen to have a publication date?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He self-answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for asking Pat,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfortunately, there is no publication date right now. What's more, I &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; don't want to guess at one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, when the first book came out, I was very new to publishing, and &lt;strong&gt;I foolishly told people they could expect the next book in a year.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when I realized I needed more time to make the second book as perfect as I could, I was forced to break that promise, and people were unhappy. And this is understandable: They felt as if they'd been lied to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm trying to avoid making that mistake again.&lt;/strong&gt; I screw up constantly, but I try to avoid fucking up in the same way twice in a row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rest assured that when there is a publication date. I'll make a big announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no. He hasn't, and won't, talk about it. He gives &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; self-reply, which explains why it's taken so long, and why he wishes people would stop asking about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for the quick answer, Pat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll admit I'm a little disappointed at the lack of a firm date, but I appreciate your artistic integrity and your desire to give us the best book possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, while it's true that my interaction with you almost entirely revolves around the books you produce, I also recognize that you are a fellow human being. &lt;strong&gt;I imagine that you are similar to me in that you have a busy and complex life.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I enjoy your books a great deal, I'm guessing that &lt;strong&gt;being the father of two young boys takes up a great deal of your time, to say nothing of the charity which you help manage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while I'd like nothing better than to read a hundred billion books from you, I'm guessing &lt;strong&gt;you probably have hobbies, too.&lt;/strong&gt; I respect that. You probably like playing video games, watching movies with friends, and occasionally walking somewhere with no purpose at all, other than enjoying the feel of cool spring grass beneath your feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did this mostly to get this question out of the way, because it was one people were guaranteed to immediately ask. And then refused to say anything else about the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:23:09.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="518" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:30:59.213" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:30:59.213" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:30:59.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="519" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:30:59.213" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Russian language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Russia or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:39:21.933" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:39:21.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="520" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:32:02.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:32:02.283" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:32:02.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="521" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:32:02.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the publication of a work, not the text of the work itself. This type of questions asks about how a specific text came into existence as a publication (which involves a publisher), not as a text (which usually does not involve a publisher). Valid examples are when or in what form a specific work was published and by whom. For publishing practices of a specific country or time period, use the [publishing] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T10:45:17.860" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T10:45:17.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="522" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:33:02.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:33:02.690" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:33:02.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="523" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:33:02.690" Score="0" Body="For questions about books in the Theodore Boone series by John Grisham. Use this tag with the [john-grisham] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T14:13:08.827" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T14:13:08.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="524" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:34:34.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:34:34.273" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:34:34.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="525" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:34:34.273" Score="0" Body="Questions relating to the analysis of characters in works of literature: for example, their traits, construction, or other aspects. This tag should be used together with any relevant work, series, or author tags." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T18:38:44.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T18:38:44.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="526" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:35:51.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Gordon Byron was a poet, politician, and aristocrat from late 18th and early 19th century Britain. He is most famous for his poetry, including such works such as &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Childe Harold's Pilgrimage&lt;/em&gt;, but his influence on literature as a whole extends beyond these, to themes such as the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com/q/341/17&quot;&gt;Byronic hero&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:44:04.220" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:44:04.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="527" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:35:51.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the poet George Gordon, 6th Baron Byron, better known as Lord Byron (1788 – 1824), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:44:04.220" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:44:04.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="528" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:36:50.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:36:50.290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:36:50.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="529" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:36:50.290" Score="0" Body="For questions about 'Les Misérables' (1862), a novel by Victor Hugo. Use in conjunction with [victor-hugo] and [french-literature]. For the musical, use the tag [les-miserables-musical]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T14:03:19.433" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T14:03:19.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="530" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:38:21.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jasper Fforde (born Jan 11, 1961) is a British writer of humorous fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His first published work, &lt;em&gt;The Eyre Affair&lt;/em&gt;, is set in an alternative history 1980's where literature is taken very seriously. Among other things, there are &amp;quot;Will-speak&amp;quot; machines in the streets that quote Shakespeare if you put a coin in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From there, many of his books have the main characters meet and interact with characters from fiction, who are often aware that they are fictional characters with prescribed roles. His books often contain wordplay and surreal humour. Part of his style is that the characters may have a certain self-reflective awareness - seen when they openly discuss how their actions are influenced, prescribed or forbidden by the demands of storytelling devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and the books themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jasper Fforde's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://jasperfforde.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jasperfforde.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:30:15.363" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:30:15.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="531" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:38:21.187" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British novelist Jasper Fforde (born 1961) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:30:15.363" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:30:15.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="532" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:39:33.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:39:33.903" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:39:33.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="533" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:39:33.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892) or his life as a writer and poet. Questions about his poems should be tagged with [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:56:35.490" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:56:35.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="534" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:40:27.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is a 434-line poem by T.S. Elliot first published in 1922. The author's notes were added in a later edition from the same year. &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is Eliot's most influential poems and is considered as a central work in modernist poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; at Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; (without the author's notes),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; on Bartleby.com&lt;/a&gt; (with the author's notes at the bottom),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wasteland.windingway.org/poem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; on Windingway.org&lt;/a&gt; (with additional annotations).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T13:50:31.263" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T13:50:31.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="535" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:40:27.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Waste Land' (1922), the poem by T.S. Eliot. Use this tag with the [t-s-eliot] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T00:22:31.593" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T00:22:31.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="536" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:41:00.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:41:00.980" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:41:00.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="537" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:41:00.980" Score="0" Body="Questions about the U.S.-born British poet, literary critic, dramatist and publisher T. S. Eliot (1888 –  1965) and his works. As a poet, Eliot is best known for poems such as &quot;The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock&quot; (1915), &quot;The Wasteland&quot; (1922) and the &quot;Four Quartets&quot; (1943). His plays include &quot;Murder in the Cathedral&quot; (1935) and &quot;The Cocktail Party&quot; (1949). As a critic, he is said to have influenced by New Criticism." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T18:00:27.000" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T18:00:27.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="538" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:41:40.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:41:40.750" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:41:40.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="539" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:41:40.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T20:34:40.040" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T20:34:40.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:42:39.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:42:39.457" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:42:39.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:42:39.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of British mystery author Margery Louise Allingham (1904–1966) or her life as a writer. Her works include the crime novel 'The Tiger in the Smoke' (1952)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T17:57:20.283" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T17:57:20.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="542" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:43:16.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:43:16.840" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:43:16.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="543" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:43:16.840" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life of German, anti-Nazi author Martin Niemöller and his works of literature, which include Of guilt and hope." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T07:30:48.243" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T07:30:48.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="544" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:43:56.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:43:56.210" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:43:56.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="545" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:43:56.210" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) or her life as a writer. She is famous for her novel 'Little Women'." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:07:38.267" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:07:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="546" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:44:58.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:44:58.127" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:44:58.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="547" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:44:58.127" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of the Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky or their lives as writers. Their most famous works include &quot;Hard to Be a God&quot;, &quot;Roadside Picnic&quot;, &quot;Monday Begins on Saturday&quot;, and the Noon Universe cycle. Questions about their works should also be tagged with [russian-literature] along with the work in question." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:17:17.757" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:17:17.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="548" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:46:06.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:46:06.373" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:46:06.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="549" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:46:06.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Goldman (1931-2018) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:07:20.677" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:07:20.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="550" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:46:41.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:46:41.220" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:46:41.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="551" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:46:41.220" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens; 1835 – 1910) or about any of his works, which include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-20T08:33:50.127" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T08:33:50.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="552" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:47:19.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:47:19.867" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:47:19.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="553" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:47:19.867" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Patrick Rothfuss (born 1973) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T20:34:19.590" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T20:34:19.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="554" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:47:59.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suzanne Collins is a US author most famous for writing the &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; novel trilogy, which has been adapted into a series of four blockbuster films.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about Suzanne Collins herself as a writer, or about any of her literary works. Note that questions about the films adapted from her works are off-topic for Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:28:14.457" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:28:14.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="555" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:47:59.987" Score="0" Body="For questions about either the author Suzanne Collins or any of her literary works (most famously the Hunger Games book series). Note that questions about the films adapted from her works are off-topic for Literature." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:29:11.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:29:11.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="556" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:53:49.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:53:49.573" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:53:49.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="557" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:53:49.573" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Odyssey, the epic poem believed to be passed down by word of mouth, and transcribed under the name &quot;Homer.&quot; Use in conjunction with [homer]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:22.617" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:22.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="558" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:54:32.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:54:32.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:54:32.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="559" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:54:32.193" Score="0" Body="For questions about literary works from Nazi Germany and the effects of Nazi Germany on literature." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:14:31.727" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:14:31.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="560" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:57:10.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:57:10.040" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:57:10.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="561" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:57:10.040" Score="0" Body="For questions about the series known as &quot;The 39 Clues&quot; by 	Rick Riordan, Gordon Korman, Peter Lerangis, Jude Watson, Patrick Carman, Linda Sue Park, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Roland Smith, David Baldacci, Jeff Hirsch, Natalie Standiford, C. Alexander London, Sarwat Chadda, Jenny Goebel." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:31:01.660" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:31:01.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="562" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:57:53.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:57:53.030" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:57:53.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="563" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:57:53.030" Score="0" Body="For questions about the literary significance of religious works or the effects of religion on literature." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:23:33.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:23:33.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="564" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:58:24.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:58:24.847" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:58:24.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="565" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:58:24.847" Score="0" Body="For questions about Wool, the book by Hugh Howey. Use in conjunction with [hugh-howey]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:43:10.280" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:43:10.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="566" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:59:07.727" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T01:59:07.727" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T01:59:07.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="567" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T01:59:07.727" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book series known as The Series of Unfortunate Events, written by Daniel Handler under the pen name Lemony Snicket. Use this tag with the [lemony-snicket] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:30:46.547" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:30:46.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="568" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:04:24.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:04:24.833" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:04:24.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="569" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:04:24.833" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Use in conjunction with [samuel-coleridge]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T13:31:04.550" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:31:04.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="570" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:04:32.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/song-lyrics&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;song-lyrics&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;song-lyrics&lt;/a&gt; tag should be used for questions about song lyrics in the general or specific song and its lyrics, replacing the name of the said song. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/852/how-should-we-tag-questions-about-song-lyrics&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/487/a-proposal-for-poetry-and-short-stories&quot;&gt;Existing policy&lt;/a&gt; is not to create tags for individual short works. The issue of whether or not we need tags for any individual works has been debated several times. The result of the latest meta discussion was in favour of using such tags, but the voting was fairly divided and we didn't get a very strong majority; however, what we've actually been doing in practice on the site for a long time has been to create tags for individual long works such as novels, plays, series, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:11:16.040" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:11:16.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="571" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:04:32.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary meaning or significance of the lyrics of a song or the literary devices used in them. Should be used with either the song-writer or the band in lieu of the author tag." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:24:56.730" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:24:56.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="572" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:05:08.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:05:08.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:05:08.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="573" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:05:08.857" Score="0" Body="For questions about the literary aspects of myths and legends." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:23:09.377" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:23:09.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="574" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:06:05.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:06:05.280" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:06:05.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="575" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:06:05.280" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Kingkiller Chronicle, the fantasy series by Patrick Rothfuss." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:02:24.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:02:24.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="576" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:06:51.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:06:51.793" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:06:51.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="577" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:06:51.793" Score="0" Body="For questions looking for specific references or asking about references in literary works." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:29:05.603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:29:05.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="578" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:07:34.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clive Staples Lewis&lt;/a&gt; (1898 – 1963) taught English literature both at Oxford University and (later) at Cambridge University. He wrote both fiction and non-fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His fiction works include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Space Trilogy&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_the_Silent_Planet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Out of the Silent Planet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1938)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perelandra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phrelandra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1943)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*That Hideous Strength&lt;/a&gt; (1945)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Screwtape_Letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Screwtape Letters&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1942)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion,_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1950)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Caspian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1951)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voyage_of_the_Dawn_Treader&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1952)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silver_Chair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1953)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse_and_His_Boy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1954)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician%27s_Nephew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1955)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Battle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1956)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His non-fiction includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Preface_to_Paradise_Lost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Preface to Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1942)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Loves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Four Loves&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1960)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_in_Words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Studies in Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1960)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Experiment_in_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Experiment in Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1961)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discarded_Image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1964)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T12:01:18.400" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T12:01:18.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="579" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:07:34.277" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British author C.S. Lewis (1898 – 1963), or any of his works, most famously his fantasy series 'The Chronicles of Narnia'." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T12:01:18.400" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T12:01:18.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="580" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:08:07.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:08:07.230" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:08:07.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="581" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:08:07.230" Score="0" Body="For questions about To Kill A Mockingbird, the book by Harper Lee. Use this tag with the [harper-lee] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:12:44.410" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:12:44.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="582" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:08:59.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:08:59.610" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:08:59.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="583" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:08:59.610" Score="0" Body="For questions about the series known as The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Use in conjunction with [suzanne-collins]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:08:32.273" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:08:32.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="584" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:09:34.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:09:34.533" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:09:34.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="585" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:09:34.533" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Raven, the poem by Edgar Allen Poe. Use this tag with the [edgar-allan-poe] and [poetry] tags." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T22:04:09.370" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T22:04:09.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:10:09.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:10:09.640" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:10:09.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:10:09.640" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Wind in The Willows, the book by Kenneth Grahame. Use in conjunction with [kenneth-grahame]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:05.643" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:05.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8527" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:10:29.147" Score="24" ViewCount="763" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading short stories by the great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, I've noticed a repeated theme: many of these stories are written in the style of a &lt;strong&gt;review&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;summary&lt;/strong&gt; of a much larger and more intricate work, which is &lt;strong&gt;wholly imaginary&lt;/strong&gt;. This seems to be Borges's way of sharing all the awesomely bonkers ideas he comes out with for books, without actually having to go to the effort of writing these massive books himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim&lt;/em&gt;: a review of a 21-chapter book of the same name by the fictional Bombay attorney Mir Bahadur Ali.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pierre Menard, Author of the&lt;/em&gt; Quixote: a brief description of the complete works of the fictional novelist Pierre Menard, followed by a more detailed study of his attempt to rewrite &lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain&lt;/em&gt;: a brief description of the complete works of the fictional Irish author Herbert Quain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Garden of Forking Paths&lt;/em&gt;: a spy story surrounds the essential philosophical issue of the eponymous work by the fictional philosopher Ts'ui Pen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Borges the inventor of this curious style of storytelling?&lt;/strong&gt; Or were there other, earlier authors who established the literary technique of creating a story idea but instead of telling it in full, only summarising it and leaving the reader tantalised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T11:18:48.747" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:23:06.077" Title="Did Borges invent the idea of writing reviews/summaries of imaginary literary works?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;metaliterature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="589" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:11:00.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:11:00.303" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:11:00.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="590" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:11:00.303" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Lady of Shalott, the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson. Use in conjunction with [alfred-tennyson]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:45.440" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:45.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="591" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:11:43.843" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Bible, a collection of sacred texts. Questions should deal with the literary aspects of the text as defined by the &lt;a href=&quot;/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;Help Center&lt;/a&gt;. Otherwise, questions should refer either to &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Christianity Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; (for general questions related to Christianity) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Biblical Hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt; (questions about Biblical text using techniques or rules of interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T21:27:01.247" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T21:27:01.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="592" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:11:43.843" Score="0" Body="The Bible, a collection of sacred texts. Questions should deal with the literary aspects of the text as defined by the Help Center. Otherwise, questions should refer either to Christianity Stack Exchange (for general questions related to Christianity) or Biblical Hermeneutics (questions about Biblical text using techniques or rules of interpretation)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T21:36:40.367" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T21:36:40.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="593" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:12:34.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:12:34.550" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:12:34.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="594" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:12:34.550" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Brian Jacques (1939-2011), the author of the Redwall series, or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T22:20:31.897" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:20:31.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="595" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:13:12.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lemony Snicket is a pseudonym for author Daniel Handler. The pseudonym was established primarily for his &lt;em&gt;Series of Unfortunate Events&lt;/em&gt; books. It continues effectively as a brand name -- for spin-off series &lt;em&gt;Asking The Wrong Questions&lt;/em&gt;, but also for unrelated books which employ a similar style and tone, such as &lt;em&gt;The Composer is Dead&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Handler also continues to write and publish under his own name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T10:43:37.870" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T10:43:37.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="596" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:13:12.647" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Lemony Snicket, pseudonym of author Daniel Handler, and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T10:43:29.443" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T10:43:29.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="597" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:13:55.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:13:55.663" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:13:55.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="598" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:13:55.663" Score="0" Body="For questions about works written in foreign languages and their effect on literary works." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T07:30:04.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T07:30:04.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="599" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:14:25.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:14:25.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:14:25.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="600" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:14:25.877" Score="0" Body="For questions about traditional fairy tales and their effects on literary works." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T03:02:52.477" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T03:02:52.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="601" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:15:00.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:15:00.407" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:15:00.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="602" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:15:00.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) or his life as a writer. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T00:37:32.007" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T00:37:32.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="603" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:28:37.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T02:28:37.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:28:37.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="604" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:28:37.920" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the physical location and time period in which a work of literature takes place." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:25:37.433" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:25:37.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2017-01-22T02:45:08.197" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any evidence supporting the fact that Grisham based Strattenburg off of a real town instead of just a generic archetype of a small town. There's no canon evidence to support either side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was still curious to see if Strattenburg bore any striking resemblances to some real towns in Pennsylvania. I went ahead and used this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theodoreboone.co.uk/dnld/resources/The_Theodore_Boone_Files_2_386d13018efc.pdf&quot;&gt;information&lt;/a&gt;, which is part of an official educational activity worksheet that serves as a companion to the books. Therefore, I'm assuming the information stated there is accurate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Strattenburg, in Stratten County, is a medium-sized town of around 75,000 population. We aren’t told&#xA;  exactly where it is, although sometimes we are given a clue: for example, in The Abduction it takes Theo&#xA;  and Ike six hours to drive from home to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Also, we’re told that there is a river&#xA;  to the east of the town forming the border with the next county.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_boroughs_in_Pennsylvania_by_population&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, only two Pennsylvania cities are close to the 75,000 mark stated in the worksheet: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem,_Pennsylvania&quot;&gt;Bethlehem&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scranton,_Pennsylvania&quot;&gt;Scranton&lt;/a&gt;. After narrowing it down to these two cities, I plugged both of them into Google Maps on a route to Chapel Hill. Bethlehem comes closest to the time stated, with an estimated time of arrival of 7 hours and 12 minutes, while a trip from Scranton is estimated to take 7 hours and 49 minutes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, Bethlehem even has the river that is referenced in the worksheet: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehigh_River&quot;&gt;Lehigh River&lt;/a&gt;, which runs in the eastern portion of Pennsylvania. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I think it's safe to say that although it's unknown whether Grisham based Strattenburg off of a real city, Bethlehem seems strikingly similar to Strattenburg if he did base it off of a real city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T02:45:08.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T04:56:51.343" Score="17" ViewCount="917" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people analyze literature, one of the first things people seem to do is look for interviews or quotes from the author where the author describes the meaning they intended their text to have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: when academics and professors of literature analyze texts, how much weight do they give to authorial intent? Is intention ever used as evidence when discussing the meaning of a text? I would be happy with a brief summery of the various scholarly views on this matter (with citations); there's no need to write a PHD thesis as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T04:14:57.347" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T05:25:09.793" Title="How much weight is given to authors' intentions in literary analysis?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="609" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T05:02:41.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T05:02:41.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T05:02:41.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="610" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T05:02:41.233" Score="0" Body="Questions related to literary theory, i.e. the body of frameworks, ideas and methods about how to interpret literature. This tag can be used for questions about literary terms and theories of literature, including the history of such concepts. For questions about existing interpretations and evaluations, use the [literary-criticism] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T20:06:18.560" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T20:06:18.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T05:23:30.050" Score="10" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question concerns &amp;quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&amp;quot; books. These are books that start out as a normal story, but then ask the reader to make a choice. (The book will say something to the effect of &amp;quot;turn to page 8 if yes, page 9 if no&amp;quot;). In this fashion, the story expands like a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that there are two different ways to think about choose your own adventure books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is to treat choose your own adventure books as a collection of multiple versions of the same story. Let's take a hypothetical story with one choice: do you (the reader) enter the magical portal that takes you to Narnia? At this choice, two versions of the story are created: one where the reader enters Narnia and one where the reader doesn't. If a story has a lot of choices, then a lot of different versions of the story are created. While the different versions of the story can be compared, the act of the reader choosing isn't considered in the analysis of the stories' meaning. In this sense, choose your own adventure games are essentially the same as traditional literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second way of looking at &amp;quot;Choose Your Own Adventure&amp;quot; books is by analyzing them as games. This means looking at questions like &amp;quot;how to readers make choices&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;how does the act of making a choice affect the meaning of the story.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how do &lt;strong&gt;scholars and theorists of literature&lt;/strong&gt; think about &amp;quot;choose your own adventure&amp;quot; books? Where do they fall on the literature game spectrum that I just outlined? If there is a debate among scholars, I would accept an answer that outlines the different perspectives in this debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T18:47:14.307" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T18:47:14.307" Title="Are &quot;choose your own adventure&quot; books literature or games?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2017-01-22T06:38:31.560" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's an ambiguous ending.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The immediate description is that Jonas has found another pocket of civilization -- and that this one is characterized by joy, music, singing. He and Gabe slide down through the snow to them, in the hopes that they will reach the community on time, be taken in, and nursed back to health.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in Jonas's weakened state, this vision is not entirely reliable -- and elements of the paragraph make him less reliable yet. The &quot;sense that he heard music behind him&quot; -- probably impossible -- &quot;but perhaps it was only an echo&quot; is a fairly strong implication that Jonas cannot really tell what he is seeing  or hearing. Similarly, his sudden certainty that &quot;they were waiting for him; and they were waiting, too, for the baby&quot; is obviously not a rational one -- even if it is true, Jonas has no way of knowing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a lot of Jonas's certainty and excitement here are entirely unreliable. It's possible that he does see, or hear, something, and is responding to it deliriously. It's also possible that there's nothing there, and this is Jonas's final, comforting delusion immediately before collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;it's ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;. Either they found a haven, or they died; you don't know for certain. Which you consider more likely is your own interpretation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually Lowry wrote additional books in the series, where Jonas has clearly lived.  &lt;em&gt;Gathering Blue&lt;/em&gt; (published in 2000) only gives an ambiguous hint that Jonas has survived and arrived into the town where the sequel takes place; but in &lt;em&gt;Messenger&lt;/em&gt; (2004) and &lt;em&gt;Son&lt;/em&gt; (2012) this is made explicit, and Jonas appears as a speaker character.  However, I believe &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt; was originally written as a standalone book (the next one was written seven years later), and certainly stands as one. So, whether or not the sequels &quot;determine&quot; the meaning of the ending of the book, is also up to you :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T20:26:46.587" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T20:26:46.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="726" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:08:52.587" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues: Cahills vs Vespers&lt;/em&gt;, Atticus Rosenbloom's mother tells him that they are 'Guardians'. What are they guarding? I don't think that it can be the different pieces of the Doomsday Device, because nobody knew where those were. i.e, the Marco Polo book was buried in Rome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are they guarding?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T23:21:50.650" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T23:36:38.090" Title="What are the Guardians guarding?" Tags="&lt;the-39-clues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:09:55.073" Score="8" ViewCount="2789" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of Horace McCoy's novel &lt;em&gt;They Shoot Horses, Don't They?&lt;/em&gt; is also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; the last sentence of the book. When the policeman asks Robert why did he shoot Gloria, he answers with that sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this enigmatic sentence? How is the crime related to horses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user227" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T21:21:07.457" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T21:21:07.457" Title="Meaning of the title &quot;They Shoot Horses, Don't They?&quot;" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;horace-mccoy&gt;&lt;they-shoot-horses-dont-they&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="616" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:10:32.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T08:10:32.260" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T08:10:32.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="617" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:10:32.260" Score="0" Body="Questions specifically about the titles of literary works: their meaning, purpose, reception, significance, etc." OwnerDisplayName="user227" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T12:41:33.620" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T12:41:33.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="618" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:17:42.277" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/19980121070621/http://www.randomhouse.com/lurkerfiles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lurker Files&lt;/a&gt; was a web-serial running between 1996 and 1997. In Wintervale University, the mysterious &quot;Lurker&quot;'s power is the anonymity and malleability of online activity - he assumes others' identities in chat rooms; entraps and blackmails students to do his bidding; and in general, brings to life a variety of dangers to the brave new world that was The World Wide Web of the '90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series was originally written by Scott Ciencin for four books (&lt;em&gt;Faceless&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;No Fear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Nemesis&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Incarnate&lt;/em&gt;). The first three of these were also printed and sold by Random House.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time, readers were urged to try and figure out the Lurker's true identity. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/19970810122940/http://www.randomhouse.com/lurkerfiles/incarnate/printeincarnate16.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the last chapter written by Ciencin&lt;/a&gt;, we get: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Lurker hesitated for a long moment--then removed the Dethboy mask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gia couldn't believe what she was seeing. She stared long and hard into the Lurker's face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now you know,&quot; the Lurker said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- but the reader does not get to learn the Lurker's identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this point, the series was continued by Marc Cerasini (&lt;em&gt;Apparition&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Triad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Clandestine&lt;/em&gt;). The books got kind of wonky under Cerasini, veering from web-focused thriller/mystery into SF/F.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From October 1997 to January 1998, readers were exhorted to &quot;Get ready for the Lurker Files finale!&quot;. However, the finale never came, and the Lurker's identity was never revealed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What happened to the Lurker Files?&lt;/strong&gt; Why was the series never concluded, and the Lurker's identity never revealed? Did something happen behind the scenes -- perhaps relating to the switchover between Ciencin and Cerasini?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T08:27:44.970" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T08:27:44.970" Title="Whatever happened to the Lurker Files?" Tags="&lt;scott-ciencin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="661" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:43:26.770" Score="64" ViewCount="9619" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the comic strip &lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; by Bill Watterson, Calvin is a boy. He has a tiger friend, who's... a little ambiguous. Is he a doll or a real tiger or a figment of his imagination? To Calvin he appears real, and to everybody else he looks like a stuffed toy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Hobbes real or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T09:32:04.963" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T19:49:13.953" Title="What is Hobbes?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;calvin-and-hobbes&gt;&lt;bill-watterson&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2017-01-22T08:43:26.770" Score="47" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's intentionally ambiguous; we don't know.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his book &lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary&lt;/em&gt;, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called 'gimmick' of my strip - the two versions of Hobbes - is sometimes misunderstood. &lt;strong&gt;I don't think of Hobbes as a doll that miraculously comes to life when Calvin's around. Neither do I think of Hobbes as the product of Calvin's imagination.&lt;/strong&gt; The nature of Hobbes's reality doesn't interest me, and &lt;strong&gt;each story goes out of its way to avoid resolving the issue&lt;/strong&gt;. Calvin sees Hobbes one way; and everyone else sees Hobbes a different way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to the participant who sees it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T15:19:47.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="624" CreationDate="2017-01-22T09:16:39.530" Score="15" ViewCount="5385" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, Peter states that Susan has become 'too grown up' to return to Narnia. However, we &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; see grown-ups coming to Narnia, or Aslan's country - we see their parents. Also, it would be &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; harsh if no grown-ups could go to 'heaven'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Susan ever able to return to Narnia?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T12:50:35.490" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T17:41:04.243" Title="Was Susan ever able to return to Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="623" CreationDate="2017-01-22T09:16:39.530" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Susan probably made it back to Narnia,&lt;/strong&gt; because her experience with faith reflects that of Lewis himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1960, C. S. Lewis wrote back to a reader and said that Susan is not in Aslan's country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not because I have no hope of Susan ever getting to Aslans's country, but because I have a feeling that the story of her journey would be longer and more like a grown-up novel than I wanted to write. But I may be mistaken. Why not try it yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://storify.com/JillBearup/what-happened-to-susan-pevensie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;, provided by BESW in chat&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh Susan!&quot; said Jill. &quot;She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that she's starting on her 'silly phase', to paraphrase Artemis, which she will eventually grow out of and redeem herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if you claim that Susan died in the train accident, &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; doesn't say that. It makes no mention of Susan near the crash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There's not much to tell,&quot; said Peter. &quot;Edmund and I were standing on the platform...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...probably on the same train though Lucy didn't know about it -&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually quite like Lewis's own experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Inside The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; by James Staurt Bell, Carrie Pyykkonen, and Linda Washington, it's mentioned several times that he struggled with religion and then became religious (partly due to an all-night talk with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/j-r-r-tolkien&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;j-r-r-tolkien&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;j-r-r-tolkien&lt;/a&gt; and another friend).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, he looks like he's saying that he did the same thing that Susan did: Became 'grown-up', but then when he &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; 'grew up', he was more 'childish'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @BESW stated in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/34938364#34938364&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, this is sort of an intentional fallacy - this only is the case because CSL decided that this is the case, without there being proof from the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to find examples from the books about being 'grown-up' being a bad thing. I've only found a few things so far:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He didn't call his Father and Mother 'Father' and 'Mother', but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh Susan!&quot; said Jill. &quot;She's interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's entirely possible that she makes it, he just didn't feel like writing a 'grownup story'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:43:46.183" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T16:43:46.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:32:43.710" Score="21" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;In programming language design, there's a process called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)&quot;&gt;bootstrapping&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In computer science, bootstrapping is the process of writing a compiler (or assembler) in the source programming language that it intends to compile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a significant milestone in the evolution of programming languages, as it signifies a certain level of maturity, a point where the language has passed its first non-trivial test. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While discussing the concept with colleagues, I started wondering if a parallel could be drawn with fictional languages in literature. Has a fictional language reached the level of maturity necessary for the work that created it to be translated in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly interested in published translations, with some indication that the translation is on par with the original work. Examples of what I'm looking for would be George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four translated in Newspeak, or the works of J. R. R. Tolkien translated in Quenya. Perhaps even Star Trek novelizations in Klingon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorDisplayName="user8" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T14:30:26.210" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T01:30:14.770" Title="Has a book ever been translated in its own fictional language?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:42:55.543" Score="12" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the finale of &lt;em&gt;Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonists release the Salaxalan ghost (in Wenton-Weakes' body) in the primordial past, to go fix his ship, when they realize this will doom humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their solution is to go interrupt Coleridge's composition of &lt;em&gt;Kubla Khan&lt;/em&gt; -- which in the story is a poem based on the ghost's story, explanation, and request for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this stop Wenton-Weakes and the ghost from fixing their ship?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It clearly doesn't stop the ghost from possessing Wenton-Weakes, or from being released in the past (the protagonists say there are now two ghosts - the original one, and now also the one that returned to the past, and has been stuck there another eternity). And, of course, the change to the poem is billions of years later than the change-point where the ghost tries to fix the ship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The book's prologue offers a clue - a visual that, in retrospect, we understand as some version of the ghost, crying in anguish at Coleridge being interrupted. But that's not very clear either.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T09:38:06.717" Title="How does interrupting Kubla Khan save humanity?" Tags="&lt;douglas-adams&gt;&lt;dirk-gently&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="448" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:54:36.797" Score="15" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Apparently, this was a coincidence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling took me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://probegi.livejournal.com/1814166.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiveJournal&lt;/a&gt;, where someone was wondering about the same thing. According to the guy over there, Karpov was only 11 when the book was originally written, and Kasparov wasn't even born - not to mention that his surname when born was &lt;em&gt;Weinstein&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, some Word of God from an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kp.ru/daily/24231.3/431173/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview with &lt;em&gt;Комсомольская Правда&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Komsomol Truth&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Борис Стругатский&lt;/strong&gt;: Что касается предсказаний-пророчеств вообще, то отношусь я ко всему этому весьма скептически. Доступный мне опыт позволяет предположить, что сколько-нибудь серьезные и конкретные подробности будущего предсказать можно только чисто случайно. Как мы сами «предсказали» какой-нибудь «метод Каспаро-Карпова».&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;А вообще вы, конечно, правы: фантасты (в том числе и мы) - никудышные предсказатели-прорицатели. Да этого от них и не требуется. Они не сеют, они в лучшем случае разрыхляют почву под посев.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Boris Strugatsky&lt;/strong&gt;: Regarding prophecies and predictions, I'm generally very skeptical about them. My experience allows me to suggest that any specific and serious predictions of the future are purely coincidental. Like we &amp;quot;predicted&amp;quot; some &amp;quot;Kasparo-Karpov method&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, you are, of course right: science fiction writers (including us) aren't good at predictions and prophecies. They don't have to be. They don't sow; the best they do is to hoe the land for further sowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or another bit from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int_t03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;off-line interview about &lt;em&gt;The Doomed City&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see question 85, second from the end): the question asks whether the brothers knew the fall of the Berlin wall and the unification of Germany were called &amp;quot;die Wende&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;the turn&amp;quot;, same as Fritz Geiger's revolution in the book (in Russian, of course). Boris Strugatsky answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Нет, это, разумеется, чисто случайное совпадение. Впрочем, наверное, все «пророчества» суть не что иное, как случайные совпадения.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English (translation mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, of course it is just a coincidence. Although, probably all &amp;quot;prophecies&amp;quot; are nothing more than accidental coincidences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T01:26:49.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="628" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:59:05.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T10:59:05.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T10:59:05.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="629" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:59:05.453" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Princess Bride, the book by William Goldman. Use in conjunction with [william-goldman]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:17:33.333" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:17:33.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:59:50.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T10:59:50.580" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T10:59:50.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T10:59:50.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;First They Came ...&quot;, the poem by Martin Niemöller. Use this tag with the [Martin-niemoller] and [poetry] tags." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T10:37:06.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T10:37:06.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:02:09.487" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:02:09.487" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:02:09.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:02:09.487" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of author Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:45:57.203" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:45:57.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="634" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:02:42.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:02:42.777" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:02:42.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="635" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:02:42.777" Score="0" Body="For questions about the ancient Greek writer known as Homer or about any of his literary works, most famously the Iliad and the Odyssey (which also have their own tags on this site)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T21:25:44.923" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T21:25:44.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="636" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:05:31.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:05:31.060" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:05:31.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="637" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:05:31.060" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Greek language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Greece or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:40:55.927" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:40:55.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="638" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:06:04.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:06:04.887" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:06:04.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="639" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:06:04.887" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Hugh Howey and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:52:58.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:52:58.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="640" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:06:52.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:06:52.427" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:06:52.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="641" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:06:52.427" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, the book series by James A. Owen." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:52:48.190" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:52:48.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="642" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:10:28.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jack London wrote short stories, novels and poems. The short stories were published in magazines and in collections such as 'Lost Face' (1910) and 'South Sea Tales' (1911).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His novels include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; (1903)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sea-Wolf&lt;/em&gt; (1904)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;White Fang&lt;/em&gt; (1906)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iron Heel&lt;/em&gt; (1908)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin Eden&lt;/em&gt; (1909)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:22:42.467" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:22:42.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="643" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:10:28.633" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Jack London (1876 – 1916) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:22:42.467" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:22:42.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="644" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:11:00.537" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:11:00.537" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:11:00.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="645" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:11:00.537" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of James A. Owen and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:53:31.173" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:53:31.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="646" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:11:52.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:11:52.043" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:11:52.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="647" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:11:52.043" Score="0" Body="For questions about James Bond, the series created by Ian Fleming." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:55:13.333" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:55:13.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="648" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:12:32.963" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:12:32.963" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:12:32.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="649" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:12:32.963" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) and her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T20:06:50.937" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T20:06:50.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="650" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:13:03.123" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:13:03.123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:13:03.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="651" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:13:03.123" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author Ian McEwan (born 1948), winner of many awards including the Man Booker Prize, or about his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:47:51.217" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:47:51.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="652" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:13:40.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:13:40.457" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:13:40.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="653" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:13:40.457" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Ian Fleming and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:53:04.383" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:53:04.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="654" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:15:15.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:15:15.860" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:15:15.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="655" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:15:15.860" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of James Fenimore Cooper and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:55:16.463" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:55:16.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="656" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:16:33.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T11:16:33.107" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T11:16:33.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="657" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:16:33.107" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Guy de Maupassant and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T09:03:17.073" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T09:03:17.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="659" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:24:13.507" Score="5" ViewCount="4817" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rick Riordan is the author of many series of fictional works about mythology. These include: &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson &amp;amp; the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;, the book set &lt;em&gt;Demigods and Magicians&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he is not solely retelling the classic myths, but also adding new events. This leads me to wonder whether those new events have occurred in his other mythological series. If they do occur in the same universe, how has that been shown in the text and where can that be seen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T23:16:41.797" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T23:16:41.797" Title="Are the different mythological series by Rick Riordan set in the same universe?" Tags="&lt;rick-riordan&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="658" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:25:04.937" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; are definitely in the same universe – they center on Camp Half-Blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;, we can conclude that they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in the same universe, given that there are no less than &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; crossover stories with PJO - &lt;em&gt;The Son of Sobek&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Staff of Serapis&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Crown of Ptolemy&lt;/em&gt; - combined with these quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”So you can’t live in Manhattan?” she asked.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Amos’s brow furrowed as he looked across at the Empire State Building. “Manhattan has other problems. Other gods. It’s best we stay separate.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-&lt;em&gt;The Red Pyramid&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5&lt;sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And sometimes when I looked across the water, I could swear I was seeing things. Sadie laughed about it, but once I thought I saw a flying horse.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;--&lt;em&gt;The Throne of Fire&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined with the fact that Drew Tanaka and Lacy from &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt; make an appearance in &lt;em&gt;The Serpent’s Shadow&lt;/em&gt;, we can conclude that &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; is set it the same universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now for &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is a fairly easy &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, given that Magnus is Annabeth’s cousin, and that Annabeth, Frederick, and Percy Jackson&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; appear in &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase&lt;/em&gt;, and that Apollo’s fall was mentioned to Magnus, and that Annabeth keeps disappearing in &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; for ‘family reasons’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;As evidenced by the fact that at the end of &lt;em&gt;The Hammer of Thor&lt;/em&gt; Annabeth says that ‘I think it’s time for you to meet Percy Jackson’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://riordan.wikia.com/wiki/Riordan_Wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Riordan Wiki&lt;/a&gt;, which I frequently visit/edit, has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://riordan.wikia.com/wiki/Series_Interactions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of all series interactions&lt;/a&gt; that's worth taking a peek at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T11:01:59.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T11:57:53.607" Score="5" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;In almost every single &lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues&lt;/em&gt; book, there are puzzles hidden inside the book, such as on the page numbers, or on the covers. i.e, in &lt;em&gt;The Viper's Nest&lt;/em&gt; (series 1, book 7), starting on page 39 there is Morse Code hidden on the page. And on the front cover, there is the string MDIALAE=RC, and on the back cover this is ARGLEDRGAE, which when stacked it says  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;MDIALAE=RC  &#xA;ARGLEDRGAE&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MADRIGAL LEADER = GRACE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who designs these puzzles?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little bit of random stuff:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can solve these puzzles and type the answer in on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://the39clues.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 39 Clues site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4jppm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4jppm.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:30.563" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T20:52:30.563" Title="Who makes the puzzles hidden inside The 39 Clues books?" Tags="&lt;the-39-clues&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:06:21.727" Score="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bill Watterson has spoken about this on a number of occasions. The very short answer is that his strips obey the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleOfFunny&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rule of funny&lt;/a&gt;, that &lt;strong&gt;Hobbes is a toy when it suits the story for him to be a toy&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;real when it suits the story that he's real&lt;/strong&gt; (for example in the strip below where Hobbes ties Calvin up &lt;em&gt;in a way that he couldn't have accomplished on his own&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Zxap.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Zxap.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Comic with Calvin tied to a chair by Hobbes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WEST:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Well, in a way that says more about Calvin than Hobbes &lt;strong&gt;because Hobbes is implicitly, explicitly just a product of his imagination.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WATTERSON:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But the strip doesn’t assert that. That’s the assumption that adults make because nobody else sees him, sees Hobbes,&#xA;in the way that Calvin does.&lt;/strong&gt; Some reporter was writing a story on&#xA;imaginary friends and they asked me for a comment, and I didn’t do it&#xA;because I really have absolutely no knowledge about imaginary friends.&#xA;It would seem to me, though, that when you make up a friend for&#xA;yourself, you would have somebody to agree with you, not to argue with&#xA;you. &lt;strong&gt;So Hobbes is more real than I suspect any kid would dream up.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WEST:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Well, at the risk of getting into psychobabble, a lot of psychologists would say that children create imaginary friends to play&#xA;out family dramas. So an argument can be just as much a part of an&#xA;imaginary world as, you know, a sort of sentimental, gooey friendship&#xA;can be.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WATTERSON:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Yeah, well, I would hope that the friendship between Calvin and Hobbes is so complex that it would transcend a normal&#xA;fantasy. &lt;strong&gt;The resolution of the question of whether Hobbes is real or&#xA;not doesn’t concern me or interest me, but, hopefully, there’s some&#xA;element of complexity there that will make the relationship&#xA;interesting on a couple of levels.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tcj.com/the-bill-watterson-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bill Watterson Interview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T19:20:46.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="662" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:06:59.097" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:06:59.097" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:06:59.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="663" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:06:59.097" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Chronicles of Narnia, the book series by Clive Staples Lewis." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:52:56.097" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:52:56.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="664" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:08:30.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:08:30.623" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:08:30.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="665" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:08:30.623" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Douglas Adams (1952-2011) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:44:38.763" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:44:38.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="666" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:09:05.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:09:05.933" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:09:05.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="667" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:09:05.933" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Scott Ciencin and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:54:43.160" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:54:43.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="668" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:09:37.573" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (1899-1986), better known as Jorge Luis Borges, was an Argentinian author, translator, and philosopher. Many of his works, such as the short stories published in the collections &lt;em&gt;Ficciones&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;El Aleph&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Aleph&lt;/em&gt;), have fantastical themes and touch on various deep philosophical concepts such as infinity, meaning, and reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading: &lt;em&gt;Borges: a Writer on the Edge&lt;/em&gt; is an academic book about Borges &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.borges.pitt.edu/bsol/bsi0.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that is freely available online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T21:46:38.440" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:46:38.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="669" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:09:37.573" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges or about any of his literary works, most famously his short story collections Ficciones (1944) and The Aleph (1949)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="93" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T21:44:24.017" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:44:24.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="670" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:10:37.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:10:37.687" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:10:37.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="671" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:10:37.687" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Horace McCoy and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:54:19.613" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:54:19.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="672" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:26:07.633" Score="15" ViewCount="9289" Body="&lt;p&gt;This trope appears everywhere in literature - &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; in fantasy. Everywhere you turn, &lt;em&gt;black&lt;/em&gt; means bad and &lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt; means good. This is particularly true when applied to people, or the consequences of peoples' actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; does it. &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of the Black Company&lt;/em&gt; does it. &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; does it. Less recently, &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; does it. &lt;em&gt;Tekkonkinkreet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Golden Age&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Myst&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Belgariad&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A Canticle for Leibowitz&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Heart of Darkness&lt;/em&gt;... in some respects, all of these use the color black to denote and describe which people are not worth trusting, and the consequences of their actions that hurt people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we go back far enough, with peculiarly higher frequency in the non-Western/European world, it seems to disappear as a relied-upon trope. Much of ancient Greek literature, for example, seems to entirely (or nearly entirely) ignore using black as a symbol for evil. Even some modern literature uses it as a neutral symbol, or just as a color signifying the presence of magic with no particular alignment; e.g., &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;. Its use as a reliable trope, then, seems to be maybe deceptively recent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To where should we trace the roots of its popularization in contemporary Western-style literature? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside, I've thought about this question a lot. I'm hoping to find and learn something deeper than the fundamental notion, or basic Googleable ideas, esp. about its Western fantasy popularization.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T15:31:24.907" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T12:01:02.817" Title="Why is black evil and white good?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2366" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:40:40.237" Score="16" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the protagonist, Anton, goes down a country road, disobeying a &quot;wrong way&quot; sign, and finds a skeleton of a fascist chained to his machine gun - a remnant of The Great Patriotic War. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Toshka, what was there, beyond the sign?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A blown-up bridge,” answered Anton. “And the skeleton of a fascist, chained to a machine gun.” He thought a moment and added, “The machine gun had sunk into the ground.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Olena Bormashenko, Gollancz, page 15.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the epilogue Anton's life-long friend Pasha wonders about the significance of this childhood experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Anka,” Pashka said. “Do you remember the anisotropic highway?”&#xA;  Anka frowned. “What highway?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Anisotropic. The one with the do-not-enter sign. Remember, the three of us went there?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I remember. It was Anton who said that it was anisotropic.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That was the time Anton went through the sign, and when he came back, he said that he found a blown-up bridge and the skeleton of a fascist chained to a machine gun.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t remember that,” said Anka. “So what?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I often think about that highway nowadays,” said Pashka. “Like there’s some connection. The highway was anisotropic, like history. You weren’t supposed to go back. But he did go back. And stumbled on a chained skeleton.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, pages 230-231.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the skeleton, and the anisotropic road with the one-way sign, in context of the events in Arkanar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T08:10:23.097" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T22:48:49.517" Title="What is the significance of the anisotropic highway and the skeleton of a fascist chained to a machine gun?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="675" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:47:50.990" Score="18" ViewCount="9546" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the main differences between a novelette, a novella, and a novel? As they sound fairly similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorDisplayName="user8" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:50:15.157" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T18:34:15.063" Title="What is the difference between a Novelette, Novella and Novel?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="674" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:50:49.080" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Thanks to @Standback for making edits)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's to do with how much content there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A novelette&lt;/strong&gt; is longer than a short story, but shorter than a novella. The word count is usually between 7,500 words to 17,500 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A novella&lt;/strong&gt; is longer than a novelette and is sometimes called a long short story or a short novel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A novel&lt;/strong&gt; is longer than a novella and is meant to be read over several days&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason they sound so familiar is that they all come from the Italian word &quot;novella,&quot; feminine of &quot;novello,&quot; which means &quot;new.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no hard-and-fast rules about where the boundaries lie between the forms. This can differ by genre and by simple established convention in readership (for example, readers now expect novels to be much longer than the ~40,000-odd words they used to be).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can take an example from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-categories/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://nebulas.sfwa.org/about-the-nebulas/nebula-rules/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nebula&lt;/a&gt; awards, which have separate award categories for different lengths. They define the categories as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Short Stories: up to 7,500 words&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Novellettes: 7,500 - 17,000&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Novellas: 17,000 - 40,000&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Novels: 40,000 + words &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T18:34:15.063" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T18:34:15.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="676" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:51:53.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T12:51:53.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T12:51:53.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="677" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:51:53.680" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Casual Vacancy, by J.K. Rowling. Use this tag with the [j-k-rowling] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:20:32.037" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:20:32.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="685" CreationDate="2017-01-22T12:53:45.237" Score="4" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Theodore Boone&lt;/em&gt; book series, a primary criminal is Pete Duffy who has committed a murder. Is Pete Duffy based on a specific murderer or is he based on the general trope of a murderer? If he is based on a specific murderer, who is that murderer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:23.190" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T20:52:23.190" Title="Is Pete Duffy based on a specific murderer?" Tags="&lt;john-grisham&gt;&lt;theodore-boone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="516" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:20:15.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (error?) tobacco reference is also found in my (eBook) copy. In-universe there are a few possible options. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's described in &lt;em&gt;Here, There Be Dragons&lt;/em&gt; as a &quot;&lt;em&gt;special cinnamon tobacco &lt;strong&gt;mix&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Presumably it's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mixed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; with something else, possibly chocolate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;John is extremely surprised to see the Professor. Perhaps in his haste and shock he simply misspoke, mistaking cinnamon for chocolate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out-of-universe it's fairly obviously a writing error, perhaps one that will be corrected in a future edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T16:05:28.030" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T16:05:28.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="684" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:23:53.683" Score="11" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that a few comic titles are also referred to as &lt;em&gt;Director's Cut&lt;/em&gt; like DC's &lt;em&gt;Final Crisis 1: Director's Cut&lt;/em&gt;. I know what a Director's Cut is in the context of film, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/1614/directors-cut-editors-cut-theatrical-cut-what-do-these-mean&quot;&gt;discussed here&lt;/a&gt; on our sister site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the meaning of &lt;em&gt;Director's Cut&lt;/em&gt; in the context of comics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:54:04.260" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T17:32:31.950" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Director's Cut&quot; in the context of comics?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="672" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:28:18.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-and-white_dualism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;black and white dualism&lt;/a&gt; is probably the most common dichotomy and can be traced back to Pythagoras' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Opposites&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Table of Opposites&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which lists both good and evil as well a well light and darkness. Usually all of those light/white/day/good are opposed to darkness/black/night/evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you asked for the first occurrence in Western literature, I'd go with Pythagoras and not Confucius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:28:18.807" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="681" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:29:31.480" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does apply to comics, although comics really have no direct correlation to a film director.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is applied to any comic that is a reprint of any particular issue with added commentary by the writer or editor, script pages or production related artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://comicvine.gamespot.com/directors-cut/4015-56076/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comicvine&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Director's Cut comics are special release issues with added content that often includes: writer's commentary, editorials, background information and additional artwork.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-04-23T17:32:31.950" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T17:32:31.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="678" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:44:49.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pete Duffy is based on a &lt;strong&gt;general trope of a murderer, not a specific criminal&lt;/strong&gt;. I haven't been able to find any murderers who murdered their wife for life insurance money, and then could've been sentenced guilty if evidence from an undocumented immigrant was analyzed. In addition, no murderers' first trial (that I've found) ended in a mistrial/retrial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T13:44:49.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2017-01-22T13:47:54.717" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always felt that it was &lt;em&gt;visually symbolic&lt;/em&gt;, that someone who &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;laugh[s] like the letter k&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was simply someone who throws their head back and opens their mouth extremely wide when laughing, so that their head and mouth seems to form a letter &quot;K&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/syI1F.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/syI1F.png&quot; alt=&quot;A side view of a face with a superimposed k&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T02:12:59.177" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T02:12:59.177" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="495" CreationDate="2017-01-22T14:20:33.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song appears to allude to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Our Lady of Guadalupe&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;religious shrine and icon&lt;/a&gt; associated with &lt;strong&gt;the Virgin Mary.&lt;/strong&gt; The lady in the picture is depicted as wearing a green cloak ruffled around her arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;she wears her sleeves all up on her arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wraps herself in rice and greens and other fancy things she bought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her pose (head bowed, in prayer) is one that will be familiar to any Catholic about to eat their dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Said our lady of the tall trees&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Supper's served&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is backed up by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fiddlefreak.com/2012/06/12/preorder-our-lady-of-the-tall-trees/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;album cover&lt;/a&gt; (by Mike Costello) which distinctly resembles the main icon in the shrine and for which it is primarily known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DQMRv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DQMRv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of two pieces of art, which appear to picture Our Lady of The Tall Trees&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T02:14:14.097" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T02:14:14.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="688" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="701" CreationDate="2017-01-22T14:30:41.500" Score="3" ViewCount="2576" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few mentions of Mrs. Jones, primarily in reference to her table cloth. Does she represent something in and of herself? If so, what does Mrs. Jones represent in Animal Farm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T02:01:18.663" Title="What does Mrs. Jones represent in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="698" CreationDate="2017-01-22T14:45:31.220" Score="6" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we look at the map, we can conclude that Lilliput is in the Indian Ocean. Is there any significance to its location in the Indian Ocean? What is that significance, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vk8bP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vk8bP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A map from an edition of *Gulliver&amp;#39;s Travels*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T02:15:27.903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T02:16:03.443" Title="Is there significance to the location of Lilliput in Gulliver's Travels?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T14:59:58.600" Score="9" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt;, is a story by Jonathan Swift that is widely accepted to be a satire. In it when Gulliver visits Lilliput he agrees to a set of articles about his presence, which read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Golbasto Momarem Evlame Gurdilo Shefin Mully Ully Gue, most mighty&#xA;  Emperor of Lilliput, delight and terror of the universe, whose&#xA;  dominions extend five thousand blustrugs (about twelve miles in&#xA;  circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all&#xA;  monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the&#xA;  centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the&#xA;  princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring,&#xA;  comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter: his&#xA;  most sublime majesty proposes to the man-mountain, lately arrived at&#xA;  our celestial dominions, the following articles, which, by a solemn&#xA;  oath, he shall be obliged to perform:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1st, The man-mountain shall not depart from our dominions, without our&#xA;  license under our great seal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2d, He shall not presume to come into our metropolis, without our&#xA;  express order; at which time, the inhabitants shall have two hours&#xA;  warning to keep within doors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3d, The said man-mountain shall confine his walks to our principal&#xA;  high roads, and not offer to walk, or lie down, in a meadow or field&#xA;  of corn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4th, As he walks the said roads, he shall take the utmost care not to&#xA;  trample upon the bodies of any of our loving subjects, their horses,&#xA;  or carriages, nor take any of our subjects into his hands without&#xA;  their own consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;5th, If an express requires extraordinary despatch, the man-mountain&#xA;  shall be obliged to carry, in his pocket, the messenger and horse a&#xA;  six days journey, once in every moon, and return the said messenger&#xA;  back (if so required) safe to our imperial presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;6th, He shall be our ally against our enemies in the island of&#xA;  Blefuscu, and do his utmost to destroy their fleet, which is now&#xA;  preparing to invade us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;7th, That the said man-mountain shall, at his times of leisure, be&#xA;  aiding and assisting to our workmen, in helping to raise certain great&#xA;  stones, towards covering the wall of the principal park, and other our&#xA;  royal buildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;8th, That the said man-mountain shall, in two moons’ time, deliver in&#xA;  an exact survey of the circumference of our dominions, by a&#xA;  computation of his own paces round the coast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly, That, upon his solemn oath to observe all the above articles,&#xA;  the said man-mountain shall have a daily allowance of meat and drink&#xA;  sufficient for the support of 1724 of our subjects, with free access&#xA;  to our royal person, and other marks of our favour.  Given at our&#xA;  palace at Belfaborac, the twelfth day of the ninety-first moon of our&#xA;  reign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this to satirize a specific agreement or only a general satire of European over-formality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T15:45:57.077" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:45:57.077" Title="Is the Man-Mountain Agreement a satire of a specific event?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="693" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:10:46.113" Score="7" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Charles_Augustus_Milverton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; depicts Holmes' and Watson's encounter with Charles Augustus Milverton, a man who is, according to Holmes, &quot;the worst man in London&quot; (he even drives Holmes to burglary!). Given the criminals whom Holmes has had dealings with, this is not a title he bestows lightly, and so it seems likely that either the detective and the blackmailer have met before, or that Holmes has worked on a case involving Milverton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything to suggest that Holmes, before being hired to deal with Milverton, had previously encountered him? If so, what were the circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T15:53:39.510" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:53:39.510" Title="Had Holmes previously encountered Charles Augustus Milverton?" Tags="&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="697" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:43:53.487" Score="12" ViewCount="491" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ice Dragon&lt;/em&gt; is a children's book by George R. R. Martin, about a girl born during the long winter.  The universe shows some similarities to the main universe of ASOIAF, but is it the same universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T12:45:21.543" Title="Is &quot;The Ice Dragon&quot; set in the same universe as &quot;A Song of Ice and Fire&quot;?" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="691" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:44:58.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that Holmes's assessment of Milverton as &quot;the worst man in London&quot; was due less to long experience of the man than to &lt;strong&gt;the extreme revulsion he felt about him&lt;/strong&gt;. It didn't take an exceptionally long study of Milverton and his methods for Holmes to get the gist of the man, and to realise that he was essentially worse, in his effects on others, than nearly any other criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how Holmes first describes the master blackmailer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that's how Milverton impresses me. I've had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After describing to Watson in detail the way Milverton works and the people he has ruined, Holmes concludes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watson notes that Holmes is very worked up, much more than usual:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about Milverton and the nature of his crimes touches Holmes in a way that few criminals can. Note that Holmes doesn't say he's the &lt;em&gt;most dangerous&lt;/em&gt; man in London (a title which, if memory serves, he reserved for Moriarty, with the second most dangerous being Colonel Sebastian Moran), but the &lt;em&gt;worst&lt;/em&gt;. This is a highly subjective evaluation, and likely based more on Holmes's personal revulsion than anything else. Allowing himself to make judgements based on his feelings is somewhat out of character, true, but we see from Watson's line above, not to mention his engagement and burglary later on, that he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; act somewhat out of character when it comes to Milverton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise: &lt;strong&gt;Holmes's evalutation of Milverton is (rather uncharacteristically) based more on his &lt;em&gt;immediate&lt;/em&gt; feeling of disgust than a long rivalry with the man.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;There are also some hints in the timeline of the story which suggest that his acquaintance with Milverton began not long before the story begins. After the encounter with Milverton at the beginning, Holmes puts on one of his disguises and spends &quot;some days&quot; out in Hampstead investigating Milverton. He needs this time to establish a contact in Milverton's household and to get to know the building well enough to successfully execute the burglary 13 days after the start of the story. If he'd already been investigating Milverton for a long time, it seems likely that he might have at least some of these resources already in place, rather than doing the entire thing in 13 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I noticed this quote which I think really clinches the issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Between ourselves, Watson, it's a sporting duel between this fellow Milverton and me. He had, as you saw, the best of the first exchanges, but my self-respect and my reputation are concerned to fight it to a finish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes specifically says that &lt;strong&gt;Watson &quot;saw [...] the first exchanges&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, and Watson's first encounter with Milverton was within this story - at the beginning of the story, Watson hadn't even heard of him. If Holmes and Milverton had encountered each other before, then that meeting wouldn't have been &quot;the first exchanges&quot; between the pair, and Holmes wouldn't have made that statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:44:58.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="692" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:48:52.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not in the same universe. Take it from the author himself, answering the same question in the comment section of his blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, it is not. The world of Ice &amp;amp; Fire did not exist when I wrote THE ICE DRAGON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://grrm.livejournal.com/406858.html?thread=20318026#t20318026&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GRRM&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="67" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:48:52.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="695" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:48:55.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T15:48:55.540" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:48:55.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="696" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:48:55.540" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1964 Soviet science fiction novel, set in the Noon universe, as well as its adaptations. Use with the [strugatsky-brothers] tag and the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T12:30:15.300" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T12:30:15.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="692" CreationDate="2017-01-22T15:49:35.313" Score="18" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No, it is not.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone asked the author this question on &lt;a href=&quot;http://grrm.livejournal.com/406858.html?thread=20265802&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;his LiveJournal page&lt;/a&gt;, and for once he gave a straight answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is The Ice Dragon in the world of A Song of Ice and Fire like the back cover of it says?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GRRM:&lt;/strong&gt; No, it is not. The world of Ice &amp;amp; Fire did not exist when I wrote THE ICE DRAGON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T15:50:20.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="698" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="689" CreationDate="2017-01-22T16:09:41.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not really the being-in-the-Indian-Ocean part, but the location in terms of how close it is to Blefuscu refers to England and France.  They were separated by an 800-yard channel in the book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The math of how big the fictional channel would be if the Lilliputians were 6 feet tall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lilliputians were 6 inches, 1/12 of the size of a 6-foot tall human.  In chapter five, Swift says the channel between Lilliput and Blefuscu is 800 yards wide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The empire of Blefuscu is an island situated to the northeast&#xA;  of Lilliput, from which it is parted only by a channel&#xA;  of eight hundred yards wide. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiplying 800 yards by a factor of 12 gives 9600, which is about 5.45 miles.  For reference, 5 miles is 8800 yards.  The real English Channel is 38000 yards/19 nautical miles across. Even though the measurements aren't the same, it's fairly clear they are supposed to be similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Jonathan Swift was satirizing the &quot;holy wars&quot; over Protestant vs Catholic beliefs, between England and France. They were fighting over breaking eggs in the novels, something Swift apparently sees as equal to the religious wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T02:16:03.443" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T02:16:03.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="348" CreationDate="2017-01-22T16:15:46.213" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;standard&quot; version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt;, the one edited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%AEn-l%C4%93qi-unninni&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sîn-lēqi-unninni&lt;/a&gt;, is dated to somewhere between 1300 BCE and 1000 BCE. Although the epic is far earlier, this is the version that includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Utanapishtim&lt;/a&gt;'s story of the flood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dating of Genesis, however, as many matters that may have some religious significance is not entirely concluded. Depending on who you ask, you will receive answers ranging from 1400 BCE to the 5th century BCE, with the earlier limit of the range stemming from traditional views rather than scientific methods (e.g.  the disputed concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mosaic authorship&lt;/a&gt;). If you accept the more conservative estimations of about 700 BCE, then the flood myth in Gilgamesh is clearly earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand, you wish to allow for the wildly exaggerated traditional datings, then I think you should also permit for a small switch of focus from Gilgamesh to the Akkadian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic of Atra-Hasis&lt;/a&gt;. Atra-Hasis also includes a flood myth, and it's widely accepted&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; that the flood myth in Tablet XI of the aforementioned &quot;standard&quot; version of Gilgamesh derives from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the flood myth in Gilgamesh is not directly comparable to the biblical narrative. In Gilgamesh, the tale of the flood is secondary to the eponymous hero's quest and is severely restricted by its first person narrative; Utanapishtim can only tell us what he personally experienced. One of the more important things we never learn, for example, is the reason for the flood, as, presumably, Utanapishtim was not aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atra-Hasis, on the other hand, provides us with the history of the world before the creation of man, and a fuller story of the deluge, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/q/1274/57&quot;&gt;an explanation of its cause&lt;/a&gt;. It is, therefore, a lot more comparable to Genesis than Gilgamesh, and this I believe is why we should focus on it instead. Following this path will lead us to an even clearer answer to your question as the earliest known record of Atra-Hasis can be dated to around 1646–1626 BCE (during the reign of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammi-Saduqa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ammi-Saduqa&lt;/a&gt;), by its colophon. Thus, Atra-Hasis is earlier even if we accept Moses wrote Genesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I would be remiss not to mention that the other Mesopotamian flood story, the Sumerian tale of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziusudra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ziusudra&lt;/a&gt;, is also older than Genesis. The story is told in a single tablet, that has been dated to around 1600 BCE. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;  &quot;In the intervening years, it is true, it had become clear that what Smith had discovered, the eleventh tablet of the Gilgamesh Epic, was derivative&quot; - Moran, William L. “Atrahasis: The Babylonian Story of the Flood.” Biblica, vol. 52, no. 1, 1971, pp. 51–61. www.jstor.org/stable/42609705.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:19.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T21:24:30.853" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="688" CreationDate="2017-01-22T16:42:40.853" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Orwell explicitly stated that the story of Animal Farm was a retelling of the Russian Revolution. Since the farm represents the &quot;&lt;em&gt;Russian Imperial Regime&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, by extension Farmer Jones is therefore Czar Nicholas II, which logically suggests that his wife, Mrs Jones is acting the part of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Feodorovna_(Alix_of_Hesse)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexandra Feodorovna&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Tsarina of Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Orwell:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;After that, I wanted to do two things. First, I wanted to kill the &quot;Russian myth:&quot; the myth that the Soviet Union was a working&#xA;  model of what a socialist state would be like. That was nothing but a&#xA;  lie. &lt;strong&gt;I wrote a history of the Russian Revolution and called it Animal&#xA;  Farm.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of course, that book tells the story of how the animals rebel against&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;the farmer who runs their farm -- the Russian imperial regime&lt;/strong&gt; -- how&#xA;  they establish a revolution, and how the revolution is then gradually&#xA;  subverted into a new class system in which the pigs, who are the&#xA;  brains of the outfit, become a new, tyrannical ruling class. And the&#xA;  animals find themselves in just as bad a situation as they were in&#xA;  before.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arcticcompass.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/aldous-huxley.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;1984: An Interview with George Orwell&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T00:28:07.567" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T00:28:07.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="707" CreationDate="2017-01-22T16:51:12.750" Score="37" ViewCount="45119" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mad Hatter: 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Have you guessed the riddle yet?' the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'No, I give it up,' Alice replied: 'What’s the answer?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'I haven’t the slightest idea,' said the Hatter&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We never find out in the book the answer, and we don't know if there actually is an answer (from the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the riddle must have come from somewhere, and maybe it does have an answer, or maybe it symbolizes something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it have an answer?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T11:57:06.133" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T11:41:11.433" Title="Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Tags="&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;&lt;alice-in-wonderland&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2017-01-22T16:54:51.713" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The riddle has no (canonical) solution.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author, after having been repeatedly questioned on the subject for nearly two years after the original work was published, eventually came up with an answer for the updated edition which they included in the preface, reproduced below from the 150th Anniversary edition. &lt;strong&gt;Note that there is no answer, merely one that the author devised post-facto&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PREFACE TO THE EIGHTY-SIXTH THOUSAND&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer&#xA;to the Hatter's Riddle (see p. 59) can be imagined, that I may as well&#xA;put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer,&#xA;viz., &amp;quot;Because it can produce a few notes, though they are VERY flat;&#xA;and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;This, however, is&#xA;merely an after-thought: the Riddle, as originally invented, had no&#xA;answer at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=K83sBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT15&amp;amp;lpg=PT15&amp;amp;dq=Alice%27s%20Adventures%20preface%20raven&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=IGlHNJOB7E&amp;amp;sig=IbgablEeU2efH37JNw_dK7grG7c&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi-s_2gq9bRAhVBVRoKHeXxBCgQ6AEIIjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Alice%27s%20Adventures%20preface%20raven&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: 150th Anniversary Edition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various other wits have noted the lack of a true answer and offered their own opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;LEWIS CARROLL himself proposed an answer in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/background/trivia/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1897 final revision of&#xA;Alice's Adventures.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Because it can produce a few notes, though they&#xA;are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; The&#xA;early issues of the revision spell &amp;quot;never&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;nevar&amp;quot;, ie &amp;quot;raven&amp;quot; with&#xA;the wrong end in front.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin Gardner, in More Annotated Alice (1990)&#xA;gave two possible answers, sent in by readers: &amp;quot;both have quills&#xA;dipped in ink&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;because it slopes with a flap&amp;quot;. In 1991, The&#xA;Spectator held a competition for new answers, among the prize winners&#xA;were: &amp;quot;because one has flapping fits and the other fitting flaps&amp;quot;;&#xA;&amp;quot;because one is good for writing books and the other better for biting&#xA;rooks&amp;quot;; and &amp;quot;because a writing desk is a rest for pens and a raven is&#xA;a pest for wrens&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Dr) &lt;a href=&quot;http://textualities.net/author/selwyn-goodacre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selwyn Goodacre&lt;/a&gt;, Editor, Journal of the Lewis Carroll Society,&#xA;Swadlincote, Derbyshire.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2083,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Any possible solutions to the Mad Hatter's conundrum: Why is a raven like a writing-desk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same 'Guardian Newspaper - notes and queries' page contains an extended quote from John Fisher's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Magic-Lewis-Carroll-John-Fisher/dp/0140040641&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Magic of Lewis Carroll&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;JOHN FISHER, in his book &amp;quot;The Magic of Lewis Carroll&amp;quot; (Thomas Nelson&#xA;1973, Penguin 1975), quotes Carroll's own answer, supplied in a&#xA;preface to the 1896 edition of &amp;quot;Alice in Wonderland&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Enquiries have&#xA;been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the&#xA;Hatter's riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here&#xA;what seems to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: &lt;strong&gt;'Because it can&#xA;produce few notes, tho [sic] they are very flat; and it is never put&#xA;with the wrong end in front!' This, however, is merely an&#xA;afterthought; the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at&#xA;all.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Fisher also quotes Sam Loyd's solution, in his posthumous&#xA;&amp;quot;Cyclopedia of Puzzles&amp;quot;, published in 1914: &amp;quot;The notes for which they&#xA;are noted are not noted for being musical notes.&amp;quot; Fisher continues:&#xA;&amp;quot;Loyd also reminded the world that 'Poe wrote on both' and that 'bills&#xA;and tales are among their characteristics.'&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2083,00.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Any possible solutions to the Mad Hatter's conundrum: Why is a raven like a writing-desk?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T18:12:27.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="704" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:03:17.193" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the novel &lt;em&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; written by English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the name Lewis Carroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T12:44:25.073" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T12:44:25.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="705" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:03:17.193" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865) by Lewis Carroll. Not to be used for questions about screen adaptations (except as they relate to the book) or about the companion/sequel 'Through the Looking Glass'. Use in conjunction with [lewis-carroll]." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:57:53.887" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:57:53.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:10:42.380" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's open to many possible interpretations.&lt;/strong&gt; Lewis Carroll intended it to be little more than a joke, with no real answer, but his readers bugged him so much that eventually he proposed an answer, which he included in the preface to the 1896 (some sources say 1897) edition of &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Enquiries have been so often addressed to me, as to whether any answer to the Hatter's Riddle can be imagined, that I may as well put on record here what seems to me to be a fairly appropriate answer, viz: &lt;strong&gt;'Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!'&lt;/strong&gt; This, however, is merely an afterthought; &lt;strong&gt;the Riddle, as originally invented, had no answer at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1173/why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; for this quote; emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Originally, it was supposed to be a little funnier than that. Carroll spelled 'never,' as 'nevar' — 'raven' spelled backwards — but a proofreader erased the inverted pun before it was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://io9.gizmodo.com/5872014/the-answer-to-the-most-famous-unanswerable-fantasy-riddle&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since the riddle as originally written was intended to have no answer, the solution provided by Carroll in later years is no more canonical than any other. So an answer to your question would be incomplete without mentioning some of the many other solutions which have been proposed over the years, several of which are (IMHO) better than Carroll's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because Poe wrote on both.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- Sam Loyd, &lt;em&gt;Cyclopedia of Puzzles&lt;/em&gt; (1914)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because it slopes with a flap.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- Cyril Pearson, &lt;em&gt;Twentieth Century Standard Puzzle Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because there is a b in both, and because there is an n in neither.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- Aldous Huxley, “Ravens and Writing Desks”, &lt;em&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/em&gt;, September 1928&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because it bodes ill for owed bills.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- Francis Huxley, &lt;em&gt;The Raven and the Writing Desk&lt;/em&gt; (1976)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because one has flapping fits and the other has fitting flaps.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- Peter Veale&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because one is good for writing books and the other better for biting rooks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;–- George Simmers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because a writing desk is a rest for pens and a raven is a pest for wrens.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;–- Tony Weston&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the above bullet points taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://manganpaper.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/solutions-to-a-famous-raven-riddle/&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T17:10:42.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="708" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:12:05.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T17:12:05.390" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T17:12:05.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="709" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:12:05.390" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of the Italian novelist Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016) or his life as a writer. He is best known for his novels &quot;The Name of the Rose&quot; and &quot;Foucault's Pendulum&quot;. Use with [italian-literature] for questions about specific works." OwnerUserId="146" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T00:00:54.080" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:00:54.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="710" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:16:53.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T17:16:53.813" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T17:16:53.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="711" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:16:53.813" Score="0" Body="For questions related to Romanian-French playwright and dramatist Eugène Ionesco and his works. " OwnerUserId="146" LastEditorUserId="146" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T00:04:40.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T00:04:40.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="774" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:21:03.307" Score="12" ViewCount="8879" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Cask of Amontillado&lt;/em&gt;, Montresor traps Fortunato in the catacombs, but his motives are not explicitly explained. Montresor does allude to some wrongs committed against him by Fortunato. Is it possible to glean something from literary analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="134" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T23:20:44.547" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T13:57:19.607" Title="Why did Montresor want to kill Fortunato?" Tags="&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T17:30:56.343" Score="8" ViewCount="761" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though David Mitchell's novels differ wildly in style and substance, all occur within the same universe, with links between them - some subtle, some very central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the books are meant to be read as a series, in one particular sequence. But, are there any books which will spoil other books, or books which won't make sense without something that's been established in a previous book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I read the books in any order I like, or are there combinations or sequences that I should avoid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T16:08:45.667" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T16:08:45.667" Title="Can I read David Mitchell's books in any order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;david-mitchell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="237" CreationDate="2017-01-22T20:29:51.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;He was probably familiar with Alexander Pope's version, which was the prestigious version at the time.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; It's likely that Keats wasn't enamored with this version. He was famously critical of 18th century poets, thinking their poetry too rule-bound and stifled. He expresses some of these criticisms in the poem &lt;em&gt;Sleep and Poetry&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a sc[h]ism&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nurtured by foppery and barbarism,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made great Apollo blush for this his land.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Men were thought wise who could not understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His glories: with a puling infant’s force&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They sway’d about upon a rocking horse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And thought it Pegasus. (&lt;em&gt;Sleep and Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, 181-187)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, Keats compares 18th century poets to infants riding upon a wooden horse, thinking it to be Pegasus. That's a pretty biting metaphor. This criticism made Byron quite angry with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But ye were dead&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To things ye knew not of,—were closely wed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To musty laws lined out with wretched rule&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And compass vile: so that ye taught a school&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A thousand handicraftsmen wore the mask&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And did not know it,—no, they went about,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Holding a poor, decrepid standard out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mark’d with most flimsy mottos, and in large&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The name of one Boileau! (&lt;em&gt;Sleep and Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, 193-206)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above, the same criticism is repeated in the lines &quot;were closely wed / To musty laws lined out with wretched rule / And compass vile&quot;. Keats attributes the deterioration of English poetry partly to Boileau, a French poet and critic of late 17th century. Boileau published a famous book, &lt;em&gt;L'Art poétique&lt;/em&gt;, which influenced English literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be useful to compare Pope's version with that of Chapman's.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The below passages correspond to the same account in the Iliad, a description of Diomedes' armor and ferocity. You can see how Chapman's line had more syllables (fourteen). His line is also a lot freer, not always punctuated at the end as we find in Pope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;High on his helm celestial lightnings play,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His beamy shield emits a living ray;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Th’ unwearied blaze incessant streams supplies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like the red star that fires th’ autumnal skies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When fresh he rears his radiant orb to sight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And bathed in Ocean shoots a keener light.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such glories Pallas on the Chief bestow’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such, from his arms, the fierce effulgence flow’d:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Onward she drives him, furious to engage,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where the fight burns, and where the thickest rage. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/203/172.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pope's Iliad&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From his bright helm and shield did burn a most unwearied fire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like rich Autumnus’ golden lamp, whose brightness men admire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Past all the other host of stars, when, with his cheerful face&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fresh wash’d in lofty Ocean waves, he doth the skies enchase.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To let whose glory lose no sight, still Pallas made him turn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where tumult most express’d his pow’r, and where the fight did burn. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://fiftywordsforsnow.com/ebooks/chapman/iliad1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapman's Homer&lt;/a&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I think that Keats was well aware of Pope's translation before reading Chapman. But I'm inclined to think that Keats was not enamored with Pope's translation, as, by his own admission, it wasn't until reading Chapman that he gained an appreciation for Homer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;em&gt;Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2A&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T20:29:51.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="717" CreationDate="2017-01-22T20:39:47.163" Score="8" ViewCount="305349" Body="&lt;p&gt;As established in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/658/are-the-different-mythological-series-by-rick-riordan-set-in-the-same-universe&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, all of Rick Riordan's mythological series take place in a single universe. I have not read any of his books, but this gave me a question. If I were to read the books it would be my first time reading them and I would intend to read all of the books at once. In what order should Rick Riordan's mythological series be read to make the most sense, and what is the chronological order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T09:35:44.130" Title="In what order should Rick Riordan's mythological series be read to make the most sense, and what is the chronological order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;rick-riordan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="720" CreationDate="2017-01-22T20:40:53.517" Score="12" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ernest Hemingway's memoir, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Moveable_Feast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, there are several references to hunger, both physically and metaphorically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are so many sorts of &lt;strong&gt;hunger&lt;/strong&gt;. In the spring there are more.&#xA;  But that’s gone now. Memory is &lt;strong&gt;hunger&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had&#xA;  finished and there was no question of &lt;strong&gt;hunger&lt;/strong&gt; any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is necessary to handle yourself better when you have to cut down on&#xA;  food so you will not get too much &lt;strong&gt;hunger&lt;/strong&gt;-thinking. &lt;strong&gt;Hunger&lt;/strong&gt; is&#xA;  good discipline and you learn from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the title of the memoir was taken from a quote from Hemingway as he was describing Paris in the 1920's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then&#xA;  wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for&#xA;  Paris is &lt;strong&gt;a movable feast.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the title of &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt; given to the memoir due to the numerous hunger references?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T00:07:25.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T00:07:25.733" Title="Are the numerous hunger references attributed to the title of A Moveable Feast?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;a-moveable-feast&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="715" CreationDate="2017-01-22T20:58:54.697" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning:&lt;/strong&gt; This is &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reminder: &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt; deals with the Greek gods. &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt; deals with the Greek and Roman gods. &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; deals with the Egyptian gods. &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard&lt;/em&gt; deals with the Norse gods. &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; has Greek and Roman gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning&lt;/strong&gt;: There may be some slight spoilers included here. I tried to put them in spoiler quotes, so don't click those if you haven't read them yet. There &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be a few minor spoilers not marked, but I tried to mark them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will present two orders here, chronological order and the order in which they should be read first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Order in which they should be read first&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt; in chronological order, but it's ordered more in how they came out and how they will make the most sense. When there are 3-5 books just listed in order, that's the order that the series goes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy  Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lighting Thief&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sea of Monsters&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Titan's Curse&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Battle of the Labyrinth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the original series; therefore, it should be read first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now you should read the short story collection &lt;em&gt;The Demigod Files&lt;/em&gt;, as most of the stories take place during/after &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Son of Neptune&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mark of Athena&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of Hades.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Blood of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the sequel series to &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, and is a continuation of the stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After this would be a good time to read &lt;em&gt;The Demigod Diaries&lt;/em&gt;, a collection of short stories, which have stories from &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the obvious part, as those are all with the same cast of characters. Now..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Red Pyramid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Throne of Fire&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Serpent's Shadow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are sort-of in the same universe (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/659/58&quot;&gt;see the other question&lt;/a&gt;) but they are with entirely different characters. The series makes several references to &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, though, so read that first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, you should read the crossovers, as they only make sense if you've read both &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Son of Sobek&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Staff of Serapis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Crown of Ptolemy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, you should read &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard&lt;/em&gt; together, in chronological order, as they take place at the same time and may have spoilers if not read together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; is the third Camp Half-Blood series. &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard&lt;/em&gt; focuses on Annabeth's cousin, Magnus, and Norse Mythology, and is sort of a continuation of &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;, as it makes several references, and Annabeth appears in the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is as in chronological order as I can figure out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trials: The Hidden Oracle&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Magnus: The Sword of Summer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Magnus: The Hammer of Thor&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trials: The Dark Prophecy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trials: The Burning Maze&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Magnus: The Ship of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trials: The Tyrant's Tomb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trials: The Tower of Nero&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Chronological order&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chronological order is great for a re-read, and probably isn't &lt;em&gt;bad&lt;/em&gt; if you're on a first read, but the above is better for first ;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Diaries: The Diary of Luke Castellan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a story set 5 years before the events of &lt;em&gt;The Lightning Thief&lt;/em&gt;, focusing on Annabeth Chase, Thalia Grace, and Luke Castellan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lighting Thief&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the beginning of the stories, which introduced us to Camp Half-Blood and all our favorite characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is set a year after &lt;em&gt;The Lightning Thief&lt;/em&gt;, and focuses on Percy &amp;amp; Co's adventure in the Sea of Monsters, aka the Bermuda Triangle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is set half a year after &lt;em&gt;The Sea of Monsters&lt;/em&gt;, and focuses on Percy &amp;amp; Co's adventure with the Hunters of Artemis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is set half a year after &lt;em&gt;The Titan's Curse&lt;/em&gt;, and focuses on Percy &amp;amp; Co's adventure in the Labyrinth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Files: Percy Jackson and the Stolen Chariot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story, set sometime in between &lt;em&gt;The Sea of Monsters&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on Percy and Clarisse La Rue's attempt to recover Ares's stolen chariot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Files: Percy Jackson and the Bronze Dragon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story set sometime in between &lt;em&gt;The Sea of Monsters&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on Percy and Annabeth's attempt to rescue Charles Beckendorf from giant ants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Files: Percy Jackson and the Sword of Hades&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story set in between &lt;em&gt;The Battle of the Labyrinth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on Percy &amp;amp; Co's attempt to recover Hades's new sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Kane Chronicles: The Red Pyramid&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first book in the &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; series. As near as I can figure, it takes place around now, in between &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt; - it's set in December, and working backwards from &lt;em&gt;The Serpent's Shadow&lt;/em&gt; brings us here. It focuses on Sadie and Carter Kane's attempt to stop Set from blowing up North America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Kane Chronicles: The Throne of Fire&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the second book in the &lt;em&gt;The Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;. It's set in March - about three months after &lt;em&gt;The Red Pyramid&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on Carter and Sadie's attempt to wake the god Ra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is set a year after &lt;em&gt;The Battle of the Labyrinth&lt;/em&gt;, and is the final smackdown in the Second Titan War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Diaries: Percy Jackson and the Staff of Hermes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story set a month after &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;, and focuses on Percy and Annabeth's attempt to recover Hermes'caduceus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Diaries: Son of Magic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story written by Haley Riordan, Rick Riordan's son, and is canon. It focuses on what happened to an enemy demigod after the Second Titan War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Kane Chronicles: The Serpent's Shadow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last book in the &lt;em&gt;Kane Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; series. It's set in the fall, and references events from &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt; (which is set in the winter), but in a way that indicates that those events &lt;em&gt;haven't&lt;/em&gt; taken place yet, so it takes place as near as I can figure the fall before the winter events of &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first book in the &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt; series. It focuses on Leo Valdez, Piper McLean, and Jason Grace's attempt to free the goddess Hera. It is set around six months after &lt;em&gt;The Last Olympian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Demigod Diaries: Leo Valdez and the Quest for Buford&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story that focuses on Leo's attempt to recover a part before his project destroys Camp Half-Blood, while simultaneously dealing with the Maenads, the crazed followers of Dionysus. It's set about a month after &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the second book. It focuses on Percy's experience with the Roman Camp Jupiter. It's set around 5/6 months after &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third book. This starts around -5 minutes after the end of &lt;em&gt;The Son of Neptune&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on the Seven of the Prophecy trying to avoid Camp Jupiter, and Annabeth's attempt to recover the Athena Parthenos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is set two days after &lt;em&gt;The Mark of Athena&lt;/em&gt;, and focuses on (spoilers for the end of &lt;em&gt;The Mark of Athena&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Annabeth and Percy's journey through Tartarus,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Hazel's learning how to use the Mist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set around a month later, this is the final smackdown with Gaea and the Giants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crossovers are set after &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;, according to Uncle Rick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Kane Chronicles: The Son of Sobek.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First crossover. Carter and Percy fight a giant crocodile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Kane Chronicles: The Staff of Serapis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second crossover. Annabeth and Sadie fight the god Serapis. Set a few months after &lt;em&gt;The Son of Sobek&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Kane Chronicles: The Crown of Ptolemy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third and final crossover. Set a few months after &lt;em&gt;The Staff of Serapis&lt;/em&gt;. Carter, Sadie, Annabeth, and Percy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; fight Setne, who escaped in &lt;em&gt;The Serpent's Shadow&lt;/em&gt;, who's trying to make himself a god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first book in &lt;em&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard.&lt;/em&gt; Magnus and his friends rebind the wolf Fenris. Set a few months after &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Trials of Apollo: The Hidden Oracle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the first book in &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt;. Apollo falls to the Earth as a human for punishment, and must fix the broken Oracles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Hammer of Thor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second book. Magnus and friends must recover Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, which has been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Trials of Apollo: The Dark Prophecy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second book. Apollo must fix another Oracle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Trials of Apollo: The Burning Maze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continues Apollo's journey as Lester Papadopoulos. Gets more into Meg's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Ship of the Dead&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Final smackdown with Loki. (The end subtly references something from &lt;em&gt;The Burning Maze&lt;/em&gt;, so putting it here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Trials of Apollo: The Tyrants Tomb&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally have not read this one yet, but it comes directly after &lt;em&gt;The Burning Maze&lt;/em&gt;. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Trials of Apollo: The Tower of Nero&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Release date: September 29, 2020.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All information in this answer came from my own reading of all of these books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top order has been made depending on how the information has been given, such as the introduction of characters, plot points, etc. This ends up mostly being in the order that Rick Riordan released them in, with a few minor changes that take into account later books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few stories that I didn't include here, these being &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson's Greek Gods&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes&lt;/em&gt;, and the stories included in the app.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Gods/Heroes&lt;/em&gt; can be read at any time, as they are the ancient Greek legends, not part of Percy's story. The stories that come with the app aren't necessary for the others, but if you want, read those any time after &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, as that's what you need to understand those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11717" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T09:35:44.130" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T09:35:44.130" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2947" CreationDate="2017-01-22T21:07:44.893" Score="8" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;For someone who wrote very autobiographical novels to the point of receiving death threats for his &lt;em&gt;Look Homeward, Angel&lt;/em&gt;, I wonder whether he wrote a diary. Did he? If so, does it contradict any of his novels significantly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T10:53:23.737" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T10:53:23.737" Title="Did Thomas Wolfe keep a diary?" Tags="&lt;diary&gt;&lt;thomas-wolfe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8946" CreationDate="2017-01-22T21:26:27.663" Score="9" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Agatha Christie's detective story &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;, was Mrs Croft really an invalid?  Or did she just pretend to be one?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We find out in the ending of the novel that Mrs Croft was a criminal.  She could get away with pretending, because she came recently from Australia, so nobody really knew her past history.  Pretending to be an invalid could give her an easy alibi, and indeed that method was used in at least one other Christie story.  However, the ending doesn't seem to reveal whether this was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T13:33:34.590" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T21:53:40.810" Title="Was Mrs Croft really an invalid?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;peril-at-end-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="716" CreationDate="2017-01-22T21:28:32.887" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final choice to make &quot;A Moveable Feast&quot; the title was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/12/AR2006121201712.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;made by Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary&lt;/a&gt;. It was supposedly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/opinion/20hotchner.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggested by Hemingway's friend, A. E. Hostner&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Hemingway quote is certainly the source of the title, the phrase &quot;A Moveable Feast&quot; clearly predates Hemingway. It originally referred to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moveable_feast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Roman Catholic feast not associated with a specific day of the year&lt;/a&gt;. If we look at the phrase in a secular context, it can be interpreted as a celebration that can happen at any time. We can see this characterization fall into place when we consider the French title of the book, &lt;em&gt;Paris est une fête&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Paris is a party&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hemingway's life in &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt; is, of course, quite the party. Consider first the company he keeps. Visits to the always entertaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gertrude Stein&lt;/a&gt; (along with her partner Alice Toklas) become a common staple and a source of news from and of other American expatriates. Dinners and other social events with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald&lt;/a&gt; and his wife Zelda also played an important part. The Fitzgeralds, if I remember correctly, were not ones to refuse a drink, and Hemingway was influenced by them. Their travels to Spain and coastal France led to further trips there for Hemingway, leading to his famous novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sun Also Rises&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important element of the book is the classic Parisian café. Cafés could were sanctuaries for Hemingway, sources of company as well as sources of solitude and places to write. I'd suggest that it is not food that connects the cafés to the title, but rather simply the luxury of being able to sit, drink, and write at one's pleasure. Hemingway's leisurely walks through the streets once in a while - often ending at a café or bookstore - also allowed him time to think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do agree that the idea of an eternal Paris - perhaps even an eternal Parisian spring - is expressed quite nicely by the quote. Recall the title of the last chapter: &quot;There is Never Any End to Paris&quot;. Set as the Hemingway family vacations in the Alps, it marks the end of Hemingway's celebratory time in Paris as one of the young writers of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost Generation&lt;/a&gt;. He has matured, both as a man and as a writer (He then dates &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Pfeiffer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pauline Pfeiffer&lt;/a&gt;, which leads to the end of his first marriage, and a different kind of end to the period). The chapter also marks the beginning of the end of the Roaring Twenties as a whole, leading up to the worldwide &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Depression&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T00:01:26.943" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T00:01:26.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="721" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="724" CreationDate="2017-01-22T21:28:42.740" Score="3" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my centennial edition of &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; by George Orwell, his bio states that he joined the Burmese Indian Imperial Police stating,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, George Orwell satirizes the Russian Revolution, which most definitely involved imperialist elements. Is imperialism satirized in &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;? If so, how is it satirized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-22T21:31:52.187" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T22:57:56.247" Title="Are there any motifs or symbols related to imperialism in Animal Farm?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="770" CreationDate="2017-01-22T22:15:48.627" Score="27" ViewCount="3051" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9/did-arthur-conan-doyle-code-holmes-and-watson-as-a-gay-couple&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it is established that Sherlock Holmes, from the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was asexual and in explaining that it is stated that he showed very little emotion in general. This led me to wonder if he was religious in any of the books. Based on the text of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, do we know if Sherlock Holmes was religious? If so, how was this displayed in his actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T16:53:39.013" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T12:30:25.593" Title="Is Sherlock Holmes religious?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T22:27:56.993" Score="10" ViewCount="833" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author of &lt;em&gt;The Dictionary of the Khazars&lt;/em&gt;, Milorad Pavic, published two editions: the Male Edition, and the Female Edition of the Dictionary. The two sections critically differ in only a few sentences, in one passage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Don't worry, these aren't spoilers. The Dictionary even recommends that you read it in whatever order occurs to you to do so! ;) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Female Edition has the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. As he passed them to me, his thumb brushed mine and I trembled from the touch. I had the sensation that our past and our future were in our fingers and that they had touched. And so, when I began to read the proffered pages, I at one moment lost the train of thought in the text and drowned it in my own feelings. In these seconds of absence and self-oblivion, centuries passed with every read but uncomprehended and unabsorbed line, and when, after a few moments, I came to and re-established contact with the text, I knew that the reader who returns from the open seas of his feelings is no longer the same reader who embarked on that sea only a short while ago. I gained and learned more by not reading than by reading those pages, and when I asked Dr. Muawia where he had got them he said something that astonished me even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Male Edition has the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And he gave me a few of the Xeroxed sheets of paper lying on the table in front of him. I could have pulled the trigger then and there. There wouldn't be a better moment. There was only one lone witness present in the garden - and he was a child. But that's not what happened. I reached out and took those exciting sheets of paper, which I enclose in this letter. Taking them instead of firing my gun, I looked at those Saracen fingers with their nails like hazelnuts and I thought of the tree Halevi mentions In his book on the Khazars. I thought how each and every one of us is just such a tree: the taller we grow toward the sky, through the wind and rain toward God, the deeper we must sink our roots through the mud and subterranean waters toward hell. With these thoughts in my mind, I read the pages given me by the green-eyed Saracen. They shattered me, and in disbelief I asked Dr. Muawill where he had got them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all but the first sentence and part of the last one are different)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's it. The rest of the books are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the metatextual significance of these two passages? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:15:33.917" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:15:33.917" Title="Why did the author of The Dictionary of the Khazars publish a &quot;male&quot; and &quot;female&quot; edition, and what's the significance of the textual differences?" Tags="&lt;metafiction&gt;&lt;milorad-pavic&gt;&lt;serbian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="721" CreationDate="2017-01-22T22:57:56.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Orwell doesn't satirize imperialism, but he seems to say it doesn't work well.  He acknowledges it's flaws, primarily the fact that the people aren't too happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the book, Mr. Jones is a successful farmer. His animals aren't being mistreated, though they are treated as animals and thus not equal to humans. They are mostly content (not really happy though), but they &lt;em&gt;jump&lt;/em&gt; at the chance to had a 'democratic' group (nation? farmyard? barnyard?) of animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Orwell's mind, imperialism may not be the best system, but it's certainly productive. However, it's vulnerable to revolutions such as the pig's revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Orwell appears to be satirizing England/the US and Germany with Mr. Pilkington and Frederick, not really their political systems specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T22:57:56.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="723" CreationDate="2017-01-22T23:13:12.690" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short of publicity stunts, there's not really anything clear-cut as to the differences.  However, it's likely a publicity stunt due to this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the MALE EDITION of the Dictionary. The FEMALE edition is almost identical. But NOT quite. Be warned that ONE paragraph is crucially different. The choice is yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the little paragraph on my copy of this book.  I only have the male edition. But according to google, the female edition is the same with swapped gender words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably a gimmick, though you can definitely read something into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry to just quote something, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/internetnation/lexicographic&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; has the best summary of it I could find. I wrote this answer, looked up what other people said, and then decided to include this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gender stereotypes are at work here, the aggression expressed in the male edition countered by the more emotionally marked reaction in the female edition. The difference between the two attitudes is all the more remarkable since they emanate from the same person, Dr. Dorothea Schulz. The determining difference is Dr. Schulz’s decision to read the Xeroxed sheets in the male edition, and not to read them in the female. The former course leads to dismay, and the hopelessness of any redemption; the latter to serenity and an expectation of harmony.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR of this answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are definitely gender stereotypes here, of a more violent male passage vs a gentle female one. However, it's also a different resolution of the narrative. You can think of it as saying &quot;gentleness will lead to a better end&quot;, but again it's unclear if this is what the author intended.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also highly likely it was just a publicity stunt. Heck, if you even asked this question it sorta worked.  Who knows, maybe the author intended people to read stuff into it that he didn't write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T23:13:12.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="614" CreationDate="2017-01-22T23:36:38.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Guardians are a group similar to the Cahills and Vespers, their job is to guard the pieces of the doomsday device.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://39clues.wikia.com/wiki/Guardians&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;39 Clues wiki page&lt;/a&gt;, they protect the pieces of the Doomsday Device and they move them from place to place until they find the right place to hide it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only known living guardian is Atticus, though his half-brother Jake may also be one.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the locations of the pieces of the doomsday device being unknown, it's possible if not likely that they were known before all of the other were killed/died.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-22T23:36:38.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-22T23:50:31.863" Score="14" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, many stories told fit &quot;A Hero's Journey&quot; - that's the whole point of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Lucas was famous for explicitly making the Star Wars story &lt;strong&gt;based&lt;/strong&gt; on Campbell's checklist and acknowledging that fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the first work of literature (that wasn't a Star Wars script :) which explicitly used Campbell's &quot;A Hero's Journey&quot; as a checklist, as acknowledged by the creator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T20:50:28.413" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:50:28.413" Title="What was the first book that explicitly used &quot;A Hero's Journey&quot; as a checklist?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1143" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:02:02.287" Score="11" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a long time ago that I read &lt;em&gt;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance&lt;/em&gt; and I vaguely recall that Phaedrus came up with a final definition of quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried skimming through the book to try and find it again, but I've come up dry and I'm wondering if my memory is not correct. Did Phaedrus come up with a definition, and if so, what was it? My recollection is that it was one or two sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="174" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T20:13:29.360" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T20:13:29.360" Title="Did Phaedrus derive a final definition of quality?" Tags="&lt;zen-and-art-of-motorcycle-maint&gt;&lt;robert-m-pirsig&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="730" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="731" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:12:26.780" Score="8" ViewCount="1876" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's final Sherlock Holmes novel, &quot;The Valley of Fear&quot;, is notable for being the only story other than the short story &lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt; where Professor Moriarty plays a direct role. We know that the &quot;The Valley of Fear&quot; is set before &lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;, even though it was written afterwards. I'm wondering if it's possible to more accurately date the novel, within the fictional chronology of Sherlock Holmes stories. If, for example, there are references to older cases Sherlock and Watson solved.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do realize that Moriarty was solely intended as a device to kill off Holmes, I would like to get a vague idea of how long Holmes was aware of the existence of &quot;the famous scientific criminal&quot;.             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T01:24:11.463" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T10:49:12.623" Title="When do the events in The Valley of Fear take place?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="730" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:23:36.930" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter I, we have a rough indication of the year, when Inspector MacDonald arrives (p. 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those were the early days at the end of the ’80’s, when Alec MacDonald was far from having attained the national fame which he has now achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, this falls around the time of one of Doyle's earliest works, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sign_of_the_Four&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, set in 1888. Now, at the end of the first part, Watson asks readers to &quot;journey back some twenty years in time&quot; for the second part of the story, which takes place in 1874 and 1875. Clearly, the first part can't take place in 1895 because Moriarty was dead by then - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Problem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; takes place in 1891. So if we assume that &quot;twenty years&quot; is an approximation, we can place &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; at 1888 or 1889.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would place the story at 1889, given that it's a better approximation, but Watson appears to be living with Holmes at the time. In the epilogue, they receive a letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then one morning there came an enigmatic note slipped into our letter box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is further supported when it is confirmed that Mrs. Hudson is still the pair's landlady. &lt;strike&gt;Dr. Watson married sometime in 1889, meaning that the events took place sometime that year or in 1888 - possibly 1888.&lt;/strike&gt; It appears that Watson married in 1888, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8124/71&quot;&gt;as per &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can be more specific as to the day. Holmes notes that he ordered the new edition of Whitaker’s Almanac because it is January 7th of the new year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some evidence here and there that Holmes has known about Moriarty for perhaps a few years. It must not have been too long, because while when Holmes first mentions Moriarty (p. 1), Watson exclaims that he has heard about the criminal before (from Holmes) - although in &lt;em&gt;The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;, he states that he has never heard of him! Likewise, the police are likely unaware of Moriarty's doings. MacDonald tells Holmes that Scotland Yard and other agencies have a favorable impression of the Professor (p. 5):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . . we think in the C. I. D. that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor. I made some inquiries myself about the matter. He seems to be a very respectable, learned, and talented sort of man.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes changes this impression by pointing out that Moriarty could not afford several luxuries than he has - a painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze, for instance - on a professor's salary. This may be the first time the police consider Moriarty a potential criminal, which is admittedly unsurprising, given that Moriarty's web keeps him well-hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes does say that he has been in Moriarty's rooms three time on various occasions, though he has yet to meet the Professor himself. He also mentions that he has &quot;dozens of exiguous threads&quot; that implicate Moriarty in various crimes, and that it could take MacDonald anywhere from three months to two years to study him. This suggests that Holmes has been aware of Moriarty's activities for some time - possibly a few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting this all together, I think we can estimate that Holmes knew about Moriarty since at least, say, 1885 or 1886.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2018-08-13T18:43:54.317" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T18:43:54.317" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="732" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:56:30.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rick Riordan, born June 5, 1964, is an American author. His first books were the &lt;em&gt;Tres Navarre&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt; series, his most famous work, started as a bedtime story for his son, Haley Riordan, who had ADHD and Dyslexia.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series now has 5 books, with several spin-off series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/08/percy-jackson-rick-riordan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/08/percy-jackson-rick-riordan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T10:43:51.597" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T10:43:51.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="733" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T00:56:30.753" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the American young-adult, mythology author Rick Riordan (born 1964), or his novels. These include Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Heroes of Olympus, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, The Trials of Apollo, and The Kane Chronicles, along with his adult series Tres Navarre." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:08:53.160" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:08:53.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T01:15:47.253" Score="8" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last of the Light Brigade&lt;/em&gt;, by Rudyard Kipling refers to Alfred Tennyson and his poem, &lt;em&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade&lt;/em&gt;. Do we know if Alfred Tennyson ever read &lt;em&gt;The Last of the Light Brigade&lt;/em&gt;? If so, what was his opinion of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T01:15:47.253" Title="Did Alfred Tennyson ever read The Last of the Light Brigade?" Tags="&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;&lt;last-of-the-light-brigade&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="748" CreationDate="2017-01-23T01:16:57.757" Score="14" ViewCount="948" Body="&lt;p&gt;A central theme in Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; is that stars, when they fall from the sky, take on the shape of human beings. One of the main characters is a fallen star who ends up living on earth as a human woman, with a human mate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is reminiscent of Ramandu in C.S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, a fallen star who lives on earth as a human man (and even has a daughter) but will eventually return to the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Neil Gaiman directly influenced by C.S. Lewis in this?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm aware that the notion of fallen stars becoming people is an ancient one, but it's still possible that there's some direct correspondence we can trace between these two works. Answers might be based on quotes from Gaiman on the issue (if any exist), or analysis of the two texts, or perhaps analysis of this trope in literature as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T12:50:15.700" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:35:28.450" Title="Was Neil Gaiman's Stardust influenced by C.S. Lewis?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;stardust&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T02:47:35.257" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most striking things about &lt;em&gt;Cryptonomicon&lt;/em&gt; by Neal Stephenson was the fact that the novel's text was full of mathematical formulas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways, this approach resembles, for example, inclusion of in-depth military technology porn in Clancy-esque technothrillers. But mathematical formulas seem to take this &quot;professional knowledge&quot; approach to a wholly separate level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a tradition of including actual formulas in fiction books that deal with mathematically inclined characters and events and subjects? Or was Stephenson's work groundbreaking in that respect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:05:52.577" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:05:52.577" Title="What is the origin of including formulas in a literary text?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;neal-stephenson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="738" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T02:51:36.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T02:51:36.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T02:51:36.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="739" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T02:51:36.433" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding a history of something (idea, style, approach) throughout literature." OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T04:50:21.350" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T04:50:21.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="488" CreationDate="2017-01-23T03:09:50.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether you'd call it a &lt;em&gt;poem&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;Niemöller definitely delivered a version of &quot;First They Came ...&quot; as a speech in German&lt;/strong&gt;, as early as January 1946, before its translation into English.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Associate Professor &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harold Marcuse&lt;/a&gt; has made a detailed study of Martin Niemöller and the evolution of &quot;First They Came ...&quot;, which you can read about in great length on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/niem.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. He describes how Niemöller first began thinking about this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shortly after the end of the war Niemöller became convinced that the German people had a collective responsibility (he often used the word &lt;em&gt;Schuld&lt;/em&gt;, guilt) for the Nazi atrocities. In October 1945 Niemöller was the the prime mover behind the German Protestant Church's &quot;Confession of Guilt&quot; (&quot;&lt;em&gt;Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis&lt;/em&gt;&quot;)(see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/niem/NiemW1967Neuanfang1945.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this quotation from Oct. 1945&lt;/a&gt;). In later speeches Niemöller claimed that a November 1945 visit to Dachau, where the crematorium was being kept as a memorial site, began that process of recognition. (I tell his story of that visit in detail in my book &lt;em&gt;Legacies of Dachau&lt;/em&gt;, excerpted here: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/niem/niembkex.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Niemöller's postwar Dachau anecdote&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marcuse goes on to conclude that &quot;First They Came ...&quot; was already beginning to evolve in Niemöller's mind in October and November 1945. There were several versions of it, varying according to his audience, but we have a definite version dating from &lt;strong&gt;6 January 1946&lt;/strong&gt;, when Niemöller delivered the following speech &lt;strong&gt;in German&lt;/strong&gt; to representatives of the Confessing Church in Frankfurt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Als Pastor Niemöller ins Konzentrationslager kam, schrieben wir 1937, als das Konzentrationslager aufgemacht wurde, da schrieben wir 1933, und die damals in die Konzentrationslager kamen, waren Kommunisten. Wer hat sich darum gekümmert? Wir haben es gewußt, es stand in den Zeitungen. Wer hat die Stimme erhoben, etwa die Bekennende Kirche? Wir haben gedacht: Kommunisten, diese Religionsgegner, diese Christenfeinde - &quot;soll ich meines Bruders Hüter sein?&quot; Dann hat man die Kranken, die sogenannten Unheilbaren beseitigt. - Ich erinnere mich eines Gespräches mit einem Menschen, der Anspruch darauf erhob, ein Christ zu sein. Er meinte: Vielleicht ist es ganz richtig, diese unheibaren Menschen kosten den Staat nur Geld, sie sind sich und den andern nur zur Last. Ist es nicht das Beste für alle Teile, wenn man sie aus der Mitte schafft? -- Dann erst ist es an die Kirche als solche herangekommen. Dann haben wir einen Ton geredet, bis er dann in der Öffentlichkeit wieder verstummt ist. Können wir sagen, wir sind nicht schuld? Die Judenverfolgung, die Art und Weise, wie wir die besetzten Länder behandelten, oder die Dinge in Griechenland, in Polen, in der Tschechoslowakei oder in Holland, die doch in der Zeitung gestanden haben. … Ich glaube, wir Bekennende-Kirche-Christen haben allen Anlass, zu sagen: Meine Schuld, meine Schuld! Wir können uns mit der Entschuldigung, es hätte mich ja den Kopf kosten können, hätte ich geredet, nicht herausreden.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wir haben es vorgezogen, zu schweigen. Ohne Schuld sind wir gewiss nicht, und ich frage mich immer wieder, was wäre geworden, wenn im Jahre 1933 oder 1934 - es muss ja eine Möglichkeit gewesen sein - 14 000 evangelische Pfarrer und alle evangelischen Gemeinden, die es in Deutschland gab, die Wahrheit bis in den Tod verteidigt hätten? Wenn wir damals gesagt hätten, es ist nicht recht, wenn Hermann Göring 100 000 Kommunisten einfach in die Konzentrationslager steckt, um sie umkommen zu lassen. Ich kann mir denken, dass dann vielleicht 30 000 bis 40 000 evangelische Christen um einen Kopf kürzer gemacht worden wären, kann mir aber auch denken, dass wir dann 30-40 000 Millionen [sic] Menschen das Leben gerettet hätten, denn das kostet es uns jetzt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation into English by Marcuse (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When Pastor Niemöller was put in a concentration camp we wrote the year 1937; &lt;strong&gt;when the concentration camp was opened we wrote the year 1933, and the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians - &quot;should I be my brother's keeper?&quot; Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables.&lt;/strong&gt; - I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? -- Only then did the church as such take note. Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault&lt;/strong&gt;, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 - there must have been a possibility - 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30-40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first &lt;strong&gt;published English version&lt;/strong&gt; I've been able to find was a translation of this speech published by the New York Philosophical Society in 1946. You can read it in full &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/niem/Niem1946GuiltHope13-16.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, along with a short analysis of how this translation differs from the more direct one done by Marcuse. It was withdrawn from publication on 5 Aug 1946 after rumours appeared that Niemöller had supported the Nazis in the 20s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Niemöller gave another speech a few months later, on 3 July 1946, entitled &quot;Der Weg ins Freie&quot; or &quot;The Path into Freedom&quot;, as part of a series organized by the Ministry of the Interior of Württemberg and Baden. You can read it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/projects/niem/NiemWeginsFreie026.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; along with an English translation and some analysis by Marcuse. This speech is sometimes claimed to be the origin of the &quot;First They Came ...&quot; quotation, but those precise words do not in fact appear there. I haven't been able to track down when those exact words were first published, but in any case, the spirit of the poem is there in the speech quoted above, which was delivered in German before it was ever translated to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T03:09:50.560" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="737" CreationDate="2017-01-23T03:56:09.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it was published, &lt;em&gt;Cryptonomicon&lt;/em&gt; was often compared to Pynchon's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity&amp;#39;s_Rainbow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is also set during WWII and (to a much lesser extent than &lt;em&gt;Cryptonomicon&lt;/em&gt;) the present day, has a technology-centered plot (to the extent it has a plot at all), and explores themes of the relationships between individuals, society, and technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calculus and statistics are frequently referred to throughout &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt;, but especially in the first section, which is set in London during the time that it was being attacked by V2 rockets.  In one episode, a statistician works on a mathematical model of the frequency of rocket hits across London.  They have divided London into a grid of squares, and counted hits within each square:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But to the likes of employees such as Roger Mexico it is music, not without its majesty, this power series Ne^-m(1 + m + m^2/2! + m^3/3! + ... + m^(n-1)/(n-1)!), terms numbered according to rocket falls per square, the Poisson dispensation ruling not only these annihilations no man can run from, but also cavalry accidents, blood counts, radioactive decay, number of wars per year....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  --Viking edition, pp 139–40&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equations that describe the flight of a ballistic missile are brought up frequently -- the title itself refers to the parabola of the missile's flight, and the idea of being on the cusp of some radical change (&quot;a delta-t away&quot;) comes up throughout, sometimes in rather poetic ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a scene where the main character (to the extent that there is one) is reading up on the V2's technical specs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So was the Rocket's terrible passage reduced, literally, to bourgeois terms, terms of an equation such as that elegant blend of philosophy and hardware, abstract change and hinged pivots of real metals which describes motion under the aspect of yaw control:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    [here follows a multi-term differential equation],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  preserving, possessing, steering between Scylla and Charybdis the whole way to Brennschluss.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  --p. 239&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other technical matter that comes up throughout involves the engineering of the underground railroad system at the Nordhausen V2 factory; organic chemistry; Pavlovian conditioning of canines, humans, and octopi; and the life expectancy of light bulbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T03:56:09.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="802" CreationDate="2017-01-23T05:06:21.197" Score="12" ViewCount="602" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I am reading Anna Karinina I notice how as the story continues Vronsky is going bald.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As characters meet him it is noted how he tries to hid his increasing baldness. For instance when Dolly goes to Vronsky's estate it is stated that he has taken to combing his hair in a way that hides his bald patch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters before and after this also note his slowly increasing baldness and how he tries to hide this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in thinking that his state of baldness may be a way of showing how the affair and love between Anna and Vronsky is slowly growing old and the way both are trying to hide this from themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T21:24:53.777" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T21:24:53.777" Title="Is there symbolism in Vronsky going bald in Anna Karenina?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2017-01-23T06:45:22.193" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's nothing in &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt; that would suggest that Ms. Havisham would be interested in speed at all: as far as I remember, we only ever see her inside Satis House, wearing her wedding-dress, living in darkness. The closest we get to seeing Ms. Havisham at speed is when Pip is instructed to walk her around her dining table in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Great_Expectations/Chapter_XI&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 11 of &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but even that isn't very fast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said, leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, &amp;quot;Come, come, come! Walk me, walk me!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr. Pumblechook's chaise-cart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, &amp;quot;Slower!&amp;quot; Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a while she said, &amp;quot;Call Estella!&amp;quot; so I went out on the landing and roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round and round the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that you're right that it's meant to be funny because it's unexpected: Ms. Havisham the ex-shut-in who's now become a daredevil and grown a need for speed, and is now a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CoolOldLady&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cool Old Lady&lt;/a&gt;. This also fits in with her character in &lt;em&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/em&gt;, where she's generally a superspy, pulling off impossible feats to save the day. In this regard, she's a bit like &lt;a href=&quot;http://hoodwinked.wikia.com/wiki/Granny_Puckett&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Granny Puckett&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Hoodwinked&lt;/em&gt;, who turns out to be a little bit more active than you'd expect from Red Riding Hood's Grandmother (who we &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Riding_Hood#Tale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;only see in bed&lt;/a&gt; in the fairy tale!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just 'cos you bring him up, it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; perfectly in character for Mr. Toad to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wind_in_the_Willows/Chapter_6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;obsessed with motor-cars&lt;/a&gt; (and to be vary of police attention).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T06:45:22.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="447" CreationDate="2017-01-23T07:26:48.527" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand what you are asking right... here is the answer -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien was not the first to use a made up language and in fact making up languages was quite common. &lt;strong&gt;These are just the first two examples I found, I am sure there are more out there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1516 Thomas More made the Utopian language for his novel &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;. He even gave a brief sample of this language addendum to More's book, written by his good friend Peter Giles. See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Utopian language&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;British Library: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/utopia/more1/alphabet1/alphabet.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas More's Utopia - the Utopian alphabet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Omniglot: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/utopian.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Utopian alphabet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1726 in &lt;em&gt;A Voyage to Lilliput&lt;/em&gt; Jonathan Swift has the Lilliputians say various things in their own language. An example - &amp;quot;Lumus kelmin pesso desmar lon emposo&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;swear a peace with him and his kingdom&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not a truly full made up language as the details of the language was never written out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford Dictionaries blog: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170801072403/http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/09/invented-languages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Invented languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the act of creating languages is not alone in its use in fiction. There has been a long history of created or constructed languages throughout history -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A legend recorded in the seventh-century Irish work Auraicept na n-Éces claims that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9nius_Farsaid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fénius Farsaid&lt;/a&gt; visited Shinar after the confusion of tongues, and he and his scholars studied the various languages for ten years, taking the best features of each to create in Bérla tóbaide (&amp;quot;the selected language&amp;quot;), which he named Goídelc — the Irish language. This appears to be the first mention of the concept of a constructed language in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest non-natural languages were considered less &amp;quot;constructed&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;super-natural&amp;quot;, mystical, or divinely inspired. The Lingua Ignota, recorded in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen is an example, and apparently the first entirely artificial language. It is a form of private mystical cant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language#Early_constructed_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section &amp;quot;Early constructed languages&amp;quot; in the aricle 'Constructed Languages' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important example from Middle-Eastern culture is Balaibalan, invented in the 16th century. Balaibalan was created in Timurid or Safavid Iran, and one of the first known constructed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its original creator may have been 14th century mystic Fazlallah Astarabadi, founder of Hurufism. But there is evidence that it might have been his followers in the 15th century, or may have even been Muhyî-i Gülşenî. There is only one example of this language, a dictionary, copies of which are to be found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and in the Princeton University Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaibalan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Balaibalan&amp;quot; on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johannes Trithemius, in Steganographia and Polygraphia, attempted to show how all languages can be reduced to one. In the 17th century, interest in magical languages was continued by the Rosicrucians and Alchemists (like John Dee and his Enochian). Jakob Boehme in 1623 spoke of a &amp;quot;natural language&amp;quot; (Natursprache) of the senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Musical languages from the Renaissance were tied up with mysticism, magic and alchemy, sometimes also referred to as the language of the birds. The Solresol project of 1817 re-invented the concept in a more pragmatic context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language#Perfecting_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section &amp;quot;Perfecting language&amp;quot; in the article 'Constructed Languages' on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for interest's sake, here is a list of some constructed languages from recent years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Solresol&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1827 by &lt;em&gt;François Sudre&lt;/em&gt; : Based on pitch levels sounded with their solfege syllables (a &amp;quot;musical language&amp;quot;) although no knowledge of music is required to learn it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Communicationssprache&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1839 by &lt;em&gt;Joseph Schipfer&lt;/em&gt; : Based on French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Universalglot&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1868 by &lt;em&gt;Jean Pirro&lt;/em&gt; : An early a posteriori language, predating even Volapük.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Volapük&lt;/strong&gt; Created in 1879–1880 by &lt;em&gt;Johann Martin Schleyer&lt;/em&gt; : First to generate international interest in IALs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1887 by &lt;em&gt;L. L. Zamenhof&lt;/em&gt; : The most popular auxiliary language ever invented, including, possibly, up to two million speakers, the highest ever for a constructed language and the only one to date to have its own native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spokil&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1887 or 1890 by &lt;em&gt;Adolph Nicolas&lt;/em&gt; : An a priori language by a former Volapük advocate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mundolinco&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1888 by &lt;em&gt;J. Braakman&lt;/em&gt; : The first esperantido&#xA;Bolak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Idiom Neutral&lt;/strong&gt; created in   1902 by &lt;em&gt;Waldemar Rosenberger&lt;/em&gt; : A naturalistic IAL by a former advocate of Volapük.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Latino sine Flexione&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1903 by &lt;em&gt;Giuseppe Peano&lt;/em&gt; : &amp;quot;Latin without inflections,&amp;quot; it replaced Idiom Neutral in 1908.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ro&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1904 by &lt;em&gt;Rev. Edward Powell Foster&lt;/em&gt; : An a priori language using categories of knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ido&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1907 by a group of reformist Esperanto speakers : The most successful offspring of Esperanto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Adjuvilo&lt;/strong&gt; crated in 1910 by &lt;em&gt;Claudius Colas&lt;/em&gt; : An esperantido some believe was created to cause dissent among Idoists&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Occidental&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1922 by &lt;em&gt;Edgar de Wahl&lt;/em&gt; : A sophisticated naturalistic IAL, also known as Interlingue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Novial&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1928 by &lt;em&gt;Otto Jespersen&lt;/em&gt; : Another sophisticated naturalistic IAL by a famous Danish linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sona&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1935 by   &lt;em&gt;Kenneth Searight&lt;/em&gt; : Best known attempt at universality of vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Esperanto II&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1937 by &lt;em&gt;René de Saussure&lt;/em&gt; : Last of linguist Saussure's many esperantidos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mondial&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1940s by &lt;em&gt;Dr. Helge Heimer&lt;/em&gt; : Naturalistic European language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Glosa&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1943 by &lt;em&gt;Lancelot Hogben&lt;/em&gt; :  Originally called Interglossa, has a strong Greco-Latin vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blissymbols&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1949 by &lt;em&gt;Charles Bliss&lt;/em&gt; : An ideographic writing system, with its own grammar and syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interlingua&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1951 by International Auxiliary Language Association : A major effort to develop a common Romance vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intal&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1956 by &lt;em&gt;Erich Weferling&lt;/em&gt; : An effort to unite the most common systems of constructed languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Romanid&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1956 by &lt;em&gt;Zoltán Magyar&lt;/em&gt; : A zonal constructed language based on the Romance languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lingua sistemfrater&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1957 by &lt;em&gt;Pham Xuan Thai&lt;/em&gt; : Greco-Latin vocabulary with southeast Asian grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neo&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1961 by &lt;em&gt;Arturo Alfandari&lt;/em&gt; : A very terse European language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Babm&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1962 by &lt;em&gt;Rikichi Okamoto&lt;/em&gt; : Notable for using Latin letters as a syllabary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arcaicam Esperantom&lt;/strong&gt; Created in 1969 by &lt;em&gt;Manuel Halvelik&lt;/em&gt; : 'Archaic Esperanto', developed for use in Esperanto literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Afrihili&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1970 by &lt;em&gt;K. A. Kumi Attobrah&lt;/em&gt; : A pan-African language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kotava&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1978 by &lt;em&gt;Staren Fetcey&lt;/em&gt; : A sophisticated a priori IAL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uropi&lt;/strong&gt;  created in 1986 by &lt;em&gt;Joël Landais&lt;/em&gt; : Based on the common Indo-European roots and the common grammatical points of the IE languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poliespo&lt;/strong&gt; creaed in the 1990s (?) by &lt;em&gt;Nvwtohiyada Idehesdi Sequoyah    Esperanto&lt;/em&gt; : grammar with significant Cherokee vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Romániço&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1991 by Anonymous : Vocabulary is derived from common Romance roots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Europanto&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1996 by &lt;em&gt;Diego Marani&lt;/em&gt; : A &amp;quot;linguistic jest&amp;quot; by a European diplomat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unish&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1996 by Language Research Institute : Sejong University  Vocabulary from fifteen representative languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lingua Franca Nova&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1998 by &lt;em&gt;C. George Boeree and others&lt;/em&gt; : Romance vocabulary with creole-like grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Slovio&lt;/strong&gt; created in 1999 by &lt;em&gt;Mark Hučko&lt;/em&gt; : A constructed language based on the Slavic languages and Esperanto grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interslavic&lt;/strong&gt; created in 2006 by &lt;em&gt;Ondrej Rečnik&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gabriel Svoboda&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jan van Steenbergen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Igor Polyakov&lt;/em&gt; : A naturalistic language based on the Slavic languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sambahsa-Mundialect&lt;/strong&gt; created in 2007 by &lt;em&gt;Olivier Simon&lt;/em&gt; : Mixture of simplified Proto-Indo-European and other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lingwa de planeta&lt;/strong&gt; created in 2010 by &lt;em&gt;Dmitri Ivanov&lt;/em&gt; : Worldlang based on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of constructed languages&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:38:56.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:38:56.290" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="722" CreationDate="2017-01-23T07:59:29.133" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;He is possibly (most likely) Catholic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at some extracts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Gloria Scott - dog bit his ankle 'as I went down to chapel' - chapel typically a catholic word in English&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Crooked Man - shows knowledge of bible when he identifies the epithet David - might just know the bible but could indicate Catholicism&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Boscombe Valley Mystery - tells criminal &quot;You are yourself aware that you will soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes&quot; - indicating belief in afterlife&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Several Books 'For God's Sake!' - a religious curse&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Blue Carbuncle -  &quot;it is just possible that I am saving a soul… Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.&quot; - believes in souls and forgiveness&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all points to Holmes being religious, and most likely Catholic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there is a lot of atheist evidence. For instance he praises a highly atheist book - Martyrdom of Man - in the sign of the four. So there is some doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T07:59:29.133" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2017-01-23T08:16:59.057" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like he was influenced by traditional English fairy stories and in particular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Clifford&quot;&gt;a writer by the name of Lucy Clifford&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A star still falls, a boy still promises to bring it to his true love, there are still wicked witches and ghosts and lords (although the lords have now become princes.) They even gave the story an unabashedly happy ending, which is something people tend to do when they retell fairytales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In The Penguin Book of English Folk Tales, we learn that mid-20th-century folklorists had collected an oral story and never noticed it was actually a retelling and simplification of a strange and disturbing children's story written by the Victorian writer Lucy Clifford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/13/film.fiction&quot;&gt;Source : Guardian article on the release of the book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract from an Amazon listing of 'Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise' by Lucy Clifford&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where all the stars are waiting To see you close your eyes. They wish you all sweet slumber, They wish you all good night; They'll tell the sun to rouse you When once again 'tis light. And while you sleep, the roses May think your cheeks so fair That, in the early morning, You'll find them resting there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anyhow-Stories-Moral-Otherwise-Clifford-x/dp/021717485X/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1485159055&amp;amp;sr=8-22&amp;amp;keywords=lucy%20clifford&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T08:16:59.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2017-01-23T08:24:06.333" Score="-8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I can't cite a source for this, I always saw Hobbes as a manifestation of Calvins persona. In a way, much like the 'Daemons' in Philip Pullmans 'His dark materials'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name, again in my opinion refers to the old English description of the devil, 'Old Hob'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old Hob is from the Catholic belief system, and is considered a nickname of the Devil which refers to “ones character”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://paranormalpsychology.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/old-hob-nickname-for-the-devil/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T08:24:06.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="736" CreationDate="2017-01-23T09:30:04.293" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;While we can't rule out an influence from Lewis, he was not Gaiman's primary motivation&lt;/strong&gt;. Gaiman has named different influences for Stardust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; has a much closer parallel to the 1926 book &lt;em&gt;Lud-In-The-Mist&lt;/em&gt; by Hope Mirrlees. Gaiman has praised the book, including it in a list of his all-time favourite novels. In this newspaper feature, he makes clear that &lt;em&gt;Lud-in-the-Mist&lt;/em&gt; was an influence of &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; and names some other inspirations too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/oct/13/film.fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Happily ever after&lt;/a&gt; by Neil Gaiman, in &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, 13 October 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started writing &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; in 1994, but mentally timeslipped about 70&#xA;years to do it. The mid-1920s seemed like a time when people enjoyed&#xA;writing those sorts of things, before there were fantasy shelves in&#xA;the bookshops, before trilogies and books &amp;quot;in the great tradition of&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. This, on the other hand, would be in the&#xA;tradition of &lt;em&gt;Lud-in-the-Mist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The King of Elfland's Daughter&lt;/em&gt;. All I&#xA;was certain of was that nobody had written books on computers back in&#xA;the 1920s, so I bought a large book of unlined pages, the first&#xA;fountain pen I had owned since my schooldays and a copy of Katharine&#xA;Briggs' &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Fairies&lt;/em&gt;. I filled the pen and began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could even argue that Lewis fits within 'the great tradition of Lord of the Rings' that Gaiman was seeking to escape. Lewis was of course contemporary with Tolkien and both were members of Oxford University literary club &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Inklings&lt;/a&gt;. One might suggest this places them as working within the same literary tradition, although the two produced stylistically different fantasy epics for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the works mentioned by Gaiman as inspirations, &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; has a particular parallel with &lt;em&gt;Lud-in-the-Mist&lt;/em&gt;. The two books share a close story arc: a mundane town bordering on fairyland, a place of which the common folk are afraid. Up until one character plucks up the courage to visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also tonal and stylistic associations between the two. Critics have noted that &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; sounds quite unlike Gaiman's normally somewhat frenetic writing and is more of a hark back to classic English Victoriana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:35:28.450" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:35:28.450" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="737" CreationDate="2017-01-23T09:42:00.797" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, 'Pataphysicien&lt;/em&gt; (transl. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploits_and_Opinions_of_Dr._Faustroll,_Pataphysician&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), written by Alfred Jarry (of &lt;em&gt;Ubu Roi&lt;/em&gt; fame) in 1898 but published in 1911, contains as last chapter (before the Speculations) a chapter called &lt;a href=&quot;http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k113964m/f124.image&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'De la Surface de Dieu'&lt;/a&gt; (transl. &lt;em&gt;On the Surface of God&lt;/em&gt;) which contains formulas and a supposed demonstration that 'god is the tangential point between zero and infinity' (it is probably necessary at this point of the discussion to specify that it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Pataphysics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'pataphysic&lt;/a&gt; novel, a literary absurdist style invented by Jarry which influenced dadaism and surrealism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This chapter itself is one of many 'scientific'-sounding chapters at the end of the novel and is supposed to be part of a 'telepathic letter' from the main character (Dr. Faustroll) to Lord Kelvin, in which Faustroll solves several philosophical problems using his new &quot;science&quot;, the 'Pataphysics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="198" LastEditorUserId="198" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T12:13:55.883" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:13:55.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:21:49.663" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;As seen from the below map from the Wikipedia article, which is identical to the version of &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Swift, which I own, the land of the Houyhnhnms is directly below what we now call Australia. Is there any significance to that location? If so, why did he choose that location?&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fGPyF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fGPyF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a map from an edition of *Gulliver&amp;#39;s Travels*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:33:40.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:33:40.403" Title="Is the location of the land of the Houyhnhnms significant?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="778" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:26:14.800" Score="4" ViewCount="757" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Swift, Gulliver travels to a land of Houyhnhnms. When I read, I like to hear the names in my head because it helps me to get into the story. However, I do not know how to pronounce Houyhnhnm. Do we have any guidance from Swift, the word's origins, or other sources for how to pronounce Houyhnhnm? If so, how do they recommend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:39:40.917" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T18:08:34.467" Title="How do you pronounce Houyhnhnm?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="777" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:42:44.413" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Swift, Swift describes Gulliver, a ship's doctor sailing and getting ship wrecked in various locations by various means. However, he does not go into as much detail in the actual description of sailing as he does other actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this because Swift hadn't sailed much or at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:48:09.097" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T18:48:09.097" Title="Did Jonathan Swift ever sail?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="754" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:43:23.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was an Irish-born author and satirist, best known for his satirical novel &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt;, but who also published dozens of novels, essays, poems, and sermons in his lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T10:46:01.580" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T10:46:01.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="755" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:43:23.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) and his literary works." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T10:46:01.580" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T10:46:01.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="756" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:44:13.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T11:44:13.093" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T11:44:13.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="757" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:44:13.093" Score="0" Body="For questions about Gulliver's Travels, the satirical novel by Jonathon Swift. Use this tag with the [Jonathan-Swift] tag. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T14:11:23.343" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T14:11:23.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="758" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:45:51.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T11:45:51.253" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T11:45:51.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="759" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:45:51.253" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Thomas Wolfe and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T12:25:04.570" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:25:04.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="760" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:46:23.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T11:46:23.443" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T11:46:23.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="761" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:46:23.443" Score="0" Body="For questions about Look Homeward, Angel, the autobiographical novel by Thomas Wolfe." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T12:24:48.780" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:24:48.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="762" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:47:12.693" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T11:47:12.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T11:47:12.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="763" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:47:12.693" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Last of the Light Brigade, the poem by Rudyard Kipling." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T12:24:52.897" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:24:52.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="764" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:47:48.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T11:47:48.653" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T11:47:48.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="765" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T11:47:48.653" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) and his life as a writer. His works include 'The Jungle Book' (1894), 'Kim' (1901), short stories such as 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888), and poems such as 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If—' (1910)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:42:49.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:42:49.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="766" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T12:47:11.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T12:47:11.467" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T12:47:11.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="767" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T12:47:11.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Lewis Carrol (pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898), such as 'Alice in Wonderland', or his life as a writer.." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:08:38.327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:08:38.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="768" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="780" CreationDate="2017-01-23T12:57:29.470" Score="4" ViewCount="2882" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/689/is-there-significance-to-the-location-of-lilliput-in-gullivers-travels&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, Riker established that the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu were representing England and France and it was satirizing the holy wars between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was being satirized in the second part of &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt;, in which Gulliver is among the inhabitants of Brobdingnag? Who or what do the inhabitants of Brobdingnag represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T17:35:43.343" Title="Who do the inhabitants of Brobdingnag represent in Gulliver's Travels?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="781" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:02:49.590" Score="5" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Swift, there is little discussion of religion except for a passage from part 3, which reads,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To this I added another petition, “that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix: because I had been thrown into his kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading.”  When this latter petition was interpreted to the Emperor, he seemed a little surprised; and said, “he believed I was the first of my countrymen who ever made any scruple in this point; and that he began to doubt, whether I was a real Hollander, or not; but rather suspected I must be a Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We never find out if Gulliver is in fact, Christian, but this is the only mention I could find in the book. Do we know whether he was Christian? Does Swift ever mention it in any of his letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T10:46:18.140" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T10:46:18.140" Title="Was Gulliver religious?" Tags="&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="722" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:07:14.207" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The single strongest piece of evidence is surely this, from &lt;em&gt;A Naval Treaty&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thank you. I have no doubt I can get details from Forbes. The authorities are excellent at amassing facts, though they do not always use them to advantage. What a lovely thing a rose is!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Holmes] walked past the couch to the open window, and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,&amp;quot; said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. &amp;quot;It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which on its face is a declaration of religious faith, though not necessary any sort of orthodoxy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the main thing that gives the impression that Holmes wasn't religious is his highly analytical, evidence-seeking character. Nowadays, this usually goes along with religious skepticism. Less so in Doyle's time, though. And the analytical evidence-seeking sort of skeptic these days is usually a very &lt;em&gt;scientific&lt;/em&gt; sort of skeptic ... and it doesn't seem hard to imagine (e.g.) that someone as uninterested in pure science as Holmes is portrayed as being (recall that he didn't know the earth went around the sun rather than vice versa) might be unfamiliar with the palaeontological evidence that life on earth is very old, or with the evolutionary ideas that make &amp;quot;arguments from design&amp;quot; so much less impressive now than they were a couple of hundred years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other evidence is, I think, much weaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holmes speaks of &amp;quot;going down to chapel&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Gloria Scott&lt;/em&gt; but I think that tells us nothing. He was at university at that point, probably Oxford or Cambridge. The Oxbridge colleges have chapels; they are universally called chapels rather than (e.g.) churches; and in Holmes's time I believe attendance was compulsory. So the fact that he went doesn't mean he was religious, and the fact that he called it &amp;quot;chapel&amp;quot; doesn't mean he was Catholic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holmes shows himself familiar with the story of David and Bathsheba in &lt;em&gt;The Crooked Man&lt;/em&gt; but that's a very famous story, and would have been more universally known then than now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holmes tells a criminal &amp;quot;You will have to answer ... at a higher court than the Assizes&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Boscombe Valley Mystery&lt;/em&gt;, which certainly could indicate belief in an afterlife and some sort of post-mortem judgement -- but it could also just be intended to scare the criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holmes praises &amp;quot;patient suffering&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger&lt;/em&gt;, which would fit well with a Christian (perhaps more specifically a Catholic) background, but the idea that suffering has merit is pretty widespread (and I suspect was more so in the 19th century when Christianity was more deeply ingrained in the culture than it is now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Cardboard Box&lt;/em&gt;, Holmes says &amp;quot;What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.&amp;quot; whose first half seems to indicate something like religious belief and whose second half seems to indicate the contrary. I think we can infer that he was neither the sort of atheist who is convinced that our universe is in fact ruled by chance (and necessity), nor the sort of believer who thinks it's perfectly obvious that the answer to that &amp;quot;perennial problem&amp;quot; is given by their own religion. But there's plenty of territory in between, both religious and irreligious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Holmes did some work for the Pope, but there's no indication that he did it out of a sense of religious obligation rather than because he was being paid to do it. He's described as having worked for any number of other eminent figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From time to time Holmes says &amp;quot;my God&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;breathes a prayer of gratitude&amp;quot; and so forth. Anyone, religious or not, could do those things, and both religious and irreligious people frequently do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the sort of question that should expect a definitive answer. (Especially as it's not unknown for people's religious position to change, as Doyle's certainly did.) If I had to guess at what Doyle would have said if pinned down, it's that Holmes was convinced (on what he considered empirical grounds) that there must be some sort of divinity behind the universe, but that he thought everything beyond that unknowable and uncertain. But there's nothing resembling a statement of that (or any other) particular view in the canon, and my guess is based as much on what I think Doyle's own position was as anything else. I think he could have made Holmes a Catholic, or an Anglican, or a Huxleyesque agnostic, without any internal contradictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T14:58:18.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="782" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:28:54.533" Score="22" ViewCount="2123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always get confused between the terms comic-book and graphic novel. What makes a comic-book be referred to as Graphic novel? What is the difference between both of the terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastEditorUserId="95" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T13:45:43.073" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:39:39.533" Title="How are graphic novels different from comic books?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2017-01-23T13:46:09.130" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A graphic novel is longer and is usually a single story; comic books are shorter and are often multiple stories.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Dictionary.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Comic book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a magazine with one or more comic strips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graphic novel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a novel in the form of comic strips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for instance, &lt;em&gt;Bone&lt;/em&gt; is a graphic novel, and &lt;em&gt;The Essential Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; is a comic book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the different in the names: A graphic &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt; is a long, unified, story, whereas a &lt;em&gt;comic book&lt;/em&gt; is lots of comics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the boundaries are a bit blurry. They are very similar, and there are cases where either would apply. But in &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt;, a graphic novel is longer and more unified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T17:19:28.600" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T17:19:28.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="769" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:10:01.927" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, earlier in Part III, I found this qupte:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I told him who we were, and begged him, in consideration of &lt;strong&gt;our being Christians and Protestants&lt;/strong&gt;, of neighbouring countries in strict alliance, that he would move the captains to take some pity on us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the short answer is yes, he is in fact Christian.  I have no idea, though, &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; religious he is exactly--but since you didn't ask that, I will not answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:10:01.927" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="712" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:11:22.867" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The cask of Amontillado&lt;/em&gt; is the description of a murder by the murder himself, Montresor. As you have noticed, information about the motive for the crime is very scarce in this short story. There is no such thing as a third party in the story, who could express some kind of neutral point of view. Or more specifically, there is no external view except the reader's one. Some hypotheses can be made&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Montresors used to be an established family, where honor was taken very seriously. A Montresor who's attacked must respond&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Montresor: &quot;The Montresors,&quot; I replied, &quot;were a great and numerous family.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fortunato: &quot;I forget your arms.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  M: &quot;A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent&#xA;   rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  F: &quot;And the motto?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  M: &quot;Nemo me impune lacessit.&quot; ¹&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as Montresor feels that he has been harmed by Fortunato... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... he then tries to take revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is also a social difference between Montresor and Fortunato, that could have aggravated their mutual disdain. While Montresor has some noble roots, his name is declining. On the other hand, Fortunato is &quot;rich, respected, admired, beloved&quot; as Montresor says and the name &quot;Fortunato&quot; suggests. But Montresor also thinks that Fortunato do not deserve this success, and that he is an impostor in many areas&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of Montresor's accusations against Fortunato are fuzzy, so he may also be mad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1972204.htm&quot;&gt;an original theory&lt;/a&gt; was emitted by Cecil L. Moffitt. She noticed that Fortunato, despite being presented as a connoisseur of fine wine, claims some incorrect things about wine:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;F: &quot;Luchesi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while Amontillado is actually a type of Sherry. An oenophile (or more likely an insane oenophile) like Montresor might have some evil plans after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &quot;No one attacks me with impunity&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="146" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:11:22.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1284" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:38:02.977" Score="3" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the events of &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;, Gaea opened up the Doors of Death so that the monsters could come back easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I could find no mention of how they got back &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the Doors. But we know that they come back, as the Furies and the Minotaur regenerate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if there was an easy way to get out of Tartarus, it wouldn't be such a great prison, and we see that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used as a prison for the Titans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do the monsters get out of Tartarus normally?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T10:48:35.200" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:53:41.423" Title="How do the monsters return without the Doors of Death?" Tags="&lt;rick-riordan&gt;&lt;the-heroes-of-olympus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:39:31.647" Score="11" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorley MacLean was a Scottish poet who worked in Gaelic. This was the language of his poem, Hallaig, about the Highland clearances and how time changes our perception of history. However, he also provided an English translation. Here are the opening stanzas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The window is nailed and boarded&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;through which I saw the West&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a birch tree, and she has always been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;between Inver and Milk Hollow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;here and there about Baile-chuirn:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;she is a birch, a hazel,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a straight, slender young rowan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Screapadal of my people&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where Norman and Big Hector were,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;their daughters and their sons are a wood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;going up beside the stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2002 famed poet Seamus Heaney offered a new translation. In parts, it is markedly different from the original although the broad meaning is preserved. Here is his version of the above text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a board nailed across the window&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I looked through to see the west&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And my love is a birch forever&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By Hallaig Stream, at her tryst&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between Inver and Milk Hollow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;somewhere around Baile-chuirn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A flickering birch, a hazel,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A trim, straight sapling rowan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Screapadal, where my people&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hail from, the seed and breed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Hector Mor and Norman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the banks of the stream are a wood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first read the translation, it struck me as almost rude: why would someone, even of Heaney's stature, feel they could do a better job of translating something than the original author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reflection, I am not aware of any other instances of a work translated by its original author being re-translated by other writers. Are there any? What additional insight might such re-translations offer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T14:41:08.600" Title="For works translated by the original author, how common is it for additional translations to exist? What might these translation add?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="753" CreationDate="2017-01-23T14:59:05.827" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Swift certainly had sailed before, probably many times.  An easy example is from Great Britain to Ireland and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1667.  In 1688, he had to leave for Moor Park in England due to political troubles in Ireland.  He made many visits to Ireland while living in England, mostly due to his health.  He finally retired to Scotland again in 1700.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this picture so helpfully shows, it's impossible to get from Great Britain to Ireland without the aid of a plane, jet ski or other flying or water transportation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sr75pm.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sr75pm.png&quot; alt=&quot;map&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T14:59:05.827" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:07:52.433" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Houyhnhnm&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, either &lt;code&gt;\ˈhwi-nəm\&lt;/code&gt; or  &lt;code&gt;\hü-ˈi-nəm\&lt;/code&gt;. (hwi-num or who-i-num)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The upside e is a schwa, representing a light and unaccented &quot;uh&quot; sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T15:07:52.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2580" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:12:28.677" Score="5" ViewCount="997" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why was Jane Eyre considered a feminist figure in the context of the Victorian society? She was unable to fully liberate herself from the inherent patriarchy.  She was strongly affected by marriage, even though she didn't fail to express her opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writing in 1966, R. B. Martin, who makes many fine points about the novel's techniques and meaning, argues that it is essentially pre-feminist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The novel is frequently cited as the earliest major feminist novel, although there is not a hint in the book of any desire for political, legal, educational, or even intellectual equality between the sexes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="250" LastEditorUserId="250" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T05:53:12.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T20:11:41.517" Title="Why is Jane Eyre considered a feminist figure?" Tags="&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="768" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:22:37.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brobdingnag doesn't represent a specific nation as Lilliput and Blefuscu do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brobdingnag are giants, but they are pointed out as extremely ugly.  They have very strict morals, but they don't regard Gulliver as a man really. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gulliver thought of the Lilliputians as miniature versions of himself, but the Brobdingnagians thought Gulliver was just a toy or tool.  The first Brobdingnagian Gulliver met tried to make money off of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Brobdingnagians seem to have very strict morals, because they didn't approve of the English politics and way of life and called them &quot;odious vermin&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swift depicts the Brobdingnagians as morally sound giants, though they seem to sit upon their high moral ground looking down upon everybody else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T15:22:37.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="769" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:34:23.103" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;He was definitely a Christian, and devout enough not to want to desecrate the cross. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In part III, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I spoken Dutch tolerably well; I told him who we were, and begged him, in consideration of our being Christians and Protestants, of neighbouring countries in strict alliance, that he would move the captains to take some pity on us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then later in chapter XI, he begs the Japanese emperor not to force him to trample on the cross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To this I added another petition, ‘that for the sake of my patron the king of Luggnagg, his majesty would condescend to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed on my countrymen, of trampling upon the crucifix: because I had been thrown into his kingdom by my misfortunes, without any intention of trading.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only occurrence of &quot;church&quot; in the book is in the preface, &quot;From the Publisher to the Reader&quot;.  This is also fictional but not really part of the events of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have observed in the churchyard at Banbury in that county, several tombs and monuments of the Gullivers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't really say anything about religion, but it's included for the sake of completeness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, all the occurrences of &quot;god&quot; or &quot;gods&quot; aren't related to Gulliver's beliefs, but the beliefs of the inhabitants of the land that he is in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: he's religious enough that he calls himself a Christian and doesn't to want to trample on the cross, but no other mention of him going to church or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T15:34:23.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2017-01-23T15:47:29.333" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Graphic novel&lt;/a&gt; is a sub-category of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_book&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;comic books&lt;/a&gt; (which are, in turn, as subset of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;comics&lt;/a&gt;). For me (and hopefully for some other people out there), graphic novels represent a more &lt;strong&gt;coherent&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;complete&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;mature&lt;/strong&gt; subset of the comic book industry (and thus my comment on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/33/should-graphic-novels-be-on-topic#comment66_33&quot;&gt;relevant meta&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dailyutahchronicle.com/2012/09/19/graphic-novels-vs-comic-books-whats-the-difference/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; calls comic books &amp;quot;periodicals&amp;quot;, but some graphic novels were first released as periodicals as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the term is often used erratically, and almost always subjectively - there exists an obligatory group of people who only apply the term to the older and classical examples (hat tip to SW prequel haters!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are some thoughts on existing examples of graphic novels, with some effort to determine what akes them graphic novels in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia page on graphic novel attributes the popularity of the term to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Contract_with_God&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Contract With God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and latter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which won a Pulitzer) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight_Returns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The books that came later, and are called graphic novels are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin_City&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sin City&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. One recent graphic novel I can think of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Is_the_Warmest_Color_(comics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blue Is the Warmest Color&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can't speak for the first two titles, one thing that is common for other graphic novels I listed is the &lt;strong&gt;coherent and complete storyline&lt;/strong&gt;. Each of them is essentially a novel, except it being told in a graphic medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphic novels are usually not based on any mainstream comics; surely, there may be a couple of &lt;em&gt;Batman&lt;/em&gt; graphic novels, but the rest usually do fly under the radar of the comicbook-ignorant community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, a graphic novel &lt;strong&gt;may not be a graphic novel upon release&lt;/strong&gt; (see &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt;), and may obtain that status over time, either by becoming famous, gathering a cult following, or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't necessarily have to be &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; (but usually longer than an ordinary comic issue) - &lt;em&gt;The Killing Joke&lt;/em&gt; is only 50-odd  &lt;s&gt;megabytes&lt;/s&gt; pages long, &lt;em&gt;Blue Is the Warmest Color&lt;/em&gt; is roughly the same. On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; took 8 years for all 75 issues to be completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't necessarily have to be &lt;strong&gt;serious&lt;/strong&gt; (mature, grim, realistic, etc.) either - the &lt;em&gt;Scott Pilgrim&lt;/em&gt; series are, in my book, a graphic novel, because it's essentially one story being told in 6 volumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphic novels that I listed revolve around &lt;strong&gt;one story or central plot&lt;/strong&gt;, sometimes telling it from different perspectives. This is unlike generic comic books, which are a continuous narration, with every 20 or so issues being bound by an overarching plot called &amp;quot;story arc&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphic novels, as opposed to mainstream comics printed nowadays, are usually self-contained. There's no background reading required, and you don't have to read some other comic series to understand what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, graphic novels tend to introduce &lt;strong&gt;recurring characters&lt;/strong&gt;, and limit introducing new characters to a minimum. A genius implementation of that principle is &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, where characters from the first volume suddenly become relevant, or have their stories explained, in later volumes. Gaiman did pretty well at intertwining the fates of his characters, in unpredictable ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graphic novels share some traits with ordinary novels - for instance, they often have a recurring symbol, used either as a plot device, a narration tool, or simply as a symbol. For instance, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone in &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, or the characteristic red stain in &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They (though not all) also follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dramatic structure&lt;/a&gt;, which is most easily traced in &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that certain Asian comics are considered graphic novels as well: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akira_(manga)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Akira&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (won a Harvey award), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Planetes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(manga)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ghost in the Shell&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Though you certainly won't see many people calling them graphic novels per se, they certainly have attained the same cult status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could say that it's just a glorified comic - and would be in a sense correct. For instance, Neil Gaiman said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[the person who said that Gaiman was writing graphic novels, not comic books] meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who'd been informed that she wasn't actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel#cite_ref-49&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cited in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, he uses the term &amp;quot;graphic novel&amp;quot; to describe his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_Comedy_or_Comical_Tragedy_of_Mr._Punch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mr. Punch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in his introduction to &lt;em&gt;Smoke and Mirrors&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;Queen of Knives&lt;/em&gt;, a short story], like my graphic novel &lt;em&gt;Mr Punch&lt;/em&gt;, is close enough to the truth that I have had, on occasion, to explain to some of my relatives that it didn't really happen. Well, not like that, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alan Moore pins the term, with pretty much the same accusations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: What do you think of the term “graphic novel” that has come into use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moore&lt;/strong&gt;: It's a marketing term . . . that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me . . . the thing that happened in the mid-’80s was that there were a couple of things out there that you could just about call a novel. You could just about call &lt;em&gt;Maus&lt;/em&gt; a novel, you could probably just about call &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; a novel, in terms of &lt;strong&gt;density&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;structure&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;size&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;scale&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;seriousness of theme&lt;/strong&gt;, stuff like that. The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel Comics—because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blather.net/projects/alan-moore-interview/northhampton-graphic-novel/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; (hat tip to Valorum), emphasis mine &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:39:39.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="807" CreationDate="2017-01-23T17:04:58.307" Score="5" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;, Montag questions the society he lives in after meeting a mysterious neighbor who encourages Montag to think and read, two thing forbidden in the dystopian world. He catches on rather quickly, prompting the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Montag have rebellious thoughts before meeting with Clarisse?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note: In this question I am looking for something (quote) from either the book or Ray Bradbury.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T17:23:49.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T23:02:33.580" Title="Did Montag ever have rebellious thoughts before meeting Clarisse?" Tags="&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="799" CreationDate="2017-01-23T17:28:27.813" Score="14" ViewCount="3708" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen themes and elements from Dr. Seuss's &lt;em&gt;Horton Hears a Who&lt;/em&gt; applied to a variety of things, such as the abortion debate, dwarfism awareness, and space aliens. While I can see how they could apply to these topics, none of them seem likely to be was Dr. Seuss was intending to talk about. But the book, like many of the author's other works, is apparently meant to convey a message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What message was Dr. Seuss intending to express in &lt;em&gt;Horton Hears a Who&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T15:47:32.730" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T15:47:32.730" Title="What was Dr. Seuss's intended message in &quot;Horton Hears a Who&quot;?" Tags="&lt;moral&gt;&lt;dr-seuss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:03:38.060" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secret Lost Diary of Admiral Richard E. Byrd and The Phantom of the Poles&lt;/em&gt; book describes a mysterious journey of Admiral Richard E. Byrd during his flight to the Polar region of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the brief description at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Diary-Admiral-Richard-Phantom/dp/160611137X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon website&lt;/a&gt; it's said he made a flight into the South Polar region. On another &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=7822&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; it's said the exploration flight was over the North Pole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in the content of the book, it also keeps shifting from the North Pole to the South, and back again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, at which pole did Admiral Byrd's alleged adventure take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="97" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T11:06:48.593" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:16:44.123" Title="At which pole did Byrd's adventure take place?" Tags="&lt;richard-e-byrd&gt;&lt;sld-of-adm-richard-e-byrd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="786" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="787" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T18:41:22.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="828" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:47:17.420" Score="4" ViewCount="2147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Pynchon is a writer famous for having dense and hard to read books, but is acclaimed for those books.  He wrote &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Crying of Lot 49&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;, and others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What order should I read his books?  His books are often read in specific orders, because all of them are hard to understand, and some books are easier than others.  What order should I read the books in to help them be easiest to understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T22:36:36.300" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T22:36:36.300" Title="What order should I read Thomas Pynchon's novels in?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ClosedDate="2017-02-14T02:18:18.927" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="789" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:48:18.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Pynchon is an American writer famous for long and dense books such as &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Crying of Lot 49&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T18:56:31.193" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T18:56:31.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="790" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:48:18.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) and his life as a writer." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:41:17.457" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:41:17.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T18:49:24.870" Score="34" ViewCount="1457" Body="&lt;p&gt;In C.S. Lewis's Narnia books, it's very clear that the Narnians are meant to represent Christianity, with Aslan symbolising Jesus (in fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/117792/31394&quot;&gt;Aslan is literally Jesus in-universe&lt;/a&gt;), while the Calormenes are meant to represent Islam. Which invites the question: &lt;strong&gt;what about Judaism?&lt;/strong&gt; (Yes, I know that other religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, are practised more in the world in general than Judaism, but Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are the religions most likely to be familiar to Lewis and his western audience.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to remember reading somewhere that the &lt;strong&gt;dwarfs&lt;/strong&gt; could be interpreted to represent Judaism, but I'm not sure what this was based on. At least in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, the dwarves seem more like atheists than anything else, although the role of atheists could also be given to the Telmarines in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Were any characters in the Narnia books intended to represent Jews?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T00:12:21.207" Title="Is Judaism represented in the Narnia books?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="792" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:06:48.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T19:06:48.993" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T19:06:48.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="793" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:06:48.993" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fantasy novel 'The Lord of the Rings' (originally published in three volumes in the years 1954-1955) by J.R.R. Tolkien. Use this tag with the [j-r-r-tolkien] tag. " OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:40:36.127" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:40:36.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1121" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:06:58.093" Score="5" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Animorphs were published from 1996 to 2001, with the last book in the series being titled &lt;em&gt;The Beginning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this book when it first came out and I was really disappointed with it.  It ended somewhat abruptly, starting a new story line that it had no intention of continuing, and in general felt rushed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the last book rushed to production?  If it was, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T19:25:16.293" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:33:48.200" Title="Was the last Animorphs book rushed?" Tags="&lt;animorphs&gt;&lt;k-a-applegate&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="795" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:09:19.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T19:09:19.613" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T19:09:19.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="796" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:09:19.613" Score="0" Body="Use this when asking about a work that was published as a comic (or a graphic novel), or about the medium as a whole. For questions about Japanese, Korean, or Chinese comics, use the [manga], [manhwa], and [manhua] tags, as appropriate." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T21:10:34.547" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T21:10:34.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="797" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:10:01.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that there are many phenomena for which there is no term. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Langacker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ronald Langacker&lt;/a&gt; said, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can think of a unicorn with daisies growing out of its nostrils, but I don't need a name for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T14:29:37.533" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T14:29:37.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="798" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:10:01.707" Score="0" Body="Questions pertaining to terms used in the study of literature, including the names of the genres, tropes, terms used for analysis, and so forth." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:52:14.377" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:52:14.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="784" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:16:36.333" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason he wrote it is very interesting.  He thought of the &quot;person's a person, no matter how small&quot;from his experiences in post-war Japan.  He had drawn anti-Japanese cartoons during the war, and he realizes this: [from an interview &lt;a href=&quot;http://davidsheff.com/article/dr-seuss/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, Japan was just emerging, the people were voting for the first time, running their own lives—and the theme was obvious: “A person’s a person no matter how small,” though I don’t know how I ended up using elephants. And of course when the little boy stands up and yells “Yop!” and saves the whole place, that’s my statement about voting—everyone counts. It’s all left over from my war experience, when I was making propaganda and indoctrination films. One of them was to encourage soldiers to vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the entire thing is an allegory for post-war Japan.  The kangaroos, therefore, represents Americans and the Whos are the Japanese.  The slogan &quot;a person's a person, no matter how small&quot; is really what Seuss is trying to get at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, he also said this on the same site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Parenting: Do you use propagandistic skills in your books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seuss: of course. However, &lt;strong&gt;most of my books don’t carry heavy morals&lt;/strong&gt;. The morals sneak in, as they do in all drama. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T19:16:36.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="803" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:20:39.963" Score="8" ViewCount="3247" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everworld is a series of 12 books published by K. A. Applegate from 1999 to 2001. In the last book, &lt;em&gt;Entertain the End&lt;/em&gt;, the main characters help a major god be freed, but the war isn't over.  Yes, the kids have elected to stay in Everworld, but the main struggle in Everworld still exists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With so many story lines left open, why was the decision made to end Everworld so abruptly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T08:41:28.287" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T08:41:28.287" Title="Why did Everworld end so abruptly?" Tags="&lt;k-a-applegate&gt;&lt;everworld-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="791" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:30:04.687" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: This does not in ANY WAY represent my own religious views.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that C.S. Lewis meant for the Dwarfs to represent the Jews. At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, the Dwarfs refused to be 'taken in' by Aslan. It's possible that C.S. Lewis meant for this to represent the Jews refusing to believe in Jesus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Jews didn't believe in Jesus. They don't think that he fulfilled the requirements to be the Mashiach (Messiah). I think I read that Christians believe that they'll get hell for that. And, in Narnia, the Dwarfs are refusing to believe in Aslan, leaving themselves to be stuck sitting there, believing that they are in a barn, for eternity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the fact that the Dwarfs are often presented with beards (quotes eventually), and Jews often wear their beards long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After posting this, I had been doing some research on what Lewis thought of Judaism. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%27s_trilemma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis's Trilemma&lt;/a&gt;, in which he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the &lt;strong&gt;really foolish&lt;/strong&gt; thing that people often say about Him: &lt;strong&gt;I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God&lt;/strong&gt;. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...As this is almost exactly what Judaism believes, that he was deified by his followers, he seems pretty critical of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://newnarnians.wordpress.com/2012/11/09/the-dwarves-are-for-the-dwarves/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt;, they make some points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, in Luke 23:1-2, &lt;strong&gt;the Jews opposed Jesus being their Savior because they were  fearful of Him.&lt;/strong&gt;  They feared Him because He did not follow their laws and how could their Messiah not respect their ways.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Similarly, &lt;strong&gt;the dwarves were blinded by their fear like they were being held in a dark stable and could not escape&lt;/strong&gt;. They could not see the paradise that Aslan created and that there were no doors at all on this stable.  Secondly, the &lt;strong&gt;Jews did not believe in Jesus even though he saved lives and performed miracles in front of them&lt;/strong&gt;.  (John 12:37)  In the book, &lt;strong&gt;Aslan performed a miracle in front of the dwarves&lt;/strong&gt;.  He made banquet food appear out of nowhere but the dwarves believed that the food was donkey food.  Thirdly, to believe in God, one must give up all control.  In the Bible, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must give up all his worldly possessions to have salvation in Him.  Nicodemus cannot give up this control.  (John 3:1-21)  In the book, the main problem for the dwarves is that they do not want Aslan to control them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, ways in which the Dwarfs could represent Jews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their belief in Aslan's return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dwarfs have always been a little reluctant to believe in Aslan, or at least his return. Remember in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, Aslan!&quot; said Trumpkin cheerily but contemptuously. &quot;What matters much more is that you wouldn't have me.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But they also say that he came back again,&quot; said the Badger sharply.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes, they &lt;em&gt;say&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; answered Nikabrik, &quot;but you'll notice that we hear precious little about anything he did afterward. He just fades out of the story. How do you explain that, if he really came to life? Isn't it much more likely that he didn't, and that the stories say nothing more about him because there was nothing more to say?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Jews don't believe that Jesus came back to life.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not believing in miracles performed right in front of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs' knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn't much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn't taste it properly. They thought they were eating and drinking only the sort of stuff you might find in a stable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently Jesus did miracles and they still didn't believe that he was the son of God.&lt;sup&gt;1 | 2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are afraid of being 'taken in' and being controlled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, at any rate there's no Humbug here. We haven't let anyone take us in. The Dwarfs are for the Dwarfs.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You see,&quot; said Aslan. &quot;They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. But come, children. I have other work to do.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And apparently from the source I mentioned before, some guy did something like that in the Christian Bible?&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; He had to give up his money to do something, and he didn't want to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the Bible, Jesus tells Nicodemus that he must give up all his worldly possessions to have salvation in Him. Nicodemus cannot give up this control. (John 3:1-21) In the book, the main problem for the dwarves is that they do not want Aslan to control them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Dwarfs have always been old Narnians, even if they've had a rocky history with Aslan. They believe that Narnia is 'not a human country'. This is reminiscent of the Jews believing in one God, but not in Jesus. (Remember the note at the top? Not my views &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tl;dr: It's fairly likely that C. S. Lewis intended for the Dwarfs to represent Judaism from his point of view.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;My knowledge of Christian theology is very sketchy.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the Gospel of John, Jesus is said to have performed seven miraculous signs that characterize his ministry, from changing water into wine at the start of his ministry to raising Lazarus from the dead at the end.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracles_of_Jesus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T15:11:39.653" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T15:11:39.653" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="742" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:42:58.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there is indeed symbolism in Vronsky's bald spot. One of Karenin's chief characteristics is his ears, which is often the first thing people notice of him. Ears are meant for hearing—hearing rumors, gossips, &lt;em&gt;scandalous affairs&lt;/em&gt;. Whereas a bald spot is something that people often conceal. It could easily symbolize an adulterous relationship. Consider this scene at the military camp, in which an officer calls to Vronsky as he leaves his Finnish hut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Vronsky!&amp;quot; shouted someone when he was already outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You’d better get your hair cut, it’ll weigh you down, especially at the top.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vronsky was in fact beginning, prematurely, to get a little bald. He laughed gaily, showing his even teeth, and pulling his cap over the thin place, went out and got into his carriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;To the stables!&amp;quot; he said, and was just pulling out the letters to read them through, but he thought better of it, and put off reading them so as not to distract his attention before looking at the mare. &amp;quot;Later!&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm#id20&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Pt. 2, Ch. 20)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of Vronsky's comrades, probably an officer, admonishes him to pay attention to his grooming. Wise advice! But does Vronsky really mind this advice? I don't think so. Because later on we learn that Vronsky never got that hair cut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ah! I’m glad to hear it,&amp;quot; said Vronsky. &amp;quot;Is madame at home or not?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Madame has been out for a walk but has returned now,&amp;quot; answered the waiter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vronsky took off his soft, wide-brimmed hat and passed his handkerchief over his heated brow and hair, which had grown half over his ears, and was brushed back covering the bald patch on his head. And glancing casually at the gentleman, who still stood there gazing intently at him, he would have gone on. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm#id96&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Pt. 5, Ch. 7)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how his hair has grown &amp;quot;half over his ears&amp;quot;. This recalls an image of Karenin that we encounter early on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, God be with you,&amp;quot; she said at the door of the study, where a shaded candle and a decanter of water were already put by his armchair. &amp;quot;And I’ll write to Moscow.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Karenin] pressed her hand, and again kissed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;All the same he’s a good man; truthful, good-hearted, and remarkable in his own line,&amp;quot; Anna said to herself going back to her room, as though she were defending him to someone who had attacked him and said that one could not love him. &amp;quot;But why is it his ears stick out so strangely? Or has he had his hair cut?&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm#chapter-33&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Pt. 1, Ch. 33)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this repetition is not by accident. Early on, Anna wonders whether Karenin's ears stick out because of a hair cut. Later on, the narrator observes that Vronsky's hair has grown &amp;quot;half over his ears&amp;quot;. I think this attention to ears and hair cuts is a little symbolic. Perhaps Karenin's ears stick out because he hears everything, and listens to everything he hears. His hair is short (which we may infer from the above passage) because he cares about appearances. On the other hand, Vronsky lets his hair grow out, and toward the end it is reaching his ears. Vronsky is aware of the chatter about his affair, but he chooses not to listen. He cares less about appearances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vronsky's hair serves to conceal, whereas Karenin's serves to uncover. Vronsky conceals his bald spot by brushing back his hair (pt. 5, ch. 7). Karenin's short hair uncovers the awkwardness of his ears, and the awkwardness of the whole affair. The idea of a bald spot as a blemish in his life of which Vronsky thinks too lightly, makes it the perfect symbol for his affair. Although it might cause other men insecurity, it doesn't make Vronsky insecure. He is far too confident for that. He is careless and cheerful about what other people notice and attend to. It's also worth pointing out, in the passage from pt. 2 ch. 20, the juxtaposition of the bald spot and the mare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T07:38:28.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="800" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:54:55.007" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;KA Applegate did a Reddit IAMA session in 2001. The implication seems to be that her decision to stop writing the Everworld novels was driven by dramatically declining sales figures compared to the large commitment required to generate new novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Everworld series was probably my favorite thing to read as a teenager. It seems like it would be the perfect material for a movie&#xA;and or series. Has there been any interest shown in that regard?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;katherineapplegate:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Thanks. You and six other people. No Hollywood love yet. It's all complicated and controlled by&#xA;Scholastic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was the series not popular?&lt;/strong&gt; I figured the blend of mythology, magic and aliens would appeal to a large audience.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;katherineapplegate:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;No, it died a painful (and not very slow) death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gzhau/iam_ka_applegate_author_of_animorphs_and_many/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAm K.A. Applegate, author of Animorphs and many other books. AMA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;suB&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Note that I've edited slightly to remove chatter.&lt;/suB&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards the final book (terminating the series) it would appear that the author wasn't especially pleased with it either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Are you satisfied with how EverWorld ended? It wasn't very satisfactory as a reader. Can you explain why you ended it the way you&#xA;did?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;katherineapplegate:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'm not happy with the EW ending. Basically I overcommitted. We could keep up with 140 pages a month -- barely --&#xA;but Everworld was 250. We got in over our heads.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, there seems to have been a certain amount of burnout on the part of the author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;katherineapplegate:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;In an exhausted, burned out wheeze. By the 4th Remnants and the next&#xA;to last Everworld, we were burned out. Really done for. 150 books&#xA;between 1989 and whatever it was, 2000. It was nuts and we had to&#xA;stop. We didn't write at all for about 5 years.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T20:07:39.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-23T19:59:02.467" Score="8" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the noval &lt;em&gt;Demons&lt;/em&gt; (by Dostoyevsky), there was a character, named Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who claimed that he was connected to the international.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Dostoyevsky mention anywhere in the book that he really was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T20:30:42.650" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T21:08:40.850" Title="Was Pyotr Stepanovich in &quot;Demons&quot; really connected to the international?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;demons&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="805" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="806" CreationDate="2017-01-23T20:56:58.320" Score="17" ViewCount="1764" Body="&lt;p&gt;In J. R. R. Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, while Bilbo is in the cave and has the ring, he and Gollum end up asking each other riddles.  After the exchange, Gollum or Bilbo mentions some riddle rules.  These rules, as far as I can remember, are not previously brought up in the book.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the name of the riddle rules referenced and, if they're available, what are the rules?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="10" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T17:18:06.070" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T00:34:10.760" Title="What are the Riddle Rules?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2017-01-23T21:02:31.100" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't really know, as they're not mentioned&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know all of the rules, because they're never really mentioned - this is the only time AFAIK, and they don't really say much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Both wrong,&quot; cried Bilbo very much relieved; and he jumped at once to his feet, put his back to the wall, and held out his little sword. He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can take a guess as to what the one that he broke here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Each riddle must have a clearly correct answer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo's question wasn't a riddle, as it could have lots of answers, and cannot be proved. (This is actually sort of like what we do on &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Puzzling&lt;/a&gt; - riddles that don't have an answer that can be proved to fit all of the lines are closed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T09:09:52.510" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T09:09:52.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="783" CreationDate="2017-01-23T21:14:22.060" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Montag committed at least one &lt;em&gt;lapse&lt;/em&gt; prior to meeting Clarisse, about a year earlier when he encountered an old man in the park. In addition to listening to  a poetry reading (not in and of itself a crime, but certainly considered aberrant behaviour) he failed to search the Professor despite being confident that he'd find a book of poetry on the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They had sat in the green soft light without saying a word for a moment and then Montag talked about the weather and then the old man&#xA;  responded with a pale voice. It was a strange quiet meeting. The old&#xA;  man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown&#xA;  out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college&#xA;  shut for lack of students and patronage. His name was Faber, and when&#xA;  he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a cadenced voice,&#xA;  looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when an hour&#xA;  had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a&#xA;  rhymeless poem.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Then the old man grew even more courageous and said something else and that was a poem, too. Faber held his hand over his left coat&#xA;  pocket and spoke these words gently, and &lt;strong&gt;Montag knew if he reached&#xA;  out, he might pull a book of poetry from the man’s coat. But he did&#xA;  not reach out.&lt;/strong&gt; His hands stayed on his knees, numbed and useless. “I&#xA;  don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I&#xA;  sit here and know I’m alive.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may wish to note that senior Firemen, aware of the constant presence of temptation to which their men are subject, will often turn a blind eye to relatively severe transgressions (such as the taking &lt;em&gt;and reading&lt;/em&gt; of the books that they're expected to burn).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Well, then, what if a fireman accidentally, really not intending anything, takes a book home with him?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Montag twitched. The open door looked at him with its great vacant eye.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;“A natural error. Curiosity alone,” said Beatty. “We don’t get overanxious or mad. We let the fireman keep the book twenty-four hours.&lt;/strong&gt; If he hasn’t burned it by then, we simply come burn it for him.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Of course.” Montag’s mouth was dry.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T23:02:33.580" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T23:02:33.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="811" CreationDate="2017-01-23T21:53:08.793" Score="6" ViewCount="4210" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the final stanza of Dylan Thomas's &lt;em&gt;Do not go gentle into that good night&lt;/em&gt;, he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And you, my father, there on the sad height,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do not go gentle into that good night.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;the sad height&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T10:25:09.923" Title="What does &quot;the sad height&quot; represent in &quot;Do not go gentle into that good night&quot; by Dylan Thomas?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;dylan-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="809" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-23T21:54:22.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-23T21:54:22.500" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T21:54:22.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="810" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-23T21:54:22.500" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British novelist William Golding (1911-1993) or about any of his literary works, most famously the book The Lord of the Flies about a group of boys who are marooned on an island." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T13:49:06.927" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T13:49:06.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="808" CreationDate="2017-01-23T22:07:40.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know that the &quot;good night&quot; represents death.  I explained this in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/421/what-does-the-good-night-symbolize-in-dylan-thomass-do-not-go-gentle-into-th/424#424&quot;&gt;previous answer&lt;/a&gt; where I showed that the poem was written for his dying father.  So the addressee of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And you, my father, there on the sad height,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is dying.  The speaker is imploring the father not to die, and the father is on the verge of death.  This is what I always took &quot;sad height&quot; to mean.  It's not the best wording, but it had to rhyme with night and light.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://apeliterature.blogspot.com/2012/10/analysis-do-not-go-gentle-into-that.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; blog thinks it's a biblical reference, referencing the Valley of Despair (last sentence of the 4th paragraph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T22:07:40.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2264" CreationDate="2017-01-23T22:15:34.500" Score="13" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; and Tolkien's legendarium as a whole, the Elves first awoke in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_places_in_Arda#Cuivi.C3.A9nen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cuiviénen&lt;/a&gt;, by a gulf in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_places_in_Arda#S&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sea of Helcar&lt;/a&gt;. We learn that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Wrath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The War of Wrath&lt;/a&gt; (Chapter 3, &lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;) and the times afterwards, many parts of the landscape were changed, and it is said that&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;quot;to Cuiviénen there is no returning&amp;quot;. Still, there is the possibility that some of the lands around it survived. It has even been hypothesized that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_places_in_Middle-earth_(fictional)#Sea_of_Rh.C3.BBn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sea of Rhûn&lt;/a&gt; is the remnant of the Sea of Helcar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any accounts of Elves (specifically, the Eldar, not the Avari) exploring &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rh%C3%BBn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhûn&lt;/a&gt; or the lands eastward, to try to find Cuiviénen and other ancestral lands? If so, were they successful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 Cuiviénen must have survived the War, as the Valar &amp;quot;set a watch&amp;quot; over it to protect the Quendi.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Meta-note:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that this is perhaps on the border of the site's scope, as I'm not necessarily asking about something that happened in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; itself. However, I think this question is in the same vein as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/805/71&quot;&gt;What are the Riddle Rules?&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/791/71&quot;&gt;Is Judaism represented in the Narnia books?&lt;/a&gt; - questions about the universe - and is therefore on-topic. Feedback, though - including about downvotes or details specific to the book which I could add - is very much appreciated, as always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T00:00:43.340" Title="Have any Elves explored Rhûn or the lands to the east?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-silmarillion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="126" CreationDate="2017-01-23T22:35:34.803" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There really aren't that many authorship debates, since an author's name will usually become associated with a story whether or not they actually wrote the work in question --- such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer&lt;/a&gt; (leading to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Homeric Question&lt;/a&gt;) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aesop&lt;/a&gt; --- and with the invention of the printing press, they'd usually get their names on the cover to boot. Pretty much the only way we find out about authorship controversies is if those debates themselves enter the historical record, such as with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alonso_Fern%C3%A1ndez_de_Avellaneda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda&lt;/a&gt;; lacking further evidence, we might have come to the conclusion that de Avellaneda was a real person. Wikipedia lists all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Authorship_debates&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;twelve authorship debates&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;none&lt;/strong&gt; of which appear in Jasper Fforde's books except for the Shakespeare authorship debate. So I think the answer to your question is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, no other debates over historical authorship over literary works are referenced in the &lt;em&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of the existence of certain works is an interesting one for the &lt;em&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/em&gt; series, given that one of the books in that series, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasperfforde.com/giveaway/tnu151.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, doesn't actually exist! Looking through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Literary_forgeries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list of literary forgeries&lt;/a&gt;, I don't see anything mentioned by Fforde, even such famous frauds as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ern Malley&lt;/a&gt;, but there's probably some in there I don't remember or haven't connected with fraud specifically. I'd love to know if anybody thinks of others!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-01-23T22:35:34.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T00:08:03.883" Score="5" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nick Hornby's novel Slam, the main character, Sam, narrates his story which happened in the past.  In the story, he recounts one or two dreams where he is transported to a day in the future.  Then what happens around him in reality in the future seems to be uncannily similar to what was in his dream (e.g., the name of a child, a certain person he would recognize from his dream that he hadn't met at the time of the dream).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are these dreams intended by Hornby to be supernatural?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: nothing else in the novel seems supernatural, but at least to me these dreams do.  (And I don't recall anything supernatural in any other of Hornby's novels, though this book seems aimed at a younger audience than his other works.)  Possibly they are intended to be supernatural, or perhaps meant to be ambiguous.  One possible explanation is that this is just Sam's story and the Sam of the future remembers his dreams in a different way than he dreamt them.  This seems not so unreasonable to me as Sam does not seem completely grounded in reality himself (though much more so by the end of the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:16:07.980" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T20:16:07.980" Title="Dreams of the future in Slam?" Tags="&lt;slam&gt;&lt;nick-hornby&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="816" CreationDate="2017-01-24T01:10:21.923" Score="8" ViewCount="351" Body="&lt;p&gt;About ten years ago, I read an old short story about Sherlock Holmes, which was not one of the 'canon' Doyle stories. I think it may have been written by one of the well-known later detective fiction authors, such as Agatha Christie or P.D. James, but I'm not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was shamelessly based on the canon story &quot;A Case of Identity&quot; - I think even the title was similar. But unlike the original, the spinoff features Mycroft Holmes together with his brother and Watson. The facts of a case are presented to the trio, just as they are to Holmes and Watson in &quot;A Case of Identity&quot;, and then each man makes his own assessment of the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes goes first, and describes the conclusions he has drawn and what he thinks the solution is (this may have been similar to the solution of &quot;A Case of Identity&quot;). Then Mycroft contradicts him, describing an entirely different solution of the case. Finally, Dr. Watson speaks up and says that both of the Holmes brothers are wrong; he gives a third solution, even more different from the other two. At the end of the story, it is confirmed that Watson's explanation was the correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else read this story, or can point me to its title or author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:17:55.787" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:17:55.787" Title="Identify non-Doylian Holmes short story: Watson outstrips Sherlock and Mycroft" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="815" CreationDate="2017-01-24T01:20:28.403" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Is this &amp;quot;A Case of Mis-Identity&amp;quot;?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to find the story on its own, but I know it is in the author's compilation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1455161586&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories&lt;/a&gt;, by Colin Dexter. I'm guessing you remember him as a writer of detective fiction because his main creation, Inspector Morse, is the protagonist of most of the other stories. This particular one is indeed a parody of &amp;quot;A Case of Identity&amp;quot;. Holmes makes the same deductions about the mysterious would-be groom, Hosmer Angel, that he made in the real story (that he was the daughter's stepfather, James Windibank). Mycroft believes that Angel is a complete fiction, but Watson believes that Angel is a real and innocent man, who took sick before going to the wedding and was treated by none other than Dr. Watson himself! This is, of course, the real explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little sad that Watson's deductions were the result of his knowing things beforehand, but he certainly surprised the two brothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:45:06.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T01:55:28.970" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/817/how-can-we-draw-meaning-from-works-if-it-was-not-intended-by-the-author?noredirect=1#comment1216_817&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I asked about how meaning gets into a work if not intended by the author. In researching that question, I ran across mention of &quot;authorial intent&quot;. In reading about it, I learned that it went through phases of being very important to analysists and other phases where it did not matter at all. In modern academic literary analysis, how much of a role does it play? Is it only to backup previously made claims or does it ever form the center of fundamental arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T07:39:46.437" Title="How much of a role does authorial intent play in modern academic literary analysis?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-02-23T02:22:18.253" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T02:09:39.393" Score="9" ViewCount="419" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Good Earth&lt;/em&gt; by Pearl S. Buck, the farmer Wang Lung and his family go through a time of famine.  In that time, girls were not very valued, and he could have sold his as a slave or even just abandoned her because of the financial burden.  In fact, people urged him to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also didn't really seem to get love.  He liked his wife for being strong and frugal but didn't like that she wasn't pretty and had a mistress, he was proud of his sons for being literate but allowed them to be so for his own pride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did Wang Lung keep his daughter during the famine?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:14:35.263" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T17:41:52.080" Title="Why did Wang Lung care for his &quot;poor fool&quot;?" Tags="&lt;pearl-s-buck&gt;&lt;the-good-earth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2017-01-24T02:33:18.033" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to Mithrandir's answer, I think that the more significant rule Bilbo broke was that his &quot;riddle&quot; was more of a question whose answer could not be deduced. In essence, the rule is that &lt;em&gt;the answer to the riddle that is asked must be able to be deduced from the actual riddle itself.&lt;/em&gt; In Bilbo's case, the answer to his riddle of &quot;what's in my pocket?&quot; is based on simply pure luck, and thus, the answer can't be deduced from the riddle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T22:37:50.207" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T22:37:50.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="822" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T02:46:36.710" Score="-2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Bilbo falls into Gollum's cave in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and he finds the ring on the ground, why doesn't he immediately put it on? Is there any textual evidence suggesting he was scared or nervous of putting it on or did Tolkien make Bilbo not put the ring on so he could have his whole conversation/introduction with Gollum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:08:26.200" Title="Why didn't Bilbo put the ring on immediately?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2017-01-24T02:52:19.677" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bilbo picked up the ring, pocketed it, and forgot about it. He didn't really even spare a moment's thought to it. Quoting directly from the Hobbit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Picking up the ring] was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it. He put the ring in his pocket almost without thinking; certainly it did not seem of any particular use at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He just had no reason to put it on, and was involved with some other stuff at the time. Bilbo even regards it as so insignificant a point that he &lt;em&gt;forgets he has it at all&lt;/em&gt; (emph. mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ask us! ask us!&amp;quot; said Gollum. Bilbo pinched himself and slapped himself; he gripped on his little sword; he even felt in his pocket with his other hand. There he found the ring he had picked up in the passage and forgotten about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;What have I got in my pocket?&amp;quot; he said aloud. He was talking to himself,&lt;/strong&gt; but Gollum thought it was a riddle, and he was frightfully upset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T02:52:19.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1637" CreationDate="2017-01-24T03:01:56.923" Score="15" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;E. M. Forster's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Passage_to_India&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Passage to India&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1924, in the decade after the Indian independence movement really started to gather steam. Forster incorporated this into his novel, showing the strong emotions raised within the British and the Indian communities after an Indian Muslim is arrested for assaulting a British schoolmistress. What did the British and Indians of the time make of this novel? Were there any articles written about this novel, or books reporting on it? I've tried Googling for contemporary reviews, but I just end up with reviews of the movie, made in 1984, long after India became independent in 1947.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T16:57:33.950" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T16:57:33.950" Title="How was &quot;A Passage to India&quot; received in Britain and India?" Tags="&lt;reception&gt;&lt;e-m-forster&gt;&lt;a-passage-to-india&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="826" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17657" CreationDate="2017-01-24T03:39:02.857" Score="22" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P. G. Wodehouse&lt;/a&gt; is known as a consummate stylist, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse#Writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a lot is known&lt;/a&gt; about how he plotted and wrote his novels. Did he ever say anything about his writing in the first person? I'm particularly curious about how he wrote &amp;quot;as&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_Wooster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bertie Wooster&lt;/a&gt;, who has a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; distinctive writing style that differs in some ways from Wodehouse's own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has he (or his biographers) written anything about how he developed Bertie's &amp;quot;voice&amp;quot; and then sustained it consistently across ten novels and over thirty short stories over 59 years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T18:37:26.030" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:37:26.030" Title="What did Wodehouse say about writing in the first-person?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;writing-process&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;p-g-wodehouse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T04:40:52.340" Score="9" ViewCount="1535" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Ghost in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; claims to be Hamlet's father's spirit released from Purgatory.  Is it possible that the Ghost is lying?  Has it been sent from Hell to stir up mischief in Elsinore?  (The play does end with a body count of eight.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:53:00.347" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:40:03.287" Title="Is Hamlet correct when he says &quot;it is an honest ghost&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2017-01-24T05:36:34.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're tackling the first three books, I'd say &lt;em&gt;Lot 49&lt;/em&gt;, followed by &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;, followed by &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;.  &quot;A Journey into the Mind of Watts&quot; makes a nice addition somewhere in there.  There is a serious ramp-up in difficulty across those three books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lot 49&lt;/em&gt; is slender and doesn't require &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much prior knowledge to follow what's happening or why something is important.  There are scenes where characters are hallucinating, but it is easy for the reader to determine when this is happening.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt; is long, but most chapters are self-contained episodes -- or seem to be, until the overall pattern emerges.  One character under extreme psychological stress hallucinates, but it's obvious to the reader.  Features a few characters who show up once for some gag purpose, only to disappear forever, which is good practice for &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; is incredibly long and dense.  A good &quot;prior reading&quot; list would probably include at least excerpts from more than 20 books.   Pynchon moves from reference to reference faster and more often than a Simpsons episode, and the range of things being referenced is incredibly broad.  The narrator tries to be helpful, but is hampered by the fact that not only are many characters dreaming, hallucinating, or undergoing extreme psychological stress, but the author himself may have been doing any or all of those things whilst writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vineland&lt;/em&gt; might make a good alternative starting place (or &lt;em&gt;Lot 49&lt;/em&gt; --&gt; &lt;em&gt;Vineland&lt;/em&gt;).  Similar level of length and difficulty to &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;.  Might seem relevant if you follow American politics.  Good introduction to both the first and the second half of his career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether a reader will &quot;miss out&quot; on critical information if they haven't read Book A before Book B, generally, no.  There are a number of &quot;soft&quot; connections between the books, i.e characters who played a large role in book A showing up for a cameo in book B (e.g. Mucho Maas from &lt;em&gt;Lot 49&lt;/em&gt; shows up briefly in &lt;em&gt;Vineland&lt;/em&gt;, Pig Bodine from &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt; shows up in a bunch of places).  A major exception to this -- a &quot;hard&quot; connection -- is the Suedwest Africa chapter of &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt; introducing characters, historical background, and themes that are all explored much more extensively in &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt;.  Due to &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;'s episodic structure, that chapter can be read as an excerpt if a reader is trying to &quot;short cut&quot; to &lt;em&gt;GR&lt;/em&gt; but still get as much background as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="181" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T04:35:36.593" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T04:35:36.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1464" CreationDate="2017-01-24T07:16:48.093" Score="7" ViewCount="2330" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to read the &lt;em&gt;In Search of Lost Time&lt;/em&gt; series out of order, because there is no good translation of the second book in my language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it necessary to read the book series in order? Are they related? Do I miss anything if I read these books out of order?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T09:55:24.490" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T09:55:24.490" Title="Can I read the second book of &quot;In Search of Lost Time&quot; out of order if I can't find a good translation?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;marcel-proust&gt;&lt;in-search-of-lost-time&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="837" CreationDate="2017-01-24T07:26:41.453" Score="8" ViewCount="2561" Body="&lt;p&gt;We see atheist and Christian heroes in Dostoyevsky's books. In many cases the works of an author reflect elements of their own life. However, the extent to which this occurs vary by author. Especially, in this instance where he has portrayed both atheist and Christian heroes, his own religion does come to mind. So, was Fyodor Dostoyevsky an atheist or Christian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Note that questions asking about authors' life with relation to their works are &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/151/are-questions-about-authors-on-topic&quot;&gt;on-topic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="221" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:29:19.867" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T23:06:30.177" Title="Was Dostoyevsky atheist or Christian?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T09:02:53.970" Score="14" ViewCount="874" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fascination with spiritualism and the occult is well known. However, I was surprised to find out that his short stories collection &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; was banned in the former Soviet Union, for &amp;quot;occultism&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes became hugely popular in the former Soviet Union, despite one short story collection, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, being banned in 1929 for supposed occultism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6607249.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Moscow honours legendary Holmes&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, published: 2007/04/30 13:37:35 GMT, BBC NEWS&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were there specific references to the occult in the stories that irked the Soviet censors? Or was the collection banned only because its author was known to occasionally dabble in the occult?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:11:23.347" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:11:23.347" Title="What occult references caused The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to be banned in the Soviet Union?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="834" CreationDate="2017-01-24T09:56:57.563" Score="13" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember this book fairly well. I'll try to provide what I remember about all points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cover&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cover was predominantly blue, with spirals across the whole thing. I think it had a person on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Author&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written by one of the authors of the original &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-39-clues&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-39-clues&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-39-clues&lt;/a&gt; series, so either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/rick-riordan&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;rick-riordan&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;rick-riordan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gordan Korman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter Lerangis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jude Watson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick Carman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Linda Sue Park&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/margaret-peterson-haddix&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;margaret-peterson-haddix&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;margaret-peterson-haddix&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Publication date&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was fairly recent, so probably somewhere between 2009-2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Title&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was two words, one of which might have been 'A' or 'The'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a boy, who has discovered that he has hypnotic powers. He hypnotizes a hypnotist, which leads to him being accepted into an institute for researching hypnotism. I think the name of the institute started with a 'S'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day he's walking, and meets a guy who's also a hypnotizer (they called it bending I think). He's in charge of an organization of benders, who have all committed crimes with their powers, who are meeting in a restaurant or something. This guy tells him not to trust the guy who's in charge of the institute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character (it's possible his name started with either Q, W, V, X, or J) goes back to the institute, where the guy in charge records him hypnotizing to vote for someone in an election, and then creates a virus that will go through the computers and hypnotize people. Our main character calls up the guy who he met and tells him that the bad guy rigged the election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guy comes to his house and discovers that main character's parents have been hypnotized to commit suicide if the main character tries to stop the bad guy, and they have to stop them from doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So then the guy who he met (tree something?) gets his band of benders and goes to stop the rigging. The main character hypnotizes the guy who the bad guy has under control to drop out of the race. (I think that the guy who was going to be elected had the name of one of the main characters of &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-shadow-children&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-shadow-children&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-shadow-children&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In revenge, the bad guy hypnotizes the main character to jump off a roof or something, and they have to stop him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T13:12:53.493" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T13:32:06.467" Title="Identify a book about a boy who has hypnotic powers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="827" CreationDate="2017-01-24T09:59:16.287" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you think the Ghost might be lying about? Claudius definitely murdered his brother, which we find confirmed in the play-within-a-play (act 3 scene 2), and by Claudius's own confession (act 3 scene 3). However, it's true that the Ghost might not be Hamlet's father. In that case, it would still have to know the details of his father's death, and the details of his father's life. Perhaps it is some infernal spirit who has this knowledge. This is actually a very interesting question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is no definite answer to this question. It's ambiguous. But it is worth asking questions about the Ghost's intent. Consider these words from the Ghost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghost:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I find thee apt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wouldst thou not stir in this. (Act I Scene V)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fathers often tell their sons or daughters what to do, and the Ghost is acting no differently. The Ghost puts quite a lot of pressure on Hamlet when he says this. In case you don't know, Lethe is a river in Greek mythology that, when drunk from, eases one of all their memories and sufferings. By making this comparison, the Ghost is goading Hamlet into action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, consider the rest of the speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghost:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, Hamlet, hear:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is by a forged process of my death&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The serpent that did sting thy father's life&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now wears his crown. (Act I Scene V)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The serpent metaphor invokes the Devil. It also makes you wonder whether it could be the Devil speaking to Hamlet. In the same way that Claudius pours poison into his brother's ear, the Ghost might be pouring poison into Hamlet's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now this last speech is a little unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghost:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let not the royal bed of Denmark be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A couch for luxury and damned incest.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me. (Act I Scene V) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the Ghost breaks the earth-shattering news that Hamlet's uncle killed his father. Then, he tells him not to be rash, nor let this taint his mind. But it clearly does taint his mind. After all, Christian values teach us to forgive, not to take revenge. The Ghost is advocating revenge. And that is the chief ambition of the Devil. So, if the Ghost is Hamlet's father, then he is certainly not purifying himself by coming back as a spirit and enticing his son into revenge. That's called temptation. It's fair to question whether this really is Hamlet's father. But I think the play rightfully does not focus on this question. Instead, it focuses on Hamlet's agency, given what he has heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the Ghost speaks truthfully about the murder of Hamlet's father, but it's ambiguous whether the Ghost actually is Hamlet's father. It could be some demon, or the Devil himself. I think it's worth asking why the Ghost says what he does, and advocates what he does. But ultimately, the play is about Hamlet's struggle to find his way out of the maze he ends up in. To revenge himself seems wrong, but not to revenge himself seems equally wrong. He has a hard predicament, and it's enlightening to see how he finally achieves peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="124" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T21:43:22.163" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T21:43:22.163" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="832" CreationDate="2017-01-24T10:05:03.483" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0545503256&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gordon Korman's &lt;em&gt;The Hypnotists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published June 2014:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6cfomm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6cfomm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover of the book, showing blue spirals&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This matches your description of the cover. Here's the book jacket description, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a gift... or is it a curse? Jax Opus can use his color-changing eyes to &lt;strong&gt;make people do things they don't want to do&lt;/strong&gt;. (Only his color-blind best friend, Tommy, seems immune.) At first, Jax doesn't know what he's doing -- temporarily &lt;strong&gt;hypnotizing friends, foes, and strangers&lt;/strong&gt;. But then his power pushes things way too far, and his secret isn't a secret any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon Jax finds himself meeting Dr. Elias Mako, who wants him to join a &lt;strong&gt;special institution&lt;/strong&gt; that will teach him how to use his powers. But what will his powers be used for? That's the big question for Jax as his hypnotic abilities draw him into a conspiracy that will have him racing against time and a mysterious mastermind to &lt;strong&gt;save his best friend, his parents&lt;/strong&gt;, and the entire United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a pretty close match to what you remember. Plus, the main character's name does indeed start with a J.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the character who Jax meets and tells him that Elias isn't good is named Axel Braintree, and he runs the Sandman's Guild, who meets in a Laundromat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elias Mako tried to get Senator Douglas Trey to be the president, but Jax hypnotized him into dropping out. Trey is indeed the name of a character in &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-shadow-children&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-shadow-children&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-shadow-children&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T13:32:06.467" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T13:32:06.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="831" CreationDate="2017-01-24T10:12:36.340" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching for Doyle's works banned in USSR in 1929 yields nothing about &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, save for this question and one comment on LiveJournal. However, searching the Russian &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B7%D1%83%D1%80%D0%B0_%D0%B2_%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A1%D0%A0#.D0.A6.D0.B5.D0.BD.D1.82.D1.80.D0.B0.D0.BB.D0.B8.D0.B7.D0.B0.D1.86.D0.B8.D1.8F_.D1.86.D0.B5.D0.BD.D0.B7.D1.83.D1.80.D1.8B&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; article for censorship in USSR, I found an entry about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maracot_Deep&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Maracot Deep&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel was published in USSR in 7 chapters (while it was published in two parts in &lt;em&gt;The Saturday Evening Post&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Strand Magazine&lt;/em&gt; before being collected in one book in 1929) from 1927 to 1929. The last chapter, published in 1929, was severely reworked. In particular, every single reference to &amp;quot;The Lord of the Dark Face&amp;quot;, and anything mystical, was purged, with the following note by editors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Конан Дойль, увлекающийся в последние годы оккультизмом, настолько перегрузил конец &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Маракотовой бездны&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; эпизодами и подробностями из &amp;quot;потустороннего мира&amp;quot; (до чертовщины и черной магии включительно!), что редакция &amp;quot;Следопыта&amp;quot; вынуждена была прибегнуть к сокращению отдельных кусков и разговоров этой части романа, совершенно неуместных на страницах журнала и нелепых с точки зрения нашего читателя, которому рассуждения о &amp;quot;вечной борьбе добра и зла&amp;quot; и мистические измышления о способах изгнания дьявола - просто скучны и смешны. Досадно за талантливого писателя, который не только докатился до мракобесия, но и проповедует его наивными приемами, лишенными даже тени оригинальности и новизны&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Taken from an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fandom.ru/inter/sherbakov_7.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; with Soviet writer and translator Aleksandr Sherbakov &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conan Doyle, who is taken an interest in occult lately, used so many &amp;quot;otherworldly&amp;quot; episodes and details in the ending of &amp;quot;The Maracot Deep&amp;quot; (including satanism and black magic!), that the editors of the &amp;quot;Pathfinder&amp;quot; had to resort to cutting some of the passages and dialogues in the last part of this novel, passages that are absolutely out of place on the pages of this journal, and make no sense for our readers, who will find discussions about &amp;quot;the eternal fight between good and evil&amp;quot; and mystical discussions about exorcism boring and laughable. It is said to see that such gifted writer has not only come to occultism, but also uses its naive tricks, which lack even the trace of originality and novelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Translation mine &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Sherbakov, the bound issue of the &lt;em&gt;Strand&lt;/em&gt; from 1929 was even missing from the library, where he went to read the last part of the novel in its original language. He attributes the censorship and changes done to the following passage, a speech by the the Lord of the Dark Face:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You wonder how I can injure them. I have powers, and they are not small ones. I can sway the minds of men. I am the master of the mob. Where evil has been planned there have I ever been. I was with the Huns when they laid half Europe in ruins. I was with the Saracens when under the name of religion they put to the sword all who gainsayed them. I was out on Bartholomew's night. I lay behind the slave trade. It was my whisper which burned ten thousand old crones whom the fools called witches. I was the tall dark man who led the mob in Paris when the streets swam in blood. &lt;strong&gt;Rare times those, but they have been even better of late in Russia&lt;/strong&gt;. That is whence I have come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Emphasis mine, taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0603271h.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this edition&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, censors could not allow such speeches, so they had it reworked, and inserted some passages of their own. &lt;em&gt;The Maracot Deep&lt;/em&gt; remained censored until 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how this is connected to Sherlock Holmes, I was able to find no evidence. Maybe Sherlock Holmes was rage-censored because of this novel. Maybe it happened to be in the same issue of Strand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One work about Sherlock Holmes that was banned in USSR was the film &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson&lt;/em&gt; (ironically, the film is of Soviet production), because it referenced the war in Afghanistan. To lift the ban, Holmes' line about Watson being to Afghanistan &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=OXifAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT234&amp;amp;lpg=PT234&amp;amp;dq=%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87%20%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9%20%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B7%D0%BE%D1%80&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=LHhYjGMdQJ&amp;amp;sig=9EXGEZL-Uq5-hiycky3iJ_5BD-M&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjP6tmC09rRAhXIbxQKHXf7C9YQ6AEIJTAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B9%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87%20%D0%B3%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9%20%D1%86%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B7%D0%BE%D1%80&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;had to be re-recorded&lt;/a&gt; to Watson being to &amp;quot;some Eastern country&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T14:07:50.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:00:09.157" Score="9" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the middle of Appendix E of &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The Three Attic Whalestoe Letters&quot;, a mysterious blue &quot;X&quot; appears through the middle of an &quot;e&quot; on the page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Click to view the whole of page 625 in context:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cILyc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/vh9OOcO.png&quot; alt=&quot;blue x close up&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never actually figured this part of &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt; out. The Whalestoe Letters still remain something of a mystery to me. It's wholly possible that this is just a part of her insanity, but I'm inclined to think there's something internally metatextual about this, given the fact similar metatextual indicators appear elsewhere in the book, such as the airway indicators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also happens to be printed in the same shade of blue that &quot;house&quot; is, but I'm not really sure what to make of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what this blue X is supposed to connect with elsewhere in the book? Is it just a random stray mark that seems to have mysteriously placed itself dead smack in the middle of the page? What are leading theories on what I should make of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:14:04.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:14:04.983" Title="What is the meaning of the blue X in the Three Attic Whalestoe Letters in House of Leaves?" Tags="&lt;mark-z-danielewski&gt;&lt;house-of-leaves&gt;&lt;metafiction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="830" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:03:56.690" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, author of such works as &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;, was a devout Orthodox Catholic from a very young age. He is reported to have, at a young age, recited prayers to guests to their great amazement. He is also said to have been greatly affected by various Bible selections. Through his time in the military academy, he continued the devout lifestyle that he had developed as a child, reading religious texts on a regular basis. However, over time he developed beliefs closer to those of the old believers than the mainstream Russian Orthodox Church. However he later wrote various contradictory things such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I was a] child of unbelief and doubt up to this moment, and I am certain that I shall remain so to the grave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[E]ven if someone were to prove to me that the truth lay outside Christ, I should choose to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later during his Siberian exile he again publicly revered Christ. However, he avoided churches and institutionalized religion. At no time though, did he become stuck in his ways. At times, he explored other religions, including Islam through reading the Quran. He described himself only as a &amp;quot;philosophical deist&amp;quot;. However, his writings in &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt; where he states belief in the holy trinity brings into question his understanding of the terminology he used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately much of this is sourced from a few Wikipedia articles because the sources they used are not available to me in this location because they are all print books, which are not to be found in libraries near me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T23:06:30.177" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T23:06:30.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="886" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:51:18.257" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The author still rules in manuals of literary history, in biographies&#xA;  of writers, in &lt;strong&gt;magazine interviews&lt;/strong&gt;, and even in the awareness of&#xA;  literary men, anxious to unite, by &lt;strong&gt;their private journals&lt;/strong&gt;, their&#xA;  person and their work; the image of literature to be found in&#xA;  contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his&#xA;  person, his history, his tastes, his passions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, it is discussing how the role of the author in the literary analysis of that time was absolute. However, it refers to &quot;magazine interviews&quot; as being an avenue in which the author's word is absolute. However, at first, I thought this was a weird translation of journal, but in the next line he refers to &quot;their [the literary men's] private journals&quot;, which clarified for me that the magazine of &quot;magazine interviews&quot; was not a journal. This led me to wonder whether magazines of that time did serious literary analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did mainstream magazines that Roland Barthes may have read include interviews for the purpose of literary analysis, or only interviews in the modern sense of magazine, author interviews?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:55:34.167" Title="What magazines was Roland Barthes referring to in The Death of The Author?" Tags="&lt;roland-barthes&gt;&lt;the-death-of-the-author&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="921" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:55:49.673" Score="11" ViewCount="769" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to clarify how I should interpret the following passage from &lt;em&gt;The Death of The Author&lt;/em&gt; by Roland Barthes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing&#xA;  a single &quot;theological&quot; meaning (the &quot;message&quot; of the Author-God),&#xA;  but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded&#xA;  and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is&#xA;  original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the&#xA;  thousand sources of culture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by this passage from &lt;em&gt;The Death of The Author&lt;/em&gt; and its reference to theology? Is he referring to a religious belief? My initial thought is that he is literally referencing a god. What do other people think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T21:54:20.537" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T00:45:11.513" Title="What is meant by the reference to theology in The Death of The Author?" Tags="&lt;roland-barthes&gt;&lt;the-death-of-the-author&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:56:30.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T11:56:30.513" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T11:56:30.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:56:30.513" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Death of The Author, the essay by Roland Barthes. Use in conjunction with [roland-barthes]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:57:00.893" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:57:00.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:57:09.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T11:57:09.603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T11:57:09.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:57:09.603" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Roland Barthes (1915 – 1980) and his life as a writer and literary analyst. He is significant for having influenced many diverse schools of literary theory, such as semiotics and post-structuralism." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T02:03:04.083" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T02:03:04.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="845" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:58:17.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T11:58:17.743" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T11:58:17.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="846" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:58:17.743" Score="0" Body="For questions about the relationship between texts or sets of texts." OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:57:10.557" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:57:10.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="847" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:59:11.510" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T11:59:11.510" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T11:59:11.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="848" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:59:11.510" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:25:07.550" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:25:07.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="849" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:59:54.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T11:59:54.657" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T11:59:54.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="850" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T11:59:54.657" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Red Wheelbarrow, the poem by William Carlos Williams. Use in conjunction with [william-carlos-williams]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:14:08.803" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:14:08.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="851" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:00:53.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:00:53.130" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:00:53.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="852" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:00:53.130" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of K.A. Applegate and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T13:21:37.067" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T13:21:37.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="853" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:02:28.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; is a (planned) seven novel series by George Raymond Richard Martin, consisting of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt; (1996)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clash of Kings&lt;/em&gt; (1999)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Storm of Swords&lt;/em&gt; (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Feast for Crows&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winds of Winter&lt;/em&gt; (TBD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dream of Spring&lt;/em&gt; (TBD)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Martin has also written two companion books to fill in some of the world-building aspects:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lands of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; (2012) with  maps drawn by Jonathan Roberts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; (2014) with co-authors Elio M. García Jr. and Linda Antonsson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In further addition there are companion stories that tell of the time prior to the events of the main series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Tales of Dunk and Egg series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hedge Knight&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sworn Sword&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystery Knight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The She-Wolves&lt;/em&gt; (unpublished)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Village Hero&lt;/em&gt; (unpublished)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sellsword&lt;/em&gt; (planned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Champion&lt;/em&gt; (planned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Kingsguard&lt;/em&gt; (planned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord Commander&lt;/em&gt; (planned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anthologies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Princess and The Queen (Dangerous Women)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Rogue Prince (Rogues)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Sons of the Dragon (The Book of Swords)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This tag can be used, together with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/george-r-r-martin&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;george-r-r-martin&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;george-r-r-martin&lt;/a&gt; tag, to ask questions about all the above works or any future works that fall into the same universe.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T15:27:07.570" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T15:27:07.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="854" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:02:28.950" Score="0" Body="For questions about A Song of Ice and Fire, the series by George R. R. Martin. Use in conjunction with [george-r-r-martin]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:50:32.470" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:50:32.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="855" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:03:08.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:03:08.943" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:03:08.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="856" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:03:08.943" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Hobbit, the book by J.R.R. Tolkien. Use in conjunction with [j-r-r-tolkien]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:08:49.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:08:49.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="857" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:03:52.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:03:52.827" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:03:52.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="858" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:03:52.827" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) or his life as a writer. His works that were originally in Russian should be tagged with [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:41:46.800" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:41:46.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:04:29.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:04:29.630" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:04:29.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:04:29.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:59:40.067" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:59:40.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="861" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:05:00.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:05:00.480" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:05:00.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="862" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:05:00.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the pre-Romantic English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake (1757 – 1827) and his works. Blake is known for combining poems with illustrations. His works include 'Songs of Innocence', 'Songs of Experience', 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' and 'Milton'. In addition to his own works, he also illustrated other books, such as Dante's 'Divine Comedy' and the Bible." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T08:38:26.370" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T08:38:26.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="863" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:05:32.493" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a poet, Victor Hugo wrote collections such as &lt;em&gt;Odes et Ballades&lt;/em&gt; (1826), &lt;em&gt;Les Feuilles d'automne&lt;/em&gt; (1831), &lt;em&gt;Les Chants du crépuscule&lt;/em&gt; (1835), &lt;em&gt;Les Voix intérieures&lt;/em&gt; (1837), &lt;em&gt;Les Rayons et les Ombres&lt;/em&gt; (1840), &lt;em&gt;Les Châtiments&lt;/em&gt; (1853) and &lt;em&gt;La Légende des siècles&lt;/em&gt; (1859 and 1877), &lt;em&gt;L'Année terrible&lt;/em&gt; (1871) and &lt;em&gt;L'Art d'être grand-père&lt;/em&gt; (1877).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His novels include &lt;em&gt;Notre-Dame de Paris&lt;/em&gt; (1831), &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; (1862), &lt;em&gt;Les Travailleurs de la mer&lt;/em&gt; (1866), &lt;em&gt;L'Homme qui rit&lt;/em&gt; (1869) and &lt;em&gt;Quatrevingt-treize&lt;/em&gt; (1874).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a dramatist, he wrote &lt;em&gt;Cromwell&lt;/em&gt; (1827), &lt;em&gt;Hernani&lt;/em&gt; (1830), &lt;em&gt;Marion de Lorme&lt;/em&gt; (1831), &lt;em&gt;Lucrèce Borgia&lt;/em&gt; (1832), &lt;em&gt;Le Roi s'amuse&lt;/em&gt; (1832), &lt;em&gt;Marie Tudor&lt;/em&gt; (1833), &lt;em&gt;Angelo, tyran de Padoue&lt;/em&gt; (1835), &lt;em&gt;Ruy Blas&lt;/em&gt; (1838), &lt;em&gt;Les Burgraves&lt;/em&gt; (1843) and &lt;em&gt;Torquemada&lt;/em&gt; (1882). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T09:50:52.450" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T09:50:52.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="864" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:05:32.493" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of French poet, novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T20:21:12.823" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T20:21:12.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="865" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:06:04.157" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:06:04.157" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:06:04.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="866" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:06:04.157" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mark Z. Danielewski (born 1966) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:07:43.630" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:07:43.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="867" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:06:38.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T12:06:38.773" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T12:06:38.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="868" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:06:38.773" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Serbian novelist, poet, short story writer and literary historian Milorad Pavić (1929 – 2009) and his works. Use this tag with the [serbian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T12:36:46.983" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T12:36:46.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="328" CreationDate="2017-01-24T12:31:35.437" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think he is the most likely option. From reviewing the books and skimming, he seems to most definitely be the only giant located under the carving. However, he isn't the only king, but in my view, &quot;who lives buried there&quot; is the more important criterion and as the giant Time fulfills both, I think he is the most likely option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T21:42:59.747" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T21:42:59.747" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T13:00:52.960" Score="6" ViewCount="1624" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Burning the Old Year&lt;/em&gt; by Naomi Shihab Nye, Nye refers to &quot;notes&quot;, &quot;lists&quot;, and &quot;letters&quot; as things that can be burned. From reading this poem, I interpret the theme to be the short time for which memories last and about how all of the papers you have will only exist for so long before they are lost and forgotten. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to believe that &quot;burning&quot; doesn't really refer to burning in the sense of burning wood, but rather another deeper meaning. However, I do not know what that deeper meaning is. So, what does &quot;burning&quot; symbolize in &quot;Burning the Old Year&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:51:27.690" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:51:27.690" Title="What does &quot;Burning&quot; symbolize in &quot;Burning the Old Year&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;naomi-shihab-nye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T13:02:54.197" Score="15" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were at least two books, although I only recall the plot of the first one. They were paperbacks, probably about octavo dimensions, fairly short as I remember them, under a hundred pages. I read them in the early 1990s in Kentucky. They were part of the family library, but unfortunately no longer seem to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books featured a group of children, likely siblings, mixed sexes and Caucasian, living in a castle that was being renovated in contemporary times, I think by the children's parents. I remember there were workers onsite. The children learn that there was likely a secret room in the castle (I think it was a combination of stories and them working out that the dimensions of the castle suggest a hidden space) with treasure in it, and some of the workers plan to find and steal it. The children learn more about the plans of the workers by dangling a microphone off of a fishing pole (I remember there was an illustration of it) attached to a tape recorder, and recording from a floor above. When they do find the secret room, I remember that it involved a door that opened onto a set of stairs going down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made a real impression on me at the time was that the author provided a lot of little details about castle construction, particularly how it applied to defense. Chiefly, I remember them mentioning flat roofs for archers to fire from and that spiral staircases always ascended clockwise so that defenders had their right sword hand free while attackers would have to use their left. There were illustrations, but my memory of them are of something like technical diagrams, floor plans of the castle and the aforementioned illustration of their eavesdropping device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have paged through &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Have_a_Wonderful_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Five Have a Wonderful Time&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (suggested in the comments since it involves a group of children, a castle, and a secret room), but it is not a match.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T22:48:50.090" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T22:48:50.090" Title="Juvenile literature about a group of children living in a castle, looking for a treasure" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1099" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:12:17.183" Score="2" ViewCount="714" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;The Da Vinci Code&quot; by Dan Brown (2003), was the albinism of Silas significant to the story line, or was its purpose only to make Silas more distinct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="5526" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T06:51:28.207" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T06:51:28.207" Title="How was the albinism of Silas significant to the story line of 'The Da Vinci Code'?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;the-da-vinci-code&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="874" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:16:37.923" Score="8" ViewCount="12430" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English nursing rhyme &quot;Jack and Jill&quot; has several verses. The first verse is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack and Jill went up the hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      To fetch a pail of water.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Jack fell down and broke his crown,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And Jill came tumbling after &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Jack's crown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:56:47.647" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T09:07:43.410" Title="What is Jack's crown?" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:20:04.050" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most likely answer, courtesy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;:  the highest part: such as&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a :  the topmost part of the skull or head&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other possible interpretations according to Albert Jack's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4579529-pop-goes-the-weasel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meaning of Nursery Rhymes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One popular suggestion for its origin is that Louis XVI of France and his queen, the infamous Marie Antoinette are Jack and Jill. But the only real supporting evidence for that is the idea that Jack &lt;strong&gt;broke&lt;/strong&gt; (or lost) &lt;strong&gt;his crown&lt;/strong&gt; and that &lt;strong&gt;Jill came tumbling after&lt;/strong&gt; him, or at least her head did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He notes that the executions of the royal family took place in 1793 and the poem was first published in 1795, which suggests a potential causal link. In that case, the &quot;crown&quot; would be a literal regal piece of headwear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also says that Kilmersdon, a small village in Somerset, England, has claimed to be the origin of the rhyme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The story told in Kilmersdon is that during 1697 the village was home to a young unmarried couple who did a lot of their courting up on a hall, away from the prying eyes of the local gossips. Consequently Jill became pregnant, but just before the baby was born, Jack was killed by a rock that fell off of the hill and landed on his head. Only days later, Jill also died in childbirth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in that case, the crown would again be the top of the head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another story lies in King Charles I's attempt to reform taxes on alcohol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up until that point, wines and ales could be bought as a pint; a half pint, known as a &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Jack&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;; or a quarter pint, known as &quot;Gill&quot; (pronounced the same way as the &quot;gill&quot; of a fist) — hence &lt;strong&gt;Jill&lt;/strong&gt;. As the measures &lt;strong&gt;came tumbling&lt;/strong&gt; down, Charles had effectively gained his tax increase, as slightly less alcohol could then be bought for the same price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beer glass manufacturers, even today, often mark the half-pint mark with a symbol of a crown as a symbol of the decrease. Thus, the &quot;crown&quot; would be that reduced measure, with the &quot;gill&quot; similarly decreasing in pace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has two more mentions of origin, one noting that Shakespeare paired the names of Jack and Jill in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dreams&lt;/em&gt;, indicating that it might be a general term for a generic man and a woman, and noting the Norse myth of Hjuki and Bil, who stole a pail of water from the Moon god, but neither anecdote relates to the use of &quot;crown&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T02:35:49.233" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T02:35:49.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:23:29.213" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It means his head.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See definition 2.1 of &quot;crown&quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/crown&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The top part of a person's head or a hat:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;‘his hair was swept straight back over his crown’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is confirmed when you look at later verses of the same poem which have been included in some editions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up Jack got, and home did trot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As fast as he could caper;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To old Dame Dob, who patched his &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nob&quot;&gt;nob&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With vinegar and brown paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- P. Opie and I. Opie, &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up Jack got and home did trot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As fast as he could caper;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And went to bed and bound his &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With vinegar and brown paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- L. E. Walter, &lt;em&gt;Mother Goose's Nursery Rhymes&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T14:23:29.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2017-01-24T14:47:10.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked multiple sources for you, and I found a common thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Just_To_Say&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that it is just about plums, as they define it as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;imagist&lt;/a&gt; poem. Imagists poems are defined by wikipedia as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which fits the poem relatively well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/this-is-just-to-say/difficulty.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shmoop&lt;/a&gt; believes that the question you have is over analyzing the text. They believe the purpose of the poem is to give an example of a poem that is exactly as it seems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the sites thought you were overanalyzing, and I was unable to find a credible site that argued the same point as the people who took it as murder or sexual assault.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T14:47:10.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="951" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:14:17.600" Score="10" ViewCount="1222" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rosario Castellanos's short story &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.materialdelectura.unam.mx/index.php/13-cuento-contemporaneo/cuento-contemporaneo-cat/42-015-rosario-castellanos?showall=&amp;amp;start=2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modesta Gómez&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; we see how a girl named Modesta with bright dreams for the future has them destroyed first by a wealthy family and then by her working-class husband.  Destitute and desperate, she becomes an &amp;quot;ambusher&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;atajadora&lt;/em&gt;), someone who preys on a lower class – the &amp;quot;Indians&amp;quot;.  These women attack the darker-skinned indigenous people on their way to market, beat them until they give up their goods, and then, as if to justify themselves, hand over a few coins as &amp;quot;payment.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Racial dynamics certainly are a key theme in the story, but normally when I think of racism, I think of unfairly discriminating against someone because of their skin color, or taking advantage of someone's low social standing for one's own gain.  Modesta Gómez's actions can certainly be characterized that way, but she goes even further – as she is assaulting an young indigenous woman in order to take her wool blanket, she yells:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You damn Indian!  Now you're going to pay me for everything!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;¡India desgraciada, me lo tenés que pagar todo junto!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why Modesta is demanding payment – recompense? – from the girl.  Nowhere in the story do indigenous people persecute her in any way.  Yet it seems as if she is here blaming &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; for the crimes perpetuated against her by the wealthy and middle class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this line marks the climax of the story, I'm sure it's essential to the author's point.  Why does Rosario Castellanos have her protagonist demanding payment from the &amp;quot;Indian&amp;quot; girl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;English quotation from &lt;em&gt;The Mexico Reader&lt;/em&gt; (2002), 552.  Spanish from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=I38A9jdym50C&amp;amp;pg=PT53&amp;amp;lpg=PT53&amp;amp;dq=India+desgraciada,+me+lo+ten%C3%A9s+que+pagar+todo+junto&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=ZNi-LgsmCg&amp;amp;sig=jreInA3FHhzPpTu3QflaCWzDjxk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjl3av95OrRAhXnq1QKHXHjAYQQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=India%20desgraciada%2C%20me%20lo%20ten%C3%A9s%20que%20pagar%20todo%20junto&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ciudad Real&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T10:51:08.837" Title="Why does Modesta Gómez demand payment from the indigenous girl?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;&lt;rosario-castellanos&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="879" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:45:47.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about &lt;strong&gt;morals&lt;/strong&gt; - in the literary sense of &quot;lessons which can be derived from a story&quot;, not in the perhaps more common sense of &quot;rules on what's right and wrong&quot;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the moral of this specific story?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did any/all of this specific author's works have a moral?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stories that have clear morals are often called &lt;strong&gt;fables&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T15:54:04.437" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T15:54:04.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="880" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:45:47.817" Score="0" Body="For questions about morals in the literary sense - lessons that can be derived from a story. Not to be used for general questions about right and wrong in a story." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T15:53:55.383" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T15:53:55.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="881" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:54:16.717" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Quran is the central religious text of the religion of Islam.  It is believed to have been told by Allah (God) through the angel Jibril (in English, Gabriel) to the prophet Muhammed.  It took him 23 years to write the Quran, which is divided into chapters, or surah, and then into verses, or ayah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Quran, which is in classical Arabic, tells the story of men from Adam to Muhammed and Allah's interactions with them.  The word Quran occurs about 70 times in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T16:20:05.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T16:20:05.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="882" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:54:16.717" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Quran, the holy scripture of Islam, and its literary content." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T16:19:53.673" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T16:19:53.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="884" CreationDate="2017-01-24T15:59:53.550" Score="8" ViewCount="617" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6/is-a-moral-lesson-a-requirement-for-fairy-tales&quot;&gt;Is a moral lesson a requirement for fairy tales?&lt;/a&gt;, the commenting crowd has pressed for clear distinguishment between whether &lt;em&gt;fables&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;fairy tales&lt;/em&gt; are being discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do fables and fairy tales differ? What are their distinguishing features, and how will I know whether the story I am reading may be one or the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T19:56:11.187" Title="What's the defining difference between a fairy tale and a fable?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="883" CreationDate="2017-01-24T16:13:55.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the dictionary definition of a fable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A short story, typically with animals as characters, conveying a moral&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/fable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries: &quot;Fable&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam Webster defines Fairy tale as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a story (as for children) involving fantastic forces and beings (as fairies, wizards, and goblins)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a story in which improbable events lead to a happy ending&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fairy%20tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster: &quot;Fairy tale&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The defining factor of a fairy tale seems to be a story involving fantastical beasts and their magical world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more opinionated difference: There is no hidden meaning in a fable, and it is meant to convey a moral truth. On the other hand, fairy tales weave a world of magic and leave much room for imagination and fantasy. It is up to the reader to decide if he grasps any message or just enjoys the imaginary world of fairies and elves.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-fable-and-vs-fairy-tale/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;differencebetween.com: &quot;fairy tales and fables&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280" LastEditorUserId="280" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T19:56:11.187" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T19:56:11.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="839" CreationDate="2017-01-24T17:55:34.167" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, at first, I thought this was a weird translation of journal, but in the next line he refers to &quot;their [the literary men's] private journals&quot;, which clarified for me that the magazine of &quot;magazine interviews&quot; was not a journal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are saying &quot;magazines&quot; must not refer to published literary journals because that would make &quot;[the literary men's] private journals&quot; redundant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the qualification &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; seems critical to the meaning here.  He's referring, literally, to any kind of private journal which might be kept by an author.  Note he also includes &lt;em&gt;their person&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., the author him/herself, &quot;still rules&quot; how his/her person is to be interpreted. Barthes is perhaps being slightly hyperbolic by stating what many people might consider self-evident, in order to make it clear what he is going to call into question (Of course I am the ruler of how my person is to be interpreted, aren't I? Presuming that was ever really a given, it certainly ends with Freud...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along these lines, although with regard to private journals the author would most likely be dead when they are first exposed, this self-evident master interpreter could still be applied.  If something is found ambiguous, a commentator might dig up some relevant statement by the author to say, &quot;We can turn to the author's own words in order to understand this..&quot; -- which applies equally well posthumously to &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; the author wrote including private journals.  Conventionally this would lend weight to the commentator's interpretation, if we assume a great posthumous commentator would be someone best able to emulate or expose &quot;what the author meant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not stop at that scenario; &quot;even in the awareness of literary men, anxious to unite&quot; implies entirely private thoughts and interpretations are also being considered.  A private journal is something likely written only for oneself, and there is a reflective, interpretive act involved both in writing and (re-)reading previous passages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Put another way, what &quot;private journals&quot; refers to here isn't any kind of publication, it means literally the private writing of an author, and so it is not redundant with &quot;magazines&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T17:55:34.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="873" CreationDate="2017-01-24T18:21:15.237" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &quot;crown=head&quot; as noted, in Chris Roberts's excellent book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1592402178&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Heavy Words Lightly Thrown&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he posits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One saucy explanation of this rhyme is that &quot;up the hill to fetch a pail of water&quot; is actually a euphemism for having sex, a&lt;strong&gt;nd that &quot;losing your crown&quot; means &quot;losing your virginity&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (in much the same way that people might &quot;go to see a man about a dog&quot; or get up to a bit of &quot;how's your father&quot; if they want to be vague about what they're doing). So here you have a rhyme about a young couple slipping off for a bit of &quot;slap and tickle&quot; and the regrets that come later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T18:21:15.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T19:11:32.417" Score="18" ViewCount="1104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that there are quite a few parallels between Agatha Christie's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hastings&quot;&gt;Captain Arthur Hastings&lt;/a&gt; and Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Watson&quot;&gt;Dr. John Watson&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both served in the British military (Hasting in World War I, Watson in the Second Anglo-Afghan War).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are relatable, first-person narrators.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are the only true friends to their less-relatable comrades (Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both present a layperson's view to the stories' fantastical deductions, as they seldom foresee the conclusion of a case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarities are too many and too strong to be simple coincidences. I have to assume that Christie decided to base Hastings on Watson for one reason or another. Are there any writings by Christie that detail just which characteristics of Hastings she borrowed from Watson, and how those shaped his character in the Poirot novels he appeared in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T21:08:52.027" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T01:57:58.163" Title="To what extent did Agatha Christie base Captain Hastings on Dr. Watson?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="888" CreationDate="2017-01-24T19:33:33.630" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't a particularly satisfying answer, but I thought it might be helpful to offer confirmation that Agatha Christie indeed thought of Hastings as Poirot's Watson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quite enjoyed Captain Hastings. He was a stereotyped creation, but he and Poirot represented my idea of a detective team. I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and now I added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passé.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Agatha Christie: An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, Agatha Christie&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T19:33:33.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T20:54:29.593" Score="9" ViewCount="10705" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; by Isaac Asimov, the author wrote several short stories, all usually revolving about robots of different types.  It's possible to interpret the short stories with many different themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a central theme that connects all of the short stories in the book?  If so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:27:57.623" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T03:16:13.070" Title="Is there a central theme in I, Robot?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;i-robot&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="892" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="893" CreationDate="2017-01-24T20:56:23.663" Score="8" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that, in passing, some books are referred to as &quot;&lt;em&gt;an American classic,&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;one of the great American classics.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; This seems like it's a whole subsection of what counts as &quot;&lt;em&gt;classic literature.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly, while infrequently, certain books are debated, or people discuss which new book is going to be canonized as the next Great American Book, most of the books that we describe as &quot;classics&quot; are ones that nobody would bother to refute. Everyone seems to agree, or assume, that they are. Stuff like &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;The Jungle&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Of Mice and Men&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we have the American classic authors, some of whom appear in that list: Mark Twain, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody disputes that these are &quot;classics&quot;. But, how did they get labeled that way? Does somebody &lt;em&gt;decide&lt;/em&gt; which books are classics and which aren't? Is there a process for canonization of the body of classical literature that I'm just not aware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there isn't, then how did this terminology come about, and why is it so consistent everywhere you look in America? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:10:54.293" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T14:26:53.483" Title="How does a book become &quot;an American classic&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-01-25T01:28:05.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="892" CreationDate="2017-01-24T21:26:33.017" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The noted science fiction author Samuel Delany has a lengthy discussion of the canonization process in his book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0819567167&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About Writing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  His conclusions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While there is a definite relationship between canonization and quality, canonization is socially constructed, mutable, and often affected by incidentals not directly related to the work's quality, including alignment with prevailing social trends, mores, or commitments, the persistence or effectiveness of individual promoters of the work, and the vagaries of fate.  Canonization is thus not infallible, inferior works can be canonized over superior ones.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The key element of canonization is a body of scholarship built up around the work, as supplemented by things such as awards, inclusion on lists, adaptations and derivative works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the defining characteristic of the canonized work is that it continues in living memory beyond its initial publication.  There is therefore a self-reinforcing aspect to canonization.  The more a book is referred to, the more visible it is, and the more likely it is to continue to be referred to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T14:26:53.483" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T14:26:53.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="892" CreationDate="2017-01-24T21:56:55.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italo Calvino's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Why read the Classics&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (2000)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/07/06/italo-calvinos-14-definitions-of-a-classic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italo Calvino lists 14 &amp;quot;definitions&amp;quot; of a classic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although (As mentioned in the comments) although the viewpoint of Italo Calvino is quite abstract and possibly intentionally ambiguous, I believe it gives a good initial idea of just the difficulty in describing a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;classic&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interpretation is given by &lt;a href=&quot;http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9656.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard J. Smith&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the work must focus on matters of great importance, identifying fundamental human problems and providing some sort of guidance for dealing with them. Second, it must address these fundamental issues in ‘beautiful, moving, and memorable ways,’ with ‘stimulating and inviting images.’ Third, it must be complex, nuanced, comprehensive, and profound, requiring careful and repeated study in order to yield its deepest secrets and greatest wisdom. One might add that precisely because of these characteristics, a classic has great staying power across both time and space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Smith seems to give more common suggestions, describing &amp;quot;fundamental issues&amp;quot; and a common suggestion of &amp;quot;staying power across both time and space&amp;quot; essentially being timeless, and relevant no matter how many years had passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:47:18.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1055" CreationDate="2017-01-24T21:59:48.703" Score="7" ViewCount="5427" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/poem/8498499-Mirror-by-Sylvia-Plath&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Mirror&quot; by Sylvia Plath&lt;/a&gt;, the speaker in the poem says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I am a lake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, also at times implies that the speaker is a mirror. However, since an object can not both be a mirror and a lake, this leads me to believe that they are instead a metaphor for something else. So, what do the &quot;mirror&quot; and the &quot;lake&quot; represent in the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T01:00:13.767" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T01:00:13.767" Title="What do the &quot;mirror&quot; and the &quot;lake&quot; represent in &quot;Mirror&quot; by Sylvia Plath?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;sylvia-plath&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:00:05.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poem/just-say&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Williams's poem allows the reader a wide range of possibilities. He or she is free to decide whether it is &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; temptation, a re-enactment of the fall, or the triumph of the physical over the spiritual. Each reader is left free to construct a poem, and the reader becomes the owner of the resulting poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site also notes that there has never been a consensus on what the poem meant, and that Williams never mentioned the meaning of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eatthispoem.com/blog/2012/8/7/this-is-just-to-say-by-william-carlos-williams-inas-plum-tat.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another site&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be as simple as this: A little poem about eating plums is too delicious to spend that much time thinking about. Over-analyzing removes the joy we receive from reading these words, smiling, and imagining how perfectly ripe those plums must have tasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing can agree on a more complex solution than &amp;quot;it's just about plums.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; Either it's up to you, or it's just about plums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T22:26:27.433" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T22:26:27.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="897" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:01:44.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:01:44.063" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:01:44.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="898" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:01:44.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of crime writer Agatha Christie (1890 – 1976) or her life as a writer. Her works include 'And Then There Were None', 'Murder on the Orient Express' and many stories about the detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:46:20.397" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:46:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="899" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:02:04.133" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:02:04.133" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:02:04.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="900" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:02:04.133" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Dan Brown (born 1964) or his life as a writer. He is famous for his works such as 'Angels &amp; Demons', 'The Da Vinci Code' and 'Inferno'." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:13:58.967" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:13:58.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="901" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:02:57.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:02:57.503" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:02:57.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="902" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:02:57.503" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Leo Tolstoy and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [russian-literature]. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:20:35.013" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:20:35.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="903" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:03:12.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:03:12.200" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:03:12.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="904" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:03:12.200" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), English novelist and poet, or his life as a writer. His novels include &quot;Far From the Madding Crowd&quot; (1874), &quot;The Mayor of Casterbridge&quot; (1886) and &quot;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&quot; (1891)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T08:02:47.640" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T08:02:47.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="905" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:03:44.100" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:03:44.100" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:03:44.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="906" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:03:44.100" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Karen Joy Fowler and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:47:21.060" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:47:21.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="907" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:25.870" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:04:25.870" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:04:25.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="908" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:25.870" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Katherine Paterson and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T23:06:07.763" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T23:06:07.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="909" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:40.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:04:40.277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:04:40.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="910" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:40.277" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T15:20:08.197" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T15:20:08.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="911" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:52.757" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:04:52.757" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:04:52.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="912" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:04:52.757" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) or his life as a writer. He is best known for 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces', which discusses the archetypal hero's journey in detail." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:47:32.307" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:47:32.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="913" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:09.997" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:05:09.997" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:05:09.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="914" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:09.997" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Juan Rulfo and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:48:17.950" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:48:17.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="915" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:20.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:05:20.493" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:05:20.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="916" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:20.493" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Joseph Heller (1923-1999) or his life as a writer. He is best known for the satire 'Catch-22', the origin of the term for a contradictory choice." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T08:54:50.893" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T08:54:50.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="917" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:30.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:05:30.950" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:05:30.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="918" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:05:30.950" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Jules Verne and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:47:11.623" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:47:11.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="919" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:06:00.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:06:00.700" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:06:00.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="920" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-24T22:06:00.700" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Justin Cronin and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-24T22:47:27.233" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T22:47:27.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="840" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:00:04.177" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that both &quot;theological&quot; and &quot;message&quot; (of the Author-God) are in quotes may be a clue about the context of the former here.  It's provisional, derived from a sort of extended metaphor, where Barthes is using theology as a stand-in for whatever kind of strongly orthodox perspective (the orthodox perspective being one you touched upon in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/839/33&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, wherein &quot;The author still rules in manuals of literary history&quot;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's an orthodoxy, and the metaphor Barthes is drawing is to theology, which, at least by most conventional definitions, pre-supposes the existence of the divine (or else it cannot proceed).  Implicit in a conventional, or at least Judaeo-Christian conventional, conception of &quot;divine&quot; is that it by definition refers to the most fundamental level of existence, from which everything else flowed/flows.  God created the world, it did not create him, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To extend the metaphor, if the existence of the divine is fundamental to theology, then the existence of &quot;the Author-God&quot; (or Gods plural) is fundamental to the &quot;manuals of literary history&quot; that address their work.  Bathes is contrasting this to a belief that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a text [...] is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's not literally trying to claim that Shakespeare or Hemingway never existed, but that the fact of their existence is perhaps not all that significant to the existence of their work, which is never purely &quot;original&quot; and so on.  Shakespeare, who's actual existence as a person who wrote all the things his name is attached to has been subject to question, is a good illustration of this; those arguments about his existence don't have much bearing on the interpretation or historical significance of the works he may or may not have written. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Barthes is trying to dethrone is of course authorial intent, but also psychological interpretations that can be simply swapped in -- the existence of authorial unconscious intents should not be regarded as the ultimate truth about things any more than their conscious intents.  Did Hemingway write the way he did about the things he did because of his childhood, repressed sexual desires, etc.? Perhaps (to keep extending the metaphor, a sort of &quot;Mad God&quot; scenario), but this is not much better or worse an explanation than that he was a genius craftsman (period, full stop).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bathes's author is then a bit like the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.  The title of the book, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Death of the Author&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; would seem to be a transparent reference to Nietzche's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_is_dead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;God is Dead&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which has a very different spin than the straightforward atheist premise that there is no God and never has been. Worth noting that in the same breath Nietzche writes &quot;...and we have killed him&quot; -- Barthes and his peer group would be mostly very aware of this passage.  Further worth noting is that this is also a metaphor; Nietzsche is not waxing theological (although what the other half of his metaphor is may be more ambiguous) and that the death/killing is not necessarily to be considered a bad thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the death of the Author-God is not necessarily a bad thing -- after all, Barthes is effectively exhorting us to help kill him.  If the Author-God was a bit of a fiction to start with, then it is one which needs to die, not literally by taking to the streets and stoning writers but by detangling the fact of their existence from the existence of their works.  This &quot;killing&quot; is like pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. Or Shakespeare, about which you can believe whatever you want: It will not make any difference to &lt;strong&gt;the text&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="33" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T23:06:11.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2881" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:19:06.103" Score="14" ViewCount="8839" Body="&lt;p&gt;In T. S. Eliot's poem &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), T. S. Eliot claims that someone (probably either humankind or the reader) only knows &quot;a heap of broken images&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A  heap of broken images, where the sun beats,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dead tree gives no shelter,  the cricket no relief,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &quot;heap of broken images&quot;? What does it mean/represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T09:21:53.900" LastActivityDate="2019-07-21T23:41:03.203" Title="What is the &quot;heap of broken images&quot; in The Waste Land?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:23:13.213" Score="6" ViewCount="914" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the moment Curley sees Lennie, he develops a strong dislike towards him because Lennie is physically bigger than Curley. I've always wondered if there were other reasons for Curley's hatred of Lennie, and so I thought Curley might have always suspected that Lennie was cognitively disabled, and that may have contributed to his strong dislike for Lennie. Is there any textual evidence to support this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T04:28:00.937" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T15:45:38.113" Title="Does Curley ever realize Lennie is cognitively disabled?" Tags="&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;of-mice-and-men&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2017-01-24T23:34:48.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://waltervstolzing.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/a-close-reading-of-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-thames-daughters-passage-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Adopting a prophetic tone of archaic allusion for much of the poem,&#xA;  Eliot asks, “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of&#xA;  this stony rubbish? Son of man,/You cannot say, or guess, for you know&#xA;  only/A heap of broken images…” (ll. 19-22).  Being a devout albeit&#xA;  unconventional Catholic, Eliot uses the term “Son of man” as one&#xA;  loaded with history and meanings, bringing the modern man into the&#xA;  discourse of ancient Semitic religions as well as the discourse of&#xA;  Christ himself, the purified son of man.  &lt;strong&gt;Modern man cannot reach this&#xA;  purified state because his world is a barren wasteland of both sexual&#xA;  and intellectual exhaustion, a heap of broken images of the past and&#xA;  present.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/the-waste-land/burial-dead-summary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shmoop&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lines 21-23 allude to Ecclesiastes, and they say that you probably don't know the answer to this last question, because all you really know about life is &quot;a heap of broken images&quot; (22), meaning that you live your life on a superficial level and don't bother to draw your thoughts together into any meaningful ideas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the meaning of the phrase alludes to how little we, as mere mortals, know about the vast enigma that is life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-24T23:34:48.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="924" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:08:55.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read the entire book, and there is no &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; evidence of Curley describing Lennie as cognitively challenged. However, the fact that Lennie is cognitively challenged seems to be understood by most of the characters, e.g. Curley's wife (who is never named in the story), who tells Lennie that &quot;I think you're nuts&quot; on pg. 44. It seems likely that Curley would also be aware of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also times when Curley uses Lennie's disability to abuse him. When Curley and Lennie first meet on page 13, Curley bullies Lennie about not speaking to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lennie was looking helplessly to George for instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;An' you won't let the big guy talk, is that it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He can talk if he wants to tell you anything.&quot; He nodded slightly&#xA;  to Lennie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We jus' come in,&quot; said Lennie softly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also plenty of evidence that Curley is insecure: about his height, about his wife, and about his fighting ability. Lennie and Curley get into a fight, and Lennie beats Curley pretty decisively. I think that it would add insult to injury for Curley to know that not only was he defeated, but that he was defeated by someone who he viewed as inferior and easily bullied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that Lennie's disability impacted the way Curley thought about and treated Lennie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there isn't any evidence of Curley being prejudiced towards people with disabilities as a &lt;em&gt;class&lt;/em&gt; of people. I couldn't find any examples of Curley, for example, using slurs to describe Lennie. (Contrast this to Curley's wife, who tells Lennie that he is &quot;nuts). It's possible that I missed something, so by all means feel free to check my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite frankly, I think that you could criticize John Steinbeck for not portraying Curley as prejudiced towards people with disabilities. It seems unrealistic to me that Curley wouldn't be prejudiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T15:45:38.113" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T15:45:38.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="949" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:08:57.320" Score="15" ViewCount="3421" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poe's poem &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt; contains the following words in the fifteenth stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] tell me truly, I implore—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does 'Gilead' mean here?&lt;/strong&gt; I've looked it up on the internet, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilead&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; the only places known as Gilead are real-life places in the Middle East - perhaps with some religious significance, but not literally Paradise. Why, then, does the narrator ask about &quot;balm in Gilead&quot;? What is the significance of this question put to the raven?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T15:48:30.327" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:48:30.327" Title="What does 'Gilead' mean in The Raven?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;the-raven&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="929" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:26:12.377" Score="9" ViewCount="2648" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gertrude Chandler Warner's story &lt;em&gt;The Boxcar Children&lt;/em&gt; became the first in a series of books that she continued writing until her death in 1979. She wrote a total of nineteen books in the series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are more &lt;em&gt;Boxcar Children&lt;/em&gt; books dated years after that. For example &lt;em&gt;The Castle Mystery&lt;/em&gt;, #36 in the series, was published in 1993. On the cover of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/books/bxc-36-the-castle-mystery-by-gertrude-chandler-warner/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition published by Scholastic&lt;/a&gt;, it says &quot;created by Gertrude Chandler Warner&quot;, and the same with all the books after &lt;em&gt;Benny Uncovers a Mystery&lt;/em&gt;, the last book she wrote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She created the series but she evidently didn't write these books since she died in 1979. However, the books don't list the actual author's name anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books don't write themselves, so who wrote the later stories in the Boxcar Children series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T23:44:40.967" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T00:34:50.767" Title="Who wrote the Boxcar Children books after Gertrude Chandler Warner's death?" Tags="&lt;gertrude-chandler-warner&gt;&lt;the-boxcar-children&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:32:59.577" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boxcar_Children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the first 19 stories were written by creator Warner. Other books in the series have been written by other writers, but always feature the byline &quot;Created by Gertrude Chandler Warner&quot;. The recent books in the series are set in the present day, whereas most of the original books were set in the 1920s and 1930s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems they were not written by one person, but by groups of people trying to recreate the stories in the style of GCW.  The authors were not credited except for the &quot;Created By&quot; line.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boxcarchildren.com/books/?taxonomy=series&amp;amp;term=the-boxcar-children-mysteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The official website of the series&lt;/a&gt; says only this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gertrude Chandler Warner wrote the first 19 stories, but there are now more than 140 titles in The Boxcar Children® Mysteries series.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boxcar_Children_novels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list&lt;/a&gt; of Boxcar Children books on Wikipedia has two categories: written by GCW, and written by subsequent authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems it was a group effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T23:47:02.160" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T23:47:02.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="968" CreationDate="2017-01-25T00:49:46.833" Score="13" ViewCount="4704" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following stanza is from Robert Frost's &lt;em&gt;Into My Own&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of my wishes is that those dark trees,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      But stretched away unto the &lt;strong&gt;edge of doom&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am guessing that the &quot;edge of doom&quot; is referring to the end of time -- as in, The trees are stretching into the end of time and space. Is this reading correct? Where does the phrase the &quot;edge of doom&quot; come from? At first when I read it, I thought that the &quot;edge of doom&quot; was a dark reference (similar to &quot;mask of gloom&quot;), but it seems to be closer to a wedding vow, such as &quot;Our marriage will last unto the edge of doom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T20:42:20.893" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T20:42:20.893" Title="What does &quot;The Edge of Doom&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="932" CreationDate="2017-01-25T01:19:44.520" Score="3" ViewCount="7130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&lt;/em&gt; by Frost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I think I know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His house is in the village though;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will not see me stopping here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To watch his woods fill up with snow.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My little horse must think it queer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To stop without a farmhouse near&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Between the woods and frozen lake&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The darkest evening of the year.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He gives his harness bells a shake&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To ask if there is some mistake.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The only other sound’s the sweep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of easy wind and downy flake.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The woods are lovely, dark and deep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I have promises to keep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And miles to go before I sleep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And miles to go before I sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the narrator stop in the woods at all? There's no farmhouse nearby and there's seemingly no reason the narrator stops in the woods when he has a promise to keep and miles to travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T06:56:04.717" Title="Why does the narrator in &quot;Stopping by Woods&quot; stop by the woods?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2017-01-25T01:19:44.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator stops because he wants to &lt;strong&gt;enjoy the scenery of the forest&lt;/strong&gt;. Assuming that the journey the narrator has to make is an extensive one (&lt;em&gt;miles to go before I sleep&lt;/em&gt;), the narrator wants to take a small break to watch the natural wonder of the snowfall and the beauty of the trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several lines that support this idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To watch his woods fill up with snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the clearest statement of the purpose of the narrator stopping in the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other sound’s the sweep&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of easy wind and downy flake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be interpreted several ways, but to me, I see this as the narrator's wondrous appreciation of the heavy snowfall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woods are lovely, dark and deep,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line hints that the narrator wants to spend more time observing the forest, but he has commitments to main and thus, has to continue on his journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T01:20:54.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T01:34:52.177" Score="5" ViewCount="1210" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/casey-bat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casey at the Bat&lt;/a&gt; is one of my all-time favorite poems.  I always thought it was just about baseball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it?  Is there a metaphor or an allegory hidden somewhere in the last inning of a baseball game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T10:30:08.623" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T20:06:02.903" Title="Is there any symbolism in Casey at the Bat?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;casey-at-the-bat&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2017-01-25T01:41:19.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because he wants to end it all&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken at face value, Robert Frost's &lt;em&gt;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&lt;/em&gt; is a pastoral poem describing a rider's pause on a journey to admire some scenery. As such, it is superbly crafted, and with few blemishes. It stands equal to Wordsworth's &lt;em&gt;Daffodils&lt;/em&gt;, inasmuch as it is picturesque and enormously popular. The poem makes few demands on the reader: the structure and rhyme scheme are conventional, the poem is short, as are the word and line lengths, and it contains no literary references or allusions. In other words, it is an easy read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if a literary work does not address the human condition in some way, and has only creamy charm to commend it, it must be considered inconsequential. Fortunately, Frost can be enigmatic, so if we want to make sense of this poem, we must be prepared dig a little. It is not too difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the opening verse, the narrator places us in woods outside a village. It is snowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I think I know.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His house is in the village though;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He will not see me stopping here&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To watch his woods fill up with snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This immediately raises a question, although is it easily missed, coming so early in the poem. Who is the narrator referring to, and is he important? Is he the person that the narrator went to see? Why does the narrator care if he is being observed? It is not illegal to admire some trees from a public road, and who has not stopped occasionally to watch snow falling? Never mind. Too many questions, and too soon. Let us read on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My little horse must think it queer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To stop without a farmhouse near&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Between the woods and frozen lake&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The darkest evening of the year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator now tells us that he is far from any shelter, and it is mid-winter. Why has he undertaken a long journey, so late in the day, and at such an inclement time of year? Could he not have stayed in the village, and found lodgings for himself and stabling for his horse? One possible explanation is that he had no money to pay for it, and so had no choice but to ride home, through the night if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He gives his harness bells a shake&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To ask if there is some mistake.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The only other sound’s the sweep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of easy wind and downy flake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer admitted that this verse caused him some anxiety, since no self-respecting rider would use a fancy harness on a working horse, and the mention of harness bells in the first line might have been the cause of some derision, at least among critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the third verse is almost a filler, since it gives us no new information. Instead, it asks another question. Is there some mistake in stopping here to admire the view? The answer is no, there is no mistake, just one final question that is about to be answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woods are lovely, dark and deep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I have promises to keep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And miles to go before I sleep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And miles to go before I sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the pay-load of the poem. The woods are lovely because they are dark and deep, and a man could lose himself to the world in them quite easily. No one is watching him, and the snow will soon cover his tracks. No one will come looking for him for some hours, at least until the horse is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can guess that the narrator is short of money, else he would have found lodgings for the night. Perhaps his errand was about money? Perhaps he needed to borrow money, or reclaim a debt, or explain why he could not repay one himself? Whatever the reason, the outcome was not a happy one, and he must return home empty-handed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to be or not to be? Like Hamlet, the narrator has responsibilities: promises to keep, and he must go home, if only to deliver bad news. Quietness with a bare bodkin is not an option. The penultimate line of the poem, repeated with great finesse, echoes the slow plodding of the horse as the narrator continues his journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T06:56:04.717" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T06:56:04.717" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T02:09:26.543" Score="10" ViewCount="6555" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short poem &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem&lt;/em&gt; by William Blake - not to be confused with his much longer epic poem of the same title; I'm talking about the &quot;did those feet in ancient times&quot; one - contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And did the Countenance Divine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And was Jerusalem builded here,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Among these dark Satanic Mills?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the &quot;dark Satanic Mills&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious, and most literal, interpretation would be that they're meant to be the industrial mills which were appearing all over England around the time Blake wrote this poem, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. But I've heard other theories, such as that they're meant to represent churches (Blake was a &quot;radical Christian&quot; who had little time for the established church) or even the academic institutions of Oxford and Cambridge. I'm interested in seeing evidence for different interpretations here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T13:39:30.720" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T05:51:52.220" Title="What are the &quot;dark Satanic mills&quot; in Blake's Jerusalem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="935" CreationDate="2017-01-25T04:20:45.477" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;To approach this question, it's worth looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Milton_preface.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entirety of the passage&lt;/a&gt; that precedes it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible; but when the New Age is at leisure to pronounce, all will be set right, and those grand works of the more ancient, and consciously and professedly Inspired men will hold their proper rank, and the Daughters of Memory shall become the Daughters of Inspiration. Shakspeare and Milton were both curb’d by the general malady and infection from the silly Greek and Latin slaves of the sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rouse up, O Young Men of the New Age! Set your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the Camp, the Court, and the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental, and prolong corporeal war. Painters! on you I call. Sculptors! Architects! suffer not the fashionable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works, or the expensive advertising boasts that they make of such works: believe Christ and His Apostles that there is a class of men whose whole delight is in destroying. We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever, in Jesus our Lord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blake contrasts Graeco-Roman ideals to Judaeo-Christian ones. The arts of the classical world are inspired by the muses, i.e., the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;daughters of Mnemosyne&lt;/a&gt;, the Greek personification of memory. Something that relies on memory is by definition a recapitulation, i.e., not new and fresh. Blake seeks to institute radically new art that would be rooted in imagination rather than memory. This imagination would be inspired by the eternal world of Jerusalem. Even though Jerusalem itself is obviously old in a temporal sense, because Christian truth is eternal, it is always radically new. So when Blake says he will not rest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Till we have built Jerusalem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In England's green and pleasant land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it's not so much a rebuilding of something that was once there, as a recapturing of the radical, eternal promise of Christianity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blake's own answer to the question he asks in the lines you quote is obviously &quot;yes&quot;: England, too, shared God's presence and it too has been, is, and can be Jerusalem. The present state of England is fallen and corrupt, much as Shakespeare's and Milton's poetry is. But even among the &lt;strong&gt;Satanic mills&lt;/strong&gt; of current-day England, Jerusalem lives on eternally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are these satanic mills? In Blake's contemporary context, they're obviously the mills of the Industrial Revolution. But there's also a contrast between these satanic mills and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mills_of_God&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;divine mill&lt;/a&gt;; proverbially, God's mill grinds slow but sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Against the rapidity of factory life in late 18th C England, Blake posits the slow workings of eternity. Just as God's face once shone on what are now clouded hills, the mills of London obscure what was once Jerusalem.  Nevertheless, those mills, being Satanic, are just part of temporality, and mere excrescences on the eternal truth of Christianity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this perspective, it makes sense to see the mills as actual mills. I'm sure Blake would agree that the churches of his day were part of the temporal corruption of the eternal truth of Christianity; nevertheless, there's no warrant for saying that the mills are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; straightforwardly mills. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T04:20:45.477" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="944" CreationDate="2017-01-25T04:32:45.567" Score="9" ViewCount="1529" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading Somerset Maugham's &lt;em&gt;Cakes and Ale&lt;/em&gt;, I came across this quote (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Charles Dickens in an after-dinner speech had stated that &lt;strong&gt;genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he actually make this statement, or is it an example of an &quot;unreliable narrator&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user59" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T21:53:23.110" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:53:23.110" Title="What did Charles Dickens say about genius and pain?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;william-somerset-maugham&gt;&lt;cakes-and-ale&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T06:18:45.030" Score="22" ViewCount="1210" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read through Orwell's short essay, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc&quot;&gt;What is Fascism?&lt;/a&gt; In it, Orwell defines fascism (or doesn't) with two sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essay was published in 1944. So we know that issues of modern politics, particularly those surrounding the state of the world at the time of WWII, seems to have (unsurprisingly) been on Orwell's mind for some time before he wrote the book. 1984 was published in 1949, five years after the writing of this essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Orwell ever talk about what, specifically, motivated him to go from pondering on fascism to writing the actual book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T15:34:35.857" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:53:37.710" Title="Do we know what prompted Orwell to write 1984?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T07:24:17.493" Score="6" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Grace of Kings&lt;/em&gt; is deeply concerned with the mechanics of power - who has it; how to get it; how to keep it; what price you pay for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through its course, the book surveys a great many rulers and would-be rulers. In each case, the book portrays power as a corrupting force, that turns rulers to paths of indulgence and self-preservation -- which sooner or later devastate the society being ruled, destroying the ruler as well. The book also points out that those most drawn to power are often the ones who will wield it least wisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To all this, Kuni is an exception. His wisdom in ruling seems smooth and unquestioned. This is apparent at every point - from the complete lack of repercussions for the looting of Pan, under his command (compare to the harsh judgement of Mata's character we're supposed to accept, when he is forced to make human sacrifice to Tazu); all the way to the utopian portrayal of the kingdoms united under his rule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The beggar's face fell at this news. &quot;Then it is even more generous of you to share food with a stranger. You're certain your parents will not mind?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy laughed. &quot;There's no need to worry. King Kuni and Prime Minister Yelu ordered grain to be shipped from Gefica, and all of us have plenty to eat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You like the king then? Even though he is not from Xana?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We no longer speak of Xana,&quot; said the boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But that's your country!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy shook his head. &quot;This is Rui, an Island of Dara.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is it that makes Kuni so exceptional?&lt;/strong&gt; Why is he worthy and successful, when all the others are not? What is it that makes him able to navigate the minefield of rebellion, leadership, and power, without succumbing to all the same traps that every other leader in the book does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:12:15.080" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:12:15.080" Title="What is the argument for Kuni being a worthy leader, when all others fail?" Tags="&lt;ken-liu&gt;&lt;the-dandelion-dynasty&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="941" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T08:52:19.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T08:52:19.920" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T08:52:19.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="942" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T08:52:19.920" Score="0" Body="For questions about the poem This Is Just To Say, by William Carlos Williams. " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T13:17:30.087" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:17:30.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="489" CreationDate="2017-01-25T09:03:45.443" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Appendix A, we get a description of dwarf-women from Gimli, also mentioning the rarity of them (only 1-in-3) and their unwillingness to go abroad. He also describes the with the following physical appearance (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are in voice and &lt;strong&gt;appearance&lt;/strong&gt;, and in garb if they must go on a journey, &lt;strong&gt;so like to the dwarf-men&lt;/strong&gt; that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The Return of the King: Appendix A - III Durin's Folk&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, in my opinion, sums up the answer that they also have beards. However, Christopher Tolkien (the editor for most of Tolkien's posthumous work) suggests similar (from &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;strong&gt;Naugrim have beards from the beginning of their lives, male and female alike;&lt;/strong&gt; nor indeed can their womenkind be discerned by those of other race...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The War of the Jewels - (Part Two) The Later Quenta Silmarillion: XIII Concerning the Dwarves&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Naugrim is the Sindarin name for Dwarves&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, the dwarves are said to appear almost exactly alike regardless of gender, and all dwarves are born with beards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="280" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T18:15:02.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="937" CreationDate="2017-01-25T09:10:58.947" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quotation &lt;strong&gt;Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095847891&quot;&gt;proverbial&lt;/a&gt; and dates to the late 19th century, more or less around Dickens's time. However, nothing like it is found in any of his novels or published letters. If he said it in an after-dinner speech, we have no records of the rest of the speech. Nor do we know when or to what audience he is supposed to have said it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A close approximation turns up in the work of Dickens's contemporary, Thomas Carlyle. His &lt;em&gt;Life of Frederick the Great&lt;/em&gt; (1858), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2104/2104.txt&quot;&gt;Book IV, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;, has the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The good plan itself, this comes not of its own accord; it&#xA;  is the fruit of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;genius&quot; (which means transcendent capacity of taking&#xA;  trouble, first of all)&lt;/strong&gt;: given a huge stack of tumbled thrums, it is&#xA;  not in your sleep that you will find the vital centre of it, or get the&#xA;  first thrum by the end! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest print source that I'm aware of where the quotation occurs exactly as stated in Maugham's 1930 novel is Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; (1887), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet/Part_1/Chapter_3&quot;&gt;Part I, Chapter 3, &quot;The Lauriston Gardens Mystery&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,&quot; he remarked with a smile. &quot;It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens died a scant seventeen years before this novel appeared in print. If the line is really from him, one would expect Holmes to say something like &lt;em&gt;Dickens said&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;They say&lt;/em&gt;, I think. More likely it's just a pithy statement of a sentiment that comes from Carlyle and/or was in the air during the Victorian period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T09:10:58.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="891" CreationDate="2017-01-25T11:17:00.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stories in '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I, Robot&lt;/a&gt;' all put Asimov's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three Laws of Robotics&lt;/a&gt; to the test, trying to find a flaw that undermines the laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Three Laws are first mentioned in '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Runaround&lt;/a&gt;'. they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch_That_Rabbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catch That Rabbit&lt;/a&gt;', the robot goes berserk and the First Law overrides it's behaviour, thus rescuing the Three Laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Lost_Robot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost Little Robot&lt;/a&gt;' the First Law is programmatically tampered with, and the robot goes into a nervous breakdown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common theme is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Calvin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Susan Calvin&lt;/a&gt;, who releases the stories to the media.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="27" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T11:17:00.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T11:36:43.993" Score="15" ViewCount="3586" Body="&lt;p&gt;The New York Times record Hercule Poirot's age as &amp;quot;unknown&amp;quot; in their obituary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Lask, Thomas. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1975/08/06/archives/hercule-poirot-is-dead-famed-belgian-detective-hercule-poirot-the.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hercule Poirot Is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, New York Times, 6 August 1975.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm not mistaken, all we know for certain is that Poirot is retired when he first appears, something Agatha Christie expressed regret for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a mistake I made there. The result is that my fictional detective must be well over a hundred by now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;Agatha Christie: An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, Agatha Christie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have a more specific figure for Poirot's age?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T15:05:52.230" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T15:05:52.230" Title="How old was Hercule Poirot?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T11:43:46.853" Score="9" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator of the work talks about how when he read &lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt; after having been told that Pierre Menard had rewritten it with the same words, he could feel a new life coming from the page and new meaning in every word. Was this solely a satire of the ridiculousness of over-reliance on authorial intent or was it also an analogy for critical lenses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T11:35:19.413" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T11:35:19.413" Title="In &quot;Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote&quot; is Menard an analogy for a critical lens?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1073" CreationDate="2017-01-25T11:54:56.693" Score="9" ViewCount="1490" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Rose for Emily&lt;/em&gt; by William Faulkner, Faulkner never mentions rose as a noun, only as a past tense verb throughout the work. However, its position as one of two primary words within the title, suggests that the &quot;Rose&quot; has significance of its own. So, what does the rose represent in the title of &lt;em&gt;A Rose for Emily&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T11:46:23.983" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T11:46:23.983" Title="What does the rose represent in &quot;A Rose for Emily&quot; by William Faulkner?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="927" CreationDate="2017-01-25T12:01:53.633" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Commentators like William Giraldi, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2uKcDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA382&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Annotated Poe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,  point out that this refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=jeremiah+8%3A22&amp;amp;version=KJV&quot;&gt;Jeremiah 8:22&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia says that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balm_of_Gilead&quot;&gt;Balm of Gilead&lt;/a&gt;, speaking figuratively, is a &quot;universal cure,&quot; and Les Harding writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To ask the question found in Jeremiah 8:22, &quot;Is there no balm in Gilead?&quot; is to ask &quot;Is there no relief or consolation for the evils which befall us?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=qfsJBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA32&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David L. Jeffrey cites &quot;The Raven&quot; as an example of an ironic use of the phrase, while retaining the biblical association:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Poe's &quot;The Raven&quot; a desperate speaker cries out for hope, but does so to a &quot;thing of evil&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zD6xVr1CizIC&amp;amp;pg=PA73&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kevin Reynaud interprets it similarly, and connects the phrase to the broader context of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mention of Gilead refers to the Bible in which the balm of Gilead was a healing ointment, implying that the narrator's only cure to depression is to be reunited with Lenore in Heaven. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.826.1354&amp;amp;rep=rep1&amp;amp;type=pdf&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T14:30:11.100" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T14:30:11.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="878" CreationDate="2017-01-25T12:50:39.083" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brenci Patiño makes the point that the two women, Modesta and the indigenous woman, are &amp;quot;pitted against each other&amp;quot; by the social structure around them.  They &amp;quot;share similar experiences of oppression,&amp;quot; but must fight each other for survival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modesta, as a servant to a wealthy family, was abused and made to live in fear.  So the specific incident, in which Modesta demands payment from the indigenous woman, Patiño attributes to the replicative power of societal norms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Modesta, her reaction towards her indigenous counterpart shows how societal norms have made her replicate the structure of power that she learned from her former &lt;em&gt;patrona&lt;/em&gt; [master].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monique Sarfati-Arnaud similarly argues that the story, and this particular aspect, communicates the irresistibility of the power structure of society:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mentality of the dominant class permeates the entire social scale in such a way that, ironically and sadly, even those who are exploited like Modesta for being at the bottom of the scale end up being exploiters of others (in a very limited and absurd way, clearly, but not therefore less ferocious and categorical), exploiters of those few who are even lower [on the social scale].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;la mentalidad de la clase dominante permea toda la escala social de forma que, irónica y tristemente, incluso aquellos que son explotados como Modesta por&#xA;pertenecer a la base de la escala terminan por ser explotadores de otros (de una&#xA;forma muy limitada e irrisoria, claro está, pero no por ello menos feroz y terminante), explotadores de aquellos pocos que están aún más abajo. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patiño, Brenci.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/17018/1_Patino_Brenci.pdf?sequence=3&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Women and Class: Power Dynamics in Contemporary Mexican Literature and Culture,&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; 2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sarfati-Arnaud, Monique, &lt;a href=&quot;http://studylib.es/doc/6764360/los--buenos--y-los--malos--en--modesta-g%C3%B3mez---lectura-id...&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Los 'buenos' y los 'malos' en 'Modesta Gómez'&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  English translation my own.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:16:57.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="955" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:03:07.183" Score="7" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second paragraph of &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This cyclical book is god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later in the story he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On some shelf in some hexagon (men reasoned) there must exist a book which is the formula and perfect compendium of all the rest: some librarian has gone through it and he is analogous to a god. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this second quote is he referring to the cyclical book in his reference to god or is he referring to the concept? If he is referring to the concept, is the cyclical book really God?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T00:55:38.057" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T00:55:38.057" Title="In &quot;The Library of Babel&quot; is the &quot;cyclical book&quot; really God?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="953" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:08:30.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T13:08:30.737" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:08:30.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="954" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:08:30.737" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Library of Babel, a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Use this tag with the [jorge-luis-borges] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:07:58.277" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:07:58.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="952" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:27:56.447" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are bringing the first quote a little out of context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary from of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the cyclical book is God &lt;em&gt;in the context&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;what the mystics claim&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrasing is a little ambiguous. It could imply that one of the mystics' claims is that there is a cyclical book, and another is that this cyclical book is God. Or, it might be the narrator's opinion that the cyclical book of which the mystics speak, is in fact -- in some manner -- God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The separation between the claim of the circular room, and the definition of the book as God -- particularly, by saying &quot;their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure,&quot; which obviously isn't the mystic's own claim -- makes it seem like a remark by the narrator. So the easiest way to read this is, the narrator is mentioning a belief of the mystics, and pointing out that &lt;em&gt;in the context of their beliefs&lt;/em&gt;, the cyclical book is God. You could interpret that as, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whether the mystics see it this way or not, their unshakable belief in a circular room and a circular book, effectively makes their belief in the existence of the book, their equivalent to belief in the existence of God.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If such a book were indeed to exist, it would be a miracle, and could be seen as divinity itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The mystics literally worship a circular book they believe exists as their God; however that is a minor aside, I only bring it up because I was telling you about shapes of rooms in the library, and a circular room is part of their myth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later quote is much more straightforward -- it's clear that we're talking about somebody being &lt;em&gt;analogous&lt;/em&gt; to God, and not actually being God itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement here is that, &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt; in the infinity of the library, there must exist a perfect and accurate index. The Librarian who stumbles across it may be no different or better than any other Librarian -- but by having discovered the true index, he will be able to find anything in the Library he desires. This, in this story, is akin to Godhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a complex and unusual view of godhood -- one in which godhood is a thing of beauty and inspiration, the idea of finding order in chaos, and also almost impossible to touch or come near, because the library is so vast that the god, or the book, cannot be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are parallels between the two usages -- first and foremost, both portray a God characterized by its ineffability, by the impossibility of finding it, and by the fundamental way the existence of such a God would change the world as the Librarians know it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there isn't any particular indication of identity beyond this. Borges here creates a world and a philosophical thought-experiment by using concepts that are clear and concrete and intuitive; that's a lot of what makes the construction of the world so clear and compelling. There's no particular reason to look for a circular book and a man with a true Index, as being &quot;actually the same thing,&quot; in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T13:27:56.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="959" CreationDate="2017-01-25T13:50:50.453" Score="12" ViewCount="2092" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Watership Down, El-ahrairah is essentially the father of all rabbits. He interacts with Prince Rainbow who seems to be a god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From where do the religious history and/or deities in the story come?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T22:13:53.707" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:16:59.200" Title="What is the foundation of the religion in Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15048" CreationDate="2017-01-25T14:01:44.797" Score="15" ViewCount="4842" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an American, so to me the title &quot;Watership Down&quot; sounds like it is about a boat that is underwater, either a submarine or a sunken surface ship. I now understand that a down is a term for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downland&quot;&gt;hill&lt;/a&gt; in England (&lt;em&gt;where the book is set&lt;/em&gt;), and 'down' makes sense as you read the book.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why &quot;Watership&quot;? Does this have a non-nautical meaning that I am not aware of?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't a more lapine (rabbit) down or at least a less nautical word chosen for the name of the book? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T16:16:21.020" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T09:11:50.740" Title="Why is it called Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="957" CreationDate="2017-01-25T14:09:26.493" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watership Down is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down,_Hampshire&quot;&gt;real place&lt;/a&gt; in Hampshire that just happens to sound as if there is some connection to water. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Watership_from_northeast.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Watership_from_northeast.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Watership Down&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(image by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Loganberry&quot;&gt;Loganberry&lt;/a&gt; of Wikipedia; public domain)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a fictitious name invented for the book; it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down#Origin_and_publication_history&quot;&gt;an area near where Richard Adams lived as a child&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The title refers to the rabbits' destination, Watership Down, a hill in the north of Hampshire, England, near the area where Adams grew up. The story began as tales that Richard Adams told his young daughters Juliet and Rosamond during long car journeys. As he explained in 2007, he &quot;began telling the story of the rabbits ... improvised off the top of my head, as we were driving along.&quot; The daughters insisted he write it down—&quot;they were very, very persistent&quot;. After some delay he began writing in the evenings and completed it 18 months later. The book is dedicated to the two girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you suggest, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downland&quot;&gt;Downland&lt;/a&gt; is a primarily English term for hills, derived from the Celtic. Therefore, the name does make quite a lot of sense - after all, rabbits &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; love hills!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T14:09:26.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="956" CreationDate="2017-01-25T14:43:55.043" Score="21" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In-universe&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El-ahrairah is much more legendary than mythical, more like a hero than a god. Here's how the text describes him the very first time his name appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Robin Hood is to the English and John Henry to the American Negroes, Elil-Hrair-Rah, or El-ahrairah - The Prince with a Thousand Enemies - is to rabbits. Uncle Remus might well have heard of him, for some of El-ahrairah's adventures are those of Brer Rabbit. For that matter, Odysseus himself might have borrowed a trick or two from the rabbit hero, for he is very old and was never at a loss for a trick to deceive his enemies. Once, so they say, he had to get home by swimming across a river in which there was a large and hungry pike. El-ahrairah combed himself until he had enough fur to cover a clay rabbit, which he pushed into the water. The pike rushed at it, bit it and left it in disgust. After a little, it drifted to the bank and El-ahrairah dragged it out and waited a while before pushing it in again. After an hour of this, the pike left it alone, and when it had done so for the fifth time, El-ahrairah swam across himself and went home. Some rabbits say he controls the weather, because the wind, the damp and the dew are friends and instruments to rabbits against their enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El-ahrairah is not a god; he didn't create the universe or its inhabitants. Nor is he a mighty warrior (like many of the characters in ancient Greek legends, say), nor yet a prophet, preacher, or saint, in the traditions of more modern religions. His awe and glamour, in the eyes of rabbits, comes from his &lt;strong&gt;ability to escape his many enemies through cunning alone&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense, of course, since strength is not the best survival trick for rabbits. If the entire company had been made up of Bigwigs, they would never have got as far as they did. Not to diminish Bigwig's contributions, it was the rabbits with more intellectual skills - leadership, intuition, and intelligence, as found in Hazel, Fiver, and Blackberry - who really enabled the success of our heroic band of rabbits. They are the one who exemplify the traits of El-ahrairah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, El-ahrairah isn't the only character in the Lapine mythos. There is &lt;strong&gt;Frith&lt;/strong&gt;, the god and creator of all things, and &lt;strong&gt;the Black Rabbit of Inle&lt;/strong&gt;, guardian of the underworld and the dead, as well as Prince Rainbow, King Darzin, and other characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How literally are these stories taken?&lt;/strong&gt; Do the rabbits truly believe that Frith created the world, and that El-ahrairah was a real rabbit prince who got up to all these wild adventures? Most probably not - the way they treat the stories Dandelion tells makes clear that they don't care that much about getting the details 'right', and see them more as entertaining tales than religious instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How about historical accuracy&lt;/strong&gt;? Well, it's possible that there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a real El-ahrairah many years ago, whose adventures have simply been wildly exaggerated and caricaturised as they passed from history to legend. But it's perhaps more likely that many different stories have been put to his name, some from various real rabbit leaders and some made up by imaginative storytellers like Dandelion. Perhaps some of Hazel's escapades will one day be retold under the name of El-ahrairah. (In fact, according to comments below, this actually happened in canon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Out-of-universe&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of what we know about the legendary background of the rabbits comes from the stories told by Dandelion and others at intervals throughout the novel. In these stories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;El-ahrairah plays the role of the cheeky hero, always successful in carrying out his pranks and fooling his enemies. As the text itself remarks, he's reminiscent of Robin Hood or Brer Rabbit or Odysseus - definitely not someone like Jesus or Moses or Mohammed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frith is the benevolent god, always present in the background and occasionally appearing in person. He doesn't have the feel of the biblical God, perhaps more like the God found in Ted Hughes's stories - which fits the often slightly whimsical tone of the El-ahrairah tales, as though they're not expected to be taken entirely seriously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rabscuttle is the companion and sidekick to El-ahrairah, confidant in his schemes and assistant in carrying them out. Again, this isn't a type of role that appears much in 'serious' real-world mythology outside of folk tales.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Black Rabbit of Inle is perhaps the most interesting character to analyse. He definitely doesn't fit the Christian idea of the Devil: he's not inherently evil, merely feared because of his association with death. He's something like the ancient figure of Hades/Pluto: the guardian of the underworld, who can be approached and bargained with; if I recall correctly, he even takes pity on El-ahrairah in one story. He's also something like the popular conception of the Grim Reaper: coming to dying creatures to harvest their souls - again, not in an evil way, but simply because it's his job.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we examine all of these characters and the stories in which they appear, we see a model which looks, if anything, like &lt;strong&gt;popular folk tales&lt;/strong&gt;, with perhaps a touch of influence from the tales of ancient Greek heroes. This fits well with the way Adams tells the story of Watership Down: it's very pastoral and folksy, a tale of the English countryside. Stories akin to Robin Hood and Brer Rabbit suit this model much better than those of Jesus or Moses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/richard-adams-watership-perhaps-made-dark/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;started off as&lt;/a&gt; stories told by Adams to his young daughters to entertain them during the school run. They didn't have a deep philosophical or religious meaning, and those who try to find such a meaning in his writing are falling prey to the common trap of overanalysing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well one day we were going to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night. Before I said anything in particular my elder daughter, who was eight at the time, said 'Now daddy we're going on a long car journey, so we want you to while away the time by telling us a completely new story, one that we have never heard before and without any delay. Please start now!'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This called for spontanaiety, it had to, and I just began off the top of my head: 'Once upon a time there were two rabbits, called eh, let me see, Hazel and Fiver, and I'm going to tell you about some of their adventures'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What followed was really the essence of Watership Down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2007/03/16/richard_adams_interview_feature.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adams has also directly answered questions about religious allegory in &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There's also been criticism of Watership Down about whether it has Christian symbolism or anti-Christian symbolisms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I don't think there's any pro or anti-society in Watership Down, it's simply a tale. If I tell a tale there has to be some baddies as well as some goodies and there are several baddies in Watership Down. &lt;strong&gt;It's only a made-up story, it's in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth.&lt;/strong&gt; I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;So you can put to bed once and for all after 30-odd years of debate that &lt;strong&gt;you weren't out to parody or parallel any religious concepts in Watership Down?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nothing like that at all.&lt;/strong&gt; Of course it's true in Watership Down that rabbits have their own religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't worship but they believe passionately in El-ahrairah, their sort of Robin Hood, they tell stories about El-ahrairah and there are lots of El-ahrairah stories included in Watership Down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid (bold emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in a different interview published only last week (!), Adams acknowledged an important source for the ideas he used when writing &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, as well as remarking explicitly that it's intended to be written in the spirit of folk tales. I think this is the answer you're looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SFS: How did the idea of the rabbits having a mythology begin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RA: Well, one of the happiest things that has happened to me is my friendship with Joseph Campbell. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SFS: How did you meet him? One of the epigraphs in Watership Down quotes his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces; had you met him already when you wrote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RA: I'd bought The Hero With A Thousand Faces when it came out in 1949, and I read it straight through twice, and on and off ever since. Then, when I was in New York and had a day or two to spare, I discovered Joseph Campbell's address; he lived in Greenwich. [...] I told him how much I'd enjoyed it, and I told him all about Watership Down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SFS: What did he think of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RA: &lt;strong&gt;Of course it's very like some of Joseph Campbell's stories; it was very much up his street. He thought it was marvellous! What he specialised in was folk tales, he knew all about folk tales.&lt;/strong&gt; There's a 3-volume work, The Masks Of God, it's wonderful. He was by far the most interesting person I think that I've met in the course of my life. [...] &lt;em&gt;The Hero With A Thousand Faces&lt;/em&gt; hit me like a bomb when I read it. I was in a great muddle at the time about my religious ideas, and trying to make sense of the cosmos. The Hero just sorted that out for me. Religious ideas made sense now; you could see how they occurred in similar format in all nations and all races. And the conception of the cosmos for the first time in my life made sense. Oh, it was a wonderful thing to know Joseph Campbell, and I re-read that book every now and then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SFS: Did it also influence the main narrative of Watership Down – the way in which Hazel becomes a rabbit hero; the way Fiver is really a shaman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RA: &lt;strong&gt;Yes, of course, it's closely modelled on the ideas of The Hero.&lt;/strong&gt; Hazel, and Bigwig of course becomes very important as the book goes on – well they all do, Blackberry, Dandelion… &lt;strong&gt;Yes, I certainly owe that to Joseph Campbell.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sfsaid.com/2017/01/richard-adams-interview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the final answer is that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; was influenced strongly by &lt;em&gt;The Hero with a Thousand Faces&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which was a study of (as I believe &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; is also based on) &lt;strong&gt;many different myths and legends, with an emphasis on heroes and traditional folk tales.&lt;/strong&gt; Note that even the names are similar: Campbell's &amp;quot;Hero with a Thousand Faces&amp;quot; becomes Adams's &amp;quot;Prince with a Thousand Enemies&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T22:16:59.200" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:16:59.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T16:02:47.900" Score="11" ViewCount="2327" Body="&lt;p&gt;Curley's wife plays an important role in the novel and yet is never given a name. Perhaps Steinbeck was trying to not encourage the audience to develop a personal connection to her? I'd like to see various other points of view, supported by textual evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T01:06:29.773" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T01:06:29.773" Title="Why does Steinbeck never name Curley's wife?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;of-mice-and-men&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="961" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T17:36:35.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T17:36:35.437" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T17:36:35.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="962" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T17:36:35.437" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding characters and character arcs." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T17:27:16.727" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:27:16.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="963" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T17:39:37.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T17:39:37.340" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T17:39:37.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="964" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T17:39:37.340" Score="0" Body="For tags about contradictions or other confusion in the plot or storyline of a work." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T18:27:32.617" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T18:27:32.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:05:01.693" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your reading of the poem makes sense. It might help to know that the dark trees are symbolizing the future in this poem. The second line tells us that these trees rarely show a breeze. This means that we cannot predict the future. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth line, Frost expresses his wish that those dark trees in the first line were stretched away to the edge of doom. This means that he hoped that the future is stretched far away. So, the edge of doom means here far away (in time). This seems consistent with your view, since it is also used in that way in the sentence you quoted, &quot;Our marriage will last unto the edge of doom&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on: &lt;a href=&quot;https://letterpile.com/writing/Robert-Frosts-Into-My-Own-Analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysis of &quot;Into My Own&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T18:05:01.693" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:05:04.460" Score="6" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right before Frodo and company head into the Old Forest, Frodo has this dream. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eventually he fell into a vague dream, in which he seemed to be&#xA;  looking out of a high window over a dark sea of tangled trees. Down&#xA;  below among the roots there was the sound of creatures crawling and&#xA;  snuffling. He felt sure they would smell him out sooner or later. Then&#xA;  he heard a noise in the distance. At first he thought it was a great&#xA;  wind coming over the leaves of the forest. Then he knew that it was&#xA;  not leaves, but the sound of the Sea far-off; a sound he had never&#xA;  heard in waking life, though it had often troubled his dreams.&#xA;  Suddenly he found he was out in the open. There were no trees after&#xA;  all. He was on a dark heath, and there was a strange salt smell in the&#xA;  air. Looking up he saw before him a tall white tower, standing alone&#xA;  on a high ridge. A great desire came over him to climb the tower and&#xA;  see the Sea. He started to struggle up the ridge towards the tower:&#xA;  but suddenly a light came in the sky, and there was a noise of&#xA;  thunder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this dream supposed to be in some way prophetic, foretelling his future sailing to the Undying Lands? Or was there another reason/outcome for this dream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="62" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T18:13:37.510" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T00:19:22.787" Title="Did Frodo have a prophetic dream?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:30:06.453" Score="22" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poe's satirical short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Predicament&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Predicament&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tells the story of a woman who is slowly decapitated by the minute hand of a large cathedral clock. In all its ridiculous, it was supposed to be a horror parody, a bit unlike much of the rest of Poe's writings. It was published in 1838; four years later, Poe published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Pit and the Pendulum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a serious and more elaborate short story where the protagonist narrowly escapes death at the hand of a swinging pendulum that comes closer and closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given some of the similarities, I was wondering if Poe wrote &lt;em&gt;The Pit and the Pendulum&lt;/em&gt; to further emphasize the absurdity of &lt;em&gt;A Predicament&lt;/em&gt; and some serious works of the genre, or if he decided to write a serious story following a similar plot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Poe ever comment on the similarities of the two stories? It's quite possible that he didn't, in which case I'd be absolutely fine with interpretations from the texts. Is there evidence from the stories that suggests that he intended the two to be alike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T15:20:20.827" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T14:20:10.023" Title="Was Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum at all inspired by A Predicament?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="971" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:55:25.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Bells&quot; is a poem by Poe, published posthumously in 1849.  It relies heavily on onomatopoeia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:15:33.830" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:15:33.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="972" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:55:25.070" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Bells&quot;, a poem published posthumously by Edgar Allan Poe." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:15:26.100" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:15:26.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="973" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:58:27.787" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;A Predicament&quot; is a humorous short story by Edgar Allen Poe.  It's often paired with another Poe piece, &quot;How to Write a Blackwood Article&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:14:24.253" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:14:24.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="974" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T18:58:27.787" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;A Predicament&quot;, a short story by Edgar Allen Poe." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:15:28.770" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:15:28.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="975" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:03:45.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost was an American poet famous for his depictions of rural life and colloquial language.  He was highly regarded and received 4 Pulitzer prizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:15:31.277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:15:31.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="976" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:03:45.467" Score="0" Body="For questions about the poet Robert Frost or his works. Questions about his short poems should be tagged with the [poetry] tag as well." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:19:31.293" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:19:31.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:07:29.500" Score="7" ViewCount="1176" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Sounder&lt;/em&gt; strikes me as quite unique, in that it gives a lot of detail, and yet most of the characters, even main characters like the boy and his father, are not named. The only character with a name is the dog, Sounder. And yet this seems so natural, that I didn't even notice it the first couple times I read the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any special significance to the dog being the only named character? Why do none of the other characters have names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:51:41.097" Title="In &quot;Sounder&quot;, why is the dog the only character with a name?" Tags="&lt;sounder&gt;&lt;william-h-armstrong&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="978" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:08:34.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:08:34.790" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:08:34.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="979" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:08:34.790" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Into My Own&quot;, a poem by Robert Frost." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:28:53.907" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:28:53.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="980" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:12:04.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Dickens&lt;/a&gt; was an English writer renowned for his fictional characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his works include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Twist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oliver Twist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1837 – 1839),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Christmas Carol&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1843),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1859),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Expectations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1860 – 1861).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:51:36.857" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:51:36.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="981" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:12:04.570" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870) or his life as a writer." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T21:35:53.927" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T21:35:53.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="982" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:14:08.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:14:08.010" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:14:08.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="983" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:14:08.010" Score="0" Body="For questions about Hercule Poirot, a fictional Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie. Use in conjunction with [agatha-christie]." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:57:14.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:57:14.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="984" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:14:19.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:14:19.673" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:14:19.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="985" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:14:19.673" Score="0" Body="For questions about Isaac Asimov's collection of short stories called &quot;I, Robot&quot;. Use this tag with the [isaac-asimov] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T18:08:53.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T18:08:53.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="891" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:22:20.223" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stories of &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; - and Asimov's robot stories in general - tend to circle around two central themes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Humanity's control and understanding of the technology it has created.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Non-human life, and the capacity of life which simulates humanity to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; and be human.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two themes are in tension with each other, which is part of what makes them such a rich, powerful pairing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Controlling and Understanding Our Technology&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of Asimov's robot stories revolve around the Three Laws of Robotics, which are meant to be defining boundaries and keep robots' behavior predictable and nonharmful. And in many of the stories, &lt;em&gt;something goes wrong&lt;/em&gt; -- the robots do not behave as expected; an interaction between the Laws arises which is not expected; the Laws turn out to have consequences that were not expected; etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As many iconic SF stories do, Asimov posits consequences that are always purely logical. The initial premise of beings following the Three Laws is entirely logical and abstract, and great importance is always placed on the fact that the results - surprising and unexpected though they may be - flow logically from the premise, given the right circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so the question that remains, that the stories interrogate, is: Are humans clever enough, wise enough, logical enough, to anticipate all the consequences of the technology they build? Can we deal with what we have created, or are we going to fall into a trap of our own making?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different stories deal with this in different ways - from &lt;em&gt;Liar!&lt;/em&gt;, where Susan Calvin realizes that the consequences of the Laws force a robot to lie and distort reality in order to avoid causing her pain, to &lt;em&gt;The Evitable Conflict&lt;/em&gt;, where humanity realizes that robots, in following their rules, have plucked away humanity's agency entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Humanity of Robots&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the stories anthropomorphize and personify the robots -- portraying them as not only machines, but actually capable of emotion, which is effectively as real as our own. This gives rise to a slew of questions about what being &quot;human&quot; truly means -- and if it can be artificially simulated, what does &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robbie&lt;/em&gt; is very clearly in this vein, where Gloria realizes she cannot think of him as anything but an individual. &lt;em&gt;Little Lost Robot&lt;/em&gt; toys with the idea of a robot gaining a superiority complex, wanting to prove itself &quot;better&quot; than a human. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Together,&lt;/strong&gt; the two themes are extremely intriguing, because they are in tension with another. If robots are, in some way, human, they cannot be anticipated and controlled. And to the extent that they follow logic to whatever conclusion it lead them, then they are clearly something &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways for these themes to conflict and interact. One example is &lt;em&gt;Reason&lt;/em&gt;, where a robot believes he is a prophet, and comes up with bizarre, mystical explanations for the world it observes. Clearly, this robot is behaving irrationally, and in some ways in a very human way -- but the protagonists observe it is &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; following the Three Laws, so it is being both robotic and human at the same time. This, of course, hints at what further tension could develop if the robot's irrational, human-like beliefs &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; happen to dovetail so nicely with what the humans wanted the robots to do anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:22:20.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="363" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:33:41.853" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;strong&gt;stay&lt;/strong&gt; here means &lt;strong&gt;stop&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;pause&lt;/strong&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stay&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;intransitive verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1:  to stop going forward :  pause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2:  to stop doing something :  cease&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/stay_1&quot;&gt;Macmillan dictionary&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4 [&lt;strong&gt;transitive&lt;/strong&gt;] &lt;strong&gt;formal&lt;/strong&gt; to stop something such as a court case from continuing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The defence has filed a petition to stay proceedings.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sense is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the lady stops her weaving in order to look down to Camelot, a curse will take effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines you've quoted are from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45360&quot;&gt;1842 version&lt;/a&gt; of the poem, which uses &lt;strong&gt;stay&lt;/strong&gt; intransitively and obscures the sense a bit. The corresponding lines in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45359&quot;&gt;1833 version&lt;/a&gt; use the verb transitively, and make the sense clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No time hath she to sport and play:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A charmed web she weaves alway.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A curse is on her, if she &lt;strong&gt;stay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her weaving&lt;/strong&gt;, either night or day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;To look down to Camelot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That of course is exactly what happens. The lady sees Lancelot in the mirror, stops weaving, and rushes to the window to catch a further glimpse of him as he rides down to Camelot. This sets the curse in motion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T19:53:49.347" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:53:49.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="988" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="989" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:48:27.363" Score="5" ViewCount="858" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trümmerliteratur is a literary movement that originated in Germany shortly after the Second World War. What are typical charactaristics of Trümmerliteratur? &#xA;How can a work that is Trümmerliteratur be recognized as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:48:27.363" Title="What are the charactaristics of German Trümmerliteratur?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="988" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:48:27.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typical charactaristics of Trümmerliteratur are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The works are written within a few years after the end of the Second World War.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work concernes the question of guilt of the war and the Holocaust. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the goals of the work is to warn for repeation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The literary style is radically different from some styles form a while before the Second World War. However, some elements of older literary movements still come back, such as the Romanticism (Romantik) and Expressionism (Expressionismus). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work is realistic, unpsychological and truthful. There are no ideologies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The work describes the ruins (Trümmer) of Germany after the war ended. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:48:27.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="977" CreationDate="2017-01-25T19:51:41.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Armstrong spoke to this point in an interview for &lt;a href=&quot;http://newberryproject.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/sounder-1970.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Writer's Digest&lt;/a&gt;. Ultimately the goal was to &lt;em&gt;universalise&lt;/em&gt; the characters, allowing the reader to place themselves into the story and to view the other characters as being representative of general themes rather than specific people with their own individual goals, hope and desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If the boy's age was not given the reader could become a part of the&#xA;story: 'The boy must be about my age.' Place and time kept vague, no&#xA;name or description of the boy. . . . And no names for the family.&#xA;With names they would have represented one family; without names they&#xA;became universal--representing all people who suffer privation and&#xA;injustice, but through love, self-respect, devotion, and desire for&#xA;improvement, make it in the world.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://newberryproject.blogspot.co.uk/2008/07/sounder-1970.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sounder - 1970 review - The Newbery Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might want to note that one of the characters from the book (the boy, now named as Moses Waters) appears in a subsequent novel by the same author; &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0064400743&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sour Land&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T19:51:41.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="996" CreationDate="2017-01-25T20:35:34.427" Score="10" ViewCount="1363" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the speaker says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above quote, he mentions the &quot;Crimson Hexagon&quot;, which has its own meaning as an almost soul-consuming wish. However, so much of this short story is analogous to and symbolism for real-world objects. So, what does the &quot;crimson hexagon&quot; represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T00:55:50.997" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T00:55:50.997" Title="What does the &quot;crimson hexagon&quot; represent in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="992" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="997" CreationDate="2017-01-25T20:59:12.910" Score="4" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Rose for Emily&lt;/em&gt; by William Faulkner, Emily Grierson, the main character of the work says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was in response to a request that Emily Grierson pay her taxes, which she claimed she was not obligated to do as a result of a hereditary obligation. How did this obligation originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T11:46:02.830" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T11:46:02.830" Title="What was the origin of Emily Grierson's hereditary obligation upon the town?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="969" CreationDate="2017-01-25T20:59:53.120" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He had several&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous occasions where Frodo has dreams which come true (or nearly true).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious is in Tom Bombadil's house:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this one he is standing before a circular wall of rock that has a  great gate carved into it. Beyond this wall is a plain with a great stone tower rising from its center. On the tower stands a man, though Frodo can only just make out his figure and the whiteness of his hair. He can hear the crying and howling of “fell voices” surrounding the tower, and see a winged shape passing across the moon. Then, the man atop the tower produces a flash of light from his staff and leaps onto the back of an enormous eagle. There is the sound of galloping horses, coming from the East, and Frodo immediately thinks “Black Riders!” as he awakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously a prophetic dream of Gandalf escaping from Isengard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dream you mention is definitely a prophecy as well, it tells of his journey through the middle Earth to his sail to the Undying Lands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he is having prophetic dreams, I imagine the most likely answer is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the ring&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noticeable that all his dreams come after he gets possession of the ring, and the ring being such a powerful source of magic, then one can assume that is the cause. It messes with your mind, as shown with Golum, so it must have messed with Frodo's unconscious mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We aren't directly told whether it is a prophecy and what causes it, but one can make assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T00:19:22.787" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T00:19:22.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T21:08:18.767" Score="16" ViewCount="3383" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very end of House of Leaves, there's a page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqV1x.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqV1x.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A scanned page, with the word &amp;quot;Yggdrasil&amp;quot; written on it. There is a dot above the word, on the next line the letters &amp;quot;Ygg&amp;quot; appear. The letters &amp;quot;d r a s i l&amp;quot; are each given their own line, descending in order from the letters &amp;quot;Ygg.&amp;quot; The passage &amp;quot;What miracle is this? This giant tree./It stands ten thousand feet high/But doesn&amp;#39;t reach the ground. Still it stands./Its roots must hold the sky.&amp;quot; appears below the word &amp;quot;Yggdrasil.&amp;quot; There is large letter &amp;quot;O&amp;quot; below that paragraph.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Yggdrasil&quot; doesn't appear anywhere else in the book, and the index, which amusingly lists every word in the book and where it shows up (including some that don't), confirms this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a lot of questions about this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does Danielewski bring this poem in quite suddenly on the last page of the book, without any clear callbacks to any other references in the book? As far as I'm aware, the notion of a world tree doesn't appear anywhere else, and the book doesn't contain clear allusions to Norse mythology as a whole. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Which narrator&lt;/em&gt; in House of Leaves are we supposed to interpret as the one who decided to include this page? Is there anything to suggest which one of them it should be?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poem is supposed to be interpreted as physically looking like the worldtree itself: the &quot;Ygg&quot; and dot at the top are the canopy, &quot;d/r/a/s/i/l&quot; makes the trunk, the poem forms the base. But... what is the large &quot;O&quot; supposed to mean at the bottom of the poem?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T01:38:37.137" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T12:28:31.963" Title="Why is the poem &quot;Yggdrasil&quot; placed where it is in House of Leaves, and which narrator included it?" Tags="&lt;house-of-leaves&gt;&lt;mark-z-danielewski&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T21:10:28.120" Score="5" ViewCount="5310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently been reading about symbolism and imagism and they seem to me to be connected in that they were in some ways the opposite of each other, one being the movement to add greater symbolic meaning to poetry and the other being a movement to add greater precision in imagery, which is not necessarily non-symbolic. I see ways in which they are both the same and different, but I may be interpreting these wrong. So, what is the distinction between Imagism and Symbolism? How are they related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T01:58:01.080" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T12:24:05.020" Title="What is the distinction between Imagism and Symbolism as poetic movements?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="991" CreationDate="2017-01-25T21:18:08.310" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;A central concern of &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; -- and particularly this section of it -- is the search for order and meaning within a chaotic world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, Borges introduces the Purifiers; those who, in their pursuit of truth and meaning, destroy anything they consider of no value:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Others, inversely, believed that it was fundamental to eliminate useless works. They invaded the hexagons, showed credentials which were not always false, leafed through a volume with displeasure and condemned whole shelves: their hygienic, ascetic furor caused the senseless perdition of millions of books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have already learned enough to understand why this can be considered shocking, blasphemous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because a book which appears random may have a hidden significance, under some currently-unknown translation or transformation or key. We understand that those destroying &quot;useless works&quot; are not truly capable judges of what is &quot;useless.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because we have grown to appreciate the beauty and order and grandeur of the Library as it is, as a library of randomness, and we understand that this artifact is being wounded, profaned, by those who would destroy the very thing that makes it so intriguing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the Purifiers are a form of destructive, narrow-minded zealotry. They destroy items of inner beauty, while on a quest that sounds attractive, but upon deeper understanding, is utterly futile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now we reach the Crimson Hexagon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Crimson Hexagon, mentioned so briefly, is given as the object the Purifiers are seeking. So, we need to understand it as the object that destructive ideologues are after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of the Library, the Crimson Hexagon sounds utterly out of place. The Library is a place of utter compliance to a constant structure; the Crimson Hexagon is imagined as an utter exception to that, breaking every single rule of the world as we understand it. All the books of the Library have the same characters; those of the Crimson Hexagon break the format and have illustrations. The Crimson Hexagon books are &quot;magical&quot; -- a property entirely out of place in our world up until now, where even the most coveted book was prized for the true knowledge it contains, not for any power that is anything other than natural. In every aspect - including their size and appearance - they are &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; than what the rest of the world contains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so, what the Purifiers, the zealots, are seeking is the impossible. They are not content with the world as it is, with its chaos and disorder. They yearn to find, not just greater knowledge and understanding, but &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; knowledge and power, packed up for them in a way that is entirely outside the realm of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly that is something much to be wished for, but it seems extremely doubtful that any will ever find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(An interesting thing to note is that if the Crimson Hexagon is indeed their object, their own methods are a waste of time - the Crimson Hexagon would be easily identifiable; they don't need to destroy every book on all the Hexagons on their way. Futile and destructive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Crimson Hexagon also stands in contrast to the next idea Borges brings: the Man of the Book. This is a much more subtle, and much more plausible, belief - indeed, the Library as describes seems to demand that such a person exist. This is not a belief of total power, breaking the bounds of reality -- it is the understanding that reality's shape naturally funnels knowledge to &lt;em&gt;somebody&lt;/em&gt;. That a Man of the Book exists &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;. And, that one's own understanding of that knowledge and that person will be limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion: the Crimson Hexagon is the enticing, but impossible goal, that zealots uses as a hollow drive and justification for their destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T21:18:08.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="992" CreationDate="2017-01-25T21:45:16.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier on, Faulker tells us that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Colonel Sartoris, the mayor . . . remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colonel originally told Miss Emily that he was doing this as a favor to her deceased father, whom he said had given the town a loan some time ago. While Miss Emily believed this, several others evidently saw through it, although they said nothing to her. Emily Grierson had hit financial troubles, so to speak, and so essentially getting rid of her taxes was a way for the colonel to help her keep going without losing her pride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's written that Miss Emily would never have accepted a charitable donation. I'd bet that this stems from the fact that the Griersons were a proud and reputable family. They might have once been members of the powerful Southern aristocracy, and Miss Emily likely still had plenty of heirlooms and reminders of that time. The family was described later on - somewhat sarcastically - &quot;the high and mighty Griersons&quot;. Therefore, Miss Emily would have viewed it would an insult to have to stoop so low as to accept financial help from others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colonel likely intended this as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen&amp;#39;s_agreement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gentlemen's agreement&lt;/a&gt; - informal, not legally binding, but bound by a gentlemanly moral code of the time. The story goes on to say that those who followed him had &quot;more modern ideas&quot;, which evidently did not include such agreements. Therefore, they attempted to undo the remission, which, of course, led to Miss Emily's refusal to pay her taxes. We see this inter-generational discord arise in another way, when only a young alderman thinks they should be direct to Miss Emily about the smell emanating from her house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T00:59:48.917" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T00:59:48.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2017-01-25T23:08:16.347" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot#Death&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page on Hercule Poirot&lt;/a&gt; and based on quotations from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtain_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Poirot died in October 1949, thirty-three years after he &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Affair_at_Styles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first met&lt;/a&gt; Captain Hastings in June 1916. (He &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; actually retired by that point, but he was a refugee escaping from World War I: it's unclear &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot#Retirement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;when exactly he retired&lt;/a&gt;). We know that he was a detective with the Brussels police force by 1893, when he tried to solve the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poirot%27s_Early_Cases#The_Chocolate_Box&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chocolate Box&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. If we assume that he was 20-40 years old in 1893, he would have been born between 1853 and 1873, fled as a refuge to Britain at the age of 43 to 63, and would have died somewhere around the age of 76 to 96, which makes sense to me. If he was 55 when he moved to Britain -- at or around retirement age -- that gives us a birth year of 1861 and a death age of 88.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T06:02:18.213" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T06:02:18.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-25T23:08:26.453" Score="9" ViewCount="350" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, most totalitarian regimes in history have been atheistic, shunning any form of religion and creating a cult of mass worship towards the leader(s) of the government. Does this hold true for the Party in &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, or does the Party endorse a religion? If so, what religion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done some background &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Religious_views&quot;&gt;research&lt;/a&gt; on this, and I've found that Orwell was strongly against anti-Semitism. From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Writing in early 1945 a long essay titled &quot;Antisemitism in Britain,&quot; for the Contemporary Jewish Record, Orwell stated that anti-Semitism was on the increase in Britain, and that it was &quot;irrational and will not yield to arguments.&quot; He argued that it would be useful to discover why anti-Semites could &quot;swallow such absurdities on one particular subject while remaining sane on others.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Nineteen Eighty-Four, written shortly after the war, Orwell portrayed the Party as enlisting anti-Semitic passions against their enemy, Goldstein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, obviously the Party was anti-Semitic, but what religion does the Party does follow or encourage? I'm looking for answers supported by textual evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T23:14:03.897" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T23:42:40.863" Title="Is there any evidence the Party was atheistic?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="999" CreationDate="2017-01-25T23:34:13.490" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Party and State appear to be atheistic, or rather fully in worship of Big Brother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Countless other words such as honour, justice, morality,&#xA;  internationalism, democracy, science, and &lt;strong&gt;religion had simply ceased&#xA;  to exist.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'These things happen,' he began vaguely. 'I have been able to recall&#xA;  one instance — a possible instance. It was an indiscretion,&#xA;  undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of&#xA;  Kipling. &lt;strong&gt;I allowed the word &quot;God&quot; to remain at the end of a line.&lt;/strong&gt; I&#xA;  could not help it!' he added almost indignantly, raising his face to&#xA;  look at Winston. 'It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was&#xA;  &quot;rod&quot;. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to &quot;rod&quot; in&#xA;  the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no&#xA;  other rhyme.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of&#xA;  the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all&#xA;  nations other than his own worshipped 'false gods'.&lt;/strong&gt; He did not need to&#xA;  know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and&#xA;  the like: probably the less he knew about them the better for his&#xA;  orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah: he knew,&#xA;  therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were&#xA;  false gods.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the proles, Smith posits that religion would actually be allowed if it hadn't simply withered away and died in the absence of any religious leaders. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The sexual puritanism of the Party was not imposed upon them.&#xA;  Promiscuity went unpunished, divorce was permitted. &lt;strong&gt;For that matter,&#xA;  even religious worship would have been permitted if the proles had&#xA;  shown any sign of needing or wanting it.&lt;/strong&gt; They were beneath suspicion. As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2017-01-25T23:42:40.863" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T23:42:40.863" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="891" CreationDate="2017-01-25T23:44:35.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the theme of &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; is that robots are more than simple monsters that will eventually destroy humanity, but can be sophisticated creatures even if their behaviour is governed by very simple rules: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three Laws of Robotics&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Three_Laws_of_Robotics&amp;amp;oldid=758199319#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Asimov found previous depictions of robots to be very one-dimensional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In The Rest of the Robots, published in 1964, Asimov noted that when he began writing in 1940 he felt that &quot;one of the stock plots of science fiction was ... robots were created and destroyed their creator. Knowledge has its dangers, yes, but is the response to be a retreat from knowledge? Or is knowledge to be used as itself a barrier to the dangers it brings?&quot; He decided that in his stories robots would not &quot;turn stupidly on his creator for no purpose but to demonstrate, for one more weary time, the crime and punishment of Faust.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The robots in &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; are specifically engineered to not be directly dangerous: it is impossible for them to &quot;rise up&quot; against humans, and are deeply compelled to serve humanity (except by hurting other humans). They range from simple beings, such as robots who &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaround_(story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have a nervous breakdown&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;go into denial&lt;/a&gt;, to incredibly complex creatures, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a robot who runs for public office&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Lost_Robot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a robot who literally &quot;gets lost&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and -- my personal favourite -- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the robot who lies&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To respond to the answers previously posted here, I don't think Asimov is specifically saying that robots may be dangerous or unpredictable or human, and I don't think the point is to do with the Three Laws specifically. I think Asimov is saying that &lt;strong&gt;machines who can think but whose thinking is designed to be limited may yet come up with complex behavior that we don't understand, but which makes perfect sense to them&lt;/strong&gt;. Dr. Susan Calman, the &quot;robot whisperer&quot; who figures out why the robots are doing what they're doing on several occasions, acts as our translator, and without her the robots' actions might appear to be dangerous or unpredictable or human, but Asimov shows us in all these stories that they arise only from simple rules and logic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more modern perspective on &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; might be the theme of complex behavior arising from simple rules, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;emergent behavior&lt;/a&gt; -- especially prominent in stories where robots appear to be behaving erratically, but are revealed to be trying to stay within the strictures of their programming. But I don't know if that's what Asimov was thinking of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of writing, an interesting comparison might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_detective_fiction#Description_of_the_genre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ronald Knox's &quot;Ten Commandments&quot; of detective fiction&lt;/a&gt;: you could think of the &lt;em&gt;I, Robot&lt;/em&gt; stories (and all of Asimov's robot fiction) as Asimov restricting what he could do (no directly killing humans! robots must obey any order except those that kill humans!) and still come up with a compelling mystery, detective story or dystropian world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-01-25T23:44:35.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T01:01:00.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a catch-all tag for identification questions; it can be used for identification requests for novels, poems, short stories, collections, anthologies, comics, essays, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic&quot;&gt;anything else falling under this site's broad definition of &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, books &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; literature, or writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used by people who have read or heard of a piece of literature and can no longer remember its title. People using this tag should provide detailed descriptions of everything they know or can remember about the work being identified, to help those answering to identify it correctly. &lt;strong&gt;Please do NOT use this tag to ask for literature recommendations&lt;/strong&gt; - it is meant to find known existing works. The description should be detailed enough that it can only describe ONE possible thing - if the same description could match multiple works, then the question may be closed as too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A list of details one should consider adding to their question includes, but is not limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When did you read the story, and how old was it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you read it 10 years ago? Last summer? &amp;quot;When I was in high school&amp;quot; is not descriptive. Try to provide a year range instead.  Was it an old crumbling book or a fresh one? Did you see it in a magazine from the 1980s or on a website yesterday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Medium and appearance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did the cover look like? Was it a thick book? A magazine? Short story collection? Novel? Maybe printed in a textbook? Was it an online story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What language did you read it in, and was it translated?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language did you read the book in? This helps to narrow down the possibilities. In case you read a translation, you should also try to provide the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; language the book was written in - this will significantly narrow down the search area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did you read this story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Public library? Airport book shop? USA? Italy? Any of these will help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anything else&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every little detail will help - do not omit anything just because you think it is insignificant. Even details that you are unsure of can be included, just with a disclaimer that you are unsure about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't just list all of these details in one giant paragraph.&lt;/strong&gt; Walls of text are more difficult to parse, and may turn people away from trying to answer an ID question. Use paragraph breaks and lists as appropriate to break up the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;identification questions should have meaningful and descriptive titles&lt;/strong&gt;. The title, ideally, should mention the distinctive points that would allow people who know the work to identify it immediately and cause those who don't to become interested in it. Titles like &amp;quot;Looking for a short story I read as a kid&amp;quot; are not helpful at all, but a title like &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2515&quot;&gt;Overpopulated world, where volunteers are being taken to be converted to food&lt;/a&gt; is much more descriptive and distinctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will also be helpful for potential answerers if you describe what &lt;strong&gt;research efforts you have already undertaken&lt;/strong&gt; and, if appropriate, any &lt;strong&gt;'false positives'&lt;/strong&gt; you came across ie. works which meet the general description but are NOT the one you are looking for. This will save other people duplicating your efforts and proposing works which you have already rejected.&#xA;For more guidance, refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/778/17&quot;&gt;Guidelines for good story-id questions?&lt;/a&gt; on meta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T21:00:04.790" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T21:00:04.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T01:01:00.703" Score="0" Body="Questions asking for identification of a story, book, or author, based on descriptive details provided within the question. Please be thorough and provide ALL of the details that you can remember when using this tag. (For questions seeking the original source of a known quote, use the [quote-source] tag instead.)" OwnerUserId="303" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T09:16:38.233" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:16:38.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1005" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1006" CreationDate="2017-01-26T01:51:21.597" Score="3" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eric Flint is fairly outspoken about his political views (in bumper sticker terms, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ericflint.net/index.php/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he's a self-proclaimed &lt;em&gt;socialist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, although - as is the case with most real humans - it's a bit more nuanced than that once you dig into details).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Did Flint ever elaborate on how his political outlook reflected in his works, especially 1632/Ring of Fire series?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking specifically for Flint's self-assessment in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T03:02:05.280" Title="Did Eric Flint comment on how his political views reflected in his writing, especially 1632 series?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1005" CreationDate="2017-01-26T02:05:32.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, but not in great detail.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best I've been able to find is &lt;a href=&quot;http://buzzymag.com/eric-flint-creator-of-the-1632-series-author-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; with Eric Flint, where he says (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image people have of Germany is a Germany that was created out of the Thirty Years War and the outcome of it. But the Germany prior to the early years of the Thirty Years War is a very, very different place. &lt;strong&gt;It was very dynamic. It was quite democratic in many respects. It was the intellectual center of Europe and it was hammered flat by the Thirty Years War.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;strong&gt;I wanted the trade union, which is, in this case, United Mine Workers, to be a central and important part of the story&lt;/strong&gt; because that almost never happens in modern, certainly in science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;what I wanted to use the novel for was to depict what I think are important features of democracy and egalitarianism that people today tend to take for granted.&lt;/strong&gt; They don’t tend to think much about it. But I wanted to show how that would unfold in this utterly chaotic situation. And the final factor is that the world of Europe in the early 17th century, this is not a medieval world. We have entered the modern era. It’s usually called the early modern era. Contemporaries alive at the time were Galileo, Rene Descartes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/12/eric-flint-remaking-history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another interview&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mostly wrote that book because I felt that Americans tend to take democracy and the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity for granted. I wanted to take a group of people raised that way, and put them into the worst war in European history, and see how it all unfolded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this is all pretty vague, but we can tell a few things at least: Flint's views on &lt;strong&gt;democracy&lt;/strong&gt;, and how it's perceived and enacted in different locations and eras, played a big part in the conception of the idea for his &lt;em&gt;1632&lt;/em&gt; series. The fact that he wanted a &lt;strong&gt;trade union&lt;/strong&gt; to be at the centre of the story is very probably also linked to his own background, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.locusmag.com/Perspectives/2016/12/eric-flint-remaking-history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;having&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;spent about 25 years of [his] life as a political organizer in the trade unions&amp;quot;, which in turn connects to his political views on workers' power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T02:05:32.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T02:11:27.780" Score="15" ViewCount="324" Body="&lt;p&gt;T.S. Eliot wrote influential essays in New Criticism, a literary theory movement that if I understand correctly tried to revive formalism and focus on close reading and the text itself, as a response to the literary criticism of the early 20th century, which had a greater focus on external resources to help in the interpretation of the text. However, T.S. Eliot is better known for his poetry. What effect did his work in the development of New Criticism have on his poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T13:57:33.340" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T13:57:33.340" Title="How did T.S. Eliot's literary criticism affect his poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="331" CreationDate="2017-01-26T02:24:08.917" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Almost certainly yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;First of all, let's look at a few quotes from the previous chapter, just to set the scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston was gelatinous with fatigue. [...] He had worked more than ninety hours in five days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before he starts to read Goldstein's book together with Julia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The clock’s hands said six, meaning eighteen. They had three or four hours ahead of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then after he reads aloud more than five thousand words of text (which must take a while):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A yellow beam from the sinking sun slanted in through the window and fell across the pillow. He shut his eyes. The sun on his face and the girl’s smooth body touching his own gave him a strong, sleepy, confident feeling. He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after a week of extremely hard work and sleep deprivation, followed by lovemaking with Julia and then (say) half an hour of reading, Winston falls asleep without setting an alarm clock. This must be at about 6:30pm, based on the same assumption of half an hour of reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;From now on, all quotes are from Part 2, Chapter 10, and all emphasis is mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The very first sentence of Chapter 10 gives us our first hint at the truth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he woke it was &lt;strong&gt;with the sensation of having slept for a long time&lt;/strong&gt;, but a glance at the old-fashioned clock told him that it was only twenty-thirty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His glance at the clock tells us &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;: it's a twelve-hour clock, so it could just as easily be 8:30am or 8:30pm. The former would mean he'd had 14 hours of sleep; the latter, only 2 hours. His sensation of having slept for &lt;em&gt;a long time&lt;/em&gt; already tips the probability in favour of the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;I’m hungry&lt;/strong&gt;,’ she said. ‘Let’s make some more coffee. Damn! &lt;strong&gt;The stove’s gone out&lt;/strong&gt; and the water’s cold.’ She picked the stove up and shook it. ‘There’s no oil in it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘We can get some from old Charrington, I expect.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;The funny thing is I made sure it was full.&lt;/strong&gt; I’m going to put my clothes on,’ she added. ‘&lt;strong&gt;It seems to have got colder.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is even stronger evidence that they've slept much longer than they realised. Julia wakes up feeling hungry and significantly colder than before, but more importantly, the stove has completely run out of oil, despite being full before they fell asleep. How could that have happened in a mere 2 hours?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sun must have gone down behind the houses; it was not shining into the yard any longer. &lt;strong&gt;The flagstones were wet&lt;/strong&gt; as though they had just been washed, and he had the feeling that the sky had been washed too, &lt;strong&gt;so fresh and pale was the blue between the chimney-pots&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence about the sun is inconclusive: either at 8:30pm (after the sun has set) or at 8:30am (when it's in a different part of the sky), it won't be shining in the same place as it was at 6:30pm. The wet flagstones suggest it's rained while they were asleep, which again is inconclusive: it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have started and stopped raining during a 2-hour period. But the sky is really damning evidence: at 8:30pm, more than an hour after sunset, the sky would be darkening. Fresh pale blue sounds like an early morning sky after rain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tirelessly the woman marched to and fro, corking and uncorking herself, singing and falling silent, and &lt;strong&gt;pegging out more diapers&lt;/strong&gt;, and more and yet more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would the prole woman be pegging &lt;em&gt;out&lt;/em&gt; clothes in the evening, rather than taking them in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He noticed that &lt;strong&gt;he badly wanted to urinate&lt;/strong&gt;, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so only two or three hours ago. He noticed that the clock on the mantelpiece said nine, meaning twenty-one. But &lt;strong&gt;the light seemed too strong&lt;/strong&gt;. Would not the light be fading at twenty-one hours on an August evening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when Winston &lt;em&gt;finally&lt;/em&gt; realises what we, the readers, should have realised a few pages earlier. He needs the toilet again, suggesting a longer sleep than just a couple of hours, and (as mentioned above) it was too light outside to be 8:30 or 9 in the evening.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As well as all the evidence from the text, as outlined above, it also makes sense from a plot-oriented point of view. We, and Winston, were never given any explanation as to why the Thought Police chose that particular moment to capture them. They already had them under surveillance, and could easily have waited months or years longer, if this was just another of their evenings spent in the hideout. As mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/227/17&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, the longer they were 'free', the more likely they were to lead the Thought Police to &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; subversives. Arresting them would only be a sensible move if it somehow became &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if they'd accidentally slept the whole night in their hideout, then suddenly it becomes clear why they could no longer be allowed to remain at large in London. They would have been missed at home that night; once they realised their mistake, the Thought Police could no longer keep up the pretence of allowing them to think they were free while in reality watching their every move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oversleeping that night was their fatal mistake, and the reason they were finally arrested.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T02:24:08.917" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1009" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T02:46:07.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Richard Adams (1920-2016) was a British civil servant and author, most famous for his novels &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Plague Dogs&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Shardik&lt;/em&gt;, all prominently featuring animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T03:50:27.473" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T03:50:27.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1010" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T02:46:07.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Richard Adams (1920-2016) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T17:40:22.213" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T17:40:22.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T05:15:50.663" Score="4" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Night Circus must have survived through the wars as the last chapter shows a business card with an email address. There is a commemorative plaque for Chandresh who died in 1932 (after the first World War). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the circus stopped I think problems would occur. How could they continue to run and have customers through the war?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:17:39.507" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T18:17:39.507" Title="How would the Night Circus have survived the world wars?" Tags="&lt;the-night-circus&gt;&lt;erin-morgenstern&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1013" CreationDate="2017-01-26T05:22:24.657" Score="5" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of the Poirot books he mentions that though clues are often small he once found a four-foot long one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't remember in which book he mentions this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know which book he did find the four-foot long clue in? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T05:46:13.960" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T15:09:08.190" Title="In which book did Poirot find a four-foot long clue?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1012" CreationDate="2017-01-26T05:45:46.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;He found it in &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt;, and he made that statement in &lt;em&gt;Lord Edgware Dies&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 7 of &lt;em&gt;Lord Edgware Dies&lt;/em&gt;, Poirot mentions this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I found a clue once,’ said Poirot dreamily. ‘But since it was four feet long instead of four&#xA;  centimetres no one would believe in it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(chapter 7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in reference to &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt;, where a 4 (or two, see below) foot pipe is used to disfigure a victim's face to make it unrecognizable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note, in &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt;, the pipe is said to be two feet long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Eh bien! I also have found something! A piece of lead-piping.'  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Nonsense, Poirot. You know very well that's got nothing to do with it. I meant little things—traces that may lead us infallibly to the murderers.'  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Mon ami, a clue of two feet long is every bit as valuable as one measuring two millimetres! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(also in chapter 7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to just be a minor discrepancy, and I don't think the difference really matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T15:09:08.190" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T15:09:08.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1014" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T07:32:28.770" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T07:32:28.770" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T07:32:28.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1015" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T07:32:28.770" Score="0" Body="Questions seeking to identify the source of a quote. If possible, include the exact quote whose origin you're seeking, or describe it as closely as you can. (For questions seeking to identify a entire story or work of literature from some remembered details, use the [identification-request] tag instead.)" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T09:16:06.707" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:16:06.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1018" CreationDate="2017-01-26T10:25:30.340" Score="20" ViewCount="15255" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a famous quote from J.R.R. Tolkien in which he states his hatred of allegorical writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always&#xA;  have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.&#xA;  I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability&#xA;  to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse&#xA;  applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the&#xA;  reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet many people have found The Lord of the Rings to be a very obvious allegory for the First World War, or less obviously for the industrial revolution, the atomic age or for the Christian faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that people may be putting a meaning onto the work that was not in the author's intention. But this seems unlikely given Tolkien's level of learning and the very clear parallels with the world war. Did he really not intend it as an allegory? If so, how does this square with his dislike of allegory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:30:14.530" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T19:51:32.933" Title="If Tolkien disliked allegory, why are there so many allegorical readings of The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2017-01-26T10:37:00.560" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, there is no complication regarding the theme of &lt;em&gt;Casey at The Bat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; The poem as generally known is purely about baseball and nothing else. However, it is unclear whether this is a portrayal of a specific game and player or not, but we do not have enough information to determine if it is and if it is, who it is. Additionally, in a 1979 article, sportswriter Leonard Koppett claims that there were 19 lines originally written, but omitted from the final version, which gave the poem and new meaning about gambling, but there are no corroborating sources to this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T10:37:00.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2017-01-26T10:37:34.133" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was an allegory because, in spite of his dislike, Tolkien felt it was necessary and inevitable that it should be one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In several lesser-known quotes, the author freely admits that the tale is allegorical. Most clearly he states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Of course my story is not an allegory of Atomic power, but of Power.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #186&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also claims it is a religious work which, given that it has no connection to any real-life religion, can only be true if it can be read as an allegory of religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work, unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #142&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how do we square this circle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is that another quote from Tolkien shows that he believed all myth was fundamentally allegorical in nature. Since one of his key purposes in constructing the legendarium around Lord of the Rings was to rebuild a lost English mythology it would be difficult for him not to write an allegory if this was his belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I dislike Allegory - the conscious and intentional allegory - yet any&#xA;attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use&#xA;allegorical language.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #131&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also believed that it was, to some extent, inevitable in the work of any author because it would surface through the subconscious. Or to put it another way, that allegory in literature was a failure only if it was created deliberately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The only perfectly consistent allegory is a real life; and the only&#xA;fully intelligible story is an allegory. And one finds, even in&#xA;imperfect human 'literature', that the better and more consistent an&#xA;allegory is the more easily it can be read 'just as a story'; and the&#xA;better and more closely woven a story is the more easily can those so&#xA;minded find allegory in it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien #109&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are we to make of this in relation to &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;? His admission that the book was an allegory of power, while denying that it is one of atomic power offers a clue. In stating his dislike of allegory, he is using the term to mean a literal reading: that he dislikes stories which offer only a single, specific political or moral interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; can be read vaguely as an allegory of power, but not specifically of atomic power. Similarly, it can be read as an allegory of warfare, or of the struggle against evil, but not specifically of one of the World Wars. He wants his readers to relate to wide themes of human experience and not to narrow lessons on distinct events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:30:35.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1021" CreationDate="2017-01-26T11:05:17.113" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the reader learns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this quote we learn a significant amount about the books, but it is still unclear whether the books are of the exact same length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T12:57:04.800" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T08:10:44.160" Title="Are all books the same length in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1019" CreationDate="2017-01-26T11:39:15.133" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd strongly speculate that the rows are 80 characters each. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblio3.url.edu.gt/Libros/borges/babel.pdf&quot;&gt;original Spanish&lt;/a&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A cada uno de los muros de cada hexágono corresponden cinco anaqueles; cada&#xA;  anaquel encierra treinta y dos libros de formato uniforme; cada libro es de cuatrocientas diez páginas; cada página, de cuarenta renglones; cada renglón, de unas ochenta letras de color negro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notably, the primary cause for doubt (the phrasing of &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; 80 letters) is still there in Spanish, and is actually a little &lt;em&gt;stronger&lt;/em&gt; in its conveying the idea of an approximation. &quot;Some&quot; in English doesn't necessarily mean there's deviation; it can just be a color word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what in English is written as &quot;some 80 letters which are black in color&quot; is written in Spanish as &quot;de unas ochenta letras de color negro.&quot; The key word in Spanish is &lt;strong&gt;unas&lt;/strong&gt; - it's not actually strictly necessary, and adds a little bit of ambiguity, because here, it just means &quot;approximately&quot; or &quot;about.&quot; It can still be a color word in Spanish, but I think that's less likely. If Borges &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to say that, yes, they are &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; 80 letters, Borges would probably have left it at &quot;de ochenta letras.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but, just before that, Borges &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; say &quot;...libros de formato uniforme,&quot; and enumerates exactly the ways that the books in &quot;uniform format.&quot; The linking of the books' uniform format and eighty-letter rows in the same sentence heavily implies that all the rows in all the books are 80 characters long. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to doubt that there are 80 characters in a row, there's definitely &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; reason to, but I don't think it's a very good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T11:39:15.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1401" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:00:04.057" Score="24" ViewCount="46126" Body="&lt;p&gt;The popular London nursery rhyme &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oranges_and_Lemons&quot;&gt;Oranges and Lemons&lt;/a&gt; is quoted and partially recited several times throughout &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;. Winston learns about it from Mr Charrington in Part 1, Chapter 8, then talks about it with Julia in Part 2, Chapter 4 and with O'Brien in Part 2, Chapter 8. Most hauntingly, in Part 2, Chapter 10, when Winston and Julia are being arrested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject, &quot;Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head&quot;!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the symbolism or significance behind the frequent mentions of this song?&lt;/strong&gt; It comes up so often that it must have been intended to have some special meaning, but I'm not sure what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T01:19:47.817" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T01:35:39.260" Title="What's the significance of &quot;Oranges and Lemons&quot; in 1984?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1567" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:03:17.437" Score="9" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading through &lt;em&gt;The Federalist Papers&lt;/em&gt;, I've come to the general conclusion that Hamilton's essays are, by and large, a stream of consciousness. I don't know if I'd be able to say exactly why, but after running the Papers through a word counter, it turns out that the &lt;em&gt;average&lt;/em&gt; sentence length is around 30 to 40 words. The &lt;em&gt;longest&lt;/em&gt; sentence in the Papers is actually &lt;strong&gt;200 words&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The recommendatory act of Congress is in the words following: “WHEREAS, There is provision in the articles of Confederation and perpetual Union, for making alterations therein, by the assent of a Congress of the United States, and of the legislatures of the several States; and whereas experience hath evinced, that there are defects in the present Confederation; as a mean to remedy which, several of the States, and PARTICULARLY THE STATE OF NEW YORK, by express instructions to their delegates in Congress, have suggested a convention for the purposes expressed in the following resolution; and such convention appearing to be the most probable mean of establishing in these States A FIRM NATIONAL GOVERNMENT: “Resolved, That in the opinion of Congress it is expedient, that on the second Monday of May next a convention of delegates, who shall have been appointed by the several States, be held at Philadelphia, for the sole and express purpose OF REVISING THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION, and reporting to Congress and the several legislatures such ALTERATIONS AND PROVISIONS THEREIN, as shall, when agreed to in Congress, and confirmed by the States, render the federal Constitution ADEQUATE TO THE EXIGENCIES OF GOVERNMENT AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE UNION.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't have to read that. You probably shouldn't, honestly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is by far &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the only example of this sort of stream-of-consciousness meandering excess in the Papers. I know Hamilton was operating on a short time-scale when writing, drafting, revising, submitting, and printing these essays. But this smacks of a disregard for any sort of editing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of leads me to wonder: were the Federalist Papers ever edited in a thorough and rigorous way? If so, by whom? And if so, what on earth were they checking for, and what changes did they make (if we know)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm more interested in whether there is evidence that they were vetted by a third party, but if there's information on Hamilton's approach to self-editing that could be relevant, I'd count that, too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T15:21:30.277" Title="Do we know whether Hamilton's Federalist papers were ever edited or vetted?" Tags="&lt;the-federalist-papers&gt;&lt;alexander-hamilton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:20:18.563" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song represents the successful eradication of shared English culture by The Party. It's a nursery rhyme the majority of British people would be familiar with, but in 1984 characters can only remember fragments of it. Winston tries to gather more information about the song as he does other aspects of pre-party culture, but fails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, then, that particular nursery rhyme? This is a harder question to answer. On a practical level, it is one of the few nursery rhymes which can be directly connected to a real world place: the church of St Clement's Dane. Winston sees a picture of this when visiting Mr Charrington, which triggers his interest. So it's an effective rhyme to use simply as a plot device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more symbolic level, it may be that it was chosen because of its increasingly threatening nature, culminating in the quote given by the OP. As Winston uncovers more and more of the rhyme he is coming closer and closer to his own downfall. The party is coming to &quot;chop off his head&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T12:20:18.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1027" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:22:47.213" Score="7" ViewCount="1274" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the speaker describes the Library, as the universe, as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains how the universe in which the story occurs is made up of hexagons. However, there is also a group of people who believe that the rooms may also be circular as we learn when the speaker says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The idealists argue that the hexagonal rooms are a necessary from of absolute space or, at least, of our intuition of space. They reason that a triangular or pentagonal room is inconceivable. (The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the organization of the library could most likely work with pentagonal rooms, given the vagouness of the specifications. This suggests to me that there is a non-mechanical reason for the choice of the hexagon. So, what is the significance/symbolism of the hexagon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T12:57:15.800" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T12:57:15.800" Title="What is the significance/symbolism of the hexagon in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:29:25.830" Score="7" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/reese/classes/artistsbooks/The%20Library%20of%20Babel.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the speaker describes hallways in between the hexagonal rooms as,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, he describes them as being narrow, but he does not describe them as small. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://libraryofbabel.info/theory.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the only English-language interpretation&lt;/a&gt;, I can find analyzing the organization of the hallways, assumes that the hexagonal rooms connect directly and therefore uses this to restrict the number of possible organizations. Also, the text never states that the hallway is straight, does not branch off, and is between only two rooms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the interpretation used by the linked interpretation correct? Or can hallways connect multiple hexagonal rooms? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the original Spanish get more specific?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-13T11:35:47.917" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T21:38:50.447" Title="Are hexagons directly connected to each other?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1025" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:37:11.937" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hexagons are a natural pattern found in various orderly structures in nature: for example, the cells of a beehive, or the columns of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_Causeway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Giant's Causeway&lt;/a&gt;. By making his Library a hexagonal tessellation, Borges could be attempting to evoke thoughts of the most perfect and ordered natural phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One geometric reason for the popularity of hexagons is that they &lt;strong&gt;tesselate&lt;/strong&gt; perfectly. Regular hexagons can be used to tile the plane in a natural and periodic pattern, while regular pentagons, heptagons, and octagons can't. Squares can, but if you wanted to design a square room with two doors, that would leave only two walls for books. In order to have a perfectly regular planar tesselation (which is necessary for the natural order and perfection that the Library represents) with more walls of books than doors in each room, the hexagon is the best possible option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2CGkm.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O2CGkm.gif&quot; alt=&quot;demo&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be a deeper significance in the connection, via hexagonal cells, to &lt;strong&gt;bees&lt;/strong&gt; and their hives and society, as discussed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://libraryofbabel.info/theory2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this awesome website&lt;/a&gt;. Like the bees in their hive, the librarians in Babel have little individuality or will to exist outside of their society/home. The bees crawl from cell to cell making honey; the librarians wander from cell to cell examining books. Philosophers from Aristotle to Karl Marx have likened humans to bees in their socieities and activities. Perhaps the library is intended to be likened to a beehive: strictly structured, containing numerous largely similar inhabitants, but full of sweet words instead of sweet honey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T12:37:11.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T12:54:50.637" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the speaker describes the cyclical book as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance/symbolism behind the book being &quot;cyclical&quot;, as opposed to a different shape?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:42:12.033" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:42:12.033" Title="What is the significance/symbolism of the Cyclical book being cyclical in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2017-01-26T13:32:13.870" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oranges and Lemons is not just a nursery rhyme, it is also a children's dance or game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two children place their hands together to form an arch - an arch of sanctuary.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The other children pass under the arch in pairs as the song is sung.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At the end &lt;em&gt;Here comes a chopper to chop off your head&lt;/em&gt;, a pair of children is caught.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That caught pair makes another arch.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song and dance is now repeated, and it becomes harder for the remaining (surviving) children to reach the sanctuary of the church metaphorically created by the arches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process repeats until all participating children have been &quot;beheaded&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excitement and the mild threat is that, as the song is repeated and repeated, it becomes harder and harder to survive - to escape the system.  I well remember the increasing tension from playing the game in childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1984, the repetition is a way of driving home that Winston's chances of surviving the attentions of Big Brother are becoming smaller.  The symbolism is of ever increasing threat.  Each mention in the book indicates that one step has been taken closer to &quot;beheading&quot; Winston Smith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T13:47:06.137" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T13:47:06.137" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2017-01-26T16:42:04.083" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an allegory, but it is a common feature of life. It's not &quot;just&quot; about baseball: it's about disappointment, about expectation, about confidence, about the trope of overcoming adversity. Sometimes, you just lose. It happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no need to apply an allegorical reading where the baseball represents, I dunno, the Free Coinage of Silver and Casey represents William Jennings Bryan. (Example borrowed from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/362/is-em-the-wizard-of-oz-em-a-satire-of-the-french-revolution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cecil Adams&lt;/a&gt;.) The poem is appreciated by people who aren't baseball fans because they know the bittersweet feeling it evokes: the heartbreak of loss combined with the silliness of the poem's style. It reminds you that there's another game tomorrow, and life goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True allegories are actually quite rare. The trope rarely works well, because no two situations are ever truly identical, and trying to force them to be just makes people uncomfortable. But great works capitalize on common human experiences. As they say about history, it never repeats itself, but it rhymes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T16:42:04.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:27:27.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T18:27:27.287" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T18:27:27.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:27:27.287" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alexander Hamilton, an American politician." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T17:29:28.897" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T17:29:28.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1036" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:28:23.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T18:28:23.603" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T18:28:23.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1037" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:28:23.603" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding Virgil's epic poem about Aeneas's journey from Troy to Italy. Use with the tags [virgil] and [latin-literature]. " OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:28:58.530" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:28:58.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:29:44.683" Score="11" ViewCount="1282" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadmus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cadmus&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonia_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harmonia&lt;/a&gt; as presented in Rick Riordan's &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson's Greek Gods&lt;/em&gt;, is unique in claiming that Harmonia became mortal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cadmus wasn’t sure he should be stealing the dragon’s dental work, especially if he was already on Ares’s naughty list, but he did as Athena commanded. When he was done with his tooth farming, a bunch of super-elite skeleton warriors sprang from the ground, and these became the first soldiers in the new Theban army. Cadmus built his city. For a while, everything was copacetic. The gods even granted him a minor goddess for his wife—Harmonia, who was a daughter of Aphrodite and Ares. Harmonia became mortal to share her life with Cadmus, which was a pretty big honor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&amp;quot;Ares, The Manly Man's Manly Man&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson's Greek Gods&lt;/em&gt;, Rick Riordan&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize Mr. Riordan's books target a younger audience, and this may seem like a minor detail in the grand scheme of making the myths accessible to youngsters. However, I feel it's a rather important one as Gods (and other immortals) turning into mortals is not something that happens in Greek mythology. The only story I know of that comes close is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Castor and Pollux&lt;/a&gt;, yet not close enough, as the twins alternate between mortality and immortality. As for Harmonia, I checked several &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Harmonia.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient versions of the myth&lt;/a&gt;, and she remains immortal in all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Rick Riordan ever commented on how accurate his portrayals are intended to be? And given that several of the stories he presents may differ significantly from source to source, has he ever provided a list of sources he used in his research of the myths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This was inspired by a Mythology Stack Exchange question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/q/2193/57&quot;&gt;Are there any Greek myths of a god permanently turning into a mortal as punishment?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:28:18.377" Title="How accurate are Rick Riordan's portrayals of ancient myths?" Tags="&lt;rick-riordan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1039" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:29:55.123" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T18:29:55.123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T18:29:55.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1040" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:29:55.123" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Russian author Alexander Pushkin (1799 –  1837) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works originally in Russian should be tagged with [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:41:21.267" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:41:21.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1038" CreationDate="2017-01-26T18:50:33.843" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rick Riordan in an &lt;a href=&quot;http://theabsolutemag.com/6499/videos/rick-riordan-discusses-interpreting-mythology-for-middle-schoolers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; says that he attempts to create a &quot;Modern Mold&quot; for the characters. He credits many of the stories he uses to &lt;em&gt;Tales of the Greek Heroes&lt;/em&gt; by Roger Green. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_in_Rick_Riordan&amp;#39;s_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). He also uses &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/Harmonia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Theoi Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as his &quot;fact checking&quot;, which was the same source you used coincidently. (Wikipedia) Since I could not find an interview on the specific example, my guess on why he changed would either be because he wanted it to be more relatable to the audience, or he learned it and preferred it that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had this issue over Rick Riordan's writing a couple of years ago, they did not match up with the information that I knew. One of the main issues with fact checking Greek mythology is that &lt;strong&gt;there was no original source&lt;/strong&gt;. (per &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/greek-mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;history.com&lt;/a&gt;). Fact checking the bible to stories is easy, we have the bible. There were many variations on all the Greek Mythologies. Robert Graves said that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Myth has two main functions, The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as ‘Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?’…The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it would be logical for there to be discrepancies throughout the stories: as long as the important moral or explanation stands, the people were free to change it as they saw fit. Thus in Rick Riordan's case, the important part was that the two got married; even if he took some liberties with the story, it can still be considered the same myth as the one we are used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:28:18.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:28:18.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1042" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:08:42.310" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:08:42.310" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:08:42.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1043" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:08:42.310" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the musical Hamilton." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:48:52.277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:48:52.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1044" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:09:34.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:09:34.280" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:09:34.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1045" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:09:34.280" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the Federalist Papers written by Alexander Hamilton." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:48:45.803" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:48:45.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1046" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:10:10.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-26T19:10:10.197" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T19:10:10.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1047" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:10:10.197" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding politics in literature. Please note that general questions about politics that aren't directly tied to literature are off-topic and shold be asked on the Politics Stack Exchange site instead." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T20:32:09.837" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T20:32:09.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:23:33.033" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a non-fiction history book, &lt;em&gt;Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years&lt;/em&gt;, a (temporarily) recurring element is &quot;The Tower of Darkness&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter 3 is even titled that, and it's fairly clearly referring to the Islamic empire or caliphate and its rule of a significant portion of Eurasia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When searching to find whether the author made that phrase up, I found it's from Edward FitzGerald's English translation of &lt;em&gt;The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Fools! Your reward is neither Here nor There!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any direct evidence that the author of the history book got this phrase from the Rubaiyat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T13:57:29.427" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T13:57:29.427" Title="Did the author base this element on the Rubaiyat?" Tags="&lt;edward-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;omar-khayyam&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;the-rubaiyat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8374" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:32:49.197" Score="6" ViewCount="6773" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where literary criticism is concerned, what are the major differences between Russian Formalism and New Criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T14:40:01.097" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T18:49:40.803" Title="What are the major differences between Russian Formalism and New Criticism?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1050" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:51:16.797" Score="7" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Radley walked to town at eleven-thirty every morning and&#xA;  came back promptly at twelve, sometimes carrying a brown paper bag that the&#xA;  neighborhood assumed contained the family groceries. I never knew how old Mr.&#xA;  Radley made his living— Jem said he “bought cotton,” a polite term for doing&#xA;  nothing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it ever revealed (elsewhere in the book or in the movie, or by Lee herself) what Mr Radley did for a living and what he was carrying in the paper bag?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T17:25:20.453" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:25:20.453" Title="Was Mr. Radley's occupation ever revealed?" Tags="&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T19:58:20.997" Score="9" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prequel to Mark Twain's &lt;em&gt;Innocents Abroad&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roughing_It&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roughing It&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Roughing It&lt;/em&gt; illustrates many of Twain's early adventures, including a visit to Salt Lake City, gold and silver prospecting, real-estate speculation, a journey to the Kingdom of Hawaii, and his beginnings as a writer. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;This memoir&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; provides examples of Twain's rough-hewn humor, which would become a staple of his writing in such later books &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#link421&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Chapter XVI of Roughing It&lt;/a&gt;, he claims he was almost a millionaire twice, but he sold his shares before the mines hit it rich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The news was all over town. The former excitement was great—this one was greater still. I walked the streets serene and happy. Higbie said the foreman had been offered two hundred thousand dollars for his third of the mine. I said I would like to see myself selling for any such price. My ideas were lofty. My figure was a million. Still, I honestly believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect than to make me hold off for more. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then he went on to say;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. I can always have it to say that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, once, for ten days. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Emphasis mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did this really happen, or is it another case of him being an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unreliable narrator?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:24:16.500" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T10:22:59.750" Title="Was Mark Twain actually almost a millionaire twice over, before he became famous?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1059" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:30:34.127" Score="6" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the narrator tells us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He showed his find to a wandering decoder who told him the lines were written in Portuguese; others said they were Yiddish. Within a century, the language was established: a Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this quote the speaker references Portuguese, Guarani, Yiddish, and &quot;Arabian inflections&quot;. While the combinations of some of these terms are nonsensical, the terms themselves originate from real world places and languages. But &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; is supposed to take place in a universe all its own, so how does the speaker know what these languages are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these languages exist in &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T20:42:20.107" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:42:20.107" Title="How do real-world languages exist in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1053" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8537" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:35:25.630" Score="3" ViewCount="1887" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently ordered the books from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cemetery of Forgotten Books&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series. I know that I will be receiving &lt;em&gt;The Angel's Game&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of The Wind&lt;/em&gt; since &lt;em&gt;The Angel's Game&lt;/em&gt; was published after &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of The Wind&lt;/em&gt;, and this makes me think that I should read them in publication order. However, I also know that &lt;em&gt;The Angel's Game&lt;/em&gt; is a prequel to &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of The Wind&lt;/em&gt; and sometimes I have found that reading a prequel first can be just as enjoyable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, would it be better to read &lt;em&gt;The Angel's Game&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of The Wind&lt;/em&gt;? Additionally, in what order should &lt;em&gt;The Cemetery of Forgotten Books&lt;/em&gt; series be read for the most enjoyable experience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:39:19.990" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T15:28:02.837" Title="In what order should the &quot;Cemetery of Forgotten Books&quot; series be read?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;carlos-ruiz-zafon&gt;&lt;the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1057" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:41:57.517" Score="-4" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, we learn that there are hallways in between rooms, which have bathroom and sleeping facilities when the speaker says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one's fecal necessities&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not account for how the people within the library are meant to eat. So, how do people in the library eat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T09:46:43.087" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T09:46:43.087" Title="How do people eat in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="895" CreationDate="2017-01-26T21:45:28.443" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem appears to contest your assertion that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an object can not both be a mirror and a lake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its title is &lt;strong&gt;Mirror&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;Mirror and Lake&lt;/strong&gt;. Throughout the poem, the speaker is the mirror. But in the second verse, the mirror claims to be a lake. What does this mean? It's easy to see how a lake can be a mirror, since it reflects. But how can a mirror be a lake? Let's unpack the poem and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first verse stresses the objectivity of the mirror:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mirror insists upon its truthfulness and its emotional detachment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... unmisted by love or dislike.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am not cruel, only truthful‚&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mirror claims to be as indifferent to human concerns as any Greek god. Even as a lake, the mirror says that when the woman looking at her reflection turns away,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout, then, there is an assertion of precision and exactitude. Yet the mirror is not merely a passive observer. Its claims to neutrality are undercut by its reference to its &quot;heart&quot;. Furthermore, it is active:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whatever I see I swallow immediately&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just as it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already, then, in the first verse itself the mirror is a bit like a lake. A lake swallows anything you put into it, and the mirror swallows everything it reflects. A person who has been swallowed by a lake is, of course, drowned. So also the ageing woman has drowned her younger self in the mirror:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that although we think of mirrors as neutral and exact, they are freighted with emotion, because of the response we have to them. There's a similarity here to existentialism or absurdism: the world itself may be meaningless and indifferent, but we find ourselves forced to make meaning of it. The mirror itself claims objectivity, but it is no more objective than a lake. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think of a lake as part of the natural world, as something that is beautiful; but a lake can be cruel even as it is beautiful, or as it reflects beauty (think of Narcissus, pining away for his beautiful reflection in a lake). We think of a mirror as something manufactured, something relatively objective and passive. But Plath shows that the mirror and the lake are one and the same: parts of a non-human world that is indifferent to human feelings, and thus cruel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ageing is part of the natural world too, and part of its cruelty. If the poem can be boiled down to a single &quot;meaning&quot; (which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/17168&quot;&gt;it shouldn't be&lt;/a&gt;), it is that the world we live in is hostile and cruel even as it claims to be neutral, and that we are all subject to its indifferent, remorseless cruelty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T21:45:28.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1050" CreationDate="2017-01-26T22:35:32.730" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's not revealed anywhere in any canon sources as to what Mr. Radley's primary occupation was.&lt;/strong&gt; It's also not addressed anywhere in the novel as to what is in the paper bag, other than the quote you refer in your question, so it probably &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; groceries. Everyone needs to eat, right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're wondering how Mr. Radley has the funds to keep buying groceries without a job, he probably does it through county welfare money, the same way the Ewells live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That makes the Ewells fine folks, then,” said Jem. The tribe of which Burris Ewell and his brethren consisted had lived on the same plot of earth behind the Maycomb dump, and had thrived on county welfare money for three generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T22:35:32.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1054" CreationDate="2017-01-26T23:32:25.317" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like many of Borges's tales, &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; is meant more as a thought experiment than a realistic story. &lt;strong&gt;Don't overthink it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no mention anywhere in the story of any of various practicalities of life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;where the librarians get food and how they eat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how the plumbing for the toilets is operated and maintained&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how the librarian population is maintained (assuming that they bear children in the normal way, how and where are those children born and raised?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whether they ever wash themselves as well as excreting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how they cope without fresh air, in the infinite indoor space of the Library&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;how the bulbs that light the Library maintain their power&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of addressing any of these practical considerations, Borges preferred to spend the text of the story pondering philosophical issues: language, meaning, and infinity. This, the essential 'theme' of the tale, should tell us how we're meant to approach it: not as a realistically constructed world in which people could actually live, but instead as a philosophical exercise for the amusement of the mind. (Having read several other Borges stories, such as &lt;em&gt;The Garden of Forking Paths&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Lottery in Babylon&lt;/em&gt;, I believe this is typical of his work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, any answer would not only be necessarily &lt;strong&gt;almost purely speculation&lt;/strong&gt;, but it wouldn't even be &lt;em&gt;useful&lt;/em&gt; speculation, in the sense that it wouldn't increase our understanding of the story in the spirit it was intended. This isn't the kind of analysis the author meant anyone to make. &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; focuses on &lt;strong&gt;wacky ideas rather than realism&lt;/strong&gt;; if Borges has intended us to worry about the latter, he would have paid more attention to it in the story itself. If you're looking for that kind of worldbuilding, then I'm afraid you've probably got the wrong author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T19:10:45.993" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:10:45.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-26T23:44:20.590" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hannah says the words &quot;I'm sorry&quot; and &quot;Thank you&quot; on sides A and B of tape 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did she say &quot;I'm sorry&quot; and &quot;Thank you&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="328" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:42:38.907" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:42:38.907" Title="What's the meaning of the ending of &quot;Thirteen Reasons Why&quot;?" Tags="&lt;thirteen-reasons-why&gt;&lt;jay-asher&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2017-01-26T23:56:45.053" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remember that the Library is &lt;strong&gt;infinite&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;complete&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Library is &quot;total&quot; - perfect, complete, and whole - and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite) - that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the phrase &quot;in every language&quot;. That includes all possible languages which might be constructed using the same twenty-two characters, including (perhaps) languages which no human has ever learned. The same issue is addressed more explicitly later on in the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no combination of characters one can make - &lt;em&gt;dhcmrlchtdj&lt;/em&gt;, for example - that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance. There is no syllable one can speak that is not filled with tenderness and terror, that is not, in one of those languages, the mighty name of a god. To speak is to commit tautologies. This pointless, verbose epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five bookshelves in one of the countless hexagons - as does its refutation. (A number &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; of the possible languages employ the same vocabulary; in some of them, the &lt;em&gt;symbol&lt;/em&gt; &quot;library&quot; possesses the correct definition &quot;everlasting, ubiquitous system of hexagonal galleries,&quot; while a library - the thing - is a loaf of bread or a pyramid or something else, and the six words that define it themselvs have other definitions. You who read me - are you certain you understand my language?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Library contains books written in &lt;strong&gt;every possible language written using the same characters&lt;/strong&gt;. It so happens that the narrator has knowledge of the languages which we know as Portuguese, Arabic (presumably in a transliterated form), and so on. In the infinite expanse of the Library, it stands to reason that &lt;strong&gt;there will be someone somewhere who knows those languages&lt;/strong&gt;, just as there will be someone somewhere who knows entirely different languages which use the same words, or which use totally different words. There will be someone, somewhere in the Library, who speaks exactly the same languages but calls Portuguese &quot;Japegrin&quot; and Arabic &quot;Sinistrom&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The infinitude of the Library, encompassing all possibilities, means that every possible combination of circumstances may happen somewhere. Don't be surprised by what seems an extraordinary coincidence - the only reason it seems like such a coincidence is because &lt;strong&gt;the story focuses on the particular place, known to exist somewhere, where these circumstances occur&lt;/strong&gt;. It wouldn't make for such a readable story if Borges had focused on the part of the Library where all the words known by all the local librarians are total gibberish to us. But since there exists a place in the Library where Spanish, English, and so on are known and understood, it makes sense to set the story there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-26T23:56:45.053" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="625" CreationDate="2017-01-27T01:30:14.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest I've seen is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clockwork Orange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Anthony Burgess, whose first-person narrator, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(A_Clockwork_Orange)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alex&lt;/a&gt;, narrates the entire novel in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NadSat&lt;/a&gt;. Nadsat isn't a distinct fictional language, as you ask for, but it is a fictional &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argot&lt;/a&gt; invented by Burgess. Here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7370-that-s-what-it-s-going-to-be-then-brothers-as-i&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a representative quote from Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;, which is clearly readable but not fully comprehensible to an English speaker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what it's going to be then, brothers, as I come to the like end of this tale. You have been everywhere with your little droog Alex, suffering with him, and you have viddied some of the most grahzny bratchnies old Bog ever made, all on to your old droog Alex. And all it was was that I was young. But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning young earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Alex all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lipmusic brrrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-universe, Nadsat is Russian-inflected cockney slang spoken amongst teenagers in the novel's dystropian future England. Out-of-universe, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nadsat&amp;amp;oldid=746209233#Function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says that&lt;/a&gt; Burgess &amp;quot;knew that if he used modes of speech that were contemporarily in use, the novel would very quickly become dated. His use of Nadsat was essentially pragmatic; he needed his narrator to have a unique voice that would remain ageless while reinforcing Alex's indifference to his society's norms, and to suggest that youth subculture existed independently of the rest of society.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T01:30:14.770" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1067" CreationDate="2017-01-27T02:19:51.263" Score="7" ViewCount="1147" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Library of Babel&lt;/em&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, the speaker tells us about the library with the following specification,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This specifies the organization of each hexagonal room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I say that the Library is unending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above quote specifies that the library is infinite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are five shelves for each of the hexagon's walls; each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This final quote describes what each book wall is like. We learn from all of this information that there are 25^1312000 individual books within the library. However, this is a finite number and the speaker has already told us that the library is infinite. This leads us to one of two conclusions, that there are multiple copies of each book or there are some empty rooms. However, the second is already disproven by the third quote, which is a universal description and the first can not be true because the speaker says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One: the Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal. The other: every copy is unique, irreplaceable, but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles: works which differ only in a letter or a comma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above quote makes it clear that every book is individual and irreplaceable. So, given that the library is not infinite in the normal sense, what does the author mean by the library being infinite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T13:09:04.020" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T13:09:04.020" Title="What does Jorge Luis Borges mean by the library being infinite in &quot;The Library of Babel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1062" CreationDate="2017-01-27T02:25:16.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's periodic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is directly answered in the text, at the very end of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have just written the word &quot;infinite&quot;. I have not included that adjective out of mere rhetorical habit; I hereby state that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who believe it to have limits hypothesise that in some remote place or places the corridors and staircases and hexagons may, inconceivably, end - which is absurd. And yet those who picture the world as unlimited forget that the number of possible books is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;. I will be bold enough to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: &lt;em&gt;The Library is unlimited but periodic.&lt;/em&gt; If an eternal traveller should journey in any direction, he would find after untold centuries that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder - which, repeated, becomes order: the Order. My solitude is cheered by that elegant hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T02:25:16.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="871" CreationDate="2017-01-27T05:40:52.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book you are thinking of may be The Sword of Glendower by Aylmer Hall. It was first published in 1960.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the blurb in my edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally Sir Owen Pryce, a man of considerable standing and dignity, is annoyed when the press dubs him &amp;quot;the man with the fairy sword&amp;quot;. But that is bound to happen when the rumour goes around that not only an ancient sword but a fairy sword is hidden somewhere at Llanviar Castle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the story of how everyone turns out secretly to hunt for the sword -even Mark who thought at first everyone was &amp;quot;batty&amp;quot;. A good and unusual adventure tale, with no fairies in it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I read it, but I remember the castle being described in detail, as well as one of the tours of the castle. Two of the children live there (children of Sir Owen) and their cousin is staying with them. The castle is, however, open for tours by the public, it is in one of these that there is a good deal of description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search for the sword leads them underground and if I remember correctly renovations are being made to the castle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T00:34:36.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-27T06:12:36.287" Score="11" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that Charles Dickens changed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Expectations#Revised_ending&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the ending to &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; after prompting. Did he do so with any of his other books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, he may have changed the endings of all his books a hundred times before publishing. However, I'm looking for alternate endings that have also been published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T06:34:38.733" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T13:29:36.040" Title="Did Charles Dickens change the endings of any of his books other than Great Expectations?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;alternate-endings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="103" CreationDate="2017-01-27T08:52:12.063" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, a reader of &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; who is unaware of its connection to &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; is pretty much guaranteed to have missed the entire point of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; is so iconic that Rhys could simply assume knowledge of its plot while writing her own book. The heroine of &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;, her husband, and her half-brother are all very important characters in Brontë's novel. Without prior knowledge of those characters as they are in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, one would not get much out of Rhys's work. The power of &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; is that it forces us not merely to rethink where our sympathies lie vis-à-vis those characters in Brontë, but also to re-evaluate the entire world view that Brontë as well as her readers (ourselves included) take unquestioningly for granted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So closely does Rhys's novel depend on  Brontë's that there's no way to discuss their relationship without spoilers. Be warned, the following reveals important plot points about both &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; In &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, the eponymous heroine falls in love with her employer, a rich man named Mr Rochester. She is a governess in his household. She has noticed some mysterious goings-on: strange laughter, an unexplained murderous attack on one of Rochester's guests, etc. But she accepts the stated explanation that a drunken servant named Grace Poole is responsible for these events.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; When Jane and Rochester are in the church about to be married, it is revealed, shockingly, that Rochester in fact already has a wife. She is a rich Caribbean heiress named Bertha Mason, and Rochester says he was &quot;tricked&quot; by his father into marrying her for her money. But as his father knew, Bertha is mad. So Rochester has kept his wife shut up in the attic. Grace Poole is in fact the servant who looks after Bertha, and the latter is the one responsible for the mysterious incidents.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Brontë's novel has no sympathy for Bertha. She is simply the inconvenient impediment that keeps Rochester and Jane apart. She cannot be a true wife to him, but prevents him from being able to marry the woman he truly loves. Ultimately she is responsible for burning down his house, killing herself and grievously injuring him in the process.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Indeed, Rochester is supposed to be the sympathetic figure. Poor man, tied to a mad wife! Thwarted in his true love because of a marriage he was tricked into! Nice enough to keep the lunatic at home instead of dumping her in an asylum! Punished for his attempted bigamy by being blinded and rendered lame while attempting to rescue the cray-cray bitch from a fire she set herself!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; neatly inverts these sympathies by showing us Bertha's point of view and telling her back story. Despised by the English for being a colonial; shut out of Jamaican society by virtue of being white and identifying with the English; married off to a cold and manipulative Englishman who carts her off to a cold and lonely island. Her husband becomes tremendously rich because of her money, then locks her up in the attic with nobody but a drunken servant for company; he then proceeds to have a love affair with the governess and is on the point of bigamy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Jane Eyre is popularly regarded as a feminist heroine because of her independent-mindedness, but Rhys shows that the feminist independence of Jane, and the eventual triumph of her &quot;true love&quot; with Rochester, depend on the unacknowledged suffering of those who were exploited by Victorian imperialism and mercantilism. Being from the West Indies herself, she saw the violence inherent in the vast mechanisms of trade. The mercantile wealth of Victorian England was built on various sorts of exploitation: slavery, colonialism, sexism. Rochester's wealth comes from his wife, who in turn inherits it from her stepfather, who ran a plantation in Jamaica where slaves worked. Jane too inherits money from a distant relative who has become rich in the West Indies. The source of this tremendous wealth goes unexamined in Brontë, because imperial exploitation was an unremarkable fact in the Victorian world-view. But by retelling the well-worn narrative from a fresh perspective, Rhys opens our eyes and causes us to reassess our values.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr Read &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, then re-read &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; to get what the latter novel is really about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T10:38:02.957" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T10:38:02.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1062" CreationDate="2017-01-27T09:25:05.900" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several options -- which makes sense, as this is a story which explores the idea of infinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Library is spherical&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately following the line &lt;em&gt;&quot;I say that the Library is unending&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the narrator says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let it suffice now for me to repeat the classic dictum: &lt;em&gt;The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one way the Library can be infinite -- if the Library wraps around and re-connects to itself, it is infinite, in the sense that you can walk in a single direction forever. The number of hexagons and books are finite, but the Library itself has no beginning and no end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Library repeats infinitely&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story concludes with this thesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I say that it is not illogical to think that the world is infinite. Those who judge it to be limited postulate that in remote places the corridors and stairways and hexagons can conceivably come to an end -- which is absurd. Those who imagine it to be without limit forget that the possible number of books does have such a limit. I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: &lt;em&gt;The Library is unlimited and cyclical.&lt;/em&gt; If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, he posits that the Library is literally infinite; that the 25^1312000 individual books repeat over and over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He calls this &quot;elegant,&quot; as yet another hope for order in random chaos -- here is suggesting, not only that there are infinite copies of all books, &lt;strong&gt;but that the arrangement of those books is preserved.&lt;/strong&gt; This is an order that cannot be perceived, tested, or comprehended by any mortal, but its (hypothetical) existence is a comfort to the narrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another variation arises naturally -- that the Library &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; extend infinitely, but with &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; arrangements of the books. Eventually, of course, you would exhaust the possible arrangements of books -- but you could create &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; configurations of those arrangements, and their location respective to one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However you look at this, Borges is demonstrating the idea of &lt;em&gt;magnitudes&lt;/em&gt; of infinity - e.g. the idea of an infinity of infinities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Library is metaphorically infinite&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the point here is that &lt;em&gt;the narrator has no idea what the structure of the universe is&lt;/em&gt;. He has no way to discover it. He can guess and conjecture, but is overwhelmed by the ungraspable nature of the Library, and of infinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is, infinity is not a concept the human mind can grasp easily. In many ways, it is &lt;strong&gt;easier&lt;/strong&gt; for us to understand something finite but whose immensity presses upon us (i.e., a finite Borgesian Library), than the infinity of our own universe (where it is so easy to focus on our own planet, country, home).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding true infinity is very difficult; creating an example of &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; infinity might have resulted in less powerful imagery. But Borges's Library is immense in a way we can grasp intuitively. It gives you a sense of scale -- the difficulty of finding a single comprehensible word in a book generated from random characters; the &lt;em&gt;existence&lt;/em&gt; of books that are works of truth and art, as the product of randomly combining characters until one forms. This is not &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; infinite, but it feels so near the real thing, as to be &lt;em&gt;metaphorically&lt;/em&gt; infinite, to demonstrate the sense of infinity even if it isn't the real thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T09:25:05.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1363" CreationDate="2017-01-27T09:30:36.753" Score="6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, in every single book of the original Hardy Boys series the brothers get kidnapped in chapter 19. From a cursory glance, I can tell that this applies to &lt;em&gt;The Hooded Hawk Mystery, The Mystery of the Chinese Junk, The Yellow Feather Mystery, The Firebird Rocket, The House on the Cliff,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Skull Mountain&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, the &quot;classic&quot; series means the fifty-eight hardcover books published from 1972 to 1979, and their companion novel &lt;em&gt;The Hardy Boys Detective Handbook&lt;/em&gt;. A book only counts as them not being kidnapped if &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt; of the brothers was kidnapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any books in the classic series that they do not get kidnapped in chapter 19?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T13:52:43.747" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T20:37:11.060" Title="Are there any books in the classic Hardy Boys series where the boys don't get kidnapped?" Tags="&lt;hardy-boys&gt;&lt;franklin-w-dixon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1075" CreationDate="2017-01-27T11:15:40.840" Score="16" ViewCount="7362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read Alice in Wonderland, and was struck by the use of organic substances (mushrooms, drinks) to alter reality.  There seems to a strong pro drug message in the story line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A news article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-19254839&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Alice in Wonderland really about drugs?&lt;/strong&gt; bbc.com, 20 August 2012&lt;/a&gt; asks the same question, but beyond outlining the possible issue, really does not investigate the question before diverging to other questions about the morals of Charles Dodgson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking for reliable references, either from Dodgson directly or someone who has done close research (friend or investigative reporting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="32" LastEditorUserId="32" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T12:30:46.450" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T07:39:51.783" Title="Is Alice in Wonderland about drugs?" Tags="&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;&lt;alice-in-wonderland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1094" CreationDate="2017-01-27T11:55:32.090" Score="11" ViewCount="3066" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;O Captain! My Captain!&amp;quot; by Walt Whitman, the speaker acts as if he has a close connection to Abraham Lincoln, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father does not feel my arm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that they are in such a relationship that Abraham Lincoln would have felt his arm and was a fatherly figure to the speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I with mournful tread,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walk the deck my Captain lies,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he describes how while others are on the shore celebrating the metaphorical ship's victory while mourning, he has stayed on the metaphorical ship with Abraham Lincoln to mourn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the speaker? Is their relationship truly close or is it just the relationship between a citizen and the president?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T10:41:22.473" Title="Who is the speaker in &quot;O Captain! My Captain!&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1071" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1074" CreationDate="2017-01-27T13:08:14.297" Score="11" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is a hard, but when I was a kid I had a book about a town that asked some Easter Bunnies to paint the town for Easter or the Easter Bunnies just painted the town or one Easter Bunny painted a bridge or there was one Bunny that painted the town. There were painting and bunnies and the whole town ended up being painted!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help the painted buildings and things looked almost exactly like how this car came out, same colours and everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p3SSN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/p3SSN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a painted car in a garage with an adult male and a child&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:35:18.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:35:18.600" Title="Help Identifying Children's Book with Easter Bunnies" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2085" CreationDate="2017-01-27T13:10:10.210" Score="9" ViewCount="6501" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &quot;Young Goodman Brown&quot; by Nathaniel Hawthorne, the main character spends a great deal of the story traveling through a &quot;dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest&quot;.  What do these woods represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T17:32:26.307" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:34:30.307" Title="The woods as a symbol in Young Goodman Brown" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="948" CreationDate="2017-01-27T14:46:11.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Rose&quot; is conspicuous by its absence.&#xA;Some commentators have said about the main character, that as a &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;victim of sexual repression and stultifying gender roles, Emily is driven to insanity and murder by family and social dynamics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-John Dennis Anderson (Student Companion to William Faulkner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This  complex  story is divided into five sections. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emily is a daughter of the &quot;Old South&quot;, living alone in a decaying mansion. She is often the topic of town gossip, when seen in public and when not. She goes out for rides with &quot;Homer&quot;, a man who many consider below her station, and it is speculated that she will marry and move away. She is seen buying arsenic in the pharmacy, and shortly after that, Homer disappears forever. Emily becomes a recluse once again, as she did after her father´s death, and when she dies a horrible secret is revealed...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only time actual roses are mentioned in &quot;A Rose for Emily&quot; is in the third to last paragraph, when the door to the &quot;bridal&quot; chamber is knocked down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...upon the valence curtains of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;faded rose&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; color, upon the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;rose-shaded&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; lights...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A red rose has often been associated with passion by poets and authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;faded rose&quot; would seem to indicate that this is a metaphor for her unconsumated and unrequited love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorDisplayName="user59" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T18:06:36.907" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T18:06:36.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1071" CreationDate="2017-01-27T14:49:25.470" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0689714815&quot;&gt;The Easter Egg Artists&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a story about a rabbit who loves painting and involves him painting the town bridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an image from the book of the painted car:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IhCiG.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IhCiG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Painted car&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see the illustrations of the book in this Youtube video reading:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssWeRR04wog&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssWeRR04wog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:34:49.300" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:34:49.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1069" CreationDate="2017-01-27T14:59:22.213" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest I've found to a definitive statement is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-winkles/lewis-carroll-was-not-on_b_7743846.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carroll’s diaries, which are on display at the exhibit, make no mention of drugs. We know that he occasionally enjoyed a glass of sherry and may have taken opiate-infused drug Laudanum (which was readily available to everyone in the 1860s). Other than that, there’s nothing connecting Alice and drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; fansite says much the same &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/resources/faq/#drugs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in their FAQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No evidence has ever been found that linked Carroll to recreational drug use. Even in his extensive diaries, Carroll has never made any reference to the use of drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is however one part in the book that may describe the use of drugs: the hookah smoking Caterpillar who advises Alice to eat from the mushroom. With the story Carroll made fun of all aspects of society, and it may be possible that he was reflecting the age with this part: In the Victorian era there were no drug laws like we know them now. Opium, cocaine, and laudanum (a painkiller that contained opium) were used for medicinal purposes, and could be obtained from a pharmacist (mind that LSD was not yet invented at the time!). So in Carroll’s days it was not uncommon to experience the effect of being ‘high’, whether or not accidentally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then note that the Caterpillar wasn't even in the original tale told by Alice, but added later when he was assembling the book for publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to cover all of the bases, some of the historical record of his diary and correspondence is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lewis-carrolls-shifting-reputation-9432378/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no longer available&lt;/a&gt; to reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... Dodgson’s diaries, which were published in abridged form in 1954 and in full, with Wakeling’s annotations, beginning in 1993. But even they are an imperfect source. Four of the 13 volumes are missing — as are the pages covering late June 1863, when his break with the Liddells occurred. A Dodgson descendant apparently cut them out after the writer died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, what has survived does not support the idea that the books were written under the influence of drugs nor that they were about drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:29:28.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1077" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:01:21.953" Score="17" ViewCount="536" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Arthur Conan Doyle's depiction of Professor Moriarty was inspired by several real-life figures, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Worth&quot;&gt;Adam Worth&lt;/a&gt;. Given Doyle's wide-ranging set of villains and antagonists in the Sherlock Holmes canon, I'd assume that this is not the only case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Doyle base any other antagonists on real-life criminals or figures, and is there evidence to support this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:48:55.567" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:48:55.567" Title="Are any Sherlock Holmes antagonists besides Moriarty based on real people?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1076" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:01:21.953" Score="15" Body="&lt;h1&gt;1. Professor Moriarty&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to go into Moriarty in more detail, because Worth was not the only inspiration for Moriarty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle did not simply draw on Worth for inspiration. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=WFODDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;dq=inspiration+for+moriarty+adam+worth&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Masters of Crime&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; states that Doyle himself only acknowledged being inspired by one criminal: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Wild&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonathan Wild&lt;/a&gt;, a 17th and 18th century master of the criminal underworld. In &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;, he is even referenced by Holmes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything comes in circles—even Professor Moriarty. Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen per cent commission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence pointing to Worth as another inspiration is largely circumstantial but quite apparent. He was once referred to as &amp;quot;the Napoleon of crime&amp;quot; by a Scotland yard detective (see &lt;em&gt;Masters of Crime&lt;/em&gt;), a phrase Doyle my have appropriated for Moriarty. Like Moriarty - and like Wild - he was famous for creating a large criminal network in London to which he could seldom be traced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Adler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irene Adler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adler, who appears in &lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt; may have been inspired by several real-life singers and courtesans. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=mcJFAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;dq=Lola+Montez+irene+adler&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; lists quite a few, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lola_Montez&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lola Montez&lt;/a&gt; (mistress of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_I_of_Bavaria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ludwig I of Bavaria&lt;/a&gt;, which hearkens to  the story), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillie_Langtry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lillie Langtry&lt;/a&gt; (whose career is similar to Adler's), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Lucca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pauline Lucca&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Bell_(courtesan)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laura Bell&lt;/a&gt;, and others. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=z5TQJyWkUC4C&amp;amp;dq=Lola+Montez+irene+adler&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Doctor and the Detective&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; also mentions one Ludmilla Hubel, whose love affair with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archduke_Johann_Salvator_of_Austria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archduke Johann Salvator&lt;/a&gt; parallels Adler's relationship with the King of Bohemia. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Adler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viktor Adler&lt;/a&gt;, an Austrian politician, may be the source of the name &amp;quot;Adler&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3. Charles Augustus Milverton&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle's famous blackmailer, who appeared in &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton&lt;/em&gt;, bears a striking similarity to the 19th century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Augustus_Howell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Augustus Howell&lt;/a&gt; in both name and occupation (blackmailer and art dealer). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=DIDNbDrcI1kC&amp;amp;dq=charles+augustus+howell+doyle&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;London After Midnight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; states the Doyle himself admitted as such, although I'm still trying to confirm this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;4. John Clay&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that &lt;em&gt;Masters of Crime&lt;/em&gt;, which drew parallels between Moriarty and Wild and Worth, same book states that John Clay, the hidden antagonist of &lt;em&gt;The Red-Headed League&lt;/em&gt;, can be similarly traced. He shares characteristics of Worth and a criminal rival of Worth's named Max Shinburn - even though Doyle did not, at the time of the story's publication, know about either of the two. The author describes Clay as a &amp;quot;dummy run&amp;quot; for Moriarty, although Doyle could not have had Worth in mind at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems possible that Doyle based Clay on Wild, though. The obvious similarity is the ability to hide behind accomplices, distance oneself from the crime, and avoid capture, which Clay has, according to Holmes, used quite often in the past. Both, too, seem to have spun vast webs - perhaps not quite at the level of Moriarty - covering a wide range of illegal activities, from petty theft to murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T00:38:43.867" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:25:26.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:25:26.493" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:25:26.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:25:26.493" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding adaptations of literature." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T18:49:13.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T18:49:13.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1080" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:27:32.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:27:32.437" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:27:32.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1081" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:27:32.437" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding alternate endings." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T18:49:31.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T18:49:31.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1082" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:28:06.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:28:06.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:28:06.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1083" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:28:06.797" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding American literature." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T18:49:35.057" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T18:49:35.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1084" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:28:47.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:28:47.710" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:28:47.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1085" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:28:47.710" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding literary awards." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T18:49:28.767" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T18:49:28.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1086" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:29:36.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:29:36.200" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:29:36.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1087" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:29:36.200" Score="0" Body="&quot;Blood Meridian&quot; (1985), a Western novel by Cormac McCarthy. Use with the [cormac-mccarthy] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T10:44:41.463" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T10:44:41.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1088" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:30:13.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-27T15:30:13.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:30:13.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1089" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:30:13.890" Score="0" Body="Questions related to audiobooks or talking books. The recording may be &quot;unabridged&quot; (representing the entire text) or &quot;abridged&quot; (shortened)." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:37:45.920" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:37:45.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1072" CreationDate="2017-01-27T15:41:56.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The woods represent fear of the world outside his village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This pretty clearly shows the traveller is fearful of the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-01-27T15:41:56.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1092" CreationDate="2017-01-27T17:21:47.127" Score="9" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stanza 26: (from the English version by FitzGerald)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Muezzin from the Tower of Darkness cries&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Fools! Your reward is neither Here nor There!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the &quot;Tower of Darkness&quot; referred to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming the tower part is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;minaret&lt;/a&gt;, but beyond that I have no clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T13:57:40.663" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T13:57:40.663" Title="What's the &quot;Tower of Darkness&quot; in the Rubaiyat referring to?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;the-rubaiyat&gt;&lt;omar-khayyam&gt;&lt;edward-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1091" CreationDate="2017-01-27T20:11:19.457" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: FitzGerald made it up. Why? We don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I expected, the translations of Rubaiyat are all over the place when it comes to sticking to the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; text. First, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bobforrestweb.co.uk/The_Rubaiyat/verse_by_verse_notes.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an analysis or FitzGerald's translation&lt;/a&gt;, which says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sense here is presumably one of a disembodied Voice calling from the Great Unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But&lt;/strong&gt;, this analysis also provides two different translations of the same rubai&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, by Edward Heron-Allen: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some are immersed in contemplation of doctrine and faith,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Others stand stupefied between doubt and certainty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Suddenly a Muezzin from his lurking place, cries out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “O Fools! The Road is neither here nor there.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Arthur J. Arberry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some people are meditating upon doctrine and faith,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one group are bewildered about doubt and certainty;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  suddenly a proclamation emerges from a hiding-place –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘O ignorant ones, the way is neither that nor this.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second translator notes that the muezzin (and, I guess, the tower too) does not appear in the original script. This is backed by the Russian translations that I dug up: out of 16 (!) translations of the same verse, only one (!) mentions a tower. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All and all, the tower appears to be a creation of FitzGerald. The forums I visited so far seem to agree that what FitzGerald did is more of a &lt;em&gt;rendition&lt;/em&gt; than a translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what Edward Heron-Allen has to say about this verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Masterly as is this paraphrase, the original is even more interesting. It runs: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&quot;Some are immersed in contemplation of doctrine and faith&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Others stand stupefied between doubt and certainty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Suddenly a Muezzin from his lurking-place cries out:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    O Fools! the Road [i.e., the &quot;Mystic Road.&quot; or &quot;Way of Salvation&quot;] is neither here nor there.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A curious parallel to this rubai occurs in Baba Tahir (IX. p. 86):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;O Man who ne'er has studied Heavenly Lore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Nor set thy foot within Tavern Doors&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Thou knowest not what thou hast escaped or gained;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    How shalt thou come among the Elect? Alas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The poet wishes to conver that if a man has neither the self-denial of ascetism nor the courage of his contrary convictions he is not fit to be admitted among men of decided character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;All things come alike to all: there is one&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    event to the righteous, and to the wicked;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    . . . to him that sacrificeth, and to him that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    sinner. - Ecclesiastes ix. 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Taken from &lt;em&gt;The second edition of Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyyát of 'Umar Khayyám.&lt;/em&gt;, edited, with an introduction and notes by Edward Heron-Allen. London, Duckworth, 1908, with minor readability improvements by myself (nothing was excluded).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.omarkhayyamnederland.com/e-library/english/e-heron-allen---1898.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Found here (open access)&lt;/a&gt; - great website with a ton of versions of Rubaiyat, in different languages. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edward FitzGerald's Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám&lt;/strong&gt;. With their original Persian sources collated from his own MSS., and literally translated by Edward Heron-Allen.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, Heron-Allen provides what he thinks is the inspiration for the rubai in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UpP2U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UpP2U.png&quot; alt=&quot;An image of a passage that inspired the author&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; C refers to the Calcutta Manuscript. No. 1548&#xA;  in the Bengal Asiatic Society's Library at Calcutta, containing 510 ruba'iyat. The original has been lost or stolen, but a copy has been made from the copy made for Edward FitzGerald at the instance of Prof. Cowell. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find an (allegedly) Persian text of this verse&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/anhTg.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/anhTg.gif&quot; alt=&quot;An image of the Persian translation of the passage written by the author&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a more literal translation by Shahriar Shahriari:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some are thoughtful on their way&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some are doubtful, so they pray&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I hear the hidden voice that may&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shout, &quot;Both paths lead astray.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One illustrator depicts said muezzin as a sort of Grim Reaper, with the scythe and stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9X2hS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9X2hS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A black-and-white drawing of a man holding a scythe on top of a building&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: apparently, those guys may actually be translating different verses, since they cite different pages of the original manuscript. Now we'll never know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/khayyam/rubaiyat_khayyam3.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Found here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T15:03:14.260" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T15:03:14.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1070" CreationDate="2017-01-28T06:56:47.603" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whitman was slightly closer to Lincoln than &quot;just ... a citizen&quot;: according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-civil-war/essays/lincoln-and-whitman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David S. Reynolds in the Journal of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History&lt;/a&gt;, he had a nodding acquaintance with the President (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On February 19, 1861, Whitman was among a throng of curious spectators in New York City who saw the president-elect arriving at the Astor House Hotel during his stopover in the city on his trip from Springfield to Washington, DC. &lt;strong&gt;During the war, when Whitman was a government worker and volunteer hospital nurse in Washington, he saw Lincoln some twenty to thirty times. He didn't meet the President, but spotted him riding through the city for business or pleasure. &quot;I see the President almost every day,&quot; he wrote in the summer of 1863. &quot;We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Once Lincoln gave Whitman a long friendly stare. &quot;He has a face like a Hoosier Michel Angelo,&quot; Whitman wrote, &quot;so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That suggests to me that the speaker in that poem is Whitman himself. Reynolds appears to share this view (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Whitman’s best-known poems about Lincoln, &quot;O Captain! My Captain!&quot; and &quot;When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,&quot; the silencing of his former poetic self is noticeable. &lt;strong&gt;Both poems marginalize Whitman and concentrate on Lincoln, presaging the poet's obsession with Lincoln in late years. In &quot;O Captain!&quot; the fixation is visible in the image of the &quot;I&quot; staring relentlessly at Lincoln's bloody, pale corpse on the ship of state's deck amid celebrations heralding the ship’s return to port.&lt;/strong&gt; In &quot;Lilacs,&quot; Lincoln is the majestic western star, while the poet is the wood thrush, the &quot;shy and hidden bird&quot; singing of death with a &quot;bleeding throat.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;No longer does Whitman's brash &quot;I&quot; present himself as the Answerer or arouse readers with a &quot;barbaric yawp.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; In the war and Lincoln, many of the nation's most pressing problems had reached painful resolution, changing the poet's role from that of America's imaginary leader to that of eulogist of its actual leader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T21:24:10.023" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T21:24:10.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T08:13:20.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was a US author whose many novels and short stories include &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Old Man and the Sea&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Green Hills of Africa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Facts about his life are also mentioned on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com/help/referencing&quot;&gt;How to reference material written by others&lt;/a&gt; page in the help centre of every Stack Exchange site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T16:34:45.620" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:34:45.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T08:13:20.170" Score="0" Body="For questions about the author Ernest Hemingway or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T16:34:45.620" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T16:34:45.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1097" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T08:16:20.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T08:16:20.807" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T08:16:20.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1098" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T08:16:20.807" Score="0" Body="Questions pertaining to the memoir 'A Moveable Feast' (1964) written by Ernest Hemingway. Use with the tag [ernest-hemingway]." OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:36:14.677" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:36:14.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="872" CreationDate="2017-01-28T09:01:43.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Silas' abusive father would often ridicule him for his appearance. It's been a while since I read the book, but if memory serves his father would often call him &quot;ghost&quot;. This put further strain on their relationship, a relationship that ended very early, with a young Silas murdering his father. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may say, therefore, that the albinism of Silas played a role in shaping his life from very early on, but I do not think it is otherwise significant to the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T09:01:43.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2389" CreationDate="2017-01-28T10:55:33.950" Score="8" ViewCount="356" Body="&lt;p&gt;While of ancient origin and being still relevant today, much is speculation about the military classic '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17405/17405-h/17405-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of War&lt;/a&gt;' by Sun Tzu. Even the existence of the author is disputed. He allegedly served the state of Wu which ceased to exist 473 B.C., making his thoughts his only legacy.&#xA;Anyway it originated in China and was adopted worldwide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite curious as to when and where it was adopted first outside of China. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd mostly like to know that it found an audience, in that it was written about and present in the library of discerning readers. But I'll settle for translated and published, as these are easier to date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to say this would have been Japan, being close by and having a thriving military tradition. But I could not find any reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T15:17:07.403" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T15:17:07.403" Title="When and where was 'The Art of War' by Sun Tzu first adopted outside of China?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;sun-tzu&gt;&lt;the-art-of-war-sun-tzu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="482" CreationDate="2017-01-28T11:53:45.920" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes there are, but they are minor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is exactly the feeling Joseph Heller wanted to provoke. He both intentionally and by 'planned accident' planted anachronisms in the story, and there are some real mistakes as well. The last category is small though, as you noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story takes place during WW2. But it was never intended as 'a realistic novel about WW2'. It was more intended to depict general truths about the madness of bureaucracy. Joseph Heller admits to having little actual war experience, having been overseas for less than a year. Catch-22 was started eight years after the war and written over a period of eight years. Post-war anachronisms in the text abound and were deliberate. Still, the convoluted storyline was carefully designed using note cards and is consistent but for smaller details. It was a first novel, and truly complicated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One inconsistency is about the number of missions over time. Between September 1943 and May 1944 the required number of missions is raised by 10 and Yossarian flies 9. But there is also mention of a number of 6 missions in 6 days in September. Implausible at best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A comprehensive list together with a chronology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/440541?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot;&gt;Spindrift and the Sea: Structural Patterns and Unifying Elements in Catch 22&#xA;Clinton S. Burhans, Jr.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Twentieth Century Literature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Vol. 19, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), pp. 239-250&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T11:53:45.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-28T12:59:11.857" Score="8" ViewCount="7981" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Wind&lt;/em&gt; by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Zafón has the main character discover a book entitled &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Wind&lt;/em&gt; in the Cemetery of the Forgotten Books. This book is by a little-known author, Julián Carax, who was not very well-received by critics and many of his books have been destroyed following his death in either Paris or Barcelona following the Spanish Civil War. Is Julián Carax based on a real person or is he a character entirely his own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:39:52.863" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T21:49:54.740" Title="Is Julián Carax based on a real author?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;carlos-ruiz-zafon&gt;&lt;the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1138" CreationDate="2017-01-28T16:56:57.943" Score="20" ViewCount="2255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ernest Hemingway wrote &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt;, the story of an American soldier fighting in the Spanish Civil War, a few years after his own experiences as an American journalist reporting on the Spanish Civil War. I know that various real-life figures appeared or were referred to in the novel, but I'm not sure how many of the events described therein really happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much of &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt; was describing or referencing actual events?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Answers could be based on quotes from the author or from someone else knowledgeable about the Spanish Civil War, or on comparisons between the text and historical records.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:17.683" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T17:13:39.453" Title="How much of &quot;For Whom the Bell Tolls&quot; is based on real events?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;for-whom-the-bell-tolls&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:49:29.910" Score="15" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously, V. is a character in the book, known only by her initial. That initial is also the title of the book, which actually includes the period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I assume this title/name symbolizes something else too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article &quot;V.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; only mentions one other meaning, the convergence of the two main plotlines, which seems a little tenuous. Other than that, this book is pretty hard to google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T21:03:13.410" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T21:03:13.410" Title="What does the letter V in Thomas Pynchon's book symbolize?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;&lt;v&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1106" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:55:04.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:55:04.797" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:55:04.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1107" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:55:04.797" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the meaning of certain terms or phrases used in a work of literature. If your question concerns the symbolic significance of something whose surface meaning is clear, use the [symbolism] tag instead. Please add specific tags as well: for the author (if known), the language (if not English), and either the work itself (if long) or the [poetry] or [short-stories] tags for short works." OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="10367" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T21:32:51.293" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T21:32:51.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1108" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1109" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:56:10.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1110" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:56:41.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:56:41.970" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:56:41.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1111" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:56:41.970" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the writing process of authors. Such questions should usually relate to specific authors or works, otherwise they might be better suited for Writers or Worldbuilding SE instead." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T19:17:57.953" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:17:57.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1112" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:57:16.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:57:16.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:57:16.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1113" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:57:16.877" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Faulkner (1897-1962) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:59:59.160" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:59:59.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1114" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1115" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:57:50.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:58:33.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:58:33.527" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:58:33.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:58:33.527" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (1940) by Ernest Hemingway. Use in conjunction with [ernest-hemingway]." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:31:34.550" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:31:34.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:59:15.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T18:59:15.593" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T18:59:15.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T18:59:15.593" Score="0" Body="For questions either about Sun Tzu/Sun Zi (544 – 496BC) as an author or about any of his works, most famously &quot;The Art of War&quot;. Use with [chinese-literature]" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T02:03:50.793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T02:03:50.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1237" CreationDate="2017-01-28T19:13:41.877" Score="20" ViewCount="4643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been studying a lot of Tennyson, and I recently read &lt;em&gt;The Kraken&lt;/em&gt;. The first 12 lines seem relatively straightforward, describing the giant beast that sleeps at the bottom of the sea, but the final three lines are peculiar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  then once by man and angels to be seen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of this is that the Kraken will continue sleeping, but will finally rise at the end of the world and die majestically. We could take this at face value, but the reference to &quot;angels&quot; in particular seems to mean that Tennyson is referring to the apocalypse in a religious sense, and therefore the Kraken could represent a religious symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I'm reminded of mythological parallels. For instance, the Norse &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prose Edda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loki&lt;/a&gt;'s escape from his bonds during Ragnarok and subsequent death in battle. There is also the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jörmungandr&lt;/a&gt;, who will also rise at Ragnarok. Tennyson's connection to mythology (admittedly, normally Greek and Roman) make me consider that there could be a tie-in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the rise of the Kraken at the end of the world symbolize anything, and is it at all connected to something religious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accepted my answer to the question because I'm relatively satisfied with the interpretation and nobody else has put forth an answer, but I don't think the question is fully complete. I tried following up on the possible connection between these lines and The Book of Revelation, but Tennyson's religious life and beliefs are extremely complicated, and I only wound up with dead ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T19:23:14.313" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T19:23:14.313" Title="What is the symbolism of the final rise of the Kraken?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="794" CreationDate="2017-01-28T19:33:48.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;There's no evidence that it was, but it's hard to say.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;K.A. Applegate herself claims that she had always planned to end it this way, at least in broad strokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd always known that Animorphs would end the way it did. I knew I wanted it to end with victory, but I also knew I didn't want a clean victory. I wanted more Lord of the Rings, less Star Wars in the ending. I always admired the way Tolkien gave his characters victory, but left them with a sadder, less exciting, less enchanting world in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a quote from the Scholastic Anibase's commentary on &lt;em&gt;Animorphs&lt;/em&gt; #54, &lt;em&gt;The Beginning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's a quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hiracdelest.com/database/articles/kaa_response-full.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;K.A. Applegate's official response&lt;/a&gt; to criticism of the ending, which is also worth a read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, she had the ending planned out long in advance. Did she rush into writing it out, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, she wrote the first 24 books of the main 54 books in the series herself, publishing one book about every other month on average. Because of the birth of her son and difficulties in writing another series of books, beginning with book #25, most were ghostwritten, with Applegate providing outlines and editing afterwards. From book #25 to book #52, which were published just about every month, Applegate only wrote two books entirely on her own (although she did write some other, longer and more complex Animorphs-related books outside of the main continuity), before she then wrote the final two books of the series, #53 and #54.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, whether or not she actually &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; rush it and phone it in is hard to say, but most of the criticized elements of the ending can be attributed to artistic choice. However, Applegate says she planned the ending in advance, and she did have a lot of time to prepare the planned ending of the series while her ghostwriters fleshed out the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:33:48.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="404" CreationDate="2017-01-28T19:56:51.107" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Commonwealth&lt;/em&gt; universe consists of three series of books that should be read in publication order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commonwealth Saga:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Misspent Youth&lt;/em&gt; (2002), &quot;prequel&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pandora's Star&lt;/em&gt; (2004)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Judas Unchained&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Void Trilogy:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dreaming Void&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Temporal Void&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Evolutionary Void&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Chronicle of the Fallers:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Abyss Beyond Dreams&lt;/em&gt; (2014)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Night Without Stars&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible exception to reading it in publication order is that the first novel, &lt;em&gt;Misspent Youth&lt;/em&gt; (which was both published first and takes place first) has the feel of a prequel of sorts. It takes place 300 years before &lt;em&gt;Pandora's Star&lt;/em&gt;, has a different focus, is much shorter, and is not necessary to read first to make sense of the rest of the series. Reading it first would probably be most &quot;coherent&quot;, which is what you're asking about, but most fans would probably recommend to read it later on (although when you read it isn't terribly important) because it doesn't really serve as a good introduction to the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This publication order does pretty much correspond to the chronological order of the plot, except that the Void Trilogy and the Fallers duology take place in parallel – however, they should still be read in publication order because of how the stories unfold. Both the Void Trilogy and Fallers duology will spoil earlier novels if read out of sequence. The books within each series absolutely need to be read in sequence to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T19:56:51.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-28T20:07:42.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T20:07:42.943" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T20:07:42.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-28T20:07:42.943" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the &quot;Animorphs&quot; book series by K.A. Applegate and assorted ghostwriters." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-28T20:16:49.607" LastActivityDate="2017-01-28T20:16:49.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-28T21:09:12.290" Score="21" ViewCount="1505" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book two of the &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.2.ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), Homer does something that I find strange: he interrupts the story to list the name of every captain involved in the Trojan war:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, O Muses, dwellers in the mansions of Olympus, tell me- for you are goddesses and are in all places so that you see all things, while we know nothing but by report- who were the chiefs and princes of the Danaans? As for the common soldiers, they were so that I could not name every single one of them though I had ten tongues, and though my voice failed not and my heart were of bronze within me, unless you, O Olympian Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Jove, were to recount them to me. Nevertheless, I will tell the captains of the ships and all the fleet together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peneleos, Leitus, Arcesilaus, Prothoenor, and Clonius were captains of the Boeotians. These were they that dwelt in Hyria and rocky Aulis, and who held Schoenus, Scolus, and the highlands of Eteonus, with Thespeia, Graia, and the fair city of Mycalessus. They also held Harma, Eilesium, and Erythrae; and they had Eleon, Hyle, and Peteon; Ocalea and the strong fortress of Medeon; Copae, Eutresis, and Thisbe the haunt of doves; Coronea, and the pastures of Haliartus; Plataea and Glisas; the fortress of Thebes the less; holy Onchestus with its famous grove of Neptune; Arne rich in vineyards; Midea, sacred Nisa, and Anthedon upon the sea. From these there came fifty ships, and in each there were a hundred and twenty young men of the Boeotians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just a tiny portion of the list: Homer continues listing these names for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on here? Why does Homer interrupt the story to list these names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T20:19:13.707" Title="In the Iliad, why does Homer list every captain involved in the Trojan war?" Tags="&lt;homer&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T00:06:52.993" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;William S. Burroughs, postmodernist author of the &quot;Beat Generation&quot;, killed his own wife in Mexico City after a wild party with Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did this affect his subsequent work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T15:31:12.200" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T15:31:12.200" Title="What effect did William S. Burroughs's killing of his own wife have on his work?" Tags="&lt;william-s-burroughs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1126" CreationDate="2017-01-29T00:23:09.413" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, because it was true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Iliad as we know it was composed over some centuries, transmitted orally, before &quot;Homer&quot; synthesized the version that was written down. Practically every word in that last sentence is subject to debate, called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question&quot;&gt;Homeric Question&lt;/a&gt;. But this is the version that I think is most generally agreed on, and which I think best answers the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest versions may have been practically contemporary. A fair number of details have been later confirmed, most notably details of the walls of Troy as discovered by Heinrich Schliemann at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hisarlik&quot;&gt;Hisarlik&lt;/a&gt; in Turkey. The style is constructed for easy memorization, with a rigid meter (dactylic hexameter, which works as well for Greek as iambic pentameter does for English) and a lot of stock phrases (like &lt;em&gt;Eos rhododactylos&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;rosy-fingered dawn&quot;, and &quot;wine-dark sea&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's entirely possible that those names are in there because those people were, in fact, there. The poem was composed to honor them, and was being told to people who remembered them. You wouldn't want the Cretans to boo you because you forgot Idomeneus, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still... that doesn't explain why people would want to listen to this rather stultifying section. Even if the Cretans cheered being mentioned, surely they didn't care about Diores, son of Amarynces, and Polyxenus, son of King Agasthenes, son of Augeas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, literarily, it does serve a number of purposes. For one thing, it makes it all feel like a historical recitation rather than a fantasy. The Greek notion of the distinction between fact and fiction doesn't match the way we think of it, and they seem to have believed in things that they knew were fictional, but that mix included a lot of reality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also serves political purposes. It helps to cement the notion of a Greek identity. It reminds them of a time they all worked together, even as Athens and Sparta were embarking on a series of wars. And it may have given authority to people claiming descent from those great Greek warriors: &quot;Look, my great-great-N-great grandpappy served with Agamemnon and Menelaus.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally... the Iliad as a whole is pretty tedious to modern ears even without the Catalog of Ships. It covers a fairly small piece of the war, and could better be known as the Wrath of Achilles. It doesn't tell any of the stories most people think of about the Trojan War: the abduction of Helen, the Trojan Horse, the Achilles Heel. I think the people who listened to it would have found the Catalog of Ships more engaging than we do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T00:23:09.413" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1131" CreationDate="2017-01-29T00:29:45.227" Score="15" ViewCount="1466" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Allen Ginsberg´s most famous poem &quot;Howl&quot;, he claims he was witness to the destruction of the best minds of his generation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,&#xA;  dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,&#xA;  angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who were the best minds of his generation? Who was he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T12:03:50.073" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T12:03:50.073" Title="Whose were the &quot;best minds&quot; being destroyed in Ginsberg's &quot;Howl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allen-ginsberg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T00:45:24.337" Score="12" ViewCount="10678" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Allen Ginsberg´s poem &amp;quot;Howl&amp;quot;, what did &amp;quot;Moloch&amp;quot; represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch was a particularly nasty god that demanded child sacrifices. What does it mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T12:03:36.880" Title="What did &quot;Moloch&quot; represent in Allen Ginsberg´s poem &quot;Howl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;allen-ginsberg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1129" CreationDate="2017-01-29T01:27:22.413" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;My view of &lt;em&gt;Howl&lt;/em&gt; is that the first lines are the introduction to the first part, painting an image with a broad brush, and that the next follows on in more detail. In fact, we can take all of Part I as commentary on its subjects' actions, which means that we can actually figure out a lot of what those best minds did. Most of them were Beat poets or members of the rising counterculture tide that swept across the country in the next decade or two. Here are just a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuli_Kupferberg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tuli Kupferberg&lt;/a&gt;, a fellow Beat poet and artist who jumped off the &lt;em&gt;Manhattan Bridge&lt;/em&gt; in 1944 at the age of 21. The idea that it was the Brooklyn Bridge was perpetuated in part by Ginsburg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This entire section (and beyond) refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cannastra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bill Cannastra&lt;/a&gt;, who awkwardly jumped out of a subway window for reasons involving liquor and died by decapitation. Cannastra was energetic, a drinker, a partier, and extremely smart. His death and his personality are referenced in the writings of several Beat poets, including John Clellon Holmes and Jack Kerouac.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Cassady&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neal Cassady&lt;/a&gt;, a Beat poet and close friend of Jack Kerouac, known for his extensive drug use. It may have led to his death, in 1968. Cassady was viewed similarly to Cannastra, and their deaths while still young (though Cassady died much later) drove this home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This incident pertains to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Solomon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carl Solomon&lt;/a&gt;, who strongly influenced and inspired the poem (including Part III). His psychiatric problems in particular and Ginsberg's reactions to them play a large role in this part, and of course show up earlier. Solomon's actual madness is seen again in the collective figurative madness of the rest of the Beat Generation; his suffering is their suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of other allusions to real-life incidents and people - these are only a few. The entire group was largely composed of the artists and writers and poets that Ginsberg knew firsthand, or through other friends. They collectively make up the &amp;quot;madness&amp;quot; that Ginsberg saw - in particular, in Solomon. He feels that he sees the madness and destructive tendencies in all the artists and poets and non-conformists around him. The point, though, is that he is attributing the madness to the societal conditions of the time - which is what &lt;em&gt;Howl&lt;/em&gt; is all about!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T18:44:07.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1133" CreationDate="2017-01-29T02:09:37.583" Score="11" ViewCount="1123" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fantasy author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jordan&quot;&gt;James Oliver Rigney Jr.&lt;/a&gt; chose the &lt;em&gt;nom de plume&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/strong&gt; for many of his works of literature, including the magnificent &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recently read up on Ernest Hemingway's novel &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt; and discovered that its hero, a fictional US soldier fighting in the Spanish Civil War, is named &lt;strong&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/strong&gt;. Instantly I wondered if there was any connection. The Wikipedia page for the author has a footnote mentioning the character, but gives no citation (in fact, doesn't even state explicitly) that the two are linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the fantasy author choose his pen name after the Hemingway character?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T20:52:04.327" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T20:52:04.327" Title="Did Robert Jordan name himself after Hemingway's character?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;for-whom-the-bell-tolls&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1132" CreationDate="2017-01-29T02:38:10.910" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately he did not, though it's a great thought!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this excerpt from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=79&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1997 interview he did on the DragonCon SciFi Channel Chat&lt;/a&gt; (yah, before the name change):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ISHAMAEL&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made you decide on Robert Jordan as your pseudonym? Is it Hemingway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ROBERT JORDAN&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it wasn't Hemingway. I simply wanted to separate the different kinds of books that I wrote with different names, and I made lists of names with my real initials and picked one name from one list and one from another, and Robert Jordan was one of the names that popped out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T02:38:10.910" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1137" CreationDate="2017-01-29T05:59:13.800" Score="8" ViewCount="3057" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many poems are filled with metaphors and underlying ideas about deeper things and more broad issues or feelings. I personally feel that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43609&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Marguerite&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is an example of this, where the poem is bursting with stylistic devices, each of which contribute to the underlying ideas of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44484&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Autumn&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is the 'other' kind of poem in my opinion. It's been described as &quot;nearly perfect, but doesn't have a lot to say&quot;. If I'm not wrong, its only aim is to describe/praise Autumn. How would one effectively comment on Keats' writing in such a context? The poem is bursting with imagery, but how do you comment on it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm looking for is quite simply examples of commentary on devices in the poem &quot;To Autumn&quot;, which would help me further develop my own interpretations. Thank you for your answers and please take into consideration that I am a high schooler (more specifically, part of the IB program). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My final goal is to be able to write an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/language-and-literature/language-a-literature-slhl/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;IB-level&lt;/a&gt; commentary of sufficiently high standards on this poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T04:01:20.887" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T11:42:11.547" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;To Autumn&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1135" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6111" CreationDate="2017-01-29T06:49:58.230" Score="13" ViewCount="2203" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Wrinkle in Time&lt;/em&gt;, conformity is evil. Meg, Charles Wallace, and Calvin go to the planet Camazotz, a dystopian world where everyone conforms to the rhythm of IT and is tortured for erring from it. Here, conforming to a higher order is depicted as painful, stultifying, and paranoia-inducing; and the higher order itself is mindlessly tyrannical and cruel, as we see in a scene where a boy is tortured with electricity for failing to bounce his ball with the rhythm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt;, the main action of the story revolves around convincing a reticent farandola (a mouse-like creature which, in the story, lives inside the human mitochondrion) to conform to a higher order–in this case a vague, omnipresent cosmic &quot;order to creation&quot; which has its own song corresponding to the rhythm of IT. But this order is presented as the sole right and good in the universe. Refusing to conform is depicted as nihilistic, suicidal, and even fascist; the character Mr. Jenkins compares a group of farandolae who refuse to conform to the order and &quot;Deepen&quot; to such dictators as Napoleon and Hitler in Chapter 11. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, there does not seem to be much difference between these two scenarios; in both there is a higher order which organizes the lives of beings according to some sort of abstract music, and refusing to conform has dire consequences for those who refuse. But resisting IT's order is heroic, while resisting the universal order is fascist. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T21:45:53.017" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T21:57:23.593" Title="Why does A Wind in the Door contradict A Wrinkle in Time on conformity?" Tags="&lt;a-wind-in-the-door&gt;&lt;a-wrinkle-in-time&gt;&lt;madeleine-lengle&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1135" CreationDate="2017-01-29T06:49:58.230" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Time&lt;/em&gt; books use a lot of Christian imagery, so there is probably also an explanation in terms of religious parallels, but for this answer I've adopted a purely character-based interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Meg's point of view of the world has evolved; the contradiction represents her two different perspectives&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Wrinkle in Time&lt;/em&gt;, Meg felt out of place in the world. She didn't seem to fit in with her peers. Her teachers didn't seem to understand her. She was uncertain about her future, and lashed out with sarcasm and copious self-loathing. We can see this from this passage early in &lt;em&gt;A Wrinkle in Time&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;School. School was all wrong. She’d been dropped down to the lowest section in her grade. That morning one of her teachers had said crossly, “Really, Meg, I don’t understand how a child with parents as brilliant as yours are supposed to be can be such a poor student. If you don’t manage to do a little better you’ll have to stay back next year.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During lunch she’d rough-housed a little to try to make herself feel better, and one of the girls said scornfully, “After all, Meg, we aren’t grammar-school kids anymore. Why do you always act like such a baby?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on the way home from school, walking up the road with her arms full of books, one of the boys had said something about her “dumb baby brother.” At this she’d thrown the books on the side of the road and tackled him with every ounce of strength she had, and arrived home with her blouse torn and a big bruise under one eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;em&gt;A Wrinkle in Time&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 3–4. Kindle Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camazotz represented Meg's view of her world at the time, a place where she was penalized on math exams for using a different method to solve the problems even though it resulted in the same answer. Meg felt she was being persecuted, cruelly forced to conform to an unjust order imposed on her by a higher power. Her adventure on Camazotz let her struggle against that injustice symbolically. Entering IT's room and doing battle with IT, and defeating it with her love for her brother Charles Wallace, who is also a misfit under the current order of the world, was an act of rebellion, an act of destruction that symbolized what Meg wished to do to the order of her life back on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time of &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt;, Meg is feeling much more secure and having an easier time fitting in. Her mother points this out early in Chapter 2, and Meg responds that getting close to Calvin has helped her fit in more because of how well regarded Calvin is at the school. Meg is still uncertain about her future, but she's much more positive about it; she even asks her mother if she'll ever be a double PhD like her mother is, implying that she's given some thought to where she might want to go in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Wallace is the one who suffers for being different in &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt;, but unlike Meg in &lt;em&gt;A Wrinkle in Time&lt;/em&gt;, who angrily rebelled and castigated herself for being unable to fit in, Charles Wallace is trying to find a way to adjust his own behavior and peacefully get his classmates to accept him. When discussing the subject in Chapter 3, Charles says &amp;quot;What I really need are lessons in adaptation. I’ve been reading Darwin, but he hasn’t helped me much.&amp;quot; Meg tries appealing to a higher power on Charles's behalf, and goes to talk with her old enemy Mr. Jenkins, the principal of her school in &lt;em&gt;Wrinkle&lt;/em&gt; and now the principal of Charles Wallace's school in &lt;em&gt;Wind&lt;/em&gt;. This fails, but it shows how Meg has matured: instead of reacting with violence and rebelling, she tries to solve problems with diplomacy, and she does so on behalf of another person instead of for her own benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The universal order in &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt; springs from a recognition that everything in the universe is interconnected. As the cherubim Proginoskes puts it in Chapter 11, &amp;quot;[W]e all need each other. Every atom in the universe is dependent on every other.&amp;quot; The farandolae are meant to Deepen, transform into tree-like farae, and take their place in the cosmic order, singing the song of creation alongside the stars. Fearful of growing up, some of them refuse to Deepen and reject the idea that everything is interconnected, but this rebellion, unlike Meg's against IT, is not noble; instead it plays into the hands of the Echthroi, creatures who want to negate all of existence. Meg and her allies must convince Sporos, one of the wayward farandolae, to stop rebelling, to stop fearing growing up, and play his &amp;quot;indispensable part&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;the great plan&amp;quot;, take his &amp;quot;own unique share in the freedom of creation&amp;quot;. (Chapter 11, p. 219.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nobility of conforming, of taking one's place in the cosmic order in &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt;, symbolizes Meg's new perspective on her life. Now Meg feels that she has a place in society. She cares for other people, like Calvin and Charles Wallace, more than herself. She is learning to see others' perspectives, most dramatically in Chapters 5 and 6 when she has to choose the real Mr. Jenkins from among a group of imposters by learning to understand him. She has come to see the complexity of life, sighing, “I wish life didn’t have to be so complicated.&amp;quot; (Chapter 2, p. 35). Meg now sees conforming and taking her place in society as a duty that carries both hardship and privileges, as a farandola Deepening into a fara can no longer move, but gains other abilities in return. As the fara Senex puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that I am rooted I am no longer limited by motion. Now I may move anywhere in the universe. I sing with the stars. I dance with the galaxies. I share in the joy—and in the grief. We farae must have our part in the rhythm of the mitochondria, or we cannot be. If we cannot be, then we are not.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;– &lt;em&gt;A Wind in the Door&lt;/em&gt; Chapter 11, pp. 216-217. Kindle Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The temptation for farandola or for man or for star is to stay an immature pleasure-seeker&amp;quot; (Chapter 10, p. 203), but growing up, though it includes its share in the grief, also includes its share in the joy, its privileges that an immature pleasure-seeker cannot have. Meg understands this now that she's become more mature: conforming to the system takes away some of her scope to be different, but it allows her to stay with Calvin, and to go off to college and find a fulfilling career like her parents have done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T06:49:58.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1134" CreationDate="2017-01-29T07:53:19.160" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;To Autumn&quot; were merely a pretty description of the season, it wouldn't be considered a great poem. In fact, to read it as a straightforward celebration is to fall into the same trap as the bees in the first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they think warm days will never cease,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Underneath the surface richness of autumn, there is a definite sense that this beauty is transitory, and taking it for granted is dangerous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tone of the poem gets darker with each stanza. Even in the first stanza, there are hints that the loveliness of the season carries something disquieting within it: autumn is &lt;strong&gt;conspiring&lt;/strong&gt; with the sun; the bees are mistaken to assume that flowers will always be around. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second stanza, there's an image of autumn sleeping: the season is found in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sense here is definitely that the beauty that autumn brings is just a pause. Soon enough, autumn will wake up and continue to scythe off the rest of the furrow. We get confirmation of this in the next stanza, where the fields are &lt;strong&gt;stubble-plains&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third stanza also explicitly contrasts autumn with spring; autumn's presence means that spring has passed, obviously. While autumn has its own music, what kind of music is it? Is it joyful, as one imagines the music of spring would be? We have &lt;strong&gt;in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn&lt;/strong&gt;; and by the end of the poem, darkness is gathering. &lt;strong&gt;Hedge-crickets sing&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;gathering swallows twitter&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.birds.cornell.edu/crows/crowfaq.htm#roost&quot;&gt;when swallows gather, it's to sleep&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the poem shows us a very beautiful autumn, but alongside that beauty is an awareness that autumn is a long way after spring, and precedes the darkness of winter. The poem is about the passage of time; autumn signifies maturation, but that is only one step before death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot going on in this poem. Thematically, it's interesting to compare it to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44477&quot;&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Grecian Urn&quot;, the figures on the urn are outside time and not subject to its destructive power. So they stay young and verdant; but there is a loss there too, as they never experience the &quot;bliss&quot; of fulfillment. The contrast with &quot;To Autumn&quot; is clear. Fructification, maturation, ripeness are all wonderful things, but they imply operating within the cycle of seasons, which in turn implies eventual death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know who said this poem is &quot;nearly perfect, but doesn't have a lot to say&quot;; that assessment is laughably wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T09:56:07.787" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T09:56:07.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2017-01-29T08:57:32.973" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ernest Hemingway traveled to Madrid in March of 1937 to observe the Spanish Civil war firsthand.  He reported on the war for the North American Newspaper Alliance.  In March 1937, he traveled to Madrid to observe conditions firsthand.  His observations and experiences provide the inspiration for the novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/event/Spanish-Civil-War&quot;&gt;Spanish Civil War&lt;/a&gt; lasted from July 1936 - March 1939.  To give a brief summary, the war was fought between the Loyalists who were defending the current Government against the Nationalists or &quot;fascists&quot; (as Hemingway referred to them) which were supported by Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler and were led by General Francisco Franco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hemingway sympathized with the loyalists as is evident in this novel.  One of the main examples of this is the protagonist, Robert Jordan who fights on the side of the loyalists against Franco's &quot;fascist&quot; forces.  Another example is Robert Jordan's love interest, Maria who was raped and orphaned by the fascist regime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following are events that actually happened and are referenced in the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segovia_Offensive&quot;&gt;Segovia Offensive&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  This actual event took place between May 31 thru June 6, 1937.  Hemingway describes Robert Jordan being assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Guadalajara&quot;&gt;Battle of Guadalajara&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  The loyalists defeated the Italian and Nationalist forces.  This battle took place between March 8 thru March 23, 1937.  Hemingway uses this actual battle as an element in shaping the character of Robert Jordan.  Jordan claims that he follows the loyalists due to their discipline at Guadalajara.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aerial bombings&lt;/strong&gt; The two most notable aerial bombings during the Spanish Civil war are the bombing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Guernica&quot;&gt;Guernica&lt;/a&gt; and the bombing of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Barcelona&quot;&gt;Barcelona&lt;/a&gt;.  The bombing of Guernica took place on April 26, 1937.  The bombing of Barcelona took place between March 16 thru March 18, 1938.  The protagonist, Robert Jordan is constantly anxious due to the appearance of enemy planes that are continually in the vicinity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firearm malfunctions&lt;/strong&gt;  There is a famous photograph of Hemingway demonstrating how to operate a firearm to an actual member of the loyalist army when his firearm malfunctions.  Robert Jordan is described as shooting an enemy horseman while the surrounding camp attempts to arm themselves with a machine gun that did not even &quot;come with directions.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HNj0q.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HNj0q.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hemingway&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The events at Ronda&lt;/strong&gt;  This is a somewhat controversial topic. Whether or not what Hemingway describes in the novel actually took place is debatable.  I am only including it in this list due to the fact that there was an actual uprising in 1936 that took place in the south, but historians still are unable to pinpoint exactly where or exactly what occurred during this uprising.  Some sources speculate that some 7,000 priests, monks and nuns were slaughtered while their churches burned while others speculate that Hemingway's depiction of events is accurate.  Hemingway describes this in detail in Chapter 10 of the novel.  He describes 500 people who are allegedly fascist sympathizers being thrown off of a cliff side from a house.  Hemingway himself even has conflicting quotes regarding this event.  He tells his friend A.E. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Revolution+in+Ronda%3A+the+facts+in+Hemingway%27s+%22For+Whom+the+Bell...-a020181962&quot;&gt;Hotchner&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Pilar remembers back to what happened in their village when the&#xA;  fascists came, that's Ronda, and the details of the town are exact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in a 1954 letter to his friend Bernard Berenson, Hemingway admitted to completely fabricating the scene.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most significant part of the novel is the bridge that Robert Jordan is planning to blow up.  The bridge and the planning of its demise is the central plot to the novel.  There has never been any definitive proof that the bridge in the novel was real.  Hemingway never spoke of the bridge being an actual bridge.  Literary scholars maintain that the bridge is simply used as a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastEditorUserId="18" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:01:50.733" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:01:50.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="995" CreationDate="2017-01-29T12:22:11.800" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Symbolism was largely a European movement in the late 19th century, associated with such poets as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Verlaine. They believed that artistic truth could not be depicted through naturalist or realist means. Instead, they sought to use images as symbols, i.e., as weighted with a meaning beyond the naturalistic. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mor%C3%A9as&quot;&gt;Jean Moréas&lt;/a&gt;, in the 1886 manifesto &quot;Le Symbolisme&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.berlol.net/chrono/chr1886a.htm&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ennemie de l'enseignement, la déclamation, la fausse sensibilité, la description objective, la poésie symbolique cherche à vêtir l’Idée d'une forme sensible qui, néanmoins, ne serait pas son but à elle-même, mais qui, tout en servant à exprimer l'Idée, demeurerait sujette. L'Idée, à son tour, ne doit point se laisser voir privée des somptueuses simarres des analogies extérieures ; car le caractère essentiel de l'art symbolique consiste à ne jamais aller jusqu'à la concentration de l'Idée en soi. Ainsi, dans cet art, les tableaux de la nature, les actions des humains, tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes ; ce sont là des apparences sensibles destinées à représenter leurs affinités ésotériques avec des Idées primordiales. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. Liszt &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mutablesound.com/home/?p=2165&quot;&gt;translates&lt;/a&gt; this as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Enemy of education, declamation, wrong feelings, objective description, symbolist poetry tries to dress the Idea in a sensitive form which, however, would not be its sole purpose, but furthermore that, while serving to express the Idea in itself, would remain subjective. The Idea, in its turn, should not be allowed to be seen deprived of the sumptuous lounge robes of exteranous analogies; because the essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself. So, in this art, the pictures of nature, the actions of human beings, all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves; these are presented as the sensitive appearance destined to represent their esoteric affinity with primordial Ideas.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line &lt;em&gt;tous les phénomènes concrets ne sauraient se manifester eux-mêmes&lt;/em&gt; is somewhat awkwardly translated as &lt;em&gt;all concrete phenomena would not themselves know how to manifest themselves&lt;/em&gt;. It means, roughly, that concrete entities would not exist in Symbolist art merely as themselves; they are the sense-phenomena (&lt;em&gt;des apparences sensibles&lt;/em&gt;) that represent platonic Ideas. This is a clear break with the naturalist and realist conventions of the earlier 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagism was a later Anglo-American movement that, like Symbolism, was a reaction to the prevailing conventions of literature. Imagist poets like Hulme, Pound, and H.D. decried the romantic and sentimentalist excesses of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Poetry&quot;&gt;Georgian poetry&lt;/a&gt;. They sought instead to be hard-edged and concrete, and to present images as precisely as possible. In the March 1913 issue of &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, Pound published &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/58900&quot;&gt;A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. He defined an image as &lt;em&gt;that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time&lt;/em&gt;, and advised aspiring imagists as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands &lt;em&gt;of peace&lt;/em&gt;.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the &lt;em&gt;adequate&lt;/em&gt; symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the Symbolists, the Imagists sought to see natural objects as symbols. Pound's insistence on using the fancy French spelling &lt;em&gt;Imagiste&lt;/em&gt; was meant to underscore the connection between the Anglo-American movement he was spearheading and its Continental forebears. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, there were clear differences between Symbolism and Imagism. Pound himself remarked on the difference in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/vorticism/&quot;&gt;September 1914 article for the &lt;em&gt;Fortnightly Review&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IMAGISME IS NOT symbolism. The symbolists dealt in “association,” that is, in a sort of allusion, almost of allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonomy. One can be grossly “symbolic,” for example, by using the term “cross” to mean “trial.” The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moreover, one does not want to be called a symbolist, because symbolism has usually been associated with mushy technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As opposed to the &lt;em&gt;allegorical&lt;/em&gt; meaning of images in Symbolism, images in Imagism were &lt;em&gt;literal&lt;/em&gt;: they described objects as exactly as possible. Any figurative or symbolic meaning arose from the juxtaposition of these concrete images with each other, or by the metaphoric application of the image to a situation. Pound's famous (and famously brief) &quot;In a Station of the Metro&quot; is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The apparition of these faces in the crowd;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Petals on a wet, black bough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphoric or symbolic force of the poem arises simply from the juxtaposition of the &quot;faces in the crowd&quot; with the &quot;petals&quot; on the branch described with great economy and precision. The Imagists emphasized such precise economy of technique. Unlike the dreamy allegories of the Symbolists, Imagists focused on describing real objects with fidelity and inventiveness, focusing on well-chosen, superbly evocative details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A useful pair of poems to contrast in this regard is Mallarmé's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://patachonf.free.fr/musique/debussy/mallarme.php&quot;&gt;L'après-midi d'un faune&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and H.D.'s &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/48186&quot;&gt;Oread&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Both deal with mythological creatures: a faun is a woodland spirit, an oread a mountain nymph. Mallarmé's poem is generally taken to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/stephane-mallarme&quot;&gt;an allegorical meditation on the creative process&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the two nymphs in the poem, which is far more complex and obscure than its popularity would suggest, seems to represent the world of the senses ... while the purer of the two may well symbolize the world of the intellect.... Since the faun or satyr of the title is able to master neither of them, one might hazard the conclusion that Mallarmé is again presenting his own predicament of a poet moving away from the material world but having not yet reached the immaterial world, and who is consequently incapable of dealing satisfactorily with either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discursive languors of Mallarmé are worlds apart from the brevity and economy of H.D. In its entirety, &quot;Oread&quot; runs to six lines: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whirl up, sea—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  whirl your pointed pines,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  splash your great pines&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  on our rocks,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  hurl your green over us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  cover us with your pools of fir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surface of Mallarmé's poem is indeed about a faun in the afternoon (duh), but why is H.D.'s poem called &quot;Oread&quot;? Furthermore, the image of turbulent sea-waves crashing against rocks, metaphorically represented as pine trees being forcibly hurled on mountains, is magnificent; but what does it mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this contrast shows, Imagist poems are much more concise than Symbolist ones, yet extremely powerful in their concision. Unlike Symbolist poems, they are hard to discuss in terms of what they &quot;mean&quot;; they simply are. They give us an arresting image that captures our imagination, and then leave us to decide what to make of them. Pound's battle cry &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000J2QBAM&quot;&gt;Make it new!&lt;/a&gt;&quot; seems apt: certainly after reading H.D.'s poem, I've never been able to see waves crashing into rocks in quite the same way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T12:24:05.020" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T12:24:05.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2017-01-29T14:42:10.923" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Orwell feared totalitarianism. He wanted to fight it and the book reads as a (dire) warning. There is at least one letter by his hand that goes into this in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I must say I believe, or fear, that taking the world as a whole these things are on the increase.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He saw nationalistic initiatives being on the rise due to the pressures and atrocities of WW2 and while he was confident Hitler would go, and soon too, he feared that even fighting fascism would lead to the waning and eventual end of truth and democracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;But if the sort of world that I am afraid of arrives, a world of two or three great superstates which are unable to conquer one another, two and two could become five if the fuhrer wished it.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in-a-revealing-1944-letter-why-hed-write-1984.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984&lt;/a&gt;, Open Culture, 9 January 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalfloss.com/article/64492/we-novel-inspired-george-orwells-1984&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;We: The Novel That Inspired George Orwell’s 1984&lt;/a&gt;, Mental Floss, 16 June 20&amp;amp;5.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter Davison (editor): &lt;em&gt;George Orwell: A Life in Letters&lt;/em&gt;. 1st Edition, Kindle Edition, ISBN-13: 978-0871404626.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T01:57:07.540" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T01:57:07.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1142" CreationDate="2017-01-29T15:09:07.307" Score="15" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a book I read in 4th grade, so about 2012-2013. This was in English and in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't really a sci-fi novel that I remember, but definitely dystopian. It was set in the future of an African nation, I don't know which one. I don't remember any futuristic tech though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were 2 or 3 kids, I think maybe a girl and a boy or 2 boys and a girl. Their father was rich, they lived in a big nice house.  Somehow they were kidnapped or ran away from somebody kidnapping them or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the father + mother found they were gone, they sent 3 detectives after the kids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The detectives traced the kids as the kids went through the slums, market, residential, across the whole city. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the kids were caught by some demon worship cult and going to be sacrificed, but the detectives rescued them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas what this book is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:51:43.533" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:51:43.533" Title="African dystopia with children on the run" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1141" CreationDate="2017-01-29T15:31:54.190" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You stated in chat that you found it (and asked someone to post an answer): &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ear, the Eye and the Arm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Nancy Farmer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5r3Hf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5r3Hf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The cover of a book titled &amp;quot;The Ear, the Eye and the Arm&amp;quot; by Nancy Farmer. The cover includes the depiction of three men in robes, one of which has wears a turban and appears to be drawing a dagger. There is also a monkey dancing on a barrel.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the year 2194, in Zimbabwe, the Chief of Security, General Matsika, leads a battle against the gangs which terrorize the nation. &lt;strong&gt;His three children, Tendai, Rita, and Kuda are kept in a fortified mansion to ensure their security.&lt;/strong&gt; Seeking adventure to earn the Scout Badge, &lt;strong&gt;they escape&lt;/strong&gt; the house with the help of the Mellower, a praise singer employed by their parents. The children then find themselves in the busy streets of Mbare Musika, where they are kidnapped and taken to Dead Man's Vlei, the lair of the She Elephant. There, &lt;strong&gt;they have to work in the plastic mines.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the Masks &lt;strong&gt;attempt to sacrifice Tendai as a messenger to the gods,&lt;/strong&gt; Arm is possessed by a mhondoro, a holy and legendary spirit of the land, who helps him to find the children. When Arm is knocked out, the mhondoro helps Tendai and his friends to temporarily destroy the Big-Head Mask, which had been going to kill Tendai. &lt;strong&gt;When the children's parents arrive, the She Elephant crushes the Mask, and the mhondoro revives Arm.&lt;/strong&gt; The gang is destroyed and their stolen wealth is redistributed among the poor; while General Matsika finally realizes that his children need more freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T22:36:33.350" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T22:36:33.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="728" CreationDate="2017-01-29T16:20:36.127" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phaedrus put Quality into two different forms: one was loose and non-metaphysical and the other metaphysical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first stage, he doesn't define it but rather uses it to come to the conclusion that real learning doesn't come from outside of one's self but rather inside oneself and that the current schooling system of grade hinders this process. He goes into how, for one quarter, he withheld grades in the hope of finding quality learning, but failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on in the continuation of the exploration of the non-metaphysical Quality, he asks a class to write a paper on &amp;quot;What is quality in thought and statement?&amp;quot; and defines Quality as &amp;quot;...a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of Rigid, formal thinking, Quality cannot be defined.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a large fragment concerning Phaedrus' first class after he gave the assignment on &amp;quot;What is quality in thought and statement?&amp;quot; The atmosphere was explosive, Almost everyone seemed as frustrated and angered as he had been by the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How are we supposed to know what quality is?&amp;quot; they said. &amp;quot;You're supposed to tell us!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he told them that he couldn't figure it out either and really wanted to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This he later notes defines it as undefinable -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that this &amp;quot;definition&amp;quot; was actually a refusal to define did not draw comment. The students had no formal training that would have told them his statement was, in a formal sense, completely irrational. If you can't define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists, Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity. When I say that, &amp;quot;Quality cannot be defined,&amp;quot; I'm really saying formally, &amp;quot;I'm stupid about Quality.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he then goes on to say that everyone knew what quality was but asking them which of two papers was the better: one which was badly written with rambling ideas and one which was not. This went on for a while, showing them with larger and lager groups of papers that there was a group conciseness on what was Quality. In the end he turned back to the standard way of teaching rhetoric to show them how to gain &amp;quot;Quality&amp;quot; in their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at least, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles expounded in them were no linger rules to rebel against, not ultimates in themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing, what really counted and stood independently of the techniques... Quality. What had started out as a heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated then by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging togetherness of a story, could be jacked up with a technique called footnote, which gives authoritative reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brought about self judgment of Quality in his students' work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in answer to that eternal student question, &amp;quot;How do I do this?&amp;quot; that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, &amp;quot;It doesn't make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it's good.&amp;quot; The reluctant student might ask in class, &amp;quot;But how do we know what's good?&amp;quot; but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him. &amp;quot;You just see it.&amp;quot; If he said No, I don't,&amp;quot; he'd be told, &amp;quot;Yes, you do. He proved it.&amp;quot; The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we get to the metaphysical part of Phaedrus' discussion of Quality he runs into the issue of proving that quality exists if he refuses to define what quality is. He comes back with this -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism. &amp;quot;A thing exists,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;if a world without it can't function normally.  If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it's defined or not.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then continues on to take Quality out of the everyday and come up with Squareness. Squareness is the opposite of Quality and is the natural state of analytics. In fact nothing was wrong with Quality as it was fine, it worked the way it should, the fault was in the way analytics worked that made it impossible to see Quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phaedrus wrote with some beginning understanding that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide, &amp;quot;Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it's been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words--. We have proved that Quality, though undefined, exists. Its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom, and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it. What remains to be seen, the thing to be analyzed, is not Quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called 'Squareness' that sometimes prevent us from seeing it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus did he seek to turn the attack. The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but Analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he was asked a question that brought things to a head and gives us another clue into the definition of Quality -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was brought about in response to Phaedrus' wild meanderings about Quality when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their Squareness, presented him with a reasonable question: &amp;quot;Does this undefined 'quality' of yours exist in the things we observe?&amp;quot; they asked. &amp;quot;Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us to (after a long bit of exploring the subject and after dropping the first part of the question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He turned his attention to the other horn of the dilemma, which showed more promise of refutation. He thought, &amp;quot;So Quality is whatever you like?&amp;quot; It angered him. The greatest artists of history... Raphael, Beethoven, Michelangelo... they were all just putting out what people liked. They had no goal other than to titillate the senses in a big way. Was that it? It was angering, and what was most angering about it was that he couldn't see any immediate way to cut it up logically. So he studied the statement carefully, in the same reflective way he always studied things before attacking them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he saw it. He brought out the knife and excised the one word that created the entire angering effect of that sentence. The word &amp;quot;just,&amp;quot; Why should Quality be just what you like? Why should &amp;quot;What you like&amp;quot; be &amp;quot;just&amp;quot;? What did &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; mean in this case? When separated out like this for independent examination it become apparent that &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; in this case really didn't mean a damn thing. It was a purely pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentience was nil. Now, with that word removed, the sentence became &amp;quot;Quality is what you like,&amp;quot; and its meaning was entirely changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brought about more moving and shifting of the meaning of Quality... which gave us this &amp;quot;Definition&amp;quot; of Quality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand in that Quality is the response of an organism to its environment.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end what we get is a version of Tao and Zen philosophies. Quality is. And Quality remains undefined and undefinable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="241" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T14:54:05.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1149" CreationDate="2017-01-29T16:26:08.867" Score="22" ViewCount="94260" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase, &quot;Open Sesame&quot;, is a curious one indeed. Until a few days ago I foolishly believed that it was derived from a slurring of the words &quot;Open, says me&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after coming to the story of Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves in my copy of The Arabian Nights, in which Ali Baba opens a magical door with the words, &quot;Open, O Simsim&quot;, I have revised my thoughts. Was my first guess correct, or Is my second guess, that the common phrase is derived from, &quot;Open, O Simsim&quot; correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="343" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T00:04:59.537" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T12:00:55.643" Title="Origin of the phrase &quot;Open Sesame&quot;" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1145" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1525" CreationDate="2017-01-29T16:35:03.860" Score="20" ViewCount="464" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a poem titled, &lt;em&gt;Saathi, Sab Kuch Sahna Hoga (You have to tolerate this all, my friend)&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harivansh_Rai_Bachchan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harivansh Rai Bachchan&lt;/a&gt;. I read this poem years ago and it is taken from an older book. Here is an excerpt of this poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;मानव पर जगती का शासन, (Human is being  ruled by the earth)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  जगती पर संसृति का बंधन, (This world is bound by this Universe)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  संसृति को भी और किसी के प्रतिबंधों में रहना होगा! (This universe has to be ruled over by someone else)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  साथी, सब कुछ सहना होगा! (You have to tolerate this all, my friend.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Bachchan referring to any specific historical circumstances or personal situations, and if so, what were they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; I translated this myself and it is not guaranteed to be perfect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T18:05:54.263" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:35:41.533" Title="What circumstances is Bachchan referring to in this poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;harivansh-rai-bachchan&gt;&lt;hindi-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1146" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-29T17:14:45.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Born at 27 November 1907, Harivansh Rai Srivastava alias Bachchan was a noted Indian poet of the Nayi Kavita literary movement (romantic upsurge) of early 20th century Hindi literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wrote many poems and autobiography. Madhushala is one of his noted works and some of his poems were also used in Bollywood songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="47" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T19:01:21.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:01:21.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1147" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-29T17:14:45.700" Score="0" Body="This tag must be used for questions about the poems by Harivansh Rai Bachchan." OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="47" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T19:01:00.577" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:01:00.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:49:19.027" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Sesame_(phrase)&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phrase first appears in writing in Antoine Galland's Les Mille et une nuits (1704–1717) as Sésame, ouvre-toi (English, &quot;Sesame, open!&quot;).[1] No earlier oral or written version of the story is known in any language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Dutch versions I know, it was &quot;Sesam, open u!&quot; (&quot;Sesam, open yourself!&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;From its apparently French origin, we can safely conclude that it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Open, says me&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sesame is a name or a magic spell. The door may be semi-sentient or possessed by a spirit/djinn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also notes that &quot;Oh Simsim&quot; is another translation of the phrase. I've been looking for references to &quot;Simsalabim&quot; as a possible source for this translation; as &quot;Simsalabim&quot; is a degeneration of &quot;k Bismi'llah ir-Rahman ir-Rahiem&quot; (&quot;In the name of Allah, the Merciful&quot; - apologies for errors in the translation or transcription; I don't speak Arabic).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, there is no evidence that &quot;Simsalabim&quot; is related to &quot;Open, Sesame&quot;. The name stands on its own; the door had to have &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; name by which it could be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T19:49:19.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:50:26.463" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely from the Hebrew word &quot;סיסמה&quot;, which translates to &quot;password&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pronunciation of the word out loud is (approximately, going off information a native speaker told me) &quot;seez-ma&quot; or &quot;sees-ma&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this provokes the question: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, Ali Baba's brother became trapped in the cave and couldn't get out. He did try &lt;em&gt;other grains&lt;/em&gt; though... If the phrase was originally something like &quot;password&quot; or &quot;password for opening&quot; (literally), why would he guess other grains?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it turns out that tale wasn't originally in &lt;em&gt;The 1001 Nights&lt;/em&gt;. It was first seen in a French translation by Antoine Galland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Galland claimed that he heard the folk tale in Aleppo, Syria. However, some scholars argue that Galland made up the story himself, since no documentation of the story in old Arabic records has ever been found. It does not appear in the oldest copy of &quot;The Thousand and One Nights,&quot; which is an Arabic manuscript from the 14th century. In &quot;One Thousand and One Nights,&quot; the storyteller Scheherazade tells &quot;Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves&quot; to her husband, the Persian king Shahryar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reference.com/art-literature/wrote-alibaba-forty-thieves-ddbb93220d132391&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(source)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Galland claimed it's a Syrian tale, but it's most likely he made it up. It's not in the oldest version, &lt;em&gt;plus&lt;/em&gt; the making-it-up explains the other grains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he made it up, it's most likely that &quot;סיסמה&quot; (seesma) became &quot;sesame&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T00:28:05.350" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T00:28:05.350" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1300" CreationDate="2017-01-29T19:52:36.053" Score="10" ViewCount="745" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And each imagined pinnacle and steep&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of godlike hardship tells me I must die&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;pinnacle and steep&amp;quot; represent the pillars of the Parthenon if I'm not mistaken. But the next line doesn't make sense to me. How can the pillars be of godlike hardship? Also, why are they imagined? I feel like I'm misunderstanding something here...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T12:58:07.297" Title="Meaning of this line in &quot;On seeing the Elgin Marbles&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1151" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:25:42.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T20:25:42.887" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T20:25:42.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1152" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:25:42.887" Score="0" Body="For questions about the chronology of the events in a story." OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T20:52:08.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-29T20:52:08.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T20:40:41.937" Score="19" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &quot;First among Sequels&quot; ends on a cliffhanger. The protagonist, Thursday Next, has to run for her life, to escape an impending fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next book in the series, &quot;One of Our Thursdays is Missing&quot;, has her counterpart Thursday5 investigate a crime. Thursday5 eventually finds Thursday Next, seriously wounded. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there don't seem to be burns involved. Thursday Next has been the victim of an attempt at her life, in the form of a taxi accident. Thursday Next's wounds are described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had a fractured skull, a broken femur, and eight breaks to her left arm and hand. There were multiple lacerations, a loss of blood, fever and a concussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I believe it also said somewhere that she had part of the taxi's steering column rammed through her in the accident. I haven't been able to find that back though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it would seem that Thursday Nexts accident in &quot;One of Our Thursdays is Missing&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; one from the fire at the end of &quot;First among Sequels&quot; - where she may actually have escaped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book after that, &quot;The Woman who Died a Lot&quot;, starts with a Thursday Next who has recovered enough to walk again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that the cliffhanger at the end of &quot;First among Sequels&quot; is never quite resolved. Closest thing I can think of, is that the remake of BookWorld at the beginning of &quot;One of Our Thursdays is Missing&quot;, also changed recent history. This is never stated in the books though.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not like Jasper Fforde to give us a cliffhanger and then not resolve it. At the very least he would make a joke about the structure or nature of stories. He hasn't done so in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - am I missing something here? Are the two issues the same? Or is there an unresolved cliffhanger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="92" LastEditDate="2017-01-29T21:30:15.483" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T12:01:20.123" Title="Is the cliffhanger at the end of &quot;First among sequels&quot; resolved?" Tags="&lt;jasper-fforde&gt;&lt;thursday-next&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1157" CreationDate="2017-01-29T22:49:55.687" Score="7" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jordan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/a&gt;, the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/a&gt;, is a pseudonym for James Oliver Rigney, Jr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1132/244&quot;&gt;From this question&lt;/a&gt;, we know he used different pseudonyms for the different genres he wrote. He did this for different reasons. &lt;strong&gt;Of all the books Mr. Rigney wrote, what different pseudonyms did he use and what genre were they used for?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The Wiki article linked for Robert Jordan above gives several pseudonyms. I'm wondering if there were more in addition to those listed and if those are accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="244" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T02:26:13.953" Title="Robert Jordan Pseudonyms?" Tags="&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;pseudonym&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-29T23:04:17.633" Score="7" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Foucault's Pendulum has a litany of character names that intrigue me. I wonder where many of them come from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Casaubon, the name of one of the main characters, seems like it comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Casaubon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Casaubon&lt;/a&gt;, a French philosopher. While I'm having trouble drawing overall thematic connections and links, this has been useful for considering exactly what's going on in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few names, though, that I can't seem to uniquely connect to any specific person or idea. Particularly, the names 'Colonel Ardenti,' 'Diotallevi,' and 'Belbo' remain a little opaque. My guess is that Ardenti just comes from the Italian word &quot;ardenti&quot; itself, but I'm not entirely sure. 'Belbo' looks like it has a lot of possibilities, and I'm somewhat lost as to which one is correct. And I don't get any results at all looking for connections to 'Diotallevi.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the above names relate to any ideas or allude to the real world?  What do they refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-14T12:09:27.240" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T12:09:27.240" Title="In Foucault's Pendulum, which names are allusions to the real world, and which are not?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;foucalts-pendulum&gt;&lt;umberto-eco&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T02:18:30.207" Score="6" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Isaac Asimov's novel and short story (short story later expanded) &lt;em&gt;Nightfall&lt;/em&gt;, there's a character named &quot;Theremon 762&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole novel is about darkness and innate fear, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theremin&lt;/a&gt;, a type of musical instrument, is known for being used to convey a sense of suspense or fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that Asimov based Theremon 762's name on the instrument?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T21:25:45.893" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T21:25:45.893" Title="Is there any evidence that Theremon 762's name was based on a theremin?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1154" CreationDate="2017-01-30T02:26:13.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Four.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=733&quot;&gt;an interview with the man himself in St. Petersburg&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tahir Velimeev&lt;/em&gt;: By the way, how many names does the multifaceted James Oliver Rigney, Jr. have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/em&gt;: Not very many, but also not a few. Under the pseudonym Reagan O'Neal the historical novels The Fallon Blood, The Fallon Legacy and The Fallon Pride were published. The events in them takes place during the American Revolution, around my hometown of Charleston. The name Jackson O'Reilly is on the cover of the western Cheyenne Raiders. My critical pieces on theater and dance I signed Chang Lung. And under the pseudonym Robert Jordan the novels of the Conan series and the The Wheel of Time series were published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/strong&gt; was the name he used for &lt;strong&gt;fantasy fiction&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series (and all associated materials)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;some &lt;em&gt;Conan the Barbarian&lt;/em&gt; stories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reagan O'Neal&lt;/strong&gt; was the name he used for &lt;strong&gt;historical romances&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;Fallon&lt;/em&gt; trilogy, set in the southern United States&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jackson O'Reilly&lt;/strong&gt; was the name he used for &lt;strong&gt;western novels&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cheyenne Raiders&lt;/em&gt; (1982)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chang Lung&lt;/strong&gt; was the name he used for &lt;strong&gt;dance and theatre critiques&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;about this work, he &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=80&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;I don't think there is any source anywhere except for my files and I'd just as soon leave them there. There are few things more boring than ten-year-old dance reviews and theater criticism.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=9&quot;&gt;addressed&lt;/a&gt; the question of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he used so many different pseudonyms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;William B. Thompson&lt;/em&gt;: As to his various pen names, their use chiefly reflects Jordan's desire for privacy for himself and his wife, publisher and editor Harriett P. McDougal, with whom Jordan shares a pre-Revolutionary War home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robert Jordan&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;There's also a commercial consideration having to do with what publishers will accept. If I'd write a horror novel under the name Robert Jordan, publishers will accept. But if I went with a Robert Jordan mystery—that far out of genre—there would probably be a big fight over it, the kind of distraction I would just as soon avoid. Not that I haven't had my share of disagreements with editors and publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Beyond all that, I also enjoy the multiple identities.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvmain.php?i=210&quot;&gt;And&lt;/a&gt; even the question of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; he came up with the names to use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My pen names have all been chosen from three lists of names using my real initials. It has been a matter of one from column A and one from column B, or maybe column C. One pen name actually managed to contain all three initials in a first name and a surname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T02:26:13.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1167" CreationDate="2017-01-30T04:37:40.437" Score="6" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that Silverberg wrote novels based on some of Asimov's stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0330325795&quot;&gt;The Child of Time&lt;/a&gt; was based off of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_Little_Boy&quot;&gt;The Ugly Little Boy&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)&quot;&gt;Nightfall&lt;/a&gt; was based off the Asimov story of the same name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many other (if any) novels/books/other works did Silverberg base off of Asimov stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:18:56.857" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:18:56.857" Title="How many works of Robert Silverberg's were based on Asimov's stories?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;&lt;robert-silverberg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1159" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T07:52:38.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T07:52:38.270" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T07:52:38.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1160" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T07:52:38.270" Score="0" Body="For questions about Margaret Peterson Haddix and her works, such as the Shadow Children series." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T11:12:14.443" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T11:12:14.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1351" CreationDate="2017-01-30T13:29:40.403" Score="10" ViewCount="1047" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Artemis Fowl&lt;/em&gt; series, the fairies speak a language named Gnommish. We know that the Book is written in this language, in spirals. And we also see some Gnommish words, such as &lt;em&gt;D'Arvit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has Eoin Colfer developed this language in any way, other than making up a few words?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T13:44:55.883" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T15:48:36.760" Title="How developed is the Gnommish language?" Tags="&lt;fictional-languages&gt;&lt;artemis-fowl&gt;&lt;eoin-colfer&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1161" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:28:13.743" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the same language but uses different symbols for letters.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4iqA2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4iqA2.png&quot; alt=&quot;An image picturing the Gnommish alphabet&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the following passages are translated literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qpnga.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qpnga.png&quot; alt=&quot;An image picturing Gnommish text&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carry me always, carry me well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thy teacher of herb and spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thy link to power arcane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forget me and thy magic shall wane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story he compares it to the Egyptian system of Hieroglyphics.&#xA;All information from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://artemisfowl.wikia.com/wiki/Gnommish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artemis Fowl Wiki.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:52:16.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1161" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:28:54.287" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnommish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gnommish&lt;/a&gt; is not a language at all, it is a cipher.  It doesn't have grammar at all, it simply encodes English words into a different phonology and orthography.  The only thing actually constructed about this particular constructed language is its alphabet, and the fact that it writes in spirals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stolaf.edu/people/hansonr/translate/gnommish/gnommish.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this.&lt;/a&gt;  It's an online English-to Gnommish translator.  The translation for &quot;happyx&quot; which is not a word, is just the translation for &quot;happy&quot; plus a letter in Gnommish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:53:05.997" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:53:05.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1164" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:51:45.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T14:51:45.990" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T14:51:45.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1165" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T14:51:45.990" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the Artemis Fowl book series, by Eoin Colfer. Use this tag with the [eoin-colfer] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T13:07:00.180" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T13:07:00.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1051" CreationDate="2017-01-30T16:06:36.470" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;He really did engage in silver mine prospecting while he lived in Nevada, though he wasn't one to really pick up a shovel and pick and do much actual work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost a millionaire twice. In the first instance, he and two partners put a claim on a blind lead of silver in a public mine. You had to put some reasonable amount of work into the mine within 10 days, or your claim became forfeit and was available to the public again. In this case, neither he nor his partners did any work on the claim and they lost it. So when he says he was a millionaire for 10 days, it was with this very promising vein of silver, which he lost. This takes place at the end of ROUGHING IT, Part 4 and the beginning of Part 5. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second time was, he owned a bunch of shares in prospective mines, and the prices were going up and up, like the dot com boom. He had several opportunities to sell but didn't, because he wanted to hold out for the best price. Then it was revealed that none of the mines were ever going to produce at the level people thought (there was some issue of mis-computing the yield coming from the mines). Since he didn't sell any shares, their value dropped to zero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="347" LastEditorUserId="347" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T16:21:58.780" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T16:21:58.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1158" CreationDate="2017-01-30T18:56:30.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Three total&lt;/strong&gt;.  Jenkins’ Guide tells about them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book457.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nightfall&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1990 novel) based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story185.html&quot;&gt;“Nightfall”&lt;/a&gt; (1941 short story).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book501.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ugly Little Boy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1992 novel) based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story289.html&quot;&gt;“The Ugly Little Boy”&lt;/a&gt; (1958 short story).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book503.html&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Positronic Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1993 novel) based on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story015.html&quot;&gt;“The Bicentennial Man”&lt;/a&gt; (1976 short story)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know there are only three of these from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Books/Book503.html&quot;&gt;the Guide's description for &lt;em&gt;The Positronic Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a fitting final third to Silverberg’s novelizations of Asimov’s stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descriptions of the other two books tells the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T19:12:19.080" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T19:12:19.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T19:39:09.140" Score="14" ViewCount="32048" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stephen King's novel &lt;em&gt;IT&lt;/em&gt; concerns a group of children who confronted an evil entity haunting their town -- and their reunion twenty-five years later to face the being again for the final time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the novel, we see each of &quot;The Losers' Club&quot; react to the news and the summons. All are frightened, most are disbelieving, but they all answer the call -- all except for Stanley Uris, who commits suicide. Stanley kills himself, after scrawling a cryptic message on the wall with his own blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a horror novel, and there is no question that &lt;strong&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; is horrifying, Stanley's behavior stands out in stark contrast to that of his friends. When I read the novel, I understood this as a kind of promise -- a promise that, as we learn the story of the children in '57-'58, one of the things we learn is how It left Stanley uniquely scarred among the group. Or, really, any explanation that would justify why Stanley kills himself in such an awful manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as I read, I felt this was never addressed. I don't see Stanley as differentiating himself from the rest of the group in any particular way, or being more affected by It than the others, or being a person inclined to panic or suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;IT&lt;/em&gt; explain why Stanley, and he alone, was driven to suicide?&lt;/strong&gt; Or does the book not actually mean to imply that Stanley was unique in responding this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T22:59:09.767" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T19:29:49.600" Title="Why does Stanley Uris react so gruesomely to It returning?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;it&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T19:59:57.710" Score="9" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know one of the characteristics of realistic works is they are mostly formulated as some independent studies of the life of society but, at the same time, I realise that the dominant approach to art in that time was to see it pragmatically, as a way to share your worldview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna Karenina seems to describe lives of two relationships: Once (in the relationship between Anna Karenina and Vronsky) the characters fell into the natural desire for the &quot;natural love&quot; (éros, so to speak) and it ended badly and once, in the relationship of Kitty and Levin, the characters seemed to contemplate about their relationship for a while and they seemed to make a happy, overall fulfilled couple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can see the book is pretty far from describing the naturalistic hopelessness and straightforward critique of the opportunistic society. Rather, I feel like Tolstoy thus argues by the natural nature of love for more liberal approach of society (the conservatism of Alexey and Mrs. Scherbatska had been devastating).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is it really possible that Leo Tolstoy intended to make the story that symbolic? Can we see there some kind of model of love Tolstoy is trying to describe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291" LastEditorUserId="1178" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T13:25:25.440" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T13:25:25.440" Title="What concept of love does Tolstoy suggest in Anna Karenina?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2841" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:13:25.550" Score="11" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Tartan of Thyme&lt;/em&gt; series is written by 'Panama Oxridge', a pseudonym. When questioned why they used this pen name the author said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Using a pseudonym was partly to distance myself from my previous picture-book persona – partly because (like Justin), I’ve never liked my name – but mostly because I think it helps the reader connect with the story.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some research and found that the author used to write children's picture books - explaining the 'previous picture-book persona'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it says at the back of the first book of the series, &lt;em&gt;Justin Thyme&lt;/em&gt;, that there is a clue to the author's real name hidden in the book. I didn't find it of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that got me wondering, was this clue ever found? Has the author's identity been discovered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T14:01:31.577" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T15:24:19.863" Title="Was the clue to who Panama Oxridge really is ever found?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;panama-oxridge&gt;&lt;tartan-of-thyme&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1171" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:15:04.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about Panama Oxridge's Tartan of Thyme series. This includes the books Justin Thyme and Thyme Running Out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T21:28:59.983" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:28:59.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1172" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:15:04.290" Score="0" Body="For questions about Panama Oxridge's Tartan of Thyme series." OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T21:28:52.880" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T21:28:52.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1173" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:16:10.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the author Panama Oxridge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T22:19:49.373" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T22:19:49.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1174" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T21:16:10.417" Score="0" Body="For questions about the author Panama Oxridge or any of their literary works." OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T23:17:36.960" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:17:36.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2233" CreationDate="2017-01-30T22:48:05.053" Score="18" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Douglas Adams was asked whether he invented this question because six times nine is actually 54, which is 42 when written in base thirteen, he replied: “I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in base 13.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This denial by Douglas Adams is well known among his fans, see eg. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/12229/4918&quot;&gt;“How did Douglas Adams choose the Ultimate Question?” on Sci Fi SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a friend told me that Stanisław Lem, on the other hand, did write a joke that is based on a positional number system with an unusual radix (not necessarily 13), somewhere in the stories about Captain Pirx.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this true?  Or, even if not all the details match, is there something close to this in Lem's writings that spawned this rumour?  Where do I find the relevant part in the writings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read all the stories about Captain Pirx, but I've read most of them only once or twice, and have probably missed this detail.  I admit they're not my most favorite part of Lem's sci fi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T02:19:20.967" Title="Did Captain Pirx make a joke in base 13?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;stanislaw-lem&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-30T22:59:46.930" Score="13" ViewCount="33299" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Albert Camus' book &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, Meursault kills a character known as &quot;the Arab&quot; for no real reason at all. Meursault even acknowledges that he doesn't have to kill &quot;the Arab&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It struck me that all I had to do was to turn, walk away, and think no&#xA;  more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he does shoot &quot;the Arab&quot;, he notes that &quot;each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, killing &quot;the Arab&quot; seems like a bad idea. But strangely enough, no real explanation is given for why Meursault killed &quot;the Arab&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T01:22:47.767" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:03:23.447" Title="Why does Meursault kill &quot;the Arab&quot; in The Stranger?" Tags="&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1238" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:04:49.447" Score="2" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has the main character of the &lt;em&gt;Story of Your Life&lt;/em&gt; (adapted as a movie called &lt;em&gt;Arrival&lt;/em&gt; in 2016), Dr. Louise Banks always known the story of her life? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anywhere in the story explained how is it possible to perceive the time as continuous &lt;em&gt;from a certain point in time&lt;/em&gt;? The novel seems to be very specific about other details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:29:14.940" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:29:14.940" Title="Has Louise always known the truth in &quot;Story of Your Life&quot;?" Tags="&lt;ted-chiang&gt;&lt;story-of-your-life&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:37:10.437" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Initially, there isn't much. The final words of Part I read this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wanted to hear the murmur of its water again, to escape from the sum and the effort and the women's tears, and to relax in the shade again. But when I got nearer, I saw that Raymond's Arab had come back. He was alone. He was lying on his back, with his hands behind his head ... As far as I was concerned, it was all settled and I'd gone there without even thinking about it. As soon as he saw me, he sat up lightly and put his hand in his pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;pg. 58-59&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a bit of a defensive mood at this point in the story. You have to remember that Meursault had simply gone with his friends for a day on the beach. Two Arabs were seemingly following them. Prior to these paragraphs, these Arabs had already engaged in a bit of a fight with Meursault and his friends, with one of them having slashed his friend with a knife. Moving on... (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I took a few steps towards the spring. The Arab didn't move. Even now, he was still some distance away... I waited. The sun was beginning to burn on my cheeks, and I felt drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. It was the same sun as on the day of my mother's funeral, and again it was my forehead that was hurting me most and all the veins were throbbing at once beneath the skin... I took a step, just one step forward. And this time, without sitting up, the Arab drew his knife and held it out towards me in the sun... &lt;strong&gt;All I could feel were the cymbals the sun was clashing against my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear still leaping up off the knife in front of me. It was like a red-hot blade gnawing at my eyelashes and gouging out my stinging eyes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;pg. 59-60&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage is also interesting. Meursault was undoubtedly under the sun, and it was affecting him. The parallel between the sun and his mother's funeral is also somewhat significant. At his mother's funeral, he was largely alone and almost kept to himself. He also defied many societal standards related to his mother's funeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passages in these pages offer that parallel. Meursault wants to keep the peace within him, and he doesn't want anyone around him. The presence of the Arab disturbed him. When the Arab drew his knife, it disturbed this peace, bringing about provoking actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... That was when everything shook... The sky seemed to be splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame. My whole being went tense and I tightened my grip on the gun. The trigger gave, I felt the underside of the polished butt and it was there, in that sharp but deafening noise, that it all started. I realized that I'd destroyed the balance of the day and the perfect silence of this beach &lt;strong&gt;where I'd been happy.&lt;/strong&gt; And I fired four more times at a lifeless body and the bullets sank without leaving a mark. &lt;strong&gt;And it was like giving four sharp knocks at the door of unhappiness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;pg. 60&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages provide a direct narrative for what directly instigated the act. Meursault may not have been completely conscious of his act. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I find interesting is the last sentence. You see, this novel is largely about existentialism. Albert Camus, the author, was an existentialist. The murder came as a shock - here we are looking at the life of an absurd man. He doesn't necessarily follow social norms, he's not married... etc. Earlier in the chapter, he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Raymond handed me his gun, the sun glinted off it... &lt;strong&gt;I realized at that point that you could either shoot or not shoot.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;pg. 57&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can shoot or not shoot. It doesn't matter. If someone is murdered or not, the world doesn't care. The theme of existence is largely at play. Whatever happens, it doesn't matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how you look at it, there is not a reasonable explanation for Meursault's actions. It conveys the theme of existentialism, as well as the title of the book overall - Mersualt is an outsider in the way that he defies the laws of society. You see this most notably in his trial, where he shows remorse, and is ultimately convicted not because he committed the murder, but because he doesn't live up to what society wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T20:21:16.730" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:21:16.730" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1179" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ted Chiang, or Chiang Feng-nan, is a US author of Chinese descent, whose relatively few works have won multiple Hugo awards, Nebula awards, Locus awards, and more. His award-winning works include &lt;em&gt;Tower of Babylon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Exhalation&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Story of Your Life&lt;/em&gt;, the last of which was adapted into a film (&lt;em&gt;Arrival&lt;/em&gt;) in 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1180" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" Score="0" Body="For questions about the author Ted Chiang (Chiang Feng-nan) or any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" LastActivityDate="2017-01-30T23:46:22.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T04:10:18.370" Score="14" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;E.E. Cummings often wrote with deliberately unconventional spelling and syntax. It was popularly criticised when published; however, did his editors try to &quot;fix&quot; his work &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; it was published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, how did Cummings convey his intentions to the editors? If so, did they know about his intent and disagree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:21:53.400" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T22:03:45.590" Title="Did Cummings' editors try to fix his works' eccentricities?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;e-e-cummings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1228" CreationDate="2017-01-31T10:42:02.713" Score="11" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of The Wind&lt;/em&gt; by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, they attempt to find a place to live for Fermín Romero de Torres, a former street beggar with a great mind, who they hire to help them find the books that their customers request. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English version of the text, they continue to use the Spanish word 'pensión', even though they could easily translate that to English.  Most people reading the book probably don't have even a basic level of Spanish. Why did the translator decide to leave 'pensión' untranslated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T11:56:08.650" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T11:56:08.650" Title="Why is &quot;pensión&quot; left untranslated in &quot;The Shadow of the Wind&quot;?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;carlos-ruiz-zafon&gt;&lt;the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="333" CreationDate="2017-01-31T11:01:25.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. In fact, each poem has a closer relative within the corpus of Keats's work. There's also a stronger connection between &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot; and one of Shelley's poems that there is between the former and &amp;quot;Hyperion&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keats first used the Endymion myth in an 1816 poem, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://keats-poems.com/i-stood-tiptoe-upon-a-little-hill/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I stood tip-toe upon a little hill&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. This poem uses the union of Cynthia and Endymion to symbolize the way in which poets, inspired by natural beauty, write poetry that achieves the status of myth. The longer &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://keats-poems.com/poems/endymion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Endymion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, written the following year, enlarges on this theme by giving the beautiful a moral force. The poem begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Its loveliness increases; it will never&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pass into nothingness; but still will keep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A bower quiet for us, and a sleep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as Endymion pines after the ideal beauty of the moon, it is out of his grasp. But when he falls in love with a mortal woman, she turns out to be Cynthia after all. By enjoying her earthly beauty, Endymion ultimately finds union with his divine beloved after all. The connection with the earlier poem is readily seen, in that the celebration of beauty is granted mythic force as a path to union with the divine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://keats-poems.com/poems/hyperion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyperion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is rather darker. Focusing as it does on the Titans after their defeat by the Olympians, it immediately undercuts any sense that to be divine (or to be united with the divine) guarantees that no harm can befall one. Paradoxically, Apollo the Olympian (and the divine poet) becomes a god precisely because he undergoes great suffering and thereby has an insight into human tragedy—something the Titans lack. Keats abandoned this poem, however, around April 1819; perhaps the fact that the Titans are suffering as well made the contrast between Olympians and Titans hard to sustain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He took up the theme again later that year, in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://keats-poems.com/the-fall-of-hyperion-a-dream/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fall of Hyperion&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. Here too Keats focuses on suffering and the role of the poet. On the one hand, poetry can present false, unreachable ideals to humankind and thus increase its suffering; on the other, poetry can provide a visionary insight into the nature of human suffering and thereby foster compassionate acceptance. Keats ended up abandoning this poem too. It seems that as his views on what poetry should be grew more complex, they resisted explicit expression in any final, resolved form. The shorter &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44477&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; captures the tensions all the better for leaving them unresolved: the urn, as a beautiful object, is outside human suffering; yet the figures on the urn are also devoid of fulfillment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true, then, that &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Hyperion&amp;quot; share the same mythic universe; Endymion's beloved, Semele (whom Keats calls Cynthia), was in fact Hyperion's daughter. It's also true that thematically, they share concerns: like so much of Keats's work, they are about the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. Yet they are vastly different. The conception of poetry in the later work is darker and less straightforwardly idealistic. There is no evidence that &amp;quot;Hyperion&amp;quot; was intended as a continuation of the earlier work. If anything, the fact that it is in blank verse, as opposed to the heroic couplets of &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot;, suggests that Keats did not mean to connect the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/ttu-ir/bitstream/handle/2346/61148/31295008633033.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critics have noted&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot; was influenced by Shelley's 1815 poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161112133425/https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45113&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alastor&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, and probably intended as a response. &amp;quot;Alastor&amp;quot; tells the story of a poet who, like Endymion, pines after an unattainable lady. Unlike Endymion's, though, Alastor's quest is unsuccessful, largely because he lacks human sympathy. There is an argument to be made that insofar as &amp;quot;The Fall of Hyperion&amp;quot; also take up the theme of poets and human sympathy, it represents a later and more considered meditation on the problems raised Shelley's work. Certainly &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/603139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the two poems have been compared&lt;/a&gt;, rather to Shelley's detriment. As far as I know, however, nobody has raised the possibility that Keats was thinking of &amp;quot;Alastor&amp;quot; not just while writing &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot;, but also some three years later while working on the &amp;quot;Hyperion&amp;quot; poems. If that speculation has merit, then there is another connection between &amp;quot;Endymion&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Hyperion&amp;quot;. Still, they would be connected via Shelley rather than directly with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T02:32:29.077" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:32:29.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1184" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:44:52.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:44:52.093" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:44:52.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1185" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:44:52.093" Score="0" Body="Questions about the the works of the Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón (1964-2020) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:15:08.167" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:15:08.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1186" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:45:57.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:45:57.990" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:45:57.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1187" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:45:57.990" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novella 'Of Mice and Men' (1937) by John Steinbeck. Use this tag with the [john-steinbeck] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T00:35:56.523" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T00:35:56.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1188" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:46:27.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:46:27.167" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:46:27.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1189" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:46:27.167" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer and professor Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T18:29:31.900" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T18:29:31.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1190" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:47:24.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:47:24.120" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:47:24.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1191" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:47:24.120" Score="0" Body="For questions about House of Leaves, the novel by Mark Z. Danielewski. Use in conjunction with [mark-z-danielewski]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:29.307" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:29.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1192" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:47:50.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His novels include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scarlet_Letter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scarlet Letter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1850),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_the_Seven_Gables&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of the Seven Gables&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1851),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blithedale_Romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Blithedale Romance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1852),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marble_Faun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Marble Faun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1860).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His short stories were published in various collections, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice-Told_Tales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twice-Told Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (volume 1: 1837; volume 2: 1842),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosses_from_an_Old_Manse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mosses from an Old Manse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1846; includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Goodman_Brown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Young Goodman Brown&lt;/a&gt; and ),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglewood_Tales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tanglewood Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1853).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T20:58:42.770" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T20:58:42.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1193" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:47:50.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 – 1864) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T20:58:42.770" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T20:58:42.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1194" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:48:26.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:48:26.433" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:48:26.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1195" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:48:26.433" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Omar Khayyam, such as [the-rubaiyat], and his life as a philosopher and poet. Use with [persian-literature]" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T02:26:29.520" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T02:26:29.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1196" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:48:47.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Jordan is famous for his series of fantasy novels &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which comprises of 14 novels and a prequel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;0: New Spring (2004)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;1: The Eye of the World(1990)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2: The Great Hunt (1990)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;3: The Dragon Reborn (1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;4: The Shadow Rising (1992)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;5: The Fires of Heaven (1993)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;6: Lord of Chaos (1994)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;7: A Crown of Swords (1996)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;8: The Path of Daggers (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;9: Winter's Heart (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;10: Crossroads of Twilight (2003)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;11: Knife of Dreams (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;12: The Gathering Storm (2009); co-authored by Brandon Sanderson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;13: Towers of Midnight (2010); co-authored by Brandon Sanderson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;14: A Memory of Light (2013); co-authored by Brandon Sanderson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jordan passed away before the completion of his series, so the series was completed by another fantasy author, Brandon Sanderson, based on Jordan's ideas and notes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:17:16.833" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:17:16.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1197" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:48:47.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Robert Jordan (1948-2007) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:17:22.290" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:17:22.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:49:45.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:49:45.720" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:49:45.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:49:45.720" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Cemetery of The Forgotten, the book series by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Use in conjunction with [carlos-ruiz-zafon]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:42.400" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:42.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1200" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:51:07.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:51:07.657" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:51:07.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1201" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:51:07.657" Score="0" Body="For questions about Foucault's Pendulum, the novel by Uberto Eco. Use in conjunction with [uberto-eco]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:51:24.363" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:51:24.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:51:48.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:51:48.787" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:51:48.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:51:48.787" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Edward Fitzgerald (1809 – 1883) or his life as a writer. He is best known for his translation of &quot;The Rubaiyat&quot;." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T02:03:13.360" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T02:03:13.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1204" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:52:11.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:52:11.387" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:52:11.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1205" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:52:11.387" Score="0" Body="For questions about A Rose for Emily, the short story by William Faulkner. Use in conjunction with [william-faulkner]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:51:38.843" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:51:38.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1206" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:52:39.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:52:39.863" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:52:39.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1207" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:52:39.863" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet Allen Ginsberg (1926 – 1997) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:58:46.253" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:58:46.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1208" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:53:30.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:53:30.647" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:53:30.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1209" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:53:30.647" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Rubaiyat, the poems most famously attributed to Omar Khayyám. Use with [omar-khayyam], [persian-literature], and [poetry]. If referencing the popular English translation, use with [edward-fitzgerald]" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:28:20.430" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:28:20.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1210" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:54:01.150" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:54:01.150" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:54:01.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1211" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:54:01.150" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Shadow of The Wind, the novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. Use in conjunction with [carlos-ruiz-zafon]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:13:59.327" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:13:59.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1212" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:54:22.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:54:22.697" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:54:22.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1213" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:54:22.697" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Stephen King and his life as a writer. Stephen King is most famous for his works in horror, such as 'Carrie', 'It' and 'The Shining'." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T20:48:57.553" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T20:48:57.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1214" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:55:07.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:55:07.300" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:55:07.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1215" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:55:07.300" Score="0" Body="For questions about Watership Down, the novel by Richard Adams. Use in conjunction with [richard-adams]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:13:52.793" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:13:52.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1216" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:55:58.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:55:58.480" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:55:58.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1217" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:55:58.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman (1819 –  1892) and his life as a writer. He is best known for this poetry collection 'Leaves of Grass'." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:15:35.867" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:15:35.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1218" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:57:30.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:57:30.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:57:30.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1219" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:57:30.877" Score="0" Body="For questions about Wuthering Heights (1847), the novel by Emily Brontë. Use with [emily-bronte]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:47:47.420" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:47:47.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1220" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:58:05.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:58:05.277" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:58:05.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1221" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:58:05.277" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of William S. Burroughs and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:00:39.047" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T14:00:39.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1222" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:58:28.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T12:58:28.793" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T12:58:28.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1223" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T12:58:28.793" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of William H. Armstrong and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:17:50.853" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T14:17:50.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1224" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:30:55.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:30:55.120" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T14:30:55.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1225" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:30:55.120" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding fictional languages within a book, such as Elvish from The Lord of the Rings." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T21:24:05.117" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T21:24:05.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1226" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:32:45.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T14:32:45.070" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T14:32:45.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1227" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T14:32:45.070" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the science fantasy novel 'A Wind In The Door' (published 1973) by Madeleine l'Engle. Use this tag with the [madeleine-lengle] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:42:33.420" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:42:33.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1182" CreationDate="2017-01-31T15:51:54.347" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably because a pensión, (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/pension#pension_Noun_200&quot;&gt;pension&lt;/a&gt; in English) is a type of boarding house which possibly does not have an adequate word in English. A typical pensión, while appearing like a &quot;bed and breakfast&quot;, will serve all three meals of the day. They are (were?)  popular with ex-patriates throughout Continental Europe, some parts of Africa such as Morocco, and also South America. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They usually offer variable plans including full-board plus &quot;tea&quot;, or the &quot;half&quot;, which does not include lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other novels based in a pensión include &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Room_with_a_View&quot;&gt;A Room with a View&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1907), and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miramar_(novel)&quot;&gt;Miramar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1967)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user59" LastEditorDisplayName="user59" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T20:58:55.220" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T20:58:55.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1231" CreationDate="2017-01-31T16:52:20.317" Score="9" ViewCount="17895" Body="&lt;p&gt;People keep telling me there is irony at the end of &lt;em&gt;Lord of The Flies&lt;/em&gt;,   specifically during the conversation with the captain of the ship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was ironic about that scene?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T04:54:32.833" Title="What was the irony of the end of Lord of The Flies?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;irony&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:05:04.543" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ironies are of juxtaposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Ralph had created a signal fire in order to bring rescuers. However it is not this fire which attracts attention but the raging forest fire set to kill Ralph. So: a fire which is supposed to doom Ralph actually brings him salvation. And it is a fire set as a result of the boys' descent into barbarism that brings civilization back to the island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is then further irony in the &quot;civilized&quot; nature of the officer who comes to rescue them. In spite of his supposed intelligence and culture, he is unable to tell that the children are not playing, but engaged in brutal savagery. Furthermore, it then becomes clear that he is a serving &lt;em&gt;naval&lt;/em&gt; officer. This angel of civilization is, in fact, a warlike killer himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The irony in these comparisons serve to remind the reader just how thin the veneer of civilization really is: the major theme of the book. Social order in civilization is kept by the threat of violence, and it may be that we have to adapt to our primitive roots in order to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T04:54:32.833" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T04:54:32.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:05:05.977" Score="5" ViewCount="677" Body="&lt;p&gt;Italo Calvino's book &lt;em&gt;Invisible Cities&lt;/em&gt; is essentially a collection of descriptions of cities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find interesting is that the chapters follow a specific structure. There are ten categories of cities, labeled &quot;Cities &amp;amp; Memory&quot;, &quot;Cities &amp;amp; Desire&quot;, and so on. The book is also divided into ten chapters. It's hard to describe the structure, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities#Structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's wikipedia's description&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The matrix of eleven column themes and fifty-five subchapters (ten rows in chapters 1 and 9, five in all others) shows some interesting properties. Each column has five entries, rows only one, so there are fifty-five cities in all. The matrix of cities has a central element (Baucis). The pattern of cities is symmetric with respect to inversion about that center. Equivalently, it is symmetric against 180 degree rotations about Baucis. Inner chapters (2-8 inclusive) have diagonal cascades of five cities (e.g. Maurila through Euphemia in chapter 2). These five-city cascades are displaced by one theme column to the right as one proceeds to the next chapter. In order that the cascade sequence terminates (the book of cities is not infinite!) Calvino, in chapter 9, truncates the diagonal cascades in steps: Laudomia through Raissa is a cascade of four cities, followed by cascades of three, two, and one, necessitating ten cities in the final chapter. The same pattern is used in reverse in chapter 1 as the diagonal cascade of cities is born&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia also provides a helpful table that allows you to &quot;see&quot; the structure visually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: how does this structure contribute to the meaning of the book? In other words, why did Calvino spend so much time creating this structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:31:50.520" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:31:50.520" Title="Meaning of the chapter structure in Calvino's Invisible Cities" Tags="&lt;italo-calvino&gt;&lt;invisible-cities&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1233" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:06:59.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T17:06:59.863" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:06:59.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1234" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:06:59.863" Score="0" Body="For questions about the literary technique of irony, often used to convey a meaning that is contrary to what was written." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T00:32:39.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T00:32:39.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1235" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:08:28.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T17:08:28.397" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:08:28.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1236" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:08:28.397" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the 1972 novel 'Invisible Cities', originally written in Italian by Italian author Italo Calvino. Use this tag with [italo-calvino] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:28:36.817" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:28:36.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1120" CreationDate="2017-01-31T17:48:04.677" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is largely based on discussions I had with one of my professors and classmates about &lt;em&gt;The Kraken&lt;/em&gt; and Tennyson’s use of symbolism in general. We believe that &lt;em&gt;The Kraken&lt;/em&gt;, like other poems of Tennyson's, should be looked at with an idea of the political and social climes of the Victorian age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson’s work is often permeated with social and political commentary. We see many patriotic poems (&lt;em&gt;Ode on the death of the duke of Wellington&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade&lt;/em&gt;, and others), especially surrounding his period as Poet Laureate. It may seem easy to criticize him as upholding the political ideas, rigid class system and moral codes of the Victorian era, and in a sense, this is true. Several views that we today might consider backward, for instance, are evident in &lt;em&gt;Locksley Hall&lt;/em&gt;, in the narrator’s attitude towards women and non-Europeans - though these do not necessarily correspond with Tennyson’s own opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d specifically like to look at Tennyson’s views in revolution. F. J. Sypher’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002376?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Politics in the Poetry of Tennyson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; describes him as one who “praised revolution abroad, but not at home; who desired change, but not too fast”. Take a look at several lines from stanza CXIII of &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam A.H.H.&lt;/em&gt; (highlighted by Christopher Ricks in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=t4VeZpepqO0C&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tennyson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should licensed boldness gather force,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Becoming, when the time has birth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A lever to uplift the earth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And roll it in another course,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With thousand shocks that come and go,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With agonies, with energies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With overthrowings, and with cries&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And undulations to and fro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a description of some of the passions and views of his friend (the inspiration for the poem), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hallam&quot;&gt;Arthur Henry Hallam&lt;/a&gt;, this also seems to support the idea that Tennyson agreed with revolution “when the time has birth” - in other words, when the time is right. However, this is not necessarily going to be easy, and it will come “with thousand shocks”, and terrible pain for the people involved. We see a more negative protrayal of bloody revolution in &lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King&lt;/em&gt;, where revolt and civil war against King Arthur and his rule leads to his death, and the deaths of many in Camelot and the Round Table. Arthur, the spirit of Britain, was crushed by such abrupt change, just as the Victorian upper classes could be crushed by a revolt from below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=qdDheGj9oNgC&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tennyson and the Fabric of Englishness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; looks at even darker views on revolution and social change coming from the working classes. &lt;em&gt;You Ask Me, Why, Tho' Ill at Ease&lt;/em&gt; is forward and direct in criticizing worked organizations and worker rights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should banded unions persecute&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Opinion, and induce a time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When single thought is civil crime,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And individual freedom mute;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can consider Tennyson less than enamored with such an idea, and indeed, other works of his dealt with real revolutions in other countries that he felt could threaten Britain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My fellow students, professor and I chose to interpret &lt;em&gt;The Kraken&lt;/em&gt; in the political context, within the larger collection of Tennyson’s works. The Kraken itself may represent the working masses and their dreams of freedom, growing steadily larger under the elite upper-classes. Their revolutionary ideas of social change are in an “ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep”, as they always are during periods of political stability. However, their discontent, stuck in the depths of their minds and hearts, has grown bigger and bigger, until it is a monstrosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, Tennyson feels, this will all burst. The Kraken - the masses - will rise as ”the latter fire” of revolution begins, throwing the country and perhaps the world into turmoil. The death of the creature is also symbolic. It could be an indication of Tennyson hoping that any resulting chaos will be short-lived or will fizzle out, or that another “cycle” of peace (to quote Sypher) will begin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, this is simply one interpretation of the poem, a consideration of Tennyson’s views on social and political change as a whole. I hope I’ve convinced anyone reading this that Tennyson &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have varying thoughts on revolution and its implications, and that this may well be the underlying meaning of &lt;em&gt;The Kraken&lt;/em&gt;. While it can be argued that the poem is an explanation of religion or of our deepest feelings, or that it should simply be taken literally, I think that the idea of sudden political change is also an equally valid stance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T17:48:04.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1177" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:12:22.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That question is really the point. Viewed in the Heptapod fashion, there isn't really any meaning to the question of what it means to &quot;always know&quot; as distinct from &quot;learning at some point&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comparison to Lagrangian mechanics is helpful. Does the photon &quot;know&quot; that it's taking the shortest path to some point under the water? Or does it make a &quot;decision&quot;, instant by instant, &quot;learning&quot; that it should turn when it enters the water surface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two are equivalent formulations, just viewed from different points of view. One point of view has all of history built in from the beginning; the other studies moment by moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not really an apt way to view humanity. The thing that makes a human brain can't avoid its progressive approach to history. Being bound to a &quot;now&quot; is fundamental to how your brain works. To be free of it, you'd have to stop being &quot;you&quot;. Everything would change. It wouldn't give you the ability to predict the future; &quot;predicting the future&quot; would be something that wouldn't make any sense to you because you'd have redefined your self as something for which future and past are one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably not realistic to posit heptapods with brains that really work so much differently. (And if they were they'd be even less explicable.) But that's not really what the book is about. It's about grief and loss. How would you feel if you really could take the long term view: that every joyful birth was tempered with the grief of death, and vice versa? Can you get over loss by taking a different world-view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't entirely happy with the way that was lost in the film, treating the time sense as a magic power that could predict the future. It was perhaps necessary to add an element like that in transferring it to the medium of film, but the story is much more meditative. As with all good sci-fi, it's not really about aliens; it's about ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:12:22.300" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1933" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:31:24.343" Score="9" ViewCount="1724" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Golding's &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, Jack's tribe is clearly meant to be portrayed as savages. However, it was never clear (to me at least) whether they considered themselves savages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Jack's tribe view themselves as savages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*note: as recommended, I am clarifiying &quot;savage&quot; to mean uncultured and uncivilized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T11:11:41.677" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T20:33:00.797" Title="Did Jack's tribe view themselves as savages?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1240" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:54:27.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:54:27.350" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:54:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1241" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:54:27.350" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the science fantasy novel 'A Wrinkle in Time' (published 1962) by Madeleine L'Engle. Use this tag with the [madeleine-lengle] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:42:57.903" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:42:57.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1242" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:55:19.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:55:19.877" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:55:19.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1243" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:55:19.877" Score="0" Body="Questions about the brothers Grimm (Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859)) and their works. Questions about their works should be tagged under [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:18:05.373" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:18:05.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1244" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:56:13.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:56:13.950" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:56:13.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1245" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:56:13.950" Score="0" Body="For questions about David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) and his various literary works. His most famous works include &quot;Infinite Jest&quot; (1996) and his posthumous novel &quot;The Pale King&quot; (2011)." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T07:33:25.217" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T07:33:25.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:57:31.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T18:57:31.257" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T18:57:31.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T18:57:31.257" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the &quot;Hardy Boys&quot; book series, by Franklin W. Dixon. Use this tag with the [Franklin-w-dixon] tag." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T19:30:10.737" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T19:30:10.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1182" CreationDate="2017-01-31T19:13:14.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Cascabel rightly says, there is no direct equivalent to a &lt;em&gt;Pension&lt;/em&gt; in Britain - in terms of the particular facilities provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned, this is not the only work in which &lt;em&gt;Pension&lt;/em&gt; is not translated, either from Spanish or from French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation to, for example, &lt;em&gt;Bed &amp;amp; Breakfast&lt;/em&gt; would carry connotations to a British reader that are not intended by the original author.  Also, many British people are aware of what a &lt;em&gt;Pension&lt;/em&gt; provides through visiting Europe as a tourist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is best left untranslated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T19:13:14.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1052" CreationDate="2017-01-31T19:23:06.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Library of Babel cannot be taken as plausible, realistic worldbuilding. &quot;How can real-world languages exist&quot; is not going to have more of an answer than &quot;How does an immense number of bound books exist,&quot; or &quot;How can they know what &lt;em&gt;bread&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;pyramids&lt;/em&gt; are, when they can't possibly have either.&quot; There is &lt;em&gt;excellent&lt;/em&gt; reason for Borges to use real languages, but they're not in-universe reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borges uses languages here in order to demonstrate yet another facet of infinity: the idea that the already-infinite selection of books and combination can &lt;em&gt;furthermore&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted according to a near-infinite number of languages or cipher keys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a fundamental theme of the piece: levels upon levels of infinity; and the blurring between the meaninglessness of random chance, the immense significance that's possible when everything exists &lt;em&gt;somewhere&lt;/em&gt;. As the books are infinite, and therefore meaningless &lt;em&gt;and also&lt;/em&gt; hiding books of impossible truth and value; the ways to &lt;em&gt;interpret&lt;/em&gt; an impenetrable book are also infinite, and therefore each book is both meaningless &lt;em&gt;and also&lt;/em&gt; possibly hiding impossible truth and value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the brilliance of this piece is in the crafting of clear, intuitive imagery, for impossible, paradoxical concepts. In this case, &lt;strong&gt;foreign languages are &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the imagery Borges needed.&lt;/strong&gt; It's an amazingly simple, elegant, &lt;em&gt;graspable&lt;/em&gt; way to convey the idea that gibberish to one person might hold meaning for another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my opinion that any modification of this concept might have made the story more plausible, but would have made its imagery weaker, less immediate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consider how using imaginary languages -- which would certainly be more plausible -- would be a stumbling block. It would take the reader time and effort to understand what is being conveyed. It would make sense, but it wouldn't be &lt;em&gt;immediately intuitive&lt;/em&gt;, which is key here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Non-language models - e.g., maybe all the books are written in cryptographic cyphers, which can be decoded - are absolutely possible, and Borges touches on these (e.g. with the repeating MCVs, and how they &lt;em&gt;struggle&lt;/em&gt; to come up with some form of language under which the text could conceivably make sense), but would take much more explanation and would be less vivid by orders of magnitude.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In contrast, consider how &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt; Borges's description is: &quot;A Samoyedic Lithuanian dialect of Guarani, with classical Arabian inflections.&quot; In the real world, this would be an utterly bizarre, implausible combination. &lt;em&gt;That's the point.&lt;/em&gt; By taking familiar elements and combining them at random, Borges arrives, again and again, at his intriguing portrait of infinity. And for that to work here, you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to be able to immediately grasp the image he's created, and how very strange it is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, those languages should not technically exist within the Library. But the Library is a dazzling thought experiment; not a &quot;real&quot; or rigorously-speculated world. In the service of the thought experiment, real languages serve Borges far better than imaginary ones could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T19:31:41.563" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T19:31:41.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1239" CreationDate="2017-01-31T20:07:19.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier, Jack did not think they were savages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I agree with Ralph. We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all,&#xA;  we’re not savages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later they become more savage and the book starts referring to them as savages.  The only thing I can really find is this quote of Bill's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Now we can’t have the fire up there—because we can’t have the fire&#xA;  up there—we need more people to keep it going. Let’s go to this feast&#xA;  and tell them the fire’s hard on the rest of us. And the hunting and all&#xA;  that, being savages I mean—it must be jolly good fun.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, the savages don't say much beyond &quot;kill the pig&quot; and &quot;beast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T20:07:19.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1181" CreationDate="2017-01-31T20:44:34.503" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;They cut his work a lot, and he couldn't do much about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (T&amp;amp;C), was especially edited. The original manuscript contained 152 poems, but only 86 were actually published in the books. The others were published two years later in 1925 under the title '&amp;amp;' - Cummings wanted the original book to be titled 'Tulips &amp;amp; Chimneys (with an ampersand)' but was overruled by his editor - Thomas Seltzer. Thomas changed the title to just Tulips and Chimneys, and then published the later poems under the title &amp;amp; (changing 'ampersand' to just 'and')&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Cummings reviewed the cut-down T&amp;amp;C, he was unhappy. However, he conceded, but insisted that the original order of the poems was kept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in answer to your question - yes, they knew about his intent and disagreed. I assume thy had conversations about it though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulips_and_Chimneys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/e-e-cummings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GxIBDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA130&amp;amp;lpg=PA130&amp;amp;dq=Tulips+and+Chimneys+editor+cuts&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=QabiC24fZc&amp;amp;sig=ZwjKrsApXWS_8p0Ep_c0XxxPa5Y&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjz28jRnO3RAhUOOsAKHSldAjQQ6AEIITAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=cuts&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T22:03:45.590" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T22:03:45.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T21:59:28.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T21:59:28.290" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T21:59:28.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T21:59:28.290" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Theodor Seuss Geisel, also known as Dr. Seuss (1904-1991), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T04:12:16.620" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T04:12:16.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1254" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:00:19.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:00:19.503" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:00:19.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1255" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:00:19.503" Score="0" Body="For questions about Young Goodman Brown, the short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:33:14.693" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:33:14.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1256" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:02:13.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:02:13.890" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:02:13.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1257" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:02:13.890" Score="0" Body="For questions about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book by Robert M. Pirsig." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:42:28.857" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:42:28.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1258" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:02:35.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:02:35.990" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:02:35.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1259" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:02:35.990" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Roman poet Virgil (70 BC - 19 BC), or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T20:44:49.180" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T20:44:49.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1260" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:03:01.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:03:01.337" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:03:01.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1261" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:03:01.337" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Henry Timrod and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T00:41:05.123" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T00:41:05.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1262" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:03:19.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:03:19.697" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:03:19.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1263" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:03:19.697" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Road Not Taken, the poem by Robert Frost." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:33:37.780" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:33:37.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1264" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:05:03.033" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:05:03.033" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:05:03.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1265" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:05:03.033" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Nose, the short story by Nikolai Gogol." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:51:14.507" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:51:14.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1266" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:05:35.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sylvia Plath was a was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, though she was most famous for her poetry. She committed suicide at the age of 31 (she lived from 1932 to 1963). Her most famous works are two collections of poetry - &lt;em&gt;The Colossus and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ariel&lt;/em&gt; - and a semi-autobiographical novel called &lt;em&gt;The Bell Jar&lt;/em&gt;. She won a posthumous Pulitzer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her work often uses alliteration and rhyme with violent or disturbing imagery. Some of her poems, on the other hand, were landscape pieces, describing, for example, Scottish moors. A lot of her works reference events in her daily life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T18:54:30.977" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T18:54:30.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1267" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:05:35.907" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Sylvia Plath and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:18:52.440" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:18:52.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="960" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:17:42.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1992/09/27/movies/film-of-bindlestiffs-bad-times-mice-and-men.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NYT Article&lt;/a&gt;, Steinbeck's wife Elaine asked him this very question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His answer was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For one good reason. She's not a person, she's a symbol. She has no function, except to be a foil – and a danger to Lennie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article was written by Jay Parini, who also wrote a biography about Steinbeck. Since there are no references in the article, I emailed Parini to see if he could remember where he got the quote from, but he could not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="256" LastEditorUserId="256" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T13:09:02.853" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T13:09:02.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1269" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:47:26.250" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T22:47:26.250" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T22:47:26.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1270" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T22:47:26.250" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the works of Italo Calvino, the Italian journalist and writer of the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novel 'Invisible Cities'. Use this tag with [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:29:25.123" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:29:25.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1271" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-01-31T23:58:27.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in installments in 1866. It follows the tangled moral and mental path of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who murders a moneylender with an axe after convincing himself that this was a morally justifiable act. It has been translated from Russian into many other languages, and remains one of the most-read works of Russian literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-01-31T23:58:27.720" LastActivityDate="2017-01-31T23:58:27.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1272" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-01-31T23:58:27.720" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel &quot;Crime and Punishment&quot; by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Not to be used for questions about any non-literary (e.g. screen) adaptations except as they relate to literature. Use in conjunction with [fyodor-dostoevsky] and [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:03:16.057" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:03:16.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T00:37:49.937" Score="10" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The God of Small Things&lt;/em&gt; by Arundhati Roy, Velutha is a member of the &quot;Untouchables&quot; - the social class at the bottom of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find slightly paradoxical is that he holds employment in Mammachi's factory as a carpenter. This is defying social norms in so many ways - he's educated (well, as a carpenter, but this sort of education is already more than what society says he can get), and has a pretty good job (again, good for his class). Oddly enough, this is okay for Mammachi and Baby Kochamma. We see the  latter file false complaints against Velutha that ultimately kills him after he defies social norms again (he has a relationship with a woman of higher class).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why did Velutha have &quot;good&quot; employment to begin with? From my understanding, it didn't affect Mammachi or Baby Kochamma that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T16:42:18.057" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T16:42:18.057" Title="Why did Velutha hold a relatively high employment status for his social class?" Tags="&lt;arundhati-roy&gt;&lt;the-god-of-small-things&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1274" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T00:46:21.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T00:46:21.067" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T00:46:21.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1275" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T00:46:21.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Indian writer and political activist Arundhati Roy (born 1961), or her life as a writer. She is famous for her novel 'TheGod of All Small Things'." OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T23:22:43.163" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:22:43.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1276" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T00:49:17.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T00:49:17.917" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T00:49:17.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1277" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T00:49:17.917" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things, written by Arundhati Roy. Published in 1997, the novel tells the story of two twins navigating Indian society and experiencing issues such as societal class, family and love." OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T00:57:34.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T00:57:34.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T01:11:03.003" Score="10" ViewCount="920" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://themanbookerprize.com/&quot;&gt;Man Booker Prize&lt;/a&gt; is often cited as one of the most prestigious awards for English literature. The selection process is supposed to be highly rigorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's the process to be nominated for the prize. Surely, no one can just submit a nomination just like that. What's the process for being nominated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T16:11:46.600" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T21:58:46.253" Title="What is the process to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;booker-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1278" CreationDate="2017-02-01T01:30:20.073" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nominations must be made by the publisher, and there are many restrictions on eligibility.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the rules at the Man* Booker Prize website &lt;a href=&quot;http://themanbookerprize.com/submissions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with specific rules for the English Man Booker Prize (for books originally written in English) and the International Man Booker Prize (for books translated from other languages) available as PDF files &lt;a href=&quot;http://themanbookerprize.com/sites/manbosamjo/files/uploadedfiles/files/161208%20MB2017%20Rules%20And%20Entry%20Form%20FINAL.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://themanbookerprize.com/sites/manbosamjo/files/uploadedfiles/files/160802%20MBI2017%20Rules%20And%20Entry%20Form%20REVISED%20-%20USE.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;strong&gt;English-language&lt;/strong&gt; Man Booker Prize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The judges are responsible for compiling a longlist of 12 or 13 books – ‘The Man Booker Dozen’ – and from this a shortlist of six books from which they then choose the winner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each shortlisted author receives £2,500 and a designer bound copy of his or her novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The winning author receives a further £50,000. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The prize may not be divided or withheld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Publishers’ entry quotas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Novels to be considered by the judges can only be submitted by the &#xA;  publishers identified in 1a. below. The number of novels a publisher can &#xA;  submit will depend on that publisher’s inclusion in longlists from 2012 &#xA;  to 2016, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;1 submission - publishers with no longlisting &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;2 submissions - publishers with 1 or 2 longlisting(s)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;3 submissions - publishers with 3 or 4 longlistings &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;4 submissions - publishers with 5 or more longlistings&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Please see the last page for the 2011 to 2015 longlists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the &lt;strong&gt;International&lt;/strong&gt; Man Booker Prize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The judges read the submissions and are responsible for compiling a &#xA;  longlist of 12 or 13 books, and from this a shortlist of six books from which &#xA;  they then choose a winner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The winner's prize purse is £50,000 divided equally between the author and the translator. There will be a prize of £2,000 each of the shortlisted titles divided equally between the author and the translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The prize may not be divided or withheld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no restriction on the number of submissions per publisher but this &#xA;  will be kept under review and may change in future years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, there are also several pages of regulations governing which books and publishers are eligible, the form the submission has to take, etc. For obvious reasons I'm not going to copy and paste all of this here, but I will note the following paragraph (&lt;code&gt;1j&lt;/code&gt;) which appears in both documents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The decision of the Administrator of the prize as to whether a work is eligible shall be final and binding and no correspondence will be entered into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The Man Group ended their sponsorship of the prize in 2019. From 2020 onwards the prize will revert to being The Booker Prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="8525" LastEditDate="2020-02-10T21:58:46.253" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T21:58:46.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2017-02-01T02:18:36.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author could be alluding to Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2264/pg2264.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; (Act IV, Scene 1, with the witches)&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A shew of eight Kings, and Banquo last, with a glasse in his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Macb. Thou art too like the Spirit of Banquo: Down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thy Crowne do's seare mine Eye-bals. And thy haire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou other Gold-bound-brow, is like the first:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A third, is like the former. &lt;strong&gt;Filthy Hagges&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why do you shew me this? - A fourth? Start eyes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What will the Line stretch out to'th' cracke of Doome?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2264/pg2264.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; (Act IV, Scene 1, emphasis mine)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Shakespeare is using the verb &lt;em&gt;stretch&lt;/em&gt; in a very similar manner, having a character inquire of the witches whether something (in this case, a family dynasty of kings, each succeeding his father, which have appeared in an apparition) will last until doomsday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Filthy Hagges&quot; (i.e. the witches) could be being referenced or alluded to by Frost's gloomy imagery that could be an apt metaphor to describe a stereotypical witch's lair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier in this scene in Macbeth, we see some tree and forest related imagery, which could map to Frost's use of arboreal language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thunder 3 Apparation, a &lt;strong&gt;Childe Crowned, with a Tree in his hand&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is this, that rises like the issue of a King,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And weares vpon his Baby-brow, the round&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And top of Soueraignty?&#xA;    All. Listen, but speake not too't&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;3 Appar. Be Lyon metled, proud, and take no care:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who chafes, who frets, or where Conspirers are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Macbeth shall neuer vanquish'd be, vntill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Great Byrnam Wood, to high Dunsmane Hill&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shall come against him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2264/pg2264.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; (Act IV, Scene 1, emphasis mine)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T02:18:36.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1273" CreationDate="2017-02-01T02:21:04.940" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not a professional historian, so my knowledge of the times is a bit vague and from school textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The events of Estha and Rahel's childhood takes place in the 1960s. That is more than ten years since India gained Independence, and thirty years since the death of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narayana_Guru&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sri Narayana Guru&lt;/a&gt;. Sri Narayana Guru had started a social reform movement in Kerala rejecting casteism and aiming for emancipation of the lower castes and casteless people. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahatma Gandhi&lt;/a&gt; also strongly supported uplifting the untouchables, as did a number of other leaders of the Indian Independence movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The net effect was that, &lt;em&gt;officially&lt;/em&gt;, there was no discrimination towards them, and indeed, the government had to undertake various measures for their welfare. While there was a lot of discrimination, the lower castes were not actively prohibited from education, or even prestigious jobs. Progress was slow, but there was progress. Further, Velutha's age makes it likely that his birth or childhood coincided with Sri Narayana Guru's life, so Velutha may have been a direct beneficiary of his movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor would be the Communist movement. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerala#Post_colonial_period&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kerala&lt;/a&gt;, the Indian state where the story takes place, was officially created in 1956, and has &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; alternated between Congress and Communist governments since. Kerala's first government was Communist, which started radical reforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lower-caste leaders of the time, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._R._Ambedkar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Ambedkar&lt;/a&gt;, had complained about the paternalistic attitude of the upper-caste people towards those beneath, so it may also be possible that Ammu's family maybe indulging in this by &quot;letting&quot; the untouchable get a good job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, the events of &lt;em&gt;The God of Small Things&lt;/em&gt; takes place in a Kerala that was well on the way to social reform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, my father, who would be of a similar age to Estha and Rahel, and is of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezhava#Position_in_society&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a similar situation to Velutha&lt;/a&gt;, attended the local public school, which was considered one of the best in the district, and an engineering college, and go on to get a decent job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T02:55:23.063" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T02:55:23.063" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="872" CreationDate="2017-02-01T06:25:25.880" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I think that his Albinism was a major point of the plot. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1099&quot;&gt;Yannis mentioned&lt;/a&gt;, the strain on his and his father's relationship led to him murdering his father. Not only that, but it is the only reason Silas was not the best weapon. If you can work only at night, then that limits your opportunities very much. And if he wanted to take the keystone from Saint-Sulpice, he could have gone in on one of the off days. His coming at night gave Sister Sandrine enough shock and suspicion to call the Senechaux. And if he hadn't come to the Chetau Ville at night, Landon and co would have been out the next day, someplace or other. This would kill the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T22:06:05.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2017-02-01T06:53:05.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems a bit unclear.  In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.douglasadams.com/cgi-bin/mboard/info/dnathread.cgi?1957,1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the author's own words&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ahem. All I can say is that it was as clear as day to me when I wrote it and now I can't figure it out myself. Sorry about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on that discussion thread someone quotes from an FAQ written on an alt.fan site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the book, Kubla Khan has a second part. The book is not actually set in our existence. It is set in an existence in which the second part of Kubla Khan exists. This second part of the poem tells the ghost about the existence of the time machine and how to travel back and stop the ship from exploding. As we well know the explosion of the ship is what caused life to begin on this miserable little planet of ours. When Dirk and Reg realised this they simply went forward in time to when Coleridge was writing the second part of Kubla Khan and stopped him. Dirk just interrupted him and talked so much that Coleridge forgot what the second part was going to be about and therefore could not finish it! This change of history sent reality back into our perspective and the human race lived on (Yay, yippee!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That in and of itself doesn't quite make sense to me either but here is what I figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, as for the change in the poem happening billions of years after the ghost heads back to the ship, Adams seems to be following a sort of time-travel &quot;synchronicity&quot; logic which says if someone goes back to the past and takes 1 hour to change things, you have 1 hour to do things in that continuum (no matter where in time you are) until the change happens.  From Chapter 34:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How long,&quot; said Dirk, quite calmly, &quot;would you guess that it's going to take that fat self-deluding bastard to reach his ship?  Because that's how long we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This chapter ends with them trying to figure out what to do and a book (which is surely the Coleridge anthology that Michael took out earlier) falling out of Michael's discarded jacket.  This causes them to realize they need to stop Coleridge from completing Kubla Khan.  Since we don't actually get to see the second part of Kubla Khan, it seems hard to say exactly why this is, but here are two guesses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second part of Kubla Khan contains the key to building the time machine, so this interruption prevents the ghost from going back in time.  This would explain why the time-travel device no longer works at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second part of Kubla Khan is what makes Michael sympathetic to the ghost's story.  This POV is espoused in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/145101&quot;&gt;this SFF answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T06:53:05.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="775" CreationDate="2017-02-01T07:21:14.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The doors of death are the only &lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; pathway to Tartarus. Between both series, four entrances to Tartarus have been shown. One in the Underworld (main entrance), one in the Labyrinth (destroyed/sealed off),  one underneath Rome, and one inside Epirus, the House of Hades (via the Doors of Death, which have now been removed). As you can see there are several pits or holes which lead to Tartarus. It is through these holes that the monsters come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Riordan Wikia also states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The map of Tartarus shows a door leading to the mortal world, which is presumably used by monsters after reforming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1U1p9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1U1p9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A map of Tartarus&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Riordan Wikia&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Books&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:53:41.423" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:53:41.423" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1478" CreationDate="2017-02-01T08:15:54.210" Score="19" ViewCount="941" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devdas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devdas&lt;/a&gt; works in Hindi literature analysis always use the term &lt;em&gt;Devdas syndrome&lt;/em&gt;. Like &quot;X work is suffering from Devdas syndrome&quot; or &quot;Y work tackled it quite well&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is this Devdas syndrome exactly? Is there an exact definition of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/bollywoods-hegemony/article2275483.ece&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Bollywood's Hegemony,&quot; Hindu.com:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To think that one of Benegal’s best and most self-reflexive films was a subversive take on the Devdas syndrome in “Suraj Ka Satwa Ghoda”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T06:39:52.023" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:47:37.400" Title="What is Devdas syndrome?" Tags="&lt;hindi-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1287" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T09:41:53.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sequel series to &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;, by Rick Riordan. It has 5 main books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Son of Neptune&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mark of Athena&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of Hades&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Blood of Olympus&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series focuses on Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, Hazel Levesque, Piper McLean, Leo Valdez, Jason Grace, and Frank Zhang's attempt to stop the goddess Gaea from rising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T10:44:00.527" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T10:44:00.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1288" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T09:41:53.127" Score="0" Body="The sequel series to Percy Jackson and the Olympians, by Rick Riordan. It has 5 main books: The Lost Hero, The Son of Neptune, The Mark of Athena, The House of Hades, and The Blood of Olympus. Use this tag for questions that pertain specifically to this series. Use in conjunction with [rick-riordan]." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:08:20.547" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:08:20.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1289" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T12:46:14.633" Score="9" ViewCount="7801" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, the conch is shattered when Piggy dies. Before that, it was held by Ralph, the &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; leader of the boys. What does the conch symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="360" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T12:48:00.890" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T05:30:11.877" Title="What is the symbolism of the conch in Lord of the Flies?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="121" CreationDate="2017-02-01T12:46:29.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is some history of the early publication of his diary in various languages to be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=y4HpAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22with%20respect%20to%20the%20personal%20history%22&amp;amp;q=%22with%20respect%20to%20the%20personal%20history%22&amp;amp;f=false#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22with%20respect%20to%20the%20personal%20history%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to the First Edition&lt;/a&gt; pages clvi-clxviii of the English translation, &lt;em&gt;The Three Voyages of William Barents to the Arctic Regions, (1594, 1595, and 1596)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first publication relating to the voyages was in Amsterdam in 1598, in Dutch. The were further editions in 1599 and 1605. Latin, French, Italian and German translations followed within a year or two of the first edition. The original English translation seems to date from 1609.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="374" LastEditorUserId="374" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T12:54:34.613" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T12:54:34.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1289" CreationDate="2017-02-01T12:55:52.737" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conch symbolizes leadership and civilization throughout the story. In the beginning, Ralph uses it as an extension of his power. For example from the first chapter after he is elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ralph smiled and held up the conch for silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph uses it throughout the story to hold meetings and even makes the rule that people could only talk if they have the conch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And another thing. We can’t have everybody talking at once. Well have to have ‘Hands up’ like at school.”&#xA;  He held the conch before his face and glanced round the mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Then I’ll give him the conch.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Conch?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That’s what this shell’s called. I'll give the conch to the next person to speak. He can hold it when he’s speaking.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy's death crosses the line from the boys being civilized to completely uncivilized. That is the point of no return. The shell is even described as being &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt; than simply being destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the conch exploded into a thousand white fragments and ceased to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T14:16:04.147" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:16:04.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1297" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:35:51.337" Score="12" ViewCount="7590" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time&lt;/em&gt; is not supposed to be about autism, Asperger's or the autism spectrum, it does feature it prominently in that Christopher, the main character, is on the spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it wasn't clear to me how much Mark Haddon knew about this topic.  Did he have any personal experiences with autism that led to him writing TCIOTDITNT?  If not, how much research did he do on the topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="353" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T18:36:14.123" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T18:36:14.123" Title="How much experience does Mark Haddon have with the autism spectrum?" Tags="&lt;curious-incident-dog-in-night-time&gt;&lt;mark-haddon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1293" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:37:31.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T14:37:31.367" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:37:31.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1294" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:37:31.367" Score="0" Body="For questions about *The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,* the 2003 novel by Mark Haddon." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T15:04:46.863" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T15:04:46.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1295" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:38:10.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T14:38:10.580" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:38:10.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1296" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:38:10.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British writer Mark Haddon or about any of his literary works, most famously &quot;The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time&quot;." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T16:23:23.183" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:23:23.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1292" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:49:17.053" Score="13" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Almost none.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Haddon has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.markhaddon.com/aspergers-and-autism&quot;&gt;spoken about this&lt;/a&gt; on his website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;unsurprisingly, i'm often asked to talk about asperger’s and autism or to become involved with organisations who work on behalf of people with asperger’s and autism, many of whom do wonderful work. but i always decline, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) &lt;strong&gt;i know very little about the subject. i did no research for curious incident&lt;/strong&gt; (other than photographing the interiors of swindon and paddington stations). &lt;strong&gt;i’d read oliver sacks’s essay about temple grandin and a handful of newspaper and magazine articles about, or by, people with asperger’s and autism. i deliberately didn’t add to this list. imagination always trumps research.&lt;/strong&gt; i thought that if i could make Christopher real to me then he’d be real to readers. i gave him some rules to live by and some character traits and opinions, all of which i borrowed from people i know, none of whom would be labelled as having a disability. judging by the reaction, it seems to have worked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also said that he didn't consider the idea of autism specifically to be important to his story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2) curious incident is not a book about asperger’s. it’s a novel whose central character describes himself as ‘a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties’. indeed he never uses the words ‘asperger’s’ or ‘autism’ (&lt;strong&gt;i slightly regret that fact that the word ‘asperger’s’ was used on the cover&lt;/strong&gt;). if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. it’s as much a novel about us as it is about christopher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;labels say nothing about a person. they say only how the rest of us categorise that person. good literature is always about peeling labels off. and treating real people with dignity is always about peeling the labels off. a diagnosis may lead to practical help. but genuinely understanding another human being involves talking and listening to them and finding out what makes them an individual, not what makes them part of a group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;i passionately believe this and i’ve said it repeatedly in many different forms. &lt;strong&gt;to become a spokesperson for those with asperger’s or autism, or to present myself as some kind of expert in the field, would completely undermine this, and make me look like a fool into the bargain.&lt;/strong&gt; i would much rather spend my time writing more novels, standing up for difference and trying to understand outsiders who see the world in surprising and revealing ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All emphasis is mine in the above quotes; the capitalisation is his.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual caveat that authors aren't always telling the truth about their work does apply here, but I believe this probably &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; true. Claiming that he hadn't done any research when in fact he had would be a very strange thing to do; I would expect the other way round to be much more likely.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Interestingly, I also found &lt;a href=&quot;http://iautistic.com/autism-myths-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time.php&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; written by someone who actually had Asperger's Syndrome, which criticises Haddon's portrayal and says it's unrealistic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WARNING: THIS BOOK WILL NOT HELP YOU UNDERSTAND REAL AUTISTICS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mark Haddon did not use the word &quot;autism&quot; in his book, let alone claim to portray autism accurately. He even spoke publicly against using his book as an autism textbook. Certainly, he was not at fault. I have nothing against Mark Haddon or his work. In fact, I finally understood enough about non-autistic people to enjoy it in 2006.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, seeing that the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has became very popular, I feel that I must explain why it should not to be taken seriously when many people (including teachers and autism professionals) recommend it as reading material on autism. Instead of a fictitious novel, I recommend reading real autism reference books by authors like Dr. Temple Grandin and Donna Williams. They have many accurate and useful first-hand insights on autism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While reading the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I noted that Christopher is highly self-aware, and could articulate his thoughts so clearly. This was very different from my own experience. At his age, I was still mostly in a state of sleepwalking. I was unaware of my own emotions, body and situational awareness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had Asperger's Syndrome and was very high functioning. I went through normal schooling without any help, medication or trouble with the school authorities. The lower-functioning people with autism probably have even less self-awareness than me. However, Mark Haddon could not have had a story if Christopher could not able to convey to us what is happening within him. Thus, his depictions of Christopher's inner state are used to advance his story and interest viewers. They are not meant to represent the autistic consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This writer goes on at length about the differences between Asperger's Syndrome in reality and the way it's portrayed in &lt;em&gt;The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time&lt;/em&gt;, including by analysing several passages from the book. I'm not going to quote all of that here, but suffice it to say that it definitely supports Haddon's claim of having pretty much no real experience of the autism spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T16:01:00.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:01:00.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1298" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:53:15.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T14:53:15.690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T14:53:15.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1299" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T14:53:15.690" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time,&quot; a 2003 novel by Mark Haddon. Use this tag with the [mark-haddon] tag." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T09:29:02.420" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T09:29:02.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2017-02-01T15:26:41.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never thought of this line in reference to the Parthenon, and to me that makes no sense.  Here's my interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I've always viewed this line is as saying &quot;every high point in hardships that I must face.&quot;  The poem goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like a sick eagle looking at the sky. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker is ready to die, obviously, because of these godlike hardships.  He is like an eagle in that he's tired of flying, sick of having to keep going, since it's such an effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hard times that the speaker is going through are being described as pinnacles, like walking over the crest of a hill.  It gets harder and harder (&quot;steeper&quot;) because the tension releases at the pinnacle, but he cannot rest because he sees the next pinnacle, the next godlike hardship, coming up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's like the light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be another tunnel full of darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T15:26:41.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1150" CreationDate="2017-02-01T16:41:26.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to read through the enjambed line. It might help to remove the carriage return:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And each imagined pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship tells me I must die&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further... it helps to realize that &quot;steep&quot; is being used here in a non-standard way, largely as a synonym for &quot;pinnacle&quot; (or at least, the steep sides of a mountain leading up to the pinnacle.) It's in there because it rhymes with &quot;sleep&quot;. (I'm not crazy about that; it feels forced to me. English just isn't a great language for writing triple rhymes like the ones in the poem. Try Italian.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you can read &quot;pinnacle and steep of godlike hardship&quot; is &quot;each difficult thing that has to be done&quot;. And in context: he sees the various battles depicted in the marbles, and that puts his imagination in mind of his own eventual death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that Keats was seeing the marbles in London, rather than on the Parthenon itself. Which gives him a great view of them, at eye level, but they've been removed from context. (Keats never made it to Greece. I don't believe he ever left England. He would surely have known the Parthenon from pictures in books, but I don't know if he would have really connected the marbles to the Parthenon itself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T16:41:26.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:15:41.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:15:41.607" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:15:41.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:15:41.607" Score="0" Body="Gerrit De Veer was an officer on Willem Barentsz's journeys. He kept a diary on his travels, which was later published. Use this tag for questions about him and his diary." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:16:27.110" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:16:27.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1304" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:29:58.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:29:58.533" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:29:58.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1305" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:29:58.533" Score="0" Body="For questions about literary awards, awarded to authors for their work in literature. Consider using specific award tags if you're question involves a specific award, such as [booker-prize]. Use for questions about the award, not for questions about books that received this award." OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:40:20.493" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:40:20.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1306" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:33:06.763" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:33:06.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:33:06.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1307" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:33:06.763" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Man Booker Prize, a prestigious literary award given to authors who demonstrate exemplary original works in literature, and who have published their work in the United Kingdom. Use for questions about the award, not for questions about books that received this award." OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T17:39:40.943" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T17:39:40.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1308" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:36:00.520" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albert Camus&lt;/a&gt; started his writing career as a journalist, and published both works of literature and philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L’Étranger&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1942, &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;): his first novel; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Mythe de Sisyphe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1942; &lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;): a philosophical essay;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Misunderstanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Malentendu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1943; &lt;em&gt;The Misunderstanding&lt;/em&gt;): a play;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caligula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1944): a play;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettres_%C3%A0_un_ami_allemand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lettres à un ami allemand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1945); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Peste&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1947; &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;): a novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_Siege&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'État de siège&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1948; &lt;em&gt;The State of Siege&lt;/em&gt;): a play;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Just_Assassins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Justes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1949; &lt;em&gt;The Just Assassins&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Righteous&lt;/em&gt;): a play;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Homme révolté&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1951): philosophy;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_(Camus_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1956): a philosophical novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_and_the_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'exil et le royaume&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1957; &lt;em&gt;Exile and the Kingdom&lt;/em&gt;): a collection of short stories;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possessed_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Possédés&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1959; &lt;em&gt;The Possessed&lt;/em&gt;): a play based on Dostoyevski's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Possessed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Happy_Death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La mort heureuse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1971; &lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt;): a novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Premier homme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1994; &lt;em&gt;The First Man&lt;/em&gt;): an unfinished novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:36:35.177" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:36:35.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1309" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T17:36:00.520" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Algerian-born French philosopher and author Albert Camus (1913 – 1960) or his life as a writer. His works should be tagged with [french-literature]. He is best known for his works 'The Stranger', 'The Plague' and others. " OwnerUserId="353" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T14:42:13.790" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T14:42:13.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T18:02:01.363" Score="10" ViewCount="2911" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is not why they call their father Atticus as much as why he lets them do this, and what this says about their characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I come from--and, I think, in 1930s Alabama--it is not common to let kids call their parents by their first names.  Usually the parents stop this from happening, and Atticus presumably made a decision not to stop them.  &lt;strong&gt;Why did he make this decision, and what does this say about his character?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T19:01:55.320" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T19:01:55.320" Title="Why do Jem and Scout call their father Atticus?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1312" CreationDate="2017-02-01T18:30:52.117" Score="5" ViewCount="1429" Body="&lt;p&gt;The influence of &quot;The Hero with a Thousand Faces&quot; by Joseph Campbell is well documented. I have picked up the version published in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1577315936&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Collected Works of Joseph Campbell&quot; series&lt;/a&gt; and have sadly found it to be disjointed and in many cases extremely difficult to understand or find the through-line of thoughts or ideas of 'The Hero's Journey'- in fact, the clearest representation of the journey I can find in this volume is in the table of contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not critiquing the work itself (due responsibility should first be placed on me, the reader); however, given the 'Collected Works' version I am forced to wonder if there is a volume for background reading from Campbell that makes this volume more clear? In other words - in this book, have I walked into Part II or III when I'm expected to have read Part I and I simply don't have the necessary background the author is expecting? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="378" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T19:48:28.480" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:48:28.480" Title="Is there &quot;required&quot; background reading for &quot;The Hero With a Thousand Faces&quot;?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;the-hero-with-1000-faces&gt;&lt;joseph-campbell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1311" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:07:33.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the best way to understand &lt;em&gt;Hero&lt;/em&gt; is to read or watch &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0385418868&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Myth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; the book is a transcript of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00A4E8E1O&quot;&gt;series of interviews by the same name&lt;/a&gt;. Bill Moyers sat with Campbell to discuss &lt;em&gt;Hero,&lt;/em&gt; and frankly I wouldn't have attempted &lt;em&gt;Hero&lt;/em&gt; without it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Myth&lt;/em&gt; is also a bit rambling, but it's two people &lt;em&gt;talking,&lt;/em&gt; which is a lot easier to understand than the dense copy of the original book. Once you've listened to two smart people just talk about this stuff, you learn the idea of it and you can understand the disjointed &quot;here's a bunch of stuff I found&quot; nature of &lt;em&gt;Hero.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Separately, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/193290736X&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Writer's Journey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a really good explanation of the Hero's Journey as a structure, which will help you to understand Campbell as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:07:33.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2017-02-01T19:18:21.363" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Author Daniel Handler maintains that a solution exists, and can be derived from the books.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.futurehorsepod.com/snicket/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview on the &lt;em&gt;Unfortunate Associates&lt;/em&gt; podcast&lt;/a&gt;, Handler maintains that a solution does exist, and that approximately one reader a year writes to him with the correct solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the transcript, beginning at 50:30 minutes into the audio (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Daniel Handler:&lt;/strong&gt; You know, it's interesting to me because I keep -- and perhaps we'll see during this calendar year if it will be different -- but every year exactly one reader writes to me and says, I've figured out what is in the sugar bowl, because of this reference and this reference and this reference, and they've completely figured it out. &lt;strong&gt;And so I'm proud that I've made an obscure enough mystery that no-one seems to grasp it, but it's still graspable.&lt;/strong&gt; At one per year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B (host):&lt;/strong&gt; And they're right? The people who write in, they're right? You agree that there's a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Handler:&lt;/strong&gt; Oh yeah. Many people have theories that are wrong. &lt;strong&gt;No, I mean, there's definitely an answer.&lt;/strong&gt; There's some mysteries that don't have a clear answer in my head, but--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B:&lt;/strong&gt; If I were to guess, would you say I was right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Handler:&lt;/strong&gt; I'll ask you this. If you were to guess if I'd tell you if you were right or not...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interview is from January 2017, soon after the first season of the Netflix TV adaptation was released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's possible he's still just being perverse, and pretending a solution exists. But he seems perfectly candid, so it seems likely we can take his word for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T19:33:36.810" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T19:33:36.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2824" CreationDate="2017-02-01T20:30:13.310" Score="14" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Rebel&lt;/em&gt;, Camus asserts that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and of production, are bourgeois myths, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Camus defining these themes as &quot;bourgeois myths&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:15:11.783" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T06:00:42.013" Title="Why is Camus asserting that &quot;Marx scientific Messianism&quot; is Bourgeois?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1315" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1316" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:16:12.513" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;, when Piper wakes up from being a gold statue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Piper woke up cold and shivering.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She’d had the worst dream about an old guy with donkey ears chasing her around and shouting, &lt;em&gt;You’re it!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Lost Hero&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 33&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She obviously wasn't aware of being gold, i.e. she couldn't look out her own eyes and she wasn't a disembodied consciousness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at other golden statues like Midas's barber, they (presumably) look the same as they did a long time ago (or else somebody would have noticed that they're a pile of dust).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piper wasn't aware of time passing, but she dreamt, so she had some brain activity thus time was passing for her. But what about the other people? Does time just move really slow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T21:32:55.087" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T21:32:55.087" Title="Does time pass for people turned to gold?" Tags="&lt;rick-riordan&gt;&lt;the-heroes-of-olympus&gt;&lt;the-lost-hero&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1315" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:20:11.673" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We don't know.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There aren't enough canon points to answer this. We only have Piper's pov on this, which makes it seem like time does pass, but the others make it seem like time doesn't pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My best guess&lt;/strong&gt; is that it's rather like being immortal. Time passes, you notice it passing, but it doesn't affect you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see this &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/83440/does-time-pass-for-king-midas-victims&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on SFF, which I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T21:20:11.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1317" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:35:09.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T21:35:09.943" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T21:35:09.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1318" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-01T21:35:09.943" Score="0" Body="The Lost Hero is the first book in the The Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan. It was published in 2010. Use this tag with the [heroes-of-olympus]  and [rick-riordan] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-01T22:00:13.850" LastActivityDate="2017-02-01T22:00:13.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-01T23:59:06.313" Score="18" ViewCount="1283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always imagined the animals in Kenneth Grahame's &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt; - Mole, Ratty, Badger, Toad, and so on - to be actual animals, clearly anthropomorphised to some extent (walking on two legs, able to row boats and drive cars, and so on) but still essentially anatomically nonhuman. So I was quite surprised to read the following passage in Chapter 12 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Toad] sang this very loud, with great unction and expression; and when he had done, he sang it all over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he heaved a deep sigh; a long, long, long sigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he dipped his hairbrush in the water-jug, &lt;strong&gt;parted his hair in the middle, and plastered it down very straight and sleek on each side of his face&lt;/strong&gt;; and, unlocking the door, went quietly down the stairs to greet his guests, who he knew must be assembling in the drawing-room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the real world, toads most definitely don't have hair. So this passage suggests that the author might possibly have imagined Toad as more of a toad-like man than an actual toad on two legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What further evidence is there in the text (or in quotes from the author, if any exist) for the level of 'anatomical anthropomorphisation' in the animals of &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:12:45.070" Title="How 'human' are the animals in The Wind in the Willows meant to look?" Tags="&lt;kenneth-grahame&gt;&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T04:45:10.073" Score="8" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple years ago, I read a book which I would like to revisit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember much, but here's what I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Setting is Ancient Egypt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the primary characters is a Pharaoh or other reputable monarch (definitely female)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Religion is a major aspect of the book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Plot may have been a mystery&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A general or important leader in battle was commanded to (graphic/mature)&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;remove the penises of the fallen enemy soldiers as a political display... I think they were collected in a basket&lt;/em&gt;. I remember this vividly because it was surprising in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The characters visited a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necropolis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;necropolis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reading level / lexile level is high / relatively complex&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A brief search brings up &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060765917&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nefertiti&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0755307828&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Assassins of Isis&lt;/a&gt; as potential starting places (?) but these authors have also written &lt;strong&gt;many&lt;/strong&gt; similar works which may be of no relation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book was written before 2014, in English. It was in the public, town library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="380" LastEditorUserId="380" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T22:48:07.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:48:07.600" Title="Identification of book set in Ancient Egypt" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1323" CreationDate="2017-02-02T11:06:33.007" Score="11" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently been reading about the various poetic and literary movements that occurred prior to the 21st century, and one thing that I don't understand is how they become a movement. Most of them have a single book, which significantly inspired them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What makes something a literary or poetic movement?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T12:13:50.727" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:07:58.110" Title="What makes something a literary or poetic movement?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1322" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:07:58.110" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many cases a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/periods/&quot;&gt;Movement&lt;/a&gt; is simply a label applied to a group of writers, who are producing works of a similar style or theme, by a reviewer.  It will start as just a way of describing the similarity of work.  The label then gets repeated and becomes a shorthand for that style or theme - and just catches the public imagination.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, a group of writers and artists will know each other and will influence each other.  This group can reasonably easily be given a &lt;em&gt;movement&lt;/em&gt; epithet.  For example:  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/periods/bloomsbury.php&quot;&gt;Bloomsbury Group&lt;/a&gt; all knew each other and revelled in their notoriety.  Another, more recent, example would be the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/periods/beat.php&quot;&gt;Beat Generation&lt;/a&gt; in the USA.  Another group of writers, most of whom knew each other, influenced each other and whose writings captured a &lt;em&gt;zeitgeist&lt;/em&gt;.  Both these groups were aware of being classed as a movement at the time they were most active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other movements, such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/periods/romanticism.php&quot;&gt;Romanticism&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/periods/enlightenment.php&quot;&gt;The Enlightenment&lt;/a&gt; comprise a more tenuous group of authors who may or may not have directly influenced each other.  The label was less widely used during the period that the authors were active and came into use through later review and analysis of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, someone writes about a group of authors, coins a name, and the name catches on.  It is very similar to the modern spreading of memes and tropes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T14:07:58.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:45:14.047" Score="9" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rand al'Thor has several moments that could be considered &quot;biblical&quot;, including (spoilers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;redeeming&quot; mankind by cleansing Saidin&quot;, Dying to save the world, and being reborn after death, etc&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Robert Jordan ever commented on this? I am really looking for a quote by either Robert Jordan or Brandon Sanderson, rather than a passage from a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T22:00:58.523" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T21:08:00.493" Title="Was Rand al'Thor supposed to be a symbol for Jesus?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:54:06.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series was mostly written by Robert Jordan, but was finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death in 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main series consists of 14 books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Eye of the World&lt;/em&gt; (1990)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Great Hunt&lt;/em&gt; (1990)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dragon Reborn&lt;/em&gt; (1991)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shadow Rising&lt;/em&gt; (1992)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fires of Heaven&lt;/em&gt; (1993)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord of Chaos&lt;/em&gt; (1994)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Crown of Swords&lt;/em&gt; (1996)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Path of Daggers&lt;/em&gt; (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Winter's Heart&lt;/em&gt; (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crossroads of Twilight&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Knife of Dreams&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Gathering Storm&lt;/em&gt; (2009; written by Sanderson)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Towers of Midnight&lt;/em&gt; (2010; written by Sanderson)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Memory of Light&lt;/em&gt; (2013; written by Sanderson)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a prequel book, &lt;em&gt;New Spring&lt;/em&gt;, and additional material such as a &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; encyclopedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series mainly follows the story of Rand al'Thor, Matrim Cauthon, Perrin Aybara, Egwene al'Vere and Nynaeve al'Meara as the world prepares for the confrontation with the Dark One once again after three thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="357" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T14:19:45.373" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T14:19:45.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-02T14:54:06.987" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the &quot;Wheel of Time&quot; book series, mostly written by Robert Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan's death. It consists of 14 books and a prequel, along with extra material such as an encyclopedia. Use this tag together with the [robert-jordan] or [brandon-sanderson] tags as appropriate." OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="357" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T14:19:37.653" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T14:19:37.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-02T15:35:34.517" Score="9" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of literary criticism takes into account historical contexts, and the relation of the text to different philosophical outlooks, stuff like Marxism, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in analysis which is done purely on the basis of what is in the text -- that is, stuff like literary devices, structure, character development, etc. Is there a specific name for this kind of literary theory? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T14:40:16.543" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T14:35:16.053" Title="What section of literary theory does &quot;pure&quot; analysis fall into?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:09:54.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;New Criticism&quot; is an older form of literary criticism but it does focus on the &quot;formal elements&quot; of a piece.  New Critics attempt to break down literature into four linguistic devices, paradox, irony, ambiguity, and tension.  They also look closely at figurative language in how it presents images, symbols, metaphors, and similes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from the book, Critical Theory Today&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tyson, Lois. &quot;New Criticism.&quot; Critical Theory Today: A User Friendly Guide. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2015. 130-33. Print. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastEditorUserId="30" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T16:14:35.667" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:14:35.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1324" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:13:58.740" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;From an interview &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kwt=%27christianity%27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: How much of Jesus Christ is there in Rand? We have the wounded palms, side wound, crown of swords... How representational of Jesus Christ is Rand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ROBERT JORDAN&lt;/strong&gt;: Rand has some elements of Jesus Christ, yes. But he is intended more to be a general &quot;messiah figure.&quot; An archetype such as Arthur, rather than a manifestation of Jesus Christ in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QUESTION&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;  Is Rand al'Thor meant to be a Jesus figure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ROBERT JORDAN&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;  Um, if you consider King Arthur to be a Jesus figure—the king who must die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of other interviews state that the Wheel of Time takes influences from many different religions, including the Bible.  This is also evident in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2209/481&quot;&gt;many of the Forsaken's names&lt;/a&gt; (Ishamael, Aginor, etc.) as well as the name of the Dark One.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also draws from Islam and Judaism (same source as above) and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Celtic myths and Norse myths and African and Middle-Eastern, and Hindu and Chinese and Japanese and Native American and even Australian Aboriginal.(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoryland.com/intvsresults.php?kw=hindu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T21:08:00.493" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T21:08:00.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2017-02-02T16:16:53.750" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;pure analysis&quot; you mean analysis that's based only on reading the book, and avoiding all outside sources, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reed.edu/english/courses/Eng213/CloseReadings.html&quot;&gt;the academic word for that is &quot;close reading.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; Close reading means analyzing a piece of text and then determining every possible meaning of that text. (In literature, stories can have multiple meanings.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that close reading isn't a theory, it is a technique. Close reading doesn't answer any questions about, for example, why writing that we find scary is scary. In most cases, you will find it hard to use close reading to talk about depictions of class, race, and gender in literature without also using outside sources. These are two examples of the many questions that literary theory helps us answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your question, you say  that &quot;I'm interested in analysis which is done purely on the basis of what is in the text.&quot; All analysis is necessarily focused on understanding what is in the text: that is the very definition of literary analysis. Close reading doesn't even provide an explanation for why concepts like &quot;literary devices, structure, character development&quot; are important; for that, you'll again need to turn to theory. Theory is useful because it expands the types of questions we can ask of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T16:26:23.167" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T16:26:23.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1332" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1343" CreationDate="2017-02-02T18:51:51.193" Score="8" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently studying Latin, and somewhere I read about a man named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titus_Pomponius_Atticus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Titus Pompons Atticus&lt;/a&gt;, and as a lover of literature, I do not like to assume that it is just a coincidence that Atticus Finch of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; has the same name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was there anything special or meaningful to Atticus's (first) name in &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*note: Please do not limit your answer to only the person I found, if there is a better example, by all means use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T13:04:11.227" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T13:04:11.227" Title="Was Atticus's name meant to mean anything?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1333" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:12:19.243" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T22:12:19.243" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:12:19.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1334" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:12:19.243" Score="0" Body="Eva Ibbotson, 1925-2010, was the author of several children's books, such as &quot;The Secret of Platform 13&quot; and &quot;The Star of Kazan&quot;. Use this tag for questions about her and her works." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T22:35:00.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:35:00.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:15:49.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-02T22:15:49.690" LastActivityDate="2017-02-02T22:15:49.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-02T22:15:49.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the children's novel 'The Secret of Platform 13' (1994) by Eva Ibbotson. Use this tag for questions about this book, and with the [eva-ibbotson] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:35:17.327" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:35:17.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T00:57:14.237" Score="7" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;Susanna Clarke's excellent novel &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt; is written in a very convincing (at least to me) &quot;19th-century literature&quot; style. Not only the language used by the characters but also the sentence structure and storytelling style of the non-dialogue sections of the book feel very much like those of classical authors such as Austen, Hardy, or the Brontes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Real connoisseurs of 19th-century literature will probably be shaking their heads at my lumping all of those authors together (so am I, to be honest). Hence my question: &lt;strong&gt;was there any specific classical author whose writing style inspired Clarke's style in &lt;em&gt;Strange &amp;amp; Norrell&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotes from the author herself would probably be the best way of answering this, but if anyone can put together an answer based simply on textual analysis, I'll be mightily impressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T16:35:05.430" Title="Was Susanna Clarke using any particular author's style for &quot;Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell&quot;?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="870" CreationDate="2017-02-03T08:17:18.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many cultures have a tradition of lighting fires and the end of the year.  This originated as a means to proptitiate the gods and ask for a kind winter and a good crop in the following summer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these old fire festivals are still followed in one form or another, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folk traditions like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uphellyaa.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Up Helly Aa&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://somersetcarnivals.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Somerset Carnival&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Modified and adopted by christianity like &lt;a href=&quot;http://brighterblessings.co.uk/articles/yule.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burning the Yule Log&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Politicised like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bonfirenight.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guy Fawkes Night&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and that is just British fire festivals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By referencing the &lt;em&gt;burning of the year&lt;/em&gt;, she is tapping into the collective consciousness that burning the old year ensures that the new year will be better.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T08:17:18.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-03T09:52:23.410" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sarah Tolmie's novelette &lt;a href=&quot;http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-dancer-on-the-stairs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dancer on the Stairs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a kind of portal fantasy, with the protagonist whisked away from our world into a strange fantastical one -- except the place she is whisked to is a guarded stairway, where she depends on charity and desperation to survive, and can get out only by growing to learn the strange culture, and forge a meaningful bond with another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the story's conclusion, long after she has escaped, the protagonist is in an unexpected position of responsibility -- orchestrating the enigmatic coronation dance. And here, at the climax of the dance several strange things happen - a break from the culture's fundamental order; a miraculous signal; and also, this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is over. But not for me. There is no more rising effervescence, but a terrible black suction into an upward void, pulling pulling pulling. I scream and hold on to Yestril and to the railing, clutching the stone, every cell protesting movement upward, movement away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pull ceases, and I fall down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A murmur passes through the crowd below, an outcry. Four members of the royal family, in their octagonal enclosure, are gone. There are tears, complaints, railing. But there will not be any serious attempt to explain it. Soon enough this will be one of the things that &amp;quot;do not command attention&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;do not happen among us.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phenomenon is brief and sudden, and obviously important to the story, but I do not understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean? Where are they being pulled? And why is it some people, and not others?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This feels like it might tie in the protagonist's arriving in the first place, from another world. And as for explaining that, the hint we have is Yestril's conjecture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But then how,&amp;quot; I continued, &amp;quot;did I end up there?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He looked at me in puzzlement. &amp;quot;I don't know,&amp;quot; I remember him saying, &amp;quot;Perhaps you, also, were too much bound?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or perhaps it's to do with the climax of the coronation, which is a (temporary) breakdown of the sigil-groups, and this is somehow an extension of that sudden, shocking intermingling and universality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not seeing a clear connection between the sudden void and either of those avenues. So I feel like I'm missing a key piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a deeply thematic story, so I expect the significance here is more a matter of understanding the theme, than it is of finding a logical, in-world explanation supported by the text -- but I might be wrong about that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T09:52:23.410" Title="What is the significance of the black void in &quot;The Dancer on the Stairs&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;sarah-tolmie&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1337" CreationDate="2017-02-03T16:28:39.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corey Olsen discusses this a bit in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://mythgard.org/academy/jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lecture series at Mythgard&lt;/a&gt;. (I strongly recommend it: he's quite gifted at close analysis, plus it's free.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He notes that most people compare it to Jane Austen, since that's the Regency author that most people are familiar with. It does fit her style well, but that of many other Georgian authors as well. In sum, he considers it an amalgam of various common tropes, rather than a direct stylistic copy of any particular author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-02-03T16:35:05.430" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T16:35:05.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1342" CreationDate="2017-02-03T18:31:22.197" Score="11" ViewCount="1874" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Shylock is pretty much disdained and humiliated only because he was a Jew. His thirst for revenge against Antonio is fuelled by the fact that Antonio constantly humiliates Shylock in front of his fellow merchants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even at the end, after Portia skilfully tricks Shylock, Shylock is forced to convert from Judaism to Christianity for going on a revenge mission against a man who insulted and berated him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Shakespeare a religious fanatic for having Shylock go through a forced conversion? Or was it necessary because of the times in which Shakespeare had to write the book?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T09:20:28.477" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T09:20:28.477" Title="Was Shakespeare a religious fanatic?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1341" CreationDate="2017-02-03T19:19:17.857" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it would be right to call him a religious fanatic. His plays contain both pro- and anti-Christian elements, all of which seem to be more about playing into the sense of the times than any personal conviction. There are hints that he may have been a crypto-Catholic (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2008/04/25/april-25-2008-was-shakespeare-catholic/5519/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as his father was accused of&lt;/a&gt;, the nature of the Ghost in Hamlet, and so on), but it would have been &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historyextra.com/article/elizabeth-i/elizabeth-i%E2%80%99s-war-england%E2%80%99s-catholics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;suicide to be a fanatical Catholic in Elizabeth's England&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I'd say the treatment of Shylock is more a matter of the prevailing mores of his time. He was no more anti-semitic than most Englishmen, which is to say, pretty anti-semitic. Jews had been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;expelled from England in 1290&lt;/a&gt;, and would not be allowed back in until decades after Shakespeare's death. The Jew would have been a stock character, and Shakespeare was drawing on the same sources that inspired the evil &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jew_of_Malta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barabas&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare had a fondness for anti-heroes, like Macbeth and Richard III. He often gave them very sympathetic speeches, and any discussion of anti-semitism in &lt;em&gt;Merchant&lt;/em&gt; must be tempered by the &quot;Hath not a Jew hands...&quot; speech. While Shylock is in many ways a stock greedy Jew (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;My daughter! O my ducats!&lt;/a&gt; O my daughter! Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!&quot;), he has that one magnificent, deeply human speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end I think it's best to treat Shakespeare's characters, and Shakespeare, as simply human, both good and bad. Religion wasn't a huge deal to him: it figures in his plays in many ways, both serious and as a figure of fun... just like real human beings. His plays were rarely fables with morals. They're stories, of people, with no simple moral summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T16:50:30.133" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T16:50:30.133" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1332" CreationDate="2017-02-03T23:03:14.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://theconversation.com/whats-in-a-name-atticus-finch-and-his-roman-forebears-44911&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;analysis website&lt;/a&gt; claims that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Latin, Atticus is an adjective meaning “belonging to Attica”, the region in which Athens is located, or more simply, “Athenian”. As a name, it had connotations of &lt;strong&gt;literary sophistication and culture&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus was a &lt;strong&gt;suave and charming&lt;/strong&gt; wheeler-dealer who deliberately eschewed political office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He preferred to exert &lt;strong&gt;influence&lt;/strong&gt; through his business interests and by cultivating &lt;strong&gt;powerful friendships&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although rare in the Republican period, the name Atticus became much more common under the Roman empire. The evidence of epitaphs and other inscriptions shows that it was held by &lt;strong&gt;senators&lt;/strong&gt;, centurions, cavalrymen, &lt;strong&gt;town&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;councillors&lt;/strong&gt;, freedmen and soldiers in the praetorian guard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it did not lose its association with Greek &lt;strong&gt;culture and refinement&lt;/strong&gt;. One of the most famous Attici was Herodes Atticus, an extremely wealthy &lt;strong&gt;intellectual&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;orator&lt;/strong&gt; who was appointed as tutor in Greek rhetoric to the future emperor Marcus Aurelius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-did-harper-lee-chose-certain-names-for-certain-10705&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus' name is a nod to the Roman orator known for his &lt;strong&gt;just decisions&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atticus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; states that it is an &amp;quot;adjective Latin name meaning '&lt;strong&gt;classic&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;elegant&lt;/strong&gt;'&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(emphasis mine on all of the quotes above)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, the bolded words represent Atticus' character very well. He is a sophisticated, highly educated, and well-cultured intellectual who always attempts to make the most ethically right decision in any situation. His name was carried by powerful Roman orators, senators, and councillors, and his occupation as a charismatic lawyer reflects this. Lee chose this name because of its historical connotation of class, elegance, sophistication, and intellectualism, all qualities that embody Atticus Finch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-03T23:03:14.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T00:54:36.733" Score="19" ViewCount="4306" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading through a fraction of Ancient Greek literature, lately, and an odd thought occurred to me. In nearly every work of Greek literature that is tangentially related to sexuality (which, we've gotta admit, is quite nearly most of the well-known ones), sex is treated as universally desirable, and is a locus of control and power. Most of the discussion around women in Greek culture seems to revolve solely around sexuality.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, Eros is often referred to as being one of those omnipresent entities in male interactions in Greek culture. &lt;em&gt;The Symposium&lt;/em&gt; goes into some manner of detail on this point about Eros, describing maleness and sexuality as effectively identical concepts with no real distinguishing factors. Still, beyond this, many of the Greek gods are described as sexually promiscuous. No emphasis seems to be placed in any writings on the &lt;em&gt;absence&lt;/em&gt; of sexuality in the Greek gods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I mean asexuality to be the total absence of sexual attraction, with anyone. This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asexualityarchive.com/asexuality-and-celibacy-whats-the-difference/&quot;&gt;a concept&lt;/a&gt; distinct from both celibacy (not having sex for a particular reason) and abstinence (not having sex by choice). For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dionysius is, based on what I've read, &lt;em&gt;abstinent&lt;/em&gt; due to indifference to sexuality. There doesn't seem to be anything to suggest that Dionysius doesn't experience sexual attraction, irrespective of whether he partakes in it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Artemis would count as an example of &lt;em&gt;celibacy&lt;/em&gt;, because she's a sworn virgin. (Note: &quot;virgin&quot; means &quot;no sexual relations with &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in ancient Greek works. There's some discussion about whether Artemis was &lt;em&gt;lesbian&lt;/em&gt;, but either way, not asexual.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While there isn't a whole lot of evidence either way, the speculation I've read about whether Athena had sex with anyone seems to have trouble differentiating between Athena as an asexual figure or an abstinent one. (This might make it hard to demonstrate asexuality through the &lt;em&gt;absence&lt;/em&gt; of sexual writings.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quintessential example, the way &quot;asexuality&quot; is used nowadays, would be if someone in some situation were to turn down a sexual situation - &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; because they didn't want to have sex with them, but rather because they just didn't feel like having sex, as a whole, with anyone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did asexuality as a concept ever appear in Greek writings?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, is there both asexuality in the Pantheon and asexuality outside of it, or is it just one of the two? I don't expect that the ancient Greeks shared our modern conception of asexuality to a T; however, if it's possible to identify that ancient Greek writings reflect an idea of asexuality comparable to our modern one, that would probably count as an example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T01:46:29.783" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T09:05:47.070" Title="Are there recorded instances of asexuality in the body of ancient Greek writings?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2017-02-04T01:51:30.453" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few gods and goddesses in ancient Greek mythology (assuming you count that as part of literature) who lead virgin lifestyles. Athena, Artemis, and Hestia come to mind as examples. Now of course, being a virgin doesn't necessarily imply being asexual - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis#Intimacy&quot;&gt;Artemis&lt;/a&gt;, for example, seems to recognise the idea of sexuality, and some stories even have it that she was in love with her hunting companion Orion. But I'm going to focus specifically on &lt;strong&gt;Athena&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;First of all, even the manner of her creation hints at an unusual distance from sexuality. She wasn't born in the usual way, but sprang fully formed and armoured from the forehead of her father Zeus. Some versions of this myth say that Zeus slept with Metis before swallowing her in fear of her prophesied offspring, and that Metis then gave birth to Athena within Zeus, but this is not universally agreed upon. Justin Martyr's &lt;em&gt;Apology&lt;/em&gt; says (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They said that Athena was the daughter of Zeus &lt;strong&gt;not from intercourse&lt;/strong&gt;, but when the god had in mind the making of a world through a word his first thought was Athena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, by itself this doesn't tell us anything about Athena's own sexuality, but symbolically it connects her with the idea of asexuality from the very beginning of her life. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena#cite_note-63&quot;&gt;study&lt;/a&gt; of Athena by Karl Kerenyi links her virginal nature to her relationship with her father.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;At least one version of the origin story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erichthonius_of_Athens#Birth&quot;&gt;Erichthonius&lt;/a&gt;, born from the earth after Hephaestus's attempted rape of Athena, certainly makes her sound asexual. I don't have an original or 'noteworthy' source for this, but I found it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asexuality.org/en/topic/18575-the-goddess-athena-asexuality-and-the-gods/&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is one story in which the god [Hephaestus] was told by Ares that Athena wanted to make love to him, so when she asked him to make her some new weapons, he said that the only payment he would need was her love. Athena didn't catch the innuendo. &lt;strong&gt;As far as she was concerned, love didn't equal sex. For her, love was what most people feel for their brothers and their sisters&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Finally, Athena is the goddess of wisdom and strategy. Her whole nature revolves around being calm, rational, and unemotional. Again, of course, this doesn't necessarily correlate with asexuality in the real world, but since we're talking about an idealised or even caricatured figure, from millennia ago to boot, it makes sense that the people writing about her might connect the two concepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either romantic love or sexual desire would be, in some sense, a departure from the pure reason which characterises Athena. She is always an advocate of rationality, and neither love nor sexuality are entirely rational impulses. While Artemis, for example, could have sexual desires without contradicting her status as the goddess of the hunt (or even the goddess of virginity - she was abstinent, not necessarily asexual), the whole concept seems to go against Athena's essential nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T01:51:30.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1310" CreationDate="2017-02-04T02:28:46.430" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lee does this to paint the whole Finch family as unconventional, reflecting upon the abnormal characters of Atticus, Jem, and Scout. In southern Alabama during the 1930's, society isn't very progressive, shown by the townspeople's negative attitudes towards African Americans. Similarly, in this setting, society expects children to address their parents with respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is within this society that the dynamic character of Atticus Finch is developed. In contrast to the other townspeople, Atticus is highly educated and progressive, defending the rights of the unrepresented. He wants his children to grow up with a forward-thinking mindset, just like him, questioning the world's opinions through rational thought and reason. Thus, one step towards doing this is to address their father as equal, showcasing Atticus's belief that all men are equal, regardless of age, gender, or race. &lt;strong&gt;For the exact reason of highlighting the unorthodoxy of the family, Jem and Scout call their father Atticus.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T02:28:46.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2017-02-04T05:02:50.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a case to be made about the &lt;em&gt;humanity&lt;/em&gt; itself (or some of it) being asexual at first. In some myths, Pandora is the first woman, created by Hephaestus for Zeus to punish humanity. Pandora's arrival and the subsequent disasters mark &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the end of the Golden Age of Man&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly were all those men doing before she came? While homosexual love was definitely not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_ancient_Greece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;news to the ancient Greeks&lt;/a&gt;, would all of humanity be involved in homosexual love until the first human woman came? It is possible that some might have been asexual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T05:02:50.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-04T15:05:16.313" Score="11" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Artemis Fowl, (anti)hero of the eponymous novel series by Eoin Colfer, is a self-described criminal genius and prodigy. He is known to have broken numerous age records, perhaps most notably that of youngest person ever to steal the &lt;em&gt;Fairy Thief&lt;/em&gt; painting (in book 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence to suggest that Colfer based him on any specific prodigy/ies,&lt;/strong&gt; either real-life ones or from earlier fictional works? Or was he just a &quot;juvenile criminal genius&quot; with no specific pre-existing inspirations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T20:42:29.190" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T20:42:29.190" Title="Was Artemis Fowl based on any specific prodigy?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;artemis-fowl&gt;&lt;eoin-colfer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1349" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eoin Colfer (1965-) is an Irish author, writing mainly books for children and young adults and most famous for his bestselling &lt;em&gt;Artemis Fowl&lt;/em&gt; series. His works include but are not limited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fantasy young-adult novels&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;Artemis Fowl&lt;/em&gt; series (8 main novels, plus short stories, graphic novel versions, and other extras)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Supernaturalist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wish List&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;science fiction&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;And Another Thing ...&lt;/em&gt;, a continuation of Douglas Adams's &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker's Guide&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;alternate-history&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Airman&lt;/em&gt;, a novel set in a fictional kingdom on the real-life Saltee Islands&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;detective stories&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Half Moon Investigations&lt;/em&gt;, a high-school detective story set in Ireland&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1350" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Irish author Eoin Colfer or about any of his literary works, most famously the bestselling Artemis Fowl series." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T15:14:27.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1161" CreationDate="2017-02-04T16:09:10.570" Score="10" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Not much.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know very little about the linguistic construction of the Gnommish language. Eoin Colfer is no Tolkien; his novels are valuable more for entertainment than for deep and complex worldbuilding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gnommish is a spoken language.&lt;/strong&gt; In-universe, it's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; just an enciphered version of English with fancy letters, as the other answers here claim. The fact that Artemis is frequently referred to as being able to &lt;em&gt;speak&lt;/em&gt; Gnommish debunks this theory immediately. We also have the following two passages from &lt;em&gt;AF and the Lost Colony&lt;/em&gt;, both of which clearly show that English and Gnommish are different from each other when spoken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No, kind sir,&quot; said No1, hurriedly cobbling together a couple of sentences from Lady Heatherington. &quot;Prithee sheathe thine weapon. I bring joyous tidings only.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The skinny human was confounded. He spoke English as well as the next American, but this little runt was spouting some kind of medieval nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kong straddled No1, holding the knife to his throat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Talk straight, ugly,&quot; said the man, deciding to give Taiwanese a go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I wish I could understand,&quot; said No1, shaking. Unfortunately, he said this in Gnommish. &quot;What I... eh... meanest to say is...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was no good. Quotes from Lady Heatherington that he could generally shoehorn into any occasion just weren't coming under pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You speak Gnommish?&quot; asked the terrified pixie, in case the big one would eat him for not being polite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes,&quot; said Artemis. &quot;I do, but Butler is not so fluent. So English, if you wouldn't mind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sure thing. Not a problem,&quot; said Doodah, grateful that he still had the tiny spark of magic left in his brain necessary to fuel his gift of tongues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The hieroglyphs used are known.&lt;/strong&gt; Their correspondence to the letters of the Latin alphabet has been canonically confirmed in &lt;em&gt;The Artemis Fowl Files&lt;/em&gt; - see image below. They are also used in most of the novels for the secret messages running along the bottom of all the pages. These messages are written in &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; with Gnommish characters (using an actual fictional language would have made them much harder to solve, and fewer readers would have bothered), but that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; mean Gnommish itself is just English with different characters. It's perfectly possible, for instance, to write English using runes of the Elder Futhark, or characters of the Cyrillic alphabet, but both of those symbol systems were created to be used for non-English languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BNDpRm.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BNDpRm.gif&quot; alt=&quot;alphabet&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We also know a few words, but not many.&lt;/strong&gt; You mention the example of &quot;D'Arvit&quot;, and the quote below from &lt;em&gt;AF and the Atlantic Complex&lt;/em&gt; gives us not only another couple of words but also a very minor piece of grammatical knowledge. But again, Colfer was focusing more on telling an entertaining story than on developing background details such as a fictional language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Probably some rubber-based solution&lt;/em&gt;, thought Artemis, but the base of the mercenaries' paint was not what bothered him - it was the name itself, which was &lt;em&gt;Plunderer&lt;/em&gt;, in Gnommish of course. The verb &lt;em&gt;plunder&lt;/em&gt; was pronounced &lt;em&gt;ffurfor&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt; suffix that changes the verb to a noun has, in Gnommish, the sound &lt;em&gt;fer&lt;/em&gt;, which would imply that one is derived from the other. Grammar lesson aside, the pronunciation of the word &lt;em&gt;plunderer&lt;/em&gt; was more or less &lt;em&gt;fourfourfour&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's written in lines, formerly spirals.&lt;/strong&gt; The Book, the ancient text which formed the fairies' version of the Bible, was written in spirals, but the modern-day, more technological fairies write in lines just like most human languages. From &lt;em&gt;AF and the Eternity Code&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Holly placed the mask over Artemis's eyes and pushed the button. Seconds later, the teenager slumped in his chair. Immediately, lines of Gnommish text began to flash across the screen behind him. In the days of Frond, Gnommish had been written in spirals. But reading in spirals gave most fairies a migraine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Commence deleting,&quot; ordered Foaly. &quot;But keep a copy. Some time when I have a few weeks off I'm going to find out what makes this guy tick.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Holly watched Artemis's life being written in green symbols on the screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, we know there are Gnommish symbols for &lt;em&gt;numbers&lt;/em&gt; as well as letters, but (as far as I know) what these symbols are has never been revealed. From &lt;em&gt;AF and the Opal Deception&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Artemis's fingers paused over the keyboard. &quot;I can't read the fairy language or numerals.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You can, in fact you are the only human who can,&quot; said Holly. &quot;You just don't remember. The pad is standard layout. One to nine, left to right, and zero at the bottom.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Nine zero nine,&quot; muttered Artemis, pressing the appropriate keys. Holly's cuffs popped on the first try - which was fortunate, because there was no time for a second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T10:52:02.530" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T10:52:02.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2017-02-04T19:08:56.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, here's my two cents.(or How I read that book)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PART 1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Start with &lt;strong&gt;The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/strong&gt;. Complete that or read as many as you can. You could go as it is in your book or mix up a few chapters, it doesn't matter since almost every story is independent. Don't go to the memoirs, just yet. Again, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes is the best to begin with since it would actually pique your interest more than the novels can. Plus, it contains one of the better stories like &amp;quot;The Speckled Band&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;PART 2:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go on to the &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Study in Scarlet&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; It gives you an insight into the early days of Sherlock and Watson and some horrible habits of Sherlock. In any case, you could either finish the novel or read just the first half of it. The Second half is in no way related to nor does it features Sherlock. My experience is that the second half really drains you. I read the first half and after reading a little of the second half, abandoned it. Then, move on to &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Sign Of Four&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Do the same, read the first parts and if you can, without getting bored, read the second part as well. I prefer reading only the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;PART 3:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, go on with the &lt;strong&gt;Memoirs Of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/strong&gt;. I believe this is the best part of the whole book(at least, in my opinion). You could go on in just about any order you want, but save &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Final Problem&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; for the last. Then, move on with to &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Return Of Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and begin with &amp;quot;The Empty House&amp;quot; since The Final Problem and The Empty House are tangentially related. Again, &amp;quot;The Return Of The Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot; is one of the finest part of the whole book, with &amp;quot;The Dancing Men&amp;quot; being my personal favourite. AT this time, you would have completed around 50-60% of the book. One of the problems with &amp;quot;The Return Of Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot; is that it isn't chronological. At one point, Watson lives alone while in the next story, he is Found in Baker Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;PART 4&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The Valley Of Fear&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I sincerely believe that it is way better than The Study in Scarlet or The Sign Of Four. Here, You would get a tangential connection to Moriarty. And, it's here that Arthur Conan Doyle makes a small error. In The Valley Of Fear, Watson claims to recognise Moriarty as The Famous Scientific Criminal Mastermind, but in &amp;quot;The Final Problem&amp;quot;, Watson claims to have never heard of him. Also, The Valley Of Fear tangentially connects Moriarty's sidekicks to the main protagonist, if I remember correctly and hence, this would be somewhat of a continuation to either of &amp;quot;The Final Problem&amp;quot; Or &amp;quot;The Empty House&amp;quot;.Then continue with &amp;quot;The Last Bow&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot; in whichever order you like.They just contain some other stories of Sherlock and his great detective skills and don't really have an overall &amp;quot;meta&amp;quot; plot and don't really give a sense of finality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;PART 5&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finish up, if any, the Study in Scarlet or The Sign of Four and end with &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The Hounds Of Baskerville&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Leaving the best for the last. As others have noted, you could read this novel entirely on its own, but Getting familiarity with Holmes's method would actually help you appreciate this novel more. It also gives a pretty much satisfying conclusion to the whole book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-04T20:28:05.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1355" CreationDate="2017-02-04T21:07:11.723" Score="15" ViewCount="3701" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gilbert often had certain ideas reappear in his various operas. One of these ideas was that of a &quot;ward in chancery.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Pirates of Penzance&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MABEL: Hold, monsters! Ere your pirate caravanserai Proceed, against our will, to wed us all,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just bear in mind that we are Wards in Chancery, And father is a Major-General!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Iolanthe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;IOLANTHE. He’s an Arcadian shepherd – and he loves Phyllis, a Ward in Chancery.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  CELIA. A mere shepherd! And he half a fairy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would being a &quot;ward in chancery&quot; have entailed back in the time Gilbert was writing operas (ca. 1900)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T00:12:14.443" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T16:51:31.780" Title="What was a &quot;ward in chancery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;gilbert-and-sullivan&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2017-02-05T00:09:54.853" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It means a minor under the guardianship of the Court of Chancery.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a real concept in those days - indeed it still is, but such children are nowadays more often referred to as &amp;quot;wards of court&amp;quot;. Most of the search engine results I found for &amp;quot;ward in chancery&amp;quot; are genealogy forum threads where people were asking about their own ancestors: for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.genesreunited.co.uk/boards/board/genealogy_chat/thread/1322244&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.familytreeforum.com/showthread.php/60962-Plain-English-please!-What-s-a-ward-in-chancery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. I did find &lt;a href=&quot;http://gsopera.com/lexicon/wards-chancery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; page about &amp;quot;wards in chancery&amp;quot; which was specific to G&amp;amp;S:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wards of the Court of Chancery, i.e., persons under that court’s protection. This perhaps explains why Major-General Stanley could be the father of so many lovely girls all between the ages of 18 and 22. How he managed to have this charming collection farmed out to him has never been explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand this fully requires an understanding of one of the most tricky and esoteric parts of the English legal system: &lt;strong&gt;equity law&lt;/strong&gt;, specifically as it applies to &lt;strong&gt;trusts&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trust&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the situation arising when one person or legal entity (the &lt;strong&gt;trustee&lt;/strong&gt;) is holding assets on behalf of another (the &lt;strong&gt;beneficiary&lt;/strong&gt;). The trustee has all legal and administrative rights to the assets, but is obligated to act in a way that is to the advantage of the beneficiary. This system is commonly used by the rich as a (legal) way to dodge tax, and trust law &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_trust_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in England specifically&lt;/a&gt; has a long history. There can be multiple trustees or multiple beneficiaries involved in a given trust, and the laws governing trusts are particularly complex, more so than common law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particularly common way for trusts to arise is when the beneficiary is a &lt;strong&gt;minor&lt;/strong&gt;. Since minors are not able to govern their own financial affairs, it is necessary for someone to take up the role of trustee. Normally a child's parents would have this role, but there are special cases when &lt;strong&gt;inheritance&lt;/strong&gt; law is involved. If a person dies and bequeaths some of their assets to a minor, then a trust is automatically set up with that minor as the beneficiary. Again the trustee(s) would usually be the minor's parent(s) ... except if the people who died were themselves the parents. In this case, the now orphaned child may find themselves the beneficiary of a trust, perhaps for a sizeable amount of money, but with no trustees. This is where the Court of Chancery comes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The laws governing trusts are part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_(law)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;equity law&lt;/a&gt;, which is a separate entity from common law and, up until the late 19th century, was in England administered by a specialised &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_equity&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;equity court&lt;/a&gt;, also known as a chancery court - namely, the English &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_of_Chancery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Court of Chancery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. This was dissolved in the 1870s, but the Chancery Division remains a separate branch of the English legal system and of the High Court of Justice to this very day. From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Court of Chancery was a court of equity in England and Wales that followed a set of loose rules to avoid the slow pace of change and possible harshness (or &amp;quot;inequity&amp;quot;) of the common law. The Chancery had jurisdiction over all matters of equity, including trusts, land law, the administration of the estates of lunatics and the guardianship of infants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in a situation where &lt;strong&gt;a minor without parents stood to inherit a considerable sum&lt;/strong&gt;, it was the Court of Chancery which assumed responsibility for that minor and their assets until they came of age. Under the terms of trust law, the court, or its chosen representative, had the right to make decisions about the child's upbringing and how to use their assets, on the understanding that everything it did was for the child's own good. Thus, that child was not only a &amp;quot;ward of court&amp;quot;, but specifically a &amp;quot;ward in chancery&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T00:09:54.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1356" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1358" CreationDate="2017-02-05T00:51:15.670" Score="14" ViewCount="1872" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people view Professor James Moriarty as the ultimate arch-enemy to Sherlock Holmes, and that perhaps he may have been a major character in the stories and novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've watched a TV series or movie adaptation, chances are the major villain was probably Professor Moriarty, but in the Sherlock Holmes written canon, is any of this actually the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Moriarty truly the major character some people view him as? Does he appear in a lot of Sherlock Holmes stories and is a mostly central character in them? Or is he not what some people might think he is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="220" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T05:16:03.817" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T13:46:47.473" Title="Is Professor Moriarty really Sherlock Holmes' arch-enemy in the way some people think?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1356" CreationDate="2017-02-05T01:52:23.060" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &lt;strong&gt;a close reading of &quot;The Final Problem&quot; says YES, but a broader analysis would tend to reject this evidence and possibly to say NO instead.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Holmes certainly considered Moriarty to be &lt;strong&gt;the most formidable criminal he ever encountered&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the very first time we see him speak of Moriarty, it is always in tones of awe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Aye, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!&quot; he cried. &quot;The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him &lt;strong&gt;on a pinnacle in the records of crime&lt;/strong&gt;. [...] He is &lt;strong&gt;the Napoleon of crime&lt;/strong&gt;, Watson. He is &lt;strong&gt;the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city&lt;/strong&gt;. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. [...]  In three days—that is to say, on Monday next—matters will be ripe, and the Professor, with all the principal members of his gang, will be in the hands of the police. Then will come &lt;strong&gt;the greatest criminal trial of the century&lt;/strong&gt;, the clearing up of over forty mysteries, and the rope for all of them; but if we move at all prematurely, you understand, they may slip out of our hands even at the last moment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Final Problem&quot; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And after his return from their apparent mutual destruction, he continues to speak of Moriarty with the same respect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, well, such is fame! But, then, if I remember right, you had not heard the name of Professor James Moriarty, who had &lt;strong&gt;one of the great brains of the century&lt;/strong&gt;. Just give me down my index of biographies from the shelf.&quot; [...] &quot;My collection of M's is a fine one,&quot; said he. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Moriarty himself is enough to make any letter illustrious&lt;/strong&gt;, and here is Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory, and Matthews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting room at Charing Cross, and, finally, here is our friend of tonight.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Empty House&quot; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also describes Moriarty's right-hand man, Colonel Sebastian Moran, as &quot;&lt;em&gt;The second most dangerous man in London.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Presumably Moriarty, then, is whom Holmes considers to be &lt;strong&gt;the most dangerous man in London&lt;/strong&gt; - a high accolade, given how many criminals Holmes has met.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;But none of this really answers the question of the nature of Holmes's &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; relationship with Moriarty. Did he consider him to be his &quot;arch-enemy&quot;, or simply another, albeit particularly accomplished and dangerous, criminal to catch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To answer this, we need to look more closely at his words in &quot;The Final Problem&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I tell you, Watson, in all seriousness, that &lt;strong&gt;if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line in life.&lt;/strong&gt; Between ourselves, the recent cases in which I have been of assistance to the royal family of Scandinavia, and to the French republic, have left me in such a position that I could continue to live in the quiet fashion which is most congenial to me, and to concentrate my attention upon my chemical researches. But I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged. [...] Again and again he strove to break away, but I as often headed him off. I tell you, my friend, that if a detailed account of that silent contest could be written, it would take its place as the most brilliant bit of thrust-and-parry work in the history of detection. &lt;strong&gt;Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent.&lt;/strong&gt; He cut deep, and yet I just undercut him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Final Problem&quot; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And the (reported) conversation between himself and Moriarty when they first met face-to-face:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'It has been a duel between you and me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. &lt;strong&gt;If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,' said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that &lt;strong&gt;if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'I can promise you the one, but not the other,' he snarled, and so turned his rounded back upon me, and went peering and blinking out of the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Final Problem&quot; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this suggests something more than mere professional respect for Moriarty's intelligence and skill. Holmes explicitly says that his 'duel' with Moriarty was the greatest height of his career as a detective, and that in order to defeat this single enemy he would gladly accept his own destruction. The above quotes definitely imply a special relationship between the two, which, yes, could definitely be described as their being &quot;arch-enemies&quot; to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, all of the above is deduced only from close reading. Let's now take a step back and consider the context of &quot;The Final Problem&quot; within the wider Holmes library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both in and out of universe, this story was written as a sort of &quot;swan song&quot;, a final eulogy of Sherlock Holmes. Both Watson and Conan Doyle thought it was the very end of Holmes when they wrote it, and both had good reason to make it &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; as though defeating Moriarty was the greatest achievement of Holmes's career - because it makes a good story, and because it enables the great detective to end on the highest possible note. So &lt;strong&gt;the testimony of &quot;The Final Problem&quot; is not necessarily reliable evidence.&lt;/strong&gt; Even if Holmes didn't consider Moriarty his arch-enemy, his biographers (both in and out of universe) would want to make it sound that way.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;So what evidence is there in the other Sherlock Holmes stories? In &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; he plays a prominent background role, and he is again mentioned there as a genius and criminal mastermind, the man behind most organised crime in London, but his personal relationship with Holmes isn't elaborated on as much as in &quot;The Final Problem&quot;. The evidence here is inconclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; definitely contradicts at least one part of &quot;The Final Problem&quot;. In the latter, Watson is unaware of Moriarty's nature as a criminal mastermind until his meeting with his friend mere days before Moriarty's downfall, when Holmes's nets were already almost closed - whereas &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt; is set long before Holmes is close to catching Moriarty, but Watson is well aware of his suspicions about the man. This again suggests, at least from an in-universe perspective, that &lt;strong&gt;Watson is an unreliable narrator in &quot;The Final Problem&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. (Out of universe, it's more likely that Conan Doyle simply forgot the exact details of &quot;The Final Problem&quot; when writing &lt;em&gt;The Valley of Fear&lt;/em&gt;, and neither should be considered more reliable or 'canonical' than the other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also interesting how few of the stories Moriarty actually appears in. Counting mentions of him as well as actual appearances, he can be found in only seven of the Holmes stories. If he really was Holmes's arch-enemy, then surely a conscientious biographer of Holmes would devote more time to him among sixty stories? This is an (admittedly weak) piece of evidence that &lt;strong&gt;perhaps Moriarty should &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be considered Holmes's arch-enemy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T00:50:37.640" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T00:50:37.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-05T05:13:13.277" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8_Q26dW1W2eZWNnOXF1VksyV0k/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Founding and Manifesto of Zardulism&lt;/a&gt;* has several pages that are... filled with symbols without clear meaning. It's only ten pages long, but three pages (5-7) are dedicated to what looks like encoded text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether it actually encodes text, or if it's designed to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; like it encodes text, is a little bit of a mystery. So... &lt;em&gt;does it&lt;/em&gt;? If so, what does it say? If not, what are we supposed to make of the fact that it doesn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;*(this link is the actual link to the document, as posted by Zardulu)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:51:24.363" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:51:24.363" Title="Do the symbol pages in The Founding and Manifesto of Zardulism mean anything?" Tags="&lt;ergodicity&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-05T07:56:10.240" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abrahamic eschatology promises a golden age for humanity, an unending time of universal peace and prosperity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of an eternally peaceful and prosperous society united in a common cause seems central to the utopian genre, so can the Abrahamic religious texts describing such a promised paradise (Ezekiel, Ezra, Baruch, Zechariah, Isaiah, Revelation, az-Zalzalah, al-Baqarah, etc) be considered utopian? Is there sufficient distinction between the eschatologies of the Abrahamic tradition that some are utopian while others are not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T09:23:41.327" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T19:21:25.247" Title="Is Abrahamic eschatology utopian?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-04-23T15:03:43.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1395" CreationDate="2017-02-05T11:50:11.723" Score="12" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was established in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/131/should-go-set-a-watchman-be-read-before-to-kill-a-mockingbird&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; should be read after &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;. However, in the comments, LaurenIpsum pointed out that a better question might be &quot;Should &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; be considered a prequel or a first draft?&quot; So, I modified it slightly to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; be read as a prequel or a first draft?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This question is not about the reading order, it's about the style of &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; and what to consider it as when reading it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T16:45:00.740" Title="Should Go Set a Watchman be read as a prequel, or an early draft?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;go-set-a-watchman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1068" CreationDate="2017-02-05T11:51:19.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, there are books where they do not get kidnapped in chapter 19.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a bunch of them, but not all. If anyone adds another answer with ones I missed, that would be awesome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Secret Panel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (25)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this book, they are kidnapped, but not in chapter 19. They are &lt;em&gt;rescued&lt;/em&gt; in chapter 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Wailing Siren Mystery&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (30)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this book, they nearly get eaten by a wolf in chapter 19, but they are not kidnapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Mysterious Caravan&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (54)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a little rockslide. Nothing to worry about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Shattered Helmet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (52)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A daring rescue of Chet &lt;s&gt;the mouse&lt;/s&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sign of the Crooked Arrow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (28)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The helicopter descends...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Short-Wave Mystery&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (24)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They lose the canoe, but they aren't kidnapped...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a list of the books that I have, in no particular order, so that you people know what I looked through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shattered Helmet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystery of the Spiral Bridge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Crooked Arrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Caravan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wailing Siren Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secret Panel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Twisted Claw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mystery of the Flying Express&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Clue in the Embers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Missing Chums&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Masked Monkey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witchmaster's Keys&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystery of the Chinese Junk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hooded Hawk Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Firebird Rocket&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House on the Cliff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secret of Skull Mountain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Short-Wave Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;While the Clock Ticked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T20:37:11.060" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T20:37:11.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1368" CreationDate="2017-02-05T13:30:25.123" Score="15" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a commonly known fact that Lewis Carroll based Alice in his &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice&amp;#39;s_Adventures_in_Wonderland&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Through_the_Looking-Glass&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Liddell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice Liddell&lt;/a&gt;, after she asked him to tell him a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But were any other characters, for instance the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatter_(Alice&amp;#39;s_Adventures_in_Wonderland)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mad Hatter&lt;/a&gt;, inspired by real life people, and what evidence is there for this in &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt;, or were they made up by Carroll? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T07:47:33.513" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T07:47:33.513" Title="Were other characters apart from Alice inspired by real life people?" Tags="&lt;alice-in-wonderland&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1365" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-05T13:39:17.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T13:39:17.233" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T13:39:17.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1366" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-05T13:39:17.233" Score="0" Body="For questions about the author Nelle Harper Lee (1926-2016) or about any of her works, such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T13:48:19.597" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T13:48:19.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1364" CreationDate="2017-02-05T14:13:53.420" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martin Gardner's &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Alice&lt;/em&gt; contains some excellent literary analysis of both &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt;, including a lot of surrounding information about Carroll in real life which helps us to analyse his books. I shall be quoting heavily from this below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of the group of wet animals in Chapter 3 of &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; - &quot;&lt;em&gt;a Duck and a Dodo, a Lory and an Eaglet, and several other curious creatures&lt;/em&gt;&quot; - are based upon real people. From &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Alice&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Carroll's Dodo was intended as a caricature of himself&lt;/strong&gt;—his stammer is said to have made him pronounce his name &quot;Dodo-Dodgson.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;The Duck is the Reverend Robinson Duckworth&lt;/strong&gt;, who often accompanied Carroll on boating&#xA;  expeditions with the Liddell sisters. &lt;strong&gt;The Lory, an Australian parrot, is Lorina, who was the eldest of the sisters&lt;/strong&gt; (this explains why, in the second paragraph of the next chapter, she says to Alice, &quot;I'm older than you, and must know better&quot;). &lt;strong&gt;Edith Liddell is the Eaglet.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is amusing to note that when his biography entered the Encyclopaedia Britannica it was inserted just before the entry on the Dodo. The individuals in this &quot;queer-looking party&quot; represent the participants in an episode entered in Carroll's diary on June 17, 1862. Carroll took his sisters, Fanny and Elizabeth, and his Aunt Lucy Lutwidge (the &quot;other curious creatures&quot;?) on a boating expedition, along with the Reverend Duckworth and the three Liddell girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;June 17 (Tu). Expedition to Nuneham. Duckworth (of Trinity) and Ina, Alice and Edith came with us. We set out about 12.30 and got to Nuneham about 2: dined there, then walked in the park and set off for home about 4.30. About a mile above Nuneham heavy rain came on, and after bearing it a short time I settled that we had better leave the boat and walk: three miles of this drenched us all pretty well. I went on first with the children, as they could walk much faster than Elizabeth, and took them to the only house I knew in Sandford, Mrs. Broughton's, where Ranken lodges. I left them with her to get their clothes dried, and went off to find a vehicle, but none was to be had there, so on the others arriving, Duckworth and I walked on to Iffley, whence we sent them a fly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the original manuscript, &lt;em&gt;Alice's Adventures Under Ground&lt;/em&gt;, a number of details appear relating to this experience that Carroll later deleted because he thought they would have little interest to anyone outside the circle of individuals involved. When the facsimile edition of the manuscript was published in 1886, &lt;strong&gt;Duckworth received a copy inscribed, &quot;The Duck from the Dodo.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There have been various theories about whom the Mad Hatter might be based on. From &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Alice&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is good reason to believe that &lt;strong&gt;Tenniel adopted a suggestion of Carroll's that he draw the Hatter to resemble one Theophilus Carter, a furniture dealer near Oxford&lt;/strong&gt; (and no grounds whatever for the widespread belief at the time that the Hatter was a burlesque of Prime Minister Gladstone). Carter was known in the area as the Mad Hatter, partly&#xA;  because he always wore a top hat and partly because of his eccentric ideas. His invention of an &quot;alarm clock bed&quot; that woke the sleeper by tossing him out on the floor (it was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in 1851) may help explain why Carroll's Hatter is so concerned with time as well as with arousing a sleepy dormouse. One notes also that items of furniture—table, armchair, writing desk—are prominent in this episode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &quot;It is impossible to describe &lt;strong&gt;Bertrand Russell&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; writes Norbert Wiener in Chapter 14 of his autobiography &lt;em&gt;Ex-Prodigy&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;except by saying that he looks like the Mad Hatter . . . the caricature of Tenniel almost argues an anticipation on the part of the artist.&quot; Wiener goes on to point out the likenesses of philosophers J. M. E. McTaggart and G. E. Moore, two of Russell's fellow dons at Cambridge, to the Dormouse and March Hare respectively. The three men were known in the community as the Mad Tea Party of Trinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ellis Hillman, writing on &quot;Who Was the Mad Hatter?&quot; in Jabberwocky (Winter 1973), provides a new candidate: &lt;strong&gt;Samuel Ogden, a Manchester hatter known as &quot;Mad Sam,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; who in 1814 designed a special hat for the czar of Russia when he visited London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hillman also conjectures that &quot;Mad Hatter,&quot; if the H is dropped, sounds like &quot;Mad Adder.&quot; This, he writes, could be taken as describing &lt;strong&gt;a mathematician, such as Carroll himself, or perhaps Charles Babbage&lt;/strong&gt;, a Cambridge mathematician widely regarded as slightly mad in his efforts to build a complicated mechanical calculating machine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think any of these theories sound especially convincing. The first one, in particular, has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland#Character_allusions&quot;&gt;refuted&lt;/a&gt; by Stuart Dodgson Collingwood in his book &lt;em&gt;The Life And Letters of Lewis Carroll&lt;/em&gt;, in which he claims that there is no evidence Carroll ever invited Tenniel to Oxford for any reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This may not really count since it's a story within a story, but the Dormouse's &quot;three little girls&quot; are again based on the Liddell sisters. From the original text (Chapter VII):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Once upon a time there were three little sisters,&quot; the Dormouse began in a great hurry; &quot;and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie;11 and they lived at the bottom of a well—&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Alice&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The three little sisters are the three Liddell sisters. &lt;strong&gt;Elsie is L.C. (Lorina Charlotte), Tillie refers to Edith's family nickname Matilda, and Lacie is an anagram of Alice.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Drawling-Master referred to by the Mock Turtle is based on Alice Liddell's drawing-master John Ruskin. From the original text (Chapter IX):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, there was Mystery,&quot; the Mock Turtle replied, counting off the subjects on his flappers,—&quot;Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling—the Drawling-master was an old conger-eel, that used to come once a week: he taught us Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Alice&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &quot;Drawling-master&quot; who came once a week to teach &quot;Drawling, Stretching, and Fainting in Coils&quot; is a reference to none other than the art critic John Ruskin.&lt;/strong&gt; Ruskin came once a week to the Liddell home to teach drawing, sketching, and painting in oils to the children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T17:28:52.750" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T17:28:52.750" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1413" CreationDate="2017-02-05T14:42:27.247" Score="8" ViewCount="1469" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading Tennyson's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/donne/718/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Memoriam A.H.H.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written in honor of his close friend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hallam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Henry Hallam&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that Christmas is a recurring theme. In appears several times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sections XXVIII - XXX, from &quot;The time draws near the birth of Christ&quot; to &quot;The light that shone when hope was born&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Section LXXVIII, from &quot;Again at Christmas did we weave&quot; to &quot;And dance and song and hoodman-blind&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sections CIV - CVI, from &quot;The time draws near the birth of Christ&quot; to &quot;Ring in the Christ that is to be&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Memoriam_A.H.H.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, which notes what I had already thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The passage of time is marked by the three descriptions of Christmas at different points in the poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which makes sense, as &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt; was written over more than a decade. However, I think there might be more to it than that. For instance, stanza CVII transitions from celebrating Christmas (&quot;the birth of Christ&quot;) to discussing the anniversary of Hallam's birth in February (&quot;It is the day when he was born&quot;). It's a little suggestive of a certain parallel - although, granted, it could simply be that Christmas reminded Tennyson of when he celebrated with his friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a deeper significance to Tennyson's repeated description of Christmases past and present, beyond simply showing how the years go by without Hallam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T11:33:24.267" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:58:13.903" Title="What is the meaning of Christmas in In Memoriam A.H.H.?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1370" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1375" CreationDate="2017-02-05T16:32:20.447" Score="9" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over the whole Jewish Bible, there are cantillation marks that denote how the text is supposed to be chanted. The sounds differ between places, such as between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic communities. However, as far as I can tell, the marks are the same. &lt;strong&gt;How long have the current cantillation marks been around?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example of some marks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQYUg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KQYUg.png&quot; alt=&quot;A passage of Hebrew text showing the placement of cantillation marks&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T23:36:04.770" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T23:36:04.770" Title="How long have the cantillation marks been around?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1348" CreationDate="2017-02-05T17:47:41.853" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is stated &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/a-fond-farewell-to-artemis-fowl-20120629-218vp.html&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;his brother Donal's favourite conversation-starter in the pub: ''Artemis Fowl is based on me.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;''So I took this character, my brother Donal, the little 12-year-old Bond villain, and said, 'What if he kidnaps one of the leprechauns for the crock of gold?''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently, Artemis is based on Colfer's brother Donal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T17:47:41.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1376" CreationDate="2017-02-05T20:11:19.920" Score="15" ViewCount="44277" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Simon and Garfunkel's song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sound of Silence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, there is the following passage &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/simongarfunkel/thesoundofsilence.html&quot;&gt;in lyrics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the people bowed and prayed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the neon god they made&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this neon god? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, they are referring to neon signs, but in what sense are neon signs &quot;gods&quot; and how exactly are people praying to them? Is this an attack on advertising or consumerism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen on various occasions accusations of people &quot;bowing and praying to&quot; television, but not so much to neon signs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: if you're more into metal-&lt;em&gt;ish&lt;/em&gt; than into hippies, there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Dg-g7t2l4&quot;&gt;cover by Disturbed&lt;/a&gt;, which is disturbingly better than one would expect it to be &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T16:54:16.510" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T19:52:40.243" Title="What is the &quot;Neon god&quot; in &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; by Simon and Garfunkel?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;simon-and-garfunkel&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1373" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-05T20:43:54.967" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about what inspired a work of literature, or a particular aspect of a work: a character, an object, a place, an event, a name, or anything else. Example questions with this tag might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What inspired the name of &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Character&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; in &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Story&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Author/Story&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt; inspired by &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Other Author/Story&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What was the inspiration for &lt;code&gt;&amp;lt;Author&amp;gt;&lt;/code&gt;'s writing technique?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T18:50:51.850" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T18:50:51.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1374" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-05T20:43:54.967" Score="0" Body="Questions about the inspiration behind a work of literature, or an object or concept in a work: what it was based on, or where the idea came from." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T18:50:51.850" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T18:50:51.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1370" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:35:22.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Current consensus seems to be that cantillation marks &lt;em&gt;as they are currently used&lt;/em&gt; originated around the &lt;strong&gt;9th or 10th century CE&lt;/strong&gt;, relatively recently in the history of Judaism. Cantillation itself has existed for a long while, but cantillation &lt;em&gt;marks&lt;/em&gt; are a relatively recent means of codifying an otherwise opaque word-of-mouth (and potentially chironomical) system. There are very few facts about cantillation that are commonly held to be true, and there is a lot of debate about what the real history is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This codification wasn't exactly early on in the history of Judaism - if it were, we'd expect to see more references to the marks specifically in the Talmud. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/817346/jewish/Who-made-up-the-way-we-sing-the-Torah.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baruch Davidson, via Chabad&lt;/a&gt; notes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The use of the cantillation marks in current use dates to at least the 9th-10th century CE. This was the era of the Masoretes, meticulous scribes in Tiberias, Jerusalem and Babylon who worked to establish a precise common text, vowelization and cantillation for the Tanakh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is echoed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20030902233039/http://www.uahc.org/oh/oh004/articles/cantor_0900.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cantor David Pincus&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eventually, in the 9th century C.E. (in the &quot;Common Era&quot;) a family of scholars in Tiberias codified a system of printed symbols which would indicate: 1) the grammatical phrases of each Torah verse, and 2) a series of notes for each sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this doesn't preclude the possibility of cantillation marks predating this time - it only serves as a claim that our &lt;em&gt;modern&lt;/em&gt; cantillation originated around that time. It does indeed appear that other forms of cantillation, both borrowed and manufactured, existed before the 9th century, and originated out of a practice called &lt;em&gt;chironomy&lt;/em&gt;, where hand-gestures were used to indicate how a part should be sung. But it's plausible that information on the exact origins has been lost; the Jewish Encyclopedia states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attempts have been made to reconstitute the oldest form of the cantillation by J. C. Speidel [et. al.]. ...their conclusions [outweigh] the probable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there you have it. It would seem to have originated in the 9th or 10th century out of a desire to codify, and make a pass at standardizing, the way cant works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic cant, well - cantillation isn't a part of the Torah itself, and doesn't necessarily have to stay fixed. Since there's no religious imperative to maintain universal cant in Judaism, it makes sense that different groups and regions would drift apart in cant at different times. (If you've ever been to services in differing temples, you'll know what I mean - many of the cants sound &lt;em&gt;similar&lt;/em&gt;, and although frequently, are not always identical.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More history for the curious: the origins of cantillation as a practice are not dated, and potentially aren't dateable at all. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/3986-cantillation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jewish Encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt; cites that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The earliest reference to the definite modulation of the Scripture occurs in the Babylonian Talmud (Meg. 32a), where R. Johanan deprecates the indifference of such as &quot;read [the text] without tunefulness and repeat [the Mishnah] without song.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's known that as a practice it goes back at least that far. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/817346/jewish/Who-made-up-the-way-we-sing-the-Torah.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chabad&lt;/a&gt; holds a slightly less reserved view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tradition of the ta'amim by which the Torah is to be sung, however, is as old as the Torah itself. It was taught to Moses together with the vowels, as it is integral to the correct understanding of the Torah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way, this establishes that the origins of cantillation itself seem disconnected from the origins of cantillation &lt;em&gt;marks&lt;/em&gt;, which is tangential, but important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T21:59:22.290" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T21:59:22.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1372" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:41:40.087" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;neon god&quot; is obviously the sign pictured earlier in the song.  But why is it a god?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sign is a god because people made it a god (&quot;the neon god &lt;em&gt;they made&lt;/em&gt;&quot;). In praying and bowing to the sign, they made it into a god.  What the sign represents, though, is harder to answer. Many interpretations I've found have said it represented advertising and TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Garfunkel (this quote is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Silence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, but it's directly quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jQGOxvDsF-kC&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a book on Paul Simon's life&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Garfunkel once summed up the song's meaning as &quot;the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly internationally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems the song is about people's inability to communicate with all of the television watching and stuff; people who don't have any kind of original thought.  I haven't found any direct quotes on the meaning other than Garfunkel's above, so you're just going to have to take what you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=796&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; cites Simon as saying this in an interview with NPR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's not a sophisticated thought, but a thought that I gathered from some college reading material or something. It wasn't something that I was experiencing at some deep, profound level - nobody's listening to me, nobody's listening to anyone - it was a post-adolescent angst, but it had some level of truth to it and it resonated with millions of people. Largely because it had a simple and singable melody.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like he just wrote the lyrics, then realized that they fit nicely with this theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-10T16:45:36.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T16:45:36.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1377" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:58:18.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T21:58:18.993" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T21:58:18.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1378" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:58:18.993" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the lives or works of Simon and Garfunkel, a popular American rock duo of the 1960's." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T22:14:39.353" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T22:14:39.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1379" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:59:53.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-05T21:59:53.103" LastActivityDate="2017-02-05T21:59:53.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1380" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-05T21:59:53.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American songwriter Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman; 1941) or his life as a songwriter. Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T22:20:21.953" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:20:21.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T02:34:51.677" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing &lt;em&gt;proves&lt;/em&gt; it. The closest are Dunya's accusations, including her knowledge that he both discussed poison with her, AND went to get that poison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...Не твой револьвер, а Марфы Петровны, &lt;strong&gt;которую ты убил&lt;/strong&gt;, злодей! У тебя ничего не было своего в ее доме. Я взяла его, как стала подозревать, на что ты способен.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Ты жену отравил, я знаю, ты сам убийца!… Ты мне сам намекал; ты мне говорил об яде&lt;/strong&gt;… &lt;strong&gt;я знаю, ты за ним ездил&lt;/strong&gt;… у тебя было готово… Это непременно ты…&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...этот ужасный человек, кажется, и был причиной ее смерти. Говорят, он ее ужасно избил!..&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Я уверена, что он был причиною смерти покойницы Марфы Петровны...&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2554&quot;&gt;translated by Constance Garnett&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's not your revolver, it belonged to Marfa Petrovna, &lt;strong&gt;whom you killed&lt;/strong&gt;, wretch! There was nothing of yours&#xA;  in her house. I took it when I began to suspect what you were capable of.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;You poisoned your wife, I know; you are a murderer yourself!...  You hinted it yourself; you talked to me of poison.... I know you went to get it...&lt;/strong&gt; you had it in&#xA;  readiness.... It was your doing....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;. . .  that awful man seems to have been the&#xA;  cause of her death. They say he beat her dreadfully.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am convinced that he was the cause of&#xA;  Marfa Petrovna's death.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as his own admission he would have easily killed his wife if Dunya told him to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Верите ли, я до того тогда врезался, что &lt;strong&gt;скажи она мне: зарежь или отрави Марфу Петровну и женись на мне, — это тотчас же было бы сделано&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you know, I was so wild about her at that time that if she had&#xA;  told me to poison Marfa Petrovna or to cut her throat and to marry herself, it would have been done at once!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while he drove Philipp to suicide, he didn't kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Вы, конечно, Авдотья Романовна, слышали тоже у них ...об истории с человеком Филиппом, умершим от истязаний, лет шесть назад, еще во время крепостного права...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...&lt;strong&gt;принудила или, лучше сказать, склонила его к насильственной смерти&lt;/strong&gt; беспрерывная система гонений и взысканий господина Свидригайлова.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You heard, no doubt, Avdotya Romanovna, when you were with&#xA;  them the story of the servant Philip who died of ill treatment he received six years ago, before the abolition of serfdom.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;. . .  &lt;strong&gt;what drove him, or rather perhaps disposed him, to suicide&lt;/strong&gt; was the systematic persecution and severity of Mr. Svidrigaïlov.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T18:37:17.493" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T18:37:17.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1341" CreationDate="2017-02-06T04:17:28.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like most English people until well into the twentieth century, Shakespeare was baptized into the Anglican church, but it does not follow that he was himself any more religious than the average Englishman of his time; and the treatment of Jews in &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; is a weak basis for the argument that Shakespeare himself was a devout Christian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, there's the obvious fact that devout Christianity is not a prerequisite for antisemitism: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Adolf_Hitler&quot;&gt;Hitler's skepticism toward the church&lt;/a&gt; is well attested. So the fact that Shakespeare's play could be considered antisemitic tells us nothing about his Christianity or lack thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, there's the example of Shakespeare's contemporary Christopher Marlowe. His &lt;em&gt;The Jew of Malta&lt;/em&gt; is far more gleeful in its antisemitism than even &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;. Michael Keefer &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/document/280072960/Antisemitism-in-Renaissance-England-Marlowe-s-Jew-of-Malta&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Marlowe's Barabas (whose only offense, beyond an arrogant narcissism, has been the greed that motivates him to enclose &quot;Infinite riches in a little room&quot;) is similarly cheated by dishonest Christians, who after seizing his property in order to pay the tribute owing to the Turks, keep it even once they've decided to refuse the tribute. The play devolves into a sequence of farcical acts of revenge and cover-up, but the notion that Christians are ethically inferior to Jews remains in circulation: Barabas may outdo in malice the Christians who have robbed him, but he is scarcely their equal in hypocrisy. &lt;em&gt;The Jew of Malta&lt;/em&gt;, in short, is antisemitic, but its antisemitism is, at least in part, a means of leveraging a satirical onslaught against Christian &lt;em&gt;mores&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Barabas and Shylock further the stereotype of the conniving, greedy Jew, but in Marlowe's play, the Christians are not much better; and in Shakespeare, Shylock too is a victim of Antonio's antisemitism. When asked why he is so eager to enforce the contract against Antonio, Shylock &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/merchant.3.1.html&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(III.1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even as they promulgate antisemitism, both plays also take a critical attitude toward it. The behavior of antisemitic Christians is not treated as justified by virtue of their Christianity or their antagonists' Judaism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Marlowe's own beliefs demonstrate that writing an antisemitic play is no indication of devout Christianity. He is generally supposed to be an atheist. His sometime roommate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Baines&quot;&gt;Richard Baines&lt;/a&gt;, a double agent and former Catholic priest, accused him of being so in a celebrated &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rey.myzen.co.uk/baines2.htm&quot;&gt;note&lt;/a&gt;, written to and at the behest of one of the members of Queen Elizabeth's cabinet. The note says that with regard to atheistic views:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Marloe doth not only holde them himself, but almost into every company he cometh, perswadeth men to Atheisme, willinge them not to be afrayed of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and utterly scorning both God and his ministers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Marlowe could write an antisemitic play while holding atheist views, then we cannot assume that by virtue of writing an antisemitic play, Shakespeare must have been Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Devout Christianity is not a prerequisite for antisemitism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The antisemitism of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; is not entirely straightforward; the antisemitism of Christians itself also comes under some critical scrutiny in the play. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marlowe's example shows that writing an antisemitic play could be compatible with any range of religious views up to and including atheism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the antisemitism of Shakespeare's play is no evidence for ascribing devoutly Christian beliefs to him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T06:07:15.350" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T06:07:15.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1344" CreationDate="2017-02-06T04:47:09.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a case can be made for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoi.com/Ouranios/ErosHermaphroditos.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hermaphroditus&lt;/a&gt;. The son of Hermes and Aphrodite, he was a remarkably beautiful youth, but uninterested in sex. Or at least, the way Ovid tells it, &quot;he did not know what love was&quot;; and when the water nymph Salmacis offers herself to him, he spurns her. Salmacis hides until he strips to bathe in her lake. She then jumps in. Despite his strong protests and attempts to throw her off, she forcibly entwines herself around him. She prays that the two of them will never be separated, and as a result, Hermaphroditus becomes a hermaphrodite. He prays to his parents in turn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O my father, and my mother, grant this prayer to your son, who owes his name to you both: if any man enter this pool, may he depart hence no more than half a man, may he suddenly grow weak and effeminate at the touch of these waters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His prayer too is granted, and the pool of Salmacis was reputed to take away the virility of men. (From Ovid, &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, trans. Mary M. Innes; Penguin Books, 1955, p. 101–104)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid is Roman, not Greek, of course. But the story is of Greek origin. I am not familiar with the Greek sources enough to know whether the detail of Hermaphroditus being uninterested in sex with Salmacis is them. Online retellings of the myth (such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.greekmythology.com/Other_Gods/Minor_Gods/Hermaphroditus/hermaphroditus.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) don't cite sources, and might well be taking that detail from Ovid. So this is more an avenue for research than a definitive answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T09:05:47.070" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T09:05:47.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-06T12:52:17.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven books set in the fictional world of Narnia. In in-universe chronological order (as can be seen, the publishing order is somewhat different), they are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; (1955)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; (1950)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; (1954)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; (1951)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the&lt;/em&gt; Dawn Treader (1952)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; (1953)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; (1956)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T00:25:25.423" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T00:25:25.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-06T12:52:17.207" Score="0" Body="Questions about The Chronicles of Narnia, the 7-book series by C. S. Lewis. Use this with the [c-s-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T21:01:06.797" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T21:01:06.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1387" CreationDate="2017-02-06T15:53:33.413" Score="12" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading &lt;em&gt;The Robots of Dawn&lt;/em&gt;, and was quite surprised firstly when Elijah Baley was excited that he'd visit the world Gladia was on, and secondly when at the end of the novel he calls her &quot;my love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His lips shaped: &lt;em&gt;Good-bye&lt;/em&gt;. And then because there was no sound -  he could not have done it with sound - he added, &lt;em&gt;my love&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And her lips moved, too. &lt;em&gt;Good-bye, my dearest love&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may have flipped the few more sentimental pages of &lt;em&gt;The Naked Sun&lt;/em&gt; rather fast, but I don't recall Baley showing that he had any newborn feelings of romantic sort towards Gladia. It appeared to me that Baley merely acknowledged her beauty, but nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong? Were there actually passages that suggested he was falling in love with, or otherwise attracted to Gladia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T17:50:36.470" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T17:50:36.470" Title="What evidence was there in &quot;The Naked Sun&quot; to suggest that Baley had feelings for Gladia?" Tags="&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;&lt;the-naked-sun&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1386" CreationDate="2017-02-06T16:59:41.627" Score="12" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see several times that he considered her attractive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She lifted her arms above her head, running her fingers through the hair and spreading it out as though to hasten drying. Her arms were slim and graceful. Very attractive, Baley thought.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Chapter 4 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She looked up, her face as pretty as ever, despite its obvious distress -  perhaps because of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Chapter 5 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then start to see signs that he is beginning to fall in love with her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or was it Gladia? He would be seeing her soon, not viewing her. Was that what gave him confidence and this odd feeling of mixed apprehension and anticipation?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Chapter 15 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Are you perhaps being influenced by extraneous motives of your own, Partner Elijah? Mrs. Delmarre is an attractive woman and you are an Earthman in whom a preference for the personal presence of an attractive woman is not psychotic.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I have better reasons,&quot; said Baley uneasily. (Daneel's cool glance was too penetrating and soul-dissecting by half. Jehoshaphat! The thing was only a machine.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Chapter 16 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now, towards the end, there is this quote, which is possibly the most telling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You will.&quot; Baley looked at the slim girl who stood before him and said, &lt;strong&gt;not without a momentary pang&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;And you will be married someday, too. Really married, I mean.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Chapter 18 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even the thought that a ship was waiting to take him back to Earth &lt;strong&gt;did not wipe out the sense of loss he felt at that moment&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Undersecretary Albert Minnim's look was intended to be one of prim welcome. &quot;I am glad to see you back on Earth. Your report, of course, arrived before you did and is being studied. You did a good job. The matter will look well in your record.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Thank you,&quot; said Baley. There was no room for further elation in him. Being back on Earth; being safe in the Caves; &lt;strong&gt;being in hearing of Jessie's voice (he had spoken to her already) had left him strangely empty&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Chapter 18 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T17:48:28.510" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T17:48:28.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1388" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1389" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" Score="0" Body="The second book in Isaac Asimov's Robot series. Use this tag for questions specifically about this book, and with the [isaac-asimov] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T18:07:45.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1393" CreationDate="2017-02-06T19:20:25.280" Score="14" ViewCount="7729" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I ask a friend about the symbolism of the Raven from &lt;em&gt;The Raven&lt;/em&gt;, they always seem to say death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is that the only thing the Raven is meant to symbolize?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:55:02.630" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:55:02.630" Title="What does the raven symbolize (besides death)?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;the-raven&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1390" CreationDate="2017-02-06T19:34:47.917" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obviously the Raven does represent death.  Since we know this, I will not touch on it here.  However, there are a few possibilities other than that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The raven in popular culture (described &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perspectivesmagazine.sk/news/ravens-and-crows-in-mythology-folklore-and-religion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) can symbolize many things.  Ravens have a wide variety of roles in myths and culture; they can symbolize things from death and war to wisdom to creation of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According many analyses I found while searching (including &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/raven/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://literatureguides.weebly.com/poe-poetry-analysis-symbolism-in-the-raven.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;), the raven also symbolizes the narrator's inability to do anything about his eventual fate; since the Raven is perpetually saying the same thing (&quot;nevermore&quot;), the narrator knows what the answer will be.  So since the raven usually doesn't speak [citation needed], this is why he chose such a nonsensical animal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the raven's perching atop the bust of Pallas might symbolize it's vanquishing of wisdom and justice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The raven can also symbolize the devil; since the narrator thinks it is from &quot;the Night's Plutonian Shore&quot; and because it is described as a &quot;demon.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T19:34:47.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1394" CreationDate="2017-02-06T19:43:27.427" Score="13" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of Gilbert's more controversial librettos is &lt;em&gt;Princess Ida&lt;/em&gt;, a story making fun of woman's education. I am asking this question in relation to how &lt;em&gt;Princess Ida&lt;/em&gt; should be viewed as a text. If his opinions of learned women were positive, the libretto is probably simply a satire of something that has come into fashion. On the other hand, if his views are negative, than the ending where Ida leaves the University for her husband should be interpreted very differently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking over the course of his works, it's hard to see any clear pattern on this issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two of his main female roles (Yum-Yum and Ida) are part of some sort of &quot;Ladies Seminary&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the Fairy Queen is mistaken for a woman from a ladies seminary is quite an important plot point in &lt;em&gt;Iolanthe&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It seems that she’s a fairy,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From Andersen’s library,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I took her for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The proprietor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of a Ladies’ Seminary!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is also the quote from &lt;em&gt;The Mikado&lt;/em&gt; regarding female authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And that singular anomaly, the lady novelist – I don’t think she’d be missed – I’m sure she’d not be missed!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Princess Ida an expression of Gilbert's opinion on woman's education?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T18:33:54.890" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T20:42:18.000" Title="Was Princess Ida written as a negative commentary on women's education?" Tags="&lt;gilbert-and-sullivan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1390" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:11:48.537" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe the Raven symbolizes death at all, but rather life, in grief of having to live after a loved one is dead. As Poe himself put it in his essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philosophy of Composition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical — but it is&#xA;  not until the very last line of the very last stanza, that the&#xA;  intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending&#xA;  Remembrance is permitted distinctly to be seen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;mournful and never-ending remembrance&quot; is the title of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0060923318&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biography of Poe&lt;/a&gt;. It's a theme Poe returned to several times, such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annabel_Lee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Annabel Lee&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course authorial intent is only one factor to consider in interpreting a work; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2009/the-author-of-a-literary-work-disagrees-with-critics-about-meaning-whos-right&quot;&gt;this discussion&lt;/a&gt;. It does, however, jibe with my own understanding of the poem even before I read Poe's explicit thoughts on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Raven is thus even sadder than death itself. The speaker craves forgetfulness, and will &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; have it: his heart shall be &quot;lifted -- Nevermore&quot;. He could be content, or at least cope, with loneliness. But the Raven is a constant reminder: he lives not just with the loss but the knowledge of the loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-03-27T15:57:42.053" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T15:57:42.053" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1392" CreationDate="2017-02-06T20:19:31.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;NOTE: This answer answers the previous question 'What were Gilbert's views on women's education?'. I will try and also answer the new question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems he was very pro-women, there is a lot of evidence to suggest he was a feminist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Jane Stedman's biography - &lt;em&gt;W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and his Theater&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Gilbert always enjoyed the company of women, particularly intelligent ones, and he was attractive to them,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also had three sisters - Jane, Maud and Florence&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://gsarchive.net/gilbert/life/long_bio.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;, and was extremely close to them&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://saraleeetter.com/blog1/2016/05/11/was-w-s-gilbert-a-victorian-feminist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;, though his parents were always very distant. He had many female friends, as well as working with several female theater managers, including Marie Litton and Priscilla German Reed, and he took part in amateur dramatics with Marie Wilton.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://saraleeetter.com/blog1/2016/05/11/was-w-s-gilbert-a-victorian-feminist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, he asked female novelist Annie Thomas to marry him, showing he thought that a women with this job was totally acceptable, and though she refused they remained friends.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Hall_Cudlip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why are some of his plays based on typical Victorian women, and verging on being sexist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well it is likely he did this for the audience. His plays in order to be successful needed to be about that era, and if in all his plays he showed feminist views then the audience wouldn't be so interested or comfortable. Think about how &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henrik Ibsen's&lt;/a&gt; plays went down with audiences. His play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Doll%27s_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Doll's House&lt;/a&gt; shocked viewers and caused great controversy from the very start when the main character - a woman - walked out on her marriage, children, and life and left men behind, quite the opposite of the Victorian idea for what women should do&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_Victorian_era#Education&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;. Another of his plays &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedda_Gabler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hedda Gabler&lt;/a&gt; shocked the victorian audience even more&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/was-playwright-henrik-ibsen-the-first-male-feminist-20140610-zs354.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; when a married woman takes her own life with a revolver. To avoid such things happening in his own plays, Gilbert couldn't be too open with his personal views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We still need to remember however, that he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; still a Victorian, and from the sources above he'll have been brought up from a young age being taught that woman had a lower place in society than men, as the Victorians thought. He may have been a feminist in some respects, but it is possible that the idea of women being educated was too ridiculous, even for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no clear evidence anywhere I've looked though, so we can't be sure what he truly thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T20:42:18.000" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T20:42:18.000" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1362" CreationDate="2017-02-06T21:39:42.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I guess first drafts make great prequels, and should definitely be read afterwards. Think of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, a lighter, less tense éclairage on &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, which irony can only be perceived if Tolkien's masterpiece was read beforehand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; does not escape this: the social tension that makes the book interesting can escape a reader - and certainly was much less central for the author - than in &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;, and for this reason reading the former in the light of the later would be my recommendation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:45:43.927" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:45:43.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1396" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-06T21:43:31.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T21:43:31.347" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T21:43:31.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1397" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-06T21:43:31.347" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Goosebumps series of horror stories for children by R.L. Stine. Use with the [r-l-stine] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T13:08:23.637" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T13:08:23.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-06T22:42:06.963" Score="14" ViewCount="1691" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Beat writer Jack Kerouac is noted for his &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; writing style exemplified in his 1957 novel, &lt;em&gt;On the Road&lt;/em&gt;, but there seems to be conflicting evidence on how &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; this book was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He famously wrote the book on a modified typewriter with a scroll of paper attached to it so that he could write continuously. But how much editing was involved in this &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; novel, and how much planning was involved in the &quot;true&quot; story the novel is based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user403" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-06T23:01:03.443" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T15:58:12.560" Title="How ‘stream of consciousness’ was On the Road? Was it planned or edited?" Tags="&lt;on-the-road&gt;&lt;jack-kerouac&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1051" CreationDate="2017-02-06T22:59:04.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that Twain was often (almost always) more interested in being interesting than in sticking to the sometimes less colorful facts of the matter. He has been described as writing &quot;autobiographical fiction&quot; and &quot;fictional autobiography.&quot; So you might find more &quot;truth&quot; about what he experienced in life in &quot;Tom Sawyer&quot; and &quot;Huck Finn&quot; than you will in his 5 &quot;nonfiction&quot; travel books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that there were other occasions where he &quot;missed it by that much,&quot; such as when he stopped working at a gold mining claim in Calaveras county - near Angels Camp, I think, where he heard the &quot;Jumping Frog&quot; story - just before they were about to strike it rich there (others supposedly took up the claim as soon as they could and did just that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If true, we can all be glad he didn't (strike it rich), because in that instance he may not have left us with his great literary works (had he struck it rich via mining or some other way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also &quot;could have&quot; gotten rich by investing in telephone stock, which was supposedly offered him at a very low cost by A.G. Bell - an entire &quot;hatful&quot; of it, which he turned down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2017-02-06T22:59:04.953" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2017-02-06T23:25:27.653" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is really more of an extended comment, than an answer. But my feeling about that rhyme is that part of the reason why Orwell used it in the story, was as another example of Winston being &quot;betrayed&quot; by something he trusted. Basically one of the themes of the book is inescapable doom, and even the things that seemed good and seemed &quot;on his side&quot;, O'Brien and Charrington for example, turn on him in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book clearly shows that Winston was fascinated by the vanished (or vanishing) past, symbolised, for example, by the paperweight. For him, the past represented a better place, or at least a different place (since he didn't actually know what it was like - see his attempt to find out from the drunk prole). At any rate, the past was a place that was free of the influence of the Party. It was a time before the Party came to be, and therefore (at least in Winston's mind), it was a purer, more innocent time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And hence his fascination with trying to find out more words to the rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the section where the Party finally &quot;arrests&quot; Winston and Julia (for lack of a better word), Charrington quotes the end of the rhyme, namely, the &quot;chop off your head&quot; part to them. To quote the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then another quite different voice, a thin, cultivated voice which Winston had the impression of having heard before, struck in; 'And by the way, while we are on the subject, &quot;Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head&quot;!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, Charrington, in disguise as the harmless/kindly shop owner, had originally mentioned the rhyme to Winston.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How it goes on I don't remember, but I do&#xA;  know it ended up, &quot;Here comes a candle to light you to bed, Here comes a&#xA;  chopper to chop off your head.&quot; It was a kind of a dance. They held out&#xA;  their arms for you to pass under, and when they came to &quot;Here comes a&#xA;  chopper to chop off your head&quot; they brought their arms down and caught you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it was as if the Past of which he was so fond, and which he valued precisely because of its absence of the Party, has betrayed him as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt Orwell had multiple reasons for using that rhyme - it's very old - but he made it fit well into the plot of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, this usage of this 18th century rhyme, in a mid-20th century novel, is probably its best known use in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="142" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T20:29:28.823" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T20:29:28.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1475" CreationDate="2017-02-06T23:57:54.917" Score="19" ViewCount="703" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Milton's epic poem &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; was first published in England in 1667. While this is long after the Protestant Reformation where alternative ideas about Christianity became slightly more accepted (and perhaps a little less deadly), a story whose protagonist is Satan himself seems fairly revolutionary from my modern perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; the first major work of literature or theological thought to sympathize with Satan or have earlier writers and artists dabbled in this concept?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user403" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T22:35:07.467" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T00:50:11.953" Title="Was Paradise Lost the first major work of literature to give &quot;sympathy for the devil&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1404" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-07T01:53:13.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T01:53:13.030" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T01:53:13.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1405" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-07T01:53:13.030" Score="0" Body="For questions about On The Road, the 1957 novel by Jack Kerouac. Use this tag with the [jack-kerouac] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T02:10:08.367" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T02:10:08.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1409" CreationDate="2017-02-07T02:03:28.893" Score="10" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned about the concept of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley&quot;&gt;uncanny valley&lt;/a&gt;, and it immediately reminded me of the following passage from &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 8 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No, no, there isn't a drop of real human blood in the Witch.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That's why she's bad all through, Mr Beaver,&quot; said Mrs Beaver.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;True enough, Mrs Beaver,&quot; replied he, &quot;there may be two views about humans (meaning no offence to the present company). But there's no two views about things that look like humans and aren't.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I've known good Dwarfs,&quot; said Mrs Beaver.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;So've I, now you come to speak of it,&quot; said her husband, &quot;but precious few, and they were the ones least like men. But in general, take my advice, &lt;strong&gt;when you meet anything that's going to be human and isn't yet, or used to be human once and isn't now, or ought to be human and isn't, you keep your eyes &#xA;  on it and feel for your hatchet.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was CS Lewis making a deliberate reference to the philosophical concept of the &quot;uncanny valley?&quot; For that matter, did the latter idea even exist back then - and if not, did it have a precursor, a related philosophical idea known about in Lewis's day, which did inspire him to write this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T02:08:34.287" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T14:06:58.573" Title="Was CS Lewis referencing the uncanny valley?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T02:04:14.853" Score="11" ViewCount="1584" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/78/78-h/78-h.htm#chap13&quot;&gt;chapter 13 of &lt;em&gt;Tarzan of the Apes&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;His Own Kind&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;, the notice posted by Tarzan reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIS IS THE HOUSE OF TARZAN, THE KILLER OF BEASTS AND MANY BLACK MEN.&#xA;  DO NOT HARM THE THINGS WHICH ARE TARZAN'S. TARZAN WATCHES. TARZAN OF&#xA;  THE APES.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/106/106-h/106-h.htm#chap04&quot;&gt;chapter 4 of &lt;em&gt;Jungle Tales of Tarzan&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The God of Tarzan&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course he did not pronounce God as you or I would pronounce His&#xA;  name, for Tarzan knew naught of the spoken language of his English&#xA;  forbears; but he had a name of his own invention for each of the&#xA;  little bugs which constituted the alphabet. Unlike the apes he was not&#xA;  satisfied merely to have a mental picture of the things he knew, he&#xA;  must have a word descriptive of each. In reading he grasped a word in&#xA;  its entirety; but when he spoke the words he had learned from the&#xA;  books of his father, he pronounced each according to the names he had&#xA;  given the various little bugs which occurred in it, usually giving the&#xA;  gender prefix for each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus it was an imposing word which Tarzan made of GOD. The masculine&#xA;  prefix of the apes is BU, the feminine MU; g Tarzan had named LA, o he&#xA;  pronounced TU, and d was MO. So the word God evolved itself into&#xA;  BULAMUTUMUMO, or, in English, he-g-she-o-she-d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Similarly he had arrived at a strange and wonderful spelling of his&#xA;  own name. Tarzan is derived from the two ape words TAR and ZAN,&#xA;  meaning white skin. It was given him by his foster mother, Kala, the&#xA;  great she-ape. When Tarzan first put it into the written language of&#xA;  his own people he had not yet chanced upon either WHITE or SKIN in the&#xA;  dictionary; but in a primer he had seen the picture of a little white&#xA;  boy and so he wrote his name BUMUDE-MUTOMURO, or he-boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To follow Tarzan's strange system of spelling would be laborious as&#xA;  well as futile, and so we shall in the future, as we have in the past,&#xA;  adhere to the more familiar forms of our grammar school copybooks. It&#xA;  would tire you to remember that DO meant b, TU o, and RO y, and that&#xA;  to say he-boy you must prefix the ape masculine gender sound BU before&#xA;  the entire word and the feminine gender sound MU before each of the&#xA;  lower-case letters which go to make up boy—it would tire you and it&#xA;  would bring me to the nineteenth hole several strokes under par.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-universe, is it ever explained how he came to use &lt;em&gt;Tarzan&lt;/em&gt; as the spelling of his name? The paragraph above would indicate that he would have switched to using &quot;White Skin&quot; as his name once he learned those words, but instead, we see that he used &lt;em&gt;Tarzan&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly, Burroughs calls it a &quot;strange system of spelling&quot;, whereas it should be a strange system of pronunciation. If he did assign sounds to the various characters, and using (g - LA), (o - TU) as representative examples, he could have wrote down &quot;Tarzan&quot; in about as many characters, using different alphabets of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T10:55:03.367" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T10:55:03.367" Title="Why did Tarzan write his name as &quot;Tarzan&quot;?" Tags="&lt;tarzan&gt;&lt;edgar-rice-burroughs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1406" CreationDate="2017-02-07T02:30:32.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We can't be sure.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simple reason for this is, as you noted in your question, that the term itself was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first used in 1970 and translated into English in 1978&lt;/a&gt;, meaning that Lewis certainly didn't use the modern meaning of the concept. However, that's not to say he didn't reference one of its predecessors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such predecessor is that mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jentsch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ernst Jentsch's&lt;/a&gt; 1906 essay &amp;quot;On the Psychology of the Uncanny&amp;quot;, which is one of the first known discussions on the topic of uncanniness, which he defines as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one’s way about in. The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Jentsch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freud&lt;/a&gt; expands on Jentsch's work in his 1919 essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Das Unheimliche&amp;quot; (The Uncanny)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several other lesser-known twentieth century European authors who also wrote about the uncanny who may have influenced Lewis's writing (although the vast majority of them were German).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, nowhere in Lewis's work does it imply that he actually acknowledged the existence of the idea of the uncanny; rather, it's more likely that he simply understood the concept of the &amp;quot;uncanny valley&amp;quot; but never realized it actually had a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the writing about the uncanny during the time period of Lewis's life was more focused on how uncanniness actually made one &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt;, while the modern term refers to how a robot or automaton that too closely resembles a human can evoke a feeling of uncanniness. Since Lewis's writing more focuses on how such a resemblance of a human-like creature to a human can be uncanny, it's more likely that he did write about some form of the modern sense of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's just no definitive answer to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T02:30:32.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1406" CreationDate="2017-02-07T05:18:32.283" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Such an interpretation does not make any sense in the context of the story. But what does makes sense is that Lewis is foreshadowing the central role that humans play in the history and salvation of Narnia. Remember that there is a prophecy that Jadis' power will be broken when two sons of Adam and two daughters of Eve sit on the thrones of Cair Paravel. Only a human being can validly rule Narnia. By stressing that the witch has no human in her, Mr. Beaver is pointing out that she is not the true ruler of Narnia. That which looks human and is not is a pretender to the throne. Only a true human can occupy it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That idea of the imposter, the thing that looks human and isn't runs through much of Lewis's work. It is there in &lt;em&gt;Men Without Chests&lt;/em&gt; (part of &lt;em&gt;The Abolition of Man&lt;/em&gt;) and it is there in &lt;em&gt;Out of the Silent Planet&lt;/em&gt; where Ransom tries to explain to the Malacandrans what is wrong with Weston. It is there in The Last Battle, where Shift dresses as human and gets Puzzle to dress as Aslan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a theological point of view, Satan is the great imposter. Christ is the new man: that which it truly and fully human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, this is not about the uncanny valley, it is about imposters, those things that set themselves up as good and true, as rightful rulers, but are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T14:06:58.573" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T14:06:58.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1398" CreationDate="2017-02-07T08:07:26.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll sum it up like this: He planned it on notebooks when travelling, and spent 7 years revising and editing it. The original however was very 'stream of consciousness' - it was written in continuous form in just 3 weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously when you are trying to publish a 120 foot long scroll, some editing is needed. As for the planning, there didn't seem to be much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During 1947 and 1950, Kerouac went on his travels that the book tells us about. He wrote about the trips in small notebooks in which a lot of the text was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He first started writing the novel in 1948 beaded in his 1947 travels. However he wasn't satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was inspired to write the long script when he received a 1000 word letter that rambles on from Neal Cassady, a great friend, he decided to write the novel as if it was a letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first draft was written in three weeks in 1951. It was the continuous 120 foot scroll that has become so famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this Kerouac continued to edit and delete sections of the manuscript to replace them with shorter passages, so there was some editing. He rewrote many parts and there was an unfortunate incident where a dog mistook part of the scroll for homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an estimated 6 drafts between 1951 and 1957, as his work was constantly rejected by his publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were several inserts that weren't included in &lt;em&gt;On the Road&lt;/em&gt;, and were put in another novel &lt;em&gt;Visions of Cody&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Road&lt;/em&gt; was finally  published in 1957, based on revisions of the 1951 scroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major edits were the fact that it was shorter and the main characters had pseudonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11709924&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NPR&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Road&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T15:58:12.560" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T15:58:12.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1369" CreationDate="2017-02-07T09:02:58.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hard to answer questions about the &lt;strong&gt;meaning&lt;/strong&gt; of a particular event or object in a given work. Such questions seem to rely on a one-to-one allegorical equivalence: a clean shirt &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; a soul unbesmirched by sin, twilight &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt; approaching death, etc. But literature doesn't make meaning through a system where decoding a given token yields its intended significance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a more fruitful way to think about Christmas in &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt; is to ask: &lt;strong&gt;How do the repeated occurrences of Christmas &lt;em&gt;work&lt;/em&gt; in the poem?&lt;/strong&gt; What is their effect? When we compare the different representations of Christmas in the poem with each other, what similarities and differences do we see? What might we make of those parallels and contrasts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics generally agree that the three Christmases in &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt; serve a structural purpose. Philip Mitchell &lt;a href=&quot;http://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/tennyson.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is possible to see the sequence structured around a three year period built around the three Christmas poems; each poem shows a growing sense of hope and resignation as time passes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the Christmas poems do more than simply mark the passage of time. They also show how the poet's response to that death moves from despair and denial to acceptance and hope over the years following Hallam's death. This view goes back at least as far as 1883. In a work published that year, &lt;em&gt;Tennyson's In Memoriam: Its purpose and its structure&lt;/em&gt;, John F. Genung &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=oZgpAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA88&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;observed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would seem, then, that the poem comprises different cycles of thought, to each of which Christmas, standing at the head, gives significance; and when we compare with one another the cycles thus introduced, we find that all have a similar structure, and that each contributes its part in an advancing and broadening series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 89)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genung argues that the first cycle focuses on the past: on memories of good times with Hallam that can never be relived. The second cycle focuses on the present: on the community of friends and on enjoyments that Hallam would have been a part of had he been alive. The final cycle focuses on the future: on the renewal of that community and its evolution into a higher force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reading of the three Christmas celebrations does demonstrate an overall trajectory from sorrow to resignation. In the first one, Section XXVIII, Tennyson describes his despair on hearing Christmas bells:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This year I slept and woke with pain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;I almost wish'd no more to wake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;And that my hold on life would break&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before I heard those bells again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the poet and his companions do attempt traditional Christmas activities, such as singing carols, those are followed by tears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then echo-like our voices rang;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;We sung, tho' every eye was dim,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;A merry song we sang with him&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Last year: impetuously we sang:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We ceased: a gentler feeling crept&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Upon us: surely rest is meet:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&quot;They rest,&quot; we said, &quot;their sleep is sweet,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And silence follow'd, and we wept.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the next Christmas celebration, Section LXXVIII, the mood has changed. The poet participates in the season's traditional joys again, but this time, those joys do not bring tears. Basically, the poet is all cried out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Again our ancient games had place,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The mimic picture's breathing grace,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dance and song and hoodman-blind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who show'd a token of distress?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;No single tear, no mark of pain:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O grief, can grief be changed to less?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O last regret, regret can die!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;No — mixt with all this mystic frame,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Her deep relations are the same,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But with long use her tears are dry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third Christmas, beginning at Section CIV, is different yet again. This time, the poet seeks to keep Christmas (&quot;the night I loved&quot;) free of sorrow, while simultaneously abjuring all the traditional forms of celebration: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No more shall wayward grief abuse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The genial hour with mask and mime;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For change of place, like growth of time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has broke the bond of dying use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let cares that petty shadows cast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;By which our lives are chiefly proved,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;A little spare the night I loved,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hold it solemn to the past.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But let no footstep beat the floor,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Nor bowl of wassail mantle warm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For who would keep an ancient form&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thro' which the spirit breathes no more?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be neither song, nor game, nor feast;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Nor harp be touch'd, nor flute be blown...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The famous New Year poem that immediately follows underscores this commitment to letting go of empty grief as well as empty joys, and to a renewal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The flying cloud, the frosty light:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The year is dying in the night;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ring out the old, ring in the new,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Ring, happy bells, across the snow:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The year is going, let him go;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring out the false, ring in the true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ring out the grief that saps the mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For those that here we see no more; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let him die&quot; and &quot;let him go&quot; refer to the year, of course; but they equally refer to Hallam. Tennyson is explicitly letting go of the grief of Hallam's death. This is not to say that he has gotten over it. Rather, as the next few poems show, he is determined to honor Hallam's qualities and remember him with joy rather than sorrow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structurally, then, the three Christmas celebrations are important milestones in the overall journey of &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt; from despair to acceptance, even to joy. The Prologue asks for &quot;a beam in darkness: let it grow&quot;; the Epilogue is an epithalamium for the poet's sister, who was engaged to Hallam at the time of his death, but is now the bride of another. As the joyful Epilogue shows, the poem as a whole shows that the prayer in the Prologue is answered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;help thy foolish ones to bear;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Christmas sections show the different stages through which &quot;foolish ones&quot; progress as they learn how to cope with sorrow and arrive at the &quot;light&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T09:02:58.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1422" CreationDate="2017-02-07T10:15:25.083" Score="4" ViewCount="810" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833670-dark-matter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Dark Matter' by Blake Crouch&lt;/a&gt;, the central plot theme is a 'box' that creates quantum superposition (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger&amp;#39;s_cat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schródinger's cat&lt;/a&gt;) such that, every time you make a decision, an alternative universe branches off from the one you are in. As we constantly make decisions, the alternative universes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;multiverse&lt;/a&gt;) that are created are infinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book, many versions of 'Jason' are created by the 'original' Jason in his trips through the box. However, there is only &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; version of Jason2 who originally kidnapped Jason1 and started the whole ball in motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't the 'final' universe they end up in be completely awash with an infinite amount of Jasons and Jason2s? After all, Jason2 made choices all the way through, yet we only ever meet one of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise that infinite numbers of protagonists in a story will be a) confusing &amp;amp; b) difficult to write but I was wondering if there was a scientific reason for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T10:31:16.130" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T02:24:58.550" Title="Why is there only one of this person in Dark Matter by Blake Crouch?" Tags="&lt;blake-crouch&gt;&lt;dark-matter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1415" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1722" CreationDate="2017-02-07T10:27:44.373" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24499258-slade-house&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slade House&lt;/a&gt;, by David Mitchell, the twins work complex illusions to tempt their prey into the attic of their house before consuming their souls. The intended victims, however, are always given opportunities to back out and escape and are given a &quot;last choice&quot; just before the soul sucking commences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are they given these choices? The twins are obviously outsiders and pretty much independent. So, why don't they simply kidnap people and get on with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm looking for an 'in-universe' answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T22:41:04.997" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T22:35:28.493" Title="Why are &quot;last choices&quot; necessary in David Mitchell's Slade House?" Tags="&lt;david-mitchell&gt;&lt;slade-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1416" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-07T12:19:16.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T12:19:16.533" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T12:19:16.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1417" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-07T12:19:16.533" Score="0" Body="The 2016 novel by Blake Crouch. Use this tag with the [blake-crouch] tag. Questions should be related to the novel 'Dark Matter', not the astrophysical concept of dark matter." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:15:17.623" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:15:17.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1421" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:53:16.073" Score="5" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Nicholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;, people use the word &quot;genius&quot; to describe people they don't even know and in such a way that I do not believe it has the same meaning as we now use it with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Mr Crowl says the following in Chapter 15:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;and I'll tell you what's more-I think these two geniuses, whoever they are,...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only time I have come across the word used strangely; however, I have also read it used as we use it now: describing someone of exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Dickens's meaning when he uses it in this other way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T22:40:53.893" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T06:22:31.430" Title="Use of 'Genius' in Nicholas Nickleby?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;nicholas-nickleby&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1369" CreationDate="2017-02-07T13:58:13.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is very far from a complete analysis, but it is worth pointing out that the poem is addressed to Christ and that it begins and ends with the theme of incarnation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou madest Life in man and brute;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is on the skull which thou hast made.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou madest man, he knows not why,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He thinks he was not made to die;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And thou hast made him: thou art just.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou seemest human and divine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The highest, holiest manhood, thou.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christ is the author of life and death, but he will not leave us in the dust. Through the incarnation he redeems us (will not leave us in the dust) and becomes the perfect model of manliness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A soul shall draw from out the vast&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And strike his being into bounds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, moved thro' life of lower phase,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Result in man, be born and think,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And act and love, a closer link&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Betwixt us and the crowning race   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of those that, eye to eye, shall look&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On knowledge, under whose command&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is Earth and Earth's, and in their hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is Nature like an open book;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No longer half-akin to brute,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For all we thought and loved and did,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of what in them is flower and fruit;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is because of the incarnation that we are kin to Christ and therefore no longer half-akin to brute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That God, which ever lives and loves,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One God, one law, one element,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And one far-off divine event,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To which the whole creation moves.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The divine event to what the whole creation moves is (reasonably) the incarnation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Christmas, of course, is the feast of the incarnation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T13:58:13.903" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1420" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1432" CreationDate="2017-02-07T14:00:25.027" Score="7" ViewCount="5679" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; is Poirot's last case and for fear of spoilers I have not looked up whether it is his last case because he dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intend to read it only after I have read all the other novels featuring him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I recently realised that Curtain was published posthumously and am now wondering if that is the reason that it is Poirot's last case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there any merit to reading the Poirot books in order?&#xA;Or does it not matter which you read when as long as &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; is last?&#xA;Or does it not matter at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T23:08:03.757" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T23:08:03.757" Title="Is there any merit to reading the Poirot novels in order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1418" CreationDate="2017-02-07T14:14:05.600" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;He appears to be using it in a sarcastic manner. He is saying that they are &lt;em&gt;so stupid&lt;/em&gt;, that he'll call them geniuses. It's like when someone says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Washington DC is the capital of the United States?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;Yes, you genius!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't mean that they are &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; super smart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and I'll tell you what's more-I think these two geniuses, whoever they are,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could be saying the same thing as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and I'll tell you what's more-I think these two idiots, whoever they are,...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Disclaimer: I haven't read this book. This is based off of the question alone.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T14:14:05.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1414" CreationDate="2017-02-07T14:25:02.817" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the premise of the book, there are an infinite number of parallel universes, and every time a 'decision' is made in any of these universes, they branch of into separate universes, one for each possible outcome. However, since 'decisions' include the different states of quantum superposition, there would be an unimaginably large amount of worlds that are virtually the same, except for the flap of a butterfly on the other side of the planet. So the 'perfect' world that Jason wants to return to exists actually in an infinite amount of variations, since there are only a couple of macroscopic things that define this perfect world (his family existing in the way he knows them, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also made the point that it was very unlikely that Jason Desson could create his quantum cube, so only a tiny portion of the worlds has a working quantum cube that allows Jason to change his reality. However, a tiny amount of infinity is still infinity. This also goes for the amount of 'perfect' worlds (as defined by Jason). If we assume that there is an infinite amount of Jasons that want to return to their world and the amount of perfect worlds is also infinite but smaller, we end up having multiple Jasons in every one of those variations of the perfect world. So there's an infinite amount of &lt;em&gt;Jason2's&lt;/em&gt;, but also an infinite amount of worlds from where he can kidnap &lt;em&gt;Jason1's&lt;/em&gt; from. So the story of the book would actually play out in an infinite number of universes with ever so slight variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But honestly, the whole story was pretty much hokum. The way the quantum superposition transcends to a macroscopic scale is just absurd. If you start to pick the story that in the end was basically romantic fantasy apart scientifically, it doesn't hold up at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="414" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-31T02:24:58.550" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T02:24:58.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1448" CreationDate="2017-02-07T15:00:41.333" Score="15" ViewCount="709" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the Legend of Drizzt series by R. A. Salvatore.  I am currently half way through Stream of Silver, which is in book two of the collection.  While reading this, I noticed that it almost reads like a novelization of a dungeons and dragons campaign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we assume that the main party, Drizzt and his group, are played by the players, then their interactions make a lot more sense.  In a campaign, it's sometimes common for players to rarely actually talk to each other in character, as these characters do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extending that assumption, every other character is an NPC (non-player character), and it makes more sense that they actually interact more, having had their story fleshed out by a caring dungeon master.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the fights the characters have gotten into are reminiscent of fights characters in a game would get into, having one fight shortly follow another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to me, there's a lot of evidence of these books being heavily influenced by the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has R. A. Salvatore ever come out as stating that he based the book/s on any dungeons and dragon campaigns, either one's he has played in or otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T17:46:24.403" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:46:24.403" Title="Were R.A. Salvatore's works inspired by real world D&amp;D campaigns?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;legend-of-drizzt&gt;&lt;r-a-salvatore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-07T16:56:45.923" Score="13" ViewCount="4867" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several cases in &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; where it is clear that Christianity, while evidently extremely rare, is still heard of. For instance, Faber notes that Jesus is still known, though in a much different form than before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's as good as I remember. Lord, how they've changed it - in our 'parlours' these days. Christ is one of the 'family' now. I often wonder it God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the Bible (a copy of which Montag saved from a house before it was burned) is evidently no longer read, and certainly not held in any high importance.  This is highlighted when Mildred asks Montag, &quot;Who's more important, me or that Bible?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is religion at all a factor in the society, and if so, has it played a role in keeping old literary fables and stories alive, if only in the oral tradition? Has Christianity - or other religions - been a source of conflict and rebellion against the overwhelmingly anti-literary world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T14:31:50.157" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T14:31:50.157" Title="Is religion still an important factor in the world of Fahrenheit 451?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1425" CreationDate="2017-02-07T17:20:50.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jesus clearly plays a role in the society. When I look at the passage you selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Christ is one of the `family' now&lt;/strong&gt;. I often wonder it God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows that Christ exists in the society (I will get back to that passage)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite there being Jesus, there are no bibles in the country&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I again look at the passage you picked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Christ is one of the `family' now&lt;/strong&gt;. I often wonder it God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down? He's a regular peppermint stick now, all sugar-crystal and saccharine when he isn't making veiled references to certain commercial products that every worshipper absolutely needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I re-highlighted a part that I found important that was not in your question. It calls Christ a member of the &quot;family&quot; which in the context of the book was a term used to describe the T.V. &quot;Family&quot; which acted as perfect models of society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now,&quot; said Mildred, &quot;my `family' is people. They tell me things; I laugh, they laugh! And the colors!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in response to your question, the society clearly has religious, but I believe that the society removed the &quot;religious&quot; aspects when they started censorship, and in doing so turned the Heavenly Figure into a less controversial figure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took some time to edit this question based off the feedback from @Hamlet and @HDE 226868&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T21:17:25.820" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T21:17:25.820" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1428" CreationDate="2017-02-07T17:26:59.060" Score="45" ViewCount="6419" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the peculiarities of Moby-Dick is that it includes large quantities of information about the science of whales and the practice of whaling. Whole chapters are dedicated to describing the technicalities of life aboard a whaling vessel in the most minute detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These make the novel read oddly: they interrupt the telling of the tale and many readers find them boring. What was Melville's reason for including so many technical chapters and going into such detail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-07T17:28:38.893" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T01:45:35.117" Title="Why is there so much technical detail of whaling included in Moby-Dick?" Tags="&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1427" CreationDate="2017-02-07T17:27:21.927" Score="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple purposes behind the novel structure of Moby-Dick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first instance the author was himself a whaleman, having spent 18 months as an ordinary seaman aboard the whaler Acushnet in 1841–42. In his experience the literature of the day, such as Miriam Coffin or The Whale-Fisherman by Joseph Hart, did not portray whaling accurately but rather sensationalised it. He wished to provide his readers with a more realistic account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doing so, he also gave the reader the information necessary to better understand and appreciate the passages of whaling described in the novel. With the reader forewarned, he is able to keep the narrative passages tense and exciting. It is interesting that, early in the novel, the Pequod meets virutally no whales and that the chases become longer and more involved as the story progresses. This may be because Melville felt he needed to give the reader more and more technical information before they could fully appreicate these encounters, but understood the science would need to be spaced out among the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In describing it to the reader, the science also serves another useful narrative function. It indicates that on whaling voyages, long periods of time pass when nothing much happens at all. By padding out of the story with scientific digressions serves as a useful narrative metaphor for waiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The level of detail provided also mirrors one of the novel's central themes: obsession. Although Ishmael is the narrator and Ahab the obvious obsessive, the amount of science indicates that Ishmael is also an obsessive. His obsession is the business of whaling itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Melville made good use of these passages in serving as metaphors for other themes of the novel where he felt it appropriate. For example in the chapter The Line, which describes how the whale line is stored and used in the boat, it ends by using the line as a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters&#xA;  round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden&#xA;  turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present&#xA;  perils of life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T17:27:21.927" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1437" CreationDate="2017-02-07T20:24:27.830" Score="12" ViewCount="8433" Body="&lt;p&gt;Were the plays within The Complete Works of Shakespeare entirely in iambic pentameter?  I seem to recall singing bits (when there were lyrics) from Twelfth Night and definitely from Much Ado About Nothing, which were not in that metric form.  However, it could be the way that I had strung the lyrics together so that I could stress the rhyming words - unlike the lines I spoke.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are Shakespeare's plays completely in iambic pentameter?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="420" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T12:32:55.063" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T10:58:27.597" Title="Were all of Shakespeare's plays fully in iambic pentameter?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1420" CreationDate="2017-02-07T21:06:15.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There's no need to read the Poirot books in any particular order.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hercule_Poirot_in_literature#Expanded.2FAdapted_stories&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rewritten a few of the early Poirot short stories (see list)&lt;/a&gt; from the book &lt;em&gt;Poirot's Early Cases&lt;/em&gt; (1923) and &lt;em&gt;The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt; (1939) and the posthumous collection &lt;em&gt;While the Light Lasts and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt; (1997) into full novels later.  Thus, if you read those short story collections, there is a risk that you get spoilers for several novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, the Poirot books sometimes mention earlier stories, but only in minor ways, and they never spoil them.  Nor are the earlier books necessary to understand the plot of newer books.  At least this is what I believe from reading over a dozen of the 45 Poirot books, so there might be exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies to &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; too.  Indeed, &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; is the last Poirot story in universe, and Agatha Christie has always intended so.  But &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; makes only minor references to a few of the earlier stories, and is readable independently of those.  In particular, &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; happens in the same location as the very first story &lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Affair at Styles&lt;/em&gt;, but apart from Poirot and his companion Hastings, it has entirely new characters, and the mysteries in the two are completely unrelated as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short story collection &lt;em&gt;The Labours of Hercules&lt;/em&gt; (1947) has a frame story connecting the short stories in it, so the short stories in any one of the short story collections should be read together in order.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are new to Agatha Christie, then I would advise against reading the books in chronological order, because if you give up halfway, then you might miss some of the best books.  While certain famous authors like Asimov or Verne have written their best books at the start of their carrier, and then after they became famous, they wrote mostly average quality books with only a few gems, this doesn't seem to be true to Agatha Christie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T21:06:15.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2017-02-07T22:28:28.180" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. Shakespeare wrote a fair bit of prose as well, especially later in his career. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryvi/full.html&quot;&gt;Henry VI part 1&lt;/a&gt; is entirely in verse. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html&quot;&gt;Tempest&lt;/a&gt; mixes verse and prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often, verse indicates the &quot;high&quot; plot line (the rich people) and prose indicates the &quot;low&quot; plot line (poor people). In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/full.html&quot;&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Viola often (though not always) speaks in poetry to Olivia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make me a willow cabin at your gate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And call upon my soul within the house;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Write loyal cantons of contemned love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sing them loud even in the dead of night;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Halloo your name to the reverberate hills&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make the babbling gossip of the air&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cry out 'Olivia!' O, You should not rest&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Between the elements of air and earth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But you should pity me!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in prose to Sir Toby Belch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My legs do better understand me, sir, than I&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  understand what you mean by bidding me taste my legs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His songs tended to be written in &quot;common meter&quot;, either iambic tetrameter or alternating lines of tetra- and tri-meter. Like Feste's song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is love? 'tis not hereafter;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Present mirth hath present laughter;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What's to come is still unsure:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In delay there lies no plenty;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Youth's a stuff will not endure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Ophelia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is dead and gone, lady,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is dead and gone;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At his head a grass-green turf,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At his heels a stone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T22:28:28.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1425" CreationDate="2017-02-07T22:53:06.030" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't, at least not in the form we know it. The society presented in the book is one of leisure, easily consumed entertainment and carelessnes. Any thoughtprovoking material (i.e. books, especially critical or philosophical ones) has been banned, as it might lead to earnest and meaningful thoughts, discussions and questions. Of course the people fail to notice that this is how progress as a society is achieved, so they are stuck in an endless loop of meaningless entertainment programming. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Religion doesn't fit in this hedonistic society at all, as faith and spirituality aren't 'fun' per se. Also religion and religious beliefs are tied to philosophical questions and considerations, so they would be regarded as equally evil as books by this society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, religion isn't banned or forbidden. It's rather instrumentalised by the entertainment industry, it's symbols and ideas turned into commercial byproducts and advertising media (as indicated by your quote). This way, even though religion still exists and people may use phrases such as 'my God', it doesn't hold any meaning any longer, therefore I make the case that a real religion in our understanding of the term doesn't exist any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common pattern in the book. Things that are considered a bad influence aren't banned or outlawed directly, they are rather turned around into a commercial product or they are disencouraged through peer-pressure and twisted rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, for those who have not yet succumbed to the world of leisure (such as the old man that Montag confides in), religion might still hold value and be a source of peace of mind or comfort. So religion still exists, but it doesn't have any meaning for the society at large. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="414" LastActivityDate="2017-02-07T22:53:06.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1826" CreationDate="2017-02-07T23:03:34.583" Score="21" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;In school, students are often taught about iambic pentameter via &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.about.com/od/shakespeareslanguage/a/Iambic-Pentameter-Examples.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespearian examples&lt;/a&gt;.  These, however, were based on the Received Pronunciation (RP) reading of Shakespeare's works. In reality, &lt;a href=&quot;http://originalpronunciation.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare used an entirely different pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, replete with differences which removed syllables relative to Received Pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the first stanza of Romeo and Juliet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two households, both alike in dignity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From forth the fatal loins of these two foes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare with the OP of the stanza in David Crystal's video &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KN6cDvKjxw4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How did Romeo and Juliet sound to Shakespeare’s contemporaries?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can iambic pentameter possibly work when the syllables that are meant to be stressed aren't even present?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T17:15:06.163" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T17:15:06.163" Title="How does Shakespeare's iambic pentameter work with Original Pronunciation?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2017-02-08T00:02:26.800" Score="24" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, much of the content of Shakespeare's plays isn't even written in verse. There's plenty of prose in Shakespeare - indeed, at least one play (&lt;em&gt;Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt;) is written almost entirely in prose. But when he did use verse, it's &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; iambic pentameter, with some exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that none of this is by chance. There's actually a pretty consistent pattern governing when he used prose and when he used verse, and similarly, when he broke the pattern of iambic pentameter, there was usually a reason for it based on the nature of that particular speech.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The types of writing in Shakespeare's plays is usually split into three distinct types: &lt;strong&gt;rhyming verse&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_verse&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;blank verse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;prose&lt;/strong&gt;. As a general rule of thumb, blank verse is the standard, while rhyming verse is reserved for more flowery speeches or occasions when it's OK to sound a little unnatural, and prose is used for more down-to-earth talk, often between lower-class people. &lt;a href=&quot;http://cola.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/engl339/verseprose.html&quot;&gt;This excellent introductory article&lt;/a&gt; to prose and verse in Shakespeare covers not only the meanings and some examples of each of the three (you're probably already familiar with these terms) but also a nice summary of how each of them tends to be used in Shakespeare's plays specifically. Quoting this article with some added emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PROSE&lt;/strong&gt; is used whenever verse would seem bizarre:  in &lt;strong&gt;serious letters&lt;/strong&gt; (Macbeth to Lady Macbeth; Hamlet to Horatio), in &lt;strong&gt;proclamations&lt;/strong&gt;, and in the speeches of &lt;strong&gt;characters actually or pretending to be mad&lt;/strong&gt; (Lady Macbeth; Hamlet and Ophelia; Edgar and King Lear) -- verse is apparently too regular and orderly for expressing madness.  Prose is used for &lt;strong&gt;cynical commentary&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. Jacques and Touchstone in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; Edmund in &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;) or &lt;strong&gt;reducing flowery speech to common sense terms&lt;/strong&gt; (all over &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;).  It is used &lt;strong&gt;when the rational is contrasted with the emotional&lt;/strong&gt; (Brutus vs. Antony in &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;).  It is used for &lt;strong&gt;simple exposition, transitions, or contrast&lt;/strong&gt; (the first scenes of &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;A Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;).  It is used for &lt;strong&gt;scenes of everyday life&lt;/strong&gt; (Bottom and company in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;; Corin in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; William, Bates and Court in &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;); for &lt;strong&gt;low comedy&lt;/strong&gt; (Bottom and company; Touchstone and Audrey in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; Fluellen and Pistol in &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;; Sir Toby Belch, Maria and Malvolio in &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;); and for &lt;strong&gt;bantering, relaxed or unbuttoned conversation&lt;/strong&gt; (Celia, Rosalind and Touchstone in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; Gower, Fluellen, MacMorris and Jamie in &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;; Prince Hal and Falstaff in &lt;em&gt;2 Henry IV&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;PLEASE NOTE: it is NOT ACCURATE to say that &quot;the lower classes speak prose and the upper classes speak verse.&quot; The highborn cousins Rosalind and Celia speak prose to one another in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, as do King Henry and Katherine of France in &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, tends to use prose both when he is being very rational and when he is very irrational (but the passionate Hamlet speaks in verse). Similarly, when the lower classes figure in serious or romantic situations, they may speak verse (e.g. Silvius and Phebe in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; the gardeners in &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;RHYME&lt;/strong&gt; is often used for &lt;strong&gt;ritualistic or choral effects&lt;/strong&gt; and for &lt;strong&gt;highly lyrical or sententious passages&lt;/strong&gt; that give advice or point to a moral (the Duke's speeech at the end of Act 3 in &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt;). Rhyme is used for &lt;strong&gt;songs&lt;/strong&gt; (Amiens in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; Feste in &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;; Ariel in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;); in examples of &lt;strong&gt;bad verse&lt;/strong&gt; (the &lt;em&gt;Pyramus and Thisbe&lt;/em&gt; play in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; and Orlando's bad poetry in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;); in &lt;strong&gt;Prologues, Epilogues and Choruses&lt;/strong&gt; (the Chorus in &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;; Puck's epilogue); in &lt;strong&gt;masques&lt;/strong&gt; (Hymen in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;; Iris, Ceres and Juno in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;) and in &lt;strong&gt;plays-within-plays&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Pyramus and Thisbe&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;; the Mousetrap play in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;), where it distinguishes these imaginary performances from the &quot;real world&quot; of the play.  It is also used for many &lt;strong&gt;manifestations of the supernatural&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g. the witches in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;; the fairies in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;; Ariel in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;) -- but not for ghosts (e.g. Hamlet's father), who retain the human use of blank verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;BLANK VERSE&lt;/strong&gt; is employed in a wide range of situations because it &lt;strong&gt;comes close to the natural speaking rhythms of English but raises it above the ordinary without sounding artificial&lt;/strong&gt; (unlike the &quot;singsong&quot; effect produced by dialogue in rhyme). Art elevates and distills the everyday; writing in blank verse helps sharpen that distinction. Blank verse, as opposed to prose, is used mainly for &lt;strong&gt;passionate, lofty or momentous occasions&lt;/strong&gt; and for &lt;strong&gt;introspection&lt;/strong&gt;; it may suggest a &lt;strong&gt;refinement of character&lt;/strong&gt;. Many of Shakespeare's most famous speeches are written in blank verse: Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's plotting; the great soliloquies of Henry V and Hamlet; Caliban's complaints and Prospero's farewell to magic in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. As noted above, a speech or scene in blank verse may end with a single rhyming couplet known as a capping couplet.  It is used to lend a final punch, a concluding flourish or a note of climax to the end of a speech or scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading a play in written form, it's easy to tell the difference: prose runs all the way to the end of the line and doesn't have capital letters at the start of every line, while in verse (either blank or rhyming) each line usually ends after roughly the same number of syllables and the next line starts with a capital letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When seeing a play being performed - at least if it's performed &lt;em&gt;well&lt;/em&gt; - it can be hard to distinguish by ear between prose and blank verse, but rhyming verse is more noticeable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's interesting to note the historical context here. Shakespeare was writing at just around the time that &lt;strong&gt;prose was supplanting verse as the primary means for writing fiction&lt;/strong&gt;, which explains why we see such a mixture in his plays, as well as why the proportion of prose to verse generally increases from earlier plays to later ones. Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/prose-and-verse-in-shakespeares-plays&quot;&gt;this very informative British Library article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A mix of [prose and verse] is unusual in much of literature, but commonplace in the plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists of his age. Although we would probably expect a modern play to be written in prose, the practice of English dramatists before Shakespeare was to write in rhyming verse. Poetry was regarded as the chief literary form, although prose was used for some types of storytelling, such as chivalric romances and travellers’ tales. (The novel as we know it didn’t emerge until the 18th century). The use of prose alongside verse was something that gradually crept into English drama towards the end of the 16th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s early comedies make use of both prose and verse, but his first tragedy, the Roman play &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, is – according to convention – written almost entirely in verse, except for Act 4, Scene 3 when Titus has a brief exchange with a simple-minded messenger. The ‘clown’, as he is listed in the dramatis personae, speaks in prose, and at one point Titus, a renowned general in the Roman army, slips into this mode while talking to the clown. Shakespeare wrote &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt; in 1593–94. By the time he wrote his later tragedies, he was using a much greater proportion of prose, and in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (composed 1600–01), for example, this is used to telling effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same article also analyses several specific passages taken from &lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, etc. I'll consider a couple of these which focus on places where Shakespeare derived from the usual iambic pentameter scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The quality of mercy is not strain’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest, it becomes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The throned monarch better than his crown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV Scene I&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third line here ends with two stressed syllables. Rather than being an unintentional slip away from iambic pentameter, this is likely a deliberate technique used to emphasise the words &lt;em&gt;twice blest&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly, the paucity of stressed syllables in the fifth line helps to make &quot;might&quot; stand out from the rest of the line, which is another form of emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More examples can be found in some early scenes of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, when Hamlet speaks in broken verse with many lines much longer than ten syllables, and towards the end of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, when Prospero speaks in shorter, iambic tetrameter, lines of verse. Both of these deviations from the norm (the BL article argues) can be interpreted in terms of semantic meaning. Hamlet is cracking up under the stress of his father's death and his mother's distance from him, and this shows in the extended lines which can hardly contain his emotion. Prospero is weakened, having lost his magic, and this shows in the diminished, seven or eight syllable, lines of his final speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T00:02:26.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1438" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T07:57:58.097" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T07:57:58.097" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T07:57:58.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1439" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T07:57:58.097" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens. Use this tag with the [charles-dickens] tag. " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T10:36:27.623" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T10:36:27.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1449" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:07:40.343" Score="9" ViewCount="695" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(Massive spoilers on the book follow).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toward the end of Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell, a nameless character appears before Childermass and performs various feats of magic, including bringing Vinculus back to life. He then vanishes and is not mentioned again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had always presumed this nameless character was John Uskglass, the Raven King. But the episode has always bothered me because I can't understand its significance. It adds nothing to the plot - Vinculus being raised by &quot;unknown forces&quot; would have served just as well - and feels like a nagging loose end introduced to no great purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the literary skill exhibited in other aspects of the novel's construction, I doubt that this is true. So: is the nameless magician John Uskglass? And what is the significance of his reappearance in terms of the novel's themes and story? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T14:11:46.797" Title="In Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell, what is the purpose of this character's resurrection?" Tags="&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1441" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:45:05.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T10:45:05.613" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T10:45:05.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1442" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:45:05.613" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2004 novel Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr. Norrell, by  Susanna Clarke. Use this tag with the [susanna-clarke] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T14:37:19.073" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T14:37:19.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1443" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:46:50.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T10:46:50.553" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T10:46:50.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1444" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T10:46:50.553" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Susanna Clarke (born 1959) or about her life as a writer. She is most famous for her novel Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell (2004). " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:45:20.170" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:45:20.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2017-02-08T13:01:49.723" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Devdas was the character from Sharatcandra. He was an alcoholic in deep love, a weak man who was resigned to his fate, a masochist. The syndrome is representative of such characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="447" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T13:01:49.723" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1423" CreationDate="2017-02-08T13:33:15.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2dck4v/hello_there_im_ra_salvatore_a_fantasy_author_for/cjo71qf/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In this AMA-thread on reddit&lt;/a&gt;, we find the questions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know, where do you draw your inspiration from? Do you write about games you've played/ran, or is it straight from your head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which R.A. Salvatore answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Straight from my head, which is a jumble of everything around me: the people I meet, the stories I hear, the music I hear, the sights and sounds of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers take it all in, chew it up into little pieces, and spit it back out, hopefully in entertaining ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I would take to mean that while some of the stories he's heard may have been told in DnD campaigns, it doesn't seem like they are a major inspiration for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="449" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T13:33:15.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1440" CreationDate="2017-02-08T14:11:46.797" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, this character is John Uskglass.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already answered this part &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/139857/31394&quot;&gt;on another SE site&lt;/a&gt;, and most of the same arguments apply here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who else could he possibly be? A magician of great power, enough to revive the dead without fairy assistance, and who changed the writing upon Vinculus's body. Vinculus was the personification of the Raven King's book; the writing upon him was the Raven King's prophecy - who but the Raven King could change it to show something new and different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man wore black boots and a black travelling coat. He was half-stooping, half-kneeling on the snowy ground beside Vinculus. For a brief moment Childermass thought it was Strange –but this man was not quite so tall and was somewhat slighter in figure. His dark clothes were clearly expensive and looked fashionable. Yet his straight, dark hair was longer than any fashionable gentleman would have worn it; it gave him something of the look of a Methodist preacher or a Romantic poet. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I know him,&quot; thought Childermass. &quot;He is a magician. I know him well. Why can I not think what his name is?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out loud he said, &quot;The body is mine, sir! Leave it be!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man looked up. &quot;Yours, John Childermass?&quot; he said with a mildly ironic air, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I thought it was mine.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a curious thing but despite his clothes and his air of cool authority, his speech sounded uncouth –even to Childermass's ears. His accent was northern –of that there was no doubt –but Childermass did not recognize it. &lt;strong&gt;It might have been Northumbrian, but it was tinged with something else -the speech of the cold countries that lie over the North Sea and –which seemed more extraordinary still –there was more than a hint of French in his pronunciation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Does the land hereabouts belong to you, sir?&quot; [Childermass] asked.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And where is your horse? Where is your carriage? Where are your servants?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have no horse, John Childermass. I have no carriage. And &lt;strong&gt;only one of my servants is here.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Where?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without troubling to look up, the man raised his arm and pointed a thin, pale finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Childermass looked behind him in confusion. There was no one there. Just the wind blowing across the snowy tussocks. What did he mean? Was it the wind or the snow? He had heard of mediaeval magicians who claimed these and other natural forces as servants. Then comprehension dawned on him. &quot;What? No, sir, you are mistaken! I am not your servant!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;You boasted of it, not three days ago,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; said the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 67 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mysterious figure with great magical power and a strange accent, who claims to own both Vinculus's body and the surrounding land, and whom Childermass has boasted of serving - come on, there's only one man this can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, Strange and Norrell confirm using their magic that John Uskglass is in Yorkshire at that very moment, but later departs and becomes once more unlocatable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Norrell did the magic, naming John Uskglass as the person they sought. He divided the surface of the water into quarters with lines of glittering light. He gave each quarter a name: Heaven, Hell, Earth and Faerie. Instantly a speck of bluish light shone in the quarter that represented Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a tone of wonder, Norrell said, &quot;I think we may have succeeded after all! It says he is here. In Yorkshire!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 66&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the silver dish of water the speck of light flickered and disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &quot;He is gone,&quot; he said. [...] &quot;It is very odd,&quot; continued Norrell, in a tone of wonder. &quot;What do you suppose he was doing in Yorkshire?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 68&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;His appearance is extremely significant for the ending of the novel.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until this point, it has seemed as though Norrell and Strange have been the ones pulling the strings of English magic. Their different approaches to the theory and practice of magic, and the growing strife between them (admittedly fuelled by the gruesome twosome Lascelles and Drawlight) has been the focus of the novel. Like Childermass, we the readers believe that they hold all the power and the destiny of English magic in their hands, and that their choices will determine its future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until this point, too, the Raven King has been spoken of only as a distant, shadowy, semi-legendary figure. Their attitudes towards him make one of the biggest differences in philosophy between Strange and Norrell, but we the readers have been left unsure what to think of him. His existence in the past seems likely, his continuing power in the present day doubtful; he has apparently never manifested himself or his power over the course of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOW, suddenly, up he pops, seemingly out of nowhere. We might assume he appeared because he was summoned by Strange and Norrell, but he doesn't go to them, and instead goes about his own business. Casually he performs the feat of raising a man from the dead, which was so far beyond Norrell's abilities as to perpetrate the entire fiasco with Thistledown; equally casually, he rewrites the entire prophecy that inspired Strange's involvement in the world of magic. It's humbling to see how helpless Norrell and Strange are in comparison to him. This is the &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; power of English magic, and we'd never really glimpsed it before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to add even more strength to the blow, we then hear from Vinculus that Strange and Norrell were never really in control of their own destinies. In the big picture, they were just the Raven King's pawns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So?&quot; said Childermass, stung. &quot;That is not so very trifling, is it? Norrell is a clever man - and Strange another. They have their faults, as other men do, but their achievements are still remarkable. Make no mistake; I am John Uskglass's man. Or would be, if he were here. But you must admit that the restoration of English magic is their work, not his.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Their work!&quot; scoffed Vinculus. &quot;Theirs? Do you still not understand? &lt;strong&gt;They &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; the spell John Uskglass is doing. That is all they have ever been. And he is doing it now!&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange &amp;amp; Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 67 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly Vinculus is hardly a reliable narrator, but on matters of prophecy, he does tend to know what he's talking about. He's already spoken many truths which nobody recognised or appreciated at the time. His very body is attuned to the Raven King's intentions and prophecies; I'd say he's worth listening to at the very least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's the Raven King who is pulling the strings, and has been from the very beginning.&lt;/strong&gt; It was he, through his prophecy and his agent Vinculus, who brought Strange and Norrell together in the first place. He showed up in England for his own purposes, to resuscitate Vinculus and rewrite the prophecy, not because of the summons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reveal is part of what makes the ending of the book to stunning and unexpected. Another part, of course, is the disappearance of the two main characters to another dimension, leaving others to carry on their work. In some ways it's an unsatisfying ending - we've identified with Strange and Norrell all this time, and wanted to see a resolution to their conflict and a glorious future for English magic (not to mention Strange's marriage!) - but there's no doubt it's an audacious move by the author, and one that leaves us (or at least me) almost wanting to read the whole book again from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T14:11:46.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2760" CreationDate="2017-02-08T14:50:47.997" Score="11" ViewCount="1310" Body="&lt;p&gt;In case you were unaware, (spoilers for both)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tom Robinson loses the trial and ends up dying in &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; whereas in &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt;, where Atticus wins the trial and Tom goes free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is from &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; for those who want proof&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; He won an acquittal for a colored boy on a rape charge. The chief witness for the prosecution was a white girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was this the only &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; inconsistency between the two novels?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I  am not asking for you all to dig through your books for every scrap of detail, just the blatant differences please. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T15:34:00.023" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:10:32.767" Title="Was Tom Robinson's trial the only inconsistency between To Kill A Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;go-set-a-watchman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1459" CreationDate="2017-02-08T20:39:08.940" Score="4" ViewCount="1394" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;Walden; or Life in the Woods&lt;/em&gt;, Thoreau says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can. &lt;strong&gt;Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new.&lt;/strong&gt; Old people did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is. Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question pertains to the part of the quote that is bolded. What does he mean by this quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T15:25:43.323" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T21:45:58.653" Title="What is meant by this quote from Walden?" Tags="&lt;walden&gt;&lt;henry-david-thoreau&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1454" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1462" CreationDate="2017-02-08T20:40:03.003" Score="22" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memoires of gedenkschriften van minister Pieter Bas&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The memoirs of Minister Pieter Bas&lt;/em&gt;) is a satirical biography of a fictional Minister of Education. The book is mostly about the man's youth in the second half of the 19th century. The book was first published in 1937.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the book, the author describes the social status of various members of the future Minister's hometown of Dordrecht, and how some of them fell down the social ladder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating from Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well-known is the case of doctor Jolles. His whole life had been one masterful tactic to hide the fact that his father had been a butcher. He married the daughter of Bille, he bought a house at the Wijnandt Bridge; and slowly ascending via the tax receiver, past the apothecary, past Boddens, yes past Venemeyer, he found himself in the space between Sanders and Simons, and would soon have been allowed to tap Simons' shoulder, saying: &quot;Would you come to me, Jan, tonight?&quot; when that fatal event happened on the card-playing evening of Mrs Beekman.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Do you want more tea, doctor?&quot; Mrs Beekman had said (she spoke those words at the window, according to others however she stood on the doorstep). &quot;No&quot;, Jolles had answered laughing, &quot;I still have a full pot at home&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The moment&lt;/em&gt; he said this, he went pale. But it was too late. His life's work was destroyed. He fell deep beneath the tax receiver, still made a few attempts to get out of this swamp until death surprised him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author goes on to suggest that death was a release, after this fall from grace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work is highly satirical, and the paragraph can be seen as poking fun at the value people ascribe to social status.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that both Jolles and Simons are medical doctors. Since it is set in the late 1800s, and written in 1937, it makes sense that a lowly origin affects Dr. Jolles' status, putting him below Dr. Simons in the eyes of the other people of status in town.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be much analysis of the book; most of what's on the internet is written by school children reading it as homework. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholieren.com/boekverslag/54987&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here, in Dutch&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholieren.com/boekverslag/50416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here, also in Dutch&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, how does having a pot full of tea at home betray his lowly origins and cause his fall from grace? Since the work is satirical, there may be a joke here that is lost on 21st century readers? The best we could think of is that it somehow showed him being too frugal to be a part of high society; but we were unable to establish if that was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="92" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T16:06:03.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T16:06:03.680" Title="How did having a full pot of tea betray the doctor's lowly origins?" Tags="&lt;memoirs-of-minister-pieter-bas&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1455" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T21:04:53.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T21:04:53.020" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T21:04:53.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1456" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T21:04:53.020" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. Use this tag with the [herman-melville] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T21:49:11.903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T21:49:11.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1457" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-08T21:06:44.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T21:06:44.057" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T21:06:44.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1458" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-08T21:06:44.057" Score="0" Body="For questions about Herman Melville and his works, most notably Moby Dick." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-08T21:49:16.570" LastActivityDate="2017-02-08T21:49:16.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2017-02-09T09:01:50.447" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the context, it appears that the quote is saying that everything progresses - what was good for the ancient people is not necessarily good for us now. For instance, a house is for people today, and we're fine with that. A cave was for the cavemen, and he was fine with that. &lt;strong&gt;What your grandparents used is not necessarily what you want to use.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T09:01:50.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T09:21:30.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T09:21:30.750" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T09:21:30.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T09:21:30.750" Score="0" Body="A play by William Shakespeare, focusing on the Jew Shylock. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:22:40.763" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:22:40.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1454" CreationDate="2017-02-09T09:24:39.090" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare this with a situation where someone visits you, you offer them food, and they say: &quot;No, thanks, I have lots of food at home!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be extremely rude in many cultures. It may imply any of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guests eat because they don't have food at home&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The host may not have enough food, so the guest may be putting considerable strain on them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The food provided by the host is not good enough for the guest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of these may be true, but one does not say that out loud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, who's not Dutch, Dr. Jolles's response seems to be a reflexive repudiation of poverty - something which a member of the gentry would never need to do. Dr. Jolles feels the need to say that he has a full pot at home because he didn't have a full pot of tea at home in his past. To quote George R. R. Martin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Any man who must say 'I am the King' is no true king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="16" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:58:01.363" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:58:01.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="829" CreationDate="2017-02-09T10:58:45.467" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the books are related and are intended to be read in order. &lt;em&gt;In Search of Lost Time&lt;/em&gt; is one work in seven volumes. Each volume is not an independent work. Rather, the novel is a developing story; the narrator is relating events from his life, and each volume furthers the narrative. Outside of specialized research or publication/translation contexts, it is rare to find the individual volumes being treated singly. The English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, for example, does not even have separate entries for each volume. (The French one, however, does.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that some sections of the narrative are relatively self-contained. For example, Roger Shattuck &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/s/shattuck-way.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;points out&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first two sections of Proust's novel, &quot;Combray&quot; and &quot;Swann in Love,&quot; can stand separately and have earned many admirers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the second half of &lt;em&gt;Sodom and Gomorrah&lt;/em&gt; (volume 4), and the entirety of &lt;em&gt;The Prisoner&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Fugitive&lt;/em&gt; (volumes 5 and 6), constitute what is called &quot;the Albertine cycle&quot;. Aaron Matz &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2005/03/in_pursuit_of_proust.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; of this cycle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite all their connections to the earlier volumes of the novel, The Prisoner and The Fugitive (along with the second half of Sodom and Gomorrah) constitute a novel unto themselves, a total fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from both Shattuck's and Matz's articles, it is clear that these relatively self-contained narratives don't map cleanly to individual &lt;em&gt;volumes&lt;/em&gt;. In talking about the &quot;first two sections of Proust's novel&quot;, Shattuck means the first two parts of volume 1, &lt;em&gt;Swann's Way&lt;/em&gt;, which are thereby the first two sections of the novel as a whole; he does not mean (as one might assume) the first two &lt;em&gt;volumes&lt;/em&gt; of the seven that constitute the entire work. And Matz likewise refers to the Albertine cycle as comprising half of one volume, and the two next volumes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a given volume of Proust's work does not itself constitute a self-contained whole. Characters recur from one volume to the next, and for the most part, knowledge of what went on in a previous volume is assumed in subsequent volumes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Proust did not complete the final revisions on the last three volumes, some overlaps, repetitions, and inconsistencies occur, so the narrative isn't developed entirely in a clean arc. Proust's technique, too, isn't strictly linear. However, this makes reading the novel in order more important, not less; reading the volumes out of order will make the experience difficult and confusing (some might say &quot;more difficult and confusing&quot;), as you won't be able to tell whether some gap or inconsistency is due to the technique, the inadequate revision, or your having skipped a volume.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T10:58:45.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:10:51.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T11:16:03.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:16:03.233" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:16:03.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T11:16:03.233" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Go Set A Watchman&quot;, the novel by Harper Lee. Use in conjunction with [harper-lee]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T11:29:37.287" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T11:29:37.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:02:41.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:02:41.957" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:02:41.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:02:41.957" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Walden; or Life in the Woods&quot;, the book by Walter David Thoreau. Use in conjunction with [walter-david-thoreau]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T13:08:02.407" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T13:08:02.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:03:12.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:03:12.160" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:03:12.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:03:12.160" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Walter David Thoreau and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:43:12.867" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:43:12.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1473" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:11:37.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:11:37.270" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:11:37.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1474" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:11:37.270" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the book by Joseph Campbell. Use in conjunction with [joseph-campbell]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T14:42:45.707" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T14:42:45.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1402" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:18:53.100" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;As asked, the question is difficult to answer. Several premises are open to question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What constitutes a &amp;quot;major work&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is your definition of &amp;quot;sympathy&amp;quot; in this context?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whatever the definition, how sure are we that Milton is, in fact, sympathetic to Satan?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Given that Henry VIII broke with the Catholic church in 1532 (barely a lifetime before Milton's birth), and that Milton lived through a civil war in England that had religious strife at its root, how &amp;quot;long after&amp;quot; the Reformation was Milton writing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keeping these issues in mind, let's see how one could think one's way to an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, as @eirikdaude pointed out in a comment to the question, that Satan is the hero of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; cannot be taken for granted. William Blake was the first to assert that Milton was &amp;quot;of the devil's party&amp;quot;, but since then, there have always been detractors. A &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674857476&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blurb&lt;/a&gt; to Stanley Fish's 1967 book, &lt;em&gt;Surprised by Sin&lt;/em&gt;, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1967 the world of Milton studies was divided into two armed camps: one proclaiming (in the tradition of Blake and Shelley) that Milton was of the devil’s party with or without knowing it, the other proclaiming (in the tradition of Addison and C.S. Lewis) that the poet’s sympathies are obviously with God and the angels loyal to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fish's book sought to bridge the gap between the two camps by an ingenious argument. Of course Satan is presented sympathetically and attractively in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;: Milton's point is that our being drawn to the devil shows how and why we are fallen. We fall because the devil is attractive, and we are fallen to find him so. Milton deliberately traps us into sympathy with the devil, so that we realize and understand our fallen nature. We are, in short, surprised into and by sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Obiter dicta: Personally I think Fish rather than Milton has devised this wonderful way for the latter to have his cake and eat it too. But then, what one reads &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; has changed between 1967 and now. Those few who read Milton at all these days don't do so to figure out what his intentions were, or even to psychologize him and say that his Christian superego is unable to mask the desires of his Satan-worshipping id. That said, on its own terms, Fish's monograph is a brilliant piece of work.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not so much that Milton has sympathy for the devil. It's that he knowingly makes the devil appear sympathetic in order to drive home the real point of his poem. And his portrayal of a sympathetic Satan has plenty of antecedents in English literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such is Christopher Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;. Both Faustus himself and Mephistopheles are sympathetic characters. As a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Areopagitica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fervent opponent of censorship&lt;/a&gt; who believed that truth would not emerge unless we test it against falsehood, Milton probably felt some kinship with Faustus's thirst for all knowledge. As for Mephistopheles, this smooth-talking charmer also has elements of the tragic hero. When Faustus asks how it is that a devil can escape the confines of Hell, Mephistopheles replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even earlier than Marlowe, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ascp/a01_04.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old English poem&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_and_Satan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christ and Satan&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (if it please you to consider it sufficiently &amp;quot;major&amp;quot;) presents Satan in a similar vein. Satan's lament at his fate is very moving:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nu ic eom asceaden     fram þære sciran driht,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;alæded fram leohte     in þone laðan ham.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ne mæg ic þæt gehicgan     hu ic in ðæm becwom,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in þis neowle genip,     niðsynnum fah,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aworpen of worulde.     Wat ic nu þa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;þæt bið alles leas     ecan dreamas&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;se ðe heofencyninge     heran ne þenceð,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;meotode cweman.     Ic þæt morðer sceal,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wean and witu     and wrace dreogan,&#xA;goda bedæled,     iudædum fah,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;þæs ðe ic geþohte adrifan     drihten of selde,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;weoroda waldend;     sceal nu wreclastas&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;settan sorhgcearig,     siðas wide.     (lines 176–188)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael D. C. Drout reads these lines aloud between the 2:40 and 3:30 marks of &lt;a href=&quot;http://mdrout.webspace.wheatoncollege.edu/2007/04/20/christ-and-satan-lines-125-223/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this podcast&lt;/a&gt;. Aaron K. Hostetter &lt;a href=&quot;https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/christ-and-satan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translates&lt;/a&gt; them as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I am separated from that gleaming host, withdrawn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from the light into this hateful home. Nor can I conceive&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;how I have come into this place, into this abjected cloud,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;stained with malicious sins, cast out of the world.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know now this fact: that he will deny us the joys of eternity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he that is the Heaven-King, and all who do not think to obey&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or please the Measurer. I must endure this killing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;this woe and this torment and wrack, deprived of good things,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;marked by my former-deeds, because I thought to drive the Lord&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from his throne, the Sovereign of Armies. I must now set myself&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;upon the ways of exile, sorrowing, upon these wide paths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Kennedy has a different &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/inpar/Christ_and_Satan_Kennedy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prose translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  am  rejected from  the  heavenly  host,  cast  out  from  light  into  this  loathsome  home.  I may  not  well  bethink  me  how  I  fell  thus  low,  into  this  deep  abyss, stained  with  my  sins,  and  cast  out  from  the  world.  Now  I  know  that  he will  forfeit  all  eternal  joy  who  thinketh  not  to  serve  the  King  of  heaven and  please  the  Lord.  Needs  must  I  undergo  correction,  vengeance  and punishment  and  pain,  stripped  of  every  good,  stained  by  my  former deeds,  because  I  thought  to  drive  God  from  His  throne,  the  Lord  of hosts.  Now,  sorrowful  and  full  of  care,  I  needs  must  go  an  exile-journey, a  wandering  wide.     (page 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeffrey Burton Russell &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/080149429X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that the poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;achieves additional power by coloring Satan as a Teutonic hero, defeated yet proud in facing his &lt;em&gt;wyrd&lt;/em&gt;, his implacable fate.     (p. 144)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the idea that Satan could be charming, or sympathetic, or heroic, has a long history prior to Milton. And Milton perhaps expected us to succumb to his charms. Nevertheless, it does not follow that Milton wanted us to maintain our sympathies for Satan. Given the overall arc of his personal life, political engagements, and written works, it seems safe to say that he would be shocked and alarmed by that interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might instead read &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; as very much a Reformation poem: a work written in the thick of the Reformation, as a way of engaging with the question of the relationship between humankind and God. The work seeks to &amp;quot;justify the ways of God to men&amp;quot;: to explain directly, and without any intervening church, how sin, grace, and redemption operate in our human world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T00:50:11.953" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T00:50:11.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1479" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:29:09.590" Score="5" ViewCount="1133" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Lord of The Flies&lt;/em&gt; character might very well be one of the most famous religious figure in literature. Is there any being specifically that the creature was based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T12:32:53.027" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:59:43.367" Title="Was there a specific being the &quot;Lord of the Flies&quot; was based on?" Tags="&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1478" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1285" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:47:37.400" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, this seems not to be quite a formal, well-defined term. Rather, it's the use of an iconic cultural touchstone as shorthand for issues and tropes that come up often - and, just as the original creation can be interpreted in different ways, can be admired or criticized, people's use of the phrase &quot;Devdas syndrome&quot; seems to depend on their own interpretation of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Devdas&lt;/em&gt; is a tragedy -- rich Devdas and middle-class Parvati are in love, but the match is prevented by family, class, and culture. Devdas goes into a self-destructive spiral of melancholy and alcohol. &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20120113071438/http://www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/DEVDAS.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Devdas Phenomenon&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, by Corey K. Creekmur, summarizes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three key events carry the story to its hopeless conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Devdas writes Paro an insincere letter denying his love for her, which he attempts but fails to prevent from being delivered;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;prior to her wedding, Devdas, breaking a childhood promise never to hit Paro again, scars Paro’s beautiful face (originally with a fishing rod), marking her with a symbol of his enduring love (and a punishment for her vanity);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;finally, as he sinks into greater oblivion despite Chandramukhi’s attempts to care for him after she abandons her profession, Devdas takes a last, aimless train ride across India.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, as he had promised (“If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll come to you”), Devdas drags himself to the entrance of Parvati’s home – to which she has been restricted — where he dies just before she is alerted to the presence of a stranger’s body just beyond the massive gates that shut her inside as she runs to him. (While these details may spoil the story for a first-time viewer, it’s clear that most Indian viewers come to any telling of the tale with the plot well-known and its now-familiar highlights eagerly anticipated with each retelling.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I gather from the various discussions I've read is that &lt;em&gt;Devdas&lt;/em&gt; is a story that &lt;strong&gt;romanticizes,&lt;/strong&gt; perhaps not uncritically, its protagonist wallowing in sorrow and tragedy. So, Devdas Syndrome is roughly this: &lt;strong&gt;The romantic portrayal, of wallowing in sorrow, &lt;em&gt;usually&lt;/em&gt; over an ended romance.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how I'm seeing the phrase used and the story discussed, primarily casually, across the internet. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geocities.ws/pivasso/reads/devdas_syndrome.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this essay&lt;/a&gt; describes Devdas Syndrome as the desire to romanticize failure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a nation, we have always loved losers. And you cannot get a bigger loser than Devdas. He symbolizes everything that is  wrong with us. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Devdas refuses to rise above his sick and sodden self-image. In fact, he wallows in it and his&#xA;    death is a supreme act of completely meaningless sacrifice. An escape,&#xA;    as it were, from the sheer trauma of coping with life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By enshrining the story of this eternal loser and packaging it so&#xA;    lovingly and misleadingly as the story of the eternal lover, Bhansali&#xA;    ends up romanticizing Devdas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://noinpart.wordpress.com/2014/02/23/the-devdas-syndrome-turning-heartbreak-into-hatred/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Devdas Syndrome: Turning Heartbreak into Hatred&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which uses the phrase to describe people who cannot get over a failed romance, who are bitter and entitled and blame all their problems on the girl who told them no. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course, not every interpretation sees romanticizing tragedy as something to be avoid it. Some find it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/lf/2002/06/26/stories/2002062601100200.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;powerful and moving&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wanted love and intensely loved, and yet could not express both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His unfulfilled love did not stop him from loving uncondition- ally... thus making his love immortal even though it destroyed him later in his life. Ultimately, Devdas is a story that projects emotion as its hero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This understanding of Devdas Syndrome seems borne out by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/fr/2002/05/31/stories/2002053100950300.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this description&lt;/a&gt; of the author of the original 1917 novella feeling it has misled people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At one time Sarat told his pals that if he only he had visualised the negative impact his book was going to have on the youth he would not have permitted his book to be filmed at all! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I do not know whether this anecdote is true, false, or a fictional portrayal, but in any event it's indicative of public opinion of the creation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:47:37.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1477" CreationDate="2017-02-09T12:59:43.367" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Lord of the Flies&quot; is a direct reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beelzebub&quot;&gt;Beelzebub&lt;/a&gt; (from the Hebrew &lt;em&gt;ba'al z'vuv&lt;/em&gt;, בעל זבוב, literally &quot;lord of flies.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beelzebub is well known as a dark god, a demon, or another name for Satan himself. The clear implication, in the context of the book, is that humanity -- freed of restraints, left to its own devices -- will naturally tend to cruel and hellish behavior; that people are devils, if given the chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T12:59:43.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1481" CreationDate="2017-02-09T13:20:26.557" Score="13" ViewCount="1849" Body="&lt;p&gt;This story came to me earlier today and now it's nagging at the edge of my brain. It was a short, somewhat silly, story, part of a collection that I read somewhere in the early 90s. I read it in the United States, in English, but the book very well might be quite a bit older. A young girl hears someone talking about how wonderful it is to live in &lt;strong&gt;Wales&lt;/strong&gt;, but misunderstands, and winds up living inside a living &lt;strong&gt;whale&lt;/strong&gt;. The setting was kind of a fairy tale in that she's apparently perfectly happy staying within the whale, and she only moves in after asking the whale politely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember there was an ink drawing of the girl exiting the whale's mouth, I think dressed quite nicely and carrying a parasol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T16:29:47.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T10:00:04.067" Title="A girl, told that it's wonderful to live in Wales, goes off to live in a whale" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1480" CreationDate="2017-02-09T14:21:19.057" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Living in W'ales&quot; by Richard Hughes, 1931&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some searching around Google Books and the internet in general, I believe it's the above short children's story, first published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2266372.The_Spider_s_Palace_and_Other_Stories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Spider's Palace and Other Stories&lt;/a&gt;. The best synopsis I can find is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bibliographing.com/2009/03/20/the-spiders-palace-and-other-stories-by-richard-hughes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from this blog post&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first story, “Living in W’ales,” “Once there was a man who said he didn’t like the sort of houses people lived in, so he built a model village. It was not really like a model village at all, because the houses were all big enough for real people to live in, and he went about telling people to come and Live in W’ales.” This man becomes a pied piper, leading everyone away to W’ales, &lt;strong&gt;including a little girl&lt;/strong&gt; and a dog who get lost along the way and, &lt;strong&gt;seeing a whale, ask to be allowed to live in it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a quote from the story itself (found through Google Books):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So they went along till they came to the sea; and in the sea was a whale. The litde [sic] girl said, &quot;That was what he meant, I suppose, when he talked about living in Wales [sic]. [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(Both instances of [sic] indicate potential OCR errors, as I haven't been able to read these sentences off the actual pages, but only from Google's transcribed search results.)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the little information I can find about the book it's not clear whether the story actually has anything to do with &lt;em&gt;Wales&lt;/em&gt;, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story also appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=6E0MAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;q=wales+whale+girl&amp;amp;dq=wales+whale+girl&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fun in Bed for Children: First Aid in Getting Well Cheerfully&lt;/a&gt; by Virginia Kirkus and Frank Scully, published in 1935, which is where I first found it, and again in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6606648-the-wonder-dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wonder Dog: The Collected Children's Stories Of Richard Hughes&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1977.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="298" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T10:00:04.067" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T10:00:04.067" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1483" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:27:41.503" Score="5" ViewCount="1691" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know a few of Robert Frost's poems, though I'm not an expert, and I've noticed that they all have long and elaborate rhyme schemes.  Is this true for all of his poems?  Has he ever written a poem that didn't rhyme consistently (have a rhyme scheme)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T15:55:05.967" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:55:05.967" Title="Has Robert Frost ever written a poem that doesn't rhyme?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1482" CreationDate="2017-02-09T15:37:56.143" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are quite a few, including&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mending_Wall&quot;&gt;&quot;Mending Wall&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Hired_Man&quot;&gt;&quot;The Death of the Hired Man&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birches_(poem)&quot;&gt;&quot;Birches&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out,_Out%E2%80%94&quot;&gt;&quot;Out, Out—&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, most of these do have a continuous meter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_verse&quot;&gt;Blank verse&lt;/a&gt; has such a meter, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse&quot;&gt;free verse&lt;/a&gt; does not. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Connections/Poetry/Forms/free1.html&quot;&gt;Frost once said&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd sooner write free verse as play tennis with the net down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/25086971?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot;&gt;A review by William O'Donnell&lt;/a&gt; says that Frost is &quot;unequalled&quot; by any British or American poets in the 19th century in his use of blank verse. In the early 20th century, such a structure was rejected by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, although Frost continued writing the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter&quot;&gt;Iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt;, of course, permeates Frost's work. However, it is an odd, even informal variant. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/801937?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot;&gt;A contemporary analysis&lt;/a&gt; of Frost notes that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/155/12.html&quot;&gt;&quot;The Runaway&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, while using the meter, is irregular even in the first few lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once&lt;/strong&gt; when the &lt;strong&gt;snow&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;strong&gt;year&lt;/strong&gt; was be&lt;strong&gt;gin&lt;/strong&gt;ning to &lt;strong&gt;fall&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   We &lt;strong&gt;stopped&lt;/strong&gt; by a &lt;strong&gt;moun&lt;/strong&gt;tain &lt;strong&gt;pas&lt;/strong&gt;ture to &lt;strong&gt;say, “Whose colt?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line feels slightly smoother; the first, fourth, seventh, tenth and thirteenth syllables are all stressed. However, the second does not flow quite so well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T15:52:23.167" LastActivityDate="2017-02-09T15:52:23.167" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T16:05:59.450" Score="18" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Daniel Handler's &lt;em&gt;A Series of Unfortunate Events&lt;/em&gt;, written under his Lemony Snicket pseudonym, delves into a great many intriguing themes -- the blindness and dysfunctionality of modern society; living with uncertainty and incomplete information; the ambiguity of moral judgments; society's tendency to clash and schism. These themes are constant and developed throughout the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there is a very distinct tone that Handler maintains in all his Snicket work -- quirkiness, idiosyncrasy, and dark, deadpan humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Handler's works, aimed for adults, have similar themes and/or tone? Or are they extremely different in nature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T14:48:51.517" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T14:48:51.517" Title="Do Daniel Handler's novels for adults share themes or tone with his Lemony Snicket work?" Tags="&lt;theme&gt;&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;lemony-snicket&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T17:28:23.170" Score="15" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the conclusion of &lt;em&gt;One Hundred Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I]t was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped&#xA;  out by the wind ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know why Macondo is a city of mirrors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;José Arcadio Buendía dreamed that night that right there a noisy city&#xA;  with houses having mirror walls rose up. He asked what city it was and&#xA;  they answered him with a name that he had never heard, that had no&#xA;  meaning at all, but that had a supernatural echo in his dream:&#xA;  Macondo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why did Gabriel García Márquez (or Gregory Rabassa, the translator, if that's the case) say it was a &lt;em&gt;city of mirrors (or mirages)&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T16:03:58.260" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T16:03:58.260" Title="Why is Macondo a city of mirages?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;gabriel-garcia-marquez&gt;&lt;one-hundred-years-of-solitude&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1657" CreationDate="2017-02-09T18:09:20.313" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4 (&quot;The World Behind the Wind&quot;), the second-to-last sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the evidence of the events of the fifteenth century, in the world east of the Bay of Bengal—the world &quot;behind the wind&quot;, as Arab navigators called it—China could have [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more to the sentence, but it's not relevant to this question (it's about why China didn't end up conquering Europe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part I'm interested in is the &quot;the world 'behind the wind', as Arab navigators called it&quot;.  Where was this term first used in a literary work? The author quotes Arab navigators, but which one and when?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T23:02:38.857" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T15:59:49.643" Title="Where was the phrase &quot;behind the wind&quot; first used?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1526" CreationDate="2017-02-09T18:57:27.273" Score="14" ViewCount="2631" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homer's two epic poems follow the story of the Trojan War through various perspectives. Did Homer make up the stories, or was there some kind of historical/mythological predecessor that he retold (or exaggerated, if the answer is historical)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T23:44:02.153" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T10:09:10.780" Title="Did Homer base the Iliad and the Odyssey on mythology?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-09T20:52:31.753" Score="16" ViewCount="4604" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to get some insight into line 74 of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot;&gt;you can read &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; online&lt;/a&gt;). Here's the passage in question (line 74 is in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That corpse you planted last year in your garden,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of things going on in this passage. One interpretation is that this section is describing a fertility rite of sacrificing a victim and burying in them in the fields to guarantee a good crop. The dog comes in because you don't want the corpse you burried to be dug up: that ruins the power of the ritual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/40/188.html&quot;&gt;line 74 seems to be an allusion to John Webster's play &lt;em&gt;The White Devil&lt;/em&gt;, which contains a very similar line&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.&quot; I'm not quite sure how to interpret the contradiction between the wolf in Webster's poem, which is a &quot;foe to man&quot;, and the dog in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; which is a &quot;friend to man&quot;. However, the section of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; that line 74 is in is full of contradictions, such as &quot;winter kept us warm&quot; (line 5). All of these contradictions illustrate the irony of modern life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to get a sense of all the different ways of looking at this line in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. Any and all interpretations of this line (so long as they are based on evidence) will be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-09T22:19:42.213" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:22:22.210" Title="Interpreting the line &quot;'O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men&quot; in The Waste Land" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1490" CreationDate="2017-02-09T21:15:22.953" Score="83" ViewCount="11456" Body="&lt;p&gt;As depicted in 1870 by James William Elliott's &lt;em&gt;National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs&lt;/em&gt;, the nursery rhyme &quot;Humpty Dumpty&quot; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All the king's horses and all the king's men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Couldn't put Humpty together again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in most if not all illustrations Humpty is portrayed as an egg... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpW2xm.jpg&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpW2xm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;By William Wallace Denslow - Library of Congress [1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11121180&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? Because nothing in the four lines of the rhyme depict him as such...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How do we know Humpty Dumpty was an egg?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:19:18.647" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:19:18.647" Title="How do we know Humpty Dumpty was an egg?" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1489" CreationDate="2017-02-09T22:26:03.377" Score="61" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Humpty Dumpty almost certainly wasn't an egg at conception&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Humpty Dumpty&lt;/em&gt; is over 200 years old, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/04/the-origin-of-humpty-dumpty/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;originating in the 1700s&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our first clue lies in the original phrasing of the poem; the eponymous Humpty Dumpty is not &quot;put back together again&quot; but rather &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Four-score Men and Four-score more, Could not make Humpty Dumpty where&#xA;  he was before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This opens up both literal falling and political falling, while also lacking references to the king, as later versions would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example of Humpty Dumpty being visually presented as an egg comes from Lewis Carroll's &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt;, wherein he argues semantics with Alice. The book, written in 1871, then popularized this personification of Humpty Dumpty -- and led to the &quot;couldn't put Humpty together again&quot; version; Alice specifically &lt;a href=&quot;http://sabian.org/looking_glass6.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;calls out the older wording as being &quot;too long for the poetry&quot;&lt;/a&gt; within the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1700s, a &quot;humpty dumpty&quot; referred to one of two things: either a brewed brandy and ale drink or a short, clumsy person (E. Partridge and P. Beale, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (Routledge, 8th edn., 2002)). &#xA;Were these the only things the phrase had been attributed to, one could easily conclude it was a morality tale against drunkenness (it was published in &lt;em&gt;Mother Goose's Melody&lt;/em&gt;, after all) or a jab at a political figure (with most signs pointing to King Richard III, who had a great fall at Bosworth Field and was a &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141202-richard-iii-genes-shakespeare-science/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;known hunchback&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VMn9E.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;img1&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further complicate things, there's also rumors of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://bshistorian.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/putting-the-dump-in-humpty-dumpty/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;siege cannon nicknamed Humpty Dumpty&lt;/a&gt; used to attack the English town of Colchester (specifically at St-Mary-At-The-Wall) during the English Civil War. All the Royalists couldn't put the cannon back on the wall after the section it was placed on was hit by cannon fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://traveltrales.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/humptydumpty2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;img2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summation, there's no signs that Humpty Dumpty was ever intended to be an egg at all, and the Lewis Carroll interpretation of the rhyme was so popular it stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="94" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-11T15:56:28.100" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T15:56:28.100" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1492" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:16:54.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:16:54.200" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:16:54.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1493" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:16:54.200" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Iliad, the epic poem by Homer. Use in conjunction with [homer]. If the question is regarding the original text in Greek, use with the [greek-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T05:31:20.867" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T05:31:20.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1494" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:17:24.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:17:24.987" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:17:24.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1495" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:17:24.987" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Odyssey, the epic poem by Homer. Use with [homer] and [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T15:45:50.660" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T15:45:50.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1496" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:22:28.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:22:28.857" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:22:28.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1497" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:22:28.857" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Legends of Drizzt, the fantasy series by R. A. Salvatore. Use in conjunction with [r-a-salvatore]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T13:30:54.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:30:54.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:24:44.157" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:24:44.157" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:24:44.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:24:44.157" Score="0" Body="For questions about Howl, the poem by Allen Ginsberg. Use in conjunction with [allen-ginsberg]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T13:31:09.160" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:31:09.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:37:47.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:37:47.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:37:47.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:37:47.680" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English romantic poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834) and his life as a writer. He is best known for the poems 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan', and the poetry collection 'Lyrical Ballads', which he co-authored with William Wordsworth." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:33:13.607" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:33:13.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1502" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:42:29.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:42:29.903" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:42:29.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1503" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:42:29.903" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Franklin W. Dixon, such as the Hardy Boys series, and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T13:41:06.577" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T13:41:06.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1504" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:58:30.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:58:30.943" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:58:30.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1505" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:58:30.943" Score="0" Body="For questions about Bridge to Terabithia, the novel by Katherine Paterson. Use in conjunction with [katherine-paterson]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T12:31:33.017" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T12:31:33.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:59:53.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T11:59:53.580" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T11:59:53.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-10T11:59:53.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about Burning the Old Year, the poem by Naomi Shihab Nye. Use in conjunction with [naomi-shihab-nye]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T13:30:59.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T13:30:59.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1510" CreationDate="2017-02-10T15:10:03.973" Score="15" ViewCount="2294" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard it said that &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; is a great work, and my impression is that every sentence has one or two words being a pun of an English word and at least one valid word of another language. What are the chief languages which those foreign words are mostly in? I know there are commentary books, but maybe it is best to know a little bit of those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if foreign words are mostly in German and French, then I may first need to have a basic understanding of both languages before I read &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, or at least know I am better suited to read it if I know both languages. It sounds too demanding to study the whole book, but likely I will examine an excerpt of it just to have a taste of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T01:09:31.037" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T01:09:31.037" Title="What languages should one know to appreciate Finnegans Wake?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1509" CreationDate="2017-02-10T15:19:47.077" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, if foreign words are mostly in German and French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, the foreign words, when there are foreign words, are in all sorts of languages; learning one language won't help. By all means, learn a foreign language for the sake of learning a foreign language. But you don't need to learn a foreign language to read Finnegans Wake. Personally, I've been able to get by with just English and the footnotes (to clarify: Finnegans Wake doesn't have explanatory footnotes, you have to read along with a companion book if you want those).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's some general advice for getting the most out of Finnegans Wake, based on my experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you're only going to read part of the book, Chapter 8 is probably the best place to start.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://finwake.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can read it online&lt;/a&gt;, but you'll probably get more out of Finnegans Wake if you read it aloud from a print copy. The real meaning of Finnegans Wake comes from the sound of the words, and you won't get that looking at letters on a computer screen. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you don't get anything out of reading Finnegans Wake, don't be afraid to stop. Read it if you enjoy it, don't read it if you're only interested because it's a &quot;hard&quot; book.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People might make fun of me for saying this, but I personally enjoy reading &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; Finnegans Wake more than I enjoy reading Finnegans Wake itself. Some of the academic papers/books are really, really interesting, even if you don't read a word of the actual book. There are also some really interesting blogs (&lt;a href=&quot;http://finwakeatx.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://peterchrisp.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) out there.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T13:25:25.993" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T13:25:25.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1509" CreationDate="2017-02-10T15:26:56.393" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found some quotes from Wikipedia about how to read it. They seem to  suggest that you should appreciate the rhythm more than anything.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eugene Jolas said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those who have heard Mr. Joyce read aloud from Work in Progress know the immense rhythmic beauty of his technique. It &lt;strong&gt;has a musical flow that flatters the ear, that has the organic structure of works of nature,&lt;/strong&gt; that transmits painstakingly every vowel and consonant formed by his ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patrick Watson said that the puns are best read by sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Those people who say the book is unreadable have not tried reading it aloud. This is the secret&lt;/strong&gt;. If you even mouth the words silently, suddenly what seemed incomprehensible (Hubert Butler called it &quot;Joyce's learned gibberish,&quot;) leaps into referential meaning, by its sound, since page after page is rich in allusion to familiar phrases, parables, sayings of all kinds – &lt;strong&gt;and the joyous and totally brilliant wordplay, over and over again imperceivable until you actually listen to it&lt;/strong&gt; – transforms what was an unrelievable agony into an adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the article also states that the work involves over 60 languages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joyce invented a unique polyglot-language or idioglossia solely for the purpose of this work. &lt;strong&gt;This language is composed of composite words from some sixty to seventy world languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say just stick to English and read it out loud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All bold marks are mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-10T22:52:30.870" LastActivityDate="2017-02-10T22:52:30.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1513" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:25:55.033" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:25:55.033" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:25:55.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1514" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:25:55.033" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English novelist David Mitchell (born 1969) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T10:16:53.697" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T10:16:53.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:26:31.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:26:31.343" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:26:31.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:26:31.343" Score="0" Body="For questions about Anna Karenina, the novel by Leo Tolstoy. Use in conjunction with the [leo-tolstoy] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:17:39.007" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:17:39.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1517" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:27:29.207" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:27:29.207" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:27:29.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1518" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:27:29.207" Score="0" Body="For questions about American writer Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) and her works, including her novel &quot;The Good Earth&quot; (1931)." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T14:16:27.160" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T14:16:27.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1519" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:28:01.240" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:28:01.240" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:28:01.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1520" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:28:01.240" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T20:44:41.953" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T20:44:41.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1521" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:28:41.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:28:41.500" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:28:41.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1522" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:28:41.500" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Peter F. Hamilton and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:56:11.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:56:11.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1523" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:35:37.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T02:35:37.490" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T02:35:37.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1524" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T02:35:37.490" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of R. A. Salvatore and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T05:45:12.877" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T05:45:12.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2017-02-11T06:05:34.150" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please note&lt;/strong&gt;: Since there is no source available which states on which year exactly this poem was written, it becomes difficult to predict what exact situation poet might be referring to. But considering the lifespan of poet and the meaning of the poem itself, I have written my own assumptions. If you find the year at which the poem is written, I will happily edit the answer accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Notes on translation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation is not correct. First, let me clarify the meaning of a few words and improve the translation of this poem which will automatically clarify its central meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;जगती&lt;/strong&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean Earth, &lt;strong&gt;it means &quot;Develop&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (You confused जगती with जगत)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;संसृति&lt;/strong&gt; does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; mean Universe, &lt;strong&gt;it means &quot;Convergence or merging into one or unity&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (You might have confused संसृति and सृष्टि)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;बंधन&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;प्रतिबंध&lt;/strong&gt; do not mean &quot;ruling over&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;they mean &quot;being restricted or constrained or pressurized&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, a proper translation of the poem is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;मानव पर जगती का शासन, - There is a constant pressure of (&lt;em&gt;so called&lt;/em&gt;) development on humans&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;जगती पर संसृति का बंधन, - Development is restricted by unity (&lt;em&gt;being one&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;संसृति को भी और किसी के प्रतिबंधों में रहना होगा! - Anyone else will oppose (restrict) convergence (&lt;em&gt;unity&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;साथी, सब कुछ सहना होगा! - (&lt;em&gt;And therefore&lt;/em&gt;) You will have to tolerate this all, my friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the central meaning of the poem is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Humans are in blind race of &lt;em&gt;so called&lt;/em&gt; development (material,&#xA;architectural, ornamental development) instead of maintaining peace,&#xA;harmony and religious oneness (unity, convergence). There is no coordination but a fierce&#xA;competition (of proving which nation is stronger and better than other).&#xA;(&lt;strong&gt;Line 1&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This constant pressure of &quot;developing&quot; restricts unity (among humans&#xA;and nations). (&lt;strong&gt;Line 2&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The leaders (politicians) manipulate the definition of &quot;unity&quot; and&#xA;restricts the very meaning of &quot;Development of All&quot; policy by keeping&#xA;races, and nations divided.(&lt;strong&gt;Line 3&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore, ironically, the same humans have to tolerate this all&#xA;(&lt;strong&gt;Line 4&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summing up&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;True development is not in proving how powerful a nation or race is, but in unity, oneness and convergence. But convergence and unity are manipulated (restricted) by the same humans to get power (personal development). This ultimately leads the same humans to suffer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coming to question&lt;/em&gt;..&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;What circumstances the poet is referring to?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I found no source which shows the exact year in which this poem was written. But Harivanshrai (born in 1907) was living in that era where India was ruled over by the British, and the entire World went to war twice (the First and Second World Wars). So we can assume, that the poem might be referring to those wars and worthless conflicts happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a personal note, We can also assume that this piece would have been written for his son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amitabh_Bachchan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amitabh Bachchan&lt;/a&gt; when he was dumped by the same people who had made him a star.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T15:17:59.370" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T15:17:59.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1487" CreationDate="2017-02-11T06:17:56.903" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to start with a minor framing correction, before I go on to &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; answer your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Iliad and The Odyssey aren't texts written by Homer. They're actually &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.religion.ucsb.edu/faculty/thomas/classes/rgst80a/lectures/lec8.html&quot;&gt;oral traditions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; It's even debatable &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question&quot;&gt;whether anyone named &quot;Homer&quot; even existed at all&lt;/a&gt;, but if they did, certainly all they did was transcribe a purely verbal story that was passed down for generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the major correction to your question is: The Iliad and The Odyssey are &lt;em&gt;a part of&lt;/em&gt; Greek mythology. They didn't arise from Greek mythology (any more than mythology arises from itself), because in oral tradition mythology, story and history quickly blend together. Stories like these may have traced real events, but they were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey#Themes&quot;&gt;educational tools&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostos&quot;&gt;good manners&lt;/a&gt;, how to treat guests, marks of cultural significance, and just generally how the gods affect peoples' lives. These stories get told and re-told; they accrue variations, adopt &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.home.earthlink.net/~merrill_odyssey/id5.html&quot;&gt;easily memorizable rhythms&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historyofinformation.com/narrative/oral-to-written-culture.php&quot;&gt;underwent significant changes&lt;/a&gt; as time went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I'm going to go out on a limb and rephrase your question for you: &lt;strong&gt;did The Iliad and The Odyssey develop around historical events?&lt;/strong&gt; This question is actually more directly answerable. Note, though, that it implies that you have to take any historical basis with a grain of salt. Remember that these are &lt;em&gt;oral&lt;/em&gt; traditions; just because they once told stories that happened doesn't necessarily mean they still do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Iliad&quot;&gt;case of the Iliad&lt;/a&gt;, the story as written is removed from its transcription by roughly four centuries. However, it does appear to have alluded to some real events and places, which means that it might actually have a historical basis. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy&quot;&gt;city of Troy&lt;/a&gt; did exist, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2003/troy030303.html&quot;&gt;geography&lt;/a&gt; described &lt;a href=&quot;https://gsa.confex.com/gsa/2001AM/finalprogram/abstract_25431.htm&quot;&gt;matches the region&lt;/a&gt;. It likely corresponds to modern-day Hisarlik. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=dWXbuQ7OiJQC&amp;amp;pg=PA226&amp;amp;dq=0-415-24923-6&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiK9MrDr4fSAhXBwiYKHW5uDzMQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot;&gt;&quot;The Trojans and Their Neighbors&quot;&lt;/a&gt; delves into this topic further, drawing parallels between story elements that appeared in the Iliad and descriptions of peoples and cultures that appeared in the area. Additionally, it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.burtonbeyond.com/id24.html&quot;&gt;helmets described in the Iliad were in use at the time&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;However, there isn't enough evidence to draw the conclusion that the Trojan War happened as described in our transcription of events.&lt;/strong&gt; There is barely enough to conclude that a real people were described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Odyssey is a little more up in the air. Most of the Odyssey is spent describing events which could not possibly have happened in our non-mythic consciousness understanding of the world. However, we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/odysseus-journey.html&quot;&gt;plausibly map where an Odysseus might have gone&lt;/a&gt;. Additionally, some archaeologists believe &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/odysseys-end-the-search-for-ancient-ithaca-112739669/&quot;&gt;we have found Odysseus' palace&lt;/a&gt; on Ithaca. There's also a lot more evidence littered around in various places in the Odyssey - for example, it's believed that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/105/26/8823.full.pdf&quot;&gt;a solar eclipse is described in the Odyssey&lt;/a&gt;, which could possibly be used to date the events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, did the journey happen as written? Definitely not. But was there a person named Odysseus who left the Trojan War and returned to Ithaca? Honestly, it's quite possible. But &lt;a href=&quot;http://mmtaylor.net/Holiday2000/Legends/Homer.html&quot;&gt;one of the sources I found puts it best&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why should we think that anything Homer wrote was historically accurate? It is mainly because he wrote about things of which he could not have had first-hand knowledge, but of which we have archaeological knowledge. Why should we think that the story is not totally accurate? Because we know at least of anachronisms, of things described that did exist as he described, but not at the time of which he writes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a broad topic, and this post only scratches the surface of it. Hopefully I've given you both reason to consider that certain elements may be true, but don't take the historicity of the story with anything more than a grain of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T06:27:04.013" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T06:27:04.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1566" CreationDate="2017-02-11T10:10:21.767" Score="14" ViewCount="1488" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eugene Onegin&lt;/em&gt; is a novel in verse, by the great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The main characters are Eugene Onegin, a young and bored man, and Tatiana, an even younger girl who falls in love with Onegin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onegin is said to be in his twenties during the main events of the novel, but I don't actually remember how old Tatiana was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know Tatiana's age, either from the novel or other sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/386/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;was prompted&lt;/a&gt; by a guy on the Internet, who claimed that Onegin was 21, and Tatiana was 13, at the time she writes the letter. This is, of course, absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T20:15:19.470" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T07:34:23.427" Title="How old was Tatiana during the main events of &quot;Eugene Onegin&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;alexander-pushkin&gt;&lt;eugene-onegin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1528" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:34:03.713" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:34:03.713" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:34:03.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1529" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:34:03.713" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of 19th-century English author Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) or about her life as a writer. She is most famous for her novel Jane Eyre." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:17:34.447" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:17:34.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1530" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:37:01.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:37:01.990" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:37:01.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1531" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:37:01.990" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Commonwealth Saga, the series by Peter F. Hamilton. Use in conjunction with [peter-f-hamilton]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:55:44.330" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:55:44.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1534" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:38:48.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:38:48.417" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:38:48.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1535" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:38:48.417" Score="0" Body="For questions about Bullet the Blue Sky, the song by U2. Use in conjunction with [u2]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T13:44:01.070" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T13:44:01.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1536" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:40:16.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:40:16.540" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:40:16.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1537" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:40:16.540" Score="0" Body="For questions about the songs of Cahalen Morrison and her life as a songwriter. Questions about her songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:25:02.830" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:25:02.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1538" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:41:00.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:41:00.457" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:41:00.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1539" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:41:00.457" Score="0" Body="For questions about Calvin and Hobbes, the comic strip by Bill Waterson. Use in conjunction with [bill-waterson]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:49:06.030" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:49:06.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:42:56.007" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:42:56.007" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:42:56.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:42:56.007" Score="0" Body="For questions about Casey at the Bat, the poem by Ernest Thayer. Use in conjunction with [ernest-lawrence-thayer]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:48:51.250" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:48:51.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1542" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:44:06.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:44:06.977" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:44:06.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1543" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:44:06.977" Score="0" Body="For questions about Catch 22, the novel by Joseph Heller. Use in conjunction with [joseph-heller]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:45:00.847" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T16:45:00.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1544" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:45:30.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:45:30.020" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:45:30.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1545" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:45:30.020" Score="0" Body="For questions about Catcher in the Rye, the novel by J. D. Salinger. Use in conjunction with [j-d-salinger]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:44:43.143" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T16:44:43.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1546" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:47:23.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:47:23.570" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:47:23.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1547" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:47:23.570" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US cartoonist William Boyd Watterson II, better known as Bill Watterson, or about any of his literary works, most famously the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T12:57:12.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T12:57:12.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1548" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:48:01.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:48:01.113" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:48:01.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1549" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:48:01.113" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Blake Crouch (born 1978) or about any of his literary works, most famously the Wayward Pines trilogy, a sci-fi mystery series set in Idaho." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:18:39.603" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:18:39.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1550" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:51:16.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:51:16.473" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:51:16.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1551" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:51:16.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the the works of US author Brandon Sanderson (born 1975) or his life as a writer. Most of his literary works fall under the umbrella of his Cosmere universe. He is perhaps best known for completing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series after the original author's death." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:13:14.237" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:13:14.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1552" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:51:52.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:51:52.507" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:51:52.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1553" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:51:52.507" Score="0" Body="For questions about Brave New World, the novel by Aldous Huxley. Use in conjunction with [aldous-huxley]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:44:48.640" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T16:44:48.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1554" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:53:09.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Proust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcel Proust&lt;/a&gt; is best known for his novel &lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;a-la-recherche-du-temps-perdu&lt;/a&gt;), published between 1913 and 1927, but he also wrote several other works, some of which were published posthumously:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_plaisirs_et_les_jours&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les plaisirs et les jours&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a collection of prose poems and novellas first published in 1896;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiches_et_m%C3%A9langes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pastiches et mélanges&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contre_Sainte-Beuve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contre Sainte-Beuve&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: an unfinished collection of literary criticism, published posthumously in 1954;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Santeuil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jean Santeuil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: an unfinished novel that is a kind of precursor of &lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt; and which was published posthumously in 1952.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:14:05.940" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:14:05.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1555" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:53:09.697" Score="0" Body="For questions about the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922) or about any of his literary works, most famously the long novel &quot;À la recherche du temps perdu&quot;, translated as &quot;In Search of Lost Things&quot; or &quot;Remembrance of Things Past&quot;." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:14:05.940" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:14:05.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1556" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:54:06.413" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:54:06.413" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:54:06.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1557" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:54:06.413" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of awarding-winning Canadian author Margaret Atwood (born 1939) or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:44:44.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:44:44.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1558" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:54:50.310" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:54:50.310" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:54:50.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1559" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:54:50.310" Score="0" Body="For questions about Little Women, the book by Louisa May Alcott. Use in conjunction with [louisa-may-alcott]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T14:03:21.673" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T14:03:21.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1560" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:56:26.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:56:26.867" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:56:26.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1561" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:56:26.867" Score="0" Body="For questions about Little Men, the novel by Louisa May Alcott. Use in conjunction with [louisa-may-alcott]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T13:43:31.167" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T13:43:31.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1562" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:57:13.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:57:13.270" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:57:13.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1563" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:57:13.270" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Lois Lowry (born 1937) or about any of her literary works, mostly children's novels." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T20:16:19.440" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T20:16:19.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1564" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:58:13.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T11:58:13.933" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T11:58:13.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1565" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-11T11:58:13.933" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Jack Kerouac and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T16:44:53.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T16:44:53.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2017-02-11T15:16:33.837" Score="14" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Some parts of the text suggest she was thirteen ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.russiandogs.net/onegin-tatiana-was-only-thirteen.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, which summarises an analysis by Russian sexologist A. Kotrovsky and columnist E. Tchernych and concludes that Tatiana was probably only thirteen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pushkin uses the word otrokovitsa.&lt;/strong&gt; This hard-to-pronounce Russian word is usually translated as maiden but in Pushkin’s time &lt;em&gt;otrok&lt;/em&gt; (male) and &lt;em&gt;otrokovitsa&lt;/em&gt; (female) referred to children from 7 to 15 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Chapter Three&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Eugene Onegin&lt;/em&gt; Tatiana asks her &lt;em&gt;nyanya&lt;/em&gt; (nanny) if she was in love in her age, and gets the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“What nonsense, Tanya! In those other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;ages we’d never heard of love:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;why, at the thought, my husband’s mother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;had chased me to the world above.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;”How did you come to marry, nyanya?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“I reckon, by God’s will. My Vanya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;was younger still, but at that stage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I was just THIRTEEN YEARS OF AGE.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Then, in famous Chapter Four&lt;/strong&gt;, Pushkin says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;To listen to the same tedious objections,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Do battle with rooted convictions,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Such as never were and never have been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Even in a young girl WHO’S JUST THIRTEEN!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... but Pushkin said she was seventeen.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a letter of 29 November 1824 to his fellow poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Vyazemsky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pyotr Vyazemsky&lt;/a&gt;, Pushkin wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the sense is not quite precise, there is more truth in the letter - the letter of a woman - and, on top of that, a seventeen-year-old one - and on top of &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; a woman in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(quote found on pp. 85-86 of &lt;em&gt;Pushkin's Tatiana&lt;/em&gt; by Olga Peters Hasty)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-11T21:40:11.447" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T21:40:11.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1023" CreationDate="2017-02-11T15:21:30.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One important thing to consider about the Federalist Papers is that they were republished. While they originally appeared in newspapers over the course of about one year (October 1787 - August 1788), they were later repackaged as a book, &lt;em&gt;The Federalist&lt;/em&gt;, which was released later in 1788. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bu.edu/law/journals-archive/bulr/documents/maggs.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An overview from the &lt;em&gt;Boston University Law Review&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; explains that Hamilton and Madison edited the essays prior to this second publication by John and Archibald M’Lean (the name is sometimes given as McLean; variants differ). There were a few major changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamilton reordered the essays, including moving No. 35 to the 29th spot and splitting No. 31 into two separate essays.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamilton and Madison (though mostly Hamilton) edited parts of the essays themselves, presumably for readability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamilton added a short preface, which explained both the purpose of the essays and why they were originally written and published so quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, there is often a lot of textual confusion, although the McLean addition is, according to the overview's author, more commonly used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0151-0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The National Archives website explains other early editions&lt;/a&gt;, including two editions in French and two more in English. The first of these two additional English additions used the exact same text as the McLean version, while the second, by George F. Hopkins, contained more revisions. The extent and nature of those edits is not well-known, although it appears that a lawyer named John Wells made them and Hamilton approved them. There is still much uncertainty surrounding this, however, as Hopkins was never fully open about the edits' origin. Another edition by a different publisher was released in 1818 through consent and edits by Madison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The McLean edition is generally considered to be definitive, partly because the McLeans published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Independent_Journal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Independent Journal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of the two newspapers that original published the Papers. While there was some revision of the essays here, including the correction of printing errors and typographical errors, no substantial changes were made from the serials. There is no information about whether the McLeans made any edits before publishing the papers in &lt;em&gt;The Independent Journal&lt;/em&gt; (or whether the other newspaper, &lt;em&gt;The New York Packet&lt;/em&gt;, did likewise), but it seems that Hamilton would have wanted to be consulted on the matter. As all three men were quite busy, then, it seems that any changes were made prior to submission to the newspapers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2017-02-11T15:21:30.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1580" CreationDate="2017-02-11T15:47:30.367" Score="12" ViewCount="3578" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Agatha Christie play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mousetrap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has not only the longest initial run of any play in history (it's been running continuously for nearly 65 years, mostly in the very same building in London), but also an ending which is traditionally kept secret, the audience asked after every performance not to reveal it except to others already in the know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;why is the play called &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; A couple of possibilities come to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nursery rhyme &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is mentioned several times in the play, so there's already a mice-related theme. (But why Mouse&lt;em&gt;trap&lt;/em&gt; rather than say &lt;em&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/em&gt; as the title?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The play-within-a-play in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is also entitled &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt;. This surely can't be a coincidence, but I'm struggling to see any other connection between the two.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any authorial word or other compelling evidence on the reasoning for the play's title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T16:47:15.820" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T16:47:15.820" Title="Why is the Agatha Christie play called &quot;The Mousetrap&quot;?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;the-mousetrap&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2611" CreationDate="2017-02-11T16:32:51.860" Score="15" ViewCount="1484" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first lines of Albert Camus' &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's told in the present tense, as in, when Meursault is recounting the event it had happened that very same day. This tense continues for the next two paragraphs, emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Home for Aged Persons is at Marengo, some fifty miles from Algiers. With&#xA;  the two o’clock bus &lt;strong&gt;I should get&lt;/strong&gt; there well before nightfall. Then I can spend the&#xA;  night there, keeping the usual vigil beside the body, and be back here &lt;strong&gt;by tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  evening. &lt;strong&gt;I have&lt;/strong&gt; fixed up with my employer for two days’ leave; obviously, under the&#xA;  circumstances, he couldn’t refuse. Still, I had an idea he looked annoyed, and I said,&#xA;  without thinking: “Sorry, sir, but it’s not my fault, you know.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Afterwards it struck me I needn’t have said that. I had no reason to excuse myself;&#xA;  it was up to him to express his sympathy and so forth. Probably he will do so &lt;strong&gt;the day&#xA;  after tomorrow&lt;/strong&gt;, when he sees me in black. For the present, it’s almost as if Mother&#xA;  weren’t really dead. The funeral &lt;strong&gt;will bring it&lt;/strong&gt; home to me, put an official seal on it, so&#xA;  to speak. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, these paragraphs have Meursault speaking as is the telegram arrived the day is speaking, the funeral the next day, and Meursault already having taken time to act on it and call off work. He can take the 2:00 bus tomorrow to arrive on time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the next paragraph and the rest of the book go like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I took the two-o’clock bus&lt;/strong&gt;. It &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; a blazing hot afternoon. &lt;strong&gt;I’d lunched&lt;/strong&gt;, as usual, at Céleste’s restaurant. Everyone &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; most kind, and Céleste &lt;strong&gt;said&lt;/strong&gt; to me, “There’s no one like a mother.” When I left they came with me to the door. It was something of a rush, getting away, as at the last moment &lt;strong&gt;I had to call&lt;/strong&gt; in at Emmanuel’s place to borrow his black tie and mourning band. He lost his uncle a few months ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading from this, he's speaking as if he had already taken the bus, lunched, and so forth in the past tense. This continues for the rest of the book and it's finally revealed at the end of the story that Meurasault was speaking in the past tense after the court case and just before the execution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first read this, I thought it was a bad translation or something in the first few paragraphs. But every copy I can get hold of keeps the tenses as they are. The line &quot;Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday&quot; and its variations have even come to represent the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the tense different for the first few paragraphs of The Stranger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:13:04.527" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T10:51:51.637" Title="Why is the tense wrong in the beginning of The Stranger?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2017-02-11T18:22:31.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The murderer refers to his three intended targets as &quot;Three Blind Mice&quot; -- in the first murder, a notebook mentioning &quot;Three Blind Mice&quot; is found, a note on the body, reading &quot;This is the first.&quot; Following this, much of the story is of the murderer's elaborate construction of opportunity to catch his victims alone and vulnerable. Hence, a mousetrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, and more spoilery:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The entire scenario, of a group of possible targets trapped with an unknown murderer, was engineered by the murderer himself -- who sets himself up as a detective, stoking their fears, ordering the people around, using &quot;recreations&quot; as opportunities to separate the people and catch them unawares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Since so much of the story turns out, in retrospect, to have been a deliberate set-up to create opportunity for murder; and since there's a strong sense of a group of people trapped and awaiting a gruesome demise, &quot;The Mousetrap&quot; seems to me very appropriate imagery -- and setting up a trap scenario for the murder victims, is quite reminiscent of Hamlet setting up a false play in order to trap his uncle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T11:42:20.767" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T11:42:20.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1572" CreationDate="2017-02-11T19:24:33.670" Score="20" ViewCount="3423" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mikhail Lermontov's &lt;em&gt;A Hero of Our Time&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Герой нашего времени&lt;/em&gt;), the main hero is Grigory Pechorin, a cynical noble army man, an example of superfluous Byronic hero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of the novel has to refer to Pechorin himself - but why? What traits make Pechorin a &quot;hero&quot;? Or is it a negative description, implying that Pechorin is not a hero? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, Pechorin is hardly a hero - he has broken at least two hearts, murdered his friend, after toying with former's love interest, and apparently abducted a Caucasian woman and (inadvertently) caused her death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T23:06:59.440" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T23:06:59.440" Title="Why is Pechorin a hero of our time?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;a-hero-of-our-time&gt;&lt;mikhail-lermontov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1571" CreationDate="2017-02-11T20:32:50.430" Score="14" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's intended to be ironic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his preface to the second edition, Lermontov criticises the readers who - like you - took the title at face value and interpreted it to mean Pechorin was really being modelled as a hero:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The preface to a book serves the double purpose of prologue and epilogue. It affords the author an opportunity of explaining the object of the work, or of vindicating himself and replying to his critics. As a rule, however, the reader is concerned neither with the moral purpose of the book nor with the attacks of the Reviewers, and so the preface remains unread. Nevertheless, this is a pity, especially with us Russians! The public of this country is so youthful, not to say simple-minded, that it cannot understand the meaning of a fable unless the moral is set forth at the end. &lt;strong&gt;Unable to see a joke, insensible to irony,&lt;/strong&gt; it has, in a word, been badly brought up. It has not yet learned that in a decent book, as in decent society, open invective can have no place; that our present-day civilisation has invented &lt;strong&gt;a keener weapon, none the less deadly for being almost invisible, which, under the cloak of flattery, strikes with sure and irresistible effect&lt;/strong&gt;. The Russian public is like a simple-minded person from the country who, chancing to overhear a conversation between two diplomatists belonging to hostile courts, comes away with the conviction that each of them has been deceiving his Government in the interest of a most affectionate private friendship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The unfortunate effects of an over-literal acceptation of words by certain readers and even reviewers have recently been manifested in regard to the present book.&lt;/strong&gt; Many of its readers have been dreadfully, and in all seriousness, shocked to find such an immoral man as Pechorin set before them as an example. Others have observed, with much acumen, that the author has painted his own portrait and those of his acquaintances! . . . What a stale and wretched jest! But Russia, it appears, has been constituted in such a way that absurdities of this kind will never be eradicated. It is doubtful whether, in this country, the most ethereal of fairy-tales would escape the reproach of attempting offensive personalities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pechorin, gentlemen, is in fact a portrait, but not of one man only: &lt;strong&gt;he is a composite portrait, made up of all the vices which flourish, full-grown, amongst the present generation.&lt;/strong&gt; You will tell me, as you have told me before, that no man can be so bad as this; and my reply will be: &quot;If you believe that such persons as the villains of tragedy and romance could exist in real life, why can you not believe in the reality of Pechorin? If you admire fictions much more terrible and monstrous, why is it that this character, even if regarded merely as a creature of the imagination, cannot obtain quarter at your hands? Is it not because there is more truth in it than may be altogether palatable to &#xA;  you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You will say that the cause of morality gains nothing by this book. I beg your pardon. People have been surfeited with sweetmeats and their digestion has been ruined: bitter medicines, sharp truths, are therefore necessary. This must not, however, be taken to mean that the author has ever proudly dreamed of becoming a reformer of human vices. Heaven keep him from such impertinence! He has simply found it entertaining to depict a man, such as he considers to be typical of the present day and such as he has often met in real life -- too often, indeed, unfortunately both for the author himself and for you. Suffice it that the disease has been pointed out: how it is to be cured -- God alone knows!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- translated by J. H. Wisdom and M. Murray (PDF available &lt;a href=&quot;http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/eBooks/Russia/BOOKS/A%20Hero%20of%20Our%20Time%20Lermontov.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, original Russian version &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ilibrary.ru/text/12/p.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;); emphasis mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that, as I already guessed without knowing anything about the book, the title is a cynical reflection on the contemporary world. Lermontov is saying that a &quot;hero&quot; &lt;em&gt;of our time&lt;/em&gt; is not really a hero but something of a jerk. But being unable to say so openly, he resorted to ironic ambiguity in order to make his point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also interesting to note that in the original Russian title &lt;em&gt;Герой нашего времени&lt;/em&gt;, the word &quot;Герой&quot;, while usually taken to mean &quot;hero&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#auto/en/%D0%93%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can also mean&lt;/a&gt; &quot;character&quot;. This was perhaps a deliberate choice of words on Lermontov's part, to further increase the ambiguity of the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T00:31:46.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T00:31:46.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2017-02-11T22:58:49.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first two (three, depending on the translation) paragraphs take place at a specific time after Meursault receives the telegram but before he boards the bus. The paragraphs after that describes his journey as he boards the bus, went to the home, etc. The change in tense (and the fact that the change in tense is accompanied by a new paragraph) is a very clear indication of the fact that the story fast forwarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine you have a story with two events: you phone a friend the first day, and the second day you get lunch with that friend. One way to tell this story is &amp;quot;I called my friend, and the next day, we got lunch.&amp;quot; Another way to tell this story is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm calling my friend Jen. We're going to talk about our plans to get lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We got lunch, and ___________.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second approach can be confusing, but it is more concise. It has the benefit that you don't need to state the amount of time that took place between the phone call and the lunch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T01:21:23.733" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="49" CreationDate="2017-02-12T02:13:33.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the books out of order (first &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;The Lost Symbol&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;Angels and Demons&lt;/em&gt;, and then &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;), and I don't think there is much reason to read them in any particular order. The stories are completely separate from each other; the only connection between them (besides Langdon himself) that I recall is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Langdon#Angels_.26_Demons&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brief mention of Vittoria&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T02:13:33.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1579" CreationDate="2017-02-12T02:56:22.687" Score="9" ViewCount="471" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brandon Sanderson has plans in place to write many books set in different worlds, but in the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson_bibliography#The_Cosmere_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cosmere&lt;/a&gt;. These books include series that have already begun (eg &lt;em&gt;Stormlight Archives&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Elantris&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mistborn&lt;/em&gt;, and others), and some that have not yet started (eg &lt;em&gt;Aether of Night&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Dark One&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Dragonsteel&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What order (if any) should the books be read in?&lt;/strong&gt; Obviously, books should be read in the proper order within a world, but is there reason to read the books of one world before another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do realize that the answer to this question will change an evolve over time as more books are released, but answerers today and in the future should respond according to the best knowledge available to them at the time answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T03:01:05.560" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T03:24:30.937" Title="Reading order for Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;cosmere&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1576" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T03:07:49.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Author: &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/brandon-sanderson&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;brandon-sanderson&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;brandon-sanderson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Published worlds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Elantris&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mistborn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stormlight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warbreaker&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson_bibliography#The_Cosmere_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;source&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanderson has also written a collection of short stories from various worlds in the Cosmere called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum_Unbounded:_The_Cosmere_Collection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T03:55:45.647" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T03:55:45.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1577" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T03:07:49.920" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding Brandon Sanderson's grand collection of works across many different worlds in the same universe. At this point, there are only sparse connections between books (some &quot;world-hoppers&quot;), but the worlds may become more closely connected as they are expanded/created. Use in conjunction with [brandon-sanderson]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T15:28:58.073" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T15:28:58.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1631" CreationDate="2017-02-12T03:22:51.197" Score="20" ViewCount="757" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (original) Inklings were a group of Oxford academics and writers, their most famous members including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Hugo Dyson. They used to meet regularly, often at the Eagle &amp;amp; Child pub in Oxford, and read portions of their work to each other. Out of this group came such well-known and influential works as &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;how and why was this group first established?&lt;/strong&gt; When was it set up? Who were its founding members? Was there any special motivation for it,  and how did it grow to its later glory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;While this question doesn't directly relate to any particular work of fiction, I feel it's very interesting from the point of view of understanding not only the lives of &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; authors but also the possible effects on their works. After all, feedback received during Inklings meetings may have led to substantial changes to some of the works being read.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T00:02:58.050" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:59:51.893" Title="How did the Inklings originate?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;inklings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1575" CreationDate="2017-02-12T03:24:30.937" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/118288/51142&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; solves your problems.  It shows a nice chart outlining a few different ways to read the cosmere.  Here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VZpSf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VZpSf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cosmere Books Reading Order as of 01/2016&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, as long as you read each series in order, you can really do whatever you want.  However, there are characters who recur in different books, and certain reading orders are preferred.  Here's what I usually recommend in terms of large-scale universes in the cosmere to friends who are starting out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mistborn series universe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Warbreaker universe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elantris universe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stormlight Archive&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arcanum Unbounded&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that is just my opinion.  I believe that it is optimal to read &lt;em&gt;Stormlight Archive&lt;/em&gt; after the other three main universes, but you can reverse that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention you've read Stormlight already, as well as Warbreaker.  That's fine.  Should you read Elantris or Mistborn first?  It really doesn't matter.  However, I would recommend rereading Stormlight afterwards, it really is worth it (I did it that way, in fact.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;http://faq.brandonsanderson.com/node/113&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;faq&lt;/a&gt; on Sanderson's website says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I recommended reading the books in sequential order rather than trying to dive into the second book in a series without having read the first book. That said, it really doesn’t matter which Cosmere series you start with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T03:24:30.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1568" CreationDate="2017-02-12T04:05:53.940" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @yannis and @Valorum have said in the comments, the play's original title &lt;em&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/em&gt; had to be changed because there was an earlier play with the same title. Yannis shared this information from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.agathachristie.com/stories/The-Mousetrap&quot;&gt;the official Agatha Christie website&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The story was adapted from a radio play, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Blind_Mice_(radio_play_and_short_story)&quot;&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written for the Royal family in 1947. The stage play had to be renamed on the insistence of another producer, Emile Littler, who had used the name on stage before the Second World War, and it was Agatha Christie’s son-in-law, Anthony Hicks who suggested the new title. In fact, it refers to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which Hamlet cryptically calls the play depicting the murder of the king, ‘The Mousetrap’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to understand why &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt; is an appropriate title for Christie's play, let's look at the play-within-a-play in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Hamlet's father's ghost has told him that Claudio is a murderer, but Hamlet worries that perhaps the ghost is an evil spirit deliberately misleading him. So to verify the ghost's story, Hamlet comes up with the plan of staging &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Gonzago&lt;/em&gt; before Claudio. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that play, Gonzago is murdered in exactly the same way that the ghost claims he himself was: his wife's lover poured poison in his ear. Hamlet wagers that if the ghost's story is true, Claudio will not be able to help reacting in a way that betrays his guilty conscience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;I’ll have these players&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Play something like the murder of my father&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I know my course. The spirit that I have seen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  May be the devil, and the devil hath power&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  T' assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of my weakness and my melancholy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As he is very potent with such spirits,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More relative than this. The play’s the thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_130.html&quot;&gt;II.ii.557ff&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the play-within-a-play is designed as a trap for Claudio. Enticed by the prospect of a delightful evening's entertainment (the way a mouse is enticed by cheese), Claudio will find himself caught. When Claudio asks Hamlet what this play is called, Hamlet does not supply its actual name, &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Gonzago&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CLAUDIUS&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What do you call the play?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt;. Marry, how? Tropically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_168.html&quot;&gt;III.ii.222–23&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marry, how? Tropically&lt;/em&gt; means: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why the heck is it called that? It is a trope, i.e., a figure of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Marry&lt;/em&gt;, like &lt;em&gt;heck&lt;/em&gt;, is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath&quot;&gt;minced oath&lt;/a&gt;; it refers to the Virgin Mary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Gonzago&lt;/em&gt; is a metaphorical mousetrap to catch a murderer. Christie's play is also about catching a murderer, and that makes &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt; a good allusive title for it. The connection with the thematic mice of the original radio play makes it particularly fitting. Another relevant point is that the name of the play was changed: Christie changed the name of &lt;em&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Mousetrap&lt;/em&gt;, just as Hamlet did with &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Gonzago&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why was the original play called &lt;em&gt;Three Blind Mice&lt;/em&gt; to begin with? The murderer in the play sets out to kill three people; since they can't see what's coming, and don't know why they are going to be killed, and two of them end up trapped in a snowed-in house, they are blind mice. (Partial spoiler follows.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; It turns out also that the murderer has picked his victims for revenge. They were responsible for a terrible ordeal he underwent as a child: he and his two siblings were placed in foster care with a farmer whose wife beat them mercilessly. The three abused children were &quot;blind mice&quot;, helpless and trapped, at the mercy of the farmer's wife. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nursery rhyme is thematically apt to the story, and is used as a motif throughout the play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, Christie was fond of using nursery rhymes as titles and themes for her work. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_Dickory_Dock_(novel)&quot;&gt;Hickory Dickory Dock&lt;/a&gt;, another &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_Dickory_Dock&quot;&gt;mouse-related nursery rhyme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooked_House&quot;&gt;Crooked House&lt;/a&gt;, from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Was_a_Crooked_Man&quot;&gt;There was a crooked man&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pocket_Full_of_Rye&quot;&gt;A Pocket Full of Rye&lt;/a&gt;, from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence&quot;&gt;Sing a song of sixpence&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One,_Two,_Buckle_My_Shoe_(novel)&quot;&gt;One, Two, Buckle My Shoe&lt;/a&gt;, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One%2C_Two%2C_Buckle_My_Shoe&quot;&gt;the rhyme beginning with that line&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.agathachristie.com/stories/how-does-your-garden-grow&quot;&gt;How Does Your Garden Grow?&lt;/a&gt;&quot; from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%2C_Mary%2C_Quite_Contrary&quot;&gt;Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt there are others. &quot;Three blind mice&quot; fits with this general partiality toward nursery rhymes, and when that title was &lt;em&gt;hors de combat&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The Mousetrap&quot; was a good substitute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T08:22:51.780" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T08:22:51.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1578" CreationDate="2017-02-12T09:18:06.073" Score="19" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Tolkien and Lewis started it when Tolkien returned to Oxford.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll answer the questions that you mentioned one by one. Unless otherwise specified, the quotes come from &lt;em&gt;Inside The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; by James Stuart Bell, Carrie Pyykkonen, and Linda Washington, chapter 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When was it set up?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years later (after working on the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;), when he returned to Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English), Tolkien and Lewis founded a writer's group called the Inklings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, this was in 1925. So the earliest possible year is 1925. But the Wikipedia article on C. S. Lewis claims that they met for the first time in 1926, pushing the possible date farther forwards. In doing some Internet sleuthing, I looked at the source that Wikipedia provided for when they ran -  from a book called &lt;em&gt;Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warrington Hamilton Lewis&lt;/em&gt;, C. S. Lewis's brother. I then looked up the book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=rdcNAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=isbn%3A006064575X&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=Inklings+&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; and performed a search for 'Inklings'. On page 183, there is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oTRks.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oTRks.png&quot; alt=&quot;Transcript below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-ings of the Inklings did not begin until April 1940. Though members of the Inklings often met at various times throughout the week, the regularity of Tuesday mornings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe the Inklings were founded in April 1940, although that could be referring to when they started regularly meeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Doing some searching through &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=QgBbAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq+&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, I found this from &lt;em&gt;The Inklings&lt;/em&gt; by Humphrey Carpenter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pDYYp.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pDYYp.png&quot; alt=&quot;Transcript below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three men knew each other well. Lewis and Tolkien met in 1926 and soon achieved an intimacy which lasted for many years. Around them gathered a group of friends, many of them Oxford dons, who referred to themselves informally and half jestingly as 'The Inklings'. When in 1939 Charles Williams found himself obliged to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So apparently it just sort of developed after Tolkien and Lewis met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This group met weekly (sometimes on Monday or Tuesday mornings, other times on Thursday evenings) during the 1930s and '40s...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who were its founding members?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my first quote - it looks like Tolkien and Lewis set it up themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...1930s and' 40s and consisted of Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams: Owed Barfield (Lewis was his daughter's godfather); Warren Lewis; Nevill Coghill (an Oxford professor); John Wain (not to be confused with John Wayne, the American actor famous for westerns - this is John Wain, the English poet and novelist); Gervase Matthews (a lecturer at Oxford); Hugo Dyson (whose talk with Lewis along with Tolkien helped Lewis to believe in God once again); Robert &amp;quot;Humphrey&amp;quot; Havard (another lecturer, who was also Lewis's and Warren's doctor); Lord David Cecil (an Oxford professor); and others, including Tolkien's son Christopher. Some friends and fellow writers like Eric Rucker Eddison (whose novel &lt;em&gt;The Worm Ouroboros&lt;/em&gt; also was a favorite of Lewis's) and Dorothy Sayers (the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery series) made guest appearances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was there any special motivation for it, and how did it grow to its later glory?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Inklings liked hanging out together and hoped to encourage each other in their meetings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why Lewis and Tolkien set up the group in the first place - probably for discussion about the works they were writing, and connecting to other writers. Why do you set up a chess club? For practice, fun, and people. It seems like that would be why they would set up a group like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is basically what it says in &lt;em&gt;The Inklings&lt;/em&gt; by Humphrey Carpenter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9AEl.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c9AEl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Transcript below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who edited the university magazine &lt;em&gt;Isis&lt;/em&gt; and published a couple of novels while still studying for his degree. There were also a few dons present at the meetings. The club existed so that members could read unpublished compositions aloud, and ask for comments and criticisms. Tangye Lean named it 'The Inklings'.&#xA;No record of its proceedings survives, though Tolkien recalled that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thanks @doppelgreener for all of the transcriptions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35386503#35386503&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;! &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T19:22:28.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1582" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T10:00:08.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T10:00:08.057" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T10:00:08.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1583" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T10:00:08.057" Score="0" Body="The Inklings were a group of writers at Oxford, who included authors such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Do not use this tag for questions about one of the authors in the group; use it for questions about the group as a whole." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:08:13.837" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:08:13.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="328" CreationDate="2017-02-12T11:47:04.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It appears so.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since nobody else answered with an explanation of how everything fits, I decided to go ahead and post my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Though under Earth and throneless now I be&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This certainly applies - he is buried and has no crown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And now he has sunk down into the Deep Realm and lies dreaming of all the things that are done in the upper world. Many sink down, and few return to the sunlit lands. They say he will wake at the end of the world.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yet, while I lived, all Earth was under me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he was a king, then metaphorically, yes, he's above everyone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From which it is plain that some great king of the ancient giants, who lives buried there, caused this boast to be cut in the stone over his sepulcher;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That is old Father Time, who was once a king in Overland,&amp;quot; said the Warden.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he was king, and we see that he is a giant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here, filling almost the whole length of it, lay an enormous man fast asleep. He was far bigger than any of the giants, and his face was not like a giant's, but noble and beautiful.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia: The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also - &lt;strong&gt;who else would it be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other giant king that we know of buried right there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems entirely possible that it was time who had it carved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T11:47:04.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:40:11.770" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'L'Etranger', the novel by Albert Camus originally written in French and usually translated as either 'The Outsider' (UK) or 'The Stranger' (USA). Use in conjunction with [albert-camus] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T14:01:39.783" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T14:01:39.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1587" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:41:46.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:41:46.170" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:41:46.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1593" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:45:43.150" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:45:43.150" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:45:43.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1597" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:47:41.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:47:41.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:47:41.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1598" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:47:41.193" Score="0" Body="For questions about Spring and All, the collection of poems by William Carlos Williams. Use in conjunction with [william-carlos-williams]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:57:44.800" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:57:44.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1599" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:48:25.053" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T12:48:25.053" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T12:48:25.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1600" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T12:48:25.053" Score="0" Body="For questions about Sredni Vashtar, the story by Saki. Use in conjunction with [saki]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:23:06.093" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:23:06.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1601" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:28:07.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about historical development within literature. Example &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/history-of-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;history-of-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;history-of-literature&lt;/a&gt; questions might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking for the first literary work to use a particular theme or idea;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking about how a literary theme or idea developed, perhaps in relation to a specific work;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking about the development of literature in a particular country or context;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;asking about the literary aspects of intellectual movements such as Romanticism or the Renaissance;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about real-world historical events as they relate to literature, use the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/historical-context&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;historical-context&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;historical-context&lt;/a&gt; tag instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about when an individual work first appeared or about revisions to that work over time, use &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/textual-history&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;textual-history&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;textual-history&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T10:38:46.323" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T10:38:46.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
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  <row Id="1611" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:50:27.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:50:27.280" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:50:27.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1613" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:50:58.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:50:58.580" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:50:58.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1614" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:50:58.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Sandra Cisneros or about any of her literary works, most famously her novel &quot;The House on Mango Street&quot;." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:02:05.943" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:02:05.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1615" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:51:33.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:51:33.590" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:51:33.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1618" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:52:26.730" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Scarlet Letter, the novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Use in conjunction with [nathaniel-hawthorne]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:34:09.370" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:34:09.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
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  <row Id="1620" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:54:37.350" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Mexican poet and author Rosario Castellanos or about any of her literary works." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:59:46.057" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:59:46.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1621" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:55:27.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:55:27.237" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:55:27.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1622" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:55:27.237" Score="0" Body="For questions about Story of Your Life, the book by Ted Chiang. Use in conjunction with [ted-chiang]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:33:31.767" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:33:31.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1623" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:58:26.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:58:26.373" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:58:26.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1624" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:58:26.373" Score="0" Body="For questions about the character Tarzan, appearing in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Use in conjunction with [edgar-rice-burroughs]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:34:33.450" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:34:33.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1625" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:59:07.873" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:59:07.873" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:59:07.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1626" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:59:07.873" Score="0" Body="For questions about 'The Art of War', the book by Sun Tzu or Sunzi. Use with [sun-tzu] and [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:02:16.080" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:02:16.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1627" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:59:39.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T13:59:39.320" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T13:59:39.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1628" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-12T13:59:39.320" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Dragonriders of Pern, the series by Anne McCaffrey. Use in conjunction with [anne-mccaffrey]." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-12T14:18:48.880" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T14:18:48.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1578" CreationDate="2017-02-12T15:46:51.317" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The well-known Inklings was a literary discussion group, and that is exactly what they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a preceding group where they got the name from, which was founded for the purpose of reading aloud unfinished compositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this initiative folded with the departure of its founder Edward Tangye Lean in 1933, Tolkien and Lewis, both members of the original group, transferred the name to their own group at Magdalen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formed around Lewis and Tolkien and being invitation only, it was a gathering of like-minded spirits valuing narrative in fiction and encouraging the writing of fantasy. Apparently it was discussion as well as the reading aloud of their unfinished works, receiving both praise and candid criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Tolkien, Lewis took particular pleasure in listening to others read their works aloud, having a phenomenal capacity to remember these texts. Tolkien summed up the spirit of Inklings meetings when he called it “a feast of reason and flow of soul” (Letters, 102).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the connection between the two 'Inklings' societies, Tolkien later said &amp;quot;although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name “Inklings” itself is a bit of whimsy, a pun on those who dabble in ink—writers--and those who may only have an inkling of what they intend to write about when they begin a project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The golden years of the Inklings seem to have been from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, when the group heard J.R.R. Tolkien’s &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; read aloud, as well as C.S. Lewis’s &lt;em&gt;Out of the Silent Planet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Perelandra&lt;/em&gt;, and Charles Williams’ &lt;em&gt;All Hallows Eve&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inklings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Inklings&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ignatius.com/promotions/looking-for-the-king/who-were-the-inklings.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who Were the Inklings?&lt;/a&gt; (Ignatius Press).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Inklings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inklings&lt;/a&gt; (Tolkien Gateway).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Humphrey Carpenter, &lt;em&gt;The Inklings&lt;/em&gt; (Houghton Mifflin, 1979)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diana Glyer, &lt;em&gt;The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community&lt;/em&gt; (Kent State University Press, 2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harry L. Poe &amp;amp; James R. Veneman, &lt;em&gt;The Inklings of Oxford&lt;/em&gt; (Zondervan, 2009).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T21:59:51.893" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:59:51.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="752" CreationDate="2017-02-12T18:08:34.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word's origin is in mimicking the whinny of a horse, which is after all what the Houyhnhnms are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge Swift never gave more specific pronunciation guides than that. There's probably no precise human equivalent, just as mung-mung, guau-guau, and woof-woof are all ways that humans try to reproduce the sound of a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My English professor rendered it as &quot;whin-in-im&quot;, and I'm sure her colleagues had a whole host of variations. I think that any of them is more or less equally valid. English speakers do have some experience in that initial aspiration, at least those in places that haven't undergone the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wine-whine_merger&quot;&gt;wine-whine merger&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extra h's in &quot;Houyhnhnm&quot; do imply more aspiration in the ns, but I think that's more important in the written than spoken form. Pronouncing it would be a bit like switching accents in the middle of a sentence, for an accent you don't really speak. With a natural language it would risk sounding pretentious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when called on, I mimick my old English prof, just because that's what gets the point across. I'd say that any other set of speakers pronouncing the word will end up in the vicinity of that, and mimic each other to reach a consensus, but that's neither more nor less right than any of their original pronunciations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T18:08:34.467" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1130" CreationDate="2017-02-12T22:10:29.263" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first and second parts of &lt;em&gt;Howl&lt;/em&gt; are, in a way, a question and an answer. One cannot read the terrible things &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1131/71&quot;&gt;that happened to real people&lt;/a&gt; and not think, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; were these brilliant thinkers driven to madness? What could make a man jump off a bridge, unloved and alone, before despairing of even the certainty of death? What could make someone drink themselves to death? What in the name of sanity could drive people to tear their clothes in protest in the streets?&amp;quot; As Ginsberg himself asks later on,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch. Moloch is the answer to all of these questions, and the others which Ginsberg convinces us to ask as we read &lt;em&gt;Howl&lt;/em&gt;, Part I. In its original incarnation, Moloch was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a child-sacrifice-demanding god&lt;/a&gt; who would strike fear into worshippers' hearts. It is, then, no surprise that he was the choice to describe the social and industrial machine that Ginsberg believed was devouring his generation. Those intellectuals had done nothing wrong, yet vices and society were killing them. So what, specifically, is Moloch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encourage anyone who desires to answer that question to read Part II, over and over. Every word, every sentence, every plea has the essence of the hell the author sees around him. Yet in the chaos, several repeated themes arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;1. The industrial machine&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cold metal and steel crush humanity's individuality, as each worker is forced to sacrifice their own thoughts and minds for the sake of industrial efficiency. Anyone who has seen Fritz Lang's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolis_(1927_film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metropolis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; may recall the shock the protagonist, Freder, feels when he witnesses the workers moving precisely in unison to ensure that the gigantic machine, Moloch, continues to run. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZpaWOLjWx0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The horrifying scene that follows&lt;/a&gt; explores the view of an outsider realizing for the first time what workers must sacrifice for the good of humans as a whole: Their own humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, of course, quite a few lines which support this symbolism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! . . . Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ginsberg views Moloch as the antithesis of his generation. Its &amp;quot;mind is pure machinery&amp;quot; while the artists and writers of the Beat generation are the exact opposite. Its &amp;quot;love is endless oil and stone&amp;quot;, cold and deathly, while the love of a human is soft and gentle (see also the sex in Part I, to some extent). Its gods are skyscrapers and factories, quite unlike most modern-day religions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;2. Authority&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite easy for members of my generation, young and collectively blind, to consider the Beat generation and the counterculture movement to be two aspects of the same underlying societal response. The onset of American involvement in the Vietnam War seems to be our image of the anti-war movement in the 1960s. Indeed, we do see some references to what may be the scorning of individuality and free thought in the military in several lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boys sobbing in armies!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch the vast stone of war!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, there are general references to government and the enforcement of social norms. Part III of &lt;em&gt;Howl&lt;/em&gt; is largely about the psychiatric confinement of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Solomon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carl Solomon&lt;/a&gt; in mental institutions, but the same theme pops up in Part II. Some general anti-government, anti-authority phrases are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch the stunned governments!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spectral nations! invincible madhouses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clearly not evident from these lines alone what some of these phrases mean, but I'm a bit more convinced from Part III. The entire poem needs to be taken into account to understand any part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;3. Themselves&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ginsberg's work is an attempt to throw off the shackles of the societal Moloch, to shout against it, and thus defy and destroy it. However, he cannot. He decries &amp;quot;Moloch whom I abandon!&amp;quot;, but he cannot abandon it, because the madness is inside him already. I'd like to point you do two consecutive lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! . . . Lacklove and manless in Moloch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is one thing to be destroyed by society, and it is another thing entirely to destroy yourself. Think back to Tuli Kupferberg, who jumped off a bridge, or  Bill Cannastra, decapitated while drunkenly jumping out a subway window, or any other member of that generation who nearly reached death by their own hands. They drank and they lived wildly and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Carr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;they stuck their heads in ovens&lt;/a&gt;, and it is so easy to just blame Kupferberg and Cannastra and Carr and the others for what was, or was almost their ruin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it wasn't their fault. The agony, the anger, the frustration, the madness was thrust upon them by their experiences with society, and even afterwards, it stuck with them. Emotional turmoil drove them to self-destruction, yet its seeds came from without, not within. Moloch was inside them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-12T22:48:54.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T03:51:46.073" Score="3" ViewCount="1392" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what a particular line in the following cheer poem is a reference to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Razzle Dazzle&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leader&lt;/strong&gt;: My name is &lt;em&gt;(your name)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm number one&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My reputation has just begun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So if you see me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Step aside&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cause I ain't got the time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response&lt;/strong&gt;: Ooh! She thinks she's bad!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leader&lt;/strong&gt;: Shut up girls, don't make me mad!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response&lt;/strong&gt;: Ooh! She thinks she's cool!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leader&lt;/strong&gt;: Cool enough for all these fools!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response&lt;/strong&gt;: Ooh! She thinks she's fine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Everyone&lt;/strong&gt;: Fine enough to M O&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fine enough to macho&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fine enough to hula hoop&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fine enough for all yall fools!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Razzle Dazzle &lt;em&gt;(3 claps)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Razzle Dazzle &lt;em&gt;(3 claps)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line I particularly do not understand is &quot;Fine enough to M O&quot; and &quot;Fine enough to macho.&quot;&#xA;This cheer poem is extremely common in summer camps and I've heard it so many times, but no one seems to know what &quot;M O&quot; is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="539" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T20:28:35.167" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T20:28:35.167" Title="What does &quot;M O&quot; in the Razzle Dazzle cheer song mean?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-13T06:46:34.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T06:46:34.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T06:46:34.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-13T06:46:34.197" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;One Hundred Years of Solitude&quot;, the novel by Gabriel García Márquez, originally written in Spanish as &quot;Cien años de soledad&quot; and translated by Gregory Rabassa" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T12:26:04.370" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T12:26:04.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="824" CreationDate="2017-02-13T08:02:19.963" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to try and judge a reception of a novel that's nearly 100 years old. Especially as reviews seem to be 'nicer' in those days than some of the scathing remarks you see in the present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is a review of the book from the Guardian in 1924 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have had novels about India from the British point of view and from the native point of view, and in each case with sympathy for the other side; but the sympathy has been intended, and in this novel there is not the slightest suggestion of anything but a personal impression, with the prejudices and limitations of the writer frankly exposed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/1924/jun/20/classics&quot;&gt;Full review from the Guardian&lt;/a&gt; - June 20th 1924&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T08:02:19.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:04:46.280" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series of fantasy novels have attracted enormous literary and critical praise. It has made numerous &quot;top X fantasy&quot; lists, been suggested as required secondary school reading and been called a classic by esteemed authors such as Antony Burgess and Harold Bloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A surface reading, however, might find little to justify such praise. The descriptive language is impressive, but sometimes overwrought. Even wikipedia can list no further underlying themes beyond a fairly obvious examination of the clash between freedom and tradition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the praise has been directed at Gormenghast as a work of imagination. However the modern reader, used to several decades of fantasy being a popular, rich and prolific genre, might find it difficult to place in the context of having been written in the 40's and 50's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions over why the book was a critical success but a commercial failure, especially compared with the publication of The Lord of the Rings in the 50's, have haunted it since publication. Even its fans seem to find these questions difficult to answer. For instance here, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/16/gormenghast-masterpiece-mervyn-peake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a journalist simply dismisses them with the answer that the book is &quot;too good&quot; for commercial success and was perhaps a little before its time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the series uniquely influential and imaginative in the fantasy genre at time of publication? If not, what else about it excites such adulation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T15:20:24.293" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:20:24.293" Title="What qualities of the Gormenghast series have made it such a critical success?" Tags="&lt;gormenghast&gt;&lt;mervyn-peake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="443" CreationDate="2017-02-13T10:18:46.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Right from the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt;, Jack and Ned are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literaturepage.com/read/little-men-21.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;portrayed&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;em&gt;inherently&lt;/em&gt; flawed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack Ford was a sharp, rather a sly lad, who was sent to this school, because it was cheap. Many men would have thought him a smart boy, but Mr. Bhaer did not like his way of illustrating that Yankee word, and thought his unboyish keenness and money-loving as much of an affliction as Dolly's stutter, or Dick's hump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ned Barker ... bragged a good deal about what he could do, but seldom did any thing to prove it, was not brave, and a little given to tale-telling. He was apt to bully the small boys, and flatter the big ones, and without being at all bad, was just the sort of fellow who could very easily be led astray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike, say, Dolly's stutter (an unfortunate affliction) or Stuffy's greediness (the result of parental overindulgence), the flaws that Jack and Ned have are seen as something wrong with their character, as moral failings. Nothing in the course of &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt; changes that assessment or causes us to feel sympathy for them. For example, Jack steals Tommy's money, and is perfectly happy to let Nat bear the burden of suspicion; when Ned grudgingly begins to accept that Nat might not be the thief after all, he bullies Nat to try and get at the truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alcott does show that each boy has his virtues as well. Jack does eventually confess to the theft and try to atone; Ned does treat Nan with disinterested affection. But for all that, neither Jack nor Ned form any significant connections with their fellow students at Plumfield. Every other boy or girl has at least one close attachment: Dan with Nat, Demi with Daisy, Tommy with Nan, Dick with Dolly, and so on. Through such attachments, the students become part of the larger Plumfield community and show the success of the school's methods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack and Ned evidently haven't formed any such bonds with the community. Their careers after Plumfield show that their inherent nature is the same. Jack is still &quot;money-loving&quot;; he is a businessman &quot;bent on getting rich&quot;. And Ned is a lawyer; nuff said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joking apart, the reason they are &quot;failures&quot; is precisely that &quot;no one mourned their absence&quot;. Unlike the other boys (and random girl or two) of Plumfield, Jack and Ned have not made themselves part of the place. So when Nat is on the verge of departure for the untamed wilds of Europe (let us remember what a barbarian place it was in the 19th century, especially when seen from the vantage point of the high culture and civilization then prevalent in America), the rest of the community gathers to wish him farewell; Jack and Ned are not connected enough to feel drawn to participate, and worse, nobody cares that they aren't part of the gathering. Is there a greater indication of failure in life than that your presence or absence makes no difference to anybody?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T23:25:54.470" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T23:25:54.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2091" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:10:38.437" Score="19" ViewCount="1284" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Room 101&lt;/em&gt; is where people are taken to meet their worst fears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;room 5&lt;/em&gt; is the room that V is kept in at Larkhill. Since it is labeled with the Roman numeral &quot;V&quot;, it is suggested in the book that this is where he took his new name from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the large numbers of literary allusions throughout the book**, and the obvious thematic connections between the two, my question is whether the latter might be a conscious reference to the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few reasons to think it might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both books deal with a totalitarian government that seeks to set itself up as a godlike force and strip its people of almost all freedom (including freedom of thought).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not only are both rooms associated with highly traumatic experiences (for Winston and V respectively), but the characters have almost &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; opposite reactions to this trauma (with Winston surrendering to the party, and V vowing to overthrow it), perhaps suggesting a deliberate contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a direct reference to Beethoven's fifth symphony, and how this spells out &quot;V&quot; in Morse code. Once we start looking for patterns of this sort, it's easy to note that 5 in binary is 101, making the room literally &quot;Room 101&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is (arguably) implied by V's later treatment of Evey that he believes he lost his fear by being forced to face his worst fears. For the most part, this transformation seems to have occured while he was locked in room 5. This, coupled with the points above, means that the character of V can be considered to have faced his worst fears while locked in a room which could - in theory - be referred to as &quot;Room 101&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think it's often far to easy to get carried away and read meanings into works where the writers never intended (or at least were not conscious of) them, so my question is: what evidence is there, if any, that this association was made consciously by the creators of the comic, and/or that the reader is encouraged to interpret the story in this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** &lt;em&gt;Note that I don't necessarily consider the large number of allusions in the book to be evidence in favour of this. It probably makes it more likely, but it's also possible that the story was deliberately sprinkled with &quot;obvious&quot; allusions so as to encourage readers to look for less obvious ones, whether they're there or not, and thus give the book the illusion of greater depth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="541" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-18T13:13:17.153" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T17:06:08.447" Title="Is there strong evidence that &quot;room 5&quot; in V for Vendetta was a conscious reference to Room 101?" Tags="&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;alan-moore&gt;&lt;v-for-vendetta&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1642" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:10:56.767" Score="103" ViewCount="23322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was there any special meaning to the year he chose? I originally thought that he just selected a date in the future but now I am not so sure. Has George Orwell or his editor ever commented on the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T14:54:00.063" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T19:27:42.820" Title="Why was 1984 set in 1984?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2017-02-13T14:46:01.450" Score="121" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Nobody knows.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been doing some Internet research, and the only thing that people agree on is that we don't know. There are, however, three theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One (slightly convoluted) theory is that he took the date from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Chayanov#After_the_Russian_Revolution&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Chayanov&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;Путешествие моего брата Алексея в страну крестьянской утопии&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;My Brother Alexei's Journey Into the Land of Peasant Utopia&lt;/em&gt;), which is set in 1984, through a connection with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Zamyatin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yevgeny Zamyatin&lt;/a&gt;, the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a novel which inspired &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;. However, this is not a very likely theory.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/fjps20/1976/fjps20.v004.i01/03066157608438001/production/03066157608438001.fp.png_v03&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;&amp;quot;Note on the Sources of George Orwell&amp;#39;s 1984&amp;quot;, by R. E. F. Smith&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He swapped the last two numbers of the year he started writing it in - 1948.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tandfonline.com/na101/home/literatum/publisher/tandf/journals/content/fjps20/1976/fjps20.v004.i01/03066157608438001/production/03066157608438001.fp.png_v03&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;&amp;quot;Note on the Sources of George Orwell&amp;#39;s 1984&amp;quot;, by R. E. F. Smith&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I found another theory that I personally found much more believable: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was named after a poem by his wife, Eileen Blair - &lt;em&gt;The End of the Century, 1984&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, Eileen wrote the poem &lt;em&gt;End of the Century, 1984&lt;/em&gt; for the 50th anniversary of her school, in 1934. The 100th anniversary would then be 1984. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eileen_Blair#Influence_on_Orwell.27s_writing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the poem was written a year before she met Blair, there are some similarities between the futuristic vision of Eileen's poem and that in Nineteen Eighty-Four, including the use of mind control, and the eradication of personal freedom by a police state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;As @RaisingAgent mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1641/why-was-1984-set-in-1984/1642#comment2285_1642&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;, Eric Arthur Blair is George Orwell's real name. See a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1671/why-did-george-orwell-name-himself-after-the-river-orwell&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As she died in 1945, when Orwell was working on &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, it seems quite possible that he would name it after her poem, in her memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.connectingsingles.com/poem14741/end-of-the-century-1984.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the poem&lt;/a&gt; by Eileen Blair are reminiscent of a dystopian world, such as 1984:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every loss is now a gain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For every chance must follow reason.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A crystal palace meets the rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That falls at its appointed season.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this seems to be referring to weather control)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No book disturbs the lucid line&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For sun-bronzed scholars tune their thought&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To Telepathic Station 9&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From which they know just what they ought:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The useful sciences; the arts&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of telesalesmanship and Spanish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As registered in Western parts;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is talking about mind control - like the fact that you must love Big Brother and the Thought Police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mental cremation that shall banish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Relics, philosophies and colds --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Manana-minded ten-year-olds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brainwashed children!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Who denounced you?&quot; said Winston.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It was my little daughter,&quot; said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. &quot;She listened at the keyhole....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-Book 3, I&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, nobody knows for sure, and we can't exactly ask the author at some point. So while we can theorize, we won't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T15:43:33.007" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T15:43:33.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1660" CreationDate="2017-02-13T15:36:56.057" Score="8" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0048&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 48 of &lt;em&gt;Nicholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Dickens expresses quite strong views on writers of plays adapted from books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Shot beyond him [&lt;em&gt;Shakespear&lt;/em&gt;], I mean,' resumed Nicholas, 'in quite another&#xA;  respect, for, whereas he brought within the magic circle of his&#xA;  genius, traditions peculiarly adapted for his purpose, and turned&#xA;  familiar things into constellations which should enlighten the world&#xA;  for ages, you drag within the magic circle of your dulness, subjects&#xA;  not at all adapted to the purposes of the stage, and debase as he&#xA;  exalted.  For instance, you take the uncompleted books of living&#xA;  authors, fresh from their hands, wet from the press, cut, hack, and&#xA;  carve them to the powers and capacities of your actors, and the&#xA;  capability of your theatres, finish unfinished works, hastily and&#xA;  crudely vamp up ideas not yet worked out by their original projector,&#xA;  but which have doubtless cost him many thoughtful days and sleepless&#xA;  nights; by a comparison of incidents and dialogue, down to the very&#xA;  last word he may have written a fortnight before, do your utmost to&#xA;  anticipate his plot--all this without his permission, and against his&#xA;  will; and then, to crown the whole proceeding, publish in some mean&#xA;  pamphlet, an unmeaning farrago of garbled extracts from his work, to&#xA;  which your name as author, with the honourable distinction annexed, of&#xA;  having perpetrated a hundred other outrages of the same description. &#xA;  Now, show me the distinction between such pilfering as this, and&#xA;  picking a man's pocket in the street: unless, indeed, it be, that the&#xA;  legislature has a regard for pocket-handkerchiefs, and leaves men's&#xA;  brains, except when they are knocked out by violence, to take care of&#xA;  themselves.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering he himself at one time wrote a play, and the viciousness of the attack, I wondered if Dickens was venting some of his own anger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, did Dickens have someone who was 'cutting, hacking and carving' his works at the time he was writing &lt;em&gt;Nicholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;, and was this barb introduced as some revenge upon that person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T04:04:51.947" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T04:04:51.947" Title="Are Nicholas's sentiments on playwrights those of his creator?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;nicholas-nickleby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1644" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-13T15:50:32.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T15:50:32.860" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T15:50:32.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1645" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-13T15:50:32.860" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the US author Jim Butcher or about any of his literary works, most famously the fantasy series The Dresden Files." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T19:22:44.923" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T19:22:44.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1646" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-13T16:37:24.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alan Moore (born 1953) is an English writer known for the graphic novels &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;From Hell&lt;/em&gt;, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has also published two novels set in his home county of Northamptonshire, and has written and contributed to several comic book serials, including &lt;em&gt;Swamp Thing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="541" LastEditorUserId="541" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T17:40:51.153" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T17:40:51.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1647" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-13T16:37:24.820" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English novelist and comic book writer Alan Moore (born 1953) and his works." OwnerUserId="541" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:52:10.893" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:52:10.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2017-02-13T17:23:57.543" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;A variety of other possible answers have been put forth, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;put succinctly in a Guardian column from 2009&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why '1984'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell's title remains a mystery. Some say he was alluding to the centenary of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. Others suggest a nod to Jack London's novel The Iron Heel (in which a political movement comes to power in 1984), or perhaps to one of his favourite writer GK Chesterton's story, &amp;quot;The Napoleon of Notting Hill&amp;quot;, which is set in 1984.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his edition of the Collected Works (20 volumes), Peter Davison notes that Orwell's American publisher claimed that the title derived from reversing the date, 1948, though there's no documentary evidence for this. Davison also argues that the date 1984 is linked to the year of Richard Blair's birth, 1944, and notes that in the manuscript of the novel, the narrative occurs, successively, in 1980, 1982 and finally, 1984. There's no mystery about the decision to abandon &amp;quot;The Last Man in Europe&amp;quot;. Orwell himself was always unsure of it. It was his publisher, Fred Warburg who suggested that Nineteen Eighty-Four was a more commercial title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Richard Blair was his adopted son).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that he started writing the book before 1948, but he was retyping/rewriting a rough draft and trying to decide between &amp;quot;1984&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Last Man in Europe&amp;quot; for a title, and according to the article I quoted above, correspondence written by Orwell about his indecision between these two titles was sent during or just before 1948.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="543" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T17:30:13.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1651" CreationDate="2017-02-13T17:39:48.830" Score="7" ViewCount="1194" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack and Jill went up the hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To fetch a pail of water.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack fell down and broke his crown,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Jill came tumbling after.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up Jack got, and home did trot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As fast as he could caper,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He went to bed to mend his head (or and bound his head)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With vinegar and brown paper.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative second verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up Jack got, and home did trot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As fast as he could caper,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With vinegar and brown paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these lyrics based on true events? Or is it a simple nonsense poem for children?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T19:25:11.747" Title="Is the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill based on real life events?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T17:48:13.273" Score="9" ViewCount="970" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ayn Rand's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a good story paired with a (sometimes belabored) expression of the author's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy&lt;/a&gt;. I was wondering if there are any real-life connections to the characters of her books. Wikipedia notes (citing Rand's journal and notes) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters#Dr._Robert_Stadler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Stadler&lt;/a&gt; was, in part, based on J. Robert Oppenheimer. Some secondary characters are also listed there, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters#Secondary_characters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nat Taggart&lt;/a&gt; (based on James Jerome Hill), Hugh Akston (based on Aristotle) and Mr. Thompson (based on Harry Truman). So we see that at least some of her characters were based on nonfictional characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What other characters, if any, were inspired by real people?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Personal speculation without basis is not really wanted here; please don't just say &quot;Dagny is X&quot; without backing it up. Proofs for answers may include close readings of the text paired with relevant history, other writings by Rand, interviews with Rand, or similar.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:49:07.913" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T01:01:25.273" Title="The real-life inspiration for the characters of Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1649" CreationDate="2017-02-13T18:46:14.983" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found several different possibilities. Here are the four I found most helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is nonsense and should not be taken so seriously&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rhyme has traditionally been seen as a nonsense verse, particularly as the couple go up a hill to find water, which is often thought to be found at the bottom of hills. &lt;strong&gt;Vinegar and brown paper were a home cure used as a method to draw out bruises on the body&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bolded the last sentence which covers the added verse you gave.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is based off King  Louis XVI&lt;/strong&gt; (this is my favorite) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack and Jill represent Louis XVI of France, who was deposed and beheaded in 1793 (lost his crown), and his Queen Marie Antoinette (who came tumbling after)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for me, the article debunks that theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a theory made difficult by the fact that the earliest printing of the rhyme pre-dates those events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is taken from a Norse mythological story&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man named S. Barring-Gold came to the conclusion that it was taken from an old Norse mythological story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Baring-Gould stated that Hjúki and Bil, brother and sister respectively in Norse mythology, were taken up from the earth by the moon (personified as the god Máni) as they were fetching water from the well called Byrgir, bearing on their shoulders the cask called Saegr and the pole called Simul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was about King Charles I of France&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another favorite of mine, this theory states that the story comes from King Charles's attempts to raise taxes. According to the story, when he was blocked by parliament, he simply lowered each volume. The song made use of several (bolded) uses of wordplay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the attempt by King Charles I to reform the taxes on liquid measures. He was blocked by Parliament, so subsequently ordered that the volume of a Jack (1/2 pint) be reduced, but the tax remained the same. This meant that he still received more tax, despite Parliament's veto. &lt;strong&gt;Hence &quot;Jack fell down and broke his crown&quot; (many pint glasses in the UK still have a line marking the 1/2 pint level with a crown above it)&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;and Jill came tumbling after&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;The reference to &quot;Jill&quot; (actually a &quot;gill&quot;, or 1/4 pint) is said to reflect that the gill dropped in volume as a consequence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by what I have gathered, the one concern I have (which I am sure you have) would be the second line. I believe it is very possible that the second line was added later on in the history of the rhyme. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_Jill_(nursery_rhyme)#Meaning_and_origin&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T19:25:11.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T19:25:11.747" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="65" CreationDate="2017-02-13T19:26:53.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what I would do if I were trapped on the roof of a burning building. Unless I could be certain of surviving a jump, I might just want to hold on to what time I had on the roof, instead of giving it all up in one jump (obviously, this depends on the height of the building, and the condition of the ground below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this instance, it seems that a jump from the roof, without a bamboo pole to slide down (which burned up after Alistair and the children slid down), would mean instant death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Amy] looked down. Far below was the construction debris. Twisted coils&#xA;  of wire, concrete, nails, tangles of rusty rebar. There was no clear&#xA;  place to land. Even if they could survive the jump, they could be&#xA;  impaled on the sharp objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues, The Clue Hunt: In Too Deep&lt;/em&gt; page 195 (chapter 25)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, at that point, Irina had already given up on her own life, having accomplished her goal of saving Amy and Dan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From high above, Irina watched them. The roof was so hot now it was&#xA;  agony to stand on it. The smoke rolled across her and cleared. She&#xA;  felt so far away from them. How hopeful they were. They didn't know&#xA;  yet that it was too late. [...] She had only seconds. That was all&#xA;  right. She'd saved him. She'd saved her beloved boy. No, not Nikolai.&#xA;  Dan. Dan and Amy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ibid., 197-198&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, after that point she does seem to reconsider giving up her life &quot;Was she really ready to let go of life?,&quot; but it appears that by the very end she decides that &quot; it was worth it to me,&quot; and hopes that the children realize that. (Anyway, those thoughts were in the very final seconds of Irina's life before the building collapses, and it was too late to do anything else at that point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it appears that it was a point of pride to Irina to remain standing as long as possible, which would not be possible after jumping and breaking bones/getting impaled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a great effort to keep standing. She would keep standing. She&#xA;  would die a better person than she'd lived. That wasn't too bad, for&#xA;  an ex-KGB spy, not to mention a Cahill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ibid.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T19:26:53.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2017-02-13T20:13:27.383" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The year 1984 was probably chosen to sound like 1948 while still being in the future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anthony Burgess, in his book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:////en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_(Anthony_Burgess_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1985&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, part novel and part commentary on Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;, gives the following explanation of the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have to remember what it was like in 1948 to appreciate &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;. Somebody in 1949 told me - that was the year the book came out - that &lt;strong&gt;Orwell had wanted to call it &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Forty-Eight&lt;/em&gt;. But they wouldn't let him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to describe &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;no more than a comic transcription of the London of the end of the Second World War&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. This analysis is supported by a great many comparisons drawn between various aspects of the London portrayed in Orwell's novel and similar things seen in London as it really was around 1948.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I refuse to draw a moral. The moral that Orwell draws from what he saw of the British working man is terrible and excessive. I insist on looking for comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And for an identification of 1984 with 1948?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, which is part of the comedy, comedy a bit grim at times, positively black. And a touch of pathos. One wants to weep over Winston Smith, so recognizable as an Englishman of the forties bred out of the working class - 'a smallish, frail figure ... his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended'. Inured to cold weather and privation, undersized through a tradition of poverty and bad feeding. He looks out on London 'with a sort of vague distaste. ... Were there always those vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up with baulks of timber, their windows patched with cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their crazy garden walls sagging in all directions?' The answer is - not always. &lt;strong&gt;This is the London of war-time or just after. It's certainly not a London of prophetic vision.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell wrote the novel in the year 1948, and intended it as a satirical commentary not only on life in the Soviet Union under Stalin (of which, it must be recalled, Orwell had no first-hand experience) but also on &lt;strong&gt;contemporary life in Britain&lt;/strong&gt;. With this in mind, it makes sense that he originally wanted to call the novel &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Forty-Eight&lt;/em&gt; (a statement which other critics have rejected, but even its falsehood wouldn't invalidate the larger point) and that in the end he chose &lt;strong&gt;a title which evoked the idea of the modern day&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;the modern day&quot; being 1948) but was still far enough ahead to be imaginable as a possible future rather than an alternative present. Thus, 1984.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;All quotes are from Anthony Burgess, &lt;em&gt;1985&lt;/em&gt;, available on Google Books &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4dB-zMYQJR0C&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; all emphasis is mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T02:17:56.090" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T02:17:56.090" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-13T21:41:39.333" Score="22" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friend of mine used to quote a poem that told the fictionalized story of Chaucer writing the first lines of the Prologue of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Whan that Aprill with his ... &quot;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he gets to the word for &quot;showers&quot; he paused and had to choose between the French version of the word and &quot;shoures&quot;, which is Anglo-Saxon. He chooses &quot;shoures&quot;, and the English language is launched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching all over for where this delightful poem comes from and I can't find it anywhere. Does it ring any bells with you? Can you end my search?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="553" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T13:17:14.950" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T16:18:10.703" Title="Looking for a poem about the (fictionalized) writing of The Canterbury Tales Prologue" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;&lt;metaliterature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1655" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-13T23:02:25.557" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T23:02:25.557" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T23:02:25.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1656" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-13T23:02:25.557" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Atlas Shrugged' (1957) written by Ayn Rand. Questions about this world should be tagged with [ayn-rand]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:36:43.930" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:36:43.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1486" CreationDate="2017-02-13T23:17:27.173" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think “behind the wind” is a literal translation of the Arabic phrase that means &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leeward&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;leeward&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. It isn't a quote of a specific person, Arabic navigator or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's kind of obvious from context, if you look at the geography: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_winds#/media/File:Map_prevailing_winds_on_earth.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prevailing winds&lt;/a&gt; in the Indian Ocean north of the equator are from east to west, so something that is to the east is leeward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#ar/en/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%87%20%D9%84%D9%84%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%AD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt; for the translation of &lt;em&gt;leeward&lt;/em&gt; into Arabic yields المواجه للريح, which it translates back word-for-word as “fronting / to the wind”. This corroborates my conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-13T23:25:26.820" LastActivityDate="2017-02-13T23:25:26.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="788" CreationDate="2017-02-13T23:55:27.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Admittedly, this advice is contrary to what most people say on the subject - Kevin Troy's answer has the standard advice covered very nicely - but I'll give my answer nonetheless. If it's not useful to you you'll be no worse off, but on the off chance it is, well, here you go:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My advice would be to start with &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;. Why? Because it's the one people talk about in hushed tones, the one people put off reading for fear they aren't up to the task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's just a book. It's a strange book, sure, but it's far from the impenetrable thing people make it out to be. It possibly seems that to people who take it too seriously, who think &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; in it must be a reference to something else, and every scene and character is part of some larger whole beyond their comprehension. Now, there are a lot of references to other things - sure - and deeper meanings to be found if you search for them - yeah, and some of it's pretty cool - but I also think Pynchon gets overanalysed. I suspect he's just having fun a lot of the time, and a lot of it isn't really &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to make sense on any kind of complex level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relax, just let it happen, accept you aren't going to be able to keep track of it all, and it's not so difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you've read &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;, I'd suggest &lt;em&gt;Vineland&lt;/em&gt; as your next stop. Why? Well because it's just so &lt;em&gt;not Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;. Where &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; is long, fast-paced, complex, and deals with characters lost in the chaos of the wider world, &lt;em&gt;Vineland&lt;/em&gt; is comparatively slow and gentle, and deals more intimately with individuals. Its characters feel more real, and the world they inhabit - though still strange - feels more like our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think once you've read these two, the order of your remaining reading won't matter too much. You'll have a good feel for the spectrum of emotions that Pynchon likes to take his readers through, and hopefully you'll have developed a taste for it, too. If so, pick one at random, or one you like the sound of, and read on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="541" LastEditorUserId="541" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T09:44:22.120" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T09:44:22.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T00:47:42.340" Score="4" ViewCount="1038" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been lively discussion about whether or not witches and wizards in the world of Harry Potter wear trousers under their robes (for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ohwitchplease/status/826658575296573441&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this tweet&lt;/a&gt;). I have not yet seen a definitive answer to this question online, though I have seen theories thrown around based on certain passages or statements by Rowling (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/AlanMattli/status/824931210518487040&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence in HP canon that wizards did/did not wear trousers under their robes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T01:43:56.130" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T12:42:37.143" Title="Do wizards in Harry Potter's world wear trousers under their robes?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1643" CreationDate="2017-02-14T00:55:07.340" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Charles Dickens in Context&lt;/em&gt;, by Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=j5c9GqZ_7BMC&amp;amp;pg=PA130&amp;amp;lpg=PA130&amp;amp;dq=charles%20dickens%20playwrights&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Emiw1IomV5&amp;amp;sig=YK5CmxQL_-HISRnqhBiRt9Nsdoo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwir26eVq47SAhXDG5QKHY06DQMQ6AEIrAEwFA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=charles%20dickens%20playwrights&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quoting from Google Books&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Survival] for both playwright and playhouse required the rapid&#xA;  production of new scripts. To keep up this frantic pace, dramatists&#xA;  cut corners, claiming as their own scripts they merely translated from&#xA;  a foreign language, closely mimicking successful plays written by&#xA;  other playwrights, or 'borrowing' the plots and characters of popular&#xA;  novels. It was this last practice that most incensed Dickens and put&#xA;  him into conflict with one of the country's most prolific playwrights,&#xA;  W. T. Moncrieff. When Dickens satirised Moncrieff in the form of&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;'s Mr Crummles, Moncrieff responded by dramatising &lt;em&gt;Nickleby&lt;/em&gt; and advertising the piece with a hostile note referencing Dickens' own failed theatrical ambitions and arguing that Dickens&#xA;  stole his characterisations from the theatre. Dickens denounced&#xA;  Moncrieff as little more than a thief ….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll need to see if Moncrieff actually stole one of Dickens's works &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;, but it seems probable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote in the question, though, does not seem to be directly about Mr Crummles, but is said to one of the guests at his farewell dinner (bold mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was upon the whole a very distinguished party, for independently of&#xA;  the lesser theatrical lights who clustered on this occasion round Mr.&#xA;  Snittle Timberry, there was a literary gentleman present who had&#xA;  dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as&#xA;  they had come out — &lt;strong&gt;some of them faster than they had come out&lt;/strong&gt; — and&#xA;  who &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a literary gentleman in consequence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, he had. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva228.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dramatic Adaptations of Dickens's Novels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Philip V. Allingham:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To the novelist's delight and irritation, the plays often appeared&#xA;  long before the novels were complete&quot; (Bolton 3), so that, for&#xA;  example, just twelve instalments into &lt;em&gt;The Pickwick Papers&lt;/em&gt; the most&#xA;  prolific of London's theatrical pirates, Edward Stirling, staged the&#xA;  burletta &lt;em&gt;Pickwick Papers; or, The Age in We Live&lt;/em&gt; at The City of London&#xA;  Theatre, Bishopsgate, on 27 March 1837. By the end of 1838, no less&#xA;  than 26 such adaptations had graced the boards of London's minor&#xA;  theatres; three stage adaptations — by William Leman Rede, T. W.&#xA;  Moncrieff, and Edward Stirling — appeared even before the novel had&#xA;  finished its serial run! &quot;Dickens's novels in general were exploited&#xA;  for their sensational, lachrymose, or farcical elements, which came to&#xA;  be magnified under the glare of the gaslight&quot; (Colby 142). The only&#xA;  way that a novelist such as Charles Dickens could protect himself&#xA;  against theatrical piracy was to acquire the right of stage&#xA;  representation by adapting his own work for the theatre. However, for&#xA;  Dickens, fully occupied with editing a weekly magazine as well as&#xA;  writing novels, a less time-consuming method of controlling stage&#xA;  adaptations of his works was to grant official approval to a dramatist&#xA;  and company who were prepared to work with him. &quot;Whenever this was&#xA;  done such plays were regarded as being the official versions. All the&#xA;  same, other versions were made and performed in other theatres&quot;&#xA;  (Morley 34).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the late 1830s and early 1840s, the number of adaptations of&#xA;  Dickens's novels on the early Victorian stage prompted critic F.&#xA;  Dubrez Fawcett in &lt;em&gt;Dickens the Dramatist&lt;/em&gt; (London: W. H. Allen, 1952) to&#xA;  term these early stage-versions &quot;The Boz Cascade&quot; and &quot;The Dickens&#xA;  Deluge.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Boz&lt;/em&gt; is one of Dickens' pseudonyms (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketches_by_Boz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sketches by Boz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T03:38:41.253" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T03:38:41.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1659" CreationDate="2017-02-14T01:50:01.013" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this is basically the same question as the one on Sci-Fi I will summarize the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/53815/in-the-hp-books-what-do-wizards-wear-under-their-robes&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; from @Valorum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, some wear underwear, some don't even go that far. Valorum gives more quotes (I encourage you to take a look at his answer), but I feel that these are the best examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Order of the Phoenix&lt;/em&gt;, here's an example with underwear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snape was hanging upside-down in the air, his robes falling over his head to reveal skinny, pallid legs and &lt;strong&gt;a pair of greying underpants&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Goblet of Fire&lt;/em&gt;, an example without underwear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry, Ron and Hermione joined it, right behind a pair of men who were&#xA;  having a heated argument. One of them was a very old wizard who was&#xA;  wearing a long flowery nightgown. The other was clearly a Ministry&#xA;  wizard; he was holding out a pair of pinstriped trousers and almost&#xA;  crying with exasperation. ‘Just put them on, Archie, there’s a good&#xA;  chap, you can’t walk around like that, the Muggle on the gate’s&#xA;  already getting suspicious –’ ‘I bought this in a Muggle shop,’ said&#xA;  the old wizard stubbornly. ‘Muggles wear them.’ ‘Muggle women wear&#xA;  them, Archie, not the men, they wear these,’ said the Ministry wizard,&#xA;  and he brandished the pinstriped trousers. ‘I’m not putting them on,’&#xA;  said old Archie in indignation. ‘&lt;strong&gt;I like a healthy breeze round my&#xA;  privates, thanks.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All credit to Valorum for this, he did the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T05:32:28.470" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1662" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T09:12:30.320" Score="6" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did Ibsen's writing in &amp;quot;A Doll's House&amp;quot; influence the James Joyce character Molly Bloom? Richard Ellmann in his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce_(biography)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Joyce&lt;/a&gt; mentions Joyce reading and getting influenced by Ibsen many times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He became more actively different from his parents and teachers. At the beginning he read Erckmann-Chatrian's nostalgic novels and at the end of his schooldays he read &lt;strong&gt;Ibsen's sardonic plays&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the principal new pressure upon him was the work of Ibsen, an- other genius who arose from a small, parochial people. Ibsen was then seventy years old, and his name was of course well known in England&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through Ibsen, largely, Joyce became convinced of the importance of drama; and, while he did not yet try playwriting,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, what other authoritative commentators, besides Richard Ellmann, provide illuminating insights into said influence and related themes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="567" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T09:54:28.397" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T09:54:28.397" Title="How did Ibsen's writing in &quot;A Doll's House&quot; influence the James Joyce character Molly Bloom?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14245" CreationDate="2017-02-14T14:04:44.370" Score="9" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Welsh poet R.S. Thomas was an ardent Welsh nationalist and advocate for independence. Although a native English speaker he learned and conversed in Welsh, although he never felt fluent enough to use it for his poetry. Yet in spite of his nationalist beliefs, his poems often painted bleak and highly critical pictures of Welsh people. Consider, from &amp;quot;On the Farm&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was Dai Puw. He was no good.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They put him in the fields to dock swedes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And took the knife from him, when he came home&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At late evening with a grin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like the slash of a knife on his face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every evening after the ploughing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And stare into the tangled fire garden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Opening his slow lips like a snail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or from &amp;quot;A Peasant&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are his days spent, his spittled mirth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rarer than the sun that cracks the cheeks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the gaunt sky perphaps once a week.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And then at night see him fixed in his chair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Motionless, except when he leans to gob in the fire.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is something frightening in the vacancy of his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or from &amp;quot;A Welsh Landscape&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An impotent people&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sick with inbreeding&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Worrying the carcase of an old song&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Thomas reconcile his nationalistic sentiments with these extremely dim views of the Welsh people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T13:50:29.393" Title="Why was Welsh nationalist poet RS Thomas so critical of the Welsh people?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;r-s-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1665" CreationDate="2017-02-14T14:32:45.827" Score="9" ViewCount="1131" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Moby Dick, Tashtego falls into the sinking head of a sperm whale from which the crew was extracting the spermaceti; he is saved by Queequeg who cuts the head and extracts Tashtego as if the head was giving birth to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rescue seems symbolic, but I cannot fully understand it, so I wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the meaning of the rescue of Tashtego?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="577" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T14:38:51.347" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:08:38.243" Title="What is the meaning of the rescue of Tashtego?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1664" CreationDate="2017-02-14T15:08:38.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The metaphor is wider than Ishmael allows in the book. Birth, at the time the novel was written, was a dangerous business. The passage in question makes clear that this birth is equally dangerous to the participants. Both Tashtego and Queequeg almost drown and the valuable head is lost in the depths of the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crew of the ship is all-male yet the metaphor of birth here is clearly feminine and it seems to fascinate the whalemen. This is not the only time that birth is used as a metaphor in Moby-Dick. A more horrific &quot;masculine&quot; birth is used several times to describe how the male imagination has &quot;birthed&quot; Moby-Dick itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;half-formed foetal suggestions of supernatural agencies, which eventually invested Moby Dick with new terrors unborrowed from anything that visibly appears&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ahab's desire to slay the whale is described in similar terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two conceptions of birth foreshadow the ending of the novel. First, the Pequod is sucked down into a womb-like vortex, entombed in the sea. This is the disastrous consequence of Ahab's warped, masculine &quot;birthing&quot; of his obsession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the feminine ship Rachel arrives, like a new mother, to rescue the survivors, including Ishmael.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also noteworthy that at all three harpooners on the ship are non-Christian &quot;savages&quot;. The rescue of Tashtego is not so much a birth as a &quot;rebirth&quot;, and as such mirrors a resurrection from the dead, a miracle performed only by Christ. This passage shows that Christians are not the only progenitors of such miracles. Instead, concern for our fellow man allows any of us to perform the miracle of rebirth in rescuing some poor unfortunate in distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parts of this answer reference the paper '&lt;em&gt;Hunting and Writing the Whale: Masculine Responses to the Maternal in Herman Melville&lt;/em&gt;' by Seth A. Hagen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:08:38.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T15:33:45.687" Score="7" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the best-selling 21st-century novels, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/5965469-the-story-behind-the-forty-rules-of-love&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, shows historical fiction employing the love of &lt;em&gt;Shams of Tabraiz&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Mevlana Rumi&lt;/em&gt;. Were those 40 rules by Shams or were they made by Elif too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="582" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-14T15:48:26.043" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T15:48:26.043" Title="Are 'The Forty Rules of Love' real?" Tags="&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T15:39:55.660" Score="14" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;O. V. Vijayan translated his Malayalam novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khasakkinte_Itihasam#English_translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ഖസാക്കിന്റെ ഇതിഹാസം&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Khasākkinte Ithihāsam&lt;/em&gt;) to English about three decades after it was originally published, with the title &lt;em&gt;The Legends of Khasak&lt;/em&gt;. The Wikipedia article, citing P. P. Ravindran as a source, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Khasakkinte Itihasam&lt;/em&gt; has been translated into ... English ... differing substantially from the original in its sensibility - most&#xA;  readers prefer to read it as an independent novel by Vijayan in&#xA;  English rather than seeing it as a translation. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The early Vijayan was marked by deep philosophical doubt and&#xA;  skepticism, but the later Vijayan upheld certitudes. &lt;em&gt;The Legends of&#xA;  Khasak&lt;/em&gt; was written by the Vijayan of certitudes, which makes it a&#xA;  very different novel in its sensibility, in spite of being a&#xA;  translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds me of the situation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/131/168&quot;&gt;Should Go Set A Watchman be read before To Kill A Mockingbird?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can read both languages fairly well, so discounting difficulty in understanding the language itself, which work should I read earlier? The original Malayalam novel, or the English &quot;translation&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To underscore the difference in the works, the titles themselves are different. The Malayalam word ഇതിഹാസം is singular, and its plural is ഇതിഹാസങ്ങൾ (Ithihāsangal). Thus, the Malayalam title would be literally &lt;em&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Legend&lt;/strong&gt; of Khasak&lt;/em&gt;, which can be interpreted differently from &lt;em&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Legends&lt;/strong&gt; of Khasak&lt;/em&gt;. The former could mean that &lt;em&gt;Khasak&lt;/em&gt; itself is of legend (like in &lt;em&gt;the legend of El Dorado&lt;/em&gt;), whereas the latter implies the legends belong to Khasak (like in &lt;em&gt;the legends of England&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T11:04:57.810" Title="Should I read the English translation of &quot;Khasākkinte Ithihāsam&quot; first, or the original?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:26:19.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elif Shafak (Elif Şafak in Turkish) is an award-winning Turkish author born in 1971. Her most famous books include &lt;em&gt;The Bastard of Istanbul&lt;/em&gt; (2007), &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt; (2010), and &lt;em&gt;İskender&lt;/em&gt; [&lt;em&gt;Honour&lt;/em&gt;] (2011). From her &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_%C5%9Eafak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Şafak blends Western and Eastern traditions of storytelling in stories of women, minorities, immigrants, subcultures, and youth. Her writing draws on diverse cultures and literary traditions, reflecting interests in history, philosophy, Sufism, oral culture, and cultural politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T12:54:32.810" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T12:54:32.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-14T17:26:19.970" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of Turkish author Elif Shafak (1971) or her life as a writer. Questions about her works originally published in Turkish should be tagged with [turkish-literature]." OwnerUserId="582" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:59:52.947" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:59:52.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-14T20:39:52.683" Score="19" ViewCount="9947" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell&quot;&gt;Eric Arthur Blair&lt;/a&gt;, author of such famous books as &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; among many others, used the name &lt;strong&gt;George Orwell&lt;/strong&gt; for his books. From the linked Wikipedia page (cited to Voorhees, &lt;em&gt;The paradox of George Orwell&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pen name &quot;George Orwell&quot; was inspired by the River Orwell in the English county of Suffolk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did he decide to name himself after that river?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-15T00:26:37.207" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T12:14:14.953" Title="Why did George Orwell name himself after the River Orwell?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;pseudonym&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2017-02-14T22:14:01.653" Score="24" Body="&lt;h1&gt;We don't know for sure, but he may have known the river.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blair originally submitted a list of four possible pseudonyms to his agent, Leonard Moore, telling Moore that he could make pick of the four&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P.S. Burton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kenneth Miles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;H. Lewis Allways&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George Orwell&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons Blair chose to use a pen name at all, one being that he thought that &amp;quot;Blair&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;too Scottish&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;. He wanted something English, and, from the research I've done, all of the above names are indeed English in origin (&amp;quot;Kenneth&amp;quot; is an Anglicization, but its connotations are &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; less Scottish than &amp;quot;Blair&amp;quot;'s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for &amp;quot;Orwell&amp;quot; even being on the list are a bit more complicated. Blair spent quite some time in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwold&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Southwold&lt;/a&gt; in his 20s and 30s, where his parents were living. It's a coastal town in Suffolk, with the nearest large towns (relative to tiny Southwold) being Lowestoft, Norwich, and Ipswich. Orwell grew familiar with the area, including the coastal regions to the north and south. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Orwell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Orwell&lt;/a&gt; is about 40 miles to the south, running from Ipswich to the coast, and it is possible that Orwell was familiar with it.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://library.brown.edu/exhibits/archive/orwell/leab.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; indicates that it may have been a stop during his journeys to London, which seems plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using &amp;quot;Orwell&amp;quot;, Blair was playing homage to the area that led to much of his early writing. There's also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell,_Cambridgeshire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a village of the same name&lt;/a&gt; in Cambridgeshire, about 60 miles from Southwold. There are, however, some questions. If he wanted the name to be after a Suffolk river, why not, for instance, use the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Blyth,_Suffolk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Blyth&lt;/a&gt;, which flows right through Southwold (perhaps the name's Scottish roots led to the same distaste as with &amp;quot;Blair&amp;quot;)? These questions probably will never be answered; there is no evidence that the River Orwell had any special significance to him over any other place in Suffolk.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do have to consider, though, that Blair did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; want to choose something that could be easily traced back to him or his family. Around the time of the publication of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Down and Out in Paris and London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, his first longer work (a memoir), he wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would prefer the book to be published pseudonymously. I have no reputation that is lost by doing this and if the book has any kind of success I can always use the same pseudonym again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that today, we have to look hard to see if there's any deeper connection between Blair and his name, it seems that for a while, he succeeded in distancing Eric Blair from George Orwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The text of the 1932 letter can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Kat.crgeorge.orwell.complete.works.epub&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In it, Blair lists the names and writes, &amp;quot;I would rather favour George Orwell&amp;quot;. (Thank you &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/35524263#35524263&quot;&gt;Gallifreyan&lt;/a&gt;!)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;quot;Too Scottish&amp;quot; has been quoted all over the Internet, but it's extremely difficult to find an original source for it. The best indication I can get is from a 1936 letter from Blair to Norah Myles, in which he writes, &amp;quot;The Blairs are by origin Lowland Scottish &amp;amp; dull&amp;quot;. That's the only thing I can find referring to his family's name's history and Scotland.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eSIhzKnNUf4C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Pseudonyms&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; states that the River Orwell was the river &amp;quot;on whose banks he had lived&amp;quot;, which seems improbable, given the 40 miles of separation. It is quite possible, though, that Blair spent time in Ipswich and on the river.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xYQyDAAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; notes that it is possible that Blair considered &amp;quot;Orwell&amp;quot; while walking along the banks of the river with his father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xYQyDAAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anonymous Speech: Literature, Law and Politics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=s7AwWlvSCCEC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Inkwell of Pen Names&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eSIhzKnNUf4C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary of Pseudonyms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T21:52:19.500" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="40" CreationDate="2017-02-14T23:12:33.873" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;@yaitloutou has a great answer, but there's three reasons they've miss out on that I'd like to include here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To convey a change in language in the original text&lt;/strong&gt;: possibly the most famous example of this is Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_tu,_Brute%3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Et tu, Brute?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;. Shakespeare's source for the historical incident, the Roman historian Suetonius, has Caesar switch from Latin to Greek to say &quot;καὶ σὺ, τέκνον;&quot; (&quot;You too, child?&quot;). In translating this scene to English, Shakespeare kept the language change, but translated the Greek into Latin so that the line would be understandable to his audience, but convey the sense of a man anguished in his last moments of life (or, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_tu,_Brute%3F#Interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in an alternate interpretation&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;you too [will die], Brutus&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Atmosphere&lt;/strong&gt;: Including language specific to a part of the world can make the fictional world feel richer. Your example of Isaac Bashevis Singer is a great one here, as he has been described as using Yiddish to conjure up the atmosphere in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shtetl#Literary_references&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the shtetlekh of Central and Eastern Europe&lt;/a&gt;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/96950/i-b-singer-the-last-demon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tablet in 2012&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most remarkable of all, however, was Singer’s ability to go on to producing fiction in a language of ghosts—stories dealing with a dead or dying world that were nonetheless living works of art. No wonder that as a Yiddish writer after 1945—the only one known to most American Jewish readers—Singer was regarded as, and called upon to be, a representative of the Old World, a medium channeling a perished Yiddish culture. After all, wasn’t his work itself filled with mediums, ghosts, and spirits, with dybbuks and demonic possession—all the paraphernalia of a vanished superstition? Where but in Singer’s pages was this lore kept alive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In translating Singer, translaters may keep some Yiddish words to keep a flavour of both Singer's original Yiddish writing and so indirectly to convey the culture Singer is writing about.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Macaronic languages are fun&lt;/strong&gt;, and often the only way to translate them is into other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaronic_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;macaronic languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-02-14T23:12:33.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1779" CreationDate="2017-02-15T00:56:51.303" Score="27" ViewCount="13174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Penelope is portrayed throughout the story to be virtuous when it comes to men, meaning that she holds out hope for her husband's safety 20 years after she saw him and had no other relationships in that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odysseus on the other hand has romantic relationships with 2 people over his journey. He even produced a son with Circe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the time when this was written (ancient Greece), would Odysseus have been considered unfaithful to his wife?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T13:21:13.510" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T13:15:55.267" Title="Was Odysseus considered unfaithful to his wife in the Odyssey?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2017-02-15T00:59:52.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source cited (&lt;em&gt;The Paradox of George Orwell&lt;/em&gt; by Richard Voorhees) gives a simple reason for the choice of this name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he was twenty-seven, he took as a pseudonym the name by which he&#xA;  is generally known, Orwell, from a river in Suffolk near which he once&#xA;  lived, and George as a typical English name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T00:59:52.557" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1682" CreationDate="2017-02-15T03:42:44.047" Score="46" ViewCount="10042" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Alan Moore's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Manhattan&quot;&gt;Doctor Manhattan&lt;/a&gt; is a superhero with godlike powers, including the ability to view his past, present, and future simultaneously. Manhattan believes that everything that happens and everything that will happen has been predetermined, and cannot be changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My memories of the comic show him to be almost passively compliant with what he's seen and what he's &quot;supposed to&quot; do. Earlier in the series, when he's building his city on Mars, he does question &quot;A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;, chapter IV), implying that he's uncertain about the predetermination of his own actions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I think that he later changes his mind, and completely believes that his actions are predetermined. This is supported by several later quotes throughout the story, like the ones below (also on Mars):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why does my perception of time distress you? [...] Everything is&#xA;  preordained. Even my responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;, chapter IX&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does seem to change his mind several times about his willingness to get involved in the affairs of humanity during that conversation, implying that he has (or believes himself to have) the freedom to choose, but that could simply be because he doesn't know everything all the time (either usually, or now because of the tachyon interference).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most people read Doctor Manhattan as a god, partly because of his powers and partly because of his detachment and separation from humanity. (There's also that whole creation of life thing going on there at the end.) However, I think it's possible that Manhattan is simply a confused human being with more knowledge and power than he really knows what to do with. I think he's really Jon Osterman underneath his blue skin, but I'm not sure if he thinks that anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Doctor Manhattan ever attempted to do anything differently from how he foresaw it? Has he tested his puppet strings? What makes him certain that he lacks free will?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doctor Manhattan seems to believe that all of his actions have been preordained. Is there any support for this, or its negation, in the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T06:41:53.217" Title="Does Dr. Manhattan have free will?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;alan-moore&gt;&lt;watchmen&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1825" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:25:22.990" Score="9" ViewCount="582" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeats was a keen student of Irish folklore and it is clear that the titular character in his poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/55687&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Song of Wandering Aengus&lt;/a&gt; is based on the pre-Christian Celtic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aengus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;god of love, youth and poetry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, little of what happens on the poem can be directly linked to surviving stories about the deeds of the god Aengus. Why, then did Yeats choose this figure and what other narrative or imagery from the poem can be linked to the mythical figure? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am particularly interested in whether there is any precedent to similes of the closing lines &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The silver apples of the moon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The golden apples of the sun.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since these seem to have been inspirational to other authors following on from Yeats including Ray Bradbury and Hope Mirrlees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:06:50.607" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:06:50.607" Title="How much of The Song of Wandering Aengus by Yeats is based on Irish folklore?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1676" CreationDate="2017-02-15T09:53:16.280" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer is probably &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following is a quote by Alan Moore about his novel &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I like that idea because when we talk about history we talk about the history of church of state and maybe a dozen families. What about&#xA;  the rest of us? Weren't we doing anything while all that was going on,&#xA;  or were we minor players in their drama? This is insisting that&#xA;  everybody has their own drama and mythology and story, and it is also&#xA;  insisting that &lt;strong&gt;if eternalism is a real thing that changes&#xA;  everything&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests to me that Alan Moore is at least &lt;em&gt;very interested&lt;/em&gt; in eternalism, and most likely believes in it. &lt;em&gt;(Note: I believe he has actually explicitly stated that he does, but since I can't find the relevant quotes, we'll go with &quot;probably&quot;.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, just because Alan Moore sees things this way, it doesn't mean his stories have to agree with him, but it does make it more likely. Now, consider the following quote from Dr. Manhattan in &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans&#xA;  insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible&#xA;  in every facet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty clear from this that (as you point out in your question) Dr. Manhattan doesn't believe he has free will. He sees a deterministic universe in which time is &quot;finished&quot; and all actions are predetermined. Ozymandias also doesn't appear to believe in free will, since he sets up events that are designed to have consequences &lt;em&gt;in the past&lt;/em&gt;. As far as I remember, everyone in the story (Ozymandias included) takes it for granted that Dr. Manhattan can predict the future accurately. The possibility of exercising free will and creating an alternative future is never even &lt;em&gt;considered&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since most (if not all) of the characters appear not to believe in free will, since absolutely nothing in the book appears to contradict this hypothesis (consider, there are some things Dr. Manhattan isn't able to know about the future, but none that he's &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt; about), and since the author of the book also appears to believe it, I'd say it's reasonable to say that none of the characters in Watchmen have free will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will necessarily include Dr. Manhattan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="541" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T06:40:05.063" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T06:40:05.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-02-15T10:34:42.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another series to consider is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_(series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dark Tower series&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main series reaches from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Gunslinger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gunslinger&lt;/a&gt; (1982) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_VII:_The_Dark_Tower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dark Tower&lt;/a&gt; (2004) for &lt;strong&gt;22 years&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower:_The_Wind_Through_the_Keyhole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wind Through the Keyhole&lt;/a&gt; (2012) extends the main series to &lt;strong&gt;30 years&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And if one counts the many other &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161116023558/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King_works_related_to_The_Dark_Tower_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;works of Stephen King which relate to the Dark Tower series&lt;/a&gt; for almost all of King's works happen in the same Universe it spans from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Salem%27s_Lot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salem's Lot&lt;/a&gt; (1975) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revival&lt;/a&gt; (2014) for &lt;strong&gt;39 years&lt;/strong&gt; and possible even more in the future&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="610" LastEditorUserId="610" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T21:32:14.747" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T21:32:14.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1676" CreationDate="2017-02-15T11:34:28.020" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer is &lt;strong&gt;no by his own design&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that he deliberately created a universe where all of his actions stay fixed, while other people have some free will. Note that my answer is based on &lt;em&gt;Before Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; comics, and very little on Alan Moore's words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But firstly, he does not see himself as Jon Osterman anymore. Remember the line from &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; #12 (emphasis respected):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It didn't kill &lt;strong&gt;Osterman&lt;/strong&gt;... Did you think it would kill &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or from &lt;em&gt;Dr. Manhattan&lt;/em&gt; #1 (emphasis respected):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DkRQn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DkRQn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Doctor Manhattan&amp;#39;s inner monologue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; I am not Jon, but Jon &lt;strong&gt;became&lt;/strong&gt; me. His perspective &lt;strong&gt;informed&lt;/strong&gt; me, his perspective-- &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; -- created me? Is that possible? What happened in that moment, that surge of energy that resulted in my birth? If I am a quantum &lt;strong&gt;effect&lt;/strong&gt;, what was the quantum &lt;strong&gt;cause?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Whatever it was, did it happen &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; the incident, or &lt;strong&gt;during&lt;/strong&gt; the incident? &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my main argument comes from &lt;em&gt;Before Watchmen: Doctor Manhattan&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;In this prequel, there existed multiple quantum realities, each of them being a reflection of different choices people made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all starts Dr. Manhattan going back in time to the point Jon Osterman was destroyed in the intrinsic field chamber. Manhattan expected to see his creation, but instead Osterman left the chamber unharmed. Apparently, Dr. Manhattan had somehow caused a disturbance in the timeline, causing the reality to splinter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Here and further, all images are from &lt;em&gt;Before Watchmen: Dr. Manhattan&lt;/em&gt; #3 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mx3ER.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mx3ER.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Doctor Manhattan&amp;#39;s inner monologue, holding the photograph of Jon and Janey&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; [Dr. Manhattan] The only way this could happen... The only way one quantum reality could splinter and fracture into an infinite number of possibilities with me at the center... Is if I somehow became the quantum observer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I didn't realize it because I had only followed the stream of my existence up to a certain point, never going back to a moment before the incident the field chamber.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Until I climbed the mountain high enough to see everything around me. &#xA;  At some point I &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; something, &lt;strong&gt;saw&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;touched&lt;/strong&gt; something that tore this quantum reality and created another. The effect then rippled back and forth along my timeline from the moment of my re-creation, creating new realities every time I made a decision.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But how? When did I--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [Janey's words from a flashback] &quot;Jon, I think I'd like to go home now, please.&quot; &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Manhattan had altered the reality during the first meeting of Crimebusters. When he had to be paired with Rorschach, he paired himself with Silk Spectre. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6dqQ0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6dqQ0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Doctor Manhattan&amp;#39;s internal monologue is shown. Captain Metropolis is holding pieces of paper with symbols of superheroes. The first symbol is Dr. Manhattan&amp;#39;s; second belongs to Rorschach. Rorschach&amp;#39;s symbols starts transforming into something else&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; [Dr. Manhattan]: What's in the box?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [Captain Metropolis]: Our first is Dr. Manhattan, whose presence here tonight honors all of us--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [DM]: It's all a matter of perspective.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [CM]: ... and the one he's partnered with tonight is--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [DM]: And perspectives can be changed... with the slightest nudge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [CM]: --is-- &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This choice had caused the timeline to fracture at multiple points, with Dr. Manhattan being at the centre - as he is the cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does th' main man do? He goes an fixes the points in time (TM) that would've otherwise lead to nuclear Armageddon. He fixes his own choices, so that &quot;others can still make theirs&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNq6d.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNq6d.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Doctor Manhattan looking at the photograph of Jon and Janey, then at the stars. His face shows sadness, monologue continues&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; [Jon's father, from flashback] &quot;... There's nothing broken so bad that you can't put it back together again with enough effort.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [Dr. Manhattan]: As I look at the random moment that brought Janey and me together, I know what I must do to fix the delicate clockwork mechanism I have broken.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Once I became the quantum observer, every time I made a choice it fractured reality, over and over. So the only way to reunite the timelines is by &lt;strong&gt;erasing&lt;/strong&gt; all those choices.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The irony is not lost on me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am the most powerful being in the known universe. I can do &lt;strong&gt;anything&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But for the world to be what it needs to be, what it &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; be, I must sacrifice my own choices, my own free will, so that &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; can have choices. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He summarises it all himself in this panel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MQlIB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MQlIB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Various scenes from Jon&amp;#39;s and Dr. Manhattan&amp;#39;s life. Scenes include Jon&amp;#39;s father smiling, Jon&amp;#39;s desctruction, Jon&amp;#39;s mother, Janey arguing with him, Dr. Manhattan having sex with Laurie, fighting in Vietnam, Comedian killing a Vietnamese woman; arranged around a picture of Dr. Manhattan&amp;#39;s angered face from the TV talk show&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Like my mother, I must give up all of my choices so that they can make of this reality what they wish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In this new, united timeline, whatever I have done in the future is done. The decisions are made, and cannot be changed. they are as irrevocable as the choices I made in the past.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because all those moments are the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; moment, &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt; moment, eternal and simultaneous.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So I must freeze that moment, that eternity, like fly frozen in amber.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am limitless.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I must &lt;strong&gt;become&lt;/strong&gt; limited... and thus let this one world, this one reality, survive intact.  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if we count &lt;em&gt;Before Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; continuity as canon, we have a pretty good explanation why Dr. Manhattan doesn't have free will: the universe where he doesn't have free will was the only universe where 1) he prevented nuclear war and 2) other people have free will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add an example from Alan Moore's comics, here's a panel from &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; #4, page 16:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PN5Cv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PN5Cv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dr. Manhattan and Janey at home. Dr. Manhattan is looking at a reproduction of Salvador Dali&amp;#39;s &amp;quot;Time&amp;quot; painting. Janey holds a newspaper with the news of attempt on President Kennedy&amp;#39;s life. Later, Wally arrives with a package.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Janey&lt;/strong&gt;: So, what you're saying is you &lt;strong&gt;knew&lt;/strong&gt; he'd get shot? Jon, I... I mean, if you're &lt;strong&gt;serious&lt;/strong&gt;, I mean, why didn't you do &lt;strong&gt;something&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Dr. Manhattan&lt;/strong&gt;: I can't prevent the future. To &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt;, it's already &lt;strong&gt;happening&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;: Jon, what are you saying? That you know the &lt;strong&gt;future&lt;/strong&gt;? About everything? About &lt;strong&gt;us&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;DM&lt;/strong&gt;: In 1959, I could hear you shouting, here, now, in 1963. Soon we make &lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt;... &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;: Just like &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt;? Like I'm a &lt;strong&gt;puppet&lt;/strong&gt;? Jon, you know how everything in this world fits together except &lt;strong&gt;people&lt;/strong&gt;. Your prediction's &lt;strong&gt;way off&lt;/strong&gt;, mister. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;DM&lt;/strong&gt;: No. We make love right after &lt;strong&gt;Wally&lt;/strong&gt; arrives with the &lt;strong&gt;earrings&lt;/strong&gt; I ordered for you... &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;: Shut &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;! You're messing up my &lt;strong&gt;mind&lt;/strong&gt;, Jon! Sometimes I think you're messing &lt;strong&gt;everything&lt;/strong&gt; up!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I mean, all this &lt;strong&gt;new technology&lt;/strong&gt;, all because of &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;! Things are happening too &lt;strong&gt;fast&lt;/strong&gt;. Things shouldn't... Was that the doorbell? &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Wally&lt;/strong&gt;: Janey? The mailman delivered this to me by mistake. Sorry I didn't drop it by &lt;strong&gt;earlier&lt;/strong&gt;. Say hi to Jon for me. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Janey&lt;/strong&gt;: Uh... Uh, &lt;strong&gt;sure&lt;/strong&gt;. Thanks, Wally. &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As further reading, I suggest &lt;em&gt;A Timely Encounter: Dr. Manhattan and Henri Bergson&lt;/em&gt; by Christopher M. Drohan, &lt;em&gt;Free Will and Foreknowledge: Does Jon Really Know What Laurie Will Do Next, and Can She Do Otherwise?&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur Ward, and &lt;em&gt;I'm just a Puppet Who Can See the Strings: Dr. Manhattan as a Stoic Sage&lt;/em&gt; by Andrew Terjesen, all collected in &lt;em&gt;Watchmen and Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;, edited by William Irwin and Mark D. White.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T12:03:48.470" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T12:03:48.470" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1684" CreationDate="2017-02-15T14:40:35.830" Score="6" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googling the poem, and utilizing Wikipedia, I could not find the answer to my question. The book I own (&quot;101 Great American Poems&quot;) which contains the poem also does not give the year of its creation - it gives the birth and death years of the featured poets, but not the publication year of the specific poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know? Or better yet (because I have this question about many poems), how can I find out when a particular poem was written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T01:13:03.320" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T01:13:03.320" Title="When did Robert Frost write &quot;Two Tramps in Mud Time&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1683" CreationDate="2017-02-15T14:58:39.987" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poems_by_Robert_Fros&quot;&gt;List of poems by Robert Frost&lt;/a&gt; includes it in a collection published in 1937. &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/book/37431#76-81&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance&lt;/em&gt; by George Monteiro&lt;/a&gt; claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Two Tramps in Mud Time&quot; was first published in 1934. At the time Frost&#xA;  remarked that he considered the poem to be &quot;against having hobbies.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, presumably it was written in (or before) 1934.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T14:58:39.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-15T17:01:37.463" Score="28" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read &lt;em&gt;Things Fall Apart&lt;/em&gt; by Chinua Achebe, and found its detailed portrayal of historical Igbo (aka Ibo) culture very interesting. My understanding is that it's a reasonably close approximation of actual Igbo culture, but does mix in elements of other similar cultures plus a little artistic license (presumably when it was written in 1958, some of the relevant cultural practices still active in the 1800s when the novel is set would have died out and would have been hard to research). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Fall_Apart#Background&quot;&gt;Wikipedia gives this brief summary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The culture depicted, that of the Igbo people, is similar to that of Achebe's birthplace of Ogidi, where Igbo-speaking people lived together in groups of independent villages ruled by titled elders. The customs described in the novel mirror those of the actual Onitsha people, who lived near Ogidi, and with whom Achebe was familiar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to know if possible which specific practices are true of the historical context and which, if any, are known to be not true of it - for example, which elements were true of Onitsha people but not Igbo, or true of the 1950s but not the 1890s, or which if any were invented for the story. Particularly around the organisation of society, things like the roles of the masked elders who act as spirits (which is similar but different to many current traditions across West Africa). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at a few sources, but I'm having trouble picking any actual facts out of the various literary criticism essays and reviews on the topic, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.articlemyriad.com/history-narrative-cultural-representation-things-fall-apart/1/&quot;&gt;this rambling essay&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/t/things-fall-apart/about-things-fall-apart&quot;&gt;Cliffs notes&lt;/a&gt; talk around the question of historical accuracy but don't seem to give any actual facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="633" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T11:46:19.920" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T04:03:01.967" Title="How did real historical Igbo society differ from its portrayal in Things Fall Apart?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;things-fall-apart&gt;&lt;chinua-achebe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="279" CreationDate="2017-02-15T18:14:12.103" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenimore_Cooper&amp;#39;s_Literary_Offenses#Reception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;It appears&lt;/a&gt; that most later critics think that Twain's criticism was unfair, and possibly intended as humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John McWilliams writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hilarious though Twain's essay is, it is valid only within its own&#xA;  narrow and sometimes misapplied criteria.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other sources cited by Wikipedia appear to claim that the essay was not intended as a criticism at all, but as humor, because Twain's criticisms are not realistic. In this essay, Twain is &quot;Impos[ing] the standards of Realism on Romance,&quot; which is humorously incongruous.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/HNS/Indians/critic.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses (Introduction)&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Twain's Indians&lt;/em&gt;. University of Virginia.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Andriano, Joeseph. &lt;em&gt;The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain&lt;/em&gt; p. 287 (1993)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-15T18:14:12.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1689" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14270" CreationDate="2017-02-16T03:34:21.680" Score="11" ViewCount="2154" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act IV, Scene IV of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, Perdita is &quot;mistress o' the feast&quot;, playing hostess at the sheep-shearing feast, when King Polixenes and Camillo arrive in disguise. Perdita gives them both flowers, accompanied by the following short speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For you there's rosemary and rue; these keep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seeming and savour all the winter long:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grace and remembrance be to you both,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And welcome to our shearing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it doesn't end there. She and Polixenes, along with Florizel and Camillo, talk at &lt;em&gt;length&lt;/em&gt; about flowers for the next 60-odd lines. (I won't quote all those lines here, since the full text of the play is freely available and easy to find online, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I saw &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; performed in the theatre, this conversation was actually cut out, as were some later sections of the sheep-shearing feast in this very long scene. But I remember hearing that the conversation about flowers had some special significance and symbolism relating to the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there more to this conversation than just idle chat about flowers?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, what is the hidden meaning and/or symbolism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T21:08:45.720" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T12:19:58.153" Title="What's the symbolism of the flowers in The Winter's Tale?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-16T05:57:18.623" Score="8" ViewCount="3578" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, the real 'evil' in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; was Roger. From the beginning the story shows how he has 'revelations' about how there is no one to stop him bullying and hurting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack, for me, simply goes mad, and the apparent lack of punishment suggests this. Fear, hunger and pride drive Jack to savagery, a way to forget all the bad things (the beast) and to have the power his pride needs. Jack's new way of life allows Roger to unleash the 'badness' in him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my interpretation correct? Or did Golding mean for Roger and Jack to be equally 'bad' and Roger simply the more physical one of the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T03:42:21.010" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T17:24:10.223" Title="Is Jack (in Lord of the Flies) actually 'bad'?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-16T06:02:08.273" Score="10" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, the boys' rescuer, the Naval Officer, does not comprehend what is really happening, terming it &quot;all fun and games&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we assume that the savages, especially Jack and Roger, go totally unpunished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph is there to speak against them, but he is practically the only one (littleuns don't really count) and he participated in the killing of Simon. This means that telling the Adults is incriminating himself as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So will the 'savages' grow up secretly knowing that savagery goes unpunished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T07:08:41.873" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T21:43:16.513" Title="Can we assume the 'Savages' go unpunished?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1693" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-16T07:45:45.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt; is a novel written by Elif Shafak in 2010. The historical-fiction-based novel revolves around another novel written by a newly reverted Muslim who writes this novel which is given to Ella, an American wife to be reviewed, who falls in love with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="582" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:37:36.603" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:37:36.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1694" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-16T07:45:45.243" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Elif Şafak's novel The Forty Rules of Love. Use this tag with the [elif-shafak] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:37:45.790" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:37:45.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1699" CreationDate="2017-02-16T10:31:43.890" Score="1" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am asking this question in response to the response to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1687/do-the-names-in-to-kill-a-mockingbird-have-significance&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, which was more broadly asking about the significance of the names in &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;. However, it was closed as too broad. As I stated there I have not done a significant amount of research because I am not yet finished with the book. &lt;strong&gt;Is there significance behind the name &quot;Scout&quot; from &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;? If so, what is the significance of &quot;Scout&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T20:06:22.993" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T20:06:22.993" Title="Is there significance behind the name &quot;Scout&quot; from To Kill A Mockingbird?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-16T10:59:58.917" Score="20" ViewCount="613" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a 1977 interview with &lt;em&gt;The Lion and the Unicorn&lt;/em&gt;, Arnold Lobel said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's straightforward to assume that Lobel's famous same-sex friends &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frog and Toad&lt;/a&gt; drew, in a very general sense, from his experiences with emotional intimacy between men. But &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/frog-and-toad-an-amphibious-celebration-of-same-sex-love&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adrianne Lobel and &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are happy to go much further and imply that Frog and Toad are gay-coded characters, even identifying the early stories as the beginning of her father's coming out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a strong case to be made for or against the claim that the famous amphibious friends are gay coded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T23:44:00.993" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T22:09:40.450" Title="Are Frog and Toad more than just friends?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1697" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-16T14:37:35.960" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Watchmen are a group of costumed crime fighters first published in 1986 by DC Comics, written by &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/alan-moore&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;alan-moore&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;alan-moore&lt;/a&gt; and illustrated by &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/dave-gibbons&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;dave-gibbons&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;dave-gibbons&lt;/a&gt;, and later made into a 2009 live action film. Dark and gritty, the storyline takes place in an alternative history where the Watchmen dramatically affect their world's events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="223" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T20:14:57.180" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T20:14:57.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1698" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-16T14:37:35.960" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for the graphic novel, or for questions about comparing it to its film adaptation. Use with the [comics] and [alan-moore] tags (and [dave-gibbons], where appropriate)." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:53:13.880" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:53:13.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1695" CreationDate="2017-02-16T15:27:59.380" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Scout is her nickname, it is less symbolic than descriptive&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I could not find any actual words from the author/book. There is no &quot;official&quot; word of why, so I sought out the definition of a scout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a quick search for the google definition of &quot;scout&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a soldier or other person sent out ahead of a main force &lt;strong&gt;so as to gather information&lt;/strong&gt; about the enemy's position, strength, or movements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bolded the part about gathering information because that is what the book is about. It follows scout as she tries to learn about the world around her. My guess is that the curious nature of Scout inspired Harper Lee to give her that name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T21:52:17.557" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T21:52:17.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1689" CreationDate="2017-02-16T17:21:39.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important element is to introduce Polixines' thoughts on, uh, selective breeding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You see, sweet maid, we marry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A gentler scion to the wildest stock,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make conceive a bark of baser kind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By bud of nobler race:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a not-so-subtle commentary on the engagement of Perdita and Florizel: she is the wilder stock, though he can also see her latent nobility. She refuses that kind of breeding, through the metaphor of the gillyvor (carnation). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest is a commentary on age and time, &quot;a sad tale best fit for winter&quot;. It starts with rosemary and rue, both familiar from Ophelia's own flower speech: rosemary for remembrance, and rue as a homonym for regret. This is a moment where the last kings are passing into age, while Perdita and Florizel are the bloom of youth. Seasonal tropes recur throughout the play, a meditation on the the cycle of growing up, having children, and growing old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T17:21:39.300" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1702" CreationDate="2017-02-16T19:36:19.727" Score="27" ViewCount="3121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know about the big stripey cat, but what is &quot;a tiger&quot; in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...finishing up with cheers and a tiger for &quot;Hadleyburg purity and our eighteen immortal representatives of it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &quot;The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg&quot; by Mark Twain)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen it in other of his writings, and those by other people. Apparently it is a particular gesture, but what, exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-16T23:17:55.883" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T21:50:46.897" Title="What does Mark Twain mean by &quot;cheers and a tiger&quot;?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1701" CreationDate="2017-02-16T19:57:08.390" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view?docId=VAB7074&amp;amp;brand=vwwp&amp;amp;field1=text&amp;amp;text1=tiger&amp;amp;submit=Search&amp;amp;hit.rank=1#1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hawaiian Archipelago (1831–1904)&lt;/a&gt;. Essentially three cheers followed by a loud growl from the crowd (the &amp;quot;tiger&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the king's appearance, the cheering was tremendous,—regular British&#xA;cheering, well led, succeeded by that which is not British, “three&#xA;cheers and a  tiger ,” but it was “Hi, hi, hi, hullah!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another description &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/three-cheers-and-a-tiger.1186094/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mentioned here&lt;/a&gt; from an article called The Artilleryman's Glossary, apparently dating from the 1870s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THREE CHEERS AND A TIGER - when &amp;quot;Three cheers and a tiger&amp;quot; was called&#xA;for, there is division as to what that represented. There is no&#xA;apparent dispute that the first portion - the &amp;quot;Three cheers&amp;quot; -&#xA;represented three &amp;quot;Hurrahs!&amp;quot;. The &amp;quot;tiger&amp;quot; portion of that is argued as&#xA;either a growl from the crowd, slowly rising in volume and pitch until&#xA;it became a roar of approbation; while others contend that it the&#xA;addition of the chant &amp;quot;Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!&amp;quot; at the end of the third&#xA;&amp;quot;Hurrah!&amp;quot;, the series of &amp;quot;Hi!&amp;quot;'s also rising in both volume and pitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidently the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.princeton.edu/princetoniana/traditions/current/cheers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Princeton University cheer&lt;/a&gt; used to include a &amp;quot;tiger&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Multiple cheers evolved throughout the latter half of the 19th century, including &amp;quot;The Tiger,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Rocket,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The Princeton Cheer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Tiger and Rocket,&amp;quot; which morphed and intertwined over time, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rah! Rah! Rah! S-s-s-t! Boom! A-h-h-h!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Tiger! S-s-s-t! Boom! A-h-h-h!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hooray, hooray, hooray! Tiger siss-boom-ah, Princeton!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we also have an example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3251/3251-h/3251-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;within the story itself&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EVERYBODY.&lt;/strong&gt; (Except Stephenson, who bows with hand on heart) &lt;em&gt;Hip—hip—hip: hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;GR.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Der Tiger—ah-h-h!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-16T22:45:28.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1707" CreationDate="2017-02-17T02:56:57.040" Score="12" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Terry Pratchett, a sailing ship becomes airborne from the force of a storm, and is pushed inland quite a distance, before becoming lodged in trees.  Is this possible? If so, are there records of it happening to other sailing ships, that Terry Pratchett could have possibly used as inspiration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T08:54:12.743" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T17:37:12.740" Title="Is this fictional event of a ship becoming airborne because of a storm based on a real event?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1690" CreationDate="2017-02-17T03:26:09.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think you can classify these characters into bad or good. They were driven into a scenario in which their natural instincts were taken into play rather than their morality or ethics. Every character developed purely based on circumstances. They were stuck on an island with no one to guide them. Their only aim was to survive. So here &quot;good&quot; and &quot;bad&quot; is relative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="670" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T03:26:09.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1704" CreationDate="2017-02-17T08:57:43.293" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many instances of boats, some of them quite large, being carried inland by a tsunami.  For example...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RaGN8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RaGN8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Boat on building&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...which is from the Japanese tsunami of 2011.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite likely that Terry Pratchett took events of this nature as inspiration for the book.  Although, wind alone isn't going to lift a boat any distance, the story doesn't have to be scientifically accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-02-17T09:03:16.167" LastActivityDate="2017-02-17T09:03:16.167" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T10:42:08.673" Score="15" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Southern authors of Harper Lee's time period wrote very autobiographical works. This led me to wonder how much Harper Lee's personal life was reflected in the narrative of &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;. After some research, I was not able to find much. However, I found some information to suggest that she had lived near the location of an event like the one written about in &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;; her father was a lawyer, like Atticus; she was a tomboy, like Scout; and she had a neighbor down the street who left things in trees, similar to what Boo Radley does in the book. I have not found sources that go into a greater analysis of the similarities. This leads me to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did Lee's personal experience affect the narrative of &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2018-10-01T14:07:20.253" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T15:02:25.533" Title="How did Lee's personal experience affect the narrative of To Kill A Mockingbird?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-17T15:38:15.810" Score="7" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am studying Samuel Barber's art song &quot;Nuvoletta&quot;, whose text is adapted from James Joyce's &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;. I have not studied &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;. The music is very beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, Nuvoletta is likened to wind, dew, and cloud, and she disappeared in the end of the excerpt. What does the event suggest and signify? What is the background of Nuvoletta (whom I suppose is a character in the novel) that makes such metaphor appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRFiUowGRtc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ms Bird sings Nuvoletta&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.james-joyce-music.com/songb_18_lyrics.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barber's adaptation of lyrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T14:48:49.587" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T14:07:40.760" Title="What does Nuvoletta's disappearance signify in Finnegans Wake?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1715" CreationDate="2017-02-18T01:28:56.957" Score="7" ViewCount="2257" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently surprised to discover that the story of Rip Van Winkle is credited to the US author Washington Irving, who published it in 1819. I'd always vaguely imagined it to be a Brothers Grimm story or an old (probably European) folk tale. It certainly has the feel of such stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it, in fact, based on one? Or did Washington Irving come up with the story out of whole cloth, inspired merely by the idea and atmosphere of traditional folk tales in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was &quot;Rip Van Winkle&quot; inspired by a particular traditional folk tale or older story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T15:05:32.760" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T15:05:32.760" Title="What was &quot;Rip Van Winkle&quot; based on?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1710" CreationDate="2017-02-18T04:08:13.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, certainly, but we don't know exactly which one(s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page for the story lists many possible &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle#Literary_forerunners&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary forerunners&lt;/a&gt; from both European and Native American folk and fairy tale traditions -- so many that it's difficult to say whether Irving was inspired by one in particular or some larger subset of the candidates.  He was very erudite and had access to multiple literary traditions -- high probability predecessors for &quot;Rip van Winkle&quot; include tales of the Seneca, the Orkneys (where his father was from), and the early medieval Levant  (which Irving had studied and written about).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irving's take on the trope was unique in that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No one had told the story in the modern tale/short story format before&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The external changes in Rip's world relate to his internal character in a way that's more sophisticated than the predecessors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irving has a sense of irony that is not present in folk tales&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T04:08:13.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1667" CreationDate="2017-02-18T10:52:24.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Read the Malayalam original first. Whatever your aim in reading the English translation, you will achieve it more readily by having the knowledge of the original in mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the quote you have provided from P P Ravindran says, the two works are far enough in Vijayan's career as to belong to completely different stages in the development of his sensibility. So if you are interested in understanding how Vijayan's outlook and craft changed over the years, then it makes sense to start with the earlier version and move to the later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If on the other hand you are interested in seeing how Vijayan adapts the same story to different audiences (Malayali vs. global, regional vs. cosmopolitan, insider vs. outsider, or however you want to frame the difference), again it makes sense to start with the original and then go through the translation with an eye out for the changes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you are interested only in seeing how &lt;em&gt;The Legends of Khasak&lt;/em&gt; fits within the tradition of Indian novels in English, knowing what the original is like will deepen your understanding of how English writing in India works when compared to the vernacular traditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Malayalam version can augment your understanding of the English in all these ways;  broadly similar arguments can be made for any other goals you have in mind for reading the English version. The converse is not true. The only way that the English version will help your understanding of the Malayalam one is if it lowers some language barrier. But you've already indicated that you are equally competent in both languages, so that's not an issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I said &lt;em&gt;understanding&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;appreciation&lt;/em&gt;. It is certainly true that juxtaposing the two versions will lead to an enhanced appreciation of both; for this reason (and many unrelated ones) your fluency in both languages is enviable. But reading the English one first won't help you trace Vijayan's development, or see how a different audience requires changes, or judge how Indian novels in English fit into the entirety of the literary traditions of the subcontinent, etc. And it would be awkward to get those insights retrospectively, by reverse-engineering them as it were while reading the Malayalam original afterwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Malayalam version had been merely an early draft that didn't stand on its own and was interesting only insofar as it was the origin of a more complete and successful English novel, then there would be no point reading it first; its value would depend solely on the later work. But given that it has its own identity and is practically a different novel altogether, reading the two texts in chronological order makes sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T11:04:57.810" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T11:04:57.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1319" CreationDate="2017-02-18T13:09:59.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't comment on the illustrations, but on examining the text, it seems clear that the author intended the animals to be very human indeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Toad shows the other animals round is canary-coloured cart early in the book, several things are mentioned that would be quite ridiculous if Toad and his companions were to be imagined as animal-like (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meantime Toad packed the lockers still tighter with necessaries, and&#xA;hung nosebags, &lt;strong&gt;nets of onions&lt;/strong&gt;, bundles of hay, and baskets from the&#xA;bottom of the cart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little sleeping bunks--ablittle table that folded up against the&#xA;wall--a cooking-stove, lockers, bookshelves, &lt;strong&gt;a bird-cage with a bird&#xA;in it&lt;/strong&gt;; and pots, pans, jugs and kettles of every size and variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These objects would vastly outsize a toad or mole if they were to be imagined as animal-like or animal-sized. Not to mention to be of little use to them. So Grahame wants the reader to imagine beings that are basically human in aspect, but with the physical features of animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my copy there is a drawing which shows the illustrator took this description quite literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aBsxI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Illustration: Mole, Toad and Ratty&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, during Toad's encounter with the Washerwoman, she doesn't at first even notice that he's a toad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woman moved nearer to him and peered under his bonnet keenly and&#xA;closely. 'Why, so you are!' she cried. 'Well, I never! A horrid,&#xA;nasty, crawly Toad! And in my nice clean barge, too! Now that is a&#xA;thing that I will NOT have.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even disguised by a bonnet, we can't possibly imagine that someone would fail to notice if the person they were talking to were a toad, unless it was a very, very human-like toad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole of Toad's escapade with the car also lends weight to the perception that he is extremely human in aspect. He can drive an ordinary car. He can be arrested and sentenced and sent to jail without any of the humans he encounters batting an eyelid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the book is a fantasy and Grahame emphasizes and de-emphasizes the animalistic qualities of his characters as it suits the narrative. But it seems there can be little doubt that when it suited him for them to appear human, the animals are supposed to be extremely close to an actual human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE: I noticed that the OP's quote isn't the first time that Toad is mentioned as having hair in the book. When he wakes up after his night the wood following his escape:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He shook himself and combed the dry leaves out of his hair with his&#xA;fingers; and, his toilet complete, marched forth into the comfortable&#xA;morning sun, cold but confident, hungry but hopeful, all nervous&#xA;terrors of yesterday dispelled by rest and sleep and frank and&#xA;heartening sunshine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And right at the end of my copy, I found an illustration which does appear to show the Toad with hair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9pgm1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Illustration: Toad&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:12:45.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1710" CreationDate="2017-02-18T14:27:26.890" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reasonably certain that Irving's major inspiration for &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle&lt;/em&gt; was the German folktale &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Klaus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (text &lt;a href=&quot;http://hs.humboldtunified.com/TLC//08English_12_S2/12%20-%20S2%20-%20%20Peter%20Klaus%20the%20Goatherd.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Almost all the analyses I've read give it precedence over other works (&lt;em&gt;Karl Katz&lt;/em&gt;, for instance is a similar, though less-well-documented story). There are many similarities that quickly indicate some connection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main character disappears for twenty years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah, poor man, Rip Van Winkle was his name, but it's twenty years since he went away from home with his gun&quot; - &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is now twenty years since his goats returned without him&quot; - &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rip/Peter witnesses a supernatural game of bowling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a level spot in the centre was a company of odd-looking personages playing at nine-pins. - &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here were twelve knights, who, without so much as uttering a syllable, were very gravely playing at nine-pins - &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Upon his return, he asks about whether his old friends are still around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Rip bethought himself a moment, and inquired, “Where’s Nicholas Vedder?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt; “Where’s Brom Dutcher?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Where’s Van Bummel, the schoolmaster?” - &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . . to get rid of his questioners he mentioned the first name that occurred to him, “Kurt Steffen?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Velten Meier?” - &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more specifically, it is mentioned that Vedder and Steffen are both &quot;in the churchyard&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all besides the fact that both stories follow the same pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Man lives in a small town (&quot;a small village&quot;/&quot;the peaceful village of Sittendorf&quot;) by the mountains (&quot;the Kaatskill mountains&quot;/&quot;the Kyffhaeusen mountains&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Man walks in the mountains and follows someone (&quot;a short square-built old fellow&quot;/&quot;a boy&quot;) to witness men playing nine-pins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Man drinks wine and falls asleep for decades.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Man wakes up and returns to his town. He eventually meets his daughter (Judith/Maria).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=DHIMAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This collection&lt;/a&gt; of folk-tales (&lt;em&gt;The German Novelists&lt;/em&gt;) has a slightly different text, but all of the above connections are the same (although &quot;Velten Meier&quot; is &quot;Valentine Meier&quot;, and the boy is a groom tending wild horses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if all of the above were not the case - which they are - there is an even more compelling reason to indicate that &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt; is the main source of inspiration for &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle&lt;/em&gt;. Irving ends his tale with a humorous note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The foregoing Tale, one would suspect, had been suggested to Mr. Knickerbocker by a little German superstition about the Emperor Frederick der Rothbart, and the Kyffhäuser mountain: the subjoined note, however, which he had appended to the tale, shows that it is an absolute fact, narrated with his usual fidelity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The German Novelists&lt;/em&gt; notes that &quot;similar tales of enchantment&quot; surround the long-dead Emperor Barbarosa (the same person as Frederick der Rothbart), who holds court under the Hartz mountains. I'm reasonably certain that Irving's addendum is a nod to these stories, and, by extension, to &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A05E3A75DED2FCE1FA7A453596E7948B/S001738351100026Xa.pdf/div-class-title-rip-van-winkleandapos-s-span-class-italic-odyssey-span-div.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staley's &lt;em&gt;Rip van Winkle's Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Irving himself admitted that he drew on the tale of Peter Klaus in creating Rip Van Winkle&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt; In W. Irving, &lt;em&gt;Bracebridge Hall&lt;/em&gt;, ed. H. F. Smith (Boston, MA, 1977), 247, in a sketch titled ‘The Historian’, Irving answers the charges of ‘plagiarism’ and asserts that he ‘had considered popular traditions of the kind as fair foundations for authors of fiction to build upon’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have the text and so cannot verify this myself, but it seems that if Irving explicitly acknowledged that &lt;em&gt;Peter Klaus&lt;/em&gt; was the inspiration, it most likely was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=f9m7WP6-eF0C&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Irving admitted whenever asked (and even inserted as a postscript in the 1848 edition), he drew upon a popular German folk tale, &quot;Peter Klaus&quot;, for the central theme of his story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; just mean the postscript I cited above, but I'll try to find a text of the edition. This isn't just word-of-author evidence; it's accompanied by strong textual parallels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T14:34:24.513" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T14:34:24.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1718" CreationDate="2017-02-18T17:00:13.950" Score="18" ViewCount="2933" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Ricky Tarr is recounting his story to George Smiley, he speculates that Boris -- a Russian spy working undercover as a trade delegate -- was &quot;waiting for a connect, working a letterbox, maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pass from a mug like me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This language appears in both the novel and the recent movie version. Do these phrases refer to cut-and-dried spying activities?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best I can come up with, based on inference and previous rodeos, is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;waiting for a connect&quot; means hanging out and waiting for a confederate to make contact via established protocol&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;working a letterbox&quot; might mean sending or receiving QSL cards in coordination with a numbers station&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;trailing one's coat and looking for a pass&quot; might mean deliberately dropping hints that one is a spy, in the hopes of drawing out enemy spies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I've got. If anyone knows better, I'd love to find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="686" OwnerDisplayName="Tom" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-18T18:11:20.220" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:41:30.660" Title="What do these espionage tradecraft phrases from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;tinker-tailor-soldier-spy&gt;&lt;john-le-carre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1717" CreationDate="2017-02-18T17:19:59.217" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;All three phrases show up on page 40 of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in a single sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He was waiting for a connect, working a letterbox maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pass from a mug like me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire paragraph is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once more it was Smiley's turn to receive the heat of Tarr's charm: &quot;So what's it all about, Mr. Smiley? See what I mean? It's little things I'm noticing,&quot; he confided, still to Smiley. &quot;Just take the way he sat. Believe me, sir, if we'd been in that place ourselves we couldn't have sat better than Boris. He had the pick of the exits and the stairway; he had a fine view of the main entrance and the action; he was right handed and he was covered by a left-hand wall. Boris was a professional, Mr. Smiley; there was no doubt of it whatsoever. &lt;em&gt;He was waiting for a connect, working a letterbox maybe, or trailing his coat and looking for a pass from a mug like me.&lt;/em&gt; Well, now listen: it's one thing to burn a small-time trade delegate. It's quite a different ball game to swing your legs at a Centre trained hood, right Mr. Guilliam?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;waiting for a connect&lt;/strong&gt; - Merely waiting to meet somebody. A connect is a person's handler or contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source is the novel itself. The term &quot;connect&quot; shows up in several places in the story. An example from the same book: &quot;&lt;em&gt;You want to know who his connect is out there - this magic guy in North Germany with a crock of gold that's going to make us millionaires overnight?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;working a letterbox&lt;/strong&gt; - Watching a drop off point for an informant. A place where somebody places a &quot;letter&quot; for another to pick up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term, &quot;letterbox&quot; is used at multiple locations in the story (and other stories) as a term for where informants drop off materials for their handlers. For example, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Ever seen that bamboo scaffolding they use? Fantastic. Twenty stories high and the coolies swarm all over it with slabs of precast concrete. A bit of discard piping,&quot; he said, &quot;handy at shoulder height. It seemed most likely if Irina was in a hurry, that the piping was the letterbox she would use.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The movie, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_of_Spies_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bridge of Spies&lt;/a&gt;, shows a letterbox in the scene where the Russian spy hides a fake nickel under the park bench. The park bench is the &quot;letterbox&quot;, a place to put &quot;mail&quot; for pick up later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;trailing one's coat&lt;/strong&gt; - An officer of one side acting as if he is a likely defector - drinking, complaining about his job, in the hope of attracting a recruitment offer from an enemy intelligence officer, with the object of recruiting the enemy as a double agent instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source for &quot;trailing one's coat&quot; comes from the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy#Jargon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;looking for a pass&lt;/strong&gt; - Hoping he can get a recruiter on the other side to defect and become a double agent. Think of how a man might make a pass at a woman in a bar hoping to flirt with her. He makes a pass, and if she reciprocates, the conversation continues to the next step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit to add:&lt;/strong&gt; John LeCarre claims he invented the spycraft jargon that shows up in his stories. This is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_Tailor_Soldier_Spy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="679" LastEditorUserId="679" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T17:41:30.660" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:41:30.660" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1704" CreationDate="2017-02-18T17:37:12.740" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to tsunamis, &lt;strong&gt;Hurricanes&lt;/strong&gt; provide great deals of destruction in coastal areas. Although, in &lt;em&gt;Nation&lt;/em&gt; it was a tsunami, IIRC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hurricane Sandy in 2012 tore entire islands on the East Coast of the United States, leaving whole marinas full of boat stranded inland. Water is a one of the most powerful forces when it comes in large quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i5U6nm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/i5U6nm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;boats&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gJC8Pm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gJC8Pm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;boat2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even whole towns can buried under debris and houses torn in half...&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2EuqOm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2EuqOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;houses&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EGb9Em.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EGb9Em.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;houses2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral of the story... never under estimate the power of Mother Nature!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T17:37:12.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1721" CreationDate="2017-02-18T21:55:10.730" Score="5" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Virgina Woolf's To the Lighthouse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, &lt;strong&gt;leaves whitening before rain&lt;/strong&gt;, rooks cawing brooms knocking, dresses rustling -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do leaves &quot;whiten before rain&quot;? Is this something common to all plants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, is a &quot;rook&quot; a type of raven, or what is a rook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T09:49:01.127" Title="To the Lighthouse -- &quot;Whitening before rain&quot;" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1720" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:07:02.307" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the Farmer's Almanac, the leaves of some deciduous trees do indeed curl upwards before storms, reacting to atmospheric changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But does seeing the undersides of leaves really mean rain is on the&#xA;way? In this case, our forebears were definitely onto something. &lt;strong&gt;The&#xA;leaves of deciduous trees, like maples and poplars, do often to turn&#xA;upward before heavy rain. The leaves are actually reacting to the&#xA;sudden increase in humidity that usually precedes a storm.&lt;/strong&gt; Leaves with&#xA;soft stems can become limp in response to abrupt changes in humidity,&#xA;allowing the wind to flip them over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://farmersalmanac.com/weather/2009/06/08/can-leaves-predict-a-storm/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FarmersAlmanac.com - Can Leaves Predict a Storm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From below they would appear to &lt;em&gt;whiten before the storm&lt;/em&gt; or as the old adage puts it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“When leaves show their undersides, be very sure rain betides.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the latter point, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHHwg6cV2lU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is a rook (in this case an American Rook). No special symbolism required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T09:49:01.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1415" CreationDate="2017-02-18T22:35:28.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure which parts exactly you're referring to for the &quot;last choices&quot;, but from what I can tell these are all either shortcomings of the 'banjax' or things that were not in the power of the twins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the banjax (the chemical that victims need to ingest before their souls can be extracted). At the end when Marinus reveals that she laid a trap for the twins she says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of all the shortcomings in your operandi, your 'banjax' is the most antiquated. Truly! An anima-abortifacient so fragile that unless the patient imbibes it of his or her &lt;em&gt;own conscious volition&lt;/em&gt; it fails to work—we haven't seen the Shaded Way deploy such a primitive formula for fifty or sixty years. What were you thinking, Grayers? If you'd only updated it you could have injected it into my body just now. Or tried to, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the first part of the problem is that the twins are using &quot;outdated technology&quot;, so to say, which means that one of the choices the victims need to make is to ingest the right food or drink in the orison. I don't think there's any more detail on why exactly the banjax has this problem, but we can just assume that's the way it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This already explains why the twins can't just kidnap them right away once they enter the aperture. Norah's viewpoint also makes this fairly explicit when she's trying to lure Marinus into the building, where she's afraid that Marinus might just leave again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We're at a delicate stage. I need to coax Marinus up to the house without her either sensing a trap, [...] or being spooked into running for the exit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not possible to &quot;suasion&quot; (i.e. mindcontrol) the victims into taking the banjax because they're engifted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I push the banjax too hard, she'll grow suspicious. [...] If Marinus weren't so engifted, I could have just suasioned her to eat it; but then if she weren't so engifted, her soul would be useless to us and she wouldn't be here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether the portraits really have any purpose and whether the victims also must reach the attic by themselves (which I think they all do), but these might be part of it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this pretty much explains most of the choices you see. If there are any particular instances I overlooked that you had mind, please let me know in a comment. I'll try to go through the ones I can think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nathan&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that in this case the banjax is the coffee Nathan gets from his dad. Here, I'm not quite sure why the damson Nathan eats almost right away when sitting down with Jonah isn't the banjax. Having to reach the attic first might be part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gordon&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I'm pretty sure that the banjax is in the meal that Norah serves him on his second visit. Why they chose an orison that had to make him revisit, I can't say, and also why they kept the orison going, although once again it seems to end with him in the attic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sally&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the one I'm least sure about. She seems to eat and drink quite a lot during the party. My theory is that one of the brownie piles has the banjax which would explain why Jonah (in the form of Melbourne Mike) shows up while she's choosing. I see two possibilities here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She picks the wrong one, which is why the orison keeps going. They give her  the escape sequence with Todd (suasioned by Jonah) to make her trust him unconditionally. The moment when she actually gets the banjax would then be the point where Todd kisses her. This would also explain why Jonah puts so much effort into wooing her (as Todd) throughout the orison. I'm not too sure about this though because it would be the only case where the banjax is being imbibed without eating or drinking something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, she might have picked the right brownie pile and ingested the banjax then. The reason for continuing the orison would then be the Grayer twins (particularly Jonah) just wanting to put on a show, being slightly arrogant. These quotes (said by Jonah) from the last section would support this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your and Todd's thrilling bid for freedom was another part of the rat's maze we had you run through, an orison inside an orison. A suborison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am speechless with admiration sister. [...] If the academy awarded Oscars for Best Orison, you'd be a shoo-in. Truly, it was a masterpiece. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, there's no indication she actually would have been able to flee at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this chapter has the only other real chance to escape prematurely which is when the aperture appears inside the house and Sally peers out and has the option to flee. It's made clear by Norah that this was a fault in the orison and was not supposed to happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the aperture—appearing of its own accord like that, and open. The girl nearly bolted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Freya&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this one, it's explicitly stated that the first banjax is the tomato juice which she ignores because it doesn't look very appetising. They then give it another try with the Cashew nuts later on which works (and is pretty much at the end of the orison).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, yes, sister, our guest turned up her nose at the tomato juice, but we banjaxed her good and proper with the cashew nuts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing how she fails to be able to leave the floor she's on after eating them, I don't think she has the option to leave the orison at that point. She doesn't ever reach the attic by herself (since the orison isn't even in Slade House), but maybe she was brought there right away before the orison started when she was brought into the house by the Blackwatermen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastActivityDate="2017-02-18T22:35:28.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1723" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-18T23:35:40.587" Score="19" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't pretend to know much about the history of literature, but I was always told that Shakespeare invented an awful lot of words, 1700 is usually the number given. How did anyone know what they meant? I know some were &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/portmanteau&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;portmanteaus&lt;/a&gt;, and some were nouns transformed into verbs, the meaning of which may have been discernible, but what about entirely new words he made up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did each play come with a list of words he'd invented? Was there a glossary attached to his works? Or did he just tell the actors what they meant and let them try portray the meaning to the audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let's say Shakespeare invented the word &quot;mimic&quot;. How did this word come to mean or was discovered to mean &quot;thing that copies another thing&quot; or  &quot;to copy another thing&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="685" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T16:57:10.610" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T19:36:31.703" Title="How did people know the meaning to Shakespeare's new words?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1728" CreationDate="2017-02-19T00:11:11.553" Score="51" ViewCount="9165" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a common trope in Western fantasy that, up until now, I've sort of taken for granted: the &quot;true name.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the idea that all things have &lt;em&gt;true names&lt;/em&gt; that are somehow more closely linked to what the thing &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, and that knowing it grants some degree of power over the thing. This has many forms and tropes, but they all have the exact same underlying elements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most commonly, though, it's used as a plot device with regard to &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That in order to figure out someone's true name, you have to totally understand them. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That true names are to be kept secret at all costs. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That finding your own true name requires some sort of developed sense of self-knowledge. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That knowing someone's true name allows you to bend them to your will. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some works seem to apply these to objects, or ideas themselves, but they ultimately stem from people and (more generally) sentient beings. Still, the idea &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to show up in one form or another in &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; fantasy books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did this idea come from, originally? Does it have a clear source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T00:36:09.160" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T09:02:23.973" Title="Where did the idea of a &quot;true name&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T02:04:57.713" Score="24" ViewCount="5103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen the Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; interpreted in two different ways (by people with different social and political views, naturally):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; Caesar as a power-mad tyrant who got his comeuppance, and Brutus and Cassius as freedom fighters sadly defeated by Caesar's former lackeys who now sought power themselves;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; Caesar as a martyr murdered before his time, and Brutus and Cassius as power-hungry killers on whom righteous vengeance was taken by Caesar's friends.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the evidence - either from the text of the play itself, or from surrounding evidence, if any - of &lt;strong&gt;which of these interpretations the writer himself intended?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; interested in any analysis of actual historical events, except inasmuch as they may inform us about the play by comparison. I'm asking about how &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; was trying to portray Caesar and the conspirators who killed him. Or to put it another way (assuming everyone involved thought themselves in the right), from whose point of view was the play meant to be written?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T01:38:52.910" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T23:05:21.600" Title="Did Shakespeare consider Julius Caesar a tyrant or a martyr?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1724" CreationDate="2017-02-19T02:55:59.440" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an anthropology question, not a literature question, since the idea is much older than writing. The idea is present in many different cultures, and we don't know whether there it has been invented independently many times or there is a single origin, just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;we don't know this regarding spoken language in general&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mention four properties which don't always go together. The secrecy of the true name, and the idea that knowing someone's true name allows you to control them, go together — if the true name gives people power over you then you'd better keep that name secret. That you have to totally understand someone in order to know their true name is rather uncommon — it's usually the opposite: knowing the name reveals the important things about the person. While people may or may not intrinsically know their true name, that name is usually given to them, so they will know it. I suspect that the idea that knowing one's true name involves knowing oneself well is non-traditional, unlike the other three properties you mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKnowYourTrueName#folder8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVTropes&lt;/a&gt; lists a few examples of cultures with a concept of true names. (At the time I write this, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; is rather substandard, with only very few examples and not at all an encyclopedic view of the topic).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In several cultures, everybody has a true name which is only known to them and to a very few people (the shaman or parent who performed some baptismal or initiation ritual and possibly a few very close relatives such as their parents and their spouse, or some important people in the tribe). For example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aranda_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aranda people&lt;/a&gt; in Australia (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=tbXbAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA124&amp;amp;lpg=PA124&amp;amp;dq=aborigines+%22secret+name%22&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ashley Montagu&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navajo&lt;/a&gt; people have a secret name which is only known to the person, to the relative who named them, and in religious ceremonies (I can't find a good online reference; ObLiterature: this comes up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hillerman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tony Hillerman&lt;/a&gt;'s Navajo Tribal Police mysteries). Sioux (at least males) have secret names which are usually conferred by a &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winkte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;winkte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LKs6GPmOWWAC&amp;amp;pg=PA117&amp;amp;lpg=PA117&amp;amp;dq=sioux+%22secret+name%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=IH8IP8QrVI&amp;amp;sig=3OBmydQduQ_6V6r6q45P6dliCeE&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Fire, &lt;em&gt;Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions: The Life of a Sioux Medecine Man&lt;/em&gt;, p. 117&lt;/a&gt;). Some Hawaiian people receive a secret name which is announced by gods in a dream and kept in the family (&lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1924.26.2.02a00060/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laura C. Green and Martha W. Beckwith, “Hawaiian Customs and beliefs relating to birth and infancy”, &lt;em&gt;American Anthropologist&lt;/em&gt; vol. 26 issue 2, 2009, p. 240&lt;/a&gt;; they cite a story where conferring a baby a name revives her). Tuareg have secret names conferred by older female relatives which are not revealed while the person is alive (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.everyculture.com/wc/Mauritania-to-Nigeria/Tuareg.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=M8VfDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT95&amp;amp;lpg=PT95&amp;amp;dq=tuareg+%22secret+name%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=S6h39qYxQz&amp;amp;sig=Q3nJw-TPZrnqruOlH6lrS6knfzY&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example you're probably familiar with if you're familiar with Western culture is this concept applied to God. In the Old Testament, the name of God is written — but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetragrammaton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;only the consonants&lt;/a&gt;, so the true name of God (including the vowels) is not (or no longer) known. Furthermore, even the “common” name of God is often eschewed: Jews and Christians often use circumlocutions such as “the Lord”. The idea that knowing the secret name of a god gives power over them was probably not original to Judaism, since &lt;a href=&quot;http://mythfolklore.blogspot.fr/2014/06/egypt-secret-name-of-ra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is also found in Egyptian myth&lt;/a&gt;. Judaism doesn't apply the concept as strongly to humans, but it is found in some Jewish cultures. For example, there are Jewish traditions of changing one's name to escape one's fate, in particular to avoid the Angel of Death who would be looking for one under one's original name. Gravely ill people might thus change their name. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=143XPyeTbCEC&amp;amp;pg=PA101&amp;amp;lpg=PA101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History&lt;/em&gt; by Benzion C. Kaganoff, p. 101&lt;em&gt;ff.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; discusses this tradition in more detail. I think this is actually an atypical example: being able to &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; one's true name (as in, a name that has power) is uncommon. A custom with a similar purpose is found in Hawaii where people will sometimes give children a name that will repulse the spirit that would take the child away (&lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1525/aa.1924.26.2.02a00060/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green &amp;amp; Beckwith, &lt;em&gt;op. cit.&lt;/em&gt;, p. 239&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/12000/does-knowing-a-spirits-name-give-special-powers-in-controlling-that-spirit-acco/30842#30842&quot;&gt;Christianity tends to avoid true names for humans&lt;/a&gt;, though the concept is not incompatible (for example many &lt;a href=&quot;http://eventful.com/siouxfalls/events/your-secret-name-conference-2015-sioux-falls-sd-/E0-001-082428709-9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christian Sioux&lt;/a&gt; still have secret names). These are just a few examples among many. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/052112171X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Anthropology of Names and Naming&lt;/em&gt; by  Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn (eds.)&lt;/a&gt; discusses more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many cultures have a folk tale where an evil wizard is defeated because the victim finds the wizard's true name and that gives them, if not complete control of the wizard, then at least the ability to nullify their enchantment. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aarne%E2%80%93Thompson_classification_systems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aarne-Thompson's classification&lt;/a&gt;, this is type 500, “the Name of the Helper”. In Grimm's tales, this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpelstiltskin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Rumpelstiltskin“&lt;/a&gt;. A tale with a similar resolution exists in cultures with no historical links such as Japan (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/title/daiku-to-oniroku/oclc/22202618&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daiku to Oniroku&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally, secret names can apply to non-human adversaries. Knowing the name of a demon can be necessary to exorcise it — this is found in modern fantasy, but has its root in folklore and religion (including &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/12000/does-knowing-a-spirits-name-give-special-powers-in-controlling-that-spirit-acco/37023#37023&quot;&gt;Catholicism&lt;/a&gt;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nrMRezmNrPcC&amp;amp;pg=PA1013&amp;amp;lpg=PA1013&amp;amp;dq=%22secret+name%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=WVWDmqa9Ar&amp;amp;sig=dHAicZV_qX9L9IONB2E35hLb1zo&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia of Medical Anthropology&lt;/em&gt; (Carol R. Ember and Melvin Ember, ed.), p. 1013&lt;/a&gt; cites the example of the Wape people of New Guinea who attribute some illnesses to a demon which must be chased away by someone who knows the demon's secret name. Besides gods (as mentioned above) and demons, other entities can have a secret name. There are cultures where a hunter must know the secret name of the beast that they are hunting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when a name is not secret, it may confer power. Many cultures avoid speaking the name of dead people, ostensibly because it might invoke their ghost. In some New Guinean cultures, one must not say one's spouse's name or more generally the names of one's in-laws (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=1X1sAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA272&amp;amp;lpg=PA272hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James George Frazer, &lt;em&gt;Aftermath: A Supplement to The Golden Bough&lt;/em&gt;, p. 272&lt;/a&gt;; this passage gives many other examples of name-related taboos).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fantasy, obviously, can play with this idea by setting the rules. It relies on ubiquitous, but vague cultural foundations — most readers would be familiar with the idea that names have power, even if they can't pinpoint a specific source (which there wouldn't be, unless the reader is from a culture where this idea is strong).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:56:54.510" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T02:55:59.440" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1724" CreationDate="2017-02-19T02:59:18.460" Score="44" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It goes back way further than the fantasy genre or even written literature.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've listed a few of the best-known examples of this trope dating back to centuries before the idea of a &quot;trope&quot; was even in circulation. This is by no means an exhaustive list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Judaism.&lt;/strong&gt; For thousands of years, religious Jews have avoided speaking the name of God. In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11305-names-of-god&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1906 Jewish Encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt;, it is suggested that all Hebrew proper names are 'true' names, more than simply labels, but saying something about the essential nature of the named person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like other Hebrew proper names, the name of God is more than a mere distinguishing title. It represents the Hebrew conception of the divine nature or character and of the relation of God to His people. It represents the Deity as He is known to His worshipers, and stands for all those attributes which He bears in relation to them and which are revealed to them through His activity on their behalf. A new manifestation of His interest or care may give rise to a new name. So, also, an old name may acquire new content and significance through new and varied experience of these sacred relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; tells us a little more about the practice of not speaking the name of God:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;although there is nothing in the Torah to prohibit the saying of the name&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#cite_note-10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[9]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; and Ruth shows it was being pronounced as late as the 5th century BCE&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2902.htm#4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[10]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;—it had ceased to be spoken aloud by at least the 3rd century BCE during Second Temple Judaism&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#cite_note-14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[12]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Egyptian mythology.&lt;/strong&gt; As mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1725/17&quot;&gt;Mithrandir&lt;/a&gt;, the concept of a person's true name granting power over them appears in tales of Egyptian mythology from thousands of years ago. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra#Rival_gods&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, cited to Geraldine Harris, &lt;em&gt;Gods &amp;amp; Pharaohs from Egyptian Mythology&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isis frequently schemed against Ra, as she wanted her son Horus to have the power. In one myth, Isis created a serpent to poison Ra and only gave him the antidote when he revealed his true name to her. Ra now feared Isis, as with his secret name revealed she could use all her power against him and have Horus take over the throne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Traditional folk tales.&lt;/strong&gt; The well-known folk story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumpelstiltskin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rumpelstiltskin&lt;/a&gt; revolves around this idea: the miller's daughter rashly promises her first-born child to the strange little man, and he will only allow her to keep the child if she can tell him his name. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/story134.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I  will  give  you three days,” said he, “and if at the end of that time you cannot tell my  name,  you  must  give  up  the  child  to  me.”  Then  the  Queen spent  the  whole  night  in  thinking  over  all  the  names  that  she  had ever  heard,  and  sent  a  messenger  through  the  land  to  ask  far  and wide  for  all  the  names  that  could  be  found. [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The  third  day  the  messenger  came  back again, and said, “I have not been able to find one single new name; but as I passed through the woods I came to a high hill, and near it was  a  little  house,  and  before  the  house  burned  a  fire,  and  round the fire danced a comical little man, and he hopped on one leg and cried,  ‘Today  do  I  bake,  tomorrow  I  brew,  The  day  after  that  the Queen’s child comes in; And oh! I am glad that nobody knew That the  name  I  am  called  is  Rumpelstiltskin!’&quot; [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And  then  she  said,  “Then  perhaps  your  name  is Rumpelstiltskin!” “The devil told you that! the devil told you that!” cried the little man, and in his anger he stamped with his right foot so hard that it went into the ground above his knee; then he seized his left foot with both his hands in such a fury that he split in two, and there was an end of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More recently, it was likely popularised by le Guin and maybe Clarke.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKnowYourTrueName&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; page entitled &quot;I Know Your True Name&quot; lists &lt;strong&gt;Ursula le Guin's &lt;em&gt;Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/strong&gt; as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropeCodifier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trope Codifier&lt;/a&gt; - the work which, while it wasn't the first to use the idea, was more popular than preceding works and provided the template for most or all later uses of the trope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He saw that in this dusty and fathomless matter of learning the true name of each place, thing, and being, the power he wanted lay like a jewel at the bottom of a dry well. &lt;strong&gt;For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.&lt;/strong&gt; So Kurremkarmerruk had said to them, once, their first night in the Tower; he never repeated it, but Ged did not forget his words. &quot;Many a mage of great power,&quot; he had said, &quot;has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing - one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished. Nor will they be, till world's end. [...] That is the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke who made the islands of the world, and the language of our lays and songs, spells, enchantments, and invocations. Its words lie hidden and changed among our Hardic words. We call the foam on waves &lt;em&gt;sukien&lt;/em&gt;: that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, &lt;em&gt;suk&lt;/em&gt;, feather, and &lt;em&gt;inien&lt;/em&gt;, the sea. Feather of the sea, is foam. But you cannot charm the foam calling it &lt;em&gt;sukien&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;you must use its own true name in the Old Speech&lt;/strong&gt;, which is &lt;em&gt;essa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No one knows a man's true name but himself and his namer. He may choose at length to tell it to his brother, or his wife, or his friend, yet even those few will never use it where any third person may hear it. In front of other people they will, like other people, call him by his use-name, his nickname - such a name as Sparrowhawk, and Vetch, and Ogion which means 'fir-cone'. If plain men hide their true name from all but a few they love and trust utterly, so much more must wizardly men, being more dangerous, and more endangered. &lt;strong&gt;Who knows a man's name, holds that man's life in his keeping.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea: The First Book of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, although it's best known from her &lt;em&gt;Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; quartet, le Guin had used the same idea in some of her earlier stories, lesser-known precursors set in the world of Earthsea. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rule_of_Names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rule of Names&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story published four years before &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; and available in full as a PDF &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hasd.org/faculty/ThomasKraus/ruleofnames.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, seems to be the first le Guin work to introduce her idea of true names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now you know the Rules of Names already,  children.  There  are  two, and  they're  the  same on  every island in the world. What's one of them?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It  ain't  polite  to  ask  anybody  what  his  name  is,&quot;  shouted  a fat, quick boy, interrupted by a little girl shrieking, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;You can't never tell your own name to nobody&lt;/strong&gt; my ma says!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[...] When  you  children  are  through  school  and  go through the  Passage,   &lt;strong&gt;you'll   leave   your   childnames   behind   and   keep   only your truenames, which you must never ask for and never give away&lt;/strong&gt;. Why is that the rule?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The  children  were  silent.  The  sheep  bleated  gently.  Mr.  Underhill answered the question: &quot;Because the name is the thing,&quot; he said in his shy, soft, husky voice, &quot;and &lt;strong&gt;the truename is the true thing. To speak the name is to control the thing.&lt;/strong&gt; Am I right, Schoolmistress?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Rule of Names&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for fantasy, but the same idea also crops up in science fiction. In the short story &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Nine Billion Names of God&quot; by Arthur C. Clarke&lt;/strong&gt;, we can see an intermediate step - a literary Archaeopteryx, if you will - between the ancient religious idea of the holy and powerful &quot;true name of God&quot; and the idea of true names as they appear in modern speculative fiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names – and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them – God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up … bingo!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now.”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see&#xA;  Chuck’s face, a white oval turned toward the sky.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Nine Billion Names of God&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we've already seen that neither le Guin nor Clarke were anywhere near the first to use these ideas, and perhaps not even the first in popular speculative fiction. But as the most popular/famous authors to do so, they likely had the largest effect on the subsequent development of the trope. Certainly the effect of le Guin's particular interpretation of it can often still be seen in modern fantasy novels to this day. I'm unsure how influential Clarke's sci-fi interpretation has been (indeed, it might be hard to distinguish between influence from his story and influence directly from Jewish religious beliefs), but in any case &quot;The Nine Billion Names of God&quot; is probably the most famous sci-fi appearance of the &quot;true names&quot; trope, so I thought it was worth a mention.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/99208/31394&quot;&gt;First uses of names having power?&lt;/a&gt; - Lexible, SFF.SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;True name&lt;/a&gt; - Wikipedia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IKnowYourTrueName&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I Know Your True Name&lt;/a&gt; - TV Tropes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and various other sources all directly linked above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T03:20:33.767" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T06:55:49.760" Score="5" ViewCount="3316" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turning_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Turning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Tim Winton is a collection of short stories about turnings (obviously) at crucial times in people's lives. I've been asked to read and annotate the first short story in the series – “Big World” – with a focus on its portrayal of personal and cultural aspects of Australian identity (it is an Australian text). Now I haven’t the faintest idea of where to start – in terms of what aspects of Australian identity I should be looking for – but a few ideas would be nice, and I can take it from there and tie the ideas into the text and talk about generic conventions and that side of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically - &lt;strong&gt;What personal and cultural aspects of Australian Identity does &quot;Big World&quot; explore?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="692" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-03T22:33:49.627" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T00:36:55.630" Title="How does the short story &quot;Big World&quot; from The Turning by Tim Winton explore aspects of Australian Identity?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;tim-winton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T11:30:15.943" Score="6" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question contains spoilers for David Mitchell's &lt;em&gt;Slade House&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first four chapters of Slade House end with the narrator in the twins' attic, sitting around a candle with them. I noticed that during Sally's viewpoint, they've switched places around the candle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Nathan&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lady Grayer on my left&lt;/strong&gt;, but she's younger now, younger than Mum. &lt;strong&gt;To my right is Jonah Grayer&lt;/strong&gt; but he's older than the Jonah in the garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gordon&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On my left there's Chloe&lt;/strong&gt;, in a hooded padded robe thing. &lt;strong&gt;On my right there's... a male Chloe.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sally&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To my right sits Kate Childs&lt;/strong&gt;, the Wicked Witch of the West, dressed in a gray Arab-style cloak thing, but now in her midthirties. Have I really been here so long? Have all those years been stolen from me? &lt;strong&gt;To my left hovers another vaguely familiar face... Jesus, it's Melbourne Mike.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Freya&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Left of the candle hovers a woman in her midthirties.&lt;/strong&gt; She's familiar... it's Maggs the landlady, but twenty year younger, slimmer, blonder, smoother-skinned and eerily beautiful. &lt;strong&gt;Right of the candle is a man of the same age&lt;/strong&gt;, also blond, and also known to me... as I study him, a young Fred Pink emerges from his face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a mistake to me, but is there any evidence whether or not it really is (from inside or outside the book)? Has this been changed in another edition, has Mitchell commented on it, etc? As far as I can tell from the story, while the twins can work all sorts of magic, switching places in the attic should be impossible, since time doesn't pass in the attic between these scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="298" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T11:31:46.080" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T11:31:46.080" Title="Why do the Grayer twins switch places?" Tags="&lt;david-mitchell&gt;&lt;slade-house&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T12:24:49.743" Score="17" ViewCount="5067" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to read The Expanse, but I'm kind of confused about which to read first and what I actually need to read. So far as I can tell The Expanse is a series of novels that fall in roughly chronological order, but there's also a number of novellas and short stories which jump around the chronology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figure the shorter stuff is going to be harder to find (published in magazines, etc). Does it matter what order I read the non-novel material in? Can/should I skip the non-novel material entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T00:27:06.403" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T03:39:06.783" Title="Do I need to read all the supplementary material for The Expanse, and in what order?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;the-expanse&gt;&lt;james-s-a-corey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1726" CreationDate="2017-02-19T13:43:41.737" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is left open by the playwright&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to look at the three characters you have chosen, starting with Cassius. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cassius is not an honorable man no matter whether you think Caesar should have died or not. Here is a quote of him trying to use his power to free a friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That you have wrong'd me doth appear in this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You have condemn'd and noted Lucius Pella&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For taking bribes here of the Sardians;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Wherein my letters, praying on his side,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because I knew the man&lt;/strong&gt;, were slighted off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His main fault with Caesar is not that he is a dictator, but that he is above him in power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like a Colossus, and &lt;strong&gt;we petty men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Walk under his huge legs and peep about&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To find ourselves dishonourable graves.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Men at some time are masters of their fates:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But in ourselves, &lt;strong&gt;that we are underlings&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Brutus is the opposite of Cassius, he is completely honorable. The reason he killed Caesar was he thought it would be best for Rome, and thus his duty. He is often considered the protagonist of this play, as he sees the most time and gains the most character development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would not, Cassius; yet I love him well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But wherefore do you hold me here so long?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is it that you would impart to me?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;If it be aught toward the general good,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Set honour in one eye and death i' the other,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I will look on both indifferently&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For let the gods so speed me as I love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The name of honour more than I fear death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His death even reflects the honorable Roman way of suicide, while also expressing regret over his part in Caesar's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Farewell, good Strato.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Runs on his sword&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Caesar, now be still:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I kill'd not thee with half so good a will.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Caesar does not appear very often in the play, it focuses mostly on Brutus. Shakespeare focuses less on whether he is a dictator or not and instead focuses on his arrogance, mainly by having him dress himself in third person. (Caesar did this..... Caesar said that). He also allows himself to be persuaded against his better judgement to go to the senate on March 15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Break up the senate till another time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When Caesar's wife shall meet with better dreams.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;If Caesar hide himself, shall they not whisper&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Lo, Caesar is afraid'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that works really well. The opening scene is a good example for those who think he is a dictator, as it revolves around two senators griping. The people seemed to have loved Caesar, as Antony uses them to drive the conspirators away and to regain control of the city. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brutus was trying to be a freedom fighter, and Cassius was greedy. Since Brutus was the protagonist of the story, he had to doubt Caesar's speech (if Caesar were just a dictator, he would have run him out with no problems, and thus would have no inner conflict), which means that the audience was given both Caesar the dictator, and Caesar the friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both examples of Caesar can be found in the scene I mentioned earlier with his wife and Decius Brutus. At first Caesar is adamant in going (note the third person)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gods do this in shame of cowardice:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Caesar should be a beast without a heart,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If he should stay at home to-day for fear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No, Caesar shall not&lt;/strong&gt;: danger knows full well&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That Caesar is more dangerous than he:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We are two lions litter'd in one day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I the elder and more terrible:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Caesar shall go forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then is convinced to stay home (note the first person)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mark Antony shall say I am not well,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, for thy humour, I will stay at home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then is convinced agin to leave by Decius's ego poking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Break up the senate till another time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When Caesar's wife shall meet with better dreams.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;If Caesar hide himself, shall they not whisper&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Lo, Caesar is afraid&lt;/strong&gt;'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an example of Antony speaking in Caesar's praise. It may be a little biased, but the facts are true enough that the crowd rallies around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:&#xA;  Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the strong feelings Antony felt at Caesar's death (the dog of war speech). Caesar was a good enough man for him to be loved by both Antony and Brutus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="444" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T23:05:21.600" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T23:05:21.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2017-02-19T16:38:32.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corey has suggested they are best read in publication order, (main novels in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Leviathan Wakes (2011)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Butcher of Anderson Station (2011)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Caliban's War (2012)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gods of Risk (2012)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Drive (2012)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Abaddon's Gate (2013)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Churn (2014)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Cibola Burn (2014)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Nemesis Games (2015)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Vital Abyss (2015)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Babylon's Ashes (2016)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Untitled Expanse Novella (TBP)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Persepolis Rising (TBP)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However another good reading order, and IMO the better one, would be as follows (again main novels in bold, and note that I've jumbled short stories, novellas etc. under one title 'short story'):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Drive - Short story published November 27, 2012.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Churn - Short story published April 29, 2014&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Butcher of Anderson Station - Short story published October 17, 2011&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Leviathan Wakes&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published June 15, 2011&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Caliban’s War&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published June 26, 2012&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gods of Risk - Short story published September 15, 2012&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Abaddon’s Gate&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published June 4, 2013&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Vital Abyss - Short story published October 15, 2015&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Cibola Burn&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published June 17, 2014&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Nemesis Games&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published June 2, 2015&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Babylon’s Ashes&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel published December 6, 2016&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Untitled Expanse Novella - Short story to be published&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Persepolis Rising&lt;/strong&gt; - Novel to be published 2017&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note there are a few more being written, and several planned as well. And if you want to be pedantic, you could technically say that &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/153017/are-the-expanse-and-the-martian-set-in-the-same-universe&quot;&gt;The Martian should be read first&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally think the second order is better as it makes a better read. It makes more sense and nothing happens which you need knowledge from another book that hasn't been read yet to understand. Although obviously I have no idea where the unpublished ones should go, so I've placed them chronologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T08:29:49.170" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T08:29:49.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T17:01:51.353" Score="1" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues&lt;/em&gt; series, Jonah Wizard is the Cahill's famous face - he's a star hip-hop musician, and he gets mobbed everywhere. He's a celebrity - he flies private planes, has tons of money, etc. He talks like a 'gangsta'. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Wassup, Pierce Landing? &lt;em&gt;The Wiz is in the house!&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues; Unstoppable: Flashpoint&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 26&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Legit, I've got some things to tell you about my man, J-dog,&quot; Jonah harangued the crowd.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;The 39 Clues; Unstoppable: Flashpoint&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 27&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Jonah based on any specific celebrity?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T17:38:54.880" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:38:54.880" Title="Was Jonah Wizard based on any specific celebrity?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-39-clues&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1735" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-19T17:31:32.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T17:31:32.877" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T17:31:32.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1736" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-19T17:31:32.877" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about possible and confirmed plagiarism in works of literature." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-19T19:12:41.173" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T19:12:41.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-19T19:17:12.703" Score="58" ViewCount="11741" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Digital rights management&quot;, DRM, is almost a standard in the e-book industry. Have copyright holders ever tried to protect physical books from scanning, for example in a way how banknotes are protected against counterfeiting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:18:55.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:18:55.353" Title="Has copy protection ever been used in physical books?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1723" CreationDate="2017-02-19T19:36:31.703" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, most of the new words appears to have based on existing words to some extent: either taking a noun and turning into a verb or vice versa (one example of this would be &quot;to dawn&quot;), or shortening a word or adding a new beginning ending (&quot;irregulous&quot;), or joining two words together (&quot;eyeball&quot;): all these would be rather easily understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More difficult, but not impossible for at least parts of his audience, would be borrowing words from other languages, especially Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These would have covered the majority of his new words. There were a few exceptions, but some of those are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/a&gt;, such as &quot;gnarling&quot;. Ther remains a very few beyond that, and for those, such as &quot;potch&quot; (Coriolanus: &quot;I'll potch at him some way&quot;), we have to remember that some sounds actually have a sort of meaning. Take &quot;slimy&quot;, &quot;slither&quot; and &quot;sliding&quot;: it would seem that &quot;sli&quot; suggest a certain meaning, so a hypothetical word formed with that combination (&quot;slinny&quot;) would suggest something similar. Context would also help. If you really want to see how one can &quot;understand&quot; a totally new word, I would suggest reading some nonsense verse, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Jabberwocky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jabberwocky&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordsinvented.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; to be a useful overview of words first appearing in Shakespeare; from the same site is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/biography/wordscoined.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a more in-depth coverage&lt;/a&gt; of how he coined words (at the end of which are a few entirely new words). For the meaning of sounds, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia article gives some introduction (I have also read about it in books on linguistics, but those were in Swedish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T19:36:31.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-19T20:17:42.057" Score="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Look at it this way - the reason why companies need DRM is because digital files can always be copied &lt;em&gt;verbatim&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. bit for bit. Companies cannot prevent files from being copied and re-distributed so they need DRM - a system that alters the files in a way that the &lt;em&gt;contents&lt;/em&gt; can only be accessed under specific circumstances, e.g. by entering a license key, inserting an official CD, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With hard copies, copying &quot;files&quot; is significantly harder, because one has to get a hold of the &lt;em&gt;physical copy&lt;/em&gt; of the product. What was equal to hitting the 'download' button, now requires taking a stroll to the library, or paying money for an actual copy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and some &lt;em&gt;more diligent&lt;/em&gt; copy centres will not allow you to copy more than a certain per cent of the book. While this doesn't apply to every country, it may still be an obstacle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to your actual question, what you are describing is called, per Wikipedia, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;analog hole&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. While it may be nigh-impossible to decipher a DRM-protected book, or crack a DRM-protected game, once you have a physical copy of an object there is a number of ways you can copy it. Off top of my head, I can already think of a &quot;lamp + tripod + DSLR camera stand&quot;, which is not very hard to construct, but is good for practical purposes. Combine this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;optical character recognition&lt;/a&gt;, and you have a fault-proof home-made analog piracy system. Why fault-proof? Because digital cameras use the same working principle as the human eye, so DRM, in this case, will be more of a double-edged stick than &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glop.org/starforce/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it is with digital content&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple technologies available, that make traditional scanning and copying impossible. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.protectedpaper.com/category_s/17.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is a technology&lt;/a&gt; that will make &quot;VOID&quot; texts appear on scanned copy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of our paper products are protected by AuthentiGuard Pantograph 4000TM. This patented technology involves the printing of hidden text messages (&quot;VOID&quot;, &quot;COPY&quot;, &quot;UNAUTHORIZED COPY&quot;, etc.) into the background of a document. Text information or other artwork is placed onto this paper. Then, when this &quot;original&quot; is copied of scanned, the hidden word pattern becomes visible on the duplicate. The end result - a clearly distinguishable copy that can not pass off as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9STIlm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9STIlm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;paper with black and white &amp;quot;VOID&amp;quot; signs all over it&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZTadm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eZTadm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;paper with colour &amp;quot;VOID&amp;quot; signs all over it&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same company sells &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.protectedpaper.com/category_s/54.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;special paper for books&lt;/a&gt; as well, though I was unable to find examples of it being used,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a more light-hearted note, &lt;a href=&quot;http://the-digital-reader.com/2012/07/11/the-disappearing-book-a-boon-for-new-authors/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is a book&lt;/a&gt; that is printed with a special kind of ink: it is sold in an air-tight package, as the ink starts to fade upon contact with air. It is called &lt;em&gt;El Libro Que No Puede Esperar - The Book That Can't Wait&lt;/em&gt;, This provides a good incentive to actually read the book, before it becomes blank paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IdHZt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IdHZt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Several photos of the same page of a book, each with the text more faded&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T20:51:59.780" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:51:59.780" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1741" CreationDate="2017-02-19T21:43:53.060" Score="11" ViewCount="15288" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's poem “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43687&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tyger&lt;/a&gt;” from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; contains one couplet whose meaning has always puzzled me, lines 17&amp;ndash;18, the first two lines of the fifth stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the stars threw down their spears&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And water'd heaven with their tears&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do these two lines mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T10:28:37.827" Title="Why did the stars throw down their spears?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1740" CreationDate="2017-02-19T21:43:53.060" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;One approach to interpreting these lines is to read them semi-literally: the tiger is such a fearsome creature that even the stars themselves threw down their weapons rather than face it, and wept at its power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanzas 2&amp;ndash;4 use the conceit of describing the tiger's making as the construction of a machine of war: something mechanical, unfeeling, cruel by creation. Even the famous phrase “fearful symmetry” of the first stanza alludes to this: machines and technology are symmetrical, and their construction is plotted and planned, “framed”, in the case of the tiger by some “immortal hand or eye” which is equal to the task of constructing such a weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanza 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what distant deeps or skies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On what wings dare he aspire?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the hand, dare seize the fire? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stanza places the origin of the fire burning in the tiger's eyes in some far-off place, either deep in the depths or far off in the sky, and questions what being would have the strength and the gall to claim it for the tiger's construction. To me this rings of the Promethean myth: like Prometheus, the tiger's creator dared to steal a powerful flame from somewhere beyond human ken and bring it back to Earth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanzas 3 and 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what shoulder, &amp;amp; what art,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could twist the sinews of thy heart?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And when thy heart began to beat,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What dread hand? &amp;amp; what dread feet?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the hammer? what the chain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In what furnace was thy brain?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the anvil? what dread grasp,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dare its deadly terrors clasp!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “twist the sinews of thy heart” in stanza 3 alludes to rope-making, like the ropes used in siege machines or to restrain the cannons of Blake's time when on-board a ship. Stanza 4 describes a forge (the furnace where the tiger's brain was crafted) and other blacksmith's tools (hammers, chains, anvils). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next come the two lines in question: “When the stars threw down their spears / And water'd heaven with their tears”. The previous stanzas  implied a process of technological advancement, starting with the Promethean theft of the fire, advancing to rope-making, and then using the flame for metallurgy. The Tiger, a machine of war so fierce that not even the stars themselves could stand against it, is the culmination. But in something of a twist ending, Blake reveals in the next two lines that the Tiger is not a human creation: “Did he smile his work to see?&#xA;Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” The immortal hand or eye that dared frame the fearsome Tiger is the same benevolent creator who made the innocent lamb from “The Lamb”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves one question: why, specifically, the stars? Because it helps set up the “twist ending”. The first four stanzas, describing the tiger's creation, allude to a human creator with the reference to Prometheus and the mentions of physical body parts, such as shoulders, hands, and feet, and human tools such as hammers, chains, and anvils. The stars are clearly beyond all human power, but lines 17 and 18 imply that a human might have created something capable of overcoming them until the “twist” in lines 19 and 20. (I'm putting “twist” in quotes because it's not terribly surprising to anyone who's read “The Lamb” and recognized the parallel structure of the two &lt;em&gt;Songs&lt;/em&gt; books, though line 20 does contain the explicit callback to “The Lamb”.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/tyger/stanza-5-stanza-6-summary.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This study help page&lt;/a&gt; says the two lines about the stars “may refer to the casting down of the angels after Satan rebelled against God”, which would make “stars” a metaphorical term for angels. This interpretation, when taken with lines 19 and 20, also helps set up the “twist”. Now we can interpret line 19, “Did he smile his work to see?”, as asking whether God, upon defeating the rogue angels, making them throw down their spears and weep as they were cast out of Heaven, smiled and took pleasure in his victory at war. In this light, line 20, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”, becomes an allusion to the dual nature of God, who, to the poet's disbelief, is both the loving, gentle being who made the innocent Lamb, and the vengeful, warlike being who made the vicious Tiger and smiled to see his defeated enemies weep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2017-02-19T21:43:53.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-19T22:58:12.317" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't against scanning specifically, but creators of ancient and medieval texts did attempt to protect their work against theft, vandalism and misattribution by writing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_curse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;curses&lt;/a&gt; on the book. You might consider this a form of early DRM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_curse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Book curses&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Ashurbanipal, King of Assyria from 668 to 627 BCE, had the following&#xA;  curse written on many or all of the tablets collected at the library&#xA;  at Ninevah [...]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I have transcribed upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe which none of the kings who have gone before me had&#xA;    learned, together with the wisdom of Nabu insofar as it existeth [in&#xA;    writing]. I have arranged them in classes, I have revised them and I&#xA;    have placed them in my palace, that I, even I, the ruler who knoweth&#xA;    the light of Ashur, the king of the gods, may read them. Whosoever&#xA;    shall carry off this tablet, or shall inscribe his name on it, side by&#xA;    side with mine own, may Ashur and Belit overthrow him in wrath and&#xA;    anger, and may they destroy his name and posterity in the land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="703" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T15:27:37.300" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T15:27:37.300" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16673" CreationDate="2017-02-20T00:18:22.990" Score="14" ViewCount="3006" Body="&lt;p&gt;The former MI5 and MI6 agent David John Moore Cornwell used the name &lt;strong&gt;John le Carré&lt;/strong&gt; on his numerous spy novels. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carr%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; explains why he had to write under a pseudonym:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he wrote the detective story &lt;em&gt;A Murder of Quality&lt;/em&gt; (1962) and &lt;em&gt;The Spy Who Came in from the Cold&lt;/em&gt; (1963), as &quot;John le Carré&quot; (&lt;em&gt;le Carré&lt;/em&gt; is French for &quot;the Square&quot;) – a pseudonym required because Foreign Office officers were forbidden to publish in their own names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;why did he choose that particular pseudonym?&lt;/strong&gt; As a British intelligence officer writing about British intelligence officers, why did he decide to use a French-sounding name? And for that matter, why that particular name - what was the significance to him of a square?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T09:39:53.343" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:34:08.063" Title="Why did John le Carré choose that particular (French) pseudonym?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;john-le-carre&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-20T01:48:30.213" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in the day, in the early 90s, I bought some software whose manual was printed on red paper, which was meant to discourage photocopying on black and white photocopiers. If you photocopied it, it would come out as a big mess because there wasn't much contrast between the print and the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can do an image search for &quot;ocean laser genius manual&quot; for photos of the manual I am talking about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably this technique was used elsewhere too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="705" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T01:48:30.213" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T02:36:23.160" Score="8" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Patrick Rothfuss' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingkiller_Chronicle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Kingkiller Chronicle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, students at the University are asked to pay a variable amount for their tuition per term, based mostly on their performance in an interview in front of the entire head staff, and partly on their performance during the previous term. For example, a student who does well is asked for a lower payments, and troublesome or ignorant students are asked for higher payments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tuition is variable, and depends partly on the intelligence of the student:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I knew from my previous discussions with Ben that you needed money or&#xA;  brains to get into the University. The more of one you had, the less&#xA;  of the other you needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also heard how high the other students' were set. The lowest had&#xA;  been four talents and six jots, but most were double that. One student&#xA;  had been charged over thirty talents for his tuition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Name of the Wind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 36 &quot;Less Talents&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last span of every term at the University was reserved for&#xA;  admissions exams. Classes were canceled and the masters spent several&#xA;  hours of each day conducting examinations. Your next term's tuition&#xA;  was based on your performance. A lottery determined what day and hour&#xA;  you would go through admissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A great deal hung on the brief interview. Missing a few questions&#xA;  could easily double your tuition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Name of the Wind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 49 &quot;The Nature of Wild Things&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bad behavior can negatively impact tuition:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; Manet snapped. &quot;He's telling you what I've told you twice&#xA;  already. You're a king-high idiot if you go through admissions this&#xA;  term.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What?&quot; I asked. &quot;Why?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Manet set his cards down with profound calm. &quot;Kvothe. You're a clever&#xA;  boy, but have a world of trouble listening to things you don't want to&#xA;  hear.&quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Take a term off,&quot; Wilem said [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You really have to,&quot; Sim said earnestly. &quot;Everyone's still talking&#xA;  about the trail. It's all anyone is talking about.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The trial?&quot; I laughed. &quot;That was more than a span ago.&quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You can be certain the masters are uniformly wet-cat-mad about that.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wilem set down his cards. &quot;I predict,&quot; he said calmly, &quot;that if you go&#xA;  through admissions, you will receive a tuition of at least thirty-five&#xA;  talents.&quot; He looked back and forth between Sim and Manet. &quot;I will&#xA;  wager a full gold mark to this effect. Does anyone care to take my&#xA;  bet?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither of them took him up on his offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 49 &quot;The Ignorant Edema&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon his return to the University, Kvothe deliberately flunks his admissions interview, inflating his tuition to bring profit to the bursar and to himself (Alveron pays Kvothe's tuition after Kvothe did him some favors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was bad behavior though, and poorly timed, especially after my&#xA;  otherwise lackluster performance. As a result, I was assigned a&#xA;  tuition of twenty-four talents. Needless to say, I was terribly&#xA;  embarrassed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Afterward I returned to the bursar's office. I officially presented&#xA;  Alveron's letter of credit to Riem and unofficially collected my&#xA;  agreed-upon cut: half of everything over ten talents. I put the seven&#xA;  talents in my purse and wondered idly if anyone had ever been paid so&#xA;  well for insolence and ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 142 &quot;Home&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the story continues, Kvothe is charged a different amount each semester, ranging from &quot;&lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; three talents&quot; (simultaneously inventing and earning an academic scholarship) to some very high amount I can't remember at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is there an existing tuition system in the real world that this system resembles?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this question because many pieces of the University (besides, of course, the alchemy classes) seem to be based on real world higher education, including fairly accurate representations of chemistry labs, among other things. Kvothe's struggles in making his tuition payments are discussed a lot in the first two books of the series, so I was wondering if this tuition system is based on anything currently or previously practiced in real institutions of higher learning. No school that I have attended has ever used a system remotely similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T04:48:11.310" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T12:44:06.007" Title="Is there a specific tuition system that the University's was based on?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;patrick-rothfuss&gt;&lt;the-kingkiller-chronicle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T03:38:26.363" Score="6" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end of the third chapter of &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies,&lt;/em&gt; Simon goes to his hideout.  It is described as having a great mat of creepers and being screened off by a few leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when he is being hunted, Ralph hides in the bushes, behind &quot;a wild tangle of creeper&quot; forming a mat that kept out all the light of the sun.  However, in the eighth chapter, Simon goes to his hideout and it is said that he cannot avoid the light of the sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I could not help but notice the similarities in wording between the descriptions for the two places.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Are they the same place or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T06:09:13.823" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T06:09:13.823" Title="Was Simon's hideout later used by Ralph?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1726" CreationDate="2017-02-20T04:35:56.060" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;As asked, the question is close to unanswerable. Specifically, your main question is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the evidence - either from the text of the play itself, or from surrounding evidence, if any - of which of these interpretations the writer himself intended?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gauging authorial intent from the text itself is a fool's game. After all, you've noted that different performances of the &lt;strong&gt;same&lt;/strong&gt; play slant very differently. Presumably those performances don't add dialogue and incidents wholesale to bolster their interpretations. Even if they selectively edit the play, the fact that they need to leave out bits that don't fit their political vision for the production shows that the text itself is open to multiple readings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves &quot;surrounding evidence&quot;. What could that be? We have no document from Shakespeare that says, in so many words, anything like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I. Cæſar was an inſufferable tyrant, methinks; I ſo depict him in my new tragœdie. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor, of course, anything where he says the opposite. The documentary record with regard to Shakespeare is scant enough that some misguided souls feel compelled to waste their lives arguing he could not have written the plays published under his name. It is actually pretty substantial compared to that left by most other actors and playwrights of his age, but that is neither here nor there; the point is, we neither have nor can expect any such clear statement of authorial intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if we &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have some such document, it would make little difference. To say that a work's meaning rests in the author's intention is to commit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intentional-fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;intentional fallacy&lt;/a&gt;. W K Wimsatt, Jr, and Monroe C Beardsley coined that term in &lt;em&gt;The Verbal Icon&lt;/em&gt;, which appeared in 1954, when I was but a wee lad. Their claim is that a work of literature is an icon: it is autonomous, and makes its own meaning through its words and their arrangement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics are unlikely to buy Wimsatt and Brooks's claim entirely any more. For example, the historic specificity of a work's use of language does undercut the claim that the work is autonomous. Words change their meanings. When Tennyson reports &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45365&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mariana&lt;/a&gt;'s words thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She only said, &quot;My life is dreary,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He cometh not,&quot; she said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;only a New Critic of admirable dogmatism would insist that the lines could validly be interpreted as expressing Mariana's dejection at her lover's inability to orgasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the claim that an author's intent does not sufficiently account for the meaning of a work is sound. Consider the following text exchange (NSFW language):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhulY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhulY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;blame-autocorrect&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are we to take John's statement of intent: &lt;em&gt;I meant, great.&lt;/em&gt; Do we trust the plain statement of his prior text, or what &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; says it meant? This is an exaggerated example, but the basic point is true nevertheless. Judging a work by the author's stated intentions has its pitfalls. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if Shakespeare's text itself is ambivalent, and his intentions both unavailable and no reliable guide, how are we to answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did Shakespeare consider Julius Caesar a dictator or a martyr?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is, we can't. We need to reframe the question. How about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What about &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; allows the play to be read/performed in these two very different ways? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a different question, and one we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; begin to answer. And as you've already intuited, to make any kind of strong case for our answer we will need to look at both internal and external evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matrim Cauthon's answer does an admirable job of looking at internal evidence in the form of dialogue and characterization. Another way to examine the internal evidence would be to look at rhetorical devices and poetic tropes. Does the play employ figurative language in a way that points to one representation of Caesar rather than the other? That's an interesting approach, but I'm not going to go there—mainly because it requires another close reading of the text, and I think it would be more useful at this juncture to examine external evidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such piece of external evidence is the play's genre. It is classified as a tragedy, not a history play. From the time of Aristotle, it has been a given that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_hero&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tragic hero&lt;/a&gt; is neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ohio.edu/people/hartleyg/ref/aristotletragedy.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a great man with a fatal flaw&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a [great] man who is neither a paragon of virtue and justice nor undergoes the change to misfortune through any real badness or wickedness but because of some mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Matrim Cauthon has argued here, the tragic hero of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is Brutus. In that case, by definition, if Brutus is meant to be seen as &lt;em&gt;flawed&lt;/em&gt; for killing Caesar, he is not to be seen as entirely &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. There must be some admixture of right and wrong in his action. By extension, if killing Caesar is not an entirely evil act, then there must be something about Caesar that allows his assassination to be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing. Asking whether Caesar is a &lt;em&gt;dictator&lt;/em&gt; or a &lt;em&gt;martyr&lt;/em&gt; is a false choice, and overstates the polarity. Sure, Caesar is a bit of a dictator. He's also a bit of a martyr. That's why Brutus is partly right to assassinate him, and partly wrong. That's why the play is a tragedy; and that's why we can argue endlessly about whether Caesar's assassination was justified or not, and whether Brutus &amp;amp; co. were public heroes who fell victim to the actions of the shameless populist Marc Antony, or vile scum who faced the populace's justified wrath. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this reading, Caesar too emerges a tragic hero: great &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; flawed. After all, the play is called &lt;em&gt;The Tragedy of Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;The Tragedy of Decimus Brutus&lt;/em&gt;. All Shakespeare's tragedies are named after their tragic protagonists; why should this one be any different? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, Antony too can be read in this double way: great man, flawed man. Demagogue, loyal friend. He is a tragic hero in his own right; Shakespeare wrote a whole 'nother entire play exploring his tragic dimensions, &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;. That play is another very important piece of external evidence for any reading of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, and (unlike &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; itself) is considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works. The fact that the Wikipedia entry for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is several times longer than that for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; provides a rough reckoning of just how much the later play is esteemed and discussed in comparison to the earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are explicit parallels between Antony in the later play and Caesar in the earlier. Both are described similarly. If Cassius &lt;a href=&quot;http://nfs.sparknotes.com/juliuscaesar/page_18.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; of Caesar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like a Colossus, and we petty men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Walk under his huge legs and peep about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To find ourselves dishonourable graves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then Cleopatra &lt;a href=&quot;http://nfs.sparknotes.com/antony-and-cleopatra/page_324.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; of Antony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His legs bestrid the ocean. His reared arm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Crested the world. His voice was propertied&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But when he meant to quail and shake the orb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There was no winter in ’t, an autumn ’twas&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That grew the more by reaping.  His delights&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Were dolphinlike; they showed his back above&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The element they lived in. In his livery&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Walked crowns and crownets. Realms and islands were&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As plates dropped from his pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magnificent though this picture is, when Cleopatra asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Think you there was or might be such a man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As this I dreamt of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The response from Dolabella is quite clear: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gentle madam, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleopatra's portrayal of Antony as an all-conquering, generous, great in bed colossus is seductive; but Dolabella's decided negative does tell us that Antony is not quite all that. Likewise for Caesar. Antony may give us a tremendously attractive picture of him in that great speech, but Brutus's ambivalence should have clued us in that Caesar isn't quite all that either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: is Caesar a dictator or a martyr? The play tells us he's something of both. How far he is either one is arguable. That's what makes the play worth arguing over, and enables such widely divergent productions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T13:03:06.530" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T13:03:06.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1748" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-20T05:18:11.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="195" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:35:57.690" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:35:57.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1749" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-20T05:18:11.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in Hindi. Hindi is one of the official languages of India." OwnerUserId="195" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:34:59.273" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:34:59.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-20T05:29:21.940" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another version of DRM that you find in paper reference sources.  (This where the data itself is not subject to protection.)  Deliberately introduced harmless errors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does nothing to stop people from copying the material for personal use but it does keep them from copying it for commercial use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You say you didn't simply copy my street map.  Please explain to the court how Silly Alley ended up in your map?  As shown by this photograph there is no alley at that location.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or encyclopedia articles that discuss a person or place that doesn't exist, same concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="711" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T05:29:21.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1743" CreationDate="2017-02-20T07:55:21.337" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;We may never know. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-double-life-of-john-le-carre/413152/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Atlantic&lt;/em&gt; article &lt;em&gt;The Double Life of John le Carré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Taking the pen name John le Carré (&lt;strong&gt;he doesn’t remember where from&lt;/strong&gt;),&#xA;  Cornwell began to write while still working in intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T07:55:21.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1752" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-20T08:24:35.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T08:24:35.530" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T08:24:35.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1753" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-20T08:24:35.530" Score="0" Body="Questions about references to other works, external incidents, etc. in literature. Use this tag with the relevant author and work tags if applicable." OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:59:10.060" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:59:10.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2119" CreationDate="2017-02-20T08:45:40.330" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://lukesmitherd.com/books/the-physics-of-the-dead/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Physics of the Dead&lt;/em&gt; by Luke Smitherd&lt;/a&gt;, when Hart is discovering the 'exit', the beast is happily dismembering Bowler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we see that Hart is talking to Bowler and we discover that Bowler's broken body is next to the exit. Earlier on, the beast stated that he wasn't going to prevent Hart leaving but he did have a plan to mess with him. We can assume that Bowler couldn't get to the exit on his own so that leaves Hart or the beast as his means of transport.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, did the beast take Bowler to the exit - was this his plan (which backfired big time) to mess with Hart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:12:06.993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:12:06.993" Title="How did Bowler get there in The Physics of the Dead?" Tags="&lt;the-physics-of-the-dead&gt;&lt;luke-smitherd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1755" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T09:41:15.500" Score="10" ViewCount="928" Body="&lt;p&gt;Orwell was familiar with Hemingway, who was already very famous by the 1920s. Mostly Orwell was quite scathing about Hemingway, because of his macho image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hemingway was relatively favourable towards the official Communists, did this contribute to Orwell's antipathy towards him? Did he ever read Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Hemingway read Orwell's book on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Hemingway read 1984 (obviously, &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; he had written &lt;em&gt;For whom the bell tolls&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I see from the Hemingway list below that Ernie owned &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; copies of &lt;em&gt;Homage to Catalonia&lt;/em&gt;, including a first edition from 1938. I recall reading that only a few hundred copies were printed in '38 (HoC flopped as direct political pamphleteering) so this must have been a fairly rare first edition. Perhaps someone knows if Hemingway was the kind of man to collect books without reading them, or if he would have probably read what books he owned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="664" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T12:11:47.337" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T12:11:47.337" Title="Is there any evidence that George Orwell read 'For whom the bell tolls'? Did Hemingway read 'Homage to Catalonia' or (later) '1984'?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1755" CreationDate="2017-02-20T10:00:11.867" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if he &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; them, but Hemingway &lt;em&gt;owned&lt;/em&gt; two copies of 1984, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/The-Ernest-Hemingway-Collection/~/media/C107EFE32F9C446A8A30B7C46C4B035F.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; (p 275) of his books, cataloged by the JFK library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librarything.com/profile/GeorgeOrwellLibrary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a catalog of books Orwell owned at his death; it is not complete, and there are some books in it that are doubtful, so it can not be taken as any kind of proof, but there are no books by Hemingway in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T10:00:11.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1831" CreationDate="2017-02-20T10:05:16.663" Score="14" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently noticed the passage in Wind in the Willows where Mole comes back to his old home contains this extraordinary quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the walls hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with&#xA;  brackets carrying plaster statuary - Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel,&#xA;  and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plaster busts of Samuel and Queen Victoria would, presumably, have been common British garden ornaments in 1908 when the book was written. But Italian revolutionary Garibaldi seems more of a stretch. Not to mention the fact that Mole's collection of statues extends to a range of other Italian heroes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seemed so incongruous that  I couldn't help but wonder: why are they there? Is this some oblique political statement by the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T00:46:53.153" Title="In Wind in the Willows, why is Mole's garden full of Italian heroes?" Tags="&lt;kenneth-grahame&gt;&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T11:48:21.577" Score="8" ViewCount="920" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a well-known fact that the author of &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; William Golding was an officer in the Royal Navy, and that some of the sights he saw inspired him to write &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boys are stranded on an island. All we know about this island is that there are a mountain, trees and a lagoon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; was also inspired by the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coral_Island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Coral Island&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the island that the boys get stranded on real? Perhaps Golding saw the island during his naval service, or maybe he set it on the same island as that in &lt;em&gt;The Coral Island&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T11:52:49.103" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T17:24:23.187" Title="Is The Lord of the Flies set on a real island?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1743" CreationDate="2017-02-20T11:51:56.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe to increase the likelihood of getting published initially?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a previously unknown author, a French-sounding name would lend some cachet. &#xA;The semi-opaque world of espionage is intriguing, partly because of the perception that insiders have access to sources of information and other resources, not available to the interested outsider. &#xA;Going back through the ages in English history, blue bloods had French as a shorthand for &quot;insider&quot;. This is fairly ubiquitous in the English milieu, example the motto Dieu et mon droit.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a new writer able to leverage the impression of being privy to hitherto unrevealed secrets, perhaps due to his access to an inner clique, would undoubtedly pique the interest of an editor reviewing his MSS, in a world then very attuned to the subject, due to cold war tensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="567" LastEditorUserId="567" LastEditDate="2019-10-31T16:44:35.880" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T16:44:35.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2017-02-20T21:13:55.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there's stronger evidence than the reasons you lay out; I'm not sure of an interview where Moore explicitly lays out this connection though I don't think he's the kind of author to do so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's the kind of author to plaster his works with hidden and not so hidden references, homages and the like; I don't think there's a danger of seeing things which aren't purposely put there with Moore. His &lt;em&gt;League of Extraordinary Gentlemen&lt;/em&gt; features a strong link to &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Black Dossier&lt;/em&gt;, which suggests he's a fan and recognises the influence of Orwell's work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strong concrete evidence probably doesn't exist, but that doesn't make you wrong!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T00:19:11.670" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T00:19:11.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="771" CreationDate="2017-02-20T21:27:51.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For some further clarification; the monthly released 'floppy' comics, published by DC, Marvel, Image etc would be called comic books always. The books made up of multiple issues of the same or complimentary comic series would also usually be called comic books. A graphic novel is usually a complete work, rather than being published in smaller parts; but this is not always the case if the term graphic novel is considered a benchmark for the best kinds of comics which go beyond the comic book label (IE Watchmen was published as individual issues and then collected and is thus considered a graphic novel in this form.) As noted by others, some creators dislike this and find graphic novel a bit pretentious.&#xA;Ultimately, I think all graphic novels are also comic books but not all comic books are graphic novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T21:27:51.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2017-02-20T21:38:56.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_(novel)#Characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry for Stan on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; is as follows;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stan is the most skeptical member of the Club. He is Jewish and is persecuted by Henry Bowers for this reason. Logic, order, and cleanliness are deeply ingrained in his psyche. He relies on logic more than anything else and is the least willing to accept that It actually exists. As an adult, he becomes a partner in a large Atlanta-based accounting firm and marries Patty Blum, a teacher. However, upon receiving Mike's phone call in 1985, he commits suicide by slitting his wrists in the bathtub and writing &quot;IT&quot; in his blood on the wall. In addition, it is heavily implied that Stan was the only one aware that It was not only female but was also pregnant, hence he chose death over returning to Derry to face the ancient terror despite being the one to slice the Losers' palms in a blood oath. It is also implied in the book that Stan remembers more about the children's encounters with It than the others do, sometimes commenting about the Turtle and other events from his time in Derry, though he claims that he doesn't remember what those phrases mean. It can be implied throughout the story that he was psychic to a mild degree (accurately predicting which job his wife should apply for, a higher sensitivity to Its activities, frequent references from the other losers to his &quot;ordered mind&quot;). Besides blaming It for George's death, Bill also blames It for Stan's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I either read the novel or watched the miniseries adaptation, but I do vaguely remember Stan having a more significant encounter with IT in one of the abandoned houses in Derry? Maybe another user can pick this up and run with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T17:47:19.913" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T17:47:19.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1691" CreationDate="2017-02-20T21:43:16.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's implied that some sort of conflict or war is occurring while the boys are on the island, which prevents them from being found earlier. So the answer would depend on the condition of the society which the boys are returning to. It's possible Simon had some family who would want an explanation for his disappearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T21:43:16.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T21:46:48.093" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Late in Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt;, Junior starts referring to her &amp;quot;Good Man&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And her Good Man agreed. As she knew from the beginning, he liked to see her win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They recognized each other the very first night when he gazed at her from his portrait. But it was in dream they got acquainted. No fuss, no bother, no recriminations -- he lifted her up to his shoulders, where she rode through an orchard of green Granny apples. When she woke in a bright, cold room, the dream-warmth was better than the blanket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The portrait, unquestionably, is of Bill Cosey. But the leap that Junior makes -- from tough-as-nails, look-out-for-number-one survivor, to imagining a dead man as her personal protector -- seems to me surprising, out of character, and pretty  arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Junior &amp;quot;adopt&amp;quot; Cosey and cast him into the role of her &amp;quot;Good Man&amp;quot;? What does this signify about her character? Are we meant to understand her as being insane, unstable -- or is this part of her character more thematic? What theme is being expressed here - and how does such an instant, intense, intimate &lt;em&gt;imaginary&lt;/em&gt; connection to Cosey fit in with the rest of the book, thematically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T21:46:48.093" Title="In &quot;Love,&quot; who is Junior's &quot;Good Man,&quot; and what does that imply about her?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;love&gt;&lt;toni-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T22:03:10.457" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two major characters in Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; are local youth Romen and street-smart Junior, who carry on a love affair while both are employed at the Cosey household.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/nov/29/fiction.tonimorrison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 2003 review&lt;/a&gt;, Elaine Showalter describes them thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That love is mirrored by a sadomasochistic affair between a local boy, Romen, and a tough reform-school girl, Junior, who both work for Heed (the pair are a kind of Romeo and Juliet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A connection to Romeo and Juliet would never have occurred to me -- they aren't forbidden lovers; they don't seem to be breaking social or cultural barriers; they don't seem to share any of Romeo and Juliets iconic traits or contrast with them (in anything but youthful, sexual passion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the character names seem heavily suggestive, and Showalter clearly found a link. &lt;strong&gt;Is there a significant comparison to be drawn here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T10:57:16.860" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T00:15:32.110" Title="Is there a &quot;Romeo and Juliet / Romen and Junior&quot; connection drawn in &quot;Love&quot;?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;love&gt;&lt;toni-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1767" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-20T22:05:35.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T22:05:35.197" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T22:05:35.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1768" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-20T22:05:35.197" Score="0" Body="For questions about Toni Morrison's 2003 novel &quot;Love&quot;. Use this tag with the [toni-morrison] tag." OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2017-02-20T23:18:25.607" LastActivityDate="2017-02-20T23:18:25.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-20T22:17:37.617" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; is narrated by L, who lives on the beach, and seems to be the only person around who truly understood Bill Cosey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I pay attention and I know all about him. That kind of understanding can only come from practice, and I had a lot of that with Mr. Cosey. You could say I fathomed his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But L, throughout the story and backstory both, is removed from the action. She's often mentioned as a quiet voice of reason, and a twist near the end has her hand in it -- but it seems we never really learn who L is, what &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; relationship to Cosey was, and why it is that she alone has such insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we actually know about L? Is any justification for her uniqueness given -- do we get any sense of why &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; is a reliable guide and narrator, when all the other characters are wrapped up in their flaws and histories? What structural or thematic role does her character fulfill in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:49:14.030" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:49:14.030" Title="What makes L unique in &quot;Love,&quot; and what is her significance?" Tags="&lt;love&gt;&lt;toni-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1772" CreationDate="2017-02-21T02:32:09.393" Score="8" ViewCount="657" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a novel that was written for the purpose of expressing Ayn Rand's philosophy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Objectivism&lt;/a&gt;. Generally speaking, barring those setbacks placed in their way by non-Objectivists, the Objectivist characters of Rand's books ultimately accomplish great things and live happy lives. The non-Objectivists, on the other hand, make one bad decision after another because of their lack of rationality and inability to see the world as it really is. This is true even when the decisions they make are extraordinarily ill-advised, like rerouting trains so that the only shipment of wheat does not make it to the East Coast, setting up many to die of hunger (Part Three, Chapter V). It almost makes it feel like the non-Objectivists in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;  are mere &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;straw men&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's true that most people are irrational at that level, or that they would continue on an irrational path when faced with utter disaster. So, I wonder if Rand meant the antagonists of her books to portray real-life non-Objectivists (meaning, she really believed them to be that stupid), or if she exaggerated their irrationalities for the purpose of illustrating her philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Rand think that people in the real world were that stupid?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T23:34:52.357" Title="Did Rand think that people in the real world were that stupid?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1771" CreationDate="2017-02-21T02:32:09.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching this question, I found a sort of answer. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged#Philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;novel's Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rand herself stated, &quot;My characters are never symbols, they are merely&#xA;  men in sharper focus than the audience can see with unaided sight. ...&#xA;  My characters are persons in whom certain human attributes are focused&#xA;  more sharply and consistently than in average human beings&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citation goes to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20090315010816/http://www.objectivistcenter.org/showcontent.aspx?ct=1987&amp;amp;printer=True&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article by Robert James Bidinotto&lt;/a&gt;, and does not (as far as I could tell) indicate &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; Rand wrote the above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only criticism of this as an answer to the above question is that Bidinotto only references the Rand quote with regard to her Objectivist heroes (Hank Rearden, in particular); it is unclear whether that rule of character creation applies also to the antagonists or humans in general in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T02:32:09.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-21T03:13:20.477" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that the closest thing to copy protection that's ever included in physical books would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Trap street&quot;&gt;Trap street&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are fake elements included by cartographers in maps to catch people illegally stealing their work. Basically, you include a street, town, river, island etc that does not actually exist in a map that you have created, and if you later catch another publisher selling a map that includes that item, you sue them for illegally profiting from your work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of interesting examples in this article: &lt;a href=&quot;http://gizmodo.com/the-fake-places-that-only-exist-to-catch-copycat-cartog-1695414770&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fake Places That Only Exist to Catch Copycat Mapmakers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="740" LastEditorUserId="927" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T01:14:33.573" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T01:14:33.573" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-21T03:39:10.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard of movie scripts being printed on red or dark brown paper to prevent photocopying on set. Photocopiers at the time only supported full black or white, so if a colour was closer to black, it would become black. Red being closer to black than white resulted in pages being full black. But is different enough to be readable by humans. Not technically a book, but similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course that wouldn't work now days with modern cameras/scanners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But modern cameras often see into the infrared spectrum so a layer of something the had a high reactivity for the infrared spectrum might. Cinemas have used bright infrared lights to prevent people recording the movie with a camera. Night vision on cameras is normally implemented with infrared lights. But not all cameras do this. Its probably also not to hard to filter out the infrared light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth considering that DRM on digital ebooks can still be bypassed using the exact same techniques as copying a physical book. You can scan/photograph the pages on an ebook reader or tablet for example. Of course it's generally quicker to crack the DRM and not have to bother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way DRM just makes it more effort to copy than it's worth for many people. Although some people will bypass it, and you only need one since if they do it then, they can share it with everyone via the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing it does is reduce the quality of the copy. A scanned book might have OCR errors. It might not get formatted the same way. It might be missing metadata like the table of contents. Page numbers might end up in the text. A cam of a movie is bad quality, washed out, bad audio, framerate might be out of sync causing blurred frames. Capping a raw decoded video/audio feed will loose quality when it gets reencoded due to it going through lossy compression twice (that won't apply to lossless codecs, but that's generally only audio).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="742" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T03:39:10.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T08:32:02.067" Score="12" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book in question was written prior to 1990.  The pages probably had no words — I was able to read at the time, so either it was not narrated or the words were not memorable.  Each page, or pair of pages, featured a scene in some fictional town which resembled a human town but populated by arthropods:  insects, spiders.  The arthropods were not anthropomorphic, but assuming the roles of humans in that town.  E.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At a dinner table, a father daddy-long-legs (harvestman) was seated at the head of a table as a pillbug was being served on a platter.  The mother was a preying mantis IIRC.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A large centipede was crawling down a street, colored like a school bus. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;I can't remember if the other insects were riding on it, or if the bus simply resembled a centipede on the outside.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pages had about the same ratio as the Magic School Bus books IIRC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="747" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T16:53:57.847" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T16:53:57.847" Title="Help me identify an old children's picture book featuring anthropomimetic arthropods" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1737" CreationDate="2017-02-21T10:45:36.173" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many video game manuals have forms of copy protection in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some games require you to use a lookup sheet from the manual or similar. The lookup sheet is sometimes a decoder wheel (such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gFtNk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monkey Island&lt;/a&gt;) or printed in a way that is hard to copy (such as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTgz0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sim City&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't really copy protection of manuals, however some games spread the copyright across the entire manual. The reason for copying a manual was primarily to bypass the copy protection of the game. Therefore as a sort of copy protection, they would often force you to have to copy the &lt;em&gt;entire&lt;/em&gt; manual, which in the 90s was not a simple task as photocopy devices were not as ubiquitous as they are today. Examples are games like &lt;em&gt;Lion King&lt;/em&gt; which required you to enter a word from a specific paragraph on a specific page in the manual, and &lt;em&gt;Eye of the Beholder&lt;/em&gt; which had a symbol on every page and required you to enter a word from a page matching the symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both were deterrents to copying the manual by requiring you to copy the entire thing, which was a significant number of pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copy protection through sheer volume is an interesting one, I think! Plus, it stops you from manually writing down the key parts, such as with a single large card, 20 minutes of laborious copying and you could get a key portion of it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the Lion King's copy protection could just be brute forced, if you found one word you could repeatedly launch the game and type in that word until eventually it was correct as it loaded quickly and prompted you immediately upon launch. The dictionary it had of page/line/word combinations was very small. Eye of the Beholder had symbols and a much bigger dictionary so it was harder to copy them manually. In addition, it prompted you after you completed the first level, so you couldn't restart the game quickly if you failed to try again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="750" LastEditorUserId="750" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T16:03:03.043" LastActivityDate="2017-02-21T16:03:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1674" CreationDate="2017-02-21T12:38:59.330" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, the question &lt;em&gt;Has Odysseus been unfaithful to his wife?&lt;/em&gt; would not make sense to the people of ancient Greece. Such a question presupposes that the Greeks had a concept of marital love and fidelity similar to ours, which they didn't. As Stephanie Coontz has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/marriage/chapter1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, the idea of marriage as a partnership based on romantic love is a product of the 18th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage....[O]nly rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead, it was considered a serious threat to social order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marital love in Greek society was not thought of as an enduring romantic and emotional bond between two equals, with sexual fidelity a marker of their trust in and satisfaction with each other. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancient.eu/article/483/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient History Encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[With girls being] Married at the typical age of thirteen or fourteen, love had little to do with the matching of husband and wife. Of course, love may have developed between the couple but the best that might be hoped for was &lt;em&gt;philia&lt;/em&gt; - a general friendship/love sentiment; &lt;em&gt;eros&lt;/em&gt;, the love of desire, was to be found elsewhere, at least for the male.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If marriage for the ancient Greeks was not an erotic [from eros] bond, then this raises two questions: (1) What was marriage for them? and (2) What was an erotic bond for them? Let's look at each in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Marriage among the ancient Greeks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the first question, Nicholas Rauh &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~rauhn/greek_gender.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explains&lt;/a&gt; that among landholding Greeks, women were married off to neighboring men to consolidate land ownership, to bear children, and to look after the household:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To insure the sanctity of the marriage relationship and the purity of the family line, freeborn Greek children underwent a highly restricted, segregated upbringing, at least insofar as sexual interaction with the opposing gender was concerned. Within the social stratum of freeborn landholding citizen elites, young people of opposite genders remained rigidly segregated. As with other ancient cultures, the freeborn daughters of respectable landholding families entered into contractually arranged marriages with males from neighboring families for purposes of procreation and to maintain the economic foundations of both families. Dowries and gifts of land parcels accompanied the coming of age in Greek society. Religious taboos, such as the need to produce a male heir to preserve the ancestor cult, added the additional requirement that the Greek bride be a virgin at the time of her marriage. Typically, young freeborn females of respectable society would experience no sexual experimentation, no dating as we know it, prior to marriage. They would be kept carefully cloistered in the private recesses of the family household and even more carefully chaperoned in public. They were generally required after puberty to hide their features whenever they were in public, donning costumes similar to those worn by females in contemporary Islamic society. Virginity prior to marriage was a requirement of the marriage contract, and chastity and modesty after marriage were norms not only expected of, but imposed on respectable Greek females. Married women were expected to maintain the household, to spin and weave clothing for the family (as well as for retail sale), to direct household servants, to attend to the highly demanding tasks of cooking, cleaning, and domestic hygiene, not to mention, the raising of the family's young. In view of the limited technologies available for these tasks the number of laboring hours devoted to them was considerable. These requirements inevitably induced families to arrange marriages for female children early on in life. On the whole, young freeborn women of property holding families would be married as soon as they reached puberty to begin the process of child bearing and to maintain the domestic quarters of the newly formed family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a classic example of what Gayle Rubin, in her celebrated 1975 essay of the same title, called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://summermeetings2013.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/rubin-traffic.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the traffic in women&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: a man gives his daughter or sister as a gift to another man, so as to augment the status of both men as well as maintain the social economy. The woman in this scenario is &lt;em&gt;property&lt;/em&gt;. Before her marriage, she belongs to her father or brother; after, to her husband. Sexual fidelity was &lt;em&gt;de rigeur&lt;/em&gt; for Greek women because adultery allowed another man access to the husband's property; and this raises the further, more threatening possibility that the children who inherit that property may not be his own. This would destroy the social economy entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This role of women would explain why, as Coontz mentions, marriage based on love would be considered &quot;a serious threat to social order&quot;. Marriage was the means by which social bonds were consolidated, status maintained, property acquired, and its orderly transfer ensured. Erotic love cares about none of those things, being based on individual desire rather than social needs. So it had no place in marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Erotic life among the Greeks&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If marriage was not for the fulfillment of sexual desire, then it is understandable that, as we saw earlier, men formed erotic relationships &quot;elsewhere&quot;. Where was that? Rauh &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~rauhn/greek_sexuality.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt; three outlets for men's sexual energies (quote has been edited for length):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;prostitutes, particularly highly gifted, highly articulate &lt;em&gt;hetairai&lt;/em&gt;. These women tended to arise from slave and/or foreign origin. They were trained by their &quot;pimps&quot; in music, dance, and on occasion intellectual skills such as rhetoric. Apart from sexual favors, these women were able to appeal to their lover's minds.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;female servants (slaves) in their households. One problem with courtesan relations was their high costs. Sexual exploitation of female servants directly under one's household control was a far cheaper alternative. This practice by freeborn Greek males may have been relatively commonplace.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;homosexual relationships ... occurred very young in life as Greek males participated in the athletic regimen and education of the &quot;gymnasium.&quot; Adult Greek males tended to &quot;prey&quot; on younger males for sexual favors and emotional relationships in this environment. Since young males had no monetary resources, could not afford &lt;em&gt;hetairai&lt;/em&gt; or even more common forms of prostitution, and could not expect to date respectable females in any manner, their outlets for sexual experimentation were basically restricted to relations with household servants, if available, and to other males. Evidence of fairly elaborate courting rituals among older Greek males and their younger lovers indicate the likely commonplace character of these relationships.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the sort of ritual we expect around romantic love—a man chasing a reluctant love object, wooing that object with poetry and gifts, eventually overcoming that reluctance—was associated in ancient Greece with homosexuality, not with one's eventual marital partner. Coontz &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stephaniecoontz.com/books/marriage/chapter1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that the Greeks even considered this sort of homosexual love the noblest of all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some cultures and times, true love was actually thought to be incompatible with marriage. Plato believed love was a wonderful emotion that led men to behave honorably. But the Greek philosopher was referring not to the love of women, &quot;such as the meaner men feel,&quot; but to the love of one man for another....Some Greek and Roman philosophers even said that a man who loved his wife with &quot;excessive&quot; ardor was &quot;an adulterer.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly in &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, the love we see that's closest to our current ideals of romantic love is the one between Achilles and Patroclus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for the men. What about the women? Very, very little is known about the erotic life of Greek women of the land-holding classes. The women depicted in the sexual couplings abundant on Greek pottery are likely servants or courtesans rather than women of the household. The few fragments we have from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/sappho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sappho&lt;/a&gt; are probably not representative; but one could use those fragments to speculate that with husbands being at best affectionate friends, and other men being taboo, perhaps women too found their erotic fulfillment with each other rather than with men. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see that Homer's epics share this view of the marital relationship. In the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, the whole point of the Trojan War is to recover a woman &lt;em&gt;stolen&lt;/em&gt; from Menelaus. Menelaus does not revile Helen as an adulteress. Rather, he and the other Greeks see her as his property, and Paris as a thief who must be punished. Since Menelaus is brother to Agamemnon, who is the most powerful king in Greece, Agamemnon must help him; and as Agamemnon's vassals, all the other Greeks are drawn into the war too. By stealing Helen, the Trojans have destroyed the very fabric of Greek society, and the only way to restore it is by forcefully retrieving her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; that Helen is back at Menelaus's side, still his queen. She isn't discarded as no longer a worthy partner, someone who has betrayed his trust through her elopement with Paris. As the daughter of Zeus and the most beautiful woman on earth, she is still extremely valuable property, and Menelaus still values her. (And let us remember that Helen didn't really choose to run off with Paris. She had no choice; Aphrodite gifted her to him. A woman's erotic preferences are beside the point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this tell us about the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope? Well, for Penelope, as for all Greek women of her class, maintaining her own fidelity is a big deal. It's not that her fidelity marks her exceptional love for Odysseus; it's that it shows how wonderful a wife she is. She runs his household impeccably, not allowing anybody to despoil his property—including herself. One of the main complaints against her suitors is that they are ruining Odysseus's home and fortune by their extravagant demands on her hospitality. That she is able to hold them off with her wit and skill makes her an exceptional woman, well worthy of praise. But to be praised as &lt;em&gt;a good wife&lt;/em&gt; in this context is to be recognized for her role as custodian of Odysseus's property: for Odysseus himself, if he's alive; for his son Telemachus, if he's not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for Odysseus? Of course he sleeps around. It would be odd if he didn't. How strange to believe that he would or should reserve his erotic energies for his wife! Calypso even comments on the double standard: men are expected to play around; if a woman does the same, it needs to be squelched immediately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;You gods are the most jealous bastards in the universe—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Persecuting any goddess who ever openly takes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A mortal lover to her bed and sleeps with him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unspoken subtext is &lt;em&gt;Zeus himself has no problem sleeping with mortal women all over the place&lt;/em&gt;; but let &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; take a mortal lover, she says, and he comes down on me like a ton of bricks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if Odysseus's little dalliances with Circe and Calypso go unremarked on by Penelope when he eventually makes his way back to her, it's because they are, in that world, unremarkable. They say nothing about the strength of their marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The strength of their marriage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiously, though, the Calypso episode &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; reveal something about the strength of their marriage. It shows that Odysseus's commitment to the marriage is as strong as Penelope's. He grows increasingly unhappy over the time he's forced to share Calypso's bed. He's been there seven years, and he starts to itch. He longs to go home, and is delighted to get his demob. Calypso offers him divinity in exchange for his staying back with her. This is his response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Goddess and mistress, don't be angry with me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I know very well that Penelope,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  for all her virtues, would pale beside you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She's only human, and you are a goddess,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eternally young. Still, I want to go back.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart aches for the day I return to my home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that Penelope is mortal, and bound to have aged in the twenty years they've been apart. Calypso, on the other hand, is a goddess, eternally young and beautiful. But Odysseus is honey-tongued, a trickster, a master of words. Does he really think that Penelope is no match for Calypso? Or is he merely saying that to placate the goddess? Who knows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we do know that he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; really want to go home. He wants to reclaim his lands, his son, and his wife. If Penelope is loyal to her marriage, then according to his lights, so is Odysseus. His homesickness may not be &lt;em&gt;romantic&lt;/em&gt;, exactly, but it does show that he is committed to the values of his society. Better to live and die as a Greek freeborn landholder, than to be immortal but enslaved to a goddess, eternally young and beautiful though she may be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We probably think that this whole story shows how terrible Penelope's lot was. The little woman, fighting against the odds to save her home and her child, faithfully waiting for her philandering husband to return home: is there anything more clichéd? And to have that woman presented as a heroine: is there anything more antithetical to our sensibilities? True. And yet, how impoverished a reading that can see only all that's abhorrent in this scenario. Penelope would find our reading strange. To turn down immortality and choose to go home instead: when Odysseus has done that, then Penelope would find it hard to cavil that he hasn't kept it in his pants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Odds and Ends&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the time when this was written (ancient Greece)&lt;/em&gt;. Whether Homer's epics can rightly be considered &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt; is a whole 'nother question. Short answer, no. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the time when this was written (ancient Greece)&lt;/em&gt;. Most of what we know about ancient Greece, including the stuff about marriage and sex that's in this answer, is from the classical period: 5th C BCE. The texts as we know them were likely written down &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oldest-greek-fragment-homer-discovered-clay-tablet-180969602/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;around the 8th C BCE&lt;/a&gt;. Three hundred years is a long time. Think how much our own social structures and sexual mores have changed since the early 1700s, and use your judgment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translations are by &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0872204847&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanley Lombardo&lt;/a&gt;, from Book 5, pages 73 and 76. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T02:17:33.207" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T02:17:33.207" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1780" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1847" CreationDate="2017-02-21T14:47:11.570" Score="15" ViewCount="1804" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed this sentence in chapter 4 of &lt;em&gt;The Gilded Age&lt;/em&gt; with numerous commas, semi-colons, colons, and dashes prolonging a sentence of prodigious length:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current, with a verdant world on either hand, and remote from both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water and the helping eddies were, and shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows and littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these “points” she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the “bight” of the great binds and thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out and skirted a high “bluff” sand-bar in the middle of the stream, and occasionally followed it up a little too far and touched upon the shoal water at its head—and then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but “smelt” the bar, and straightway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward and passed her under way, and in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the bar and fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing—and the pilot was lucky if he managed to “straighten her up” before she drove her nose into the opposite bank; sometimes she approached a solid wall of tall trees as if she meant to break through it, but all of a sudden a little crack would open just enough to admit her, and away she would go plowing through the “chute” with just barely room enough between the island on one side and the main land on the other; in this sluggish water she seemed to go like a racehorse; now and then small log cabins appeared in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women and girls in soiled and faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against woodpiles and rail fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show; sometimes she found shoal water, going out at the head of those “chutes” or crossing the river, and then a deck-hand stood on the bow and hove the lead, while the boat slowed down and moved cautiously; sometimes she stopped a moment at a landing and took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of slouchy white men and negroes stood on the bank and looked sleepily on with their hands in their pantaloons pockets,—of course—for they never took them out except to stretch, and when they did this they squirmed about and reached their fists up into the air and lifted themselves on tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the &quot;story&quot; behind this? Was Twain deliberately seeing how long he could draw out a sentence? Are there any longer ones in any of his works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, some of the chapters of this book were written by Twain's friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, but not this one - this is Twain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-21T22:00:21.527" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T15:10:36.827" Title="Is this the longest sentence by Twain?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="73" CreationDate="2017-02-21T17:15:24.913" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting question. I don't have a definitive answer, but here is some pertinent information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the foreword to the book, the fictional (and pathologically self-important) Kinbote suggests reading the notes first, then the poem (with the help of the notes), and then the notes again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Other notes, arranged in a running commentary, will certainly satisfy&#xA;  the most voracious reader. Although those notes, in conformity with&#xA;  custom, come after the poem, the reader is advised to consult them&#xA;  first and then study the poem with their help, rereading them of&#xA;  course as he goes through its text, and perhaps, after having done&#xA;  with the poem, consulting them a third time so as to complete the&#xA;  picture. I find it wise in such cases as this to eliminate the bother&#xA;  of back-and-forth leafings by either cutting out and clipping together&#xA;  the pages with the text of the thing, or, even more simply, purchasing&#xA;  two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent&#xA;  positions on a comfortable table&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These instructions are not necessarily Nabokov's, however. Rather, they are used to illustrate Kinbote's ludicrous self-importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Nabokov agrees with Kinbote that re-readings are important. In &lt;em&gt;Lectures on Literature&lt;/em&gt;, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we read a book for the first time... the very process of&#xA;  learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this&#xA;  stands between us and artistic appreciation.... In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So regardless of in what order you read the work originally, Nabokov does expect you to re-read and re-explore it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is certainly the case that in these subsequent readings, Nabokov intends you to jump around, following his leads and cross-references. He built that kind of branching structure into &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; intentionally. (It is clear from recurrent passages elsewhere in his oeuvre that Nabokov has an aesthetic preoccupation with this kind of branching structure.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, Nabokov does make a comment specifically about &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; which might shed some light on your question. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter06.txt_with-big-pictures.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; can be found the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTERVIEWER:&lt;/strong&gt; Mention of Swift moves me to ask about the genre of &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt;; as a &quot;monstrous semblance of a novel,&quot; do you see it in terms of some tradition or form?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;VN:&lt;/strong&gt; The form of &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; is specifically, if not generically, new. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This response doesn't tell us much, but it does reveal that Nabokov conceived of &lt;em&gt;Pale Fire&lt;/em&gt; as being of a new form: at the very least it is a new &lt;em&gt;species&lt;/em&gt; of novel (if not a new &lt;em&gt;genus&lt;/em&gt; of literature). Maybe the differentia of this species, in Nabokov's mind, is its non-linearity or hypertextuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="104" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T15:13:43.623" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T15:13:43.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-21T17:23:14.110" Score="12" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Kay Chronister's short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shimmerzine.com/the-fifth-gable-by-kay-chronister/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fifth Gable&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; the women who live in the four-gabled house are described in an interlude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before they had been women who lived in the four-gabled house, they&#xA;  had been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A maiden aunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A minister’s wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A washed-up stage actress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A nurse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They did not resemble themselves anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be wrong, but as I see no other order to this list, I think that the first description (&quot;A maiden aunt&quot;) belongs to the woman who makes her bed in the first gable, and the second to the second etc. There is a certain amount of support for this throughout the story; for example, when the women of the house bury Marigold's third child (the one from the woman who makes her bed in the first gable), it would seem appropriate that the minister's wife would suggest a religious activity for the funeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“We should sing a hymn,” said the woman who made her bed in the second&#xA;  gable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Why?” said the woman who made her bed in the fourth gable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It’s conventional. She’d like that.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense that the woman who makes her bed in the third gable, whose reproductive process is linked to drama, is the &quot;washed-up stage actress.&quot; A stereotypical minister's wife would keep a garden, I suppose, so it makes sense that the woman who made her bed in the second gable would produce botanical offspring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just don't understand why a former nurse would be associated with technology, and children made of metal. I guess it's possible that the women's life-creating powers don't relate to their former occupations, but then those don't really need to be mentioned at all, right? (And that also would contradict the pattern I established above.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Although, to be fair, associating the nurse with the almost-biological process of the woman who made her bed in the &lt;s&gt;first gable&lt;/s&gt; cellar does make a certain amount of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is that the order of former vocations does not match the order of gables. I just think it makes sense to make the list follow that order; besides, if I'm right about the actress and the minister's wife, that means that half of the list &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; follow that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, assuming I'm right in my assumptions about the women and their former jobs, &lt;strong&gt;why does the nurse create with metal?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T09:34:34.950" Title="Why does the former nurse create with metal?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kay-chronister&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T04:42:51.520" Score="15" ViewCount="7292" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intentional fallacy is described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/fallacy.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay &quot;The Intentional Fallacy&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. What exactly is the intentional fallacy? Is the concept still used in academia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T21:38:08.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T21:38:08.213" Title="What is the &quot;Intentional Fallacy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1784" CreationDate="2017-02-22T10:49:50.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The intentional fallacy is a misnomer in that the fallacy is not committed intentionally, but rather it relates to intentions. The intentional fallacy is the fallacy of using authors' intentions in interpreting literary works as opposed to interpreting the texts itself. Yes, it is very much relevant today as has been shown on this site. Most people still do not understand the differentiation between an authors' intentions and the interpretations of their work and those that do often ridicule it. As for whether it is important in modern literary theory, it is still important because nothing had changed to make it more acceptable to analyze intentions as opposed to meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a fallacy because it is often unknown to those who commit it, but it is based on a flawed premise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Intentional Fallacy&lt;/em&gt; by W.K. Wimsatt, Jr. and Monroe C. Beardsley&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/intentional-fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia Britannica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T20:24:23.383" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:24:23.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1784" CreationDate="2017-02-22T12:01:03.177" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Intentional Fallacy is the fallacy of defining the meaning of a work using the author's intentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The author intended their work to mean this, and so it means this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this has problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does one know the author's intentions?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What if the author failed in conveying their intentions? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting Wimsatt and Beardsley:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the poet succeeded in doing it, then the poem itself shows what he&#xA;  was trying to do. And if the poet did not succeed, then the poem is&#xA;  not adequate evidence, and the critic must go outside the poem‑for&#xA;  evidence of an intention that did not become effective in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, either the intention to convey a particular meaning is evident in the work, and therefore it already means that, or the work doesn't convey that intention, making it irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This itself could be a fallacy: &lt;strong&gt;Does the author even have intentions?&lt;/strong&gt; - as &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/213841/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Downey&lt;/a&gt; argues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes an author deliberately composes without thematic intentions.&#xA;  ... So, let us consider the method which Salvador Dalí claims that he&#xA;  and Luis Buñuel used when creating &lt;em&gt;Un Chien Andalou&lt;/em&gt;, to put together&#xA;  whatever images came to their mind without any particular intentions&#xA;  directing them. ... &lt;strong&gt;In such a work of art, it is not possible that&#xA;  any such intentions be shown, since there are none.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But there is still a definite intention behind such art&lt;/strong&gt;, namely, the intention to compose with no thematic intentions. This intention&#xA;  could be successfully shown to an audience through a work, certainly.&#xA;  However, Dalís often intend otherwise (so they say). They may intend&#xA;  not to reveal whether or not there are certain, or even any, thematic&#xA;  intentions (perhaps that is an intentional anti-religious theme in&#xA;  that scene in &lt;em&gt;Un Chien Andalou&lt;/em&gt;, after all; we do not know.) Perhaps,&#xA;  even, Dalí does not want us to know whether he wants us not to know.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;An intention not to reveal might apply to the intention not to reveal.&lt;/strong&gt; What a grand game...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related trope: &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/discussion.php?id=03bbm343en6hjez66oowopm7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The curtains are blue.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human language is imperfect, and humans as well. The author may have tried to communicate and idea, yet they may have an imperfect command of the language, or of the art of story-telling, or may have used devices which undermined their intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is it still relevant today?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is still relevant today, and it shall remain relevant: As time passes, language changes, the context changes, and it becomes more and more difficult to divine authorial intent. An author's creation often far outlives the author. Works are read without any knowledge of the author or the circumstances in which the work was created, and acquire a meaning of their own in the minds of the reader. This meaning cannot be dismissed because the author seemed to have intended another meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T12:22:16.237" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T12:22:16.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1758" CreationDate="2017-02-22T12:58:54.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The island is never named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get pretty close:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch&#xA;  us we’ll have fun.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the island is never named and we also don't know where in the world it takes place.  Though the book was based on &lt;em&gt;The Coral Island,&lt;/em&gt; the island in question is just a generic island, which happens to be coral.  I don't think the island is important to the story, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could find nothing in all my searches that indicates that the island was based on a real island, especially since it is so perfectly suited to Golding's needs (for example, the mountain, Castle Rock, the pools, and all the symbolism of the island throughout the novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T17:24:23.187" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T17:24:23.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1789" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:17:10.850" Score="5" ViewCount="1287" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asmodean pulled open a small door, intending to find his way to the&#xA;  pantry. There should be some decent wine. One step, and he stopped,&#xA;  the blood draining from his face. &quot;You? No!&quot; The word still hung in&#xA;  the air when death took him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who killed Asmodean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am pretty sure it was one of the Forsaken, but which one? Demandred or Graendal or someone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T17:39:01.867" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T17:39:01.867" Title="Who killed this Forsaken in The Fires of Heaven?" Tags="&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1788" CreationDate="2017-02-22T13:41:32.237" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asmodean's killer is revealed in &lt;em&gt;Towers of Midnight.&lt;/em&gt;  The glossary entry for Graendal states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A ruthless killer, she was responsible for the deaths of Aran'gar and Asmodean and for the destruction of Mesaana.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the book, Shaidar Haran says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Three Chosen, destroyed by your actions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before that, there was a lot of speculation about who killed Asmodean.  The pinnacle of that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fanfiction.net/s/4975913/1/Sherlock-Holmes-Examines-the-Death-of-Asmodean&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Sherlock Holmes fanfiction&lt;/a&gt; which pretty much explains all the reasoning used before it was revealed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T13:41:32.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1790" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1800" CreationDate="2017-02-22T16:26:14.377" Score="9" ViewCount="4781" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shimmerzine.com/the-fifth-gable-by-kay-chronister/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fifth Gable&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Kay Chronister, the protagonist interacts with the women who live in the four-gabled house. Which, suddenly and inexplicably, at the end of the story finds itself with five gables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Where are we going?” said Marigold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The fifth gable,” said the woman who made her bed in the third gable&#xA;  of the four-gabled house. “We’ll need privacy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, it is mentioned that the house formerly had only a single gable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But before then, the woman who made her bed in the third gable had&#xA;  lived alone. And the house had only one gable, and she could bear no&#xA;  children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt; to be sure that the word &quot;gable&quot; doesn't have any meaning besides for the architectural one (eg &quot;place where people sleep&quot;); it doesn't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do understand that there is magic in this story, so the house could conceivably be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFvizAQHJz8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hogwarts sort of place&lt;/a&gt; with shifting architecture, but is there another explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many gables could there be in a four-gabled house?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a possibility of a gable that isn't counted as part of a set, but is still a gable -- like a house with a peaked roof and four gables that extend from the flat part of the roof (the set of four gables), but the ends of the peaked roof might also qualify as &quot;gables&quot;? Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5jOj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt; as an example: are there two gables here, or four? Could the house below be referred to as a two-gabled house, because of the two smaller gables that jut out of the roof?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5jOj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t5jOj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A house with a peaked roof, with two gables on the side.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-11T15:55:26.463" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T15:55:26.463" Title="How many gables are there in the four-gabled house?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kay-chronister&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1893" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:25:52.060" Score="11" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;, Count Bezukhov's doctors gave him Cream of Tartar after his stroke. What purpose did that serve? I haven't been able to find anything about medical benefits of cream of tartar that seem even vaguely related to this condition; what exactly did they think that giving him that would accomplish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T02:45:29.880" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T02:45:29.880" Title="Why did the doctor give Count Bezukhov cream of tartar?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1858" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:43:30.260" Score="20" ViewCount="862" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some critics have claimed that the explanation of Aslan's sacrifice in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; supports the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ransom_theory_of_atonement&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ransom theory of the atonement&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; There's also a much briefer definition of what that is &lt;a href=&quot;https://carm.org/dictionary-ransom-theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; basically, the Ransom theory holds that Christ died to provide a ransom to the Devil - it is generally rejected by Protestants, which would make it odd for C. S. Lewis to support it). However, I haven't been able to find anything in Lewis's other works to support that. Are there opinions on whether that passage &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; supports that view, and is anyone aware of any other Lewis writings that would support (or explicitly contradict) that view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T05:06:07.193" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T08:29:53.590" Title="Did C. S. Lewis support the Ransom Theory in the Chronicles of Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:49:14.100" Score="16" ViewCount="14875" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;em&gt;Shades of Grey&lt;/em&gt; has a subtitle, The Road to High Saffron, though neither the US nor the UK editions include that on the cover. The book ends in a way that hints at a follow-up. But his web site has no sign of a sequel, and his forthcoming book begins a new series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept is fascinating, and I'd love to see it finish playing out, though I suspect that there isn't that much left to be said. Is a sequel planned at all, or should I think of Shades of Grey as a complete work unto itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T18:14:43.377" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T10:23:19.077" Title="Does Jasper Fforde intend a sequel to Shades of Grey?" Tags="&lt;jasper-fforde&gt;&lt;sequel&gt;&lt;shades-of-grey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1793" CreationDate="2017-02-22T19:59:03.827" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, more books are planned, but whether any and if so how many will actually be written seems to be unclear at this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The probably most up-to-date thing I can find from the author at the moment is a short note &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasperfforde.com/special.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on his website&lt;/a&gt; about a prequel for next year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2018: USA/UK Publication of Shades of Grey Prequel: 7 Things to do before you die in Talgarth &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2nnehg/jasper_ffordes_shades_of_grey_whens_the_next_one/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to this reddit thread&lt;/a&gt; this release date has been pushed back a couple of times from 2015 already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it seems that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sffchronicles.com/threads/534346/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some early editions of the book included titles for two sequels&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He plans two more books: it says in my copy that Brunswick &amp;amp; deMauve will return in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shades of Grey 2: Painting by Numbers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Shades of Grey 3: The Gordini Protocols&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the release for &lt;em&gt;Painting by Numbers&lt;/em&gt; has been pushed back several times. Originally, it was supposed to be released in 2013 according to the linked thread on SFF chronicles, but there is currently no official planned release date. Fforde explained this delay &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/2f98pj/we_are_read_for_pixels_authors_for_the_pixel/ck74q02/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in an AMA in 2014&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was immensely proud of 'SoG' and had high hopes for it, but initial sales were tepid, despite generous reviews, hence the lack of a sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment also contains some information about the prequel (in spoilers, in case you don't want to know until it's out):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; A prequel to 'Shades of Grey' that is essentially a standalone set in the Shades of Grey world, two weeks before the Something that Happened, referred to in Shades of Grey. Jane and Eddie won't be born for another seven hundred years, but there's still a lot of fun to be had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in May 2016, Fforde &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2016/apr/26/jasper-fforde-webchat-jane-eyre-charlotte-bronte#comment-73497443&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;replied to a comment on The Guardian&lt;/a&gt; saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I like this book, but it has had disappointingly low sales - although things are picking up now. I'm planning on writing a sequel as the bokk [sic] after the book after the book I'm working on now, so maybe 2019.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the current timeline he &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; also have been talking about the prequel again, but there's no way to tell for sure. This is the latest update from him I can find (apart from his website), so I'm afraid you'll still have to wait it out and see whether anything will actually be released over the next years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="298" LastEditDate="2017-02-22T20:21:22.537" LastActivityDate="2017-02-22T20:21:22.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-22T22:18:53.517" Score="7" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Beast's conversation with Simon is one of my favorite conversations in literature. The fact that the beast represents the devil (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1477/was-there-a-specific-being-the-lord-of-the-flies-was-based-on&quot;&gt;Beelzebub specifically&lt;/a&gt;), leads me to think that Simon is playing the role of Jesus or an angel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any other examples in the book that portray Simon as a holy creature?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="3" LastEditDate="2020-01-22T11:33:13.553" LastActivityDate="2020-01-22T11:33:13.553" Title="Who did Simon represent during his conversation with the beast?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1795" CreationDate="2017-02-23T00:58:18.167" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many ways Simon can be seen as a Christ figure.  Among the largest scale ones are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simon is never violent, and he never becomes as savage as the others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simon always helps other people and is never mean to Piggy or any of the littl'uns&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact he goes so far as to pick the fruit that the little'uns can't reach and give it to them.  He therefore gets a crowd of people who follow him--similar to the followers of Christ.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He understands that the beast is within the humans, that the beast is human nature and not some other entity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quest to find the beast on the mountaintop is a pretty blatant reference to Jesus and to holy figures in general; he goes somewhere to achieve something (salvation, for example) and comes back changed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Simon's death, trying to inform the savages of what he has found out about the beast, represents Jesus's death as well.  Simon dies thought to be the beast, but simply trying to spread the truth that he is not, in fact, the beast.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T00:58:18.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1805" CreationDate="2017-02-23T04:01:09.280" Score="12" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several of Nabokov's early, Russian-language novels were translated into English in the 1960s, either by Nabokov himself (&lt;em&gt;Despair&lt;/em&gt;), or by translators under his guidance (including his son Dmitri).  To what extent did Nabokov take these translations as opportunities to improve upon the originals?  Did he make extensive changes to any of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not looking for a catalog of changes, just a high-level overview of the extent to which there were any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T08:24:39.570" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T00:54:39.353" Title="How much &quot;self-editing&quot; did Nabokov do when his Russian novels were translated into English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1782" CreationDate="2017-02-23T09:30:44.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They did not resemble themselves anymore.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the associations you draw, linking the various women to the various professions, make sense, I feel they are very weakly supported by the text -- relying on broad stereotypes and tenuous speculation. Even if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a link here, it is likely to be equally tenuous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt; this text is placed in the story -- only after three iterations of baby-creation have (almost) completed; as a momentary interlude before the double climax (of what the first woman makes Marigold do, and the fifth gable). This doesn't seem to me like establishing character; its goal is not to characterize the individual women. The need to establish the women as similar, but each an individual, has passed - Marigold has already been through all but the last of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, it is further characterization of the &lt;em&gt;group&lt;/em&gt;, as one that was once &quot;normal&quot; and &quot;conventional&quot; (&lt;em&gt;&quot;The women had been married before, to ordinary men...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), and then actively banded together (&lt;em&gt;&quot;The women who lived in the four-gabled house found each other in tabloids, then in Sunday papers, then finally in a medical journal that three times failed to pass a peer review...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;). This is crucial to establish, since at the story's conclusion we learn that the women are not together only for shared sorrow and circumstances, but are actually cooperating, working in synergy, to achieve something they could not accomplish alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reiterating that all these women left lives and careers, bitter or otherwise, serves to reinforce that -- and strengthen the double view the entire story runs on: what seems like women isolating themselves in shared misery, being shunned for their strangeness, turns out to be a deliberate and cooperative project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's important here is &lt;strong&gt;that they did not resemble themselves anymore&lt;/strong&gt;. That their sorrow, their power, their shared house and what they have done with it, has shaped them into something new and different. If there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a strong clear connection, if the influence of their previous lives had been clearly present, &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; would have been the oddity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T09:30:44.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1782" CreationDate="2017-02-23T09:34:34.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A proposal for a possible connection - tenuous, but no more than those you've suggested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nurses work at hospitals, which are full of &lt;em&gt;machines and medical instruments&lt;/em&gt;. Think of patients hooked up to IVs and beeping machines of every shape and size -- this is what nurses deal with constantly; it's a lot of what their care for patients look like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, medical instrumentation isn't quite &quot;parts of old radios and tractors,&quot; and have more beeping than &quot;the spinning of propellors.&quot; But the essential idea that &lt;strong&gt;machinery is what sustains and creates life&lt;/strong&gt;, sounds like a conclusion you can certainly choose to draw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T09:34:34.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1790" CreationDate="2017-02-23T14:21:25.007" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably Four.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A four-gabled house seems to refer to an X-like shape, with a gable extending in each direction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/69RXM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/69RXM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Four-Gabled House - X-Shaped&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, take a look at this &lt;a href=&quot;http://thedailysouth.southernliving.com/2013/09/17/house-plan-of-the-month-four-gables/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;image and house-plan&lt;/a&gt; for a house called The Four Gables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a design where, clearly, there is no possible place for a fifth gable. Each direction of the house is already taken; above the gables, the house ends in a single point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hypothetically, you might stretch the house out, add another story above the crossed gables (&lt;em&gt;&quot;Perhaps they would hurt her so deeply that she could at last ascend to the fifth gable&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), but that would seen like very odd architecture, and less likely to be described as a four-gabled house to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possibly More?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google shows me that additional configurations with four gables are entirely possible, e.g. this one, in the gardens of Burrswood Hospital:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f2sLF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/f2sLF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Four-Gabled building: Burrswood Hospitol&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's conceivable that with a structure like this, it appear to be a four-gabled house from its front facade, but have additional gables in back, obscured from view. That would be a &quot;four-gabled house&quot; with more than four gables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to match up with the constant stress that it is a Four-Gabled House, or with the description of &quot;ascending&quot; to the fifth gable, but it's hypothetically possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Appearing and Disappearing Gables&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, it seems fairly clear that the story is banking on the reader understanding the house as having precisely four gables, and the fifth gable as being magical (and inaccessible by normal means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The constant reference to &quot;the four-gabled house&quot;, and the matching of four women for four gables, is clear. We're not intended to question the architecture here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the story is titled &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Fifth Gable&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; -- telling us, right from the start, that there &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; be a fifth gable. An obvious implication is that the fifth gable is special, remarkable. But then it isn't referenced again until the very end. To me, this omission indicates that the fifth gable is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a mundane part of the house -- if you &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; there's a fifth gable, but keep calling it a four-gable house, that's because there's a very immediate reason &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to count the fifth one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You call attention to this very interesting snippet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The women who lived in the four-gabled house found each other in tabloids, then in Sunday papers, then finally in a medical journal that three times failed to pass a peer review. But before then, the woman who made her bed in the third gable had lived alone. &lt;strong&gt;And the house had only one gable, and she could bear no children.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be read simply: before the women convened together, the third woman lived in a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; house, and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; house had only one gable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But knowing the story's conclusion, knowing that magically-appearing gables are an option, and knowing the third woman's unique significance, does offer us an intriguing reading: rather than the fifth gable being a magical feature of the house or the coven, &lt;strong&gt;each woman brings a gable into existence.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We eventually learn that the third woman is the linchpin; the other women are primarily there to cause enough suffering, that the third woman will be able to give them a child. This casts the above paragraph in a very different light: not that the third woman was &lt;em&gt;one among many&lt;/em&gt;, and lived in a different place. Rather, &lt;em&gt;she had a unique ability&lt;/em&gt;, and gathered others around her, in order to be capable of actually putting it to use. So there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; reason to see this description as significant, see the third woman &lt;em&gt;as she was&lt;/em&gt; as being significant, and guess that it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be the same house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other component in this reading is: &lt;strong&gt;the story is deliberately misleading you.&lt;/strong&gt; Until the end, the women appear to be of a kind -- all of them barren; none of them able to help; none of them able to carry infants to term. The story appears to be Marigold trying one after the other, all of them inevitably failing, Marigold growing more despairing -- just as the women have. This story pattern, &lt;em&gt;given the title&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;The Fifth Gable&quot;, might be pointing in a clear direction: that Marigold, too, will despair, and join the women, getting a gable of her own. (On my first readthrough, her constant baked goods seemed like it might make for &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; eventual &lt;em&gt;modus operendi&lt;/em&gt; -- crafting children out of dough, perhaps.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's an example where there's a strong implication that &lt;strong&gt;the women create the gables.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further support for this can be found in the third woman's line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“He wasn’t really mine. None of them have been.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a stress here -- that even though the four women are doing all of this impossible creation of children, &lt;em&gt;the mother participates as well.&lt;/em&gt; So, in a very real sense, the fifth gable &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; Marigold's -- just not in the way we (might have) expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In conclusion,&lt;/strong&gt; while the simplest reading is that the house has four gables &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a magical fifth one, there is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; support in the story for a reading where each woman causes one gable to spring into creation. This would address the line saying &lt;em&gt;&quot;the house had only one gable&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T14:21:25.007" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1802" CreationDate="2017-02-23T16:27:43.563" Score="15" ViewCount="1376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this not long ago, maybe a year.  It was either a short story or a novella, certainly not longer.  Read in English, in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was definitely older though, no clue exactly when but probably before the 2000s. (I remember very yellow crackly pages in my copy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One quote that I distinctly remember was something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They said that Daniel Boone would pick up and move camp if he saw the smoke from another man's fire. Compared to Boone, &amp;lt; main-character-name &gt; was pathologically gregarious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I don't remember the main character's name)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book opened with the main character (an old man) living on a mostly abandoned world. I don't remember the exact setting, but it was barren of sapient life.  There were animals that were like a cross between a racoon, komodo dragon, and velociraptor. They were sentient and hostile to humans, but the main character had somehow tamed them so they didn't attack him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A woman visits the man, asking for his help with something.  I'm fairly certain it's not explicitly stated in the story yet, but the man understands what she wants.  He refuses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out there are two rival factions warring for control of pretty much everything, and he doesn't want to participate in the war. Furthermore, he doesn't trust the woman to be who she claims to be (she says she's from faction A, but she might be from B)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in here another man appears, heavily injured and unconscious.  I don't remember much about this, except I'm fairly certain the woman kills the unconscious man. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story culminates with the reveal of the a piece of technology. This is some sort of wristband that allows the wearer to warp between parallel Earths. The old man's version of the device was older and in the form of a belt.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an asteroid.  In different versions of the Earths, the asteroid went from overshooting it on the right, to hitting the edge, to full-on collision, then hitting the left edge, to missing, etc.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man was living on a planet where the asteroid had come close enough to obliterate life, but not actually hit and destroy the planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woman turned out to be evil (shocker amirite) and stole something (I think) from the old man.  He chased her, and she kept running and warping from world to world. At some point they even warped to a place where the asteroid had completely destroyed the planet and there wasn't even an atmosphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, it turns out the old man was the creator of this technology. He couldn't live in a world with that tech being constantly used, so he left to live like a hermit on an Earth far away.  He had created the device, and another person had refined it into a lightweight wrist device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spared the woman and told her to leave, but she still tried to kill him.  She failed, and I'm fairly certain the old man just left her for the komodo-racoon-raptor beasts to kill. He packed up camp and left for a more distant world, possibly using up the rest of his device's battery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end, the leader of the pack of the komodoraptors was implied to have gained human-like intelligence, implying that it would start a dog-eat-dog style civilization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I'm fairly certain the reason the old man didn't like the technology was because he thought it would lead (spoiler: it did) to humanity exterminating other versions of humanity and pretty much any other animals they came across, cutting off their future and preventing them from evolving further.  The ending possibly implied that he realized what the komodo lizards would become, but maybe not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly certain I read this story in a collection of short stories from assorted authors, again in the US about 6 months to a year ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T08:24:25.390" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T08:24:25.390" Title="Science fiction short story with the ability to jump from world to world" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1801" CreationDate="2017-02-23T16:45:11.690" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;This strongly reminds me of &lt;em&gt;The Long Earth&lt;/em&gt; series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I distinctly remember a passage about the main character, Joshua Valiente, which matches the quoted passage comparing him with Daniel Boone. In this series, there's a device called a Stepper which lets humans &lt;em&gt;step&lt;/em&gt; between parallel Earths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Earth_%28series%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, it seems the series originated in a short story, &lt;a href=&quot;http://thelongearth.wikia.com/wiki/The_High_Meggas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The High Meggas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (The device is a belt in this story.) Looking at the Long Earth Wikia's plot description for that story, it seems there is a female character who turned out to be the villain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Shea asks for the gun, so that she can finish him off - an act of murder. Larry realises that she is a killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The asteroid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The crater was made by a fragment of an asteroid that hit Linsay's&#xA;  Earth - as well as the surrounding worlds - ten or fifteen thousand&#xA;  years previously. Larry calls this asteroid &quot;the Fist&quot;. ...   With&#xA;  every move, the effects of the Fist become more pronounced. Finally,&#xA;  Linsay and Shea move into the Gap - a world where the Earth has been&#xA;  destroyed completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have super-intelligent baboons, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Anna Shea appears suddenly, holding a gun - she also survived the Gap.&#xA; Big Yin, the superbaboon pack leader, assaults her from behind and&#xA; Shea is killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-23T23:09:05.850" LastActivityDate="2017-02-23T23:09:05.850" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1808" CreationDate="2017-02-23T21:14:20.383" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very end of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, a group of covered wagons picks up people who were stranded by the &lt;em&gt;Comet&lt;/em&gt;'s demise. Is it significant that they're heading east (e.g. that they were somehow &quot;undoing&quot; the progress of the people who contributed to progress by heading west in the covered wagons)? Or am I reading too much into that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking specifically about authorial intent here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T00:00:32.747" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T00:00:32.747" Title="What is the significance of the fact that the covered wagons were traveling East at the end of Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1797" CreationDate="2017-02-23T22:03:29.287" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nabokov sometimes used translations into English as an opportunity to touch up his work, but sometimes he didn't. Below are a few case studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe the best example of Nabokov making changes is &lt;em&gt;Laughter in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, the author's rewrite of Winifred Roy's 1935 translation of the Russian &lt;em&gt;Kamera Obskura&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colapinto has a piece in the New Yorker called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nabokov-retranslated-laughter-dark&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Nabokov Retranslated &amp;quot;Laughter in the Dark&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (2014) which describes the changes Nabokov made to Roy's translation. It turns out that Nabokov worked directly from Roy's translation in composing &lt;em&gt;Laughter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are just some of the changes that Nabokov made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He changed all the character names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He added the early film scene which foreshadows the book's end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He changed the age of the heroine from Roy's &amp;quot;seventeen or eighteen&amp;quot; to sixteen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He substantially re-worked the opening to increase its speed. (This includes adding the memorable passage about the animated Bruegel painting and changing the mechanism by which Axel Rex is introduced).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He made minor changes to imagery (such as adding the imagery of the &amp;quot;frozen wave&amp;quot; of carpet to the final scene).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He changed the mechanism by which Albinus discovers Margot's infidelity (which involves replacing the character of Segelkranz with Udo Conrad).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear from &lt;em&gt;Laughter&lt;/em&gt; that at least sometimes Nabokov used translations as an occasion to substantially touch up his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in the 1970 foreword to his translation of &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; (with Michael Glenny), Nabokov explicitly declares that he did not make any substantial changes to the work. He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realized as soon as my collaboration with Mr. Glenny started that our translation should be as faithful to the text as I would have insisted on its being had that text not been mine. Revampments of the lighthearted and highhanded order that I used for the English version of, say, &lt;em&gt;King, Queen, Knave&lt;/em&gt; could not be envisaged here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The only adjustments I deemed necessary are limited to brief utilitarian phrases in three or four passages alluding to routine Russian matters&lt;/strong&gt; (obvious to fellow-émigrés but incomprehensible to foreign readers) &lt;strong&gt;and to the switch of seasonal dates in Ganin’s Julian Calendar to those of the Gregorian style in general use&lt;/strong&gt; (e.g., his end of July is our second week of August, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nabokov may have left &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; alone, but he does admit in the above passage that he made &amp;quot;revampments of the lighthearted and highhanded order&amp;quot; to &lt;em&gt;King, Queen, Knave&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, he admits as much also in the foreword to that book, where he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the end of 1966, my son had prepared a literal translation of the book in English, and this I placed on my lectern beside a copy of the Russian edition. &lt;strong&gt;I foresaw having to make a number of revisions affecting the actual text of a forty-year-old novel&lt;/strong&gt; which I had not reread ever since its proofs had been corrected by an author twice younger than the reviser. Very soon I asserted that the original sagged considerably more than I had expected. I do not wish to spoil the pleasure of future collators by discussing the little changes I made. Let me only remark that my main purpose in making them was not to beautify a corpse but rather to permit a still breathing body to enjoy certain innate capacities which inexperience and eagerness, the haste of thought and the sloth of word had denied it formerly. Within the texture of the creature, those possibilities were practically crying to be developed or teased out. I accomplished the operation not without relish. The “coarseness” and “lewdness” of the book that alarmed my kindest critics in émigré periodicals have of course been preserved, but &lt;strong&gt;I confess to have mercilessly struck out and rewritten many lame odds and ends&lt;/strong&gt;, such as for instance a crucial transition in the last chapter where in order to get rid temporarily of Franz, who was not supposed to butt in while certain important scenes in the Gravitz resort engaged the attention of the author, the latter used the despicable expedient of having Dreyer send Franz away to Berlin with a scallop-shaped cigarette case that had to be returned to a businessman who had mislaid it with the author’s connivance (a similar object also figures, I see, in my Speak, Memory, 1966, and quite properly, too, for its shape is that of the famous In Search of Lost Time cake). I cannot say I feel I have been losing time over a dated novel. Its revised text may soften and entertain even such readers as are opposed, for religious reasons no doubt, to an author’s thriftily and imperturbably resurrecting all his old works one after the other while working on a new novel that has now obsessed him for five years. But &lt;strong&gt;I do think that even a godless author owes too much to his juvenilia not to take advantage of a situation hardly ever twinned in the history of Russian literature&lt;/strong&gt; and save from administrative oblivion the books banned with a shudder in his sad and remote country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I should like to mention an apt quote from the foreword to &lt;em&gt;Invitation to a Beheading&lt;/em&gt;, where Nabokov explicitly describes his urge to emend his previous work.  He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If some day I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be “To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered, for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.”&lt;/strong&gt; Generally speaking the urge to do this grows in proportion to the length of time separating the model from the mimic; &lt;strong&gt;but when my son gave me to check the translation of this book&lt;/strong&gt; and when I, after many years, had to reread the Russian original, &lt;strong&gt;I found with relief that there was no devil of creative emendation for me to fight.&lt;/strong&gt; My Russian idiom, in 1935, had embodied a certain vision in the precise terms that fitted it, and the only corrections which its transformation into English could profit by were routine ones, for the sake of that clarity which in English seems to require less elaborate electric fixtures than in Russian. My son proved to be a marvelously congenial translator, and it was settled between us that fidelity to one’s author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage Nabokov confesses his desire to emend his earlier writing, while also observing that he found no need to change &lt;em&gt;Invitation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, sometimes Nabokov used translation as an occasion to make drastic changes (as in &lt;em&gt;Laughter in the Dark&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;King, Queen, Knave&lt;/em&gt;), but sometimes he didn't (as in &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Invitation to a Beheading&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T00:54:39.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1833" CreationDate="2017-02-24T04:58:13.007" Score="13" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember when I was child (probably about 40 years ago), I read some story in a Russian book (I think original was Russian, not translated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story is the following: a man read some documentary book about WW2, but it isn't the same WW2, which we know, other events, other names, other Nazi leader (not Hitler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he think that if he could go to this time and kill this leader, we can save lot of lives. Then he fell asleep and transferred to this time. He managed to meet this leader and kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then we woke up at home, take this book and see that events changed, WW2 now is the same as we know and the Nazi leader was Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to find this story, so it's probably around 70th and in Russian language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: What else I remember: it was in  a book, containing science fiction stories by different authors (for example I remember another story, where a man could use electricity instead of food and became very strong). This story (which I'm looking for) is short (2-3 pages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To kill the Nazi leader (before they took power) the man came to one meeting and after the meeting asked the leader for a private conversation and strangled him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other detail: when he was in an old German (or maybe Austrian) city, he hired some man with a mustache to help with his luggage and by mistake gave him a very big banknote (because was not familiar with local currency). This mustache man took the money and disappeared very fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the protagonist returned to his time, he recalled his face and understood who he was. Last sentence in this story: &quot;What was his name? Schicklgruber? Hitler!&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T18:22:58.587" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:22:58.587" Title="Short story in Russian about time travel and changing the history of WW2" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1804" CreationDate="2017-02-24T05:01:23.667" Score="11" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Just going, brother! Just looking for some place to stop . . . somewhere. &lt;strong&gt;We're from Imperial Valley, California. The 'People's Party' crowd grabbed the crops and any food we had in the cellars. Hoarding, they called it. So we just picked up and went. Got to travel by night, on account of the Washington crowd. . . . We're just looking for some place to live&lt;/strong&gt;. . . . You're welcome to come along, buddy, if you've got no home—or else we can drop you off closer to some town or another.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance in-universe is that they are literally escaping California (and thus heading East).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance out of universe is - presumably - as you noted, that it is the reverse of the original. During Oregon Trail days, you traveled West to obtain maximum freedom and opportunity. During the events when Comet got stuck, California became the land of un-freedom and tyranny, with the mid-west being the only free option to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T05:01:23.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1817" CreationDate="2017-02-24T07:40:18.267" Score="2" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lews Therin and his Companions put the seal on the Bore and supposedly locked away the Dark One and all of the 13 Forsaken. But in the prologue​ of &lt;em&gt;The Eye of The World&lt;/em&gt; which happened after this, Ishamael meets Lews Therin, also there are multiple indications in the first book that Ishamael was never imprisoned. If that's the case, why did he wait for three thousand years? He could have done a lot of bad things, maybe even become the ruler of the whole world? What was he doing all that time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastEditorUserId="357" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T18:41:54.820" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T18:41:54.820" Title="What was Ishamael doing for three thousand years?" Tags="&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1812" CreationDate="2017-02-24T07:45:40.350" Score="25" ViewCount="9648" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Around the World in 80 Days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a novel be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jules Verne&lt;/a&gt; about an Englishman who makes a bet with some fellow club members that he can travel around the world in 80 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays with modern flight, going round the world in 80 days wouldn't only be possible, but could be done 40 times over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the time the book was published in 1873, there was no flight, just steamships, railways and hot air balloons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So at this time, would going round the world (visiting every time zone, and at least staying out of the polar circles) in 80 days be possible, or would this feat be quite a big thing which is why the book became so popular and famous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T04:53:04.713" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T04:53:04.713" Title="Could you actually go around the world in 80 days?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;around-the-world-80-days&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2017-02-24T08:44:34.600" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Circumnavigation was nothing new. Speedy circumnavigation was new, but not unheard of, and &lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt; wasn't positing anything outlandish or even vaguely sci-fi. It's a story celebrating what the British Empire had already accomplished, not postulating what might be possible in the future. Verne himself claims to have been inspired by an early 1860s newspaper item which said that a man could in fact go around the world in 80 days and someone had done so already. Verne's claim is probably not precisely true, but whether it's an error of his memory or of the newspaper item we can't know—see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1813/151&quot;&gt;verbose's answer&lt;/a&gt; for speculation on what article he might have read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People had been circumnavigating the globe for centuries—the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Magellan%27s_circumnavigation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first known successful attempt&lt;/a&gt; was in the early 1500s and the feat was repeated several times in the following three hundred years. Circumnavigations became both more common and faster in the 1800s. Thomas Cook ran a leisurely circumnavigation group tour in 1872, a few months before &lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt; was published.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt; opens with a discussion of just how trivial circumnavigation had become for a man with sufficient resources, and Verne isn't exaggerating (see above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent global infrastructure improvements also meant the world was ripe for speedy circumnavigation: In 1870 George Train made the journey in 80 days (minus two months spent in France; his 80-day record is just counting the travel time). It was ridiculously expensive to go around the world quickly, but given sufficient money the big obstacle was unrest in the areas one traveled rather than the speed of one's mode of travel (again, reflected relatively accurately—albeit sensationally—in the novel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sixteen years after &lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt; was published, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Seventy-Two_Days&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland competed on behalf of the &lt;em&gt;Cosmopolitan&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;New York World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to see who could do the circumnavigation faster. There was no question that they could do it. Both met with hardship on the way, but each beat the semi-fictional 80-day record: Bly did it in 72 days, Bisland in 76; the difference was largely a matter of which newspaper was willing to spend more money on the stunt. (For more information on both women, I recommend Jason Porath's excellent &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0062405373&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rejected Princesses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.) A few months later George Train did it again and hit 67 days, then beat his own record a third time with 60 days in 1892.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popularity of &lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt;, then, was more about the reputation and skill of the author and his depiction of the dangers encountered on the journey, than about the feasibility of the feat itself. The deadline lent extra urgency to the dangers the characters encountered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that &lt;em&gt;Around the World&lt;/em&gt; celebrates the technological marvels and political influence of the world-spanning British Empire. It flatters the British pride, and that certainly didn't hurt its popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T14:24:05.030" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T14:24:05.030" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1811" CreationDate="2017-02-24T09:02:47.187" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was possible, but not easy. The difficulty of the task accounts for the substantial amount of the bet: £20,000 in 1873 is worth about £2,000,000 or more than US $2.5 million today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Butcher's 1995 &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199552517&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of Verne's book includes an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ibiblio.org/julesverne/books/awed%20revd%20edn.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;appendix&lt;/a&gt; that provides details of contemporary sources that had information regarding quick circumnavigations, both theoretical and actual. A periodical called &lt;em&gt;Le Tour du Monde&lt;/em&gt; carried an article on the occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, when I was but a wee lad. The article said that it was now possible to complete the circumnavigation in 80 days, with the following itinerary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Paris to Port Said, railway and steamer............6  days&#xA;Port Said to Bombay, steamer ......................14 days    &#xA;Bombay to Calcutta, railway .......................3  days  &#xA;Calcutta to Hong Kong, steamer ....................12 days   &#xA;Hong Kong to Edo, steamer .........................6  days   &#xA;Edo to Sandwich Islands, steamer ..................14 days   &#xA;Sandwich Islands to San Francisco, steamer.........7  days   &#xA;San Francisco to New York, railway.................7  days   &#xA;New York to Paris, steamer.........................11 days    &#xA;Total ............................................ 80 days&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Port Said is the head of the Suez Canal; the Sandwich Islands are Hawaii. ) This theoretical journey is pretty much the exact itinerary proposed by Fogg, so Verne must have seen this article and found it an inspiration for his novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another inspiration was the American entrepreneur &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Francis_Train&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Francis Train&lt;/a&gt;. In 1870, he traveled around the world in 80 days. Well, the actual &lt;em&gt;travel&lt;/em&gt; took 80 days, but he broke his journey and hung around in France for a while. From the Wikipedia article linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in 1870 Train decided to make a trip around the globe, which was covered by many newspapers. The actual traveling took 80 days, though he stayed two months in France, supporting the Paris Commune for which he spent two weeks in jail (the US government and Alexandre Dumas intervened to get him released). His exploits possibly inspired Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days. His protagonist Phileas Fogg is believed to have been partially modeled on Train.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One remarkable person to complete a circumnavigation in less than Verne's stated time was the investigative journalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nellie Bly&lt;/a&gt;. Following the publication of Verne's novel, she decided to try to see whether the journey could actually be completed in 80 days. In 1889, she went &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Seventy-Two_Days&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;around the world in 72 days&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T09:25:00.747" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T09:25:00.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1814" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-24T09:51:27.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T09:51:27.377" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T09:51:27.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1815" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-24T09:51:27.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about the book 'Around the World in Eighty Days' (French: 'Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours', 1872) by Jules Verne. Use this tag with the [jules-verne] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:39:19.267" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:39:19.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1824" CreationDate="2017-02-24T11:01:11.897" Score="1" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware of speculation that Indiana Jones is possibly based on one or more hybrids of historical individuals, but does the character have a literary forerunner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="819" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T11:33:42.250" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T11:33:42.250" Title="Does Indiana Jones have a literary inspiration or equivalent?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;indiana-jones&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1810" CreationDate="2017-02-24T11:30:20.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He was doing &quot;Bad Stuff&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Ishamael&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt; lists two possibilities on whether he was trapped or not. He was either A. half sealed and able to be spun out of the prison, or B. never trapped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the important things to remember about Ishamael was that he was insane, so the things he supposedly did may not make sense to a non crazy, non evil person. The wiki also only knows of two of his adventures, but they are incredibly important to the &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the wiki, he, under the name of Ba'alzamon, raised a trolloc  army and attacked, and destroyed Manetheren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His most devastating action during the Wars was when he led the Shadows forces in directly assaulting Manetheren. The attack destroyed Manetheren and allowed the Trolloc armies to ravage nearly all of the Westlands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then disappeared after 40 years, and the trolloc army is destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then becomes the chief advisor to Arthur Hawkwing under the name of Jadwin Moerad. It was he who encouraged Arthur to lay siege to Tar Valon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He set about wrecking that which Hawkwing had built, &lt;strong&gt;advising him to dismiss all Aes Sedai from his service, lay siege to Tar Valon&lt;/strong&gt;, send his armies across the Aryth Ocean, and refuse Healing on his deathbed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Hawkwing's death he basically sows chaos into the main contenders to the thrown by killing many of them. Then, after 40 years, he vanishes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I agree with the theory of Aran son of Malan son of Senar, who stated that Ishamael could be spun back out into the pattern for as long as 40 years to do evil and, in response to your question, he did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I got this information from the  WOT Wikia article on Ishamael. If anyone wants to find the original source I believe (I have sadly not read it) that the information comes from &lt;em&gt;The World of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T11:48:45.140" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T11:48:45.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:30:14.930" Score="3" ViewCount="1976" Body="&lt;p&gt;The official publishing company of J.K Rowling named &lt;strong&gt;Pottermore&lt;/strong&gt; have revealed (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/features/etymology-behind-harry-potter-character-names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) that there are/were interesting and well thought etymology of characters in Harry Potter book series. It does not contain however all the characters' names' etymology (including famous Longbottoms, Weasleys etc)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What led Ron's sister name to be &lt;strong&gt;Ginevra Weasley&lt;/strong&gt; (Ginny Weasley)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T19:22:49.027" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T23:17:37.823" Title="Why was Ginny Weasley named Ginny Weasley?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1818" CreationDate="2017-02-24T13:58:53.140" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe all the Weasleys except Ron were named after either characters from Arthurian legend or historical royalty of England/Albion/Britain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arthur (duh)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Molly (sometimes a nickname for Margaret or Mary)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Percival&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frederick&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ginevra (a form of Guinevere)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T23:17:37.823" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T23:17:37.823" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-24T17:11:20.623" Score="10" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading Zora Neale Hurston's memoir &lt;em&gt;Dust Tracks on a Road&lt;/em&gt; and I thought it seemed to be full of tall tales as well as omissions, though obviously it is based on her real life. In his afterword to the edition I read, Henry Louis Gates Jr writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hurston did make significant parts of herself up, like a masquerader putting on a disguise for the ball, like a character in her fictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered to what extent the memoir was fictionalised - is it possible to summarise the key fictions? Or would it be shorter to summarise the key facts?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="248" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-02-24T18:29:59.273" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T18:29:59.273" Title="How fictionalised is &quot;Dust Tracks on a Road&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;zora-neale-hurston&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1816" CreationDate="2017-02-24T19:50:46.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origins are well documented on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones#Origins_and_inspirations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Lucas was very public about the character of Indy being inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Scrooge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scrooge McDuck&lt;/a&gt; in a treasure hunting storyline, although &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Quatermain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alan Quartermain&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Challenger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Professor Challenger&lt;/a&gt; are taken to be more direct references.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T19:50:46.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1679" CreationDate="2017-02-24T21:23:19.960" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not meant to be definitive nor exhaustive, but merely an exploration of certain themes and symbols in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats is widely regarded as one of the great poets of the ages--Eliot considered him the greatest poet of the 20th century--and is certainly of similar stature with the greatest poets of antiquity. Thus his innovations regarding subjects such as mythology can be taken as new additions to canon. Linking his use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aengus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aengus&lt;/a&gt; to previous stories is not essential, where choosing the mythological figure associated with poetry conveys meaning merely for the choice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Love, youth and poetic inspiration&quot; are clearly the central themes of this poem.  (Insight might be found in Yeats &lt;em&gt;not having choosen&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ois%C3%ADn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oisín&lt;/a&gt; as the protagonist, as that choice could be said to carry different significance.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, there is a direct reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/oengus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dream of Aengus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in that Aengus was said to have fallen in love with a girl he'd seen in a dream, and pursued her until he found her. Yeats is certainly transfiguring this story from mythology into a new form that carries new meaning.  [As a referent, you may want to read Yeats' plays dealing with the Ulster Cycle.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And caught a little silver trout&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This instantly brought to mind the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_of_Knowledge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salmon of Knowledge&lt;/a&gt;, which is due no doubt, in part, to the opening of the stanza &quot;Because a fire was in my head&quot;, where head can be taken as &quot;mind&quot;. Perhaps Yeats was being playful in recasting this legendary fish as a &quot;little silver trout&quot;. (In other words, the poet is not to receive all the knowledge of the world, merely a little piece. Clearly the poet places less value on knowledge than love, which is consistent with Yeats, who could be quite romantic: &quot;Wine comes in at the mouth&quot; and so forth.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Salmon of Knowledge was elevated from common fish status by eating 9 hazelnuts. Unlike Fionn, Yeats doesn't have a chance to cook the fish and gain its benefit, being distracted by a girl.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author's use of a &quot;hazel wood&quot; is not random--hazel wood was said to be sacred to poets, and thus proscribed for use in the hearth, which is doubly interesting in that it is presented in a fire context. Possibly Yeats' meaning is that the fire of inspiration cannot be restrained, for is use of fire is clearly meant to mean inspiration. [More on hazel in the Celtic tradition can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_sacred_trees#Hazel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_sacred_trees#Apple&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;apple tree&lt;/a&gt; also has meaning in Celtic lore.  The proposed meanings both work in the context of the poem: &quot;fruitfulness&quot; as in fertility and sexual maturity/appeal; &quot;immortality&quot; in that the girl is ethereal and likely represents an ideal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet is do distracted by the girl, he forgets what he was doing and spends the rest of his life pursuing her, who, as an ideal, is ultimately unobtainable.  But for the poet, this is useful, as it leads to a lifetime of inspiration (striving to reach the ideal) and results in this, and many other, poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;golden apples of the sun&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has several references, all of which Yeats would have been intimately familiar with, deriving from Classical Mythology, which he draws on extensively in other poems, and Norse Mythology (Ireland was subject to Norse migration), as well as Irish mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Irish reference is to the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_apple#Irish_mythology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silver Branch&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and linked to mortality, apropos as the poet is now old, and a poet should &quot;not go gentle into that good night&quot;, as a later prince of the form would comment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek reference is to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesperides#The_Garden_of_the_Hesperides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garden of the Hesperides&lt;/a&gt; and linked with immortality, an interesting juxtaposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Norse reference is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%C3%B0unn#Apples_and_fertility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Idunn&lt;/a&gt; and linked to fertility, here clearly in the context of the mind (i.e. creativity.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On silver apples I have no direct reference.  Possibly the poet was being poetic and playful, and the meaning of the silver apples can be inferred by their contrast to the golden apples. The Sun and Moon are linked in both Greek and Norse mythology, with the transposition of male/female nature in the respective traditions. (In Norse Mythology, the sun is female and moon is male, the opposite of Greek Mythology.)  Possibly we can take the silver apples to mean mortality, in contrast to the golden apples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth noting that orange blossoms are associated with marriage and used by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Garc%C3%ADa_Lorca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorca&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Wedding&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blood Wedding&lt;/a&gt;. Both poets were certainly referencing, in part, the idea of the &quot;Great Marriage&quot; or &quot;Sacred Marriage&quot; to the &quot;Great Goddess&quot;, which should be understood in the context of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adonis#Myths&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adonis&lt;/a&gt; as representing death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find the poet's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/two-songs-play&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two Songs from a Play&lt;/a&gt;&quot; useful, as it draws heavily on Classical literature, and touches on some similar themes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everything that man esteems &lt;br&gt; Endures a moment or a day. &lt;br&gt; Love's pleasure drives his love away, &lt;br&gt; The painter's brush consumes his dreams; &lt;br&gt; The herald's cry, the soldier's tread &lt;br&gt; Exhaust his glory and his might: &lt;br&gt;Whatever flames upon the night&lt;br&gt;Man's own resinous heart has fed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a practical sense, it is the state of un-fulfillment that drives the artist, they journey so to speak, as opposed to the achieving of the goal, which is death, at least creatively speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T02:03:56.620" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T02:03:56.620" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1436" CreationDate="2017-02-24T22:22:28.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the disconnect may derive from regarding Shakespeare's plays as being written literature.  The publication of the text versions of his play, whether in the the First Folios, the quartos, or any later form, were subsequent to the performance of the work.  Although Shakespeare is potentially more widely read than any other poet, this method of engaging in is work is always secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poetry of Shakespeare's plays is meant to be spoken.  Thus, the metric problems you refer to would have been non-issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If, in rehearsal, a line doesn't scan, the line can be altered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also notable that the exact text which was performed while Shakespeare was at the Globe may never be known. Text was altered by intent or by accident, and there were both authorized and unauthorized publications during that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern text of Shakespeare, whether for reading or performance, represent amalgamations of different versions.  Even today, the exact text you will see performed may very likely been altered by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dramaturge&lt;/a&gt; drawing from alternate versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all modern adaptations have the intent of making the Bard's work more accessible to modern audiences and readers, which may include syllabic alteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:22:28.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="359" CreationDate="2017-02-24T22:31:44.743" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There could be numerous reasons: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If published under a different imprint, the new publisher may not have the rights to the original artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Response to artwork is subjective, so a new editor may have may see value in a different cover, based on the current market.  (People like new, shiny stuff!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It may simply be a way to distinguish the printing from earlier printings. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It would be helpful if you could post or link to pictures of the same novel with different covers. My own personal pet peeve is when a movie based on a book comes out, and instead of the wonderful, original cover, the work is branded for years with a horrible, movie-poster cover.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-02-24T22:31:44.743" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1871" CreationDate="2017-02-24T23:48:03.967" Score="11" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this one book I've been looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is relatively small, but pretty thick. The cover features a young boy running upwards, with a tiny doglike creature in the bottom lefthand corner. It's all black and white, and I believe it is textured. There are leafless trees that sharply contrast with the background, with creepy-looking birds hunched over that have eyes made of shiny red material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character is a young boy named William whose family was killed in a fire, and who was then &quot;adopted&quot; by a church. I don't think they call it a church, but a synonym I cannot remember. This church is in the middle of a forest, and much of the story happens in winter. From what I can remember, William finds a creature (pretty sure it is a species he calls &quot;fob&quot;) that hurt its leg in a metal trap. He is alone in the woods and is about to turn back — please remember that this is a magical setting and &quot;fobs&quot; are universally distrusted by humans — when he finds that the creature can speak. Out of pity, he frees the animal, but it doesn't run away. Instead, it follows him home to the church. Apparently it can talk to the church pig (I think her name is Maggie). There isn't much significance in this, but after its leg heals it often sleeps in the pigsty, and gets quite a bit of gossip from her. Some more stuff that we know about the fob is that he won't tell his real name, because it holds a lot of power against himself, and his name is Brother Matthew or something. Only a guy called Brother Martin knows about the &quot;fob&quot;, because William begged him to nurse him back to health. This creature is pretty loyal to William and protects him in some ways. I think that he, as a magical creature, is allergic to rowan and metal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One night, a super rich and important guy called Jacob comes on a horse, accompanied by a fay(e) [sorry, not sure if it has an e]. This fay(e) is a magical creature bound to his master, Jacob, like a guard. I forget his name, but it may or may not have started with H. He doesn't need to eat or sleep and all of his wounds heal almost instantly. So apparently Jacob is very interested in William, but William is afraid of him. Soon the church people (all of them male monks) find out that Jacob has leprosy, which explains his mask, long sleeves, and horrid breath. I'm not sure if there's anything between this and the next events, but William finds out that Jacob traded his health for immortality, and is eternally ill. However, he can't stand to suffer more, so he came to the church to beg release from an angel, and in return he promises that the church will inherit his vast fortune (pretty sure he's rich). So, for some reason he chooses William to come with him to the creepiest part of the forest, which is rumored to hold the remains of the fallen angel. The fay(e) guy tells him where to dig, and he actually finds the corpse of a tall, slim angel with an arrow in his chest. (the story is that a group of men or faye, I'm not sure, shot and killed him, and he was buried here where no one would find out). Somehow the angel wakes up, Jacob takes off his mask and sleeves, begs, and is killed mercifully by the angel. I don't remember if the angel flew away or just died again, but now the fay(e) is bound to William because he is the only one who saw Master Jacobs die. So, the fay(e) must protect William with his life, and can't leave without dying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is really long, but in the next few chapters I remember that there is this evil old lady that has a white crow and weird soup. I think she hates the Abbott of William's church, who dies, also at the mercy of an angel (he was sick too). There's also a faceoff between the fay(e) king, his army, and the fay(e) bound to William, who has betrayed his race to protect Master Jacobs. I don't remember finishing the story, and would definitely love to. I've searched everywhere for it and I don't think it's too well known, so thank you to anyone who can help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="840" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T17:13:05.810" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T20:10:00.273" Title="Which book has a main character named William in a church in a forest?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1832" CreationDate="2017-02-24T23:53:58.953" Score="8" ViewCount="6007" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many stage plays - including all thirty-seven/thirty-nine of Shakespeare's - consist of five acts, while others consist of only three acts. (Are there any other common numbers of acts?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the difference between a three-act play and a five-act play, in terms of the kind of story they tell and how they tell it? What considerations tend to be taken into account by the playwright when deciding how many acts to divide their play into?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T22:12:07.537" Title="What's the difference between a five-act play and a three-act play?" Tags="&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1830" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-25T00:39:59.303" Score="9" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started reading &quot;The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle&quot; by Haruki Murakami in English and I'm quite enjoying it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I learned that the English version — although well-translated — omits several whole chapters from the original! I also happen to speak Russian, and I discovered that there's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/2002/10/kostkni.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian version&lt;/a&gt; by Sergei and Ivan Logachev which is apparently translated from the original Japanese. (The page count seems to confirm this: 600 for English vs. 770 for Russian.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I could find no information about the quality of this translation. Would anyone happen to know whether the Russian version is a high quality translation, and if so, if it's worth reading over the English version on account of the additional content?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="841" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T17:33:11.127" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T17:33:11.127" Title="&quot;The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle&quot;: English vs. Russian translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;the-wind-up-bird-chronicle&gt;&lt;haruki-murakami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1757" CreationDate="2017-02-25T00:46:53.153" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2jXS2XWLwwMC&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Annotated Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - not annotated by Grahame himself, for the record - and found some interesting notes (pages 118-119):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Garibaldi was actually quite well-known in Europe and beyond in the late 19th century, thanks in part to his frequent travels around the world. Playing a major role in unifying a formerly long-shattered peninsula is no small feat, and he received quite a lot of recognition for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In 1864, Garibaldi visited &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fowey#Notable_people&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fowey&lt;/a&gt;, the town Grahame lived in (several decades later) when he cobbled together &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;, and it is likely that the Italian was well-remembered there. Small towns don't get visited by international heroes every day. He even shook hands with the future wife of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Quiller-Couch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Quiller-Couch&lt;/a&gt;, the writer who was supposedly the inspiration for Ratty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/why-did-giuseppe-garibaldi-become-a-victorian-celebrity&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garibaldi merchandise was quite commonplace&lt;/a&gt; in Europe and elsewhere at the time, and it was not expensive. Mole is not well-off, as he tells Ratty before they go to his house:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I know it’s a—shabby, dingy little place,’ he sobbed forth at last, brokenly: ‘not like—your cosy quarters—or Toad’s beautiful hall—or Badger’s great house—but it was my own little home—and I was fond of it'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, small ornamental statues - relatively cheap, but not tacky - seem to fit Mole's persona very well.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is hypothesized that &quot;heroes&quot; is from a quote by Alfred Tennyson describing a meeting with Garibaldi. You may think it odd that Grahame should choose such an obscure reference, but keep in mind that Chapter 11 is titled ‘Like Summer Tempests Came His Tears', an allusion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45379&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Tennyson poem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TUkBAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a contemporary biography of Garibaldi&lt;/a&gt; explains that he had great affection for the English people. He wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'The English nation is by no means exempt from imperfections, yet the English are the only people who can be compared with the ancient Romans.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even before his fight for reunification in 1860 - which Britain helped, by the way, in part to keep France in check - Garibaldi's exploits in South America had become a hit among all classes. He also shared anti-Catholic sentiments, which of course permeated England, and was quite grateful for British help in Italy. In other words, Giuseppe Garibaldi was a &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; hit in Britain in the mid to late 19th century, and it's no stretch for him or his comrades to be in Mole's garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T00:46:53.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1829" CreationDate="2017-02-25T00:49:10.643" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeares-plays/shakespeare-five-act-structure/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is an excellent site discussing five-act structure in Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;, containing a diagram and numerous examples.  Essentially, the five-act structure can be broken down as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prologue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conflict&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rising Action and Climax&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Falling Action&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#D.C3.A9nouement.3B_resolution.2C_revelation.2C_or_catastrophe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Denouement&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exposition of the five-act structure is associated with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freytag&lt;/a&gt;, who was concerned with Classical Drama and Shakespeare. The link to criticism of Freytag discusses how structure changes with modern literature.  The compaction of late acts is probably most brilliantly demonstrated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hitchcock&lt;/a&gt; in the ending of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_by_Northwest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;North by Northwest&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of the three-act structure can be said to originate with Aristotle, who believed plays needed to have a beginning, middle and end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indiana.edu/~audioweb/T206/three-act.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indiana University has an excellent page discussing it here&lt;/a&gt; which breaks down the sections as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Setup&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Confrontation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Resolution&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With each section divided by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_point&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;plot point&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the three-act structure is mostly associated with story arcs in cinema in the contemporary landscape.  Wikipedia lists it exclusively as a structure utilized in film and television.  Despite the potentially &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.movieoutline.com/articles/the-five-key-turning-points-of-all-successful-movie-scripts.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hyperbolic title of this page&lt;/a&gt;, it is nevertheless an extremely insightful and useful analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason you won't find much on three-act structure in plays is because number of acts in any given play is quite variable.  Modern and contemporary playwrights, dating to at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ibsen&lt;/a&gt;, experiment with different act structures. A good playwright can find a way to structure their story regardless of the act structure, as is demonstrated by many works considered masterpieces with structures beginning at one act and proceeding upwards from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemporary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dramaturges&lt;/a&gt; regularly alter the &quot;breakup&quot; of longer plays, as the contemporary theater tend to avoid productions with more than a single intermission.  Thus a &quot;five-act&quot; Shakespeare play is commonly presented in two halves, with a single intermission. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I put &quot;five-acts&quot; in quotes because &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/shakespeares-plays/shakespeare-five-act-structure/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this structure is a later innovation&lt;/a&gt;, not present in Elizabethan, or even Jacobean, drama in any formal sense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding alternate structures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One-act is a very common form, and arguably the original form, deriving from Greek Drama.  Aristotle considered this a requirement for greatness in drama. [See the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical unities&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous examples of a modern one-act is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilde&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salome&lt;/a&gt;, but there are many such examples, and it's a quite popular contemporary structure because of it's efficiency from the standpoint of time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Becket&lt;/a&gt; heavily utilized a one act structure as he reduced drama to it's most basic form.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breath_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breath&lt;/a&gt; has a run-time of about 25 seconds.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern act structure was in large part driven by theater concessions.  Thus Maxwell Anderson or Noel Coward might write a four act play—four acts mens three intermission during which the audience may visit the bar.  This slowly transformed into two act plays as people became busier, &lt;em&gt;(and possibly attention spans shortened as new media such as film and television became dominant,)&lt;/em&gt; and the acceptable length for the average play got shorter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Angels in America is an example of an extraordinarily successful play unconcerned with running time.  From a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.roundhousetheatre.org/performances/angels-in-america/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to a current production of the play&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Run Time: Millennium Approaches runs approximately three hours. Perestroika runs approximately three hours and 40 minutes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is notable that in cinema, where the three-act structure dominant, this structure is applied to work that does not feature an intermission, or any temporal division, between the acts, except in rare cases where a film may have an intermission.  (The &quot;Roadshow&quot; edit of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hateful_Eight&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hateful 8&lt;/a&gt; which has a running time of 187 minutes, is a recent example of a film presented with an intermission.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T22:12:07.537" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T22:12:07.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1807" CreationDate="2017-02-25T02:37:37.417" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;After intensive search I found it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sever_Gansovsky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sever Gansovsky&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story: Demon of history (1967).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I found Russian text: &lt;a href=&quot;http://books.rusf.ru/unzip/add-on/xussr_gk/gansos17.htm?1/4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Демон истории&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="128" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T02:37:37.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1790" CreationDate="2017-02-25T03:01:29.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, thank you for posting this question. I would never have found out about the story &quot;The Fifth Gable&quot; without this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire story reminds me of the Mayan creation story &lt;em&gt;The Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PV-Literal.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literal translation&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mesoweb.com/publications/Christenson/PopolVuh.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;less literal translation&lt;/a&gt; are available for free online). I don't have any evidence that the author is aware of &lt;em&gt;The Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt;. But there are several clear parallels that need to be considered. I'm going to argue in this answer that the short story draws on Mesoamerican cosmological concepts, which can explain, among other things, the emphasis on the numbers four and five.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like &quot;The Fifth Gable&quot;, the Popol Vuh takes place in a location consisting of four corners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When will be completed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Germination,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All sky,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Earth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its four cornerings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its four sidings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its measurings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its four stakings,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number four comes from the four corners of the earth. This is a symbol that's ubiquitous throughout Mesoamerica, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/1478/62&quot;&gt;throughout the world as well&lt;/a&gt;. (We'll return to the number four, and how it relates to the number five, in a few paragraphs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descriptions of the births and the deaths of the babies in &quot;The Fifth Gable&quot; are also reminiscent of the descriptions of the creation of humanity in &lt;em&gt;The Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt;. Humanity is created five times, and destroyed four times due to being created with flaws in &lt;em&gt;The Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt;; the exact same thing happens in &lt;em&gt;The Fifth Gable&lt;/em&gt;. Here are some quotes of the various creations of humanity from &lt;em&gt;The Popol Vuh&lt;/em&gt;. As you can see, there's a lot of similarities between these descriptions and the descriptions in &quot;The Fifth Gable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then its framing therefore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its making as well.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mud  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its flesh they made.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not therefore good they saw it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely it would come undone,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely crumbled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely sodden,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely mushy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely fallen apart,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely as well it would dissolve.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not then set apart its head.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely one direction its face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merely hidden its face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not would it look about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would speak at first,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is not its thought.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Merely straightaway it would dissolve in water.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not strong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's why the number five relates to the number four. If the earth has four directions or pillars, then there's also a fifth pillar: the central point. In Mesoamerica (and everywhere where the symbol of four corners is used), this center point is given intense political and spiritual significance. The details are way too complicated to get into here, but suffice it to say that a good portion of Mesoamerican mythology centers around creating the center point, and thus establishing a power that is central to the surrounding forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that it would be a pretty good guess that by &quot;fifth gable&quot; the author means &quot;the center&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea if the author intended any of these connections, or if she based her story not off of the Popol Vuh but similar creation myth from another part of the world. But it's interesting regardless. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/608/111&quot;&gt;And the symbol of the four corners has meaning regardless of whether the author intentionally based the story off of the symbol&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T20:04:59.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2171" CreationDate="2017-02-25T04:02:29.800" Score="5" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dan Conway, head of the Phoenix-Durango in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, was evidently a superb executive. He also receives (largely) positive treatment in the novel. However, the book also says that he initially went along with the industry group behind the anti-dog-eat-dog rule, and the novel gives several other indications that the author's not trying to present him as being 100% positive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, is there any significance to the fact that his railroad wasn't named after him? The &quot;good&quot; characters all named their companies after themselves (Wyatt Oil, Rearden Steel, Taggart Transcontinental, etc.) and the &quot;bad&quot; characters' companies had generic-sounding names (Associated Steel, Amalgamated Switch and Signal, etc.), so is the generic-sounding name evidence that we're supposed to have a negative view of Dan Conway - that he represents people who just &quot;caved&quot; morally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, he definitely never joined the strikers (he wasn't in Galt's Gulch when Dagney was shown around, and Eddie is able to track him down towards the end of the novel), and there's no evidence either way about whether John Galt ever approached him (in fact, he seems to have quit on his own without any of the strikers having met with him).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, why didn't Dan Conway ever join the strike? Why didn't the novel say whether he was asked to join? &lt;em&gt;Would&lt;/em&gt; John Galt have been likely to have asked him to join? (It seems like an odd omission given that Dagney asked him to stay and fight and Eddie tracked him down to ask him to help Taggart Transcontinental).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does Ayn Rand want us to view this character?&lt;/strong&gt; Is he basically a good person who &quot;caved&quot; under pressure from the looters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking specifically about authorial intent here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:59:38.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T11:40:32.040" Title="How should we view Dan Conway?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1838" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-25T06:25:02.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ayn Rand was a Russian-American philosopher and novelist who's known for &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;We the Living&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt;, and a variety of non-fiction. This tag should generally be used with the specific Ayn Rand book in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions in this tag should generally pertain specifically to her books (especially to her literary works). Questions that are purely about her overall views on philosophy, economics, or government should generally be asked on the Philosophy, Politics, or Economics Stack Exchange sites (depending on the subject of the post).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that questions about her philosophy &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; on-topic if they pertain to understanding a specific aspect of (or passage from) one of her books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T13:02:00.103" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T13:02:00.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1839" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-25T06:25:02.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905 – 1982) or her life as a writer. If this question is about one of her books, the book in question should also be tagged." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T21:05:58.683" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T21:05:58.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1854" CreationDate="2017-02-25T17:43:02.523" Score="12" ViewCount="4671" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I was doing some research, looking for an answer for &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1696/115&quot;&gt;Are Frog and Toad more than just friends?&lt;/a&gt;, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/10/31/15-fictional-characters-who-are-also/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; listing 15 fictional characters the author thinks are probably gay. Some of them are widely joked about (Bert and Ernie, Peter Pan), but two characters on the list were deeply mystifying: Old Yeller, and Edmund Pevensie from the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, it's been a long time since I read the Narnia books, but I did read them again as an adult, and I can't remember a single thing that would suggest Edmund is gay, particularly if we confine ourselves the &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; as the list does. I can't recall any of the four Pevensie children having any kind of sexuality at all, except for some intimations about Susan in &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, so it seems to me we could as well say that Peter was gay and Lucy was a lesbian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I very much doubt Lewis, as a Christian philosopher in the 1950's, would have written a gay character intentionally, but is there any way to interpret the text that would suggest Edmund is gay? Conversely, is there a way to interpret the text that suggests he's not gay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T23:44:10.430" Title="What suggests Edmund might be gay?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2017-02-25T19:02:28.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there's absolutely no textual evidence for this. There's really not anything in the text that would come &lt;em&gt;even vaguely&lt;/em&gt; close to supporting this. I suppose that you could say that, strictly speaking, the text doesn't say he's not either, though, but the fact remains that this simply can't be answered on the basis of textual analysis - it's simply not in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Correct me if I'm wrong, but C. S. Lewis doesn't really explicitly discuss LGBT issues in any of his major works (Narnia or otherwise). You are also correct in stating that it would be &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; anachronistic for him to intentionally make a character gay given the time he was writing in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind that that wasn't really a major public issue at the time (certainly not like it is today), and C. S. Lewis tended tended to shy away from controversial theological issues (and it certainly &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have been controversial at the time - people's ideas on LGBT issues have evolved a lot since the 1950's) to some extent (at least in his major works), preferring to discuss &quot;common ground&quot; that all Christians could agree on - in fact, he's pretty explicit about that in, for example, &lt;em&gt;Mere Christianity&lt;/em&gt;. (He does discuss some of those types of issues in his letters and essays, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T13:22:49.570" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T13:22:49.570" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" Score="0" Body="For questions about the use of pseudonyms by authors. Use this tag with the tag for the author in question." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" LastActivityDate="2017-02-25T19:43:11.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1846" CreationDate="2017-02-26T04:10:35.430" Score="7" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do realize that the passage of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; where Atticus defended Tom Robinson has been heavily analyzed elsewhere at this point. However, it seems like most people got the impression that Atticus's choice to give Tom Robinson a competent defense reflected a progressive view of race on his part (I certainly got that impression from studying that in lit class). This is obviously why &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt;'s portrayal of him was so controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, do we necessarily need to change our analysis of that passage based on the later book? How do you reconcile those two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the complicated publication history behind &lt;em&gt;Watchman&lt;/em&gt; (the fact that Harper Lee seems to have forgotten about it, the lack of clarity about when she decided to publish it, and the fact that &lt;em&gt;Watchman&lt;/em&gt; was written before &lt;em&gt;Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;), is Harper Lee essentially flatly contradicting herself here? How did Harper Lee view Atticus at various points? For example, when she published &lt;em&gt;Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt;, had she already forgotten about &lt;em&gt;Watchman&lt;/em&gt; (and/or believed that she would never publish it) and therefore changed her view of Atticus? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a strongly related question about how much &quot;authority&quot; authors have to change an existing &quot;canon&quot; after the fact (particularly long after the fact), but that should be a separate question at a minimum and may or may not be the best fit for Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also strongly related (but not identical): &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1362/should-go-set-a-watchman-be-read-as-a-prequel-or-an-early-draft&quot;&gt;Should Go Set a Watchman be read as a prequel, or an early draft?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:48:04.480" Title="Should Go Set a Watchman change our view of Atticus defending Tom Robinson?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;go-set-a-watchman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1845" CreationDate="2017-02-26T13:13:42.283" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aside from the debate over whether Atticus had a progressive view on race that Hamlet raised, the answer is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; because they are two different Atticus Finches. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1395/143&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, it is pointed out that Lee focused more on social tension in &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; than in &lt;em&gt;Go Set A Watchman&lt;/em&gt; and therefore it is clear that the purpose of the novels is different. Also, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1450/was-tom-robinsons-trial-the-only-inconsistency-between-to-kill-a-mockingbird-an?rq=1&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; it is shown that a very key detail that affects the actions of Atticus was different. We, therefore, do not know whether the Atticus from &lt;em&gt;Go Set A Watchman&lt;/em&gt; would have acted differently in different circumstances. Finally, they are two different people, this would be like analyzing Harry Potter because of an earlier draft. We can analyze each one individually as having different traits without that having an effect on the overall character interpretation. However, we can use thw two in conjunction, especially the changes to analyze the meaning and development of &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; and the thoughts of Harper Lee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T13:13:42.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2017-02-26T14:31:33.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At 419 words, this whopper may indeed be the longest sentence Twain ever wrote. Searching the internet for references to longest Mark Twain sentences, the best I found was this 262-worder from &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line; that was the woods on t’other side–you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the rive softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away–trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks? rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in the swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there so cool and fresh, and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/sentence-life/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; refers to a mere (!) 236-word sentence as the possible record. If these claims to fame for sentences not much more than half as long as the one you've found can be taken seriously, then yours may quite possibly be the record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;story&quot; behind these impressively extended and verbose sentences - clearly not just a one-off in Twain's writing, since there are several sentences scattered through his works which, although not as long as the example you've found, are nevertheless over two hundred words long and therefore pretty impressive and out of the ordinary - it may well be the case that the author was deliberately trying to create exceptionally long sentences for effect; partly, of course, longer sentences were simply more common in writing in those days, before the age of modernity, advertising and the internet, when people's attention spans shrank to the size of gnats' and it became necessary to impart information to them as swiftly and efficiently as possible before they went &quot;TL;DR&quot; and moved on to something more entertaining; partly, also, long sentences can be a practically useful writing device, as for instance when trying to include a great deal of description but make it feel compressed as though it's all happening at the same time (in your example, putting the entire description of the boat's motion and progress in a single sentence gives the reader the feeling that they're taking it all in at a single glance rather than reading about it piece by piece in a book; in the above description of a sunrise, again putting it all in one sentence is akin to compressing the experience into a single glance, the way it would be in the real world, rather than artificially extending it by a long wordy description); but in addition to their utility in writing, it may be that Twain was using these excessively long sentences for humorous effect or to make a point - a thesis supported, for example, by the following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lsa.umich.edu/german/hmr/101/Hausaufgaben_Info/TwainSchrecken.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech&lt;/a&gt; he once made in German on 21 November 1897, and for which he also wrote the entertainingly bad English translation which is provided below (a better translation is available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twainquotes.com/18971127.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but Twain's own has amusement value while still being comprehensible).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am indeed the truest friend of the German language - and not only now, but from long since - yes, before twenty years already. And never have I the desire had the noble language to hurt; to the contrary, only wished she to improve - I would her only reform. It is the dream of my life been. I have already visits by the various German governments paid and for contracts prayed. I am now to Austria in the same task come. I would only some changes effect. I would only &lt;strong&gt;the language method - the luxurious, elaborate construction - compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can.&lt;/strong&gt; With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One &#xA;  her yonder - up understands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before several days has the correspondent of a local paper &lt;strong&gt;a sentence constructed which hundred and twelve words contained, and therein were seven &#xA;  parentheses smuggled in, and the subject seven times changed.&lt;/strong&gt; Think &#xA;  you only, my gentlemen, in the course of the voyage of a single sentence must the poor, persecuted, fatigued subject seven times change position! Now, when we the mentioned reforms execute, will it no longer so bad be. Doch noch eins. I might gladly the separable verb also a little bit reform. I might none do let what Schiller did: he has the whole history of the Thirty Years' &#xA;  War between the two members of a separable verb in-pushed. That has even Germany itself aroused, and one has Schiller the permission refused the History of the Hundred Years' War to compose - God be it thanked! After all these reforms established be will, will the German language the noblest and the prettiest on the world be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;332 words.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-02-26T15:46:48.213" LastActivityDate="2017-02-26T15:46:48.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1850" CreationDate="2017-02-26T14:53:29.943" Score="19" ViewCount="1617" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ran into this quote in a book named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.es/Site-Reliability-Engineering-Production-Systems/dp/149192912X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems&lt;/a&gt; at the beginning of chapter 7: The Evolution of Automation at Google. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book claims it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Garc%C3%ADa_Lorca?wprov=sfla1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Federico García Lorca&lt;/a&gt; quote, but it does not provide any information regarding which García Lorca work it comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some quotes sites mention the quote with García Lorca as the author but, again, no further information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="856" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T09:19:00.983" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T09:19:00.983" Title="Where does this Federico Garcia Lorca quote come from? Is it a fake?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1848" CreationDate="2017-02-26T19:54:14.443" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a quote from an interview he gave in 1931.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Traigo preparados cuatro libros. De teatro. De poesía. Y de impresiones neoyorkinas, el que puede titularse : &lt;em&gt;la ciudad&lt;/em&gt;, interpretación personal, abstracción impersonal, sin lugar ni tiempo dentro de aquella ciudad mundo. Un símbolo patético : Sufrimiento. Pero del revés, sin dramatismo. Es una puesta en contacto de mi mundo poético con el mundo poético de Nueva York. En medio de ambos están los pueblos tristes de África y sus alrededores, perdidos en Norteamérica. Los judíos. Los sirios. Y los negros. ¡Sobre todo los negros! Con su tristeza se han hecho el eje espiritual de aquella América. El negro que está tan cerca de la naturaleza y de la otra naturaleza. ¡Ese negro que se saca música hasta de los bolsillos! Fuera del arte negro no queda en los Estados Unidos más que mecánica y automatismo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have prepared four books. About theater. About poetry. And about my impressions of New York, which I could call &lt;em&gt;The City&lt;/em&gt;, a personal interpretation, an impersonal abstraction, without a specific place or time within that city-world. A pathetic symbol: Suffering. But reversed, without dramatics. It's a coming into contact of my own poetic universe with the poetic universe of New York. The centerpieces of both are the sad peoples of Africa and their surroundings, lost in North America. The Jews. The Syrians. And the Blacks. Especially the Blacks! With their sadness they have become the spiritual axis of that America. The black who is so close to nature and to the other nature. That black who draws music even out of his pockets! Aside from Black art, there is nothing left in the United States but mechanics and automatism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(note: the Spanish word literally translates to 'blacks', but that's not intended to be offensive/derogatory in any way)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interview was given to &lt;em&gt;Gaceta Literaria&lt;/em&gt;, published in Madrid on 15-01-1931, under the title “Estampa de García Lorca”, after Lorca had spent about one year in New York. Passages from this interview were later included in the collection &lt;em&gt;A Poet in New York&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pedro Guerrero Ruiz and Veronica Dean-Thacker. &lt;em&gt;Federico García Lorca: el color de la poesía&lt;/em&gt;. Universidad de Transylvania, 1998. p. 112. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=8w_RzCab69kC&amp;amp;pg=PA112&amp;amp;dq=%22fuera+del+arte+negro%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Federico García Lorca. Nouveaux textes en prose.” In &lt;em&gt;Bulletin Hispanique&lt;/em&gt;, 1954, vol. 56, n° 3. p. 263. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.persee.fr/doc/hispa_0007-4640_1954_num_56_3_3397&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Persée&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Salvatore Poeta. “Federico García Lorca: Poeta en Nueva York y/o Nueva York en el poeta”. In &lt;em&gt;Naufragios&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 2, no. 1, Primavera, 2010 : Ensayo. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.casavaria.com/naufragios/2010-01/ensayo/salvatore-poeta-lorca-ny.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T22:15:27.340" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T22:15:27.340" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1851" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1853" CreationDate="2017-02-27T00:14:22.990" Score="13" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite sharing many of the same characters, the books &lt;em&gt;Go set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;To Kill a mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; portray the same characters in very different ways. I am also made suspicious of how old Harper Lee was when the book came out, as it seems very odd to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Harper Lee intend to publish &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T00:18:55.650" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T07:19:15.030" Title="Did Harper Lee intend Go set a Watchman to be published?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;go-set-a-watchman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1851" CreationDate="2017-02-27T01:21:17.837" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;If one would believe Joe Nocera, former op-ed columnist for &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an article titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/joe-nocera-the-watchman-fraud.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Harper Lee ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Fraud&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (July 24, 2015 - the book was published on July 14, 2015), Nocera claims that this is a money grab from Lee's current protector, Tonja Carter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/02/the-tragedy-of-harper-lee/385132/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harper Lee: The Sadness of a Sequel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (February 3, 2015) in &lt;em&gt;The Atlantic&lt;/em&gt; notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harper Lee, née and known to those close to her as Nelle, spent the&#xA;  majority of her life not wanting &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; to be published.&#xA;  Or, at least, she has spent the majority of her life telling the media&#xA;  that she didn't want &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; to be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't the first instance of controversy after Carter took the reigns. A biography of Lee by Marja Mills also ran into trouble. &lt;a href=&quot;http://gawker.com/how-unauthorized-is-the-new-book-about-harper-lee-1605214844&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How Unauthorized Is the New Book About Harper Lee?&lt;/em&gt; from Gawker&lt;/a&gt; (July 18, 2014):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Things formally went sour in 2011. It was a transition year for the&#xA;  aging sisters, for one thing. Alice Lee, who had practiced law past&#xA;  her 100th birthday, finally retired in December and went into a&#xA;  nursing home herself after a bout of pneumonia. It seems clear that&#xA;  over the course of the year she'd been handing off the reins of her&#xA;  law firm to a younger partner, Tonja Carter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earlier that year, in April, Mills had finally sold her book. When the&#xA;  sale was announced, Penguin Press (an imprint at Penguin Random House)&#xA;  described the book as having been written with the participation of&#xA;  both Lee sisters. But shortly thereafter, that same month, a statement&#xA;  bearing Harper Lee's name reached the press:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Contrary to recent news reports, I have not willingly participated in&#xA;    any book written or to be written by Marja Mills. Neither have I&#xA;    authorized such a book. Any claims otherwise are false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mills seems to have been caught off guard by this. She already had in&#xA;  hand a statement from Alice Lee dated more than a month earlier, in&#xA;  which Alice confirmed both her participation in the project and her&#xA;  sister's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice Lee passed away about 8 months before &lt;em&gt;Go Set a Watchman&lt;/em&gt; was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All said and done, it looks very fishy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T07:19:15.030" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T07:19:15.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2017-02-27T03:38:16.717" Score="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who rather likes the totally non-canonical idea of gay Edmund, there is really no textual evidence to support this idea and you are right to point out that it is extremely unlikely that Lewis intended the character to be gay. There's not even much of what most people would consider obvious gay subtext. We don't see Edmund longingly describe the appearance or other attributes of other male characters, for example. We don't see him form the kind of extremely close male friendship that seems to border on romantic that you sometimes see in other works. We don't really see other characters describe him in ways that are coded gay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that being said, the person in the linked article isn't the first to come up with the idea of gay Edmund. A quick look at Narnia's M/M category over on the popular fan fiction site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archiveofourown.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Archive Of Our Own&lt;/a&gt; reveals that Edmund is the character most listed in male/male pairings section despite the fact that both Peter and Caspian are played by older, arguably more attractive actors in the movies. Caspian/Edmund is the most popular male/male romantic pairing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why do many fans see Edmund, in particular, as gay but not, say, Peter or Lucy? What you have to realize about the way that many LGBT people read or view fiction is that they sometimes connect aspects of a particular character's &lt;em&gt;journey&lt;/em&gt; or arc to their own journey or struggles with queerness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One rather prominent example of this is the character Elsa from the Disney movie &lt;em&gt;Frozen&lt;/em&gt;. A lot of LGBT people read Elsa as gay, not because she pines after women, explicitly or otherwise, but because her character arc shares much in common with the type of struggles that LGBT people face. Elsa is forced by her parents to keep her powers hidden, &quot;conceal, don't feel.&quot; This causes her to feel alienated from her community and family, even from her sister who loves her no matter what. Elsa eventually chooses to live alone in a literal ice fortress because this is the only place where she can be herself. This parallels the issues that many young gay people face with lack of family acceptance, feelings of alienation and isolation, feeling somehow dangerous to others, suppression of a major part of themselves, and choosing to be apart from the community that they were born into because they don't feel they can be themselves there. But someone could, of course, correctly point out that there is nothing in the movie itself that suggests Elsa is gay and her sexuality goes entirely unaddressed in the movie. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I do think there are elements of Edmund's character that LGBT people might identify with in this way. Edmund starts out the series feeling alienated from his siblings for reasons that aren't entirely clear. Edmund started being a jerk the first time he came back from boarding school which perhaps indicates that he was experiencing some form of bullying (interestingly, the same boarding school doesn't seem to have had a similar effect on Peter -- and though I believe Peter suggests that Edmund himself has become a bully, it wouldn't be unusual for someone who is bullied to, in turn, bully others). Edmund seems to harbor a certain amount of resentment toward his more explicitly masculine older brother (this isn't to say that Edmund is feminine, just that Peter is usually given the more explicitly masculine tasks of physically protecting the girls or generally waving his sword around, for example). In his resentment, Edmund screws up big time and betrays his siblings. Edmund is forgiven, but aspects of this forgiveness are kept &quot;secret&quot; -- the books explicitly point out that the all the conversation between Edmund and Aslan was never revealed to others, but that it was a conversation that Edmund never forgot. Edmund ends up doing something heroic in a way that suits his personality (using his smarts to come up with the idea of breaking the witch's wand -- something that no one else thought of). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not saying that all gay people identify with these experiences or that no straight people can identify with them, but I think there is a certain overlap between Edmund's experiences and the experiences of many LGBT people that isn't really true of the other Pevensie siblings. The feelings of alienation and isolation followed by eventual acceptance and affirmation of Edmund's particular qualities as a person is a journey that would feel familiar and comforting to many LGBT people. Actually, now that I think of it, Edmund and Elsa share quite a bit in common -- the feelings of alienation from family, the somewhat closed-off personality, the much more open, optimistic, sweet younger sister, even the association with cold and winter (Edmund goes to the White Witch's castle to ally with her, Elsa has ice powers and goes off on her own to create her own ice castle). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to answer this question:  &lt;em&gt;Conversely, is there a way to interpret the text that suggests he's not gay?&lt;/em&gt; No. There is nothing in the text itself that suggests he is heterosexual. We see more of adult Edmund in &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; than we do the other Pevensie siblings, but we don't see anything that would point to a possible sexuality. This certainly doesn't mean that he's gay -- but it is one less obstacle to people viewing him in that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="860" LastEditorUserId="860" LastEditDate="2017-02-27T18:42:32.180" LastActivityDate="2017-02-27T18:42:32.180" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18379" CreationDate="2017-02-27T09:41:10.117" Score="17" ViewCount="666" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a short story about a man (a journalist?) visiting a prison inmate. He was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, and it was a case of mistaken identity or insufficient alibi. The conviction hinged on the fact that he could not prove that he was really himself because he could not remember the location of a country he had been to. The story ended with the journalist leaving the prison making a note to himself to remember things so as to not be in such a situation himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please identify the story. I must have read it a decade ago, but the story itself was probably very old (a century old or more, think O.Henry/Maupassant/Hawthorne…). I read the story in English, but it could have been a translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="862" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T14:48:33.430" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T14:48:33.430" Title="Short story about a man condemned to death because he cannot remember the details about a country" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T23:07:41.473" Score="8" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flash Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is an umbrella term used to describe any fictional work of extreme brevity, including the &lt;em&gt;Six-Word Story&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;140-character stories&lt;/em&gt; (also known as 'twitterature'), &lt;em&gt;the dribble&lt;/em&gt; (50 words), &lt;em&gt;the drabble&lt;/em&gt; (100 words), and &lt;em&gt;sudden fiction&lt;/em&gt; (750 words).  Is the genre significantly different from poetry and short stories, and, if so, what are its distinctive attributes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="158" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T20:41:12.383" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T20:41:12.383" Title="How is 'flash fiction' a distinctive genre?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1792" CreationDate="2017-02-27T23:47:26.153" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To cite &lt;a href=&quot;https://christianity.stackexchange.com/a/54392&quot;&gt;an answer on Christinanity SE&lt;/a&gt; that sticks to C. S. Lewis' expressed views on the matter, avoiding theological debates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;does not see any need to settle on a particular theory of the atonement, considering it to be something beyond human understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a letter written to a &amp;quot;Mr. Young&amp;quot; (otherwise unidentified) dated 31 October 1963 -- so less than a month before he died -- Lewis is clearly replying to five specific questions that Young had asked him. One of them, #3, related to the Atonement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Scripture says that Christ died 'for' us,&lt;sup&gt;a&lt;/sup&gt; I think the word is usually ὑπέρ (on behalf of), not ἀντί (instead of). I think the ideas of sacrifice, Ransom, Championship (over Death), Substitution, etc., are all images to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt; the reality (not otherwise comprehensible to us) of the Atonement. To fix on any &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; of them as if it contained and limited the truth like a scientific definition wd. in my opinion be a mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;a&lt;/sup&gt; The editor, Walter Hooper, suggests Romans 5:8 at this point.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: C.S. Lewis, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0060819227&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collected Letters. Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950-1963&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, ed. by Walter Hooper (HarperCollins, 2007), p. 1476 [italics in original].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Credit goes to Davïd for this answer, that deals with how CSL believes his book should be read rather than with his beliefs on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T08:29:53.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-02-27T23:58:45.307" Score="10" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having just had an exceptionally busy week, I've been trying to recall the details of a relevant short story whose name escapes me. I have the feeling it was a fairly old, 'classical' horror story - probably not by Edgar Allan Poe, but in his kind of style - and also quite famous and well-known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central character is a lawyer, or lawyer's clerk, who is in the process of combing through some massive volumes in order to piece together enough evidence to implicate a particular person in a crime. I think he's working to a deadline; as the days drag on, he becomes more and more devoted to his search, and gets less and less sleep. At the end of the story, he finishes collecting the final pieces of evidence he needs, and promptly collapses from overexertion. In an epilogue, he wakes up in hospital days later and hears that he was successful in producing enough evidence for conviction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a supernatural, and somehow parallel, element to the story. I can't remember the details of the demonic creature involved - I think it had a name, but like many of the best horror villains, perhaps its true nature remained insidious and unclear even to the very end - but somehow the revelation of this monster was intimately connected to the clerk's search for evidence. It was something like: the less sleep he got, the stronger the creature became; or the closer he came to finding the evidence he needed, the closer the creature came to materialising. In any case, the climax of the story was the climax for both parts: as he completed his search for evidence, the demon also reached some critical stage. It's possible that the demon didn't actually exist and was just a product of his fevered imagination, since I'm pretty sure he made a full recovery in the epilogue and was no longer plagued by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, I think this is a pretty well-known story, and I expect someone else here will have heard of it. There may be some elements I'm not remembering precisely right, but hopefully this will be enough for someone to identify the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clues as to what it might have been called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T09:50:12.960" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T09:50:12.960" Title="'Classical' horror short story in which overwork is linked to a supernatural demon" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1862" CreationDate="2017-02-28T01:36:13.573" Score="13" ViewCount="690" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph of the Holmes story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diogenes-club.com/navaltreaty.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Naval Treaty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, reads as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods. I find them recorded in my notes under the headings of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, &quot;The Adventure of the Naval Treaty&quot;, and &quot;The Adventure of the Tired Captain&quot;. The first of these, however, &lt;strong&gt;deals with interest of such importance and implicates so many of the first families in the kingdom that for many years it will be impossible to make it public.&lt;/strong&gt; No case, however, in which Holmes was engaged has ever illustrated the value of his analytical methods so clearly, or has impressed those who were associated with him so deeply. I still retain and almost &lt;em&gt;verbatim&lt;/em&gt; report of the interview in which he demonstrated the true facts of the case to Monsieur Dubugue of the Paris police, and Fritz von Waldbaum, the well-known specialist of Dantzig, both of whom had wasted their energies upon what proved to be side issues. &lt;strong&gt;The new century will have come, however, before the story can be safely told.&lt;/strong&gt; Meanwhile I pass on to the second in my list, which promised also at one time to be of national importance, and was marked by several incidents which give it a quite unique character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken by itself, this seems like the kind of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoodleIncident&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noodle Incident&lt;/a&gt; reminiscence which is fairly common among the Holmes stories. On many occasions Watson as narrator refers to some adventure they had together which never made it to publication. Perhaps this is a way of reminding readers that Holmes had a great many more adventures than just those that were published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this particular case, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diogenes-club.com/seco.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Second Stain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is in fact the name of a later story, from &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;. Its first paragraph reads as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had intended &quot;The Adventure of the Abbey Grange&quot; to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public. This resolution of mine was not due to any lack of material, since I have notes of many hundreds of cases to which I have never alluded, nor was it caused by any waning interest on the part of my readers in the singular personality and unique methods of this remarkable man. The real reason lay in the reluctance which Mr. Holmes has shown to the continued publication of his experiences. So long as he was in actual professional practice the records of his successes were of some practical value to him, but since he has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs, notoriety has become hateful to him, and he has peremptorily requested that his wishes in this matter should be strictly observed. It was only upon my representing to him that &lt;strong&gt;I had given a promise that &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; should be published when the times were ripe&lt;/strong&gt;, and pointing out to him that it is only appropriate that this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important international case which he has ever been called upon to handle, that I at last succeeded in obtaining his consent that a carefully guarded account of the incident should at last be laid before the public. If in telling the story I seem to be somewhat vague in certain details, the public will readily understand that there is an excellent reason for my reticence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Conan Doyle always intend &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; to be an actual story from the beginning, or was it originally just another Noodle Incident which he only later decided to write up as a story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Question inspired by @Hamlet on &lt;a href=&quot;http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/93238/literature/93240#93240&quot;&gt;Area51&lt;/a&gt;; I asked him if he was planning to post it here before doing so myself.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T02:18:17.003" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T18:20:03.780" Title="How much of &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; did Conan Doyle have planned when he wrote &quot;The Naval Treaty&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1857" CreationDate="2017-02-28T02:16:29.753" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might think of flash fiction as a very short story (it is sometimes also referred to as a short short story). Most magazines that specialize solely in flash fiction don't accept fiction that is above, say, 1000 words or 1500 words, maybe as much as 2000 words at most. Flash Fiction Magazine and Flash Fiction Online both have a maximum word count of 1000 words, for example. By contrast, some (though not all) magazines that specialize in traditional short stories require a &lt;em&gt;minimum&lt;/em&gt; word count of around 2000-3000 words. Some magazines also accept both flash fiction and more traditional short stories.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It differs from poetry in that poetry typically puts a stronger emphasis on the aesthetic qualities of language such as rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, metaphor, simile, etc to create layers of meaning on top of the literal text. Most (though not all) poetry is written in verse. That being said, there probably is a certain degree of overlap between what is known as a prose poem (a poem written in prose as opposed to verse) and a piece of flash fiction that uses very lyrical language.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other forms that you've mentioned (twitterature, dribble, drabble, and sudden fiction) all sound like specialized forms of flash fiction. I know that the drabble, for example, is a concept that originates in fandom and is traditionally a story that is &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; 100 words, though some people don't use this strict of a definition for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="860" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T02:16:29.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1860" CreationDate="2017-02-28T03:26:10.113" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to find any primary source material from Doyle on the matter, and after a decent amount of reading, it doesn't seem like anyone else has, either. However, that doesn't mean I can't give it a good shot, because we've certainly got some material to go on, especially if we consider the stories in the context of all of Doyle's stories about Holmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, while there are certainly some similarities between &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; (which I will use to refer to the actual printed story) and the imaginary one, there are also quite a few differences (all quotes in the bullets from Watson's writing in &quot;The Adventure of the Naval Treaty&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first of these, however, deals with interest of such importance and implicates so many of the first families in the kingdom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, it doesn't. By my count, the people who knew about the problem in England were the Prime Minister (Lord Bellinger), the Secretary for European Affairs (Trelawney Hope), Hope's wife, and, according to Hope, &quot;each member of the Cabinet&quot; as well as &quot;two, or possibly three, departmental officials&quot; - as plus Eduardo Lucas, who I'll get to in a moment. What about anyone outside England? According to the Secretary, &quot;no one abroad&quot; knew of the letter. Only one &quot;first family&quot;, therefore, is implicated, and that is the family of the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Scotland Yard and the French police were conducting investigations at the time that had a bearing on the case, but these were just into the murder of Eduardo Lucas, also known as Henri Fournaye. I won't spoil the plot for anyone who hasn't read &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;, but I will say that the police didn't find out about the connection between Lucas and the lost letter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No case, however, in which Holmes was engaged has ever illustrated the value of his analytical methods so clearly or has impressed those who were associated with him so deeply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is absolutely not true. In fact, precisely three people knew - prior to the story's publication - how Holmes solved the real case: Watson, the person who took the letter (whom I shall leave anonymous), and, of course, Holmes himself. In fact, Holmes actually ends the narrative with an enigmatic reply to the Prime Minister, when asked how he did it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We also have our diplomatic secrets,&quot; said he, and picking up his hat he turned to the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, that's my favorite line in any Holmes story. Second, Holmes' methods weren't illustrated to anyone besides Watson! Perhaps others were indeed impressed, but that's only because they were intentionally kept in the dark about it. So I think there's a discrepancy here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I still retain an almost verbatim report of the interview in which he demonstrated the true facts of the case to Monsieur Dubugue of the Paris police, and Fritz von Waldbaum, the well-known specialist of Dantzig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a discussion about how Holmes actually did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; explain things to people, see my above point. If he didn't explain his methods to the bloody &lt;em&gt;Prime Minister&lt;/em&gt;, there's no way he talked to foreign officials about it, given that the British government - at least, those who knew about it - wanted the whole thing kept secret. Plus, while there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a French police investigation (with no mention of Dubugue) involved during the real adventure, it had to do with the death of Eduardo Lucas/Henri Fournaye, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the missing letter. I can also assure you that neither von Waldbaum nor the city of Dantzig were even mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, all three sentences Watson dedicates to describing the story bear almost no resemblance to the actual published adventure. Now, it is possible - &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; - that this is intentional deception on the part of Watson (and thus Doyle), to grab the readers' attention without telling them anything of substance, and not revealing any specifics, to protect Holmes and his request for secrecy. We do know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1358/71&quot;&gt;Watson is at times an unreliable narrator&lt;/a&gt;. However, using that assumption here is a generous interpretation of the problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Thomas Vranken's &lt;em&gt;The Public, the Press, and Celebrities in The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; establishes many ties and underlying themes among all the stories in this collection, implying that the published version of &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; was written during this same period. For instance, secrecy and the troubles of those in power are touched upon in quite a few adventures, including &quot;The Adventure of the Priory School&quot;. Additionally, Watson himself becomes much less willing to give details of certain cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I should be guilty of an indiscretion if I were even to hint at the identity of some of the illustrious clients who crossed our humble threshold in Baker Street &lt;em&gt;(&quot;The Adventure of Black Peter&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is years since the incidents of which I speak took place, and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them. . . with due suppression the story may be told in such fashion as to injure no one. &lt;em&gt;(&quot;The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If in telling the story I seem to be somewhat vague in certain details the public will readily understand that there is an excellent reason for my reticence. &lt;em&gt;(&quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watson as a narrator has clearly evolved. He's much more reluctant to share details, a pattern which was not as apparent before, if it even existed. This may be in part because Doyle's stories involve more and more prestigious figures (although that was also true for certain cases in the past; see &quot;A Scandal in Bohemia&quot;, as well as &quot;The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle&quot;, &quot;The Adventure of the Naval Treaty&quot;, and others). Yes, Watson of course refused to give much information the first time around, but when Doyle actually wrote stories about people in power, he did not shy away from naming names, even though the characters were fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vranken touches upon other similarities. He connects the many references to struggles with aristocratic composure in &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot; with Doyle's experiences with being knighted in 1902, and also states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the Return . . . the connection between sexualised feminine power and celebrity becomes far stronger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;citing the actions of Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope - which I, like Watson, will only allude to, so as not to give the whole plot away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, for anyone wondering how the story could have changed so much in the intervening years - if it was indeed just an idea at first, which is what the evidence indicates - there may be an explanation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=56531vWZOeQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Bed with Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; suggests that Jean Leckie, Doyle's second wife, may have written &quot;more than 1,000 words&quot; (page 100) of &quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;, as well as influencing other stories. This would certainly account for many discrepancies between the two versions, suggesting that the published one was largely written later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T18:20:03.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1780" CreationDate="2017-02-28T07:34:10.507" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Project Gutenberg has compiled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3200&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; from over 220 of his works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I downloaded the text (about 16 million bytes) and split it by &lt;code&gt;'. '&lt;/code&gt; (and similar patterns) to identify sentences. Then I split sentences into words. (There is some scope for error in both these steps: for example, periods can occur within sentences, in abbreviations.) Sorting these pointed me to the following which may possibly be the top 10 sentences by length:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A sentence of about 688 words, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/innocent/text/mapchap58.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Innocents Abroad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, namely the middle of the three sentences below (note that this actually gets split into multiple sentences by the program because of a footnote that occurs in it, which I've omitted here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something interfered, and we did not visit the Red Sea and walk upon the sands of Arabia. I shall not describe the great mosque of Mehemet Ali, whose entire inner walls are built of polished and glistening alabaster; I shall not tell how the little birds have built their nests in the globes of the great chandeliers that hang in the mosque, and how they fill the whole place with their music and are not afraid of any body because their audacity is pardoned, their rights are respected, and nobody is allowed to interfere with them, even though the mosque be thus doomed to go unlighted; I certainly shall not tell the hackneyed story of the massacre of the Mamelukes, because I am glad the lawless rascals were massacred, and I do not wish to get up any sympathy in their behalf; I shall not tell how that one solitary Mameluke jumped his horse a hundred feet down from the battlements of the citadel and escaped, because I do not think much of that—I could have done it myself; I shall not tell of Joseph's well which he dug in the solid rock of the citadel hill and which is still as good as new, nor how the same mules he bought to draw up the water (with an endless chain) are still at it yet and are getting tired of it, too; I shall not tell about Joseph's granaries which he built to store the grain in, what time the Egyptian brokers were &amp;quot;selling short,&amp;quot; unwitting that there would be no corn in all the land when it should be time for them to deliver; I shall not tell any thing about the strange, strange city of Cairo, because it is only a repetition, a good deal intensified and exaggerated, of the Oriental cities I have already spoken of; I shall not tell of the Great Caravan which leaves for Mecca every year, for I did not see it; nor of the fashion the people have of prostrating themselves and so forming a long human pavement to be ridden over by the chief of the expedition on its return, to the end that their salvation may be thus secured, for I did not see that either; I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway—I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, &amp;quot;D—n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent—pass out a King;&amp;quot; I shall not tell of the groups of mud cones stuck like wasps' nests upon a thousand mounds above high water-mark the length and breadth of Egypt—villages of the lower classes; I shall not speak of the boundless sweep of level plain, green with luxuriant grain, that gladdens the eye as far as it can pierce through the soft, rich atmosphere of Egypt; I shall not speak of the vision of the Pyramids seen at a distance of five and twenty miles, for the picture is too ethereal to be limned by an uninspired pen; I shall not tell of the crowds of dusky women who flocked to the cars when they stopped a moment at a station, to sell us a drink of water or a ruddy, juicy pomegranate; I shall not tell of the motley multitudes and wild costumes that graced a fair we found in full blast at another barbarous station; I shall not tell how we feasted on fresh dates and enjoyed the pleasant landscape all through the flying journey; nor how we thundered into Alexandria, at last, swarmed out of the cars, rowed aboard the ship, left a comrade behind, (who was to return to Europe, thence home,) raised the anchor, and turned our bows homeward finally and forever from the long voyage; nor how, as the mellow sun went down upon the oldest land on earth, Jack and Moult assembled in solemn state in the smoking-room and mourned over the lost comrade the whole night long, and would not be comforted. I shall not speak a word of any of these things, or write a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sentence of about 423 words that is included in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following sentence of about 418 words, from &lt;em&gt;A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece of somebody else's without remembering him in cash for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice, leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain around the trees; they had to smother their anger when his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying waste the result of their patient toil; they were not allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its fat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twentieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes, and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet other taxes—upon this free and independent pauper, but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church; if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds to keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter—but no, that last infamy of monarchical government is unprintable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following sentence of about 410 words, from &lt;em&gt;Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he said it was a young bull now, and very frisky; and he was to bear a principal hand at a funeral; and she said, &amp;quot;The bull?&amp;quot; and he said, &amp;quot;No, myself&amp;quot;; but said the bull did take a hand, but not because of his being invited, for he wasn't; but anyway he was away over beyond the Fairy Tree, and fell asleep on the grass with his Sunday funeral clothes on, and a long black rag on his hat and hanging down his back; and when he woke he saw by the sun how late it was, and not a moment to lose; and jumped up terribly worried, and saw the young bull grazing there, and thought maybe he could ride part way on him and gain time; so he tied a rope around the bull's body to hold on by, and put a halter on him to steer with, and jumped on and started; but it was all new to the bull, and he was discontented with it, and scurried around and bellowed and reared and pranced, and Uncle Laxart was satisfied, and wanted to get off and go by the next bull or some other way that was quieter, but he didn't dare try; and it was getting very warm for him, too, and disturbing and wearisome, and not proper for Sunday; but by and by the bull lost all his temper, and went tearing down the slope with his tail in the air and blowing in the most awful way; and just in the edge of the village he knocked down some beehives, and the bees turned out and joined the excursion, and soared along in a black cloud that nearly hid those other two from sight, and prodded them both, and jabbed them and speared them and spiked them, and made them bellow and shriek, and shriek and bellow; and here they came roaring through the village like a hurricane, and took the funeral procession right in the center, and sent that section of it sprawling, and galloped over it, and the rest scattered apart and fled screeching in every direction, every person with a layer of bees on him, and not a rag of that funeral left but the corpse; and finally the bull broke for the river and jumped in, and when they fished Uncle Laxart out he was nearly drowned, and his face looked like a pudding with raisins in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following sentence of about 376 words, from &lt;em&gt;Life on the Mississipi&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, &amp;amp; as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, &amp;amp; i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie—i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins &amp;amp; herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me—i no i love to read his word &amp;amp; tell him all my troubles &amp;amp; he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did &amp;amp; now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater &amp;amp; that wasnt so once—our minister and others often talk with me &amp;amp; a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that God has called me &amp;amp; on the first Sunday in July i will join the church—dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet—you no i learned to read and write while prisons &amp;amp; i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this &amp;amp; lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, &amp;amp; that i never new who my father and mother was &amp;amp; i dont no my right name, &amp;amp; i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another &amp;amp; i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, &amp;amp; you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad—I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50— if you ever want any or all of it let me know, &amp;amp; it is yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This &amp;quot;sentence&amp;quot; of about 494 words from a letter, though it contains so many parenthetical remarks that we probably shouldn't count it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His patience; his indestructible equability of temper; his exceeding gentleness, kindness, forbearance, lovingness, charity; his loyalty: to friends, to convictions, to promises, half-promises, infinitesimal fractions and shadows of promises; (There was a requirement of him which I considered an atrocity, an injustice, an outrage; I wanted to implore him to repudiate it; Fred Grant said, &amp;quot;Save your labor, I know him; he is in doubt as to whether he made that half-promise or not—and, he will give the thing the benefit of the doubt; he will fulfill that half-promise or kill himself trying;&amp;quot; Fred Grant was right—he did fulfill it;) his aggravatingly trustful nature; his genuineness, simplicity, modesty, diffidence, self-depreciation, poverty in the quality of vanity-and, in no contradiction of this last, his simple pleasure in the flowers and general ruck sent to him by Tom, Dick and Harry from everywhere—a pleasure that suggested a perennial surprise that he should be the object of so much fine attention—he was the most lovable great child in the world; (I mentioned his loyalty: you remember Harrison, the colored body-servant? the whole family hated him, but that did not make any difference, the General always stood at his back, wouldn't allow him to be scolded; always excused his failures and deficiencies with the one unvarying formula, &amp;quot;We are responsible for these things in his race—it is not fair to visit our fault upon them —let him alone;&amp;quot; so they did let him alone, under compulsion, until the great heart that was his shield was taken away; then—well they simply couldn't stand him, and so they were excusable for determining to discharge him—a thing which they mortally hated to do, and by lucky accident were saved from the necessity of doing;) his toughness as a bargainer when doing business for other people or for his country (witness his &amp;quot;terms&amp;quot; at Donelson, Vicksburg, etc.; Fred Grant told me his father wound up an estate for the widow and orphans of a friend in St. Louis—it took several years; at the end every complication had been straightened out, and the property put upon a prosperous basis; great sums had passed through his hands, and when he handed over the papers there were vouchers to show what had been done with every penny) and his trusting, easy, unexacting fashion when doing business for himself (at that same time he was paying out money in driblets to a man who was running his farm for him—and in his first Presidency he paid every one of those driblets again (total, $3,000 F. said,) for he hadn't a scrap of paper to show that he had ever paid them before; in his dealings with me he would not listen to terms which would place my money at risk and leave him protected—the thought plainly gave him pain, and he put it from him, waved it off with his hands, as one does accounts of crushings and mutilations—wouldn't listen, changed the subject;) and his fortitude!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This sentence of about 326 words from &lt;em&gt;Sketches New and Old&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Riley used to tell about publishing a newspaper up in what is Alaska now, but was only an iceberg then, with a population composed of bears, walruses, Indians, and other animals; and how the iceberg got adrift at last, and left all his paying subscribers behind, and as soon as the commonwealth floated out of the jurisdiction of Russia the people rose and threw off their allegiance and ran up the English flag, calculating to hook on and become an English colony as they drifted along down the British Possessions; but a land breeze and a crooked current carried them by, and they ran up the Stars and Stripes and steered for California, missed the connection again and swore allegiance to Mexico, but it wasn't any use; the anchors came home every time, and away they went with the northeast trades drifting off sideways toward the Sandwich Islands, whereupon they ran up the Cannibal flag and had a grand human barbecue in honor of it, in which it was noticed that the better a man liked a friend the better he enjoyed him; and as soon as they got fairly within the tropics the weather got so fearfully hot that the iceberg began to melt, and it got so sloppy under foot that it was almost impossible for ladies to get about at all; and at last, just as they came in sight of the islands, the melancholy remnant of the once majestic iceberg canted first to one side and then to the other, and then plunged under forever, carrying the national archives along with it—and not only the archives and the populace, but some eligible town lots which had increased in value as fast as they diminished in size in the tropics, and which Riley could have sold at thirty cents a pound and made himself rich if he could have kept the province afloat ten hours longer and got her into port.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This sentence of approximately 300 words again from &lt;em&gt;A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrow that I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught of none, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbol of that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in the darkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this complexion of mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor could-not, might be by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master and most dear lord.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This of about 297 words, from &lt;em&gt;Roughing It&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In place of roughs and rowdies staring and blackguarding on the corners, I saw long-haired, saddle-colored Sandwich Island maidens sitting on the ground in the shade of corner houses, gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, I walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded street-cars, I met dusky native women sweeping by, free as the wind, on fleet horses and astride, with gaudy riding-sashes, streaming like banners behind them; instead of the combined stenches of Chinadom and Brannan street slaughter-houses, I breathed the balmy fragrance of jessamine, oleander, and the Pride of India; in place of the hurry and bustle and noisy confusion of San Francisco, I moved in the midst of a Summer calm as tranquil as dawn in the Garden of Eden; in place of the Golden City's skirting sand hills and the placid bay, I saw on the one side a frame-work of tall, precipitous mountains close at hand, clad in refreshing green, and cleft by deep, cool, chasm-like valleys—and in front the grand sweep of the ocean; a brilliant, transparent green near the shore, bound and bordered by a long white line of foamy spray dashing against the reef, and further out the dead blue water of the deep sea, flecked with &amp;quot;white caps,&amp;quot; and in the far horizon a single, lonely sail —a mere accent-mark to emphasize a slumberous calm and a solitude that were without sound or limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, saving the best for last, this of 297 words from &lt;em&gt;A Horse's Tale&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first day I came, I don't know how long ago it was, Buffalo Bill took me on Soldier Boy to Thunder-Bird's camp, not the big one which is out on the plain, which is White Cloud's, he took me to THAT one next day, but this one is four or five miles up in the hills and crags, where there is a great shut-in meadow, full of Indian lodges and dogs and squaws and everything that is interesting, and a brook of the clearest water running through it, with white pebbles on the bottom and trees all along the banks cool and shady and good to wade in, and as the sun goes down it is dimmish in there, but away up against the sky you see the big peaks towering up and shining bright and vivid in the sun, and sometimes an eagle sailing by them, not flapping a wing, the same as if he was asleep; and young Indians and girls romping and laughing and carrying on, around the spring and the pool, and not much clothes on except the girls, and dogs fighting, and the squaws busy at work, and the bucks busy resting, and the old men sitting in a bunch smoking, and passing the pipe not to the left but to the right, which means there's been a row in the camp and they are settling it if they can, and children playing JUST the same as any other children, and little boys shooting at a mark with bows, and I cuffed one of them because he hit a dog with a club that wasn't doing anything, and he resented it but before long he wished he hadn't: but this sentence is getting too long and I will start another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T07:34:10.507" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1864" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1869" CreationDate="2017-02-28T07:54:49.367" Score="23" ViewCount="7006" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of his books use quotation marks for direct speech. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Will he come? The jejune jesuit!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ceasing, he began to shave with care.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — Tell me, Mulligan, Stephen said quietly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — Yes, my love?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — How long is Haines going to stay in this tower?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Buck Mulligan showed a shaven cheek over his right shoulder.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fellows talked together in little groups.One fellow said:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  —They were caught near the Hill of Lyons.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  —Who caught them?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  —Mr Gleeson and the minister. They were on a car. The same fellow added:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  —A fellow in the higher line told me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some particular reason?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Before reading the comments and responses I was not aware that the use of quotation dash was common in other languages. My purpose for asking the question was, as someone guessed, to find out whether Joyce aimed to achieve some theatrical effect or maybe introduce purposeful ambiguity by choosing the dash over the quotation mark. Or did he want to use the device that is common to plays - and if so did he explicitly ever mention why they are preferable to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;p&gt;I do not think that it is a question for English Language and Usage because I am not questioning whether it is correct to use them, only what literary effect would someone gain by using them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="677" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T04:52:01.033" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T04:52:01.033" Title="Why doesn't James Joyce ever use quotation marks?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1864" CreationDate="2017-02-28T08:53:50.667" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;quotation dashes,&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/feb/06/inverted-commas-unpunctuated-speech-fiction-reading&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;theater style,&quot; or &quot;the continental manner.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; The latter term is because it's used (among several other styles, like &amp;lt; &gt; ) by many languages common in continental Europe, but it's common enough in English that you'll find it in the writings of authors as diverse as William Faulkner, Philip K. Dick, and Cormac McCarthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any specific claim by Joyce himself about the choice to use quotation dashes. It may have been to evoke a continental style, or to give a theatrical sense to the text (quotation dashes are similar to common dialogue punctuation conventions used by English playwrights), or to give his publishers are hard time; his works often had their punctuation standardised on the way to printing. Or maybe he just liked it better than all those inverted commas floating around. Personally I don't think he needed a reason to use quotation dashes any more than I'd need a reason to use single quotes instead of double ones or put double spaces after my sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T08:53:50.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2017-02-28T09:49:56.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not the oldest, but: there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poet_Laureate_of_the_United_Kingdom&amp;amp;oldid=764717326&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom&lt;/a&gt;, the modern tradition starting informally with Ben Jonson in 1616, and formally with John Dryden in 1631 and continuing to the present day. (Carol Ann Duffy is the current Poet Laureate, since 2009.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course throughout history various poets and writers have been appointed as court poets or been given awards by kings for particular works. I wouldn't be surprised to find examples from over 2500 years ago in the Veda and related literature. (Off hand, the story of Yājñavalkya and Janaka's prize of cows comes to mind, though that was for philosophizing, not for literature.))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T09:49:56.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="336" CreationDate="2017-02-28T10:04:12.643" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a linguist, but I think it's worth mentioning that the Odysseus→Ulysses transformation is a special case of something called the &quot;Sabine L&quot;: some words that had &quot;d&quot; sounds in Old Latin (or in Greek) became &quot;l&quot; in later (classical) Latin. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lacrima&lt;/em&gt; in Latin from Old Latin &lt;em&gt;dacrima&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;dakry&lt;/em&gt; from PIE *dakru- from which both English &lt;em&gt;tear&lt;/em&gt; and Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;aśru&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;olere&lt;/em&gt; &quot;smell,&quot; from the same root as &lt;em&gt;odor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lingua&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;dingua&lt;/em&gt; (cognate &lt;em&gt;tongue&lt;/em&gt;, Sanskrit &lt;em&gt;jihvā&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Latin &lt;em&gt;lēvir&lt;/em&gt; &quot;husband's brother&quot; (cf. &quot;levirate&quot;) from *daivēr &gt; Sanskrit देवृ still present in Hindi as &lt;em&gt;devar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just to avoid any ambiguity here at this question, &lt;em&gt;Ulixes&lt;/em&gt; being the Latin form of Greek &lt;em&gt;Odysseus&lt;/em&gt; is not an arbitrary choice made up by some author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T10:04:12.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2017-02-28T10:38:52.570" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly thanks for a question about Saki, one of my favourite authors sadly forgotten between Wilde and Wodehouse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is a matter of interpretation; I have read all of Saki's short stories multiple times, and I don't find &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt; to be one of the darkest, or even dark at all. I think it's just a combination of two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of Saki's stories have a humorous opposition between a child (or young person) and an aunt or similar guardian. (Seen in Wilde and Wodehouse too.) The most satisfying example is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/beasts/chapter33.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lumber Room&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where Nicholas outwits his cousins' aunt (inimitably described by Saki as &quot;the aunt-by-assertion&quot; and &quot;the &lt;em&gt;soi-disant&lt;/em&gt; aunt&quot;). But of course similar examples are scattered throughout the stories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of Saki's stories use death humorously: in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Esmé&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; we have a boy being eaten by a hyena (feels morbid typing it here, but the story is hilarious); we have the same being discussed at great length by Clovis in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter13.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Quest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/beasts/chapter2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Laura&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; we have her joking about her death and then dying (sandwiched between two delicious sentences), &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Unrest Cure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a joke about genocide written when it must have been absurd, and so on. (And minor examples abound, such as the death at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tobermory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if you don't take the death of Conradin's guardian seriously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/clovis/chapter10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a typical Saki story: there's an imaginative boy (or sometimes it's a girl, as in the stories featuring Vera, most famously &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/saki/beasts/chapter6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Open Window&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;); he's clever but the adults are rigid and oppressive; he has a world of his own (greatly amplified by his imagination) in which the adults have no admittance and would not understand anyway; and just once, he gets his satisfaction. What's not to like? :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not compare it to &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, which I found truly dark and frankly will probably not read again. On the other hand, each time I dip into Saki it's pure joy and (somewhat horrified) laughter, and I don't think we need to consider stories like &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vastar&lt;/em&gt; as being about the darkness in children. Saki's children are independent and consider themselves superior to the adults; any harm wished on the obtuse adults is purely secondary and comes from indifference or a wish to break free, rather than malice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The fact that &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vastar&lt;/em&gt; fits into a general pattern of Saki stories and characters means that we need not look for any special inspiration for it specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastEditorUserId="869" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T14:09:20.467" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:09:20.467" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1864" CreationDate="2017-02-28T14:37:15.640" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;James Joyce preferred dashes to quotation marks for aesthetic reasons. He even went so far as to call quotation marks &quot;perverted commas&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He remarks on his dislike of quotation marks at various places in his correspondences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the fewer the quotation marks the better.... The ‘ ’ are to be used only in the case of a quotation in full dress, I think, i.e., when it is used to prove or to contradict or to show &amp;amp;c. (&lt;em&gt;Letters of James Joyce&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. I, p. 263)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then Mr. Cape and his printers gave me trouble [with &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;]. They set the book with &lt;strong&gt;perverted commas&lt;/strong&gt; and I insisted on their removal by the sergeant-at-arms. (&lt;em&gt;Letters of James Joyce&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. III, p. 99)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages are recorded &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/j/Joyce_JA/quots/quots3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="104" LastEditDate="2017-02-28T16:28:25.353" LastActivityDate="2017-02-28T16:28:25.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1891" CreationDate="2017-02-28T14:45:43.820" Score="-1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nealstephenson.com/seveneves.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seveneves&lt;/em&gt; by Neal Stephenson&lt;/a&gt;, towards the end of part II, the human race is reduced to 7 people (all women) who contrive to rebuild the human race by use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis#Humans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parthenogenesis&lt;/a&gt;. Due to various mishaps (and the uninvited and unwelcome US president) the pre-prepared 'Human Genetic Archive' has been destroyed so only the genetic material from the 7 remains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They knew, before the population was reduced to 7, that the archive had been destroyed. So why didn't they 'harvest' genetic information from &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; who was still alive at this point ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T06:02:30.270" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T19:26:25.267" Title="Why didn't they harvest more genetic information?" Tags="&lt;neal-stephenson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1828" CreationDate="2017-02-28T15:54:19.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6870698-the-crowfield-curse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Crowfield Curse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Pat Walsh, published in 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4diM0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4diM0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Book cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will knows a secret.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Somewhere in the forest, behind the abbey where he lives, is a grave. And beneath the snow lies something he thought could never die. But Will is not alone in knowing the truth about the Crowfield Curse. Hidden in the dusk, someone else is watching...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/30/crowfield-curse-pat-walsh-children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review&lt;/a&gt; mentions the leper named Jacobus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One, Jacobus Bone, is a leper who was once a fine musician. His servant, Shadlok, is a sinister creature, with long silver hair and a criss-cross map of old scars on his face. They are seeking something and Will thinks it has to do with an old legend that an angel was once killed near the abbey; a feather from the angel's wing is preserved as a holy relic there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found via a Google search for &lt;code&gt;fantasy orphan boy Fey leprosy&lt;/code&gt; (searching for William, Jacob, and leprosy brings up a lot of results for a Dr. William Jacob who apparently specializes in leprosy treatment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T20:10:00.273" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T20:10:00.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T05:20:48.843" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to identify a novel or travelogue, possibly 18th century, possibly translated from French, which features as a significant tangent the story of a haunted painting. I believe the ghost story is presented with an extremely elaborate frame story regarding an orphan taken in by monks who would ultimately become a painter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, the ghost story goes like this: the owner of a purportedly haunted painting wants to verify its status and tricks a guest into spending a night in its room while placing other guests in a room with a placebo painting which he tells them is haunted. The guest in the room with the genuine painting reports having had a tormented sleep. I believe this all takes place in Italy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason I'm strongly associating the book with James Tissot's painting &quot;The London Visitors&quot;, which is of course 19th century, but covers are out of sync with subject all the time. The name sounds something like A Sentimental Journey, but it certainly isn't Sterne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should add that although the tangent is significant in context, it takes up only a few pages. I have absolutely no memory of the rest of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T09:56:17.187" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T09:56:17.187" Title="Identify a novel/travelogue (18th century) featuring an anecdote about haunted painting" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1841" CreationDate="2017-03-01T05:50:43.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting in this conversation that Lewis had very level-headed opinions about homosexuality and did write directly about the subject outside of his children's fiction; in his private life, he was great friends with a gay man, also a devout Christian, who expressed his theory of homosexuality to Lewis and whose view Lewis seemed to accept as authortitative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This friend was Arthur Greeves, a familiar name to anyone who has read Lewis. In Greeves' assessment, homosexuality was a divinely-ordained burden, an opportunity to grow in holiness through lifelong celibacy. Although this might seem distasteful to many of us, it's worth noting that Greeves doesn't condemn himself as inherently flawed or sinful - if Lewis did accept this view, that's significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis also wrote about the issue of homosexual relations in English public schools with clarity. He accuses the English public of reacting with disgust for neither moral nor Christian reasons but rather squeamishness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is to say that 1. Lewis has written about homosexuality and 2. Lewis' views were comparatively broad-minded. Although I doubt that any Narnian character is gay, it isn't impossible, and should be thought about through the lens of Lewis' actual writings on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;You can read about his &quot;pious homosexual friend&quot; in Vol. II of his letters, where a footnote identifies the friend as Greeves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read about Lewis and public school homosexuality &lt;a href=&quot;https://spiritualfriendship.org/2013/08/23/c-s-lewis-on-homosexuality-and-disgust/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="885" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T05:58:24.547" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T05:58:24.547" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1864" CreationDate="2017-03-01T10:05:18.020" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is strictly a matter of differences in punctuation styles among writers of English from different nations. I love Joyce, and find his use of dashes for quotations economical, elegant and perfect easy to follow. I have seen old American editions of his works that tried substituting quotation marks for the dashes, and the results were hideous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commonwealth writers of English (i.e., from the U.K. and its former colonies) differ with American writers over two issues: whether to use single or double quotation marks and whether to include the comma (or period) inside or outside the closing quotation mark. An Australian writer I used to edit would argue endlessly with me on this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The American novelist James Michener preferred the British practice of using single quotes for quotations and double quotes for quotations within quotations, whereas the prevalent American practice is the opposite. My favorite American novelist, William Faulkner, seemed to loathe all punctuation, particularly commas. He would write these magnificent sequences without commas, and eschewed apostrophes altogether. When you can write like Faulkner, you get to make your own rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="891" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T10:05:18.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-01T19:04:43.697" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe I checked this out from our library in Kentucky somewhere between 1986 and 1995. I remember it as a short book, less than a hundred pages, maybe less than thirty. A pair of children (at least. There could have been more. And I don't remember if they were related to each other) decide that a lady in their neighborhood is a witch. When they confront her on it, they either convince her or she decides to play along. Either way, they convince her to try a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_ointment&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;flying ointment&lt;/a&gt; they got from a library book (it involved some sort of grease and soot). After an abortive attempt to launch herself from a roof, the &quot;witch&quot; proceeds to make short hops in the yard, broom astride, and claiming that she was jumping higher than she could before, implying that the ointment was doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. I was recently reminded of the book when a friend was mentioning how some of the old &quot;flying ointments&quot; had psychoactive components, implying that the &quot;flying&quot; was a matter of skyclad witches standing astride dosed brooms and getting a contact high through their mucous membranes. Of course, this book, being a children's book, involved a fully clothed witch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the illustrations were done in a pen-and-ink manner. I remember there being one of the attempted flight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that it was &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Jennifer_Hecate_Macbeth_William_McKinley.html?id=j6kybUfVFTsC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; despite a common theme of a flying ointment and witches, as I clearly remember the &quot;witch&quot; as an older female. Neither do I believe it to be &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1440931.The_Active_Enzyme_Lemon_Freshened_Junior_High_School_Witch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Active Enzyme, Lemon Freshened Junior High School Witch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which some reviews also note has a flying ointment, but also that it's all kids trying it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-03-01T19:29:48.243" LastActivityDate="2017-03-01T19:29:48.243" Title="A pair of children decide that their neighbor is a witch and convince her to try flying" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1892" CreationDate="2017-03-01T19:31:47.860" Score="14" ViewCount="2051" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Aslan is asked why he has to die in the &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, he answers something in the sense that there is a &quot;deeper magic&quot; that he has to obey. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is this &quot;deeper magic&quot;? Since Narnia can be interpreted as a religious allegory, does this &quot;deeper magic&quot; have any correspondence to Christian beliefs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T22:16:10.150" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T07:14:16.060" Title="Is Deeper Magic something more than God (the Emperor beyond the Sea) in Narnia?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1882" CreationDate="2017-03-02T00:52:14.407" Score="8" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a Scholastic-type book, probably about 5th-grade level. I would have read it in the 1980s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember there were a brother and sister, possibly in upstate New York. They either found or fell into a cave, inside of which were hazelnuts. They ate? the nuts, and this transported them back to Colonial times. They ended up living with a friendly family until they could get back to the cave/hazelnuts to return to the present. I think the settlers were Dutch or German. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one bit I remember vividly: upon arrival, they were taken in by a family, and saw something like a coal scuttle. When one of them asked what it was, the neighbor laughed and said something to the effect of &quot;Well, if you're living with &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; family, no wonder! A coal scuttle is for carrying live coals from one house to another when your fire goes out, and Mrs. [Name] has never let that happen! Her fire has burned for years!&quot; Later in the book, the family has rushed out for some emergency and forgotten to bank the fire. They run back, the woman feeds and fusses over the fire, and finally finds one coal poking out like a glowing eye: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She sat back on her heels. &quot;X years,&quot; she said proudly, &quot;and still it burns!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a few monochrome illustrations — maybe in brown? — and the one I remember is just after the two have transported back to the present. The brother is standing and the sister is sitting on the ground of the cave, knees up, head on her crossed arms, and he notices her Colonial-style dress and her long hair spilling over her shoulders and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really like to read this again, so please let me know if this sounds the least familiar. I've Googled every combination of keywords I can think of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T18:29:02.563" Title="Story ID: Brother and sister go back to colonial times" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1881" CreationDate="2017-03-02T01:11:09.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this &lt;strong&gt;Caroline D. Emerson's &lt;em&gt;The Magic Tunnel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ap6CM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ap6CM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broad outline of the story sounds exactly the same as what you've described, although the bit with the cave and the nuts doesn't seem to match (they go back in time by using a subway train in New York) and the bit about the fire is too minor to be mentioned in any of the descriptions I've found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, I Googled &quot;brother sister new york eat nuts time travel colonial&quot;. That led me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=588465&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this forum thread&lt;/a&gt;, where someone asked about what sounds like exactly the same story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was in the late 60s or early 70s. It's about two kids - brother and sister - who live in contemporary New York. They hear a story that if you stand in the very front of the lead car in a subway train and make a wish it will come true. They wish themselves to the Dutch Colony of New Amsterdam in 16-whatever-it-was. They find out how hard colonial life was, they have some adventures, and then they go back to modern New York before they get stuck in the past or change history or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answerer linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B000WA9OG4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Amazon page&lt;/a&gt;, which has a few not-very-informative reviews. I also found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6068506-the-magic-tunnel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Goodreads page&lt;/a&gt;, which is a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; more helpful and descriptive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sarah and John make a wish while in a subway train under New York City and are transported to New Amsterdam in 1664. I loved this book as a child. The details stuck with me: not having forks and sleeping in cupboards in the wall. It's a great way to learn about early colonial history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The plot was fairly simplistic and straightforward, but I liked how it showed the duality of such an adventure: the kids lived it up and had all the fun in the world until the first day ended, forcing them to deal with the very Puritanical and strict mores of the time period. And of course going back home wasn't going to be easy, considering which PART of the 1600s they were in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The characters were pretty adorable, too, even for 1940s gender stereotypes. And even Sarah didn't live up to hers for that long, after she got into the spirit of things. My favorite part will always be their adventure in the wilderness, with the clams and everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T18:29:02.563" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T18:29:02.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5294" CreationDate="2017-03-02T01:28:59.577" Score="19" ViewCount="1017" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon its publication, Thomas Hardy's novel &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; inspired much debate as to whether Tess should be perceived as an innocent young woman thrust too early into the cruel world of men or as a shameless, immoral woman who deserved everything she got. The author claimed to be surprised by this controversy, as he had intended the interpretation to be clear all along; he even added the subtitle &quot;A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented&quot; in an attempt to clarify the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the pro-Tess interpretation intended by the author was also my own interpretation of the novel, so I don't need that explained to me. I'm still puzzled, however, by how it could be read as a criticism of Tess and the women like her. &lt;strong&gt;What justifies the anti-Tess reading of the novel?&lt;/strong&gt; What is there in the text (or anywhere else, e.g. prevailing views in the society of the time) which could be interpreted in that light? Why did some people's sympathies not lie with Tess after reading it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any anti-Tess critic ever explained their interpretation in detail? Lacking that, can we still work out what exactly might have led such people to their view of the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-02T04:01:52.863" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T12:09:50.053" Title="What justifies the anti-Tess interpretation of &quot;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&quot;?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;tess-of-the-durbervilles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T04:19:56.810" Score="8" ViewCount="3778" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Bazaars_of_Hyderabad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In The Bazaars Of Hyderabad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the poet Sarojini Naidu says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you chant, O magicians?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Spells for aeons to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;em&gt;aeons&lt;/em&gt; likely refers to eternal ages and the magicians are likely chanting such spells for the eternity of their visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't understand the significance of the reference to the magicians in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me with this question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="905" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T10:59:56.140" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T11:11:38.973" Title="What is the significance of the magicians in the poem 'In The Bazaars Of Hyderabad'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;sarojini-naidu&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-02T05:11:17.833" Score="15" ViewCount="1347" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is &quot;close reading&quot;? How does it relate to the study of literature? Are there any instructions about how to do a close reading of a text/passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T23:26:31.117" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T17:51:06.680" Title="What is close reading?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;close-reading&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1897" CreationDate="2017-03-02T10:16:52.113" Score="6" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, this one story (novel) I read as a child. It was a around 250-400 page book with medium text size (and sketches on one every left page (almost). I only remember fragments of it. If anyone could help me identify it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This boy uses a boat to flee to an island (supposedly uninhabited) not far away from his house. (He fled because of abuse from his alcoholic guardian, don't remember if it was his dad-not fully certain about this). He builds a shelter there and also comes back to the village for supplies on his boat (with his friend, the boat had a limited capacity, he had some friends with him, I don't exactly remember how many). Everything was going good but then one day some new visitors come to the other side of the island and he and his friends try to hide but the visitors find a piece of thread (which I think one of his friend -a girl- left behind while sewing something). I don't remember the story after that.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not perfectly certain of the details but it's mostly correct to my remembering though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authors I remember reading to as a kid - Enid Blyton, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, Alexander Dumas, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain if that would give any hint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="907" LastEditorUserId="907" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T05:08:44.473" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:52:31.870" Title="Help me identify a story about a boy who flees to an island with his friends" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2770" CreationDate="2017-03-02T17:32:44.163" Score="10" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a story that was part of a Reader's Digest anthology.&#xA;I read in the very early 1990s as a German translation, but I am pretty sure, the story is from the USA (and was probably written in the 1980s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember neither title nor author of the story, but this is a synopsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is probably set in the 1970s-1980s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main actor is Mat[t]hew (?) McFadden, a teenager around 15-16 years old.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He grew up on a farm (probably in Wyoming/Montana/Idaho), but lost his parents.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first days after his loss, he stays with an aunt and uncle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He also tried to commit suicide with a rope, but fails.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Somehow he ends up in a prison cell, where he learns, that his uncle and aunt do not want to / can not care for him on the long term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thus, he is sent to an orphanage (or a Juvenile Detention Center?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During his time there he makes 3 close friends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first is in his age.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second is also around that age, but has hearing problems that were diagnosed loo late. Due to this problems, his family thought he was mentally challenged and he did not get proper treatment and education. He is a physically strong and friendly, good-natured person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third is younger, around 10. Grew up in a bad neighbourhood in a big city(?). He is clever, funny, and becomes the best friend of the &amp;quot;second guy&amp;quot;. I think he also had fun learning sign language from his friend - I remember the sign for &lt;em&gt;snow&lt;/em&gt; played a role.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a bad guy (red haired?), a criminal and leader of a group of bullies, some ignorant watchmen and a female teacher who recognises the kid's true potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conflict between the &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; kids escalates and Matthew fights with the bully-leader. This fight was described rather detailed, I remember lost teeth and blood.  He wins this fight (strong farm boy), but the revenge would be fatal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To save him, the teacher helps him to escape from the orphanage, brings him to an isolated farm where he can make a living. One by one, his friends come to this farm as well (either escape the orphanage or are old enough to be released). These last parts after his escape were less detailed, rather an epilogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an idea about the title/author or how to find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not &lt;em&gt;Holes&lt;/em&gt; by Louis Sachar. Comparing the two, I would say, the story I am looking for is more dramatic. The story focuses on the things that went wrong in the kid's previous life and the things that are wrong in this orphanage (&lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; like the ignorant watchmen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T02:41:21.033" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T02:41:21.033" Title="Teenager in orphanage or prison" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1885" CreationDate="2017-03-02T18:53:50.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained&#xA;  interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading&#xA;  emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by&#xA;  close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in&#xA;  which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of&#xA;  text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close reading expects readers to focus on the information that a text&#xA;  provides, without relying on a lot of information or support. This is&#xA;  different from other kinds of reading lessons you teach, in which you&#xA;  may start out by introducing teacher-set purposes, discussions of&#xA;  students’ life experiences, picture walks, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close reading discourages such front-loading. The goal of close&#xA;  reading instruction is to foster independent readers who are able to&#xA;  plumb the depths of a text by considering only the text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We all know that it’s not enough to just understand what a text says.&#xA;  Close readers not only grasp an author’s message, but they also take a&#xA;  look under the hood, so to speak. They try to recognize the author’s&#xA;  tone or perspective, the implications of the author’s word choices,&#xA;  and why a text is structured or organized as it is. Additionally,&#xA;  readers should go beyond a text, evaluating its quality or value,&#xA;  comparing it with other texts, or determining its implications. It’s a&#xA;  lot to ask of students, but with appropriate scaffolding and support,&#xA;  they can do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;mdash; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/common-core-close-reading-0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scholastic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that means that when doing a close reading one examines writing by moving slowly through the text, examining very small distinctions such as the choice of a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T01:24:06.727" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T01:24:06.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1878" CreationDate="2017-03-02T19:11:49.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few thoughts here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's actually a little more subtle than to say that &lt;em&gt;Narnia&lt;/em&gt; is a strict allegory. C. S. Lewis's intent (and some people, such as @Hamlet, would argue that that's not really the same thing as meaning - that's a different discussion though) was to write a &quot;re-imagining&quot; of the Christian story of sorts - for example, if a world like Narnia existed and it needed redemption in the same way that our world did, how would Jesus have redeemed them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, the Stone Table is a clear reference to the 10 Commandments in particular (and the Law of Moses in general), which was originally written on a stone tablet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that thinking, the &quot;Deeper Magic&quot; represents (in one sense, at least) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Covenant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Covenant&lt;/a&gt; that was brought about by Jesus's death and Resurrection (see also &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/matthew/26-28.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the specific New Testament passage in which it occurs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; What, then, do we make of the fact that the &quot;deeper magic&quot; existed before the dawn of time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To cite @Nathaniel's excellent comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many Christians believe that the &quot;New Covenant&quot; is not &quot;new&quot; in the sense of being defined recently or in reaction to something, but as something that has existed for a long time but was only clearly revealed recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Christian theology (and certainly in C. S. Lewis's view), the New Covenant isn't really &quot;new&quot; in the sense that Aslan / Jesus suddenly sat down and said &quot;I've got it - I know what I'll do!&quot; The principles behind this were &lt;em&gt;there all along&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the second part of your question (is the Deeper Magic something more than God?), you may want to look at the closely related &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euthyphro dilemma&lt;/a&gt;. That basically says &quot;is morality good because God says so or is God good because he follows the law of morality?&quot; In the first case, you'd have to wonder if the laws of morality were arbitrary, and in the second you'd have to see them as being almost &quot;higher&quot; than God in a sense (because they're something independent from him that he's also bound by). The &quot;standard&quot; Christian answer to this is that morality is an essential part of God's character. I can't remember if C. S. Lewis explicitly stated that he agreed with that view anywhere, but he almost certainly would've been aware of it given his work with apologetics. That view's largely uncontroversial among theologians at this point (as far as I know), so I'd be really surprised if he disagreed with that view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T17:01:44.190" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:01:44.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1870" CreationDate="2017-03-02T19:26:25.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Either Stephenson didn't consider this, or considered it and turned it down. This is ultimately good: Stephenson's role as an author is to remain scientifically plausible under benefit of the doubt in order to play emotional appeals, not to maintain strict adherence to scientific and logical accuracy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephenson as an author regularly puts on the facade of scientific possibility. He does this in order to make the events in a story seem reasonable and plausible - but make no mistake, it's just a facade. The entire point about the moon breaking up is a great monument to the pseudoplausibility he employs. His position as an author, and where he places himself, is emotional appeal to the scientific mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the framing of this question somewhat misses the point of that part of the story. It's not intended to be a scientific or wholly rationalized approach - it's intended to be a good yarn, a story consumed and a story pushing towards something on a more emotional level. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at the end of it, there's an enormous amount of emotional draw in the idea of seven people embarking to restore the human race on Earth. It's a task that Stephenson is setting up to seem &lt;em&gt;plausible but difficult&lt;/em&gt;, with no mind to issues such as &quot;we need greater biodiversity than that to succeed.&quot; Consider, then, what would be different if Stephenson had done it the way you propose here: that emotional draw would have been lost, because the future of humanity would be a heck of a lot more certain and guaranteed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't be more certain in reality, mind you, but setting it up so that the one resource needed to rebuild humanity was destroyed is an operative point in that emotional appeal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-03-02T19:26:25.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1878" CreationDate="2017-03-02T20:05:53.730" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;First we need to understand what the &quot;Deep Magic&quot; is/represents, before moving to the &quot;Deeper Magic.&quot;  We know from chapter 13 of &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; that the Deep Magic is written in several places (on the Stone Table, on the Scepter of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, etc.).  We also know from that chapter that it defines what Justice requires.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This closely parallels, then, the Old Testament Law, which establishes both laws and a sacrificial system for dealing with those who break the law.  Colin Duriez summarizes that the Deep Magic is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the moral order by which the world of Narnia is made and sustained.  One of its inner laws is that unless the Witch is given blood for every treachery committed all Narnia will fall apart, perishing in fire and water.  The Deep Magic has affinities with Old Testament law. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=O1K421wnr9EC&amp;amp;pg=PA181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Field Guide to Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, 181&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what about the &quot;Deep&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; Magic&quot;?  Paul Ford likens it to &quot;self-sacrificing love&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=SIVAHtOyADQC&amp;amp;pg=PA214&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pocket Companion to Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, 214&lt;/a&gt;) and points to LWW chapter 15, where Aslan says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know.  Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time.  But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation.  She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This deeper magic is thus both older and less known than the Deep Magic.  This parallels in Christianity the mechanism that makes it possible for Jesus Christ's death on the cross to save (or, more specifically, &lt;em&gt;atone for&lt;/em&gt;) law-breakers.  Lewis is purposefully vague when it comes to the exact function of this mechanism (as shown elsewhere, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1792/76&quot;&gt;he did not personally commit to any particular theory of atonement&lt;/a&gt;).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Broadly speaking, however, the deeper magic parallels God's grace in the New Covenant: a grace that was only foreshadowed in the Old Testament, a grace that fulfills the Law and its sacrificial system, a grace that was established long before the Old Testament law was formally given. Thus Duriez writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The deeper magic is] a deeper principle than the natural moral order that sustains the world.  This is a principle resembling the New Testament notion of grace, which fulfills and perfects the older law. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=O1K421wnr9EC&amp;amp;pg=PA181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Field Guide to Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, 181&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T16:22:00.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1791" CreationDate="2017-03-02T20:44:17.063" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Notably this isn't the Count's first stroke. It is, in fact his sixth. Doctors have known for centuries that victims of stroke can become constipated and suffer from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal_impaction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fecal impaction&lt;/a&gt; as a result of loss of muscular function in the colon. This can become highly painful and ultimately will lead to bowel infection. A small dose of a purgative such as Cream of Tartar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/2561027R.nlm.nih.gov/2561027R#page/n413/mode/2up/search/tartar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;potassium bitartrate&lt;/a&gt;) administered with plain water would result in looser stools and less chance of constipation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Post-stroke constipation prevalence rate in stroke patients is 30-60%.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Constipation not only leads to a low quality of life, but also&#xA;interferes with rehabilitation treatment because of problems in bowel&#xA;movement control.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3309224/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bowel Function in Acute Stroke Patients&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T11:08:15.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1895" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1896" CreationDate="2017-03-03T00:31:40.910" Score="11" ViewCount="1177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to pin down a certain short story by O. Henry. I remember the plot quite well, but not the title, nor which book collection of O. Henry's stories I first encountered it within. And let's face it: That man (otherwise known as William Sydney Porter) wrote a huge number of short stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little Googling failed to turn it up when I searched for words and phrases I thought I remembered. And when I looked for a collection of online summaries of O. Henry's works, I failed to find this one. For instance, it is not one of the stories summarized &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shortstoryguide.com/o-henry-short-stories/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/index.php?p=web/author/OHenry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I remember about the characters and plot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the story begins, a young man is speaking to a young lady. It appears that they have known each other all their lives, and in recent years he has been thinking that he is love with her. Now he is begging her to marry him. (It may not have been the first time.) She seems fond of him, but for some reason or other she has turned him down. I got the impression that she was highly sensitive about the fact that his family was wealthy and hers was poor, which he may have been so foolish as to mention as a good reason for her to marry him. The girl's family's &quot;genteel poverty&quot; may have been a fairly recent change in their circumstances, however, since I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the two families lived near one another in a &quot;good part of town.&quot; (Implicitly she resided in a large house which her family had owned, free and clear, for a long time, or so I gathered.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She even goes so far as to say that she is going to return all his gifts. He blinks, and claims she has never done him the honor of accepting any of the gifts he has tried to give her. (Implicitly: Within the last few years, after he started getting really interested in her in romantic terms.) She gently but firmly sets him straight on that point. Evidently he has &lt;em&gt;forgotten&lt;/em&gt; that once upon a time, when she was just a little girl (4? 6? Something like that?), and he was a few years older, he gave her a toy bear (I think) which was hollow and filled with candy. She ate the candy, but she still has the bear, and will return it to him as soon as possible as a sign that she doesn't want to receive any other gifts from him. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After this highly unsatisfactory conversation, this young man goes walking through a park (Central Park?). He sees another young couple sitting side by side on a park bench, and he somehow learns or deduces that they have nowhere else to spend the night, and it promises to be a fairly cold night. (Not actually snowing, if memory serves, but bound to be uncomfortable for people spending all the hours of darkness outdoors.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The two young gentlemen confer, and the stranger in town says that he and the young lady are eloping. I think they were from &quot;old Southern families&quot;; I forget how they ended up here (in what I'm &lt;em&gt;almost sure&lt;/em&gt; is New York City, where so many of O. Henry's tales were set). They have little or no money at the moment, and no friends or relatives in this city who would put them up for the night, and they can't get properly married until tomorrow morning. Of course it would never do for them to share sleeping quarters inside a room somewhere when they were not yet a married couple.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The wealthy young gentleman would be happy to lend or give enough funds to let these two lovebirds each have a separate hotel room, but soon realizes that their Southern pride won't allow them to accept such &lt;em&gt;charity&lt;/em&gt; from a total stranger. After chewing on the problem, he does suggest a compromise which would not require any money to change hands. He assures the Southern gentleman that he, the wealthy young man, is very well-acquainted with a young lady of impeccable moral fiber who would be happy to share her accommodations with another well-bred young lady (the Southern girl). The Southern gentleman is, of course, welcome to sit on the park bench all night if he feels the honorable obligation to do it that way, but wouldn't it be nice for his young lady to protect her health by finding shelter with another young lady? This suggestion is finally accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, the wealthy young gentleman receives that toy bear back (by messenger, I believe), and there is something inside it -- or accompanying it -- to strongly suggest (in some symbolical way which escapes me) that his young lady has decided the time is right for them to get married after all, now that he's somehow &quot;proved&quot; something-or-other about himself.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone recognize this story? If I went digging around in all the online e-texts I could find that collect material by O. Henry, I might eventually unearth it, but I'm hoping that this approach will be much faster. (Since my Googling efforts didn't work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="914" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T06:15:11.027" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:24:47.480" Title="Looking for an old O. Henry story about a wealthy young man trying to woo a &quot;genteel poor&quot; young lady in New York City" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1895" CreationDate="2017-03-03T07:24:47.480" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/henry/o/roads-of-destiny/chapter3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Discounters of Money&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It occurs in the collection of O. Henry stories called &lt;em&gt;Roads of Destiny.&lt;/em&gt; It occupies pages &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/completeworksofo002824mbp#page/n397/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;379 to 384 in this book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;…and there you have young Howard Pilkins with 4,000,000; and a good fellow at that. He was an agreeable, modestly arrogant young man, who implicitly believed that money could buy anything that the world had to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One evening Pilkins went down to the red brick house in Gramercy Square, and made what he thought was a proposal to Alice v.&amp;hairsp;d.&amp;hairsp;R.&amp;nbsp; Alice, with her nose turned down, and thinking of his money, considered it a proposition, and refused it and him. Pilkins, summoning all his resources as any good general would have done, made an indiscreet references to the advantages that his money would provide. That settled it. The lady turned so cold that…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You’ve forgotten,” said Alice v. d. R., with a little smile. “It was a long time ago when our families were neighbours. You were seven, and I was trundling my doll on the sidewalk. You have me a little gray, hairy kitten, with shoe-buttony eyes. Its head came off and it was full of candy. You paid five cents for it—you told me so. I haven’t the candy to return to you—I hadn’t developed a conscience at three, so I ate it. But I have the kitten yet, and I will wrap it up neatly to-night and send it to you tomorrow.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the event with the park bench and cold night etc. happen exactly as you described in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[In case you're curious: I found this by looking for &quot;The Complete Works of O. Henry&quot; on the Internet Archive, then downloading the plain text version, and searching through the entire text first for &quot;park&quot; (gave up after a few occurrences), then for &quot;bear&quot; and finally for &quot;candy&quot; which led to this.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:24:47.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1887" CreationDate="2017-03-03T07:52:31.870" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/book-details.php?id=289&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Secret Island by Enid Blyton&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall anything about an alcoholic guardian although the main protagonists Grandfather is leaving to stay with a relative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part with a visitor finding a thread is definitely in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other points you may recognise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They frequently sink the boat to prevent it from being found&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They 'swim' a cow over to the island for fresh milk&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They build a 'living' house from willow trees&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have chickens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The have a winter hideout in a cave&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 'abuse' in the story was aimed at Peggy, Mike &amp;amp; Nora by their aunt and uncle who, thinking that the parents are dead/lost take advantage of free labour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peggy Arnold, and younger twin siblings Mike and Nora, are living with a harsh aunt and uncle after their parents are thought to have been killed in a plane crash. In this first adventure, aided by an orphan boy, Jack, they have befriended, they run away to an island on a nearby lake, and together they make a new home constructed with the branches of a willow tree, this much-loved &amp;quot;living house&amp;quot; being one of the highlights of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, living on one's own turns out to be far more difficult than they thought, and, along with a lot of fun and happiness, they also suffer a lot of hardship – especially when winter sets in. It does not help that the police are looking out for them, too, and Jack has to be very careful when he ventures ashore to sell produce at a market, and has one or two narrow escapes from being detained by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Series_(Enid_Blyton)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T07:52:31.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1899" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1900" CreationDate="2017-03-03T10:34:31.800" Score="1" ViewCount="15940" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does 'pinoc' in &lt;em&gt;The Man in the High Castle&lt;/em&gt; mean? I had the feeling it is someone subordinate but I did not find an exact explanation in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T08:24:09.770" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T09:00:19.183" Title="What does 'pinoc' mean?" Tags="&lt;philip-k-dick&gt;&lt;the-man-in-the-high-castle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1899" CreationDate="2017-03-03T10:49:37.867" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is an epithet for the puppet government of the Pacific States of America: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since he had never been able to make out Wyndam-Matson's relationship to the&#xA;  pinocs — the puppet white government at Sacramento — he could not fathom his ex-employer's power to sway the real authorities, the Japanese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do not think this is ever explicitly mentioned in the book, I believe the word derives from the name of the fictional puppet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pinocchio&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorDisplayName="user8" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T11:19:17.920" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T11:19:17.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1905" CreationDate="2017-03-03T14:48:31.953" Score="29" ViewCount="16975" Body="&lt;p&gt;JK Rowling &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/10/20/j-k-rowling-at-carnegie-hall-reveals-dumbledore-is-gay-neville-marries-hannah-abbott-and-scores-more&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;announced in 2007&lt;/a&gt; to an audience at Carnegie Hall that Albus Dumbledore was in fact, gay and always had been...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JKR:&lt;/strong&gt; My truthful answer to you... &lt;strong&gt;I always thought of Dumbledore as gay.&lt;/strong&gt; [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Dumbledore's gay!&amp;quot; [laughter] &amp;quot;If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there ever any textual evidence in the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; novels that would have led a reader, especially the target readers, to believe this was the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T20:21:17.393" Title="Is there any textual evidence to support that Dumbledore was gay?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1902" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-03T15:12:02.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T15:12:02.077" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T15:12:02.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1903" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-03T15:12:02.077" Score="0" Body="Questions related to sexuality, including LGBT themes (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), in works of literature or literary theory." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T18:38:04.620" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T18:38:04.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1901" CreationDate="2017-03-03T17:22:32.717" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of &lt;em&gt;explicit&lt;/em&gt; confirmation, the answer is a very solid &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;. At no point did any character, nor the omniscient narrator, identify Dumbledore's sexuality in simple terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Signs and portents.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/arts/29conn.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Various&lt;/a&gt; writers have identified incidents and passages that might act as &lt;em&gt;subtle indicators&lt;/em&gt; toward his sexuality. Note that all of these were spotted post-facto and some require a very ungenerous interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore's love of knitting patterns, a typically feminine pre-occupation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘No, I was merely reading the Muggle magazines,’ said Dumbledore. &lt;strong&gt;‘I&#xA;  do love knitting patterns.&lt;/strong&gt; Well, Harry, we have trespassed upon&#xA;  Horace’s hospitality quite long enough; I think it is time for us to&#xA;  leave.’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2007/10/dumbledore/224374/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lack of a female love interest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore's extravagant dress-sense&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This younger Albus Dumbledore’s long hair and beard were auburn.&#xA;  Having reached their side of the street, &lt;strong&gt;he strode off along the&#xA;  pavement, drawing many curious glances due to the flamboyantly cut&#xA;  suit of plum velvet that he was wearing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rita Skeeter's description of his relationship with Grindelwald (who we now learn was his lover). I've highlighted the smutty parts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘Oh, now, I’m glad you mentioned Grindelwald,’ says Skeeter, with a tantalising smile. ‘I’m afraid those who go dewy-eyed over Dumbledore’s spectacular victory must brace themselves for a bombshell – or perhaps a Dungbomb. &lt;strong&gt;Very dirty business indeed.&lt;/strong&gt; All I’ll say is, don’t be so sure that there really was the spectacular duel of legend. After they’ve read my book, people may be forced to conclude that Grindelwald simply conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and &lt;strong&gt;came quietly!’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rita Skeeter's description of his relationship with Harry Potter. I've highlighted the parts that suggest that he's a sexual deviant&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘Oh yes,’ says Skeeter, nodding briskly, ‘I devote an entire chapter to &lt;strong&gt;the whole Potter–Dumbledore relationship. It’s been called&#xA;  unhealthy, even sinister.&lt;/strong&gt; Again, your readers will have to buy my&#xA;  book for the whole story, but there is no question that Dumbledore&#xA;  took &lt;strong&gt;an unnatural interest in Potter from the word go&lt;/strong&gt;. Whether&#xA;  that was really in the boy’s best interests – well, we’ll see. It’s&#xA;  certainly an open secret that Potter has had &lt;strong&gt;a most troubled&#xA;  adolescence.’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aberforth's description of Dumbledore's relationship with Grindlewald&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘But after a few weeks of it, I’d had enough, I had. It was nearly&#xA;  time for me to go back to Hogwarts, &lt;strong&gt;so I told ’em, both of ’em, face&#xA;  to face, like I am to you, now,’ and Aberforth looked down at Harry,&#xA;  and it took little imagination to see him as a teenager, wiry and&#xA;  angry, confronting his elder brother. ‘I told him, you’d better give&#xA;  it up, now.&lt;/strong&gt; You can’t move her, she’s in no fit state, you can’t&#xA;  take her with you, wherever it is you’re planning to go, when you’re&#xA;  making your clever speeches, trying to whip yourselves up a following.&#xA;  He didn’t like that,’ said Aberforth, and his eyes were briefly&#xA;  occluded by the firelight on the lenses of his glasses: they shone&#xA;  white and blind again. ‘Grindelwald didn’t like that at all. He got&#xA;  angry. &lt;strong&gt;He told me what a stupid little boy I was, trying to stand in&#xA;  the way of him and my brilliant brother&lt;/strong&gt; … didn’t I understand, my&#xA;  poor sister wouldn’t have to be hidden once they’d changed the world,&#xA;  and led the wizards out of hiding, and taught the Muggles their place?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dumbledore's own description of Grindelwald&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘Grindelwald. &lt;strong&gt;You cannot imagine how his ideas caught me, Harry,&#xA;  inflamed me.&lt;/strong&gt; Muggles forced into subservience. We wizards triumphant.&#xA;  Grindelwald and I, the glorious young leaders of the revolution.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;‘Oh, I had a few scruples. I assuaged my conscience with empty words.&#xA;  It would all be for the greater good, and any harm done would be&#xA;  repaid a hundredfold in benefits for wizards. &lt;strong&gt;Did I know, in my heart&#xA;  of hearts, what Gellert Grindelwald was? I think I did, but I closed&#xA;  my eyes.&lt;/strong&gt; If the plans we were making came to fruition, all my dreams&#xA;  would come true.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And of course, as the LA Times has stated, his &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; is a dead giveaway&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;While the anagram to 'Tom Marvolo Riddle' is 'I am Lord&#xA;  Voldemort,' as my good friend pointed out, &lt;strong&gt;'Albus Dumbledore' becomes&#xA;  'Male bods rule, bud!'&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-showbiz7-23oct23-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven clues that 'Potter's' Dumbledore was gay&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-03T20:21:17.393" LastActivityDate="2017-03-03T20:21:17.393" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-03T19:24:47.387" Score="4" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Orwell volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After being wounded on the front line, he went to Barcelona and was caught up in the suppression of the POUM militia by the Spanish Communists. This incident soured him on the USSR and communism for the rest of his life. It led him to write &lt;em&gt;Homage to Catalonia&lt;/em&gt;, a denunciation of Soviet propaganda and influence in Spain, and ultimately &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, a book-length nightmare of the totalitarian future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before Orwell travelled to Spain in 1937, what was his opinion of the Soviet Union? Was he always against it? Was he ever for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="664" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T21:48:15.303" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T21:48:15.303" Title="What did George Orwell think of the USSR before travelling to Spain?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1908" CreationDate="2017-03-03T23:53:46.630" Score="9" ViewCount="2036" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first part of Thomas Hardy's &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; ends on an extremely dark and sinister note: Alec d'Urberville successfully gets Tess on her own in the middle of nowhere, and they end up having sex. This scene is deliberately not described explicitly, and we need to deduce what happened from surrounding events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was already established that he was attempting to seduce her and she, despite not returning his feelings, was too inexperienced to know how to deal with him. But the big question is &lt;strong&gt;to what extent their sexual relationship was consensual&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been a long-running debate among readers and critics, and whether or not I get a definitive answer one way or the other, I'd like to see the arguments supporting each side. The answer to this question may be an important factor in determining &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1883/what-justifies-the-anti-tess-interpretation-of-tess-of-the-durbervilles&quot;&gt;the interpretation of the character of Tess&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm aware that this question is more clearly resolved in various film adaptations, but my question is about the novel alone.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T12:16:26.707" Title="Was Tess raped?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;tess-of-the-durbervilles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1907" CreationDate="2017-03-04T02:34:22.327" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would disagree about there being ambiguity as to whether Tess was raped. I think this question misunderstands the actual debate about that specific scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a look at the scene in question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves. Everything else was blackness alike. D'Urberville stooped; and heard a gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers. &lt;strong&gt;She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tess is asleep. Tess can not give consent. Consent means that you give permission for something to happen. Tess can not give permission because she is literally unconscious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ambiguity in this scene isn't about whether Tess was raped. The ambiguity stems from how the scene was written. After Hardy tells us that Tess is asleep, the narrative essentially ends. The next chapter begins &quot;some few weeks subsequent to the night ride in The Chase&quot;. The question of why this gap occurs, and what affect the gap has on the story, is a very interesting question best addressed in a followup question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting question is about what this scene tells us about gender and class. Hardy is clearly trying to make some sort of criticism of the dynamics in this scene: in the next paragraph, he essentially asks why this scene occurs over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; &lt;strong&gt;why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the wrong woman the man&lt;/strong&gt;, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot you can critique about Hardy's portrayal of this scene. For example, the passage seems to imply that we should give up trying to stop sexual assault. The sentence &quot;many thousand years of analytical philosophy have failed to explain to our sense of order&quot; implies that sexual assault is a strange, unexplainable phenomena that can never be stopped. Another interesting followup question would be to ask about the political message this passage conveys about rape, class, and gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a lot of interesting questions about this passage where there's a lot of room for debate. I don't see how there can be any debate about whether Tess was raped, given what actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T02:34:22.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1909" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-04T02:48:03.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-04T02:48:03.690" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T02:48:03.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1910" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-04T02:48:03.690" Score="0" Body="For questions concerning the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. Use with the [leo-tolstoy] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T10:50:09.957" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T10:50:09.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="116" CreationDate="2017-03-04T04:29:51.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-modern authors from the generation (or two) of authors preceding David Foster Wallace are commonly cited as his influences (&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/@kunaljasty/a-lost-1996-interview-with-david-foster-wallace-63987d93c2c#.tsi9b65lx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; for example) with regard to his writing style. The usual suspects generally include Don DeLillo (Wallace and DeLillo were correspondants according to &lt;em&gt;Every Love Story is a Ghost Story&lt;/em&gt;), Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis. Pynchon and Gaddis specifically are known for intricate and long sentence structure, similar to Wallace's work in &lt;em&gt;Infinite Jest&lt;/em&gt; and elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the footnotes specifically, my only knowledge of Wallace discussing them is not in the context of inspiration, but purpose. Wallace described the rationale for their usage in a letter to his editor, Michael Pietsch (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/09/the-unfinished&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; New Yorker article):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story,&lt;BR&gt;2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. &lt;BR&gt;3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude &lt;br&gt;4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns . . . &lt;br&gt;5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.” He also said, “I pray this is nothing like hypertext, but it seems to be interesting and the best way to get the exfoliating curve-line plot I wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="339" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T04:29:51.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1289" CreationDate="2017-03-04T11:13:22.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conch establishes Piggy's inferiority to the reader early on, providing the basis for his exclusion from the island society, such as physiognomy (judgement of character via appearance), non-standard English &lt;em&gt;(&quot;I can't hardly move&quot;)&lt;/em&gt;, and freaky ideas that mark him as an outsider - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;better to have rules and agree&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph finds the conch but Piggy tells him how to use it. Piggy neither tries to demonstrate his knowledge by blowing it himself, nor questions the Ralph's leadership as soon as &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; blows it -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Piggy, too, raised his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, the conch triggers Golding's chief condemnation of Nazism: Piggy, the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;outsider&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, who is ultimately slaughtered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the plane crash, the &quot;sound of the conch&quot; summons the whole population towards Ralph. It becomes a powerful symbol of civilization and order once the assembly votes Ralph as the leader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This concept is furthered by Ralph's use of the conch as a vessel of democratic legitemacy. It governs the boys' meetings because the boy who holds the conch is given the right to speak. Furthermore, the conch is one of the key symbols that marks the inevitable erosion of civilised feeling whilst savagery dominates the boys and Ralph loses his influence as the &lt;em&gt;non-corrupt&lt;/em&gt; leader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ralph picks up on the fact that &lt;em&gt;&quot;Things are breaking up&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, the conch is his first port of call. However, the meeting loses focus at this point in the novel, where in previous meetings the conch had been enough to maintain order &lt;em&gt;while it had still been a novelty&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack makes an &quot;obscene&quot; joke about Simon's suggestion of the beast &quot;with one crude expressive syllable&quot;, and finally displaces the meeting when he declares &quot;bollocks to the rules!&quot;. Although he knows all his efforts will be in vain, Piggy's immediate reaction is &quot;blow the conch, Ralph!&quot;. This highlights the importance of the conch not only to the leader that uses it, but to his supporters, despite the fact that no civilised symbol can overcome the savageness of the people (which is, essentially, Golding's message).   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone with self-respect and a belief in humanity, Ralph's disgust at his own actions leads him to use the conch as a means of comfort. This advances the plot: the conch not only helps him come to terms with his actions, but consolidates his belief that a) what he did was wrong, and b) Jack was nothing more than a savage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an affectionate reverence for the conch ~ took the conch caressingly with both hands and knelt &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Roger kills Piggy with a boulder, which has also been mentioned previously, the conch shell is crushed. This signifies the complete demise of civilised instinct amongst almost all the boys on the island.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T11:13:22.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T11:31:24.700" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question contains spoilers for David Mitchell's Slade House.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first three chapters, the narrator will at some point ascend the stairs in Slade House and walk past a bunch of portraits. These seem to be very accurate portraits of the previous victims of the Grayer twins as they looked at the time of their death, in chronological order. The last portrait in the line depicts the narrator themselves, but without eyes (whereas the other portraits all seem to have eyes). As far as I remember, the portraits themselves are never mentioned explicitly by either the twins or Marinus in the book (the only people from whom we could expect an explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I read The Bone Clocks, but I seem to remember that the Blind Cathar is also a painting without eyes. This doesn't seem like a coincidence, but I'm not sure what to make of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the significance of the portraits? Is it just the twins showing off? Is it some sort of manifestation of the previous victims that they can't control, much like the &quot;ghosts&quot; of the hairdresser and of Gordon that show up? They don't seem to be a &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; component of the orison, since Freya doesn't see any portraits in The Fox and Hounds. Why don't the portraits have eyes until the victim is killed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that a complete answer might have to draw upon the mythology established in The Bone Clocks, unless I'm missing something obvious in Slade House.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T00:06:12.997" Title="What is the significance of the portraits in Slade House?" Tags="&lt;david-mitchell&gt;&lt;slade-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1690" CreationDate="2017-03-04T13:59:28.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this is more of a chapter than an answer, but bear with me! If you would prefer a more concise version, just can stick to this first paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone in Lord of the Flies is &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot;, and, by extension, so is everyone on earth. People are inherently savage. That was Golding's message, having been appalled by wartime atrocities as well as war itself. Even Ralph, the protagonist, and Piggy, who seemed wise and good-natured, succumbed to barbarism by helping to kill Simon. Golding's novel symbolises the fact that quiet, subversive evil will survive, whereas any modicum of goodness will be destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing about Nazism that Golding found most horrendous was not that there was one bigot who believed in terrible things, but that &lt;em&gt;other, normal people&lt;/em&gt; ended up following him. He believed that society was governed by &lt;em&gt;survival of the fittest&lt;/em&gt; (think of Hitler's so-called &amp;quot;Aryan race&amp;quot;), meaning they were happy to discriminate against outsiders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from William Golding's essay &lt;em&gt;Fable&lt;/em&gt;, given as a lecture in Calafornia, 1962. (I bolded the important text)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Before the second world war I believed in perfectibility of social man; that a correct structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all social ills by a by a reorganization of society. It is possible today that I believe something of the same again; but after war I did not because I was unable to. &lt;strong&gt;I had discovered what man could do to one another&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not talking of one man killing another with a gun, or dropping a bomb on him or blowing him up or torpedoing him. I am thinking of the &lt;strong&gt;vileness beyond all worlds&lt;/strong&gt; that went on, year after year, in the totalitarian states. It is bad enough to say that so many Jews exterminated in this way and that, so many people liquidated, but there were things done during this period from which I still have to &lt;strong&gt;avert my mind lest I should be&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;physically sick&lt;/strong&gt;. They were not done by the headhunters of New Guinea, or by some primitive tribe in the Amazon. They were done, skilfully, coldly, by educated men, doctors, lawyers, by men with a tradition of civilization behind them, &lt;strong&gt;to beings of their own kind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to pass on; but I must say that anyone who moved through those years without understanding that &lt;strong&gt;man produces evil as a bee produces honey&lt;/strong&gt;, must have been blind or wrong in the head. [...] It seemed to me that man's capacity for greed, his innate cruelty and selfishness was being hidden behind a kind of pair of political pants. I believed then, that &lt;strong&gt;man was sick - not exceptional man, but average man.&lt;/strong&gt; I believed that the condition of man was to be a morally diseased creation and that the best job I could do at the time was to trace the connection between his diseased nature and the international mess he gets into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] I decided to take the literary convention of boys on an island, only to make them &lt;strong&gt;real boys&lt;/strong&gt; instead of paper cutouts with no life in them; and try to show how the shape of the society they evolved would be conditioned &lt;strong&gt;by their diseased, their fallen nature&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, the people in the minority were regarded as weak. People selfishly followed the 'strongest' leader in order to 'win', which is why Ralph (who is democratic) is hunted down, and Piggy (his supporter, the smartest boy on the island), is killed. They ultimately lose out to Jack (who is needlessly corrupt) and Roger (Jack's sadistic helper). Desperate not to be hunted as outsiders, Samneric betray Ralph when tortured by Roger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The child, as Piggy said, &amp;quot;what had a mark on his face&amp;quot;, is wiped out almost instantly by the fire. His minor deficiency (a birthmark) costs him his life. As savagery flares, the killings become worse, starting with a sow (who even has piglets). Make of this what you will, but it's hard to miss at second glance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;bleeding and mad [...] wedded to her in lust, excited [...] blood and terror [...] prodding with his spear [...] stabbing downward with his knife [..] leaning in with his whole weight [...] inch by inch [...] high-pitched scream [...] heavy and fulfilled upon her&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack's attitude morphs into an increasingly graphic allusion to Hitler.  He laughs at his &amp;quot;reeking palms&amp;quot; having killed the pig, where in an earlier chapter he at least &amp;quot;grimaced distastefully&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger's evilness escalates much like Jack's. When Jack orders him to sharpen &amp;quot;the stick at both ends&amp;quot; to mount the head, he does so without question. He kicks the littluns' sandcastles and throws stones at Henry but aims to miss as a result of &amp;quot;the taboo of old life&amp;quot;, but the littluns fear him already. When Jack discovers masks, Roger takes &amp;quot;liberated from shame and self-consciousness&amp;quot; to the next level, by levering down a rock to kill Piggy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rock struck Piggy a glancing blow from chin to knee [...] Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back [...] his head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, &lt;em&gt;the body of Piggy was gone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simon alone acted morally for its inherent value. In terms of Golding believing that mankind is all evil, Simon is the exception that proves the rule. He alone is consistently kind, regardless of the consequence - he gives Piggy meat, thereby braving Jack's anger, he tells Jack to suck his wound although Jack  bullies him, and he picks food for the littluns who can't reach it. He fearlessly seeks the truth, and confronts the beast. When he understands that the beast resides in them, he takes the ultimate risk. His bravery backfires, much like resistance did during the era of Nazism. Golding seemed to believe that mankind was doomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T17:24:10.223" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1931" CreationDate="2017-03-04T15:53:17.200" Score="14" ViewCount="8075" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the moment Simon is introduced in &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, we learn that he faints a lot. He has his own place which he retreats to when he feels he is about to faint or maybe have a fit, and when he sees the pig's head he hallucinates and has a conversation with the head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simon’s head wobbled. His eyes were half closed as though he were&#xA;  imitating the obscene thing on the stick. He knew that one of his times&#xA;  was coming on. The Lord of the Flies was expanding like a balloon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also mentioned that he is covering his eyes from the light a bit earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simon lowered his head,&#xA;  carefully keeping his eyes shut, then sheltered them with his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest he was epileptic, and that would make sense because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies/Characters&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikibooks&lt;/a&gt; says that at the time, people who had epilepsy were considered to have a higher religious connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I can't find any clear evidence on what condition Simon has. Is he an epileptic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T22:01:12.407" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T07:41:01.043" Title="Is Simon epileptic?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2017-03-04T18:35:10.710" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Existing answers have covered a few of these concepts, but there was plenty of Christian iconography apart from the devil who promoted evil among mankind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The island itself, particularly Simon's glade, functions as a kind of Garden of Eden that is gradually corrupted by the introduction of evil. Simon's glade turns into a kind of church because of him. Within, Simon attracts the most idyllic and flighty creatures -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He squatted down, parted the leaves [...] gaudy butterflies that danced around each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Simon is stabbed to death by boys with pointed sticks, we are reminded of a certain 'hero' who was beaten by &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; with sticks before he was killed &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; a stick. Further, Simon is the character who arrives at the moral truth of the novel, and because he is killed sacrificially as a consequence of having discovered the truth, his life contains strong parallels with that of Jesus Christ. His conversation with the Lord of the Flies similarly parallels the confrontation between Christ and the devil in Christian theology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the parallels between Simon and Christ are incomplete, so the novel is not a pure Christian allegory. Simon is an unsung, solitary, stammering boy where Jesus was an altruistic saviour. For another thing, Simon lacks the supernatural connection to the divine that is the main characteristic of Jesus. Simon is is wise in many ways, with a high intuitive intelligence and exceptional bravery. Yet he is no son of God, and his death does not bring salvation to the island. Rather, his death plunges the island into deeper savagery and moral guilt. For another, Simon dies before he can tell the boys what he has discovered, while Christ managed to spread his moral philosophy before he was crucified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T18:35:10.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T18:40:11.933" Score="5" ViewCount="8825" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently reread &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone&lt;/em&gt; after a long time away from the series. I noticed that within in the first five pages, Sirius Black is mentioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Borrowed it, Professor Dumbledore, sir,&quot; said the giant, climbing carefully off the motorcycle as he spoke. &quot;Young Sirius Black lent it to me. I've got him, sir.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It came as a surprise to me, as I had previously thought J.K. Rowling had written the book without much thought to a larger series (not sure where I got that idea). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How far ahead did J.K. Rowling plan &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; while she was writing it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T01:46:38.013" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T02:12:42.233" Title="How far ahead did J.K. Rowling plan Harry Potter?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1230" CreationDate="2017-03-04T20:42:15.023" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The naval officer represents man's woefully-misguided denial of evil. It's so far off the mark, it's tragic. His arrogance echoes that of the boys, whose abominable underestimation of evil took a &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt; to explain. 'Goodies' like Simon and Piggy pined for civilization, their last hope. Now they're dead, and the officer from the adult world is as flawed as than the savages who killed them. &lt;em&gt;Ironic&lt;/em&gt;, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&quot;man produces evil as a bee produces honey&quot; (William Golding, &lt;em&gt;The Hot Gates&lt;/em&gt;, 1965) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The naval officer has god-like qualities such as a 'crown' and an ability to tell 'when people were telling the truth'. The next irony comes in when we find out that despite these qualities, he would rather sulk about the boys' failure to operate sportingly, than show concern or sympathy about two murdered children. He says &quot;Could have put up a better show than that?&quot; and not much else, which is perhaps an indication that things and people aren't always what they seem, once again subverting the misconception that men are naturally good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more. The reader has just endured a novel so deep and cataclysmic that Golding says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I get letters from psychiatrists; psychologists, clergymen - complimentary, I am glad to say, but sometimes tinged with a fair bit of indignation that I should seem to know something about human nature without being oficially qualified&quot; (William Golding, *The Hot Gates, * 1965)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it ironic that while my head is full of burning and barbarism as a result of how moved I am by this psychological critique, the naval officer's first reaction is &quot;the kid needed a bath, a hair-cut, a nose-wipe and a good deal of ointment&quot;! As if his first speculation wasn't  obliviously ironic enough, the officer &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; says &quot;Jolly good show, eh?&quot;, which is clearly untrue and perhaps serves as a juxtaposition: he has outlying qualities such as shrewdness about lies/truths, yet it turns out that his mental perceptions are naive (which corroborates the ironic concept that people are not what they seem). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The naval officer has a gun and wears an epaulette. This betrays him as a warmonger, but doesn't suss out the island violence when it's staring him in the face. Despite that Ralph is being chased by half-naked, dirty, masked teenagers with pointed sticks, it comes as a surprise that two boys were murdered - &quot;Two? Killed?&quot;. He finds it hard to accept that a bunch of British children could descend into such upheaval - like Jack, he thinks &quot;the English are best at everything&quot;. This arrogance escalates the existing irony, which is that that humans have no idea that they are evil despite evidence to the contrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much like the British empire, their society breaks up, and the officer finds it hard to cope with the fact that being English doesn't automatically help people to subsist after all. This is implied when he shows incredulity at the fact that &quot;a pack of British boys/couldn't put up a better show&quot;, and then proceeds to awkwardly stare towards the ship in the opposite direction! Yet he himself carries a gun, and has the power to cause a much &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; severe death toll. He's a hypocrite but he doesn't know it. That's ironic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T20:42:15.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T21:36:36.160" Score="9" ViewCount="3151" Body="&lt;p&gt;For GCSE English in Britain, the language section involves 15 poems we have to write about in the exam. In 45 minutes, we get one of the poems, and we have to compare it to another of the 14 poems from memory based on a question that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be related to power. One poem stands out as particularly challenging: &lt;em&gt;Tissue&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/guides/zwg6nbk/revision/8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can read &lt;em&gt;Tissue&lt;/em&gt; online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to show that I'm not literally asking for the 'answer', here is a range of questions that the teachers think examiners may ask on this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Power of Humans, Power of Nature, Effects of Conflict, Reality of Conflict, Loss and Absence, Memory, Negative Emotion [anger/guilt/fear/pride], Identity, Individual Experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. &amp;quot;Compare how the writer presents loss and absence in &lt;em&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/em&gt; and one other poem.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it seems like a vague, rambling monologue about buildings and paper. We've studied it in class, but everything has gone right over our heads, for want of anything related to the &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; concept that is direct enough to gain marks in an exam. We're told to get to the heart of each poem, but &lt;em&gt;Tissue&lt;/em&gt; is very trying, and none of my friends are faring much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from references that our lives are controlled too much by money (&amp;quot;Fine slips&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;paid by credit card&amp;quot;), &lt;strong&gt;can you spot any underlying messages about &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; that would make sense in an exam, and aren't generalized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the sake of context in terms of &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; when it comes to our poetry cluster, here are a few other poems from the &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; section in case anyone knows them -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ozymandias, London, The Emigree, My Last Duchess, Storm on the Island, Checking out me History&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Prelude&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few bullet points on &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; would be great (there are million possible interpretations of this poem, but don't write an essay!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T13:47:43.213" Title="In what way is the poem 'Tissue' by Imtiaz Dharker related to power / conflict?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;imtiaz-dharker&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T21:58:54.137" Score="12" ViewCount="14651" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all&#xA;  caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the&#xA;  presence of the telescreen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'They've got you too!' he cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;They got me a long time ago&lt;/strong&gt;,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful&#xA;  irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is a quote from the end of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, with added emphasis. O'Brien posed as a member of the resistance to entrap Winston, who was trying to end the domination of the Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the part in bold mean? He said it regretfully; is it possible that at one time he was a dissident and got caught, just as Winston has?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="10167" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T12:55:34.587" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T12:55:34.587" Title="What did O'Brien mean when he said &quot;They got me a long time ago&quot; in the book 1984?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2017-03-04T22:13:56.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's definitely the implication, yes. It's a sentence that should be taken fairly literally, if obscurely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story-wise, this serves a functional purpose. It shows someone who used to perform actions counter to what the government wanted, and was, in essence, reformed into participation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O'Brien is extremely knowledgeable about the past - likely far more than he lets on to Winston. On top of that, it seems that people of the Inner Party are all generally more well-read than those of the Outer Party (go figure). How else would they know about the contents of books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'It is called wine,' said O'Brien with a faint smile. 'You will have read&#xA;  about it in books, no doubt. Not much of it gets to the Outer Party, I am&#xA;  afraid.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also knowledgeable about the sort of philosophy that - guess what - comprises mostly terms you'd find in books, and the sorts of things you'd really only learn from books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said.&#xA;  'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I&#xA;  will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is&#xA;  there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past&#xA;  is still happening?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This smacks of someone well-read. And these two examples were &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;easy to find&lt;/a&gt; - if you search for &quot;O'Brien,&quot; the book is littered with references to how knowledgeable he seems to be about the past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that aside, this is also an important jab at Winston's only real hope at escape: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He thought oftener of O'Brien, with a flickering hope. O'Brien might know that he had been arrested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's possible to hypothesize about how O'Brien ended up in government work following being had, perhaps suggesting that practices have changed over time, or aren't as absolute as they seem, the fact remains: he was probably caught, and was probably stopped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-03-04T22:13:56.967" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T22:16:05.180" Score="6" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Dr. Azad,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Why did you give my husband that money?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end of his nose was pitted with age, his cheeks had given way to jowls, pockets of air puffed the skin around his eyes, when he smiled the corners of his mouth turned down, and it was a big, generous smile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's very simple. Because he is my friend. My very good friend.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Brick Lane&lt;/em&gt;, Chanu and Dr Azad have a somewhat strange relationship. The upshot seems to be that they like to needle each other, so keep seeing each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does Dr Azad give him all that money to go back to Bangladesh? We see their relationship from Nazneen's perspective. Is it possible she didn't understand it, or misrepresented it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T16:51:31.537" Title="Why did Dr Azad pay for Chanu's ticket to Bangladesh?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;monica-ali&gt;&lt;brick-lane&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-04T22:59:03.730" Score="11" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Social Contract&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Jean-Jacques Rousseau says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Russia will never be really civilized, because it was civilized too soon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is he referring to, when saying it was civilized too soon, and why that would prevent Russia from being civilized later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="144" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:33:50.673" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:33:50.673" Title="Why is Rousseau saying that &quot;[...] Russia was civilized too soon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jean-jacques-rousseau&gt;&lt;du-contrat-social&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1932" CreationDate="2017-03-04T23:04:19.577" Score="14" ViewCount="1721" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite a number of authors of English literature around the early 20th century published with initialed pen names (EM Forster, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, ...) whereas others did not (Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, ...), and I was curious as to what might lead an author to use initials for their given names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ask a concrete question, why did JRR Tolkien publish as such, as opposed to something like &quot;Ronald Tolkien&quot; or &quot;J. Ronald Tolkien&quot; since it seems he  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/biography/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;went by Ronald&lt;/a&gt;?  Is there any record for why Tolkien chose (or was convinced) to use this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you happen to know why other authors around this time period chose to use initials, I'd be happy hear about this also--the only case I know about is the recent case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._K._Rowling&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;JK Rowling&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T00:53:22.673" Title="Why did Tolkien publish as J.R.R. Tolkien?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2017-03-05T01:34:42.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think these interpretations of O'Brien's reply are driven primarily by the obvious implication in Winston's outcry.&#xA;In detail, it implies that O'Brien was and still is considered (by Winston) as a co-conspirator, and that he was expected to be caught by the Thought Police like Winston just was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that O'Brien's reply &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be literally interpreted, as he wants to say, that he once was a conspirator against the Party, who was caught a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that interpretation would contradict Winston's expressed assumption, that O'Brien was just caught, which must be considered valid from the viewpoint of Winston, as he saw O'Brien a short time ago living and working, apparently, for and with consent from the Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once (about 30 years ago) stumbled over the same scene and sayings and thought a while about it, and came to the conclusion, that O'Brien, kind of sardonically, wanted to tell that he always was a believing member and supporter of the Party and the order of society, and that he had outwitted Winston.&#xA;The key point is, in my opinion, the twofold meaning of &quot;got&quot;, which Winston uses in the meaning of &quot;caught&quot; but O'Brien in the sense of &quot;being in true consent with&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="929" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T01:49:11.250" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T01:49:11.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1917" CreationDate="2017-03-05T02:12:42.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As previously answered on another Stack Exchange site; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/31116/41144&quot;&gt;some things were certainly pre-planned&lt;/a&gt; (h/t &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/8/yannis&quot;&gt;yannis&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1917/how-far-ahead-did-j-k-rowling-plan-harry-potter#comment3260_1917&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;). According to an &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20070606214138/http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/faq_view.cfm?id=56&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archived version of Potter FAQ on Rowling's website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'The Half-Blood Prince' might be described as a strand of the overall&#xA;  plot. That strand could be used in a whole variety of ways and back in&#xA;  1997 I considered weaving it into the story of 'Chamber'. It really&#xA;  didn't fit there, though; it was not part of the story of the basilisk&#xA;  and Riddle's diary, and before long I accepted that it would be better&#xA;  to do it justice in book six. I clung to the title for a while, even&#xA;  though all trace of the 'Prince' storyline had disappeared, because I&#xA;  liked it so much (yes, I really like this title!). I re-christened&#xA;  book two 'Chamber of Secrets' when I started the second draft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the ideas and title of the sixth book were there, but were moved to a later point in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowling has also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/31117/41144&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; that the ending of the story was written before she had found a publisher:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of&#xA;  my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had&#xA;  heard of me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;- &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/5119836.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rowling to kill two in final book&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; BBC News 27 June 2006&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were also many &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/138800/41144&quot;&gt;plot points that were preplanned&lt;/a&gt; (h/t &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/11/gallifreyan&quot;&gt;Gallifreyan&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1917/how-far-ahead-did-j-k-rowling-plan-harry-potter#comment3259_1917&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;). For example, she &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/135884/41144&quot;&gt;knew&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1999/1099-bostonglobe-loer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1999&lt;/a&gt; that Harry's inheritance of his mother's eyes would be important in later books. Harry's catching the snitch by mouth &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20110903162024/http://harryahistory.com/2008/08/hedwig-owl-of-a-different-fate.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was a deliberate setup&lt;/a&gt; for a later book. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/138800/41144&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T02:12:42.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T13:50:16.840" Score="12" ViewCount="10893" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, Orwell devotes a few lines to a singing thrush that lands several feet away from Julia and Winston during their first secret meeting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A thrush had alighted on a bough not  five metres away, almost at the level of their faces. Perhaps it had not seen them. It was in the sun, they in the shade. It spread out its wings,  fitted them carefully into place again, ducked its head for a moment, as though making a sort of obeisance to the sun, and then began to pour forth a torrent of song. In the afternoon hush the volume of sound was startling. Winston and Julia clung together, fascinated.  The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, never once repeating itself, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity. Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But by degrees the flood of music drove all speculations out of his mind. It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that  filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of such a detailed description? Personally, I've always thought that the thrush has had a greater symbolic meaning in the novel because its beautiful singing serves as a sharp contrast to the harshness of Oceanian society. Is there greater meaning in this passage that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="123" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T14:55:18.297" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T01:42:05.657" Title="What is the greater meaning of the thrush?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2017-03-05T14:33:37.353" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few possible explanations of this line, which I've arranged below in what I think is increasing order of likelihood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O'Brien really was a former dissident who'd been completely turned to the Party.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the most literal interpretation, and the one espoused by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1922/17&quot;&gt;Emrakul's answer&lt;/a&gt;. In the first moment of seeing him, Winston clearly still believes that O'Brien is a subversive element like himself. O'Brien's response could be interpreted to mean that Winston is almost correct, but just out by many years on the timeline: he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a rebel once, but has long since changed his loyalties to the Party. Who better to ensnare new dissidents like Winston than someone who once was one himself? If he really was a subversive element at one point, it would explain how he can do such a good impersonation of one in order to fool people like Winston.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I find this interpretation hard to believe. Would &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; former dissident really be trusted by the Party to the extent that O'Brien was? He's a member of the Inner Party, and entrusted not only with the deepest secrets of the Party (such as the explanations of the system contained in Goldstein's book) but also with the practical jobs of catching and turning new subversives like Winston. Surely they could have found someone better than a former rebel for these tasks? Consider Winston himself: after his release from the Ministry of Love, he has money, a good job, and the knowledge of impending death, but he never seems to be &lt;em&gt;trusted&lt;/em&gt; to any particular extent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O'Brien simply meant that the Party had &lt;em&gt;recruited&lt;/em&gt; him a long time ago.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's more than one possible interpretation of the word &quot;got&quot; here. Perhaps O'Brien is responding to Winston's assumption that the Party &quot;got&quot; him (arrested him for his anti-Party sentiments) with the statement that yes, they &quot;got&quot; him (made him one of them) a long time ago. One doesn't need to have been a dissident in order to be &quot;got&quot; and made into a loyal Party man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is consistent with the &quot;irony&quot; in O'Brien's words. Under the first interpretation listed above, there would be nothing particularly ironic about his response to Winston: yes, he was caught as a subversive, but it was much longer ago than Winston thinks. But under this interpretation, the irony lies in the difference in the meaning of &quot;got&quot; between the way Winston says it and the way O'Brien says it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O'Brien is just trying to mess with Winston's mind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be consistent with the way O'Brien plays all sorts of mind games with Winston in the next chapter. A few of the clearest examples follow, but these are by no means the only ones. Much of the torture O'Brien inflicts on Winston is psychological; it is his mind, more than his body, that they are trying to break in the Ministry of Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘It exists!’ he cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘No,’ said O’Brien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is not pretending, thought Winston, he is not a hypocrite, he believes every word he says. What most oppressed him was the consciousness of his own intellectual inferiority. He watched the heavy yet graceful form strolling to and fro, in and out of the range of his vision. O’Brien was a being in all ways larger than himself. There was no idea that he had ever had, or could have, that O’Brien had not long ago known, examined, and rejected. His mind CONTAINED Winston’s mind. But in that case how could it be true that O’Brien was mad? It must be he, Winston, who was mad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You do not exist,’ said O’Brien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps his words &quot;They got me a long time ago&quot; are simply intended to confuse Winston and make him wonder about the same question that you're asking here. Perhaps he wants Winston to hold out hope, for a while, that as a former subversive it might be possible to turn O'Brien back against the Party. The slow loss of this hope might be more effective in breaking Winston's rebelliousness than a sudden revelation that O'Brien was a total Party man.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Finally, let's look at the very next words O'Brien says after what's quoted in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a mild, almost regretful irony. He stepped aside. From behind him there emerged a broad-chested guard with a long black truncheon in his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You know this, Winston,’ said O’Brien. ‘Don’t deceive yourself. You did know it — you have always known it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, he saw now, he had always known it. But there was no time to think of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, exactly, had Winston always known? Does this line enable us to decide between the three possible interpretations listed above? Well ... not really. It seems what O'Brien means is that on some level Winston has always known O'Brien was a true Party man, but whether he was always loyal to the Party or was at some point a subversive doesn't really seem relevant to this line. In a way, the ambiguity here, and especially the &quot;Don't deceive yourself&quot;, could be seen as consistent with the third interpretation, that O'Brien is simply playing mind games with Winston. But it's not conclusive, and I still think any of the three interpretations could be valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T14:33:37.353" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1915" CreationDate="2017-03-05T15:58:16.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nigel Williams, a first-hand witness of Golding's life and work, stated in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9142869/William-Golding-A-frighteningly-honest-writer.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2012 Telegraph&lt;/a&gt; article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was quite clear that &lt;strong&gt;Simon, the epileptic boy&lt;/strong&gt; who falls down in a&#xA;  fit in front of the pig’s head was not a symbolic, Christian&#xA;  character, although he did talk, very interestingly, about the&#xA;  compromises and mistakes the church was forced to make in so called&#xA;  civilised society. He saw him as representing an element that seems to&#xA;  a necessary part of almost all varieties of human group - something he&#xA;  called “the numinous” – &lt;strong&gt;that yearning for spirituality that nags away&#xA;  at humans, even when they are at their most brutally physical&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis by myself)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is strong, yet not compelling evidence towards Golding writing Simon an epileptic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T15:58:16.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1915" CreationDate="2017-03-05T17:14:56.133" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dictionary definition of &lt;em&gt;Epilepsy:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A neurological disorder marked by sudden recurrent episodes of sensory disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions, associated with abnormal electrical activity in the brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at Simon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the choir huddled into line and stood there swaying in the sun [...]&#xA;  one of the boys flopped on his face in the sand and the line broke up. // &lt;em&gt;Simon is particularly delicate. Victims of epilepsy are more likely to faint as a result of over-heating.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's always throwing a faint&quot;, said Merridew. &quot;He did in Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor.&quot; // &lt;em&gt;Epileptic victims are more likely to faint in stressful situations, such as performing in a choir, or as a result of tiredness. Modern-day causes of epilepsy involve taking drugs, which similarly degrade your body's functionality. Note 'recurrent episodes' in the definition, and that Simon is 'always throwing a faint'.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that the pallor of his faint was over, Simon was a skinny, vivid little boy, with a glance coming up from under a hut of straight hair that hung down, black and course. // &lt;em&gt;Epilepsy is characterised by its suddenness. Similarly, Simon's fits seem to turn on and off at the flick of a switch.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For a moment or two Simon was happy to be accepted and then he ceased to think about himself. When he bashed into a tree Ralph looked sideways and Robert sniggered. Simon reeled and a white spot on his forehead turned read and trickled. // &lt;em&gt;Epileptic victims suffer from sensory disturbance, making Simon more likely to get distracted from something as small as the fact that Ralph 'smiled constrainedly' at him. The fact that he is 'reeling' even though he has 'allowed his pace to slacken until he was walking', hints that he gets dizzy easily, which is something that causes epileptic attacks and so is a common attribute of epileptic victims.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simon lowered his head, carefully keeping his eyes shut, then sheltered them with his hand. // &lt;em&gt;It's well known that epileptic victims are prone to seizures/fainting as a result of abnormal electrical activity triggered in the brain because of flashing light. Simon was experiencing something similar beneath a veil of leaves. Sunlight spread across a forest canopy will cause a 'dappled' effect of irregular light/dark patterns which are associated with with flashing lights. This would have been heightened by swaying branches and Simon's movement underfoot.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;strong&gt;the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. [...] In Simon's right temple, a pulse began to beat on the brain.&lt;/strong&gt; // &lt;em&gt;That about says it all. Normal victims of fainting don't hallucinate like this. Golding may well have known about the correlation between religious experience and epilepsy. Simon is probably a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/67/did-the-lord-of-the-flies-have-any-kind-of-religious-reference-more-specific-tha/1916#1916&quot;&gt;christ-like figure&lt;/a&gt;. It is more likely that the pig-lord Simon saw was an epiphany about human nature, than a convenient figment of his stressed-out imagination.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the way we refer to an event is lot more telling than the details of the event itself. Crucially, Golding did not say Simon 'felt rather faint so he soon passed out'. If he had, that would imply that he viewed it as an isolated, random, and &lt;em&gt;unexpected&lt;/em&gt; event that anyone could experience. Instead, Golding explains that Simon 'knew that one of his times was coming on'. Therefore, Simon's continual fainting is more likely to be a diagnosed condition of which he is fully aware, such as epilepsy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that the boys may lack sleep. Sleep deprivation, if Simon has it, is something that would make him more likely to have epileptic attacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Ralph is the only boy who helps Simon with the shelters, he describes them as 'tottery'. So the boys rest in 'tottery' shelters on a deserted island, but have up to this point enjoyed living in a first-world country where even Piggy had a warm bed. It's like camping night after night without a sleeping bag, for someone who has never gone camping before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Simon has the burden of moral conscience - he alone voices the littluns' fears of the 'beastie', saying 'maybe it's only us'/'what's the dirtiest thing there is?', but when the boys laugh in his face they make it clear that Simon is alone in his traumatic fear. Simon is probably no older than ten, given that he is so short (see below) and Piggy calls him 'young Simon'. From all this, are we supposed to gather that Simon is sleep-deprived? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Simon, walking in front of Ralph, felt a flicker of incredulity - a beast with claws that scratched, that sat on the mountain-top, that left no tracks and yet was not fast enough to catch Samneric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simon does not believe, like Jack, that the beast is something that they can hunt and kill. He is too mature for that: 'his eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life'. His free indirect speech shows that he thinks of the beast as the people, something they can't control. If had to lose sleep as a pre-teen kid, it would be over an indestructible evil residing &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; us (&quot;my&quot; belief), rather than a freak bogeyman on the top of a mountain (everyone else's belief).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However Simon thought of the beast, there rose before his inward sight a picture that was at once heroic and sick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from evidence to suggests Simon is epileptic, Golding had incentive to give him epilepsy in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simon is a genius. In spite of his youth, he has incredible perception that Golding believed no-one of the time actually possessed. But his &lt;em&gt;unique&lt;/em&gt; insight - that the 'beastie' lies in the people - helps make him an outsider. He is indeed epileptic. In the context of a barbaric society, epilepsy is not just a medical condition but a &lt;em&gt;weakness&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epilepsy is a tool that makes him more delicate, easier to victimise, and thus even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; of an outsider. (Not because epilepsy &lt;em&gt;makes&lt;/em&gt; him frail, but because people who are more frail are more likely to have epilepsy). This drawback makes it more believable that he could be killed, and didn't manage to flee/put up any fight. If he had optimal &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; ability, no-one would buy it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His epileptic attacks no doubt take their toll on both his energy and the minimal respect that people have for to him. All the while, this effect contributes to Golding's theme of &lt;em&gt;outsiders&lt;/em&gt; (see below), relating to the wartime prosecution that made him believe &quot;man produces evil as a bee produces honey&quot;, which is the whole point of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simon is described as 'skinny', and Ralph's language implies that he is short - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If Simon walks in the middle of us&quot;, said Ralph, &quot;then we could talk over his head.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the fact that he can hardly keep up - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The three of them fell into step. This meant that every now and then Simon had to do a double shuffle to catch up with the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Golding's revulsion of Nazism was less than a decade old when he wrote the novel, so &lt;em&gt;survival of the fittest&lt;/em&gt; and the rejection of outsiders is a recurring theme. The theme of outsiders is important, making Simon's epilepsy important too. Much like the child with the birthmark who was burned in wildfire, the democratic leader who was hunted down, and the overweight geek who was knocked off a cliff, Simon (ironically mistaken for 'beastie') was murdered by savages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph says to Simon in chapter 7 'you're batty' and to Jack that 'He's queer. He's funny', and Piggy also dismisses him: 'he's cracked'. Simon is also too kind for his own good: he gives Piggy his share of the meat, thereby vexing Jack at his worst. He advises Jack to suck his wound despite having been bullied by him. He selflessly picks food for the littluns. He helps Ralph carry Percival to the shelter, remains loyal to him, and works consistently hard on the shelters (despite Ralph's taunts). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simon's 'goodness' goes hand-in-hand with his earlier drawback, epilepsy, as they both portray him as a pushover (easier to kill). Given how convenient it would have been for Golding to give Simon epilepsy, and all the evidence that backs it up, I believe that Simon is epileptic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T17:27:44.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1925" CreationDate="2017-03-05T19:49:21.680" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the present day, when an author like J. K. Rowling uses initials in the author's name on books, it is plausible that this was an explicit choice / conscious decision, and the author had a special reason for doing so. (In Rowling's case, the reason was that the publishers thought young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This plausibility is based on certain assumptions about &quot;normal&quot; names in the English-speaking world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A person's &quot;real&quot; or &quot;proper&quot; name, used for most purposes in real life, is in the format &quot;GivenName Surname&quot;. (For example, Rowling's name, at the time she was writing the books, was &quot;Joanne Rowling&quot;, and she might be referred to formally as &quot;Ms. Joanne Rowling&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name used by one's friends and family is either one's given name, or some diminutive form of it. (For example, Rowling is called &quot;Joanne&quot; or &quot;Jo&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on such assumptions, it is reasonable to wonder about other authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien: for example, one may speculate that he used initials because he was an academic scholar wishing to adopt a somewhat different pen name in his books for children, just as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became &quot;Lewis Carroll&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of us know, I guess, that these assumptions do not necessarily hold across different cultures. Even &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;obvious&quot; assumptions may be false&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personal names around the world&lt;/a&gt; vary. (For instance, the children of V. S. Achuthanandan are named V. A. Arunkumar and V. V. Asha, and this is perfectly natural.) Pointers on Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personal name&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthroponymy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anthroponymy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Personal_names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personal names&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Personal_names_by_culture&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personal names by culture&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But cultures vary not just across space but also across time: it is easy to forget that &lt;em&gt;“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if one is willing to abandon one's cultural conditioning and be a little open-minded about what sort of names people are allowed to have, it turns out that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien was not doing anything unusual in using initials; it was a common practice at the time. (The fact that he was called “Ronald” by his friends and family implies nothing about his formal name: C. S. Lewis was called &quot;Jack&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name “J. R. R. Tolkien” was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a pen name that he used for non-academic works; it was simply &lt;em&gt;his name&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This applies not just to Tolkien but to many early 20th-century English authors (as asked at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1852/why-did-these-early-20th-century-authors-publish-under-first-and-middle-initials&quot;&gt;now-deleted question&lt;/a&gt;). Many authors used initials simply because many &lt;em&gt;people&lt;/em&gt; in the late 19th / early 20th centuries used initials. We do not need to look for special literary reasons, because these authors were not doing anything special. The names with initials were not their &lt;em&gt;noms de plume&lt;/em&gt; but simply their conventional names that they used in other aspects of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me elaborate on both these points separately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Names with initials were common&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can take a deeper look at the milieu of E. M. Forster (born 1879), J. R. R. Tolkien (born 1892) and T. S. Eliot (born 1888), by looking at the styles of names in fields other than literature. As a proxy for getting a representative list of names, let's look at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Film directors: in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_films_before_1920&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of British films before 1920&lt;/a&gt;, there are many directors who went by initialed names, including R.W. Paul (born 1869), G.A. Smith (born 1864), A. E. Coleby (b. 1876), W. P. Kellino (b ~1874), A.V. Bramble (b 1884). Note that many of these seem to have gone by different styles of names at different periods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_England_cricket_captains&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;England cricket captains&lt;/a&gt;: A N Hornby (b 1847), W. G. Grace (b 1848), H. D. G. Leveson Gower (b 1873), C. B. Fry (b 1872), M. J. K. Smith (b 1933).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_the_United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom&lt;/a&gt;: H. H. Asquith (born 1852).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nobel laureates from the United Kingdom: J. J. Thompson (b 1856), A. V. Hill (b 1886), C. F. Powell (b 1903).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English_mathematicians&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English mathematicians&lt;/a&gt;: G. H. Hardy (b 1877), F. H. Jackson (b 1870), D. G. Champernowne (b 1912), I. J. Good (b 1916), W. T. Tutte (b 1917), J. W. S. Cassels (b 1922).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are even more that did not use initials, of course. This cherry-picked list of names is only to illustrate that people using names with initials were not uncommon, and presumably there aren't necessarily special literary reasons for being part of that trend. (It does seem to be a trend: the occurrence seems to peak in that rough period.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these non-literary people did not use their initials as &quot;pen names&quot; for some special literary purpose — these were simply the names by which they were known in real life, the names by which articles about them are still titled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I picked only people from the UK, but you can also look at people in the broader British-influenced countries: we have scientists like C. V. Raman, S. N. Bose, J. C. Bose (continuing to the present day), and people from the literary world like R. K. Narayan or V. S. Naipaul.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doing a statistical analysis over some larger and more representative dataset of names will let you know whether authors like Forster and Tolkien were picking a name style unusual for their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;“J. R. R. Tolkien” was not a pen name&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the name with initials a &lt;em&gt;nom de plume&lt;/em&gt; he adopted for non-scholarly works? No! Here are the covers of a 1922 scholarly work of his, and the second edition of another:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TlUham.png&quot; alt=&quot;Middle English&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8SeqGm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Sir Gawain&quot;&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Middle English, not Middle Earth!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien first published a work of fiction in 1937 (&lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;). If we search on Google Books for books before 1935, and look for strings like &quot;Mr. J. R. R. Tolkien&quot;, &quot;Mr. John Tolkien&quot;, &quot;Mr. Ronald Tolkien&quot;, &quot;Mr. John Ronald Tolkien&quot; and &quot;Mr. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien&quot;, we find results only for the first one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pxMOAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=&amp;quot;Mr+J+R+R+tolkien&amp;quot;&amp;amp;dq=&amp;quot;Mr+J+R+R+tolkien&amp;quot;&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, 1921&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D0wGB.png&quot; alt=&quot;Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, Volume 4, Issues 22-23&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=57KgAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22Mr+J+R+R+tolkien%22&amp;amp;dq=%22Mr+J+R+R+tolkien%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The University Bulletin, 1922&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wEllT.png&quot; alt=&quot;The University Bulletin, Volume 1, Issue 1 - Volume 6, Issue 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=4JnfAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22Mr+J+R+R+tolkien%22&amp;amp;dq=%22Mr+J+R+R+tolkien%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Periodical, 1923&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bRgzw.png&quot; alt=&quot;The Periodical, Volume 9&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=sGlDAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;dq=%22Mr+JRR+tolkien%22&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=%22J+R+R+tolkien%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Studies in English, 1927&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9IdKb.png&quot; alt=&quot;Studies in English&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=GAA6AAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=&amp;quot;Mr+J+R+R+tolkien&amp;quot;&amp;amp;dq=&amp;quot;Mr+J+R+R+tolkien&amp;quot;&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Books in Print, 1920&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A0Uk.png&quot; alt=&quot;British Books in Print, Volume 8&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take a look at these, especially the last one: do we really want to look for special literary reasons for, or even consider unusual, the fact that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; these people had initials in their formal terms of address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastEditorUserId="869" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T00:53:22.673" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T00:53:22.673" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1239" CreationDate="2017-03-05T20:33:00.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think they view themselves as savages, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; are proud of it. Based on their subsequent behaviour, Jack's gang shed all moral restraint by the time they  &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1690/is-jack-in-lord-of-the-flies-actually-bad&quot;&gt;kill a mother pig&lt;/a&gt;. Given the way they communicate - &amp;quot;a littlun howled, creased and crimson&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;double cry&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;ululation&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;high, bird-like cry&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;silvery laughter&amp;quot; - they probably don't class their tribe as a cultured company. You only have to take one look at Jack's behaviour in chapter 3 to see how much shame he has in being wild:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack was bent double [...] his nose only a few inches from the humid earth. [...] Then dog-like, uncomfortable and on all fours yet un-heeding his discomfort, he stole forward five yards and stopped. [...] His sandy hair, considerably longer than it had been when they dropped in, was lighter now; and his bare back was a mass of dark freckles and peeling sunburn. A sharpened stick about five feet long trailed from his right hand; and except for a pair of tattered shorts held up by his knife-belt he was naked. [...] they were bright blue, eyes that in this frustration seemed bolting and nearly mad. [...] Jack himself shrank at this cry with a hiss of indrawn breath; and for a minute he became less of a hunter than a furtive thing, ape-like among the tangle of trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The advent of the masks is pivotal to advancing the plot. Originally, Roger throws stones but 'aims to miss' as a result of what Golding calls 'the taboo of old life'. But when he and Jack, and soon the rest of the tribe, can be camoflaged 'like moths on a tree trunk', I'm sure they have no problem identifying themselves as savages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He looked in astonishment, no longer at himself but at an awesome stranger. [...] He began to dance and his laughter became a bloodthirsty snarling. He capered towards Bill, and the mask was a thing on its own, behind which Jack hid, liberated from shame and self-consciousness.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language is deliberately enticing, as if Jack rejoices at his new personna. He doesn't 'jump' or 'leap', he '&lt;em&gt;capers&lt;/em&gt;'. I would go as far to say that his new barbaric appearance makes him euphoric. Certainly, Roger changes drastically once he learns his misdeeds will not bear any connection to a boy who was once kept in line by the threat of punishment, so he kills Piggy with no shame, and tortures Samneric without holding back; without aiming to miss. In this way, he becomes Jack's willing henchman, stopping at nothing to do his dirty business for him. Are these the actions of a boy who would class himself as savage? Absolutely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no reason to assume that Jack's tribe would have any reason &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to class themselves as savages. Jack even advertises the primitive activities of his tribe to the whole island population:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Listen all of you. Me and my hunters, we're living along the beach by a flat rock. We hunt and feast and have fun.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He speaks under no pretence of sophistication, which suggests he is not ashamed of what they do. Compare his non-standard use of 'me and my hunters' to his upper-class language when he is first summoned by 'the sound of the shell':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;All right then. Sit down. Let him alone. [...] He's always throwing a faint. / He did in Gib.; and Addis; and at matins over the precentor. [...] All right choir. Take off your togs. [...] I should think this is the easiest way. [...] We're English; and the English are best at everything.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there's the everlasting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And don't forget their twisted sense of humour that lacks any sense of self-reproach after they have butchered the pig:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Right up her ass!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Did you hear?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Did you hear what he said?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Right up her ass!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the fact that none of the tribe bother to counter Piggy's insulting points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I've got this to say. You're acting like a crowd of kids. Which is better - to be a pack of painted [******] like you are, or to be sensible like Ralph is? Which is better - to have rules and agree, or to hunt and kill? Which is better, law and rescue, or hunting and breaking things up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, the lack of reaction from the tribe means that none of them oppose Piggy's claims that they are 'kids', or less than sensible. Considering how everyone hates Piggy (which is something they get from Jack), the fact that they let Piggy's arguments lie could well mean that they themselves view themselves as savages. At the very least, it demonstrates an inability to reason that would result from accepting their lives as being savage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how none of them reject Jack's savage orders -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Go on. Tie them.&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;See? they do what I want.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The act of tying innocent people up is so stereotypically savage, and the fact that 'they felled the twins &lt;strong&gt;clumsily and excitedly&lt;/strong&gt;', hints that they see themselves as savages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when Jack superstitiously announces &amp;quot;This head is for the beast. It's a gift&amp;quot;, the reader is left in no doubt of his savageness, and I don't think the tribe is either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T20:33:00.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T21:56:53.200" Score="4" ViewCount="1169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mr. Swales plays a small role, but his interactions with Mina and Lucy seem to suggest a deeper significance. What is the significance of Mr. Swales, if any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T22:50:52.900" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:34:59.797" Title="What is the significance of Mr. Swales in Dracula?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;dracula&gt;&lt;bram-stoker&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="346" CreationDate="2017-03-05T22:23:27.883" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Unfortunates&lt;/em&gt; comprises 27 chapters. The first and last chapters are kept stationary, while the remaining 25 chapters are reflective vignettes shuffled into random order. The way that &lt;em&gt;The Unfortunates&lt;/em&gt; maintains coherence in the face of complete &quot;disorganization&quot; effectively amounts to three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reasonable bookending of the story. The intro sets the scene and establishes the book's tone and themes, and the ending closes them once the reader is in full knowledge of the vignettes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Usually short vignettes, which leave questions of how the narrator got there and what they're doing there besides reflecting somewhat moot. We're not supposed to feel a need to ask such questions at all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The topics of most of these vignettes are the narrator's thoughts, which are portrayed in a circuitous roundabout way that complements the shuffled order of the book. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Unfortunates&lt;/em&gt; isn't a book that conveys plot. It doesn't conform to many of the accepted norms of Western writing, and through its rejection, manages to position itself such that the only thing that matters to each vignette is its emotional context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On top of that, the narration within each vignette is, in some ways, also a facet of the nonlinearity. By making each individual vignette structurally nonlinear in its narration, the order in which they're read becomes a matter of which scene and which setting the reader encounters first. This ultimately isn't a jarring experience, because there's continuity established by the &lt;em&gt;way&lt;/em&gt; the narrator goes about narrating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike most Western storytelling, the questions of &quot;how did we get here?&quot; and &quot;what's going on?&quot; and &quot;who wants what; what's in their way?&quot; just aren't relevant. These sorts of questions are the ones that are needed to &lt;em&gt;establish&lt;/em&gt; a linear order in a book at all, and the removal of the need to ask those questions paves the way for nonlinearity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of the intentional design of the book, in calling itself an experimental novel. It's supposed to be presented in-text as a coherent story despite nonlinearity. But it's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; presented on a meta-level as a challenge to the need for linear plot and many of the tropes of Western storytelling, while itself remaining within the comfort zone of the Western storytelling framework. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technique, then, effectively boils down to it stripping away any of the questions one could ask that would &lt;em&gt;lead to&lt;/em&gt; a need for linearity at all. That's what gives it much of its power as a presentation of emotion and thought alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T22:23:27.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-05T23:11:16.443" Score="5" ViewCount="3886" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read Edgar Allan Poe's short story &quot;Eleonora&quot;, a thinly veiled self-portrait in which the protagonist falls in love with his younger cousin, who later dies and leaves him alone. He (the protagonist, not Poe) vows that his love for his cousin will be undying and that he will never love another woman in her place. So far, so unsurprising: this is standard romance fare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, in the final paragraphs of the story, the narrator reveals that, long after the death of Eleonora and his subsequent departure from the valley where they grew up, he falls in love again and marries another woman named Ermengarde, about whom almost nothing is said, except for the implication that Heaven and/or the spirit of Eleonora forgive him for breaking his vow, for reasons unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the message being put across by this story?&lt;/strong&gt; Is the 'moral', if you will, that it's OK to break a vow of eternal love? The story is all about issues which were surely of great emotional importance to the author; is there some hidden meaning in it which isn't immediately clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T09:00:55.107" Title="What is the message of Poe's &quot;Eleonora&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;moral&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1937" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-05T23:38:58.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-05T23:38:58.943" LastActivityDate="2017-03-05T23:38:58.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1938" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-05T23:38:58.943" Score="0" Body="For questions related primarily to the author's intended meaning of a text (as opposed to literary analysis apart from authorial intent)." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T03:17:00.997" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T03:17:00.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1928" CreationDate="2017-03-06T01:42:05.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On an immediate level, the thrush symbolises &lt;strong&gt;freedom&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was in the sun, they in the shade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This symbolises how the thrush is free to live its life as it chooses - literally 'free as a bird' - while Winston and Julia are subjugated by the oppressive society they live in.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it. What made it sit at the edge of the lonely wood and pour its music into nothingness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the bird is singing not just because of some social obligation, but out of pure emotion. It also awakens feelings in Winston:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was as though it were a kind of liquid stuff that poured all over him and got mixed up with the sunlight that filtered through the leaves. He stopped thinking and merely felt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this, Winston finally begins to feel sexual desire for Julia: his inhibition or lack of feeling which prevented them from making love earlier is gone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole description of the thrush and its singing is in sharp &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt; to the description of human society which makes up most of the book. It seems carefree, happy, artistic, beautiful, emotional - none of these are adjectives one might have used to describe anything else in the book so far. This contrast appears even more starkly when Winston's thoughts wander briefly away from the thrush and back to human surveillance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wondered whether after all there was a microphone hidden somewhere near. He and Julia had spoken only in low whispers, and it would not pick up what they had said, but it would pick up the thrush. Perhaps at the other end of the instrument some small, beetle-like man was listening intently — listening to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And much later on, shortly before their arrest, Winston and Julia's thoughts go back to the thrush again, and once again we see the contrast between it and the Party society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘He wasn’t singing to us,’ said Julia. ‘He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The birds sang, the proles sang. The Party did not sing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;One strange aspect of this passage is that the description of the thrush's song is actually &lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt;. The song thrush (&lt;em&gt;Turdus philomelos&lt;/em&gt;), the main species of thrush found in Britain, has a song which is distinctive because of its constant &lt;strong&gt;repetition&lt;/strong&gt;: every set of notes it makes is repeated over and over again, at least 2 or 3 times and often more. Every British birdwatcher knows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G53oH-MI9qU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G53oH-MI9qU&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when I first read &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, the following description of the thrush's song (emphasis mine) was horribly jarring to my suspension of disbelief:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The music went on and on, minute after minute, with astonishing variations, &lt;strong&gt;never once repeating itself&lt;/strong&gt;, almost as though the bird were deliberately showing off its virtuosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the explanation for this apparent mistake? Well, Occam's razor would say it actually is a simple mistake, and that Orwell wasn't aware of the defining characteristic of the song of one of the commonest British songbirds, despite choosing that song to describe at length in his novel. But what if there's a darker and more subtle explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the thrush isn't a real thrush at all. Perhaps the Party has created believable fake birds to do some of their spying for them. Perhaps the unrealistic song of the thrush was an early indication that, even then, the Party was watching Winston and Julia's every move (as we discover much later on, they had certainly been watched since long before this scene).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Or perhaps I'm thinking of the wrong dystopian novel and have &lt;a href=&quot;http://thehungergames.wikia.com/wiki/Jabberjay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jabberjays&lt;/a&gt; on the brain.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure I've read this theory elsewhere, and that perhaps it was even made explicit in one of the film adaptations of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;. But I can't find any reference to it now, so my justification above, based only on the text and a knowledge of ornithology, will have to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T01:42:05.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T04:53:42.537" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Elephant and the Kangaroo&lt;/em&gt;, T.H. White names his protagonist &amp;quot;Mr. White,&amp;quot; with no first name ever given.  There are several notable similarities between the author and his protagonist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they are both English authors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr. White lives in Ireland, as T.H. White had&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they both seem to be freethinkers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they were both unwed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one might guess that the protagonist is intended to be some version of the author.  The only other indication of a possible reason for this name I noticed was a brief comparison of the protagonist with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Rabbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;White Rabbit&lt;/a&gt;, though I suspect this is secondary.  (Note the title of the work is based on an infrequently used comparison to two of the main characters to an elephant and a kangaroo.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did T.H. White ever explicitly explain the choice of name for this protagonist?  If so, did he say to what extent Mr. White and/or his experiences are intended to be similar to the real-life author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T22:06:49.263" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T22:06:49.263" Title="Why did T.H. White name his hero Mr. White?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-elephant-and-the-kangaroo&gt;&lt;t-h-white&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1942" CreationDate="2017-03-06T06:18:55.883" Score="6" ViewCount="1047" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ada Palmer's &lt;em&gt;Too Like The Lightning&lt;/em&gt;, the first book of &lt;em&gt;Terra Ignota&lt;/em&gt;, the character of J.E.D.D. Mason has many names - &lt;em&gt;&quot;each Power here has a different name for J.E.D.D. Mason.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series is bursting with different cultures and factions, and each name mentioned reflects on those using it. Many of the names are not given in English, and some are not translated or explained, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What names for J.E.D.D. Mason are given in the course of the series, and what is the meaning of each?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NOTE: Some of the names are &lt;strong&gt;critical&lt;/strong&gt; spoilers for &lt;em&gt;Too Like the Lightning&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T06:48:47.197" Title="What are the many names of J.E.D.D. Mason, and their meanings?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1941" CreationDate="2017-03-06T06:35:36.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a community-wiki answer where we can compile a list of names and their meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tai-kun,&lt;/strong&gt; Japanese. This name has a double meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tai-kun,&quot; as written, is applying the &lt;a href=&quot;http://jisho.org/word/%E5%90%9B-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;-kun&quot;&lt;/a&gt; suffix for &quot;boy&quot; or &quot;young man&quot; to the name or nickname &quot;Tai.&quot; This is consistent with the book's description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like Sniper, Ando used the Japanese nickname 'Tai-kun,' an old one, remnant from when the Child first appeared in the media's eye, riding wide-eyed on Hotaka Ando Mitsubishi's shoulders through the eternal overload of Tokyo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the word 'taikun' translates as &lt;a href=&quot;http://jisho.org/word/%E5%A4%A7%E5%90%9B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;liege lord; shogunate.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; So even his name of boyish endearment is also one of power and lordship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jagmohan,&lt;/strong&gt; Indian. &lt;em&gt;Jag&lt;/em&gt; is the world, and &lt;em&gt;Mohan&lt;/em&gt; is to captivate, delight, enchant, etc - combined, the name means &quot;one who captivates/enchants the world.&quot; It's a title of Lord Krishna, who is one of the most important avatars of Lord Vishnu, the protector in the Hindu Trinity. The name itself is not an unusual one in India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Is there any further significance to this one? This all fits well thematically. But in the chapter &quot;The Tenth Director,&quot; &quot;Jagmohan&quot; is referred to as &quot;practically a pun,&quot; which I don't understand.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Xiao Hei Wang,&lt;/strong&gt; Chinese. In Mandarin, &lt;em&gt;xiao&lt;/em&gt; means little, and is often used as a term of endearment, usually for someone younger, and is added to the beginning of someone's name. &lt;em&gt;Hei&lt;/em&gt; means red, a color associated with good luck and fortune in Chinese culture. &lt;em&gt;Wang&lt;/em&gt; is a common Chinese surname, and can be translated to king. It would appear as if &quot;Little Red King&quot; is the Chinese strat's preferred nickname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Micromegas,&lt;/strong&gt; Utopian, sometimes abbreviated to &quot;Mike.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His Utopian nickname is not short for Michael, though the invocation of Heinlein's might be intentional. It is short for Micromegas, &quot;Littlebig,&quot; the alien visitor from Jupiter who towers over humankind in grandeur and philosophy in Patriarch Voltaire's famous (and possibly Earth's oldest) science-fiction tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Michael/Heinlein reference refers to Heinlein's alien visitor Valentine Michael Smith, of &lt;em&gt;Stranger in a Strange Land&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Porphyrogene&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; Masonic. Meaning is something like &quot;child of the purple,&quot; with the purple being the imperial color, signifying royalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance of the name &quot;J.E.D.D. Mason&quot; itself is a crucial plot point in &lt;em&gt;Too Like The Lightning&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;J.E.D.D.&quot; stands for &lt;strong&gt;Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D'Arouet&lt;/strong&gt; - sacrilegious in our own day; even worse in the Seven Hives, where public mention of religion is forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Madame D'Arouet explains that each of J.E.D.D. Mason's ba'pas picked out one of the names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Donatien&quot; is significant as the given name of the Marquis de Sade.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Epicurus&quot; could be calling us back to Carlyle and Bridger's conversation. Carlyle referred to Epicureans as rejecting the idea of an afterlife, and believing in the importance of lasting pleasures. He also refers to the Neo-Epicureans - a fictional economic philosophy, maintaining that government's job is to &lt;em&gt;&quot;make sure people live in ways that make them happy.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; Neo-Epicureanism is also credited with the setting's bash' system, replacing traditional family structures. &lt;em&gt;(Is there additional significance to this choice of name?)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;D'Arouet&quot; is a reference to Voltaire's real name, Arouet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T06:48:47.197" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T06:48:47.197" CommentCount="8" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-03-06T06:35:36.280" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T08:15:27.820" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;My Side of the Mountain&lt;/em&gt;, Sam apparently wants to head out to sea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As we approached the hemlock grove, I noticed that Dad was carrying a pack. He explained it as food for the first few days, or until I could teach John, Jim, Hank, and Jake how to live off the land. I winked at him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;But, Dad, a Gribley is not for the land.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What do you mean?&quot; he shouted. &quot;The Gribleys have had land for three generations. We pioneer, we open the land.&quot; He was almost singing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And then we go to sea,&quot; I said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Things have changed. Child labor laws; you can't take children to sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, do we see any indication that he wanted to go to sea? He had seemed pretty happy where he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any indication in the rest of the novel that he wanted to go to sea?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:11:04.783" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:11:04.783" Title="Is there any indication that Sam wanted to go to sea before he states that he wants to go to sea?" Tags="&lt;my-side-of-the-mountain&gt;&lt;jean-craighead-george&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1944" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T10:49:44.970" Score="19" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;All place names in Charlotte Brontë's &lt;em&gt;The Professor&lt;/em&gt; appear to be obscured. A few examples from the novel's first chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That gentleman and Lord T. knew well enough that the Crimsworths were an unscrupulous and determined race; they knew also that they had influence in the borough of X——; and, making a virtue of necessity, they consented to defray the expenses of my education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked, moreover, if he could give me employment. His answer expressed no approbation of my conduct, but he said I might come down to ——shire, if I liked, and he would ‘see what could be done in the way of furnishing me with work.’ I repressed all—even mental comment on his note—packed my trunk and carpet-bag, and started for the North directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“After two days’ travelling (railroads were not then in existence) I arrived, one wet October afternoon, in the town of X——.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? Is this peculiarity specific to Brontë, or a wider convention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T01:28:18.893" Title="Why are place names obscured in Charlotte Brontë's The Professor?" Tags="&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-06T14:59:03.463" Score="8" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Corbett's books are mostly autobiographical, &lt;em&gt;My India&lt;/em&gt; particularly so. It describes several incidents across Corbett's life in India. One of the most moving ones is from Corbett's time as a Railway contractor on the shores of the Ganges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There had been some delay in payments, and Corbett was nearly bankrupt. His foreman came to speak to him, and met his servant going to serve him lunch. They asked him what his lunch consisted of, and the answer was, if my memory is correct, a single &lt;em&gt;roti&lt;/em&gt; and some &lt;em&gt;dal&lt;/em&gt;. The austerity impressed his foremen, and they, after waiting for him to finish his meal, promised him to continue working, but pleaded for some solution. Of course, the payments came soon after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story as written by Corbett is powerful. However, I wonder: is Corbett a reliable narrator? Have other, contradictory, accounts of the events in his book come out? Specifically, I'm most interested in the aforementioned event, but a general account of his accuracy would be good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T13:54:58.310" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T13:54:58.310" Title="How accurate is Corbett's &quot;My India&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;my-india&gt;&lt;jim-corbett&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1979" CreationDate="2017-03-06T15:57:39.213" Score="11" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article on Stephen King's &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says that Carrie is based on two girls in King's schools. It has this quote, with a &amp;quot;citation needed&amp;quot; attached:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was a very peculiar girl who came from a very peculiar family. Her&#xA;mother wasn't a religious nut like the mother in &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;; she was a&#xA;game nut, a sweepstakes nut who subscribed to magazines for people who&#xA;entered contests … the girl had one change of clothes for the entire&#xA;school year, and all the other kids made fun of her. I have a very&#xA;clear memory of the day she came to school with a new outfit she'd&#xA;bought herself. She was a plain-looking country girl, but she'd&#xA;changed the black skirt and white blouse – which was all anybody had&#xA;ever seen her in – for a bright-colored checkered blouse with puffed&#xA;sleeves and a skirt that was fashionable at the time. And everybody&#xA;made worse fun of her because nobody wanted to see her change the mold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling some phrases from this mostly returns blogs and other sites which repeat this verbatim. Two books seem to be of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?redir_esc=y&amp;amp;hl=ja&amp;amp;id=EmsYAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=%22she%20was%20a%20game%20nut%2C%20a%20sweepstakes%20nut%22&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=%22she%20was%20a%20game%20nut%2C%20a%20sweepstakes%20nut%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Something about the Author&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Anne Commrie, 1989, Gale&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=jNDrAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22she%20was%20a%20game%20nut,%20a%20sweepstakes%20nut%22&amp;amp;dq=%22she%20was%20a%20game%20nut,%20a%20sweepstakes%20nut%22&amp;amp;hl=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Authors &amp;amp; Artists for Young Adults&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, vol. 1, Agnes Garrett, Helga P. McCue, 1989, Gale Research.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither seem to be a primary source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the part about Carrie being based on those two girls has a rather vague source: &amp;quot;King, (2000), p.78&amp;quot;. If we assume that this assertion and the quote are from the same source, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists two books published by King in 2000 that might be the source of this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2000, &lt;em&gt;On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft&lt;/em&gt;, Scribner, ISBN: 978-0-684-85352-9.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;2000, &lt;em&gt;Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing&lt;/em&gt;,   BOMC, ISBN: 978-0-965-01851-7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is (are?) Carrie based on? Is the above quote true, and if so, where did it come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T21:23:46.813" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T21:23:46.813" Title="Who was (were?) the inspiration for Carrie?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;carrie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1947" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1959" CreationDate="2017-03-06T21:17:03.407" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Waiting for Godot&lt;/em&gt; obviously never actually explicitly says who Godot is or exactly why the characters are waiting for him. How much do the characters know themselves? For example, do they even know who Godot is or why it's important to wait for him, or do they just know that they're supposed to wait? Is there good literary analysis on this point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T23:03:31.560" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T02:35:40.730" Title="How much do the characters in Waiting for Godot actually know?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;samuel-beckett&gt;&lt;waiting-for-godot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3350" CreationDate="2017-03-06T21:22:09.243" Score="8" ViewCount="1332" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the big jokes in Catch-22 is Major Major's striking resemblance to Henry Fonda. Why did Joseph Heller choose Henry Fonda in particular? Is there any significance to the choice, or was it a somewhat arbitrary choice of someone that the audience was likely to have seen (or at least heard of) before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:09:48.343" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:59:56.260" Title="Is there any significance to Major Major being a Henry Fonda lookalike?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1949" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1950" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T21:24:33.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1951" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:09:46.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T23:09:46.760" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T23:09:46.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1952" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:09:46.760" Score="0" Body="Questions about the author and playwright Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) or about any of his works." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:07:34.327" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:07:34.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1953" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:10:26.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-06T23:10:26.030" LastActivityDate="2017-03-06T23:10:26.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1954" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:10:26.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Waiting for Godot' (1948-1949) by Samuel Beckett. Use with the [samuel-beckett] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:33:52.103" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:33:52.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1955" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2004" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:44:21.747" Score="11" ViewCount="1519" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The End&quot; is a very short story, not much over 1000 words, in Borges's collection &lt;em&gt;Fictions&lt;/em&gt;. It describes a paralysed man, Recabarren, who observes an unnamed black guitar player avenge himself on Martin Fierro, the killer of his brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there some deeper significance or symbolism here?&lt;/strong&gt; Many of the other stories in &lt;em&gt;Fictions&lt;/em&gt; are philosophically interesting or simply wacky, exploring concepts such as language, infinity, imagination, and pattern. This one seems banal by comparison, but perhaps there's something I'm missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T23:02:48.143" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:56:34.780" Title="Is there any deeper significance to the Borges story &quot;The End&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1957" CreationDate="2017-03-06T23:54:08.820" Score="12" ViewCount="2031" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember when I was a kid my dad read us a book about two children, brother and sister, who ran away from home, and stayed the night in a museum. They slept under a bed (that was an example of a certain style of furniture, if I remember right), because nobody ever cleaned under there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time remembering the plot, but I remember the brother telling about how he played War with his friend, and when they had to leave they would take their cards with them, and spit on the cards and say &quot;Thou shalt not shuffle&quot;. Later in the story, the brother said he got his money by cheating in this game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at one point in the story, they rent a PO box for a quarter, because they can't get it for just two days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope these details are correct; it was years ago when I heard the story. Does anyone have any idea what the title and author of this book could be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T11:32:34.210" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T11:32:34.210" Title="Story about two siblings who run away from home and stay in a museum at night" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1956" CreationDate="2017-03-07T00:32:36.373" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Mixed-Up_Files_of_Mrs._Basil_E._Frankweiler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by E. L. Konigsburg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The brother and sister in question are Jamie and Claudia Kincaid, who run away from home.  They live in the Metropolitan Museum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jamie did both of the things that you describe with the cards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jamie wanted to sit with his buddy, Bruce. They played cards on the &#xA;  bus; each day meant a continuation of the day before. (The game was &#xA;  nothing very complicated, Saxonberg. Nothing terribly refined. They played war, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every night when Bruce got off at his stop, he'd take his stack of cards home with him. Jamie would do the same. They always took a vow not to shuffle. At the stop before Bruce's house, they would stop playing, wrap a rubber band around each pile, hold the stack under each other's chin and spit on each other's deck saying, &quot;Thou shalt not shuffle.&quot; Then each tapped his deck and put it in his pocket. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the PO box:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Here's the plan: we rent a post office box in Grand Central. Like when &#xA;  you send in box tops, you always send them to P.O. Box Number So-and-so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We write a letter and tell them to answer us at the box number. After they tell us that they need help, we reveal ourselves. As heroes.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the quarterly part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For how long?&quot; the man inquired. &#xA;  &quot;For about two days.&quot; &#xA;  &quot;Sorry,&quot; the man said, &quot;we rent them quarterly.&quot; &#xA;  &quot;All right, then. I'll take eight quarterlies. That makes two days.&quot; &#xA;  &quot;Quarter of a year,&quot; the man said. &quot;That makes three months.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the bed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At last she found a bed that she considered perfectly wonderful, and &#xA;  she told Jamie that they would spend the night there. The bed had a tall &#xA;  canopy, supported by an ornately carved headboard at one end and by two &#xA;  gigantic posts at the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, you also noted about laundromats in the comments. They are mentioned 4 times, here's one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They packed their gray-looking laundry back into their pockets and &#xA;  walked to the door of the laundromat. At the door Claudia turned to Jamie &#xA;  and asked, &quot;Can we ...?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T00:32:36.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2017-03-07T00:49:44.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for asking this question!  (Not least because I am itinerant and my Borges is all in boxes, but your question led me to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://posthegemony.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/borges_collected-fictions.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collected stories of Borges in pdf&lt;/a&gt;, which will provide ℵ value on any mobile device.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borges was not only profound, he intended his stories to be enigmas.  Any analysis I give can only be partial, and must be regarded as musings on certain symbols and themes, not definitive answers.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is quite ambiguous regarding identity: The black guitarist is never named, and it is unclear as to whether Recabarren is the narrator. This relates to a theme of the story in which all men belong to a single group. &lt;em&gt;(In the linked pdf, you can find Borges using a form set theory in the context of narrative construction, and the narrative nature of reality may also be said to be a theme.)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further support for &quot;ambiguity of identity&quot; as a theme may be found in: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recabarren regards a visitor at his door as: &quot;A boy with Indian-like features (Recabarren's son, perhaps) opened the door a crack.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recabarren loses the ability to speak after the guitar player loses the singing contest and never sings after, suggesting the two are linked. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly how that link is interpreted is multi-variant, and can be understood in contexts such as philosophy, literature, and psychology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very simple analysis of the story involves freedom:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Recabarren is presumably bed-ridden per his &quot;great useless body&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The windows of Recabarren's room have heavy bars.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recabarren is unsentimental: &quot;He looked down &lt;em&gt;without pity&lt;/em&gt; at his great useless body&quot;.   Upon learning he can no longer speak, Borges writes &quot;From&#xA;learning to pity the misfortunes of the heroes of our novels, we wind up feeling too much pity for our own; but not Recabarren, who accepted his paralysis as he had earlier accepted the severity and the solitudes of the Americas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, Recabarren both is trapped by his infirmities, but unbound by them. His minds is free, and he does not suffer, because suffering is a perceptual condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The face of approaching rider is unseen: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Recabarren could make out the broadbrimmed hat, the dark poncho, the piebald horse, but not the face of the rider,&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, to me, suggests the rider may be Death, but I can only guess because the rider's features. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But per the story's reversal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The black man (the guitarist) fulfills the function of the Grim Reaper. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that it is a knife fight, not a gun fight or other form of combat. Reaping requires a blade.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity is in regards to the interloper who is given a name, Martín Fierro. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fierro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Fierro&quot; means &quot;iron&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_(name)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin is a form of Mars&lt;/a&gt;, god of war.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;His work of vengeance done, he was nobody&#xA;now.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that identity comes out of having a purpose. With that purpose fulfilled, the actor gains freedom from self, in the profoundest sense.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is reflected in Recabarren's equanimity regarding his own condition. However, for the unnamed man, this freedom may be illusory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Or rather, he was the other one: there was neither destination nor destiny on earth for him, and he had killed a man.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, again, highly ambiguous.  Not &quot;because&quot; he had killed a man, but &quot;and&quot; he had killed a man.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it refers to the status of Cain? Or that the character has no meaningful future because death is now impeding per his trade in identity with the other? Or that he has switched from &quot;one with a purpose&quot; who is an agent of destiny, to &quot;one who awaits their destiny&quot;, which is a metaphor for dying. [Compare to Yeats' &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1825/391&quot;&gt;The Song of Wandering Aengus&lt;/a&gt;&quot; where fulfillment is creative death, and unfulfillment is life itself.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man is free because he achieved vengeance, but achieving it creates another prison.  (Although, perhaps he will be given a name when he meets his own fate...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Borges was remarkably precise with language and so any and all ambiguity must be intended.  The condition of &quot;what is the author saying?&quot; is the result the author was certainly looking for, by presenting a story that is also an enigma.  (The &quot;The Aleph&quot;, for instance, is presented as in the mystery genre, but the mystery carries the much more profound, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_mysteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;religious context&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To Borges, existence was a series of wonderful enigmas.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm certain Borges wrote about this, but it's been so long, I couldn't tell you where specifically to look, only that it's in there somewhere, and that reading anything Borges wrote about writing is profoundly rewarding;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Enigmas:&#xA;The enigmatic quality of Borges' stories relates partly to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics#Philosophical_hermeneutics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;textual hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt; from the inverse, game theory perspective of a narrative designer. the idea that so long as a text cannot be definitively analyzed, it will continue to hold interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is similar to the concept of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solved game&lt;/a&gt;, such a Tic-tac-toe, which loses appeal once the player has determined the solution. By contrast, AI may not beat humans at Chess and Go, but the games are computationally intractable and cannot be solved.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T03:47:46.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1947" CreationDate="2017-03-07T02:35:40.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haha.  Great question!  The ambiguity is intended and there is certainly exhaustive scholarship on the play and characters, which likely includes analysis of this question. This is a brief, partial answer, which I hope to have time to elaborate in the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a very high level, they know only what is right in front of them, which is to say, the material reality (which, it is worth mentioning, involves disparity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The characters don't really have backstories, just names, and it isn't even clear to the audience whether one is meant to be a dog or a human behaving like a dog (i.e. is it a wardrobe/casting choice? The best plays are playful;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of Godot, you know what they know, which is vague and unconvincing, and yet you don't really have much choice in the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where even are they?  The set is so general.  There is a tree, as I recall, but that's about it.  In the words of a sage &amp;quot;Wherever you go, there you are&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't actually matter if they move on or not, they'll still be in a condition of waiting for something, because they themselves have no destination or purpose, other than existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's actually purgatory? The settings of Beckett's plays tends to be purgatorial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A location is in the general sense is indicated in the play's setting as &amp;quot;A country road. A tree.&amp;quot;, but time and circumstances and every other aspect of the impending meeting is undefined, as is the never seen &amp;quot;Godot&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are obvious religious and economic meanings, but as Beckett is purposefully enigmatic, I'd never presume to claim to fully understand his non-trivial plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, two of the last lines of the play are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VLADIMIR: (without anger). It's not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ESTRAGON: No, nothing is certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the &lt;em&gt;very last lines&lt;/em&gt; and direction are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ESTRAGON: Well, shall we go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VLADIMIR: Yes, let's go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They do not move.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T02:35:40.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="267" CreationDate="2017-03-07T04:00:09.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt;, like many of Saki's stories pitting children against adults, was inspired from his childhood. Saki had lost his parents at an early age, and was fostered by tyrannical aunts. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=BpnkAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT201&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;q=sredni&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reading Saki: The Fiction of H.H. Munro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Brian Gibson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Munro's true mother was run over by a cow and Ethel notes that Aunt&#xA;  Augusta was afraid of the creatures, [...] this bovine-induced tragedy&#xA;  seems significant, given Saki's &quot;preoccupation with animals that&#xA;  attack women&quot;; these attacks seem both imaginative recreations&#xA;  and reworkings of Mary Munro's death &amp;mdash; perhaps helping her son&#xA;  to deal vicariously with the loss &amp;mdash; and fantasies of&#xA;  surrogate-mothers' deaths. Ethel Munro herself notes that Aunt Augusta&#xA;  and Aunt Tom were &quot;guilty of mental cruelty; we often longed for&#xA;  revenge&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Saki's stories, perhaps reflecting Munro's absence of or yearning for&#xA;  his mother, do not show the defeat of a mother as often as they revel&#xA;  in the defeat of aunts or other female guardian figures by fate,&#xA;  animals and children. [...] In the much-anthologized &quot;Sredni Vashtar&quot;,&#xA;  Conradin's revered polecat-ferret kills his strict cousin-guardian&#xA;  Mrs. De Ropp after she kills Conradin's pet Houdan hen, echoing&#xA;  Munro's childhood loss of a favourite Houdan cock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ethel Munro is Saki's sister.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later on, while discussing &lt;em&gt;The Lumber-Room&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Penance&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sredni Vashtar&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This sense of surveillance, of being trapped by a guardian's watchful&#xA;  eye, more in keeping with Victorian than Edwardian settings for&#xA;  child-centered fiction, suggests these tales tap into the adult&#xA;  Munro's remembrance of his 1870s childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T04:00:09.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T05:24:55.120" Score="2" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Magic Grandfather&lt;/em&gt;, by Jay Williams (published 1979), there are several spells that do certain things. For instance, &lt;em&gt;Aldoragamba luro vopo vir voarchadumia&lt;/em&gt; is a transportation spell. &lt;em&gt;Tripsarecopsem&lt;/em&gt; helps with the crystal ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Near the beginning of the notebook of spells he found a description of how to pronounce the hard words, which was a great help. He fixed each step for himself so that he was clear about how to open the portal and keep it open. Above all, he set himself to learning the transportation spell by heart. It had only five words, but they were a mouthful: &lt;em&gt;Aldoragamba luro vopo vir voarchadumia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-Horrible Wendel&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This, said the notebook, was a ball made out of rock crystal, whatever that was. Looking into it and saying the word &lt;em&gt;Tripsarecopsem&lt;/em&gt;, you could see any person or thing at a distance and this helped you concentrate on them so that you could bring them to you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-Transformations&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did Jay Williams get these spells from? Did he make them up? Do they mean anything?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:38:39.663" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:38:39.663" Title="Where did the spells come from in The Magic Grandfather?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;jay-williams&gt;&lt;the-magic-grandfather-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1962" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1965" CreationDate="2017-03-07T12:45:46.497" Score="36" ViewCount="12936" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone&lt;/em&gt;, Snape asks Harry many questions during his first Potions class. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing Snape asks Harry is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Potter! What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Victorian Flower Language, asphodel is a type of lily meaning ‘My regrets follow you to the grave’ and wormwood means ‘absence’ and also typically symbolized bitter sorrow. If you combined that, it meant ‘I bitterly regret Lily’s death’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But was this intentional? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it seems like a too-good-to-be-true coincidence, but I need confirmation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="941" LastEditorUserId="941" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T19:41:58.490" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T19:41:58.490" Title="Does Snape talk in code?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2017-03-07T13:03:06.190" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a Pottermore article (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/features/lily-potter-petunia-and-the-language-of-flowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lily, Petunia, and the Language of Flowers&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) this is written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If his first words to Harry are anything to go by, the language of flowers suggests that Snape deeply regrets Lily Potter’s death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also on monkshood and wolfsbane, the next tings he asks about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snape also asks Harry what the difference is between monkshood and wolfsbane. It is perhaps a more poignant sentence when looked at through the language of flowers. Monkshood is associated with ‘chivalry’ while wolfsbane can mean ‘misanthropy’ or a dislike of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here it could be said that Snape is comparing the heroic actions of Lily Potter with Snape’s own distrustful nature. Or even perhaps between Harry, the Boy Who Lived, and himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It goes on to explain the meanings of Lily and Petunia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't know if this was intentional when JKR was writing.  (Also check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/57301/51142&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; on a related site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, as you say, a too-good-to-be-true coincidence, so it was probably intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T13:03:06.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2017-03-07T13:04:37.850" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;As stated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/57300/severus-snapes-first-words-to-harry-potter-an-apology&quot;&gt;this same question on Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, J. K. Rowling has never said anything stating whether or not this was intentional. We only have speculation to go on, so I will speculate :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Too much of a coincidence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How likely is it that this was by accident? You've got him saying something that, when interpreted the right way, becomes a major plot point later on. It seems &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; unlikely that this was accidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She had planned the things about Snape for a while.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that JKR had given Alan Rickman (the actor who played Snape) some bits of information about Snape before everything was revealed, so we know that she was planning this stuff in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;http://time.com/4180663/alan-rickman-goodbye-to-harry-potter/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote from Alan Rickman&lt;/a&gt;, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, &lt;strong&gt;persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume,&lt;/strong&gt; and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The potion that it makes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you mix these things, it creates the potion known as &lt;em&gt;The Drought of Living Death&lt;/em&gt;, so-called because you sleep and don't wake up. However, this could also reference that Snape was living in agony after Voldemort killed Lily, because he had betrayed her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, we have lots of evidence pointing to yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems that she did.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;I looked this up after seeing @CHEESE's answer&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/features/lily-potter-petunia-and-the-language-of-flowers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pottermore&lt;/a&gt;, which is to be considered at least sort of canon, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If his first words to Harry are anything to go by, the language of flowers suggests that &lt;strong&gt;Snape deeply regrets Lily Potter’s death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’ The answer can be found in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Professor Slughorn asks the class to brew the Draught of Living Death. Interestingly, this is after Harry found Snape’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making and followed his instructions to prepare the perfect draught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asphodel is a type of lily and means ‘remembered beyond the tomb’ or ‘my regrets follow you to the grave’ while wormwood is often associated with regret or bitterness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T13:12:38.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1962" CreationDate="2017-03-07T13:15:17.503" Score="42" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We don't know, but there's a lot of evidence supporting it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language of flowers&lt;/a&gt;, or floriography, goes back much further than Victorian times. It was used or alluded to in Shakespeare's plays (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1689/17&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;) and even the Hebrew Bible. It's unknown whether J.K. Rowling knew about it - she's never commented publicly on the wormwood/asphodel theory - but &lt;strong&gt;other characters in the Harry Potter books do have appropriate flower-based names&lt;/strong&gt;: for instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flowermeaning.com/petunia/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Petunia&lt;/a&gt; symbolises anger and resentment.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Let's take a look at the wider context surrounding this quote (the full passage is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/book-extract-long/snape-targets-harry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Potter!’ said Snape suddenly. ‘What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the line under consideration. To gather evidence as to whether or not it's significant, let's look at what &lt;em&gt;else&lt;/em&gt; Snape says in the same exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Let’s try again. Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this is certainly foreshadowing. The bezoar becomes much more important in book 6, when Harry uses it (on the advice of the Half-Blood Prince, whom he little realises is Snape himself) to win a Potions contest in Slughorn's class, and then later uses it to save Ron's life.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What is the difference, Potter, between monkshood and wolfsbane?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably a foreshadowing of book 3, when the werewolf Lupin comes on the scene and Snape, when taking one of his classes, attempts to teach the students about werewolves in the hope that they'll recognise Lupin as one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;Snape definitely has significant lines&lt;/strong&gt; in this scene. It makes sense that his wormwood/asphodel line is also somehow significant.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;There's also an article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/features/lily-potter-petunia-and-the-language-of-flowers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pottermore&lt;/a&gt;, a site which is affiliated with J.K. Rowling and for which she often provides new pieces of her own writing, which talks about this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Victorian language of flowers was used back in the 1800s to send meaningful messages, convey deep secrets and share moments. Nearly every flower has a special meaning and, in times when some words could not be spoken aloud, bouquets would say a 1,000 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are hidden meanings throughout all the Harry Potter books, but what do we learn about Lily, Petunia and Severus when we examine their stories with this language in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asphodel and wormwood&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If his first words to Harry are anything to go by, the language of flowers suggests that Snape deeply regrets Lily Potter’s death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’ The answer can be found in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; when Professor Slughorn asks the class to brew the Draught of Living Death. Interestingly, this is after Harry found Snape’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making and followed his instructions to prepare the perfect draught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asphodel is a type of lily and means ‘remembered beyond the tomb’ or ‘my regrets follow you to the grave’ while wormwood is often associated with regret or bitterness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that Rowling approves Pottermore articles even if she didn't write them herself, this is more evidence from the authorial-intent angle. Still, of course, even if she didn't intend this symbolic interpretation originally, it's so neat that she would surely have no issues pretending (or letting it be generally assumed) that she did.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The asphodel/wormwood line was also &lt;strong&gt;used by fans as evidence for a Severus-Lily relationship even before book 7 came out&lt;/strong&gt;. While not offering much evidence that the symbolism was intentional, this does show that it was clear enough to put the idea of Severus's love for Lily into people's minds even before such a thing was ever part of canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were a few hints or things that made people consider [Severus/Lily]. In Snape's first Potions class, he talks about the combination of two ingredients, Asphodel and Wormwood. Wormwood is a very bitter root, and Asphodel is a type of lily. Snape says these two create the Draught of Living Death, and in DH, there are a few instances where Snape's eyes suggest he's, to use a somewhat melodramatic phrase, dead inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cosforums.com/showpost.php?p=5518432&amp;amp;postcount=825&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CoS forums&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://psyfic.livejournal.com/188866.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this LiveJournal post&lt;/a&gt; written &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the publication of book 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We know from book 1 that Snape likes (or is good with) riddles and is a master of double entendre and insinuation. Many times his words are couched with hidden meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In their first meeting in Potions class, Snape picks Harry out as &quot;our new celebrity&quot; and asks him what he would get by adding asphodel to an infusion of wormwood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asphodel symbolically means death, esp. death of someone beloved to the person who offers asphodel. Asphodel is also a lily. Wormwood symbolically means bitter sorrow. So in essence, Snape is asking Harry if he knows what death wrapped in bitter sorrow is. Or put another way, he might be trying to tell Harry that he loved her and that he bitterly regrets Lily's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Finally, for further reading including a detailed analysis of the symbolism of asphodel and wormwood in both real-world floriography and other works of literature, you may be interested in &lt;a href=&quot;http://corvus-kari.dreamwidth.org/307595.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T13:28:04.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2383" CreationDate="2017-03-07T14:12:54.060" Score="11" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Lust Over Pendle,&lt;/em&gt; we see a pile of books and magazines that Draco's been using to study for pretending to be a Muggle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Draco gestured at the window seat of the breakfast room. It was piled high with Muggle magazines; she spotted &lt;em&gt;Living etc, Elle Dec, Tatler, Country Life, FHM&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Loaded&lt;/em&gt;. A few battered looking Penguins, including &lt;em&gt;Cold Comfort Farm, The Empress of Blandings, Brideshead Revisited&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Monarch of the Glen&lt;/em&gt;, lay scattered around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- A.J. Hall, &lt;em&gt;Lust Over Pendle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Hall regularly gives subtle nods to her inspirations and leaves coy inferences for alert readers, I assume such a great honking list of references is offering some specific commentary--but I'm not familiar enough with the works, especially the magazines, to hazard a guess as to precisely what's being said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What reference or commentary is made by the list of Draco's reading material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T21:24:07.310" Title="What's the significance of Draco's reading material?" Tags="&lt;a-j-hall&gt;&lt;lust-over-pendle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1945" CreationDate="2017-03-07T16:06:59.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very least, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rupkatha.com/indian-english-fiction/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some people have doubts&lt;/a&gt; (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rajarshi Mitra’s essay on Jim Corbett’s &lt;em&gt;My India&lt;/em&gt; titled “Dear Native Sahib: India in Jim Corbett’s Autobiographical Writings” is a surprise entry in this anthology of critical essays on Indian Fiction in English. One might wonder how an autobiographical writing may fit into the schema of fiction. However, a closer reading would reveal an insightful critique of the autobiographical elements in Jim Corbett’s &lt;em&gt;My India&lt;/em&gt;. An autobiographical account may naturally raise the expectation of credibility. But Mitra detects several fissures in Corbett’s representation of India, particularly during those moments when he bids farewell to the country in which he lived, breathed and wrote. A fondness of spirit coloured by nostalgia for the land makes Corbett’s &lt;em&gt;My India&lt;/em&gt; too sweet and too nice, where “even the rogue Sultana is portrayed as a benevolent dacoit helping out the poor in need.” “The marked sense of sexual and political innocence that might at times seem too contrived” &lt;strong&gt;makes Jim Corbett’s &lt;em&gt;My India&lt;/em&gt; fictional&lt;/strong&gt;. Corbett’s convenient and quiet espousal of the colonizer’s anxiety leaves several political questions answered, which Mitra attempts to address in this essay. While Corbett chooses Kenya as his future home, we see the East-West encounter from the other side of the colonizer’s gaze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T16:06:59.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17659" CreationDate="2017-03-07T18:58:07.203" Score="10" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Jules Verne, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Michel_Strogoff/Partie_1/Chapitre_5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Michel Strogoff&lt;/em&gt;, part 1 chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;, when Michel arrives to Nijni-Novgorod, there's a huge trade fair going on in the city.  The text seems to give two contradictory numbers about how long the trade fair is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nijni-Novgorod, qui en temps ordinaire ne compte que trente à trente-cinq mille habitants, en renfermait alors plus de trois cent mille, c’est-à-dire que sa population était décuplée. Cet accroissement était dû à la célèbre foire qui se tient dans ses murs pendant une période de &lt;strong&gt;trois semaines&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[later]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tel était l’aspect de la plaine, tel il devait être pendant les &lt;strong&gt;six semaines&lt;/strong&gt; que dure ordinairement la célèbre foire de Nijni-Novgorod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do these two numbers differ?  What am I misreading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can find &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Michel_Strogoff/Partie_1/Chapitre_5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text of the novel online on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;, and also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7442&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have originally noticed this contradiction in the Hungarian translation &lt;em&gt;Sztrogof Mihály&lt;/em&gt;, Pesti Szalon Kvk. (1994), ISBN:963834024X, translated by &lt;em&gt;Supka Géza&lt;/em&gt;, edited by &lt;em&gt;Gerencsér Zsuzsa&lt;/em&gt;.  This translation doesn't always stick to the meaning of the original text, but in this case it does have both numbers.  I show the relevant quotes below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nyizsnyij Novgorod, melynek lakossága általában nem több, mint harminc-harmincötezer lélek, ebben az időszakban több mint háromszázezret számlált, tehát megtöbbszöröződött.  Ennek az oka pedig a híres vásár volt, mely három hétig tartott a város falai között.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ősrégi szokás szerint még az is megesett ezen a hat hétig tartó Nyizsnyij Novgorod-i vásáron, hogy […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Michael_Strogoff/Chapter_V&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The English translation by Agnes Kinloch Kingston&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1842/1842-h/1842-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;and the one found on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; does not mention a duration the second time in the text, so it does not have this contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T19:33:21.767" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T19:42:41.413" Title="How long is the Nijni-Novgorod trade fair?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;michel-strogoff&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1973" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:01:15.183" Score="4" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point in the book, Plutarch Heavensbee claims that he didn't know that Katniss was going back into the Games. This would seem very odd if true, especially given that he was the Head Gamemaker and was already involved in the conspiracy against the Capitol. Was he lying? If so, why? If not, what might the original plan have been given that Katniss wouldn't actually be in the arena for them to retrieve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-07T20:09:43.890" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T20:09:43.890" Title="Did Plutarch Heavensbee actually not know the details of the Quarter Quell?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1975" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:05:56.677" Score="7" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;The books and movies strongly imply that President Snow was using mass surveillance (e.g. When he revealed that he knew about Katniss and Gale having kissed). Between that, President Snow's paranoia, and the fact that Snow would presumably be watching Plutarch Heavensbee carefully given what happened in the previous year's Games, how did they successfully create a conspiracy involving so many people without tipping off Snow??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any historical precedent for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T16:54:08.987" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T16:54:08.987" Title="How did they plan the conspiracy against the Capitol given mass surveilance?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1971" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:18:43.190" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He didn't know about it way back during the Victory Tour, only later on.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote you're thinking of is from the final chapter of &lt;em&gt;Catching Fire&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Neither you nor Peeta were told. We couldn't risk it,” says Plutarch. “I was even worried you might mention my indiscretion with the watch during the Games.” He pulls out his pocket watch and runs his thumb across the crystal, lighting up the mockingjay. “Of course, when I showed you this, I was merely tipping you off about the arena. As a mentor. I thought it might be a first step toward gaining your trust. I never dreamed you'd be a tribute again.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the event he's referring to is when he danced with Katniss during the Capitol stage of her and Peeta's Victory Tour, months before the Quarter Quell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Are you planning the Quarter Quell Games already?” I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, yes. Well, they've been in the works for years, of course. Arenas aren't built in a day. But the, shall we say, flavor of the Games is being determined now. Believe it or not, I've got a strategy meeting tonight,” he says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plutarch steps back and pulls out a gold watch on a chain from a vest pocket. He flips open the lid, sees the time, and frowns. “I'll have to be going soon.” He turns the watch so I can see the face. “It starts at midnight.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That seems late for—” I say, but then something distracts me. Plutarch has run his thumb across the crystal face of the watch and for just a moment an image appears, glowing as if lit by candlelight. It's another mockingjay. Exactly like the pin on my dress. Only this one disappears. He snaps the watch closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That's very pretty,” I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, it's more than pretty. It's one of a kind,” he says. “If anyone asks about me, say I've gone home to bed. The meetings are supposed to be kept secret. But I thought it'd be safe to tell you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the arena was already being made - which makes sense, because Hunger Games arenas must take months or even years to build and set up before the Games begin. But the exact nature of the Quell wasn't yet known to Plutarch, the new Head Gamemaker. Most probably it wasn't known to &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; yet; the Victory Tour was still underway, Snow had only just decided that Katniss and Peeta's love story wasn't convincing enough, and so the idea of sending them back into the arena probably wasn't on the table yet. (This is assuming, as seems reasonable, that this idea was created specifically in response to Katniss and the revolutionary movement she inspired, rather than having been planned for the Third Quarter Quell ever since the Hunger Games started.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, as Head Gamemaker, he would have known about this plan well before it was publicly announced. Perhaps he was even the one who suggested it to Snow, as in the films. But it's not particularly strange that he didn't know about it way back during the Victory Tour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T19:18:43.190" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T19:57:04.777" Score="21" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one of the Interlude scenes in the book &lt;em&gt;Star Wars Aftermath: Empire's End&lt;/em&gt;, a child interacts with Jar Jar Binks, and gives more details about how the adults don't like him due to their beliefs that he helped the Empire come into being.  However, the kids love him because he's a funny clown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a reflection of how real life audiences saw the character?  Children liked him for being goofy, but adult fans really didn't like him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="309" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T17:42:09.960" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T17:42:09.960" Title="Is the treatment of Jar Jar Binks in Aftermath: Empire's End a reflection of audience treatment?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;star-wars-the-aftermath-trilogy&gt;&lt;chuck-wendig&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1972" CreationDate="2017-03-07T20:16:03.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know for sure because the books are filtered through Katniss's first person POV and she doesn't know about the conspiracy until later. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know that Beetee is a tech genius who is shown to be capable of hacking into Capitol television programs to broadcast rebel propaganda. It isn't unreasonable to assume that such a person would also be capable of making a few surveillance cameras turn in the other direction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we know that Katniss and Peeta go on the roof of the Training Center to talk privately which suggests that there are a few places in the Capitol where one can have a private conversation. The older victors would probably be more familiar with such locations than Katniss and Peeta. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Plutarch Heavensbee shows Katniss his watch which when viewed from the correct angle shows the mockingjay. At the time, Katniss thinks this is just one of the Capitol's trends, but later it seems like Plutarch was trying to communicate to her that he was with the rebellion. This suggests that rebels within the Capitol during this period communicated using a good deal of subterfuge -- by hidden symbols and coded language, for example.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="860" LastActivityDate="2017-03-07T20:16:03.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-07T23:00:37.443" Score="14" ViewCount="1511" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm three books (and three short stories) into Corey's &quot;The Expanse&quot; series, and I've noticed an interesting trend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Corey describes the ethnicity and inherited culture of individual characters to depict a multicultural, multi-ethnic future, he focuses (sometimes in creepy detail) on their skin color and facial features. But while he's got a future full of people descended from Pacific Islanders, Asians, Africans, etc., hardly any individual is described with physical markers I'd consider &quot;white.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fully embrace an extremely diverse future, but I'm quite sure Corey's not imagining a future where humanity's simply blended out the extremes of physical diversity. I'm told this by his repeated emphasis that Naomi's multi-ethnic features are extremely unusual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the TV series based on the books both the main characters and a lot of the background folks are cast with white actors (even the guy with eight parents), but I don't see much indication that's specifically adhering to any sense the book provides for those characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Corey's future just a largely non-white one, or is something else going on? Am I anticipating a future revelation about the setting or is this just an uncommented bit of subtle worldbuilding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T00:40:17.977" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T17:51:58.713" Title="Where are the white folks in The Expanse?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-expanse&gt;&lt;james-s-a-corey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T00:14:24.373" Score="19" ViewCount="6216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 3 of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/em&gt;, Geppetto shapes the piece of wood Mastro Cherry had given him into a marionette. When he creates the nose, it starts growing uncontrollably: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After the eyes, Geppetto made the nose, which began to stretch as soon as finished. It stretched and stretched and stretched till it became so long, it seemed endless.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Poor Geppetto kept cutting it and cutting it, but the more he cut, the longer grew that impertinent nose. In despair he let it alone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/em&gt;, by C. Collodi. Translated from the Italian by Carol Della Chiesa&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Pinocchio's nose grow? It can't be because he told a lie, at this point in the story the puppet hasn't even spoken yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T22:03:55.863" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T19:00:07.353" Title="Why does Pinocchio's nose grow?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;carlo-collodi&gt;&lt;the-adventures-of-pinocchio&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1976" CreationDate="2017-03-08T01:38:23.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very short answer is that in the future, racial difference have largely been sidelined and pale-skinned caucasians are a relative rarity due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/10/changing-faces/funderburg-text?rptregcta=reg_free_np&amp;amp;rptregcampaign=20131016_rw_membership_r1p_us_se_w&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;racial intermingling&lt;/a&gt;. This question was addressed in a four-way interview between TheVerge.com, show co-producer Naren Shankar and authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who write together as &quot;James S. A. Corey&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; [Shankar] &lt;em&gt;credits authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who write together&#xA;  under the pseudonym James S. A. Corey) with the show's broad ethnic&#xA;  mix, because it's such a significant part of their books. &quot;They always&#xA;  said, &lt;strong&gt;‘The people who make it out into space, it's not just going to&#xA;  be Neil Armstrong, clean-cut, classically white Americans. It's going&#xA;  to be Indian, Chinese, Russian [people], a mix of everybody, every&#xA;  ethnicity. And that's just going to melt and mingle.'&lt;/strong&gt; We really wanted&#xA;  to reflect that, and retain that in the show, because it does say&#xA;  something about humanity, and that movement out into space.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;We're trying to really represent human beings, and &lt;strong&gt;to extrapolate, to&#xA;  the extent it's possible with this kind of drama, where humanity might&#xA;  go, how ethnicities might mix, how people might look.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The authors describe their racial blend as &quot;aspirational.&quot; &quot;Part of the mandate when you're writing a future is to write the kind of&#xA;  future you want to see,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; says Abraham. &quot;Not that we're utopian, but&#xA;  the idea of a future where it's less mixed and interesting than my&#xA;  immediate day-to-day life would have been weird.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11103434/syfy-the-expanse-series-diverse-cast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How SyFy's The Expanse cast its multiracial future&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T01:38:23.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1946" CreationDate="2017-03-08T02:34:19.560" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 1* of &lt;em&gt;On Writing&lt;/em&gt;, King says that Carrie White was based on two girls that he knew from high school. All the details mentioned in the question are there, but not in those exact words. &lt;s&gt;It is likely that Wikipedia's source for their quote is &lt;em&gt;Secret Windows&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;/s&gt; muru has left a comment with a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.desperation.dk/carrie.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; to a website with the exact quote, attributed to an interview of King in the April 1981 issue of the Twilight Zone magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I also helped myself, digging back to my memories of high school&#xA;  (my job teaching English didn’t help; I was twenty-six by then, and on&#xA;  the wrong side of the desk), &lt;strong&gt;remembering what I knew about the two&#xA;  loneliest, most reviled girls in my class—how they looked, how they&#xA;  acted, how they were treated.&lt;/strong&gt; Very rarely in my career have I explored&#xA;  more distasteful territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’ll call one of these girls Sondra. She and her mother lived in a trailer home not too far from me, with their dog, Cheddar Cheese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The other girl I’ll call Dodie Franklin, only the other girls called&#xA;  her Dodo or Doodoo. &lt;strong&gt;Her parents were interested in only one thing, and&#xA;  that was entering contests.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whatever the Franklins might have won, a supply of clothes for growing&#xA;  teenagers wasn’t part of the haul. &lt;strong&gt;Dodie and her brother Bill wore the&#xA;  same stuff every day for the first year and a half of high school:&#xA;  black pants and a short-sleeved checked sport shirt for him, a long&#xA;  black skirt, gray knee-socks, and a sleeveless white blouse for her.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  Some of my readers may not believe I am being literal when I say&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;every day&lt;/em&gt;, but those who grew up in country towns during the fifties and sixties will know that I am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dodie and Bill Franklin got on all right at Durham Elementary, but&#xA;  high school meant a much bigger town, and for children like Dodie and&#xA;  Bill, Lisbon Falls meant ridicule and ruin. We watched in amusement&#xA;  and horror as Bill’s sport shirt faded and began to unravel from the&#xA;  short sleeves up. He replaced a missing button with a paperclip. Tape,&#xA;  carefully colored black with a crayon to match his pants, appeared&#xA;  over a rip behind one knee. Dodie’s sleeveless white blouse began to&#xA;  grow yellow with wear, age, and accumulated sweat-stains. As it grew&#xA;  thinner, the straps of her bra showed through more and more clearly.&#xA;  The other girls made fun of her, at first behind her back and then to&#xA;  her face. Teasing became taunting. The boys weren’t a part of it; we&#xA;  had Bill to take care of (yes, I helped—not a whole lot, but I was&#xA;  there). Dodie had it worse, I think. The girls didn’t just laugh at&#xA;  Dodie; they hated her, too. Dodie was everything they were afraid of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After Christmas vacation of our sophomore year, Dodie came back to&#xA;  school resplendent. The dowdy old black skirt had been replaced by a&#xA;  cranberry-colored one that stopped at her knees instead of halfway&#xA;  down her shins.&lt;/strong&gt; The tatty knee-socks had been replaced by nylon&#xA;  stockings, which looked pretty good because she had finally shaved the&#xA;  luxuriant mat of black hair off her legs. The ancient sleeveless&#xA;  blouse had given way to a soft wool sweater. She’d even had a&#xA;  permanent. Dodie was a girl transformed, and you could see by her face&#xA;  that she knew it. I have no idea if she saved for those new clothes,&#xA;  if they were given to her for Christmas by her parents, or if she went&#xA;  through a hell of begging that finally bore dividends. It doesn’t&#xA;  matter, &lt;strong&gt;because mere clothes changed nothing. The teasing that day was&#xA;  worse than ever.&lt;/strong&gt; Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the&#xA;  box they’d put her in; she was punished for even trying to break free.&#xA;  I had several classes with her, and was able to observe Dodie’s&#xA;  ruination at first hand. I saw her smile fade, saw the light in her&#xA;  eyes first dim and then go out. By the end of the day she was the girl&#xA;  she’d been before Christmas vacation—a dough-faced and freckle-cheeked&#xA;  wraith, scurrying through the halls with her eyes down and her books&#xA;  clasped to her chest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Italics are in the original; bold is mine.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an interesting aside, King continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both Sondra and Dodie were dead by the time I started writing&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;. [...] Dodie married a TV weatherman who gained something of a reputation in New England for his drawling downeast delivery.&#xA;  Following the birth of a child—I think it was their second—Dodie went&#xA;  into the cellar and put a .22 bullet in her abdomen. It was a lucky&#xA;  shot (or unlucky, depending on your point of view, I guess), hitting&#xA;  the portal vein and killing her. In town they said it was postpartum&#xA;  depression, how sad. Myself, I suspected high school hangover might&#xA;  have had something to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never liked Carrie, that female version of Eric Harris and Dylan&#xA;  Klebold, but through Sondra and Dodie I came at last to understand her&#xA;  a little. I pitied her and I pitied her classmates as well, because I&#xA;  had been one of them once upon a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I have the e-book, so my page numbers are not going to help you much. I'm not really sure how the book is arranged, but it appears that this passage is in section (?) 29.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T04:46:02.540" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T04:46:02.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T02:43:31.950" Score="16" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pratchett's &lt;em&gt;Nation&lt;/em&gt; was recommended to me because it depicts an alternate reality version of Pasifika cultures, faiths, and traditions. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me it's got cannibals and reveals that a Pasifika culture is the forgotten remnant of a culture which was once successful by Western standards of science and technology. My Googles, however, have not turned up much information on what kind of reception this book got from Pasifika people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was &lt;em&gt;Nation&lt;/em&gt; received by Pasifika audiences? What's the general popular and critical response to it by Pasifika voices?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T20:43:04.947" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T20:43:04.947" Title="What is the Pasifika response to &quot;Nation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;nation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1977" CreationDate="2017-03-08T03:02:00.297" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pinocchio is born dishonest. This is both true in a symbolic way, as well as a literal way. Quite literally the first thing Pinocchio does after being born is get Geppetto thrown in jail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Poor Marionette [Pinocchio],&amp;quot; called out a man. &amp;quot;I am not surprised he doesn't want to go home. Geppetto, no doubt, will beat him unmercifully, he is so mean and cruel!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Geppetto looks like a good man,&amp;quot; added another, &amp;quot;but with boys he's a real tyrant. If we leave that poor Marionette in his hands he may tear him to pieces!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They said so much that, finally, the Carabineer ended matters by setting Pinocchio at liberty and dragging Geppetto to prison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinocchio's self-portrayal to the world is already dishonest, and his inability to claim ownership over the bad he does is shown to be the central problem. And the story has barely even started. Pinocchio is born dishonest, a liar in a literal sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thankfully, Collodi does a great job of pointing this out to us at every turn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CHAPTER 4&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The story of Pinocchio and the Talking Cricket, in which one sees that bad children do not like to be corrected by those who know more than they do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty obvious from the chapter headings - not just this one, but others included - that Pinocchio's portrayed as a child who was born &amp;quot;bad.&amp;quot; The nose plays into this. Heck, minutes, maybe hours into his existence, he's already committed his first murder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps he did not think he would strike it. But, sad to relate, my dear children, he did hit the Cricket, straight on its head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a last weak &amp;quot;cri-cri-cri&amp;quot; the poor Cricket fell from the wall, dead!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lying is ultimately used as an analogy for all of Pinocchio's bad behavior. Many of the subsequent sections of the book involve Pinocchio doing something bad, and then lying about it. Collodi helpfully lays the first instance out for us as a chapter heading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CHAPTER 17&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pinocchio eats sugar, but refuses to take medicine. When the undertakers come for him, he drinks the medicine and feels better. Afterwards he tells a lie and, in punishment, his nose grows longer and longer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, the meaning of his nose growing is to set a precedent. When we later encounter the Curse of the Growing Nose, we know that it's because something about the way Pinocchio was made... makes him lie. He was born bad, and that's the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T03:02:00.297" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1982" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1987" CreationDate="2017-03-08T04:05:08.210" Score="10" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this in the 90s, but I remember that, when I mentioned it to my mother, she commented that it was a fairly well-known book which she herself had read when she was younger (she would have been in her late 30s when she made that comment, so she probably would have read it in the 60s). Most or all of the drama happens in a hospital, I want say one outside of a major city and thus somewhat constrained in terms of resources, both medicine and personnel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main characters is a pathologist who is dating a fairly young woman (maybe younger than him). During a tryst, possibly just &lt;em&gt;post-coitus&lt;/em&gt;, he's caressing her knee and realizes that something about it doesn't feel right. He has it checked out (perhaps discreetly without letting her know) and finds that she has cancer in her knee, removal of which will probably require amputation of her knee and everything below it. He has a crisis of faith, wondering whether he should tell her himself, and also whether he would have noticed it sooner if he hadn't been distracted by their romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another plotline going on with a pregnant mother. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/rh-factor/basics/definition/prc-20013476&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rh factor test&lt;/a&gt; either is not performed, or is performed incorrectly, which leads to complications that threaten her life and that of the baby. I don't think the pathologist was directly involved with this case, at least initially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, some part of me wants to say that the plot twist, such as it is, is that the death is an older man who was briefly mentioned in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was initially thinking that the title was &lt;em&gt;Common People&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Ordinary People&lt;/em&gt;, but I'm coming up with nothing useful, and I think I'm thinking of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_People_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Judith Guest novel&lt;/a&gt; with the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T16:45:21.357" Title="Drama, probably set in a hospital, where we know early on (from the blurb?) that someone is going to die due to a doctor's mistake" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T10:03:12.763" Score="7" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philology is a branch of English academia, described on Wikipedia as &quot;a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics&quot;. I am no expert, but its central premise appears to be that these three subjects are essentially indivisible for a proper understanding of a text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien, in his letters, described himself as a philologist, as does Tom Shippey, one of the few academics to have made a serious study of Tolkien's work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the introduction to his book, &lt;em&gt;JRR Tolkien: author of the century&lt;/em&gt;, Shippey states that the teaching and study of the subject is in decline and has practically vanished from universities. But he does not elaborate on the reasons why he believes this to be true or why it might have happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he correct? And if so, given the obvious utility of the subject (the value of the premise with which I opened this question seems pretty incontestable to me), why has it declined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T10:45:08.953" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:57:01.663" Title="Why is the study of Philology in decline?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;philology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="1985" CreationDate="2017-03-08T12:07:15.683" Score="8" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;A novel was described to me some time ago, in which people traveled to other parts of history by living in carefully designed cubicles (of which there was a whole building, all of them jammed up next to each other with a walkway over the top for observation through one-way glass ceilings) which were perfectly period-accurate until the occupant just sort of skips over into the time their cubicle is mimicking. I believe the main story was about a historical fire in late 1800s New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to know what novel this was, so I can recommend it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/17/rand-althor&quot;&gt;Rand&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T13:31:25.107" Title="Novel about time travel through period accuracy" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1984" CreationDate="2017-03-08T12:18:08.903" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_Again_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time and Again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jack Finney. From Wikipedia's description (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In November 1970, Simon Morley, an advertising sketch artist, is approached by U.S. Army Major Ruben Prien to participate in a secret government project. He is taken to &lt;strong&gt;a huge warehouse on the West Side of Manhattan, where he views what seem to be movie sets&lt;/strong&gt;, with people acting on them. It seems this is a project to learn whether it is feasible to &lt;strong&gt;send people back into the past&lt;/strong&gt; by what amounts to self-hypnosis—whether, by convincing oneself that one is in the past, not the present, one can make it so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Si agrees to participate in the project, and requests permission to go back to &lt;strong&gt;New York City in 1882&lt;/strong&gt; [...] It is a &lt;strong&gt;huge fire&lt;/strong&gt;, and Si and Julia find themselves trapped. They barely escape. Si learns that the building used to house the newspaper the New York World and one piece of the puzzle fits in—the missing word in Carmody's note was &amp;quot;Building&amp;quot;. After watching the efforts to fight the fire, in which many die, the shaken couple returns to Gramercy Park. There is no sign of Pickering. [The burning of the New York World building is a factual historical event].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How I found it&lt;/strong&gt;: when I searched Google for &lt;code&gt;time travel novel fire in New York&lt;/code&gt;, all of the top several results were about this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T13:31:25.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="1986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T12:30:28.150" Score="5" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, a leading newspaper in the United States provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bestseller lists&lt;/a&gt; in their &lt;em&gt;The New York Times Book Review&lt;/em&gt;. These lists are very influential in what is read by a large number of people, due to the publicity gained from a book reaching the list at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm skeptical of what the list represents. How is the list put together? What standards are used? How are the sales counted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:50:34.513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:50:34.513" Title="How do The New York Times bestseller lists work?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1982" CreationDate="2017-03-08T16:45:21.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Final Diagnosis&lt;/em&gt; (1959), the first novel by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hailey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Hailey&lt;/a&gt; (the author of &lt;em&gt;Airport&lt;/em&gt; (1968) and other books). To confirm, you can look at the reviews on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124921.The_Final_Diagnosis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; which taken together should give some sense of the plot, or the plot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Young_Doctors_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Young Doctors&lt;/em&gt; (1961)&lt;/a&gt; a film based on the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;David Coleman is a young doctor hired by a hospital's pathology department. The head of the department, Dr. Joseph Pearson, sees Coleman as a rival, and they fight over many medical issues. Coleman falls in love with Cathy Hunt, a nurse at the hospital, who develops a tumor in her knee. Pearson believes that the tumor is malignant and that the leg should be amputated, but Coleman disagrees. Coleman orders three blood tests on Mrs. Alexander, an expectant mother whose baby may have hemolytic disease, but Pearson believes that the tests are excessive and cancels the third test. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the reviews on Goodreads mention the Rh factor explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the context of the swirling conflict, the novel focuses on two principle [&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;] cases: a student nurse with a possible malignant bone tumour who may lose her leg, and an infant with a potentially incompatible Rh factor that may result in death. The two physicians disagree and argue about the diagnosis in both cases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T16:45:21.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T17:00:22.780" Score="9" ViewCount="823" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1735, Alexander Pope wrote &lt;em&gt;Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.&lt;/em&gt; There is a line &quot;a parson much bemus'd in beer.&quot; What has &lt;strong&gt;beer&lt;/strong&gt; to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bemuse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1735, British poet Alexander Pope &#xA;  lamented, in rhyme, being besieged by &quot;a &#xA;  parson much bemus'd in beer.&quot; The cleric &#xA;  in question was apparently one of a horde&#xA;   of would-be poets who plagued Pope &#xA;  with requests that he read their verses. Pope meant that the parson had found his &#xA;  muse—his inspiration—in beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all &lt;strong&gt;whose inspiration&lt;/strong&gt; did the parson find? How did &lt;strong&gt;beer&lt;/strong&gt; became a source of inspiration? What does it mean in this context? Were they having drinks while reading their verses? I am bemused by the use of &lt;strong&gt;beer&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="402" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T00:04:41.427" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T00:04:41.427" Title="Why is 'beer' used in ''a parson much bemus'd in beer&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1988" CreationDate="2017-03-08T17:57:51.477" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems/detail/44895&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the entire poem&lt;/a&gt;, the speaker is complaining to his friend that every Tom, Dick, and parson who can dip a quill thinks he or she is a poet, and then brings or sends the poem to him for his opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there a parson, much bemus'd in beer, &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  A maudlin poetess, a rhyming peer,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  A clerk, foredoom'd his father's soul to cross,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Who pens a stanza, when he should engross?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Is there, who, lock'd from ink and paper, scrawls&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  With desp'rate charcoal round his darken'd walls?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  All fly to Twit'nam, and in humble strain&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he likes the crap poetry they're happy; if he doesn't they're furious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bless me! a packet—&quot;'Tis a stranger sues,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  A virgin tragedy, an orphan muse.&quot;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  If I dislike it, &quot;Furies, death and rage!&quot;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  If I approve, &quot;Commend it to the stage.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he (the speaker of the poem) is exhausted with providing free editing and critique services for terrible amateur writers. One such amateur is a parson (who has to write a weekly sermon and so thinks himself &quot;a writer&quot;) who builds up Dutch courage with a German import and can only write his (apparently horrible) verse when drunk.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-03-08T20:48:11.963" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T20:48:11.963" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T18:45:18.813" Score="5" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading Elizabeth Barrett Browning's &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;, and as I read through Aurora's early life and adolescence, I came to wonder if the poem was inspired at all by Barrett Browning's own childhood and later life. For instance, I'm aware from some brief background reading that the author was in part cared for by her aunt after her mother's death in her early twenties, mirroring Aurora's relationship to her aunt, who takes care of her after both her parents died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these parallels indeed part of a larger scheme of connections between Aurora Leigh and Elizabeth Barrett Browning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-10T19:32:16.820" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T19:32:16.820" Title="To what extent is Aurora Leigh autobiographical?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1990" CreationDate="2017-03-08T18:45:18.813" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to my own research, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ebb/huangal.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interesting essay&lt;/a&gt; discussing some of the semi-autobiographical parts of &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;, and how Barrett Browning's character was consciously and unconsciously influenced by her own life. I've referenced that in some places; other parts are from my own outside reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aurora's mother died when Aurora was four, leaving her without a maternal figure in her life. The consequences were extremely important, yet the character's memories of her mother are different from Barrett Browning's memories. For instance, Aurora remembers her mother visually most through a posthumous painting of her, which brought to mind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A dauntless Muse who eyes a dreadful Fate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A loving Psyche who loses sight of Love,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A still Medusa with mild milky brows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All curdled and all clothed upon with snakes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, her memories explicitly contradict this, and Aurora knows that this was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; her mother. She then writes that the woman could have been all those things,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or my own mother, leaving her last smile&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In her last kiss upon the baby-mouth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barrett Browning wrote a passage in a letter shortly after her mother's death which is quite reminiscent of her later writing in &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; (from Leighton's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=wHp90dJD7fkC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, page 55):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her voice is still sounding in my ears - her image is in my heart - and &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; are to be loved, however unreal they may be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see some similar parallels with Aurora's father, especially given that she has a close relationship with him - until his death, nine years later - which mirrors Barrett Browning's relationship with her father, until she eloped with Robert Browning, which cut off their correspondence. Aurora's father attempted to impart a love of learning to her, from an early age:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sent the schools to school, demonstrating&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fool will pass for such through one mistake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While a philosopher will pass for such,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through said mistakes being ventured in the gross&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barrett Browning exhibited the same devotion to her father, even though he has been variously described as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=msBELZQWBZIC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;despotic&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/ecummingsb.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;overprotective and tyrannical&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. All the same, he (as well as her mother) encouraged Barrett Browning's reading, education, and subsequent writing. Indeed, we see many connections between this real-life education and Aurora's books. Names run off like a stream of rushing water: Theophrast, Aelian, and other Classical writers (who are referenced again in allusions later in the poem). There is no doubt that the relationship with Barrett Browning's father echoes in the writing in &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the essay I cited earlier points out, Aurora's interactions with Romney Leigh can also be viewed as commentary on her own life. We see clear disconnect between the two from the beginning, as they go through adolescence and young adulthood together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We came so close, we saw our differences&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A godlike nature his; the gods look down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Incurious of themselves; and certainly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Tis well I should remember, how, those days&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I was a worm too, and he looked on me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aurora has her eyes set things completely different. Her goals in life, her aspirations, rest on poetry, the way she can look &quot;for the gods&quot; and a better understanding of the world. Romney has different designs, and different beliefs as to what a female poet can and cannot do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essay points to an early relationship between Barrett Browning and Hugh Stuart Boyd. There was clearly a disconnect between the two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In her diary accounts of the relationship, she describes her unrequited affections. According to Laurelyn Douglas, &quot;For a year her entries calculate the bitter difference between his regard and her own, and she wonders if she can ever hope for reciprocation&quot; (Douglas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems somewhat ironic, insofar as Aurora is the one to reject Romney's advances, whereas Boyd appears to have inadvertently rejected Barrett Browning's advances. It begs the question of whether this reversal is a reflection on that courtship, and whether Barrett Browning agrees or disagrees with how it ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T18:45:18.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T22:12:54.477" Score="45" ViewCount="8359" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Charlie and the Chocolate  Factory&lt;/em&gt;, Wonka says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't want a grown-up person at all. A grownup won't listen to me; he won't learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I had to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Charlie responds,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is why you sent out the Golden Tickets!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which Wonka replies,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exactly! I decided to invite five children to the factory, and the one I liked best at the end of the day would be the winner!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what has always puzzled me, is how did sending out Golden Tickets ensure that children, and not grown-ups, would win? Lots of grown-ups certainly tried to find the Tickets; how could Wonka know that none of them would get one? Has there ever been an explanation given for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="121" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:39:20.730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T05:49:00.010" Title="How did Wonka's Golden Ticket sweepstakes ensure that children would win?" Tags="&lt;charlie-and-the-chocolate-factory&gt;&lt;roald-dahl&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1988" CreationDate="2017-03-08T22:59:21.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=AvmzBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA102&amp;amp;lpg=PA102&amp;amp;dq=pope%20pun%20bemused&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=gIz9JUmvvk&amp;amp;sig=875cNgZZqthDoP05UujEev8je2s&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwinyLm6gMjSAhVI7oMKHa1_C8AQ6AEIUDAM#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=pope%20pun%20bemused&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fowler's Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; considers &quot;bemused&quot; a pun on the name of Laurence Eusden, a notable poet and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Eusden,_Laurence_%28DNB00%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notable drunkard&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it sounds to me as if &quot;bemused&quot; here primarily means &quot;drunk&quot;. While the term is etymologically related to &quot;inspired by muses&quot;, it has meant (at least since the early 18th century) simply &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bemuse&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;confused&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Pope was aware of the pun on &quot;muse&quot;; the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bemuse&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; quotes that he 'punned on it as &quot;devoted utterly to the Muses.&quot;' but I can't find a citation for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T22:59:21.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2017-03-08T23:22:21.687" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, it isn't addressed anywhere in the book. It's possible that Wonka simply assumed that all candy bars are bought by children — it's a children's book, and seems to be full of generalizations like that. But there is one other bit that sheds some light. The newspaper story announcing the golden tickets before the chocolate bars containing them were actually distributed begins with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I, Willy Wonka, have decided to allow five children — just &lt;em&gt;five&lt;/em&gt;, mind you, and no more — to visit my factory this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes it clear that only children will be allowed. It's not clear exactly &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; would happen if an adult were to claim one of the tickets, but we can imagine that Wonka would engineer some situation or other to prevent an adult from entering his factory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="965" LastActivityDate="2017-03-08T23:22:21.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2000" CreationDate="2017-03-08T23:30:32.263" Score="30" ViewCount="11165" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end of &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;, we learn that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Snape disliked Harry because he resembled his father&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This however, does not account for why Snape shows favoritism to Draco before the Dark Lord resurrects (after which it is relatively obvious why). I am surprised because we are supposed to see Snape as a good guy, and while it makes sense for him to torment harry, he gains no obvious advantage in helping Malfoy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is Snape so fond of Malfoy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="871" LastEditDate="2017-03-09T10:49:37.323" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T15:45:17.433" Title="Why is Snape so fond of Malfoy?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2017-03-08T23:39:39.847" Score="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, an adult &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; find one of them. One of the women working at the factory of Veruca Salt's father is the person who opens the particular candy bar with the Golden Ticket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Mr. Wonka is explicit, as hobbs correctly notes, in saying that only five &lt;em&gt;children&lt;/em&gt; would be allowed on the tour (with one or two guardians apiece). So while technically this Rosie the Walnut-Sheller would be allowed into the factory, it would be whatever child she brought with her who would be taking the tour (and competing for the prize).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T09:54:41.503" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T09:54:41.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-08T23:59:18.957" Score="-3" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Jordan's &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series, the Aes Sedai are divided into seven Ajahs: the Blue, the Brown, the Green, the Grey, the Red, the White, and the Yellow (plus the Black Ajah, which is secret and threaded insidiously through all of the others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: spoilers from books 4+ follow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think few would dispute that the Red Ajah is portrayed as &quot;the bad Ajah&quot;, the worst of them all (not counting the Black, of course). Various things throughout the series support this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By its very nature, gentling men who can channel, the Red Ajah presents a serious threat to the main protagonist of the series.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several prominent Blacks are officially Reds, such as Galina Casban (head of both the Red Ajah and the Black Ajah, if I recall correctly) and Katerine Alruddin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elaida. 'Nuff said.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the splitting of the Tower, the entire Red Ajah sides with Elaida - not a single one in Salidar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest we get to a protagonist among the Red, unless there's someone I'm forgetting, is Pevara, and she isn't really much of a Red, even having spoken in favour of Warders. By contrast, there are more &quot;good&quot; characters, people we can sympathise with, in every other Ajah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can it be said that the Blue is portrayed as &quot;the good Ajah&quot; in the same way as the Red is portrayed as &quot;the bad Ajah&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points in favour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The very first Aes Sedai we meet, and the only one we know for a long time, is of the Blue. In this sense, the Blue Ajah provides our introduction to Aes Sedai, a base point to identify with and from which to judge the rest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the splitting of the Tower, the entire Blue Ajah goes to Salidar - not a single one with Elaida.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There aren't many prominent Blacks who are officially Blues. There are two Blues among the thirteen Blacks who leave the Tower in book 2/3, but they're probably the two most minor characters among those thirteen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other evidence is there in favour of, or against, this reading of the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T00:53:35.450" Title="Is the Blue Ajah portrayed as &quot;the good Ajah&quot;?" Tags="&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2017-03-09T00:38:14.233" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that though the Blue Ajah are more consistently &quot;good&quot; than other Ajahs, but the WoT balances prominence between the Blue and Green Ajahs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of the major Aes Sedai (of whom I count six: Egwene, Elayne, Nynaeveh, Moiraine, Siuan and Cadsuane) three are Green or identify as Green: Elayne Egwene, and Cadsuane. Moiraine and Siuan are Blue. Nynaeve is Yellow. This point is particularly open to quibbling, though. Even if we drop Cadsuane and Siuan, the numbers still favour Green.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Siuan and her predecessor as the Amyrlin Seat were Blue, but Egwene and her successor Cadsuane are Green. Green is rising.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Green Ajah are the ones who have always most prepared for war against the Dark One and his minions. Their head is called the Captain-General, after all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Greens have always &lt;em&gt;embraced&lt;/em&gt; (snicker) men. They have the most Warders, and most have multiple Warders. Of course, the quality of a single Lan towers above quantity of many others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, &lt;a href=&quot;http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/Green_Ajah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the WoT Wikia&lt;/a&gt; says the Green Ajah is the largest behind the Red. Not sure what to make of that, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T00:38:14.233" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="1999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1997" CreationDate="2017-03-09T00:47:50.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, There is no evidence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, here is a list of statistics from the WoT wiki about the numbers of Black Ajah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Red: forty-eight (making at least 24% of all Red sisters actually Black, best guess is that they hunted the future Dragon)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Green: thirty-eight (21%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gray: thirty-two (22%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brown: twenty-eight (21,5%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yellow: twenty-one (17,5%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blue: twenty-two (23% best guess is that they have the greater and more efficient eyes-and-ears system)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White: seventeen (17,5%)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have less then some, more than others. While this does not incriminate them, it is not good enough either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the events of Salidar, that was politically motivated. Their democratically elected ruler who was supported by the Blue was just kicked out and stilled (the worst thing you can do to an Aes Sedai). The wiki says the rebels were the ones who sided with Siuan. Of course the Blue sided with Siuan!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in my comment to Rand (the user, not the deadly wizard), RJ does a good job of not having &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; groups like in Harry Potter. We knew Slytherin was evil, they outright told us Slytherin was evil. The Black Ajah are pretty well spread out between the 6 (with the exception of Red), unlike the Death Eaters who all came from Slytherin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note I purposely avoid talking about specific people. Just as Elaida's horribleness should not curse the Red, Moiraine's greatness should not redeem the whole Blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T00:53:35.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1995" CreationDate="2017-03-09T02:44:02.730" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's subtle and perhaps a bit of a stretch, but I think we can infer that Snape likes Draco for a similar reason to why he &lt;em&gt;dislikes&lt;/em&gt; Harry. He dislikes Harry because Harry's father treated him badly at school. And he likes Draco because Draco's father treated him well at school. I'm mostly getting this from the following passage in the chapter &quot;The Prince's Tale&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At last, when only a dozen students remained to be sorted, Professor&#xA;  McGonagall called Snape. Harry walked with him to the stool, watched&#xA;  him place the hat upon his head. “Slytherin!” cried the Sorting Hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Severus Snape moved off to the other side of the Hall, away from&#xA;  Lily, to where the Slytherins were cheering him, &lt;strong&gt;to where Lucius&#xA;  Malfoy, a prefect badge gleaming upon his chest, patted Snape on the&#xA;  back&lt;/strong&gt; as he sat down beside him. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that Lucius and Snape's friendship goes all the way back to Snape's first days at Hogwarts. Yeah, it is technically possible that a pat on the back doesn't mean much and they could have not spoken to one another for years after this, but you have to think about why this passage is being included in the first place. I think it is included to establish an early positive relationship between Lucius and Snape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sirius Black also alludes to Snape's friendship with Lucius during his argument with Snape at Grimmauld Place in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tell me, &lt;strong&gt;how is Lucius Malfoy these days? I expect he's delighted&#xA;  that his lapdog's working at Hogwarts&lt;/strong&gt;, isn't he?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Speaking of dogs' said Snape softly, &quot;did you know that Lucius Malfoy&#xA;  recognised you last time you risked a little jaunt outside?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that Sirius seems to believe that Snape is working for Voldemort, he alludes specifically to Lucius Malfoy in this passage and seems to reference a long term association between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snape also has a somewhat strange reaction to Harry naming Lucius Malfoy as a Death Eater in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I saw the Death Eaters! I can give you their names! Lucius Malfoy.&quot;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Snape made a sudden movement, but as Harry looked at him, Snape's eyes&#xA;  flew back to Fudge.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the sudden movement here? Snape already knows that Lucius is a Death Eater, so it can't be surprise. I think it more likely that Snape's first impulse here is to deny the accusation or to silence Harry somehow because he doesn't want Lucius named (despite the fact that he probably knows Lucius is guilty). But he thinks better of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Narcissa refers to Snape as Lucius's &quot;old friend&quot; in the &quot;Spinner's End&quot; chapter of &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Severus ... please ... You are, you have always been, Draco's&#xA;  favorite teacher ... &lt;strong&gt;You are Lucius's old friend&lt;/strong&gt; ... I beg you ... You&#xA;  are the Dark Lord's favorite, his most trusted advisor .. Will you&#xA;  speak to him ... persuade him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I think that the fact that Narcissa chooses to come to Snape at all in this chapter and not to any of the many other Death Eaters that she could have spoken with shows that &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; believes that Snape would be willing to help Draco. And she seems to believe this partly because Snape is Lucius's old friend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that the favoritism toward Draco is feigned on Snape's part because Snape does do the whole double agent thing -- but I don't think so. Snape's treatment of Harry shows that he holds onto things. He mistreats Harry because Harry's father bullied him, but he also saves Harry's life because Harry's mother was special to him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think Lucius's friendship at Hogwarts might have meant a great deal to a young Snape. Think of the images that we get of young Snape -- poor, clothes don't fit right, often alone, kind of weird, kind of geeky, bad home life. To have an older rich kid who is also a Prefect take an interest in him probably would have been a very big deal to Snape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think that Snape would have retained some feelings of friendship towards Lucius despite the fact that Lucius supports Voldemort and Snape does not. Snape is someone who is motivated primarily by personal loyalty rather than high-minded ideals. He doesn't turn on Voldemort because he disagrees with Voldemort's ideology (although at least later on he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to disagree with Voldemort's ideology). He turns on Voldemort and works for the other side because Voldemort went after Lily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In short, Snape favors Draco because Lucius was his old friend and Snape has a rather difficult time separating children from their parents.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="860" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T02:44:02.730" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-09T04:08:45.867" Score="16" ViewCount="1534" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/13/111&quot;&gt;According to this question about Ray Bradbury's intentions&lt;/a&gt;, Ray Bradbury did not intend for &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; to be about government censorship, and went so far as to say &quot;Fuck you&quot; to someone who argued that &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; was about government censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Bradbury right? Is &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; not about government censorship? Or can an argument be made that &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; can be interpreted as being about government censorship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T20:43:32.840" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T10:18:45.617" Title="Ray Bradbury says Fahrenheit 451 isn't about censorship. Is he right?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-03-09T15:37:34.017" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Had worn them really about the same,&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is not an absolute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grassy path may legitimately be less traveled, although the difference is trivial in the final analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T15:37:34.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1955" CreationDate="2017-03-09T16:37:38.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It turns out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Emilio_Recabarren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recabarren&lt;/a&gt; was a political figure in Chile who was imprisoned for 8 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you will recall, the setting of the story is in Latin America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The loss of voice could be a reference to being silenced politically, and connected to the black guitarist as a symbol of the oppressed classes, where &amp;quot;Iron War&amp;quot; might be taken as the brutality of industry in suppressing workers, which sometimes backfires and leads to leftist rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mart%C3%ADn_Fierro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin Fierro&lt;/a&gt; is itself a political and social allegory in the form of an epic poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a great quote in the John Sayles film &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matewan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matewan&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; where Chris Cooper, as a labor organizer, says &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;All I see is workers fighting workers&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in response to a management tactic to divide workers by inciting racial strife, and referencing WWI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may shed light on the cyclic nature of the struggle as presented in this story, where it ends with the one man as victor, but prefigures his own, eventual overthrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:56:34.780" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:56:34.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1976" CreationDate="2017-03-09T17:51:58.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Insofar as there is a main character in the Expanse series, it is Holden.  Holden represents a sort of idealized, middle-American stock, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_America_(United_States)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;middle-American&lt;/a&gt; refers to the heartland.  (Very similar to James Tiberias Kirk's Iowan roots.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miller also occupies a more central role than other characters, and I believe he is also Caucasian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holden's centrality, I believe, provides the core of the ethnic representation your are musing on.  As I recall, it is usually he (and Miller) who are describing other characters.  Thus, they may naturally be focusing on differences, and not feel the need for describing the ethnicity of their own stock. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T17:51:58.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2008" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6694" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:54:42.193" Score="12" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; closely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/608/how-much-weight-is-given-to-authors-intentions-in-literary-analysis&quot;&gt;How much weight is given to authors&amp;#39; intentions in literary analysis?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related (as an example of what I'm talking about): &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1901/is-there-any-textual-evidence-to-support-that-dumbledore-was-gay&quot;&gt;Is there any textual evidence to support that Dumbledore was gay?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loosely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1845/should-go-set-a-watchman-change-our-view-of-atticus-defending-tom-robinson&quot;&gt;Should Go Set a Watchman change our view of Atticus defending Tom Robinson?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also related: Discussion in the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1973/793&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2001/ray-bradbury-says-fahrenheit-451-isnt-about-censorship-is-he-right&quot;&gt;Ray Bradbury says Fahrenheit 451 isn&amp;#39;t about censorship. Is he right?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain authors, such as J. K. Rowling, are notorious for making declarations about the meaning of their text after the fact. One notable example is Rowling's claims that Dumbledore was gay. From what I've read, most people's reaction to that claim fell into one of three camps: that's great, that's terrible, and &quot;no, she's wrong.&quot; I'm particularly interested in the &quot;no, she's wrong&quot; camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;To the extent that authorial intent is relevant to meaning&lt;/em&gt; (and I do realize that that's a controversial point), how much weight should we give to authors' later declarations on meaning? Does there have to be some evidence that they intended that at the time that they actually wrote the book and/or some kind of indication in the text that that their claim is actually true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a concrete example, does it even matter that J. K. Rowling claims that Dumbledore's gay? How much weight (if any) should we give that claim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another concrete example: J. K. Rowling has released additional background material (allegedly used as part of her research for the books) - e.g. character sketches, etc. Is there validity to using those for interpretation (or do we just say &quot;no, not part of the text&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any cases where an author's later claims about the text were clearly refuted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Important note:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not asking about how authorial intent &lt;em&gt;in general&lt;/em&gt; is related to meaning (that was already addressed in a linked post) - just how much weight later declarations that aren't clearly settled by the text should be given (like J. K. Rowling's claim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T05:35:29.797" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:49:34.067" Title="How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2009" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2012" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:59:50.263" Score="37" ViewCount="7603" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just come up with a conjecture on what a piece of literature means, but the author has said that they didn't mean for their work to suggest that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Ray Bradbury's &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; is often considered an iconic book about censorship, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.laweekly.com/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted-2149125&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bradbury says that he didn't write the book about censorship at all&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; answer in a case like this, or does it depend on how you analyse the text?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read '&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/608/how-much-weight-is-given-to-authors-intentions-in-literary-analysis&quot;&gt;How much weight is given to authors&amp;#39; intentions in literary analysis?&lt;/a&gt;', but this question approaches the issue from the perspective on an academic, whereas I specifically want to address questions where more casual readers want to check if their theories are 'correct' and how a reader can decide the method of analysis for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:44:57.190" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T16:44:57.190" Title="The author of a literary work disagrees with critics about meaning—who's right?" Tags="&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-09T18:59:50.263" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(I previously posted this as an answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/revisions/2001/3&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but Hamlet wanted to focus on actual textual analysis rather than discussing the intent issue, so I've separated this out into a new Q&amp;amp;A)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy, even for people familiar with literary analysis, to conflate asking &lt;em&gt;&quot;Did the author mean this?&quot;&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;&quot;Does the work mean this?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you'd expect with an issue like this, there's no objectively true answer about who's correct here—asking if the author is &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; doesn't make a lot of sense, because there's no scale to measure &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; against. Instead, I'll introduce some of the common schools of thought on the issue of authorial intent (how you should interpret what the author &lt;em&gt;wanted to say&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Author&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people would argue that the author—the person who created and crafted the piece of literature—is the one who knows most intimately what they intended to convey through their work. This view was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory#Differences_among_schools&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;favoured by the majority of literature critics&lt;/a&gt; until around the 20th century, when New Criticism and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/intentional-fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;intentional fallacy&lt;/a&gt; became more accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biographical criticism&lt;/a&gt; is one of the schools of literature which favours the author's intent and meaning as opposed to examining the text alone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Biographical criticism is a form of Literary criticism which analyzes a writer's biography to show the relationship between the author's life and their works of literature. Biographical criticism is often associated with Historical-Biographical criticism, a critical method that &quot;sees a literary work chiefly, if not exclusively, as a reflection of its author's life and times&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This longstanding critical method dates back at least to the Renaissance period, and was employed extensively by Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By using context of the author's life, views and experiences, biographical criticism tries to uncover meaning through what the author may have intended to convey. Historically, this tended to be applied rather literally—the author's word was taken to be generally true without debate. This is not necessarily true in more modern analysis, though, where a balance is achieved between accepting the author's word and the other factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Text&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Criticism&lt;/a&gt; is the form of literary criticism that comes to mind when considering the &lt;strong&gt;text&lt;/strong&gt; as the primary source of meaning. New Criticism emphasises &lt;em&gt;close reading&lt;/em&gt; (for context, see '&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1885/what-is-close-reading&quot;&gt;What is close reading?&lt;/a&gt;'), and tries to find meaning through the author's choice of words rather than their experiences and historical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is debated whether New Criticism's method of almost entirely &lt;strong&gt;excluding&lt;/strong&gt; historical context is effective. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/447958?journalCode=ci&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Criticism: Pro and Contra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, René Wellek outlines the major issues with New Criticism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Four accusations are made more frequently. First, the New Criticism is an &quot;esoteric aestheticism,&quot; a revival of art for art's sake, uninterested in the human meaning, the social function and effect of literature. [...] Second, the New Criticism, we are told, is unhistorical. It isolates the work of art from its past and its context. Third, the New Criticism is supposed to aim at making criticism scientific, or at least &quot;bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science&quot; [...]. Finally the New Criticism is being dismissed as a mere pedagogical device, a version of the French &lt;em&gt;explication de texte&lt;/em&gt;, useful at most for American college students who must learn to read and to read poetry in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting, for context, that René Wellek was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; criticising New Criticism himself—he was merely outlining the common flaws pointed out by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reader&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another prominent group of literature critics who eschew both of the above approaches, instead favouring &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; as the main decider of a piece's meaning—&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reader-response criticism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What reader-response criticism tries to say is that a piece of work does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; have one objective meaning that can be determined through careful analysis. The linked Wikipedia article phrases it well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reader-response theory recognizes the reader as an active agent who imparts &quot;real existence&quot; to the work and completes its meaning through interpretation. Reader-response criticism argues that literature should be viewed as a performing art in which each reader creates their own, possibly unique, text-related performance. It stands in total opposition to the theories of formalism and the New Criticism, in which the reader's role in re-creating literary works is ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While writing this, I've reflected on the issue a little, and reader-response criticism starts to make a lot of sense. Critics in the past have read pieces and tried to find a way to interpret works and &lt;em&gt;find meaning&lt;/em&gt;, as if it is an inherent property of a work, but, as shown by the many schools of literary criticism, each reader &lt;strong&gt;does find a different meaning&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that I've written this without any reference at all to any specific book (like Fahrenheit 451, as I stated in the question). That's because I'm almost certain you would be able to switch the book title and have the exact same argument without gaining any real knowledge—any answer will either have to interpret Fahrenheit 451 from each possible view point, or simply state one opinion. Instead, I hope that I've started to share the tools to find out the answer on your own, or at least recognise how many literature critics would approach the problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In brief answer to the specific question: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Is Bradbury right?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;—it depends who you ask, and what they think about literary criticism. A biographical critic would say &lt;em&gt;&quot;yes, of course he's right—he wrote the book!&quot;&lt;/em&gt;; a New Critic would ask for the textual evidence to prove it and reader-response critic would ask what you believed the text meant!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When trying to prove if your conjecture is 'right' (if such a statement makes sense), you should consider &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; you want to prove it—close reading and analysis of text is often quite sound proof, but you may miss some of the context and nuance without considering the author's life and context. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Of Mice and Men&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxnotes.com/of-mice-and-men-context-racism-in-1930s-america-gcse.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;racism is a major theme&lt;/a&gt;, but by not knowing the context of the novel in 1930s America, the meaning is very much lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In works of fantasy or science fiction where there is little historical context, close reading or reader-response may be a better choice, because historical context may be less clear, and possibly harder to justify than in a work that is clearly set in a historical period. Nevertheless, as Hamlet points out, fantasy and sci-fi works do tend to have some link to reality, so dismissing the point completely (as I had originally done) is probably not valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You can analyse literature from many different perspectives, but the predominant methods are &lt;strong&gt;author intention&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;text meaning&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;reader interpretation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Confusing intention, meaning and interpretation can cause many issues when analysing texts, and, as pedantic as it may be, framing a question in a different way can drastically change its answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Asking who's 'right' or 'wrong' doesn't make a lot of sense in subjective analysis of literature—ask whether something can be 'proved' or 'disproved' instead for best results!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T19:31:04.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-09T20:16:22.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An author just wrote a book. I ask the author what the book is about, and she says, &quot;it's about how anyone, if they work hard enough, can lead a fulfilling life&quot;. There's nothing left to talk about; the author explained the meaning and the case is closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, let's ask the author a different question: &quot;in your book, how do you communicate the message that anyone can lead a fulfilling life.&quot; And the author responds: &quot;I communicate this message by writing about several characters who, although they all come from different backgrounds, all manage to lead fulfilling lives.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you see the different between the first and second answers? The first answer is a statement. The second answer is an argument. If we assume that everything the author says is correct, then we see the author's first answer and automatically accept it as valid. But when we ask the second question, we see that the first answer is really the conclusion of the argument presented in the second answer. The author is reading her own work and making arguments about its meaning. The author is no different from any other reader when it comes to interpreting her work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has two implications. First, authors can be wrong when it comes to interpreting their own work. But secondly, and more importantly, &lt;em&gt;asking about authors' intentions&lt;/em&gt; is a different, and less important, question than &lt;em&gt;asking about texts' meaning&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean that intentionality doesn't have a place in modern scholarship. For example, there's a branch of scholarship called &quot;textual genetics&quot; which studies how texts are created by looking at revisions and drafts of final works, which &lt;a href=&quot;http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/26375/1/TEXT17Bushell.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;often leads to questions about intentionality&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geneticjoycestudies.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a free online journal of textual genetic criticism of James Joyce's writings&lt;/a&gt; if you want to see what this criticism looks like.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's important to realize that while asking about an author's intentions can be an interesting question, and can lead to insights into the meaning of a text, intentions and meaning are completely different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appendix: for your amusement, here is a list of statements where the author makes very incorrect statements about their works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This interview from Bob Dylan cracks me up&lt;/a&gt; (thank you BESW)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What are your songs about Bob?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, some are about four minutes, some about five and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve&quot;, he replied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2w6f1a/i_just_sat_through_a_night_of_indoctrination_and/cooabir/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This reddit thread is one of the funniest things I've ever read.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think of any others, let me know in the comments!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-03-09T20:16:22.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-09T23:34:13.487" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Deliberately steering clear of academic criticism, since that's what you &lt;em&gt;asked&lt;/em&gt; for (granted, not what you &lt;em&gt;answered&lt;/em&gt; and therefore presumably not the intended meaning of the question. Badum tish.):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the author has said that they didn't mean for their work to suggest that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various ways you could nevertheless be right:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author might be lying: they did mean for their work to suggest that, but have since changed their mind as to the wisdom of suggesting any such thing. We conclude that authorial statements of meaning must not be blindly accepted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author's statement might be true but irrelevant. If I write a work that unintentionally suggests (by my mention of various details) that I'm a serial killer, and as a result you (a detective) catch me, then it really doesn't matter whether or not I &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; for my work to suggest that. Objectively, it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; suggest that to you, the reader, and you were correct to persist with your theory. We conclude that texts convey information other than that intended by the author (not to say whether or not this information qualifies as &quot;meaning&quot;). Furthermore, a text can say more about the author's views than the author is willing to admit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author might be confessing to an error. If they consistently confuse the words &quot;flaunt&quot; and &quot;flout&quot;, and wrote that somebody &quot;flaunted the rules&quot;, then the text &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; state, to any reader in possession of a dictionary, that the person in question was showy in their display of the rules. That the author &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to say that the person disdainfully broke the rules is a matter to be corrected in the second edition, and presumably will be now we've pointed it out. So you are correct in your reading of the first edition text, but not in a terribly interesting way. Still we conclude that for purely mechanical reasons, right down to typos, a text can mean something different from what the author hoped it would mean. Furthermore, we sometimes choose to analyse the text as the author intended, not as the text exists.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author may have been dimly aware of &quot;that&quot; without truly realising it, and although they believe that their work couldn't possibly be an expression of &quot;that&quot;, in fact it was. This may or may not be possible to prove, but sometimes it is. There have been cases of unintentional plagiarism, never mind unintentional expression of an idea. We conclude that the author is not an absolute authority even on the context of the &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; of the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author may be pleading for context to be properly taken into account, not actually disagreeing with you. Perhaps &lt;em&gt;The Simpsons&lt;/em&gt; writers did not intend literally to predict that Donald Trump would become President. And yet certainly there's an episode which says exactly that, long before Trump even proposed running, and President he is. So your theory that, &lt;em&gt;to a modern audience knowing what we know now&lt;/em&gt;, this joke plays rather differently from how it played &lt;em&gt;to the audience at the time, knowing only what its author knew then&lt;/em&gt; might well be correct. Modern readers see an unintended allusion to actual events, which may have some impact on their experience of the text, despite knowing perfectly well the author's statement is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; correct that this new interpretation of the joke was never intended. We conclude that the context of the reader informs meaning, that a text's meaning to a reader can change by time or by circumstance, and that reading a text in general has purpose beyond a mere attempt to determine the intent of the author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the reader cannot claim any absolute objective authority any more than the author can. If you somehow misread the word &quot;Transylvania&quot; as &quot;Transsiberia&quot;, then it's going to subtly alter your genuine experience of the opening passage of Bram Stoker's &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt;, but there's not much mileage in writing your English class report on the basis that the Count is Russian. Similarly if it turns out I have an alibi for all those murders, then you're not looking so smart after all, regardless of what my text implies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Line these conclusions up as supporting or opposing genuine techniques of criticism, or not, as you please!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Informally, though, if you read &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; and conclude that Bradbury was trying to make readers think disapprovingly of government censorship, then you're making a statement about Bradbury and you're probably wrong (since I doubt he was lying). If you read &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; and conclude that it &lt;em&gt;will in fact&lt;/em&gt; make readers think disapprovingly of government censorship, then you're making a statement about readers and you're probably right at least as often as not. If you wanted for some reason to make statements &quot;purely about the text&quot; then you must avoid both traps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="994" LastEditorUserId="994" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T01:10:16.300" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T01:10:16.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-10T00:39:29.573" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another way to approach this type of question is to take the view that works of art don't have meaning. An essay has meaning. A work of art creates an experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reader reading Olivier Twist might have that experience and say to themselves, &quot;workhouses are bad&quot;. This is a conclusion based on an experience. Is it the meaning of the work that provided the experience? Not really. Another reader of a different mindset might have the same experience and come away thinking &quot;workhouses are great&quot;, just as two people may try the same flavor of ice cream and one may conclude that putting chocolate chips in ice cream is a good thing and the other that is is a bad thing. Neither of these conclusions constitute the meaning of ice cream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we can be pretty sure that Dickens wanted readers who had the experience of reading Oliver Twist to draw the conclusion that workhouses are bad. In that sense, he would disagree with the reader who came away from the experience thinking workhouses were great. But that is a disagreement with a conclusion based on an experience, not really a disagreement about the meaning of a work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This way of looking at the matter is reinforced by the fact that we still read Oliver Twist today. This cannot be because we feel passionately about whether workhouses should be abolished. They were abolished long ago. But the experience of reading Oliver Twist is still an enjoyable one today, even if any conclusions that Dickens may have wanted us to draw from it are moot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Bradbury created an experience in 451. Many people reading it came away from the experience thinking &quot;government censorship is bad&quot;. Bradbury clearly hoped that they would come away from it thinking &quot;television is bad&quot;. Most didn't, perhaps because most of them already thought government censorship was bad (and that television was good) and we tend to look for evidence that confirms our existing opinions and discount that which disputes them. (Confirmation bias.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since Fahrenheit 451 is still considered a good book, independent of whether people reach the same conclusion from the experience of reading it as Bradbury intended, indicates that, like the experience of reading Oliver Twist, the experience of reading 451 is pleasant independent of any conclusions we might draw about censorship or television. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Bradbury had written an essay arguing the television is bad, there would be no doubt that he meant that television is bad. But he wrote a novel and the novel contains an experience, not a meaning. We can reach different conclusions after having had that experience, just as we can reach different conclusions after having any other kind of experience. These conclusions are not the meaning of the experience. A blizzard or a good meal are experiences. They don't have meaning. But having had those experiences we may draw conclusions about the wisdom of warm clothing or the appropriate uses of garlic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T00:39:29.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="608" CreationDate="2017-03-10T04:55:32.603" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;My father was a professor of literature and I am reasonably confident that if he were asked this question he would say that the purpose of criticism is not to figure out what the author meant, but to fully understand and appreciate the nature of the experience that the work creates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spent much of his career arguing for the superiority of the 1850 version of Wordsworth's prelude over the 1805. The 1805 version is considerably more liberal in its sentiments and it was preferred by many of the scholars of the day for that reason -- they considered it to be a better work because it expressed more liberal sentiments compared to the more conservative sentiments of the 1850 version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my father's argument was not that the 1850 version was better because its politics were more conservative, but that it was better because it was better poetry; that its images were more striking and its emotions both more mature and more deeply felt. (I'm paraphrasing his argument wildly, but that seems to me, through the filter of memory, to be the gist of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember an anecdote about Beethoven which I assume I must have heard from him. A woman came up to Beethoven after a concert and asked him what the piece he had just played meant. Beethoven answered by sitting down at the piano and playing it again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A piece of art, in other words, means itself, the totality of its experience, and nothing else. The purpose of criticism is both to judge the quality of the experience as an experience and to make the fullness of the experience more accessible to the reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is not the majority view among literary critics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to me, the notion of a piece of literature as a covert polemic seems odious. I believe that a writer turns to fiction not to conceal an argument which they are very capable of making plainly, but to record an experience. Sometimes, in other words, what you want to say is not that the world &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; be such and such, but simply that the world &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; such and such, not how human life should be lived, but simply what the nature of human experience actually is. Experience, by its nature, cannot be conveyed in summary. It can only be taken whole. The meaning of a poem is the poem. The meaning of a novel is the novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T05:25:09.793" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T05:25:09.793" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-03-10T05:24:06.967" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no contradiction here. Note the beginning of the last stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shall be telling this with a sigh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Somewhere ages and ages hence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous stanzas make it clear that, despite the traveller's hesitation, there really was nothing to choose between the roads. It is a meaningless choice and its consequences cannot be known because &quot;way leads on to way&quot; and he is probably not going to have the chance to go back and explore the other path. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that is not how he is going to tell the story later in life. Later he is going to make the decision seem more bold and adventurous than it really was, and is going to claim that this bold choice made all the difference in his life. The final, and most famous, lines, therefore, are a piece of humbug:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I took the one less traveled by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that has made all the difference.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the tale he is planning to tell at parties later in life, but, as the previous lines have made clear, these sentiments are all bosh. There was nothing to choose between the roads and he has no idea if the choice he made made any difference at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with the poem seems to be that most of the readers get so caught up in the romance of those last lines that they fail to notice the plain statement that they are a piece of humbug. The words &quot;with a sigh&quot;, particularly, emphasize the humbug of the words that follow. Why will he sigh? To make his words seem vaguely tinged with regret. It's an act. It is humbug. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can't see it because we want the particular piece of humbug to be true. We want poems to have poetic ideas and poetic themes and the road less travelled is just what we think a poetic theme should look like. So obviously the poet must have meant those words seriously, and so the rest of the poem -- which if read plain is making it clear that those sentiments are humbug -- becomes difficult and mysterious because the conclusion does not seem to follow from them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is, I suppose, as good an illustration of the purpose of literary criticism. Not to elucidate some hidden meaning about forging your own path in life, but to point out that it is, on the plain face of it, describing not some momentous life choice, but the kind of humbug we tell ourselves and our friends about the significance of our choices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T12:22:51.993" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T12:22:51.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2017-03-10T05:37:22.017" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it's a fairy tale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that's not a long enough answer to satisfy the SE gods. But it really is all there answer there is. Fairy tales follow fairy tale logic and fairy tale logic is moral, not physical. The five children were chosen by a moral logic that selected one representative of virtue and four representatives of vice, and, most importantly, the representative of virtue had no idea that he, and he alone, was the representative of virtue, for that is one of the essential qualities of virtue in the moral order of fairy tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any other explanation is illogical because it imposes a non-fairytale logic on a fairytale, and the only logic that applies to fairytales, and which applies with iron ferocity in fairytales, is moral logic. Thus no agency was required for the tickets to find their intended recipients; it is morally impossible that they should have been found by anyone else.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T10:26:22.670" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T10:26:22.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1983" CreationDate="2017-03-10T05:57:14.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think C.S. Lewis himself gives a fairly exhaustive answer to this question in the &lt;em&gt;The Abolition of Man&lt;/em&gt;. Lewis begins the first of the three essays that make up the book by looking at an elementary school textbook and showing how it has broken fundamentally with the entire Western tradition by interpreting a statement such as &quot;the waterfall is sublime&quot; not as an objective and just statement about the waterfall, and instead treating it as an a subjective statement about the observer's feelings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we view the statement &quot;the waterfall is sublime&quot; as a objective and just statement about the waterfall, that implies that objects in the world deserve a particular kind of response from us and that if we fail to give that response, it is because there is a defect in our appreciation -- a defect which education might seek to cure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies a very different view of the relationship between language, thought, and reality than is implied by the idea that calling the waterfall sublime is merely an expression of the observer's feelings. Here language never describes reality at all, it only describes the observer's reactions. Language, and the reading of language, becomes entirely psychologized -- which is pretty much exactly what has happened in the study of literature. And in that environment, what would the place of philology be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:57:01.663" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:57:01.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T07:40:05.273" Score="11" ViewCount="1696" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to read &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt; for a couple years now, but don't have the opportunity to sit down with a big physical book for long stretches of time. I do, however, have much more time available to read ebooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the experience of &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt; change or diminish as an ebook? I ask particularly because the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ergodic&lt;/a&gt; artifact quality of &lt;em&gt;House&lt;/em&gt; interests me as a graphic designer with a specialty in print media. How effectively does &lt;em&gt;House's&lt;/em&gt; ergodicity translate into the digital text? (Is there a particular ebook version which is notably more or less successful in this translation?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T12:46:19.617" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T04:34:28.693" Title="Is House of Leaves' ergodicity preserved as a digital text?" Tags="&lt;house-of-leaves&gt;&lt;mark-z-danielewski&gt;&lt;ebooks&gt;&lt;ergodicity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2018" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:16:38.313" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;It wouldn't work - &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt; does not translate to ebook format &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; you have prior knowledge of how the book is supposed to work. Even then, you'd lose detail. I say this because, while the textual features of the book itself may not be missing, many of the cues that would lead a reader to question whether there's meaning buried at all would be lost. Additionally, physical properties of the book and pages could easily be lost as well. It's a book heavily reliant on physical interaction with the text, and in the absence of that, many details are lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rare exception might be possible where the aspect ratio of the pages is maintained and they're kept in their exact current formatting - but even then, not all information about the text is preserved. &lt;strong&gt;My answer is going to focus specifically on the visual/physical cues which, while present in book form, may not be present in ebook form.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm going to post pictures of some pages in House of Leaves to explain why this is the case. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pages have meaning in the way they're stacked together, and that meaning can easily be lost in an ebook format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Very often, finding content in &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt; takes work. There's a learning curve to navigating the book, and it's often quite misleading by design. Text searchability downright ruins this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bookmarks are a physical indicator of where you're getting lost in the book as you read it. You're going to need a lot of them. An e-text doesn't have the same kinesthetic/erdogic value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your ability to actually physically see through the pages is sometimes key to understanding the dimensional interplay between them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not necessarily a &amp;quot;missing cue,&amp;quot; but pages are mirrored, reversed, rotated, and modified text in different fonts, all over the place. This would be present in the ideal ebook, but it'd make it harder to navigate the text.&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, if an ebook text only shows you one page at a time, this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; going to destroy this information entirely. You can't view the book one page at a time - you have to view both the left and right sides simultaneously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While I don't go into detail about this in my answer, some ebook formats lose color information. The coloration of words varies throughout the book, and if you're missing that, you're missing critical symbolic information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate point, though, is that House of Leaves often requires you to think of the book as a physical stack of pages. Cues in the book rely on you physically being able to look at and &amp;quot;through&amp;quot; it. At times, it asks you to think about looking &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; the book - as if there's a tunnel or a pathway somehow vertically winding its way through the two-dimensional pages. Ebooks make this extremely difficult to capture, and so many details could be lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The following details and images could be considered minor spoilers.&lt;/strong&gt; I've taken pains not to divulge anything that abjectly changes the meaning of the book, but it's hard not to show the content of the book. &lt;em&gt;Also, bear in mind that any difficulties present in an ebook format are&lt;/em&gt; also &lt;em&gt;going to be present in pictures of a physical book.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've smallified the images here for convenience - click through for full-size images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The densest chapter with regard to this problem is Chapter IX. This is because of a sequence of windows in the middle of the page, as well as constant rotations and reversals that have to be made in order to successfully navigate the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t6J47.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/t6J47.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think this is bad? There are about 40 more pages like this next to each other. But you don't read them at the same time, oh no, that would be too easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty easy to see from this picture alone that you might encounter some difficulties in reading the text as an ebook. Flipping pages over, constant zooming in and out, font sizes, etc. all contribute to mechanical problems that could arise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's actual textual meaning being lost, too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've uploaded a video of me simply flipping through a tunnel in the book. With the application of a little kinesthetic thought, there's a physical sense given to the reader that this tunnel is actually &lt;em&gt;inside the book.&lt;/em&gt; If you look at the pages as they're stacked together, you look at the wall you reach at the end of the tunnel, and you look back, and it's supposed to feel like you can look &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt; the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't something that's going to be very easy to pick up on using an ebook. Ebooks make it difficult to look at past pages and think about them &lt;em&gt;being a stack of pages.&lt;/em&gt; I'm picking the most heavy handed of the times this occurs, but rest assured that this occurs everywhere and often, in subtle, minor ways. Picking up on them is going to be a confusing and difficult task in an ebook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://media.giphy.com/media/xUA7aMXpXE26Z4TdGU/giphy.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://media.giphy.com/media/xUA7aMXpXE26Z4TdGU/giphy.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Flipping through the pages&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can't make out the text, but you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make out the direction of the text, and that's what matters. The text is spoilers, anyway.) Note that the important part here isn't the formatting - I'm assuming an ebook format could preserve that. Even assuming formatting is preserved, what it's still missing is the feeling like on the left is the part of the tunnel you've been through, and on the right is the part of the tunnel you have yet to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that, but the actual navigation of the content of the book is, in and of itself, &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a maze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of &lt;em&gt;finding content in the book&lt;/em&gt; is an intentional and variable part of the experience of reading it. Some things are supposed to take longer to find, and some things are quite simple and easy. Text searchability removes this dimension of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 114 has &amp;quot;See Chapter Six, footnote 82, Tom's Story as well as footnote 249. -- Ed.&amp;quot; Except footnote 249 is incredibly difficult to actually &lt;em&gt;physically find&lt;/em&gt; in the book, despite the fact that it's four or five pages long. Why? Because it's designed to look like the rest of the text that surrounds it. It's built to confuse you: you can find footnote 250 all right, and it's right next to some text that &lt;em&gt;looks like&lt;/em&gt; the text in footnote 249 - but this text isn't a footnote. So you find 250 first, and then flip back trying to find 249, gloss right over it, end up suddenly at footnote 246, and wonder, &amp;quot;wait, how did I get here? I was just at footnote 250!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this example were &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; less subtle, it would be hard to spot in an ebook. And believe me, some of them are hard to spot in a &lt;em&gt;physical&lt;/em&gt; book. This brings me to a point related to the difficulty of finding text. It's similar, but not quite the same...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sheer quantity of bookmarks - and their positions in the books - is part of the significance of the text. This is hard to reconstruct, but as you read the text, you'll quickly find that one bookmark isn't enough. Then, two. Then, three. At one point, I required seven bookmarks in order to trace my path through the text. Where are the bookmarks? The bookmarks are where you get caught, snagged on some thorn in the book's side. It's a physical indicator that confounds your perception of your own progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 121 says, in footnote 148, &amp;quot;See Exhibit One.&amp;quot; That takes you to page 530, where you read some text, and then see &amp;quot;For references, see bibliography in Chapter IX.&amp;quot; That means that you first have to &lt;em&gt;find&lt;/em&gt; Chapter IX, which I hope I've already demonstrated is supposed to be not a straightforward task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That takes you to page 152, which despite being a literal bibliography, is worth reading. Then it's back to page 530 to finish reading, then back to page 121. Cool, done with that chain. But then there's another footnote on page 121. Footnote 152 on the same page reads, &amp;quot;See Chapter XVII.&amp;quot; (Yes, you're supposed to read it.) So now you're off to Chapter XVII. Chapter XVII is a fun house of links, starting before the chapter even begins with footnote 357, which requires that you look up a poem. Back from looking up a poem, now you're into the body of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, I'm going to start skipping further sub-links. Then, when reading Chapter XVII, you'll encounter footnote 375, taking you to Appendix F. Then later, once you're done and return to Chapter XVII, you'll run into &amp;quot;See pages 22-23&amp;quot; in a footnote. Then later, once you're done with &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; and return to Chapter XVII, you'll run into footnote 391, which says &amp;quot;See footnote 310 and corresponding reference. -- Ed.&amp;quot; (Thanks, editor ol' pal.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote 310 has footnotes of its own. Those footnotes take you to other places in the book, and now you need five bookmarks. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And look, honestly, I didn't want this example to be 450 words long, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in theory this experience could be simulated on a desktop computer, actually physically doing it is an intrinsically different experience. Reading this book on a computer may even be &lt;em&gt;faster&lt;/em&gt;, but for this reason, it'd encourage you to gloss over details that may be relevant, where the book encourages you to absorb a lot of irrelevant and distracting information. You're supposed to forget, a little, about where you were and what you were doing there, and how you went down this rabbit hole, anyway - and the omnipresence of irrelevant information is intrinsically meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frequently, in the book, your ability to see through the pages becomes pertinent. When two pages overlap, as in the following example, you end up with the ability to see where text &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, but not what that text &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt;. When you're not supposed to know (example later), it's shown using various techniques. But sometimes you &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; supposed to know what it says, but you're not supposed to know until a little bit after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I managed to capture one of these pages, so you can see what I mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ONDP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0ONDP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how it looks like you hit a wall at the end of that page? That's an effect caused by two overlapping pages, each on the flipside of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But hey, guess what those pages actually look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F0pdA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F0pdA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yyyyep, those are 45 degree rotations. Speaking of which...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many blocks of text in House of Leaves are written upside-down, sideways, at slants, and sometimes even in literal circles. This forces you to physically turn the book over. Other blocks of text are written in backwards type - I physically held my book up to a mirror to read certain sections of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This level of interaction is fairly significant in the book. While it's ambiguous what the meaning is, I tend to interpret it (as do many others) as symbolic of the &amp;quot;ease&amp;quot; of being dragged through a maze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And heck, you know those pages above? Some pages are even written at a 45 degree angle. Some are written at a 45 degree angle &lt;em&gt;upside down&lt;/em&gt;. Try reading &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; on your stinkin' computer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I want to leave you with a curiosity that I actually didn't notice the first time I read this book. Because, you know, it's a physical copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N8ycM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Page 333, neat.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WQe88.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hey wait, there's something weird on this page.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tFlFH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What? How'd &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; get there? And why's it printed so close to the inside of the book?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I've provided a few case examples for the sort of information that would be lost in an e-text format. I wish you the best in reading Leaves!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T04:34:28.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:24:28.467" Score="11" ViewCount="2350" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just re-reading &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;, the first volume of Neil Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;. In the story titled &lt;em&gt;The Sound of Her Wings&lt;/em&gt;, the following conversation takes place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GJVso.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GJVso.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Death and Dream&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Death&lt;/strong&gt;: You are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;utterly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the stupidest, most &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;self-centered&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, appallingest &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;excuse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;anthropomorphic personification&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; or any &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; plane! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the part that interests me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;fantile, ado&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lescent&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, pa&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;thetic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; specimen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for &quot;bolding&quot; only certain parts of these words? Are we supposed to read them by placing stress on these parts, or is it something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I ask is because I have never before seen only &lt;em&gt;a part&lt;/em&gt; of work being highlighted, unless it was needed to point a mistake (&lt;em&gt;oh, my dear essays&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T09:00:26.110" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T09:00:26.110" Title="What is the reason for partial highlighting in &quot;The Sandman&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2021" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:25:32.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:25:32.760" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T09:25:32.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2022" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:25:32.760" Score="0" Body="To be used for about the graphic novel, or its relation to other works, along with the [neil-gaiman] and [comics] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T14:29:05.283" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T14:29:05.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2020" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:29:58.633" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeah, you've basically got it. They're syllabic stress indicators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comics are pretty text-light for how information-dense they need to be. So, tricks like this are used to highlight tonal shifts where they might not otherwise be immediately obvious. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoldInflation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;even a TVTropes page about this&lt;/a&gt;. Especially when trying to convey emphasis, even in such a high quality print as the Sandman series, just italicizing words isn't going to cut it. When you're talking about a &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt; of a word rather than the whole thing, this problem only gets worse. So partial bolding is used instead to indicate stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T09:29:58.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2027" CreationDate="2017-03-10T09:33:26.567" Score="27" ViewCount="3480" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the characteristics of Haiku is that the poems are usually of 17 syllables (5-7-5). Exceptions exist, of course, but 17 is the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why 17? How did the originators of Haiku come to settle on 17? How does it contribute to a haiku's aesthetics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T09:42:03.027" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T10:58:53.737" Title="Why are haiku usually of 17 syllables?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1986" CreationDate="2017-03-10T10:14:38.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; (thereafter &lt;em&gt;NYT&lt;/em&gt;) has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/methodology/?action=click&amp;amp;contentCollection=Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pretty detailed explanation&lt;/a&gt; of their methodology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the list does talk about retail sales (which is rather good news, but is not the case in other industries such as video games). Those figures are measured from a panel on which &lt;em&gt;NYT&lt;/em&gt; does not say much, except that it's confidential and should be trusted, and is restricted to the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rankings reflect unit sales reported on a confidential basis by vendors offering a wide range of general interest titles. Every week, thousands of diverse selling locations report their actual sales on hundreds of thousands of individual titles. The panel of reporting retailers is comprehensive and reflects sales in stores of all sizes and demographics across the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a list &lt;em&gt;à la Prévert&lt;/em&gt;, we find out that those thousand of retailers include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;national, regional and local chains; scores of online and multimedia entertainment retailers; supermarkets, university, gift and big-box department stores; and newsstands&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and is opt-in based:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are a book retailer interested in reporting your store's weekly sales to The New York Times Best-Seller Lists, send a request here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is as much as we know on the data and its representativeness: we do not know much about the panel's exact size or composition. The fact that you can opt-in on it probably correlates it a bit too strongly with the lectorate of &lt;em&gt;NYT&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's also note that editors that are nominated for appearance in the list should complete some requirements from &lt;em&gt;NYT&lt;/em&gt; to appear in the actual, published list. Very little is known about those requirements, whether they include a financial participation, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Publishers and vendors of all ranked titles must conform in a timely fashion to The New York Times Best-Seller Lists requirement to allow for examination and independent corroboration of their reported sales for that week&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite those meager news on the overall obscurity of the process, three positive points should be noted about the process: &lt;em&gt;NYT&lt;/em&gt; is very transparent about how significant it judges its ranking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An asterisk (*) indicates that a book's sales are barely distinguishable from those of the book above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is transparent also about any distinguishable manipulation in figures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When included, such bulk purchases appear with a dagger (†).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the body is independent from the advertising department:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The New York Times Best Sellers are compiled and archived by The Best-Seller Lists Desk of The New York Times News Department, and are separate from the Culture, Advertising and Business sides of The New York Times Company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: You can trust &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; to know what they do, but hey, they won't tell us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T12:11:54.973" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T12:11:54.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T10:35:52.090" Score="10" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark Z. Danielewski's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13531066-the-fifty-year-sword?ac=1&amp;amp;from_search=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fifty Year Sword&lt;/a&gt; is told by five narrators whose parts were ostensibly collected in interviews and tightly interleaved. Quoting the first page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe because the history of any ghost story is a ghost story unto itself, which is to say another story completely, assuming any of what follows can rightly even be considered a ghost story; rather than delve into the devices and biases and oddly canted idiom of the five persons—one of whom in the early years slept with another and now endlessly wonders about the lakes of fall where someone else once wandered; two of whom still nurture their affection for one another, expressing so in an array of notes and overseas phone calls; a fourth who lost three; and the last of whom from the prison of a later life hates them all—or represent them throughout with characterizing phrases, temporal references, and even more quotation marks hopelessly nested within reiterating nests of still more marks; &lt;strong&gt;to delineate their respective and independently conducted interviews, colored quotation marks are used instead: &quot; = 1, &quot; = 2, &quot; = 3, &quot; = 4, &quot; = 5&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Where no quotations appear only the worst should be assumed: an interruption by someone other than one of the before mentioned persons, the reader or even &lt;strong&gt;the author&lt;/em&gt; who additionally, it must be stated, has done nothing more than lend together these gathered and rerelated bits&lt;/strong&gt; so as to here present a pretty peculiar and perhaps altogether alternate history of one October evening in East Texas.—MD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;All typos and emphasis mine. The five quotation marks are actually in different colours in the book&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a few years since I read the book, but I didn't get the impression that the different narrators actually affect the way the story is told, where I would really expect an unreliable and in parts contradictory narrative. The text is simply broken into segments of various lengths (usually around one or two lines), each given to a different narrator. I couldn't even really extract any characterisations of the individual narrators, or match the five people described above with the five different colours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this background story and the use of the five different quotation marks just a gimmick or can we actually extract additional meaning from who narrates what part? What about the italicised part in the above quote? Seeing how much effort Danielewski put into every single detail of some of his other works, I'd be surprised if the narrative wasn't assigned carefully to the individual narrators, so I'm wondering whether the additional meaning is actually there but was just lost on me due to not paying enough attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="298" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T11:39:40.483" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T11:39:40.483" Title="Are the five narrators in The Fifty Year Sword more than a gimmick?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;mark-z-danielewski&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2024" CreationDate="2017-03-10T10:37:08.960" Score="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before diving into the history of haiku, there's a precursor step. The Japanese language is broken up into symbols that are what we'd typically write in English as digraphs. Most sounds in Japanese consists of a consonant and a vowel combined. To illustrate this, have a haiku:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ふ る い け や&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;em&gt;fu ru i ke ya&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  か わ ず と び こ む&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;em&gt;ka wa zu to bi ko mu&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  み ず の お と&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;em&gt;mi zu no o to&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5 symbols, 7 symbols, 5 symbols. So when we talk about &quot;syllables,&quot; this meant something much more specific in Japanese. And this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_%28Japanese_prosody%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;happened to be something of importance to Japanese poetry&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, this haiku is easier to read if we split it up by words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ふる　いけ　や / かわず　とびこむ / みず　の　おと&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah, the ancient pond / as a  frog takes the plunge / the sound of water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all is a slight simplification, though. Japanese has digraphs, like きょ, which we write as trigraphs in English: kyo, as in Kyoto. But these still count as one phonetic unit (called &quot;&lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in Japanese), and that's what notation like &quot;5-7-5&quot; counts. (Haiku tends to be written with kanji, anyway, which changes the raw symbol count. But writing it like I did above serves to show clearly where the &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; are.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the poetic basis for understanding the structure of the haiku out of the way, let's talk history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origins of haiku lie in religious practices, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_famous_haiku_background.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shinto and Buddhist alike&lt;/a&gt;, as well as &lt;a href=&quot;http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_600ce_waka.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;general poetic practices and culture&lt;/a&gt;. Songs frequently followed a form called &lt;em&gt;waka&lt;/em&gt;. This form essentially boiled down to a combination of two other forms: &lt;em&gt;choka&lt;/em&gt;, which follows 5-7-5-7...5-7-7, and &lt;em&gt;sedoka&lt;/em&gt;, which follows 5-7-7-5-7-7. This precursor to haiku was just a culturally ingrained pattern - not unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I?t=22s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the four chord song&lt;/a&gt; [language warning]. It's just a shared recognizable pattern for music and poetry. And many forms for poetry diverged from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form called &lt;em&gt;tanka&lt;/em&gt; is a specific form of &lt;em&gt;waka&lt;/em&gt;, and is so frequently used interchangeably that it has muddied the meaning of &lt;em&gt;waka&lt;/em&gt;. However, the &lt;em&gt;tanka&lt;/em&gt; form is a refinement and restriction on the general pattern of &lt;em&gt;waka&lt;/em&gt;: it follows the form 5-7-5-7-7 specifically. This form is often considered the precursor to what we now call haiku. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many poets laid their hands on shaping this form in between &lt;em&gt;tanka&lt;/em&gt; and haiku. Enumerating them all is beyond the scope of this answer. Significant contributors were Matsunaga Teitoku, a wandering poet who wrote a plethora of prose and poetry, and Issa, who wrote often on the state of Japanese society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the direct precursor to haiku is &lt;a href=&quot;http://terebess.hu/english/haiku/shiki.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Masaoka Shiki&lt;/a&gt;, who took the form that had evolved over time, and focused in on 5-7-5. He &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the person who gave it the name &quot;haiku,&quot; largely under the banner of tanka reform. He wrote well over 25,000 haiku. It is largely the popularization of Shiki's writings in Japan that led to the prominence of the form elsewhere in the world. His commentary presented it as a simpler, cleaner aesthetic - its compressed nature, he wrote, could sketch life and reality much more easily than any more complex form could. This is a strong appeal to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;principles in Japanese culture&lt;/a&gt;, and is the ultimate aesthetic choice backing haiku. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was then spread through popular poets and poetry to English-speaking countries - except instead of Japanese phonetic units, they naturally counted in English syllables. The popularization of haiku spread from there into the 1950s, giving us the form we know it in today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T10:58:53.737" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T10:58:53.737" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-10T12:25:48.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to hear an author's analysis.  It is interesting to hear an academic's analysis.  It's interesting to develop YOUR analysis.  There can't be any general rule regarding which is 'correct'.   And always be aware that an opinion is tacitly prefaced by 'this is one way of looking at it, today, in the context of this class/publication'.  It is the pleasure, the duty even, of an artist to be inconsistent.  Is that a quote from someone far more learned than me?  If not, it ought to be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradbury (if Wikipedia is to be believed) offered at least two interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury stated that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time (during the McCarthy era) about the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he described the book as a commentary on how mass media reduces interest in reading literature.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two are not mutually exclusive. Moby Dick is about obsession, class, religion, good and evil -  and it's also a ripping yarn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we can assume that in both these cases, the author was consciously writing a multifaceted  story, even if he came to change opinion on which facet was dominant (does one HAVE to be dominant?)    We could compare the fervour with which some modern college courses analyse works to find sexist, racist and other unacceptable undertones, which may indicate the author's cultural background but are most unlikely to reveal his intent.  Doubtless they're currently dissecting 'Little Women' for gender-identity issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1006" LastEditorUserId="1006" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T13:01:45.570" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T13:01:45.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2029" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-10T12:33:07.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ergodic literature requires more effort of interaction from the reader than reading words and turning pages sequentially. It often means treating the book's physicality as a part of the reading experience, turning it, reading it out of order, comparing pages to each other, etc. For digital media it can mean making important choices about how to consume the text via multiple hyperlinked sections or similar interactive controls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be ergodic elements in texts which are not themselves considered ergodic; the difference is usually based on how important the ergodic interaction is to a &quot;successful&quot; reading of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T13:26:59.227" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T13:26:59.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2030" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-10T12:33:07.100" Score="0" Body="For questions about literary elements which require non-trivial interactive effort for the reader to successfully traverse." OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T13:26:50.857" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T13:26:50.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2020" CreationDate="2017-03-10T14:32:53.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What @Emrakul said, but also because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Klein#Sandman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Todd Klein&lt;/a&gt; did the lettering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letterers don't get much notice or respect, but Klein is something of a rockstar in his field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Eisner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Will Eisner&lt;/a&gt; was the first important letterer (although he was also, obviously, an author and artist, and hugely significant if the award named for him is any indication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Sandman, my understanding is that Gaiman was pushing the boundaries of the form, presumably following the lead of Alan Moore, and opening the way for later, post-modern comics.  Klein has written about how the expanded requirements of Gaiman's groundbreaking work required a new approach to lettering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can even see in influence in recent subtitling of films, breaking out of the boring white lettering on the bottom.  (There are several recent examples that escape me now, but John Wick 2 used such an approach.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T17:23:51.883" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T17:23:51.883" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2033" CreationDate="2017-03-10T16:11:29.870" Score="13" ViewCount="6308" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ian Fleming's Bond novel &lt;em&gt;You Only Live Twice&lt;/em&gt; has one of my favourite poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You only live twice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Once when you're born&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And once when you look death in the face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Only_Live_Twice_%28novel%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, this is merely  &quot;in the style of ... Bashō.&quot; There are claims that this haiku is actually by Bashō (&lt;a href=&quot;http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/04/james-bond-declassified-50-things-you-didnt-know-about-007/slide/you-only-live-twice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Time.com article&lt;/a&gt;, for example). Is the haiku really by Bashō, or did Fleming pen it himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is by Bashō, what is the original Japanese version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T16:39:46.337" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T15:56:30.260" Title="Is the haiku in &quot;You Only Live Twice&quot; by Bashō?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ian-fleming&gt;&lt;james-bond&gt;&lt;haiku&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2032" CreationDate="2017-03-10T16:38:25.597" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bashō never wrote that haiku&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The haiku is not listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/matsuo-basho/poems/?search=you+only+live+twice&amp;amp;B1=SEARCH&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on PoemHunter&lt;/a&gt; or in his list of works &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D#List_of_works&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, which starts to seem suspicious, but then I found authoritative confirmation at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mi6-hq.com/sections/movies/yolt_trivia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MI6 HQ&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The title of &quot;You Only Live Twice&quot; comes from a haiku (or poem) included in the Ian Fleming novel on which the film is based. It goes: &quot;You only live twice. Once when you are born. And once when you look death in the face.&quot; In the novel, the poem is written by James Bond for his friend Tiger Tanaka. Due to a badly-worded attribution at the front of the novel, the poem is sometimes incorrectly believed to have been written by a Japanese poet called Matsuo Basho (See: Bashô Matsuo.) It is clarified in the novel that is should not be considered a haiku at all i.e. it is a poor attempt at writing poetry by Bond after being taught how to do so. The novel and it's epigraph explain that the haiku is &quot;after Basho&quot; i.e. written in the style of the famous 17th Century Japanese poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, the haiku has been attributed to Bashō throughout the mainstream media, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/jamesbond/11271693/12-James-Bond-film-titles-explained.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Telegraph&lt;/a&gt; and (as you stated in the question) &lt;a href=&quot;http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/04/james-bond-declassified-50-things-you-didnt-know-about-007/slide/you-only-live-twice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Time&lt;/a&gt;, although the phrasing looks so similar that I could imagine one of the articles being '&lt;em&gt;inspired&lt;/em&gt;' by the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd be interested to know if anyone has a copy of the attribution referenced on MI6 HQ's site to see whether it is ambiguous; unfortunately, I don't have a copy, but I can say with a reasonable amount of confidence that Fleming wrote the haiku and did not intend to attribute it to Bashō.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T16:38:25.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-10T18:24:59.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T18:24:59.260" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:24:59.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-10T18:24:59.260" Score="0" Body="For questions about the concept of authorial intent. Please do not use this tag for questions about authors' intentions as they relate to a specific passage of text." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-10T18:37:56.220" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T18:37:56.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-03-10T22:19:16.290" Score="14" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   I took the one less traveled by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   And that has made all the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotes have a way of taking on a life of their own. These lines, the last three lines of Frost's &lt;em&gt;The Road Not Taken,&lt;/em&gt; have been endlessly quoted by many people: as epigraphs in their books, on their personal web pages, and so on. And why not? They express an idea that is almost heroic: of doing the unconventional thing, being a maverick rather a conformist, of the virtue of individualism that has always resonated in America, of the satisfaction (or regret!) that your choice ended up making a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To use language is to give expression to ideas; language begins to turn into poetry when the ideas are striking, or the form is striking, or both. Here we have a master poet who has cloaked this idea in creative language, and there are all sorts of subtle things that make the words memorable and charming. (The rhyme, the repetition of the “I”, …) So those who wish to “borrow” the language of a poet to express this idea about themselves are certainly not doing anything “wrong”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of the poem, though, it appears that the author may have intended (see questions on &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/authorial-intent&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;authorial-intent&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;authorial-intent&lt;/a&gt;) something else (or something &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;), which becomes apparent if we read the poem closely, in its entirety and in order. So let's do that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sorry I could not travel both&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And be one traveler, long I stood  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very first line the author sets the context quickly: here he is, faced with two roads in a wood. Of course, being a single person he can't travel both (what a delightfully absurd idea!), so he's having to make up his mind. This he does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And looked down one as far as I could&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To where it bent in the undergrowth;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then took the other, as just as fair,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And having perhaps the better claim,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's considered one road and then decided to take the other one, which (“as just as fair”) is very similar. Why? Simply because it appears “perhaps” better, after looking at its grass and feeling that it needs walking on. Immediately after making this decision on such flimsy grounds though, he is aware that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though as for that the passing there&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had worn them really about the same,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And both that morning equally lay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In leaves no step had trodden black. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, then again (“Though as for that”), the difference is not such a big one, possibly even non-existent. Both roads are good; perhaps the one he didn't take is good too. (You could call &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; contradiction, but it's just that on closer examination the difference has vanished. And whenever we list pros-and-cons of any choice, taking one side of the matter and then the other, we are, in a sense, contradicting ourselves.) So there is already a fear of having picked the wrong one, which is assuaged with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, I kept the first for another day!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I doubted if I should ever come back.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The next time I'm here, I'll take the other one” is what he tells himself, knowing fully well that there may not be a next time. What's more likely to happen is something else (I've added the quotation marks for clarity):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shall be telling this with a sigh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Somewhere ages and ages hence:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I took the one less traveled by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that has made all the difference.”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember the original reason he picked the second road, because it was “perhaps” better, as it was “grassy and wanted wear”? The reason which, on closer examination, turned out to be flimsy as the difference was negligible? No matter; he's going to stick to that story. Years later, at parties and to grandchildren, he's going to make the difference seem larger than it was. Exaggerate it, put on an act (“telling this with a sigh”), claim that his decision has always been to take the less-travelled road, and that this has made a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So those who take the last three lines and think that they represent Frost's intention can be said to have “misunderstod” the poem. (See similar comments by David Orr, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/weve-gotten-wrong-robert-frost-classic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in video&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in text&lt;/a&gt; — he's written an entire book called &lt;em&gt;The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong&lt;/em&gt; and the excerpt linked is good reading.) It is also telling that many people misremember the poem's title as &lt;em&gt;The Road Less Traveled&lt;/em&gt;: Frost may have intended the title &lt;em&gt;The Road Not Taken&lt;/em&gt; to be about the road &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; did not take, but many people who are strongly affected by the last lines seem to have interpreted the poem as being about the road not taken by (many) &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt;: the less-travelled road he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, (as I said at the beginning of this answer), they are perfectly valid in their understanding of those three lines specifically, which are indeed intended to convey the idea they have. (That's why he's going to say it “ages and ages hence”: because it is really an awesome thing to say!) The poet is fooling around and mocking the utterance of that idea, sure, as is clear from reading the entire poem and as convincingly demonstrated by the historical research in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/493/why-does-robert-frost-contradict-himself-in-the-road-not-taken/499#499&quot;&gt;Rand al-Thor's answer&lt;/a&gt;, but the poet is also on to something more here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphorical application of the poem to a scope beyond forest-navigation is obvious, as the experience is universal: we have all been faced with questions like “which subjects should I study?” “Should I stay at my current job or take the new one?”. And we have responded with reasoning like “I will study [X] because it will fulfill my soul” or “I will stay at my current job because career prospects are better”. But people change, the world changes, and this reasoning may turn out to be rubbish. We are left rationalizing the choices we did make, or overstating their significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is life. We are faced with choices; we hesitate and waver; we consider one option and then the other; we pick somewhat randomly for reasons that seem good at the time; we know these reasons don't always hold water; we may tell ourselves we can still try the other one and only sometimes admit to ourselves that the decision may be irrevocable; we later muse/wonder about having taken the other choice (&lt;em&gt;The Road Not Taken&lt;/em&gt;); we make peace by telling grand stories about how our choice was the right one (or sorrow by telling how our choice was the bad one). So the last lines may be an act, but the propensity to put on such an act is very real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly without intending it, Frost has created a masterpiece that succinctly captures all of this in 20 memorable lines (with rhyme and metre), with the images of a “yellow wood” to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having understood all this about human nature though, one arrives at a maturity that goes back to the point Frost was trying to make to his friend Edward Thomas (again, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/493/why-does-robert-frost-contradict-himself-in-the-road-not-taken/499#499&quot;&gt;Rand al-Thor's answer&lt;/a&gt;): no matter which choice we make, we'll go through the same sequence of emotions anyway. It's just two roads in a wood; the choice doesn't matter. Quit agonizing so much, pick one and keep moving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of comments based on other Frost poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is not the only Frost quote that is loved by people even though the context of the poem is against it. Many people attribute “Good fences make good neighbors” to Frost or his poem &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mending Wall&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, even though in the poem the narrator is speaking against someone who utters that proverb mindlessly. (Here too, the distinction between someone who says something and means it, and the poet thinking about the act of saying it.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a sense, Frost's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44263&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fire And Ice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is also a similar consideration-reconsideration, which you could call “contradicting himself”: picking one option and then saying the other will do too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T22:19:16.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2017-03-10T22:28:19.503" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an author has an intention, and other people are interpreting it differently, then perhaps the author &lt;em&gt;deserves&lt;/em&gt; to lose control of the meaning of the work, because they've failed at their mission ... or perhaps inadvertently explored their subconscious more than they realized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't think of a literary example, the best overall I can think of would be &lt;em&gt;Apocalypse Now&lt;/em&gt;, which was written by a warmonger right-winger, and is perceived by most on both sides of the aisle to be the exact opposite of what he embodied. I believe rightfully so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe there are exceptions to that. Nabokov never deserved to lose control of the meaning of &lt;em&gt;Lolita&lt;/em&gt; because the people condemning it were reactionary philistines who didn't bother to read it. The libertarians perceiving &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; to be anti-government propaganda are over-eagerly projecting their desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm not saying that the meaning of a book is completely fungible, but if the bulk of the audience that a work is &lt;em&gt;aimed at&lt;/em&gt; is interpreting it in a certain way that differs from the author, then there are good reasons, and the author lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know that type of person who'll just insult someone, and then everyone goes silent, and then that person laughs and says 'It was a joke! Why's everyone being such a stick in the mud!' You don't keep getting the benefit of the doubt, if you're bad at communicating &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt; to others then you (rightfully) lose the power to tell other people how to feel about what you're producing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1024" LastActivityDate="2017-03-10T22:28:19.503" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="43" CreationDate="2017-03-10T23:35:35.250" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Denner resin comes from the sap of denner trees, and addicts ('sweet-eaters') will go to great lengths to eat it. It usually turns their teeth white, as it does for a girl whom Kvothe sees dance naked on the snow as part of a deal she made to get some. It is addictive and triggers euphoria for a time, but it has nasty side effects like numbness, delirium, and disorientation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are reasons to doubt that a) Denna symbolises/personifies denner resin, and b) that Denna is a physical manifestation of denner resin. Certainly, Kvothe's narration is imperfect, such as the time he downplayed the incident when he was arrested in book two, but there's a limit to how far Rothfuss could take an extended metaphor before the reader stops taking Kvothe's story seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe is too damn clever to take a drug like denner resin. Look at what Abenthy, an &lt;em&gt;arcanist&lt;/em&gt;, said about him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;hardly ever makes mistakes. I'll bet he knows every song you've ever sung to him. He knows more about what's in my wagon than I do. [...] It's not just memorisation though. He understands. Half the things I've been meaning to show him he's already figured out for himself. Have you ever known a boy his age who talks the way he does?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In book two, Elxa Dal is similarly impressed at Kvothe's ability given his age, expressing surprise that he is &quot;already a re'lar&quot; at 17 (although Kvothe is actually 16). This is because Kvothe's knowledge massively surpasses both his age and his time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Within a span I could identify any chemical in his cart. In two months I could distill liquor until it was too strong to drink, bandage a wound, set a bone, and diagnose hundreds of sicknesses from symptoms. I knew the process for making  four different aphrodisiacs, three concoctions for contraception, nine for impotence, and two philtres referred to simply as 'maiden's helper'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are told that Abenthy's main interest is chemistry, so Kvothe knows a lot about ailments and remedies, and poisons...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he [Trapis] spoke he absentmindedly crossed his legs and began to rub one of his bare feet. &lt;em&gt;Inefficient circulation,&lt;/em&gt; a long-unused part of me thought. &lt;em&gt;Increased risk of infection and considerable discomfort. Feet and legs should be raised, massaged, and swabbed in a warm infusion of willow bark, camphor, and arrrowfoot&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was during Kvothe's time in Tarbean, where he spent three years on the streets. Considering he still remembers the things he's learnt, it's likely that he understands the full side-effects of the poisonous denner resin, so it's not plausible that he would become addicted. Kvothe also had an advantageous upbringing. Abenthy describes him as 'living in such an enlightened atmosphere', which is not the sort of place where you find drug addicts. Look at the unfavourable way in which Kvothe describes the so-called 'sweet-eaters' (as opposed to the pleasant way he describes Denna, see below):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I learned to run from anyone with an unnaturally white smile. [...] Tarbean is full of dangerous people, but none as dangerous as a sweet-eater filled with a desperate craving for more resin. They will kill you for a pair of pennies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Kvothe only just manages to scrape a living in Tarbean. He could not have been such a good pickpocket if he had been eating expensive drugs, and considering how impressed he is with a low-value coin, he needed all the money he could get. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I gaped. A silver penny was worth ten copper pennies, or fifty iron ones. More than that, it was worth a full belly every night for a month. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Through dangerous trial and error I discovered the proper way to slit a purse and pick a pocket. I was especially good at the latter. Locks and latches of all kinds soon gave up their secrets to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not only that obtaining denner resin would have made him poor in the first place, but the side-effects of eating it would hinder his ability to escape the brutal guards inside Tarbean. As it is, Kvothe survives against the odds because of his unnatural wit and sensitivity, which he would not have if he had been insensible as a result of taking drugs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone was watching me. On the street you either develop a sensitivity to certain things, or your life is miserable and short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, Kvothe's intelligence is offset by the sheer stress he suffers throughout the trilogy. His family was murdered, he's in debt with a gaelet, and a really rich guy &lt;em&gt;hates&lt;/em&gt; him. But think of it this way: would Kvothe be more likely to be daunted / putt off denner resin if he knew all about it, or if he had no idea what it could do?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe is too good at the lute to be a drug addict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could play for hours upon hours [...] I began to play something other than songs. When the sun warms the grass and the breeze cools you, it feels a certain way. I would play until I got the feeling right. I would play until it sounded like Warm Grass and Cool Breeze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe also wins his silver talents at the Eolian for his grand performance of 'The Lay of Sir Savian Trailard'.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Denna changes her name habitually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dianne, Denna, Dinnah, Dyanae, Dinael, Dinay, Dianah, Donna, Dyane and Alora.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because Kvothe first knows her as 'Denna', it doesn't mean that that it important enough to be taken as a literal play-on-words for denner resin. She herself dismisses the name 'Denna':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Denna', she said softly. 'I'd almost forgotten her. She was a silly girl.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Denna affects her surroundings too much to be a figment of Kvothe's tweaked storytelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Roent's wife, Reta, sat in front of that wagon. Her mien wavered from severe, when she watched the men loading the wagons, to smiling when she spoke to the girl [Denna] standing nearby. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Bast held up his hands defensively. 'It's just something I noticed, Reshi. All the women in your story are beautiful. I can't gainsay you as a whole, as I've never seen any of them. But this one [Denna] I did see. Her nose was a little crooked.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] 'Here we all are.' Sovoy smiled at me as he walked over and put his arm casually around Denna's waist. [...] Together, they turned and walked arm in arm back to their table. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Three more days and five more fruitless trips to Imre. Neither Deoch nor Threpe had heard any news of her. Deoch told me that it was her nature to disappear like this, and that looking for her would serve about as much purpose as calling for a cat. I knew it to be good advice, and I ignored it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] We were almost out when the man behind the bar called out. [...] 'That your cousin [Denna] then?' he asked. 'Has the constable said she could go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;Denna:&lt;/em&gt; 'an older gentleman introduced himself to me. [...] If things continue smoothly, I think he'll be my patron before the year is out.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] I was about to explain things to her when Denna gestured to a man standing behind her. [...] 'Kvothe, this is Lenthoren.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;Simmon:&lt;/em&gt; 'I talked with Sovoy. He's still not over her [Denna]. He really loved her, you know.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Denna isn't a real person, then the people apart from Kvothe whom she affects are either made up, which would be extreme and contrived, or many scenarios are conjured up merely to accommodate her, which would undermine the point of Kvothe's narration. However, this particular factor only discounts the idea that Denna is fake, not the idea that Denna is as bad as denner resin.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Denna is characterised to fully to be fake/ a negative force like denner resin, worthy of being ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I had pneumonia when I was just a tiny baby [...] That's why my lungs aren't good. It's horrible not being able to breathe sometimes.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Denna was a made-up character to hint at Kvothe having a drug addiction, or she was a negative force like denner resin, it's not plausible that she would have been given a backstory that invokes the reader's sympathy. Consider her following descriptions. They sound sincere, as if Kvothe really is romantically interested in Denna, and she likes him back at least a little bit. It would be misleading if Rothfuss had intended Denna to be as detrimental a force as denner resin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She smiled at me then. It was warm and sweet and shy, like a flower unfurling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] This time as I sang it I looked out into the audience, hoping at the end I would hear a voice answering my own. [...] Then a voice drifted onto the stage, gentle as a brushing feather, singing [...] She sang as Aloine; I as Savien. Part of me wanted to search the audience for her, to find the face of the woman I was singing with. [...] Distracted, I touched a wrong note and there was a burr in the music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Then I heard a voice, a voice like burning silver, like a kiss against my ears. Looking up, my heart lifted and I knew it was my Aloine. Looking up, I saw her and all I could think was, beautiful. Beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;Denna:&lt;/em&gt; 'You remind me of a Willow', she said easily. 'Strong, deep-rooted, and hidden. You move easily when the storm comes, but never farther than you wish.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] I sat there in the dark, holding her sleeping body in my arms. She was soft and warm, indispensably precious. I had never held a woman before.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] But tonight she was wearing a dark green dress that left her shoulders bare. She was stunning. She knew it. She smiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They even speculate about her patron, who is confirmed by the Cthaeh in book two to be beating her. Firstly, the fact that the all-knowing Cthaeh acknowledges Denna's existence discounts one of the theories that Denna is made up. Secondly, if she &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; made up/ just a symbol of denner resin, then her patron would have to be made up too. It's unlikely that Rothfuss would have created a whole character to accommodate a false character/ a purely symbolic character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that I looked more closely, I noticed that she had a bruise on one temple in addition to the bandage on her arm. [See above for the mention of her patron]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denna is treated like a real human. She eats sociably and even saves Kvothe's life, despite that these things undermine the idea that she is a negative drug/ a false character, making it implausible that Rothfuss should have put in the following scenes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Denna and I had the opportunity to eat some lunch of our own. Just some flatbread, sausage, and the rest of my carrots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] My hands gripped at the top of the arch, but couldn't find any purchase. Denna caught me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denna is also observant in such a way that a negative / fake character would have no need to be, pointing things out to the protagonist (sometimes before he notices them) in a way is either affectionate or helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Did you know that when you're angry your eyes [...] I thought I was imagining it before [...] but your eyes really do change colour.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe says that she is the only one to have noticed this, apart from Abenthy who is sharp-witted by virtue of being an arcanist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Straight after Kvothe nearly dies by losing his grip on a cliff] 'Oh!', she gasped, her hands going to her mouth, 'Your beautiful hands!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the same could be said even if Denna &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a negative influence on Kvothe, but I think she shows too much forthright compassion to be seen as such. It is unlikely that she is a symbol of addiction for the same reason (because a drug addiction wouldn't save his life like Denna).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Denna is too smart (in a positive way) to be a symbol for denner resin / a negative force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denna has a high level of intuitive intelligence, allowing her to suggest a plan when they're in danger: lure the draccus off a cliff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Do you think that would hurt it?' I asked dubiously. 'Well', Denna said, 'when you flick an ant off the table it doesn't get hurt even though for an ant that has to be like dropping off a cliff. But if one of us jumped off a roof, we'd get hurt because we're heavier. It makes sense that bigger things fall even harder.' She gave a pointed look at the draccus. 'You don't get much bigger than that.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was right, of course. She was talking about the square-cube ratio, though she didn't know what to call it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Denna eats denner resin by mistake, and that would either make no sense or be very contrived if the theory the she &lt;em&gt;symbolises&lt;/em&gt; denner resin were true. However, this has nothing to do with the theory that Denna is a negative force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe is concerned about the resin she has eaten, implying that he would have no intention of consuming it himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had pried a large disk of sticky material out of the bottom of one of the pans and taken a bite out of it. [...] 'What's ophalum?' she asked softly. 'A drug. Those are denner trees. You just had a whole mouthful of denner resin.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;em&gt;Denna:&lt;/em&gt;  'I suddenly feel really good.' [...] 'It's the resin', I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] 'I want to get you back to Trebon', I said. 'Just in case you ate more resin than is good for you. I wouldn't trust any doctor living there, but they probably have some medicines I could use. Just in case.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] I was no longer worried about her overdosing. After gathering a small mountain of firewood, her mania was fading, leaving in her in a content, almost dreamy legarthy. Still, I knew the after-effects of the drug would leave her exhausted and weak. I wanted her safely in bead in Trebon for her recovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe is careful when approaching her, and when speaking of her. She seems far more sophisticated / complex than a drug. Everyone knows that drugs feel good at the time, but has bad side-effects, end of story. Denna is far more baffling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As with all truly wild things, care is necessary in approaching them. [...] With slow care rather than stealth we must approach the subject of a certain woman [...] I fear approaching her too quickly even in a story. Should I move recklessly, I startle the very idea of her into sudden flight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe gets angry when Chronicler records his attempts to summarise Denna, despite not indicating otherwise. Drugs is not a topic you would skirt around in such a squeamish, touchy fashion. Drugs are drugs. A victim of drugs would not want to drag it out. The sooner they are covered by the narrator, the better (from the narrator's perspective). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Her lips were always red, morning and night. As if minutes before you saw her, she had been eating sweet berries, or drinking heart's blood. [...] What good can come of this? How can I make any sense of her for you when I have never understood the least part of her myself?' / Chronicler had written most of this out before he realised that Kvothe had probably not intended him to. [...] Kvothe's eyes caught and held him. They were the same dark eyes that cronicler had seen before. Eyes like an angry God's. [...] Kvothe tore the half-written sheet with slow care, the sound bleeding he colour from Chronicler's face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe treads carefully with Denna, as if she is delicate (unlike a euphemism for drugs), and as if her nature is unpredictable, unlike drugs, whose effects are continuous and predictable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I knew the truth: I would never see her again. But here she was, and I was entirely unprepared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What next&gt; A kiss on the hand was traditional, but what sort of kiss was appropriate? In Atur you merely nod over the hand. Cealdish ladies like the moneylender's daughter I had chatted with earlier expected you to brush the knuckles lightly and make a kissing sound. In Modeg [...]... I pressed my lips gently to the back of her hand for the space of time it takes to draw a quick breath. Her skin was warm and smelled vaguely of heather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] We talked through the long hours of night. [...] It was like we were doing one of those elaborate Modegan court dances, where the partners stand inches apart, but - if they are skilled - never touch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] I should have been bolder and kissed her at the end. I should have been more cautious. I had talked to much. I had said too little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point also does not discount the idea that Denna is a negative force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kvothe has too much restraint and willpower to take drugs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In book two, Threpe voices his surprise that the Maer rewarded Kvothe by paying for his tuition, because many of Kvothe's favours to the Maer were unsung. In reality, Kvothe had saved the Maer's life, won him a wife, and cleared his lands of bandits, so he arguably deserved much more. However, he manages not to admit the more dubious of these deeds as they are not socially appropriate. Such moral restraint is uncharacteristic of a drug addict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in book two, Kvothe gets annoyed with Denna's song which she composes herself and plays on a harp because it throws the Chandrian (who killed his family) in a positive light. Rather than excusing his aggressive reaction with the real reason he hates the Chandrian, he manages to restrain himself because he knows that most people view the belief in the Chandrian as childish, and that telling Denna of the Chandrian's existence could get her killed. This similarly shows restraint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the fact that Kvothe is a musician tells us that songs are a vivid event for him. Since he respects music so much, it is unlikely that he would have praised Denna's harp-playing music to the extent he does if she wasn't real / primarily symbolised a drug addiction. He also respects women as women are kind to him, so it is unreasonable to think that he would have personified a drug addiction in his story using a beautiful woman, or that Denna is a negative force like denner resin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally, Kvothe shows that he has great willpower when he painfully sets his own nose moments after he realises it it broken, at the age of 12.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My vision was blurry and my nose felt larger than the rest of my head. I prodded it delicately. Broken. Remembering what Ben had taught me, I put one hand on each side and twisted it sharply back into place. I clenched my teeth against a cry of pain, and my eyes filled with tears. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, I think that all the Denna/denner-resin theories are unlikely. Congratulations on reaching the end of this answer!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="922" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T20:56:13.960" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T20:56:13.960" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-10T23:55:14.650" Score="12" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stephenie Meyer's four-book Twilight series has an unofficial and lesser-known companion novel, &lt;em&gt;Midnight Sun&lt;/em&gt;, which retells the story of the first novel &lt;em&gt;Twilight&lt;/em&gt; from Edward's point of view instead of Bella's. Meyer never completed this book, but a draft version was leaked on the internet and has since been made freely available on Meyer's website. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_(novel_series)#Other_books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the reason Meyer never finished this project was due to her own change of heart about the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn't dovetail too well with the original story. In any case, I feel too sad about what has happened to continue working on Midnight Sun, and so it is on hold indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear from this quote exactly how and why Meyer's attitude changed, but clear that it did. Authorial intent aside, however, I'm curious about how, if at all, this change in attitude comes across in the actual text - whether it could be guessed or deduced at all from a close reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there differences in tone between &lt;em&gt;Twilight&lt;/em&gt; and (the published part of) &lt;em&gt;Midnight Sun&lt;/em&gt; which correspond to the author's change of heart about the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, does the text of &lt;em&gt;Midnight Sun&lt;/em&gt; differ in its portrayal of the Cullens, or any other characters, from the text of &lt;em&gt;Twilight&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T17:05:30.323" Title="What differences in attitude can be seen in the text of Twilight and Midnight Sun?" Tags="&lt;stephenie-meyer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2039" CreationDate="2017-03-11T09:36:35.243" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no change when looking at the draft.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sequence of events is:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It was an interrupted project laying about&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mtv.com/news/2559148/stephenie-meyer-midnight-sun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which got leaked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It wasn't something that I was in the middle of working on,&amp;quot; she explained. &amp;quot;It was a project that I had been doing before.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the author found out she was understandably upset and decided to make available the rough draft &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;as is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/midnight-sun-interrupted-by-fifty-shades-of-grey-spinoff-2015-10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She explained how unhappy she had felt about the work after the leak, and how her plan was to just shelve it entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Stephenie Meyer's website&lt;a href=&quot;http://stepheniemeyer.com/2008/08/midnight-sun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first feeling was that there was no way to continue.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It has taken me a while to decide how and if I could respond. But to end the confusion, I’ve decided to make the draft available&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that she, for a variety of reasons, never did get back into the story&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/stephenie-meyer-talks-twilights-10th-833037&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The movies, and the general large ownership of the story changed my relationship to the story. It made it hard for me to write in that world, and that’s why I couldn’t do Midnight Sun, because the characters had gotten away from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until recently:&#xA;There are some more paragraphs but they are unpublished and again on hold indefinitely. The story appears to be jinxed&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hypable.com/stephenie-meyer-life-and-death-jacob-renesmee-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; You said last week at New York Comic Con that E.L. James’ Grey put pause on Midnight Sun.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Q:&lt;/strong&gt; Will you tell me — you said you wrote a couple of paragraphs — what those paragraphs were?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SM:&lt;/strong&gt; It was the day that Edward leaves school early right before the weekend with the meadow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So if and when the story really gets published, it is safe to assume there will be numerous changes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But there should be no effect like killing off protagonists. That was just a temporary emotion&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/stephenie-meyer-talks-twilights-10th-833037&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt; due to the leak and has nothing to do with the story itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the leak happened, which was not a big deal in retrospect, but at the time it made me so paranoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mtv.com/news/2559148/stephenie-meyer-midnight-sun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.mtv.com/news/2559148/stephenie-meyer-midnight-sun/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.businessinsider.com/midnight-sun-interrupted-by-fifty-shades-of-grey-spinoff-2015-10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.businessinsider.com/midnight-sun-interrupted-by-fifty-shades-of-grey-spinoff-2015-10&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://stepheniemeyer.com/2008/08/midnight-sun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stepheniemeyer.com/2008/08/midnight-sun/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/stephenie-meyer-talks-twilights-10th-833037&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/stephenie-meyer-talks-twilights-10th-833037&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hypable.com/stephenie-meyer-life-and-death-jacob-renesmee-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.hypable.com/stephenie-meyer-life-and-death-jacob-renesmee-interview/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more background &amp;amp; tidbits:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stepheniemeyer.com/project/midnight-sun/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stepheniemeyer.com/project/midnight-sun/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://stepheniemeyer.com/2009/11/new-moon-qa-with-stephenie/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://stepheniemeyer.com/2009/11/new-moon-qa-with-stephenie/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T17:05:30.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2041" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T13:54:20.633" Score="9" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 19th century fiction, there are a lot of references to moneylenders as &quot;Jews&quot;.  For example, in &quot;Framley Parsonage&quot;, by Anthony Trollope, Lord Lufton says &quot;the pocket-books of the Jews are stuffed full of his dishonoured papers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of these references? Would 19th century readers have assumed that the moneylenders were all Jewish, or would they have taken this for a careless reference to moneylenders in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T10:50:46.370" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T10:50:46.370" Title="Why are there so many references to Moneylenders and Jews in 19th century fiction?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2041" CreationDate="2017-03-11T20:04:03.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;At the time, there were many Jewish bankers/moneylenders, so moneylenders were probably often portrayed as Jews.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a very long time, the Jews have been associated with banking and money. There are a few reasons, such as that there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; a lot of Jewish bankers after the 11th century. In &lt;em&gt;The Encyclopedia Judaica&lt;/em&gt;, in their article on Banking and Bankers, in the section on Europe, they say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the First Crusade, (1096) the Jewish merchant, in his necessarily long journeys, no longer enjoyed even minimal physical security. In Western and Central Europe, especially in Spain, the crystallization of the essentially Christian nature of the rising city communes combined with this insecurity to drive out the Jews from commerce and prohibit them from engaging in crafts. In France, England (up to 1290), Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and northern and central Italy, &lt;strong&gt;Jews had to turn to loan-baking on a larger or smaller scale to make a living.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So already in the 11th century, the Jews were turning to money lending. It continued...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the 13th century the notion that the &lt;em&gt;Wucherer&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;usurer&amp;quot;) was a Jew was already current, for example, in the writings of Berthold of Regensburg, Walther von dee Vogelweide, and Ulrich von Lichtenstein. The word &lt;em&gt;judaizare&lt;/em&gt; became identical with &amp;quot;taking interest&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moneychanging and coinage privileges were often combined with moneylending, and Jews were frequently the sole agents arranging loans...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on to describe more about the centuries afterwards, but let it suffice to say that there were many Jewish bankers. Let's skip to the section on &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;19th and 20th centuries&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article describes many well-known Jewish bankers, such as the Rothschilds, the Mendelssohns, and the Bleichröeders. These families all made large loans at times, and were fairly famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of those families have Wikipedia articles, as well as articles in the Encyclopedia. I'll quote from the beginning of the Wikipedia articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothschild_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rothschild&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the 19th century, the Rothschild family possessed the &lt;strong&gt;largest private fortune in the world&lt;/strong&gt;, as well as the largest private fortune in modern world history. The family's wealth was divided among various descendants and today their interests cover a diverse range of fields, including financial services, real estate, mining, energy, mixed farming, winemaking and nonprofits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelssohn_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mendelssohn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1795 the eldest son Joseph Mendelssohn established the bank Mendelssohn &amp;amp; Co. in Berlin, and his brother Abraham joined the company in 1804. Many members of the family worked for the bank until it was forced to shut down in 1938.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerson_von_Bleichr%C3%B6der&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bleichröeder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bleichröder was born in Berlin. He was the eldest son of Samuel Bleichröder, who founded the banking firm of S. Bleichröder in 1803 in Berlin. Gerson first joined the family business in 1839. In 1855 upon the death of his father, Gerson became the head of the banking firm. The bank maintained close contacts with the Rothschild family; the banking house of Bleichröder acted as a branch office in Berlin of the Rothschilds' bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an article in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00JKF0HLS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Medieval Jewish Civilization: An Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, reprinted online at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jewish-moneylending/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;myjewishlearning.com&lt;/a&gt;, they say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, however, the potential of great profits and the widespread demand for moneylending made it universal among Jews. Mordecai B. Hillel of Germany (b. 1298) wrote that there is no profit in any form of commerce like that to be made in lending money. Ibn Adret in Spain observed that it has become permitted for everyone to charge interest on loans to Gentiles, “and now all have made themselves ‘sages’ in this respect, adding that he heard in the name of Rashi, that this is because taxes have constantly been increased and there is no longer any limit to “because of livelihood” (i.e. in order to meet their tax burden, Jews had no alternative.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we see above, after they started the moneylending, they continued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot ignore the influence of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/william-shakespeare&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;william-shakespeare&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;william-shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;. In it, a Jew named Shylock is a moneylender who wants to 'take a pound of flesh' as payment. (There were actually no Jews in England at the time of the writing of this play, as they were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expelled  in 1290 and didn't return until 1657&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; was apparently written between 1596 and 1599.) As the play has been regarded as the play in which Shakespeare 'found himself the most' (source: &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia Judaica&lt;/em&gt;'s article on Shakespeare), it was fairly well read. So a lot of people had this idea that Jews were moneylenders while there weren't even any Jews there, and people held that in mind for a while, and then it gained more credibility when the Rothschilds and the other bankers came on the scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-11T21:07:57.227" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-11T20:50:28.183" Score="4" ViewCount="977" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Philip Pullman's novel &lt;em&gt;The Amber Spyglass&lt;/em&gt;, we're told that the Consistorial Court has developed doctrines of &amp;quot;preemptive penance and absolution&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Father President,&amp;quot; said Father Gomez at once, &amp;quot;I have done preemptive penance every day of my adult life. I have studies, I have trained--&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The President held up his hand. Preemptive penance and absolution were doctrines researched and developed by the Consistorial Court, but not known to the wider Church. They involved doing penance for a sin not yet committed, intense and fervent penance accompanied by scourging and flagellation, so as to build up, as it were, a store of credit. When the penance had reached the appropriate level for a particular sin, the penitent was granted absolution in advance, though he might never be called on to commit the sin. It was sometimes necessary to kill people, for example; and it was so much less troubling for the assassin if he could do so in a state of grace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions about these doctrines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is this a reference to a real-life doctrine in a real-life religion? Are these doctrines compatible with real-world Christianity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the fact that these doctrines exist tell us about the Consistorial Court and the &amp;quot;wider Church&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T18:37:49.933" Title="Understanding preemptive penance and absolution" Tags="&lt;the-amber-spyglass&gt;&lt;philip-pullman&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2060" CreationDate="2017-03-12T01:23:31.953" Score="7" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, Neil Gaiman's understanding of mythology and literature is exceptionally profound, and he is able to render stories with mythological resonance surpassing the work of most of his contemporaries, particularly in the groundbreaking &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)#Reception_and_legacy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sandman series&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His choice of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morpheus comes from Ovid&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm wondering if Heine's famous poem &quot;Morphine&quot; was an influence also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might just be coincidence in the rendering of two great artists, but where I didn't discover &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heine&lt;/a&gt; until later in life, Gaiman strikes me as someone who probably read him in high school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A notable element of the Sandman character is his perpetual, existential angst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s a mirror likeness between the two&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bright, youthfully-shaped figures, though&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One’s paler than the other and more austere,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I might even say more perfect, more distinguished,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than the one who’d take me confidingly in his arms –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How soft then, loving, his smile, how blessed his glance!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then it might well have been, that his wreath&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of white poppies touched my forehead, at times,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Drove the pain from my mind with its strange scent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But all that’s transient. I can only, now, be well, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the other one, so serious and pale,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The older brother, lowers his dark torch. –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sleep is good: and Death is better, yet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Surely never to have been born is best.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;[Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Morphine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allpoetry.com]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:13:07.057" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:13:07.057" Title="Was Neil Gaiman influenced by Heinrich Heine?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;morphine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2041" CreationDate="2017-03-12T01:37:57.693" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry to be brief, I'm writing this on a phone (more to follow later). Short answer: for a long time, usury rules generally forbade Catholics from lending money at interest to other Catholics. Similarly, Jews generally couldn't charge interest to Jews, but they &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; lend money to Christians at interest. (Both were basing the prohibition on a number of Biblical passages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prohibition lead to Jews becoming bankers for the primary reason that they were allowed to lend money at interest, and that's where the stereotype came from. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for more information on usury rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another major reason, of course, was economic restrictions placed on them due to widespread racism. For example, for many years they weren't even permitted to join guilds, which would effectively ban them from certain industries. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8032/what-percentage-of-jews-were-in-finance-money-lenders-throughout-middle-ages&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for more details on that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T14:11:53.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T14:11:53.210" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2052" CreationDate="2017-03-12T02:13:54.460" Score="12" ViewCount="1416" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once the characters in &lt;em&gt;No Exit&lt;/em&gt; realized that they were placed there to torment each other, why didn't they refuse to do so? When Joseph says &quot;eh bien, continuons&quot; (&quot;very well, let's get on with it&quot;) at the end, is he implicitly consenting to participate in this? What's the significance of his agreement (or at least lack of refusal) in Sartre's overall philosophy? In the context of the story (and Sartre's philosophy), could the characters &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; have refused and what might have happened if they had?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T05:25:40.583" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T01:10:26.107" Title="Why did the characters in &quot;No Exit&quot; agree to torment each other?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jean-paul-sartre&gt;&lt;no-exit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2017-03-12T03:05:02.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pullman is specifically attacking the Roman Catholic Church (although I don't think that he has any truck with other religions or branches of Christianity). Remember that in the Dark Materials novels, the Reformation never happened, so the Catholic Church reigned supreme, at least in Western Christendom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know very little about Catholic doctrine, and my outlook may be distorted by my Protestant upbringing, so I need to tread carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea behind penance and indulgences seems to be that you can earn time off from Purgatory by performing penances and/or obtaining indulgences from the Church. Purgatory is a place where believers go to atone for sins committed during their lifetimes before they can be admitted into Heaven. Indulgences are granted by the Church, and can be either partial or plenary. A plenary indulgence wipes out all time served in purgatory for a &lt;strong&gt;particular&lt;/strong&gt; sin (not all sins), whilst a partial indulgence wipes out only part of the time spent there. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catholic.org/prayers/indulgc.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to Indulgences&lt;/a&gt;. This is still part of official Catholic doctrine, although I don't think that indulgences are issued today, and it would cause a good deal of controversy if they were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if you don't believe in Purgatory, then this is all a load of &lt;em&gt;dingo's kidneys&lt;/em&gt;, as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would put it. As an aside, Protestants see no need for Purgatory, since they believe that full atonement for all believers' sins (i.e., all sins of all believers) was obtained by Christ when he was crucified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of obtaining forgiveness (absolution) for sins not yet committed (a so-called plenary indulgence) harks back to the Crusades. In &lt;em&gt;The DaVinci Code&lt;/em&gt;, Dan Brown suggests that plenary indulgences were granted in advance for &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; sins committed by anyone who joined the Crusades (with certain exceptions, such as for heresy). The truth of this seems to be rather doubtful, and I certainly cannot vouch for it. The idea of performing penance in advance may well be an invention of Pullman (or other writers), and no part of Catholic doctrine either now or in the past, although I can see the appeal of it to someone with a legalistic frame of mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Consistorial Court seems to be pure invention by Pullman. There were (and still are) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consistory_court&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Consistory Courts&lt;/a&gt;, but their remit seems to be rather mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, modern Protestants view a lot of Catholic doctrine as legalistic and rather mechanical (i.e., do X and Y will happen). Pullman milks this for all it is worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T03:28:18.267" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T03:28:18.267" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2048" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:28:42.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T05:28:42.730" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T05:28:42.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2049" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:28:42.730" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;No Exit&quot; by Jean-Paul Sartre. Use with the [Jean-Paul-Sartre] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T13:02:35.580" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T13:02:35.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2050" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:30:09.123" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-12T05:30:09.123" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T05:30:09.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2051" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-12T05:30:09.123" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French novelist, playwright and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) or his life as a writer. Questions about his philosophy should usually be asked on Philosophy Stack Exchange unless they pertain to understanding an aspect of one of his literary works. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:18:11.337" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:18:11.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2017-03-12T12:41:31.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that the realization that the characters are their own tormentors is made clear quite early in the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INEZ: It's obvious what they're after— an economy of man-power— or&#xA;  devil-power, if you  prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where&#xA;  customers serve themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ESTELLE: Whatever do you mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INEZ: I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And their immediate reaction is, indeed, to refuse to participate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GARCIN: No, I shall never be your torturer. I wish neither of you any harm, and I've no concern with you. None at all. So the solution's easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest of the play, the characters are trying &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to torment each other -- by ignoring each other, by trying to comfort one another, by laying bare their secrets. But always, there is &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; that keeps them from being able to hold their peace, that keeps them interacting and orbiting one round the other. Even if it's something so trivial as a burning desire for a looking glass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important implication made throughout the play is that these three characters were put together deliberately, precisely &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; this exact combination would be so self-perpetuating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ESTELLE:  ...But why, why should we of all people be put together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GARCIN: A pure fluke, I should say. They lodge folks as they can, in the order of their coming. Why are you laughing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INEZ: Because you amuse me with your &quot;flukes. &quot;As if they left anything to chance! But I suppose you've got to reassure yourself somehow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ESTELLE: So it was all fixed up beforehand? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INEZ: Yes. And they've put us together deliberately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INEZ: I know. And you're another trap. Do you think they haven't foreknown every word you say? And of course there's a whole nest of pitfalls that we can't see. Everything here's a booby-trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that the combination, the premise, is contrived rather than happenstance. Not &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; three individuals would torment each other eternally, not even &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; three damned sinners. &lt;strong&gt;But &lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; three were specially picked and matched to each other because they &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; torment each other forever, and would be incapable of stopping themselves, even as they recognize what they are doing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-03-12T12:41:31.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2046" CreationDate="2017-03-12T12:55:50.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Sartre himself, they could have refused. In the many time misquoted &quot;&lt;em&gt;L'enfer, c'est les autres&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&quot;Hell is other people&quot;), Sartre made it clear that he did not imply people would always torture each other, but rather, that flawed relationship would always push people to hell, as there was nothing more important to us that the view of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, the reason why the characters end up torturing each other would be that their relationships are flawed, at least according to the &lt;em&gt;Comments on Huis Clos&lt;/em&gt;, 1964 that I reproduce here (translation is mine, if you find a more satisfactory one I would be please to edit it in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“ Hell is others ” has always been misunderstood. It was thought that I wanted to infer that our relationships with others was always flawed, that they were infernal relationships. But, it was something totally different I want to say. I want to say that if our relationships with someone else are twisted, vicious, then the other is but hell. Why? Because others are, in the end, what matters most for ourselves, for our own understanding of who we are. When we reflect on ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, ultimately we use the knowledge others have gathered on us, we use the means others have used, have given us the possibility to use upon ourselves. Whatever I might say of myself, the judgement of the other is present in my speech. This implies that, if my relationships are flawed, I am putting myself at the hand of others and in this case, I am in hell. And there are a great many number of people in the world that are in hell because they depend too much on the judgement of others. But this doesn't mean at all that we cannot have relationships with others, it only marks the fundamental importance of each other on each of us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Sartre, Commentaire sur le CD Huis Clos, 1964&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="255" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T01:10:26.107" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T01:10:26.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2059" CreationDate="2017-03-12T22:13:32.517" Score="8" ViewCount="10992" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically the last lines of the Wasteland:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shantih shantih shantih&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[The Wasteland]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was written in 1922, and the invocation can be taken as a response to the horrors of the first World War, but I'm interested in the mythological context, and wonder what insight may be found in the specific text Eliot was referencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T20:32:37.077" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T20:32:37.077" Title="Which Upanishad is TS Eliot referencing with &quot;Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.&quot; and why?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5157" CreationDate="2017-03-13T00:21:36.530" Score="14" ViewCount="13830" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning and turning in the widening gyre&lt;br&gt;The falcon cannot hear the falconer; &lt;br&gt;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;&lt;br&gt; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, &lt;br&gt;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br&gt;   The ceremony of innocence is drowned; &lt;br&gt;The best lack all conviction, while the worst&lt;br&gt;Are full of passionate intensity. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely some revelation is at hand;&lt;br&gt;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.&lt;br&gt;The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out&lt;br&gt;When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi&lt;br&gt;Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert&lt;br&gt;A shape with lion body and the head of a man,&lt;br&gt;A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,&lt;br&gt;Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it&lt;br&gt;Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.&lt;br&gt;The darkness drops again; but now I know&lt;br&gt;That twenty centuries of stony sleep&lt;br&gt;Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,&lt;br&gt;And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,&lt;br&gt;Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats says basically &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; in this poem except what the rough beast it is.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So what's the answer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T22:49:36.037" Title="What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Tags="&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2058" CreationDate="2017-03-13T00:27:27.323" Score="10" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a short story in the early 90s, from a collection dating from the 80s or earlier, which detailed a young man teaching logical fallacies to his female friend.  Later, when he begins to court her, he finds himself rebuffed as she uses the logical fallacies to take apart all of his reasons for loving her.  A fine and frustrating tale!  Does anyone know the author or title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1042" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T15:08:22.897" Title="Which short story describes how a man's teaching logic to his would-be girlfriend backfires?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2017-03-13T03:40:01.140" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surely the point is that we don't know. When a civilization ends, what comes next?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the previous civilization began with a birth in Bethlehem, then whatever comes next symbolically repeats the pattern. But when all we see about us is the fall of the old, how would we know what comes next? And so the question: what rough beast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T11:56:39.610" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T11:56:39.610" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2056" CreationDate="2017-03-13T05:59:09.100" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.jp/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&amp;amp;ion=1&amp;amp;espv=2&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8#q=short%20story%20love%20logical%20fallacy&amp;amp;*&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;short story love logical fallacy&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and got &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.whstigers.org/UserFiles/Servers/Server_4255074/File/Hopper/Love%20Is%20a%20Fallacy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a PDF to &lt;em&gt;Love is a Fallacy&lt;/em&gt; by Max Shulman&lt;/a&gt; as the first result. Quoting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... It is clear that we are well matched.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Hasty Generalization,&quot; said Polly brightly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I beg your pardon,&quot; said I.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Hasty Generalization,&quot; she repeated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;How can you say that we are well matched on the basis of only five dates?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I chuckled with amusement. The dear child had learned her&#xA;  lessons well.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;My dear,&quot; I said, patting her hand in a tolerant manner,&#xA;  &quot;five dates is plenty. After all, you don't have to eat a&#xA;  whole cake to know it's good.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;False Analogy,&quot; said Polly promptly. &quot;I'm not a cake. I'm&#xA;  a girl.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I chuckled with somewhat less amusement. The dear child had&#xA;  learned her lesson perhaps too well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Polly, I love you. You are the whole world to me, and the moon and&#xA;  the stars and the constellations of outer space. Please, my darling,&#xA;  say that you will go steady with me, for if you will not, life will be&#xA;  meaningless. I will languish. I will refuse my meals. I will wander&#xA;  the face of the earth, a shambling, hollow-eyed hulk.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There, I thought, folding my arms, that ought to do it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &quot;Ad Misericordiam,&quot; said Polly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to fit the description quite well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-13T15:08:22.897" LastActivityDate="2017-03-13T15:08:22.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2017-03-13T06:14:08.037" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_V-02.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swami Krishnananda's book on &lt;em&gt;The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This instruction, which was communicated to the Devas, Manushyās and&#xA;  Asuras – gods, men and demons – by the single letter Da repeated three&#xA;  times, meaning &lt;em&gt;Dāmyata, Datta, Dayadhvam&lt;/em&gt; – &lt;strong&gt;be self-controlled, be&#xA;  charitable and be compassionate&lt;/strong&gt;, is applicable to all mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brihadaranyaka_Upanishad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the &lt;em&gt;Brihadaranyaka Upanishad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, chapter 5, second &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmana&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brahmana&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (one of the more recent ones, looking at the dates given in Wikipedia). If you're new to this, know that many tales of Hindu mythology are about the struggles between Asuras and Devas. Swami Krishnananda says Asuras &quot;are extremely cruel in their nature,&quot; &quot;[…] always insult, injure and harm other people,&quot; &quot;[…] are hard-hearted people.&quot; They're the demons, but not all Asuras are necessarily evil. The antagonist of the &lt;em&gt;Ramayana&lt;/em&gt;, Ravan, or the Asura king Mahabali, are considered capable rulers, pious, wise and knowledgeable. However, the constant warring between Asuras and Devas, while good for creating stories, isn't good for the normal people caught underfoot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, in this &lt;em&gt;Brahmana&lt;/em&gt;, Lord Brahma, the Creator in the Hindu Trinity, instructs Devas to show restraint (in enjoying pleasures), Asuras to be compassionate, and mankind to be charitable. Mankind has the qualities of both Asuras and Devas, and so mankind should follow all three instructions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if these three has actually followed these instructions, so many wars could have been averted. If mankind would embrace self-control and compassion, we wouldn't be warring all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shanti&lt;/em&gt; literally means peace, and the triple utterance of &lt;em&gt;shanti&lt;/em&gt; is common (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/6951/om-shanti-shanti-shanti&quot;&gt;this post on the Hinduism Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;), so that by itself is not from a particular Upanishad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:51:17.850" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T03:43:53.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2044" CreationDate="2017-03-13T20:50:57.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;strong&gt;no indication&lt;/strong&gt; in various sources found online &lt;strong&gt;that Gaiman was influenced by Heinrich Heine&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, these are the authors Gaiman said he was influenced by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Michail Bulgakov, &lt;em&gt;Master and Margarita&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I loved it when I read it, yes;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neilgaiman.com/FAQs/Influences&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Gaiman&amp;#39;s website&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary Shelley &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wrote an essay titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/18/my-hero-mary-shelley-neil-gaiman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mary Shelley: My Hero&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (&lt;em&gt;duh&lt;/em&gt;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I came to the conclusion that Lord of the Rings was, most probably, the best book that ever could be written [...] I wanted to write The Lord of the Rings.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/G%20K%20Chesterton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;C. S. Lewis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading — these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader. I would think: “When I am a writer, I shall do parenthetical asides. And footnotes. There will be footnotes. I wonder how you do them? And italics. How do you make italics happen?”&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C. S. Lewis was the first person to make me want to be a writer. He made me aware of the writer, that there was someone standing behind the words, that there was someone telling the story.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/G%20K%20Chesterton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;P[amela] L. Travers  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P. L. (Pamela) Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins books, made me want&#xA;  to tell stories like that. Ones that seemed like they had existed forever, and were&#xA;  true in a way that real things that had actually happened could never be.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;G. K. Chesterton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chesterton was important — as important to me in his way as C.S. Lewis had been.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search/label/G%20K%20Chesterton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight... &lt;sup&gt;ibid&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alan Moore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And [&lt;em&gt;Swamp Thing&lt;/em&gt; #28, written by Moore] was the final straw; what was left of my resistance crumbled. I proceeded to make regular and frequent visits to London's Forbidden Planet shop to buy comics...&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=Jc9MaZrG3j8C&amp;amp;pg=PA18&amp;amp;dq=gaiman%20-%20moore%20-%20friendship&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ei=g-cuTfG1DsexhQeA7tHmCg&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;oi=book_result&amp;amp;ct=result&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;H. P. Lovecraft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The odd thing is that the finest gift from Lovecraft was less the Cthulhupoid stuff and more some amazing pointers at the things that he was influenced by: one of the Granada paperback reprints, Dagon I think, all of which I read when I was eleven or twelve at my grandmother’s house in Southsea, contained his essay on Supernatural Horror in Literature and it was like being handed a road map for where I should be reading and what I should be looking for.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Stephen King&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King’s book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. In there he points out that if you just write a page a day, just 300 words, at the end of a year you’d have a novel. It was immensely reassuring – suddenly something huge and impossible became strangely easy. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;6&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kurt Vonnegut&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who on Earth could read a Vonnegut book and think that he was a grandfatherly bundle of warm fuzzy happiness? I mean, I read Vonnegut first as a ten year old, and it was shocking because he could joke in the face of such blackness and bleakness, and I’d never seen an author do that before. Everything was pointless, except, possibly, a few moments of love snatched from the darkness, a few moments in which we connect, or fail to.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rudyard Kipling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I definitely don’t write like Kipling but he was a literary hero as a kid. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;8&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poe isn’t for everyone. He’s too heady a draught for that. He may not be for you. But there are secrets to appreciating Poe, and I shall let you in on one of the most important ones: read him aloud.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ray Bradbury&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wanted to write about Ray Bradbury. I wanted to write about him in the way that he wrote about Poe in ‘Usher II’ — a way that drove me to Poe.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://flavorwire.com/424609/neil-gaiman-on-the-writers-who-influenced-and-inspired-him/6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Others&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were a handful of other authors who made me want to be a writer.&#xA;  And I think what they all had in common was that they made it look like fun. G. K. Chesterton, who delighted in painting pictures in sentences, like a child let loose with a paint box. &lt;strong&gt;Roger Zelazny&lt;/strong&gt;, who reshaped myth and magic into science fiction. &lt;strong&gt;Harlan Ellison&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Michael Moorcock&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Samuel R. Delany&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Ursula K. Le Guin&lt;/strong&gt; (although she intimidated me) and &lt;strong&gt;Hope Mirrlees&lt;/strong&gt;, who only wrote one good book, “Lud-in-the-Mist.” But if you write a book that good you do not need to do it again.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/neil-gaiman-shares-his-reading-habits.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Did I say short? Must have slipped.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;em&gt;in short&lt;/em&gt;, Gaiman doesn't mention Heine as his influence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the problem is in the premise of your question: &lt;em&gt;Morpheus&lt;/em&gt; is not in the state of &quot;perpetual, existential angst&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first volume &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt; there are some hints that Morpheus is having some sort of existential crisis, but in the end it gets resolved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rvbt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1rvbt.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My sister has a function to perform, even as I do. The Endless have their responsibilities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have responsibilities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I walk by her side, and the darkness lifts from my soul.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I walk with her, and I hear the gentle beating of mighty wings...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xYFqP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xYFqP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is much to do in my kingdom. Much to restore. Much to create.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But that can wait...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have found the solace I sought, though not in the way I imagined.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From dreams I conjure a handful of yellow grain...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I throw the grain into the air.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I hear it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the sound of wings...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;solace&lt;/em&gt; in this case would be the realisation that the purpose of his existence is his duties - and indeed, throughout later volumes he gets into all sorts of trouble precisely because he takes his duties &lt;strong&gt;way too seriously&lt;/strong&gt;. He is the most responsible of all of the Endless, save perhaps Death (why not Destiny? That guy doesn't do anything, he just hangs around with his book!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, his responsibilities is what (spoilers!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; got him killed. If it wasn't for responsibilities, he could've fought the Furies, and possibly even defeated them while in the Dreaming. But taking into account the damage to the Dreaming and the dreamers, he chose to give up his existence to allow the next aspect of Dream to take his place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, no, Morpheus is not in state of existential crisis, and no, Gaiman (for all we know) wasn't influenced by Heine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-14T05:24:17.157" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T05:24:17.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T02:06:58.947" Score="13" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Watch series by Sergei Lukyanenko describes the often bloodless struggle between the Night Watch and the Day Watch. It's a sort of cold war in which each side is only permitted to attack members of the other side if they break the Treaty in some way, this rule being upheld by the Inquisition which stands above both Watches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a great deal of discussion throughout the books of the nature of the Watches and the struggle between them. Anton's - and by extension, the reader's - nuanced perception changes quite a lot during the course of the series. After just having read a long conversation in &lt;em&gt;Twilight Watch&lt;/em&gt; between Anton and Gesar about this, I was struck (not for the first time) by the thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;can the Night and Day Watches be interpreted as some kind of political allegory?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know much about the author's political views, but negativity towards America and the west comes across several times in the text, so perhaps the Watches can be seen as symbolising the two sides in the Cold War? Or perhaps they represent different political factions within Russia? (Again, I know nothing about Russian politics, so this may be a stupid suggestion.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm looking for answers based on &lt;strong&gt;connecting clues from the text to actual facts about politics.&lt;/strong&gt; Authorial-intent answers with &lt;strong&gt;quotes from Lukyanenko&lt;/strong&gt; would also be welcome, but please don't post answers just based on your own political views unless you can back them up with something more concrete. This is a literary question, not a political soapbox.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T23:29:29.357" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T14:47:56.233" Title="Political allegory in Lukyanenko's Watch series?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;night-watch-cycle&gt;&lt;sergei-lukyanenko&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2063" CreationDate="2017-03-14T04:49:17.770" Score="3" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently in the middle of &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/080701429X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Man's Search for Meaning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viktor Frankl&lt;/a&gt;. Twice thus far, he mentioned a manuscript that he brought with him to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auschwitz&lt;/a&gt;, and lost there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he first arrives in camp, and the prisoners' belongings are confiscated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I tried to take one of the old prisoners into my confidence.&#xA;  Approaching him furtively, I pointed to the roll of paper in the inner&#xA;  pocket of my coat and said, &quot;Look, this is the manuscript of a&#xA;  scientific book. I know what you will say; that I should be grateful&#xA;  to escape with my life, that that should be all I can expect of fate.&#xA;  But I cannot help myself. I must keep this manuscript at all costs; it&#xA;  contains my life's work. Do you understand that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Viktor E. Frankl. &lt;em&gt;Man's Search for Meaning&lt;/em&gt;. 1959. Translated by Ilse Lasch, Beacon House, 2006. Part I, p 14&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankl was not able to keep his manuscript. Later, he attempted to reconstruct it from memory while still in the camps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To avoid these attacks of delirium, I tried, as did many of the&#xA;  others, to keep awake for most of the night. For hours I composed&#xA;  speeches in my mind. Eventually I began to reconstruct the manuscript&#xA;  which I had lost in the disinfection chamber of Auschwitz, and&#xA;  scribbled the key words in shorthand on tiny scraps of paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;p 35&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Viktor Frankl ever publish this manuscript? Where can I find it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:44:26.073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:44:26.073" Title="Did Viktor Frankl ever publish his manuscript?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;viktor-frankl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2062" CreationDate="2017-03-14T04:49:17.770" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After writing the question, I Googled around a bit more, and found that the pieces of the manuscript were used to write &lt;em&gt;Man's Search for Meaning&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On his first day, Dr. Frankl was separated from his family; later he&#xA;  and a friend marched in line, and he was directed to the right and his&#xA;  friend was directed to the left -- to a crematory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He took an older prisoner into his confidence and told him about the&#xA;  hidden manuscript: ''Look, this is a scientific book. I must keep it&#xA;  at all costs.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He said the prisoner cursed him for his naivete. They were stripped&#xA;  and sent to showers, and then a work detail. Their own clothes were&#xA;  replaced with prison clothes, and the manuscript was never returned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But late at night in his barracks, he began recreating it in on bits&#xA;  of paper stolen for him by a companion. These notes were later used&#xA;  for ''Man's Search for Meaning.'' In it, he wrote that once the&#xA;  prisoners were entrenched in camp routine, they would descend from a&#xA;  denial of their situation into a stage of apathy and the beginning of&#xA;  a kind of emotional death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/04/world/dr-viktor-e-frankl-of-vienna-psychiatrist-of-the-search-for-meaning-dies-at-92.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Viktor E. Frankl of Vienna, Psychiatrist of the Search for Meaning, Dies at 92&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; New York Times Sept. 4, 1997&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I originally assumed the manuscript had a different thesis, because I thought that Frankl developed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;logotherapy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; his experiences in the camps. It appears that Frankl was working on logotherapy &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; he entered the camps. His inclusion of his experiences in the camps was an emphasis of, rather than a history of, his theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T04:49:17.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T05:48:22.237" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Assassin's Creed&lt;/em&gt; games mostly have a present-day component, where the protagonist's descendent enters the Animus, reliving the protagonist's life. Since this is merely replaying memories, we don't actually affect the past in the game, but, in &lt;em&gt;Assassin's Creed II: Revelations&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; With the power of the Piece of Eden, Ezio the ancestor communicates with Desmond the descendent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from the AC novels I have read (the first five to be published, IIRC), there is no mention at all of present day events. I don't recall how exactly the event in the spoiler block happened in the corresponding book, but Desmond Miles makes no appearance, of that I am sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why aren't the present day events and characters part of the AC books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:58:45.327" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T13:58:45.327" Title="Why don't the Assassin's Creed novels include present day events?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;assassins-creed&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2017-03-14T20:44:18.253" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Times have changed. In the 1960s it was far more unusual for an adult to eat chocolate bars than it would be today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2017-03-14T20:44:18.253" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-14T20:46:34.550" Score="14" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading Mark Twain's &lt;em&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt; and Joan converses with the Dauphin of France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The talk between Joan and the King was long and earnest [...] and has been set down in [...] testimony at the Process of Rehabilitation; for all knew it was big with meaning, though none knew what that meaning was at that time, of course.  For we saw the King shake off his indolent attitude and straighten up like a man, and at the same time look immeasurably astonished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Made a man of him for a moment, removing his doubts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But left&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;his hindering and pestiferous council&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though doing so would have &quot;set him free.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is said of Théoden in the &lt;em&gt;Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He drew himself up, slowly, as a man that is stiff from long bending over some dull toil.  Now tall and straight, he stood, and his eyes were blue as he looked into the opening sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He follows Gandalf's counsel to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cast aside regret and fear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he lets live Gríma Wormtongue, though he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[bewitchment] seems to me more wholesome than your whisperings.  Your leechcraft ere long would have had me walking on all fours like a beast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first does not exhibit as much of a physical transformation.  There seems a more similar mental change, namely both finding hope when they had been completely ignoring it before due to poisonous relationships.  There is also the somewhat magical influence from an outsider that accomplishes it, in the form of Gandalf (a Maia) and Joan, who gives him &quot;a sign&quot; from her Voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Tolkien's portrayal of Théoden influenced by Twain's book &lt;em&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T18:10:04.967" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T14:14:47.593" Title="Was Théoden's revival inspired by Mark Twain?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2071" CreationDate="2017-03-15T02:23:40.310" Score="6" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stars are Legion seems to be an entirely female-society. I've not completely finished the book, so the answer may well be in the last 60 pages, but this book tends to feel very vague on the details of how things actually work in the world. (Part of that is the unreliable narrator, who we know pretty much from the start doesn't remember what happened to them before the book began).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I keep finding myself wondering, as the book seems very clear that this world/universe is completely female, how reproduction works. They mention people &quot;coming out wrong&quot; and one group believes the world gives them what they need as they need it (so they don't always, as I understand it, birth human creatures). There's also a lot of disease and such present. They can also swap wombs, and there is some discussion of how some people are seemingly better prepared to birth people/desired things than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an in-universe explanation of how they create more people? They refer to themselves as human, so I'd expect that it'd work similar to normal human reproduction as we know it, but the distinct lack of males makes me wonder. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:43:47.217" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:43:47.217" Title="How does this world increase their population?" Tags="&lt;the-stars-are-legion&gt;&lt;kameron-hurley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2084" CreationDate="2017-03-15T02:38:44.997" Score="4" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy's gut-wrenching tragedy &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; includes a lot of discussion of the concept of marriage, from various different characters, some of whose views even change over the course of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some ways, married relationships are portrayed as unloving and unsuccessful (Jude and Arabella, Sue and Mr Phillotson), in contrast to the 'freer' nature of a non-marital relationship. On the other hand, Jude and Sue face many difficulties due to being &lt;em&gt;un&lt;/em&gt;married, and perhaps their lives would have ended up better if they had got married. Is there any consistent underlying message here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Overall, what view of marriage does &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; promote - positive or negative?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T20:23:02.933" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T20:23:02.933" Title="What view of marriage is presented in Jude the Obscure?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2073" CreationDate="2017-03-15T04:34:23.740" Score="8" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Twain's quote about government's ostensibly trusting in God and asserting that on their currency, I have seen it reproduced both this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I think it would better read, &quot;Within certain judicious&#xA;  limitations we trust in God,&quot; and if there isn't enough room on the&#xA;  coin for this, why enlarge the coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I think it would better read, &quot;Within certain judicious&#xA;  limitations we trust in God,&quot; and if there isn't enough room on the&#xA;  coin for this, why, enlarge the coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comma after the &quot;why&quot; changes the meaning entirely. Which is accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In either case, it seems something is missing. If the first case, it would read better with a question mark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..., why enlarge the coin&lt;strong&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and in the second case, with an exclamation mark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;..., why, enlarge the coin&lt;strong&gt;!&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is right/accurate, or did he sometimes write/say it one way, and other times another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="15" LastEditDate="2017-03-16T14:38:53.967" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T14:38:53.967" Title="Did Twain mean the coin should be enlarged or not?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2067" CreationDate="2017-03-15T07:27:19.047" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This answer contains spoilers for the book &lt;em&gt;The Stars Are Legion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the entire novel and the question is never answered in depth. What becomes increasingly clear throughout the novel is that the Legion is the remnants of a civilization that was once much more scientifically/technologically advanced than the Legion is when the novel takes place. The characters have amazing tech, but no one seems clear on how any of it works beyond purely mechanical &quot;put cog here&quot; type of stuff. The only people who have any sort of understanding of how the ships work are &quot;the witches&quot; and they are insane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also this line near the end of the book which shows that the organic &quot;world&quot; of the Moshki (and probably the other worlds) were constructed over metal skeletons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The world here is much worse off than the Katazyrna. The flesh has&#xA;  peeled back from all the walls to reveal rusted-out metal, twisted&#xA;  wiring, shriveled tendons. What really makes up the core of every&#xA;  world? Metal skeletons? Fashioned by whom? The gods? Did a god truly&#xA;  come all the way out here and shit out the Legion itself and fly on&#xA;  across the universe, or have we been here all along?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strongly suggests that the worlds were actually man made (although Zan doesn't seem to understand this). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The women produce &quot;what the world needs&quot; as you said -- and this includes children. It seems like most women do not birth children, but rather other parts for the ship. Sex is seemingly not needed for reproduction, but -- and this is important -- &lt;em&gt;the women still experience sexual desire and they have sex with one another&lt;/em&gt;. The reason this is important is that it suggests that these people used to reproduce sexually. There is no need for a species that has always reproduced asexually to have a sex drive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I think the most likely answer is that some advanced civilization of humans wanted to create self-sustaining spaceships and they figured out a way for the ship itself to produce whatever it needs, partly by having the women occupants &quot;birth&quot; parts and children. The ship itself gets the women pregnant. The technicalities of how this works are not explained whatsoever. Jayd gets &quot;treatments&quot; prior to her pregnancies, but it is pretty clear that this isn't required to get pregnant. In fact, the people on the lower levels seem to expect women to just spontaneously turn up pregnant at more or less regular intervals. Zan's companions from the lower levels express surprise that she doesn't become pregnant like the rest of them during their long journey and once she thinks on it, Zan seems to agree with them.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="860" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T07:27:19.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T10:51:49.850" Score="4" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this specific (germanophobic, sorry about that) bit in one of Nabokov's works but I just can't find it now. It described several bürgers drinking beer and casually laughing at someone's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I was pretty certain it was from &quot;The Gift&quot; but I'm not too sure about that anymore, since searching the full text didn't help. Can anyone, by any chance, help me find a precise quote (either in Russian or in English)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1071" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-15T14:22:51.947" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T23:00:34.427" Title="Looking for a specific passage by Nabokov" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2070" CreationDate="2017-03-15T13:13:35.517" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes. The comma should be there.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the wider context around that quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We used to trust in God. I think it was in 1863 that some genius suggested that it be put upon the gold and silver coins which circulated among the rich. They didn't put it on the nickels and coppers because they didn't think the poor folks had any trust in God. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The President ordered the removal of that motto from the coin, and I thought that it was well. I thought that overstatement should not stay there. But I think it would better read, &amp;quot;Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God,&amp;quot; and if there isn't enough room on the coin for this, why, enlarge the coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=D1AbAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT7254&amp;amp;lpg=PT7254&amp;amp;dq=But+I+think+it+would+better+read,+%22Within+certain+judicious+limitations+we+trust+in+God,%22+and+if+there+isn%27t+enough+room+on+the+coin+for+this,+why+enlarge+the+coin.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=ZEirWq4ojU&amp;amp;sig=vx6ufcT197UClbrhDmNRoLXXSfI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj04vWVyNjSAhUlLMAKHTTwBQEQ6AEIODAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=But%20I%20think%20it%20would%20better%20read%2C%20%22Within%20certain%20judicious%20limitations%20we%20trust%20in%20God%2C%22%20and%20if%20there%20isn%27t%20enough%20room%20on%20the%20coin%20for%20this%2C%20why%20enlarge%20the%20coin.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twain is saying that he doesn't think &amp;quot;We trust in God&amp;quot; should be on the coins, but he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; think the longer, more nuanced version should be. Suggesting they enlarge the coin to fit this quote on would make sense with the rest of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he was asking the rhetorical question &amp;quot;why enlarge the coin?&amp;quot;, this would go &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; his own suggestion in the previous clause. In this case, it would make more sense to link the two together by a &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; instead of an &amp;quot;and&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When the quote is reproduced without the comma after &amp;quot;why&amp;quot;, it seems to be generally by less reliable sources.&lt;/strong&gt; For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twainquotes.com/Coins.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TwainQuotes.com&lt;/a&gt; (a website over which presumably less care has been taken than over a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nw69BwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT102&amp;amp;lpg=PT102&amp;amp;dq=But+I+think+it+would+better+read,+%22Within+certain+judicious+limitations+we+trust+in+God,%22+and+if+there+isn%27t+enough+room+on+the+coin+for+this,+why+enlarge+the+coin.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=LSoI-k3ZW0&amp;amp;sig=EERY9kh1CGAeDmPXAOaoCX--BuA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj04vWVyNjSAhUlLMAKHTTwBQEQ6AEIMjAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=But%20I%20think%20it%20would%20better%20read%2C%20%22Within%20certain%20judicious%20limitations%20we%20trust%20in%20God%2C%22%20and%20if%20there%20isn%27t%20enough%20room%20on%20the%20coin%20for%20this%2C%20why%20enlarge%20the%20coin.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;printed and published volume&lt;/a&gt; of collected works of Twain) has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember rightly, the President required or ordered the romoval of that sentence from the coins. Well, I didn't see that the statement ought to remain there. It wasn't true. But I think it would better read, &amp;quot;Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God,&amp;quot; and if there isn't enough room on the coin for this, why enlarge the coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that even in this rendition, there is no question mark at the end. If the meaning was &amp;quot;why enlarge the coin?&amp;quot;, then there should certainly be a question mark. If the meaning was &amp;quot;why, enlarge the coin!&amp;quot;, then it could do perfectly well with just a full stop instead of an exclamation mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise: &lt;strong&gt;the surrounding context, meaning, word choice, and punctuation suggest that &amp;quot;why, enlarge the coin&amp;quot; is the correct interpretation; furthermore, the sources which have &amp;quot;why enlarge the coin&amp;quot; tend to be less reliable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-15T13:13:35.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-15T18:59:29.127" Score="9" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is repeated several times throughout &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; that Newspeak is the official language of Oceania. However, as you can see below, although Oceania covers some English-speaking areas (Australia, England, the United States, Canada, etc.), much of its territory has native languages other than English (Spanish, Portuguese, Xhosa, etc.). Since the vast majority of Newspeak vocabulary is derived from English, is this &quot;anglified&quot; Newspeak spoken in South America and Africa, or is Newspeak adapted to work with each native language of each province of Oceania? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ivEjk.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ivEjk.png&quot; alt=&quot;Map of the 1984 world&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="123" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T14:08:02.507" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T14:08:02.507" Title="Are there regional variations of Newspeak?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2017-03-16T12:44:26.500" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a reference to the Catholic belief that sin can be atoned for through confession and the acceptance of a self-imposed punishment, called a penance.&lt;/strong&gt; This atones for the sin, and wipes away some of the time the sinner will have to spend waiting to enter heaven. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Even in the early days of Christianity, this concept proved problematic.&lt;/strong&gt; Acts of penance tend to involve privations such as fasting, self-flagellation or undertaking pilgrimage. They thus have little to do with the actual sin committed, which means a person can absolve themselves of a sin without taking any personal responsibility for the results of that sin. For example, if you steal something and commit penance, why do you then have to accept an earthly punishment for your crime, seeing as God trumps any earthy authority who tries to hold you to account?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting choice for Pullman to highlight, because &lt;strong&gt;penance became one of the most-hated aspects of the Catholic church during the middle ages&lt;/strong&gt;. It began to sell Indulgences, which were essentially automatic forgiveness of sins in exchange for money. The idea the rich could almost literally buy their way into heaven was widely seen as unjust. To make matters worse they Church employed Pardoners, individuals who went out and aggressively sold Indulgences, often with the aim of raising money for specific church projects. &lt;strong&gt;This was a direct contributor to the Protestant reformation&lt;/strong&gt;, as Martin Luther decided to write his famous Ninety-Five Theses after hearing his parishioners say they no longer needed to change their sinful behavior after purchasing Indulgences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Preemptive&quot; penance has never been official dogma&lt;/strong&gt;, and indeed it does not stand up to logical scrutiny. If one wishes to obtain forgiveness of a sin in advance, one clearly has the intention of sinning and, therefore, cannot truly be repentant. However, it's a clever way of both setting up a plot point and highlighting the inherent problems in the very concept of penance, especially the one of personal responsibility. And it's very close indeed to the idea of Indulgences which, in Britain at least, are widely learned about at school and understood as an unfair abuse of power on the part of the church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, then, a key plank in a central theme of the trilogy, which is the inherent oppression that results when organised religion rigidly applies doctrine and dogma. Preemptive absolution is not merely unfair: it is illogical and is deliberately used as a tool of subjugation. That it is secret - not widely known outside the church - speaks volumes about the inherent hypocrisy of a supposedly benevolent organisation trying to protect its wealth and power. &lt;strong&gt;Dogma, Pullman is saying, will always lead to corruption&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Yes, it is a reference to a real-life doctrine, although no specific parallel exists and it is not directly compatible with actual Christianity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. That it is a corrupt and hypocritical organisation as a result of its strict adherence to dogma.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T12:44:26.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2043" CreationDate="2017-03-16T13:50:30.820" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no established exact parallel AFAIK in any mainstream religion.  I can't comment on any personal promises made by a corrupt priest.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might compare the SF story 'Time In Advance' by William Tenn. &quot;In the far future a law is passed enabling citizens to serve out sentences for crimes they intend to commit, serving the full term, but with a 50% pre-criminal discount.&quot;   This story of secular preemptive absolution reaches a tidily moral conclusion, perhaps more so than Pullman would have allowed! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1006" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T13:50:30.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2074" CreationDate="2017-03-16T15:19:03.640" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Probably not.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;War prisoners apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and &lt;strong&gt;he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(George Orwell, &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is made very clear early on in the book that under IngSoc, what you would call cultural/national background is despised and probably in way of disappearing. &lt;strong&gt;Newspeak would therefore not be adapted to languages that are already banned.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility though, would be that Newspeak collected some local linguistic structures (Orwell says &quot;formations&quot;), as any language that becomes dominant after a transitional period. This is possible, but the following extract rules it out for the &quot;purest&quot; of Newspeak: before Newspeak became global, it was already purified of most English influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in 'The Times' were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in use in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of the Newspeak Dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. &lt;strong&gt;It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the Dictionary, that we are concerned here.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Orwell, &lt;em&gt;The principles of NewSpeak&lt;/em&gt; (appendix to &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All emphasis not in the original texts)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastActivityDate="2017-03-16T15:19:03.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2197" CreationDate="2017-03-16T16:27:10.013" Score="3" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us take the book series &lt;em&gt;TombQuest&lt;/em&gt;, by Michael Northrop. This book series is published by Scholastic, and they have &lt;a href=&quot;http://tombquest.scholastic.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a website for it&lt;/a&gt;. This series is a multiplatform, which means that there is a game associated with it. Like &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-39-clues&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-39-clues&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-39-clues&lt;/a&gt; (which is also a multiplatform). In that game, the connection is obvious - you hunt for the clues. And in another multiplatform, &lt;em&gt;Infinity Ring&lt;/em&gt;, the connection is even more obvious - the game is part of the story, and each book picks up where the game left off, and vice versa. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble finding a connection between the book &lt;em&gt;TombQuest&lt;/em&gt; and its video game counterpart. In the book, the main characters have to Fight a group called the 'Death Walkers'. And in the game, you have to build your tomb, and invade other players tombs, avoiding their traps, and try to steal their treasure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see how they are connected. Then again, I've only read the first book (and I haven't played in a looong time. I was, however, one of the fifty beta testers for the game). Is there any connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T13:48:38.630" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T13:48:38.630" Title="Is there any connection between the TombQuest books and the associated game?" Tags="&lt;adaptation-comparison&gt;&lt;michael-northrop&gt;&lt;tombquest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2082" CreationDate="2017-03-16T16:53:22.423" Score="21" ViewCount="2184" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winnie the Pooh is our favorite ball of fluff that likes to eat honey in the Hundred-Acre Wood... but where does he get his name from? Specifically, where does &quot;Pooh&quot; come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mgXbzJzIZE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I&lt;/a&gt; know that Winnie comes from a real bear that was the pet/mascot of a Canadian Army solider/battalion that was named after the city of Winnipeg. The bear eventually ended up in the London Zoo.  A.A. Milne took his son Christopher Robin to the zoo where Christopher fell in love with Winnie and eventually named is own stuffed bear the same. That toy bear later became the inspiration for the Winnie the Pooh series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not explain where &quot;Pooh&quot; comes from, especially since in-universe he is always called just &quot;Pooh&quot; or &quot;Pooh Bear&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So where does the Pooh name come from?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side bar (not part of the main question): Considering this was a children's series and &quot;Pooh&quot; is close to &quot;poo&quot; which is short for &quot;poop&quot; which is a euphemism for excrement, did &quot;poo&quot; mean the same thing back in 1926 as it does today?  If it did, did A.A. Milne take this into consideration when naming his character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T07:07:02.517" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T07:07:02.517" Title="What is a Pooh?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;a-a-milne&gt;&lt;winnie-the-pooh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5558" CreationDate="2017-03-17T01:44:34.347" Score="7" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many people and institutions around the world hold &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burns_supper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burns suppers&lt;/a&gt; on or close to Burns Night, 25 January. Part of these events is the traditional reading of Robert Burns's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Address_to_a_Haggis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Address to a Haggis&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, during or after which the haggis is sliced open and served.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the history of the reading of this poem at Burns suppers?&lt;/strong&gt; How and why did the practice first begin, and how far back does it go? Clearly it's a Burns poem about food, and therefore suitable for a Burns supper, but is it the only one, or is there more to it than that? I'm curious about this tradition, since it's one of few occasions I've been to where the reading of a poem (other than grace) is an important part of a meal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Which I'd always thought was called &quot;Ode to a Haggis&quot;. Am I wrong, or is this an alternative title?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T16:34:55.870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T09:43:57.610" Title="When and why did the practice of reading &quot;Address to a Haggis&quot; at Burns Night dinner originate?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-burns&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2080" CreationDate="2017-03-17T03:20:40.483" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) According to &lt;em&gt;When We Were Very Young&lt;/em&gt; By A. A. Milne, Pooh was a swan that Christopher Robin named Pooh, so that if he didn't come Christopher could pretend he was just saying that he hadn't wanted the swan to come anyways (or something to that effect).  This was before the establishment of Winnie the Pooh proper, so it may be considered invalid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) As said in the comments, the first chapter of Winnie the Pooh says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But his arms were so stiff ... they stayed up straight in the air for more than a week, and whenever a fly came and settled on his nose he had to blow it off. And I think — but I am not sure — that that is why he is always called Pooh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably refers to the sound blowing a fly off one's nose makes, namely a sort of poohing sound.  This is the author's explanation in universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="137" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T03:20:40.483" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2083" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T05:05:51.877" Score="18" ViewCount="6371" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 6 of &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Nick describes Daisy's reaction to the people of West Egg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place.” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—&lt;strong&gt;appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms&lt;/strong&gt; and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the part in bold, which says that Daisy was &quot;appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms&quot;.  What are the &quot;old euphemisms&quot; being referred to?  I've wondered about this for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A euphemism is where you use one word as a substitute for a more offensive word.  But I don't think Fitzgerald is referring to literal euphemism here.  I have one theory: perhaps he means that rich people have upper-class families have a way of masking their hedonistic tendencies.  The new-money people of West Egg, on the other hand, are more ostentatious about their hedonism.  Is this what Fitzgerald is talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1078" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T04:26:41.703" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T20:48:59.160" Title="What are the &quot;old euphemisms&quot; in The Great Gatsby?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2068" CreationDate="2017-03-17T08:28:55.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the preface to my edition of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For a novel addressed by a man to men and woman of full age: which attempts to deal unaffectedly with the fret and fever, derision and disaster, that may press in the wake of the strongest passion know to humanity; to tell, without mincing of words, of a deadly war between flesh and spirit; and to point the tragedy of unfulfilled aims...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is in Hardy's own words his aim. He later also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The marriage laws being used in great part as the tragic machinery of the tale, and it general drift on the domestic side tending to show that, in Cicero's words, the civil law should be the enunciation of the law of nature (a statement that requires some qualification, by the way), I have been charged since 1895 [date Jude came out] with a large responsibility in this country for the present 'shop-spoiled' condition of the marriage theme (as a learned writer characterized it the other day). I do not know. &lt;strong&gt;My opinion at that time, if I remember rightly, was what it is now, that a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties - being then essentially and morally no marriage -&lt;/strong&gt; and it seemed a good foundation for the fable of a tragedy...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addditionally it seems obvious to me that Arabella practically tricked Jude into marriage, using both his lust and his ideals. This is in some way symbolised by the fake hair he only finds out she has when they are married. Hardy also says she has a &quot;strategy&quot; and she talks to her friends about 'hooking him'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find the quote now but Hardy also talks about Sue and Jude's non-marriage being far more real than any on paper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think Hardy thought that marriage in itself was not a problem but the laws and rules that surrounded it. He believed in natural marriage more than the marriage that was written down in the Church register.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T10:18:37.953" LastActivityDate="2017-03-17T10:18:37.953" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1072" CreationDate="2017-03-17T13:30:28.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The woods represent wildness, the untamed frightful world of nature, which contrasts strongly with the purity and order of Salem (the town in which the story takes place). At the outset of the story, Goodman Brown is poised precariously between choosing to remain in the safety of his home (with his wife Faith) and the terrifying forest he decides to explore when night falls. Home comes to symbolize security and faith (Goodman's wife's name is Faith for a reason!) while the forest represents evil incarnate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the clearest sign that the forest represents the opposite of faith is the presence of Satan himself amidst the woods. Goodman's choice to venture into the forest becomes a battle of good vs. evil, in which he vacillates between staying put with Faith and falling into the clutches of the devil: “Too far! Too far!&quot; he shouts when he realizes he might walk so far into the woods as to fall for the devil's wicked seduction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not just the devil though. Hawthorne uses other images and symbols to convey how the woods represent fear and &quot;otherness.&quot; For example, he uses the trees themselves and Native Americans who dwell in the forest as a symbol of the dark and exotic dangers that lurk within the woods, as we can see in his references to both the trees and the Indians in this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.litcharts.com/lit/young-goodman-brown/themes/nature-and-the-supernatural&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; helped me figure all this symbolism out and has more detail and examples if you need additional help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1074" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T17:34:30.307" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:34:30.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-17T16:40:21.210" Score="9" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Adem people believe that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Men have nothing to do with conception;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sex is not restricted to specific partners.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our culture, those are the main reasons for marriage. There were also no married couples shown in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do the Adem marry, and if they do, why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-03-17T17:14:55.370" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T13:29:26.130" Title="How did the Adem view Marriage?" Tags="&lt;patrick-rothfuss&gt;&lt;the-kingkiller-chronicle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2072" CreationDate="2017-03-17T19:00:54.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a passage from &lt;em&gt;The Gift&lt;/em&gt; which depicts two Germans as brutish and indifferent to human suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yasha's death had its most painful effect on his father.... Meanwhile nothing stopped with Yasha's death and many interesting things were happening: in Russia one observed the spread of abortions and the revival of summer houses; in England there were strikes of some kind or other.... and one Sunday &lt;strong&gt;a young Berlin merchant with his locksmith friend&lt;/strong&gt; set out on a trip to the country in a large, four-wheel cart with only the slightest smell of blood, rented from his neighbor, a butcher: two fat servant maids and the merchant's two small children sat in plush chairs set on the wagon, the children cried, &lt;strong&gt;the merchant and his pal guzzled beer&lt;/strong&gt; and drove the horses hard, the weather was beautiful so that, &lt;strong&gt;in their high spirits, they deliberately hit a cleverly cornered cyclist, beat him up violently&lt;/strong&gt; in the ditch, tore his port-folio to bits (he was an artist) &lt;strong&gt;and rolled on, very happy&lt;/strong&gt;, and when he had come to his senses, the artist overtook them in a tavern garden, but the policeman who tried to establish their identities was also beaten up, after which they &lt;strong&gt;very happily&lt;/strong&gt; rolled on along the highway, and when they saw that police motorcycles were gaining on them, &lt;strong&gt;they opened fire with revolvers and in the ensuing gunplay a bullet killed the merry merchant's three-year-old son.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;The Gift&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 49-50)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage does not explicitly mention laughter, but it does portray the Germans as &amp;quot;very happy&amp;quot; in the face of their brutish acts. We are led to believe that they will be indifferent to the fact that their actions have led to the death of the three-year-old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many other places where Nabokov depicts Germans, in both positive and negative light. They frequently make appearances in the stories he wrote while living in Berlin. For example, the story &amp;quot;Cloud, Castle, Lake&amp;quot; is about a Russian emigre who is bullied by Germans on a mandatory vacation, and &amp;quot;The Fight&amp;quot; is about a quarrel between Germans in a tavern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T20:43:12.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2017-03-18T10:33:36.903" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The new-money people of West Egg, on the other hand, are more ostentatious about their hedonism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, yes, you have caught the gist of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daisy is aware, as is Nick, of the fact that the more conservative cultural mores are in play in West Egg, but the people there are closer to openly breaking free of them, of shrugging them off. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a very slight, but very real, admiration in that phrase &quot;raw vigor&quot;; on at least one level, probably visceral, Daisy appreciates the vitality and energy of the people, but she's also aware that their freedom is limited, that they haven't quite escaped society's conservative strictures yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classic Fitzgerald phrasing - almost a throwaway, but it tells you about a central internal conflict within the character using what, barely ten words? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1079" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T10:33:36.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-18T09:01:52.193" Score="17" ViewCount="17092" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my favorite quotes is Churchill's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We sleep safely at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But recently I found out that Orwell was attributed with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since the book was printed in 1949, I'm curious who said it first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Scarlet Kleen" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T23:04:14.557" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T23:04:14.557" Title="Who said it first - Orwell or Churchill?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;winston-churchill&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2017-03-18T12:47:14.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just finished reading &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt; in its collected trade paperback edition. At the end, there is a short essay by Alan Moore, titled &lt;em&gt;&quot;Behind the Painted Smile&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which explains the creative process behind the book - how it was conceived and how it was executed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, Alan Moore wanted to write a similarly themed comic about a guy called &quot;The Doll&quot;, who would be fighting a totalitarian state in 1980s. This early idea was rejected by DC. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later Alan Moore came together with David Lloyd (the artist of &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;) and gave him the draft of &quot;The Doll&quot;. They decided to make this comic, with the protagonist being called &quot;Vendetta&quot; at first. This title, however, was called &quot;too Italian&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It were Dez Skinn and Graham Marsh that came up with the title &quot;V for Vendetta&quot;, and Alan Moore and David Lloyd liked it so much it gave them new incentive to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my understanding is that the name &quot;V&quot; came first, and the contents of the work were later adapted to suit that name. This is why multiple explanations of V's name exist, such as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Room V&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vi Veri Veniversum Vivus Vici&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evey (E. V.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Valerie (the gay woman in room IV)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Victory station, where V built his base of operation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Probably&lt;/em&gt; a nod to the circled-A anarchist symbol, flipped upside-down. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I don't think that this was an intentional conscious reference to Orwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-03-18T12:47:14.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2093" CreationDate="2017-03-18T17:49:24.603" Score="24" ViewCount="3213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like all of Shakespeare's plays, his &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is of course written and performed almost entirely in English. But there is one line of this particular play - perhaps the most famous - which is always reproduced in the original Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CASCA: Speak, hands, for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;CASCA first, then the other Conspirators and BRUTUS stab CAESAR&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CAESAR: &lt;strong&gt;Et tu, Brute!&lt;/strong&gt; Then fall, Caesar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Act III, Scene I (bold emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've actually never liked this change in language, because it spoils my suspension of disbelief - it reminds the audience that these characters were in ancient Rome and likely to be speaking Latin rather than English, and therefore that all the &lt;em&gt;rest&lt;/em&gt; of the dialogue in the play isn't true to life - so I'm curious about what it's supposed to add to the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why this brief switch from English to Latin?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:19:12.407" Title="Why does Shakespeare's Julius Caesar switch to Latin for the &quot;Et tu, Brute&quot; line?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2092" CreationDate="2017-03-18T20:33:56.377" Score="29" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's not for the sake of veracity&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the historical Caesar pronounced or not the said words is disputed. Of five Antique sources on Caesar's death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nicolaus of Damascus, Plutarch and Appian do not report the quote&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suetonius and later Cassius Dio report it only as a dubious variant to the tradition, but using Ancient Greek rather than Latin: Και συ τέκνον&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is debate as to why Caesar would have switched to Greek for this admonition but as every Roman in the upper circles, Caesar was probably raised in a Greek-speaking environment before learning Latin, and this can be interpreted as a regression to the language of his childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that no ancient sources report the quote in Latin has lead the French and Italian versions to retain another translation, &lt;em&gt;Tu quoque mi fili&lt;/em&gt;, probably coined by Lhomond in the 18th century, which brings us to why Shakespeare used another translation of the quote to Latin, &lt;em&gt;Et tu, Brute&lt;/em&gt;, in his masterpiece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It sounded OK to the medieval ear - or even stylish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mixing Latin and vernacular language was a widespread practice in Medieval Europe. Latin was still the language of scholars and clerics, while vernacular language was taking the spot gradually, so mixing both languages would not have shocked an educated audience in the 14th century. But Shakespeare worked later, and his inclusion of a Latin hemistich was probably motivated by style consideration, mimicking a practice that came to life in 15th century Italy where poets would alternate verses in Italian and Latin. It was probably considered fashionable by Shakespeare to include some Latin at climactic moments of his plays, you can find a list in the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/ThemesAndTopics.aspx?TopicId=58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin&lt;/a&gt; on ShakespearesWords.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The sentence was probably proverbial in English at the time&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare himself used it (in Latin) in &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; and Richard Edes features it in &lt;em&gt;Caesar Interfectus&lt;/em&gt; in 1582 (17 years before the play we're discussing), which hints toward the fact that the sentence was probably often quoted in the context of similar fates for those that reach power before being used in the play. The audience, I would say, would have been expecting the line and waiting for it rather than shocked by its appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being &amp;quot;true to life&amp;quot; is by no means one of the objectives of Shakespeare's plays, or at least not being constantly true to life. Alternating between ghosts and lively maid scenes was the man's genius, and realism should definitely not be judged in this case using modern standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:19:12.407" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:19:12.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T07:55:00.243" Score="11" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Cider House Rules, Jane Eyre and several works by Charles Dickens (such as David Copperfield and The Great Expectations) are repeatedly mentioned and cited. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the roles of David Copperfield is the citation “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”, which applies to Homer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the role of Jane Eyre? I only see that they are both about orphans, but I think there should be another connection that explains why Jane Eyre is used in The Cider House Rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T10:43:44.153" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T09:17:12.967" Title="What is the role of Jane Eyre in The Cider House Rules?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;john-irving&gt;&lt;the-cider-house-rules&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-19T10:40:54.553" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the American author John Irving (1942–) or about any of his literary works, such as &lt;em&gt;The World According to Grap&lt;/em&gt; (1978) and &lt;em&gt;The Cider House Rules&lt;/em&gt; (1985).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T11:38:54.697" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T11:38:54.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-19T10:40:54.553" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author John Irving or about any of his literary works" OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T11:39:02.250" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T11:39:02.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2097" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-19T10:44:29.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T10:44:29.933" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T10:44:29.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2098" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-19T10:44:29.933" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Cider House Rules, the book by John Irving. Use this tag with the [john-irving] tag." OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T11:39:07.027" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T11:39:07.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6597" CreationDate="2017-03-19T16:57:36.637" Score="6" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, Tolkien believed that people had an innate ability to &quot;hear&quot; subtle differences in names and dialects, even if they didn't full understand why things sounded different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, in the area of the Shire, he gave things names dervied from English and in the area of Bree he gave things names derived from Welsh. Examples of the former are Bywater, Overhill and Willowbottom . Examples of the latter include Archet (from &lt;em&gt;ar chet&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;the wood&quot;), Combe (from &lt;em&gt;cwm&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;valley&quot;) and Bree itself (which means &quot;hill&quot; in Welsh).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His aim was to drop a hint to the reader that, as the party travelled from the Shire to Bree, things had changed slightly. This was a new country, if not entirely foreign. He hoped the change in linguistics would be enough to communicate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples. Many dwarvish names derive from old Norse, while the Riders of Rohan, obviously, name things in old English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this always made me wonder: he obviously did the same thing with his fictional languages (i.e. Lothlorien - the &quot;dream flower&quot;) but are there any other examples of this in his work derived from real-world language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T18:44:07.157" Title="Which real-life languages other than English, Welsh and Old English/Norse did Tolkien draw on for naming things?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-19T19:01:01.243" Score="9" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is regularly interspersed with essays -- something that I have not seen anywhere else in literature. How significant are these essays? They obviously help in exploring the themes and messages of the novel, but how do they fit in the definition of fiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Large sections of the novel, especially the second epilogue, are philosophical discussions instead of a narrative. So I wondered whether this novel should be considered fiction, non-fiction or an amalgamation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1089" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-19T19:11:53.293" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T03:36:20.053" Title="What is the relevance of the essays in Tolstoy's 'War and Peace'?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2103" CreationDate="2017-03-19T19:24:07.343" Score="21" ViewCount="58730" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Art Spiegelman's &lt;em&gt;Maus&lt;/em&gt;, he represents different people from different countries as different animals. For instance, he represents the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, the Polish as pigs, the Americans as dogs, and the French people as frogs. How were these choices representative of the different countries? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, the Jews/mice and the Germans/cats is easy - they were hunted like cats hunt mice. But why the others? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:10:46.000" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T19:40:51.690" Title="Why were these animals used to represent the different countries in Maus?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;maus&gt;&lt;art-spiegelman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="25" CreationDate="2017-03-19T19:49:33.547" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's not true to assume that all foreign bits in Foucault's Pendulum were left untranslated in the English version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, Latin is more familiar to Italian, French, Spanish, &#xA;  Portuguese, or Rumanian readers than to Britons or Americans. For &#xA;  this reason, Weaver, with my approval, sometimes shortened some &#xA;  long quotations and nonchalantly inserted some English paraphrases. &#xA;  It was a process of domestication that attempted to preserve some &#xA;  archaic aspects of the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umberto Eco, &lt;em&gt;Experiences in Translation&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;(all unsourced quotes that follow are from the same piece)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's also state that if Umberto Eco is well acquainted with his translations, he should not be considered as the author or even as &quot;approving&quot; his translations. When speaking about a remarkable German translation, he states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and &#xA;  my contribution consisted not in providing an ‘authorized’ interpretation but &#xA;  in encouraging an alternative solution - as if I were a co-translator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umberto Eco is much against statements of intent and helps his translators by emphasizing textual evidence rather than by imposing his own interpretation of his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading another tribute by Eco out-rules another option: it was not either to keep the translation &quot;true to word&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He [William Weaver] was a great translator because he also knew that to translate the meaning, one must dare to reject the literal translation in order to conserve the effect or the deeper sense of the text. For reasons of space, I am limited to relating one amusing memory, of a time in which we tore the text apart in order to render a simple play on words, a wordplay that was already difficult for Italian readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umberto Eco, &lt;em&gt;Ciao, Bill&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same also gives us a credible explanation for the Italian words present in the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he sought to accurately render the fluidity, the rhythm, the lexical richness, and the sound of the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Umberto Eco, &lt;em&gt;Ciao, Bill&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But an explanation is not enough: we want to know &lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt;, not &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; Weaver chose to keep Italian words... I'm currently re-reading the great interviews Weaver gave to the Paris review in hope of finding something, but this is the closest I got:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I start at page one, and I may even start at page one this time because I’m thinking about this problem all the time. Briefly, my modus operandi is simply to begin and work as fast as possible, leaving gaps. If there is a problem I will make a big parenthesis, indicating that I have left a sentence out. Or I will translate it and write, He was happy / glad / delighted / overjoyed, and decide later. If there’s something I don’t really understand I will leave it. I will type it in Italian and put it in boldface, so that when I see it I’ll know that it’s a real problem, which I’ll have to discuss with Eco. After having done this very rapid (i.e., in a month or two) first draft, I print it out; then I arm myself with a box of Ebony soft pencils and good erasers, and I go over it painstakingly with a pencil. I fill in the blanks, make the choices and change things. I have a big legal pad beside me and at the top is written, Ask Um; then I write: pg. 35; pg. 10; and the things I want to discuss with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Weaver, &lt;em&gt;The Art of Translation n°3&lt;/em&gt;, Paris Review&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes for a very poor explanation on the finished work, however - given the extremely high quality of his translations, it's unlikely that they were left incomplete, so I don't consider this a finished answer. Rather, a commentary much too long to be published as such!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T16:58:20.813" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T16:58:20.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2017-03-19T20:44:13.273" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, let me just point out two things which it may be useful to bear in mind when considering how seriously to take this answer: whether I'm overanalysing or underanalysing here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, &lt;strong&gt;some of the choices of animals &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; significant.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not completely random; the author spent some considerable time thinking about which animals to use to represent certain groups, even to the extent of having specific reasons for rejecting some suggestions. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fuchsmichael.net/courses/graphicnovelfall2012/index.php/blog/post/maus-and-the-animals-143&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very beginning of the second volume (page 9) Art is thinking about what species he should choose to depict his wife’s nation, the French. Francoise votes for a ‘bunny rabbit’ but Spiegelman dismisses the idea claiming that it is a choice too sweet and gentle for the French. This scene reassures me in my view that in Maus the animals chosen to represent the different nationalities are selected for a reason, and they are not mere results of an arbitrary pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;strong&gt;some of the choices don't really matter at all.&lt;/strong&gt; For national or ethnic groups which played only a minor role in the story, the choice of animals used to represent them was much more arbitrary, because it didn't really matter at that point. As the author &lt;a href=&quot;http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/art-spiegelman-why-mice-in-metamaus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the book was coming to a close, I really couldn’t have cared less about my metaphor, but I was stuck with it. People would ask me, “Oh, how would you draw us Italians?” and I as always stumped. I just had to deal with each of these issues as they came up, and it led to the whole sequence in Maus II of talking to Françoise about how to represent her. In a way I started reaching for the absurd to make sure one didn’t take the ruling metaphor at, um, “face” value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that out of the way, let's start considering the different groups and their animal representations one by one. I'll go through them in approximate order of their importance to the story, so the choices of animals will become more arbitrary and less significant as we go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Jews as mice&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spiegelman has actually spoken about this in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/10/20/why-mice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt;, and told us what inspired him to create this depiction. It seems that as well as the cat-and-mouse allegory (about which more later), there has been a long tradition of portraying Jews as rats or mice in anti-Semitic works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most shockingly relevant anti-Semitic work I found was The Eternal Jew, a 1940 German “documentary” that portrayed Jews in a ghetto swarming in tight quarters, bearded caftaned creatures, and then a cut to &lt;strong&gt;Jews as mice—or rather rats—swarming in a sewer, with a title card that said “Jews are the rats” or the “vermin of mankind.”&lt;/strong&gt; This made it clear to me that this dehumanization was at the very heart of the killing project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Zyklon B, the gas used in Auschwitz and elsewhere as the killing agent, was a pesticide manufactured to kill vermin—like fleas and roaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I began to do more detailed and more finely grained research for the longer Maus project, I found &lt;strong&gt;how regularly Jews were represented literally as rats.&lt;/strong&gt; Caricatures by Fips (the pen name of Philippe Rupprecht) filled the pages of Der Stürmer; grubby, swarthy, Jewish apelike creatures in one drawing, ratlike creatures in the next. Posters of killing the vermin and making them flee were part of the overarching metaphor. It’s amazing how often the image still comes up in anti-Semitic cartoons in Arab countries today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Germans as cats&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/10/20/why-mice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;, Spiegelman spoke about how the perceived grace and nobility of cats ties in to the supposed Aryan supremacy which was part of the Nazi German ideology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one rendering of a cat in full Nazi drag that looked sort of like Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. &lt;strong&gt;It was the most noble and savage version of the Nazis, tying into the stereotypes that presented Nazis as somehow sexy.&lt;/strong&gt; It reminded me of the whole Night Porter genre of pornography that involved SS uniforms and scared me away from drawing Maus with really large-scale cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, of course, as you've already noted, &amp;quot;Jews as mice, Germans as cats&amp;quot; can be seen as a symbolic representation of the Holocaust as a &amp;quot;cat and mouse&amp;quot; affair with the Germans hunting down the Jews. Interestingly, Spiegelman originally had this idea for an entirely different case of racism in a different continent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, mice…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, it all started with me trying to draw black folks. [...] I wanted to do something in that melodramatic pulp illustration mode, complete with venetian blind shadows, but with animal faces in which the denouement would have the protagonist getting crushed to death by a giant mousetrap that snaps shut on his body. I made some sketches but I was floundering. A filmmaker I had become close friends with, Ken Jacobs, was teaching an introduction to cinema class. On this particular day, Ken showed a bunch of old racist animated cartoons from the silent and early sound era. The blacks were cheerfully represented as subhuman, monkeylike creatures with giant minstrel lips—stereotypes stealing chickens, stealing watermelons, playing dice, all singin’ &amp;amp; dancin’, just the daily stock in trade of our racist cartoon heritage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…it all led me to my Eureka moment: the notion that &lt;strong&gt;I could do a strip about the black experience in America, using an animated cartoon style. I could draw Ku Klux Kats and an underground railroad and some story about racism in America.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] After my self-excoriating doubts settled in, I realized that this cat-mouse metaphor of oppression could actually apply to my more immediate experience. This development took me by surprise—my own childhood was not a subject for me. But I did realize that if &lt;strong&gt;I shifted from Ku Klux Kats and anthropomorphized “darkies” to the terrain I was more viscerally affected by, the Nazis chasing Jews as they had in my childhood nightmares&lt;/strong&gt;, I was on to something. It became my three-page contribution to Funny Aminals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;French as frogs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling the French frogs is actually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reference.com/world-view/french-people-called-frogs-5ae6b3251443d7a4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;long-running thing&lt;/a&gt;, at least in Britain. I've always assumed this is due to the French practice of eating frogs (many derogatory nationalist terms are based on cultural delicacies: the French are &lt;em&gt;frogs&lt;/em&gt;, the Germans are &lt;em&gt;krauts&lt;/em&gt;, the British are &lt;em&gt;roast-beefs&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.) According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rsdb.org/search/french&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Racial Slur Database&lt;/a&gt; (TIL this is a thing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French are said to laugh like frogs. When they laugh, their adam's apples bulge out of their necks like frogs. Also perhaps from the French delicacy of frog-legs. Another possible derivation is the Fleur-de-Lys displayed on the French king's banner in the Middle Ages, which, to the English enemy, looked like squatting frogs. UK origins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Poles as pigs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a deep and sticky quagmire to get into. Many critics have condemned Spiegelman for his portrayal of Poles as pigs, accusing him of racism against the Polish people. Entire academic papers have been written on this issue. In an effort to keep it short, I'll quote just from &lt;a href=&quot;http://kpk-toronto.org/wp-content/uploads/MAUSProblemsREVMarch2016-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this 82-page article&lt;/a&gt; entitled &amp;quot;Poles as Pigs in MAUS&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portraying Poles as pigs is offensive. In fact, it has been acknowledged as such by literary critics. In the biographical introduction to the excerpt from MAUS that appears in &lt;em&gt;The Norton Anthology of American Literature&lt;/em&gt;, 7th edition (New York: Norton, 2007), Volume E, p. 3091, editors Jerome Klinkowitz and Patricia B. Wallace describe Spiegelman’s representation of Poles as pigs as &lt;strong&gt;“a calculated insult” leveled against Poles.&lt;/strong&gt; A similar point was made by Harvey Pekar, a celebrated underground comic book write, who describes himself as a Jew with a background similar to Art Spiegelman’s: “When he [Spiegelman] shows them [Poles] doing something admirable and still portrays them as pigs, he’s sending a mixed message.”&#xA;​&#xA;Characteristically, Spiegelman has dismissed Poles’ concern about their depiction as pigs as “a squeal,” the sound pigs make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pig imagery or “metaphor,” on the other hand, is rarely, if ever, explained – whether in MAUS itself, or in available reading materials. One handout provided to students states that the animals have a “symbolic quality,” without any further explanation of the role of the pigs.&#xA;​&#xA;“You pig,” is universally considered to be an insult. In many cultures, pigs are viewed as disgusting, filthy, and greedy animals. They are often considered to be vulgar and stupid. The implication, therefore, is that there is something unsavoury about the pig people. This is one obvious negative connotation that would not be lost on the students, especially since that image is reinforced by the negative stereotypes used to portray Poles, who even manage to remain fat while imprisoned in Auschwitz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Jews and Muslims, pigs are “unclean” animals. &lt;strong&gt;Jewish culture in particular views pigs, and pork, as non­kosher, or unclean.&lt;/strong&gt; [...] It is telling that Spiegelman chose this supremely un­kosher animal to depict the Poles, rather than the Germans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the image of Poles as being “unclean” has a long and shameful tradition. In Poland, &lt;strong&gt;when a Jew wanted to insult a Pole, he called him a “Polish pig.”&lt;/strong&gt; [...] &lt;strong&gt;Polish inmates of Nazi camps were often called “Polish swine” by German officials&lt;/strong&gt; and kapos (prisoner functionaries). &lt;strong&gt;Poles are also referred to as “pigs” in Jewish memorial books.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;​&#xA;MAUS employs the same imagery of the Poles as found in Nazi propaganda, where Poles were often referred to as “pigs.” Art Spiegelman was, of&#xA;course, aware of these problematic associations when he chose to portray Poles as pigs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently Spiegelman has even admitted that bias against Poles played a role in his choice of the animal used to represent them. Quoting from the same article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus&lt;/em&gt; (New York:&#xA;Pantheon, 2011), belatedly, Spiegelman divulges his actual reasons for portraying Poles as pigs: it is to bash Poles. With reference to his father’s attitude towards Poles, he quips, “So my metaphor [mice to be killed outright, and pigs to be exploited and eaten] was somehow able to hold that particular vantage point while still somehow acknowledging my father’s &lt;strong&gt;dubious opinion of Poles as a group&lt;/strong&gt;.” (P. 122.) Despite the fact that Poland had for centuries given sanctuary to Jews persecuted elsewhere, Spiegelman adds: “‘And &lt;strong&gt;considering the bad relations between Poles and Jews for the last hundred years in Poland, it seemed right to use a non­-Kosher animal.&lt;/strong&gt;’” (P. 125.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Americans as dogs&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could again be interpreted as tying into the symbolism of the &amp;quot;cat and mouse&amp;quot; game of Germans and Jews. In the end, the American dogs come and chase away the cats to rescue the mice. Although there's not much love lost between dogs and mice in real life, the enmity between dogs and cats is real enough, and could represent the war between Americans and Germans. Again, an &lt;a href=&quot;http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/art-spiegelman-why-mice-in-metamaus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; with Spiegelman seems to confirm this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning again to my simpleminded ur-text of American popular culture: cats chase mice, and dogs, by God, chase cats – it’s a direct food chain. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But dogs were easy; it’s almost the Family Feud answer to what animals come to mind and how do you perceive them. &lt;strong&gt;The dogs were heroic vanquisher of cats, so there was that.&lt;/strong&gt; besides, as soon as you’re a cartoonist drawing a dog, you’ve got lots of different kinds of dogs to draw. You’ve got Collies and Dachshunds and Cocker Spaniels and Chihuahuas and their species or sub-species are much more clearly delineated than cats, even though cat fanciers will say otherwise. Here, the fact that there were so many possible dogs got me to actually verbalize to myself: “Oh, I get it. &lt;strong&gt;Americans are a mongrel race, a bunch of mutts.&lt;/strong&gt;” Bill Mauldin’s panel cartoons of Willie and Joe – the “dogfaces” of World War II as GIs were called – came to mind as soon as I started trying to figure out what it might mean to draw a dog in an army uniform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Gypsies as moths&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, for one thing, they're &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymantria_dispar_dispar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gypsy moths&lt;/a&gt;, so even the name fits. Also, moths fit with an imagery of itinerancy - flitting from place to place, but never stopping for long - which makes them a reasonable choice to symbolise gypsies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Spiegelman has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/art-spiegelman-why-mice-in-metamaus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;story&lt;/a&gt; about where the inspiration came from for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vividly remember drawing the sequence where my mother went to see a fortune-teller – I was in a small cabin, deep in the woods of Connecticut that summer. I prefer to work at night when I can, and these giant moths kept flinging themselves against the glass, trying to get in. Most of them looked like casting calls for Mothra. They were insane and enormous. I got really fascinated by what their faces looked like. And it was at precisely the moment I was trying to figure out how to draw the gypsy, so it was preordained that I’d use gypsy moths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Brits as fish&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this point, we're getting to nationalities which are less important to the story, and their choices of animal are becoming more arbitrary. But here's what Spiegelman &lt;a href=&quot;http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/art-spiegelman-why-mice-in-metamaus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;; take it with a pinch of salt if you like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Vladek looks for Anja after the war, he goes to a large displaced persons center at Belsen. The British are in charge of that camp. I guess I could have avoided the whole issue since they just appear in the mise-en-scène for a panel or two, but I decided to give the Brits a walk-on part – or, as it finally resolved itself, a swim-on part. I thought about &lt;strong&gt;fish and chips, an island culture, fish out of water&lt;/strong&gt;. All those things just seemed to lead me toward drawing fish without bicycles but with jeeps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Swedish as reindeer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are plenty of reindeer in Sweden. I'm not sure if there's any deeper meaning than that. The author doesn't have much to &lt;a href=&quot;http://piratesandrevolutionaries.blogspot.com/2015/07/art-spiegelman-why-mice-in-metamaus.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;say&lt;/a&gt; about it either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sweden was quite welcoming to refugees after the war. I thought of the Swedes as somehow far outside the loop of my Eastern European narrative and finding an animal so totally out of the scale with mice, cats, and mutts – those large galumphing and gentle reindeer – struck me as amusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;All bold emphasis is mine in the quotes above.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T20:44:13.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2017-03-19T20:49:46.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Male hobbit names often come from early Medieval European history. Some examples;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Merry&quot; is really short for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_Meriadoc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meriadoc&lt;/a&gt;, a Briton leader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Pippin&quot; is short for &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peregrine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peregrine&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &quot;Pippin&quot; itself suggests several Carolingians, among which is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepin_the_Short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pippin the short&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paladin Took, the Thain of the Shire, comes from Charlemange's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paladins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Odovacar Bolger, one of the guests at Bilbo's brithday party, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odoacer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odoacer&lt;/a&gt;, a soldier of unclear extraction who was the first &quot;King of Italy&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T20:49:46.653" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2090" CreationDate="2017-03-19T22:53:16.053" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Actually? Neither.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In conclusion, &lt;strong&gt;QI&lt;/strong&gt; believes that this saying was introduced by&#xA;  Richard Grenier who was attempting to provide a pithy representation&#xA;  of an idea he ascribed to George Orwell. Later writers and speakers&#xA;  turned his phrase into a quotation and directly attached it to Orwell.&#xA;  Over time variants were constructed with modified phrasing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote Investigator has a long &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; about this quote, cited in the Wikiquote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/List_of_misquotations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; mentioned in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2090/who-said-it-first-orwell-or-churchill#comment3842_2090&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;. They have many variations of the quote, from various different people including Kipling, Le Carré, Churchill, and Orwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you asked about those last two in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In more recent years the saying has sometimes been connected to the&#xA;  statesmen Winston Churchill. Here is an example from 2006:&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/#note-2950-19&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/#note-2950-19&quot;&gt;19&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;While it may be apocryphal, Winston Churchill is often quoted as&#xA;    having said (supposedly paraphrasing Orwell) “We sleep soundly in our&#xA;    beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on&#xA;    those who would do us harm.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many quotes of Orwell's that are thematically similar, but don't quite match the words of your quote. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1942 Orwell published an essay about Kipling in which he referred&#xA;  to a phrase in the poem “Tommy”: &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/#note-2950-4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;ebooks@adelaide, (University of Adelaide, Australia), Collected Essays of George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling (1942). (Accessed ebooks.adelaide.edu.au on 2011 November 5; Essay is available under Australian copyright law)&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of&#xA;    this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling&#xA;    phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the&#xA;    English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms&#xA;    that guard you while you sleep’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the same essay Orwell made a&#xA;  statement about Kipling that thematically overlapped the later&#xA;  misattributed phrase: &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/#note-2950-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;ebooks@adelaide, (University of Adelaide, Australia), Collected Essays of George Orwell, Rudyard Kipling (1942). (Accessed ebooks.adelaide.edu.au on 2011 November 5; Essay is available under Australian copyright law)&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/#note-2950-6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;2006, The Yale Book of Quotations by Fred R. Shapiro, Section George Orwell, Page 569, Yale University Press, New Haven. (A note in this reference mentions the misattributed words and Orwell’s actual words) (Verified on paper)&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men,&#xA;    inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell referred to “less civilized” men above whereas Grenier later&#xA;  referred to “rough men”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the article for more examples of this idea in Orwell's writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-19T22:56:28.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2107" CreationDate="2017-03-19T23:24:45.740" Score="8" ViewCount="358" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám&lt;/em&gt; is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám (1048–1131), a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Edward FitzGerald the first to collect these poems together and publish them in a unified work, or had there been previous published volumes (in any language) of &lt;em&gt;collected&lt;/em&gt; works of Omar Khayyám? I'd always assumed the Rubaiyat was the magnum opus of Khayyám himself, rather than being gathered together long after his death by someone else, but am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T13:57:49.470" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T13:57:49.470" Title="Was FitzGerald the first to collect the poems of the Rubaiyat together?" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;the-rubaiyat&gt;&lt;edward-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;omar-khayyam&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2106" CreationDate="2017-03-20T06:42:55.320" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can depend on how you read the word &quot;collected&quot;, and also how genuine you believe FitzGerald's version - with its omissions and insertions - to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;11th century - 12th century&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;The Rubaiyat had been popular in Persia since the 11th century. They were occasional verses, but there is nothing found to show they were brought  together and published as a collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;13th century&lt;/strong&gt; 13th century manuscripts have been found, and used to identify several hundred additional verses, but this is scattered across multiple publications, without a single defining collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;15th century&lt;/strong&gt; The volume that changed everything, Ousley's Persian volume is dated 1460. This seems to be the best bet for the &lt;a href=&quot;http://exhibitions.slv.vic.gov.au/explore-exhibition/zoom-image/decorated-title-page-rubaiyat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;earliest collection in any language&lt;/a&gt;. And it is the one FitzGerald had a copy of on which to base his collection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1079" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T13:08:46.283" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T13:08:46.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2101" CreationDate="2017-03-20T13:33:43.417" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to address the pig metaphor specifically, cause obviously (I'm Polish) it caused a lot of heated discussions in my country. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is largely about racism/nationalism so to the extent Spiegelman doesn't support racist or nationalist ideas himself I guess we shouldn't treat his choices - whatever they are - as his own views on the nations portrayed, and probably more as an illustration of sad absurdity of such depictions, esp. when we move from the simple victim-perpetrator relationship of Jews and Germans. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Poles as pigs is prime example cause given the conditions (eg. antisemitism was indeed on the rise before WWII but OTOH Poland was the only country where Germans issued death penalty for helping Jews so hiding a Jewish neighbour meant you not only had to provide them with food and shelter for 5 long years but you put your whole family's life at stake - to put it in perspective, 2m ethnic Poles died along with 3m Polish Jews during WWII) the variety of attitudes (from absolute heroism through passiveness to complicity out of fear, greed or even actual anitisemitism) was rather remarkable and any blanket statement will be oversimplification of a terrible social psychology experiment it all turned out to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then you should take into account that Maus is a memoir so Art's father is entirely entitled to having either good or bad memories of the Poles he met during war and the metaphors represent his personal view of the matters and if that was passed onto Art then it's sad but should be taken into account as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly the pig being certainly not a positive metaphor is at least a complex one - and the complexity of the Polish-Jews relationships before, during and after WWII is something we're still trying to sort out as a nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1097" LastEditorUserId="1097" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T14:00:00.593" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T14:00:00.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2113" CreationDate="2017-03-20T17:48:54.823" Score="19" ViewCount="9472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading in the first volume of the Lord of the Rings recently, and ran across this quote when Gandalf and Frodo are talking about the Ring for the first time after its true nature has been discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There wasn’t any permanent harm done, was there?&quot; asked Frodo anxiously. &quot;He would get all right in time, wouldn’t he? Be able to rest in peace, I mean?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Tolkien mean by &quot;rest in peace&quot;?  Evidently, in modern terms it usually refers to death, but was that what Frodo was referring to, or was this a foreshadowing of Bilbo's journey across the sea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T07:44:14.383" Title="Did Frodo want Bilbo to die?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2110" CreationDate="2017-03-20T18:44:23.870" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Remembering that Tolkien was Catholic, I would suggest that the meaning is not specifically or simply death, but rather the ability to rest in peace after death -- which in Catholic terms means to be reconciled with God. Thus I think the import of Frodo's question is whether or not Bilbo has been irredeemably corrupted by the ring. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Bilbo's passage over the sea would constitute his resting in peace, I don't know that I would go so far as to call this a deliberate foreshadowing. It is all too easy to find associations in any text is you look hard enough. I would want foreshadowing to we written in a heavier hand than this before I called it by that name.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T18:44:23.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2110" CreationDate="2017-03-20T18:49:27.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt it very much. This conversation between Frodo and Gandalf occurs very early on in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, the second chapter in fact (&lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Past&lt;/em&gt;). Frodo had not even used the Ring, or fallen under its spell. Since Bilbo had already lived well beyond any normal lifespan, it would be understandable if Frodo had thought about his eventual demise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the books indicate when Frodo learned that Bilbo (and he himself) would be joining the Elves on their exodus into the West. There may be some intimation of it in &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, but it is years since I have read the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T18:49:27.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2110" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:22:49.073" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's referring to Bilbo's retirement to Rivendell. Bilbo's plan was to relax, listen to the songs, translate some books, and work on his memoirs. As Gandalf put it in the next line: ‘He felt better at once'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think Frodo had Bilbo's longer-term prospects in mind. He didn't know that a journey across the Sea was in the cards. All the rest Bilbo was expected to get was at the Last Homely House.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frodo (and Hobbits in general) don't seem to think much about the Afterlife, and the uncertainty of what happens when you go The Elves Know Not Whither. &quot;Rest&quot; doesn't seem to figure into it: maybe for Elves, in Mandos, but not for Men. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a bit of an oddity for Tolkien to have used a phrase there with such clearly Catholic overtones. He generally tried to avoid evoking our religion(s) into Middle-earth. Tolkien's ear sometimes failed to notice when his turns of phrase had other meanings. (Every time he mentions &quot;Tirion upon Túna&quot; I still mentally add &quot;... upon Rye&quot;). So I think here he's referring simply to the straightforward event: Bilbo went to Imladris, to rest, peacefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-03-20T21:47:50.307" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T21:47:50.307" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T19:53:58.807" Score="5" ViewCount="1474" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Winthrop's sermon &quot;A Model of Christian Charity&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://winthropsociety.com/doc_charity.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;) is an extraordinarily famous sermon, which is referenced by American politicians to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sermon, John Winthrop compares the American colonists to &quot;a city upon a hill&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, &quot;may the Lord make it like that of New England.&quot; For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What point is John Winthrop trying to make here by referencing &quot;a city upon a hill&quot;? How would this have been interpreted by his audience? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm asking this question because this passage tends to be interpreted by modern audiences as one of the first instances of American exceptionalism. I'm trying to get a sense of whether that is an after the fact interpretation or a reflection of how the sermon was interpreted at the time it was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T06:08:13.530" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:41:39.133" Title="Why does John Winthrop compare the Massachusetts Bay Colonists to &quot;a city upon a hill&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1029" CreationDate="2017-03-20T20:48:05.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his essay on Pascal's sphere, which relates to several of the themes of &quot;The Library Of Babel&quot;, Borges also notes the fixation certain mystics had on picturing God as an infinite sphere whose circumference is nowhere and center, everywhere. Thus, Borges is probably continuing his train of thought on this subject in that essay by making the book that represents God cyclical, as well as making the Library itself analogous to Pascal's sphere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2017-03-20T20:48:05.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-20T23:10:01.233" Score="6" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;The popular Christmas song &quot;The Twelve Days of Christmas&quot; has many different versions, but they're usually something along the lines of the following (final verse, which includes all the others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love sent to me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Twelve drummers drumming,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eleven pipers piping,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ten lords a-leaping,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nine ladies dancing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eight maids a-milking,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seven swans a-swimming,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Six geese a-laying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Five gold rings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Four calling birds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Three French hens,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two turtle doves,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a partridge in a pear tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What do these choices of gifts symbolise?&lt;/strong&gt; What's the deeper significance of each of the twelve types of people, animals, or objects? I seem to remember reading about a Christian significance (the twelve drummers are the twelve apostles, the four calling birds are the four evangelists, and so on). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_(song)#Meanings_of_the_gifts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also mentions an interpretation in terms of Catholic catechism, but also cites a source claiming that this is incorrect. I'd be interested in seeing both the evidence for and against this Catholic interpretation, and also any &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; reasonable interpretation of the song. A good answer would list several different possible symbolic meanings and summarise evidence for/against each one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T00:40:07.010" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:30:31.550" Title="What's the symbolism in The Twelve Days of Christmas?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2114" CreationDate="2017-03-21T04:32:37.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;His listeners would have recognized it as a quote from Matthew 5:14:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be&#xA;  hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.&#xA;  Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in&#xA;  the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others,&#xA;  that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is therefore telling them that they are to be a light to the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: The exceptionalism here is not American exceptionalism (there was not America at the time), it is Christian exceptionalism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;true Christians are of one body in Christ (1 Cor. 12). Ye are the&#xA;  body of Christ and members of their part. All the parts of this body&#xA;  being thus united are made so contiguous in a special relation as they&#xA;  must needs partake of each other's strength and infirmity; joy and&#xA;  sorrow, weal and woe. If one member suffers, all suffer with it, if&#xA;  one be in honor, all rejoice with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Puritans regarded themselves as representing a purified Christianity and hoped to establish a Christian society free of the corrupting influence of the old world. In doing so, he argues, they take on an exceptional responsibility: the reputation of God and his people throughout the world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely&#xA;  with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to&#xA;  withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a&#xA;  by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to&#xA;  speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We&#xA;  shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause&#xA;  their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out&#xA;  of the good land whither we are going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later doctrine of American exceptionalism seems to be a secularization of this idea: an exceptionalism based on civic virtues and the constitution rather than on love and grace. Modern liberalism generally is basically a secularized version of Christianity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou must observe whether thy brother hath present or probable or&#xA;  possible means of repaying thee, if there be none of those, thou must&#xA;  give him according to his necessity, rather then lend him as he&#xA;  requires (requests). If he hath present means of repaying thee, thou&#xA;  art to look at him not as an act of mercy, but by way of commerce,&#xA;  wherein thou art to walk by the rule of justice; but if his means of&#xA;  repaying thee be only probable or possible, then he is an object of&#xA;  thy mercy, thou must lend him, though there be danger of losing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, allowing for certain changes in rhetorical style over the years, could be Bernie Sanders. Except Bernie Sander would not likely quote Deuteronomy in support of this assertion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:41:39.133" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:41:39.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1754" CreationDate="2017-03-21T04:37:50.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hart, after receiving his vision of the dying man's life and realising how much he owed Bowler, ran to find Bowler's (or in this case Bowler's broken form.) It was Hart carried brought Bowler to the exit so that Bowler could leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Beast's plan, it was simply to torment Hart once Bowler was no longer around to be a support mechanism, and to always let Hart - as Hart now knew how to get out - think he was going to escape and then always prevent him doing so at the last minute, in order to screw with him in the worst way possible (The Beast says all this to Bowler.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. but put a spoiler warning in that title! ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1104" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T10:57:42.007" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T10:57:42.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T07:08:51.747" Score="18" ViewCount="4320" Body="&lt;p&gt;221B Baker Street. One of the most famous addresses in literature. But why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there any reason Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose this particular address as the residence of his famous protagonist? Did he have any links to that part of London?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I've been told the house didn't exist at the time, but the street existed, and maybe the number 221 has other significance in his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T12:08:26.040" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T03:38:54.943" Title="Why Did Doyle Choose 221B Baker Street?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2017-03-21T07:47:01.327" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the &lt;s&gt;un&lt;/s&gt;reputable Internet sources indicate that the numbering on Baker Street in Doyle's lifetime was only up to 100. Apparently Doyle initially called the street &quot;Upper Baker Street&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One theory is that Doyle chose 221B - a non-existing address - to avoid some poor fella living there from receiving piles of mail an unwanted &lt;em&gt;clients&lt;/em&gt; - which is the theory I subscribe to, as this is what a decent man would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from that, there is no information I could find that would explain why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle chose &lt;em&gt;221B&lt;/em&gt; of all possible (higher-than-100) addresses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle himself lived at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea, Portsmouth, at the approximate time of writing his first stories. Wikipedia lists no accounts of Doyle living or working near Baker Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References (most copy each other verbatim anyway):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smithsonianmag - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-mystery-of-221b-baker-street-3608784/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mystery of 221B Baker Street&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;History House - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historyhouse.co.uk/articles/221b_baker_street.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Did 221b Baker Street Exist?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/221B_Baker_Street&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;221B Baker Street&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Arthur Conan Doyle&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T18:10:52.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T18:10:52.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2564" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:06:48.757" Score="8" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently been reading and re-reading Alan Moore and David Lloyd's &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;. After having skimmed through it multiple times and settling a few questions I had about the continuity, only one question remains. In volume I, chapter 2, &lt;em&gt;The Voice&lt;/em&gt;, on page 13 the following conversation occurs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nsn3k.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nsn3k.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;V and Evey talk about music&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... they eradicated &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; cultures more &lt;em&gt;thoroughly&lt;/em&gt; than they did &lt;em&gt;others&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No &lt;em&gt;Tamla&lt;/em&gt; and no &lt;em&gt;Trojan&lt;/em&gt;. No &lt;em&gt;Billie Holiday&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Black Uhuru&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;His Master's Voice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Every hour. On the hour.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We'll have to see what we can do about that...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Italics authors', bold emphasis and &lt;em&gt;choice of capitalisation&lt;/em&gt; mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;V says &quot;his master's voice&quot;, which is also the title of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the novel by Stanislaw Lem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see that V is most likely talking about the order in which the citizens of post-war Britain live - the oppression, constant surveillance, fascism, etc. V's primary goal throughout the novel is to make people raise their heads and pave their own way with their own decisions, as opposed to their masters' voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still I find the choice of words here peculiar. Having skimmed through Lem's novel's description on Wikipedia I can see that it is not exactly about the same things as &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;. There is a bit about &quot;criticizing Cold War military and political decision-making as corrupting the ethical conduct of scientists&quot;, but as I said, this is not what &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt; is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here comes my question: is this quote a conscious reference to Stanislaw Lem's &lt;em&gt;His Master's Voice&lt;/em&gt;? If so, how exactly are the two books linked? If not, what explains this choice of words (for instance, &quot;&lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; master's voice&quot; would be more suitable, I think)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;I would appreciate if spoilers from Lem's novels be tagged as such&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:30:18.177" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T07:05:43.663" Title="Does V reference Stanislaw Lem's &quot;His Master's Voice&quot;, and if so, why?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;alan-moore&gt;&lt;stanislaw-lem&gt;&lt;v-for-vendetta&gt;&lt;his-masters-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2123" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:09:26.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:09:26.663" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:09:26.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2124" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:09:26.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the graphic novel 'V for Vendetta' by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. Use with the [alan-moore] or [david-lloyd] tags, and the [comics] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:32:43.873" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:32:43.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2125" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:10:35.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:10:35.777" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:10:35.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2126" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:10:35.777" Score="0" Body="For questions about Stanislaw Lem's 1962 science fiction novel. Use with the [stanislaw-lem] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:16:06.737" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:16:06.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2127" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:11:38.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:11:38.647" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:11:38.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2128" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:11:38.647" Score="0" Body="Question about the works of Neil Gaiman (born 1960) or his life as a writer. He is known for his book 'American Gods', and the Sandman comics." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:20:04.540" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:20:04.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2129" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:13:48.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T08:13:48.477" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T08:13:48.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2130" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T08:13:48.477" Score="0" Body="To be used for Heinrich Heine's poem &quot;Morphine&quot;. Use this together with the [heinrich-heine], [german-literature], and [poetry] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T17:17:38.347" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:17:38.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1485" CreationDate="2017-03-21T10:53:36.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning, Macondo was a city solidly set in reality. Magical things happened, but everybody agreed they happened. However, as time passed by, gradually the hold of Macondo on reality started slipping. Things became increasingly illusory. There are several instances of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fernanda's prolonged correspondence with the imaginary doctors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The massacre of over three thousand people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The inability of the soldiers to see José Arcadio Segundo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The brothel frequented by Aureliano (Babilonia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Santa Sofía de la Piedad's battle of attrition against the decrepitude of the house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, I think the massacre is the strongest bit of evidence. Three thousand four hundred and eight people were slaughtered, and history was so convincingly re-written that nobody except José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano believed it happened. Consider Úrsula's thoughts about José Arcadio Segundo when the latter spoke of these deaths to her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only then did Úrsula realize that he was in a world of shadows more impenetrable than hers, as unreachable and solitary as that of his great-grandfather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet José Arcadio Segundo was the one who had the most complete grasp of the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the brothel that Aureliano frequented is also telling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her eternal smile seemed to have been brought on by the credulity of&#xA;  her customers, who accepted as something certain an establishment that&#xA;  did not exist except in the imagination, because even the tangible&#xA;  things where unreal: the furniture that fell apart when one sat on it,&#xA;  […] the frames with prints cut out of magazines that had never been&#xA;  published. Even the timid little whores who came from the&#xA;  neighborhood: when the proprietress informed them that customers had&#xA;  arrived they were nothing but an invention. […] [As] soon as they got&#xA;  their peso and fifty cents they would spend it on a roll with cheese&#xA;  that the proprietress sold them, smiling more than ever, because only&#xA;  she knew that that meal was not real either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things seem to indicate that, a little by little, Macondo was slowly becoming less and less real, more and more mirage, until, of course, it was wiped out from reality in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, my son,&quot; he sighed. &quot;It's enough for me to be sure that you and I&#xA;  exist at this moment.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T10:53:36.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2133" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:34:11.203" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:34:11.203" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:34:11.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2134" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:34:11.203" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature which were originally written in the French language, regardless whether they were written or published in France or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T13:48:03.257" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T13:48:03.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2135" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:37:26.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:37:26.530" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:37:26.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2136" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:37:26.530" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the influence of historical events or notions on a literary work, or about the extent to which works of literature accurately depict historical events, figures, customs, ideas, etcetera. " OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:52:37.050" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:52:37.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2137" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:54:04.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T15:54:04.820" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T15:54:04.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2138" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-21T15:54:04.820" Score="0" Body="For trope in the movie sense and their origins: universally defined images with deeper implications than their linguistic meanings. Not for the rhetoric figure." OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="255" LastEditDate="2017-03-21T16:55:31.480" LastActivityDate="2017-03-21T16:55:31.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2140" CreationDate="2017-03-21T16:54:24.353" Score="6" ViewCount="946" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although the word is not used, Twain's zany novel of title-frenzy and mad-scientist capitalistic schemes &lt;em&gt;The American Claimant&lt;/em&gt; (sequel to &lt;em&gt;The Gilded Age&lt;/em&gt;) describes the intent by the megalomaniac Mulberry Sellers to &quot;materialize&quot; dead people for use as cheap labor. He intends to contract these would-be minions of his out as policemen and soldiers and such, thus saving city and national governments big money while reaping a giant profits for himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this 1892 novel the first to include &quot;zombies&quot; among its characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, these &quot;zombies&quot; never really materialize - they remain figments of Mulberry's overfertile imagination; yet still, as far as the concept goes, is this the &quot;advent of the zombies&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, Twain was not only ahead of his time, again, but a case could be made that he foresaw the inroads that robots would make into the labor market (if you stretch or conflate &quot;zombies&quot; to &quot;robots&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T17:03:23.200" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T23:07:10.587" Title="Was Twain the first author to write of Zombies?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2017-03-21T17:03:33.773" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zombies go way back, further than 1892. There has been a fear of the undead since caveman times, when some tribes used to tie up corpses to stop them coming back to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the earliest form of writing about living dead is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt; (roughly 18th century BC)&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://dawnoftheundead.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/the-history-of-zombies-in-literature-or-revenge-of-the-living-trope/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and will let the dead go up to eat the living!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the dead will outnumber the living!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/723/ilmari-karonen&quot;&gt;Ilmari Karonn&lt;/a&gt; mentions in the comments that that passage was probably copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar#Descent_into_the_underworld&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The descent of Ishtar&lt;/a&gt;, which was around but not written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the word 'zombie' comes from the Haitian 'zombi' - meaning spirit of the dead.&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://umich.edu/%7Eengl415/zombies/zombie.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;. Originated in roughly 1791 from the voodoo culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the actual mention of the word 'zombie', the earliest I can find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=gbhIAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA52&amp;amp;dq=zombi&amp;amp;hl=fr#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=zombi&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here on google books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an account of Hispaniola in French by Moreau de Saint-Méry. It is called &lt;em&gt;Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'Isle Saint-Domingue&lt;/em&gt; and was published in 1797:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Une jeune beauté au teint d'ébène, qu'un conte de &lt;strong&gt;Zombi&lt;/strong&gt; (*) fait trembler de tous ses membres, veille pour l'attendre, lui ouvre une porte qu'elle sait faire mouvoir sans bruit , &amp;amp; n'a qu'une crainte , c'est d'être trompée dans son attente.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Mot créol qui signifie: esprit, revenant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated using google translate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A young ebony-skinned beauty, whom a Zombie (*) tale frightens to the bone, stays awake waiting for him, lets him in through a door that she knows how to open quietly, and has but one fear, which is that her wait was in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) Creole word meaning: spirit, undead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later of course we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/a&gt; (1818), which is arguably a zombie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://dawnoftheundead.wordpress.com/2013/08/28/the-history-of-zombies-in-literature-or-revenge-of-the-living-trope/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; - Dawn of the undead - wordpress.com&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;http://umich.edu/%7Eengl415/zombies/zombie.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt; - Umich.edu&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T16:27:17.143" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2146" CreationDate="2017-03-21T20:23:52.540" Score="29" ViewCount="951" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/214040&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Odyssey began as oral tradition&lt;/a&gt;, and was later transcribed by someone we now call &quot;Homer.&quot; Disregarding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homeric Question&lt;/a&gt; concerning the identity of the person who transcribed these works, it recently occurred to me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since The Odyssey began as oral tradition, it must naturally have evolved over time. Transcription of oral tradition is an imperfect process, and having been passed by memory and by oral education, small changes are bound to accrue. Additionally, any specific player/orator has control over their performance, and individual changes as an individual deemed necessary are also likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems plausible that multiple copies of at least &lt;em&gt;parts&lt;/em&gt; of The Odyssey should exist: that &quot;Homer&quot; and Homer alone should feel the need to write them down seems counter-intuitive and inexplicable. It would be surprising to me to learn that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; Homer bothered to write any portion of The Odyssey down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a minimum, if multiple people had versions of The Odyssey in their memory that &lt;em&gt;differed&lt;/em&gt; from Homer's, I'd expect to find an account of that somewhere. There are a great number of ways that changes and differences could have been recorded and retained; that none of them seem to be mentioned anywhere confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there different copies of parts of The Odyssey, or is Homer's version the only known evidence of this oral tradition? If so, are there major differences between them, or are written versions largely consistent with the one presented by Homer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T07:41:19.087" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T07:41:19.087" Title="Are there any recorded discrepancies between The Odyssey as oral tradition and The Odyssey as Homer transcribed it?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5954" CreationDate="2017-03-21T21:24:06.470" Score="3" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the opening lines of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; at the beginning of chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Who is John Galt?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Ellie Willers, mocking and still - as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why did you say that?&quot; asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why does it bother you?&quot; he asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It doesn't,&quot; snapped Eddie Willers...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source of object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent did Eddie learn why he felt that later, or why it bothered him so much? Why did he tell the bum that it didn't bother him when they both knew that it did? Who was Eddie trying to convince - the bum or himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T14:35:06.610" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T02:30:06.680" Title="How much did Eddie Willers understand about his situation by the end of Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T21:43:31.273" Score="5" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;, both Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn seem bound and determined to undermine each other. I know both of them are desperately trying to get promoted (to the point of doing absolutely absurd things to do so), but why such schadenfreude on their parts when the other experienced some kind of misfortune? Do they see promotion as some &amp;quot;zero-sum game&amp;quot; where they can only &amp;quot;win&amp;quot; at the other's expense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T15:39:24.813" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T15:39:24.813" Title="Why were Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn so determined to undermine each other?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-21T21:58:12.797" Score="11" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum2.leidenuniv.nl/verba-africana/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verba Africana website&lt;/a&gt; is a fantastic website that publishes recordings, transcriptions, and analysis of African oral literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the stories published on the site is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum2.leidenuniv.nl/verba-africana/ewe/b-jealous-twins-analysis.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jealous Twins&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; it is an Ewe tale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the interesting things about the story is that it follows a formula. The storyteller begins by framing the story as something not to be taken seriously:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ye ŋutinya yia gblɔ ge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I am going to tell this story&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ne ɖeviwo abe fefe fefe ene&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      to children as a play&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The storyteller then does a call and response with the audience: she says &quot;Listen to a story&quot; and the audience responds with &quot;Let the story come.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the characters are introduced with &quot;The story moves and lands on a man and the wife,&quot; and finally the narrative begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the phrases used to frame this story (e.g. &quot;the story moves and lands on [characters]&quot;) are used in another Ewe tale recorded on the site: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hum2.leidenuniv.nl/verba-africana/ewe/b-headless-crabs-analysis.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Headless Crabs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are these stories framed in this particular way? What effect does this framing have on the story? Why is this framing a convention of Ewe oral literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T03:50:41.567" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T03:50:41.567" Title="Why, at the begining of the tale Jealous Twins, does the storyteller frame the story?" Tags="&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2142" CreationDate="2017-03-21T22:59:11.027" Score="20" Body="&lt;h2&gt;On the answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Much of the structure of this answer is based on the very clear history of&lt;/em&gt; The Odyssey &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; The Iliad &lt;em&gt;written by Nicolas Bertrand in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/IMG/pdf/N_._Bertrand.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2009 Article (PDF)&lt;/a&gt;. The primary sources discussed are the following, and I will try to reference them more closely in successive edits, but this is a process that takes time, as I relied on translations to write the original answer):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epic Singers and Oral Tradition&lt;/em&gt;, Lord, A,B, Cornell University Press, 1991&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Making of the Homeric Verse: the collected papers of Milman Parry&lt;/em&gt;, Parry, M, Clarendon Press, 1971&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die typischen Scenen bei Homer&lt;/em&gt;, Arend, Weidmann, 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homeric Questions&lt;/em&gt;, Nagy, University of Texas Press, 1996&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's a text? This is a question that needs to be answered to be able to understand this question fully. What you're asking is basically, why we don't we have a &lt;code&gt;diff /homer.txt /oral.txt&lt;/code&gt;? There is nothing like a signed version of &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. Whatever version you read was probably compiled (I'm not saying translated, I mean compiled) in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that if we want to compare the version you're reading with oral tradition, we need to identify which version you're reading - a problem one seldom has with texts from post-medieval era, and has to a much latter degree with texts that post-date the diffusion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;codices&lt;/a&gt; by Ancient Rome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Come on, I want an answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the birth of &lt;em&gt;the Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;the Iliad&lt;/em&gt;) is a long-lasting oral tradition. This sophisticated tradition has few current-day equivalent in Europe, but luckily enough, in the early 20th century, Perry and Lord, who were as curious as the OP but had no access to the Internet, went on asking living bards for their input on what the &lt;em&gt;Oral Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; (this is my term, not theirs) could have been: &lt;em&gt;epske pjesme&lt;/em&gt;, the oral epic tradition in Yugoslavia, was still lively and they had many interviews with practicing bards that confirmed their intuition (intuition shared with a third guy called Arend, working separately, who apparently preferred libraries to the Balkans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they got from their discussion confirmed two great intuitions those guys had:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt; were not written to be... written. They were written down after being composed to be learned by heart. This was first identified by identifying then studying structures called &amp;quot;Homeric verses&amp;quot;: those are rhyme structures repeated with similar semantic content (generally a character and an associated adjective). The canonical example of this is &amp;quot;Swift-footed Achilles&amp;quot;. One would have three or four such structures for each character, that he could rely on when coming back to the character. They have an evident mnemonic function, which tells you a lot about how close to Oral tradition the version we can read is, but they are also a great &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot; tool: they are prepared to fit in Homeric verses well, allowing to keep the flow whenever the story takes a new twist. Those structures are actually very old and are sometimes shared with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit&lt;/a&gt; (making it ridiculous to argue that we're talking about western culture here)!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if you go away from the language itself, the oral character of the story is evident: all boat landings, all fights, share a common structure so that poets only have to remember the scheme once, and decline it according to what's important in a given example. Of course, seeing this from only a single version of the story (whichever &amp;quot;Homer&amp;quot; version you found) can be difficult, but it's confirmed by the study of the above mentioned &lt;em&gt;epske pjesme&lt;/em&gt;. This kind of system speaks very much against &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; being written by a single man. It also says a lot about the stability you may expect between versions: they will all share the same structure, and big discrepancies would therefore be about omitting or detailing a given event in the story (small discrepancies between oral tradition and a written text not being very likely to survive time...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So come on, where are those discrepancies?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same studies on Yugoslav poets that &amp;quot;proved&amp;quot; the existence of a mnemonic framework throughout &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt; were studied long enough that we know how little they vary: several years apart, poems built around similar verse and story structure were recorded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allows for poet to compose quickly and efficiently improvisations on a given structure. What &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; users of the same technique tell us is that this was used to give out acts, various and varied performance of a given theme, with both great consistency and great diversity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Then how come we have only one version?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we know for sure that those were oral texts, how did we get down to the single version we read today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's a transcription. The best way to see &lt;em&gt;the Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the Iliad&lt;/em&gt; is as a movie. A movie is not a script, it's not even the sum of all scenes of the script that were played out once. It's a collage of chosen bits that were recorded and distributed. Of course the base material (the actual scenes recorded) is important, but you can't go back to them from the written (recorded) piece. Nor is it realistic to think we recorded a single performance of a poet: both &amp;quot;books&amp;quot; are far too long for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we agree &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; is just a movie, we need to know when it was shot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Shooting &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is: who put &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; on paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First option:&lt;/strong&gt; The Scriptist. There was a predating cultural substrate, but the guy who wrote done the two poems also composed them. The main argument for this is in my opinion weak, &lt;em&gt;ie&lt;/em&gt; that poems of such wisdom and complexity could not have been conceived without the help of writing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second option:&lt;/strong&gt; The Oralist. The poems were dictated (by one or more poets). The tenants of this option (among which Lord and Powell) witnessed that the texts that were dictated to them by the Yugoslav poets were much better when dictated than when recorded, as it forced the poets to pace themselves and extend the sentences. We can use the analogue of theater actors knowing they are recorded for a movie, asking to shoot a scene again or including bonuses that are not in their usual performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Retaining this option gives for a very affirmative answer to your question: the two poems are not different &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; from the oral tradition, but they consist a more organised and exhaustive version of the  poetic wisdom that brought them to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Third hypothesis&lt;/em&gt;: The texts transitioned slowly from oral to written to written and unified. This is Nagy's hypothesis. He gives a very precise timeline (which in my opinion is quite irrelevant here) but the basic idea is to have the text put down in three phases. At first, as described above (just a writing framework and tool), then more and more &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; versions would circulate. In a third time, some of these performances would be recorded in a written form. In a fourth time, those written down would be aggregated and standardized before, ultimately, a &amp;quot;fixed&amp;quot; version appears (for &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, we can date this to Aristarchus's edition in 150 B.C.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this last option is preferable: we should be able to imagine an oral tradition that is slowly merged into a nascent, written tradition, before for both political and cultural versions a central version emerged, that would then vary only slightly - &amp;quot;corruptions&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cleaning&amp;quot; periods, basically through spread (for corruptions) and study of many versions to make a clean one (for cleaning or bottlenecks). The text you know comes at one of those bottlenecks, and its incredibly long history as a &amp;quot;single&amp;quot; cultural object explain no variations of it have gained wide tract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable exceptions to this are details of the Trojan Horse that survived in other texts/the popular culture, and a lot of mythology that we know in contradictory/more detailed version, because both these elements had a cultural significance to those over time that transmitted the text to you, from Athens scholars to Roman and Egyptians to Arabics and Byzantines, to Italian scribes of the 15th century, to French scholars of the 19th and British scholars of the 20th...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know of one version because every effort has been made to present a coherent, written version of a text that was initially probably a collection of oral performances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T09:17:21.247" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T09:17:21.247" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2147" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2148" CreationDate="2017-03-21T23:54:37.560" Score="3" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eva Ibbotson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_River_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journey to the River Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a novel set mainly in the Amazon region of Brazil. It's clearly set quite some time before its publication date of 2001, what with a &quot;governess&quot; being a major character; but it must also be set after the 1880s, given the existence of &lt;em&gt;Little Lord Fauntleroy&lt;/em&gt; as a stage play in the story. Wikipedia says it's set &quot;early in the twentieth century&quot;, but gives neither a source for this claim nor a more specific period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When was the book set?&lt;/strong&gt; Let's see how narrow we can get the range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T00:07:20.823" Title="When is Journey to the River Sea set?" Tags="&lt;eva-ibbotson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2147" CreationDate="2017-03-22T00:03:15.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's set in 1910.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For while the sisters prized proper learning, they also prized good manners, thoughtfulness, and care for others, and the girls learned both algebra and needlework. Moreover, they took in children whose parents were abroad and needed somewhere to spend the holidays. Now, some thirty years later, in the autumn of 1910, the school had a waiting list, and those girls who went there knew how lucky they were. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 1, ch. 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="255" LastEditDate="2017-03-22T00:07:20.823" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T00:07:20.823" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2155" CreationDate="2017-03-22T12:48:01.070" Score="18" ViewCount="5072" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jay Gatsby in Fitzgerald's novel &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; is no doubt smart, talented, and brave. But he only pursues his own egoistic desires, is quite delusional in his love affairs, does not hesitate to destroy a family, does not create anything, and does not make others happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is he great?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1132" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-16T03:16:00.207" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T03:16:00.207" Title="Why is Gatsby great?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2086" CreationDate="2017-03-22T14:13:32.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They probably have something similar, but it is unclear.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have no concept of fatherhood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Do you truly believe a man puts a baby in a woman?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well . . . yes,” I said a little awkwardly. “In a manner of speaking. It takes a man and a woman to make a baby. A mother and a father.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You have a word for it!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 127, &lt;em&gt;Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To them, sex and love are explicitly separate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What of love?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vashet laughed again then, loud and long and vastly amused. Half of Haert must have heard it, and it echoed back to us from the distant hills. “You barbarians, ” she said, wiping moisture from her eyes. “I had forgotten how backward you are. My poet king was the same way. It took him a long, miserable time before he realized the truth of things: There is a great deal of difference&#xA;  between a penis and a heart.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 124, &lt;em&gt;Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another scene, too long to truly quote here, in which Vashet tells Kvothe that he can go after Penthe, even though Vashet and Kvothe have been sexually intimate.  Though this might seem like Penthe was in love with Kvothe, except for this quote by Vashet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“All she is looking for is sexplay. There is no harm in it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 124, &lt;em&gt;Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the Adem, music is very private and intimate. This quote from Vashet does include the fact that a woman and a man might be partners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vashet nodded gravely. “A family might sing together if they are close. A mother might sing to her child. A woman might sing to her man.” A slight flush rose on&#xA;  Vashet’s cheeks as she said this. “But only if they are very much in love, and very much alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 113, &lt;em&gt;Wise Man's Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vashet does at one point call sex &quot;Loveplay&quot; in WMF chap. 113.  Additionally, one of the previous owners of Kvothe's sword is cited as &quot;Finol of the clear and shining eye, much beloved of Dulcen.&quot; (WMF chap. 125).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Adem do have a concept of love, and maybe a concept of people in love being &quot;partners&quot;, though not necessarily sexual partners. They may not have the specific rituals that define &quot;marriage&quot;, but they probably have something close to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="865" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T13:29:26.130" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T13:29:26.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2017-03-22T14:46:47.380" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of revenants was definitely present in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/2147/2892&quot;&gt;Mabinogion&lt;/a&gt;, which dates to the about the 12th century CE, and is present in Norse mythology in relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/2444/2892&quot;&gt;Freyja's powers&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Beastly Gerbil suggests, this idea may be as old as literature itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:00:19.890" LastActivityDate="2017-03-22T15:32:45.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-22T14:59:20.467" Score="1" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicanor_Parra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parra&lt;/a&gt;'s &quot;anti-poems&quot; but I can't recall the exact wording, or which book it appeared in, and can't seem to find it online. The poem says something along the lines of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing important is learned from books. (I read this in a book.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q: What is the actual Parra poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ideally the answer will feature the Spanish text.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T16:36:26.080" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T16:36:26.080" Title="Nicanor Parra line: &quot;Nothing important is learned from books. (I read this in a book.)&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;nicanor-parra&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2176" CreationDate="2017-03-22T18:34:01.877" Score="5" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often find that an author's lesser-known works are among my favorites; some examples are Steinbeck's &quot;Tortilla Flat&quot; and &quot;The Wayward Bus&quot;, Jack London's &quot;The Road,&quot; and Twain's &quot;The American Claimant&quot; (not to mention Grisham's &quot;A Painted House&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &quot;The Innocents Abroad&quot; was Twain's most popular book (in terms of number of sales) during his lifetime, but since then, I would imagine it has been overtaken by &quot;Tom Sawyer&quot; and &quot;Huck Finn&quot; and possibly others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know, particularly, where &quot;The American Claimant&quot; fits in among Twain's other works. Mulberry Sellers is, IMO, one of Twain's most entertaining and fascinating characters - perhaps without peer among his protagonists - after Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there an online site that would show, filtered by author, how many copies of each of an author's works have sold?&lt;/strong&gt; Even if it was just ordered by rank (1..N), rather than numbers of sales or copies printed, I would find it very interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:50:47.590" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:50:47.590" Title="Is there a list of book sales (or numerical rank) by author online?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2017-03-22T21:56:18.830" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems to have been the editor who proposed the title, and the author didn't like it much.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original suggestion seems to have come from Fitzgerald's editor and friend, Maxwell Perkins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I always thought that &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot; was a suggestive and effective title, -- with only the vaguest knowledge of the book, of course. But anyway, the last thing we want to do is divert you to any degree, from your actual writing, and if you let matters rest just as they are now, we shall be perfectly satisfied. The book is the thing, and all the rest is inconsiderable beside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 16 Apr 1924 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lawsDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT117&amp;amp;lpg=PT117&amp;amp;dq=I+always+thought+that+%22The+Great+Gatsby%22+was+a+suggestive+and+effective+title,+--+with+only+the+vaguest+knowledge+of+the+book,+of+course.+But+anyway,+the+last+thing+we+want+to+do+is+divert+you+to+any+degree,+from+your+actual+writing,+and+if+you+let+matters+rest+just+as+they+are+now,+we+shall+be+perfectly+satisfied.+The+book+is+the+thing,+and+all+the+rest+is+inconsiderable+beside+it.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=SsiYEf5a4I&amp;amp;sig=Pa7tdPE07ZHUBXntu9TqFYcNNpE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiwiZ-BievSAhUqBsAKHfxNCPwQ6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=I%20always%20thought%20that%20%22The%20Great%20Gatsby%22%20was%20a%20suggestive%20and%20effective%20title%2C%20--%20with%20only%20the%20vaguest%20knowledge%20of%20the%20book%2C%20of%20course.%20But%20anyway%2C%20the%20last%20thing%20we%20want%20to%20do%20is%20divert%20you%20to%20any%20degree%2C%20from%20your%20actual%20writing%2C%20and%20if%20you%20let%20matters%20rest%20just%20as%20they%20are%20now%2C%20we%20shall%20be%20perfectly%20satisfied.%20The%20book%20is%20the%20thing%2C%20and%20all%20the%20rest%20is%20inconsiderable%20beside%20it.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the author first sent the book to Perkins, he titled it &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; but was unsure of this title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under separate cover I'm sending you my third novel: The Great Gatsby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby. After you've read the book let me know what you think about the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, 27 Oct 1924 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/the-novel-is-wonder.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before his editor even had the chance to reply to this letter, he sent another, amended, version and changed the title to &lt;em&gt;Trimalchio in West Egg&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Trimalchio in West Egg. The only other titles that seem to fit it are Trimalchio and On the Road to West Egg. I had two others, Gold-hatted Gatsby and The High-bouncing Lover, but they seemed too light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, 7 Nov 1924 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/the-novel-is-wonder.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perkins responded as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now deal with this question: various gentlemen here don't like the title,—in fact none like it but me. To me, the strange incongruity of the words in it sound the note of the book. But the objectors are more practical men than I. Consider as quickly as you can the question of a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Maxwell Perkins to F. Scott Fitzgerald, 18 Nov 1924 (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/07/the-novel-is-wonder.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After persuasion from both his wife and his editor, Fitzgerald agreed to the title &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;. But months later, even when the book was about to be published, he was still trying to make last-minute changes to the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On 7 March [1925], Fitzgerald cabled Perkins to ask if it was too late to change the novel’s title because he wanted to revert to “Gold-Hatted Gatsby” or “Trimalchio.” Perkins replied on 9 March: “Title change would cause bad delay and confusion.” And on the nineteenth Fitzgerald cabled again: CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE STOP WHART WOULD DELAY BE. By then it was too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/bio/bruccoli-somesort.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was published on 10 April 1925 under the title &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But why &quot;Great&quot;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1571/17&quot;&gt;this similar question about an unrelated work&lt;/a&gt;, there may be an element of irony or even sarcasm in the title. Perhaps Gatsby really is as bad as you say, and the title refers to him as &quot;Great&quot; as an ironic way of pointing up how un-Great he actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are other interpretations. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;http://group406.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-title-of-novel-and-what-makes-jay.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; considers the question of what makes Gatsby &quot;great&quot; and makes the case that he actually is great, as a character and arguably as a person too. Readers might admire him or find his story relatable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps Gatsby is no more than a simple man who lives, loves, and dies. But &lt;strong&gt;perhaps he is much more than that – a hero for all dreamers, one who stands for the survival of his dreams even in the face of unconquerable adversity, and one who dies tragically, an honorable yet empty man, with an army of faithful readers mourning his defeat in death but unceasingly admiring his disposition in life. Perhaps, just maybe, it is what he is fighting for that everyone can relate to.&lt;/strong&gt; When it comes down to it, Gatsby is fighting to chase a love that is slipping too quickly into his past for him to catch. We, as the readers, know that Gatsby’s desire for Daisy’s love is a hopeless case, yet we want so badly for him to be happy; it is this paradox that brings us all together in support of Gatsby. It is what makes us hate Daisy when she cries over the shirts. It is what makes us love him when he puts his pride aside to hide in the bushes to make sure she is alright. It is what makes us sick when Gatsby’s body is floating dead in his pool. It is what makes us feel as though we are there at his funeral, mourning the loss of a close friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gatsby's success story is also one that could well be called &quot;great&quot;, and which Americans in particular might admire and identify with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Fitzgerald] created Jay Gatsby to embody the American dream. That unique American ability to go from rags to riches. A dream that is the epitome of all dreams, and that all people have dreamt at one time or another: The poor boy or the broke soldier having the very very rich girl, and rising to the class of the rich and famous. [...] in a mere 3 years, he went from nothing to owning one of the largest houses in New York speaking to the most powerful people around, and throwing parties that every important person in the Us attended. This is the American Dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And more than that: as well as being financially successful, Gatsby has a personal life which is arguably dominated by self-sacrifice. What you describe as &quot;quite delusional in his love affairs&quot; could also be described as a man who will do anything for love, even to the extent of sacrificing his own life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even though F. Scott Fitzgerald could have stopped there, he did not feel that James Gatz had truly become great. &lt;strong&gt;He points out that Gatsby, unlike everyone else, achieved this greatness for love. When one person selflessly gives themselves, sacrifices themselves, sacrifices everything they have, and even gives their life for someone else; they are greater than anyone.&lt;/strong&gt; Gatsby's pursuit of Daisy, to win her love, is the dream he lives for, and hope sustains him. Daisy is Gatsby's version of the American Dream, the love of his life, the perfect housewife, the ultimate status, &quot;the king's daughter, the golden girl&quot; (however all of these qualities are just Gatsby's idealization of her after dreaming about her for five years) and he is willing to sacrificing everything to obtain her. James Gatz lived his entire life to love Daisy. When he shows her the stuff in his house, he's showing her the house he has created for her. He doesn't really care for any of this - it's all done specifically for her. Even the parties stopped when she didn't like them. [...] &#xA;  In the end, he says that &lt;strong&gt;he will tell the police that he was driving, he waits outside her house like a gallant knight, and finally takes a bullet for her so that she may live on.&lt;/strong&gt; Jay Gatsby has lived and created all that he has in the name of love and the name of Daisy, not James Gatz or Jay Gatsby.&#xA;  The last comment from Gatsby is about Daisy coming to him, and Nick responds by stating that Gatsby is better then all of them. So Gatsby dies for love and for the people. Moreover he is great in all desires and all his dids. &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T00:34:46.217" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2110" CreationDate="2017-03-22T23:23:51.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider what Gandalf told Frodo about the ring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Rings, does not die, but he does&#xA;  not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until every minute&#xA;  is weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible,&#xA;  he &lt;em&gt;fades&lt;/em&gt;: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in&#xA;  the twilight under the eye of the Dark Power that rules the Rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after that, Frodo starts asking about Bilbo, and in the context of this, Frodo would obviously prefer Bilbo to eventually die rather than have that happen to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also I believe that Tolkien assumed Frodo to be good on the whole, and that he assumed that a reasonably good person accepts that dying is the natural course of events, and not something to be opposed to, but this is just conjecture.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1127" LastEditorUserId="1127" LastEditDate="2017-03-23T07:44:14.383" LastActivityDate="2017-03-23T07:44:14.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2158" CreationDate="2017-03-23T20:41:36.447" Score="11" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can somebody please explain this expression from a Mark Twain story, &lt;em&gt;A Double Barrelled Detective Story&lt;/em&gt;: 'Sedgemoor trade-mark, white sleeve badge'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among other things he said that my character was written in my face; that I was treacherous, a dissembler, a coward, and a brute without sense of pity or compassion: the 'Sedgemoor trade-mark,' he called it—and 'white-sleeve badge.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:09:40.967" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:09:40.967" Title="What do &quot;Sedgemoor trade-mark&quot; and &quot;white-sleeve badge&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2157" CreationDate="2017-03-24T02:37:23.487" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You need to understand the historical context for this. It all goes back to the various struggles and civil wars which took place in seventeenth-century England. Essentially the whole chapter is a &quot;your great-grandfather killed my great-grandfather&quot; type story.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Firstly, there's another relevant line a couple of paragraphs earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old, is of an old but unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and for King James’s purse’s profit, so everybody said — some maliciously — the rest merely because they believed it. The bride is nineteen and beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, immeasurably proud of her Cavalier blood, and passionate in her love for her young husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part I, Chapter I (text available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3180/3180-h/3180-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sedgemoor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sedgemoor&lt;/a&gt; was the deciding battle of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monmouth_Rebellion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monmouth Rebellion&lt;/a&gt;, in which James Scott, the Duke of Monmouth attempting to overthrow and displace King James II, was roundly defeated by the king's forces. Many of Monmouth's supporters were deemed traitors, and executed or deported. This scene-setting paragraph tells us that the groom's ancestors had been Monmouth supporters who fled the country, and perhaps bribed the king in order to be able to escape unharmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bride's ancestors, however, were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cavaliers&lt;/a&gt;, Royalist supporters in seventeenth-century England. This accounts for her father's animosity towards the groom: as the descendant of &quot;king and country&quot; types, who perhaps fled the country during Cromwell's time &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; of their loyalty to the king, he hated a descendant of men who &quot;betrayed&quot; the king and fled the country for that reason. We see much of this centuries-old bitterness in his choice of insults:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among other things he said that my character was written in my face; that I was treacherous, a dissembler, a coward, and a brute without sense of pity or compassion: the ‘Sedgemoor trade-mark,’ he called it—and ‘white-sleeve badge.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Treacherous&lt;/strong&gt; - this corresponds to the supposed treachery of Monmouth's supporters in rising up against their king. A &lt;strong&gt;dissembler&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;coward&lt;/strong&gt; - this corresponds to his ancestors, the Monmouth supporters who, instead of owning up to their beliefs and facing execution proudly, chose to pay off the king and flee the country to save their skins. (A &quot;brute without sense of pity or compassion&quot; - this seems to be the simple truth, judging from how he treated his wife.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so we come to &lt;strong&gt;Sedgemoor trademark&lt;/strong&gt;, the real crux of the bride's father's dislike. It's not, or at least not entirely, due to the groom's own personality, but rather an age-old feud inherited from earlier generations. As for &lt;strong&gt;white-sleeve badge&lt;/strong&gt;, I'm really not sure what this refers to. As Tim Lymington suggested &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/379770/87724&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, white may have been a colour used by Monmouth's troops during the war. Spagirl &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/379766/white-sleeve-badge#comment893133_379770&quot;&gt;found&lt;/a&gt; a source which provides further evidence for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seeing his influence waning, Monmouth set out on a highly successful tour of the West Country, being received by people and gentry alike as if he were Prince of Wales. At Exeter he was greeted by 20,000 people, including 1,00 young men dressed uniformly in white, like an army offering itself to him if only he would lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dD5Sd5UydioC&amp;amp;pg=PA91&amp;amp;dq=monmouth+sedgemoor+rebels+white&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi4tqiiz-zSAhVbHGMKHZxEA58Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=white&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were also colour-coded regiments in Monmouth's army - the Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and White. Perhaps Jacob Fuller's ancestors were members of the White regiment at Sedgemoor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:46.387" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T02:37:23.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2161" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:42:09.507" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does Die Verwandlung have autobiographical aspects? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What similarities are there between the life of Gregor Samsa and the life of Franz Kafka?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:42:09.507" Title="Why does Die Verwandlung have autobiographical aspects?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-metamorphosis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2160" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:42:09.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several aspects why Die Verwandlung is based on the life of Franz Kafka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kafka wrote the book during the period he was depressed and he had sleeping disorders, which means he couldn't function very well in daily life. Gregor Samsa also can't function because of his metamorphosis. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kafka had a good relation with his sister and a bad relation with his father. Samsa also had a bad relation with his father after he was transformed and Samsa's sister takes care of him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The name Samsa has the same structure as Kafka.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kafka is form a salesmen family, Samsa is a salesman. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:42:09.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2174" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:44:45.400" Score="19" ViewCount="3598" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether it is known whether the 227 days in Life of Pi symbolical is for pi or that the symbolism I see (as a mathematician :)) is pure coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it is symbolic for pi because pi ~ 22/7, which is quite well-known. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T16:31:06.527" Title="227 days in Life of Pi, coincidence or symbolical?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;life-of-pi&gt;&lt;yann-martel&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2163" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:47:12.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franz Kafka&lt;/a&gt; (1883 – 1924) lived in Prague and wrote in German. Few of his works were published during his lifetime; the author ordered his friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works after his death, but Brod published them nevertheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The works published before Kafka's death include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemplation_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Betrachtung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1912; &lt;em&gt;Contemplation&lt;/em&gt;): a collection of short stories;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Judgment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Das Urteil&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1913, &quot;The Judgment&quot;): a short story;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Die Verwandlung&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1915; &quot;The Metamorphosis&quot;): a short story;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Country_Doctor_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ein Landarzt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919; &lt;em&gt;A Country Doctor&lt;/em&gt;): another collection of short stories;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Penal_Colony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;In der Strafkolonie&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1919; &quot;In the Penal Colony&quot;): a short story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of Kafka's most famous works were published posthumously. These posthumous publications include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Process&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1925; &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Das Schloss&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1926; &lt;em&gt;The Castle&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerika_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Verschollene&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Amerika&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1927; &lt;em&gt;The Man Who Disappeared&lt;/em&gt;): an unfinished early novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_of_China_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1931; &lt;em&gt;The Great Wall of China&lt;/em&gt;): a collection of short stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kafka's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka%27s_Diaries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diaries&lt;/a&gt;,  written between 1909 and 1923, and his letters were also published after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T21:12:34.603" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T21:12:34.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2164" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:47:12.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) or his life as a writer. His most famous works include 'Die Verwandlung' ('The Metamorphosis') and 'Der Process' ('The Trial'). Questions about his works should be tagged with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:23:47.353" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:23:47.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2165" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:49:47.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T17:49:47.147" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:49:47.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2166" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:49:47.147" Score="0" Body="For questions about Franz Kafka's Die Verwandlung. Use this tag with the [franz-kafka] and [german-literature] tags. " OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T20:14:26.420" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T20:14:26.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2167" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:50:35.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T17:50:35.837" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:50:35.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2168" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:50:35.837" Score="0" Body="For questions about Yann Martel's Life of Pi. Use this tag with the [yann-martel] tag. " OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="84" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T18:14:40.183" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:14:40.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2169" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:52:14.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T17:52:14.563" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T17:52:14.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2170" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-24T17:52:14.563" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Canadian author Yann Martel (born 1963) or his life as a writer. He is most famous for his novel 'Life of Pi'." OwnerUserId="84" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:09:06.803" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:09:06.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:14:19.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While many of Ayn Rand's characters are completely unambiguous (Hank Rearden is good, Head of State Thompson is bad), some are ambiguous or mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Ayn Rand is trying to include different &quot;types&quot; of characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dr. Robert Stadler is the guy who knew better - the ultimate traitor,&#xA;in a sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fred Kinnan (the union boss) knows he's running a racket but doesn't do anything about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eddie Willers represents the common man - the guy who's just as moral&#xA;as a Hank Rearden or Dagney Taggart but lacks their ability.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dan Conway's the guy who could have been, so to speak - he &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&quot;gets it&quot; but he &quot;caves&quot; under pressure. He's somewhat reminiscent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead#Gail_Wynand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gail Wynand&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt; in a way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Wet Nurse (Tony) is the guy who changes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T18:06:49.967" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T18:06:49.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:14:23.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's highly doubtful that it was a coincidence.  Most of the sources I looked at on the internet acknowledge that it was intentional, although in the book, Pi is named for the French word for swimming pool.  However, the fact that he is named after 3.141592.... (close to 22/7) does at many new facets to his character.  I think the 227 days on the boat adds to the metaphor of the infinite, the allegorical figure that Pi is and all he represents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find a quote by the author, so I think this is up to the individual reader.  However, it doesn't seem like this could be a coincidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:14:23.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:22:09.013" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;If this is a coincidence, it's one hell of a coincidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of those situations in which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov&amp;#39;s_gun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov's gun&lt;/a&gt; is your friend. If it weren't significant, why would the author have mentioned a specific number of days? While some books do get into gritty details like that with no particular stated reason - many fantasy books, for example - Life of Pi isn't that kind of book. It's pretty safe to assume that if the author makes a &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; of a seemingly arbitrary number, it's not really arbitrary at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So 227 days is almost definitely from 22/7, which is approximately pi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:22:09.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:25:36.993" Score="23" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably symbolic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookbrowse.com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/823/yann-martel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; with Yann Martel, from which two of his answers in particular jumped out at me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I chose the name Pi because it's an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a &quot;rational&quot; understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, &quot;irrational&quot; yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wanted an Indian animal. At first I had an adolescent Indian elephant. But that was too comical. Then a rhino, but rhinos are herbivores and didn't see how I could keep a herbivore alive for 227 days in the Pacific. So finally I settled on what now seems the natural choice, a tiger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first quote tells us that the author had the concept of rationality and irrationality, and the connections as well as the contrast between them, in his mind while writing the book. This sounds similar to the &lt;em&gt;rational&lt;/em&gt; approximation 22/7 for the &lt;em&gt;irrational&lt;/em&gt; number pi, and makes it more likely that this was indeed an intentional reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second quote suggests that the length of time was somehow significant. Why, instead of changing the animal to one more likely to survive for 227 days, did Martel not instead change the time period to one a rhino was more likely to survive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings me to (IMO) the most compelling argument: &lt;strong&gt;why specify the number of days at all?&lt;/strong&gt; It seems quite strange and unrealistic that Pi or anyone else would even be able to keep track of the days during that surreal voyage; &quot;several months&quot; would surely be a more reasonable way of describing the period. But no, it's stated as exactly &lt;em&gt;two hundred and twenty-seven days&lt;/em&gt;. Why bother to give a precise number at all, unless it's somehow significant? And given that it's significant, exactly what its significance is then becomes obvious, tying in with the title and the name of Pi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T18:25:36.993" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-24T18:31:51.880" Score="5" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The yo-yo is mentioned often in Thomas Pynchon's &lt;em&gt;V.&lt;/em&gt;, including in a few chapter names.  What does it symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T21:08:22.340" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T21:08:22.340" Title="What is the symbolism of the yo-yo in V.?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;&lt;v&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2154" CreationDate="2017-03-24T20:02:11.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no central repository for total sales numbers for books, so any composite list will be by approximation only. Their approaches, content and methods all differ and they make interesting reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to consider the source and to interpret with great care. Most aim at recent sales and historic figures, if present at all often are all but obscured by more recent, bigger volume. You will find little on Mark Twain beside his recently published 'autobiography' I'm afraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are several, in no particular order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/?_r=0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/best-selling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/best-selling/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/pw-bestsellers/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/pw-bestsellers/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=sv_b_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/ref=sv_b_2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/21-best-sellers.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/21-best-sellers.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Only 21, no Twain, but with a nice intro.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Shows 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as Twain's top bestseller. No author sort nor trends though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/aug/09/best-selling-books-all-time-fifty-shades-grey-compare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/aug/09/best-selling-books-all-time-fifty-shades-grey-compare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Jamie Oliver et al.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Downloads only, also recent only, BUT features Mark Twain as top 3 author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="120" LastEditDate="2017-03-24T20:10:17.933" LastActivityDate="2017-03-24T20:10:17.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2017-03-24T21:33:56.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There appears to be very little &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;behind&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the colour difference. Salvatore thought up a misfit drow character on the spur of a moment while very little was defined on the drow race. Drizzt was ahead of the actual setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20080514045127/http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue393/interview.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Novelist R.A. Salvatore crosses over into his newest magical realm and brings along his favorite character &lt;/a&gt; (SciFi.com, archived by the Wayback Machine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor called me at work and said, &amp;quot;I've got to go to a marketing meeting to sell the book, and we can't use [that character], and I really need to be able to tell marketing.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Give me a little while. I'll call you back.&amp;quot; She said, &amp;quot;Oh, no. You don't understand. I'm two minutes away from where I have to be five minutes ago.&amp;quot; And off the top of my head I said a Dark Elf. And there was this long pause. &amp;quot;Yeah, a Dark Elf Ranger, that's cool. Nobody's done that.&amp;quot; And there was a long pause, and she said, &amp;quot;There's a reason why no one's done that.&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;No. It will be all right. It will be all right. It's just a sidekick character.&amp;quot; And another pause. &amp;quot;What's his name?&amp;quot; And off the top of my head I said, &amp;quot;Drizzt Do'Urden?&amp;quot; Then a long pause. &amp;quot;Can you spell it?&amp;quot; I said, &amp;quot;Not a chance.&amp;quot; It came to me off the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character's gotten more popular as time's gone on. After the third book, around 1990, people really wanted to know where this guy came from, and so I wrote the Dark Elf trilogy, a prequel to the other three books. And in doing that I created this society of Dark Elves, the Drow, in Forgotten Realms. And he kept going like the Energizer bunny. It's amazing to me. I don't know how. I don't know why. I try not to ask too many questions. [Laughs]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For continuity reasons alone the eye colour never changed. Salvatore never commented on it leaving the field to fan conjecture and trope theories. These vary from possible human ancestry to logical reasoning setting Drizzt apart from his red-eyed race:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheLegendOfDrizzt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Legend of Drizzt&lt;/a&gt; on TV Tropes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drizzt's lavender eyes are remarked upon by anyone who sees it and are a pretty unique identifier as most drow have red eyes. They symbolically represent his more gentle and heroic nature compared to the rest of his brethren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheDarkElfTrilogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dark Elf Trilogy&lt;/a&gt; on TV Tropes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drizzt has Lavender Eyes, an unusual color for drow to the extent that his family initially wonders if he's blind. Has some Innocent Blue Eyes thrown in, since they come from combining a blue tint with the regular red glow from infravision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently drow eye colours became more varied eventually, as the setting grew over the years. Reasons for this were equally colourful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crystal_Shard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Crystal Shard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzt_Do%27Urden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drizzt Do'Urden&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Purple_Eyes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Purple Eyes&lt;/a&gt; (All the Tropes).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="120" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T18:06:53.627" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T18:06:53.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2178" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-24T23:59:52.257" Score="8" ViewCount="5333" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The South&quot; is a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a man, Dahlmann, who is injured by bashing his head against a window, but makes an almost miraculous recovery after a long stint in hospital. He heads out to the countryside in the hope of convalescence, but is unwillingly embroiled in a knife fight with some locals. The implication at the end of the story is that he will not survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although on the face of it there isn't much to this story, I get the feeling (not only because it's Borges, not even only because he's mentioned it as perhaps his best story) that it's absolutely soaked in symbolism and layers of meaning. But I lack the knowledge or intuition to puzzle out the deeper parts of the story, and am left fumbling in the dark. I got some extremely interesting answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1955/17&quot;&gt;my previous question&lt;/a&gt; about the deeper meaning of another Borges story, so maybe I'll get lucky twice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the deeper meaning or symbolism of &quot;The South&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T06:38:46.380" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T06:38:46.380" Title="Is there any deeper significance to Borges's &quot;The South&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2017-03-25T12:39:39.903" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While this does not answer the significance of the entire book, it focuses on a few key points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is actually partially autobiographical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his early life, Borges worked in a library. In the year 1938, the same year his father died, he bumped his head on a window and nearly died of septicemia - blood poisoning. 'The south' was published in 1953, and the same thing happens to the protaganist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later description of the hospital relates to his own time in hospital. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/03/31/borges-brain-injury/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt;, Borges said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Then I spent a fortnight in a hospital. I had nightmares and sleeplessness – insomnia. After that they told me that I had been in danger, well, of dying, that it was really a wonderful thing that the operation had been successful.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the book it says about his time in the hospital:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘His head was shaved, he was strapped with metal bands to a table, he was blinded and dizzied with bright lights, his heart and lungs were listened to, and a man in a surgical mask struck a needle in his arm.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been looking for significance for the rest of the book, though as yet, haven't written anything up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several sites suggesting that the South represents 'Heaven' and the North 'Hell' - During his time in the hospital he suffers badly and is always wishing that he could return south to his home. Other sites also say he dreamed up a heroic death for himself, perhaps how he may have wanted to die, in the south,  while in fact he dies on the operating table. This may be Borges thinking about what could have happened to himself had things gone different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/borges/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Literature Website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/03/31/borges-brain-injury/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Science Blogs&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;currently verifying that this interview was legitimate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://madeleinebyrne.com/blog/2015/5/7/jorge-luis-borges-and-the-south&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madeleine Byrne&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T12:39:39.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2182" CreationDate="2017-03-25T13:13:39.423" Score="14" ViewCount="1178" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following sentence occurs in Mark Twain's sketch &lt;em&gt;Private History of a Campaign that Failed&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the reflection that the &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt; might end us before we were a day older.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant here by &quot;halter&quot;? Is an obscure or antiquated meaning of that word being used here? If so, what is meant by it? Or is it a typo, and it should be &quot;weather&quot; instead of &quot;halter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context might suggest that, because Twain had just lamented the rain, the thunder, and the lightning, so &quot;weather&quot; would make sense here; but &quot;halter&quot; appears in at least two places where this sketch has been recorded: In the venerable gutenberg rendition of it &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3200&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and in another online source &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fairytalescollection.com/MarkTwain/ThePrivateHistoryofaCampaignThatFailed.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-25T13:26:28.163" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T07:35:44.067" Title="What does &quot;halter&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2180" CreationDate="2017-03-25T13:16:02.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;A halter used to be a rope for hanging people - a noose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Nowadays it has evolved to be a strap around a horse's head, but you can still see the original 'rope around the neck' idea.&lt;/strike&gt; DLosc in the comments below points out that it &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to mean a strap round a horse's head, and became a noose when hanging was introduced in the middle ages. &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=halter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; pins the strap round the horse's head meaning to Saxon times, and the hangman's noose to mid 15th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thefreedictionary.com/hangman&amp;#39;s+halter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;hangman's halter&lt;/strong&gt; - a rope that is used by a hangman to execute persons who have been condemned to death by hanging'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the story but I assume that perhaps they have been sentenced to death by hanging?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T07:35:44.067" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T07:35:44.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2180" CreationDate="2017-03-25T14:15:43.287" Score="17" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It means &quot;noose&quot; - figuratively, hanging.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@BeastlyGerbil's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2181/17&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is correct, but for completeness I checked for other uses of the word &quot;halter&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3200/pg3200.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Entire Gutenberg Twain Files&lt;/a&gt; (warning: slow to load!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The court informed him that a sheriff had been appointed to do the hanging, and—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Capt. Ned's patience was at an end. His wrath was boundless. The subject of a sheriff was judiciously dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the crowd arrived at the canyon, Capt. Ned climbed a tree and arranged the &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt;, then came down and noosed his man. He opened his Bible, and laid aside his hat. Selecting a chapter at random, he read it through, in a deep bass voice and with sincere solemnity. Then he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for him. Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear inspection. You killed the nigger?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Roughing It&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 50&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;By advantage taken of one in fault, in dire peril, and at thy mercy, thou hast seized goods worth above thirteenpence ha'penny, paying but a trifle for the same; and this, in the eye of the law, is constructive barratry, misprision of treason, malfeasance in office, ad hominem expurgatis in statu quo—and the penalty is death by the &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt;, without ransom, commutation, or benefit of clergy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Prince and the Pauper&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 24&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The jailer finished by lifting himself a-tip-toe with an imaginary &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt;, at the same time making a gurgling noise in his throat suggestive of suffocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another was a man who had been accused of stealing a horse; he said the proof had failed, and he had imagined that he was safe from the &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt;; but no—he was hardly free before he was arraigned for killing a deer in the King's park; this was proved against him, and now he was on his way to the gallows. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Prince and the Pauper&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 27&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, we have,&quot; said another citizen, &quot;we've got this&quot;—and he produced a &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many shouted: &quot;That's the ticket.&quot; But others said: &quot;No—Count Angelo is innocent; we mustn't hang him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Those Extraordinary Twins&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the garish light of the electric lamps I saw the little group of privileged witnesses, the wife crying on her uncle's breast, the condemned man standing on the scaffold with the &lt;strong&gt;halter&lt;/strong&gt; around his neck, his arms strapped to his body, the black cap on his head, the sheriff at his side with his hand on the drop, the clergyman in front of him with bare head and his book in his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;From the 'London Times' of 1904&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;Twain definitely uses the word &quot;halter&quot; to mean a noose for hanging&lt;/strong&gt;, in his writings in general. Finally, let's look at the wider context of the quote you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We were like to be drowned with the rain, deafened with the howling wind and the booming thunder, and blinded by the lightning. It was indeed a wild night. The drenching we were getting was misery enough, but a deeper misery still was the reflection that the halter might end us before we were a day older. A death of this shameful sort had not occurred to us as being among the possibilities of war. It took the romance all out of the campaign, and turned our dreams of glory into a repulsive nightmare. As for doubting that so barbarous an order had been given, not one of us did that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;First&lt;/em&gt; he's complaining about the weather, but then he &lt;em&gt;changes topic&lt;/em&gt; to worry about the halter. It's not just a typo for &quot;weather&quot;: the halter is a deeper misery than the weather. Note also the reference to a barbarous &quot;order&quot; being given - the order for hanging, and nothing to do with the weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T14:15:43.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="249" CreationDate="2017-03-25T15:47:24.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Absolutely agree with #3!  I just finished Les Mis (took me like 6 months!) and had the exact same impression about Thenardier/Gollum parallel.  To me it seems likely that Thenardier was an inspiration to Tolkien in creating Gollum and the theme of &quot;how do you explain 'evil' in a world good God created.&quot;  I was only looking from the point of view that there is an &quot;evil&quot; character that unwittingly plays a role in the success of the &quot;good&quot; characters.  I immediately thought of Gandalf conjecturing to Frodo that Gollum might play some kind of role in the quest to destroy the ring, and that Frodo should not harbor thoughts of the harm/destruction of Gollum. As we know Gollum's delirious greed quite unintentionally saves the day in becoming the ultimate agent in the destruction of the ring. Thenardier's greed unintentionally saves the day by unlocking the sewer for ValJean/Marius escape from probable death (at least for Marius). Also Thenardier and his greed act as the agent to reveal to Marius his rescuer and the ultimate reconciliation of Marius/Cosette with ValJean at the latter's death at end of novel. I'm kind of literarily lazy, but I', sure there are several other more subtle examples where the despicable actions of Thenardier are key to the ultimate &quot;happy ending&quot; to the life of ValJean and Cosette/Marius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes a despicable character driven by intense self-centered greed [that the reader would like to see killed!] ultimately plays a role in God's ultimate plan that us lowly human bit players cannot understand at the time. Although to me Thenardier seems a much more one-dimensional &quot;bad&quot; guy whereas the Gollum/Smeagol thing is more complex and realistic.  With the pervasive theme of redemption and how &quot;bad can always become good&quot; in Les Mis, I found it interesting that Mr. Thenardier remains a bad apple even to the very end with his resumption of petty crime in America. Come to thing of it, it seems like Eponine, in the end, is the Smeagol to Mr. Thenardier's Gollum - she truly loves and cares about Marius and we see her in a good light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another more obscure Les Mis parallel to more modern media that came to my mind ... when ValJean escapes his bonds in Thenardier's den of criminals and warns them they can do nothing to scare/threaten/harm him, and then demonstrates this by searing the white hot fire brand into his own skin. This reminded me of the Keyser Soze folklore in &quot;The Usual Suspects&quot; where the rival gang is threatening Soze with his family at gun point, and Soze proceeds to slit his own wife's throat and kill his own children and &quot;shows those men of will what will really was.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1156" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T15:47:24.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2178" CreationDate="2017-03-25T17:06:25.280" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that has outlined by Beastly Gerbil, the protagonist is living through events based on Borges's on life: in his novel, the protagonist hits a &lt;em&gt;recently painted door jamb&lt;/em&gt;, while in his autobiography, Borges hits &lt;em&gt;a freshly painted open casement window&lt;/em&gt;. The reference to fresh paint seems to make no doubt of the biographical nature of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The many &lt;a href=&quot;http://dept.sfcollege.edu/HFL/hum2461/lecturenotes/documents/borgeselsur.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;political and literary references&lt;/a&gt; that populate the story always had me believe that this story was about the implication of writers in politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From a corner in the room, an old over-wrought gaucho (in whom Dahlmann saw&#xA;  a cipher of the Sur—that is, of his version of the Sur) threw him a naked dagger, which&#xA;  came to rest at his feet. It was as if the Sur had decided that Dahlmann should accept&#xA;  the duel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers, Borges seems to make the case, do not get to choose when they fight or when they don't fight political power, but much the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastActivityDate="2017-03-25T17:06:25.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2185" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2186" CreationDate="2017-03-25T18:18:27.607" Score="13" ViewCount="1404" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt;, we see that Hedwig is killed by the Avada Kedavra curse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No - HEDWIG!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The broomstick spun to earth, but he just managed to seize the strap of his rucksack and the top of the cage as the motorbike swung the right way up again. A second's relief, and then another burst of green light. The owl screeched and fell to the bottom of the cage.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;No - NO!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J. K. Rowling has &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/686281035135475713&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;stated&lt;/a&gt; that this symbolizes the death of childhood. However, is this supported by anything in the books? Is there anything to assume that this is representative of the death of childhood, and not just a random death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-03-26T09:02:54.307" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T10:39:32.113" Title="Is there any textual evidence that this death in Deathly Hallows symbolized the end of childhood?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2185" CreationDate="2017-03-25T20:19:11.927" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;WARNING: Spoilers ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine on all quotes below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why was Hedwig killed anyway?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the twitter link provided in the question, Rowling gave a fuller explanation in an interview (full transcript of the interview can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2007/07/30/j-k-rowling-web-chat-transcript/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twinkletoes*: &amp;quot;Why did you feel that Hedwig's death was necessary?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;J.K. Rowling: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The loss of Hedwig represented a loss of innocence and security&lt;/strong&gt;. She has been almost like a cuddly toy to Harry at times. &lt;strong&gt;Voldemort killing her marked the end of childhood&lt;/strong&gt;. I’m sorry… I know that death upset a LOT of people!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Username of person asking question&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedwig was the last remaining part of his childhood. Ron and Hermione both had grown up, and this supposedly caused Harry to become an adult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The name 'Hedwig'&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Hedwig' symbolises other things too. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedwig_of_Silesia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;St. Hedwig&lt;/a&gt; was the patron saint of orphans, making the owl even more special to Harry, who was himself an orphan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had had it as long as he could remember, and the first question he could ever remember asking his Aunt Petunia was how he had gotten it [the scar].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;In the car crash &lt;strong&gt;when your parents died&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; she had said. &amp;quot;And don't ask&#xA;questions.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry also chooses the name 'Hedwig' from one of his schoolbooks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry kept to his room, with his new owl for company. &lt;strong&gt;He had decided to&#xA;call her Hedwig, a name he had found in A History of Magic&lt;/strong&gt;. His school&#xA;books were very interesting. He lay on his bed reading late into the&#xA;night, Hedwig swooping in and out of the open window as she pleased.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 6&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the name came from his schoolbook, suggests that with the death of Hedwig, his schooldays and childhood was over along with his innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Colouring&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedwig in the book was white, a symbol of innocence and the protection of other, saint like, people. When she was killed this innocence was gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purity and innocence of Harry when he is a child is represented by the colour white, and Hedwig &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/105189/what-kind-of-owl-is-hedwig&quot;&gt;is a snowy owl&lt;/a&gt;, the whitest owl there is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry now carried a large cage that held &lt;strong&gt;a beautiful snowy owl&lt;/strong&gt;, fast asleep with her head under her wing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 5&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Friends&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back at the Dursleys', Hedwig was also basically Harry's only childhood friend outside of Hogwarts and magic. This is summed up perfectly in this extract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to every other miserable feeling, he now felt guilty&#xA;that he’d been irritable with Hedwig; &lt;strong&gt;she was the only friend he had at&#xA;number four, Privet Drive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Chapter 3&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And perhaps even better, this quote from when Harry has just lost Hedwig:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Wait a moment,&amp;quot; said Hagrid, looking around. &amp;quot;Harry, where’s&#xA;Hedwig?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;She . . . she got hit,&amp;quot; said Harry.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The realization crashed over him:&lt;/strong&gt; He felt ashamed of himself as&#xA;the tears stung his eyes. &lt;strong&gt;The owl had been his companion, his one&#xA;great link with the magical world whenever he had been forced to&#xA;return to the Dursleys.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He misses her when she is gone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedwig had been absent for two nights now. Harry wasn’t worried about her: she’d been gone this long before. &lt;strong&gt;But he hoped she’d be back soon — she was the only living creature in this house who didn’t flinch at the sight of him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a mutual friendship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She, too, was carrying a parcel and looked extremely pleased with herself. &lt;strong&gt;She gave Harry an affectionate nip with her beak&lt;/strong&gt; as he removed her burden, then flew across the room to join Errol.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - Chapter 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The snowy owl clicked her beak and &lt;strong&gt;nibbled his ear affectionately as Harry stroked her feathers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Chapter 4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He walked away from them, looking around, &lt;strong&gt;with Hedwig nestled contentedly on his shoulder&lt;/strong&gt;, but this room was not likely to raise his spirits&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - Chapter 4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedwig hooted happily at Harry from her perch on top of a large wardrobe, then took off through the window; &lt;strong&gt;Harry knew she had been waiting to see him&lt;/strong&gt; before going hunting.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - Chapter 5&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her death shows once again how the remnants of Harry's childhood were gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Birthdays&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Credit to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/115/torisuda&quot;&gt;Torisuda&lt;/a&gt; for posting &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2185/is-there-any-textual-evidence-that-this-death-in-deathly-hallows-symbolized-the#comment4073_2185&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt; that got me started on this bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Dudley is always getting a ton of birthday presents:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dudley, meanwhile, was counting his presents. His face fell.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Thirty-six&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; he said, looking up at his mother and father. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;That's two&#xA;less than last year&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All Harry got for his tenth birthday was a coat hanger and a pair of socks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...then tomorrow, Tuesday, was Harry's eleventh birthday. Of&#xA;course, his birthdays were never exactly fun -- &lt;strong&gt;last year, the Dursleys&#xA;had given him a coat hanger and a pair of Uncle Vernon's old socks.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Still, you weren't eleven every day.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 3&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Hagrid gets Harry his first true birthday present, on his first birthday as a wizard, he instantly becomes attached:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Just yer wand left - A yeah, an' &lt;strong&gt;I still haven't got yeh a birthday&#xA;present.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Harry felt himself go red.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;You don't have to --&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I know I don't have to. Tell yeh what, I'll get yer animal. Not a toad,&#xA;toads went outta fashion years ago, yeh'd be laughed at - an' I don'&#xA;like cats, they make me sneeze. &lt;strong&gt;I'll get yer an owl&lt;/strong&gt;. All the kids want owls, they're dead useful, carry yer mail an' everythin'.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Twenty minutes later, they left Eeylops Owl Emporium, which had been&#xA;dark and full of rustling and flickering, jewel-bright eyes. Harry now&#xA;carried a large cage that held a beautiful snowy owl, fast asleep with&#xA;her head under her wing. &lt;strong&gt;He couldn't stop stammering his thanks,&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;sounding just like Professor Quirrell.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Don' mention it,&amp;quot; said Hagrid gruffly. &amp;quot;Don' expect you've had a lotta&#xA;presents from them Dursleys.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - Chapter 5&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then a couple of weeks before the day of his seventeenth birthday, his first birthday as an adult wizard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Mrs Weasley] Actually, I’ve been wanting to ask you &lt;strong&gt;how you want to celebrate your birthday&lt;/strong&gt;, Harry. &lt;strong&gt;Seventeen&lt;/strong&gt;, after all, &lt;strong&gt;it’s an important day&lt;/strong&gt;. . . .”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Chapter 6&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedwig dies, leaving Harry distraught:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second’s relief, and then another burst of green light. &lt;strong&gt;The owl screeched and fell to the floor of the cage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“No — NO!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The motorbike zoomed forward; Harry glimpsed hooded Death Eaters scattering as Hagrid blasted through their circle.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Hedwig — Hedwig —”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But the owl lay motionless and pathetic as a toy on the floor of&#xA;her cage. &lt;strong&gt;He could not take it in, and his terror for the others was&#xA;paramount.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Chapter 4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems more than just a coincidence that Harry received Hedwig on his first wizard birthday, in the first book, and lost her on just before his first adult wizard birthday, in the last book. She was present throughout his wizarding childhood, and died just before he left it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Children's Toys&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been a recurring theme that Hedwig was almost a child's toy to Harry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowling mentions it in the aforementioned interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has been almost &lt;strong&gt;like a cuddly toy&lt;/strong&gt; to Harry at times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is mentioned once again when she dies in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the owl lay motionless and &lt;strong&gt;pathetic as a toy&lt;/strong&gt; on the floor of&#xA;her cage.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Chapter 4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This 'cuddly toy' idea, attaches Hedwig in a special way to Harry. She was his pet, his toy, his friend, and so much else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this provides an answer, there is a lot of evidence, you just have to take a second look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How this was done:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I developed this answer over a few days, mostly because I didn't have the time to do it all at once. First I checked through the first and last books, before checking the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To search through a book, I would open up a pdf of it and then search through it using Ctrl+F. I searched 'Hedwig' in each and came up with the quotes above. I obviously added the emphasis myself. After a couple of edits, it is the answer you know see before you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T10:39:32.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T03:08:57.207" Score="8" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final pages of &lt;em&gt;Death of a Ghost&lt;/em&gt; describe Mrs. Lefcadio looking at a self-portrait of her husband, and much is made of how different it is from the famous Sargent portrait of the man. And then she turns it over:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Written across the back in the painter’s enormous hand was a single phrase:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;'Your secret, Belle darling.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The old lady returned to the portrait. She touched her lips with her forefinger and pressed it on the painted mouth.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Oh, Johnnie,' she said sadly. 'Such a lot of trouble, my dear. Such a lot of trouble.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the secret John Lefcadio was reminding Belle of, and which of the novel's troubles did it cause or represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T15:24:33.757" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:32:52.227" Title="What is Belle's secret?" Tags="&lt;margery-allingham&gt;&lt;death-of-a-ghost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2191" CreationDate="2017-03-26T03:24:21.450" Score="11" ViewCount="1117" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading Hilary Mantel's novel &lt;em&gt;Wolf Hall&lt;/em&gt;, I noticed that the protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is referred to as often as possible simply as &quot;he&quot;/&quot;him&quot; rather than by his name. This includes in contexts where &quot;he&quot; would more naturally be read as referring to someone else: many times when reading such sentences, I would 'stumble', misreading who the pronoun was referring to, and have to go back and reread the sentence with the correct interpretation. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sees three elderly Lowlanders struggling with their bundles and moves to help them. The packages are soft and bulky, samples of woolen cloth. A port officer gives them trouble about their documents, shouting into their faces. He lounges behind the clerk, pretending to be a Lowland oaf, and tells the merchants by holding up his fingers what he thinks a fair bribe. “Please,” says one of them, in effortful English to the clerk, “will you take care of these English coins for me? I find them surplus.” Suddenly the clerk is all smiles. The Lowlanders are all smiles; they would have paid much more. When they board they say, “The boy is with us.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tor.com/2013/06/10/wolf-hall-excerpt/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance, I read this as the port officer lounging behind the clerk, or maybe someone else lounging ... I was completely confused about who was doing what. Only when I reached the end of the paragraph, &quot;The boy is with us&quot;, did I realise that Tom must have helped the Lowlanders in some way, and then I went back and worked out that it was &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; lounging behind the clerk/port officer and signalling to the merchants.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There were many other (probably better) examples throughout the book, but I've given my copy away to charity and Chapter 1 is the only excerpt I can find on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was part of what made me condemn &lt;em&gt;Wolf Hall&lt;/em&gt;, despite its Man Booker Prize, as simply a poorly written book: if the reader keeps stumbling and having to go back and reread sentences because their intended meaning is different from their most natural meaning, that's usually a hallmark of bad writing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It struck me that this excessive use of pronouns would have made much more sense if the book was written with &lt;strong&gt;first-person narration&lt;/strong&gt;. If Cromwell had been a first-person protagonist, there would never have been any confusion about whether the pronoun referred to him or someone else - it would have been &quot;I&quot;/&quot;me&quot; and not &quot;he&quot;/&quot;him&quot;. Thus, I came to the conclusion that the book was originally written in the first person and then hastily and somewhat shoddily edited into third-person narration, changing too many of the &quot;I&quot;s into &quot;he&quot;s instead of &quot;Cromwell&quot;s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any more evidence to support this conclusion?&lt;/strong&gt; Acceptable evidence might be either more textual clues suggesting that early drafts of the book were written in the first person, or possibly a statement from the author (if the author says it &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; originally first-person narration, I'd take that with a pinch of salt, but if she says it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, I'd be inclined to believe her).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:39:07.250" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:39:07.250" Title="Was Wolf Hall originally written in the first person?" Tags="&lt;wolf-hall&gt;&lt;hilary-mantel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T16:10:51.073" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Tiriel&lt;/em&gt;, it's mentioned several times that Tiriel is blind, first in Chapter I, line 27:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look at my eyes, blind as the orbless skull among the stones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later again in Chapter II, lines 61-65:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon as the blind wanderer enter’d the pleasant gardens of Har,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They ran weeping, like frighted infants, for refuge in Mnetha’s arms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The blind man felt his way, and cried: ‘Peace to these open doors!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let no one fear, for poor blind Tiriel hurts none but himself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tell me, O friends, where am I now, and in what pleasant place?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as several more times afterward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My immediate thought when I first read Chapter I was that it symbolized his lack of empathy (i.e. metaphorical blindness to the feelings of others), which led his sons to revolt and throw him out, but he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem genuinely sad that his wife, Myratana, has died. Also, the arc of the story didn't seem to quite fit this reading. His lack of empathy doesn't seem to ever come back to bite him in a straightforward way: he gets exactly what he wanted, killing all his children with his curse; his brothers Ijim and Zazel remain in exile where he put them; and he dies as he wanted, cursing his own father, Har, for creating one set of laws meant to apply to everyone. Aside from the rebellion of his sons, everything pretty much seems to go his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the blindness signify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2017-03-26T16:10:51.073" Title="What does Tiriel's blindness symbolize?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-26T16:17:31.103" Score="3" ViewCount="1454" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://comicvine.gamespot.com/the-furies/4060-56083/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Three Sisters&lt;/a&gt; - the Hecatae, the Fates, the Kindly Ones - are ubiquitous in Neil Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheHecateSisters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;and in other works&lt;/a&gt;). They appear in the first volume to give Morpheus three answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZITR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hZITR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then appear in almost every volume, in one aspect or another, until finally they appear as the Kindly Ones and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; bring ruin to the Dreaming and force Morpheus to give up his existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morpheus describes them as obeying the oldest rules, in the same way he does. The Three-in-One appear to be a fundamental force in the Universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then there's this panel after the events described above - to me, it appeared as Neil Gaiman's monologue, reflecting on the plot of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1dzVSm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1dzVSm.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is never explained what exactly they are, which brings me to the question - &lt;strong&gt;what do the three sisters symbolise&lt;/strong&gt;? The inevitability of fate? Some sort of higher power? Determinism? Taking the responsibility for own actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T07:56:35.970" Title="In Neil Gaiman's &quot;The Sandman&quot;, what do the Three Sisters represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2188" CreationDate="2017-03-26T16:36:21.743" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The author says using &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; was a deliberate stylistic choice.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-exchange-hilary-mantel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt; with the New Yorker, she explained that she consistently called him &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; because that fit better with the way the book is written than using his name would. She said this made the text more &amp;quot;intimate&amp;quot;. See the following quote (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And can you explain why Cromwell is often the only character who is referred to with the pronoun “he”? As Joan Acocella points out, you often violate grammar for Cromwell’s sake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I’m behind his eyes, so Cromwell is always “he.” Occasionally, there is an ambiguity, and the “he” could refer to somebody else, and I think that’s just the price you pay&lt;/strong&gt;. To keep calling him Cromwell wouldn’t fit with the way the book is written. &lt;strong&gt;Although it’s written in the third person and not the first person&lt;/strong&gt;, it’s actually more intimate than many third-person narratives. It’s as if the camera is on his shoulder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/07/bookclub-hilary-mantel-wolf-hall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another interview&lt;/a&gt; with the Guardian, Mantel described how she started writing the book. Regarding the present tense and the person's views (again, emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I woke one morning with some words in my head: &amp;quot;So now get up.&amp;quot; It took a while to work out that this was not an order to get the day under way. It was the first sentence of my novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. The basic decision about the book was taken seconds before I began writing. &amp;quot;So now get up&amp;quot;: &lt;strong&gt;the person on the ground was Cromwell and the camera was behind his eyes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;events were happening now, in the present tense&lt;/strong&gt;, unfolding as I watched, and what followed would be filtered through the main character's sensibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And regarding why she said &amp;quot;he&amp;quot;, she expanded slightly on what she meant by &amp;quot;intimacy&amp;quot; in the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He [Cromwell] seemed to be occupying the same physical space as me, with a slight ghostly overlap. It didn't make sense to call him &amp;quot;Cromwell&amp;quot;, as if he were somewhere across the room. I called him &amp;quot;he&amp;quot;. This device, though hardly of Joycean complexity, was not universally popular. Most readers caught on quickly. Those who didn't, complained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a quick search, I found the book contains the word 'he' over 5541 times, 'his' over 2906 times, 'him' over 1581 times and 'himself' over 329 times. But the book only says 'Cromwell' 374 times, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; that includes chapter titles and so on. There is no doubt this is purposeful, after all the book contains 187,240 words. &lt;strong&gt;'he/him/his/himself' makes up 5.5% of the words&lt;/strong&gt; in the book ('he' alone just under 3%), while &lt;strong&gt;'Cromwell' makes up less than 0.2%&lt;/strong&gt;. Quick comparison: 'Harry' makes up 2% of all words in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These facts can be found by opening up a pdf of the book online (note that the pdf itself is illegal, but reading it is not) and using 'Ctrl+F' to find words in the book. I used &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ako.nl/data/producten-media/9789056723620.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this pdf&lt;/a&gt; here. Note for words like 'he' you need to add spaces either side to define it as a word, otherwise words like 'the' will be included as it contains the letters 'he' in that order. This does means instances such as &amp;quot;he,&amp;quot; won't be included however, though I have now updated the above stats to try and include as many of such instances as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She wrote it in the third person, and always referred to Cromwell as &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; because that was what fit best with the way the story was being told - she felt that he was with her when writing the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T19:47:34.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2194" CreationDate="2017-03-26T18:06:46.470" Score="15" ViewCount="89697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know where this poem originates from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One fine morning in the middle of the night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two dead men got up to fight,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to back they faced each other,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drew their swords and shot one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it is from the Victorian era but would be interested to know if it has any definite origins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus: Are there more of this type of poem and is there a name for this genre of poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T23:35:04.243" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T23:35:04.243" Title="What is the origin of this contradictory poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2193" CreationDate="2017-03-26T23:59:44.380" Score="27" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt;. Like, really old. So old that it's impossible to tell where it originated.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Lore_and_Language_of_Schoolchildren.html?id=sdWwHbOf4oAC&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Iona and Peter Opie, published in &lt;strong&gt;1959&lt;/strong&gt;, catalogues many different schoolyard poems from throughout the first half of the twentieth century, including the following version of the one you're interested in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ladles and jellyspoons&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I stand upon this speech to make a platform&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the train I arrived in has not yet come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so I took a bus and walked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I come before you to stand behind you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and tell you something I know nothing about!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One fine day in the middle of the night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  two dead men got up to a fight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  back to back they faced each other&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  drew their swords and shot each other&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a paralysed donkey passing by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  kicked a blind man in the eye&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  knocked him through a nine inch wall&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  into a dry ditch and drowned them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't actually read the Opies' book myself, but according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://playgroundjungle.com/2009/12/ladies-and-gentlemen-hobos-and-tramps.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Opie noted that this had been collected in 12 different schools around the UK, but that it had also been collected, with almost no variation, fifty years before. It was probably older than that, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rhyme most likely evolved from other nonsense rhymes based on similar themes: opposites put together, blind people watching, deaf people hearing, and so on. A manuscript in the Bodleian library dating back to &lt;strong&gt;1480&lt;/strong&gt; contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw three headless [men] playing at a ball,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A handless man served them all.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While three mouthless men laughed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Three legless [men] from them ran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also found several sources pointing to a &lt;strong&gt;1305&lt;/strong&gt; manuscript &lt;em&gt;The Land of Cockaigne&lt;/em&gt; for an even older version of this kind of nonsense poem, but I haven't managed to track down a copy of the original manuscript to check the details. The primary source here appears to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-mummers%27-play/author/r-j-e-tiddy/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mummers' Play&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by R. J. E. Tiddy, published in 1923, the relevant citation being on p. 116.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;With such a long history, it seems the best conclusion we can draw is that &lt;strong&gt;the idea of this poem has been around so long that it's pretty much a folk tradition.&lt;/strong&gt; It's been handed down from generation to generation, probably mostly orally, and has of course changed and mutated quite a lot over the last seven hundred years. But trying to pin down an 'original author', for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; particular version of the poem, is a fruitless venture in this centuries-long game of Chinese Whispers. Even today, there are many slightly different versions of the poem, and no single 'canonical' wording - just look at the number of variations listed &lt;a href=&quot;https://able2know.org/topic/119869-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/queries/lostquotes/?id=134&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;As for your bonus question about the genre of this poem, I would say it's a classical &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense_verse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;nonsense rhyme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It should be noted, however, that there are two distinct kinds of nonsense poem: ones like this where the words make sense individually but become nonsensical when put together in the right way, and ones like Lewis Carroll's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jabberwocky&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which are full of nonsense &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;http://folklore.bc.ca/one-fine-day-in-the-middle-of-the-night-introduction/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;would say&lt;/a&gt; that only the latter counts as a true nonsense rhyme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the &lt;em&gt;Two Dead Boys&lt;/em&gt; poem (“One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night”) is often referred to as a nonsense rhyme, the description is not strictly accurate. It is clearly understandable in any of its many forms and versions and the impossibilities in the story are no more than sensible words and phrases that have been transposed. An example of a true nonsense rhyme can be seen for instance in the first four lines of Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” from &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking Glass&lt;/em&gt; [...] One can get a feeling for the severe, gathering darkness of the poem from Carroll’s introductory lines but, until Humpty Dumpty explains it in its entirety, the poem, and particularly these first four lines, makes no sense at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in everyday parlance, &quot;nonsense verse&quot; can certainly be used to cover both types of poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former type specifically have also &lt;a href=&quot;http://folklore.bc.ca/one-fine-day-in-the-middle-of-the-night/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;been called&lt;/a&gt; &lt;strong&gt;ballads of impossibilities&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The folklorist and writer Ed Cray, writing to others on an Internet ballad chat line, noted that the rhyme [the same one you're asking about] was a “Ballad of Impossibilities” and that, “A number of these songs/ballads of impossibilities were printed as broadsides in the 18th and 19th centuries.[”]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T07:31:54.010" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T07:31:54.010" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-27T01:34:12.103" Score="4" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Shadow Dragons&lt;/em&gt;, the party that sets off from The Flying Dragon via trump gets stuck in an &amp;quot;endless expanse of whiteness&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an endless expanse of whiteness. There was no distance, no perspective. Just infinite space. Except for the old man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man is dismissive of the group, until he sees Rose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man didn't reply, but merely regarded them with disdain—until his eyes fell on Rose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the companions' great surprise, his mouth dropped open in shock, and his eyes, cold a moment before, suddenly filled with tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Rose,&amp;quot; he said, his voice barely a whisper. &amp;quot;How can you be...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He appears to have a watch similar to Alvin Ranson (and his fellow time travelers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] he opened the pocket watch, which bore no dragon on the cover, and was fesooned with several more dials and buttons than John's own watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then describes the area they are in as &amp;quot;Platonia&amp;quot;, and mentions something called the &amp;quot;Quorum&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A new zero point, and here, in Platonia!  This must be brought before the Quorum.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rose doesn't recognize him, and when questioned about how to leave (to get to the Keep of Time), he abruptly tells them to try the trump again, and walks away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, before they leave, he tells Rose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And Rose,&amp;quot; he added, &amp;quot;try to think well of me in the future—and in the past.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is he? All we know is that he's an old man, lives (or at least exists) in a place called Platonia, and is either a member or acquaintance of a group called the Quorum. Who is he, or who does he represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T01:34:12.103" Title="Who was the old man in Platonia?" Tags="&lt;imaginarium-geographica&gt;&lt;james-a-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2196" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5611" CreationDate="2017-03-27T01:52:30.247" Score="4" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;The epilogue of &lt;em&gt;Suldrun's Garden&lt;/em&gt;, the first book of Jack Vance's Lyonesse series, is a sort of literary equivalent of a &quot;next time&quot; teaser in a TV series. More than summarising the events so far and describing the current state of affairs, it asks rhetorical questions about what will happen next. Many of these questions act as foreshadowing for significant events in later books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tamurello, fearing Murgen, refers Casmir to the wizard Shan Farway. In their plotting they use the name &quot;Joald&quot; and both fall silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foreshadows the Joald cataclysm at the end of book 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What of Glyneth, who loves Watershade and Miraldra, but yearns for her vagabond life with Dr. Fidelius? Who will woo and who will win her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foreshadows Glyneth's otherworldly adventure at the end of book 2.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aillas is King of South Ulfland and now he must reckon with the Ska, who wage war against the world. When he thinks of the Ska he thinks of Tatzel, who lives at Castle Sank. He knows a secret way into the fortress Poelitetz: how will this knowledge serve him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foreshadows both the Tatzel escapade in book 2 and part of the war at the end of book 3.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who nets the turbot who swallowed the green pearl? Who proudly wears the pearl in her locket and is impelled to curious excesses of conduct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foreshadows the first chunk of book 2, about the green pearl.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what of the knight of the Empty Helmet, and how does he comport himself at Castle Rhack?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wait, what the heck is this all about?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I remember, having read all three books several times, neither the &quot;knight of the Empty Helmet&quot; nor &quot;Castle Rhack&quot; is &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; mentioned anywhere else in the trilogy. But it seems beyond weird to introduce a character only for the sake of asking a teaser question about him which is never resolved or even mentioned before or since. Is this the most blatant violation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov's Gun&lt;/a&gt; I've ever seen, or is there some other mention of or reference to this person that I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: &lt;strong&gt;I give up. &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; of the knight of the Empty Helmet, and how &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; he comport himself at Castle Rhack?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:29:16.380" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:54:18.567" Title="What of the knight of the Empty Helmet, and how does he comport himself at Castle Rhack?" Tags="&lt;jack-vance&gt;&lt;lyonesse-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2079" CreationDate="2017-03-27T08:46:31.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/tombquestwiki/status/842412505120956416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; Michael Northrop, the author, for an answer, and he sent me a Direct Message on Twitter with the answer. I'll post what he wrote in quote blocks, and support it with quotes and screenshots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good question! In TombQuest, Alex and Ren often find themselves trying to navigate dangerous, trap-filled underground tombs—just like players in the game do. The game also includes weapons, costumes, tomb designs, and even villains, like the Stung Man, from the different books in the series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, Book 2: Amulet Keepers is set in London. When it was released, items from that location (like the Royal Guard costumes) were added to the game. Now that all of the books are out, all the special items are available. (The code inside each book unlocks them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So basically, the connection between the books and the game is in what you’re doing (exploring tombs that often resemble ones from the series) and in what you’re doing it with. I like to use Tut’s Kopesh (from Book 3) as my weapon, and I usually choose Alex’s scarab amulet over Ren’s Ibis for extra protection. When I’m designing a tomb, I usually pick creepy old Highgate Cemetery (from Book 2) as the theme. I live in New York, though, so sometimes I go with the old subway tunnels from Book 1. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—Michael Northrop, author of TombQuest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go through this, and look at some quotes and screenshots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In TombQuest, Alex and Ren often find themselves trying to navigate dangerous, trap-filled underground tombs—&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Got you!&quot; Alex crowed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ren's nerves were a jumbled mess, but she pushed Alex away, got to her feet, and tried to get it together. &quot;Oh, great,&quot; she managed. &quot;Traps.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Book of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 21&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;just like players in the game do.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jba0w.png&quot; alt=&quot;picture of the game, from the main page of the TQ website&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The game also includes weapons, costumes, tomb designs, and even villains, like the Stung Man, from the different books in the series.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For example, Book 2: Amulet Keepers is set in London. When it was released, items from that location (like the Royal Guard costumes) were added to the game. Now that all of the books are out, all the special items are available. (The code inside each book unlocks them.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You see?&quot; said the Stung Man. &quot;They're just here to do a job. I'm the one you have to worry about.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Book of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 22&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And last, but certainly not least, is the new tomb theme. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say that perhaps the archaeologists missed a spot when they set out to uncover all the tombs in the Valley of Kings. This one comes with some wear and tear; fire damage, I fear. Handle with caution!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tombquest.scholastic.com/blog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TombQuest development blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tl;dr:&lt;/strong&gt; We see that in the game, you have to &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt; sort of like they do in the books, and you also have cool items and stuff from the books in the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T02:10:18.480" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T02:10:18.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2017-03-27T12:35:13.120" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Conan Doyle is giving the reader a clue as to Holmes' character.  Educated readers at the time of publication would have picked up on these clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time, Baker Street was an upmarket residential part of &lt;a href=&quot;http://london1868.com/weller39.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;London&lt;/a&gt;.  To the western side - so not industrial, north of the river - so more fashionable, centrally placed near to major roads and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianlondon.org/maps/railwaymap.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;railway stations&lt;/a&gt; - so good for travel, not in the really expensive parts of the metropolis - so Holmes is not rich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other famous - real - people who lived in Baker Street around this time or earlier, including H.G.Wells and William Pitt the Younger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order for someone to be able to afford rooms in Baker Street, he would have needed to be comfortably off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the streets and districts of London mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories existed at the time.  So it makes sense for the author to pick a real street with a certain cachet to round out the character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-03-27T12:35:13.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2199" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2223" CreationDate="2017-03-27T20:23:15.843" Score="9" ViewCount="1636" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Volume One of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sandman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Preludes_%26_Nocturnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_(comics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dream&lt;/a&gt; is held captive for 70 years. After escaping and taking vengeance on his (only surviving) captor, he returns home, to the Dreamworld. Finding it in disarray, he realizes that he needs to recover his &quot;tools,&quot; his totems of power, so that he can make things right again. He mentions that he has &quot;placed too much of [himself] in the tools,&quot; implying that his tools (ruby, pouch of sand, and and helm) contain parts of his power and, perhaps, his being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lJoLYm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lJoLYm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream (silhouetted) speaking with Lucien. Lucien: &amp;quot;It hurts me too, Lord.&amp;quot; Dream: &amp;quot;Hurts. Yes... Some power returns to me, simply by BEING here. But i placed too much of myself in the TOOLS. And they are GONE.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #2 &quot;Imperfect Hosts&quot; page 16&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He decides to quest for his lost tools, spending most of the volume in that pursuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After recovering his pouch and helm, Dream attempts to recover his ruby from a Justice League storage house (#5 &quot;Passengers&quot;). However, he is knocked out when he touches it, because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Destiny&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dee&lt;/a&gt; modified it during his years of using it. While Dream is out, Dee takes the ruby, and wreaks global havoc with it for one day (#6 &quot;24 Hours&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that day is over, Dream asks Dee to return the ruby to him so he can attempt to fix all the things that Dee has broken. Dee, however, refuses, and threatens to kill Dream with the ruby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/maHNn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/maHNn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream and John Dee in conversation. Dream: &amp;quot;You will repair it, then, give back control of it to me? You will return it?&amp;quot; Dee: &amp;quot;Give my baby to YOU? Don&amp;#39;t be STUPID.&amp;quot; Dee, brandishing the shining ruby: &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m going to kill you.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #7 &quot;Sound and Fury&quot; page 5&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During that conversation, Dream says a little more about his relationship with the gem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PbuaV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PbuaV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dee to Dream (in a diner): &amp;quot;She&amp;#39;s so clever. My clever baby.&amp;quot; Dream: &amp;quot;Listen to me.&amp;quot; Next panel, Dream is shown supine, with a shining gem on his chest. Dream&amp;#39;s disembodied voice: &amp;quot;I made the stone, created it from the fabric of my being long ago. Powered by my spirit it was made to manipulate the fabric of dreams, of the world I rule.&amp;quot; Inset shows Dream (wearing his helm) holding the ruby by a chain.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #7 &quot;Sound and Fury&quot; page 4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream takes the battle to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreaming_(comics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dreaming&lt;/a&gt;, where Dee appears to destroy Dream with the ruby; actually, he destroyed the ruby and transferred the power inside it back to Dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XGhGMm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XGhGMm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream, towering over a small Dee. Dream: &amp;quot;But you destroyed the ruby. I doubt I would have thought of that. Destroying it, you released the power stored in it. My control of the dreamworld. It&amp;#39;s all mine again. It feels GOOD.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #7 &quot;Sound and Fury&quot; page 20&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the ruby represent?&lt;/strong&gt; There's a lot going on around this ruby: it is an object that was created by an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2020/481&quot;&gt;anthropomorphic personification&lt;/a&gt; of dreams, invested with his power and part of his being, that was stolen from him, rendered unusable to him, used to wreak global chaos, destroyed in an attempt to kill its creator, and ultimately returned its power to Dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not very well-versed in mythology, but I am fascinated by the ruby and Dream's relationship with it. I would appreciate answers that involve mythology (as Dream has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_(comics)#Dream_and_mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;connections&lt;/a&gt; to mythology), but answers with other sources are also acceptable. Like I said, there's a lot going on with this gem, but answers don't need to explain all of it (good answers, like scientific theories, will explain as many facts as possible; the more things explained the better).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T18:39:08.683" Title="What does Dream's ruby represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2190" CreationDate="2017-03-27T21:08:34.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The three women is a recurring motif in stories and mythology. The fates, the graces, the furies in Greek mythology, the norns in Norse mythology, Shakespeare's weird sisters, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, Gaiman recurrently hints that the three-in-one are both the fates and the furies. Perhaps the three - the mother, the maiden, the crone, also stands for some sort of female principle (contrasting with the father, the son, and the holy ghost?), one that is not so much interested in winning the game as making sure it creates an interesting whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fates (and their counterparts in other mythologies) are often seen working with threads and weaves, as a metaphor for life and fate. Perhaps it also stands for literature and storytelling itself, and the three-in-one seem to always be slightly removed from the story, shaping it, rather than being part of it. Their question seems to echo that of the baby taken by Death in an early episode - “was that all?”, to which Death responds, “you get what anybody gets, you get a lifetime”. Even though the fates - as we all are - seem to be in control of what happens to a life, they still have this question: What was it, in the end? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1173" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T07:56:35.970" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T07:56:35.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2201" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-28T04:49:48.393" Score="12" ViewCount="2395" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in another &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2190/481&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, the three witches are very significant in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_(Vertigo)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sandman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. While that other question asks for their significance in general, I have a much more specific question to ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In issue #2 (&amp;quot;Imperfect Hosts&amp;quot;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_(comics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dream&lt;/a&gt; returns to his home after escaping captivity on Earth. Finding things greatly changed from how he left them, he realizes that he must recover his tools and fix things. He summons the Hecateae, and calls one of them by name. This kicks off a discussion about how the witches prefer to be called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Ngua.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8Ngua.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream's discussion with the three witches is transcribed below.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream: &amp;quot;Lady Atropos, you have found me out. I &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DO&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; want&#xA;something.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crone: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Atropos?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; No. Not now. You might as well call me the&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morrigan!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allmother: &amp;quot;She's &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, my ducks. Might as well call us&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tisiphone, Alecto,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Magaera&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; -- and that takes us back, eh?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maiden: &amp;quot;Might as well call us &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Diana, Mary, Florence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Candy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Ha ha! Uh, sorry.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream: &amp;quot;For me, you will always be the three graces, ladies.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice off-panel 1: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Flatterer!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice off-panel 2: &amp;quot;Ooh, he's the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;clever&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; one!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream: &amp;quot;So what &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I call you?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maiden: &amp;quot;I'm &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cynthia.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crone: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She's Mildred.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I'm &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mordred.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Stupid name. I&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ought&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to be &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morgaine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allmother: &amp;quot;It wasn't &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; fault. I just got them &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;confused&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;was all!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #2 &amp;quot;Imperfect Hosts,&amp;quot; page 19&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Note: another &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/urMOA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;version&lt;/a&gt; of this panel, provided by Gallifreyan, records only three names, leaving out Candy&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Dream finally asks them for help, he addresses them by other names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWwI9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWwI9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream addresses each of the three in turn. The conversation is transcribed below.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream (to the young witch): &amp;quot;MAIDEN, there was a POUCH of SAND. It was&#xA;stolen from me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream (to the kindly older witch): &amp;quot;I SEE. Then your question, ALL&#xA;MOTHER. My HELM -- what happened to it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream (to the oldest witch): &amp;quot;CRONE. A final question, for you. My STONE,&#xA;my DREAMSTONE, my RUBY MOONSTONE. Who has THAT now?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #2 &amp;quot;Imperfect Hosts,&amp;quot; page 21&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have, essentially, two questions about this exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. What is the significance of the name change?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understood it, Dream called them by names that he was likely using for millennia. Did they change names because of the general weirdness that happened during Dream's 70 year absence? I infer from the Crone's statement (&amp;quot;Atropos? No. Not now.&amp;quot;) that the names were changed from what they were before (&amp;quot;not now&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;not anymore&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this name change have a deeper meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. What do the different names represent?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not very well versed in mythology; these names don't mean much to me. I was able to find some things during my preliminary research for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I found that Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone are the names of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Kindly_Ones&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erinyes&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Found that by searching Wikipedia for &amp;quot;three witches comics,&amp;quot; and finding a mention of the Erinyes on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Kindly_Ones&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a page&lt;/a&gt; about a volume of&lt;/em&gt; The Sandman &lt;em&gt;that I haven't yet read&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I found that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Morr%C3%ADgan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morrigan&lt;/a&gt; is a figure from Irish mythology, a &amp;quot;phantom queen&amp;quot; who represents fate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most relevant result that I found by searching the web for the &amp;quot;Diana, Mary, Florence and Candy&amp;quot; was &lt;a href=&quot;http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Three_Witches&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which is very light on the background for these names. I'm also confused about how the Maiden gave four names for three persons.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: &lt;strong&gt;Why did the three change their names now, and what do those different names mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:33:25.433" Title="What's the significance of the witches' name change in Sandman?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2072" CreationDate="2017-03-28T07:47:43.057" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from the quote by Silenus, I can remember two more germanophobic passages. The first one is about Fyodor's student (and it mentions humor):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Он был самодоволен, рассудителен, туп и по-немецки невежественен, т.е. относился ко всему, чего не знал, скептически. Твердо считая, что смешная сторона вещей давным-давно разработана там, где ей и полагается быть – на последней странице берлинского иллюстрированного еженедельника, – он никогда не смеялся – разве только снисходительно хмыкал. Единственное, что еще мало-мальски могло его развеселить, это рассказ о какой-нибудь остроумной денежной операции. Вся философия жизни сократилась у него до простейшего положения: бедный несчастлив, богатый счастлив. Это узаконенное счастье игриво складывалось, под аккомпанемент первоклассной танцевальной музыки, из различных предметов технической роскоши. На урок он норовил прийти всегда на несколько минут раньше и старался уйти на столько же позже.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Владимир Набоков, Дар)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was self-satisfied, discursive, obtuse and &lt;strong&gt;germanically ignorant&lt;/strong&gt;; i.e., he treated everything he did not know with skepticism. &lt;strong&gt;Firmly believing that the humorous side of things had long since been worked out in the proper place for it (the back page of a Berlin illustrated weekly), he never laughed, or limited himself to a condescending snicker. The only thing that could just barely amuse him was a story about some ingenious&#xA;  financial operation.&lt;/strong&gt; His whole philosophy of life had been reduced to the simplest proposition: the poor man is unhappy, the rich man is happy. This legalized happiness was playfully put together to the accompaniment of first-class dance music, out of various items of technical luxury. For the lesson he always did his best to come a little before the hour and tried to leave a little after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second, the most germanophobic in the whole novel in my opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Он ехал на урок, как всегда опаздывал, и, как всегда, в нем росла смутная, скверная, тяжелая ненависть и к неуклюжей медлительности этого бездарнейшего из всех способов передвижения, и к безнадежно-знакомым, безнадежно-некрасивым улицам, шедшим за мокрым окном, а главное – к ногам, бокам, затылкам туземных пассажиров. Он рассудком знал, что среди них могут быть и настоящие, вполне человеческие особи, с бескорыстными страстями, чистыми печалями, даже с воспоминаниями, просвечивающими сквозь жизнь, – но почему-то ему сдавалось, что все эти скользящие, холодные зрачки, посматривающие на него так, словно он провозил незаконное сокровище (как в сущности оно и было), принадлежат лишь гнусным кумушкам и гнилым торгашам. Русское убеждение, что в малом количестве немец пошл, а в большом – пошл нестерпимо, было, он знал это, убеждением, недостойным художника; а все-таки его пробирала дрожь, – и только угрюмый кондуктор с загнанными глазами и пластырем на пальце, вечно-мучительно ищущий равновесия и прохода среди судорожных толчков вагона и скотской тесноты стоящих, внешне казался, если не человеком, то хоть бедным родственником человека. На второй остановке перед Федором Константиновичем сел сухощавый, в полупальто с лисьим воротником, в зеленой шляпе и потрепанных гетрах, мужчина, – севши, толкнул его коленом да углом толстого, с кожаной хваткой, портфеля – и тем самым обратил его раздражение в какое-то ясное бешенство, так что, взглянув пристально на сидящего, читая его черты, он мгновенно сосредоточил на нем всю свою грешную ненависть (к жалкой, бедной, вымирающей нации) и отчетливо знал, за что ненавидит его: за этот низкий лоб, за эти бледные глаза; за фольмильх и экстраштарк, – подразумевающие законное существование разбавленного и поддельного; за полишинелевый строй движений, – угрозу пальцем детям – не как у нас стойком стоящее напоминание о небесном Суде, а символ колеблющейся палки, – палец, а не перст; за любовь к частоколу, ряду, заурядности; за культ конторы; за то, что если прислушаться, что у него говорится внутри (или к любому разговору на улице), неизбежно услышишь цифры, деньги; за дубовый юмор и пипифаксовый смех; за толщину задов у обоего пола, – даже если в остальной своей части субъект и не толст; за отсутствие брезгливости; за видимость чистоты – блеск кастрюльных днищ на кухне и варварскую грязь ванных комнат; за склонность к мелким гадостям, за аккуратность в гадостях, за мерзкий предмет, аккуратно нацепленный на решетку сквера; за чужую живую кошку, насквозь проткнутую в отместку соседу проволокой, к тому же ловко закрученной с конца; за жестокость во всем, самодовольную, как-же-иначную; за неожиданную восторженную услужливость, с которой человек пять прохожих помогают тебе подбирать оброненные гроши; за… Так он нанизывал пункты пристрастного обвинения, глядя на сидящего против него, – покуда тот не вынул из кармана номер васильевской «Газеты», равнодушно кашлянув с русской интонацией.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Владимир Набоков, Дар)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was going to a lesson, was late as usual, and as usual &lt;strong&gt;there grew in him a vague, evil, heavy hatred&lt;/strong&gt; for the clumsy sluggishness of this least gifted of all methods of transport, for the hopelessly familiar, hopelessly ugly streets going by the wet window, and &lt;strong&gt;most of all for the feet, sides and necks of the native passengers. His reason knew that they could also include genuine, completely human individuals with unselfish passions, pure sorrows, even with memories shining through life, but for some reason he got the impression that all these cold, slippery eyes, looking at him as if he were carrying an illegal treasure (which his gift was, essentially), belonged only to malicious hags and crooked hucksters. The Russian conviction that the German is in small numbers vulgar and in large numbers—unbearably vulgar was, he knew, a conviction unworthy of an artist; but nonetheless he was seized with a trembling, and only the gloomy conductor with hunted eyes and a plaster on his finger, eternally and painfully seeking equilibrium and room to pass amidst the convulsive jolts of the car and the cattle-like crowding of standing passengers, seemed outwardly, if not a human being, then at least a poor relation to a human being.&lt;/strong&gt; At the second stop a lean man in a short coat with a fox-fur collar, wearing a green hat and frayed spats, sat down in front of Fyodor. In settling down he bumped him with his knee and with the corner of a fat briefcase with a leather handle, and this trivial thing turned his irritation into a kind of pure fury, so that, staring fixedly at the sitter, reading his features, he instantly concentrated on him all his sinful hatred (for this poor, pitiful, expiring nation) and &lt;strong&gt;knew precisely why he hated him: for that low forehead, for those pale eyes; for Vollmilch and Extra-stark, implying the lawful existence of the diluted and the artificial; for the Punchinello-like system of gestures (threatening children not as we do—with an upright finger, a standing reminder of Divine Judgment—but with a horizontal digit imitating a waving stick); for a love of fences, rows, mediocrity; for the cult of the office; for the fact that if you listen to his inner voice (or to any conversation on the street) you will inevitably hear figures, money; for the lavatory humor and crude laughter; for the fatness of the backsides of both sexes, even if the rest of the subject is not fat; for the lack of fastidiousness; for the visibility of cleanliness—the gleam of saucepan bottoms in the kitchen and the barbaric filth of the bathrooms; for the weakness for dirty little tricks, for taking pains with dirty tricks, for the abominable object stuck carefully on the railings of the public gardens; for someone else’s live cat, pierced through with wire as revenge on a neighbor, and the wire cleverly twisted at one end; for oruelty in everything, self-satisfied, taken for granted; for the unexpected, rapturous helpfulness with which five passersby help you to pick up some dropped farthings&lt;/strong&gt;; for.... Thus he threaded the points of his biased indictment, looking at the man who sat opposite him—until the latter took a copy of Vasiliev’s newspaper from his pocket and coughed unconcernedly with a Russian intonation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov, translated by Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, both these passages, while critical of Germans, describe Russians (Fyodor's student and a man on a tram). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="1179" LastEditDate="2017-03-28T09:40:48.377" LastActivityDate="2017-03-28T09:40:48.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2205" CreationDate="2017-03-28T21:09:41.667" Score="12" ViewCount="530" Body="&lt;p&gt;In W.G. Sebald's 1995 novel &lt;em&gt;The Rings of Saturn&lt;/em&gt;, the author describes different walks he takes. In some paragraphs, he describes the paths he takes very carefully, while in others he only mentions directions or how long he walked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can those walks be traced in the real world or is Sebald too vague?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1145" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T00:06:32.277" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T11:43:44.627" Title="Can W.G. Sebald's walks in &quot;The Rings of Saturn&quot; be traced?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-29T02:35:08.373" Score="7" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: contains unmarked spoilers.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ali Smith's &lt;em&gt;The Accidental&lt;/em&gt; is about the Smart family (Eve, Michael, Magnus, and Astrid) and a woman, Amber, who seemingly appears out of nowhere at their holiday home and has a dramatic effect on each of their lives. The book is split into twelve main parts: a &quot;beginning&quot;, &quot;middle&quot;, and &quot;end&quot; for each of Astrid, Magnus, Michael, and Eve respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Amber leaves at the end of the &quot;middle&quot; section, the Smarts return to their real home to find it bare: thieves have completely ransacked the place. The implication is that Amber was to blame:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Months later he remembered that she knew&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  where the house keys were kept, after this game–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in the bedside cabinet. Months later, too,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  he thought about the wanting her with shame&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and not a little wryness, like a clue&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  right under his own nose, a clue that came&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and went and told him exactly what he needed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  plain as abc, and he’d refused to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- middle, Michael&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The real world was elsewhere, like she was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine her, systematically emptying things room by room, shifting them through the front door and across the pavement into a van in the dead of night. She was in league with someone, a man, surely. She had to be. She'd need someone to help move the heavier things; you'd need someone to help you clean up afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- middle, Michael&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is there really enough evidence to say that Amber robbed them after she left, or could it have been a coincidence? Or is the point that it's supposed to be ambiguous and we can never know? Given the significance of all the character interactions in the book, I'm sure that whatever the answer to this question is, it will tie in metaphorically to the relationships that form the core of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a significant question to ask, because the answer to it may change our view of Amber. Was she merely a thief taking advantage of the family, and her lasting influence on their lives an accident, or was she somehow sent by Providence, an odd stranger, as Eve is to the other family at the very end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Amber involved in the ransacking of the Smarts' home or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:10:17.817" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:10:17.817" Title="In &quot;The Accidental&quot;, was it really Amber who did this?" Tags="&lt;ali-smith&gt;&lt;the-accidental&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2203" CreationDate="2017-03-29T06:53:24.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how accurate this is, as I haven't read the book, but I found an online map which seems to map the exact paths he took, so it seems that you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; take the same journey as him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website is called LITMAP (Literature Maps) which appear to have used google maps to trace the paths. It can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://barbarahui.net/litmap/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll add a couple of screenshots below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts off and has the majority of sites around the east of England:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mPMt1m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mPMt1m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Map showing tracks centred on East Anglia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But zooming out reveals it is across the world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tWDX2m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tWDX2m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Map showing world tracks&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also very helpfully has text down the side for each location with the relevant quote from the book. It also has page numbers. It starts at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital University and ends at Coburg, which reading the summary of the book suggests this map is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that by clicking on a section of text in the right hand column, it highlights that particular place in the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T11:43:44.627" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T11:43:44.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-03-29T11:58:29.457" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're getting at the very essence of the meaning of the poem, namely he's contrasting the marginality of the initial choice with the potentially enormous, and unknown, consequences of that choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He doesn't strictly contradict himself; he emphasises how slim the grounds were for the original choice in the first place - he chose the road which had &quot;perhaps&quot; the better claim, so he wasn't even certain that the grounds were genuine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, at the end, he returns to &quot;I took the path less travelled by&quot; he's reflecting on that decision he originally made on arbitrary grounds, in the light of the life he has had since, all of which has followed from that decision, and all the consequences in his life which have followed from it, and contemplating the fact that all those consequences were held in the balance by that one marginal decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's contemplating what we now call the butterfly effect.  But I prefer his characterisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1187" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T11:58:29.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-29T14:18:03.117" Score="4" ViewCount="1177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realized that some of the Forsaken names were familiar to me (Ishamael and Ishmael from Moby Dick, Asmodean and Asmodeus the demon). Did Jordan take inspiration for the names for all the Forsaken, and if so what were the other inspirations for the other Forsaken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Thanks to @Mithrandir for pointing out that Ishmael is also a biblical name, with him being the son of Abraham &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T14:25:04.650" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T23:54:46.303" Title="What were the inspirations for the Forsaken's names?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="673" CreationDate="2017-03-29T17:13:15.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is hard to say what they wanted to say (even my commented edition does not have any special remarks on it), I would interpret it as a contraception part of the character in “The Experiment”, Fritz Geiger who was a Nazi by hearth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chained to the machine gun I would interpret as that he was forced to fight, no matter whether he stood behind the ideology or not. Just like many people in Arkanar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that this is my interpretation, considering also the works &lt;em&gt;The Experiment&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Kid From Hell&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that this was one of the first novels with their ideas of extraterrestrial influence from a more advanced civilization, it could be that they just used the framework to bring the reader closer to the idea of the main story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T15:38:12.223" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T15:38:12.223" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2207" CreationDate="2017-03-29T17:29:26.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jordan uses many mythological and historical sources for the Forsaken. Some etymologies are more clear than others.  I'll go through each of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aginor:&lt;/strong&gt; Aginor was a character in the Iliad who attacked a stronger opponent (Achilles) and was defeated, similar to Aginor's own demise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aran'gar:&lt;/strong&gt; Etymology explained in the series as a type of blade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Asmodean:&lt;/strong&gt; As you acknowledge, comes from the demon Asmodeus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Balthamel:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://13depository.blogspot.com/2002/03/balthamel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; draws parallels between Balthamel and Dionysus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bel'al:&lt;/strong&gt;  May come from בליעל Belial, which means worthless in Hebrew.  In the Bible, &quot;sons of Belial&quot; is used for evil men. (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Deuteronomy.13.14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deut. 13:14&lt;/a&gt;) (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.steelypips.org/wotfaq/3_sources/3.01_bible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cyndane:&lt;/strong&gt; Etymology explained in the series as &quot;last chance&quot; in the Old Tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Demandred:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.steelypips.org/wotfaq/3_sources/3.05_king-arthur.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; says that Demandred is the name of one of Arthur's knights; however, I cannot find that anywhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Graendal:&lt;/strong&gt; I'm not sure.  It may be related to Grendel, a villain in Beowulf, but I don't see much similarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ishamael:&lt;/strong&gt; From Ishmael, the name of Abraham's first son by Hagar in the Bible. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.16.15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 16:15&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;M'Hael:&lt;/strong&gt; May be a reference to Michael, the archangel in the Bible, coming from Hebrew מיכאל Mikha'el = &quot;Who is like God?&quot;  He's the enemy of Lucifer, the morning star, who might be Lews Therin, Lord of the Morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lanfear:&lt;/strong&gt; From l'enfer, the French word for &quot;Hell.&quot;  Selene is probably related to the Greek moon-goddess by the same name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mesaana:&lt;/strong&gt; From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.steelypips.org/wotfaq/3_sources/3.10_misc-refs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Possibly from Messalina, the notorious third wife of Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, Emperor of Rome. Jose Abrigo observes that there was actually an ancient city called Messana, whose civil war was the catalyst for the First Punic War between Rome and Carthage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moghedien:&lt;/strong&gt; Etymology explained in the series as &quot;spider&quot; in the Old Tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moridin:&lt;/strong&gt; It means Death in-series; however, it might be a reference to Mordred from the Arthurian legend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Osan'gar:&lt;/strong&gt; Etymology explained in the series as a type of blade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rahvin:&lt;/strong&gt; The wiki says that he may be based on a Hindu demon Ravana.  His alias Gaebril is probably based on Gabriel the angel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sammael:&lt;/strong&gt; Might be related to the prophet Samuel, but probably closer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samael&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samael&lt;/a&gt;, a biblical archangel who, according to Wikipedia, has been seen as both good and evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semirhage:&lt;/strong&gt; Possibly based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiramis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semiramis&lt;/a&gt;, a legendary Assyrian queen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-29T23:54:46.303" LastActivityDate="2017-03-29T23:54:46.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2017-03-29T17:55:23.493" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No he did not!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process can be traced back at least to Thomas Carlyle, who in &lt;em&gt;Sartor Resartus&lt;/em&gt; (1833–34) publishes a summary and a critique, &lt;em&gt;à la Borges&lt;/em&gt;, of the fictional book &lt;em&gt;Clothes, Their Origin and Influence&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's note that Thomas Carlyle pushed it even further than Borges, publishing the review in a magazine with no mention of its fictional nature! While book 1 is a comment mainly of (pseudo-)philosophical nature, the readers of &lt;em&gt;Fraser's Magasine&lt;/em&gt; would find, in the begging of book 2, a fiction of what is deemed as a summary of &lt;em&gt;Clothes, Their Origin and Influence&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Even better: he knew he did not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[I] discovered, and was overwhelmed by, Thomas Carlyle. I read &lt;em&gt;Sartor Resartus&lt;/em&gt;, and I can recall many of its pages; I know them by heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luis Borges, &lt;em&gt;Word Music and Translation&lt;/em&gt;, Lecture, Delivered February 28, 1968, cited in &lt;em&gt;This Craft of Verse&lt;/em&gt;, Harvard University Press, 2000&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="255" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T21:17:22.850" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T21:17:22.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T01:44:01.120" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: major spoilers follow for the plot of &lt;em&gt;Silas Marner&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In George Eliot (Marian Evans)'s novel &lt;em&gt;Silas Marner&lt;/em&gt;, the eponymous weaver's life goes through several significant stages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;his years-long period of living alone and hoarding gold;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the miserable period immediately after his gold is stolen;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;his time of happiness after Eppie comes into his life.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two most major life-changing events which happen to him during his time in Raveloe are of course the theft of his gold and the arrival of Eppie. Each of these has a huge effect not only on his way of living but even on his personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of the novel, he gets some closure on the first of these events, when his gold is returned to him and the thief identified. But wouldn't his life would have gone on in pretty much the same way if this had never happened? Or is the recovery of the money and Dunstan's body somehow more momentous than just to make Silas realise how little the gold matters to him now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does the revelation in chapter 18 make the story different from what it would have been if the theft had remained a mystery?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:31:11.447" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T14:31:11.447" Title="What is the plot significance of the discovery of Dunstan and the money?" Tags="&lt;silas-marner&gt;&lt;george-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T03:00:07.470" Score="6" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cold Comfort Farm is set gently but irresistibly a decade or two after its original publishing date, with video phones and the Anglo-Nicaraguan War of '46 and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, setting the action in the future doesn't impact the plot or characters in any particular way, and although Gibbons places many movements and genres in her satirical sights I don't get the impression futurism or speculative fiction are among them. It seems like a peculiar choice for a novel most famous as a satire of the &quot;loam and lovechild&quot; genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does setting &lt;em&gt;Cold Comfort Farm&lt;/em&gt; in the future add to the novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T03:05:27.193" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T03:05:27.193" Title="What does its future setting add to Cold Comfort Farm?" Tags="&lt;cold-comfort-farm&gt;&lt;stella-gibbons&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T03:18:39.470" Score="10" ViewCount="4834" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stella Gibbons invented the sukebind for &lt;em&gt;Cold Comfort Farm,&lt;/em&gt; and she wields it with metaphorical deftness as if it had its own long floriographic history to draw on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd assumed that the sukebind and its blooming were indicative of animal urges, especially un-premeditated sex. But then it's also associated with Ada Doom, as a wreath of sukebind buds on Fig Starkadder's portrait is an explicit herald of her impending emergence--and of all the Starkadders I'd say Aunt Doom is the least in touch with their earthy sense of &quot;what comes naturally.&quot; There are also references to harvesting sukebind which I can't decipher thematically at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What theme might the sukebind invoke which would explain its disparate representations throughout the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T17:11:32.337" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T13:38:55.970" Title="What does the sukebind represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;cold-comfort-farm&gt;&lt;stella-gibbons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2215" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-30T03:24:14.087" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In her forward to &lt;em&gt;Cold Comfort Farm&lt;/em&gt; (which takes the form of a letter to Anthony Pookworthy, and is fully in the character of her assumed alter ego) Stella Gibbons exclaims,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Talking of men of genius, what a constellation burns in our midst at the moment! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But she offers no clear elaboration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is this brightly shining genius?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T04:27:40.217" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T04:27:40.217" Title="Who is the constellation which burns in their midst?" Tags="&lt;cold-comfort-farm&gt;&lt;stella-gibbons&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2217" CreationDate="2017-03-30T14:42:05.273" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Jim Butcher's foreword in the short story collection &lt;em&gt;Shadowed Souls&lt;/em&gt;, he discusses an event in which a pack of coyotes surrounds his home in an attempt to prey on his pet dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story seems a bit farfetched to be real, and I wouldn't put it past Jim to make up such a story just to have a little bit of umph for a book.  So, has Jim Butcher expressed whether this story about the coyotes is real, made up, or somewhere in between?  If it is made up, does he explain WHY he made it up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T17:14:13.083" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T17:14:13.083" Title="Did the event in Jim's foreword actually happen?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jim-butcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2216" CreationDate="2017-03-30T14:54:05.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In essence, yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a bit of poetic licence in the foreword to his short stories - I wouldn't be surprised if he somewhat exaggerated the description of events for dramatic effect - but the bare bones of the story, about coyotes attacking his dog, does seem to be true. At least, he posted about it on Twitter at the time and everyone seemed to take it completely seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frost survived a coyote attack Saturday PM. Broke a tooth on the coyote. Came out with battle scars. #GoodDog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/longshotauthor/status/446066701725995008&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;18 March 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Coyotes just tried for Frost again. At least three of them, one of them a pup. Parents probably teaching pups to hunt. He's okay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/longshotauthor/status/497639480090984448&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;8 August 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the other tweets sent in response, and his responses to those. In both threads, other people raise the possibility of him using a gun against the coyotes to defend his dog, and he says that wouldn't be legal inside city limits, but he did yell at the coyotes to try to scare them away, and he was close to his dog when the attacks happened. So although the passage about him going out with a loaded gun probably isn't true, the whole thing certainly seems to be a serious issue rather than something he just made up for a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-03-30T14:59:51.720" LastActivityDate="2017-03-30T14:59:51.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2222" CreationDate="2017-03-31T00:55:59.493" Score="8" ViewCount="2097" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading this paragraph from this mystery of Agatha Christie &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, this small paragraph is there which has no previous resemblance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By Jove, he'd sailed pretty near the wind once or twice! But he'd&#xA;  always got away with it! There wasn't much he drew the line at&#xA;  really. [...] No,there wasn't much he'd draw the line at. He fancied that&#xA;  he was going to enjoy himself at Soldier Island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My understanding of the passage:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't know what Jove means. The character as mentioned before he has done some deeds in his life which are not quite legal or very dangerous. But he has always got his way around of its consequences. He had done things like that, he does not have a limit for what he would do if money was the reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Request:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Please tell me where I am wrong or the whole thing means something else. And please ignore if my bad English has offended you, sorry!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Chapter one and the character introduction of Philip Lombard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1196" LastEditorUserId="1196" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T03:24:32.010" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T03:24:32.010" Title="What is the meaning of this paragraph from &quot;And Then There Were None&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;and-then-there-were-none&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-03-31T01:36:48.753" Score="6" ViewCount="636" Body="&lt;p&gt;I figured Anthony Pookworthy, Esq., ABS., LLR., was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS#Other_uses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;able seaman&lt;/a&gt;, but his last qualification remained a mystery to me. So I went looking, and during my research I learnt that Sutherland's &lt;em&gt;How to Be Well Read&lt;/em&gt; claims Pookworthy's instead an &quot;absolute liar.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I wouldn't trust Sutherland as far as I can throw his book, but I suspect he's right that &quot;Pookworthy&quot; is a backwards mondegreen for &quot;puke-worthy&quot; so I can't disregard him entirely. Further investigation revealed &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bookdrum.com/books/cold-comfort-farm/1186/bookmark/29363.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;somebody on the Internet&lt;/a&gt; who says Pookworthy is an Associated Back Scratcher and Licensed Log Roller. My conclusion is that there's no clear consensus on this, and I turn to you, dear Stack:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do Pookworthy's ABS., LLR., credentials mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T12:40:18.250" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T11:24:21.240" Title="What are Pookworthy's credentials?" Tags="&lt;cold-comfort-farm&gt;&lt;stella-gibbons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2220" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:29:18.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T02:29:18.447" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T02:29:18.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2221" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:29:18.447" Score="0" Body="Agatha Christie's greatest mystery novel. This tag must always be used together with the [agatha-christie] tag." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T05:26:37.587" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T05:26:37.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2218" CreationDate="2017-03-31T02:47:56.900" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't (yet) read the novel in question, but I can explain the passage's simple meaning as a fluent English speaker. Let's take this apart, one piece at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By Jove!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of the commenters mentioned, &quot;by Jove!&quot; is an exclamation, similar to &quot;By God!&quot;. In fact, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/by_Jove&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, the term comes from another name for the god Jupiter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he'd sailed pretty near the wind once or twice! But he'd always got&#xA;  away with it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right; &quot;sailing near the wind&quot; means to do something that is &quot;only just legal&quot; or dangerous. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/sail+close+to+the+wind&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary, citing the &lt;em&gt;Cambridge Idioms Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There wasn't much he drew the line at really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're close with your interpretation, here, but I think it needs a slight change to be perfect. I don't think this only means that he has always gotten away with &quot;sailing close to the wind&quot; without consequence. To &lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/draw+a+line&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;draw a line&lt;/a&gt; means to make a limit for yourself -- to tell yourself that I'll drive 5 miles over the speed limit, but not 30. In this statement, the speaker is saying that they don't really have any self-imposed limits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No,there wasn't much he'd draw the line at. He fancied that he was&#xA;  going to enjoy himself at Soldier Island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;fancy,&quot; as a verb (in the fourth entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fancy#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), means to imagine or suppose. These two statements together imply that the speaker expects to enjoy himself a lot on Soldier Island, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; he doesn't have any self-imposed limits. I haven't read the book, but this statement is designed to make one feel uncomfortable about this character, because this character will have &quot;fun&quot; in a place away from regular society, probably even at the expense of other people. I would be wary about this one, if I were you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-03-31T14:40:30.680" LastActivityDate="2017-03-31T14:40:30.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2199" CreationDate="2017-03-31T19:24:39.923" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have seen that the viewers' perception of Endless is based on individual expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NWRS5m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NWRS5m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;You look terrible. White as the man in the moon. Are you always so pale?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That Depends on who's watching.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sorry?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No matter.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Dream appears as a black short-haired man to Nada, while he usually looks like a pale white messy haired man (not like Neil Gaiman &lt;a href=&quot;http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/8/84/Neil_Gaiman_01.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4hmiXm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4hmiXm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Kai'ckul&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4fXZNm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4fXZNm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's not all. The Endless are different from all the other entities in the sense they are truly &lt;em&gt;endless&lt;/em&gt;. Endless cannot be killed, as they are anthropomorphic personifications of natural forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ChzCOm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ChzCOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;The Endless? The Endless are merely patterns. The Endless are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The Endless are repeating motifs. The Endless are echoes of darkness, and nothing more. We have no right to play with their lives, to order their dreams and their desires.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an Endless is &amp;quot;killed&amp;quot;, another aspect of them takes place instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FfHPe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FfHPe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;If we kill you, another aspect of yourself will take your place. That is what I learned at the congress at the dawn of time.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman: Overture&lt;/em&gt; #4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's talk about the tools for a little: the Ruby, the Helm, the Pouch. Dream says he created them at the beginning of time to help him govern his realm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zaqGg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zaqGg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;They stole more than time. When I established this realm I created tools to administer it. My tools are lost. I need help.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ruby, as it turns out in &lt;em&gt;The Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt;, is not one of a kind. Dream had created a number of Dreamstones, of which the most powerful was the Ruby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xXTrR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xXTrR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Penny for your thoughts&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You have no pennies, Matthew.&amp;quot; (awkward silence) &amp;quot;I was contemplating upon this emerald. It was one of the twelve Dreamstones I created long, long, long ago. The greatest of them, the one into which I put the most of myself, was the Ruby. There were others - a Rose-Quartz I gave to poor Alianore, a Fire-Opal, a Black Pearl, a Topaz... Some of them are scattered. Some have been destroyed. This was the least of them. It was an Eagle Stone I created for the great birds. And they used it for a time; and then they returned it to me.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morpheus draws our attention to the facets of the gem; the facet is the visible side, and each facet may be different, but it doesn't describe the whole gem. The gem has many facets, of which only one can be seen at a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6f4u9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6f4u9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Facets, Matthew. Each facet catches the light in its own way. It glints and sparkles and flashes uniquely. It would almost be possible to believe that the facet was the jewel; not just a tiny part of it. But, then, as we move the jewel another facet catches the light...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So? What's your point?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;My point? I have no point, Matthew. Save for the jewel, and the facets, and the light. We see an aspect of the whole. But the facet is not the jewel...&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Click for full resolution&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #21 (page 11), introducing Dream along with most of his family:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream of the Endless: ah, there's a conundrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In this aspect (and we perceive but aspects of the Endless, as we see&#xA;the light glinting from one tiny facet of some huge and flawlessly cut&#xA;precious stone),&lt;/strong&gt; he is rake-thin, with skin the color of falling snow.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Emphasis added &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Ruby represents the multi-faceted nature of Dream as one of the Endless.&lt;/strong&gt; The Endless are anthropomorphic personifications of natural forces, but those forces will continue to exist even if a personification is destroyed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zRd6fm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zRd6fm.png&quot; alt=&quot;The universe knows someone is missing, and slowly it attempts to replace him. Wesley Dodds's nightmares have stopped sine he started going out at night.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a personification is needed (apparently), so a new aspect of an Endless will be born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The newborn aspect will still be the same Endless - except, possibly, in personality. Thus they are called &amp;quot;aspects&amp;quot; - just as the facets of the gem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ruby also represents Morpheus' self-restraint, and consecutively the importance with which he treats his job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOqZpm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOqZpm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;The ruby contains too much of me - of my power - in its fabric. It stole more when I tried to use it.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think for Morpheus' case, we can quite accurately say that he has put his soul into his job&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman has another opinion. In Hy Bender's &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt; Gaiman says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Ruby] was normally a kind of computer, that automated things for the Sandman; instead of having to figure out how to perform a certain task, Dream would just say &amp;quot;Ruby, do this,&amp;quot; and it was done.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Secret Origins&amp;quot;, page 236.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also this bit, where Gaiman calls the Ruby a trap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HB&lt;/strong&gt;: Yep. What can you say about issue 7, &amp;quot;Sound and Fury&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: It wrapped up the Sandman's quest for his tools of office, and it restored him to full power by having Doctor Dee destroy his ruby - demonstrating that tools can be the subtlest of traps.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid, &amp;quot;Preludes and Nocturnes&amp;quot;, page 37.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In combination with the previous quote, I think this means that Morpheus was less bounded by his own rules after the destruction of the Ruby, and started giving matters more attention. Perhaps it is also amplified by the time he had to reflect on his doings, while in captivity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is echoed in the last volume, &lt;em&gt;The Wake&lt;/em&gt;, in the story named &amp;quot;Exiles&amp;quot; (drawn exquisitely by Jon J. Muth):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qRkOB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qRkOBm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Daniel: &amp;quot;Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps. One day, I know, I must smash the emerald.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can take from this that Dream has learned his lesson from his unfortunate mishap with the Ruby and Dr. Dee, and won't rely on tools as much anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: One possible exception is Death, but it is not clear whether she will exist &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the Universe is gone. It is almost certain, however, that she will be the last of the Endless.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;: Whatever the correct English expression is.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T18:39:08.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2225" CreationDate="2017-03-31T21:32:40.307" Score="10" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is the sealed letter that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry that orders Hamlet's execution a deliberate reference to the Biblical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King David&lt;/a&gt; having &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uriah_the_Hittite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uriah the Hittite&lt;/a&gt; carry a letter to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joab&lt;/a&gt; ordering his death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the morning it happened that David wrote a letter to Joab &lt;strong&gt;and sent it by the hand of Uriah&lt;/strong&gt;. And he wrote in the letter, saying, “Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die.” So it was, while Joab besieged the city, that he assigned Uriah to a place where he knew there were valiant men. Then the men of the city came out and fought with Joab. And some of the people of the servants of David fell; and Uriah the Hittite died also. (2 Samuel 11:14-18, NIV)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, how likely would it have been that Shakespeare's original audience would've understood the reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-08-03T22:20:16.003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T10:44:13.443" Title="Was the sealed letter ordering Hamlet's death a Biblical reference?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2017-04-01T11:07:47.093" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe it's a specific reference to that story in the Book of Samuel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A message that instructs the recipient to execute the messenger is a well-known old trope that has appeared in many stories.  &lt;strong&gt;TVTROPES WARNING&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PleaseShootTheMessenger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The TvTropes page “Please Shoot the Messenger”&lt;/a&gt; contains many examples.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the most well-known example is the story of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theoi.com/Heros/Bellerophontes.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bellerophontēs&lt;/a&gt; from Greek mythology, which is retold in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; chapter 6.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bellerophontēs was a mortal hero who may have been the son of the god Poseidon.  He was once guest of Proitos, king of Tiryns.  The wife of the king has lied that Bellerophontēs has offered his love to her.  This has angered the king, but as Greeks at that time took hospitality very seriously, he didn't dare to take revenge on his guest Bellerophontēs himself.  Instead, Proitos sent Bellerophontēs to Iobathēs, king of Lykia, with a ciphered message asking Iobathēs to kill the hero.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Iobathēs also considered hospitality his foremost obligation, so he wasn't willing to outright kill the messenger.  Instead, he sent him on a series of dangerous heroic tasks.  Eventually, Bellerophontēs has passed all the tests and survived the traps, and also took revenge on Proitos's wife.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know if this particular Greek myth is older than the biblical story, nor what the oldest example is.  It is, however, just one example out of many stories that precede Shakespeare, which is why I don't think the letter in Hamlet has to reference the story of Uriah in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="1179" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T11:50:40.913" LastActivityDate="2017-04-01T11:50:40.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2219" CreationDate="2017-04-01T17:11:02.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim that ABS and LLR stand for &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Associate Back Scratcher&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (not Associate&lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt; as in the source you found) and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Licensed Log Roller&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; seems to be quite widespread. It appears in, among others, Faye Hammill's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=W_dqoz3d7I0C&amp;amp;pg=PA154&amp;amp;lpg=PA154&amp;amp;dq=anthony+pookworthy+associated+back+scratcher+licensed+log+roller&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=CSagLUTtYL&amp;amp;sig=jj2GT7mjvdCYG1a2-e5OPbYfY_I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjpuPvZ2YPTAhVqDMAKHSY5DL8Q6AEIIzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=anthony%20pookworthy%20associated%20back%20scratcher%20licensed%20log%20roller&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; Bill Peschel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YqUbrdPl4QMC&amp;amp;pg=PT79&amp;amp;lpg=PT79&amp;amp;dq=%22associate+back+scratcher%22+%22licensed+log+roller%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lvVSCWo5x5&amp;amp;sig=H1-yY6B5-3yac7AtakmhwSkva1I&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi7m4O82oPTAhWFD8AKHSbeAocQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22associate%20back%20scratcher%22%20%22licensed%20log%20roller%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lo vers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/w-europe/england/gibbons/cold/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assorted&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://nigeness.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/reputation.html?m=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog posts&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, none of these books or internet pages cites a source for this claim, although they do provide slight circumstantial evidence by mentioning it as part of an argument that Gibbons was thumbing her nose at the literary elite and satirising established practices in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most authoritative source I've been able to find is Lynne Truss's introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9WesxDij-XcC&amp;amp;pg=PT17&amp;amp;lpg=PT17&amp;amp;dq=%22associate+back+scratcher%22+%22licensed+log+roller%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=4smT_FIlQy&amp;amp;sig=kbrhCdQi6Zyto8keKyl646OYVGs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi7m4O82oPTAhWFD8AKHSbeAocQ6AEIHTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22associate%20back%20scratcher%22%20%22licensed%20log%20roller%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 2006 edition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gibbons also overtly rejected the literary world with her dedication to Pookworthy - A.B.S. and L.L.R. stand for 'Associate Back Scratcher' and 'Licensed Log Roller'. She didn't move in literary circles, or even visit literary squares, or love in literary triangles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this appears within &lt;em&gt;the book itself&lt;/em&gt;, some might take it to be conclusive. But of course Truss is only one reviewer, and her word isn't necessarily worth more than anyone else's just because she managed to get her review included in a later edition of the book.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I suspect the real answer is that &lt;strong&gt;we don't know&lt;/strong&gt;. The very fact that you've found different sources making different claims about what the initials stand for suggests that there is no 'canonical' answer. Apparently Gibbons never said explicitly what &quot;ABS, LLR&quot; stood for, and others have taken the interpretation of these initials into their own hands. It's even possible that she had no particular words in mind to fit these initials - that, essentially, &lt;strong&gt;there is no answer&lt;/strong&gt;. If she did, surely she would have mentioned them either in the book itself or in some kind of supplementary materials? The initials already convey the idea of &quot;fancy pointless acronyms&quot; even without knowing what they stand for, and perhaps that's all they were intended to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T11:24:21.240" LastActivityDate="2017-04-02T11:24:21.240" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2228" CreationDate="2017-04-01T19:00:53.640" Score="12" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, the main character (Anton/Rumanta) falls in love with Kira and decides to take her with him back to Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since their task is to be as undercover as possible, it’s obvious that they are not allowed to save everyone/whoever they like. Kira also has not any bigger roles to build up Arkanar after the revolt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do they decide whom to save/what are the rules on who is allowed to bring to Earth?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1185" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-01T20:22:23.283" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T05:52:39.173" Title="How do they decide who to save/bring to Earth in Hard to Be a God?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2227" CreationDate="2017-04-01T19:59:06.497" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; bring anyone to Earth.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The persons of interest - scientists, astronomers, medics, artisans, poets, you name it - are not sent to Earth. They are re-routed to kingdoms that value their respective fields more that Arkanar (which is pretty much any kingdom out there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bagheer of Kissen, accused of lunacy bordering on treason, had been thrown in a dungeon and had only been rescued by Rumata with great difficulty. He had been &lt;strong&gt;sent to the metropole&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had then &lt;strong&gt;sent Sinda&lt;/strong&gt;, who hadn’t understood a thing, &lt;strong&gt;into Soan&lt;/strong&gt;, where he shrugged his shoulders and continued to look for the philosopher’s stone under the watchful eye of Don Condor.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Olena Bormashenko, printed by Gollancz UK first edition, chapter 5, page 117, all bold emphasis here and hereafter is mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As seen on this page in the book, Rumata (and, I reason, other operatives) only target people who would immediately be neutralised without operatives' intervention. The whole point here is doing as few interventions as possible, and letting the history take its course. Operatives are mostly observers, and the action part comes later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t like that we've tied our hands and feet with the very formulation of the problem. I don’t like that it’s called the Problem of Nonviolent Impact. Because under my conditions, that means a scientifically justified inaction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“There are two hundred and fifty of us on this entire planet. Everybody controls themselves, and everybody finds it very hard. The most experienced of us have lived here for twenty-two years. They came here as nothing more than observers. They were completely forbidden to do anything whatsoever. Imagine that for a moment: forbidden to do anything. They wouldn't even have had the right to save Budach. Even if Budach was being trampled before their eyes.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 1, pp. 37-38.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no indication Anton would be allowed to bring Kira to Earth.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two conversations about Kira's possible travel to Earth, both of which seem more like Anton's daydreaming, than actual plans. It is, in my opinion, highly unlikely that Anton would be allowed to bring Kira anywhere, and there is no mention of other operatives keeping souvenirs either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is this one passage where he thinks whether he could ask his friend Anka to keep an eye on Kira when she goes to Earth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You’d be safest on Earth, he thought. But how would you manage without me? And how will I manage here alone? I could ask Anka to be a friend to you there. But how will I manage here without you? No, we will fly to Earth together. I’ll pilot the ship myself, and you will sit next to me, and I’ll explain everything to you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 10, pp. 225-226.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... Although Boris Strugatsky thinks otherwise.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boris Strugatsky has been doing an off-line interview with fans since 1998. Among the questions &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int_t20.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, someone asked whether Rumata would actually be able to bring Kira to Earth. The answer was &quot;why not?&quot; (see question 10):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;: Действительно ли Румата мог взять Киру и улететь на Землю?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;: Мог бы. А почему, собственно, нет?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: Is it true that Rumata was able to fly to Earth and take Kira with him?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;: He could. Why not?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Translation mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; Anton was allowed to bring Kira home, it would be precisely because she is insignificant&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Kira? No one! She is a daughter of an &lt;em&gt;assistant&lt;/em&gt; to a &lt;em&gt;court clerk&lt;/em&gt; and a gray sergeant. Not married and a redhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was just a girl, eighteen years of age, snub-nosed, her father an assistant to the court clerk, her brother a sergeant in the storm troopers. And she was late getting married, because she was a redhead, and Arkanar didn't think much of redheads.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, chapter 3, page 79. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fact: her father is a literate man. Chances are, he'll get caught in the whirlwind of Don Reba's purge and be slaughtered, especially after&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The Holy Order takes over Arkanar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes for her brother. Due to her red hair, there's a fair chance she'd be killed too, for the reason above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and this is almost what happened, as we see in later chapters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her father was laid up. &lt;strong&gt;He had been kicked&lt;/strong&gt; out of his office and beaten severely with sticks as a farewell. [...] The boy also said that her brother had turned up—wounded, but cheerful and drunk, in a new uniform. He gave money to his father, drank with him, and was once again threatening that his boys would roll over everyone. [...] Father asked that she not come home under any circumstances. Her brother was &lt;strong&gt;threatening to settle scores with her for getting mixed up with a noble, the red-haired bitch&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 10, pp. 224-225.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T05:52:39.173" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T05:52:39.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-02T03:08:53.880" Score="4" ViewCount="638" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Kendrick Lamar's new single &quot;Humble&quot;, he references the game Tetris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pull up on your block, then break it down: we playin' Tetris&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A.M. to the P.M., P.M. to the A.M., funk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not quite sure what the reference to Tetris is supposed to mean. I've seen several different interpretations of that line online, and I'm curious to get everyone's thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-02T07:23:52.790" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T06:37:10.720" Title="Understanding Kendrick's reference to Tetris in &quot;Humble&quot;" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;kendrick-lamar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2251" CreationDate="2017-04-02T11:10:19.153" Score="10" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God#Adaptations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;It appears&lt;/a&gt; that Strugatsky brothers have written a stage adaptation of &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, named &lt;em&gt;Without Weapons&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;A Man from a Distant Star&lt;/em&gt;. Wikipedia claims that the play &quot;reveals previously unknown details&quot; about the world of &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does the play add? What are the differences between the novel and the stage adaptation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T13:22:36.190" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:55:57.587" Title="What details does the &quot;Without Weapons&quot; / &quot;A Man from a Distant Star&quot; stage play add to the lore of &quot;Hard to be a God&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;&lt;without-weapons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2232" CreationDate="2017-04-02T12:38:29.550" Score="6" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the prologue of &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You know, Anetchka--&quot; said Pashka.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Don't you call me Anetchka,&quot; Anka cut in abruptly. She could not stand to be called by any other name than Anka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I know about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_given_name#Diminutive_forms&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;diminutive forms&lt;/a&gt; of Russian names, and that different diminutive forms of the same name can be used in different ways (e.g. a man named Ivan might be called Vanya, Vanka, or Vanechka by different people or under different circumstances). But my knowledge of Russian diminutives isn't good enough to understand the nuances of when each different form would be used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it say about Anka's character that she refuses to answer to Anetchka?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Note to non-Slavic speakers:&lt;/em&gt; as I understand it, this is not the same as, say, an Englishman called James who refuses to answer to Jim. Russian diminutive forms are much more prevalent, even being widely used for common nouns as well as personal names, and different diminutives of the same name have specific meanings. I suspect that a fluent Russian speaker could look at this quote and immediately deduce something about Anka's personality - my question is what.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T09:01:51.127" Title="Why doesn't Anka like to be called Anetchka?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2231" CreationDate="2017-04-02T16:57:18.393" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All three of them are trying to seem more grown up than they really are.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Running from their boarding school? With crossbows blazing? That doesn't sound like trying to be more grown up than they really are &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. We don't know how old they are at this time, but I'll make an educated guess and say 12-16 years old, the right time when running away towards independence is most craved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Pashka was filled with the vague elation he always felt when he and Anton had run away from boarding school and a day of total independence lay ahead—full of undiscovered places, wild strawberries, hot deserted meadows, gray lizards, and ice-cold water from unexpected springs. And as always, he wanted to whoop and leap up high in the air, and he immediately did so, and Anton looked at him, laughing, and Pashka saw that Anton’s eyes expressed complete understanding.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, Gollancz edition, prologue, page 5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do note that they carry loaded and lethal weapons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anka gave Pashka back his rifle. “Do you always let loose at each other like that?” she asked enviously.&#xA;  “Of course!” Pashka said in surprise. “What, are we supposed to yell ‘Boom-boom’? ‘Bang-bang’? The game needs an element of risk!”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was suddenly seized with the certainty that even if he turned his back to them, the heavy bolt would still sink right into the bridge of Pashka’s nose, between his cheerful green eyes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, pages 10 and 11. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kids mean business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She is (mentally) the most grown-up of them all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is also, I think, an old trope in Soviet (and maybe in other&lt;sub&gt;1&lt;/sub&gt;) literature, that in a group of two boys and a girl, the girl is usually the most level-headed person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Anton: he clearly admires her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had excellent muscles — Anton enjoyed watching the little hard ball of her biceps roll under her tanned skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was wonderful walking alone in the forest with her like this, shoulder to shoulder, bare elbows touching, glancing over occasionally to take in how pretty she was, how agile, and how amazingly friendly. How her eyes were big and gray, with black eyelashes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, pages 3 and 6, respectively. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Pavel: he clearly is the most cheerful and happy-go-lucky person of the three. Before the game of Wilhelm Tell, Anton is unsure, Anka is skeptic, and only Paska enjoys himself almost until the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anton took the red bundle and examined it carefully. He looked at Anka—her eyes were like slits. And Pashka was enjoying himself—he was having fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pashka was smirking. He was still playing around. Anton bent down and started slowly drawing the bowstrings.&#xA;  “Bless you, my father William!” Pashka called out. “And thank you for everything, no matter what happens.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, page 11.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among those adolescent boys, someone has to be the grownup. This hapens to be Anka. And from her overall tone and posture throughout the prologue, one can see that she acts unimpressed by boys' feats. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Anka being the grownup, and Pashka being the least grownup, is what makes her dismiss Pavel's address as angrily as she did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pavel was most likely trying to patronise her by using a diminutive &quot;Anechka&quot;, given this is the first time she ever ran away from the boarding school with them. He felt he needed to introduce the newbie to the adventure, but Anka had a different opinion on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anechka is a very childish and diminitive name.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Disclaimer: this part reflects my own observations and experiences, and I don't expect everyone to agree.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, not necessarily childish - lovers may use it in their conversations, but I don't think it is very common. Of all my friends called Anna, all preferred to be called Anya (Аня). An'ka (Анька) is also possible, but it is even less informal and has to be used for someone who is a very close friend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna sounds too formal - there were two Empresses or Russia with that name (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%98%D0%BE%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B0_%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;); Anechka, on the other hand, is very patronising. Both of my friends did not (mildly put) prefer to be called Anechka under any circumstances. In Anka's situation, when she was among peers, she definitely would not prefer to be called Anechka, or, even worse, Anyusha (Анюша). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anka, on the other hand, does not sound patronising, but rather as a nickname that is &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to be used by peers (this isn't something I could possibly rationalise either - the ending &lt;em&gt;-nka&lt;/em&gt; is often used to derive new &quot;friendly&quot; names for things, and I always thought upon reading that Anka preferred to be called that because it sounds teenager-ish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have been a behind-the-scenes reason for the name &quot;Anka&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; The rest is pure speculation and is only tangential to the question.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pure speculation, and a very far stretch, and frankly, more of a historical anecdote, but it appears that an &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0-%D0%BF%D1%83%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BC%D1%91%D1%82%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anka&lt;/a&gt; was a major character in the 1934 Soviet film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapaev_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapaev&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, about the eponymous Red Army comander. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;a href=&quot;http://[introduction%20by%20Ken%20MacLeoud][7]&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;introduction to &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Ken MacLeod notes that &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt; was intended to be written differently, as &quot;an exciting adventure story in the manener of &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Authors changed the tone of the novel after &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%A5%D1%80%D1%83%D1%89%D1%91%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BC_%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nikita Khrushev's visit to the avant-garde exhibiton&lt;/a&gt;, where he heavily criticised the artists, using, among others, swear words. Boris Strugatsky reflected on this in his afterword for &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We shouldn’t have illusions. We shouldn’t have hopes for a brighter future. &lt;strong&gt;We were being governed by goons and enemies of culture&lt;/strong&gt;. They will never be with us. They will always be against us. They will never let us say what we believe is right, because what they believe is right is something completely different. And if for us communism is a world of freedom and creativity, for them communism is a society where the people immediately and with pleasure perform all the prescriptions of the party and government.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The realization of these simple — although then far from obvious for us — truths was painful, like the realization of any truth, but beneficial at the same time. New ideas appeared and strongly demanded their immediate implementation. The “fun story in the spirit of The Three Musketeers” that we had thought up began to appear in an entirely different light, and I didn’t need long speeches to convince Arkady that they needed to make a substantial ideological adjustment in The Observer. The time of “light things,” the time of “swords and cardinals” seemed to have passed. Or maybe it simply hadn’t come yet. &lt;strong&gt;The adventure story had to, was obliged to, become a story about the fate of the intelligentsia, submerged in the twilight of the Middle Ages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, afterword, page 244. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, just &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt;, the name Anka had been added to form a positive connection between the hero of the novel and the symbol of patriotism that Anka of the 1934 film was, to soothe the reaction of censors. According to her Wikipedia entry, Anka was added per the request of Stalin, who named &lt;em&gt;Chapaev&lt;/em&gt; his favourite film (ironically enough, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ria.ru/society/20140417/1004323786.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;so did Vladimir&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, this is just my speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aOCimm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aOCimm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Стреляй Анка, спасай наших!&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;Fire, Anka, save our allies!&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Anka on a grafitti in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Art by &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%A5%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA.%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B1.%D0%BB.8%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%A7%D0%B0%D0%BF%D0%B0%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%9F%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%BD_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%84%D1%84%D0%B8%D1%82%D0%B8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V. Vizu, from Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;, CC BY-SA 3.0. The grafitti reads &quot;Fire, Anka, save our allies!&quot; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: As much as I hate to mention those books here, &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;'s Hermione Granger would be Anka to Ron and Harry.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-03T09:01:51.127" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T09:01:51.127" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1175" CreationDate="2017-04-02T19:57:06.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes… I don't get it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs in &lt;em&gt;Pirx pilóta kalandjai&lt;/em&gt; (orig title. &lt;em&gt;Opowieści o pilocie Pirxie&lt;/em&gt;; in &lt;em&gt;Stanisław Lem teljes science-fiction univerzuma&lt;/em&gt; vol. 2, (2006) Szukits könyvkiadó, translator Murányi Beatrix), in the short story “Feltételes reflex”.  The young student Pirx and the older scientist (astrophysicist) Langner are waiting in a hotel room on the moon, before traveling to the base at the back side of the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langner asks Pirx his age, without looking up from the complicated computations he was doing.  Pirx replies “111”, which makes Langner look up, then adds “in binary”, which makes the scientist smile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langner kiterített az asztalon egypár új diagramot, és nagyítóval vizsgálgatta, olyan elmélyülten, ahogy Pirx még kedvenc színésznője képeit sem nézte soha.  Közben megkérdezte Pirxtől, hány éves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– Száztizenegy – felelte Pirx, és amikor társa felpillantott, hozzátette: – &lt;strong&gt;Kettes számrendszerben.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langner most mosolyodott el először. Kezdett emberhez hasonlítani. Erős, fehér foga volt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation (by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Iribarne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis Iribarne&lt;/a&gt;) of that passage from Lem's novella &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?836200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Conditioned Reflex&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; as printed in the Avon Books edition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34346&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tales of Pirx the Pilot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spreading out some new spectrograms on the table and studying them more intently than Pirx had had ever scrutinized his favorite pinup, Langner suddenly asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How old are you?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A hundred and eleven,&amp;quot; Pirx said, and added, when the other looked up, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;in binary.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langner broke out in a smile—his first—a smile that lent him an almost human look. He had strong, immaculately white teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers don't seem to make any sense.  (Pirx is actually 22 years old at that time.)  This appears to show that the young Pirx still says the first stupid thing that comes into his mind without thinking it through, which is in character for him.  If there's a deeper meaning or joke behind the choice of these particular numbers, I can't see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T02:19:20.967" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T02:19:20.967" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-03T13:22:36.127" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;One passage from &lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons&lt;/em&gt; has got me wondering how GRRM leaves clues for his readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He tried to count the pennies nailed to the old oak, but there were too many of them and he kept losing count. &lt;strong&gt;What’s that all about?&lt;/strong&gt; The Blackwood boy would tell him if he asked, but &lt;strong&gt;that would spoil the mystery.&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;Chapter 48, Jamie I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself have &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/147966/57310&quot;&gt;claimed&lt;/a&gt; that it is but a mere wish tree. However, as I went down &lt;a href=&quot;http://asoiafuniversity.tumblr.com/post/145454644275/but-that-would-spoil-the-mystery-the-pennytree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the rabbit hole&lt;/a&gt;, it seems there is a theory that this is George's way of telling his readers not to &quot;spoil the mystery&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there is a fair bit of unexplained mysteries and magic going on in &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;, but in my experience we are left to draw our own on conclusion, or receive some form of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statement&lt;/a&gt; from Martin in an interview. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/151905/57310&quot;&gt;At times&lt;/a&gt; he will even affirm that we should be patient and that not all the mysteries will be solved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, these statements are coming from an -out-of-universe perspective. My question is, &lt;strong&gt;does Martin make a habit of making these kind of meta-statements &lt;em&gt;in-universe&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T22:46:42.993" Title="Does GRRM have a habit of making meta statements?" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2258" CreationDate="2017-04-03T18:48:25.253" Score="12" ViewCount="973" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the end of &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, the last Volume of the Lord of the Rings, the hobbits return to the Shire.  There, they meet Saruman and his follower Grima (Wormtongue).  When Saruman attempted to slay Frodo, failing because of the Mithril coat, Frodo replies,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'No, Sam!' said Frodo. 'Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt&#xA;  me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was&#xA;  great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands&#xA;  against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare&#xA;  him, in the hope that he may find it.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, however, relates particularly to Saruman's reply to these words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Saruman rose to his feet, and stared at Frodo. There was a strange look in his eyes of mingled wonder and respect and hatred. 'You have grown, Halfling,' he said. 'Yes, you have grown very much. You are wise, and cruel.  You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt to your mercy. [...]'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What period in time is he referring to when he says that Frodo has grown?&lt;/strong&gt;  To my knowledge, the only time he has met Frodo up to this juncture is when they crossed him on the way to Rivendell from Gondor after the burial of Theoden.  Did Saruman know Frodo from the Orthanc stone?  Since when does Saruman feel that Frodo has grown wise and cruel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T11:33:48.067" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T11:33:48.067" Title="Where did Saruman know Frodo from?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2242" CreationDate="2017-04-03T22:26:19.190" Score="8" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the afterword of &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the advice of I. A. Efremov, we renamed the Minister of the Defense of the Crown Don Reba (he had previously been Don Rebia—an overly simple anagram, in the opinion of Ivan Antonovich.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=t22yBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT198&amp;amp;lpg=PT198&amp;amp;dq=On+the+advice+of+I.+A.+Efremov,+we+renamed+the+Minister+of+the+Defense+of+the+Crown+Don+Reba+(he+had+previously+been+Don+Rebia%E2%80%94an+overly+simple+anagram,+in+the+opinion+of+Ivan+Antonovich.)&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2CZzCGhqem&amp;amp;sig=6iB-rgCY1cjL5L9e7-pphGyXbLQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiRxIufponTAhVBC8AKHTIWAzAQ6AEIHjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=On%20the%20advice%20of%20I.%20A.%20Efremov%2C%20we%20renamed%20the%20Minister%20of%20the%20Defense%20of%20the%20Crown%20Don%20Reba%20(he%20had%20previously%20been%20Don%20Rebia%E2%80%94an%20overly%20simple%20anagram%2C%20in%20the%20opinion%20of%20Ivan%20Antonovich.)&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2015 translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I enjoy anagram puzzles, I wasn't even going to attempt one in not only a foreign language but a less familiar alphabet, so I remained puzzled about what anagram this was referring to, until @Gilles &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=36452891#36452891&quot;&gt;pointed out&lt;/a&gt; in chat that of course Rebia (Ре́бия) would have been an anagram of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavrentiy_Beria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beria (Бе́рия)&lt;/a&gt;, the most famous and long-standing chief of the Soviet secret police. The reference is clear: Don Reba is also a chief of secret police, also ruthlessly responsible for the detection and punishment of thousands of so-called traitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the name, &lt;strong&gt;what similarities can be drawn between the character of Don Reb(i)a and the real-world figure of Beria?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm interested to see how far the comparison goes, and how clear it is from the text of the novel, without using anagram games, that Don Reba was based on Beria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T14:28:49.973" Title="What parallels can be drawn between Don Reba and Beria?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2234" CreationDate="2017-04-03T22:46:42.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a huge fan of the &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; series. I've spent hours getting lost in arguments about the politics, military tactics of ASOIAF, and I've spent just as many hours trying to predict what will happen in future books. There's a lot to discuss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you've misunderstood the argument of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://asoiafuniversity.tumblr.com/post/145454644275/but-that-would-spoil-the-mystery-the-pennytree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; that you cited in support of your claim about the wishing tree. The blog post's argument rests on comparisons between the tree and comparisons between descriptions of magic. The blog post correctly observes that when Martin describes magic, he keeps the details mysterious. Depending on the context, this creates a sense of wonder, horror, or both. The blog post isn't arguing that we will eventually find out the details behind magic in the universe, but that by keeping the details mysterious, Martin makes the magic more meaningful. Hence the reason why Martin seems to not at this by saying that knowing the origin of the tree would &quot;spoil the mystery&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blog post is not talking about predictions, which is what you seem to be talking about in this answer. As you know, one of the things that makes ASOIAF enjoyable is that there's all sorts of forshadowing and red herrings and you can make all sorts of predictions about future books. And of course people want Martin to spoil the fun, so he has to tell his readers to wait for future books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that these two types of unknown aren't comparable. When Martin forshadows, he doesn't tell the reader to wait and see &lt;em&gt;in the books&lt;/em&gt;; he drops all sorts of hints that allow the reader to guess what's happening. When Martin describes magic, he deliberately keeps things mysterious. We've learned all sorts of details about the politics and the plot as the books progress, but we haven't learned very many new things about magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be out of character for this trees purpose to be revealed later in the books. So no, I don't think the tree will be the subject of a great reveal plot wise. It's possible that I'll be wrong, but I doubt it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of making meta statements: if you mean &quot;does Martin tell readers &lt;em&gt;in his books&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to in interviews, etc.) to wait for details to be revealed in future books, the answer is no. When Martin forshadows, he does so by giving the reader details that allow the reader to predict what happens in future books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-04-03T22:46:42.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2241" CreationDate="2017-04-04T00:12:04.240" Score="34" ViewCount="12477" Body="&lt;p&gt;24601 has developed into being an iconic part of both the &lt;em&gt;Les Miserables&lt;/em&gt; book and musical. Was that number special to him, or was it simply a random number he chose (I doubt it)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T00:29:56.797" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T00:38:09.987" Title="Was there a reason Victor Hugo chose 24601 as the number for Jean Valjean?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2240" CreationDate="2017-04-04T00:29:18.843" Score="38" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes: it corresponds to the date of Hugo's conception.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of a pattern of similarities between the character of Jean Valjean and the author himself: both are of similar age, have similar habits and similarly austere lifestyles, and even share the same dreams. This is according to David Bellos's &lt;em&gt;The Novel of the Century: The Extraordinary Adventure of Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;, which concludes Part Three with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Hugo put in a secret sign to remind himself and maybe those who knew him well that there were deep links of identity between the dutiful and persistent ex-convict and himself. Hugo was born on 26 February 1802, but because he was a slightly premature baby, &lt;strong&gt;he always believed he had been conceived on 24 June 1801.&lt;/strong&gt; Valjean's prison number on his first incarceration at Toulon is 24601.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=evwPDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT171&amp;amp;lpg=PT171&amp;amp;dq=The+Novel+of+the+Century+:+The+extraordinary+adventure+of+Les+Miserables+24+June+1801&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=cxsURZsgZU&amp;amp;sig=wqdk3yK8QKphFO20FJIjhsJHcvU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi388G_xInTAhXMFsAKHT34AWYQ6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=The%20Novel%20of%20the%20Century%20%3A%20The%20extraordinary%20adventure%20of%20Les%20Miserables%2024%20June%201801&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 162&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a bonus, Valjean's second prisoner number was apparently also chosen for its special significance to Hugo: it refers to the month of his daughter Léopoldine's death. From footnote 46 in Kathryn Grossman's &lt;em&gt;Figuring Transcendence in Les Miserables: Hugo's Romantic Sublime&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaudon demonstrates that this image, which represents genius in one of the poet's earliest &lt;em&gt;carnets&lt;/em&gt; (8 July 1820), is a sign of his &amp;quot;deep identification&amp;quot; with Valjean (&lt;em&gt;Temps&lt;/em&gt; 547). As further evidence that the hero is an alter ego, Gohin cites the two numbers assigned to him in prison. The first, &lt;strong&gt;24601, refers to the supposed date of Hugo's conception (24 June 1801)&lt;/strong&gt;, while the second, &lt;strong&gt;9430, alludes to Léopoldine's death in September 1843&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;Une histoire&amp;quot; 47; see also 52).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CYfTZ09kszMC&amp;amp;pg=PA165&amp;amp;lpg=PA165&amp;amp;dq=hugo+les+miserables+24+June+1801+24601&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=9pdP5PcTMO&amp;amp;sig=xkB7JzlGO0ibJS_uRxZQC1Ct2rs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiBp8OMxonTAhVBLMAKHSR9BrEQ6AEIODAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=hugo%20les%20miserables%2024%20June%201801%2024601&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 165&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T00:38:09.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2238" CreationDate="2017-04-04T01:42:25.227" Score="8" Body="&lt;h1&gt;SPOILERS AHEAD! This answer may contain spoilers including hints to the major plot points of the book; sprinkled all over.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;References&lt;/em&gt;: all Beria facts below are basically from Russian Beria Wiki page unless otherwise stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;First, political parallels.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don Reba's role in the state.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His role in the book was described by many as &quot;the grey cardinal&quot; - basically, the Armand Jean du Plessis (more well known as Cardinal Richelieu) of Arkanar. Beria played a similar role for Stalin (with the difference that Stalin wasn't merely a puppet of his but an owner, unlike both Arkanar monarch and Luis XIII).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, my own analogy was rejected by none other than Anton/Rumata, who explicitly thought that Reba was NOT Richelieu equivalent like Rumata's boss Don Kondor thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Дон Рэба для него — это что-то вроде герцога Ришелье, умный и дальновидный политик, защищающий абсолютизм от феодальной вольницы. Один я на всей планете вижу страшную тень, наползающую на страну, но как раз я и не могу понять, чья это тень и зачем… И где уж мне убедить его, когда он вот-вот, по глазам видно, пошлет меня на Землю лечиться.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For him, Don Reba is something like the Duke of Richelieu, a shrewd and farsighted politician, defending absolutism from feudal excesses. I’m the only one on this whole planet who’s aware of the terrible shadow creeping over the country, but even I can’t figure out whose shadow it is or where it’s coming from. And how can I possibly convince him, when I can see in his eyes that he’s almost ready to send me back to Earth for treatment?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, Gollancz, chapter 1. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, Boris Strugatsky in offline interview also indicated that &quot;for realz&quot;, Anton was &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; wrong - Don Reba wasn't a grey cardinal, but in reality, a very well masked agent of the Order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;По замыслу авторов, &lt;strong&gt;дон Рэба – профессиональный агент влияния и политический диверсант Ордена, великолепно замаскировавшийся под хитроумного придворного интригана и серого (во всех смыслах) кардинала&lt;/strong&gt;. Ему удалось обмануть всех, в том числе и нашего Антона-Румату, который при всех его статях все-таки дилетант-самоучка, не лишенный известных талантов, но начисто лишенный серьезной практики. Так что пресловутая «серость» дона Рэбы существует, скорее, в воображении Руматы, обиженных придворных, а так же – авторов (естественно глядящих на мир глазами своего героя). (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int0094.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don Reba's official position in the state&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Reba was the security minister (his official title was министра охраны короны/Minister for Crown's Safety). Beria was, of course, head of NKVD, the predecessor of KGB. Both were in charge of finding out everything about everyone in the state in the name of state security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Орел наш, благородный дон Рэба озабочен знать, что говорят и думают подданные короля. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our eagle, the noble Don Reba, is interested in what the king’s subjects say and think.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Oppressor-in-chief&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, Don Reba was in charge of oppressing all enemies of the state, like Beria who was officially accused of helping Stalin organize 30s repressions &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(ironically, Beria likely wasn't actually as guilty as many others, as he only took his position in 1938 after main repressions ended - I covered that a couple of bullets below).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Coup and taking power.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Reba organized a palace coup, killing the king, and becoming the leader of the Arkanar. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beria was accused of the same by Khruschyov's cabal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, later historical revelations revealed that it was a trumped-up charge used as an excuse to get rid of him since everyone else in Central Committee was afraid of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, regarding Beria's arrest.... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;agent of influence&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; thing mentioned in the very first section: as we recall from history, Beria was accused of and executed for being British spy and agent of influence (Arkady Strugatsky actually mentioned &quot;laughing about that fact&quot; in one of his letters when he was 20, sadly I don't have a link to the book citing that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while we the readers don't see it from the text (but can make a guess as &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; readers did, that Reba is way way too good given the outcomes compared to how we see him via Rumata's eyes); the quote from the BNS interview at the end of last bullet confirms that &quot;Agent of influence for the Order&quot; is exactly how the authors saw the character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Doctor's Plot&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - parallel #1 - persecuting doctors via accusations of poisoning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Reba tried to do that with doctors in Arkanar, except Rumata interfered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Лейб-знахарь Тата вместе с пятью другими лейб-знахарями оказался вдруг отравителем, злоумышлявшим по наущению герцога Ируканского против особы короля, под пыткой признался во всем и был повешен на Королевской площади.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The healer Tata, along with five other healers, had suddenly turned out to be poisoners who had been plotting against the king at the instigation of the Duke of Irukan. Tata had confessed to everything under torture and was hanged in the Royal Plaza.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, chapter 5, page 117.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Кем-то была затрачена уйма золота, чтобы помешать свершиться гневу народному в отношении богомерзких шпионов и отравителей, бывших лейб-знахарей его величества.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Someone spent a fortune in gold to prevent the people’s wrath from being carried out against the godforsaken spies and poisoners, the former healers of His Majesty.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 7, page 167.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Beria wasn't at fault for that particular rise of anti-Semitism in USSR, and furthermore, when he got elected to be a leader following Stalin's death, he stopped that effort, rehabilitated everyone arrested; and arrested and executed the man actually responsible (Beria's second in command in MGB, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%8E%D0%BC%D0%B8%D0%BD,_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB_%D0%94%D0%BC%D0%B8%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ryumin&lt;/a&gt;). But, &lt;strong&gt;he is frequently blamed for that&lt;/strong&gt; in Russia as well. Of course, Don Reba arrested Dr. Budakh, forced him to give the recipe for poison which he then used to poison the king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BNS actually covered this in an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int0096.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;offline interview&lt;/a&gt;, openly admitting that Beria wasn't as bad as people usually blame him for, and Strugatsky brothers were as ignorant of the truth as anyone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Вы совершенно правы.... &lt;strong&gt;Берия безусловно чрезмерно демонизирован, а причины этого явления, по-моему, в плохом нашем знании собственной истории&lt;/strong&gt;. Да и откуда нам брать информацию? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctors%27_plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Doctor's Plot&lt;/a&gt;&quot; - parallel #2 - death of the ruler.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book, Don Reba kidnaps Doctor Budakh, forces him to give him poison, and that poison is used to kill the king via fake-Budakh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Это страшный человек. Это оборотень, который явился на свет только упущением божьим. Я врач, но мне не стыдно признаться, что при случае я охотно умертвил бы его. Я слыхал, что король отравлен. И теперь понимаю, чем он отравлен. (Румата насторожился.) Этот Рэба явился ко мне в камеру и потребовал, чтобы я составил для него яд, действующий в течение нескольких часов. Разумеется, я отказался. Он пригрозил мне пытками – я засмеялся ему в лицо. Тогда этот негодяй крикнул палачей, и они привели ему с улицы дюжину мальчиков и девочек не старше десяти лет. Он поставил их передо мной, раскрыл мой мешок со снадобьями и объявил, что будет пробовать на этих детях все снадобья подряд, пока не найдет нужное. Вот как был отравлен король, дон Румата.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This is a terrible man. A werewolf who only came into this world by an oversight of God. I’m a doctor, but I’m not ashamed to admit that if I had the chance I would have gladly put him to death. I have heard that the king was poisoned. And now I understand what he was poisoned with.&quot; Rumata pricked up his ears. &quot;This Reba showed up in my chamber and demanded that I make up a poison for him that worked in the course of a few hours. Naturally, I refused. He threatened me with torture—I laughed in his face. Then the villain called to the torturers, and they brought in a dozen boys and girls no older than ten years of age from the street. He lined them up in front of me, opened my potion bag, and declared that he would try all the potions on those children in a row until he found the right one. That’s how the king was poisoned, Don Rumata.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 8, page 203.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In USSR Beria was sometimes accused of trying to kill Stalin, including by refusing medical help when Stalin was dying (I don't have a cite, this is stuff I read/heard 20 years ago).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rise to power&lt;/strong&gt; before the coup&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Reba, just like Beria, was a small bureaucrat who rose to power by deposing prior security chiefs (Beria famously was in charge of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%95%D0%B6%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%9D%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B9_%D0%98%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87#.D0.90.D1.80.D0.B5.D1.81.D1.82_.D0.B8_.D1.81.D0.BC.D0.B5.D1.80.D1.82.D1.8C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taking care of his predecessor, Yezhov&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Потом тогдашний первый министр был вдруг арестован и казнен, погибли под пытками несколько одуревших от ужаса, ничего не понимающих сановников, и словно на их трупах вырос исполинским бледным грибом этот цепкий, беспощадный гений посредственности.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon the then-First Minister was suddenly arrested and executed, a number of horror-stricken and bewildered officials died during torture, and this tenacious, ruthless genius of mediocrity grew like a pale fungus on their corpses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 3, page 85.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Amnesty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beria initiated amnesty when he came to power, for ~1.5M people. Mostly for criminals. So did Don Reba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;– Не, – сказал другой монах. – Растлитель – тот Рудах. Его и выпустили еще ночью. Сам отец Кин его расковал и наружу вывел. А я...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Nah,” another monk said. “The child molester—that’s Rudach. He was already released last night. Father Kin unchained him himself and took him out. And I—”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 8, page 196.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Personal characteristics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beria was an infamous womanizer. Don Reba wasn't accused of that (or pedophilia or rape, as Beria was) but he did have a &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt;, rather less-reputable lover, Dona Okana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Писала дона Окана, фрейлина, новая фаворитка дона Рэбы.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The letter was from Doña Ocana, a lady-in-waiting and the new favorite of Don Reba.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Deep authorial intent.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2423/31&quot;&gt;my answer to &lt;em&gt;&quot;Are any of the countries in Hard to Be a God based specifically on particular real-life countries?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Arkanar (especially its transition from &quot;grey stormtroopers&quot; to &quot;black monks&quot;) has close parallels to Nazi Germany; and Rumata explicitly compares Holy Order to &quot;fascist feudalism&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Boris Strugatsky &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hro.org/node/2925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally considered fascism closely parallel to Stalinism&lt;/a&gt;; only with nation hatred replaced with class hatred.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T03:25:59.910" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T03:25:59.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2916" CreationDate="2017-04-04T05:58:38.853" Score="10" ViewCount="897" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing Vronsky loves more than Anna is Frou-Frou his horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the race he rides her too hard, she falls, and her back breaks. He kicks her in a rage trying to get her up and then shoots her when he realises she can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time Anna breaks down and loses all sense of propriety. Later in the coach home she confesses, unrepentantly to Karenin. From here on out her life is on the downhill road to her eventual death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the race symbolistic of what is to come?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="350" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T14:59:38.350" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T15:57:28.973" Title="Is Frou-Frou's death a foreshadowing of Anna's in Anna Karenina?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2416" CreationDate="2017-04-04T08:10:27.693" Score="12" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember, when I was in middle school, reading a series of mystery books.  The titles were of the format 'X and Y', where X was a type of gemstone, and X and Y began with the same letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as more specific details, I'm afraid I don't remember much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only language I've ever been fluent in is English.  I highly suspect the books were originally written in English, but I know for sure they are at least available in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reading level of the series is likely aimed somewhere between 5th and 9th grade reading levels (roughly 11 to 15 years old).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know that there were at least 4 books in the series (likely more).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The entire series takes place on earth (no sci-fi or fantasy components)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are multiple protagonists, including at least one male and at least one female.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the novels included a plot point of ceramic guns, such that they made it through airport security&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another plot point (possibly in the same book, possibly in another) involved a statue (Jade, IIRC), with a tracking device that was one of the eyes of the statue itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I was in middle school in Utah (United States) in the late 1990's / early 2000's.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm 90% sure (though not 100%) that the author (or at least the pseudonym) was female.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1219" LastEditorUserId="1219" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T08:59:10.460" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T10:13:29.940" Title="Mystery book series whose titles are alliterations and involve gemstones" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2017-04-04T08:39:15.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming you were in middle school in the 1980s, this is most likely the novelisation of the TV series &lt;em&gt;Sapphire &amp;amp; Steel&lt;/em&gt; and the sequels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078682/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sapphire &amp;amp; Steel&lt;/a&gt; was a science fiction series that ran on ITV in the UK in the early 1980s.  Two enigmatic characters appear on Earth to try to repair a fault in space-time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sapphire-Steel-Peter-J-Hammond/dp/0352305142&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book of the series&lt;/a&gt; by the scriptwriter P.J.Hammond. This book was followed up by a number of others, written by different people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T08:39:15.873" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-04T09:47:25.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T09:47:25.970" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T09:47:25.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-04T09:47:25.970" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the German language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Germany or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:41:10.333" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:41:10.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="822" CreationDate="2017-04-04T12:10:49.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a good question, since we see from the rest of the story (in the Lord of the Rings) that the Ring &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to come to Bilbo.  We read for instance in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, Gandalf says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now, when its master was awake once more and sending out his dark thought from Mirkwood, it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the&#xA;Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to&#xA;find the Ring, and not by its maker. [...]'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't he put it on right away?  As @Emrakul has pointed out, there was no reason to put it on, but in a broader sense, it should be pointed out that Sauron was still far from being as powerful as he would be, and did not yet know that The Ring had been found.  Therefore, his thought was not yet upon it, and he was not attempting to draw it to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this, as @Emrakul said, this Ring was still kind of just a sort of trinket to him, and though the Ring desired to be found, it itself had a lesser power than it would have.  If you remember from &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, the Ring gained power as soon as it entered Mordor.  Here, hidden underneath a mountain with its Master unaware of its presence, it had a lesser power: not yet enough to make its Bearer desire to put it on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T13:08:26.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2257" CreationDate="2017-04-04T13:17:25.477" Score="6" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading &lt;em&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt; - an allegory for the Christian life written by John Bunyan while in prison for his religious beliefs.  This passage follows directly after Christian's encounter with the cross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then was Christian glad and lightsome, and said, with a merry heart, &quot;He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.&quot; Then he stood still awhile to look and wonder; for it was very surprising to him, that the sight of the cross should thus ease him of his burden. He looked therefore, and looked again, even till the springs that were in his head sent the waters down his cheeks. Now, as he stood looking and weeping, behold three Shining Ones came to him and saluted him with &quot;Peace be unto thee&quot;. So the first said to him, &quot;Thy sins be forgiven thee&quot; [Mark 2:5]; the second stripped him of his rags, and clothed him with change of raiment; the third also set a mark on his forehead, and gave him a roll with a seal upon it, which he bade him look on as he ran, and that he should give it in at the Celestial Gate.  So they went their way [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the roll meant to represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-04T10:07:31.597" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T19:44:18.823" Title="What did the Roll which the Shining Ones delivered to Christian represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;pilgrims-progress&gt;&lt;john-bunyan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-04T15:33:30.840" Score="13" ViewCount="737" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm re-reading &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt; and was struck again by a strange scene whose meaning isn't immediately clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Lyagavy&amp;quot;, Part 3, Book 8, Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;, Mitya rushes to Tchermashnya at the underhanded suggestion of Samsonov, in a desperate attempt to come up with money. Finding Lyagavy drunk, he decides after an unsuccessful effort to speak to him that he needs to stay the night until Lyagavy becomes sober. In the middle of that night, he awakes with a searing headache and realizes that he almost died because of the fire fumes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But his head ached more and more. He sat without moving, and unconsciously dozed off and fell asleep as he sat. He seemed to have slept for two hours or more. He was waked up by his head aching so unbearably that he could have screamed. There was a hammering in his temples, and the top of his head ached. It was a long time before he could wake up fully and understand what had happened to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At last he realized that the room was full of charcoal fumes from the stove, and that he might die of suffocation. And the drunken peasant still lay snoring. The candle guttered and was about to go out. Mitya cried out, and ran staggering across the passage into the forester's room. The forester waked up at once, but hearing that the other room was full of fumes, to Mitya's surprise and annoyance, accepted the fact with strange unconcern, though he did go to see to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But he's dead, he's dead! and ... what am I to do then?” cried Mitya frantically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They threw open the doors, opened a window and the chimney. Mitya brought a pail of water from the passage. First he wetted his own head, then, finding a rag of some sort, dipped it into the water, and put it on Lyagavy's head. The forester still treated the matter contemptuously, and when he opened the window said grumpily:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It'll be all right, now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mitya eventually goes back to sleep, and (as far as I know) the incident goes no further and is never mentioned again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dostoevsky is such a purposeful writer that I have a hard time believing that this is just a throwaway incident. &lt;strong&gt;Is there any special significance, symbolic or otherwise, to this event?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it only meant to exacerbate the extreme mental turmoil Mitya is going through at the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1227" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T11:21:56.597" Title="What is the significance of the &quot;suffocation scene&quot; at Tchermashnya in Brothers Karamazov?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2230" CreationDate="2017-04-04T15:44:13.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, as is usual with user-generated content, Wikipedia has glaring errors here. Here's what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God#Adaptations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page that caused you to ask the question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Without Weapons (Без оружия, Bez oruzhia) also known as A Man from a Distant Star (Человек с далёкой звезды, Chelovek s dalyokoy zvezdy) was a play created by the Strugatsky brothers themselves in 1989. It roughly followed the plot of the book and revealed several previously unknown details. Certain characters were also combined together for the sake of brevity. The play was most likely created as a reaction to the Fleischmann film.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is ALL wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The play's first version (see below) was created (finished) in 1976; and was created not as reaction to 1989 Fleischmann film, but in response to 1966 request by Lyubimov, a famous Taganka theater director.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even a second version, despite being &lt;em&gt;published&lt;/em&gt; in 1989, was actually written in 1980s and had nothing to do with Fleischmann.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's not a big surprise that &lt;strong&gt;&quot;revealed several previously unknown details&quot; is also way wrong&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The play isn't some further elaboration of book canon, the way J.K.Rowling's &lt;em&gt;ahem&lt;/em&gt; later &quot;works&quot; are. It's merely a theatrical play &quot;&lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt;&quot; the book.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The play was not even &quot;non canon&quot; for the book - it wasn't even &quot;canon&quot; for Strugatsky Brothers themselves. They hated it; and refused to include it in published &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; works.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only &quot;details&quot; the play reveals are things that are deliberately different from the book for play purposes (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, you should be aware that there are two separate, very different versions of the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First 1976 &quot;Человек с далёкой звезды (Без оружия)&quot; / &quot;Man from a distant star (without weapons)&quot; version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting tidbit: this was written for the famous Lyubimov's theater, with Rumata to have been played by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Vysotsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vladimir Vysotsky&lt;/a&gt; (for English speakers, imagine a mix of Bob Dylan and Sir Christopher Lee as far as popularity/cultural influence :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version is about 50% shorter; and has a very different backstory (see below)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second version: &quot;Без оружия / Время серых&quot; (&quot;Without Weapons&quot; / &quot;The Time of the Grays&quot;) published in 1989 and more famous.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, let's start with main differences between the second later version, and the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kira gets involved with jealous triangle with Dona Okana&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The attack on Rumata's house happens because Kira blabs to visiting Okana things about Rumata and Budakh that she relays to Don Reba; coupled with the fact that Dona Okana is jealous of Kira.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; В финале гибнут не только Кира и Уно, но и Арата Горбатый и сам Румата  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; In the epilogue, not only Kira and Uno die, but Arata the Humpback and Rumata himself die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Кира гибнет не от арбалетной стрелы, а от метательного ножа.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Kira isn't killed with a crossbow bolt, but with a throwing knife&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Барон Пампа дон Бау в романе — потомственный барон и друг Руматы, а в пьесе — его преемник.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baron Pampa is not Rumata's aristocratic friend; but instead his successor.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Будах в пьесе — колдун, поэт, мистификатор и учёный, в то время как в романе — лишь выдающийся врач.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Budakh is a wizard, poet, mystic and scientist; whereas in the book he's just a doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Румата: Будах? Тот самый? Будах Арканарский?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Кондор: Тот самый знаменитый Будах. Математик и астроном.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Румата: И еще немножко поэт, немножко колдун, немножко  мистификатор,&#xA;  как я понял... почему он окопался в &quot;Серой Радости&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Related to the last two bullets, Dr Budakh in the play actually absorbed a lot of features of the book's Baron Pampa (he's huge, likes to fight and drink).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the book, Marshal Totz lived 300 years before the events (Rumata says so in his musings after meeting Kiun). In the play, Totz is alive and in charge of attacking Arata's peasant mutiny.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Кира в пьесе — дочь трактирщика и сестра Абы.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the play, Kira is daughter of pub owner and sister of Aba&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Дона Окана не гибнет в пьесе. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Dona Okana stays alive in the play&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Дон Сатарина становится доной в пьесе.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Satarina became female Dona Satarina; and I don't think there's any backstory about selling torture collection.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second of all, let's look at the differences between the first original play version and second version (summarized &lt;a href=&quot;http://irukan.livejournal.com/16719.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;~ 50% shorter&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The action happens on Giganda (instead of unnamed planet where book's Arkanar kingdom is on) - the planet which is a setting for a different Noon universe novel, &quot;The Kid from Hell&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The historical period is a later one, with widespread muskets and other fire arms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The prologue / backstory is vastly different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reviewer in linked page likened it - not without cause - to a mix of &quot;Hard to be a God&quot;, &quot;Inhabited Island&quot;, and &quot;A guy from Purgatory&quot;/&quot;The Kid from Hell&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rumata isn't a IEH researcher named Anton sent to the planet on purpose. Instead, he's a cadet of space navigation institute named Maxim, who crashed there accidentally, took on the identity of an aristocratic friend of his called Rumata killed by pirates; and had no idea that Earth had IEH presence on the planet until the very end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Servant boy Uno is actually Kira in disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T17:55:57.587" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:55:57.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-04T17:11:56.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T17:11:56.373" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T17:11:56.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-04T17:11:56.373" Score="0" Body="A literary work which is written to discuss another piece of literature, also known as a literary criticism." OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="350" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T17:40:32.937" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T17:40:32.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2254" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-04T19:08:48.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T19:08:48.927" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T19:08:48.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2255" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-04T19:08:48.927" Score="0" Body="Use with the [strugatsky-brothers] tag for the stage play written by them based on the novel &quot;Hard to be a God&quot;." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T20:48:16.613" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T20:48:16.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-04T20:46:27.207" Score="7" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a book I recall from my childhood, but details are sparse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an upper bound on release, I would have read this ~1990-1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only detail that really stands out is that towards the end, there are a couple children (and possibly the older man / scientist type) in the basement of the house with the time machine, and they're attempting to return to the present, with the restriction that they can't target a specific date, and have to count the (blinks, ticks, seconds, whatever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes all night, and the characters risk falling asleep and overshooting the target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1237" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-04T20:48:56.037" LastActivityDate="2017-04-04T20:48:56.037" Title="Children's Book with Time Machine in the Basement" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2249" CreationDate="2017-04-04T23:11:12.767" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The roll represents &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_%28theology%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;assurance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assurance is a Protestant Christian doctrine that states that the inner witness of the Holy Spirit allows the justified disciple to know that he or she is saved. Based on the writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, assurance was historically a very important doctrine in Lutheranism and Calvinism, and remains a distinguishing doctrine of Wesleyanism and Methodism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia: Assurance (theology)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The story&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to contrast Christian, who gains his assurance immediately after conversion, signified by entering the Wicket Gate (repentance) and arriving at the foot of the Cross (the coming of faith); and Ignorance, who has done neither of these things, but simply hopped over a wall and joined the other Pilgrims on the King's Highway. Christian has assurance, but Ignorance does not, and he does not have an evidence of assurance (i.e. his own Roll).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, Ignorance has what is termed &lt;em&gt;false assurance&lt;/em&gt;. He pretends that he is a Christian, and may indeed believe himself to be a Christian, when in fact he is not, since he has come neither to faith nor repentance. He is a sham, even though he talks like a Christian, and likes to be in the company of Christians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very end of the story, both Christian and Ignorance make it across the River of Death, and to the gates of the Celestial City. However, Christian is admitted, since he has his Roll, whilst Ignorance is not. Ironically, Christian has great difficulty getting across the River, whilst Ignorance gets across easily, and this irony was deliberate on Bunyan's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now while I was gazing upon all these things, I turned my head to look back, and saw Ignorance come up to the river side; but he soon got over, and that without half that difficulty which the other two men met with. For it happened that there was then in that place, one Vain-hope, a ferryman, that with his boat helped him over; so he, as the other I saw, did ascend the hill, to come up to the gate, only he came alone; neither did any man meet him with the least encouragement. When he was come up to the gate, he looked up to the writing that was above, and then began to knock, supposing that entrance should have been quickly administered to him; but he was asked by the men that looked over the top of the gate, Whence came you, and what would you have? He answered, I have eat and drank in the presence of the King, and he has taught in our streets. Then they asked him for his certificate, that they might go in and show it to the King; so he fumbled in his bosom for one, and found none. Then said they, Have you none? But the man answered never a word. So they told the King, but he would not come down to see him, but commanded the two Shining Ones that conducted Christian and Hopeful to the City, to go out and take Ignorance, and bind him hand and foot, and have him away. Then they took him up, and carried him through the air to the door that I saw in the side of the hill, and put him in there. Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction. So I awoke, and behold it was a dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Back to reality (tl:dr)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doctrine of assurance is not exactly controversial, since a Christian definitely needs some measure of assurance to in order to prosper and be useful in his faith, and Paul writes about &lt;em&gt;full assurance&lt;/em&gt; in his letters. Assurance is basically confidence, and without confidence, no one can achieve anything of importance. However, some denominations major on it, whilst others simply acknowledge its desirability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believers may gain assurance immediately upon conversion (as does Christian), whilst others come to assurance slowly, and some not at all. Many believers lose their assurance at some point in their lives (again, like Christian), and may only regain it after a long time and a lot of struggle, and then only partially. A few manage to keep their assurance throughout their lives (I know of at least one such person), and they tend to be the most cheerful of Christians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bunyan, with his little Roll, would, on the face of it, have us believe that one needs assurance to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but this is not so, as Jesus makes quite clear in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 (my apologies for the long quote):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matthew 25: 31-46 (King James Version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the righteous have absolutely no assurance that they will be accepted, when in fact they are welcomed with open arms; whilst the unrighteous, full of false assurance and excuses, are sent away empty-handed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an eminent example of someone who lost their assurance, and then (hopefully) found it again in some measure (King Solomon), read Ecclesiastes: &amp;quot;Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that W. B. Yeats alludes to assurance (or, rather, the absence of it) in The Second Coming:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best lack all conviction, while the worst&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are full of passionate intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the &lt;em&gt;rough beast&lt;/em&gt; may be the outworking of false assurance: the behaviour of those who think that they believe in the divine, when in fact they believe only in themselves. You have only to look at Iraq and Syria to see the rough beast in action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T02:24:35.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2236" CreationDate="2017-04-05T10:58:03.467" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;He might be addressing Frodo more as a generic hobbit than as himself.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is immediately after the following short speech from Frodo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No, Sam!&amp;quot; said Frodo. &amp;quot;Do not kill him even now. For he has not hurt me. And in any case I do not wish him to be slain in this evil mood. He was great once, of a noble kind that we should not dare to raise our hands against. He is fallen, and his cure is beyond us; but I would still spare him, in the hope that he may find it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is Frodo's knowledge of Saruman's nature, his level-headed wisdom in telling the others to spare his life, and his easy, unconscious claiming of the moral high ground that causes Saruman's &amp;quot;wonder and respect and hatred&amp;quot;. But is it &lt;em&gt;Frodo&lt;/em&gt; saying this that surprises Saruman so, or just the fact that &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; hobbit had such wisdom in him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Gandalf, Saruman has never been one to respect small things or see the greatness in them. He was always ambitious, his mind on high affairs, and hobbits were beneath his attention until he found out about the Ring. While Gandalf the wanderer was already a known face in the Shire even before the events of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, let alone &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Saruman remained in his tower at Isengard, too proud to concern himself with lesser beings. Even after he knew a hobbit was the Ring-bearer, I doubt he appreciated the inner strength and resilience of these little people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus we can see why it would be a surprise to him for &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; hobbit to speak such noble and insightful words as Frodo did. He thought of them as insignificant, unworthy of any respect, and suddenly one of them rears up and talks like a lord of men. Saruman, then, stares at this upstart, who must surely have &amp;quot;grown very much&amp;quot; from a Halfling's humble roots to be able to address an Istari so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps significantly, it is precisely Saruman's lack of respect towards those he considers beneath him which causes his death only moments later. Despite all they've been through together, he doesn't respect Wormtongue but kicks him and treats him like a dog. If he'd been kinder to his last loyal companion, or even had enough respect for him to realise that he was capable of &amp;quot;not being able to stand it any more&amp;quot;, he would have lived a longer life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Or he might have other ways of gaining information about people.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already know the power of the Voice of Saruman, the power to cajole and persuade people beyond what their reason tells them. And this Istari has other tricks up his sleeve as well, even in his weakened state. As we saw back in &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But come now,&amp;quot; said the soft voice. &amp;quot;Two at least of you I know by name. Gandalf I know too well to have much hope that he seeks help or counsel here. But you, Théoden Lord of the Mark of Rohan, are declared by your noble devices, and still more by the fair countenance of the House of Eorl. O worthy son of Thengel the Thrice-renowned! Why have you not come before, and as a friend? Much have I desired to see you, mightiest king of western lands, and especially in these latter years, to save you from the unwise and evil counsels that beset you! Is it yet too late? Despite the injuries that have been done to me, in which the men of Rohan, alas! have had some part, still I would save you, and deliver you from the ruin that draws nigh inevitably, if you ride upon this road which you have taken. Indeed I alone can aid you now.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Théoden opened his mouth as if to speak, but he said nothing. He looked up at the face of Saruman with its dark solemn eyes bent down upon him, and then to Gandalf at his side; and he seemed to hesitate. Gandalf made no sign; but stood silent as stone, as one waiting patiently for some call that has not yet come. The Riders stirred at first, murmuring with approval of the words of Saruman; and then they too were silent, as men spell-bound. It seemed to them that Gandalf had never spoken so fair and fittingly to their lord. Rough and proud now seemed all his dealings with Théoden. And over their hearts crept a shadow, the fear of a great danger: the end of the Mark in a darkness to which Gandalf was driving them, while Saruman stood beside a door of escape, holding it half open so that a ray of light came through. There was a heavy silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was Gimli the dwarf who broke in suddenly. &amp;quot;The words of this wizard stand on their heads,&amp;quot; he growled, gripping the handle of his axe. &amp;quot;In the language of Orthanc help means ruin, and saving means slaying, that is plain. But we do not come here to beg.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Peace!&amp;quot; said Saruman, and for a fleeting moment his voice was less suave, and a light flickered in his eyes and was gone. &amp;quot;I do not speak to you yet, Gimli Glóin’s son,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;Far away is your home and small concern of yours are the troubles of this land. But it was not by design of your own that you became embroiled in them, and so I will not blame such part as you have played – a valiant one, I doubt not. But I pray you, allow me first to speak with the King of Rohan, my neighbour, and once my friend.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;, Book III, Chapter 10: &amp;quot;The Voice of Saruman&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious tool Saruman is using here is his Voice, his power of persuasion, in a last-ditch attempt to hypnotise Theoden and the men of the Mark into his thrall. But he also seems to have some power of insight or recognition. &lt;strong&gt;How does he know Gimli's name and origins?&lt;/strong&gt; As far as we know, he's never met the dwarf before, and by the time the Fellowship of the Ring was formed, Saruman's treachery was well known. He must have conduits of information of which we know nothing. Perhaps he used the same sources to learn about Frodo, long before meeting him face to face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What means does he use to spy on people and find out about them before he meets them? Well, it could be some secret Maiar power, some art of divining a person's name and nature from a glance at their face ... or it could be as simple a tool as spies. We know that at least one of his servants - and a trusted one at that - had encountered Frodo back in Bree in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some while ago one of Saruman's most trusted servants (yet a ruffianly fellow, an outlaw driven from Dunland, where many said that he had Orc-blood) had returned from the borders of the Shire, where he had been negotiating for the purpose of &amp;quot;leaf&amp;quot; and other supplies ... He was the squint-eyed southerner at the Inn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Unfinished Tales&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;The Hunt for the Ring&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we know that he, like Sauron, could use birds as his agents to scout for him. Perhaps these spies of his, human or avian, were Saruman's tools for gathering information, so that he always appeared well-informed and knew much about people before he ever set eyes on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Much of this answer was inspired by the excellent answer on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/83983/31394&quot;&gt;another SE site&lt;/a&gt; from Darth Melkor (user8719), although the words and some of the ideas are my own.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T10:58:03.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2268" CreationDate="2017-04-05T18:32:44.660" Score="7" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/nighting.html#VI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; resource on '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_a_Nightingale#Poem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode to a Nightingale&lt;/a&gt;' by Keats says that the word &quot;still&quot; in stanza 6 (&quot;Still wouldst thou sing&quot;) might have more than one meaning. However, I can't see it meaning anything beyond 'You would continue to sing'. Could there really by another viable interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T19:37:47.393" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T15:46:50.213" Title="Alternate meaning of &quot;still&quot; in 'Ode to a Nightingale'" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2017-04-05T18:47:43.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Would you sing if you were dead (still, motionless)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allusion to stillness is reinforced by the above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In such an ecstasy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ode to a Nightingale&lt;/em&gt;, verses 57 and 58 (just above the one the OP mentioned)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T19:45:22.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2017-04-05T19:51:47.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Still&lt;/em&gt; here is also an allusion to death, to being still, to no longer being alive, or moving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Allusion&quot; means to refer to something without mentioning it directly, which is what poets do. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; here has a double meaning (a noted Keats device) of being a synonym for nonetheless, and also a reference to death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems to me, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-05T20:14:17.417" LastActivityDate="2017-04-05T20:14:17.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2305" CreationDate="2017-04-05T22:22:43.907" Score="12" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book some years ago, probably around 2010, though it was definitely older than that. It had a fairly short and simple title, of the kind one might expect to find on a fairy tale: &quot;The Lost World&quot; or &quot;The Princess's Journey&quot; or something in that vein. My copy was hardback, the cover mainly white with a stylised drawing running across both back and front, featuring a few people, one rather prominently on the front, and a landscape with mountains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought it might have been written by Philippa Gregory, but I checked through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippa_Gregory#Bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;her bibliography&lt;/a&gt; and couldn't see it there. The author's surname definitely began with an early letter in the alphabet (A to H) - I remember that from where the book was in my bookcase - and it was probably written by a woman. &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; on further reflection, I think the author may have been called Maria, with a surname starting with G and possibly Gl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't actually remember much of the plot. It was a typical fairy-tale-ish type story: a princess going on a quest? meeting a poor boy in a forest? that kind of thing. The really memorable and distinctive part was that the story was told &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt; in the same book: once in a relatively short and simple way, prefaced by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;this is the story of &lt;em&gt;[title of book]&lt;/em&gt; as I first heard it&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and then again in a longer way with more details included, prefaced by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;this is the story of &lt;em&gt;[title of book]&lt;/em&gt; as it was told to me when I wanted to know more&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. In their essential details, both stories were the same, but there may have been some actual differences between them as well as just extra material in the second retelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the name of this story? I'm sure I'll know it when I see it, but it's still eluding me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T08:36:21.847" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T10:19:39.757" Title="Fairy tale story in two parts: &quot;as I first heard it&quot; and &quot;when I wanted to know more&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="812" CreationDate="2017-04-06T00:00:43.340" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;They probably had at least some contact with those lands.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Dorwinion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dorwinion&lt;/a&gt; is a land adjacent to the Sea of Rhun, at least according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://middle-earth.xenite.org/files/2011/10/pauline-baynes-wilderland-01.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this map&lt;/a&gt; by Pauline Baynes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aorm2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aorm2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Map of the East&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Elves of Mirkwood, at least, drank wine which came from Dorwinion. From &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now come with me,&quot; he said, &quot;and taste the new wine that has just come in. I shall be hard at work tonight clearing the cellars of the empty wood, so let us have a drink first to help the labour.&quot; [...] It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy; but this wine, it would seem, was the heady vintage of the great gardens of Dorwinion, not meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king's feasts only, and for smaller bowls not for the butler's great flagons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dorwinion, or Dor-Winion, is also mentioned as a source of fine wine in &lt;em&gt;The Lay of the Children of Hurin&lt;/em&gt;, line 230:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There baked flesh and bread from his wallet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they had to their hearts’ joy; but their heads were mazed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  by the wine of Dor-Winion that went in their veins,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and they soundly slept on the soft needles&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of the tall pine-trees that towered above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an unpublished essay, which can be found cited in various places on the internet, Tolkien said that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dorwinion] was probably far south down the R. Running, and its Sindarin name a testimony to the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the the cultivation of vines was not known originally to the Nandor or Avari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that Dorwinion was inhabited at least partially by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nandor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nandor&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avari_(Middle-earth)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avari&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps (but not necessarily, given the spread of the Sindarin language) also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Sindar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sindar&lt;/a&gt;. All three of these groups consisted of Elves who did not complete the Great Journey to Valinor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Silvan_Elves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silvan elves&lt;/a&gt; of Mirkwood were descendants of the Nandor, who, despite not having gone all the way to Valinor, were still among those who left Cuiviénen. You say &quot;specifically, the Eldar, not the Avari&quot;, without mentioning any of the other groups of Elves, but I'm guessing that you'll count the Elves of Mirkwood, who dwell much further east than Rhun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we know that at the least, &lt;strong&gt;there was trade between the western Elves and the lands around Rhun&lt;/strong&gt;. Anything more than that will, I think, be a matter of speculation; as far as I can tell, none of Tolkien's writings describe Elven expeditions to the East, but nor do they say that such expeditions never happened. And there's a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of discussion on the internet about this and related issues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/2webj9/regarding_rh%C3%BBns_knowledge_of_dwarves_and_elves/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Regarding Rhûn's knowledge of Dwarves and Elves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rhûn at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rh%C3%BBn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Rh%C3%BBn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tolkien Gateway&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://middle-earth.xenite.org/2011/10/19/was-dorwinion-an-elf-kingdom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Was Dorwinion An Elf Kingdom?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000046&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Where was Dorwinion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that there is so much discussion and speculation indicates that there's no 'canonical' answer, beyond the pieced-together facts about Dorwinion which I've outlined above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Some of this answer is based on the same idea - Dorwinion - as Riker's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/923/17&quot;&gt;now-deleted answer&lt;/a&gt;. But I've provided a lot more evidence, links, and quotes, so I think I can safely say that this answer is my own work.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T00:00:43.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-06T04:38:16.900" Score="5" ViewCount="2813" Body="&lt;p&gt;The video version of Kendrick Lamar's single Humble begins with the following three lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wicked or weakness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You gotta see this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Waaaaay (yeah, yeah!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the version of the song on streaming sites like spotify opens with three different lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nobody pray for me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's been that day for me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Waaaaay (yeah, yeah!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are there two different versions of the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-06T04:57:20.950" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T04:57:20.950" Title="Why is the introduction different for the video and streaming versions of Lamar's Humble?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;kendrick-lamar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2267" CreationDate="2017-04-06T10:06:37.393" Score="18" ViewCount="1520" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a short story I read in High School. We read it in English class so it was likely published in an anthology intended for use in schools. (This was in Scotland in the 1970's if that helps.)&lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;&#xA;The story begins, I think, with a robot being programmed to collect, from a certain planet, an example of every type of fauna  which falls within a certain weight range. (The planet does not have a 'human-niche' type civilization, just wildlife, as it were.) &lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;&#xA;After the robot is programmed and set to work some disaster or other befalls the spaceship carrying the entities who programmed the robot and no-one ever goes back for it. It just stays there, collecting....&lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;&#xA;Skip forward many years and the main human character enters the story. I can't recall how or why he is on the planet, but he is. He can't contact his mothership and somehow we know some of his vital stats, including his weight. He is in the collectable range...... &lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;He discovers this 'storage area' of fauna samples all standing in suspended animation and the robot appears and tries to 'collect' him too.&lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;Our hero flees the scene and outwits and dodges the robot for an extended period, we are in great suspense because we know he is within the specified range for collection.&lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;Eventually the relentless pursuit over many hours, possibly days, wears him down, the way a human can run down an antelope, and the robot catches him. It picks him up with its robotty appendages, turns him round a bit then puts him back down and placidly trundles away. &lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;How has he escaped? He was in target range for collection! Readers are wracked with consternation.&lt;Br&gt;&lt;Br&gt;Our hero finally manages to make contact with his mothership and tells them all about it, when they ask if he is okay he says something like, 'yeah, but I must have lost at least five pounds...' putting him just outside the target range for the trundling collector. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched for this on and off over the years with no success. Would love to know what else, if anything, the author had published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T08:24:10.907" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:57:15.670" Title="Sci-Fi Short Story - Life Saving Weight Loss" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2266" CreationDate="2017-04-06T10:35:23.097" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Typing a few keywords (robot collect animals weight range chase human short story) into google came up with the following story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ruum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Porges&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Porges&lt;/a&gt; published 1953&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synopsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shape-shifting, indestructible robot—a &amp;quot;Type H-9 Ruum&amp;quot;—is accidentally left behind on earth during the age of the dinosaurs by visiting aliens, and not recovered because their ship is destroyed in a battle. The Ruum's work is collecting different species of animals within a 30-mile radius, weighing 160 pounds (give or take 15 pounds) and preserving them in a state of suspended animation for later retrieval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many millions of years later Jim Irwin, a uranium prospector in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, encounters the Ruum's specimens, animals which include modern and prehistoric mammals and a small Stegosaurus. After he has noticed that the animals are all of a uniform size, and alive, the still-functioning Ruum appears. Shooting it with a rifle does not damage it, and when the approaching blob-shaped Ruum reveals gripping hooks and a probe dripping green liquid, Irwin runs as it pursues him at a steady five miles per hour. It is noted that Irwin weighs 149 pounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fit and military-trained, Irwin attempts to evade and destroy the Ruum. First he hides above his trail and drops a boulder on it, but this also fails to damage it. Then he climbs a sheer cliff, but the Ruum extrudes a climbing claw to the ledge where he is hidden. He tries to dislodge it with a stick, and finds the Ruum can generate an electric shock. He shoots it and dislodges it, but the Ruum is unharmed by the fall and responds by growing multiple claws. Having not had any time for food or sleep, Irwin eventually circles back to his camp by a lake and sets a trap with dynamite. Taking advantage of the Ruum's distraction by a grizzly bear, which it kills, he detonates the dynamite using a pistol bullet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dazed by the explosion, he sees the Ruum still unharmed and still approaching. Exhausted and defenseless, he awaits it adding him to its collection. However, it lifts him up, then puts him back down and leaves. Soon afterward, his colleague Walt Leonard arrives by seaplane and rescues him. Safely in the plane, they make plans to bring a helicopter and collect some of the Ruum's specimens in its absence to sell to scientists. Leonard comments on Irwin's haggard appearance, guessing him to have lost 10 pounds during the chase: the reader understands that this caused his weight to become less than the Ruum's weight criterion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there are a few differences it generally matches the storyline given, and was the first hit on google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an illustration from an &lt;a href=&quot;http://mrcampbellrocks.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The-Ruum-by-Arthur-Porges-Full-Text.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;illustrated version&lt;/a&gt;, with 1 other illustration available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kvLgS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Illustration of Ruum&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also thanks to user14111 for commenting a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?74067&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an ISFDB page&lt;/a&gt; with a list of publications this story appeared in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:57:15.670" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2259" CreationDate="2017-04-06T15:46:50.213" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it's true that &quot;still&quot; is polysemous, I have a hard time justifying a reading of &quot;dead&quot; or &quot;motionless&quot; in this context. I could just as easily justify that the bird is making bootleg whiskey. &quot;Still&quot; is clearly describing the manner of the bird's singing, and the bird is not dead. Indeed, the next line is &quot;Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than invoking multiple interpretations, I'd suggest looking at the other definitions as &lt;em&gt;coloring&lt;/em&gt; the word here. The other possibilities exist in your mind as you read the poem, especially when you read it out loud. (Poems should almost always be thought of as spoken, rather than silent. They pack a lot of meaning into a few words, and the sounds and rhythm are part of that.) The line begins &quot;Still&quot; and you have a moment where all of the possible meanings of the word co-exist in your mind, and even after the rest of the line makes the surface meaning clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of death pervades the stanza, and you will feel something different about that word, even in the same definition. A poem is like a painting: it means more than the sum of the brushstrokes, even if there's only one viable interpretation of the subject. The Mona Lisa is always a smiling person; the question is how it makes you feel, and how each brushstroke helps it achieve that feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wouldn't look at this as an actor who might choose to pronounce the word as if it meant &quot;dead&quot;. That is a valid way to approach a text, but in this case I think it would be a disservice to the poem; it would confuse the surface meaning. But you can enjoy the fact that those other meanings lurk there, and ask whether they do or do not affect how you feel about the poem as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point I'm trying to make is that I think the study guide may be pointing you in the wrong direction with the way they've phrased the question. The word does have more than one meaning, and that does matter. But it's not a matter of treating it as a riddle to be decrypted, and where you've somehow missed the joke if you didn't get the hidden meaning. (This is a long-standing grudge with me: I didn't understand this until well after high school. I think it's common with the way nerds approach poetry. I don't know if it was the teacher who failed at that, or me, or if it's simply an unavoidable stage.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd ask you instead to ask about the other ways he could have written that line. What if he'd said &quot;Thou wouldst sing still&quot;; what is gained or lost by the shift in focus on that word? What if he'd said &quot;Yet wouldst thou sing&quot; (and noting that &quot;yet&quot; also has multiple meanings)? I'm not looking for a judgment of better or worse; I don't even really know if Keats gave any consideration to writing it that way. (Though it can be fascinating to see rough drafts.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a question of, &quot;This poem is famous, and many people are moved by it. How does it achieve that, and does this particular element contribute to it?&quot; Your answer can be &quot;no&quot;, in fact, but the consideration is what helps you appreciate why you might want to read poetry. That's the lesson they're supposed to be teaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-04-06T15:46:50.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-07T03:10:11.673" Score="5" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yann Martel got a lot of criticism for his book &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/books/13book.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One reviewer described it as &amp;quot;is every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Much of this criticism stems from his discussions about the Holocaust, and his use of allegory to discuss the Holocaust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, I'm intrigued about the following quote on page 116 where Martel, through his main character who in many ways represents him, gives an explanation about why he &amp;quot;see[s] the Holocaust in everything&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, during the Holocaust--&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, I know about striped shirts and the Holocaust. But Wall Street capitalists also wear striped shirts, for example, as do clowns. Everyone has a striped shirt in their closet.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Perhaps you're right,&amp;quot; Henry said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was irked. Sarah had long ago lost interest in the Holocaust, or at least in his creative involvement with it. And she was wrong. It wasn't that he saw the Holocaust in everything. It's that he saw everything in the Holocaust, not only camp victims, but also capitalists and many others, perhaps even clowns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot to unpack in this passage, but my immediate question is: why does Henry see &amp;quot;everything in the Holocaust&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T11:04:36.613" Title="In Beatrice and Virgil, why does Henry say he sees everything in the Holocaust?" Tags="&lt;yann-martel&gt;&lt;beatrice-and-virgil&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-07T04:56:57.880" Score="6" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an article titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edrants.com/why-yann-martels-beatrice-and-virgil-is-the-worst-book-of-the-decade/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil is the Worst Book of the Decade&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a reviewer complains about the following passage in &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; (located on pages 18-19):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was near a tree, the soil around it soft and bare, and the impact of his foot-stamping was thunderous, certainly to him, and a couple lying nearby turned his way because of it. Henry stood, amazed. The ground had trembled. He had felt the reverberation. The earth itself had heard him, he thought. He looked up at the tree. It was a giant tree, a galleon with its sails in full rig, an art museum with its entire collection on display, a mosque with a thousand worshippers praising God. He gazed at it for several minutes. A tree had never before been so soothing to him. As he admired it, he could feel the anger and distress draining from him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The review describes this passage as overwrought and unnecessary. Specifically, the reviewer seems to feel that this passage could be replaced with a single sentence about Henry stamping his foot, and that the description of the reverberation and the tree is repetitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this passage serve a purpose that the reviewer is overlooking? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T21:19:12.723" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T18:47:26.163" Title="Understanding Yann Martel's description of a tree" Tags="&lt;yann-martel&gt;&lt;beatrice-and-virgil&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2275" CreationDate="2017-04-07T12:44:22.343" Score="5" ViewCount="499" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/parable-old-man-and-young&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Parable of the Old Man and the Young&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, usually attributed to Wilfred Owen although much of it was written by Siegfried Sassoon, is a slight retelling of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac (see Genesis 22) in such a way as to turn it into an allegory of the First World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not counting the chilling last two lines, &lt;strong&gt;how much does this poem differ from the Bible story?&lt;/strong&gt; I've looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this version&lt;/a&gt; of Genesis 22, but of course there are many versions and translations of the Bible which must have various slight differences between them. I'm interested in how much of the wording of the poem was designed to be WWI-specific. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;clearly &quot;took the fire with him, and a knife&quot; is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; specifically part of the war allegory, as almost exactly the same words appear in the Genesis link above;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I suspect that &quot;parapets and trenches&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a war reference, and that all Abraham builds in any version of the Bible story is an altar;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what about, for instance, &quot;belts and straps&quot;? Do they appear in some version of the Bible story, or are they meant to represent the uniforms worn by young conscripted soldiers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of all, I'm interested in &lt;strong&gt;&quot;the Ram of Pride&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. In the Bible story, Abraham sacrifices a ram instead of his son. But does the symbolic identification of this ram with Pride have any Biblical background, or is it an invention of the WWI poets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T21:37:14.943" Title="How much does &quot;The Parable of the Old Man and the Young&quot; differ from the original Bible story?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;wilfred-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2273" CreationDate="2017-04-07T11:27:41.557" Score="5" ViewCount="779" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book in the mid to late nineties that I don't have any clue how to search for. Here are the things that I remember from this book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main character was younger than 18 and he had a vision problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The vision problem was claimed to have been caused by staring at an eclipse but it turned out the older brother sprayed pesticide? in his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The kid played soccer, and was a goalie.  The book had a few different parts where it talked about the soccer games.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He may have recently moved to a new area where he didn't have friends.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was a string of break-ins at houses that were being sprayed for insects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; I believe the older brother and his cronies were behind these&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some of the kids friends family had a Orange Grove, at one point there was a late frost (or maybe early frost) and people scrambled to save as many oranges as they could.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the setting of the book was Florida, but that might just be from the oranges.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At one point, the kid may have been kicked out of school or sent to a troubled kids school.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I can think of any more details, I'll add them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1264" OwnerDisplayName="USER_8675309" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T13:09:20.347" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T15:31:45.730" Title="What is the name of this book about soccer and oranges?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2272" CreationDate="2017-04-07T11:46:36.057" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are thinking of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangerine_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tangerine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; written by Edward Bloor, published in 1997. The Goodreads summary (which I remember as being the blurb on the back of the book) makes it sound like the plot is supernatural:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Tangerine, underground fires burn for years and lightning strikes the same field every day. Strange things happen here -- but nothing is stranger than the secrets Paul discovers about his brother, his new group of friends, and his own dangerous past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVNXBm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dVNXBm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Book cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the summary on Wikipedia makes it clear that the book is entirely a domestic drama of mundane origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before the beginning, when Paul Fisher is in kindergarten. One of Erik's friends calls Paul &quot;Eclipse Boy&quot;. (Erik is Paul's brother) On Paul's first day of kindergarten, he is bullied by 5th graders about him being legally blind. At the beginning of the novel and Erik doesn't defend him letting him get teased.Next, Erik and Paul move houses, with their parents, from Houston, Texas to Lake Windsor Downs in rural Tangerine, Florida. Erik, the older son, looks forward to a football scholarship at the university of his choice. Paul, the younger son, is visually impaired and considered blind, but plays soccer. His family credits his visual injury to a solar eclipse, which he does not remember. Soon after they unpack, Paul goes for a tour of his new school, where characters Mike Costello and his brother Joey are introduced. One day at football practice, Mike Costello is killed by lightning; whereupon Erik and his friend Arthur Bauer tell jokes after hearing the news, even though Mike was one of their teammates. On his first day of school, Paul meets Coach Walski, the coach of the soccer team, and tries out for the team, but is later told that his visual impairment prevents his eligibility, and blames this on his mother's revelation of the impairment to the school administrators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Throughout the story, houses in Paul's neighborhood are fumigated for termites many of the houses are robbed by Erik and his friend Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Paul runs back to his house, where a confrontation with a furious Arthur and Erik causes Paul to finally fully recall the memory he had been repressing—after spray-painting a wall and wrongfully assuming that Paul had turned them in, Erik restrained Paul while Victor Castor (his lackey at the time, mirroring Erik's relationship with Arthur) sprayed paint into Paul's eyes as punishment. Paul confronts his parents about their concealment of the event. His mother cries and they admit to lying about the eclipse, stating that they were only trying to ensure that Paul never hated Erik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Back at the school, Paul and his mother meet with the principal, who informs him that Tino and Victor have been suspended for three weeks for attacking a student. Since Paul attacked a staff member, he is expelled from all public schools in the county. As Paul and his mother leave the school, the kids outside express approval towards him for his actions defending Tino and Victor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want even more matching points, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/tangerine-bloor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schmoop&lt;/a&gt; has a pretty comprehensive summary of the book chapter by chapter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="Sean Duggan" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2017-04-07T15:31:45.730" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T15:31:45.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1054" CreationDate="2017-04-07T16:59:36.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You don't eat in the library.&lt;/em&gt; You'd get the books messy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library here is intended to evoke a university library, where scholars toil away their lives searching for some snippet of information. Libraries have bathrooms, and places for catnaps, but not real sleeping facilities, and certainly not places to eat. You go home for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, why did Borges include that surreal little detail if you're not intended to ask about the other pragmatics of life in the Library? Or rather than engaging in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/RITDpredictions/posts/792214577468502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crit-fic&lt;/a&gt;, what is the effect on the story of that line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that it helps set the tone of the piece. This line is in the opening paragraph, and establishes a certain absurdity right from the get-go. Sleeping standing up does not make this a very inviting place. Jumping to the question of bathrooms before you've established the purpose of the place is simultaneously pragmatic and out of place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's in keeping with the last line of the paragraph: &quot;The light they emit is insufficient, incessant,&quot; a striking contrast. At first they might seem contradictory, but they aren't. That, and the fact that the light comes from &quot;some spherical fruit&quot;, creates a mood that is somewhat off-kilter. The reader is being told &quot;This is not a place of the real world&quot; by the ridiculousness of the practical details we do get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels like a university library, where the author spent a lot of time and which would be very familiar to many readers. The &quot;insufficient, incessant&quot; light must be maddening: the lights are on 24x7, but it's nonetheless often too dim to read comfortably. The &quot;spherical fruit which bear the name of lamps&quot; sounds like the kind of thing a bleary-eyed scholar might come up with: the dim lamps feel like his only nourishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-04-07T16:59:36.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2271" CreationDate="2017-04-07T20:00:42.023" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;How much does this poem differ from the Bible story?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem appears to be mostly consistent with the original Biblical story (starting with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 22:3&lt;/a&gt;, through part of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 22:13&lt;/a&gt;). As to your three bulleted points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;took the fire with him, and a knife&amp;quot; is, indeed, part of the story (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 22:6&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The only thing Abraham built was an altar (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 22:9&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Belts and straps&amp;quot; do have some relevance to the story in the Bible, as Abraham &amp;quot;bound his son Isaac (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 22:9&lt;/a&gt;). (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kimhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Radak&lt;/a&gt; explains in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.9?lang=bi&amp;amp;p2=Radak_on_Genesis.22.9.4&amp;amp;lang2=bi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commentary to that verse&lt;/a&gt; that the binding was Isaac's initiative, to ensure that any last minute struggle would not invalidate the sacrifice.) I was not able to find any commentaries who describe what Abraham bound his son &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;; I assume that belts and straps are only meant to represent uniforms of soldiers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One small difference that I noticed between the poem and the Bible is that Isaac does not say &amp;quot;Behold the preparations, fire and &lt;strong&gt;iron&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; as he does in Owen's poem, but rather &amp;quot;Behold the fire and the wood.&amp;quot; The absence of the knife from Isaac's question has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/34494/5323&quot;&gt;discussed&lt;/a&gt; on our sister site, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mi Yodeya&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference I noted was Owen's use of the name &amp;quot;Abram;&amp;quot; while it is true that Abraham was originally called &amp;quot;Abram,&amp;quot; his name was changed to &amp;quot;Abraham&amp;quot; earlier on (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.17.5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gen. 17:5&lt;/a&gt;), and so it appears in this passage. It's possible that the name &amp;quot;Abram&amp;quot; was used in the poem for the purpose of meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more small difference: the poem implies that the angel said &amp;quot;Behold, / A ram,&amp;quot; and suggested that Abraham offer the ram instead of his son. However, in the Biblical narrative, the angel stops speaking in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verse 12&lt;/a&gt;, and the &amp;quot;Behold, a ram&amp;quot; and decision to use that ram as a replacement sacrifice are ascribed to Abraham (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verse 13&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The &amp;quot;Ram of Pride&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked around a little bit, but I couldn't find any Jewish commentary that links the ram with pride. There are a few questions about the ram on Mi Yodeya (&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/48734/5323&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/29854/5323&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/59843/5323&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;) along with some other questions about the Binding of Isaac that might help you understand the poem better (&lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/q/5518/5323&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; in particular, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/binding-of-isaac&quot;&gt;tag&lt;/a&gt; more generally).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible link that I could think of is the use of the word &amp;quot;קרן&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.22.13?lang=bi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verse 13&lt;/a&gt;; the word literally means &amp;quot;horn,&amp;quot; but can also mean &amp;quot;strength&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pride&amp;quot; (as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Ezekiel.29.21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezekiel 29:21&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.132.17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalms 132:17&lt;/a&gt;). However, I don't think that this is the intended meaning, here -- none of the sources I skimmed mentioned this interpretation, and Even-Shoshan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Concordance_of_the_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;קונקורדנציה החדשה&lt;/a&gt; does not list Gen. 22:13 as one of the verses where קרן carries this meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T21:37:14.943" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2276" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T11:20:35.493" Score="-1" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Days_of_Christmas_(song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Twelve Days of Christmas&lt;/a&gt;, did the recipient receive &lt;strong&gt;a single partridge&lt;/strong&gt; or did they receive &lt;strong&gt;one partridge each day for twelve days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the relevant lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the First day of Christmas my true love sent to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a Partridge in a Pear Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the Second day of Christmas my true love sent to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two Turtle Doves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the Third day of Christmas my true love sent to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Three French Hens,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two Turtle Doves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and a Partridge in a Pear Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T20:46:52.577" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T17:40:26.843" Title="Did the recipient receive twelve partridges or just one?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2116" CreationDate="2017-04-08T12:41:47.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no sufficient reason to regard the lines as symbolic at all. Of course, one can never prove absolutely that they were not intended as symbolic by the original author (supposing there was a single original author). But there is no good reason the think these are any more than whimsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There will always be the whimsically challenged commentator who can dream up symbolism out of gossamer and moonbeams. (For an example of a whimsically challenged question, and answers, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/156596/does-hobbes-ever-do-anything-that-calvin-himself-could-not-do&quot;&gt;Does Hobbes ever do anything that Calvin himself could not do?&lt;/a&gt; of SFF SE.) But being whimsical themselves, if unintentionally so, they are impossible to refute logically. Unless they meet some reasonable standard of demonstration, which much at least include evidence of parallel use of the same symbols in other works (or how is any reader to have recognized these purported symbols?), the refutation is simple denial, which can just as easily be made in blanket form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any older text is going to present images that would not occur to us to use in the same context today. This tempts us to ask why the image was used. And this will always tempt some to a symbolic interpretation, because, they will reason, if they don't have a sensible plain meaning, clearly they must have been meant symbolically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not necessary at all. There is a long tradition of whimsy and nonsense in popular song. It is a form that should be recognized and respected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also, alas, a long tradition of trying to find symbolism in nonsense, something Lewis Carroll satirized in Humpty Dumpty's explanation of Jabberwocky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are ancient works that are clearly symbolic in their intent, but there is a gallon of pure whimsy for every dram of symbolism.  Our judgement should always be whimsy until proven symbolic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, to put it another way, Occam's razor applies to literary interpretation as much as to scientific interpretation, and the simplest explanation that fits the available facts in this case is whimsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:30:31.550" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:30:31.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2278" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T13:05:50.280" Score="5" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional nursery rhyme/riddle &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_was_going_to_St_Ives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As I was Going to St. Ives&lt;/a&gt;&quot; appears to have a simple answer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;How many were there going to St. Ives?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Just the traveller.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But is this what the author originally intended?&lt;/strong&gt; Surely he could have met the man, the wives and the menagerie &lt;em&gt;traveling in the same direction&lt;/em&gt;, not least because a single unencumbered man/woman could undoubtedly move faster than a family and several thousand cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T21:05:31.877" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T23:42:14.820" Title="How many were going to St. Ives?" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T13:18:18.033" Score="6" ViewCount="2386" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_was_going_to_St_Ives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia &lt;/a&gt;indicates that the classic riddle &quot;As I was Going to St Ives&quot; was written at some point in the 1700s or 1800s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I was going to St Ives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I met a man with seven wives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bigamy, however has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigamy_Act_1603&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;illegal in the UK since at least the 1600s&lt;/a&gt; and prior to that, a breach of ecclesiastical law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this man's bigamy not noted upon by the author? Is there any indication why (or how) he even had seven wives in the first place?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;As I was going to St Ives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I met a man with seven wives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He was promptly arrested&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For a breach of the Bigamy Act 1603&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And subsequently executed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T21:04:55.413" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T09:07:03.477" Title="How did the man going from/coming to St Ives have seven wives?" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2278" CreationDate="2017-04-08T13:27:43.393" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2278/how-many-were-going-to-st-ives/2280#comment4390_2278&quot;&gt;Rand al'Thor makes the valid comment&lt;/a&gt; that as with many nursery rhymes &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;it doesn't have an author&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest known published version of it comes from a manuscript dated to around 1730 , though as it was a nursery rhyme it was probably in use orally beforehand. The modern form was first printed around 1825.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask about earlier versions being clearer in the comments, but the only difference in the earliest known version is it says nine instead of seven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The riddle doesn't have a definite answer, though 1 is the general accepted answer. While the answer &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be 7+49+343+2401+16807+1 which is 19608, remember this is a &lt;em&gt;children's&lt;/em&gt; nursery rhyme, and the purpose of it wouldn't be to make little children do ridiculously long sums, so the intended answer is likely to be 1. The riddle would have been designed to surprise people with the simple answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem may have been developed to help the lateral thinking and problem solving skills of the children, to make them think which way the people were travelling. The words in nursery rhymes are usually included to make the poem humorous, or just to make it rhyme, usually both reasons are present. They need to be simple and words children would know or will know in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nursery rhymes also often create nice visual images for the reader, and woman, sacks, cats and kittens would be easy to visualise for the child. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;All info from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_was_going_to_St_Ives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T18:26:34.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2017-04-08T13:47:03.980" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because the poem was never intended to be realistic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a simple nursery rhyme, designed to amuse children and to have an unexpected answer. It's not a complex piece of literature with much thought put into worldbuilding, consistency, and realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, so why do &quot;wives&quot; appear in the poem at all? Wouldn't it have worked equally well with, say, a man accompanied by seven &lt;em&gt;servants&lt;/em&gt;, each carrying seven sacks, and so on? Well, not quite as well. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Wives&quot; is a nice simple word&lt;/strong&gt; - again, remember that the song is meant for children - and it also &lt;strong&gt;rhymes with St. Ives&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;Servants&quot; is a longer word, with more syllables (thus wouldn't scan as well), and I can't think of any place names that rhyme with it. For a child learning this rhyme, it's easy to imagine a man, women, sacks, cats, and kittens - why complicate it by saying they were his servants or his mistresses or his aunties or anything less familiar to a child than wives?&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Alternatively, going with the lateral-thinking theme of this riddle, it never says they were all &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; wives. Perhaps he was walking together with seven wives, his own and those of six other men!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T13:47:03.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2017-04-08T17:03:15.633" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when the rhyme was first created &lt;em&gt;wife&lt;/em&gt; also commonly meant &lt;em&gt;woman&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A woman considered without reference to marital status, and related senses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &quot;wife, n.&quot; OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2017. Web. 8 April 2017. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/228941?redirectedFrom=wife#eid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED says that that meaning is still in use in Scotland. This meaning survives in &quot;standard&quot; English in words like &lt;em&gt;housewife&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;midwife&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a man with seven (or nine) wives was a man accompanied by that many women. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could be maids or other servants, or relatives, or just women travelling with him. No need to worry about bigamy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1272" LastEditorUserId="1272" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T12:58:59.460" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T12:58:59.460" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-08T20:20:35.430" Score="7" ViewCount="3584" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Fall of the House of Usher&lt;/em&gt;, Edgar Allen Poe has several spots where he talks about the gloomy, cloudy, atmosphere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I looked at the house, it seemed to me that it was being wrapped in a strange vaporous cloud. A mystic fog seemed to rise from the decaying trees and nearby swamp until it covered the gray stone walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A furious gust of wind entered and nearly lifted us from our feet. It was a tempestuous yet strangely beautiful night. Clouds hung thickly about the turreted roof of the house. The wind blew in violent gusts, pausing now and again. The clouds were tossed about, coming together and then being blown apart before our eyes. The lowest surfaces of the moving clouds and the tree trunks all about the house were bathed in an eerie glow. Yet no moon shone; no stars twinkled; no lightning flashed. What then was this strange, unnatural light that seemed to be circling about the old mansion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this all about? Is there a reason for this crazy weather, or is it just to enhance the creepy feeling of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T17:43:18.257" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T17:43:18.257" Title="Why is there a focus on the atmosphere in The Fall of the House of Usher?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2276" CreationDate="2017-04-08T20:35:00.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;PNC Wealth Management, a US bank, calculates both the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Price_Index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christmas Price Index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;True Cost of Christmas&lt;/em&gt; each year, based on this song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is based on the &quot;shopping basket&quot; on the twelfth day, containing everything from a single partridge in a pear tree up to twelve drumming drummers. The latter is based on the total cost of &quot;the complete set of 364 items&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is at least one important interpretation of the song where the gifts each day are cumulative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2017-04-08T20:42:00.193" LastActivityDate="2017-04-08T20:42:00.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2863" CreationDate="2017-04-08T22:57:06.760" Score="7" ViewCount="296" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Seed-Merchant's Son&quot; is a poem by Agnes Grozier Herbertson, often included in collections of WWI poetry. It doesn't go into the details of the war, like some other WWI poems; in fact, the war is only mentioned once in the poem, which mainly focuses on the father's reaction to his son's death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Seed-Merchant has lost his son,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His dear, his loved, his only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Seed-Merchant goes on his way:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I saw him out on his land today;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, never a soul could understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why he looked at the earth, and the seed in his hand,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he had never before seen seed or sod:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I heard him murmur: ‘Thank God, thank God!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem ends on this somewhat ambiguous note, which I'm not sure how to interpret. Perhaps it's dangerous even to try, when the poem itself says &quot;never a soul could understand&quot;, but warnings like that shouldn't always be taken literally, so let's pose the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did the Seed-Merchant thank God?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's definitely a significant part of the poem, being literally the final line, and it must say something about the Seed-Merchant's reaction to his son's death, though I'm not sure exactly what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T05:12:36.373" Title="Why did the Seed-Merchant thank God?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T05:51:13.117" Score="7" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Yann Martel's &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt;, there is a bizarre scene where Henry's dog, Erasmus, gets rabies and attacks Henry's cat, Mendelssohn. Because of this, both characters need to be killed: Mendelssohn because of the injury sustained in the attack and Erasmus because he has rabies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's bizarre about the scene is that although the vet claims the dog had rabies, there is virtually no logical explanation for how the dog could have gotten rabies. From page 161:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How their dog, who was supposed to have been vaccinated, caught &lt;em&gt;rabies&lt;/em&gt;, which turned out to be the diagnosis, was a question that neither the vet nor the shelter were they had got him could answer. There are all kinds of wild animals in big cities that have rabies, he was told. Worse even: the plague. But proper sanitary conditions prevent the spread of these diseases and they don't normally jump to pets. Perhaps the vaccine had failed. Henry wondered if Erasmus could have contracted rabies at the taxidermist's store. The notion was ridiculous; nonetheless, it trotted in his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The even stranger thing is that the death of Erasmus and Mendelssohn, although clearly important to Henry, is not mentioned once later in the book. The mystery is never resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions about the scene. First, on a practical note, is there ever a conclusive explanation for why Erasmus gets rabies? (It's very possible that the explanation is intentionally mysterious). Second, what is the meaning of this scene, and how does it contribute to the message of the rest of the book? I expect answers to answer both questions, in large part because they are interrelated; you can't answer one without considering the other. In other words, if your answer is just that this scene represents an improbable event, you also have to explain why this improbable event is such an important scene in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T05:58:04.403" LastActivityDate="2017-10-01T10:51:42.627" Title="In Beatrice and Virgil, why does Erasmus kill Mendelssohn?" Tags="&lt;yann-martel&gt;&lt;beatrice-and-virgil&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2289" CreationDate="2017-04-09T07:45:48.673" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the January 2004 issue of &lt;em&gt;The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, they ran a story called &quot;Nimitseahpah&quot;. In this story, there is a 'darkness' at the bottom of a mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then that thing that all miners dread came to pass. Something big went wrong, and almost all of the 150 men in the tunnels that day were killed. The details of the disaster were sketchy, Jesse said. Whatever happened was so unusual that the whole incident lay cocooned in legend and rumor. The survivors (there were very few) spoke of things no sane person believed. The mine had come to life. Or the miners had pierced the darkness, and it had devoured them in retribution. All the machinery stopped at once - the air compressors, the big water pump, the man skips - and could not be restarted. Men were sucked bodily into the void, seven thousand feet down. Rescue parties disappeared. Not a single body was ever recovered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Page 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Something as cold as a January night seemed to be dragging me through the sand toward the main shaft of the Pahpocket. I stretched out my arms, grabbing... ...It felt exactly as if the ground around the shaft had tilted and risen upward like the sides of a funnel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Page 22&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's obviously something down there; that's the whole point of the story. However, &lt;strong&gt;is this at the bottom of every mine if you dig deep enough or only at the Pahpocket?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T10:20:42.710" Title="Is there 'darkness' at the bottom of every mine if you go deep enough?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nancy-etchemendy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2288" CreationDate="2017-04-09T10:20:42.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was, as well, the deepest in history as far as anyone knew, and there should have been many who knew, for the entire state was aswarm with mining experts in those days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/nimitseahpah/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First tier of the first part&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, I don't have access to a paper version of the novel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's in every mine at a given depth, nobody witnessed it elsewhere empirically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Nev's experience tells us otherwise (as the word &lt;em&gt;Darkness&lt;/em&gt; is so central in the short story, I don't believe it could be accidental):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The place where the light meets the darkness. The balance. It feels like . . . like the afternoon before a storm. A hum. Inside you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nev speaking, &lt;em&gt;Part 6&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unclear whether it's the perception of darkness that Nev interiorates, or darkness itself, but I don't think that Nev was contaminated in some way: his perception of Darkness, in my view, comes from his Paiute education. Darkness exists everywhere, but was bursted at its heart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fact that Nev had been raised by a Paiute explained a lot about his behavior, and also about the way the other children treated him. [...] They said his Indian mother had taught him black magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Part 4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;had pierced the heart of darkness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;OP's quote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: it's not darkness the miners pierced, it's the heart of darkness. I don't believe anything separates the mine from others, except it went deeper than most, exposing darkness too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastActivityDate="2017-04-09T10:20:42.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T10:43:24.393" Score="9" ViewCount="7437" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/54364&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Jumblies&lt;/a&gt;' by Edward Lear, the protagonists go to sea in a sieve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     In a Sieve they went to sea:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In spite of all their friends could say,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     In a Sieve they went to sea!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And when the Sieve turned round and round,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every one cried, ‘You’ll all be drowned!’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They called aloud, ‘Our Sieve ain’t big,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        Far and few, far and few,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;           Are the lands where the Jumblies live;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;           And they went to sea in a Sieve.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why a sieve?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-09T15:31:19.730" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T09:58:32.080" Title="Why did &quot;they&quot; go to sea in a sieve?" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-09T22:34:13.983" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Cormac McCarthy's &lt;em&gt;The Orchard Keeper&lt;/em&gt;, the eponymous old man is visited by the cops. They do not get a warm welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did they go there at all, and why was the old man so hostile to them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might have just missed the fact that it was spelled out in the book, but if not, there are three possible reasons I can see for the cops to want to question him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They might have found the moonshine hidden on his property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They might have found the body hidden on his property&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They might have discovered that the government &quot;tank&quot; on his property was shot up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is perhaps most likely, because we know the police were investigating the moonshine case after they found a lot of liquor in the car in the creek. If that's the case, though, I don't understand the old man's hostility, &lt;em&gt;unless&lt;/em&gt; he himself believed they were there for one of the other two reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could've been the second reason (we already know some kids had found the body before the old man did), but if I recall correctly the body disappeared at some point before the cops came (although I don't think I understand who moved it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were the third reason, which I guess is also likely, why did he respond with such hostility? Surely his crime, in this case, wasn't too egregious? What was the &quot;tank&quot;, exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T02:31:49.110" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T02:31:49.110" Title="Why did the police go to The Orchard Keeper?" Tags="&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9516" CreationDate="2017-04-09T22:54:11.197" Score="5" ViewCount="8209" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is Llewelyn Moss tracked by Chigurh and the Mexicans in &lt;em&gt;No Country for Old Men&lt;/em&gt;? I'm asking several clarifying questions here, but I'm really just wondering what I missed about the tracking device(s) (were there more than one?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Llewelyn made a dumb decision when returning to give water to the surviving cartel member in the beginning of the story, and he knows that. But why, after he finds the tracker in the satchel, does he stay in the hotel overnight even though he knows his pursuer knows where he is? (In the film, Chigurh arrives right after Llewelyn finds the tracking device, so no issue there, but in the book he goes back to bed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do the Mexicans find Llewelyn at the motel first? Do they also have a tracker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how does Chigurh track Llewelyn and the girl at the end? Wells did say that Chigurh had other ways to find him, but what was he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="201" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T12:38:37.317" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T12:38:37.317" Title="How did they track Llewelyn Moss in &quot;No Country for Old Men&quot;?" Tags="&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;no-country-for-old-men&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2308" CreationDate="2017-04-10T02:12:51.607" Score="12" ViewCount="980" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ishmael and other characters repeated refer to Queequeg as a cannibal, which in modern parlance means that he consumes human flesh. However, the novel doesn't ever say that outright, rather, Ishmael just seems to use the word to indicate that Queequeg was just non-native from a distant land that practices a bizarre religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any indication that Queequeg was a cannibal in the modern sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T13:52:47.003" Title="Is calling Queequeg a &quot;cannibal&quot; meant to imply he literally consumed human flesh?" Tags="&lt;herman-melville&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-10T02:35:35.890" Score="1" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the January 2004 issue of &lt;em&gt;The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, they ran a story called &quot;Nimitseahpah&quot;, by Nancy Etchemendy. 'Nimitseahpah' is the name of the Paiute statue that's part of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It has a powerful name. Nimitseahpah. The Paiutes never say it aloud. They only whisper it, same as the old miners,&quot; I heard Nev say.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Page 17&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But where is this name from? Is it a real name from somewhere, or did Nancy just make it up? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T23:02:50.213" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T23:02:50.213" Title="Where did the name Nimitseahpah come from?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;nancy-etchemendy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-10T05:24:34.090" Score="12" ViewCount="1442" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive novels, the chapters are grouped into parts, the titles of the parts combining to form a &lt;em&gt;ketek&lt;/em&gt;. For example, in the first book, &lt;em&gt;The Way of Kings&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Above Silence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Illuminating Storms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dying&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Storm's Illumination&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silence Above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Above silence, the illuminating storms &amp;mdash; dying storms &amp;mdash; illuminate the silence above.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;ketek&lt;/em&gt; is described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=OHclhBVv-X4C&amp;amp;pg=PA1003&amp;amp;lpg=PA1003&amp;amp;dq=ketek%20poem&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=9NPUHCzC-C&amp;amp;sig=6AybcCqOlqoFu5obk4TlCUWhlFA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiu74POkJnTAhUBJZQKHeLwA7IQ6AEIVTAM#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ketek%20poem&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the endnote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above sample is noteworthy as it is a ketek, a complex form of&#xA;  holy Vorin poem. The ketek not only reads the same forward and&#xA;  backward (allowing for alteration of verb forms) but is also divisible&#xA;  into five distinct smaller sections, each of which makes a complete&#xA;  thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The complete poem must form a sentence that is grammatically correct&#xA;  and (theoretically) poignant in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;em&gt;keteks&lt;/em&gt; (the form: palindrome [allowing for conjugation, etc.], &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; [≥2] thoughts) based on some real-life form of poetry, or are they purely fictional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T21:45:48.090" LastActivityDate="2020-02-05T14:29:15.710" Title="Are keteks based on some form of real-life poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;stormlight-archive&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2279" CreationDate="2017-04-10T09:07:03.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't say that they are his wives. &#xA;Just that he is with them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With can mean either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&#xA;accompanied by (another person or thing).&#xA;&quot;a nice steak with a bottle of red wine&quot;&#xA;synonyms:   accompanied by, in the company of, escorted by&#xA;&quot;she's gone out with her boyfriend&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&#xA;having or possessing (something).&#xA;&quot;a flower-sprigged blouse with a white collar&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in this case, he is merely accompanied by them, and not having or possessing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1297" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T09:07:03.477" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2290" CreationDate="2017-04-10T13:10:40.557" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is likely that at root the reference goes back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ukFh4weMIUAC&amp;amp;pg=PA238&amp;amp;lpg=PA238&amp;amp;dq=he%27s+grown+so+old+and+sordid,+he%27d+put+to+sea+upon+a+sieve+for+money.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mrVINl6z18&amp;amp;sig=dCbVh9ODZdDtgwuXMTSWwybwEFE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjay4nJ_JzTAhXCQyYKHVwQAT0Q6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=he&amp;#39;s%20grown%20so%20old%20and%20sordid%2C%20he&amp;#39;d%20put%20to%20sea%20upon%20a%20sieve%20for%20money.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plays of Aristophanes&lt;/a&gt; where it is said of Simonedes that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he's grown so old and sordid, he'd put to sea upon a sieve for money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the suggestion is that the love of profit has overtaken sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A much fuller answer can be found on the &lt;em&gt;English Language and Usage Stack&lt;/em&gt; in the question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/368690/what-does-it-mean-by-put-to-sea-upon-a-sieve-for-money&quot;&gt;What does it mean by “put to sea upon a sieve for money”?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edward Lear wrote many of what he called 'non-senses', so it may be futile to expect to extract precise meaning. However,  when Lear was a child his family suffered severe 'financial reverses' and he later claimed his father had spent time in Debtors prison, though this is not substantiated. This makes it possible to speculate that the theme of financial folly loomed large for him and may have contributed to his selection of the 'sailing in a sieve' theme. Likewise, 'pinky papers' in the second verse may be a reference to the Financial Times and its distinctively coloured pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:38:46.387" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T20:06:29.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2300" CreationDate="2017-04-10T16:26:26.297" Score="12" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a YA novel that I read sometime between 1977 and 1980 from our public library (after I started reading &quot;big books&quot; in second grade, but before we moved from that town).  Two notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;We lived in a small town in Iowa (USA) with an underfunded library that had a lot of older books, so I strongly suspect that this novel may have been written any time from the late 40's on. This library had many books which had been written in the 1920's and 1930's.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although I was definitely under age 10 when I read it, it was more-than-likely written for YA, since that's where I gravitated to in the library at the time (unlike the school librarian, whom I referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/156930/28471&quot;&gt;in this post&lt;/a&gt;, our public librarian was very much an enabler for me in this pursuit - giving a shout-out to Mrs. Brown!).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Story Description&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plot points that I remember include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A boy (early-to-mid teens) was in a small plane with either his father (a businessman) or his father's pilot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The plane crashed in a mountain wilderness; pilot was killed, boy survived.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Boy was rescued and nursed back to health by an old man.  (&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; I seem to remember that the old man had been part of the Klondike gold rush in the 1890's, but I'm not certain).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By the time the boy was healthy enough, it was too late in the year to hike out before winter, so plans were made for the boy to winter with the old man and hike out in the spring.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Boy learned how to survive a mountain winter from the old man.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Old man died during the winter, boy survived alone until spring.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the spring, boy was found by a search plane.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1300" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:43:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T18:26:10.370" Title="YA Adventure/Survival Novel, Written Late 1940's Through Late 1970's" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2298" CreationDate="2017-04-10T16:39:33.290" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, I found a book which is reasonably similar, however it was published in 1983 and doesn't include an old man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hatchet&lt;/a&gt; by Gary Paulsen. Here is the plot summary from Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian Robeson is a thirteen-year-old son of divorced parents. As he travels from Hampton, New York on a Cessna 406 bush plane to visit his father in the oil fields in Northern Canada for the summer, the pilot suffers a massive heart attack and dies. Brian tries to land the plane, but ends up crash-landing into a lake in the forest. He must learn to survive on his own with nothing but his hatchet—a gift his mother gave him shortly before his plane departed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the summer, Brian learns how to survive in the vast wilderness with only his hatchet. He discovers how to make fire with the hatchet and eats whatever food he can find, such as rabbits, birds, turtle eggs, fish, berries, and fruit. He deals with various threats of nature, including mosquitos, quail, a porcupine, bear, skunk, moose, wolves, and even a tornado. Over time, Brian develops his survival skills and becomes a fine woodsman. He crafts a bow, arrows, and a fishing spear to aid in his hunting. He also fashions a shelter out of the underside of a rock overhang. During his time alone, Brian struggles with memories of home and the bittersweet memory of his mother, whom Brian had caught cheating on his father prior to their divorce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a sudden tornado hits the area, it draws the tail of the plane toward the shore of the lake. This triggered his thoughts that there may be a survival pack of some sorts on the plane. Brian makes a raft from a few broken off tree tops to get to the plane. When Brian is cutting his way into the tail of the plane, he drops his hatchet in the lake and dives in to get it. Once inside the plane, Brian finds a survival pack that includes additional food, an emergency transmitter, and a .22 rifle. Back on shore, Brian activates the transmitter, but not knowing how to use it, he thinks it is broken and throws it aside. However, his distress call is heard by a passing airplane, and he is rescued. Brian spends the remainder of the summer with his father but does not disclose his mother's affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be it? It seems to be a reasonably famous book (Cover says over 2 million copies sold) so it might be something your library had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T16:39:33.290" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2298" CreationDate="2017-04-10T18:01:10.733" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53961.Canyon_Winter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canyon Winter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Walt Morey, originally published in 1972.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The private plane taking Peter to his wealthy father's ranch crashes in the Rockies, and its pilot is killed. Struggling to survive, and sure that no one will rescue him, Peter stumbles across rough and unforgiving Omar Pickett, who has lived in the mountains for years. Peter must rely on Omar--and learn to rely on himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librarything.com/list/561/all/Survival-plane-crash-childrens%25252Fyoung-adult-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt; of YA adventure stories about plane crash survival, immediately above another fondly-remembered book, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librarything.com/work/754667&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danny Dunn on a Desert Island&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Jay Williams.  Key words used for the Google search were: &lt;code&gt;ya wilderness survival stories published before 1980&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I grabbed a copy from Amazon and it was definitely &lt;em&gt;Canyon Winter&lt;/em&gt;.  Interestingly, I totally forgot about the stuff that happened &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; Peter was rescued.  That must not have interested me the last time I read it, when I was 9 or 10.  I think this must also have been the book that started my life-long love of sourdough, which I know started before I was 15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1300" LastEditorUserId="1300" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T18:26:10.370" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T18:26:10.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-10T18:54:52.397" Score="8" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sandman: Overture&lt;/em&gt; #5, Morpheus speaks with Night while paying a &quot;social visit&quot;. There, Night claims Morpheus and Desire are very much alike:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/od3i0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/od3i0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Desire and I... we had disagreements.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, you two are too similar.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We are nothing at all alike. Desire is manipulative, it is selfish and single-minded. It cares nothing for its responsibilities. It is the opposite of me in every way.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for the full resolution &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to agree with Morpheus on this one. It is true that he acted dumbly by dooming Nada to Hell; he has other quirks as well, like always demanding to have things his way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I wouldn't say he and Desire are alike. For one thing, Morpheus takes his responsibilities &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; seriously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made Night say Morpheus and Desire are alike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T17:29:52.230" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:53:06.443" Title="Why does Night say Desire and Morpheus are alike?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2295" CreationDate="2017-04-10T20:17:41.037" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/poetic-asides/personal-updates/poetic-form-palindrome-poetry-or-mirror-poem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palindrome poems&lt;/a&gt; have been around for a while. They're sometimes called &quot;mirror poetry&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar form is the &lt;a href=&quot;http://poets.spice.org.hk/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=category&amp;amp;id=6&amp;amp;Itemid=7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reverse poem&lt;/a&gt;, where the poem takes on an opposite meaning when read backwards. Those are usually on a line-by-line rather than word-by-word basis, which means you don't have to play as many games about &quot;verb forms&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specification of &quot;five distinct smaller sections, each of which makes a complete thought&quot; is not specifically familiar, though it's not really well exemplified here. The five sections in the example are pretty incomplete as thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Structurally, it sounds similar to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/features/august-writing-challenge-1-book-shelf-poem/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bookshelf poem&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make this poem entirely out of book titles. You can use more than one&#xA;  in a line if you want, and add or take away punctuation to make it&#xA;  flow, but you can’t chop them up or miss out words! The title can be&#xA;  anything you want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That link dates from 2012; and the novels you mention date to 2010. I believe that bookshelf poetry dates back further than that, and it doesn't appear to be original to that contest, but I don't have evidence of older instances.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know of an older example with chapter titles. Isaac Asimov's 1972 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gods Themselves&lt;/a&gt; is divided into three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Against Stupidity&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Gods Themselves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Contend in Vain  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, they are a line from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schiller&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friederich Schiller&lt;/a&gt;'s verse poem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maid_of_Orleans_%28play%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Jungfrau von Orleans&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-04-10T21:20:09.960" LastActivityDate="2017-04-10T21:20:09.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2457" CreationDate="2017-04-11T02:59:28.547" Score="13" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne Frank writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a throng of admirers who can't keep their adoring eyes off me&#xA;and who sometimes have to resort to using a broken mirror to try and&#xA;catch a glimpse of me in the classroom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a real event, or was Anne Frank exaggerating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: I don't have the exact page number[/not sure how I infer from Kindle], but the date in the diary is &amp;quot;Saturday, 20 June 1942&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T00:16:03.740" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T00:16:03.740" Title="Why does Anne Frank have so many admirers at school?" Tags="&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;&lt;the-diary-of-a-young-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T08:21:58.813" Score="12" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: MASSIVE spoilers ahead. If you haven't read the last Harry Potter book, but plan to do so, turn back now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the entire Harry Potter series, there was one character who was the comic 'bad guy' - designed to be disliked. This of course is Snape. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think that he is a Death Eater, working for Voldemort, with a personal disliking of Harry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the final book in chapter 33 'The Prince's (Snape's) Tale', that all changes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our entire view of Snape changes, and we learn he isn't who we thought he was. He &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; working against Dumbledore and for Voldemort, but actually the other way round:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hide them all, then,&quot; he croaked. &quot;Keep her—them—safe. Please.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And what will you give me in return, Severus?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;In—in return?&quot; Snape gaped at Dumbledore, and Harry expected him to protest, but after a long moment he said, &quot;Anything.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Snape raised his eyebrows and his tone was sardonic as he asked,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Are you intending to let him kill you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [Dumbledore]: &quot;Certainly not. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; must kill me.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Severus Snape wasn’t yours,&quot; said Harry. &quot;Snape was Dumbledore’s, Dumbledore’s from the moment you started hunting down my mother.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn all this when Harry sees the memories he gave him just before he died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is possibly the biggest twist in the entire Harry Potter series. It shocked many, and seems completely unexpected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But maybe it &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; have been so unexpected...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was there any evidence prior to the revelation that Snape is actually a 'double-agent' and not who we thought he was?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T08:46:53.967" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T03:46:33.100" Title="Is there any evidence that this character in Harry Potter was a double agent all along, prior to the revelation?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2263" CreationDate="2017-04-11T10:10:56.027" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Land Beyond&lt;/em&gt; by Maria Gripe.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was thinking about this book again, and went into a sort of meditative state, seeing the book's cover in my mind's eye and trying to recall the title. It wasn't quite &quot;The Lost World&quot; ... but maybe something similar? Eventually the phrase &quot;The Land Beyond&quot; floated into my mind, and I thought why not give it a try. The name &quot;Maria Gripe&quot; also floated into my mind around the same time, but I thought Gripe sounded like an odd name, and just Googled &lt;code&gt;&quot;The Land Beyond&quot; Maria&lt;/code&gt;. Voila!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74420.The_Land_Beyond&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Land Beyond is the same story, told twice. The first is a simplistic version, written in (or translated into) the nonsensical style of a 19th century fairy tale, complete with symbolism and allegory. An explorer walks into a kingdom and tells the king he’s found a land that does not appear on any map. Other characters try to find it. The second story retells the first, and expands it, which allows all of the unnamed characters to have long, dull conversations about life. There is even more symbolism, allegory and political satire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a slightly longer review &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/maria-gripe-4/the-land-beyond-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. This is the cover I remembered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7wQw.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x7wQw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T10:19:39.757" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T10:19:39.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2304" CreationDate="2017-04-11T11:17:45.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One piece of evidence (I'm sure that there's more):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an early Quidditch match, Harry's broom starts trying to buck him off. Hermione sees that Snape is mouthing an incantation so sneaks over to try and put him off by setting fire to his robe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It transpires that Quirrell is performing the incantation and Snape is muttering a &lt;strong&gt;counter-curse to keep Harry safe&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Setting Snape's robe on fire disrupts the entire teachers' seating area and, as a result, Quirrell breaks his magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T19:42:33.113" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T19:42:33.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2336" CreationDate="2017-04-11T13:28:32.660" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the fifth line from the third stanza of &quot;A German Requiem&quot;, the word &lt;em&gt;waistcoat&lt;/em&gt; is modified by &lt;em&gt;leering&lt;/em&gt;. I can understand &lt;em&gt;waistcoat&lt;/em&gt; is personified as a person here. Is this person the priest? And why is this person &lt;em&gt;leering&lt;/em&gt;? I cannot get any clue from the context. So I was thinking maybe there are some cultural background behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How comforting it is, once or twice a year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To get together and forget the old times.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As on those special days, ladies and gentlemen,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the boiled shirts gather at the graveside&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a leering waistcoat approaches the rostrum.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is like a solemn pact between the survivors.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They mayor has signed it on behalf of the freemasonry.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The priest has sealed it on behalf of all the rest.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nothing more need be said, and it is better that way-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the link to the poem. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-german-requiem/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-german-requiem/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1304" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:50:59.007" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T16:32:23.737" Title="Why is &quot;waistcoat&quot; modified by &quot;leering&quot; in the poem “A German Requiem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;james-fenton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2293" CreationDate="2017-04-11T13:47:39.557" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Queequeg was indeed a consumer of human flesh. The relevant passage comes from Chapter 17, which describes Queequeg's religious fasting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then asked Queequeg whether he himself was ever troubled with dyspepsia; expressing the idea very plainly, so that he could take it in. He said no; only upon one memorable occasion. It was &lt;strong&gt;after a great feast&lt;/strong&gt; given by his father the king, on the gaining of a great battle &lt;strong&gt;wherein fifty of the enemy had been killed&lt;/strong&gt; by about two o’clock in the afternoon, &lt;strong&gt;and all cooked and eaten that very evening.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No more, Queequeg,” said I, shuddering; “that will do;” for I knew the inferences without his further hinting them. I had seen a sailor who had visited that very island, and he told me that &lt;strong&gt;it was the custom,&lt;/strong&gt; when a great battle had been gained there, &lt;strong&gt;to barbecue all the slain in the yard or garden of the victor&lt;/strong&gt;; and then, one by one, &lt;strong&gt;they were placed in great wooden trenchers, and garnished round like a pilau, with breadfruit and cocoanuts; and with some parsley in their mouths&lt;/strong&gt;, were sent round with the victor’s compliments to all his friends, &lt;strong&gt;just as though these presents were so many Christmas turkeys.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0017&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt;, Ch. 17. &amp;quot;The Ramadan&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not it was common  in 19th century to indiscriminately refer to all foreign tribespeople as &amp;quot;cannibals&amp;quot;, Melville explicitly characterizes Queequeg as a genuine cannibal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T13:52:47.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2318" CreationDate="2017-04-11T16:05:39.913" Score="14" ViewCount="10268" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act III Scene 2 of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Portia : One half of me is yours, the other half yours. Mine own, I would say; but if mine then yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly translated it means &quot;One half of me is yours, and the other half—my own half, I’d call it—belongs to you too. If it’s mine, then it’s yours, and so I’m all yours.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't Portia directly say that she totally belongs to Bassanio? Why take this &quot;curved route&quot; to end up at the same place ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1193" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T20:25:50.750" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T10:43:23.990" Title="Why does Portia say this in The Merchant of Venice?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2309" CreationDate="2017-04-11T17:01:28.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It will be hard to get anything from it on its own, you probably need to take a step back and see it compared to the rest of the scene, and really in contrast to the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few points I'd put down if I was writing an essay on this. I'll bullet-point and explain. I'm currently in Year 9/Grade 8, and my English teacher always goes on about PEE paragraphs (Point Evidence Explanation). I will bullet point the points, the evidence is obviously the quote, and then I'll explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start with what I think is the strongest point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It shows he makes her whole&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the biggest point here, would be that two halves make a whole. One half she has said already belongs to him, but now her own half does too, she is whole again. She is almost saying that he makes her whole. He brings her together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now a few other points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It emphasises her love&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If she had simply said &amp;quot;I'm all yours&amp;quot;, that isn't as effective. By basically splitting herself in two, and saying that one half already belongs to him, but now the other does too, it shows how much she loves him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It shows she is flustered&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portia is one of the characters who is a higher intellectual in the play. She is usually in control, quite calm and with the upper hand, but here, she is almost incoherent. It shows she is eager to express her feelings and that she can hardly find the right words to say. She interrupts and corrects herself a lot in the full speech which shows she is completely smitten with Bassanio. It's like she's a young girl asking someone out, and forgetting all her words and being completely flustered about the whole things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It shows she is fully committed to Bassanio&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is almost granting him ownership of her. She is giving herself to him and this shows her trust and respect for him. She is willing to give everything that belongs to her to him. Only someone who truly and completely loves someone would do something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T20:23:02.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2350" CreationDate="2017-04-11T17:28:42.730" Score="6" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that Earth has very little trouble placing its people into extremely high positions all over in a variety of countries and societies, despite not having mind control technology - or for that matter, much of any useful technology for infiltration (they can't spy remotely, for example, requiring Rumata to be physically present to record stuff with his &lt;strike&gt;Google Glass&lt;/strike&gt; headband camera). They have their unlimited synthesized gold, but I doubt you can just buy high nobility that easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Rumata's singular case can be explained - he's a &quot;foreign noble&quot;, in a distant province, and he assumed the identity of an actual dead noble. (and even so, Don Reba tumbled on to his cover story pretty easily, by checking that real Don Rumata of Estor is dead for several years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did the rest of them manage this feat? Don Kondor is far higher placed than Rumata, in Republic of Soan. The text mentions several others by name, and the implication seems to be that there are dozens if not hundreds all over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T17:40:30.237" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T17:21:56.860" Title="How does Earth manage to get so many highly placed agents?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2314" CreationDate="2017-04-11T18:04:38.417" Score="24" ViewCount="3085" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;, basically every name has a significance/pun. For example, Dr. Dischord - his name is 'Discord' with 'chord' - implying bad sounds. Or the DYNNE, or 'din'. And Chroma, with his colors.  I even managed to figure out something for King Azaz (the wordy king) - it's from A to Z. But I was unable to figure out what Alec Bings's name was supposed to represent. He's the guy who can see through things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Simple,&quot; he said proudly. &quot;I'm Alec Bings; I see through things. I can see whatever is inside, behind, around, covered by, or subsequent to anything else. In fact, the only thing I can't see is whatever happens to be right in front of my nose.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... Does his name mean anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T18:42:12.403" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T19:20:53.610" Title="What is the significance of Alec Bings's name in The Phantom Tollbooth?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2312" CreationDate="2017-04-11T18:34:51.270" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s noted in The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (which I highly recommend to any fan- it's a really lovely book) published by Knopf/Random House in 2011; on page 106, annotation 10 reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;“I’m Alec Bings”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  According to the author, this character’s curious name has no special significance apart from the fact that it rhymes with the remark spoken immediately following its first mention: “I see through things.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The annotations were done by Leonard Marcus, and he interviewed Juster, Feiffer, and their wives for the content of the annotated edition, according to the acknowledgements page at the back of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1307" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-11T19:26:24.080" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T19:26:24.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T18:37:55.857" Score="7" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_We_Come_A-wassailing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here we come a-wassailing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is a traditional Christmas tune but it has almost no mention of the traditional Christmas subjects. The only one I can see in the entire version printed in Wikipedia is in a verse I've never heard before myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bring us out a table&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And spread it with a cloth;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bring us out a mouldy cheese,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And some of your Christmas loaf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first verse, though, which is pretty universally known talks about &quot;leaves so green&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here we come a-wassailing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Among the leaves so green;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here we come a-wand'ring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So fair to be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Generally&lt;/em&gt; one doesn't think of green leaves and winter time. Yes, the chorus says &quot;God bless you and send you a happy New Year&quot;, but different cultures have celebrated the new year &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;at different times&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the Middle Ages in western Europe, while the Julian calendar was still in use, authorities moved New Year's Day variously, depending upon locale, to one of several other days, among them: 1 March, 25 March, Easter, 1 September, and 25 December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, was this actually a &quot;Christmas&quot; song, or was it intended to be sung at some other point in the year. If designed for December, what &quot;green leaves&quot; are we talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T10:10:56.640" Title="Is &quot;Here we come a-wassailing&quot; supposed to be sung at Christmas?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2304" CreationDate="2017-04-11T19:09:28.190" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The strongest evidence (in my opinion) is Dumbledore's unwavering trust. When other characters doubted him, Dumbledore always affirmed his confidence, but never gave others a reason to share it.  This clearly suggests that he possesses some secret knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, when Harry and Lupin discuss Snape (Half Blood Prince) we have the following exchange&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But,&amp;quot; said Harry, &amp;quot;just say — just say Dumbledore's wrong about Snape&#xA;—&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;People have said it, many times. It comes down to whether or not&#xA;you trust Dumbledore’s judgement. I do; therefore, I trust Severus.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lupin, who is at the heart of the Order of the Phoenix, is able to offer no better proof of Snape's fidelity than this, suggesting that Dumbledore must have some good reason that he is unwilling to share with even his closest confidants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T20:16:45.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T19:37:17.050" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Long Earth&lt;/em&gt;, when the bomb was about to go off in Datum Madison, people were fleeing by means of stepping.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the stepping began.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Parents carried their children, and went back for their own old folk, and their elderly neighbours.  In care homes, some bewildered senior citizens had Steppers slapped on them and were sent East or West for the first time in their lives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that seniors were handed steppers and told to go.  But in the very beginning of the book, it says that steppers only worked if the user completed the assembly themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could this work? The twisting of the wire required to complete the assembly obviously required some dexterity, and it would almost certainly take longer than the less than 60 second timeframe it apparently did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T08:19:02.230" Title="How did the seniors use the steppers?" Tags="&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2309" CreationDate="2017-04-11T20:22:17.717" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, let's take a look at the wider context around this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beshrew your eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They have o'erlook'd me and divided me;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One half of me is yours, the other half yours,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And so all yours. O, these naughty times&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Put bars between the owners and their rights!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And so, though yours, not yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 14-20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's already talking about being &lt;strong&gt;divided&lt;/strong&gt; before she starts on the &quot;one half yours&quot; thing. I'm not &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; sure what she means by being overlooked and divided, but presumably it's a reference to the way her father's will allows her only to marry a man who chooses the right casket. Thus, if she fell in love with anyone who &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; choose correctly, she would be &lt;strong&gt;divided&lt;/strong&gt; between love and duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the concept of her being divided is already on the table, hence this particular roundabout way of &quot;saying without saying&quot; that she has feelings for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why does she say it in such a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5dGA9zqiPes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;roundabout way&lt;/a&gt; at all? Because &lt;strong&gt;she doesn't want to admit that she loves him.&lt;/strong&gt; At this point, he hasn't &quot;won&quot; her yet by passing the Trial by Casket, so in some sense she isn't &quot;allowed&quot; to love him. Earlier on she says (lines 4-6, emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's something tells me, &lt;strong&gt;but it is not love&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would not lose you; and you know yourself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hate counsels not in such a quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's denying, perhaps even to herself, that she loves him. She dares not admit it at this stage, for fear of having her heart broken if he chooses wrongly. Thus the convoluted and obfuscated language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, as someone mentioned in comments, it wouldn't be Shakespeare without some nice flowery verbiage!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-11T20:22:17.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2950" CreationDate="2017-04-11T20:50:39.480" Score="6" ViewCount="3791" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Bassanio is about to make his choice of the three caskets at Belmont - a choice upon which rests his chances of marriage to Portia - she calls for music and singing while he ponders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Music, whilst BASSANIO comments on the caskets to himself&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SONG.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tell me where is fancy bred,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or in the heart, or in the head?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How begot, how nourished?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Reply, reply.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is engender'd in the eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With gazing fed; and fancy dies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the cradle where it lies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let us all ring fancy's knell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'll begin it,--Ding, dong, bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- The Merchant of Venice, Act 3, Scene 2, Lines 64-73&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this song an attempt by Portia to influence Bassanio subconsciously towards lead?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the song is about &quot;fancy&quot;, superficial liking; it suggests that what appeals to the eye is not necessarily what is truly valuable. And in a subtle piece of wordplay, the first three lines of the song all rhyme with &quot;lead&quot;. Portia is already in love with Bassanio, although she &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2318/17&quot;&gt;dare not admit it&lt;/a&gt;, and she's certainly clever enough to set up such a scheme, in order to prod him towards choosing the right casket but still maintain plausible deniability. On the other hand, perhaps I'm reading too much into this, and underestimating Portia's honour and dedication to the rules imposed by her late father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T13:01:18.717" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T02:48:02.807" Title="Does Portia subconsciously influence Bassanio's choice of casket?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2315" CreationDate="2017-04-11T21:00:23.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plants that grow green in European wintertime have become entwined in the myth and rituals of the season. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wTwQDgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PT76&amp;amp;ots=9jIs53GP1S&amp;amp;dq=wassail%20evergreens&amp;amp;pg=PT77#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=wassail%20evergreens&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Celebration: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2011&lt;/a&gt; ascribes the 'leaves so green' of the song to the bowl's being decorated with Rosemary and other evergreens. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other evergreens could have included &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistletoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mistletoe&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mistletoe continued to be associated with fertility and vitality&#xA;  through the Middle Ages, and by the 18th century it had also become&#xA;  incorporated into Christmas celebrations around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holly_and_the_Ivy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holly and Ivy &lt;/a&gt;are often treated as a pair when talking about yuletide evergreens. (mature holly in a woodland can be as spare and lanky tree which lends itself to ivy swarming its trunk. In the winter this can give the striking effect of a fully clothed tree with two sorts of leaves. In fact with three sorts, when ivy gets to the top of its climb it puts out a branches rather than runners and forms a 'bush' with non-lobed leaves. The bush flowers and sets berries. This could go some way to accounting for all the colours of berry attributed to holly in the '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans_Day_Carol&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sans Day Carol&lt;/a&gt;' as Ivy berries set green and ripen black.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;holly and ivy have been a mainstay of British Advent and Christmas&#xA;  decorations for Church use since at least the fifteenth and sixteenth&#xA;  centuries, when they were mentioned regularly in churchwardens’&#xA;  accounts&#xA;  They are also the subject of numerous carols, the example still current being a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holly_and_the_Ivy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;carol which may date to the 1700s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The holly and the ivy, When they are both full grown, &lt;Br&gt;Of all the&#xA;  trees that are in the wood, &lt;Br&gt;The holly bears the crown. &lt;Br&gt;The&#xA;  rising of the sun &lt;Br&gt;And the running of the deer, &lt;Br&gt;The playing of&#xA;  the merry organ, &lt;Br&gt;Sweet singing in the choir.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T10:10:56.640" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T10:10:56.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2333" CreationDate="2017-04-11T21:41:12.537" Score="7" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In conversation with Doctor Budakh - and later Arata, Rumata (Anton) basically states the Earth's - and his personal - party line about non-interference with foreign cultures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Что ж, — сказал он, — извольте. Я сказал бы всемогущему: «Создатель, я не знаю твоих планов, может быть, ты и не собираешься делать людей добрыми и счастливыми. Захоти этого! Так просто этого достигнуть! Дай людям вволю хлеба, мяса и вина, дай им кров и одежду. Пусть исчезнут голод и нужда, а вместе с тем и все, что разделяет людей».&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... — &lt;strong&gt;Бог ответил бы вам: «Не пойдет это на пользу людям. Ибо сильные вашего мира отберут у слабых то, что я дал им, и слабые по-прежнему останутся нищими».&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[I'm paraphrasing here, not direct-translating, for brevity - DVK]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It won't help the people to give them enough nourishment, housing and&#xA;  clothes - the strong will take the goods from the weak, and the weak&#xA;  will stay in poverty.    — Я бы попросил бога оградить слабых,&#xA;  «Вразуми жестоких правителей», сказал бы я.   — &lt;strong&gt;Жестокость есть&#xA;  сила. Утратив жестокость, правители потеряют силу, и другие жестокие&#xA;  заменят их&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It won't help to protect the weak by making the strong weaker, as the&#xA;  new rulers who are harsh will arise to replace the ones you made&#xA;  weaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Накажи жестоких, — твердо сказал он, — чтобы неповадно было сильным&#xA;  проявлять жестокость к слабым.    — &lt;strong&gt;Человек рождается слабым.&#xA;  Сильным он становится, когда нет вокруг никого сильнее его. Когда&#xA;  будут наказаны жестокие из сильных, их место займут сильные из слабых.&#xA;  Тоже жестокие. Так придется карать всех, а я не хочу этого&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It won't help to punish the harsh ones, as the ones just less weak&#xA;  than them will arise and turn harsh, requiring to punish &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Тебе виднее, всемогущий. Сделай тогда просто так, чтобы люди&#xA;  получили все и не отбирали друг у друга то, что ты дал им.   — &lt;strong&gt;И это&#xA;  не пойдет людям на пользу, — вздохнул Румата, — ибо когда получат они&#xA;  все даром, без трудов, из рук моих, то забудут труд, потеряют вкус к&#xA;  жизни и обратятся в моих домашних животных, которых я вынужден буду&#xA;  впредь кормить и одевать вечно&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It won't help to just give everything to everyone, as humans will just&#xA;  turn to cattle, forever dependent on the god who gave them the&#xA;  abundance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Не давай им всего сразу! — горячо сказал Будах. — Давай понемногу,&#xA;  постепенно!   — &lt;strong&gt;Постепенно люди и сами возьмут все, что им&#xA;  понадобится.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's no point in giving things bit by bit, as humans will achieve&#xA;  that progress on their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Будах неловко засмеялся.   — Да, я вижу, это не так просто, — сказал&#xA;  он. — Я как-то не думал раньше о таких вещах… Кажется, мы с вами&#xA;  перебрали все. Впрочем, — он подался вперед, — есть еще одна&#xA;  возможность. Сделай так, чтобы больше всего люди любили труд и знание,&#xA;  чтобы труд и знание стали единственным смыслом их жизни!   Да, это мы&#xA;  тоже намеревались попробовать, подумал Румата. Массовая гипноиндукция,&#xA;  позитивная реморализация. Гипноизлучатели на трех экваториальных&#xA;  спутниках…   — Я мог бы сделать и это, — сказал он. — &lt;strong&gt;Но стоит ли&#xA;  лишать человечество его истории? Стоит ли подменять одно человечество&#xA;  другим? Не будет ли это то же самое, что стереть это человечество с&#xA;  лица земли и создать на его месте новое?&lt;/strong&gt;    Будах, сморщив лоб,&#xA;  молчал обдумывая. Румата ждал. За окном снова тоскливо заскрипели&#xA;  подводы. Будах тихо проговорил:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And it won't do to mind-wipe everyone and turn them into Earth-model&#xA;  communars. Since basically it's the same as killing them and replacing&#xA;  them with earthlings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Тогда, господи, сотри нас с лица земли и создай заново более&#xA;  совершенными… или еще лучше, оставь нас и дай нам идти своей дорогой. &#xA;  — Сердце мое полно жалости, — медленно сказал Румата. — Я не могу&#xA;  этого сделать.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: doesn't matter what you as Earth do, the only two ways are to let people's society develop on their own and progress at their own pace; OR, replace them wholesale with a new society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that set of views (not an unreasonable one), &lt;strong&gt;what changed so that, a mere couple of decades later, in the same Noon universe, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Progressors&lt;/a&gt; - whose whole core goal is antithetical to what Anton expressed - are working everywhere in the universe&lt;/strong&gt; - including, as per &quot;&lt;em&gt;Waves Extinguish the Wind&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Arkanar itself, where Toyvo Glumov worked as a Progressor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T06:40:36.540" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T08:18:49.567" Title="Given Anton's attitudes expressed to Budakh, why did Earth start Progressors?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2326" CreationDate="2017-04-11T21:55:35.823" Score="8" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;The obvious implication from the text of &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt; is that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Kira was killed on the orders of Don Reba - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at the very least, Anton blames Don Reba and that triggers his meltdown. (this gets more obvious in the play based on the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authorial intent was slightly different - in an interview with readers, Boris Strugatsky said that while Don Reba was the one who sent the monks, it was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; with the orders to kill anyone; but rather, to take Kira as hostage against Rumata:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Насколько я помню, дон Рэба имел целью захватить в плен Киру, дабы потом использовать ее как орудие шантажа&lt;/strong&gt;. Замысел не удался, главным образом, из-за отвратительно низкой дисциплины его монахов (характерной, впрочем, для феодальных дружин всех времен и народов). Кроме того, дон Рэба никак не ожидал, что Румата, отъехавший давеча аж в пределы Пьяного леса, ухитрится каким-то загадочным образом оказаться дома.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a curious and somewhat famous &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/rec/peresl03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; at some point on Russian interwebz, that asserted that Boris Strugatsky was wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essay posited that instead it wasn't Don Reba in the first place - &lt;strong&gt;it stated that the murder was the work of Arata the Hunchback&lt;/strong&gt; (contradicting explicit authorial intent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Does the text support this theory?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T09:13:00.050" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T09:13:00.050" Title="Does the text support the theory that Arata the Hunchback killed this character?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-11T22:16:20.033" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to find this one for several years but somehow Google-fu was weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pretty old - I think I read it in early/mid 90s. Internet-published.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Apocryphal mishmash of entire Noon universe&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Very specific plot detail that can serve as litmus test remains in my memory - they had some sort of galactic defence firedrill, involving two star cruisers named after dinosaurs (I think one was Stegosaurus).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;somewhat predictably, it was written in Russian&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T12:01:35.933" LastActivityDate="2017-05-17T12:01:35.933" Title="Please help identify a fanfic-y apocryphal story based on Noon Universe" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;apocryphal-works&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2327" CreationDate="2017-04-12T05:54:02.623" Score="4" ViewCount="831" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Tell-tale Heart&lt;/em&gt;, we see the madman does kill the old man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not bother me. I knew it would not be heard through the wall. Finally the beating stopped. The old man was dead.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I moved the mattress away and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone, dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there for many minutes. There was no beat. He was certainly stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the very end, we see that he hears the heart beating again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Villains!&quot; I shrieked at the police officers. &quot;Do not pretend to me any more! Do not mock me any more! I admit everything! Tear up the planks - here, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;! It is the beating of his hideous heart!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Did he actually die? Is he hearing the heart beating for real, or is this his crazy, guilty, conscience? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-12T11:56:41.820" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T11:56:41.820" Title="Is the old man still alive at the end of The Tell-tale Heart?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-12T07:23:54.230" Score="8" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Manhattan Projects&lt;/em&gt; uses red and blue in clearly representational ways, but I can't quite figure out what they represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first they're used to designate between the Oppenheimer twins, and later between alternate realities where things go right or wrong, so I thought they might be simple commentary on good/bad dualities, not unlike white hats and black hats to color-code the good guys and the bad guys. &lt;a href=&quot;http://polycomics.com/post/50119859952/red-and-blue-color-in-the-manhattan-projects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I don't seem to be alone in this interpretation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But reading further challenges that simple analysis to the point where I had to abandon it as inconsistent with the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in Vol. 2, &quot;Then. Iceland.&quot; red and blue distinguish between living beings and inanimate objects on one page, while on the next page one individual's panel contains both colors. Then individuals are shown in both all-red and all-blue panels on the same page and I gave up trying to figure it out and came here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What meaning does &lt;em&gt;The Manhattan Projects&lt;/em&gt;' use of red and blue convey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T01:58:01.990" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T01:58:01.990" Title="What do red and blue represent?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2322" CreationDate="2017-04-12T08:44:52.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Not really, unless you're willing to allow a lot of stretches and assumptions.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We could scrape a motivation for Arata to have ordered the abduction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, it could be argued he had the motive: he has asked Rumata multiple times for &amp;quot;lightnings&amp;quot;, to crush the oppressors of common folk. Rumata always refused, justifying the refusal by the very possible scenario where one of Arata's old allies would overthrow him and use the &amp;quot;lightnings&amp;quot; for less noble purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No,” said Rumata, “I will not give you lightning. It would be a mistake. Try to believe me. I can see further than you.” Arata was listening, his head sunk on his chest. Rumata clenched his hand. “I will only give you one reason. It pales in comparison with the primary reason, but you will actually understand it. You are very good at surviving, worthy Arata, but you too are mortal; and if you die, if the lightning passes into other hands that are not as pure as yours, then I shudder to even think of the consequences.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, seeing that Rumata could not be swayed by the means of persuasion, Arata decided to try a more blunt method: make it sting for Rumata, by killing the one person he truly cared for on this planet. Rumata would then use the lightnings himself, and cause at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; destruction to the lords and oppressors Arata hates so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arata could also have seen Rumata as having betrayed him, by saving him, providing him with money, but not giving him weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Once I had a friend,” he said. “You’ve probably heard of him - Waga the Wheel. We had begun together. Then he became a bandit, the king of the night. I didn’t forgive him for his treason, and he knew it. He had helped me a lot—out of fear and self-interest—but he never did want to come back. He had his own goals. Two years ago his people gave me up to Don Reba.” He looked at his fingers and curled them into a fist. “And today I found him in the Port of Arkanar. In our business, there’s no such thing as half a friend. &lt;strong&gt;Half a friend - that’s always half an enemy&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9. Emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essay you speak of gives a different interpretation. It claims that Arata was a ruthless manipulator, and it would be him, and not Don Reba, who would benefit from killing Kira: chaos caused by Rumata's raging would help Arata stage another uprising. We do not know if this actually happened, since our knowledge of the events in Arkanar is limited to the moment the patrol airship dropped sleeping gas on the city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, however, interesting that this scene did not exist in the brothers' original manuscripts. It was added after (friendly) requests by editors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything in this novel was unusual to [editors], and a lot of requests (quite friendly, by the way, and not at all meanly critical) were made. On the advice of I. A. Efremov, we renamed the Minister of the Defense of the Crown Don Reba (he had previously been Don Rebia - an overly simple anagram, in the opinion of Ivan Antonovich.) Moreover, we had to do a lot of work on the text and &lt;strong&gt;add an entire big scene where Arata the Hunchback demands lightning from the hero and doesn’t receive it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Afterword by Boris Strugatsky.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not at all sure as to why the editors would want this scene added - possibly they were trying to do exactly this - shift the blame from Reba to Arata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to notice that the chapter is very short, and if one was to read the book with this whole chapter missing, nothing would be lost from the plot, and there would be &lt;strong&gt;absolutely no reason to suspect Arata as having planned anything against Rumata&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Author's stance that it was Reba who ordered the abduction, is much stronger.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is far more likely that Reba was intended as the wannabe abductor or killer. Notice the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We’re all operatives,” said Don Condor. “And all that is precious to&#xA;us must be either far away on Earth or inside us. So that no one can&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;take it away and use it as a hostage&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“You’re talking about Kira?” Rumata asked.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Yes, my boy. If all I know about Don Reba is true, keeping him under control is a difficult and dangerous task. You see what I’m trying to say.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Yes, I see,” Rumata said. “I’ll try to think of something.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one notices from reading further, Rumata could've thought of something faster. It is at least strongly &lt;em&gt;implied&lt;/em&gt; in the text that Reba was behind this, and if the author acknowledges this, it is probably true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Condor has all but prophesised the outcome, being more experienced and knowledgeable in feudal affairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also not clear whether Arata could have known Rumata would be going to the Drunken Lair: Arata leaves immediately after their conversation, and I would assume he headed to get the money, and then start some more rebellions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reba openly attached a spy to Rumata, so he would be notified when Rumata and his friend left on horses (implying a long ride); Arata, on the other hand, seems more like a lone wolf type - it is unlikely he had a network of spies, and while he could have had the money, it is unlikely he would have ordered mercenaries to abduct Kira, let alone the fact it weren't even mercenaries that came - it were monks, who obey Don Reba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In the name of the Lord!” roared below. [...] There were numerous riders outside - &lt;strong&gt;sullen men in black with pointed hoods&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9. Emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arata did not have power over them - they'd immediately quarter him for all the &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; he's done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Arata regarded Rumata as a god:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Don Rumata, do you remember how disappointed I was when I found out who you are? I hate priests, and it was very bitter to me that their false fairy tales turned out to be true. But a poor rebel must draw benefit from whatever circumstances he encounters. The priests say that the gods have lightning. Don Rumata, I really need lightning to break down the fortified walls.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumata gave a deep sigh. After the miraculous helicopter rescue, Arata had insisted on an explanation. Rumata tried to explain about himself; he even pointed out Earth’s sun in the night sky—a tiny, barely visible star. &lt;strong&gt;But the rebel only understood one thing: the damned priests were right and there were gods living behind the firmament who were all-good and all-powerful.&lt;/strong&gt; And since then, he steered each of his conversations with Rumata to one thing: God, since you exist, give me your power, for it is the best thing that you can do.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9. Emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be unlikely for Arata, who is an extremely cautious person (having survived thus far, at least) would want to angry a person he regarded as a god, especially given he knew that Rumata had a helicopter (&amp;quot;iron bird&amp;quot;), which would mean he'd be able to traverse the distance between the Drunken Lair and his house on short notice, which conflicts with the objective given to the monks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“They always mess things up,” someone said softly downstairs. “The master’s at home.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“What’s that matter to us?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“It matters because he’s the best swordsman in the world.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“And they also said that he left and won’t come back till morning.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All and all, all of this has a very distinct stench of Reba, and not a musk of Arata in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T08:57:40.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2324" CreationDate="2017-04-12T11:56:18.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It was his crazy, guilty conscience.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as the quote you mention, in which the murderer makes sure that the old man is dead by holding his hand to his heart for &quot;many minutes&quot; without feeling a beat, there's also this in the next paragraph, from when he's hiding the old man's body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think he could possibly still be alive after that!&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Besides, the murderer is quite clearly insane. We are constantly reminded of this throughout the story by his wild protestations that, despite what everyone thinks, he is not mad. It was an insane decision to kill the old man in the first place - because of the appearance of his eye? what the heck? And this insanity comes out perhaps most strongly of all at the very end of the story, when he thinks he hears the old man's heart. Just look at the way he describes the noise and the reaction to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I gasped for breath - and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly - more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations, but the noise steadily increased. Why &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observation of the men - but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; I do? I foamed - I raved - I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder - louder - &lt;em&gt;louder!&lt;/em&gt; And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! - no, no? They heard! - they suspected! - they &lt;em&gt;knew!&lt;/em&gt; - they were making a mockery of my horror! - this I thought, and this I think. But any thing was better than this agony! Any thing was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! - and now - again! - hark! louder! louder! louder! &lt;em&gt;louder!&lt;/em&gt; -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the narrator lapses into sentence fragments suggests that his reason is deserting him altogether. The way he reacts so strongly to the perceived noise while the policemen don't react at all suggests that it's only in his head and not a real, audible sound.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;This is, in fact, the point of the story. The murderer is a classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unreliable narrator&lt;/a&gt; - he constantly claims not to be mad, although he clearly is, and in the end he dooms himself by his own guilt-ridden imaginings. Poe explores exactly the same idea in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imp_of_the_Perverse_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Imp of the Perverse&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in which a young man murders his older relative and gets away scot-free and unsuspected until his &quot;perverse&quot; guilty conscience makes him, against his own will, confess the deed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-12T11:56:18.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5610" CreationDate="2017-04-12T23:40:24.860" Score="12" ViewCount="1169" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; opens somewhere in Britain, at and around the Admiral Benbow inn. &lt;strong&gt;Where exactly is this meant to be?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be relatively near to Bristol, so I'd guess somewhere in the West Country of England. I've also heard it said that it's meant to be in Cornwall, but I'm not sure what the textual or extratextual evidence is for this. I've even been to a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; Admiral Benbow inn in Penzance, but that's presumably named after the fictional one rather than the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T10:59:18.587" Title="Where is the start of Treasure Island set?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2745" CreationDate="2017-04-13T00:13:13.650" Score="12" ViewCount="462" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the same period, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/a&gt; wrote, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Found_in_a_Bottle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS Found in a Bottle&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (1833) and the intriguing tale of buried treasure, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gold-Bug&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (1843). All of these works influenced Stevenson's end product. [...] Stevenson also admits that he took the idea of Captain Flint's skeleton point from Poe's &quot;The Gold-Bug,&quot; and he constructed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bones&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Billy Bones&lt;/a&gt;'[s] history from the pages of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Irving&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Washington Irving&lt;/a&gt;, one of his favorite writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the good 'pedia provides no source for this claim, so I turn to SE for better results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Stevenson's &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; influenced by Poe's &quot;The Gold-Bug&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either textual evidence (strong enough to be more than a mere reuse of common tropes), or an exact source for Stevenson's admission cited by Wikipedia, would make a good answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T21:53:15.753" Title="Was Stevenson's Treasure Island influenced by Poe?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2331" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-13T01:07:02.033" Score="5" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there must be some connection between the last two lines from the first stanza of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-german-requiem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A German Requiem&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday the very furniture seemed to reproach you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Today you take your place in the Widow's Shuttle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe there must be some contrast between &lt;em&gt;yesterday&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;today&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/126282/51838&quot;&gt;another post on ELL&lt;/a&gt;, I asked the same question and received a comment which says yesterday the widow was alone with the furniture and today she is taking the shuttle with other widows. I think that helped my understanding. But I still want to dig a little deeper into the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the furniture reproach her? Perhaps she sobbed too much so that even the furniture found it unbearable? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1304" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:55:20.987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T12:04:41.180" Title="What is the connection between the following two lines from &quot;A German Requiem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;james-fenton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-13T04:13:08.517" Score="10" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://battlefieldearth.com/introduction/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;his 1980 introduction to &lt;em&gt;Battlefield Earth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, L. Ron Hubbard claims that the novel is a work of &quot;&lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; science fiction&quot; and then sets out to define that term. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hubbard spends more time defining fantasy than he does science fiction, as if somehow the shade cast by the one will illuminate the other. And each time he starts to postulate a quality of science fiction, he then says it's insufficient and embarks on another reminisce. Once he gets into the concept of purity of genre by way of a roundabout rant on mistaking fantasy for sci-fi but never gets down to cases. After nine rambling pages of name-dropping and shade-throwing I'm left without any clear sense of what he thinks &quot;&lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; science fiction&quot; is, aside from &lt;em&gt;Battlefield Earth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, in concise terms, is Hubbard's conception of &quot;&lt;em&gt;pure&lt;/em&gt; science fiction&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T09:59:17.160" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T12:12:59.007" Title="What is Hubbard's definition of &quot;pure science fiction&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;l-ron-hubbard&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2321" CreationDate="2017-04-13T05:05:05.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a fragment of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sedenko.pl/2011/01/19/wywiad-z-borysem-strugackim-2002/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview with Boris Strugatsky&lt;/a&gt; (in Polish)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant fragment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our shallow look at the progressors and their ideas have been replaced with something deeper [...].Humanity, after reaching the level have to become progressors becauses &lt;strong&gt;there always will be people who can't live happy knowing that somewhere blood is being spilled and children are hurt, especially if they have resources to change it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, there is a short story &quot;Its NOT hard to be a God&quot; written by Marek Oramus that shows the bad way the progressor movement can end - they came out of hiding, slowly took over power &quot;for the greater good&quot; and quickly turned into tyrants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T08:18:49.567" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T08:18:49.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2332" CreationDate="2017-04-13T11:14:12.463" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me start with this paragraph where Hubbard speaks of &quot;imaginative fiction&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you mix science fiction with fantasy you do not have a pure&#xA;  genre. The two are, to a professional, separate genres. I notice today&#xA;  there is a tendency to mingle them and then excuse the result by&#xA;  calling it “imaginative fiction.” Actually they don’t mix well:&#xA;  science fiction, to be credible, has to be based on some degree of&#xA;  plausibility; fantasy gives you no limits at all. [...] They are&#xA;  simply very different genres from a professional viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a little before that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So anyone seeking to say that science fiction is a branch of fantasy&#xA;  or an extension of it is unfortunately colliding with a time-honored&#xA;  professional usage of terms. This is an age of mixed genres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why Hubbard spends so much time talking about fantasy. He's trying to distinguish science fiction from fantasy (hereafter SF and F) because he thinks there's a trend towards mixing genres and considering them SF. In his view, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;pure&quot; SF is any SF that doesn't have F elements in it&lt;/strong&gt;. Towards the end, he says as much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And as an old pro I assure you that it is pure science fiction. No&#xA;  fantasy. [...] Science is for people. And so is science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than that, best that I can tell, he seems satisfied by the dictionary definitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Of SF:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, by dictionary definition and a lot of discussions with Campbell&#xA;  and fellow writers of that time, science fiction has to do with the&#xA;  material universe and sciences; these can include economics,&#xA;  sociology, medicine, and suchlike, all of which have a material base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, while he does say SF &quot;has to be based on some degree of plausibility&quot;, that's a very subjective judgement, and since this definition doesn't use it, I think we can leave plausibility out of the equation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And for F:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So fantasy could be called any fiction that takes up elements such as&#xA;  spiritualism, mythology, magic, divination, the supernatural, and so&#xA;  on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hubbard also stresses on science and SF being about people, but this isn't about &lt;em&gt;defining&lt;/em&gt; SF. Instead it's about the point of science and SF:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[It] was no use to just send machines out for the sake of machines,&#xA;  [and] that there was no point in going into space unless the mission&#xA;  had something to do with people [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is not that SF that's not about people isn't SF, but that such fiction has no point (just as science that doesn't have anything to do with people isn't &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;-science).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise, as far as I can tell, Hubbard thinks that &quot;pure&quot; SF is fiction that has to do with material universe and sciences &lt;sup&gt;see 1 above&lt;/sup&gt; and &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; have elements of spiritualism, magic and other non-&quot;material&quot; phenomena &lt;sup&gt;see 2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T12:12:59.007" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T12:12:59.007" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-13T12:28:45.030" Score="10" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://battlefieldearth.com/introduction/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L. Ron Hubbard says&lt;/a&gt; that to be &quot;pure,&quot; &quot;credible,&quot; and &quot;have a point,&quot; (all things he clearly values highly) science fiction must be plausible; limited in its possibilities; have to do with material-based sciences; be focused on people over machines; and not incorporate spiritualism, the supernatural, mythology, or similar non-materialistic phenomena or notions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;em&gt;Battlefield Earth&lt;/em&gt; meet Hubbard's own criteria for science fiction which is not just &quot;pure,&quot; but credible and pointed? The story seemed neither plausible nor limited to me, but it's been a very long time since I read the novel and I'm willing to be convinced otherwise by people more familiar with it than I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T12:28:45.030" Title="Is &quot;Battlefield Earth&quot; good science fiction by Hubbard's standards?" Tags="&lt;l-ron-hubbard&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2307" CreationDate="2017-04-13T14:39:50.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Waistcoat&quot; here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt; for the person wearing the waistcoat. It is parallel to the &quot;boiled shirts&quot; who gather at the graveside in the previous line. (Boiled shirts are well-starched and stiff, like the kind you'd see in Downton Abbey.) Together, the two images present people who are, on the surface, very serious, but don't actually care about the occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;waistcoat&quot; doesn't seem to be a priest; priests wear robes. He could be an Anglican minister, but it's more likely to single out his collar. It's more likely that he's some grandee of the town, a businessman or rich person. I don't think he's a veteran of the war, or he'd be wearing a uniform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why that person is &quot;leering&quot;... I don't believe it's intended sexually, due to the lack of other sexual references in the poem, but rather in the more general sense of &quot;unpleasant&quot;. I suspect that the unpleasantness is more in the way the the objects of the ceremony perceive it, rather than from actual ill intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is a series of uncomfortable images of the aftermath of war, and in particular the grief of widows who are being celebrated for their sacrifices. That ceremony feels false. The important people of the city are using it as a way to celebrate their importance: speeches are made, documents are signed, and if you're very lucky, that's all. It would be even worse if they actually thought or spoke about just how awful it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do think that &quot;leering&quot; is an odd choice here: the connotations are inherently sexual. The language hasn't changed that much since the poem was written, and I don't think its connotation is that different in the UK. (Even if it were, the poet is a professor of English, and should be careful about such implications regardless of his own dialect.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only imagine that it's intended to increase the sense of possessiveness and intrusion: this puffed-up poo-bah is using their grief as a prop. Perhaps I'm oversensitive to shy away from the sexual connotations, a bit like using &quot;rape&quot; for something merely unpleasant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-04-13T16:32:23.737" LastActivityDate="2017-04-13T16:32:23.737" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2340" CreationDate="2017-04-14T01:39:35.087" Score="9" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anna Keown's poem &quot;Reported Missing&quot; is addressed to a World War One soldier by a first-person narrator who is desperately hopeful that he isn't dead. Here's the poem in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My thought shall never be that you are dead:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who laughed so lately in this quiet place.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The dear and deep-eyed humour of that face&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Held something ever living, in Death’s stead.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Scornful I hear the flat things they have said&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all their piteous platitudes of pain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I laugh! I laugh! – For you will come again –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This heart would never beat if you were dead.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The world’s adrowse in twilight hushfulness,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There’s purple lilac in your little room,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And somewhere out beyond the evening gloom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Small boys are culling summer watercress.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of these familiar things I have no dread&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Being so very sure you are not dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What relation is the soldier to the narrator?&lt;/strong&gt; A son? A husband? A lover? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers based either on a close reading of the poem itself or on outside information, e.g. about Keown's own life and family, would both be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T20:12:40.313" Title="Who is &quot;Reported Missing&quot; addressed to?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T18:50:34.900" Score="12" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Re-reading Jack London's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1056/1056-h/1056-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin Eden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for my project, I've come across this passage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and here he was at a higher pitch than ever.  All the hidden things were laying their secrets bare.  He was drunken with comprehension.  At night, asleep, he &lt;strong&gt;lived with the gods in colossal nightmare&lt;/strong&gt;; and awake, in the day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon the world he had just discovered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin Eden&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XIII. Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears right after Martin discovers Herbert Spencer, whose works will play a major role in Martin's later life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the sentences before the one with highlighted bit; I can also understand why he &lt;em&gt;&quot;went around like a somnambulist&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I can't understand is the &quot;nightmare&quot; and &quot;gods&quot;. If &quot;nightmare&quot; is used in a literal sense here, why would he have nightmares at all, especially with gods? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the nightmares are meant in a more symbolic sense, then what do they represent? It is stated in the book that Martin resented sleep, seeing it as a waste of time, and thus sleeping for only 5 hours a day (even trying sleeping for only 4 hours, but that was too hard). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just don't see why Martin would experience anything negative in his sleep, since everything thus far has only been good for him - Ruth, studying, writing, and now Spencer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T09:07:07.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T20:07:31.617" Title="Why did Martin Eden live at night with the gods in a colossal nightmare?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;martin-eden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2338" CreationDate="2017-04-14T20:12:40.313" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no information about Keown's life, but I can make a guess based on a close reading of the poem. I think this poem is addressed to the narrator's son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The addressee was clearly loved, and loved dearly, by the narrator.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is still, however, very open-ended. There are many kinds of love, and many relationships that can involve intense feelings of the heart.  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This heart would never beat if you were dead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The flower in the addressee's &quot;little room.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Flowers could be for anyone (and I am not familiar, off hand, with any floriographic references related to purple lilacs), but I think it's telling that the room is described with a juvenile, diminutive adjective. One would not describe a lover's room so, I think, nor a husband's (and as far as I know, most married couples share a room).  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s purple lilac in your little room,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't think this is as strong a proof as the one above it, but I think that the reference to &lt;strong&gt;&quot;small boys&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; of whom the narrator has &quot;no dread&quot; refer to small boys who remind this parent of the days when her son the soldier was young.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(Of course, this could also be a reference to happy childhood memories, or to children that a couple never had, but I thought that this interpretation is a likely one, and consistent with my analysis in #2.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-04-14T20:12:40.313" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-14T21:56:49.957" Score="3" ViewCount="3255" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn't quite literature, but a quote from Winston Churchill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he referring to the fact that he will be writing a history of the time he lived in (as he was a prolific writer of history)? Or, more that his actions will dictate the historical record? Perhaps it is both, but I'd like to know a bit more about why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-14T23:03:51.750" LastActivityDate="2020-01-24T12:46:45.213" Title="Interpretation of a Churchill quote" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;winston-churchill&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-15T00:22:31.480" Score="8" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marge Piercy's novel &lt;em&gt;Woman on the Edge of Time&lt;/em&gt; presents a chilling view of the modern mental health system, by documenting the thoughts and experiences of a woman committed to a mental institution against her will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was the author basing her portrayal on real-life experience?&lt;/strong&gt; Had she been involved with mental asylums or mental health therapy on any level in her own life - e.g. did she know someone who'd been committed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T13:42:19.230" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:28:45.023" Title="Did Marge Piercy have experience with the mental health system?" Tags="&lt;marge-piercy&gt;&lt;woman-on-the-edge-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-15T11:21:25.987" Score="1" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Keats's Ode on Melancholy, he writes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;neither twist Wolf's bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Wolf's bane described as &quot;tight-rooted&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T23:39:07.557" Title="Why is this adjective given in Ode on Melancholy" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2345" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-15T11:43:17.827" Score="7" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Ode on Melancholy&quot;, Keats uses the images of three poisons in the first stanza: Wolf's bane, nightshade, and yew-berries. Are these poisons simply meant to connote death/suicide, or might they have a deeper purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T20:02:12.537" Title="Do the poisons in &quot;Ode on Melancholy&quot; have deeper meaning?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2345" CreationDate="2017-04-15T18:16:41.380" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keats may have chosen the first two of these specific poisons because he could associate them with grapes and wine, and he may have chosen yew-berries because they look like beads. The first poison is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in mythology, Medea gave Theseus a cup of wine poisoned by wolfsbane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second poison is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bitter nightshade is a vine with poisonous red berries which grow in clusters somewhat resembling bunches of small grapes. So again, we have an association with wine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yew berries are also red, although they look much less like grapes. Yew berries actually look like a little bit like beads, in that it looks like they have a hole through them (it actually only goes halfway through, the extremely poisonous seed being in the hole). Keats' line is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make not your rosary of yew-berries,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of this line? Rosaries are used for prayers, so possibly what Keats means here is something like &quot;don't pray to death.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theme of poisonous wine or grapes returns in the third stanza: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... and aching Pleasure nigh,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  save him whose strenuous tongue&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;    Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; And be among her cloudy trophies hung.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T20:02:12.537" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T20:02:12.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2347" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2348" CreationDate="2017-04-15T21:04:45.093" Score="8" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the dinner at the king's palace, Rumata has a conversation with Father Gur, the poet. Rumata offers him a copy of the poets work, in exchange for a promise to write something new:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Very well put, Father Gur. By the way, is it still possible to find your book?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I don’t know… And I don’t want to know.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Just in case, you should know: one copy is in the metropole, in the&#xA;library of the emperor. Another is kept in the Museum of Curiosities&#xA;in Soan. The third is with me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gur spooned some jelly onto his plate with a trembling hand. “I… don’t&#xA;know…” He looked at Rumata mournfully with his huge sunken eyes. “I’d&#xA;like to read it… reread it…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’ll be happy to lend it to you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And then?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And then you’ll give it back.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;And then you’ll be given back!&lt;/strong&gt;” Gur said sharply.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5. Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused by Father Gur's reply. In original Russian, the last two lines of the conversation are as follows (with bold part matching that in the translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Потом вы вернете.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;strong&gt;И потом вам вернут!&lt;/strong&gt; — резко сказал Гур.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal translation in this case is &amp;quot;And then they'll give it back to you!&amp;quot;. While all three versions mean the same thing, I found the tone to be different, and it caused me to question the meaning of Father Gur's line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read it in Russian, I assumed he was referring to future generations of poets that would be inspired by Father Gur's work. This thought of mine was prompted by an earlier line by Rumata:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Look at your plate and keep eating. I’ll tell you who you are. You’re a brilliant storyteller, &lt;strong&gt;the founder of a new literary movement — the most fruitful one there is&lt;/strong&gt;.” Gur’s cheeks slowly started to glow. “In a hundred years, and maybe even earlier, &lt;strong&gt;dozens of storytellers will follow in your footsteps&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ibid&lt;/em&gt;. Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, Father Gur may be just too humble and skeptic to accept that possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading the English translation, however, the tone suggested that Father Gur may somehow be referring to Don Reba, and persecution of artists in Arkanar, as if he was saying &amp;quot;And then you'll be given back [after they kill me for possessing it]!&amp;quot;. This, I think, is supported by the line that follows immediately after:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumata shook his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Don Reba really scared you, Father Gur.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which one is it? Is Father Gur telling that Rumata will be rewarded for lending Gur his book? Or is he telling that Rumata and Gur will be prosecuted for the possession of this banned work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, today (15&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; of April) &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36732133#36732133&quot;&gt;is the birthday&lt;/a&gt; of Boris Strugatsky, one of the authors of this terrific book!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T06:10:54.877" Title="What does Father Gur mean by &quot;And then you'll be given back!&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2017-04-15T23:54:24.620" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subsequent text pretty clearly provides the context; and it's the one you suggested (&quot;after they kill me for possessing it&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Напугал... Вам приходилось когда-нибудь жечь собственных детей? Что вы знаете о страхе, благородный дон!..&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Гур Сочинитель вдруг принялся шептать так тихо, что Румата едва слышал его сквозь чавканье и гул голосов:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — А зачем все это?.. Что такое правда?.. Принц Хаар действительно любил прекрасную меднокожую Яиневнивору... У них были дети... Я знаю их внука... Ее действительно отравили... &lt;strong&gt;Но мне объяснили, что это ложь... Мне объяснили, что правда — это то, что сейчас во благо королю... Все остальное ложь и преступление&lt;/strong&gt;. Всю жизнь я писал ложь... И только сейчас я пишу правду...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Scared... Did you ever have to burn your own offspring? What do &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; know about fear, Noble Don!..&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - What's the point of all this? ... What's the truth?... Prince Haar actually loved the beautiful Yainevor.... They had childredn... &lt;strong&gt;But I &lt;em&gt;had it explained to me&lt;/em&gt; that this is a lie&lt;/strong&gt;. I had it explained that truth - is what is currently good for the king.... Everything else is a lie &lt;strong&gt;and a crime&lt;/strong&gt;. All my life I wrote lies... And only now I write the trutrh...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He discusses being afraid&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He persists in using anonymous 3rd tense - the unmentioned &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are the ones who hold him in his power (implying of course Don Reba's people) - the same implied &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in the sentence the question bolded.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the cultural context also supports this. Anyone who grew up in USSR would immediately assume that &quot;И потом вам вернут!&quot; has State Security connotations as the first option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T12:35:13.340" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T12:35:13.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-16T00:28:14.080" Score="13" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doyle published &lt;em&gt;The Lost World&lt;/em&gt; well after both killing off and reviving Sherlock Holmes. He wrote about Professor Challenger and Holmes concurrently for about fourteen years, and continued to write Professor Challenger stories for a few years after the last Holmes story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doyle always had a kind of CSI-esque &quot;five seconds in the future&quot; attitude toward science in the Holmes stories, and toward the end of that series more speculative elements were included. These remind me of the center-stage speculative elements of the Professor Challenger stories (though not as spiritualist), which leads me to wonder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the original Doylian texts give any indication that Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger occupy the same fictional world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-04-16T01:02:00.380" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T21:20:43.697" Title="Do Holmes and Challenger coinhabit the same fictional world?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2311" CreationDate="2017-04-16T17:21:56.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say this depends on the particular agent we're talking about. For some, I admit, being placed might be very difficult (see Don Condor), but for others solutions may be trivial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bribery&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earthlings are ridiculously rich, due to &lt;s&gt;Philosopher's stone&lt;/s&gt; their &quot;synthesisers&quot;. This infernal machine appears to be able to produce gold of very high purity from... sawdust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There, underneath a pile of trash, was the compact field synthesizer Midas in its strong silicate safe. Rumata cleared away the trash, entered in the code, and lifted the lid of the safe. Even in the white electric light, the synthesizer looked peculiar in the midst of the scattered junk. Rumata dumped a &lt;strong&gt;few shovels of sawdust into the receiving funnel&lt;/strong&gt;, and the synthesizer began to hum quietly, its display panel turning on automatically. Rumata shoved a rusty bucket underneath the output chute with the toe of his boot. And immediately — clink, clink, clink! — &lt;strong&gt;gold disks with the aristocratic profile of Pitz the Sixth, King of Arkanar, started pouring&lt;/strong&gt; onto its battered tin bottom.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 1; emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, gold may not be able to buy nobility [citation needed], but it may buy you a fleet and a trade, especially in a world that has not yet experienced geographic discoveries - there's no one to say you're an impostor, if you come from a land far far away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trader Pani-Pa, in my opinion, would have benefited from this the most:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Approximately at the same time, in another hemisphere, Carl Rosenblum, one of the leading experts on the peasant wars in France and Germany, also known as the wool-seller Pani-Pa, led a revolt of Murissian peasants, stormed two cities, and was killed by an arrow to the back of the head while trying to stop the looting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ibid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Infinite supply of money would have propelled him to the heights of the merchant society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined with some skillful acting and rather fortunate previous events, this is effectively how Anton came to be Rumata.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trickery&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumata recalls an operative who serves as a shaman for a tribe of barbarians:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let us assume that you’re alive and in Arkanar. It’s possible, of course, that you’ve been captured by barbarian raiders who’ve come down from the North Red Ridge. In that case, Don Condor is planning to get in touch with our friend Shushtuletidovodus, who specializes in the history of primitive cultures and is currently serving as a shaman-epileptic under a chief with a forty-five-syllable name.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ibid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoopi Goldberg, &lt;em&gt;A Knight in Camelot&lt;/em&gt;, anyone? I can't even imagine the range of awesome feats of awesomeness one could pull of for barbarians ca. 12th century with 22nd century technology. Not that one would even have to, given even predicting weather (using meteorology equipment from the airships), or healing, would make a shaman &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; shaman.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypnosis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earthmen seem to be in possession of at least some sort of a mind-control technology, as seen in the following excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Budach gave an awkward laugh. “Yes, I see, it’s not that simple,” he said. “Somehow I’ve never thought about these things before. We seem to have considered everything. Although,” he leaned forward, “here’s another possibility. Make it so that people love work and knowledge more than anything, so that work and knowledge are the only meanings of their existence!”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, that’s another thing we were planning to try, thought Rumata. &lt;strong&gt;Mass hypnoinduction&lt;/strong&gt;, positive remoralization. &lt;strong&gt;Hypnoemitters&lt;/strong&gt; on three equatorial satellites. “I could do this, too,” he said. “But should we deprive mankind of its history? Should we exchange one mankind for another? Would it not be the same thing as wiping mankind off the face of the planet and creating a new mankind in its place?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 8; emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this does not mean, or even imply, that they have more localised (portable) version of this technology, or that it was ever used, one could be convinced that it is possible. It would not be necessary to brainwash too many people to get one agent placed, as the peasantry does not have to be briefed on the new noble don in town (they'll learn from rumours anyway). &quot;Nudging&quot; even one noble don to introduce our agent to the court would be enough for a good start. In Don Condor's case, he did not necessarily &lt;em&gt;start&lt;/em&gt; as the Chief Justice and Holder of the Great Seals. I suspect it is entirely possible that he started from lower ranks, and moved up the court ladder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Training and knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this agent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stephan Orlovsky, also known as Don Capata, the commander of a company of His Imperial Majesty’s crossbowmen, ordered his soldiers to open fire on the executioners at a public torture of eighteen Estorian witches; he cut down the judge and two court bailiffs and was lanced by the Imperial Guard. Writhing in agonies of death, he shouted, “But you’re human! Get them, get them!” — but few heard him over the roar of the crowd: “Fire! More fire!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A military man. We have seen in the book that the operatives not only possess advanced technology, but also considerable prowess in battle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fifteen well-fed bumpkins with axes weren’t too much for a man who’d mastered methods of battle that would only become known on this planet three centuries in the future. The mob pressed forward and fell back. A number of axes remained on the floor; two storm troopers were doubled over and clambering into the back rows, carefully cradling their dislocated arms. Rumata had complete mastery of the fan defense, in which attackers are faced with a solid curtain of gleaming steel, and breaking through this curtain seems impossible.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 6.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rumata stood on the windowsill, continuing to make threatening gestures with his sword, and at that very moment &lt;strong&gt;a spear came out of the dark yard and hit him in the back&lt;/strong&gt;. It was a terrible blow. &lt;strong&gt;It didn’t pierce the metalstrom shirt&lt;/strong&gt;, but it knocked him off the windowsill and threw him onto the floor.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ibid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mastery of martial arts, fencing, probably also archery (see prologue), and armour that cannot be pierced by anything known back then is a good recipe for promoting a military man all the way up the army rankings.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-04-16T17:21:56.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2352" CreationDate="2017-04-16T19:37:21.593" Score="11" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mark Dunn's &quot;progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable&quot; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ella Minnow Pea&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the populace of a small island are forbidden the use of certain letters of the English alphabet in speech and writing as they fall off of a sign. The story develops as characters write letters to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one letter, dated &quot;Topsy Turvy, Octavia 19&quot; (Thursday, October 19 -- at this point, the letters &quot;D&quot; and &quot;B&quot; are forbidden) and addressed to Nate, Tassie includes a postscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PS. The Mephistophelians live here. Not in the Orient. You will get my meaning later.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;em&gt;Ella Minnow Pea&lt;/em&gt; (First Anchor Books Edition, October 2002), page 128 (paperback)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mephistophelian&quot; was one of the words I learned from this book. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freedictionary.org/?Query=mephistophelian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FreeDictionary.org&lt;/a&gt;, the word is an adjective, and means &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;showing the cunning or ingenuity or wickedness typical of a devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that, when used as a noun, the word refers to devils. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what Tassie is trying to get at here. As far as I could tell, the meaning of this PS is not clarified in later points of the book (contrary to the assurance at the end of the message).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point in the story (after a good number of letters are illegal, before people are allowed to use similar-sounding letters in their place), people often used less common synonyms instead of words that contain &quot;illicitabeticals.&quot; It is likely, then, that &quot;Mephistophelians&quot; will stand in for &quot;devils&quot; or &quot;demons&quot; (D is a forbidden letter at this point, along with B, F, J, K, Q, and Z), but I don't know to whom, in particular, Tassie refers. It might be the Island High Council, the island rebels, or something more abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't either know why these devils belong in the Orient. This could be a reference to island geography (although I'm not sure why it would be necessary to replace &quot;east&quot; with &quot;Orient&quot;) or to something outside the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:47:27.910" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:47:27.910" Title="Who are the Mephistophelians?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ella-minnow-pea&gt;&lt;mark-dunn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2351" CreationDate="2017-04-17T12:17:19.483" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the page immediately behind the post-script OP quoted, we can read the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Six big devils from Japan quickly forgot how to waltz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note this sentence contains every letter in the alphabet, hence fitting all requirements but length.&#xA;&quot;The Mephistophelians live here. Not in the Orient.&quot; could be translated: the &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;evils live here, not in &lt;strong&gt;J&lt;/strong&gt;apan (forbidden letters highlighted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tassie is working on a shorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pangram&lt;/a&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_quick_brown_fox_jumps_over_a_lazy_dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nollop's&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;Enterprise 32;&quot; the &quot;six big devils&quot; sentence is her latest attempt at the time of the writing of this letter (44 characters), and presumably was included in the envelope together with the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second reference to this is made in the farewell letter of Amos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The devils aren't in Japan! The devils are here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later in the same letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The liquor jugs could be the devil (remember that Amos is alcoholic) that solve the issue!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bigger morale here is that problems can be solved by looking at our faults and wrongs, rather than searching for explanations far away from ourselves. In my opinion the post script is intended both as an enigma, and to explain part of the moral behind the book (local solutions for local issues, rather than accepting unfair laws and searching outside culprits/explanations).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="255" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T14:18:50.587" LastActivityDate="2017-04-19T14:18:50.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2355" CreationDate="2017-04-17T19:36:23.403" Score="12" ViewCount="2448" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a specific scene of &lt;em&gt;Requiem for a Nun&lt;/em&gt; by William Faulkner, Temple Drake states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Temple Drake is dead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response, Gavin, Nancy's lawyer, responds: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The past is never dead. It's not even past. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this famous quote mean in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1336" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-23T07:29:56.150" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T07:29:56.150" Title="Meaning of this William Faulkner quote" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2423" CreationDate="2017-04-17T23:57:01.323" Score="10" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arkanar, Irukan, Soan, ... there are several countries mentioned and given at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; description and fleshing out in the book. &lt;strong&gt;Are any of these intended to be direct parallels of specific real-life countries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could see Arkanar being the USSR, especially since &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2238/17&quot;&gt;Don Reba is based on the Soviet figure Beria&lt;/a&gt;, but there could also be elements of the Spanish Inquisition in Reba's pogroms. Is there any evidence, either from the text itself or from interviews with the authors, for Arkanar or any of the other countries mentioned being modelled on particular countries in the real world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T13:55:54.137" Title="Are any of the countries in Hard to Be a God based specifically on particular real-life countries?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2353" CreationDate="2017-04-18T09:42:03.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never read the book, but I always assumed it meant something to the effect of &quot;What happened to us in our past isn't gone and forgotten. It affects us all the time. It's with us in every moment.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-04-18T13:23:07.673" LastActivityDate="2017-04-18T13:23:07.673" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T19:56:18.830" Score="6" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Doll%27s_House&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second volume of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tells the story of Rose Walker and her relationship with Dream as the vortex of the modern era. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was reading the volume, I was initially confused about how the prologue (#9 &quot;Tales in the Sand&quot;) and Part Four (#13 &quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot;) related to the narrative of the complete volume. While there are volumes of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; that don't have a single story line (like the third volume, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Dream_Country&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dream Country&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), I think it's clear that &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the end of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, I think it's pretty clear that the prologue's purpose was to introduce Desire's conspiracy against Dream that played out over the course of the volume. However, I still wonder about &quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot; -- it certainly connects to other parts of the overall storyline of the Sandman (for example, setting up a working relationship with Will Shakespeare for #19 &quot;A Midsummer Night's Dream&quot;); does it connect to the particular storyline of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;? I think it might fit better among the other standalone stories of &lt;em&gt;Dream Country&lt;/em&gt;, rather than in the middle of the cohesive narrative of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot; doesn't really fit in well in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Doll%27s_House#Plot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's description of the plot&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-19T22:01:26.827" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T15:56:27.890" Title="Does part four of Doll's House add to the narrative of the volume?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2356" CreationDate="2017-04-19T22:25:30.513" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to remember in this case that &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; was originally published in monthly issues; they were connected by overarching stories, but weren't collected in volumes. Thus I replace the question &quot;Does part four of Doll's House add to the narrative of the volume?&quot; with the question &quot;Why was the story 'Men of Good Fortune' collected in &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer appears to be [somewhat trivial]: Morpheus' most recent meeting with Robert Gadling takes place roughly at the same time as the main story arc of &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was important to have &quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot; appear exactly at this point, because this is when it is set chronologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming you read the monthly issues, source of possible confusion becomes clear: Gaiman says that the end of the issue #12 (&quot;Playing House&quot;) should have had &lt;em&gt;&quot;Next: The Prior Engagement&quot;&lt;/em&gt; written in the end. Editor or typer took it out from the issue, since the following issue (#13, &quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot;) does not have that title. My digital trade paperback has the notice: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eHWj2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eHWj2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Jed: &amp;quot;Jed. Why are you wearing those things? It&amp;#39;s so dark. Can you see okay?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Sure I can see, Jed. I can see everything. I can see just fine.&amp;quot; (NEXT: THE PRIOR ENGAGEMENT)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the maths: Robert and Morpheus met in the year of our Lord 1389, and agreed to meet once in a hundred years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e6ED6m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e6ED6m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hob Gadling: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#39;t mind them. They&amp;#39;re thick as King Dick, the lot of them. A hundred years&amp;#39; time. On this day. I will see you in the year of our lord fourteen hundred and eighty nine, then.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus we know that they must have met in 1989. We can compare that using the dates from the prologue of &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, where Morpheus, immediately after the events on the Skerry, goes to the Threshold, Desire's realm, and says Unity was raped 50 years before that (i.e. it should be 1939):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iucD6m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iucD6m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus: &amp;quot;Obviously that is exactly what I am doing. And I am accusing you of more than that. Desire - who was Rose&amp;#39;s grandfather? Who fathered her mother on sleeping Unity, fifty years ago?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;, however, it all gets confused: we can conveniently see that Unity was not raped in 1939, but in 1932:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bTPHj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bTPHj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;July 1939. Ellie Marsten is in a charity ward. She&amp;#39;s still asleep. She has woken twice in the last decade... Each time she cried for her mother. She still thinks she is eight. Unity Kinkaid was raped, seven years ago. She gave birth to a baby girl. The scandal was hushed up.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we change &quot;years&quot; to &quot;months&quot;, this panel fits into the timeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked Neil Gaiman on Twitter about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gallifreyan&lt;/strong&gt;: Hi there! A question about chronology in The Sandman: is this panel's timing wrong? Shouldn't Unity have been raped in 1939?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/855106252963061761&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neil Gaiman&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: I think Morpheus is approximating. And probably should have rounded up, not down. But he was in a glass prison while it was all happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it appears that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36823405#36823405&quot;&gt;Shokhet was right&lt;/a&gt; again saying that the number 50 does not have to be precise; &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36824957#36824957&quot;&gt;I was right too&lt;/a&gt;, saying that 57 rounds up to 60 instead of 50. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it &lt;strong&gt;makes sense&lt;/strong&gt; for the events of &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; to take place in 1989. Consider this panel from &lt;em&gt;The Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wdrZvm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wdrZvm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Solicitor: &amp;quot;Your... Uh, your grandmother woke on September the 14th, 1988.&amp;quot; Rose: &amp;quot;Something like that. How do you know?&amp;quot; Solicitor: &amp;quot;That was when Alex fell asleep. Irony, eh?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The solicitor says Unity awoke in 1988, same time Alex Burgess fell asleep, i.e. when Morpheus broke out and put him in a nightmare. Thus it is chronologically more probable for the events of &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; to be set in 1989 (i.e. &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt; ended somewhere between 1988 and 1989). Either Morpheus doesn't know that 57 should be rounded up to 60, or that panel from &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt; must be confusing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_Companion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Hy Bender (page 44) raises an interesting point here: during his encounter with Brute and Glob (in &quot;Playing House&quot;), Morpheus tells Hippolyta Hall that he has &quot;a prior engagement&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N59jLm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N59jLm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus: &amp;quot;I have a prior engagement, I am afraid. I can discuss this no further. I will see you again, Hippolyta. Until then. Fare well.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next story after that is &quot;Men of Good Fortune&quot;. Thus, Bender makes the conclusion that the prior engagement is Morpheus' meeting with Robert Gadling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is backed by Gaiman's words on those pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;N.G&lt;/strong&gt;: [...] The prior engagement referred to, of course, was the Sandman's centennial appointment with Hob Gadling in 1989; and it was genuinely important for Dream not to miss it, because it was the meeting in which he affirmed their friendship.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4, page 54.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in the same chapter 4 of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, Gaiman asserts multiple times that he &lt;strong&gt;intended&lt;/strong&gt; for their meetings to take place in 1989.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@Shokhet is also right to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36816656#36816656&quot;&gt;assert&lt;/a&gt; that the comics were supposed to be set in the year they were published, and the same chapter for the companion confirms that Gaiman was writing them in '89.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could, however, ask: &quot;Why not collect the story in some other volume, like, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Fables_%26_Reflections&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fables and Reflections&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&quot;. And the answer is - it'd be too late and crammed. Hob Gadling's story must be told before further volumes, and though dates may be fuzzy, most evidence shows that it fits into the chronology of &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T18:01:07.737" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T18:01:07.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-19T23:38:12.107" Score="7" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Asbjørnsen og Moe are the Norwegian answers to the Brothers Grimm, the collectors of what is still considered the definitive volume of Norwegian folk tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many of these tales were taken from stories which already existed in written form, and were any of them the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; written versions of stories which had previously existed only in oral form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T07:46:07.580" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T07:46:07.580" Title="Were any of the Asbjørnsen og Moe stories transcribed directly from oral traditions?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;asbjornsen-and-moe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2360" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2370" CreationDate="2017-04-20T02:50:10.860" Score="8" ViewCount="1745" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the prologue to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Doll%27s_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #9 &quot;Tales in the Sand&quot;), Gaiman tells the story of Queen Nada. Neil Gaiman is not African, nor (as far as I could tell) were any of the people who worked with him. Therefore, I wonder if the &lt;a href=&quot;http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Sandman_Vol_2_9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;story of Queen Nada&lt;/a&gt; has a parallel in traditional African stories. If not that particular story, I'd still like to know whether the form of the story (outlined below) is a traditional one. (&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; section below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tale is told only once to each man, as part of a manhood ritual:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7MH4x.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7MH4x.png&quot; alt=&quot;Two African men in traditional garb, standing side by side, holding spears. A narrator&amp;#39;s box says &amp;quot;One tale is only ever told once.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;page 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story-teller and the boy travel together into the desert, and the&#xA;story-teller commands the boy to find something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TF6Tx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TF6Tx.png&quot; alt=&quot;The old man, talking to the young.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;page 3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old man: Now you must go and find something, and bring it back to me.&#xA;  And when you have brought it back to me I will tell you the tale.&#xA;  While you are looking, I will make the fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Young man: But Grandfather...&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; must I find?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EFUnt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EFUnt.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;page 3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old man: You will know when you find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another form of the tale is told by women, in a language that they&#xA;keep from the men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTWjI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PTWjI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Narration box: There are tales the women tell, in the private tongue men-children are never taught and older men are too wise to learn, and these tales are not told to men.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;page 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npwje.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/npwje.png&quot; alt=&quot;The two men walking back from the desert.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;page 24&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Narration box: There is another version of the tale. That is the tale&#xA;  the women tell each other, in their private language men-children are&#xA;  not taught, and the old men are too wise to learn. And in that version&#xA;  of the tale perhaps things happened differently. But then, that is a&#xA;  women's tale, and it is never told to men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing the tale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the tragic love between Dream and Queen Nada. Fearing the&#xA;  consequences of loving an immortal, Nada spurns Dream. In anger, Dream&#xA;  sends Nada to Hell, where she remains to the present day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Google searches for &quot;Queen Nada&quot; only returned pages dedicated to &lt;a href=&quot;http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Nada_(New_Earth)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the comic book character&lt;/a&gt;. I did manage to find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.boomtron.com/2010/09/sandman-tales-in-the-sand-neil-gaiman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; criticizing the gendered storytelling and the depiction of Africa by non-Africans (even though that author admits that they story told is told well even through these unlikeable means). That page does not contain any information about the specific tale, or its form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, my questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the story of Queen Nada one that is told in an African oral tradition?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If yes, is there another, known version of the tale that was specific to women?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If not, is the form of storytelling portrayed in &quot;Tales in the Sand&quot; loyal to traditional forms of storytelling in Africa?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T00:26:28.617" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T00:26:28.617" Title="Is the story of &quot;Tales in the Sand&quot; (or its form) faithful to traditional African stories?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:01:16.843" Score="8" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story I'm looking for is one I read only once over a decade ago for class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is set in a small town in the U.S., sometime around the 1950s, 60s, akin to &quot;Monsters are Due on Maple Street.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story, the town is planning and then gathers as a mob to evict a man and his family from their home due to the fact that the man they're going after struck and killed an elderly man with this car sometime before the start of the story.  During the planning stages, I think I remember we get little snippets of different households' residents and all their flaws and complexities in their day to day life, and how their eviction of this murderous man has affected their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole town ends up on the man's front step, but when he comes out to face them, he repels them by basically owning his mistake completely and shaming the mob for treating him as less than human.  He acknowledges that he made a grave mistake he can never make up for, but he scolds them for losing sight of their own humanity trying to find a scapegoat.  I remember some of the words used were that his own words made the crowd &quot;rock back on their heels.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be greatly appreciated in finding this story!    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1343" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T03:10:17.040" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T17:01:40.090" Title="Looking for a short story about a small-town mob who goes after a man who had accidentally killed another man" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2362" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:19:32.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T03:19:32.827" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T03:19:32.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2363" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:19:32.827" Score="0" Body="Mark Dunn is an American author and playwright. He authored [ella-minnow-pea], among other novels." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T07:22:14.103" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T07:22:14.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2364" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:20:32.033" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T03:20:32.033" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T03:20:32.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2365" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:20:32.033" Score="0" Body="A &quot;progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable&quot; by Mark Dunn. Use this tag together with [mark-dunn]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T07:22:05.990" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T07:22:05.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="673" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:21:21.863" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I interpreted the scene with the highway and the skeleton as a subtle bit of foreshadowing. It'll take some inference to get there, so bear with me if you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The highway is the progress of history&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pavel says as much in the given quote: &quot;The highway was anisotropic, like history. You weren’t supposed to go back.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, going back through history is exactly what Anton does. He immerses himself in the society of Arkanar, which the people of Earth consider to be at an earlier point of historical progression. More than Don Condor or Pavel himself, Anton goes native. He has real friends among the natives, like Baron Pampas. He falls in love with Kira, a native woman. He even adopts the passionate hatred of the natives, abandoning the more appropriate dispassion and pity, as he himself notes in Chapter 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why? What has happened to me? Where did it go, my nurtured-since-childhood respect and trust in my own kind, in man— the amazing creature called man? Nothing can help me now, he thought in horror. Because I sincerely hate and despise them. Not pity them, no— only hate and despise. I can justify the stupidity and brutality of the kid I just passed all I want— the social conditions, the appalling upbringing, anything at all— but I now clearly see that he’s my enemy, the enemy of all that I love, the enemy of my friends, the enemy of what I hold most sacred. And I don’t hate him theoretically, as a “typical specimen,” but him as himself, him as an individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a little further on in the same long monologue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I came here to love people, to help them unbend, see the sky. No, I’m a bad operative, he thought remorsefully. I’m a no-good historian. When exactly did I manage to fall into the swamp that Don Condor was talking about? Does a god have the right to feel anything other than pity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though Anton has not literally traveled through time, he's absorbed himself so thoroughly in historical conditions that he's started to adopt historical ways of thinking—hatred, vindictiveness—even while he keeps his values. Anton still values the things he was taught to value on Earth, like learning, curiosity, discovery, and peace, but he despises those who don't embody those values, instead of just condescendingly pitying them and hoping for the enlightenment of their descendants. It becomes so bad that he fantasizes about killing Don Reba and starting his own rebellion in Chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the very thought that thousands of others— maybe less talented but also honest and truly noble people— were fatally doomed caused an icy chill in his chest and an awareness of his own vileness. Sometimes this awareness became so acute that his mind would become clouded, and Rumata could almost see the backs of the gray bastards illuminated by lilac flashes of gunfire, and Don Reba’s eternally insignificant, pale visage contorted with animal terror, and the Merry Tower collapsing on itself. Yes, that’d be sweet. That would be actual work. An actual macroscopic impact.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt; (Rediscovered Classics) (p. 77). Chicago Review Press. Kindle Edition. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also thinks how he envies Arata, the consummate rebel who struggles against the crown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arata was the only person here for whom Rumata felt neither hatred nor pity, and in his earthling’s dreams— the feverish dreams of a man who had lived for five years surrounded by stench and blood— he often imagined himself as such an Arata, having received the high right to murder the murderers, torture the torturers, and betray the traitors for having passed through all the hells of the universe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid pp. 213-214&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing that ends his fantasies is foreknowledge of the rapine that would follow such an uprising:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then the inevitable. Bloody chaos in the country. The surfacing of Waga’s night army, ten thousand thugs excommunicated by every church— rapists, murderers, and sadists; hordes of copper-skinned barbarians descending from the mountains and destroying everything that moves, from newborns to the aged; huge crowds of peasants and townspeople, blind with terror, fleeing to the forests, mountains, and deserts [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, p. 77.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither Anka nor Pavel follow Anton up the highway. Neither feels the same temptation he does: Pavel manages to maintain a proper distance from his work, while Anka stays on Earth, ever the cautious one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The skeleton represents figures like Don Reba who obstruct the progress of history&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 10, Anton sums up Reba thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We’ve been racking our brains, vainly trying to squeeze the complicated, contradictory, enigmatic figure of our eagle Don Reba into the ranks of Richelieu, Necker, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Monck, and he turned out to be a petty hoodlum and an idiot! He betrayed and sold out everyone he could, got tangled up in his own schemes, got scared to death, and ran to the Holy Order to be saved. In half a year he’ll be slaughtered, and the Order will remain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid, pp. 220-221.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Reba's determination to fight, to impose his own will on the country, led to his own death; he purposefully chained himself to his weapon by refusing to stop weaving schemes within schemes, trying to improve his own lot; but in the end, chained to the gun, he couldn't stop fighting, and he had to take things to their bitter conclusion. His legacy ended there as he sank into the ground, pulled down by his weapon, the Holy Order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The bridge represents the dark age that Arkanar has fallen into by the end of the book&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the highway is the progress of history, the bridge was what allowed civilization to move smoothly from one age into the next. But the bridge was blown up, probably in the same battle that the fascist died in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the bridge, making progress up the road is difficult. But it's not impossible to ford a river or wade through a swamp or trundle through a valley. It's slow, dangerous, and many more will die than would have walking across the bridge. But some can still make it to the other side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Arkanar at the end of the novel: their society's bridge to the next era of history has been blown up thanks to Don Reba. People who would have survived into the next age will now die, and the path for those who survive will be much harder than it would have been. But because Anton and his colleagues managed to save at least a few of the people who will usher in the next era, it's still possible for their society to finally come out on the other side and continue down the road of history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="115" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T03:30:51.560" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T03:30:51.560" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2367" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2369" CreationDate="2017-04-20T03:41:57.487" Score="10" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, there is the matter of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/673/481&quot;&gt;skeleton chained to a machine gun&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;An anisotropic road,&quot; Anton explained. Anka stood with her back to&#xA;  him. &quot;Traffic can move only in one direction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also remembered by the characters later in the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Anka,” Pashka said. “Do you remember the anisotropic highway?” Anka&#xA;  frowned. “What highway?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Anisotropic. The one with the do-not-enter sign. Remember, the three&#xA;  of us went there?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I remember. It was Anton who said that it was anisotropic.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That was the time Anton went through the sign, and when he came back,&#xA;  he said that he found a blown-up bridge and the skeleton of a fascist&#xA;  chained to a machine gun.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t remember that,” said Anka. “So what?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I often think about that highway nowadays,” said Pashka. “Like&#xA;  there’s some connection. The highway was anisotropic, like history.&#xA;  You weren’t supposed to go back. But he did go back. And stumbled on a&#xA;  chained skeleton.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Olena Bormashenko, Gollancz,&#xA;  pages 230-231.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to look up the meaning of &quot;anisotropic&quot; when I encountered it in &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, but was amused to learn it again in chemistry class a short while later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what word was used for &quot;anisotropic&quot; in the original, and whether the original word belongs more to science than to literature, as the English word does (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=anisotropic&amp;amp;rdfrom=Anisotropic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, for example, lists only a mathematics/physics definition).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What word was used in the original Russian for &quot;anisotropic&quot;? Does that word also usually carry a scientific definition?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in this information mostly out of curiosity, and nothing else; however, it may have relevance to the interpretation of the symbology of that scene, asked about in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/673/481&quot;&gt;linked question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T12:09:00.900" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T12:09:00.900" Title="What word was used for &quot;anisotropic&quot; in the original Russian text of &quot;Hard to Be a God&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2380" CreationDate="2017-04-20T05:29:34.707" Score="7" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a poem I read years ago that I can't remember the name of. The setting is rural, possibly set in 19th or 20th century United States. A young man, possibly even a teenager, suddenly has some major medical problem. His sister calls for the doctor, who gives the young man some ether and tries to save him, but to no avail and he passes away. The most striking thing I can remember is that at the end of the poem, possibly the last line or two, goes something like &quot;And they all went about with their lives/For it had not been them who had died&quot;. Obviously, that's not the exact line, and I can't even remember if it was in rhyming verse, but the poem did conclude with something to that effect. The only other notable thing I can remember is that the poem was at most a few stanzas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1344" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:17:50.203" Title="Poem about a young man who dies" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2367" CreationDate="2017-04-20T05:55:40.907" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original Russian version does not use any made-up or composite word for &quot;anisotropic&quot;. &quot;Anisotropic&quot; is a real world present in English language; it is used in science, as well as technology. &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.britannica.com/science/anisotropy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Britannica&lt;/a&gt; defines it as following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anisotropy, in physics, the quality of exhibiting properties with different values when measured along axes in different directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is consistent with what we see from Pavel's explanation in the epilogue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The highway was anisotropic, like history. You weren’t supposed to go back. But he did go back. And stumbled on a chained skeleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Say, a diode is anisotropic (it offers resistance one way, and no resistance the other); moving away from science, there are one-way roads, as the one in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is of Greek origin (&quot;anisos&quot; = unequal, &quot;tropos&quot; = turn) according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/anisotropic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Oxford Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/anisotropic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian counterpart, as I would expect from a word of Greek origin, sounds exactly the same (&quot;anizotropnoye&quot;; pronounce &quot;ahn-eezo-trope-no-yeah&quot; if you wish):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Шоссе было &lt;strong&gt;анизотропное&lt;/strong&gt;, как история. Назад идти нельзя. А он пошел. И наткнулся на прикованный скелет.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find examples of usage of the Russian word, &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com.tr/#en/ru/anisotropic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;анизотропное&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in anything other than scientific articles, this book, and articles about this book. It is highly possible that the Strugatsky brothers adapted it for their purposes from scientific parlance, given that Boris Strugatsky worked in an observatory as a professional astronomer, and Arkady Strugatsky was a professional translator of technical literature from multiple languages, including English and Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T05:55:40.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2360" CreationDate="2017-04-20T06:09:36.023" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite conveniently, Neil Gaiman answered this in his interview with Hy Bender for &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;. In chapter 4, which is devoted to &lt;em&gt;Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, Hy asks Neil whether he was inspired by anything in particular for this story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HB&lt;/strong&gt;: The first story proper, &amp;quot;Tales in the Sand&amp;quot;, reads like a true African fairy tale. Given its authentic feel, I was surprised to learn that you didn't do any research for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;I didn't do any research specifically for the story&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I'd been reading African myths and folk tales for years - like the ones about Anansi, the trickster spider god - and lots of them stuck in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HB&lt;/strong&gt;: What about the intriguing tales you allude to on page 1: &amp;quot;The Lizard Who Lost His Male Member&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Trickster Who Sold Ape Dung to King Lion Telling Him It Was the Soul of the Moon&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: I made those up, too. [&lt;em&gt;Laughter&lt;/em&gt;.] Among the joys of this issue was that it was my first attempt in the series at &lt;strong&gt;pure pastiche&lt;/strong&gt; - that is, openly imitating an established style of storytelling. I'd played around with pastiche previously in terms of mood, but this was my first try at wholly &lt;strong&gt;imitating the voice and spirit of an anthropological and ethnographical folk tale&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was also excited about tackling something from an oral tradition, because I love the rhythm and language of such stories.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4: &amp;quot;The Doll's House&amp;quot;, page 50. Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus to answer your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Tales in the Sand&amp;quot; is not based on any real story; it is a pastiche of  African folk tales. Note that this doesn't mean there is no predating similar story, it's simply that Gaiman didn't know of any.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not a traditional tale, so there won't be a version of the story that is specific to women.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to Gaiman, he tried to imitate the form of storytelling of traditional African folk tales.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T13:40:27.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="337" CreationDate="2017-04-20T09:29:59.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no climax: this is likely intentional&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowling's early life was difficult. Her mother suffered from illness and she had an awkward relationship with her father. She longed to leave home for the big city. She then went on to suffer poverty and stigma as a single parent living in Scotland. These experiences have left her with strong beliefs about politics and society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these beliefs and experiences find a voice in The Casual Vacancy. Andrew's character and desires mirror aspects of her early home life. The Weedon family offer a realistic, if grim, example of life on the worst British council estates. Many of the middle class characters are preachy and uncaring, an attitude one can find exemplified in popular newspapers like the Daily Mail. Her desire, clearly, was to create an unflinching portrayal of everything she saw as wrong with British society. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/sep/22/jk-rowling-book-casual-vacancy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian&lt;/a&gt; has referred to the book as &amp;quot;a parable of national politics&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rowling herself has stated that she sees many of these problems as stemming from the judgemental nature of British politics and journalism. She has described British society as &amp;quot;phenomenally snobby&amp;quot; and the middle classes in particular as &amp;quot;pretentious&amp;quot;. She has also said, in connection with The Casual Vacancy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm interested in that drive, that rush to judgment, that is so prevalent in our society, We all know that pleasurable rush that comes from condemning, and in the short term it's quite a satisfying thing to do, isn't it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is a book about responsibility. In the minor sense—how responsible we are for our own personal happiness, and where we find ourselves in life—but in the macro sense also, of course: how responsible we are for the poor, the disadvantaged, other people’s misery.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that the working title of the novel was &amp;quot;Responsibility&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Minor spoilers follow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, then, does this tie in to the lack of a firm ending? The tragedy that culminates the novel stems from the judgements made against the Weedon family: with more support, Crystal would not be left desperate for love and affection, nor in charge of her little brother. But the ultimate failure is one of responsibility: society has failed in its responsibility for the Weedons, and Crystal herself has failed her personal responsibility for her sibling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The message Rowling wants to send, then, is that failing responsibility results in tragedy. She wants this message to be bleak and unflinching so as to mirror her own experiences at the sharp end of British society. She is unwilling to offer the reader easy answers to hard questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these things are achieved by the open-ended, unsatisfying nature of the ending: by failing to provide a hard climax she is telling her reader that these squalid tales and tragedies will continue, until people and politicians finally start to live up to their responsibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2021-01-07T08:17:06.540" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T08:17:06.540" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2381" CreationDate="2017-04-20T12:23:52.340" Score="8" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well established that Tolkien used his fiction as a means of filling gaps and solving riddles in the extant studies of mythology and linguistics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time, he chose to do this by supplying a definitive answer to a problem. His work, as a whole, was supposed to represent the lost body of English myth. In a more specific example, he address the problem of elves in northern European myth: these beings are divided into light, dark and swart elves on the one hand and wood and water elves on another. No clear explanation is given of these divisions in surviving myth. Tolkien &quot;solved&quot; the problem with his stories of the various sunderings of the Elves in the Silmarillion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That example is drawn from an essay on the Silmarillion by Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey. Right after, he makes a throwaway remark that the Silmarils themselves are a similar kind of &quot;solution&quot;. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Silmarils themselves, in my opinion, are an attempt to solve the mysterious riddle of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sampo&lt;/a&gt;, an undefined object often referred to in the Finnish Kalevala - Tolkien was fond of Finnish, modeled aspects of Quenya on it, and furthermore admired the Kalevala as a product of exactly the kind of literary rescue-project he would have liked to see in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academics have apparently been arguing for years about what the Sampo is, and/or represents, and seem to have concluded that a definitive answer is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this essay - and the bit at the end about the &quot;rescue-project&quot; - would seem to strongly imply that by &quot;solve&quot;, here, Shippey means a solid, practical &quot;solution&quot; as per the question of Elvish identity, not an allegorical one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other writers have drawn parallels between the Sampo and the Silmarils. And after a cursory read around the subject, it's clear there are significant similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are once-in-a-lifetime objects created by god-like craftsmen at the height of their powers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are locked away and then stolen, and this action sets in motion a chain of tragic events.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both end up being lost in the sea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples, with these being the strongest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while all this strongly suggests that Tolkien's story of the Silmarils was inspired by the Sampo, it does not seem clear how it &quot;solves&quot; the mythical problem of what the Sampo is and what it represents. So, what does Shippey mean by his remark that the Silmarils address this problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T18:21:01.113" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:06:55.020" Title="How do the Silmarils solve the puzzle of the Sampo?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;the-silmarillion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T13:53:41.910" Score="5" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the following tanka by Saigo Hoshi which I came to read today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now indeed I know&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That when we said &amp;quot;remember&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and we swore it so,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it was in &amp;quot;we will forget&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that our thoughts truly met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1347" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T16:49:34.640" Title="What is the meaning of this tanka by Saigo Hoshi?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-20T15:37:57.337" Score="9" ViewCount="672" Body="&lt;p&gt;What features of Keats's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44478&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on Melancholy&lt;/a&gt;&quot; make it an ode? This is a question that seems to be important in our English class, yet I don't have a comprehensive answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines &quot;ode&quot;&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a lyric poem usually marked by exaltation of feeling and style,&#xA;  varying length of line, and complexity of stanza forms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most I can say is that he praises melancholy but there's definitely more than that if it's an important question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T13:24:03.563" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T18:46:09.910" Title="Why is &quot;Ode on Melancholy&quot; an Ode?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2375" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3115" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:28:57.217" Score="10" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;C. S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; includes a scene of what amounts to the Last Judgment (I don't recall the exact chapter, but it's toward the end of the book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The creatures came rushing on, their eyes brighter and brighter as they drew nearer and nearer to the standing Stars. But as they came right up to Aslan one or other of two things happened to each of them. They all looked straight in his face, I don't think they had any choice about that. And when some looked, the expression of their faces changed terribly - it was fear and hatred: except that, on the faces of Talking Beasts, the fear and hatred only lasted for a fraction of a second. &lt;strong&gt;You could see that they had suddenly ceased to be &lt;em&gt;Talking&lt;/em&gt; Beasts. They were just ordinary animals.&lt;/strong&gt; And all the creatures who looked at Aslan in that way swerved to their right, his left, and &lt;strong&gt;disappeared into his huge black shadow&lt;/strong&gt;, which (as you have heard) streamed away to the left of the doorway. &lt;strong&gt;The children never saw them again. I don't know what became of them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is C. S. Lewis endorsing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilationism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;annihilationism&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. &quot;conditional immortality&quot;, where some people become immortal and others either cease to exist or cease to be conscious) here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His statement that &quot;You could see that they had suddenly ceased to be &lt;em&gt;Talking&lt;/em&gt; Beasts&quot; and that they &quot;disappeared into his huge black shadow&quot; seems to suggest &quot;yes,&quot; but his statement that &quot;I don't know what became of them&quot; seems to suggest that Lewis is deliberately trying to avoid taking a position on exactly what happened to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T17:02:05.233" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:02:05.233" Title="Does C. S. Lewis support annihilationism in The Last Battle?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2376" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:30:05.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T16:30:05.063" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T16:30:05.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2377" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-20T16:30:05.063" Score="0" Body="The Last Battle is the final book (chronologically) in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. Please use this for questions specific to that book; please also include the Chronicles of Narnia and C. S. Lewis tags." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T21:19:03.723" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:19:03.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2017-04-20T19:42:29.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, an ode is defined as a formal address to an event, person, or thing not present. Thus, this poem is an ode as it addresses Melancholy, which could be called a thing not present. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T19:42:29.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2368" CreationDate="2017-04-20T19:45:04.420" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are most likely talking about Robert Frost's poem, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/53087&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Out, Out-&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which fits your description and ends, &quot;And they, since they/Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-20T21:17:50.203" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:17:50.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2372" CreationDate="2017-04-20T21:06:55.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Shippey meant that this may have been Tolkien's goal at the beginning, but like Tolkien's other &quot;solutions&quot; he seems to have abandoned it as the story grew in the telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's conceit of the Silmarillion as a mythology for England was largely abandoned through the constant rewrites. In fact, Tolkien abandoned it even more thoroughly than the finished Silmarillion we see today. Tolkien realized during the 1950s and 60s that the project needed a ground-up rewrite. Most prominent among those is the &quot;flat earth&quot; problem. Tolkien's early beautiful myth of the sun and the moon assumed a flat earth (originally, shaped like a giant boat). Later, he added a story where the earth became &quot;bent&quot; (round), removing Valinor from the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this reads like a mythical form being replaced by science, and that just didn't square with the man who devised not one but several different kinds of calendars calculated to four decimal places. So he set about replacing it with a purely round world, and that was his final thoughts on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When his son set about crafting &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, he chose to use the earlier version, in part because that was more compatible with the published &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. Christopher also abandoned the frame story of Eriol/Aelfwine, which helped set the context for the myths as proto-English. These stories, too, had drifted over time, as did the location of Middle-earth and England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These illustrate how Tolkien may have begun with an intention of &quot;solving&quot; things, but it was rarely where he ended up. Shippey is well aware of that, so I think that's the context he intended it in: Tolkien may have set out to solve the problem of the Sampo, either consciously or unconsciously (he never mentioned it, certainly), but that tale quickly grew in the telling and took on a life of its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien remained a problem-solver. He continued to take inconsistencies in his own stories and turn them into stories of their own. His own rewrite of the Gollum story for the current edition of The Hobbit, to take into account his later re-casting of Gollum as a murderer and the ring as the Ring, becomes a footnote in the introduction about how the first edition was Bilbo's self-deceptive lie. And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-04-20T21:06:55.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2382" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5102" CreationDate="2017-04-20T23:10:35.347" Score="17" ViewCount="967" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some years ago I used to collect &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rupert_Bear&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rupert Bear&lt;/a&gt; annuals. I had a huge collection going all the way back to the 1940s, with some gaps which I slowly filled in over the years, and every time I got a new book, it meant reading several new Rupert stories. So I was rather disappointed when at some point (some time in the noughties, I think) they published a new Rupert annual in which at least one of the stories was exactly the same as one previously published - the Yeti story from 1990, if memory serves. But now I'm curious about whether this had any precedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the history of reusing Rupert Bear stories?&lt;/strong&gt; Was it ever done before? Has it become a regular thing in recent years, or did they do it once and then never again because of fan backlash? For that matter, what &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the exact year I remember in which they (?) started reusing stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:16:35.440" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T22:41:15.837" Title="When did the Rupert Bear stories start repeating themselves?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rupert-bear&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1966" CreationDate="2017-04-21T07:40:24.640" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you ask (and it's a really good question)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living etc and Elle Dec are interior decorating magazines, basically high-end furniture porn. My partner used to read them regularly (he's the one who designs the covers) so it was a minor in-joke at his expense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tatler and Country Life are THE upper-class magazines going, aimed at the aristocracy and gentry and those who want to be. (They are also notoriously the magazines that you find in dentists waiting rooms.) These are Draco actually researching who he is posing as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FHM and Loaded are &quot;lads mags&quot; and very much of their period. They're aimed at a different type of well off individual, like the City traders who bob up in DandD. They're sexist and flashy and full of gadgets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the magazines represent Draco trying on three different and somewhat incompatible identities without thinking what the combination of the three says about him (which shows why Hermione's right that he needs a Muggle-picker.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books are completely different. They're second-hand and have already stood the test of time (though not in Draco's ownership). They are all light literature from (or focussing on, in the case of Brideshead) the inter-war period and deal with people living in the country (the Highlands of Scotland, in the case of Monarch of the Glen) usually leisured people in large country houses who are nevertheless trying to process the horrors of WWI while keeping them at bay with light banter, leisured living and deflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the magazines are what Draco wants to appear to be, and the books tell us more about who he really is (or who he's trying to figure out he is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1350" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T07:40:24.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2356" CreationDate="2017-04-21T15:56:27.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36815609#36815609&quot;&gt;discussing this question in chat&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/11/gallifreyan&quot;&gt;Gallifreyan&lt;/a&gt; mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36816257#36816257&quot;&gt;that he had wondered about the significance of Hob Gadling&lt;/a&gt;, arguably the protagonist of &amp;quot;Men of Good Fortune.&amp;quot; We both mentioned our pet theories (&lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36816280#36816280&quot;&gt;Gallifreyan's&lt;/a&gt;: as a foil to Morpheus; &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36816319#36816319&quot;&gt;mine&lt;/a&gt;: to show how Dream's relationship with humanity changes over time), and that got me thinking about how I might answer that question should Gallifreyan choose to ask it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if &amp;quot;Men of Good Fortune&amp;quot; was included in &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; precisely to develop these characteristics of Dream? I posit that &lt;strong&gt;it is necessary to develop these pieces of Dream's character for the ending of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Let me explain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to understand why Dream is so conflicted in killing Rose Walker, it's necessary to first establish that he cares for humanity not only generally, but also that he cares for individuals. At the start of &amp;quot;Men of Good Fortune,&amp;quot; Morpheus is rather detached from humanity, and his older sister attempts to make him feel more for individuals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3sUjD.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3sUjD.png&quot; alt=&quot;Dream and Death dressed in ancient clothes.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Death (to Dream): Well, at least &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; go out and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;meet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; them. I&#xA;just think maybe it would be good for you to see them on &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;their&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;terms, instead of yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;page 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this initial meeting, Dream is not very interested in individual lives, discussing other matters while his sister is intently &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_watching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;people-watching&lt;/a&gt;. Death tells him &amp;quot;Shush, listen to the people&amp;quot; (page 3). At their first reunion, Dream insists that he only meets Gadling because &amp;quot;it might be interesting&amp;quot; (pages 4-6), treating Gadling more like an &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot; specimen than as a friend or acquaintance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their 19th Century meeting, Dream is greatly offended by Hob's implication that the Endless might need the friendship of a human. Before he storms out, Hob repeats the claim, and says that if Dream returns in a hundred years, he will be vindicated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bR6G7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bR6G7.png&quot; alt=&quot;Two panels. In the first, Dream is putting on his hat, speaking in a loud voice, and preparing to leave. Hob replies with an outstretched hand. In the second, Dream is rushing out the door, while Hob follows, still reaching.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Panel 1&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dream: You dare to call me lonely?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hob: Yes. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Panel 2&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hob: Tell you what. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'll&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; be here in a hundred's year&#xA;time. If &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you're&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; here then, too -- it'll be because we're&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;friends&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; other reason. Right? (Right?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;page 23&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the final meeting of Dream and Hob, in 1989, Dream makes it to his meeting with Hob. (Although he may have to rush to make this &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T1yrL.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prior engagement&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; mentioned on the penultimate page of &amp;quot;Playing House,&amp;quot; the issue that immediately precedes &amp;quot;Men of Good Fortune.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pWEei.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pWEei.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hob: I...I wasn't sure you'd be coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream: Really? I have always heard it was impolite to keep one's&#xA;friends waiting. Would you like a drink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;page 24&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we see that while Dream didn't originally care about individuals, by the time of his most recent meeting with Hob Gadling, he had developed the ability to call a human &amp;quot;friend,&amp;quot; along with the ability to recognize and care for an individual member of humanity. (This may be &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/36816426#36816426&quot;&gt;related to Dream's 70-year imprisonment&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important to the later parts of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, because although Dream clearly cares about his job and is engaged in protecting the dreaming well-being of large populations, he previously didn't care much about individual lives -- this was what allowed him to kill a vortex without pause. However, when Rose's turn comes to die at Dream's hand, he delays. Even though he knows who and what Rose is, he makes no move against her (and even goes out of his way to preserve her life) until she begins to cause problems in the Dreaming. Even then, he pauses to explain to her why she must die (and Rose even complains that he talks to much -- &amp;quot;Forchrissakes! Look, just do it. Stop apologizing and just do whatever you're going to do. Okay? Just do it.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument might be made that this is part of what caused Dream's reluctance to end Rose's life. And a reader would be entirely unaware of this part of Dream's struggle without having watched the evolution of Dream's relationship with individuals over the course of the centuries in &amp;quot;Men of Good Fortune.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #16, &amp;quot;Lost Hearts&amp;quot; page 11&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T15:56:27.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2385" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-21T13:01:27.917" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can hardly remember any of it, but it has been bugging me for days that I cannot seem to identify this strip. I know one fact for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginning of a volume started on a boat, in which 'invaders / evil guys' infiltrated the hut to search for a CD. On the deck, they question a father of a young child where it is, he then cannot help but look at his young child, and the villain smiles with 'of course' and rips open her teddy bear to steal the disk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to remember more, but this is everything I know for sure now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Roberrrt" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-21T16:17:26.787" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T16:17:26.787" Title="Strip / comic with a young child's teddy bear being ripped open for a CD" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2397" CreationDate="2017-04-21T18:51:31.340" Score="9" ViewCount="6575" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;em&gt;Possession&lt;/em&gt; contains some spot-on mimicry of several different writing styles, including lengthy poems by two fictional Victorian poets. The character of RH Ash in particular feels as if there is some model, or models, for him. He has a very distinct style and a distinct set of interests (including naturalism and Greek and Norse myths).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he similar to Tennyson, or Browning, or some other real poet, or an amalgam?  Or is he purely Byatt's creation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T01:28:43.290" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T01:28:43.290" Title="Is the character of Randolph Henry Ash based on any particular Victorian poet?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2017-04-21T18:58:55.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This is meant as a supplement to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2379/17&quot;&gt;@akr's concise answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ode&quot; derives from two Ancient Greek word for song: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Da)oidh%2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἀοιδή&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Dw)%7Cdh%2F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ᾠδή&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will note from the links that one of the entries for the first word is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1.song, a singing, whether the art of song, Hom.; or the act of singing, song&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2.the thing sung, a song, Hom., etc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3.the subject of song, Od.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=widh&amp;amp;la=greek#Perseus:text:1999.04.0058:entry=a)oidh/-contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perseus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English meaning, which akr concisely defines, includes this third, modifying meaning.  (A scholar of Linguistics recently quipped to me that &quot;usage is the gold standard&quot;, which is the usage akr presents.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these types of questions, you would definitely want to use a more comprehensive dictionary, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt; or similar resources, which delve into etymology.  However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=ode&amp;amp;allowed_in_frame=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this entry from the Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; reveals the limitations of various free resources, as the definition is not comprehensive, and fails to mention the relevant information in regards to your question. Wiktionary is normally a good resource, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also falls woefully short&lt;/a&gt; in its present state regarding this word.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ode was likely used because the poem is lyric and composed in honor of the subject&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T19:27:01.930" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:27:01.930" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1361" CreationDate="2017-04-21T19:21:25.247" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, consider the fact that many of the texts you mention include significant apocalyptic elements, too. In fact, imminent judgment is a major theme in the majority of the works you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Isaiah 6:8-13:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Then I said, “Here I am! Send me.” 9And he said, “Go, and say to this people:&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  “‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  10Make the heart of this people dull,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and their ears heavy,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and blind their eyes;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  lest they see with their eyes,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and hear with their ears,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and understand with their hearts,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and turn and be healed.”&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  11Then I said, “How long, O Lord?”&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  And he said:&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  “Until cities lie waste&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  without inhabitant,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and houses without people,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and the land is a desolate waste,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  12and the Lord removes people far away,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  and the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  13And though a tenth remain in it,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  it will be burned again,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  like a terebinth or an oak,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  whose stump remains&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  when it is felled.”&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  The holy seed is its stump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, that's quite different than what you'd normally expect from a work intend primarily as a utopian work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether the &quot;golden age for humanity&quot; is utopian, I suppose that depends somewhat on your view of the text and your definition of utopian work. Some of this depends, too, on your view of the relationship between authorial intent and meaning, so feel free to disagree with me on this point, but I think that there's a real sense in which the author has to actually &lt;em&gt;intend&lt;/em&gt; a utopian (or dystopian) work to be that. For example, books like &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; are clearly dystopian fiction, but in all three cases the authors were consciously writing dystopian fiction for the purpose of engaging in social commentary. They are also, in some sense, counterfactual: Suzanne Collins doesn't &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; think that the government's going to start running annual Hunger Games, but that's not really the point. You can say the same for utopian fiction, actually. I really don't think that that's what's going on with the texts you mention, though; while they certainly make heavy use of hyperbole and metaphor, I don't think that the authors were really intending the texts to be completely counterfactual in the way that you'd usually see with utopian or dystopian fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-04-21T19:21:25.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1100" CreationDate="2017-04-22T12:02:28.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.history.com/topics/the-art-of-war&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; gives a brief summary of its history of adoption in various countries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they do know is that copies of the book, typically written on sets of sewn-together bamboo slats, ended up in the hands of politicians, military leaders and scholars across China. From there, translated copies of “Sun Tzu’s” work found their way to Korea and Japan. &lt;strong&gt;(The oldest Japanese version dates from the 8th century A.D.)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more than 1,000 years, rulers and scholars across Asia consulted The Art of War as they plotted their military maneuvers and imperial conquests. Japanese samurai, for example, studied it closely. However, &lt;strong&gt;it did not reach the Western world until the end of the 18th century, when a Jesuit missionary translated the book into French.&lt;/strong&gt; (Historians say that the French emperor Napoleon was the first Western leader to follow its teachings.) It was finally &lt;strong&gt;translated into English in 1905.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- History.com (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done some fact checking and found sources for each of these claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Japan:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu#Legacy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, sourced to M. R. McNeilly, &lt;em&gt;Sun Tzu and the Art of Modern Warfare&lt;/em&gt; (2001), claims that &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; reached Japan (presumably in a translated version) in about &lt;strong&gt;760 AD&lt;/strong&gt;, and quickly became popular among generals and military leaders there. However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.classicsofstrategy.com/2015/11/sun-tzu-the-art-of-war-c-500-300-bc.html#2r&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this academic article&lt;/a&gt;, sourced to the 1971 Samuel Griffith translation of &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; itself, claims that it reached Japan in around &lt;strong&gt;516 AD&lt;/strong&gt; via Korea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Korea:&lt;/strong&gt; if the last article linked above is correct, then &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; was presumably translated into Korean some time in the &lt;strong&gt;5th or 6th century AD&lt;/strong&gt;. But unfortunately I haven't been able to find any more details about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Vietnam:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ho Chi Minh&lt;/a&gt; seems to have been the person who introduced &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; to Vietnam and translated it to Vietnamese, presumably in the &lt;strong&gt;late 1930s or early 1940s&lt;/strong&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sonshi.com/william-duiker-interview.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; with William Duiker, professor of East Asian studies and author of Ho Chi Minh's biography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;France:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; first reached the western world when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Joseph_Marie_Amiot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Father Amiot&lt;/a&gt;, a Jesuit missionary, translated it into French in &lt;strong&gt;1772&lt;/strong&gt;. It was this translation that first made the title &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Art de la Guerre&lt;/em&gt;), since the original Chinese title would be better translated as &lt;em&gt;Competitive Methods&lt;/em&gt;. The French translation remained obscure until Napoleon used it to conquer half of Europe. See &lt;a href=&quot;http://scienceofstrategy.org/main/content/first-western-translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; from Science of Strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;England:&lt;/strong&gt; Lionel Giles, a Victorian sinologist, is often credited as being the first to translate &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; into English, in 1910; his version is still considered the 'canonical' one to this day. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://chasethechampionship.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/The-Art-of-War-2010-Web-Version1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this edition&lt;/a&gt;'s acknowledgements for examples of this claim. In fact, the first English translation was published in &lt;strong&gt;1905&lt;/strong&gt; in Tokyo by one &lt;a href=&quot;https://markpeters.wordpress.com/2006/12/08/captain-calthrop-and-the-art-of-war/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Captain Calthrop&lt;/a&gt;, but it was roundly criticised by Giles before he produced his much better translation. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://suntzusaid.com/artofwar.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; for more details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T12:11:53.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="673" CreationDate="2017-04-22T20:25:11.743" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of the Soviet Union, which is where the book was written and where the framing story is presumably taking place, a “fascist” is someone from the Axis, an enemy in a war that had an especially heavy toll count. A “fascist” is also an ideological enemy, someone who opposes communism. I don't remember the text explicitly specifying that the skeleton dates back from the Great Patriotic War (i.e. World War II), it could be a later war, however the fact that only a skeleton is left and it has partly sunk into the ground may indicate that the skeleton is old and so the war was a long time in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that, specifically, the machine gun has sunk into the ground is I think symbolically indicating that in the world where Anton and the other children grow up, war is a thing of the past. History has reached its last stage, with everyone living happily in a worldwide communist society. The machine gun is no longer relevant, but the history is remembered — and this memory of a painful history in the protagonists' world is why they go and help other worlds through the difficult parts of their history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The road itself is styled as “Forgotten Highway”, which conveys the idea  that the horrors of war against fascism belong to the past more forcefully than the fact that the machine gun has sunk. The sinking of the machine gun does however indicate that the emotional feeling over the horrors of war is forgotten, the history that remains is more intellectual, more abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the skeleton of the fascist is &lt;em&gt;chained to a machine gun&lt;/em&gt; is quite significant. Soldiers were chained to machine guns to avoid them running away as far back as World War I&lt;sup&gt;1,2,3&lt;/sup&gt;. I don't know how much of that is historical fact and how much is propaganda or rumors&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;, but regardless it is cultural background that should be familiar to the intended audience of the novel. The fact that the soldier was chained to a machine gun indicates that he was not fully willing. He may have been reluctant, or outright forced to fight. The evil side, the responsibility for the war against good, is not on ordinary soldiers who are mostly deluded or coerced, but on their leaders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Young Anton saw this gruesome remainder of the horrors of war, and this undoubtedly made him more sensitive to the suffering of others than his fellow historians. (We only have Anton's word of what he saw, actually, but even if he made that up, it shows that the topic was preying on his mind.) This explains why, later in life, he struggles with the non-intervention policy of the Institute of Experimental History. He can't stand to see more people tied to a machine gun to fight for fascism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;em&gt;anisotropic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; road is one which is different depending on which direction you travel in. My understanding of it is that since the highway is anisotropic, going there and back again does not necessarily get you back to your point of origin. When Anton returns, he has been changed by what he saw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Pashka puts it at the end, Anton wasn't supposed to get emotionally involved with the concrete suffering of the pre-communist eras. But he did as a child, and this explains why he did as an adult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://addingham.info/letters-front/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ilkley Gazette – October 13th 1916: German Chained to a Machine Gun.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amedeoguillet.com/italian-libya-spanish-civil-war/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sebastian O'Kelly on photos of the Spanish Civil War by Amedeo Guillet&lt;/a&gt;: “There was also a gruesome picture of a dead youth chained to a machine gun so he could not run away.” &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flamesofwar.com/hobby.aspx?art_id=3187&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A biography of Leytenant Ivan Zabolotny&lt;/a&gt;: “Ivan was very grateful when, upon reaching the other side of the river, he found an Italian soldier who was chained to a machine gun, surrendering instead of firing.” &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; See for example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://forum.wehrmacht-awards.com/forums/showthread.php?t=202981&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forum thread “Japanese soldiers chained to their machine guns”&lt;/a&gt; for speculation on this topic. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2367/what-word-was-used-for-anisotropic-in-the-original-russian-text-of-hard-to-be&quot;&gt;A direct translation of the Russian original&lt;/a&gt;, and a rather technical word so there is no subtext to it other than the literal meaning. &lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T22:48:49.517" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T22:48:49.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2344" CreationDate="2017-04-22T23:39:07.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possible that Keats is using the adjective &quot;tight-rooted&quot; here to keep the tone of the first half of the poem consistent, in that tight-rooted has a connotation of being trapped and imprisoned, not free to roam the world. This is in keeping with the previous mention of the river Lethe, which was associated with lethargy in Greek mythology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T23:39:07.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-22T23:46:24.893" Score="5" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Sarojini Naidu say something about this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;When the house is on fire, the poet should stop singing, and get the&#xA;  buckets to put out the fire.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got this from a FB &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/169234266466751/photos/a.169253569798154.39496.169234266466751/1195288420527992/?type=3&amp;amp;comment_id=1195326127190888&amp;amp;comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R%22%7D&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;post&lt;/a&gt;. But I want to find out the original source of this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1354" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-22T23:52:53.967" LastActivityDate="2017-04-22T23:52:53.967" Title="Did Sarojini Naidu say this: When the house is on fire, the poet should stop singing...?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;sarojini-naidu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-23T01:05:17.150" Score="11" ViewCount="7610" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the names in the Harry Potter series are chosen so as to reflect some trait of their character. For example: Sirius Black the black dog, Remus Lupin the wolf, Severus the severe teacher, Luna Lovegood the eccentric but caring friend, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Narcissa&lt;/strong&gt; Malfoy's name seems to suggest that she's full of herself, but as far as I can tell, the main motivation driving her in the books is to protect her &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt;, not herself. She sacrifices a great deal for Draco, even essentially betraying Voldemort for his sake in the end - surely &quot;maternal&quot; would be a better way of describing her than &quot;narcissistic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why, then, the name Narcissa? What does this say about her character?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a narcissistic side to the way she's portrayed in the books which I've missed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T17:18:54.887" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T17:18:54.887" Title="What does Narcissa Malfoy's name say about her character?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-23T12:28:25.963" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story at least 15 years ago in a fairy tale compilation. The story had a teenager reading a novel hidden inside a textbook (forgot if it was math textbook or something else). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the story was either set in the real world or in the medieval ages. There was no magical element. I believe I might have read the story in Chinese, since I read it when I was in China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grandma was cleaning (I think) and she asked him if he was studying. He said yes. And then the grandma came over and ripped the books right out of his hands and said something like &quot;what's this? this doesn't look like a textbook&quot; and then shredded the novel to pieces. I think she might have also beaten him severely with a broomstick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1357" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-23T14:56:23.927" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T14:56:23.927" Title="Story where grandma rips her grandson's novel/textbook to shreds" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2393" CreationDate="2017-04-23T12:29:16.827" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoilers involved!&lt;/strong&gt; TL;DR at the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an interview (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2004/0304-wbd.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.beyondhogwarts.com/story.20040304.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theninemuses.net/hp/m.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;), the author says the following about the name Narcissa (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;queenmarion: I noticed in the Black Family tree that everyone is named after a constellation. Is this intentional? Does this have any bearing on the plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JK Rowling: It's just one of those family traditions, although Narcissa breaks the trend. &lt;strong&gt;I had always thought of her as 'Narcissa' so I decided not to change her to match the others when I came up with their names.&lt;/strong&gt; There's been a lot of speculation that she is in some way linked to Lily and Petunia, because of the flower theme, but I can put that rumour to rest here: she isn't related to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this isn't necessarily true, it does raise a lot of interesting questions about the connection between &amp;quot;Narcissa&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; names of people in the Harry Potter series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Constellation names in the Black family&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a start, the rest of the Black family are named after constellations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Narcissa's sisters are called &lt;strong&gt;Andromeda&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Bellatrix&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_(constellation)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andromeda&lt;/a&gt; is a constellation which can be seen in the northern hemisphere. It is named for Andromeda, daughter of Cassiopeia, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Greek myth&lt;/a&gt;, who was chained to a rock to be eaten by the sea monster Cetus. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellatrix&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bellatrix is a star&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion constellation&lt;/a&gt;, the third brightest. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion also features in Greek mythology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Narcissa however isn't a star or a constellation, but her name is still a part of Greek mythology: it is the female version of the male name &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narcissus&lt;/a&gt;, the man who drowned because he fell in love with his reflection in a pool of water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She does continue the star theme in the family when she names Draco. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(constellation)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Draco Constellation&lt;/a&gt; is named as it looks like a dragon, and &lt;em&gt;draco&lt;/em&gt; is the Latin form of dragon. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(constellation)#Mythology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragons play a big part in Greek mythology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Narcissa isn't named after a constellation or star may suggest she is slightly different from the rest of her family, and indeed she is in the fact that, to her, family is more important than Voldemort. But the fact that all their names are part of Greek myths show they are related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;People with flower names&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also mentioned in the quote is the flower theme. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_(plant)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narcissus is a genus of flowering plants&lt;/a&gt; which includes the daffodils, and Narcissa is only one of many characters in Harry Potter whose names relate to flowers. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2015-09-17/did-you-spot-all-these-hidden-references-in-jk-rowlings-harry-potter-names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Radio Times article&lt;/a&gt; gives a nice list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hogwarts itself also plays host to a number of flower-named characters, including Pansy Parkinson, Lavender Brown, Poppy Pomfrey and Beauxbatons visitor Fleur Delacour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important characters with flower names apart from Narcissa are of course the sisters Lily Potter and Petunia Dursley. While JK says that they aren't related to Narcissa, the fact they are all named after flowers might show something else. So what do Lily, Petunia and Narcissa have in common? Well, they all have completely different personalities, but they all have one thing in common. They are all very caring of their sons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lily&lt;/strong&gt; cared for Harry so much she sacrificed herself to save him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all know how Harry got that scar. Lily's love for Harry allowed him to be saved, but at the cost of Lily's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Petunia&lt;/strong&gt; may hate Harry, but she is very caring of Dudley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very clear that Dudley is a spoilt child. But this is because Petunia loves him, and is just pampering him too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Narcissa&lt;/strong&gt; cares so much for Draco that she risks her life to protect him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is so worried for Draco that she gets Snape to make an Unbreakable Vow to protect him (in Chapter Two of &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have all three very maternal women linked by their names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The language of flowers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar to the last section, there may be hints in the language of flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are already signs of this appearing in the books (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1962/does-snape-talk-in-code?rq=1&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;), so the flowers may suggest something about each character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;Lily&lt;/strong&gt;' symbolises motherhood, beauty and purity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flowermeaning.com/lilly-flower-meaning/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; has the following list on what a lily means: &lt;em&gt;royalty and regal bearing, motherhood and fertility, purity and the beauty of youth, passion and drive, renewal and rebirth&lt;/em&gt;. Some of these, in particular motherhood, purity and beauty of youth (remember Snape and James both liking her) definitely relate to her character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Petunia&lt;/strong&gt; symbolises anger and resentment, in how she acts towards Harry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flowermeaning.com/petunia/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The same site&lt;/a&gt; says that a petunia represents: &lt;em&gt;anger, resentment, being with you is soothing&lt;/em&gt;. She is definitely angry and resentful towards Harry for being a wizard. It pretty much sums up her character, except for the maternal side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I did find interesting was that further down the page under different colour meanings it says: &lt;em&gt;Pink – Motherly Love, Femininity, Gentleness, Compassion&lt;/em&gt; (Although it says this doesn't apply specifically to Petunias.) Motherly love is definitely part of her character, just not so much auntly love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are links for the meaning of each flower to each woman; what about Narcissa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flowermeaning.com/narcissus-flower-meaning/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;same site&lt;/a&gt; has quite a range of things that it symbolies, as it veries in different cultures. There were a couple that definitely apply though. It contains &lt;em&gt;Prosperity and wealth, especially in the future&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Future misfortune&lt;/em&gt;. Both of these are definitely true, the Malfoy family are rich, rich enough for Lucius to buy the entire Slytherin Quidditch team Nimbus 2001s to outdo Harry's 2000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They certainly aren't a very lucky family. They get in Voldemort's bad books and he gives Draco the task of killing Dumbledore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.buildingbeautifulsouls.com/symbols-meanings/flower-meanings-symbolism/narcissus-meaning-symbolism/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; also has something intersting under the Victorian meanings section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Victorian Language of Flowers Narcissus implies respect, decorum and devotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Narcissa is certainly a very devoted mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there isn't quite as much here, there are certainly some links.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But not narcissistic?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing you'd think that the name suggested, it doesn't actually seem to suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There certainly isn't any evidence in the book that Narcissa is Narcissistic. There is some evidence that Bellatrix might be, Lockhart is very Narcissistic, and even Voldemort to some extent is, but there is no evidence for Narcissa. A Narcissist would protect themselves at all costs, but Narcissa risks herself and her relationships in order to protect Draco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion and summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While JK says the name just stuck, there are links to the motherly aspects of Lily and Petunia via flowers, and the fact that she isn't named after a star/constellation shows she might be different from the rest of the Black family in the fact that family is more important than Voldemort to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T17:27:02.380" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2405" CreationDate="2017-04-23T15:38:16.637" Score="11" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first story &quot;Rich In Russia&quot; in Bech: A Book, John Updike writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(the mailbox, students should know, where his pitifully nibbled checks&#xA;  arrive has been well scarred by floating urban wrath, and his last&#xA;  name has been so often ballpointed by playful lobby-loiterers into a&#xA;  somewhat assonant verb that Bech has left the name plate space blank&#xA;  and depends upon the clairvoyance of mailmen)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &quot;somewhat assonant verb&quot; did Updike have in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1358" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:09:33.707" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:09:33.707" Title="What word did Updike have in mind here?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2386" CreationDate="2017-04-23T17:04:27.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_(Byatt_novel)#Background&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; makes a claim, apparently based on this article by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/21/books/unearthing-the-secret-lover.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New York Times&lt;/a&gt;, that Randolph Henry Ash is based on Robert Browning and/or Alfred Lord Tennyson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not having read the book, I can't really offer any further commentary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="93" LastEditorUserId="93" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T19:38:52.753" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T19:38:52.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-23T17:13:14.797" Score="9" ViewCount="1531" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story &quot;One Out of Many&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;V.S. Naipaul&lt;/a&gt;, how is the concept of cultural encounter treated? I have a few questions about that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the author aware of the cultural encounter theme?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does he manifest that awareness? Are the main characters, mainly Santosh, aware of the cultural encounter theme?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What clues does he provide of such awareness, if any?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the usage of “clothes” highlight the theme of cultural encounter?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the usage of “contrasts” (present versus past, now versus then, here versus home) throughout the short story help in highlighting the theme of cultural encounter?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1360" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T10:54:07.903" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T11:31:10.393" Title="How is the concept of cultural encounter treated in the short story “One Out of Many”?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;v-s-naipaul&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-23T18:17:09.680" Score="7" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Stung Man is the antagonist of &lt;em&gt;Book of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;, the first &lt;em&gt;TombQuest&lt;/em&gt; book. He's got an... Interesting backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Stung Man wasn't called the Stung Man at that point, not yet. Everyone gets their nickname for a reason.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As the pharaoh's men searched outside, the thief discovered that his hiding place was full of scorpions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alex tried to imagine it. Was there light in the cave, or was it the sound that first alerted him to the fact that something was wrong? By then it didn't matter, because they were on him. The thief was stung again and again, all over his body: his legs, his torso, his arms, his neck. His face.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He refused to call out.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He chose death over capture.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When they finally found him, he was swollen past recognition. His stubborn courage earned the pharaoh's grudging respect. The Stung Man was given a lavish burial and a story that would last thousands of years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;TombQuest: Book of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some Egyptian mythology and stories, but I've never heard of a story like this. Then again, I'm hardly an expert. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any Egyptian story like this? Did Michael Northrop base his story off of anything?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-23T18:23:52.750" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T18:29:11.463" Title="Was the Stung Man based on an existing character from Egyptian mythology?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;michael-northrop&gt;&lt;tombquest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2399" CreationDate="2017-04-23T18:29:11.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It came from personal experience&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While he didn't die, he once got repeatedly stung by a bunch of yellowjackets.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tombquest.wikia.com/wiki/The_Stung_Man&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The TombQuest Wiki&lt;/a&gt; says this about the matter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Stung Man's story was inspired by a real event of Michael Northrop. He, his brother, and his brother's friend were hiking up a mountain, and one of them accidentally steps on a yellow jacket nest, and they start running. Michael remembered he got over 75 stings, his brother got only 2, and his brother's friend got none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A yellow jacket is a type of wasp).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://michaelnorthrop.net/?page_id=5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;his online biography&lt;/a&gt; he says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three random facts about me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1) I am dyslexic and had to repeat second grade.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;2) I once stepped on a yellowjacket nest and was stung approximately 75 times.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3) According to family lore, I am related to Jonathan Swift, who wrote Gulliver’s Travels.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So thats definitely true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that he decided to incorporate his own experience into the books. When he writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thief was stung again and again, all over his body: his legs, his torso, his arms, his neck. His face.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they finally found him, he was swollen past recognition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was probably what happened to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T18:29:11.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2270" CreationDate="2017-04-23T18:47:26.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sigh. Critical responses to &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; have a tendency to completely miss the point of what is a sophisticated and innovative book. I suppose it's understandable when it's just &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.edrants.com/why-yann-martels-beatrice-and-virgil-is-the-worst-book-of-the-decade/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one blog post&lt;/a&gt;, but when &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/books/13book.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New York Times&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/13/AR2010041303903.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Washington Post&lt;/a&gt; do the same thing... I suppose it's fine if you personally didn't enjoy &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt;, but criticizing the writing style when the writing style supports themes that you didn't take the time to understand? That's something else entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; is a novel about how to talk about events when language isn't working. We're first introduced to this theme through Martel's analysis of the Holocaust on page 20:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His flip book was about having his soul ripped out and with it, attached, his tongue. Wasn’t that what every Holocaust book was about, aphasia? Henry remembered a statistic: fewer than two percent of Holocaust survivors ever write about or testify to their ordeal. Thus the typical approach of those who do speak about it, so precise and factual, like a stroke victim who’s learning how to speak again and who starts with the simplest, clearest syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics have argued that it's arrogant for the Henry to compare his book to the experiences of Holocaust survivors. But if you consider the fact that Henry represents Yann Martel the author, and that the flip book represents the book &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt;, you'll see that Martel is just introducing his book to his readers. What is &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; about? It's about being unable to talk about a traumatic event, but finding ways to talk about it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's turn to the so-called &quot;overwritten&quot; passage about the tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was near a tree, the soil around it soft and bare, and the impact of his foot-stamping was thunderous, certainly to him, and a couple lying nearby turned his way because of it. Henry stood, amazed. The ground had trembled. He had felt the reverberation. The earth itself had heard him, he thought. He looked up at the tree. It was a giant tree, a galleon with its sails in full rig, an art museum with its entire collection on display, a mosque with a thousand worshippers praising God. He gazed at it for several minutes. A tree had never before been so soothing to him. As he admired it, he could feel the anger and distress draining from him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trees can't talk. Trees can't use language. But in this passage, we see that the tree is able to respond to Henry's actions, and that Henry and the tree are able to communicate (&quot;the earth had heard him, he thought&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons why people hate &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; is because it compares the Holocaust to the treatment of animals at the hands of humans. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-a-webermann/why-is-a-holocaust-surviv_b_5882926.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's a comparison made by many Holocaust survivors&lt;/a&gt;, by the way). In Martel's &quot;overwritten&quot; passage about the tree, Martel introduces a new, unique point of comparison between Holocaust survivors and animals: they have trouble talking about their traumatic experiences! But at the same time, Martel's description of the tree is a message of hope: through some process that we don't understand yet, the tree is able to respond and communicate. How that communication can happen is explored in rest of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Martel's &lt;em&gt;Beatrice and Virgil&lt;/em&gt; is a tour de force examination of language, metaphor, communication, and how literature can shed light on the unexplainable. It's a pity that none of the reviewers were able to pick up on that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-04-23T18:47:26.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T02:05:37.777" Score="8" ViewCount="481" Body="&lt;p&gt;What purpose do nightmares serve in the world of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;? In the second volume of The Sandman Library (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_The_Doll%27s_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), Dream spends most of his time tracking down and dealing with a number of errant nightmares (Brute, Glob, and the Corinthian). He refers to these as &quot;his creations&quot; many times, unforming some (to be reformed later) and banishing others (for a few thousand years, implying that they will eventually return).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What purpose do these creatures serve? Dream seems to take his &quot;job&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; very seriously; this seems to include caring for the well-being of sentient creatures -- the other main story of &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, for example, was that of the dream vortex, which posed a great danger to anything that dreamed, and Morpheus did his best to avert the impending disaster.&#xA;In this volume, he also disbands and attempts to rehabilitate the Collectors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that it's possible that while nightmares are not good for individual humans, they serve a greater purpose for humanity. The basis for that argument would be that the focus of Morpheus' care for sentient creatures appears to undergo some shift from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2384/481&quot;&gt;humanity-only to include individual humans&lt;/a&gt;, and the nightmares were created long before Dream cared much for lone individuals. The only caveat that accompanies this interpretation is the apparent absence of a benefit for humanity in general. (At least, I don't see one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It cannot either be that nightmares are things that humans (or sentient beings) find in their minds, and that Dream does not remove -- in this universe, nightmares are the creations of the King of Dreams. They are things that he expressly created, for some purpose that escapes my understanding at the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do they serve some purpose in-universe? Are they just a plot device, or a metaphor? (Something else?)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I searched Google, I was not able to find much about nightmares. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://sandman.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Dreams/Nightmares&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shared Wikia page for dreams and nightmares&lt;/a&gt; says (without a source) that &quot;Nightmares are beings created by Dream to populate his realm and to help him with various tasks.&quot; This does not, however, explain &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the purpose of nightmares is. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/TheSandman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; seems to treat them all as mere &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NightmareFuel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nightmare Fuel&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; but I think there should be a greater purpose in them, especially since Neil Gaiman is such a careful writer, and Dream is such a careful guardian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I'm not sure what, exactly, that job is. In three volumes of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, I have yet to see a job description. Perhaps that will come later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T18:54:55.770" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T16:25:33.487" Title="In &quot;The Sandman&quot;, what are nightmares for?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="77" CreationDate="2017-04-24T10:04:26.837" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not very wide, although there are more works than you might think. Some of these works, especially older works, were non-fictional. I will list a few works about Japan that were published in the USA and/or written in the USA or by American authors. Maybe more (non-fictional?) works can be found in &lt;em&gt;A Collector's Guide to Books on Japan in English&lt;/em&gt;, Joseph Rogala, 2001. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Japan as It Was and Is (1855)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This was written by Richard Hildreth, who was, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hildreth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; an American journalist, author and historian. However, it is non-fictional. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Japan in American Fiction, 1880-1905&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It looks like there are at least two books in the series &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.nl/search?hl=nl&amp;amp;tbo=p&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=bibliogroup:%22Japan+in+American+Fiction,+1880-1905%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_metadata_r&amp;amp;cad=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japan in American Fiction, 1880-1905&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Young Americans in Japan or the Adventures of the Jewett family and their friend Oto Nambo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Muramasa blade, a story of feudalism in old Japan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first novel (you can read it &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/youngamericansi01greegoog#page/n12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), was written by Edward Greey (1835-1888). Although he was born in England, he moved in 1868 to New York City. He wrote several Japan themed books, including Young Americans in Japan; or, The Adventures of the Jewett Family and their Friend Oto Nambo.  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://john-adcock.blogspot.nl/2011/09/edward-greey-1835-1888.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, here you can find a longer list of novels)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one, &lt;em&gt;A Muramasa blade, a story of feudalism in old Japan&lt;/em&gt; (you can read this &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/amuramasabladea00wertgoog&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), was written by Louis Wertheimber. I can't find much information about this author. The book was published in 1887 by Boston: Ticknor and Company&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The American Diary of a Japanese Girl (1901)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Diary_of_a_Japanese_Girl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, this was the first English language novel published in the United States by a Japanese writer, although I do not know whether this counts as American literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="84" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T10:04:26.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2396" CreationDate="2017-04-24T10:08:30.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of &lt;em&gt;assonant&lt;/em&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a rhyme in which the same vowel sounds are used with different consonants in the stressed syllables of the rhyming words, as in &lt;em&gt;penitent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reticence.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the last name in question is &lt;em&gt;Bech,&lt;/em&gt; and the similar word is a verb, my guess is that he was thinking of &lt;em&gt;fuck&lt;/em&gt; (or possibly the Irish variant &lt;em&gt;feck&lt;/em&gt;). It's &quot;somewhat assonant&quot; because it's really matching the hard &lt;em&gt;-c&lt;/em&gt;, depending on how the &lt;em&gt;-ch&lt;/em&gt; of Bech is pronounced. The only other similar epithet is &lt;em&gt;bitch,&lt;/em&gt; which is much more often used as a noun when it's scrawled on a wall. (It can be a verb, but almost always in speech or in prose, not graffitoed aphorisms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T10:08:30.210" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2396" CreationDate="2017-04-24T11:55:35.107" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only speculate, but the simplest ballpoint mark one could make to 'Bech', using the same vowel sounds with different consonants would be a simple vertical stroke between the 'e' and 'c', creating 'Belch'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T11:55:35.107" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T13:30:43.443" Score="7" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poetical_Works_of_John_Keats/Ode_on_Melancholy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on Melancholy&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; Keats writes &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For shade to shade will come too drowsily,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;shade to shade will come too drowsily&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="341" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-24T15:40:10.393" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T15:44:30.730" Title="Meaning of &quot;shade to shade&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2406" CreationDate="2017-04-24T15:44:30.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keats is saying that if you try to immerse yourself in objects of sadness, then you won't be as aware of your own sadness as much. Shade (sadness) will come to (existing) shade too drowsily: i.e., it will not be as noticeable. But if it comes out of the blue, it will be that much more powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But when the melancholy fit shall fall &#xA;         Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud...  Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T15:44:30.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-24T16:00:12.427" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first 4 books in &lt;em&gt;TombQuest&lt;/em&gt; all have an amulet featured on the cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OGxBD.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jgqb9.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j7OGq.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt; &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lmGk6.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Images from &lt;a href=&quot;http://tombquest.scholastic.com/books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scholastic&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then... the fifth book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gqCYO.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It features this really cool scary guy, who I'm assuming is Anubis, and makes a cool profile pic for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/tombquestwiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter&lt;/a&gt;. But... why was the decision made to change the style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T16:00:12.427" Title="Why does the cover of the 5th TombQuest book not have an amulet?" Tags="&lt;michael-northrop&gt;&lt;tombquest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2410" CreationDate="2017-04-24T18:30:53.010" Score="13" ViewCount="2647" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently browsing for some quotes from a few of my favorite authors, and I noticed that in all the lists of &quot;Top Quotes by...&quot; were quotes from characters within the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that yes, of course, the author came up with and published those words, but whom should the quote be attributed to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should the attribution go to Albus Dumbledore or J.K. Rowling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not asking from &quot;formal usage&quot; point-of-view &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126860/attribution-quoting-a-fictional-character&quot;&gt;(which this post covers nicely),&lt;/a&gt; I am not writing an academic paper or anything like that... I am more interested in it as literary concept. To that end why would online stores be selling posters, coffee mugs, etc. with the quote attributed to the author, rather than the character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T21:01:10.383" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T01:08:31.587" Title="Are quotes from a character technically quotes from the author?" Tags="&lt;attribution&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2409" CreationDate="2017-04-24T19:24:26.937" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answer to the title: &lt;strong&gt;Not at all&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's take a quote from Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If I could work my will,every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote was of course from the Christmas hating Ebenezer Scrooge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we quote this as coming from Dickens, someone not familiar with his book may assume that Dickens hated Christmas, which we have no evidence for. He may have written the words, but it isn't his quote. He is giving the words to a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we quote it to Ebenezer Scrooge, again someone not familiar with the name may assume they are a real person. So it seems we can't just quote one or the other. Someone made the point that if the character is really famous we can just quote their name, but that's not true. Not everyone will have heard of a character, and someone else made the point they won't be as famous in a couple of hundred years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been discussions similar on &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/126860/attribution-quoting-a-fictional-character&quot;&gt;English.SE&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/8440/attributing-quotes-to-fictional-characters&quot;&gt;Writing.SE&lt;/a&gt;, but none give a definite answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one of the answers gives a link to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethicsalarms.com/2010/02/02/literary-quotation-ethics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;. It reaches the conclusion at the bottom that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fair, honest and ethical way to quote a fictional character is to note the speaker first, then the book, play or movie, and finally the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't an official guideline, but it seems good advice. So in the case of my example, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If I could work my will,every idiot who goes about with Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” - Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character deserves to be connected to words they say, it defines who they are as a character. But we don't want to give the idea that they aren't fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a character usually &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; express the ideas of the author. So we can't just say the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best, and in my opinion fairest way to say both, and the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your example, the quote should go as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.&amp;quot; - Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter by JK Rowling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no definite answer, but I think this makes the most sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some comments, I'm going to clarify and expand on a couple of different contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If all the audience know the character&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the audience &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt; knows the character (e.g. If someone goes to a book meeting after everyone's read a book) then you can probably just quote the character. The audience will know they are a fictional person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If you are quoting multiple times&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time I would go with character, book, author. After that, the reader will know that the character isn't real, and you can just quote the character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If the character is used as the author's 'mouthpiece'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes authors write a sort of biography, but use a character instead of themselves. In this case, and if you have to be absolutely sure this is the case, it would probably be best to quote the author, as that is &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; thought, not the character's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In all other situations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Include all the information, author, character and book. If one person doesn't know the character is fictional, then you need to include all information, at least the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources, and examples of sites that agree with the character, book, author format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/32vwyt/when_quoting_from_a_book_should_the_character_or/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on the context in which you're giving the quote, I would generally quote the character, if I wasn't sure that everybody would know who I was talking about I would go on to cite the book title and author. The problem with just quoting the author on the matter when it's a character saying whatever it is you're quoting is that it might suggest that the character's opinion is the author's opinion. But that doesn't make any sense. It's not that Shakespeare loves Juliet, but rather he wrote about Romeo loving Juliet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with this, especially where it says 'if I wasn't sure that everybody would know who I was talking about I would go on to cite the book title and author.' and the Shakespeare/Juliet example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080612122158AAcM9zb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure it goes &amp;quot;Quote.&amp;quot; Character. Work (title underlined). Author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another gives an alternate way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As [character] said in [Book] by [Author], &amp;quot;QUOTE.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fansofrealitytv.com/forums/books/97273-how-do-you-properly-attribute-quote-made-fictional-character.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fansofrealitytv&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would think &amp;quot;Quote&amp;quot; - character in title by author. You have to credit the author of the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.monmouth.edu/uploadedFiles/Resources_for_Writers/Research_and_Documentation/CitingFiction.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a guide to citing fiction by Monmouth University. It doesn't say anything about quoting characters, but it does say the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A WORK OF FICTION BY A SINGLE AUTHOR:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Author’s Name. Title of Work. Publisher, Year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TWO WORKS OF FICTION BY THE SAME AUTHOR:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Author’s Name. Title of Work. Publisher, Year.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Title of Work. Publisher, Year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I imagine it would include the character's name if it said about quoting a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T17:20:53.697" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T17:20:53.697" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2317" CreationDate="2017-04-24T21:56:20.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like one of the small (potential) inconsistencies you can find in this series (or just hypothesis of the characters?), which allow the story to continue and escalate. We can find references pointing to the need of the manual construction by Lobsang:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I myself went through the physical process of constructing a Stepper, via an ambulant unit. I might venture to suggest that it is unlocking a door within us that most of us don’t know exists.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[24th chapter, The Long Earth]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also mentioned when the police Steppers created, that need just a simple thing to finish the Stepper and make the process work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Since Step Day, things had moved on quickly. The techs had come up with a police-issue Stepper, robust components in a sleek black plastic case, resistant even to a close-range gunshot. &lt;strong&gt;Of course, as with all Steppers – just as she’d found at the start with Linsay’s prototype – to make it work for you, you had to finish the assembly of the working components yourself.&lt;/strong&gt; It was a nice piece of kit, although you had to ignore the jokes about the potatoes needed to run it. ‘Do you want fries with that, Officer?’ Ha ha.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[9th chapter, The Long Earth]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to the most probable answer, that construction of the whole stepper box is not needed, but you just need to finish the construction, which could happen pretty fast to accommodate the requirement of 60 seconds in question (though this is probably not stated well in the book, for the fact that it had to happen very fast).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="676" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-24T21:56:20.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T04:31:43.200" Score="3" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading Manfred by Lord Byron and my professor said something that I found interesting. In Act 1, Manfred introduces the idea of humans being 1/2 dust and 1/2 deity. Both link to the problematic consciousness of human beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite that we can create designs, technology, and other great things, we find ourselves unable to excerpt any sort of control over time due to our own mortality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we are deities because of our minds, but we are dust because of our bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in how people interpret Manfred's character (and ultimately, Byron's ideology based off of this book) and what Manfred's character shows in human nature (if it shows anything at all). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do qualities of Manfred, the Byronic Hero, reflect how rioters and protesters behave today?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If so... is Manfred an &quot;ideal&quot; human being because he defiant against Power?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the book trying to establish a project in the real world to convince society to not succumb to Power? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1371" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T01:16:05.823" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T01:16:05.823" Title="What does Manfred's character tell us about human consciousness?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;manfred&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T06:03:34.983" Score="6" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;Manfred is more serious compared to Don Juan's light heartedness. While Manfred lives within the realm of seriousness and continuous self-pity, Don Juan lives in the realm of cynicism as it brings blatantly &quot;inappropriate humor&quot; to rather serious topics that Byron wants to address (mainly the attack on England's hypocrisy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why did Byron's writing become more satirical and ironic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1371" LastEditorUserId="1371" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T14:59:01.157" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T14:59:01.157" Title="Byron's transition from Manfred to Don Juan" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;manfred&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2317" CreationDate="2017-04-25T08:19:02.230" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the 24&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; chapter of &lt;em&gt;The Long Earth&lt;/em&gt; (boldface mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joshua asked, ’So why do people need Steppers at all?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Lobsang:] ‘Perhaps in a more indirect way than is imagined, Joshua. &lt;strong&gt;The brief notes Linsay left insist that the placing of every component is crucial and needs pin-sharp care, so that the builder’s attention is totally wrapped up in the task.&lt;/strong&gt; The need to align the two home-wound coils reminds me of the tuning of early metal detectors. &lt;strong&gt;As for the other components, they appear to be there for the &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; of the thing,&lt;/strong&gt; and the look can be very important. The winding of the coils themselves is especially hypnotic. If I may be Tibetan for a moment, I believe that what we have here is a kind of technological mandala, designed to tilt the mind into a subtly different state, disguised as a bit of everyday western technology. &lt;strong&gt;It is the act of making a Stepper that enables one to step, you see, not the gadget itself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two important aspects here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the first instructions for the Stepper required you to do everything yourself, it was later found out that this is not essential. It is only to be expected that in the 25 years between Step Day and the Madison Bomb, people meticulously optimised steppers to require as little effort as possible from their user. On this basis, a stepper completion within a minute is not surprising (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2412/34&quot;&gt;the passage quoted by Jakuje&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If Lobsang’s hypothesis is true, dexterity is not important factor, but rather putting your mind in the right state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T08:19:02.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2244" CreationDate="2017-04-25T12:31:53.003" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;By intense googling, I ended up on the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/233111.Lynn_Gardner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gems and Espionage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; series, by Lynn Gardner, which looks very promising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the books :  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;have a title following the &quot;Gemstone and Some Word starting with the same letter&quot; scheme, e.g. &quot;Emeralds and Espionage&quot; or &quot;Pearls and Peril&quot;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;are written by a female author.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;were published between 1995 and 2004.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;seem to be &quot;mystery&quot; themed  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1373" LastEditorUserId="1373" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T10:13:29.940" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T10:13:29.940" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-25T15:36:00.683" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the final chapter of &lt;em&gt;La Fiesta del Chivo&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Feast of the Goat&lt;/em&gt;), Samson the parrot plays a recurring role.  Here are a few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her reply is a sudden jabbering.  The five women turn their heads: Samson is awake and announces it by chattering. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samson, who has been quiet for awhile, displays his pleasure or displeasure again by puffing out his feathers and shrieking.  No one says anything. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Samson has begun to move nervously around the bars of his cage; he sways back and forth, stops, sharpens his beak on his claws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These short interludes are interspersed in Urania's recounting of her most tightly held secret, but I don't recognize any real pattern.  I suppose it's possible that Vargas Llosa simply wanted a light way to interrupt the story, but I suspect it's more than that.  What is the purpose and/or meaning of Samson's interjections through this crucial part of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T03:03:46.507" Title="Why does Samson the parrot figure so prominently in the climax of La Fiesta del Chivo?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;vargas-llosa&gt;&lt;la-fiesta-del-chivo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3780" CreationDate="2017-04-25T16:42:13.640" Score="22" ViewCount="2092" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is this image in the &amp;quot;Friday, 9 July, 1942&amp;quot; section of Anne Frank's diary; a design of the house which is popularly called the Secret Annex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aI7v.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6aI7v.png&quot; alt=&quot;Diagram of house layout&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Anne's original diary have a (rough) sketch of the Secret Annex, or was it completely a rendition from the details from the diary?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T00:15:20.377" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T00:15:20.377" Title="Is the house plan in Anne Frank's diary an artistic rendition, or is it sketched by Anne?" Tags="&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;&lt;the-diary-of-a-young-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2409" CreationDate="2017-04-25T17:02:25.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is only a partial answer and is admittedly rather incomplete, but I think you really have to look at the context to determine if the character is saying something the author is likely to agree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once read a (laughably absurd) article during the brief moral panic over the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series (believe it or not, such a moral panic did, in fact, exist in certain circles) that claimed that the message of the series is summed up in the following quote (from &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for the author of the article, the quote is from Voldemort, the arch-villain of the book. That being the case, it's safe to assume that the author completely disagrees with the sentiment; you could quote this as an example of something that the author does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous other examples of quotes from characters that the author would almost certainly disagree with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point being that just because a character in a book said something doesn't mean that the author agrees with the sentiment; there are just too many counterexamples for that to even be a serious idea. (I don't think that that's what you were suggesting in your question, just wanted to throw that out there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the specific quote you mention, a lot of times Albus Dumbledore &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, a &quot;mouthpiece&quot; for the author. Just as there are cases where a character (like Voldemort) delivers stuff that the author clearly disagrees with, there are also cases where characters are clearly serving as &quot;mouthpieces&quot; of the author in a sense. For example, it's pretty clear that C. S. Lewis would agree with anything that Aslan says in the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;. He's an &quot;unrestricted&quot;/unqualified &quot;mouthpiece&quot; for the author in the sense that anything Aslan says C. S. Lewis also says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A character can also serve as a &quot;mouthpiece&quot; in specific circumstances or on particular topics. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;, Hermoine Granger is often a &quot;mouthpiece&quot; for the author in terms of factual information about the in-series universe (e.g. the properties of the Sword of Gryffindor), so we can assume that she's speaking for the author on factual questions. We can't necessarily assume that she's speaking for the author on other topics, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albus Dumbledore &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be such a character. When he's speaking on topics like, for example, morality or philosophy, he generally says stuff that the author seems likely to agree with. I'm sure you can find counterexamples, but it seems relatively safe to assume that the character's generally speaking for the author on those topics (obviously subject to the context).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the extent to which the author is likely to agree with a character is determined by the context as well as the author's statements on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T17:02:25.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2409" CreationDate="2017-04-25T18:31:01.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the problem here lies in the distinction between an aphorism and a quotation. An aphorism is a pithy saying meant to express a general truth. We assume that the author of an aphorism believes what they are saying. What we commonly call &quot;quotes&quot; are in fact generally aphorisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All aphorisms are quotations, of course, but not all quotations are aphorisms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are quoting the work of an author, you should always credit the author, and you should cite the work you are quoting from so that the reader can retrieve the context is they want to. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are quoting an aphorism of an author (or anyone else) you should credit the author, but you need not necessarily cite the source. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you are quoting the aphorism of a character in a work of fiction, you should attribute the quotation to the author as a quotation, but make it clear that the aphorism is the aphorism of the character, not the author. This can often be done easily enough by extending the part you quote to capture the attribution of the words. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T18:31:01.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2422" CreationDate="2017-04-25T20:19:38.580" Score="7" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;This essay was published in (perhaps among other places) in &quot;Wampeters Foma and Granfalloons&quot;. There are two Wheaton Colleges in the U.S., one in Norton MA and the other in Wheaton IL. Does anyone know (and can you provide a reference) as to which of these two colleges this address was delivered at?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1375" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-04-25T21:38:08.090" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T21:38:08.090" Title="Vonnegut's &quot;Address at Rededication of Wheaton College Library, 1973&quot;" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2421" CreationDate="2017-04-25T20:39:51.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to be the one in Massachusetts. The essay is frequently cited as being published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=rm5r4pBzPzAC&amp;amp;pg=PA508&amp;amp;lpg=PA508&amp;amp;dq=%22Wheaton%20College%20alumnae%20magazine%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=bW9Eqqaw0O&amp;amp;sig=sdcY_iHotcBWCaM8TCCXUnVPIg0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwje1a7ducDTAhUJ5yYKHSKUBDkQ6AEIKDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Wheaton%20College%20alumnae%20magazine%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wheaton College alumnae magazine&lt;/a&gt;, which is the magazine of the Wheaton College in Massachusetts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note, however, that the library's &lt;a href=&quot;http://wheatoncollege.edu/college-history/1920s/wallace-library/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;own history page&lt;/a&gt; does not make any mention of a rededication in 1973. There was a renaming of a room after a key alumna in 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-04-25T20:39:51.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2354" CreationDate="2017-04-26T02:52:33.747" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Original Authorial intent: &quot;Three Musketeer&quot;-ish pre-Age-of-Discovery kinda-Spain-cum-Russia-or-France (sans muskets).&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on Boris Strugatsky's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/55082/21/Strugackiii_-_Kommentarii_k_proiidennomu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commentaries to the past&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (which comments on most of their works in great detail), quoting the original 1963 letter from Arkady Strugatsky where the idea of the book was discussed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;«...Существует где-то планета, точная копия Земли, можно с небольшими отклонениями, &lt;strong&gt;в эпоху непосредственно перед Великими географическими открытиями&lt;/strong&gt;. Абсолютизм, веселые пьяные мушкетеры, кардинал, король, мятежные принцы, инквизиция, матросские кабаки, галеоны и фрегаты, красавицы, веревочные лестницы, серенады и пр. &lt;strong&gt;И вот в эту страну (помесь Франции с Испанией, или России с Испанией)&lt;/strong&gt; ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... &lt;strong&gt;Это можно написать весело и интересно, как «Три мушкетера», только со средневековой мочой и грязью, как там пахли женщины, и в вине была масса дохлых мух.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation mine (as usual:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;«... There is a planet somewhere, an copy of the Earth with small deviations, &lt;strong&gt;in the era just before the Age of Discovery&lt;/strong&gt;. Absolutism, merry drunk musketeers, cardinal, king, rebellious princes, inquisition, sailors' taverns, galleons and frigates, beauties, rope ladders, serenades, etc. &lt;strong&gt;And in this country (a cross between France and Spain, or Russia and Spain)&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You can write this in a fun and interesting way, kind of like &quot;Three Musketeers&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;except with middle-ageish urine and mud;&lt;/strong&gt; with stinky women and a bunch of dead flies in the wine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for cultural context - the writings of Alexander Dumas, especially &quot;The Three Musketeers&quot;, were incredibly popular in USSR, far more so than generally in the West.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Textually:&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h1&gt;Arkanar is in some ways based on Third Reich.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Rumata equates the events of the Holy Order's takeover with what happened in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, there was oblique:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;А ведь можно было догадаться, думал Румата. &lt;strong&gt;Там, где торжествует серость, к власти всегда приходят черные&lt;/strong&gt;. Эх, историки, хвостом вас по голове... Но он заложил руки за спину и покачался с носков на пятку.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know, I could have guessed, thought Rumata. &lt;strong&gt;Wherever grayness triumphs, black robes come to power&lt;/strong&gt;. Oh, historians, stick a tail in all of you… But he put his hands behind his back and rocked from toe to heel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;From the 2014 translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, they explicitly called the burger guards &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stormtroopers&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;На ступеньках сидел, пригорюнясь, серый &lt;strong&gt;штурмовик&lt;/strong&gt;, поставив боевой топор между коленей&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The grey &lt;strong&gt;stormtrooper&lt;/strong&gt; sat sadly on the stairs...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And finally, Rumata explicitly referenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a well known point in Reich history &#xA;(The night of the Long Knives)&lt;/a&gt; in reference to soon-to-be-dead Father Tzupik; a captain of the Grey stormtroopers and the head of palace guard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Отец же Цупик, как человек военный и бывший бакалейщик, лицом владеть не умел. Он мрачнел, кусал губу, пальцы его на рукояти меча сжимались и разжимались; и в конце концов он вдруг дернул щекой, резко повернулся и, нарушая все правила, пошел вон из опочивальни прямо на толпу оцепеневших от такой невоспитанности придворных. Дон Рэба, извинительно улыбаясь, поглядел ему вслед, а Румата, проводив глазами нескладную серую фигуру, подумал: «Вот и еще один покойник». Ему было известно о трениях между доном Рэбой и серым руководством. &lt;strong&gt;История коричневого капитана Эрнста Рема готова была повториться&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Father Zupik, as a military man and a former grocer, could not control his face. ... turned sharply and, violating all the rules, went out of the bedchamber ... Don Reba, with an apologetic smile, looked after him, and Rumata, seeing with his eyes an incoherent gray figure, thought: &quot;There's another dead man.&quot; He was aware of the friction between Don Reba and the gray leadership. &lt;strong&gt;The story of the brown captain &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_R%C3%B6hm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ernst Röhm&lt;/a&gt; was ready to be repeated&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rumata also compared Arkanar events to fascism to Don Condor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;И когда я говорю ему о фашизме, о серых штурмовиках, об активизации мещанства, он воспринимает это как эмоциональные выражения  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when I tell him about fascism, about the gray stormtroopers, about the intensification of burgeousie, he perceives this as emotional expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Rumata explicitly calls the Order-invaded Arkanar &quot;feudal-&lt;strong&gt;fascist&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; base of aggression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... вылилось в провокационную интригу Святого Ордена и привело к превращению Арканара в базу &lt;strong&gt;феодально‑фашистской агрессии&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Resulted in the provocation based intrigue of the Holy Order and led to the transformation of Arkanar into the base of &lt;strong&gt;feudal-fascist aggression&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, in a later publications, Boris Strugatsky (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hro.org/node/2925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;criticizing nationalists in Russia in &quot;Фашизм - это очень просто&quot; (&quot;Fascism - it's quite simple&quot;)&lt;/a&gt;) explicitly equated fascism with feudalism and feudal mentality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Могу легко представить себе человека, который, ознакомившись со всеми этими моими дефинициями, скажет (с сомнением): &quot;Этак у тебя получается, что лет пятьсот-шестьсот назад все на свете были фашистами - и князья, и цари, и сеньоры, и вассалы...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  В каком-то смысле такое замечание бьет в цель, ибо оно верно &quot;с точностью до наоборот&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;фашизм - это задержавшийся в развитии феодализм&lt;/strong&gt;, переживший и век пара, и век электричества, и век атома, и готовый пережить век космических полетов и искусственного интеллекта. Феодальные отношения, казалось бы, исчезли, но феодальный менталитет оказался живуч и могуч, он оказался сильнее и пара, и электричества, сильнее всеобщей грамотности и всеобщей компьютеризации.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Живучесть его, безусловно, имеет причиной то обстоятельство, что корнями своими феодализм уходит в дофеодальные, еще пещерные времена, в ментальность блохастого стада бесхвостых обезьян: все чужаки, живущие в соседнем лесу, - отвратительны и опасны, а вожак наш великолепно жесток, мудр и побеждает врагов. Эта первобытная ментальность, видимо, не скоро покинет род человеческий. &lt;strong&gt;И поэтому фашизм - это феодализм сегодня&lt;/strong&gt;. И завтра.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can easily imagine a person who, having become acquainted with all these definitions of mine, will say (with doubt): &quot;So it turns out that five hundred or six hundred years ago everyone in the world was fascists - princes, kings, senyors, and vassals ... &quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a sense, that hits the mark, for it is true &quot;in reverse&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;fascism is the feudalism that has lingered in development&lt;/strong&gt;, survived the age of steam, the age of electricity, and the age of the atom, and is ready to survive the age of space flights and Artificial Intelligence. Feudal relations seemed to have disappeared, but the feudal mentality proved to be tenacious and powerful, it proved to be stronger than steam and electricity, stronger than universal literacy and universal computerization.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its vitality, of course, is due to the fact that the roots of its feudalism go back to prefeudal, caveman times, to the mentality of the flea-infested group of tailless monkeys: all strangers living in the neighboring forest are disgusting and dangerous, and our leader is superbly cruel, wise and Defeats the Enemies. This primitive mentality, apparently, will not leave the human race anytime soon. &lt;strong&gt;And so fascism is feudalism today&lt;/strong&gt;. And tomorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, original intent contradicts these parallels; the book was supposed to be a pure historical adventure without deep subtext and obvious links to modernity. Quoting from &quot;Commentaries on the past&quot; again; another ANS letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;А мне хотелось создать повесть об абстрактном благородстве, чести и радости, как у Дюма. И не смей мне противоречить. &lt;strong&gt;Хоть одну-то повесть без современных проблем в голом виде.&lt;/strong&gt; На коленях прошу, мерзавец! Шпаг мне, шпаг! Кардиналов! Портовых кабаков!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I wanted to create a story about abstract nobility, honor and joy, Dumas-like. And don't you dare contradict me. &lt;strong&gt;At least one story without modern problems in their naked form.&lt;/strong&gt; I beg you on my knees, scoundrel! Give me Épées! The Cardinals! Port taverns!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h1&gt;Republic of Soan clearly seems based on Republic of Venice&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Trade Republic with heavy maritime trade:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ни тем более в торговой республике Соан, давно уже пустившей все свои леса на корабли&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nor even more so in the trading republic of Soan, which had long ago used all its forests to build ships&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Led by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Council_of_Venice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;12 member council&lt;/a&gt; of patricians&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... дон Кондор, Генеральный судья и Хранитель больших государственных печатей торговой республики Соан, вице‑президент Конференции двенадцати негоциантов&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don Condor, General Custodian and Custodian of large state seals of the commercial republic of Soan, Vice President of the &lt;strong&gt;Conference of Twelve Traders&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet he's a high ranking noble, outranking Rumata who's considered ancient nobility of the Empire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;но ноги, следуя этикету, сами собой согнулись в коленях, шпоры торжественно звякнули, правая рука описала широкий полукруг от сердца и в сторону, а голова нагнулась так, что подбородок утонул в пенно‑кружевных брыжах. Дон Кондор сорвал бархатный берет с простым дорожным пером, торопливо, как бы отгоняя комаров, махнул им в сторону Руматы, а затем, швырнув берет на стол, обеими руками расстегнул у шеи застежки плащ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but his legs observed the proper etiquette in spite of himself and bent at the knees. His spurs jingled solemnly, his right hand swept out an arc starting at his heart and ending at his side, and his head bent down so that his chin sank into the foamy lace ruff. Don Condor ripped off his plumed velvet beret, hastily waved it in Rumata’s direction, as if he were chasing off mosquitoes, flung it on the table, and undid the clasps of his cloak at his neck with both hands.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;From the 2014 translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h1&gt;Overall, all the kingdoms seem based on feudal medieval Europe.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;У нас безотказное оружие – &lt;strong&gt;базисная теория феодализма&lt;/strong&gt;, разработанная в тиши кабинетов и лабораторий, на пыльных раскопах, в солидных дискуссиях…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have a foolproof weapon — &lt;strong&gt;the basis theory of feudalism&lt;/strong&gt;, developed in quiet offices and laboratories, at dusty archaeological digs, in thoughtful discussions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;From the 2014 translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  центробежные процессы в древней Империи стали значимыми. Воспользовавшись этим, Святой Орден, представлявший, по сути, интересы наиболее реакционных групп &lt;strong&gt;феодального общества&lt;/strong&gt;, которые любыми средствами стремились приостановить диссипацию...   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the centrifugal processes in the ancient empire became relevant. Taking advantage of this, the Holy Order, essentially representing the interests of the most reactionary groups of &lt;strong&gt;feudal society&lt;/strong&gt;, who desired to stop the disintegration by any means necessary…&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;From the 2014 translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;В полном соответствии с базисной теорией феодализма&lt;/strong&gt;,– он яростно поглядел прямо в глаза дону Кондору,– это самое заурядное выступление горожан против баронства,– он перевел взгляд на дона Гуга,– вылилось в провокационную интригу Святого Ордена и привело к превращению Арканара в базу феодально‑фашистской агрессии.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In full accordance with the basis theory of feudalism&lt;/strong&gt;,” he furiously looked Don Condor in the eye, “this commonplace rebellion of the citizens against the barony,” he shifted his gaze to Don Gug, “turned into a provocative intrigue by the Holy Order and resulted in the transformation of Arkanar into a base of feudal-fascist aggression.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;From the 2014 translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then of course we have all the Walter-Scottish (or, musket-less Alexander-Duma-like) trappings of the fiction book set in medieval times; with swords, crossbows, plate armour, feudal noble lords, smalltime tradesmen, witch hunts, palace intrigues, alchemists, court poets, lack of hygiene, taverns, etc...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duma's work obviously influenced the book, by the way - even if you ignore word-of-god authorial intent discussed at the beginning of the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are even allusions to Dumas' characters (falsely comparing Don Reba to Cardinal Richelieu)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At one point, &quot;Three Musketeers&quot; line is directly quoted by Pashka:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Меня зовут Бон Саранча,– неохотно признался Пашка.– «&lt;em&gt;И здесь он, по‑видимому, ляжет – один из тех, что были с ним&lt;/em&gt;».  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name is Bon Locust, Pashka reluctantly admitted. &quot;&lt;em&gt;And here, apparently, he will lie down - one of those who were with him.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Lyudeny group (main experts on Strugatsky in Russian interwebz), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/ludeni/tbb.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pashka's quote is from 1936 Russian translation of Three Musketeers&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;С. 24. «И здесь он, по-видимому, ляжет – один из тех, что были с ним». – А. Дюма, «Три мушкетера», 1, 5: «– &lt;em&gt;Здесь, – сказал он, пародируя стих из Библии, – здесь умрет Бикара, единый из тех, которые с ним&lt;/em&gt;». Перевод под ред. А. Попова. Издание романа: М.-Л.: Academia, 1936, с. 87. Оригинальная цитата из Дюма: «&lt;em&gt;Ici, dit-il, parodiant un verset de la Bible, ici mourra Biscarat, seul de ceux qui sont avec lui&lt;/em&gt;». Библейский источник пародии – Откровение Иоанна (17, 14): «...Он есть Господь господствующих и Царь царей, и те, которые с Ним, суть званые и избранные и верные» («...qu'il est le Seigneur des seigneurs et le Roi des rois, et les appelés, les élus et les fidèles qui sont avec lui les vaincront aussi»).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Subtextually: events in Arkanar symbolized 1963 attacks of Communist state on culture.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(for context, in December 1962, among the general end of the &quot;thaw&quot;, Nikita Khruschyov lambasted &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%A5%D1%80%D1%83%D1%89%D1%91%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BC_%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B8_%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abstract artists' exhibition at Manezh&lt;/a&gt; which opened a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Nonconformist_Art#1962_.E2.80.93_mid-1970s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;witch-hunt on various cultural figures from Soviet powers that be&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is discussed in detail in the next part of HTBAG chapted in &quot;Commentaries to the Past&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Осознание этих простых, но далеко для нас не очевидных тогда истин было мучительно, как всякое осознание истины, но и благотворно в то же время. Новые идеи появились и настоятельно потребовали своего немедленного воплощения. Вся задуманная нами «веселая, мушкетерская» история стала смотреться совсем в новом свете, и БНу не потребовалось долгих речей, чтобы убедить АНа в необходимости существенной идейной коррекции «Наблюдателя». Время «легкомысленных вещей», время «шпаг и кардиналов», видимо, закончилось. А может быть, просто еще не наступило. &lt;strong&gt;Мушкетерский роман должен был, обязан был стать романом о судьбе интеллигенции, погруженной в сумерки средневековья&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The realization of these truths, simple but back then far from obvious to us,  was painful, like any awareness of the truth, but also beneficial at the same time. New ideas emerged and urgently demanded their immediate implementation. All the &quot;merry, musketeerish&quot; story that we conceived was viewed in a new light, and it did not take Boris long speeches to convince Arkady of the need for a substantial ideological correction of the &quot;Observer&quot;. The time of &quot;frivolous things&quot;, the time of &quot;swords and cardinals&quot;, apparently ended. Or maybe it just has not come yet. &lt;strong&gt;The Musketeer novel was supposed to, had to, become a novel about the fate of the intelligentsia, immersed in the twilight of the Middle Ages&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T13:55:54.137" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T13:55:54.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2402" CreationDate="2017-04-26T06:14:07.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've asked the question from the wrong angle, so let me answer from the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is Dream's job description?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dream's job is to maintain a dreamland - the place where people go when they are dreaming. If he is not maintaining it, the dreamland tends to run wild, which can cause weird symptoms on Earth - the &quot;sleeping sickness&quot; that was running when Dream was imprisoned. He is also creating dreams and nightmares, and he is responsible for killing dream vortexes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So why not making only nice dreams?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the quickest answer would be &quot;because Morpheus is not always a nice person&quot; (he is, for most of the time quite indifferent) - he sentenced a girl that spurned him for ten thousand years in Hell and more than once he was happy to leave people for certain death. His morality is quite different to human - in other words he doesn't necessary find any difference between a pleasant dream and nightmare, all he cares about the quality of the provided dream. And in some ways nightmares must be more precise and robust, because they are universal - we all occasionally have a visit from Corinthian, when we dream about slasher-killer chasing us through the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as a human beings we &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.livescience.com/32730-why-do-we-have-nightmares.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DO NEED to have nightmares&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nightmares are helpful to our survival or else they probably would have been done away with by evolution, said Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard University. Barrett theorizes that nightmares act as the brain's way of focusing a person's attention on issues they need to address.&#xA;  &quot;Nightmares probably evolved to help make us anxious about potential dangers,&quot; Barrett said. &quot;Even post-traumatic nightmares, which just re-traumatize us, may have been useful in ancestral times when a wild animal that had attacked you, or a rival tribe that had invaded might well be likely to come back.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the behaviour of Corinthian , we can also assume that nightmares can work independently as sort of field agents and are able to affect the mortal world in much more direct way than Dream can (or want): Corinthian was a serial killer for years, later he works as a private eye (no pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T08:58:31.147" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T08:58:31.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T06:20:11.457" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the movie tie-in edition of &lt;em&gt;Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastic World Around You&lt;/em&gt; only have a different cover (compared to the original edition), or are there also changes to the text and contents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I mean the two actual books that you can buy (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0689859414&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Arthur-Spiderwicks-Field-Guide-to-the-Fantastical-World-Around-You/Tony-DiTerlizzi/The-Spiderwick-Chronicles/9781416960959&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). Thanks to Rand al' Thor for providing the links. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I am asking whether there are any significant differences (besides the cover) between the two editions i.e. photos in the movie edition.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is an example question. It is linked to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/703/are-questions-about-different-editions-of-a-book-on-topic&quot;&gt;meta question&lt;/a&gt; asking whether it is on topic.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="186" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T13:24:58.897" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T13:24:58.897" Title="Are there any major differences between the movie tie-in edition of Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide and the original edition?" Tags="&lt;holly-black&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2402" CreationDate="2017-04-26T09:42:42.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Dreaming is supposed to be a reflection of the real world... or maybe vice versa? In any case, The Dreaming (and Dream), in a sense, define the real world - by defining the things that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePjr7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ePjr7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Left panel (Destiny speaks): &amp;quot;Well and all: and while you are prince of those symbols and shapes that mean other than they seem, of metaphor and of allusion, my domain is that which is, of actions and consequences and paths. But I can neither live your life for you, nor shoulder your responsibilities.&amp;quot; On the right, Destruction speaks: &amp;quot;Our sister defines life, just as Despair defines hope, or Desire defines hatred, or as Destiny defines freedom.&amp;quot; Morpheus: &amp;quot;And what do I define, by this analogy of yours.&amp;quot; Destruction: &amp;quot;Reality, perhaps?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Click for full resolution&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Destiny, Morpheus' realm is a &quot;metaphor&quot; or an &quot;allusion&quot; of the real world; it's then easy to interpret dreams dreamers' reflections on the real world. It's not like dreams are defined as binding scenarios in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; - they're more like stereotypes, or actors, used to convey a message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What message could a nightmare convey then? Corinthian, according to Morpheus, is supposed to show dreamers the &quot;darkness inside them&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q6iEo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Q6iEo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus: &amp;quot;A nightmare created to be the darkness, and the fear of darkness in every human heart. A black mirror, made to reflect everything about itself that humanity will no confront.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morpheus described Corinthian in more detail in &lt;em&gt;The Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lS5qo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lS5qom.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus: &amp;quot;A dark mirror. Imagine that you woke in the night and rose, ans seemed to see before you another person, whom slowly you perceived to be yourself. Someone had entered in the night and placed a mirror in your sleeping place, made from a dark metal. You had been frightened only of your reflection.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7vEPi.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7vEPim.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;But then the reflection slowly raised one hand, while your own hand stayed still...&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Click for full resolution&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, Corinthian was intended to show people that &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;, of everyone else, are their own antagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could one convey that message in a nice, happy dream? I imagine this method is the most powerful - how to convey the horrors one carries better than with a horror? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nightmares, then, are intended for metaphors and allusions that require this, and not some other approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, good and cheerful dreams are supposed to reflect the happiness of the dreamers. If I was a sardonic person, I'd indicate that some people take joy from the suffering of others, but that's another conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm saying &quot;reflect&quot; because it's what is implied throughout the whole story - that the Endless do not control but &lt;em&gt;execute&lt;/em&gt; the will of the living beings. Hob Gadling's story may be a mockery of that - Death will not take him because he doesn't accept death as a part of life. Morpheus himself says that &quot;[the Endless] are [living beings'] puppets&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q2UUp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q2UUpm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus: &amp;quot;We are their toys. Their dolls, of you will&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Click for full resolution&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T16:25:33.487" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T16:25:33.487" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-26T19:55:08.530" Score="8" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of the book &lt;em&gt;Till we have faces&lt;/em&gt; by C. S. Lewis is translated into Czech language as &lt;em&gt;Dokud nemáme tvář&lt;/em&gt;. I would translate that into English literally as &quot;While we don't have a face&quot; or &quot;Until we don't have a face&quot;, which is not very clear. But in both cases, it is the opposite of the original English name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT (based on comments):&#xA;The Czech world &lt;em&gt;dokud&lt;/em&gt; can be translated as both &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt;. I know that in English &lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;while&lt;/em&gt; is not the same. &#xA;My presumption, that the translations means the opposite is based on the fact that in one language the title is about having a face, while it is about NOT having a face in the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why would that be? Does it make sense somehow? Or is it just a mistake?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="234" LastEditorUserId="234" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T09:04:17.960" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T09:04:17.960" Title="Why does the Czech translation of &quot;Till we have faces&quot; mean the opposite?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;till-we-have-faces&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2428" CreationDate="2017-04-26T22:08:10.830" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The choice of the translator is likely to be their interpretation or possibly even a regional colloqualism to deliver the spirit of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a comfortable working knowledge of several Western European languages but was stumped when I started doing business in the Baltics and Balkans. The negative use a more complex nuance (or perhaps simply subject to a different linguistic philosophy) and their negatives would either be non-existant or doubled up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the concept of pending time is also distinct. Many of the speakers when using English would muddle &quot;until&quot;, &quot;while&quot; and &quot;by&quot; for timing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that the translator considered the end result that Lewis wanted and foudn the most natural Czech phraseology. Therefore he turned the phrase from a future conditional to a present subordinate with a similar outcome, e.g. &quot;till we meet each other again&quot; vs. &quot;whilst we're apart&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1338" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-26T22:27:12.687" LastActivityDate="2017-04-26T22:27:12.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2430" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2434" CreationDate="2017-04-27T00:55:36.643" Score="8" ViewCount="367" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/posts/2423/revisions&quot;&gt;this answer edit&lt;/a&gt;, someone changed my translation of a word &quot;арбалет&quot; as used in Strugatsky's Russian text of &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt; from the one I used (&quot;arbalest&quot;) to &quot;crossbow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of translating the book (&lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, by Strugatsky brothers), which of the two English terms is more appropriate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T20:53:42.383" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T18:07:47.917" Title="Should this word in Hard to Be a God be translated as &quot;arbalest&quot; or &quot;crossbow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2430" CreationDate="2017-04-27T01:10:32.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arbalest IS a type of crossbow with steel &quot;bow&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki article for &quot;арбалет&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in English it is translated as &quot;crossbow&quot; - it seems that Russian language uses the name of specific type of crossbow as a general one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same goes with dictionaries: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reverso.net/russian-english/%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reverso&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dict.com/Russian-English/%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dict&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://translate.academic.ru/%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%82/en/ru/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academist&lt;/a&gt; translates as either &quot;arbalest&quot; or &quot;crossbow&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?l1=1&amp;amp;l2=2&amp;amp;s=%E0%F0%E1%E0%EB%E5%F2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Multitran&lt;/a&gt; does as above&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there is no word for &quot;arbalest&quot; as a specific type of crossbow (heavy crossbow with steel bow) and арбалет is used for all types of weapons that are made as &quot;horizontal bow attached to a stock&quot;, I'd stick to using the more general English &quot;crossbow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T01:53:14.090" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T01:53:14.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2432" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-04-27T08:17:35.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T08:17:35.263" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T08:17:35.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2433" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-04-27T08:17:35.263" Score="0" Body="For questions about book the &quot;Till We Have Faces&quot; by the British writer C. S. Lewis. Use this with the [c-s-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="234" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T10:55:06.863" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T10:55:06.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2430" CreationDate="2017-04-27T09:31:33.307" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't know whether it was an arbalest or a crossbow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote (for the lack of a better source) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbalest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A large weapon, the arbalest had a &lt;strong&gt;steel prod (&amp;quot;bow&amp;quot;)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Emphasis mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking that as the trait that distinguishes an arbalest from a crossbow, we... gain nothing. There is no mention of &lt;em&gt;arbalests&lt;/em&gt; in the original Russian version, and descriptions given to crossbows don't indicate the material of the prod.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ложа Анкиного арбалета была выточена из черной пластмассы, а тетива была из хромистой стали и натягивалась одним движением бесшумно скользящего рычага. Антон новшеств не признавал: у него было доброе боевое устройство в стиле маршала Тоца, короля Пица Первого, окованное черной медью, с колесиком, на которое наматывался шнур из воловьих жил.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prologue&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, in the translation by Olena Bormashenko&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Anton's crossbow is described as an arbalest, presumably due to copper covering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The black stock of Anka’s crossbow was made of plastic, while the strings were chrome steel, operated by a single motion of a noiselessly sliding lever. Anton didn’t trust newfangled technology; he had an old-fashioned &lt;strong&gt;arbalest&lt;/strong&gt; in the style of Marshal Totz (King Pitz the First), overlaid with black copper, with a cable of ox sinew wound around a little wheel.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Emphasis added.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, only Anton's crossbow is ever described as an arbalest in this translation. Being described as &amp;quot;old-fashioned&amp;quot;, I don't think it was really an arbalest, given that in our world arbalests were developed in 12th century, and Marshal Totz, presumably, lived before that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that since the world of &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt; appears to have plate armour, the need for arbalests is obvious. Brother Aba's crossbow, for instance, is described differently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Брат Аба с неожиданной для его комплекции резвостью извлек из-под стола &lt;strong&gt;огромный боевой арбалет&lt;/strong&gt; и положил перед собой прямо на бумаги.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brother Aba, with surprising agility for his bulk, took a &lt;strong&gt;huge combat crossbow&lt;/strong&gt; out from underneath the desk and placed it on the papers in front of him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapter 7&lt;/em&gt;. Emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is an arbalest due to being a &lt;em&gt;combat&lt;/em&gt; crossbow, but we don't have any definitive evidence; and it's not clear why it's not described as an arbalest in the translation, while Anton's clearly is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, given the ambiguity in authors' descriptions, both are equally valid; &amp;quot;crossbow&amp;quot;, however, is more recognisable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;: I sent her an e-mail asking about her choice of words; she responded that there was no underlying motivation to use &amp;quot;arbalest&amp;quot;&#xA;instead of &amp;quot;crossbow&amp;quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T07:02:09.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2373" CreationDate="2017-04-27T16:36:14.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my point of view, generally it may suggest that people will say or ask other people to &quot;remember&quot; certain things because they think those things will be forgotten by them. If they believe that they will never forget about them or certain things,they would not swear to &quot;remember&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further referring to the individuals suggested in the above, it implies that this person want the other person to &quot;remember&quot; about them, because he/she may feel that the other person will forget about their love. In short, the above tanka manifests the inner feelings of a lover who fears that his/her lover will forget about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am sorry if I have given a wrong interpretation. The above are only my ideas about the given poem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T16:49:34.640" LastActivityDate="2017-04-27T16:49:34.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5616" CreationDate="2017-04-27T17:40:16.190" Score="8" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;One important plot point in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is that the King feels invincible due to the prophecy that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shall come against him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Act 4, Scene 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, of course, happens in the final act, in the form of the soldiers under Malcolm who have cut branches from the wood where they made camp (Act 5, scene 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to a story told by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaus_Magnus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olaus Magnus&lt;/a&gt; in his work on Swedish history and society, &lt;em&gt;Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus&lt;/em&gt;, printed in 1555: The Swedish king Hachonis are making war against the Danish king Sigaro, and are camping in a forest. The soldiers are ordered to cut branches and advance slowly on Sigaro's castle. A messenger tells Sigaro that a wood is advancing on his castle, and he interprets this as an omen that his death is near, and he is indeed slain in the following battle. (Book 7, chapter XX; AFAIK, neither of these kings have much if any basis in reality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my admittedly limited search for other potential sources I have not found anyone suggesting anywhere else where Shakespeare could have gotten it from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence for or against Shakespeare taking this story out of Olaus Magnus? Is there any other source to which it is commonly attributed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://runeberg.org/olmagnus/0323.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a scanned version of the &lt;em&gt;Historia&lt;/em&gt; in Latin with a wood cut of soldiers moving with a forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-27T17:57:13.940" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T04:23:52.503" Title="Was Shakespeare inspired by Olaus Magnus when writing Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2439" CreationDate="2017-04-28T12:24:40.573" Score="8" ViewCount="1145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book when I was in elementary school in Ashland, KY, probably between 1990 and 1998. It was a paperback, with the cover primarily blue, maybe with the main character on the front in dark sunglasses. The protagonist was a young boy, I think a cub scout or boy scout. Another boy (I think, a bully), throws a firecracker at him as a prank, and it explodes in his face, blinding him. The rest of what I remember of the book was him adapting to his new handicap and coming to accept that he may never regain his sight again (although I seem to remember that his vision started to come back, at least partially, near the end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not get a chance to read the first part of the book, as the binding had failed and a decent chunk was missing, including likely the scene where he was actually blinded, although I picked up a fair amount from context. There was a scene where he went to a school for the blind and just sat on the bed. When his roommate asked why he was doing nothing, he excused himself by saying &quot;I'm blind&quot; whereupon his roommate pointed out that they were blind too, and it didn't stop them. I think the roommate also introduced him to the practice of attaching tactile tags to clothing to let him know what color it was. There was a scene using basic echolocation where he learned to get an impression of the room's dimensions by clapping once and listening. And lastly, I remember there being a scene where he confronted the bully who blinded him and we learn that the psychopathic monster he's been building up in his head is just a kid who made a mistake and feels horrible about what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T04:04:49.423" Title="Book about a boy blinded by a firecracker" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2438" CreationDate="2017-04-28T12:41:57.400" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140364854&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Follow My Leader&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, by James Garfield? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vRkUY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vRkUY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;front cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book opens with the main character, Jimmy Carter, playing baseball - this could be what you're remembering as scouting. The cover does have the main character on it, wearing dark glasses. The book was published in 1994, so it's within the time frame. I don't know enough about it to say for sure, but it appears to match your description, from what I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T13:09:08.100" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T13:09:08.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T13:02:22.263" Score="5" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are &quot;the meaning of life&quot;, art, and in particular &quot;the life of an artist&quot; themes in Chekhov's drama &quot;The Seagull&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:27:22.693" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T09:27:22.693" Title="Are &quot;the meaning of life&quot;, art, and in particular &quot;the life of an artist&quot; themes in Chekhov's drama &quot;The Seagull&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;the-seagull&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T23:20:23.283" Score="8" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Slow Regard of Silent Things, one of the gifts Auri prepares for Kvothe is a bed of his own near hers in the Underthing, along with a candle and a kiss. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just finished a re-read of both The Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear, and while I found references to her giving him the candle and the kiss and letting him know that there is always a safe place for him to stay with her, I wasn't sure if he ever made use of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he ever stay with Auri in the Underthing, making use of that third gift? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-04-28T23:27:29.390" LastActivityDate="2017-04-28T23:27:29.390" Title="Does Kvothe ever use the bed Auri prepared for him?" Tags="&lt;patrick-rothfuss&gt;&lt;the-kingkiller-chronicle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-28T23:58:58.757" Score="15" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Michael Ende's brilliant novel &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;, the world of Fantastica is ruled by the Childlike Empress, a mysterious ruler who is given a different name each time a new human comes to her world. When Bastian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; seeks to take her place as Emperor after she disappears, he is first thwarted by Atreyu and then discovers that by seizing power he would have doomed himself to oblivion and insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What message does &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; promote in terms of power?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it want its readers to come away with the idea that power corrupts and seeking it is a bad thing? Or that power should remain in the hands of those who have always held it? Or something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T15:47:16.383" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T15:47:16.383" Title="What is the Neverending Story's moral about power?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;&lt;moral&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-29T01:19:11.780" Score="8" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anton, aka &quot;Don Rumata of Estor&quot;, is Russian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pashka, aka &quot;Don Hug, first groom of the chamber of his lordship the Duke of Irukan&quot;, is Russian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alexander Vassilevitch, aka &quot;Don Kondor, Supreme Judge and Keeper of the Great Seal of the Mercantile Republic of Soan&quot; (and other titles), is Russian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even the other Earth observers mentioned only in passing, such as those we hear about near the beginning who &lt;s&gt;violated the Prime Directive&lt;/s&gt; failed in their missions by interfering too much, seem to have Russian names.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How culturally mixed are the Earth observers on the planet, really?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it just a coincidence, or due to the fact that he knew them of old on Earth, that Anton and his closest friends are all Russian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, what is the political situation back on Earth - is there some kind of United Earth organising these missions to other planets, or is the entire expedition a Russian-specific thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Sorry if this is made clear later on in the book; I'm only on Chapter 7 at the moment.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-04-29T09:56:02.443" LastActivityDate="2017-04-29T09:56:02.443" Title="How culturally mixed were the Earth ambassadors in Hard to Be a God?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-04-30T07:52:22.260" Score="20" ViewCount="6588" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alan Turing's article &quot;Computing Machinery and Intelligence&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/TuringArticle.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;) is commonly interpreted as introducing the Turing test. Briefly, the Turing test is when you have two computer terminals, one controlled by a human in different room, and another controlled by a computer. A second human then has to determine which terminal is the human-controlled terminal and which is the computer-controlled terminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you read the actual text of the article, you will notice something strange. The test Turing proposes at the introduction is actually a test to see if someone can identify a terminal controlled by a man from a terminal controlled by a woman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game.&quot; It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either &quot;X is A and Y is B&quot; or &quot;X is B and Y is A.&quot; The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only at the end of the article that Turing brings computers into play. He asks what would happen if a machine replaced the man, and whether the game would change. Turing reasons that if the third human identified the human man from the human woman at the same rate the third human identifies the machine pretending to be a man from the human woman, then the machine is indistinguishable from being a human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We now ask the question, &quot;What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?&quot; Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, &quot;Can machines think?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that gender continues to play a role in the test. The Turing test, &lt;em&gt;as Turing proposes it&lt;/em&gt;, is whether a human can identify a machine from a terminal controlled by a woman. &lt;strong&gt;Never in his paper does Turing propose a test where the only thing a human has to identify a terminal controlled by a human whose gender is unspecified from a computer controlled terminal&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, why talk about gender at all? In particular, why talk about gender at the very beginning of the paper, and only later discuss the (presumably) real topic of the paper, computers?  Note that it's extremely unlikely that this is &quot;random&quot; (whatever &quot;random&quot; means in the context of literature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer has gotten a lot of answers arguing that gender has nothing to do with the test. I suppose this is a good thing: it's good to get a lot of different viewpoints. However, a possible answer that no one has considered yet is that Turing's paper may be related to various tropes about AI and gender. An answer arguing along that lines is something I would really be interested in reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're interested in writing such an answer but worried that it will get buried under the other answers here, don't worry! I'll accept the first good answer I see, which will move the answer to the top of the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're unconvinced that such an answer exists, I would encourage you to take a closer look at Tariq Ali's excellent answer, which cites a paper dedicated to rebutting interpretations of Turing's paper that focus on gender. I'm interested in an answer that explains the arguments that Tariq Ali's answer rebuts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:30:25.863" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:30:25.863" Title="Understanding political subtexts in the Turing test paper" Tags="&lt;alan-turing&gt;&lt;science-and-technology-studies&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-04-30T13:11:11.970" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turing is talking about gender purely to make it easier to discuss A and B, I think. He was a gay man who didn't suffer fools gladly; gender wasn't a point of discrimination for him beyond what living in the early part of the 20th century would make any white cis male. He was interested in &lt;em&gt;thinking&lt;/em&gt;, in puzzles, in how the machines worked, in creating a computer (literally a computational device, not &quot;computer&quot; as we think of the word) which could answer any question or problem you put to it without being specifically programmed for that sole question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Hodges wrote a pretty exhaustive bio of Turing, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/069116472X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alan Turing: The Enigma,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and there is no misogyny or gender bias highlighted that I recall. He was engaged for a time to Joan Clarke, another boffin, and ended things amicably over his homosexuality. But (as shown in the film &lt;em&gt;The Imitation Game&lt;/em&gt;) he respected her mind greatly. There's no historical evidence that Turing would think a computer &quot;only&quot; had to clear the hurdle of &quot;being as good as a mere woman&quot; to fool a man. He was using contemporary parlance of &quot;man&quot; to mean &lt;em&gt;sentient human.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T13:11:11.970" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-04-30T16:31:44.223" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, Alan Turing had expressed his ideas about the Turing Test before &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; using gender...at least, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Alan_Turing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. In 1948, Alan Turing wrote in an unpublished manuscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not difficult to devise a paper machine which will play a not very bad game of chess. Now get three men as subjects for the experiment. A, B and C. A and C are to be rather poor chess players, B is the operator who works the paper machine. ... Two rooms are used with some arrangement for communicating moves, and a game is played between C and either A or the paper machine. C may find it quite difficult to tell which he is playing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That manuscript would later be published in 1968.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to this quote, I think &lt;strong&gt;Lauren Ipsum&lt;/strong&gt;'s claim that Turing was &amp;quot;talking about gender purely to make it easier to discuss A and B&amp;quot; is probably correct. For whatever reason, Turing didn't like using the chess example, and instead switched it with the party game example...but both paragraphs are essentially talking about the same &amp;quot;game&amp;quot;. The point is that A (a computer) is playing against B (a non-computer) and is trying to trick C (the judge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is an alternative viewpoint about the Turing Test, called the &amp;quot;literal reading&amp;quot; by Gualtiero Piccinini in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/2410435/Turings_Rules_for_the_Imitation_Game&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turing’s Rules for the Imitation Game&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors have read Turing’s passage in a ... literal way, suggesting that the goal of the machine is to simulate a man imitating a woman, while the interrogator – unaware of the real purpose of the test – is still attempting to determine which of the two players is the woman and which is the man. I will call this the literal reading. Supporters of the literal reading disagree over which of the machine’s capacities are being uncovered by Turing’s game. Some argue that his point is testing the machine’s ability to utilize language like a person; the blindness of the interrogator and the gender impersonation are introduced for methodological reasons – in order to make the test unbiased. Others suggest that Turing’s point was not to test the machine’s ability to utilize language like a human, but literally to test the machine’s competence at replicating the abilities of a human male whois attempting to imitate a human female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some footnotes, Gualtiero mentions a proponent of the &amp;quot;literal reading&amp;quot; that appears to grapple with the specific gender nature of the test:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote 2: According to Genova, the literal reading accounts for Turing’s replacement proposal because Turing held the view that thinking is imitating; thus, a machine successful at imitating must be thinking (Genova, 1994, pp. 315–322). According to Genova, the request that the machine speciﬁcally simulate a human male imitating a human femaleis explained by what she takes to be Turing’s views on sexual identity, due to his own experience as a homosexual (ib., esp. pp. 314–315).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnote 7: Genova’s account in terms of Turing’s alleged view that thought is imitation is ... problematic. First, such a view is no reason to &lt;em&gt;restrict&lt;/em&gt; a test for thought to the simulation of a human male imitating a human female, rather than allowing for a wider range of simulations. Second, and more importantly, Genova provides no textual evidence to warrant her attribution to Turing of the view that thought is imitation. In studying his work, I have found no evidence that Turing held such a view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his paper, Gualtiero makes several arguments against the &amp;quot;literal reading&amp;quot;. Instead, he is in favor of the &amp;quot;standard reading&amp;quot;, which is the one that is most commonly accepted in society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the traditional interpretation of this passage, when a machine and a human being are playing the game, the goal of the interrogator is to discover which is the human being and which is the machine,while the goal of the machine is to be mistaken for a human being. I will refer to this as the standard reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His evidence in favor of the &amp;quot;standard reading&amp;quot; is the 1948 quote, other passages within the text which more naturally suggests an &amp;quot;standard reading&amp;quot; interpretation, and a lack of a good explanation for how the &amp;quot;literal reading&amp;quot; served Alan Turing's purpose of replacing the question &amp;quot;Can Machines Think?&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any reading of Turing’s rules must explain how the imitation game fulﬁlls his goal of replacing the question of whether machines can think. As I said, the standard reading’s account is straightforward: if a machine can demonstrate mastery of human language, knowledge, and inferential capacities to the point that it is mistaken for a human being, most people would consider it intelligent – or so they should according to Turing. With respect to this replacement goal, though, the literal reading generates more questions than answers. ... The proponents of the literal reading owe us not only an answer to these questions, but an explanation for why Turing did not address them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He, however, does not fully dismiss the literal reading, indicating in a footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions have actually been answered at length by Sterrett (2000), who argues that the test deﬁned by the literal reading makes a better test for intelligence than the test deﬁned by the standard reading. Of course, Sterrett does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;  attribute her arguments to Turing. The issue of what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the best test for machine intelligence is irrelevant to the topic of the present paper. Here, I concentrate on what Turing &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;didn’t say&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1395" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T15:47:21.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-04-30T21:19:24.530" Score="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dispute your claim that the Turing test, or Turing's article, is about gender. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; I see no hint in Turing's article that the test is about gender. If you think that it is, it is up to you to come up with evidence why that is a reasonable conclusion. Therefore, the only thing that is answerable in your question is: why does Turing use gender, to explain or make a point that is unrelated to gender?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no evidence that this is anything but the straightforward didactic device it appears to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Turing uses the word &lt;em&gt;sex&lt;/em&gt;, you use the word &lt;em&gt;gender&lt;/em&gt;. I'll use the word &lt;em&gt;sex&lt;/em&gt;, following Turing; the distinction is actually somewhat relevant, but not philosophically so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this answer will not distinguish between thinking, consciousness, sentience, soul possession and other similar but not identical concepts. Turing uses the word “thinking” and links it to some variations on these other ideas but does not make a clear distinction between them. I will do likewise, although much could be said on the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, my perspective is that of a (former) computer scientist and occasional teacher of computer science. I am familiar with the concept of the Turing test and the historical context in which it was formulated but have not researched Turing's writings or the precise context in which he wrote this text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us start with the historical context. In Turing's time, the concept of a machine that might think in a way that's similar to a human is rather novel, daring and &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; rejected. The concept is not wholly new — numerous human creation myths and golem and other similar ideas have existed for longer than we have recorded history. What was new in Turing's time was the idea that the creation of a thinking mind could be understood in technological terms and not just as magic: a thinking mind would be constructed by engineers, who would use techniques that are in principle reproducible (see §3) rather than a magical insufflation of life by dint of opaque biological processes or divine grant. It was a rather shocking idea, which is why about than half of the article consists of a refutation of counterarguments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have a philosophically daring idea which needs to be explained in a way that won't outright shock the audience and cause immediate rejection. An abrupt presentation of the idea would risk being emotionally rejected without serious intellectual consideration. This calls for a gradual presentation that first hooks the audience into a reasonable-sounding series of arguments, and then shows that if this idea is reasonable then so should be the more daring one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The daring idea is that a human and a (sufficiently advanced) thinking machine cannot be distinguished through the way they think, and the way they communicate via language in the abstract. (Turing neglects the language aspect, assuming that a thinking machine would be able to master human language. I will likewise consider mastery of language as part of the requirements of thinking.) The human and the machine may be distinguished by physical characteristics — they may have different size and shape, they may have different means of concrete communication (typing vs holding a pen, different timbers of voice, etc.). The point of the setup of the Turing test is to argue that these are only superficial differences that do not matter to the crucial question of whether the machine thinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we need to explain that there's a test for which a thinking machine and a human will be indistinguishable. But since this claim would immediately be rejected, we need to bring it up gradually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then let's start where we have two different &lt;em&gt;humans&lt;/em&gt; who need to be distinguished. Nothing shocking about that. Human A is trying to pass off as human B, human B is trying to refute this, and the goal of the interrogator C is to determine which is which. With two specific humans, C would have an easy job, by asking something that only B would know. So the test doesn't really work with specific humans. It would work a lot better with categories of humans. This way, A could justify ignorance of a fact, or variation from a stereotype, because not every member of the category would have to know the fact or follow the stereotype.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We need to find a way to distinguish between two categories of humans who are not easily distinguished by their knowledge or mental ability. Yet these categories should be unambiguously distinct. Preferably those categories should have physical distinctions, to make the requirements for the setup of the test more evident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things like nationality (which would lead to knowledge and language differences) and age (not well-defined and could also have noticeable intrinsic differences) wouldn't work. On the other hand, sex perfectly fits the requirement. Note that this does not require to accept that there is no intrinsic mental difference between men and women. While Turing's society did make some distinctions in this respect, his audience would not automatically have jumped to the conclusion that the test would obviously reveal which is which. And in any case what matters is not that the test &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; not reveal which is which under any circumstance, but that it is &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; that the interrogator would be unable to decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, first make the test be about sex. Then, once the audience has accepted the framework of the test as reasonable, switch the test to be about human vs machine. If the test is good enough to determine whether men and women can be distinguished as a category, then it's good enough to determine whether humans and machines can be distinguished as a category.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the test has been established in section 1, Turing does not come back to the idea of testing for sex (gender). The paper is not about a test for gender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2017-04-30T21:19:24.530" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-05-01T10:57:35.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is important to bear in mind that the Turing test is really an illustration rather than a attempt to prove anything. Bear in mind also that when this statement was made the idea that a computer could successfully imitate a human was a very distant possibility so he is very much talking about an overall concept rather than the nuances of its possible execution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense the ability to distinguish between a man and a woman is a simple and understandable way to get the overall context and scope of the task across in fact it is more about explaining the &lt;em&gt;nature&lt;/em&gt; of the problem than having any specific bearing on the test itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it is a massive stretch to say that it would be &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to distinguish between a man and a woman purely by written communication, in many cases probably not easy but it would be reasonable to expect that an average person might get it right more often than not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Turing is saying here is that to pass the test a computer would not have to be indistinguishable from any specific person but that it is no more different from one person than any other person ie if it is no easier to distinguish a computer from a woman as it a man from a woman then it has successfully passed for &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt;.  Whether it is the man or the woman replaced makes no difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the difference between a man and a woman is a relatable example of two people where its is &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; to be able to differentiate them but it is not trivial to explain exactly how you would do it. For example if you were trying to differentiate between a Lawyer and a Physicist there might well be trivial tricks with grammar and vocabulary that would make the task a lot easier by brute force analysis ie it is not a task which is trivial even with a large amount of computing power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could start taking about person A, person B and person C and then describe at length that they are quite similar but not identical but saying a man a woman and an observer makes for a much clearer example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also need to be clear what the Turing test actually says. It is simply the ability to fool a human being in conversation. In of itself, it is not directly about modeling human intelligence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="765" LastEditorUserId="765" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T14:43:53.743" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T14:43:53.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="493" CreationDate="2017-05-01T13:55:19.690" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By conveying &quot; I took the one less traveled by&quot; Frost suggests that he is moving out of the flow of the world.In short it means that he does not go with the flow. Normally people are used to go with the flow of the world without considering about what they really want and what is the purpose of doing things.but in contrary to them(the majority who go with the flow) the poet takes the &quot;less traveled&quot; path which may contain many obstacles and hardships. However it makes a difference because everyone is used to accept what the society say uncritically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &quot;taking a path&quot; emphasizes &quot;taking a decision&quot; which is hard to take but seems right.In our life time we all have faced such situations where we are completely confused to choose from two paths(of life)/decisions.In such situations We feel the insecurity and uncertainty like the poet(&quot; Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T13:55:19.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-05-01T14:48:44.933" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I have to object outright that it's only at the end of the article that he introduces computers. He makes the transition at the end of the first section, and there are seven sections; I didn't even have to scroll to see that, and the whole article is quite long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of the article is &quot;Computer Machinery and Intelligence,&quot; and the  imitation game where you distinguish between male and female is given in the context of trying to show whether machines think. The point is, can a machine trick you into thinking it's a person any better than a man can trick you into thinking he's a woman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we know our John Conner-looking Terminator will pass for a real person? Well, more people think it's human than people think our woman pretending to be John Conner is actually a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1406" LastEditorUserId="1406" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T14:59:10.863" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T14:59:10.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2453" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:09:37.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag should be used for any questions about works of literature which were originally written in the Spanish language, or about Spanish-speaking authors. Note that this includes literature which has nothing to do with Spain the country, e.g. which originates in Latin America. For more details on the reasoning for this usage, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/647/17&quot;&gt;this meta post&lt;/a&gt; about country tags vs language tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:09:37.613" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:09:37.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2454" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:09:37.613" Score="0" Body="Questions about literature in Spanish: works of literature which were originally written in the Spanish language, whether from Spain, Latin America, or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:08:00.613" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:08:00.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2455" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for questions about Carlos Ruiz Zafon's &lt;em&gt;Cemetery of Forgotten Books&lt;/em&gt; series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_of_the_Wind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Wind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;La sombra del viento&lt;/em&gt;; 2001)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Angel%27s_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Angel's Game&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;El juego del angel&lt;/em&gt;; 2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_Heaven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Prisoner of Heaven&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;El prisionero del cielo&lt;/em&gt;; 2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Labyrinth_of_Spirits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Labyrinth of Spirits&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;El laberinto de los espíritus&lt;/em&gt;; 2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the official English-language website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.carlosruizzafon.co.uk/the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2456" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which begins with &quot;The Shadow of the Wind&quot;. Use this tag together with the [carlos-ruiz-zafon] and [spanish-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T15:48:06.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2303" CreationDate="2017-05-01T16:58:08.970" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The biography by Melissa Muller (Bloomsbury, 1999), based on information from relatives and friends, states that Anne was always popular and assertive at school, and not good at concentrating (which may have meant she was more aware of what the boys were up to). In 1942 there were 12 girls and 18 boys in her class, so the relatively small number of girls could have meant that they all attracted more attention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1408" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T16:58:08.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-05-01T18:30:18.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will try to approch this from a different angle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of your comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't think this answers the question. My question is, in a paper about computers, why is the first thing that Turing talks about gender, and why is the category Turing testing for really the male-female binary instead of the human-computer binary. ....  I want to know why Turing is writing about gender in a paper about computers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really quite simple, there was no such thing as a computer at the time. Not as he meant it, and not as you mean it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turing's idea was to create a machine that could think like a human. At the time this would have been considered pure and utter non-sense. A computer can add, or subtract, but not think. This is an era where the one of the most sophisticated &quot;computers&quot; around was a slide rule. To suggest that a slide rule could think was beyond silly. Yes there were were readers, yes, there were &quot;mechanical&quot; computers. But there was not, at that time, anything, even a little bit like what we have today. Not even a tiny a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A computer, was a machine that would, when supplied with an input, produce an output. Cash registers were &quot;computers&quot;. You mashed buttons, they turned wheels, gears and, dials, and gave you a total. That's just what there was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So like explaining a concept a child, you start with something simple, then work into your complex example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three people, A man, a woman, and an interrogator. The Interrogators job is to figure out which person is the man, and which is trying to pretend to be a man. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All ready, your brain ticks on, and your starting to think about ways you can do this. Questions you could ask to find out which is the man and which is the pretend man.  You might even say a few questions out loud. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;---- Right here at this point, you have a pretty fun puzzle. It's not impossible for a woman to pose as a man (under the rules of the game). You have your audience thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now suppose if you will we replace the woman with a computer. One that was built to pretend to be a man. Surely it would need to be complex, but lets say we did it... and the paper continues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Man/Woman &quot;game&quot; is just a simple game. One that everyone can play. A 5 year old can play. Men and women are different everyone knows that. But now how could you tell one from the other in the constructs of the game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then jump to Computer/Man. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well computers can't communicate, well lets say they can. Well umm....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now your thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you just start with &quot;So I have this slide rule that talks to me&quot;, it might be time for a padded room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why he decided to do man/woman instead of some other groupings of two people we can only guess, but it seems that the reason is because it's the hardest to win. Age, race, height, all are really easy to come up with questions. Man/Woman, is much more difficult.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1413" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T18:30:18.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2459" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2465" CreationDate="2017-05-01T20:32:44.933" Score="8" ViewCount="1323" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the prologue to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Season_of_Mists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #21), the Endless are gathered for a family meeting. Each of them talks with a different typeface, to help differentiate their manners of speech and personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering why Delirium speaks with colored speech bubbles. I understand that the shifting font size shows her to be slightly tipsy and not quite coherent, but I wonder what quality of speech might be indicated by the changing colors of the bubbles. Is it just more of the same, or do the colors indicate something else about Delirium's speech? (Whimsy, perhaps? My brother noticed that the colors of the speech bubbles in one panel matched the colors of the butterflies that Delirium created.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this example from page 8, with three or four different colors in the bubbles (left), and the panel with the butterflies from page 13 (right):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BuTeB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BuTeBm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A48A.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A48Am.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T21:53:42.527" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T21:53:42.527" Title="What's up with the colors of Delirium's speech bubbles?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-01T20:44:06.047" Score="6" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #21, some of the various members of the Endless families receive short biographic descriptions. Here's part of Delirium's (p 10):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For Delirium was once Delight. And although that was long ago now,&#xA;  even today her eyes are badly matched: one eye is a vivid emerald&#xA;  green, spattered with silver flecks that move; her other eye is vein&#xA;  blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who knows what Delirium sees, through her mismatched eyes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a reason her eyes are two different colors?&lt;/strong&gt; It appears from the above passage that it may have something to do with her development from Delight; is one color normally associated with delight, and the other with delirium?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://sandman.wikia.com/wiki/Delirium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikia page&lt;/a&gt; says &quot;One of her eyes is blue, and the other is green, though she can adjust them to the same color but says that hurts her,&quot; but doesn't mention &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; (in-universe or out) the eyes are different colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-05-01T22:01:37.107" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T12:08:37.250" Title="Why are Delirium's eyes of two colors?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2462" CreationDate="2017-05-01T21:01:49.620" Score="9" ViewCount="670" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a short story long ago. I can't remember the details but I would like to reread it. What's it's title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is a science fiction story concerning some sports match. A referee makes a bad call and then the hats of the spectators reflect sunlight burning him. I also remember the author is pretty famous but I can't remember who.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it online in a collection of sci-fi stories 4-5 years ago. It's probably 20th century. It might have been Clarke or Asimov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1418" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T02:49:26.510" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T02:49:26.510" Title="Short story where spectators at a sports match shine a mirror at the referee and burn him" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2461" CreationDate="2017-05-01T21:17:52.027" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62811&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“A Slight Case of Sunstroke”&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur C. Clarke&lt;/a&gt;. Like most of Clarke's story, it's a hard SF story (perfectly physically plausible). It's one of two stories by Clarke where someone is killed by a death ray, the other being &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?62810&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Let There Be Light”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In “A Slight Case of the Sunstroke”, the setting is a football match between the national teams of two fictional Latin American countries, and the spectators have been (unknowing to them) instructed to orient reflective material in such a way as to kill a political opponent of the order giver. In “Let There Be Light”,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; a driver is blinded and loses control of his car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/59555/searching-for-football-related-short-story&quot;&gt;This story has also been sought on SF&amp;amp;F.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T21:17:52.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2459" CreationDate="2017-05-01T22:09:12.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Her &lt;a href=&quot;http://sandman.wikia.com/wiki/Delirium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikia page&lt;/a&gt; says this about the colors of the speech bubbles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Todd Klein, the series' letterer, draws her speech as a scrawl, against a multi-colored background, sometimes the background color will match the mood she is in (red for anger, blue and green for calm, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't, as far as I can tell, have a citation for this claim. It appears to be copied almost word-for-word from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delirium_(comics)#Fictional_character_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't source this claim either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't analyze Delirium's utterances in other works (and searching the web for pictures shows that the colors are used somewhat differently from the way they're used in &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;, with more colors and waves of colors per bubble), but I see that Delirium speaks in only thirteen panels in this issue (pages 8-17). In those pages, it appears that her speech mostly uses &lt;strong&gt;lighter colors for calmer sentences, and darker colors for more heated ones.&lt;/strong&gt; The particular color doesn't seem to make much difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of Delirium's speech in this issue is calm; for one example, see page 13 (the one with the butterflies):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A48A.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4A48Am.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when Desire provokes Delirium (by calling her &quot;Delight&quot;), the speech bubbles take a darker hue (page 17):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yYCde.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yYCde.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in these panels, the colors blue and green are used for more forceful speech, unlike what the various wikis posited. However, those colors are darker than the ones used before. It might even be possible to interpret the last two bubbles by Delirium in the above picture to contain an increase in both &lt;em&gt;volume&lt;/em&gt; (the huge, bold word &quot;GOD&quot;) and &lt;em&gt;emotion&lt;/em&gt; (the shift from white to dark green from left to right).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting difference between my interpretation and that of the anonymous wiki-users is the panel on the bottom of page 16:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NXZWt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NXZWtm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some reddish-purplish color in this balloon (especially in the tail); however, that color is of a lighter hue. As per Wikia, this should be read as a statement in anger, because of the red. According to my interpretation, this statement has no anger in it, only shock. (And I think my interpretation is more likely, given Delirium's expression in this panel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T21:18:04.013" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T21:18:04.013" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2459" CreationDate="2017-05-01T22:34:15.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a decision by the letterer, Todd Klein. As he explains in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, it was supposed to reflect her fluent, shifting nature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delirium was a different challenge. &amp;quot;Her lettering constantly changes in size, shape, and slant, wobbling in out, to indicate that she's always on the verge of madness,&amp;quot; Klein says. &amp;quot;Her balloons also contain a variety of rainbow colors, which was my idea but executed by the colorist Danny Vozzo.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Secret Origins - Origins of Lettering Styles&amp;quot;, page 245.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took the changing typeface to indicate Delirium's changing voice volume, and maybe pitch, while the colour could indicate her overall (inner) mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Klein most probably took the &amp;quot;on the verge&amp;quot; part from Gaiman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: [Delirium] is a character I wanted in a state of flux - she's been one thing, she's become something else, and eventually she'll change into something else again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HB&lt;/strong&gt;: Is this state of flux unique to Delirium?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes. It has to do with her being the youngest; she's practically a cosmic afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you flip through &lt;em&gt;Brief Lives&lt;/em&gt;, you'll see that Delirium's look is constantly changing, pretty much whenever the mood strikes her, so it's easy for Delirium to look like several different people.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid, page 241.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-01T22:34:15.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="994" CreationDate="2017-05-02T02:05:02.260" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be something no one cares about anymore, but Yggdrasil is an Ash Tree that splits into every known reality and the house is on Ash Tree Lane so it does actually have a pretty constant and repeated reference throughout the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1421" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T02:05:02.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-02T05:11:11.390" Score="13" ViewCount="5095" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm probably revealing my ignorance about &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; and comic books here. Why does Morpheus look like the writer who created him, Neil Gaiman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dgMWO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dgMWO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;On the left - younger Neil Gaiman (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/2048306/book-review-neil-gaiman-reads-his-own-american-myths&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;); on the right - Morpheus from &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just a random choice? Or is there a deeper thematic significance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T16:59:53.997" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T17:35:27.707" Title="Why does Morpheus look like Neil Gaiman?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-02T05:36:24.240" Score="8" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading George W. DaSent's 1861 translation of &lt;em&gt;The Story of Burnt Njal&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://sagadb.org/brennu-njals_saga.en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;because it's available for free online&lt;/a&gt;). I have what some may consider a basic question, but given that I don't know anything about Iceland I thought I would ask it. What exactly is a beacon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now both sides ride home from the Thing, and Hauskuld and Hrut ride westward by Hallbjorn's beacon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate answers that go into a little bit of depth about the cultural context of beacons in Iceland at the time period of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-01T00:11:59.837" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T00:11:59.837" Title="What is a beacon?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2469" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2476" CreationDate="2017-05-02T06:58:59.223" Score="13" ViewCount="6023" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Much ado about nothing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare, Act 1 Scene 1, Beatrice declares to Benedick&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swears he loves me.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that Beatrice is basically saying 'I would rather X than hearing a man say he loves me.' But I don't understand the dog barking at a crow bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does a dog barking at a crow signify?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some research and found that a crow is a bad omen, so perhaps the dog barking is warning the owner of a bad omen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T16:42:03.357" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T18:22:05.920" Title="What does a dog barking at a crow signify?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2485" CreationDate="2017-05-02T09:44:26.550" Score="9" ViewCount="783" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm about halfway through &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. What's sustained me through this famously difficult novel is the quality of the prose and characterisation. However, I was struck by the thought that what makes it &quot;difficult&quot; is the sheet volume of internal, stream of consciousness, monologue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages chop and change in subject with great rapidity, making them difficult to follow. The manner in which they chop and change with the actual narrative of the plot - often at great length - in turn makes that difficult to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm quite aware that Joyce was deploying these novel techniques to bring a new degree of character and realism to his writing. And I would agree it was successful: these confused narratives ring true as an attempt to describe a thought process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm left wondering, though, why he felt the need to deploy them in such a huge novel. Arguably they would have been more successful in short stories such as the &lt;em&gt;Dubliners&lt;/em&gt; collection where, indeed, he first trialed these ideas. There does seem to be a body of serious critical though on &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; which does regard it as bloated and self-indulgent. So, do we know why Joyce chose to experiment with stream of consciousness at quite such extreme lengths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T10:11:59.663" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T00:55:36.807" Title="Why is there so much stream of consciousness in Ulysses?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="513" CreationDate="2017-05-02T10:09:16.457" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to this question lies in the genesis of the book. Grahame invented these characters in stories told to his son, who suffered a variety of health problems and eventually committed suicide. It is likely that Toad's failings, which form the backbone of the narrative, were intended as a form of moral fable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, neither Grahame nor his publisher originally intended the book to be specifically for children. The author pitched it as ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A book of youth, and so perhaps chiefly for youth and those who still&#xA;  keep the spirit of youth alive in them; of life, sunshine, running&#xA;  water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides, free of problems,&#xA;  clear of the clash of the sex, of life as it might fairly be supposed&#xA;  to be regarded by some of the wise, small things that ‘glide in&#xA;  grasses and rubble of woody wreck’.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would seem to imply that he thought of it as a kind of Young Adult book for his age, aimed at late teens and adults who wished to keep that flame alive. The sheer density of the language supports that view: my pre-teen children, both prolific readers, struggled with the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original publisher advertised the book as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A whimsical satire upon life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an early reviewer called it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;An urbane exercise in irony at the expense of English character and mankind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of which suggests a piece of work aimed at younger readers, in spite of the anthropomorphic nature of the characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Grahame originally invented some children's stories for his son. According to his wife, Elspeth, he then wrote these down as individual short stories. Later, he went back to them and composed the stories into a single narrative which he intended for young adults and it was &lt;strong&gt;at this point that he inserted the two chapters to which you refer&lt;/strong&gt;: Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Wayfarers All. It seems likely, although I have no evidence for this, that he intended them to increase the literary weight of the finished work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to your question then, is that they stick out from the general narrative because they were, in fact, later additions. And that they differ in tone because they are there to serve a different purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First whisper of 'The Wind in the Willows' by Kenneth Grahame, Elspeth Grahame.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Essential Guide to Children's Books and Their Creators Paperback by Anita Slivey &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T10:27:28.390" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T10:27:28.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2475" CreationDate="2017-05-02T10:50:06.277" Score="8" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Egil's Saga, often thought to have been written by famed Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson, appears to be a heroic family history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It differs from other sagas and, indeed, from other work by Sturluson, because it includes a wealth of detail on the Viking legal system as practiced in Iceland. So much detail, in fact, that historians draw on it as a valuable historical resource in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all potentially interesting to the modern reader, of course. However, viewed from a contemporary vantage point it seems somewhat peculiar. The legalese is a distraction from the narrative. And it would, presumably, have been relatively familiar to a contemporary reader. Especially considering that only the well educated of the time would have been able to read it in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories as to why Sturluson chose to go into so much detail in this saga about the laws and legal customs of his time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB - I have added a &quot;history&quot; tag, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/588/do-we-need-tags-for-literature-related-or-specialist-academic-disciplines&quot;&gt;I feel there is a place for academic non-literature tags&lt;/a&gt; where questions touch on related disciplines.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T14:12:07.417" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:04:09.097" Title="Why is there so much legalese in Egil's Saga?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2468" CreationDate="2017-05-02T10:53:44.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's a geographical feature: a stony hill with a cairn.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/beacon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beacon&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have to be a man-made signal: the word can mean just a &quot;high hill or other easily distinguishable object&quot;, e.g. one which can act as a landmark and provide guidance for sailors or wanderers. See, for instance, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brecon_Beacons&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brecon Beacons&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for &quot;Hallbjorn's beacon&quot; on Google; most of the results were from the Story of Burnt Njals, but I also found the following result from &lt;a href=&quot;http://baekur.is/en/bok/000233832/0/144/The_book_of_the_settlement_of&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The book of the settlement of Iceland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which apparently describes the history of how these specific hills, or the cairns on them, came to be called Hallbjorn's beacons (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snæbjorn   and  his  men   came   up  with  them   at  &lt;strong&gt;the  hills  which   now   are   called   Hallbjorn's-Beacons&lt;/strong&gt;.      Hallbjorn      and  his  went  to  the  top  of  one   of  the   hills  and  defended  themselves  there;  there  three  of  Snæbjorn's  men  fell  and  both  Hallbjorn's  companions  ;  next   Snæbjorn  cut  off  the  foot    of   Hallbjorn    at   the   anckle   joint,   whereupon    he   limped   to  the  southermost   hill  and   slew   there  yet   two   men    of    Snæbjorn's   and    there    Hallbjorn    fell   withal;   therefore  &lt;strong&gt;there  are  three  beacons   on  that  hill  but  five  on  the   other.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the first &quot;beacons&quot; in this passage is used to mean the hills themselves, and the second is used to mean the cairns on top of the hills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://sagadb.org/brennu-njals_saga.is&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original Icelandic version&lt;/a&gt; of the story. (I say &quot;original&quot; - of course the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; original was in Old Norse, but Icelandic is by far the closest of the modern Scandinavian languages to Old Norse, so this should be close enough. If anyone has the text of the story in Old Norse, let me know what the relevant paragraph says there.) The corresponding sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nú ríða þeir heim af þingi hvorirtveggju og ríða þeir vestur hjá Hallbjarnarvörðum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the record, the translation you quote in your question seems pretty accurate. Even without knowing Icelandic, you can see that a word-for-word translation would be something like &quot;Now ride they home from the Thing, both sides, and ride they west past Hallbjarn's beacon.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the original word is &lt;strong&gt;Hallbjarnarvörðum&lt;/strong&gt;. Plugging this into an automatic translator, and adding spaces appropriately, gives something like &quot;Hallbjarn guards&quot; or &quot;Hallbjarnar watches&quot; or &quot;Hallbjorn beacon&quot;. Searching Google for &quot;Hallbjarnarvörðum&quot; reveals that &lt;strong&gt;it's a real place in Iceland&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VWHFG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VWHFG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Photograph&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nat.is/travelguide/ahugav_st_hallbjarnarvordur.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; (in Icelandic) recounts the same story of Snæbjorn and Hallbjorn as cited above, explaining the history of the name; the same story is also available in what seems to be a fuller and more original form &lt;a href=&quot;https://is.wikisource.org/wiki/Landn%C3%A1mab%C3%B3k/51._kafli&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (also in Icelandic). The &lt;a href=&quot;http://icelandroadguide.com/index.php?POI_G=c7e172b4-492e-4937-bfa9-81f63d1666a6&amp;amp;tqlPOI_G=c7e172b4-492e-4937-bfa9-81f63d1666a6&amp;amp;cmsszd=places&amp;amp;cmsszs=en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iceland Road Guide&lt;/a&gt; describes the Hallbjarnarvörður as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;stony mounds with cairns on them&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://mapcarta.com/32906356&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Map Carta&lt;/a&gt; also describes it as a cairn in West Iceland. You can see the cairns on top of the stony mound in the photo above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T10:53:44.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-02T16:28:17.807" Score="13" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malice_(series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2009) was the first hybrid graphic novel I read, though I've seen more than one other since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;hybrid graphic novel,&quot; I mean a book that contains passages of both traditional, unillustrated text, as well as graphic passages, with captioned panels of images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that Chris Wooding was the first to write a novel in this fashion. &lt;strong&gt;Who wrote the first hybrid graphic novel?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interests me because so many like to consider comics and prose literature to be two entirely different things (and, sadly, often assign value to &quot;real literature&quot; only). Hybrid graphic novels, to my mind, are a kind of literary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_stream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Third Stream&lt;/a&gt;. And for me, personally, &lt;em&gt;Malice&lt;/em&gt; was a bridge of sorts into the world of comics (and away from the aforementioned literary snobbery).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd like to know who came up with the idea, and also try to read the first of these hybrids, to get better acquainted with these kinds of books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T23:09:26.973" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T06:55:01.240" Title="What is the earliest hybrid graphic novel?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2472" CreationDate="2017-05-02T18:23:20.103" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: &lt;em&gt;Egil's saga&lt;/em&gt; is not particularly more interested in legal matters than similar sagas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know what other sagas are being referenced in the question, but one should recognise that there are several types of sagas. The more important ones are sagas about Icelanders (&lt;em&gt;Íslendingasögur&lt;/em&gt;), sagas about Kings (&lt;em&gt;Konungasögur&lt;/em&gt;), and legendary sagas (&lt;em&gt;fornaldarsögur&lt;/em&gt;). Egil's saga belongs to the first group. These typically focus on one or several conflicts on Iceland, or the travels of Icelanders, during the saga age, ca 870-1065 (which corresponds rather well to what is usually termed the &quot;Viking age&quot; in mainland Scandinavia). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were legal matters so important in general? First, it should be noted that Iceland was a free state. Iceland was settled by people a couple of steps down on the societal scale. Unlike e.g. the Orkneys, Iceland had no kings or even jarls until late in its history. It had &quot;chieftains&quot;, and free farmers. It had a body for creating laws, and a judicial system, but there was no enforcement beyond what individuals were capable of. The law was a way for self-conscious chieftains and farmers to settle conflicts honourably. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many saga heroes were sentenced to become outlaws, free for anyone to kill without repercussion. Other sagas tell of how the heroes will go to great lengths to avoid being forced into such positions by those harbouring ill will to the heroes (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Njal's saga&lt;/em&gt;). Thus, since &quot;conflict&quot; is almost a genre marker, &quot;dealing with legal matters&quot; is also one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;Egil's saga&lt;/em&gt;, legal matters are actually not very important to the plot; there is the inheritance that sometimes drives the conflict, but that is settled in Norway, and is not inherently important to drive things forward. Other legal matters are dealt with in self-contained episodes. It is in fact noted towards the end of the saga that Egil did not become embroiled in any major legal conflicts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Kellogg has written an introduction for the recent edition of all the sagas of Icelanders, simultaneously published in all Nordic languages. I have consulted the Swedish translation, i.e. in &lt;em&gt;Islänningasagorna: Samtliga släktsagor och fyrtionio tåtar&lt;/em&gt;, first volume, for information about genre matters and Icelandic society. The first volume also contains Egil's saga, which I skimmed through to remind me of the legal episodes, since I could not remember that they featured at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-02T23:04:09.097" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T23:04:09.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2017-05-02T20:31:52.500" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It doesn't appear to be symbolic at all; a dog barking at a crow is merely an annoying sound that she would rather listen to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crows are notorious for teasing other animals. I mean... &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y0xwX5iOFok&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;look at this&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above linked video, the crow is hanging around behind a dog, who's tied up, and repeatedly going and pecking the dog with it's beak and dashing away. It just keeps bothering the dog. Presumably the dog is barking at the crow, but the crow doesn't leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatrice is taking an example of an annoying sound, and saying that she would rather listen to that then the man's declaration of love. She's giving a very clear message - &lt;em&gt;I don't love you&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=CVRMYd6vmco&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;'s a video of a dog barking at a crow. The crow is just staying there, while the dog continues to bark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-05-02T20:31:52.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2467" CreationDate="2017-05-02T23:21:26.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems it is because many people believe that Dream is Neil's alter ego, probably because at least in some panels Morpheus DOES look like Gaiman: Empire's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/50greatestcomiccharacters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;50 greatest comic characters&lt;/a&gt;&quot; states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Over the run, Dream's appearance has been based on David Bowie, Bauhaus' Peter Murphy, The Cure's Robert Smith and &lt;strong&gt;author Neil Gaiman&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaiman himself denies that he and Dream are the same person. Here, in an interview with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/neil-gaimans-the-sandman-returning-this-fall-20131025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rolling Stone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Is the character sort of an idealized version of yourself?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  God, I hope not. The only thing that I think is particularly funny is that when I was a young man with very normal hair, I was writing Sandman with huge, weird, crazy hair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pressreader.com/canada/edmonton-journal/20090116/282522949347110&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmonton Journal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He's a lot like me, only with an immortal's superpowers and no sense&#xA;  of humour of any kind,&quot; Gaiman said. &quot;Hmm. So in fact, he isn't&#xA;  anything like me at all, but he does have very messy hair. That was a&#xA;  great point of correspondence between me and the character. He's much&#xA;  paler than I am, too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an interview with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/oct/22/how-we-made-sandman-gaiman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Years later, Karen [DC Editor] said: &quot;Of course, Dream is you.&quot; I said: &quot;No, I've got a sense of humour.&quot; I suppose he looks like me, though. But that's one of those peculiar things where you gradually start to look like your dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Article,id=20080/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; suggests, that indeed that Dream &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt; Gaiman  (sadly, I have access only to abstract)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I maintain throughout the article that Gaiman designs Morpheus with Romantic understandings of Prospero and, drawing from the larger DC Universe of superhero motifs, how &lt;strong&gt;Gaiman constructs Morpheus as an alter ego.&lt;/strong&gt; Rather than a superhero, &lt;strong&gt;I argue that Morpheus is a Romantic hero bearing traces of the author’s autobiography.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Katsiadas, Nick &quot;Mytho-auto-bio: Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, the Romantics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Studies in Comics&lt;/em&gt; Volume 6 Issue 1 (July 2015). &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1386/stic.6.1.61_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DOI: 10.1386/stic.6.1.61_1&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T04:29:04.463" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T04:29:04.463" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4168" CreationDate="2017-05-02T23:40:12.093" Score="12" ViewCount="740" Body="&lt;p&gt;In page 33 of the play &quot;A View from the Bridge&quot; by Arthur Miller, Eddie describes Rodolfo saying he:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;looked so sweet there, like an angel – you could kiss him he was so sweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paper Doll they call him. Blondie now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the &lt;strong&gt;language&lt;/strong&gt; of each of these suggestions imply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1432" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T12:23:25.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T12:23:25.680" Title="Language in A View from the Bridge" Tags="&lt;arthur-miller&gt;&lt;a-view-from-the-bridge&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-02T23:43:31.093" Score="13" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ozma of Oz&lt;/em&gt;, one of the several rather lesser-known sequels to L Frank Baum's classic &lt;em&gt;The Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.org/authors/baum-l-frank/ozma-of-oz/chapter-06.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text here&lt;/a&gt;), contains the following passage in Chapter 6, &amp;quot;The Heads of Langwidere&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To their disappointment they found the door tightly closed. A sign was tacked to the panel which read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OWNER ABSENT.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Please Knock at the Third Door in the Left Wing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Now,&amp;quot; said Tiktok to the captive Wheeler, &amp;quot;you must show us the way to the Left Wing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Very well,&amp;quot; agreed the prisoner, &amp;quot;it is around here at the right.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can the left wing be at the right?&amp;quot; demanded Dorothy, who feared the Wheeler was fooling them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Because there used to be three wings, and two were torn down, so the one on the right is the only one left. It is a trick of the Princess Langwidere to prevent visitors from annoying her.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this book as a child and thought it was nothing more than an amusing pun - the &amp;quot;left&amp;quot; wing being the right wing because it was the only one &lt;em&gt;left&lt;/em&gt;. Years later, when I'd become somewhat more &amp;quot;spoiled&amp;quot; by life, I realised that it might be a &lt;em&gt;political&lt;/em&gt; joke: when the political left wing and centre have disappeared, the right wing ends up being portrayed as the left wing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this actually a political reference, or am I reading too much into it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I've read most of Baum's &lt;em&gt;Oz&lt;/em&gt; series - albeit when I was probably too young to pick up on many political allegories - I don't know enough about his political leanings or other relevant surrounding context to be able to judge whether this reading is a valid interpretation or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T12:25:17.787" Title="Is this a political reference in &quot;Ozma of Oz&quot;?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;&lt;l-frank-baum&gt;&lt;oz&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-03T00:53:34.197" Score="9" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 3 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Season_of_Mists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #24), there are three creatures shown guarding the gates of Dream's palace (left). The lion refers to the whole group as &quot;Gatekeepers&quot; (p 20-21).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lF39t.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lF39tm.png&quot; alt=&quot;A large door, with many stairs. There is a large lion with the face of an eagle on the left, a winged horse on the right, and a super large red dragon above the entryway.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ERos4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ERos4m.png&quot; alt=&quot;The lion, speaking to Dream through a statue of itself: &amp;quot;We Gatekeepers cannot keep them all out, should they take it to force their way in.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;code&gt;page 21                            page 20&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;click either image to embiggen&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creatures are an eagle-faced lion (I couldn't find a name for a creature like this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hybrid_creatures_in_mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's list&lt;/a&gt; -- I'd call it a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;griffin&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://sandman.wikia.com/wiki/Gatekeepers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Sandman_characters#Gate_Keepers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; do, if it had wings), a red &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wyvern&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pegasus&lt;/a&gt; (or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winged_horses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;winged horse&lt;/a&gt;; both wikis identify this as a &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippogriff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hippogriff&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; which I think is incorrect because it has four horsey legs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These creatures are also shown, with very slight variation&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;, in &quot;A Dream of a Thousand Cats&quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #18, p 13). Notably, the eagle-faced lion has wings (and may have a simian body; it's hard to tell through the trees), and the red dragon is green. The winged horse appears unchanged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this grouping of creatures based on anything in mythology?&lt;/strong&gt; I might have taken them for mere random elements in the cosmology of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, but for their recurrence from issue #18 to #24 (and, apparently, in future issues as well). Is this a traditional set of mythical beasts, or are they merely (consistent) random elements in Gaiman's world? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Might they have a symbolic meaning?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griffin#Heraldic_significance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Each&lt;/a&gt; of these &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyvern#In_heraldry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creatures&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippogriff#Beliefs_and_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;associated&lt;/a&gt; with some symbolic and/or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraldry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heraldic&lt;/a&gt; meaning. Do their presence or actions in the Sandman stories represent something deeper about the Sandman, or the Dreaming?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I would have called it a dragon, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5394m.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morpheus calls it &quot;Wyvern&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Brief Lives&lt;/em&gt; chapter 2 (#42).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; At least, in my library's copy of the book. We have found differences in editions of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; in an earlier &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2201/481&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T23:02:23.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T21:53:25.653" Title="Are the guardians of Dream's palace based on mythology? Are they symbolic?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2478" CreationDate="2017-05-03T08:33:45.837" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL:DR - The language has been carefully chosen to cast doubt on Rodolfo's adulthood and masculinity&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eddie is a traditional, older, blue collar dock worker with a conservative attitude to masculinity and the role of men in the family. Rodolfo, his wife's cousin, is the opposite. He is young, liberal and harbours wild dreams of a singing career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eddie has also developed an infatuation with his wife's young niece, Catherine. Rodolfo and Catherine develop a relationship and, eventually, begin dating. This further strains relations between the two men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Eddie's language is denigrating Rodolfo, trying to cast him as young, foolish and dangerously irresponsible. Furthermore, he is trying to convince himself that Rodolfo is homosexual. He is implying these things without saying them outright by his patronising choice of language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;looked so sweet there, like an angel – you could kiss him he was so sweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sweet&quot; is a description you might use for a cute child, not a young adult. This association is strengthened because sweets (as in the confection) are associated with children. You might also use it to describe a pretty young girl, casting doubt on Rodolfo's sexuality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;An angel&quot; is an interesting one because it is ostensibly a compliment on someone's virtue. But that is not the intention here, given the content. Angelic is, again, a phrase associated with the innocence of childhood and cherubim, literally angels in the form of a child. Innocence and virtue are also traditionally feminine qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Kiss him&quot; is, coming from a man, another dig at Rodolfo's sexuality. This rough man is insinuating that Rodolfo is girlish enough in looks and behaviour to arouse sexual feeling in other men. It's also stated passively, suggesting that Rodolfo might actually encourage and enjoy such attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paper Doll they call him. Blondie now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Paper Doll&quot; is of course a children's toy, not something for a responsible adult. Furthermore it's a toy particularly associated with girls rather than boys, especially as they grow older. And paper is weak, easily torn, not like a tough man should be. There is a further implication on class and education here, since paper is associated on multiple levels with reading, writing and academia which, in Eddie's world view, should not be things of interest to a working man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Blondie&quot; is a feminine name with further feminine implications. Men should not be interested in the colour of their hair. Blonde is not a description usually applied to men, with something like fair-headed being used instead. Blonde women are associated with a stereotype of being ditzy, stupid and unreliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T09:07:10.347" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T09:07:10.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2444" CreationDate="2017-05-03T12:46:18.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer rides on the coattails of Gilles and Tariq Ali, who have both provided informative and insightful answers, and addresses a follow-up question concerning the meaning of this paragraph from the paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We now ask the question, &quot;What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?&quot; Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, &quot;Can machines think?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, in setting up the thought experiment, Turing writes &quot;It is A's object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification.&quot; Now, Turing is establishing the criterion for evaluating the outcome, by setting up an experimental control, as is done in statistical tests, such as drug studies. He knows that the machine will not succeed every time, any more than will the human A, and here he is simply proposing that if the machine's performance over a number of tests is statistically in line with a human's performance, then that would be good grounds for regarding it to be intelligent. Turing is proposing a statistical measure as a better test of machine intelligence than &quot;that seems intelligent to me&quot; opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turing does assign gender roles in his formulation of the test, with the man being the subject of the test and the woman being given what is explicitly called a supporting role, but this does not seem out of line with then-prevailing mores regarding gender roles. Given those mores, it seems unlikely that anyone at the time would have misunderstood Turing's intent, even if that person objected to those mores. Pretty clearly (then as now), you can reverse the gender roles without changing the essential nature of the test. Furthermore, if Turing wanted to make a point about gender, surely he would have said &quot;man&quot; or &quot;woman&quot; throughout, rather than using the labels A and B as he does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Attempting to read the paper in the light of current mores has a hint of Whig historiography about it - it will only obfuscate one's understanding of what Turing meant, and, as pointed out above, if you think his thesis is weakened by its use of gender, it is a trivial matter to reformulate it in a gender-neutral form. Tariq Ali has given an interesting collection of attempts to read the paper literally, and I think we should acknowledge Sterrett's point (with regard to her own preference for a literal version of the test) that such readings are not Turing's work; they are derivative works by their respective authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that later in the paper, while considering various objections to the notion of artificial intelligence, Turing discusses a simplified version of the game: &quot;The game (with the player B omitted) is frequently used in practice under the name of &lt;em&gt;viva voce&lt;/em&gt;...&quot; This has become what is frequently meant when someone writes of the Turing test, primarily (I imagine) because it is simpler, rather than because it is (coincidentally, I think) gender-neutral. That simplicity comes at a cost, however: there is no experimental control or baseline to measure the machine's performance - being mistaken for a human every time would be a considerable achievement, but how would half the time rate? In this one-on-one version, there is no comparable test in which a human is attempting to pass herself off as something other than what she is. As Gilles has already explained, using gender as the test was an inspired choice on Turing's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1427" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-04T00:50:48.567" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T00:50:48.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2430" CreationDate="2017-05-03T18:07:47.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a native English speaker I find the word &lt;em&gt;arbalest&lt;/em&gt; archaic, at best. Crossbow, or &lt;em&gt;huge battle crossbow&lt;/em&gt;, conveys to me the original meaning of the phrase &lt;em&gt;огромный боевой арбалет&lt;/em&gt; clearly and succinctly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, I have not read Трудно быть богом, in English or Russian. However, the only possible excuse I could think of to use &lt;em&gt;arbalest&lt;/em&gt; would be to convey an image of some extremely old-fashioned (but still deadly, of course) weapon. Perhaps this is the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T18:07:47.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="163" CreationDate="2017-05-03T18:48:06.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no perfect translation. In any translation there is always a balance between semantic precision and preservation of poetic devices, language usage, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You first have to decide on what kind of translation to do: Literary or Literal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literary translation translates the original into a plausibly literate presentation of the original, maintaining at least some if not all of the literary devices used in the original. This is the more difficult. It really almost requires the creation of a new work of literature, based upon, and hopefully equal in quality to, the original. Various French poetic translations of &lt;em&gt;Eugene Onegin&lt;/em&gt; come to mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literal translations normally seek only to translate semantic meaning, devoid of most elements of style, elocution or the word symbolism of the original language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both kinds of translations have to deal with word flow, sense of humor, cultural references, and descriptions understood by native speakers when reading the original language that are often difficult or impossible to accurately render in the target language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said all this, I believe that the real challenge in translating a work of literature is to have such extensive knowledge of the target language to be able to decide, after all, what sounds good, and reasonable, and readable, and literate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: Dramatic works are somewhat different…one has to understand the specific production nuances of theatrical works, stage directions, etc., and to understand the dynamics of theater. The final translation of a play takes place on stage, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastActivityDate="2017-05-03T18:48:06.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2470" CreationDate="2017-05-04T00:55:36.807" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct to point out that Joyce's use of the stream of consciousness technique developed over his career. While there are only inklings of it in his early work, there is quite a bit of it in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, however, is not the apogee of the stream of consciousness technique in Joyce. That spot is reserved for &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, a work in which Joyce carried the technique (and all of its attendant experimental devices) to the limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; Joyce used the technique, a probably unsatisfying answer is that it was simply something that greatly interested him. Over the course of his career, as his ideas about writing and his personal aesthetics developed, he used the technique more and more because it was in tune with those ideas and that aesthetics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, Joyce came to believe that following the automatic impulses of his own mind in his writing was exceedingly valuable. So he experimented with the technique to a greater degree. Further, he was adventurous and unafraid of potential failure. All of these sentiments are expressed in the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Emotion has dictated the course and detail of my book, and &lt;strong&gt;in&#xA;  emotional writing one arrives at the unpredictable which can be of&#xA;  more value, since its sources are deeper, than the products of the&#xA;  intellectual method.&lt;/strong&gt; In the intellectual method you plan everything&#xA;  beforehand. When you arrive at the description, say, of a house you&#xA;  try and remember that house exactly, which after all is journalism.&#xA;  But the emotionally creative writer refashions that house and creates&#xA;  a significant image in the only significant world, the world of our&#xA;  emotions. The more we are tied to fact and try to give a correct&#xA;  impression, the further we are from what is significant. &lt;strong&gt;In writing&#xA;  one must create an endlessly changing surface, dictated by the mood&#xA;  and current impulse&lt;/strong&gt; in contrast to the fixed mood of the classical&#xA;  style. This is ‘Work in Progress’. The important thing is not what we&#xA;  write, but how we write, and in my opinion &lt;strong&gt;the modern writer must be&#xA;  an adventurer above all, willing to take every risk, and be prepared&#xA;  to founder in his effort if need be.&lt;/strong&gt; In other words we must write&#xA;  dangerously: &lt;strong&gt;everything is inclined to flux and change nowadays and&#xA;  modern literature, to be valid, must express that flux. . . . A book,&#xA;  in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand, but as one writes&#xA;  it will form itself, subject, as I say, to the constant emotional&#xA;  promptings of one’s personality.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conversations with James Joyce&lt;/em&gt; (1974), by Arthur Power (also quoted &lt;a href=&quot;https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/james-joyce-we-must-write-dangerously/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this quote is from &lt;em&gt;Finnegans-Wake&lt;/em&gt;-era Joyce, and directly references that work, we can expect that Joyce held similar sentiments when writing &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. This quote reveals why, in general, Joyce was fond of the stream of consciousness technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="104" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T00:55:36.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T02:32:09.000" Score="9" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stephen King's &quot;The Dark Tower&quot; is receiving a bit of press recently due to the upcoming movie.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd always believed I'd read this book, but it bears no resemblance to the one I remember having read about 30 years ago!  So now I'm questioning what it was that I actually &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; read, or whether I'm just imagining it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From memory...&#xA;- It was called &quot;The Dark Tower&quot; (I think)&#xA;- It was part of a series, and I think each book was to be written by a different author (one of whom I believed was Stephen King, but apparently not. I only read one.)&#xA;- One character was a giant spider-like creature.&#xA;- Another's name was something like &quot;Annie Storm&quot; (I definitely remember the pun being used... &quot;A port in Annie Storm&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I have. Google yields nothing, and this is driving me crazy!  Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1436" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-24T12:36:37.530" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T12:36:37.530" Title="What book did I read if not &quot;The Dark Tower&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2467" CreationDate="2017-05-04T09:57:35.687" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because he doesn't.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or maybe he does, just a little bit, because Gaiman sort of looks like a whole bunch of other dudes (and dudettes) who influenced Morpheus' looks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Well, at least his face hasn't been explicitly stated to be based on Gaiman's.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through canon (that is, word of gods - people who actually worked on &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;) sources, I couldn't find an indication that Gaiman was explicitly used as an inspiration for Morpheus' appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's one bit where Gaiman says about his motivation with Morpheus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inspiration for his clothes came from a print in a book of Japanese design, of a black kimono, with yellow markings at the bottom which looked vaguely like flames; and also from my desire to write a character &lt;strong&gt;I could have a certain amount of sympathy with&lt;/strong&gt;. (As I wouldn't wear a costume, I couldn't imagine him wanting to wear one. And seeing that the greater part of my wardrobe is black [It's a sensible colour. It goes with anything. Well, anything black.], then &lt;strong&gt;his tastes in clothes echoed mine&lt;/strong&gt; on that score as well.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;From the afterword to &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;. That last part about wearing black had also come up in &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/118322037426/hi-i-just-noticed-ive-never-seen-you-wearing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaiman's Tumblr&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, this is the black robe with flame motif Gaiman is mentioning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhcVWm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bhcVWm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dmpb0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dmpb0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MZf2Hm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MZf2Hm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left - from &amp;quot;Sleep of the Just&amp;quot;; middle - from &amp;quot;Dream a Little Dream of Me&amp;quot; (Constantine even joked that he wouldn't get on public transport with Morpheus looking like this); right - from &amp;quot;Sound and Fury&amp;quot;; all collected in &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But according to Mike Dringenberg (the inker and then penciller of the first 8 issues), none of the characters were copied directly from real people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the characters are direct renderings of individual people; they're composites emerging from my memories;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archives.sfweekly.com/exhibitionist/2014/04/18/the-sandman-speaks-neil-gaiman-and-mike-dringenberg-on-the-glories-of-their-graphic-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there's only one character that has explicitly been stated to be &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/43244685761/personally-ive-always-thought-that-death-was&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mostly inspired by a real person&lt;/a&gt; - Death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6OknG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6OknG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cinamon Hadley and Death of the Endless&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left - Cinamon Hadley; right - Death of the Endless.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to Morpheus, he's never stated to be based on, or even to intentionally resemble Neil Gaiman. He was a sort of collage of many people the artist knew back then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sandman himself is even more of a composite. Certain well-known people influenced the design -- his mop of hair came from &lt;strong&gt;Robert Smith&lt;/strong&gt; and ballet dancer &lt;strong&gt;Farukh Ruzimatov&lt;/strong&gt; was always in my mind for his dramatic physique, but face wasn't so much Bauhaus' Peter Murphy, but rather a type of &lt;strong&gt;English face, of which Murphy's is a shining example&lt;/strong&gt;. That face can be averaged between Dirk Bogarde, as he appeared in the 1959 version of A Tale of Two Cities; the young Terrence Stamp of Billy Budd, and David Bowie in the '70s, with a dash of Syd Barrett.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for his bearing, he's &lt;strong&gt;an amalgam of half a dozen guys&lt;/strong&gt; that I knew slightly in the old punk/ club scene and didn't want to know any better: they were all tall, pale, beautiful, and serious sleazebags who used women like toilet paper.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid; emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see Morpheus &lt;em&gt;resembling&lt;/em&gt; the people Dringenberg mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Smith_(musician)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Smith&lt;/a&gt;'s hair&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dxGLNm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dxGLNm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Robert Smith&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21E6Fm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/21E6Fm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left - Robert Smith from The Cure (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slicingupeyeballs.com/2009/04/07/robert-smith-cure-no-free-music/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image src&lt;/a&gt;); right - Morpheus from &amp;quot;Dream a Little Dream of Me&amp;quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/akm8e.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/akm8e.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Robert Smith and Morpheus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left - Robert Smith; right - Morpheus from &amp;quot;Into The Night&amp;quot;, collected in &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://insatiablebooksluts.com/2014/03/10/morpheus-mondays-dream-worst-day-week/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;image src&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farukh_Ruzimatov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Farukh Ruzimatov&lt;/a&gt;'s physique&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/voS6U.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/voS6U.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ruzimatov and Morpheus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left - Farukh Ruzimatov (adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://mariinskiy.com/?play_person_cod=ruzimatov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;); right - Morpheus from &amp;quot;Sleep of the Just&amp;quot;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are fit, skinny, muscular (Ruzimatov is a ballet dancer), but it's not possible to see a direct resemblance - for one thing, there are no clear shots of Morpheus' body in the first 8 issues. Once again, it changes later in series, when the art becomes more abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xgFCbm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xgFCbm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Morpheus from &lt;em&gt;The Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt; chapter 5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Murphy_(musician)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Murphy&lt;/a&gt;'s face&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DODSn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DODSn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus and Peter Murphy&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left and right - Morpheus; middle - Peter Murphy (adapted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://s1.zetaboards.com/anthroscape/topic/5778967/1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is the most well-known source inspiration. Here's what Gaiman has to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original idea-model for Morpheus was Peter Murphy from Bauhaus. …and even that was after I’d described him a lot and Sam Kieth had sketched pages of faces, and we’d picked one. Mike Dringenberg went “Oh, you mean a Peter Murphy face” and we went, “Oh yes.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/search/peter+murphy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thank @Slytherincess for hooking me up on Peter Murphy. Goth rules!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaiman even mentions in his interview in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt; that he also wanted Morpheus to have a rock-star appearance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted him to look like royalty. In the late 1980s, kings and queens were dressing and behaving like ordinary people, and I felt it was celebrities - and especially rock stars - who were our true royalty. I made some drawings with that in mind, and with the Sandman dressed in a black kimono I ran across in a book of Japanese design. I sent those off to Sam Kieth, who was the first issue's penciller, and Sam developed the Dream we see in issue 1. The Mike Dringenberg, who was inking the first issue, said, &amp;quot;Hey, he looks like Peter Murphy from Bauhaus.&amp;quot; Dave McKean and I got some Bauhaus videos and immediately saw that Mike was right; and Dave ended up making the central image on the cover of &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt; 1 a Peter Murphy-like face.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Secret Origins - Origins of Dream&amp;quot;, page 236.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest thing I cold find for Morpheus to resemble Gaiman was like this (the general shape of the face and all the hair):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XcmT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2XcmT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus, Neil Gaiman, and Morpheus once again.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Left and right - Morpheus, from &amp;quot;Sleep of the Just&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3, respectively; middle - Neil Gaiman somewhere in 80s or 90s (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/2048306/book-review-neil-gaiman-reads-his-own-american-myths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;src&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman himself certainly doesn't believe Morpheus was modeled on him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: You look very much like Dream of the Endless. Is this purposeful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;: I don’t think I looked like Dream while I was writing him.  Maybe it’s a similar phenomenon to the way people grow to look like their dogs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/14106873965/you-look-very-much-like-dream-of-the-endless-is&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neil Gaiman's Tumblr&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: I have just started reading The Sandman and I had a question. I know you said that Dream's wardrobe is based on your own but is his appearance based on you as well? I personally think the resemblance is uncanny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;: I don’t think so. This is what I looked like when SANDMAN 1 came out, after all…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Photo of Mike Dringenberg and me at the first ever Sandman signing, at Jim Hanley’s Universe. Note the non-existent crowds, and the piles of unsold copies of Sandman #1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NoHQf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Mike Dringenberg and Neil Gaiman&quot; /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/27162562739/i-have-just-started-reading-the-sandman-and-i-had&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neil Gaiman's Tumblr&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, most recently:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: Did you intentionally make Dream look an awful lot like you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;: Not really. I suspect we’ve grown to look more like each other over the years, like people and their dogs. I mean, at the time that that issue came out I looked like this (I’m the one on the right):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m4pBM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m4pBM.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that with all of these, some traits seem similar, but Morpheus doesn't really look &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; any of them. My point is, sure Morpheus &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; to look like Neil Gaiman - Gaiman was there, he's the creator of the character - but he also looks like a lot of other people who influenced the artist at that time. And if one was to look at later issues, Morpheus looks even less like Gaiman or anyone mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNBb3.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LNBb3.png&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus(es)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A4N5Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A4N5Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;Morpheus(es)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He retains the basic traits, but it becomes harder and harder to identify him with any particular person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's only fair to point out that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; artists apparently did use Neil Gaiman for their depictions of Morpheus. Here, it's Marc Hempel, who illustrated &lt;em&gt;The Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1pkn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k1pkn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T17:35:27.707" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T17:35:27.707" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2486" CreationDate="2017-05-04T20:59:29.703" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Black Tower&quot; by Richard A. Lupoff, the first book of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_series&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungeon&lt;/a&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One character is called &quot;User Annie&quot; or later &quot;Annabelle&quot;.  Another is a spider-like creature named &quot;Shriek&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:  Some supporting quotes as requested.  These are from later books in the series I'm afraid.  I admit this doesn't prove the first character is called &quot;User Annie&quot; in earlier books.  But, she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book Five : The Hidden City.  p7.  &quot;The dungeon was playing havoc on Annabelle's acrophobia.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book Five : The Hidden City.  pp14, 15.  &quot;He and Shriek had also arrived in a ruined city.&quot; [...]  &quot;That my dear spider woman, is an equally unpleasant concept [...]&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1439" LastEditorUserId="1439" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T21:32:44.080" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T21:32:44.080" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-04T22:37:46.357" Score="7" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://uncannymagazine.com/article/sun-moon-dust/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sun, Moon, Dust&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Vernon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ursula Vernon&lt;/a&gt;, there are three warriors who have lived for many years inside a sword. When the sword is passed down to a young boy as an inheritance, the warriors are surprised to discover that he does not even have the spark of a desire for power and conquest. Dust is very upset, Sun is content to wait in the sword until the next to bear it with intent for war comes along, while Moon rediscovers agriculture, choosing to remain outside of the sword to farm the land together with Allpa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sun removed Moon's gem from the sword when he decided to tarry outside of it. Is Moon's decision permanent? Will Moon age while he's outside of the sword? Will he die, eventually? (Is there enough information in this story to tell?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder about this, because if Moon gives up his (health and) longevity in order to spend time with Allpa, his story becomes that much more touching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T01:58:10.413" Title="Will Moon age while he's outside of the sword?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;ursula-vernon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2489" CreationDate="2017-05-04T22:37:46.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Moon will age, outside of the sword. I'm not certain if he will be able to return to the sword eventually; I've found contradictory evidence in the story. I welcome any and all constructive criticism of my analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Moon will age&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;My strongest support for this theory: the trio of warriors refuse all offers of food while the sword is their home. They don't need and/or can't use mortal forms of sustenance -- the sword sustains them. After Moon leaves the sword and his gem is removed, he finally accepts Allpa's offer:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Can I offer you a meal before you go?&quot; asked Allpa. Here they were,&#xA;  three visitors and they had been here for more than a day and he&#xA;  hadn’t even fed them. In his head, a legion of aunts and maternal&#xA;  relatives shouted at him for his utter failure of hospitality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Battle is our bread and meat,&quot; said Dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh…&quot; said Allpa faintly. &quot;I… um… have stew?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sun was definitely smiling behind her veil. &quot;It is a kind offer,&quot; she&#xA;  said. &quot;But we do not eat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“First, though…” said Allpa shyly. “Can I make you something to eat?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moon smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think I’d like that.”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Moon seems to deliberate about this decision somewhat. If he will not age, he loses nothing by spending his time doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; outside of the sword instead of whiling away the time in the sword with Dust. (While it's possible to interpret Moon's thinking periods as slowly remembered nostalgic reveries about his time farming the land before the sword, I think that the first passage I'm about to quote shows that he was mulling over a problem, and not experiencing nostalgia.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moon was gazing over the stream again. Occasionally he would move a&#xA;  few feet downstream, studying the water like a man with a problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I will go into the blade,” she said. “You won’t, though, will you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moon stood, unmoving, for a long time. Then he shook his head and&#xA;  Allpa felt his heart leap for no particular reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Returning to the sword&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Moon will be able to return to the sword&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sun removes Moon's gem, and Moon pockets it. There is not much reason to hold on to the gem if he won't be able to use it. (I don't either think he keeps it in order to pawn it later. I assume there is no market for gems in the impoverished agricultural society that Allpa calls home.) This is not a particularly strong support, though.  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She stripped off her glove and slid her nails under the blue stone on&#xA;  the hilt. It popped out with surprising ease, as if it had barely been&#xA;  held in at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sun tossed the stone to Moon, who caught it and tucked it away.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Moon will not be able to return to the sword&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sun tells Moon that she will hold a grudge against him because he has doomed her to an &quot;eternity&quot; with Dust with no one else to talk to&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. (However, this might refer only to Allpa's lifetime, after which Moon will rejoin the other two warriors.)  &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I won’t forgive you for this,” she said to Moon, conversationally.&#xA;  “Eternity with Dust was tiresome enough when there was someone else to&#xA;  talk to. But I do understand.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I'm not sure exactly how these three spend their time in the blade. This passage implies that they are awake (at least for part of the time), and converse with one another. However, in an earlier part of the story, Moon says that &quot;We will sleep in the blade until another champion comes,&quot; implying that they do (or can) spend their sword time without being awake. Perhaps this can be the basis of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/ask&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-05-04T22:37:46.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2494" CreationDate="2017-05-05T07:12:32.783" Score="6" ViewCount="8290" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist of &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt;, Shadow Moon, has never met his father. His mother had refused to share information about his father with him as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Tell me about my father.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — He’s dead. Don’t ask about him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — But who was he?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — Forget him. Dead and gone and you ain’t missed nothing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — I want to see a picture of him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — I ain’t got a picture,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter sixteen.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then comes a revelation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Wednesday fathered Shadow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Shadow is not surprised at this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Shadow found that he was completely unsurprised when he recognized the man who dances with her. He had not changed that much in thirty-three years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't he surprised? There certainly weren't any hints from his mother, and his father didn't hint at it either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T09:40:30.113" Title="Were there any clues given about Shadow's father?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2492" CreationDate="2017-05-05T09:40:30.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Warning: answer contains MASSIVE unmarked spoilers!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Lack of surprise fits with the process he's going through.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Shadow dies on the tree, his entire experience in the succeeding chapters is a surreal journey of enlightenment and oblivion. He forgets real-world things like his name, and learns so much more (which he soon forgets after coming back to life).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you remember?&quot; she asked. &quot;Do you remember what you learned?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I lost my name, and I lost my heart. And you brought me back.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Easter and Shadow, Chapter 19&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You learn anythin' from all this?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shadow shrugged. &quot;I don't know. Most of what I learned on the tree I've already forgotten,&quot; he said. &quot;I think I met some people. But I'm not certain of anything anymore. It's like one of those dreams that changes you. You keep some of the dream forever, and you know things deep down inside yourself, because it happened to you, but when you go looking for details they kind of just slip out of your head.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yeah,&quot; said Mr. Nancy. And then he said, grudgingly, &quot;You're not so dumb.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Maybe not,&quot; said Shadow. &quot;But I wish I could have kept more of what passed through my hands, since I got out of prison. I was given so many things, and I lost them again.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Maybe,&quot; said Mr. Nancy, &quot;you kept more than you think.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; said Shadow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Nancy and Shadow, Chapter 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that he shows no surprise at learning that Wednesday is his father might be a foreshadowing of his experience further along his journey, where he learns about death, and gods, and (it is suggested) the fundamentals of the universe, as he passes into nothingness. As he moves further into the realm of death, his enlightenment and inability to be surprised increase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Also, he's already figured out the grand master plan.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I figured it out,&quot; said Shadow. &quot;Kind of. I'm not sure when I figured it out. Maybe when I was hanging on the tree. Maybe before. It was from something Wednesday said to me, at Christmas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Loki just stared at him from the floor, saying nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's just a two-man con,&quot; said Shadow. &quot;Like the bishop with the diamond necklace and the cop who arrests him. Like the guy with the fiddle, and the guy who wants to buy the fiddle. Two men, who appear to be on opposite sides, playing the same game.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Shadow and Loki, Chapter 19&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He'd already realised, or is in the process of realising what the whole Old vs New Gods war is really all about, either while he was on the tree or even before. Given that the whole thing is a con job cooked up by Odin and Loki, Shadow must be wondering what his own place in all this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely that any of the plan is a coincidence, so the fact that Wednesday hired him, (apparently) an ordinary mortal human, and brought him into the world of gods, is probably less of an accident than it seemed. Perhaps he's already realised that Wednesday needed someone to die for him. Perhaps he's begun to wonder, &quot;&lt;em&gt;why me?&lt;/em&gt;&quot; Given how deeply involved with the world of gods he's become in so short a time, it shouldn't really be a surprise that his involvement actually goes back much further.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Besides, it's no surprise to &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt;, right? Whenever a character in literature has a 'mystery father', it usually turns out to actually be some other character in the book. And nobody would fit better than Wednesday, the man who hired Shadow and looked after him and brought him into the world of gods. Well, Shadow used to read a lot of fiction too - perhaps, in some sort of meta sense, he's unsurprised for just the same reason we are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-05-05T09:40:30.113" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-05T16:12:32.920" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I have seen this theme in literature or film more than once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older male author is flattered by a young, female student, after she says she loves his books.  They start a relationship.  One morning, he asks her what book of his she likes most.  When she names a title, he realises that it is not his books she admires, but the books by a more famous author with the same family name.  He is heartbroken, his ego thrashed, and he throws out the girl he suddenly considers terribly stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When and where and by who was this theme first described?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this most recently in the film &lt;em&gt;Elle&lt;/em&gt; by Paul Verhoeven, based on the novel &lt;em&gt;Oh...&lt;/em&gt; by Philippe Djian.  I'm certain I've encountered the theme before and neither Djian nor Verhoeven was the first to describe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="542" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T22:15:58.423" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T22:15:58.423" Title="Earliest example of older male author being flattered by female fan, breaking relationship after discovering she confused him with famous namesake" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-06T15:45:54.107" Score="24" ViewCount="766" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Tintin#List_of_titles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The first nine albums&lt;/a&gt; were originally published in black and white, with colored editions to appear later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (never redrawn in colour )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tintin in the Congo&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tintin in America&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cigars of the Pharaoh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Blue Lotus&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Broken Ear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Black Island&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;King Ottokar's Sceptre&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Crab with the Golden Claws&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which books have been entirely redrawn? I can confirm that &lt;em&gt;Tintin in the Congo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tintin in America&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cigars of the Pharaoh&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Blue Lotus&lt;/em&gt; were, but I have no first-hand experience with the latter titles.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I assume that the books published only in color haven't been significantly modified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TyElH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TyElH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Opening frames 1931 (monochrome) and 1946 (colour)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The opening frames from the 1931 and 1946 versions of Tintin in the Congo&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_in_the_Congo#/media/File:Opening_of_Tintin_in_the_Congo.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T02:40:50.050" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T02:40:50.050" Title="Which Tintin books were redrawn by Hergé?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;tintin&gt;&lt;herge&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-06T15:46:55.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T15:46:55.777" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T15:46:55.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-06T15:46:55.777" Score="0" Body="Series of comic books written by the Belgian author Georges Remi under the pen name Hergé. Use with the [herge] tag." OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-06T18:54:50.440" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T18:54:50.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2250" CreationDate="2017-05-06T18:31:45.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my reading of this passage, a few things have always struck me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mitya alerts the forester who is relatively uninterested in the entire ordeal, though he still is intrigued enough to take a peek inside and say everything will be OK. Perhaps this mirrors the interest others take in the juicy debauchery of Mitya's own struggle without being concerned enough to offer him help. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further still, Dostoyevsky may be commenting on a sad aspect of human nature in the reaction of the forester. How often do characters in both literature and reality see the plight of another and turn away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my first reading of the novel I thought the scene depicted Mitya's own feeling of suffocation by the situation within he finds himself, although that may be too simplistic! His frenzied pacing, staring down at the sleeping peasant all has such a frenetic rush - it is only magnified by the physical choking on charcoal fumes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1448" LastActivityDate="2017-05-06T18:31:45.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-06T21:18:42.767" Score="7" ViewCount="2868" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let nothing unite us, so that nothing can separate us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is from the second stanza of the poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neruda.uchile.cl/obra/obrafarewell.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Farewell&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://spanishpoems.blogspot.co.uk/2005/02/pablo-neruda-farewell.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt;) — the original Spanish text is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Para que nada nos amarre que no nos una nada.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that if you love someone, you should &quot;set them free&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1449" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T02:31:19.083" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T03:43:14.297" Title="What does &quot;Let nothing unite us, so that nothing can separate us&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;pablo-neruda&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-07T14:38:33.413" Score="7" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;There will be unmarked spoilers from &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pretty much the first job Mr. Wednesday and Shadow pull together is the ATM job; before it, Wednesday asks Shadow to cause a snowfall - by thinking about snow. Shadow does so, and it does indeed snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major thing about gods in the novel is that they're powered by belief, specifically by belief of ordinary people (which is actually a recurring theme throughout &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/117006/70236&quot;&gt;Gaiman's other works&lt;/a&gt;) - when I read that episode I thought this was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later in the novel we learn that Shadow is not a mere man, but a son of a god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that mean Shadow was able to cause the snowfall, do the coin trick (putting the golden coin in place of Sun in Iceland), and influence minds (like with Chad and Sam), only because of his heritage, and not because anyone can focus their belief to shape reality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T15:57:19.810" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T15:57:19.810" Title="Is it implied that anyone can cause a storm with their will, or was it something about Shadow?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-07T14:41:45.963" Score="9" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of &lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, the Lord has his page dress up as a woman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sirrah, you go get Bartholomew, my page,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dress him in all suits like a lady.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That done, escort him to the drunkard's chamber,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And call him &quot;Madam&quot;, do him obseisance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get why it was necessary to have a wife there; it improves the ploy. But why did they need to have Bartholomew dress up? Couldn't they have gotten a real woman to do it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:20:23.643" Title="Why was it necessary to have the page dress up as a woman?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-taming-of-the-shrew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2505" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2506" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" Score="0" Body="A play by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag. " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T14:48:01.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2503" CreationDate="2017-05-07T15:04:40.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it is likely that the only reason Shadow was able to cause the snowfall was because of his inheritance as a God's son, at that point in the book, I think Wednesday was just leading Shadow to believe that his belief was what caused the snowfall so as to not reveal who he really was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone Could in fact focus their beliefs to alter reality, I doubt the people of Lakeside would have chosen to spend their lives freezing, for the most part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1451" LastActivityDate="2017-05-07T15:04:40.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2508" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2510" CreationDate="2017-05-07T20:55:09.310" Score="15" ViewCount="2682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that some of Cohen's songs have religious context, so when I heard the lyrics of this song that stated, &quot;You strike my side by accident,&quot; I thought it could be symbolism of Jesus being stabbed in his side on the cross. Does Cohen have a specific speaker for this song, or is it left to individual interpretation? If there is no specific speaker, what are some speakers that make sense with the symbolism in the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A significant piece of the lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well I stepped into an avalanche&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It covered up my soul;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I am not this hunchback that you see&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I sleep beneath the golden hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You who wish to conquer pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You must learn, learn to serve me well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You strike my side by accident&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As you go down for your gold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The cripple here that you clothe and feed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is neither starved nor cold;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He does not ask for your company&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not at the centre, the centre of the world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1453" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T15:28:11.307" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T12:30:32.527" Title="Who is the speaker in Leonard Cohen's song, &quot;Avalanche&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T05:02:15.893" Score="8" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fourth stanza of the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-german-requiem/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A German Requiem&quot;&lt;/a&gt; indicates that the widow lived in fear and the young man could not move at liberty between the armchairs. I cannot figure out why. What does the widow fear? And who is the young man? Does that mean the young man could not live at ease?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better for the widow, that she should not live in fear of surprise,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better for the young man, that he should move at liberty between the armchairs,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better that these bent figures who flutter among the graves  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tending the nightlights and replacing the chrysanthemums  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are not ghosts,   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That they shall go home.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bus is waiting, and on the upper terraces  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The workmen are dismantling the houses of the dead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1304" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-08T05:30:37.563" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T17:03:01.303" Title="What could be the possible reason behind &quot;live in fear&quot; and &quot;move at liberty&quot; in the fourth stanza of &quot;A German Requiem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;james-fenton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2508" CreationDate="2017-05-08T08:08:11.847" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll try tackle this one, though I should preface that Cohen's lyrics are often impressionistic, combining different motifs without one specific meaning. For example, &quot;Hallelujah&quot; - perhaps his most famous song - combines different Biblical stories (David, Samson) freely, not being easily mapped to one single character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This song combines different motifs, too. Your interpretation of &quot;you strike my side by accident&quot; could well be correct. This song appears to be partly in the voice of the soul entering the world (the &quot;Avalanche&quot;), partly in the voice of the Deity, and partly in the voice of a scorned lover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.leonardcohenforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=28468&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a good thread discussing these and other aspects of the song, such as Gnosticism. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-the-Leonard-Cohen-song-Avalanche&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is some more from Quora. &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/view/7856/8913&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; is an academic paper discussing, &lt;em&gt;inter alia&lt;/em&gt;, Cohen's original poem that this song was based on. (I've tried to summarise these sources in this answer, but they are worth reading for further depth.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T08:08:11.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T08:39:41.930" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know what is Joyce's opinion on Mr. Mooney and Mrs. Mooney's marriage and separation in &quot;The Boarding House.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What has he alluded to through that incident? Does he connote any significant idea here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading the short story, I began to think that, &quot;When you get married to a person who is inferior to your social status/class, educational level etc. there is a big chance of them becoming incompatible.&quot; This idea seems to be particularly relevant to the marriage of Mrs. Mooney to her father's foreman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this theme present in the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not need a broad answer, but can you please tell me whether my argument is correct or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1383" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-05-09T15:50:11.113" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T11:46:16.070" Title="Is this idea about incompatibility in marriage because of social status found in James Joyce's &quot;The Boarding House&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2504" CreationDate="2017-05-08T15:20:23.643" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because it's funny. A man in a dress is always funny. Or at least, it was in Elizabethan times, and was true until perhaps the last decade or so. (Now, it just looks kinda homophobic/transphobic.) The whole goal is to play a prank:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I long to hear him call the drunkard husband,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And how my men will stay themselves from laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When they do homage to this simple peasant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's funny to trick the man, it's even funnier to trick him with a boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used the man-in-a-dress to comedic effect elsewhere, most notably Thisby. It makes a man look small and weak, and thus comic in the Aristotelian sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comedy, as we have said, is a representation of inferior people, not&#xA;  indeed in the full sense of the word bad, but the laughable is a&#xA;  species of the base or ugly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flute tried to assert his manliness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FLUTE: What is Thisby? a wandering knight?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  QUINCE: It is the lady that Pyramus must love.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  FLUTE: Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is the Nurse in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;. There's great comic effect to be mined out of a large man playing the Nurse: just as the portrayal makes the man look un-masculine, the nurse looks un-feminine. And so when she makes coarse jokes (&quot;Now, by my maidenhead -- at twelve years old.&quot;), the effect is enhanced. Falstaff, sneaking out dressed as a woman in &lt;em&gt;Merry Wives&lt;/em&gt; is a similar gag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this is a very careful comic balance for Shakespeare to walk, because he also played women in serious ways. He had not just great dramatic female roles like Cleopatra and Tamora, but great female comic characters for whom femininity is crucial. This is most visible in &quot;cursed&quot; characters like Beatrice in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado&lt;/em&gt; or Kate in &lt;em&gt;Shrew&lt;/em&gt;: the roles aren't funny if the audience doesn't fully accept them as attractively feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The audience would, of course, have been aware that these characters were portrayed by boys. Several of Shakespeare's greatest comic female characters dress as boys: Rosalind, Viola, Julia. Again, there's a delicate balance where the audience is being asked to accept that these are boys-playing-girls-dressed as boys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It worked only because the audience was fully imbued in the trope, and simply accepted it. I think of it as similar to the effect of intercutting in modern cinema: the world doesn't jump perspectives like that, but since you've been trained to accept that as the language of cinema, it doesn't give you even a moment's pause. It's not so much &quot;suspension of disbelief&quot; as genuine belief: that's the way this world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, they only believe it in the theater. They don't accept boys-dressed-as-girls in real life. Unless, of course, they're drunk. So the effect of using Bartholomew is to make the drunken guest seem more despicable, and thus funnier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also helps that this keeps the prank as a &quot;boy's club&quot; moment. Women, especially young women, were usually portrayed as more refined in their sensibilities. Even low-born characters like Audrey in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt; (&quot; I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul&quot;) have some touch of propriety. Women do participate in pranks (like Mistress Quickly in &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, part 1&lt;/em&gt;), but are usually less coarse about it. I'm certain Shakespeare could have written a woman into the scene without breaking the drunken-fraternity nature of the the prank, but it was certainly in character to make it an all-male moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-05-08T15:20:23.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-08T19:54:02.517" Score="6" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The View From Saturday&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2 (page 22 in my copy), there's this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On her left sat Dr. Roy Clayton Rohmer, the District Superintendent for Clarion Academy. Both Dr. Rohmer and Mrs. Olinski paid strict attention to the man at the podium. There could be no mistake: This was the man of the hour, king for the day.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wore a navy blue, precision fit pin-striped suit and a white-on-dazzling-white shirt. An edge of his French cuffs showed beneath his jacket sleeves. Mrs. Olinski was not sure how much the correct amount was, but if she put a spirit-level to his, they would be exactly right. The French cuffs were held together with onyx cuff links, and his collar was tied with a red-striped power necktie. The television lights beamed down on his crop of hair, which was tinted the color of peach pits. He was dressed, brushed, coiffed, and blow-dried not just to be seen but to be looked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dr. Rohmer could not, would not take his eyes off the man at the podium, and Mrs. Olinski thought of &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;Don't look at me like that!&quot; said the King to the Cheshire Cat. &quot;A cat may look at a King,&quot; said Alice. Mrs. Olinski wanted to tell Dr. Rohmer that a cat may look at a king. But why bother? The audience was not permitted to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble understanding why that would be an appropriate quote to mention. Nobody told him that he couldn't look, and he's obviously doing it, so why would Mrs. Olinski want to tell him that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:38:42.190" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:38:42.190" Title="Why is the 'a cat may look at a king' quote relevant for when Dr. Rohmer is looking at the man on the podium?" Tags="&lt;the-view-from-saturday&gt;&lt;e-l-konigsburg&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-09T20:12:53.717" Score="15" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a lot of stories over the years, and Google is not being kind to my search terms (it probably flagged something with NSA or Homeland Security, too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book I'm thinking of is set in an alternate reality, in the future for when it was written but in what is now our past.  Overpopulation is a concern with not much food available (compared to the population).  The government takes volunteers who are offering to end their lives, and then those volunteers are converted into nutritional pills that are handed out to the rest of the population as food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was originally thinking it was &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, but others have contested that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not read &lt;em&gt;Make Room! Make Room!&lt;/em&gt;, by Harry Harrison, from which the movie &lt;em&gt;Soylent Green&lt;/em&gt; was adapted (I have not seen this movie either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updates&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have read this book circa 2008-2010, but it was definitely an older book (pre-90s).  If I remember correctly, this was during my &quot;Top 100 books&quot; phase, where I was catching up on the top-rated books.  I'm assuming it may be on a list such as this, and I remember some of the other books were from Hemingway, &lt;em&gt;The Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1463" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T05:16:07.033" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T07:00:14.213" Title="Overpopulated world, where volunteers are being taken to be converted to food" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2516" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2517" CreationDate="2017-05-10T19:03:24.397" Score="7" ViewCount="4941" Body="&lt;p&gt;The internet seems crazy about this quote, but nobody reports a reliable source.&#xA;Where was it originally written or spoken?&#xA;(I.e., which book, interview, or essay?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1464" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-10T19:12:07.240" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T19:21:19.090" Title="Where do I find Edmund Wilson's quote &quot;No two persons ever read the same book?&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;edmund-wilson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2516" CreationDate="2017-05-10T19:21:19.090" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is likely to be a slight variation of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from Wilson's &lt;em&gt;The Triple Thinkers&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0374513228&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon link&lt;/a&gt;). You can see the section of interest in the Preface, page ix. Conveniently, the preview includes that page, so you can view it for free (although without as much context as you might like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source can be found relatively easily, with a clear citation, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Wilson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;. It's always worth checking there, or searching through it using Google to see if you can find an entry in Wikiquote—they tend to be quite reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastActivityDate="2017-05-10T19:21:19.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T08:16:31.697" Score="6" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/40372-the-sandman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ran for 75 issues; there was one &quot;special&quot; issue which told Orpheus' story, but it's not numbered. According to Neil Gaiman in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, he was intending to end the series at &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; point, but it's not clear whether he &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; the series to run for exactly 75 issues&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mike Carey's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/59893-lucifer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - which uses the character created in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; and shares the same continuity - also ran for 75 issues; it had a 3-issue comic &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Presents: Lucifer - The Morningstar Option&lt;/em&gt;, a one-shot &lt;em&gt;Lucifer: Nirvana&lt;/em&gt;, but those are, again, not numbered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both comics were published monthly, so I understand that they ran for the same amount of time (~6 years) - but what is the reason for that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it purely a coincidence that the two series ran for exactly 75 issues? Was it a homage from Mike Carey to Neil Gaiman, and the series &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; originally was a spin-off from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-12T17:12:39.527" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:44:24.420" Title="Do &quot;The Sandman&quot; and &quot;Lucifer&quot; deliberately share the number of published issues?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;lucifer&gt;&lt;mike-carey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2521" CreationDate="2017-05-12T17:44:24.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There's not much evidence I could find, but it would be one hell of a coincidence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number 75 is pretty specific. For two comics to stop on that number would be some coincidence, especially because it is quite a small amount of issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I could find which may indicate something was from the following &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acidlogic.com/mike_carey.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interviewer: How far do you plan on expanding the story arc to Lucifer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carey: Actually, we're coming to the end now. Issue 75 is going to be the big climax. Actually, that's not true. The real climax comes in issue 69, the end of Morningstar, but then there are repercussions from that which take it forward to 75 and then &lt;strong&gt;at 75 we stop&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate it was &lt;em&gt;planned&lt;/em&gt; to stop on the number 75, though Carey doesn't mention why. It could just have easily ended slightly before if the climax was a few issues before hand, the repercussions didn't have to continue for so long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could have been planned just to end on 75 because that is quite a nice number, but I doubt that is the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is most likely that Carey had noticed this and decided to likewise end on 75. The fact it was planned in advance to end on the same number seems to infer that it was intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-12T17:44:24.420" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2250" CreationDate="2017-05-12T19:21:33.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, congratulations on having read so far in Brothers Karamazov. It takes determination, at the very least, to suffer through the excruciating detail that is characteristic of Dostoevsky’s style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dostoevsky gives us many character portraits of people in Russia at that time, many of them negative. So, in general, the scene with Lygavy portrays another type of typical personage, the drunken and malicious Russian peasant.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the novel, the suffocation scene of Lyagavy is a piece of the puzzle, a stroke of the brush in painting, for the illustration of hopelessness, and absurdity, of Dimitry’s situation in this part of the novel. It is indicative of not only the hopeless affair with Grushenka, but of the sea of aggressive, but petty buffoonery in which he is practically drowning. When he is shown holding a wet cloth to some drunken peasant, it just shows how low he has sunken.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: This whole scene may actually focus Dimitry’s mind on his entire situation, by sinking him so low, so close to suffocation himself, as to begin to ask himself serious questions. However, he has yet, in the novel, to focus on higher minded objectives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: To me it is interesting to see the meaning of some Russian names, i.e. &lt;em&gt;Lyagavy&lt;/em&gt; can mean, in Russian, one who has lied. In this scene, Lyagavy also called Mitya a liar, thus adding another small layer to the portrayal of absurdity. Dostoevsky is indeed a master of this form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorUserId="1247" LastEditDate="2017-05-15T11:21:56.597" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T11:21:56.597" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2467" CreationDate="2017-05-12T22:51:56.283" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Take my word for it or not, but I'm the writer of the article &amp;quot;Mytho-Auto-Bio: Neil Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, the Romantics, and Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; The study focuses the reasons why Gaiman intended to finish &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt; with &amp;quot;The Tempest&amp;quot; by representing Shakespeare completing his bargain with Morpheus in writing &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, which is supposedly Shakespeare's final play. I argue that he uses an autobiographical simile in the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beginning in the nineteenth-century, criticism typically identifies autobiographical dimensions of Shakespeare in his character Prospero, from The Tempest--Coleridge being one such critic. There are many instances where such criticism reads Prospero's monologues as instances where Shakespeare speaks through the character, especially within the final epilogue, wherein he bids &amp;quot;farewell&amp;quot; to the stage. I argue that Gaiman titles his intended final issue &amp;quot;The Tempest&amp;quot; to connect with Shakespeare writing his supposed final play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from the relevant portion of my article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is within The Tempest’s epilogue where one may be drawn to an understanding of how Shakespeare assumes Prospero’s persona to announce his exeunt from The Globe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my charms are all o’erthrown,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what strength I have’s mine own,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which is most faint….&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As you from crimes would pardon’d be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let your indulgence set me free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These portions are traditionally read as Shakespeare’s final curtain call; Prospero’s magical charm are Shakespeare’s ‘charms’, or imaginative power, which has lost strength. Shakespeare has exhausted his charms; he is tired and seeks respite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Gallifreyan's comment: no one ever said Morpheus was a superhero (I certainly do not), but I wanted to make clear that although the series is connected to the larger DC Universe, Morpheus is not a superhero but distinctly connects with the model of the Romantic hero--in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1472" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-13T13:10:59.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-12T23:36:07.177" Score="24" ViewCount="34003" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Act 1 Prologue to the play &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two households, both alike in dignity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From forth the fatal loins of these two foes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the continuance of their parents’ rage,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which, but their children’s end, nought could remove,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The which if you with patient ears attend,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare spoils the whole play, telling the audience the entire premise of two lovers meeting and that they eventually &amp;quot;take their life&amp;quot;. Surely revealing this at the start of the play kills of tension as the audience already knows Romeo and Juliet will die at the end? If so, what benefit was their for revealing this information at the start of the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T23:24:06.667" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T23:24:06.667" Title="What is the benefit in the Prologue &quot;spoiling&quot; the play in Romeo and Juliet?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2527" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2530" CreationDate="2017-05-13T09:37:15.010" Score="9" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started reading the book, &quot;Social Justice in Islam.&quot; This is a book by Sayyid Qutb, translated into English by John B. Hardie, commissioned by the Near Eastern Translation Program. There's not really any good references to any of these people online outside this book, nor is there any information about what the Near Eastern Translation Program was or what it did. Questions about who ran this program and why aside (though I'm very curious to know), they went to great lengths in their translation to highlight the controversiality of this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they really didn't talk about what in it was controversial, who found it controversial, and why they classify it that way. The foreword to the book reads like someone defensively trying to justify translating &lt;em&gt;this book&lt;/em&gt;, ending, for example, with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It should, of course, be clearly understood that the views expressed in the works translated are the opinions of the writers and not of the American Council of Learned Societies or the Committee on Near Eastern Studies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like it goes beyond the standard disclaimer of authorial opinion. &lt;em&gt;Especially&lt;/em&gt; in context, it's written in a much more personal tone, as if the writer &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; wants to emphasize this point. The translator's introduction goes on to highlight exactly the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There will be many points which the specialist and the non-specialist alike will feel like challenging. So much the better, for this, from a Western point of view, is a provocative book. But the aim of the present work has been neither to comment nor to criticize, but simply to translate, as the author himself would have written it, had he written in English.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also vaguely hints at some sort of controversy, predicted or past, surrounding this book. It's also the second time this is mentioned, and it occurs no more than &lt;em&gt;one page&lt;/em&gt; after the prior quote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, to be clear, there's vague historical reason to believe that this book was, indeed, controversial, even in Muslim societies. A more modern book cover has this to say about the author:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Social Justice in Islam&quot; is perhaps the best known work of Sayyib Qutb, a leading figure in the Muslim Brethen of Egypt who was &lt;strong&gt;executed by the regime of 'Abd al-Nasr in 1966&lt;/strong&gt;. Despite the years that have passed since Sayyid Qutb's death, the imprint of his thought on the contemporary Islamic movements of the Arab world remains profound. [emph. mine]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, all of these things seem like loose threads suggesting that some part of this book either &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; controversial, or was &lt;em&gt;expected to be&lt;/em&gt; controversial - both to Muslim cultures and to Western ones. But nobody really seems to want to talk about why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Was&lt;/em&gt; there some sort of controversy surrounding this book, either in Muslim countries, &quot;Western&quot; countries, or both? If so, who took issue with it, and what, exactly, were the issues taken?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if I'm reading this correctly, why, then, do the translators go to such great lengths to highlight how controversial this book is, without explaining anything about what's controversial in it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T12:18:11.880" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T12:18:11.880" Title="Why do the translators of &quot;Social Justice in Islam&quot; strongly hint at its controversiality, without mentioning what's controversial?" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;sayyid-qutb&gt;&lt;social-justice-in-islam&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2732" CreationDate="2017-05-14T02:42:26.867" Score="13" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be Mark Twain or O.Henry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It discusses the shortcomings of that era's novels and short stories. Specifically, it parodies authors' remarks qualifying dialogue. The author of the essay claims that those remarks have become so mindless and mechanical that no one, neither authors no readers, pay attention to the actual meaning of the words those remarks contain: as if there existed a barrel of words and stock phrases specifically for this purpose, and each time an author needed to qualify a character's dialogue line, he or she would just dip his or her hand into the barrel and select some words and phrases at random. As in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I have no idea,&quot; said the policeman and wept.&#xA;&quot;You might be right,&quot; said the dog, flicking cigar ashes on the floor.&#xA;&quot;You should have told me earlier,&quot; said the woman and tugged thoughtfully at her beard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1478" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T08:03:04.757" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T07:01:36.280" Title="Can anyone remind me who wrote this essay about qualifying remarks? (Mark Twain, maybe?)" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-05-14T02:51:56.450" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have to remember, the audience is well aware that a tragedy usually ends in the deaths of many of the main characters; therefore, I would argue that the enjoyment of the play is derived from an exploration of a set of themes that require the audience's understanding of the direction the play is moving in, in order to allow for emphasis to be placed on these themes (rather than the plot). The enjoyment of the play does not come from learning that everyone dies in the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, it was a tragedy! I see, what a clever play. I did not see that coming!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1477" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T02:51:56.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2527" CreationDate="2017-05-14T05:41:28.880" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Much of the potential for controversy can be put down to the reputation of its author&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would seem that this is less about controversy surrounding the book itself, and more about its author, and about the &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; for controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sayyid Qutb is a polarizing figure. To quote Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayyid_Qutb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brief description&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though most of his observations and criticism were leveled at the&#xA;Muslim world, Qutb is also known for his intense disapproval of the&#xA;society and culture of the United States, which he saw as obsessed&#xA;with materialism, violence, and sexual pleasures. Views on Qutb vary&#xA;widely. He has been described by followers as a great thinker and&#xA;martyr for Islam, while many Western observers see him as a key&#xA;originator of Islamist ideology. Others in the West believe Qutb is an&#xA;inspiration for violent groups such as al-Qaeda. Today, his supporters&#xA;are identified by their opponents as &amp;quot;Qutbists&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Qutbi&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most important aspect of this is that some (particularly US and European) scholars view him as an philosophical inspiration for political Islamists, or even for Al-Qaeda. He has been called by some &amp;quot;the father of modern terrorism,&amp;quot; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://The%20father%20of%20Islamic%20fundamentalism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;the father of Islamic fundamentalism,&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; though such labels are heavily disputed and controversial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Peter Bergen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to underestimate the influence that the Egyptian writer&#xA;Sayyid Qutb had on Islamists around the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Economist &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.economist.com/node/16588026&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;best sums up&lt;/a&gt; Western thinking on Qutb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pre-eminently among the pioneers of 20th-century Islamism, Sayyid Qutb&#xA;has come to be seen as the evil genius who inspired today's global&#xA;jihad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That alone would be enough to make him and his writings controversial in the West (or for that matter among many in the Middle East).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, he was hostile not only to what he perceived as Western  ideals, but also to many Muslim governments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And both the countercultural movement in the West and the Islamic&#xA;awakening had revolutionary features, because Qutb's writings not only&#xA;explained that Islam was a whole way of being, they also contented&#xA;that most Muslim governmental systems were mired in &lt;em&gt;Jahiliya&lt;/em&gt;, a&#xA;state of pre-Islamic ignorance and even barbarism. Qutb never named&#xA;names in his writings. But what he wrote was clearly directed against&#xA;authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one might imagine, a writer who criticized authoritarian regimes might not be terribly popular with &lt;em&gt;modern-day&lt;/em&gt; authoritarian regimes, which still control some countries in the Middle East, or with their adherents (be they Muslim or any other religion). Recall that political Islam (such as the Muslim Brotherhood) is one of the primary threats to the dominance of secular regimes&#xA;in the Middle East (particularly authoritarian ones). This could account for the controversial nature of his views in predominantly Muslim countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the matter of racism in his writings, which, while it would undoubtedly most perturb the West, generally being written in a context of criticizing Western culture, could also rub  a lot of other people the wrong way. Though he experienced (and was critical of) prejudice and discrimination during his time in the US, he was not above it himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he&#xA;enjoys as art and in his own artistic works. &amp;quot;Jazz&amp;quot; music is his music&#xA;of choice. &lt;strong&gt;This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy&#xA;their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on&#xA;the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other.&lt;/strong&gt; The&#xA;American's intoxication in &amp;quot;jazz&amp;quot; music does not reach its full&#xA;completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as&#xA;coarse and obnoxious as the music itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&amp;quot;Amrika allati Ra'aytu&amp;quot; (The America That I Have Seen), Sayyid Qutb&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for his attitudes toward Jews, let's just say they weren't particularly favorable. One of his more famous works is &lt;em&gt;Our Struggle Against the Jews&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1950, which is exactly what it says on the tin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would consider it highly likely, then, that the translators wrote these &amp;quot;disclaimers&amp;quot; merely because of Qutb's controversial reputation, particularly in the US. We see similar things when other books by controversial authors are published, regardless of whether those books stirred up contemporaneous controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I couldn't find any evidence that this &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; book induced controversy when it was translated to English.&lt;/strong&gt; Undoubtedly it was controversial when first published, though, as many of Qutb's works were, due to their blunt opposition to the contemporary governments in the Middle East.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T05:54:34.937" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T15:23:06.583" Score="6" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Richard Russo's novel &lt;em&gt;Straight Man&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonist Hank claims to be a philosophical disciple of William of Occam, and applies Occam's razor to his approach to deduction many times.  As I recall, the use of Occam's razor was the only way in which Hank considered himself a disciple of this William, which is also Hank's given name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He names his dog Occam, which escapes from his house near the climax of the book, and is hit by a car and killed by one of his colleagues, Finny.  This provides some natural narrative symmetry by leading to a scene at the end where he buries his dog with his estranged dying father looking on, complementing a scene from the beginning where his father buries a dog with him as a child looking on.  One could also read into Occam's death some symbolism regarding the distance Hank puts between himself and others in his relationships.  Putting those points aside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there any significance that a character named &quot;Occam&quot;, rather than just Hank's dog, dies at the end?  For instance, is there any evidence that Hank no longer so strongly subscribes to Occam's razor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T16:08:33.193" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T16:08:33.193" Title="Symbolism of Occam's death in Straight Man?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;richard-russo&gt;&lt;straight-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="421" CreationDate="2017-05-14T17:17:24.597" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;night&quot; is obviously death, but the question is more why it is described as &quot;good&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dylan Thomas could easily have used a negative adjective such as &quot;dread&quot; or a neutral one such as &quot;dark&quot; to make the poem scan. Instead, he chooses a simple, positive adjective to set up opposing views within the poem. He does not want his father to die, or even to accept death willingly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, he has to admit the opposing view that death is a natural process and often welcomed by people who simply feel that they have had enough. The word &quot;good&quot; is a very abbreviated way of setting up that view; the rest of the poem consists of examples of why he thinks death should be resisted and why even an elderly person should never accept its inevitability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final stanza, where he asks his father to simultaneously curse and bless him with his tears, sums up this conflict. His father's &quot;fierce tears&quot; would be the proof of his father's reluctance to die. This would be a blessing in confirming his views, but it would be a curse because it would show his father's grief about his impending death - and it would not prevent him from dying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps at this point Thomas realises how selfish his own wishes are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1408" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T19:59:48.443" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T19:59:48.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-14T21:41:55.270" Score="45" ViewCount="1082" Body="&lt;p&gt;I live in the USA, where people react poorly if you spoil a move or a book for them. However, the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2525/what-is-the-benefit-in-the-prologue-spoiling-the-play-in-romeo-juliet&quot;&gt;What is the benefit in the Prologue &amp;quot;spoiling&amp;quot; the play in Romeo + Juliet?&lt;/a&gt; raises the interesting point that beliefs about spoilers vary according to location, time period, and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to trace our current aversion to spoilers to a specific time period? Have there been any works on the history of thought about spoilers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm not quite sure how to ask this question successfully; please leave comments or edit if this question is too broad.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-14T22:02:10.243" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T16:20:40.647" Title="History of Spoilers" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2017-05-14T23:08:45.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line has a different context in the two sections of the poem. In the first, it is primarily about death, the physical changes of the body and the cold blankness of the eyes. &#xA;The second section is describing a woman laden with jewellery and the narrator thinks again of the &quot;pearls that were his eyes&quot; as he gazes at the jewels surrounding her. As the woman is described using the same phrases as Shakespeare uses for Cleopatra, the reference to pearls may also be meant to recall Antony sending Cleopatra a pearl as a gift. (There is rather a lot of Shakespeare in this poem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1408" LastActivityDate="2017-05-14T23:08:45.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2539" CreationDate="2017-05-15T14:06:42.627" Score="10" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does this sentence from &amp;quot;Double Barrelled Detective Story&amp;quot; by Mark Twain mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If I was running this shop I'd make him say something, some time or other, or vamos the ranch.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Spanish, 'Vamos' means 'let's go' as far as I know. However I couldn't quite get what Twain was trying to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-03-31T00:07:36.017" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T00:07:36.017" Title="What does &quot;vamos the ranch&quot; mean in this Mark Twain short story?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2538" CreationDate="2017-05-15T17:27:53.043" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;vamos&lt;/em&gt; in Spanish does mean &quot;let's go!&quot;, it took on another meaning in America, and later on a different spelling: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vamoose&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;vamoose&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;intransitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;:  to depart quickly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the 1820s and '30s, the American Southwest was rough-and-tumble&#xA;  territory—the true Wild West. English-speaking cowboys, Texas Rangers,&#xA;  and gold prospectors regularly rubbed elbows with Spanish-speaking&#xA;  vaqueros in the local saloons, and a certain amount of linguistic&#xA;  intermixing was inevitable. One Spanish term that caught on with&#xA;  English speakers was vamos, which means &quot;let's go.&quot; Cowpokes and dudes&#xA;  alike adopted the word, at first using a range of spellings and&#xA;  pronunciations that varied considerably in their proximity to the&#xA;  original Spanish form. But when the dust settled, the version most&#xA;  American English speakers were using was vamoose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the time, Mark Twain probably still used the original spelling, but with the new meaning, so what he wrote means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If I was running this shop I'd make him say something, some time or&#xA;  other, or [exit] the ranch.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know the context, but presumably the character being talked about doesn't talk much and the speaker doesn't like that and wants to make him leave the ranch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-05-15T17:27:53.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-15T17:45:39.003" Score="6" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading Max Beerbohm's &lt;em&gt;Zuleika Dobson&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Duke suddenly pours out his soul to Zuleika, his regrets and love so exaggerated that readers can't help but cringe and laugh, I thought it absolutely had to be a throwback to Dostoevsky and his (socially) ridiculous characters in &lt;em&gt;Notes from Underground&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Double&lt;/em&gt;, and although more restrained, &lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Possessed&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;. It wasn't only those aspects like verbosity, but also a certain style—a grandeur, almost an admirable innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But it is a fact that I, in whom pride&#xA;  has ever been the topmost quality, have never expressed sorrow to any&#xA;  one for anything. Thus, I might urge that my present abjectness must&#xA;  be intolerably painful to me, and should incline you to forgive. But&#xA;  such an argument were specious merely. I will be quite frank with you.&#xA;  I will confess to you that, in this humbling of myself before you, I&#xA;  take a pleasure as passionate as it is strange. A confusion of&#xA;  feelings? Yet you, with a woman's instinct, will have already caught&#xA;  the clue to it. It needs no mirror to assure me that the clue is here&#xA;  for you, in my eyes. It needs no dictionary of quotations to remind me&#xA;  that the eyes are the windows of the soul. And I know that from two&#xA;  open windows my soul has been leaning and signalling to you, in a code&#xA;  far more definitive and swifter than words of mine, that I love you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given Dostoevsky's success already in Beerbohm's early life, I believe Dostoevsky must have influenced Beerbohm significantly, if he creates such a character to me so iconic of Dostoevsky. But Googling the two names only reveal some loose articles that happen to reference both authors, not any interviews or writings of Beerbohm regarding Dostoevsky. Maybe even Beerbohm found Dostoevsky disagreeable, and was satirizing Dostoevsky's caricatures of suddenly-impassioned men—I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are there any interviews or writings regarding Beerbohm's opinion of Dostoevsky?&lt;/strong&gt; Or was Dostoevsky so omnipresent in the late 1800s that documenting his influence on any author would have been superfluous? I'm also open to any analyses that show influence (or non-influence), even if not explicitly said or written by Beerbohm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2019-08-23T15:52:36.350" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T15:52:36.350" Title="What was Max Beerbohm's literary relationship to Dostoevsky?" Tags="&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;max-beerbohm&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-16T11:34:09.553" Score="4" ViewCount="294" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leopold Bloom is the primary protagonist of Joyce's novel Ulysses. Throughout the novel, we are treated to an extensive transcription of his thoughts and feelings via the stream of consciousness method that Joyce was pioneering. This has lead to critics labeling Bloom as one of the most fully developed characters in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A key theme of the novel is Bloom's relative social isolation. Although not poor and with apparent society connections, he is treated with mild contempt and rudeness by many of the other characters in the book. He is half-Jewish but even other relative outsiders to Irish society - such as Italian immigrant Nannetti - are shown to have a higher social status (Nannetti has been elected a Councillor) and to act as though they look down on Bloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interests me is why this is rarely mentioned in his internal monologue. Indeed, given the different social mores between now and the novel's setting in 1904, it took me several chapters to realise Bloom &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; being disrespected by many of the other characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of this omission in the otherwise comprehensive study of Bloom's character? Are we to presume that he barely registers the snubs he perceives? Or is the lack of comment setting up some of the later themes and plot threads of the novel? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-05-24T08:37:36.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T10:08:39.183" Title="Why do we see so little mention of Leopold Bloom's social isolation in his internal monologue?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-05-16T19:38:08.950" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Shakespeare had depended on surprise for his plays to be enjoyable, you would never have heard of him. People would see the play once, get the full effect, and then there would be no point in going again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger Ebert said, &quot;It's not what a movie is about, it's how it is about it.&quot; The same goes for plays. Shakespeare tells you the ending up front because he wants you to not just wait for the surprise, but to watch how it happens to them. There are many different causes: their parents, their friends, their youth, even something as simple as a message that went astray. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's much like your own life. Spoiler alert: you're going to die. What matters is how you live between now and then. As actors, we strive for authenticity at each moment. The question we constantly ask, &quot;What is it that the character wants most in the entire world? What is preventing them from getting it?&quot; That's how enjoyable performances are constructed: the intensity of each instant, regardless of the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a wonderful moment in the film &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare in Love&lt;/em&gt;, where Juliet rises and asks, &quot;Where is my love?&quot;. The audience is in tears, and one answers her: &quot;Dead!&quot; The audience member knows what's going on, but Juliet doesn't. The moment is powerful because we know what she's about to learn. She's being carried by forces more powerful than herself, and the tragedy is in how she reacts to them, instant by instant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's audiences knew the ending of Romeo and Juliet before he even set pen to paper. Shakespeare rarely constructed novel stories. He repeated well-known tropes. The audience didn't sit through it in order to get a surprise ending; if anything, that would have annoyed them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's true of modern audiences as well. When you go catch a James Bond movie, you don't need a spoiler alert that Bond wins and the villain loses. In a rom-com, it doesn't matter whether boy-gets-girl-back really follows boy-meets-girl and boy-loses-girl: they have different effects, but what's important is how he goes about getting her rather than his success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To repeat myself for one final redundancy: the benefit of &quot;spoiling&quot; the ending is that the audience is relieved of the pressure of guessing how it turns out, and get to focus instead on the individual moments. If you just wanted to know the end of the play, Shakespeare would tell you, &quot;Save your penny: they die.&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The reason you sit through the two hours traffic on that stage is to see how they get to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Actually, I don't see him turning down cash. Theater is always on the brink of bankruptcy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-05-16T20:32:58.203" LastActivityDate="2017-05-16T20:32:58.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-05-16T22:20:38.823" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, but the prologue &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; spoil the ending of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;! Take a look at those lines again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From forth the fatal loins of these two foes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose misadventur’d piteous overthrows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these &quot;star-cross'd&quot; lovers will die to bury their parents' strife. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespearean_tragedy#Chronology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Many of Shakespeare's tragedies&lt;/a&gt; end with the main characters dying, so it's likely that the audience already knew that the main characters would likely die, and the prologue might be slyly hinting that they will &quot;take their [own] life&quot; (although that line clearly means &quot;take their lives [from forth the fatal loins ...]&quot;, thanks @DLosc!), but doesn't tell you anything about why this death comes about. The audience knows something sad is coming, but they don't know what it will be yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this prologue sets you up to think that the suicide will be engineered by the lovers, perhaps of the &quot;if we can't be together, life isn't worth it&quot; variety. As you watch the play, however, things seems to get better and better for Romeo and Juliet while things get worse and worse for the Montagues and the Capulets: they meet! They fall in love! They get married! A cunning plan is hatched so that Juliet can run away from her family and be reunited with her husband! All this time, the audience is thinking, &quot;Wait a minute, this is a tragedy? And the prologue told me that they're going to kill themselves? How will we get there from here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, boom, a letter goes awry, Romeo decides to kill himself and, just like that, the audience knows where this is going. Without the prologue, they would spend Act 5 wondering if Romeo's plan can be stopped; with it, they are certain that his plan will succeed. This lends additional tragedy to the scenes of &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.5.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romeo planning his death&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friar Laurence learning that Romeo doesn't know about the scheme&lt;/a&gt;, since the audience already knows that these schemes will fail, that Romeo will die, and that this will almost certainly lead to Juliet's own death. I'd argue that, without the prologue, Act 5 could have been longer, with more potential interruptions to Romeo's plan -- and further increasing the audience's hopefulness -- before a surprising finish. But Shakespeare opted to let the audience get ahead of the story, giving them a longer period of time to feel sad for the characters before their actions destroy their own lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes this more like the end of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; (where Caesar's ghost tells the non-history-buffs Brutus' final fate, who then has time to reconcile himself to it), rather than the end of &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; (where Iago's plan succeeds right to the end, when it is unexpectedly revealed and some small sense of justice is restored). It's also a bit like an episode of TV where the teaser shows you, say, &lt;a href=&quot;http://breakingbad.wikia.com/wiki/Crazy_Handful_of_Nothin%27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a street covered with the debris from an explosion&lt;/a&gt;, and the audience then spends the rest of the show trying to work out how that happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T21:50:08.100" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:50:08.100" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T08:32:07.720" Score="15" ViewCount="3562" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first verse of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrLk4vdY28Q&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonard Cohen's &quot;Hallelujah&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, there are these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I've heard there was a secret chord&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That David played and it pleased the Lord&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But you don't really care for music, do you?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It goes like this...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out what the &lt;em&gt;But you don't really care for music, do you?&lt;/em&gt; line is supposed to mean. Who is it addressed to? Why is it relevant in that spot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-17T20:08:10.067" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T02:43:55.133" Title="Explanation of the line 'But you don't really care for music, do you' in &quot;Hallelujah&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2549" CreationDate="2017-05-17T09:38:30.553" Score="7" ViewCount="914" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia defines feminism as seeking &quot;to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, personal, and social rights for women&quot;. It also calls &lt;em&gt;The Left Hand of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; part of &quot;feminist science fiction&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[spoilers for the book follow]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The science-fiction novel describes a culture in which there is no gender divide: individuals are essentially hermaphrodites and commonly both father and bear children during their lives. One of the major characters in the novel is an earth male who finds it difficult to understand the non-gendered nature of this society. They, in turn, find him bizarre and believe him to be some sort of pervert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a book of considerable depth. The author uses the non-gendered nature of the alien culture to explore human obsessions with duality, and with gender roles in western culture. It poses a number of interesting questions for the reader to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, while the book has strong and clear themes around gender, I have always struggled to understand how it is explicitly feminist by the definition given at the start of the question. It seems to posit not particular superior judgement of this necessarily gender-equal society compared to our own. Nor does it seem to offer much exploration of patriarchy or other societal ways in which men oppress women in human society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, then, is it considered feminist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-28T09:32:24.760" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T09:32:24.760" Title="In what ways is The Left Hand of Darkness a feminist novel?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-left-hand-of-darkness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2548" CreationDate="2017-05-17T12:28:42.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like others have mentioned, your definition of feminism is too narrow. For argument's sake, we might distinguish between feminist &lt;strong&gt;politics&lt;/strong&gt; and feminist &lt;strong&gt;thought&lt;/strong&gt; or philosophy. Considering the social distinctions between men and women and questioning them would be encompassed by the latter definition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le Guin's novel does this in literary form. By positing a society where gender is radically different from how it is in our world, we can imagine how our society might be different if we were to rethink gender roles and construct them in a fairer way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel is seen through the eyes of Genly, an inhabitant of Terra (Earth, i.e. our society). This heightens the contrast with Gethen. A number of times in the book we see  him struggle to understand this society's social norms.  (I don't have the book available right now to quote, but there are a number of incidents like this.) Again, this can provoke the reader to think about how gender roles are taken for granted here on 'Terra'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastEditorUserId="1366" LastEditDate="2017-05-21T14:16:29.030" LastActivityDate="2017-05-21T14:16:29.030" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2551" CreationDate="2017-05-17T16:16:12.100" Score="7" ViewCount="5934" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often hear/read people saying that &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; books became popular because of the games, but I personally don't believe that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I heard &lt;a href=&quot;http://youtuner.co/s/11747&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt; with the Brazilian translator of the books (Tomasz Barcinski) where he said that &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; book franchise has sold over 5 million copies just in Eastern Europe, and even before the games came out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tend to believe that, but I have found no sources to confirm that data.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any information on how many &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; books were sold before and after the games were released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1495" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T13:48:48.370" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T13:48:48.370" Title="How did The Witcher games affect the popularity of The Witcher books?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;&lt;adaptations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2550" CreationDate="2017-05-17T18:42:53.857" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In English-speaking world - very positively.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because they weren't translated to English before the games came out :D&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/witcher/comments/49iows/how_many_books_did_the_witcher_games_help_to_sell/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thread on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; which asks the same question - sadly, none of the answerers quote any sources. It's hard to provide exact sale figures, because there are now different editions and two different translations, but it's certain that the release of the first game marked an increase in sales of the English translation of the book - simply because it didn't have an official English translation before that (at least according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witcher&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrzej Sapkowski himself says he was popular in English-speaking countries before the games were published:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The belief, widely spread by CDPR, that the games made me popular outside of Poland is completely false. I made the games popular. &lt;strong&gt;All of my translations in the West—including the English one—were published before the first game.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a-no-bullshit-conversation-with-the-authors-behind-the-witcher-and-metro-2033&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;; emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then he says people on signings and cons only come there because of the games:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wrote the first Witcher story 30 years ago,&quot; he continues. &quot;When I come to my author meetings, there's no one in the audience close to my age. I am 69. There's no one. Kids everywhere. &lt;strong&gt;How are some of them supposed to know—especially in Germany, Spain or the US — that my books are not game related?&lt;/strong&gt; That I'm not writing books based on games? They may not know that, and CDPR bravely conceals the game's origins. It's written in fine print, you need a microscope to see it, that the game is 'based on' [my books].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Ibid; emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says basically the same thing in another interview, while reluctantly acknowledging that games did positively influence the sales of the books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe it is the success of my books that significantly affects the popularity of the games. That in reality, the games used this fact, as my success beat the games to the punch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The translations of my books into most European languages - including English - preceded the release of the first game. Long before the game - and it's a known fact - I was a well known writer, even there, where there have been no translations of my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course I don't want to diminish the role of the video game, it is obvious that it had a positive impact on the interest of foreign publications and the number of translations. A lot of gamers, of course, have only gained interest in the books because they liked the games. Otherwise, they would have never read it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-11-06-ever-wondered-what-the-author-of-the-witcher-books-thinks-about-the-games&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This attitude of Sapkowski's had attracted a backlash from Dmitri Glukhovsky, the author of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00HF5XY60&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metro&lt;/em&gt; book series&lt;/a&gt;, which were also adapted into very successful &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_2033_(video_game)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;games&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Without the gaming franchise, the Witcher series would never get this crazy international readership that it has.&lt;/strong&gt; And it's not just about the gamers but the gaming press and the buzz it creates, and just the feeling of something great and massive and impressive coming out. This got people hooked. &lt;strong&gt;He would remain a local Eastern European phenomenon without this, but he would never break into the West.&lt;/strong&gt; And the same goes for my Metro books.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/a-no-bullshit-conversation-with-the-authors-behind-the-witcher-and-metro-2033&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;; emphasis mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some statistics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.novelrank.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NovelRank&lt;/a&gt; claims to provide information on book sales, taken from the Amazon website. Here's what the all-time chart looks like for &lt;em&gt;The Last Wish&lt;/em&gt; (the first book of the series, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0316029181&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;published by Orbit&lt;/a&gt;) paperback:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5AO3q.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5AO3q.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.novelrank.com/asin/0316029181&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The surge in 2015 handily coincides with the release of the third game, &lt;em&gt;The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt&lt;/em&gt;, which is the most commercially successful game of the series, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/.../List_of_accolades_received_by_The_Witcher_3:_Wild_H...&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;record number of accolades&lt;/a&gt; (&gt;250).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can see that the sales were steadily decreasing until the year the game was released. Since the game received such positive reviews, and was very warmly welcomed to the public, but most importantly because it contains numerous easter eggs and links to the novels - the characters of &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xB1Dt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ciri&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jfl5l.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yennefer&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/enFda.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aen Elle elves&lt;/a&gt;, cities such as Novigrad and Oxenfurt, the Nilfgaardian invasion (again!), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHZqzoZjx5o&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unicorn scene&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IJUpp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;basilisk scene&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I55cX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blindfolded training scene&lt;/a&gt; - I imagine more than one player decided to read the books, either after seeing this on the opening of the game:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W8iFg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W8iFg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The Witcher game is based on a novel by Andrzej Sapkowski&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or after seeing this panel in the final credits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4pJ4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G4pJ4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is based on the prose of Andrzej Sapkowski&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that the last book of the series, &lt;em&gt;Lady of the Lake&lt;/em&gt;, has only been translated in March 2017, and the mid-quel book &lt;em&gt;Season of Storms&lt;/em&gt; is still awaiting translation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In Europe&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the Internet Speculative Fiction Databse entry for &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pe.cgi?25632&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/a&gt; - we see that it has French and German translations that predate the games. From my own experience I can say that Russia and Hundary were acquainted with the books before the games - and the Russian translation by Eugene Weisbrot even won numerous awards - but I too was introduced to &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt; via the first game. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, in my opinion, is the Slavic mythology and the political allusions, in the first, and in the later books of the series, respectively. The mythology would not be familiar to some English (or non-East-European) readers, and the apolytical stance of the protagonist could have gone unnoticed with non-Polish audience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the matter of competition - &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; was being published for the first time in 1990s, and given that the two series are very much alike - geared for adults, gritty atmosphere - the American series most likely attracted more attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T13:33:58.470" LastActivityDate="2017-05-18T13:33:58.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-17T23:25:05.897" Score="11" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lucifer Morningstar, the Vertigo Comics character, was created by Neil Gaiman with influence from John Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; - at least that's what is written on his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_(DC_Comics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page, and even on the official DC website's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dccomics.com/blog/2015/12/16/lucifer-101-what-you-need-to-know&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; 101&quot;&lt;/a&gt; page, which is supposed to brief new readers for the 2016 &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; comic series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This incarnation of Lucifer is similar to the Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost and looks a bit like David Bowie. The loveliest of the Archangels, he rebelled three seconds after Creation and ruled as Lord of Hell for 10,000,000,000 years, but became bored and tired of humanity’s view of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find a source for the similarity with David Bowie - in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt; and in this panel from &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1KZV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X1KZVm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lucifer&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iWQ8t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iWQ8tm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;David Bowie&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vanyaland.com/2016/01/13/david-bowie-1947-2016-his-destruction-isolation-and-how-we-were-always-trying-to-keep-up/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Bowie image source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant chapters of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt; don't touch the subject of Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, yet the the assumption that it was an influnce is floating everywhere and is taken for a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence, in the form of an acknowledgement by Neil Gaiman, that &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; was an inflience on Lucifer's character?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, which traits do Milton's and Gaiman's visions of Lucifer share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T21:24:48.400" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T00:12:05.160" Title="Which traits of Milton's Lucifer from &quot;Paradise Lost&quot; did Neil Gaiman carry to &quot;The Sandman&quot;?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T08:52:51.473" Score="13" ViewCount="9299" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of the first verse of &quot;Hallelujah&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It goes like this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The fourth, the fifth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The minor fall, the major lift&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The baffled king composing Hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take it the king is referring to David, who was named earlier. But why is he referred to as 'baffled'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-18T09:24:13.713" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:47:38.587" Title="Why is the king 'baffled' in &quot;Hallelujah&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2561" CreationDate="2017-05-18T15:46:21.633" Score="9" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, the magician Norrell has cornered the market on magical books, which must have been a considerable expense. He also seems to have a considerable estate. How did he become so wealthy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that the character's motivation is driven by the British peerage, in which titles and wealth go to people who have done important things, but inherited without evincing such merit. Norrell isn't a peer of any kind, and is ridiculed when the idea of giving him a title comes up. Wealth and title don't always go together, but there often seems to be a tension between the titled class and those who earned their wealth. So where did Norrell's wealth come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T17:10:37.343" Title="What is the source of Mr. Norrell's wealth?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2304" CreationDate="2017-05-18T16:52:40.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on what you mean by &amp;quot;all along.&amp;quot; Snape was actually working for Voldemort, and then after he realized that Voldemort intended to kill the Potters he became loyal to Dumbledore and (apparently) remained so for the rest of his life. (His actions in the sixth book were entirely taken in an effort to re-establish his cover with the Death Eaters, not out of disloyalty to Dumbledore).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Snape accidentally referred to Lily as a mudblood and attempted to apologize, Lily said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends – you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He opened his mouth, but closed it without speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that Snape actually joined Voldemort (he didn't even bother to deny that that was his intent), so he clearly wasn't a double agent at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/97327/was-snape-really-prejudiced&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about whether Snape was actually prejudiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he had been a double agent &lt;em&gt;prior&lt;/em&gt; to agreeing to do whatever Dumbledore asked, it would make no sense for Dumbledore to ask what he'd do in return for protecting the Potters. He had also given Voldemort accurate information about what he heard about the prophecy. This suggests that Snape was actually working for Voldemort up until the point that he found out that Voldemort intended to kill the Potters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence suggests that he remained working for Dumbledore all along (e.g. the fact that he saved Harry in the first book and the fact that he went to great lengths to protect the Sorcerer's Stone).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sixth book, you see him working with Dumbledore to protect Draco Malfoy and working to re-establish his cover with the Death Eaters by meeting with Bellatrix and taking the Unbreakable Vow to cooperate with Draco's plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple lines of evidence that he was lying to Bellatrix at their meeting, such as the fact that he apparently got the information on Draco's mission by using Legilimency on Draco (rather than directly from the Dark Lord like he claimed), the fact that Bellatrix believed him to be lying until he agreed to take the Unbreakable Vow, and the fact that Dumbledore apparently had to persuade Snape to agree to kill him. Even at the end, Dumbledore apparently had to persuade Snape to go through with killing him. Thus, he appeared to continue to be working with Dumbledore at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, he was also secretly carrying out Dumbledore's intentions throughout the seventh book as well, up until the point that he was killed by Voldemort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T03:46:33.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-18T19:05:58.273" Score="9" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to rhetorically analyze a passage in Amy Tan's novel titled &lt;em&gt;The Joy Luck Club&lt;/em&gt;, where a character, Lindo Jong, describes her experience with the arranged marriage process. I've included the passage below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The matchmaker had bragged about me: ‘An earth horse for an earth sheep. This is the best marriage combination’… But even if I had known I was getting such a bad husband, I had no choice, now or later. We were always the last to give up stupid old-fashioned customs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm currently trying to analyze the negative diction and ambiguity of this passage. The negative diction can be seen with the words &quot;stupid&quot; and &quot;old-fashioned.&quot; The ambiguity occurs with the word &quot;customs,&quot; as the reader doesn't know what exactly the customs Tan is criticizing are: are the customs society's suppression of a woman's voice, or society's reliance on astrological signs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what the rhetorical goal of this passage would be, and what the purpose of the ambiguity is. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1499" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T09:34:50.950" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T19:03:45.460" Title="What specifically is being described as stupid and old-fashioned in this passage on arranged marriage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;amy-tan&gt;&lt;the-joy-luck-club&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2559" CreationDate="2017-05-18T19:25:46.793" Score="41" ViewCount="13142" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;, the 1986 comic written by Alan Moore and drawn/lettered by Dave Gibbons, is recogniseable (among other features) for the schematic of its comic pages - they all use the 9-panel grid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6ycxm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/O6ycxm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://dw-wp.com/2013/02/book-group-lucille-debeurme/9-panel-grid-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the pages don't have &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; 9 panels, but the geometry remains the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9p1nYm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9p1nYm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oLSBpm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oLSBpm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Watchmen #1, pages 12 and 24. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen this layout anywhere in the comics I read; neither was it present in Moore's other works, e.g. &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt;, drawn by David Lloyd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DY9Fhm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DY9Fhm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7DSW4m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7DSW4m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt; #1, pages 6 and 12. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this raises two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whose idea was it to use the 9-panel grid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's most likely to be the artist, but Alan Moore is known for his excesisvely detailed comic scripts, and he's usually involved with the artistic process as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What was the reason for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.g. in &lt;em&gt;V for Vendetta&lt;/em&gt; David Lloyd, the artist, decided not to have thought baloons or sounds. Just because. Alan Moore had to adapt to that. What is the story behind the 9-panel grid in &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;? What purpose does it story, from the point of the story, and the picture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T19:35:25.207" Title="Why does &quot;Watchmen&quot; use the 9-panel grid?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;alan-moore&gt;&lt;watchmen&gt;&lt;dave-gibbons&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2558" CreationDate="2017-05-18T21:13:54.717" Score="44" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It was a decision by the artist, Dave Gibbons.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has said so in his Twitter, in response to a thread discussing the origin of the 9-panel grid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Actually, I chose the nine panel grid and sold it to Alan. Gave him great control &amp;amp; its restriction challenged me to compose more creatively&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/davegibbons90/status/856772740510081025&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dave Gibbons on Twitter&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Watching the Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;, Gibbons mentions the 9-panel grid again, and notes that it was influenced by Steve Ditko, the comic artist who created the character Rorschach was based on, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://comicsalliance.com/omega-men-nine-panel-grid/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comicsalliance reports&lt;/a&gt;. Dave Gibbons also mentions Ditko in &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/davegibbons90/status/856806366018772992&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another tweet&lt;/a&gt; from the above thread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The control part is understandable - 9 panels means a lot of scenes one can be fit on just one page. It makes the progression of the plot easy, by describing more than one action without the need for the reader to flip the page (or use two pages - see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also makes following the plot easier - one simply has to read from left to right, top to bottom. Some even suggest that a &lt;a href=&quot;http://comicbook.com/blog/2013/11/17/on-watchmen-and-shakespeare-the-9-panel-grid-and-iambic-pentameter/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;grid is similar to the poetic meter&lt;/a&gt;. This is sometimes overlooked in modern comics, where panels overlap and details stick out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/olmFS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/olmFS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nebezial.deviantart.com/journal/f-k-it-it-s-death-vigil-for-EVERYONE-531698214&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Death Vigil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, volume I, chapter (issue) 1, page 28.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to be reading from left to right first, or top to bottom? Such layouts as this may be confusing for readers like me, who cannot be sure which way the page is supposed to be read, so they read it the wrong way, and sometimes get spoilers. With a &lt;em&gt;strict&lt;/em&gt; grid, on the other hand, it's impossible to follow a reading order other than the one intended by the creators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grid is great from the artistic perspective on multiple levels. For instance, there are &lt;em&gt;a lot (and I mean &lt;strong&gt;a lot&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt; of ways of using a 9-panel grid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcOh1.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kcOh1.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/a/2288819/408057&quot;&gt;Image courtesy of Tom Carpenter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked a question on Mathematics Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/2287784/408057&quot;&gt;In how many different ways can a 9-panel comic grid be used?&lt;/a&gt; Turns out 9 panels allow for 322 variations, which is more that a 6-panel grid and a 4-panel grid allow  - 32, and 8 variations, respectively (for comparison, 6-by-3 grid, i.e. 2 pages, allows 314662 variations, while 16-panel grid allows 70878). This gives the writer and the artist sufficiently many ways to divide the page in any shape that is most suitable for the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ocGTc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ocGTcm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXaYz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXaYzm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qymZj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qymZjm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; #4 and #7; here and afterwards, click on the image for full resolution.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;http://comicsworkbook.com/9-panel-grids/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; points out, this grid has the benefit of a central panel - one that could be the focus of the page, and that would be the summary or the main idea of the whole page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, 9 panels could also be divided in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LpQrQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LpQrQm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hGhF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3hGhFm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; #5&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that the colours of the panels alternate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/10qhym.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/10qhym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in case of the second page, it's the colour purple and the triangle symbol that form the pattern. I found this contrast an interesting detail and similar to techniques in films and books, i.e. when the camera shoots alternate between a close-up of the actor, and wide shots of the scenery, or when a chapter told from a character's perspective, and then from narrator's or other characters (e.g. &lt;em&gt;The Martian&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Witcher&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the 9-panel grid allowed the creators to explore the potential of 2-page &quot;splash&quot; scenes, such as this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ta6L6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ta6L6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix 1&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how much exactly the 9-panel grid influenced Alan Moore's script, but there's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tcj.com/a-portal-to-another-dimension-alan-moore-dave-gibbons-and-neil-gaiman/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;panel with With Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons&lt;/a&gt;, moderated by none other than the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman, which offers at least some information on their creative process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix 2:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the latest crossover between the mainstream DC &lt;em&gt;Rebirth&lt;/em&gt; universe and &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; also used a 9-panel grid, to indicate the connection between the two comics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iw9AP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Iw9AP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.polygon.com/comics/2017/5/3/15519892/watchmen-dc-comics-batman-flash-rebirth-button&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image source&lt;/a&gt;, click to enlarge &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T17:24:52.363" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:24:52.363" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2554" CreationDate="2017-05-19T10:06:26.337" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point in the book (page 59 of the Kindle edition, in chapter 4) Drawlight states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had an old uncle called Haythornthwaite who died and left him a world of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there is no indication in the book as to whether Drawlight is telling the truth.  He is, after all, something of a gossip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does however seem that his wealth is inherited.  Haythornthwaite could be Norrell's mother's brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a discussion of this at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://hurtfew.wikispaces.com/Uncle+Haythornthwaite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurtfew Wikispace&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-19T07:55:57.790" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T07:55:57.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2563" CreationDate="2017-05-19T16:11:57.760" Score="9" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a science fiction story where some academics developed a technology that would let them bring a person from the past into the present. Various candidates were discussed and dismissed before Shakespeare was selected as universal to cross the divide. The implication ends with a last line where one professor tells another that he failed Shakespeare in a class on his own writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the bibliographic details, if available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1514" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T20:17:18.673" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T20:17:18.673" Title="Title and author for SF short story about giving Shakespeare an F?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2562" CreationDate="2017-05-19T16:19:51.870" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Immortal Bard&lt;/a&gt; (in some copies of &lt;em&gt;Earth is Room Enough&lt;/em&gt;, it's titled as &quot;An Immortal Bard&quot;), a short story by Isaac Asimov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 professors are having a drink at a cocktail party of sorts. The physics professor, Dr. Welsh, is moderately tipsy (read: pretty drunk).   He strikes up a conversation with a young English professor, Dr. Robertson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh claims to have invented a technology to allow him to bring people back from the past. He's tried Archimedes, Newton, Galileo, and possibly others. However, they couldn't adjust to life in the 20th century. So next, he brings back Shakespeare.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare is enthusiastic, and glad to hear that humanity loves his work. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Bard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asimov is totally not biased&lt;/a&gt;) To see how people treat his works now, Welsh enrolls Shakespeare in an afternoon lecture course, &lt;em&gt;taught by Robertson&lt;/em&gt;.  Welsh then has to send Shakespeare back, not due to any mechanical error.  Robertson flunked Shakespeare, and Shakespeare couldn't stand the embarrassment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T16:19:51.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2122" CreationDate="2017-05-19T18:36:44.483" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, it has nothing to do with Lem's novel.&lt;/strong&gt;  It's a play on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master&amp;#39;s_Voice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous trademark&lt;/a&gt; originated by the Gramophone Company (and later used by EMI) in the UK and used by Victor (and later RCA) in the USA.  Take a look at the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tamla and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Records&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trojan&lt;/a&gt; are both record labels known for releasing music by (respectively) African-American or African-British artists.  (Tamla was the name used in the UK by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motown&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motown Records&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Billie Holiday was an African-American jazz &amp;amp; blues singer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Black Uhuru is a Jamaican reggae group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, V is saying that music by black people has been eradicated from the national media, and replaced by state propaganda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastActivityDate="2017-05-19T18:36:44.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2568" CreationDate="2017-05-20T07:48:26.530" Score="14" ViewCount="1167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Brazilian, I frequent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Mathematica Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, and I've never heard of Tom Sawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was confusing when I read a &lt;a href=&quot;https://mathematica.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/954/can-we-do-something-to-suppress-tom-sawyers&quot;&gt;meta post&lt;/a&gt; that described people as &quot;Tom Sawyers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are a few people who frequent the Mathematica.SE site for the purpose of soliciting extensive free program development and/or debugging services. I think of such people as Tom Sawyers, and they really bug me. So I ask: can more be done to discourage such people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this reference to Tom Sawyer supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know he is a character in a book (hence why I'm asking this question here), but that's about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1518" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:08:57.637" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:08:57.637" Title="Understanding a reference to Tom Sawyer in the context of avoiding work" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;adventures-of-tom-sawyer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-20T16:12:56.597" Score="4" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Levin was deep-thinking; Stiva was shallow. It is hard to believe there was long lasting friendship between these two. Exactly What qualities in Oblonsky kept this friendship alive? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin constantly chided Stiva for his bad husbandry, but if Oblonsky was as shrewd as Levin wished him to be, would Livin have liked him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was not Stiva's silliness or the lack of guile exactly the kind of quality that Levin found most appealing in a friend? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1520" LastEditorUserId="1520" LastEditDate="2017-05-20T16:36:42.123" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:33:16.887" Title="Could Levin have a friend like Oblonsky in real life?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2566" CreationDate="2017-05-20T20:11:26.650" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is referencing the plot of the second chapter of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt;, by Mark Twain. In this chapter, Tom tricks the other boys into doing his work for him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What do you call work?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why, ain’t that work?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The brush continued to move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth – stepped back to note the effect – added a touch here and there – criticised the effect again – Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No – no – I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence – right here on the street, you know – but if it was the back fence I wouldn’t mind and she wouldn’t. Yes, she’s awful particular about this fence; it’s got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No – is that so? Oh come, now – lemme, just try. Only just a little – I’d let you, if you was me, Tom.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ben, I’d like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly – well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn’t let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn’t let Sid. Now don’t you see how I’m fixed? If you was to tackle this fence and anything was to happen to it – ”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, shucks, I’ll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say – I’ll give you the core of my apple.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, here – No, Ben, now don’t. I’m afeard – ”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’ll give you all of it!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2 - taken from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/writings_tom.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PBS site&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they are saying here, is that this character is making the other people do his work for him - and that these people are doing the same thing, pushing their work onto other people. (FWIW, they are commonly referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/19665/294691&quot;&gt;help vampires&lt;/a&gt; across the Stack Exchange network.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Since Tom Sawyer tricked the other people into doing the work that he was supposed to do, they are comparing these people to him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-20T20:11:26.650" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-21T08:11:01.307" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a dodgy question as I have few details about this book, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a book that was already around in the 1990s and famous enough to be translated into Dutch. (It wasn't a Dutch book but was read in the Netherlands, in Dutch, around then).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its main character was a clock keeper who spent his time keeping many, many clocks running in a large old house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the genre was mystery and I think there was a murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's not a lot to go on but does anyone have any idea what book this could be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I believe the house was very large and had many clocks which had to be wound and looked after. The period was probably Victorian, maybe later but before battery operated clocks. The man looking after the clocks was probably employed by the owner of the house and the house was very large (probably an aristocrat's house).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="186" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T08:11:41.407" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T11:03:30.503" Title="A book about a clock keeper" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2570" CreationDate="2017-05-21T08:26:31.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The 3 Investigators: The Screaming Clock&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GudYN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GudYN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Front cover&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alarm clock went off with the bloodcurdling scream of a woman in mortal terror!  Who could have made such a clock--and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Three Investigators immediately set out to discover where the mysterious clock came from.  When they come across a run-down house in Hollywood, they find an entire room full of dreadful clocks--and time is running out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a book that was already around in the 1990s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was published in 1991, so it fits your time frame, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0679821732&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and famous enough to be translated into Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it looks like it's been &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblio.com/book/het-laatste-uur-van-albert-klok/d/158948254&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated to Dutch&lt;/a&gt;, so that fits too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its main character was a clock keeper who spent his time keeping many, many clocks running in a large old house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember exactly, but there were a whole lot of clocks running an old, rundown house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the genre was mystery and I think there was a murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a mystery series, although I don't think that there was actually a murder in this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T12:36:47.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2573" CreationDate="2017-05-21T16:39:54.760" Score="11" ViewCount="8348" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare is incredibly famous for writing a lot in iambic pentameter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why did he choose to write in this specific style of having ten beats and 5 stressed syllables per line? Considering it was not at all a requirement for plays at the time and many poets wrote in a completely different meter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wasn't this just making his life unnecessarily difficult considering the quantity of stuff he wrote in such a manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="1022" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T10:31:02.493" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T10:31:02.493" Title="Why did Shakespeare write in iambic pentameter?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2572" CreationDate="2017-05-22T17:40:12.510" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare wrote iambic pentameter because that was the most common verse meter of the time. He didn't establish it. Edmund Spenser used it in The Faerie Queene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sing of Knights and Ladies° gentle deeds;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Christopher Marlowe in Dido Queen of Carthage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iup.&lt;/em&gt; Come gentle &lt;em&gt;Ganimed&lt;/em&gt; and play with me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I loue thee well, say &lt;em&gt;Iuno&lt;/em&gt; what she will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poets had been using it since at least Middle English, such as Geoffrey Chaucer in Canterbury Tales:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whan that aprill with his shoures soote&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And bathed every veyne in swich licour&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of which vertu engendred is the flour;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The first couple of lines are somewhat loose in the meter, but the second couplet is fairly rigorous, roughly pronounced: and BAH-thed EV'ry VEIN in SWICH li-QUOR/of WHICH vir-TUE en-GEN-dred is the FLOOR [flower]&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;why&quot; is simply that it's perceived to fit the natural rhythms of English fairly well. French and Italian frequently use six-foot lines, which correspond to about the same number of words but with more gender-marked endings. English words tend to mix stressed and unstressed syllables, so you get iambs and trochees in speech quite frequently. I don't really know why we picked iambic rather than trochaic verse; for all I know it's arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why he wrote in verse at all... partly it makes plays easier to memorize. Some kind of structure helps you remember how the words fit together: one sound cues the next. Songs are even more memorable, but blank verse seems to be sufficiently memorable for actors to keep multiple plays going in repertory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, it just sounds good. Audiences like the sound of verse, going back to antiquity. It can have a hypnotic quality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic pentameter seems to fit a sweet spot in English of having enough structure to be memorable and enjoyable, without feeling sing-songy. Different languages settled on different forms to meet the common sounds available in those languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare wrote almost exclusively in verse for his early plays, and got more prosey as he went on, especially for comic characters. Verse carries the power of drama especially well. As he got more comfortable with letting the wordplay alone carry the comedy, he began to write more prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-05-22T17:40:12.510" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2574" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2606" CreationDate="2017-05-22T20:35:59.053" Score="9" ViewCount="730" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plot is a bit hazy for me since I read this novel years ago but can someone tell me if they know this book? &#xA;The plot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bomb goes off in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Building collapse and many people die.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Society starts to break down &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hero and his family own a shop and have hidden supplies which wasn't allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hero saves girl from rogue gangs when going to collect water.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They fall in love.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Corrupt soldiers are introduced who take food and gun supplies and set up base in hills surrounding the city&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Heroes mum dies at the beginning but dad dies later on and so does brother or sister.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A big revolution topples the army and freedom of the people lead to the formation of a new community of survivors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The new community builds churches and teaches kids etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The mutated ground meant the food grown was deadly and I think a cow dies of being too skinny.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the new community fails and people are dropping dead. They run out of food in the new reformed city and the hero and heroine decide to escape to look for some kind of utopia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They run into rogue gangs in other cities but barely survive.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They find utopia in last chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-22T20:44:11.997" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T13:25:28.753" Title="Identify a (post nuclear?) fallout story" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-22T21:23:43.970" Score="3" ViewCount="452" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been following the 2016 &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; series, and enjoying it. While re-arranging my Calibre library, I noticed that, while all the issues up to and including 12th have been written by Holly Black, issue 13 was written by Black &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Richard Kadrey, while all issues after that were written by Kadrey alone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pQMAl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pQMAlm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Issue #13&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MF3jK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MF3jKm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Issue #14&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r0BTq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r0BTqm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Issue #15&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full resolution. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; comic series was written by Mike Carey alone. &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; was written by Neil Gaiman alone. While a rotating cast of artists is a known thing in comics, especially in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; and the new &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; series (though not so much in Mike Carey's series), I didn't know of a series that would change the writer in the middle of the run, and especially in the middle of an arc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know some other comics do it, but I expected &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; to be held to a higher standard. &lt;strong&gt;What is the reason the writer was changed mid-series?&lt;/strong&gt; Was it a pre-mediated decision, or was it because of a disagreement over the process (which seems unlikely since Black and Kadrey did an issue together)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T20:18:46.573" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T20:18:46.573" Title="Why did the writer of the 2016 &quot;Lucifer&quot; comic series change from Holly Black to Richard Kadrey?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;holly-black&gt;&lt;lucifer&gt;&lt;richard-kadrey&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2576" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2614" CreationDate="2017-05-23T08:23:14.380" Score="4" ViewCount="18502" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;An Inspector Calls&lt;/em&gt; by J.B Priestley, does Eric Birling actually rape Eva Smith? Does &quot;force&quot; indicate rape, and did he &quot;force&quot; himself into the apartment or onto her? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he did rape her - why does she stay with him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if he raped her, or simply forced his way into the apartment and she willingly slept with him (but if she was unwilling to let him into the apartment, why would she be willing to sleep with him?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1473" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T12:22:49.083" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T15:33:48.437" Title="Does Eric Birling rape Eva Smith?" Tags="&lt;an-inspector-calls&gt;&lt;j-b-priestley&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="615" CreationDate="2017-05-23T08:52:35.673" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As suggested in a comment, it is a reference to the normal practice of putting injured horses out of their misery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gloria feels her life is hopeless and has attempted suicide in the past. During the dance marathon she becomes increasingly depressed - losing the will to live.  She tells Robert that her life is hopeless and she would be better off dead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert feels that killing her is the kind thing to do.  Putting her out of her misery and saving her decades of further unhappiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when arrested, he doesn't attempt to deny the shooting.  He simply makes the metaphorical connection to the practice with horses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-05-23T08:52:35.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2576" CreationDate="2017-05-23T11:00:03.223" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;force&quot; indicates rape. Eric admits elsewhere in the play that Eva let him in to her rooms, albeit unwillingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INSPECTOR: You went with her to her lodgings that night?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ERIC: Yes, I insisted - it seems. I'm not very clear about it, but&#xA;  afterwards she told me she didn't want me to go in, but that - well, I&#xA;  was in that state when one easily turns nasty - and I threatened to&#xA;  make a row.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;INSPECTOR: So she let you in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ERIC: Yes. And that's when it happened. And I didn't even remember -&#xA;  that's the hellish part. Oh - my God! How stupid it all is!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Priestley wants to highlight the hypocrisy of the Birlings. It suits the themes of the play to make Eric as monstrous as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T12:23:49.597" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T12:23:49.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-23T16:56:37.017" Score="4" ViewCount="10283" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my theories is that the Inspector is like Moses and the Birling family is like the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh in the Bible decides to free the slaves, but then doesn't go through with it so God punishes him. In the book Mr. and Mrs. Birling originally doesn't accept any blame for what they did to &amp;quot;Eva Smith&amp;quot; but then the Inspector changes their minds. But soon after the inspector was exposed as being &amp;quot;not a real inspector&amp;quot; they revert to their old mindset (except Eric and Sheila), just like the Pharaoh does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe in the introduction of the play it briefly mentions the seven deadly sins. Below is who I believe represents each sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7 deadly sins and possible character representations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lust (Eric/Gerald)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gluttony (Mr. Birling/Gerald/Mrs. Birling)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Greed (Birling/Gerald/Mrs. Birling)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sloth (Eric? I don't fully understand the definition of sloth)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wrath (Sheila)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Envy (Sheila)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pride (Gerald/Mr. Birling/Mrs. Birling)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T20:53:22.797" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T11:33:19.393" Title="Does the Birling family (and Gerald) represent the 7 deadly sins and/or the story of the pharaoh?" Tags="&lt;an-inspector-calls&gt;&lt;j-b-priestley&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="779" CreationDate="2017-05-24T05:22:04.590" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, from what I have understood from your question, you are questioning the incipient feminist tendencies of the eponymous heroine as her matrimony in the end problematizes her individuality and autonomy which she upholds throughout the narrative. In order to present my case, I would like to expand the scope of our study by including the historical background of the novel and the position which Charlotte Bronte takes through her text as far as the woman question is concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is imperative for us to look at the kind of female protagonists which were created prior to Bronte's age as it followed the male paradigm of representation by the male writers as Virginia Woolf argues in her theoretical document, 'A Room of One's Own', where she asserts that the domain of novel writing was influenced by male perspective. The female protagonists which were conceived even by writers like Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet would follow a certain class affiliation and have to conform to the ideals of beauty and romance. Bronte's protagonist can be seen as a break away from this myopic woman's world which was depicted earlier as she chooses to have an ordinary, plain looking girl whose independent mind and bold choices accelerates the major action of the story. Marriage for her is always secondary as she asserts from time to time her individuality and rebellious spirit which was seen clearly in her arguments with her mother in the initial parts of the story that forms a critical part of her personality. It is this sense of autonomy in her that gives her the courage to refuse Rochester’s marriage proposal in spite of her admiration for him. More than love, she is looking for self-respect and a sense of equality in social status in the framework of marriage which is an unprecedented demand from a female. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, even though Jane marries in the end, we need to pay critical attention to the process rather than the destination. Bronte’s creative genius lies in her narrative mechanism which equalizes the difference between both the partners, making it an egalitarian bond which influences and affects both the partners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="273" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T05:22:04.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2017-05-24T15:03:34.970" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song has many verses, some of which varied in different performances. Even sticking to the &quot;canonical&quot; verses used in the Jeff Buckley version, however, there's demonstrably no one consistent &quot;you&quot; being referred to between verses.  This can be shown by the fact that the &quot;you&quot; in the second verse seems to be a composite of Sampson and King David himself, whereas the first verse refers to David in the third person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, the answer is ambiguous, but the most natural reading to me is to assume the first, third, fourth (and arguably the fifth) verses are all directed to the narrator's lover, who seems to be a somewhat distanced and indifferent figure (with the second verse taking a detour to directly address the subject of the first).  The narrator seems to idolize [her], with the first and fourth verses somewhat blasphemously conflating her with God. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under that reading, we can picture the narrator (Cohen?), a songwriter writing a song for his girlfriend.  He pictures himself charming her with his song, like King David pleased the Lord with a &quot;secret chord.&quot;  But he know that in real life, she's not even a fan of his music, or really any music.  There's no secret key to her heart, or at least, not one that he knows (compare the similar themes in Frank Ocean's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Frank-ocean-songs-for-women-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Songs For Women&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which directly references this line).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rsrevision.com/hallelujah.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This source&lt;/a&gt; indicates that all the best-known verses come from two separate recordings by Cohen, a 1984 version with more religious imagery, and a 1988 version more focused on the relationship with a lover.  The Buckley version includes verses from both, although not the single verse shared between versions.  It's only the second verse from the first version, however, that clearly addresses someone other than the narrator's lover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T17:42:34.727" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T17:42:34.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2553" CreationDate="2017-05-24T15:18:49.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The concept of divine inspiration, where the artist is not the creator of the art, but rather a conduit for something originating with God, is an ancient one, perhaps most cogently formulated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ion_%28dialogue%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato's &lt;em&gt;Ion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  It would almost have certainly been familiar to someone as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen#Poetry_and_novels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-educated&lt;/a&gt; as Cohen when he wrote &lt;em&gt;Hallelujah&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It further seems clear that the only way one could discover a &quot;secret chord&quot; sacred or pleasing to God would be via divine inspiration, which, in the &lt;em&gt;Ion&lt;/em&gt;, is depicted as a somewhat &lt;a href=&quot;http://popculturephilosopher.com/socrates-talk-show/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;baffling&lt;/a&gt; and mysterious process.  Since Cohen immediately goes on to reveal the secret chord (or rather, chord progression), he is explicitly comparing himself to David, and arguably autobiographically describing how baffling the creation process feels to &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;.  After all, this is an artist who famously said &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rollingstone.com/music/live-reviews/leonard-cohen-offers-rare-peek-into-his-process-at-popular-problems-preview-20140911&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;If I knew where the good songs came from, I'd go there more often.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a sly suggestion here that only divine inspiration and/or a secret chord would be enough to please his picky lover, who doesn't &quot;really care for music.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:47:38.587" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:47:38.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2556" CreationDate="2017-05-24T16:06:17.970" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't characterize it as &quot;ambiguous,&quot; it seems fairly clear that she's using the one custom to critique the other, and characterizing &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; as stupid and old-fashioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhetorically speaking, the astrological belief is presented as more &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt; absurd and outdated, the lack of agency over her own marriage is absurd and outdated by extension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2017-05-24T16:06:17.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:16:57.783" Score="4" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huexotzinco_Codex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Huexotzinco Codex on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia describes the document as a &quot;Nahua pictorial manuscript&quot;, and claims that it was used as evidence in a Spanish court case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Wikipedia article also contains several images of the codex. And I have to say, looking at the images, I don't see how the codex could be used as testimony or have any sort of meaning. For example, what on earth is this image supposed to represent? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5zCOR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5zCOR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Huexotzinco Codex&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two related questions are: how can the Huexotzinco Codex be read? How was it used as testimony in the Spanish court system?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T23:47:27.810" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T23:47:27.810" Title="How can the Huexotzinco Codex be read?" Tags="&lt;huexotzinco-codex&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2584" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:16:57.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I view the Huexotzinco Codex as important because it tells the indigenous perspective of Spanish colonization using the indigenous writing system. The Spanish made a concerted and deliberate effort to burn indigenous manuscripts and suppress indigenous perspectives. And unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/72319/AI_Vol33_No2_MichaelArbagi1.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Spanish were successful&lt;/a&gt;: out of a literary tradition as prolific as any other, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JfbDAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PR14#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;about a dozen pre-conquest manuscripts remain, as well as two-dozen post-conquest manuscripts&lt;/a&gt;. It's impossible to put into words the knowledge lost or the destruction caused to a culture as important as any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Huexotzinco Codex is a pictorial manuscript. Pictorial manuscripts were a complex art form used to represent everything from historical manuscripts to calendars or almanacs to land claims to tax records. In terms of how to interpret the Huexotzinco Codex, it probably is closest to the pictorial tax records used by the Triple Alliance (Aztec empire). In economic terms, the Triple Alliance is somewhat similar to modern economies: the Triple Alliance had markets and &lt;a href=&quot;https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2015/AEA_16/um/54537083/MES-14-MexiconTaxes-libre.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an extensive tax system&lt;/a&gt;. The Triple Alliance empire kept detailed tax records, such as the tax record found in the Codex Azoyú. I don't have permission to reproduce the image, but you can view an image of the tax record &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/5049415/Codice_Humboldt_Fragmento_1_Ms._amer._2_and_Codice_Azoyu_2_Reverso_Estudio_de_la_Nomina_de_Tributos_de_Tlapa_y_su_Provincia_al_Imperio_Mexicano&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on page 62 of this PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tax record is a five by six grid with images in each grid. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/5049415/Codice_Humboldt_Fragmento_1_Ms._amer._2_and_Codice_Azoyu_2_Reverso_Estudio_de_la_Nomina_de_Tributos_de_Tlapa_y_su_Provincia_al_Imperio_Mexicano&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is a complicated document, but essentially the columns on the right record the month using glyphs, while the columns on the left record the quantity of taxes sent to the empire. Each row, therefore, records the tax send at that particular time. Bear in mind that the text also includes information about the political context of various changes in the amount of taxes given to the empire, by (for example) including depictions of various officials at various points in the tax record.&lt;/a&gt; For more information, click on the above link, or take a look at the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/5048944/Negotiating_Aztec_Tributary_Demands_in_the_Tribute_Record_of_Tlapa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Negotiating Aztec Tributary Demands in the Tribute Record of Tlapa&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to the Huexotzinco Codex, which I will include images of because &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the codex is located in the Library of Congress and is in the public domain&lt;/a&gt;, we see that it follows a similar structure. While it doesn't include any month or year glyphs (perhaps due to spanish influence, perhaps due to the fact that the codex refers to more or less a one time event), we see that the quantities of tax are clearly drawn out. For example, here is an image of page seven in the manuscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MCwYI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MCwYI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Page seven of the Huexotzinco Codex&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not that difficult to see the quantities of goods clearly laid out. For example, the twenty-one circles on the right side of the document represent 21 gold plaques. Keep in mind that some of images represent multiples of goods: for example, the darts on the second row represent bundles of darts. (For more images and more explanation of the images, take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress; manuscripts concerning Mexico: a guide&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the Huexotzinco Codex is a post-conquest document, and it records not taxation by the Triple Alliance but the abuses of the Spanish in Huexotzinco (&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;). The Huexotzinco Codex was evidence in a lawsuit between Hernán Cortés (the Spaniard who conquored the Tripple Aliance) and the first audiencia (Spanish officials) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;). The first audiencia had extracted tribute from Huexotzinco, but Cortés argued that he had the rights to Huexotzinco, and that the first audiencia were stealing from him (&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;). Indigenous voices were included in the lawsuit as evidence of the fact that the first audiencia had extracted tribute from them (&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;). Of course, the fact that they were included at all was not without controversy, as the testimony of  Gregorio de Saldana shows (page 184 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Indians presented by the contrary party lack credibility, and they should not be given credence because they are Indian vassals of the said Marques, and all the Indians in general are bad Christians, drunks, liars, idolaters, eaters of human flesh, vile persons who will perjure themselves for anything whatsoever. And much less should the paintings which the contrary party presents be given credence, because they were made by the same infidel and barbarous Indians, and my parties were not cited for it and so they could have painted whatever they wished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;paintings&quot; refers to the codex.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how the codex was included as evidence and interpreted by the Spanish: first, the &quot;Indians&quot; gave oral testimony in which they referenced the codex. For example, to quote from the testimony of &quot;Esteban, an Indian who was previously named Tochel, which in the Christian language means rabbit&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And as to the maize which they have given to the said factor, they have&#xA;  it painted in a painting which he asked to be shown. And when he saw&#xA;  it&#xA;  he said through the said interpreter,&#xA;  regarding the sixteen black pictures painted after&#xA;  the fashion of the combs of the Indians, that each picture&#xA;  represents&#xA;  four hundred&#xA;  loads of maize and the other sixteen black bands, after the fashion of outstretched&#xA;  banners of the Indians, each one of them&#xA;  is&#xA;  twenty loads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also possible that the codex was interpreted by a Spaniard familiar with the codices. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/29781759&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;For example, in a related court case also involving the indigenous people of Huexotzinco, Fray Toribio de Motolinia (a Spaniard) gave testimony where he interpreted the codices&lt;/a&gt;. Given that the records from the trial include not just the Huexotzinco Codex but also a replica of the Huexotzinco Codex that was annotated in Spanish, it's possible that something similar happened in that trial (&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015027976789;view=1up;seq=81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harkness Collection&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the picture of the Huexotzinco Codex that I included in this answer, you may have noticed that there were several images of humans. These images represent indigenous people from Huexotzinco who were enslaved by the Spanish. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-native-american-slavery-20160505-snap-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slavery, not European plagues, is the real reason why indigenous populations in the Americas were decimated, the slavery of indigenous peoples laid the foundation for the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans, and the slavery of indigenous peoples continued long after slavery was abolished&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things to take away from this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can we understand the contradiction between the fact that the Spanish burned indigenous texts and the fact that the Spanish relied on these texts to run their colonial government.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What would be lost if the indigenous texts were converted into European forms? What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Aztec writing system?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did the Spaniards and the indigenous people of Huexotzinco make sense of each other, and in particular their different forms of government, legal systems, and writing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T11:16:57.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2587" CreationDate="2017-05-25T11:58:48.327" Score="24" ViewCount="39490" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've grown up loving the quote &quot;Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.&quot; and I've been searching around to find out where it came from (with only a small amount of luck).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered that it came from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/83627-do-not-meddle-in-the-affairs-of-dragons-for-you&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suzanne McMinn&lt;/a&gt;, however, I have no references beyond that. Did she get it from someone else? Which book did it appear in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1542" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-25T18:05:07.547" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T23:40:18.270" Title="Origins of quote: &quot;Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2586" CreationDate="2017-05-25T12:10:03.920" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like a spoof of the quote from &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, by J.R.R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It comes from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'But it is said: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. The choice is yours: to go or wait.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'And it is also said,' answered Frodo: 'Go not to the Elves for counsel for they will answer both no and yes.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Is it indeed?' laughed Gildor. 'Elves seldom give unguarded advice, for advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for where the dragon part is from, I found a book called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/84134.Dragonswan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragonswan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Sherrilyn Kenyon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be kind to dragons, for thou art crunchy when roasted and taste good with ketchup. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=SYiPLciA9PQC&amp;amp;q=Crunchy+#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=Crunchy&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Google Books)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;These quotes appear to have been merged.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, nobody knows where this first came from, but here's something from July 27, 1999, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salon.com/1999/07/27/marceau/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Salon magazine&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All this, and he has a wickedly weird and original sense of humor. “Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards,” Marceau once said, “for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also apparently in the 24th of February, 1999 issue of the Plainview Daily Herald, according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/do_not_meddle_in_the_affairs_of_dragons&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://unger.myplainview.com/miscellaneousnews.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;their archives&lt;/a&gt; appear to be down (and the Wayback Machine is turning up blank).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator&lt;/a&gt; Twitter account &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/QuoteResearch/status/867926430419738625&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;responded&lt;/a&gt; to a request for help with an even earlier use of the quote, from Usenet (&lt;a href=&quot;https://t.co/0K0GRKdErx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;July 10 1989&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do Not meddle in the affairs of Wizards, for you are crunchy and go&#xA;  well with catsup&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Brian Beattie was the first to write this line (it appears as part of his signature on that post), but the quote was there, in some form, in 1989.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried sending an email to the email address included in the post, but...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y3p2S.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y3p2Sm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Address not found&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080808172256AA1CQ5n&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Yahoo Answers thread&lt;/a&gt; someone mentioned that it was from the Dragon magazine. There are archives available &lt;a href=&quot;https://annarchive.com/files/Drmg001.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for now. I looked through the first 150 magazines, after which it isn't older than the quote above, with a &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; + &lt;kbd&gt;F&lt;/kbd&gt; search for &lt;code&gt;do not m&lt;/code&gt;, and didn't find anything - if anyone else want to see if they can find anything, they are welcome to - like, the &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; + &lt;kbd&gt;F&lt;/kbd&gt; search doesn't work on images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T20:46:53.560" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T20:46:53.560" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-25T13:09:50.660" Score="6" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &quot;Constellation of Vital Phenomena&quot; (Anthony Marra) Sonja remembers visiting anatomy and pathology museum in London. There she stumbles upon an exhibit of a skull of a cannibal. The placard says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next line says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure I understood what association Sonja (or, rather, the author) had in mind. Is it simply due to the fact that Sonja bought the nutcracker the same day she visited the museum? I guess there is greater significance attached to it, something I failed to notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1543" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:08:47.447" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:08:47.447" Title="What is 'the morbid association between the cannibal and the nutcracker'?" Tags="&lt;anthony-marra&gt;&lt;constellation-vital-phen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2591" CreationDate="2017-05-25T20:03:16.773" Score="13" ViewCount="660" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember 2 years ago reading a book in class about a retired soldier who lures homeless people into his house and murders them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the plot went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lets say the heroes name is X.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The antagonist is a retired soldier from the military. He wants to serve his country in the war against homelessness- by murdering them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X leaves his family because he was abused by his dad and he decides to go and move to another city&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X finds it hard to live in the streets but he has a sleeping bag with him which I think gets robbed when he tries to sleep in an alleyway&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X then runs out of money but meets another homeless boy who is extremely street wise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This boy is an expert and begging for money from higher classes while living on the streets&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the other boy knows about a ship that homeless people can take refuge in if they pay a certain amount of money.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile the ex-soldier has killed several homeless people and I think he says &quot;who cares no ones going to miss them anyway&quot;. The soldier feels he is doing his country a favour by fighting the war against homelessness. It is hinted that the soldier is mentally ill.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually X is introduced to other homeless kids and they all become friends. The other boy and X notice that some of the other homeless kids that they met are going missing. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is revealed the soldier keeps the bodies of his victims under the floor boards in a cool area and he states the smell is becoming worse.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X and his friend eventually run into a girl who looked too pretty, smart and rich to be homeless. But she still says she is homeless and she hangs round with X and his friend. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The girl pays for most of the food (which is suspicious) and pays for them to survive a bit. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One day X's friend goes missing. X is frightened and unsure what to do. He searches everywhere that his friend usually begs for money from.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X finds the homeless girl and tells her the story&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember how but eventually X finds the home of the soldier and he has a gut feeling that his friend is in his house somewhere. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They (X and the girl) wait and spy outside his house for days but there is no evidence of the man being some kind of murderer. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Police are called because of many missing people and the police investigate the soldiers house.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember how (again) but the soldier outwits the cops and they leave thinking he isn't a suspect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X decides to investigate for himself and knocks on the soldiers door. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The soldier knew that X was spying on him and had a plan to kill X because X was also homeless. I am not sure but I don't think the soldier knows about the girl. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually X finds his way to the cellar and finds the bodies of his friends and several other people. He tries to escape the house but the door is locked and the soldier is there with a knife.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a fight between X and the soldier. As soon as the soldier is about to kill X the door is broken down and police come to arrest the soldier.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even though the police initially didn't think he was a suspect, it turned out that the homeless girl was actually a famous news reporter doing a story on the life of homeless people. When she found a trend in missing people she informed the police and she eventually saves X.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;X is initially mad at her for not being honest and something else (again not sure) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please help me find this book? I loved it to pieces when I first read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T00:59:30.667" Title="Identify a story about murders of homeless people" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2590" CreationDate="2017-05-25T20:14:09.100" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_(Swindells_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stone Cold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by Robert Swindells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxpHjm.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hxpHjm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stone Cold is a realistic young-adult novel by Robert Swindells, published by Heinemann in 1993. Set on the streets of London, the first-person narrative switches between Link, a newly homeless sixteen-year-old adjusting to his situation, and Shelter, an ex-army officer scorned after being dismissed from his job, supposedly on 'medical grounds'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just from that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_(Swindells_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia blurb&lt;/a&gt;, we see that it's a newly homeless person, up against an ex-army officer, who wants to kill the homeless people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/30949/stone-cold/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penguin Books&lt;/a&gt; has this to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A tense thriller plot is combined with a perceptive and harrowing portrait of life on the streets as a serial killer preys on the young and vulnerable homeless. Link, aged 17, is distrustful of people until he pairs up with Deb, another homeless youngster. But what Deb doesn't tell him is that she's an ambitious young journalist on a self-imposed assignment to track down the killer and she's prepared to use herself as bait...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deb appears to match your description of the girl in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-05-25T20:14:09.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T17:25:46.273" Score="6" ViewCount="913" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Their Eyes Were Watching God&lt;/em&gt; (which is a fantastic book &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/598/111&quot;&gt;that is also [shameless plug] a proposed topic challenge&lt;/a&gt;), there's a strange scene on pages 61-62 where several vultures (a type of bird) start talking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He finally lit on the ground and walked around the body to see if it were really dead. Peered into its nose and mouth Examined it well from end to end and leaped upon it and bowed, and the others danced a response. Tat being over, he balanced and asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What killed this man?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chorus answered, &amp;quot;Bare, bare fat.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he picked out the eyes in the ceremonial way and the feast went on The yaller mule was gone from the town except for the porch talk, and for the children visiting his bleaching bones now and then in the spirit of adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's strange because, I think aside from possibly one other scene in the beginning of the book, it's the only time animals speak in the book. And as far as I can tell this isn't a particular theme of the book. So what's the point of including a page long scene where animals speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T21:08:01.427" Title="Why do vultures unexpectedly start talking in Their Eyes Were Watching God?" Tags="&lt;zora-neale-hurston&gt;&lt;their-eyes-were-watching-god&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T18:20:14.727" Score="8" ViewCount="761" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Ten of the &lt;em&gt;Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt;, we're told that Regulus Black is a seeker for the Slytherin team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any symbolism behind Regulus Black's Quidditch position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got the idea for this question when reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/why-the-harry-potter-books-are-better/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Strand's article where she discussed the symbolism of Quidditch&lt;/a&gt;. An answer that discussed her work on the subject would be interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T18:26:25.987" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T18:26:25.987" Title="Why is Regulus Black a seeker?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2593" CreationDate="2017-05-26T20:11:06.923" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we're interpreting the scene that Hamlet wrote about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2594/481&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt; (I haven't read the books recently enough to recall whether Regulus' Quidditch position is mentioned elsewhere), I have another, perhaps simpler explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Regulus' position is mentioned, specifically noticed by Harry, &lt;strong&gt;to create some form of kinship or connection between Harry and Regulus&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The friends start with the initials R.A.B., not sure who or what they signify, and eventually find out that those are Regulus' initials. Then they're not sure whether he's a &quot;good guy&quot; or not (most of the Black family members are proudly on Voldemort's side, after all); when they enter his room and find the green and silver, that would initially make them believe that Regulus was working against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, once they discover that Regulus is a Seeker, Harry can begin to allow himself to feel something toward Regulus as  a friend or ally. This makes Kreacher's story, establishing Regulus as an agent against Voldemort and his Horcruxes, somewhat more believable to the friends (and the readers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To set the scene: the friends discover the meaning of the letters R.A.B., and then cautiously set out to find what they can from Regulus' room. They can assume that he was not their friend because of his lineage (I don't recall whether they knew at this point that he was once a Death Eater), but then Harry finds something interesting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry, meanwhile, had noticed another photograph: a Hogwarts Quidditch&#xA;  team was smiling and waving out of the frame. He moved closer and saw&#xA;  the snakes emblazoned on their chests: Slytherins. Regulus was&#xA;  instantly recognizable as the boy sitting in the middle of the front&#xA;  row: He had the same dark hair and slightly haughty look of his&#xA;  brother, though he was smaller, slighter, and rather less handsome&#xA;  than Sirius had been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he's a Slytherin, which initially supports the possibility that he's not a friend of Harry's, but he can smile and wave in a picture*. He also looks like Sirius. And then Harry discovers something that is more important to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He played Seeker,&quot; said Harry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What?&quot; said Hermione vaguely; she was still immersed in Voldemort's&#xA;  press clippings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's sitting in the middle of the front row, that's where the Seeker&#xA;  ... Never mind,&quot; said Harry, realizing that nobody was listening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If many people can be friends with someone simply because they attended a school that they did, I can understand that Harry can relate to and start to feel good feelings toward someone who was also a Hogwarts Seeker. After this preparation, they are now ready to hear Kreacher's testimony, now ready to accept Regulus as the good guy that he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I don't have the books on hand at the moment, so I can't really support this very well, but I'm pretty sure that no &quot;bad guy&quot; in Harry Potter was ever shown &quot;smiling and waving&quot; in a photograph. Sirius Black, for instance, before the reveal that he was set up and was actually one of the best &quot;good guys&quot; in the books, was known only by his crazed mug shot. I can't really say without evidence, but I wouldn't be surprised if pictures are consistently used in the books by Rowling as a device to illustrate a person's &quot;goodness.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-05-26T20:11:06.923" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T20:44:47.177" Score="5" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2595/481&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; that I recently wrote elsewhere on this site, I posited that photographs are used by J.K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books as a device to portray the subjects of the photograph in a specific light. I wrote that answer about Regulus Black, who was shown &quot;smiling and waving&quot; in a photograph before readers are told that he died hunting Horcruxes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall (but don't have the books at hand) that, before Harry and the readers are told that he was a framed good guy (and are made to believe that he betrayed Harry's parents), Sirius was shown only by his mug shot, as a crazed and evil-looking man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ddew0.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ddew0.gif&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/File:Prisoner_of_Azkaban_-_Sirius_Black.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;img source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there evidence in the Harry Potter books to support this theory? Is there any evidence against?&lt;/strong&gt; Just because someone is evil (or a supporter of Voldemort) doesn't mean that they can't look friendly and nice in photographs -- has any Death Eater or other &quot;bad guy&quot; been shown nicely in a photo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T03:29:05.360" Title="Are photographs in Harry Potter a device for characterizing subjects?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2597" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-26T22:51:35.007" Score="8" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;Cranford&lt;/em&gt;, there's a particular line that I'm having trouble understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a married couple come to settle in town, somehow the gentleman disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about it, and I came up with the following hypotheses: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The men are forced to leave town by the ladies of Cranford.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The men have a tendency to mysteriously vanish from Cranford.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The men choose to avoid Cranford as much as possible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then men have no job opportunities close to Cranford.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure which hypothesis is right. Does anyone have any insight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt from the novel if you have not already read it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://pastebin.com/Ns51zdFR&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Excerpt from the Novel Cranford By Elizabeth Gaskell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1544" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T01:29:15.847" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T07:20:16.360" Title="What does the narrator really mean by the following quote from the novel Cranford?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-gaskell&gt;&lt;cranford&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2597" CreationDate="2017-05-27T07:20:16.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe the men are actually 'forced out' or mysteriously disappear. This line (I believe) refers to Gentlemen in the social life of the class focused on in Cranford. These men do not then actually have to be gone to have 'disappered' they just have to be socially inactive or unimportant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As most of the women are elderly it is likely that most of the men have died off (naturally) as at that time it was quite common for men to marry younger women (and so they often passed away before their spouses). If meomory serves me Cranford is a sort of retirement area, few young people (of the class focused on) live there and so this explanation seems the most likely to me, especially as time stretchs in Cranford and the men may take a year or more to 'disapper', and still be thought to do so. They may also simply suffer from some age-related illness and so not 'go out' and thus not be seen in social life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added to this, as I understand it, the women simply dominate. The men in the town do not really participate in social life because it is a women dominated area and the younger ones probably do soon leave to find better prospects. The older healthy Gentlemen probably go off to their club, or stay with friends frequently because their is not much social life for them in Cranford and so are not seen much. While their wives are seen because they do enjoy the social life in Cranford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T07:20:16.360" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2017-05-27T08:26:13.157" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sonnet 116 of Shakespeare, we also find the phrase &quot;the edge of doom&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Within his bending sickle's compass come;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But bears it out even to &lt;strong&gt;the edge of doom&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it suggests &quot;the end of time&quot;, since according to the sonnet, love could not be altered by hours or weeks (weight of time), nevertheless Love will remain and bear the time out until the end of time and space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1545" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-27T15:45:40.087" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T15:45:40.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2017-05-27T19:59:55.723" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Listening to Leonard Cohen's songs, I feel, more so than for any other songwriter, that every word was carefully chosen.  In this case, I think the line is addressed to a listener who, for no reason other than to rhyme with 'hallellujah', doesn't really care for music. Cohen didn't explain his songs; they're for us to figure out. &quot;You don't really care for music&quot; is unexpected -- anyone who doesn't care for music wouldn't be listening to a song -- and an interruption to the flow of the lyrics, thus a little jarring (similarly the wise David as &quot;the baffled king&quot;), setting us up for the hallellujah. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1547" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T12:47:06.593" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T12:47:06.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2548" CreationDate="2017-05-27T21:09:46.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is feminist because none of the inhabitants of Gethen are male or female; they are both. As Genly is the principal narrator of the story, and comes from Terra, he automatically refers to everyone he meets as &quot;he&quot;, as his established convention is to default to the male pronoun, and he is used to men running society. If he referred to all the Gethenians as &quot;she&quot; (which is equally valid) the feminist aspects would be clearer, but part of the subtlety of the novel is Genly's unconscious prejudices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1408" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T21:09:46.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2017-05-27T21:57:42.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first sentence, in French, contains an ambiguity about time which can't be translated into English. The original line is:&#xA;&quot;Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Où peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In written French the past historic tense is normally used, but as this novel has a first person narrator, he uses the &quot;passé composé&quot; tense normally used in everyday speech. To form this tense, you usually use the verb &quot;to have&quot; followed by the past participle (similar to one of the past constructions in English, e.g. &quot;I have written a letter&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However - a peculiarity of French is that certain verbs (15 common ones, mostly to do with motion) use the verb &quot;to be&quot; instead of the verb &quot;to have&quot;. So in French you don't say, for example, &quot;I have gone&quot;; you say &quot;I am gone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of these non-standard verbs is the verb &quot;to die&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, you can legitimately translate the first line of the novel as &quot;Today, Mum died&quot; or &quot;Today, Mum is dead&quot;. Most translations take the first option (though they unaccountably change the word order!), because otherwise the second sentence doesn't follow on too well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1408" LastActivityDate="2017-05-27T21:57:42.683" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3322" CreationDate="2017-05-28T09:17:20.877" Score="9" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to identify a comedic book that was recommended​ to me some time ago. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember much, but here is a brief description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title may have contained a person's name... If memory serves it may have even been a title containing &quot;Mr. [Name]&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work is either 1 short, or a collection of short stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cover had clocks in it (perhaps they were warped in a surreal way). This copy appeared to be around 80 pages and has small dimensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story poked fun at certain authority figures (presidents or prime ministers) via implications of incompetence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly the book was written by an English (UK) author/authors sometime in the past 40-50 years. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that the story featured time travel or some means of observing the lives of the authority figures from a close distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1550" LastEditorUserId="1550" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T17:40:41.100" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T12:57:22.870" Title="Short story that poked fun at certain authority figures (presidents or prime ministers) via implications of incompetence" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-28T12:40:08.140" Score="4" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Presents: Lucifer - The Morningstar Option&lt;/em&gt; #3 (written by Mike Carey and drawn by Scott Hampton), Lucifer explains he needed Rachel Begai to channel her desire to destroy the Velleity, as he himself is short on desire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b5Ggt.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/b5Ggtm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Lucifer: &amp;quot;The Velleity was designed to satisfy desire. It&amp;#39;s a commodity I&amp;#39;m short on, but yours did well enough. When you wished it gone, it had no choice but to destroy itself. By the way, you&amp;#39;ll be needing this.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full resolution. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that point Lucifer has his hidden agenda, namely getting the Letter of Passage from Yahweh - he wouldn't go to all the trouble of fighting the Velleity otherwise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Getting the Letter serves other means - breaking free of Yahweh's Creation, and of his omniscience and omnipresence. This is what Lucifer wants, or &lt;em&gt;desires&lt;/em&gt; (as explained later, from the start of creation) - he doesn't show interest in anything else, and everything he does in the &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; comics series is for that one goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was also acknowledged in the last issue of the series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m36vT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m36vTm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;You&amp;#39;ve been unhappy because you&amp;#39;ve desired things that cannot be.&amp;quot; Lucifer: &amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s what desire is. The need for what we can&amp;#39;t have. The need for what&amp;#39;s readily available is called greed.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full resolution. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why is Lucifer short on desire?&lt;/strong&gt; How does that fit in the rest of the series? Is my understanding of his character wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T15:30:47.887" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T15:30:47.887" Title="Why is desire &quot;a commodity [Lucifer is] short on&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;lucifer&gt;&lt;mike-carey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2574" CreationDate="2017-05-28T13:10:10.450" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nevermind, after 5 days I found it due to some research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother_in_the_Land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brother in the Land&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Swindells&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ryZfs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ryZfs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to stumble upon it while reading his other book &lt;em&gt;Stone Cold&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot is actually similar, but not exactly as what I stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wiki the plot goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The narrative begins on a hillside, where the protagonist, Danny Lodge, encounters a man in a radiation suit, who confiscates his bike and orders him to return to his home town, the fictional Skipley. Arriving there, Danny finds the town in ruins, and learns that his family's shop has collapsed, killing his mother. His brother Ben and their father have survived. Shortly after the war, Danny meets a girl named Kim.&#xA;  The local Commissioner issues an order that the injured and infirm are to be taken out of the ruins and placed at the roadside so they can be taken to hospital: this turns out to be front for his plan to kill off those who will be a burden. Presently, the Commissioner's men come to the shop and arrest Mr Lodge. The lorry bearing Mr. Lodge explodes, killing everyone on board, and leaving Danny and Ben orphans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the plot I said is accurate enough. Its a great read I suggest (if you haven't already) that you read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T13:25:28.753" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T13:25:28.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2607" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2608" CreationDate="2017-05-28T14:36:29.533" Score="18" ViewCount="1548" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2513/17&quot;&gt;This excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; by Joshua Engel draws a comparison between men dressed as women in Shakespeare-era plays and perspective jumps in modern cinema:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The audience would, of course, have been aware that these characters were portrayed by boys. [...] It worked only because the audience was fully imbued in the trope, and simply accepted it. I think of it as similar to the effect of intercutting in modern cinema: the world doesn't jump perspectives like that, but since you've been trained to accept that as the language of cinema, it doesn't give you even a moment's pause. It's not so much &quot;suspension of disbelief&quot; as genuine belief: that's the way this world works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which made me wonder: when did this &lt;em&gt;stop&lt;/em&gt; being the norm? In Shakespeare's day, there were no women actors, and all the female characters were portrayed by men, but of course this is no longer the case today. &lt;strong&gt;When did women in plays start being portrayed by actual women?&lt;/strong&gt; For that matter, was the change sudden (perhaps due to a change in law) or was there a more gradual shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;If a fully multicultural and international answer to this would be too broad, then it's OK to restrict answers to &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; theatre, which has had (as far as I know) a continuous history between Shakespeare's time and the present day.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T23:56:55.313" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T23:56:55.313" Title="When did men dressed as women stop being the norm in English theatre?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2607" CreationDate="2017-05-28T15:19:10.500" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It started in the 1600s, and was a gradual process not a sudden one. By the Edwardian era, it was no surprise to the audience to see an actress on stage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until the 1600s, women had very few rights, and there was no chance of a woman appearing on stage. Theater was popular during the early 1600s and in other places in Europe woman first appeared on stage during operas. This, however, angered the church, and the public wasn't too pleased either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Women first appeared on stage in England during Charles I's reign (1625-1649), but the actors themselves were not English, they were French. Charles's Queen, Henrietta Maria, was a Frenchwoman and it was her influence that brought a French company, complete with actresses, to perform in London at the Blackfriars Theatre. The public were horrified, and the rising Puritans even more so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An audience member called Thomas Brande wrote the following to the Bishop of London about the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glad I am to saye that they [the actresses] were hissed, hooted, and pippin-pelted from the stage, so as I do not think they will soone be ready to trie the same againe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first introduction of actresses had been a failure. And as Oliver Cromwell abolished the crown and banned theater, there was no chance of actresses becoming normal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, during Charles II's banishment, he had seen French plays were it was already normal for actresses to be seen on stage. During the restoration of the crown, he wanted women to be allowed to appear on stage, but he had to do it in a way such that the puritans and public wouldn't be angry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He granted a charter to the Drury Lane company. It stated all females be played by woman, not men. The document still exists today (&lt;strike&gt;trying to find image or transcript&lt;/strike&gt; can't find). The reaction was mixed, but not entirely outraged. However, as the first women started appearing, the public began both accepting it and expecting it, and theater companies realised it brought in more audience members, so allowed character roles to be played by woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first legal actress was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hughes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margaret Hughes&lt;/a&gt;, who became the first woman to perform on an English stage at the Vere Street theatre, on 8 December 1660. She played Desdemona in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon after came the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nell_Gwyn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nell Gwyn&lt;/a&gt;, an actress and the King's mistress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving into the 1700s, and Victorian era, actresses were abundant and some famous enough to marry into nobility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stagebeauty.net/th-women.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The story of woman's ascent to the stage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nctheatre.com/nct/blog/women-in-theatre-a-historical-look&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NCTheatre - Women in Theatre: A Historical Look&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatredatabase.com/17th_century/women_on_stage.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theatre Database - Women on Stage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-28T16:29:01.593" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T16:29:01.593" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2605" CreationDate="2017-05-28T21:50:30.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Lucifer is cold and calculating&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morningstar does not &quot;desire&quot; - he plans and gets what he wants, not &quot;wishes&quot; and &quot;hopes&quot; to get it - there is no passion, so no desire, just cold calculation. There you have Rachel that is full of passion - she regrets that she is responsible for the death of her brother, so she hopes and &lt;strong&gt;desires&lt;/strong&gt; to fix her mistake by killing the Velleity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastActivityDate="2017-05-28T21:50:30.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2610" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-28T21:55:39.453" Score="7" ViewCount="1228" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://courses.wcupa.edu/fletcher/britlitweb/aedwardsa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;An Explication of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43999&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Work Without Hope&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, by Amy Edwards, ’02&#xA;West Chester University&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last two lines of this poem are the turning point, and make it all come together. Coleridge writes, &quot;Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;[1.]&lt;/strong&gt; The man is saying that drawing nectar in a sieve is impossible because is [sic] [it] just drains through, as will any work without hope. &lt;strong&gt;[End of 1.]&lt;/strong&gt; Hope cannot live without an object, because if there is no hope and no point, then there is no reason to continue. These lines show how hopeless the man is. He has no hope, and sees himself as a cold, lonely winter. Although it is a beautiful day, blooming with the first signs of spring, he cannot see anything other than the hopelessness that surrounds him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never sieved nectar, but gravity should cause any (viscous) liquid to permeate a sieve without needing human work? So I do not understand 1 above, even after reading the above explication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T00:38:05.837" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T00:38:46.567" Title="Why did Samuel Coleridge metaphorise 'work without hope ' as 'nectar in a sieve'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2017-05-29T00:38:30.640" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if whole books have been written on the topic, but at least &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cairn.info/pour-une-semantique-des-constructions-grammatical--9782801113608-p-165.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;whole book chapters&lt;/a&gt; have been. I haven't read this book, but I'll share my first impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing to note is that the English translation you quote is reasonably faithful. It slightly misses the effect of the original, however, in that it doesn't use a future tense. A more accurate translation of the beginning of the second paragraph would be (my translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The old people's home is in Marengo, eighty kilometers from Algiers. I will take the bus at two o'clock and I will arrive in the afternoon. This way I will be able to hold the wake, and I will come back tomorrow night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing that isn't apparent in the English translation is which past tense is used in most of the book. The normal tense in a novel is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_simple&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;passé simple&lt;/a&gt;. This is a literary tense, rarely used in everyday life in the 20th century, suitable for expressing that something happened at some past time. &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; is (apart from the first two paragraphs) written in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_compos%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;passé composé&lt;/a&gt;, which in literary usage is only used to indicate that something has been accomplished, but in everyday language is used for any past action. The use of &lt;em&gt;passé composé&lt;/em&gt; gives a feeling of immediacy — the events that are narrated are still very relevant, whereas &lt;em&gt;passé simple&lt;/em&gt; would tend to indicate a tale from the past. The use of &lt;em&gt;passé composé&lt;/em&gt; also gives a feeling of informality, which is expressed in other ways: Meursault is a working class person, who uses simple language (also visible, for example, in the tendency to use of short sentences).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many ways, the book is written like a personal diary. In this respect, the succession of tenses makes sense. The first few sentences are written in the present tense. They describe what Meursault thinks when he writes the first entry in this diary, soon after receiving the news that his mother has died. The part starting with “I took the two-o'clock bus” is the next entry in the diary, written after the bus trip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where this simple interpretation fails is that as far as I can tell, the opening is the only place where Meursault uses the present tense. It is unlikely that he would never need to express actions in progress. This singles out Meursault's mother's death as an exceptional event. Furthermore, that event is not only where the book starts, it's where the idea of the book starts. This singular use of the present makes it look like the news of Meursault's mother's death caused Meursault to start holding this diary. He was considerably shaken, and this kicked off the chain of events in the rest of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole book is built on several ambiguities, including the extent to which Meursault is emotionally shaken by his mother's death and other events. The text, superficially, makes him look extremely detached, cold, emotionless. He writes simple descriptive sentences, showing no emotion, just like he shows no emotion in many other ways (not crying at his mother's funeral, shrugging when asked about marriage, ...). Yet there is subtext that shows him more affected under his cold attitude. I think the use of the present tense in the opening shows that he is emotionally shaken at his mother's death but does not realize it consciously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T10:19:23.267" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T10:19:23.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2610" CreationDate="2017-05-29T00:38:46.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that he doesn't write that one &quot;sieves nectar in a sieve,&quot; but rather that one attempts to &lt;em&gt;draw&lt;/em&gt; nectar in a sieve, as one would draw water from a well. See one of Merriam-Webster's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/draw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to bring or get from a source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's true that impurities may be sifted out of the nectar in this fashion, if the purpose of putting it there was to collect or transport it, this is an exercise doomed for failure -- something like Work without Hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T00:38:46.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T12:18:51.753" Score="3" ViewCount="1672" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &lt;strong&gt;&quot;An Inspector Calls&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; by J.B Priestley, Mr Birling gives a speech at the beginning of the play riddled with dramatic irony and selfish statements; he doesn't get to finish the speech as the Inspector arrives. Near the end of the play, after the Inspector exposes the Birlings for their crimes and misbehavior, the Inspector gives a speech which completely opposes Mr Birling's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Birling's speech (before the Inspector arrives):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;......... a man has to make his own way- has to look after himself - and his family too, of course, when he has one - and so long as he does that he won't come to much harm. But the way some of these cranks talk and write now, you'd think everybody has to look after everybody else, as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive- community and all that nonsense. But take my word for it you youngsters - and I've learnt in the good hard of school of experience - that a man has to mind his own business and look after himself and his own and-&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inspector's speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But just remember this. One Eva Smith has gone - but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and a chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught in fire and blood and anguish.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the Inspector is a mouthpiece for J.B Priestley but what I don't understand is how these two speeches are opposite to each other. I understand that the Inspector says we are all responsible for each other, but he states that throughout the play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain how these two speeches are polar opposites?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="1531" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T12:30:45.640" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T18:06:54.353" Title="How does the Inspector's speech contradict Birling's speech in the play &quot;An Inspector Calls&quot;?" Tags="&lt;an-inspector-calls&gt;&lt;j-b-priestley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2576" CreationDate="2017-05-29T12:29:26.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is highly likely that the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;force&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; meant Eric raped Eva. The Inspector says to Eric that he &lt;strong&gt;&quot;just used her for the end of one of his drunken evenings&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eric also admitted that Eva was also slightly drunk because she had nothing to eat meaning maybe she wasn't conscious enough to make up her mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it is hinted that Eva was a prostitute as the place she was most commonly found in was the Palace Bar home to the &lt;strong&gt;&quot;women of the town&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Prostitutes). When Eva was pregnant she couldn't tell Mrs Birling that she was raped by Eric because at the time people wouldn't take the thought of a prostitute being raped seriously. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why Eva couldn't possibly stop Eric coming into her apartment or why she would still see him after the the events that took place simply because of her role in society, this is one of the major reasons Eva commits suicide as she was constantly treated as garbage by others due to her &lt;strong&gt;&quot;class&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and exploited for her &lt;strong&gt;&quot;pretty&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; looks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="1531" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T12:34:27.170" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T12:34:27.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-29T13:12:29.537" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Around 13-15 years ago I had a book (or 2!) which featured a collection of short stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written in German; I sadly remember neither the name of the book, nor the author's or publisher's name. What I do remember is, that it featured stories of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Münchhausen&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schildbürger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Till Eulenspiegel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe some dinosaur stories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a hardcover book, that's for sure.&#xA;It also featured a couple of pictures to support the stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not the book &amp;quot;Der Struwwelpeter&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd highly appreciate any tips, be it bookcovers, names, authors..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1556" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T11:11:36.847" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:34:31.753" Title="Collection of short-stories for kids/teens in German" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2017-05-29T13:18:29.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Till Eulenspiegel. Münchhausen. Die Schildbürger&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a hardcover book and sorry I am not German and don't speak a drop of German but I am going to guess its this because its a hard cover book with several short stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Till-Eulenspiegel-M%C3%BCnchhausen-Schildb%C3%BCrger-einem/dp/B004WCWPNC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon.de&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me if I am wrong; this is just a researched guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T11:10:24.047" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:10:24.047" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2618" CreationDate="2017-05-29T18:44:49.630" Score="9" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main character's internal monolog at one point reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You just want to kill.&lt;/em&gt; Yes, I do. &lt;em&gt;And are you capable of it?&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;   ... the only thing I regret is killing her in vain. So they've almost taught me. &lt;em&gt;But that's bad. That's dangerous. Remember Sergei Kozhin? And George Lenny? And Sabine Kruger?&lt;/em&gt; [Italics present in the English translation.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt; is a Russian science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky set in the future. Some of the historical references in it are set in our future, but some reference things in our past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;George Lenny&lt;/em&gt; might be an oblique reference to &lt;em&gt;Of Mice and Men&lt;/em&gt;, whose main characters are George and Lennie&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (and where the reference to learning to kill would be fairly relevant). Are there similar explanations for &lt;em&gt;Sergei Kozhin&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sabine Kruger&lt;/em&gt;? And is there a better explanation for &lt;em&gt;George Lenny&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Note that &lt;em&gt;Lennie&lt;/em&gt; might easily come out &lt;em&gt;Lenny&lt;/em&gt; after being transliterated to Cyrillic and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-05-29T20:06:50.340" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T09:03:13.427" Title="In &quot;Hard to Be a God&quot;, are &quot;Sergei Kozhin&quot;, &quot;George Lenny&quot;, &quot;Sabine Kruger&quot; real historical references?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2617" CreationDate="2017-05-29T19:32:34.830" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, in the context of the novel, those are the names of the operatives who were previously named &amp;quot;sprinters&amp;quot;, i.e. people who could not simply stand and watch the barbarian actions of the population, and decided to act themselves in accordance with their understanding of right and wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're first mentioned by Don Condor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Because occasionally we do get… &lt;strong&gt;enthusiasts, blast them—sprinters who can’t go the distance.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumata gave a crooked smile and started pointlessly fiddling with his boots. Sprinters. Yes, there’ve been sprinters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ten years before, &lt;strong&gt;Stephan Orlovsky&lt;/strong&gt;, also known as Don Capata, the commander of a company of His Imperial Majesty’s crossbowmen, &lt;strong&gt;ordered his soldiers to open fire on the executioners at a public torture of eighteen Estorian witches&lt;/strong&gt;; he cut down the judge and two court bailiffs and was lanced by the Imperial Guard. Writhing in agonies of death, he shouted, “But you’re human! Get them, get them!”—but few heard him over the roar of the crowd: “Fire! More fire!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approximately at the same time, in another hemisphere, &lt;strong&gt;Carl Rosenblum&lt;/strong&gt;, one of the leading experts on the peasant wars in France and Germany, also known as the wool-seller Pani-Pa, &lt;strong&gt;led a revolt of Murissian peasants, stormed two cities,&lt;/strong&gt; and was killed by an arrow to the back of the head while trying to stop the looting. He was still alive when they came for him in the helicopter, but he couldn’t speak and only looked on in guilt and bewilderment with his big blue eyes, which constantly streamed tears…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And shortly before Rumata’s arrival, the magnificently placed confidant of the Caisan tyrant (&lt;strong&gt;Jeremy Tafnat&lt;/strong&gt;, a specialist in the history of agrarian reforms) &lt;strong&gt;suddenly staged a palace coup, usurped power, and for two months attempted to start a golden age&lt;/strong&gt;. He stubbornly refused to reply to furious queries from his neighbors and from Earth, earned the reputation of a lunatic, managed to avoid eight assassination attempts, and was finally kidnapped by an emergency team of Institute workers and transferred by submarine to an island base by the planet’s southern pole.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;From the translation by Olen Bormashenko, chapter 1, emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Anton remembers them because they were victims of their haste and their maladjusted attempts to do good. Throughout the novel it's reinforced that the operatives aren't there to act (unless with microscopic interventions), but to observe, and even to observe &lt;em&gt;how to observe&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Anton,” Don Condor said. “There are two hundred and fifty of us on this entire planet. Everybody controls themselves, and everybody finds it very hard. The most experienced of us have lived here for twenty-two years. &lt;strong&gt;They came here as nothing more than observers. They were completely forbidden to do anything whatsoever&lt;/strong&gt;. Imagine that for a moment: forbidden to do anything. They wouldn’t even have had the right to save Budach. Even if Budach was being trampled before their eyes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You’re impatient like a child,” Don Condor declared. “And we must be very patient.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rumata smiled bitterly. “And while we watch and wait,” he said, “calculating and planning, animals will be destroying humans every minute of every day.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Anton,” Don Condor said, “the universe has thousands of planets where we haven’t come yet, where history is taking its course.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But we’ve come here already!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes, we have. But we’ve come here to help these people, not to satisfy our righteous rage. If you’re weak, leave. Go home. After all, you really aren’t a child, and you knew what you’d encounter here.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(spoilers follow!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; In the further context of the novel, this scene foreshadows the ending of the novel, where Rumata, enraged by the death of Kira, lost himself and slaughtered &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of people, including Don Reba, in order to execute &amp;quot;justice&amp;quot; (or simply in blind rage). Anton too was a &amp;quot;sprinter&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any historical references to real figures who had those names, save for &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BD,_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B9_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sergei Kozhin (Сергей Кожин)&lt;/a&gt;. He was a Napoleon-era Russian cavalry general, who led some very successful attacks against French forces. I couldn't find a way to relate him to the events of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it may just be possible that those are characters from other works set in the Noon Universe, but I don't remember them from the few works I've read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-30T09:03:13.427" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2285" CreationDate="2017-05-29T22:46:18.280" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't say whether this is a thing in Christian theology as well (I assume the Seed-Merchant was Christian), but the Jewish faith requires one to bless God for things that appear to be bad, as well as for good things. (Although the blessing said is phrased differently from one that's said after something obviously good happens.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;חַיָּב אָדָם לְבָרֵךְ עַל הָרָעָה כְּשֵׁם שֶׁהוּא מְבָרֵךְ עַל&#xA;  הַטּוֹבָה&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A person is obligated to bless upon the bad just as he blesses upon&#xA;  the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Berakhot.9.5?lang=bi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mishna, Brachos 9:5&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I don't think that the Seed-Merchant is practicing this exact form of blessing, but my understanding of his statement, stemming from that background, is that the Seed-Merchant will thank God for anything that happens. His belief is that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%9B%D7%9C_%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%99%D7%93_%D7%A8%D7%97%D7%9E%D7%A0%D7%90_%D7%9C%D7%98%D7%91_%D7%A2%D7%91%D7%99%D7%93&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whatever God does is for the best&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; and this is his way of expressing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T22:46:18.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2285" CreationDate="2017-05-29T22:57:22.807" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that I already wrote an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2619/481&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to this question, but I just had another thought that I thought was different enough to require another post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interpretation of this passage is that the grief of losing a son made the Seed-Merchant lose the edge of his touch on reality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, never a soul could understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why he looked at the earth, and the&#xA;  seed in his hand,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he had never before seen seed or sod:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's having some trouble coming to terms with his loss, and has difficulty going about his daily tasks. Things that once came easily to him are now more difficult, and objects that were once familiar to him now seem alien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then he murmurs to himself &quot;Thank God, thank God!&quot; It's unclear, but he may be talking to himself, imagining a conversation with another where he responds to &quot;How are you?&quot; with the standard, meaningless ‘Thank God, thank God!’ that doesn't actually reflect his inner feelings, as he must have many times since the news of his son's death hit the town. This may have become a habit after responding in this way many times, or he may be preparing himself to respond in this fashion the next time a townsperson approaches and asks after his well-being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-05-29T22:57:22.807" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2985" CreationDate="2017-05-30T05:28:19.320" Score="8" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember the author and title of a story I once read. It was set in Paris in the nineteenth century, and I assume also written by a nineteenth-century French author.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about a grumpy man who doesn't do much, and is always complaining about everything. A lot of the story is taken up by him going out to dinner and complaining about how bad the food is. It's all very dreary and depressing, but exaggeratedly so, for comedic effect.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there is also a part where he plans a trip to England, and he takes the coach to a port, goes to a bar while waiting for the ferry to arrive, and then decides against the trip and goes home again. (But this may be from something else I'm confusing it with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T03:25:33.563" Title="19th-C French story about loner who dines and doesn't go to England" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2627" CreationDate="2017-05-30T05:51:23.690" Score="7" ViewCount="880" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a quote that goes along the lines of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It may be true that every man has his price but there is not enough gold in the world to pay mine&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the exact quote and who said it. I think it's from a british government official during the age of imperialism but that's just a guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1559" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-05-30T15:47:28.423" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T17:05:43.587" Title="Looking for a quote: &quot;It may be true that every man has his price but there is not enough gold in the world to pay mine&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2017-05-30T11:55:59.887" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, this answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2581&quot;&gt;duplicates one that @Chris Sunami has already given&lt;/a&gt;: the &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is a woman the singer addresses. But when I came and read his answer, I felt there was still some interest in mine. Like him, I wonder if my answer will strike readers as sacrilegious. I apologize if it is offensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flow of thought in Cohen's lyrics is not logical; it is subjective and psychological. The poet is associating events in the lives of biblical David and Samson with events in his own life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passages referring specifically to David include (1) Now, I've heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord… The baffled king composing hallelujah; (2) You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya; and (3) the title and refrain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) The first passage (Now, I've heard there was a secret chord / That David played, and it pleased the Lord… The baffled king composing hallelujah) refers to the David as a “musician credited for composing many of the psalms contained in the Book of Psalms” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) which does contain the oft-repeated title word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqHAv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QqHAv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;David Playing the Harp by Jan de Bray&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is often pictured with a harp or lyre, as in the picture David Playing the Harp by Jan de Bray, 1670.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The second passage (You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya) refers to the story of David and Bathsheba, which appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2%20Samuel%2011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 Samuel 11&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof&#xA;of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was&#xA;very beautiful, 3 and David sent someone to find out about her. The&#xA;man said, “She is Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of&#xA;Uriah the Hittite.” 4 Then David sent messengers to get her. She came&#xA;to him, and he slept with her. (Now she was purifying herself from her&#xA;monthly uncleanness.) Then she went back home. 5 The woman conceived&#xA;and sent word to David, saying, “I am pregnant.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) And the third, the title and refrain, are a word used many times through the book of Psalms and often left untranslated in English versions. (It sometimes appears consecutively, but not in as many consecutive statements as in Cohen’s song. That’s more typical of spirituals.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passages referring specifically to Samson include (4) She tied you to a kitchen chair / She broke your throne, and she cut your hair. This relates to the way that Delilah betrayed Samson in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges%2016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Judges 16&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 Sometime later, he [Samson] fell in love with… Delilah. 5 The rulers&#xA;of the Philistines went to her and said, “See if you can lure him into&#xA;showing you the secret of his great strength and how we can overpower&#xA;him so we may tie him up and subdue him. Each one of us will give you&#xA;eleven hundred shekels of silver.” 6 So Delilah said to Samson, “Tell&#xA;me the secret of your great strength and how you can be tied up and&#xA;subdued.” 7 Samson answered her, “If anyone ties me with seven fresh&#xA;bowstrings that have not been dried, I’ll become as weak as any other&#xA;man.” 8 Then the rulers of the Philistines brought her seven fresh&#xA;bowstrings that had not been dried, and she tied him with them. 9 With&#xA;men hidden in the room, she called to him, “Samson, the Philistines&#xA;are upon you!” But he snapped the bowstrings as easily as a piece of&#xA;string snaps when it comes close to a flame. So the secret of his&#xA;strength was not discovered… 15 Then she said to him, “How can you&#xA;say, ‘I love you,’ when you won’t confide in me? This is the third&#xA;time you have made a fool of me and haven’t told me the secret of your&#xA;great strength.” 16 With such nagging she prodded him day after day&#xA;until he was sick to death of it. 17 So he told her everything. “No&#xA;razor has ever been used on my head,” he said, “because I have been a&#xA;Nazirite dedicated to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were&#xA;shaved, my strength would leave me, and I would become as weak as any&#xA;other man.” 18 When Delilah saw that he had told her everything, she&#xA;sent word to the rulers of the Philistines, “Come back once more; he&#xA;has told me everything.” So the rulers of the Philistines returned&#xA;with the silver in their hands. 19 After putting him to sleep on her&#xA;lap, she called for someone to shave off the seven braids of his hair,&#xA;and so began to subdue him. And his strength left him. 20 Then she&#xA;called, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” He awoke from his&#xA;sleep and thought, “I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.” But&#xA;he did not know that the Lord had left him. 21 Then the Philistines&#xA;seized him, gouged out his eyes and took him down to Gaza. Binding him&#xA;with bronze shackles, they set him to grinding grain in the prison. 22&#xA;But the hair on his head began to grow again after it had been shaved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biblical figures loved G-d and wished to serve Him; but they were merely men, with weakness and failure in their nature, and they failed in crucial ways suggested in the lyrics -- David with Bathsheba, Samson with Delilah. Yet through it all (in Cohen's version) they repeated the title of the song, which is the Hebrew word for &amp;quot;praise G-d.&amp;quot; Serving G-d remained the meaning of their lives, and in that sense they remain loyal despite their failings. They remain hopeful that G-d will accept that which is good in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly the poet loves the woman he addresses and wishes to serve her; but he is merely a man, with weakness and failure in his nature, and he failed in crucial ways. (The nature of this failure is perhaps suggested by the fact that David's and Samson's failures were with women.) Yet through it all the poet repeated the title of the song. Serving the woman he loves remained the meaning of his life, and in that way he remain loyal despite his failings and hopeful that she will accept that which is good in him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line you ask about is one of the points of transition in the song. The poet says that while David was able to serve his G-d with music, the poet is not able to serve his love with music because she does not like music. This is of course ironic if we think of the poet as Cohen himself, whose occupation is music and who is even at this moment addressing the woman with a song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did my best, it wasn't much&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And even though it all went wrong&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll stand before the lord of song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T02:43:55.133" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T02:43:55.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-05-30T13:27:55.283" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 but went into self-imposed exile in 1904 and returned to Dublin only a few times before his death in Zurich in 1941.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During his lifetime, Joyce published the following works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamber_Music_(poetry_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chamber Music&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1907): a collection of poems;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubliners&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dubliners&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1914): a collection of short stories, including &quot;The Dead&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1916): a coming-of-age novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiles_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Exiles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1918): a play;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomes_Penyeach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pomes Penyeach&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1927): a collection of short poems;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1922): a novel;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1939): a highly experimental work of fiction that is hard to classify.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of works were published posthumously:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stephen Hero&lt;/em&gt; (1944): Joyce's first attempt to write what would eventually become &lt;em&gt;A A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Giacomo Joyce&lt;/em&gt; (1968);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cats of Copenhagen&lt;/em&gt; (2012): a short story;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finn's Hotel&lt;/em&gt; (2013).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T20:11:21.893" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T20:11:21.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-05-30T13:27:55.283" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941) or his works." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T21:09:07.927" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T21:09:07.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-30T20:34:46.367" Score="7" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://forums.steven-hall.org/yaf_postst52_What-are--Raw-Shark-Texts-Negatives.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In a forum post&lt;/a&gt;, Steven Hall, the author of &lt;em&gt;The Raw Shark Texts&lt;/em&gt;, announced that each chapter of &lt;em&gt;The Raw Shark Texts&lt;/em&gt; had a negative chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hello.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For each chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there is, or will be, an&#xA;  un-chapter, a negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all the negatives are as long as a novel chapter - some are only a&#xA;  page, some are only a couple of lines. Some are much longer than any&#xA;  chapters in the novel. Not all the negatives are online, some are, but&#xA;  they're hiding. Some are out there in the real world, waiting to be&#xA;  found. Anyone with the Raw Shark UK special edition will already have&#xA;  Negative 6/36 and anyone with a Canadian edition will have Negative&#xA;  36/36 (and also a good idea of what some of the other negatives are).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The negatives are not deleted scenes, they are very much a part of the&#xA;  novel but they are all splintered from it in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's also sticky negative discussion thread for folks to chat and&#xA;  post their findings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Happy hunting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Steven H&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of these &quot;negatives&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T02:36:52.400" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T01:26:29.993" Title="Why does The Raw Shark Texts have &quot;negative&quot; chapters or &quot;un-chapters&quot;?" Tags="&lt;steven-hall&gt;&lt;the-raw-shark-texts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2622" CreationDate="2017-05-31T05:12:21.517" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first part of the phrase, &quot;every man has his price&quot; is apparently a mis-quote of a remark by Robert Walpole, made in 1734, that &quot;I know the price of every man in this house (i.e. the House of Commons) except three&quot;, although it is believed that the phrase was in common use before this time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest combination with &quot;all the gold in ... couldn't buy ...&quot; that I could find is an anonymous political pamphlet about William Pitt the Younger, titled: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Freedom of England in Contra-Distinction to Pitticism: addressed to the Freeholders of the County of Lincoln in particular, and to the Freeholders and Electors throughout England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland in General.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as quoted in The Fireside Magazine from January 1819, p.62:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Mr. Pitt's proposition for parliamentary reform, in 1783, was followed up by the meeting of the Thatched House Tavern, to take the sense of the people upon the conduct of the House of Commons, government were alarmed indeed. The test could not be stood, they knew ; therefor, as the life and soul of this dreadful measure could not safely be destroyed, he must be corrupted.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Every man has his price&lt;/strong&gt;, said the ---- to his friends, go and buy Pitt.  Buy Pitt! your -------- returned they, with every mark of incredulous surprise.  Buy him, buy him, returned the ----, with his accustomed eagerness.  Daddy Jenky now saw what his master was driving at, and made the best of the matter. Your -------- is aware, that &lt;strong&gt;all the gold in the Bank of England were insufficient&lt;/strong&gt; to buy the son of Chatham!  Gold, gold, gold! said the ----;  no, no, no, nor ribbons, nor dukedoms neither, will buy Pitt!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the censored words are &quot;king&quot; and &quot;highness&quot;, and &quot;Daddy Jenky&quot; is Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastEditorUserId="1558" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T17:05:43.587" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T17:05:43.587" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2630" CreationDate="2017-05-31T10:23:45.010" Score="50" ViewCount="17133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've often heard &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker&amp;#39;s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; referred to as H2G2 but never really understood why. I wondered whether anyone actually knew or whether it was just adopted unquestioningly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1571" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T10:36:59.653" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T08:41:03.563" Title="Why is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy referred to as H2G2?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;douglas-adams&gt;&lt;the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2017-05-31T10:45:22.797" Score="81" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy&quot; is a pretty long mouthful of a name. Imagine having to say all that every time you wanted to talk to fellow fans about the franchise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most obvious way to shorten it is to use initials (as is done e.g. with LotR for &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and many other things), but in this case even &lt;strong&gt;HHGttG&lt;/strong&gt; is a bit of a mouthful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Removing the minor words like &quot;to&quot; and &quot;the&quot; (which is also common practice) leaves us with &lt;strong&gt;HHGG&lt;/strong&gt;, as seen on e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.douglasadams.com/creations/hhgg.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the relevant URL&lt;/a&gt; at Douglas Adams's website.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And HHGG is quite a pretty little acronym, with two H's and two G's. It seems a natural step to go from there to &lt;strong&gt;H2G2&lt;/strong&gt;, counting the letters rather than actually saying H and G twice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T10:45:22.797" CommentCount="16" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2017-05-31T10:46:06.683" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was the title given to the &quot;Earth Edition&quot; on the web:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://h2g2.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;H2G2.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This was founded - and named - in 1999 by Douglas Adams himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly taken from &lt;em&gt;The &lt;b&gt;H&lt;/b&gt;itch&lt;b&gt;H&lt;/b&gt;iker's &lt;b&gt;G&lt;/b&gt;uide to the &lt;b&gt;G&lt;/b&gt;alaxy&lt;/em&gt;.  This website was an early attempt at crowdsourced knowledge.  Somewhat overshadowed by the later &lt;em&gt;Wikipaedia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A description of the history of H2G2.com is given &lt;a href=&quot;https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/a943184&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on that site&lt;/a&gt; and Adams' own description is &lt;a href=&quot;https://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A550955&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on another page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From 1978 up to about 1982 I had a friend who worked in the sound department of the BBC.  The series was commonly either referred to &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker's&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;HHG&lt;/em&gt;.  The abbreviation &lt;em&gt;H2G2&lt;/em&gt; become more common after the creation of the website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T18:22:05.453" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T18:22:05.453" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1944" CreationDate="2017-05-31T13:30:21.120" Score="17" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this peculiarity specific to Brontë, or a wider convention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's most definitely a wider convention.&lt;/strong&gt; There are hundreds of books from the same era - not only in English literature; Dostoevsky did it too - which obscure place names, personal names, or even dates in this way. And it seems there are almost as many different reasons for doing so: the more I research this topic, the more possible explanations I find. I'll summarise some of the potential reasons here and then give a list of links for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make it feel as though the author is reporting real events which need to be redacted.&lt;/strong&gt; Imagine if the novel was about real people and places; some of the names might then need to be redacted in order to preserve the anonymity of those involved. By including such redactions in fiction, the author is giving the readers a subtle impression of authenticity - and perhaps even  of scandalousness: &quot;ooh, what's being described here is so exciting that they can't even reveal the names involved! this must be juicy gossip!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this conceit of preserving the anonymity of (fictional) people or places is even mentioned explicitly. In &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, the coordinates of the island are often mentioned but never explicitly stated; supposedly this is because the story is a true one and the narrator wants to prevent anyone else from finding the island and going to seek the treasure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To avoid having to do detailed research into a real place.&lt;/strong&gt; If the author had used the names of real locations, they would have had to either research those locations and make sure to get every detail correct, or report on them inaccurately. The former would have been a lot of work, and the latter might have been seen as undesirable or bad writing. (Personally I enjoy reading books which describe real places accurately, and I try to do the same in my own writing. But then I have the advantage of Google Maps and Street View, enabling me to actually look around a town and describe its layout and buildings; Victorian-era authors were less fortunate in this regard.) Nobody wants to be inundated with angry letters from readers about how these two streets don't actually join or how there's no family of this name in this village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility, of course, would have been to make up imaginary place names and use those instead. Naturally, this has &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; been done by many authors, and in many different ways. Leaving aside the obvious case of fantasy fiction set in entirely imaginary worlds, even an imaginary location has to be set somewhere in the real world. Thus we have the fictional Midlands town of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlemarch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middlemarch&lt;/a&gt;, the fictional English county of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Barsetshire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barsetshire&lt;/a&gt;, the fictional Northern town of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coketown&lt;/a&gt; - and that's in 19th-century English literature alone.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make the novel more broadly appealing by avoiding specifying its setting.&lt;/strong&gt; A novel set in a particular, &lt;em&gt;specified&lt;/em&gt;, place or time might be most appealing to readers who know the place well or live in the same time, but by avoiding specifics, an author might enable everyone (or at least, a wider group of people) to identify with the story equally well. If a book is set in Manchester, then people who don't live in Manchester must perforce view the story from a distance, and people who hate Manchester might not even read it; if it's set in X——, then hey, that could be my town!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, this argument is one that appeals to me personally. One of the main reasons fantasy is my favourite genre is that it throws off the shackles of real society and doesn't affect the prejudices of readers. If I read a book in which, say, the hero is part of a real-world organisation which I dislike, that's likely to spoil it for me; but in a wholly imaginary world, my prejudices will affect my experience less.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As a little nod and interesting tidbit for readers 'in the know'.&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes a location can be redacted but still described so that anyone who's familiar with its general surroundings can work out exactly where it is. I've heard that this is possible in &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; - street names have been censored, but anyone who knew St. Petersburg could easily tell which street was being described. This enables some readers to get an extra buzz from 'sharing a secret' with the author, while not lessening the experience for those who aren't in the know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some authors also achieved this effect by describing real places but giving them fictional names. Thomas Hardy was a notable example: for anyone who knows England, his &quot;Christminster&quot; is very obviously Oxford, his &quot;Casterbridge&quot; is Dorchester, and so on (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/429/17&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt;). Another example is Elizabeth Gaskell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cranford_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cranford&lt;/a&gt;, a thinly veiled sketch of her childhood home Knutsford. Sometimes this makes the first point above a more real issue: descriptions are redacted because they actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; of real people and places, not just because the author wants to give that impression. An amusing example of this is in Lorna Moon's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thecourier.co.uk/lifestyle/entertainment/theatre/131421/doorways-in-drumorty-shines-light-on-the-incredible-life-of-lorna-moon/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doorways in Drumorty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which uses the fictional town of Drumorty to paint a picture of her own home town of Strichen; the residents of Strichen were so scandalised that her book was banned in the local library there!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/9479/87724&quot;&gt;Why, in old books, are dates often given with the years redacted?&lt;/a&gt; From our friends at the English SE; despite the title, it concerns redaction of names and places in literature as well as dates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/26/misplaced-why-do-novelists-disguise-real-locations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Misplaced: why do novelists disguise real locations?&lt;/a&gt; From the Guardian; mostly about replacing real place names by fictional ones rather than redacting them entirely, but still relevant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/30mv9i/why_are_proper_names_sometimes_redacted_in/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why are proper names sometimes redacted in classical literature?&lt;/a&gt; From Reddit; this one is a shorter read, but some good points made there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wormhole.carnelianvalley.com/on-the-reasons-for-censoring-names-and-places-in-victorian-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On The Reasons For Censoring Names And Places In Victorian Literature&lt;/a&gt; From a reviewer of Victorian literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ask.metafilter.com/72590/Why-censor-town-names&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why censor town names?&lt;/a&gt; From Ask MetaFilter (already mentioned by Spagirl in comments).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T13:30:21.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T14:23:19.427" Score="9" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; There may or may not be unhidden spoilers from the novel here. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While watching the fourth episode of &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt;, where Laura and Shadow's mutual history has been revealed (to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/05/theamerican-godstv-series-fixes-one-of-the-books-biggest-problems/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first major deviation from the novel&lt;/a&gt;), I noticed that the novel didn't explain what exactly it was Shadow did to get in prison, and what part Laura had in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, there is this exchange where it is shown that Laura asked Shadow to do something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How was prison?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Could have been worse.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes.” The tip of the cigarette glowed orange. “I’m still grateful. I should never have got you mixed up in it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well,” he said, “I agreed to do it. I could have said no.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Author's preferred text, chapter 3. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is this blurb where it is explained that Laura organised a robbery (?) because she was cheated by her associates (?) and Shadow was the driver (?):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He hurried on, pushed through the warden’s gray office, and found himself looking at the VCR repair store on the outskirts of Eagle Point. Three years ago. Yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside the store, he knew, he was beating the living crap out of Larry Powers and B. J. West, bruising his knuckles in the process: pretty soon he would walk out of there, carrying a brown supermarket bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. The money they could never prove he had taken: &lt;strong&gt;his share of the proceeds, and a little more, for they shouldn’t have tried to rip him and Laura off like that. He was only the driver, but he had done his part, done everything that she had asked of him…&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . . ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nobody talked about the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nobody even mentioned Laura, and that was all that Shadow had wanted&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ibid, chapter 16, emphasis mine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Laura was a travel agent, even before she met Shadow - what kind of shady business with &amp;quot;proceeds&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ripping off&amp;quot; can a travel agent get involved in? Is there an explanation that I missed in the novel, or something by Neil Gaiman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T14:23:19.427" Title="What exactly was Shadow's crime, and what was Laura's part in it?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-05-31T14:42:28.790" Score="-2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;The definition of Tone seems to be entirely based on author's intent. But I remember reading that modern Literary Analysis heavily discourages relying on author's intent when Analyzing a passage. Why then, do we still analyze tone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1575" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:14:50.790" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:14:50.790" Title="Why do we study the Tone when analyzing a passage?" Tags="&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2634" CreationDate="2017-05-31T16:57:05.477" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people talk about tone, they're typically​ not talking about the tone the author intended, but rather, the tone the audience perceives. Tone isn't an absolute monolith intrinsic to a piece of writing - it's wholly a part of the way an individual perceives it. That makes it relevant to a great number of lenses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To clarify the dictionary definition that you found in comments, there are a couple points worth noting. First, a lot of the definitions a surface search on Google will tell you are colloquial meanings, not literary ones. It's important to be skeptical of a surface-level definition of a complex topic. Especially because, when those definitions &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; correct, they often rely on words that have different literary and colloquial meanings, and so it's very easy to think a simple definition suffices when in reality it may have just confused you further. (Look up the definition of &quot;text&quot; for a clear example - even Wikipedia arguably gets this wrong.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in this case, it's actually a reasonable definition - but the writer is a rhetorical writer, not &lt;em&gt;the actual&lt;/em&gt; writer. While some tonal information is encoded in what the reader knows about the writer, most of it is encoded in the word choice &lt;em&gt;independent of&lt;/em&gt; intent, which is the &quot;writer&quot; the reader perceives. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's also important to note, as Hamlet mentions, that trying to discern what the author meant isn't universally a bad thing - it's just not the complete picture, and we need to be very careful not to over-broadly apply that kind of thinking to questions where it's not relevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-05-31T17:02:05.693" LastActivityDate="2017-05-31T17:02:05.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2017-06-01T07:34:21.180" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenimore_Cooper&amp;#39;s_Literary_Offenses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, by Mark Twain?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that you are thinking of this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The remark about the swiftness&#xA;  of the flight was unnecessary, as it was merely put in to forestall the possible objection of some over&#xA;  particular reader that the Indian couldn’t have found the needed “opportunity” while fleeing swiftly.&#xA;  The reader would not have made that objection. He would care nothing about having that small&#xA;  matter explained and justified. But that is Cooper’s way; frequently he will explain and justify little&#xA;  things that do not need it and then make up for this by as frequently failing to explain important&#xA;  ones that do need it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-06-01T07:34:21.180" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16883" CreationDate="2017-06-01T10:52:37.607" Score="15" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of years ago, I went to a stage performance of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, in which Antonio and Bassanio were portrayed as being in a gay relationship together since before the start of the play. This correspondingly affected the romance between Bassanio and Portia, which was portrayed as being somewhat forced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I didn't feel this was true to the original spirit of the play - I'd always imagined Bassanio as being merely close friends with Antonio and being in love with Portia - but I do remember some lines in the play which (assuming they weren't changed for this performance, which I think is very unlikely) seemed to fit surprisingly well with this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any textual evidence that Bassanio and Antonio were or weren't in a relationship?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T22:38:54.400" Title="Is there any evidence for a gay relationship in The Merchant of Venice?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-01T23:14:45.337" Score="9" ViewCount="309" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine&lt;/a&gt;, Ursula K. Le Guin describes the future as &quot;a safe, sterile laboratory&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the task of science fiction is not to predict the future. Rather, it contemplates possible futures. Writers may find the future appealing precisely because it can’t be known, a black box where “anything at all can be said to happen without fear of contradiction from a native,” says the renowned novelist and poet Ursula K. Le Guin. “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in,” she tells Smithsonian, “a means of thinking about reality, a method.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the particular combination of the words safe, sterile, and laboratory. I'm looking for an answer that explains why Ursula K. Le Guin, in the context of this interview, describes the future as a &quot;laboratory&quot;, and why the laboratory is &quot;safe&quot; and &quot;sterile.&quot; I would &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/712/how-to-indicate-what-kind-of-answer-youre-looking-for&quot;&gt;prefer&lt;/a&gt; answers that perform a close reading of the article. Answers that draw on Le Guin's other works will be helpful as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things that I'm not interested in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I know that laboratories are associated with being &quot;sterile&quot; for various scientific reasons; I don't need answers that point this out. I'm interested in the literary qualities of the word &quot;sterile&quot;. Sterile implies a lack of unwanted life. Answers should explore all of the implications of the word &quot;sterile&quot;. Remember that Le Guin isn't actually talking about a laboratory (where the word sterile should be accepted without question) but is making an analogy between a laboratory and science fiction (every aspect of the analogy can be debated, including the use of the word sterile).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/why-sci-fi-keeps-imagining-the-enslavement-of-white-people/361173/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining the Subjugation of White People&lt;/a&gt; is in many ways a critique of Le Guin's claim that &quot;the future is a safe, sterile laboratory.&quot; As with any idea, understanding the critique of the idea leads to a better understanding of the idea itself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T11:48:42.323" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T11:48:42.323" Title="Why is the future &quot;a safe, sterile laboratory&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2640" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2629" CreationDate="2017-06-02T02:44:22.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You already know what H2G2 stands for, and that it is a type of acronym to avoid having to write or say the whole name. I think you are asking why the acronym is H2G2 instead of HHGG, which is the same length so there is no additional economy being made here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers 2 indicate repetition. The practice probably comes either from mathematics (algebra), where the numbers are written as superscripts (eg X^2 meaning X times X) or as prefixes (eg 2X meaning X plus X); or from chemistry, where they are written as subscripts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example H2O (or HOH) is the chemical symbol for di-hydrogen oxide (water) : 2 hydrogen atoms attached to 1 oxygen atom. Or H2SO4 (or HHSOOOO) which is the chemical symbol for dihydrogen sulphate (sulphuric acid). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So H2G2 is the 'chemical symbol' for (The) Hitch Hiker's Guide (to the) Galaxy. By the same rule, W3 or WWW means the World Wide Web; and TW3 - more correctly (TW)3 - is TWTWTW which means &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Was_the_Week_That_Was&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That Was The Week That Was&lt;/a&gt; (a satirical TV program of the 1960s). Following the mathematical usage, 3i means &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.3i.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Investors in Industry plc&lt;/a&gt;, and 3M means the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.3m.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons for such &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numeronyms&lt;/a&gt;. Beside repetition, numbers are also used phonetically (eg K9 for &quot;canine&quot;), or visually (eg H4CK3D for HACKED), or to indicate the number of letters omitted from a long word (eg i18n for &quot;internationalization&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the present case the intention is probably to give the acronym a more scientific or modern appearance, similar to Y2K for &quot;the year 2000&quot;, making use of the decimal abbreviation K for kilo = 1000, instead of the (ancient) Roman numerals MM.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1616" LastEditorUserId="1616" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T08:41:03.563" LastActivityDate="2017-06-04T08:41:03.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="702" CreationDate="2017-06-02T06:19:35.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lewis Carroll wrote charade based poems that had one-word answers. My theory is his answer was a charade, the first sentence being LETTER, the second sentence being &lt;em&gt;backwards&lt;/em&gt;. Note that the subject Raven is &quot;Nevar&quot; backwards and a writing desk is &quot;&lt;em&gt;for words&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; He also did letters that skipped word riddles. After his answer just use the second word and it reads &quot;however merely afterthought; riddle originally had answer all.&quot; So is the answer &lt;strong&gt;&quot;One is nevaR backwards and one is forwords&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See my article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-solve-why-raven-like-writing-desk-neil-bant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1617" LastEditorUserId="1617" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T16:38:24.383" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T16:38:24.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T13:17:47.917" Score="7" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;There will be very heavy spoilers - do not read further if you haven't finished the novel.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. World is the leader of the new gods, though his exact area of influence is left somewhat ambiguous in the novel. This may be an intentional decision, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Mr. World is in fact Loki, and also Shadow's old cell mate, Low Key Lyesmith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His appearance is somewhat distinctive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Low Key, who was a grifter from Minnesota, &lt;strong&gt;smiled his scarred smile&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How the hell should I know?” Lyesmith kept his &lt;strong&gt;orange-blond hair pretty much shaved&lt;/strong&gt;. You could see the lines of his skull. “Tell you what, though. This country started going to hell when they stopped hanging folks. No gallows dirt. No gallows deals.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Author's preferred text, chapter 1; emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hair colour may be irrelevant, but combined with the scars on his face, which are faithful to a legend where his mouth was sewn shut after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loki#Archaeological_record&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some incident&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://americangods.wikia.com/wiki/Low_Key_Lyesmith&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the other&lt;/a&gt;, I claim for this question that his appearance is very distinctive and recognisable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also reason to believe that Loki had the same appearance when in his role as Mr. World:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He smiled then, &lt;strong&gt;his scarred smile&lt;/strong&gt;. Mr. World was easily amused. Mr. Town had noticed this on several occasions. It had amused him to play chauffeur, in Kansas, after all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Ibid, chapter 17; emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for my question - &lt;strong&gt;don't the new gods recognise that Mr. World is Loki&lt;/strong&gt;? I realise this piece of trivia is not very well-known, especially with him being portrayed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/11/113509/4383054-1630125576-39430.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;such&lt;/a&gt; handsome &lt;a href=&quot;https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/americangods/images/e/e9/Jonathan_tucker_low_key_lyesmith.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20170418202057&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;actors&lt;/a&gt; lately, but surely the new gods have done their homeworks (with one of them literally being the god of wireless communication and all that) and must know the appearance of all the old gods (&amp;quot;know your enemy and &lt;strong&gt;know your ally&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and all that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don't the new gods know that Mr. World is Loki, based on his appearance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If they do, why on Earth would they accept him as their leader? Even if one factors in him being a Norse god and &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; having some sort of information about the enemy camp, he is &lt;em&gt;the Trickster God&lt;/em&gt; - they should know this sword is of two ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-02T19:16:01.553" Title="Are the new gods not aware of the appearance of this character?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2722" CreationDate="2017-06-02T15:22:10.013" Score="10" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Brandon Sanderson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn:_The_Hero_of_Ages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (book three of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mistborn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; trilogy), Preservation and Ruin are two anthropomorphized forces of nature, evenly matched in their struggle against one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two forces are represented throughout the books by the colors white, for Preservation, and black, for Ruin. The mists are of Preservation, and are white. The ash is of Ruin, and is black -- really dark black, not the usual ash color (see, for example, the excerpt from Sazed's book at the beginning of chapter 19: &amp;quot;Yes, the ash was black. No, it should not have been. [...] Perhaps it was the influence of Ruin's power [...]&amp;quot;). More explicitly, in the final chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The twists of mist he saw, they led to a vast white light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He reached out and touched the mist, and felt an awesome power. A&#xA;power of stability. To the side, the other corpse -- the one he didn't&#xA;recognize -- was also leaking something. A deep black smoke. Sazed&#xA;reached out with his other hand, touching the smoke, and felt a&#xA;different power -- more violent. The power of change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These powers are not &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/672/481&quot;&gt;good and evil&lt;/a&gt; -- Ruin is something of an entropic force, and Preservation is the anti-entropic force. This distinction appears to be very important to Ruin -- he tries to explain this to Vin more than once. For example, in chapter 57:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vin, Vin. &lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; can't you see? This isn't about good or evil. Morality&#xA;doesn't even enter into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the entire series, Vin wears black, as it's a good color for sneaking at night, as Mistborn are won't to do. At the end of the second book, &lt;s&gt;King&lt;/s&gt; Emperor Elend Venture is encouraged to wear white, which improves his image, making him stand out in a world covered by ash. This pairing of colors isn't really emphasized much throughout the book, except for one scene, in which Emperor and Empress crash a ball in a city they have recently placed under siege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't an evening for subtlety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[grand entrance, billowing white cape]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside the antechamber, waiting nobility began to whisper and&#xA;question. Vin heard them asking if anyone recognized these strange&#xA;newcomers, one in black, the other in white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the stress of the contrasting colors in this passage may only serve to reinforce to the readers that this couple doesn't really belong in that room, by flaunting their nonconformity to societal fashion. Later in the same chapter (30), a short while after the dramatic entrance, we're told that the &amp;quot;men generally wore dark clothing, and the women generally wore colors.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The royal couple are also shown, standing side by side, in white and black on the book's cover (at least, for the edition that I was reading):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hESM1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hESM1m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bookcover of 'The Hero of Ages'&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0765356147&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;img src&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the use of these two colors for Ruin and Preservation, as well as for Vin and Elend, signify a link between these two pairs?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:22:51.800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:22:51.800" Title="Are Vin and Elend symbolically linked to Preservation and Ruin in The Hero of Ages?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;mistborn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-02T16:59:29.710" Score="6" ViewCount="15116" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/jeffbuckley/hallelujah.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hallelujah&lt;/a&gt;&quot; contains a mix of Biblical themes. The first stanza mentions (King) David by name, and the first three lines of the second seem to refer to one of King David's stories (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/II_Samuel.11?lang=bi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;II Samuel 11&lt;/a&gt;). The fourth line, I believe, switches to a story of Samson (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Judges.16.4?lang=bi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Judges 16&lt;/a&gt;), and the fifth has elements of both David and Samson in it (Samson was a judge, and never had a throne; &quot;she cut your hair&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sefaria.org/Judges.16.19?lang=bi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitely Samson&lt;/a&gt;). The final line of the stanza reads &quot;and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You saw her bathing on the roof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She tied you to a kitchen chair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She broke your throne, and she cut your hair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that the final line of the stanza refers to Samson; however, I'm not sure what Samson has to do with &quot;Hallelujah.&quot; Using a Bible search engine, I could not find an instance where Samson's name (שמשון) appeared with the word &quot;Hallelujah&quot; (הללויה). I could not either find the name שמשון in &lt;em&gt;Psalms&lt;/em&gt; (although it's possible that one or more Psalms are attributed to Samson; I don't know &lt;em&gt;Psalms&lt;/em&gt; or the commentaries on it well enough to say). There's certainly nothing in the story of Delilah with the word &quot;Hallelujah.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word does not appear in II Samuel 11 (nor, actually, in the entire book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, my questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who are the subject and object in the final line of the stanza? Is it Bathsheba and David, or Delilah and Samson?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the reference made by that line?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-02T17:24:38.480" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T18:35:23.043" Title="The meaning of the line &quot;and from your lips she drew the Hallelujah&quot; in &quot;Hallelujah&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2017-06-02T19:13:46.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's yet another context switch. It doesn't directly continue on from the Samson story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to connect to any specific Biblical story; there are non-biblical images in the stanza (&quot;she tied you to a kitchen chair&quot;). Rather, it's an emotional invocation: she has coaxed the speaker to an ecstatic state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;hallelujah&quot; appears most prominently in the Psalms, nominally written by King David. It means &quot;praise God&quot;, and is most associated in English as an exclamation used when one is overwhelmed with joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together with the other stanzas, it illustrates a rocky relationship with both extreme lows (exemplified here by Samson's defeat, as well as the evocative but non-biblical image of a broken throne[1]) and the extreme highs accompanied by an exclamation of &quot;Hallelujah!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] The broken throne may hint at the story of the succession of David by Solomon, his son with Bathsheba, rather than by primogeniture of his eldest son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T17:08:50.973" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T17:08:50.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3916" CreationDate="2017-06-03T03:36:19.277" Score="8" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 90s I read a collection of short stories by a South American female author (most likely translated to English vs having been written in English originally). I remember the stories were good, and I remember fragments of a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a person (female?) meditates on a small ornamental table in a hallway, which has flowers on it. There was a death, perhaps? Or a divorce?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a woman on a plane is thinking (about...?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an essay about the beauty and perfection of the avian egg&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a story in which a woman turns on her kitchen light in the middle of the night and finds many cockroaches frozen all over the floor because they have eaten the borax poison she set out and have frozen in place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, I think the stories may have tended towards being a bit chilly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to revisit these stories and know more about this author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1626" LastEditorUserId="1626" LastEditDate="2017-06-04T10:08:01.223" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T08:54:05.277" Title="Which South or Central American female author wrote a short story about frozen cockroaches?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2287" CreationDate="2017-06-03T04:00:46.317" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I honestly have no practical explanation as to why or how Erasmus could have contracted rabies, except for research I found on Wikipedia that said dogs are the most common animal worldwide affected by rabies. It also said over 99% of cases in countries with infected dogs are caused by dog bites, which would explain how Mendelssohn got the disease; Erasmus bit her. It could have been something like a bat bite, but I think it likely came from the taxidermy shop. Erasmus spent a lot of time with Henry in the taxidermy shop, and Henry has the notion in the book that that could have been the cause. I read that the virus can spread through exposure to infected bears, domestic farm animals, groundhogs, weasels, &amp;amp; other carnivores. However, none of the animals in the taxidermy shop were alive. It could have had something to do with the chemicals in the shop, but I really don't know. I think it's meant to be a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your second question, this is something that I only realized long after finishing the book. The book is about two animals, a donkey named Beatrice and a howler monkey named Virgil. The plight faced by them and countless other animals is used to symbolize the destruction and devastation of the Holocaust. I believe Erasmus and Mendelssohn are used symbolically, that their deaths are used to symbolize the deaths of Beatrice and Virgil, as well as countless other animal deaths and, on a larger scale, the deaths of the Holocaust. Henry has a personal experience of losing two beloved animals, which parallels the experience in the taxidermist's story and allows him to relate to the animal deaths in the play. This enables him to further understand the Holocaust connection and realize the importance of preserving that story through creative fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1627" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-03T08:31:02.227" LastActivityDate="2017-06-03T08:31:02.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-04T14:37:01.930" Score="8" ViewCount="2397" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second verse of &quot;Hallelujah&quot; by Leonard Cohen goes like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You saw her bathing on the roof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She tied you to a kitchen chair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She broke your throne, and she cut your hair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last 5 lines are all talking about the subject's relation with a woman. But I fail to see how the first line is connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the line about faith have to do with the rest of the verse?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T19:19:51.630" Title="How does the line 'your faith was strong but you needed proof' match the rest of the verse in &quot;Hallelujah&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2653" CreationDate="2017-06-04T16:58:02.400" Score="17" ViewCount="1114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me identify this story about child slavery? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this last year in my English class and its a book about slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Synopsis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Protagonist is a young male who collects unmarked cans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He collects certain types of containers, I am not sure what it is but anyway he collects ones with no label on them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe they are cans of soup or dog food (not sure!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He has a habit of buying old cans and his parents are worried about him&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One day he finds another person who loves collecting unmarked cans as well (a young female).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eventually, he finds a mutilated finger in one of the unmarked cans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He keeps buying tin cans and finding different types of weird items.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe he finds a tin can with a wedding ring, a human ear and a note that pleads for help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He realizes that all the cans come from the same factory and he decides to venture out and explore it himself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eventually he finds the factory and finds that the owner of the factory is missing a finger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The owner enslaves the male protagonist and he finds that the owner has illegally bought dozens of child slaves who are forced to work in his factory 24/7 in poor conditions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The parents of the protagonist and the police searches for him for weeks but have no clue at where he is (the factory is in another town).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist (somehow) sends off a letter to the female tin collector in one of the tins hoping she finds it (which she does!).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the final chapters of the book, the female tries to tell authorities that he has been kidnapped and enslaved in the factory but as she is young no one believes her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She also ventures alone to the factory to try and save the protagonist and she does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the slaves are released and the protagonist is back with his family. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I believe the slave owner is mutilated by one of his factory machines because in the last chapter I remember it saying that no one ever heard again of the owner and in another tin can someone finds live human fingernails and toenails. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that this gruesome book is a kids' book as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T20:17:48.567" LastActivityDate="2018-07-23T11:46:18.523" Title="Story about child slavery and mutilated body parts?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2139" CreationDate="2017-06-04T17:04:30.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Zombies are also found &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2152/481&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; in Norse mythology; during &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ragnarök&lt;/a&gt;, the unworthy dead return from Hel to fight the Norse gods (and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einherjar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einherjar&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read about this recently in Neil Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/Norse+Mythology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Loki's troops are the legions of Hel. They are the uneasy dead, the&#xA;  ones who died shameful deaths, who will return to the earth to fight&#xA;  once more as walking corpses, determined to destroy anything that&#xA;  still loves and lives above the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Gaiman, Neil. &quot;Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/em&gt;. New York: W.W. Norton, 2017. p 272.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Einherjar themselves might also be classified as zombies, because they also returned from the dead, but they don't really feel zombie-esque because they're on the home team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] and the Aesir and with them the Einherjar, all the warriors who&#xA;  died good deaths in battle, will dress for war, and together they will&#xA;  ride out to Vigrid, the final battlefield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;ibid., p 273.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read any other Norse mythology to date, so I take him at his word that he is faithful to the original myths. Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k#cite_note-FOOTNOTEByock200572-33&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cites&lt;/a&gt; a similar claim to Jesse Byock's &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140447555&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2005 translation&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prose Edda&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not earlier than &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2140/481&quot;&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt;, but as the &lt;em&gt;Prose Edda&lt;/em&gt; was compiled circa 1220 CE (per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose_Edda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), it's certainly earlier than Twain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T23:07:10.587" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T23:07:10.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2651" CreationDate="2017-06-04T17:06:48.373" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Canned&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Shearer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alex Shearer&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VSspZm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VSspZm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First hit on google when typing 'boy tin can factory child slavery finger book'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/alex-shearer/canned/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kirkus Reviews&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This macabre mystery may make readers give up canned foods. Fergal Banfield, an eccentric English lad with the peculiar &lt;strong&gt;hobby of collecting unlabelled cans from supermarket bargain bins&lt;/strong&gt;, discovers a gold ear stud in his latest acquisition. The mystery deepens when &lt;strong&gt;he next discovers a severed human finger in another can&lt;/strong&gt;. Fergal meets &lt;strong&gt;Charlotte, a fellow can-collector&lt;/strong&gt;, who finds a human ear in one of her cans, and it goes with the gold stud. Fergal’s investigation leads him to a &lt;strong&gt;pet-food factory&lt;/strong&gt; owned by Mr. and Mrs. Dimble-Smith. Fergal makes the grisly discovery that &lt;strong&gt;the factory is staffed by enslaved young children&lt;/strong&gt; from Africa and Asia, who become ingredients of the pet food when they grow old enough to resist captivity. &lt;strong&gt;Pressed into service&lt;/strong&gt; and fearing for his life, &lt;strong&gt;Fergal gets a message to Charlotte&lt;/strong&gt; on a can label about his situation and location, but &lt;strong&gt;no one believes her story&lt;/strong&gt;. So it’s Charlotte to the rescue! The grotesque elements of the story are more suggestive than descriptive, and Shearer’s delightfully droll, dark humor makes for many light moments. Readers with a taste for the bizarre and gross will find this tale most tasty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @Mithrandir for adding some related extracts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Protagonist is a young male who collects unmarked cans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fergal felt he needed somewhere to hide, a wall to retreat behind - some shelter. He didn't want a hobby to bring him into contact with other people, he wanted one to shield him from then. And that was when he became interested in cans.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not rare cans, though, nor ancient cans from expeditions to the North or South Pole; not foreign cans from exotic places, or cans in unusual colors. Just simple, ordinary, everyday cans.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Without labels.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe they are cans of soup or dog food (not sure!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For you, Fergal,&quot; he whispered. &quot;I'll open this one for you.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he returned to the kitchen.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mr. Bamfield fetched a plate and the can opener. With solemn ceremony he clasped the butterfly opener around the rim of the can...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...The smell of it alone was enough. Never mind the sight of it - that pinky-gray mush look it had. It was hard to know exactly what it was supposed to be. It smelled like some kind of economy-brand pet food.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He has a habit of buying old cans and his parents are worried about him&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon, to his mother's increasing unease, Fergal had filled the  entire top shelf of his bookcase with cans.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One day he finds another person who loves collecting unmarked cans as well (a young female).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How do you know,&quot; he said, &quot;that it's more important to you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Because I need it,&quot; the girl said. &quot;For my collection!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 7&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, he finds a decapitated finger in one of the unmarked cans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a finger. A finger. A human finger. With a slightly grubby fingernail, and a mark around it - a faint indentation around the base.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There it was, lying on his desk.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One canned finger.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One finger, canned.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 5&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe he finds a tin can with a wedding ring, a human ear and a note that pleads for help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's an ear,&quot; he said. &quot;Off someone's head.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fergal took the small gold earring from his pocket and placed it down on Charlotte's dressing table.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It's a sleeper.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That's right.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Interesting.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What did you find first?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;This.&quot; Charlotte reached into her desk drawer, took something out, and placed it next to the gold stud.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It's a ring.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were four of them: one vowel and three consonants. They spelled out the word &lt;em&gt;h e l p&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He realizes that all the cans come from the same factory and he decides to venture out and explore it himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The code,&lt;/em&gt; Charlotte thought. &lt;em&gt;He must have found the code. He must have found the code on a labelled can. he must have discovered where the strange cans were coming from. And there the manufacturer's name would be, on the label of the can he had found - a name and probably an address too. That must have been why he was so excited. He had matched the code.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eventually he finds the factory and finds that the owner of the factory is missing a finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Interested in cans, are you?&quot; he said. He held his hand up so that I could see he had a finger missing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The owner enslaves the male protagonist and he finds that the owner has illegally bought dozens of child slaves who are forced to work in his factory 24/7 in poor conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, I bit and kicked and scratched as hard as I could, but I was overpowered and taken inside. I heard the door clang shut behind me and the sound of a double lock. And I've not seen daylight since. All I've done is work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There are two shifts here - all day and all night...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...When we get to sleep, we're cramped together into two small rooms - one for girls, one for boys. Sometimes you have to wake somebody up to tell them that it's time for them to go to work so that they will get out and you can have their bed. The food we get is disgusting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Chapter 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The parents of the protagonist and the police searches for him for weeks but have no clue at where he is (the factory is in another town).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was at the bus depot. She felt her feet take her to the information point; she heard her voice say, &quot;Excuse me, where can I get a bus to Havverstock?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 16&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist (somehow) sends off a letter to the female tin collector in one of the tins hoping she finds it (which she does!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the biggest shock of all came when she found label one and began to read what was written.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was a letter, addressed personally, to her.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the final chapters of the book, the female tries to tell authorities that he has been kidnapped and enslaved in the factory but as she is young no one believes her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Look, love,&quot; he said, &quot;I'm sure you mean well. I've got kids myself, see, and I know what you're all like. They get fantasies, don't they? I used to get them too when I was your age. Dreams about being a hero, about saving people from drowning and getting medals and being modest about it and all the rest. Am I right?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 17&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She also ventures alone to the factory to try and save the protagonist and she does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She jumped down from the step. The door closed behind her and the bus went on its way.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She was alone in the still of the night.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 16&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All the slaves are released and the protagonist is back with his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The children had been taken away and looked after. Those who had homes were reunited with their parents. Those who were orphans were found decent families to live with. The factory was closed down.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 17&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the slave owner is mutilated by one of his factory machines because in the last chapter I remember it saying that no one ever heard again of the owner and in another tin can someone finds live human fingernails and toenails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the Dumble-Smiths had gone. How they had gone, where they had gone, nobody seemed to know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 17&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He fished it out and inspected it. It was a nail.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A great big toenail.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 17&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T00:00:00.583" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T00:00:00.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2654" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-05T13:39:34.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T13:39:34.420" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T13:39:34.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2655" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-05T13:39:34.420" Score="0" Body="For questions about the electronic books as a medium, not for books read in the digital format." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T14:28:51.057" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T14:28:51.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2656" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-05T13:42:38.240" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T13:42:38.240" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T13:42:38.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2657" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-05T13:42:38.240" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about the Vertigo Comics series, not for the character from Abrahamic religions. Use with the [comics] tag and respective author tags, e.g. [mike-carey], [holly-black], or [richard-kadrey]." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:33:56.483" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:33:56.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2658" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2017-06-05T13:52:59.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T09:23:56.360" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T09:23:56.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T14:45:50.527" Score="12" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; There will be spoilers regarding characters from the end of the manga here. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hayao Miyazaki's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/manga/nausicaa.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Kaze no Tani no Naushika&lt;/em&gt;) manga, the characters are usually depicted as multi-layered, and developing throughout the series... except Nausicaä herself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; E.g. Kushana goes from blood-thirsty and arrogant to humble and peaceful; the Holy One of the Mani tribe helps Yupa and Asbel escape; Charuka first is loyal to the Emperor, but then decides he is actually loyal to the people, and sees Nausiaä as a saviour of the human race.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;br&gt;&#xA; Even the Guardian of the Garden changes his mind about Nausicaä and lets her go. Same goes for both sons of the Emperor - they're not flat characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nausicaä, on the other hand, remains the same - stil love the Ohmu, the forest, the people, and everyone else. She remains an optimist, and to an extent, a happy-go-lucky person. We are not shown much of her inner world except how she perceives the forest (positively), the insects (positively), needless deaths (negatively), and so forth. These are more or less all her character traits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong about this? Are there some subtle changes in Nausicaä's character that I did not notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T16:40:50.880" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T21:17:37.800" Title="Does Nausicaä not develop as a character at all?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;manga&gt;&lt;nausicaa-of-the-valley-of-the-wind&gt;&lt;hayao-miyazaki&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T17:26:25.237" Score="11" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several years ago, I read a memorable short story included as an example (of what, I don't recall) in a book about writing.  The story was set in a historical era of France.  I believe it was translated from the French, and written in the era it depicted, although I'm not sure about either of those facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot concerned a group of poor soldiers who pool all their money to purchase one of them a night with a famous prostitute -- possessor of the &quot;dearest charms in all France.&quot;  They determine the lucky beneficiary by lottery.  When he tells the lady in question his story, she declares she can be as generous as his comrades and that he will not pay a &quot;single sou&quot; for the privilege of her time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The punchline is that she refunds him, not the entire amount, but just the few coins he used to buy into the lottery!  I haven't been able to find or identify either this story, or the book that quoted it.  Anyone have any thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T11:55:05.200" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T11:57:53.143" Title="&quot;The Dearest Charms in France&quot; - French story about soldiers, a lottery, and a famous prostitute" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="672" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:12:43.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A lot of our standard language encodes subconscious in-group, out-group preferences.  As theorist Franz Fanon explored in his work &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Skin,_White_Masks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Skins, White Masks&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; the probable origin is the psychological desire to distance oneself from non-desired traits by displacing them onto a group readily distanced from the target audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since racial examples can be controversial, and tend to garner instinctive resistance, let's start with a non-racial example.  The word &lt;em&gt;dexterous&lt;/em&gt; is a positive adjective meaning &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dexterous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skillful and competent with the hands&lt;/a&gt;&quot; whereas &quot;sinister&quot; is a negative adjective meaning &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sinister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;singularly evil or productive of evil&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (see also &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gauche?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gauche&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).  Yet, the words originate in ones meaning &quot;right-handed&quot; and &quot;left-handed.&quot;  The fact that a significant majority of people are right-handed has resulted in a distinct semantic preference for right-handedness being encoded into language that is used commonly, and without any malicious intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the advent of positive/negative word pairs in European languages contrasting white and black is at least arguably related to the formation of a unified European racial identity privileging lighter skin, perhaps as a reaction to increased collective competition with the darker-skinned cultures of the Middle East and Africa.  Recent literature that counters this trend often does so as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2004/12/a_whitewashed_earthsea.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a direct and explicit response&lt;/a&gt; against the perceived &lt;a href=&quot;http://taxicrash.github.io/2016/05/11/tolkien-race/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subconscious racism in the color-coding of older fantasy works&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T19:35:35.843" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T19:35:35.843" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2662" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:46:02.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-05T19:46:02.067" LastActivityDate="2017-06-05T19:46:02.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2663" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-05T19:46:02.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'American Gods' (2001) or the way it relates to its adaptations. Use with the [neil-gaiman] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T11:00:08.410" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T11:00:08.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-05T22:11:59.480" Score="6" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least four major characters have the name &quot;John&quot; or &quot;Jonathan&quot;, including Jonathan Strange, John Segundus, John Childermass, and John Uskglass. This is potentially confusing to a reader. In particular the name &quot;John Segundus&quot; threw me: it's a very odd English name, and hinted at possibly being a pseudonym, perhaps for Strange himself before the character is introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John is a very common name, and while it's reasonable to know several &quot;John&quot;s in real life, I would expect most authors to keep character names fairly distinct for the convenience of readers.* Is Clarke hinting at something, or is it just a part of her often-enigmatic style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[*] JRR Tolkien being a glaring exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T15:06:39.933" Title="What is the significance of &quot;Jonathan&quot; in Strange and Norrell?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T03:34:36.167" Score="9" ViewCount="664" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Fables_%26_Reflections#.22The_Parliament_of_Rooks.22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Parliament of Rooks&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #40), Abel tells a toddler Daniel Hall a &quot;children's story&quot; about how he and Cain came to live in the Dreaming (pages 18-20). In the story, Dream and his sister Death appear similarly to Pop Vinyl characters, and it's really quite adorable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WI2GH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WI2GHm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Two panels, both with a child version of Dream and Death of the Endless. Caption 1: &amp;quot;Death was a little older than Dream. Things had the potential to die before they had the potential to dream. But there hadn&amp;#39;t been much dreaming or much dying back then. Things were still taking shape.&amp;quot; In the second panel, Death giggles as Dream learns to walk. Caption: &amp;quot;They were... they were children, back then. In the olden days.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; (page 18) &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cain objects to this portrayal of the eldest Endless, but Abel's rebuttal is a little unclear to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7co90.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7co90m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cain, to Abel: &amp;quot;Children? They didn&amp;#39;t even look remotely human. None of us did, back then. What are you trying to feed the child -- sanitized pablum? Li&amp;#39;l Death? Li&amp;#39;l Morpheus? Revolting!&amp;quot; Abel: &amp;quot;This is muhmy story, Cain. Luhleave me alone.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; (page 18) &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I wonder about the veracity of Abel's portrayal of the Endless. Cain thinks this is a gross oversimplification, but Abel says &quot;this is my story.&quot; I think there are three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abel knows that Cain is right, and changes the story and imagery for baby Daniel's benefit. After all, he does change the end of the story; it's clear by now that in Gaiman's world, Cain and Abel do not live &quot;happily ever after,&quot; as Abel finishes the story. He may sanitize other details of the story for the child's benefit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abel thinks he's right, because he is. We know that the Endless appear differently to different people (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2223/481&quot;&gt;this Lit.SE answer&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abel thinks he's right, but he isn't. Cain considers Abel simpleminded, constantly calling him any of several derogatory names like &quot;powderbrain&quot; or &quot;numbskull.&quot; There isn't much to analyze, but Abel appears to be of normal intelligence, even if he is much softer (perhaps more naive) than his brother. If he honestly believes that he and his brother lived happily ever after&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, then he may be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unreliable narrator&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these three is it? &lt;strong&gt;Was Morpheus actually &quot;Li'l Morpheus&quot; for a time?&lt;/strong&gt; (Is there another possibility I haven't considered?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; 1: I don't think it's likely that he doesn't understand that his fraternal relationship is severely abusive and dysfunctional, although I admit the possibility. I submit that he doesn't intend the living &quot;happily ever after&quot; as part of his story, making it more of a hinted plea to his brother, because the point of view shifts from &quot;way back when&quot; back to the present time, when Abel is speaking to Daniel. On the other hand, he doesn't stutter during that part; Matthew notes on the next page that the stutter disappears when Abel tells stories, making it possible that that sentence &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; part of the story. I'm not really sure how to interpret that part. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T12:37:08.250" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T20:02:49.637" Title="Did young Dream and Death really look like this?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2668" CreationDate="2017-06-06T09:35:02.657" Score="13" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Book X (10) of The Illiad Hector (edition: Britannica Great Books of the Western World (The Illiad and The Odessey together), rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler) swears the following oath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;May Jove the thundering husband of Juno bear witnes that no other Trojan but yourself shall mount those steeds, and that you shall have your will with them for ever.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He swears this to Dolon, son of Eumedes, who agrees to, in return for Peleus's chaiot and steeds when and if they should be captured, spy on the Achaeans and try discover their plans of battle for the next day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oath is followed by the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The oath he swore was bootless, but it made Dolon more keen on going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the oath bootless? Is it because Jove only has to witness (instead of may jove take my children, juno give me no sons etc). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can't be because the oath gives him no 'booty' (treasure/loot) because the horses are the boot...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; There seems to be no reason (at this point) to think Hector would go back on his word, and the horses do exist, so presuming the Trojons win (which they are at this point in the story [the Achaeans are in retreat]) there is every reason to presume that Dolon will at some point recieve the horses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the oath 'bootless/useless' because the promised reward is not certain, i.e. it cannot immediately be bestowed on him? &lt;strike&gt;If so why is Dolon more eager to go?&lt;/strike&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T23:57:39.990" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T15:38:41.157" Title="What is a bootless oath?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2017-06-06T09:39:38.020" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bootless&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;useless, unprofitable&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;a bootless attempt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can replace the word bootless like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The oath he swore was useless, but it made Dolon more keen on going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oath didn't mean anything, but it made him more keen anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I'm understanding it, it's saying that it &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; be kept. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2667/what-is-a-bootless-oath/2668#comment5624_2668&quot;&gt;Rand said&lt;/a&gt;, I'm not explaining &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it won't be kept, because I'd need to actually have the book with me ;). But from what you quoted, it appears that the text - whoever the narrator is - is saying that the oath won't be kept. Perhaps it wasn't a strong enough oath; perhaps the person making it doesn't have the power to carry it out. But whoever the narrator is doesn't think that the oath will carry any weight. But, despite this, it makes whoever it was directed to more confident in what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T14:25:45.373" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T14:25:45.373" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2669" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-06T12:11:40.327" Score="4" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;The so-called Silly Walk Song by the Monty Python troupe (lyrics and video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBipikT-3xI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, lyrics in text form &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-silly-walks-song-lyrics-monty-python.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) is mostly a lament of the tedium and futility of a life of money-induced drudgery. But there are a few lines which are much darker and don't quite seem to fit with the tone of the rest of the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Life is a silly walk in the park,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A knife in your throat held after dark.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Life is a terrible joke a lark,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A spoken word then it all goes dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does the idea of a &quot;knife in your throat held after dark&quot; come from? What does it mean and how does it fit with the overall theme? What does bloody murder have to do with working uselessly in an office for money, or is there some indirect or symbolic meaning in this phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-06T12:25:32.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T12:25:32.340" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;a knife in your throat held after dark&quot; in the Silly Walk Song?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;monty-python&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2665" CreationDate="2017-06-06T14:16:13.410" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Cain is most probably right in blaming Abel for &amp;quot;sanitising&amp;quot;.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;When was &amp;quot;that time&amp;quot;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When The Dreaming was first established, Dream was its only inhabitant for millions of years - at least according to Neil Gaiman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always assumed the Sandman spent millions of years in a version of The Dreaming completely on his own; and I think he quite enjoys the alternative of having others around - though he'd never admit it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4: &amp;quot;The Doll's House&amp;quot;, page 52. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the author says &amp;quot;millions&amp;quot;, and not billions. Assuming all the Endless were born very promptly after the &amp;quot;beginning&amp;quot; of the universe, I think it's quite obvious that Cain is right - after all, Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, and the universe is 3 times older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel are not necessarily human.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Matthew asks how Eve, Cain, and Abel fit into the scientific view on the history of the world, Abel begins to respond that the story he told was not set on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RVRKX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RVRKX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption is that the story of Adam and his wives was not meant as a history of human beings as well - Cain does say &amp;quot;you're everybody's mother&amp;quot;, and even though Eve says &amp;quot;it's a matter of opinion&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;which part of this comic series isn't&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Dreamers, in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; universe, are not only humans... and not even &amp;quot;living beings&amp;quot; in the accepted sense of the word.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take this panel from &lt;em&gt;The Sandman: Overture&lt;/em&gt; #2 - this is what Dream looked like for the first dreamers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qvR5O.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qvR5O.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's somewhat humanly-arrogant to assume those characters looked like humans a long time ago. After all, in a series whose protagonist changes appearance as he pleases, things like this shouldn't come as a surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why Abel &amp;quot;sanitised&amp;quot; his story is his audience - a former human now-raven Matthew, and the human boy Daniel (nobody cares about the gargoyle). Quite possibly they wouldn't understand his story if he told it as it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-06T20:02:49.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12350" CreationDate="2017-06-06T17:55:08.897" Score="8" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Bel Kaufman's &lt;em&gt;Up the Down Staircase&lt;/em&gt;, part of the story is told through notes that Sylvia Barrett sends to other teachers. For example, the first one goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FROM: Mrs. Beatrice Schachter, Room 508&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  TO: Miss Sylvia Barrett, Room 304&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Dear Syl—&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Welcome to the fold! I hope it goes well with you on this, your first day. If you need help, just holler; I'm in 508.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  What's your program? Can we synchronize our lunch periods?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Fondly,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Bea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 2, Sylvia and Beatrice seem to exchange seven notes within a single day of work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How were they sent? Did they ask students to deliver them during classes? During breaks? My imagination runs rampant and thinks of pneumatic tube transport, but surely this wasn't the case in 1960s US schools?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:08:37.883" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T21:39:06.860" Title="How were notes sent from classroom to classroom in Up the Down Staircase?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;up-the-down-staircase&gt;&lt;bel-kaufman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-07T00:08:06.723" Score="12" ViewCount="402" Body="&lt;p&gt;The satirical novel &lt;em&gt;My Uncle Napoleon&lt;/em&gt; by Iraj Pezeshkzad was briefly banned in Iran in the 1970s. Presumably this was because some aspects of its portrayal of Iranian society were considered undesirable by the new government. In order to find out whether or not I'm likely to enjoy this book, I'd like to know more specifically exactly which aspects these were. @BESW &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/596/suggest-your-lit-se-reading-challenges-here/752#comment2676_752&quot;&gt;suggested&lt;/a&gt; that I post this as a question on the main site, so here it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why, &lt;em&gt;specifically&lt;/em&gt;, was &lt;em&gt;My Uncle Napoleon&lt;/em&gt; banned in Iran after 1979?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T19:11:05.053" Title="Why was My Uncle Napoleon banned in Iran?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;my-uncle-napoleon&gt;&lt;iraj-pezeshkzad&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2676" CreationDate="2017-06-07T00:40:14.857" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are some excerpts from Azar Nafisi's introduction to a new edition of the novel (published, and slightly edited, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/may/13/featuresreviews.guardianreview26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;'s website&lt;/a&gt;, 5/13/2006) that may indicate why it was banned by the Iranian government. In brief, it criticized the state of society and government in Iran at the time, and also talked about &quot;love and eroticism&quot; in a way that many puritanical Muslims might object to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The very structure of the novel, its use of farce, and its frank and&#xA;  entertaining investigation of love and eroticism go against any&#xA;  fundamentalist or puritanical doctrine, be it Islamic or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the book is not political, it is politically subversive,&#xA;  targeting a certain mentality and attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pezeshkzad's Dear Uncle Napoleon can only exercise his petty tyrannies&#xA;  within his own household, yet he also represents far grimmer dictators&#xA;  with much greater power to harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes it seemed to me when I still lived in Iran that My Uncle&#xA;  Napoleon predicted and articulated in farcical terms the mindset&#xA;  ruling over the Islamic Republic. Like all totalitarian systems, the&#xA;  Iranian government feeds and grows on paranoia. To justify its rule&#xA;  the regime had to replace reality with its own mythologies. The&#xA;  Islamic regime based its absurd justice on Uncle Napoleonic logic,&#xA;  destroying the lives of millions of Iranians through its laws, jailing&#xA;  and torturing and killing all imagined enemies and accusing them of&#xA;  being agents of the Great Satan, namely America and its allies. If&#xA;  Uncle Napoleon felt that the delay in his nephew's train was a British&#xA;  plot, the guardians of morality in Iran saw a woman's lipstick or a&#xA;  man's tie as props/accessories in an imperialist plot to destroy&#xA;  Islam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To lie is a way of life, and it is justified because telling the truth&#xA;  has unpleasant and sometimes fatal consequences. Thus a community is&#xA;  created based on illusions and fantasies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although My Uncle Napoleon is highly critical of the society it&#xA;  depicts, it is also the best testament to the complexity, vitality,&#xA;  and flexibility of Iranian culture and society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://old.seattletimes.com/html/books/2002972461_unclenapoleon07.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review from &lt;em&gt;The Seattle Times&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Valerie Ryan, 5/5/2006) calls Napoleon's garden a &quot;microcosm of the larger world.&quot; The Iranian government would probably not be delighted to hear themselves described as regularly &quot;trembling with rage.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was not able to find any list of banned books in Iran on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/1334/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first page&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=list%20of%20books%20banned%20in%20iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google results&lt;/a&gt; that included &lt;em&gt;My Uncle Napoleon&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.postdesk.com/banned-books-list-reasons-why-censorship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/24/iran-banned-books_n_4157973.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.revolvy.com/topic/List%20of%20books%20banned%20in%20Iran&amp;amp;item_type=topic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, citing the &quot;1988 Act of the Guidelines to Publish Books, by the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution of Islamic Republic of Iran,&quot; lists several reasons why a book may be banned. The reasons cited above may fall under one or more of those reasons, specifically &quot;mocking and weakening the national pride and nationalistic spirit,&quot; &quot;renouncing the fundamentals of religion,&quot; and/or &quot;creating an atmosphere of losing national values to the culture and civilization of western or eastern colonizing systems.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Renouncing the fundamentals of religion; promoting corruption;&#xA;  inviting the society to riot against Iran; promoting the ideas of&#xA;  terrorist and illegal groups and corrupted sects and defending&#xA;  monarchy; stimulating conflicts between the various ethnic or&#xA;  religious groups or creating problems in the unity of the society and&#xA;  the country; mocking and weakening the national pride and&#xA;  nationalistic spirit, and creating an atmosphere of losing national&#xA;  values to the culture and civilization of western or eastern&#xA;  colonizing systems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information on the reasons for book censorship in Iran, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_censorship_in_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mhpbooks.com/criteria-for-banned-books-in-iran/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Criteria for banned books in Iran&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Note: that article mentions, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranfocus.com/en/?option=com_content&amp;amp;task=view&amp;amp;id=1246&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;links to&lt;/a&gt;, a list of 200 banned books that was given to a bookseller. That link is dead, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20161224055515/http://www.iranfocus.com/en/?option=com_content&amp;amp;task=view&amp;amp;id=1246&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; does not have a useful capture of that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-07T19:11:05.053" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T19:11:05.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2680" CreationDate="2017-06-07T14:34:25.127" Score="10" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;http://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2667/what-is-a-bootless-oath&quot;&gt;question &lt;/a&gt; I asked abouth the following oath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;May Jove the thundering husband of Juno bear witnes that no other Trojan but yourself shall mount those steeds, and that you shall have your will with them for ever.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in Book X (10) of The Illiad Hector (edition: Britannica Great Books of the Western World (The Illiad and The Odessey together), rendered into English prose by Samuel Butler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He swears this oath to Dolon, son of Eumedes, who agrees to, in return for Peleus's chaiot and steeds when and if they should be captured, spy on the Achaeans and try discover their plans of battle for the next day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oath is followed by the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The oath he swore was bootless, but it made Dolon more keen on going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous question's answer establishes that a bootless oath is a useless oath. &lt;em&gt;On further reading of my edition I found a second usage of bootless where it certainly meant useless so Mithrandir's answer is correct.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time my question is why &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; the oath useless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extra context: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be no reason (at that point) to think Hector would go back on his word, and the horses do exist, so presuming the Trojons win (which they are at that point in the story [the Achaeans are in retreat]) there is every reason to presume that Dolon will at some point recieve the horses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dolon is killed on his way to spy on the Achaeans but he has no way of knowing this so that cannot be the reason the oath is useless and this would not make him keener on going...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-09T18:38:16.507" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T18:38:16.507" Title="Why is the oath sworn to Dolon by Hector a &quot;bootless&quot; one?" Tags="&lt;homer&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2017-06-07T16:58:53.493" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The specific Butler passage you reference can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0217%3Abook%3D10%3Acard%3D272&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perseus&lt;/a&gt;&#xA; line 272-348. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D10%3Acard%3D332&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An alternate 1924 translation by  A.T. Murray&lt;/a&gt; may also be found there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Murray is quite distinct from the Butler in these passages, which got me wondering about the Greek because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The use of &quot;bootless&quot; is undoubtedly wordplay referencing Achilles' famous heel.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murray's translation, by contrast, merely reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So spake he, and swore thereto an idle oath, and stirred the heart of Dolon..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0133%3Abook%3D10%3Acard%3D332&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Greek can be found here&lt;/a&gt;, line 332:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὣς φάτο καί ῥ᾽ ἐπίορκον ἐπώμοσε, τὸν δ᾽ ὀρόθυνεν:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing in the Greek overtly relating to footwear or feet—The Ancient Greek word for &quot;boot&quot;, here anglicized as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.classics.upenn.edu/myth/php/tools/dictionary.php?regexp=COTHURNUS&amp;amp;method=standard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cothurnus&lt;/a&gt;&quot; bears no relation to any of the words in the passage, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the use of ἐπίορκον (&quot;epiorkon&quot;) made &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; think of a pun per the &quot;pee&quot; sound--&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pous&amp;amp;la=greek#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;πούς&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;poos&quot;) is the Greek word for foot, which becomes, among other things, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ciudadseva.com/texto/los-versos-del-capitan-tus-pies/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pie&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (pee-ay) in Spanish.  Butler is said to have been influenced by Cervantes, so it is quite possible the same thought would have occurred to him.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Puns regarding feet are a staple of Oedipus Rex, for instance.  Oedipus was pierced through his ankles when his father had him exposed him in the wilderness, and that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Oedipus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Oedipus&quot; actually means &quot;swollen foot&quot;&lt;/a&gt; greatly increases the irony of the irony of revelation of his identity, which turns out to be hilariously obvious in retrospect;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, while the use of &quot;bootless&quot; in this passage appears to be an invention of Butler he is in very good company.  Butler's choice of bootless is not only consistent with the spirit of Ancient Greek literature, but quite brilliant imo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T02:01:22.323" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T02:01:22.323" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2678" CreationDate="2017-06-07T17:40:23.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It likely has to do with a quote by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automedon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Automedon&lt;/a&gt; later in the Iliad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Alcimedon, what man beside of the Achaeans is of like worth to curb and guide the spirit of [Achilles'] immortal steeds, save only Patroclus, the peer of the gods in counsel...&quot;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D17%3Acard%3D456&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source: Iliad, 17.475, A.T. Murray &lt;em&gt;trans.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These horses were supernatural, reputedly the offspring of a harpy and the west wind, thus difficult to manage for mortals, save noble Patrochlus, who used to feed and groom them for Achilles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T17:40:23.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2664" CreationDate="2017-06-07T18:47:48.283" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was doing a little research on the etymology of John recently.  &lt;em&gt;(I suspect that Riordan's &amp;quot;Jackson&amp;quot; is a reference to John, where &amp;quot;Jack&amp;quot; is a form of John, and Percy Jackson is likely meant to be &amp;quot;Perseus Son-of-the-Grace-of-God&amp;quot;, which is a reflection both of his parentage and his deliverance as an infant cast out to sea.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Online Etymological Dictionary states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;masc. proper name, Middle English Jon, Jan (mid-12c.), from Old French Jan, Jean, Jehan (Modern French Jean), from Medieval Latin Johannes, an alteration of Late Latin Joannes, from Greek Ioannes, from Hebrew Yohanan (longer form y'hohanan), said to mean literally &amp;quot;Jehovah has favored&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Jah is gracious,&amp;quot; from hanan &amp;quot;he was gracious.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek conformed the Hebrew ending to its own customs. The -h- in English was inserted in imitation of the Medieval Latin form. Old English had the Biblical name as Iohannes. As the name of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, it was one of the most frequent Christian given names, and in England by early 14c. it rivaled William in popularity and was used generically (in Middle English especially of priests) and as an appellative (as in John Barleycorn, John Bull, John Q. Public).&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=john&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Online Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that all 4 Johns you mention are very positive and admirable characters.  Usklass was certainly graced, as a foundling who rose to become a supreme King.  Likewise, Strange, Segundus, and Childermass are all fairly graced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Barleycorn&lt;/a&gt; is worth looking at, as he is a very famous figure in English paganism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &amp;quot;Segundus&amp;quot;, it means &amp;quot;second&amp;quot; in Latin, thus &amp;quot;John the Second&amp;quot;.  I'm not sure how to interpret that in context, but there does seem to be some history regarding Latinate English names. This is an area of interest, although I know very little about it. (Offhand, I recall Stoppard's &amp;quot;Septimus Hodge&amp;quot; from the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arcadia&lt;/a&gt;, which is worth seeing/reading, particularly if you are a Strange&amp;amp;Norrell fan.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_(name)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonathan&lt;/a&gt; vs. John.  The names may be distinct but the root is the same and the meanings are similar: &amp;quot;God has graced&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;God has given&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-07T20:16:40.110" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2650" CreationDate="2017-06-07T19:38:55.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an initial attempt at answering, and the answer may evolve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;-  The verse itself is a synthesis of romantic and transcendental love&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joe Campbell would likely have talked about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mythicjourneys.org/newsletter_feb07_campbell.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amor/Roma&lt;/a&gt; connection, which might also be expressed as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eros&lt;/a&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agape&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She broke your throne&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could have many referents.  I thought about Arthur/Guinevere, and in that context is could be a reference to betrayal. (Arthurian legends have many Christian elements, although Tristan&amp;amp;Isolde is a more direct expression of Amor/Agape.)  But it seems more likely this is again a reference to the Old Testament, probably a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;She cut your hair&quot; is definitely a reference to Samson &amp;amp; Delilah&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is an allusion to the bible, consistent with the song title. In this context, it probably reflects the willingness of the pursuer to surrender their power to the object of desire, regardless of consequence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;You saw her bathing on the roof&quot; is obviously a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathsheba&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David and Bathsheba&lt;/a&gt;, which is about lust, sin and redemption &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[Thanks to Mithrandir for reminding me of this!]&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as the final line would seem to support this hypothesis that the agony and ecstasy of love, in this case, are welcomed and redemptive.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a restatement of a very old philosophical question in Christianity.  Here I think it could refer to his faith in love, on a transcendental level, but the need for confirmation on a physical level.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &quot;You saw her bathing on the roof/Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew&quot; made me think of Diana/Artemis, but this may be per my background in  Classical mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bathed may have a literal meaning, but for me it is clearly an allusion to the moon goddess, for whom &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actaeon#The_plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;being spied bathing is a central myth&lt;/a&gt;.  Acteaon is torn apart by his own hounds, which can be a metaphor for the agony of desire, or the inability to contextualize such transcendental beauty.  The story also has an element of human sacrifice to appease the goddess.  Clearly, Cohen's object of desire is a goddess to him, worth any sacrifice or torment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt the highly literate Cohen was aware of this story, and I think it's also extremely probably he was familiar with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Goddess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The White Goddess&lt;/a&gt;, which among other ideas, casts poetry as sort of a sacred language. The matriarchal elements are consistent with Cohen's surrender, romantically and spiritually, to the object of desire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T16:07:04.340" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T16:07:04.340" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3387" CreationDate="2017-06-08T06:11:09.323" Score="2" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Herta Müller, the Romanian-born-German-novelist, won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the same year, her novel &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Angel&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;) was published and received much laudation. Despite this, it seems to me that there has been a dearth of critical analysis of this novel (at least in English, I concede that I do not possess the ability to find it in any other language, although I would easily believe it exists in German). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I have only been able to find three or so essays/articles on the book (as well as some reviews by newspapers) but nothing that seemed to me to be serious, academic criticism. This was a huge surprise to me given the fact that the book came out in the same year that she won the Nobel Prize. My question is: has much academic criticism been written concerning this novel? Is there any substantial analysis of her work as a writer that pays special attention to this novel? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="850" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T08:14:25.790" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T18:22:34.830" Title="Is there much critical analysis of &quot;The Hunger Angel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;herta-muller&gt;&lt;the-hunger-angel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2691" CreationDate="2017-06-08T10:50:46.477" Score="8" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book seemed to be set between the wars and in hindsight felt like an English version of &lt;em&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;. Three brothers decided to spend the summer in the woods near their house. I think two initially planned but ended up taking the youngest with them as well. They set up a small camp and salted a pig so they had food for the summer. They saw a night heron down by a river. They met an old man who lived in a house made from faggots, they were initially very scared of the old guy, but eventually saw him as no threat and made friends. He taught them how to smoke his pipe as they'd seen him smoking and were curious. I think they may also have lost some of their food to what they thought was a bear but ended up being a badger, that might have been a beehive that they came across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the book in around 1985 but it was clearly written much earlier than this. I think it's called &lt;em&gt;Bear Woods&lt;/em&gt; but I may have conflated that with a local area of the same name. The version I had was blue cloth no dustcover and had some beautiful white on black illustrations. Nobody I know as an adult has ever heard of it and maybe my google-fu is terrible but I've failed to find it anywhere online either. It's clearly a children's book, but not in the sense of a picture book with a few simple sentences. It's a coming of age story which I would love to revisit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1036" LastEditorUserId="1036" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T08:58:05.443" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T08:58:05.443" Title="Identify a book about boys living in the woods for a summer" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T10:52:34.303" Score="10" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;The Heart of Haiku&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Hirshfield. In it, there are many examples of haikus by Bashō. In them, they always appear to give reference to a time, either explicitly or through description of the moment. Are there any examples of early Japanese haiku that attempt to describe a place rather than a moment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-08T15:50:10.933" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T22:29:57.807" Title="Do traditional Japanese haikus always describe a moment?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;haiku&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-08T10:59:23.803" Score="3" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;The Heart of Haiku&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Hirshfield. In it, many examples of haikus translated from Japanese are given. However, in their English form, they lack the rhythm and meter of Haiku. Does this take away from their meaning? If so, in what way? In music, songs' lyrics are often translated loosely to maintain the melody and rhythm. Does an equivalent process occur for music?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T22:24:44.890" Title="Does translation take away from the meaning of verse and poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2686" CreationDate="2017-06-08T21:47:36.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh yes.  But it should not stop you reading in translation! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many poems contain &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wordplay&lt;/a&gt; that is only possible in the original language, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;idiom&lt;/a&gt; that is only meaningful in the context of that culture.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tang Dynasty Poetry&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, has an additional layer of meaning based on the ideograms used. Reading in translation removes this dimension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhythm can be used to impart meaning, but in my experience this is fairly rare.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these elements will be described in commentary on the poems in the translated works, so my advice is, where possible, look for translations with the most annotation, and, where possible, read multiple translations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T21:47:36.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2686" CreationDate="2017-06-08T22:24:44.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Douglas Hofstadter wrote a wonderful meditation on translation, the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0465086454&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Ton Beau de Marot&lt;/a&gt;. It contains literally scores of translations of the same poem from French into English. Each translation preserves some aspects of the original: meter, rhyme, various aspects of tone, wordplay, vowels, consonants. Some are close, some are loose. Some are whimsical, some are serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of them is the same poem; each of them is different from all others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to capture everything about a poem in translation. You can't even read the same poem twice: the &quot;translation&quot; from the page into your head will always vary a little. A great poem, I'd say, is one that will vary more between readings, making it evergreen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's fair to say that translation &quot;takes away&quot; from the meaning of the poem. There was never any single &quot;meaning&quot; for it to detract from. A translation adds to it, creating a new poem which is somehow conceptually related, but the original remains right where it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poem -- indeed, any text -- is a dialogue between its author and its reader. The &quot;meaning&quot; of that dialogue is the change it produces in the reader. The author never really knows the reader's state to start with, and can't point to a unique transformation that they can be certain will take place. The author may have a variety of hopes for it, and the totality of those hopes are expressed in the text as you see it. Change a single letter and you get a different thing. Substitute a word for its &quot;synonym&quot; and you still get a different thing. That's why &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jitterbug_Perfume&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Robbins had a character declare&lt;/a&gt;, “There are no such things as synonyms!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in every translation, something is lost, and something is gained. That &quot;something&quot; could be anything, any aspect of language. You can hope to arrive at a similar effect that a native reader would have had upon reading the original, but even that native reader won't have a single &quot;meaning&quot; for the poem. So how close you come to achieving that effect is itself a new dialogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-06-08T22:24:44.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2692" CreationDate="2017-06-09T08:51:52.257" Score="14" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago, I translated all of Sappho's poems. In doing so, I had to reconstruct some parts of the texts, and do some amateur level criticism. One example of such work lies in the poem sometimes referred to as in the question title, whose first line goes &lt;code&gt;φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν&lt;/code&gt; (That [man] seems to me equal to the gods). The second stanza goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν. τό μ’ ἦ μάν&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ὠς γὰρ εὔιδον βροχέως σε, φώνας&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  οὖδεν ἔτ’ ἴκει,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or rather, this is the version I like best. The other version has line 3 read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ' ἴδω βρόχε', ὤς με φώνας&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(and l. 4 with εἴκει). Now the reasons I prefer the reading given first are two:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not like that tmesis. For some reason, it feels unnecessary to split the verb in two and put that pronoun in the middle for syllable quantity. Of course, another solution to this (which is my invention) would be &lt;code&gt;ἐσϝίδω&lt;/code&gt;, with a digamma for the quantity. This doesn't address the other reason though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catullus's version of this has &lt;code&gt;aspexi&lt;/code&gt;, which is indicative, and not some form of subjunctive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trouble is, the only source I found with this reading is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia802704.us.archive.org/22/items/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wharton&lt;/a&gt;, which has no critical apparatus or commentary, whereas everywhere else I see the second reading (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante06/Sappho/sap_intr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliotheca Augustana&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://inamidst.com/stuff/sappho/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The complete poems of Sappho&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600209.us.archive.org/25/items/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmonds&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/doc/34720745/Sappho-and-Alcaeus-Loeb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Campbell&lt;/a&gt;). So I was wondering: why did Wharton put this version forward, and what is experts' opinion about how likely this is to have been the original version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Extra references&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/sappho/sappho0.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cox's edition of Sappho&lt;/a&gt; was formerly on the English Wikisource, and is another edition with &lt;code&gt;εὔιδον&lt;/code&gt;, and also seems to have no critical apparatus and no comments on this reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia800309.us.archive.org/27/items/LonginusOnTheSublimeTheGreekTextEditedAfterTheParisManuscriptWith/longinus_sublime_Roberts.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This edition of Longinus &lt;em&gt;On the sublime&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; reports the text as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KWSub.png&quot; alt=&quot;amended text in the above link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that is with &lt;code&gt;ἔς σ' ἴδω&lt;/code&gt;, and adds this critical note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2cCi8.png&quot; alt=&quot;critical note to the poem in the above link&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is Longinus's work following a Paris manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS: Little self-advertising&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently opened &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelegorini.blogspot.it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blog&lt;/a&gt; where, among other things, I will post, very very slowly, all of my work on Sappho. For now, the only Sappho I've posted is &lt;a href=&quot;https://michelegorini.blogspot.com.tr/2017/06/catullus-and-sappho-ode-to-anactoria.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;precisely this poem&lt;/a&gt;, alongside Catullus's version. Any views and/or comments are welcome! &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastEditorUserId="1662" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T19:44:09.750" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T19:44:09.750" Title="About l. 3 of the second stanza of Sappho's Ὠδὴ εἰς Ἀνακτωρίαν (Ode to Anactoria)" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;philology&gt;&lt;sappho&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2684" CreationDate="2017-06-09T10:35:05.077" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendon_Chase&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brendon Chase&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denys_Watkins-Pitchford&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BB&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His books are very hard to get now (at least where I live) but you may be able to find the TV series based on it, which stayed quite true to the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is about three boys who go live in the woods (Brendon Chase) to escape their aunt. Robin and John, the older two, go first and later fetch Harold, the youngest, who had had measles. The old man is Smokoe Joe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see there it was written in 1944.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T17:38:37.500" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T17:38:37.500" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2690" CreationDate="2017-06-09T16:29:04.643" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To begin with, we must remember that the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho_31&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sappho 31&lt;/a&gt; is preserved only in (Pseudo-)Longinus's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Sublime&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Sublime&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a first century work whose authorship is disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wharton, in his preface, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have not concerned myself much with textual criticism, for I do not arrogate any power of discernment greater than that possessed by a scholar like Bergk. Where he is satisfied, I am content. (pg. xi)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly incongruous, then, that Bergk's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/poetaelyricigrae00berguoft#page/600/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetae Lyrici Graeci&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (pg. 600-601) &lt;strong&gt;does not agree with this reading&lt;/strong&gt; in its proposed text. (Note, however, some counter-examples below.) In fact, it does not even honor this reading with a mention in its &lt;em&gt;apparatus criticus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bergk's reading:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὥς σε γὰρ ϝίδω, βροχέως με φώνας&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  οὐδὲν ἔτ' ἴκει&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentions two other readings for this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Blomfieldius &amp;amp; Ahrensius&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὡς γὰρ σ' ἰδω βρόχεως...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hermannus&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὡς ἴδω γάρ σε βρόχε', ὥς...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where does the &quot;εὔιδον&quot; reading come from? I found that it is cited in Merrill's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0004%3Atext%3Dcomm%3Apoem%3D51&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commentary to Catullus 51&lt;/a&gt; (Harvard University Press, 1893).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely enough, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapfo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slovak Wikipedia article on Sappho&lt;/a&gt; also gives the &quot;εὔιδον&quot; reading, citing Bergk's Teubner edition. In addition, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0313%3Astephpage%3D763a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bernardakis' commentary to Plutarch's &lt;em&gt;Amatorius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; cites the same reading from Bergk, though I cannot find it. It is possible that Bergk emended the text between editions, but I am not in a position to verify that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roberts, in the 1907 Cambridge University of Press &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0639%3Achapter%3D10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition of Longinus' &lt;em&gt;De Sublimitate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, follows the text of Bergk almost exactly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὥς σε γὰρ ἴδω βροχέως με φωνᾶς οὐδὲν ἔτ̓ εἴκει &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Loeb edition (1995), reviewed by Russell, is very close to this as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ὥς γὰρ &amp;lt;ἐς&gt; σ' ἴδω βρόχε' ὥς με...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, the &quot;&amp;lt;ἐς&gt;&quot; suggests the editor's &lt;em&gt;suggested addition.&lt;/em&gt; I unfortunately don't have access to the latest Teubner edition, but the &lt;strong&gt;overwhelming consensus seems to be in favor of the reading without εὔιδον.&lt;/strong&gt; Given the many divergent readings of this line, it is likely that it was bungled very early in its manuscript tradition: it was, after all, a relatively obscure work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1227" LastEditorUserId="1227" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T16:58:50.240" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T16:58:50.240" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2693" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2017-06-09T17:09:48.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;interpretations of specific passages or aspects of a work of literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;the history or context around literary tropes, conventions, awards, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;identification of stories or quotes you can't place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;other specific questions about literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T17:09:48.780" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T17:09:48.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2694" PostTypeId="7" CreationDate="2017-06-09T17:10:38.650" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;reading recommendations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;questions about creating literature yourself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;    &lt;li&gt;questions about languages in general, not just as they relate to literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-06-09T17:10:38.650" LastActivityDate="2017-06-09T17:10:38.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2695" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2697" CreationDate="2017-06-09T20:54:18.377" Score="4" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;asar bhī le rahā huuñ terī chup kā&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  tujhe qaa.il bhī kartā jā rahā huuñ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm researching on Urdu shayars and it's a part of my assignment to collect 500 urdu shers with their meaning. The original link for the above lines is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rekhta.org/couplets/asar-bhii-le-rahaa-huun-terii-chup-kaa-firaq-gorakhpuri-couplets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I understood from first line: &quot;poet is referring to his beloved that he is enjoying her's silence&quot;. But I'm not getting the second line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1667" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T11:25:56.907" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T18:14:31.123" Title="What is the meaning of the second line of this sher?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;khamoshi-shayari&gt;&lt;urdu-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2695" CreationDate="2017-06-10T18:14:31.123" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I know my language correctly then the literal meaning is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even after being influenced by your silence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am also impressing you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the shayaris are romantic. So I'll assume that the first person is male and the one he is talking to is female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, here the Shayar, Firaq Gorakhpuri, probably says that he is telling a story (or anything else) to her. And she is listening to it silently. In that way, he is impressing her with his words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1564" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T18:14:31.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T19:43:26.747" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;While listening to Splean's last album &lt;em&gt;Ключ к шифру&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Key to the Cipher&lt;/em&gt;) again, I've wondered about a particular line from the song &quot;Джа играет джаз&quot; (&quot;Ja is Playing Jazz&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Сегодня Джа играет джаз,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  А завтра – Родину продаст.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today Ja is playing jazz,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and tomorrow he'll sell his motherland.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Translation mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It very much seemed like there's some background I was missing, since people don't usually go accusing people of betraying their country in song lyrics for no good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turned out I was right - &lt;a href=&quot;https://reproduktor.net/gruppa-splin/dzha-igraet-dzhaz/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;, where I also took the lyrics from, claims that &quot;Сегодня он играет джаз, а завтра Родину продаст&quot; (&quot;Today he is playing jazz, and tomorrow he'll sell his motherland.&quot;) is a line from a Soviet magazine &lt;em&gt;Крокодил&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Crocodile&lt;/em&gt;), which became popular and widely known for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, but who is Ja? &lt;a href=&quot;http://teenslang.su/content/%D0%B4%D0%B6%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; lists &quot;джа&quot; is a slang word for jazz - how is this related to &quot;him&quot; from the magazine? And how does that relate to the rest of the lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Сегодня Джа играет джаз,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  А завтра – Родину продаст.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Хотя, кому она нужна?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Об этом знает только Джа.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Сегодня Джа играет джаз&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  И это наш последний шанс,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Чтобы увидеть старика.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Пока не скажет Джа – пока,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My brief summary: Ja is playing jazz; he's an old man; he's going to sell (betray) his country (but who needs it anyway?); and it's their last chance to see &quot;the old man&quot; before he says &quot;goodbye&quot; (presumably dies or runs away).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a reference to some political event I'm surely oblivious to, or just a random reference added in for no reason at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T02:13:28.610" Title="In the song &quot;Ja is Playing Jazz&quot; (Джа играет джаз), who is Ja?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;splean&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2699" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-10T19:57:55.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-10T19:57:55.860" LastActivityDate="2017-06-10T19:57:55.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2700" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-10T19:57:55.860" Score="0" Body="To be used when asking about the Russian rock band Splean and their songs. Use with the [song-lyrics] and [russian-literature] tags as appropriate." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T17:56:16.350" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:56:16.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-10T20:59:27.547" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;There will be many unmarked spoilers for &lt;em&gt;Kokopelli &amp;amp; Co. In Attack of the Smart Pies&lt;/em&gt; by Larry Gonick here. Just a warning.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Darien Drinkwater is, indisputably, the main antagonist of &lt;em&gt;Attack of the Smart Pies&lt;/em&gt;. He&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;kills Emma's parents &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;steals Emma's number and key&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;kidnaps Mrs. Krishnamurti &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;attempts to poison Mrs. Krishnamurti&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does some other stuff that may not be so nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, we can explain why he did these things - the car crash that killed Emma's parents was an accident. He explained that he couldn't turn himself in because of his wife, who got a head injury and doesn't remember what happened. He then takes in Emma as a foster child, even though he never wanted a child around, in an attempt to make things right. He doesn't even get angry when she burns his posterior half off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He takes the key and number, and tries to take the money, because he feels he deserves it - he did take care of Emma for many years. My theory here is that he has slightly unhinged by the death of his wife, if you feel like that's a stronger argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He accidentally knocks Mrs. Krishnamurti's head on the concrete, and takes her and locks her in the basement - she will interfere with her worries about Emma not being at school (she's the teacher). Drinkwater even gives her a whole lot of sandwiches (okay, they were meat and she's a vegetarian, but he gave her food), and even the newspapers that she asks for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He only tries to poison her because Feather suggested it (this is complicated and requires knowledge of the book), it didn't sound like he was planning on killing her (although I could be missing it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he says that he never meant for anything to happen like that, that he didn't mean to hurt anyone (around p. 88 IIRC). He does attempt to hurt Koko at the end, though...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through all of this, we also have to consider that he had just lost his wife, and that he was very good to Emma before all of this. He does exhibit some alarming qualities before this, though, like screaming at his wife with his eyes closed while driving the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we consider Darien Drinkwater to be objectively evil&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T12:06:14.433" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T12:06:14.433" Title="Can Darien Drinkwater be considered evil?" Tags="&lt;larry-gonick&gt;&lt;kokopelli-attack-of-the-smart-pies&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2725" CreationDate="2017-06-10T21:32:07.493" Score="4" ViewCount="1067" Body="&lt;p&gt;While seeking the answer to a &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;story-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; question the other day, I got sucked into a collection of Guy de Maupassant's short stories. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Have fun!&lt;/a&gt;) One of them, &amp;quot;The Orphan&amp;quot;, is about a woman, Mademoiselle Source, who adopts a young boy and is later - so the text strongly implies - murdered by him. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/266/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full text here.&lt;/a&gt;) My question is twofold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; did he kill her?&lt;/strong&gt; He does fall under suspicion, but seems to have a solid alibi and is acquitted. How, then (and when) did he actually manage to perform the deed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He proved that he had spent the evening up to eleven o'clock in a cafe. Ten persons had seen him, having remained there till his departure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The driver of the diligence stated that he had set down the murdered woman on the road between half-past nine and ten o'clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; did he kill her?&lt;/strong&gt; What was his motivation? She'd brought him up since he was a child, and never been anything but loving to him. Even if he hated her for some reason, she was actually in the process of leaving her home when she died, so he wouldn't have had to put up with her any longer anyway. What possible reason could he have to want her dead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T10:57:31.270" Title="Why and how did the orphan kill his adoptive mother?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-11T02:11:08.227" Score="16" ViewCount="1499" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading Kilmartin and Cox's translation of Stanislaw Lem's &lt;em&gt;Solaris&lt;/em&gt;, and one particular passage stood out to me. I'm hesitant to ask a question about the Kilmartin and Cox translation, because I found out after reading it that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/15/first-direct-translation-solaris&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1) it's a very poor translation, most likely due to the fact that (2) it's not a direct translation, it's a translation of a French translation of the Polish text&lt;/a&gt;. The passage occurs on page 30 of my translation, where one character is referred to as a &quot;Negress&quot; and described using racially coded language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suddenly, looming up in the opening which led to the communal bathroom, a tall silhouette appeared, barely distinguishable in the surrounding gloom. I stood stock still, frozen to the spot. A giant Negress was coming silently towards me with a smooth, rolling gait. I caught a gleam from the whites of her eyes and heard the soft slapping of her bare feet. She was wearing nothing but a yellow skirt of plaited straw; her enormous breasts swung freely and her black arms were as thick as thighs. Less than a yard separated us as she passed me, but she did not give me so much as a glance. She went on her way, her grass skirt swinging rhythmically, resembling one of the steatopygous statues in anthropological museums. She opened Gibarian's door and on the threshold her silhouette stood out distinctly against the bright light from inside the room. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, I feel like I'm missing some things in translation here: the word &quot;Negress&quot; seems weird to me, and I'm not sure if this is due to Kilmartin and Cox's translation. On the other hand, the passage appeals to several racial stereotypes, such as the reference to the &quot;grass skirt,&quot; and the &quot;statues in anthropological museums.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three interrelated questions. How much was this passage altered in translation? How would the language have been understood by Polish readers? And why did Lem code this particular character as black?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T08:37:40.377" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T08:37:40.377" Title="Understanding the use of the word &quot;Negress&quot; in the Kilmartin and Cox translation of Solaris" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;&lt;stanislaw-lem&gt;&lt;solaris&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15617" CreationDate="2017-06-11T10:34:22.413" Score="12" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sappho 94 (τεθνάκην δ' ἀδόλως θέλω), there is this tercet at ll. 25-27, which is very incomplete, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600209.us.archive.org/25/items/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog/lyragraecabeing00edmogoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmonds&lt;/a&gt; doesn't even have, and which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hs-augsburg.de/%7Eharsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante06/Sappho/sap_me05.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliotheca Augustana&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130902072454/http://www.scribd.com:80/doc/34720745/Sappho-and-Alcaeus-Loeb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Campbell p. 69&lt;/a&gt; both read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;κωὔτε τις [^ ^ οὔ]τε τι&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ἶρων οὐδ᾽ ὐ[^ – ^ ^&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ἔπλετ᾽, ὄππ[οθεν ἄμ]μες ἀπέσκομεν·&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia802704.us.archive.org/22/items/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wharton&lt;/a&gt; seems to not even have the fragment, and then safopoemas. This weird doc full of horrid typos, which is no longer available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk/data/doc/safopoemas.doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the link it was at&lt;/a&gt;, which is now broken, but can be found as a pdf &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170712221542/http://ftp.utalca.cl/intercambio/plataforma/lgc/Dani/Libros/Para%20imprimir/Poemas_completos_Safo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with the same garbage typos as the doc version, and is based on a Spanish edition of Sappho, has this semi-garbage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;χωΰτε τις[λόγος οδ]τε τι Τρον ούδ' ύ[δατος ρ6χ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ϊπλετ' όπ π [όθεν Εμ]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;μες άπέσχομεν&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very messy, but it allows us to almost complete the above as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;κωὔτε τις [λόγος οὔ]τε τι&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ἶρον οὐδ᾽ ὔ[δατος †ρ6χ†&lt;br&gt;&#xA;ἔπλετ᾽, ὄππ[οθεν ἄμ]μες ἀπέσκομεν·&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safopoemas translation reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Y no hubo colina profana | And there was no sacred hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;o sagrada, ni fuentes de aguas | Or profane, nor springs of water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a donde no hayamos ido | Where we haven't gone to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tells us that &amp;quot;λόγος&amp;quot; is probably a typo/mojibake for &amp;quot;λόφος&amp;quot;, given by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=lofos&amp;amp;la=greek#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LSJ as quoted by Perseus's Greek Word Study Tool&lt;/a&gt; as various things including &amp;quot;crest of a hill&amp;quot;, and that the incomprehensible &amp;quot;ρ6χ&amp;quot; must somehow mean &amp;quot;spring&amp;quot;. I looked for all possible combinations of vowels substituted for the 6 and endings, and found nothing on Perseus, but found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=raxia&amp;amp;la=greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;ραχία&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;flood-tide&amp;quot;, on the Rocci dictionary. Not too fitting, but maybe. Back in the days when I translated Sappho, I had temporarily settled for &amp;quot;ῥέον&amp;quot;, but now I guess a better way to do this would be &amp;quot;ῥόος&amp;quot;, both meaning &amp;quot;stream&amp;quot; and keeping the initial consonant and possibly a vowel. Analysing other fragments in that safopoemas, 6 is almost certainly an omicron, and the chi could be a kappa, so we could have &amp;quot;ροχ&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ροκ&amp;quot;, neither of which yields anything interesting on Perseus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked around for another source for this completion (possibly Reinach, which this document claims to be following in the quote below), but was unable to find any. So my question is: what was this reconstruction supposed to look like, and who proposed it, and of course, how supported is this amongst critics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quote from safopoemas.doc's introduction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El texto griego que hemos utilizado fue el que preparó Theodore Reinach, en atención a su magnífico aparato crítico y como homenaje mínimo a su severo y conservador trabajo, que prefiere, sin audacia, leer lo mínimo con la seguridad de que esas escasas palabras fueron de Safo, en lugar de las largas, interesantes y arriesgadas reconstrucciones de otros autores. Como la edición de Reinach, que finalmente revisó Aimé Puech, fue anterior a la publicación de varios papiros importantes y de otras ediciones útilísimas, hemos consultado permanentemente las de Edmonds, Diehl y Page, y en varias ocasiones las hemos seguido.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek text we have used was that which Theodor Reinach prepared, with attention to his magnificent critical apparatus and as a minimal hommage to his strict and conservative work, who prefers, without boldness, to read the least with the sureness that these scarce words were of Sappho, in the place of the large, interesting and risked reconstructions of other authors. Since Reinach's edition, which Aimé Puech finally revised, was prior to the publication of various important papyri and of other very useful editions, we have permanently consulted those of Edmonds, Diehl and Page, and in various occasions we have followed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600201.us.archive.org/0/items/supplementumlyri00diehuoft/supplementumlyri00diehuoft.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diehl p. 49&lt;/a&gt; also has an incomplete (in fact, even more incomplete than the others) version. Can't get ahold of Bergk, but seen as &lt;a href=&quot;http://inamidst.com/stuff/sappho/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; doesn't give the Bergk number for this poem, Bergk probably didn't have the poem at all. Voigt is also either to be paid for, a Google Book, or on researchgate which I'd have to join for something which is not my field of study, which feels like lying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T18:47:22.407" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T20:01:27.330" Title="Who put forward this completion to Sappho 94, and what is it actually supposed to read?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;sappho&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2702" CreationDate="2017-06-11T10:35:53.273" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe that it was him who killed her. I think that it was the two relatives.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did they kill her?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had a lot of time to do so. They used knife. (As given in the story)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did they kill her?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few reasons I believe it was the relatives and not the orphan who killed Madam Source are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They wanted Madam's wealth from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only they knew that Madam was frightened by the orphan's behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They must have thought that the Madam changed the will in fear.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Orphan was mere 15 years old (i.e. a teenager) when he behaved so peculiarly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As given in the question itself, he had no reason to kill her.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He turned out to be a good-natured guy in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The relatives thought that they could frame the orphan and get the wealth for themselves as they were the only living relatives of Madam (given in the story).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1564" LastEditorUserId="1564" LastEditDate="2017-06-11T11:53:11.867" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T11:53:11.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3710" CreationDate="2017-06-11T10:37:55.043" Score="4" ViewCount="1297" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hamla hai chaar sū dar-o-dīvār-e-shahr kā&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sab jañgaloñ ko shahr ke andar sameT lo  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;حملہ ہے چار سُو در و دیوارِ شہر کا &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  سب جنگلوں کو شہر کے اندر سمیٹ لو&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://rekhta.org/couplets/hamla-hai-chaar-suu-dar-o-diivaar-e-shahr-kaa-jaun-eliya-couplets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the meaning of each word independently, but unable to compile them in order to get the meaning of the whole sher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I understand from this: &quot;Someone is attacked by someone from all sides and that person is advising or ordering others to collect all the forests inside the town&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't think that is what Jaun Eliya meant this from the sher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1667" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T10:29:11.063" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T10:29:11.063" Title="What is the meaning of this sher?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;urdu-literature&gt;&lt;khamoshi-shayari&gt;&lt;jaun-eliya&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2017-06-11T17:02:59.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By reading it, it's quite obvious that the literal meaning is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Attack of the doors and walls of the city from the four directions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gather all the forests inside the city&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the Shayar Jaun Eliya, conveys that the walls of the cities are expanding. So there has to be the deforestation at nearby places. So the shayar asks us to put the forest(s) in the city, i.e., to plant the trees in the city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1564" LastActivityDate="2017-06-11T17:02:59.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2708" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2709" CreationDate="2017-06-12T03:03:08.037" Score="6" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UnNbAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=From%20an%20army%20of%20three%20divisions%20walden&amp;amp;pg=PA345#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=From%20an%20army%20of%20three%20divisions%20walden&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passage in question&lt;/a&gt; is in &lt;em&gt;Walden&lt;/em&gt;'s conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The philosopher said &quot;From an army of three divisions one can take&#xA;  away its general, and put it in disorder; from the man the most abject&#xA;  and vulgar one cannot take away his thought.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Thoreau referencing here? Is it anyone in particular, or is he making more of a general reference to &quot;The Philosopher&quot; as a cultural construct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1673" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T15:50:02.213" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T15:50:02.213" Title="Who is Thoreau quoting (or paraphrasing) here in Walden?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;walden&gt;&lt;henry-david-thoreau&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2708" CreationDate="2017-06-12T14:42:28.730" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes from Confucius, in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.acmuller.net/con-dao/analects.html#div-10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Analects&lt;/em&gt;, 9.26&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Master said: “You can snatch away the general of a large army, but you cannot snatch away the will of even the lowliest of men.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This connection is made in Bill McKibben's edition of &lt;em&gt;Walden&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=AZIDAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA307&amp;amp;lpg=PA307&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 307&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T14:42:28.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T16:01:16.450" Score="12" ViewCount="1788" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading Brave New World it seemed obvious to me that Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne are in some way referring to Marx and Lenin, but I couldn't figure out any clue to support this claim. Is it truly so and what are they representing? Is there any (related) symbolism in their other names (first and last, respectively), i.e. Bernard and Crowne?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1676" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T07:20:42.310" Title="Symbolism of Marx and Lenina's names in Huxley's Brave New World?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2711" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:51:35.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T17:51:35.543" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:51:35.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2712" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:51:35.543" Score="0" Body="For questions about the series of fantasy novels, and the franchise of comics, as it relates to Literature defined in the Help Center. Use with [andrzej-sapkowski], [polish-literature], and [comics], as appropriate. Note that questions about the games and TV series inspired by it are considered off-topic in this site." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T05:29:32.353" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T05:29:32.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2713" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2714" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1974 spy novel. Use with the [john-le-carre] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T17:56:31.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2715" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-12T19:45:03.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T19:45:03.830" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T19:45:03.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2716" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-12T19:45:03.830" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;Their Eyes Were Watching God&quot; by African American author Zora Neale Hurston. Questions about this novel should be tagged with [zora-neale-hurston]. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T17:04:38.533" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T17:04:38.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2717" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2718" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" Score="0" Body="Use this with [hayao-miyazaki] and [manga] tags" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T19:56:40.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" Score="0" Body="For questions on the book &quot;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values&quot;. Use this with the [robert-m-pirsig] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T20:15:12.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-12T21:09:41.520" Score="10" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background and research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I am planning to post this poem on &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelegorini.blogspot.it/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;my blog&lt;/a&gt; relatively soon, I was doing some research on the first line. From what I had written previously, I seem to have found two different versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Παῖδες, ἄφωνος ἔοισα τόδ' ἐννέπω, αἴ τις ἔραται&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Καίπερ ἄφωνος ἔοισα ποτεννέπω, αἴ τις ἔραται&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I opted for the first one for my translations, because &lt;code&gt;καίπερ&lt;/code&gt; only stresses the concessive (is that the word?) nature of the participle, and I preferred to have a vocative there like &lt;code&gt;παῖδες&lt;/code&gt;, and also because instead of a seemingly useless prefix I preferred an object for the verb &lt;code&gt;ἐννέπω&lt;/code&gt;. Tonight I was trying to get more info on the sources. I looked into &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/graeca/Chronologia/S_ante06/Sappho/sap_intr.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bibliotheca Augustana&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;code&gt;ἐπιγράμματα&lt;/code&gt; link does not exist. I looked at Edmonds (who proposes another version, &lt;code&gt;παῖς ἔτ'&lt;/code&gt;, which I prefer to the one I opted for back in the days, and has &lt;code&gt;τόρ'&lt;/code&gt; instead of the object, an adjective referred to the speaker meaning &quot;clear, distinct&quot;, perhaps I will adopt this reading), and he says &lt;code&gt;Anth. Pal. 6 269&lt;/code&gt;. Sadly, I found no scans of that. I looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/doc/34720745/Sappho-and-Alcaeus-Loeb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Campbell&lt;/a&gt; hoping for a more detailed critical note, and the poem isn't there! &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia802704.us.archive.org/22/items/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog/sapphomemoirtex00bunngoog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wharton&lt;/a&gt; agrees with me, &lt;a href=&quot;http://inamidst.com/stuff/sappho/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Complete Poems of Sappho&lt;/a&gt; follows Cox (or so he says), and ends up agreeing with my choice -- almost, he has &lt;code&gt;τότ'&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;τόδ'&lt;/code&gt;, perhaps a typo, as &quot;then&quot; doesn't seem to fit in there. I'm starting to wonder where I got the other choices. Well, the &lt;code&gt;καίπερ&lt;/code&gt; might have been off the weird safopoemas.doc (pdf version &lt;a href=&quot;http://ftp.utalca.cl/intercambio/plataforma/lgc/Dani/Libros/Para%20imprimir/Poemas_completos_Safo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), for which cfr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2704/who-put-forward-this-completion-to-sappho-94-and-what-is-it-actually-supposed-t&quot;&gt;my post on the completion of Sappho 94&lt;/a&gt;. But the other thing? Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%8E%CE%BC%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9_%CE%95%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%B8%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%BC%CE%B9%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Greek Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; completely agrees with me on this! Googling &lt;code&gt;Σαϋναϊάδα&lt;/code&gt; yields &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loebclassics.com/view/sappho-fragments/1982/pb_LCL142.205.xml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;code&gt;ποτεννέπω&lt;/code&gt;. I don't remember this source, but perhaps that was it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyways, I was wondering what the experts think about this line and its most likely &quot;correct&quot; reading, what the sources for this poem have to say, and why Campbell doesn't include it. Is it perhaps of disputed authorship, along with the other two epigrams in elegiac couplets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference to Greek Wikisource with texts of epigrams&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of these (the present one is Απόσπασμα 118, the other one 119) can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%8E%CE%BC%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9_%CE%95%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%B8%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%BC%CE%B9%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The third one, to the fisher Pelagon (&lt;code&gt;τῷ γρίπει Πελάγωνι πάτηρ ἐπέθηκε Μένισκος / Κύρτον καὶ κώπαν, μνᾶμα κακοζοΐας&lt;/code&gt;), has strangely been removed even from there. Somebody &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%95%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%B3%CF%81%CE%AC%CE%BC%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B1_%CE%A3%CE%B1%CF%80%CF%86%CE%BF%CF%8D%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; probably doesn't have a clear idea what an epigram is :). Anyway here is someone following Edmonds on the poem of the question and including all 3 epigrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bergk&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600207.us.archive.org/18/items/poetaelyricigrae00berguoft/poetaelyricigrae00berguoft.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bergk p. 636&lt;/a&gt; ha all epigrams, his line 1 reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Παῖδες, ἄφωνος ἐοῖσα τότ' ἐννέπω, αἴ τις ἔρηται&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he has this critical note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U7pG4.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U7pG4.png&quot; alt=&quot;Bergk&amp;#39;s critical note for the epigram&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Acknowledging a mistake&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoopsies! I missed them in Campbell because they were in smaller font. p. 113. Et voilà: good morning &lt;code&gt;ποτεννέπω&lt;/code&gt;, though Campbell agrees on the vocative. Here is a screenshot of all the epigrams in Campbell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RWWKS.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RWWKS.png&quot; alt=&quot;The three epigrams in Campbell&amp;#39;s Sappho edition&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastEditorUserId="1662" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T07:22:32.900" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T07:22:32.900" Title="About Sappho's epigram for the little girl Aithopia: first line (manuscript tradition and experts' take), and authorship" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;sappho&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2643" CreationDate="2017-06-12T21:52:10.010" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this color scheme reflects a larger theme in the book (and, indeed, the series); namely, that of realizing and accepting that one's identity can have more than one part to it. The colors, then, are clues to the characters' initial states. Let me explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;1: Ruin and Preservation&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One idea that is present throughout the series is that Ruin and Preservation don't stack up as good and evil -- they're more about Ruin and Preservation (see, for example, the quote in the question post). They're opposites; where one exists, the other cannot. Where one acts, the actions of the other are canceled. It appears that these two forces are irreconcilably opposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by the end of the story, Sazed takes up both of the powers, and becomes Harmony. This, of course, wouldn't work very well if Ruin were evil. These things are powers, and they only &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt; to be contradictory; Sazed's ascension proves that they are, in fact, compatible. This is the most subtle, yet perhaps most significant expression of this theme in the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;2: Vin and Elend&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the entire series, both Vin and Elend struggle to understand the different parts of their personalities and identity, before ultimately realizing that they are, indeed, able to integrate the different facets of their identities into a cohesive whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vin has a short conversation with Elend about their struggles (at their first ball in &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;, in chapter 32):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; Vin said firmly. &quot;No, I'm &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; about this, Elend. You've been&#xA;  doing the exact thing I have. You've been so determined to be a good&#xA;  king that you've let it squish who you really are. Our&#xA;  responsibilities shouldn't have to destroy us.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They haven't destroyed you,&quot; he said, smiling behind his short beard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They nearly did,&quot; Vin said. &quot;Elend, I had to realize that I could be&#xA;  both people -- the Mistborn of the streets and the woman of the court. I&#xA;  had to acknowledge that the new person I'm becoming is a valid&#xA;  extension of who I am. But for you, it's opposite! You have to realize&#xA;  that who you were is still a valid part of you. That person makes&#xA;  silly comments, and does things just to provoke a reaction. But, he's&#xA;  also lovable and kindhearted. You can't lose those things just because&#xA;  you're the emperor.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A) Vin&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vin grew up in the gangs on streets. She becomes, of necessity, incredibly hard and street-smart. After discovering her Mistborn abilities and training under Kelsier, she becomes a super-powered assassin and warrior. These are violent and destructive elements of personality and identity; these might belong to Ruin. She describes herself as a &quot;knife&quot; more than a few times (&quot;She was a knife -- Elend's knife, the Final Empire's knife.&quot; -chapter 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when she attends her first ball (posing as a noble), she discovers this tremendous affinity for the social life, and for dressing up and dancing. Her struggle to understand how this soft, Preservation-linked&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; side of herself fits with the warrior side is discussed many times in all three books of the series. For example, in chapter 27 of &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the longest time, she'd struggled to understand how that part of&#xA;  her fit into the rest of her life. She still wasn't certain she knew&#xA;  the answer. Was Valette Renoux, the girl she had pretended to be at&#xA;  the balls, really a part of Vin, or just a fabrication devised to&#xA;  serve Kelsier's plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also takes up reading and studying, spending more time than perhaps necessary studying the Alendi's journal, and taking extensive notes about it. She studies the Deepness as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vin eventually becomes Preservation, and gives up her life to destroy Ruin. Her final, and perhaps defining act was a major one on the side of Preservation. However, more important was her ability to accept that both parts of her identity are equally valid. Here, at the end of a lengthy internal monologue (ch. 32):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's...true&lt;/em&gt;, Vin thought. &lt;em&gt;I can be both. Why did it take me so long to figure it out?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;B) Elend&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Elend is first introduced, he is a gentle and soft-spoken scholar, more interested in books and theories of politics than in getting his hands dirty in any real-world endeavor. This gentleness, I think, should be associated with Preservation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost against his will, he is thrust into the real world and forced to become increasingly more involved in it, first with the (constitutional) monarchy of a city, and eventually creating an empire by (largely Vin's) force. At the end of the second book, Elend gains Allomantic powers, and becomes a warrior and assassin more powerful (if less skilled) than Vin. These violent facets of Elend's identity clash with his former, more simple life, and this is something that dogs the emperor throughout the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;, he spends much time and mental effort deciding where the line is drawn between protection (of his own people and others) and aggression (accomplishing that protection by conquering an enemy city). In chapter 36:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That was the step he balked at -- the last step that would take him&#xA;  from defender to aggressor. From protector to conqueror. And he was&#xA;  frustrated at his own hesitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that instance, although Elend initially instructs his soldiers to prepare for attack, he ultimately decides chooses the path that Preservation indicated was preferable (in chapter 55) by calling off the attack (ch 65). The color white is mentioned explicitly as a part of Elend's decision-making, there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I wear white&lt;/em&gt;, Elend thought. &lt;em&gt;The color of purity. I try to represent what is good and right. For my men.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm not going to attack this city, Ham,&quot; Elend said. &quot;I won't conquer&#xA;  these people, even if it is for their own good.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would initially lead us to believe that Elend's character is entirely Preservation; however, his final act was not only on a battlefield, but was with of a quality of military prowess that bested Vin's, wreaking great havoc and destruction on the opposing force (ch 81).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elend moved with a grace she had never seen from him -- she had always&#xA;  been the better warrior, yet at this moment, he put her to shame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elend's last, defining act was one of war -- something linked to Ruin. More important, though, is his ability to accept that his ability and responsibility to commit violence was not a contradiction to who he was as a gentleman and a scholar. His final reconciliation of the different facets of his personality is mentioned in chapter 67:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yomen seemed to take little comfort in the words, but Vin smiled. Not &#xA;  because of what Elend said, but because of how he said it. Something&#xA;  about  him had changed. He seemed confident in a way he'd never been&#xA;  before.  He had some of the same idealistic air he'd expressed when&#xA;  he'd been a  youth at court -- yet he also had the hardness of the man&#xA;  who'd led his people.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He'd finally found the balance. And, oddly&#xA;  enough, it had come from  deciding to retreat. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She looked up at Elend, a man she seemed to know better than herself.&#xA;  He  hadn't needed to tell her that he'd reconciled the two halves of&#xA;  himself,  she'd simply been able to tell it from looking at him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;3: Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colors that are associated with Vin and Elend represent their initial states. At the beginning of the series, Vin was simply a girl of the streets, and a warrior. This violent, Ruin-linked nature is represented by her dark clothes. When we first meet Elend, he was only a gentle-natured highborn scholar; something that is very easily connected to the white color of Preservation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, however, Vin and Elend are both able to discover and reconcile the multipartite aspects of their personalities into a cohesive whole, in the same manner that Ruin and Preservation are joined, through Sazed, into Harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 This side is more connected to Preservation than one might think. I can't find it at the moment, but there was an excerpt from Sazed's book that discussed Preservation &lt;em&gt;preserving&lt;/em&gt; Khlenni culture through the Final Empire's noble class. If true, the balls and the dancing have a strong connection to Preservation.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-06-12T21:52:10.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2730" CreationDate="2017-06-13T01:46:34.703" Score="6" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;TenSoon is a kandra, a type of sentient magical creature in Sanderson's &lt;em&gt;Mistborn&lt;/em&gt; series, and a proud one at that. After the events in the second book of the series, he travels to his homeland, willingly, to stand trial for several offenses that he had perpetrated against his people (and to warn the kandra of a coming danger related to those incidents). There is a very strong element of honor in the kandra culture, and TenSoon would &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; run away from captivity. This is mentioned multiple times in &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt; before his escape. Here, from chapter 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He would not run, and he would not strike down one of his own. He was&#xA;  better than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from chapter 20:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TenSoon sat in his cage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cage's very existence was an insult. Kandra were not like men --&#xA;  even if he were not imprisoned, TenSoon would not have run or tried to&#xA;  escape. He had come willingly to his fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by the end of chapter 20, something has already changed. A female acquaintance of his, MeLaan, visits him in his cell. She exhorts him to fight, to rebel against the governing body of the kandra people. He responds that he would not, but then begins manipulating his captors into affording him the opportunity of escape by mentioning that his dog's body was humiliating and disgraceful to him. This ensures that when he is taken for his execution (ch 33) he has a body that is significantly faster than his captors', allowing him to outrun them and escape successfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whatever change occurred, it must have happened somewhere between the beginning and the end of the 20th chapter. Something happens, or TenSoon reaches some conclusion, that changes him from the &quot;no, I would never try to escape even if it were possible&quot; kandra that he was, to a &quot;less orthodox&quot; (his words) and rebellious kandra who takes steps to create and utilize a way out of his lawful (if somewhat unjust) execution. However, I think I missed it, whatever it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What caused this sudden and striking change in TenSoon's character?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this change serves to emphasize the kandras' utter surprise when TenSoon begins his escape (as well as some mild surprise for the readership), but a change this dramatic should be caused by &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. TenSoon has lived approximately 700 years, and humans 1/20th of his age don't change like that without strong cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T12:36:02.763" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T12:36:02.763" Title="What changed that made TenSoon want to run?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;mistborn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2727" CreationDate="2017-06-13T07:49:08.737" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember from school that a certain book was treated during English literature classes about an English man who grew up in a mansion isolated from society? He was taken care of and everything without having to interact with other human beings. When he finally came out into society, there was a disconnect between his view of things and reality. Could anyone tell me the title and author of that book? It was set somewhere in the 20th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It must have been about 25 years ago I read it. It was a British novel. I think we had a cheap paperback version and on the cover there was a picture of a man wearing fancy clothes, a grey bowlerhat and a walking stick, sitting on a chair. The idea of the novel was that the person was mentally stilted, because of his lack of social contact, very much set in his ways and routines and unable to understand other people or even acknowledge their autonomy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1677" LastEditorUserId="1677" LastEditDate="2017-06-16T03:38:45.230" LastActivityDate="2017-06-16T03:38:45.230" Title="What was this novel about an English man growing up in a mansion isolated from society?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2702" CreationDate="2017-06-13T09:30:28.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was almost certainly the orphan who killed his adoptive mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did he do it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;For her assets, for his inheritance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then arises why did it even occur to him to murder the woman who raised him, cared for him, bought him the books he enjoyed studying, and who loved him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Because he was evil.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probable that Guy de Maupassant expected his readers to believe that personality characteristics could be physically inherited, and that since the young man in this story was an orphan he may have come from &quot;bad stock&quot;. We know that his birth mother, widowed just before he was born, died penniless, and it was common among the privileged classes who enjoy private incomes to associate poverty with moral degeneracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he is the murderer, he is &lt;em&gt;extremely ungrateful to the woman who raised him,&lt;/em&gt; a trait almost universally considered to be deeply unpleasant and sociopathic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He requests money from her several times and receives it. After obtaining on one occasion a large sum, he asks for more only a few days later. When she says no he appears to be &quot;satisfied with her decision&quot;. But we realise he is exceptionally committed to giving a false appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nasty selfishness of his character is shown in that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he now did not even talk to Madame Source, merely answering her&#xA;  remarks with short, formal words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is quiet and terse for a year, and he spooks Madame Source with his behaviour, but nonetheless he is still&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;agreeable and attentive in his manner toward her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when she expressed a wish, he unmurmuringly carried it into execution.&#xA;  When she wanted anything brought from the city, he immediately went&#xA;  there to procure it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This combination causes her to feel as though &quot;she were going insane&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is clearly something wrong with him mentally that sadly his adoptive mother's efforts to reach out to him cannot help him get through:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he did not appear to listen to her, and she shuddered (...) when she&#xA;  has spoken to him five or six times successively without being able to&#xA;  get a word out of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the viewpoint of the narrator, Maupassant describes him as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a self-contained, unapproachable being, in whom there seemed always to&#xA;  be some active, dangerous mental labor going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Madame Source's death, he weeps from morning to night, yet Maupassant comments that his state was one of violent grief &quot;at least to all appearance&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did he do it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Madame Source's last coach journey was from her new house to her old house. At least this is strongly implied by her body being found by the village postman, whereas her new house is in the suburbs. When the postman notices a splash of blood, he first thinks that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some boozer must have had a nose bleed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not occur to him simply as a possibility: he believes this is what &quot;must&quot; have happened&quot;. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader is probably meant to infer that the reason for the postman's notion is &lt;em&gt;that the body was found close to a drinking establishment.&lt;/em&gt; And the only such place we know about is &lt;em&gt;the cafe at which the orphan spent time that evening.&lt;/em&gt; If it was nearby then he would only have had to leave it for a few moments when he heard the coach and then return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the young man appears to have a firm alibi, how firm is it really? If he was in the cafe all the time, then he could not have personally committed the murder and it would be unlikely that the villagers would believe otherwise. There is no suggestion that they believe he paid another party to carry it out or used supernatural means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the cafe was a drinking establishment, then many patrons there may get drunk, perhaps even early on in the evening. And the orphan is, or at least he becomes, effective at causing those who believe he is guilty to change their minds about him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(a) man who speaks with such facility and who is always in good humor&#xA;  could not have such a crime on his conscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps he has no conscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually he even becomes mayor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could he simply have manipulated the perceptions of the ten people in the cafe? Perhaps for example they were in two groups and during the crucial few minutes he ensured that each group believed he was in the company of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1678" LastEditorUserId="1678" LastEditDate="2017-06-13T09:45:54.770" LastActivityDate="2017-06-13T09:45:54.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="410" CreationDate="2017-06-13T21:21:40.127" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Harry has done this before, although indirectly&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This trope is called the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnspokenPlanGuarantee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unspoken Plan Guarantee&lt;/a&gt; and relies on the idea that the audience gets bored when someone first lays out a careful plan and this plan then goes off without a hitch. Either you explain the plan and then throw a couple of spanners in the works so the reader does not know what might happen, or you don't reveal the plan and pretend like the person who made the plan had contingencies for his contingencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am being deliberately vague in the first paragraph to avoid spoiling Changes and Ghost Story. people who want more details can consult the spoiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of Changes, Someone does something to Harry. Then, Ghost Story revolves around Harry trying to figure out who did it to him and why. Eventually, he not only finds out WHO did it to him, but also that this person did this because Harry asked him to, AND that Harry also had his memory of him asking this favor erased to avoid people finding out why he asked this. While this isn't directly hiding something from the viewer, the concept remains: Harry deliberately does not mention something he did, only to reveal it at a later time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spoilers for those who want them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; In Changes, Harry strikes a deal with Mab to gain power so he can save his daughter. In return, he would become the new Winter Knight. To try and avoid this burden, Harry asked Kincaid to kill him after he saved his daughter, in the hopes of escaping Mab's deal. He also asked Molly to erase the memory of him asking Kincaid to kill him, because otherwise Mab could simply read this from his mind. Everything beyond the deal with Mab is hidden from the reader in Changes, and then revealed in the finale of Ghost Story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is in the book Turn Coat. At first, it seems like Harry just wants a showdown between House Raith, Shagnasty and the Council because he thinks that House Raith is framing the titular Turn Coat. But then it turns out that this is just a ruse to trick the real turncoat into revealing themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="448" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T08:17:14.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2724" CreationDate="2017-06-13T23:31:10.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This plot reminded me of the movie &quot;Being There&quot; starring Peter Sellers. I looked it up and it turns out this film was adapted from a book of the same title published in 1970: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677877.Being_There&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Being There&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jerzy Kosinski.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the book you are after? Though he didn't really have &quot;major troubles adjusting&quot; after he left the mansion. Quite the opposite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-06-14T01:19:15.917" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T01:19:15.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2723" CreationDate="2017-06-14T10:56:53.350" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;He realises that more is at stake than he'd thought.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, note that TenSoon's change of heart is more gradual than you've made it sound. OK, it's still pretty quick from the point of view of a centuries-old creature, but it doesn't all happen in a single chapter. There's actually a whole series of passages which show the change step by step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;TenSoon's original crime, of breaking Contract and telling Vin the secret of controlling kandra back in &lt;em&gt;The Well of Ascension&lt;/em&gt;, was committed on impulse and without thinking. He &lt;em&gt;accidentally&lt;/em&gt;, as it were, became a rebel and a traitor. Then, like a good kandra, he returned to the Homeland to confess his crime and give himself up for judgement. He didn't have to do so - no other kandra knew what he'd done - but at that point he was still too law-abiding not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Later, he rationalised what he'd done, convincing himself that the kandra's duty was now to serve Vin and assist her in the inevitable conflict with Ruin. It's for this reason that he demands a public trial rather than private execution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By revealing his accusations in an open forum, he would earn himself an eternity of pain. Forcing a trial would be foolish, for there was no hope of vindication. His confessions had already damned him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If he spoke, it would not be to defend himself. It would be for other reasons entirely.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Judgement,&amp;quot; he repeated, this time barely whispering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it may take him as much as a &lt;em&gt;year&lt;/em&gt; even to change this far. He spends a year imprisoned in a pit before going to face judgement, and with nothing to do there but think, he has plenty of time to consider his actions and the reasons or justifications for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When he comes to face judgement, he still doesn't even consider the possibility of escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't bind his hands; that would have been too much of an insult even for him. Kandra obeyed the Contract, even those of the Third Generation. He would not run, and he would not strike down one of his own. He was better than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Measures taken to prevent his escape are insulting and purely symbolic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cage's very existence was an insult. Kandra were not like men - even if he were not imprisoned, TenSoon would not have run or tried to escape. He had come willingly to his fate.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet, they locked him up. [...] It was made of iron plates and hard steel bars with a strong wire mesh stretched across all four faces to keep him from reducing his body to base muscles and wriggling through. It was another insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he has already consciously rebelled, at least to some extent, in his impassioned speech to the other kandra. This was his first premeditated act of rebellion, and one which perhaps makes it easier for him to make the decision to rebel even further by escaping 'justice'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The most crucial moment is &lt;strong&gt;during chapter 20, in his conversation with MeLaan&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a kandra he respects and cares about, urging him to rise up against the Second Generation and lead the younger generations in a revolution. While he discards the idea and argues against her, he is pleased that his words about Vin had at least convinced her. And, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2723/what-changed-that-made-tensoon-want-to-run#comment5742_2723&quot;&gt;muru mentioned in a comment&lt;/a&gt;, the biggest turning-point of all is when &lt;strong&gt;he realises that events outside are moving even faster than he'd thought&lt;/strong&gt;, and that Vin may need him after all. His knowledge of the world above is a year out of date, and MeLaan updates him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You were right, TenSoon,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;Ash cloaks the land in a mantle of black. The mists come during the day, killing both crops and people. Men march to war. Ruin has returned.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TenSoon closed his eyes. &amp;quot;They will do something,&amp;quot; he finally said. &amp;quot;The First Generation.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;They are old,&amp;quot; MeLaan said. &amp;quot;Old, forgetful, impotent.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TenSoon opened his eyes. &amp;quot;You have changed much.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Closing his eyes for several moments shows the strength of his unspoken reaction to MeLaan's news, even though his words are as submissive as ever. His comment about how she's changed may also foreshadow his own change. His thoughts come back to the same issue later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had returned to receive his punishment because that was right. It was more than honour, more than Contract. It was who he was.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet, if the things MeLaan had said were true ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ruin has returned.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After this, he does set the events in motion that lead to his escape, by mentioning the dog's body, but he's still unsure. He does so only to give himself a &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt;, to leave his options open; he doesn't necessarily &lt;em&gt;plan&lt;/em&gt; to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had taken him quite some time to appreciate the advantages of those bones.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He paused.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But, no. He had not come to bring revolution. He had come to explain, to serve the interests of his people. He would do that by accepting his punishment, as a kandra should.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There was a chance. A slim one. He wasn't even certain he wanted to escape, but if there was an opportunity ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He then spends an &lt;em&gt;entire chapter&lt;/em&gt; agonising about what to do, whether he should take the 'honourable' course and submit to the Second Generation's sentence or whether it's now his duty to find Vin and help her. I'll try to quote only the most relevant parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Days later, MeLaan's words still pricked TenSoon's conscience. [...] &lt;strong&gt;now, strangely, an eternity of imprisonment seemed like the easy way out.&lt;/strong&gt; [...] by so doing, he would leave MeLaan and the others to be destroyed as their leaders refused to take action. What's more, he would leave Vin without the information she needed. [...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The end could be nearing. If it was, then Vin needed to know the truths about the kandra.&lt;/strong&gt; Their origins, their beliefs. Perhaps she could use the Trust itself. Yet, if he told Vin anything more, it would mean an even greater betrayal of his people. Perhaps a human would have found it ridiculous that he would hesitate now. However, so far, his true sins had been impulsive, and he'd only later rationalised what he'd done. If he fought his way free of prison, it would be different. Wilful and deliberate.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...] Escape was not something he preferred to contemplate - it simply wasn't the kandra way. He had broken Contract, and deserved punishment. There was honour in facing the consequences of one's actions.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wasn't there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 24 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when he gets the dog's bones, he's not sure whether he should use them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dared he hope? [...] &amp;quot;What is wrong with the bones I now wear?&amp;quot; TenSoon asked carefully, pulling over the sack, uncertain whether to be excited or ashamed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 24&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's only by the time he actually comes to face his sentence that he's fully made up his mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had been a wild hope, but he'd manipulated the Second Generation into giving him back the dog's body. [...] The comfortable bones gave him strength. This was the body that Vin had given him. She was the Hero of Ages. He had to believe that.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Otherwise, he was about to make a very big mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 33&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The next time we see him, he's back in Luthadel, and this is the first time he seems entirely free of doubt that he did the right thing by escaping:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I should never have left her&lt;/em&gt;, TenSoon thought, feeling a stab of anxiety. &lt;em&gt;My foolish kandra sense of duty. I should have stayed here, and told her what I know, little though it is.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The world could end because of my foolish honour.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 52&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: his change of mindset is slower than you've made it sound, but the biggest turning-point is when he learns the world is ending sooner than he'd expected, Ruin is already working actively to destroy it, and Vin may have need of him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-14T10:56:53.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2731" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2744" CreationDate="2017-06-14T20:37:02.740" Score="10" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a relatively short while, I'll have to write a blog post on this poem, so I've been doing some research into the sources. The first is P.Oxy. 1232, an image of which is the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P.Oxy._X_1232.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5RhrH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of P.Oxy.1232&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A later source is P.Oxy. 2076, with image below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://163.1.169.40/gsdl/collect/POxy/index/assoc/HASH011f/ee301502.dir/POxy.v0017.n2076.a.01.hires.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4ERi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of P.Oxy. 2076&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these, I can find most of what the text at &lt;a href=&quot;https://el.wikisource.org/wiki/%CE%8E%CE%BC%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9_%CE%BA%CE%B1%CE%B9_%CE%95%CF%80%CE%B9%CE%B8%CE%B1%CE%BB%CE%AC%CE%BC%CE%B9%CE%B1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek Wikisource (very end of page)&lt;/a&gt; has. However, there is a bit that is not in these images. From what I see on &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia600204.us.archive.org/29/items/oxyrhynchusppt1000grenuoft/oxyrhynchusppt1000grenuoft.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grenfell and Hunt's book on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (HUGE DOCUMENT, Firefox crashed while I tried to find the page of the below image)&lt;/a&gt;, P.Oxy.1232 is supposed to have a couple other fragments, one of which they transcribe as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wUgIP.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wUgIP.png&quot; alt=&quot;transcription of extra fragment of P.Oxy. 1232&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is a scrap of papyrus in no way connected to the image above, on what basis do they include it in the poem of the two images above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-15T00:30:47.993" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:47:06.847" Title="About Sappho's &quot;Hector and Andromacha&quot; poem" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;sappho&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2528" CreationDate="2017-06-14T20:40:48.230" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essay you're thinking of is possibly &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/70/70-h/70-h.htm#link2H_4_0010&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Dean Howells&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Mark Twain. Towards the end of the piece, he criticizes those who ape the greatness of Mr. Howells by attempting to imitate his &amp;quot;stage directions,&amp;quot; and succeed only in making their work boring by the meaningless repetition of the same few tired phrases. Here is the relevant passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Howells does not repeat his forms, and does not need to; he can invent fresh ones without limit. It is mainly the repetition over and over again, by the third-rates, of worn and commonplace and juiceless forms that makes their novels such a weariness and vexation to us, I think. We do not mind one or two deliveries of their wares, but as we turn the pages over and keep on meeting them we presently get tired of them and wish they would do other things for a change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... replied Alfred, flipping the ash from his cigar.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... responded Richard, with a laugh.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... murmured Gladys, blushing.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... repeated Evelyn, bursting into tears.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... replied the Earl, flipping the ash from his cigar.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... responded the undertaker, with a laugh.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... murmured the chambermaid, blushing.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... repeated the burglar, bursting into tears.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... replied the conductor, flipping the ash from his cigar.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... responded Arkwright, with a laugh.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... murmured the chief of police, blushing.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“... repeated the house-cat, bursting into tears.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on and so on; till at last it ceases to excite. I always notice stage directions, because they fret me and keep me trying to get out of their way, just as the automobiles do. At first; then by and by they become monotonous and I get run over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T00:27:28.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-15T19:54:32.180" Score="10" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;My impression was that the name Coin is meaningful as opposed to arbitrary.  My thoughts on the meaning so far are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Other side of the same coin&amp;quot; in that Coin represents the good guys, but is also an authoritarian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relates to the communal society of District 13, rendered necessary due to the condition of extreme resource scarcity, but there is no indication that things will change all that much with a new regime in the capital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That you're flipping a coin in choosing a leader&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because you can never be certain of how they will rule once in power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in other ideas on the meaning of the name in the context of the books, and if Collins herself has commented on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T13:43:22.663" Title="Meaning of President &quot;Coin&quot; in the Hunger Games books?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2735" CreationDate="2017-06-15T22:48:24.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: major spoilers follow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Coin ~ money&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few ways in which the District 13 leader could be symbolised by the idea of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Power.&lt;/strong&gt; Money can be used to buy power, or as a representation of power, and one of the most important things about this character is that she seeks power.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lack of personality.&lt;/strong&gt; Money has no use value; it's faceless (except in the literal sense, coins frequently having rulers' faces on them) and emotionless. Similarly, President Coin plays her cards close to her chest and we never really know what she's thinking or planning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also interesting to consider her first name with this in mind. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alma&lt;/a&gt;, in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and related languages, means &quot;soul&quot; - so &quot;Alma Coin&quot; suggests &quot;&lt;strong&gt;soul of money&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Not a flattering epithet, and one which hints at her coldness and ruthlessness. Similarly, in Latin, Alma is a feminine form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/almus#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;almus&lt;/a&gt;, which can mean &quot;nourishing&quot; - so another interpretation is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;nourished by money&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Two sides of the same coin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the whole idea behind the events that play out towards the very end of the series: Katniss kills Coin because she realises she's just as bad as Snow. What's a common metaphor for two people or situations being equally bad? They're two sides of the same &lt;em&gt;coin&lt;/em&gt;. Literally the culmination of the entire series is tied up with the realisation that Coin is just the other side of the same coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a hint towards Coin's nature, this only really works in retrospect - I don't think it would be reasonable for even the shrewdest of close readers to deduce that Coin was likely to end up as bad as Snow just from her name. Nevertheless, viewing it in retrospect, it's still quite striking as an indicative piece of wordplay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Flipping a coin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally I don't hold with this theory, so I'm not going to be able to make a convincing argument for it. But since you've mentioned it in your question, I will at least quote what others have said about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Money will work for anyone. It doesn't care who uses it. It's just a tool. It merely exists to be used. Money's fickleness becomes especially significant with coins. We use coins as a representation of pure chance. Flipping a coin gives you fifty-fifty odds. (Just look at Two-Face of Batman fame.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Coin has no perceptible allegiance -- she doesn't even seem that loyal to District 13, her home. She embraces Katniss when it was useful to her. When Katniss became a liability, Coin threw her to the proverbial wolves. When President Coin offers to flip for the chance to kill Snow, it's a subtle allusion to her capriciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Cristina Hartmann, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/In-The-Hunger-Games-why-did-the-author-choose-the-character-name-Coin-for-President-Coin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I haven't been able to find any direct quotes from Suzanne Collins about this, and I suspect that none exist. She's notoriously reluctant to give press interviews, and there's not much available in the public record by way of direct commentary from her about her books.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/In-The-Hunger-Games-why-did-the-author-choose-the-character-name-Coin-for-President-Coin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In The Hunger Games, why did the author choose the character name &quot;Coin&quot; for President Coin?&lt;/a&gt; -- Quora&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/In-The-Hunger-Games-are-the-names-Coin-and-Snow-used-to-represent-Money-and-Religion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In The Hunger Games, are the names Coin and Snow used to represent Money and Religion?&lt;/a&gt; -- Quora&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mockingjayfilm.org/character-names-and-their-meanings-part-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Character Names and their Meanings (Part 2)&lt;/a&gt; -- Mockingjay film site&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/18968/31394&quot;&gt;Were there any other names that were plays on words in The Hunger Games?&lt;/a&gt; -- Odog, Sci-fi &amp;amp; Fantasy SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-15T22:48:24.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-16T10:10:28.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can remember, a scientist in this book invented something based on mescaline and the result was that he - and others who followed this procedure - recognized that people are being exploited by energetic monster creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mescaline has to be mixed with ether&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monsters were otherwise invisible to people, but they were separate entities, that is not living inside human mind as suggested in &quot;The Mind Parasites&quot; by C. Wilson.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1693" LastEditorUserId="1693" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:59:06.433" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:59:06.433" Title="Identify a book about scientist who used mescaline to see monsters" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-16T21:46:22.837" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2664/17&quot;&gt;What is the significance of &amp;quot;Jonathan&amp;quot; in Strange and Norrell?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Strange&quot; immediately strikes the reader as a rather ... well, strange name. Even in Britain, the country which produces such wackily wonderful names as Pogglethorpe, Higginbottom, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOd3lwluQIw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;and so on&lt;/a&gt;, I've never seen Strange as a surname except in this book. It stands out from the other names in the novel, which all seem rather more believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might say that Strange is clearly an out-of-the-ordinary person, someone who never fit in. But he's less &quot;strange&quot; than e.g. Childermass or Vinculus, so why was he the one singled out for the strange name? What does it signify in terms of his character and his place in the plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did the name &quot;Strange&quot; come from, and what is its significance?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-17T17:08:24.637" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:08:24.637" Title="What is the significance of the name &quot;Strange&quot; in Strange and Norrell?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2740" CreationDate="2017-06-17T08:02:37.127" Score="11" ViewCount="25324" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the ending chapter of &quot;To Kill a Mockingbird&quot;, Atticus and Mr Heck Tate (the Sheriff) are deciding who is responsible for the death of Mr Ewell. Atticus thinks Jem killed Mr Ewell but Heck knows it was actually Boo Radley. Heck Tate said that instead of bringing Boo to the public they should just &quot;let the dead bury the dead.&quot; What is meant by this quotation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1694" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:08:18.733" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T04:42:30.860" Title="In To Kill a Mockingbird, what does &quot;let the dead bury the dead&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2739" CreationDate="2017-06-17T09:45:19.217" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book In To Kill a Mockingbird, Boo Radley (The one who killed Bob Ewell) and Tom Robinson are seen as &quot;mockingbirds&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus said previously in the book that it is &quot;wrong to kill a mockingbird as they do nothing for us other than sing their hearts out&quot;. Heck Tate realizes that Jem didn't kill Bob Ewell but it was in fact Boo Radley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heck already saw one innocent man have his life ruined because of the community&#xA;(Tom Robinson). Tom was killed because of pure racism and hatred in the white society and Heck knew that if the whole of Maycomb were to know Boo Radley killed Bob Ewell everyone would come and thank him and bring presents etc. Heck realizes that Boo does not like this kind of attention and he killed Bob Ewell out of pure kindness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Heck stated &quot;let the dead bury the dead&quot;. He states that they should just say Bob Ewell fell on his knife while drunk and killed himself, but what he actually means is that we should let Tom Robinson (a man who was innocently killed) bury the dead (Bob Ewell, the man who played a massive part in the death of Tom Robinson). It is also a quote from Luke 9:60 in the Bible.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It might also be that Heck feels that Bob Ewell's death cancels out the death of Tom Robinson.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Scout the little girl realizes that its wrong to put Boo in the spotlight as she said to Atticus &quot;well Atticus, its a bit like shooting a Mockingbird&quot; hence the title of the book. &quot;To Kill A Mockingbird&quot;, the mockingbirds in this book are all those who are persecuted by society as a &quot;malevolent phantom&quot; (Boo Radley) or as a &quot;negro&quot; (Tom Robinson) are Mockingbirds because Tom and Boo has done nothing other than help the community. Some other Mockingbirds might be Mayella Ewell who is abused by her father and forced to look after the many kids in her house to only get beaten by her father and forced to testify &quot;rape&quot; against Tom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let the dead bury the dead&quot; is an old expression which originates from the New Testament. When a man wished to follow Jesus and become a disciple, he asked if he could first bury his father, who had just died. But, Jesus replied,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom&#xA;  of God [Luke 9: 59-60]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This response's meaning is that the man must not put earthly duties before spiritual ones. After the children are attacked by the reprobate Bob Ewell and Jem left arm is seriously injured, Atticus discusses the matter with Sheriff Tate, alluding to Jem's having to go to court and testify to what has occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mr. Finch, do you think Jem killed Bob Ewell? Do you think that?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the ensuing argument between the two men, Heck Tate explains that Bob Ewell fell upon his own knife because he disbelieves what Atticus proposes, that Jem stabbed Ewell; furthermore, he sees no need to involve Jem in this matter of the death of the despicable Ewell. The honorable Atticus does not want Jem to lose respect for his father if he covers the truth for his son. But, Tate insists on giving his report of the incident. He tells Atticus that this is his town, and he knows everything that goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's a black boy dead for no reason, and the man responsible for&#xA;  it's dead. Let the dead bury the dead this time, Mr. Finch. Let the&#xA;  dead bury the dead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, let Tom Robinson &quot;bury&quot; Bob Ewell as an act of poetic justice, and the incident will be taken care of; in this way, Boo Radley with his &quot;shy ways&quot; will not be exposed to the gossip and cruelties of the public. The town can &quot;move on&quot; from the repercussions of the trial as all the injustice connected to it will finally end. The dead will take care of the dead, and the living will go on living in their own ways. Otherwise, it would be like killing a mockingbird to bring Boo to court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus finally understands the wisdom of Sheriff Tate and agrees with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an implication that the dead are dead and nothing can be done for them, so the living should continue with their lives and more worthwhile endeavors. In this case, allowing Boo Radley to not be drawn into the spotlight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="1531" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T15:53:39.387" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T15:53:39.387" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2742" CreationDate="2017-06-17T12:32:45.470" Score="5" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the very end of &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, a group of men arrive at Rumata's house and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; murder Kyra,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sending Don Rumata into a blind and murderous rage. But &lt;strong&gt;who were they, who sent them, and why did they come in the first place?&lt;/strong&gt; They weren't expecting Rumata to be home, and Kyra said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They've come for me,&quot; she whispered. &quot;I knew they would!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is she an important target, and for whom? What was their purpose in coming &quot;for her&quot; (?), or in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; killing her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T11:56:19.573" Title="Who came to Rumata's house at the end, and why?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;hard-to-be-a-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2741" CreationDate="2017-06-17T12:59:57.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;They were Reba's men.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Spoilers will follow. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the authorial intent, and this is what is &lt;em&gt;implied&lt;/em&gt; in the novel. Boris Strugatsky acknowledged this explanation in an off-line interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Насколько я помню, дон Рэба имел целью захватить в плен Киру, дабы потом использовать ее как орудие шантажа. Замысел не удался, главным образом, из-за отвратительно низкой дисциплины его монахов (характерной, впрочем, для феодальных дружин всех времен и народов). Кроме того, дон Рэба никак не ожидал, что Румата, отъехавший давеча аж в пределы Пьяного леса, ухитрится каким-то загадочным образом оказаться дома.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int_t20.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Off-line interview with Boris Strugatsky about &lt;em&gt;Hard to Be a God&lt;/em&gt;, question #5&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, don Reba's plan was to capture Kira and use her to blackmail [Rumata]. The plan failed, mostly because of the very weak discipline amongst monks' ranks (which was, by the way, present in most medieval brotherhoods). Moreover, don Reba did not expect at all for Rumata, having gone to the heart of the forest on the previous day, to be back home at this moment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Translation mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could see that the men who stormed the house were monks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“In the name of the Lord!” roared below. [...] There were numerous riders outside - &lt;strong&gt;sullen men in black with pointed hoods&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Hard to be a God&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 9. Translation by Olena Bormashenko, emphasis mine. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that they did not anticipate for the owner of the house to be at home, but at the same time they knew very well it was Rumata:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“They always mess things up,” someone said softly downstairs. “The master’s at home.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “What’s that matter to us?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “It matters because he’s the best swordsman in the world.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “And they also said that he left and won’t come back till morning.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I tell? Because Rumata has been called the best swordsman in the world by our eagle don Reba, of all people. All this leads me to believe that it was don Reba who ordered Kira's abduction, but his monks messed it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kira also says &quot;they've come for me&quot;, in which she implies she was expecting this. In the same chapter, Kira says that her brother had also become a monk, and threatened her for being friendly with Rumata, a noble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy also said that her brother had turned up—wounded, but cheerful and drunk, in a new uniform. He gave money to his father, drank with him, and was once again threatening that his boys would roll over everyone. He was now a lieutenant in some special squad; he’d taken the oath of allegiance to the Order and was about to be ordained. Father asked that she not come home under any circumstances. Her brother was threatening to settle scores with her for getting mixed up with a noble, the red-haired bitch.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, chapter 10. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is unlikely that this was her brother, and entirely unlikely that this was some brotherly revenge or a random hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another theory, originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/rec/peresl03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published online&lt;/a&gt;, and the topic of the question by @DVK, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2322/11&quot;&gt;Does the text support the theory that Arata the Hunchback killed this character?&lt;/a&gt;, suggests that it was Arata who ordered Kira's assassination, in order to provoke Rumata's anger (since Arata had subtly criticised Rumata for lack of action before). I feel that the answer I gave to that question is sufficient (and too long to quote here), but my main points are: Arata respected (and maybe even feared) Rumata; Reba had much stronger motivation; don Condor (being more experienced) had already predicted that Rea would try to use Kira; the attackers were monks, which implies they served Reba. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it was clearly the authorial intent that Reba ordered the abduction, and it is worth noticing here that the whole chapter with Arata the Hunchback was added by authors after some advice by editors (due to censorship concerns), so it is unlikely Arata was intended to have a role other than simply being mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T11:56:19.573" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T11:56:19.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2731" CreationDate="2017-06-17T17:47:06.847" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After P.Oxy. 2076, it becomes apparent (as I said also in &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelegorini.blogspot.it/2017/06/hector-and-andromacha.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my blog post about this poem&lt;/a&gt;) that the lines of the spare scrap join rather nicely with some of those of P.Oxy. 2076.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before that papyrus, however, there seems to be no reason to put the two together other than the P.Oxy. number. Concerning that, I posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/4580/how-are-p-oxy-numbers-chosen&quot;&gt;a question on Latin SE&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Edmonds joined the scrap to column 1 and left column 2 separate is a mystery. He probably just saw a completion that could have made them fit together, and thought maybe this was nearer to the top of the roll than the other column. He would have to answer that himself. It was entirely his call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T17:47:06.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2330" CreationDate="2017-06-17T21:53:15.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stevenson's admission of the earlier stories and authors he'd &lt;s&gt;plagiarised&lt;/s&gt; borrowed ideas from comes in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://surface.syr.edu/libassoc/206/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;My First Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - his little-known preface to &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;, first published in McClure's Magazine in September 1894.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First Stevenson acknowledges very readily some minor ideas and motifs taken from other writers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not to be wondered at, for stolen waters are proverbially sweet. I am now upon a painful chapter. No doubt the parrot once belonged to Robinson Crusoe. &lt;strong&gt;No doubt the skeleton is conveyed from Poe.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but goes on to say that these small acts of 'plagiarism' are unimportant and that his greatest debt is to Washington Irving, from whom he took almost wholesale the character of Billy Bones. (I won't go into this in too much detail since it's not the main subject of the question here; if you're interested in more evidence for the Irving connection, you can read &lt;em&gt;My First Book&lt;/em&gt; in full &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/61330&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and also see very similar descriptive passages from &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; and Irving's &lt;em&gt;Tales of a Traveller&lt;/em&gt; reproduced together in Appendix C of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lKw8yzQLTvEC&amp;amp;pg=PA240&amp;amp;lpg=PA240&amp;amp;dq=stevenson+treasure+island+edgar+allan+poe&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=zvP54-OZjT&amp;amp;sig=Jjo-BbbEEzClzVSE5yvtlkFQcgE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwir0ciR6MXUAhUoLMAKHVPYCo8Q6AEIQTAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=stevenson%20treasure%20island%20edgar%20allan%20poe&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this edition&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;.) Later on, he returns to Poe by saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The map was the chief part of my plot. For instance, I had called an islet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Skeleton Island, not knowing what I meant, seeking only for the immediate picturesque; and it was to justify this name that &lt;strong&gt;I broke into the gallery of Mr Poe and stole Flint's pointer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these nods to Poe must refer specifically to &quot;The Gold-Bug&quot;, in which the famous real-world pirate Captain Kidd left signposts to his fictional treasure which included a skull and two skeletons, presumably belonging to some of his former crewmen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How I found this:&lt;/strong&gt; after some failures at looking for answers on the internet using various different search terms, I finally discovered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug#Influence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; a direct quote from Stevenson, which I could then paste into Google to find its source.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-17T21:53:15.753" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2737" CreationDate="2017-06-18T04:27:01.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colfer's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Supernaturalist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Supernaturalist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has blue &quot;energetic monster creatures&quot; called &quot;Parasites&quot; that only very few humans can see. These monsters appear to exploit humans, sucking out their life force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; It is revealed toward the end of the book that t are actually helping humans, by alleviating the pain of the dying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a scientist who tried to make others able to see them by causing threats to their safety, but, if I remember correctly, there was nothing in the book about mescaline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-18T14:18:35.003" LastActivityDate="2017-06-18T14:18:35.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2747" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16310" CreationDate="2017-06-18T15:57:43.827" Score="10" ViewCount="2743" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently &lt;a href=&quot;http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/38097167#38097167&quot;&gt;discussing &lt;em&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt; in The Reading Room&lt;/a&gt;, and I mentioned that I reread it because I felt that there were things that I had not understood. One of these things is the Mind Game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://enderverse.wikia.com/wiki/Mind_Game&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the game's Wikia page&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Mind Game, also known as the Fantasy Game, was an advanced&#xA;  computer program that was played by Battle School Students. The Mind&#xA;  Game adapted to the interests of each student, and was used by the&#xA;  Battle School staff to analyze the student's personality and&#xA;  psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each student had their own slightly different flavor of the game, as it adapted to the thoughts and actions of each player. Card devotes &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of time with Ender in his Mind Game, and when I read it in high school, I didn't understand much of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, when Ender visits the Bugger world, he finds that the aliens had constructed a life-size replica of parts of the Game for Ender to find when he came to visit. He also had vivid dreams of playing different parts of the game while fighting the aliens (although I think the aliens had forged an ESP-style connection with Ender, and planted those dreams there. My memory of a lot of the finer details is a little fuzzy, and I don't have a copy of the book on hand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only useful analysis that I found through a quick Google this morning was this side note in Shmoop's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shmoop.com/enders-game/a-short-note-before-starting-symbol.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Short Note Before Starting&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you haven’t read Orson Scott Card’s introduction to Ender's Game,&#xA;  you might take a look at it, if only for the part where Card says that&#xA;  he avoided all the literary tricks that make reading hard (Intro.32).&#xA;  [...] But that doesn’t mean that Card avoids symbolism. Mostly, it&#xA;  tends to mean that his symbolism is rather clear. For instance, when&#xA;  Ender’s character in the mind game can’t play on a playground, that&#xA;  kind of seems like a symbol for his lost childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://enderverse.wikia.com/wiki/Mind_Game#The_Giant.27s_Drink&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Giant's Drink&lt;/a&gt;, especially, seems to be somehow important, but I can't figure out why. On one level, it's obviously a tool that Card uses to develop Ender's character (and ability to think laterally), but it seems to me (when I read the book years ago, and still today) that the dilemma, and Ender's solution, must have some other symbolic meaning, besides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the symbolism of the Mind Game, and the various areas and activities therein (especially the Giant's Drink)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T16:15:28.183" Title="Symbolism of the Mind Game in Ender's Game" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;enders-game&gt;&lt;orson-scott-card&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T01:12:35.397" Score="8" ViewCount="529" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Neil Gaiman's adaptation of the Norse myths, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/Books/Norse+Mythology/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it is sometimes clear that certain elements are used in the stories as a way for the Norse people to transmit useful information and skills to their children. For example, in &quot;The Last Days of Loki,&quot; Loki invents a net, and Kvasir deduces what it was (both its use and its manner of construction) from the pattern of the ashes. This small exchange can ensure that children understand the skill of net-making (and also, possibly, to teach them deductive reasoning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the earlier stories, &quot;Before the Beginning, and After,&quot; describes the creation of human beings. Odin and his brothers, realizing that the world of Midgard must be inhabited, set out to create humanity. They collect two logs that had floated to shore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first log was a log of ash wood. The ash tree is resilient and&#xA;  handsome and its roots go deep. Its wood carves well and will not&#xA;  split or crack. Ash wood makes a good tool handle, or the shaft of a&#xA;  spear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second log they found, beside the first on the beach, so close to&#xA;  the first log they were almost touching, was a log of elm wood. The&#xA;  elm tree is graceful, but its wood is hard enough to be made into the&#xA;  toughest planks and beams; you can build a fine home or a hall from&#xA;  elm wood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The godly brothers then give the logs first life, then will, intelligence, and drive, and finally shape (one male, one female). Then they give them clothes, for they were cold, and finally they gave them names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last of all they gave the two people they had made names: the man they&#xA;  called Ask, or Ash Tree; the woman they called Embla, or Elm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does this description of man as Ash, and woman as Elm, tell us anything about how the ancient Norse people understood gender and the differences between men and women?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If the story does tell us something about the ancient Norse views on gender, is there something in the first passage I quoted, about the suitable uses for ash and elm wood, that is relevant to this? The explanation of the differences between the two woods (both are useful, but in different ways) might reveal a similar attitude toward men and women (neither is superior, but they have different roles), or it might only be a practical description of the materials available to the Norse, and nothing else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this description of man and woman as Ash and Elm changed in any way from the original Norse myths? (I know there's been some discussion about the accuracy of Gaiman's transmission of the myths, but I haven't yet seen any discussion of &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; discrepancies in &lt;em&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What, if anything, does it mean that Yggdrasil is an ash tree (&quot;Yggdrasil and the Nine Worlds&quot;)? Is Yggdrasil meant to have masculine characteristics?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T13:47:48.820" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T13:47:48.820" Title="Are man and woman like ash and elm? How?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;norse-mythology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T01:58:34.637" Score="8" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking at &lt;em&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/em&gt; to write &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2748/481&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I read a passage of the book more closely than I had before, and noticed something interesting. When humans are created, the brothers Odin, Vili, and Ve each take a different role in the creation of the first two fully functioning humans beings. First, Odin gives them life: &quot;Odin [...] breathed life into them [...] now they were alive.&quot; Then &quot;Vili gave them will; he gave them intelligence and drive. Now they could move, and they could want.&quot; Finally, &quot;Ve carved the logs,&quot; giving them a shape, making one male and one female. And then all three brothers give them clothes, and names. (p. 33-34)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a significance to the creation of each different part of the complete human being coming from different brothers? After reading Gaiman's book, I don't feel that I know Vili and Ve very well, but Odin is certainly very different from his brothers. Neither Vili nor Ve, for example, sacrificed an eye or hanged themselves to seek knowledge. The gallows-god is also a strong-willed leader; Odin, not his brothers, leads the Aesir and the Einherjar. He is in charge of battle, and is the most important god in the Norse pantheon; these are qualities that his brothers lack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, does it mean that essential qualities of humanity are endowed by different gods?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these gods have different skill sets? Is it possible that Odin wouldn't be able to, let's say, carve the logs into a shape? Or could it be that, assuming all three brothers are equally capable, there is a reason that Odin, as the god of war (or any of the other things he is god of) is associated with the breath of life, and ditto for Vili and Ve? How should we explain the multistep and multi-player creation of humanity in the Norse mythos?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T13:48:07.987" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T19:30:34.377" Title="What does it mean that different parts of humans are created by different gods?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;norse-mythology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T02:21:22.153" Score="7" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have started to read some classic books and I am having some trouble understanding some parts of chapter 6 part 3 in &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt;, this is after Raskolnikov is called a &quot;Murderer&quot; by a man that was in Raskolnikov's lodgings. Briefly after Raskolnikov chases the man and comes back to his room, he starts thinking about his theory. However, I get confused in this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the first place, because I can reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object--ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed at carrying it out as justly as possible, weighing, measuring and calculating. Of all the lice I picked out the most useless one and proposed to take from her only as much as I needed for the first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone to a monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows that I am utterly a louse,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe he is trying to prove that is indeed a &quot;louse,&quot; which I think means something insignificant and trivial. However, I don't get what he is trying to say with this list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first place, because I can reason that I am one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok so he is one because he can figure out by himself he is a louse. Got it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object--ha-ha!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where I get lost. He says for &quot;a month past,&quot; which I think means a month after, he has &quot;been troubling benevolent Providence.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;What is &quot;benevolent Providence?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he says that it wasn't because of his human lust, but because of a nobler purpose. How does that prove he is a &quot;louse&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a slight feeling that he is being sarcastic, but I am not sure. Could someone clarify what he means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1698" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T08:13:27.960" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T17:59:08.623" Title="Confusing list in Crime and Punishment" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2748" CreationDate="2017-06-19T07:29:22.163" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will start with question 3, as it is the most straightforward. Gaiman has done a whole lot of elaboration on a passage that is in fact rather short. I will quote the relevant passages from the primary sources, as they are rather short. First &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda/V%C3%B6lusp%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Völuspá&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;17&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To three there came  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from the land  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  this high and mighty  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Aesir to the house,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  found they on land,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  less mighty,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ask and Emblu  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  void of destiny. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mind they not own,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  reflection they had not,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  no vision nor cover  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or colour fine;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mind gave Odinn,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  reflection gave Hænir,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  vision gave Lódurr &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and colour fine.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, from Snorri's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/pre/pre04.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gylfaginning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, chapter IX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the sons of Borr [Odin, Vili and Vé] were walking along the sea-strand, they found&#xA;  two trees, and took up the trees and shaped men of them: the first&#xA;  gave them spirit and life; the second, wit and feeling; the third,&#xA;  form, speech, hearing, and sight. They gave them clothing and names:&#xA;  the male was called Askr, and the female Embla, and of them was&#xA;  mankind begotten, which received a dwelling-place under Midgard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the original Norse myths does not really make &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; connection between the trees and the characteristics of the genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it should be noted that while the original &quot;Ask&quot; is the same name as for the ash tree, the etymology of &quot;Embla&quot; is not clear, and the connection to elm, coming from Snorri, is not universally accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as for what the passages tells us of Norse mythology and the Norse worldview, this is even more difficult. For start, it is not even sure that the names are originally Norse, as some scholars have wanted to connect the names with Adam and Eve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you want to see how the Norse thought about men and women, at least in terms of what work they did, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe14.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rígsþula&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is probably the most explicit (it tells of how the three hereditary groups of thralls, yeoman farmers, and aristocrats were formed). If we look at the names of the children of the yeoman farmers, we see the boys being given names with meanings like &quot;The Strong&quot;, &quot;The Holder of Land&quot;, &quot;Craftsman&quot; or &quot;The Broad-Shouldered&quot;, while their sisters had names such as &quot;Bride&quot;, &quot;The Slender&quot;, &quot;The Proud&quot;, &quot;The Fair&quot;, and &quot;The Graceful.&quot; (it is possible that these should be the names of the daughters of the aristocrats; the sons in that family all have meaning denoting kinship and inheritance, so they are not useful for this analysis).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Gaiman's explanation seem to line up decently with what can be found in other sources. Note that the question about how highly women were valued in the Viking age is a contentious topic, where you can find views influenced by the politics of today, or views on Christianity, or other issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T07:29:22.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2754" CreationDate="2017-06-19T08:52:39.013" Score="16" ViewCount="1293" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 48, &quot;Dea ex Machina&quot;, of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, we meet Doctor Adams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; is of course written by Richard &lt;em&gt;Adams&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any indication besides the surname that this character is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-insertion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-insertion&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Adams?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the surname just a &quot;coincidence&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T09:32:34.753" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T10:59:02.223" Title="Is Doctor Adams a self-insertion in Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2750" CreationDate="2017-06-19T09:46:13.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I admit that I haven't read the novel, but a look at the Russian text suggests that by &quot;benevolent Providence&quot; Raskolnikov means God. The relevant quote is Russian is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;во-вторых, что целый месяц всеблагое провидение беспокоил, призывая в свидетели, что не для своей, дескать, плоти и похоти предпринимаю, а имею в виду великолепную и приятную цель, – ха-ха!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He uses &quot;беспокоил&quot;, which means &quot;troubled&quot; (note the past tense), and &quot;целый месяц&quot;, which means &quot;a whole month&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;всеблагое провидение беспокоил, призывая в свидетели&quot; (&quot;troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness&quot;), he means calling God to witness that he is doing something for the greater good, of for a noble purpose. In chapter 3, part 5, Raskolnikov says that he believes in God, so it's not hard to believe that he would say something like &quot;God is my witness&quot;, &quot;I swear to God&quot;, etc. In Russian they sometimes say &quot;ей-богу&quot;, which is a somewhat softer version of the mentioned English expressions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raskolnikov is most surely being sarcastic here, because in the Russian text he uses the word &quot;дескать&quot;, which, as @DVK points out, means &quot;allegedly&quot;, and is commonly used in reported speech in Russian to indicate that the person being spoken of said one thing but did the other. By &quot;louse&quot;, which in Russian is &quot;вошь&quot;, he means a small, low, and otherwise a bad person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T17:59:08.623" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T17:59:08.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2752" CreationDate="2017-06-19T10:35:29.263" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doctor Adams is the author's father.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Adams is the son of Evelyn Adams, who worked as a country doctor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find no definitive quote from the author to confirm this was his intention: however the similarity in name, profession and locale make it seem extremely likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some critics have taken the similarity as read. For instance in his essay &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/19480011/_The_Shrinking_of_the_Epic_Hero_Richard_Adams_Watership_Down_and_the_Epic_Tradition_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: Richard Adams' Watership Down and the Epic Tradition&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Kenneth Ketchell of Louisiana State University says in a footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The doctor is named Dr. Adams and, significantly, Richard Adams's father was a country doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If university academics cannot source an explicit connection, it is possible that suppositions based on this strong circumstantial evidence is the best that we can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-06-29T10:59:02.223" LastActivityDate="2018-06-29T10:59:02.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2755" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:59:57.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-19T13:59:57.607" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T13:59:57.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2756" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-19T13:59:57.607" Score="0" Body="For questions about Norse mythology, the myths and folklore of the old Nordic people. This tag may also be used for questions about the various retellings of these ancient stories, such as for example the 2017 book by English author Neil Gaiman." OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T08:40:46.483" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T08:40:46.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T17:28:31.467" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;About ten years ago I read a short article online somewhere (probably just a couple of paragraphs) about a man and his father. Something the father told him when he was young shaped his decisions about who he wanted to be. It made an impression on me, and I've since tried searching for it on the internet, but with no luck. Any help to identify the short article would be appreciated!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of a walk through the snow, a father looked back with his son, and showed him the footsteps each of them had made in the snow. The father's steps were direct and purposeful, and lead directly to where they were now. On the other hand, the son's steps wandered to and fro, exploring this, walking along a fence for a while, looking at that, and were not at all direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father tried to use this as a lesson to teach his son to always be purposeful, direct, and decisive in life. At that moment, the son decided that that was exactly how he was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; going to lead his life, but would allow himself to be thrilled by any interesting distractions that came along in life, in spite of perhaps having made other plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1702" LastEditorUserId="1702" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T12:07:20.183" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T12:07:20.183" Title="Help identifying short article about footsteps in the snow" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-19T20:03:25.457" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of my copy of &lt;em&gt;Raven's Gate&lt;/em&gt;, there's a Q&amp;amp;A with Anthony Horowitz, the author. One of the questions is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Is it difficult to write both Alex Rider and The Gatekeepers at the same time? What do you think the series have in common, and what's different?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;: I can't write Alex Rider at the same time as The Gatekeepers - the two are just too different. Fortunately, I've now finished the sixth Alex adventure, &lt;em&gt;Ark Angel&lt;/em&gt;, and don't plan to return to him until I've finished the second and third volumes of The Gatekeepers series.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What do the two series have in common? Pace, adventure, action, violence, and, I hope, readability. They're both fairly adult - not classic &amp;quot;children's books&amp;quot;. But Matt Freeman is no Alex Rider. He's much less sure of himself, even more of a victim than Alex. And there won't be quite so many happy endings in The Gatekeepers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what are some examples of Matt being less sure of himself? In what other ways are they different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T20:03:25.457" Title="What makes Alex Rider and Matthew Freeman so different?" Tags="&lt;anthony-horowitz&gt;&lt;alex-rider&gt;&lt;the-gatekeepers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2749" CreationDate="2017-06-19T20:38:28.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to attempt an answer, based on my knowledge of mythology in general, and Classical mythology in particular, with the caveat that I'd redirect you towards Stack Mythology where the real Norse experts reside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The separation of qualities among different deities is a staple of most pantheons.  Even in fairly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;binary pantheons such as Zoroastrianism&lt;/a&gt; you'd have one deity representing qualities accepted to be good as distinct from a a deity representing opposite qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is surely related to the need to separate and define concepts.  (i.e. without evil to contrast it with, how does one define good?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the larger pantheons, it would seem that deities, in general, need to have a function.  Thus domains and human qualities are divided among the gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time of Plato, we start to see the gods as representations of ideas, or ideals, which carries the implication that they may not be strictly literal. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to Vili and Ve, there is a linguistic component:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vili#Etymology_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vili&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;will&quot; in Old Norse &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9_(shrine)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vé&lt;/a&gt; is a word for shrine, an enclosure that can be an analogy for the body housing the spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will, spirit and breath and life are intimately connected in the Greek and Latin, through words such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pneuma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pneuma&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anima#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anima&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/psyche#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psyche&lt;/a&gt;, although this concept is pretty universal.  It makes sense that Odin, in his role of the all-father, would reserve this power for himself.  (Odin is a notorious collector of powers, and not to be trifled with.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I believe these words are distinct from words meaning intent or will, as with Vili.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The association of these three qualities with three brothers may be indicative of the relatedness of the concepts &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may also be taken as an indicator of their fundamental nature: a human being has a spirit, a body, and volition.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the separation of powers may be a function of deities needing to have a function.  A a single god imbued with all functions and powers would seem to be in conflict with polytheism in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-06-19T20:38:28.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1450" CreationDate="2017-06-19T20:43:40.750" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few 'blatant' differences that are obvious when reading both the books. Most of these aren't that difficult to spot once you read both the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blatant differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly, Atticus has changed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Mockingbird,&amp;quot; Atticus Finch, Scout and Jem's father, is an honorable lawyer and perhaps better father who somberly defends African-American Tom Robinson at Robinson's rape trial.&amp;quot;Mockingbird's&amp;quot; Atticus is so renowned that the ABA Journal headlined an article &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_25_greatest_fictional_lawyers_who_are_not_atticus_finch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 25 Greatest Fictional Lawyers (Who Are Not Atticus Finch).&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He tries to bear no ill will towards anybody, regardless of color. A member of a mob &amp;quot;is still a man.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I do my best to love everyone,&amp;quot; he tells Scout in &amp;quot;Mockingbird.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's a shock to encounter &amp;quot;Watchman's&amp;quot; Atticus, who serves on the local citizens' council and remembers his defense of Tom Robinson -- which, in &amp;quot;Watchman,&amp;quot; concludes with a not guilty verdict -- with &amp;quot;an instinctive distaste.&amp;quot; He's also a former Klan member, though he went &amp;quot;to find out exactly what men in town were behind the masks.&amp;quot; (The Klan is alluded to in one &amp;quot;Mockingbird&amp;quot; line as a &amp;quot;political organization.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a challenge envisioning Gregory Peck -- who played Atticus in the 1962 &amp;quot;Mockingbird&amp;quot; movie -- playing this version of the attorney. He certainly would have given it a layer of darkness.&#xA;However, this Atticus still loves his daughter. It's the question of whether his daughter can love him that forms the crux of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly, Jean Louise is fully grown&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'Mockingbird':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You want to grow up to be a lady, don't you?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her response: &amp;quot;Not particularly.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pants-wearing Jean Louise Finch of &amp;quot;Watchman&amp;quot; is more ladylike than the overalls-wearing Scout, but she still doesn't fit in with the demure women of Maycomb. She dislikes the town &amp;quot;Coffees&amp;quot; and obviously prefers the freedom of New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Good Lord, Aunty,&amp;quot; she tells Atticus' sister, Alexandra, at one point. &amp;quot;Maycomb knows I didn't wear anything but overalls till I started having the Curse.&amp;quot;&#xA;The coming of age of &amp;quot;Watchman's&amp;quot; Jean Louise is starker. There are passages of her as a teenager, going on a date and defending her adopted Manhattan. Gone is the wonder of young Scout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lastly, the timelines of the plot.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though &amp;quot;Watchman&amp;quot; dates from about 1957, its plot -- pitting the locals' defense of the South's old ways against Jean Louise's distaste for them -- is surprisingly topical given the recent controversy over the Confederate flag.&#xA;The N-word is used with some abandon and Uncle Jack, in particular, tries to explain the region to Jean Louise as &amp;quot;a separate nation&amp;quot; that fought the Civil War &amp;quot;to preserve their identity.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Watchman&amp;quot; also has a distinctly modern feel compared to the Depression-set &amp;quot;Mockingbird.&amp;quot; The roads are now paved, there are mentions of television and the city is coping with the strivings of returning veterans. It's a far cry from the sleepy village of the'30s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source / further reading:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/14/living/feat-harper-lee-watchman-mockingbird-5-things/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harper Lee's 'Mockingbird' and 'Watchman' an intriguing comparison&lt;/a&gt; by Todd Leopold, CNN, 14 July 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:10:32.767" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:10:32.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T01:40:32.167" Score="4" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;One symbol that is repeatedly associated with Desire is a crystal heart. This appears in several Sandman stories, including in each Endless member's gallery. (Each Endless has a gallery, containing the sigils of the other Endless.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9JvCL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AAj7im.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream, standing in his gallery and holding Desire&amp;#39;s sigil -  a crystal heart.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; vol. 2: &lt;em&gt;The Doll's House&lt;/em&gt;, part seven: &quot;Lost Hearts&quot;; click for full page. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do have a picture of one of these hearts from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/157164/41144&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; that I had asked earlier on another SE site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/koTuP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/koTuPm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A woman, holding and then breaking a red crystalline heart.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;The Sandman #16 &quot;Lost Hearts&quot;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hearts are also something of a signature for Desire; when Nada's village was destroyed by Desire in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #9 (&quot;Tales in the Sand&quot;), crystalline hearts are left in the sand (and prompt the old man to begin his tale). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder, then, if the &quot;emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless,&quot; (seen in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #38 &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman:_Fables_%26_Reflections#.22The_Hunt.22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hunt&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) is also associated with Desire of the Endless. The heart, given to Baba Yaga, appears strikingly similar to those hearts associated with Desire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/whPE5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/whPE5.png&quot; alt=&quot;One silhouetted hand giving an emerald heart to another. Baba Yaga&amp;#39;s speech bubble reads &amp;quot;Aye, this is the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless. Well, good luck to you, boy.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, this emerald heart may or may not actually have once belonged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Koschei_the_Deathless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koschei the Deathless&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XIMmM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XIMmM.png&quot; alt=&quot;The granddaughter asks the grandfather &amp;quot;I thought you said it wasn&amp;#39;t the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless.&amp;quot; The grandfather answers &amp;quot;Maybe I was mistaken. Maybe Baba Yaga was easily fooled. Who knows?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Desire's hearts appear in different colors, at least white and red, so I don't think Koschei's hearts green means that this is a different type of heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless connected to Desire?&lt;/strong&gt; If so, what is that connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-20T14:05:00.357" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T21:40:24.903" Title="Is the heart in &quot;The Hunt&quot; associated with Desire?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2750" CreationDate="2017-06-20T06:18:07.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roskolnikov is obsessed with the idea of powerful people who can 'break' the laws because they are 'special'. His primary example is Napolean. These people are in his mind 'better' and the laws (such as 'you shall not murder') simply do not apply to them. This should become clearer as the book progresses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The murder he commits is his way of trying to prove to himself that he is one of those people, the better/special ones who the law does not apply to. (As I see it his refusal of more menial work, such as he is sometimes offered by friends, is refused because of his feeling of 'being better'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the first place, because I can reason that I am one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is him saying he can reason he is one of the 'better people'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object--ha-ha!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second piece is him explaining to himself how he chose someone who was a 'worse person' who didn't 'deserve to live'. The first step he mentions is his first step into his new life as a person who will impact the world (as Napolean did) but in a good way (thus the noble object). However by this point he is doubting his own theory thus the 'ha-ha'. The month past is the one leading up to the murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I beleive Gallifreyan is correct about the benevolent Providance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all Roskolnikov trying to convince himself he did right but by this point he knows in his heart he is wrong and admits it at the end of his speech, by calling himself a louse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T06:18:07.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2763" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-20T07:42:16.507" Score="7" ViewCount="3081" Body="&lt;p&gt;XKCD 369, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/369/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dangers&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, mentions two results for 'died in a blogging accident':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/dangers.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But XKCD has messed up the Internet. Now there are a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; more results for 'died in a blogging accident' - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=died+in+a+blogging+accident&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;250k of them&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried a search using Googles fancy tools, to exclude results that contained 'xkcd' and searching before the comic came out, searching for the exact term &quot;died in a blogging accident&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It... didn't work so well; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.il/search?tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1970%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F30%2F2007&amp;amp;q=%22died+in+a+blogging+accident%22+-xkcd&amp;amp;oq=%22died+in+a+blogging+accident%22+-xkcd&amp;amp;gs_l=serp.3...8814.13235.0.19215.2.2.0.0.0.0.199.344.0j2.2.0....0...1.1.64.serp..0.0.0.gCCtga6RTsI&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no results were found&lt;/a&gt;. Without searching for the exact term, though, results in a bunch of irrelevant results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what was Randall referring to here? What were his two results? Or did he just make the number up on the spot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:48:31.500" Title="What were the original two results for 'died in a blogging accident'?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;xkcd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2761" CreationDate="2017-06-20T08:11:10.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hearts are certainly important, and were planted throughout the series intentionally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you leaf through the series, you'll find either an image of a heart or the word &lt;em&gt;heart&lt;/em&gt; in virtually evert issue. Hearts are a major part of what &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt; is about.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Neil Gaiman in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, part two, chapter 4: &amp;quot;The Doll's House&amp;quot;; emphasis respected. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the heart really belong to Koschei? I don't know. Most probably. But is the heart connected to Desire? Almost certainly. As Neil Gaiman acknowledges later in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, the moral of &amp;quot;The Hunt&amp;quot; is some dreams (and some desires) should stay dreams (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/60750/70236&quot;&gt;What did Vassily see when he looked at the sleeping woman?&lt;/a&gt; on SFF):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hy Bender&lt;/strong&gt;: Any comments about the very end of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neil Gaiman&lt;/strong&gt;: Well, the granddaughter thinks the fairy tale's about her and her boyfriend, but of course it's not at all; it's a true story about her grandfather, and about &lt;strong&gt;dreams better left unrealized&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Ibid, chapter 8: &amp;quot;Fables and Reflections&amp;quot;; emphasis added. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would even put forward a theory that this story is similar to &amp;quot;Three Septembers and a January&amp;quot;, the story about Emperor Norton, the first and last emperor of the United States. In both stories, Desire tries (in &amp;quot;The Hunt&amp;quot; - subtly, in the other - not so much) to claim the protagonist for its own realm, and on both occasions Dream averts it, by showing them a dream. Norton had a dream of being the emperor; Vassily was granted an opportunity to see the object of his dream, and politely refused it (&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/160899/70236&quot;&gt;I wonder if the duke's daughter dreaming of goblets of sour blood had any influence on Vassily&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although another theory I just developed (after reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/162018/41144&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) is that the heart is related to Desire, but through Koschei. It's simple, and confined to this panel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KHjqN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KHjqNm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the emerald heart of Koschei the Deathless. He kept his life in this heart, but a woman stole it, and he died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. here we have the classic story of Desire making someone fall in love and then die because they couldn't be loved back. I think the key difference between Vassily and Koschei in this case is dreams versus desire, respectively. I'm not quite sure where to draw the line between the two in this case, but if we were to accept that the duke's daughter was only a dream for Vassily, then we don't need to involve Desire with another plot to bring a man to his doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of words in this panel is what drives my theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6lM8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h6lM8m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Vassily looked at her. She was Beautiful, indeed. And pale. And fragile. She was everything he had dreamed of.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that is says &amp;quot;dreamed of&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;desired&amp;quot;. I think the line between dreams and desires in this case is that Vassily didn't truly want the girl to belong to him - he was curious as to whether she truly was as she was depicted in the miniature. Hence he dreamed of her, but without romantic or sexual desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-20T21:40:24.903" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T05:02:22.507" Score="7" ViewCount="1025" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Seanan McGuire's Incryptid series, there are the Aeslin mice, who believe the Price/Healy men are their gods, and the women are their Priestesses. They give them all names (like the Arboreal Priestess (which I think is Verity), the Precise Priestess (Antimony), and the God of Chosen Isolation (Artie, maybe?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, it's hard to keep track of all of these. What are all the known names of the Priestesses and Gods, and which character do they match up with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T12:51:47.623" Title="Who are all the Priestesses and Gods?" Tags="&lt;seanan-mcguire&gt;&lt;incryptid&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T09:57:00.020" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to identify a story about a boy who survived the attack on Hiroshima. My clearest memory is the moment of impact: the boy happens to be outside the city and dives into a pond just before the bomb hits, and so survives the immediate effects of the blast. (1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that my memory is hazy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm pretty sure he eventually gets sick and dies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I thought he folded a hundred cranes in order to make a wish, but that was a real &lt;em&gt;hibakusha&lt;/em&gt; child, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sadako Sasaki&lt;/a&gt;, who attempted to fold &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_thousand_origami_cranes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one thousand&lt;/a&gt; before she died.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps he befriends the historical figure, and she is the one who dies?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Perhaps I have misremembered the main character, and she is the one who dives into the pool?&lt;/strike&gt; (No, she was too young.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/109888&quot;&gt;Apparently plausible.&lt;/a&gt; Thanks Mithrandir for the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1711" LastEditorUserId="1711" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T12:59:25.877" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T12:59:25.877" Title="In which story does a child survive Hiroshima by diving in a pond?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2763" CreationDate="2017-06-21T11:48:31.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably some MySpace blog page(s) which are no longer available.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comic was published on 11 January 2008. Unfortunately the &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/%2A/http://www.google.com/search?q=died+in+a+blogging+accident&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wayback Machine&lt;/a&gt; doesn't seem to list results of Google searches. I went hunting around the internet and found a couple of leads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://slashdot.org/story/08/01/12/1312258/xkcd-inadvertently-causes-googlebomb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this forum post&lt;/a&gt;, on 12 January 2008:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I found the original 2 results of the search, when the number of results was still down at 12. Both results pointed to this blog: &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&amp;amp;friendID=59755147&amp;amp;blogID=106406778&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&amp;amp;friendID=59755147&amp;amp;blogID=106406778&lt;/a&gt; [myspace.com]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that link is now dead, which may be why your advanced search (linked in the question) yielded no results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;according to comments on &lt;a href=&quot;http://mrcopilot.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/died-in-blogging-accident.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;,on 17 January 2008:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original 2 posts were about death by blogging, but didn't list anyone having died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MySpace deaths can probably be considered death by blogging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a list of possible ways to die via blogging accident &lt;a href=&quot;http://journal.petajinnathandersen.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure how serious this is, and the link at the end is also dead, but it does mention MySpace - &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;. Too much for a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T11:48:31.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2768" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2791" CreationDate="2017-06-21T13:28:33.220" Score="4" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a good while I've been trying to recall a book I read about 15 years ago.&#xA;What I remember:&#xA;The Novel was based around a modern day (at the time) global war scenario, with the main battles taking place on the Asian continent between US and Chinese infantry forces, involving entrenched combat during bitter cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Book was very large, about the size of a hefty&#xA;encyclopedia/dictionary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a plane on the cover resembling an&#xA;F-117 Nighthawk &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A good portion of the plot focuses on the internal&#xA;monologue of a newly elected US president. In particular I remember&#xA;his monologue describing how he was trained to &quot;chop&quot; one hand into&#xA;his palm to emphasise certain words during his speech he uses &quot;and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is something i feel very strongly about&quot; as an example I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another main character was a younger US soldier who survived a massacre by chinese forces by hiding under his dead comrades in his trench.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Descriptions of the M16 a high ranking US soldier was using vs the AK rifles the chinese were using, in particular the fire selection modes and how they showed the attitude/fighting style of each force.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Background character US Soldier getting a cold burn from his frozen rifle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this rings a bell with somebody, the title has plagued me for years!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1714" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T22:43:53.070" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T22:43:53.070" Title="Very large World War 3 novel: US vs China, main characters include new US president and younger US soldier" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T14:59:36.247" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story &lt;em&gt;The Fifth Head of Cerberus&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonist - whose real name is never mentioned, so I'll just call him &quot;Number Five&quot; as his father and aunt do - is essentially an experiment of his father's. Towards the end of the story he learns that he is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; a cloned duplicate of his father, in fact part of a long sequence of such duplicates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The visiting Dr Marsch describes the experiment as like &quot;relaxation&quot;, in which approximations are made increasingly accurate by iteration. He says that &quot;Number Five&quot; and his father are now essentially one individual - an observation which seems supported by the close physical resemblance between them, noted throughout the story and especially strong towards the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the implication of the final part of the story, or at least the implication I picked up, is that &quot;Number Five&quot; turns out &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to be so much like his father after all. In fact, he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; kills his father, and serves long years in a labour camp for this crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was his father expecting this, and did he do the same thing to his own father? &lt;strong&gt;By doing what he did, is &quot;Number Five&quot; essentially conforming to his father's intent and carrying on the same family tradition? Or did he dramatically diverge from the expected behaviour of his family&lt;/strong&gt; (and if so, why - what influences on his life made him so different from his father and grandfather?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only read the story once, and the answer to this important issue has evaded me. But I suspect that a close reading of the text, and especially the parts which refer to the protagonist's father/ancestors and his relationship with them, will provide enough evidence to piece together the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T14:59:36.247" Title="Did &quot;Number Five&quot; really act differently from his father?" Tags="&lt;gene-wolfe&gt;&lt;the-fifth-head-of-cerberus&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1888" CreationDate="2017-06-21T17:11:17.863" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First: thanks to you for reading the question and giving it a thought!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After several failed attempts to google this book/story by the story fragments, I finally had the idea to look for a list of all Reader's Digest &amp;quot;Condensed Books&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;Selected Editions&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, Wikipedia offers such lists in &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%E2%80%99s_Digest_Auswahlb%C3%BCcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader%27s_Digest_Condensed_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;While screening those lists, I finally recognised the title of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Find a Safe Place&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; by &lt;strong&gt;Alexander Lazzarino and  E. Kent Hayes&lt;/strong&gt;, published in a &amp;quot;Condensed Book&amp;quot; in 1985 in the US and 1993 in Germany (title of the German translation was &amp;quot;Freiheit auf Bewährung&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To confirm the finding, there is a good review on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/alex-e-kent-hayes-lazzarino/find-a-safe-place/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.kirkusreviews.com&lt;/a&gt; (formatting by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fuzzy underpinnings of this &amp;quot;dramatization&amp;quot; of the story of four chance reform-school boys (&amp;quot;actual case histories,&amp;quot; supplemented by &amp;quot;composites&amp;quot;), Lazzarino and Hayes offer an unusual closeup of the &lt;strong&gt;lives of children we throw in jail &amp;quot;because they have no adults to care for them.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; The scene is Clearwater [Nebraska] Boys' Industrial School, an institution designed for hard-core delinquents, where in 1963 there arrived:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Matt, a 14-year-old &lt;strong&gt;Wyoming ranchhand's son&lt;/strong&gt;, who got into minor trouble with the law after his father's death left him &lt;strong&gt;orphaned&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John, a &lt;strong&gt;bright black teenager&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;My mama left me, and the state figured I'd end up here sooner or later anyway, so they greased the skids and shipped me straight. It was all legal...&amp;quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ralph, an &lt;strong&gt;obese 15-year-old mute&lt;/strong&gt; who, for years, had been &lt;strong&gt;erroneously classified as profoundly retarded&lt;/strong&gt;; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tony, a &lt;strong&gt;streetwise black ten-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; who had acted as mother's pimp.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This unlikely group stuck together as friends: their &amp;quot;determination to survive and capacity to adapt to a system that... rendered them helpless&amp;quot; pulled them through. But not without some bad moments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lazzarino and Hayes vividly depict the two systems of governance at Clearwater: the adult administration, generally well-intentioned but handicapped by inadequate funds or staff; and the small groups of inmates in each &amp;quot;cottage&amp;quot; who actually run the place with the administration's tacit consent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a tough and very intelligent kid like Matt, there were only three options: release the pent-up rage (no outlet); go crazy; or begin to think you really are bad (so it's not an injustice to be in a place like Clearwater) and take over as one of the chief goons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though tempted by the third option, &lt;strong&gt;Matt ultimately administered a savage beating to the head goon, two of whose teeth had to be removed surgically from Matt's knee&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He and John were &lt;strong&gt;saved from sentences in an adult prison by an escape, arranged--hold your breath--by three of the Clearwater staff&lt;/strong&gt;, who knew all along they didn't belong there and acted in accordance with &amp;quot;bottom line standards of justice and human dignity.&amp;quot; In all, quite a story--told without the melodrama that could easily have sunk it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pub Date: May 28th, 1984&#xA;Publisher: McGraw-Hill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="682" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T02:27:44.853" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T02:27:44.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2771" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:56:43.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T19:56:43.887" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T19:56:43.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2772" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-21T19:56:43.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;IT&quot;, a horror novel written by Stephen King. The story revolves around a shape-shifting monster who terrorizes the state of Maine and a group of children who attempt to stop it. Questions about this novel should be tagged with [stephen-king]. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T17:04:32.617" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T17:04:32.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2773" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T20:12:17.417" Score="7" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shel Silverstein's poems are illustrated by himself. The illustrations often provide the 'punchline' of the poem, as in the following examples (all taken from &lt;em&gt;Falling Up&lt;/em&gt;. Pictures are mine - feel free to replace them with better ones):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Safe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look to the left,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I look to the right,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Before I ever&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Move my feet.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No cars to the left,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No cars to the right,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I guess it's safe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To cross the street...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem is accompanied by this illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wjzW9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wjzW9m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;*&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a safe falling out of the sky onto the girl's head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unfair&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They don't allow pets in this apartment.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That's not decent, that's not fair.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They don't allow pets in this apartment.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They don't listen, they don't care.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I told them he's quiet and never does bark,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I told them he'd do all his stuff in the park,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I told them he's cuddly and friendly, and yet -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They won't allow pets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is accompanied by this charming animal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VuNiL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VuNiLm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Web-Foot Woe&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Us swans and geese&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have rotten luck.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You folks don't know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose name is whose.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I waddle in -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You all yell &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Duck&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can't you see&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That I'm a &lt;em&gt;goose&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this pointed picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BLohl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BLohlm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Imagining&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're only &lt;em&gt;imagining&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A mouse is in your hair.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You've got to stop imagining&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That mice are everywhere.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think you're just imagining&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To give yourself a scare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But trust me dear, I wouldn't lie:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; mouse up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this slightly surprising picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rawJf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rawJfm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've made the point; there are more examples. So can these illustrations be considered part of the poem itself, as they are necessary to understand the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T23:28:00.497" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T00:17:51.107" Title="Are the illustrations part of Shel Silverstein's poems?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;shel-silverstein&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:18:32.500" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been re-reading &lt;em&gt;19 Days - One Day&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, a webcomic&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; by the Chinese author &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/old_xian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Xian&lt;/a&gt;. One of the first chapters has me wondering, though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mLqr9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mLqr9m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full resolution &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does Zhan Xixi mean when he says &amp;quot;What if...&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing he's afraid Jian Yi slipped and fell, but it's not clear from the further exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is Jian Yi an idiot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about this one. Firstly, Jian Yi appears to genuinely be taking a shower. Secondly, the bathtub is behind him. Thirdly, there are showers that are supposed to be taken directly on the floor, and the shower thingy appears to be fixed in place. Fourthly, Zhan Xixi tells him he's an idiot. Question - what am I not getting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The manhua can be read &lt;a href=&quot;http://yaoi-blcd.tumblr.com/archive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here on the translators' Tumblr&lt;/a&gt; (posted there with the permission of the author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; Chinese comics are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhua&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manhua&lt;/a&gt;. Read left to right (though I've heard about manhua that are read right to left, I've not seen any).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:21:13.167" Title="Why does Zhan Xixi call Jian Yi an idiot?" Tags="&lt;19-days-one-day&gt;&lt;old-xian&gt;&lt;manhua&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:27:57.810" Score="4" ViewCount="1175" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the protagonist of &lt;em&gt;19 Days - One Day&lt;/em&gt; is called Zhan Zheng Xi. Or Zhan Xixi. I'm not sure, because he's been called all three:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zhan Zhengxi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oFOtEm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oFOtEm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;I want to see Zhan Zhegxi.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zhan Zheng Xi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cgvGSm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cgvGSm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Zhan! Zheng! Xi! Run!&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zhan Xixi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0L9vm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/e0L9vm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;You said Zhan Xixi is going to be there too?! Why didn&amp;#39;t you say so earlier!!&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two I can attribute to translation from Chinese to English. What about the third one, Zhan Xixi? Does he have four names, as in &quot;Zhan Zheng Xi Xixi&quot;, or is it something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All images taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://yaoi-blcd.tumblr.com/tagged/19-days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T19:24:56.253" Title="Is it Zhan Zheng Xi, Zhan Zhengxi, or Zhan Xixi?" Tags="&lt;19-days-one-day&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;manhua&gt;&lt;old-xian&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:28:36.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:28:36.760" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:28:36.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:28:36.760" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chinese webcomic (manhua) by [old-xian]. Use with the [old-xian] and [chinese-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:31:00.383" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:31:00.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" Score="0" Body="Use this tags for questions about Old Xian (Old先), the Chinese comic artist, and her works, such as [19-days-one-day]." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:31:03.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2780" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2781" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" Score="0" Body="For questions about Chinese comics; use this tags either for specific works (with appropriate title and author tag), or for the medium as a whole." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" LastActivityDate="2017-06-21T21:32:35.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T03:22:21.710" Score="13" ViewCount="5190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Henry Reed's poem &quot;Naming of Parts&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/poem/2003/11/naming_of_parts.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;) depicts a lesson used to teach soldiers the various parts of their rifles. (Hence the title &quot;Naming of Parts&quot;). Interspersed between the description of the lesson is a description of a nearby field. For example, here is the first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We shall have what to do after firing. But today,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Today we have naming of parts. Japonica&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;And today we have naming of parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of interrupting the narrative with a description of nature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2018-12-19T18:14:20.213" Title="Why does the poem &quot;Naming of Parts&quot; contrast war with nature?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;henry-reed&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2017-06-22T03:22:21.710" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is best answered using a technique called close reading. So unfortunately, if you're just looking for an answer about the poem &quot;Naming of Parts&quot;, you're going to have to read about close reading first. But since close reading is a useful and important concept that explains so much about literature, I think you will find it worth your while!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Close reading is a way of reading a text that is completely different from how you would normally read. When you read normally, the words enter into your mind and you remember the general idea of what the words say. But when you read normally, you don't pay much attention to each individual word itself, or the order and arrangement of the words, or to the punctuation. Close reading is the opposite. When you close read, you ignore the big picture and focus on the little details. This means asking questions such as: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What words are repeated? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What words are capitalized? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What meaning does each individual word have?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do any of the words have more than one meaning?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What effect do punctuation and line breaks have on the meaning?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the order of the words? What words come first? What words come last? Why?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These little details may seem insignificant. But it's the little details that contain the most information. Resist the urge to think about the big picture, at least right away. The big picture will emerge slowly from the little details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference between close reading and normal reading is speed. You may be a slow reader, you may be a fast reader, but when you read normally, your eyes move from left to right, and you don't go backwards unless you missed something. Close reading is different. Because you're focusing on all these little details, you will spend a lot of time close reading a very small passage of text. And you won't just be reading left to right: you'll have to move backwards, reread things, underline things, and pause and think about things. For this reason, close reading is typically done with a very small passage. That passage can range in size from a single sentence to a few paragraphs. But unless you have a lot of time on your hands, you aren't going to close read an entire novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, this answer will only focus on the fourth and fifth stanzas of &quot;Naming of Parts.&quot; I'm focusing on these stanzas because I find them the most interesting. Here they are below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;They call it easing the Spring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;&amp;emsp;For today we have naming of parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last thing about close reading. Don't close read on a computer. Print out the passage you want to close read. That way, you can underline words and jot down notes. Trust me, it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now that we understand what close reading is, the next step is to actually close read the fourth and fifth stanzas of &quot;Naming of Parts.&quot; To do this, I need to print out the passage, look at all the tiny little details, move backwards and forwards through the text, and write down my notes. I need to ask questions of the little details: what are the exact meanings of this word? Why is this word capitalized? What is the purpose of this period? I asked all of these questions, and took notes on a piece of paper. I then typed up my notes, which I reproduce below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The word spring has several connotations: it can mean the season, it can mean to spring (i.e. to jump), or it can mean a spring (an object that if pushed or pulled, will return to its original shape).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The line &quot;They call it easing the Spring&quot; is emphasized by its indentation and the fact that it is at the end of the fourth stanza.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The repetition with variation of the phrase &quot;we call this \ Easing the spring&quot; v. &quot;They call it easing the Spring&quot; is interesting. The change in pronouns seems to be important.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bolt could be interpreted as a phallic object (i.e. it looks like a penis).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;breech&quot; can mean a crack in something, which could be interpreted as a vulvic or yonic object (i.e. it looks like a vagina -- BTW &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/lets-clear-up-the-vagina-vs-vulva-debate-once-and-for-all_us_562f99dfe4b06317990f73c8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's a discussion of whether vagina or vulva is the more appropriate term to use in this context&lt;/a&gt;, and here's a Stack Exchange question about &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19171/what-is-the-female-version-of-phallic&quot;&gt;whether vulvic or yonic is the more appropriate term to use&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;rapidly backwards and forwards&quot; is repeated twice, making it hard to miss. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first time the phrase &quot;rapidly backwards and forwards&quot; is mentioned, it is in the context of instructions for how to use the &quot;bolt&quot;. Given the symbolism of the bold and the breech, it's pretty clear that &quot;slide it rapidly backwards and forwards&quot; is a reference to sex.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second time the phrase &quot;rapidly backwards and forwards&quot; is mentioned, it's in the context of &quot;And rapidly backwards and forwards / The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bees and flowers have a sexual relationship: bees transfer pollen from one flower to another, which allows the plants to reproduce.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the fact that this stanza is filled with sexual references, when I hear the words &quot;fumbling&quot; and &quot;assaulting,&quot; especially after the phrase &quot;rapidly backwards and forwards,&quot; I immediately think of how those words can describe sex.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In list item #3 I mention the change in pronouns between &quot;we call this / Easing the spring&quot; and. &quot;They call it easing the Spring&quot;. The we and they creates an us and them affect in the poem: &quot;we&quot; is identified with the military trainees, and the pronoun &quot;they&quot; is used to refer to the bees (&quot;The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers / They call it easing the Spring.&quot;) and thus to nature. The effect of this is to identify the humans as separate and different from nature: nature is not considered part of the group identified with the pronoun &quot;we&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, the comparison is also a very strange one. Why on earth contrast human sexuality to non-human sexuality? Those are two very different things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The poem also comments on the inadequacy of the soldiers. The poem lists &quot;the point of balance&quot; as an important element of the weapon (it's one of the parts that is named), but tells us that &quot;Which in our case we have not got&quot; the point of balance. To be balanced, one needs to be calm and controlled; not being balanced means being clumsy. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how you read the poem, it either teases or encourages the soldiers. The soldiers are told that &quot;easing the spring... is perfectly easy / If you have any strength in your thumb.&quot; Telling someone that something is easy can encourage them (it's easy; you can do it!) or discourage them (it's easy; why can't you do it?). The poem deliberately obscures the full context of this phrase to create this ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nature is described as &quot;the almond-blossom / Silent in all of the gardens.&quot; This is in direct contrast to the soldiers naming (i.e. speaking out loud) the various parts of their weapon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sexual references in the poem are about watching sex. With the phrase &quot;as you see&quot;, the poem implies that someone is demonstrating how &quot;The purpose of [the bolt] / Is to open the breech&quot; and that we are observing. There is no indication that the narrator is doing anything, the narrator is simply watching.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The instructions (the &quot;naming of parts&quot;) are designed for a masculine audience. The soldiers are instructed on how to use the phallic bolt (&quot;We can slide it / Rapidly backwards and forwards&quot;) but not on the use of the yonic breech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I want to return to the phrase &quot;easing the Spring&quot; which I discussed in list items #1 and #2. A spring is something that goes back and forth; given the amount of sexual references in this stanza alone, and the frequent references to &quot;rapidly backwards and forwards (which perfectly describes a spring's motion) it seems reasonable to interpret the word &quot;Spring&quot; not just as a season but as another reference to sex. This interpretation is supported by the placement of the word &quot;easing&quot; next to the word &quot;Spring&quot;: easing can imply slowly moving something, which is another reference to sex in the context of the phrase &quot;We can slide it / Rapidly backwards and forwards.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could honestly go on for at least twenty more bullet points. I'm going to stop now because this answer has to end sometime. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The close reading is finished! We have the little details. But we aren't done yet. My notes aren't coherent, and there is no overarching argument--the big picture--that can make sense of these little details. To fix this, we will use the little details as pieces of evidence to support a larger argument. What the larger argument is is up to you, but you need to support your argument with evidence from your close reading. Otherwise, it's an opinion, not an argument. The following paragraphs represent my final argument about &quot;Naming of Parts,&quot; based on the evidence I found using close reading. (It functions as my answer to the OP's original question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reed's poem &quot;Naming of Parts&quot; contrasts nature with war as a way of critiquing the culture surrounding the military. The poem uses metaphor to make a parallel between learning to use weapons and sex. The narrator's inexperience with both subjects is evidenced by the fact that he (the soldier is only instructed in phallic weaponry) observes rather than participates. Therefore, this poem describes &lt;a href=&quot;http://taxicrash.github.io/2014/12/30/monomyth-incorrect-dangerous/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an initiation rite&lt;/a&gt;, where violence (using a weapon) is a necessary component in sexual maturity and thus adulthood. Among other things, this poem implies a commentary on the gendered violence of the military, a commentary justified by the military's sexual assault epidemic, as well as the use of systematic rape as a military tactic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The comparison between the military and nature serves to emphasize the strangeness, alienness, and absurdity of the situation. As the military conducts its initiation rite, it is contrasted with an image of sexual relationships in nature. This image is foreign, and its foreignness is emphasized by the contrast between &quot;we&quot; (the soldiers) and &quot;them&quot; (nature); the poem supposes that nature is fundamentally separate from the soldiers. In addition, nature is &quot;silent&quot; and has &quot;balance&quot; while the soldiers are inadequate (&quot;it is perfectly easy / If you have any strength in your thumb&quot;). While the soldiers struggle with the initiation rite, an alternative exists. The nature portrayed in the poem doesn't need a rite: it is self-assured and doesn't need to learn because it merely exists. This contrast highlights the absurdity of the soldiers, their initiation rite, and their violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's close reading! I hope this answer was interesting, and I hope you walk away with an understanding of how close reading is a powerful tool that can answer all sorts of interesting questions about literary texts. If you have questions about any of this, please ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you read my answer, you may have disagreed with some of my interpretations of the text. You may also have thought of interpretations that I completely overlooked. That's completely normal. Different people will notice different things. In my opinion, close reading is best done as a collaborative exercise: that way no stone is left unturned. If you're interested in learning more about how and why people read the same text differently, there's a great tool called &quot;reader response criticism&quot; that I hope to discuss on this site at a later point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I want to emphasize that learning how to close read is like learning how to read normally. It takes time and practice. If you want to learn to close read, I encourage you to find a passage you find interesting and just try close reading. See what you can do. And keep trying. You won't get anywhere without practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-08T13:53:16.363" LastActivityDate="2017-07-08T13:53:16.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2784" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T03:48:08.307" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read this story a long time ago. I remember some fragments like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a young man travelling (maybe on a train). He starts talking to another passenger in the same seat (or cabin). The other passenger has an apple. The young man wants the apple but the stranger warns him that this is an apple of wisdom. After eating it he will know about everyone's feelings and intentions. The young man insists and the stranger gives him the apple before the young man gets off the train. After eating the apple, the young man is shocked. He suddenly starts &quot;seeing&quot; how other people like his lover/wife and other relations are not good to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a long time (around 1990), I thought that this is an &quot;Oscar Wilde&quot; story. But after all the time I am not able to find it in any Oscar Wilde collection (the ones I came across). Also, it was in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you can help me figure this out, I would like to read it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1715" LastEditorUserId="1715" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T10:00:41.457" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T10:00:41.457" Title="Can you identify this story involving apple of wisdom" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2773" CreationDate="2017-06-22T09:36:27.673" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to say that with some of them, yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some of Silverstein's poems where the illustration is humorous but not required, such as &quot;My Beard&quot; (from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Sidewalk_Ends&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Where the Sidewalk Ends&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My beard grows down to my toes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I never wears no clothes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I wraps my hair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Around my bare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And down the road I goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the picture of a little man wrapped in his beard running down the street is funny, you don't need it to understand the text. But in the examples you've cited, without the image, you literally can't understand the punchline (the safe falling, the elephant in the girl's hair).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, for some of them (obviously you'd have to go through his work and read them to figure out which), the illustration is part and parcel of the text, and cannot be separated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T17:30:40.247" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T17:30:40.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2787" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8068" CreationDate="2017-06-22T12:26:18.260" Score="5" ViewCount="1617" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the passage being analysed, from Francis Bacon's essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-50.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Of Studies&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly and with diligence and attention. Some books may also be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man, conference a reading man, and writing an exact man. And therefore if a man writes little, he had need have a good memory; if he confers little, he had need have a present wit; and if he reads little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that he doth not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Histories make men wise, poets witty, the mathematics subtle, natural philosophy deep, moral, grave, logic and rhetoric able to contend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here are the questions I'm expected to answer about this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by conference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) A meeting where conversation is important&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) A gathering of people&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) A get together&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) A group of people assembled to hear a speaker&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does some books are to be tasted mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) To be read with diligence and attention&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) To be read but not curiously&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) To be read just for fun&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) To be read only in parts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How must we approach the 'meaner' sort of books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) They are to be read by deputy and extracts made of them by others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) They are to be read but not to contradict and confute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) They are to be read but only in parts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) They are to be read but not curiously&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What should be the real object of reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) Not to contradict and confute&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) To weigh and consider&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) To distil the contents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) To understand the author's point of view&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If a man reads very little, what must he pretend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(A) He must pretend to have a good memory&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(B) He must pretend to have a lot of intelligence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(C) He must pretend to know a lot&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;(D) He must pretend to be witty&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Nhmm0.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers I marked are: &lt;strong&gt;2D, 3A, 4B, 5A&lt;/strong&gt;. However, the correct answers are: &lt;strong&gt;1D, 2A, 3D, 4D, 5C&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my understanding is that the answers I marked are directly from the passage as it is. However, the correct answers seems to be different. Perhaps a great understanding of the passage is required?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1719" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T13:47:05.177" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T10:34:51.543" Title="Why are my answers wrong for this Bacon passage about reading and writing?" Tags="&lt;francis-bacon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2698" CreationDate="2017-06-22T13:15:26.413" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jah is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rastafari#Jah_Rastafari_and_Jesus_of_Nazareth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;god of Rastafari&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is often mentioned is late- / post-soviet era songs. For example &amp;quot;Джа на нашей стороне&amp;quot; by Гражданская Оборона or &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aquarium.kroogi.com/ru/content/2051713-Edinstvennyy-Dom-Dzha-dast-Nam-Vsyo.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Единственный дом (Джа даст нам всё)&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Boris Grebenshikov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As some users have doubts about this Jah being Jah Rastafari, here are some examples from other Russian rock songs (all these band are classics of Russian rock).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grazhdanskaya_Oborona&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Гражданская оборона&lt;/a&gt; - Мы в глубокой жопе (literal translation: &amp;quot;We are in deep ass&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Благая травка, великий Джа&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Полет с девятого этажа&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Веселый праздник растафарай&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Другое место - терновый рай&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rough translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sacred weed, great Jah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A jump from the ninth floor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy celebration of Rastafari&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other place is thorny paradise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarium_(band)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Аквариум&lt;/a&gt; - Растаманы из глубинки (&amp;quot;Rastas from the boondocks&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Мы знаем, что есть только два пути:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Джа Растафара или война&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rough translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know there are only two ways&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jah Rastafari or the war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nochnye_Snaipery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ночные снайперы&lt;/a&gt; - Куба (&amp;quot;Cuba&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Мы кубинскими звёздами царапали спину и грудь&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;И завидовали тем, кто здоровался за руку с Джа&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rough translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We scratсhed our backs and chests with cuban stars&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And envied those who shaked hands with Jah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T02:13:28.610" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2789" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Passage&lt;/em&gt; is a trilogy of apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic vampire novels by US author Justin Cronin, consisting of the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Passage&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Twelve&lt;/em&gt; (2012)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The City of Mirrors&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2790" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" Score="0" Body="For questions about the trilogy of vampire novels by US author Justin Cronin." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T13:50:39.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2768" CreationDate="2017-06-22T13:54:57.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a book called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_Light_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arc Light&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the cover with the plane:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euwLr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/euwLr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Wikipedia mentions some of the same characters I remembered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel focuses on four key groups:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;President Walter Livingston, his successor, and his National Security Council, particularly National Security Advisor Greg Lambert.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The US Air Force crew of an ICBM silo who receive the firing order and are then stuck in their silo when the Russian missiles strike.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Major David Chandler, US Army Reserve as he is activated and sent to Europe where his unit spearheads the allied advance towards Moscow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chandler's wife, Melissa, as she struggles with their first child in the midst of a nuclear war.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the book by looking through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:World_War_III_speculative_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WW III speculative fiction on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, major thanks to Randal'Thor!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1714" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T14:01:36.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2823" CreationDate="2017-06-22T14:06:32.123" Score="6" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://csatprep.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/rc-exercise-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://csatprep.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/rc-exercise-1.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Patriotism is a very complex feeling, built up out of primitive instincts and highly intellectual convictions. There is love of home and family and friends, making us peculiarly anxious to preserve our own country from invasion. There is the mild instinctive liking for compatriots against foreigners. There is pride, which is bound up with the success of the community to which we feel that we belong. There is a belief, suggested by pride, but reinforced by history, that one’s own nation represents a great tradition and stands for ideals that are important to the human race. But besides all these, there is another element, at once nobler and more open to attack, an element of worship, of willing sacrifice, of joyful merging of the individual life in the life of the nation. This religious element in patriotism is essential to the strength of the State, since it enlists the best that is in most men on the side of national sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: This passage appears in Bertrand Russell's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=wnmMAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT49&amp;amp;lpg=PT49&amp;amp;dq=Patriotism%20is%20a%20very%20complex%20feeling,%20built%20up%20out%20of%20primitive%20instincts%20and%20highly%20intellectual%20convictions.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=HjPorrqcrK&amp;amp;sig=ICvdyRA9U78kUOg1oE2GAdGrdNY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwimoqCx0NHUAhVDPz4KHUSYBwMQ6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Patriotism%20is%20a%20very%20complex%20feeling%2C%20built%20up%20out%20of%20primitive%20instincts%20and%20highly%20intellectual%20convictions.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Men Fight&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; however, this should not be necessary to understand the passage, which was quoted by itself in the example question linked above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example question asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What does the author imply by using the phrase “open to attack” for the element of worship in patriotism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Options are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This element is unnecessary in some instances of patriotic behaviour &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This element will call for various acts of national sacrifice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This element has no historical basis yet it is important &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;This element can cannot (sic) be justified on rational grounds&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer key indicates that the last option (the element cannot be justified on rational grounds) is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analysis is not quite clear to me. I want to know what this sentence actually implies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;here is another element, at once nobler and more open to attack, an element of worship, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1719" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T03:05:14.580" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T03:05:19.147" Title="What does the author imply by using the phrase “open to attack” for the element of worship in patriotism?" Tags="&lt;bertrand-russell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2749" CreationDate="2017-06-22T19:22:18.903" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The primary sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us start with what the sources actually say they were given, and by whom. First, from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poetic_Edda/V%C3%B6lusp%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Völuspá&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;18&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mind they not own,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;reflection they had not,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;no vision nor cover  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;or colour fine;  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;mind gave Odinn,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;reflection gave Hænir,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;vision gave Lódurr &lt;br&gt;&#xA;and colour fine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, Snorri, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/pre/pre04.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gylfaginning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, chapter IX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the sons of Borr were walking along the sea-strand, they found&#xA;two trees, and took up the trees and shaped men of them: the first&#xA;gave them spirit and life; the second, wit and feeling; the third,&#xA;form, speech, hearing, and sight. They gave them clothing and names:&#xA;the male was called Askr, and the female Embla, and of them was&#xA;mankind begotten, which received a dwelling-place under Midgard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(comparing with Swedish translations I have, there are large variation; Lars Lönnroth translation of Völuspa lets the gods give breath, force, and blood and colour, respectively. There is less difference in Snorri's acccount, which is unsurprising as it is in prose; instead of &amp;quot;feeling&amp;quot;, they are given the &amp;quot;ability to move&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen, the two sources that retell this even differs in almost every detail; Völuspa claims that it was Odin, as well as the relatively unknown Gods Hænir and Lódurr, while Snorri says that it was the sons of Borr, which he earlier had identified as Odin, Vili, and Vé. Vili and Vé are also almost unknown quantities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Who are these gods?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hænir also appears as the hostage sent by the Aesir to the Vanir at the end of the war between them, and he makes himself into a great chieftain, but he seems to be utterly reliant on the advice of the other hostage, Mimir. He also appears as one of the survivors after Ragnarök, where he selects something wooden that has to do with destiny (Lönnroth claims it is tools for divination, Steinsland that it is a new world tree). Finally, and perhaps most interesting, he also appears with Odin and Loki in the 10th century verse &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haustl%C3%B6ng&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haustlöng&lt;/a&gt;, which has made some commenters suggest that the otherwise unknown Lódurr might be Loki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vili and Vé are the little-known brothers of Odin, and they crop up here and there: they helped in slaying Ymir and the creation of the world from his corpse. Odin wou1d also, apparently, let his brothers rule in his stead when he was on his travels. Once he was gone so long that they married his wife...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why three?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could have been more than one god to show that this was not something even the powerful Odin could achieve on his own (remember, the Norse gods are in fact rather feeble when compared to other pantheons); and three is a more &amp;quot;magic&amp;quot; number than two. However, there is also a suggestion made by Steinsland that this could have something to do with an earlier verse in Völuspá, where three giantesses enter the world of the Aesir and cause it to fall; apparently, there is structural parallelism to the point that the genders are wrong in this passage. As to why three giantesses, that is a good question, but it could be that they are actually the norns Urd, Verdandi and Skuld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing seems clear, and that is that Odin as the most important god was also the one that actually gave them life. However, the other two gods, who also gave important things, are all decidedly vague and unknown (unless we take the hypothetical identification of Lodurr with Loki as fact), so that we can not really know why each gave what. This is reflected in the scholarly literature I consulted: even Clunies Ross, who is most interested in the matter, does not really devote energy on who gave what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on this is that we should probably give more weight to the version in Völuspá. Even if the two versions might reflect two independent traditions, it seems more likely that someone introduced Odin's two brothers in a story where there originally were two other, little-known gods, than the other way around. That we have an early piece of scaldic poetry which puts Odin in a similar situation with at least one of these gods is also important. I would think that Hænir was an older, once important god that was almost, but not quite, forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;My sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from translation linked in the text, I've consulted Lars Lönnroth's &lt;em&gt;Den poetiska Eddan&lt;/em&gt; and Karl G. Johansson's &lt;em&gt;Snorres Edda&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gro Steinsland's &lt;em&gt;Fornnordisk religion&lt;/em&gt; was used for most of the details on the different gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Britt-Mari Näsströms &lt;em&gt;Nordiska gudinnor&lt;/em&gt; had a good introduction to Vili and Vé.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Margaret Clunies-Ross &lt;em&gt;Prolonged Echoes&lt;/em&gt; has a lot to say about the creation of the world in general, and the ideology that is presented through it in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T19:30:34.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T20:49:48.810" Score="4" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Allison Beals and Her 25 Eels&quot; is a poem in &lt;em&gt;Falling Up&lt;/em&gt; by Shel Silverstein. It describes how Allison uses 24 eels -- as shoelaces, earrings, ladle, etc. The 25th, however, is different. The poem ends like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The 'lectric one was a lamp that could shine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And one got a new job on page fifty-nine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see an eel half off the page (bottom left corner):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/glcXO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/glcXOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, if you flip back (the poem is on page 98) to page 59, you can see an eel being used as a wire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpg5y.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpg5ym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So is the page-59 eel shown in other publications of the poem&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;? If so, how?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Which, IMO, it &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be, as I think it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2773/are-the-illustrations-part-of-shel-silversteins-poems&quot;&gt;actually a part of the poem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-22T23:06:19.747" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T14:21:55.297" Title="How is the connection between the picture on page 59 and the last line of &quot;Allison Beals and Her 25 Eels&quot; shown in other publications of the poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;shel-silverstein&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2796" CreationDate="2017-06-22T22:47:16.677" Score="6" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; is an anthology collection of steampunk stories by various South-East Asian authors, including names such as Olivia Ho, Marilag Angway, and Timothy Dimacali. I know very little about either steampunk or South-East Asian literature, so none of these names were familiar to me; however, a little online searching told me that at least some of them, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TJ_Dimacali&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dimacali&lt;/a&gt;, were already well-known authors in the genre, and presumably were asked to contribute for that reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Were all of the contributors already established authors?&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, is &lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; a collection of short stories by famous authors, the sort of anthology that might advertise itself by &quot;includes stories from So-and-so!&quot; - or is it a collaborative effort to create a new thing, a South-East Asian steampunk collection, by a mixed team qualified more by enthusiasm than experience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T23:53:22.813" Title="Were the contributors to &quot;The SEA is Ours&quot; all already established authors?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;the-sea-is-ours&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2795" CreationDate="2017-06-22T23:53:22.813" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://rosariumpublishing.com/the-sea-is-ours.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;features a combination&lt;/a&gt; of widely established authors, experienced authors who are not yet widely known outside a particular niche audience, and authors who are just beginning to be published. This is unsurprising; it's typical of anthology collections to use Big Name contributors to boost awareness of unrecognized talent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6981308.Marilag_Angway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marilag Angway&lt;/a&gt; has anthologized stories across several genres.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.salimbalcomics.com/creators&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paolo Chikiamco&lt;/a&gt; is writer and editor of many comics and anthologies, as well as interactive fiction works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TJ_Dimacali&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timothy James M. Dimacali&lt;/a&gt; writes both science fiction and science journalism. His work is studied in Philippine schools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lauraleehill.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L.L. Hill&lt;/a&gt;'s stories and poetry have been anthologized, and her entry for &lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; is an elaboration on a previous work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alessahinlo.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alessa Hinlo&lt;/a&gt; is a newer writer; &lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; appears to be her second published short story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://silver-goggles.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-sea-is-ours-roundtable-olivia-ho_8.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olivia Ho&lt;/a&gt; may be newly published, or I may just be bad at Googling.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert Liow is published in the &lt;em&gt;Singapore Poetry Writing Month&lt;/em&gt; anthology and by the Singapore’s Creative Arts Programme, but I think &lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; is his first international distribution.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14813411.Pear_Nuallak&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pear Nuallak&lt;/a&gt; is published in a couple magazines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/wulfettenoire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ivanna S. Mendels&lt;/a&gt; writes short stories and children's books.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5016187.Kate_Osias&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kate Osias&lt;/a&gt; is an award-winning author, and co-editor of volumes of the &lt;em&gt;Philippine Speculative Fiction&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zmquynh.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;z.m. quỳnh&lt;/a&gt; writes short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, but &lt;em&gt;The Sea is Ours&lt;/em&gt; is her first speculative fiction work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://nghivo.com/wp/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nghi Vo&lt;/a&gt; is a professional author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obscurity and a small publishing portfolio don't equate to inexperience; many excellent and prolific authors never break out of their local region, and often an author's first work is a highly polished gem representing time and energy they'll never have the opportunity to again devote to a single work once they're immersed in the publishing grind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-06-22T23:53:22.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-22T23:56:36.333" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/738/481&quot;&gt;this month&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/571/481&quot;&gt;topic challenge&lt;/a&gt;. The purpose of these challenges is to increase the diversity of the literature that we discuss on this site. This is important for a number of reasons, among them to increase our understanding of cultures other than our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I'd like to ask if the stories from &lt;em&gt;The SEA is Ours&lt;/em&gt; accurately portray South-East Asian culture. I have little to no prior experience with SEA culture, and want to ensure that I'm getting a correct picture from the stories of this anthology (whenever my copy arrives). I understand that &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=38044993#38044993&quot;&gt;culture isn't static&lt;/a&gt;, and that part of writing SEA characters and culture into a steampunk world necessitates the creation of something new; however, I imagine that an effort was made to preserve the essence of SEA culture and society in the brave new steampunk world(s) of this collection. If that effort falls short in some manner, I'd like to be alerted about it in advance so that I don't come to misunderstand the culture under discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While an &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=38044864#38044864&quot;&gt;argument could be made&lt;/a&gt; that if &quot;SEA authors are writing SEA steampunk, then it would be difficult for it to not in some way be an authentic representation of SEA culture,&quot; I know that other efforts by members of a given culture to explain parts of that culture have fallen short in different ways. (See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1037/conversation/counterargument-to-if-chamorros-are-doing-it&quot;&gt;this part of a conversation in chat&lt;/a&gt; regarding Chamorro culture.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that the best answers to this question will come from those who have both read the book, and are familiar enough with SEA culture to point to things that were done correctly (or not). Answers that quote reviews from South-East Asians describing the accuracy of the stories are also acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1037/conversation/sea-culture-in-the-sea-is-ours-with-besw&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; about this in chat which may be of use to potential answerers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T00:08:33.067" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T09:51:28.683" Title="Do the stories in &quot;The SEA is Ours&quot; accurately portray the essential aspects of South-East Asian culture?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;the-sea-is-ours&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2017-06-23T00:42:53.410" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the original Polish text of this passage (plus half a sentence as the sentence breaks are different in the translation). I highlighted the sentence that was translated as “A giant Negress was coming silently towards me with a smooth, rolling gait.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zbliżyłem się do okrągłej komory, z której rozchodziły się korytarze na kształt&#xA;  szprych koła, kiedy mijając jakieś ciasne, boczne przejście wiodące, zdaje się,&#xA;  do łazienek, zobaczyłem wielką, niewyraźną, prawie zlewającą się z półmrokiem&#xA;  postać.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zatrzymałem się jak wryty. &lt;strong&gt;Z głębi owego odgałęzienia szła niespiesznym,&#xA;  kaczkowatym chodem ogromna Murzynka&lt;/strong&gt;. Zobaczyłem błysk jej białek i prawie&#xA;  równocześnie usłyszałem miękkie, bose plaśnięcia jej stóp. Nie nosiła nic&#xA;  oprócz błyszczącej żółtawo, jakby ze słomy uplecionej spódniczki; miała&#xA;  olbrzymie, obwisłe piersi, a czarne ramiona dorównywały udom normalnego&#xA;  człowieka; minęła mnie, nie spojrzawszy nawet w moją stronę - w odległości&#xA;  metra - i poszła, kołysząc słoniowatymi kłębami, podobna do owych&#xA;  steatopygicznych rzeźb z epoki kamienia łupanego, jakie widuje się czasem w&#xA;  muzeach antropologicznych. Tam gdzie korytarz zakręcał, zwróciła się w bok i&#xA;  zniknęła w drzwiach kabiny Gibariana. Kiedy je otwierała, przez mgnienie&#xA;  stanęła w mocniejszym świetle, które paliło się w pokoju.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French translation by Jean-Michel Jasienko that this English translation is derived from is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Une femme géante, de type négroïde, s’avançait tranquillement, en se dandinant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;Murzynka&lt;/em&gt; is translated as “&lt;em&gt;[femme] de type négroïde&lt;/em&gt;” in French and “Negress” in English. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murzyn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (note that I don't speak Polish so I cannot confirm this from personal experience), this word is neutral in Polish, or at least was at the time Lem wrote, so it would be closer to “Black” in contemporary English. See the Wikipedia page for a discussion of the connotations of this word, especially in the context of translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating &lt;em&gt;Murzynka&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;em&gt;Negress&lt;/em&gt; does seem slightly out of place, given that the translation dates from 1970. But only slightly. Do keep in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro#United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Negro&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Negress&lt;/em&gt; haven't always been offensive&lt;/a&gt;. Until the Civil Rights movement, it was a neutral term in the US. The only way in which it was potentially offensive is that it was often used to imply that there was a difference between Negros and non-Negros, even though such differences were generally not relevant except when viewed from a racist perspective. The same goes for the French translation, by the way: it avoids the noun “&lt;em&gt;Nègre&lt;/em&gt;” which I think was already offensive at the time (but, like &lt;em&gt;Negro&lt;/em&gt;, had been neutral earlier), and instead uses the expression “&lt;em&gt;de type négroïde&lt;/em&gt;” which is purely descriptive. There is clearly no intent, either from Lem or from the French or English translators, to use offensive language here; perceiving the word &lt;em&gt;Murzynka&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Negress&lt;/em&gt; as offensive would be an anachronism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Grass skirt” seems to be an invention of the English translators. The French translation has a straw (“&lt;em&gt;paille&lt;/em&gt;”) skirt both times, and as far as I can make it out it's the Polish text only mentions straw (&lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C5%82oma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;słoma&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, “ze słomy” means “of straw”), but the skirt only looks like (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/jakby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jabky&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; ze słomy&lt;/em&gt;) straw (more precisely, it's straw-colored).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The imagery of “steatopygous statues in anthropological museums” is a pretty direct translation of the original (“owych steatopygicznych rzeźb z epoki kamienia łupanego, jakie widuje się czasem w muzeach antropologicznych”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that the woman is meant to evoke a primitive appearance, with a reference to very old African art. The woman is connected to primitive man, and, perhaps, to primitive man's fears — a little later she is compared to Aphrodite. That and the way she is described as distant in this passage make her a possible goddess, a formidable one rather than a gentle one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T00:42:53.410" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2802" CreationDate="2017-06-23T16:01:44.873" Score="11" ViewCount="678" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoilers ahead for The Red-Headed League.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this Sherlock Holmes story, Holmes and Watson are recruited by a flustered pawnbroker, Jabez Wilson, who has been tricked into joining a fake society, the Red-Headed League. In reality, the society was just a ruse to get Wilson out of his house between the hours of 10 and 2. Whilst he was out, the criminal John Clay, who had taken a job in Wilson's shop, was digging a tunnel to the nearby bank. Wilson was supervised by Clay's accomplice, William Morris, who acted as the League's enforcer and who served to make sure Wilson never left the offices they had hired for him to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Clay had finished the tunnel, Morris disbanded the League. Wilson came to the office as usual to see a sign that read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Red-Headed League is Dissolved&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  9 October 1890&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes is then able to guess the date when the duo plan to carry out their raid on the basis of this announcement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And how could you tell that they would make their attempt tonight?&quot; I asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Well, when they closed their league offices that was a sign that they cared no longer about Mr Jabez Wilson's presence - in other words, that they had completed their tunnel. But it was essential that they should use it soon, as it might be discovered, or the bullion might be removed. Saturday would suit them better than any other day, as it would give them two days for their escape. For all these reasons I expected them to come tonight.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, wasn't this a daft and reckless move on the part of the criminals? Relieving Wilson of his cushy fake job at the office was sure to arouse his suspicions. Because of Wilson's despair at losing the job he ended up recruiting Holmes, which lead to the foiling of their raid. Wouldn't it have made much more sense simply to leave Wilson to keep his membership of the League until they'd made their escape? He would eventually put two and two together once his assistant disappeared and he stopped getting £4 a week for doing essentially nothing. It seems that they put an awful lot of work into creating this whole charade in the first place. Why didn't they maintain it for just a couple more days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This misstep certainly doesn't fit with Holmes's judgement that Clay was one of the brightest criminals in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Smart fellow, that,&quot; observed Holmes as we walked away. &quot;He is, in my judgement, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he had not a claim to be the third.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What can explain the behaviour of Clay and Morris here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="579" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-23T18:50:15.660" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T18:50:15.660" Title="Why did Morris and Clay preemptively dissolve the Red-Headed League?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2801" CreationDate="2017-06-23T17:38:03.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I took a look in Leslie S. Klinger's &lt;em&gt;The new annotated Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;. This does indeed appear to be a problem that has puzzled commentators. Three suggestions are mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clay was trying to economize (suggested by Thomas L. Stix).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clay was trying to establish how superior he was to Wilson by letting him go. (suggested by Greg Darak, in &quot;But why dissolve the League?&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clay thought so little of Wilson that it never occurred to him that Wilson would go to Holmes. (unattributed)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are, of course, Watsonian explanations. A Doylist explanation is that the story would not be as effective if the payments stopped at any other point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-06-23T17:38:03.113" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-24T14:40:37.977" Score="6" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;, Lucifer says the following to Morpheus, when trying to explain his burden of ruling Hell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/keAvO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/keAvO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lucifer: &amp;quot;You also rule a world, Morpheus. A world of sleepers and dreamers. A simple place - compared to Hell. I envy you. Can you imagine what it was like? Ten billion years spent providing a place for dead mortals to torture themselves. And like all masochists they called the shots - &amp;#39;Burn me&amp;#39; &amp;#39;Freeze me&amp;#39; &amp;#39;Eat me&amp;#39; &amp;#39;Hurt me&amp;quot;&amp;#39;... And we did.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot say I see Lucifer's point here. In some of the further stories it is shown that Morpheus has lots of work in The Dreaming, and that it doesn't seem to be easy to rule at all. What does Lucifer mean by &quot;A simple place - compared to Hell&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T21:42:17.693" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T21:42:17.693" Title="Why is The Dreaming a simple place compared to Hell?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2017-06-24T19:07:17.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Going to post the ones I've found so far, and add as I find more. (This might contain spoilers, if you've not read all the books, but very minor ones.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Arboreal Priestess - Verity Price&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patient Priestess - Enid Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;God of Uncommon Sense - Alexander Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Well-Groomed Priestess - Caroline Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;God of Scales and Science - Alex Price&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;God of Decisions Made in Necessity - Kevin Price&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Precise Priestess - Antimony Price&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The God of Empty Rooms and Cold Regrets/God of Difficult Bargains and Unwanted Knowledge - Thomas Price&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Pilgrim Priestess/The Remarkably Noisy Priestess - Alice Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Priestess of Unexpected Violence/The Violent Priestess, Who Never Learned To Be Careful - Frances Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;God of Early Arrivals and Earlier Departures - Daniel Healy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polychromatic Priestess - Elsie Harrington&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unpredictable Priestess - Shelby Tanner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High Priest of Goddammit, Eat Something Already - Mike (Verity's uncle)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="25" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T00:56:30.990" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T00:56:30.990" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-24T23:20:46.387" Score="4" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;In about 1998, I found a used paperback that I liked, but gave the book away and can no longer remember the author's name.  The book was remarkable in that it used only lowercase letters throughout.  The one story I remember clearly is that she would find abandoned, broken-down cars on the side of the road (maybe fix them or something?) and drive them away.  The stories were generally about her hobo/nomadic adventures - it was probably inspired a lot by 'On The Road'. &#xA; The author's tone was not trying to be insightful, highbrow or shocking, just documenting a fascinating fun life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember the cover being a warmer color, maybe orange, and the marketing blurbs mentioning the beat generation, which is why I bought the book in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked all over at reviews and summaries of female beatnik authors - I don't believe it is one of these: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elise Cowen &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anne Waldman &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hedwig Gorski &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Edie Parker &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diane di Prima&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carolyn Cassady &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hettie Jones &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harriet Zwerling &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joanne Kyger&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two seem possible, but none of their books seem like it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Janine Pommy Vega (inspired by 'On The Road')&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruth Weiss (because of lowercase fetish, but style/content seems off)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave up looking for this long ago, but then thought maybe the internet can help.  If you know the book or author, or where to look, please reply.&#xA;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1734" LastActivityDate="2017-06-24T23:20:46.387" Title="Seeking female (later beatnik?) author, used all lowercase" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2818" CreationDate="2017-06-25T12:41:50.610" Score="11" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;a href=&quot;http://surface.syr.edu/libassoc/206/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;little-known preface&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; (which I discovered while answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2330/17&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;), Robert Louis Stevenson wrote rather persuasively on the possibilities for how a fictional character might be inspired, whether by a stranger encountered once or by a good old friend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then I had an idea for John Silver from which I promised myself funds of entertainment: to take an admired friend of mine (whom the reader very likely knows and admires as much as I do), to deprive him of all his finer qualities and higher graces of temperament, to leave him with nothing but his strength, his courage, his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, and to try to express these in terms of the culture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical surgery is, I think, a common way of &quot;making character&quot;; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a hundred words with us yesterday by the wayside; but do we know him? Our friend, with his infinite variety and flexibility, we know ― but can we put him in? Upon the first we must engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in hand, we must cut away and deduct the needless arborescence of his nature; but the trunk and the few branches that remain we may at least be fairly sure of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As soon as I read the first sentence of this quote, I wondered: &lt;strong&gt;who was the friend of Stevenson on whom Long John Silver was based?&lt;/strong&gt; Silver is easily the most interesting character in &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; - a most &quot;ambiguous rogue&quot;, as I once saw him very accurately described - and it would be very interesting to know who inspired him, especially if it was a famous figure &quot;whom the reader very likely knows and admires&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T21:13:14.830" Title="Who was Long John Silver based on?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T15:36:51.303" Score="2" ViewCount="941" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter two of &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;, Lucifer mentions the angels Raguel and Sandalphon as angels who could rebel [against God]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQqqW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZQqqW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lucifer: &amp;quot;I thought I was rebelling. I thought I was defying his rule. No... I was merely fulfilling another tiny segment of his great and powerful plan. If I had not rebelled, another would have, in my stead. Raguel, perhaps, or Sandalphon.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why those two angels? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T20:39:13.853" Title="Why does Lucifer mention Raguel and Sandalphon as possible rebels among the angelic host?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2809" CreationDate="2017-06-25T15:36:51.303" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; Both are mentioned in other works (&amp;quot;Murder Mysteries&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, respectively) as angels who were somewhat disillusioned with Heaven and followed Lucifer in his rebellion. Spoilers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Raguel&lt;/strong&gt;'s story is described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Mysteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Murder Mysteries&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, a short story by Neil Gaiman, collected in &lt;em&gt;Smoke and Mirrors&lt;/em&gt;, which also has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/490789.Murder_Mysteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adapted into a comic&lt;/a&gt; by the ubiquitous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._Craig_Russell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P. Craig Russell&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raguel is the angel whose function is to be the Vengeance of the Lord; he was tasked with finding the murderer of another angel, Carasel. So he did, and it turned out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Carasel was murdered by his lover Saraquael, because the latter didn't feel he was getting enough attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most interesting part is the beginning of the temptation of Lucifer, and the events described in the story were the first that led to his rebellion. Moreover, it was not only Lucifer that was disturbed - Raguel himself was also shaken, not only because he wasn't sure the justice he executed was not the right thing to do, but also because he had been played by God to show Lucifer the injustice of the Lord:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; ‘And were you wrong to destroy him?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked into His old, old eyes. ‘It was my function. But I do not think it was just. I think perhaps it was needed that I destroy Saraquael, in order to demonstrate to Lucifer the Injustice of the Lord.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He smiled, then. ‘And whatever reason would I have for doing that?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; ‘I . . . I do not know. I do not understand—no more than I understand why You created the Dark or the voices in the Darkness. But You did. You caused all this to occur.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He nodded. ‘Yes. I did. Lucifer must brood on the unfairness of Saraquael’s destruction. And that—amongst other things—will precipitate him into certain actions. Poor sweet Lucifer. His way will be the hardest of all my children; for there is a part he must play in the drama that is to come, and it is a grand role.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raguel followed Lucifer in his rebellion and also &amp;quot;fell&amp;quot;... but continued to perform his function on Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fyHt7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fyHt7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Raguel: &amp;quot;I never fell. You understand?&amp;quot; Protagonist: &amp;quot;What did you do to me?&amp;quot; Raguel: &amp;quot;I don’t care what they say. When the others fell, I didn't fall. I’m still doing my job, as I see it. Doesn't matter how long it is. I still want to go home.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sandalphon&lt;/strong&gt;'s story is first described in &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; #11, &amp;quot;Children and Monsters pt. 2&amp;quot;. He followed Lucifer too, and like Raguel, he did not abandon old habits once on Earth. However, he was far less down-to-earth (no pun intended) than Raguel, and considered himself almost a successor for Lucifer. First, in the issue I mentioned, he tried to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; breed angelic stock from the seed of the archangel Michael, to use them in a war against Heaven.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jTQUl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jTQUl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Sandalphon: &amp;quot;You should not interfere here, Morningstar.&amp;quot; Lucifer: &amp;quot;Oh? And why is that?&amp;quot; Sandalphon: &amp;quot;Because the fight I continue here is the one that you began. I am raising soldiers.&amp;quot; Lucifer: &amp;quot;Indeed? To what purpose?&amp;quot; Sandalphon: &amp;quot;To storm the gates of Heaven!&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, after Lucifer intervened and &amp;quot;canceled&amp;quot; those plans for good, we learn , in #60 &amp;quot;The Breach pt. 2&amp;quot; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Sandalphon had been conceiving children with Lilith, creating an army of angelic half-breeds, that he and Lilith lead to war on heaven in further chapters.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JId8J.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JId8Jm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lilith: &amp;quot;So I set about to forge this host. Angels, but not of Heaven. I met father - a son of Heaven - in the soft places. We coupled there, and I conceived. Not once, but many times.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA; &lt;sub&gt; Click for full resolution &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Because neither the short story nor the comic adaptation were published by Vertigo, one may point out that this connection may be completely superfluous. However, since both the short story and &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt; were published roughly at the same time (1992, with &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; issues #21-#28 having been published in 1990-1991), it is quite possible that Neil Gaiman had planned this story when writing &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;, but couldn't publish it with &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;, as it has got nothing to do with the Sandman; Gaiman had noted in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt; that he got side-story ideas when writing the main plot, and would later develop them in other volumes that were not bound by a common story arc. This was the case with the stories about Death - &amp;quot;Death in Venice&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;The High Cost of Living&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;The Time of Your Life&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; The story is interesting in a number of ways; from &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; mythos perspective, it sheds light on the beginning of the universe at the time even most Endless did not exist (Destiny did, and Death was likely born during this story; some angels mention creating Sleep as a concept, which may be a reference to the birth of Dream).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also interesting because it is very close, chronology-wise, to the events of &amp;quot;Lilith&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; #50, which was also illustrated by P. Craig Russell (I do not believe this is a mere coincidence). While &amp;quot;Murder Mysteries&amp;quot; describes the first event that led to Lucifer's rebellion, &amp;quot;Lilith&amp;quot; describes the last drop after which Lucifer (rejected Samael as his name) and departed from Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; Since the &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; series was not written by Neil Gaiman but by Mike Carey, and contradicts (somewhat) &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; canon on few points, e.g.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, the Lighbringer did not fall from Heaven to Hell, but was offered to rule Hell as a compromise by his creator, as Hell was the farthest place there is from Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one may argue that it is not canon either. However, the discrepancies can be attributed to a changed point of view, or to a difference in narration. Regardless, Neil Gaiman had helped (advised) Mike Carey in making &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, so I assume it was done with his blessing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T20:39:13.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2805" CreationDate="2017-06-25T22:22:30.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Sandman universe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hell involved real souls. The Dreaming is purely phantasmic.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lucifer has two rivals for rule of Hell (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_(DC_Comics)#Triumvirs_of_Hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Azazel &amp;amp; Beelzebub&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Forgive me if details are sparse, as It's been years since I last read the series, and I may be conflating the content with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellblazer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constantine&lt;/a&gt; stories that involve Lucifer, particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Habits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garth Ennis' run in the series&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do recall Morpheus sort of wiping the Dreaming clean in one of his story arcs.  He can do this because everything in the Dreaming comes from his mind.  This is not something Lucifer can do because the denizens of hell, and ostensibly the terrain, exists independently of Lucifer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My assumption on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faerie_(DC_Comics)#Fictional_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hell as tangible real-estate&lt;/a&gt; comes partly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Books_of_Magic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Books of Magic&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;The band of refugees were met by Lucifer, who offered them a corner of Hell to have as their own...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, another Gaiman creation in the same universe as Constantine and Morpheus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I seem to recall a similar idea in Susan Clarke, where there is a border relationship between one of Uskglass' Faerie dominions and Hell. I'd be interested to know if this idea pre-dates the contemporary authors.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-06-25T23:56:51.443" LastActivityDate="2017-06-25T23:56:51.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-25T23:08:50.777" Score="9" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn:_The_Alloy_of_Law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Alloy of Law&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Brandon Sanderson. As is the norm in many of Sanderson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1575/481&quot;&gt;Cosmere&lt;/a&gt; books, the story is followed by a short section titled &quot;Ars Arcanum,&quot; with a description of some of the various kinds of magic present on that particular world of the Cosmere. (There's a bit about the naming of this section on Sanderson's blog, &lt;a href=&quot;https://brandonsanderson.com/annotation-mistborn-ars-arcanum/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While lazily skimming that section, I noticed that the final sentences read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is primarily concerned with things of the Spiritual realm, and is&#xA;  of the greatest interest to me. If one of these three arts is of great&#xA;  interest to the Cosmere, it is this one. I think there are great&#xA;  possibilities for its use.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the rest of that section was written neutrally, without a specific voice; however, those lines reveal that someone must be speaking. Those last few lines force the weary reader to wake up and pay closer attention to that which he has just read. (At least, that was the effect it had on me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who wrote those lines?&lt;/strong&gt; Is is Mr. Sanderson himself? Is it &lt;a href=&quot;http://stormlightarchive.wikia.com/wiki/Hoid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hoid&lt;/a&gt;, the world-hopping character who finds himself in many of the Cosmere stories? Is it someone from Scadrial (the world of Mistborn, and &lt;em&gt;The Alloy of Law&lt;/em&gt;), or elsewhere in the Cosmere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: there may be clues in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum_Unbounded:_The_Cosmere_Collection&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcanum Unbounded&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but I have yet to read that collection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I am uncertain of the author's intention, but I feel uneasy about whoever it was that wrote this. I understand that the art described, Hemalurgy, was just described in that appendix as &quot;not evil,&quot; but is known only (to me, at this time, at any rate) as an art that requires very bloody (described as &quot;messy&quot; in one of the books) murder and implanted metal spikes to function. I would feel uneasy about &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; character that found Hemalurgy interesting. (At least, more interesting than Feruchemy or Allomancy. Those are clean magics, and feel a lot more fun and wholesome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T01:06:52.063" Title="Who narrates &quot;Ars Arcanum&quot; in The Alloy of Law?" Tags="&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;cosmere&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2812" CreationDate="2017-06-26T00:24:33.840" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://coppermind.net/wiki/Ars_Arcanum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ars Arcanum&lt;/a&gt; is written by a world hopper named &lt;a href=&quot;http://coppermind.net/wiki/Khrissalla&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khriss&lt;/a&gt;. (Fan wiki, citing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Stormlight_Archive/comments/4nov0o/no_spoilers_first_draft_of_the_stormlight_novella/d4bwlnk/?context=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanderson's agent on reddit&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://coppermind.net/wiki/Ars_Arcanum#cite_note-AU-rosharan-2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcanum Unbounded&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her origin will be explained in the &lt;em&gt;White Sands&lt;/em&gt; graphic novels. She has minor appearances in &lt;em&gt;Mistborn Secret History&lt;/em&gt; where she is researching the events with Ruin and Preservation. She is reportedly more knowledgeable than Hoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far at least she has had no evil intentions. From what I have read she simply views things like a scientist would. (i.e. a scientist finding diseases interesting).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T01:06:52.063" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T01:06:52.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T14:31:35.853" Score="3" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;While doing some background research for another question about Daniel Clowes' &lt;em&gt;Ghost World&lt;/em&gt;, I stumbled upon &lt;a href=&quot;http://forward.com/culture/183148/the-dark-comic-arts-of-daniel-clowes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, which mentions the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fp10S.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fp10S.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Enid: &amp;quot;Whaddya call a Japanese Jew?&amp;quot; Becky: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know. Where are you taking me?&amp;quot; Enid: &amp;quot;Sosumi! Get it?&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . I don't get this.  The first thing a search yields for &quot;sosumi&quot; is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosumi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apple notification sound&lt;/a&gt;, and some further search shows that &quot;sosumi&quot; == &quot;so sue me&quot;, and I don't understand how that is relevant either. There is also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g293983-d7790093-Reviews-Sosumi_Sushi-Jerusalem_Jerusalem_District.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese restaurant in Jerusalem&lt;/a&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/sosumi-records&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;records label&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of those substituted in the joke make it funny, which makes me conclude that I'm missing some context, especially with Enid (probably) being Jewish, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Clowes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel Clowes&lt;/a&gt; comes from a Jewish family as well (and Enid Coleslaw being an anagram of Daniel Clowes, and all that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:08:06.747" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:08:06.747" Title="Why would one call a Japanese Jew &quot;Sosumi&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;daniel-clowes&gt;&lt;ghost-world&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2814" CreationDate="2017-06-26T15:45:55.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pun is to be read as &quot;so sue me,&quot; referencing a negative anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are prone to sue others often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://forward.com/culture/183148/the-dark-comic-arts-of-daniel-clowes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; you cited quotes this joke as an example of an anti-Semitic joke in the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the pieces at MCA and in Clowes’s larger body of work, Jews and&#xA;  anti-Semitism often hide in plain sight. The name of the “Ghost World”&#xA;  protagonist, Enid Coleslaw, is an anagram for Daniel Clowes, and Enid&#xA;  is Jewish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She declines a bagel from her friend Rebecca (“Becky”) because the&#xA;  bagel is “too WASPy,” and she shares a joke with Becky: “Whaddya call&#xA;  a Japanese Jew? Sosumi.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Another &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2815/481&quot;&gt;deleted answer&lt;/a&gt; makes a similar point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T15:47:30.603" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T15:47:30.603" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2558" CreationDate="2017-06-26T16:54:12.887" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought (in 1987) that the reason behind the choice of the nine panel grid was that each panel reflects the size of the page. Meaning if you draw a diagonal line from the upper left corner to the bottom right corner of the first panel, and you extend this line, you will eventually cross the mid and last panel on the page in the same way.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At least for me this gave meaning as I found the storytelling to be very self-aware of the comic book format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1740" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T19:35:25.207" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T19:35:25.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2808" CreationDate="2017-06-26T20:15:34.263" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ernest_Henley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Ernest Henley&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Per Andrzej Diniejko, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/henley/introduction.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Ernest Henley: A Biographical Sketch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson modelled the most famous pirate in literature — &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;'s Long John Silver with his wooden leg — on his crippled friend Henley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doris Alexander, in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ERKwK3_qkKkC&amp;amp;pg=PA23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creating Literature Out of Life&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, devotes a chapter to Stevenson's creative process in this book, and therein quotes a letter from Stevenson to Henley:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;.  Of course, he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound [in body], was entirely taken from you.&quot; (page 26)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maiming that Henley had undergone was the amputation of his left leg below the knee (not to the hip as in Silver's case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2017-06-26T21:13:14.830" LastActivityDate="2017-06-26T21:13:14.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2017-06-26T22:14:12.827" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Native speaker here. The most important part that was lost in translation was the rhythm of the prose. Lem's texts at all times have a quality similar to that of a blank verse. Sadly, I think it would require much better writer than Lem to save the meaning and give a similar quality to English translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also a number of passage's literal details got lost. Reading this I see an image of Venus of Willendorf (except the arms and clothes), which was well known at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bo1MP.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bo1MP.png&quot; alt=&quot;Venus of Willendorf&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts omitted/wrong I would translate/correct as:  a duck-like walk (&quot;kaczkowatym chodem&quot;), a black woman (&quot;murzynka&quot;), arms equal to normal man's thighs  (&quot;ramiona dorównywały udom normalnego człowieka&quot;), passed by without even a glance in my direction (&quot;nie spojrzawszy nawet w moją stronę&quot;), swinging her elephant-like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/withers#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;withers&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;kołysząc słoniowatymi kłębami&quot;), steatopygous sculptures from &lt;strong&gt;paleolith&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;steatopygicznych rzeźb z epoki kamienia łupanego&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to be as accurate here as I could, zero improvisation on my part. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;murzynka&quot; alone was at the time, and still is, simply the most common Polish word for &quot;a black woman&quot;, maybe not elegant like modern &quot;afro-amerykanin&quot; (&quot;Afro-american&quot;), but also not derogatory. (Don't mistake with adjective &quot;murzyński&quot; which presently &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; derogatory). But &quot;Negress&quot; isn't a totally inappropriate translation, as the passage as a whole clearly aims to scare you. Simple as that, I don't see anything deeper. Lem gathered as many small unexpected disturbing details as he could that would scare in the context, but without putting Gibarian out of character (the author of said ghost) or sacrificing reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a race was just one of these small details for Lem: slightly disturbing (for a Polish contemporary reader, who was unlikely to see a black person in entire life!) but not alluding to anything significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1741" LastEditorUserId="1741" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T08:49:47.617" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T08:49:47.617" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T23:45:50.757" Score="11" ViewCount="1121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories feature burial while alive; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Premature_Burial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one case&lt;/a&gt;, the subject of the story actually suffers from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taphophobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;taphophobia&lt;/a&gt; before his own live burial. (Wikipedia helpfully includes a list of &quot;Burial while alive in other Poe works&quot; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Premature_Burial#Burial_while_alive_in_other_Poe_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Premature Burial&quot; page.&lt;/a&gt; These are &quot;Berenice,&quot; &quot;The Cask of Amontillado,&quot; &quot;The Fall of the House of Usher,&quot; and &quot;The Black Cat.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a commonly held belief that Mr. Poe himself was taphophobic, perhaps due to his preoccupation with live burial in so many of his short stories (eg &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.medicinae.org/e16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;The Premature Burial&lt;/em&gt; plays exquisitely on popular fear, yet as a man of the times it is likely that Poe’s environment imparted some personal fear of premature burial.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). However, Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Premature_Burial#Analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;analysis&lt;/a&gt; attributes this preoccupation to the public's fear of live burial that was rampant in the West at that time.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if there is any support for this theory of Mr. Poe's personal taphophobia besides for his stories, perhaps in a letter that Poe wrote or interview that he gave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; They &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Premature_Burial#cite_note-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cite&lt;/a&gt; this claim to Kennedy, J. Gerald. &lt;em&gt;Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing&lt;/em&gt;. Yale University Press, 1987: 58–59.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:14:15.397" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:14:15.397" Title="Is there any indication that Poe feared live burial?" Tags="&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-26T23:57:20.237" Score="5" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story &lt;em&gt;The Fifth Head of Cerberus&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonist has a name which is never stated explicitly, different from the &amp;quot;Number Five&amp;quot; by which his father and aunt refer to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I told [my father] my name, but he shook his head. &amp;quot;Not that. You must have another name for me - a private name. You may choose it yourself if you like.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said nothing. It seemed to me quite impossible that I should have any name other than the two words which were, in some mystic sense I only respected without understanding, &lt;em&gt;my name&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that it's the same name as his father's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Is that [Number Five] what you call him?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's more convenient since his name is the same as my own.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is his actual name?&lt;/strong&gt; There are various references dropped through the story which might give us clues about it, but is there enough for us to deduce or at least guess at either of those &amp;quot;two words&amp;quot; which form his name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T10:55:47.647" Title="What is Number Five's real name?" Tags="&lt;gene-wolfe&gt;&lt;the-fifth-head-of-cerberus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-06-27T01:52:47.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fact that the introduction tells us what is going to happen is a sort of meta-game that the playwright is playing with the story. Their love is &quot;star-cross'd&quot; and &quot;death-mark’d&quot; - by TELLING the audience what is about to happen, it more heavily impresses upon the viewer that this is an outcome which was fated from the start. Thus, the sense of tragic fate permeates all actions that happen in the course of the play by providing us with the awareness of their deaths before the story even begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think how the story would change if you didn't know until the last moment how it was going to end - it might feel much more heroic at times, and you might even begin to believe that you are attending a comedy at times. Tipping his hand early in the story forces us to see all future events in their full, tragic light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T01:52:47.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2792" CreationDate="2017-06-27T03:05:19.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Open to attack,&quot; in this context, means that &lt;strong&gt;this particular piece of the feeling of patriotism is vulnerable or defenseless to questions asked about it.&lt;/strong&gt; (I couldn't easily find a dictionary that defined &quot;open to attack,&quot; but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/open%20to%20attack&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thesaurus.com&lt;/a&gt; links it to defenseless and vulnerable, among other, similar words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The worship-like element of patriotism, then, must vulnerable to something according to the view portrayed in the quoted passage. Since this is a standardized test with only four possible answers, we can consider each of them to decide whether they fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;unnecessary in some instances of patriotic behaviour&quot; does not mean that this element is vulnerable to an attack; it means that it is not always needed. Next!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;will call for various acts of national sacrifice.&quot; This option can be a little confusing, because it might mean that it leaves patriots vulnerable to put themselves in danger, to sacrifice themselves for a national benefit. However, on further thought, this describes a vulnerability in the &lt;em&gt;patriot&lt;/em&gt;, and not in the belief of patriotism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;has no historical basis yet it is important&quot; does not (only) describe a way that this part of the belief is vulnerable. This statement made me think a bit, because it does kind of present a vulnerability -- that there is no historical basis for this element of patriotism. However, the second part of this statement, &quot;yet it is important,&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; something that is part of the definition of &quot;open to attack.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;cannot* be justified on rational grounds&quot; is a &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; vulnerability in patriotism. If it cannot rationally answer questions about it, then it can be described as &quot;open to attack&quot; from those rational questions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By process of elimination, then, the answer must be number four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I was going to correct a typo in your question, but then found that the typo was also present in the original -- the question actually does state that &quot;This element can cannot be justified on rational grounds.&quot; You may be better served using other study material. I haven't really thought about your &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2787/481&quot;&gt;other question&lt;/a&gt; much, but many of the commenters there posit that &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the choices for some of those questions are wrong. Good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T03:05:19.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1314" CreationDate="2017-06-27T06:00:42.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this chapter, Camus is comparing &quot;the Christian and Marxist world,&quot; and finds that the two have much more in common with each other than either does with the &quot;ancient world&quot; – by which he largely means Aristotelian Greece. &quot;For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued;&quot; he writes. It may help to understand if we restore the full text of the quoted sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Progress, the future of science, the cult of technology and of production, are bourgeois myths, which in the nineteenth century became dogma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In defending this view, Camus refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/futureofsciencei00rena&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renan's &quot;Future of Science&quot;&lt;/a&gt; - which he says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;gives the most accurate idea of the almost mystic hopes aroused in the&#xA;  nineteenth century by the expansion of industry and the surprising&#xA;  progress made by science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camus argues that &quot;this hope is the hope of bourgeois society itself&quot; because bourgeois society is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the final beneficiary of technical progress…[w]hen we are assured that tomorrow, in the natural order of events, will be better than today, we can enjoy ourselves in peace. Progress, paradoxically, can be used to justify conservatism. A draft drawn on confidence in the future, it allows the master to have a clear conscience. The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Marx and Hegel, Camus states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;continued on the path of nineteenth-century bourgeois thought…that: &quot;The gradual and progressive development of equality is both the past and the future of the history of man.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps another part of the question may be rooted in the definition of the word &quot;myth.&quot; In modern times, many take it as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/futureofsciencei00rena&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second definition used here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[a] person or thing existing only in imagination, or whose actual existence is not verifiable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if we instead read the use of the word myth here to lean toward the first definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a story…[which embodies] a belief…in which often the forces of nature and of the soul are personified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we might better be able to understand Camus' point. Or, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Power_of_Myth#/Campbell.27s_views_on_religious_fundamentalism_in_the_.22Power_of_Myth.22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as a more recent touchstone&lt;/a&gt; might phrase it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On this immediate level of life and structure, &lt;em&gt;myths offer life models&lt;/em&gt;. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T06:00:42.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2821" CreationDate="2017-06-27T06:27:48.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist's name is &lt;strong&gt;Gene Wolfe&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kim Stanley Robinson &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nyrsf.com/2013/09/a-story-kim-stanley-robinson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confirmed this with the author&lt;/a&gt; at SFRA in 1978:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are clues in the text that the family’s last name is either canine or lupine, and that it begins with a W (indeed, the Monday and Tuesday Number Five finds on the shelf when looking for his father’s work would be a rare little chapbook by Virginia Woolf, there next to books by Kate Wilhelm and Vernor Vinge). And, as I once said in a report to a seminar, after describing why I thought Number Five’s family name was Wolf, “what better first name for a clone than Gene?” The groans caused by this pun were appropriately loud, but I was talking about one of the great punmeisters of our time, whose story “Thag” ends with a character named Harry Naler who turns out to be a hairy nailer (of the serpent’s tail to the floor); so when I next saw Wolfe, at the SFRA conference in 1978, I told him my joke, and he nodded gravely. “You are the first person I know of to have guessed Number Five’s name,” he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T10:55:47.647" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T10:55:47.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2017-06-27T07:12:46.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a somewhat decent account of &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddle#Riddles_as_a_game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;riddles as a game&lt;/a&gt;. While the riddles in The Hobbit are generally considered reflective of those found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exeter_Book#The_Riddles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Exeter Book&lt;/a&gt;, that book does not define any system of &quot;rules.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastEditorUserId="1743" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T14:07:26.173" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T14:07:26.173" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:37:15.630" Score="3" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first issue of &lt;em&gt;Black Magick&lt;/em&gt; opens with a pagan ritual being done during full moon. A circle member's phone rings, and the ritual is interrupted, and the following panels take place (behind a spoiler because there is &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; nudity there, but not too much):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VE1Y4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VE1Y4.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should also note that those two women really are witches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the gesture with the knife mean? Was it meant to be intimidation, or is it some ritualistic thing?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The woman with the knife says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Make sure you &lt;strong&gt;ground&lt;/strong&gt; yourself before you leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:13:00.910" Title="What is happening in issue #1 of &quot;Black Magick&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;greg-rucka&gt;&lt;black-magick&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2828" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:38:04.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T09:38:04.867" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T09:38:04.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2829" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:38:04.867" Score="0" Body="Use this for the comic series written by Greg Rucka and published by Image Comics. Use with the [greg-rucka] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:24:46.923" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:24:46.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2830" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2831" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" Score="0" Body="Use this for the graphic novel (or the comic strips) by Daniel Clowes. Use with the [daniel-clowes]&#xD;&#xA; and [comics] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T09:38:52.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-27T10:29:07.290" Score="6" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Hemingway's&lt;/em&gt; book &lt;em&gt;The Old Man And The Sea&lt;/em&gt;, after catching the mighty Marlin, and coming to the conclusion that the sharks are probably going to consume the entire Marlin - why didn't Santiago just cut up the fish and stored at least parts of it on the board of his skiff? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, it's stated that the weight of the Marlin was approximately 1,500 pounds and that it was as long as the boat, and possibly even longer, so there was no possibility to store the whole Marlin on the skiff. But, it was most definitely possible to store a few hundred pounds of it on board. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand, of course, that Santiago extremely respected the Marlin and felt that it is just &quot;right&quot; that they &quot;sail&quot; home &lt;em&gt;together&lt;/em&gt; - side by side, as equals - but after the first shark attack, the Marlin was mutilated and Santiago knew that there's a fair chance that there will be nothing left of it when he'll reach his home port. &#xA;At this point in time, he still had his knife, and the second shark attack, during which his knife was lost, came a few hours later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1746" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:07:57.640" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T12:50:48.673" Title="The Old Man And The Sea - why didn't Santiago cut up at least part of the Marlin, and stored them on board of the skiff?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;the-old-man-and-the-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2814" CreationDate="2017-06-27T10:41:54.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pun plays on the negative stereotype that Jews are prone to using sharp business practices to take advantage of non-Jews, and that when confronted they respond by asserting that there is nothing the non-Jews can now do to reverse what has happened, since the law would uphold the Jews' right to act as they acted, however sharp or unforeseen their action may have been (&quot;so sue me&quot;); and it uses the fact that &quot;so sue me&quot; sounds as if it could be spelled &quot;sosumi&quot;, which could easily be a Japanese word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not refer to a non-existent stereotype that Jews are prone to being litigious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apple Computer is said to have adopted the name &quot;sosumi&quot; for its beep sound with reference to a longstanding legal battle with Apple Corps, the media company founded by members of the musical group the Beatles. Apple Computer had agreed in the settlement not to enter the music business, but when the creator of the alert chime heard from the company's legal department that the sound might be regarded as too musical, he joked that it should be called &quot;Let it Beep&quot;, with reference to the Beatles' song &quot;Let it Be&quot;. Further told that the legal department wouldn't like that name either, he responded &quot;so sue me&quot;, which stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1745" LastEditorUserId="1745" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T10:57:57.593" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T10:57:57.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2834" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2835" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English comic artist, writer, and letterer Dave Gibbons, and his works, e.g. &quot;Watchmen&quot;. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:48:25.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2836" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-27T11:58:23.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T11:58:23.460" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T11:58:23.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2837" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-27T11:58:23.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski (1948-) or his life as a writer. His works include The Witcher series and the Hussite trilogy. Questions about his works should use the [polish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:23:57.873" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:23:57.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2838" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2839" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of the English novelist and comics writer Mike Carey, whose works include &quot;Lucifer&quot;, &quot;The Girl With All the Gifts&quot;, and &quot;The Boy On the Bridge&quot;. Use with the appropriate title tags, and the [comics] tag, when necessary." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:03:53.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2827" CreationDate="2017-06-27T12:13:00.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grounding is creating balance and stability in yourself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;both before you receive and transfer energy when casting a spell or healing&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and also afterwards, either by shedding excess energy or by replenishing, for example from the earth&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1747" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T12:13:00.910" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1170" CreationDate="2017-06-27T13:56:59.217" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Panama Oxridge is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paul-adshead.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Adshead&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether any clues were hidden in the Thyme books themselves, but the website for the series contains an elaborate puzzle whose solution is the author's real name. As mentioned by @Shokhet in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/was-the-clue-to-who-panama-oxridge-really-is-ever-found#comment2669_1170&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;, you can see the start of the trail &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1170/was-the-clue-to-who-panama-oxridge-really-is-ever-found#comment2669_1170&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Start by running your cursor over the Thyme clan badge in the bottom left-hand corner of 47 web pages. Each one will reveal a different number and a letter of the alphabet. Simply write the letters in numerical order to discover your first clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here I started on a long journey through the website, collecting 47 different links with alphanumeric codes which finally led me to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.justinthyme.info/page117.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; and the next level of the puzzle. At that point, I decided that this would get solved more quickly as a group effort, and so I posted the whole thing to the wonderful &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/52910/5373&quot;&gt;Puzzling SE&lt;/a&gt;, where @Sp3000 very competently finished off the solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read through the answers on Puzzling for the full derivation of the solution, but it's easy to check by just going to &lt;a href=&quot;http://justinthyme.info/page133.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; and submitting &lt;code&gt;paul&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;adshead&lt;/code&gt; into the two boxes, which takes you to &lt;a href=&quot;http://justinthyme.info/page103.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a page&lt;/a&gt; where the first letter of each sentence spells out PAUL ADSHEAD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T13:56:59.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2949" CreationDate="2017-06-27T16:41:51.460" Score="7" ViewCount="23884" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scott Fitzgerald rarely puts characters or events that have do not either have an underlying message or support in the character development of the lead characters. Therefore I was confused as to what Owl Eyes represented. Clearly he is significant as he is one of the few people to show up to Gatsby's funeral. So what is he supposed to represent or rather what message is Fitzgerald trying to deliver through Owl Eyes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1752" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:07:47.133" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T21:14:39.010" Title="What is the purpose of Owl Eyes in Great Gatsby?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-06-27T18:35:26.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that there is the idea that knowing the ending harms the literary work only holds for material that depends on a &quot;twist ending&quot;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sixth_Sense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sixth Sense&lt;/a&gt;.  But even with that film, knowing the ending allows one to glean more from the material on subsequent viewing, in terms of references and foreshadowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, having seen many productions of R&amp;amp;J, the criteria for determining if the production &quot;works&quot; is if the audience is screaming inside for Romeo not to drink the poison, despite knowing he's going to drink the poison.  Same with Juliet when she wakes up and finds him dead.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romeo and Juliet is one of the most famous plays of all time.  In fact, it is a testament to the strength of the text that it has worked for centuries, despite &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;everyone knowing the ending&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Work that is &quot;ruined&quot; by spoilers is always lesser work, based on gimmick (the big &quot;twist&quot;) as opposed to artistic merit.  Which is not to say such work has no merit, just that it is in a different category to narratives that are experienced again and again by an audience that already knows the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-06-27T18:35:26.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2017-06-28T00:24:34.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that Tolkien based all of his riddles in style, and some of them in actual wording, on classical &amp;quot;old literary&amp;quot; riddles. As mentioned in the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/81152/31394&quot;&gt;Who wrote Tolkien's riddles?&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Riddles: they are 'all my own work' except for 'Thirty White Horses' which is traditional, and 'No-legs'. The remainder, though their style and method is that of old literary (but not 'folk-lore') riddles, have no models as far as I am aware, save only the egg-riddle which is a reduction to a couplet (my own) of a longer literary riddle which appears in some 'Nursery Rhyme' books, notably American ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Tolkien's Letters, Letter #110&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the theme is very much that of old, classical riddles, and thus it seems unlikely that there was any hard-and-fast ruleset as such. In ancient times people were generally less concerned with restricting themselves with multiple rules (we can see this also in the use of language, e.g. the way there were no standard English spelling rules until several hundred years ago, but I digress). To make the game fair and fun, it was enough for the riddle to be &lt;strong&gt;uniquely solvable&lt;/strong&gt; - i.e. there's a solution which is deducible from the riddle as stated and which is the only word fitting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are basically the same criteria as described by Mithrandir, fi12, and TML in their answers, but I can back them up as 'the' criteria for a solid classical riddle with citations from some of the internet's top experts on riddling, namely those at &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/q/5249/5373&quot;&gt;Puzzling SE&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; Riddle should have one and only one interpretation which coherently addresses each line/clue contained in the Riddle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However hard the riddle a supermajority of fluent English (or whatever your target language may be) speakers must, when presented with the solution, consider it the only correct one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is to use as many different figurative or metaphoric descriptions as are necessary to ensure that the intersection of their interpretations is a single word or phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is always the same. Stylistic additions such as rhyme, rhythm, twists of meaning, and even metaphor are optional. The only real rule - insofar as there are any &amp;quot;rules&amp;quot; at all - is that the riddle should be &lt;strong&gt;uniquely solvable from the information provided&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. from the statement of the riddle itself. (And if they aren't, they'll be &lt;a href=&quot;https://puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1254/5373&quot;&gt;closed on Puzzling&lt;/a&gt; :-) )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T00:24:34.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T06:44:26.953" Score="9" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a well-documented fact that the character of &lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/112941/superman-75th-anniversary-how-man-steel-changed-times&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Superman has undergone many shifts over the decades&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1978, Elliot S! Maggin's first Superman novel &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000K00XTI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Last Son of Krypton&lt;/a&gt; was published. Now, you might be looking at that timeline (or the cover art from the book) and thinking to yourself &quot;Oh, this is the novelization of the first Richard Donner Superman film.&quot; Don't be fooled - this is an entirely different version of the Superman tale! Some quick examples: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Johnathan and Martha Kent were selected by Albert Einstein (traveling in disguise under the name &quot;Calvin Eisner&quot;) as the couple most fit to raise the incoming Kryptonian child&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the novel, Clark Kent is a television anchor, rather than an investigative reporter at a newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Clark and Lois not only do not work together, but there's no indication of any kind of romantic entanglement between them (although Superman, obviously, still regularly rescues Lois from certain doom.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, around the same time as he must have been working on drafts of the novel, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fortress.net.nu/Maggin/bibliography.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maggin was also getting Story and Writer credits from DC Comics for Superman&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to track down reasonably priced copies of issues of Superman from that period, so my question is: Which elements, if any, from Maggin's novelization which would have been a mirror of what was going on in the then-current iteration of the Superman character in the DC comics world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: One obvious correlation between the novels and LATER issues of the Superman comic have to do with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Superman's experience in the afterlife, where he faces a version of heaven and is told that he has a unique - or at least RARE - opportunity to choose whether or not he ever &lt;strong&gt;wants to die&lt;/strong&gt;. This was later used by DC Comics during the &quot;Death and Return of Superman&quot; storyline in the 1990's in &lt;a href=&quot;http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Adventures_of_Superman_Vol_1_500&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adventures of Superman Volume 1 #500&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this does NOT fit the question, as it happened in the comics almost 20 years after it appeared in the novel. I am looking for parallels that would have been around the same period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T21:05:13.277" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T15:03:09.197" Title="Which items from Elliot S! Maggin's novel &quot;Last Son of Krypton&quot; mirror the Superman mythos of the comics in the same era?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;elliot-s-maggin&gt;&lt;last-son-of-krypton&gt;&lt;superman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T07:51:45.443" Score="36" ViewCount="19883" Body="&lt;p&gt;I spent an extensive amount of time as an undergrad writing about and researching &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, especially in terms of Tolkien's famous essay on &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;. Getting a sense of what inspired Tolkien greatly enhanced my understanding of and appreciation for &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite those efforts, I have yet to read &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. (One factor holding me back is that my vision has been impacted by Peter Jackson's films; I want the memory of those to fade a bit before coming to it somewhat &quot;fresh&quot; with my own imagination at work.) It, along with &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, continues to gather dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is relatively simple and straightforward (I hope): &lt;strong&gt;in what ways, if any, is an initial reading of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; enhanced by first reading &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been told both that the latter is relatively dry and unexciting and, on the other hand, that it is essential reading in terms of how it establishes the background for Tolkien's other works. I'm interested in knowing now whether it's worth it to read it before I commit to reading &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="1804" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T14:28:54.603" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T15:15:50.083" Title="Should I read The Silmarillion before or after reading The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;the-silmarillion&gt;" AnswerCount="10" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T11:55:59.240" Score="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should read &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;after&lt;/strong&gt; reading &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; trilogy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start off with an analogy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Silmarillion starts on such a gigantic scale that if you begin with it everything else is going to seem confusing, petty, or irrelevant. If you want to understand the history of the American Civil War, you don't start with the Big Bang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What's &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; about?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a collection of stories that illustrate how Arda (&quot;The World&quot;) was created by Eru Iluvatar; His Children, the Elves and Men; events during the Years of the Trees; and the main bulk of the book: events of the First Age concerning The Silmarils &lt;strong&gt;way before &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; begins&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also chapters on some events in the Second and Third age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full description can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silmarillion&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What's &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; about?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a trilogy &lt;strong&gt;focusing on the events of the Third Age&lt;/strong&gt;; mainly focusing on the Rings of Power and the adventures of the Fellowship. The books encompasses Middle-earth in the Third Age and is the highlight of all of Tolkien's works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The title of the novel refers to the story's main antagonist, the Dark Lord Sauron, who had in an earlier age created the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power as the ultimate weapon in his campaign to conquer and rule all of Middle-earth. From quiet beginnings in the Shire, a hobbit land not unlike the English countryside, the story ranges across Middle-earth, following the course of the War of the Ring through the eyes of its characters, not only the hobbits Frodo Baggins, Samwise &quot;Sam&quot; Gamgee, Meriadoc &quot;Merry&quot; Brandybuck and Peregrin &quot;Pippin&quot; Took, but also the hobbits' chief allies and travelling companions: the Men Aragorn son of Arathorn, a Ranger of the North, and Boromir, a Captain of Gondor; Gimli son of Glóin, a Dwarf warrior; Legolas Greenleaf, an Elven prince; and Gandalf, a Wizard.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More information can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and by watching the movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why should you read &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; first?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Publication order – &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; was published first&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lord of the Rings was published on: July 29, 1954. The Silmarillion was published on: September 15, 1977. That's a two decade gap. Most authors recommended readers to read their books in the order they were published. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tolkien's world is mostly centered around Hobbits&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is centered around the adventures of Hobbits and their companions. It's all about how Hobbits came to become so famous, all thanks to Bilbo and Frodo. It is depicted through the eyes of the Hobbit Frodo Baggins (some chapters dedicated to Sam, Pippin and Merry), while &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;.... is not. There's barely any mention of &quot;Hobbits&quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; at all. You can't start reading Tolkien's books without knowing anything about Hobbits!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is an easier read to begin with&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More coherent story line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flows nicely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Consistent writing style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The whole book focuses on a single plot – destroying that darn Ring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;For TLotR: It's all about bringing the Ring into the Mountain.  &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;? You have one chapter about Elves, one about Men, one about the Ainur (Valar and Maiar), suddenly jumping to Turin's adventures, Beren's love story, the dark-elf Maeglin; all this throughout the whole book. There's no consistent narration in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;; the story is jumping all over the place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; was written by JRR Tolkien alone, &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; was written (majority) by him and his son Christopher, giving rise to the issue of inconsistent writing styles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christopher himself notes in the Foreword of &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the years passed the changes and&#xA;  variants, both in detail and in larger perspectives, became&#xA;  so complex, so pervasive, and so many-layered that a final&#xA;  and definitive version seemed unattainable. Moreover the&#xA;  old legends ('old' now not only in their derivation from the&#xA;  remote First Age, but also in terms of my father's life)&#xA;  became the vehicle and depository of his profoundest&#xA;  reflections. &lt;strong&gt;In his later writing mythology and poetry sank&#xA;  down behind his theological and philosophical&#xA;  preoccupations: from which arose incompatibilities of tone&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A complete consistency (either within the compass of&#xA;  The Silmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and&#xA;  other published writings of my father's) is not to be looked&#xA;  for&lt;/strong&gt;, and could only be achieved, if at all at heavy and&#xA;  needless cost. Moreover, my father came to conceive The Silmarillion as a compilation, a compendious narrative, made long afterwards from sources of great diversity&#xA;  (poems, and annals, and oral tales) that had survived in&#xA;  agelong tradition; and this conception has indeed its&#xA;  parallel in the actual history of the book, for a great deal of&#xA;  earlier prose and poetry does underlie it, and it is to some&#xA;  extent a compendium in fact and not only in theory. To this may be ascribed the varying speed of the narrative and&#xA;  fullness of detail in different parts, the contrast (for example)&#xA;  of the precise recollections of place and motive in the&#xA;  legend of Túrin Turambar beside the high and remote&#xA;  account of the end of the First Age, when Thangorodrim&#xA;  was broken and Morgoth overthrown; &lt;strong&gt;and also some&#xA;  differences of tone and portrayal, some obscurities, and,&#xA;  here and there, some lack of cohesion&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, we follow Frodo and friends through their journey to Mount Doom and beyond. We witness them mature and grow psychologically. In &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; however, we are introduced to a main character at the start of the chapter, but by the next chapter, we follow the story of another character. This transition prevents any kind of &quot;attachment&quot; to form between reader and character, hence &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; is a much harder read.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; really just resembles a &quot;&lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; appendix&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure not many read the TLotR appendices before &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;. Why? You bought &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; to read about a fantastical adventure, probably not to read a bunch of abbreviated post-book fillers. &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; is that kind of a read. The whole book doesn't focus on one character, it's more of one-chapter-one-main-character, not unsimilar to an appendix. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; contains spoilers for &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Seriously&lt;/em&gt; major spoilers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_the_Rings_of_Power_and_the_Third_Age&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one chapter&lt;/a&gt; at the end of &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; that completely summarises the events of the Third Age, which also includes a nice summary of the War of the Ring. The intention of the author (and editor) is clear: Read &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; first, and then read &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; to have a complete summary of what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;By reading &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; first...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...you get to know more about Hobbits, which are the centre of Tolkien's imagination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...you build stamina as you pursue Tolkien's books. Easy reads to hard reads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...you aren't going to be spoiled by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_the_Rings_of_Power_and_the_Third_Age&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age&lt;/a&gt; chapter at the end of *The Silmarillion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...you get to learn more about Middle-earth gradually. To once again cite the analogy &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-it-necessary-to-read-The-Hobbit-before-The-Lord-of-the-Rings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I read&lt;/a&gt; to reinterate my points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Silmarillion starts on such a gigantic scale that if you begin with it everything else is going to seem confusing, petty, or irrelevant. If you want to understand the history of the American Civil War, you don't start with the Big Bang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;–Ernest W. Adams&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; By reading all about the War of Wrath, the resultant sinking of Beleriand and the imprisonment of the Dark Lord Morgoth in the First Age first, you'll realise how insignificant the defeats of the Third Age is in comparison to the First Age. Sauron is merely the servant of Morgoth and Gondor doesn't get sunk after the War of the Ring. &lt;strong&gt;You don't want to spoil your Tolkien experience by making the amazing events of TLotR seem insignificant by reading &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion first&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Much credit goes to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://lotrplaza.com/showthread.php?20306-Silmarillion-vs-LOTR&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; and its users, whose relevant points helped me write this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;See also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-it-necessary-to-read-The-Hobbit-before-The-Lord-of-the-Rings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this question which received answers relevant to this question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1467" LastEditorUserId="1467" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T14:28:14.837" LastActivityDate="2018-09-16T14:28:14.837" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T12:39:54.187" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Voronwë's answer is excellent, but I'm going to post the answer I was planning to anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LotR is a gripping tale; the Silmarillion is more like a textbook or encyclopedia.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;slight&lt;/em&gt; exaggeration, but the Sil is definitely written in a much less engaging style; it describes the history of eons rather than the events of an exciting war. It focuses more on races than individual people; if you want to have main characters to identify with, you need LotR.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The natural progression in readability is Hobbit -&gt; LotR -&gt; Silmarillion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Hobbit is more of a book for children. Of course it's interesting and analysable in its own right, but the writing style is easy for people of almost any age to engage with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;LotR is written in more of a &quot;high fantasy&quot; style, but it's still an exciting enough story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/23805/31394&quot;&gt;laced with occasional humour&lt;/a&gt;. The hobbits, as well as often serving as audience surrogates, are sympathetic characters whom it's easy to identify with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silmarillion is more like an ancient saga, written in a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;http://wot.wikia.com/wiki/High_Chant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;High Chant&lt;/a&gt; and focusing on gods and kings and heroes rather than relatable characters. It needs not only stamina but also a deep existing engagement with the world in order to get through it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Starting with the Silmarillion may even turn you off Tolkien altogether.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal experience speaking here. I know someone (a literature graduate at that, someone who's used to reading dense and wordy texts, who enjoyed reading tomes such as &lt;em&gt;Les Miserables&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;) who tried to introduce themselves to Tolkien by diving into the Silmarillion. &lt;strong&gt;Big mistake.&lt;/strong&gt; They couldn't get into it, set it aside, and they still haven't tried to go back to &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; Middle-Earth works, thus missing out on a great masterpiece and one of the milestones of 20th-century literature. (LotR, that is, not the Silmarillion.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Read LotR, then the Silmarillion, then &lt;em&gt;re&lt;/em&gt;read LotR.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be my recommendation. Reading LotR will ensure you're fully engaged with the world of Middle-Earth, by easing you into the mythos through the eyes of relatable characters, but it should also give you a thirst to learn more about that world. You can &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; when reading it that there's much more to the structure and history of the world than we're seeing in the story; you catch brief glimpses of civilisations and artefacts about which you learn almost nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Then&lt;/em&gt; you read the Silmarillion, and learn much more about the history and background that you've caught tantalising glimpses of. And afterwards you may want to read LotR again, as your appreciation of it will be enriched by all this background knowledge. (In fact, reread it anyway. I must have read it at least half a dozen times by now, and I notice new things every time.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And don't forget, there's even more Middle-Earth material to read after LotR and the Silmarillion! You've still got the 12-volume &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Middle-earth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of Middle-Earth&lt;/a&gt; to look forward to. I haven't read this one, so I'm not sure how much is gained by reading it in order, but you may be interested to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/141057/31394&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; in order to see how to read the whole thing (HoME, Sil, and LotR) in &lt;strong&gt;in-universe chronological order&lt;/strong&gt;. Whether that's a good way to read HoME the first time, or a fun exercise for a &lt;em&gt;re&lt;/em&gt;read of the entire mythos, would be a topic for a different question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T12:39:54.187" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T13:26:12.947" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with the posters saying: first LotR (to enjoy it fully, and it is an easier read, and the huge scale of the Silmarillion events will not &quot;dwarf it down&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But not in your specific case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case: you already know about (most of) the LotR events, through Jackson's filter (which discards some things, and changes some others, to make it more &quot;cinematic&quot;, and shortens a LOT of the descriptions, timeframes, and events, and insist a lot more on war and fights than Tolkien did)&lt;br&gt;&#xA; (for me, LotR is really about showing the dying beauty of nature and of creatings of old, a nostalgy of a dying age and the leaving of the elves from this world, which is about to become more 'mechanical'... This is what transpired the most when I read it, and what makes me love it so much.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help put the films aside, and as you already know the gist of LotR:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend you now read the Silmarillion, and afterwards you will be able to reward yourself by reading the Lord of the Rings, and enjoy all its beauty and sadness, with a mind less occupied by Jackson's films and more by that fantastic backdrop of the Silmarillion (which is taken from decades of writing by Tolkien before (and also after) the writing of the Hobbit and of LotR). And then maybe continue towards the History of Middle Earth series (which I couldn't afford yet but I'm really thrilled to read).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the Silmarillion will not be easy to read: many, many places and names. I recommend you keep a pen&amp;amp;paper, or a mindmap software (freemind, freeplane, or their equivalent for your OS) to at least keep traces of important names and their relations. (a lot of it exists, but it is often too detailed.... one you write yourself will probably prove more appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a word of warning: the first few pages are very different from the rest of it, and feel like reading the Bible (which was intentionnal from Tolkien, but may appear weird and/or dry). This stops many readers and prevent them to discover all the gems ( ;) ) hidden in the rest of the book. Please, please, keep reading! : the story it is telling is important for the rest of the book, and the rest of the book is much more readable and in a different style (not as down to earth as Lord of the Ring, but more like epic stories of old gathered from oral histories over the ages...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are about to enter a wonderful world, meet Beren and Luthien, the Valars, Morgoth, Turin Turambar, and discover a bit of what happened in the several thousands of years before LotR... I envy you :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1757" LastEditorUserId="1757" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T14:15:26.193" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T14:15:26.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T18:10:17.057" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking two different questions here, one in the title (&quot;should I read the Silmarillion before or after LotR?&quot;) and one in the text (&quot;what would be the upside to reading the Silmarillion before LotR?&quot;). You have gotten very good answers to the first question, although there are some factual inaccuracies (e.g. if we're going for time-order, it turns out Tolkien &lt;em&gt;started&lt;/em&gt; the Silmarillion before starting the Lord of the Rings trilogy) -- but the second question seems quite wide-open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let's talk about what this is. &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; is a tale of gods and elves and men. It begins by explaining that there are three levels of godhood, which one might call in English &lt;em&gt;God Supreme&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;god&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;demigod&lt;/em&gt;: these are called by the Elves &lt;em&gt;Eru Ilúvatar&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Vala&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Maia&lt;/em&gt;. As in Judeo-Christian backstory, the &lt;em&gt;creator&lt;/em&gt; category is a singleton -- there is one being inhabiting this category, one True God who created our world by creating the gods and demigods to sing in a sort of harmony. In this story one particular god was &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; than all of the other gods and demigods, and desired a sort of &lt;em&gt;individuality&lt;/em&gt; from the divine which is ultimately in many ways a &lt;em&gt;betrayal&lt;/em&gt; of that God Supreme and results in all of the evil, chaos, and discord in the world; he sang discordant notes into the harmony. It is clear that this is a part of the God Supreme's intent and plan, but it still is the source of great strife for us here. Other gods, however, during the story are able to work together to imprison and then exile this god from the world that he helped to create, so that his influences are more subtle and lingering than actively destructive. This sets up the Lord of the Rings books as a discussion of how two of those lingering threads of the betrayer's chaos -- the demigods Saruman and Sauron, who became minions of the betrayer -- were ultimately defeated by the cooperation of men and elves and sentient trees and the demigod who you know as Gandalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As people have suggested, this kind of puts the whole epic narrative into a sort of perspective that kind of takes a lot of its punch away. But in some ways it still has a lot of force: this is a critical moment where despite being defeated in the absolute largest battle, the betrayer-god yet has the ability to win the entire war. If this is a game of chess, he has two pawns which are about to make it to the back row and get queened. For some reason the other gods don't seem to see this (or don't realize how serious the threat is or something) and the fate of this cosmic struggle depends only on these poor, ordinary individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think part of the problem is that therefore, to first approximation you mostly get a ton of &lt;em&gt;backstory&lt;/em&gt;, which is not necessary to understand the greater story but realy does help in flavoring it. Like, if you read the Silmarillion first, you get to feel just how impressive Elrond is when later in &lt;em&gt;Fellowship&lt;/em&gt; he off-hand says &quot;I remember well the splendour of their banners. It recalled to me the glory of the Elder Days and the hosts of Beleriand, so many great princes and captains were assembled.&quot; And you realize that this isn't just someone &lt;em&gt;named after&lt;/em&gt; the Elrond of the Silmarillion, this &lt;em&gt;is the same guy,&lt;/em&gt; having been around for thousands of years. Like, without that backstory you could maybe have reasonably thought that the &quot;Elder Days&quot; were a few hundred years back, but no: this elf is truly &lt;em&gt;ancient&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also get a sort of conspiratorial perspective on the rest of the narrative. For example, there is a character who you have not met yet, named Tom Bombadil. He is a lot of peoples' least-favorite character because he appears in &lt;em&gt;Fellowship&lt;/em&gt; as a sort of deus-ex-machina saving the hobbits from an early before-they-are-ready encounter with the forces of evil. When you return to these epic books to reread them things only get more confusing, &quot;wait, he did &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; with the One Ring?!&quot; But once you have read the Silmarillion, you can kind of approach this character with a new perspective, &quot;okay so this is clearly either a God or Demigod, is it maybe one of the ones from the Silmarillion?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I should note that there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; some ambiguous dialogue which caused J.R.R. Tolkien to write a letter specifically saying that Tom is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Eru Ilúvatar: Frodo asks &quot;Who is Tom Bombadil?&quot; and his wife is not able to really comprehend that question and answers unhelpfully, &quot;He is&quot;, but this has an uncomfortable Judeo-Christian resonance as God says to Moses, 'Tell your people that &quot;I AM&quot; has sent you.' So Tolkien shut that fan theory down. But all of the Valar and Maiar are still open for interesting fan theories, and Tolkien is also on record as having specifically left Tom in during editing to leave this very question open, so as to create an enigmatic feeling in the world of his creation. So fan theories are very much this character's point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those sorts of things are what you can expect to get out of reading &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; before you read &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. The scope of what's going on becomes vastly more epic, albeit that a lot of the backstory has already passed; a lot of the people who you thought might be normal humans turn out to be deities of various forms; some people turn out to be way, way older than anything you've thought of before; and finally, you may get a better handle on what the heck is going on with Gondor and its Stewards and Aragorn and the Sword that was Broken, because Isildur will be a somewhat more familiar name to you, maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1761" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T18:10:17.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1372" CreationDate="2017-06-28T18:16:14.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like @CHEESE's answer very much, and will only add that &quot;neon god they made&quot; almost certainly relates to the worship of technology, with the alienating effects suggested by Garfunkel, regardless of what Simon said.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bob Dylan is famous for dismissing meaning and profundity of his work, which is untrue on most levels. Perhaps Simon was taking a cue from Dylan. Imo, Simon's castigation of his youthful genius strikes me as overly harsh in relation to that extraordinary period of work.  Simon rendered the trite profound.  Compare, say, to the Beastie Boys' similar take on their early work as &quot;just the most outrageous sh#t we could think of to say.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. the Beasties evolved profoundly over the years, and their sensibilities kept getting more refined.)*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Neon God&quot; may be technology we worship like a God even though we ourselves made it. It came out of our humanity but our obsession with, and the precedence we give it, may have the effect of diminishing our humanity&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T19:52:40.243" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T19:52:40.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T19:22:18.967" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another point that hasn't been mentioned.  The Silmarillion has a summary of the Lord of the Rings as its final chapter, &quot;Of the Rings of Power and The Third Age&quot;.  It is a full summary of LoTR and would be a gigantic spoiler.  Clearly the Silmarillion was meant to be read after LoTR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize you have already seen the movies, so a spoiler isn't that big of a deal for you.  But I'm giving my answer for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Since The Silmarillion has a spoiler for LoTR in it, clearly it was meant to be read after.  If you're a purist this may be of interest.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other people happening across this answer who haven't seen the movies may wish to know a spoiler exists in The Silmarillion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1767" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T21:14:56.857" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T21:14:56.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T19:51:35.240" Score="9" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; is set in England, and one of the characters is Madame Tracy, who makes her living by doing &quot;occult&quot; seances, either by using a crystal ball or a Tarot deck (which doesn't contain any Major Arcana because their sight was upsetting the clients). The following detail caught my attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And she made sure that she had always put sprouts on to boil just before a seance. Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussels sprouts cooking in the next room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this some sort of British humour? From an Internet search I can see that Brussels sprouts seem to be an (in)famous popular Christmas dish in Britain - is that it? The novel isn't set during Christmas, though; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/good-omens.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Annotated Pratchett File&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tor.com/2013/05/22/a-comprehensive-reference-guide-to-good-omens/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference file by Tor.com&lt;/a&gt; don't mention this scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T20:49:12.883" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T00:35:04.187" Title="What is it with British occultism and Brussels sprouts?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T19:54:12.033" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google has failed me. I am trying to recall a quote I read once, which goes something like this: &quot;I have reached the mountain peak I saw in my youth, but it is not snow here; it is only salt.&quot; Meaning, I guess, that he had found the success he aspired to but it was not meaningful as he had believed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought perhaps it had been one of those &quot;contextless quotes&quot; from a journalist or essayist, but it may have been a character in a book speaking it. Any help appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1768" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T19:54:12.033" Title="Trying to find a quote: Salt on top of the mountain, instead of snow" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2855" CreationDate="2017-06-28T20:30:55.367" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brussels sprouts release sulphur when cooked. Sulphur, of course, is very strongly associated with hell in the Christian tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Madame Tracy is using this gimmick to (subtly) suggest to her clients she has some sort of a connection with the underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could, however, also interpret the smell of sulphur as a direct reference to Revelation 21:8, and the eventual fate that awaits all who &amp;quot;practice magic arts&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+21:8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation 21:8, New International Version&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, nothing reassuring or comfortable about that. Except perhaps in the sarcastic manner of British humour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user8" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T23:27:15.323" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T23:27:15.323" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2858" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-28T21:04:54.407" Score="4" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chorus of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_Dragons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imagine Dragons&lt;/a&gt;' &quot;Thief&quot; (from the deluxe version of the album &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke_%2B_Mirrors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smoke + Mirrors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), written by Clare Reynolds and Natalie Maree Dunn, goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So take me back&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I believed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Back when I was unafraid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just like a thief&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all the heights&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That I could reach&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Back when I was unafraid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just like a thief  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://open.spotify.com/track/2Q4OrJV7rGtUpPsLGbchgr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spotify&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tvtj75377vpk3qdwmgkx44f42pa?lyrics=1&amp;amp;u=0#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyrics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lyrics confuse me slightly. Invoking the &quot;thief,&quot; I'm pretty sure, cannot be only for the purpose of creating an example of someone who's unafraid -- why not &quot;hero,&quot; or any other person who is unafraid? (The word is also the title of the song, perhaps hinting at something...more?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the word &quot;thief&quot; can carry a negative connotation, and so (at least for me) distracts from the request to &quot;take me back&quot; to an earlier, simpler, and more naive time &quot;when I believed.&quot; Also, &quot;all the heights/that I could reach&quot; make more sense when connected to almost any other profession that requires bravery from its practitioners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of the song is that the singer is speaking to someone who doesn't understand the darkness that can exist in the world, for people who experienced things than the listener had not, as in the first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If only you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You could see&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The darkest place that you could be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh maybe then you'd understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From desert heat to cobbled streets&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From broken home to the city beat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There's so much more than you could know  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is followed immediately by the chorus: &quot;So take me back...&quot; I interpret this as a hope or prayer that the singer can go back to a simpler time, so that he and the listener will be on the same level again. (He does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; ask that the listener gain negative life experiences.) I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think that &quot;thief&quot; is a good example of someone who has that earlier and lighter frame of mind that the speaker wishes to return to. The thief may be unafraid, but that mindset is probably not the solution that the speaker seeks from the &quot;darkest place that you could be.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, why use the word &quot;thief&quot; in &quot;Thief&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-10-27T00:44:02.200" Title="On the use of the word &quot;thief&quot; in Imagine Dragons' &quot;Thief&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;clare-reynolds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T21:16:13.663" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the books in the chronological order of the story, that is, the Silmarillion, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, and I would recommend this order - although maybe not for all readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good points of this order are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When reading the Hobbit and the LotR, you know the settings. Others have pointed that LotR focuses on hobbits and they nearly aren't mentioned in the Silmarillion. Hovever, the LotR has a prologue about hobbits but it doesn't have an introduction to men, elves and dwarfs. By reading the Silmarillion you start the other books knowing what they are, and knowing a lot about the Middle Earth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This way of reading makes the three books appear as parts of the same story, that is mostly contained in the Silmarillion. If you enjoy that bigger story, it flows more naturally if read in chronological order that than if you have to make a thousands of years flashback.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This order works for me because I'm very interested in the biggest picture. In fact, I'm usually more interested in history than in novels, and the Silmarillion can be read more as an alternate history book than as a novel. For readers who prefer great novels to dry sagas, reading the LotR builds up the interest to read the Silmarillion and reading it last can be better, as other answers say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the spoiler, I would say that unless you have a very good memory, it's difficult to match that spoiler with the LotR while reading it. It just seems a good spoiler when you read it having read the LotR first. Of course, you grasp from it that in the end the good guys drop the ring in a volcano and destroy it, but you don't need any spoiler to guess that from the beginning of the LotR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize with the Big Bang and Civil War metaphor others have used: if you are interested only in the American Civil War, read about it and then you might get interested in learning about what happened before, but if you are interested in the Big Bang, the Civil War and what happened in-between, I'd suggest to start by the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, for me, reading the LotR without having read the Silmarillion would be like reading about the American Civil War having to guess what slavery, cotton and the United States are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1769" LastEditorUserId="1769" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T13:09:20.277" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T13:09:20.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2858" CreationDate="2017-06-28T22:13:55.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about any official meaning, and it's the first time I hear about this song, but it struck me like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So take me back&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(to)&lt;/em&gt; When I believed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(So take me)&lt;/em&gt; Back when I was unafraid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(take me)&lt;/em&gt; Just like a thief&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed like &amp;quot;back&amp;quot; implied &amp;quot;taking&amp;quot;, like in the first verse and the next line implies taking as well. As in thief isn't actually referring to the subject, but rather the one he's speaking to. Thief is one who's taking (well, could be back) things without asking, potentially at any cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginning of the next verse, i.e. &amp;quot;And&amp;quot; kinda ruins it. It could be substituted with an &amp;quot;of&amp;quot; in order to continue the &amp;quot;unafraid&amp;quot; line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(unafraid)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strike&gt;And (?)&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;em&gt;Of&lt;/em&gt; all the heights&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That I could reach&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(So take me)&lt;/em&gt; Back when I was unafraid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Take me)&lt;/em&gt; Just like a thief&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other possibility is he is recalling the heights he could reach back when he was unafraid and &amp;quot;Just like a thief&amp;quot; is a refrain of a kind, so it implies the same context as the first time, i.e. it's not a continuation of the previous line but stands for itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1676" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T22:13:55.813" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-28T22:40:15.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had read the Hobbit and LotR before Sil, and still didn't care for it. After reading LotR again, I recognized that some of the off-hand references made were recorded fully in Sil. I read that again, and it was like an epiphany. What happens in the Rings is BECAUSE of what happens in the Silmarillion, but I don't think I made much of the connections the first time I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've now read it three times, and gain more understanding each time, whereas I read LotR for pure pleasure of the adventure and good conquering evil. There is much more grey in Sil, just as there is in the Christian Bible. (One example here is when King David violated Sanctuary and killed a man, but still remained the favored of the Lord.) It is not as an enjoyable read, except the exhilaration of discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you should read Lord Of The Rings 1st, 3rd, and 5th. Tolkien is very deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1771" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-28T22:46:40.603" LastActivityDate="2017-06-28T22:46:40.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2864" CreationDate="2017-06-28T23:48:25.207" Score="3" ViewCount="501" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wilfred Owen's poem &quot;The Unreturning&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://markandrewholmes.com/theunreturning.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text here&lt;/a&gt;) seems remarkably free of context - it never says explicitly what it's about, what's happening, which &quot;dead&quot; are being talked about, who or what are &quot;unreturning&quot;, or what the point of the poem is. Therefore I'm hoping that this is a poem which will lend itself well to close reading, and that our understanding of it will be greatly increased by doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the first questions this poem made me ask is: &lt;strong&gt;who is the narrator?&lt;/strong&gt; The poem is written in the first person in at least a couple of places:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it sound like the narrator might be God, calling the dead as they leave life ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but this suggests that the narrator fears heaven, which surely God would not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I can't really work it out. &lt;strong&gt;Who is the first-person speaker?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T23:49:46.413" Title="Who is the speaker in &quot;The Unreturning&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wilfred-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2285" CreationDate="2017-06-29T05:12:36.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the thanking of God in a few ways. I think it's helpful to look at the final four stanzas one by one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So still he was that the birds flew round /&#xA;  The grey of his head without&#xA;  a sound,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leading up to the end of the poem, the Seed-Merchant is at peace within the natural world, exemplified by his stillness. I see a contrast here between the machination of warfare, especially chemical (viz. &quot;unnatural&quot;) warfare, and the serenity of the natural world. Nature provides a place of solace in the midst of the violent, destructive consequences of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Careless and tranquil in the air, /&#xA;  As if naught human were standing&#xA;  there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stillness of the man affects the natural world: the birds are &quot;[c]areless and tranquil.&quot; There is no divide between man and nature. Instead, it is as if no human were even there. If this were the throes of war, the birds would certainly not feel that tranquility. Given the spiritual implications of the final lines, I cannot help but imagine St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-francis-and-the-birds/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, never a soul could understand / Why he looked at the earth, and the&#xA;  seed in his hand, /&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that &quot;never a soul could understand&quot; the Seed-Merchant's actions has to do with the idea that his act of faith, or piety even, goes beyond the logic and the rational. In a world torn apart by war, of course this does not make sense. However, I contend that the fault is in the on-looker, not the Seed-Merchant. To him, his actions make perfect sense and culminate in the final lines, but to a world that just fought what was supposed to be the war to end all wars, it does not. It's our souls that are at fault, not the Seed-Merchant's. Indeed, the world is so affected by war that even at the level of individual souls, people cannot recognize simple acts of faith for what they are. The world has been corrupted -- body and soul -- by the violence of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he had never before seen seed or sod: / I heard him murmur: ‘Thank&#xA;  God, thank God!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seed, a metaphor for new life, new beginnings, possibly resurrection, evokes a fresh awareness of the beauty and power of the natural world. The humble seed (possibly an allusion to having faith the size of a mustard seed?) keeps this man going because in it lies the hope of creation. Again, the natural world -- this time a tiny seed -- contrasts with war. Despite all the human-created weapons that seek to wipe out life, the seed exists to create life anew. Compare the seed to artillery: it is almost absurd how such a small thing creates life after such massive forces work to wipe it out. Yet, &lt;em&gt;thankfully&lt;/em&gt;, the world can go on, can be re-created, because of something as simple as a seed. The Seed-Merchant knows the promise of life contained within each seed he plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And so he thanks God: it is through the seed that the world can continue, that nature can thrive again, that all life does not end because of war. There is suffering and death, but there is also resurrection and new life.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T05:12:36.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2862" CreationDate="2017-06-29T05:54:29.310" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: my reading of this poem is informed by the brief analysis of it provided &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wilfredowen.org.uk/poetry/the-unreturning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; by the Wilfred Owen Association. That said, I think I take it in a slightly different direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clearly spiritual implications in this poem thanks to the final line referencing the doors of heaven. I think the poem can be interpreted effectively using three different personae for the &quot;I&quot; in the poem: &quot;I&quot; as generic poetic &quot;speaker&quot; (in this case a sonneteer), &quot;I&quot; as spiritual doubter in the midst and aftermath of war, &quot;I&quot; as Owen himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The analysis I linked to connects the &quot;I&quot; to Owen. The critic there makes this argument:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;First drafted late 1912 or early 1913 THE UNRETURNING allegorises&#xA;  Owen's own religious heartsearchings emanating from his dislike of the&#xA;  narrow evangelicalism practised at Dunsden by the Reverend Herbert&#xA;  Wigan. What makes the link evident is Owen's early draft having on its&#xA;  reverse side a drafted letter to Wigan setting out his objections to a&#xA;  'Christian Life' that 'affords no imagination, physical sensation,&#xA;  aesthetic philosophy', its one dimensional 'strait line upwards' and&#xA;  its 'one interpretation of Life and Scheme of Living among a&#xA;  hundred.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some value in this interpretation; however, it limits the scope of the poem. The narrower the &quot;I&quot;, the less relevant the implications of the poem become for the rest of us. Therefore, I'd like to take up the two other ways of looking at the speaker, the first of which is really a vehicle for arriving at the second way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;I&quot; as sonneteer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examining the poem through the lens of the typical tone of a sonnet sheds light on some of the irony therein. The theme of unrequited love in a sonnet is as old as the style itself. However, the sonnet takes a different turn by having &lt;em&gt;the people themselves&lt;/em&gt; not return, rather than the abstract construct of love. Looking at the narrator as a writer of sonnets, we can notice the way Owen plays with the conventions of sonnets. For example, consider the final two lines of the second quatrain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And never one fared back to me or spoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is the lover rejected, the lover alone and pining for an answer or at least a response. Now, it is nature, the world, the cosmos that is working against the narrator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a structural perspective, this idea is strengthened by the final three lines of the closing sestet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gagged by the smothering Wing which none unbinds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of Wing here alludes in my mind to George Herbert's poem &quot;Easter Wings,&quot; which directly (and famously in the world of poetry) connects Christ to a winged creature. Here, the Wing gags and smothers. Reading this idea through the lens of the sonnet structure, we see the sonneteer living in this &quot;love triangle&quot;: &lt;code&gt;Wing -- The Unreturning -- The Speaker&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing on structure and the conventions of a sonnet, we can see how the narrator is stuck in this position of unrequited love. In this instance, however, the force preventing any sort of return or even response seems to be &quot;God as Wing,&quot; which leads to...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;I&quot; as spiritual doubter in the midst and aftermath of war&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly this is great irony in a sonnet where the divine smothers and gags, chains people in, and leaves those still alive in the world disconnected from those who have died. This narrator then stands for the consciousness that simply cannot allow two ideas to coexist: a religious belief in a loving God and the death and destruction of war. When people go off and die and don't return, giving no assurance of anything beyond this world, then there is cause for doubt, especially when war is what leads to death in such massive numbers. The narrator then is one who is living in the tension of faith and disbelief, a tension made worse by the world in which the narrator lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T05:54:29.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2775" CreationDate="2017-06-29T09:36:01.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;Zhan Zheng Xi&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...and not Zhan Zheng Xi Xixi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chinese naming conventions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are such that the &lt;strong&gt;first word in the name is the surname&lt;/strong&gt;, which is different from &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; names where the surname comes after the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the first word in this character's name is: 'Zhan'. This would be the surname, also known as 姓 (xìng).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;subsequent two words are the character's personal name&lt;/strong&gt;, which their parents choose for them. This is also known as 名 (míng). This personal name is almost always disyllabic, with a small exception being monosyllabic. In this case it is disyllabic -- 'Zheng Xi'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give an example: Take Harry Potter and Zhan Zheng Xi. The former's surname is Potter, and the latter's surname is Zhan. The former's personal name is Harry, and the latter's personal name is Zheng Xi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Personal names vs nicknames&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Zhan Xi Xi' isn't wrong as well, it would classify as a &amp;quot;nickname&amp;quot; given to the character by his friends. Take Ronald Weasley for example. He's not always called Ronald. Instead, he's called 'Ron'. Same thing here, Zheng Xi can be abbreviated into Xi Xi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1467" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T09:36:01.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2866" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was an Englishman who fought as a soldier in the First World War. He remains one of the most famous WWI poets, writing well-known poems such as &quot;Dulce et Decorum est&quot; and &quot;Anthem for Doomed Youth&quot; which painted grim pictures of the horrors of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was killed in battle on 4 November 1918, long after the peace had been agreed but one week before the signing of the Armistice which officially ended the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2867" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" Score="0" Body="Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) was an English poet, most famous for his WWI poems depicting the horror of war, before he was killed as a soldier in that same war." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T10:50:27.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2868" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2882" CreationDate="2017-06-29T12:54:08.290" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Siegfried Sassoon's poem &quot;Atrocities&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Atrocities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text here&lt;/a&gt;) describes the murder of German prisoners by British soldiers during WWI. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The discovery in 2013 of an early draft of one of Sassoon's best-known anti-war poems [&quot;Atrocities&quot;] had biographers saying they would rewrite portions of their work about the poet. [...] &quot;This is very exciting material. I want to rewrite my biography and I probably shall be able to get some of it in. It's a treasure trove.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What precisely was so significant about this rediscovered draft?&lt;/strong&gt; It's not every day that biographers decide to rewrite sections of their biographies based on newly unearthed material. (The cited &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/03/siegfried-sassoon-poem-atrocities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guardian article&lt;/a&gt; is hardly more explanatory than Wikipedia itself on this point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T12:53:52.723" Title="Why was the early draft of &quot;Atrocities&quot; so significant?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;siegfried-sassoon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2017-06-29T15:28:00.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert on this poem, but having read its first chapter (the first four stanzas, &quot;The Burial of the Dead&quot;) several times, poring over individual words and sentences, I came up with a couple of possible interpretations of the &quot;heap of broken images&quot; based on context from elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tarot cards&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third stanza is all about one &quot;Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante&quot; and her tarot cards. These, of course, contain images and can be piled in heaps, so the &quot;heap of broken images&quot; could be an earlier reference to &lt;strong&gt;tarot cards&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, let's look at some of the specific cards mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not find / The Hanged Man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These references both to rocks and to death, specifically by hanging, may be intended to link back to the earlier stanza, specifically the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is shadow under this red rock,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a shelterless dead tree isn't necessarily evocative of hanging, the word &quot;dead&quot; used in juxtaposition with the idea of a tree and of being unwelcoming, no help provided, could easily put that idea across. This links up with the &quot;Hanged Man&quot; from later on. Also, the inviting red rock - and the speaker doing the inviting, who may be the same as the &quot;hyacinth girl&quot; mentioned a few lines later - could be related to the &quot;Lady of the Rocks&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and one more thing from the same description of the barren desert scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will show you fear in a handful of dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is arguably what a tarot card reader might do. If the cards come up indicating some gruesome fate, then despite being nothing but small scraps of paper which will soon turn to dust, they can strike fear into the hearts of those who believe in them. Another potential link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The remains of a life&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire chapter, from its title through every stanza, has a theme of death about it. The description of the barren landscape, with its &quot;stony rubbish&quot;, &quot;dead tree&quot;, and &quot;dry stone&quot;, is particularly evocative of death - we might call this place a &lt;em&gt;dead&lt;/em&gt; landscape, and bones or a skeleton would fit neatly with the scene described. And later, in the fourth stanza, there is talk of growing corpses as if they were plants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That corpse you planted last year in your garden,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be a possible way of reading the second stanza. The desert scene so evocative of death could be the site of someone's grave; the &quot;branches grow[ing o]ut of this stony rubbish&quot; correspond to the sprouting of the corpse referenced later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;heap of broken images&quot;, under this interpretation, would be &lt;strong&gt;images of the dead person's life&lt;/strong&gt;. It's said that you see images of your life flashing before you just before you die; and once you're dead, those images are all that's left of what used to be your life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The branches growing from the grave are probably something metaphysical, perhaps symbolising eternal life after death. The &quot;[s]on of man&quot; cannot say or guess anything about them, for we know only the mortal life, the &quot;heap of broken images&quot;, and are blind to what comes after it. We, the mortal children of man, see only the barren desert scene and the remains of the dead person's life, not what is sprouting from their corpse in a different dimension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T15:28:00.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-29T19:52:15.517" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;... in what ways, if any, is an initial reading of The Lord of the Rings enhanced by first reading The Silmarillion?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My opinions are formed from reading each of the Hobbit, LOTR, and The Silmarillion over twenty times over the course of my youth, in the time between Bakshi and Jackson.  The Silmarillion does not enhance LOTR.   LOTR gives value to The Silmarillion, a horribly edited conglomeration of amazing stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'd say that you should read LOTR first.&lt;/strong&gt; If anything, reading the The Silmarillion first takes away the joy of learning more about Middle Earth you can only get by first reading LOTR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1786" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T20:25:34.683" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T20:25:34.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-29T20:05:43.170" Score="7" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatikvah&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HaTikvah&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; Israel's national anthem, was adopted from an earlier poem called &quot;Tikvateinu,&quot; by Naftali Herz Imber. Here is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatikvah#Official_text&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official text&lt;/a&gt; of the anthem (translation and transliteration can be found on the linked WP page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;כָּל עוֹד בַּלֵּבָב פְּנִימָה&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  נֶפֶשׁ יְהוּדִי הוֹמִיָּה,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  וּלְפַאֲתֵי מִזְרָח קָדִימָה&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  עַיִן לְצִיּוֹן צוֹפִיָּה,&amp;rlm;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;עוֹד לֹא אָבְדָה תִּקְוָתֵנוּ,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם.&amp;rlm;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the first stanza and the refrain from Imber's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatikvah#Text_of_Tikvateinu_by_Naftali_Herz_Imber&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original 1877 poem&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;כל עוד בלבב פנימה&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  נפש יהודי הומיה,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ולפאתי מזרח קדימה,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  עין לציון צופיה;&amp;rlm;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;עוד לא אבדה תקותנו,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  התקוה הנושנה,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  לשוב לארץ אבותינו,&amp;rlm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  לעיר בה דוד חנה.&amp;rlm;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official version of the anthem has changed substantially from the original poem; in the second stanza, all the lines except the first have been altered. &quot;התקוה הנושנה&quot; (&quot;the ancient hope&quot;) became &quot;הַתִּקְוָה בַּת שְׁנוֹת אַלְפַּיִם&quot; (&quot;the two-thousand year hope&quot;); the more significant changes, though, are &quot;לשוב לארץ אבותינו&quot; (&quot;to return to the land of our ancestors&quot;), which became &quot;לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ&quot; (&quot;to be a free nation in our land&quot;); and the final line, &quot;לעיר בה דוד חנה&quot; (&quot;the city where David encamped&quot;) was changed to &quot;אֶרֶץ צִיּוֹן וִירוּשָׁלַיִם&quot; (&quot;the land of Israel and Zion&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some further research revealed that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.timesofisrael.com/how-an-unwieldy-romantic-poem-and-a-romanian-folk-song-combined-to-produce-hatikva/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the change was made in 1905&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tel Aviv schoolteacher Doctor I. L. Metman Hacohen altered Imber’s&#xA;  lyrics in 1905, making a reference to “the ancient hope” more&#xA;  specific: “the two-millennia-old hope.” “To return to the land of our&#xA;  fathers / to the city where David camped” became “To be a free nation&#xA;  in our land / the land of Zion and Jerusalem.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the second line of the second stanza was changed to be more specific, and the final line was changed for the rhyme. However, I'm not sure why the &lt;em&gt;penultimate&lt;/em&gt; line was altered; I had originally assumed that it was changed after the founding of the State of Israel (after all, it doesn't make sense to speak of a &quot;return&quot; to a land in which you currently reside). If &lt;em&gt;The Times of Israel&lt;/em&gt; is accurate, though, and that change was also made in 1905, it was 43 years prior to Israel's independence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the penultimate line of &quot;HaTikvah&quot; altered?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T23:34:04.257" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T23:34:04.257" Title="Why was the text of &quot;HaTikvah&quot; changed?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;naftali-herz-imber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2872" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-29T20:12:37.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T20:12:37.863" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T20:12:37.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2873" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-29T20:12:37.863" Score="0" Body="Naftali Herz Imber (1856-1909) was a Jewish Hebrew-language poet. He is famous for &quot;Tikvateinu,&quot; the poem that the Israeli national anthem, &quot;HaTikvah,&quot; was based on. Use this tag in conjunction with [hebrew-literature]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T23:56:25.443" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T23:56:25.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2874" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-29T20:13:25.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T20:13:25.453" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T20:13:25.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2875" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-29T20:13:25.453" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Hebrew language." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:32:39.650" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:32:39.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2876" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2877" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" Score="0" Body="How questions about Sir Terry Pratchett, the English author, and his works. His most famous work ıs the Discworld cycle, and some other works include &quot;Strata&quot;, &quot;Nation&quot;, the Johnny Maxwell trilogy, and &quot;Good Omens&quot;, in collaboration with Neil Gaiman." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" LastActivityDate="2017-06-29T21:35:49.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2879" CreationDate="2017-06-30T03:00:44.633" Score="20" ViewCount="3956" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came upon a short story, &lt;em&gt;Death of a Foy&lt;/em&gt; (1980), in the compendium &lt;em&gt;The Winds of Change&lt;/em&gt; (1983). In the intro, Asimov states that he was &quot;hardly able to stop laughing&quot;, but I just can't seem to get the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it's a two page story that ends with the paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Give my big hearts to Maude, Dwayne. Dismember me for Harold's choir. Tell all the Foys in Sortibackenstrete that I will soon be there --&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What am I missing here&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it's word play in the same vein as two of his other stories in this collection. (plays on &quot;slow and steady wins the race&quot; and &quot;much ado about nothing&quot;). Perhaps that's misleading me, but given the publish dates it may just be a 30+ year old reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two other stories and their wordplays were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sure Thing&lt;/em&gt; (1977); &quot;Sloane's Teddy wins the race.&quot; =&gt; &quot;Slow and steady wins the race.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; (1977); &quot;Much Adieu About Nothing&quot; =&gt; &quot;much ado about nothing&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amusing side note: in &lt;em&gt;About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, the character was killed for that pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1788" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T12:20:47.870" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T12:20:47.870" Title="What is Asimov's joke in &quot;Death of a Foy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2878" CreationDate="2017-06-30T03:29:34.503" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;It took me a second to get it; you have to say it out loud. When you do, you might hear a bit of a familiar melody come to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's playing off the lyrics to &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Cohan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George M. Cohan&lt;/a&gt;'s &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_My_Regards_to_Broadway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Give My Regards to Broadway&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Give my regards to Broadway&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remember me to Herald Square&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That I will soon be there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full story just to build up to the punchline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="179" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T11:23:31.333" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T11:23:31.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2871" CreationDate="2017-06-30T04:45:34.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://forward.com/culture/153452/rewriting-hatikvah-as-anthem-for-all/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this opinion piece&lt;/a&gt;, Philologos writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original words of Stanza 2 of “Hatikvah” were: “Od lo avda&#xA;  tikvateynu, / hativka ha-noshana, / lashuv le-eretz avoteynu, / le’ir&#xA;  ba David, David ḥana” — “We still have not lost our hope, / our&#xA;  ancient hope, / to return to the land of our fathers, / to the city in&#xA;  which David, in which David encamped.” In 1948, the return to the Land&#xA;  of Israel being no longer merely a hope and Imber’s reference to David&#xA;  sounding archaic, this was changed to Od lo avda tikvateynu, / hatikva&#xA;  mi-shnot alpayim, / lihiyot am ḥofshi b’artseynu, / be-eretz tsiyon&#xA;  ve’yerushalayim” — “We still have not lost our hope, / our&#xA;  2,000-year-old hope, / to be a free people in our land, / in the land&#xA;  of Zion and Jerusalem.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think he is saying that the original expression לשוב לארץ אבותינו expressed the hope of return in the future, while the revised version לִהְיוֹת עַם חָפְשִׁי בְּאַרְצֵנוּ viewed the return as having already occurred and the hope of the future became free nationhood.  I do not see what sources Philologos uses to reach this interpretation so I cannot provide any more detail to acertain if this was really the intent of Dr. Metman Hacohen in 1905.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible correctness of Philologos's analysis is certainly debatable, especially since he seems to have gotten the date of the change wrong, but I wanted to provide his interpretation as one possible reason for the change to the penultimate line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T04:45:34.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2017-06-30T06:09:28.663" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To say anything definitive about &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is challenging; indeed, this work seems to evade interpretation with each new line and stanza. With many interpretations carry with them some merit, I contend that the line &quot;heap of broken images&quot; is meant to evoke something broader about modernist art: &lt;strong&gt;this line is a metatextual reference to the poem itself and its underlying epistemology.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot writes, &quot;[Y]ou know only / A heap of broken images.&quot; I want to focus on that word &quot;know.&quot; Eliot is calling into question that which we can know in this waste land. The mirror that we used to be able to hold up to reality is broken; the self is fractured. There is no unifying epistemology, or, in post-modern terms, meta-narrative. Everything is a broken image. Reading the poem in this light, one can realize that what Eliot is presenting us with broken images of a broken world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in &lt;em&gt;A Genealogy of Modernism: A study of English literary doctrine 1908-1922&lt;/em&gt;, Michael Levenson argues,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The principle of order in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; depends on a plurality of&#xA;  consciousnesses, an ever-increasing series of points of view, which&#xA;  struggle towards an emergent unity and then continue to struggle past&#xA;  that unity.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english.illinois.edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/eliot/wasteland.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the aftermath of the destruction of World War I, the social and political institutions can longer be trusted to hold society together. Instead, rather than unification, we have separation and multiplicity. We have an epistemology that jumps from image to image, each time only seeing a part of the whole. The whole has been destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this line amidst the plethora of allusions and annotations. The meaning of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; relies on other texts and other writers. Its meaning is fractured insofar as it is not self-contained; it is allusive. In that sense &quot;heap of broken images&quot; is an apt description for the poetic effort Eliot is making in this work. It evokes Eliot's essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Traditional and the Individual Talent.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; In it, Eliot writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His&#xA;  significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to&#xA;  the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set&#xA;  him, for contrast and comparison, &lt;em&gt;among the dead&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is exactly where we are in the first section of this opus: in the midst of burying the dead, tracing meaning back through the work of other artists and finding meaning in the broken images of humanity. This constitutes what the artist can &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T06:09:28.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2868" CreationDate="2017-06-30T12:53:52.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It appears there may be a misunderstanding in the question. There is no particular significance to &lt;em&gt;Atrocities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia quote is a bad summary of the article it references, which makes two separate points run together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article opens with the changes to the poem &lt;em&gt;Atrocities&lt;/em&gt;, a choice made by the journalist for a number of reasons. The poem is fairly well known. It has shocking, evocative imagery. And the draft version makes clear that the changes are substantial, with the original being even more provocative. All of these things make it a great lede for a newspaper article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote about the &quot;treasure trove&quot; in the article is much further down. Set in context it is clear that the person who said this, Sassoon's biographer Jean Wilson, is referring to the entire collection, not just a single poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among the Sassoon material is a notebook with almost 50 previously&#xA;  unpublished poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(snip)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sassoon's biographer Jean Moorcroft Wilson said: &quot;This is very&#xA;  exciting material. I want to rewrite my biography and I probably shall&#xA;  be able to get some of it in. It's a treasure trove.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth pointing out that this can be read two ways. Although there's an implication that the discovery has made Wilson want to rewrite her biography, it's not concrete. &quot;I want to rewrite&quot; could be taken as reading that Wilson was planning a revision &lt;em&gt;in any case&lt;/em&gt;, and is excited to also include the new material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it then goes on to make an entirely separate point about &lt;em&gt;Atrocities&lt;/em&gt;, which makes clear that it's only part of the wider &quot;trove&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Commenting on the Atrocities draft, she said: &quot;The publisher,&#xA;  Heinemann, wouldn't let him publish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia summary runs the &quot;trove&quot; quote directly after its description of Atrocities, making them seem related when they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T12:53:52.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2878" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:32:43.937" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feghoot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a feghoot&lt;/a&gt;: a story that builds up to a pun for its punchline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asimov seems to have had a fondness for feghoots, as he did this in several stories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Loint of Paw&quot;, about a criminal who uses the statute of limitations and a time machine to his advantage, has the punchline &quot;a niche in time, saves Stein&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Battle Hymn&quot; has &quot;Mars says yes!&quot; (for &lt;em&gt;The Marseillaise&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it's a play on the chorus of the song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Give_My_Regards_to_Broadway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Give my Regards to Broadway&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Give my regards to Broadway, remember me to Herald Square,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Tell all the gang at Forty-Second Street, that I will soon be there;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whisper of how I'm yearning to mingle with the old time throng;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Give my regards to old Broadway and say that I'll be there ere long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Asimov had misremembered the penultimate line or perhaps knew another version of it. &quot;Tell all the Foys in Sortibackenstrete&quot; seems like an intended &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spoonerism&lt;/a&gt; of &quot;tell all the &lt;em&gt;boys&lt;/em&gt; in Forty-Second Street&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a shame, since he seems to have based the title of his story on that misremembered line. It should have been called &quot;Death of a Fang&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T12:47:32.193" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T12:47:32.193" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-06-30T13:36:58.337" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the question of reading order: The Hobbit and LotR's are written to be read as literature.  Therefore, I would generally recommend they be read in order and first.  The Silmarillion (imho) is more appropriately compared to Bulfinch's Mythology in that &quot;Our work is ...for the reader... who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made...&quot; (heavily edited from the preface of &quot;The Age of Fables&quot;).  The Silmarillion represents an attempt to edit together the many back stories created by Tolkien to explain the world of Arda and the development of it's languages into a single source of mythology. The stories in it, could in some sense be seen as prose translations of epic poems originally sung in one of the variants of elvish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1793" LastActivityDate="2017-06-30T13:36:58.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-06-30T15:33:13.387" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I now understand the poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://markandrewholmes.com/theunreturning.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Unreturning&quot;&lt;/a&gt; much better than I did when I asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2862/17&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, thanks to Peter's excellent answer and my reading through it several more times and more carefully. It's about the dead (presumably, given the poet's history, those who were killed in war) being utterly distant and disconnected from the world of the living, tragically so, and apparently causing the narrator to feel spiritual doubt and even distaste towards Heaven itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there's still one thing I don't understand: all the references to the natural cycles of day and night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There peered the indefinite unshapen dawn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The weak-limned hour when sick men's sighs are drained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half the poem is spent talking about day, night, and dawn. Surely this must have some symbolic meaning and connection to the main topic of the dead and their distance from the living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of the references to night, day, and dawn in this poem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T07:44:01.340" Title="What do the night and day in &quot;The Unreturning&quot; symbolise?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;wilfred-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2998" CreationDate="2017-06-30T19:57:03.597" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;yet the words sufficed&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  To compel the recognition they preceded.&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  And so, compliant to the common wind, &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  In concord at this intersection time&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.&lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I'm never certain how to pronounce this word in the context.  (I suspect this was Eliot's intention, but my assumption is based on the theme and conflicting &quot;hints&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wind, as in moving air, seems to be the reasonable choice, and implied by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Over the asphalt where no other sound was    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a few lines later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I met one walking, loitering and hurried&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  As if blown towards me like the metal leaves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, wind, as in a Yeatsian gyre*, provides an attractive &quot;near rhyme&quot;, and may be implied by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We trod the pavement in a dead patrol&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because a patrol is generally understood as to &quot;keep watch over (an area) by regularly walking or traveling around.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't expect most readers to hold with this second option, however, the Four Quartets begin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Time present and time past &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are both perhaps present in time future, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And time future contained in time past. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is pretty darn cyclic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The Second Coming was published in 1919, about 15 years before Eliot began working on the first Quartet, Burnt Norton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:06:53.557" Title="&quot;wind&quot; or &quot;wind&quot;? re: Little Gidding, II.50" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;four-quartets&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3008" CreationDate="2017-07-01T01:17:01.963" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started reading Natsume Sōseki's &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt; a week or two ago in preparation for &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/772/17&quot;&gt;this month's topic challenge&lt;/a&gt;, and I came across the following paragraph towards the end of the first chapter (whose full text is freely available in English at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Cat/Chapter_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WikiSource&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But human beings do not seem to understand the rights of property. Every time we come on something good to eat, invariably they descend and take it from us. Relying on their naked strength, they coolly rob us of things which are rightly ours to eat. &lt;strong&gt;Miss Blanche lives in the house of a military man, and the tomcat’s master is a lawyer. But since I live in a teacher’s house, I take matters of this sort rather more lightly than they.&lt;/strong&gt; I feel that life is not unreasonable so long as one can scrape along from day to day. For surely even human beings will not flourish forever. I think it best to wait in patience for the Day of the Cats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should being a teacher's cat mean that our unnamed hero is more blasé about human 'robbery' than cats belonging to lawyers or military men? I don't understand the connection here. Perhaps there's some Japanese cultural reference that I'm not getting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T08:21:21.890" Title="Why should a teacher's cat care less about human robbery?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2650" CreationDate="2017-07-01T06:32:58.320" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second verse is primarily an allusion to the story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathsheba#Biblical_narrative&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David and Bathsheba&lt;/a&gt; (with the odd clause about Samson and Delilah thrown in). The &quot;you&quot; addressed by the speaker is David himself. &quot;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&quot; also refers to David.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.leonardcohen-prologues.com/hallelujah.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Cohen explained the line&lt;/strong&gt; in a 1985 magazine interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the Judaic tradition, David asked for ordeal. But the Rabbies [sic] said we should be reluctant to do so because ordeal there will sure be!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a rabbinic tradition holds that David wanted to prove how strong his faith in God was, so he asked for a test of faith. But when the test came (seeing Bathsheba bathing), he failed it spectacularly. His best intentions were &quot;overthrown.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the biblical account, David's yielding to temptation led to an escalating series of cover-ups, culminating in his command to have Bathsheba's husband Uriah killed. The next nine chapters of 2 Samuel (12-20) comprise a series of tragedies and conflicts within David's family, which the narrative identifies, at least in part, as God's judgment on David's sin. But there is also grace: David and Bathsheba's second son Solomon lives to succeed his father as king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theme of brokenness and grace in the story of David and Bathsheba fits the overall mood of the song, the contrast between the singer's &quot;cold and broken&quot; experience of love and his continuing refrain of &quot;hallelujah.&quot; The words of the final verse sound like something David might have said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And even though it all went wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'll stand before the Lord of song&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1091" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T06:32:58.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2885" CreationDate="2017-07-01T07:44:01.340" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For my answer, I'm going to build off my previous assertion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2862/17&quot;&gt;found here&lt;/a&gt;) that the narrator of this poem is &quot;one who is living in the tension of faith and disbelief&quot; and that the &quot;I&quot; stands for a spiritual doubter in the midst and aftermath of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alongside the context of war, night and day become another dichotomy in the poem to reflect a violent struggle. We have good v. evil, life v. death, war v. peace, faith v. doubt, and now night v. day. In the first line &quot;night crushed out the day.&quot; Night starts out the poem on the winning side, which is indicative of the tone the whole poem will take. A force of evil, of darkness, has triumphed over good, over the light. Given the spiritual struggles contained herein, I think it's appropriate to see Genesis echoed here. It's not &quot;Let there be light&quot; and &quot;God saw that it was good.&quot; Instead, Owen begins the poem with the inverse of Genesis and gives us an image of darkness winning in a battle against light. The violent triumph that the phrase &quot;crushed out&quot; connotes is essential to how Owen establishes mood here immediately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Night then becomes a time of &quot;stillness,&quot; a time that is the absence of life or human presence. It is a void: &quot;no ghost woke&quot; and &quot;never one fared back to [him] or spoke.&quot; Again in Genesis the void, the chaos, is prior to light existing; here we are back in that dark void. In a sense Owen is inverting the order of Genesis. By having night triumph over day, he can effectively subvert traditional Judeo-Christian concepts of lightness and darkness (or at least call them into question) and further underscore the spiritual doubt of the speaker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might traditionally expect that with the coming of a new day at dawn, light would again be victorious, life would appear, and all doubts would dissipate. That is not what Owen presents. Instead, dawn is &quot;indefinite&quot; and &quot;unshapen.&quot; This is quite a contrast to night crushing out day. Here dawn seems battered, &quot;vacant.&quot; There is no triumphant &quot;Let there be light&quot; proclamation. The dawn is weak and &quot;sad as half-lit minds,&quot; possibly like the minds that still believe that good will defeat evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What then we arrive at in the final stanza is a conclusion that the forces of death and darkness have defeated those of goodness and light. The consequence of war is the inversion of the moral order of Christianity. Good is not the victor; instead, night reigns, having weakened the forces of light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T07:44:01.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-01T20:03:36.343" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;The eyes being reflective are proof that a Soul is inside of the body in &lt;em&gt;The Host&lt;/em&gt;, and is used as verification by both Souls and humans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Look, look, look!&quot; he says. He pulls a small cylinder from his hip pocket and twists the top. A beam of light shoots out the end.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He turns the flashlight on his face.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The light makes his skin yellow. It shows the prominent cheekbones beside a long thin nose and a sharply squared-off jaw. His lips are stretched in a grin, but I can see that they are full, for a man. His eyebrows and lashes are bleached out from the sun.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But that's not what he's showing me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His eyes, clear liquid sienna in the illumination, shine with no more than human reflection. He bounces the light between left and right.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Host&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4 (page 35)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like it should have some sort of significance - the phrase '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_eyes_are_the_window_to_the_soul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the eyes are windows to the soul&lt;/a&gt;' comes to mind - but I don't know what the significance could be. So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a significance to this? If so, what?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-01T22:11:39.483" LastActivityDate="2017-07-01T22:11:39.483" Title="Is it significant that the eyes being reflective are proof that a Soul is inside in &quot;The Host&quot;?" Tags="&lt;stephenie-meyer&gt;&lt;the-host&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T06:19:28.870" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can discern certain Nietzschean undertones such as Undershaft's idealization of the will to power. I also understand Undershaft's discussion on the problem with describing poverty and starvation as virtues, and how the Salvation Army essentially bribes the poor with bread as opposed to actually saving their souls. Sure, that may dismantle the moral position of Cusins and Barbara, but how does it contribute to his own position? He manufactures weapons and self-admittedly sells to all indiscriminately. It seems to be a non-sequitur when he says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[killing] is the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because he - by his own admission - shouldn't have any qualms in providing that &quot;social system&quot; with firepower. I don't really understand the main argument he is using by the end of the book to persuade Cusins and Barbara. Why were they persuaded? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1802" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-02T07:03:30.730" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T07:03:30.730" Title="What is the essence of Undershaft's moral argument in Major Barbara?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;moral&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;major-barbara&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T14:14:35.810" Score="5" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading the paper &quot;Erasing the Invisible Cities: Italo Calvino and the&#xA;Violence of Representation&quot; by John Welsh (&lt;a href=&quot;http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&amp;amp;context=wproml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read for free online&lt;/a&gt;). I've read and enjoyed Calvino's &lt;em&gt;Invisible Cities&lt;/em&gt;, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper is about the &quot;violence of representation&quot; and how this concept relates to Calvino's writing. As I understood it, &quot;violence of representation&quot; refers to the idea that words are incapable of describing the &quot;totality of experience&quot; (Welsh). The mere act of writing is violent in that it robs experience of its true meaning. Note that this is a topic I know little to nothing about, so its very possible that I'm misunderstanding important detail(s). It's also confusing because Welsh uses the phrases &quot;violence of representation&quot; and &quot;crisis of representation&quot;, and I'm not entirely sure what the difference is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh argues that Calvino overcomes this using a strategy Welsh refers to as &quot;lightening&quot;. As I understood it, &quot;lightening&quot; is about exactness, and describing things with as little language as possible. But this is something I have no familiarity with, so I could very easily be missing the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up to this point, if there have been any misunderstandings of Welsh's points, the blame lies with me. I'm now going to do something I prefer to avoid; I'm going to criticize Welsh's argument despite not fully understanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welsh analyzes several passages written by Calvino to look for evidence of lightness. But the analysis was in very broad strokes. Welsh argued that lightening was a goal of Calvino, and to the extent that I understand Welsh's arguments, it seems like Welsh was successful. But given that Welsh started out with a philosophical critique of the idea of language, it seemed to me that there was very little analysis of the specific language, the words, the order of the words, the punctuation, the rythm, etc. of Calvino's writing. So while Welsh perhaps showed that lightening was a &lt;em&gt;goal&lt;/em&gt; of Calvino's, Welsh, in my mind, didn't show that it was something Calvino actually achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is a two part question. First, I would appreciate an explanation of the many concepts Welsh used in his paper. But second, I would appreciate if someone could show, rather than tell, what the concept of &quot;lightening&quot; really is. I think the best way to do that would be through a close reading of either a passage by Calvino or a passage by a different author that uses similar ideas. Since &quot;lightening&quot; is presumably about language, I think that a close reading of Calvino's language is the best way to understand what Calvino is doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T11:45:53.087" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T11:45:53.087" Title="Understanding the technique of &quot;lightening&quot; in Calvino's writing" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;italo-calvino&gt;&lt;invisible-cities&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2017-07-02T14:24:42.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not Sam making a statement about himself and his personal desires.  He is referencing his family history where both his father and grandfather went to sea.  If he chooses to follow this pattern he would go to sea too, but as you say,  throughout the novel he prefers the land, and this one line at the end does not indicate a change of heart.  The conversation is one where he is gently throwing his father's words back to him to see what the reaction will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T14:24:42.653" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T15:59:25.670" Score="9" ViewCount="684" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Four&lt;/em&gt;, Holmes is a drug user:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morroco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't see any evidence of this addiction in &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;, but we do see this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exactly describes what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; happening, in-universe - he is taking drugs on those occasions. But Watson is saying that he does not see him taking the drugs, although they had been together 'many weeks'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - was Doyle actually writing him as taking drugs then, and Watson somehow failed to notice, or was he not (out of universe) taking them and that was a later decision? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T09:23:46.787" Title="Was Holmes written as a drug user in A Study In Scarlet?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2283" CreationDate="2017-07-02T17:34:17.150" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Enhancing the creepy feeling&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing the weather and external conditions certainly does this effectively. The whole story has a masterfully built atmosphere of oppressive dread - not a dread linked to fear of some specific event, but a deep, existential disquiet. The countenance and behaviour of Roderick Usher, the mostly behind-the-scenes sickness and death of his sister, and the lightless and gloomy atmosphere within the house all serve to heighten this feeling, of course, but it's already introduced in the first paragraphs of the story, before the narrator even enters the house, by the description of the external atmosphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the opening sentence of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word choice here is already evoking the ambience that pervades the whole story: the day is &quot;dull&quot; and &quot;dark&quot;, the clouds &quot;oppressive&quot;, the landscape &quot;singularly dreary&quot;, the house &quot;melancholy&quot; (more on this later), and of course the time of day is evening, the most depressing hour, as the light fades and darkness closes in. Already, then, we're starting to feel that gloom and dread which makes the story so memorable. This is &lt;strong&gt;setting the scene&lt;/strong&gt; for what is to come later. It's no surprise when the second sentence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine if, instead, the narrator had ridden through verdant countryside in bright sunshine with birdsong all around, and arrived at the House of Usher around midday. If we'd seen &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; in the first sentence, then the second would have been an unexpected shock, and the writer would have had to work harder to instil in us that feeling of oppressive gloom. He could still have done it, of course, using much the same description of the interior and inhabitants of the house, but it would have taken longer, and might have been lessened by the memory of the pleasant exterior remaining in our minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again later on, towards the end of the story, we get a vivid description of the storm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this -- yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars -- nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a sign that things are &lt;strong&gt;escalating&lt;/strong&gt;: the atmosphere has shifted from a quiet, pervading dread to a frantic, hysterical terror. We've already seen the change in Roderick Usher's demeanour, the increase in his symptoms and excitement, and even the narrator being affected enough for insomnia. With this description of the storm outside, we get the feeling that the story has just shifted up another gear. This prepares us for the terror of Madeline's reappearance at the climax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, imagine if instead the weather outside was as oppressively still as at the start of the story, the air dull and heavy and soundless. In that case, we might have been slower to accept how significantly the condition of both main characters has changed. The heightening terror throughout the reading of the Ethelred story would have been (slightly) lessened, since the weather is constantly mentioned or alluded to in subtle ways throughout these paragraphs - we're never permitted to forget it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The link between the building and the family&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed these sentences while rereading the story just now, and at first didn't think much of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought &lt;strong&gt;the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people&lt;/strong&gt;, and while speculating upon &lt;strong&gt;the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other&lt;/strong&gt; -- it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the &quot;House of Usher&quot; -- an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, &lt;strong&gt;both the family and the family mansion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I now believe that this apparently throwaway remark, from the narrator's internal monologue in the third paragraph, is more significant than it seems. The building symbolises the family, and we can see this connection in many different ways throughout the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firstly, the title. &quot;The Fall of the House of Usher&quot; could refer either to the downfall of the family and the deaths of its last surviving scions, or to the literal collapse of the house at the end of the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The gloomy exterior of the house, which the narrator spends several paragraphs dwelling on at the start, matches perfectly the condition of both Usher siblings. The house is described as bleak and depressing, removed from the heavens above by its vaporous atmosphere; Roderick Usher is described as wan, cadaverous, and presumably similarly removed from his surroundings (at least no mention is made of him venturing outside); and both siblings are afflicted by a sort of morbid apathy which he describes as &quot;a constitutional and a family evil&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unnatural storm which gathers around the house towards the end of the story coincides with the height of Roderick Usher's distractedness and terror. His hysteria mirrors that of the weather - which, given that it seems to be an extremely localised phenomenon, can be seen as an attribute of the house more than its wider surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The deaths of both Usher siblings, and thus of the line of the Usher family, are followed almost immediately by the utter destruction of the building, swallowed up by the eerie tarn.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the description of the external atmosphere surrounding the house, as well as being a writing technique to evoke the appropriate feeling in the reader, is also meant to be a direct &lt;em&gt;in-story&lt;/em&gt; correspondence with the mental atmosphere surrounding the Usher siblings. Just as they are oppressed by their own mental illness and drowning in unnatural despair, so the house is oppressed by heavy clouds and ends up drowning in the tarn. The parallel is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-02T17:34:17.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-02T18:31:34.337" Score="5" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Clifford&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paul Clifford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is most famous for its opening phrase, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;It was a dark and stormy night&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Today, this phrase is seen as a textbook example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;purple prose&lt;/a&gt; - writing which is overly extravagant and flowery, drawing the reader's attention more to the words than the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the context of the original novel, was this really purple prose?&lt;/strong&gt; Was the novel full of purplitude elsewhere, or was it (for its time) a reasonably ordinary piece of writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The book is available on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7735/7735-h/7735-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;, so you can read it yourself if necessary to judge its purpleness or otherwise.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T08:47:04.020" Title="Was &quot;It was a dark and stormy night&quot; deliberately purple prose?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;edward-bulwer-lytton&gt;&lt;paul-clifford&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2897" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3323" CreationDate="2017-07-02T20:10:19.273" Score="11" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read &lt;a href=&quot;http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/30/what-are-republicans-reading-an-elephants-in-the-room-summer-2017-reading-list/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article at Foreign Policy&lt;/a&gt; (archived &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170702190041/http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/30/what-are-republicans-reading-an-elephants-in-the-room-summer-2017-reading-list/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) stating the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom&lt;/em&gt;] grounds Churchill and illuminates the grim conclusions Orwell didn’t blanch at, like his dark, practical view that Spain was better off with Franco winning the civil war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote sounds like Orwell eventually concluded that Spain would be better off under Franco.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert on Orwell, but I've recently re-read &lt;em&gt;Homage to Catalonia&lt;/em&gt;, a chronicle of Orwell's experiences in the Spanish civil war and for some reason &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nationalreview.com/article/215718/non-fiction-100&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a conservative favorite&lt;/a&gt;. I've also read &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; several times, I've read a variety of his other work, and I'm currently working on Christopher Hitchens' &lt;em&gt;Why Orwell Matters&lt;/em&gt;. I've never come to the conclusion that Orwell felt Fascism would be acceptable under any circumstance. Rather, I've understood Orwell to be against totalitarianism in all its forms and to be on the side of truth and human decency. I've also understood his conclusion after his experiences fighting alongside the left in the Spanish civil war was that the Soviets were also totalitarian, but I never understood him to have come to the conclusion that the Fascists were to be preferred to the Communists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence to support the assertion that I've quoted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1806" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T06:19:54.477" Title="Did George Orwell ever feel that Spain would be better off under Franco?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2907" CreationDate="2017-07-03T01:18:03.090" Score="7" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been getting back into reading fiction recently after taking a break from books. I've been going back over old books that I used to read at my high school, and there's this one book I want to read again, but I cannot remember the name of it for the life of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can remember, it's based in Britain, and it's about a boy who I think had Asperger's and/or photographic memory. I can't remember much about the plot itself, but I specifically remember the boy's father or step-father being an antagonistic character. The book follows the boy's and the dad's perspectives, and the dad's name was Chris. I think the boy was called Dan. I seem to remember race being a topic in the story. I feel like the boy in the book was mixed race or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I wanted to read it again was that I never actually got to the end of the book. I graduated before I had a chance to finish it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help is appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1807" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T22:33:59.013" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T22:33:59.013" Title="Book set in Britain about a boy with Asperger's whose dad's name was Chris" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2017-07-03T01:21:39.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Dog_in_the_Night-Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by Mark Haddon. The protagonist is a boy named Christopher who has &quot;behavioural difficulties&quot; (Asperger's is implied but never explicitly stated). At the start of the story, he lives with his father Ed Boone in Swindon, England, but during the course of his investigations of the death of the next door neighbour's dog, he discovers that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; his father not only killed the dog, but lied to him about his mother being dead. So Christopher runs away from his father and goes to find his mother in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T01:21:39.103" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="124" CreationDate="2017-07-03T01:28:15.193" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the conclusion &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/127/17&quot;&gt;you've already posted&lt;/a&gt;: the lawyer upped the 5 years to 15 years because of &lt;strong&gt;impulsive pride&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I think it's interesting to look at this in the wider context of the story, which is really all about pride and impulsiveness set against wisdom and patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the story, both the banker and the lawyer are described as young men, foolish, who (presumably under the influence of alcohol) make a tremendous wager on the spur of the moment without realising its consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of five-and-twenty. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The banker, who was younger and more nervous in those days, was suddenly carried away by excitement; he struck the table with his fist and shouted at the young man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's not true! I'll bet you two million you wouldn't stay in solitary confinement for five years.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you mean that in earnest,&amp;quot; said the young man, &amp;quot;I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fifteen? Done!&amp;quot; cried the banker. &amp;quot;Gentlemen, I stake two million!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Agreed! You stake your millions and I stake my freedom!&amp;quot; said the young man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this wild, senseless bet was carried out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the story is told from the banker's point of view, his impulsive nervousness and excitement are described more explicitly than the lawyer's, as is his arrogant pride:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two million is a trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you won't stay longer.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the parallelism between the two men at this stage is clear. Both are described as &amp;quot;young&amp;quot;, both agree almost instantaneously to this bet of ridiculous proportions, and both are stubborn enough to believe they'll win. It makes sense that the lawyer is as much driven by pride as the banker, and this is why he ups the time from five years to fifteen. &lt;strong&gt;The banker has had his moment of showing off, by offering the two million pounds; the lawyer wants to prove that he can match the banker's bravado by making an offer of his own, more than just the suggested five years.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's later on in the story that the two characters begin to contrast with each other. The banker, interacting with other people and the world around him, changes little. His fortunes change, but his personality does not; he remains foolish and impulsive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Desperate gambling on the Stock Exchange, wild speculation and the excitability which he could not get over even in advancing years, had by degrees led to the decline of his fortune and the proud, fearless, self-confident millionaire had become a banker of middling rank, trembling at every rise and fall in his investments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when he goes to murder the other man, he lacks the gumption to be certain of his course; he uses phrases like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; I had the pluck to carry out my intention&amp;quot;. The lawyer, by contrast, has changed massively during his fifteen years of solitary confinement. Not only his appearance - he's now described as yellow and skeletal - but his personality is totally different. The wisdom he's accumulated during those fifteen years has turned him into an eternally world-weary old man, and he allows the banker to win their bet because he's proved beyond a doubt that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is the better man. The banker spends his night in tears and self-contempt; the lawyer knows enough to be satisfied with himself despite his hatred of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral of the story, then, is that &lt;strong&gt;patient wisdom triumphs over impulsive pride, and study can turn the latter into the former.&lt;/strong&gt; The two men started out similar to each other in nature, but end up very different from each other due to their different experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T18:49:25.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T02:21:34.627" Score="3" ViewCount="619" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marethyu is a central character in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secrets_of_the_Immortal_Nicholas_Flamel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. You can read more about him &lt;a href=&quot;http://secretsnicholasflamel.wikia.com/wiki/Marethyu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but that Wikia page contains major spoilers for the series, so follow that link at your own peril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marethyu is, among other things, Death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Marethyu was said to have gone by many different names prior to his&#xA;  appearances in the books - however, all of these names meant Death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is also directly involved in many occurrences throughout the books that involve his dealing death, so the appellation is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His &quot;signature piece&quot; is his hook, which replaces one of his hands. Spoilers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; That hook is constructed from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://secretsnicholasflamel.wikia.com/wiki/Four_Swords_of_Power&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Swords of Power&lt;/a&gt;: Joyeuse, Excalibur, Durendal, and Clarent. The swords are each connected to one elemental power (earth, air etc). It is also called the sword, or hook of &quot;Aether,&quot; and confers to its wielder power over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was this hook intended to parallel the Grim Reaper's scythe?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_(personification)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personification of Death&lt;/a&gt; in many cultures often wields a farm tool with a curved blade. Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/49260/41144&quot;&gt;Death of the Endless is occasionally shown with a scythe&lt;/a&gt;. I've seen many &quot;fan arts&quot; of Marethyu's hook online (as far as I could tell, none official), and most look something like Captain Hook's hook, and not much like a scythe. I don't remember any of the book's descriptions of this hook's appearance, but it has to appear as something that can fit on the end of one's arm, which obviously means that though it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a curved blade, it does not appear exactly as a scythe does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physical appearance aside, is there any indication from the books that Marethyu/Death's hook is supposed to be a scythe? A trivial Google search didn't turn up anything relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T02:26:42.287" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T14:32:11.723" Title="Is the hook of Marethyu meant to evoke a scythe?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;michael-scott&gt;&lt;secrets-immortal-nick-flamel&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2902" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-03T02:23:21.880" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T02:23:21.880" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T02:23:21.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2903" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-03T02:23:21.880" Score="0" Body="The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel (title shortened due to tag limits) is a Young Adult fantasy series by Michael Scott. Use this tag for questions about the series, and in conjunction with [michael-scott]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T06:32:00.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T06:32:00.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2904" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-03T02:25:53.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T02:25:53.403" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T02:25:53.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2905" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-03T02:25:53.403" Score="0" Body="Michael Scott (1959-) is an Irish author, who writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Scott also publishes romance under the pseudonym &quot;Anna Dillon.&quot;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T06:31:27.647" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T06:31:27.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2898" CreationDate="2017-07-03T08:04:04.897" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it doesn't seem to mention Asperger's, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edge_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Edge by Alan Gibbons&lt;/a&gt; otherwise seems a good fit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Edge is a young adult novel by Alan Gibbons, published in 2002. The novel features the young Danny Mangam as he battles his mixed race and escapes with his mother from his abusive stepfather (NB this character is called Chris Kane). It was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching 'Novel YA (for 'Young Adult') Chris Dan mixed-race'. I tried that when the same search, but with 'Asperger's' rather than 'mixed-race' came up blank. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T11:07:05.210" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T11:07:05.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T08:33:49.573" Score="4" ViewCount="3309" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help with understanding this quote and what it's trying to convey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1810" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T00:43:05.140" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T08:36:26.610" Title="What is the quote &quot;We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe&quot; trying to convey?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2896" CreationDate="2017-07-03T08:47:04.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase itself is not &quot;purple prose&quot;. In fact, it has been used before. Paul Clifford was written in 1890, and the exact same phrase was used in an 1809 essay &lt;em&gt;The History of New York&lt;/em&gt; by no lesser writer than Washington Irving. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a dark and stormy night when good Anthony arrived at the famous&#xA;  creek (sagely denominated Haerlem river) which separates the island of&#xA;  Mannahatta from the main land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The spelling oddities are in the original)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's nothing particularly good - or bad - about that paragraph. Contrast it to quote from Paul Clifford set in its full context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at&#xA;  occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind&#xA;  which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies),&#xA;  rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame&#xA;  of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is overworked and unnecessarily complex and melodramatic, the very epitome of &quot;purple prose&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time, memory of the full opening sentence has been lost and all we recall is the opening few words which have come, unfairly, to be held up as the archetypal example of &quot;purple prose&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T08:47:04.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="184" CreationDate="2017-07-03T11:45:51.337" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A Bibliography of the Works of Willy Ley&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://libguides.uah.edu/ld.php?content_id=19269349&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF link&lt;/a&gt;) was compiled by Jean M. Perreault for the Special Collections of the M. Louis Salmon Library at the University of Alabama in Huntsville after they acquired Ley's collection of books and journals upon his death in 1969 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170925230830/https://libguides.uah.edu/c.php?g=263653&amp;amp;p=1759979&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). It lists the illustrator of &lt;em&gt;Exotic Zoology&lt;/em&gt; (1959, 1st printing) as Olga Ley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is as definitive as it's reasonable to get without an edition to hand that makes the attribution itself (which is an answer I'd love to see, especially if it can say which edition!); while the claims made by Wikipedia and Goodreads concur that Olga Ley is the illustrator, they don't offer any support or citation for their claims. The UAH Library's commissioned bibliography of their own collection, on the other hand, can be considered the next best thing to an original source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T09:13:56.463" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T09:13:56.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="184" CreationDate="2017-07-03T11:54:04.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doing a bit of Googling turns up a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=xboLAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books result&lt;/a&gt;, which gives this cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UMQOp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which says 'Illustrated by Olga Ley' on the front cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears as if this version is from 1962 (at least, that's the date of the edition on the cover, as well as what Google Books says). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T15:13:47.947" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T15:13:47.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T12:14:45.187" Score="8" ViewCount="500" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Five Orange Pips&quot; opens with two rather large paragraphs. The first one describes that there are a lot of good cases. The second, however, goes into detail about one of these cases - 180 words that are almost entirely unrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The year ’87 furnished us with a long series&#xA;  of cases of greater or less interest, of which I re-&#xA;  tain the records. Among my headings under this&#xA;  one twelve months I find an account of the ad-&#xA;  venture of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur&#xA;  Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in&#xA;  the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the&#xA;  facts connected with the loss of the British barque&#xA;  “Sophy Anderson”, of the singular adventures of&#xA;  the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally&#xA;  of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as&#xA;  may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by&#xA;  winding up the dead man’s watch, to prove that&#xA;  it had been wound up two hours before, and that&#xA;  therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that&#xA;  time—a deduction which was of the greatest im-&#xA;  portance in clearing up the case. All these I may&#xA;  sketch out at some future date, but none of them&#xA;  present such singular features as the strange train&#xA;  of circumstances which I have now taken up my&#xA;  pen to describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them serve to say that this is a bizarre case that is going to be detailed in the story. But why does Watson/Doyle go into detail about the other cases in the beginning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T20:19:38.313" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T15:51:34.380" Title="Why does &quot;The Five Orange Pips&quot; devote an entire paragraph at the beginning to the case with the watch?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2913" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-03T12:21:28.963" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T12:21:28.963" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T12:21:28.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2914" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-03T12:21:28.963" Score="0" Body="René Descartes (pronounced &quot;day-kart&quot;) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, and lived 1596-1650. Descartes was one of the key figures in the scientific revolution. Use this tag for questions about his writings." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T17:54:52.617" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T17:54:52.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6960" CreationDate="2017-07-03T15:37:48.837" Score="10" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just William&lt;/em&gt; is an enduring series of stories about an errant schoolboy from a solidly upper-middle class family in Edwardian England. Due to their subject and humorous nature they are typically perceived as children's literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is quite common online to find claims that their author, Richmal Crompton, originally intended them for an adult audience. There is some circumstantial evidence for this: she also wrote a lot of adult literature and the density of language in the stories is beyond most children at William's 11-12 years of age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On investigation, I cannot find any solid evidence to support this supposition. Did Crompton intend the stories for an adult audience? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T02:21:31.677" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T09:32:09.980" Title="Were the Just William stories written for adults or children?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;just-william&gt;&lt;richmal-crompton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2243" CreationDate="2017-07-03T17:35:25.037" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vronsky has learned, earlier that day, that Anna is pregnant. It's obvious that the horse's death is tied to this revelation. The pregnancy, which forces her husband to acknowledge the affair, leads to the breakup of their marriage and further tragedy. Vronsky knows that he caused the horse's injury, and yet he will not admit the reason. His agitation must have affected his skill as a jockey, but his nature is to avoid responsibility and self-examination. The only other explanation is bad luck. Vronsky seems to lead a charmed life, but that has just changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy notes, immediately after the horse's injury, that Vronsky will remember this as the darkest moment of his life. Another person might remember it as the day he learned he'd be having a daughter, but Vronsky is selfish. To him Anna is just another conquest. He does his duty by her, as he understands it, but no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frou-Frou's death, from this vantage, is a symbol of the change in fortunes for Vronsky and Anna, not where those fortunes will lead. Anna's death has already been foreshadowed. Until this point, both characters could have gone back to their previous lives without serious repercussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the text, &quot;the horse's back was broken and she had to be killed&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/annakareninatols00tolsiala/annakareninatols00tolsiala_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nathan Dole translation, Internet Archive, page 261&lt;/a&gt;). He has gone from his initial rage to cradling her head before the medical staff arrive. It's not explicitly stated that Vronsky shoots Frou-Frou himself, which one would expect if he had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastEditorUserId="1816" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T15:57:28.973" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T15:57:28.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2894" CreationDate="2017-07-03T17:56:40.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's clarify: Holmes was taking a 7% solution of &lt;em&gt;cocaine&lt;/em&gt;, which is a stimulant. Watson is saying that Holmes would never take a &lt;em&gt;narcotic,&lt;/em&gt; which is a depressant. At the time, cocaine was not considered any harder of a drug than alcohol; it wasn't the deadly drug we see it as now. Coca-Cola actually had the coca leaf in it originally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you recast the first quote as &quot;Holmes getting steadily drunk at a pub on shots of fine whisky&quot; and the second as &quot;Holmes shooting meth,&quot; you have more of a modern equivalent. So yes, Holmes was abusing a mind-altering chemical, but Conan Doyle wasn't intending to present him as a gutter-crawling junkie. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T17:56:40.753" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:27:13.020" Score="3" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scott McCloud's &lt;em&gt;The Sculptor&lt;/em&gt; opens with the following scene, where Meg asks David to whisper her something:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxQi4.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LxQi4m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Meg: &amp;quot;Tell me now. Whisper it in my ear&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for larger image &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scene is expanded at the very end of the novel, where Meg explains David that he can choose something the world &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; remember about him - a secret that will die when Meg gets old and dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNDRg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNDRgm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Both lying in bed in their apartment. Meg: &amp;quot;Tell me a secret. Something you&amp;#39;ve never told anyone. Tell me so softly even that moth can&amp;#39;t hear. After you&amp;#39;re gone, I&amp;#39;ll carry it inside of me. I&amp;#39;ll think of it every day. But when I&amp;#39;m gone, the secret goes with me. Together, we&amp;#39;ll let it die, just you and me. Not &amp;#39;cause we&amp;#39;re helpless in the face of time, but because we&amp;#39;re giving ourselves to time with all our hearts.&amp;quot; David: &amp;quot;Okay... a bit weird, but I like it. Let&amp;#39;s do this.&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for larger image &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he whisper? At first I thought it would be &quot;I love you&quot;, because he's a romantic, but then I realised they'd already exchanged those words; another secret I can think of is the details of his deal with Death, but he'd explained those as well by that time. What else could he have said?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Scott McCloud talks about this scene briefly in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tcj.com/scott-mccloud-unpacks-and-defends-the-sculptors-ending/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; (obvious spoilers), but he doesn't reveal what David said)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T18:21:19.057" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:21:19.057" Title="What secret did David whisper to Meg at the end of &quot;The Sculptor&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;the-sculptor&gt;&lt;scott-mccloud&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2920" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2921" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Sculptor&quot;, the 2015 graphic novel by Scott McCloud. Use with the [comics] and [scott-mccloud] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T21:28:10.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2922" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2908" CreationDate="2017-07-03T22:49:08.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Descartes presents ideas like Zen koans. Thinking about the questions they raise can change the way you think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we see, what do we see? We know more about optics and neurology than Descartes did, but the puzzle remains--how does an arrangement of light beams turn into sensory perception, experience, and ideas? What makes a thing beautiful to one person and ugly to another? How much of what you've already seen influences how you interpret what you see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we tell other people what we've seen? We can show someone what we saw with a photo or a video, but we can't transfer all the associations we attach to it. Painting attempts to do so, but there is a chasm between what we see in our mind's eye and what we can express. Images, words, music, dance, they all try and fail to pull ideas out of our head and put them in another's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting aside art, how do we communicate? We agree on a lexicon, a toolbox, a set of symbols that have meaning, like the letters of an alphabet. We assemble them into words or shapes or sounds. We pretend that we have described a thought, but it is a crude semblance. Yet, that is the best we can do. It is what we must do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After learning the code, we focus on our goals. We stop thinking about how we speak. We simply speak. We hear what we expect to hear. We see what we expect to see. To trade our thoughts better with our group, we think more like our group. We can only describe what we understand, what we have the vocabulary to say, and what our audience is prepared to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-03T22:49:08.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2924" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2931" CreationDate="2017-07-04T00:26:21.820" Score="7" ViewCount="6772" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie's famous crime story &lt;em&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/em&gt; was written both as a book and later as a play by Christie herself. However, when adapting her own story for the stage, she made a significant change to the ending, namely ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: major spoilers follow!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... in the book, every single one of the ten people on the island ends up being killed, even the true mastermind behind it all; while the play has a happier ending, in which Vera Claythorne and Philip Lombard are innocent and manage to escape the island together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for the play&lt;/a&gt; (cited to Christie's autobiography, which I didn't find online) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She knew the ending would have to be changed as all of the characters die in the book and therefore &quot;I must make two of the characters innocent, to be reunited at the end and come safe out of the ordeal.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, other stage versions of the story (including one from 1944, only a year after Christie's own play) have preserved the book's dismal ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did Christie change her play's ending from the novel's?&lt;/strong&gt; Was she afraid that nobody would like a story in which all the main characters die - and if so, why did such qualms apply to the play more than to the original novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T16:24:20.030" Title="Why was the ending of &quot;And Then There Were None&quot; changed for the stage version?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;and-then-there-were-none&gt;&lt;adaptation-comparison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2341" CreationDate="2017-07-04T06:07:35.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;1) I searched for the quotation. It seems to be pretty doubtful that Churchill said it. And it's hard to see how it is meaningful at all to ask what Churchill meant by the words if he did not actually say them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) This &lt;a href=&quot;https://eganhistory.com/2012/10/30/on-doing-history-empathy-accuracy-in-the-undergraduate-classroom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; seems to take it for granted that the Churchill of this story refers to his literal writing of history, not to &quot;writing&quot; history in the sense of doing historically significant things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) It's hard to see how Churchill could have meant that simply by doing historically significant things he could be sure that he would be remembered kindly. Of course he knew of lots of people who had done historically significant things but who are remembered as monsters or fools, or who are forgotten altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) The quotation would be funny on the view that he meant to refer to literal writing. Then his confidence seems sly and in a way self-effacing, because it suggests that he is &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; confident of favorable recollection because he will write the record. If we take him to mean &quot;History will be kind to me for I'm just so awesome,&quot; the remark seems like silly boasting and not appropriate to the mythic persona of Churchill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T12:13:44.557" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T12:13:44.557" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2912" CreationDate="2017-07-04T08:53:04.190" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;From spending a little time teaching and studying parts of the Sherlock Holmes canon, I conjecture that there is a two-fold purpose at work here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doyle is beginning to establish an expansive universe in which he can situate his Sherlock Holmes stories. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doyle is enticing readers to buy future issues of &lt;em&gt;The Strand Magazine&lt;/em&gt; in which he will continue the creation of said universe. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the opening of the story is germane to my argument, so I include it here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases&#xA;  between the years '82 and '90, I am faced by so many which present&#xA;  strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know&#xA;  which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained&#xA;  publicity through the papers, and others have not offered a field for&#xA;  those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a&#xA;  degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate.&#xA;  Some, too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be, as&#xA;  narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but&#xA;  partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon&#xA;  conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was&#xA;  so dear to him. There is, however, one of these last which was so&#xA;  remarkable in its details and so startling in its results that I am&#xA;  tempted to give some account of it in spite of the fact that there are&#xA;  points in connection with it which never have been, and probably never&#xA;  will be, entirely cleared up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is masterful on Doyle's part: he is giving himself incredible freedom to take any number of footholds he would like with each new story. It is important to keep in mind that this was only the fifth Sherlock Holmes story published in &lt;em&gt;The Strand Magazine&lt;/em&gt;. Consequently, there's still plenty of world-building for Doyle to do through Watson. That opening sentence gives Doyle an 8-year span to draw from, which more importantly means that he doesn't have to obey any sort of chronology. By giving examples in the following paragraphs of some of these cases, Doyle lets himself explore ideas of cases/stories yet to be told/written. Maybe the case in question was a half-baked idea that never made it beyond a couple sentences. Regardless, it certainly furthers the characterization of Holmes of detective and of Watson as narrator. With just a couple paragraphs, Doyle gives Watson great authority as an expert on Holmes (ostensibly) and extends the limits which future stories can explore. He is writing himself into a place of greater freedom rather than constraint. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second purpose (i.e. the &quot;buy-me&quot; theory) is one that takes more of a Marxist approach (as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_literary_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marxist literary criticism&lt;/a&gt;): Doyle wants his stories to sell. In serialized format there needs to be some sort of enticement to keep coming back to the same characters. When teaching these stories, I used an analogy with my students to present-day TV: we frequently see cold opens that hook us to an episode and get teasers for future weeks at the end of an episode. Serialization in literary form uses similar techniques. I see this opening as both an enticing &quot;cold open&quot; to keep reading this particular story and a hint at things to come in future stories. &lt;strong&gt;This small example of a case as yet unexplored brings us into the world of Sherlock Holmes and creates possibilities for where it might go, leading readers to want to keep reading and keep buying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your asking this question and my answering it are enduring proof of its success. Even 120+ years later, readers still come back to these relatively mundane, unexplored details.  We care about these things, and I have to believe Doyle's original audience did as well. This to me is just one of many examples of Doyle's brilliant creation of the world of Sherlock Holmes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T08:53:04.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2928" CreationDate="2017-07-04T11:08:05.837" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Scoop&lt;/em&gt; by Evelyn Waugh. I thought I was fully comprehending the story, until the return of John Boot at the end of Book 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they had gone, Mrs. Stitch said: &quot;I must go too. Just tell me in three words what happened. The last thing I heard was from Lord Copper. He telephoned to say you had left.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Not a word from him. It's been very awkward.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The American girl?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, exactly. We said good bye a fortnight ago. She gave me a lucky pig to wear round my neck — it was made of bog-oak from Tipperary. We were both very genuinely affected. Since then I haven't dared go out or answer the telephone. I only came here because I knew she wouldn't be coming.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poor John. I wonder what went wrong... I like the bit about the pig &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; much.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What American girl? What does this have to do with the wrong Boot being sent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If I am not supposed to know at this point in the story, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; I'm &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be confused, then please only state that much visibly, and use &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/71396/188984&quot;&gt;spoiler syntax&lt;/a&gt; for any further explanation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My reading club is stopping at Book 1 this week and no one's supposed to read ahead, which is why I can't just keep reading. If the rest of my co-readers are confused as well, I'd like to have an explanation for them, so I ask here. I have tried to look for plot summaries online but see nothing focused on Book 1 except on bookrags.com, behind a paywall.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T11:30:37.390" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T11:30:37.390" Title="What happens at the end of Book 1 of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop?" Tags="&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;&lt;scoop&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2927" CreationDate="2017-07-04T11:28:08.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &amp;quot;American girl&amp;quot; is John Boot's lover, from whom he wants to escape.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole thing about John Boot wanting to get a foreign assignment to Ishmaelia started off because he wanted to get away from this &amp;quot;American girl&amp;quot;. Here's the passage where he first asks Julia Stitch for help, in the first few pages of Book 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I want to get away from London,&amp;quot; said John Boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So it's come to that? All on account of your American girl?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, mostly.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I warned you, before you began. Is she being frightful?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My lips are sealed. But I've got to get far away or else go crazy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;To my certain knowledge she's driven three men into the bin. Where are you going?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That's just what I wanted to talk about.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains why John Boot is too afraid to go out or answer the telephone. He's told his lover that he was leaving for Ishmaelia, and she thinks he's already gone; he desperately wants to keep it that way, presumably so that he can avoid her company for a time, even though it means he's stuck indoors and away from social engagements. Thus his comment that it's &amp;quot;been very awkward&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T11:28:08.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2912" CreationDate="2017-07-04T13:32:23.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watson/Doyle does this a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;. The whole Sherlock Holmes canon is peppered both with these casual references to other cases - adventures which happened &quot;off-stage&quot;, so to speak. More examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had seen little of Holmes lately. [...] From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his &lt;strong&gt;summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder&lt;/strong&gt;, of his clearing up of the &lt;strong&gt;singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee&lt;/strong&gt;, and finally of &lt;strong&gt;the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland&lt;/strong&gt;. Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;A Scandal in Bohemia&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice--that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of &lt;strong&gt;Colonel Warburton's madness&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was some time before the health of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes recovered from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of ‘87. The whole question of &lt;strong&gt;the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis&lt;/strong&gt; are too recent in the minds of the public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches. They led, however, in an indirect fashion to a singular and complex problem which gave my friend an opportunity of demonstrating the value of a fresh weapon among the many with which he waged his life-long battle against crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Reigate Puzzle&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods. I find them recorded in my notes under the headings of &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Tired Captain.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; The first of these, however, deals with interest of such importance and implicates so many of the first families in the kingdom that for many years it will be impossible to make it public. No case, however, in which Holmes was engaged has ever illustrated the value of his analytical methods so clearly or has impressed those who were associated with him so deeply. I still retain an almost verbatim report of the interview in which he demonstrated the true facts of the case to Monsieur Dubugue of the Paris police, and Fritz von Waldbaum, the well-known specialist of Dantzig, both of whom had wasted their energies upon what proved to be side-issues. The new century will have come, however, before the story can be safely told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Naval Treaty&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our months of partnership had not been so uneventful as he had stated, for I find, on looking over my notes, that this period includes &lt;strong&gt;the case of the papers of Ex-President Murillo&lt;/strong&gt;, and also &lt;strong&gt;the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship &lt;em&gt;Friesland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which so nearly cost us both our lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Norwood Builder&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My colleague, Dr. Watson, could tell you that we are very busy at present. I am retained in this &lt;strong&gt;case of the Ferrers Documents&lt;/strong&gt;, and the &lt;strong&gt;Abergavenny murder&lt;/strong&gt; is coming up for trial. Only a very important issue could call me from London at present.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Priory School&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this memorable year '95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his &lt;strong&gt;famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca&lt;/strong&gt; -- an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope -- down to his arrest of &lt;strong&gt;Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer&lt;/strong&gt;, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of Black Peter&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon &lt;strong&gt;the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker&lt;/strong&gt;. Here also I find an account of &lt;strong&gt;the Addleton tragedy&lt;/strong&gt;, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The &lt;strong&gt;famous Smith-Mortimer succession case&lt;/strong&gt; comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of &lt;strong&gt;Huret, the Boulevard assassin&lt;/strong&gt; — an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all emphasis mine in the above quotes)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked through only half of the Sherlock Holmes stories to gather these quotes, and only glanced at the first few paragraphs of each one, but that was enough (together with the quote from your question) to find references to &lt;em&gt;twenty-two&lt;/em&gt; &quot;off-stage&quot; adventures, only &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1860/17&quot;&gt;one of which&lt;/a&gt; is actually related in a later story. There are others mentioned in passing deep within the text of the story, e.g. the off-hand reference to the &lt;strong&gt;Conk-Singleton forgery case&lt;/strong&gt; at the very end of &quot;The Adventure of the Six Napoleons&quot;. There are also passages which simply reflect on the vast number of Holmes cases without mentioning or alluding to any of them in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Speckled Band&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man. It is safe to say that there was no public case of any difficulty in which he was not consulted during those eight years, and there were hundreds of private cases, some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character, in which he played a prominent part. Many startling successes and a few unavoidable failures were the outcome of this long period of continuous work. As I have preserved very full notes of all these cases, and was myself personally engaged in many of them, it may be imagined that it is no easy task to know which I should select to lay before the public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &quot;The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of all this is &lt;strong&gt;to make the reader hungry for more, and to leave the door open for Doyle to write as many stories as he wants to.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By making clear how many hundreds of cases Holmes is involved in, Doyle is allowing himself to write as many stories as he wants without ever exceeding the quantitative limitations of his character. Making references to specific untold adventures is a way of cementing this fact in readers' heads: saying there are hundreds is one thing, but saying &quot;there are hundreds, such as &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt;&quot; makes it all sound more plausible, and gives readers something concrete to remember, more than just a number, to support the idea that he has many off-stage adventures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another purpose of the name-drops is to pique the reader's interest and curiosity. By making us feel as though we're being drop-fed little bits and pieces of a much larger collection of stories, Doyle is exciting and frustrating our desire for more. Even once the entire Sherlock Holmes canon (only 60 stories) is complete, we still &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that there are more Holmes tales we haven't seen, some of which sound tantalisingly interesting. A Dutch steamship which nearly cost both Holmes and Watson their lives? A wound watch which was crucial in the solving of a case? A mad colonel, a tired captain, a canary-trainer? What's the story behind all these, and why can't we read them?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enduring fascination of these occasional name-drops is shown in the amount of non-canonical Holmes stories they've inspired by other writers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Further_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes#The_Madness_of_Colonel_Warburton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colonel Warburton's madness&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archiveofourown.org/works/1671644&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Tired Captain&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://221beanbakerstreet.info/Trepoff.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Trepoff murder&lt;/a&gt;, and probably most if not all of the others have inspired their own works of Holmes fan-fiction by non-Doylian authors. Explicitly giving your readers' imaginations some open possibilities to work with (fanfic being a way for these imaginations to express themselves, even if not one Doyle foresaw or encouraged) is a great way of keeping an engaged fanbase for your stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T16:58:46.993" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T16:58:46.993" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-04T13:35:52.137" Score="10" ViewCount="651" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I was reading a 5th grader's comprehension book. It had multiple excerpts from good (if not well-known) novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of them particularly stood out to me. It was about a woman who lived in the Victorian era. When she was a young girl, Victoria was crowned. On her coronation day, the protagonist and her sister couldn't handle the huge crowd and so started walking down a less busy road. There they see a sickly boy of their age lying on the ground. He tells them that he'd escaped from the factory he worked in. The master used to beat underage workers and kept them in alarmingly unsuitable conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her older sister is considerably disgusted by him and tells her to leave him as is. Not listening to her, she helps him stand up and is kind to him. He begs them to let him escape so that he can live a better life. And he implores her not to say which way he went if the master came searching for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon the dreaded master comes and gets hold of the boy. He is rough and tells the girls that this is the way of life for the poor — harsh. He himself worked in factories as a boy and believes the poor have no way but to work hard. In the meantime, the boy slips off his grip and manages to flee. The master gives up then and heads back to the factory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many years later, she reminisces about that day as she attends Queen Victoria's funeral. She has become old and can't push her way through the crowd. A gentleman helps her pass the crowd and when she turns to thank him, she smiles and sees that exact same scar the boy had on the man's face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this simply a short story or part of a novel? Which book is it taken from then?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="401" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T09:25:32.157" LastActivityDate="2018-07-22T09:25:32.157" Title="A story in which a young girl saves a poor boy from a factory owner and meets that boy decades later" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2924" CreationDate="2017-07-04T14:00:28.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;And Then There Were None was originally published in 1939 at the outbreak of World War 2. The author adapted for the stage in 1943 when the war was at its apex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/and-then-there-were-none-bbcs-new-agatha-christie-adaptation-would-make-the-queen-of-crime-proud-a6780521.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Hilary Strong&lt;/a&gt;, CEO of &quot;Agatha Christie Ltd&quot; who manage the rights to the author's work, theatre producers at the time felt that in an atmosphere of such bleakness, there was no appetite for a play with such a bleak ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The play was written just after the war and the theatre came back to&#xA;  her and said we can’t cope with the ending,” says Strong. “People had&#xA;  just had enough of brutality.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that she appears to have based the new ending on the fact that the rhyme which inspires the play has two alternative versions. The original uses the ending:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He went and hanged himself and then there were none.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the stage version is based on the concluding line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He got married and then there were none.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned by the author in her autobiography. Here, she gives another reason for the change of ending (emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought to myself it would be exciting to see if I could make it&#xA;  into a play. At first sight that seemed impossible, &lt;strong&gt;because no one&#xA;  would be left to tell the tale&lt;/strong&gt;, so I would have to alter it to a&#xA;  certain extent. It seemed to me that I could make a perfectly good&#xA;  play of it by one modification of the original story. I must make two&#xA;  of the characters innocent, to be reunited at the end and come safe&#xA;  out of the ordeal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that she was concerned that the &quot;real life&quot; sense of watching people on a stage would feel different to the omniscient, third-person narration of a novel and that audiences would demand a believable scenario for recounting the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T16:24:20.030" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T16:24:20.030" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-04T19:25:17.280" Score="5" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur Conan Doyle was a believer in the supernatural. My source here is from the Muse magazine, published by Cricket Media, in the October 2011 issue, page 6, by Doug Stewart. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the English celebrities who came to see the mystifying American perform that year [1920] was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the mystery writer. Conan Doyle was as famous around the world as Houdini was, thanks to his wildly popular detective stories starring crime solver Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur's admirers may have assumed that he, like the brainy sleuth he had created, was committed to keen observation, hard evidence, and logical reasoning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If so, they were wrong. Conan Doyle believed in fairies, ghosts, haunted houses, and messages from beyond the grave. He rushed backstage after one of Houdini's performances, and the pair talked well into the night. Sir Arthur believed that certain people, called mediums, had supernatural abilities. He was convinced that Houdini was one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But did this belief in the supernatural influence his writings at all? Do we see any evidence of this in the Sherlock Holmes stories, or any of his other fiction works? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T19:31:51.480" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T19:00:41.753" Title="Did Conan Doyle's belief in the supernatural influence his fiction writings in any way?" Tags="&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2934" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2935" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" Score="0" Body="To be used for the questions about &quot;Djinn&quot;, the comic series written by Jean Dufaux, and illustrated by Ana Miralles. Use with the [comics] tag, and appropriate author tags.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" LastActivityDate="2017-07-04T19:40:38.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2938" CreationDate="2017-07-05T06:41:24.413" Score="11" ViewCount="1127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;, when Lady Bracknell asks Jack about his politics, he answers &amp;quot;Liberal Unionist&amp;quot;. Here's the exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell: What are your politics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LB: Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ch/books?id=d-_wAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&amp;amp;lpg=PA1&amp;amp;dq=%22Or%20come%20in%20the%20evening,%20at%20any%20rate.%22%20-minor&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=bKaawalB6L&amp;amp;sig=ReIKHXKggPNE1w31Nk9RVsHM76o&amp;amp;hl=fr&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjx5oytvPHUAhUJXhoKHd7pAmoQ6AEIQTAH#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Or%20come%20in%20the%20evening%2C%20at%20any%20rate.%22%20-minor&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; first paragraph) that the Liberal Unionists were allied with the Tories (hence &amp;quot;they dine with us&amp;quot;), but what does she mean by &amp;quot;or come in the evening&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1828" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T12:58:23.367" Title="In &quot;The Importance of Being Earnest&quot;, what does 'Or they come in the evening, at any rate' mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2937" CreationDate="2017-07-05T07:33:02.300" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a reference to the English class system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell, a stickler for propriety, is suggesting that the Liberals are lower class than herself.  The lower classes don't &lt;em&gt;dine&lt;/em&gt; in the evening, they merely eat a meal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dinner&lt;/em&gt; was as much an institution as a simple meal.  One dresses for dinner, is summoned by one's butler and is served by one's footmen.  She would regard the Liberal Unionists as of a class such as mere &lt;em&gt;trade&lt;/em&gt; who don't bother with such things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the Liberal Unionists don't &lt;em&gt;dine&lt;/em&gt; - don't follow the process of &lt;em&gt;dinner&lt;/em&gt; -&#xA; but they do visit around dinner time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell is a snob, there are many instances of her snobbery in the play.  Also, the works of Oscar Wilde, an Irishman, contain several jibes at the English class system as he saw it at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T07:50:44.170" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T07:50:44.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2887" CreationDate="2017-07-05T07:45:38.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;matters&quot; being referred to here are not just about robbery, but earlier text as well. Reread the lines directly proceeding your quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Blanche, the white cat who lives opposite and whom I much admire, tells me whenever I see her that there is no living creature quite so heartless as a human. The other day, she gave birth to four beautiful kittens. But three days later, the shosei of her house removed all four and tossed them away into the backyard pond. Miss Blanche, having given through her tears a complete account of this event, as**sured me that, to maintain our own parental love and to enjoy our beautiful family life, we, the cat-race, must engage in total war upon all humans. We have no choice but to exterminate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the narrator is referring to &quot;total war upon humans,&quot; with the interpretation being that, in general, living as a cat with a schoolteacher is not as bad as living as a cat with a military man (who we just saw throws away babies) or a lawyer, who may be more strict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T07:45:38.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T15:30:59.040" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Listen Nations&quot; is one of the songs on the album &lt;a href=&quot;https://mostlymusic.com/products/miami-meets-toronto-cd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miami Meets Toronto&lt;/a&gt;, in which the Miami Boys Choir and the Toronto Boys Choir (both started by Yerachmiel Begun) sing together. The song is about the suffering of people, and the nations of the world not caring. The chorus is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when I saw it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The thought I could not bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My fellow people dying&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their cries no one did hear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So listen nations&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the voices of those so dear &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I added the lyrics to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Yerachmiel-Begun-The-Miami-Boys-Choir/Listen-Nations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;musixmatch.com&lt;/a&gt;, so you can view the lyrics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this song referring to anything in particular? I.e., the Holocaust (it's Jewish music, BTW). If so, is there anything in the text that shows this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T14:10:28.627" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T14:10:28.627" Title="Is &quot;Listen Nations&quot; referring to any incident in particular?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;yerachmiel-begun&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1936" CreationDate="2017-07-05T18:01:14.893" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Funerals are for the living. Deathbed promises, on the other hand, are for the dying. The story (as you note) is autobiographical, so this issue must have weighed heavily on Poe. His wife was sick, but far from dead, when he wrote this story. The loss of his mother at an early age could also have influenced his predilection for doomed ladies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator claims to be insane. This is Romantic shorthand for &quot;I'm different from everyone else, nobody understands me, I experience things intensely.&quot; Poe takes it a step further because his narrators really are insane, thanks to some horrible experience. He mirrors it by claiming he was sane before but no longer is, while presenting the &quot;sane&quot; part as a dream world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When his beloved dies, the narrator's outward world changes to reflect his inward world. This is more mirroring, another Romantic trope (&quot;It was a dark and story night&quot;), having the environment respond to the character rather than vice versa. This is when he claims to go insane. He hears murmuring in the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator leaves the valley. This is a sort of rebirth, because mirroring. He may have broken his vow by leaving, and he certainly signals his intention to break it. This he now does. It's worth asking, though, if the vow still binds him, and if not, when it stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator meets and marries another woman. In a horror story, the dead Eleonora would appear and wreak vengeance (a story Poe would eventually write). For now, a disembodied murmuring offers forgiveness and, once he's in heaven, an explanation. The voice mentions Eleonora in the third person and uses a &quot;familiar and sweet voice,&quot; which could be the wind's. Of course, he's crazy, so you can't be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to know what Poe meant to say. There is no way to know what Eleonora herself would have said about the narrator's new love. The only thing you can truly know is how grief and redemption affect you. The real insanity would be to let grief ruin the rest of your life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:01:14.893" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="785" CreationDate="2017-07-05T18:16:44.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full text on Amazon makes it clear that this is a Hollow Earth book. According to the myth (and that's all it is), there are holes in the Earth at both poles. They provide passage to another world inside our planet, which is hollow. Once inside, you can get out again through either hole, which explains the confusion. Byrd was definitely in Antarctica in February 1947, so it's the only way he could get to the Arctic with nobody noticing. That's an awful long way to go on one tank of gas, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:16:44.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2567" CreationDate="2017-07-05T18:38:06.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oblonsky is presented as a person who is everybody's friend. He's not an especially good person, though. He cheats on his wife. He makes a poor deal selling his land. He's not particularly good at his job. The reason he survives is because everyone likes him, but he's not sharp enough (or ruthless enough) to use this likability to his advantage. You probably know someone like him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin, on the other hand, doesn't have many friends. He prefers his farm to the city. He tends to focus on his own affairs, meaning he takes little interest in the affairs of others. He doesn't like small talk. Oblonsky is happy to talk to him, where few others will tolerate him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Levin has few friends, while Oblonsky has many. The relationship is asymmetric, but it works because Levin has no one else to turn to. Oblonsky could be smarter, more sober, or better at business, but as long as he's friendly, Levin will be his friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:38:06.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2945" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-05T18:43:47.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T18:43:47.630" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T18:43:47.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2946" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-05T18:43:47.630" Score="0" Body="Yerachmiel Begun is an American Jewish musician, and the founder of the Miami Boys Choir. Use this tag for questions about his songs, and in conjunction with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-05T20:09:48.747" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:09:48.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="718" CreationDate="2017-07-05T19:20:01.837" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nchistoricsites.org/wolfe/bio.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolfe's birthplace&lt;/a&gt;, he kept a journal during long trips (Europe in 1924 and the Western US in 1938, his last work). The same page claims, &quot;He once said the reason he wrote a book was to forget it.&quot; Wolfe is widely quoted as saying, “The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he kept a journal only during certain periods, we can infer that he did not keep a journal during the other periods. If he wrote to forget, he certainly wouldn't want to keep a diary as a reminder. From what I know of his writing habits, he wouldn't have time for a diary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no way to prove he didn't keep a diary, but I believe these are good reasons to think so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T19:20:01.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2948" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-05T19:28:07.353" Score="10" ViewCount="1729" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; calls the novel of ideas a subgenre of philosophical fiction, without defining the first term. The &lt;em&gt;Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory&lt;/em&gt; (2010) uses the terms &quot;novel of ideas&quot; and &quot;philosophical novel&quot; interchangeably.  In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/books/review/whatever-happened-to-the-novel-of-ideas.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; published together in the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; in 2016 under the headline &quot;Whatever Happened to the Novel of Ideas?&quot;, Benjamin Moser also uses the terms to mean the same thing, and Pankaj Mishra, while eschewing the word &quot;philosophy&quot;, draws no distinction between them. Writing in the &lt;em&gt;Financial Times&lt;/em&gt; in 2012, Jenny Erdal &lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Qm3xMUk5gc0J:https://www.ft.com/content/1cc50e4c-7d81-11e1-81a5-00144feab49a%3Fmhq5j%3De2+&amp;amp;cd=2&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=fr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;describes&lt;/a&gt; the two forms as &quot;close cousin(s)&quot;, but she does not explain the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There does, however, seem to be general agreement that the novel of ideas is quite rare nowadays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since not all ideas are philosophical, I do not favour a definition of the novel of ideas as a type of philosophical novel, it seeming that if one is a subtype of the other then the relationship should be the converse. But in that case, what definitions might we use? And if neither wholly includes the other, and therefore each has instances that are not instances of the other, how might we define the two genres as &quot;close cousins&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google's Ngram viewer returns the following for the use of the two terms over time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XzcNd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XzcNd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;philosophical novel and novel of ideas&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have looked briefly at a number of other sources, including encyclopedias. While several define the two terms as equivalent, several others do not. But I have so far found only one source that offers clearly contrasting definitions, namely Leszek Kolek's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.inibi.uph.edu.pl/images/inne/publikacje_ka/Kolek_PhD.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1975 PhD thesis&lt;/a&gt;. The author defines one of his aims as being to provide &quot;a definition and description of the genre called 'novel of ideas' on the basis of (Aldous) Huxley’s fiction&quot;. Achieving his aim, he describes its distinctive features as being found in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;its “material”: that is, explicit ideas appearing in the fictional reality;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a reduced semantic significance of character and plot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a semantic and structural balance between explicit and implicit modes of presentation,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where an explicit idea is &quot;an abstract, syncretic and explicit statement analysed in essayistic utterances of the characters, the narrator’s comments, and in various forms of quotations&quot; (p.106).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to say that the novel of ideas differs from the philosophical novel &quot;owing to the syncretic character of explicit ideas&quot; and its &quot;lack of a 'thesis'&quot;, the implication being that a philosophical novel shares the above three features except that its explicit ideas are non-syncretic and it contains a thesis. (It could also be that he means to suggest that the expression of ideas in a philosophical novel is achieved using means that have a greater proportion of the implicit rather than the explicit, but he does not say so explicitly.) Kolek qualifies the distinction, however, by acknowledging that &quot;we&quot; lack a precise definition of the philosophical novel (p.107). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How far this gets us, I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1745" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:14:57.910" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:14:57.910" Title="What is the difference between a philosophical novel and a novel of ideas?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2843" CreationDate="2017-07-05T20:48:51.330" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the surface, Owl Eyes is a perceptive character. He sees things that others miss. In reality, though, he's more easily fooled than anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The large glasses, of course, tie him to the Eckleburg billboard. There's a continuous contrast between surface and reality in the book, with the nagging question of how to tell the difference. Bigger glasses? Eckleburg's are the biggest, and they don't see what's going on right in front of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We first meet &quot;Owl Eyes&quot; in Gatsby's library. His real name is never given, but he may represent Ring Lardner. He's looking at volume one of &lt;em&gt;Stoddard's Lectures&lt;/em&gt;, one of those books nobody reads but claims they have. He notices it's a book, not a prop, but the pages haven't been cut. (In those days printers saved time by folding up large sheets and binding those together, which left the edges of the book a series of folds rather than pages. To read, then, you needed a paper knife to cut through these folds.) Gatsby has never read the book, and if he hasn't read volume one, he hasn't read any. The book is real, the house is real, but Gatsby is not. Owl Eyes sees that the book is a book, but that's all. He sees the surface but not the reality. &quot;You can't judge a book by its cover&quot; is inverted--he sees inside the book but not inside its owner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We next meet Owl Eyes in the driveway after he's crashed his car. He cheerfully admits he doesn't know how to drive. However, he's managed to block everyone else from leaving, and he has no clue about how to fix the situation. Again, he sees the surface (he knows how to drive) but not the reality (he can't deal with the consequences of a crash).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, he shows up at Gatsby's funeral. The only person who feels that much sympathy, besides Nick, is the person who can't see. Gatsby is a cardboard cutout. Owl Eyes has come to his parties and believes the facade is real, but Gatsby died because he wasn't the person he appeared to be. He wasn't a person at all, just a void he hoped Daisy would fill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-05T20:48:51.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2319" CreationDate="2017-07-06T02:48:02.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no way to make a direct link between Portia's preparations and Bassanio's eventual choice. It's more instructive, I'd say, to consider the song's effect on the audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see, as early as Portia's first appearance (act 1, scene 2), that she's attracted to Bassanio. &quot;I remember him well,&quot; she responds when Nerissa mentions him. She has just trashed a long, diverse series of suitors, so he made an impression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see one suitor choose the gold casket and another the silver. Both are sent home. There are only three caskets, so we know the third, leaden casket is the correct choice. Portia knows too, and we know she wants Bassanio to make the right choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portia asks for music while Bassanio makes his decision. Imagine yourself in the Globe Theater, watching this scene. You're rooting for him, you're thinking, &quot;Lead! Lead! It's the lead one!&quot; You hear the song. &quot;Bred... Head... Shed... Lead! Come on! You've got this!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Shakespeare is going to wring every possible drop of drama from this situation. Bassanio reasons his way to the right answer, taking his time. The audience as well as Portia hang on every word. She's a fictional character, but members of the audience are real. They will remember that moment. They will come back for more. Four centuries later, we're still coming back for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T02:48:02.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2017-07-06T04:49:13.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My go-to source for authority on a matter like this is J.A. Cuddon's &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Here is the definition there for &quot;novel of ideas&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A vague category of fiction in which conversation, intellectual&#xA;  discussion and debate predominate, and in which plot, narrative,&#xA;  emotional conflict and psychological depth in characterization are&#xA;  deliberately limited. Such a form of novel is perhaps best exemplified&#xA;  by Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1921), Point Counter Point (1928) and&#xA;  After Many a Summer (1939).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it amusing that it is immediately described as a &quot;vague category,&quot; hence the need for this question. In my brief research I kept coming back to Huxley, which might also explain the n-gram results and which supports some of what you found in your research. I can't think of much else that fits this definition. I once checked out (but never actually read) a book by Owen Barfield, a lesser-known Inkling, called &lt;em&gt;Worlds Apart&lt;/em&gt; that probably is also a novel of ideas. Nothing else comes to mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with these terms arises when &quot;novel &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; ideas&quot; comes to mean &quot;novel &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; ideas&quot; and thus anything philosophical in literature, which includes &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of famous literature, comes to mean the latter. Case in point, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/list/show/91894.Novels_of_ideas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list on Good Reads&lt;/a&gt; of novels of ideas starts with &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, a novel that does anything but fit Cuddon's definition. This maybe hits at the crux of the problem: &lt;strong&gt;the textbook definition does not align with the popular usage of the term.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sum, the pedantic literary critic (which I have no shame in admitting to being) sees &quot;novel of ideas&quot; as a classification with limited scope and few examples. The general public, it would seem, conflates &quot;philosophical novel,&quot; an incredibly broad category, with &quot;novel of ideas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T05:02:17.280" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T05:02:17.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2952" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T11:29:21.567" Score="2" ViewCount="1578" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTjw96-Z700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this version&lt;/a&gt;, by the Maccabeats, of the classic song &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; stuck in my head for a while.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(because @Shokhet linked me to it.... -_-)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version, by Jew in the City and the Maccabeats, makes a point about cellphones (via the music video). Such as at 1:39:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZcINam.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZcINam.png&quot; alt=&quot;Video still with SMS overlay&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and 0:52:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FyqRsm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FyqRsm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Video still with SMS overlay&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zLfCnGVeL4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original version&lt;/a&gt; by Simon and Garfunkel, was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; about cellphones - the cell phone was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invented in 1973&lt;/a&gt;, and &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; was recorded in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Silence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1963/1964&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - what was the original message of the song? What caused &lt;em&gt;the sound of silence&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T13:52:52.820" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:52:52.820" Title="What was the original &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; about?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;simon-and-garfunkel&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2017-07-06T12:15:23.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the song states or implies an ultimate cause. But the proximate cause is made explicit enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People talking without speaking,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  People hearing without listening&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What we've got here is failure to communicate.&quot; &lt;em&gt;The Sound of Silence&lt;/em&gt; is about a culture in which people don't really connect with one another. They may make flappy noises with their lips, those noises may impinge on others' eardrums, but not much beyond that is happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think the song specifies (or tries to) anything more about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; that state of affairs came to be. It's easy enough to spin plausible theories (it's all the fault of commercialism, represented here by the Neon God of advertising! it's all because of passive entertainment-consumption, represented here by the Neon God of technology and television! or even, less plausibly: it's all the fault of abandoning traditional cultural and social structures, which is why the only prophets are the ones writing slogans on subway walls!) but there's no particular reason to think S&amp;amp;G had &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; specific aetiology in mind, still less any way of picking out which one if they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1376/35&quot;&gt;this answer to another SoS question&lt;/a&gt; which quotes both Simon and Garfunkel on the topic and I think bears out what I said above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T12:15:23.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2954" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2955" CreationDate="2017-07-06T14:26:08.103" Score="3" ViewCount="5638" Body="&lt;p&gt;I narrowed my search to two Newton: Joseph Fort Newton and Isaac Newton. I think the first one did it. I see four solutions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joseph Fort Newton wrote it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isaac Newton wrote it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both wrote it (maybe one was inspired by the other).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;None of those two wrote it (and internet failed me)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any source to find the author of the original quote? A book for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1838" LastEditorUserId="1838" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T08:10:19.510" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T15:43:57.967" Title="Who is the author of the quote: &quot;We build too many walls and not enough bridges&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2954" CreationDate="2017-07-06T14:50:34.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;TL;DR: Joseph Fort Newton.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like Joseph Fort Newton. I've looked through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Isaac_Newton#.22We_build_too_many_walls....22_Source.3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion on Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;, which is the basis for my research here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Pire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dominique Pire&lt;/a&gt;, upon &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1958/pire-lecture.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;receiving the Nobel Prize&lt;/a&gt;, sourced it to 'Newton'. Just Newton. After that, it appears to be attributed to &lt;em&gt;Isaac Newton&lt;/em&gt;, who is what most people think of when they hear 'Newton' (actually, more people might think of Fig Newtons, but not in the context of people (but who knows, people are weird)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20120801021715/http://www.books.fr/blog/newton-hors-les-murs-955/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; (in French, used Google Translate) claims that's it's Joseph Fort, but don't provide a source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This however is itself a paraphrasing of the actual writing, to wit. JF's 1948 book &amp;quot;Adventures of Faith&amp;quot; pp 51-52 (((Why are so many people shy, lonely, shut up within themselves, unequal to their tasks, unable to be happy? Because they are inhabited by fear, like the man in the Parable of the Talents, erecting walls around themselves instead of building bridges into the lives of others; shutting out life.&amp;quot;)))&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-Wikimedia discussion&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, this appears to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B000RRMMES&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then searched for it on Google Books, and found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=XMRZAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;dq=The+One+Great+Church%3A+Adventures+of+Faith&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=walls&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copy with snippet view&lt;/a&gt; and performed a search for 'walls'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I found it on page 52:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wiAPc.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wiAPc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Text of above quote with 'walls' highlighted&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's actually a &lt;em&gt;misquote&lt;/em&gt;. It's a paraphrase of the original quote that became popular and mis-attributed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:56:06.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="209" CreationDate="2017-07-06T17:47:59.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Salinger's daughter said in her book, Dreamcatcher, that the scene where the nuns ask Holden if he is Catholic or not, is a thinly veiled reproduction of J.D. Salinger's Jewish heritage. He did not like inquiries--of any kind, as he was reclusive--into what religion he was, regardless of acceptance or anti-Semitism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more similarity: it's no coincidence Holden hates the movies, as he references his brother D.B. as &quot;prostituting himself out there in Hollywood.&quot; According to Margaret Salinger, her father was so incensed by Hollywood's treatment of his story &quot;Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut&quot; that he has refused to sell the movie rights to any of his stories to Hollywood.  It is reported that his last will and testament has a stipulation blocking any Hollywood adaptations of his works after his death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According the IMDb the movie, Foolish at Heart, on which his story was based, was nominated for two Oscars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1811" LastEditorUserId="1811" LastEditDate="2017-07-06T21:28:49.107" LastActivityDate="2017-07-06T21:28:49.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-06T23:58:42.577" Score="11" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt; (full text of this and preceding chapters available &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Cat/Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), the cat makes reference to a particular &quot;western novel&quot; in order to draw an analogy with his master:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, and who were the women?” enviously my master asks. At first glance my master usually looks cold and hard; but, to tell the truth, he is by no means indifferent to women. &lt;strong&gt;He once read in a Western novel of a man who invariably fell partially in love with practically every woman that he met. Another character in the book somewhat sarcastically observed that, as a rough calculation, that fellow fell in love with just under seven-tenths of the women he passed in the street.&lt;/strong&gt; On reading this, my master was struck by its essential truth and remained deeply impressed. Why should a man so impressionable lead such an oysterish existence? A mere cat such as I cannot possibly understand it. Some say it is the result of a love affair that went wrong; some say it is due to his weak stomach; while others simply state that it’s because he lacks both money and audacity. Whatever the truth, it doesn’t much matter since he’s a person of insufficient importance to affect the history of his period. What is certain is that he did enquire enviously about Coldmoon’s female fiddlers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a real &quot;Western novel&quot; being referred to here, and if so, what is it?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm always curious about little intertextual references like this, and it'd be a shame if it turned out to be an idea the author had made up out of whole cloth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T19:00:35.133" Title="Does this passage in &quot;I Am a Cat&quot; reference a real Western novel?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2959" CreationDate="2017-07-07T07:21:56.917" Score="7" ViewCount="691" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-E81QKkid4o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mabel Grey, by Brown Bird&lt;/a&gt; contains peculiar lyrics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics are awfully specific about what happened to this ship, which is a common pattern I see when a song is referent to a real-life event. It's reminiscent of Barrett's Privateers, in that it appears like it could be referring to a specific event, and is written in the form of a historical allusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, while Barrett's Privateers is fictional, it contains the details needed to tell a full story. Mabel Grey here seems to be a snapshot of some existing story - its descriptions are both cursory and rather specific, leaving a great number of holes for the listener to either fill in, or, alternately, understand within a pre-existing context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leads me to wonder if the Mabel Grey was a real ship and person. There certainly have been both ships and people named &quot;Mabel Grey&quot; (or, Gray). Notably, two schooners that wrecked have borne the name: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FqKACQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA56&amp;amp;lpg=PA56&amp;amp;dq=mabel+gray+schooner+sunk&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=UKTGFmZomQ&amp;amp;sig=H3aamc91-ET02pTLCYsn5S-2hpU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi4x5Tx0PbUAhVjImMKHXoyDi0Q6AEIJDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=mabel%20gray%20schooner%20sunk&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one sunk on March 11, 1904, off the coast of California&lt;/a&gt;, and the other &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shipindex.org/ships/mabel_gray&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has an entry on ShipIndex, but doesn't seem to have any other public information&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are my best guesses as to where I would start. But I really have no clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this song referring to a real event? If not, is it new fabrication, or does it refer to something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T10:43:46.227" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T10:43:46.227" Title="Is the song &quot;Mabel Grey&quot; by Brown Bird an allusion to a real ship?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2958" CreationDate="2017-07-07T08:06:17.230" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to an interview (&lt;a href=&quot;https://heartstringsmag.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/all-the-right-reasons-an-interview-with-joe-fletcher/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) with surviving band member Joe Fletcher, &quot;Mabel Grey&quot; is in reference to a real ship of the same name, but was written by the late David Lamb and details about the inspiring shipwreck are unknown by anyone except possibly Lamb's wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is David Lamb the original writer of that song?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is. He actually co-wrote it with another friend of mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you know the background of that song?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I do know it was an actual ship. From what I’ve read about the ship, it does not sound as though the song was written about that particular story. It was a shipwreck. It was kind of a well-documented shipwreck. I haven’t read anything about it in a long time. [...] I wish now that I would have asked him more about the song. [...] I never really inquired any more deeply, but he had a great imagination. He was very interested in sea stories, just like I am and he worked in a shipyard until he stopped working fully to concentrate on the band. I have a feeling, if I had to guess... I could ask MorganEve about it, she would probably know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Fletcher says the shipwreck was well-documented, I'd guess it's the 1904 California wreck you link in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also speculation (&lt;a href=&quot;https://themetdet.com/at-table-chef-james-rigato/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) that the song references a real woman, Diana of the Dunes (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_of_the_Dunes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;) AKA Alice Mabel Grey, but that looks like somebody just Googled the name and made assumptions; I can't find any connection to Alice Mabel Grey in the text of the song--the closest is folklore that Diana of the Dunes appears to sailors before a storm (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=f8UyahyLt20C&amp;amp;pg=PA103&amp;amp;lpg=PA103&amp;amp;dq=alice+mabel+grey+AND+malta&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=1tP9kZAfBi&amp;amp;sig=oN4h2UCUVTjvRIlx8WzxDt3ks3c&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjNwo_Q2fbUAhUBwGMKHdpfCEUQ6AEIOjAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=alice%20mabel%20grey%20AND%20malta&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T08:15:02.083" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T08:15:02.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2948" CreationDate="2017-07-07T09:58:43.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as Leszek Kolek's 1975 work, I have now found a second text that offers contrasting definitions of the two terms: Timothy Bewes's &quot;What is 'Philosophical Honesty' in Postmodern Literature?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;New Literary History&lt;/em&gt;, vol.31, no.3, 2000, pp. 421-434). Bewes's article is referred to in David Cunningham's entry on &quot;Philosophical Novel&quot; in the &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia of the Novel&lt;/em&gt; (2011), published by Wiley Blackwell. Unlike every other author I have consulted, Bewes states that the novel of ideas is &quot;one of the most prevalent of contemporary literary forms&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bewes defines the philosophical novel (PN), in contradistinction to the novel of ideas (NOI), as having no authorial predetermination, instead comprising a meditation. The author of a PN, he says, seeks to meet the reader halfway, refusing to play to the gallery and appeal to the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly ignoring the fact that the term NOI was used a long time before the coinage of &quot;postmodern&quot;, he then says that the NOI is &quot;a characteristic of postmodernity&quot;: whereas the PN is &quot;modern&quot;, the NOI is &quot;postmodern&quot;. In his view, the NOI manifests on a wide scale as the only form in which &quot;philosophical honesty&quot; can appear in &quot;postmodern literature&quot; when &quot;'market-led' dishonesty&quot; has become a &quot;&lt;em&gt;structural&lt;/em&gt; feature of the cultural and philosophical landscape&quot;. In short, he views the NOI as a vehicle for telling the reader the ideas that he wants to hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not at all in tune with Bewes's viewpoint, but I thought it was worth referring to here because he is one of very few authors to offer contrasting definitions of the PN and NOI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1745" LastEditorUserId="1745" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T14:49:50.273" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T14:49:50.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2961" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T11:11:26.227" Score="12" ViewCount="361" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I asked a more verbose version of this question on Sci Fi &amp;amp; Fantasy where it didn't go down well. It seemed to get bogged down in whether or not the Potterverse really is &quot;inconsistent&quot;. But I feel it's an interesting topic which might go down better here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Harry Potter books are a ripping yarn, but the logical consistency of their setting tends to play second fiddle to the demands of character and story. It is hard to see how many aspects of Wizard society and economy might function and is the cause of many fan questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are no rules to say fantasy worlds have to make logical sense. The fashion, since Tolkien, is that they should. But prior to him (and a few later examples), wild flights of fancy were the norm. Kazuro Ishiguro is on record has saying he's not interested in whether his fantasy worlds make any sense, merely in whether they work to help examine his chosen themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder whether these omissions may have been partially deliberate on the part of the author. What if Rowling intentionally made aspects of the wizarding world nonsensical in order to make points about modern society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Quidditch. It leaves much to be desired as a sport, yet many Wizards seem oblivious and remain fanatically devoted to it. Could this not be read as a wry commentary on the fanatical devotion shown by many sports fans to what are, after all, relatively inconsequential pursuits? And the &quot;poor&quot; nature of some Wizarding families in spite of the magic available to them. Again, perhaps a comment on how a rich western society still relegates some people to live in poverty, in spite of the wealth of the nation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Rowling ever intimated, or is there any additional evidence, that some or all of the logical inconsistency in her invented world should be read as allegory or metaphor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T13:00:37.227" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:41:17.510" Title="Are the inconsistencies in Harry Potter symbolic or allegorical?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T13:11:17.057" Score="6" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of &quot;The Boscombe Valley Mystery&quot;, while Holmes and Watson are on the train, we see this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of papers which Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he suddenly rolled them all into a gigantic ball and tossed them up onto a rack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pun is that after they are &lt;em&gt;past Reading&lt;/em&gt;, he &lt;em&gt;stops reading&lt;/em&gt;. So: was this pun intentionally placed by Doyle? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T09:27:10.937" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T09:27:10.937" Title="Was the pun on the word 'reading' intentional in &quot;The Boscombe Valley Mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T13:36:22.123" Score="13" ViewCount="802" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nausicaa in the Odyssey is the princess of a race of seafarers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She and her people are beloved of and descended from Posidon/Neptune. Nausicaa herself is directly descended from both sides as her grandfathers were brothers and sons of a son of Neptune/Posidon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her people's ships have no rudders because they always know the way and carry the sailors to their destination. They are primarily a sailing nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does Nausicaa mean 'burner of ships'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T03:41:17.427" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T03:41:17.427" Title="Why is Nausicaa named 'burner of ships'?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T14:42:12.767" Score="4" ViewCount="1218" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;, the fifth book of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; series, in chapter 2, Lucifer explains that rebelled against god, and was cast out of Heaven to Hell, along with his lieutenants. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/71a6d.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/71a6d.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lucifer: &amp;quot;I thought I was rebelling. I thought I was defying his rule. No... I was merely fulfilling another tiny segment of his great and powerful plan. If I had not rebelled, another would have, in my stead. Raguel, perhaps, or Sandalphon. We fell, my comrades in arms and I. We fell so far... So long... And after an eternity of falling, we came to rest in this place. And I knew then that there was no way that I would ever return to paradise...&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version of Lucifer and his fall &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/880069124440944640&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was inspired&lt;/a&gt; by John Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2552/11&quot;&gt;could use a comparison&lt;/a&gt;, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last, 75th issue of &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, a different story is told. Lucifer rebelled, yes, but the wasn't cast down - he was offered to rule the (then barely-existing) realm of Hell, as a compromise, by his Father. This would put Lucifer as far away from Heaven and God as possibly, which is all he wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HG9gG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HG9gGm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLRj3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bLRj3m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLsGf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLsGfm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full pages &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pages from &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; are Lucifer's memories, meaning they can't be wrong. &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; pages, on the other hand, can - maybe Lucifer was lying to Morpheus, who knows?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Lucifer fell, his wings (which used to be white and feathery) burned and became bat-like. However, we can see that in &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, he didn't fall and his wings were left unscathed. And yet, in &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; #8 (&quot;The House of Windowless Rooms pt. 4), Susano-o-no-Mikoto says that separated from Lucifer (as Morpheus cut them off), his wings &quot;healed&quot;, meaning they returned from their bat-like shape to the normal angelic shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/La85y.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/La85ym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full page &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even in &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; #75 (&quot;All We Need of Hell&quot;), he is seen with his bat-like wings, in a faithful reproduction of the same scene from &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ogZRt.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ogZRtm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Click for full page &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; Lucifer fell (literally), and his wings burned, as seen in &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt;, it is implied that he fell, because his wings are burnt as well, but his own recollection is that he didn't fall, but simply left Heaven. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I wanted to chalk this up to the simple reason - &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; was written by Neil Gaiman, while &lt;em&gt;Lucifer&lt;/em&gt; was written by Mike Carey (albeit with help and advice from Neil Gaiman), so the latter could have simply retconned the former. But that doesn't explain why Lucifer's wings were burnt if he didn't fall in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can those two stories, as told by Lucifer in &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; and his own series be made to work with each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T14:42:12.767" Title="What is the explanation for the two versions of Lucifer's fall from Heaven in &quot;The Sandman&quot; and &quot;Lucifer&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;lucifer&gt;&lt;mike-carey&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2966" CreationDate="2017-07-07T18:31:20.573" Score="9" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a story when I was young (so 1990's) about a group of kids, possibly middle school or high-school age, that end up traveling to an alternate reality that's in black in white.  I believe they end up going to it while they were in school, so they appear in another school on the other side.  The kids stand out because they were in color while everything else was in black and white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually the kids start turning black and white themselves.  It also turns out that if they completely turn, they're stuck in this alternate world forever.  They end up escaping by finding an item buried in someone's bag (or purse, unsure) that hadn't changed yet and use it to get home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it feeling sort of Goosebumps-esque, but I looked through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goosebumps_(original_series)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of books&lt;/a&gt; and didn't see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it in the 90's, possibly very early 2000's.  It was an American story and in English.  I don't think it was a full-length novel, but might have been shorter like a Goosebump book, but I'm fairly certain it was not in a collection, it was an individual book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T18:40:37.827" Title="Goosebumps-esque story about a group of kids visiting an alternate black and white world" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2965" CreationDate="2017-07-07T18:38:50.037" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://goosebumps.wikia.com/wiki/The_Haunted_School&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Haunted School&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, #59 in the Goosebumps series. From Wikia's description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While searching for needed materials, they find an elevator that goes sideways and transports them to a classroom in Grayworld, a place where everything is in grayscale (black and white). Here they meet Seth Cortez and his friends, Eddie, Mona, Eloise, and Mary who became a few of the members of the Missing Class of 1947 who have not aged even after all that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the way they escape:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thalia explained to her friends how she opened her tube of lipstick one day and got excited after discovering that it still had color. She hadn't seen color in so long, she tried to draw on the wall to make colorful pictures. But when her lipstick touched the wall, it made an exit into the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by Googling &lt;code&gt;story kids travel to alternate reality &quot;black and white&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, which led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/83557/31394&quot;&gt;this solved question&lt;/a&gt; on another SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T18:38:50.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-07T20:19:24.057" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2010 I read a book about WW III and I've been trying to find it again since. It's quite an impossible search since as far as I remember the title is 'war'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Written by a fighter plane veteran&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;About WW III, mostly happening in eastern Russia, Japan and eastern Asia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Half the book is written in first person and describes fights on sea, land and in the air. Submarines vs warships, tank battles and fighter plane fights. Lots of tactics. Especially the parts in the air are very elaborate. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First chapter starts in Japan, just before the war.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The version I read was a pocket book, I think about 300 pages and it had a blue cover.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at the wiki page 'WW III speculative fiction' but I don't think it's any of those in the list. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was epic. Any help on this is much appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. I found the book in a hostel in Australia. Maybe by an Australian author...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1842" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-07T22:43:56.187" LastActivityDate="2017-07-07T22:43:56.187" Title="WWIII novel by fighter plane veteran, set in East Asia (first chapter in Japan)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2994" CreationDate="2017-07-07T23:55:02.323" Score="4" ViewCount="1651" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main thrust of Edgar Allan Poe's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52829/a-dream-within-a-dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Dream Within a Dream&quot;&lt;/a&gt; concerns the existential angst of the narrator, and his fear that &quot;all that we see or seem&quot; is nothing but &quot;a dream within a dream&quot;. But much of the second stanza dwells instead on a sandy beach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I stand amid the roar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of a surf-tormented shore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I hold within my hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grains of the golden sand —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How few! yet how they creep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through my fingers to the deep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While I weep — while I weep!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O God! Can I not grasp&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Them with a tighter clasp?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O God! can I not save&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt; from the pitiless wave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the purpose of these lines, and how do they fit into the poem as a whole?&lt;/strong&gt; Do the sand and the surf have some deep symbolic meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T04:57:09.743" Title="What's the point of the sandy beach in &quot;A Dream Within a Dream&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-08T20:49:04.387" Score="7" ViewCount="28489" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fifth verse of &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; runs thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the people bowed and prayed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the neon god they made&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the sign flashed out its warning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the words that it was forming&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the sign said:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The words of the prophets are&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Written on the subway walls&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And tenement halls&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And whispered in the sound of silence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's already a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1372/58&quot;&gt;question about what the neon god is&lt;/a&gt;. But why does it say that 'the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls'? What does this signify? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:18:46.587" Title="What is the significance of the words of the prophets being written on the subway wall?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;simon-and-garfunkel&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2973" CreationDate="2017-07-08T23:59:48.447" Score="8" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trolls&lt;/a&gt; are a common feature of Scandinavian folklore - and possibly also of those of the wider Nordic region, Finland and Iceland as well as Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, although I'm not sure about this). But the Scandinavian countries have a very mixed history and culture, and have often been united in one or two nations instead of three during their history. I'm curious about how, if at all, national differences are expressed in traditional literature and folklore, specifically concerning trolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much does the portrayal of trolls differ between the literature of the different countries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there traditional troll stories which are distinctively &quot;Norwegian&quot;, &quot;Swedish&quot;, etc., and can these be told apart just from the nature of the stories themselves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T13:20:14.243" Title="Are there significant differences across the Nordic countries in the traditional portrayal of trolls?" Tags="&lt;myths&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2952" CreationDate="2017-07-09T03:45:19.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Silence is the absence of sound. The title, then, is a paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to understand the historical context of folk rock. The world was recovering from a devastating war, not just physically and economically but psychologically. How do you live in a society that is capable of genocide? What does it mean to be human when members of your species consider industrialized murder not only possible but a worthy goal? What can you accomplish when nuclear war may break out at any moment and destroy everything? How can you be human in the midst of so much inhumanity? Another parodox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The events of the song take place in a dream. There's tension all through the song between opposites: the ideal and the real, the individual and society, light and dark, sound and silence. The singer addresses darkness itself as a friend and walks through a dark city. There's no loneliness so acute as when you know there are people all around you. Simon's depression certainly informed this image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;neon god they made&quot; is the central image. Is it television? Is it religion? Is it war? Yes, it is all those things and more. Everyone hears the message. Everyone follows the cultural imperative. No one wants to hear an alternative, much less consider it. There is an infinitude of options that do not end in greed and death. There are none so deaf as those who will not hear, and no sound will penetrate that willful ignorance. The singer makes a sound, but to the multitude it is silence, drowned out by orthodoxy. His words fall into a well of other wise thoughts, ready to be drawn out by those who will heed them. No one in this vision will heed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the message still relevant? More than ever, but few are willing to listen. Our instinct as individuals is to survive, but our instinct as cultures is to destroy. The final paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T03:45:19.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2971" CreationDate="2017-07-09T08:38:51.427" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are great variations of how trolls are portrayed, but it is not primarily a matter of national literature. I will be focusing on Sweden and Norway, where I know the traditions best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we should note that trolls range in appearance from some that are quite human-like, to the point that they are able to move in human society and can only be spotted if someone sees that they have a tail, to some that are huge, monstrous beasts that really does not seem to differ from giants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trolls that looks like humans also tend to act quite human, in that they live in families, does things like keep animals, brew beer and marry, even if they live long and have magical powers. They can get along well with neighbouring humans, or behave as tricksters and thieves. They sometimes rob a mother of her child and place a changeling in it's stead, and they can also catch and hold grownups inside mountains. They typically live in forested areas. These traditions are strong in southern and middle Sweden (in northern Sweden there is a similar type of creature which are collectively known as &quot;vittra&quot;). I don't know how common they were in Norway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The larger trolls are more monstrous in their deeds as well, and are often the type that would treaten to eat unwary travellers in folk tales. This type seems to be more common in Norway, but there are examples from Sweden as well. They tend to live in mountainous regions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the difference is on a sliding scale and can be from story to story, rather than from region to region. We can take one famous example, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peer Gynt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, as told by Ibsen, where the title character in the second act ends up in the hall of the mountain king, under Dovre. The king offers to let Peer marry his daughter Anitra and be made into a troll. There is no suggestion here that the trolls are in any way hideous: Peer calls Anitra lovely (Act two, scene five).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Peer Gynt has parallels to the Icelandic &lt;em&gt;Kjalnesinga saga&lt;/em&gt;, from the 14th century, in which the hero actually marries the daughter of the king of Dovre and has a son with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous depictions of trolls from Norway was made by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Kittelsen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodor Kittelsen&lt;/a&gt;, contemporary with Ibsen; &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Trollet_som_grunner_p%C3%A5_hvor_gammelt_det_er.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is one example. A generation later, Swedish artist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Bauer&lt;/a&gt; similarly shaped the perception in Sweden. &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_Bauer_1915.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is one excellent example. Note how the Swedish trolls, while large, are clearly on a much smaller scale. These depictions mean that trolls today are mostly thought of as quite inhuman, even if they are not always outright monstrous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The troll tradition seems to have been much less strong in Denmark, likely since the trolls were associated with wild and untamed areas, which were much less common there. I don't know much about Finnish or Sami traditions, even there seems to have been similar creatures to at least the more monstrous trolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short: while there are tendencies that trolls tend to be more human-like in Sweden, and larger and less civilised in Norway, and there certainly are stories that clearly originate from particular regions, there are no hard rules. The biggest difference is probably that trolls in Norway tend to live in mountains, while trolls in Sweden are more associated with forests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a good overview of different stories in Johan Egerkrans &lt;em&gt;Nordisk väsen&lt;/em&gt;. I also checked Wikipedia in &lt;a href=&quot;https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bokmål&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trold&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swedish&lt;/a&gt; to see if there were significant differences or particular stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-07-09T08:38:51.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-10T04:14:44.870" Score="10" ViewCount="327" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading the 1983 Michael Kandel translation of Stanislaw Lem's &lt;em&gt;His Master's Voice&lt;/em&gt;. The plot revolves around a secret military project to decode an alien message. The main character is a mathematician, and in one scene in the book he describes a mathematical proof of certain properties of the alien message. The scene takes place on page 86 of my copy of the book, and I have reproduced the scene below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was from this position that I proceeded to the translation of the problem into the language of mathematics. What I did I cannot present plainly, since our everyday language lacks the required concepts and words. I can only say, in general, that I studied the purely formal properties of the &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot;--treating it as an object mathematically interpreted--for features that are of central interest in topological algebra and the algebra of groups. In doing this, I employed the transformation of transformational sets, which gives the so-called infragroups or Hogarth groups (named after me, since I was the one who discovered them). If I obtained, as a result, an &amp;quot;open&amp;quot; structure, that would still prove nothing, because it could be that I had simply introduced an error into my work, going on some false assumption (such an assumption might be, e.g. the assertion of the number of code signs in a sing e&amp;quot;unit&amp;quot; of the message). But it happened otherwise. The &amp;quot;letter&amp;quot; closed beautifully for me, like an object separated from the rest of the world, or like a circular process (to be more precise, like the DESCRIPTION, the MODEL of such a thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent three days setting up a program for the computer, and the computer carried out the task on the fourth. The result said that &amp;quot;something, in some way, closes.&amp;quot; The &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; was the letter--in the totality of the interrelations of its signs; but as for the &amp;quot;how&amp;quot; of that closing, I could only make certain guesses, because my proof was indirect. The proof showed that the &amp;quot;described object&amp;quot; was NOT &amp;quot;topologically open.&amp;quot; But to reveal the &amp;quot;means of closure&amp;quot; with the aid of current mathematical methods was impossible for me; such a task was several orders of difficulty greater than the one I had managed to surmount. The proof, then, was very general--one could even say vague. One the other hand, not every text would have displayed this property. The score of a symphony, for example, or a linear coding of a television image, or an ordinary linguistic text (a story, a philosophical treatise) does not close in that fashion. But the description of a geometric solid closes, as does that of something as complex as a genotype or a living organism. The genotype, true, closes differently from the solid. But by going into such distinctions and details I fear that I will be confusing the reader rather than explaining to him what I did with the &amp;quot;letter.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two related questions about this passage. First, I'm hoping that someone can break down the mathematics or lack thereof in this passage. Some of this is clearly made up; Hogarth is the fictional main character, so &amp;quot;Hogarth groups&amp;quot; probably aren't a real thing. But given Stanislaw Lem's reputation, I doubt that all of this is made up; I feel like some of this passage must have a relationship to real mathematics. It would be great if I could get an explanation of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, this passage is simplified, and the (fictional) narrator tells us that it's intentionally simplified. So my question is, what does this passage tell us about the message? What does the fact that the message is &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot;, which makes it more like a &amp;quot;geometric solid... [or] a genotype&amp;quot; than a &amp;quot;a story [or] a philosophical treatise&amp;quot; convey to a lay reader? The narrator tells us that this is meant to be understood without a background in mathematics, but I feel like I'm missing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T21:21:19.093" Title="Mathematics or gibberish? Understanding a description of an alien message in His Master's Voice" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;stanislaw-lem&gt;&lt;his-masters-voice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-10T07:54:00.273" Score="8" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember a book I read sometime within the last ten years, but although I'm able to recall a fair bit of the story I have no idea of the title or author. I believe it's a &quot;modern&quot; mystery (rather than something by Agatha Christie or someone like that), but it's definitely set in England sometime between the late 19th and mid-20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, some decades before the time of the story, there was a death where a woman was poisoned (or thought by people to have been poisoned) and a man was suspected. I think the suspect was the vicar (unpopular in town because of his &quot;modern&quot; ways), or perhaps a doctor, and the woman may have been his wife or fiancée. In any case, he was also suspected of having an affair with some girl, perhaps a maid, and this was supposed to have been his motive for murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A malicious gossip (I think some kind of religious fanatic) has kept the story alive all these years, and the vicar (?) was ostracized or driven from the town, perhaps to his grave. (I seem to remember a gravestone being vandalized or shunned. Perhaps the girl was also suspected of involvement in the murder and died somehow?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this is only revealed gradually, because something in the present of the story brings it back up, but I don't remember what it is (are there more deaths? someone's will?). Anyway, it turns out the vicar was innocent, both of the affair and the murder. The girl was maybe infatuated with him and made up some story, or she was having an affair with someone else and the rumor was distorted. Did the victim actually commit suicide because she was in love with the man, over the gossip of his affair with the girl? Or was it assisted suicide because she was suffering from some malady? I don't recall precisely. At the bottom there was definitely a story of two lovers who were torn apart by malicious gossip, leading to the death of one or both, and still being maligned by the town decades later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also seem to remember that there's only one or two people in town who don't believe in the gossip, one of them a doctor or dentist (or lawyer?), and the other I think an old lady living in the house where it took place (the sister of one of the people involved?). I have a vague recollection that the doctor turns out to have been guilty of something (possibly of facilitating the woman's suicide, or keeping some dying admission secret).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also seem to remember that the main character (a man, I'm pretty sure; he might be a journalist or attorney of some kind) travels back and forth to this town, presumably from London, several times, and that the whole business has more or less poisoned the atmosphere of the town with guilt/resentment, making it suspicious of outsiders digging into the past. The destructive consequences of village gossip is a major theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character first gets wind of the story in the inn/boardinghouse/B&amp;amp;B where he's staying or a pub where he's having dinner. I also seem to recall that there's something in the story about music (was the vicar a music lover who introduced new tunes to the services?), but I can't swear to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's NOT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Moving Finger (Agatha Christie)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Night at the Mocking Widow (Carter Dickson)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1850" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T07:54:00.273" Title="Identify mystery novel: Past crime uncovered in English village, gossip leading to death(s)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2963" CreationDate="2017-07-10T16:59:09.237" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to attempt an answer with the caveats that the materialists often find my etymological ideas on names to be poetic as opposed to scientific, and that I'd want to know what Graves thought but don't have access to his Greek Myths at the moment.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gallifreyan posted &lt;a href=&quot;https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2015/07/30/was-nausikaa-a-ship-burner-speaking-names-and-etymology/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an excellent link&lt;/a&gt; to a scholar who pondered this question.  My take on the essay is that this interpretation is very much in question.  This leads me to believe that the Wikipedia assertion is misleading in that it makes the proposed etymology &quot;burner of ships&quot; a definite, rather than a &lt;em&gt;proposed&lt;/em&gt;, meaning.  &lt;em&gt;(i.e. no one knows for sure, which is the case with many Ancient Greek names. A strictly materialist viewpoint would hold that everyone is guessing, which is why I like to check the Graves, with the idea that his guesses could be categorized as &quot;as good as any, better than most&quot;, per his keen poetic insight.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;ka&quot; could be meaningless, and not based on the Greek work κάω (káō), but assuming it is based on that verb, I'll propose an alternate meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Passion for Ships&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose this because &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=kai%2Fw&amp;amp;la=greek&amp;amp;can=kai%2Fw0&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.04.0073:alphabetic%20letter=k:entry%20group=1:entry=kai/w&amp;amp;i=1#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the meanings of κάω&lt;/a&gt; is burning in the sense of passion.&lt;/strong&gt; Pindar uses it in this manner, speaking of Medea: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...and a longing for Greece would lash her, her mind on fire...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0162%3Abook%3DP.%3Apoem%3D4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pindar, Pythian Odes, 4.219&lt;/a&gt; [Greek excerpt: &quot;ἐν φρασὶ καιομένα”]&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This association does not seem to be merely poetic in that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/indoeurop.html#IR044300&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots&lt;/a&gt; has an entry for kā-:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kā- To like, desire. Oldest form *keh2‑, colored to *kah2‑, becoming *kā‑.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This root isn't listed for Ancient Greek (although ambiguity in relation to the meaning of names is sometimes an indicator of pre-Greek origins) except loosely in the word &lt;em&gt;kardia&lt;/em&gt; for heart.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B4%CE%AF%CE%B1#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kardia comes from a &lt;em&gt;ker&lt;/em&gt; root&lt;/a&gt; (the d is eventually dropped in the Romance languages) and the AHDIR has a subsequent entry: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ker-3 Heat, fire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Passion or desire actually makes more sense from a narrative perspective because there is an element of romance in Odysseus' interaction with Nausicaa, who would marry him if he didn't have to return to Penelope.  She later marries Telemachus, Odysseus' son, and so I'd go so far as to propose her name could mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Passion for Sailors&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BD%CE%B1%CF%85%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ναυτικός (nautikos)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;mariner, sailor, seaman&quot; is derived from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BD%CE%B1%E1%BF%A6%CF%82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ναῦς (naûs)&lt;/a&gt; &quot;ship&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nausicaa chooses the seashore to do the washing with her handmaidens, and this is clearly not random.  The beach is a decent place to watch for sails, especially in an era where it is prudent for ships to stay in sight of land.  The beach is also a great place to keep watch for flotsam, such as shipwrecked sailors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it occurs to me this second meaning could be inverted so that Nausicaa means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Desire of Sailors&quot; / &quot;Beacon of Sailors&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;because Odysseus washes up on &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; beach through divine intervention, and Telemachus returns to marry her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End Note: The wikipedia entry omits &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/sweeney-erect#13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eliot's mention of her in a famous poem&lt;/a&gt;, which could be taken as a corroboration of the passion/desire interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Paint me a cavernous waste shore / Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, / Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks / Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.    // Display me Aeolus above / Reviewing the insurgent gales / Which tangle Ariadne’s hair / And swell with haste the perjured sails. // Morning stirs the feet and hands / (Nausicaa and Polypheme) / Gesture of orang-outang / Rises from the sheets in steam // ....  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="1743" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T19:12:20.557" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T19:12:20.557" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2976" CreationDate="2017-07-10T21:21:19.093" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a mathematician, and to me the style of narration in this passage sounds very familiar. Because of the extreme abstraction from reality of most of (pure) mathematics, we who study it often dread being asked what we do by non-mathematicians. The difficulty of trying to explain our work to laypeople in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; level of detail is a common joke among mathematicians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This varies between different fields of maths, as some can be more directly related to relatively concrete objects, such as numbers or geometric figures, than others. Those who study &lt;em&gt;number theory&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;geometry&lt;/em&gt; have an easier time explaining at least the basics of their field: it's easy to show people patterns among whole numbers, or to draw visual diagrams. Perhaps the hardest branch of maths to explain to the layman, due to its abstraction from anything remotely visualisable, is &lt;em&gt;algebra&lt;/em&gt;. (Even &lt;em&gt;category theory&lt;/em&gt;, for mathematicians the most abstract field due to its extreme generality, can be more easily explained, either in terms of points and arrows and commutative diagrams or just by saying &quot;it's what everything else in maths is a special case of&quot;.) &#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Just as an example to illustrate the difficulty and abstraction of algebra, here's the definition of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scheme&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most basic concepts in modern algebraic geometry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An affine scheme is a locally ringed space isomorphic to the spectrum of a commutative ring. A scheme is a locally ringed space &lt;em&gt;X&lt;/em&gt; admitting a covering by open sets &lt;em&gt;U_i&lt;/em&gt;, such that the restriction of the structure sheaf &lt;em&gt;O_X&lt;/em&gt; to each &lt;em&gt;U_i&lt;/em&gt; is an affine scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to understand this definition, you need to know: what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringed_space&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;locally ringed space&lt;/a&gt; is and what it means for two such to be isomorphic; what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_ring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commutative ring&lt;/a&gt; is; what it means to take its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_of_a_ring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;spectrum&lt;/a&gt;; and what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_set&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open sets&lt;/a&gt; mean in topology. In order to understand the definition of a locally ringed space, you need to know: what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_space&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;topological space&lt;/a&gt; is (this also explains the meaning of &quot;open sets&quot;); what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheaf_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sheaf&lt;/a&gt; is; what its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalk_(sheaf)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;stalks&lt;/a&gt; are; and what a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_ring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;local ring&lt;/a&gt; is. In order to understand what a spectrum and a local ring are, you need to know what an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_(ring_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ideal&lt;/a&gt; of a ring is. Rings and topological spaces are among the most basic objects of algebra and topology respectively, although there are entire textbooks and undergraduate courses about these objects and the things associated with them such as ideals and open sets. Sheaves and their stalks are both very tricky concepts to understand even for high-level maths graduates, and realistically you need to have taken advanced courses in differential geometry, category theory, and analysis in order to fully grasp these definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So just for this &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; definition, of one of the foundational objects used in algebraic geometry (which despite its name is mostly pure algebra), you need to have a deep understanding of abstract algebra, topology, differential geometry, category theory, and analysis. And an introduction to schemes is only part 2, the first part after &quot;Preliminaries&quot;, of &lt;a href=&quot;http://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/216blog/FOAGjun0417public.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the standard treatise on algebraic geometry&lt;/a&gt; (warning: 800-page PDF link), which some students are required to know in full &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; starting a doctoral degree in algebraic geometry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you scared yet?&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Coming back to the point ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... the passage you quoted sounds very much like how real mathematicians sound when trying to explain their work to laypeople. Unfortunately, &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; it's written for a lay audience, it's not enough for an expert to understand exactly what mathematical objects are being referred to here. The language of mathematics, above all, is &lt;strong&gt;precise&lt;/strong&gt;, and most or all of that precision is lost when it's translated into an ordinary language such as English or Polish. If the imaginary narrator were speaking to a colleague instead of to a lay audience, he would be using strange letters and symbols instead of words that anyone can understand, and it would be easier for me to tell what actual mathematics is behind it. As it is, all I can do is make an educated guess at which mathematical objects are being 'approximated' by his rough description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was from this position that I proceeded to the translation of the problem into the language of mathematics. What I did I cannot present plainly, since our everyday language lacks the required concepts and words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is essentially the same point that I've just been making. He's not explaining any of this &lt;em&gt;properly&lt;/em&gt;, because he can't do that without resorting to symbols and formulae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can only say, in general, that I studied the purely formal properties of the &quot;letter&quot;--treating it as an object mathematically interpreted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obvious. If you're going to analyse a real-world problem mathematically, you need to turn it into an ideal mathematical model, and consider only the formal properties of the objects involved rather than their actuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may interest you to know that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_(group_theory)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;letters and words&lt;/a&gt; can be turned into ideal mathematical objects: in algebra, a &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; is simply a symbol (with no particular meaning - it doesn't matter what symbol is used) and a &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; is a sequence of such symbols. The study of these 'formal' letters and words leads to interesting results in group theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;--for features that are of central interest in topological algebra and the algebra of groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Topological algebra&lt;/strong&gt; is a real thing: it's the study of mathematical objects which have both topological and algebraic properties that mesh nicely with each other, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_group&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;topological groups&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_ring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;topological rings&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topological_algebra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;topological algebras&lt;/a&gt;. (Yes, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; topological algebra is an object studied in the field of topological algebra. Deal with it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;algebra of groups&lt;/strong&gt; is also a real thing - it just means group theory, the study of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_(mathematics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;groups&lt;/a&gt;, which is a subfield of algebra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In doing this, I employed the transformation of transformational sets, which gives the so-called infragroups or Hogarth groups (named after me, since I was the one who discovered them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there's no such thing as a transformational set or an infragroup. As you note, Hogarth groups are clearly fictional, being named after a fictional character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I obtained, as a result, an &quot;open&quot; structure, that would still prove nothing, because it could be that I had simply introduced an error into my work, going on some false assumption (such an assumption might be, e.g. the assertion of the number of code signs in a sing e&quot;unit&quot; of the message). But it happened otherwise. The &quot;letter&quot; closed beautifully for me, like an object separated from the rest of the world, or like a circular process (to be more precise, like the DESCRIPTION, the MODEL of such a thing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this is hard to interpret. There are several different properties in various branches of mathematics which could be described roughly as &quot;openness&quot; and &quot;closedness&quot;. The analogy to a circular process makes me suspect that &quot;closedness&quot; here describes something more like a &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ClosedCurve.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;closed curve&lt;/a&gt; from geometry than a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_set&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;closed set&lt;/a&gt; from topology, but most likely it's not &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; either of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept that a result one way would be inconclusive due to the possibility of a false assumption, but a result the other way is conclusive - again, this has a ring of truth to it. When approximating a real situation by a mathematical model, you &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; have to make assumptions, and some of those assumptions have the potential to make your model useless. But if you're sensible about what assumptions you make, you'll make sure to do it so that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you get the result you're hoping for, you know it actually works; it's only if you &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; get the desired result that you need to go back to the drawing board, and maybe try different assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I spent three days setting up a program for the computer, and the computer carried out the task on the fourth. The result said that &quot;something, in some way, closes.&quot; The &quot;something&quot; was the letter--in the totality of the interrelations of its signs; but as for the &quot;how&quot; of that closing, I could only make certain guesses, because my proof was indirect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This again is a concept I'm very familiar with: that of an &lt;strong&gt;existence proof&lt;/strong&gt;, one which is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_proof&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;constructive&lt;/a&gt;. In maths, you can often prove the existence of an object satisfying certain properties, even if you can't actually find an explicit example. For instance, any result which uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Axiom of Choice&lt;/a&gt; is likely to involve knowing something exists without being able to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the fact that the letter is &quot;closed&quot; (whatever that means - he hasn't given us a rigorous mathematical definition or anything approaching one) is somehow significant. It proves the existence of something, even without giving a way to construct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The proof showed that the &quot;described object&quot; was NOT &quot;topologically open.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, interesting. It seems like my guess before was wrong and we're talking about openness and closedness in the topological sense rather than in the sense of curves. Evidently, our narrator has used a &lt;strong&gt;topological&lt;/strong&gt; model for the letter, and he's just proved that some ideal mathematical object used in this model is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_set&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;open&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important note! In topology, &lt;strong&gt;closed is NOT the opposite of open.&lt;/strong&gt; Some sets can be both closed and open; most sets in most topologies are neither closed nor open. It's probable, then, that when the narrator says &quot;open&quot; he means open in the rigorous topological sense, but when he says &quot;closed&quot; he means &quot;not open&quot;, rather than actually topologically closed. Either that, or there's some property of the topology he's using, or of the specific set within his topology, which implies that it &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be either open or closed. Or, of course, it's simply a mistake and Lem didn't know that open and closed aren't opposites in topology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But to reveal the &quot;means of closure&quot; with the aid of current mathematical methods was impossible for me; such a task was several orders of difficulty greater than the one I had managed to surmount. The proof, then, was very general--one could even say vague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just repeating what we already know - that his proof is non-constructive. He knows the set is &quot;closed&quot; (in whatever sense he's using that word), but he can't prove &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; it's closed, only &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; it's closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One the other hand, not every text would have displayed this property. The score of a symphony, for example, or a linear coding of a television image, or an ordinary linguistic text (a story, a philosophical treatise) does not close in that fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is interesting. It tells us that the mathematical property exhibited by the letter - the property described as &quot;closedness&quot; - is something that many texts don't have. But that much is obvious: if every possible text was &quot;closed&quot;, there would be no need to prove that the letter is, and doing so wouldn't be a significant result. The curious thing is that texts with meaning, such as stories or symphonies, don't exhibit the same property as the letter. Thus, the mathematical analysis of the 'letter' may suggest that in its fundamental nature, it's not really akin to a message written by an intelligent entity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the description of a geometric solid closes, as does that of something as complex as a genotype or a living organism. The genotype, true, closes differently from the solid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting this together with the preceding sentences, it looks like the fundamental mathematical nature of the &quot;letter&quot; is more like an object of natural symmetry, as found in geometry and biology, than an intelligently designed and meaningful message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of discovery can be very significant in science: the revelation that something once thought to be close in nature to X actually behaves more like Y. Such breakthroughs have caused the remodelling of particle physics, the reorganisation of biological taxonomy, and new connections between parts of maths once thought to be very different. The discovery of an identical pattern cropping up in two apparently unrelated branches of mathematics was what ultimately led to not only the proof of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermat%27s_Last_Theorem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fermat's last theorem&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most famous mathematical problems in the wider world, but also, as a step along the way, and more importantly within mathematics, the proof of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_theorem&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taniyama-Shimura conjecture&lt;/a&gt; which links those two branches together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But by going into such distinctions and details I fear that I will be confusing the reader rather than explaining to him what I did with the &quot;letter.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Lem's way of breaking off the painful &quot;maths for a lay audience&quot; passage and going on to something different.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After performing a close reading of the passage quoted in your question, I've come to the following conclusions regarding the narrator's work on the &quot;letter&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he was working at the intersection of two fields of maths, topology and algebra;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he used a non-constructive proof to establish a new property of the mathematical object used to model the message;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this proof shows that, in some sense, the nature of the message is more like that of a naturally symmetric object than that of a meaningful communication;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the vagueness of the description (necessary due to its audience) makes it impossible to confirm that this is real maths rather than gibberish, but it's certain that some of the mathematical objects used are fictional.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Postscript: on Lem and mathematics&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lem wasn't formally qualified in maths, but nonetheless he was &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/83950/31394&quot;&gt;quite knowledgeable about it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, he was knowledgeable enough to be able to write about fictional mathematical events which were so plausible that &lt;a href=&quot;https://cameroncounts.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/a-literary-mathematical-puzzle/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;they actually came true later&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-10T21:21:19.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="2982" CreationDate="2017-07-10T23:59:09.570" Score="6" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading the classical children's book series &lt;em&gt;Swallows and Amazons&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur Ransome, I started with the eponymous first book &lt;em&gt;Swallows and Amazons&lt;/em&gt;, but read &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;Swallowdale&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, I first read &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt; in the same spirit as the other stories - the children going on boats and having adventures, albeit rather more thrilling adventures than their usual summer-holiday fare. It was only after reading &lt;em&gt;Swallowdale&lt;/em&gt; that I realised &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt; was actually metafictional: &lt;strong&gt;considered to be a work of fiction even within the world of the Swallows and Amazons.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was much later that I read &lt;em&gt;Missee Lee&lt;/em&gt;, which I assumed to be in the same metafictional category. Although not featuring the character of Peter Duck, it does seem to follow on from the novel &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt;, and it similarly stretches the reader's suspension of disbelief much more than most of the books in the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other candidates for possibly being metafictional include &lt;em&gt;Great Northern&lt;/em&gt; (which also features the boat &lt;em&gt;Wild Cat&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;Pigeon Post&lt;/em&gt; (wherein, if I recall correctly, the children successfully dowse and mine copper). But these I'm less sure of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which of the books in the &lt;em&gt;Swallows and Amazons&lt;/em&gt; series are considered to be metafictional?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question would probably be best answered using intertextual references (&lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt;, for instance, is clearly metafictional because of the way it's described in &lt;em&gt;Swallowdale&lt;/em&gt; - are there other inter-book references like this?), but I'm open to being convinced by other evidence too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T09:26:59.440" Title="How many of the Swallows &amp; Amazons stories are metafictional?" Tags="&lt;arthur-ransome&gt;&lt;swallows-and-amazons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-11T02:47:44.117" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have forgotten the title of a book I read around 10 years ago. The book was fairly old then. The setting was in times of horses, carriages and telegrams. It consisted of a gentleman who went to stay as a live-in teacher for 2 children and fell for their mother. The father had traveled a lot and became disabled (due to a shooting incident or something) and used to drink a lot. He generally wasn't a nice guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also a cleaning maid (who helped to hide the affair) named Horton. And a family doctor who used to come visit. I think the man (teacher) used to write to his sister named Aggy or Agatha. Eventually the wife kills the husband (by poisoning or some sort). Some lines I remember and can paraphrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No doubt find Horton stretched across the threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The doctor is blowing smoke, and he is fanning it this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was during pre-Google times, and all search terms I used did not produce any close results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1849" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-11T02:53:57.477" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T02:53:57.477" Title="Story about a man (teacher) having an affair" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2980" CreationDate="2017-07-11T11:18:17.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I recall &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt; is the only explicitly metafictional story in the series. As you recall it is specifically mentioned that Peter Duck is a fictional character (within the S&amp;amp;A 'universe'). Indeed, in &lt;em&gt;Swallowdale&lt;/em&gt; it is mentioned that the 'story' of Peter Duck was contrived in the 'long winter nights' on a wherry with Captain Flint (James Turner).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;Pigeon Post&lt;/em&gt;, I would say that this story is part of the real S&amp;amp;A 'universe' purely because the subsequent story &lt;em&gt;The Picts and the Martyrs&lt;/em&gt; follows on from it and makes references to the story throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;Missee Lee&lt;/em&gt;, there're no obvious contradictions in the text that state (as in the case of &lt;em&gt;Swallowdale&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt;) that this is a metafictional tale. However, the ship that they sail ('Wild Cat') is the same as in &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt;. This would imply that the work is metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia ( &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallows_and_Amazons_series#Overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LINK&lt;/a&gt; ) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two books, &lt;em&gt;Peter Duck&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Missee Lee&lt;/em&gt;, and possibly also &lt;em&gt;Great Northern?&lt;/em&gt;, are metafictional, being fictional stories of the protagonists' voyages to exotic lands, as imagined by the fictional protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion &lt;em&gt;Great Northern&lt;/em&gt; is by far the most plausible of the three and I wouldn't consider it a metafiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Arthur Ransome himself made it clear that this story was not metafiction. Writing to Myles North, discussing the book's dedication, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...At all costs it must do nothing to weaken the reality ... nothing to suggest that it is a mere story and not the record of an actual happening, even if for bird protection's sake, the details are somewhat disguised. (AR's own emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Northern%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia Great Northern page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arthur-ransome.wikia.com/wiki/Peter_Duck_story&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some further information about 'Peter Duck Stories'.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-25T09:26:59.440" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2017-07-11T22:48:50.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it's not as long as some of the ones mentioned here, but the longest one I was personally aware of was Jean Auel's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_Children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earth's Children&lt;/a&gt; books - the first one, &lt;em&gt;Clan of the Cave Bear&lt;/em&gt;, was released in 1980, and the final book, &lt;em&gt;The Land of Painted Caves&lt;/em&gt; was released in 2011, making it &lt;strong&gt;31 years.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a while, it was thought there would be a 7th book, making this series even longer, but it's been clarified that no, &lt;em&gt;Land of the Painted Caves&lt;/em&gt; is the last book in the series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-07-11T22:48:50.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T01:02:22.340" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Swallows and Amazons&lt;/em&gt;, the first book of the eponymous series of children's classics, as well as many of the later books in the series, is set in and around a lake in the Lake District of England. I don't remember whether the lake is named in the book, but it's certainly fictional, albeit based on real-life locations that Ransome knew. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallows_and_Amazons#Places_in_Swallows_and_Amazons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the lake is a fictionalised version of Windermere but the surrounding countryside more closely resembles that around Coniston. Wild Cat Island, the location of the island camp, has elements from Peel Island in Coniston and Blake Holme (or Blakeholme) in Windermere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the references are to other books, extratextual material, which doesn't seem to be available online. I'm curious about how clear these connections are from the text itself, including the maps at the front of the book. Is it obvious to anyone who knows the Lake District which lakes and islands the fictional setting is modelled on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T21:43:36.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:43:36.580" Title="Are the location inspirations clear from the text of Swallows &amp; Amazons?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;swallows-and-amazons&gt;&lt;arthur-ransome&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2621" CreationDate="2017-07-12T03:25:33.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more searching I found that what I described is the 70-page short novel &quot;&lt;strong&gt;À vau-l'eau&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; by &lt;strong&gt;Joris-Karl Huysmans&lt;/strong&gt;, written in 1882, and translated into English as either &quot;Downstream&quot; or &quot;With the Flow&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80_vau-l%27eau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; mentions, it was the last thing Huysmans wrote in his early naturalist style, before turning to the decadent style of his famous novel &quot;À rebours&quot;. (That's probably why the style seemed &quot;fin-de-siècle, or a parody thereof&quot; to me, because it's clearly no longer straightforward realist or naturalist.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is also interesting because apparently the character of &lt;i&gt;des Esseintes&lt;/i&gt; in &quot;À rebours&quot; is a reimagining of &lt;i&gt;Jean Folantin&lt;/i&gt; in &quot;À vau-l'eau&quot; as a richer, more cultured man, but filled with the same disgust for then-modern everyday life.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aborted trip to England that I mentioned was a mix-up with &quot;À rebours&quot;; it is indeed &lt;i&gt;des Esseintes&lt;/i&gt; who plans to travel to London but ultimately decides not to board the train.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T03:25:33.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2962" CreationDate="2017-07-12T13:04:58.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my own multiple (and recent) readings of the complete novels and stories of Sherlock Holmes, I see Holmes noted for a direct, rather dry style of verbal delivery. Watson, the narrator in this passage, has a more romantic cast on his interpretation of events, but also tends to stick to the facts, as he sees them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't rule out the possibility of &amp;quot;Reading&amp;quot; being a play on words, but the lack of puns in the rest of the Canon would make it unlikely, perhaps even unintentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an immense amount of material written on all facets of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The following blog, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sherlockian.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.sherlockian.net/&lt;/a&gt; is just one of hundreds of examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/article/doyle/7315/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one source&lt;/a&gt; directly pertinent to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much wordplay is in the &amp;quot;Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot; stories by Arthur Conan Doyle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karen Murdock has been studying the various figures of speech and rhetorical techniques in the 60 Holmesian tales, collectively called &amp;quot;the Canon&amp;quot;. She notes a use of zeugma when Watson reports in The Hound of the Baskervilles: &amp;quot;All afternoon and late into the evening he [Holmes] sat lost in tobacco and thought.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Lost in Tobacco and Zeugma&amp;quot;, Canadian Holmes, Summer 2004, p. 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murdock notes that puns and other humorous forms of word play are not found in the Canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that doesn't mean that there is no intended pun here. Personally, I believe it likely that it IS intended, however rare other such Canon examples may be, simply because authors tend to use words with a purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T13:08:06.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T14:41:47.743" Score="9" ViewCount="912" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the General Prologue of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, Chaucer describes a character who is a yeoman in service of a knight. It's mentioned on line 115 that the yeoman has a shiny silver &quot;Cristopher&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Cristopher on his brest of silver sheene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is a &quot;Cristopher&quot;, and what does it tell us about this character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T17:10:28.287" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T17:10:28.287" Title="What is a &quot;Cristopher&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T14:51:35.417" Score="4" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the General Prologue of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, we're introduced to Madame Eglentyne, a prioress (a nun). On lines 124-126, there's a confusing passage where we're told that she speaks elegant French, but that she doesn't know the French of Paris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For Frenssh of Parys was to hir unknowe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would someone know French but not the French of Paris? Is this a joke about her (and the people around her) thinking she knows French, when the fact is that her French is essentially gibberish?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T15:10:10.040" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T17:32:18.007" Title="How much French does Madame Eglentyne know?" Tags="&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2989" CreationDate="2017-07-12T16:30:10.667" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No one knows, but it is likely a joke at the expense of the Prioress.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, as you have observed, multiple ways of interpreting this text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that Parisian French is radically different from the scholarly French taught at &quot;the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe&quot;. It's not hard to imagine that the sanitised French taught in an English convent could be quite different to the rough dialect spoken on the streets of Paris. It could also be a matter of accent or skill: that she can recite genteel phrases but cannot actually converse or understand real French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the multiple interpretations and the distance in time from the authorship of the text, we can never know for certain what exact meaning Chaucer intended here. However, we can infer what his intentions were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the interpretation, the Prioress - alongside many other religious characters - is held up in the &lt;em&gt;Tales&lt;/em&gt; as a figure of mockery. She breaks a number of rules of religious life, yet clinging to the mannerisms and rights her station gives her. She also has a habit of aping courtly ladies, which is not befitting to the role of a prioress. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this, whatever is wrong with her French it is clear these lines are poking fun at her &quot;achievement&quot; in trying to speak it. Indeed it may be a double joke. Not only is she taking on airs by claiming a useless skill, but since French was, at this point, the language of the English court, her having learned it at all may be another example of how she is imitating aristocratic manners in place of focusing on her religious role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/8493&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. Rothwell, The Chaucer Review, Volume 36, Number 2, 2001&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-07-12T17:32:18.007" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T17:32:18.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2988" CreationDate="2017-07-12T17:59:42.883" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;Cristopher&amp;quot; is a St. Christopher medal, to this day often cast in silver. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reference.com/world-view/meaning-saint-christopher-medal-282907cd1c71ef87#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference.com's definition&lt;/a&gt; (there are hundreds of definitions online; this one was chosen due to its clarify of wording):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Saint Christopher medal is worn by members of the Catholic Church as an appeal to Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers. By showing their devotion to the saint in this manner, Catholics believe he will bless them and protect them from storms and other hardships they may encounter. Saint Christopher began to be well recognized for his piety starting in the fifth century....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But back to Chaucer: If you read the description of the knight, you can see he dresses simply, even though his deeds are formidable,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His steeds were good, but he was not gaily dressed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A tunic of simple cloth he possesed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Discoloured and stained by his habergeon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For he had lately returned from his voyage&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And now was going on this pilgrimage. &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Translation from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librarius.com/canttran/genpro/genpro043-078.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Prologue&lt;/a&gt; on Librarius, which presents the Middle English text and a modern English version side by side.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Yeoman, on the other hand, dresses in a bright and colorful manner, with the silver St. Christopher's medal on his chest, as if to show off, rather than keep it private, as a protection in travels. Again, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librarius.com/canttran/genpro/genpro101-117.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Prologue, lines 101-117: The Yeoman&lt;/a&gt; on Librarius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either man shows his character in his chosen dress. The Knight has no need to show off. The Yeoman is trying to look as if he is more important than he actually is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:47:10.440" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:47:10.440" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="2992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2970" CreationDate="2017-07-13T03:43:35.667" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jesus claimed that &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/matthew/13-57.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a prophet is without honor in his own country&lt;/a&gt;. Where would you find people without honor in modern cities? In other words, where would you find prophets speaking truth that has the stamp of religious validity? Not in churches, not in the halls of power, not in the media, not on college campuses. No, you should go where the poor go. The Old Testament prophets wandered &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblehub.com/isaiah/40-3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the wilderness&lt;/a&gt;. Today's prophets ride the subway and live in the projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T19:31:26.670" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T19:31:26.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2969" CreationDate="2017-07-13T04:57:09.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that immediately struck me on reading the poem is how the two stanzas seem to form an argument and a counterargument. The first stanza ends with the assertion &quot;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream&quot;, while the second ends by questioning that assertion: &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the first stanza as the narrator bidding farewell to someone as they die, someone who basically thinks the narrator is wasting his life: &quot;Thus much let me avow — / You are not wrong, who deem / That my days have been a dream&quot;. Given the next few lines about losing hope, it seems the narrator has spent a good portion of his life being hopeless, miserable, and melancholy, on what the dying person seems to think are thin pretenses. The narrator quibbles with that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet if hope has flown away&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a night, or in a day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a vision, or in none,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is it therefore the less gone?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is arguing that misery is always valid, no matter the pretense, and ends by stating with a smug sort of nihilism, &quot;&lt;em&gt;All&lt;/em&gt; that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream&quot;, i.e. life is ultimately a meaningless illusion whether one spends it in misery or happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the second stanza, the narrator seems to begin doubting himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I stand amid the roar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of a surf-tormented shore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I hold within my hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grains of the golden sand —  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the &quot;golden sand&quot; as life, time, or opportunities to do all the things that can only be done in life: spend time with friends and family, strive to create something, fulfill passion or ambition—all the things the narrator is not taking advantage of by spending time in melancholy. The &quot;surf-tormented shore&quot; can represent a few things, but to me the one that feels most right is to interpret the choppy ocean as all the things that detract from spending life well: all the cruelties and obstacles that the world will throw at you to lessen the value of your life. Since the sand represents a life well spent, the waves represent something which erodes that sand away.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next few lines also reinforce this interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How few! yet how they creep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through my fingers to the deep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While I weep — while I weep!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sand is falling through the narrator's fingers into the depths of the ocean while he weeps—in other words, he is losing his chance to enjoy the good things in life while he stands at the edge of the ocean weeping. He begins asking God whether there might be anything he can do to hold on to those chances, even one of them. He ends by questioning his earlier statement: &quot;Is &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; that we see or seem / But a dream within a dream?&quot; In other words, could there possibly be more in life, even in a small way, than sitting around and moping?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I was reading &quot;A Dream Within a Dream&quot;, I discovered that Poe wrote another poem called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44886/a-dream-56d22426d2d30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dream&lt;/a&gt;&quot; that forms an interesting pair with it. While dreaming in &quot;A Dream Within A Dream&quot; represents a haze of melancholy that stops the narrator from enjoying the good things in life, the dream in &quot;A Dream&quot; represents a hope that carries him through the hard times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That holy dream—that holy dream,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While all the world were chiding,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hath cheered me as a lovely beam&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A lonely spirit guiding.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both poems, other people chide the narrator for dreaming instead of living in the present, and in both poems the narrator defies them, but in &quot;A Dream&quot; the narrator asserts a greater truth to be found in the dream, and chooses to dwell there as a way of preserving the goodness in his life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What though that light, thro' storm and night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So trembled from afar—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What could there be more purely bright&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In Truth's day-star?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas in &quot;A Dream Within a Dream&quot;, the dream is meaningless and the narrator chooses to dwell there in order to wallow in self-pity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2017-07-13T04:57:09.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T15:58:34.150" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started reading Sam Logan's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.samandfuzzy.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sam and Fuzzy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; online, and am greatly enjoying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth volume of the NMS Series (&lt;em&gt;Sam and Fuzzy Missing Inaction&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://Boundaries,%20Pt.%209&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boundaries, Pt. 9&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) there's a cute scene where Sam references the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokey_cokey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hokey Pokey&lt;/a&gt;, and two other characters finish the traditional verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FimjM.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FimjMm.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sam: You've got it all wrong. I'm just doing what &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; all do. You&#xA;  put the right bribes in. You take the right guys out. Y'know. The&#xA;  crime Hokey Pokey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paxton: You're just trying to turn this all around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tusks: &lt;strong&gt;THAT'S WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT!&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;slams hand on table with a&#xA;  WHAM!&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there are two ways to read this exchange, if one were to read it aloud, with stressing and inflection. You can read it as a normal verbal exchange, and ignore the song -- then Tusks is shouting, after having just understood Sam's true intentions. However, you can also read it (as I suspect most people would) with the inflection and tones (and probably even music!) that belong to the song, up to and including the &quot;WHAM&quot; at the end. This leads to a curious (and fun!) effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a term for a passage like this one, that deliberately messes with the way that a reader will form the words in their mind?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Double entendre&lt;/a&gt;&quot; crossed my mind, but that effect is one of meaning, not inflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T19:50:31.443" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T19:50:31.443" Title="Is there a word for a literary technique that allows a short passage to be read aloud in more than one way?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-13T23:26:55.230" Score="3" ViewCount="898" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read a few critical explanations and exegeses on Harold Pinter's one-act play, &lt;em&gt;The Dumb Waiter&lt;/em&gt;. I'm still confused by a few things that happen at the very end, before the curtain. I understand that Ben got the order to kill Gus, but what confuses me is how Gus went into the lavatory, through a door on the left, and then for some reason came back in through the other door, the one on the right. Did he loop around? Is that even possible in old hotels in England?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other--and more confusing--element is this: Upon returning from the lavatory, why was Gus stripped of his jacket, waistcoat, holster and revolver?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1811" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T12:04:05.793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T12:04:05.793" Title="What exactly happened at the end of The Dumb Waiter?" Tags="&lt;harold-pinter&gt;&lt;the-dumb-waiter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2886" CreationDate="2017-07-14T09:54:30.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is &quot;wind&quot; as in moving air; you can hear Eliot himself reading the Quartets &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga8tQrG4ZSw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with the line in question at minute &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Ga8tQrG4ZSw?t=2738&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;45:38&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="885" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T19:06:53.557" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T19:06:53.557" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="2999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1026" CreationDate="2017-07-14T21:33:40.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a strictly geometrical perspective, any side of a hexagon can only connect to another single hexagon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pbQud.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pbQud.png&quot; alt=&quot;From Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tiling patterns have a very &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessellation#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient history&lt;/a&gt;, and Borges was no doubt drawing on this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of hexagons is that they pack perfectly, with no spaces in between.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Had Borges wanted multiple pathways between rooms, he certainly would have picked a different pattern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect Borges was drawing on the history of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;honeycomb patterns&lt;/a&gt; (although the &quot;honeycomb conjecture&quot; wasn't proven until 1999), and was potentially thinking of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beehive_tomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beehive tombs of antiquity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be that the walls between hexagons are thick, which produce the hallways, but that Borges was intending that the structure itself was perfectly packed, with no space between rooms but the hallways. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Babel was published in 1941, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Penrose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penrose&lt;/a&gt; was only 10 years old, so the story predates the exciting, recent work in tiling patterns. The game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hex_(board_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hex&lt;/a&gt; likewise doesn't appear until somewhere in the 1940's, but after its creation, a very large number of modern strategy games adopted this pattern.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It never hurts to look at the Spanish, but Borges seems to write in a way that allows very faithful translation between English and Spanish. (His work tends to do well when translated by algorithms, in my experience;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it is possible to connect 3 rooms by creating a hallway through a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertex_(geometry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vertex&lt;/a&gt;, this would disrupt the hexagonal shape, and render it an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mathsisfun.com/definitions/irregular-polygon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;irregular&lt;/a&gt;, 7-sided polygon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T21:38:50.447" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T21:38:50.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-14T21:53:09.533" Score="3" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Binti&lt;/em&gt; by Nnedi Okorafor, the main character Binti has an object she refers to as an &quot;edan&quot; - it's an object that allows her to communicate with another species she encounters, and seems to have other properties as well. She mentions that it's some sort of ancient technology that no one knows what it is anymore or what it was used for. There's not a lot of description in the book, just that it is metal and round (I think). It can also come apart into pieces, although I'm not sure if that's part of the design intentionally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any real-world object that it is based on, or that it is intended to mimic? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="25" LastEditDate="2017-07-14T23:04:11.150" LastActivityDate="2017-07-14T23:04:11.150" Title="Does Binti's edan translate to a real-world object?" Tags="&lt;binti&gt;&lt;nnedi-okorafor&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3002" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3004" CreationDate="2017-07-14T23:37:25.367" Score="8" ViewCount="569" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently heard a theory that parts of Tolkien's legendarium and the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; story may have been inspired by the real-life &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Silvianus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ring of Silvianus&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Wheeler consulted with J. R. R. Tolkien on the name of the god invoked in the curse, the ring and curse may have inspired the One Ring in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. [...] It is hypothesised that Wheeler, in his discussion with Tolkien on the name Nodens on the curse tablet, would also have discussed the ring at The Vyne, with which he was familiar. It is thought that other aspects of the archaeology of the Lydney area, including an Iron Age fort known as Dwarf's Hill, may have influenced Tolkien's writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only sources cited by Wikipedia for these claims are articles in a few UK newspapers (the Daily Express, the Guardian, and the Independent). None of these are particularly reliable sources. But the fact that the Tolkien Society takes it seriously enough to help set up a Tolkien-themed &quot;Ring Room&quot; at Vyne is interesting, and lends the theory more weight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What evidence is there for the idea that Tolkien based his One Ring on the Ring of Silvianus?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I knew, Tolkien took most of his ideas from Germanic mythology, so a real-life inspiration like this is interesting. Evidence could come either from the text itself or from any kind of extratextual material - other writings set in Middle-Earth, Tolkien's letters or notes, ... Even a reference to an academic paper about this, rather than just newspaper articles, would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T07:36:09.830" Title="What evidence is there for Tolkien's One Ring being based on the Ring of Silvianus?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-15T02:08:32.050" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read Brooke Bolander's short story &quot;Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies&quot;, which has been nominated for both Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Short Story after its publication less than a year ago (November 2016) in Uncanny Magazine. It's very short and you can read it in full &lt;a href=&quot;http://uncannymagazine.com/article/talons-can-crush-galaxies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;warning:&lt;/strong&gt; contains strong language and potentially disturbing content, about assault and gruesome revenge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, &lt;strong&gt;exactly what manner of being is the narrator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can tell from the story that she's one of a group of sisters from a millennia-old civilisation, who speak an ancient language, possess great power, and can pass in and out of the &quot;mortal plane&quot;. Does the text or subtext suggest a &lt;em&gt;particular&lt;/em&gt; civilisation and language, a particular kind of mythical creature? Or is it meant to be vague about her exact nature and leave it to our imaginations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T11:33:52.607" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T11:33:52.607" Title="Who or what is the narrator of “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies”?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;brooke-bolander&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3002" CreationDate="2017-07-15T07:36:09.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there was any inspiration, it was likely very minor. The only thing this ring seem to have in common with the One Ring is the curse, and that Tolkien could easily have gotten from elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious inspiration for the rings of power is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andvaranaut&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andvaranaut&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from the Völsung cycle: a magical ring which gave great riches to the owner, but at the ultimate cost of their destruction. It was first owned by the dwarf Andvari and taken from him by Loki to give to Hreidmar, king of the dwarfs, as part of a ransom; Andvari cursed the ring. This fits well with the seven rings given by Sauron to the kings of the dwarves, as well as the One ring. Andavaranut is responsible for Fafnir's transformation into a dragon, and, likely, for the continued misfortunes of Sigurd and the Nibelungen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering Tolkien's general approach to creating his legends, my opinion is that this is a likely point from where the general concept of the rings of power was developed.  Some would instead argue that Tolkien was primarily inspired by Wagner's ring cycle (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://lnu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:349219/FULLTEXT01.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), but that does not seem strictly necessary. Some influence is likely, but not to the point that LoTR should be seen as a variation on Wagner rather than the original. Let's not forget that the War of the Ring is a small ripple in the aftermath of more cataclysmic events; the One Ring was originally not the major focal point it would be when LoTR was published. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the Ring of Gyges, a story told by Plato in &lt;em&gt;The Republic&lt;/em&gt; of a ring that can turn it's wearer invisible, which destroys the original owner's morality, but not through any inherent corruption but by removing the restraints placed on him by other's observation. Even if Tolkien appears to never have alluded to this in any text, it is not an unlikely influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; could very well have been written exactly as it was even if the Ring of Silvanus had never been unearthed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T07:36:09.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-15T17:41:08.873" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Calvino's &lt;em&gt;Under the Jaguar Sun&lt;/em&gt; was originally intended to be a complete novel about the five senses, but Calvino died before completing the novel, which was published as an incomplete collection of short stories about three of the five senses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little bit confused about the last short story in the collection--&quot;The Name, the Nose&quot;--which as the title implies is about the sense of smell. The story concerns three characters, each of whom meets and are attracted to a woman who they can only identify through a distinctive smell. The ending of the story reveals that the distinctive smell is due to the fact that all three woman are dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what the message or point of this ending is. For example, is Calvino trying to make some sort of argument about the nature of the senses? Any answer consisting of an argument using evidence from the text would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T18:32:11.580" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:32:11.580" Title="Understanding the ending of &quot;The Name, the Nose&quot;" Tags="&lt;italo-calvino&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;under-the-jaguar-sun&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-15T23:43:08.810" Score="11" ViewCount="1962" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Heart of Darkness, Marlow comes back after Kurtz's death feeling unsure about the people around him after witnessing the atrocities of the Congo which are not known to the people back at home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Marlow feel the need to lie to the intended and others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1873" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-15T23:52:16.313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T07:12:45.960" Title="What in the Congo causes Marlow's need to lie to the Intended and others back at home?" Tags="&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;heart-of-darkness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2887" CreationDate="2017-07-16T02:24:18.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage ahead of this is implying, by showing how the cats react to the cruelty of humans, that the cats take on the traits of their human masters. Miss Blanche, who lives with the military man, suggests making war on the humans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Blanche, having given through her tears a complete account of this event, assured me that, to maintain our own parental love and to enjoy our beautiful family life, we, the cat-race, must engage in total war upon all humans. We have no choice but to exterminate them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Natsume, Soseki. I Am A Cat (p. 6). Kindle Edition. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tomcat, who lives with a lawyer, is offended by the violation of property law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the three-colored tomcat living next door is especially indignant that human beings do not understand the nature of proprietary rights. Among our kind it is taken for granted that he who first finds something, be it the head of a dried sardine or a gray mullet’s navel, acquires thereby the right to eat it. And if this rule be flouted, one may well resort to violence. But human beings do not seem to understand the rights of property. Every time we come on something good to eat, invariably they descend and take it from us.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, pp. 6-7 &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since our narrator lives with a teacher, he reacts to this situation like a teacher would: he decides that the best course of action is to wait patiently for the humans to fall and for a Day of the Cats to arrive, instead of taking proactive action like a war to bring it about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being a teacher's reaction is somewhat cultural, but even in English we have sayings like &quot;Those who can't do, teach&quot; that cast teachers as indecisive and passive. And our narrator's master definitely conforms: as we discover, he's indolent, unsociable, and a bit of a hypochondriac. He fancies himself some kind of intellectual, but as we discover later on, he buys books that he never reads, his understanding of English is tenuous at best, and he's not much of a writer. Our narrator tells us as much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First you must understand that this master of mine lacks the talent to be more than average at anything at all; but nonetheless he can’t refrain from trying his hand at everything and anything. He’s always writing haiku and submitting them to &lt;em&gt;Cuckoo&lt;/em&gt;; he sends off new-style poetry to &lt;em&gt;Morning Star&lt;/em&gt;; he has a shot at English prose peppered with gross mistakes; he develops a passion for archery; he takes lessons in chanting &lt;em&gt;No&lt;/em&gt; play-texts; and sometimes he devotes himself to making hideous noises with a violin. But I am sorry to say that none of these activities has led to anything whatsoever.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, pp. 6-7 &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone like this were living under the kind of oppression that the cats are, it's doubtful he would be at the forefront of an armed rebellion against the oppressors. The particular reason our narrator gives also sounds like something his master might say in a similar situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel that life is not unreasonable so long as one can scrape along from day to day. For surely even human beings will not flourish forever. I think it best to wait in patience for the Day of the Cats.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Ibid, p. 7 &lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not one paragraph ago, our narrator said he found the idea of armed war against humans a reasonable suggestion, but now he claims that life under human oppression is not unreasonable. The particular justification he gives, that &quot;surely even human beings will not flourish forever&quot;, sounds a bit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sa%E1%B9%83s%C4%81ra_(Buddhism)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buddhist&lt;/a&gt; or possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stoic&lt;/a&gt;. It's the sort of thing that someone who fancies himself an intellectual, like our narrator's master, would say to justify his own inaction, under the guise of some deeper philosophy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T08:21:21.890" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T08:21:21.890" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-16T09:14:26.653" Score="4" ViewCount="316" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul&lt;/em&gt;, the following things resolve Odin's troubles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Thor changes an eagle back into a fighter plane, which (unintentionally?) kills the Draycotts, whom Odin entered a contract with.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Odin re-entered the hospital he wanted to stay in, on more favorable terms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A new Guilt God emerged, apparently from Dirk's old fridge, and dealt with Toe Rag and the green-eyed giant, as they were escaping from Valhalla.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from getting rid of his old fridge, and possibly giving an old god (who was perhaps a guilt god, as Dirk felt a &quot;nameless roaring guilt that came howling at him out of nowhere&quot; at their encounter) a coin, which apparently helped precipitate the 3rd item above, I don't see that Dirk did anything for the resolution of this story.  But as Toe Rag and the giant were escaping anyway, this doesn't seem crucial to the resolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dirk made his way to Valhalla, and tried to help Odin against the Draycotts, but quickly gave up.  Kate apparently is responsible for 2, and Thor for 1.  As far as I can tell, it seems like he figured out, more or less, what was going on, and tried to help fix things, but without success in any major way.  Did Dirk actually do anything useful for the end of this story?  (Am I missing the significance of 3?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T11:00:13.347" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T11:00:13.347" Title="Did Dirk Gently do anything to help Odin the end of Tea Time?" Tags="&lt;douglas-adams&gt;&lt;dirk-gently&gt;&lt;the-long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3010" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3011" CreationDate="2017-07-16T15:15:32.713" Score="7" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this novel about 3 years ago on the train, having borrowed it from a co-passenger. I couldn't read the whole book and I'd like to complete it now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When did you read the story, and how old was it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it 3 years ago and I don't remember how old it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Medium and appearance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, the cover has a brownish picture with the title of the book. It was, I think, a picture of long brown hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a novel with hard cover and must have had around 200-300 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What language did you read it in, and was it translated?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was in English and I can't say if it was translated. It was set in the UK or USA, but it might not be translated I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anything else&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was particularly about teenagers attempting and succeeding in suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This novel was about a family with five teenage daughters. It starts with an ambulance to bring the body of one of those girls who committed suicide. Then a back story starts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of those girls tries to commit suicide, but fails. However, she does it again and dies. Thereafter, another one tries and succeeds. This thing goes on and on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motive isn't explained in the story till the last I read. This is the suspense I want to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I had to give the novel back, three of them had committed suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-16T18:04:33.307" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T18:04:33.307" Title="Novel about teenagers committing suicide" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3010" CreationDate="2017-07-16T15:26:09.543" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I Googled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Novel%20about%20teenage%20sisters%20committing%20suicide&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Novel about teenage sisters committing suicide&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; and the first result from Wikipedia was for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_Suicides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Virgin Suicides&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Virgin Suicides&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is the 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey&#xA;  Eugenides. The fictional story, which is set in Grosse Pointe,&#xA;  Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five sisters, the&#xA;  Lisbon girls. The novel is written in first person plural from the&#xA;  perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find&#xA;  an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an image of the cover from Wikipedia, with a closeup of brown hair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PVKlU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PVKlU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A book cover, with the title, and a closeup image of long brown hair.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T15:26:09.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3010" CreationDate="2017-07-16T15:26:46.773" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Virgin Suicides&lt;/em&gt;, by Jeffrey Eugenides&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/c9/Virgicides.jpg/220px-Virgicides.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_Suicides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an ambulance arrives for the body of Mary Lisbon, a group of anonymous neighborhood boys recall the events leading up to her death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without warning, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in the bathtub. She is found in time and survives. A few weeks later, their parents allow the girls to throw a chaperoned party at their house in hopes of cheering Cecilia up. However, Cecilia excuses herself from the party, goes upstairs, and jumps out of her bedroom window. She is impaled on the fence post below, and she dies almost immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-16T15:26:46.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3023" CreationDate="2017-07-16T21:51:24.413" Score="4" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading through some of the short stories written for the (now largely defunct) &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/info/168/the-overlook-hotel?tab=schedule&quot;&gt;weekly writing exercise&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/168/the-overlook-hotel&quot;&gt;Writers SE chatroom&lt;/a&gt;. On 28 February this year, the writing prompt was &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/168?m=35740789#35740789&quot;&gt;Something new&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and the user &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackexchange.com/users/344606/kit-z-fox&quot;&gt;Kit Z. Fox&lt;/a&gt; wrote a piece with this title which can be found &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://foxfirekitty.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/lightning-rounds-73/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; on her blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This short story is about a woman who's soon to be married and her interactions with her mother. I wasn't quite sure how to interpret the very last paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I looked out the window to the yard where guests were gathering. I held my breath until I thought I could speak. “I’m already wearing Gramma’s necklace,” I said quietly, touching the locket at my throat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What emotion is making her so speechless?&lt;/strong&gt; Is she choked up at the thought of a gift from her father, angry at her mother for her presumption, or something else? This passage seems ambiguous, and I wonder if there's enough elsewhere in the text to make the answer completely clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T21:42:31.707" Title="Why is the narrator speechless at the end of this short story &quot;Something new&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-17T10:25:11.993" Score="4" ViewCount="1261" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once Shelley said, &quot;Keats was a Greek.&quot; What was the context? Whom did he say this to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1879" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T12:50:10.373" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T18:34:10.203" Title="On what occasion did Shelley say &quot;Keats was a Greek&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3007" CreationDate="2017-07-17T19:53:17.127" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why did Marlow lie? On pg. 24, Marlow said that he hates and detests lies (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.freeclassicebooks.com/Joseph%20Conrad/Heart%20of%20Darkness.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can read the book online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you google &quot;Why did Marlow lie?&quot; you get dozens of answers, all leading to the point that telling the truth would do no one any good, and it is better for the dead to be well thought of, blah blah blah, etc. etc. etc. I think this is true, as far as it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the deeper problem, let’s ask the question, what if he had NOT lied? Could he have really explained, in words, the entire pernicious atmosphere of the area? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The truth here is particularly impossible to explain to anyone who is not an eyewitness to the facts that the native cannibals committed horrible atrocities in their everyday lives, and that Kurtz became their leader and led them in the further commission of these atrocities. How can anyone truly and completely  describe an existence where human life is of no consequence, if the listener has no experience of the same? Combat veterans also have difficulty in describing life in a combat zone. That’s why they usually only talk to other combat veterans about such things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Kurtz was at once, an active participant in the horrors, and, also vehemently wished the natives to be exterminated, is a dichotomy Marlow cannot explain to his own satisfaction, let alone to Kurtz’s Intended or others. How could Marlow get inside Kurtz's head, and understand how Kurtz could justify these horrors? How could Marlow even describe them? No, it was better simply to deny these truths, since Kurtz is dead. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer the OP’s question, what is so horrible in the Congo is actually uniquely indescribable. However, it has to do with cannibalism, humans as food, shrunken heads, and so on, all creating a horrendous tableau incomprehensible to the normal European mind.  Yes, Marlow lied because it was the nice thing to do, but really he lied because he was literally incapable of telling the whole truth. No one would understand or believe him, who had not been there himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, this is my opinion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1247" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-17T20:59:38.600" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T20:59:38.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2480" CreationDate="2017-07-17T20:21:10.213" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are definitely based on mythology, as dragons and hippogriffs are mythological creatures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JdWRAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA195#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Said to be the product of a union between a griffin and mare, [the hippogriff] represents Christ, who is both human and and divine.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That makes a lot of sense b/c Morpheus is an immortal, but has feeling like a normal human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hippogriff is also said to be a symbol of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=WRvMTx9wTukC&amp;amp;pg=PA223&amp;amp;dq=Hippogriffe&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;as_brr=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Hippogriffe&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;love&lt;/a&gt;, which would also make sense as lost love was a major story arc in the series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble finding legit citations for the &quot;western&quot; dragon as a symbol.  &lt;em&gt;(The dragon depicted is squarely a modern conception of a medieval European dragon, as opposed to a Chinese dragon.)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mythologically speaking, Dragons in the European tradition are always the nemesis. (Fafnir, Beowulf's dragon, etc.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would fit in that Morpheus is often cast as nemesis to transgressors in the stories, delivering vengeance or punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python of Delphi&lt;/a&gt; is a very early instance of dragons in the European tradition, and is associated with divine inspiration of prophecy, although the character of the dragon in the comic doesn't make me think of that aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia Americana states that the hippogriff is a symbol of Apollo&lt;/a&gt;, so there's a connection with the dragon in that regard.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The architectural precedent dates back to ancient times and is surely the inspiration for the gate guardians.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing that came to mind for me is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclopean_masonry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cyclopean architecture&lt;/a&gt; of the Mycenaean period, and the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Gate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lion Gates of Mycenae&lt;/a&gt;.  (Different symbols, same underlying principle.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ishtar Gate at Babylon&lt;/a&gt; is almost certainly an inspiration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lilyworktile.com/handmadetileblog/2016/2/29/ishtar-gate-of-babylon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here we find a dragon&lt;/a&gt;, although, in this case, the other guardian is a bull. The Ishtar Gate was so well known, it was one of the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Wonders_of_the_Ancient_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Wonders of the World&lt;/a&gt;, inspiring the imagination of humans from antiquity onward. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/cultures/mesopotamia_gallery_09.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Assyrian guardian figure&lt;/a&gt; is a hybrid, consisting partly of a steed with wings, like Gaiman's hippogriff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Frazerian conception, the stone guardians of the ancient world were a form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sympathetic magic&lt;/a&gt;—utilizing the forms at the gates conferred their power for protection. (This is similar in principle to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_(classical_antiquity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palladium&lt;/a&gt;.) In Morpheus' domain, where anything is possible, the stone figures become animate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T21:53:25.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T21:53:25.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-17T20:42:05.007" Score="12" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first line of the General Prologue of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, the month of April is given a masculine pronoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T17:09:20.073" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T17:09:20.073" Title="Why is the month of Aprill masculine?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3015" CreationDate="2017-07-17T21:42:31.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, there are basically two ways to interpret that last paragraph. The bride's speechlessness can either indicate that she has become &quot;choked up&quot; about her mother's thoughtfulness, or it can tell us that she is upset at her mother for offering this gift. After reading the story again more closely, I believe that she is upset at her mother. Here are two reasons why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The story begins with &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; pieces that indicate that the narrating bride is upset at her mother. For example, in the first sentence: &quot;she was probably totally clueless that she was not wanted there.&quot; In the second paragraph: &quot;I pulled a smile as tight as my hair.&quot; In the entire six-paragraph story, the first five paragraphs uniformly include some indication that the bride is &lt;em&gt;not happy&lt;/em&gt; with her mother or her mother's actions. If the final paragraph were to include some change to that theme, I would expect some indication that is more clear than the ambiguous speechlessness that you ask about.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In that final paragraph of the story, the bride also tells her mother &quot;I’m already wearing Gramma’s necklace.&quot; This, to me, sounds like an objection to the new blue necklace that her mother has just offered to her. She &lt;em&gt;doesn't want it&lt;/em&gt;, because she's already wearing her grandmother's necklace, and so continues to be upset about her mother's actions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside (and this is not really a part of the answer), I think that some more thought is needed regarding the exact objection the bride has to the new necklace. Is it merely, as she claims, that she is already wearing a necklace? I read this paragraph that the narrating bride doesn't want the new necklace because she's wearing &lt;em&gt;Gramma's&lt;/em&gt; necklace, specifically. Gramma's necklace is connected to something older, perhaps a tradition, and the bride does not want to give that up in exchange for a new necklace from her mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-07-17T21:42:31.707" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3022" CreationDate="2017-07-18T01:02:41.990" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been a couple of different explanations given for this, but the upshot seems to be that &lt;strong&gt;there's nothing particularly significant about the masculinity of April&lt;/strong&gt; - it was more a product of the way language was used at the time than any kind of symbolic statement about masculinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQRXCAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes to the Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; (2014)&lt;/a&gt;, Prof Walter Skeat says that the masculinity of Aprille is derived from that of the Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aprilis#Proper_noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aprilis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Latin was of course much more widely used, especially in literature, in Chaucer's day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in his notes published &lt;a href=&quot;https://tigerweb.towson.edu/duncan/chaucer/notes-gpopening.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and based on those of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dfjV8a75qV4C&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_slider_thumb&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Pollard&lt;/a&gt;, Prof Edwin Duncan cites Skeat and then points out that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; in Chaucer's time was the neuter, as well as the masculine, genitive, there is no evidence that Chaucer here personified either the month or the wind as a masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why &quot;his&quot; was used as a neuter pronoun is that &lt;strong&gt;the word &quot;its&quot; didn't exist yet&lt;/strong&gt;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/its&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/a&gt;, the neuter possessive pronoun &quot;its&quot; dates back to around the 16th century, well after Chaucer's time. (Thanks to @GarethRees for pointing this out to me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T13:01:02.177" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T13:01:02.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T02:21:24.350" Score="6" ViewCount="1106" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many characters in Gaiman's Sandman stories that have multiple names; Morpheus is one of them. For the most part, they usually don't mind if someone calls them by one name or another. The first that I've seen this happen was with Ishtar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After meeting Ishtar, Morpheus calls her by two other names for goddesses of love (Belili and Astarte). She corrects him both times, asking him to call her only &quot;Ishtar.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C1Vhh.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/C1Vhh.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;both images from &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #45&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dream: Hello, Belili.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ishtar: Ishtar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ishtar: What brings you here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dream: You do, Astarte.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ishtar: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ishtar.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This exchange is interesting, and makes me wonder if there is a reason that Ishtar insists on that name, as opposed to the others? Perhaps there is a historical element of worship that Ishtar had that Belili and Astarte didn't, that allowed her to draw the power she needed to live from the nightclub where she danced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T15:19:27.630" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T13:27:58.223" Title="Why does Ishtar insist on being called &quot;Ishtar&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-15T20:44:03.213" Score="5" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not quite understand the last sentence. Why  did Jonathan say one vampire meant many? What did he mean by &quot;the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks? Does he mean that he has made up his mind to become a vampire too if Mina became one, or that he wants to use his love to help Mina ascend to heaven if Mina became a vampire? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="conan" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T09:50:56.217" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T12:52:53.263" Title="What does this sentence mean (from 'Dracula')?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;bram-stoker&gt;&lt;dracula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T13:49:51.113" Score="5" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Agatha Christie's book The Listerdale Mystery, in the story Swan Song, there is the following qoute:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It required no imagination to realise that his father's name had been Cohen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes after a description of Mr Cowen, the agent of an Opera Singer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with a frame rather too well covered, and clothes that were rather too faultless. His hair was very black and shining, and his teeth were aggressively white. When he spoke he had a way of slurring his 's's' which was not quite a lisp, but came perilously near to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it then relatively obvious (i.e. it requires no imagination) that Mr Cowen's actual surname is Cohen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T11:35:53.823" Title="Why was Cowen easily seen to have been Cohen?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;the-listerdale-mystery&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-18T14:07:52.370" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Agatha Christie's book The Listerdale Mystery, in the story Mr Eastwood's adventure, there is the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He knew only too well that the kind of story that the editor in question did not want that kind of story - beautiful though it might be. The kind of story he wanted, and insisted on having (and incidentally paid handsomely for getting), was all about mysterious dark women, stabbed to the heart, a young hero unjustly suspected, and the sudden unraveling of the mystery  and fixing of the guilt on the least likely person, by the means of wholly inadequate clues; in fact,&#xA;  'THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'Although', reflected Anthony, &quot;ten to one, he'll alter the title and call it something rotten, like &quot;Murder Most Foul&quot; without so much as asking me!&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anthony is an author and is trying to write a story called THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND CUCUMBER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if this excerpt is possibly a dig by Agatha Christie at her editor? I know that there was a movie based loosely on one of her books called &lt;em&gt;Murder Most Foul&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is if there is any evidence that this excerpt is 'pointed' at anyone, i.e. more than just a bit of atmosphere for the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T14:26:24.200" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T12:14:03.903" Title="Is this quote by Mr Eastwood a pointed remark by Agatha Christie?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;the-listerdale-mystery&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3033" CreationDate="2017-07-18T18:12:16.690" Score="3" ViewCount="567" Body="&lt;p&gt;Siegfried Sassoon's short poem &quot;The Hero&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hero/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text here&lt;/a&gt;) is about a young soldier who has died in the First World War, and describes the news of his death being given to his grieving mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I studied this poem for an English literature GCSE, I remember disliking the character of the &quot;Brother Officer&quot;, thinking him an arrogant, patronising man who had more contempt than sympathy for the dead man and his mother. So I was surprised to read commentary from an examiner which was much more positive about him and painted him as a sympathetic figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is the Brother Officer being portrayed in this poem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially since the poem is written from his point of view, this question should be answerable by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1885/17&quot;&gt;close reading&lt;/a&gt; - perhaps the choice of words used to describe him or his thoughts can be analysed to deduce his attitudes. Answers which draw on extratextual information, such as Sassoon's attitude towards the army, would also be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:55:38.907" Title="How is the Brother Officer being portrayed in &quot;The Hero&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;siegfried-sassoon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3025" CreationDate="2017-07-18T19:41:23.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think @Shokhet is probably correct in that it's likely a form of teasing/light antagonism, but, on further reflection, it probably goes deeper than that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is an older, less known name for Ishtar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names have power, and Morpheus is showing some by reminding her he knows her entire history.  (The &lt;a href=&quot;http://sandman.wikia.com/wiki/Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Endless&lt;/a&gt; are older than the gods, and likely more powerful.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is related to Tammuz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has multiple implications with negative emotional resonance:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tammuz is the slain lover of Ishtar/Belili, and so the reference has negative emotional resonance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Ishtar returns from the underworld, she finds Tammuz/Dumuzid on his throne, &quot;not mourning her at all&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Tammuz version of her descent to the underworld, Ishtar's agency could be said to be diminished by the involvement of Tammuz as the objective—Gaiman is post-modern so this may be a consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Babylonian version, Belili is distinct from Ishtar, presented as a version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geshtinanna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geshtinanna&lt;/a&gt;, sister (and lover?) of Tammuz, who takes Ishtar/Inanna's place in the underworld.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Belili is the underworld version of Ishtar, and the Sumerian underworld is no kind of fun.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using Belili carries the implication that she is in a kind of hell&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, working in a strip club where dancers have to put up with a lot of crap, as men in such settings do not always act in a respectful manner. This is particularly problematic when you remove the &quot;temple&quot; context [see note], resulting in a degraded form. Sex workers are widely stigmatized.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, as I seem to recall, she cannot &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; dance, in the sense of her status as the Great Goddess, which must be a kind of torture. (She cannot be herself, only a diminished reflection of herself.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This may be a reference to a certain conception of the cycle of Greek Mythology, which from certain perspectives (certainly Graves's) can be understood as a subjugation of feminine power, which is to say diminishment of the power and status of the Great Goddess.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The idea of &quot;temple prostitution&quot; in Mesopotamia is disputed, but the idea caught hold, as it can be regarded from many perspectives, including a feminist perspective, and is definitely present in modern, speculative fiction.  It is this idea Gaiman is referencing with Ishtar's situation and existence. Taking the life of her lovers is sometimes referred to as the Great Marriage (aka death).  Gene Wolfe wrote about this aspect of the Goddess in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Are_Doors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There Are Doors&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T13:26:04.003" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T13:26:04.003" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3040" CreationDate="2017-07-18T20:28:06.080" Score="9" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Moby Dick, beginning of chapter 10, I read about the resemblance of Queequeg's head to George Washington's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It may seem ridiculous, but it reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to this European, George Washington is better known as first President of the United States of America than as general. So why is he called &lt;em&gt;General&lt;/em&gt; here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.it/search?q=Washington%27s%20bust&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj8sLm21JPVAhVFmbQKHXNEAdsQ_AUIBigB&amp;amp;biw=1313&amp;amp;bih=654&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Washington's bust&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Google Images and I found he is not always represented in a uniform. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these are the options I could think of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's just me: Washington is more famous as general than as president&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's Europe vs USA: for Americans, Washington is more famous as general than as president&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's now vs then: in 1850s, Washington used to be more famous as general than as president&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="77" LastEditorUserId="77" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T20:58:37.710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:54:30.793" Title="Why does Melville call Washington &quot;General&quot; rather than &quot;President&quot;" Tags="&lt;herman-melville&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3030" CreationDate="2017-07-18T20:55:38.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your reading of the poem, Rand. On reading the poem, I did not find any evidence to support that the &quot;Brother Officer&quot; is nice. I did, however, find plenty of evidence to the contrary, primarily from the third stanza, which is composed of Brother Officer's private thoughts. Here are some:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Jack', cold-footed, useless swine,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The officer has only negative, malicious thoughts about the fallen soldier -- a &quot;sympathetic figure&quot; would not consider a fallen soldier a &quot;useless swine&quot; even if that soldier was not the sharpest tool in the shed or a little afraid of battle. (And &quot;'Jack',&quot; in quote marks? Did you even know this soldier?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And no one seemed to care &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; care, Brother Officer? Aren't you &quot;sympathetic&quot; toward this soldier who died in service of his country, or his mother?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And no one seemed to care&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Except that lonely woman with white hair. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;that lonely woman with the white hair&quot; is a mother who just lost her son in war. &quot;Sympathetic figure&quot; my foot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few other small clues in the poem that point toward this conclusion, but I think that these are the most egregious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T20:55:38.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-18T21:18:51.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T21:18:51.023" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T21:18:51.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-18T21:18:51.023" Score="0" Body="For questions about the series by L. Frank Baum based in the Land of Oz. This includes the famous &quot;The Wonderful Wizard of Oz&quot; (1900) as well as several lesser-known sequels. Use this tag together with the [l-frank-baum] tag." OwnerUserId="481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-18T22:41:04.297" LastActivityDate="2017-07-18T22:41:04.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-15T17:20:43.363" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.classicreader.com/book/3383/1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Man, the Maid and the Miasma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by P.G. Wodehouse ends with the following paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He bent across the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Isn't this like the old times?' he said. 'Do you remember the first time I ever ki–'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just then the orchestra broke out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence I am wondering about is the last, &amp;quot;Just then the orchestra broke out&amp;quot;. My first thought was that it was all a play in the theatre, because there were a few references to the theater in the story. Am I right, or is there a better explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="loading..." LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T00:04:01.190" Title="What does &quot;the orchestra broke out&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;p-g-wodehouse&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3036" CreationDate="2017-07-15T17:57:11.177" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Break out&lt;/strong&gt; in the dictionary means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to develop or emerge with suddenness or force  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/break%20out&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples given are &lt;em&gt;the fire broke out&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the riot broke out&lt;/em&gt;, meaning, suddenly began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, 'the orchestra broke out' means 'suddenly started playing'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1896" OwnerDisplayName="marcellothearcane" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T17:57:11.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3036" CreationDate="2017-07-15T18:07:58.133" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are having supper in a place with an orchestra - possibly a night club. This is mentioned earlier in the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'As a matter of fact,' he said, haughtily, 'I was to have had supper&#xA;with a chorus-girl this very night.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The orchestra is getting ready to play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Bob,' said the girl, as the first threatening mutters from the&#xA;orchestra heralded an imminent storm of melody, …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the comparison to a &lt;strong&gt;storm&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/break+out&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;break out&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to burst forth suddenly, as with a fire, a riot, giggling, shouting, etc. &lt;em&gt;A fire broke out in the belfry. A round of giggling&#xA;broke out when the teacher tripped.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/storm_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a storm breaks (=begins):&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A violent storm broke just as we reached the mountain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="michael.hor257k" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-15T18:07:58.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2984" CreationDate="2017-07-19T02:37:44.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was pretty clear when I hiked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetherlam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wetherlam&lt;/a&gt; and along Hole Rake that that was the setting of &lt;em&gt;Pigeon Post&lt;/em&gt;: Wetherlam = High Topps.  This is borne out by the books by Hugh Brogan and Christina Hardyment cited on the Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On p.344 of Hugh Brogan's &lt;em&gt;The Life of Arthur Ransome&lt;/em&gt; is this quote from Ransome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He [Oscar Gnospellius] had spent much of his life as a prospector, in Peru and Africa, and he gallantly threw himself into the business of my prospecting children, lecturing me on gosson, veins, reefs, pyrites and what not, demonstrating, with the tools he had himself used, the methods of panning and washing, and taking me up Weatherlam &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; to make sure of the details of Slater Bob's activities and the ancient tunnels on the hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot locate my copy of Hardyment's &lt;em&gt;Arthur Ransome and Captain Flint's Trunk&lt;/em&gt;, but the local college library has a copy of her &lt;em&gt;The World of Arthur Ransome&lt;/em&gt;, which documents (with diary quotes and illustrations, p.97) his visiting Tilberthwaite Valley gathering info for &lt;em&gt;Pigeon Post&lt;/em&gt;. This is the gully that Tilberthwaite Gill runs down the eastern edge of Wetherlam.  See &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.one-foot.com/Hole%20Rake%20and%20Tilberthwaite%20Gill%202009.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this web site&lt;/a&gt; for an overview of the relationship between these places.  The whole area is riddled with old mine workings, and more: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the north end of the second old quarry is a cave (walled up) once used as a whisky still by the notorious Lanty Slee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Map &quot;Wetherlam 4&quot; in A. Wainwright's &lt;em&gt;The Southern Fells&lt;/em&gt; (1960, Kendal).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T00:58:13.703" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T00:58:13.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3032" CreationDate="2017-07-19T05:43:13.490" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Checking &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=General%20Washington%2CPresident%20Washington%2CGeneral%20George%20Washington%2CPresident%20George%20Washington%2CGeorge%20Washington&amp;amp;year_start=1770&amp;amp;year_end=1900&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CGeneral%20Washington%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CPresident%20Washington%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CGeneral%20George%20Washington%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CPresident%20George%20Washington%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CGeorge%20Washington%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Google Ngrams viewer, from 1770 to 1900&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BywfS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BywfS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram frequency graph&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see that &quot;General Washington&quot; was by far the most common appellation during the years &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; was written and published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not an American, so I can only guess as to why this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His role of the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army is far more important and influential than his role of the first President of the US. After all, if it weren't for the military role, the presidential role wouldn't even have happened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And, of course, there was only ever one  Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, but many Presidents of the US since.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further, he was a military man for much of his early life.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As removed as we are from those times, and given the global importance that the office of the President of the US has gained, for &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; it seems that Washington as President is more important than Washington as General. But that is not necessarily the case during those decades immediately after the US gained independence when the War of Independence would have been the most significant event of the preceding hundred years or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that if you look up some of the books that Google used for this result, you'll see titles like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=McrTAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Life of General Washington, First President of the United States&lt;/a&gt; (1851), which extensively uses letters and memoirs written by Washington;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=8lNPAQAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Life of General Washington, Commander in Chief of the American Forces&lt;/a&gt; (1846);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=t-_Z4hXcx18C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Life of General Washington&lt;/a&gt;, which claims to be the &quot;only biography authorized by Washington himself&quot;, re-assembled and published in 1991 from older manuscripts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T13:54:30.793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:54:30.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3028" CreationDate="2017-07-19T10:29:59.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only stereotype I know of relating to the name Cohen is that it's a very common Jewish surname, coming directly from the Hebrew כֹּהֵן‎ (kōhēn) meaning &quot;priest&quot;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohen_(surname)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bearing the surname often (although not always) indicates that one's patrilineal ancestors were priests in the Temple of Jerusalem. A single such priest was known as a Kohen, and the hereditary caste descending from these priests is collectively known as the Kohanim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if someone is described as being clearly descended from a Cohen, the only thing I can think of is that their appearance must be somehow very Jewish. I'm not familiar enough with these stereotypes to be sure, but perhaps the accent described is influenced by Yiddish? Anyway, this must be what the passage is supposed to mean, as that's the significance of the name Cohen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Interestingly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowen_(surname)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cowen&lt;/a&gt; is an Irish surname, with no Jewish connections as far as I'm aware. Presumably the surname change from Cohen to Cowen, if indeed there was one, was part of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-do-some-Jewish-families-and-individuals-change-their-last-name-to-something-non-Jewish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reasonably common practice&lt;/a&gt; among Jewish families in those days to change their surnames to less Jewish-sounding ones.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T10:29:59.090" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3045" CreationDate="2017-07-19T10:59:56.207" Score="15" ViewCount="22769" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hamlet's very last words are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rest is silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do they actually mean? This being Shakespeare, I reckon the significance of these words cannot be only the banal comparison between death and silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if these words have a theological connotation, too, which would not be surprising at all when we learn, early on in the play, that Hamlet was a student at Wittenberg, where Luther himself also studied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1179" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T11:10:21.613" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T15:34:59.407" Title="The meaning of &quot;The rest is silence&quot; in &quot;Hamlet&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3043" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-19T12:45:43.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-19T12:45:43.637" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T12:45:43.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3044" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-19T12:45:43.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Hamlet' by William Shakespeare, and related materials. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T21:02:28.800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T21:02:28.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2017-07-19T15:14:00.057" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There appear to be multiple ways of reading this sentence, depending on how you interpret the context of &quot;rest&quot; and &quot;silence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet has been experiencing a great deal of upset and distress during the course of the play. Enough to drive him to madness. So one possible reading of this sentence is that the &quot;silence&quot; of death will finally allow him to &quot;rest&quot;. &quot;Going to your rest&quot; is, of course, a common euphemism for death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also the end of the play, as well as the end of Hamlet. &quot;The rest is silence&quot; can be read literally in the context of the performance: there is little left to watch, after which the characters will be silent. And in the context of the play itself, Hamlet himself will be silenced by death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it can also be read as a continuation of the speech and little to do with death itself. Before expiring, Hamlet is talking about the possible outcome of Fortinbras's election. &quot;The rest is silence&quot; could be interpreted as a statement saying Hamlet would vote for him, but the outcome is otherwise uncertain. &quot;The rest&quot; of the possible outcome is &quot;silent&quot;: one can imagine a personification of fate or prophecy refusing to speak more on the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you like puns, and Shakespeare seems to have done, there's one here. Shortly before his dying speech, Hamlet personifies Death and refers to the act of dying as an &quot;arrest&quot;. So here he is saying &quot;th'[e/a]rest [i.e. dying] is silence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a major theme of the play is mortality and the question of what comes after. We see this in Hamlet's statements about the ghost of his father, about Yorick, about men going to die in battle. We see it, most famously in &quot;to be or not to be&quot; and in an &quot;undiscover'd country&quot;. &quot;The rest is silence&quot; could be a statement of uncertainty: Hamlet is about to find out the answer to this question but he cannot tell anyone what it is. In fact, the answer may be &quot;silence&quot;, i.e. oblivion. This is your theological connotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the literary value in this short line appears to be one of substantial ambiguity. Which is fitting, given the questions of uncertainty and faith at the heart of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T14:52:24.327" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T14:52:24.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3066" CreationDate="2017-07-19T16:18:37.223" Score="6" ViewCount="2995" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, O'Brien claims that the party's philosophy is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; solipsism. Why does he claim that? Was he telling the truth, and how does the party's philosophy &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; differ from solipsism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From chapter 3, section 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind - surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false. Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I told you, Winston,&amp;quot; [O'Brien] said, &amp;quot;that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing; in fact, the opposite thing...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does O'Brien claim that the party's philosophy is not only different than solipsism, but its exact opposite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T02:14:22.170" Title="Why does O'Brien claim that the party didn't believe in solipsism?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3195" CreationDate="2017-07-19T16:26:21.857" Score="8" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that O'Brien shows a high level of awareness of the Party's deceptiveness and malice (e.g. the fact that he admitted to being involved in creating and promoting the Goldstein myth), to what extent does he actually believe in the system himself? Why wasn't he considered a thought criminal? Or were Inner Party members not &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; expected to conform to the party's beliefs to the same extent that Outer Party members were as long as everyone else was convinced that they did? Or is he practicing some form of doublethink?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of example, he said in chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that a closely related question is whether the telescreen in his house actually worked and whether he could &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; turn it off. If it worked, who was monitoring him, and what were they actually monitoring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T18:22:47.160" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:37:29.107" Title="Why wasn't O'Brien considered a thought criminal?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:04:21.990" Score="11" ViewCount="6674" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, it is pretty clear that there is some sort of war going on outside of the island (the dogfight that leads to the dead pilot, the naval ship that rescues the boys at the end, the evacuation of the boys). The vibe I got was that it was WW2. It wasn't explicit, but the book was published not long after the war &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Golding#Novels&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1954)&lt;/a&gt; and Golding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Golding#War_service&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fought in that war&lt;/a&gt; and just the overall tone seemed to fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently I have repeatedly come across the suggestion that the war was, in fact, nuclear. Both a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Flies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cl5r40hzij4&amp;amp;t=11s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube video&lt;/a&gt; repeated this claim. Am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems unlikely to me because the boys are being evacuated. Nuclear war, as we now know, is either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;very sudden&lt;/a&gt;, making evacuation impractical; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;very cold&lt;/a&gt;, making evacuation unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T01:53:46.963" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T20:08:23.533" Title="Is there really a nuclear war in the world of &quot;The Lord of the Flies&quot;?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2017-07-19T20:55:14.397" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;With Shakespeare's characters, you usually know what they're thinking. With Hamlet, you're never sure. In the second scene he goes over recent events but says, &quot;I must hold my tongue!&quot; He agonizes over his situation, considers every alternative, and finds reasons to avoid action, but he never tells us what drives him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He behaves as if there are voices in his head, not one but several, each pulling him in a different direction. He can't commit to one course of action because he knows he'll change course sooner or later. He is the first to admit he might be insane. Is he &quot;crazy like a fox,&quot; only pretending to fool his enemies, or is he truly schizophrenic? You're never sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might suppose that the fatal poison (or his impending death) is enough to silence the voices for a moment. In that moment he is the rightful king of Denmark, and he gives Horatio instructions. Before he dies, he gives us the only indication of his mental state. The voices will be gone forever. &quot;The rest is silence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's one interpretation. Another is that Hamlet, like several other characters in Shakespeare, is aware of being a fictional construct. He forgoes action because, as the ringmaster, he has others to manipulate. He even puts on a play within the play. It's only in the denouement that he takes on his rightful role. His final words are a stage direction &lt;em&gt;to himself&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-19T20:55:14.397" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-19T23:53:12.627" Score="2" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;About a year ago I discovered &lt;em&gt;Twin Peaks&lt;/em&gt; on Netflix, and I am currently enjoying every moment of season 3. I've really come to appreciate the subtleties and nuances of David Lynch's style of storytelling. While I want to dive further into his cinematic canon (which would be a question for a different SE community), I am curious about influences on his work from a literary perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has David Lynch ever identified specific literary influences -- works and/or writers -- that have shaped the way he tells stories?&lt;/strong&gt; It doesn't necessarily have to be an influence on &lt;em&gt;Twin Peaks&lt;/em&gt; in particular, but that would be a bonus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="258" LastEditorUserId="258" LastEditDate="2017-07-20T00:36:31.377" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T16:44:38.317" Title="Literature and the work of David Lynch" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;twin-peaks&gt;&lt;david-lynch&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3022" CreationDate="2017-07-20T10:29:04.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is possibly a reference to astrology.  In western astrology, April is regarded as a masculine month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April is the month of Aries, The Ram, a masculine sign.  It is ruled by Mars, a masculine planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As astrology was more highly regarded in Chaucer's time than today, he could well be making a reference to April's astrological masculinity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, to be sure of this as an explanation, a reference to a feminine month using feminine pronoun is needed.  I can't immediately think of such a reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T10:29:04.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3068" CreationDate="2017-07-20T11:30:17.160" Score="8" ViewCount="6459" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ralph Crown mentions in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3050/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; that a particular line in the play &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; could be interpreted as Hamlet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_wall&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;breaking the fourth wall&lt;/a&gt;, and implies that this is common in Shakespeare plays:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another [interpretation] is that Hamlet, like several other characters in Shakespeare, is aware of being a fictional construct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about how widespread this phenomenon actually is, especially if we exclude things like the &quot;Chorus&quot; or &quot;Prologue&quot; in plays such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2525/17&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, and also exclude lines such as the one in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; which could be interpreted as fourth-wall-breaking but could also be interpreted in other, non-immersion-breaking ways. I realise that there's a lot of ambiguity and double meanings in Shakespeare, but some things leave little room for doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many of Shakespeare's actual theatrical &lt;em&gt;characters&lt;/em&gt; have lines which are fairly unambiguously breaking the fourth wall?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T15:50:48.313" Title="Do a lot of Shakespeare characters break the fourth wall?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3026" CreationDate="2017-07-20T12:52:53.263" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jonathan means that he will become a vampire too if Mina does.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's pick apart that quote you've highlighted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To one thing I have made up my mind. If we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land (the state of vampirehood), but that she shall not go &lt;em&gt;alone&lt;/em&gt;. He's saying it would be better for her to have company as a vampire than to suffer such a fate alone, and he's decided that if necessary he will make the supreme sacrifice to join her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One vampire &quot;meant&quot; many, in the sense that when one vampire is created, many more will follow on its heels. In this case, one vampire (Mina) would mean at least two (Mina and Jonathan). He's surmising that each time a human was converted to a vampire in the past, they would often be joined in that state by others who loved them and didn't want them to suffer eternally alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms the above interpretation: love is the &quot;recruiting sergeant&quot; for the ranks of vampires, meaning it is love that causes new vampires to be created from humans. Love - in this case, Jonathan's love for Mina - causes one human to follow another into vampiredom, thus swelling the ranks of vampires more than if the first human 'turned' had nobody who loved them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T12:52:53.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T14:58:51.420" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cat in &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt; calls the children 'dear little things':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The children, dear little things, now trot off, day after day, to kindergarten: but on their return, they sing songs, bounce balls and sometimes hang me up by the tail.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even in that quote we see that they don't treat the cat well - they 'hang me up by the tail'. And we see earlier, as well, that the cat and children don't get along so well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are two children, one of five and one of three: they sleep in their own room, sharing a bed. I can always find a space between their bodies, and I manage somehow to squeeze myself quietly in. But if, by great ill-luck, one of the children wakes, then I am in trouble. For the children have nasty natures, especially the younger one. They start to cry out noisily, regardless of the time, even in the middle of the night, shouting, “Here’s the cat!” Then invariably the neurotic dyspeptic in the next room wakes and comes rushing in. Why, only the other day, my master beat my backside black and blue with a wooden ruler.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... why does the cat call the children 'dear little things' if they treat the cat so badly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:03:37.267" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:03:37.267" Title="Why does the cat call the children 'dear little things' if they treat the cat badly?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3056" CreationDate="2017-07-20T16:30:39.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's most likely being sarcastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble finding anywhere else where the cat uses that kind of direct sarcasm, but such sarcasm definitely fits with the style of ironic verbal abuse that comprises most of his narration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But however ugly I may be, there’s no conceivable resemblance between myself and that queer thing which my master is creating [in his bad watercolor painting]. First of all, the coloring is wrong. My fur, like that of a Persian, bears tortoiseshell markings on a ground of a yellowish pale grey. It is a fact beyond all argument. Yet the color which my master has employed is neither yellow nor black; neither grey nor brown; nor is it any mixture of those four distinctive colors. All one can say is that the color used is a sort of color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am A Cat&lt;/em&gt; (p. 8). Kindle Edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure of the sentence also fits with a sarcastic interpretation. If you leave off the last bit, it says &amp;quot;The children, dear little things, now trot off, day after day, to kindergarten: but on their return, they sing songs, bounce balls [...]&amp;quot;. Without the last bit, they do sound like dear little things, nice children who trot off to kindergarten for fun and learning, then return home and enjoy an idyllic afternoon of singing and bouncing balls. But the cat then slips in at the end that they sometimes hang him up by the tail, which is not dear or idyllic at all; it's something that nasty little children who will probably grow up to be serial killers would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line also plays into the narrative conceit of the book. The cat is privy to all sorts of things that no human knows about, because he can go anywhere unnoticed, like a fly on the wall. Maybe even more unnoticed—I swat at flies if I see them, but I wouldn't chase off a cat. To anyone else, the children probably do seem like dear little things with their songs and their balls, but the cat knows something more about them, that they're also little monsters who hang him up by his tail and pitch him out of bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-07-20T16:30:39.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3063" CreationDate="2017-07-20T17:03:30.553" Score="8" ViewCount="4531" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Paul Simon's album Graceland there is a song All Around the World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This song has a repeating theme in the verses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is always some variation of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no doubt about it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three instances are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says there's no doubt about it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there's no doubt about it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said there's no doubt about it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Full lyrics &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/music/preview/Tvto3zg6nnu2sgstakjwbihn4ki?lyrics=1&amp;amp;utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=search&amp;amp;utm_campaign=lyrics&amp;amp;pcampaignid=kp-lyrics&amp;amp;u=0#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what the myth of fingerprints is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T10:15:03.567" Title="What is the Myth of Fingerprints?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;paul-simon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-20T17:48:55.633" Score="5" ViewCount="1106" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things I've noticed through reading Shakespeare is that a lot of his plays include a meta-reference making fun of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; Fabian says &quot;If this were played upon a stage now, I could / condemn it as an improbable fiction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer-Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Puck tells the audience that if they don't like the play, which he describes as &quot;this weak and idle theme&quot;, they should pretend it was a dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we shadows have offended,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Think but this, and all is mended,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          That you have but slumber’d here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          While these visions did appear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          And this weak and idle theme,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          No more yielding but a dream,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping to get a list of every single meta-reference where Shakespeare makes fun of his own play. I've looked online, and I haven't been able to find such a list, so I'm hoping to use the collaborative power of the internet to make one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T20:13:16.143" Title="Shakespeare making fun of Shakespeare: listing all of the self-deprecating meta-references in Shakespeare's plays" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-07-25T02:28:42.267" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3059" CreationDate="2017-07-20T20:10:58.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rosalind, &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, Act V Scene 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If it be true that good wine needs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and good plays prove the better by the help of good&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  you in the behalf of a good play!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Puck, &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Act V Scene 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gentles, do not reprehend:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  if you pardon, we will mend:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, as I am an honest Puck,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If we have unearned luck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We will make amends ere long;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The &quot;serpent's tongue&quot; is a hissing sound, another form of audience disapproval.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prospero, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV Scene 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our revels now are ended. These our actors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As I foretold you, were all spirits and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are melted into air, into thin air:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Leave not a rack behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The &quot;great globe&quot; could be a reference to the Globe Theatre.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;King John&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By heaven, these scroyles of Angiers flout you, kings;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And stand securely on their battlements,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As in a theatre, whence they gape and point&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At your industrious scenes and acts of death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O, there be&#xA;  players that I have seen play, and heard others&#xA;  praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely,&#xA;  that, neither having the accent of Christians nor&#xA;  the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so&#xA;  strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of&#xA;  nature's journeymen had made men and not made them&#xA;  well, they imitated humanity so abominably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T20:13:16.143" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T20:13:16.143" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-07-20T20:10:58.987" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-21T08:38:42.903" Score="6" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago, roaming around in a library, I stumbled across a short novel about the future of communication. I think that it was written in the 70s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting from the first appearance of the Reader's Digest, the author imagined the future of literature was described as progressive condensation of information. Forced by the more and more pronounced frenzy of daily life, people lacked time and looked for shorter and shorter news, literature and personal conversations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd love to read again this novel but I forgot title and author. It was a short (and a bit gloomy) story. It was translated into Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1905" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-21T11:10:26.427" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T11:10:26.427" Title="Novel about the future of communication, everything becoming shorter and shorter" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3314" CreationDate="2017-07-21T11:21:20.610" Score="4" ViewCount="1142" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Than in the storm smoking along the wind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Athwart the wood. Two witches' cauldrons roar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From one the weather shall rise clear and gay;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the other an England beautiful&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And like her mother that died yesterday.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57205/this-is-no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full poem&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just getting to know this poem; I think I understand the emotional turns, but these lines are confusing me. He has just said that the choices are not between &amp;quot;justice and injustice&amp;quot; -- so the image in these lines seems to represent the true choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they supposed to sound indistinguishable? One one hand we have &amp;quot;clear and gay&amp;quot; weather, and on the other we have &amp;quot;an England beautiful&amp;quot;. Is Thomas trying to say that it doesn't matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And who is England's mother, and why did she die yesterday? (Would this be a reference that was clear to readers at the time?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1907" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T17:22:58.030" Title="What do these lines in Edward Thomas's 'This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong' mean?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edward-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3058" CreationDate="2017-07-21T11:23:22.433" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;myth of fingerprints&quot; is that by focusing on trivial aspects of ourselves, we appear to be very different when in fact we have much more in common with one another. It's also a literal myth: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/14/why-your-fingerprints-may-not-be-unique/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fingerprints are highly differential but they are not unique&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As user @PeterShor very helpfully observed in the comments, our commonality is emphasised by this line, where &quot;they&quot; is fingerprints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have seen them all, and man, they're all the same&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While our differences are stressed by the final verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lives a former talk-show host&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   And far and wide his name was known&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   He said, “There’s no doubt about it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That’s why we must learn to live alone”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The myth of fingerprints condemns us to live alone - as atomised, quarrelsome individuals - when we could instead enjoy the fruits of living in harmony. It's interesting that the subject of the song is a talk show host, someone who makes a living interviewing the rich and famous and thus focussing on what makes them &quot;different&quot; from everyday people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous verse becomes interesting in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out in the Indian Ocean somewhere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There’s a former army post&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Abandoned now just like the war&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And there’s no doubt about it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was the myth of fingerprints&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That’s what that old army post was for  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armies are required because we fight over our differences: it's what &quot;the old army post was for&quot;. There is, however, hope that we might learn. The army post is abandoned. There is also only one US army base in the Indian Ocean - Diego Garcia. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Garcia#Arrival_of_the_US_Navy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Its inhabitants were forcibly removed by the US navy&lt;/a&gt; prior to building the base. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth remembering that this is the closing track on an album which features critiques of racism as a major theme. Racism is founded on differences - the myth of fingerprints. This is all over other repeated structures in the song. &quot;Watermelon&quot; is a common racist motif in the US. &quot;Black pit town,&quot; could be a mining town, or also a mining town populated by people of colour. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics about the sun rising and falling (&quot;bloody&quot; - another conflict motif) and &quot;all around the world&quot; suggest this has been going on essentially forever. We notice it - &quot;somebody says what's a better thing to do&quot; - but do nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is a song about how conflict and oppression are built on emphasizing small differences between people. It opines that this is human nature and that we must, to some extent, learn to live with it. But that it shouldn't stop us asking questions and doing what we can to improve matters, even if we must, eventually, &quot;learn to live alone&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T07:34:36.507" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T07:34:36.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2017-07-21T14:26:35.627" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's admittedly been a little while since I read the book, but I don't think that we have to assume that it was nuclear. The book is quite explicit that there was some kind of war, and the implication from the end of the book (with the naval ship visible at the end) that it was brutal and in some way analogous to the war that took place on the island, but it never says (or, to my knowledge, implies) that it was nuclear; the story line could have just as easily applied to a conventional war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Germany launched 1,402 V-2 rockets at the U.K., 1358 of which were launched at London. These missiles weren't especially accurate, but they were spectacular at intimidation; they could, as I understand it, fly above the cloud cover, so from the observers' perspective, they &quot;appeared out of nowhere&quot; with little warning and at seemingly arbitrary targets. (The fact that nearly 97% of them were launched at London gives you a sense of how extensively the city was targeted during WWII).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was actually quite common to evacuate people (especially children) from populated areas, and that did actually appear in literature of the time. For comparison, in the &lt;em&gt;Narnia&lt;/em&gt; series, &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; is quite explicit about the fact that the Pevensies had been sent to the country to escape the bombing of London. There was &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; a nuclear bomb detonated in the U.K. (although the book was written after the nuclear bombing of Japan). Although this book was obviously written by a different author for a different audience, the point is that this kind of evacuation was hardly unique to &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, nor was it all that uncommon historically (especially in areas like London that experienced heavy bombing), nor do we have to assume that authors were referring to nuclear weapons. Conventional warfare was more than brutal enough to justify the evacuations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T17:16:44.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T17:16:44.147" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="776" CreationDate="2017-07-21T14:42:09.397" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heaney, as you have suggested in your third paragraph, was a terrific translator, his finest translation being &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of a translator is critical; translators must know more than the linguistic differences between the languages; they must be able to understand and convey the cultural similarities and differences between the source and the target languages. To do such translation requires more than technical language skills; it requires the ‘right’ awareness of the role of translation and translation issues as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the above passage, I think Heaney hits the right note when he translates it, the conveyance of the poem using a slight re-wording may annoy especially if the original author had not intended it this way but that is never Heany's focus. It is to tell the story from a new perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To borrow his own words, Seamus Heaney, the man and his poetry, forever catches, 'the heart off guard, and blows it open'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1908" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T02:24:02.337" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T02:24:02.337" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3046" CreationDate="2017-07-21T16:18:10.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Classic&quot; solipsism states that only one's own mind can be certain to exist. It's at least partially an attempted solution to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;problem of other minds&lt;/a&gt;: given that we can only observe other peoples' behavior, not access their consciousness somehow, how do we know that they actually &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; conscious? It's actually a surprisingly difficult question - imagine if you encountered a new species that's quite unlike humans and were trying to determine if its members were conscious; how would you go about testing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another consideration here is that it's impossible to coherently doubt your own existence (because if you do doubt that, who or what's doing the doubting?), which is why proponents of solipsism can be certain of the existence of their own mind (if nothing else). A student once asked a famous philosopher &quot;how do I know I exist?&quot; The philosopher simply replied &quot;who's asking the question?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have &quot;collective solipsism,&quot; you've essentially already admitted the actual existence of other minds, so in that sense it's the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, like solipsism, the Party holds that they can actually alter external reality just by declaring it to be so (e.g. 2 + 2 = 5). O'Brien also extends the argument that, in a sense, the past only &quot;exists&quot; in written records and in peoples' memories; given that the Party controls both, they can (supposedly) rewrite history. This implies that history doesn't have an external reality beyond human consciousness; under this philosophy, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, it didn't make a sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T16:18:10.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2017-07-21T17:20:10.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unambiguously&lt;/strong&gt; is key here, since his plays are filled with little winks to the audience.  The first example that came to mind was Robin Goodfellow's monologue at the end of Midsummer Night's Dream:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If we shadows have offended, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Think but this and all is mended: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That you have but slumbered here &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While these visions did appear. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And this weak and idle theme, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No more yielding but a dream, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gentles, do not reprehend. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you pardon, we will mend. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, as I am an honest Puck, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If we have unearnèd luck &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We will make amends ere long. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Else the Puck a liar call. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So good night unto you all. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Give me your hands, if we be friends, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Robin shall restore amends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T17:20:10.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2017-07-21T23:28:42.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original claim isn't that characters &lt;em&gt;break&lt;/em&gt; the fourth wall, just that they are aware that they are fictional. In TV Tropes terms, this is &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LeaningOnTheFourthWall&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;leaning on the fourth wall&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lampshading&lt;/a&gt;. (Not coincidentally, both use the same line from &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; as a page quote!). Many of these examples &quot;could also be interpreted in other, non-immersion-breaking ways&quot;, but I'd argue that an audience watching a play on a stage with a literal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscenium&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;proscenium&lt;/a&gt; would not fail to notice that the actors are commenting on the play in progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples from the &lt;em&gt;Leaning on the Fourth Wall&lt;/em&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Twelfth Night: &quot;If this were play'd upon a stage now, I would condemn it as improbable fiction&quot; (Act 3 Sc 4)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As You Like It: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;All the world's a stage&lt;/a&gt; and we are but players.&quot; (Act 2 Sc 7)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Julius Caesar: &quot;How many ages hence shall this our lofty scene be acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown!&quot; (Act 3 Sc 1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macbeth: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_and_tomorrow_and_tomorrow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Life is but a walking shadow&lt;/a&gt; [= actor], a poor player [= actor] who struts and frets his hour upon the stage&quot; (Act 5 Sc 5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/LampshadeHanging/Theater&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lampshade Hanging (Theatre)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most of the female characters pretending to be male tend to lampshade the fact that they are male actors playing a female characters disguised as male.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamlet's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_the_speech&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speak the speech I pray you&lt;/a&gt;&quot; monologue can be seen as a combination of putting a shade on the common Theater techniques of the era, and a Take That! against the overuse of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Henry VI Part 3, things are going badly for the Yorkists at the Battle of Towton. The leaders gather and exchange poetic speeches about how badly it's going, that being how characters do things in these plays. Warwick reproves them thusly: &quot;Why stand we like soft-hearted women here, /  Wailing our losses, whiles the foe doth rage; / And look upon, as if the tragedy / Were play'd in jest by counterfeiting actors?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some examples from my own brain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The most straightforward example is characters who explain their actions (past and planned) to the audience in soliloquies, although this is more of a theatrical device than fourth-wall breaking. This includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard III&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iago&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iago&lt;/a&gt; and, of course, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Merchant of Venice: &quot;I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; / A stage where every man must play a part, / And mine a sad one.&quot; (Act 1 Sc 1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Tempest: &quot;These our actors, /  As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air: / And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, / The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;globe&lt;/a&gt; itself, / Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-07-21T23:28:42.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T03:23:48.557" Score="6" ViewCount="4153" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; was not among &lt;em&gt;whom&lt;/em&gt;? What did O. Henry want us to know from this line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author says this line after Jim hugs Della out of affection after seeing the magnitude of her sacrifice (her hair, which she parts with) for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paragraph is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year - what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. &lt;strong&gt;The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.&lt;/strong&gt; This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/GifMag.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full story&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't interpret this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1911" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-07T00:34:49.740" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T00:34:49.740" Title="What does the line &quot;The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them.&quot; mean in The Gifts Of The Magi?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="776" CreationDate="2017-07-22T18:19:13.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;August Strindberg&lt;/a&gt;, who translated some of his works into French, and even wrote some original works directly in French. One of the works he translated is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Father_(Strindberg_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Father&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in his transaltion called &lt;em&gt;Le Père&lt;/em&gt;, and in a more recent translation &lt;em&gt;Père&lt;/em&gt; (at least if I interpret &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Strindberg#Traductions_r.C3.A9centes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; correctly). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understand from secondary sources, Strindberg's French was passable, but it was hardly of the quality that his translation was as readable as they would have been if someone more capable had done them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normal translations usually age, so that a work needs a new translation every fifty years or so, even if the original might only need small adjustments in spelling. Whether this is also true for self-translations is doubtful, but this might also be an issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T18:19:13.890" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T18:52:24.827" Score="4" ViewCount="1041" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read a fascinating blog post titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/frost-henddecasyllabics-for-once-then-something/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Frost, Hendecasyllabics &amp;amp; For Once, Then, Something&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The blog post describes the challenges of scanning Robert Frost's poem &quot;For Once, Then, Something&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44264/for-once-then-something&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can read Frost's poem online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the first four lines of the poem. If you read it aloud, you'll notice that it sounds clunky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Always wrong to the light, so never seeing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Deeper down in the well than where the water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gives me back in a shining surface picture  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for the poem sounding &quot;clunky&quot; is that it's written in trochaic meter. The rhythm of the poem goes like this: &quot;DUMda DUMda DUMda DUMda DUMda.&quot; This rhythm doesn't sound natural to the English language, which prefers meters like Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. But Frost wrote the poem in trochaic meter, in part because he was imitating a Latin poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I find interesting about the blog post is that in addition to scanning the poem in trochaic meter, which is the scansion Frost intended and the scansion Frost used when reading the poem aloud, the blog post also provides an alternative scansion of the poem that is not in trochaic meter. The argument for this scansion, as I understand it, is that trochaic meter is not natural to the English language, and while trochaic meter is interesting, there should be a scansion that sounds natural to English speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, how should the poem be scanned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:03:36.210" Title="How to scan Robert Frost's &quot;For Once, Then, Something&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:06:46.387" Score="13" ViewCount="1038" Body="&lt;p&gt;The demon Crowley, living on Earth was as long as it existed, has long been weaving plots to aid Hell in the coming Armageddon. Though, of course, it doesn't seem that good an idea when it starts, both Crowley and Aziraphale worked in their respective fields to aid their factions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It meant that Crowley had been allowed to develop Manchester, while Aziraphale had a free hand in the whole of Shropshire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manchester seems to be a particularly devilish idea of Crowley's, since he's very proud of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is so evil about Manchester, in real life or in the novel, that Pratchett and Gaiman made it Crowley's magnum opus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:48:33.003" Title="What is so satanic about Manchester?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3073" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3074" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agness Nutter, Witch&quot;, the novel written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Use with respective author tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:10:57.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3075" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3076" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Nation&quot;, Terry Pratchett's 2008 alternative history novel. Use with the [terry-pratchett] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" LastActivityDate="2017-07-22T19:26:52.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3077" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-22T22:04:24.107" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt; we see this chunk of text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He continues to wear his black cotton crested surcoat and, thereunder, a quilted kimono of hand-woven silk which, supposedly a keep-sake of his elder brother, he has worn continuously for twenty years. Even the most strongly woven silk, cannot survive such unremitting, such preternaturally, perennial wear. The material has been worn so thin that, held against the light, one can see the patches sewn on here and there from the inner side. My master wears the same clothes throughout December and January, not bothering to observe the traditional New Year change. He makes, indeed, no distinction between workaday and Sunday clothes. When he leaves the house he saunters out in whatever dress he happens to have on. I do not know whether this is because he has no other clothes to wear or whether, having such clothes, he finds it too much of a bore to change into them. Whatever the case, I can’t conceive that these uncouth habits are in any way connected with disappointment in love.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a detailed description of what he chooses to wear should say a lot about this character. What can we learn from his choice of dress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:03:24.500" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T15:58:54.173" Title="What does the teacher's clothing choice say about him?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3069" CreationDate="2017-07-23T00:24:58.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That&lt;/em&gt; refers to the &quot;answer&quot; alluded to in the previous sentence. When you have a million dollars, you don't appreciate the things you already have. In the case of their gifts, it really is the thought that counts, because they've rendered each other's gifts useless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Them&lt;/em&gt; refers to the titular gifts, specifically, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Henry may be implying that the Christ child didn't need the gift of wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T00:24:58.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T01:22:54.150" Score="6" ViewCount="1118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently teaching myself to scan, and I'm practicing with Coleridge's &quot;Kubla Khan&quot; at the moment. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/550.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can read the entire poem online&lt;/a&gt;. I've arrived at line 32: &quot;Floated midway on the waves;&quot; and I'm confused about where to place the feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty obvious to me that the stress of the line looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;ed &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;way &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not really sure where the feet should go in this line. Should they be positioned like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;ed| &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;way| &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; the| &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a catalectic trochaic tetrameter, or like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;|ed &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;|way &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;| the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;|;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is an acephaleous iambic tetrameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T05:25:54.997" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:40:41.807" Title="Catalectic trochaic tetrameter or acephaleous iambic tetrameter? Scanning &quot;Kubla Khan&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3084" CreationDate="2017-07-23T01:58:20.867" Score="2" ViewCount="866" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Neil Gaiman's novel &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt;, many of the characters Shadow encounters turn out to be somehow part of the world of the gods, even those like Low-Key Lyesmith who'd seemed innocuous. Most of those who don't had either been part of his life before prison, such as Audrey, or were people he met in Lakeside, like Chad Mulligan. All of these characters, at some point in the story, help move the plot along; they have some connection with other characters, integrating them into the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception, as far as I can tell, is &lt;strong&gt;Sam Black Crow&lt;/strong&gt;. She turns up several times through the book, but each appearance feels like a one-off and not really connected to anything else in the story. She could be removed altogether and nothing important would change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, then, is her purpose in the novel?&lt;/strong&gt; What role does she play in the story, and why is she important enough to get so many scenes involving her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:22:43.057" Title="What was the purpose of Sam Black Crow in American Gods?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T11:21:07.937" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter two of &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, we see this scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; As we turned at Hotan’s corner another geisha appeared. She was slim, well-shaped and her shoulders were most beautifully sloped. The way she wore her mauve kimono gave her a genuine elegance. “Sorry about last night, Gen-chan—I was so busy. . .” She laughed and one glimpsed white teeth. Her voice was so harsh, as harsh as that of a roving crow, that her otherwise fine appearance diminished in enchantment. So much so that I didn’t even bother to turn around to see what sort of person this Gen-chan was, but sauntered on toward Onarimachi with my hands tucked inside the breast-fold of my kimono. Coldmoon, however, seemed to have become a trifle fidgety.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused as to what is supposed to be happening in this scene. What was she busy with? What does the rough voice imply? Why does Coldmoon become fidgety?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:03:12.270" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T17:00:12.007" Title="What is happening in the scene with Coldmoon and the geisha?" Tags="&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3082" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T11:42:16.717" Score="1" ViewCount="1066" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each that we lose takes part of us;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A crescent still abides,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which like the moon, some turbid night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is summoned by the tides.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Emily Dickinson &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1915" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T17:31:51.540" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T02:40:58.723" Title="What does this 'Each that we lose takes part of us' quote from Emily Dickinson mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;emily-dickinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3072" CreationDate="2017-07-23T11:45:26.963" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often with a Pratchett joke, if I don't 'get it', it is worth asking myself what Pratchett knew that I didn't, and the text often gives me a clue where to start looking. And the same applies here, though I don't know which text is Pratchett and which Gaiman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P/G point us at a time period and associated quality and tell us that the mindset is out of date.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If craftsmanship is dated, what replaces it? Mass industrial production. And where was one of the cradles of the Industrial Revolution? Manchester. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Friedrich Engels was the son of a German manufacturer and worked as his agent in their factory in Manchester. Here he developed his strong social conscience from his real experience of the city. This resulted in his work &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Condition of the Working-Class in England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1844, in which he &lt;a href=&quot;https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1844engels.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world. If any one wishes to see in how little space a human being can move, how little air - and such air! - he can breathe, how little of civilisation he may share and yet live, it is only necessary to travel hither. True, this is the Old Town, and the people of Manchester emphasise the fact whenever any one mentions to them the frightful condition of this &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hell upon Earth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;; but what does that prove? Everything which here arouses horror and indignation is of recent origin, belongs to the industrial epoch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the fact of Manchester's history is enough to explain Crowley's satisfaction with it, but the highlighted quote underlines the connection that P/G may have been making. Pratchett's later works &lt;em&gt;Dodger&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Snuff&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Raising Steam&lt;/em&gt; all have strong themes of social justice and reinforce the idea that he would be familiar with Engels' work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of potentially corroborative details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the worst areas was called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/my-forefathers-life-in-manchesters-slums-discovering-family-roots-in-the-hell-on-earth-of-angel-a6896021.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Angel Meadow'&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Engels translated to English is 'angels';&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Crowley and Aziraphale are, of course, angels. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of which leads me to conclude that this mordant reference isn't really a 'joke'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-12T11:32:00.337" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T11:32:00.337" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3080" CreationDate="2017-07-23T12:26:17.580" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I disagree with your second paragraph - she plays quite an important role in Lakeside, when she defends Shadow from Audrey, and doesn't give him away to police (despite having multiple reasons to report him). I believe it was important for Shadow to see that there are people who trust him and believe him, and &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; him, which is important at the end of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this passage (and what follows it) from chapter 13 sums it up nicely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Who did kill those men?” she asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I would.” She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a Cabernet right now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It’s not easy to believe.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I,” she told him, “can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that point Shadow himself already believes everything that is going on (he's already been to House on the Rock), but he had to convince himself so hard, and had to be offered so much evidence, that he thinks others will not believe those things. But Sam does. My understanding is that Shadow is projecting his skepticism on others, to find out that not everyone is as stuck-up as he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a very nice online article titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://the-artifice.com/neil-gaiman-american-gods-gender-myths/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Gender Myths in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which postulates that Sam was intended as a counterpart to other female characters in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam is quite different from the other characters (not just female ones) because she is independent, and is able to manage on her own. Shadow helped her go to El Paso, true - but she has been hiking for three years, and could have as well done this on her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has quite a full life - attends a university, casts in bronze, works in a cafe. From all the non-Goddesses present - Aubrey, Laura, Shadow's neighbour - she's the only one who is not in any way petty (haven't cheated on anyone, haven't tried to take revenge on anyone) and is otherwise a very nice human being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same article also argues that Sam is portrayed in a very masculine way (e.g. the way she treats Aubrey, her courage when hiking and confronting Shadow, her romantic preferences, etc.) which indicate a departure from portrayal of women in American culture (I can't attest to that, though) - she is neither too masculine nor too feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam can also be interpreted as a possible romantic interest for Shadow, as the ending suggests. Obviously he cared about her, and the scene where he comes for her with the flowers can be seen as Shadow finally getting over Laura and starting a new life. Before that, the narration, the events, were largely centered on Shadow; Sam having a life, and a love life, of her own shows Shadow he is not the centre of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-american-gods-tv-series-fixes-one-of-the-book-s-big-1795437720&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another online article&lt;/a&gt; claims the TV series fixed the most important flaw of the novel - a very shallow portrayal of Laura's character. Compared to Laura, who is supposed to be an important character in the novel, Sam, being only a supporting character, receives an unproportional amount of descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:22:43.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3093" CreationDate="2017-07-23T15:27:50.893" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgin_Suicides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Virgin Suicides&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, we find that every daughter of the Lisbon family has attempted to suicide and succeeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at the end of the novel, we don't find any motive behind all of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was the motive behind the suicides ever explained by the author?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this was never explained in the novel, I am looking for an out-of-universe explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T14:12:07.870" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T14:21:26.513" Title="Was the motive behind this ever explained by the author of The Virgin Suicides?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;the-virgin-suicides&gt;&lt;jeffrey-eugenides&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-23T17:29:56.303" Score="2" ViewCount="1105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/glossary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A feminine ending is a line in verse where the last syllable is slack&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the first four lines of Hamlet's famous &quot;to be or not to be&quot; monologue all have feminine endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be, or not to be--that is the question:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read that passage aloud, you'll see that there's a clear contrast between the first four lines and the fifth line. This is because the first four lines have feminine endings, while the fifth line does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some good gender-neutral alternatives to the phrase &quot;feminine ending&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T00:17:26.070" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T00:17:26.070" Title="Are there any gender-neutral alternatives to the phrase &quot;feminine ending&quot;" Tags="&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3087" CreationDate="2017-07-23T17:29:56.303" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This issue came up in the book &lt;em&gt;Meter in English: A Critical Engagement&lt;/em&gt;, which is essentially a bunch of scholars and poets debating various points about meter. Robert Wallace proposed using the term extra-syllable ending, abbreviated e-s ending. Annie French proposed using the term &quot;falling ending,&quot; arguing that &quot;falling ending&quot; sounds less clunky, and that the sound of &quot;falling ending&quot; -- &lt;strong&gt;fall&lt;/strong&gt;ing| &lt;strong&gt;end&lt;/strong&gt;ing| -- communicates the fact that the last syllable of a falling ending line is unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also heard the phrase &quot;weak ending&quot; used as well (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803121433198&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Oxford Reference webpage&lt;/a&gt;). Personally, I prefer the phrase falling ending. But if you are so inclined, &quot;weak ending&quot; and &quot;extra syllabic ending&quot; should work as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Meter in English: A Critical Engagement&lt;/em&gt;, several people argued that historically, the term feminine ending didn't refer to gender at all. Instead, it referred to the fact that the feminine ending in French words was unstressed. Personally, I'm not sure if I find this argument convincing. First of all, I know that grammatical gender is a thing, but so is linguistic relativity. Second, regardless of the origin of the term, it's pretty clear to me that in modern English, the term reinforces the stereotypical association of women with weakness. So I personally would prefer not to use it, although I won't hold it against you if you do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T18:51:14.343" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T18:51:14.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3087" CreationDate="2017-07-23T21:15:06.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For rhyming poetry, the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/double%20rhyme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;double rhyme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has been used. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that term is probably older than &lt;em&gt;feminine rhyme&lt;/em&gt; in English. The OED has a citation for &lt;em&gt;double rhyme&lt;/em&gt; in 1693, which is well before I can find any mention of &lt;em&gt;feminine rhyme&lt;/em&gt; in English in Google books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you can have feminine endings without them being rhymes, so maybe this isn't an actual answer to your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2017-07-23T21:44:06.980" LastActivityDate="2017-07-23T21:44:06.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3082" CreationDate="2017-07-24T02:40:58.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The missing portion of the quote is &quot;loved one.&quot; When we lose someone we love, a portion (the &quot;crescent&quot;) remains. She extends the analogy by comparing the pangs of grief, which never quite subside, with the tidal pull of the moon on a cloudy night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T02:40:58.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3079" CreationDate="2017-07-24T04:52:43.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a case like this, it is partly a matter of personal preference, and partly a matter of determining the meter used by the rest of the poem. To quote from Turco's &lt;em&gt;The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics&lt;/em&gt; (pp. 41-42):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epiploce&lt;/em&gt;. This is a term used to describe a situation when, in scansion, a line of verse may be viewed in either of two ways, that is, as a catalectic trochaic tetrameter line (&lt;code&gt;/^|/^|/^|/&lt;/code&gt;), or as an acephaleous iambic tetrameter line (&lt;code&gt;/|^/|^/|^/&lt;/code&gt;). Generally, the matter can be settled by a scansion of the rest of the poem to determine the normative meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule of thumb easily settles the case for &lt;em&gt;Kubla Khan&lt;/em&gt;: given that most of the poem is written in iambic meter, it makes sense that &quot;Floated midway on the waves&quot; should be scanned as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;|ed &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;|way &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;| the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;|;&quot; to avoid conflicting with the rest of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, there isn't really a difference in how &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;|ed &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;|way &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;| the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;|;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;ed| &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;way| &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; the| &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;;&quot; are pronounced, so it's also a matter of personal preference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hartman's &lt;em&gt;Verse: An Introduction to Prosody&lt;/em&gt; (which is a fantastic read) explains the contradiction between catalectic trochaic tetrameter and acephaleous iambic tetrameter by citing Derek Attridge, a scholar who argues that there aren't feet in English poetry, but beats. The complexities of this argument are outside the scope of this answer, but anyone interested in learning more should take a look at &lt;em&gt;Verse: An Introduction to Prosody&lt;/em&gt;, which provides a useful summary, or any one of Attridge's books on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T05:27:23.723" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T05:27:23.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3092" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T09:48:27.803" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second chapter of &lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, we see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SINCE New Year’s Day I have acquired a certain modest celebrity: so that, though only a cat, I am feeling quietly proud of myself. Which is not unpleasing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On the morning of New Year’s Day, my master received a picture-postcard...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see that the cat is pretty well known; almost all of the letters and stuff that we see the master receiving mention the cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But  don't see any mention of &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; this cat became well-known. Did I somehow miss it? What happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T21:23:40.157" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T16:21:02.403" Title="How did the cat become well known?" Tags="&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3085" CreationDate="2017-07-24T14:21:26.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16814/1/jeffrey-eugenides-virgin-suicides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; with Jeffrey Eugenides by &lt;em&gt;Dazed Digital&lt;/em&gt; (published 06 August 2013) includes this question and answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DD: In &lt;em&gt;The Virgin Suicides&lt;/em&gt; you wrote, ‘Something sick at the heart of the country had infected the girls.’ Were you anchoring that in the&#xA;  political situation of 1993?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jeffrey Eugenides:&lt;/strong&gt; I certainly was. I&#xA;  grew up in Detroit in the 60s, which was haemorrhaging population.&#xA;  There were race riots and a feeling of national decline which affected&#xA;  my mood growing up. I assumed that it would affect the moods and&#xA;  disposition of the Lisbon girls as well. I was living in Germany when&#xA;  the book came out in the 90s, and they were calling America a&#xA;  ‘hyper-power’ because of the resurgence of the economy during the&#xA;  Clinton years. I thought, ‘The prediction I made in &lt;em&gt;The Virgin&#xA;  Suicides&lt;/em&gt; is not exactly right. I shouldn’t be too pessimistic in&#xA;  life.’ And then there was the crash in 2008! Basically, I was right,&#xA;  but I’m trying not to be too pessimistic. There’s still a lot of&#xA;  potential for any generation in any country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T14:21:26.513" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:26:15.150" Score="8" ViewCount="600" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3079/catalectic-trochaic-tetrameter-or-acephaleous-iambic-tetrameter-scanning-kubla/3091#3091&quot;&gt;Catalectic trochaic tetrameter or acephaleous iambic tetrameter? Scanning &amp;quot;Kubla Khan&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; describes an interesting case when the placement of feet has no effect on the pronunciation of a line of verse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line in question is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Float&lt;/strong&gt;ed &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;way &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt;;&quot; it's ambiguous whether the line should be scanned as &lt;code&gt;/^|/^|/^|/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/|^/|^/|^/&lt;/code&gt;. The important take away is that either scansion sounds exactly the same; how the feet are placed doesn't change the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, this raises a question: what are feet actually for? Do English language poems actually have feet, or are feet just a convention, or a stand in for another concept? After all, if feet &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; important, shouldn't there be a difference in how &lt;code&gt;/^|/^|/^|/&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;/|^/|^/|^/&lt;/code&gt; sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T23:38:10.900" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:27:52.237" Title="Do English language poems actually have feet?" Tags="&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:35:50.740" Score="2" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the justice system in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; very interesting. One one hand, it seems similar to the justice system in the real world: there are trials where the accused can call a witness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I may be wrong,' said Dumbledore pleasantly, 'but I am sure that under the Wizengamot Charter of Rights, the accused has the right to present witnesses for his or her case? Isn't that the policy of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Madam Bones?' he continued, addressing the witch in the monocle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there are many examples when suspects don't get a trial. For example, both Hagrid and Sirius were sent to Azkaban without a trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does the justice system in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; work? And is Rowling trying to make some sort of commentary here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T14:33:52.923" Title="How does the justice system work in Harry Potter?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9357" CreationDate="2017-07-24T15:51:32.933" Score="4" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Candida&lt;/em&gt; by Shaw, there is this line by Morell at the beginning. (Fourth speech from the beginning)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morell: &lt;strong&gt;Just like Anarchists not to know that they can't have a &#xA;  parson on Sunday!&lt;/strong&gt; Tell them to come to church if they want to &#xA;  hear me: it will do them good. Say I can only come on Mondays and &#xA;  Thursdays. Have you the diary there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand the meaning of the bold part in this line. Can someone please explain what it means. I have looked up the internet but could not find any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T12:03:28.083" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T09:24:46.330" Title="What is the meaning of this line in Candida by Shaw?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;candida&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2017-07-24T16:24:22.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Feet and (broadly speaking) meter are used in countless English poems by many poets. This is basically to develop symmetry in the poem. So that lines fall in a melody when recited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it is best seen in Italian sonnets, but post the Shakespearan period, this has deviated. If we see the poem Ozymandias of Egypt by P.B. Shelley the lines are in perfect iambic pentameter but fail to develop a rhythm when recited. So, it's a device to make the poem structured and (since most lack the ability to write in proper feet) unique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1911" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:27:52.237" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:27:52.237" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:15:33.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like there are two questions here. (1) Does English language break down into metrical feet and (2) are metrical feet used in English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The American Poetry Foundation defines a foot as a measurement of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/foot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;accentual-syllabic meter&lt;/a&gt;, which is just a way of saying English speech regards stresses and syllables distinctly. The breaking up of large rhythmic structures &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;into feet&lt;/a&gt; is natural.  In analysis of poems with strongly regularized rhythm, feet are used to determine the normative meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can apply them to Blake, which will comment on the Coleridge question, and highlight the potential ambiguity in metrical interpretation.  Specifically, the second stanza of Blake's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;London&lt;/a&gt; can be delivered variously in conjunction with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?9924-Normative-Meter-Two-Syllable-Feet-and-Three-Syllable-Feet&amp;amp;s=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;normative&lt;/a&gt; Iambic Tetrameter of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;/ery &lt;strong&gt;cry&lt;/strong&gt; / of &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;/ery &lt;strong&gt;Man&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;In &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;/ery &lt;strong&gt;In&lt;/strong&gt;/fants &lt;strong&gt;cry&lt;/strong&gt; / of &lt;strong&gt;fear&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;In &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;/ery &lt;strong&gt;voice&lt;/strong&gt;: / in &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;/ery &lt;strong&gt;ban&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;mind&lt;/strong&gt;-&lt;strong&gt;forg'd&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;acles / I &lt;strong&gt;hear&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I broke up the final line into three feet for ease of reading, utilizing first a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bacchius&lt;/a&gt; and second a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dactyl&lt;/a&gt; to set up a final iamb, although it can certainly be done with four feet.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, the stress on &amp;quot;forg'd&amp;quot; can be suppressed to result in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spondee&lt;/a&gt; on the final foot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;mind&lt;/strong&gt;-forg'd / &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;acles / &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;hear&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Utilizing an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amphibrach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amphibrach&lt;/a&gt; for the first foot.  It seems less graceful to try to impose a four foot structure on the 4th line, and there is a case for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyrhythm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;polyrhythmic&lt;/a&gt; approach because the last line can also be delivered with only three stresses, by suppressing the stress on the &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;mind&lt;/strong&gt;-forg'd / &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;acles / I &lt;strong&gt;hear&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Preference of the reciter is the driving motivator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more regularized a poem in English, the more apparent the feet will be.&#xA;Shakespeare is famous for iambic pentameter but it's not always fully regularized.  One of my favorite pentameter poems begins with a trochees which morph to iambs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thou&lt;/strong&gt; hast / &lt;strong&gt;made&lt;/strong&gt; me, / and &lt;strong&gt;shall&lt;/strong&gt; / thy &lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt; / de&lt;strong&gt;cay&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and which I render entirely trochaic in recitation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thou&lt;/strong&gt; hast / &lt;strong&gt;made&lt;/strong&gt; me-- / &lt;strong&gt;shall&lt;/strong&gt; thy / &lt;strong&gt;work&lt;/strong&gt; de/&lt;strong&gt;cay&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44113/holy-sonnets-thou-hast-made-me-and-shall-thy-work-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holy Sonnet&lt;/a&gt; of Donne's, iambic pentameter is the normative meter  and strongly manifests itself to an English speaker after the first line. Breaking it in the 9th and 10th lines adds power to the poem, but requires analysis in terms of where the stresses might go.  Thus feet are useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think feet do appear even in modern poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;saw&lt;/strong&gt; / the &lt;strong&gt;best&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;minds&lt;/strong&gt; / of &lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; / gene&lt;strong&gt;ra&lt;/strong&gt;tion / des&lt;strong&gt;troyed&lt;/strong&gt; by / &lt;strong&gt;madn&lt;/strong&gt;ess, / &lt;strong&gt;star&lt;/strong&gt;ving / hys&lt;strong&gt;ter&lt;/strong&gt;ical / &lt;strong&gt;nak&lt;/strong&gt;ed, / &lt;strong&gt;drag&lt;/strong&gt;ging /them&lt;strong&gt;selves&lt;/strong&gt; / through the / &lt;strong&gt;ne&lt;/strong&gt;gro / &lt;strong&gt;streets&lt;/strong&gt; at &lt;strong&gt;dawn&lt;/strong&gt; / &lt;strong&gt;look&lt;/strong&gt;ing / &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; an / &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt;gry / &lt;strong&gt;fix&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but that it's more rarely applied as an analytic or compositional tool in free verse, as the previous line could be delivered with a different number of stresses, or different stress positions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot demonstrates that meter can still be strongly imposed on freer verse that resembles prose, save for the strong rhythm, making a case that meter is the fundamental distinction of poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; was a / &lt;strong&gt;way&lt;/strong&gt; of / &lt;strong&gt;put&lt;/strong&gt;ting it - &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; very / &lt;strong&gt;sat&lt;/strong&gt;is/ &lt;strong&gt;fact&lt;/strong&gt;ory: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;A &lt;strong&gt;peri&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;phras&lt;/strong&gt;tic / &lt;strong&gt;stud&lt;/strong&gt;y / in a / &lt;strong&gt;worn&lt;/strong&gt;-out / po&lt;strong&gt;et&lt;/strong&gt;ical  / &lt;strong&gt;fash&lt;/strong&gt;ion, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Leav&lt;/strong&gt;ing / one &lt;strong&gt;still&lt;/strong&gt; / with the / in&lt;strong&gt;tol&lt;/strong&gt;erable / &lt;strong&gt;wrest&lt;/strong&gt;le &lt;br&gt;&#xA;With &lt;strong&gt;words&lt;/strong&gt; / and &lt;strong&gt;mean&lt;/strong&gt;ings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &amp;quot;intolerable&amp;quot; does not fit neatly into a tetrasyllable, having five syllables unless contracted, which is part of the tension Eliot is comenting on.  Again, like Ginsburg, there are numerous way to break these lines into feet.  &lt;em&gt;(It's an art, not a science! ;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is difficult to contextualize certain famous modern poems without a recognition of meter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This&lt;/strong&gt; Is / &lt;strong&gt;Just&lt;/strong&gt; To / &lt;strong&gt;Say&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have &lt;strong&gt;eat&lt;/strong&gt;en / the &lt;strong&gt;plums&lt;/strong&gt; / that were &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; / the &lt;strong&gt;ice&lt;/strong&gt;box &lt;br&gt;&#xA;and &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; you were / &lt;strong&gt;prob&lt;/strong&gt;ably / &lt;strong&gt;sav&lt;/strong&gt;ing / for &lt;strong&gt;break&lt;/strong&gt;fast &lt;br&gt;&#xA;For&lt;strong&gt;give&lt;/strong&gt; me they / were de&lt;strong&gt;lic&lt;/strong&gt;ious &lt;br&gt;&#xA;so &lt;strong&gt;sweet&lt;/strong&gt; and / so &lt;strong&gt;cold&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How it is broken up into feet is less important than that there is a strong, underlying meter which renders this a poem as opposed to a mere note on the refrigerator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The further we get from the Elizabethan period, the more unruly the phrasing becomes, and by the modern poems, definitive application of scansion is problematic because the poems rarely have a discernible normative meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to demonstrate &lt;em&gt;unequivocally&lt;/em&gt; that feet do exist, and have application even in modern English poetry I'll use a work from the poet widely regarded as the greatest of the 20th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Turn&lt;/strong&gt;ing / and &lt;strong&gt;turn&lt;/strong&gt;ing / in the / &lt;strong&gt;wi&lt;/strong&gt;dening / &lt;strong&gt;gyre&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;fal&lt;/strong&gt;/con &lt;strong&gt;can&lt;/strong&gt;/not &lt;strong&gt;hear&lt;/strong&gt; / the &lt;strong&gt;fal&lt;/strong&gt;/con&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, my breakdown of the first line is in no way definitive, &lt;em&gt;(and I'm not entirely happy with my choice, though the intent is readability and as a guide for delivery--it has been pointed out that a case can be made for a stress on the &amp;quot;in&amp;quot;, which I personally feel is sub-optimal;)&lt;/em&gt; but it's &lt;em&gt;indisputable&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;strong&gt;the second line is in perfect iambic pentameter.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The genius of this choice is a factor of the beats to syllables ratio between the first and second line--4/11 vs. 5/10.  This creates an extraordinary effect that might be termed &amp;quot;metrical compression&amp;quot;, and itself can be understood as the merging of traditional and modern English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic pentameter might be taken as the normative meter in that in reappears in many important lines, and is used to set up or contrast the metrical variations of previous or subsequent lines.  The other indisputably iambic pentameter lines is the poem are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mere &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt;/ar&lt;strong&gt;chy&lt;/strong&gt; / is &lt;strong&gt;loosed&lt;/strong&gt; / up&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; / the &lt;strong&gt;world&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;best&lt;/strong&gt; / lack &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; / con&lt;strong&gt;vic&lt;/strong&gt;/tion, &lt;strong&gt;while&lt;/strong&gt; / the &lt;strong&gt;worst&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;dark&lt;/strong&gt;/ness &lt;strong&gt;drops&lt;/strong&gt; / a&lt;strong&gt;gain&lt;/strong&gt;; / but &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; / I &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;what&lt;/strong&gt; / rough &lt;strong&gt;beast&lt;/strong&gt;, / its &lt;strong&gt;hour&lt;/strong&gt; / come &lt;strong&gt;round&lt;/strong&gt; / at &lt;strong&gt;last&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T18:27:48.017" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:47:44.677" Score="2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jet is Rachel's best friend, and her loyal ally in later issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Jet is poisoned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rachel whispers her old name to her, &quot;Bryn Erin&quot;, but addresses not Jet but James. After that, James, Rachel's friend who apparently died in 17th century, &quot;awakens&quot; in Jet's body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James supposedly swallowed a part of the Tree (from the Garden of Eden) that made him immortal; problem is, he was already dying. If he became immortal, he shouldn't have died, and should've kept his own body. If he died, how did he come back? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I supposed to assume he &lt;em&gt;reincarnated&lt;/em&gt; in Jet, after 4 centuries? If so, why in Jet, and why only now? And where did he go after Jet came back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T23:47:44.677" Title="What is the connection between Jet and James?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rachel-rising&gt;&lt;terry-moore&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3100" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3101" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" Score="0" Body="To be used for the dark fantasy horror comic series created, written, and drawn by Terry Moore. Use with the [comics] and [terry-moore] tags.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" LastActivityDate="2017-07-24T23:48:30.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3079" CreationDate="2017-07-25T00:52:08.923" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your self-answer is correct.  The application of the division of feet can have a degree of subjectivity--ultimately it doesn't matter where you divide the foot because the line will still have the same number of stresses to syllables.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, in heavily regularized verse, the method is used to determine the normative meter, and it's helpful to have some standardization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T15:40:41.807" LastActivityDate="2017-07-27T15:40:41.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7974" CreationDate="2017-07-25T01:25:32.973" Score="4" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains of the nation.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall pass to ashes.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he answers: “Omaha.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sandburg: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/sandb02.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Limited&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's a profound poem wrapped in a shell of the everyday, and it's title is perhaps taken as a commentary on the mundane mindset. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't think Sandburg means anything by relating Omaha specifically to non-existence, possibly the name of the city just scans, or represents the heartland, but then I think of Strindberg naming his famous play about marriage &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dance of Death&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and wonder...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Did Sandburg have any negative feelings about the wonderful city of Omaha?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T10:43:03.230" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T11:03:24.747" Title="Did Sandburg have anything against Omaha?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;carl-sandburg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T03:39:01.903" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working through the website &lt;a href=&quot;http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;For Better for Verse&lt;/a&gt;, and I'm currently working on a scansion of Thomas Hardy's &quot;The Oxen&quot;. The last verse looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the lonely barton by yonder comb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our childhood used to know,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I should go with him in the gloom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hoping it might be so. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything but the second to last line of the poem is straightforward to scan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the &lt;strong&gt;lon&lt;/strong&gt;|ely &lt;strong&gt;bar&lt;/strong&gt;|ton by &lt;strong&gt;yon&lt;/strong&gt;|der &lt;strong&gt;comb&lt;/strong&gt;|&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our &lt;strong&gt;child&lt;/strong&gt;|hood &lt;strong&gt;used&lt;/strong&gt;| to &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt;|,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I should go with him in the gloom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Hop&lt;/strong&gt;ing| it &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt;| be &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt;|. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the second to last line is very interesting because it's ambiguous. The first time I read that line, I interpreted the first foot as a trochee, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; should go &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; him &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;gloom&lt;/strong&gt;. However, For Better for Verse seems to prefer an iambic tetrameter, i.e. I &lt;strong&gt;should&lt;/strong&gt; go &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; him &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;gloom&lt;/strong&gt;. Both interpretations appear to be equally valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Better for Verse has a little blurb justifying its scansion of the poem, but I thought it would be interesting to open this question up to the community. So what do you all think, and more importantly, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T12:36:39.060" Title="Should there be a trochee in the second to last line of Thomas Hardy's &quot;The Oxen&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3109" CreationDate="2017-07-25T07:04:43.947" Score="4" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;In trying to learn about literature I have frequently encountered the idea of postmodernism. But as I have little humanities experience I have had trouble getting my head around the concept. Can anyone explain it simply? If you can provide examples of widely read books in the style, that might help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:08:18.167" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T16:08:18.167" Title="What does postmodernism mean in terms of literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3025" CreationDate="2017-07-25T07:44:04.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for her insistence on the name Ishtar could be quite simple. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belili is the name applied by the Canaanites (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.succubus.net/wiki/Belili&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;) who were Hebrew, and had their own God. Astarte is the Hellenised form (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astarte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;), as in Greek. They too had their own Gods. Ishtar is the original Mesopotamian version (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;) and was associated with far more than just sex. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could suggest that this is the name that represents her most powerful, and original (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;), form. If you consider that she talks about temple prostitution, this would have been a ritual - whether real or made up by Herodotus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus#Contemporary_and_modern_critics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6&lt;/a&gt;) - that gave her A LOT of power, since worship is what give Gods power in the Sandman universe (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bookriot.com/2017/04/28/before-american-gods-gaiman-explored-the-brief-lives-of-gods-in-the-sandman/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By calling her by these other names Dream might (whether unconsciously, or on purpose I cannot say) be reminding her of less powerful forms. Her decline from a main goddess to an exotic dancer who is barely hanging on to power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="1900" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T11:00:39.110" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T11:00:39.110" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3028" CreationDate="2017-07-25T08:49:03.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dug up the quote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.se/books?id=HaGlAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT4&amp;amp;dq=He%20was%20a%20tall%20man,%20clean-shaven,%20with%20a%20frame%20rather%20too%20well%20covered,%20and%20clothes%20that%20were%20rather%20too%20faultless.%20His%20hair%20was%20very%20black%20and%20shining,%20and%20his%20teeth%20were%20aggressively%20white.%20When%20he%20spoke%20he%20had%20a%20way%20of%20slurring%20his%20%27s%27s%27%20which%20was%20not%20quite%20a%20lisp,%20but%20came%20perilously%20near%20to%20it.&amp;amp;hl=sv&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=He%20was%20a%20tall%20man%2C%20clean-shaven%2C%20with%20a%20frame%20rather%20too%20well%20covered%2C%20and%20clothes%20that%20were%20rather%20too%20faultless.%20His%20hair%20was%20very%20black%20and%20shining%2C%20and%20his%20teeth%20were%20aggressively%20white.%20When%20he%20spoke%20he%20had%20a%20way%20of%20slurring%20his%20%27s%27s%27%20which%20was%20not%20quite%20a%20lisp%2C%20but%20came%20perilously%20near%20to%20it.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, as I believe it is relevant to the question exactly how the sentences are joined together. The full paragraph reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He displayed neither resentment or surprise. Mr Cowan was indeed&#xA;  accustomed to the vagaries of the artistic temperament. He was a tall&#xA;  man, clean-shaven, with a frame rather too well covered, and clothes&#xA;  that were rather too faultless. His hair was very black and shining,&#xA;  and his teeth were aggressively white. When he spoke he had a way of&#xA;  slurring his 's's' which was not quite a lisp, but came perilously&#xA;  near to it. It required no imagination to realise that his father's&#xA;  name had been Cohen. At that minute a door on the other side of the&#xA;  room opened, and a trim, French girl hurried through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not read the sentence in question as a comment on the previous description, but rather as a continuation of it: apart from the other characteristics just described, Mr Cowan looked like he should have been named Mr Cowen. The most common &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotypes_of_Jews#Physical_features&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stereotype about Jewish looks&lt;/a&gt; is probably that of the large, aquiline nose. My guess is that is what is intended by the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T08:49:03.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3106" CreationDate="2017-07-25T09:06:00.487" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Post-modernism is characterized by the rejection of enlightenment (i.e. scientific) certainties. In the post-modernist world view, everything is influenced by language, culture and socialization, to the point where it becomes difficult to impossible for people agree on an objective truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-modernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, for example, wrote a book entitled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://The%20Gulf%20War%20Did%20Not%20Take%20Place&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Gulf War Did Not Take Place&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. This argues that the perception between soldiers on the two sides and audiences across the world, watching the conflict through the distorted lens of locally-biased media coverage was so vast that there cannot be one single accepted account of what happened during the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-modern literature, therefore, is often characterised by techniques and viewpoints that emphasize this uncertainty and the role of language in creating it. They may be fragmentary, use pastiche to blur the distinction between high and popular culture and often feature metafiction, unreliable narrators and impossible situations such as magical realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the earliest great postmodern author was James Joyce. His novel &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.flashpointmag.com/reisman.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, for example, cannot be read as a typical narrative as it makes little sense. It is, instead, a multi-layered piece of work relying on puns, polyphony and an extreme stream of consciousness technique to create a literary landscape that the reader is free to interpret as they choose. &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; is less extreme, but can also be considered postmodern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other well known examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Third Policeman&lt;/em&gt; by Flann O'Brien in which the narrator explores a frustrating, nonsensical hellscape of impossible bureaucracy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Naked Lunch&lt;/em&gt; by William Burroughs in which a drug addict tells a series of loosely related stories which may or may not be real and which can be read in any order.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt; by Joseph Heller in which an air force pilot deals with the brutal consequences of illogical, contradictory military orders and discipline.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bell Jar&lt;/em&gt; by Sylvia Plath in which the protagonist, slipping in and out of psychotic episodes, struggles to deal with her treatment.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Things They Carried&lt;/em&gt; by Tim O'Brien, a series of essays about Vietnam which blend history, the authors experience and fiction without clear distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas&lt;/em&gt; by Hunter S. Thompson in which a pair of drug addicts take a road trip across America, divorced from reality by their use of hallucinogens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fight Club&lt;/em&gt; by Chuck Palahniuk in which an unreliable narrator decides to aggressively rebel against social norms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Brief History of Seven Killings&lt;/em&gt; by Marlon James which explores the attempted murder of Bob Marley from a variety of different character viewpoints.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Science fiction has proved a rich genre for post-modernist work, with authors such as Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson and Phillip K Dick having many novels among their output in the tradition. Philosophical novels, or novels of ideas are also a fertile ground, with those by Umberto Eco being particularly noteworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T09:06:00.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T09:13:15.523" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the cat gets his teeth stuck in a rice cake, we see that eventually O-san has to help him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O-san looks at the mistress as if to say, “Why not make him go on dancing?” The mistress would gladly see my minuet continued, but, since she would not go so far as wanting me to dance myself to death, says nothing. My master turned somewhat sharply to the servant and ordered, “Hurry it up, if you don’t help quickly the cat will be dead.” &lt;strong&gt;O-san, with a vacant look on her face, as though she had been roughly wakened from some peculiarly delicious dream, took a firm grip on the rice-cake and yanked it out of my mouth&lt;/strong&gt;. I am not quite as feeble-fanged as Coldmoon, but I really did think my entire front toothwork was about to break off. The pain was indescribable. The teeth embedded in the rice-cake are being pitilessly wrenched. You can’t imagine what it was like. It was then that the fourth enlightenment burst upon me: that all comfort is achieved through hardship. When at last I came to myself and looked around at a world restored to normality, all the members of the household had disappeared into the inner room.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;I Am a Cat&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2 (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does O-san have a 'vacant look on her face, as though she had been roughly wakened from some peculiarly delicious dream'? What does this imply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:03:00.737" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:48:05.767" Title="What is the meaning of O-san having a blank face?" Tags="&lt;i-am-a-cat&gt;&lt;natsume-soseki&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-25T09:51:08.943" Score="5" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tim O'Brien's novel of the Vietnam War, &lt;em&gt;The Things They Carried&lt;/em&gt;, is usually labelled as fiction, even though aspects of it are based on settled history and the author's own experience serving a tour as an infantryman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This blurring of fact and fiction is a key theme of the novel. One of the stories in the book makes a distinction between &quot;story truth&quot; and &quot;happening truth&quot; and argues that one is in no way superior to the other in terms of the actual &quot;truth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it would be interesting to know if O'Brien - or anyone else, perhaps a biographer - has ever attempted to split some of the fact from the fiction in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T09:51:08.943" Title="Has there ever been an attempt to separate the facts and fiction in The Things They Carried?" Tags="&lt;the-things-they-carried&gt;&lt;tim-o-brien&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:21:22.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem always seemed to me to be contrasting the realities of the war that they are about to be thrown into with the seemingly pastoral views outside of the window. What the poet is seeing outside is not the entirety of reality and his mind keeps wandering away from the war, to the more peaceful countryside. The comfortable illusion that everything is green and beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that is why the stanza's are interspersed with one another. His mind is wondering away from what he is learning, and then being jogged back (wash, rinse, repeat). Similar to a school kid who isn't paying attention to maths but is rather staring out of the window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T13:21:22.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3113" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:28:44.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stormlight Archive&lt;/em&gt; is a series of epic fantasy novels by the US author Brandon Sanderson, which is projected to have ten books. The first two books in the series, &lt;em&gt;The Way of Kings&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Words of Radiance&lt;/em&gt;, have already been published, and the third book, &lt;em&gt;Oathbringer&lt;/em&gt;, is planned to be published in November 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:52:19.043" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:52:19.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3114" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:28:44.190" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Stormlight Archive, an epic fantasy series by Brandon Sanderson, or about any of the individual books within it. Use with the [brandon-sanderson] tag." OwnerUserId="1033" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:52:19.043" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:52:19.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2375" CreationDate="2017-07-25T13:52:56.893" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the book in front of me right now, but Aslan makes it clear in &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; that animals could go back to being &quot;dumb&quot; beasts. In fact, there are several examples of this in the series (such as the cat when he sees Tash in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;). Consider the following quote (from chapter 10):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Creatures, I give you yourselves,&quot; said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. &quot;I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but &lt;strong&gt;do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and into them you can return.&lt;/strong&gt; Do not so.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; also implies that numerous animals had &quot;gone back&quot; to being &quot;dumb&quot; animals again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the conditions under which a talking animal can cease to be conscious appear to be very different than the conditions under which humans can cease to be conscious. That being said, the fact that the animals ceased to be conscious doesn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; imply that C. S. Lewis thinks that the same thing will happen to humans (although it's certainly a possible interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that it's likely that C. S. Lewis was trying to avoid that controversy here. Most likely, he didn't think that this was the best place to address that kind of controversy (or to go into details about exactly what happened to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; We don't have to assume that C. S. Lewis was teaching annihilationism here (although it's certainly a &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; interpretation). It's more likely that he was dodging the question, leaving it to be addressed in other books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T15:08:47.777" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T15:08:47.777" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="623" CreationDate="2017-07-25T14:09:12.340" Score="-1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Maybe.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's important to realize that her attitude towards Narnia is only one of several reasons that Susan wasn't there. For example, unlike the other characters, Susan isn't dead yet. Everyone who was in Aslan's country in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; was either there because they were in Narnia at the end of the world (e.g. Eustice, Jill, and the others at the Last Battle) or because they had recently died (Peter, Edmund, Polly, and others had recently died in a train accident; Susan doesn't appear to have been with them at the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, even if Susan &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; remained a friend of Narnia, there's absolutely no reason that she'd be in Aslan's Country at that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; people actually recorded to have gone to Aslan's Country while still alive are those alive at the end of the world in Narnia and Reepicheep the mouse (in &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a minimum, then, Susan has the opportunity to change. We can only speculate as to whether she actually &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; or not (although, as others have said, the text strongly implies that her current behavior was a &amp;quot;phase&amp;quot; she was going through), but I think that there was a good chance that she did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point to consider: being &amp;quot;too grown-up&amp;quot; (at least in the sense of chronological age) doesn't seem to be an absolute exclusion. Several of the people there were already adults, or even quite old (e.g. Digory Kirke), so chronological age alone doesn't seem to be an absolute exclusion. This is especially true given that the Pevensies had already been told that they were too old to return to Narnia (Peter in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; and Lucy and Edmond in &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;). I think &amp;quot;grown up&amp;quot; in that sense refers more to a mental attitude (rather than just their age in years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I think that this quote from the end of &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It isn't Narnia, you know,&amp;quot; sobbed Lucy. &amp;quot;It's you. We shan't meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?&amp;quot;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;But you shall meet me, dear one,&amp;quot; said Aslan.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Are - are you there too, Sir?&amp;quot; said Edmund.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I am,&amp;quot; said Aslan. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't definitively answer from the books whether Susan ever did that, but the books do at least hint at the possibility that Susan would grow out of the &amp;quot;phase&amp;quot; she was in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; The fact that Susan wasn't there in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; doesn't necessarily mean that she wouldn't be in the future. She had plenty of opportunities to change. With that said, we simply don't know whether she did or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T17:41:04.243" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3095" CreationDate="2017-07-25T14:27:22.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; closely related (on Science Fiction SE): &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/155372/why-did-the-wizarding-society-seem-to-have-such-a-weak-view-of-civil-rights&quot;&gt;Why did the wizarding society seem to have such a weak view of civil rights?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the answers there, people that were sent to prison without trials (e.g. Hagrid, who was sent to prison without even having been charged with anything &quot;as a precaution,&quot; or Sirius Black, who at least had clear charges against him even if he wasn't actually tried) &quot;because of fear and political expediency,&quot; as the accepted answer on the linked question says. In the case of Hagrid, quite simply, the Ministry wants to be seen as doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. The fact is they have &lt;em&gt;no clue&lt;/em&gt; what the Monster of Slytherin was and they were completely powerless to stop it, but of course they couldn't/wouldn't actually &lt;em&gt;admit&lt;/em&gt; that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scrimgeour was quite explicit about this when discussing the case of Stan Shunpike with Harry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, of course, to you it will matter enormously,” said Scrimgeour with a laugh. “But to the Wizarding community at large ... &lt;strong&gt;it’s all perception, isn’t it?&lt;/strong&gt; It’s what people believe that’s important.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Half-Blood Prince, Chapter 16, A Very Frosty Christmas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting at this point that Muggle societies aren't above holding people in prison without charges, trials or &lt;em&gt;habaes corpus&lt;/em&gt; out of fear (consider, for example, internment of Japanese in the U.S. during WWII or certain other more recent events - I'll let you draw the inference as to which ones I'm referring to), so perhaps we shouldn't be entirely surprised to learn that Wizarding society has done the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, as discussed in the other Q&amp;amp;A, Wizarding society's view of civil rights seems to be considerably weaker and less &quot;modern&quot; than current views of civil rights, and there were &lt;em&gt;major&lt;/em&gt; procedural problems with the trials when they were held at all (e.g. the fact that the chief law enforcement officer also served as both the chief judge and chief prosecutor). These procedural flaws are a major reason that Cornelius Fudge's blatant attempt to railroad Harry Potter nearly succeeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-07-25T14:33:52.923" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T14:33:52.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3105" CreationDate="2017-07-25T19:32:45.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could scan the second to last line as three trochees followed by an iamb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;In the lón|ely bár|ton by yón|der cóomb|&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our chíld|hood úsed| to knów|,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Í should| gó with| hím in| the glóom|,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hóping| it míght| be só|.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe the straight iambic scansion works anywhere near as well. It puts stress on &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt;, which is a relatively unimportant auxiliary verb.  It also puts stress on two prepositions — &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; — while leaving the stress off main verb of the sentence, &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the line works better if you start it with two trochees, so as to emphasize &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Í should| gó with| hím in| the glóom|&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Í should| gó with| him ín| the glóom|.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, the second one is better, because it's closer to iambic tetrameter, the main meter of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T12:36:39.060" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T12:36:39.060" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3105" CreationDate="2017-07-25T21:12:28.380" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your instincts are very good in choosing a trochee for the beginning of the third line.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasizing the &quot;I&quot; is meaningful&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet sets up this line by musing that if a person said the animals are kneeling, the poet would go out in the darkness to see.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasizing &quot;should&quot; renders the line robotic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meter is often used to set up a variation in meter.  This is surely the case with this particular line, although the position only partly aesthetic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emphasizing the &quot;should&quot; undermines meaning in not having this crucial line stand out and draw attention to itself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully I'm explaining it clearly, but in maintaining the rhythm of the previous line, the independent thought of third line is overrun by the &quot;momentum&quot; of the second line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-07-25T21:12:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T03:07:23.643" Score="19" ViewCount="1694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I go to used book sales about once or twice a year. Recently, I bought some books that I've been meaning to read for a while. However, when I started reading them, I realized that about a quarter of the books I purchased weren't in great shape -- no missing pages thankfully -- but pages that were about to fall out, a broken spine, brittle paper, etc. I'm not really sure how long they'll hold up for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I obviously should have checked the books before I purchased them. To be honest, they were really cheap, so I was more focused on getting as many books as I could for fifteen dollars (my usual budget) than I was on actually making sure that the books were in good condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for future reference, what should I look out for when purchasing used/old books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:11:02.767" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T17:11:02.767" Title="How can I check that used or old books are in good condition before I purchase them?" Tags="&lt;book-collecting&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3121" CreationDate="2017-07-26T03:26:51.303" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the expression is &quot;You can't judge a book by its cover,&quot; but in this case, you might be able to start there.  :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have time to look at each individual book for a minute or two, I would personally start by checking the cover for &lt;strong&gt;evident &quot;trauma&quot; marks.&lt;/strong&gt;  I mean like big dents or crushed corners (typical if the book is dropped).  These are frequently what will wear on the binding of the book, which is typically what matters to avid users.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second thing I would check is to open the book at random.  Is there a place where the book tends to fall open very easily?  If so, check the pages next to there.  Are they starting tear or disconnect along the seam?  This could be a sign either that someone left the book on its face with a weight on it, or simply left it open for a long time - both of which will &lt;strong&gt;weaken the binding,&lt;/strong&gt; making pages more prone to fall out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third thing I would check is &lt;strong&gt;page wear&lt;/strong&gt;.  This is a somewhat unusual issue, but on the occasion, especially with very old books, you'll run across a copy that was very used - to the point that the pages are starting to wear away on the corners.  While this can be &lt;em&gt;nice&lt;/em&gt; for antique collectors, for a reader, it's not ideal, since the pages are more fragile and will tear easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other things too, and I'm looking forward to seeing what other community members come up with, but that's what I tend to check for.  Hope it helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="350" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T20:19:55.407" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T20:19:55.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3121" CreationDate="2017-07-26T09:40:39.370" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to @anonymous2's excellent answer, look for &lt;strong&gt;water damage.&lt;/strong&gt; Check for stains, on the pages, the outer binding, and the dust jacket if there is one. Look at the edges of the pages for mold spots. Ruffle through the pages and sniff. No really. You can smell mold or mustiness, which will tell you if the book was wet or damp and developed a mold problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if the book is not considerably old or of historic value, put it in a freezer bag and stick it in a freezer below 0ºF (-20ºC) for a week. This will kill any bedbugs (and hopefully any other critters which may have nested in it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T15:13:27.317" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T15:13:27.317" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2017-07-26T14:49:54.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Picture yourself as a theatergoer in Elizabethan England. It would be much like going to the googleplex and choosing what to watch. &quot;Action? Romantic comedy? How about that blockbuster we've seen a dozen times?&quot; The point is, you know what you're getting when you buy your ticket. You've picked a certain genre because you want a certain experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in Elizabethan England as today, an original story is hard to find. The audience had probably seen other versions of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; already. &quot;Is this the one where the two kids kill themselves? Oh, yeah, it is.&quot; You might learn something, but what you mainly want is to be entertained for a couple of hours--and to have something to talk about at the water cooler the next day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for the prologue was to give the audience a tl;dr. If you got occupied for a while with something else (and there was plenty of else to occupy you), you could easily pick up the thread again. It's not just about giving you the ending, it's about giving you the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've gone to the movies for tension, you've gone to the wrong place. The good guy wins, the couple get over their misunderstandings, the cops track down the killer. There are just enough exceptions to prove the rule. Shakespeare knew his audience, and audiences haven't changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T14:49:54.847" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2017-07-26T15:40:09.527" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP states that the source is hard to spell. That can't apply to the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A classical character who actually blinds himself is Oedipus. His crime is the same as the one Macbeth contemplates--regicide, or murdering the king. Shakespeare's audience would be familiar with the story of Oedipus and with the constant reminders about the evils of regicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To someone unfamiliar with the name, Oedipus would be hard to spell, and he is a character known for blinding himself. As always, other interpretations are possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T15:40:09.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T10:07:43.760" Score="7" ViewCount="6551" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who wrote &lt;em&gt;&quot;Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams…And I'll show you a happy man.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was spoken by George McAllister (=the character name of the Latin teacher &quot;the Realist&quot; in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Poets_Society&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dead Poets Society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some says that it could be Alfred Lord Tennyson, but can someone confirm this and state the precise publication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the transcript from the film:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;McAllister&lt;/strong&gt;: You take a big risk by encouraging them to be artists, John. When they realize they're not Rembrandts, Shakespeares or Mozarts, they'll hate you for it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Keating&lt;/strong&gt;: We're not talking artists, George, we're talking freethinkers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;McAllister&lt;/strong&gt;: Freethinkers at seventeen?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Keating&lt;/strong&gt;: Funny — I never pegged you as a cynic.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;McAllister&lt;/strong&gt;: Not a cynic, a realist. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams, and I'll show you a happy man.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Keating&lt;/strong&gt;: &quot;But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;McAllister&lt;/strong&gt;: Tennyson?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Keating&lt;/strong&gt;: No, Keating.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Video of the scene:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0l2j5wqzs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0l2j5wqzs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1938" OwnerDisplayName="MOLAP" LastEditorUserId="1938" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T09:45:31.333" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T03:17:23.243" Title="Who wrote a specific poem in the movie 'Dead Poets Society'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1169" CreationDate="2017-07-26T18:24:08.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the guilty pleasures of writing is that you create a world where you have absolute power. You place the scenery, you define the people, you make the rules, and you decide who lives and who dies. Whatever you intend for readers to take away from your work, you make specific statements with your plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a fairy tale, the hero overcomes obstacles with his bravery, wit, strength, or dumb luck. When he marries the princess and lives happily ever after, you have told the reader that that is his reward for having those qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy states his idea of marriage by presenting two contrasting couples. Anna (the title character) is married to Alexey, but if he loves anything, it's his job. As long as Anna does what he expects of her, her other activities are tolerated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna falls in love with Vronsky, a dashing officer. She has never really loved Alexey. When she must choose between the two, she always chooses Vronsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farmer Levin loves Kitty, but he's awkward and shy. Kitty turns him down but goes into a funk. While recovering, she meets Varenka, an angelic figure who inspires her to re-assess her lifestyle. Levin also tries to lose himself, in his case with study and work. When their paths cross again, they are ready for marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, love is not enough to save a relationship. Anna hides from her insecurity in drugs and denial, and she dies in a fall. Vronsky sees himself through Alexey's eyes and commits a form of suicide. As in a fairy tale, when you don't win, you die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin and Kitty examine themselves and find room for improvement. They have epiphanies. They want to be better people, and they work towards that goal. Tolstoy's reward for them is to live happily ever after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-26T18:24:08.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T23:02:33.837" Score="13" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;After starting university and going to the library for some time, I noticed a peculiar thing: comics seem to be grouped under PN irrespective of their authors' general grouping. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt; series by Neil Gaiman, who is an English author: the first volume, &lt;em&gt;Preludes and Nocturnes&lt;/em&gt;, has the Library of Congress code PN6728 .S26 G355 2010 (and the others have similar codes). Gaiman's other works seem to all be located in the PR section (English (non-American) literature), e.g. &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt; is listed under PR6057 .A319 A84 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for this? At first I thought it was because a comic may be made by a range of authors from different countries (as in the writer, the artist, the letterer, the colourist), but there are comics made by just one person (editors notwithstanding), and they're still listed under PN. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T15:51:29.280" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T19:18:21.170" Title="Why are comic books listed under PN (&quot;general literature&quot;), and not under authors' respective categories in Library of Congress system?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;library-and-information-science&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T23:44:35.590" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Inheritance Trilogy, like many works set in fantasy worlds, has a lot of apparently made-up names. However, I think I see glimmers of real-world languages shining through in many of them, like Dekarta and Enefa; other names, like T'vril, seem to be referencing naming conventions in cornerstones of the fantasy genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I seeing patterns where there are none, or is Jemisin drawing on real-world sources for the names in The Inheritance Trilogy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:17:39.247" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:17:39.247" Title="Are The Inheritance Trilogy's names derived from real-world sources?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;n-k-jemisin&gt;&lt;the-inheritance-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-26T23:49:53.303" Score="7" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2017/07/24/on-confederate-counterfactuals/#comment-73421&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This comment&lt;/a&gt; on Timothy Burke's article &quot;On Confederate Counterfactuals&quot; describes a story (presumably a novel) the user read about 40 years ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the very first Confederate counterfactual I read in the 1970s. Of course I can’t remember the title or author at this remove, but one of its conceits was that the Confederacy couldn’t hold itself together, because states just kept seceding. Florida was an independent republic, for example, and it catered to tourists from the Union.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What story is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-07-27T18:33:45.093" LastActivityDate="2017-07-30T16:25:03.463" Title="What Confederate counterfactual story features Florida as an independent tourist republic?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3140" CreationDate="2017-07-27T22:04:11.140" Score="-1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading this part of the Scarlet Letter in the Custom House:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise, were we to look about us and discover a form, beloved, but gone hence, now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic moonshine, with an aspect that would make us doubt whether it had returned from afar, or had never once stirred from our fireside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not understand the initial part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It would be too much in keeping with the scene to excite surprise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could understand after that, which was saying how we would discover a beloved creature that would be close or really far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, I don't understand this the expression of &quot;It would be too much in  keeping with the scene to excite surprise&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been using &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/lit/the-scarlet-letter/the-custom-house/page_15.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sparknotes &quot;No Fear Literature&quot; tool that simplifies passages from &lt;em&gt;The Scarlet Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It interprets the quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them,—of no great richness or value, but the best I had,—was gone from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My writing gift might not have been very rich or valuable, but it was the best I had, and it was gone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could that be if writing is not even mentioned? He mentions &quot;an entire class of susceptibilities.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1698" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T02:41:51.427" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T19:03:07.227" Title="Understanding passage from Scarlet Letter about &quot;keeping with the scene&quot;?" Tags="&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;&lt;the-scarlet-letter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-27T23:10:44.767" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Sculpted&quot; is the word used to refer to any non-human inhabitants of the world of &lt;em&gt;The Spire&lt;/em&gt;. All of them are different from humans in physical appearance, often quite drastically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Skew&quot; is a derogatory term used for Sculpted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6nnvX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6nnvX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Issue #1 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sculpted were made by humans, but they most likely (at least according to the author &lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt;) descend from humans. They also take on more dangerous jobs (that's what they were made for).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The city is also surrounded by &quot;vapor&quot;, where humans can't (and don't) live without masks. Sculpted live there just fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1jEg5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1jEg5m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Issue #2 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even Sculpted occupying high positions are sometimes disregarded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1pOpW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1pOpWm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Issue #1 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Skulpted occupy lower tiers of the Spire (tier ~= social class&lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt;), but apparently work hard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ruwb9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ruwb9m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Issue #1 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A group called &quot;Zoarim&quot; are religious zealots who see the Sclupted as abominations and kill them (and use their body parts to make stuff)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are nomadic religious groups who live out in the wilderness beyond its walls who are far more hardline in their zero-tolerance approach to non-humans — as they’d call them — than anyone inside the city. &lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People are not happy because apparently Sculpted come to the Spire (the city) and &quot;take their jobs&quot; (because they're better suited, really)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oImJP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oImJP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Issue #5 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author claims &lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt; that the xenophobia in &lt;em&gt;The Spire&lt;/em&gt; is inspired by the modern world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, as we know, living in the armpit of hypocrisy which the Western world often becomes, it’s one thing for a society to claim to be egalitarian and color-blind and free from all prejudice; it’s quite another for its people to actually live, think and act like that. And that’s what’s going on in the Spire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spurrier didn't link Sculpted to only one social group. &lt;strong&gt;Which social group is he trying to represent here?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cbr.com/murder-xenophobia-sci-fi-action-collide-in-spurriers-the-spire/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CBR's interview with Simon Spurrier, the writer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T08:05:46.703" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T05:58:34.030" Title="What social group are the Sculpted supposed to represent?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;simon-spurrier&gt;&lt;the-spire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3134" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-28T11:04:38.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T11:04:38.450" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T11:04:38.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3135" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-28T11:04:38.450" Score="0" Body="Use for the 2015 8-issue comic series, written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jeff Stokely and Andre May. Use with the [comics] tag and the respective author tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T04:43:26.040" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T04:43:26.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3136" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3137" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" Score="0" Body="Use for questions about the life and works of the British comics writer and novelist Simon &quot;Si&quot; Spurrier." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T11:08:17.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3139" CreationDate="2017-07-28T17:38:15.620" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a book about a night shift hotel receptionist/clerk who spent all his time reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had some high powered life but after some (tragic?) event he was disillusioned by life and quit his old life. He took a night shift job at a small hotel and spent all his free time sleeping or reading, he also spent most of his job time reading (as it was a very quiet hotel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His idyllic new life crashes down when a parcel is left at the desk which turns out to be full of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly he is faced with the dilemma of what to do with the package when it is never picked up and opens it out of curiosity. His problem is then what to do with the money...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought it was called Night Shift but a google search didn't seem to bring anything up... Does anyone know what it could be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T07:20:04.373" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T07:20:04.373" Title="A book about a night shift clerk in a hotel" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3138" CreationDate="2017-07-28T18:39:35.370" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I googled around a little bit, using different search terms, and found one possibility: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/515139.Nightwork&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nightwork&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Irwin Shaw&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the Goodreads summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A dead man’s briefcase presents a down-on-his-luck pilot with the&#xA;  chance of a lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pilot Douglas Grimes’s best days are long behind him. Grounded due to&#xA;  a medical condition, Douglas has resigned himself to menial work as a&#xA;  desk clerk at a seedy hotel. But his fortune flips when he discovers a&#xA;  hotel guest dead from a heart attack and, next to him, a tube jammed&#xA;  with hundred-dollar bills. Douglas grabs the money and, with it, the&#xA;  chance to remake his life. In Europe, he meets Miles Fabian, an&#xA;  elegant and erudite con man with a flair for extravagance. Fabian&#xA;  recruits him for his latest ploy: robbing members of the idle rich.&#xA;  But what will happen when his bad behavior catches up with him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you have someone who switched to a job as a hotel clerk from pilot, who finds a container with money in it while on the job, and appears to match most of the other criteria that you listed. It also has a title similar to &quot;Night Shift.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the cover (from Goodreads):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACX59.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ACX59.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;If it helps, I think the search that finally produced this result was &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?&amp;amp;q=novel+about+night+shift+hotel+clerk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;novel about night shift hotel clerk&lt;/a&gt;.&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T18:39:35.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3132" CreationDate="2017-07-28T19:03:07.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence is somewhat convoluted, obviously. You have to peel back the layers like an onion's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the &quot;form, beloved.&quot; The writer loved someone, but she has &quot;gone hence,&quot; so she has moved away (but may return &quot;from afar&quot;). Now he feels haunted by her, so much so that he imagines her sitting by the fire as if she'd never left. The ghostly simile is extended with the ray of moonlight (and implies that it's dark).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we're in the writer's present. He must invite us to &quot;look about&quot; a room, or &quot;scene,&quot; to see the ghost. &quot;In keeping with,&quot; in this context, means &lt;em&gt;consistent,&lt;/em&gt; that is, a ghost would fit into the atmosphere of this room. The sense of this first clause is so convoluted because it depends on inversion. We are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; surprised to see a ghost because it is &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context, however, it appears the narrator is only describing his late nights. There is no woman. He has given us this brief tableau to evoke a sense of longing and mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other sentence, &quot;susceptibilities&quot; refers to the inspiration the narrator feels he should get from his surroundings at the Custom House, because he gets inspiration from the same sources anywhere else. He has just used several paragraphs (which include the first sentence) to tell us about that inspiration. In other words, he is &lt;em&gt;susceptible&lt;/em&gt; to seeing images in moonlight, which he then writes about during the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-28T19:03:07.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3141" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T00:26:33.233" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;Mallory's Oracle&lt;/em&gt; by Carol O'Connell, Charles seems to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; get shot twice in the heart at pointblank range or something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then in the next scene he is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; in hospital but awake and fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an explanation for this anywhere or is it just a literary miracle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1942" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T14:27:59.017" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T14:27:59.017" Title="What is the explanation for the ending of &quot;Mallory's Oracle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;carol-oconnell&gt;&lt;mallorys-oracle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1884" CreationDate="2017-07-29T07:00:58.317" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please note:&lt;/strong&gt; It becomes difficult to predict what exact situation the poet might be referring to since I did not find any authentic source. However, I have compiled the various possibilities and scenarios the poetess might be referring to from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Bazaars_of_Hyderabad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; source. Hope it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The poetess's birth city is Hyderabad and as an emotional touch, she has also scribbled a few other poems that describe the Hyderabad of her time. (For example, 'NightFall in the city of Hyderabad'). So, at her time, there can actually be magicians demonstrating various magic tricks to kids in the markets of Hyderabad whose scene was described in the poem, along with others like 'merchants', 'vendors', 'maiden' etc. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.euacademic.org/UploadArticle/46.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; article published in European Academic Research (vol. 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had observed minutely the lives of the humble&#xA;  folks of her country and appreciated in her poetry their&#xA;  participation in humble activities of day to day life. Sarojini&#xA;  Naidu painted beautiful picture of various &lt;strong&gt;occupations&lt;/strong&gt; that&#xA;  were prevalent during her time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in this poem too, she described Magicians as another set of prevailing &lt;strong&gt;occupation&lt;/strong&gt; in her city.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another deeper meaning of signifying Magicians is best described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Bazaars_of_Hyderabad#Themes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Emotional moods are stirred by the poet, when Naidu makes the readers feel that the bazaar life also witnesses both sorrows and joys. Wedding and festival occasions brings joy in the Bazaar’s life when people buy jewelry, garlands, fruits and children crowding near the &lt;strong&gt;magicians&lt;/strong&gt;. The sorrow and sadness is witnessed when common public kitchens are arranged when the nobles or soldiers die and when flower girls are seen weaving masses of white flowers to be used for the dead people’s grave&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="195" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T14:33:40.830" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T14:33:40.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T08:01:00.630" Score="4" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;em&gt;in Just&lt;/em&gt;, (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47247/in-just&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;) the balloon man whistles and children come running. On the surface, this could simply be about a man selling balloons and children wanting to buy them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we know that e. e. cummings was Christian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._E._Cummings#Early_years&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;). And in a lot of Christian imagery, the Devil is represented with cloven hooves (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-Devil-associated-with-cloven-hoofs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;), just like the balloon man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the balloon man calls, and the children (innocents) come, drawn by the allure of balloons (a childhood delight).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the Balloon Man represent the Devil, seducing the innocent with delights so that they will follow him?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="1900" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T07:03:27.077" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T07:03:27.077" Title="Does the poem 'In Just' (e. e. cummings) allude to innocents being led astray by the devil?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;e-e-cummings&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T17:08:42.097" Score="4" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Dickens, the viewpoint frequently changes from Esther Summerson, or first-person, to third person. What is this style known as? Also, why did Dickens place such a important emphasis on Esther Summerson as to relate through her, since he also used an omniscient third person POV?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="1082" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T16:30:25.600" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T16:30:25.600" Title="What is the name of the writing style in &quot;Bleak House&quot; by Charles Dickens? Why is that style used?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;bleak-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2100" CreationDate="2017-07-29T17:12:51.580" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether this answer would be sufficient, but the essays in War and Peace probably wanted to acquaint the reader with the history and how strangely it moves. For example, in one of the essays the example of a steam train moving in different ways in different viewpoints is given. In this way Tolstoy probably wanted to show the various features and viewpoints of that particular part of Russian history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T17:12:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3146" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-29T17:49:06.917" Score="6" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;, Ivan tells a long story to Alyosha about the &lt;em&gt;Grand Inquisitor&lt;/em&gt;. I have been trying to grasp its meaning for sometime, but what is the significance of that story? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1082" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-29T18:25:25.090" LastActivityDate="2017-07-29T18:25:25.090" Title="What is the significance of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T12:42:35.857" Score="3" ViewCount="514" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;Gates of Fire&lt;/em&gt; by Steven Pressfield. I encountered this passage, to which, I cannot wrap my head around the context that author is trying to convey. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We had reached the river now. We could hear with ears that were no longer ears and see with eyes that were no longer eyes the stream of Lethe and hosts of long-suffering dead whose round beneath the earth was at last drawing to a close. They were returning to life, drinking of those waters which would efface all memory of their existence here as shades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, it is context free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the author trying to convey here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1945" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-07-30T12:51:14.277" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T08:27:25.413" Title="What is the author trying to convey in this passage from &quot;Gates of Fire&quot; by Steven Pressfield?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;gates-of-fire&gt;&lt;steven-pressfield&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3148" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T19:14:37.930" Score="9" ViewCount="2397" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a (new) ten-episode series, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5734140/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;called &lt;em&gt;Will&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, depicting the &quot;lost years&quot; of Shakespeare and taking many liberties. Most of the adult characters are real: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southwell_%28Jesuit%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Southwell&lt;/a&gt; , &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Walsingham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Walsingham&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Topcliffe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Topcliffe&lt;/a&gt;. Evidently it is possible to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tntdrama.com/shows/will&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;watch the episodes online&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one I have not been able to identify, an older man whom Marlowe regards with considerable affection, played by Julian Sands, and named &lt;strong&gt;Barrett Emerson&lt;/strong&gt;; if real, his name, to history, might be Lord Something; he seemed wealthy, but quite ill.  I have requested some books on Marlowe's friends (&lt;a href=&quot;http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b15996826~S1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Christopher Marlowe: poet &amp;amp; spy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://oskicat.berkeley.edu/record=b15245795~S1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: journeys through the Elizabethan underground&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added: Marlowe always says &quot;My King&quot; in speaking to this man, rather than using the name. In turn, Emerson always calls Marlowe &quot;Wasp,&quot; rather than the &quot;Kit&quot; we would have expected. I don't know of anything about Marlowe that calls &quot;wasp&quot; to mind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, does anyone know who Barrett Emerson might have been, or know for sure that he is fictional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1946" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T00:08:28.680" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T00:08:28.680" Title="Is Barrett Emerson, portrayed in the TV series &quot;Will&quot;, a real Christopher Marlowe patron?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;christopher-marlowe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-30T21:13:40.127" Score="6" ViewCount="383" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the inside jacket of my copy of &lt;em&gt;His Master's Voice&lt;/em&gt;, there is a short biographical blurb about the author, Stanislaw Lem. The blurb contains the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Originally trained in medicine, he began his writing career in the 1940's, rapidly developing into one of Europe's most prolific, brilliant, and admired writers, and elevating science fiction from genre to literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of this use of the word genre comes from Larry McCaffery's &lt;a href=&quot;http://spinelessbooks.com/mccaffery/100/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 20th Century’s Greatest Hits: 100 English-Language Books of Fiction&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Working as he did on the treadmill of genre SF, Dick never wrote a single work which can be termed a &quot;masterpiece,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &quot;elevating science fiction from genre to literature&quot; mean? What is the distinction between genre and literature, and is such a distinction useful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T00:18:17.763" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T13:01:50.317" Title="What is the distinction between literature and genre? Is such a distinction useful?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3149" CreationDate="2017-07-31T03:03:54.933" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hard science fiction isn't for everyone. For one thing, it's hard to follow if you don't know much about science. The &lt;em&gt;fiction&lt;/em&gt; too often gets left behind the &lt;em&gt;science.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literature, on the other hand, is intended for everyone. You don't have to be familiar with the tropes of a specific genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lem wrote SF because the Soviet censors weren't sophisticated enough to catch the subversive ideas he hid inside the genre's conventions. He wrote for a general audience so they would read and understand. To do so, he had to put the fiction ahead of the science. He thus paved the way for soft SF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A genre is a subset of fiction. A genre work can be good or bad, but it generally stays within a scope of traits. P.K. Dick applied the Beat sensibilities to SF and continued the development of soft SF, but he didn't write for a general audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literature is any fiction that, for whatever reason, has received unusual attention. The arbiters of taste have elevated it to classic status. It's rare enough for general fiction to become literature, but it's astounding for a genre writer such as Lem to reach that height.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T03:03:54.933" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3151" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T07:48:14.503" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a recollection of a quote I thought came from Heinrich Heine. My recollection of the quote is something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you go up to the mountaintop and say the right words, the whole world will change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word mountaintop is popular in quotes but I don’t find anything resembling my quote in Google searches, so there is probably something wrong with my recollection.&#xA;Does anyone recognize the quote which sounds like a German romantic literary product?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1948" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T08:28:25.093" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T08:28:25.093" Title="Who is the author of this quote about saying the right words on a mountaintop and changing the world?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3144" CreationDate="2017-07-31T14:17:17.863" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on whom you ask. Some will tell you that the widest POV is the controlling factor, because narrowing it down is only an exception. In that case, &lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt; is omniscient (or third-person) POV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some will tell you it's alternating or multiple POV. There isn't an official name for this classification, since there are so many possible variations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some will tell you it's omniscient/first-person POV, because those are the two POVs used, end of discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better question might be, why did Dickens choose this format? Is Esther so much more important than any other character? Did he start out one way and change his mind? Was he going for contrast, character, or narrative logic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T14:17:17.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T15:42:30.357" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the general prologue of The Canterbury Tales, we're introduced to the character of the Reeve. The Reeve is described as having his hair cut like a priest's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His berd was shave as ny as ever he kan;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      His heer was by his erys ful round yshorn;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      His top was dokked lyk a preest biforn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know nothing about the hair styles at the time, so what does this say about the Reeve's character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T20:30:26.670" LastActivityDate="2017-07-31T20:30:26.670" Title="Why is the Reeve's hair cut like a priest's?" Tags="&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T16:15:34.627" Score="5" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/webcore/murphy/canterbury/2genpro.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Prologue&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; spends a lot of time talking about the Pardoner's hair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Pardoner hadde heer as yelow as wex,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By ounces henge his lokkes that he hadde,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therwith he hise shuldres overspradde;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But thynne it lay by colpons oon and oon.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But hood, for jolitee, wered he noon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For it was trussed up in his walet.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dischevelee, save his cappe, he rood al bare. (ll. 675–683)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know nothing about the hair-styles at the time, so what does this particular style say about the Pardoner? The text makes it clear that the Pardoner thinks highly of his hair (&amp;quot;Hym thoughte he rood al of the newe jet&amp;quot;), with the implication that others most likely think less of the hair-style. But is that all there is to this particular passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T10:53:22.597" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T10:53:22.597" Title="Significance of the Pardoner's hair style" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T16:31:08.503" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of the descriptions of all the characters in the general prologue of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, the text reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now have I told you soothly in a clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The word soothly means truly; &quot;in a clause&quot; means the passage was short. Interestingly, in many of the modern English translations, this line is rendered as &quot;Now have I told you quickly, in a clause,&quot; which isn't quite right; just another example of why you shouldn't trust these modern translations. If you're interested in why translations render the passage this way, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3184/why-do-translation-of-the-line-now-have-i-told-you-soothly-in-a-clause-ignore&quot;&gt;I asked a question about it&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpreted this as a joke, because by modern standards, the descriptions were not quick. But at the time, would it have been interpreted as a joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T17:05:13.693" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:22:53.223" Title="Is this a joke about the length of the General Prologue?" Tags="&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-31T17:29:58.533" Score="8" ViewCount="428" Body="&lt;p&gt;C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia are a great children's series which present an allegory the New Testament and Biblical history. That said, Lewis sometimes put in things that don't necessarily reflect traditional Christian beliefs, such as his inclusion of the character Emeth who through his good deeds alone (not his belief in Christ/Aslan) stirs deep controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Last Battle is a stirring story that is similar and style and feel to the Book of Revelation. There is a character, Puzzle the Donkey, who although good follows what he knows to be incorrect and evil. He is ultimately forgiven by Christ/Aslan, but not before being told something that &quot;that made his ears go down, and some more words that made his ears go up&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a corresponding group or entity in Biblical history that has a similar fate as Puzzle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1950" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-07-31T21:25:15.793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T14:08:48.627" Title="Does Puzzle the Donkey have an allegorical relationship with any entity in the Book of Revelation or the Bible at large?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3162" CreationDate="2017-07-31T19:38:36.110" Score="8" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book a while ago - I remember enjoying the read (I think it was intended to be humorous). I'm pretty sure it was a short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must have read it in the last ten years, and there is a high chance it is therefore a children's book, but I'd still like to find out the name, and would be grateful if someone could do so. My google searches so far have come out with nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I can remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was about a young man who is about to marry a woman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The woman does something very stupid, I think involving a barn/mill and an axe, hammer or saw, and starts crying because she thinks her children will get hurt (I seem to remember her telling others and they start crying too).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man tells the woman that if he can find three people more stupid he will marry her, and sets out on a journey.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first person more stupid hangs his trousers on a door handle and tries to jump into them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't remember what the second person does&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third group of people think the moon has fallen into their lake and are trying to fish its reflection out with a net.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man returns and marries the woman.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember anything about the title or author, but I hope this should be enough information for someone to find it. Thanks to anyone who tries!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T19:46:14.357" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T19:46:14.357" Title="A book about a man finding three people more stupid than his fiancée" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3149" CreationDate="2017-07-31T20:07:14.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Literature&quot; in this context is used to connote what may be termed the genre of &quot;Literary Fiction&quot; as opposed to mere &quot;Genre Fiction&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction is exceptionally useful in the contemporary landscape to  distinguish work with deeper merit (i.e. possessing more than mere entertainment value.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Elevated beyond genre&quot; is a way of connoting that a &quot;genre&quot; novel has social, philosophical, or literary value, as opposed to mere entertainment value.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea of literary elevation of genre fiction is reserved for relatively few genre authors--in speculative fiction those names include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swift&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orwell&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dick&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lem&lt;/a&gt;, although this list may extends beyond such Olympian heights. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same type of &quot;transcendence of genre&quot; is afforded to comic book authors such as Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, who elevated the &quot;comic book genre&quot; into the field of &quot;literature&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genre#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The idea of dividing the medium into genres goes back to Plato&lt;/a&gt;, where such divisions were seen a useful and necessary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Division of literature into genres is useful because it's allows practitioners and scholars to separate the forms in order to discuss, analyze, and create.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the modern context, genre distinctions are a powerful marketing tool, allowing publishers to target consumers predisposed to specific types of content.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with art is subjectivity, and everyone has their favorite authors.  Joy derived from a work is legitimate, and notwithstanding of the &quot;elevation&quot; of the work.  But a much stronger case for elevated work can be made for authors like Swift, Orwell, Lem and Dick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, as a Classical Scholar and Mythologist, &lt;strong&gt;all fiction was &quot;genre fiction&quot; before the modern literary fiction movement.&lt;/strong&gt; This extends from Gilgamesh and Homer through &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dumas&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jack London&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In many ways, speculative fiction is the most literary of the genres because the origins of speculative fiction, of which Swift is a paragon, is the facilitation of discussion of social issues that would be censured if made directly in context of contemporary society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus Lem could use genre to be be subversive, avoiding the censure of overly literal bureaucrats who wouldn't catch the subtext, and this is a tradition which goes back to at least Homer, in that the Iliad was a heavily subversive work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, genre opens the discussion of such topics to a wider audience than would normally be interested.  &lt;em&gt;(i.e. Hunger Games is probably more widely read, and at a much younger age, than treatises on information warfare and economic inequality.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason I find the terminology useful is to distinguish between genre authors who elevate the form (Lem, Dick) and literary authors &lt;em&gt;utilizing&lt;/em&gt; genre (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard-Boiled_Wonderland_and_the_End_of_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Murakami&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Chabon#Summerland.2C_The_Final_Solution.2C_Gentlemen_of_the_Road.2C_and_The_Yiddish_Policemen.27s_Union&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chabon&lt;/a&gt;).  I'll read the work of the literary authors, admittedly superior stylists, but don't always find it as &lt;em&gt;satisfying&lt;/em&gt; as the work of the pure genre writers, for which style is not a primary consideration. By contrast, of Cormac McCarthy I might say &quot;He is a an author who transcends literary fiction to return it to its genre roots.&quot; &lt;em&gt;(Possibly I am more attracted to McCarthy per my interest in fundamental ethical questions, the concept of the &quot;personal code&quot;, and his allegorical approach.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T21:46:33.030" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T21:46:33.030" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3159" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T02:56:29.773" Score="5" ViewCount="1123" Body="&lt;p&gt;We all have an intuitive idea of what a genre is. Science Fiction, Fantasy, Mystery... these are all examples of genres. But this intuitive understanding doesn't seem to easily translate into coherent definitions. It's easy to list books that qualify as Science Fiction; it's harder to explain why, and it's even harder to find a coherent definition of Science Fiction that everyone can agree on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are genres? Are they a useful concept for understanding literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T03:03:35.050" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T15:53:40.833" Title="What are genres? Are they a useful concept?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3159" CreationDate="2017-08-01T04:43:29.487" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start with what genres aren't. When people debate the definition of say, Science Fiction, what makes these debates possible is the belief that an objective, correct definition of Science Fiction exists. However, the assumption that genres have objective, coherent definitions doesn't hold up to even the most cursory of scrutiny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Works can be assigned to multiple genres. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18490533-radiance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Radiance&lt;/em&gt; is a decopunk pulp SF alt-history space opera mystery&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/790/do-we-need-a-childrens-literature-tag#comment2887_793&quot;&gt;Hat tip to BESW for the example&lt;/a&gt;). Debates about what genre a book belongs to can only be resolved with the recognition that stories can have multiple genres. Genres are not distinct categories, and genres are not mutually exclusive; genres merge, overlap, and split.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Genres often have little to do with the actual content of a text, and often have everything to do with how readers of a text perceive themselves. Harry Potter is a perfect example of this. Originally marketed as children's literature, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=harry%20potter%20adult%20edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the British publisher published &quot;adult editions&quot; of the Harry potter books&lt;/a&gt;. The adult editions had the same text but a different cover. It's not hard to read the subtext that some adult readers were not comfortable reading books identified as being for children. And it's not hard to read into the debate over whether Harry Potter is children's literature or adult literature a debate, not about the content of the books, but about &lt;em&gt;who&lt;/em&gt; should be reading Harry Potter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Genres are not fixed in time; any definition of a genre will eventually become out of date. Let's return to the example of Harry Potter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/03/harry-potter-trend-for-much-longer-childrens-books-booklist-jk-rowling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Research suggests that due to the popularity of Harry Potter, the length of children's literature books has increased substantially&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Genres do not merely describe literature; in many cases the existence of a genre is what causes the creation of works of literature. The example of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/solarpunks/solarpunk-a-reference-guide-8bcf18871965#_=_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solarpunk&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is highly instructive. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=36095665#36095665&quot;&gt;Hat tip to BESW for this example&lt;/a&gt;). The genre of solarpunk was literally created &lt;a href=&quot;http://missolivialouise.tumblr.com/post/94374063675/heres-a-thing-ive-had-around-in-my-head-for-a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;when someone wrote a tumblr post proposing the creation of a new genre&lt;/a&gt;. Since then, the existence of the genre of solarpunk has caused the creation of new stories. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What all of these case studies suggest is that genres are not objective, descriptive, fixed, and coherent, but are subjective, fluid, and are as much prescriptive as they are descriptive. With this newfound knowledge, let's move on to some actual definitions of what genres are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at how genres are actually used, genres essentially represent communities of readers. If a book is labeled with a genre, this serves as a signpost for the community of readers that said book is a book that they should read. These communities are both real, in that they have conventions and clubs and websites, and imagined, in that readers of a genre may not have interacted with other readers but still feel that they are a part of the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genres are about marketing. They are labels used by marketers to appeal to readers. Genres are created, defined, and redefined by a complex interplay between marketers and readers. There are too many examples to count of publishers reclassifying books in response to reader pressure, or of readers disagreeing with the classifications used by publishers. It's not a top-down model.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the last part of the question, genres are a powerful force in the world of literature, and the study of genre is useful, necessary, and will lead to important insights. This answer has given many examples of how genres shape literature. But in order for genre to be studied productively, it's important to understand what genre is or is not. There can be no productive study of genre with the assumption that genres are objective, fixed, coherent categories. That will only lead to pointless debates about the classification of books into genre, at the expense of understanding how genre actually effects the world of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-01T05:39:50.087" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T05:39:50.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2460" CreationDate="2017-08-01T12:08:37.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can start by remembering the occasion when her eyes &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; of two colours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sHVw6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sHVw6m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Destiny: &amp;quot;It is... refreshing... to see you so collected.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Brief Lives&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 7. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a moment in Destiny's garden Delirium regains her sanity, reminding Destiny of the days when she was Delight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n5eXR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/n5eXR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Dream? What did he tell you?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Delirium?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It's still me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But...?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;If you're going to fall apart, then one of us has to keep this thing going. Please get up. I don't know how much longer I can be like this. It hurts very muchly.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Your eyes are the same color.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So? I can do that. I can do that if I have to.&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Ibid. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it's not evident from the illustrations (colouring errors are notorious when it comes to Delirium), Delirium's eyes are of the same colour when she's &amp;quot;collected&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her eyes are of different colours to indicate that she is prone to split personalities - one moment she is kind, the other ruthless (e.g. when she gave the poor policeman the &lt;em&gt;bugs&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delirium's overall appearance is also changing, more so that her siblings'. Per Neil Gaiman, Delirium is the most changing of her family due to her age, and &amp;quot;Delirium&amp;quot; is not necessarily her final form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: I decided Delight would would make for a very appropriate past existence for Delirium, because she's a character I wanted in a state of flux - she's been one thing, she's become something else, and eventually she'll change into something else again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HB&lt;/strong&gt;: Is this state of flux unique to Delirium?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NG&lt;/strong&gt;: Yes. It has to do with her being the youngest; she's practically a cosmic afterthought.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Sandman Companion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13 &amp;quot;Secret Origin&amp;quot;, page 241 (first edition). &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She doesn't even &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; enough to remember which of her eyes the silver specks went to, if I'm remembering a page I can't find right now correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T12:08:37.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3157" CreationDate="2017-08-01T12:31:57.397" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/English_Fairy_Tales/The_Three_Sillies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Three Sillies&lt;/a&gt; is your story.  There are many kids book editions so matching the particular one you saw might be hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting from the link,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that was another big silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the gentleman went on his travels again; and he came to a village, and outside the village there was a pond, and round the pond was a crowd of people. And they had got rakes, and brooms, and pitchforks, reaching into the pond; and the gentleman asked what was the matter. &amp;quot;Why,&amp;quot; they say, &amp;quot;matter enough! Moon's tumbled into the pond, and we can't rake her out anyhow!&amp;quot; So the gentle man burst out a-laughing, and told them to look up into the sky, and that it was only the shadow in the water. But they wouldn't listen to him, and abused him shamefully, and he got away as quick as he could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there was a whole lot of sillies bigger than them three sillies at home. So the gentleman turned back home again and married the farmer's daughter, and if they didn't live happy for ever after, that's nothing to do with you or me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T13:43:58.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2017-08-01T19:20:40.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaiman plays with mythology, but he also &lt;em&gt;plays at&lt;/em&gt; mythology. The Endless, like classical Greek gods, descend into petty squabbles that mortals would quickly resolve. Grudges, such as Desire's grudge against Dream, can fester for decades or centuries because time is not a factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Night represents darkness, of course, but the darkness can obscure as well as hide. Mothers play favorites, even if they claim otherwise. Before she helps Morpheus, she wants to pinch him, and not in a good way. She mentions the other children. He brings up Desire, but before he can ask for information or intercession, Night pushes one of his buttons. He whines. The moment passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that Night is playing with Dream. She claims that Desire doesn't visit, but she knows about the plot to destroy Dream. Before she can give away anything, she distracts him and changes the subject. She knows Desire and Dream are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; alike. After all, it's Dream's sense of responsibility that will be his downfall. Night doesn't care. She knows, because she promises they will never meet again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Night so callous? She is as old as Time, and yet she eats continuously. Inside her there is a void that can't be filled, a black hole that pulls at everything, a pall that consumes every ray of light, an addiction, an endless hunger. Next to that, love for her family runs a distant second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gods have their problems, but they usually end up as constellations or strange animals. Gaiman leaves Night in a hell of her own making, willing to lie to her own son and let him go to his doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T19:20:40.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2805" CreationDate="2017-08-01T19:39:08.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple answer is that souls want to come in to the Dreaming, while they want to get out of Hell. There's a layer of security involved. Also, when Lucifer says Hell practically runs itself, he's referring to a hierarchy of employees who've had millennia to maximize their productivity and learn their mission statement. They all report to him, and in most cases, they probably already know what he'll say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Lucifer at the helm, then, Hell does run itself. Once Morpheus takes over, however, all that changes. It's the worst kind of lie, a truth that becomes false as soon as it's told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, while Morpheus doesn't comprehend everything that goes into running Hell, Lucifer doesn't appreciate the problems of running the Dreaming. Like a horrible boss, he's trying to get someone else to do his job and their own at the same time, while he goes on vacation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-01T19:39:08.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-01T20:33:21.200" Score="4" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the prologue of &lt;em&gt;Season of Mists&lt;/em&gt; (the fifth volume), a family reunion occurs and the six Endless siblings are formally introduced, and have speaking roles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQAlK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VQAlK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As shown, each has a unique lettering style, which encompasses not only the letters but also the shape and colour of the speech baloons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Todd Klein famously did the lettering for the whole run of &lt;em&gt;The Sandman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt;, so I assume the lettering styles originated with him. What motivated his artistic choices? What do the lettering styles tell us about the Endless? Were the styles a collaborative effort between him, Gaiman, and the artists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1: Except some 3 issues, where John Constanza replaced him. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T16:41:12.483" Title="What is the origin of Endless' lettering styles in &quot;The Sandman&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;&lt;todd-klein&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3166" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T02:07:42.560" Score="10" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;Little Free Library is an organization that builds and distributes miniature libraries that can hold, I would guess about twenty books each. Here's a picture of one &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Little_Free_Library,_Easthampton_MA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;from Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VB2Ei.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VB2Ei.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A &amp;quot;Little Free Library&amp;quot;: a small box in the shape of a house that holds about twenty books. The box is placed in a residential neighborhood.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://littlefreelibrary.org/about/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Free Library website claims&lt;/a&gt; that their program, by providing a easy, low cost way to establish a miniature library, helps bring books to low-income families who otherwise would not have access to them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most successful ways to improve the reading achievement of children is to increase their access to books, especially at home (McGill-Franzen &amp;amp; Allington, 2009). But according to the U.S. Department of Education, up to 61% of low-income families do not have any books for their kids at home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little Free Libraries play an essential role by providing 24/7 access to books (and encouraging a love of reading!) in areas where books are scarce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Little Free Library website cites a lot of stats about how many miniature libraries they've been able to start. But they don't provide any evidence that these libraries are providing books to low income families. So my question is, do Little Free Libraries actually increase low-income families' access to books? Or are they just an excuse to build cute but ineffective boxes to store books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T02:58:13.147" Title="Does the &quot;Little Free Library&quot; program actually provide access to books to low income communities?" Tags="&lt;library-and-information-science&gt;&lt;book-access&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3126" CreationDate="2017-08-02T06:45:03.463" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a Tennyson quote as far as we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A member of the Tennyson Society have checked the Tennyson concordance, (not in itself complete), and confirms to me so far that this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a Tennyson quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1938" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T06:45:03.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3156" CreationDate="2017-08-02T14:08:48.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes and no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes because he resembles &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+17&amp;amp;version=B21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the great prostitute&lt;/a&gt; in the way that he misguided the whole world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no because most of the characters in the Chronicles of Narnia don't primarily represent their biblical archetype but rather, as in Lewis' &lt;em&gt;The Screwtape Letters&lt;/em&gt; the different ways human psychology can go to. That's because Narnia was indeed written to be understood by children and I think the strong idea in Puzzle is that if he was born into a fine Narnian donkey family, he could have a beautiful life but instead, he became the worst of the worst. There is a very little of the &quot;evil evil&quot; in this world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the construction of the Last Battle is very different from the Revelation's because C. S. Lewis and as it's clear from his concept of the origin of life in &lt;em&gt;The Problem of Pain&lt;/em&gt;, wasn't much into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literalism&lt;/a&gt;. I think the concept he sketches out in the Last Battle is much closer to what most liberal Christians would imagine the end of the world like than to the mythological battle in the Revelation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="291" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T14:08:48.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3172" CreationDate="2017-08-02T16:04:45.553" Score="7" ViewCount="9502" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &quot;the silent imputation of parsimony&quot; mean? It appears in the first paragraph of &quot;The Gift of the Magi,&quot; which I've quoted below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One dollar and eighty-seven cents.That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one's cheeks burned with &lt;strong&gt;the silent imputation of parsimony&lt;/strong&gt; that such close dealing implied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T09:23:04.420" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T21:26:14.530" Title="What does the phrase &quot;the silent imputation of parsimony&quot; mean in The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3171" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2017-08-02T16:41:21.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story it is clear from the starting line that Del and Jim were poverty-stricken. Such was the extent of poverty that even the cents were in pennies. Henry mentions the pennies were saved cautiously by (Della) almost pressurizing the grocer, the vegetable man or the butcher. She literally overpowered them (metaphorically &lt;strong&gt;bulldozed&lt;/strong&gt;) and saved pennies for small purchases. Indeed, she had to indulge in &lt;strong&gt;parsimony&lt;/strong&gt;(unwillingness to spend money) though she didn't like it. Hence she was embarrassed while haggling over the tiny cents and the same reflected on her cheeks which turned red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;strong&gt;imputation&lt;/strong&gt; means accusation. So we can say that the &lt;strong&gt;close dealing&lt;/strong&gt; implied obviously that Del was poor and accused her of being stingy. But the accusation was &lt;em&gt;silent&lt;/em&gt;, meaning that neither she nor the shopkeeper voiced aloud that she was parsimonious. Her behavior in the market implied that she was very poor and she too was embarrassed by the silent accusation of parsimony of close dealings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, interestingly Henry uses &lt;em&gt;one's&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Della's&lt;/em&gt; to possibly suggest the general condition of anyone performing such parsimony. (Everyone's cheeks would burn). Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1911" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T16:41:21.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3170" CreationDate="2017-08-02T19:44:38.953" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;O. Henry is considered a master of the short story, and this excerpt tells you why. His very first paragraph tells you something about a main character and about the conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Parsimony,&lt;/em&gt; or penny pinching, is generally considered an undesirable trait (or was in Henry's time). A young married woman such as Della would be responsible for shopping and cooking, and she would receive an allowance from her husband for food. The local merchants have no reason to think that Della lacks money. Instead, they would believe that she's driving a hard bargain (&quot;bulldozing&quot;) to be unpleasant. They would naturally &lt;em&gt;impute,&lt;/em&gt; or ascribe to her, this stinginess and disrespect. However, they wouldn't say that out loud to a lady, hence their &lt;em&gt;silence.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beneath it, however, Della's &quot;cheeks burned.&quot; She is embarrassed by having to do what she's doing, and yet she has done it for some time and continues to do it. Shame is another quality that is viewed differently today. It was quite powerful in earlier times. Henry is telling us that she has motivation strong enough to offset her shame, and that will help drive the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T19:44:38.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2739" CreationDate="2017-08-02T20:28:38.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Let the dead bury the dead.&quot; No doubt Harper Lee heard that verse all her life. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says it to shame a new disciple who wants to bury his father. In those days, however, &quot;burying&quot; included a year after the original interment for the bones to become bare, upon which they would go into a tomb. So the disciple is trying to postpone his invitation for as much as a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that have to do with Ewell's death? Not much. Tate and Finch argue over how Ewell died. Finch, the lawyer, wants to have a trial and get at the truth, even if it implicates his daughter. Tate is tired of the whole business, and another trial will keep the town on edge. The simple and obvious solution is that Ewell, drunk and in the dark, fell on his own knife. Tate invokes the ultimate authority, the Bible, and quotes Matthew, hoping that will settle everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Tate probably means is &quot;What's done is done&quot; or &quot;let sleeping dogs lie&quot; or a confusion of both. He's seen too much death recently. He can hold an inquest, rule Ewell's death an accident, and let everyone move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T20:28:38.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3129" CreationDate="2017-08-02T21:43:30.557" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/tgje6/hello_reddit_im_fantasy_novelist_nk_jemisin_ama/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In her Reddit AMA from 2012&lt;/a&gt;, Jemisin addressed this a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was:&#xA;&quot;How do you discover/generate names? Yours are always so evocative.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer was: &#xA;&quot;For my protagonists, I just generally think a bit about the character and try to feel out syllables that fit. Nahadoth (Inheritance Trilogy), for example, felt like the sort of character who needed a long, ominous-sounding name. I tried two syllables, added another, then decided he needed more, and kept at it 'til I found something that felt right.&#xA;For less-important characters, I actually use a weird trick: I open any file on my hard drive, pick the last syllable of a random filename, pick the first syllable of another, and put them together. :)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I know she's talked about naming in the context of her construction and depiction of race, too. For example, her Dreamblood Duology is loosely Egyptian, and many of the characters have names that are more or less 'Egypt-y'. Characters not from the primary urban setting (tribal groups etc) have their own flavor to their naming conventions as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her Broken Earth series, characters associated with the 'earth magic' group have appropriately mineral-themed names. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Season_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To quote Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, civilians have a &quot;given name followed by use-caste (rank of profession) followed by comm (community, town, or city).  For instance Schaffa Guardian Warrant is a Guardian named Schaffa from the comm Warrant.&quot; To my knowledge, Wikipedia is accurate to the book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T21:51:04.550" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T21:51:04.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3175" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T21:57:51.603" Score="4" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically I'm trying to reconstruct in words what goes on with/in the Scar itself, as in between Hedrigall's departure and then his return on the airship. It's something to do with the whole possibility trope (like with Doul's sword), but I'm not quite sure I understand what actually goes down. Does Hedrigall just freak the Armadans out so much that they decide it's not worth it and to turn around? Also I'm sure it intersects with the decline/death of the avanc somehow? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully that's not too much of a mess. I don't need a play-by-play, I think, but if someone could reconstruct basically the impetus, the action, the crisis, and the outcome, I should be able to make sense of it. At least, as much sense as Mieville allows. I'm sure the answer to &quot;what happened&quot; is fundamentally uncertain, but I'm not sure that I even know what exactly to be uncertain about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks, and I'm happy to clarify if needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T13:18:44.703" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T13:18:44.703" Title="What happens at the end of The Scar by China Mieville?" Tags="&lt;china-mieville&gt;&lt;the-scar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-02T22:44:50.927" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Digger&lt;/em&gt; is a webcomic about a wombat. On the comic published on April 12th, 2007, we're shown the archives of the Temple of Ganesh. &lt;a href=&quot;http://diggercomic.com/blog/2007/04/12/digger-64/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can view the comic online&lt;/a&gt;. Looking at the archives, several of the books in the archives have visible titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of all the books whose titles are visible? I tried googling &quot;digger archives of temple of ganesh&quot; but didn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T23:22:25.787" Title="Listing the books in the archives of the Temple of Ganesh" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;ursula-vernon&gt;&lt;digger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="318" CreationDate="2017-08-02T22:47:40.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Epistolary novels should help increase reader identification with the writer-protagonists. The format shifts our sense of the weight of the &quot;invisible hand of the author&quot; from the words being written to the presentation of the individual texts. This helps us put the author out of the way, developing an increased sense of agency for those writer-protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More agency for characters, plus the diagetic reality of the letters/documents/etc, promotes the reader's sense of verisimilitude. The world and the story gain tangibility.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Further, sustaining that verisimilitude and agency allows the reader advanced interior access to writer-protagonists. Not only can we &quot;see their thoughts,&quot; but also we can see them attempting to put their thoughts into a coherent, communicable document. How an epistolizing character constructs their documents should, in a good epistolary novel, show us much about the character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Epistolary novels are excellent ground for use of unreliable narrators and contradictory perspectives/reports of events, especially if we get more than one character writing letters. We tend to assume, reading an epistolary, that events are being recorded faithfully, that the writer-protagonist is communicating honestly and in good faith, but this can be subverted, requiring readers to revise their perspective and analytic technique.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Epistolary novels also allow for huge amounts of &quot;off-screen&quot; action just by definition. These two points together can generate complex, dynamic plots that belie the seeming-simple nature of the episolary. All this can lead to undermining reader expectations, generating surprise, re-read value, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could get a whole lot more specific if the question was about the effects of the epistolary form on interpretation of / reaction to a specific novel, but this should at least be a solid partial list to get thinking about the way an author might be shaping your experience of a story by using epistle rather than direct narration. The items I listed should have a fair degree of general applicability. However, a &quot;complete, accurate&quot; answer is pretty impossible here, because conventions and techniques for deploying any stylistic mode change over time, as do the concerns to which an author might apply that mode. That is to say, a Jane Austen novel and a modern CIA thriller are going to use the epistolary form in different ways for different purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T12:36:28.600" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T12:36:28.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3176" CreationDate="2017-08-02T23:20:23.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I didn't know of any existing list, so I made my own. (?) means it's my best read but I think I'm probably wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leviticu&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Rats I Have Known&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Black Dogs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  King in Yellow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chickens IV&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Squids&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice in Wonder Land&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chickens of the World II&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shmoops&lt;/em&gt; (?)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;I Am Mouse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sandman&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rlyeh Text III&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nobel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chicken II&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Abridged History of the Cosmos–the First 50 Years&lt;/em&gt; (this one was tricky, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwombatstudio.com/2004/02/12/556/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vernon had already told us what it says&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And four pages later we see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No Bad Frogs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Guide to Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like there's a D&amp;amp;D manual on the shelf in that panel too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the titles in the chapter are either partials (&lt;em&gt;Note-&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Smo-&lt;/em&gt;), gibberish, or easy to make out (&lt;em&gt;Atlas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Squid&lt;/em&gt;). Mention to &lt;em&gt;Travels and Travails&lt;/em&gt; though, and &lt;em&gt;Travel [illegible] on the Sou&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;Son&lt;/em&gt;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-08-02T23:22:25.787" LastActivityDate="2017-08-02T23:22:25.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3179" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3180" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" Score="0" Body="To be used for &quot;Digger&quot;, the webcomic written by Ursula Vernon. Use with the [comics] and [ursula-vernon] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T04:41:32.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1170" CreationDate="2017-08-03T06:48:04.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;His name does appear in the book, if you read the last line of the inside back dust jacket of the hardback edition, which begins with the words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Panama Oxridge? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ends with the words `poor lad's head!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds like 'Paul Adshead'. You'd probably need to know that was his name in order to see it though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further to the above information regarding the Justin Thyme website, the name Paul Adshead is also spelt out by the playing cards next to the joker on the Thyme clock, found in the library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The code is explained on page 257 of the book; each suit represents a different letter, so the ace and 6 of hearts stand for P, the 16th letter of the alphabet, the ace of spades stands for A, the 1st letter of the alphabet, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1964" LastEditorDisplayName="user1964" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T15:24:19.863" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T15:24:19.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8071" CreationDate="2017-08-03T07:14:23.090" Score="9" ViewCount="1249" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;, Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter Catherine Linton constantly change their names and created confusion as to who is who. And you would all have read the part where Lockwood discovers carved variation of their names (Catherine). And the Catherines of this book change their names, such as 'Catherine Earnshaw' to 'Catherine Linton', and 'Catherine Linton' to 'Catherine Heathcliff' - soon-to-be Catherine Earnshaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By changing the female protagonists' names, what can be expected of its effect to our readers or the character's status in the story? Isn't this quite an uncanny aspect of the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1943" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T22:14:29.310" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T22:14:29.310" Title="Complicated name features in Wuthering Heights" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;emily-bronte&gt;&lt;wuthering-heights&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T11:54:19.497" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is, 'Is Iambic pentameter just an illusion?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I learned Shakespeare in school, my teacher emphasized on the thing called 'iambic pentameter'. That goes like 'du Dum du Dum......' But when I looked up at the famous 'tomorrow speech' from Macbeth, I really didn't think this isn't on Iambic pentameter. Only Iambic pentameter I can name was the line 'That strets and frets his hour upon the stage.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I posted a question in the other site and the answer I was given was that there is no strict iambic pentameter. No-one writes poems in strict iambic pentameter and that shakespeare isn't much of it. They said it is even debatable whether Shakespeare 'knew' what is iambic pentameter or he just followed what other people in his period wrote. I was... deeply confused?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they say the poem I gave as an example of Iambic trimeter isn't much of Iambic either. It goes like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Although the sun and moon were gone&#xA;And the universe ceased to be&#xA;And thou art left alone&#xA;Every existence would exist in thee.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my perception of Iambic completely wrong? I've  always thought that poems are to be written in iambic. I don't know why my teacher so much gave an emphasis on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1943" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T11:54:19.497" Title="Shakespeare and Iambic pentameter" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2017-08-03T15:39:58.747" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T17:04:36.433" Score="7" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I personally prefer to read &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; in the original English, but over the course of asking questions on this site I've come across several modern English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I've noticed is that in most translations of line 715 (&quot;Now have I told you soothly in a clause&quot;) tend to ignore the word soothly (truly) and replace it with a word like quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://english.fsu.edu/canterbury/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the Ecker and Crook translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As briefly as I could I've told you now&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Degree, array, and number, and of how&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This company of pilgrims came to be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In Southwark at that pleasant hostelry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tigerweb.towson.edu/duncan/chaucer/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's Duncan's translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now have I told you briefly, in a clause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The state, the array, the number, and the cause &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do translations ignore the word soothly? It seems important to the passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T17:31:38.497" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T16:31:39.410" Title="Why do translations of the line &quot;Now have I told you soothly in a clause&quot; ignore the word soothly?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3159" CreationDate="2017-08-03T17:18:23.140" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that a genre is a kind of non-spoken contract between creator and reader, an implicit understanding of some of the things that has to be accepted to make the work function as intended. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most important such understanding when it comes to literature is that if something is a labelled &quot;fiction&quot;, then it need not have anything to do with reality. Many genres of fiction ascribe further to a certain realism, where it is deemed important that most or all events contained in the work are realistic, and most try for at least a level of psychological realism, where the characters are supposed to act in a believable manner. However, different genres can play more or less loosely with the realism, sometimes replacing it with a set of genre conventions; for example, in most detective fiction, it is expected that some sort of justice is ultimately served, while some science fiction subgenres relax the laws of physics as we know them so that interstellar travel is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other genres instead are defined mainly by the form that the work takes: poetry places further constraints on language, where the lines classically has had to follow some sort of pattern, but where instead word order or word choices are freer than &quot;ordinary&quot; language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, genres are not rigid things: it is, for example, possible to write detective fiction where justice is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; served. Challenging the conventions has always been a way to create new, interesting works. Even if a creator has intended to place his creation firmly within a certain genre, readers can also derive enjoyment through treating it as if it belonged to another: an excellent example of this is the sherlockians who treats Arthur Conan Doyles stories as &quot;real&quot; retellings of the adventures of an historical figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, genres are useful shortcuts that lets us dispense with certain questions about the realism of certain things (such as &quot;how comes this person always stumbles into murder mysteries with unnaturally clever attempts to cover the tracks?&quot;), and instead analyse the qualities of a work with the genre conventions taken as a a given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T17:18:23.140" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3184" CreationDate="2017-08-03T17:31:05.707" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many renditions of the original English text use the word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;shortly&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; instead of &quot;soothly&quot;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.librarius.com/canttran/genpro/genpro717-785.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this version&lt;/a&gt; from Librarius:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now have I toold you shortly in a clause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Th'estaat, th'array, the nombre, and eek the cause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Why that assembled was this compaignye&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      In Southwerk, at this gentil hostelrye&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      That highte the Tabard, faste by the Belle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kLomCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT53&amp;amp;lpg=PT53&amp;amp;dq=Now+have+I+told+you+shortly+in+a+clause+canterbury+tales&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=luuZy-GF6x&amp;amp;sig=5bspHTFeUpKBSn-BBtMhwG3775k&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwidzsOFy7vVAhXGPhQKHbDjD_cQ6AEIQTAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wiQTBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA57&amp;amp;lpg=PA57&amp;amp;dq=Now+have+I+told+you+shortly+in+a+clause+canterbury+tales&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=rrwU2GlWVf&amp;amp;sig=SMn5a595pK_yfZFo_9t0LGIZbUA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwidzsOFy7vVAhXGPhQKHbDjD_cQ6AEITjAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Now%20have%20I%20told%20you%20shortly%20in%20a%20clause%20canterbury%20tales&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.no/books?id=u71rxf02d8IC&amp;amp;pg=PA46&amp;amp;lpg=PA46&amp;amp;dq=Now+have+I+told+you+shortly+in+a+clause+canterbury+tales&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=x41YJ0Ddnn&amp;amp;sig=nJiYBsV8dEoJZUZTQqzXvs1L-j4&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwidzsOFy7vVAhXGPhQKHbDjD_cQ6AEIRDAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Now%20have%20I%20told%20you%20shortly%20in%20a%20clause%20canterbury%20tales&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; editions, all available on Google Books. I haven't been able to find anything pointing to which of &quot;shortly&quot; and &quot;soothly&quot; came first or which is considered more definitive. As with e.g. &lt;em&gt;Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt; or the plays of Shakespeare, I suspect that there are several extant versions of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; with very small differences between them (a word here, some punctuation there) and nothing to place one of them above another in terms of 'canonicity'. &lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; my gut feeling was correct, as confirmed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales#Text&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (sourced to Helen Cooper's and Derek Pearsall's guides to &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Tales vary in both minor and major ways from manuscript to manuscript; many of the minor variations are due to copyists' errors, while others suggest that Chaucer added to and revised his work as it was being copied and (possibly) distributed. Even the earliest surviving manuscripts are not Chaucer's originals, the oldest is likely to be MS Peniarth 392 D (called &quot;Hengwrt&quot;), compiled by a scribe shortly after Chaucer's death. [...] No authorial, arguably complete version of the Tales exists and no consensus has been reached regarding the order in which Chaucer intended the stories to be placed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, setting aside the idea of a single authoritative edition, we can use some common sense and close reading to guess at which word was intended. In H.S. Toshack's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=oKJifD-d76AC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;workbook edition&lt;/a&gt; of the General Prologue, the difference between &quot;shortly&quot; and &quot;soothly&quot; in this passage is discussed on page 97, making a reasonable argument that &quot;soothly&quot; makes more sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Soothly' (truly, accurately) fits the context better: in the next few lines Chaucer justifies that claim by laying out the framework within which he has offered his information. We have also seen Chaucer the Pilgrim, previously, taking great care to distinguish between what he has recorded as fact and what is just a judgement on his part. Additionally, 'shortly' would make 'in a clause' redundant, since it means much the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems likely that &quot;soothly&quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the correct word to use in this passage (to the extent that it's possible to define a 'correct' version), but the prevalence of the &quot;shortly&quot; version explains why many translations into more modern English use words such as &quot;briefly&quot; rather than, say, &quot;truly&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-03T17:45:21.047" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T17:45:21.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3155" CreationDate="2017-08-03T20:22:53.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's an outright joke. I'd certainly say it's mildly ironized, but a long introduction is still a 'clause' compared to a much longer body. The phrase is worthy of a 'heh' rather than a 'hahaha', you could say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I take the phrase &quot;soothly in a clause&quot; is as a prefatory assertion of truth value. The 'clause' or prologue itself is akin to, say, the Argument at the front of Shakespeare's &quot;The Rape of Lucrece&quot;; it is, literally, the first clause of the document. It is sort of setting up a contract between the speaker and reader, saying &quot;What I have told you so far is true and you can reliably take it as the basis of what is to come in the stor(y/ies).&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty well substantiated by sources cited in the answer by Rand al'Thor to the question you linked above, where he quotes H.S. Toshack writing that &quot;'Soothly' (truly, accurately) fits the context better: in the next few lines Chaucer justifies that claim by laying out the framework within which he has offered his information. We have also seen Chaucer the Pilgrim, previously, taking great care to distinguish between what he has recorded as fact and what is just a judgement on his part.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:22:53.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2301" CreationDate="2017-08-03T20:53:06.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dream and Desire are the most humanized of the Endless, especially in that they commit so heavily to a specific identity that pervades any and all given manifestation of themselves. All of the Endless do this to an extent, more or less consciously, but Dream and Desire take it a lot further than the others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't dispute Ralph Crown's interpretation of Night's motivation but I also don't feel like I can speak to it extensively. If I run with the idea that Night is tricking Morpheus, though, I still read her &quot;too similar&quot; barb as having more than just a grain of truth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that Dream over-identifies with his persona so much that he has long neglected his real responsibilities in favor of those inflicted upon him by his attachment to his, uh, 'humanity'. Desire not caring about its responsibilities is part of its role, but Dream ~failing~ to care about his appropriate responsibilities is his downfall. His over-commitment to fixing problems caused by his over-commitment to his humanity. Nada and the &quot;other quirks&quot; mentioned in this question's text are perfect examples of Dream's misguided sense of responsibility. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Night says that Dream and Desire are &quot;TOO similar&quot;, notice. I'm claiming that that excess is specifically a lack of intentional focus on the cosmic/metaphysical responsibilities of the Endless. Desire is not supposed to have that intentional focus. Dream is supposed to have it, but because he gets distracted by basically 'human drama' (note that Dream is pretty &quot;selfish and single-minded&quot; himself) he loses that focus and becomes &quot;too similar&quot; to Desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastActivityDate="2017-08-03T20:53:06.443" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T21:10:13.827" Score="9" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Sophie's World&lt;/em&gt;, we have one scene that can be described as a sex scene. It's in the chapter 'The Garden Party'; page 478 in my edition. Here's the relevant part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The guests applauded, and one of the boys threw a firecracker up in the pear tree. Joanna left the table and pulled Jeremy up off his chair. They lay down on the grass and started kissing each other again. After a while they rolled in under the red-currant bushes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Nowadays it's the girl who takes the initiative,&quot; said Mr. Ingebrigsten.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Having said that, he got up and went over to the red-currant bushes where he stood observing the phenomenon at close quarters. The rest of the guests followed suit. Only Sophie and Alberto remained sitting at the table. The other guests now stood in a semicircle around Joanna and Jeremy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...fumbling with his belt.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Don't catch cold!&quot; said Mrs. Ingebrigsten.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sophie looked despairingly at Alberto.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It's happening more quickly than I thought,&quot; he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on in this scene? Why is it important that the girl is taking the initiative? Why does everyone go watch? What is Alberto talking about - what's happening here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T08:47:56.200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T08:47:56.200" Title="Why is it important that 'Nowadays it's the girl who takes the initiative'?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;sophies-world&gt;&lt;jostein-gaarder&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-03T21:21:23.827" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to identify established terms for analyzing non-linear narratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the narrative chronology is the order in which events are narrated, what is the standard term for the &quot;internal&quot; chronology of the fiction itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to which of the two &quot;chronologies&quot; should we seek to apply the standard structural patterns like e.g. Freytag's pyramid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, the event that arguably kicks off the whole sordid tale is when Claudius murders the king, but the actual narrative starts &lt;em&gt;in media res&lt;/em&gt; with the appearance of the king's ghost. Sources disagree on which of the two events is the &quot;inciting incident&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non-linear narratives date back millennia, can it really be true that we're still struggling with the terminology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1968" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T21:17:00.693" Title="Terms for structural analysis of a non-linear narrative" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3166" CreationDate="2017-08-03T23:18:09.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an article titled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://journal.radicallibrarianship.org/index.php/journal/article/view/17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Free Libraries®: Interrogating the impact of the branded book exchange&lt;/a&gt;&quot; published in the open-access &lt;em&gt;Journal of Radical Librarianship&lt;/em&gt; (yes, that's a real thing), two librarians take a look at the locations of &quot;Little Free Libraries&quot; throughout the cities of Toronto and Calgary. What they found is that &quot;Little Free Libraries&quot; tended to be placed in areas near libraries. In other words, &quot;Little Free Libraries&quot; were only helping those who already lived near a library and thus already had access to free books. They also found, through comparing the location of Little Free Libraries to socioeconomic variables such as race and income, that Little Free Libraries tended to be located in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/REsAi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A map comparing the location of &amp;quot;Little Free Libraries&amp;quot; in Toronto to the location of free public libraries in Toronto. Map from the Schmidt and Hale article.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ri7Us.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The relation between the position of Little Free Libraries and race in Toronto.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schmidt and Hale, the authors of the article, make a convincing case that Little Free Libraries are less about helping people, and more about making a show of helping people. And of course, Schmidt and Hale also point out that the Little Free Library organization is making a handsome profit doing so, through revenue streams such as the sale of Little Free Library &quot;kits&quot; that are used to construct the library-thingies. Since it's an academic article, Schmidt and Hale use a bunch of fancy words to say this, such as neoliberalism. If you want the fancy words, read the Schmidt and Hale article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schmidt and Hale's research also investigated the contents of the Little Free Libraries, i.e. the types of books that people put in the Little Free Libraries. And they found the Little Free Library organization's official guidelines were to avoid putting political or religious books in Little Free Libraries. If you're an organization who thinks that literacy can be solved by selling boxes rather than, say, solving the root cause of a lack of literacy, poverty, then... ugh, I'm about to use the word neoliberalism. Read the Schmidt and Hale article, it's really good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response to Gilles comment. Little Free Libraries are small. One of my bookshelves, which I use for my personal use, holds about three times as many books as a little free library. Putting a Little Free Library in a densely populated area doesn't really make sense, at least if your goal is to increase access to books; such an area would be better served by an actual library. Putting a Little Free Library in a sparsely populated area makes a lot more sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, if I had written this article I would have taken population into account. I took a look at population densities in Toronto, and while locations that aren't near libraries tend to be less dense, in most cases there are still people living there. So while this is perhaps not a best practice, it doesn't invalidate the results of the study. This would have been more problematic if this had been a study of a rural area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T00:40:19.987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T00:40:19.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3283" CreationDate="2017-08-04T08:44:19.517" Score="12" ViewCount="5724" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Tyger&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is part of his collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an extraordinary set of poems which explores ideas such as spirituality, love, poverty, repression, all expressed and contrasted in beautiful language often involving children or animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Tyger&quot;, however, doesn't have any immediately obvious (to me) deeper meaning. It seems to be mostly a banal and repetitive, albeit poetically written, description of a tiger and its creation. Usually in a Song of Experience one would expect to see either more pessimism and cynicism or a depiction of the cruelty of society. I think I'm not really grasping the &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; of this poem, but since it's Blake, I'm sure there is one hiding somewhere in the subtext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the deeper meaning of &quot;The Tyger&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T19:17:49.650" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T19:17:49.650" Title="What is the deeper meaning of &quot;The Tyger&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3194" CreationDate="2017-08-04T09:45:36.773" Score="3" ViewCount="870" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have analyzed a quote from the play &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; with the question, &quot;How is reputation shown in the play?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonato is a king and does not want his reputation to be ruined due to the awful acts of Hero. This is shown through the quote, &quot;here point a dagger into me&quot;. Shakespeare uses &quot;dagger&quot; to show how he wanted to kill himself when his reputation was ruined. This is because if a king had a bad reputation people would hate him and no one would follow him. The audience understands how reputation was important to Leonato as a king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please give me feedback on this analysis? Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1970" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-04T20:10:49.567" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T15:12:43.860" Title="Analysing a quote from Much Ado About Nothing" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3193" CreationDate="2017-08-04T11:39:10.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, if you are going to quote, quote accurately: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hath no mans dagger here a point for me? (&lt;a href=&quot;http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ado_F1/scene/4.1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;F1&amp;rsquo;s question mark at the end of this line seems to make better sense than Q1&amp;rsquo;s period, though that period may be validly suggestive regarding manner of oral delivery. Adding an apostrophe to make it &amp;ldquo;man&amp;rsquo;s&amp;rdquo; is a routine emendation for a modern editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the quotation implies a death wish on Leonato&amp;rsquo;s part, possibly hyperbolically, but only its context connects this with reputation at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, to the extent that Leonato is preferring death to disrepute, one can be a bit more specific about how he prefers to be reputed: as one who firmly and effectively controls the sexuality of the women in his family, that being the crux of masculine honor under patriarchy. Since his role as governor is as surrogate or viceregent for the king, itself a masculine role that is all about honor, his authority and ability to lead will indeed suffer, as you suspect, if his reputation suffers in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, remember that Hero&amp;rsquo;s supposed unchastity is merely that, supposed. The attentive portion of the audience is aware, as Leonato is not, that she has been framed here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastEditorUserId="1971" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T15:12:43.860" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T15:12:43.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3047" CreationDate="2017-08-04T16:53:22.807" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the primary ways that the Party differs from other dictatorships is that they know full well what they are doing (seeking power for its own sake), so it's perfectly natural that O'Brien would be aware of it. In a sense, the fact that he accepts that is evidence that he's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a thought criminal, and him refusing to accept that would be thoughtcrime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the Party's actual philosophy was a lot different than what it projected to others (big surprise). That being said, O'Brien &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, believe the Party's philosophy - it's just that agreeing with the system means that he agreed with the Party pursuing power for its own sake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the telescreen issue, it's worth noting that conversations held while the telescreen was supposedly off were still recorded. (It's not known if that was because the telescreen was on the whole time or if O'Brien was simply using a different recording device).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book tells us very little about other members of the Inner Party or the specifics of its internal governance structure, so it's a little unclear whether Inner Party members would still be watched by the Thought Police or by other Inner Party members. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; know that the Inner Party is structured as an oligarchy, and that it's very debatable whether Big Brother actually exists or not; these facts at least suggest a relatively flat power structure, but the point isn't directly provable from the books. So, again, it's not clear exactly what the actual mechanism would be to hold another Inner Party member accountable for thought crime would be (especially if there's not actually a central &quot;leader,&quot; so to speak).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that O'Brien insists that the Party declaring something to be true could quite literally &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; it true; given that he appeared to be truthful about the Party's philosophy in other places, it's safe to assume that he actually believed this himself. This belief is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3046/why-does-obrien-claim-that-the-party-didnt-believe-in-solipsism&quot;&gt;related to - but definitely different than - solipsism&lt;/a&gt;. The Party wants to rewrite the past? Well, the past only exists in peoples' memories and in written records, and the Party controls both. The Party says that 2 + 2 = 5? Well, it's true because they claimed it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably that belief would entail some kind of doublethink on his part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, O'Brien's fully aware of the Party's malice and also believes that the Party can literally control truth. And yes, as @Gaurav pointed out in the comments, &quot;all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T04:58:28.713" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T04:58:28.713" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3190" CreationDate="2017-08-04T20:07:00.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some refer to the events themselves as the &lt;em&gt;story,&lt;/em&gt; while the recounting of those events is the &lt;em&gt;discourse.&lt;/em&gt; You can impress your friends by using the words &lt;em&gt;fabula&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sjuzhet,&lt;/em&gt; which mean the same thing in Russian. A search on &quot;narratology&quot; will give you all the information you need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-04T20:07:00.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-07-12T14:40:07.597" Score="5" ViewCount="4020" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the difference between a 'metaphor' and an 'allegory'? Their dictionary meanings are too close to distinguish. Explanation with examples will be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definitions I've come across defines an 'allegory' as a story, poem or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning. On the other hand, a 'metaphor' is something very similar. It is defined as a thing regarded as symbolic of something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Please also explain whether an allegory can be a metaphor or vice-versa.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="SRS" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T22:41:39.723" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T13:03:25.027" Title="What is the difference between a 'metaphor' and an 'allegory'?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3198" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2017-07-12T15:08:54.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An allegory is an extended metaphor. A metaphor might have one point of commonality between the story and reality; the allegory might have many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Allegory and metaphor are figures of speeches often seen in literature and art. Metaphor is a phrasal expression, which is used to make a comparison of unrelated objects and actions. Allegory can be said to be an extended metaphor. Allegory is a comparison on a deeper note.&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.differencebetween.net/language/difference-between-allegory-and-metaphor/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;- Differences Between Allegory and Metaphor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of examples, as requested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/a&gt; by John Bunyan is an example of an allegory. It is a story about a man called Christian who meets various people under various scenarios, each of which is named after situations or significant events one might encounter in real life. The life of the protagonist is written as an &lt;em&gt;allegory&lt;/em&gt; of the life of a Christian person.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;camel's nose&lt;/em&gt; is a metaphor for a situation where the permitting of a small, seemingly innocuous act will open the door for larger, clearly undesirable actions.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel%27s_nose&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;- wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;camel's nose&lt;/em&gt; story is told to make one point and only one point. There isn't any particular significance to other body parts of the camel, to the tent, or to any alternate housing for the camel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pushing a metaphor beyond its intended point tends to miss the point of the metaphor altogether. Allegories, however, are intended to be mined for the rich mappings to their real-life analogues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="329" OwnerDisplayName="Lawrence" LastActivityDate="2017-07-12T15:08:54.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-05T16:03:07.350" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does everyone turn against Mlle Michonneau very suddenly after the arrest of Vautrin? (Even Rastignac, who knows that Vautrin's pal murdered Victorine's brother.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1973" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T16:58:45.570" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T03:23:26.643" Title="Why does everyone turn against Mlle Michonneau in Balzac's Père Goriot?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;honore-de-balzac&gt;&lt;le-pere-goriot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1431" CreationDate="2017-08-05T20:57:43.277" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. As the other answers say, there are large portions of Shakespeare's plays that are in prose and not iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even in the sections that are in iambic pentameter, Shakespeare didn't write in perfect iambic pentameter. He wrote in something that today's scholars call &amp;quot;strict iambic pentameter&amp;quot;, which allows certain deviations from perfect iambic pentameter. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.mosaicmusings.net/index.php?showtopic=7492&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; for a more detailed explanation of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not perfect iambic pentameter? I've seen the explanation that it's too monotonous. Poetry and blank verse sound better if the rhythm is occasionally varied. Another, quite practical, reason is that it is harder to write in perfect rather than in strict iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I illustrate the rules of strict iambic pentameter by giving a scansion of the start of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow&lt;/em&gt; soliloquy from &lt;em&gt;Macbeth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tomó/ row ánd/ to mór/ row ánd /to mórrow,/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five iambic feet, with a feminine ending in the last one (allowed in strict iambic pentameter). What &lt;em&gt;feminine ending&lt;/em&gt; means is that an unstressed syllable is added to the last foot of the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Créeps in/ this pét/ ty páce/ from dáy/ to dáy,/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five feet, the first one a trochee and the next four iambs. This is a trochaic substitution, which is allowed in strict iambic pentameter (except for the last foot of a line).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the/ lást sýl/lable óf/ recórd/ed tíme;/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two deviations from iambic pentameter in this line. The first two feet are a pyrrhic followed by a spondee. This is called a &lt;em&gt;double iamb&lt;/em&gt; and is allowed in strict iambic pentameter. The third foot is an anapest, which you're apparently not supposed to use in strict iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And áll/ our yés/terdáys/ have líght/ed fóols&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perfect iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wáy/ to dús/ty déath./ Óut, óut,/ bríef cándle!/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two permissible deviations in this line. The fourth foot and fifth feet are spondees – allowed in strict iambic pentameter – and the line has a feminine ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize, the allowed substitutions in Shakespeare's time were trochees (except in the last foot), spondees, and double iambs. Feminine endings of lines were also allowed. However, you aren't allowed to make too many substitutions; if you do this the meter stops sounding iambic. For instance, three trochees in a row would clearly be excessive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the above, Shakespeare occasionally bent the rules in his plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether he bent the rules in his sonnets, where one would expect him to follow them more closely. There are quite a few lines where at first it looks like he might have bent the rules; for example, in Sonnet X:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For thóu/ art só/ posséss'd/ with múr/derous háte/&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it looks like the last foot is an anapest. However, thinking about it closer, you realize that the two-syllable pronunciation &lt;em&gt;murd'rous&lt;/em&gt; is a perfectly good pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;murderous&lt;/em&gt;. And if you look at Shakespeare's original spelling, it was indeed &lt;em&gt;murdrous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare didn't always pronounce &lt;em&gt;murderous&lt;/em&gt; with two syllables. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Richard III,&lt;/em&gt; we have the lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A cóck/atríce/ hast thóu/ hátch'd to/ the wórld,/&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose ún/avóid/ed éye/ is múr/deróus./&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where you need to pronounce &lt;em&gt;murderous&lt;/em&gt; with three syllables to have it fit the iambic pentameter. And here, Shakespeare spells it with three syllables: &lt;em&gt;murtherous&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other words that Shakespeare could pronounce with either two or three syllables (or either one or two syllables) so as to make the line scan. Sometimes the spelling shows his intended pronunciation, but not always.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T10:58:27.597" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T10:58:27.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4020" CreationDate="2017-08-06T10:24:20.367" Score="4" ViewCount="1733" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &amp;quot;The Bounds of Reason&amp;quot;, the first story in the collection &lt;em&gt;Sword of Destiny&lt;/em&gt;, the second of the first two Witcher short story collections, we see the following exchange between Yennefer and the dragon Villentretenmerth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Forgive me my frankness and forthrightness, Yennefer. It is written all over your faces, I don't even have to try to read your thoughts. You were made for each other, you and the Witcher. But nothing will come of it. Nothing. I'm sorry.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know,&amp;quot; Yennefer blanched slightly. &amp;quot;I know, Villentretenmerth. But I would also like to believe there are not limits of possibility. Or at least I would like to believe that they are still very far away.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does he mean by &amp;quot;nothing will come of it&amp;quot;? Does it just mean that they will have no children together (due to Yennefer's barrenness), or that their relationship will not last (as it didn't last last time - indeed, they've only just got back together again)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the meaning of this phrase more clear in the original Polish text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T00:07:35.520" Title="In what sense will &quot;nothing come of&quot; Geralt and Yennefer's relationship?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-06T10:38:01.020" Score="10" ViewCount="17137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I like to carry paperback books with me in a backpack. I've noticed that this puts a lot of wear and tear on these books. I can't not carry these books in my backpack, but what can I do to better protect them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:05:43.510" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T21:42:05.000" Title="How to travel with paperback books without damaging them?" Tags="&lt;book-care&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-06T10:47:21.350" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Benedict Society&lt;/em&gt; series, the Whisperer is a machine that transmits thoughts and implants messages in people's brains, usually harmful. And the Emergency is the tense, stressful situation artificially created by the Whisperer that doesn't actually exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are either of these symbolic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T00:44:34.787" Title="Is the Whisperer or the Emergency symbolic?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;trenton-lee-stewart&gt;&lt;the-mysterious-benedict-society&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2017-08-06T11:04:35.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I also travel a lot with paperback books in a bag, and I've managed not to damage them too much by considering the problem as a geometrical/physical one, analysing the shapes and forces involved.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;A paperback book is essentially a cuboid, with two faces that can peel away from the rest and keep peeling away in pages until you reach the middle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LRIBFm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LRIBFm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As long as you can &lt;strong&gt;keep it in that cuboid shape&lt;/strong&gt;, you're all good. What really damages a paperback book is when the covers or pages start opening inside your bag and then getting bent or folded unnaturally against things. If you can keep the book safely closed, it's much harder to damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, make sure to pack your bag so that there are no forces tending to push the book open. Ideally, go the other way and make sure there are &lt;strong&gt;forces tending to press the book closed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have a thin flat space inside your bag (e.g. a compartment for a laptop, and you don't have a laptop with you), putting a book inside there might be able to keep it pressed closed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you have more than one book with you, lay them flat against each other so that each one can hold the next one closed. (This doesn't help for the outermost covers of the stack, but at least it's a part of the problem solved.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Try not to have anything pressing against the 'page edge' of the book, the edge opposite the spine. Too much pressure there will splay the pages apart and possibly fold them unhealthily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are going to be many different ways of achieving the desired effect, depending on factors such as the size and shape of your bag, of the books, and exactly what else you're carrying in the same bag. But by keeping the above bold principles in mind, you should be able to minimise the damage to your paperback books while carrying them around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T11:04:35.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-06T13:22:22.037" Score="6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman is &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/y4lPPN_Qcc4?t=36m55s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on record&lt;/a&gt; saying the people who captured Morpheus in issue #1 (i.e. Roderick Burgess and the Order of the Ancient Mysteries) are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;completely rubbish, English, sort of Crowley-esque, hedge magicians&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they deserve this evaluation, though? For one thing, the &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; able to capture Morpheus. Granted, he was &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; weak, but then it did require some preparation on their part to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roderick Burgess was also called the Daemon King; Alex Burgess states that he had seen things that were supposedly real magic; it's mentioned once (in &lt;em&gt;Kindly Ones&lt;/em&gt;, if memory serves) that Aleister Crowley had admitted Roderick Burgess was the best of them. It's also postulated that he was able to summon the four winds to do his bidding (and that Alex was nothing like his father in that regard). Not to mention, of course, that Roderick was able to kill Sykes once he'd lost his protection amulet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point is, although we don't know any of their achievements, evidence points that they &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; real, qualified magicians, not to the opposite. What makes Neil Gaiman say so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T13:34:39.073" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T22:56:47.310" Title="Why are the magicians who captured Morpheus &quot;rubbish&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3207" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2017-08-06T14:17:39.053" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Friction acts on the book regardless of whether it's fixed or not. If a bag doesn't have a special compartment for books of laptops, it may be beneficial to acquire a book cover. It can be plastic, paper, or even textile, depending only on one's choice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YVy9Gm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YVy9Gm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KVlX0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KVlX0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plastic covers (also called wraps) seem to be available online (e.g. I took the picture above from &lt;a href=&quot;https://kpc-ltd.com/product/book-wallets-standard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). One could fashion a custom book cover from plastic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCvD4zDzkJc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's a tutorial&lt;/a&gt;), or from paper (which is easier). The advantage here is customisable size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A cover offers some advantages for book protection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is functional even outside the bag&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It can be customised to be water-proof and grease-proof (depending on material)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also protects the corners of the book (if one does it right)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can be made as fashionable as one likes (also obscures the title of the book)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some tutorials on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wikihow.com/Cover-a-Textbook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to cover a textbook&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Durable-Plastic-Book-Cover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to make a durable book cover&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T14:17:39.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3208" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-06T14:27:23.300" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the repairs to the house reached a certain level a native American conducted cleansing or blessing ceremony. The native American may have called the person &quot;Carpenter&quot; and one particular line of dialog was similar to &quot;You do excellent work, Carpenter.&quot; There was a woman the &quot;carpenter&quot; met and that is where they got involved in a an environmental legal battle, perhaps with a mining company. I thought it might have been a book by Nicholas Sparks or Ron Rash, but I could not identify it from reviewing their works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was read on Radio Reader by Dick Estell not earlier than 2002. I can only find a list read by him up to 2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1975" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T14:27:23.300" Title="Identify novel where someone repairs or restores an old house and gets involved in an environmental legal battle" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2017-08-06T14:29:19.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I use a tupperware/kliklock container, but I if I am short of space, putting the book in &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; a laptop in its case keeps it flat (not instead of a laotop). Also if you put a clipboard into the back pack it forms a rigid and flat central divider that is not deformed when you strap it to your back which is the main issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Covering a book with a flexible plastic cover in a back pack won't protect the text block or spine, it is the bending that is the problem, you want to stop it flexing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only do this for other people's books or library books, my own books I like to drop in the bath and dry out on the radiator because I can, because they aren't kindles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1972" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-06T14:48:22.217" LastActivityDate="2017-08-06T14:48:22.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2017-08-07T09:41:23.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I carry mine in a sealable freezer bag (ziploc and the like). Water, food, etc. can't get in and the cover and pages can't separate to be peeled away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-08-07T09:41:23.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T12:07:02.380" Score="6" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I love,&quot; said Susan, &quot;and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny's eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda's are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. [Bernard's] grow full and brim and never break.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: The Waves (Virginia Woolf)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This describes Susan's emotional breakdown when seeing Jinny kissing Bernard. Critics have noted that this is describing what the children are seeing, and not the appearance of the eyes. But I am having trouble understanding the imagery of the eyes here. Why are Susan's eyes being described as &quot;hard&quot;, Jinny's as &quot;breaking into a thousand lights&quot;, and so on? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1978" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-07T12:20:47.183" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T18:00:55.133" Title="Why does Susan say her &quot;eyes are hard&quot; when suffering an emotional breakdown in the Waves (Virginia Woolf)?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-waves&gt;&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3213" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-07T15:57:29.150" Score="8" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second volume of &lt;em&gt;Fables&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, we see that the Fables possess an enormous amount of various firearms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CIQov.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CIQov.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did they come from? Snow White states in the first volume that Fables are on a tight budget. She also states most of them couldn't save their wealths from Fable Land when they ran away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even past that, had they had those they'd use them to fight the adversary. This all leads me to believe the Animal Farm acquired those weapons after they escaped, and did so in secret, so that the Fabletown didn't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it ever explained, maybe in the future volumes (I'm only on volume II), where they got the weapons from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T00:44:23.393" Title="Where did the Fables get all those weapons in the first place?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;fables-comic&gt;&lt;bill-willingham&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3192" CreationDate="2017-08-07T20:29:18.587" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perceived &quot;banality&quot; in relation to &lt;em&gt;Innocence &amp;amp; Experience&lt;/em&gt; may be regarded as a device.  In fact, the poems are all quite profound, but structured in a way as to be suitable for children as well as adults. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clue to the meaning can be found in Blake's ideas on the nature of the universe, which involves creative and destructive forces.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;One Law for the Lion &amp;amp; Ox is Oppression&quot;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Marriage of Heaven and Hell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just based on the previous quote, the inference is that different rules apply to different types of creatures, with the fierce, carnivorous Tyger presented as one extreme, and the gentle herbivorous lamb as the other.  (One kills for food, the other is slaughtered.) Creation has both types of being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the cited work, Blake discusses the division between body and soul:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body &amp;amp; a Soul.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, &amp;amp; that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the following Contraries to these are True&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Energy is Eternal Delight&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, &lt;em&gt;The Tyger&lt;/em&gt; can be seen as positing the possibility that the creator intended this duality, and that &quot;good&quot; and &quot;evil&quot; are not just present in the universe, but in each individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What immortal hand or eye, Could/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is a recognition of the mind of a creator with understanding far surpassing the average human viewpoint or conception.  Symmetry here may be taken in the mathematical sense, with the implication of duality required in reflective symmetry.  (i.e. &quot;good&quot; only has meaning in relation to the opposite concept.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The key line in the poem is:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Did he who made the lamb make thee?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that the poem is only nominally addressed to the celestial Tyger--more practically, it is addressed to the &quot;child&quot; listening to the poem, who, by device, becomes &lt;em&gt;associated&lt;/em&gt; with the fierce Tyger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Child may be understood in the sense of &quot;children of god&quot;, not specifically relating to chronological age, although part of what makes this one of the most famous poems in English is it's universality, and suitability for literal children.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The association with the Tyger is an indication that we all contain these dualities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So what Blake is suggesting, as opposed to merely asking, is that the same creator made both the hunter and the prey, and that both have their place in the grand scheme.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no doubt there are other valid interpretations, and more complex and nuanced analyses, but here I have attempted to shed light on the most simple interpretations, which do not require deep knowledge of Blake's ideas.  The ability to interpret this poem simply is a factor in the genius of Blake's in regard to &lt;em&gt;Innocence &amp;amp; Experience&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-08-08T20:54:56.087" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T20:54:56.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3216" CreationDate="2017-08-07T23:17:52.070" Score="11" ViewCount="23646" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a poem on a forum, attributed to Rudyard Kipling called &amp;quot;THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON&amp;quot; (the title seems to be often posted in caps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Google search indicates that where posted, this is always attributed to Kipling. My skepticism comes from the fact that it's almost exclusively posted (and attributed to Kipling) by... very politically motivated individuals. Searching through several lists that claim to be comprehensive collections of his work, none of them seem to include this poem. Is this poem deliberately omitted due to possibly objectionable content (unlikely due to him being controversial anyway), or was this written by somebody else and attributed to Kipling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This website resists my attempts at formatting, so here is the top result for the poem (on startpage anyway), with a website name that makes me doubt its neutrality: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.europeanamericansunited.org/school1/Fiction/kipling/awakened.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;europeanamericansunited.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a copy of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not part of their blood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It came to them very late,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With long arrears to make good,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were not easily moved,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They were icy -- willing to wait. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Till every count should be proved,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ere the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their voices were even and low.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their eyes were level and straight.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There was neither sign nor show.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not preached to the crowd.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It was not taught by the state.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No man spoke it aloud. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not suddently bred.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It will not swiftly abate.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through the chilled years ahead,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When Time shall count from the date.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;That the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't care about the politics of the posters, but if anybody has actual information on this poem's authorship it would be appreciated. I already heavily doubt that he wrote this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1980" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T23:55:24.717" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T23:55:24.717" Title="Did Rudyard Kipling Write &quot;The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3215" CreationDate="2017-08-08T03:51:34.980" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem has been altered from what Kipling actually wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13085/13085-h/13085-h.htm#page443&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Project Gutenberg — in &lt;em&gt;A Diversity of Creatures&lt;/em&gt;, by Rudyard Kipling (1917).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original title was &lt;em&gt;The Beginnings&lt;/em&gt;. And all the instances of &lt;em&gt;the English&lt;/em&gt; in Kipling's poem have been replaced by &lt;em&gt;the Saxon&lt;/em&gt;. For instance (quote can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Diversity_of_Creatures/The_Beginnings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seen on WikiSource&lt;/a&gt; as well):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was not part of their blood,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It came to them very late,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With long arrears to make good,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the English began to hate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;became&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was not part of their blood,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It came to them very late,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With long arrears to make good,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the Saxon began to hate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put the poem into context, Kipling wrote it during World War I, probably after the death of his son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kipling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Kipling&lt;/a&gt; in that war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T15:59:45.857" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T15:59:45.857" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-08T07:07:44.977" Score="4" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;At what point did Sophie and Alberto become real? When did they become more than a character in a book? Or were they always 'real', and they only needed the book to be written for things to happen and so that they could escape? We know that Sophie has memories from before the events of the book, but did those events actually happen or was she 'created' at that moment and the memories implanted by the major?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T20:32:32.120" Title="When did Sophie and Alberto become real?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;sophies-world&gt;&lt;jostein-gaarder&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2017-08-08T17:30:27.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaiman is speaking in relative terms. Burgess may have some ability, but compared to whom? Crowley, in real life, was a charlatan. In his eyes, someone who could call up a stiff breeze on a summer day would seem like a true mage. For all we know, reports of the &quot;feats&quot; of these wizards are the result of the drugs they often took rather than true magick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ritual that caught Morpheus, remember, went to completion in spite of Burgess, not because of him. He must have stumbled across the right spell and used it at the right time. If he had succeeded in summoning Death and she resisted, the backlash might have killed him (ironically bringing Death anyway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the basic rules of magic is, don't call up what you can't put down.&#xA;A true mage would have done something, &lt;em&gt;anything,&lt;/em&gt; with Morpheus, not leave him in a bubble. Burgess didn't know what he had or what to do with it once he had it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Burgess manage to kill Sykes? He had several years to stumble across another spell, one that actually worked. It may even be possible that some other entity wanted revenge on Sykes, such as the original owner of the amulet, and Burgess took credit for someone else's spell. That's what a &quot;rubbish&quot; wizard would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, consider the real players in this universe: the Endless, the Furies, superheroes, various gods, and all their retinues. Next to them, a dilettante in a country manor is beneath notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-08T17:30:27.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3148" CreationDate="2017-08-08T23:47:54.173" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought he was vaguely patterned on Lord Strange, who was a mentor and ran the company which first produced Marlowe's work (and Henry VIs). Lord Strange was also in royal lineage via more distant relative, and was a slight threat to Elizabeth, ergo &quot;my king&quot;. Strange was also poisoned, but died year after Marlowe, but I wonder if this was the basis for the fictional character of Anderson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1981" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T02:57:44.490" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T02:57:44.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-09T00:03:15.187" Score="7" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked out &lt;em&gt;The Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; from the library and read it today. I found it a bit easier to read than I'd expected (I guess I expected worse-than-Shakespearean language/turns of phrase) and then I realized that of course, it had been translated from Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I read through, I found kind of odd phrasing here and there, that made me wonder how different it was from the original text. I also found it really hard to discern the meter (apparently, it's written in dactylic hexameter) but would it have been easier to hear in the original language, and perhaps there was also more rhyme in the original? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could there also have been &quot;clever&quot; pieces of writing, like puns and such, that you can't pick up in the language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: how much was lost in translation? (My copy was the translation by Robert Fitzgerald.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T11:34:27.243" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T14:38:48.800" Title="How much of the original verse is lost in Fitzgerald's translation of The Aeneid?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;virgil&gt;&lt;aeneid&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3204" CreationDate="2017-08-09T00:38:53.110" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Whisperer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, if one goes looking for symbolism, I find it interesting that the thoughts of the Whisperer are at first transmitted through technology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This child's voice is currently being transmitted on every television, radio, and cell phone in the world [...] although in an important part of every mind this child's messages are being heard, understood, and taken seriously, in another part - the part that is aware of itself - the messages remain undetected [...] &amp;quot;Is that why your test asked whether we liked television and radio?&amp;quot; asked Reynie. Mr. Benedict tapped his nose. &amp;quot;Exactly [...]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Whisperer - and Mr. Curtain - are all about hiding the fact that they are persuading people, tricks, sleight of hand, and removing all thought from the thought process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might almost take it as symbolism for how ads and other media are persuading us to do things without our realizing it through our smartphones and other technology. For example, in the study &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/dir.20110/abstract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unconscious processing of Web advertising: Effects on implicit memory, attitude toward the brand, and consideration set&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the abstract says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consumers have become increasingly savvy about technology in recent years, and many of them ignore Web ads during online activities. In this context, measuring advertising effects based on the traditional cognitive models of information processing may undervalue the effectiveness of Web ads. This study experimentally examined the effects of unconscious processing of Web ads by manipulating the level of attention paid to the ad (directed vs. nondirected attention). Online advertisers should be encouraged by the findings of this study. The results suggest that, upon exposure to Web ads, consumers experience priming caused by implicit memory and build a more favorable attitude toward the advertised brand regardless of the levels of attention they paid to the advertisements. Furthermore, those who unconsciously processed Web ads did not remember seeing the ad explicitly, but they were more likely to include the advertised brand in the consideration set than those who had no exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems very similar (in method/effect) to the passage from the Mysterious Benedict Society. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shmoop.com/the-mysterious-benedict-society/tv-symbol.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; in agreement with my analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Emergency&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is said in the beginning about the emergency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Things had gotten desperately out of control, the headlines reported [...] citizens everywhere were clamoring for a major - no, &lt;em&gt;dramatic&lt;/em&gt; - improvement in government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is all fabricated by Mr. Curtain, who plans to solve the world's problems and become M.A.S.T.E.R. of the Earth and its regions. This seems like some sort of political jab, though I can't really find anything at first glance to to back this up. I'll keep searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T00:44:34.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-09T02:48:07.183" Score="3" ViewCount="548" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/country-fair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Country Fair&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Charles Simic centers around a dog with six legs.  I'm sure the dog is supposed to symbolize something important that the speaker feels the presupposed audience is dismissively claiming non-existent, but I'm not sure what that thing is. I've seem claims that the dog is supposed to represent Yugoslavia, which would be consistent with Simic's other writings in terms of being Yugoslavic-focused, but I can't reconcile that with the idea that the speaker expects people not to believe the dog exists (&quot;If you didn't see the six-legged dog, it doesn't matter.  We saw it...&quot;), and that expectation of disbelief seems quite clear to me in the work.  What does the dog represent, and if it's Yugoslavia then how can that be reconciled with the expectation of skepticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evidence for an expectation of skepticism, as requested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is framed as a retelling of an event by the speaker to a listener.  The speaker opens with &quot;If you didn't see the six legged dog,/It doesn't matter./We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.&quot;  This phrasing, &quot;If you didn't see X, it doesn't matter. We did&quot; is confrontational in both tone and nature.  It seems almost a response to the common backhanded statement of disbelief, &quot;I didn't see any...&quot;.  And indeed the speaker appears to be engaging in that sort of speech by which one attempts to assert the authenticity of one's perception of events as real-- that is, real in defiance of either alternative contradictory interpretations or rejection of the experience therein asserted: the speaker begins with the aforementioned combative language, details a series of events that further entrench their position of authority: &quot;As for the extra legs,/One got used to them quickly/And thought of other things&quot; (If you had seen the dog you would not think it strange any longer that it had six legs.  Your preoccupation with the number of legs is a distraction and foolish thought stemming from your naivete), and then finishes by preempting any further discussion of what happened with &quot;And that was the whole show.&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confrontational, almost aggressive language belies a speaker who does not expect to be believed, listened to, or to have their experience validated.  It's very defensive, and seems intended to preempt insistence that they must be making up this six-legged dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1415" LastEditorUserId="1415" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T18:59:26.960" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T18:59:26.960" Title="What does the six-legged dog in Charles Simic's poem &quot;Country Fair&quot; represent?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;charles-simic&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3224" CreationDate="2017-08-09T10:30:25.120" Score="6" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;R.S. Thomas was a Welsh poet who worked between 1942 until his death in 2000. His poems are almost exclusively modern in structure, in the sense that they eschew meter and rhyme in favour of a more prose-like structure. Here's a short example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Looking upon this tree with its quaint pretension&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of holding the earth, a leveret, in its claws,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or marking the texture of its living bark,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A grey sea wrinkled by the winds of years,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I understand whence this man's body comes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In veins and fibres, the bare boughs of bone,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The trellised thicket, where the heart, that robin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Greets with a song the seasons of the blood.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But where in meadow or mountain shall I match&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The individual accent of the speech&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That is the ear's familiar? To what sun attribute&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The honeyed warmness of his smile?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To which of the deciduous brood is germane&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The angel peeping from the latticed eye?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of his poems, however, is quite different in structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One night of tempest I arose and went&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Along the Menai shore on dreaming bent;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wind was strong, and savage swung the tide,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the waves blustered on Caernarvon side.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in the morrow, when I passed that way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On Menai’s shore the hush of heaven lay;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wind was gentle and the sea a flower,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the sun slumbered on Caernavon tower.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this - and, as far as I can tell only this - poem, entitled &lt;em&gt;Night and Morning&lt;/em&gt;, among his work conform to traditional poetic structures?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T15:36:57.420" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T15:36:57.420" Title="Why does only one of R. S. Thomas' poems conform to traditional poetic devices?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;r-s-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3223" CreationDate="2017-08-09T10:34:24.337" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason is because it is not entirely Thomas' own work: it is a translation of a traditional Welsh song (obtained &lt;a href=&quot;http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Erborsley/poem.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ar noswaith ddrycinog mi euthum i rodio&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ar lannau y Fenai gan ddistaw fyfyrio;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Y gwynt oedd yn uchel, a gwyllt oedd y wendon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A’r môr oedd yn lluchio dros waliau Caernarfon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ond trannoeth y bore mi euthum i rodio&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hyd lannau y Fenai, tawelwch oedd yno;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Y gwynt oedd yn ddistaw, a’r môr oedd yn dirion,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A’r haul oedd yn twrynnu ar waliau Caernarfon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a Welsh speaker, but a cursory glance at the original suggests it is composed in rhyming couplets, as Thomas' translation is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more literal - non-rhyming - translation of the words makes it clear why Thomas felt entitled to publish his version as poetry of his own devising. This is from William John Gruffydd, sometimes better known as &amp;quot;Elerydd&amp;quot;, the Archdruid of the National Eisteddfod of Wales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One rainswept eventide I went a-walking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the shores of Menai in silent meditation:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Loud was the wind and wild was the white billow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the sea was hurling over the walls of Caernarvon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But on the morrow morn I went a-walking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the shores of Menai, and stillness was on them;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Silent was the wind, and kindly was the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the sun was shining on the walls of Caernavon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently John Betjeman was moved to describe Thomas' version as &amp;quot;the perfect lyric&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:07:41.587" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3225" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3226" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" Score="0" Body="For the manga &quot;Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind&quot; (Kaze no Tani no Naushika) by Hayao Miyazaki. Use this with [hayao-miyazaki] and [manga] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T14:17:27.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-09T22:12:01.003" Score="3" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_I_Lay_Dying&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;As I Lay Dying&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is one of my favorite Faulkner novels, but I always come back to the thought: &quot;Who on earth names their kid Vardaman?&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't get me wrong, I love the name, and Vardaman is my favorite character in the novel, just wondering where it comes from, or what may have inspired Faulkner to choose it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-09T22:26:13.557" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T17:11:16.010" Title="What kind of name is Vardaman?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;as-i-lay-dying&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-09T22:16:52.700" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Sophie is taking her religion studies test, she writes this: (page 124 in my edition; chapter &quot;Hellenism&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P.S. In the Bible there is something that could have been one of the fine hairs of the rabbit's fur. The hair was called the Tower of Babel, and it was destroyed because the Magician didn't want the tiny human insects to crawl up that high out of the white rabbit he had just created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Sophie saying about the Tower of Babel and God here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T21:03:05.073" Title="What is Sophie saying about the Tower of Babel here?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;sophies-world&gt;&lt;jostein-gaarder&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2847" CreationDate="2017-08-09T23:00:15.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree that the Silmarillion should be read after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, but for quite a different reason than everyone seems to be espousing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For me, when I finished the Hobbit, I wanted to enter the world again. The Lord of the Rings does so, but in a &quot;vaster&quot; way - the battles and acts have a large impact on Middle Earth, and it alludes to past tales and battles, and a completion of the long struggle to cast physical embodiments of evil out of Middle Earth. It puts everything in the Hobbit into perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I finished the Lord of the Rings, I wished it, too, to keep going. And the Silmarillion does so as well, but in a still yet vaster way. It tells the story of how Middle Earth was created (in my opinion, the first story in the Silmarillion, which tells of the world's creation, is one of the most beautiful short stories I've ever read) and the story of Morgoth, a more terrible enemy than Sauron ever was, and leads up to the Lord of the Rings, and puts it in its place. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone seems to refer to the Silmarillion as &quot;dry&quot; - nonsense! It's a fabulous story, with just as much intrigue, heartbreak, war, pain, and victory as the Lord of the Rings. True, it's more &quot;mythically&quot; written than the Lord of the Rings, but that doesn't mean it's dry - the Norse myths, written quite &quot;mythically&quot;, are exciting and fun to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all this being said, once you've read in the order of Hobbit, LotR, Silmarillion, I would read it all again in chronological order. When you do so you will pick up on references in LotR you never noticed - such as Aragorn's various stories and mentionings, most memorably the reference to the story of Beren and Tinuviel-Luthien in the hollow under Weathertop on the way to Rivendell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from there - onward into the world of Tolkien!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-08-09T23:00:15.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3235" CreationDate="2017-08-09T23:03:43.353" Score="3" ViewCount="871" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do the characters of Benvolio and Mercutio in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; symbolize, if anything? Mercutio's character mainly provides jokes, and then, in his hot-headedness, is slain by Tybalt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benvolio at first tries to take Romeo's mind of Rosaline, and then tries to stop the violence between first Tybalt and Mercutio with Romeo, and then between Romeo and Tybalt. He then, after Romeo kills Tybalt, reports to the Prince of Venice what happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these two characters have any special meaning, represent any quality in particular, or represent some person from Shakespeare's time that members of the audience would have recognized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T00:06:45.947" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T15:24:03.647" Title="Benvolio and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3242" CreationDate="2017-08-10T00:33:26.587" Score="6" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading J.R.R. Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún&lt;/em&gt; and the commentary talks a little bit about differences between Old Norse and Old English epic poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Old English verse does not attempt to hit you in the eye. To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norse poetry is also described as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pithy, strophic [i.e., stanzaic], often dramatic form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;aims at &lt;em&gt;seizing a situation&lt;/em&gt;, striking a blow that will be remembered, illuminating a moment with a flash of lightning - and tends to concision, weighty packing of the language in sense and form&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Norse poetry also has specific meters. What other major differences are there between Old English and Old Norse poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T08:53:51.887" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T10:09:09.670" Title="Major differences between Norse epic poetry and English epic poetry" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3233" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-10T09:22:00.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T09:22:00.920" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T09:22:00.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3234" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-10T09:22:00.920" Score="0" Body="Questions about determining and representing the meter of a poem, a practice called scansion." OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:27:48.957" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:27:48.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3231" CreationDate="2017-08-10T15:24:03.647" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The names of these two characters, which are introduced in actual spoken lines (not just speech prefixes or &lt;em&gt;Dramatis Personae)&lt;/em&gt; within the first two scenes, would largely have answered this question for an Elizabethan audience. Benvolio is Italian for &lt;em&gt;I mean well&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;cf. the word &lt;em&gt;benevolent.&lt;/em&gt; Mercutio is the prime example of the &lt;em&gt;mercurial&lt;/em&gt; temperament in John Draper&amp;rsquo;s &lt;em&gt;The Humors &amp;amp; Shakespeare’s Characters&lt;/em&gt; (Duke UP 1945, rpt. AMS 1965). A mercurial temperament is an unstable one in which each of the four humors prevails by turns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T15:24:03.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T16:19:41.233" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Digger&lt;/em&gt;, and there's a scene in chapter six where Mural is crying next to a tombstone that reads &quot;No Unicorns in Heaven.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the tombstone mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T16:47:38.010" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T17:01:35.533" Title="Why does Lung the Quick's tombstone read &quot;No Unicorns in Heaven&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;ursula-vernon&gt;&lt;digger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2017-08-10T16:22:28.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of me takes a not altogether perverse pride in the battered appearance of many of my books; but when I want to protect one from battery in my bookbag, I favor an appropriately sized mailing envelope lined with bubble wrap, available at office supply stores and sometimes even supermarkets in my country (USA).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T16:22:28.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3239" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3240" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" Score="0" Body="For questions about the &quot;Fables&quot; comic series by Vertigo, written by Bill Willingham. Use with the [bill-willingham] and [comics] tags as appropriate." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T16:48:39.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3236" CreationDate="2017-08-10T17:01:35.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://diggercomic.com/blog/2008/01/13/digger-309/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; the scene you're talking about (click for full-size version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EQTiE.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EQTiEm.gif&quot; alt=&quot;frame&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the comments on the page linked above, the backstory of Lung the Quick is explained in more detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Digger-Vol-1-Ursula-Vernon/0976921227&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first Digger book&lt;/a&gt;. If you don't have the book, it's also summarised &lt;a href=&quot;http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Unicorn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (OK, that site isn't a reliable source in itself, but it's sourced directly to the book) as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A book-only expansion to Digger tells us the story of a sculpter &quot;commissioned&quot; by a mad emperor, who had a forehead deformity and believed himself to be part-unicorn, to create statues of unicorns and nothing else. The artist came to hate unicorns, and dreamed of creating a perfect statue of the god Ganesh, which he accomplished after the emperor tried to eat poison and died. The epitaph on his tombstone reads, &quot;There are no unicorns in Heaven.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-10T17:01:35.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3232" CreationDate="2017-08-10T19:35:45.113" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like to note that my knowledge on English verse is not as good as of Norse. Thus I will start with a description of Norse verse, and then try to compare with what I know of English verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Norse verse&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Tolkien is obviously talking about the verse found in eddic poetry (as opposed to the kind of scaldic poetry that where aimed at Kings and trying to flatter them), I will limit myself to that. The two main verse types in the &lt;em&gt;Poetic Edda&lt;/em&gt; are &lt;em&gt;Fornyrðislag&lt;/em&gt; ('past-words-form') and &lt;em&gt;Ljóðaháttr&lt;/em&gt; ('song metre'). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Fornyrðislag&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fornyrðislag is the older form, used in the Edda for epic poetry (such as &lt;em&gt;Völuspá&lt;/em&gt;). It is divided into strophes of usually eight lines, with two stressed syllables in each line, and a number of unstressed syllables, which can vary more freely. Alliteration is used to bind two lines together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ljóðaháttr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ljóðaháttr is used for dialogue and poetry meant to divulge wisdom. Every strophe consists of two pairs of three lines, where the first and second usually contain two stressed syllables each and are connected by alliteration. The third line contains an alliteration and three stressed syllables. Again, the number of unstressed syllables is freer, and they can be reduced so that they are almost non-existent. Let's take what is probably the most famous strophe in &lt;em&gt;Hávamál&lt;/em&gt; as an example, where I have marked the alliterations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;eyr fé,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;eyja frændr,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  deyr &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;jalfr it &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;ama,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;k veit einn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;t aldrei deyr:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;ómr um &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;auðan hvern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All vowels alliterate with each other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that while kennings are sometimes used in both forms, they are less common than in scaldic poetry, and when used, less complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Old English verse&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien takes &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; as his prime example of Old English poetry, which is good for me as it is the work I know best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verse in &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; has a metre that as far as I can tell is very close to Fornyrðislag, except:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are no strophes, but rather just line upon line like in hexameter epics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paired lines in Fornyrðislag are set on the same line with a caesura between, but otherwise work much the same, except that the first half sometimes only contains one stressed syllable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Comparison&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the metre is very similar, but Norse poetry try to condense everything more: where &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; have no strophes, Norse poetry have very short strophes which are all usually dealing with one specific topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another difference on a larger scale: &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; is one continuous poem, with no subdivisions. The closest we can come to something on the same scale in the &lt;em&gt;Poetic Edda&lt;/em&gt; is the second part, dealing with the matter of Sigurd. While much shorter in total, and using Fornyrðislag and its strophes, it is also divided on several different distinct poems, each dealing with some distinct story (i.e. &lt;em&gt;The short lay of Sigurd&lt;/em&gt; starts when he has already killed Fafnir).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, Norse poetry is, as Tolkien suggested, much more concentrated, both in subject matter and language. It does try harder to make a direct impact, whereas Old English poetry is comparably more sedate, trying to spin a longer story, where the tension is built slower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sources&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I checked J.R.R. Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún&lt;/em&gt;, just to make sure exactly what poems he was comparing and that I was not missing anything.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I used Lars Lönnroth's &lt;em&gt;Den poetiska Eddan&lt;/em&gt; and his foreword for the parts on the Eddic poetry. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also double checked Háttatal in &lt;em&gt;Snorres Edda&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Karl G. Johansson and Mats Malm (but that was actually not necessary, as he only gives examples of the two types of verse, and does not discuss them at all).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;, apart from Tolkien, I checked the foreword of my copy of Seamus Heaney's translation, which generally confirmed the above, but I did not find any detailed discussion of the metre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T10:09:09.670" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T10:09:09.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2017-08-10T23:38:07.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am no expert on this poem, and I haven't read all of it, but my immediate thought was that the broken images represented the pieces of memories each person has. The position of that phrase at the beginning of the stanza comes right after the narrator recalls various scenes, presumably from their past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The memories seem fragmented - memories about seasons, months, conversations, and then the longest &quot;fragment&quot; is of the narrator sledding with her cousin. With this interpretation, I read the stanza as &quot;What life will grow out of these memories?&quot; As in, how will these memories shape you? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot know because we are not all-knowing - our only knowledge (&quot;You cannot say, or guess, for you know only    A heap of broken images&quot;) is these memories that are so fragmented and limited. The latter part of the stanza&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is shadow under this red rock,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I will show you something different from either&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your shadow at morning striding behind you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading as the the limits of the life allotted to each person - for example, &quot;Your shadow at morning striding behind you&quot; represents what you were at your birth, and &quot;your shadow at evening rising to meet you&quot; your death to come. These images are shown under shadow; here the shadow is in desert, meaning it is relieving. Why is the image of ones' death relieving? My answer is that it gives one a sense of purpose - brings one out of indecision, knowing that death is coming, in a sort of &quot;live life to the fullest&quot; attitude. The image of one's birth is given to show how far you have come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sprouting of a corpse, written about in the lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That corpse you planted last year in your garden, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think is asking if the life, and the memories left from it, have had an impact on people and have lead to a new growth yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T23:04:57.373" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T23:04:57.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-10T23:45:36.297" Score="14" ViewCount="360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read a brief piece about this a long time ago -- as in, over twenty years ago. (Possibly in some sort of literary reference book.) As near as I can recall, the following sequence of events is supposed to have occurred in the real world, probably in the decade of the 1920s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some time after the end of World War I (then better known as &quot;The Great War&quot;), a group of poets in the United Kingdom contrived a hoax.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe that a bunch of them, well-acquainted, were all spending a weekend in someone's country house, and then someone suggested they invent the complete works of an imaginary poet whom they would allege had been one of the many brave young Englishmen whose lives had been cut short in the recent war.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of this fledgling poet's &quot;complete works&quot; were turned out within the next few days.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then someone arranged to have it all published in one small volume, with one or more introductory pieces to &quot;inform&quot; the reader of when and where this talented youngster had been born, and had died in the war, and how one or more of his notebooks had been returned to his family, with his unpublished poetic efforts contained within. (This explained why nobody had ever heard of him before; he had never made a sale to any British periodical.) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember how long the hoax lasted, but eventually someone spilled the beans and admitted that it was &lt;em&gt;pointless&lt;/em&gt; for critics to try to trace signs of the young poet's gradual psychological development, etc., in different poems written on similar themes, supposedly a few years apart, as he matured and reconsidered his previous attitudes on one thing or another. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I spent some time looking through Wikipedia pages on such subjects as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_forgery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary forgery&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Nonexistent_people_used_in_hoaxes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;nonexistent people used in hoaxes&lt;/a&gt;, etc., but I did not pick up the trail of this imaginary young poet. For some reason, it did not occur to me at that time to seek help on here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better late than never! Now that I've described what I am sure I once read, does anyone recognize this episode? If you remember the name of the fictitious poet, that probably will suffice to help me track down anything else I want to know about the hoax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="914" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T05:26:01.063" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T18:01:27.197" Title="An imaginary young British poet who was invented as a literary hoax in the 1920s?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T00:44:41.713" Score="16" ViewCount="2246" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Iliad starts at kind of an odd spot. It starts by describing the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles (Akhilleus in my translation) over the women they have acquired from raids. It mentions off-hand that they have been there for nine years. Why is nothing about those nine years described at the beginning to introduce the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:42:23.590" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T17:44:44.823" Title="Why does the Iliad start &quot;in the middle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16523" CreationDate="2017-08-11T05:55:37.203" Score="6" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it a bit hard to understand this epitaph of the deer in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lll/lll.4.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 2 in &lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preyful princess pierced and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say a sore; but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dogs did yell: put L to sore, then sorel jumps from thicket;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or pricket sore, or else sorel; the people fall a-hooting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores one sorel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of one sore I an hundred make by adding but one more L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get only the following wordplay but not enough for the whole thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;sorel = young deer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pricket = young deer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;L (in the last line) = roman numeral for fifty.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the following mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sore (second line first half),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;L to sore (third line),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whole fifth line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sore (last line),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1987" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T21:54:08.310" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T21:54:08.310" Title="What does Holofernes deer epitaph from Love's Labour's Lost mean?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;loves-labours-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3197" CreationDate="2017-08-11T13:03:25.027" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An allegory is the picturing of an idea, for example death as a skeleton.&#xA;A Metaphor is a deepening of meaning or colouring the text by exchanging // inserting a phrase, like in german, &quot;desert ship&quot; is a metaphor for camel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1989" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T13:03:25.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3229" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:19:45.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the rabbit is described as our universe, pulled out of a magician's hat, where the magician is God. Philosophers, discoverers, they are the ones Sophie says built the Tower of Babel, or climbed to the tip of the rabbit's hairs. She thus represents the Tower of Babel as a great achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sophie then represents God, or the magician, as wishing to not reveal the trick, limiting the philosophers and humans. The meaning of this could be taken in several ways. First, God can be seen as a harsh God from this picture - one who limits the explorers, the most creative, wishing humans to live a passive life, accepting their world as it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, God can be seen as a God who wishes to preserve the questions, and wait to reveal them at a later time - that is, He is not ready to reveal the answers, so He stops the humans from climbing out to watch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, God can be seen as protective - perhaps humans are not ready, or never will be ready, to see the answers to their deep questions, and so He is protecting them from their own wish. There could of course be other viewpoints I have not thought of, but these are the three big ones that immediately appear to my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These viewpoints range from &quot;good&quot; to &quot;bad&quot; - the third viewpoint representing a &quot;good&quot; God, the second not as obviously benevolent, though He could be; we don't know, and the first &quot;bad&quot;. The question is which Sophie takes to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally, I thought the first interpretation was most likely, but after more thought, I am leaning towards the second interpretation. The reason is the amount Sophie swings around between different viewpoints on God. At first she questions the existence of God (how could God have come to be?) and then later feels &quot;at one&quot; with God/the universe. Her perspective on God varies as much as that of the philosophers. The second viewpoint seems neither good nor bad from our limited perspective, which makes me think it's the viewpoint she'd take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T20:28:24.157" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T20:28:24.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3246" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:23:23.310" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible that Thomas Nashe wrote this passage, which would account for its dated references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hunting deer was a sport for the upper class in Shakespeare's England, with its own terminology. A one-year-old deer was a buck, at two a pricket, at three a sorrell, at four a soare. The passage has a little fun by confusing &lt;em&gt;sore&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;soare&lt;/em&gt;, then &lt;em&gt;soare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sorrell&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second line, then, only the third &quot;sore&quot; should be &quot;sore,&quot; the others are &quot;soare.&quot; In the third line, he adds the letter L to &lt;em&gt;soare&lt;/em&gt; to get &lt;em&gt;sorrell&lt;/em&gt; (in some versions it's &lt;em&gt;ell&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;L,&lt;/em&gt; playing on &lt;em&gt;yell&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth line, the letter ell becomes the number L. The difference between &lt;em&gt;soare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;sorrell&lt;/em&gt; becomes fifty, so Holofernes (naturally) multiplies. Thus sorrell = soare * 50. Some versions use &lt;em&gt;O&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last line extends the previous &quot;calculation&quot; by adding another L to get 50 + 50, or 100. There could be a play here on the soft S, which looked like f (or 1), but I doubt it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T15:23:23.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3246" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:27:20.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sore&quot; also means &quot;deer&quot;. From &quot;Sport on Dartmoor&quot;, 1895, reprinted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=_kgDAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA117&amp;amp;lpg=PA117&amp;amp;dq=sore%20buck%20fourth%20year&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=VNhnuungjt&amp;amp;sig=DHfD_6b4GxlLXaUP1tHr0aEIPuY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj_k-e8vM_VAhWXw4MKHWIRCOUQ6AEIMjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=sore%20buck%20fourth%20year&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature, and Art&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Fallow-deer, now a much more favourite animal for the table, but seldom hunted except in the New Forest, was a Fawn the first year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pricket the second year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sorel the third year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sore the fourth year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Buck of the first head, the fifth year, and a Buck, or a Great Buck, the sixth year and afterwards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, they're arguing about just how old the deer was. It was a &quot;sore&quot; (deer) made &quot;sore&quot; (painful) by shooting at it. But adding an &quot;L&quot; to &quot;sore&quot; makes &quot;sorel&quot; or &quot;sore L&quot;, either a younger deer or 50 of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't quite parse how he's supposed to make 100 out of that, except perhaps by adding &quot;one more L&quot; as in &quot;fifty more&quot;. (I don't think the wordplay quite works.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A red deer, by contrast, was a calf, brocket, spayad, staggard, stag, and a hart, respectively.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T15:27:20.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3297" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:38:50.293" Score="12" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a very distinct yet vague memory of a book I remember reading at school. It had very little text, and was illustrated, in a format similar to &lt;em&gt;Jumanji&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Where The Wild Things Are&lt;/em&gt;. The illustration style was very similar to the former - almost surreal in its hyperreality and severity - maybe a little like the style of P.J. Crook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrative concerned a young boy whose father left him at home, possibly to pick his wife up from the hospital as she has just had a baby. I'm wondering if the title is something like 'The New Arrival' but I have tried countless google combinations, I just haven't been able to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, the boy is left alone in the house and begins to see strange things, such as faces in the walls. I remember very vividly an illustration from his point of view looking into the washbasin in the bathroom, and the plug hole has turned into a face. There's another part where the garden wall seems to have been anthropomorphised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was probably published in the 80s or 90s. I probably encountered the book in around 1995. It was a large hardback, but probably only had a few dozen pages. It was written in English, was not likely a translation as I recall the boy's house looking like an ordinary British house, but I may be mistaken. It was written for children but was quite 'strange'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1990" LastEditorUserId="1990" LastEditDate="2017-08-11T15:48:36.613" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T10:30:09.180" Title="Creepy children's illustrated book, like Jumanji, about boy waiting for parents to come home with new baby, sees faces in walls" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3253" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:52:56.947" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for any questions about works of literature which were originally written in any of the languages commonly referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Germanic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;North Germanic&lt;/a&gt;, Nordic or Scandinavian (except Finnish, which is an entirely unrelated language). These are all grouped together in a single tag because they're often too similar to each other to be reasonably distinguishable. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/692/17&quot;&gt;How should we tag Scandinavian/Nordic questions?&lt;/a&gt; on meta for more details and rationale for this tagging system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T20:37:01.547" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T20:37:01.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3254" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:52:56.947" Score="0" Body="For questions about Scandinavian literature: works of literature which were originally written in any of the North Germanic (or &quot;Scandinavian&quot;) languages - Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, or Old Norse. Note that this is a language tag and not a country tag: the place of publication is irrelevant." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T20:36:59.010" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T20:36:59.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3228" CreationDate="2017-08-11T15:53:33.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a town named Vardaman in Mississippi, about 40 miles southeast of Oxford. Faulkner could have borrowed the name because he liked the sound of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more likely, however, is that he used the name of James K. Vardaman (1861-1930), who was governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908. They called him &quot;Great White Chief,&quot; because like other Southern politicians of the time, he validated the racism of the white citizenry. By using that name for a child of questionable intelligence, Faulkner is also questioning the intelligence of the governor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T15:53:33.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3217" CreationDate="2017-08-11T20:32:32.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that Sophie and Alberto became real as they crawled to the tip of the rabbit's fur. The more questioning they became, and the farther along they crawled, the more real they became. They no longer said just the words the major put in their mouths, and acted just as the major wished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this fits in with Alberto's view of philosophy - with the entire analogy of the white rabbit. Those who crawl towards the tips of the rabbit's fur are more alive, more aware, than those who just accept it. And at the end, they look into the Magician's eyes, and perhaps even leave the rabbit, and this is what Sophie and Alberto ended up doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T20:32:32.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-11T20:39:42.643" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Sophie's World&lt;/em&gt;, as the end of the book approaches, crazier and crazier things begin to happen - dramatic storms, fairy tale characters in the forest, geese that carry people around, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3189/why-is-it-important-that-nowadays-its-the-girl-who-takes-the-initiative&quot;&gt;strange garden parties&lt;/a&gt;, and so forth. The purpose seems to be that it shows the power the author (well, not really the author, the in-book author, the major) has over the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is this shown through such fantastic events? I can understand inserting some irony (&quot;breaking the fourth wall&quot; so to speak) and lots of birthday references, but the fairy tale characters for the most part seem kind of random, and the whole party is just weird (though Alberto does suspect the crashing of the white Mercedes distracted the major so they could escape).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the purpose in making the ending so fantastic and wildly different from the rest of the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-08-11T20:39:42.643" Title="How does it improve the book to show the major's power?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;sophies-world&gt;&lt;jostein-gaarder&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="922" CreationDate="2017-08-11T23:26:38.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first attempt at writing an answer, so I hope I have done it right in terms of links of attribution and format. If I have not, I hope someone will tell me, so I can benefit from clarification. Beyond that, I’ll simply give it a whirl!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is too simplistic and pedestrian of an interpretation, but maybe we can make a case for simplicity. It seems that the entire first verse is the antecedent referent for the phrase “a heap of broken images.” The phrase in question might best be studied by the words that immediately precede it: “Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the first verse is fascinating because it contemplates the utter cruelty of a month that births beauty, and all the subsequent moments of beauty in a life, all the half stories, “mixing memory and desire,” mixing what we recall with what we wish, perhaps. But as this verse is entitled, The Burial of the Dead, we see a foreshadowing of some point, some perspective, some lesson that is almost tangible, albeit it with ‘broken images’—the earthy erosion, snow, rain, tubers, lilacs, a girl named Marie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside that may or may not be relevant, but which requires discussion in another direction, it might help to know that a dear friend of Eliot’s died in the month of April during WWI. Eliot mourned deeply for his friend. Like I said, that takes it in another direction, a direction potentially important enough to rquire its own discussion for some other time.)(But if curiosity is killing you, this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/30/the-women-come-and-go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Yorker article&lt;/a&gt; is excellent and cites original sources)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an overall sense, that foreshadowed point, that message or lesson, is: Despite all the life we have and think we remember, whether we live it well or not, whether we remember it accurately or not, it is all for naught if we do not accept that we have one job on earth. That job, apparently, is to face the inevitable end of that life with a gratitude and gracious acceptance of the Higher Power that has made it all possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get this notion from the words, “Son of man,” which was a reference to a verse in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ezekiel-Chapter-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezekiel&lt;/a&gt;: “And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee.” There are recurring “Son of man” references in Ezekiel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic message of that Biblical reference is ‘Yes, it is all doom and gloom and the people will fight and write books about it, and bend the knee to false images and some will fight harder than others for their right to glorify said images. In the end, though, we ought to rejoice in the behavior that celebrates God’s word—having done so is the reward, the goal, the point of it all.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Eliot gives us this: &#xA;“And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,&#xA;And the dry stone no sound of water.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be a half-formed holographic Biblical reference to Ecclesiastics [12.5]: “Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets…” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ecclesiastics: 13,14 sums it all up this way: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s worth noting that Eliot underwent a “conversion” of sorts to Anglo-Catholicism, an Anglican form of Christianity that emphasizes the Catholic rather than Protestant heritage and even customs. But he was very selective and discerning in his faith, and it didn’t happen overnight. Still, he was resolute and dedicated. His pursuit of faith was neither an overnight miracle nor was it something he dropped for the next new thing. It was a life-long pursuit for Eliot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what the heck does all this have to do with “A heap of broken images?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plenty as it turns out. There is mention of Marie. Briefly, she was &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0271027371&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marie, Countess Larisch&lt;/a&gt;. Cousin to Crown Prince Rudolph (who was also an Archduke), famous for the apparent murder suicide of his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, and himself. There remains considerable controversy over whether it was, in fact, a murder-suicide, or a couple of murders. It seems that from the moment of the deaths, a cover up was well underway. Either way, it was forevermore ‘The Mayerling Affair’, as the doomed couple was staying at Mayerling Lodge when they left earth. Marie, the Countess Larich, was a close friend of Baroness Vetsera, and after the deaths, it was discovered she acted as a kind of go between for cousin Rudolph and Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marie was banished from court and spent the rest of her life in varying degrees of scandal, poverty and something less than palaces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You may be familiar with popular film culture that presents the basics, fictionalized and otherwise, of the Mayerling saga, namely Mayerling (1969) - This remake of the 1937 French favorite stars Omar Sharif as the Prince of Hapsburg, who defies his father by leaving his royal lifestyle and joining in student protests during the Hungarian Revolution. When he falls in love with the young and wealthy Catherine Deneuve, the king thwarts their plans of marriage, which leads to tragedy. Also starring James Mason and Ava Gardner. Also, in theater, Joseph and David Zellnik wrote City of Dreams, an original musical based on what the musical calls “the double suicide” of Crown Prince Rudolf and his teenage mistress, Mary, in Vienna in 1889 and which includes the character of Countess Larich.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And guess what? T.S. Eliot met Countess Marie Larich, probably in 1911 near Munich—he was about 22 and she was 53. They spoke. The bulk of the first verse of The Wasteland were her memories, her conversation, her heap of broken images—and what a heap it was! Most of the lines of the first verse of The Wasteland were remembered snippets of conversations he had with Marie, according to Eliot’s second wife, &lt;a href=&quot;http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0156948702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valarie Eliot&lt;/a&gt;. (Can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manuscript-of-t-s-eliots-the-waste-land-with-ezra-pounds-annotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, too). (Further, see the voluminous sites created by &lt;a href=&quot;http://world.std.com/~raparker/pub/marie.html#Introduction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard A. Parker&lt;/a&gt; for information on Countess Marie Larisch, who wrote several books, including one about her &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/MY_PAST.html?id=uUFJvgAACAAJ&amp;amp;source=kp_cover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;involvement in the Mayerling Affair&lt;/a&gt;, an involvement she largely denied but which cost her the position as intimate and confident to her aunt Empress Elisabeth, Crown Prince Rudolph’s mother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So! T. S. Eliot, who later became a Christian, surely began his search for “the answer” years before he tried to be a Christian.  (And he prevailed in this attempt despite his rather unchristian like treatment of his first wife and collaborator, Vivien Haigh-Wood, a bright and creative, if tormented, troubled and emotionally damaged, woman. Eliot seemed not so much in love as he was desirous of losing his virginity.) Speaking of which, his friends (largely, the Bloomsbury clique) did not like Vivienne; Virginia Wolf once referred to her, as &quot;This bag of ferrets is what Tom wears round his neck.&quot; (She, of course, later strolled along the banks of the River Ouse before wading in over her head with stones in her pockets.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His search for faith, his unhappy marriage, his utter disillusionment with the war all combined to form what Ezra Pound, a friend and critic, saw as Eliot poetry that could be trimmed, edited, reworked and enhanced to become a major part of the Modernist literary movement that defined some of the greatest writing in our history. Eliot’s poetry began as far more autobiographical than it became in its final forms. By the time we read the leaner versions, including The Wasteland, we had real T.S. Eliot poetry, real sets of poems, yes, but one could say that we, too, had only “a heap of broken images” belonging to someone else and someone else’s someone else. Which reminds me of another verse from Ecclesiastics (12.8): “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1985" LastEditorUserId="1985" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T01:08:17.963" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T01:08:17.963" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1943" CreationDate="2017-08-12T17:22:38.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, there wasn't; Sam had no wish to go to sea. Sam is referencing what his father said earlier in the book (pgs 8 and 9 in my copy):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dad didn't like the land. He liked the sea, wet and big and endless.&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Sometimes he would tell me about Great-grandfather Gribley, who owned land in the Catskill Mountains and felled the trees and built a home and plowed the land - only to discover that he wanted to be a sailor. The farm failed, and Great-grandfather Gribley went to sea. &lt;br&gt;As I lay with my face buried in the sweet greasy smell of my deerskin, I could hear Dad's voice saying, &quot;That land is still in the family's name. Somewhere in the Catskills is an old beech with the name &lt;em&gt;Gribley&lt;/em&gt; carved on it. It marks the northern boundary of Gribley's folly - the land is no place for a Gribley.&quot;&lt;br&gt; &quot;The land is no place for a Gribley,&quot; I said. &quot;The land is no place for a Gribley, and here I am three hundred feet from the beech with &lt;em&gt;Gribley&lt;/em&gt; carved on it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at the end, his dad is saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The Gribleys have had land for three generations. We pioneer, we open the land.&quot; He was almost singing.&#xA;  &quot;And then we go to sea,&quot; I said.&#xA;  &quot;Things have changed. Child labor laws; you can't take children to sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also notice that Sam winks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I winked at him.&#xA;  &quot;But, Dad, a Gribley is not for the land.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sure sign that Sam is joking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T17:22:38.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2639" CreationDate="2017-08-12T17:47:39.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ideas can be frightening, and can hurt those who produce them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for an example the ideas of Galileo, and where they got him - house imprisonment, banned from discussing the heliocentric view. Science fiction, on the other hand, can be frightening, but it is contained. It is fiction. Yet still, like all literature, it contains an idea - it conveys the author's point, but more subtly than outright stating it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Samuel R. Delany [says], &#xA;  “The variety of worlds science fiction accustoms us to, through imagination, is training for thinking about the actual changes—sometimes catastrophic, often confusing—that the real world funnels at us year after year. It helps us avoid feeling quite so gob-smacked.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It conveys the idea, more subtly than explicitly stating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author is asked about that idea, they can say that it was merely to explore, merely to write a story for people to enjoy, by no means to propound an idea. By nature, it is a way for a writer to explore an idea, but with less impact on themselves. Le Guin also said in the quote you provide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Writers may find the future appealing precisely because it can’t be known, a black box where “anything at all can be said to happen without fear of contradiction from a native,”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Precisely because it can't be known&lt;/em&gt;, where anything can be said to happen &lt;em&gt;without fear of contradiction&lt;/em&gt;. Because the future can't be known, we can talk about in the format of a science-fiction book without fear of repercussions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also interesting is a later quote in the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I really like design fiction or prototyping fiction,” says novelist Cory Doctorow [...] &quot;It’s like an architect creating a virtual fly-through of a building.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also safe in the sense that nothing is going to blow up while writing - it's all on paper. It's an exploration of what could be that examines the consequences, before it's built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for the term safe; now for laboratory. Laboratories are places where experiments are done, tests are made, theories are explored. Likewise, a science-fiction novel is a laboratory for the future. What if this is true? How does that affect the plot? Look at some of the questions on Worldbuilding.SE and you will see that the world that is constructed imposes restrictions on things that can be done in that world, and it affects how the people in that world operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, the term that is I think the strangest in that quote, sterile. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.definitions.net/definition/sterile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fourth definition of sterile as per Webster&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;fig.: Barren of ideas; destitute of sentiment; as, a sterile production or author&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case: a laboratory barren of previous ideas, so it is therefore open to the creation of new ones. If you want to explore the absence of government, you can write about it while ignoring previous stances on the subject. You can introduce out there things like warp drives. It allows you to be more open to new ideas by taking them away from the backdrop of the old ones. As the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Bl43cU5rdVwC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=fiction%20is%20more%20effective&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human&lt;/a&gt; (google books link) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than nonfiction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Semi-recent examples can be found in the Mary Tyler Moore show or the Bill Cosby show, which improved how people thought about working, single women and African-Americans respectively, in a fictional format. With this in mind, the science fiction novel is a laboratory that is sterile, totally clean, from other ideas and impressions. The world can be born anew in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my overall interpretation would be: a science fiction novel is a place to explore ideas about the future in a way with less repercussions and with less interference from current ideas than a non-fiction book or opinion piece might have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to the critique of the original article, I'd point out this quote, which sums it up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sci-fi, then, doesn’t just demonstrate future possibilities, but future limits—the extent to which dreams of what we'll do remain captive to the things we've already done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, I see it less as a critique of the original article/quote and more as an extension of it. Sci-fi is still a safe, sterile laboratory, but it's being used to explore limits as well as possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-14T18:50:53.070" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T18:50:53.070" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2017-08-12T17:53:40.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll offer a no doubt idiosyncratic, personal and possibly controversial opinion on the topic given in your title - &amp;quot;Do we know what prompted Orwell to write 1984?&amp;quot;. The question contained in the body of your question is slightly different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Orwell ever talk about what, specifically, motivated him to go from pondering on fascism to writing the actual book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course Orwell talked about his motivations for writing the book, but&#xA;I'll try to be a bit more general than quoting him directly on those reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading Orwell off and on my whole life. I grew up in Bombay, India. When I was around 12 or 13, a young visiting English teacher to our school read us the first chapter of &amp;quot;Animal Farm&amp;quot;. I had never heard of it before. A bit later, I might have been 15 then, I borrowed and read 1984 from the school library. I remember that it really spoke to me. A bit after that I found copies of the Collected Journalism, Essays, and Letters from a local library and read and re-read them for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell was a prolific essayist and journalist. He also wrote a lot of letters. One can read statements about why he wrote 1984, but it's more interesting to attempt to trace his thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it in a nutshell, Orwell seems to have become convinced, over a period of about 15 years or so, starting in the early 30s, that totalitarianism and totalitarian leaders, which included the examples of his contemporaries Franco, Hitler and Stalin, posed a special and possibly existential threat to the human species. He also seems to not have been so much concerned with totalitarianism's directly destructive potential, despite horrible examples like the Nazis, so much as what they might do to human society. In other words, his concerns appear to have been at least partly humanistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only that, he seems to have felt there was far too much cultural acquiescence to totalitarian thinking among people at large, and not enough awareness of the dangers. His writings directly on the subject started in the mid 30s and increased in volume as time went on, with such themes eventually playing a dominant role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell's major writing is available online, some of it is out of copyright in Australia, and so is available on Project Gutenberg Australia, so it's easy to look through them and see these concerns taking shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His interest in this really seems to have started during the Spanish Civil War. As most people reading this doubtless know, Orwell fought briefly in the Spanish Civil War in an anti-fascist outfit called POUM and was wounded. He wrote a famous book about it called &amp;quot;Homage to Catalonia&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, his interest seems to have continued and increased as he thought and wrote about similar totalitarian phenomena like the Nazis and the Bolshevik/Communist Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fairly detailed and explicit discussion of all this is in his essay: &amp;quot;Why I write&amp;quot; (1946), which includes the well-known passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a revealing bit of dialog in the 1939 novel &amp;quot;Coming Up for Air&amp;quot;, which is full of references to Hitler and Stalin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I think you've got it wrong.  Old Hitler's something different.&#xA;So's Joe Stalin.  They aren't like these chaps in the old days who&#xA;crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for&#xA;the fun of it.  They're after something quite new--something that's&#xA;never been heard of before.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'My dear fellow!  There is nothing new under the sun.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first quote is from Bowling, the protagonist. The response is from his friend, a school teacher named Porteous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Orwell himself thought that Hitler and Stalin were &amp;quot;after something quite new&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading between the lines, Orwell decided in the 1940s to use a novel as a more effective vehicle to transmit his ideas and thoughts about totalitarianism to a wider audience. That novel was 1984.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you will forgive some editorializing, it's interesting to note what Orwell &lt;em&gt;did not&lt;/em&gt; consider to be a particular danger or problem. Specifically, standard Western Imperialism. Though he grew up during the British Empire, and even served as a British Imperial Policeman in Burma (and wrote a novel set there), he seems to have mostly tended to make excuses for it. For example, a random example from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/george-orwell-explains-in-a-revealing-1944-letter-why-hed-write-1984.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Orwell Explains in a Revealing 1944 Letter Why He’d Write 1984&lt;/a&gt; (borrowed from Bookeater's answer above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know enough of British imperialism not to like it, but I would support it against Nazism or Japanese imperialism, as the lesser evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he didn't &amp;quot;like&amp;quot; British imperialism but would &amp;quot;support&amp;quot; it. This is despite the truly impressive crimes and destruction committed by the British and their cousin the United States. And people like Hitler having acknowledged their indebtedness to Britain and US policies as having &amp;quot;shown the way&amp;quot;. But this is in keeping with general British attitudes on the matter, which, even in the 21st century, remain largely unchanged. And it's certainly true that Britain and the United States have never been totalitarian internally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:53:37.710" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:53:37.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2001" CreationDate="2017-08-12T18:06:20.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can make an argument for anything, really. It just depends on whether it's a good argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that  the common interpretation of Fahrenheit 451 as being about government censorship isn't a very good interpretation. What fits much better is the one that the author himself intended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fahrenheit's not about censorship, it's about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news, the proliferation of giant screens and the bombardment of factoids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The government is merely carrying out what the people wants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs. Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: 'now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.' Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the purpose of the firemen: to continue what humans on their own began. Without the firemen, one could argue, the situation would be mostly the same - a few eccentrics, but the majority focused only on violence and quick entertainment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's exactly the statement which Bradbury wanted to make: today, we are going down that path. When I go down my school hallway I see more phone screens than mouths talking. I'm considered an extreme nerd (and so are most of my friends for that matter) for &lt;em&gt;::gasp::&lt;/em&gt; liking to read and learn. School has moved away from learning and towards making school &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot; and incorporating &amp;quot;technology&amp;quot;. This point about school is also made in Fahrenheit 451:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Censorship, I would argue, is more about the banning of discussion of specific topics. This isn't censorship. This is a complete end to real learning and thought. It's about staring, blank-eyed, at a screen - Montag's wife is almost not there by the end of the book, with the installation of the screens so she can &amp;quot;watch the story&amp;quot;, though the stories are really meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's what the people wanted. They &lt;strong&gt;wanted&lt;/strong&gt; the books to go away. The government and the firemen were just a tool of the people. So, the books went up in flames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="566" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T10:18:45.617" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T10:18:45.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16410" CreationDate="2017-08-12T22:31:23.900" Score="4" ViewCount="5217" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;No Ordinary Sun&quot; by the Maori poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hone_Tuwhare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hone Tuwhare&lt;/a&gt; is about a tree's reaction to some kind of deadly threat, the titular &quot;no ordinary sun&quot;. Addressing the tree in the second person, the poem warns that it will no longer live happily as before and that there's no point in resisting its fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the poem in full e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://nzpoems.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/no-ordinary-sun.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; it's only five verses long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can we tell for sure what is the catastrophe threatening the tree?&lt;/strong&gt; My immediate thought when reading the poem was that it could be a nuclear weapon, but is this the only sensible interpretation? Could it also be a more conventional bomb or explosion? Could it even be the actual sun itself, just having become much hotter and more uncomfortable due to climate change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T09:58:38.030" Title="What exactly is the &quot;No Ordinary Sun&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;hone-tuwhare&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3264" CreationDate="2017-08-12T22:41:06.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself believe it was a nuclear weapon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;raise them not sharply in supplication &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to the bright enhaloed cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about what a mushroom cloud would look like from the inside in that very instant before it incinerates you, it would look like a halo - one would merely see the ring, not the whole &quot;poof&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;resilience for this is no mere axe &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to blunt nor fire to smother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this means that this is no ordinary explosion. Many standard bombs/explosions are sort of &quot;fiery&quot; and are like a figurative axe - they cut things down, crumble things. But an atomic bomb is different - it completely incinerates things close to the blast, leaving only a darker mark that was the object's shadow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is no gallant monsoon’s flash, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  no dashing trade wind’s blast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flashes/blasts are also associated with the atomic bomb. Now, both of these above could probably be construed into thinking of it as a normal bomb, instead of an atomic bomb, but the real clincher for me is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fading green of your magic &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  emanations shall not make pure again &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  these polluted skies . . . for this &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is no ordinary sun. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;these polluted skies&quot; - the atomic bomb was unlike other bombs in that instead of just devastation, it pollutes land for many years. Atomic bombs (and their direct descendants hydrogen bombs) have become many, many times more powerful, and therefore that much more polluting, than the only atomic bombs to be dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &quot;for this / is no ordinary sun&quot; - a famous phrase related to the atomic bomb is &quot;a flash brighter than the sun&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O tree &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in the shadowless mountains&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the white plains and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the drab sea floor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  your end at last is written.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, there's an interesting point to consider. Even after an explosion, you can come back after a little bit, and see growth, rebirth. After a fire, after natural disasters, you can also see rebirth. A scene I like to think of is in Disney's Fantasia - after the volcano erupts, it all comes back. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an atomic bomb, it doesn't work like that. If you look at the area of the Chernobyl disaster, lifeforms are still being born with mutations. There is a whole forest whose needles have turned red from the radiation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this all together points fairly clearly towards the poem referencing an atomic bomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point - &quot;Tree let your arms fall&quot; is repeated in the poem. The symbolism there is that of giving up, giving in. There is nothing resistance can do. There is nothing the tree can do against the power of the atomic bomb. It can resist a fire with thick bark. It can resist a storm with its deep roots. It can resist, even, an explosion. But the sun is no ordinary one, and it must give in. Its end &quot;is at last written&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, this is not the only time a tree appears in Tuwhare's poetry. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://nzpoems.blogspot.com/2011/08/friend-hone-tuwhare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Friend&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he writes for the last stanza&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps the tree &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  will strike fresh roots again: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  give soothing shade to a hurt and &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  troubled world.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the most relevant passage involving a tree, but a tree appears in many of his poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tree, in his mind, if you look at that last stanza, gives relief, it soothes. An atomic bomb is almost the exact antithesis of that. It is utter destruction. In this context, when the tree, relief, is told to give up - give in - to the atomic bomb, that says a lot about what he thought. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-12T23:15:06.833" LastActivityDate="2017-08-12T23:15:06.833" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2639" CreationDate="2017-08-13T04:14:18.357" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In computer work, there's a type of system called a &lt;em&gt;sandbox&lt;/em&gt;. It's a model, a toy, a place to try things that could cripple or destroy a working system. You create a sandbox to let a student make mistakes or conduct experiments. A sandbox isn't connected to other systems and can be reset any number of times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this interview Le Guin uses the same general idea to describe science fiction. You can create a world to any specification and try out new ideas. If the world is destroyed, well, it was only make-believe, no harm done. That's a common strategy in SF: extrapolate a current trend to an absurd degree to show the danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another strategy is to create a culture with one exaggerated trait. What happens when a species gives up emotion and devotes itself to logical behavior? You won't find a large group of people willing to try the experiment over a long period of time. In SF, though, you can present such a culture as a &lt;em&gt;fait accompli&lt;/em&gt; and explore the ramifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other genres (except fantasy) assume that your story takes place in a more-or-less real world. That limits the leeway you have in stretching the boundaries of what is possible. That limits the questions you can ask about the preconceptions we have about the nature of humanity. Good fiction can make you re-examine your place in society. Good SF can make you re-examine your place in the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T04:14:18.357" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T04:34:31.730" Score="3" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“…we can deplore,” the radio, the voice of the little yellow-bellies from Tokyo was saying. God, Frink thought; and we called them monkeys, &lt;strong&gt;these civilized bandy-legged shrimps who would no more set up gas ovens than they would melt their wives into sealing wax&lt;/strong&gt;. “…and we have deplored often in the past the dreadful waste of humans in this fanatical striving which sets the broader mass of men wholly outside the legal community.” They, the Japs, were so strong on law. “…To quote a Western saint familiar to all: ‘What profit it a man if he gain the whole world but in this enterprise lose his soul?’ ” The radio paused. Frink, tying his tie, also paused. It was the morning ablution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to improve my English by reading some literature. I've thought of posting this in the English board, but I think I understand the sentence correctly, which means the Japanese would rather melt their wives into sealing wax than set up gas oven. It just doesn't makes sense. It seems related to some rumors about Japanese in the author's time. I did a brief googling about &quot;melt wife into sealing wax&quot; but found nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1994" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T10:16:28.527" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T13:45:14.793" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;melt wives into sealing wax&quot; in Dick's &quot;The Man in the High Castle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;philip-k-dick&gt;&lt;the-man-in-the-high-castle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3275" CreationDate="2017-08-13T04:39:01.890" Score="13" ViewCount="5734" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several major characters in &lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; are named after fictional or historical characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Calvin is named after theologian John Calvin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hobbes is named after Thomas Hobbes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Miss Wormwood is named after Wormwood in &lt;em&gt;The Screwtape Letters&lt;/em&gt;, a low-level demonic tempter. Appropriately, it's also the name of a bitter substance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then: why did the author choose those specific names? Were they mostly for the deliberate irony (naming Calvin after a serious theologian, Wormwood being named after both a tempter and a bitter substance, etc.), or are there more &quot;layers&quot; to this that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T14:04:21.437" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T14:04:21.437" Title="Why did Bill Watterson choose the character names he did?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;bill-watterson&gt;&lt;calvin-and-hobbes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3269" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T04:40:45.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T04:40:45.890" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T04:40:45.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3270" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T04:40:45.890" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American cartoonist Bill Watterson (born 1958) or his life as a writer. He is most famous for his cartoon 'Calvin and Hobbes'." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:13:42.380" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:13:42.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3267" CreationDate="2017-08-13T08:00:54.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googling this book tells me that it's about an alternative ending to World War II. So, let's look at the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these civilized bandy-legged shrimps who would no more set up gas ovens than they would melt their wives into sealing wax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at each part of this, along with the line above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and we called them monkeys &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like it's saying that we called them monkeys, as in, we were discriminatory towards them. We were prejudiced. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these civilized &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is saying that we were wrong. They are as civilized as we are. They're not barbarians. It contradicts the next statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bandy-legged shrimps &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not familiar with this book, but context tells me that this is a negative stereotype of the Japanese. This is using their previous prejudice as a way to say &quot;wow, we were so wrong&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;who would no more set up gas ovens than they would melt their wives into sealing wax &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this book has to do with World War II, I'll assume that you're familiar with the gas ovens in the Holocaust. If you aren't, suffice it to say that there were gas ovens used to kill millions of people during the Holocaust.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They would no more&lt;/em&gt; means here that they wouldn't set up the gas ovens. If they wouldn't melt their wives into sealing wax, which the implication here is that they wouldn't, they wouldn't set up gas ovens for slaughtering people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This looks like Frink is either being brainwashed to think that they weren't as bad as they actually were, or having an epiphany, and throwing off years of prejudice. You'll have to see for yourself which it is. (Although based on what I see in the Kindle screenshot, it looks like the former, especially as it's an alternative ending to World War II. But I don't know the book.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T13:45:14.793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T13:45:14.793" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" Score="0" Body="For questions about Philip K. Dick's 1962 alternative history novel, in which the Axis forces had won WWII. Use with the [philip-k-dick] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T08:25:25.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2331" CreationDate="2017-08-13T12:04:41.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;A German Requiem&quot; is full of contrasts, especially in the first and last stanzas with their repetitive structure and countless sentences of the form &quot;It is not X. It is Y.&quot; In these particular lines, we're looking at a &lt;strong&gt;contrast between aloneness and togetherness&lt;/strong&gt;: between sitting in your own house forgetting and taking part in a ceremony of forgetting together with others. &lt;strong&gt;Forgetting&lt;/strong&gt; is the key concept in this poem. I think the following lines from the start of the third stanza are especially key to understanding what the poem is all about, because of their directness and transparency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How comforting it is, once or twice a year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To get together and forget the old times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ceremony being described - the journey in the &quot;Widow's Shuttle&quot;, the gathering of &quot;boiled shirts&quot; in a cemetery to hear speeches, the short time spent tending the graves before going home - is all part of the so-called &lt;strong&gt;&quot;ritual [of] oblivion&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; described in the first stanza. Let's look again at those lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What you must go on forgetting all your life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You will find out that you are not alone in the enterprise.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yesterday the very furniture seemed to reproach you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Today you take your place in the Widow's Shuttle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage introduces the description of said ritual: waiting for the bus, dressed almost like a bride, gathering at the graveside, and so on. It's in these lines that the poem transitions from talking about &lt;em&gt;forgetting&lt;/em&gt; to talking about &lt;em&gt;communal forgetting&lt;/em&gt;. This is the contrast which the last two lines express: when the widow sits at home alone and ignores the past, the very furniture seems to reproach her for her forgetting; but when she takes her place together with the other widows, she receives validation and solidarity as they all sit and forget the past together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T12:04:41.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3268" CreationDate="2017-08-13T13:31:29.380" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;With regards to Calvin and Hobbes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Later, when Watterson was creating names for the characters in his comic strip, he decided upon Calvin (after the Protestant reformer John Calvin) and Hobbes (after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes), allegedly as a &quot;tip of the hat&quot; to the political science department at Kenyon. In The Complete Calvin and Hobbes, Watterson stated that Calvin is named for &quot;a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination,&quot; and Hobbes for &quot;a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Watterson#Early_life&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;; unfortunately this particular section is only cited by a dead link to a personal autobiography.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the Amazon preview/Google book preview of &lt;em&gt;Looking for Calvin and Hobbes: The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson&lt;/em&gt;, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He later told an interviewer in 1987 that the names Calvin and Hobbes were &quot;a tip of the hat to the political science department at Kenyon College...I thought it was funny.&quot; Calvin was named after the sixteenth-century Protestant theologian who believed in predestination, Hobbes after the philosopher a century later who once observed that &quot;life is nasty, brutish, and short&quot;. Or that's what Watterson would have you believe. &quot;That's not true,&quot; Rich West told me. &quot;The linking of the two names wasn't natural. The strip did not come from the idea that both characters would be named after philosophical thinkers. However, Hobbes was definitely a tip of the hat - and perhaps a bit of a smirk at - his political science degree from Kenyon. Calvin was just a coincidence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes the origin of Calvin and Hobbes' names fairly clear; now for Miss Wormwood's. In the same book just quoted, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have a lot of sympathy for Miss Wormwood,&quot; Watterson admitted in his interview with &lt;em&gt;The Comics Journal&lt;/em&gt;. &quot;We see hints that she's waiting to retire, that she smokes too much, and that she takes a lot of medication. I think she seriously believes in the value of education, so needless to say, she's an unhappy person.&quot; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wormwood's name is borrowed from the apprentice devil in C.S. Lewis' novel &lt;em&gt;The Screwtape Letters&lt;/em&gt;. This devil's job is to keep his human charge on a course that will ultimately lead him away from God and into the awaiting arms of the devil. The other authority figures at the school are portrayed with equal disdain [...] These characters represent censorship, they embody the idea of institutional control and loss of self. They seek to dampen Calvin's imaginative life by trying to force him, an unusually shaped peg, into a square hole. Their goal is to lead him away from who he truly is [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I think summarizes the meaning of Miss Wormwood's name quite nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T13:31:29.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2509" CreationDate="2017-08-13T14:02:42.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central theme of &quot;A German Requiem&quot; is that the characters described, survivors of World War II and their families, are &lt;strong&gt;forgetting their experiences in order to cope&lt;/strong&gt;. Forgetting is the key concept here. I think the following lines from the start of the third stanza are especially key to understanding what the poem is all about, because of their directness and transparency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How comforting it is, once or twice a year,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To get together and forget the old times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unexpected word &quot;forget&quot; is jarring here. Usually people who shared an experience get together to &lt;em&gt;remember&lt;/em&gt; it, but here people are getting together to &lt;em&gt;forget&lt;/em&gt;. Thus the central theme of the poem is brought out very clearly by its contrast with what we might have expected to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole ceremony being described - the widows dressed almost like brides, their journey in the &quot;Widow's Shuttle&quot; to their families' cemetery, the gathering of &quot;boiled shirts&quot; by the graves to hear speeches - is all part of the so-called &lt;strong&gt;&quot;ritual [of] oblivion&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; described in the first stanza. I believe the fourth stanza, the one you're asking about here, is a continuation of the same theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better for the widow, that she should not live in fear of surprise,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The better for the young man, that he should move at liberty between the armchairs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The better that these bent figures who flutter among the graves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tending the nightlights and replacing the chrysanthemums&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are not ghosts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That they shall go home.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The bus is waiting, and on the upper terraces&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The workmen are dismantling the houses of the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mention of the bus again towards the end of this stanza supports the idea of continuity. We're still following the same story, that of the widows and other graveside mourners who gather to validate each other in their forgetting of the events of the war. So the &quot;widow&quot; and &quot;graves&quot; mentioned here in the fourth stanza must be the same widow and graves of the first three stanzas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the poem is stating that &lt;strong&gt;it's &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; to forget, better than remembering&lt;/strong&gt;. Whether this statement is genuine or ironic is probably up for debate: personally I think it sounds sarcastic, and that Fenton doesn't have a very high opinion of these forgetters, but I've also seen readings which interpret the poem as saying that sometimes it's necessary to forget because remembering is so horrendous. But regardless of how much sarcasm is in there, the &lt;em&gt;words&lt;/em&gt; of the poem at least are in favour of forgetting. We see this in the quote from the third stanza above (&quot;How comforting it is&quot;), as well as in the first stanza (&quot;you must go on forgetting&quot;), and I think this is also what's going on here in the fourth stanza: the message is 'better to forget'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's examine the individual lines you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better for the widow, that she should not live in fear of surprise,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The widow puts the horrors of war out of her mind so that they can't come back to haunt her. This is the &quot;surprise&quot; she might fear - such memories unexpectedly cropping up. With all of them committed to oblivion, she no longer has to &quot;live in fear&quot; of that surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The better for the young man, that he should move at liberty between the armchairs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the &quot;young man&quot; is one too young to remember the war, perhaps the son of one of these widows, perhaps even a child. (It's not clear exactly when the poem - first published in 1980 under the title &quot;Elegy&quot; - is set.) His &quot;liberty&quot; is the liberty of ignorance. It is better for him, the poem argues, not to grow up surrounded by tales of horror, to be able to feel free in his own home rather than weighed down by the awful stories of what happened to his parents and family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: these lines are saying it's better to blank out the horrors of war than to dwell on them.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T17:03:01.303" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T17:03:01.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-13T14:20:22.020" Score="17" ViewCount="28551" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a lot of paperback books. Almost exclusively, in fact. I have one problem, though - all the covers get bent while I read them (or sometimes after one of the siblings has a crack at it). They end up with bent covers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AFcp5m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Paperback cover with bent corner&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I like to keep my books in good condition (unfortunately, that's not always possible). How can I straighten out a book with a bent cover like this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; having twelve encyclopedias sitting on top of it for a couple days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:10:13.147" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T01:19:39.057" Title="How do I straighten out a paperback book's cover that is bent?" Tags="&lt;book-care&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2908" CreationDate="2017-08-13T15:56:59.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like to start with a couple thought experiments and analogies. None of these are meant to be offensive in any way, but merely to explain a point. Please comment with any suggestions on how to improve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's say you see a person walking on the street of a minority race. What do you think? Try taking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Race IAT&lt;/a&gt;, a test which asks you to match pictures of white children with sad/destructive words and pictures of African-American children with happy words. Don't feel bad if you came out with difficulties doing so; most people do, even those who themselves are in a minority group. (Read Malcolm Gladwell's &lt;em&gt;Blink&lt;/em&gt; for an interesting discussion of this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, imagine that same person walking towards you, hand in their pocket. What do you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another scenario. Consider discussing politics with a kid. Let's say they ask you about a topic which you have strong feelings about. How do you talk about opponents to your position? How do you talk about people who agree with your position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another scenario. Imagine you have been working on a research project for years, slaving over it, agonizing over it. Future funding is dependent on it. You've been finally doing some of the end experiments, and you're getting some weird results that don't fit with your hypothesis. You redo them, and they still don't come out the way you'd like. Do you shelve the research and not publish? Do you redo the experiments again? What are your thoughts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another scenario, a less divisive one this time. Tell yourself you're really thirsty. It's a hot day, and you really need a drink. Picture warm sunny beaches, deserts, baking heat, humidity. Think about this for a bit. Odds are, when you're done, you'll actually feel thirsty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world we describe in our minds affects how we see things. We see everything through a lens - our biases, perceptions, thoughts, all affect how we act and see the world. That's exactly what this quote is describing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone (or at least most people) know that they are biased, in some way or another. That bias affects how we see things. It's why we should be thoughtful when looking at anything. How much of what you're thinking is colored by your perceptions? Are you really thinking about this with an open mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what this quote is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that I'm pretty sure this quote was not said by Descartes. &lt;a href=&quot;http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/03/09/as-we-are/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; provides several citations for when it was said. The earliest source for which there is any support is the Talmud:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”— Rabbi Shemuel ben Nachmani, as quoted in the Talmudic tractate Berakhot (55b.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this too is uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T20:54:40.510" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T20:54:40.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3279" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1488" CreationDate="2017-08-13T16:34:50.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like to step back from this stanza a bit and look at an earlier one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You cannot say, or guess, for you know only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the dry stone no sound of water. Only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is shadow under this red rock,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I will show you something different from either&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your shadow at morning striding behind you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I will show you fear in a handful of dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/922/what-is-the-heap-of-broken-images-in-the-waste-land/3243#3243&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; I interpret the meaning of the broken images in this passage as referencing the memories someone has. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this interpretation, I read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That corpse you planted last year in your garden,&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As asking if the life, and the memories left from it, have had an impact on people and have lead to a new growth yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we now arrive at your passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I'd like to point out that Dog is capitalized, which makes me think this isn't just an ordinary dog, but a &lt;em&gt;represenation of something/someone else&lt;/em&gt;. Looking at my earlier interpretation of this growth from the dead as the impact of the memories, my first thought for what the Dog could be representing is a critic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The critic &lt;em&gt;appears to be&lt;/em&gt; a friend to men - many read what they say and consider it - but in reality, they can be enemies, which explains the connection with Webster's &lt;em&gt;The White Devil&lt;/em&gt;. Further, the next line is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which Google Translate gives as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You! Hypocrite reader!-my similar,-my brother!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I think also points towards critics. &quot;Hypocrite reader&quot; - it's a common phrase that &quot;those who can't do, critique&quot; - and so critics can be seen as hypocrites, who examine something and point out all the flaws, when they themselves have many flaws and haven't created something nearly as good. As for &quot;my similar&quot; - most of us by nature critique - it's normal to notice the flaws before the perfections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the passage is saying, keep the critics far away - else they'll dig up what's left of the person and their memories and doings and destroy the things that are growing from their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Peter Shor kindly pointed out, the line is actually from Au Lecteur, another poem. The last section of the poem translates as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the infamous menagerie of our vices,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though he does not utter great gestures or cries,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He would gladly make earth a debris&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in a yawn would swallow the world;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's Boredom! The eye loaded with an involuntary cry,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He dreams of scaffolding by smoking his houka.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You know him, reader, this delicate monster,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Hypocrite reader!-my similar,-my brother!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact the line is referring to boredom, not critics, but I think the two are still connected. The earlier parts of the poem refer to people's vices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our sins are stubborn, our repentance is cowardly;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We make ourselves pay our admissions,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And we go cheerfully back into the muddy path,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Believing by vile tears to wash all our spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by including the line, Eliot is referring to people's vices, one of which is criticizing others, being hypocritical. Thus, the interpretation still fits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T00:56:20.643" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T00:56:20.643" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3032" CreationDate="2017-08-13T17:55:44.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am quite far removed from my studies of early American History, so I am sure there are many nuances to the politics that I am forgetting, but one of the major reasons that Washington was considered a good candidate for president was his prior experience leading the Continental Army (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mountvernon.org/digital-encyclopedia/article/presidential-election-of-1789/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). Because this experience was so important to his contemporaries, it makes sense that they would continue to use his military rank when referring to him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a previous answer explained, it is clear that in Melville's time, the use of General Washington is more common than President Washington. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all this aside, if we try to understand why Melville chooses this for Moby Dick, I think there may be some value in thinking about the different connotations behind someone who leads as a general vs a president.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general is the ultimate decision-maker. Although s/he might (should) consider input from others in the military, in some ways the military really is a dictatorship; if a general gives an order, his troops are to carry it out, no questions asked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, a President is a politician, and is Constitutionally designed to be the opposite of a dictator, instead listening to input coming from a variety of constituents before making a final decision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that Melville's choice of the word General instead of President was a deliberate indication that dictators are the only type of leaders respected within Ahab's world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1967" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T17:55:44.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3281" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3282" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" Score="0" Body="For question about the 1991 Norwegian book &quot;Sophie's World&quot; by Jostein Gaarder. Use this tag with the [jostein-gaarder] and [scandinavian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T20:53:03.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3192" CreationDate="2017-08-13T20:56:54.470" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is somewhat of a generalization of my self answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1740/why-did-the-stars-throw-down-their-spears&quot;&gt;Why did the stars throw down their spears?&lt;/a&gt; where I ended up analyzing most of the poem to explain the meaning of one particular, mystifying line. It's all based on my own reading and my meager knowledge of Blake's philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The most obvious deeper meaning in &quot;The Tyger&quot; is how, in combination with &quot;The Lamb&quot;, it alludes to the dual nature of the Christian creator God.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the other poems from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The Tyger&quot; has a paired partner from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43670/the-lamb-56d222765a3e1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lamb&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &quot;The Lamb&quot; talks about the creation of the gentle, innocent lamb with its soft, woolly coat and &quot;tender voice&quot;, and at the end establishes a correspondence between the lamb and its creator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is called by thy name,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For he calls himself a Lamb:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is meek &amp;amp; he is mild,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He became a little child: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language used to describe the making of the lamb is simple and far more banal than the language used for the tiger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Little Lamb who made thee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;           Dost thou know who made thee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gave thee life &amp;amp; bid thee feed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By the stream &amp;amp; o'er the mead;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gave thee clothing of delight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Softest clothing wooly bright;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gave thee such a tender voice,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Making all the vales rejoice!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, &quot;Who gave you your life? Who told you to feed? Who gave you your wool and your voice?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though &quot;The Tyger&quot; begins with a similar passage, enumerating the features of the tiger and asking who made them, there's a certain conceit to the language that has no parallel in &quot;The Lamb&quot;, most obvious in the poem's fourth stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the hammer? what the chain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In what furnace was thy brain?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the anvil? what dread grasp,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dare its deadly terrors clasp!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tiger is described with military and industrial language. It was constructed in furnaces, on anvils, with hammers and chains and ropes (&quot;And what shoulder, &amp;amp; what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart?&quot;). Unlike the lamb, the tiger is a weapon of war, adapted for killing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even though we've just spent four stanzas wondering what immortal being could possibly have crafted a weapon of war as fearsome as the tiger, the fifth stanza suddenly admits the possibility that it was the same being who made the gentle and innocent lamb, ending with the line &quot;Did he who made the Lamb make thee?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza repeats the first stanza, but this time instead of asking who &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Could&lt;/strong&gt; frame thy fearful symmetry&quot;, it asks who &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Dare&lt;/strong&gt; frame thy fearful symmetry&quot;. The narrator is implying that God, who made the Lamb, is perfectly capable of also creating the Tiger, but wonders that he dared to do it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a deeper level, the pair of &quot;The Lamb&quot; and &quot;The Tyger&quot; can represent a person attaining an adult, intellectual understanding of God and the nature of the world. God loves the little children, his little innocent lambs frolicking in their fields and knowing not how to do evil. To them &quot;He is meek &amp;amp; he is mild&quot;. He is the God of love from the New Testament, who &quot;calls himself a Lamb&quot; and &quot;became a little child&quot;. But the adult is closer to the tiger, capable of war, killing, and sin more broadly; and sometimes sinful adults meet the Old Testament God who smote Sodom and Gomorrah, the vengeful and destructive force who &quot;smiled his work to see&quot; when &quot;the stars threw down their spears / And water'd Heaven with their tears&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza also offers some support for this reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what distant deeps or skies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On what wings dare he aspire?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the hand, dare seize the fire?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds a lot like the myth of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humans. Fire was the beginning of furnaces, hammers, anvils, chains, and the other industrial paraphernalia that are mentioned later, so attaining fire was the moment humans became able to create weapons of war to become like the tiger. But attaining fire in the Promethean story also has some resemblance to the fall of Adam and Eve in Christianity; it was a sudden event in which humans gained something originally reserved for gods, and became a little bit like gods themselves, &quot;growing up&quot; in a sense. It's a common trope in Christian thought that children live in an Edenic, sin-free state and don't fall and become sinful until they grow up, so growing up is linked via the fall of Adam and Eve to attaining fire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, God, in one of his moods as the vengeful God who punishes sinners, created the tiger, a fearsome creature of war. Humans, after the fall of Adam and Eve, gained the same capacity for vengeance and war, but doing so opened them to being smitten by the vengeful God in turn. The story of how the tiger was created represents this concretely with attaining fire as the fall of Adam and Eve and the industrial tools that fire enabled for creating weapons and wreaking destruction representing the sin that humans became capable of. By realizing that God created the fearsome tiger as well as the gentle lamb, a person can gain an adult, nuanced understanding of God by comprehending His dual nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2017-08-13T20:56:54.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2908" CreationDate="2017-08-14T17:14:43.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote (which has been altered slightly from the original) seems to have first appeared in Joseph Jaworski's book &lt;em&gt;Synchonicity: The Inner Path of Leadership,&lt;/em&gt; whose first edition was published in 1996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is explained better by quoting the whole paragraph it is contained in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I considered the importance of language and how human beings interact with the world, it struck me that in many ways the development of language was like the discover of fire—it was such an incredible primordial force. I had always thought that we used language to &lt;em&gt;describe&lt;/em&gt; the world—now I was seeing that this is not the case. To the contrary, it is through language that we &lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt; the world, because it's nothing until we describe it. And when we describe it, we create distinctions that govern our actions. To put it another way, we do not describe the world we see, but we see the world we describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jaworski seems to connect this to Buddhist philosophy. Another answer shows that similar things are discussed in the Talmud. And this also seems very similar to the Sapir-Whorf theory of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linguistic relativity&lt;/a&gt;. I have no idea whether Descartes ever said anything resembling this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-03-14T08:36:26.610" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T08:36:26.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T17:36:25.437" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading about the Portuguese author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Am%C3%A1lia_Vaz_de_Carvalho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho&lt;/a&gt;, I came across the following interesting tidbit of information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The collection of stories for children she wrote with her husband, Contos para os nossos filhos (&quot;Tales for our Children&quot;, 1886) was approved by the Board of Public Instruction for use in schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Wikipedia provides no citation for this claim, and I haven't been able to find out any more information online (I tried searching for the author's name together with &quot;tales for our children&quot; and together with &quot;schools&quot;). &lt;strong&gt;How exactly was a book of short stories &quot;use[d] in schools&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Were the stories educational in nature, was it a &quot;cautionary tales&quot; type collection, or were they simply studied in literature class, presumably together with more classical works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T02:02:30.290" Title="How was &quot;Contos para os nossos filhos&quot; used in schools?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;maria-amalia-vaz-de-carvalho&gt;&lt;antonio-candido-goncalves-crespo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3285" CreationDate="2017-08-14T17:52:23.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&amp;amp;sl=pt&amp;amp;u=http://www.custojusto.pt/lisboa/livros/contos-para-os-nossos-filhos-vaz-carvalho-crespo-19127377&amp;amp;prev=search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; (page is google-translated) has a sale of the book and says it was approved for use in schools. Later on the page it says*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volume of short stories from 1886, selected and translated by the couple Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho and Gonçalves Crespo, dedicated to &amp;quot;the mothers&amp;quot; and destined to the children: &amp;quot;stories to delight the imagination of children, stories that they understand, that interest them, that Make them laugh, and make them cry. &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These versions of the traditional tales compiled by the Danish Andersen and the Germans Grimm knew a great publishing success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that these stories were just like a book of fairy tales might be used. When I was in the elementary grades, we had a book full of short stories and excerpts from longer stories we used to practice our reading and &amp;quot;explore different ideas&amp;quot;. This would probably be used in much the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The original in Portuguese is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volume de contos de 1886, selecionados e traduzidos pelo casal Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho e Gonçalves Crespo, dedicado &amp;quot;às mães&amp;quot; e destinado às crianças: &amp;quot;contos para deleitarem a imaginação das crianças, contos que elas entendam, que as interessem, que as façam rir, e que as façam chorar&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Estas versões dos contos tradicionais compilados pelo dinamarquês Andersen e pelos alemães Grimm conheceram um grande sucesso editorial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T01:41:07.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3244" CreationDate="2017-08-14T19:10:22.817" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Ralph Crown comments above, is it possible you're thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ern Mallory&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernest Lalor &amp;quot;Ern&amp;quot; Malley was a fictitious poet and the central figure in Australia's most famous literary hoax. He and his entire body of work were created in one day in 1943 by conservative writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart in order to hoax Max Harris and his modernist magazine &lt;em&gt;Angry Penguins&lt;/em&gt;, which Harris co-edited with John Reed of Heide, Melbourne. Imitating the modernist poetry they despised, the hoaxers deliberately created what they thought was bad verse and submitted sixteen poems to Angry Penguins under the guise of Ethel, Ern Malley's surviving sister. Harris and other members of the Heide Circle fell for the hoax, and, enraptured by the poetry, devoted the next issue of &lt;em&gt;Angry Penguins&lt;/em&gt; to Malley. The hoax was revealed soon after, resulting in a &lt;em&gt;cause célèbre&lt;/em&gt; and the humiliation of Harris, who was put on trial, convicted and fined for publishing the poems on the grounds that they contained obscene content. &lt;em&gt;Angry Penguins&lt;/em&gt; folded in 1946.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McAuley and Steward were Australian, not from the U.K., and there was no party involved, and it's a bit later in history (1940s, not 1920s), but the rest seems to match. All seventeen poems were written in a single afternoon. There was not, as far as I can tell, any commentary on the analysis of development. In fact, the whole thing was found out in a week of publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preface biography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to his inventors' fictitious biography, Ernest Lalor Malley was born in Liverpool, England, on 14 March 1918. His father died in 1920, and Malley's mother migrated to Petersham, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with her two children: Ern, and his older sister Ethel. After his mother's death in August 1933, Ern Malley left school to work as an auto mechanic. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday, he then moved to Melbourne where he lived alone and worked as an insurance salesman, and later as a watch repairman. Diagnosed with Graves' disease sometime in the early 1940s, Malley refused treatment. He returned to Sydney, moving in with his sister in March, 1943, where he became increasingly ill (as well as temperamental and difficult) until his death at the age of 25 on 23 July of that same year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malley's life as a poet became known only after his sister Ethel (another fictitious creation of McAuley and Stewart) found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings. These poems featured a brief preface, which explained that they had been composed over a period of five years, but it left no instructions as to what was to be done with them. Ethel Malley supposedly knew nothing about poetry, but showed the poems to a friend, who suggested that she send the poems to someone who could examine them. Max Harris of Angry Penguins was to be that someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-14T19:17:53.227" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-14T19:56:20.480" Score="5" ViewCount="1393" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there is anyone out there that understands the ending of &lt;em&gt;Fire and Hemlock&lt;/em&gt;, I'd be very grateful for a detailed explanation. The ending corresponds approximately to Part 4 (Nowhere), Section 6, where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Polly comes to save Tom. Specifically, the part set in the magical swimming pool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I first read that section 20 years ago, but I still don't really know what happens here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant section starts around the words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At first sight it seemed to be autumn in the garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fire and Hemlock&lt;/em&gt; was, of course, written by the late great Diana Wynne Jones. She is unaccountably missing from this site, so I'm happy to remedy this omission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-15T15:13:32.643" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T16:01:05.173" Title="The ending of Fire and Hemlock" Tags="&lt;diana-wynne-jones&gt;&lt;fire-and-hemlock&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6020" CreationDate="2017-08-15T00:37:07.530" Score="11" ViewCount="5419" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some years ago I studied many of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Many of them are very clearly paired up, an Innocence song and an Experience song deliberately written to compare and contrast with each other: not only those with identical titles such as &quot;Nurse's Song&quot; and &quot;Holy Thursday&quot;, but also others with parallel structures such as &quot;The Lamb&quot; and &quot;The Tyger&quot;. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3283/17&quot;&gt;this excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; to another Blake question, Torisuda says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like the other poems from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The Tyger&quot; has a paired partner from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;The Lamb&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally my question was going to be &quot;is it true that they all come in pairs&quot;, but since there are 28 Songs of Experience and only 19 Songs of Innocence, it definitely can't be true, at least not this way round. So I'll instead pose a slightly broader question, as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience clearly pair up with each other?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T15:29:30.920" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T15:29:30.920" Title="How many of the Songs of Innocence and of Experience come in pairs?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-15T08:30:16.127" Score="8" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Primrose Everdeen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dies. What can we learn from their death? What does this teach us, from an out of universe point of view?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-15T11:08:33.653" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T22:06:00.567" Title="What can we learn from this character's death in &quot;Mockingjay&quot;, out of universe?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3292" CreationDate="2017-08-15T11:24:35.740" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the synopsis of this book a number of years and have since been unable to remember the title or author. Searching of likely options have been unsuccessful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the following details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is about a community that is, I think, sealed within a single block of flats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At first, this place has everything that people could want, up to and including a school.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At some point resources begin to become scarce and this leads to residents fighting and the society crumbling. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think there was something about a lot of fighting occurring between the residents of the various floors, as in they had formed pseudo-tribes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it might have been part of the golden age of scifi, but possibly not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is anybody able to identify the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T11:51:24.413" Title="The name of a story about a community contained within an apartment building" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3291" CreationDate="2017-08-15T11:32:15.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;That sounds very much like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Rise_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;High-rise by J G Ballard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story depicts a luxury high-rise building as its affluent residents gradually descend into violent chaos. [...] Life in the high-rise begins to degenerate quickly, as minor power failures and petty grievances among neighbours and rival floors escalate into an orgy of violence. Soon skirmishes are being fought throughout the building, as floors try to claim elevators and hold them for their own. Groups gather to defend their rights to the swimming pools and party-goers attack &amp;quot;enemy floors&amp;quot; to raid and vandalize them. The lower, middle, and upper floors of the building gradually stratify into distinct groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does not take long for the occupants of the entire building to abandon all social restraints, abandoning life outside the building and devoting their time to the escalation of violence inside; people abandon their jobs and families and stay indoors permanently, losing all sense of time. As the amenities of the high-rise break down and bodies begin to pile up, no one considers leaving or alerting the authorities, instead exploring the new urges and desires allowed by the building's disintegration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T11:51:24.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2017-08-15T12:40:14.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This death is probably the single most significant event in the entire series, with the possible exception of &quot;I volunteer as tribute!&quot; in book one. It completely changes every single aspect of the ending of the story, as well as significantly changing the history of Panem. First, let's look at just those changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The death of Coin.&lt;/strong&gt; This is the most obvious consequence of Prim's death: it opens Katniss's eyes to the true nature of President Coin, and inspires her to assassinate this new leader. Ironically, Coin sealed her own fate by her actions - if she hadn't ordered those parachutes dropped, Katniss wouldn't have been motivated to kill her, at least not until she'd made her despotism more clear and Katniss was no longer in a position of power.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The loss of Gale.&lt;/strong&gt; The love-triangle subplot also found its final resolution in Prim's death. Although we the readers could have guessed long ago that Katniss would end up with Peeta over Gale (Peeta was so much more significant in the story, got so much more page time), Gale had been gaining advantage throughout &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, being there for her while Peeta was kidnapped and then psychotic. Then, suddenly, the person Katniss loved most is dead and Gale could be partly to blame. Boom, end of romantic tension, Everlark for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A bittersweet ending.&lt;/strong&gt; The whole series is full of death, by the very nature of the Hunger Games and of war - Collins doesn't stint on showing us the brutality of both. But this death strikes much closer to home. If it hadn't been for this, Katniss and her nearest and dearest might have been able to make themselves a life almost as before in Twelve: living with her mother and sister, with Peeta, Gale, and Haymitch close by. Now it's very clear that &lt;em&gt;nothing will ever be the same again&lt;/em&gt;. Nothing would anyway, for Katniss, after all she's been through, but with Prim gone this becomes even starker, and we appreciate more clearly how broken Katniss is and how long it takes her to stitch her life back together again after the war is over.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's the effect on the story, from an out-of-universe point of view. The death of this one innocent girl brings about a massive change in the jurisdiction and history of Panem, a clear resolution to the romantic subplot, and clarifies the bittersweetness for Katniss of the 'victory' in Panem by breaking the plot armour which those closest to her have so far enjoyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But you were asking about what we can &lt;em&gt;learn&lt;/em&gt; from her death, what lessons or morals we can draw from this part of the story. I'm not exactly sure what kind of thing you're looking for, but here's a few obvious conclusions and how they relate to Prim's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;War is hell.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said above that Collins doesn't stint on showing us the gritty reality of war. This comes out in so many ways throughout &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;: the prominence of propaganda in the war effort, the casual killing of civilians, the isolation in ignorance of one team of soldiers from the rest, ... and now this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nobody is safe, even the innocents.&lt;/strong&gt; Prim is surely the person we'd have least expected to die in this story. She's not a soldier; she's not (as far as we knew up to this moment) part of the war effort at all. Her main role in the story seemed to be someone Katniss loved unconditionally - a less complex relationship than with Peeta or Gale or her mother - and as a motivation, a reason for Katniss to keep fighting and to want a better Panem (more on this later). Her death seems more horrendous than any of the soldiers, and gives us a face for all the untold innocents suffering in this war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neither side is as rosy as it makes out.&lt;/strong&gt; I don't think I need to go into much detail about this, as it's the whole point of the business with Coin. Just as Katniss learns that Coin would be almost as bad a dictator as Snow, so we, the readers, realise that both sides committed atrocities - and Prim's death is the catalyst for that realisation. This is an important lesson in terms of real war too: it's never &quot;good against evil&quot;; that's just what they (your country, or the victors, or whoever) want you to think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense, from a narrative point of view, Prim 'had' to be killed. Somebody close to Katniss needed to die, to remind us that you can't get through war without losing anyone and to show us how difficult it is for her to piece her life back together at the end; and it couldn't be Peeta or Gale, because that would end the love triangle in the wrong way. But there's another reason why it had to be Prim ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It's all about Prim.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prim's death brings the story full circle. It was Prim who started everything off, by being reaped as a tribute forcing Katniss to volunteer. Every step of the way, Katniss has been fighting for Prim: when she volunteered to be part of the Hunger Games, when she promised Prim that she'd try to win and come back home, when she promised Snow to play along with the romance facade after her family was threatened, even when she fought for a better Panem. She doesn't get much page time, but she's always there in Katniss's thoughts, &quot;&lt;em&gt;the only person in the world I'm certain I love&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. Perhaps we needed reminding of that, and here's our reminder: Prim lying dead and Katniss (who's been having a nervous breakdown almost every other chapter in &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;) finally, totally, broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems fitting to end this by quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/11343/31394&quot;&gt;perhaps the only SE answer that's made me tear up&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's always been for Prim. Not for the Capitol, not for the rebels, not for the hunger games. For Prim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-15T12:40:14.367" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2479" CreationDate="2017-08-15T19:11:22.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Politics in Oz&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole idea of politics in Oz has been around for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Baum himself was asked whether his stories had hidden meanings, but he always replied that they were written to &quot;please children&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;says the Wikipedia article, and the book it cites, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=5i2vBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Oz+in+Perspective:+Magic+and+Myth+in+the+L.+Frank+Baum+Books.&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjn_66mxdnVAhUHxGMKHcmQCHkQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=they%20were%20written%20to%20%22please%20children%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oz in Perspective: Magic and Myth in the L. Frank Baum Books&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, agrees, but then goes on to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, in his statement about writing &quot;only to please children,&quot; Baum undoubtedly is distorting the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same book says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That Baum had at least a mild interest in politics and political movements and that he worked his interest into his Oz books is well documented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The note after this sentence cites &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Littlefield; Erisman, &quot;L. Frank Baum and the Progressive Dilemma&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cook; Geer and Rochon; and Koupal, &quot;Wonderful Wizard of the West&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Politics of Oz: A Symposium&quot; that includes Gessel; Koupal, &quot;Add a Pinch&quot;, and Erisman, &quot;L. Frank Baum and the American Literary Tradition&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Ozma of Oz political background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until Ozma of Oz comes into the picture, it's interesting to note that the political landscape (if I may use such a term referring to a children's storybook) of Oz is rather fragmented. We go from the Wizard of Oz to the Scarecrow with a lot of tumult, and inbetween there are witches, and distant lands still in Oz that are really under nobody's control. The politics start with the second Oz book, &lt;em&gt;The Marvelous Land of Oz&lt;/em&gt; (quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvelous_Land_of_Oz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They learn from Glinda that after the fall of Oz's mortal king Pastoria decades ago, a long lost princess named Ozma was hidden away in secrecy when the Wizard of Oz took the throne. She also informs them that Ozma is the rightful ruler of the Emerald City and all of Oz in general, not the Scarecrow (who did not really want the job anyway). [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The restored Ozma is established on the throne after defeating Jinjur and her army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, placing the proper ruler on the throne, defeating a rebel army, and making Ozma look good (Tip has been the hero for most of the book when this twist comes into play).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ozma of Oz comes in, she becomes &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; ruler of Oz. From there, most of the Oz stories are about keeping her in power or extending it - a decidedly political turn. For example (quotes in this section taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Oz_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In  &lt;em&gt;Ozma of Oz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they must save Ev's royal family from the evil Nome King. With Princess Ozma's help, they finally return to Oz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They defeat the Nome King to preserve Ozma's kingdom and also to replace the Princess Langwidere with more capable rulers in Ev.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Emerald City of Oz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the Nome King is tunneling beneath the desert to invade Oz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They must preserve Ozma's kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Patchwork Girl of Oz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Munchkin boy named Ojo must find a cure to free his Uncle Nunkie from a magical spell that has turned him into a statue. With the help of Scraps, an anthropomorphic patchwork doll, Ojo journeys through Oz to save his uncle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this doesn't mention is that a major plot point is the illegality of using one of the ingredients Ojo must collect, so much of the story ends up centering on laws, mercy, and justice. Ozma here again features significantly.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tik-Tok of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the two try to rescue the Shaggy Man's brother from the Nome King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, defeating the Nome King and preserving Ozma's kingdom is a significant plot point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scarecrow of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cap'n Bill and Trot journey to Oz and, with the help of the Scarecrow, the former ruler of Oz, overthrow the villainous King Krewl of Jinxland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, again, defeating an enemy and extending/preserving Oz territory are a feature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lost Princess of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Princess Ozma mysteriously disappears, four search parties are sent out, one for each of Oz's four countries. Most of the book covers Dorothy and the Wizard's efforts to find her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding Ozma and therefore preserving her rule is the main plot point, and defeating evil in Oz.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magic of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ruggedo, former Nome King, tries to conquer Oz again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, preserving Ozma's rule and defeating enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Glinda of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dorothy, Ozma and Glinda try to stop a war in the Gillikin Country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stopping a war and preserving Ozma's rule again!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;General conclusions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize from all of this, it's pretty clear that Baum's books focused on the stability, unity, and endurability of government, even if it was fictional. Returning again to &lt;em&gt;Oz in Perspective&lt;/em&gt;, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Baum's books] treat important aspects of politics. They can easily be seen as embodying Baum's reaction to the corruption, instability, and lack of unity that characterized America during large portions of his life. And since the solutions to the problems of government in Oz involve magic, it is easy to theorize that Baum felt that in the real world of his day, many political problems were insoluble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, and the earlier citations referring to scholar's analysis of the politics of Oz points to political allegory having at least some play in the Oz tales. (Interestingly enough, Baum wrote for the &lt;em&gt;Aberdeen Times&lt;/em&gt; earlier in his life, and wrote several politically focused articles and editorials.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Your actual question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, all of this being covered, to treat your actual question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Princess Langwidere is cited as vain and too busy admiring herself to actually do administrative tasks, and that she doesn't really enjoy affairs of state. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_of_Ev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; if you wish; this can also be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=A-EQAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=ozma+of+oz&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjNgP6e9NnVAhUoxoMKHS13CwcQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=affairs%20of%20state&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in the Google books copy.) Since she doesn't want to be bothered, she specifically tricks people with the sign you mention in your question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baum was annoyed by instability, and this is much the situation here - the only ruler of Ev is a vain, disinterested Princess, who doesn't keep things in order or do much of anything. If that's not the definition of unstable, I don't know what is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baum then uses Princess Langwidere as a reason to go on a dangerous quest to replace her with a more capable ruler. The whole situation here is political, and it is almost certainly one of the general political references the aforementioned scholars have noticed throughout Baum's work. However, whether this specific joke is about the right versus the left wing in politics is difficult to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, Baum himself was sympathetic to the Populists and voted for the Democrats (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=504&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Baum was sympathetic to the Populist movement, supported William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896, and, though not an activist, consistently voted for Democratic candidates. (In 1896, the Populists joined the Democrats in backing Bryan’s bid for the presidency.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Populists ended up merging with the Democrats soon after they supported Bryan, which fits with your thoughts of right wings portrayed as left wings, except that the Populists were also left wing, generally speaking. Interestingly, though, the Populists were mostly farmers, who are normally right wing, but were angry with &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what they perceived to be the interests of the Eastern establishment and banking elite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-6/apush-gilded-age/a/the-populists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khan Academy&lt;/a&gt;.) They were then a sort of inbetween group - some left-wing and right-wing - and when the Populist party merged with the Democratic party, it isn't inconceivable to think of it as becoming slightly more right wing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baum's books were actually decently influenced by the politics of his time, so it's not impossible that the left/right wing joke in &lt;em&gt;Ozma of Oz&lt;/em&gt; is also political, referencing the Populists merging with Democrats, and I think it is somewhat likely given the relative position of each party and the many-times espoused parallels between Oz's stance on some issues and the Populists' stance on those issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T12:25:17.787" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T12:25:17.787" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2820" CreationDate="2017-08-16T01:44:37.293" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No, there seems to be no evidence that Poe was taphephobic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer relies heavily on the master's thesis &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memoireonline.com/03/17/9702/m_Taphephobia-in-Edgar-Allan-Poes-collection-of-gothic-tales-a-new-historicist-study-of-19th-centu.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Taphephobia in Edgar Allan Poe's Collection of Gothic Tales: A New Historicist Study of 19th Century America's Most Prevalent Fear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written by Salma Layouni as part of her MA degree at the University of Sousse, Tunisia. If you really want to know more about taphephobia in Poe's work, this long and detailed study is worth reading.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Taphephobia was &lt;strong&gt;a common thing among the general public&lt;/strong&gt; in Poe's time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; describes the history of the fear and how it led to the invention of &quot;safety coffins&quot; in which one could survive being buried alive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fear of being buried alive peaked during the cholera epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries but accounts of live burial have been recorded even further back. [...] The general fear of premature burial led to the invention of many safety devices which could be incorporated into coffins. [...] A large number of designs for safety coffins were patented during the 18th and 19th centuries and variations on the idea are still available today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it makes sense that he would choose this as one of the many topics and themes he wrote about, regardless of his own feelings. Good horror stories play on people's existing fears, and if taphephobia was a prevalent fear among his readership, then it's a good choice to write horror stories about. He even discusses, in the opening paragraphs of &quot;The Premature Burial&quot;, why he chose this topic, and plays upon the fears of his readers while doing so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs--the stifling fumes from the damp earth--the clinging to the death garments--the rigid embrace of the narrow house- the blackness of the absolute Night--the silence like a sea that overwhelms--the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm--these things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed--that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead--these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth--we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that he identifies himself with the taphephobe, in his consistent use of &quot;we&quot; in this passage, serves the dual purpose of making the readers feel closer to him and of setting the scene for his first-person narration of a premature burial - in no way does it suggest that he himself was taphephobic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Layouni &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.memoireonline.com/03/17/9702/m_Taphephobia-in-Edgar-Allan-Poes-collection-of-gothic-tales-a-new-historicist-study-of-19th-centu16.html#toc20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discusses&lt;/a&gt; at length (too much length to summarise here) how &quot;The Premature Burial&quot; is designed in such a way as to play on the fears of a typical American:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The realistic feature of this particular tale grants its historical dimension that can be used to study a social phenomenon that invades the 19th C American society. Poe uses different literary techniques to guarantee different effects on different readers and to widen the scope of taphephobia as a universal fear that can overwhelm any human being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is true, it seems less likely that the story was based on the author's &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; fear, rather than just a prevailing fear in the society of the time.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In addition, there were already &lt;strong&gt;various existing stories about being buried alive&lt;/strong&gt; on which, it seems, at least in part, Poe based some of his own such stories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Premature Burial&quot; is very similar in plot to John Galt's &lt;em&gt;Blackwood&lt;/em&gt; story &quot;The Buried Alive&quot; (1821) - a comparison of the two may be found in Andrew Mangham's article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literatureandscience.org/issues/JLS_3_1/JLS_vol_3_no_1_Mangham.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Buried Alive: The Gothic Awakening of Taphephobia&quot;&lt;/a&gt; from the Journal of Literature and Science.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parts of &quot;The Premature Burial&quot; are also very similar to the notes and poems accompanying a &quot;life-preserving coffin&quot; exhibited at the annual fair of the American Institute in 1843 - the many verbal parallels are discussed in W.T. Bandy's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/A_Source_of_Poe_s_The_Premature_Burial.html?id=biBxnQEACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Source of Poe's &quot;The Premature Burial&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and T.O. Mabbott's annotated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom3t010.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1978).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Cask of Amontillado&quot; is very similar to Joel T. Headley's &quot;A Man Built in the Wall&quot;, published in the Columbian Magazine in August 1844 - I haven't been able to find this story online, but an excerpt can be seen in T.O. Mabbott's annotated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom3t030.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1978).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Cask of Amontillado&quot; could also be partly inspired by a nun's interment in the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmion_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marmion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Walter Scott - a writer whose work is known to have inspired Poe on other occasions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Cask of Amontillado&quot; could also be partly inspired by the 1831 short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Bret%C3%A8che&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;La Grande Bretèche&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (which I've also read, and they are indeed reminiscent of each other) by Honoré de Balzac - another writer who is often compared to Poe and may have inspired him more widely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear, then, that taphephobia was &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; a theme in the literature of the time. Poe was following an existing trend, both in real people's beliefs and in horror stories, and there's no particular reason to think he was inspired by his own personal fears about being buried alive.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Interestingly, while writing this answer, I came across a new tidbit of information which is &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; what you're looking for: that &lt;strong&gt;Poe was afraid of the dark&lt;/strong&gt;. The following quote is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hF43CgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT27&amp;amp;lpg=PT27&amp;amp;dq=Mr.+John+Mackenzie,+in+speaking+of+Edgar,+bore+witness+to+his+high+spirit+and+pluckiness+in+occasional+schoolboy+encounters,+and+also+to+his+timidity+in+regard+to+being+alone+at+night,+and+his+belief+in+and+fear+of+the+supernatural.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=HQkEYMXQlZ&amp;amp;sig=Q2FnpT2wLCn3nagettdJbvGeGiA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi6l_-szdrVAhVoJMAKHXiiCG4Q6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Mr.%20John%20Mackenzie%2C%20in%20speaking%20of%20Edgar%2C%20bore%20witness%20to%20his%20high%20spirit%20and%20pluckiness%20in%20occasional%20schoolboy%20encounters%2C%20and%20also%20to%20his%20timidity%20in%20regard%20to%20being%20alone%20at%20night%2C%20and%20his%20belief%20in%20and%20fear%20of%20the%20supernatural.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Home Life of Poe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Susan Archer Weiss, who knew him in his last few years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. John Mackenzie, in speaking of Edgar, bore witness to his high spirit and pluckiness in occasional schoolboy encounters, and also to his timidity in regard to being alone at night, and his belief in and fear of the supernatural. He had heard Poe say, when grown, that the most horrible thing he could imagine as a boy was to feel an ice-cold hand laid upon his face in a pitch-dark room when alone at night; or to awaken in semi-darkness and see an evil face gazing close into his own; and that these fancies had so haunted him that he would often keep his head under the bed-covering until nearly suffocated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have a phobia, which he might have channelled into writing some of his &quot;buried alive&quot; stories (like the protagonist of &quot;The Premature Burial&quot;, he would have found it unpleasant to wake up in a dark and unfamiliar place), but it wasn't specifically taphephobia.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Your question is, perhaps, a tribute to Poe's brilliance. His stories are so well-written that you wonder if they're based on his own fears, if they have that almost inimitable sign of a deep personal connection from the writer, rather than just being a great portrayal of phobia which evokes that fear in the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T11:12:29.843" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T11:12:29.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3252" CreationDate="2017-08-16T04:38:10.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;Changes&lt;/em&gt;, by Anthony Browne, published in 1990. I can't lay hands on my copy at the moment but below is the cover, copied from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.anthonybrownebooks.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9V0u.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U9V0u.png&quot; alt=&quot;Changes book cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his illustrations can be quite surreal, which may be why he illustrated an edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Gorillas are also a favourite of his to draw, and he has written several books starring Willy, a chimp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-16T10:30:09.180" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T10:30:09.180" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-16T13:38:34.110" Score="5" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Gene Wolfe's loose trilogy of novellas &lt;em&gt;The Fifth Head of Cerberus&lt;/em&gt;, the middle story (&lt;em&gt;&quot;A Story&quot; by John V. Marsch&lt;/em&gt;) is the one which gives us the most direct insight into the lives of the so-called 'abos' or Annese, the original indigenous inhabitants of Sainte Anne. The story focuses on the twins Sandwalker and Eastwind, but the Shadow Children, mysterious person-like creatures who dwell on Sainte Anne together with the people, also get a lot of page time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who or what are the Shadow Children?&lt;/strong&gt; When they talked about having come from another world, I assumed they were humans who had somehow had their form taken from them by the Annese, and that this explained the humanoid form of the Annese in this story. But in the third story, &lt;em&gt;V.R.T.&lt;/em&gt;, it seems as though the splashdown at the end of this story really was the first arrival of humans on Sainte Anne ... so where did the Shadow Children come from, why are they so insubstantial now (if they're not human, were they always that way?), and what is their relationship to the Annese?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Even though I've now finished the whole trilogy, there are still things to be understood and mysteries to be unravelled! This reflects the depth and subtlety of the stories and the world Wolfe created. Perhaps I should reread the second one.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T13:38:34.110" Title="What are the Shadow Children?" Tags="&lt;gene-wolfe&gt;&lt;the-fifth-head-of-cerberus&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3159" CreationDate="2017-08-16T15:53:40.833" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you want to read something, how do you make your choice? When you go into a library, where do you go first? When you go to the movies, what do you want to see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we read for recreation, we choose what to read based on the mood we're in. For sentiment, we choose romance. For stimulation, we choose adventure. For fun, we choose humor. For puzzling, we choose mystery. Every story has a theme, and we want to feel it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, there are subgenres and shades of emotion. Some adventure stories turn into horror. Some humor turns into romance. In the end, though, we get what we came for. If we don't get that satisfaction, that catharsis, we feel cheated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its most basic, genre boils down to tragedy and comedy. Will things turn out well for the characters, or do some of them have to die? Will we feel happy or sad when the curtain goes down?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genre is about evoking an emotion. An abandoned house, for instance, triggers dread and not joy, while a brightly lit garden triggers joy and not dread. Writers use certain tropes to condition the reader, to influence the reader's emotions. Twisting or inverting tropes doesn't invalidate them, it only changes the perspective on them. Tropes have power. That's what makes them tropes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we read for criticism, we analyze. We look at themes (among other things). In a short story, there may be only one emotion. In longer works, the emotion may shift or alternate. As a basic story element, theme is as much a part of literature as plot or character. Genre helps to establish the theme, so it is important to analysis, albeit in a secondary role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T15:53:40.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2001" CreationDate="2017-08-16T18:54:51.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you been to a library recently? In olden times, libraries had books. Lots of books. That was how you learned things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When newspapers and magazines came along, libraries added newspapers and magazines. When videotapes and DVDs came along, libraries added videotapes and DVDs. Each time they cut down on their books to make room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Internet came along, libraries didn't need books or newspapers or magazines or videotapes or DVDs. All these media will go the way of the clay tablet and the papyrus scroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have the Internet, we can get the very best news and information, right? or at least the very best cat memes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradbury extrapolated a trend. Television, a new technology in his time, could have been used to enlighten and inform. Instead it became &quot;the idiot box,&quot; &quot;the boob tube.&quot; The government wasn't responsible for that. Networks show what people want to watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day there's something new: spin doctors, echo chambers, infotainment, silos, alt-facts, anything to avoid reality. If it doesn't affect us directly, if it doesn't agree with our preconceived notions, let it burn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who read books are dangerous, therefore books are dangerous. It's not true, but it's what people want to believe. Ostensibly, &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; is about destroying books. In reality it's about destroying ideas, destroying even the capacity to &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; ideas, and in the end destroying our minds and thus ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1816" LastActivityDate="2017-08-16T18:54:51.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-17T00:00:52.530" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a vague memory of a book in which a killer (perhaps a serial killer) says &quot;There. There.&quot; as they stab someone. I think the killer is female, but I am not certain of that. It even might be some means of killing other than stabbing. I think the killing is retribution for some kind of abuse. Note that I am NOT referring to Randy Lenz in &lt;em&gt;Infinite Jest&lt;/em&gt; (reading that section of the book is what dredged up the memory). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional details: the book was a novel, written in English ten or more years ago, I believe. Not SF or fantasy, not noir. Set in the contemporary US. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2009" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T14:29:25.160" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T14:29:25.160" Title="Novel in which a killer says &quot;There. There.&quot; as she or he stabs people" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3308" CreationDate="2017-08-17T00:22:43.110" Score="4" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;A physics problem in my book (and apparently in others, from the hits Google gives) goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comic-strip hero Superman meets an asteroid in outer space and hurls it at 800 m/s, as fast as a bullet. The asteroid is a thousand times more massive than Superman. In the strip, Superman is seen at rest after the throw. Taking physics into account, what would be his recoil velocity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the curious, it would be 800,000 m/s, or over 2 million miles per hour, but that isn't my question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone find the comic (if it exists) that this problem refers to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T15:34:38.887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T14:59:10.403" Title="Finding comic referenced in semi-classic physics problem" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;superman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3290" CreationDate="2017-08-17T19:57:31.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I quite like  Rand al'Thor's comprehensive answer and will only add that the simple answer may be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The senselessness of war&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not in terms of what might incite the sub-optimal condition of war, which, in some cases, can be justified, but that many events and many deaths can be regarded as senseless (i.e. having no good reason.)    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I focus on this as the simple answer is that the death in question occurs after victory has been achieved.  It's senseless because there is no reason to continue the fighting.  This is compounded in that the victims in this case were non-combatants.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For parallels, I might look at Sam Fuller's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Red_One&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Big Red One&lt;/a&gt;, based on Fuller's experiences in WWII.  (The opening scene touches on this very subject.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a major theme of the more recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_from_Iwo_Jima&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letters from Iwo Jima&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-08-17T22:06:00.567" LastActivityDate="2017-08-17T22:06:00.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3306" CreationDate="2017-08-17T23:45:46.410" Score="6" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_Lagerl%C3%B6f&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Selma Lagerlöf&lt;/a&gt; online, I was somewhat surprised to learn the following fact:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the start of World War II, she sent her Nobel Prize medal and gold medal from the Swedish Academy to the government of Finland to help raise money to fight the Soviet Union. The Finnish government was so touched that it raised the necessary money by other means and returned her medal to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Finland was an ally of Nazi Germany and they fought the Soviet Union together in World War II, I'm wondering what Lagerlöf's support of Finland signified, especially since she came from a country which remained neutral throughout the war. I've never heard anything about her being a Nazi supporter, but then I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/806/17&quot;&gt;been surprised before&lt;/a&gt; by authors' political views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did Selma Lagerlöf want to sponsor Finland's war effort in WW2?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T17:14:30.253" Title="Was Selma Lagerlöf a Nazi supporter?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;&lt;selma-lagerlof&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-18T01:08:32.073" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;My brother wrote to me that he's looking for a book that he read some years ago. Since I don't seem to know it, I thought you might help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about a professor who returns to a university in a little village in the United States. People die, and also animals (a certain kind of birds I think) because of poisoning. In the end the main character gets kidnapped and is held on an isolated private reservation (by native Americans?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember ever having heard of such a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2012" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-18T06:30:00.033" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T12:04:52.537" Title="A book about a professor that returns to university in a little town and people, possibly animals, die from poisoning" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3304" CreationDate="2017-08-18T06:48:34.917" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it should be noted that almost everyone in Sweden was at least sympathetic Finland in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winter war&lt;/a&gt; of 1939-1940 against the Soviet union, and also to a lesser extent in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuation_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Continuation war&lt;/a&gt; of 1941-1944 (but by then, Lagerlöf was dead). The general idea was expressed as &quot;Finland's cause is ours&quot;. This was for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical reasons: Finland had once been part of Sweden, and was still seen as a natural ally, while the Soviet union carried all the stigma from the Swedish wars against Russia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moral reasons: the Soviet union was clearly the aggressor against a smaller, neutral country.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Political reasons: from the more centrists parts of the social democratic party and towards the right, there were a strong abhorrence to communists. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Realpolitical reasons: If the Soviet union conquered Finland, they would be at Sweden's doorstep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led the Swedish government to declare itself a non-combatant, rather than neutral. Sweden gave material aid and allowed volunteers to join the Finnish army. Sweden also let Finnish children be evacuated to Sweden. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, it should be noted that at least during the Winter war, Finland was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; an ally of Germany. There has however been a debate to what extent it was allied with Germany during the continuation war, which I will not go into here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, being friendly to Finland, and even giving material aid, was nothing extraordinary during the early parts of the war. Probably the only ones that took the Soviet side in Sweden at that time was the communists. During the latter parts, when Finland fought on the same side as Germany, which occupied Denmark and Norway, sympathies were more mixed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Did Selma Lagerlöf sympathize with the Nazis?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not really. She did on occasion do things that today would be seen as racist (there is a novella of hers that depicts the Travellers as a lower breed, and she once got involved in a beauty contest to present a &quot;real Swedish type of Woman&quot;), but she also helped Jewish-German author Nelly Sachs to flee to Sweden, and she wrote a novella to aid &quot;Jews and other unwanted people&quot; that tried to flee Germany. However, when she came under pressure in Germany following this, she cowed in and issued a statement that it was an act of mercy, not a political &#xA;statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is really nothing that says that Lagerlöf had any particular Nazi sympathies, beyond perhaps the orientation towards Germany that was common in her generation. Her support for Finland was something very much in line with the official Swedish attitude of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of my sources are in Swedish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sweden's attitude and general politics against Finland is mostly from memory, but are described in more detail &lt;a href=&quot;http://popularhistoria.se/artiklar/anfallet-pa-finland-blev-aven-sveriges-sak-finska-vinterkriget&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lagerlöf's general politics has been take from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.svd.se/selma-lagerlof-kopplas-ihop-med-rasbiologin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and the details of her novella to aid the Jews is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://elinwagner.blogspot.se/2005/01/selma-lagerlf-i-och-ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (where a biography over her is quoted).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T06:48:34.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2646" CreationDate="2017-08-18T14:31:55.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly the short story collection &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural Histories&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guadalupe_Nettel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guadalupe Nettel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Since the stories you seek were translated into English, I guessed that the author might be relatively well-known in South American literature. So I did a Google search for &lt;code&gt;short stories south american&lt;/code&gt;, and lo and behold, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/430787/these-are-the-latin-american-authors-you-should-be-reading-this-summer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Natural Histories&lt;/em&gt; (2014), Nettel composes a mosaic of unforgettable characters: there’s the pregnant woman who spends her days observing how two fishes fight, the bourgeois family whose apartment is taken over by cockroaches or the couple of musicians who share a genital infection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mention of cockroaches made me almost certain that this is the book you're looking for. After that it was just a matter of finding detailed enough reviews to check everything you've described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In “The Marriage of a Red Fish,” a young woman witnesses the crumbling of her marriage through the lens of a pair of Siamese fighting fish, whose perilous cohabitation reflects in the actions of the husband and wife. &lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/book-review/guadalupe-nettels-natural-histories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably your woman meditating in a hallway with a divorce involved.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'War in the Trash Cans' sees a household war waged against an invasion of cockroaches (though ending also with a symbolic lone orphaned cockroach, much like the forlorn-feeling narrator at that time). &lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/mexico/nettelg.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is surely the story with the frozen cockroaches.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find anything about a woman on a plane, or an avian egg, but both of these details are quite vague. The whole collection of stories is about animals (or fungi) and how they relate to humans, so it's plausible that a bird's egg is described somewhere. Or maybe you're remembering parts of another book which is mixed up with &lt;em&gt;Natural Histories&lt;/em&gt; in your memory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T14:31:55.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3302" CreationDate="2017-08-18T15:43:48.517" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This description, up to changes in the numbers involved, seems to be a &lt;strong&gt;common exercise set to physics students&lt;/strong&gt;. I've found people asking for help with this problem or trivial variants at &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110301033555AAjFZMz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo Answers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.chegg.com/homework-help/questions-and-answers/superman-hurls-asteroid-1800-times-mass-velocity-950-m-s-recoil-velocity-q15849493&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chegg&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/momentum-questions-please-help-need-them-done-tonight.62466/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Physics Forums&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.ptc.com/t5/PTC-Mathcad-Questions/NEED-HELP-WITH-PROBLEMS-REGARDING-MOMENTUM-ENERGY/td-p/91607&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PTC&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://express-helpline.online/comic-strip-hero-superman-meets-asteroid-outer-space-hurls-fast-bul-5235162.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Express Helpline&lt;/a&gt;, as well as actual answer sheets from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.spokanefalls.edu/InetShare/AutoWebs/AsaB/Phys101/TS_Chapter6_7_Answers.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;college physics course&lt;/a&gt; ... and all of these links were just on the first page of Google results for &lt;code&gt;superman hurls asteroid&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having studied maths and physics, I can tell you two things from experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Firstly, there are many specific exercises which 'do the rounds' and somehow crop up in dozens of textbooks and courses on a given topic from all over the place. Sometimes there's a seminal textbook in the field which has influenced all the others; sometimes the 'original source' (if there is one) is more or less impossible to track down and teachers have just been copying the exercise from each other since time immemorial. So, &lt;strong&gt;don't expect to always be able to find an original source for much-reused problems.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Secondly, it's common practice to make these kinds of exercise more 'fun' by involving some fictional characters. If you're going to set your class a problem about an object moving through space, &lt;em&gt;why not&lt;/em&gt; make it Davros or the USS Enterprise? If you're going to set them a problem about an object interacting with a much larger one, &lt;em&gt;why not&lt;/em&gt; make it Superman doing something heroic? But few teachers have the dedication to design an exercise around a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; sci-fi story, instead picking facts and variables to make the story fit the exercise. So, &lt;strong&gt;don't expect there to be a real story behind a physics problem in a sci-fi context.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, all that being said ... I did find a potential real source for the Superman asteroid problem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Hhq5pjy6CgYC&amp;amp;pg=PA21&amp;amp;lpg=PA21&amp;amp;dq=superman+hurls+asteroid&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=nBbEQBe1CA&amp;amp;sig=HKYch6OjBxdBCinSbPy4ptE8Rbs&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiHran-gOHVAhWDLFAKHat3AwgQ6AEIeDAP#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=superman%20hurls%20asteroid&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times&lt;/em&gt;, edited by JJ Darowski&lt;/a&gt;, I discovered the comic issue &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;World's Finest Comics&lt;/em&gt; #68 (1954)&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://comicvine.gamespot.com/world-s-finest-comics-68-the-menace-from-the-stars/4000-120066/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in which&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;The Menace from the Stars!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (Superman) written by Unknown, penciled by Wayne Boring and inked by Stan Kaye. Superman stops an asteroid on a collision course with Earth - but Kryptonite in the asteroid's make-up leave him with amnesia, and the effects of the asteroid are far from over on Earth too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story seems to have been based on an episode of the TV series &lt;em&gt;Adventures of Superman&lt;/em&gt;, which seems to be better known than the comic, namely &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Panic in the Sky&quot; (1953)&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0506583/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in which&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Superman rams a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. The impact causes the asteroid to now orbit the planet. However, Superman is staggered as he returns to Earth. He manages to change back to Clark Kent (apparently a reflex action) but doesn't remember who he is. Meanwhile, the orbiting asteroid still presents hazards for Earth. Only Superman can place an explosive device that will demolish the asteroid -- and no one, including Clark, knows where Superman is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these stories feature Superman dealing with an asteroid, and the TV episode for sure (probably the comic too) specifically features him colliding with it in space, as in the physics problem you cite. So these stories, if anything, were probably the inspiration for your exercise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-18T15:43:48.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3310" CreationDate="2017-08-19T08:22:25.670" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it an idiom or should it be understood literally?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It is from &quot;The Sign and The Seal&quot; by Graham Hancock. The full quote runs thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The peasant whom we met and talked to were poor, in some cases very poor indeed, and their lives were clearly &lt;strong&gt;ruled by the iron rods of soil and season&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;iron rods of soil&quot; puzzles me the most. Unless it is an idiom, does it refer to some geological feature of the Ethiopian soil?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is an idiom, what is its meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T09:53:36.977" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T09:53:36.977" Title="Is &quot;by the iron rods of soil and season&quot; in Graham Hancock's &quot;The Sign and The Seal&quot; an idiom?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-sign-and-the-seal&gt;&lt;graham-hancock&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3309" CreationDate="2017-08-19T09:51:45.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Ruled by an iron rod&quot; is a well-known English idiom. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/rule_with_a_rod_of_iron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Control or govern very strictly or harshly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;‘she ruled their lives with a rod of iron’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The peasants in your quote have lives which are controlled very strictly or harshly, hence they're &lt;strong&gt;ruled by an iron rod&lt;/strong&gt;. What controls their lives so much? The &quot;&lt;strong&gt;soil and season&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (this phrase itself is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonym&lt;/a&gt; which denotes their whole environment - weather, seasons, natural rhythms of the day and year). So the metaphorical iron rods which rule them must be &lt;strong&gt;the iron rods of soil and season&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T09:51:45.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3069" CreationDate="2017-08-19T14:29:58.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I differ in my perception here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Magi brought gifts that are considered wise, the reason is the gold brought as gift symbolises 'influence' which infant Jesus was to acquire afterwards as a mentor for his disciples his followers and his menfolk; frankincense symbolises Him as a holy spirit and myrrh his early demise as myrrh is a perfume used preferably over dead bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence means those gifts they brought were symbols but what they symbolise have nothing to do with those Magi. They were not so influential as Jesus was to become later on; not so sacred as Jesus who was a holy spirit and they were not to meet their demise at so early an age as Jesus did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'That' means the what those gifts represented and 'them' means 'the Magi'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am wrong, I may be corrected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T14:29:58.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3062" CreationDate="2017-08-19T15:08:26.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found a few possible interpretations of these lines, each of which &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; make sense in the wider context of the whole poem and the emotions and attitudes behind it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background information&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After war broke out, Edward Thomas spent a long time agonising over whether he should join the armed forces or emigrate with his family to the relative safety of America. Eventually, in July 1915, he joined the army (where he was later killed). This poem was written in December 1915, supposedly immediately after a heated argument with his father, who was more aggressively patriotic and demonised the Germans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see the emotions from that argument spilling over into the poem itself: Thomas clearly rejects the conventional patriotic instincts of hating Germans and &quot;grow[ing] hot / With love of Englishmen&quot;, which he sees as being a farce &quot;to please newspapers&quot;. Some have even interpreted the &quot;fat patriot&quot; line as referring to his own father. He is distancing himself from these zealous patriots, although by the end of the poem he has established his own, different, brand of patriotism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The choice between the cauldrons&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tricky one. One possible reading is that the decision is, as you guessed, between two more or less equivalent choices - that choosing between two equally attractive cauldrons is similar to choosing between two equally unattractive patriots from different countries. This is the interpretation espoused by &lt;a href=&quot;https://martyncrucefix.com/tag/this-is-no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martyn Crucefix's analysis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The irony is though that what emerges from these apparent alternatives (Thomas again using contrasting terms in this poem) is similar. The adjectives “clear and gay” and “beautiful” suggest that there is little to choose between these alternatives, echoing line 8 with its phrase “I have not to choose”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An entirely different reading is that the two cauldrons symbolise the two types of English patriotism which Thomas is contemplating: the one pure and unadulterated by propaganda, the other obsessed with the country itself and opposed to all other countries. This is the interpretation espoused by &lt;a href=&quot;http://mural.uv.es/sangis/edwardthomas.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sandra Gisbert Sánchez's analysis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He compares, in a metaphor of witches’ cauldrons, his feelings of patriotism and other patriot’s feelings. Outside one cauldron, there is his patriotism which goes beyond this hatred, so he loves the English countryside with a weather that “shall rise clear and gay”. On the other cauldron there are other traditional patriots like his father, who love England as newspapers write, also hating Germans because of the war conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, neither of these interpretations is enough to properly convince me, so I lay them both before you for consideration; take or leave each one as you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;England and her mother&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taken in the context of the rest of the poem, it seems this may be a reference to a sort of reincarnation, and that the &quot;mother&quot; is in fact just England herself, or an older version of the same country. Notice the reference to a &quot;phoenix&quot; a few lines later. If the phoenix is England, then symbolically the country is rising out of the ashes of its mother's pyre. This interpretation fits with the line that you're puzzled about, and is espoused by &lt;a href=&quot;https://committedchameleon.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/england-edward-thomas-the-war/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Despite his distaste for discussing it, Thomas hopes for an end to the war from which ‘an England beautiful and like her mother that died yesterday’ may rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/society/the-poets-of-the-first-world-war-edward-thomas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another reviewer&lt;/a&gt; has similar thoughts about this line, as well as interpreting Thomas as one so undecided that he has no interest in picking a side (which would fit with the first interpretation mentioned above of the lines about the cauldrons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For Thomas, England is still the mother of the land where he is from, and subsequently fights for, regardless of the careless politicians at the top, who he criticises heavily. England gives meaning to a wandering soul, lost in conflict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read several reviews and analyses of the poem before writing this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mural.uv.es/sangis/edwardthomas.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Thomas (This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://martyncrucefix.com/tag/this-is-no-case-of-petty-right-or-wrong/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Closely Analyse a Poem (and keep exam boards happy) #3 Edward Thomas’ ‘This is no case of petty right or wrong’&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://committedchameleon.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/england-edward-thomas-the-war/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;England, Edward Thomas &amp;amp; The War&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blueandgreentomorrow.com/society/the-poets-of-the-first-world-war-edward-thomas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The poets of the First World War: Edward Thomas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T15:08:26.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3315" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-19T21:55:29.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-19T21:55:29.057" LastActivityDate="2017-08-19T21:55:29.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3316" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-19T21:55:29.057" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;I Am a Cat&quot; (吾輩は猫である), a collection of episodes from the life of a cat in early 20th-century Japan, written by Natsume Sōseki. Use with the [natsume-soseki] and [japanese-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T15:40:18.063" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T15:40:18.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-19T22:22:53.570" Score="7" ViewCount="1338" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've got a &lt;em&gt;few&lt;/em&gt; hardcover books. I usually read paperback, but sometimes I'll find myself with a hardcover book.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Often, these will have jackets on them. Paper jackets that rip and get in the way and fall off when you try to move them. You can't even use them as proper bookmarks, they'll just slip out. (No, I love those covers, why do you ask?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any harm that it will do to the book itself if I remove the jacket and permanently keep it off? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:10:24.643" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T10:41:31.960" Title="Should I keep the jacket on a hardcover book?" Tags="&lt;book-collecting&gt;&lt;book-care&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3318" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about maintaining and caring for physical books. Example questions with this tag might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I avoid damaging my books when [...]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can I repair a book after [...]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to [...] a book safely?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I [...] my books?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3319" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" Score="0" Body="For questions about maintaining and caring for physical books, e.g. how to avoid damage to them and make them last longer." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:34:31.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3320" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions inspired by or specifically relevant to the hobby of collecting books. Example questions with this tag might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When purchasing a book, how can I ensure [...]?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Should I [...] in order to make my books last longer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that some but not all of these questions will also fall under the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/book-care&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;book-care&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;book-care&lt;/a&gt; tag, for questions about maintaining and caring for books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3321" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" Score="0" Body="For questions specifically related to the hobby of collecting books, e.g. how to ensure the physical quality and durability of a book." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T00:41:01.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2604" CreationDate="2017-08-20T01:37:26.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was able to find the book I was thinking of! It is “The McLandress Dimension” by John Kenneth Galbraith writing as Mark Epernay. The person who once recommended it referred to it in an email recently and it came back to me. My description had a few flaws, and I will try to give a good synopsis of the book here as well as refer to my previous descriptors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character of the book does occur in the title, however it isn’t the Mr. [Name] Etc. format I thought, but instead is “The McLandress Dimension”. My description of the clocks on the title was also a bit off – there is only one clock, and it is surrounded by charicatures of the authority figures I mentioned. One of the figures is using his arms to signal a certain time on the clock (as if the arms were the clocks hands as seen below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the bit about the story poking fun at certain authority figures, it does so but not for their incompetence. Instead a large focus of the story is on these people (whom were well known at the time of publishing in 1968) and their inability to focus on topics other than themselves for long periods of time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the article mentioned in the comment below I was able to find the following which does a good job explaining the main elements of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Mark Epernay's slim volume of essays is a paeon of praise to the imaginative and eccentric Herschel McLandress, former professor of Psychiatric Measurement at the Harvard Medical School, a genius fated, Mr. Epernay tells us, for a position of honor among the scientific and medical immortals. Not content to mend the tattered psyches of Harvard students and tired of serving as pathfinder to 'Cliffies trying to find themselves, Dr. McLandress devoted himself to applying statistical methods to the analysis of political and economic trends.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a copy of the book now, and it is 123 pages long with some illustrations throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U6TtV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U6TtV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dust Jacket of &amp;quot;The McLandress Dimension&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1550" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T12:57:22.870" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T12:57:22.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2897" CreationDate="2017-08-20T06:19:54.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read George Orwell's 1942 essay &lt;em&gt;Looking Back on the Spanish War&lt;/em&gt; (tip of the hat to @Randal'Thor), it's quite difficult to imagine that Orwell ever came to the conclusion that Spain would be better off under Franco. This is because:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orwell continually bashed Fascism, both in practice and principle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orwell repeatedly spoke well of the Socialist cause, even though he was very critical of Stalin's approach to the Spanish civil war.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Orwell specifically stated that the war was worth fighting even if it was a lost cause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Against Fascism&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell in his essay specifically calls out the evil of Fascism numerous times, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is little question that what one may roughly call the ‘whites’ commit far more and worse atrocities than the ‘reds’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Reds and Whites of course refer to the left (Communists) and the right (Fascists), respectively. Orwell goes on to describe those who support Fascism (emphasis added throughout):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When one thinks of all the people who support or have supported Fascism... they are all people with something to lose, or people who long for a hierarchical society and &lt;strong&gt;dread the prospect of a world of free and equal human beings.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He reiterates this in his description of what was at stake and who stood to benefit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, play-boys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell's disdain for the Fascists here is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Favoring Socialism&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a number of passages, Orwell speaks highly of the Socialist cause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in reference to his encounter with a rural Italian soldier fighting for the left:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I remember — oh, how vividly! — his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that &lt;strong&gt;there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right.&lt;/strong&gt; In spite of power politics and journalistic lying, the central issue of the war was the attempt of people like this to win the decent life which they knew to be their birthright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each passage, Orwell's clear support of Socialism is stated in the context of how its purpose is to provide the masses with a decent standard of living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Orwell supports Socialism in principle, he does not spare criticism for the confounding behavior of Russia, which worked to suppress a revolution in Spain while also doing little to support those fighting the Fascists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As to the Russians, their motives in the Spanish war are completely inscrutable... their actions are most easily explained if one assumes that they were acting on several contradictory motives. I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, Orwell's disdain for the left applies to its political strategies and not its desired ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In Support of the Lost Cause&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell states that evil must be fought and cannot be relied upon to collapse on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism, for instance, is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does? And what instance is there of a modern industrialized state collapsing unless conquered from the outside by military force?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that Orwell refers to Fascism simply as the noun &lt;em&gt;evil&lt;/em&gt;. It's hard to imagine him acquiescing to evil, even if the cost is death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, he makes the clearest recapitulation of his support for the leftist fight in Spain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whether it was right, as all left-wingers in other countries undoubtedly did, to encourage the Spaniards to go on fighting when they could not win is a question hard to answer. &lt;strong&gt;I myself think it was right&lt;/strong&gt;, because I believe that it is better even from the point of view of survival to fight and be conquered than to surrender without fighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is substantial evidence to think that by 1942 -- five years after escaping Spain -- Orwell had sufficient time to reflect on whether the leftist fight against Fascism was worth it. He knew that Fascism was evil, he felt that Socialism was not, and he knew that evil had to be confronted. He must have decided that the Spanish civil war was worth the fight for the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1806" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T06:19:54.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5113" CreationDate="2017-08-20T07:14:47.977" Score="14" ViewCount="634" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a book in the 90's, while I was a teen, but it is very likely it was published much earlier. I have been trying to find it on and off since. I do not remember character names. Sorry. Things I do remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book is of novel length&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Technology level is middle 20th century. No magic. No personal computers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Point of view character is a man.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book starts with the man going to huge property (with a house) of a millionaire, who is his friend. Millionaire became millionaire by  revolutionising steel industry, I think.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible that they are friends from after the war. I think WWII but I might be wrong.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While a driver or his friend is driving him to the house, the man sees a tractor ploughing the field. The tractor has no driver; it is tied with steel cable to a steel or iron boulder and is going by itself in ever shortening circle as the cable winds up. The millionaire explains that the tractor is one of his automation experiments; he wants to revolutionise agriculture the same way he did steel industry. That means circular field which can be worked on with automated tractors, with houses and storage on the edges of formerly square fields. That's the only sci fi part of the novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The millionaire has a beautiful wife. She loves him very much, but is something of a wild spirit, a force of nature. She likes to ride horses, she likes speed, is a good swimmer etc. Sort of like Teddy Roosevelt in female form, if that makes sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I remember a scene near the start of the novel. The man is introduced to wife, there is a pool party after a while and millionaire friend tells him that she can hold her breath for 20 minutes or something like that. There is a bet involved, I think. The wife dives in and does not dive out. The man sees that nobody at the party is worried so he realises it's a trick of sort. He dives in too, multiple times and she is nowhere to be found in the pool. So he dives in one last time and finds a hatch to secret underwater chamber where there is breathable air and she is inside. It might not have been pool, maybe some small (artificial) lake on the property.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They fall in love, the man and millionaire's wife. I am not certain if they ever slept together, but they were deeply in love. The man feels bad about messing with his friend's wife but the millionaire is not that much conflicted although it is very tricky situation. They are two people he loves most in the whole world, one as his best friend and one as his wife and lover. He is intelligent man, a genius if you will; he doesn't want to ruin friendship and marriage just because his best friend and his wife love each other. I think that he even jokes at one point, something like: &quot;I was worried you two won't get along. I shouldn't have worried, I guess.&quot; . Yet, it is a conflict that needs to be resolved.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Near the end of the book, some sort of accident happens. Either horse bucks and the wife falls or something like that. Anyway, the result is that her neck is broken and she is unconscious. I am not certain whether she wakes up to have a last talk with her husband and his friend. What I am certain of, is&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The family physician/ property doctor checks on her. Even if she wakes up or survives whatever happened to her, she will never walk again. The heartbreaking decision is made: the doctor will inject her with lethal dose of morphine and she will perish without pain, instead of suffering the rest of her life as para/quadriplegic, which would be worse than death for a free spirit like her. I am not certain whether she was awake to help them make that decision, but they do just that. I do not know whether it is doctor doing the injecting or her husband or her lover but she dies at the end of book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that one of character names might be Henry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Language is English and it is all happening in US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I remember. Any help is appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" OwnerDisplayName="jo1storm" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T11:56:21.713" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:26:17.007" Title="Identify a book, love triangle, death of a woman, no Personal Computers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-20T13:33:59.350" Score="5" ViewCount="683" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far as I understand(I might be wrong), the 5 or so people that form the committee that decides who should get the Nobel Prize for Literature are primarily Swedish Nationals. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/prize_awarder/committee.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a list of the current commuter members&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now given that the Nobel for Literature is an international prize that is given to people from many different cultures and languages, shouldn't the committee that decides who should get the prize rather be composed of many people from different cultures who speak different languages, so as to make the proceedings more fair? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2024" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:49:10.467" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:49:10.467" Title="Why is the Nobel Literature Prize committee primarily staffed by Swedish nationals?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;nobel-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3325" CreationDate="2017-08-20T17:33:57.737" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alfred Nobel's will states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Priset] [...] för litteratur [utdelas] af Akademien i Stockholm[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or, in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The award for Literature shall be awarded by the Academy in Stockholm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the awards are granted by academies based in Stockholm, except for the peace prize, which is awarded by a five-member committee chosen by the Parliament of Norway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Academy has then elected to organize the work in the following manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A large group of people, including Academy members, professors, and former winners, are able to suggest people for consideration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A four or five-member sub-committee, elected for three years, does the heavy lifting of registering, investigating and recommending winners. They can ask for expert opinions of outsiders, and ask for translations if not enough such are available. They reduce all the suggestions to a short-list of about twenty. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then the entire Academy discuss the list, and it is reduced further to five.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Over the summer, the members read such authors that they need to get further acquainted with.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early autumn, they vote on the winner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the nationality of the Academy, I have not been able to find the statutes, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.svd.se/andra-akademiens-stadgar-nu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; LTE makes it clear that only people of Swedish nationality are eligible (and thus not, e.g. Swedish-speaking Finns). They could, I guess, involve more non-members in the preparatory work, but I think it would be hard to wiggle away from the wording of the will, even if it is clearly the work of Nobel's own hand, not a lawyer. In the end, it is the Swedish Academy, and no other body, that is responsible for awarding the prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, remember that there was actually an uproar about the fact that the awards should be granted &quot;without regards to nationality&quot; when the contents of the will first became known. Even so, while the prizes have always been of a very substantial sum, it was in no way clear from the start that they would take on the significance they have today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nobelprize.org/alfred_nobel/will/testamente.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel's will&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.svenskaakademien.se/nobelpriset/hur-nobelpristagare-i-litteratur-utses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How the Swedish academy organizes the awarding of the prize.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2017-08-20T18:27:48.077" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T18:27:48.077" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2017-08-20T18:46:06.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You are black? [...] In my country everyone had white skin, so we had to use the shades. My hair were dark so I've been called black&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paraphrased quote above is from &amp;quot;American Gods&amp;quot;, but I believe it brings the essence of what people trying to say: in Polish, calling someone &amp;quot;black&amp;quot; might mean something different than in English: When on Google photos I've tried to search &amp;quot;czarna dziewczyna&amp;quot; (black girl) I came with this pictures on top:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hxnztm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Hxnztm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Female model with black skin tone and black hair.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pyQzVm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pyQzVm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Female model with white skin tone and black hair.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Polish they both would be described as &amp;quot;black&amp;quot; because of their hair colour rather than skin one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why the word &amp;quot;murzyn&amp;quot;,&amp;quot;murzynka&amp;quot; were not treated as racial slur but rather as a way to avoid confusion; even more, calling someone &amp;quot;black&amp;quot; to their face have might be taken offensively. Probably the most neutral way (and I believe most common today) would be saying &amp;quot;ciemnoskóry&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;czarnoskóry&amp;quot; - literally &amp;quot;dark&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;black skinned&amp;quot; - in example &lt;a href=&quot;http://film.interia.pl/galerie/zdjecie,iId,1808785,iAId,159194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you have gallery of &amp;quot;black skinned Oscar winners&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Czarnoskórzy zdobywcy Oskara&amp;quot;) one one of the gossip portals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bit more info about the word &amp;quot;murzyn&amp;quot; can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.afrykanistyka.uw.edu.pl/pliki/files/PDF/%C5%81azi%C5%84ski-Murzyn-2007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this whitepaper&lt;/a&gt; written by Marek Łaziński from the Warsaw University (translated by myself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s first follow the origins and changes of the word &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;czarny&amp;quot; and other substitutes in European languages: &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; comes from ancient, almost pre-Slavic &amp;quot;murin&amp;quot; or latin &amp;quot;maurus&amp;quot; meaning &amp;quot;black&amp;quot;, that was used in ancient Rome for denizens of north Africa. In other languages it has evolved into German &amp;quot;Mohr&amp;quot; or English &amp;quot;Moor&amp;quot;, Russian &amp;quot;mavr&amp;quot; and meant someone with skin darker than those of Greek or Italian origin, without differentiating between Arabs/Berbers or very dark skinned Africans from central and southern Africa. There was no need for the difference, since for the whole middle ages Europe was dealing mainly with Arabs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In XVI century in the English language the word &amp;quot;negro&amp;quot; (from Latin &amp;quot;niger&amp;quot; - &amp;quot;shining black&amp;quot;) arrives to describe people living south from &amp;quot;Moors&amp;quot;, but up to XVIII century those words are often used interchangeably [...].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Neither English &amp;quot;Moor&amp;quot;, German &amp;quot;Mohr&amp;quot; or Polish &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; had in the pre-colonial era negative connotations - while &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; for European was a stranger, it wasn't always a slave - often it was an enemy worth of respect both in combat and as a prisoner of war. The best example is Othello, &amp;quot;the noble Moor whom our full senate call all in all sufficient&amp;quot; [...] or Mulley Hassan from Schiller's &amp;quot;Fiesco&amp;quot;, prisoner from Tunis, who not finding any gratitude for his service says &amp;quot;The Moor has done his work, the Moor can go&amp;quot; [...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only during the exploitation of Africa and mass slave-trading time English &amp;quot;Negro&amp;quot; and German &amp;quot;Neger&amp;quot; completely replaced &amp;quot;Moor&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Mohr&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Negro&amp;quot; brings an image of a slave that has no rights whatsoever, treated as a working animal rather than prisoner of war. While Polish &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; also similarly has connotations with American slaves, it also brings back all history of dealing with dark-skinned people, not limited to the last few centuries of colonialism and industrial-grade slavery. So history gives the word &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; more chance for staying neutral than English &amp;quot;Negro&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, words &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Czarny&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Czarnoskóry&amp;quot; have almost the same connotation, although the latter one lacks the meaning &amp;quot;slave&amp;quot;* and it’s not used as a vulgar graduation of darkness, it is somehow more related to definitive racial slur &amp;quot;czarnuch&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither history of language or modern text connotations don't show any differences in the value of words &amp;quot;Czarny&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; &lt;sup&gt;** &lt;/sup&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;whats more the word &amp;quot;czarny&amp;quot; as a personal description is homonymic with someone with dark complexion, a dark haired man or woman.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marek Łaziński, &amp;quot;Murzyn zrobił swoje, czy Murzyn musi odejsć? Historia i przyszłość słowa 'Murzyn' w polszczyźnie&amp;quot;,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.afrykanistyka.uw.edu.pl/pliki/files/PDF/%C5%81azi%C5%84ski-Murzyn-2007.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.afrykanistyka.uw.edu.pl/pliki/files/PDF/%C5%81azi%C5%84ski-Murzyn-2007.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's again follow up the information from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/57/gilles-so-stop-being-evil&quot;&gt;@Giles&lt;/a&gt;' &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2703/understanding-the-use-of-the-word-negress-in-the-kilmartin-and-cox-translation/2798#2798&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, which provides that the original &amp;quot;Murzynka&amp;quot; has been translated into&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Une femme géante, &lt;strong&gt;de type négroïde&lt;/strong&gt;, s’avançait tranquillement, en se dandinant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French there is a word &amp;quot;négresse&amp;quot;, (as &amp;quot;female-negro&amp;quot;), but it hasn't been used here, instead we have the usage of forensic anthropological term &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/essay/anthropology/negroid-division-of-negroid-racial-group-african-oceanic-and-american-negro/41837/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Negroid&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in summary: the translation is simply incorrect and for English speaking reader it should be replaced by either &amp;quot;black woman&amp;quot; or (if we follow the French anthropological path) &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;negroidal&lt;/a&gt; woman&amp;quot;. In any case neither Lem nor the French translator were trying to provide any negative connotation to the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; * -&amp;quot;biały murzyn&amp;quot; would mean &amp;quot;white slave&amp;quot; for example &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt; ** although press avoids to use the word &amp;quot;Murzyn&amp;quot; when writing negatively about someone &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T16:47:02.427" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T16:47:02.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="477" CreationDate="2017-08-20T21:08:22.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floral_Games&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Floral games&lt;/a&gt; predate Nobel Prizes, prizes of the French Academy and even the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. They are given in a regular basis - one condition in the question the Poet Laureate doesn't meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In middle ages, they run in Tolouse from 1324 to 1484 and in Barcelona from 1393 to about 1500.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In 1694 the award was reborn in Tolouse, arriving to present with little interruption.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Barcelona Floral Games were revived in 1859, and arrived to present with some interruption and continuity formally assured in exile during Franco dictatorship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1769" LastActivityDate="2017-08-20T21:08:22.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3317" CreationDate="2017-08-21T04:00:46.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe dustjackets protect a book to a significant degree.  But I am in favour of keeping them with the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dustjackets are often prettier than the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flaps of a dustjacket can be used as bookmarks (unless the book is very big).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dustjacket can be removed while the book is being read and left on the bookshelf as a marker of where it goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/07/save-hardcover-book-dust-jacket/312822/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; from 2015 argues for keeping dustjackets on the books - for decoration, for keeping the actual book undamaged, and for the extra information printed on the inside flaps.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my favourite use of dustjackets (also mentioned at the end of the above article) is for disguising the book I am actually reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T04:00:46.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3092" CreationDate="2017-08-21T08:23:10.193" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My feeling was that it must have been pretty uncommon to have a cat as a &quot;pet&quot; - e.g. one that sits on the lap of their master. Especially that in this case the teacher was a well-known and respected member of the community. So I think that it must have spread as a rumour like &quot;how funny the teacher has a cat&quot; sort of way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="200" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T08:23:10.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T09:40:49.653" Score="1" ViewCount="2958" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just started reading Frankenstein. I really want to make sure that I understand everything I read, so I want to make sure of what these sentences mean. I already did google them, but didn't find anything - seems that I am the only person who didn't figure them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”And expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness, who did not enjoy this blessing.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not really sure what it means. Does he mean that some people boast about happiness even if they didn't have it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”If one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves—such a friend ought to be—do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He previously says that humans are half made-up and need another half to complete themselves, why does he then advise to not lend a friend's aid to improve one's self? I didn't get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”I spoke of my desire of finding a friend—of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that it means that he seeks a fellow man who has passion for science and knowledge to share sympathy with him, can (ever fallen to my lot) mean he did meet others before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2034" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T21:11:14.903" Title="Questions on the meaning of a passage about friendship in Frankenstein, Letter 4" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3335" CreationDate="2017-08-21T10:57:26.887" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The language of the time tended to be a little Yoda-like in its grammar, so you have to be patient with it. Also, all three of your lines run together to explain one thing: That Victor loved someone, and lost her, and now feels empty and alone without her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1. “And expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness, who did not enjoy this blessing.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A man [i.e., a person] who did not have this blessing couldn't boast about being happy, because if he didn't have this blessing, he could not possibly &lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt; happy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You need the rest of the sentence to clarify the next one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;2. “I agree with you,&quot; replied the stranger; &quot;we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves &amp;mdash; such a friend ought to be &amp;mdash; do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Friend&quot; here means &lt;em&gt;lover, beloved, spouse,&lt;/em&gt; not &quot;buddy.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This starts &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We, meaning people in general, are made as only half of a whole.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here this is a complicated hypothetical, so I'm going to put the sentence back in if-then order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You will remain only half a person if your other half isn't willing to improve your weaknesses and faults. Your other half is a person who you think is smarter and better than you, that person you love more than yourself, which is ideally how you should think of your other half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original, sans flourishes, runs &quot;we remain half-creatures if the one you love does not complete you.&quot; It's the &lt;em&gt;do not&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;does not&lt;/em&gt; which is really throwing you, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;3. “I spoke of my desire of finding a friend—of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I talked about how I wanted someone to love &amp;mdash; how I wanted a closer, deeper relationship with another person. I have never had such a close relationship so far in my life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/f/frankenstein/summary-and-analysis/letter-4/letter-4-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whole relevant passage,&lt;/a&gt; in order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tale was quickly told, but it awakened various trains of reflection. I spoke of my desire of finding a friend, of my thirst for a more intimate sympathy with a fellow mind than had ever fallen to my lot, and expressed my conviction that a man could boast of little happiness who did not enjoy this blessing.&quot;I agree with you,&quot; replied the stranger;&quot;we are unfashioned creatures, but half made up, if one wiser, better, dearer than ourselves — such a friend ought to be — do not lend his aid to perfectionate our weak and faulty natures. I once had a friend, the most noble of human creatures, and am entitled, therefore, to judge respecting friendship. You have hope, and the world before you, and have no cause for despair. But I — I have lost everything and cannot begin life anew.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T20:57:23.143" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T20:57:23.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3337" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:18:53.093" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Line&lt;/em&gt; (a one-act play by Israel Horovitz), the characters constantly jockey for position in a line. All of the characters seem to have a very different idea of what they're even waiting &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;, or why it's so important to be first in line. Why are they so determined to be first in line? What do they think that they're going to achieve? Also, do they ever figure out how different their conceptions of what they're even waiting for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, to what extent (if any) do the characters recognize the absurdity of their situation and behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T15:46:20.337" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T15:46:20.337" Title="Do the characters in Line (by Israel Horovitz) ever fully grasp the absurdity of their behavior and situation?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;israel-horovitz&gt;&lt;line&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3338" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3339" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" Score="0" Body="For questions about the one-act play by Israel Horovitz. Use with the [israel-horovitz] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T16:24:18.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3340" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3344" CreationDate="2017-08-21T16:27:06.633" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Setting aside the question of whether the award was appropriate/merited, why did the Swedish Academy award Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize? What is publicly known about how and why they made that decision?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:49:17.943" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:49:17.943" Title="How and why did the Swedish Academy decide to award Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;bob-dylan&gt;&lt;nobel-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T17:46:45.383" Score="6" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chap. 45 of the Decline and Fall, when Tiberius is made Augustus 4 years before the death of Justin II, Gibbon's marginal note reads &quot;Association of Tiberius, A.D. 574&quot;. As far as I've been able to determine, all editions use the word 'association', but I suspect it may be a misprint for 'accession'. Is this a misprint -- perhaps a misreading of Gibbon's MS -- or a technical (or rare) use of 'association'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2038" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T22:45:28.567" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T01:24:05.377" Title="Is Gibbon's use of &quot;association&quot; a misprint or unfamiliar sense of the word?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edward-gibbon&gt;&lt;decline-and-fall-of-roman-empire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:02:21.257" Score="6" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally got a round to checking out &lt;em&gt;Straight Outta Compton&lt;/em&gt; and it got me thinking seriously about metric feet in English poetry, and English poetry in general. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's long been my suspicion that one of the reasons rap is the dominant form of contemporary poetry is that it expands the form in meaningful ways, distinct in the modern lyric medium.  &lt;em&gt;(Here I use &quot;modern lyric&quot; as originating from &quot;light verse&quot; in jazz, which itself derives from the blues, and introduces the concept of syncopation, which transforms music.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't had a chance to break down extended passages from the lyrics utilized in the film, which features some highly sophisticated meter, but I'll use a single lyric line (also the title of the film) to try and demonstrate the supposition that led to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line is properly delivered as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;straight out of / &lt;strong&gt;Comp&lt;/strong&gt;ton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which can be broken down as a tribrach followed by a trochee. I've tried different ways of delivering this line, but I can't do it without long and short syllables, even when I try to deliver it as robotically as possible.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For those who don't think a &quot;robotic&quot; approach to music can't be “funky” or involve syncopation, I refer you to Devo classics such as &lt;em&gt;Working in a Coalmine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Satisfaction&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Through Being  Cool&lt;/em&gt;.  Mark Mothersbaugh reportedly forced their first drummer to play with only one hand because he didn't sound robotic &lt;em&gt;enough&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even when I deliver the line poorly, getting cataletic with a single syllable in the first foot, followed by a spondee and trochee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Straight&lt;/strong&gt; / out of / &lt;strong&gt;Comp&lt;/strong&gt;ton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't do it without using long and short syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way I can do it without long and short is by removing syncopation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Straight &lt;strong&gt;out&lt;/strong&gt; / of &lt;strong&gt;Comp&lt;/strong&gt;/ton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in this case using as iambs to establish the meter, and which brings me back to stressed/unstressed metrical feet.  Only problem is, in this context, the delivery is archaic and wildly incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T09:39:35.577" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T01:45:08.343" Title="Do rap lyrics require metrical feet in English with long and short syllables?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:03:08.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3047/why-wasnt-obrien-considered-a-thought-criminal&quot;&gt;Why wasn&amp;#39;t O&amp;#39;Brien considered a thought criminal?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible, but we don't have to assume that that's what he meant. By his own admission, O'Brien helped create the Goldstein myth in the first place and to have helped write &quot;Goldstein's&quot; book. He calls the ideas in the book largely true, but calls the program set forth in it to overthrow the Party &quot;nonsense.&quot; This seems to make it &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; unlikely that he was a dissident in the same way that Winston was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other people have pointed out how well-read O'Brien seems to be. This is perfectly true, but this is probably a product of being an Inner Party member. As an Inner Party member, he'd have to be aware of and &quot;in tune with&quot; the Party's true aims and philosophy. That being the case, what it means to be a loyal Inner Party member was very different than what it meant to be a loyal Outer Party member. For example, he shows a good deal of awareness of the Party's malice, but, far from making him disloyal to the Party, he wholeheartedly embraces it. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that he fully accepted and embraced that was actually evidence that he was &lt;em&gt;loyal&lt;/em&gt; to the party (not that he was &lt;em&gt;disloyal&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also shows a good deal of confidence in the Party's ability to literally alter history. He claims that the past exists only in people's memory and in written records, and that the Party controls both, so when they rewrite history it literally &lt;em&gt;becomes&lt;/em&gt; true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T20:26:28.970" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T20:26:28.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3340" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:25:44.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The records of the discussions of the Swedish Academy are kept secret for 50 years, meaning that as of the time I'm writing this, the last laureates for which we actually have any real insight into the discussion that took place prior to the awards are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelly_Sachs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nelly Sachs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Agnon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Josef Agnon&lt;/a&gt;, who shared the prize in 1966.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For later laureates, we basically have two sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The official reason given by the Academy, in this case &quot;for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What individual members of the academy, or other people with potential insight, have said. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found one interview with Academy member Anders Olsson in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dt.se/kultur/akademiledamot-anders-olsson-darfor-fick-bob-dylan-nobelpriset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dalarnas Tidningar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which at leasts shows that Olsson appears to be pleased with the choice. He, among other praise, mentions &quot;the musicality and depth of the poetry&quot;, and lauds Dylan for &quot;baffling intensity&quot; and &quot;natural and beautiful rhymes&quot;. Olsson is also a member of the Nobel Committee that does a lot of the preporatory work, so his answer should carry weight. Another member is Horace Engdahl, who in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.svd.se/man-maste-se-storheten-aven-i-det-som-alla-forstar#sida-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; interview gave his own reason: &quot;[Dylan's] poetry is thoughtful but never constructed.&quot; (I'm paraphrasing a bit here).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond sources such as these, unlikely to show displeasure with the choice, there is only speculation. All we can be sure of is that at least nine members of the Academy (there are nominally eighteen, one is not participating in the work, and a majority is necessary) thought this was a good enough choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-08-21T22:48:25.020" LastActivityDate="2017-08-21T22:48:25.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5955" CreationDate="2017-08-21T20:49:06.277" Score="5" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Friedrich_Nietzsche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche&lt;/a&gt; rather prominently includes the idea of the Übermensch (&quot;overman&quot; or &quot;superman&quot;), who were exempt from the ordinary rules of morality in some sense. Is this what the following passage from &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is referring to? Does Uncle Andrew consider himself an Übermensch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All in good time, my boy,&quot; said Uncle Andrew. &quot;They let old Mrs. Lefay out before she died and I was one of the very few people whom she would allow to see her in her last illness. She had got to dislike ordinary, ignorant people, you understand. I do myself. But she and I were interested in the same sort of things. It was only a few days before her death that she told me to go to an old bureau in her house and open a secret drawer and bring her a little box that I would find there. The moment I picked up that box I could tell by the pricking in my fingers that I held some great secret in my hands. She gave it to me and made me promise that as soon as she was dead I would burn it unopened, with certain ceremonies. That promise I did not keep.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Well then, it was jolly rotten of you,&quot; said Digory.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Rotten?” said Uncle Andrew with a puzzled look. “Oh, I see. You mean that little boys ought to keep their promises. Very true: most right and proper, I’m sure, and I’m very glad you have been taught to do it. &lt;strong&gt;But of course you must understand that rules of that sort, however excellent they may be for little boys—and servants—and women—and even people in general, can’t possibly be expected to apply to profound students and great thinkers and sages.&lt;/strong&gt; No, Digory. &lt;strong&gt;Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures.&lt;/strong&gt; Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T20:03:03.540" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T19:16:37.270" Title="Does Uncle Andrew consider himself an Übermensch in The Magician's Nephew?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3341" CreationDate="2017-08-21T22:00:23.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gibbon uses the word &lt;em&gt;association&lt;/em&gt; a lot, in many ways.  One sense he uses is listed in my OED as sense 6: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Law&lt;/em&gt;. The appointment of additional legal officials to act as colleagues on any occasion; the writ appointing them.&quot; (It lists citations from 1613 and 1809 books about the law.)  Gibbon seems to use it in this sense in chap 48 part I (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Constantine, his eldest son, enjoyed in a mature age the title of&#xA;  Augustus; but the weakness of his constitution required a colleague&#xA;  and a guardian, and he yielded with secret reluctance to the partition&#xA;  of the empire. The senate was summoned to the palace to ratify or&#xA;  attest the &lt;strong&gt;association&lt;/strong&gt; of Heracleonas, the son of Martina: the&#xA;  imposition of the diadem was consecrated by the prayer and blessing of&#xA;  the patriarch; the senators and patricians adored the majesty of the&#xA;  great emperor and the partners of his reign; and as soon as the doors&#xA;  were thrown open, they were hailed by the tumultuary but important&#xA;  voice of the soldiers. After an interval of five months, the pompous&#xA;  ceremonies which formed the essence of the Byzantine state were&#xA;  celebrated in the cathedral and the hippodrome; the concord of the&#xA;  royal brothers was affectedly displayed by the younger leaning on the&#xA;  arm of the elder; and the name of Martina was mingled in the reluctant&#xA;  or venal acclamations of the people. Heraclius survived this&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;association&lt;/strong&gt; about two years: his last testimony declared his two sons&#xA;  the equal heirs of the Eastern empire, and commanded them to honor his&#xA;  widow Martina as their mother and their sovereign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in chap 49 part V, about the successors of Charlemagne:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the &lt;strong&gt;association&lt;/strong&gt; of his son Lewis the Pious asserts the independent&#xA;  right of monarchy and conquest, and the emperor seems on this occasion&#xA;  to have foreseen and prevented the latent claims of the clergy. The&#xA;  royal youth was commanded to take the crown from the altar, and with&#xA;  his own hands to place it on his head, as a gift which he held from&#xA;  God, his father, and the nation. The same ceremony was repeated,&#xA;  though with less energy, in the subsequent &lt;strong&gt;associations&lt;/strong&gt; of Lothaire&#xA;  and Lewis the Second: the Carlovingian sceptre was transmitted from&#xA;  father to son in a lineal descent of four generations; and the&#xA;  ambition of the popes was reduced to the empty honor of crowning and&#xA;  anointing these hereditary princes, who were already invested with&#xA;  their power and dominions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems reasonable to me that he uses it this way in chapter 45, to mean the official appointment of Tiberius to Caesar-hood.  According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_II_Constantine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all-knowing and infallible Delphic Oracle&lt;/a&gt;, Tiberius was made Caesar in 574 and Augustus in 578, which bears out the marginal note under my proposed interpretation. (Thanks to Joshua Engel for pointing this out.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T01:24:05.377" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T01:24:05.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-21T23:32:11.937" Score="15" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel Prize website page&lt;/a&gt; on the nomination and selection of Literature Laureates, and didn't quite understand the list of people and organisations eligible to submit nominations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The right to submit proposals for the award of a Nobel Prize in Literature shall, by statute, be enjoyed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Previous Nobel Laureates in Literature;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the four items in this list, #3 is completely unambiguous, #2 is also pretty clear, and #1 is reasonably clear (although one might quibble about what precisely constitutes being &quot;similar&quot; to the Swedish Academy). The one I really don't get is #4.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean for a society of authors to be &quot;&lt;em&gt;representative of the literary production in their [country]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, for the purposes of the Nobel Prize nomination procedure?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:49:26.233" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T18:20:34.253" Title="Who can nominate candidates for a Nobel Prize in Literature?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;nobel-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1948" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:06:17.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age&lt;/em&gt;, by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor of Literature Alan Nadel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the authority for offices of command relies on null sets, perhaps the exemplary null set in the novel is Major Major Major Major. Even his name is an empty sign, signifying not authority but the name of authority, not power but its absence. His promotion to squadron commander was rendered as a tautology that emphasized its insignificance: &quot;'You're the new squadron commander,' Colonel Cathcart had shouted rudely across the railroad ditch to him. 'But don't think it means anything, because it doesn't. All it means is that you're the new squadron commander'&quot; (57). [...] Bearing a striking resemblance to Henry Fonda, Major Major even lacks his own physical identity and is recognized only as a reference point, an allusion to someone he is not and whose public identity, in turn, is an imaginary referent, coming as it does from roles written and directed by other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Philip D. Beidler, &quot;Mr. Roberts and American Remembering; or, Why Major Major Major Major Looks Like Henry Fonda&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of American Studies&lt;/em&gt; 1996, 30(1), pp. 47-64:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Major Major Major Major, the ultimate product of and operational cog in the Catch-22 machine. He is the definitive good Joe in a bad situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Jerry M. Lewis and Stanford W. Gregory, &quot;Extensions to the sociology of the inept&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Qualitative Sociology&lt;/em&gt; 1978, 1(1), pp. 58-78 (relating Catch-22 characters to William J. Goode's sociological definition of ineptitude):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The clearest portrayal of an inept role is the character of Major Major Major Major. [...] We see in Heller's depiction of M several dimensions of&#xA;  ineptness. First, he always followed the rules yet no one liked&#xA;  him or trusted him. [...] Second, there is a clear foreshadowing of the well-known &quot;Peter Principle&quot;: that one tends to rise in organizations to&#xA;  one's own level of incompetence. [...] A third dimension of M's ineptness is related to his physical appearance. He felt he must continually apologize for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda, for it was anathema to him being&#xA;  so closely identified with competence. After several of these&#xA;  &quot;embarrassing catastrophes&quot; M begins to take an active part in&#xA;  defining himself as inept. [...] Finally, Heller (1955:104) writes: &quot;In the midst of a few foreign acres teaming with more than two hundred people, he had succeeded in becoming a recluse.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the satirical depiction of M we can derive this general proposition: that over a period of time the inept become aware of their role, and when they accept it begin to actively contribute to its institutionalization. Thus, Heller in his depiction of M moves the analysis of the inept beyond Goode's model, because he allows the individual to have an active part in the&#xA;  definition of the inept role. In Goode's treatment the inept can do little but accept their fate. Heller, though, argues that when the inept, as personified by M, knowingly accept their roles, they begin to develop through interaction the range and definition of that role. Thus, we see M, after a combination of events, working &quot;creatively&quot; to develop his role as an inept&#xA;  officer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, a deliberate irony here I think: Henry Fonda was famous for his competence, Major Major's claim to fame is... his resemblance to Henry Fonda, which drew unflattering comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Long before he even suspected who Henry Fonda was, he found himself the subject of unflattering comparisons everywhere he went. Total strangers saw fit to deprecate him, with the result that he was stricken early with a guilty fear of people and an obsequious impulse to apologize to society for the fact that he was not Henry Fonda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other irony is that the sheer absurdity of the &quot;inverted&quot; system he found himself in. Major Major was notable for his mediocrity in spite of having apparently been at least a reasonably good student. He drew unfavorable comparisons to Henry Fonda because he looked like him (in spite of Henry Fonda's popularity and competence). He was reasonably well-liked and accepted by his peers when he joined the military until he was promoted to squadron commander, at which point people wanted nothing to do with him anymore. And, as Squadron commander, he kept getting forced to re-sign the same purely informational (or even contradictory) papers when he signed with his real name, and he stopped getting them back when he signed them with the fake name &quot;Washington Irving.&quot; He was also promoted to a Major in the first place by accident due to a computer glitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, people's reaction to his resemblance to Henry Fonda (as well as the irony of a mediocre character resembling a notably competent and &quot;good-looking&quot; individual) is all part of the absurdity of the situation he finds himself in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T16:59:56.260" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T16:59:56.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4784" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:15:26.230" Score="3" ViewCount="522" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Nurse Duckett informed Yossarian in &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt; that the Brass was planning to &quot;disappear&quot; Dunbar, Yossarian replied that &quot;It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?&quot; This strongly suggests that this use of the verb &quot;to disappear&quot; wasn't in popular use at the time that the book was written (or that, if it was, Joseph Heller wasn't aware of it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this the first use of the term, or did Catch-22 merely popularize it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T17:24:35.973" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:38:50.037" Title="Did Joseph Heller invent this particular use of the verb &quot;to disappear&quot; in Catch-22 or merely popularize it?" Tags="&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3352" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3354" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:19:55.143" Score="2" ViewCount="550" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt; contains the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There was only one catch&lt;/strong&gt; and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That's some catch, that Catch-22,&quot; he observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's the best there is,&quot; Doc Daneeka agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there was only one catch, why is it &quot;Catch-22&quot;? I had always thought that &quot;Catch-22&quot; was &quot;the catch after Catch 21 and the catch before Catch 23&quot;. Or was it that that particular policy (the one on when you could be grounded) only had one catch and that the other catches applied to other policies? Or that Catch-22 was the &quot;summation&quot; of all the other catches in some sense (because Catch-22 means that they have the right to do anything you don't have the power to stop them from doing)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T21:38:04.770" Title="Why Catch-22 if there was only one catch?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4760" CreationDate="2017-08-22T17:22:13.753" Score="2" ViewCount="1068" Body="&lt;p&gt;When he's in the hospital and is forced to censor letters, Yossarian signed his &quot;name&quot; as &quot;Washington Irving.&quot; Later in the book, Major Major does the same thing on official documents. What's the significance of this? Why Washington Irving?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T20:40:05.910" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T16:37:59.947" Title="Why did Yossarian sign letters with &quot;Washington Irving&quot;?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3352" CreationDate="2017-08-22T18:45:51.540" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;There is only one catch&quot; refers to that particular situation. The previous lines describe a character Orr, who should be grounded (prevented from flying). Which he's entitled to be, on the grounds that it would be crazy to continue flying. All he has to do is ask... but that would imply that he was sane, and thus sane enough to fly. &quot;Catch-22&quot; is the name of that particular catch, the self-defeating one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are presumably others: the book presents the Army as a complicated, rule-bound, infuriating place, full of many catches. But this one's a doozy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbering of &quot;catches&quot; hints at a bureaucracy. It implies that there are more of them out there, though we're never introduced to them. They may have numbers like 21 and 23... or not. The next one could well be 43,384. (Take a look at military unit numbers and see if you can find a pattern.) They could be lettered, or named, or even just completely undesignated. But they're certainly out there. Probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You almost certainly can't get a list of them... but the number hints that maybe you could, if you just knew how. If you knew how, of course, you wouldn't need the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-08-22T21:38:04.770" LastActivityDate="2017-08-22T21:38:04.770" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3220" CreationDate="2017-08-22T22:01:24.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I said in my comment above, Latin and English poetry are very different.  They both have multiple layers of depth and meaning, but in very different ways.  Firstly, meter in Latin is not based on stress but on long and short syllables.  This isn't even a thing in English, so a translation in meter is impossible.  Even translating it into an English meter is very hard, as well as stupid.  In addition, many poetic figures of speech in Latin are made possible by fluid word order, which is not available in English.  For example, while in English you could only say &quot;he had a large basket of apples,&quot; in Latin you could say &quot; large he had of apples basket.&quot;  This could emphasize not only the immense size of the basket (the space between large and basket) but also the fact that the apples are inside the basket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll give you a quick example by glossing the first couple lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arms and man I sing, of Troy who first from shores&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit / littora&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to Italy, by fate exiled, and Lavinian came shores&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this order would not work in English, but there are reasons (other than fitting into the meter) why Vergil chose that order.  For example, the Troiae in line 1 is usually translated as &quot;came from the shores &lt;em&gt;of Troy&lt;/em&gt;&quot; could, because of the word's placement between clauses, mean &quot;the man &lt;em&gt;of Troy&lt;/em&gt;&quot;—Aeneas.  The placement of venit (came) is also interesting and has some depth to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also differences in translation.  For example, Vergil uses two different words for &quot;shore:&quot; oris and littora.  There must be some significance to this other than the fact that he had to fit it in the meter; I'm not sure what it is but it's certainly there. This is just a little bit of what was lost—the depth of everything, every placement and choice of every word, which is totally lost in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T14:38:48.800" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T14:38:48.800" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-22T23:59:06.797" Score="12" ViewCount="682" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about Arabic poetry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and specifically the description of scansion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rhymed poetry falls within fifteen different meters collected and explained by al-Farahidi in &lt;em&gt;The Science of ‘Arud&lt;/em&gt;. Al-Akhfash, a student of al-Farahidi, later added one more meter to make them sixteen. The meters of the rhythmical poetry are known in Arabic as &quot;seas&quot; (&lt;em&gt;buḥūr&lt;/em&gt;). The measuring unit of seas is known as &quot;&lt;em&gt;taf‘īlah&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and every sea contains a certain number of taf'ilas which the poet has to observe in every verse (&lt;em&gt;bayt&lt;/em&gt;) of the poem. The measuring procedure of a poem is very rigorous. Sometimes adding or removing a consonant or a vowel can shift the &lt;em&gt;bayt&lt;/em&gt; from one meter to another. Also, in rhymed poetry, every &lt;em&gt;bayt&lt;/em&gt; has to end with the same rhyme (&lt;em&gt;qāfiyah&lt;/em&gt;) throughout the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confused me for a number of reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does it mean to have fifteen different meters? Meter in poetry is the overall rhythmic structure; are the fifteen different things actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;feet&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &quot;seas&quot; really just another word for meter, or is there some significant difference between the &quot;seas&quot; of Arabic poetry and the meter of western poetry?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since seas are made up of taf'ilahs, does that mean it's a &lt;em&gt;taf'ilah&lt;/em&gt; which is basically a foot?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked for a better description of this, but searching for &quot;seas arabic poetry&quot; just gave me a list of results which were essentially identical to the above-quoted Wikipedia page. Is there a better resource for learning about the scansion structure of Arabic poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the basics of how scansion works in Arabic poetry?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:07:14.017" Title="How does scansion work in Arabic poetry?" Tags="&lt;meter&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3357" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5138" CreationDate="2017-08-23T14:27:48.037" Score="1" ViewCount="1697" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3353/why-did-yossarian-sign-letters-with-washington-irving&quot;&gt;Why did Yossarian sign letters with &amp;quot;Washington Irving&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Major Major and Yossarian would routinely sign official documents and censorship documents with &quot;Washington Irving&quot; (I have another question on exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they do that). When that became too monotonous, they'd sign stuff with &quot;Irving Washington&quot; for awhile. Why didn't they simply select a completely different name? Why did they consider reversing the names less monotonous? Or is that part of the joke (the fact that it really wasn't all that different)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T16:41:15.757" Title="Why did Yossarian and Major Major consider &quot;Irving Washington&quot; less monotonous to sign?" Tags="&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4703" CreationDate="2017-08-23T14:30:51.060" Score="2" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;, Dunbar would routinely cultivate boredom in an effort to extend his life. Why did he consider that worthwhile? Why did he &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; a long but boring life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T23:18:14.597" Title="Why did Dunbar consider a life of intentional boredom worth living?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T17:18:56.157" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bureaucratic logic is one of the primary themes in &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;. To what extent is this inspired by &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt; by Franz Kafka? Both have the sense of being caught in the cogs of a remote, irrational, and soulless bureaucracy, but are there more concrete examples of the influence of &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T00:38:04.940" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T00:38:04.940" Title="To what extent was Catch-22 inspired by &quot;The Trial&quot;?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-trial&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3362" CreationDate="2017-08-23T17:21:14.227" Score="7" ViewCount="1782" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the novel, the main character's name is given only as &quot;Josef K.&quot; In fact, as I recall, several characters even actually refer to him as Josef K. Why isn't he given a last name? Is this symbolic of the soul-crushing influence of the bureaucracy that is, in some sense, stripping him of his identity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T17:31:27.457" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T15:51:52.227" Title="Why is Josef K.'s last name never revealed?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-trial&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3361" CreationDate="2017-08-23T17:58:52.590" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This answer is primarily based on Ignace Feuerlicht, &quot;Omissions and Contradictions in Kafka's Trial&quot;, &lt;em&gt;The German Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 1967, 40(3), pp. 339-350 - available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/402393?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you have Jstor access. All quotes below are from this article.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Josef K.'s last name is not the only, though perhaps it is the most prominent, piece of information which is carefully not stated in &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt;. The setting of the novel is also omitted, as are the names of several other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial#Characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;characters&lt;/a&gt;, and of course the nature of Josef K.'s crime. So it could be said that secretiveness and omission are themes in &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt; as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing now on the main question, there are a few possible interpretations. (Quotes below are all from the Feuerlicht article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Symbolising his emptiness and lifelessness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory seems convincing at first glance, but it doesn't hold much water when we compare Josef K. to other characters in the book with or without their surnames specified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The lack of his&#xA;  last name can be taken and has been taken as a sign and accusation&#xA;  of his emptiness, lifelessness, or of the anonymity and fragmentation&#xA;  of modern life, especially that of the middle class. But Rabensteiner&#xA;  or Miss Montag, for instance, are not more alive or greater individ-&#xA;  ualists than K., in spite of their full last names. Another &quot;accused&quot;&#xA;  man is actually the only one in the novel to have a first and a last&#xA;  name (Rudolf Block). K.'s antagonist, the assistant director, has&#xA;  no name at all; nor are the names of the director, the priest, or&#xA;  any high Court official, or the Court itself mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Indicating Kafka's contempt for him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some evidence for this theory in the words of Kafka himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In&#xA;  a diary entry of a day when he might have been working on the&#xA;  Trial (27 May, 1914), Kafka writes that he finds the &quot;K&quot; ugly,&#xA;  almost nauseating. &quot;And yet I write it down, it must be characteristic&#xA;  of me&quot; (T, 375).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; To be sure, the passage refers only to the letter&#xA;  &quot;K&quot; as written by Kafka, and not to any symbolic or philosophic&#xA;  meaning which it might have for Kafka or for his novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Denoting Franz Kafka himself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, the letter K is called &quot;ka&quot;, so Kafka sounds almost like K-fK. And the final letter of &quot;Josef&quot; gives us the F, so &quot;Josef K.&quot; almost rhymes with &quot;Kafka&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;K., to be sure, is in some respects akin&#xA;  to Kafka. He is employed by a large firm, is single, and has a decisive&#xA;  experience at the age of thirty (Kafka had a literary breakthrough&#xA;  when he wrote &quot;Das Urteil&quot; at about that age). But he is in many&#xA;  ways Kafka's opposite. Unlike Kafka, he does not suffer from a&#xA;  &quot;father complex&quot; or from an &quot;infinite&quot; guilt (H, 196), but is full&#xA;  of self-confidence. He does not seem to possess any creative abilities.&#xA;  He is a self-made man and quite satisfied with his job. While K. probably is of average height (he is shorter than Willem&#xA;  and taller than Block), Kafka was six foot tall. Unlike K., Kafka&#xA;  frequently suffered from insomnia and headaches, often was late&#xA;  for appointments, did not wear heavy clothing in winter, and did&#xA;  not drink any liquor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Denoting Franz Kafka's father Herrmann.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this other Kafka would be a better analogy for the role - the surname connection doesn't necessarily imply a representation of the author himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[L]ike&#xA;  K., Kafka's father was a self-made man, had an oratorical flair,&#xA;  looked down on people below his social rank, was of robust health,&#xA;  had frequent fits of anger, and was superficially religious. He, too,&#xA;  had an experience at the age of thirty that started a new chapter&#xA;  in his life: He opened a store in Prague. And, for the benefit of those&#xA;  who believe that &quot;the man from the country&quot; in the Türhüterlegende&#xA;  corresponds to K., Kafka's father was literally a man from the&#xA;  country. But in spite of the similarities and in spite of the initial&#xA;  &quot;K,&quot; Josef K. is neither a dehydrated Franz Kafka nor an emasculated&#xA;  Herrmann Kafka, but a literary figure in his own rights and with&#xA;  his own life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there you go. Four different theories for why Josef K.'s last name was never revealed, each with reasons both for and against believing it. Take your pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Cited to Franz Kafka, &lt;em&gt;Der Prozeß&lt;/em&gt;&#xA; (Berlin, 1951). H stands for &lt;em&gt;Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem&#xA; Lande&lt;/em&gt; (New York, 1953) and T for &lt;em&gt;Tagebucher&lt;/em&gt; (New York, 1948).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T14:45:05.597" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T14:45:05.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3609" CreationDate="2017-08-23T18:31:21.493" Score="5" ViewCount="716" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that Josef K. didn't know exactly who was even summoning him or on what basis they were doing so, why did he cooperate? What would've happened if he had simply refused to go along with the whole proceeding (like Hank Rearden did in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T23:02:35.160" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T01:30:06.117" Title="Why didn't Josef K. simply ignore the summons?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-trial&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-23T19:57:56.983" Score="5" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mark Twain's 1892 novel &lt;em&gt;The American Claimant&lt;/em&gt; was written very soon after the Wounded Knee Massacre (1890), which was basically revenge for the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass (&quot;Little Big Horn&quot;). This unprovoked and wanton slaughter was seemingly the final nail in the coffin of Indian resistance to Euro-American territorial incursion and cultural forced assimilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &quot;anti-Indian&quot; for the first decades of his life, it seems Twain at the end re-thought his position on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it be that the titled English heir in &lt;em&gt;The American Claimant&lt;/em&gt; (Berkely Rossmore, who even dressed up as a cowboy and took the name Howard Tracy to remain incognito) was meant to represent wealthy Euro-Americans, whereas the uncouth and eccentric American (Mulberry Sellers) was a symbol of the &quot;Indians&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the character Washington Hawkins, a confederate of Sellers', was from Cherokee Strip (land taken from the Cherokees in the &quot;Oklahoma Land Rush&quot; of 1889).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, to quote from the book where the Earl of Rossmore speaks of the rights of the American Claimant: &quot;&lt;em&gt;...morally the American tramp is rightful earl of Rossmore; legally he has no more right than his dog.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even L. Frank Baum (author of &lt;em&gt;The Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt;) admitted that the way the Indians were treated was wrong, although he still called for their utter destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;BTW, although I love &quot;&lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;Huck Finn&lt;/em&gt;&quot; as much as (and probably more than) the next guy, &lt;em&gt;The American Claimant&lt;/em&gt; may be my favorite novel from this, my favorite author. It is at least as topical as anything else he's written, too, and is replete with zombies, robots, mass-produced monstrosities, etc. etc. It could make a great movie. Are you listening, Hollywood? Netflix? Amazon?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-23T21:33:31.070" LastActivityDate="2017-08-23T21:33:31.070" Title="Is &quot;The American Claimant&quot; a veiled take on &quot;The Indian Question&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;politics&gt;&lt;the-american-claimant&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1144" CreationDate="2017-08-23T20:22:45.423" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.balashon.com/2007/10/open-sesame-and-sisma.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; gives a very interesting possible origin for the phrase &lt;em&gt;Open Sesame&lt;/em&gt;. It says that the Arabic word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D8%B3%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;simsim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in addition to meaning &lt;em&gt;sesame&lt;/em&gt;, is also a rare literary word for &lt;em&gt;gate&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the original French translation of &lt;em&gt;sésame, ouvre-toi&lt;/em&gt; would correspond in Arabic to either &lt;em&gt;gate, open thyself&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sesame, open thyself&lt;/em&gt;. Ali Baba's brother-in-law, not knowing the obscure other meaning of &lt;em&gt;simsim&lt;/em&gt;, takes it for &lt;em&gt;sesame, open thyself.&lt;/em&gt; And then he forgets which grain was the key word, sealing his doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the origin of &lt;em&gt;open sesame&lt;/em&gt;, it seems likely that Galland actually collected an obscure Arabic folk tale, which has now vanished from the Arabic literature and oral tradition. There's no reason to posit that he chose &lt;em&gt;sésame&lt;/em&gt; because it sounded like the Hebrew word for password.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that same blog post says that the blogger could find the Hebrew word &lt;em&gt;sisma&lt;/em&gt; (meaning &lt;em&gt;signal&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;password&lt;/em&gt;) only in one document before modern Hebrew, and that it's in fact a word borrowed from Greek: &lt;em&gt;syssemon&lt;/em&gt; (σύσσημον). This word appears in the Bible in Mark 14:44 – &lt;em&gt;Now the betrayer had arranged a signal with them: &amp;quot;The one I kiss is the man; arrest him and lead him away under guard.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was a very uncommon Hebrew word when Galland wrote or translated &lt;em&gt;Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves&lt;/em&gt;; it doesn't seem likely that Galland would have known it, and it is thus unlikely to have provided the inspiration for &lt;em&gt;open sesame&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T12:00:55.643" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T12:00:55.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3367" CreationDate="2017-08-23T23:29:30.110" Score="10" ViewCount="1050" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt; by Franz Kafka contains many deliberate omissions of information: for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3361/17&quot;&gt;main character's surname&lt;/a&gt; and the names of several other characters, the nature of his crime, and &lt;strong&gt;the location of the unspecified city and country in which the story takes place&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Countries mentioned in the text include Italy (the Italian &quot;business contact&quot; in chapter 9) and Germany (Miss Montag is described as German in chapter 4). There doesn't seem to much to go on, with very few explicit mentions of real-world countries. Is it possible to identify the setting of this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T20:46:35.713" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T20:46:35.713" Title="Where is Kafka's &quot;The Trial&quot; set?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-trial&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3366" CreationDate="2017-08-24T00:01:43.710" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This answer is primarily based on Ignace Feuerlicht, &quot;Omissions and Contradictions in Kafka's Trial&quot;, &lt;em&gt;The German Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 1967, 40(3), pp. 339-350 - available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/402393?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you have Jstor access. All quotes below are from this article unless otherwise stated.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the OP, there is little explicit information in the text indicating a precise location. However, there are various hints which we can piece together using close reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, let's note something which may &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; to be relevant evidence but actually isn't, and which is only apparent from the original German text rather than translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Words, such as &lt;em&gt;Elektrische&lt;/em&gt; (47), &lt;em&gt;bloßfüßig&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;   (48, 173), &lt;em&gt;Verkühlung&lt;/em&gt; (223, 238), and the use of &lt;em&gt;sein&lt;/em&gt; in the perfect&#xA;   of &lt;em&gt;stehen&lt;/em&gt; (90, 224) and &lt;em&gt;sitzen&lt;/em&gt; (160) point to Southern Germany&#xA;   and Austria, but are indicative of Kafka's rather than K.'s country&#xA;   of origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the OP, we know that the setting isn't Italy or (more importantly) Germany. But so far this is all negative evidence. What positive indications do we have about where it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; rather than where it &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General cultural indications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;K. lives in a country which is at peace and where law and&#xA;  order prevail (12).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The phrase &lt;em&gt;mit keinem Heller bezahlen&lt;/em&gt; (138) and the&#xA;  fact that Captain Lanz greets Miss Montag by bowing to her and&#xA;  respectfully kissing her hand (100) suggest more strongly the old&#xA;  Austro-Hungarian Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's start to get more specific. The following piece of evidence cuts down the possibilities a LOT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;K. [...] lives and works in a &quot;capital&quot; (112)&#xA;  where German is spoken, judging from the first names and family&#xA;  names (Elsa, Karl, Leni, Hasterer, Biirstner, Rabensteiner) and&#xA;  from the name of the one and only street mentioned (JuliusstraBe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many or most of the inhabitants of that capital are Catholics since&#xA;  the Cathedral is Catholic. This excludes Bern, the Protestant capital&#xA;  of Switzerland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, most specifically of all, here's a quote from chapter 10 of &lt;em&gt;The Trial&lt;/em&gt; itself (using the David Wyllie translation freely available &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kafka/franz/trial/chapter10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The moonlight glittered and quivered in the water, which divided itself around a small island covered in a densely-piled mass of foliage and trees and bushes. Beneath them, now invisible, there were gravel paths with comfortable benches where K. had stretched himself out on many summer’s days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An island on a river with a park excludes Vienna, Linz, Graz, Salzburg, Klagenfurt, and Innsbruck, but it could fit &lt;strong&gt;Prague&lt;/strong&gt; - namely &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.prague.eu/en/object/places/480/kampa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kampa Park&lt;/a&gt; on an island in the river Vltava.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prague also fits the other clues mentioned above: it was the &lt;strong&gt;capital&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Bohemia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kingdom of Bohemia&lt;/a&gt; within the &lt;strong&gt;Austro-Hungarian empire&lt;/strong&gt;, a predominantly &lt;strong&gt;Catholic&lt;/strong&gt; region where &lt;strong&gt;German&lt;/strong&gt; was an official language. It also happens to be the city where Kafka was born and lived for most of his life, so it makes sense for him to use it as a setting for his book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People, very familiar with Prague, recognize&#xA;   indeed certain sections of the city, the Kampa Island, the Charles&#xA;   Bridge, and especially the Cathedral Square and the Cathedral with&#xA;   its silver statue of a saint.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Prague theory is also supported by Heinz Politzer's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Franz_Kafka.html?id=GNlEAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Together, the&#xA;   German Rabensteiner, the Czech Kullich, and the Jew Kaminer&#xA;   represent the three nationalities of Prague, which is also the city of K.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR: it's set in Prague.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Page numbers are from Franz Kafka, &lt;em&gt;Der Prozeß&lt;/em&gt;&#xA; (Berlin, 1951). H stands for &lt;em&gt;Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem&#xA; Lande&lt;/em&gt; (New York, 1953) and T for &lt;em&gt;Tagebucher&lt;/em&gt; (New York, 1948).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Cited to Pavel Eisner, &quot;Franz Kafkas Prozess und Prag&quot;, &lt;em&gt;German Life and Letters&lt;/em&gt; 1961, 14: pp. 16–25 (in German; &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0483.1961.tb00045.x/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T00:01:43.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3369" CreationDate="2017-08-24T01:21:52.923" Score="-2" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDNzQ3CXspU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a youtube link&lt;/a&gt; the song in question &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_and_Destroy_(The_Stooges_song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Search and Destroy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, released by the Stooges on the album &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_Power&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raw Power&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web tells me the line is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I always thought the line was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm a streetwalking &lt;em&gt;cheater&lt;/em&gt; with a &lt;em&gt;hat&lt;/em&gt; full of napalm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(On the track, he seems to pronounce it as &quot;hat&quot; requires a Boston accent if it's actually &quot;heart&quot;—Iggy is from Michigan;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q: Do the lyrics posted on the internet come from a textual source, such as liner notes, or is it possible inaccuracies have been introduced and codified by the internet?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=search%20and%20destroy%20stooges%20lyrics&amp;amp;oq=search%20and%20destroy%20stooges%20lyrics&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60j0l3.7655j0j7&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Search and Destroy Lyrics as posted on the internet&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T21:32:15.987" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T21:32:15.987" Title="&quot;Hat full of napalm&quot; or &quot;Heart full of napalm&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3368" CreationDate="2017-08-24T01:41:16.257" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &quot;I'm a streetwalking cheetah&quot;, and &quot;heart full of napalm&quot;, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=UbHeAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT174&amp;amp;lpg=PT174&amp;amp;dq=I%20used%20to%20walk%20around%20London,%20through%20the%20park%20and%20stuff,%20with%20this%20leopard%20jacket%20I%20had,%20a%20cheetah-skin%20jacket%20actually-%20it%20had%20a%20big%20cheetah%20on%20the%20back-and%20all%20the%20old%20men%20in%20London%20would%20drive%20by%20in%20their%20cars%20and%20they%E2%80%99d%20stop%20and%20try%20to%20cruise%20me.%20All%20I%20liked%20to%20do%20was%20walk%20around%20the%20streets%20with%20a%20heart%20full%20of%20napalm.%20I%20always%20thought%20Heart%20Full%20of%20Soul%20was%20a%20good%20song%20so%20I%20thought,%20What%E2%80%99s%20my%20heart%20full%20of?%20I%20decided%20it%20was%20basically%20full%20of%20napalm.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=XgBYdJ-FSj&amp;amp;sig=O6Auwlr2ryxqQKXRgEUPV4pKTnc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiBlc3b3e7VAhVL6IMKHRnwAaQQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=I%20used%20to%20walk%20around%20London%2C%20through%20the%20park%20and%20stuff%2C%20with%20this%20leopard%20jacket%20I%20had%2C%20a%20cheetah-skin%20jacket%20actually-%20it%20had%20a%20big%20cheetah%20on%20the%20back-and%20all%20the%20old%20men%20in%20London%20would%20drive%20by%20in%20their%20cars%20and%20they%E2%80%99d%20stop%20and%20try%20to%20cruise%20me.%20All%20I%20liked%20to%20do%20was%20walk%20around%20the%20streets%20with%20a%20heart%20full%20of%20napalm.%20I%20always%20thought%20Heart%20Full%20of%20Soul%20was%20a%20good%20song%20so%20I%20thought%2C%20What%E2%80%99s%20my%20heart%20full%20of%3F%20I%20decided%20it%20was%20basically%20full%20of%20napalm.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; with Iggy Pop from &lt;em&gt;Please Kill Me: The Uncensored History of Punk&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iggy Pop says: &quot;I used to walk around London, through the park and stuff, with this leopard jacket I had, a cheetah-skin jacket actually- it had a big cheetah on the back-and all the old men in London would drive by in their cars and they’d stop and try to cruise me.&#xA;All I liked to do was walk around the streets with a heart full of napalm. I always thought Heart Full of Soul was a good song so I thought, What’s my heart full of?&#xA;I decided it was basically full of napalm.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Internet is correct in their listing of the lyrics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T01:41:16.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3370" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3371" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" Score="0" Body="For questions about Franz Kafka's novel &quot;The Trial&quot; (original title &quot;Der Process&quot; in German). Use this tag together with the [franz-kafka] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T12:38:40.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8328" CreationDate="2017-08-24T21:14:13.123" Score="1" ViewCount="436" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;em&gt;Exit&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;The Joshua Tree&lt;/em&gt; by U2) repeatedly refers to &quot;the hands of love.&quot; The full lyrics are below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know he got the cure&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But then he went astray&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He used to stay awake&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To drive the dreams he had away.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;He wanted to believe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the hands of love.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His head it felt heavy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As he came across the land&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A dog started cryin'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like a broken-hearted man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At the howling wind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At the howling wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He went deeper into black&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Deeper into white.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He could see the stars shine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like nails in the night.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He felt the healing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Healing, healing, &lt;strong&gt;healing hands of love&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like the stars shiny, shiny from above.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hand in the pocket&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fingering the steel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The pistol weighed heavy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And his heart he could feel was beating&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Beating, beating, beating,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh my love, oh my love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh my love, oh my love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So hands that build&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Can also pull down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hands of love.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the &quot;hands of love&quot; and why does the character in the song want to believe in them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T21:25:44.830" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T11:49:15.933" Title="What are the &quot;hands of love&quot; in Exit?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;u2&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3373" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-24T21:17:47.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T21:17:47.363" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T21:17:47.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3374" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-24T21:17:47.363" Score="0" Body="The Joshua Tree is an album by U2. Questions should focus on the literary aspects of the album such as its lyrics, not merely about the album as popular music. Use with the [u2] and [song-lyrics] tags." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T22:48:59.730" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T22:48:59.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3375" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-24T21:21:42.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T21:21:42.653" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T21:21:42.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3376" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-24T21:21:42.653" Score="0" Body="For questions about the popular Irish rock group U2 (and its members) as they relate to literature, specifically their songs. Use this tag together with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-24T22:48:16.437" LastActivityDate="2017-08-24T22:48:16.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3377" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-25T02:14:43.117" Score="2" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whenever I read a book, I create an image of how the character would look like, from the author's description, in my mind. And this image mostly would be different from person to person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I have watched the show or movie before reading the book, I tend to have the picture ready-made. So, even after reading the author's description of the character, the image from the show is the one which mostly lingers in the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a very common phenomenon/experience for most of the readers. So, I was curious whether there is a name for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="185" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T12:02:00.393" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T12:02:00.393" Title="What is this phenomenon called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;adaptation-comparison&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2017-08-25T03:02:44.017" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you are describing can be somewhat related to the Wish Away psychological drama, where however a murder triangle exists. First Nandini Basu kills Siddharth and then Netaji kills Nandini Basu. So there is a sequence: first a young boy gets killed by a middle-aged woman, then this middle-aged woman gets killed by an old man. However, no PC was used in this drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2053" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T06:25:45.687" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T06:25:45.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3433" CreationDate="2017-08-25T03:45:04.093" Score="6" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book in the 80s or 90s that I had &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; was &quot;The Talisman&quot;.  I've just finished reading &quot;The Talisman&quot; and found that it wasn't the book I had read back then, though there are many similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some of the elements of the story that I'm trying to identify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main character was a young boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The boy was dealing with two worlds/realities and I think flipped back and forth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The boy had to make a trek across a fair distance of America on his quest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were creatures from either the alternate world or beyond that were working for the bad guy and trying to find the boy in our world (&quot;The Talisman&quot; doesn't really have anything like this)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The creatures were some kind of black goblins/demons, and camouflaged themselves as scraps of tire rubber on the sides of roads (This always stuck with me and is the major component that I remember that was missing from &quot;The Talisman&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I had thought that the author was a Horror author doing a Modern Fantasy book, but maybe that was just because I had it mixed up with &quot;The Talisman&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've enjoyed reading &quot;The Talisman&quot;, but I'd really like to reread whatever book it is that I'm remembering, since I've plainly forgotten a lot about it despite having really enjoyed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2054" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:59:01.173" Title="What book has monsters that disguise themselves as black tire chunks on the sides of roads?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2017-08-25T11:44:28.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is that it's simply the onomatopoeia being used for the sound of his laugh. While the usual Spanish &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-linguistic_onomatopoeias#Laughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;onomatopoeia for laughter&lt;/a&gt; is a &quot;j&quot; sound, &quot;jajaja, jejeje, jijiji, jojojo, jujuju&quot;, there are some languages such as Korean that use a &quot;k&quot; sound to depict it, with &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/142171/is-kekeke-considered-an-english-word&quot;&gt;kekeke&lt;/a&gt;&quot; becoming a fairly well-known one from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kekeke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean StarCraft players&lt;/a&gt;. Outside of its normal cultural context of standard onomatopoeia, it's more likely descriptive of the actual sound of her grandfather's laughter, a breathless chuckle that one might associate with someone so amused they can barely draw breath to actually put voice to the laughter. Now, sick and old, he no longer has that voiceless mirth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally feel it's the least satisfying of the answers so far, since it's more descriptive than symbolic, but it's what came to mind with the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T11:44:28.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1766" CreationDate="2017-08-25T15:09:15.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unclear.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's certainly some evidence that characters' names in &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; were chosen carefully:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the names Vida and Vivian both refer to life&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;, and these characters (Romen's grandmother and Junior's mother) are in some sense the people who gave life to Romen and Junior;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roman's surname Gibbons could be a reference to the classical historian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Gibbon&lt;/a&gt;, most famous as the author of &lt;em&gt;The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire&lt;/em&gt;, which could clue that the book is a rewriting/reinvention of classical tragedies and molestation stories&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Junior's surname Vivian(e) was one she gave herself after her mother, and naming herself is an indication of her strong and independent nature&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the unusual name &quot;Heed the Night&quot; hints at the sexuality so prevalent in the novel&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and that leaves Romen and Junior. The names certainly &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; very similar to Romeo and Juliet, and if Morrison was as careful in choosing names as it seems she was, then surely this can't have been an accident. It must be the first thing many people think of when seeing the names &quot;Romen and Junior&quot; paired together, and Morrison must have realised that at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are also other possible interpretations of these names. &quot;Romen&quot; sounds a lot like Roman, perhaps hinting at the connection with classical literature&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt;; but it also sounds like Roaming, which could be hinting at his inability to stay in his 'place' in society, e.g. his refusal to be peer-pressured into taking part in gang rape&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; (perhaps like Romeo, gatecrashing a Capulet party?). &quot;Junior&quot; is an ironic name, both in the way she got it (after her mother's boyfriend Ethan Payne &lt;em&gt;Jr.&lt;/em&gt;, or at least plausibly so) and in the fact that she's actually &lt;em&gt;older&lt;/em&gt; than Romen. This is one place where we find contrast - and yet, somehow, similarity - with Romeo and Juliet: where Romen is 14 and Junior 19, Juliet is 13 and Romeo is usually taken to be older. (That makes Juliet the &quot;junior&quot; member ... significant?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case could be made that they're akin to Romeo and Juliet not in coming from warring families but in coming from very different places and being raised in different ways.&lt;sup&gt;[2]&lt;/sup&gt; Our introduction to Junior's place of origin is to tell us that it's very far from Romen's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Settlement is a planet away from One Monarch Street. [...] the only crime was departure. One such treason was undertaken by a girl with merged toes called Junior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;O Romen, Romen! Wherefore art thou Romen? Deny thy grandfather and refuse thy Gibbons - or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, and I’ll no longer be a Settlement girl.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Further reading and references:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[1] Karen F. Stein, &lt;em&gt;Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison&lt;/em&gt; (2009). Available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y3554BEVqIIC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; - see in particular the section &quot;Names and Naming&quot; on pp. 69-70.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[2] Pelagia Goulimari, &lt;em&gt;Toni Morrison&lt;/em&gt; (2011). Available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aiupAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; - see in particular the discussion of Romen and Junior (linking them to Romeo and Juliet) around p. 120.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assorted other online reviews and summaries which I've read while writing this answer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T00:15:32.110" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T00:15:32.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3384" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9018" CreationDate="2017-08-25T15:24:57.000" Score="8" ViewCount="8321" Body="&lt;p&gt;While answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3383/17&quot;&gt;a different question&lt;/a&gt;, I wanted to find out Romeo's age in the Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;. It's well known that Juliet is 13, and generally assumed that Romeo is older (hence the occasional modern-day accusation that he's a paedophile), but what's the actual evidence for the latter? I've looked up about this online and found various places saying essentially that we don't know Romeo's age, but I'd be interested to see all the textual (or extratextual) evidence regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, do we know about Romeo's age?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T20:37:04.100" Title="How old is Romeo?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3385" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3388" CreationDate="2017-08-25T16:20:44.993" Score="13" ViewCount="2055" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story of Cupid and Psyche, found in the &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; of Apuleius, Cupid, sent to wound Psyche with his arrows, falls in love with her himself, and flees.  Later, her parents consult the oracle of Apollo at Miletus to find out whom she will marry.  The oracle's reply is that Psyche should be dressed in funeral clothes and placed on a hill to be killed by a fiery winged serpent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let Psyche's corpse be clad in mourning weed &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And set on rock of yonder hill aloft :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her husband is no wight of human seed, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But serpent dire and fierce as may be thought,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who flies with wings above in starry skies &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And doth subdue each thing with fiery flight.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The gods themselves and powers that seem so  wise &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With mighty Jove be subject to his might;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rivers black and deadly floods of pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And darkness eke as thrall to him remain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is the Loeb Classical Library translation of 1922, book 4, verse 31.) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(Apuleius)/Liber_IV#31.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Original Latin&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand this prophecy either literally or allegorically.  She does not marry a fiery winged serpent. She marries Cupid, who is winged but not fiery. It seems like a metaphorical stretch to understand him as a serpent.  He does subdue each thing, but not with fiery flight.  While it is true that mighty Jove is subject to his might, I do not know what to make of the rivers black and the rest of that part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the clear implication of the funeral dress in the first line is that Psyche will be killed by the monster, and this is how Psyche's parents take it.  But she is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on here?  Presumably Apuleius’ point is not that the oracle blew it.  What does Apuleius mean us to understand about the prophecy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2056" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2017-08-25T19:53:04.043" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T19:27:26.870" Title="What is up with the oracle's prophecy in the story of Cupid and Psyche?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;apuleius&gt;&lt;the-golden-ass&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2017-08-25T18:18:23.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know much. About the only concrete data is that he's described as a &quot;youth&quot;. We also know that his parents and Juliet's parents are social peers, which implies that they're of roughly similar age, but leaves room for him to be considerably older without violating the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think his flightiness and moodiness makes an interpretation of &quot;mid to late teens&quot; most justified, but I think you could justify a pedophile interpretation if you thought it made an interesting performance. I suspect that it would not, but I suppose it would be up to a director to try it and find out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a more interesting question in the age of Paris, who is often portrayed as considerably older and a figure of disgust, but that isn't a requirement of the text. It is also possible to portray him as only slightly older and a sympathetic figure, one whom Juliet might have made a tolerable match were she not overcome by what she imagines to be true love. Setting up Romeo as a much older man could have some interesting implications for his unjustified murder of Paris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy, I think, that Juliet is considerably younger than women were usually married in England at the time. Shakespeare's wife was in her late 20s, and that was &lt;a href=&quot;http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/family/marriage.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;much more the custom&lt;/a&gt;. Marrying Juliet off at 12 or 13 would not be impossible, but definitely unusual. Shakespeare often used foreign settings to gain some distance from everyday British customs. Romeo and Juliet are characters of exaggerated emotion, which fits well with the behavior of young teens, and less well with more mature characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T18:18:23.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2683" CreationDate="2017-08-25T18:19:54.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academic articles specifically about this book, in both English and German:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beate Petra Kory, &quot;Herta Müllers Sprachpantomime &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt; Ein Annäherungsversuch an die Zentralmetapher des Romans&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Temeswarer Beiträge zur Germanistik, Band 10&lt;/em&gt; (2013), pp. 59-67. German title translates to &quot;Herta Müller's language pantomime [?] &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;: an approach to the central metaphor of the novel&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://litere.uvt.ro/publicatii/TBG/pdf/TBG/tbg-10-2013.06121301.pdf#page=60&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Available here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pavlo Shopin, &quot;Unpacking the Suitcases: Autofiction and Metaphor in Herta Müller’s &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies&lt;/em&gt; (2014), 50(2), pp. 197-215. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/sem.50.2.197&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Available here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bettina Bannasch, &quot;Zero – A Gaping Mouth: The Discourse of the Camps in Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel between Literary Theory and Political Philosophy&quot;, chapter in &lt;em&gt;Other people's pain: narratives of trauma and the question of ethics&lt;/em&gt; (2011), edited by Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Olivia Spiridon, &quot;From Fact to Fiction: Herta Müller’s Atemschaukel&quot;, chapter 8 in &lt;em&gt;Herta Müller: Politics and Aesthetics&lt;/em&gt; (2013), edited by Bettina Brandt and Valentina Glajar.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christian Bergmann, &quot;Das Unsagbare sagen: Metapher, Symbol und Allegorie in Herta Müllers Roman Atemschaukel&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Muttersprache: Zeitschrift zur Pflege und Erforschung der deutschen Sprache&lt;/em&gt; (2011), 121(3), pp. 220-226. German title translates to &quot;Speak the unspeakable: metaphor, symbol, and allegory in Herta Müller’s novel Atemschaukel&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More general analysis that pays special attention to this novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Karin Bauer, &quot;Gender and the Sexual Politics of Exchange in Herta Müller’s Prose&quot;, chapter 10 in &lt;em&gt;Herta Müller&lt;/em&gt; (2013), edited by Brigid Haines and Lyn Marven.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gunther Martens &amp;amp; Benjamin Biebuyck, &quot;Channelling figurativity through narrative: The paranarrative in fiction and non-fiction&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Language and Literature&lt;/em&gt; (2013), 22(3), pp. 249-262. Contains a section entitled &quot;Paranarrative and metaphor &lt;em&gt;in praesentia&lt;/em&gt; in Herta Müller's &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Angel&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More articles specifically about this novel (in German), though I'm not sure how academic they are, can be found in the 10/2011 edition of &lt;em&gt;Gegenwartsliteratur: Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch (A German Studies Yearbook)&lt;/em&gt;, focusing on Herta Müller (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stauffenburg.de/asp/books.asp?id=1188&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hartmut Steinecke, &quot;Herta Müller: &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;. Ein Roman vom “Nullpunkt der Existenz”&quot;. German title translates to &quot;Herta Müller: &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Angel&lt;/em&gt;. A novel from the &quot;origin of existence&quot;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Michael Braun, &quot;Die Erfindung der Erinnerung: Herta Müllers &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. German title translates to &quot;The invention of memory: Herta Müller's &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Norbert Otto Eke, &quot;“Gelber Mais, keine Zeit”. Herta Müllers Nach-Schrift &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;. Roman&quot;. German title translates to &quot;&quot;Yellow corn, no time&quot;. Herta Müller's post-script novel [?] &lt;em&gt;Atemschaukel&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;How did I find all this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Using Google Scholar!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took a surprisingly short time to gather all the material presented here. The most time-consuming part was just to write up all of these references in a proper style and translate the German ones. Getting a list of them was pretty easy just from &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;q=%22the+hunger+angel%22&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;as_sdt=1%2C5&amp;amp;as_sdtp=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=Atemschaukel&amp;amp;btnG=&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I only started using Google Scholar recently, but it's an &lt;strong&gt;invaluable&lt;/strong&gt; tool for finding academic references in literature and other subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T18:22:34.830" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T18:22:34.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3388" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3385" CreationDate="2017-08-25T19:51:18.223" Score="16" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The text&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a translation in verse, so don't set too much store on the exact wording. Some of the words may have been chosen for rhythm and rhyme rather than for precise meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here's the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/apuleius4.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin original&lt;/a&gt; (or at least one of the preserved Latin texts, I don't know if we know what the exact original is):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Montis in excelsi scopulo, rex siste puellam&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ornatam mundo funerei thalami.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nec speres generum mortali stirpe creatum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sed saevum atque ferum vipereumque malum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  quod pinnis volitans super aethera cuncta fatigat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  flammaque et ferro singula debilitat,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  quod tremit ipse Iovis quo numina terrificantur,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  fluminaque horrescunt et Stygiae tenebrae.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An advantage with this classic is that multiple translations are often available for comparison. You have the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1666/1666-h/1666-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation by William Adlington&lt;/a&gt; in a modernized spelling. I didn't find another English translation online but I used two French translations (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99%C3%82ne_d%E2%80%99or_ou_les_M%C3%A9tamorphoses/IV&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nisard 1865&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_M%C3%A9tamorphoses_(Apul%C3%A9e)/Traduction_Bastien,_1787/Livre_IV&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bastien 1787&lt;/a&gt;) to write this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fire and iron&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid is not exactly described as a “fiery winged serpent”: his wings and the fiery aspect are mentioned separately. The fiery aspect is mentioned in the line “&lt;em&gt;flammaque et ferro singula debilitat&lt;/em&gt;”: he cripples (&lt;em&gt;debilitat&lt;/em&gt;) with fire (&lt;em&gt;flamma&lt;/em&gt;) and iron (&lt;em&gt;ferro&lt;/em&gt;). The word &lt;em&gt;ferro&lt;/em&gt; can mean any of many objects made of iron, most commonly the sword, but here I think it refers to arrow tips. Although today Cupid's best known &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid#Attributes_and_themes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;attribute&lt;/a&gt; is his arrows, the Romans also often had him carry a torch, as seen in the (modern) sculpture &lt;em&gt;Cupid and Hymen&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rennie_(sculptor_and_politician)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Rennie&lt;/a&gt;. The symbol of the lit flame standing for love that burns the heart was common in Roman culture, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_in_ancient_Rome#Wedding_ceremonies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some Roman wedding traditions involved a lit torch&lt;/a&gt;. This, by the way, is the origin of the English idiom “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/carry_a_torch_for&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;carry a torch&lt;/a&gt;”. So my understanding of this line is that “fire and iron” is a way to refer to Cupid's two attributes, the torch and the arrows, in a generic way that makes him not obviously identifiable, but rather evokes a terrible monster or warrior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar interpretation is given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=hZLoyxBWsboC&amp;amp;pg=PA159&amp;amp;lpg=PA159&amp;amp;dq=%22ferro+singula%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mXLw5gQ36f&amp;amp;sig=boW9MmhTSSWY0veGlEdWPyIoXNg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ferro%20singula%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas McCreight&lt;/a&gt; (“Psyche's Sisters as &lt;em&gt;Medicae&lt;/em&gt;? Allusions to Medecine in &lt;em&gt;Cupid and Psyche&lt;/em&gt;”, in &lt;em&gt;Lectiones Scrupulosae: Essays on the Text and Interpretation of Apuleius's Metamorphoses in Honour of Maaike Zimmerman&lt;/em&gt;, p.159). He points out that the dual use of flame and iron is used again later in the story (V:20) when Psyche carries a lamp and a dagger to kill her husband who she still believes to be a monster. McCreight further analyses fire and iron as medical symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the light of the fact that fire and iron is a recurring theme, it is a bit unfortunate that Adlington dropped the association here, as did Nisard. Bastien describes him as “waging war with flame and iron”, which is closer to the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Serpent&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The serpent aspect comes from the line “&lt;em&gt;sed saevum atque ferum vipereumque malum&lt;/em&gt;”. A word-for-word translation goes something like this: “but violent/wild/cruel/beastly (&lt;em&gt;saevum&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;ferum&lt;/em&gt;) and evil (&lt;em&gt;malum&lt;/em&gt;) like a viper (&lt;em&gt;vipereum&lt;/em&gt;)”. The Latin &lt;em&gt;vipera&lt;/em&gt; can mean either a snake in general or a viper in particular, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aalphabetic+letter%3DV%3Aentry+group%3D20%3Aentry%3Dvipereus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjective form&lt;/a&gt; used here is prone to being used in a metaphorical way, in particular to mean &lt;em&gt;poisonous&lt;/em&gt; (as in &lt;em&gt;viperea anima&lt;/em&gt;, quoted from Virgil, meaning “poisonous breath”). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viperidae&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;viper&lt;/a&gt; a poisonous snake, I think the most common one around the Mediterranean. Love is commonly described as having a poisoning effect because it muddles people's judgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rivers black and deadly floods of pain&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two lines describe the unnamed Cupid as “making Jupiter himself tremble” (“&lt;em&gt;tremit ipse Iovis&lt;/em&gt;”), “terrifying gods” (“&lt;em&gt;numina terrificantur&lt;/em&gt;”), and causing rivers (“&lt;em&gt;flumina&lt;/em&gt;”) and the dark hell (“&lt;em&gt;Stygiae tenebrae&lt;/em&gt;”) to become terrified (“&lt;em&gt;horrescunt&lt;/em&gt;”). I'm not sure what the last verse means literally. Etymologically, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aalphabetic+letter%3DS%3Aentry+group%3D72%3Aentry%3DStyx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stygiae&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; refers to the river &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Styx&lt;/a&gt;, which is the boundary between earth (where humans live) and Hell (the Underworld where the dead live), but it often refers metonymically to the Underworld, i.e. Hell. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stygian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English speakers have been using stygian to mean &quot;of or relating to the river Styx&quot; since the early 16th century. From there the meaning broadened to describe things that are as dark, dreary, and menacing as one might imagine Hades and the river Styx to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the association between “Stygian darkness” and the dreadriness of Hell in fact dates back from well before its adoption in English, as evidence by its &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=5g8-AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;lpg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=Stygius+emissa+tenebris&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=s2lbnFWJTG&amp;amp;sig=HxE_HDJSacChSRg3ZT8PEDHYdVA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Stygius%20emissa%20tenebris&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;use by Virgil&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Georgica&lt;/em&gt;, III:551). So I don't think that the river (&lt;em&gt;flumina&lt;/em&gt;) is Styx or is dark in any remarkable way, but rather the author insists that there is no barrier to Cupid's power. Love (or lust, this passage does not distinguish between the two) has affected &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jupiter&lt;/a&gt; and other gods many times in Roman mythology. One of the best known myths about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pluto&lt;/a&gt;, ruler of Hell, is his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone#Abduction_myth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;abduction of Persephone&lt;/a&gt;, so love has reached Hell itself. As for the river, I don't know if this alludes to a specific mythological tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nisard translates this passage by stating that the gods themselves have been affected by Cupid and Styx failed to defend Hell against him, without mentioning a river (not Jupiter nominally). Bastien states that Cupid is feared by “the master of the gods” and that he is feared by “sea, hell and heavens”. My take on this passage is that the important point is the universality of the fear of the unnamed monster, that he affects not only humans but even the most powerful and fearsome gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The funeral dress&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prophecies are always cryptic or incomplete, and often misleading. &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProphecyTwist&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prophecy Twist&lt;/a&gt; is by no means a recent trope. The oracle didn't get anything wrong, but his words have three possible interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The prophecy is definitely meant to make Psyche and her entourage believe that Psyche is supposed to be killed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But this point in the story, the reader knows that Venus has wished Psyche a fate worse than death: she is to fall in love with the worst possible person (IV:31: “&lt;em&gt;hominis extremi, quem (…) Fortuna damnavit (…)&lt;/em&gt;”: the most extreme human damned by fortune (…)). So for the reader, the prophecy ostensibly suggests that Psyche will fall in love with the monster that it describes rather than being killed by it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If we interpret the description of the monster symbolically rather than literally, it fits the embodiment of love.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2017-08-25T19:51:18.223" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3385" CreationDate="2017-08-26T02:53:00.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Let Psyche’s body be clad in mourning wed, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And set on rock of yonder hill aloft: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her husband is no being of human seed, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But serpent dire and fierce as might be thought. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who flies with wings above in starry skies, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And doth subdue each thing with fiery flight. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The gods themselves, and powers that seem so wise, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With mighty Jove, be subject to his might, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rivers black, and deadly floods of pain &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And darkness eke, as thrall to him remain.’ &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.pomona.edu/~cmc24747/sources/apuleius/apuleius.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adaptation of the William Adlington translation&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is a prophecy about Psyche's fate so much as a cryptic prophecy about her future husband, (but not so cryptic that the audience wouldn't get the reference.)  &lt;em&gt;The Golden Ass&lt;/em&gt; is a bawdy comedy, and comedies usually end in reconciliation, if not marriage.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Let Psyche’s body be clad in mourning wed&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be a reference to the fate of her sisters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And so [Psyche's sister] cast herself headlong from the mountain. But she fell into the valley neither alive nor dead, for all the members and parts of her body were torn amongst the rocks, whereby she was made prey to the birds and wild beasts, as she worthily deserved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neither was the vengeance of the other delayed, for Psyche, traveling in that country, happened to come to another city where her other sister lived. When she had declared all such things as she told to her other sister, she ran likewise to the rock and was slain in the same way. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pages.pomona.edu/~cmc24747/sources/apuleius/ga_5.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ibid. Book V.27&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line about mourning is followed by a reference to the rocky precipice from which the sisters leap.  Here marriage is conflated with death.  Psyche being led to a crag and exposed is reminiscent of a human sacrifice. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda_(mythology)#Mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andromeda&lt;/a&gt; leaps to mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There Ammon, the Unjust, had made decree &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Andromeda, the Innocent, should grieve &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  her mother's tongue. They bound her fettered arms &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  fast to the rock. When Perseus her beheld &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  as marble he would deem her, but the breeze &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  moved in her hair, and from her streaming eyes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the warm tears fell. Her beauty so amazed &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  his heart, unconscious captive of her charms, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that almost his swift wings forgot to wave. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://Andromeda,%20the%20Innocent,%20should%20grieve%20her%20mother&amp;#39;s%20tongue.%20They%20bound%20her%20fettered%20arms%20fast%20to%20the%20rock.%20When%20Perseus%20her%20beheld%20as%20marble%20he%20would%20deem%20her,%20but%20the%20breeze%20moved%20in%20her%20hair,%20and%20from%20her%20streaming%20eyes%20the%20warm%20tears%20fell.%20Her%20beauty%20so%20amazed%20his%20heart,%20unconscious%20captive%20of%20her%20charms,%20that%20almost%20his%20swift%20wings%20forgot%20to%20wave.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P. Ovidius Naso, Metamorphosis 4.669&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we have wings, we have a sacrificial bride, the breeze (Zephyr figures in the story of the sister's death, which involves being carried by the wind), and love at first sight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Apuleius is consciously referencing that passage of Ovid's, but Ovid's Metamorphosis is so influential, it's almost impossible not to.  Scholars seem to agree: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118876169.ch6/summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ovid in Apuleius' Metamorphoses&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/23041549?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Book-like self. Ovid and Apuleius&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3290439?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Comparison of Ovid and Apuleius as Story-Tellers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid even uses the term &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=cupidi&amp;amp;la=la&amp;amp;can=cupidi0&amp;amp;prior=se&amp;amp;d=Perseus:text:1999.02.0029:book=4:card=604&amp;amp;i=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cupidi&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ut stetit, “o” dixit “non istis digna catenis, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sed quibus inter se cupidi iunguntur amantes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0029%3Abook%3D4%3Acard%3D604&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ibid. 4.678&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated by Frank Justus Miller as: &quot;Then, when he alighted near the maiden, he said: &quot;Oh! those are not the chains you deserve to wear, but rather those that link fond lovers together.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We even have an aquatic monster to be slain by Perseus, and Ovid specifically references Apollo slaying the dragon Python in these passages.  Like Cupid, Apollo is famed for his archery, and is also associated with the fire of divine inspiration.  Love is commonly understood as a fire kindled in the heart, a different kind of divine inspiration. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*(The choice of viper, a much smaller serpent, may be a secondary reference to Cupid's &quot;poisoned&quot; arrows—arrows may be said to &quot;have wings&quot; in that they fly.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apuleius would seem to brilliantly invert the story of Andromeda in his prophecy, where the fearsome beast is now Love itself. The irony is that now it is the beast who is vanquished by the maiden.  In falling in love with Psyche, Cupid becomes her subject.  &lt;strong&gt;Love conquers all, but Psyche conquers Cupid.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It's also worth looking at another famous source on Eros/Cupid, which is Plato, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_(Plato)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Symposium&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#The_madness_of_love_.28249d.E2.80.93257b.29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phaedrus&lt;/a&gt;. There you'll find allegory for Eros and Psyche (body and soul), and reference to wings.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus_(dialogue)#Derrida_on_.27pharmakon.27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Derrida&lt;/a&gt; wrote about the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=farmakon&amp;amp;la=greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;φάρμακον&lt;/a&gt; (pharmakon) in relation to this subject—pharmakon can be medicine or poison, and shares a common root with the word for a sacrificial victim and poisoner. Death again comes up in relation to this topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The Platonic-Socratic position maintains that the love we generate for beauty on this earth can never be truly satisfied until we die&quot; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iep.utm.edu/love/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Philosophy of Love&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cupid has power over mighty Jove because even Jove is subject to the whims of his heart.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it goes deeper than that.  Aristotle weighs in on the subject of Eros, referencing Hesiod:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Hesiod says, “ First of all things was Chaos made, and then broad-bosomed Earth ... and Love, the foremost of immortal beings,” thus implying that there must be in the world some cause to move things and combine them. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0052%3Abook%3D1%3Asection%3D984b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle, Metaphysics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this conception, Eros/Cupid is the force behind all of creation, the &quot;desire&quot; that brings things together to generate the universe and everything in it. (I believe early conceptions of gravity were based on this idea of attraction.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without Eros, everything in the universe grinds to a halt, and thus, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx#Significance_of_the_River_Styx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even the river Styx, which has power over the Olympian gods&lt;/a&gt;, trembles before Eros' power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The prophecy is essentially saying that Psyche will be married to the most powerful entity in the universe, described as a fearsome beast to invite a false conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That this entity turns out to be Love is the twist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T19:27:26.870" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T19:27:26.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-26T05:21:36.690" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;My girlfriend is trying to find a story she once read (in 2004, when the book was not new). If anyone can help me earn a few relationship-points it would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is set some time near the end of the 1800s, probably in the USA. The main character is a 15-year-old female only child (possibly named Ophelia?) who has gone on a holiday to the beach with her parents (her family has at least some money, but may not have been particularly rich). The beach has (some) segregated bathing hours, since there is a scene where the girl is walking on the beach with her father during the men's bathing time (which gets questioned). While there, she has an affair with a doctor who is already married with children (who may be a family friend or otherwise known to her parents). The two are caught in the act (possibly by the man's child?), leading to the expected scandal. The doctor's marriage is effectively ended by this, although he may or may not actually get divorced immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the aftermath, it is discovered that the girl is pregnant. While giving birth she is given laudanum (or some form of drug) and when she comes round the baby boy has already been spirited away by her parents against her wishes. She is then sent away to boarding-school for a few years, but this is skimmed over briefly. Her relationship with her parents is effectively over, due to them stealing her baby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she leaves the school at around 18-19 she goes looking for her child, and finds him with a couple who are not native english speakers (possibly French or French-Canadian). She takes the issue to court, trying to get custody, and wins her case but chooses to leave the child with the foster parents when she sees that he is too young to understand what is happening and doesn't want to leave his home (the child hasn't been told that she is his mother). The doctor has resurfaced and is involved in the court case, since he had been the one to find the foster parents three years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story ends with the main character and the doctor reunited, one or both of the foster parents ill/dying, and the child clearly about to be returned to her (but the story ends before that happens).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2059" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T12:25:35.690" Title="Identify a historical romance/drama where a young woman has an affair while on a beach holiday" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5141" CreationDate="2017-08-26T19:11:08.157" Score="17" ViewCount="11337" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; in the chapter in which aunt Alexandra has come to stay with Jem &amp;amp; Scout at Maycomb county, she has a private chat with Atticus about Scout and Jem not knowing their heritage. After the chat Atticus comes to the kids' bedroom and delivers his lawyerly monologue about the need for Jem and Scout to remember they are Finches and behave accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This un-Atticus like behaviour unnerves the children and when Scout cries, he relents and tell them to forget what he just said. Atticus is visibly frustrated and while leaving makes the remark&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Get more like Cousin Joshua every day, don't I? Do you think I'll end up costing the family five hundred dollars?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of this Scout has the following thought&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know now what he was trying to do, but Atticus was only a man. It takes a woman to do that kind of work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &quot;work&quot; was Scout refering to? Is this in a negative connotation (eg work=fear obligation guilt) or something more positive (like making the children feel better)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2062" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-08-26T19:22:18.410" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T11:21:41.343" Title="What did Scout mean when she said &quot;It takes a woman to do that kind of work&quot;?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3392" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-26T21:29:22.650" Score="6" ViewCount="1031" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trinket&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; defines &lt;em&gt;Trinket&lt;/em&gt; like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1:  a small ornament (such as a jewel or ring)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2:  a small article of equipment&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  3:  a thing of little value&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does Effie Trinket's name - either her first or last - relate to how she is portrayed throughout the series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T20:45:12.273" Title="How does Effie Trinket's name relate to how she is portrayed throughout the series?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3392" CreationDate="2017-08-26T23:45:11.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to think of the word &lt;em&gt;trinket&lt;/em&gt; as suggesting not only small size and low value, but a small-minded owner, one who obsesses over possessions and ascribes them more value than they really have: the sort of person to whom the phrase &amp;quot;little things please little minds&amp;quot; is ideally suited. The term &lt;em&gt;trinket&lt;/em&gt; itself is slightly derogatory - it refers to a thing that's almost worthless, but presumably it has some worth to its owner - and therefore by extension suggests that the owner is superficial to care about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's compare that impression with how Effie is depicted in the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Here's the very first time we hear about her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly he falls into a Capitol accent as he mimics Effie Trinket, the maniacally upbeat woman who arrives once a year to read out the names at the leaping. &amp;quot;I almost forgot! Happy Hunger Games!&amp;quot; He plucks a few blackberries&#xA;from the bushes around us. &amp;quot;And may the odds — &amp;quot; [...] &amp;quot; — be ever in your favor!&amp;quot; I finish with equal verve. We have to joke about it because the alternative is to be scared out of your wits. Besides, the Capitol accent is so affected, almost anything sounds funny in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We haven't even met her yet, but already our impression of her is of a slightly ridiculous person, &amp;quot;maniacally upbeat&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;affected&amp;quot; with a voice that makes anything sound funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then the very first time we see her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effie Trinket, District 12's escort, fresh from the Capitol with her scary white grin, pinkish hair, and spring green suit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So she looks slightly ridiculous as well as sounding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And the very first time we hear her speak:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bright and bubbly as ever, Effie Trinket trots to the podium and gives her signature, &amp;quot;Happy Hunger Games! And may the odds be ever in your favor!&amp;quot; Her pink hair must be a wig because her curls have shifted slightly off-center since her encounter with Haymitch. She goes on a bit about what an honor it is to be here, although everyone knows she's just aching to get bumped up to a better district where they have proper victors, not drunks who molest you in front of the entire nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bright and bubbly&amp;quot;, despite the fact that two kids are about to be condemned to almost certain death, reinforces the impression of a superficial person. This is the first of many references to her hair problems, a superficial thing which still seems to matter more to her than the poverty of the people in front of her or the tragedy of the seemingly doomed tributes. She has no empathy; to her, District 12 is just somewhere she wants to escape from to a more cushy job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And after Katniss volunteers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, bravo!&amp;quot; gushes Effie Trinket. &amp;quot;That's the spirit of the Games!&amp;quot; She's pleased to finally have a district with a little action going on in it. &amp;quot;What's your name?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I swallow hard. &amp;quot;Katniss Everdeen,&amp;quot; I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I bet my buttons that was your sister. Don't want her to steal all the glory, do we? Come on, everybody! Let's give a big round of applause to our newest tribute!&amp;quot; trills Effie Trinket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't want her to steal all the glory&amp;quot;?! &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/villains/images/7/7a/Triple-facepalm-picard-812.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;FACEPALM&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Don't you just want to &lt;em&gt;slap&lt;/em&gt; some sense into the woman? That one phrase shows how utterly disconnected she is from the reality of the Games, from District 12, from the thoughts and lives of the people around her. Verbs like &amp;quot;gushes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;trills&amp;quot; emphasise the portrayal of her as a scatter-brained, superficial person who totally doesn't &lt;em&gt;get it&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't grasp the pathos of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More hair problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effie Trinket is trying to get the ball rolling again. &amp;quot;What an exciting day!&amp;quot; she warbles as she attempts to straighten her wig, which has listed severely to the right. &amp;quot;But more excitement to come! It's time to choose our boy tribute!&amp;quot; Clearly hoping to contain her tenuous hair situation, she plants one hand on her head as she crosses to the ball that contains the boys' names and grabs the first slip she encounters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Effie Trinket is disgruntled about the state her wig was in. &amp;quot;Your mentor has a lot to learn about presentation. A lot about televised behavior.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, she's disconnected from the horrendous reality of what's happening, and prefers to focus on the little unimportant things such as her hairstyle. Never mind that she's about to read out another name and condemn another person to death; never mind that Haymitch has drunk himself into oblivion purely as a coping mechanism to deal with mentoring kids to their deaths every year; what about her &lt;em&gt;hair&lt;/em&gt;, dammit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, here's perhaps the clearest demonstration of all of her obliviousness and lack of empathy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;At least, you two have decent manners,&amp;quot; says Effie as we're finishing the main course. &amp;quot;The pair last year ate everything with their hands like a couple of savages. It completely upset my digestion.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair last year were two kids from the Seam who'd never, not one day of their lives, had enough to eat. And when they did have food, table manners were surely the last thing on their minds. Peeta's a baker's son. My mother taught Prim and I to eat properly, so yes, I can handle a fork and knife. But I hate Effie Trinket's comment so much I make a point of eating the rest of my meal with my fingers. Then I wipe my hands on the tablecloth. This makes her purse her lips tightly together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I even need to comment on this passage; Katniss has said it all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there we go: a few chapters into the book, and we have a very clear impression of Effie &lt;em&gt;Trinket&lt;/em&gt; as someone &lt;strong&gt;superficial, self-obsessed, paying attention to small issues and ignoring the large&lt;/strong&gt;. Just the sort of person who might stereotypically be associated with gathering &lt;em&gt;trinkets&lt;/em&gt;. So yes, her name does indeed reflect her portrayal as a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the second book, she has a bit more character development, showing real emotion and care for Katniss and Peeta, but even then she fails to recognise the Games for what they are, and is mostly sad to lose the people who've brought fame to 'her' District and presumably increased her status in the Capitol milieu. In the third book, she appears only very briefly towards the end, mostly to give us and Katniss a chance to snort at the ridiculous irony of &amp;quot;Effie Trinket, rebel&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;In the &lt;strong&gt;films&lt;/strong&gt;, she's much more developed, playing an active role in &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; and becoming a three-dimensional and empathetic character. This is one of the films' more major departures from the books, but it's one I can support, since it's a well-portrayed character development and gives Elizabeth Banks a chance to shine. (I very rarely praise films' departures from book canon, so this says a lot about my appreciation of the HG films.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-26T23:45:11.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5369" CreationDate="2017-08-26T23:59:27.810" Score="8" ViewCount="2387" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Hardy's &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;, the character Liza-Lu (Tess's sister) plays a very minor background role throughout most of the novel, until near the very end when Tess says she wants Angel to marry her after she, Tess, is gone. Angel and Liza-Lu are seen together in the very final scene, although it's left open whether or not he does end up marrying her after mourning Tess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was this twist added to the end?&lt;/strong&gt; What does it add to the story, mostly a tragedy of lust and love? I always found it weird that Tess would be matchmaking for Angel at that point, especially her own sister. Is it meant to convey the idea that there is always hope for new love, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-27T00:18:20.453" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T13:42:53.337" Title="What's the significance of Liza-Lu?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;tess-of-the-durbervilles&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3398" CreationDate="2017-08-27T00:58:11.123" Score="4" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the diverse characters introduced in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; during Caspian's tour of the Old Narnians are three bears known as the &quot;Bulgy Bears&quot;. What exactly does it mean for them to be &lt;em&gt;bulgy&lt;/em&gt;? It's not a word I've seen used very much, but presumably they bulge somehow - in what way do they bulge? What does this tell us about the characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T15:06:28.890" Title="Why are the bears bulgy?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3397" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-27T08:10:25.433" Score="2" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning:&lt;/strong&gt; spoilers follow for the Wheel of Time series, including the last few books!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Demandred recruited Mazrim Taim for the Shadow, but when exactly did this happen in Rand's timeline? In &lt;em&gt;The Dragon Reborn&lt;/em&gt; it is revealed that the runaway Black Ajah Aes Sedai have a plan to free Mazrim. So was he converted even before he met Rand? If yes, why did he come to help Rand at the Dumai's Wells? Was it to plant his own men with Rand? Did Dashiva (Osan'gar, Aginor previously) persuade Taim to help Rand so he can later become Rand's personal Asha'man, or was it Demandred who sent Taim to Dumai's Wells because he didn't want Rand to be captured by the Shaido? Or is it possible that Taim was still not on the Shadow's side and he was there just because he cared about Rand's protection for the Black Tower?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="357" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T18:11:25.983" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T18:11:25.983" Title="How does Mazrim Taim's timeline work out?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3395" CreationDate="2017-08-27T15:06:28.890" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you google &quot;algy met a bear&quot; you will get thousands of hits on the traditional &quot;Algy met a bear, the bear met Algy.  The bear was bulgy, the bulge was Algy&quot;.  If you look up pre-1940 &lt;em&gt;bulgy bear&lt;/em&gt; in Google books you get  hits, such as this one in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=vnAXAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA88&amp;amp;dq=bulgy+bear&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi3goSa1ffVAhVr8IMKHbZTBCIQ6AEIMDAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=bulgy%20bear&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Everybody's Magazine&lt;/a&gt; with some version of a bear meeting  Benjy, with predictable results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that our Narnian bears would do such a thing: I'm sure their bulge came from eating too much honey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From which I conclude: when &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; was written, &quot;Bulgy bear&quot; was a known thing, appropriated &amp;amp; repurposed by CSL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2017-08-27T15:06:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-27T22:19:40.707" Score="12" ViewCount="3950" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've noticed that a lot of my books contain a warning that if the book is missing a cover, it may be unauthorized. For example, the copyright page of my copy of George R R Martin's &lt;em&gt;Clash of Kings&lt;/em&gt; reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sale of this book without a front cover may be unauthorized. If this book is coverless, it may have been reported to the publisher as &quot;unsold or destroyed&quot; and neither the author nor the publisher may have received payment for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the purpose of this message? 95% of my books were purchased in the US, so it's possible that this might be a United States thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:10:44.880" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T06:15:03.083" Title="Why do some books warn that books with missing covers may be unauthorised?" Tags="&lt;book-collecting&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T08:12:25.373" Score="6" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stage directions for Mallatratt's &lt;em&gt;The Woman in Black&lt;/em&gt; indicate that the middle-aged man, &quot;whose name is Kipps, will not be referred to as 'Kipps' but as 'Actor'--even though he clearly isn't one,&quot; while the young man &quot;who is an actor, will not be referred to as 'Actor' but as 'Kipps.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be purely a script convention that is not present in the performance, meaning the only way the audience has to deal with it is through being confused by the programme; so far as I can tell it's just a way for the author to mess with the production team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What purpose does this confusing name convention serve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T08:12:25.373" Title="Why is the Actor Kipps, and Kipps the Actor?" Tags="&lt;stephen-mallatratt&gt;&lt;the-woman-in-black&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3399" CreationDate="2017-08-28T12:58:57.630" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paperbacks without covers are stripped books (hat tip user14111). &lt;em&gt;The Economics of the Publishing and Information Industries: The Search for Yield in a Disintermediated World&lt;/em&gt; has a pretty good explanation of why they exist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All books can be returned for a full refund as long as the basic (and publically announced) terms and conditions of sale are followed. Returns are a blight on book publishing since a book sold today can be returned tomorrow, which makes planning, especially in the short term, exceptionally difficult. Problems in estimating the proper market for a book, uncertainty in the marketplace, and inefficiencies in the channels of distribution contribute to this serious problem. A book can be returned for full credit (in essence, this is a consignment sale) to the publisher as long as clearly promulgated terms of sale conditions are followed. In some instances, a bookstore or distributor has up to two years to return a title. The entire hardbound book (including the dust jacket) is returned; however, a trade or mass market paperback is stripped of its cover and only the coer is returned. The remaining stripped book is supposed to be pulped, although some street merchants in many major cities obtain (almost certainly illegally) and sell stripped books, for a fraction of the suggested retail price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a pretty good argument that this practice is wasteful. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/shelftalker/?p=6089&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog posts in Publisher's Weekly&lt;/a&gt; makes the argument that if you aren't going to sell the book, then there's no reason why you can't give it away for free to someone living in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3166/does-the-little-free-library-program-actually-provide-access-to-books-to-low-i&quot;&gt;book desert&lt;/a&gt;. (Credit to Gallifreyan to linking to the tweet that linked to the Publisher's Weekly article).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Rand suggested in a comment, this answer might be a good place to explain how to use search engines to find reputable sources. In the comments, someone mentioned that &amp;quot;Sometimes you just get lucky with your search terms.&amp;quot; The thing about luck is that when you need it you don't have it. Relying on luck is not an effective research strategy. Let me describe my strategy for researching this question, which as you will see, relies not on luck but on persistence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find &lt;em&gt;Economics of the Publishing and Information Industries&lt;/em&gt;, I used two separate search engines: &lt;a href=&quot;http://google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholar.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt;. Google Scholar is a version of Google that only indexes academic resources (e.g. books or journal articles). Since academics tend to cite sources, academic sources are almost always, but not always, more reliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a comment/now deleted answer from user14111, I learned that the term for a book that is missing its cover is a &amp;quot;stripped book.&amp;quot; I started my research by Googling the term &amp;quot;stripped book,&amp;quot; but I did not get any results other than the Wikipedia article that user14111's now deleted answer cited. Since Wikipedia is not a reputable source, and since the Wikipedia article did not cite any sources for its definition of stripped books, I kept searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then tried using Google Scholar to search for the phrase &amp;quot;stripped books&amp;quot;. I did not find any results. I knew then that the keyword &amp;quot;stripped books&amp;quot; was too broad, and that I needed to narrow it down. Thinking that &amp;quot;stripped books&amp;quot; were a practice of the publishing industry, I tried &amp;quot;stripped books publishing&amp;quot; in a normal Google search. I still didn't get any results. I then reasoned that this was a question about the business practices of the publishing industry. I then added the keyword &amp;quot;economics&amp;quot; to make the query &amp;quot;stripped books publishing economics&amp;quot;. And I finally found &lt;em&gt;The Economics of the Publishing and Information Industries&lt;/em&gt;, which was the fourth result of my query. If I hadn't found it then, I would have kept trying different queries. I don't select queries at random, usually, my strategy for search keywords is to be as specific as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No luck is involved. It's just persistence and a little bit of skills and experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T06:15:03.083" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T06:15:03.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3397" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:07:10.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's what it says in &lt;em&gt;The Wheel of Time Companion:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While not a Darkfriend originally, he was always prime material for them, a man far more interested in wealth and power than anything else, willing to do whatever was required to get them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was being carried to Tar Valon when he was freed, supposedly by his supporters, but actually by Demandred...Demandred offered Taim a choice, and Taim accepted, going to Rand in Caemlyn with one of the seals on the Dark One's prison to make sure that Rand would trust him and take him in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Siuan finds out about this in TSR Chapter 17 and assumes that he escaped with the help of his followers, although it was really Demandred.  Before this point, he was not a Darkfriend--one of the only male channelers to not succumb to the madness who was not a Darkfriend.  After, he was with the shadow all the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="85" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T14:07:10.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3430" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:40:21.410" Score="5" ViewCount="754" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chaper 20 of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, after Lizzy refuses to marry Mr Collins, Mrs Bennet says of her: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There she comes... looking as unconcerned as may be, and caring no more for us than if we were &lt;strong&gt;at York&lt;/strong&gt;, provided she can have her own way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that York is a place in England, but it just seems to be a very strange thing for her to say. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is meant, in the context of the times, by being at York?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T17:24:02.503" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T04:53:32.440" Title="In Pride and Prejudice, what is meant by the phrase 'at York'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2212" CreationDate="2017-08-28T14:49:55.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In part, yes, the return of his gold does serve to make him realise how meaningless it is to him now. But there are two things that come of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It allows him to return to his old home town. And he realises that the church is gone. And that there is now no chance of him being acquitted of the theft. But that he doesn't mind. Compare &quot;There is no just God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears witness against the innocent!&quot; with &quot;I think I shall trust Him till I die&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Godfrey begins his preamble about adopting Eppie (before the reveal that he is her biological father) by claiming that he feels guilty because it was Dunsey, his brother, who committed the theft of the gold. And that he wants to make it up to Marner&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T16:06:58.407" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T16:06:58.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3407" CreationDate="2017-08-28T17:29:46.013" Score="3" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Boys of Summer&lt;/em&gt; by Don Henley contains the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out on the road today, I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A little voice inside my head said, &quot;Don't look back. You can never look back&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I thought I knew what love was&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What did I know?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Those days are gone forever&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I should just let them go but-&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;deadhead sticker on the Cadillac&quot; is obviously a piece of deliberate irony - owning a Cadillac is a symbol of upper-middle-class suburbia and &quot;deadhead&quot; is a symbol of youthful rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested, though, in the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A little voice inside my head said, &quot;Don't look back. You can never look back&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Don Henley implicitly categorizing himself (or, at least, the narrator of the song) as a &quot;Cadillac owner&quot; (minus the Deadhead sticker)? Is the narrator a former &quot;deadhead sticker&quot; type who became a &quot;Cadillac owner&quot; type, warning himself that he's no longer a &quot;deadhead&quot; type?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:58:50.963" Title="Is Don Henley equating himself with upper-middle-class suburbia in &quot;The Boys of Summer&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;don-henley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3406" CreationDate="2017-08-28T17:47:00.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song is comparing a failed relationship to the overall passage of time. The first verse describes an empty beach, as all of the beachgoers have left for the summer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Empty lake, empty streets,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sun goes down alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It then segues into describing the woman he cares for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm driving by your house&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Don't know you're not home.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I can see you,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obsessive behavior: he's no longer in her life (so he doesn't know her whereabouts), but he still knows where she lives. It's even creepier in the next verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, baby, I'm gonna get you back,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm gonna show you what I'm made of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knows, however, he can't have her, and should move on. That's the &quot;little voice inside [his] head&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key refrain is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can tell you my love for you will still be strong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After the boys of summer have gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The boys of summer&quot; are baseball players, but the other metaphors seem to refer more directly to the passage of summer itself (and taking the baseball players with it). He continues to love her. The line in isolation suggests devotion even after the fading of youth, but in context, the images point to a relationship that itself is over and he's having a hard time letting go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;deadhead sticker on the Cadillac&quot; is another of those supporting images. The owner was presumably a follower of the Dead in their youth, but is now driving an expensive car rather than a beat-up VW Microbus. They retain a little bit of their youthful exuberance after selling out... or perhaps it's mere pretension and a hanging on to a past that, like the boys of summer, have gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T19:58:50.963" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:58:50.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T18:43:31.790" Score="5" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, the minor character of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Cinna&lt;/strong&gt; the poet&quot; is brutally killed by an angry mob who mistake him for Cinna the &lt;strong&gt;conspirator&lt;/strong&gt;. When he protests, &quot;I am Cinna the poet&quot;, they respond, &quot;Tear him [to pieces] for his bad verses&quot; - his &lt;strong&gt;works of art&lt;/strong&gt;. (Disclaimer: I don't know how faithful this is to any surviving stories of the real Cinna.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the second novel of the &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; series, the supporting character &lt;strong&gt;Cinna&lt;/strong&gt; is brutally killed by a group of thugs. His death has been ordered because the dress he made for Katniss - a &lt;strong&gt;work of art&lt;/strong&gt; with hidden symbolism - is deemed to be a sign that he's part of a &lt;strong&gt;conspiracy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd always thought that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/16668/31394&quot;&gt;many of the characters have names used in Shakespeare's play[s]&lt;/a&gt;&quot; was a bit of a silly observation, since the obvious naming connection between many of the characters from District 2 and the Capitol is that they have &lt;em&gt;Roman&lt;/em&gt;-sounding names, not specifically Shakespearian ones. But after noticing this maybe-too-much-for-coincidence Cinna connection, I began to wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many of the Roman-named Hunger Games characters have similar character arcs to their namesakes,&lt;/strong&gt; either Shakespearian or real-life ancient Roman? (&quot;Character arcs&quot; could cover their deaths, their roles in the story, or anything else about them.) Is there enough evidence to say that the name choices were more than just a way of giving a general ancient-Rome vibe to Panem, or have I just stumbled upon a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T19:03:46.167" LastActivityDate="2017-08-29T19:03:46.167" Title="What parallels can be drawn between Hunger Games characters and their classical namesakes?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3410" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:02:07.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T19:02:07.653" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:02:07.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3411" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:02:07.653" Score="0" Body="For questions about the popular American rock group Eagles (and its members) as they relate to literature, specifically their songs. Use this tag together with [song-lyrics]. Consider tagging the individual member's name (rather than the band) for questions related to a specific member's solo work." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T19:42:35.543" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:42:35.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3412" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:04:03.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-08-28T19:04:03.057" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:04:03.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3413" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:04:03.057" Score="0" Body="Questions about the solo works of Don Henley (born 1947). Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]. For questions related to the Eagles, consider using the [eagles] tag instead." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:23:54.780" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:23:54.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3414" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3577" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:11:26.243" Score="2" ViewCount="1640" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the Cocteau Twins are known for their mumbled lyrics (to the point that there's sometimes debate about exactly what's being sung), the song &lt;em&gt;Heaven or Las Vegas&lt;/em&gt; (from the album of the same name) clearly and repeatedly contrasts Las Vegas with heaven (&quot;But is it Heaven or Las Vegas?&quot; --- &quot;Is it Heaven or Las Vegas?&quot; --- etc.). Why are these seen as somehow contrasting? Is there any significance to picking Las Vegas in particular for this contrast (or is it just the fact that the name happened to fit, like Winslow, AZ was in &lt;em&gt;Take it Easy&lt;/em&gt; by The Eagles)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T20:21:05.147" Title="Why are &quot;Heaven&quot; and &quot;Las Vegas&quot; contrasted in &quot;Heaven or Las Vegas&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;cocteau-twins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-28T19:18:01.987" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=38561369#38561369&quot;&gt;chat&lt;/a&gt;, @BESW taught me that there is a certain way that Kokopelli - a Native American god - must be depicted. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249593.Kokopelli_s_Flute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kokopelli's Flute&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Kokopelli is shown as both an old man named Cricket and an actual cricket. Is the way the way he is depicted in line with the respect that is required when depicting Kokopelli?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-08-28T19:18:01.987" Title="Does &quot;Kokopelli's Flute&quot; correctly depict Kokopelli?" Tags="&lt;kokopellis-flute&gt;&lt;will-hobbs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3418" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T00:04:14.417" Score="1" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read all of ASoIaF, and even though he gets limited time on the page, people love to speculate about young Griff, aka Aegon Targaryen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Apart from the fact that most people had assumed him dead, what is the evidence of the idea that he might be a Blackfyre?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="85" LastEditDate="2017-08-29T00:21:20.440" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T00:03:24.043" Title="What is the evidence supporting the idea that Aegon (young Griff) is a Blackfyre?" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T08:12:56.870" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Sandman - Overture&lt;/em&gt; #5 we learn that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Dream is a son of Night and Time, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two entities who were not seen before (in the original run). If there was any doubt that Night and Time are the parents of all the Endless, &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/164722453431/who-was-despairs-predecessor-i-always-assumed-it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this post by Neil Gaiman&lt;/a&gt; lifts them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it makes one wonder - why &lt;em&gt;Night&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Time&lt;/em&gt;? Of all possible entities (or of all possible names), why those two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time is described as &quot;watch[ing them] from the micro-moments between seconds&quot;, while Night is described as &quot;exist[ing] in the vast stretches of untime and unspace beyond every event horizon&quot;. What can we learn about the Endless from their parentage? What symbolism, if any, does it carry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part about Time is particularly interesting; Time and Night would have to represent some fundamental forces or events, given they're the parents of such fundamental things as the Endless. However, time was described as non-essential or &quot;bendy&quot;, in some regions of space, and especially in Dream's realm, in soft places. It wasn't treated as very important, so it seems a bit odd that the entity who fathered Dream is Time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="1226" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T16:00:11.660" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T16:00:11.660" Title="Why Night and Time?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3659" CreationDate="2017-08-29T11:05:13.127" Score="6" ViewCount="2614" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that I did not understand about Animal Farm is why the animals, after the hen's rebellion, simply came forward to confess their crimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Napoleon offers no incentive for coming forward. He does not threaten anything against animals that have committed a crime and do not confess, nor does he offer any inclination that he even knows who has committed any crime, other than obviously understanding that there must have been ringleaders in the hen's uprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, having seen other animals executed by the dogs for committing crimes, animals continue to come forward and admit that they broke the law, and are summarily executed in front of the rest of the congregated animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly the rebellion leaders coming forward first seemed particularly strange, as they must have known their punishment would be severe. They were already questioning the authority of Napoleon, so to suddenly submit to him would surely be in their worst interests?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also no hint that these were false confessions manufactured by the pigs in order to establish a firm hand against dissenters, mostly because I can't see how anyone would be encouraged to confess falsely if they had just witnessed that their punishment would be death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the hens who did spearhead the rebellion were not the ones who confessed and were executed, then I can't imagine that the pigs would quash the rebellion effectively, it would simply strengthen the resolve of the hens who started the first rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did this somehow reflect a real event that happened in Russia? And if it did, was it accurately represented in terms of people confessing their own crimes and being punished after witnessing the punishments of others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="376" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T20:50:25.380" Title="Why did the animals in Animal Farm confess to their crimes?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-29T19:04:37.963" Score="2" ViewCount="887" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chaucer's &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, we're told that the Reeve always rides at the end of the procession of pilgrims going to Canterbury:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And evere he rood the hyndreste of oure route.&#xA;  (line 622; &lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/CT/1:1.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text is available online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T13:39:08.787" Title="Why does the Reeve ride at the end of the procession?" Tags="&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-08-30T01:02:53.370" Score="3" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Koran, the most important sacred text of Islam, was originally written in Arabic, and some Muslims argue that it should only be read in Arabic, as translating it to other languages would mar the sacredness of the text. However, the Arabic language itself has surely evolved in the time since the Koran was written, probably enough that the idea of &quot;translation&quot; from the original Arabic to modern Arabic would make sense, and I'm unsure whether such a translation would be considered to preserve the holiness, if the language is essentially the same but the words are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are new editions of the Koran published in Arabic as it's spoken today, or are they fully faithful to the original form of Arabic in which it was first written?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T01:02:53.370" Title="Are modern editions of the Koran still written in the original form of Arabic?" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;koran&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2512" CreationDate="2017-08-30T11:46:16.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of incompatibility due to social status certainly comes up &lt;em&gt;later&lt;/em&gt; in the story, in the context of the relationship between Polly Mooney and Bob Doran:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Doran's] family would look down on her. First of all there was her disreputable father and then her mother's boarding house was beginning to get a certain fame. He had a notion that he was being had. He could imagine his friends talking of the affair and laughing. She was a little vulgar; some times she said &quot;I seen&quot; and &quot;If I had've known.&quot; But what would grammar matter if he really loved her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the main doubt in Doran's mind about marrying Polly, other than a more general dread at the whole concept of marriage. So it does seem to be a potential issue for &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt;; however, the last sentence of the quoted passage above negates this to some extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we also need to consider Mrs Mooney, Polly's mother. Throughout the story she is portrayed as an extremely capable and intelligent woman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. [...] She governed the house cunningly and firmly, knew when to give credit, when to be stern and when to let things pass. All the resident young men spoke of her as The Madam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her way of dealing with the affair between Doran and her daughter is a Machiavellian masterpiece. The strong implication is that she deliberately allowed it to go on long enough that he would feel obligated to marry Polly. She was aware of it for a long time (long enough that even the other lodgers became aware!) before doing anything about it, and she chose her moment carefully. &lt;strong&gt;She shrewdly manipulated events so that she could get her daughter safely married off to Doran.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There had been no open complicity between mother and daughter, no open understanding but, though people in the house began to talk of the affair, still Mrs. Mooney did not intervene. Polly began to grow a little strange in her manner and the young man was evidently perturbed. At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs. Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. [...] She had been made awkward by her not wishing to receive the news in too cavalier a fashion or to seem to have connived and Polly had been made awkward not merely because allusions of that kind always made her awkward but also because she did not wish it to be thought that in her wise innocence she had divined the intention behind her mother's tolerance. [...] she thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, we can safely conclude that she would consider marriage to Doran to be a safe and healthy prospect for Polly. If she hadn't, she would've put a stop to their affair at an earlier stage, perhaps as soon as she was aware of it. It's a safe bet that if she's actively schemed to get her daughter married to this man, she doesn't consider them to be incompatible or an unhealthy match. Thus, &lt;strong&gt;for her, the difference in social status between them is not an issue.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; it follows that the reason for the failure of her own marriage wasn't, at least in her view, a difference in social status. If her marriage to Mr Mooney had taught her that such differences cause broken relationships, then she wouldn't now be trying to get her own daughter married to a man of a different class from herself. Thus the final conclusion is that &lt;strong&gt;Mr and Mrs Mooney's incompatibility was nothing to do with their difference in social status.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible gap in this logic would be if Mrs Mooney is wrong about her own marriage - if it &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; fail due to their class difference but she believes there was some other reason for it. But given the consistent portrayal of Mrs Mooney as a highly intelligent and competent woman, this seems unlikely.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: no, the Mooneys weren't incompatible just due to social status differences - because if they were, then Mrs Mooney wouldn't be manoeuvring her daughter into such a marriage.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T11:46:16.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3423" CreationDate="2017-08-30T12:14:33.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The yellow bile or &lt;em&gt;choler&lt;/em&gt; of this &amp;ldquo;sclendre colerik man&amp;rdquo; is at least partly expressed in suspicious wariness of others. In his position as Reeve (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reeve_(England)#cite_ref-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;estate manager&lt;/a&gt;), this has served both &amp;ldquo;his lorde&amp;rdquo; and himself well, preventing them from being cheated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ther nas baillif, ne hierde, nor oother hyne,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That he ne knew his sleighte and his covyne;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They were adrad of hym as of the deeth. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/CT/1:1.1?rgn=div2;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;603&amp;ndash;05&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he rides at the rear of the company because that is the best way to keep an eye on everyone else. There are some pretty shady and scurvy characters among the &lt;em&gt;route&lt;/em&gt; of his &lt;em&gt;nyne and twenty&lt;/em&gt; fellow-pilgrims, so to some extent this vigilance is warranted; but more importantly it is a characteristic of his temperament that he cannot well turn off even where it is inappropriate&amp;mdash;wherein, precisely, lies the essence of humor of character, according to a theory most famously put into practice by Ben Jonson, and best articulated by Henri Bergson in his essay &amp;ldquo;Le Rire&amp;rdquo; (&amp;ldquo;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/4352-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laughter&lt;/a&gt;&amp;rdquo;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastEditorUserId="1971" LastEditDate="2017-08-30T13:39:08.787" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T13:39:08.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3404" CreationDate="2017-08-30T18:40:19.107" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'At York' as you have rightly remarked is far away from the scene of action. But York is figuratively used to mean a distant place; It metonymically describes any place far off, particular for the general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lizzy doesn't care whosoever is around, she's oblivious of the surroundings and given to follow her own sweet will, all are removed from her reckoning to places as distant as York. Jane Austen chose York, she might as well choose any other place to suggest the character's detachment from the persons around her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T05:44:45.260" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T05:44:45.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3432" CreationDate="2017-08-30T20:59:59.827" Score="6" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a theater troupe visits Hamlet's castle, he makes some... rather pointed changes to their show, which now includes a murder much like the one his uncle performed. Why didn't anyone else (especially his uncle) figure out (or, at least suspect) such an obvious ploy? And why didn't anyone find Claudius's bizarre reaction to the addition suspicious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:37:47.203" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:53:48.593" Title="Why didn't Hamlet's modifications to the theater troupe's play &quot;tip off&quot; anyone else?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3431" CreationDate="2017-08-30T21:57:23.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well... who says they didn't? We see the play mostly from Hamlet's point of view. He has few allies, and deliberately pushes people away. For all we know, lots of other people were suspicious of the guy who started screaming when presented with a situation not unlike the circumstances of his rise to power. They just didn't do anything about it, at least not in Hamlet's field of view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, if they were plotting something, they'd hardly tell Hamlet, would they? He's been acting nuts lately. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much to be made of Gertrude's reaction. The play is ambiguous about her knowledge of the situation. I've seen it presented with everything from her being a complete patsy, to a woman making the best of a very precarious situation, to a co-conspirator in the murder. It will be hard for a live audience to look at her at the moment Claudius is yelling for the lights, but the actor should certainly be making choices at that instant about what she is learning. A film director, with better control over the audience's point of view, can help direct their attention to her choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for everybody else, there is one nice bit of text that helps guide how to play the rest of the court:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The king doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keeps wassail, and the swaggering up-spring reels;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The kettle-drum and trumpet thus bray out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The triumph of his pledge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it is a custom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More honour'd in the breach than the observance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This heavy-headed revel east and west&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Makes us traduced and tax'd of other nations:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They clepe us drunkards, and with swinish phrase&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Soil our addition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words... the king parties hard, and the rest of the court with him. So it would be an easy choice to make that nobody does really connect Claudius' outburst with a guilty conscience. They're all having a really good time, and maybe they think he's just drunk. Or perhaps simply don't care. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do all seem pretty out of it. Nobody cares that Hamlet was passed over for kingship. When Fortinbras comes in, there's nobody to tell him that they don't want a Norwegian (with a French name for some reason) to replace the Danish king (with a Roman name). The entire state of Denmark appears pretty rotten, not just the guy at the top. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-08-30T21:57:23.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3379" CreationDate="2017-08-30T22:23:34.223" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it turns out that the book I was thinking of was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Into the Out Of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Alan Dean Foster&lt;/strong&gt;.  The part about a kid being the main character was me mixing up &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Talisman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Into the Out Of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main character of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Talisman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a young boy (Jack), the main characters of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Into the Out Of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are an off-duty undercover FBI agent (Joshua) and a vacationing third-shift Eddie Bauer phone sales agent (Mary) as well as the Maasai elder (Olkeloki) who came to find them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack is dealing with two worlds (our technological world and &quot;The Territories&quot;, a world of magic) and flips back and forth between them. Joshua and Mary have to travel with Olkeloki to a weak spot between worlds (our world and the &quot;Out Of&quot;, the place everything in our world came out of and where mostly things too messed up to exist here seem to have stayed) to close it before monsters from the Out Of can flood  through and ravage the Earth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack is making a trek from New Hampshire to California to find the Talisman so that he can return to New Hampshire and use it to heal his mother of cancer.  Olkeloki travels from Tanzania to Washington DC to find two &quot;Ilmeet&quot; (non-Maasai people raised in modern culture. Outsiders.) that are needed to help close the weak spot.  He finds Joshua and Mary, and they travel back to Tanzania to complete their quest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack isn't actively hunted on his journey, but has to deal with enemies he meets on his path. Josua, Mary, and Olkeloki have to deal with the Shetani, creatures from the Out Of that can travel though shadows, disguise themselves as anything black (such as tire rubber on the roadside), and warp space (for instance turning an airplane bathroom into a space that could not fit inside the plane while trying to take Mary before the trio reached Africa)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2054" LastEditorUserId="2054" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T16:59:01.173" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T16:59:01.173" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6037" CreationDate="2017-08-31T00:36:25.620" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sci-fi/fantasy author Mary Gentle's first novel, &lt;em&gt;A Hawk in Silver&lt;/em&gt;, is set in the small town of 'Surcombe' on the south coast of England. Although Surcombe is fictional, the description of it is so precise, so detailed, so consistent in tiny minor details that don't matter to the story itself, that surely it must also be accurate, a thinly veiled description of a real town. For example, this from the first few pages, when Holly is lying on Highrock at the top of the East Hill (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KY-tKrE0lmUC&amp;amp;pg=PT4&amp;amp;lpg=PT4&amp;amp;dq=surcombe+old+town&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=ITHf9WY5xS&amp;amp;sig=cImIcGRWP7FM0kypO-Pq_Fvsx4Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwie_LrpmYDWAhXHCMAKHW6wCbYQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=surcombe%20old%20town&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on Google Books&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surcombe Old Town lay below, a maze of narrow streets. Houses with ancient red-tiled roofs, white-plastered walls and black beams, were interspersed with shops, pubs and churches. There were miniature cars, doll-people, and sudden inky shadows that resolved themselves into black cats sleeping on dusty pavements. The main road, scaled with cars, glittered and fumed like a summer dragon. She saw grey stone spires and - raising her eyes - the West Hill and the Castle bulking opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down on the beach were fishing-boats, drawn up on the shingle in the shadow of the tarry-black net-drying sheds. Her eyes were drawn by the line of the coast past the West Hill, behind which modern Surcombe and her own home lay hidden, along to the Marina where the town ended. From Hallows Hill to Gallows Hill a heat-haze hid the marshes; beyond that lay the small town of Combe Marish and a long sweep of land that finished a score of miles away at Deepdean, where Chalkspit jutted out into the Channel. And all the time, on her left, the sea lay flat and innocent and unbearably bright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the description of Surcombe match a real-life South Coast town, and if so where?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T01:09:37.897" Title="Where is the setting of &quot;A Hawk in Silver&quot; based on?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;mary-gentle&gt;&lt;a-hawk-in-silver&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3436" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3440" CreationDate="2017-08-31T04:15:24.020" Score="3" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard a variety of interpretations of &lt;em&gt;Hotel California&lt;/em&gt; by The Eagles: the &quot;high life&quot; in Los Angeles, a journey from innocence to experience, greed in the music industry, drug addiction. (Confusingly enough, the band seems to have confirmed several of these interpretations). Regardless of which of these interpretations is &quot;correct,&quot; though, I'm particularly interested in the final verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last thing I remember, &lt;strong&gt;I was&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Running for the door&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I had to find the passage back&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the place I was before&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Relax,&quot; said the night man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;We are programmed to receive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;You can check out any time you like,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But you can never leave!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that this verse is implying that there's some kind of external coercion keeping you in the Hotel California. With that said, why would the narrator be &quot;running for the door&quot; and trying to check out, but suddenly find himself unable to leave? Does this imply that people are unable to change, or merely that they tend to go back to their behavior in spite of their best intentions? Or am I missing the point entirely here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would it even mean to check out but not leave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T04:20:47.213" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T15:10:21.913" Title="Does Hotel California imply that people aren't capable of changing?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-eagles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3438" CreationDate="2017-08-31T09:16:48.670" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;http://zadolba.li/story/24274&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet-article (in Russian)&lt;/a&gt; refers to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;рассказ Честертона, в котором герой, требующий от окружающих постоянно быть весёлыми, не выдержал собственных требований, спился и покончил с собой&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Chesterton's short story, in which its character, who demanded from the people to be constantly cheerful, could not stand his own requirements, ruined himself by drink and committed suicide (self translated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What work of Chesterton's (I suppose it's &lt;a href=&quot;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G. K. Chesterton&lt;/a&gt;) may it be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I can't guarantee that the plot is depicted precisely, nor that the work really exists (the article author could distort the plot, mistake or misinform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="363" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:08:21.927" Title="Identify Chesterton's story in which a character wants people to be cheerful but ends up committing suicide" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3437" CreationDate="2017-08-31T10:33:51.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is almost certainly “The Three Tools of Death”, a Father Brown mystery, in which Sir Aaron Armstrong appears to have been murdered. A scene is set where it appears he has been shot at, stabbed and an attempt made to hang him before he was pushed from a window.&#xA;Fr Brown determines that Sir Armstrong was actually in the grip of a suicidal mania, triggered by breaking his temperance vow as a result of being driven to the edge of sanity by his &amp;quot;religion of cheerfulness&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening of the story introduces Sir Armstrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For though Sir Aaron was a philanthropist, and thus dealt with the darker side of our society, he prided himself on dealing with it in the brightest possible style. His political and social speeches were cataracts of anecdotes and &amp;quot;loud laughter&amp;quot;; his bodily health was of a bursting sort; his ethics were all optimism; and he dealt with the Drink problem (his favourite topic) with that immortal or even monotonous gaiety which is so often a mark of the prosperous total abstainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The established story of his conversion was familiar on the more puritanic platforms and pulpits, how he had been, when only a boy, drawn away from Scotch theology to Scotch whisky, and how he had risen out of both and become (as he modestly put it) what he was.&#xA;Yet his wide white beard, cherubic face, and sparkling spectacles, at&#xA;the numberless dinners and congresses where they appeared, made it&#xA;hard to believe, somehow, that he had ever been anything so morbid as&#xA;either a dram-drinker or a Calvinist. He was, one felt, the most&#xA;seriously merry of all the sons of men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story does not quite match the description of requiring all around him to be cheerful, but his servant does say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My poor old master made game of me for wearing black; but I always said I should be ready for his funeral.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you to @Randal'Thor for finding the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Innocence_of_Father_Brown/The_Three_Tools_of_Death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text &lt;/a&gt;at wikisource&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T13:08:21.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3277" CreationDate="2017-08-31T15:10:47.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the cover has creased, the layers of the paper will have separated and the fibres pulled out of alignment. The crease is then bulkier than the rest of the cover and stretched on the side it bends away from. &#xA;As you cannot push the fibres back into their former alignment, this is a technique I have used to get the cover to lie flat. Note, don't do this with a valuable book whose ££ you wish to retain, as it is ultimately a destructive method. &#xA;I started with this book (click images to enlarge):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/04WSL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/04WSLm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Paperback with bent and creased corner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to the inside of the cover, I used a fine scalpel blade to 'shave' away the upstanding line of the crease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ejd5j.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ejd5jm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;crease being shaved from inside cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then used tape strips across the shaved crease to restore tension to the inside face of the cover. I would have preferred to paste paper strips, but had no paste available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oxNw3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oxNw3m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;tensioning tape strips applied approximately perpendicular across crease&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ouw30.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ouw30m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;book cover now lies flat at corner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corner will remain damaged, but looks better when sitting out and is less likely to sustain more damage when being returned to the shelf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-08-31T15:18:40.130" LastActivityDate="2017-08-31T15:18:40.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3436" CreationDate="2017-08-31T18:24:49.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Try asking the question this way: &quot;How does this line affect the reader?&quot; Taken in itself, it's a very disconcerting image: some kind of illusory freedom. The phrase &quot;check out&quot; hints at death, suggesting that your freedom is so compromised that not even death can release you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to note that this in the context of &quot;night man&quot;, a late-night hotel clerk. He cannot necessarily be trusted to be providing correct information, especially in the light of his confusing and ambiguous &quot;we are programmed to receive&quot;. I'm not sure how the word &quot;programmed&quot; would have been received at the time the song was written, but today it alludes to a computer without free will. (I suspect it was that way at the time, too, but there might have been subtle differences since computers weren't ubiquitous.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's very easy to think of this solely in terms of drug addiction, which includes by definition a loss of free will. That's certainly a valid understanding of it, though it still doesn't admit an image-by-image allegorical reading; some images resist that interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd say the best way to understand that line is to think of it in terms of the emotions it invokes in you, in whatever way you connect to it. That's why the band's seemingly contradictory statements about its &quot;interpretation&quot; are all simultaneously valid. Rather than telling you a coded story, it's creating a set of emotions that are common to many states of humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T15:10:21.913" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T15:10:21.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T06:34:48.670" Score="6" ViewCount="1702" Body="&lt;p&gt;The e e cummings poem &quot;the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls&quot; mocks the titular ladies for their small-minded domesticity. The last four lines read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cambridge if sometimes in its box of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sky lavender and cornerless, the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I understand the main point here: the Cambridge ladies are too wrapped up in their gossip and knitting to care about anything else, even something as significant as the sky and the moon; such things are &quot;above&quot; their notice. What I don't understand is why the moon is said &quot;sometimes&quot; to &quot;&lt;em&gt;rattle&lt;/em&gt; like a fragment of &lt;em&gt;angry&lt;/em&gt; candy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What occasions does cummings mean by &quot;sometimes&quot;? How does the moon &quot;rattle&quot;? And why is it &quot;angry&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1091" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T09:46:45.280" Title="Why is the moon &quot;angry&quot; in e e cummings' &quot;the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;e-e-cummings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3448" CreationDate="2017-09-01T07:12:47.493" Score="0" ViewCount="397" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote from &quot;The Sign and The Seal&quot; by Graham Hancock:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If this had been what had happened then it would undoubtedly go a long way to explain the strangely menacing suggestion to the King of France that it might be a good idea if he were to have the 'treacherous Templars' (still mainly Frenchmen at the time) executed forthwith.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to ask about the exact meaning of the expression &quot;go a long way to explain&quot;. I'll try to ground my question. The text preceding the quoted hints that Harbay (Ethiopian king at the time) might have got the &quot;intelligence&quot; that Lalibela (future king of Ethiopia) in exile is plotting against him being in alliance with the Templars. If it is so then it is understandable that Harbay would defend himself and address the King of France with the above mentioned menacing suggestion (to kill the Templars). That logical chain being straightforward, makes me curious why 'go a long way ' expression is used which in my understanding means 'hard and arduous to explain'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T10:03:07.387" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T10:03:07.387" Title="Why is the phrase &quot;go a long way to explain&quot; used in &quot;The Sign and the Seal&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;graham-hancock&gt;&lt;the-sign-and-the-seal&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T09:31:23.693" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in a book having seven parts/volumes that there was a friend of Krishna called Chhandak who was always with Krishna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also talked about someone who could not speak but wanted to learn flute from Krishna, and for Dakshina, was about to give his thumb. It was when Krishna was with his Guru. It talks about the time and the feeling of Krishna when whole Yadav once was destroyed and he met with Rishi Durvasa; Rishi Durvasa heard that the whole Kaurav Line was destroyed and Krishna did nothing then Rishi durvasa was about to curse Krishna but Krishna's aura of God appeared and Rishi Durvasa calmed down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone provide me the name of the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I don't myself think that someone called Chhandak really existed, specially who was always with Krishna but the way it is written in that book. I liked that so I want to read the other parts of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I read Library : DAVV, Indore, India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2094" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T17:05:40.857" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T17:05:40.857" Title="What is the name of that book which talks of a friend of Krishna called Chhandak?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-01T09:37:15.273" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Directly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he openly and directly declare himself belonging to the conservative tradition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Indirectly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or did he do it indirectly through his view of human nature and his choice of themes in his works? For example in his works about the decline of tradition (in example Brideshead Revisited).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Others view of him&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And did others see him as having influenced and inspired the conservative tradition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1938" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T14:52:28.330" Title="Did Evelyn Waugh see himself as a conservative author, and/or did others categorize him as such?" Tags="&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3443" CreationDate="2017-09-01T10:02:47.273" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're misunderstanding the meaning of the phrase &amp;quot;go a long way to(wards)&amp;quot;. E.g. see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/to-go-a-long-way&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you say that something goes a long way towards doing a particular thing, you mean that it is an important factor in achieving that thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Although by no means a cure, it goes a long way towards making the patient's life more tolerable.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[+ towards/to]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finedictionary.com/go%20a%20long%20way.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; you cited in comments gives an alternative meaning of the phrase: it can also be interpreted more literally, as someone or something literally travelling a long (possibly arduous) distance. But given the context, it's clearly the other meaning that's being used here. If Harbay believed that the Templars were plotting against him, it might &lt;strong&gt;go a long way towards (be an important factor in)&lt;/strong&gt; explaining his suggestion to the King of France of having the Templars killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T10:02:47.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3446" CreationDate="2017-09-01T10:12:16.200" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that you're thinking of the wrong religion, and it's actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channa_(Buddhist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Channa/Chandak&lt;/a&gt;, servant and charioteer to the Buddha? Looking up Chhandak &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.indiachildnames.com/name.aspx?name=Chhandak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tells me&lt;/a&gt; that the name is derived from this Buddhist figure, even though it's mostly found among Hindus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in that case, could the book you're thinking of be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhammapada&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dhammapada&lt;/a&gt;? It has a lot more than seven chapters, but maybe you only had part of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T10:12:16.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2017-09-01T11:27:03.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing an interview with the publisher back when I studied it in school. In the original draft first chapter outlined a nuclear war and was implied to be a bit over the top, most publishers hadn't gotten past it and refused the book on the basis of the first chapter thinking the book to be mainly about a nuclear war. This introduction was gotten rid of in later drafts. I saw your question because I thought of it randomly and wanted to see if there was a copy out there so I started googling.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this on the Times of London website: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/editor-demanded-cuts-to-absurd-lord-of-the-flies-dnxsdp0nnln&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Editor demanded cuts to ‘absurd’ Lord of the Flies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2095" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T20:08:23.533" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T20:08:23.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3462" CreationDate="2017-09-01T15:01:34.040" Score="9" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out the name of this story that I remember reading in 2nd grade (2002). Here are the only details I remember: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a child who is going to school and his father, who is an old fashioned farmer, doesn't see the value of school and education. This story definitely takes place in the United States probably in the middle of the 20th century. The child then brings his father to school and the teacher has him look under a microscope. He is skeptical that he will see anything but then he sees some small organism and it has some profound effect on him that changes his outlook. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember this book having some illustrations to go with it. One particular illustration was of the father himself looking through the microscope wearing a blue button-up shirt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it ring any bells? Thanks in advance! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2096" LastEditorUserId="2096" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T18:46:05.180" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T16:23:05.827" Title="Story about father who looks through microscope for the first time" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3454" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:51:01.143" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T21:51:01.143" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T21:51:01.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3455" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:51:01.143" Score="0" Body="For questions about the popular American rock group The Eagles (and its members) as they relate to literature, specifically their songs. Use this tag together with [song-lyrics]. " OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T10:33:33.920" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T10:33:33.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3456" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:52:33.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T21:52:33.640" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T21:52:33.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3457" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:52:33.640" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Scottish dream pop group Cocteau Twins (and its members) as they relate to literature, specifically their songs. Use this tag together with [song-lyrics]. " OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T10:33:43.520" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T10:33:43.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3458" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:54:41.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-01T21:54:41.610" LastActivityDate="2017-09-01T21:54:41.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3459" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-01T21:54:41.610" Score="0" Body="For questions about singer-songwriter Paul Simon as he relates to literature, specifically his songs. Use this tag together with [song-lyrics]. " OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T10:33:38.060" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T10:33:38.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T06:02:41.320" Score="8" ViewCount="2505" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Pudd'nhead Wilson&lt;/em&gt;, by Mark Twain, the character David Wilson makes a remark that results in the townspeople writing him off as a &quot;pudd'nhead&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had just made the acquaintance of a&#xA;  group of citizens when an invisible dog began to yelp and snarl and howl&#xA;  and make himself very comprehensively disagreeable, whereupon young&#xA;  Wilson said, much as one who is thinking aloud--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I wish I owned half of that dog.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why?&quot; somebody asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Because I would kill my half.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the townspeople, I am rather literal minded and can't really understand what the character is getting at.  Can someone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2102" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T09:23:35.753" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T16:45:53.060" Title="What does Pudd'nhead Wilson's joke about half a dog mean?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;puddnhead-wilson&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3452" CreationDate="2017-09-02T10:51:58.393" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the story you are after is the short story &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The split cherry tree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Stuart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jesse Stuart&lt;/a&gt; written in 1939.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching 'story boy father school teacher microscope' and it was the fourth or fifth hit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the story and as I couldn't find a good conclusive summary online I wrote one myself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The story is set in rural America and is about a boy named Dave Sexton who climbs a neighbors' cherry tree with a group of his friends. The tree breaks and the boys must pay for it. Dave Sexton can't afford to pay the dollar fine, but his schoolmaster, Professor Herbert, offers to pay the fine if Dave stays two hours after school. Dave however believes he has to do chores on his father's farm, and that he would be whipped if he didn't do them. Proffessor Herbert says he is too old to be punished like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Dave gets home, his father, Luster, is furious with Dave and professor Herbert, and with schools in general. He sets of to the school with a gun saying that a bullet will make a hole in a schoolteacher as well as any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However Professor Herbert manages to get Luster to look through a microscope at something he scraped off his teeth. Luster is amazed at what he sees and his view on schools changes entirely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The story ends with them both going home and Luster telling his wife all about what he saw. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full story can be read &lt;a href=&quot;http://tlc.cet.ac.il/ShowItem.aspx?ItemID=263e47e4-8191-4f14-bae5-2400e3dbe57a&amp;amp;lang=EN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few relevant extracts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pa stopped scattering the bundles of fodder. He looked at me. He says, &quot;Why are you gettin' in here this time o' night? You tell me or I'll take a hickory withe to you right here on th' spot!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I says, &quot;I had to stay after school.&quot; I couldn't lie to Pa. He'd go to school and find out why I had to stay. If I lied to him it would be too bad for me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why did you haf to stay atter school?&quot; says Pa. I says, &quot;Our biology class went on a field trip today. Six of us boys broke down a cherry tree. We had to give a dollar apiece to pay for the tree. I didn't have the dollar. Professor Herbert is making me work out my dollar. He gives me twenty-five cents an hour. I had to stay in this afternoon. I'll have to stay in tomorrow afternoon!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now, Dave,&quot; says Pa, &quot;let's get ready fer school. I aim to go with you this mornin' and look into bug larnin', frog larnin', lizard and snake larnin', and breakin' down cherry trees! I don't like no sicha foolish way o' larnin' myself!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pa hadn't forgot. I'd have to take him to school with me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the afternoon when we went to biology Pa was in the class. He was sitting on one of the high stools beside the microscope. We went ahead with our work just as if Pa wasn't in the class. I saw- Pa take his knife and scrape tartar from one of his teeth. Professor Herbert put it on the lens and adjusted the microscope for Pa. He adjusted it and worked awhile. Then he says: &quot;Now Luster, look! Put your eye right down to the light. Squint the other eye!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pa put his head down and did as Professor Herbert said. &quot;I see 'im,&quot; says Pa. 'Who'd a ever thought that? Right on a body's teeth! Right in a body's mouth. You're right certain they ain't no fake to this, Professor Herbert?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; says Pa. &quot;You are goin' to do as he says. He's a good man. School has changed from my day and time. I'm a dead leaf, Dave. I'm behind. I don't belong here. If he'll let me I'll get a broom and we'll both sweep one hour. That pays your debt. I'll hep you pay it. I'll ast 'im and see if he won't let me hep you.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked online for illustrations but couldn't find any...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="9" LastEditDate="2017-09-04T16:23:05.827" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T16:23:05.827" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:02:00.183" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Gillian Beer's &lt;em&gt;Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction&lt;/em&gt;. This book is essentially a work of literary criticism of Darwin's theory of evolution. It traces the Darwin's literary influences as well as Darwin's impact on literature. It also features a close reading of Darwin's work, and argues that ideas can't be separated from the language they are contained in. It's a really interesting work and it's worth reading if you're interested in Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that I didn't get from the introduction was to what extent Beer was doing something new by applying literary criticism to a scientific work. Was this something that has always been done, is Beer the first person to have done this, or is Beer part of an emerging tradition but not necessarily the first?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:30:05.060" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:30:05.060" Title="To what extent was literary criticism being applied to scientific works at the time Darwin's Plots was written?" Tags="&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;charles-darwin&gt;&lt;science-and-technology-studies&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:25:15.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:25:15.480" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:25:15.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:25:15.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the &quot;book in a box&quot; 'The Unfortunates' (1969), an experimental novel by B. S. Johnson. Use with the [b-s-johnson] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:36:38.407" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:36:38.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:28:47.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:28:47.570" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:28:47.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:28:47.570" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of B. S. Johnson (1933–1973), an English poet, novelist, and critic, or his life as a writer. Use appropriate individual works tags when needed; use the [poetry] tag when asking about his poems." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:12:47.567" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:12:47.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Luke Smitherd, a British writer." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:35:58.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2011 supernatural mystery novel by Luke Smitherd. Use with the [luke-smitherd] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:38:47.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3473" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3474" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2007 young adult novel by Jay Asher; use with the [jay-asher] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:43:24.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3475" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3476" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Jay Asher, an American writer of fiction, best known for &quot;Thirteen Reasons Why&quot;. Use with the appropriate work tags when needed." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:45:05.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3477" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3478" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" Score="0" Body="For questions without their own tags; if you see any, please add the necessary tags (be it author tags, work tags, or any other), and add a short usage guidance for those tags. Otherwise the system will delete them again." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T17:49:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3479" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3480" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" Score="0" Body="For questions about Erin Morgenstern's 2011 fantasy novel. Use with the [erin-morgenstern] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T18:18:25.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3481" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3482" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Erin Morgenstern, an American artist and writer, knwon for her fantasy novel &quot;The Night Circus&quot;. Use with appropriate individual works tags when needed.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" LastActivityDate="2017-09-02T18:25:07.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T04:17:50.740" Score="5" ViewCount="5466" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've become interested in Bob Dylan's song &quot;A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall&quot;, which I find perplexing and hard to make sense of. Looking at the lyrics, it seems that there is quite a bit of ambiguity as to how the song should be interpreted. Here's the first verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've been out in front of a dozen dead oceans&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From reading the lyrics I can't figure out if the song is meant to be sad or uplifting. On one hand, a lot of the imagery connotes death and misery, such as &quot;a dozen dead ocean&quot; and &quot;seven sad forests&quot;. And end end of a verse--&quot;a hard rain's a-gonna fall&quot;--seems ominous, almost like a warning of a coming storm. However, the song also seems to be about the reunification of a parent and his son: the parent is asking where the son was, and the son responds with a description of his travels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final verse adds to this ambiguity. The son informs the parent that they are leaving again (&quot;Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son? / Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one? / I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin'&quot;). This could be considered as sad--they are departing--but also a good thing--the son is continuing with his travels. In addition, the son informs that they expect to drown in the rising water--sad--but that they know their song and will sing it as they drown--defiant, inspiring, and perhaps an uplifting conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dylan's performances of the song only add to this ambiguity. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCGoOPM2_x0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In one of his latest renditions of the song, he is accompanied by an orchestra, and the music is similar to an inspiring, uplifting soundtrack that would be played at the end of a movie&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ex-m-eEKsg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In another version from 1963, Dylan is accompanied by only an acoustic guitar, and his voice has the characteristic mournful quality that I associate with his music&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4ur3de&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;And in a third version from his 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue, the song sounds like a bar song: mournful but funny and entertaining at the same time&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: is the song supposed to be mournful or uplifting? What accounts for the range of interpretations of the song, both from a close reading of the lyrics, and from the various ways that Dylan has performed the song throughout his career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T20:49:49.993" Title="Is Bob Dylan's &quot;A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall&quot; supposed to be uplifting or mournful?" Tags="&lt;bob-dylan&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-03T15:49:28.500" Score="4" ViewCount="984" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sergei Prokofiev's &lt;em&gt;Peter and the Wolf&lt;/em&gt; is a combination of a children's story and a musical composition. A narrator narrates the story while an orchestra plays the corresponding music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=awo6r7a90yUC&amp;amp;pg=PT52#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the English translation of the performance instructions&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each character of this tale is represented by a corresponding instrument in the orchestra: the bird by a flute, the duck by an oboe, the cat by a clarinet playing staccato in a low register, the grandfather by a bassoon, the wolf by three horns, Peter by the string quartet, the shooting of the hunters by the kettle drums and bass drum. Before an orchestral performance it is desirable to show these instruments to the children and to play on them the corresponding leitmotivs. Thereby, the children learn to distinguish the sonorities of the instruments during the performance of this tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Peter represented by a string quartet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T18:59:46.043" Title="In Peter and the Wolf, why is Peter represented by a String quartet?" Tags="&lt;music&gt;&lt;peter-and-the-wolf&gt;&lt;sergei-prokofiev&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3485" CreationDate="2017-09-03T19:28:39.863" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a peculiar question, and it is hard to imagine what  could possibly answer it.  But the following speculation was suggested to me by a relative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human voices are mixtures of tonalities recognized by our ear, and animals seem to make a more limited range of sounds.  By analogy, string quartets which are capable of making a wider range of kinds of sounds than (say) oboes, are more suited to representing the human voice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2017-09-03T19:28:39.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T01:36:23.267" Score="5" ViewCount="6232" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;Purple Hibiscus&lt;/em&gt;, Mama kills Papa by putting poison in the tea that he shared with his children, which is not lost on Kambilli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Why did you put it in his tea?” I asked Mama, rising. My voice was loud. I was almost screaming. “Why in his tea?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a pretty important thing to just leave out, as there is no direct answer that I can see in the text. &lt;strong&gt;Why did she choose his tea to poison him? Why would she needlessly want to risk the life of her children?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T15:41:25.900" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:45:40.307" Title="Why did Mama put the poison in his tea?" Tags="&lt;purple-hibiscus&gt;&lt;chimamanda-ngozi-adichie&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3488" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3489" CreationDate="2017-09-04T09:30:23.600" Score="10" ViewCount="4968" Body="&lt;p&gt;On some books, I've noticed that they have colors on the edges of the pages. For instance, on my &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tikkun&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xQkwO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xQkwOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;tikkun&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemara&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;G'mara&lt;/a&gt; (part of the Talmud):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uUI2R.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uUI2Rm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;g&amp;#39;mara&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of these colors? Are they only found on religious books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T17:11:15.143" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T17:11:15.143" Title="Why do some books have colors on the edges of the pages?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;book-collecting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3488" CreationDate="2017-09-04T10:50:35.020" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is actually fairly common and has no real significance. It's a purely decorative process called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fore-edge_painting&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;edge painting&lt;/a&gt; (or fore-edge painting) because it's color painted on the fore-edge of the book (go figure).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's common on religious texts, but that's only because religious texts simply tend to be better made and better decorated. It's quite general, though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T10:50:35.020" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3512" CreationDate="2017-09-04T11:34:57.090" Score="2" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like this quote but didn't get its correct meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My deduction is - &lt;em&gt;One is asking God that what should he do when he didn't know himself at first&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of Rumi's quote &quot;Lo, for I to myself am unknown, now in God's name what must I do?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T08:24:10.660" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T08:24:10.660" Title="Meaning of Rumi's quote &quot;Lo, for I to myself am unknown, now in God's name what must I do?&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3514" CreationDate="2017-09-04T13:38:24.807" Score="7" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt; by Cormac McCarthy the names of the man and the boy are never revealed. Would this technically be considered a stylistic choice of the author? I pulled up a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson209/definition_style.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; and it says &quot;Style describes how the author describes events, objects, and ideas.&quot; Is the lack of names a style, or just a part of plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1752" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T16:57:40.650" Title="Can absence of information be considered a stylistic choice?" Tags="&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-04T18:33:54.947" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that we've learned through this site's scope discussions is that literature has a very subjective definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious how academics define and have defined literature. Is there any chance we could put together a list of the various definitions of literature that have been proposed by academics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Over the years&amp;quot; here means since the earliest academic discussions about the definition of literature, not just the last few decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T20:24:43.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T20:24:43.700" Title="What are the ways academics have defined literature over the years?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3492" CreationDate="2017-09-04T18:33:54.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a collaboratively edited list; please feel free to add to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Jim Meyer, 1997, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arts-sciences.und.edu/summer-institute-of-linguistics/work-papers/_files/docs/1997-meyer.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is Literature A Definition Based on Prototypes&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meyer's 1997 paper is based around the idea that words are defined on the basis of a &quot;prototype&quot;, or an ideal example that perfectly fits the definition of the word, and that other examples fit the definition to a lesser degree, or not at all. Experimental evidence has shown that people's definitions of words tend to be based on a list of criteria: a perfect fit for the definition will meet all of the criteria, while some words will still meet the definition because they meet some of the criteria, but not all of the criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meyer proposes that literature is defined by the following list of criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are written texts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are marked by careful use of language, including features such as creative&#xA;  metaphors, well-turned phrases, elegant syntax, rhyme, alliteration, meter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are in a literary genre (poetry, prose fiction, or drama)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are read aesthetically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;are intended by the author to be read aesthetically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;contain many weak implicatures (are deliberately somewhat open in&#xA;  interpretation)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A perfect example of literature will meet all of these criteria; other examples still count as literature, but are less perfect because they only meet some criteria. For example, oral literature meets all of these criteria other than not being a written text; it still is literature, but it is not as good of an example of literature compared to a work that was written down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T01:16:27.640" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T01:16:27.640" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-09-04T18:33:54.947" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="384" CreationDate="2017-09-04T22:59:22.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;girls and boys&quot; would seem more natural than &quot;boys and girls&quot;, and using that phrase would have naturally set up a rhyme with &quot;toys&quot;.  I suspect, however, that the rhyme was probably seen as detracting from the song rather than enhancing it, and the words &quot;boys&quot; and &quot;girls&quot; were swapped for the purpose of avoiding the rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Original French Concept Album, with lyrics by Alain Boubil, the song is completely different.  Translated very rigidly, the first verse is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My prince is on his way already. (déja)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     I do not know like what he will be. (sera)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     But I know that he will come tomorrow. (demain)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     My prince is already on his way. (chemin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second verse continues singing about the prince; the bridge says &quot;all children&quot; have a childhood, but does not mention &quot;boys and girls&quot; nor &quot;girls and boys&quot;.  The notion of &quot;boys and girls&quot;, along with most of the content of the song, was completely new in the English version of the show. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herbert Kretzmer and others who worked on the lyrics often followed the rhyme schemes from the original songs when those songs were consistent themselves, but in many of the original songs the rhyme schemes varied between verses, and Kretzmer's lyrics do likewise, though not necessarily matching the rhymes exactly.  The first verse of the original has an AABB rhyme scheme and the word ordering was clearly tweaked to create that (compare lines 1 and 4).  The second verse has an ABAB rhyme scheme (&quot;magique&quot;, &quot;le veut&quot;; &quot;musique&quot;, &quot;les yeux&quot;).  Even though the original had an ABAB rhyme in the opening verse, the rhyme in the first couplet (déja and sera) is pretty weak and not overly distracting since there's only one sound in common (the final &quot;ah&quot;).  A rhyme with a dypthong (&quot;oy&quot;) and consonant (&quot;z&quot;), by contrast, would call undue attention to itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2120" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T22:59:22.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3461" CreationDate="2017-09-04T23:32:00.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's re-organize the phrase: &quot;Because (of the fact that) I would kill my half, I wish I owned (only) half of that dog.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's really the act of ownership that's the issue here, and with it responsibility. Wilson's joke is like saying &quot;I like plants but I can't own them because I'd forget to water them and they'd die&quot;. But Wilson wouldn't own the other half, so he wouldn't have to have full responsibility; someone else would take care of the dog for him. It's a joke, a kinda meta-joke and not a very good one, so no wonder he gets ragged on (even if the townspeople are, generally, ableist garbage). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His joke's logic is also why being an aunt/uncle is great: you still get lil kids, but you don't have to, like, be their parents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastActivityDate="2017-09-04T23:32:00.613" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T01:24:22.767" Score="2" ViewCount="698" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to work my way through &lt;em&gt;Where's Wally? The Fantastic Journey&lt;/em&gt; by Martin Handford. But I got stuck on the first page!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j9p4c.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j9p4c.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A crowded scene with many tables where people sit and eat, other people are carrying bowls, platters and cauldrons of food. Many discarded items lie on the floor. A text insert has the title ‘The Gobbling Gluttons’ and introduces the reader to the book’s story and lists other characters and items which are hidden in the image in addition to Wally (Waldo)&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you give me some advice on how to find Wally? Where should I start looking, what should I look for, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T09:59:51.403" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T14:10:11.823" Title="How can I find Wally?" Tags="&lt;martin-handford&gt;&lt;wheres-wally&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3496" CreationDate="2017-09-05T05:29:39.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One good way of tackling this particular genre is to take a marking pen (black is best) and put a cross through the face of everyone on the page who isn't Wally. Eventually, you will find Wally. You can work your way systematically through any &quot;Where's Wally&quot; book in this manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. It took me less than 5 minutes by just looking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T05:29:39.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3496" CreationDate="2017-09-05T11:11:44.480" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A computer scientist named Randal Olson actually worked out an algorithm of how to find him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 68 total pages to look in across the 7 books - and by plotting the locations he made a heat map using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_density_estimation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kernel Density Estimation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOMmlm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOMmlm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Location points&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zRb6Hm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zRb6Hm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Kernel Density Estimate&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then using a computer program, he worked out the optimal search path:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/98lwF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/98lwF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Optimal Search Path&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The optimal search path is to start in the black circle and follow the black line. Supposedly, this will help you find him as quick as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few other tips that I used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Look for red and white stripes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The iconic white and red striped top and hat often was the thing that alerted me to the location of Wally. While the illustrator has included a lot of other things with red and white stripes, I still found it easier to look for the stripes than to look for Wally himself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make use of the other characters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are (usually) 6 characters to find on each page - Wally, Wenda, Woof, Wilma, Wizard Whitebeard and Odlaw. Wally is, of course, the main target - but often when searching for him I would find another character. Now this isn't and hard and fast rule, but most of the time the characters are pretty spread out. So once you have found one - look in the other sections of the book. You might not find Wally, but you should at least find another character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Know where &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to look&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the location dots - Wally is found in the top left only once - and is never found at the bottom of the right page. If you know he's not going to be there then you don't need to look.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more you find him the better you get, so don't give up - keep practising!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T14:10:11.823" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T14:10:11.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2782" CreationDate="2017-09-05T12:28:54.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gone are the days of the Aeneid when a poet boils within himself , &quot; Of arms and men I sing.&quot; All poets,  particularly war poets, invented their own language to despise ' war and the pity of war'. Owen delivers the message about the old lie, 'dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori' while Arthur Rimbaud depicts a soldier dead in Asleep In The Valley. Nature stands for creation, fruition— consummation of life and beauty at its best in sharp contact to which stands war bringing death and destruction on its wake. It negates all that sustains life— all that's healthy in nature. And for this particular purpose nature and war are juxtaposed; they are two extremes, poles apart.&#xA;In the poem Naming of Parts by Henry Reed we are led into a military classroom in the background of nature in blossoms and there from, into the inner workings of a young soldier's mind that shuffles across the class room lesson within and nature in its full glory without. He is in his late teens or early twenties.He has just embarked on the new found land of sensuous joy. For him beckoning of life, beckoning of pollination is hard to resist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How dull, drab and awfully frightening might he feel to think of a rifle parts which symbolically represents death when Japonica glistening outside The instructor's demonstration with a rifle without allowing the trainee soldiers to handle it, is set against the silently eloquent boughs of the garden suggesting arms of the loved one which' in our case... got'. How painful to the young soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the safety catch, its quick release and the death knell. The young mind is appalled and instantaneously reverts to the blossoms, presumably maidens in pristine glory— a thing which eludes his sensual pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth stanza the bees have found the bed of crimson joy of Blake's description, of course without the suggested derogatory implications.The poor soldier is denied that joy of intense love only to be reminded vaguely how it feels in easing of spring with the suggested pun and implied implications. It pains him to see the bee forward and backward into the core of the blossom. Oh busy bee, how lucky you are!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So nature brings out very poignantly what the young soldier is denied at the prime of life and parroting the the words of the classroom he makes his suffering all the more excruciating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastEditorUserId="2075" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T12:47:11.840" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T12:47:11.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-05T13:24:09.123" Score="7" ViewCount="14952" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is based off of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/867/58&quot;&gt;recent meta debate&lt;/a&gt;. Although something being literature - or not being literature - does not automatically make something on or off topic, this is an interesting question that may shed some insight on the meta discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can music be considered as part of 'literature'? Has it been considered 'literature' by anyone in the past? What arguments are there for it being literature/not being literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T00:57:22.260" Title="Can music be considered literature?" Tags="&lt;music&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2017-09-05T14:17:19.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, music and literature are two different genres of art, with the distinctions hinging on the medium used. The former is understood to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;organization and production of harmonious sounds&lt;/a&gt;, while the latter is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arrangement of written words&lt;/a&gt; on a visual display. There can be an occasional crossover between the two forms. For example, a lot of music today uses written words to complement the harmony and convey a message. And for its turn, poetry is a form of literature that can be described as having a musical quality. But these blurred lines are not fundamental to either art form, and the two can still be said to be distinct, even if one borrows aspects from the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1961" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T14:17:19.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2017-09-05T14:27:49.793" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Hibiscus_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; for this book has an explanation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beatrice, mother and wife in the Achike family, often called &quot;mama&quot;, is a quiet, maternal figure for much of the work, presenting a softer, warmer presence in the home in contrast to the often tyrannical presence of Eugene. Passive is another term applicable to her, at least for a great deal of the book. During the course of the novel, Beatrice suffers two miscarriages after severe beatings from Eugene. She polishes the figurines on the étagère after every beating. It is insinuated that she stays with Eugene partially out of gratitude for his unwillingness to marry another woman after she could only have two children. Ultimately, however, Beatrice cannot cope with Eugene’s behaviour and poisons him. Her son, Jaja, takes the blame for the crime and she is a shattered wreck after this point. At the conclusion of the novel, however, with Jaja’s impending release from prison, there are some indications that her condition will improve.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1961" LastEditorUserId="37" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T17:24:35.600" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T17:24:35.600" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3513" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:35:52.173" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Most Surfaces&lt;/em&gt; By The Gathering (from their &lt;em&gt;Nighttime Birds&lt;/em&gt; album) has the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The frost hits me in the eye and wakes me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  These are blurry winters and I cannot see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I walk into the white light of the snow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the sun comes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I break it with my shadow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which tells me where I go&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The frost hits me in the eye and wakes me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am the snow falling down on you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I tear up your face with my frost&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make you run to somewhere warm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I come I see you get away&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I burst out about your emptiness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the line &quot;The frost hits me in the eye and wakes me&quot; immediately followed by the lines &quot;I am the snow falling down on you / I tear up your face with my frost&quot;? Is the last verse still written from the perspective of the original narrator, or does it change &quot;perspectives&quot; and now write from the &quot;perspective&quot; of the snow itself? If it's still being written from the perspective of the original narrator, what accounts for the &quot;transformation&quot; from being &quot;acted upon&quot; by the snow to being the snow itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T16:52:59.407" Title="Are there two separate narrators in &quot;On Most Surfaces&quot; by The Gathering?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-gathering&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3508" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:44:17.273" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Loosely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3503/are-there-two-separate-narrators-in-on-most-surfaces-by-the-gathering&quot;&gt;Are there two separate narrators in &amp;quot;On Most Surfaces&amp;quot; by The Gathering?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;em&gt;On Most Surfaces&lt;/em&gt; by The Gathering (on their &lt;em&gt;Nighttime Birds&lt;/em&gt; album) has the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The frost hits me in the eye and wakes me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  These are blurry winters and I cannot see&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I walk into the white light of the snow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When the sun comes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I break it with my shadow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which tells me where I go&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The frost hits me in the eye and wakes me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am the snow falling down on you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I tear up your face with my frost&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make you run to somewhere warm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I come I see you get away&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I burst out about your emptiness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only appears to describe a single &quot;surface&quot; (evidently a snow-covered landscape). That being the case, why is this titled &quot;On Most Surfaces&quot;? What's the significance of the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T16:46:15.630" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T16:46:15.630" Title="Why is &quot;On Most Surfaces&quot; titled the way that it is given that only one surface appears in the song itself?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;the-gathering&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3505" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:53:29.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T15:53:29.667" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T15:53:29.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3506" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-05T15:53:29.667" Score="0" Body="Use for literature questions pertaining to the works of The Gathering (and the lives of its members), a Dutch symphonic metal band. Consider using this tag together with the [song-lyrics] or [music] if you're asking about their music." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-05T16:46:51.810" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T16:46:51.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3504" CreationDate="2017-09-05T16:45:57.477" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me preface this by saying I have no knowledge of the song or its writers/performers beyond the information in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this only appears to describe a single &quot;surface&quot; (evidently a&#xA;  snow-covered landscape)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, a landscape is made up of any number of surfaces, lawns, fields the tops of walls, roads, paths, the roofs of houses, the ledges of a windowsill, the boughs of a tree, the tips of the pales of a fence....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think you may be off-beam on assuming that the 'most surfaces' relates to snow, snow generally lands on the upper or windward surface of things, whereas &lt;em&gt;frost&lt;/em&gt;, which is mentioned more often in the lyric, forms on tops, sides, undersides and edges, in fact... on most surfaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a guess, perhaps the lyric was inspired by a report on weather conditions, in my part of the world the phrasing is usually something like 'widespread frost except in sheltered glens', but perhaps elsewhere there are warnings of &lt;em&gt;frost on most surfaces&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-09-05T16:45:57.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2017-09-06T14:14:00.823" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it was a spur of the moment decision. While Beatrice was definitely moved to the breaking point by Eugene's abuse, I think it was the Eugene's comment while drinking tea, or just before, which was the straw that broke the camel's back. Or maybe he broke one of her figurines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tea is important because it is a sort of quiet rebellion. By refusing to share his tea, Eugene is unknowingly protecting his children. There was no risk to kids, because Beatrice knew Eugene won't share his tea. He might have shared some other food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T00:42:44.117" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:42:44.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3490" CreationDate="2017-09-06T16:09:36.237" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there's actually a deeper meaning to this quotation. It touches upon the crucial link between identity and morality. In essence, Rumi is saying, how can I know &lt;em&gt;what to do&lt;/em&gt; if I don't know &lt;em&gt;who I am&lt;/em&gt;? In my opinion, the larger meaning depends on whether it is viewed as a rhetorical question or not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is viewed as rhetorical, then Rumi is implying that morality depends on identity. We cannot know how we must act until we figure out who we are, or at least who we want to be in this world. If we are or want to be compassionate, then we must be kind to others. If we are or want to be honest, then we should refrain from lying or misleading others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if the quotation is viewed as a question whose answer Rumi does not himself know, then I see it as pointing to a paradox of human existence, that we are often forced to make decisions and take action in this world without first knowing who we really are or what we really stand for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="2132" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T15:27:57.137" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T15:27:57.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3503" CreationDate="2017-09-06T16:41:34.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the surface (no pun intended :P), one might presume that there are two narrators: the original speaker and the snow. But I interpret the whole last stanza as metaphorical. The speaker is &quot;the snow falling down on you&quot; perhaps in the sense that the speaker's coldness toward others makes them flee toward places or people of more emotional warmth, causing the speaker to despair. Perhaps it is also in the sense that the speaker's coldness toward her humanity or even her own self causes this part of her personality to depart, leaving the other part despondent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the metaphor goes deeper, because snow is something that is by nature cold. The metaphor suggests that the speaker is by nature cold and cannot change this part of her personality, or else she (or at least a part of her) will die, as snow melts when it gets too warm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another component of this beautiful metaphor is that the speaker's quick change in perspective demonstrates perhaps an uncanny empathetical insight or sense of oneness with the universe. The speaker is hit in the eye and made unable to see by the snow, as well as woken up (or, by metaphorical extension, brought to see reality more closely) by the snow, yet at the same time, she &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the snow. This external force which both jolted her awake and obscured her path was part of her all along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quick metaphorical flitting back and forth of perspective reminds me of a similar instance in line 4 of Mark Strand's poem, &quot;The Good Life&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You stand at the window.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is a glass cloud in the shape of a heart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There are the wind’s sighs that are like caves in your speech.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are the ghost in the tree outside.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The street is quiet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The weather, like tomorrow, like your life,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is partially here, partially up in the air.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is nothing that you can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The good life gives no warning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It weathers the climates of despair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and appears, on foot, unrecognized, offering nothing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and you are there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="2132" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T16:52:59.407" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T16:52:59.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3491" CreationDate="2017-09-06T17:29:01.380" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Omission is an extremely important part of style. Often what is said is actually less important than what is &lt;em&gt;left unsaid&lt;/em&gt;, sometimes referred to as the subtext. Hence the critical importance of the oft-repeated advice to &quot;read between the lines.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particularly brilliant use of this stylistic device occurs in F. Scott's Fitzgerald description of Gatsby lying dead in his pool in chapter 8 of &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of a compass, a thin red circle in the water.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that up to this point Gatsby's name has been heard in the novel far more than the man himself has been seen, this description, which carefully and deliberately skirts around the statement that &quot;Gatsby was lying dead in the pool,&quot; is loaded with irony. This effect is accentuated by the banality of objects like a mattress and leaves and by the minimalism of words like &quot;barely perceptible,&quot; &quot;little ripples,&quot; &quot;small gust,&quot; &quot;accidental,&quot; and &quot;slowly,&quot; which contrast starkly with Gatsby's bold, brash, fast-paced, intentional, and outsized lifestyle. The whole description is extremely fitting given the overall irony and complexity of Gatsby as a character whose grand self-created image is at odds with his true identity. Had Fitzgerald used the name &quot;Gatsby&quot; anywhere in this passage, this effect would have been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, with regard to the example you give of the man and the boy in &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt;, I think this is an extremely important stylistic choice by McCarthy that makes these characters universal, essential, even somewhat primordial. Though McCarthy develops these characters a lot in the novel, perhaps more important than their specific identities is their position as essentially the last man and the last boy on earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2132" LastEditorUserId="2132" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T17:56:56.947" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T17:56:56.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-06T22:36:53.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-06T22:36:53.347" LastActivityDate="2017-09-06T22:36:53.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-06T22:36:53.347" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life or works of Rumi (1207-1273), a Persian Muslim poet. Questions about his short poems should be tagged with [poetry]. Questions about his works should be also tagged with [persian-literature], or other language tags if applicable." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:41:32.300" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:41:32.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-07T03:13:50.420" Score="4" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sound is a major defining component of &lt;em&gt;The Woman in Black&lt;/em&gt;: many of the imaginary and semi-present elements of the performance get explicit sound cues. They're a diegetic conceit of the framing device, and serve to make the pantomime more understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is the dog Spider, who is entirely invisible and only given presence through the actors' pantomimed interactions, not given any sound effect cues at all? Even when the dialog narrates cues like &quot;she is yelping loudly,&quot; the sound direction never backs it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T03:13:50.420" Title="Why is Spider silent?" Tags="&lt;stephen-mallatratt&gt;&lt;the-woman-in-black&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3523" CreationDate="2017-09-07T07:16:11.143" Score="6" ViewCount="1604" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Walt Whitman's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/349&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Voice of the Rain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from his book &lt;em&gt;Leaves of Grass&lt;/em&gt;, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I descend to lave the droughts, &lt;strong&gt;atomies&lt;/strong&gt;, dust-layers of the globe...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;atomies&quot; mean here? I could picture small particles but then I cannot be sure. Looking the word up yields nothing that would fit in here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2135" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T00:06:30.057" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T00:06:30.057" Title="What does &quot;atomies&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3519" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-07T11:57:02.703" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-07T11:57:02.703" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T11:57:02.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3520" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-07T11:57:02.703" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books' series (Spanish: 'Cementerio de los libros olvidados') by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, which begins with &quot;The Shadow of the Wind&quot;. Use this tag together with the [carlos-ruiz-zafon] and [spanish-literature] tags. " OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:28:13.907" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:28:13.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2017-09-07T16:26:42.530" Score="10" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would say Music should not be classified as Literature because &lt;strong&gt;to do so would cause much confusion in talking about work in two fundamentally distinct artistic mediums.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[See PephenKinD's answer for a good breakdown of the different qualities of the two mediums.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Music deals with combinations &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.liutaiomottola.com/formulae/freqtab.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequencies/wavelengths&lt;/a&gt;, in terms of sequence of notes, and harmony/dissonance.  It shares a common metric structure with most forms of poetry, and all literature if all language is regarded as having a metric structure.  But &lt;strong&gt;music is non-linguistic&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, literature deals with concepts expressed in language. The field of Linguistics and Semiotics attempts to break down what this actually means, but in common language, it's all about combinations of words as opposed to frequencies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the basic distinction.  However&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lyrics are definitely a literary form&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can range from &amp;quot;light verse&amp;quot;, as in Duke Ellington, to serious political and social commentary (Chuck D and Ice Cube.)  The Billie Holiday classic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Fruit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strange Fruit&lt;/a&gt; is an early example of lyrics used for social critique, but that tradition goes back much farther, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_rebel_song&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish Rebel Songs&lt;/a&gt; as an example. In fact, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ballads&lt;/a&gt; were traditionally narratives set to music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the discussion of musical properties and construction are distinct from the discussion of literary properties and constructions, even though pure music may be narrative, as in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_and_the_Wolf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter and the Wolf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nobel prize in literature awarded to Bob Dylan is a recognition of lyrics as serious literature.  In this case, the musical framework for the poetry is corollary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My underlying point is about the necessity of distinction between mediums, genres and fields.  These distinctions exist to set clear boundaries and terminology for discussion of such subjects.  Certainly one could call music literature, but I'm not it's a useful leap.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology of literature&lt;/a&gt; may help elucidate this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T19:46:27.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3491" CreationDate="2017-09-07T16:57:40.650" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wallace's answer is definitive, so this answer is merely in way of commentary on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hidden information is not only a stylistic choice, but a strategic choice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Viewed from the standpoint of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information theory&lt;/a&gt;, meaning is created by an author's choices.  In some cases author's want to &quot;spell things out&quot; in an unambiguous way, but great literature tends to leave as much as possible to the reader.  In some sense, a poem or narrative is a puzzle.  The author may be said to utilize game theory in determining how best to &quot;hook&quot; the reader and sustain interest over the course of the poem or narrative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wholeheartedly agree with Wallace that the omission of the characters' names by McCarthy is in service of universality and fundamentality of the characters.  McCarthy's books are heavily allegorical, and The Road is distinctly a parable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another key omission on the Road that serves as a &quot;hook&quot; is the lack of explanation of exactly what the event was that ended civilization.  As I recall, it was described simply as &quot;three low concussions in the distance&quot; &lt;em&gt;[paraphrase]&lt;/em&gt; with no further explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-09-07T16:57:40.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3518" CreationDate="2017-09-07T20:01:41.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The confusion comes from Whitman's using a (now archaic) word form.  I don't know to what degree Whitman's specific choice &quot;atomies&quot; was standard in his time, but Whitman is generally considered a poet of the first rank, and poets are allowed to invent words and engineer novel usage.  &lt;em&gt;(Often, those two capabilities are marks of the greatest poets.  Shakespeare was the most fertile because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he was writing during the first period of what came to be modern English&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atomies may refer to the atomic level of existence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take this from context of this particular verse, Voice of the Rain, and because the idea is established at the outset of Leaves of Grass:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I celebrate myself, and sing myself,&#xA;  And what I assume you shall assume,&#xA;  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Whitman: Song of Myself&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is supported by &quot;And all that in them without me were seeds only...&quot; in that seeds, dust, and atoms are small, basic units, similar to motes. You'll note that atom and mote are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/atomies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;standard definitions of atomy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is further supported in that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/guide-walt-whitmans-leaves-grass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Whitman was famous for using lists&lt;/a&gt; in this poem in particular, thus using different words for similar concepts is not only consistent, but almost certainly intended in this passage.  However, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's quite possible Whitman was intending a double meaning (again a mark of poetry) in the secondary usage of bones&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, bones are often hidden in the &quot;dust-layers of the globe&quot;.  Whitman was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil#Linnaeus_and_Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paleontology&lt;/a&gt; was an exciting, rapidly developing area in science.  [Note: The first edition of &lt;em&gt;Leaves of Grass&lt;/em&gt; was published a few years before &lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;Voice of the Rain&lt;/em&gt; seems not to have appeared until the 1891 edition of &lt;em&gt;Leaves&lt;/em&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd even go so far as to suggest the third meaning of atomies as &quot;minute creatures&quot; such as insects or micro-organisms, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microscope#Rise_of_modern_light_microscopes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per the history of the microscope&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My personal feeling is that what Whitman's was really saying with atomies is &quot;all of the sets of minutiae that comprise the world&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Atomy is related to anatomy, and this strengthens the anthropomorphic theme--that of the poet has giving voice to the rain.  (See also &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/waste-land-part-v-what-thunder-said&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What the Thunder Said&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.) If the rain has a voice, surely the earth itself can be regarded as an organism, or an amalgam of organisms.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leaves is, at times, quite sexual, and this passage is distinctly so.  The rain is creating life in a process analogous to procreation: &quot;I descend to lave the drouths, atomies, dust-layers of the globe,&#xA;And all that in them without me were seeds only, latent, unborn;&#xA;And forever, by day and night, I give back life to my own &#xA;origin...&quot;  In many ways, this section calls to mind the mating of Gaia and Ouranos (heaven and earth) but transforms the process into something nurturing as opposed to terrifying in that the progeny is sustaining, not destructive.&lt;/em&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-09-08T17:58:14.557" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T17:58:14.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4271" CreationDate="2017-09-08T04:20:44.847" Score="13" ViewCount="4780" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the quote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand.&#xA;  That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed,&#xA;  whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart! (Fitzgerald p. 155).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is that Nick is on the train (on the hottest day of the year) heading to have luncheon with Daisy, Jordan, Gatsby, and Tom. The paragraph before this is the conductor exclaiming that it is hot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can tell the narrator is saying that he doesn't care about the conductor's sexual life, but I can't see how that is remotely related given the context. Anyone know what this quote is supposed to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2139" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T03:50:06.387" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T03:50:06.387" Title="What does this quote from The Great Gatsby mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3461" CreationDate="2017-09-08T08:51:02.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;At its most basic, the &quot;joke&quot; is simply the expectation created by the initial remark, followed by the anticlimactic punch line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could also be alluding to some of the racial themes explored in the novel.  The irrationality of owning half a dog can be compared to the irrational implications of then-present ideas about race.  For example, the character Roxy is considered to be property due to having one-sixteenth black ancestry, despite having both the appearance as well as the intelligence and strength of character attributed to whites at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, this can be seen as a metaphor for society.  Society in Mark Twain's time was deeply divided along racial, political, social, and economic lines (much like the present day).  Yet this joke can be taken to mean that it would be impossible to simply separate the good from the bad without destroying the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2140" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T08:51:02.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-08T12:22:30.460" Score="1" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere or other, many years ago, I read that there was a name for the type of book written by the likes of L.M. Alcott. That they were a backlash against the novels of the time and meant to teach moral lessons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this true, and is there a name for the genre?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="1900" LastEditDate="2017-09-09T05:46:22.797" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:30:27.213" Title="Type of book written by L.M Alcott" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;louisa-may-alcott&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3461" CreationDate="2017-09-08T14:44:45.563" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The part about &quot;half&quot; a dog is to lure the townspeople into the joke.  If he had just said he wished to own the dog, it would have been too obvious, and not interesting enough.  This way of phrasing it forces people to ponder what he means, and what possible reason there could be to want only half of a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once people have fallen into the trap, he springs the punchline, &quot;so I could kill my half!&quot;  Obviously, this would kill the whole dog, so the whole thing is just a deliberately convoluted way of expressing that he wants to kill off the dog to shut it up.  (Elaborate circumlocutions were popular comedic devices of the time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a faux-sophisticated young-person's joke, that probably would have left young men in the frat houses at Wilson's college convulsing with laughter, but it is badly misjudged for this stolid audience.  It's Twain's way of establishing the distance in perspective between Wilson and the townspeople.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T14:44:45.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3526" CreationDate="2017-09-08T23:20:54.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;One type of novel written by L. M. Alcott was the &lt;em&gt;suspense novel&lt;/em&gt;.  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Fatal_Love_Chase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on her &lt;em&gt;A Long Fatal Love Chase&lt;/em&gt; describes the plot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a discontented maiden who lives on an English island with only her bitter old grandfather for company and who begins the novel by rashly declaring: &quot;I often feel as if I'd gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom.&quot; Right on cue, a man...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this what you mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2017-09-08T23:20:54.227" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3531" CreationDate="2017-09-09T21:09:30.803" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;The inscription on the Mirror of Erised reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which reads &quot;ishow no tyo urfac ebu tyo urhe arts desirE&quot; backwards.  I'm okay that the punctuation ends up a little funny, but what is the reason for the spacing choices made on this inscription?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastEditorUserId="68" LastEditDate="2017-09-10T14:20:01.930" LastActivityDate="2017-09-10T14:20:01.930" Title="The Mirror of Erised, gnica psno itp ircs ni" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3530" CreationDate="2017-09-09T21:52:47.390" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of possible reasons why the spacing was chosen in a different way from that of the original unreversed words (which is, by the way, a very minor stylistic choice) ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To make the 'words' in the reversed inscription sound more like real words.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare &quot;&lt;em&gt;Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi&lt;/em&gt;&quot; with &quot;&lt;em&gt;Erised straeh ruoy tub ecaf ruoy ton wohs i&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. How would you even pronounce a word like &quot;straeh&quot; or &quot;ruoy&quot;? Although none of the reversed 'words' are actually English words (except &quot;on&quot;), they all look fairly plausible as foreign or made-up words, and are reasonably pronounceable. To see why pronounceability is an aspect worth considering, think of people reading the book aloud for their children.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To obfuscate the cipher more thoroughly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a pretty simple cipher to crack anyway, for one who has any level of experience with such things, but it would be even easier if the spacing was done exactly right. It would be easy to notice, for instance, that &quot;ruoy&quot; is &quot;your&quot; backwards, or &quot;wohs&quot; &quot;show&quot;. But by changing up the spacing, the writer is making the cipher just a &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; harder for readers to spot at once. That way, more people might be surprised when the inscription is revealed to be a cipher, and different readers could have fun discussing together which of them noticed it and which didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-09T21:52:47.390" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-10T22:25:03.803" Score="3" ViewCount="510" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://onehundredpages.wordpress.com/a-room-of-ones-own-by-virginia-woolf/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Room of One's Own&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Virginia Woolf:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;Success prompts to exertion; habit facilitates success&lt;/strong&gt;.’ That is a man's sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Woolf judge the bolded sentence to be a ‘man's sentence’? Can’t the red apply to women (or transsexuals) too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T15:39:50.360" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T15:39:50.360" Title="Why did Virginia Woolf judge 'Success prompts to exertion; habit facilitates success' a 'man's sentence'?" Tags="&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;&lt;a-room-of-ones-own&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12430" CreationDate="2017-09-10T22:32:12.123" Score="8" ViewCount="1129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &quot;Mouse&quot;, collected among other places in &lt;em&gt;Smoke and Mirrors&lt;/em&gt;, is about a man who is buying a trap to get rid of the mouse in his house. He doesn't want to kill the mouse, so he buys a safe trap. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, at home, his wife seems pregnant. She goes away for what seems to be an abortion, and when she comes back, she complains about the pain. As she does so, her husband can't tolerate it and goes away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the kitchen, the trap has a mouse in it. The man can't kill it, so he takes it gently to his yard and sets the mouse free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember if his wife actually being mentioned as pregnant, but it was my impression that she was getting an abortion. From the contrast in the treatment the protagonist shows to his wife (actually their unborn child) and to the mouse, it &lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt; to me that the story might be criticising abortion. This was most baffling, because I clearly remember Neil Gaiman mentioning&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; a non-existing &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt; story, where we would see the dreams of an unborn baby about to be killed by an abortion, and he said that he didn't write the story because he didn't want it to be used as leverage to persuade young girls into keeping children they didn't want. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So right now Neil Gaiman seems to be pro-choice. Is this short story really anti-abortion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1 I don't remember which interview it was - &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/0ei9OQkQ2BU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/y4lPPN_Qcc4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, or some else.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T22:22:58.383" Title="Does Neil Gaiman's &quot;Mouse&quot; criticise abortion?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3356" CreationDate="2017-09-11T00:04:37.123" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prosody is the science that describes poetry forms called meters or seas (bohor) in Arabic.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The  comparison between two prosodies requires some basic  knowledge of both prosodies.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In western prosodies there is one form with two analogous but different contents.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sound and prosodic syllables are represented by U  for both unstressed (English) and short (Latin) syllables, which may be represented by no 1.&#xA;and _ for stressed (English) and long (Latin), may be represented by 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analogy  is best described by Reuven Tsur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English Renaissance poets thought they succeeded in the adaptation of the quantitative metre. But they were doing something that was very different from what they thought they were doing: working in a stress timed language, they based their metre on the more or less regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and not as they thought, on the regular alternation of longer and shorter syllables. They used the same names and graphic notation for the various metres, but the system was utterly different, and well- suited to the nature of a stress-timed language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two symbols 1 and 2 are adequate for linguistic and prosodic rules  description of both languages.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When it comes to Arabic these two symbols are adequate only for linguistic description. It falls short from prosodic rules description because Arabic prosodic  units are 2 and 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 being a monolithic unit composed of 1+2 (short + long) syllables.&#xA;Considering this  3  as one entity is a must to enable a consistent  full rule description of Arabic prosody.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Latin is quantitative Arabic is both  quantitative and qualitative. Syllable time duration is not the controlling factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This long introduction is necessary to answer the other two questions. The answer is descriptive. More explanation is needed for detailed information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basic   &amp;quot;taf‘īlahs&amp;quot; are two types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two units : 2 3 and 3 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Three units : 2 2 3 – 2 3 2 – 3 2 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The permutations of these units and (other derived from them) unite in a meter clock which proves that Arabic meters is a manifestation of an arithmetic program felt by Arabs – maybe like other peoples - just like that program felt by bees and controls  the design of their cells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s3iAs.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/s3iAs.gif&quot; alt=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/two-clocks/two%20clocks%20Ara%20+%20Eng.gif&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;12  is the unit of iambic meters it is a foot . But  In Arabic 12 is combined in the monolithic prosodic symbol 3 called watid.&#xA;22 is the unit of spondaic meter it is a foot . In Arabic it is considered as two sabab units. less than taf‘īlah&#xA;So generally we can say a Latin foot ranges between the Arabic watid 3 and the taf‘īlah&#xA;Relevant subjects: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?84779-Is-there-a-poetry-in-architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is there a poetry in architecture?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you find the answer useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://108973645-322039956313661226.preview.editmysite.com/uploads/1/0/8/9/108973645/mutadarak_orig.png&quot; alt=&quot;a busy cat&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pETghkpUu0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This youtube video provides a clear example&lt;/a&gt;. It can be understood in English, Arabic and its original Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please listen to the first half line (00:19 - 00:23) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=kFUpZfKL5c4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this song&lt;/a&gt;. Its pronunciation is &amp;quot;Fee layaalin katamat sirral hawaa&amp;quot;. Word meanings are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fee = in = في&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Layaalin = nights = ليالٍ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Katamat = concealed = كتمت&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sir = secret = سرّ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alhawa = love = الهوى&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cv = da = 1 &amp;amp; CV = Cvv = CvC = DUM = 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scansion: Fee layaalin katamat sirral hawaa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fee =CV=2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Layaa=CvCV=12=3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lin=CvC=2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ka=Cv=1&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tamat=CvCvC=112=13&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sir=CvC=2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ral=CvC=2&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hawaa=CvCV=12=3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bid=2 Dojaa=3 Law=2 Laa=2 Shomoo=3 Sol=2 Go=1 Raree=3. Pattern is: 2 3 2 1 3 2 2 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further details and many lines are explained on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/showthread.php?16003-Does-it-work-in-English&amp;amp;s=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Poetry Free-for-all&lt;/a&gt;; threads #11 and #12; unfortunately most of the links there are no more active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2148" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:07:14.017" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:07:14.017" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T00:30:24.227" Score="7" ViewCount="4276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites have published a modified version of Kipling's poem &amp;quot;The Beginnings.&amp;quot; In the new version of the poem, the title was renamed to &amp;quot;THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON&amp;quot; (often posted in all caps), and the word &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; was replaced with &amp;quot;Saxon&amp;quot;. Even though the poem is modified, it is still attributed to Kipling. This poem came to my attention thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3215/did-rudyard-kipling-write-the-wrath-of-the-awakened-saxon&quot;&gt;a question on our site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments of that question, one member of this site asked a very logical and interesting question: what is the point of changing &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Saxon&amp;quot;? I thought that the question was a good one that didn't deserve to remain hidden in the comments section, so I'm asking it as a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of this poem can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.europeanamericansunited.org/school1/Fiction/kipling/awakened.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;europeanamericansunited.org&lt;/a&gt; (the URL is very telling). And here is a copy of the poem, if you understandably don't want to be visiting these websites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not part of their blood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It came to them very late,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With long arrears to make good,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were not easily moved,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They were icy -- willing to wait.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Till every count should be proved,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ere the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their voices were even and low.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their eyes were level and straight.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There was neither sign nor show.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not preached to the crowd.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It was not taught by the state.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No man spoke it aloud.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was not suddently bred.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It will not swiftly abate.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through the chilled years ahead,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When Time shall count from the date.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That the Saxon began to hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T04:39:30.850" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T04:39:30.850" Title="Why rename Kipling's poem &quot;The Beginnings&quot; to “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-12T13:50:17.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:50:17.383" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T13:50:17.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-12T13:50:17.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 20th-century English writer Anthony Burgess (1917 - 1993) or about any of his literary works, most famously &quot;A Clockwork Orange&quot;." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:16:50.480" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:16:50.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3542" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3543" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 20th-century US author and columnist Erma Bombeck or about any of her writings and literature." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T13:53:19.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T14:02:08.937" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, the original master plan (foiled by dumb chance and human incompetence) was that the newly born Antichrist should be brought up in the family of the US Cultural Attaché in Britain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was this considered the best place for the Antichrist to grow up?&lt;/strong&gt; Is this a subtle dig at American culture by the two (British) authors, implying that the cultural section of a US embassy is where the world's greatest depths of moral depravity are to be found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I'm still in the middle of reading the book, so apologies if this is answered later on. But I'm past the point where Crowley and Aziraphale know there was a mix-up, so I suspect we won't be seeing much more of the Dowling family after this.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T15:00:16.420" Title="Why was an American diplomat's family considered the best place for the Antichrist?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3483" CreationDate="2017-09-12T20:09:17.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;“A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall” is, undoubtedly, one of Dylan’s best songs, and in fact it was the song that Patti Smith performed during the Nobel prize ceremony last year. Before I attempt an answer let me provide some context first. The reference for what follows is the book “Bob Dylan - All The Songs: The story behind every track” by P. Margotin and J. Gueson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” was written in the summer of 1962, at the peak of the Cold War and just before the events that lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The song has has been associated with this historical episode, and in fact most people believe that the song was written as a response to the crisis (October 1962). In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://bobdylan.com/albums/freewheelin-bob-dylan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;liner notes to Dylan’s second album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the song, it is written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;Hard Rain,&quot; adds Dylan, &quot;is a desperate kind of song.&quot; It was written during the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 when those who allowed themselves to think of the impossible results of the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation were chilled by the imminence of oblivion. &quot;Every line in it,&quot; says Dylan, &quot;is actually the start of a whole song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn't have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in fact the song must have been written earlier, since (a version of) it was first performed in public by Dylan in September 22, 1962, during a hootenany organised by Pete Seeger (a notable folk musician) at Carnegie Hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A recording of that performance is available here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WbcFrS-tX8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WbcFrS-tX8&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure of the song -as a dialogue between a mother and a son who is coming back home- and the melody itself are borrowed from &lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87742141?mode=transcription&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Scottish folk ballad “Lord Randall”&lt;/a&gt; that dates back to the 17th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A version of the ballad can be found here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2I6aRh9LOQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2I6aRh9LOQ&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my impression that the melody of the original &quot;Lord Randall” is sad and mournful (others may judge differently), Dylan adaptation sounds slightly more uplifting but I think (and the reference above shows) that his intention was definitely to write a powerful protest song, almost like a prophetic vision of sorts, reflecting the fear of a human-provoked apocalyptic event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let me add a couple of lines by Dylan himself also taken from the liner notes to &quot;The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan” (and don’t forget that he was 21 years old at the time). They were quite revealing for me and in a way may hint at what was his vision in his early songs and albums:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The way I think about the blues,&quot; he says, &quot;comes from what I learned from Big Joe Williams. The blues is more than something to sit home and arrange. What made the real blues singers so great is that they were able to state all the problems they had; but at the same time, they were standing outside them and could look at them. And in that way, they had them beat. What's depressing today is that many young singers are trying to get inside the blues, forgetting that those older singers used them to get outside their troubles.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2156" LastEditorUserId="2156" LastEditDate="2017-09-12T20:49:49.993" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T20:49:49.993" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3551" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T23:23:49.887" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a lot of historical romance novels (specifically those set in Regency England), people decide to get married very suddenly a lot of the time. You see this a lot in the marriage of convenience trope, but also in various other flavours of historical romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this happens, they usually either end up running away to Gretna Green (because apparently anyone there can witness/perform marriages, at least in the era historical romances are usually set) or getting a &quot;special licence&quot; that allows them to get married very quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's this special licence? Why is it needed? Is this an actual thing that was required of people of the time, or is it merely a romance novel trope that allows the author to sidestep the actual laws/rules of marriage in that time period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T16:08:52.937" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T16:08:52.937" Title="Why is a special license needed to get married?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;historical-romance&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-12T23:35:47.530" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1965 Arthur Waskow &quot;asked [Paul Booth] whether anyone had ever considered the possibility that the New Left was inventing a 'new literary form.'&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Smoking Typewriters&lt;/em&gt; 21, McMillian 2011; referencing SDS Records, Reel 5, Series 2A, No. 42, August 2, 1965) In McMillian's context, Waskow was probably referring to the  radical approach toward letter-sharing as a form of &quot;dialogue and cross-fertilization&quot; which characterized the Students for a Democratic Society. It could, however, be speaking to the style of underground press which rose out of that correspondence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the SDS's epistles, or the underground press movement associated with the New Left, considered unique forms of literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-09-12T23:35:47.530" Title="Did the SDS invent a new literary form?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T04:55:05.553" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lyrics to &lt;em&gt;Nighttime Birds&lt;/em&gt;, the title track from the album of the same name by &lt;em&gt;The Gathering&lt;/em&gt;, are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their ways are open&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they spread as their wings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they want to be certain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of a warm surrounding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they fly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  through the night as beautiful&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nighttime birds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The warm wind picks them up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they fly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  through the night as beautiful&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nighttime birds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in the lines &quot;they want to be certain / of a warm surrounding&quot; and &quot;The warm wind picks them up&quot;. Why is this associated with &lt;strong&gt;nighttime&lt;/strong&gt; birds? Typically, you wouldn't associate &quot;night&quot; with &quot;warm winds&quot; and wanting to be sure of a warm surrounding, but the lyrics are quite specific that they want to be certain of a warm surrounding &quot;when they fly through the night.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, are they merely seeking warmth &lt;em&gt;in the midst of&lt;/em&gt; the night?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third (rather literal) interpretation is that the song's referring to the fact that migrating birds tend to try to catch warmer &quot;updrafts&quot; by opening their wings to &quot;catch&quot; it. There are a few birds that are either nocturnal or frequently migrate at night, so I suppose that it's &lt;em&gt;plausible&lt;/em&gt; at least that the author was thinking of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an authoritative source on which one the author was referring to? Or are there other possibilities that I'm not thinking of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T04:55:05.553" Title="Why does &quot;Nighttime Birds&quot; associate night with warmth?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-gathering&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3166" CreationDate="2017-09-13T10:38:29.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_desert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book deserts&lt;/a&gt; is well documented and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/where-books-are-nonexistent/491282/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very serious indeed&lt;/a&gt;, so any mass movement aiming to tackle the issue needs to be appreciated for trying to make a difference towards improving low-income people's access to books and literacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am Indian and have no direct experience of this initiative, but was intrigued to read a good many articles about Little Free Libraries including on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Free_Library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; after first learning of the movement thanks to your question right here today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall be glad to provide more references when I get more time, but it seems to me the important aspect that is maybe not explicitly mentioned in the question, answer or comments is that &lt;strong&gt;the vast majority of the book-sharing initiative here is being taken up by individual volunteers&lt;/strong&gt; who are convinced by the original concept and greatly motivated to start book sharing and community building around that little library on their lawn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course 'Little Free Library' the non-profit company is providing concept, guidance, affiliation and also selling the kits to make the little libraries, but individual book lovers seem to be deciding where to put them up and what books to fill them with, also how to interact with the community. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Individuals living in various places are most of the affiliates, and this movement therefore seems to be &lt;strong&gt;not necessarily a vast, centralised, pre-planned, heavily funded and company-regulated project to provide free books to the underprivileged&lt;/strong&gt;, where the non-profit company decides policy and placement, and so has greater control over the outcomes, but rather an earnest attempt by many like-minded people to inculcate a love of reading in those who have not been reading much to begin with. Not necessarily because they are &lt;em&gt;poor&lt;/em&gt;, either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that for this very reason it is not easy to assess the impact of this recent movement from the specific perspective of your question -- was providing free books to the &lt;em&gt;poor&lt;/em&gt; even the fundamental intention of many of those book-lovers who built those libraries? I think getting more people to care more about reading was likely a more immediate motivation --  but the huge number of affiliated little libraries is itself testament to its global popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the same Wikipedia article,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are more than 50,000 registered Little Free Libraries worldwide, in all 50 of the United States and in 70 countries (...) While the majority of Little Free Libraries are in the United States, the book exchanges can be found in countries around the world, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Italy, Germany, UK, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Russia, Armenia, Pakistan, Qatar, Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, China, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The fact that the concept has been adopted in Colombia, &lt;a href=&quot;https://littlefreelibrary.org/two-libraries-a-world-apart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greece&lt;/a&gt; and parts of Africa and and Asia tells me that the real impact of this idea may eventually be felt more in developing countries, within communities hungry for literacy and reading opportunities.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In developing parts of the world, book-sharing on the Little Free Library model makes sense because access to reading is not a priority and public library systems are underdeveloped. The idea has &lt;strong&gt;potential there&lt;/strong&gt;, is what I mean, although a lot of work will need to be done by the local communities themselves, to build and sustain these valuable social projects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is debatable whether such a collection of individual initiatives, even so numerous and popular as this, can really benefit the poorest people, or whether reading can even be grown without addressing the huge problem of poverty, as pointed out in the earlier answer and comments, but while the library profession may be divided about the impact and value of the Little Free Library movement, I read that a list of honors that librarians have bestowed on Little Free Library include Library Journal’s Movers and Shakers Award (2013), the National Book Foundation’s Innovations in Reading Prize (2013), and a Library of Congress Best Practices Award (2015).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe it is time to take the project into the inner-city areas to benefit the impoverished and thus embattled urban communities, as suggested in @Joshua Engel's thoughtful comment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave you for now with this extract from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/05/the-case-against-little-free-libraries/523533/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same detailed article&lt;/a&gt; that provided the information about the above list of awards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe the solution is to fight for library services in underserved neighborhoods [...] if public support for library services and innovation were stronger, especially in marginalized communities [...] if book deserts weren’t a thing, then Little Free Library would have no claim over them [ ...] In just 6 years, the organization has emerged as a recognizable new element of the urban landscape—or at least certain landscapes. Now that all those boxes are out there, Little Free Library could really do something to activate and extend their network.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="2159" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T02:58:13.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-14T02:58:13.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3544" CreationDate="2017-09-13T11:08:35.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd say that yes, this is a subtle dig at American culture in the way that you described. A fair proportion of the UK population see the American 'ruling elite' as only having their own interests at heart. Raising the anti-christ in this environment would give the child a good grounding for the tasks ahead of him/her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd also suggest that it was a reworking or homage to the film '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Omen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Omen&lt;/a&gt;' where the anti-christ (Damien) is placed with Robert &amp;amp; Katherine Thorn. Robert Thorn is then appointed to the post of U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2017-09-13T15:00:16.420" LastActivityDate="2017-09-13T15:00:16.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-13T16:56:47.917" Score="7" ViewCount="1491" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm taking notes and learning about the poem &quot;North&quot; by Seamus Heaney, and would like help with the literary analysis of some lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Expect aurora Borealis in the long foray, but no cascade of light. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel this may mean that the poem's speaker should expect to receive flashes of brilliance in his endeavours, but no complete enlightenment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;trust the feel of what nubbed treasure your hands have known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't even find an adequate definition anywhere of &quot;nubbed&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Appreciate the help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2162" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-10T19:32:50.967" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T13:08:18.097" Title="In the poem &quot;North&quot; by Seamus Heaney, what is meant by the Aurora Borealis line and the word &quot;nubbed&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;seamus-heaney&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-14T00:28:12.727" Score="6" ViewCount="1197" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=mp0s9GgrafUC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PA24#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pg 24&lt;/a&gt;), archetypal criticism has had a falling out with modern critics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;More recently, critics have been wary of the reductionism involved in the application of such unverified hypotheses to literary works, and more alert to the cultural differences that the archetypal approach often overlooks in its search for universals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt; doesn't really elaborate on this, or provide any resources for me to learn more about the topic. But at the same time, it's the &lt;em&gt;Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;, which is a well regarded source, so it seems unlikely (but still possible) for the dictionary's claims to be incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific point when critics began rejecting the archetypal approach? Why exactly does this approach lead to reductionism and/or the overlooking of cultural differences? Is the Oxford Dictionary even correct when it says that modern critics have become wary of archetypal criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T22:36:07.340" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T13:47:28.057" Title="Why don't modern critics like archetypes?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3562" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3564" CreationDate="2017-09-14T16:44:01.733" Score="14" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this poem in a collection and now I can't find it. It starts with the poet talking about how they were approached by someone who had loved one of their poems. But the reader could not remember the name of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This delighted the poet because, not only had the poem moved the reader, but someday they would rediscover it and be moved all over again as if they were reading it for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anybody know the name of this poem, and the name of the poet?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(P.S. Yes, I am aware of the irony here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-14T16:50:12.713" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T01:26:44.613" Title="The name of a poem about a poet being happy that someone has forgotten the title of their poem" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3562" CreationDate="2017-09-15T06:02:40.317" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually found it myself. I remembered the collection I had read it in and searched through it. It is &lt;em&gt;The Secret&lt;/em&gt; by Denise Levertov.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two girls discover&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the secret of life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;in a sudden line of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;poetry.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I who don’t know the&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;secret wrote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the line. They&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;told me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(through a third person)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;they had found it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;but not what it was&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;not even&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;what line it was. No doubt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;by now, more than a week&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;later, they have forgotten&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the secret,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the line, the name of&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the poem. I love them&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;for finding what&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I can’t find,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and for loving me&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;for the line I wrote,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;and for forgetting it&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;so that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a thousand times, till death&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;finds them, they may&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;discover it again, in other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lines&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;in other&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;happenings. And for&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;wanting to know it,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;assuming there is&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;such a secret, yes,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;for that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;most of all.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise now that I had the description a little bit wrong. That's the trouble with memory I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="1900" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T09:55:04.053" LastActivityDate="2017-09-15T09:55:04.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-15T09:32:21.773" Score="4" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A4ngerkrieg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sängerkrieg&lt;/a&gt;, or contest of minstrels, was an event which (supposedly) took place at Wartburg Castle in Germany in the early 13th century. Since its veracity is disputed, I assume there weren't any contemporary written accounts of it, so presumably the story of the Sängerkrieg lasted a long time in purely oral form. My question is: how long, exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when was the first written version of either &lt;strong&gt;1)&lt;/strong&gt; the tale of the event itself or &lt;strong&gt;2)&lt;/strong&gt; the actual songs which were supposedly recited there? I'm especially curious about the latter, to see how long these songs lasted as oral tradition while being linked to a specific event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T07:40:37.170" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T07:40:37.170" Title="How long did accounts of the Sängerkrieg last as purely oral literature?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3872" CreationDate="2017-09-15T10:47:19.980" Score="12" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;Catch 22&lt;/em&gt;, Yossarian describes how he makes a boring task (censoring letters) interesting by erecting &quot;dynamic intralinear tensions&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more &lt;strong&gt;dynamic intralinear tensions&lt;/strong&gt;, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but the salutation &quot;Dear Mary&quot; from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, &quot;I yearn for you tragically A. T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.&quot; A. T. Tappman was the group chaplain's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Heller having a go at a particular pompous academic or clique? Or, did he invent this strained term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="567" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T18:36:28.353" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T14:36:43.273" Title="Did Heller base his sarcastic swipe at academia on any actual example?" Tags="&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-15T16:36:49.873" Score="6" ViewCount="4946" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &quot;FACT&quot; page of the book &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; by Dan Brown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The Consortium&quot; is a private organization with offices in seven countries. Its name has been changed for considerations of security and privacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this organization, really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-15T18:54:29.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T09:24:34.490" Title="What is the real &quot;Consortium&quot; as mentioned in Dan Brown's Inferno?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;inferno&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T04:51:59.427" Score="9" ViewCount="3253" Body="&lt;p&gt;The witches tell Macbeth that he will be defeated only if Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. This should give Macbeth a very good reason to &lt;em&gt;avoid&lt;/em&gt; Dunsinsane, so that his enemies never focus on it. If I were Macbeth, I would probably burn down Dunsinane, and then move to another part of the country. Why does he, instead, fortify it? The prophecy does not say that he will be defeated when Dunsinane is overrun; it says that he will be defeated when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2172" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T07:57:44.517" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T19:06:45.927" Title="Why does Macbeth move to and fortify Dunsinane?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T09:34:19.173" Score="9" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is directly inspired from this one on &lt;a href=&quot;https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/27141/the-word-chimiste-in-baudelaires-au-lecteur&quot;&gt;French Language Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize it, the OP is wondering about the good translation for &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;chimiste&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; in Baudelaire's opening poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal/1861/Au_lecteur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Au Lecteur&lt;/a&gt;. This poem can also be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://fleursdumal.org/poem/099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; with some translations of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to provide an answer, but, as non specialist, I feel it can be considered as opinion-based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question here is double:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What to think about this particular case (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;chemist&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;alchemist&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And more globally what is the good way to forge an opinion in such a case?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've read these questions and answers (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/163/what-are-the-challenges-in-translating-a-work-of-literature&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2686/does-translation-take-away-from-the-meaning-of-verse-and-poetry&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;) but I think this is not totally a duplicate of them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the comment of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/111/hamlet&quot;&gt;Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;, I try here to explain my reasoning about this translation (but my English is poor and saying all this is not self evident... sorry about that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Baudelaire could have chosen the word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;alchemist&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; if he though it was the good/appropriated one. But he did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely there is the alexandrine aspect, and due to that we can not have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sur l'oreiller du mal c'est Satan Trismégiste&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Et le riche métal de notre volonté&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Est tout vaporisé par ce savant alchimiste (13 syllables).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we can't either have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Est vaporisé par ce savant alchimiste (because we lose here the two hemistichs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But (even if less pleasant), it can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Est tout vaporisé par ce grand alchimiste (12 = 6 + 6 syllables... even if Trismégiste is already &amp;quot;three times great&amp;quot;...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or any other formulation that surely Baudelaire was able to elaborate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On another plane, there is the meaning aspect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first one is near context &amp;quot;riche métal&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;rich metal&amp;quot;) which recalls gold, added to &amp;quot;enchanté&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;bewitched&amp;quot;) et &amp;quot;vaporisé&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;vaporized&amp;quot;)... which all could tend to alchemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is the overall poem context: Baudelaire is talking about our human condition, something totally real which is not related to false beliefs (alchemy). And presuming Satan is part of this reality (or simply an allegory), he is surely skilled enough to make usage of a real science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize, my opinion is &amp;quot;chemist&amp;quot; is more appropriate. But I'm in hope to find here a more accurate and expert explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2173" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T01:04:40.253" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T01:04:40.253" Title="Accuracy of the translation of Baudelaire's &quot;Au Lecteur&quot;: how to forge an opinion?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;charles-baudelaire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T13:57:44.273" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Subway&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;The Last Poets,&quot; 1970, track 02) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/The-last-poets-on-the-subway-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius.com link&lt;/a&gt;) concludes with shouting the word &quot;blink&quot; a lot, and I'm not sure what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface level, I figure it might be describing the lights going past the train--but it could just as easily be the two men blinking furiously at each other. The verses describe both character and environment in a similar manner earlier in the piece. Or it could be something else entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And whatever literal element the blinking is depicting in the scene described, what does it signify for the poem's theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="151" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T21:19:35.853" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T21:19:35.853" Title="What's all the blinking about?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-last-poets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-16T15:34:23.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T15:34:23.913" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T15:34:23.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-16T15:34:23.913" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to the book Inferno written by Dan Brown. Please use this tag with the [Dan-Brown] tag." OwnerUserId="2169" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-16T17:47:11.177" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T17:47:11.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-16T21:23:55.263" Score="4" ViewCount="626" Body="&lt;p&gt;Digable Planets' &lt;em&gt;Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like That)&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space),&quot; 1993, track 06, released as a single in 1992) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Digable-planets-rebirth-of-slick-cool-like-dat-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius.com link&lt;/a&gt;) quotes the &quot;blink blink&quot; passages from &lt;em&gt;On the Subway&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;The Last Poets,&quot; 1970, track 02) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/The-last-poets-on-the-subway-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genius.com link&lt;/a&gt;), but in a radically different context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the &quot;blink blink/think think&quot; lines in &lt;em&gt;Rebirth of Slick&lt;/em&gt; signify independent of their reference to &lt;em&gt;On the Subway&lt;/em&gt;, when taken solely as lines in Digable Planets' own work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does &lt;em&gt;Rebirth of Slick's&lt;/em&gt; quotation of &lt;em&gt;On the Subway&lt;/em&gt; transform the meaning of the quoted text? Are Digable Planets calling attention to some relationship between themselves (or their work) and The Last Poets (or &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; work)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2017-09-16T21:23:55.263" Title="What does &quot;Rebirth of Slick&quot; mean when it quotes &quot;On the Subway&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;the-last-poets&gt;&lt;digable-planets&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3959" CreationDate="2017-09-17T05:09:45.740" Score="13" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, people often spend weeks, months, or even decades in other worlds. They return to their old life at the exact instant that they left as if they were never gone. For example, the Pevensies spent years (perhaps decades?) in Narnia after the events of &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. Afterwards, they're transported back to their original lives as schoolchildren and carry on with their ordinary lives. People still treated them the exact same way that they always treated them, oblivious to all of the knowledge, skills, and life experience that they gained while they were in Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's strongly implied that being in certain worlds influences your abilities and attitudes to an extent (characters often slowly regain certain skills, such as swordsmanship, over the course of several hours upon returning to Narnia). Even setting that aside, why didn't the characters find that &lt;em&gt;profoundly&lt;/em&gt; disturbing? Personally, if I woke up as a 10-year-old again and was expected to carry on living as if I actually was a 10-year-old (returning to elementary school, etc.) and being treated as if I was 10, I'd find that &lt;em&gt;profoundly&lt;/em&gt; unsettling and frustrating (not to mention infuriating), so why does this never appear in the books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T05:25:59.337" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:13:44.567" Title="Why don't people in the Chronicles of Narnia have trouble &quot;transitioning&quot; back to their old life after extended times in other worlds?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3576" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-17T18:01:47.577" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a chapter of this book years ago, and I really want to read it now but can't remember the name or author (Tom Clancy maybe?). It started like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two men (at least one is really high up in the military), drive to a meeting separately. They meet in a park or somewhere like that to avoid microphones or cameras recording them. They talk about possible plots against the US (I think the White House specifically) and one of them talks about how he would do it if he were a terrorist. Based on the ripples in a nearby harbor/body of water, he realizes that there are boats under the water (he was a sailor or something), and they both realize that the plot he thought of was occurring right then. They leave quickly in the non-military guy's car because they think the military guy's car will be sabotaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that was hard to follow but if anyone knows what this book is, please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2183" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T18:20:10.747" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:57:59.940" Title="Identify a military-science type book where two men meet and discuss plans, realize that boats underwater are the plan in motion" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3414" CreationDate="2017-09-17T18:22:46.217" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heaven is obviously seen as a perfect place, with no sin, filled with God's presence.  Las Vegas is sometimes seen as the exact opposite - there's gambling (which some view as sinful), &quot;immoral&quot; adult entertainment, and it's not very religious.  God is nowhere to be found.  These things led to the nickname &quot;Sin City,&quot; as Peter Shor pointed out.  Arguably, no other city has the same powerful reputation, so this is probably why the Cocteau Twins chose it to contrast with a perfect Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we say &quot;I'm in heaven&quot; we mean it's something wonderful, which the song implies. Being in Las Vegas can also feel enjoyable and wonderful, but at the same time it might be wrong or not worth the consequences. So he's saying, this feels great, but is it right and good in the long run? At least that was my take on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2183" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-17T20:21:05.147" LastActivityDate="2017-09-17T20:21:05.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3363" CreationDate="2017-09-17T23:11:50.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kafka didn't technically finish the book, but it's worth noting that at the ending, Agents executed Josef K.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that whatever agency was doing the prosecution had at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; capacity to act. Unfortunately, due to the fact that the novel isn't complete, it's not clear exactly what happened to cause that to happen (other than Josef K. being told by a priest that his trial was going badly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While we can't know exactly what precipitated his ultimate execution, Josef K. learns from Titorelli (a court sketch artist) that it's essentially impossible to be acquitted. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial#Plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; summarizes their meeting as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Titorelli turns out to be an official painter of portraits for the court (an inherited position), and has a deep understanding of the process. K. learns that, to Titorelli's knowledge, not a single defendant has ever been acquitted. He sets out K.'s options and offers to help K. with either. The options are: obtain a provisional verdict of innocence from the lower court, which can be overturned at any time by higher levels of the court, which would lead to re-initiation of the process; or curry favor with the lower judges to keep the process moving at a glacial pace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not known whether Josef K. had taken any steps to try to cause his trial to &quot;grind to a halt,&quot; although it is worth noting that he had fired his lawyer, so he &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; not have been. (It's very unclear whether the lawyer had actually done anything, though, and we can't be sure about exactly what Josef K. had been doing in the interum with regards to his trial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These facts seem to suggest that Josef K. would've been convicted and executed had he simply ignored the summons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one thing that his participation in his trial &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to have done is to have &quot;broken&quot; him in some sense, and he offers no resistence when agents come to execute him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning, Josef K. appears to hold out at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; hope that he's dealing with people that can be reasoned with. Between that and the uncertainty about what the agency can actually do to him, it's actually fairly natural that he would &quot;go along with&quot; the process (at least at first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-23T20:28:09.687" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T20:28:09.687" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-18T04:31:51.130" Score="1" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lyrics to &lt;em&gt;Long Road out of Eden&lt;/em&gt; by the Eagles are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moon shinin' down through the palms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shadows movin' on the sand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Somebody whisperin' the twenty-third psalm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dusty rifle in his tremblin' hands&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Somebody tryin' just to stay alive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He got promises to keep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Over the ocean in America&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Far away and fast asleep&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Silent stars blinkin' in the blackness of an endless sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cold silver satellites, ghostly caravans passin' by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Galaxies unfoldin', new world's bein' born&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pilgrims and prodigals creepin' toward the dawn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's a long road out of Eden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Music blastin' from an SUV&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On a bright and sunny day&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rollin' down the Interstate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the good old USA&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Havin' lunch at The Petroleum Club&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Smokin' fine cigars and swappin' lives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He said, &quot;Give me another slice of that barbecued brisket&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Give me another piece of that pecan pie&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Freeways flickerin', cell phones chimin' a tune&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We're ridin' to utopia, road map says we'll be arrivin' soon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Captains of the old order clingin' to the reins&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Assurin' us these aches inside are only growin' pains&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But it's a long road out of Eden&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Back home, I was so certain the path was very clear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But now I have to wonder what are we doin' here'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm not countin' on tomorrow and I can't tell wrong from right&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I'd give anythin' to be there in your arms tonight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Weavin' down the American highway&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through the litter and the wreckage and the cultural junk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bloated with entitlement, loaded on propaganda&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now we're drivin' dazed and drunk&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Been down the road to Damascus, the road to Mandalay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Met the ghost of Caesar on the Appian Way&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He said, &quot;It's hard to stop this bingein' once you get a taste&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the road to empire is a bloody stupid waste&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Behold the bitten apple, the power of the tools&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But all the knowledge in the world is of no use to fools&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's a long road out of Eden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Appian Way was a major Roman Road. The Road to Damascus was presumably referring to the Apostle Paul's conversion experience, and presumably the &quot;bitten apple&quot; is referring to the fall of Adam and Eve (hence the &quot;long road out of Eden&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Caesar selected because he represented imperialist empire-building? If so, is this song primarily &quot;about&quot; imperialism and war, or is it talking about imperialism more in the context of overall American materialism and &quot;cultural junk&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One more factor to consider: the very next song is &quot;I Dreamed There Was No War.&quot; I &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; doubt that this placement was coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what's the significance of Mandalay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-18T14:24:03.787" LastActivityDate="2017-09-18T14:24:03.787" Title="Why did they meet the &quot;ghost of Caesar&quot; or go on the &quot;road to Mandalay&quot; in &quot;Long Road out of Eden&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;eagles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="423" CreationDate="2017-09-18T23:06:34.590" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the poem is value-laden about these things, but I do think that the poem is about (which is to say, interested in) issues around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;temptation (aestheticizing an immoral/sinful act is a good way to make oneself feel less bad about committing it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;how we ask for forgiveness (grammatically, the speaker does not ask for it at all)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;remorse (which, does the speaker show it?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;excuses (there is no punctuation between &amp;quot;Forgive me&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;they were delicious&amp;quot; as if the speaker was rushing to get the justification out)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and similar concerns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good meta-question for the poem might be: Is how the speaker goes about the act of eating the plums and making their apology a morally good, emotionally effective way, or a way that assuages their own feelings without actually resolving the root problem? The poem to me has always seemed a warning against passive-aggressiveness, and an argument for authenticity in social engagement. Think about how you would feel if your roommate left this note!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prosaic quality in this poem that some have noted (&amp;quot;remove the line breaks and it's just a couple little sentences&amp;quot;, by the way, is descriptive of a vast swath of English poetic history) lends to imagining it as an actual, material object. That imagination gives the document an insistently embedded, social dimension that can't be ignored: the poem, the note on the fridge, is an act of communication that is inescapably politicized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1962" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T23:52:17.270" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T23:52:17.270" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3584" CreationDate="2017-09-18T16:27:59.530" Score="2" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems it was written about a military initiative in &lt;a href=&quot;http://crossref-it.info/textguide/wilfred-owen-selected-poems/36/2640&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spring 1917&lt;/a&gt; but was there a name for the battle itself?  I can't seem to find a reference anywhere...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2192" OwnerDisplayName="rogerdpack" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T07:00:06.730" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T09:59:05.170" Title="What Battle inspired Wilfred Owen's &quot;Spring Offensive&quot; poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;wilfred-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2739" CreationDate="2017-09-19T04:42:30.860" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always understood the phrase &quot;let the dead bury the dead&quot; to mean &quot;let it go, it's over, time to move on&quot;. In the case of &quot;to Kill a Mockingbird&quot; that is exactly what Sheriff Tate is telling Atticus. No earthly good can be served by arresting Boo Randall for killing an evil man who was trying to kill a child. All it can do is cause more harm. So bury the truth and let the dead deal with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2187" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T04:42:30.860" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3582" CreationDate="2017-09-19T09:59:05.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Owen does not label a particular action in the poem, but there is supporting evidence to suggest it was inspired by a specific event. Shortly before writing the poem, he put this in a letter home on the 25th April:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Immediately after I sent my last letter…..we were rushed up into the&#xA;  line. Twice in one day we went over the top, gaining both our&#xA;  objectives. Our &quot;A&quot; Company led the attack and of course lost a&#xA;  certain number of men. I had some extraordinary escapes from shells&#xA;  and bullets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digging through the history of Owen's Battalion, the 2nd Manchesters, reveals that the likely action took place on the 14th of April. The troops were ordered into an attack on a trench complex on the western side of St. Quentin in northern France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To reach the jump-off point, the soldiers took a long march during which they rested in the shade of a hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Halted against the shade of a last hill,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After resting, they plunged into the assault over a ridge on the hill and were shelled by German artillery, suffering casualties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [snip]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Over an open stretch of herb and heather&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Exposed. And instantly the whole sky burned&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With fury against them; and soft sudden cups&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Opened in thousands for their blood; and the green slopes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chasmed and steepened sheer to infinite space.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On reaching their final objective, they found the German trench empty. After the action, most of the battalion was sent back to their HQ at Savy Wood to rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And crawling slowly back, have by degrees&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Regained cool peaceful air in wonder—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why speak they not of comrades that went under?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not definitive evidence, but given the strong circumstantial links in the dates and description of events, it seems likely this is the action which inspired the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: ST QUENTIN 1914-1918 - Hindenburg Line by Helen McPhail and Philip Guest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T09:59:05.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3586" CreationDate="2017-09-19T10:14:54.947" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Emily Fox-Seton&lt;/em&gt; by Frances Hodgson Burnett, there is this line in chapter nine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There had been noble Hyrsts in the reign of Henry I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I look up what hyrsts refers to, the dictionary says that it is the type of wood. But in the context of the book it is referring to the ancestors of a Marquis, who are being viewed with reverence, so it seems like that would be a strange comparison to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does anybody have an idea what the term could mean in this context?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T15:19:37.073" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T15:42:20.527" Title="What is a Noble Hyrst?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frances-hodgson-burnett&gt;&lt;emily-fox-seton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3585" CreationDate="2017-09-19T15:42:20.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In context, it refers to the family which is now called Walderhurst.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a longer quote from the passage you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She cherished a touching secret desire to know what might be discoverable concerning the women who had been Marchionesses of Walderhurst before.  None of them but herself, she gathered, had come to their husbands from bed-sitting rooms in obscure streets.  There had been noble Hyrsts in the reign of Henry I., and the period since then elapsed had afforded time for numerous bridals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is saying that the family of Walderhurst, formerly Hyrst (perhaps Hurst in between), has been counted as nobility since the reign of Henry I - namely, the early 1100s - and that due to their long pedigree, they have always been married to women from other wealthy families, not a single one from &quot;bed-sitting rooms in obscure streets&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hat tip to @Spagirl for pointing to this in comments; but as she said she wasn't going to post an answer, I went ahead and looked up the passage in order to do so myself.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T15:42:20.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3587" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-19T17:09:31.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T17:09:31.710" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T17:09:31.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3588" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-19T17:09:31.710" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English poet John Milton (1608–1674), author of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and other works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T18:04:34.943" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T18:04:34.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3589" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-19T17:11:44.817" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-19T17:11:44.817" LastActivityDate="2017-09-19T17:11:44.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3590" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-19T17:11:44.817" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400) or his life as a writer. He authored The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women and other works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T16:01:09.693" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T16:01:09.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3598" CreationDate="2017-09-20T20:35:45.613" Score="6" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Emperor-Over-the-Sea is referenced at several points during the series. The Stone Table, Deep Magic and the Deeper Magic were all set in motion by him, and he is the father of Aslan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same time, he does not directly enter the series; he does not appear to be present in Aslan's Country during &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; or the events of &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, and doesn't appear to directly intervene. He doesn't even seem to be present at the creation of Narnia during &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; or the Final Judgment in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; - the entire country was sang into existence by Aslan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that C. S. Lewis was not a deist, why is this? Why was the Emperor-Over-the-Sea such a remote figure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T09:12:46.280" Title="Why does the Emperor-Over-the-Sea play such a small role in the Chronicles of Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9644" CreationDate="2017-09-20T20:45:54.317" Score="13" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 11th-century king &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut_the_Great&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cnut/Knut/Canute&lt;/a&gt; of Denmark, Norway, and England is today best known for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_waves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;story&lt;/a&gt; of how he sat on the beach commanding the waves to turn back. The original account of this story, written in the 12th century by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_of_Huntingdon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry of Huntingdon&lt;/a&gt;, uses it to illustrate Cnut's &lt;strong&gt;humility&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[W]hen at the summit of his power, he [Canute] ordered a seat to be placed for him on the sea-shore when the tide was coming in; thus seated, he shouted to the flowing sea, &amp;quot;Thou, too, art subject to my command, as the land on which I am seated is mine; and no one has ever resisted my commands with impunity. I command you, then, not to flow over my land, nor presume to wet ihe feet and the robe of your lord.&amp;quot; The tide, however, continuing to rise as usual, dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leaped backwards, saying: &amp;quot;Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/henriciarchidia00unkngoog/page/n265&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon (1154) VI.17&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chroniclehenryh01foregoog/page/n234&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translated by Thomas Arnold (1879)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later accounts twisted it around so as to portray Cnut as a foolishly &lt;strong&gt;proud&lt;/strong&gt; ruler, as if he really believed he could stop the waves. The tale &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_waves#Proverbial_reference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has become&lt;/a&gt; an almost proverbial example of hubris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How and why did the moral of the story change?&lt;/strong&gt; I'd like to know both the nature of the change (if possible, some kind of timeline of accounts of the story?) and also the reason for it (e.g. did it start off as just a misunderstanding by a later storyteller, or could there have been some political motive?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T23:58:54.710" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T23:58:54.710" Title="How and why did the story of King Cnut change?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3597" CreationDate="2017-09-20T22:30:08.080" Score="8" ViewCount="1595" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3592/why-does-the-emperor-over-the-sea-play-such-a-small-role-in-the-chronicles-of-na&quot;&gt;Why does the Emperor-Over-the-Sea play such a small role in the Chronicles of Narnia?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the Emperor Beyond The Sea in &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; named that? &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; sea is he beyond, and why is he beyond it? Is this implying that the Emperor Beyond the Sea has a country that's kind of analogous to Aslan's Country? If so, why are they separate countries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T21:23:49.763" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T21:23:49.763" Title="Why is the Emperor Beyond the Sea named that?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-21T03:35:04.560" Score="-1" ViewCount="1308" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been asked this question and I am finding it difficult to pinpoint an answer. I presume it must be c) or e) but I cannot decide. An explanation of the correct choice would be very helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water....&quot; The rhetorical purpose of this description is to compare Miss Emily with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) a large aquatic creature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) a dead body submerged in formaldehyde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) an obese corpse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) a decomposing fish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e) a drowning victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2201" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T12:23:29.270" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T12:23:29.270" Title="What is the rhetorical purpose of the description of Miss Emily?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3595" CreationDate="2017-09-21T07:33:57.503" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see this as rhetorical.  It is a description of how bodies decompose in water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A body that is left in water will start to decompose, gases develop inside the body and force the skin outwards.  The skin of the bloated body becomes pallid and stretched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen a few times farm animals that have fallen into water and drowned.  Their bloated bodies are not a pleasant sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T07:33:57.503" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3594" CreationDate="2017-09-21T09:55:50.247" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emperor Beyond The Sea represents Yahweh, Old Testament God, The Father. Also, God of the Jews. Aslan represents Jesus and New Testament. Emperor indeed has a separate country (Israel, if you will) with his own people. You might say that he is beyond the Sea of Understanding or Knowledge; nobody can know his will or anything about him. In a way, Emperor is a hero of another story, a story that is almost finished. Being human god hybrid, Jesus is much closer and easier to understand than Yahweh; so it goes with Emperor and Aslan. Emperor is idea, far away from people's eye, unknown and unknowable. Aslan is there and approachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's my interpretation at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastActivityDate="2017-09-21T09:55:50.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3592" CreationDate="2017-09-21T10:00:21.427" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HeroOfAnotherStory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hero of another story&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In works of fiction, it often seems like the world revolves around the&#xA;  Main Characters, that nothing interesting happens unless one of them&#xA;  is in the middle of it. And sometimes that’s true; sometimes the main&#xA;  cast are so important that nothing big can happen without their&#xA;  involvement. But other times, it’s not that the Main Characters are&#xA;  the only ones that stories happen to; it’s that we only see the&#xA;  stories that happen to the Main Characters. It turns out the&#xA;  supporting characters have their own adventures going on off-screen,&#xA;  where they’re the stars and the Main Characters only make cameo&#xA;  appearances. These characters are the Heroes of Another Story: we may&#xA;  not see much of their adventures, but it adds something to the&#xA;  fictional world if we know these people continue to lead interesting&#xA;  lives even when the Main Characters aren’t around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2017-09-22T07:08:45.667" LastActivityDate="2017-09-22T07:08:45.667" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9118" CreationDate="2017-09-21T11:55:05.290" Score="10" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this in the 1990s while living in Kentucky. Pretty sure it was a library book, although I'm not certain if it was the school or city library. The main character is a young teenage male, in either middle school or high school, Caucasian, living in a small town in the United States. I believe it had pen-and-ink drawings at a few places in the book, and I'm pretty sure it was broken up into chapters. Two things have stuck with me: one is that he is at one point babysitting an infant (maybe his little brother?), and starts reading the dictionary to the child (I remember &quot;pusillanimous&quot; and &quot;susurration&quot; being two of the words, the latter being where he realized that the S words worked best), which calms the child. I think there was a later scene where the child was using a few multiple-syllable words as part of its babble, puzzling its parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is a running thread in the books where he's doing a science project for a science fair, and his projects keep accidentally breaking things. I believe his overall theme was sources of power over history. I remember one project was a full-sized catapult, complete with a large rock in the holder, which went off when someone (the teacher?) pulled the lever, not realizing it was functional. Another was a steam engine. I think it exploded because he didn't set up the pressure valve correctly. The last had something to do with a fan and a source of smoke, maybe a demonstration of wind power. I remember he initially was going to use a burning rag for the smoke, but found a more elegant solution, I think involving chemicals to generate smoke. At the time of the fair, the teachers were hesitant, knowing what had happened with the other projects, but when he switches it on, the calamity comes when a classmate suddenly leaps back and knocks some things (including a bottle of ink, I think) over. Turns out the classmate had reversed the fan blade, thinking it would cause the smoke to blow back on the protagonist, unaware that a reversed fan blade blows the same direction as before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like I ought to remember more of the book, but those are the bits that stick out. I remember being particularly impressed with the catapult, and trying the dictionary trick with my little brother (it didn't work as well as in the book, but I learned some new words in the process).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T02:37:35.493" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T18:51:30.430" Title="Book about a boy who develops several accidentally destructive science projects" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-21T12:02:26.490" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many Young Adult novels I have read lately (in the past couple years), the book changes the perspective every chapter (or every page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, &lt;em&gt;The Sun is Also a Star&lt;/em&gt;, by Nicola Yoon (ISBN: 9780553496680) and &lt;em&gt;I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives&lt;/em&gt;, by Caitlin Alifirenka, Liz Welch, and Martin Ganda (ISBN: 9780316241311).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This style gives the reader the personality, thoughts and feelings of many different major characters in the book, especially before they meet or connect, which they almost always do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I have personally seen this in recent years, what I would like to know is the &lt;strong&gt;first novel to use this method while still flowing naturally&lt;/strong&gt;. If you find this too subjective to answer, simply the first novel to regularly switch perspective will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="145" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T15:17:19.160" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T01:48:04.800" Title="When did the perspective-switching trend begin?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-22T16:14:12.520" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;King Rat&lt;/em&gt; by James Clavell, two radios in the camp are found by the Japanese. The radios were found only because of an informer. Who was the informer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some time I thought that it was Smeedel-Taylor, but my friends have proven to me that this makes no sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was the informer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2206" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:22:06.507" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:22:06.507" Title="Who is the radio informer in King Rat by Clavell?" Tags="&lt;james-clavell&gt;&lt;king-rat-clavell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3723" CreationDate="2017-09-23T09:35:17.807" Score="5" ViewCount="1095" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;IT&lt;/em&gt; (1986), Stan Uris is attacked near Derry light house by &lt;strong&gt;Pennywise&lt;/strong&gt;. He is able to survive this attack by just speaking the names of several birds and &lt;strong&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; is just taken aback. For some reason &lt;strong&gt;Pennywise&lt;/strong&gt; fear birds or doesn't like birds and this gives Stan some time to run from the scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;strong&gt;Pennywise&lt;/strong&gt; afraids of bird? I also asked this on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-reason-why-Pennywise-is-afraid-of-birds&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; but the answers I got are not satisfying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2089" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-09-23T14:37:35.277" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T11:51:11.930" Title="Why is It afraid of birds?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;it&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3363" CreationDate="2017-09-23T18:16:54.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this has been already answered, but this is my interpretation of why K. repeatedly went to the summons. K. is holds his reputation above all else and his fear that he may be deemed guilty and there after looked down upon by others gnaws at him. He tries to pretend that he doesn't care when in reality this scenario is making him go paranoid. K. is a man that will always try to solve a problem if a solution is apparent which we see throughout the novel. Each time his trial seems helpless, he is fed a little bit more information and regains hope that by one mean or another he can put this trial to rest. In this way, the Trial drives him mad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he did not show up at the proceedings nothing would have likely occurred. The story the priest tells K. near the end of the novel represents K.'s own life. The doors upon doors represents K.'s life and he is causing himself to be stuck at the first door because of the words the guard who represents the Law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1752" LastActivityDate="2017-09-23T18:16:54.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T01:27:08.733" Score="8" ViewCount="8170" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the defining features of literary fictions as compared to popular ones? Is it the way how characters are developed? Or is it some peculiarity in the use of language? Please feel free to explain in detail as I am a novice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a question popped up in my mind because of several reasons. Literary fiction is the more respected form. But many valuable literary works have actually been popular ones. For example the &quot;Arabian Nights&quot; or even the bible stories must be considered to be popular. But they are also respected as literary works. Is that solely because of historic reasons? Also is there some objective criteria that demarcates the genre and literary works? Like one is plot driven and the other is character driven. Or the form of language used in one versus the other. If so can they be expressed explicitly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the current context, there could be a book which might be characterized as satirical or detective fictions. But they might still be giving valuable insights into human nature or the society we live in. Will such works be remembered as great works of art?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2215" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T19:22:03.163" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T23:13:01.453" Title="What is the distinction between &quot;literary fiction&quot; vs. &quot;popular fiction&quot;?" Tags="&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3612" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T03:38:31.943" Score="3" ViewCount="1897" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn more about spoken word poetry, and I stumbled upon Darius Simpson and Scout Bostley's &quot;Lost Voices&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpPASWlnZIA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can watch the performance online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the themes of the piece is the problematic nature of the privileged speaking for the marginalized. Darius Simpson is a black man, and Scout Bostley is a white woman. Throughout the poem, they describe how those with privilege speak for them rather than allowing them to speak. Here's one such line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not a problem that you want to sympathize but to tell me you know my pain, is to stab yourself in the leg because you saw me get shot. We have two different wounds, and looking at yours does nothing to heal mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interested me about the piece is that when it's performed, the two performers describe each other's experience. For example, the poem begins with Bostley saying &quot;The first day I realized I was black,&quot; despite the fact that she is white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are Simpson and Bostley doing the very thing their spoken word poetry condemns?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T14:33:40.070" Title="Why do Simpson and Bostley speak for each other in &quot;Lost Voices&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;darius-simpson&gt;&lt;scout-bostley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3612" CreationDate="2017-09-24T05:06:13.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something you see a lot in spoken word poetry (particularly the poetry Button Poetry often features) is this willingness to explore the uncomfortable, about making you see the world from perspectives that are difficult to consider or subjects that don't often see the light of day in &quot;polite company&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem does that forcefully, from the very start. Before any words are uttered, you see the poets inhale, as if they're about to speak, and then they switch spots. While the lines are spoken, the one whose experiences are actually being delineated is performing them without a voice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole poem is focused on this idea of people from privileged positions (white privilege and male privilege) getting to be the louder voice, being about to get more airtime and attention and praise when &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; speak about the issues that affect their more marginalized counterparts. The male speaks about the woman's position, the white person speaks about the POC's perspective. They get heard, they get listened to, they get lauded for calling attention to the plights of others that they &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; can never understand or feel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the very action of the poem's presentation is, as you point out, the very thing they're working against, the very problem that they have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, it feels like this poem is intended to draw attention to the plight of the woman's perspective, and of the black man's perspective, but this is not so. The poem is supposed to make you uncomfortable with this idea, to push home this point that regardless of your good intentions in trying to give voice to the voiceless by using your own voice as a megaphone to declare that &lt;em&gt;something must be done&lt;/em&gt;, you are erasing the experiences and voices of the people who really need to be doing the speaking. You're not giving them a platform to speak, but instead insisting you know how to fix this &lt;em&gt;for them&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Movements are driven by passion not by asserting yourself dominant by&#xA;  a world that already put you there./You speak to know pain you only&#xA;  fathom because we told you it was there./You know nothing of silence,&#xA;  until someone who cannot know your pain tells you how to fix it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the sections of the poem that starts to push this idea that the privileged voice is not the one that needs to be speaking, by getting right up in the listener's face and making them face their own privilege (whatever that might be). Basically, nothing can change if you're already dominant, there's no drive to change that, you've already won. Yet people act like they understand, like their struggles are equal, like they can offer solutions to problems they've never had to face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this poem is calling out the idea of allyship, when it is just empty gestures and this insistence that any voice is better than no voice, even though that declaration tends to just be a way of erasing any chance the marginalized have for actually being able to voice their own experiences, their own pain, and to push for things that will actually help and actually cause something to change in a way that will actually make a difference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is a painful one to listen to, once you realize that. When you are forced to be shown how your own attempts at making things better for those who are less privileged than you actually cause more harm and heartache than you thought, because oh you were just trying to &lt;em&gt;help&lt;/em&gt;, its a hard thing to face. It's hard to look at them, to realize that they are doing the very thing you yourself may have done and there's this instinctive revulsion, like &quot;oh but I'm not like &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but if we all weren't &lt;em&gt;like that&lt;/em&gt; there wouldn't be a poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza kinda drives this point home:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Every day is a crucifixion when there is no regard for lines crossed./I fight so my voice can be heard/I fight for the voices you silence all in the name of what is right...The problem with speaking up for each other is that everyone is left without a voice.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line &quot;I fight for all the voices you silence in all in the name of what is right&quot; is the hardest line for me, because it echoes of not only present day, where the voices of the privileged get so much more airtime, but also echoes all these times in history where we tried to &lt;em&gt;make things right&lt;/em&gt; by allowing the louder voices to trample the quieter ones, where we tried to make everyone equal not by allowing everyone a voice and a stance, but by making them as much like the privileged group as possible, regardless of how much that made sense, or how much pain it caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is a very performative act - while the person with privilege is speaking for the other person, the marginalized person is speaking the same words BUT SILENTLY. You literally get to watch the act of someone's voice being forcefully removed and being replaced by a well meaning privileged ally. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tl;dr they do it because it makes for a damn powerful in your face poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T05:06:13.673" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T17:29:13.570" Score="8" ViewCount="2882" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the September/October 2017 issue of the &lt;em&gt;Cicada&lt;/em&gt; magazine, they ran a story by Nino Cipri, entitled &quot;A Silly Love Story&quot;. (Published online &lt;a href=&quot;http://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/slipstream/nicole-cipri/a-silly-love-story&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;by the author&lt;/a&gt; (who also goes by Nicole).) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story focuses on Jeremy - our main character, a man - and Merion, a bi-gendered character, who are in a relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see the story of how Jeremy and Merion met, and we see that Merion has an encounter with a girl who is curious as to whether Merion is a boy or girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jeremy was eating kalamata olives when a tall brunette with Bettie Page bangs approached Merion. &quot;Sorry,&quot; she said. &quot;I just have to ask, are you a girl or a boy?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Merion glared at her. &quot;I'm Merion.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Like, as in Maid Marion?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Like, as in fuck you,&quot; he spat. Jeremy's heart had sped up. It was an odd thing to fall in love with somebody's ferocious vulnerability...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Merion react so strongly? I understand that they are not one specific gender at all times, like the brunette seems to be insinuating, but why not just say 'I'm bi-gendered'? Why immediately blow up at the girl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:08:40.427" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:08:40.427" Title="Why does Merion react so strongly to being asked what their gender is?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nino-cipri&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3616" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3932" CreationDate="2017-09-24T18:09:39.380" Score="10" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt; contains interludes named &quot;Coming to America&quot;, which describe how certain gods and other entities arrived to the country. One of those stories features a djinn (a fire spirit, sort of), who works as a taxi driver, and a young man from Oman, who came to America on business. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/All_Books_Have_Genders&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;All Books Have Genders&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt; (collected in &lt;em&gt;The View from the Cheap Seats&lt;/em&gt;), Neil Gaiman discusses the book, and describes it as overall male, with the exception of the &quot;Coming to America&quot; stories, including this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book had a gender now, and it was most definitely male. I wonder now, looking back if the short stories in American Gods were a reaction to that. There are maybe half a dozen of them scattered through the book, and all (but one) of them are most definitely female in my head (even the one about the Omani trinket salesman and the taxi driver).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Page 73. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the story female? And what does female mean here? Both the main characters in it are male (there's of course them being gay, but I don't think it prompts the story being called female), and I don't see any traits in the story which could be called female.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; 1 &lt;/sup&gt; Hat tip to jo1storm for finding it on Neil Gaiman's website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T19:36:13.027" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T23:57:21.180" Title="Why is the Omani trinket salesman story &quot;female&quot;, and what does female mean here?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3617" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3622" CreationDate="2017-09-24T18:43:08.863" Score="3" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frank and Helen are some of the few people recorded to have entered Narnia and stayed permanently. That being said, most people return to England the exact moment that they left, and most other people don't stay permanently until they're actually killed in England (e.g. Prof. Kirke, who dies in a train accident).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, what happens to them in England? Did they simply disappear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:23:39.277" Title="What happened to Frank and Helen in England?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-24T19:10:58.890" Score="8" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently finished &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flatland&lt;/a&gt; (full text link), and I found it generally a somewhat disconcerting read. I realize that it's satire, and it's written in the tone of satire, particularly when it comes to women - but some of the remarks that they make in writing are very off-putting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can conclude roughly one of three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's actually satire and I'm misreading it under a modern lens with modern expectations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or - It's poorly-executed satire,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or - This portrayal isn't satire at all, and it just seems like it could be because of a modern lens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea which of these it is. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book as written is absolutely satire - the author denotes it as this; it's intended to remark on late Victorian-era societal structure. However, parentheticals sometimes include remarks and comparisons that we're intended to accept and gloss over, which has the effect of implying they're simply true without challenging them in any way (end of chapter 3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus, in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier class - &lt;strong&gt;creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence&lt;/strong&gt; - it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain things are absolutely satirical (from chapter 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...others oblige a Woman, when travelling, to be followed by one of her sons, or servants, or by her husband; others confine Women altogether to their houses except during the religious festivals. But it has been found by the wisest of our Circles or Statesmen that the multiplication of restrictions on Females tends not only to the debilitation and diminution of the race, but also to the increase of domestic murders to such an extent that a State loses more than it gains by a too prohibitive Code.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a setup that allows Abbot to draw attention to a poor Victorian standard... and then he challenges it in the worst possible way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For whenever the temper of the Women is thus exasperated by confinement at home or hampering regulations abroad, they are apt to vent their spleen upon their husbands and children; and in the less temperate climates the whole male population of a village has been sometimes destroyed in one or two hours of simultaneous female outbreak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These kinds of things, in addition to offhand references to &quot;the Frail Sex&quot; which go unchallenged, lead me to question whether, or &lt;strong&gt;which parts&lt;/strong&gt; were intended as satire, and which parts were intended to remain unchallenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any way to tell? How do we know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-24T19:40:39.673" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T19:40:39.673" Title="Which parts of the portrayal of women in &quot;Flatland&quot; are satire?" Tags="&lt;flatland&gt;&lt;satire&gt;&lt;edwin-abbott-abbott&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3615" CreationDate="2017-09-24T19:57:15.107" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two questions looped into one here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why, within the text, would Merion react this way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why was the story written with this scene present?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, these two have distinct answers, because the motivation for writing it doesn't simply amount to &quot;that's what Merion would do.&quot; So it's important to start there - why was this passage added?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exchange is operative on this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was an odd thing to fall in love with somebody's ferocious vulnerability, but that was the position Jeremy found himself in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This snippet of a scene is written specifically so &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; line is emphasized. In order for that thought to have such an impact as it's written, it has to proceed a moment where Merion exposes some kind of vulnerability, which means one of those moments has to be written in just before it. This is pretty early in the story, as well, so it's intended to highlight an important point of their relationship dynamic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this is a crude way of writing this in, but it's definitely functional. The scene feels abrupt, and for that reason, the &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; of Merion's irritation becomes obfuscated. I also don't see evidence that this snippet was &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to convey exactly why Merion responds this way, beyond Jeremy's vague conception of vulnerability, though, which does make it stick out in an odd way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a nice hook to the first question - why, within the text, would Merion react this way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To tell you the truth, there's no real way to know what the author had in mind, because the passage is so short. The most I can really say on this point is that I can empathize with the character's frustration. I have had similar experiences in the past. I don't have the same identity as this character, but it's similar enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to be very careful about what I say here, and please be careful as well, for two reasons. First, because my emotional experience is one experience, and I can only speak from what I know, and definitely not for all NB-identified people. And second, because all things equal, if it does matter to you, in my experience it's better to be open and ask than it is to assume, and I want to make that pointedly clear up front. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, the frustration with being asked repeatedly how you identify is... also real. While I'd probably put Merion's response at &quot;not constructive and not deserved,&quot; I'd also add on a hefty, &quot;but it's still understandable.&quot; That question, asked out of the blue, can feel like (and mean) a lot of things it's not intended to. Just a couple reasons I'd identify...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the question was asked at all means that, well, it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; matter to the asker. &lt;em&gt;Especially&lt;/em&gt; if it's the first time we've met (as is in-context for the story), it means they're not just &lt;em&gt;going&lt;/em&gt; to treat me differently, but are &lt;em&gt;intending&lt;/em&gt; to treat me differently, depending on which one of the two Acceptable Options I pick for them. That's a really uncomfortable position to be in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on top of that, it can be tiring. Being asked persistently about this leads to a feeling where, well, I really wish the answer just didn't matter (see above). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both these reasons are why I present cis at the cost of what I guess would be unexplored self-expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this to say, especially when asked at the wrong time, this question can really cause people to bristle internally. Merion being written this way... reflects that frustration, at least for me. But I would have liked to see the author describe it in a bit more detail, because as it's written, it's just hard to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T09:42:39.997" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T09:42:39.997" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3626" CreationDate="2017-09-24T22:03:23.987" Score="9" ViewCount="5878" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main demonic character in the humouristic-apocalyptic story &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; by Pratchett and Gaiman goes by the name Anthony &lt;strong&gt;Crowley&lt;/strong&gt; - a name which instantly jumped out at me because of its similarity to the famous English occultist and magician &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aleister Crowley&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily I would have dismissed it as a coincidence, since the surname Crowley isn't too uncommon, and in the context of &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; it even has a fictional etymology, being derived from &quot;Crawly&quot; the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But given the context - a book which talks a great deal about the occult and contains a great many British cultural references - I have to wonder if it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a deliberate reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What evidence is there that Crowley's name was chosen to refer to Aleister Crowley?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Evidence might take the form of e.g. quotes from the authors, comparisons with other things in the text, or any other reasonable course of deduction.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T17:19:13.303" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T17:19:13.303" Title="Is the name Crowley in Good Omens a reference to the famous occultist?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;&lt;aleister-crowley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3617" CreationDate="2017-09-24T22:31:50.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did they simply disappear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like the only possible answer, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you go to Narnia and spend an amount X of time there before returning to our world, then some amount Y of time will have passed here, where the relationship between X and Y is never made quite clear except that Y &amp;lt;&amp;lt; X. This is because, for whatever reason, time passes more quickly - often &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; more quickly - in Narnia than in our world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you go to Narnia and &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; return to our world, then ... well, you never return to our world. If you never leave Narnia, you'll never reappear in our world. So yes, &lt;strong&gt;they simply disappeared.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other possibility is that after many years in Narnia, when they were old and their descendants were ready to rule, they might have returned to our world, perhaps returning to their original ages like the Pevensies in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. But &lt;strong&gt;why would they want to do so?&lt;/strong&gt; Who'd give up being the benevolent ruler of a happy kingdom of talking animals for a life of drudgery as a cab driver in stinking 19th-century London? Husband and wife and all their children were in Narnia; they might have left behind some friends and relatives in England, but by that time they'd surely built a new life for themselves in Narnia which they were happy enough with not to want to leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did nobody notice their disappearance?&lt;/strong&gt; Well, it was a pretty crazy night all round in London, with the mad witch knocking policemen senseless and so on. If the cab driver disappeared, it might have been assumed that she'd killed him; and the police would probably be much less concerned about his disappearance than that of the violent and dangerous woman. As for Helen, we're not even shown the place where she was taken from. It might have been a source of worry and bother for a while, for their friends and neighbours if nobody else, but nobody cared much about the poor folk of 19th-century London, and a couple more or less wouldn't really concern the authorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-24T22:31:50.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-09-25T00:40:23.100" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It won't let me comment, so I wrote this here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say as a crude start, one could say, Literature has both a sophisticated seriousness of content and a pleasing style. Popular fiction is simply fun or pleasing to read for a large group. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one looks at, for instance, Jonathan Franzen, he is somewhere on the borderline, tending towards the popular. The work is well-crafted, absolutely readable, treats issues in the newspapers. However, one feels no really profound meditation over the human condition is present. Nor that the writer is capable of such. If we compare that to great literature, for instance, Yukio Mishima, we find lyrical language, of exceeding luxuriance, giving expression to an unparalleled searching. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The objectivity consists in something like a general agreement, not in taste, but in a good sense recognition of the presence or absence of artistic, read: human, gravitas.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expressed neatly, pleasure, versus more than pleasure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question really presupposes the possibility of higher levels of consciousness concerning the evaluation of a work. In other words, what impresses the average teenager as deep, will not impress a great mind. A claque of cognoscenti forms about the great works, upholding them, as it were. The matter isn't of taste, but rather of existence, or lack of, sound judgment. Whether sound judgment is only of today, of this age, or always and perpetual, is not necessarily in need of an answer for the objectivity. We can know what the judgment was in each age, without considering it as true.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to objections: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.&#xA;&quot;&quot;The question really presupposes the possibility of higher levels of consciousness concerning the evaluation of a work&quot; OK, how do you tell the difference between a &quot;higher levels of consciousness&quot; and lesser levels of consciousness?&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;General agreement, modified by gigantic power. For instance, MLK is held, largely, to be a man of superior moral gravitas. This is what I mean by, not true, i.e., in some always and ever quantifiable sense, but “objective”, in that we can say, it was held to be so by the human community, largely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a legal setting we use the criterion of reasonableness. Anyone outside this bound suffers from “diminished capacity”. In other words, the criterion is objective because the normative is visible, though not true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;one feels no really profound meditation over the human condition is present&quot; (1) this may be your personal definition, but the question isn't asking for personal definitions. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would it be possible that a definition were not &quot;personal&quot;? The question is, in that case, aberrant or irrational. It supposes that the &quot;objective&quot; is not set down by some person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;(2) Why is this the defining characteristic, as opposed to the infinite other ways someone could use to classify books into categories.&quot; Simply because, in experience, this is the way it has been established. That is what is meant by, not true, i.e., not always and ever, but empirical. As it has been to humans. &quot;To humans&quot; means, it is humans that ground the definition of the objective and the subjective. There is no higher agency that descends to humans and hands them such a logos, or way of asserting in words.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;How can you tell when literature contains &quot;profound meditation over the human condition&quot;?&quot; One must ask a really serious human being. I.e., not a teenager impressed by the latest graphic novel. This presupposes that humans consider some other humans more serious, and some less serious. And that, largely, such judgments hold sway, they become powerful, they are real. Again, not true, but what has happened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original post said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Also is there some objective criteria that demarcates the genre and literary works? Like one is plot driven and the other is character driven.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is the rule about what is &quot;objective&quot;, have I made a mistake in giving criteria that are so different? Where is the demarcation line? Doesn't one judge, and say, this is &quot;character driven&quot;, just as one judges and says, here, just here, we see profound searching? I should like to learn of this, if someone understands it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2217" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T19:24:01.413" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T19:24:01.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3363" CreationDate="2017-09-25T01:18:31.970" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;He was awoken, at home, by police. One need only take the narrative on its face. What do you suppose would happen if a Turkish man, in the current situation of that country, ignored a summons? He would end up in one of those back rooms suffering the consequences. Ayn Rand is no realist! Read a page of the Gulag Archipelago, you will learn what happened to such as who ignored summons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kafka gives us such a sense of unreality, we forget that life is shaped by the dream of real forces. Although, I don't think Kafka forgot as much.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2217" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-25T01:30:06.117" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T01:30:06.117" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3615" CreationDate="2017-09-25T02:06:14.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because Merion's being forced in their view to fit into the gender binary - when they're not. (And I'll be using the singular they here - it's much less confusing, and it's &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; no matter what gender they are.) Merion &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; quite fit the gender binary, and as such, this is seen by them as being impolite. It's an imposition - an attempt to force a irregular polyhedron into a round or a square hole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its not all that much different from deadnaming a trans-person - innocent or not, it is a denial of identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author's notes go into that better than I can (at the end of the story!) - though from the viewpoint of someone who's not gender binary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gender is weird. I don't pretend to understand everything that goes into what makes someone say, &amp;quot;I'm a man,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;I'm a woman,&amp;quot; or, in my case, &amp;quot;I don't know.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity freaks some people out. (The question that a stranger poses to Merion: &amp;quot;I just have to know: are you a boy or a girl?&amp;quot; I've been asked that, many times.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story is what it says it is: a silly love story. In particular, it's an expression of my love for nerds, and for ambiguity. Uncertainty keeps life interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2219" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-25T11:31:30.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3621" CreationDate="2017-09-25T13:03:03.457" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to source a quote from the author, but there is an interview which offers some circumstantial evidence that Crowley is indeed named after the famous Occultist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actor Mark Sheppard played a character called Crowley in the TV series &lt;em&gt;Supernatural&lt;/em&gt;. There is a common presumption among fans of that show that the character was inspired by Crowley from Good Omens. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scifinow.co.uk/news/man-of-steel-official-trailer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt;, Sheppard claims to have met Neil Gaiman, who rebuffed the claim. Of more relevance to the question is this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The names are the same, but it’s always a nod to Aleister Crowley.&#xA;  Everything has always been a nod to Aleister Crowley.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this quote strongly suggests that Sheppard also got this from Gaiman himself. If so, that would be a confirmation by the author that the name is a reference to the occultist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an interesting aside, the demon Crowley and the occultist both share the same initial, A, which is further evidence the collusion is deliberate. However, demon Crowley's first name is hidden for much of the book but is later revealed to be Antony, not Aleister. The reason for this is a somewhat obscure literary pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'Heigh ho,' said Anthony Crowley, and just drove anyway.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a take on the nursery rhyme (originally a music hall song) &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordsforlife.org.uk/frog-he-would-wooing-go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Frog He Would A-wooing Go&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which ends with the words &quot;Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley&quot;, a mere letter's difference from the book quote. It's a thin connection, but if Crowley's name is already used by the authors for one somewhere obscure reference, it seems likely that the much more obvious reference was also intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T09:41:14.263" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T09:41:14.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3627" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-25T13:06:26.910" Score="9" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to find this story for years. I remember reading it in Reading class as a kid (in the 1960s or early 70s). This would have been in a 4th or 5th grade reading book in New York State. It may have been in Highlights Magazine or Reader's Digest around the same time, too--I seem to recall that when I read it in school, I'd already read the story. I'm pretty sure it's an O. Henry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story starts with a boy leaving for work in the morning. He's been working in a factory since his father died--supporting his mother and two younger siblings. He resents it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This morning he decides that his younger brother can take his turn supporting the family. So the older brother decides to just walk away--toward freedom. The story ends with the surprise reveal that the boy has been working so long in the factory that he is crippled (and, thus, will never be free or able to support himself any other way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this ring a bell for anyone? Thanks in advance for any help offered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2225" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-16T14:02:26.640" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T14:02:26.640" Title="Looking for a story about a boy deformed by factory work - I think it's an O. Henry" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2017-09-26T00:01:58.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to muru's excellent answer, taking on the &quot;why&quot; part of the question, this final part of Eliot's poem presents us with a world in ruins, not as much in substance as in spirit. The prevailing intention I think, is to depict spiritual emptiness: with the invocation of the biblical crucifixion with no resurrection, the depiction of the Grail with towers upside down in air, everything hints to a world failed in its deepest spiritual meaning. The pilgrim of the lonely path is projecting his ghost, making three with the narrator that by all appearance is also a part of the same being, creating this silent, thirsty, decomposing trinity. And then, the Thunder speaks, to each and all, as in the Upanishad: &quot;What have you given?&quot;, &quot;Why are you locked inside yourself?&quot;, &quot;Take control&quot;. As the thunder's voice is heard (where in many religious writings, including all semitic, &lt;em&gt;to have heard&lt;/em&gt; the holy word is to understand and accept and live by it), the world recomposes itself, and the trinity, now as one, is seen fishing peacefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in all, I see it as a metaphor of what the world is without giving, compassion and control, and how he who &lt;em&gt;hears&lt;/em&gt; the veddic teachings will find his peace in this decomposing world. Why is the text referenced? Simply because the whole section is nothing but the poetic illustration of this very text from the Upanishads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2228" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T11:20:53.207" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T11:20:53.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T00:06:00.530" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;With Those We Love Alive&lt;/em&gt; is a work of interactive fiction published by Porpentine. &lt;a href=&quot;http://aliendovecote.com/uploads/twine/empress/empress.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can read the work online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the unique features of the work is it asks the reader to draw sigils on their arm at very moments during the story. Here is one example of such an instruction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Draw a sigil of new beginnings on your skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that these sigils are drawn on the skin seems significant. It means that the sigil is a part of the reader's body, rather than something like a paper that can be disposed of. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/14/drawing-violences-mundanity-with-those-we-love-alive/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This seems to be recognized by various other people who read the story&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When playing this I didn’t want to draw on myself, so I used a piece of paper. The symbols still meant something to me (and I still have the piece of paper), but I think some of the effect was lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why exactly is it important to draw these sigils on the reader's skin, rather than something like a piece of paper? What changes about the story if the sigils are not drawn on the readers arm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T00:06:00.530" Title="Why does With Those We Love Alive ask the reader to draw sigils on their skin?" Tags="&lt;interactive-fiction&gt;&lt;with-those-we-love-alive&gt;&lt;porpentine&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3635" CreationDate="2017-09-26T17:29:52.593" Score="2" ViewCount="886" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text of Beethoven's 9th Symphony was largely &quot;borrowed&quot; from the poem &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; by Friedrich Schiller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text of the first verse of the poem (second verse of Beethoven's 9th symphony) is as follows (translation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._9_(Beethoven)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joy, beautiful spark of divinity,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Daughter from Elysium,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We enter, burning with fervour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  heavenly being, your sanctuary!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your magic brings together&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  what custom has sternly divided.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All men shall become brothers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  wherever your gentle wings hover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next verse seems to be referring to earthly pleasures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whoever has been lucky enough&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to become a friend to a friend,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whoever has found a beloved wife,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  let him join our songs of praise!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, and anyone who can call one soul&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  his own on this earth!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Any who cannot, let them slink away&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  from this gathering in tears!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 4th verse makes a passing reference to God, but only after a reference to the &quot;Daughter from Elysum&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Every creature drinks in joy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  at nature's breast;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Good and Evil alike&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  follow &lt;strong&gt;her&lt;/strong&gt; trail of roses.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;She&lt;/strong&gt; gives us kisses and wine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a true friend, even in death;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Even the worm was given desire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and the cherub stands before God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final verse is much more explicitly religious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you bow down before Him, you millions?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you sense your Creator, O world?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seek Him above the canopy of stars!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He must dwell beyond the stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this start with an explicit reference to Greek mythology and only &quot;evolve&quot; to talking about God later? How did the religious views of Schiller and Beethoven influence this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:13:22.667" Title="Why does &quot;Ode to Joy&quot;/Beethoven's Symphony #9 start with a reference to Greek mythology and only mention God towards the end?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;ludwig-van-beethoven&gt;&lt;friedrich-schiller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3660" CreationDate="2017-09-26T17:43:03.137" Score="2" ViewCount="1749" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It takes brains &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to make money,&quot; Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem's signature. &quot;Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;T. S. Eliot,&quot; ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the telephone without identifying himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His superiors were thoroughly baffled by the reference. It's unclear if they even knew who T. S. Eliot &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, and it caused a flurry of activity thereafter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the significance of using T. S. Eliot here? Was he used merely because he was a famous and successful poet who the book's readers would've been likely to have heard of, or is there additional significance behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T09:08:39.957" Title="What's the significance of the T. S. Eliot reference in Catch-22?" Tags="&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-26T17:47:18.397" Score="5" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an intern who is teaching in high school in India. In the syllabus, I got across Anton Chekhov's &quot;The Cherry Orchard&quot; in Hindi. After discussing the book with the students, I found out that there were two groups in the discussion. A group supporting Trofimov and the main character, well other said Lophakhin. In the book, Lopakhin is a realist, while Trofimov is an idealist. This inquiry is very interesting, and there are no online sources to the topic of the contrast between these two characters. So, If you have any opinion or interpretation, please share. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2235" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:30:45.097" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T17:14:56.717" Title="Is there a contrast between Trofimov and Lopakhin in Anton Chekhov's 'The Cherry Orchard&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;&lt;the-cherry-orchard&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3631" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:13:57.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's because the Germans, at the turn of the 18th century until the time of Hitler, saw the Greeks as the &lt;em&gt;fons et origo&lt;/em&gt; of themselves. &amp;amp; because  Beethoven was at the cleavage of the old moral thinking, and the Romantics, or, what we know as creative thinking. The history of Mozart's Don Giovanni brings this out most sharply. With the final scene being censured for frivolity, a kind of comedy of happy endings for all but the &amp;quot;sinner&amp;quot;, suggesting a lack of moral seriousness (since, in a tragedy, moral badness is not so easily overcome by those on the bad side of it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the view that identifies divine providence with progress. Think of the phrase from the American document: &amp;quot;nature's God&amp;quot;. The sciences, born of Greek beginnings, are God's providence become material progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philhellenism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philhellenism&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sturm und Drang&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2217" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:13:22.667" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:13:22.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3636" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:47:31.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T22:47:31.120" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T22:47:31.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3637" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:47:31.120" Score="0" Body="For questions related to the life and works of Ludwig van Beethoven, a German composer who lived from 1770 - 1827. Consider using this with the [german-literature], [song-lyrics], and/or [music] tags." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T00:25:35.487" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T00:25:35.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3638" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:49:47.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T22:49:47.590" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T22:49:47.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3639" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:49:47.590" Score="0" Body="For questions related to the life and works of Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 - 1805), a German philosopher, poet, historian, physician, and playwright. Consider using the [german-literature] with this and, if asking about his poetry, use the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T05:00:37.553" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T05:00:37.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3640" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:52:18.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T22:52:18.103" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T22:52:18.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3641" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:52:18.103" Score="0" Body="For questions related to the Eagles, an American rock band. Consider using this in conjunction with the [song-lyrics] or [music] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T04:59:53.660" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T04:59:53.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3642" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:56:37.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T22:56:37.153" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T22:56:37.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3643" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:56:37.153" Score="0" Body="For questions about the non-lyrical parts of music (e.g. instrumentals) and how they relate to the literary aspects of music." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T06:37:00.797" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T06:37:00.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3644" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:58:41.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literature SE has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/487&quot;&gt;policy&lt;/a&gt; to use medium tags on questions about specific works only if those works are too short to merit their own title/series tags. For example, a question about a short story would be tagged with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/short-stories&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;short-stories&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;short-stories&lt;/a&gt; instead of the title tag, but a questions about a play would be tagged with the title of the play and the name of the author. The &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/theater&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;theater&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;theater&lt;/a&gt; tag is reserved for &lt;strong&gt;questions about plays and theater in general&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:37:19.847" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T09:37:19.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3645" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T22:58:41.997" Score="0" Body="For general questions about plays and theatrical performances as works of literature. If your question is about a specific play, use the title and author tags instead." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:37:19.847" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T09:37:19.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3646" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.257" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3647" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T23:00:34.257" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the literary significance or meaning of names that appear in literature." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:20:47.390" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:20:47.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3648" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-26T23:01:23.097" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-26T23:01:23.097" LastActivityDate="2017-09-26T23:01:23.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3649" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-26T23:01:23.097" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and works of Israel Horovitz, an American playwrite." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T05:00:02.447" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T05:00:02.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3539" CreationDate="2017-09-27T02:38:06.933" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the kinds of websites that are publishing this poem, I don't think it's a stretch to say that this change has something to do with race or racism. And the thing about race and racism is that these ideas are inseparable from gender and reproduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a reason why so many states and countries worked very hard to pass &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anti-miscegenation laws&lt;/a&gt;--laws that segregated marriage. There's a reason why &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/the_deadly_history_of_they_re_raping_our_women_racists_have_long_defended.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the justification given for lynching black men in the American south was that they had allegedly raped white women&lt;/a&gt;. Race is seen as something passed on through birth; according to racists, in order to maintain the white population, it's important for white men and women to marry and have white children. (Never mind that this is contradicted by modern genetics; ideology trumps science any day of the week). So if a white woman--who is seen as the rightful property of a white man--has a relationship with someone who is not white, to a racist that is problematic because they are allegedly causing the &amp;quot;white race&amp;quot; to decrease in population and die out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is certainly something that concerns the people who are publishing the poem. For example, the website europeanamericansunited.org has, next to pages titled &amp;quot;Diagramming a White America&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Diversity is Our Weakness&amp;quot;, a page called &amp;quot;Ethics and Mate Selection.&amp;quot; The page is full of alleged scientific research about how humans &amp;quot;select mates&amp;quot; and advice for &amp;quot;selecting mates.&amp;quot; The subtext--that &amp;quot;selecting a mate&amp;quot; is important to preserve the &amp;quot;white race&amp;quot; isn't stated explicitly in that particular page, but you don't have to look hard to find it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the possibilities are endless; but those possibilities can only exist so long as the forces of Dissolution and Chaos do not succeed in their evil and genocidal plan to amalgamate the wonderful diversity of humanity into a medium-tan &amp;quot;United Nations Man&amp;quot; in their rapacious lust for power and all-consuming greed to unjustly expropriate the labor of others. They want an alienated unit of production and consumption with no history, no culture, and no future beyond created consumerist desires. A creature with no ancestry that can serve as a source of pride or a well of patriotism that could lead him to stand against his evil overlords. The medium-tan United Nations Man is NOT forward progress in the evolution of Life, but rather the surrender to entropy in the devolution to inert and homogenized matter. It is the opposite of life: it is DEATH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genocide is evil -- uniquely evil -- because of all the crimes that can possibly be committed, it is the ONLY crime that carries with it the very real potential of ending ALL human life. Genocide can take place through direct killing, to be sure, but can also take place through intermarriage. The disappearance of an entire race of humanity, whether a little at a time or all at once, is still the same thing. And the extinction of even ONE race of humanity could very likely mean the ultimate extinction of ALL of humanity. Chew on that for a minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Taken from the page titled &amp;quot;The EAU View of Race&amp;quot;; I'm trying to avoid linking to these pages for obvious reasons, but you don't have to look hard to find the pages I'm quoting from).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To move on (finally) to a discussion of the actual poem, I think the best way to interpret the change from &amp;quot;the English&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;the Saxon&amp;quot; is that Saxon is a reference to the lineage of the &amp;quot;white race&amp;quot;. Of the four words &amp;quot;White Anglo Saxon Protestant&amp;quot; (WASP is an acronym that stands for a particular group of white Americans), Saxon is the word that sounds the most like a historic group of people far off into the past. Referencing this far off ancestral group is referencing the idea of an unbroken chain of reproduction, a chain that must be continued at all cost. (As I've established in the previous paragraphs, this is something that the people publishing the poem find to be crucially important). It's not unlike a King or a Ruler basing their claim to power on the fact that they are descended from previous Kings or Rulers. The reference to the Saxons establishes whiteness' legitimacy--the &amp;quot;white race&amp;quot; has been around for a long time--and also references a need for whiteness to continue reproduce in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T12:57:43.633" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3651" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:04:24.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T04:04:24.803" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T04:04:24.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3652" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:04:24.803" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Japanese language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Japan or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:33:22.323" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:33:22.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3653" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:06:51.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T04:06:51.917" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T04:06:51.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3654" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:06:51.917" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia (c. 2100 BC) which is one of the oldest surviving works of literature in the world. Use this tag with the tag [sumerian-literature] for Gilgamesh texts in Sumerian, with the tag [akkadian-literature] for Gilgamesh texts in Akkadian, or with both, for questions that are relevant to texts in either language." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:51:13.357" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:51:13.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3655" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:07:48.747" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T04:07:48.747" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T04:07:48.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3656" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-27T04:07:48.747" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Polish language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Poland or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:32:50.897" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:32:50.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3657" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3658" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" Score="0" Body="For questions about Portuguese literature: works of literature which were originally written in the Portuguese language, whether from Portugal, Brazil, or elsewhere in the world." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T06:41:12.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3422" CreationDate="2017-09-27T08:33:30.563" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe this is in reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Trials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moscow Trials&lt;/a&gt;, a series of show trials during Stalin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Purge&lt;/a&gt;. Of particular interest is how &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Krestinsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nikolay Krestinsky&lt;/a&gt; repudiated his written confession in open court, and then reversed his position the next day, presumably after being tortured. Confessions didn't make much of a difference for Stalin. Once accused, you knew what was going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user8" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T08:33:30.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3632" CreationDate="2017-09-27T09:08:39.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central point of this skit is, of course, to illustrate that the Colonels are ill-educated &quot;fools&quot;: neither has heard of one of the most famous poets of the 20th century. But any famous poet would do for that: why Eliot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest reason simply seems to be that Heller, the author of Catch-22, was a fan. Heller taught English at college, and Eliot would have been a common part of the curriculum. Letters sent by Heller quote Eliot as an inspiration, saying that The Waste Land was &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/25/catch-22-author-enjoyed-war&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;always present in my awareness&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heller also quotes Eliot in interviews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;T.S Eliot said that when one is forced to write within a certain&#xA;  framework, the imagination is taxed to its utmost and will produce its&#xA;  riches ideas. Given total freedom, the work is likely to sprawl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversations with Joseph Heller by Joseph Heller&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics and biographers have also claimed thst Eliot was often a consideration when Heller was writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The notion of playing off an aggressively modern idiom against a&#xA;  familiar biblical narrative clearly looks forward to &lt;em&gt;God Know&lt;/em&gt;s, but&#xA;  Heller abandoned the idea apparently when he remembered T. S. Eliot&#xA;  had already done something along these lines in 'The Journey of the&#xA;  Magi'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Fiction of Joesph Heller by David Seed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that this reference to T. S. Eliot in Catch-22 is not isolated. Over the following two pages, it is repeated eleven times. Heller wants us to remember the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot has been both praised and criticised for the obscure, ambiguous nature of his poetry. His contribution to literary criticism reflects this, arguing that any art can only be understood in context of previous art and that while poems may have a stated meaning, non-subjective judgments by readers are equally valid. In the book, the colonels treat the name as though it is some sort of puzzle, which would seem to be a fitting metaphor for the way in which critics (and Eliot himself), treated Eliot's poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T09:08:39.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3661" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3662" CreationDate="2017-09-27T10:02:06.820" Score="11" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first heard of George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; in high school when a teacher mentioned that it was an allegory of the Soviet State. So I read it two years later with that understanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While recently reading another novel on the same subject I was led to wonder: If I had come across &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; at age 12 in a second-hand bookshop in India without any pre-knowledge of its allegorical significance might I not have read it like a regular (if highly imaginative and quite sinister) children's story about talking animals?&#xA;And might not somebody else read it thus without being aware of its political significance? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That confusion would not occur if that information is explicitly stated in the book itself. The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; doesn't seem to clarify this point, but does mention that Orwell's very explanatory 'Preface' was for some reason not published in most editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell originally wrote a preface complaining about British self-censorship and how the British people were suppressing criticism of the USSR, their World War II ally (...) Although the first edition allowed space for the preface, it was not included, and as of June 2009 most editions of the book have not included it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So did George Orwell or the publisher actually state anywhere in the text that it is an allegory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T19:38:26.603" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T19:38:26.603" Title="Does &quot;Animal Farm&quot; explicitly state anywhere in the text that it is in fact a political allegory?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3661" CreationDate="2017-09-27T11:16:03.930" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest thing to a statement of allegory is the often-ignored subtitle of the book &quot;A Fairy Story&quot;. This was on the cover of the original editions, but was dropped by U.S. publishers and most subsequent editions followed suit. Fairy Stories, traditionally, contain a moral lesson or imperative. So this indicates that the novel is to be read as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DlLCx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DlLCx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover &amp;quot;Animal Farm A Fairy Story&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that the central moral lesson of Animal Farm is a direct and purposeful critique of Soviet History, and the novel works best when understood as such. However, it also works as less specific critique of the dangers of political personality cults and how they form the basis of totalitarian regimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is made explicit by the author. He was a socialist who fought against fascists in the Spanish Civil War. In the preface to a 1947 Ukranian edition of Animal Farm he wrote that the experience of Communist purged in Spain showed him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of&#xA;  enlightened people in democratic countries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to writing the book, he was also distressed by the pro-Soviet propaganda put out by the British Ministry of Information during World War 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell was one of the few British socialists of his age who was openly critical of Soviet politics. While a committed socialist all his life, he felt it was necessary to implement socialism within a democratic framework to avoid the risk of tyranny and dictatorship. He believed the Soviet communists had corrupted the original ideals of Marx and made the lives of common folk in Russia worse as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that his later dystopian novel, 1984, presents these themes even more strongly, and drops the facade of Soviet history entirely. Yet the identity of the ruling &quot;party&quot; as INGSOC - English Socialism - shows it is still clearly inspired by the politics of Soviet Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, therefore, no need for Orwell to state the allegorical nature of the book. Its main goal is to warn people against the dangers of totalitarianism and it functions as he intended without knowledge of Soviet politics and history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why the Allies Won - Dr. Richard Overy  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Destroying the Myth: George Orwell and Soviet Communism - John Newsinger , Journal of Socialist Theory, 1999 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T08:51:51.173" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T08:51:51.173" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T16:38:02.913" Score="5" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been racking my brain with the meaning of three expressions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;taut-jawed men - does it mean that they are stern looking, that their facial expression is tight and tense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;brick-lipped, hard-heeled women - same sense as number 1, I mean that they are with pursed lips or are they wearing some kind of reddish lipstick?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the hard-heeled part - does it mean that their heels are rough, in the sense that they are hurrying, hard-working women, etc., hence their cracked heels though we can't know that just from looking at them on the street.&#xA;Is it more like they are stomping so hard because they are brusque?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to be on the safe side and provide some context, here is the whole sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He walked along Eighth Street, over to Christopher, then to the river, threading his way like a pickpocket through the crowds just off the ferryboats from New Jersey: taut-jawed men in stiff hats and suits and obsidian shoes, newspapers pinned under their arms; brusque, brick-lipped, hard-heeled women in floral dresses.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp;amp; Clay&lt;/em&gt;, by Michael Chabon (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=3T61gEg6WhwC&amp;amp;pg=PA173&amp;amp;lpg=PA173&amp;amp;dq=%22He+walked+along+Eighth+Street,+over+to+Christopher,+then+to+the+river,+threading+his+way+like+a+pickpocket+through+the+crowds+just+off+the+ferryboats+from+New+Jersey:+taut-jawed+men+in+stiff+hats+and+suits+and+obsidian+shoes,+newspapers+pinned+under+their+arms;+brusque,+brick-lipped,+hard-heeled+women+in+floral+dresses.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=k61ID1oMMN&amp;amp;sig=qYnVQofkm8VGlZek4HsYHZsku-k&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiyg8no78XWAhUGaRQKHQW3AVoQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22He%20walked%20along%20Eighth%20Street%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 173&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2239" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T17:22:48.280" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T17:22:48.280" Title="What do these metaphors about hardship in &quot;The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;amazing-adventures-kavalier-clay&gt;&lt;michael-chabon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-09-27T18:20:51.890" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;strong&gt;core question&lt;/strong&gt; for literature enthusiasts and I am glad you asked it. Certainly there are no objective criteria to differentiate 'literary fiction' from 'popular fiction.' Since much of literature discussion is necessarily subjective I shall try to answer your answer based on my own experience as a constant and dedicated reader of novels -- both popular fiction &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 4 most important (admittedly subjective) criteria that I tend to use to differentiate literary and popular fiction are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;content, scope and themes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;quality of writing;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;treatment: plot driven vs character driven, as you mentioned; and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;literary reputation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Content, scope and themes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Popular fiction tends to have more interesting/ adventurous/ sensational/ entertaining subject matter and many popular works are &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt; fiction such as detective fiction, crime, romance, science fiction, horror, fantasy, Westerns etc. The whole novel typically 'sticks' to the theme: that means the content is well defined and predictable; and the scope is relatively narrow. Moreover authors maintain consistent style and are unlikely to &lt;em&gt;mix&lt;/em&gt; elements of multiple genres.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand literary fiction has a wide range of content: its themes are drawn from the whole of human life. So its scope is extremely broad and the writers can draw on a variety of styles to suit their purposes. Literary novels typically focus on life experiences and the best  of them are profoundly philosophical about human nature and the meaning of life. Since it is not required to conform to a 'genre' the audience expectations are less important for such works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Treatment and quality of writing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best-written popular fiction certainly has very high standards but I have found much of popular fiction to have a slightly lower quality of writing. This is because aspiring authors come from various backgrounds and actually improve as their career progresses. Since popular fiction is often more focused on plot than characterisation, a slightly lower quality of language does not affect the work by much. Whereas literary fiction is mainly character-driven, and authors tend to be very committed to attaining the highest standards of writing because readers read these books as much for the 'writing' as the 'story.' So literary fiction usually has uniformly high standards of writing, compared to popular fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Literary reputation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall reputation of a work is built over many years. Literary fiction is often (as you said) popular fiction that has been elevated to literary status over years by the common agreement and approval of writers, literary critics and readers. So the best literary works are read by successive generations of readers and 'stand the test of time' to become highly respected literary classics. By contrast much of popular fiction is forgotten within a couple of generations. However the best popular fiction works can become 'genre classics' and get read by many generations of readers who are interested in and devoted to that genre. The finest genre works also illuminate our world-view and are often very close to great Literature!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary:&lt;/strong&gt; What makes a work of fiction great is the approval of many readers and the literary community. Popular fiction is intended more to please the audience  while literary fiction aims to reflect upon the 'human condition.' Please note that somebody can set out to write 'literary fiction' but end up writing a mediocre book that won't pass the test of literary standards. It is also very possible for a work of popular fiction to fulfil most of the criteria of literary fiction and eventually be celebrated as a great literary work!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T05:37:08.020" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T05:37:08.020" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-09-27T18:43:21.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least according to science fiction grandmaster Samuel Delany, well-known for &quot;literary&quot; books in popular genres, the distinction is largely one of anticipated audience.  Popular fiction is generally aimed at a larger, more mainstream audience, and &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; feature simpler plots and language.  It also typically follows one or another set of standard genre conventions, which guarantee it a potential audience that enjoys that genre.  For example, mystery novels, such as those written by Agatha Christie, usually concern a murder, or other serious crime, a range of plausible suspects, and a set of clues that potential allow the reader to anticipate the eventual unmasking of the criminal, which comes at the end of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary fiction is often considered more prestigious, and is generally expected to draw a smaller, more highly educated audience, often of a higher socioeconomic class.  Its use of language may be more complex and its plots more original.  It may also be experimental in one sense or another.  Salman Rushdie, Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith are three well-known and widely read current authors of literary fiction.  Their work may have genre elements, but is not easily characterized or summarized by them.  A successful literary work may draw a tiny fraction of the audience of a popular fiction work, yet have an individual influence that is greater and more lasting.  Literary works can occasionally be extremely popular, but their popularity is often not easily predictable.  It is worth noting that many popular genres are formed in imitation of a standard-setting literary predecessor (for example, epic fantasy in imitation of Tolkien).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As popular fiction works become older, their audience profile becomes more like that of literary fiction, in as much as older books, regardless of genre, tend to be read by a smaller, more educated audience.  They also become experienced more like literary fiction, is as much as their genre characteristics become less familiar as their own time period disappears into the past.  In terms of &quot;canonization&quot; (becoming widely and consistently considered as ranking among the great literary works across the ages), popular works are canonized as often as literary ones. Again according to Delany, canonization essentially reduces to the ability of a work to maintain a productive body of criticism, secondary literature and other cultural artifacts, which combine to keep it alive in the collective cultural imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source:&lt;/strong&gt;  Delany, Samuel, &lt;em&gt;About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, &amp;amp; Five Interviews&lt;/em&gt;, Wesleyan University Press, 2013&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T19:18:59.257" LastActivityDate="2017-09-27T19:18:59.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-09-27T20:01:36.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Literary Fiction&quot; is a genre, like any other, with distinct emphasis (style, emotional impact, emphasis on the human condition.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that before the modern literary movement of the late 19th century, all literature was &quot;genre&quot; (epics, sagas, romances, histories, etc.)  &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is a revenge story, just like Euripides' &lt;em&gt;Hecuba&lt;/em&gt;, and both are ancestors of Quentin Tarantino's work in cinema.  The greatness of Shakespeare elevates his work to the highest echelons of literature, but in their time, they were &quot;popular&quot; plays aimed at the widest possible audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's somewhat rare these days for genre fiction to be elevated to the level of great art, but it's worth pointing out that of all the &quot;genres&quot;, speculative fiction is the most literary because it developed as a means of social critique (Swift, etc.)  The best speculative fiction can be intensely literary, for instance, Orwell.  Every book Philip K. Dick wrote was about the human condition in a technological society, with an emphasis on the nature of identity in relation to perception (the subjectivity of experience), with empathy as the consistent, central theme.  To my mind, this makes him more of a philosopher working in a narrative form. &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; has a a deeply mythological basis, suitable for educational purposes, and it's primary function is uncompromising social critique appropriate for middle-school and up.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Chabon was once quoted to the effect that, while he really wanted to be a genre writer, he felt he had to write about adult themes like disappointment to be taken seriously.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The general intent of genre writers is to &quot;tell a great story&quot; or present exciting ideas, but genre is often elevated to &quot;literary&quot; status.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Character Driven vs. Plot Driven&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that better work tends to be character, as opposed to plot, driven, but this doesn't mean great work can't have a strong plot!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But literary work can also be &lt;strong&gt;allegorical&lt;/strong&gt;.  This is the case of &lt;em&gt;No Country for Old Men&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Blood Meridian&lt;/em&gt;, which are, not unsurprisingly, also &quot;genre&quot; novels (crime, sci-fi and the Western).  Cormac McCarthy can be said to transcend genre, which may be taken to include the &quot;literary genre&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T18:26:34.840" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T18:26:34.840" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3633" CreationDate="2017-09-27T20:25:01.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you mention the &quot;main character&quot;, I'm going to assume you are referring to Madame Ranyevskaya. &lt;em&gt;(Checkov's plays tend to be ensemble pieces, and I'm not sure it's useful to designate a main character, but Madame R. may qualify as the central character in that everything revolves around her, and she is the symbol for the vestigial aristocracy that was at the center of the social upheaval taking place in Russia around and after Checkov's time.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding Trofimov vs. Lopakhin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trofimov is an idealist because he is young, inexperienced, and has a lot of free time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lopakhin is a pragmatist because he has more experience, and comes from a lower social class without the luxury of leisure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't forget that, towards the end of his life, Checkov declared his plays farces and they are undoubtedly comic, which accounts for their bittersweet quality.  Most great tragedy contains comic elements, either wordplay or irony, but Checkov merges the two forms better than most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T17:03:58.117" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T17:03:58.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-27T23:22:26.843" Score="3" ViewCount="544" Body="&lt;p&gt;This book is fairly geopolitically significant, because it describes a lot of the recent events in the world as driven by Russia and Russian disinformation campaigns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an English copy of this book in order to read it myself, but as of yet, I've been entirely unable to find a reliable one. There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/Foundations-Geopolitics-Geopolitical-English-Translation/dp/1521994269/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one on Amazon&lt;/a&gt;, but it doesn't seem like it's particularly reliable, and doesn't even list a translator. The text is also extremely poor quality, and is broken in many places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does a reliably translated copy of this text exist anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-09-27T23:28:05.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-02T13:16:15.493" Title="Is there a good English translation of &quot;Foundations of Geopolitics&quot; by Aleksandr Dugin?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;foundations-of-geopolitics&gt;&lt;aleksandr-dugin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:21:22.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:21:22.800" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:21:22.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:21:22.800" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and works of E. E. Cummings (often stylized e e cummings), an American poet, author, and playwright." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:30:06.030" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:30:06.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3671" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:22:30.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:22:30.637" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:22:30.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3672" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:22:30.637" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and works of the Russian playwright and short-story writer Anton Chekhov (1860 – 1904). Uses this tag with the [russian-literature] tag. If the question is about a short story, you should also use the [short-stories] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:34:40.467" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:34:40.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3673" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:23:10.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:23:10.420" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:23:10.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3674" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:23:10.420" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding literature originally written in Italian, regardless of whether they were written or published in Italy or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:33:07.757" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:33:07.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3675" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:24:12.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:24:12.820" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:24:12.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3676" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:24:12.820" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the works of the playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:24:04.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:24:04.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3677" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:25:00.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-09-28T20:25:00.183" LastActivityDate="2017-09-28T20:25:00.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3678" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-09-28T20:25:00.183" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of early 20th-century English writer Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 1882-1941) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:45:39.843" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:45:39.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3617" CreationDate="2017-09-29T13:44:45.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read the last book, &lt;strong&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/strong&gt;, it mentions, as you go into the 'real' Narnia, also called Aslan's Country, you can see the past characters, depending on how far back from the past they were. It states, how Frank and Helen were in the Garden of the Phoenix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these two were King Frank and Queen Helen from whom all the most ancient Kings of Narnia and Archenland are descended. And Tirian felt as you would feel if you were brought before Adam and Eve in all their glory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the conclusion I draw is that they, after dying, went into the deeper, real Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T14:23:39.277" LastActivityDate="2017-09-29T14:23:39.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3681" CreationDate="2017-09-29T15:11:48.447" Score="7" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read somewhere that it is typical of poems such as Nibelungenlied to use a figure of speech which in fact merges two phrases into one by the mean of a common word. An example could be the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And then I ate the apple was red as blood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proper example of this can be found in Nibelungenlied (Adventure 20, 1184, 1-2), where we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;man sach&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ortwin von Mezze | ce Rvedgeren sprach&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one saw&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ortwin von Metz | to Rüdiger said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a name for this figure of speech? Is it a typical figure of other &lt;em&gt;archaic&lt;/em&gt; poems such as Beowulf or am I confusing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2246" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T19:06:35.050" Title="A figure of speech combining two phrases" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3680" CreationDate="2017-09-29T16:45:19.013" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, this type of phrase is known as a &quot;Wendesatz&quot;. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online dictionary that explains the term, let alone a translation.) Below are a few examples. Some of them don't work well in translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Ich liebe &lt;strong&gt;meine Frau&lt;/strong&gt; liebt mich nicht mehr&quot;: I love &lt;strong&gt;my wife&lt;/strong&gt; no longer loves me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Ich hasse &lt;strong&gt;egoisten&lt;/strong&gt; kümmern sich nur um sich selbst, nie um mich.&quot;: I hate &lt;strong&gt;egoists&lt;/strong&gt; care only about themselves, never about me.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Erst lehren sie ihre Kinder &lt;strong&gt;zu sprechen&lt;/strong&gt; bei Tisch wird ihnen verboten.&quot;: First they teach their children &lt;strong&gt;to speak&lt;/strong&gt; during meals is forbidden (i.e. they forbid their children to speak during meals).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Ich werde niemals &lt;strong&gt;reich&lt;/strong&gt; mir doch mal den Kaviar&quot;: I'll never be &lt;strong&gt;rich&lt;/strong&gt;/&lt;strong&gt;pass on&lt;/strong&gt; the caviar. (reich: 1. [adjective] rich; 2. imperative of the verb &quot;reichen&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a long list of German examples in the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://multisprech.org/2016/11/03/gedankenspruenge-durch-wendesaetze/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gedankensprünge durch Wendesätze&lt;/a&gt; (3 November 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: The &quot;Wendesatz&quot; looks a lot like a special subclass of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apo_koinou_construction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;apo koinou construction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Wikipedia defines as &quot;a blend of two clauses through a lexical word which has two syntactical functions, one in each of the blended clauses.&quot; Here is an example: &quot;There was a door led into the kitchen&quot; (Hemingway). This sentence looks like a normal sentence from which &quot;that&quot; (&quot;a door that ...&quot;) has been deleted. Wendesätze, however, don't even try to be grammatical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T19:06:35.050" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T19:06:35.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3688" CreationDate="2017-09-29T17:25:01.217" Score="6" ViewCount="667" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Very&lt;/em&gt; closely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3575/why-dont-people-in-the-chronicles-of-narnia-have-trouble-transitioning-back-t&quot;&gt;Why don&amp;#39;t people in the Chronicles of Narnia have trouble &amp;quot;transitioning&amp;quot; back to their old life after extended times in other worlds?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Pevensies accidentally wandered back into England, they had been away for years (or perhaps even decades) and had only a vague recollection that they'd even seen the lamp-post before, which implied that they had forgotten. Why didn't they continue to express that kind of confusion when they got back? The book implies that they remember a good deal about what was going on when they left; for example, they remembered to apologize to the Professor for accidentally leaving the coats that they borrowed in Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also mentions that Mrs. Macready avoided the room. While I don't remember if it's explicitly stated in the text, I've always assumed that that implied that they remembered why they had entered the wardrobe in the first place (I could be wrong about that, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they got back, did they remember &quot;where they had left off&quot; with their old life? Did they remember everything that they would have remembered when they left (e.g. what they had for lunch the day before they left, the fact that someone asked them to clean their room today, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, after returning from Narnia in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;, they apparently got on the train that they were planning on taking to begin with and carried on with their business. (Granted, their absence wasn't nearly as long that time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the texts admittedly don't talk a lot about their &quot;ordinary&quot; lives in England, there's no indication in the text as to their behavior being noticeably strange (with the exception of Lucy's return from the wardrobe). So, why did they remember as much as they did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-09-29T22:18:21.803" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T23:06:50.063" Title="Why did people appear to remember what was going on at the time they left England when they returned from Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4924" CreationDate="2017-09-29T17:26:40.683" Score="8" ViewCount="2290" Body="&lt;p&gt;The books imply that the Pevensies were in Narnia for years (or perhaps even decades) in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. Is there any indication of exactly how long they were gone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T08:37:06.130" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T19:13:07.167" Title="How long did the Pevensies rule in Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3684" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15030" CreationDate="2017-09-29T17:34:40.713" Score="12" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story in the 1990s sometime. I remember it being novel-length, but short novel length, maybe 200 pages or so. The cover art I remember was the most 80s thing you've ever seen - a girl with big poofy hair, shoulder pads, and the kind of VHS-style lighting you only still see in soap operas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character was a girl, American, sixteen years old and fat (her word). She was in a relationship with a man twice her age (I seem to remember he was 32 years old exactly). The book may have even been a sequel - I seem to remember they already knew each other when it started, that we didn't really get a &quot;meet cute&quot;. During the course of the novel they move in together, and I believe she gets a job. I don't think he does - I seem to remember him being the &quot;starving artist&quot; type, as his immaturity, and the girl's realization of it, is a significant plot point. I don't remember if they stay together or not at the end of the novel. I do remember that her parents very much don't approve of the relationship and are always trying to talk her out of it. (I don't remember why they don't just forbid her to see him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is somewhat of a romance. Their relationship is sexual, and I distinctly remember her complaining to him once that he wants too much sex and it's exhausting her. I don't remember the prose being explicit at all though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember how she either read a book or went to a seminar about why average-sized men like heavy girls, and the speaker/writer explicitly made it an Oedipal thing, that men like fat because it reminds them of their mothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reminded of this story a little while back and have not been able to remember what the title was or who wrote it, so I'm trying to figure that out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2245" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T09:21:58.037" Title="Trying to remember a book about a relationship between a teenage girl and an older man" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T17:08:03.743" Score="6" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Tale of Mr Tod, Beatrix Potter mentions a substance to be found in a hole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There he had dug quite a deep hole for dog darnel; and had set a mole trap&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this substance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2249" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-09-30T21:40:15.350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:24:42.450" Title="In The Tale of Mr Tod what is Dog Darnel?" Tags="&lt;the-tale-of-mr-tod&gt;&lt;beatrix-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-09-30T22:17:22.200" Score="4" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given its unflattering depiction of life in a certain type of society, I'm guessing that &lt;em&gt;Persepolis&lt;/em&gt; may have been banned in more than one country in the past, but I'm not sure where to find this information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In which countries has the book &lt;em&gt;Persepolis&lt;/em&gt; ever been banned?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T22:17:22.200" Title="In which countries has Persepolis been banned?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;persepolis&gt;&lt;marjane-satrapi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3682" CreationDate="2017-09-30T22:52:48.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It was part of their 'resetting' back to life in our world.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the dialogue from when the Pevensies discover the lamp-post again after spending years or decades ruling Narnia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I know not how it is, but this lamp on the post worketh upon me strangely. It runs in my mind that I have seen the like before; as it were in a dream, or in the dream of a dream.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sir,” answered they all, “it is even so with us also.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And more,” said Queen Lucy, “for it will not go out of my mind that if we pass this post and lantern either we shall find strange adventures or else some great change of our fortunes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Madam,” said King Edmund, “the like foreboding stirreth in my heart also.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the archaic formalism of their speech; at this point they're still entirely within their lives as Narnian kings and queens. Some part of them still remembers the lamp-post, but it's buried deep, and their memories of their previous lives in our world presumably still deeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, a few paragraphs later, the really important part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these Kings and Queens entered the thicket, and before they had gone a score of paces they all remembered that the thing they had seen was called a lamppost, and before they had gone twenty more they noticed that they were making their way not through branches but through coats. And next moment they all came tumbling out of a wardrobe door into the empty room, and they were no longer Kings and Queens in their hunting array but just Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in their old clothes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The memory of the lamp-post &lt;em&gt;returns to them&lt;/em&gt;, as if by magic. The hold of Narnia is weakening, and they're turning back to their old selves. The same magic which enables them to turn from adults back to children, and their clothes to turn from Narnian royal garb to English schoolkids' clothing, also returns their much-faded memories of our world into their heads. Thus it makes sense to conclude that along with big things like &amp;quot;what's a lamp-post&amp;quot; (which they'd also forgotten during their years in Narnia), small things like &amp;quot;what's for dinner&amp;quot; would also have returned to their memories by magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotes above are only from &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; - the book spanning the longest period of Narnian time in which memories of our world might fade - but presumably the same happens in the other stories too (except &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, of course, which don't feature any return to our world). LWW was the original Narnia book, the first one Lewis wrote, so Lewis would have had this model in mind when writing the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-09-30T23:06:50.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3683" CreationDate="2017-10-01T06:33:10.810" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We know, that at the time of &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;, Rabadash had asked for Susan's hand in marriage. We are also told that he was not the only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the invitations started when she was 18, and that ten people proposed to her, at the rate of five per year, she was 20 years old at the time of THaHB. Since she was 12 at time of entering Narnia, we can assume that the Pevensies were in Narnia for at least 8 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Narnia Wikia says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This took place in 1000 NT, and she and her siblings shared rule of Narnia for the next fifteen years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, 15 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Susan_Pevensie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;http://narnia.wikia.com/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Narnia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Age of Narnia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372" LastEditorUserId="372" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T09:10:15.820" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T09:10:15.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3685" CreationDate="2017-10-01T21:36:56.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The website below defines darnel as a type of weedy grass, and includes the Beatrix Potter quote as an example of its usage. I'm guessing that dog darnel is a local dialect version of the name, or perhaps a variation which has fallen into disuse. It is also known as bearded darnel, and can be mistaken for wheat, with serious consequences, as it is poisonous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.learnthat.org/dictionary/47346_darnel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Darnel&amp;quot; at Open Dictionary of English by LearnThat Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1964" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:24:42.450" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:24:42.450" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3691" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T01:54:57.733" Score="13" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to identify a book I used to read as a child (90s-00s) that I just barely remember. It was for young children, and I believe each page had a sentence or two along with an illustration. It might have even been part of some kind of children's anthology. I don't know if it was published around the time I was a child, or before. It seems very likely that it was published sometime between 1990 and 2000. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's driving me crazy, and I really want to remember what it was called! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the main character was an animal of some kind, likely a bear, a dog, or a hippopotamus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, the character realizes he has no food in his kitchen, so he drives up a hill in his car (I think it was red?) to the grocery store. There, he buys lots of food and puts it in his car. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I think the food weighed down his car too much for him to drive it, so he begins to eat some of the food so that he can drive the car. He ends up eating all of the food by the time he gets home. I distinctly remember in one of the illustrations he's drinking a bottle of ketchup with a straw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the book ended with him back where he began, in his kitchen realizing he has no food (because he ate it all on the way home). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone identify this story? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2256" LastEditorUserId="2256" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T17:51:47.303" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T08:38:56.300" Title="Identify a Children's Book about a character who eats all his groceries on the way home" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3692" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3693" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) or about any of his literary works, most famously the 1958 novel &quot;Things Fall Apart&quot;." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T11:47:29.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3604" CreationDate="2017-10-02T14:43:22.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your answer lies in the specific characteristics of each bird mentioned. I have not read the book but per your question will give you an answer. Will use the example of &lt;strong&gt;eagles&lt;/strong&gt;. This bird roars above all existence, only topped by the sky and the unknown. Science says they know what's above the sky I see but I've never been there. Why believe what I haven't seen is what I ask myself, since I've seen the Hunger Games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only common denominator I read from your question is that only birds are mentioned and scare the character. Well, birds represent freedom, happiness, innocence, cuddling and many other good qualities which are not what IT likes or portrays. IT is scared of his opposite. IT is scared of loveliness, freedom, etc... Sounds like the well-known &quot;good over evil&quot; used in all horror stories narrated in a new way. If so, nice catch for Stephen King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, the eagle traits are, not only they fly above all other existent beings, they also do not mate if not in the highest point possible. For they want to make sure they are pairing with an equal. Using Eagles as part of the mentioned birds would bring good so high above evil. If it was used. Mentioning the birds is a direct invitation to investigate them, learn about those birds in order to find a reason. Again, literary genius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you post the passage? May be able to give you more if I can read it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2232" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T18:51:11.633" LastActivityDate="2017-10-03T18:51:11.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3524" CreationDate="2017-10-02T14:54:17.557" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without re reading The Great Gastby I would suggest. &quot;A stain from his hand&quot; - could be an expression to suggest masturbation. Dark because someone finds sex nasty or because the object of the masturbation is unaccepted. I do remember the Great Gastby attempted to &quot;expose&quot; many nastiness conducts of the &quot;high society&quot; of London. &quot;That anyone should care in this heat...&quot; - or who cares? What in the world? Who told the person that their personal life is important or interesting to anyone else?, It's too hot for anyone to care. Or, the other characters are themselves too horny to care when they haven't satisfied their own desires. Portrait of selfishness and individualism. &quot;Whose head...&quot; - face - &quot;made damp the pajama pocket...&quot; -the pocket formed in the pajama around the genital area. Though I do not know who gave the ticket to who, I can infer it was a male. I could look for the book and read it again, but prefer to ask, who gave the ticket to who? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2232" LastActivityDate="2017-10-02T14:54:17.557" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3897" CreationDate="2017-10-02T16:45:11.933" Score="10" ViewCount="8004" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, several of Susan's close relatives (including all of her siblings) were killed on the same day in a train crash. The book merely mentions that she was no longer a friend of Narnia, and that she was in a particularly silly phase of life where she only cared about parties. The fact that the book refers to that in the present tense implies that Susan &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; felt that way (even after the train crash).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did she apparently persist in that even after the death of all of her siblings on the same day? Why didn't that make her reconsider, and why doesn't the book note her reaction to the event? This seems like a &lt;em&gt;highly&lt;/em&gt; abnormal reaction to that kind of a personal tragedy at a minimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or was Peter merely unaware of Susan's current mental state when he stated that she's no longer a friend of Narnia (given that he couldn't exactly visit earth to see how she was handling the whole thing)? But, if that's the case, how do we account for C. S. Lewis's comments on her being in a particularly silly phase of life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T16:51:32.830" Title="Why didn't The Last Battle mention Susan's reaction to her family's death?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4928" CreationDate="2017-10-02T16:51:00.683" Score="3" ViewCount="1273" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, Emeth was a soldier from Calormene who worshiped Tash. Apparently, he &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; that Tash was basically like Aslan, so Aslan interpreted Emeth's worship of Tash as actually being worship of him. Aslan tells Emeth in chapter 15 that &quot;I take to me the services which thou hast done to Tash... if any man swear by him and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Emeth ends up going to Aslan's Country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the theological significance/basis of this? How did this reflect C. S. Lewis's broader views on salvation? Does Lewis think that sincerity is &quot;enough&quot; for salvation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T17:04:21.773" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T23:24:23.823" Title="How does Emeth's presence in Aslan's Country in The Last Battle fit in with the rest of C. S. Lewis's theology?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4003" CreationDate="2017-10-02T17:10:27.653" Score="5" ViewCount="423" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wood Between the Worlds has numerous pools. We're told about where three of them lead: our world, Narnia, and Charn. Evidently, each pool leads to a separate universe in the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; multiverse, each with its own history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of these apparently aren't fully formed yet, because when they went to Narnia it had at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; kind of existence, but it wasn't formed until Aslan came and sang it into existence. (It's not clear from the books how many of the pools lead to universes like that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a universe ceases to exist, its pool &quot;dries up.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're not told much about any of the other worlds (other than the three that they visit in the story), other than Digory indicating a desire to visit some of them. (He never does, given later events and the fact that he disposes of the magic rings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did C. S. Lewis intend to (or at least consider) writing about any of them (other than the three he discusses), or was he merely indicating their existence for the sake of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T19:34:16.453" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T15:08:14.917" Title="Did C. S. Lewis ever intend to write about any of the other universes in The Magician's Nephew?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T19:20:02.403" Score="2" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Generations&quot;, from Shalsheles V (and released as a single), the first verse is about a Holocaust survivor with his great grandson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's Friday night, peace descends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Shalom Aleichem&lt;/em&gt;, their voices blend&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As young and old sing in harmony&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To watch their faces in the candles' glow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The child, his sweet voice does flow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mingling with his Zaidy’s in melody&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Zaidy smiles, filled with pride&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His great-grandson at his side&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One can see the fire within his eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It’s the spark of all of those&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  who have survived to build their lives&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With memories of six million left behind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the chorus is about... generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's generations, and generations&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  links in a lasting chain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Klal Yisroel, growing stronger&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  rebuilding again and again and again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Footsteps of our great past&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  our guide through the sorrows and pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  God will not forsake us&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  our hopes and our dreams will always remain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble seeing how the chorus relates exactly to the first verse in particular, and the rest of the song as a whole. How does the verse lead to the chorus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T03:02:53.523" Title="What does the chorus of &quot;Generations&quot; by Shalsheles have to do with the first verse?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;shalsheles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3724" CreationDate="2017-10-02T19:43:49.393" Score="16" ViewCount="1086" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aslan says the following in &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is not certain that some wicked one of your race will not find out a secret as evil as the Deplorable Word &lt;strong&gt;and use it to destroy all living things&lt;/strong&gt;. And &lt;strong&gt;soon, very soon,&lt;/strong&gt; before you are an old man and an old woman, great nations of your world will be ruled by tyrants who care no more for joy and justice and mercy than the Empress Jadis. Let your world beware. That is the warning.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; imply that whatever secret hadn't been discovered yet, but it could also mean that it &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; been discovered, they just hadn't used it yet. Was Lewis thinking of a particular invention (e.g. nuclear weapons or other WMD), or was he thinking of a hypothetical future invention? If it was the former, is Lewis claiming that nuclear weapons and/or other WMD are intrinsically evil?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, was Lewis thinking of a specific tyrant (perhaps Josef Stalin)? Or does the fact that he uses plural (tyrant&lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;) indicate that he's thinking of several different tyrants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these necessarily the same people (i.e. is the person who discovers/uses the equivalent of the deplorable word necessarily one of the tyrants)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-02T20:40:46.750" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T13:34:32.133" Title="Was C. S. Lewis condemning nuclear weapons in The Magician's Nephew?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-02T21:59:12.013" Score="6" ViewCount="1627" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was rereading 1984 when I noticed something amiss in this passage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran:&#xA;  THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM by Emmanuel Goldstein&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Distracted by the wear-and-tear of the book, by the afterglow of his initiation into the brotherhood, Winston fails to ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does a copy of the most-hated book by the most-hated author still have its title-page? In full capital letters?&#xA;A title which arouses instant suspicion and would damn the holder if anyone even glimpses at it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal belief is that George Orwelle's' intends to foreshadow that, the Brotherhood as described by O'Brien, is a fabrication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have imagined, probably, a huge underworld of conspirators, meeting secretly in cellars, scribbling messages on walls, recognizing one another by codewords or by special movements of the hand. Nothing of the kind exists. The members of the Brotherhood have no way of recognizing one another, and it is impossible for any one member to be aware of the identity of more than a few others. Goldstein himself, if he fell into the hands of the Thought Police, could not give them a complete list of members, or any information that would lead them to a complete list. No such list exists. The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the organization as described by O'Brien actually existed, one member in the brotherhood would have expurgated the title-page, or replaced the inscription with something far less obvious and offensive. They don't have the luxury of religious reverence towards their book, they can't treat it like a bible; they would have taken a basic-- and safe-- precaution. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of the Inner Party's motives, whether it was as an oversight or their way of strengthening Winston's entrapment-- leaving the title in the book seems like a masterful way to quietly foreshadow O'Brien's planned betrayal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or am I wrong in assuming that level of caution is needed? Would the real-or-imagined Brotherhood actually be fine with leaving that title-page in their book? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastEditorUserId="2259" LastEditDate="2017-10-03T04:01:40.000" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T22:09:38.657" Title="Why does Emmanuel Goldstein's book in 1984 have a title page?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3705" CreationDate="2017-10-03T14:35:57.053" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, it's worth noting that the cover itself didn't have a title, which would help to cover up the title page. Goldstein's book is described as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A heavy black volume, amateurishly bound, &lt;strong&gt;with no name or title on the cover&lt;/strong&gt;. The print also looked slightly irregular. The pages were worn at the edges, and fell apart easily, as though the book had passed through many hands. The inscription on the title-page ran...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, there were a few possible ways that the Thought Police could've discovered what they were reading, most of which would've been problematic even without a title page. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could've read inside the book from a telescreen. In that case, &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; portion of the book would've likely been incriminating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could've captured someone while they were reading it or had it in their possession. Again, though, the lack of a title page wouldn't have been much of a defense in this case given that the authorities could (and probably would) simply read what what was written in the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They could've searched someone's house or belongings and found it there, in which case the same logic as above applies. It's not like they exactly had to get search warrants or probable cause to do so.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have direct evidence on this point from the book, but I'm wondering if the mere act of reading something that wasn't easily recognizable as a Party-published book would look suspicious in and of itself. Again, I don't have direct evidence on that from the book, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T22:09:38.657" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T22:09:38.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T08:18:23.983" Score="9" ViewCount="852" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been trying to figure this out recently, but I can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My logic it this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) A lot of people think that poetry must rhyme. But the list of poets who broke with that tradition when it suited them is too long to write here. So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Perhaps it is the length. Poems tend, these days, to be shorter than prose writing. But the very earliest known poem was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Which is very long and tells a story. These &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic poems&lt;/a&gt; were quite common in the old oral tradition. So perhaps it is the existence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhythm&lt;/a&gt;. Such as the famous use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt; by Shakespeare (although he did screw with that when it suited his purposes). But...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) Then you get &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free verse&lt;/a&gt;, which follows the rhythm of human speech. Rather than any sort of strict meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if none of this is a defining characteristic of &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; poetry in the modern incarnation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can one define poetry?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1900" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T00:00:07.213" Title="How can poetry be defined?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2706" CreationDate="2017-10-04T13:12:43.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To explain what a sher means, we should first know about what a sher is. and what is there in the sher to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First let me tell you about in a SHER, what does Misra e Oola(first line) and Misra e Saani(Second line) usually represent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misra e Oola in a Sher is Daa'wa(دعویٰ, Claim). So in the first line the writer claims something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misra e Saani in a sher is Daleel (دلیل, Argument). So in the second line, the writer tries to prove what he had claimed above in the first line.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this Poetic verse, Assume the first person sitting in a Forest/Jungle, Saying that they are under attack by the &lt;em&gt;Cities&lt;/em&gt; from four of the sides he has claimed that they are under attack and in the second line he provides a solution for it, to Cover all the forest in the cities, this means you should not let the cities to grow and cover all the wild life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2263" LastEditorUserId="2263" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T14:33:38.063" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T14:33:38.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3709" CreationDate="2017-10-04T19:24:52.557" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a tough question.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot, in particular, demonstrated the primacy of meter over rhyme in Four Quartets.  (Rhyme is generally considered to be the primary mnemonic device, a critical element in that poems are traditionally meant to be recited, but that particular poem shows that meter alone serves the function quite well.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rap, the most popular and vital form of modern poetry, heavily utilizes rhyme, but sophisticated meter still seems to be the distinguisher of the best work.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Duchamp and the Beats, a lot of people seemed to decide poetry was anything one called poetry, which led to a lot of very poor &quot;verse&quot;, but I'd make the case that even free verse, if it's any good, has impeccable meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell_Anderson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maxwell Anderson&lt;/a&gt; was quite unequivocal on the subject of form: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is the fashion, I know, to say that poetry is a matter of content and emotion, not of form, but this is said in an age of prose by prose writers who have not studied the effect of form on content or who wish to believe there is no limit to the scope of the form they have mastered.&quot;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: Maxwell Anderson, &quot;Poetry in the Theater&quot;, 1939 | Excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/americanplaywrig00fren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Playwrights On Drama&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal feeling is that poetry is defined by form more than content, because even doggerel is a low form of poetry. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; extends the definition a bit too far with the requirement that poetry &lt;em&gt;&quot;evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning&quot;&lt;/em&gt; because it's quite possible to write perfect verse with no deeper meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might find Robert Graves' definition from the White Goddess to be of some interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon-goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Goddess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The White Goddess&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little bit out there in a modern context, admittedly, but it's important to remember that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Festival of Dionysus&lt;/a&gt; was a religious event centered around dramatic poetry,  the Homeric Hymns has  religious function, and the pronouncements of ancient oracles were highly stylized language with obscured meaning. &lt;em&gt;(&quot;Stylized language with obscured meaning&quot; is one definition of poetry.)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a sometimes poet, I find the idea that poetry is a &quot;sacred language&quot; to be quite resonant, and substantiated by the sublime effect great work produces.  This is to say the effect of great poetry goes beyond the strictly rational, which is the domain of both creative insight and religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not an uncommon idea. A second excerpt from Anderson's essay heavily utilizes religious language: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I believe with Goethe that dramatic poetry is man's greatest achievement on this earth so far, and I believe with the early Bernard Shaw that the theater is essentially a cathedral of the spirit, devoted to the exultation of humanity, and boasting an apostolic succession of inspired high priests which extends further into the past than the Christian line founded by Saint Peter.&quot;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: Maxwell Anderson, &quot;Poetry in the Theater&quot;, 1939 | Excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/americanplaywrig00fren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Playwrights On Drama&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson extends the metaphor in the subsequent passages, notably using the term &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mystery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mystery&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in the religious context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It has been, even at its best, a democratic temple, decorated with more gargoyles than saints, generously open to wits, clowns, excoriating satirists, false prophets, and crowds of moneychangers with a heavy investment in the mysteries. Lately it has recognized the mysteries only as a side show, and have been overrun with guides who prove to an eager public that all saints are plaster and all prophets fakes.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/americanplaywrig00fren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ibid.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson was commenting on, in part, Shaw's later attack on Romanticism in drama, and Shaw did win that argument as far as the 20th Century is concerned.  (Anderson's most famous play, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bad_Seed_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bad Seed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, was a prose drama;) But I like to think Anderson might have felt vindicated had he lived to see the monster hit &lt;em&gt;Hamilton&lt;/em&gt;. Poetry maintained a strong presence on the  stage in the form of light verse in American Musical Theater in particular, which is a significant form. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shaw's direction brought us to the pinnacle of theater in the 20th century with playwrights like Beckett, but it's unclear that greatest modern dramas are entirely &quot;prosaic&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They give birth astride of a grave, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the light gleams an instant, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  then it's night once more.&quot;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: Waiting for Godot&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an excerpt from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJPexsU6Vk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Was I sleeping?&quot; monologue&lt;/a&gt; which is hard to regard as not being poetry.  David Mamet is well known for incorporating an underlying metric structure in his prose plays, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qa9dttNx1S8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can rise to lyric heights&lt;/a&gt;. We tend to think of examples such as these as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;elevated language&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, referring to poetic qualities of language embedded in prose contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Graves makes a point that poetry evolves over time across different cultures, and in different periods &quot;high&quot; and &quot;low&quot; forms are in or out of favor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This highlights the difficulty in defining an art form which, at it's best, uses language to convey the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ineffable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ineffable&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's worth mentioning that the poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicanor_Parra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicanor Parra&lt;/a&gt;, in seeking to break free of the conventions of the past, coined the term &quot;anti-poetry&quot; to distinguish the new form and approach.  But even anti-poetry is a type of poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forms of poetry are vast and ever changing, but all poetry shares a common trait that may not be possible to put into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T00:00:07.213" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T00:00:07.213" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:34:01.713" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first book of the Worldwar series, the Race, upon hearing that the Tosevites have invented the radio, but have not achieved space flight, decide that in order to make their invasion less of a hassle would be to use their nuclear arsenal to sabotage global communication on Tosev III. All they succeeded in doing was announcing their presence to the natives and partially irradiated a few industrial centers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't the expeditionary force sent to Tosev III be able to deduce that while the Tosevites have invented the radio, but not space flight, that they have not created the silicon chip yet, therefore rendering the EMP strike useless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2265" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T20:40:05.323" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T20:40:05.323" Title="Why does the Race use EMP weapons on a society that recently just perfected the vacuum tube?" Tags="&lt;harry-turtledove&gt;&lt;worldwar-series&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3714" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3715" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Worldwar series by Harry Turtledove, set in an alternate universe. Use with the [harry-turtledove] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T20:41:42.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3716" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3717" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" Score="0" Body="For questions about Harry Turtledove, the American novelist, and his works, which mostly include speculative fiction. One example is the [worldwar-series]" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T20:43:47.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3720" CreationDate="2017-10-04T21:12:13.100" Score="16" ViewCount="10729" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recurring joke in Pratchett and Gaiman's &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; is that all the music tapes in Crowley's car are songs from Queen, which is apparently a British rock band. From near the start of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Crowley was currently doing 110 mph somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns, no wings. Admittedly he was listening to a &lt;em&gt;Best of Queen&lt;/em&gt; tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into &lt;em&gt;Best of Queen&lt;/em&gt; albums.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This joke is picked up again and again throughout the book, as Crowley and Aziraphale try to play various tapes in his car - Tchaikovsky, Vivaldi, etc. - and always get a Queen-ified version. Possibly due to my utter ignorance about popular music, I don't get the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why do tapes left in a car turn into Queen albums, specifically?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T14:57:16.740" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T09:28:24.567" Title="What's the joke with &quot;Best of Queen&quot; in Good Omens?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3719" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-04T21:21:28.907" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the novel, Maxim is shown to have an almost superhuman physical condition, easily performing unthinkable feats, which include, but aren't limited to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being able to run for a very long time without fatigue&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Being able to carry a (heavy) armed man while running&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reflexes considerably faster than those of the Inhabitants of Saraksh, able to dispatch ~10 men within a few seconds&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Incredible resistance to radiation - able to swim in a radioactive river, and eat a radioactive fish with no harmful consequences&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Able to survive 7 (?) bullets from a very close range directly to his torso; at least 2 of them should be fatal as per an assessment given later by a doctor&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list may be amended, but this is the general shape of things. The novel is set in the 22nd century, and Maxim implies all humans are considerably improved physically by that time (he also states later in the novel that prolonged exposure to the climate of Saraksh has weakened him).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the novella &lt;em&gt;Space Mowgli&lt;/em&gt; (aka &lt;em&gt;The Kid&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Малыш&quot;) is set in the same time period (in-universe), and its characters do not seem to be as developed physically as Maxim (if they were, they wouldn't be as challenged when playing with the Kid), which leaves two possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only the Free Search Group members are as physically developed, possibly due to some tampering with their bodies and stuff (for which there's no evidence in what I've read so far).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's an inconsistency in the writing, because &lt;em&gt;Prisoners of Power&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Space Mowgli&lt;/em&gt; were written separately in different years (were they? I'm not sure). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to understand this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T21:21:28.907" Title="What explains Maxim Kammerer's superhuman physical condition in &quot;Prisoners of Power&quot; (aka &quot;The Inhabited Island&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;prisoners-of-power&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2017-10-04T21:52:35.450" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The theory proposed by Terry Pratchett is that &quot;Best of Queen&quot; is the only decent music that can be found on the road in gas station markets, so those CDs tend to accumulate in the car, without the driver noticing them much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman proposes that the CDs do really turn into &quot;Best of Queen&quot; albums, just like that. He occasionally gets fan mail about it: &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/141846479980/excessivelysesquipedalian-i-was-getting-the&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/30447689346/semblanceofnormality-in-all-my-life-i-have&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For stuff like that, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lspace.org/books/apf/good-omens.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Annotated Pratchett File&lt;/a&gt;, where I got this piece from, is a good resource. I can't access their cited source right now, so I'm still looking for a primary source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-10-04T21:52:35.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-05T05:38:56.703" Score="6" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does literary theory know a &lt;strong&gt;technical term&lt;/strong&gt; for the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An accomplished writer intentionally publishes the first version of one of their texts &lt;em&gt;in a language which they neither know (well), nor usually publish in, nor is a language usually read by the writer's usual readership&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remarks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Needless to say, the &quot;neither know (well)&quot; condition implies that the writer has to rely on the good offices of some translation services, of some sort or the other. The question is not restricted by how the 'translation' was made, but &lt;em&gt;an essential part of the question is that the foreign-language version is the&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;first version of the text&lt;/strong&gt;: there was no first version in the native language of the writer. This makes this case so curious.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I know one example of this phenomenon, but won't give it, not to bias the question, and &lt;em&gt;because I am mostly interested in the technical term&lt;/em&gt;. I would also appreciate some relevant examples from literary history, but to find those seems comparably easy. But again: relevant examples would be appreciated, too. There is, e.g., some tradition of what one could call 'love offerings', in the sense that a writer tries to honour some linguistic community by taking the pains of composing a piece in a foreign language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't know a technical term. &lt;strong&gt;Neither 'pseudonomy'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;nor 'Pseudepigrapha'&lt;/strong&gt; are applicable (while vaguely related of course). It's some curious variant of obfuscation. In the case motivating this question, it seems some sort of being embarassed about the piece and wanting to 'downplay' it as a 'lesser work', and trying to curb the number of people who will read it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1939" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:12:14.253" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:12:14.253" Title="Does literary theory have a technical term for a writer publishing the first version of one of their works in a foreign language?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3733" CreationDate="2017-10-05T11:04:54.427" Score="9" ViewCount="1104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story from Kahlil Gibran's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500601h.html#18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Madman: His Parables and Poems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, but for some reason, I can't get to the point of understanding of the wisdom behind it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three ants met on the nose of a man who was asleep in the sun. And after they had saluted one another, each according to the custom of his tribe, they stood there conversing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first ant said, “These hills and plains are the most barren I have known.  I have searched all day for a grain of some sort, and there is none to be found.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said the second ant, “I too have found nothing, though I have visited every nook and glade. This is, I believe, what my people call the soft, moving land where nothing grows.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the third ant raised his head and said, “My friends, we are standing now on the nose of the Supreme Ant, the mighty and infinite Ant, whose body is so great that we cannot see it, whose shadow is so vast that we cannot trace it, whose voice is so loud that we cannot hear it; and He is omnipresent.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the third ant spoke thus the other ants looked at each other and laughed. At that moment the man moved and in his sleep raised his hand and scratched his nose, and the three ants were crushed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2269" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T03:42:56.707" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T09:18:55.990" Title="What is the point hidden behind Kahlil Gibran's poem &quot;The Three Ants&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;&lt;the-madman-his-parables-and-poems&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3604" CreationDate="2017-10-05T11:51:11.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you may be thinking too much about the specifics of what Stan was saying. What drives off It is not the birds, but rather Stan drawing strength from his passion. Birdwatching is a major part of his life, something he's passionate about, and he's drawing strength from it to oppose It. My impression is that It is empowered by the fear and despair of its victims and the birdwatching book is allowing Stan to drive away that fear by focusing on his birds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T11:51:11.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3704" CreationDate="2017-10-05T12:20:18.910" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is set a generation before &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, specifically 1900 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magician%27s_Nephew&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;). The latter book is set during World War II. Thus, in the time frame of &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;, nuclear weapons had not yet been discovered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, at the time the book is set, the nuclear weapon is still a hypothetical future invention, and the text is consistent with Aslan referring to nuclear weapons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the &quot;great nations of your world will be ruled by tyrants,&quot; both Hitler and Stalin would seem to qualify. Neither had risen to power yet, but both would within 35 years, which fits very well with the time frame &quot;before you are an old man and an old woman.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a related note, C.S. Lewis wrote the essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://inklingsclass.blogspot.com/2013/12/in-our-latest-reading-c.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Living in an Atomic Age&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where he doesn't really address the question as to whether atomic bombs are evil. He does say that civilization would end eventually, with or without the invention of the atomic bomb, and all the atomic bomb could do is bring that end earlier. Thus, according to Lewis, all the pools in the Wood between the Worlds are eventually destined to dry up. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T13:34:32.133" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T13:34:32.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-10-05T13:52:56.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this thread I see a lot of references to phrases such as &quot;human experience&quot; and &quot;the human condition&quot;. I think it's worth stepping back and asking whose experiences we are talking about. I believe, and hopefully I can show this in my answer, that the question of &quot;whose experience&quot; is the key to understanding the concepts of literary fiction and popular fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's get something straight: all books contain meditations on the human condition. Dan Brown's &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt;, derided as the ultimate example of the failings of popular literature, contains lines that can only be interpreted as mediations on the human condition, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meditations can be explicit statements about the human conditions. They can also be asides, snippets, scenes, that while might not necessarily be phrased as &quot;humans are like x&quot; still illustrate an aspect of the human condition. For example, the rape scene in &lt;em&gt;The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo&lt;/em&gt;--another example of a book derided for containing the failures of popular literature--is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299216/Stieg-Larsson-wrote-novel-The-Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-fuelled-brutal-rape.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allegedly a reflection of the author's personal experience witnessing a rape&lt;/a&gt;. His depictions of graphic sexual violence certainly says something about one aspect of the human experience. (If you only like academic articles, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hate-Women-Kick-Their-Asses/dp/0826518508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's an academic book on the subject&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I would go as far as to say that if you're telling a story, then you automatically have created a reflection or a mediation or whatever fancy word you want to call it about the human condition. A story means someone is sharing their experience. &quot;I was hungry, then I ate&quot; is short and simple, but it tells you a lot about the human experience--the relationship between hunger and eating for one thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mistake here is to conflict a human's experience with all human experience. &quot;I was hungry, then I ate&quot; is one human experience, but there is also &quot;I was hungry and I couldn't eat&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; contains lots of supposed universal messages about the power of love, but it also represents the experience of a white author who was culturally insensitive enough to write &lt;a href=&quot;http://nativeappropriations.com/2016/03/magic-in-north-america-the-harry-potter-franchise-veers-too-close-to-home.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an incredibly insulting depiction of native american beliefs and practices&lt;/a&gt;. So perhaps the reflection in Harry Potter reflect a certain type of experience rather than a universal experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a well known concept in the literary world of &quot;windows and mirrors&quot;. It essentially means that in classrooms, children should have access to books that are &quot;windows&quot;, i.e. they help them see the perspectives of others, and books that are mirrors, i.e. that help the reader better understand themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think when it comes to &quot;popular&quot; v. &quot;literary&quot;, what's at issue isn't the existence of this human experience, but the question of what experience is being described and how it is being described. &quot;Popular&quot; obviously implies that is being read by a lot of people. Literary, on the other hand, carries the assumption of being the province of the elite few. Reading popular fiction is seen as mindless entertainment, while reading literary fiction is seen as something you can do to improve and educate yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In practice, if we look at what books are considered &quot;literary&quot;, its almost always books that are assigned by educators or placed in syllabi by academics. So of course it is not surprising that, until recently, the vast majority of &quot;literary&quot; works were written by white authors. It is of course also not surprising that books become &quot;literary&quot; for pedagogical rather than artistic reasons. &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is an excellent book if you're trying to teach high schoolers about symbolism, but in many respects, such as character development, the book falls flat. And it wouldn't be surprising if academia favored books with more complex, professional writing, because that's a skill academia is trying to teach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I haven't found the popular v. literary dividing line to be helpful or useful. I've found that while there are books and authors I prefer, in terms of being able to learn from what I read and get value out of what I read, pretty much any story will do. James Joyce once said that all novels are autobiographical. When we read, we are absorbing someone's experiences--that experience may be similar or different from our own. If I think hard enough, I find that I am always able to learn something from someone else's experience (or if I'm reading my own fiction, my own experiences). Literary just means that academia has found the book useful, popular fiction just means that popular culture has found the book useful. Not to disparage either group, but I think it's important to decide what you like and find useful, rather than relying solely on the judgement of other people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2270" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T23:13:01.453" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T23:13:01.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="378" CreationDate="2017-10-05T14:40:05.200" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gaurav's reply and quote from the book would suggest to me that Miss Haversham did indeed nurture a need for speed, within her self-imposed withdrawal from the world. Also, from personal experience, any fiery spat with one's partner usually ended with a slammed front door and red-lined, wheel-spinning,law-breaking take off in the family car....whether a Porsche 911 or Austin 1100 !!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, her &quot;hand twitching on my shoulder&quot; makes me think that maybe she had time-travelled and experienced throttling up a motorbike engine!!??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2271" LastEditorUserId="2271" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T14:46:45.900" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T14:46:45.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3730" CreationDate="2017-10-05T17:21:05.787" Score="8" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51731/the-trees-are-down&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;at the Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. A Slideshare &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slideshare.net/ShanAmbrose/the-trees-are-down&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;presentation&lt;/a&gt; makes the unsourced claim that the trees mentioned were cut down in the &quot;early 1920s&quot;. However, the level of grief expressed within the poem suggests that another event might have influenced the emotions expressed within the poem. I suspect (without evidence) that her sister's predeceasing her by a short period could possibly have influenced these emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, no source appears to explicitly date the poem, hence the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2273" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-05T17:23:43.543" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T19:30:58.400" Title="When was Charlotte Mew's &quot;The Trees Are Down&quot; published?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;charlotte-mew&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3851" CreationDate="2017-10-05T17:39:46.410" Score="2" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my office there is a guy named &amp;quot;Ed&amp;quot;.  When he is not around, some of the other guys say to those who ask for him that &amp;quot;We are Ed-less&amp;quot;.  It sounds like an Irish accent saying &amp;quot;headless&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I wondered if there was part of the Ichabod Crane story, &amp;quot;the Headless Horseman&amp;quot;, that drew from a historical &amp;quot;Edward&amp;quot;.  Does it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this in the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_VI_of_England#Fall_of_Somerset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward VI of England&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ichabod means &amp;quot;glory is lost&amp;quot; and Edward summarized the charges against Somerset as &amp;quot;ambition, vainglory, ...&amp;quot;, and noted at his uncle's death that &amp;quot;[he] had his head cut off&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ichabod's rival is the younger, Abraham 'Brom Bones' Van Brunt. Edward's father was Henry VIII, quite the father with his many wives, (arguably a veritable Abraham), and the legitimate antecedent to the throne.  Just as the line of Henry won, the line of Brom bones won.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The primary competition in the time of Edward was the war on Scotland called &amp;quot;the rough wooing&amp;quot;, and the primary competition in the legend is the wooing of Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy farmer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These have the &amp;quot;weak smell&amp;quot; of a connection, but I am no literary scholar, nor am I deeply familiar with the history of Edward Tudor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I did not know the history of the cold war between the US and Russia, and the lyrics to &amp;quot;Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer&amp;quot;, then I would not know the strong connection of one to the other, likely driving unconscious connection and extraordinary popularity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer_(song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gene Autry's version the song&lt;/a&gt;, released in 1949, about 2 years after the start of the cold war.  I'm wondering if Sleepy Hollow worked in a similar way, but about a 150 years earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a similar theme of slight transformation of a previously known story, and story elements to improve relevance and impact of the story that connects Sleepy Hollow and Edward Tudor?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2272" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:27:35.143" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:27:35.143" Title="Is there a relationship between Edward VI and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;washington-irving&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3728" CreationDate="2017-10-05T19:30:58.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems to have been first published posthumously in 1929.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;A New Matrix for Modernism: A Study of the Lives and Poetry of Charlotte Mew and Anna Wickham&lt;/em&gt; by Nelljean Rice &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JfuAAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA33&amp;amp;dq=charlotte+mew+the+trees+are+down&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi0vMLjkNrWAhXGJJoKHYgEBuQQ6AEIOTAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=charlotte%20mew%20the%20trees%20are%20down&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calls it&lt;/a&gt; &quot;one of her last poems&quot;, and she died on 24 March 1928.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;In Nature's Name: An Anthology of Women's Writing and Illustration, 1780-1930&lt;/em&gt; edited by Barbara T. Gates &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UVTFe0Ak9_AC&amp;amp;pg=PA207&amp;amp;dq=charlotte+mew+the+trees+are+down&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi0vMLjkNrWAhXGJJoKHYgEBuQQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=charlotte%20mew%20the%20trees%20are%20down&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources it&lt;/a&gt; to her collection &lt;em&gt;The Rambling Sailor&lt;/em&gt;, which was &lt;a href=&quot;http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8600192?selectedversion=NBD1304180&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first published in 1929&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not clear exactly when it was &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt;, but the late 1920s seems like the best guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-05T19:30:58.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3722" CreationDate="2017-10-06T05:57:51.157" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me the moral seems to be that &lt;strong&gt;those who poke fun at religion are foolish&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many allegorical stories about animals, especially personified ones, have a moral which says something about &lt;em&gt;humans&lt;/em&gt; (see Aesop's fables, for example). In order to see what the point of this story is, let's ignore for a moment the context of these characters being ants on a man's nose, and consider what they're saying to each other. They're in an unfamiliar place, and share their impressions of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first ant said, “These hills and plains are the most barren I have known. I have searched all day for a grain of some sort, and there is none to be found.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said the second ant, “I too have found nothing, though I have visited every nook and glade. This is, I believe, what my people call the soft, moving land where nothing grows.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the third ant raised his head and said, “My friends, we are standing now on the nose of the Supreme Ant, the mighty and infinite Ant, whose body is so great that we cannot see it, whose shadow is so vast that we cannot trace it, whose voice is so loud that we cannot hear it; and He is omnipresent.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first ant's words are entirely prosaic. It has no romantic notions about the place they're in, but is merely concerned with whether it can find food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second ant refers to a story told among its people, which is a slightly more poetic way of viewing the place. It sees beyond the immediate concerns of food, and is perhaps interested to visit a place it has heard about without ever visiting before (the &amp;quot;I believe&amp;quot; shows that it's unfamiliar with the &amp;quot;soft, moving land&amp;quot; despite having heard tales about it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third ant is overtly religious, describing the place as the nose of a &amp;quot;mighty and infinite&amp;quot; creature so vast that their tiny existence can't hope to comprehend it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, &lt;strong&gt;ignoring the context of where we actually know them to be&lt;/strong&gt;, this could easily be a conversation between three humans of different tribes. Two of them are concerned with the lack of food in the area (one of them also speculating that it may be a legendary place his people tell stories about), while the third is in a sort of religious ecstasy, not caring about the lack of food but instead raving about a Supreme Being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about it like that, it's easy to imagine the first two people - atheists, perhaps, or at least not strongly religious - laughing at the third. &amp;quot;Why's he going on about this religious nonsense,&amp;quot; they might say, &amp;quot;when he should be worrying about finding food?&amp;quot; Of course, the last laugh is on them, as it turns out the third ant was right all along and they all get wiped out by the Supreme Being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems, then, that the moral of the story is &lt;strong&gt;don't ridicule religion&lt;/strong&gt;, because it may turn out to be true and then the joke will be on you. This was the case with the personified ants of this story, who presumably represent humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T05:57:51.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T08:11:00.400" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of David Lodge's &lt;em&gt;Out of the Shelter&lt;/em&gt;, right before&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Jill and her mother are killed by the bomb, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jill and Tim are getting a little intimate... at the age of what looks like six. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;mdash; You're not going away tomorrow, are you Daddy? said Jill, keeping her arms round his neck so he couldn't stand up straight.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; Not straightaway, no, my precious.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; Not ever?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; You have a nice sleep now, my pet, or you'll be too tired to play with me in the morning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; Can Timothy sleep in my bunk?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; We usually let them, said Auntie Nora.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;mdash; I suppose it's all right, if he's going to marry you, said Uncle Jack, and the grown-ups laughed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The guns sounded faint now, a long way off. He pulled down his pyjama trousers and Jill wriggled beside him as she pulled up the skirt of her nightie. Then he felt her cool soft fingers on his thing and with his own finger he felt for the little crease between her legs. He was warm and safe and sleepy. He hoped that there would be another raid the next night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are Jill and Tim doing this? What's the point of this scene?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T08:11:00.400" Title="Why are Jill and Tim getting... intimate in &quot;Out of the Shelter&quot;?" Tags="&lt;david-lodge&gt;&lt;out-of-the-shelter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2553" CreationDate="2017-10-06T15:16:32.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;taken from genius.com - &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By some interpretations, Cohen is in an argument with God. King&#xA;  David’s “hallelujah,” in the book of Psalms, is said to have pleased&#xA;  the Lord. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has always been my take that he was &quot;baffled&quot; because of my own dislike of music, I took the &quot;you&quot; of &quot;you don't really care for music, do you?&quot; to be myself. As if David was &quot;baffled&quot; that I could not like this song when God did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2275" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T15:16:32.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3743" CreationDate="2017-10-06T16:10:04.870" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Amazon.com prices for a few random books as of 10/5/2017:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; - paperback $9.29, hardcover $17.89, audio CD $38.98&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets&lt;/em&gt; - paperback $8.34, hardcover $16.41, audio CD $28.46&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone&lt;/em&gt; - $7.89 for the paperback, $17.06 audio CD&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The War of Art&lt;/em&gt; - paperback $10.20, MP3 audiobook $9.79 (slightly cheaper)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two obvious criticisms of what I have above are the fact that these are the Amazon.com prices (rather than the publisher price), and that this is a limited number of books (so it may not represent overall trends).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have any hard statistics on this, but it seems to me that that audiobooks (with some exceptions) tend to be dramatically more expensive than the print edition of the books. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to hold true even with electronic versions (e.g. purchases from Audible.com or iTunes), so the physical cost of producing the CDs doesn't appear to entirely explain the cost differences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm also not convinced that the additional cost of creating the audiobook in the first place entirely accounts for its price. I do understand that the publisher needs to recoup the cost of producing it in the first place in order to make it worthwhile to sell it, but it seems like that cost would be distributed among a large number of people (at least for popular audiobooks like &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;). Also, the marginal cost of producing additional units it relatively low - selling 2 million units isn't twice as expensive as selling 1 million units. Finally, the cost of producing the goods in the first place isn't really related to the price that people are willing to pay for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, what is the logic behind these prices? How do the publishers typically price audiobooks relative to paper and hardcover books and why? How does this compare to Amazon.com's pricing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that Amazon.com does dynamic pricing, so my guess is that they're doing some kind of regression analysis to get an objective function relating price to profit somehow and then doing single-variable optimization on that. But this doesn't really explain how they came up with the approximate price range to begin with, or how the publishers came up with the list price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T16:23:14.540" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T18:45:33.110" Title="How do publishers determine how much to charge for audiobooks relative to their printed version?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;audiobook&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-06T17:32:48.977" Score="12" ViewCount="2584" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;, and there's a sexually explicit scene where Jon Snow and Ygritte have sex. Jon does something, and afterwards Ygritte says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterward, she was almost shy, or as shy as Ygritte ever got. “That thing you did,” she said, when they lay together on their piled clothes. “With your . . . mouth.” She hesitated. “Is that . . . is it what lords do to their ladies, down in the south?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I don’t think so.” No one had ever told Jon just what lords did with their ladies. “I only . . . wanted to kiss you there, that’s all. You seemed to like it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Aye. I . . . I liked it some. No one taught you such?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There’s been no one,” he confessed. “Only you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A maid,” she teased. “You were a maid.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really get what this conversation is about. Why does Ygritte ask about ladies in the south?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2276" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T16:49:03.040" Title="Understanding this sex scene in A Song of Ice and Fire" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3748" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:17:13.177" Score="2" ViewCount="393" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt; series, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dune_religions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;various religions&lt;/a&gt; have undergone drastic transformations. Judaism seems to be largely &quot;intact,&quot; but both Christianity and Islam appear to have been substantially mixed with Buddhism. For example, Wikipedia's list of religion in &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt; includes Mahayana Christianity, which it describes as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hybrid of Mahayana Buddhism and Christianity, which presumably interpreted Jesus Christ as a Buddha.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that virtually all branches of Christianity regard Christ as God, this seems like a rather fundamental change. Islam doesn't seem to be all &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; amenable to hybridization with Buddhism either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did so many of the religions of &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt; appear to have been mixed with Buddhism at some point? And how does it account for such fundamental changes to the religions? Did this reflect a poor understanding of what doctrines of Christianity and Islam were important on Herbert's part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T20:25:24.583" Title="Why does Dune have such fundamental changes to major religions?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;frank-herbert&gt;&lt;dune&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3911" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:34:49.347" Score="10" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3569/accuracy-of-a-translation-how-to-forge-an-opinion&quot;&gt;Accuracy of a translation: how to forge an opinion?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several authors, such as Samuel Beckett, periodically translated their own works. Are their translations generally regarded as accurate? Do people tend to find them more - or less - trustworthy than translations done by professional translators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have there been any examples of authors who did translations that included major changes to the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T21:06:19.250" Title="Do authors who translate their own works tend to do accurate translations?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3738" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:38:03.883" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I've read the books, but I read a lot of romances, and the idea is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, she's teasing him about cunnilingus (the act of giving oral sex to a female/someone with a vulva) - she's surprised he knew what to do (or perhaps more accurately, surprised it is something someone would even think to do), and is curious how he knew how to please her. So the remark is both her commenting on how he treats her differently than others (perhaps differently from other Northern men she's been with, which is why she asked about people in a different locale - she's assuming he might have been with someone more &quot;foreign&quot; who would have taught him these things). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the idea of orally pleasing a woman isn't the first thing most men think to do in most of the &quot;medieval&quot; environments that get written about - the idea is the woman is generally there for the man's pleasure, so not much time is taken to make sure the lady also gets the happy ending, as it were. So she didn't expect him to take the time to make sure she was pleased as well, and thus her curiosity at where he might have picked up such a skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it's somewhat of a joke/innuendo in and of itself, the way she asks about it - &quot;is that what lords do to their ladies, down in the south&quot; - the south referring both to geography, and the southern/lower half of a woman's body, often neglected in terms of pleasure and merely considered just the area where the guy inserts tab A into slot B until he reaches his own pleasurable climax. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="25" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T19:44:02.600" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:44:02.600" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3737" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:39:59.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking your example of the Harry Potter audiobooks, I looked at the prices directly from the publisher, &lt;a href=&quot;https://harrypotter.bloomsbury.com/uk/bookshop/audio-editions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bloomsbury Publishing&lt;/a&gt;. I compared the length of the paperbacks to the cost of the audiobooks, and it turned out that the trend was almost perfectly matching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take the length of the first book as 1, and the price also as 1, and measure relative to that, we get the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chamber of Secrets: Length 1.10, Cost 1.11&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prisoner of Azkaban: Length 1.39, Cost 1.29&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goblet of Fire: Length 2.48, Cost 2.39&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Order of the Phoenix: Length 3.34, Cost 3.29&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Half-Blood Prince: Length 2.18, Cost 2.39&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Deathly Hallows: Length 2.57, Cost 2.75&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like a pretty convincing trend. Conveniently, all were narrated by Stephen Fry, so it seems that the costs would be relatively constant (i.e. a similar cost per hour of recording). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's impossible to know exactly how the business model for these audiobooks works without inside knowledge, but it's reasonable to speculate that Fry's payments for each book would be proportional to the length of time needed to record them, so the cost of the product to the consumer would scale accordingly. I would conjecture also that Stephen Fry's narration contributes to the high cost of the HP audiobooks relative to the novels, considering he's a celebrity rather than an unknown voice actor. Certainly, demand would increase knowing that Stephen Fry narrated, and I imagine he is also able to command a greater wage than an unknown voice actor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rrvoice.com/audiobook-narration-pricing-simplified/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RR Voice&lt;/a&gt; has an interesting article which goes into some of the many ways that audiobook narrators would charge for their work, such as royalty splits and per finished hour payments (i.e. £X for every hour of recording given to the customer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I can't really say much more without going too far into the realm of speculation, it does appear from the example of Harry Potter that the prices often do correlate with the production cost to a reasonable degree. However, with the many different ways of charging for production, and the difficulty of knowing how much consumers will pay for a certain audiobook, it's difficult to make any more judgements than just observing the link with length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="41" LastEditorUserId="41" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T18:45:33.110" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T18:45:33.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3744" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:43:18.340" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frank Herbert (October 8, 1920 – February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author who was best known for his authorship of the &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T19:09:54.510" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:09:54.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3745" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-06T18:43:18.340" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author Frank Herbert (1920-1986) or about any of his literary works, most famously the Dune series." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T19:09:25.153" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:09:25.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3746" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-06T19:14:29.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T19:14:29.290" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:14:29.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3747" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-06T19:14:29.290" Score="0" Body="Dune is both the name of a series of science fiction books and the name of the first book in the series. Use this tag for questions about any of the books in the series, NOT just the first book. Use together with the [frank-herbert] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-06T19:26:51.707" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T19:26:51.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3740" CreationDate="2017-10-06T20:25:24.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Religions are no constants. They have always interacted with each other and with society and are rather flexible. Consider Mormonism, which started as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncretism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syncretism&lt;/a&gt; of Christianity and freemasonry. In less than two centuries, it changed major tenets like polygamy, racism, etc. because they were not practically compatible with society. Older religions are not immune to this either, just compare modern Protestantism with the Catholicism of the Middle Ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Dune happens ten thousand years into the future. It is only to be expected that religions will fundamentally change and merge in such a long time. Which religions will take part in these processes with what outcome is impossible to predict; so Herbert’s guess is as good as any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T20:25:24.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3751" CreationDate="2017-10-06T22:14:22.647" Score="3" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Thought Police presumably encountered Thought Criminals with at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; regularity. At a minimum, there were a fair number of people imprisoned at the Ministry of Love. With that said, how did they prevent themselves from becoming Thought Criminals too (given that they probably would've had to interact with whatever made the individuals thought criminals to begin with)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T03:44:20.947" Title="How did the Thought Police prevent themselves from becoming Thought Criminals?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3611" CreationDate="2017-10-06T22:39:18.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to edit my answer to respond to some comments, but for some reason the edits didn't go through, so here's my response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what I'm trying to say is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Books, or stories in general, represent perspectives. Perspectives can mean a view on an issue, or a perspective can mean how that perspective is communicated. To give a hypothetical example, if two authors write the same book, but only one author knows how to spell, the perspective being communicated in those two books is very different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is always stuff to talk about when you're talking about a perspective. Academics wrote an entire book on &lt;em&gt;The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo&lt;/em&gt;, even though that's the poster child for &quot;popular fiction&quot;. Even if you aren't an academic or don't like academic thinking/writing, there is always things to talk about. If you think a book is bad, then you can talk about why you think it's bad!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is really what perspectives are useful for you to have more of. Academia (the primary source of what books count as &quot;literary&quot;, at least in the USA: if a book is added to enough syllabuses in colleges or is taught in enough public schools, etc.) has certain criteria for what perspectives they find useful. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think that someone who just finished Joyce's Ulysses has gained something more that someone who completed Da vinci code?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, I would argue that an alien from outer space, who has had no contact with humans, would probably learn more from a book that has resonated with a lot of people and that represents the &quot;popular&quot; culture than a book that represents &quot;elite&quot; culture. An alien reading &lt;em&gt;Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt; might not learn very many historical facts, but they would learn something about the value of historical facts to a large portion of the public. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example: &lt;em&gt;Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; is a great book if you want to teach high schoolers about symbolism, which is a goal of academia. If you're looking for characters with depth, then Gatsby is probably not the book for you, unless you're interested in reading something narrated by a detached, boring man with no personality, who is describing a different man with no personality other than the fact that that he is rich and obsessed with a rich woman. But again, let me emphasize, the fact that the characters are boring does not prevent you from learning things from the fact that they are boring. The fact that people ignore the boringness of the characters because they are rich certainly says something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you get out of a book depends on you and what you are looking for, not the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2277" LastActivityDate="2017-10-06T22:39:18.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2017-10-07T05:43:55.593" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;They don't because they don't need to.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither in 1984 or in Orwell's memoirs are the inner workings of the  Thought Police described in detail. Aside from stray comments about the selection of new agents, or how the upper classes would grow ever more fanatic in spite of their greater knowledge, it's unclear if the Thought Police would police their own ranks differently from that of the masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Un)fortunately, we can look to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Intelligence_Directorate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;GRU&lt;/a&gt; former Soviet Union for a possible, clearer answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Victor Suvorov in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquarium_(Suvorov)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aquarium&lt;/a&gt; relates:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's it over there . . .' Grey-hair points to a fat square chimney,&#xA;  no more than ten metres high, built on top of a flat asphalt roof. The&#xA;  black roof floats among the greenery of the lilac bushes like a raft&#xA;  in the ocean or an oldfashioned battleship, sitting low in the water&#xA;  with its funnel quite out of proportion. A thin transparent smoke is&#xA;  rising from the chimney. 'Is that someone leaving the organization?'&#xA;  'No.' Grey-hair laughs. 'The chimney is not only our way out; it is&#xA;  also a source of energy for us and the guardian of our secrets. At the&#xA;  moment they are simply burning secret papers. It's better, you know,&#xA;  to burn them than to keep them. When somebody leaves the organization&#xA;  the smoke is not like this; it is dense and oily. If you join the&#xA;  organization you too will one day rise into the sky through that&#xA;  chimney. But that's not what we're here for now. The organization is&#xA;  giving you a last chance to change your mind, a final opportunity to&#xA;  consider your choice. And to give you something to think about, I'll&#xA;  show you a film. Sit down.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most of the Cold War, the GRU operated out of Soviet Embassies in the West. Despite their numbers, the GRU was aware that the allure of the surrounding societies would eventually seduce at least few of its members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, instead of focusing on the beginning of betrayals (thought-crime), which would have been extremely costly and a poor use of resources (imagine surveilling your own surveillance everyday), the GRU instead focuses mainly on the end: first, by stating that all GRU officers will be cremated, and, second,  betrayal simply moves that timeline up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means the organization expects a tiny percentage of its agents to go rogue and &lt;strong&gt;makes explicit the procedures to deal with it, to its agents&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Aquarium, unreliable or poorly performing agents are immediately sedated and shipped back on a plane to Moscow by their own comrades. Suvorov himself who assisted in said procedure narrowly escapes his own procedure towards the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of 1984, we can say that the Thought Police will be generally more vigilant and more strict about what constitutes betrayal. Nonetheless, they will fundamentally approach it as the GRU did:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Betrayal will happen, and when it does, make sure the members of organization follow procedure: light the traitors on fire.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2259" LastEditorUserId="2259" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T15:41:07.017" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T15:41:07.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:15:35.780" Score="8" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Baudelaire's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Femmes damnées&quot; / &quot;Damned Women&quot;&lt;/a&gt; contains the following lines (fifth stanza):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Et d'autres, dont la gorge aime les scapulaires,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qui, recélant un fouet sous leurs longs vêtements,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mêlent, dans le bois sombre et les nuits solitaires,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L'écume du plaisir aux larmes des tourments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And others, whose breasts love the feel of scapulars,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who, concealing a whip under their long habits,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mingle, in the dark woods and solitary nights,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The froth of pleasure with tears of torment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand the last two verses, but I don't understand the first two. Are these women in some kind of cult? Are they sadomasochistic nuns? Is it symbolical? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anyone explain this to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2283" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T21:08:29.597" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T21:16:53.973" Title="What does &quot;And others, whose breasts love the feel of scapulars,&quot; mean in Baudelaire's &quot;Damned Women&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;charles-baudelaire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3757" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:28:11.270" Score="8" ViewCount="13997" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 17 of Dan Brown's &lt;em&gt;Origin&lt;/em&gt;, he mentions something called the Grishneshwar Temple Drop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the slideshow concluded with a deeply unsettling video of an Indian cleric dangling a tiny infant over the edge of a fifty-foot tower. Suddenly the cleric let go, and the child plummeted fifty feet, straight down into an outstretched blanket, which joyful villagers held like a fireman's net.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The Grishneshwar Temple Drop,&lt;/em&gt; Langdon thought, recalling that it was believed by some to bring God's favor to a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this ritual? I cannot find any reference to this online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T15:43:57.390" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T18:12:46.027" Title="What is the Grishneshwar Temple Drop as mentioned in Brown's &quot;Origin&quot;?" Tags="&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;origin-langdon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3754" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3755" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Origin&quot;, the fifth novel in Dan Brown's Robert Langdon series. Use with the [dan-brown] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T15:44:40.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3756" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T15:59:41.170" Score="7" ViewCount="1603" Body="&lt;p&gt;I completed reading Agatha Christie's 'Death comes as the end' and while going through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Comes_as_the_End&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki page&lt;/a&gt; of the novel I read that Author had changed the ending by suggestion of a friend and she later regretted the change, instead preferring the original one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find the original ending but was not successful. &#xA;Does anyone here know what the original ending was or point me where I can find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2037" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T18:46:45.367" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T16:13:30.813" Title="What was the alternate ending of Agatha Christie's 'Death comes as the end'?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;alternate-endings&gt;&lt;death-comes-as-the-end&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3753" CreationDate="2017-10-07T18:12:46.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The practice exists, but elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204699/Pictured-Horrific-baby-dropping-ritual-India-sees-toddlers-thrown-roof-good-prosperity.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horrific baby-throwing ritual in India where toddlers are tossed from roof for good luck&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;The Daily Mail&lt;/em&gt;, August 6, 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These horrific pictures show terrified toddlers being thrown from a&#xA;  roof before plummeting 15metres onto a bedsheet below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;15 meters is about 50 feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This particular ritual took place in the village of Harangal,&#xA;  Parbhani, in western India's Maharashtra.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another ritual was taking place on the same day in Sholapur, about 280&#xA;  miles south of Mumbai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/world/what-in-the-world/for-babies-in-india-a-30-foot-plunge-for-good-luck.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;For Babies in India, a 30-Foot Plunge for Good Luck&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, July 28, 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Legend has it that a saint advised people whose babies were dying to&#xA;  build a shrine and drop the ailing infants from the roof to show their&#xA;  trust in the almighty. When they did so, the story goes, the babies&#xA;  were miraculously cradled to safety in a hammock-like sheet that&#xA;  appeared in midair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From then on, prayers for the birth of a healthy baby in the region&#xA;  have included a promise to toss the baby as an offering to the god who&#xA;  granted the prayers. Villagers believe that the ritual brings the&#xA;  child long life and good luck, and maintain that it does no harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] witnesses say it continues on a small scale in some villages,&#xA;  including in Mangasuli, where the Lord Khandoba, an avatar of Shiva,&#xA;  is worshiped by Hindus as the deity of the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grishneshwar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grishneshwar Jyotirlinga temple&lt;/a&gt; is a relatively famous Shiva temple. But it's about three hundred kilometers from Solapur. Even though both are in the same state of Maharashtra, I don't know what possessed Brown to mix the two up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T18:12:46.027" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-07T19:58:45.730" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The War Between the Classes&lt;/em&gt;, the class sets up four levels of classes: Blue, the highest class; Dark Green, the lower high class; Light Green, the higher low class; and Orange, the lowest of the low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a direct parallel to actual social prejudices for each color? E.g., Orange representing African Americans? Or Blue representing the white population?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we draw a parallel for each color?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T19:58:45.730" Title="Is there a direct parallel to actual social prejudices for each color in &quot;The War Between the Classes&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;the-war-between-the-classes&gt;&lt;gloria-d-miklowitz&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3759" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3760" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" Score="0" Body="&quot;The War Between the Classes&quot; is a 1985 novel by Gloria D. Miklowitz. It explores the theme of social and racial prejudices, through a classroom experiment that assigned different students to different levels of society. Use this tag with the [gloria-d-miklowitz] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:15:36.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3761" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3762" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" Score="0" Body="&quot;Out of the Shelter&quot; is a novel written by David Lodge, that follows the story of Timothy, a British boy growing up in the aftermath of the Second World War. Use this tag with the [david-lodge] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:31:32.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3763" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3764" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about any works of literature that were originally created in the Persian language. Please use with the appropriate author and work tags as well." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:34:47.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3765" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3766" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Host&quot; is a novel by Stephanie Meyer, which focuses on Wanderer, a member of an alien species that inhabitants the bodies of other species and controls them, called 'souls', and her interactions with the previous occupant of the body and the other humans on Earth. Use this tag with the [stephanie-meyer] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" LastActivityDate="2017-10-07T20:44:19.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3767" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3768" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" Score="0" Body="Shalsheles is a modern group of adult singers that sing Jewish songs, often using lyrics from the Jewish prayers and holy books. Their songs are mostly composed by Yitzchak Rosenthal. When asking a question about the lyrics of one of their songs, please use the [song-lyrics] tag as well." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T02:37:42.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3769" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3774" CreationDate="2017-10-08T10:18:29.827" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please help me to understand the following sentence from &lt;em&gt;The Sign and the Seal&lt;/em&gt; by Graham Hancock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A soft afternoon breeze, laden with the fragrance of distant deserts, blew through the tawny canyons beneath me, circulated amongst the ravines and foothills, and soared on eagles' wings across the first battlements of the escarpment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The first battlements of the escarpment&quot; puzzles me the most. There are no 'battlements' (no fortifying construction in sight judging by context). A very prolonged slope is present in the scene as a geological feature. I guess that the 'battlements' has some indirect, idiomatic (?) meaning here. Is this correct? It is difficult for me to perceive the literary beauty of the sentence without comprehending details. Adding that 'battlements' and 'escarpment' have (imho) very similar meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T03:36:12.817" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T03:36:12.817" Title="How to envisage 'battlements of the escarpment'" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-sign-and-the-seal&gt;&lt;graham-hancock&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-08T12:49:03.690" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did Nita and Dairine's sibling relation change after Dairine became a wizard in &lt;em&gt;High Wizardry&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2285" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T12:49:36.397" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T12:49:36.397" Title="How did Nita and Dairine's sibling relation change after Dairine became a wizard?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;young-wizards&gt;&lt;diane-duane&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2553" CreationDate="2017-10-08T15:14:27.933" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now, I've heard there was a secret chord&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That David played, and it pleased the Lord&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But you don't really care for music, do you?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The minor fall, the major lift&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The baffled king composing hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your faith was strong but you needed proof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You saw her bathing on the roof&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She tied you to a kitchen chair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She broke your throne, and she cut your hair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And from your lips she drew the hallelujah&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to point out the second verse is all about failures. &quot;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&quot; probably references Gideon, who had God perform miracles to prove that he was really the one God wanted. &quot;You saw her bathing on the roof / Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya&quot; references, of course, David and Bathsheba - David saw her, killed Bathsheba's husband, and took her as wife. &quot;She tied you to a kitchen chair / She broke your throne and she cut your hair&quot; probably all references the story of Samson and Delilah - Samson wanted Delilah even though he'd been warned not to be with her, and then she tricked him and cut his hair, removing his God given power. His actions eventually caused his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of the Old Testament is about God choosing a hero or rescuer, and the hero, rescuer, Israel, or all of the above, failing, and God forgives again. Just look, for example, at the book of Judges (though really almost any Old Testament book would do). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is baffled for several reasons, then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's in awe of the grandeur of God - this is a theme throughout the Old Testament as well, so this isn't really a reference to the next verse. (&quot;O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!&quot; - Psalm 8:9 is just one example of one of a verse written by David in awe of or praising God.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's in awe that in spite of his failures, God is still listening to him, and being pleased by his work. (There's references to this in the Psalms, as well.) I mean - he was God's chosen, but then he killed someone and took their wife. God was displeased with him, but forgave him and loved him still. That's outright baffling, that kind of forgiveness. He's also, in that sense, thanking God with his hallelujah - a thank you for being forgiven.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain #2 a little more - David was incredibly ashamed after he committed adultery with Bathsheba. In Psalm 51, listed in the NIV as &quot;A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba&quot; David says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have mercy on me, O God (51:1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not cast me from your presence (51:11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an earlier Psalm that David wrote in another time of trouble and his own sin, he writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O Lord, do not rebuke me in your anger &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or discipline me in your wrath (38:1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My guilt has overwhelmed me &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  like a burden too heavy to bear (38:4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the phrase &quot;overwhelmed me&quot; here reflects the phrase &quot;overthrew ya&quot; in Cohen's song. Psalm 39 continues his expression of pain and guilt, and then in Psalm 40&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] the Lord &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  turned to me and heard my cry. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He lifted me out of the slimy pit, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  out of the mud and mire; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  he [sic] set my feet on a rock&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and gave me a firm place to stand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He put a new song in my mouth (40:1 - 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2nd Samuel, it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then David said to Nathan [God's prophet], &quot;I have sinned against the Lord.&quot; Nathan replied, &quot;The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.&quot; (2 Samuel 12:13)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, the penalty for adultery and murder was death, but God forgave him and removed the death penalty for him, though David was still punished. Interestingly, after David was punished (his child by Bathsheba died), he immediately washed and &quot;went into the house of the Lord and worshiped&quot; (2 Samuel 12:20), which is reminiscent of Cohen's line &quot;And from your lips she drew the hallelujah&quot; - David's sin in a way caused him to praise God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the Psalms, David's poetry alternates between begging for forgiveness, thanking God for the forgiveness, and praising God. Throughout the Psalms, David also asks God a lot of questions - showing he's quite often baffled by God's actions - but the best one explaining this verse of Hallelujah is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is man that You are mindful of him? (8:4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is literally in awe and astonishment that God pays any attention to man, forgives man, has given man ownership of anything (later in the Psalm David says &quot;You [...] crowned [man] with glory and honor&quot;). No wonder David is &quot;the baffled king&quot; in Cohen's verse. Later in the same Psalm, David says &quot;O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!&quot; (Psalm 8:9) - he is literally a &quot;baffled king composing hallelujah&quot; - he goes right from being baffled to praising God. This is exactly Cohen's line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;baffled&quot; may also refer to Cohen's own creative process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its composition famously reduced Cohen to sitting in his underwear on the carpeted floor of his room at the Royalton Hotel in New York, filling notebooks, banging his head against the floor. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/dec/19/leonard-cohen-hallelujah-christmas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cohen may have pictured David similarly &quot;banging his head&quot; and then coming up with the &quot;secret chord [that] pleased the Lord&quot; and being a bit baffled on what happened inbetween.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for this being a nonlinear story, I think it was kind of meant to be. Cohen wrote over 80 verses of the course of an impressively long period of time (I think around a year). The various covers of the song pick and choose verses, and mix them up, to represent their own subtheme (love, forgiveness, etc). As Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cohen's lyrical poetry and his view that &quot;many different hallelujahs exist&quot; is reflected in wide-ranging covers with very different intents or tones, allowing the song to be &quot;melancholic, fragile, uplifting [or] joyous&quot; depending on the performer: The Welsh singer-songwriter John Cale, the first person to record a cover version of the song (in 1991), promoted a message of &quot;soberness and sincerity&quot; in contrast to Cohen's dispassionate tone; the cover by Jeff Buckley, an American singer-songwriter, is more sorrowful and was described by Buckley as &quot;a hallelujah to the orgasm&quot;; Crowe interpreted the song as a &quot;very sexual&quot; composition that discussed relationships; Wainwright offered a &quot;purifying and almost liturgical&quot; interpretation; and Guy Garvey of the British band Elbow made the hallelujah a &quot;stately creature&quot; and incorporated his religious interpretation of the song into his band's recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All quotes from the Bible in this answer are from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIV_Study_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NIV Study Bible&lt;/a&gt; from 1995, edited primarily by Kenneth Barker, though with help from Burdick, Stek, Wessel, and Youngblood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T00:36:09.280" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T00:36:09.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Use in conjunction with [samuel-coleridge] and [poetry]." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T16:13:55.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3769" CreationDate="2017-10-08T21:16:03.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just from reading the wider context of the passages surrounding the quote I could not rule out the writer using poetic licence, likening the rocks of the landscape to battlements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeking to test this theory I looked at aerial images if Aykel, which were inconclusive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then did an online search for images of Aykel and found this image &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pYvHz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pYvHz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;escarpment rocks above hills with shacks in foreground&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on a &lt;a href=&quot;http://ronnieborr.com/blog/africa/need-a-tan-head-for-sudan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;travel blog&lt;/a&gt; which, with the dramatic enclosure of the rocks on the skyline, while not conclusive, may be seen as supporting a metaphorical reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-10-08T21:16:03.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3775" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-08T22:03:18.390" Score="8" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading a lot of Vonnegut recently, and I've noticed some interesting stuff. &lt;em&gt;Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children's Crusade&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;God Bless You Mr. Rosewater&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Cat's Cradle&lt;/em&gt; are similar to a novel in format, though &lt;em&gt;Slaughterhouse Five&lt;/em&gt; is of course all &quot;out of order&quot; and in two of the three, Vonnegut breaks the fourth wall more than a few times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;Timequake&lt;/em&gt; is this weird combination of stream of consciousness, real life, and fiction, so you have no idea what the heck's going on. Semi-similarly, &lt;em&gt;Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons&lt;/em&gt; (a collection of Vonnegut's talks and articles) go over all sorts of different topics, with little rhyme or reason (at least to my mind), feeling kind of stream of conscious-y as well. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, looking at the dates the novels were published, it shakes out as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cat's Cradle - 1963&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;God Bless You Mr. Rosewater - 1965&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Slaughterhouse Five - 1969&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons - 1974&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Timequake - 1997&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the later the book was published, the less like a normal novel the book is. Does this hold true for the rest of Vonnegut's books? Was this intentional? Why did this happen? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T03:22:40.883" Title="Vonnegut's writing style as time passed" Tags="&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3779" CreationDate="2017-10-09T02:48:36.493" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just started reading it so please don't spoil!&#xA;I just wanna know if the book and/or its story is finished. I have presumed it's finished because it was first published back in the 1960's, but I have come across some reviews that indicate the book is not finished, also the wiki page says that the author was trying to write a sequel but eventually didn't. So before seriously driving into the book, I would like to know if the book is finished or not. By &quot;finished&quot; my bottom line is that I don't want to experience an unsettled feeling after reading the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1994" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T03:29:37.953" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T04:34:29.960" Title="Is &quot;The Man in the High Castle&quot; finished?" Tags="&lt;the-man-in-the-high-castle&gt;&lt;philip-k-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3892" CreationDate="2017-10-09T04:06:46.723" Score="5" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two particular incidents that I was thinking of in particular. First was his comment to Katniss prior to the first Hunger Games that killing people in the Arena wasn't really all &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; different than just hunting animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second was his invention of bombs designed to maximize casualties. In particular, he designed a bomb with two blasts: one to kill/injure people and a second, delayed explosion so that when people rushed in to help the wounded it would kill them, too. Even after Katniss confronts him about this, he rationalizes it and doesn't appear to show much remorse about its potential effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a minimum, these seem exceptionally callous. What accounts for his willingness to be so ruthless and to show such an indifference to the suffering of others? Is he sadistic, or is he merely willing to be ruthless?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T14:37:27.803" Title="Does Gale have a sadistic streak, or is he merely willing to be ruthless?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3777" CreationDate="2017-10-09T04:34:29.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borrowing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/108943/31394&quot;&gt;my answer on another SE&lt;/a&gt; ... the novel ends with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Nobusuke Tagomi coming back to his own timeline, ordering Frank Frink released, then having a heart attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it also lacks a complete resolution: Philip K Dick always planned to go back to it and write a sequel some day. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.philipkdickfans.com/literary-criticism/interviews/hour-25-a-talk-with-philip-k-dick/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview&lt;/a&gt; with the author (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then when it came time to close down the novel the I Ching had no more to say. And so &lt;strong&gt;there’s no real ending on it. I like to regard it as an open ending.&lt;/strong&gt; It will segue into a sequel sometime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that’s why I’ve never written a sequel to it. Because it’s too horrible. It’s too awful. &lt;strong&gt;I started several times to write a sequel to it&lt;/strong&gt; and I would had to go back and read about Nazis again. And I’d just like to off every one of them, it’s what I’d like to do. And so I could never do a sequel to it. Somebody would have to come in and help me do a sequel to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T04:34:29.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2017-10-09T12:55:59.980" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I can't speak with authority as to the contents of the original diary, I'd suggest that in answering the question &lt;em&gt;as posed&lt;/em&gt;, 'Is the house plan in Anne Frank's diary an artistic rendition, or is it sketched by Anne?' and 'Did Anne's original diary have a (rough) sketch of the Secret Annex, or was it completely a rendition from the details from the diary?', there are several avenues to be explored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) is the plan illustrated in the question in Anne's hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) can we find any trace of an 'rough sketch' in Anne's hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) would it be possible to construct the plan from details in Anne's text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) would it be &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; to construct the plan from details in Anne's text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at a) 'Is the plan in Anne's hand?' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My immediate response to that, as a design professional who spent many years at a drawing board before computer drafting took over, I would not regard that as the plan of a 15 year old girl in Anne's circumstances. The drawing utilises standard drafting conventions and use of lettering stencils. It seems unlikely these would be taught to girls of Anne's age and era, or that she would have access to the requisite tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Can we find trace of a 'rough sketch' in Anne's hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My efforts here are necessarily limited, but internet searches for images of the manuscript do not readily turn up such a sketch. In fact, widening the search I could not find any drawings of Anne's at all. I can find no reference either to the existence of Anne's own plan, which one feels would have been made much of and pored over by conspiracy theorists if no-one else. However, this is not conclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) would it be possible to construct the plan from details in Anne's text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not in a position to comprehensively answer this question as I've not read the text recently enough or with attention to this detail.  What I did see from looking at the plan was a detail that seemed improbable for a plan constructed from references in text rather than a measured survey, and this led me to look much more closely at the way the landing area with the bookcase fits together in regard to what the plan shows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The left hand wall of the  landing offset by a few inches from the left hand wall of the corridor which leads to it from the frontage building. While it is far from impossible that Anne would notice this, it seems quite unlikely for her to have recorded it. This can obviously be tested by examining the text, but also relies on knowing whether this detail of the plan is correct in regard to the building. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I can see from photographs of the entrance to the annex as it exists now, the recording of the landing is incorrect, or has at least been simplified. The plan shows the swinging bookcase being closer to the wall on its hinge edge than wall with windows, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.annefrank.org/en/Anne-Frank/Not-outside-for-2-years/-The-Secret-Annex/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;while photos clearly show it closer to the opposite wall with the windows&lt;/a&gt;. However, the two different photographs of the bookcase on the linked site almost look as though the left hand wall has been realigned at some stage between the images being taken. If we look at the ceiling area where what appears to be the corner of an adjacent room intruding into the landing, the side of that projection which is perpendicular to the windows, appears shorter in the colour photo than in the black and white, the undecorated areas on the black and white being boxed in in the colour. This diversion into the shape of the landing doesn't effectively prove anything about how the hallway looked in Anne's period of residence, all it does indicate that we can't be fully sure without going into very great research detail, exactly how this area looked when Anne knew it. If walls have moved between photographs, how else might that corner with its awkward projection and slight recesses in the stonework have been boxed off at other times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d) would it be necessary to construct the plan from details in Anne's text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question which I think can be answered most definitively. There would be no need to construct a plan from textual descriptions. The building still stands, Otto Frank survived. The text is not the only source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking these four avenues together, I see no evidence for a plan sketched by Anne herself, but no need to construct one from her descriptions either. Certainly the plan pictured in the question is highly unlikely to be drawn by Anne. The use of conventions such as arrows indicating direction of rise on the stairs, wash-hand basins depicted as curved when the actual artefacts are rectangular, the use of stencilled lettering, the labelling of the rooms in French, certainly militate against this being Anne's own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T11:02:03.097" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T11:02:03.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3781" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3782" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" Score="0" Body="The Young Wizards series is an ongoing fantasy series by Diane Duane, focusing on Nita Callahan and Kit Rodriguez and their attempts to slow entropy and defeat the Lone Power, who created entropy. Use this tag with the [diane-duane] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T15:43:58.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T15:57:54.010" Score="10" ViewCount="8847" Body="&lt;p&gt;T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men, unusually, opens with a quote from a Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mistah Kurtz— he dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most printings of the poem that I've seen, this single quote is given an &lt;em&gt;entire page&lt;/em&gt; which is otherwise blank. If that was the author's intention, this surely underlines the significance of the link between the two to the poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a high level, there's a clear thematic relationship between the two: both are about the fundamental barbarity of man. However it seems likely there is a deeper relationship between the two, both in terms of close reading and in terms of how the one inspired the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone elucidate on why the poet chose to open with this quote, whether there are deeper links here, and what they might be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T17:10:39.470" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:21:59.637" Title="What is the relationship between Heart of Darkness and The Hollow Men?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3785" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3786" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" Score="0" Body="Also known as &quot;The Inhabited Island&quot; (and rarer, &quot;Dark Planet&quot;), &quot;Prisoners of Power&quot; is a novel by the Strugatsky brothers. Use with the [russian-literature] and [strugatsky-brothers] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T17:15:18.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T18:19:57.657" Score="6" ViewCount="781" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Peripeteia&amp;quot; is an unexpected reversal of circumstances or a turning point. In tragedy, this sudden change of circumstances is usually a negative one. Is it possible for peripeteia to be a positive one too? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A guy named Peter has been working hard his whole life, but has never gotten any credit for his work. Unexpectedly, he starts getting the appreciation he deserves and gets a promotion or a raise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this be called peripeteia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2288" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T03:44:19.947" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T04:04:22.047" Title="Can 'peripeteia' be a positive change too?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-09T19:44:13.223" Score="6" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving has remained extremely popular. Wikipedia lists 24 film and TV adaptations including the well know Tim Burton film and, perhaps more unsurprisingly, 19 musical works inspired by the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not long and available in the public domain if you want to read it. I have just done so and was surprised to find it very ordinary. The writing is charming but veers to the purple in places. And the tale itself is spun well enough but lacks anything in the way of originality. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First published in 1820 it thus shares an era with titans of gothic horror such as Shelley and Poe. They too, of course, enjoy ongoing fame: but their imagination and originality would seem to warrant it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What qualities does Sleepy Hollow have that it has remained so popular alongside them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T19:44:13.223" Title="What qualities have lead to the enduring popularity of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" Tags="&lt;washington-irving&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3790" CreationDate="2017-10-09T22:16:16.813" Score="27" ViewCount="11397" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read several novels (Cornelia Funke's &lt;em&gt;Inkheart&lt;/em&gt; trilogy springs to mind, for example) in which each chapter is associated with a quote from some other piece of literature, which is usually somehow relevant to the events of the chapter. The same technique can be used with short story collections, the quotes being associated with individual stories rather than chapters (see Poe, for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a name for this literary practice, or for the quotes themselves?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I'd like to be able to say &quot;Poe often practised _____ by putting a quote just below the title in many of his short stories&quot; or &quot;What is the significance of the _____ quote for Chapter 17 in [book]?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T20:56:39.927" Title="What's it called when a short quote appears at the beginning of a chapter?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3789" CreationDate="2017-10-09T23:31:03.630" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Spagirl commented, it is an &lt;strong&gt;epigraph&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the great and powerful &lt;strike&gt;Oz&lt;/strike&gt; Google puts it (borrowing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;, which in turn borrows from Oxford dictionary), an epigraph is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; puts it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that is set at the beginning of a document or component. The epigraph may serve as a preface, as a summary, as a counter-example, or to link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia itself cites three different sources in the above quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An epigraph is an effective literary tool that some writers utilize to focus the reader toward the theme, purpose, or concerns behind the work - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.umich.edu/~eng217/student_projects/araisininthesun/epigraph.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a student's project on the University of Michigan website&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An epigraph is a literary device in the form of a poem, quotation or&#xA;  sentence usually placed at the beginning of a document or a simple&#xA;  piece having a few sentences but which belongs to another writer. An&#xA;  epigraph can serve different purposes such as it can be used as a&#xA;  summary, introduction, an example, or an association with some famous&#xA;  literary works, so as to draw comparison or to generate a specific&#xA;  context to be presented in the piece. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/epigraph/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.net&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It also cites a section in &lt;em&gt;Negotiating the New in the French Novel: Building Contexts for Fictional Worlds&lt;/em&gt; by Teresa Bridgeman (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TfOt4zvrTn4C&amp;amp;pg=PA129&amp;amp;lpg=PA129&amp;amp;dq=Epigraph%20(literature)%20%20conventional%20context&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=94AZEeRyEu&amp;amp;sig=fcuDwtLOdrjm54hGJoK4MrFe4Lg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ei=R4-wUrzpOMmPrQe9xIDQAQ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Epigraph%20(literature)%20%20conventional%20context&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the section&lt;/a&gt; applies the ideas of how an epigraph can affect a story to a specific piece of French literature). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:27:48.597" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:27:48.597" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3789" CreationDate="2017-10-09T23:38:10.340" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word you are looking for is epigraph. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/epigraph&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionary defines the word as&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-10-09T23:38:10.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4010" CreationDate="2017-10-10T02:24:48.443" Score="5" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1837/how-should-we-view-dan-conway&quot;&gt;How should we view Dan Conway?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, a quote from the opening scene of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Who is John Galt?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still - as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why did you say that?&quot; asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The bum leaned against the side of a doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why does it bother you?&quot; he asked.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It doesn't,&quot; snapped Eddie Willers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, towards the end of Part 1, Chapter 3, Dagney Taggert encounters a newspaper vendor in the Taggart Terminal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the corner of the concourse, by the main entrance, there was a small newsstand. The owner, a quiet, courteous old man with an air of breeding, had stood behind his counter for twenty years. He had owned a cigarette factory once, but &lt;strong&gt;it had gone bankrupt, and he had resigned himself to the lonely obscurity of his little stand in the midst of an eternal whirlpool of strangers.&lt;/strong&gt; He had no family or friends left alive. He had a hobby which was his only pleasure; he gathered cigarettes from all over the world for his private collection; he knew every brand made or that had ever been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dagney liked to stop at his newsstand on his way out. &lt;strong&gt;He seemed to be part of the Taggart Terminal, like an old watchdog too feeble to protect it, but reassuring by the loyalty of his presence&lt;/strong&gt;. He liked to see her coming... she stopped tonight, as usual, to buy a pack of cigarettes... &quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what get things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind - and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After they muse about whether people &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; think these days, he continued:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I don't like the thing that's happening to people, Miss Taggert.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I don't know. But I've watched them here for twenty years and I've seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was wonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they were going and were eager to get there. Now they're hurrying because they are afraid. It's not a purpose that drives them, it's fear. They're not going anywhere, they're escaping. And I don't think they know what it is that they want to escape. They don't look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They smile too much, but it's an ugly kind of smiling; it's not joy, it's pleading. I don't know what it is that's happening to the world.&quot; He shrugged. &quot;Oh, well, who is John Galt?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;He's just a meaningless phrase!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;She was surprised by the sharpness of her own voice&lt;/strong&gt;... &quot;Why do people keep saying it? Nobody seems able to explain just what it stands for, yet they all use it as if they knew the meaning.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why does it disturb you?&quot; he asked.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I just don't like what they seem to mean when they say it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;I don't, either, Miss Taggart.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some interesting parallels here. First, the parallel phrase &quot;Why does it bother you?&quot; (the bum) vs. &quot;Why does it disturb you?&quot; (the newspaperman). Both Dagney and Eddie replied (Eddie &quot;snapped&quot; and Dagney replied &quot;sharply&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eddie denies that it bothers him at all, and Dagney says that it bothers her because she doesn't like what she thinks people mean by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bum seems to be a permanent fixture of the streets (&quot;pleas for dimes were so common on the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations&quot;) and the newspaperman is a fixture of the Taggart Terminal itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the bum and the newspaperman have at least some degree of insight into the situation. The bum &quot;had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt [the causeless uneasiness], and as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: &lt;strong&gt;as if he knew the reason.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The newspaperman displays passive resignation to his situation, and the bum is described as having a &quot;cynical&quot; resignation to his situation. And yet the bum is described as &quot;intelligent.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do we make of these parallels? Are the characters supposed to be similar, or is there supposed to be a contrast?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The newspaper seems almost like a cross between Eddie Willers and Dan Conway in a weird sort of way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, passive resignation is seen as a bad trait, and the newspaperman's factory had gone bankrupt at least 20 years earlier. (The circumstances are never described, so it's not clear if it was due to incompetence or mismanagement on his part or if it was just bad luck or some other set of circumstances). With that said, he was aware of what was happening to people, didn't seem to share in their fear or purposelessness, and didn't like what was happening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we to make of him? How did Ayn Rand want us to view him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:34:26.513" Title="What should we make of the newspaper vendor in Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3787" CreationDate="2017-10-10T03:18:17.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his Master's thesis, titled &lt;a href=&quot;http://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/11451/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The peripeteia, an analysis of reversal speeches by Barbara Bush, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Christopher James Anderson of Iowa State University did exactly this, and presented some justification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is important to note that &lt;em&gt;peripity&lt;/em&gt; need not always be concerned&#xA;  with tragedy. Aristotle has defined &lt;em&gt;peripeteia&lt;/em&gt; as a reversal of the action.&#xA;  Humphrey House, author of &lt;em&gt;Aristotle’s Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, goes a step further&#xA;  and defines it as a “reversal of intention.”&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; This definition takes&#xA;  into account the “thought” or the &lt;em&gt;daimio&lt;/em&gt; exercised by the character.&#xA;  House describes it as “holding the wrong end of the stick.” &lt;em&gt;Peripeteia&lt;/em&gt; can&#xA;  then be determined to be deciding the proper side of an argument or&#xA;  event and moving to that side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another definition, more recently interpreted, comes from noted&#xA;  literary critic Frank Kermode. He defines it as a “disconfirmation&#xA;  followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations&#xA;  falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach discovery by an&#xA;  unexpected route. It has nothing to do with our reluctance to get&#xA;  there at all. So that in assimilating the &lt;em&gt;peripeteia&lt;/em&gt; we are enacting&#xA;  that readjustment of our expectations in regard to an end.”&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; This&#xA;  definition leads to a sense of accomplishment that can occur when a&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;peripeteia&lt;/em&gt; is properly enabled. Here it is clear that the outcome lies not in tragedy as with the Shakespearean example noted earlier,&#xA;  but in triumph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Anderson then goes on to examine the eponymous speeches where he feels peripeteia happens in the positive sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnotes mentioned above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/aristotlespoetic032945mbp/aristotlespoetic032945mbp_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;House, &lt;em&gt;Aristotle’s Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p 96&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.davidlavery.net/Courses/Narratology/Kermode_Frank_The_Sense_of_an_Ending_2000.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kermode, &lt;em&gt;The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p 18&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T10:02:03.783" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T10:02:03.783" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T13:58:03.490" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;prose Edda&quot;, as opposed to the &quot;poetic Edda&quot; was written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturlusson as we know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older, poetic Edda is much older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How old could it actually be? There seems to be a possibility there is a linguistic connection with the name &quot;Veda&quot; - the old Indian Vedas - which would suggest it is really very, very old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2295" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T12:52:16.853" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T11:01:23.037" Title="The Icelandic Edda's origins" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;edda&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3794" CreationDate="2017-10-10T14:54:56.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Properly, the name &lt;em&gt;Edda&lt;/em&gt; refers only to one work: Snorri's &lt;em&gt;Edda&lt;/em&gt;, a work on Norse poetics, including the background in mythology necessary to write and understand such. The name probably comes from an Icelandic word for (great) grandmother, but there are also other theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The so-called &lt;em&gt;Poetic Edda&lt;/em&gt;, also known as &lt;em&gt;Sæmundar Edda&lt;/em&gt; (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A6mundr_fr%C3%B3%C3%B0i&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sæmund the Learned&lt;/a&gt;) or the &lt;em&gt;Elder Edda&lt;/em&gt;, is a modern construct. 17th century Icelandic Scholars knew Snorri's Edda, and speculated that he had used an older collection of poetry when writing his book. When bishop &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brynj%C3%B3lfur_Sveinsson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brynjólfur Sveinsson&lt;/a&gt; got into his possesion a manuscript containing a collection of poetry dealing with different mythological and legendary matters, he was sure he had found that Edda. The manuscript was sent to the Danish King, and is today known as the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Regius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codex Regius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Bishop Brynjólfur also secured &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flateyjarb%C3%B3k&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flateyjarbók&lt;/a&gt; for posterity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, the name &lt;em&gt;The poetic Edda&lt;/em&gt; is seen as the preferable one (it was almost certainly not compiled by Sæmund), and is commonly used. Modern editions often add poetry discovered in other sources apart from the &lt;em&gt;Codex Regius&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, both the name and the exact contents are modern conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the age of the poetry itself, it is really impossible to say. The poetry was likely orally transmitted during long periods, with a relatively stable core being improvised on or having small changes. This is evidenced by &lt;em&gt;Völuspá&lt;/em&gt;, where we have two full length versions as well as fragments given by Snorri: they differ in which order they present some matters, have differing passages, and one seem to have had a Christian message attached to it. Some parts are identical, however. We can see that some passages has older grammar or word choices, but this does not help to date the work in it's entirety. One passage can also be found in a 9th century German source, but that is as far back as we can really be sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Veda&lt;/em&gt; seems to stem form a PIE word for &quot;knowledge&quot;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.etymonline.com/word/*weid-&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymology Online&lt;/a&gt;, it's closest cognate in North Germanic languages today is Swedish &quot;veta&quot; (surprisingly close), which stems from Old Norse &lt;em&gt;vita&lt;/em&gt;, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.saob.se/artikel/?unik=V_0657-0257.Upis&amp;amp;pz=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAOB&lt;/a&gt;. Thus, there does not seem to be any substantial link here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should be able to verify the first three paragraphs in any half-way decent intoduction to a modern edition of at least the poetic Edda. I have used Lars Lönnroth's translation &lt;em&gt;Den poetiska Eddan&lt;/em&gt; and Karl G. Johansson's and Mats Malm's &lt;em&gt;Snorres Edda&lt;/em&gt;. Lönnroth has also supplied the argument in the fourth paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T08:52:44.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:52:44.437" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3783" CreationDate="2017-10-10T15:40:39.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an immediate and direct connection between the two. Toward the conclusion of Heart of Darkness the narrator, Marlow, describes Kurtz as &quot;hollow to the core&quot; (p72). By this, he means that Kutz is lacking in moral fibre and has been seduced into a facsimile of worship by the dark heart of Africa. This is much the same state as the &quot;quiet and meaningless&quot; and &quot;lost, violent&quot; Hollow Men of the poem, with their &quot;headpiece filled with straw&quot;. Indeed it is possible to see the poem as almost an epilogue to the novel, rather than the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the clearest textual link between the two is the obvious spiritual symbolism in The Hollow Men: &quot;death's other kingdom&quot; (heaven), &quot;Five o'clock in the morning&quot; (this is the traditional hour of Christ's resurrection) which imply their emptiness is partly spiritual. It is hard to imagine a greater spiritual emptiness in the eyes of a Christian such as Marlow as to have set oneself up as a literal pagan deity as Kurtz has done. It is actually possible to read the poem as a direct representation of this act, with an unnamed narrator inventing a pagan ritual to avoid mortality: &quot;Not that final meeting / In the twilight kingdom.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other flashes of imagery. The Hollow Men meet at &quot;the tumid river&quot; which could be the Congo river, central to the narrative of Heart of Darkness. The book describes Africa as a &quot;kingdom of death&quot;, a motif repeated several times in the poem. There are literal hollow men in the book: the severed heads on poles which have been stripped of their contents by ants and vultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down&#xA;  from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the events of the novel, Marlow has a near-death experience, which he describes thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is a description of hollowness. The grayness of the vision corresponds to the &quot;twilight&quot; and the &quot;shadow&quot; and the &quot;sightless&quot; in the poem. The evanescence of things is the spiritual emptiness that suffuses the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the famous final couplet of the poem &quot;This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper&quot; could be read as a description of Kurtz's equally famous final words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'The horror! The horror!'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot. Clarendon Press, 1987. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conflicts in Consciousness: T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T.S. Eliot’s Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T14:21:59.637" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:21:59.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-10T17:30:02.160" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone recommended &lt;em&gt;Pack Challenge&lt;/em&gt; by Shelly Laurenston to me. It's erotica FYI--not really sure if this is the place for questions about that, but I thought I would try anyway. The main character has this obsession with the words slut and whore, and I'm starting to find it annoying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She glanced over at the clock on her night table. She still had a couple of hours before she had to be into work, but she just couldn’t face Zach when he woke up. He would, naturally, think her a big ol’ slut. Probably want to pass her around to his friends. And she couldn’t really blame him. She hadn’t merely thrown herself at the guy. She’d practically tackled him. The thought made her cheeks burn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally she loosened her grip on him. But, to his surprise, she wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned her forehead against his chest. “When, exactly, did I become such a fucking whore?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Zach was completely confused. “What are you talking about?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Me. I’m a whore.” Zach wasn’t sure if she wanted him to start calling her that during sex or if she was serious. Instead of potentially sending her spiraling into depression, he decided to go with her possibly being serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Do you do this sort of thing with everybody in town?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No!” She looked up at him, completely insulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then you’re not a whore. Psychotic? Absolutely. Whore? No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character appears to use the words &amp;quot;slut&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;whore&amp;quot; on every single page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112539.Pack_Challenge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Goodreads reviews are a mixed bag&lt;/a&gt;: some people seem to like the book and some people don't. The reviews that don't like the book all seem to mention the main character's use of the words &amp;quot;slut&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;whore&amp;quot;. The reviews that are positive don't seem to mention it at all. I'm trying to understand the perspective of people who don't find this annoying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the main character use these words so frequently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2299" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T12:13:46.557" Title="Why does Sara frequently describe herself using derogatory words in Pack Challenge?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;shelly-laurenston&gt;&lt;magnus-pack&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3838" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:08:42.217" Score="12" ViewCount="359" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the origins of putting epigraphs in a work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has this example from 1700, but no explanation on when or why epigraphs came into vogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Facsimile of the original title page for William Congreve's The Way of&#xA;  the World published in 1700, on which the epigraph from Horace's&#xA;  Satires can be seen in the bottom quarter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WP7zf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WP7zf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Title page&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2302" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T09:39:51.620" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T11:41:41.110" Title="What is the origin of epigraphs?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3799" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:47:38.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson (November 13, 1850 - December 3, 1894) was a Scottish novelist. His most famous works include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1883), a novel narrating the story of &amp;quot;buccaneers and buried gold&amp;quot;. It is had a considerable impact on the popular view of pirates, such as the &amp;quot;X marks the spot&amp;quot;, schooners, and shoulder parrots.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapped_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kidnapped&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1886) is a historical fiction novel set around real 18th-century events, most prominently the Appin Murder on May 14th, 1752.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1886) centers around the strange occurrences in London related to Dr. Henry Jekyll and an evil Edward Hyde after Jekyll's attempts to separate good and evil goes awry.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child%27s_Garden_of_Verses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Child's Garden of Verses&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1885) is a collection of poems for children on topics such as childhood, illness, play, and solitude.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T21:19:55.000" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T21:19:55.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3800" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:47:38.997" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Scottish novelist and poet Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T21:20:12.640" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T21:20:12.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3801" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:48:19.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T19:48:19.577" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T19:48:19.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3802" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:48:19.577" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding Romeo and Juliet, a play written by William Shakespeare. Use together with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T20:39:16.117" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:39:16.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3803" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:51:18.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T19:51:18.827" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T19:51:18.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3804" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:51:18.827" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the concept of close reading. Do not use this tag merely because you think that the question's answers would involve close reading." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:22:22.510" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:22:22.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3805" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:52:35.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T19:52:35.520" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T19:52:35.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3806" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:52:35.520" Score="0" Body="For questions related to The Silmarillion by J. R. R. Tolkien. Use this tag with the [j-r-r-tolkien] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:24:39.017" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:24:39.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3807" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:54:47.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winston Churchill was a British politician, public speaker, and writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a politician, he is best known for being Prime Minister from 1940 - 1945 and again from 1951 - 1955.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a writer, he worked as a journalist, wrote numerous speeches, and wrote several books on history. He won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:22:28.973" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:22:28.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3808" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T19:54:47.417" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and works of Winston Churchill, a British politician, speaker, and writer most notable for being the Prime Minister of England from 1940 - 1945." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:20:57.433" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:20:57.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3809" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:18:40.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:18:40.333" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:18:40.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3810" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:18:40.333" Score="0" Body="For questions on literature originally written in the Dutch language. Please also make sure to use the applicable work and author tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:21:05.717" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:21:05.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3811" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:19:44.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:19:44.017" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:19:44.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3812" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:19:44.017" Score="0" Body="Questions about literature that was originally written in any of the Chinese languages (including Classical Chinese, Mandarin and Cantonese), regardless of where it was published. Please also make sure to use the applicable work and author tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T17:34:19.737" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T17:34:19.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3813" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:21:04.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:21:04.850" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:21:04.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3814" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:21:04.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) or about his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T19:45:51.110" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T19:45:51.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3815" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:21:39.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:21:39.003" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:21:39.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3816" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:21:39.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet Emily Dickenson (1830–1886) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:23:20.530" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:23:20.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3817" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:22:25.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:22:25.147" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:22:25.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3818" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:22:25.147" Score="0" Body="&quot;Jane Eyre&quot; is a novel by the British author Charlotte Brontë. Use this tag with the [charlotte-bronte] tag." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.023" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3819" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.003" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3820" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:24:19.003" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding works written under the penname James S. A. Corey (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) or the lives of the individual authors." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:24:50.683" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:24:50.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3821" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:24:59.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:24:59.973" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:24:59.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3822" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:24:59.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Jules Verne (1850–1905) or his life as a writer. Use with the [french-literature] tag. He is famous for his fictional adventure/exploration works such as 'Journey to the Center of the Earth' (1864), '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea' (1870), and 'Around the World in 80 Days' (1872). " OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T21:57:37.473" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T21:57:37.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3823" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:27:00.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:27:00.787" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:27:00.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3824" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:27:00.787" Score="0" Body="Questions related to William Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar, which was probably written in 1599.  Use this tag in conjunction with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T20:31:30.617" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T20:31:30.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3825" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:28:43.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:28:43.847" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:28:43.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3826" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:28:43.847" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of John Le Carre (1931-2020), the British author best known for his George Smiley espionage novels, or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:15:05.833" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:15:05.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3827" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:29:45.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:29:45.927" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:29:45.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3828" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:29:45.927" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862). He is best known for his book 'Walden' and his essay &quot;Civil Disobedience&quot;." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:02:48.607" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:02:48.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3830" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:30:26.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:30:26.577" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:30:26.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3831" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:30:26.577" Score="0" Body="Questions pertaining to the various definitions of literature." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T15:37:58.967" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T15:37:58.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3832" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:31:30.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:31:30.617" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:31:30.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3833" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:31:30.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910) or his life as a writer. He is more famously known by his pseudonym, O. Henry." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:15:24.633" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:15:24.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3834" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:45:09.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:45:09.857" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:45:09.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3835" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:45:09.857" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and work of Richard Russo, the American writer of novels, short stories, and screenplays." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:48:14.463" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:48:14.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3836" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3837" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" Score="0" Body="XKCD is a webcomic written by Randall Munroe, and available at https://xkcd.com. Please use this tag with the [comics] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T20:52:05.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3798" CreationDate="2017-10-10T21:07:04.657" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first known epigraph was used in Froissart's &quot;Chroniques&quot; about 1404 and  «Calendarium» of Regimontan at 1476.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Э. стали применяться в лит-ре с нач. 15 в., впервые, насколько известно, в кн. «Хроники» («Chronique», написана к 1404, опубл. 1495) Ж. Фруассара, «Calendarium» Реджомонтано (Венеция, опубл. около 1476), «Максимы» (1665) Ф. де Ларошфуко («Наши добродетели — это чаще всего искусно переряженные пороки»).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stihi.ru/2015/03/06/5068&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Epigraphs began to be used in literature from the beginning of the 15th century. The first known appearance of an epigraph is in the “Cronique” books (written in 1404 and published in 1495) by J. Froissart, “Calendarium” by Reggomontano (Venice, published circa 1476) and “Maxims” (1665) by F. de La Rochefoucauld (“Our virtues are more often all skillfully dressed vices”).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;- Russian to English translation&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An image of a page with an epigraph from “Chroniques” is available courtesy of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=7616&amp;amp;CollID=16&amp;amp;NStart=180501&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VsfBe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VsfBe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2305" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T11:41:41.110" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T11:41:41.110" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3839" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:23:25.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:23:25.407" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:23:25.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3840" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:23:25.407" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the life and works of American rapper Kendrick Lamar. If asking about one of his songs, consider using the [song-lyrics] tag as well." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T08:33:22.107" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:33:22.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:24:40.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:24:40.780" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:24:40.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:24:40.780" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about works of literature originally created in the Latin language, along with the applicable author and work tags." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:08:14.677" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:08:14.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:26:04.487" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:26:04.487" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:26:04.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:26:04.487" Score="0" Body="Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by John Milton. It was first published in 1667, with a second, revised edition in 1674. Use with the [john-milton] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:49.477" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:49.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3845" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:26:47.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:26:47.070" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:26:47.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3846" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:26:47.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature originally written in any of the Arabic languages, including Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:35:11.173" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:35:11.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3847" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:27:58.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:27:58.093" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:27:58.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3848" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:27:58.093" Score="0" Body="Treasure Island is a novel by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. Please use this with the [Robert-Louis-Stevenson] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T08:33:36.063" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:33:36.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3849" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:32:00.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-10T22:32:00.547" LastActivityDate="2017-10-10T22:32:00.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3850" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-10T22:32:00.547" Score="0" Body="The Boxcar Children is a series of children's novels started by Gertrude Chandler Warner and continued by a number of different authors. Use with the [Gertrude-Chandler-Warner] tag if asking about one of the books written by her." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T08:33:40.217" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T08:33:40.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3729" CreationDate="2017-10-11T12:35:34.110" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was going to post this as a comment, but when I realised it would run to a thread rather than a single note I thought better to try and form it as an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP puts forward a proposition and asks if there is a link between the Ichabod Crane portion of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Edward VI. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proposition springs from a potential play on words extracting  ‘Ed(ward)-less’ from ‘headless’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In support of the proposition the OP puts forward three potential parallels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ichabod means &quot;glory is lost&quot; and Edward summarized the charges against Somerset as &quot;ambition, vainglory, ...&quot;, and noted at his uncle's death that &quot;[he] had his head cut off&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ichabod's rival is the younger, Abraham 'Brom Bones' Van Brunt. Edward's father was Henry the 8th, quite the father with his many wives, (arguably a veritable Abraham), and the legitimate antecedent to the throne. Just as the line of Henry won, the line of Brom bones won. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The primary competition in the time of Edward was the war on Scottland called &quot;the rough wooing&quot;, and the primary competition in the legend is the wooing of Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter of a wealthy farmer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before looking elsewhere for evidence to support or disprove the proposition, it may be fruitful to examine the integrity of the OP's supporting claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ichabod means “glory is lost”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name certainly appears to be related to glory though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichabod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;opinions differ&lt;/a&gt; as to exactly what, it may be ‘no glory’, ‘Alas! The glory’ or ‘glory has left’.&#xA;The OP juxtaposes this with Somerset’s ‘vainglory’. Which suggests that he is identifying Ichabod Crane with Somerset, but draws no explicit conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I considered whether the OP intended this as support for identifying Crane as Edward, but could see no mechanism for how that might work. If Crane is Edward, who did he behead?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Vainglory' means (per OED)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glory that is vain, empty, or worthless&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than 'lost glory' or 'no glory' so as a link it lacks substance. &#xA;Also we should ask, is 'glory' a sufficiently rare concept that allusions to it are sufficient to link historical and fictional characters, lacking any other commonality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP then notes that Edward had Somerset beheaded. The character who is beheaded in TLoSH is the Hessian Soldier, who does not appear in the theory. It is not clear how this fact supports the proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparison of Abraham Bones with Henry 8th, via the quality of ‘being an Abraham’ and an allusion to Henry’s many wives and his being ‘quite the father’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link rests on the definition of ‘being an Abraham’ commonly taken to mean ‘father of many’ or ‘father of a nation’. Henry had three legitimate heirs survive to adulthood, none of whom had heirs of their own. Therefore Henry’s line did not continue the monarchy beyond his immediate heirs, limiting his claim to either definition of a ‘veritable Abraham’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that, through the Reformation, Henry shaped his realm more than many monarchs and thus was the ‘father of a nation’, but that is not a claim the OP advances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Abraham link fails, any feature of Brom and Henry both ‘winning’ is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘Rough Wooing’ is then likened to the wooing of Katrina Van Tassel. Setting aside all other considerations of the nature of that war or its protagonists, the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; ‘The Rough Wooing’ only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rough_Wooing#cite_note-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dates from the 1850s&lt;/a&gt;, though Scott alluded to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so rough a mode of wooing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in his 1828 &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2jINAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;dq=the%20rough%20wooing&amp;amp;pg=PA85#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=the%20rough%20wooing&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tales of a Grandfather&lt;/a&gt; but at the time of Scott's publication TLoSH had already been in print for 8 years. Therefore, unless an earlier popularisation of that name is determined this thread falls away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bringing these together, what does the proposition leave us with?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crane as Somerset, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bones as Henry. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We are ‘Ed-less’ as no character is proposed for the role of the King, unless it was intended that Crane fill the edward Role, then what of Somerset?. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore we are left with a contest between Somerset and Henry VIII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this assessment, the proposition fails in its own terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no path which takes us to Edward IV, only a leap of&#xA;conjecture.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no path which takes us to Somerset . The proposed link of&#xA;equating ‘glory is gone’ with ‘vainglorious’ &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be seen as&#xA;generally supportive of a theory &lt;em&gt;if there were other grounds&lt;/em&gt;, but&#xA;there are not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ‘headlessness’ of Somerset does not provide support since it&#xA;cannot be made to correlate to TLoSH. Crane is not beheaded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one were to argue that he metaphorically ‘lost his head’, we would then have to ask at whose instruction/hand? Crane was frightened by the Hessian Horseman, being either a true ghost or in fact Brom Bones. But Brom Bones has been equated with Henry, not Edward. The proposition and support put forward do not support either the Ghost, or Brom being Edward. If neither of them is Edward, then the beheading of Somerset at Edwards instruction cannot be cited as evidence of a link between TLoSH and Edward IV.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no path which takes us to Henry VIII. The suggested support&#xA;for Brom’s identification with him rests on the leap of conjecture&#xA;which introduced Edward IV in the first place and a tenuous reading&#xA;of what it is to ‘be an Abraham’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the Rough Wooing allusion were not dismissed on grounds of&#xA;chronology, it would still fail as an analogy. The war on Scotland&#xA;was initially prosecuted by Henry in part with the intention of&#xA;achieving a forced marriage for his &lt;em&gt;son&lt;/em&gt;, not himself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP references three historical characters, Edward, henry and Somerset. But we have only two fictional characters to map them to, unless we include the Hessian Soldier or Katrina Van Tassel. This in itself, even overlooking the complete absence of other supporting evidence, seems to be an insurmountable problem for the proposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP also makes reference to the supposed connection between the lyrics of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and the Cold War, asking if there is ‘a similar theme of slight transformation of a previously known story, and story elements to improve relevance and impact of the story’. No evidence is cited for this link and the closest I can find online is a supposed link between a claymation film from the 60s, not the song, and the Nazis, not the Cold War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion is that the general proposition ‘part of the Ichabod Crane story, &quot;the Headless Horseman&quot;, ... drew from a historical &quot;Edward&quot;’ may or may not be true and that the more specific proposition that there is something that ‘connects Sleepy Hollow and Edward Tudor’ fails on its own terms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be evidence out there which leads to such a conclusion, but internet searches reveal nothing which link the two and there is nothing cited in the question which supports the view, or any path or thread which leads us towards it. for example Irving does not have a famously documented interest in the Tudors and if the characters in the tale &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be matched to historical characters, there is no interpretation or enlightenment brought to the subject by the tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T10:57:25.727" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T10:57:25.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3852" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3853" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" Score="0" Body="&quot;Charlie and the Chocolate Factory&quot; is a novel by the author Roald Dahl, focusing on a boy named Charlie Bucket and his tour of Willy Wonka's legendary chocolate factory. Use this tag with the  [roald-dahl] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T13:42:07.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3854" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3855" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" Score="0" Body="For questions about the prolific British writer Roald Dahl (1916-1990) or about any of his literary works, which include novels and short stories, children's and adult books." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T13:44:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3856" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:01:43.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:01:43.730" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T14:01:43.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3857" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:01:43.730" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Assassin's Creed book series by Oliver Bowden &amp; Matthew J. Kirby (published by Penguin, 2009-current). Not to be used for the video game of the same name that inspired it, except as they relate to the book." OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:56:26.067" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:56:26.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3858" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:32:38.027" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:32:38.027" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T14:32:38.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3859" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:32:38.027" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880) or her life as a writer. She went by the pseudonym of George Eliot." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:23:06.930" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:23:06.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3860" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3861" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" Score="0" Body="For all questions about the novel Silas Marner by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). Note that this is a novel tag and not a character tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T14:54:19.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3862" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:37:02.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:37:02.793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:37:02.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3863" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:37:02.793" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding authors' creation of new words (e.g. &quot;tintinnabulation&quot; by Edgar Allan Poe)." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:51:02.470" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:51:02.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3864" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:37:52.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:37:52.507" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:37:52.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3865" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:37:52.507" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Canadian singer, songwriter, and author Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) or his life. Use with [lyrics] or [poetry] tags when necessary." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:14:13.297" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:14:13.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3866" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:38:42.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:38:42.630" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:38:42.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3867" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T15:38:42.630" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American novelist and short story writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T15:52:08.463" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T15:52:08.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3868" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:06:29.657" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This tag is for the novel &lt;em&gt;Michel Strogoff&lt;/em&gt; by Jules Verne, originally written in French and translated into English as &lt;em&gt;Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel describes the journey of a heroic soldier who takes a letter through a war, takes a suffering woman under his wings, must see his mother suffer while he serves his country, gets captured by a traitor military leader and blinded, and persists in his mission despite all the difficulties. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T16:19:35.677" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T16:19:35.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3869" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:06:29.657" Score="0" Body="For questions about Jules Verne's novel &quot;Michel Strogoff&quot;, known in English also as &quot;Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar&quot;. Use with the [jules-verne] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T16:18:11.727" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T16:18:11.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3870" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:10:19.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T16:10:19.300" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T16:10:19.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3871" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:10:19.300" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Peril at End House' by Agatha Christie featuring the detective Hercule Poirot. Should be tagged with [agatha-christie]." OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:15:13.187" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:15:13.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3566" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:17:02.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm missing something, after sifting through Google for awhile I haven't been able to discover any other usages of the term other than in the book. Even searches of Google Scholar and various academic journals and databases don't show any results (other than in articles about - or explicitly referring to - Catch-22). That being said, I haven't been able to find evidence of any usage of the term prior to the book (or any actual usage of the term in academia), and all references to it appear to be in the book itself or in discussions of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite possible that the author did have a particularly pompous academic in mind. He studied English as an undergraduate at University of Southern California and New York University and then earned a MA in English from Columbia University in 1949 (approximately 12 years prior to publishing &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;). He then spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University and taught composition for 2 years at Pennsylvania State University. (He later taught again part-time in the 1970s at Yale University and University of Pennsylvania, but that was after the publication of Catch-22).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point in mentioning that is that he doubtless came into contact with many academics in English in his time at 5 different university English departments (at least some of which would've presumably been pompous). Maybe he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have someone specific in mind, or maybe he was poking fun at several of the pompous academics he had known, or maybe this is just an aggregate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that he seemed to have invented the term for the book, it's more likely that he was poking fun at academia in general rather than any specific group or individual; while he &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have had someone in particular in mind at the time, that doesn't seem to make its way into the book specifically, and he presumably would've known quite a few people he could've based that on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T14:36:43.273" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T14:36:43.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1992" CreationDate="2017-10-11T16:54:07.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the same logic, why does he leave it up to chance who will find them in the first place, given that he was clearly looking for a specific type of child to visit him? After all, the primary purpose of this was to select a successor - selecting 5 kids &lt;em&gt;at full random&lt;/em&gt; and choosing his favorite seems like a very odd way to choose a successor (especially given that 4 out of the 5 - 80% of the candidates - were clearly completely unsuitable).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unknown the extent to which Wonka was leaning on the process (if he was at all). The fact that Violet's father had his entire factory looking for the Wonka bar would suggest that that one at least wasn't the result of him leaning on the process, but it's quite plausible that Charlie's was no accident. (After all, the previous 4 did seem to be unsuitable for some rather obvious reasons even just based on the news coverage of them, so it would seem rather absurd for him not to make any effort to lean on the results of the final one). Obviously, the text doesn't directly answer that, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the rules of the contest do specify that only children were permitted to win the contest, so presumably if an adult had found the ticket they would've been obliged to give it to a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the previous facts, though, another possible answer is that &quot;he assumed that children would win for the same reason that he believed that at least one of the winners would be suitable to be a successor.&quot; This suggests that either the process wasn't as random as it looked, or that the author simply intended for us to suspend our disbelief on the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, of course, possible that it really was sheer good luck on Wonka's part, or that he believed that 5 children was enough to give him good odds of finding at least one suitable successor; by sheer statistical odds, that would require that at least 20% of the world's children (1/5) were suitable as successors (i.e. had the characteristics he was looking for). Maybe he was optimistic that a kid who hadn't been &quot;spoiled&quot; yet could be trained to be his next successor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final possibility (and this is obviously speculative): it's quite possible that there was a &quot;Plan B&quot; to find a successor if this plan didn't work out. If Charlie had ended up not working out, then maybe he would've just run another contest or something like that to get more candidates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T05:49:00.010" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T05:49:00.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2970" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:06:33.280" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some insight can potentially be gained by comparing and contrasting Simon's later song &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.paulsimon.com/song/poem-underground-wall/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Poem on the Underground Wall,&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in which a graffiti artist's scrawling of a obscenity on the wall of a subway station is described, in deliberately florid language, as the act of a &lt;em&gt;poet&lt;/em&gt;.  Similarly, if we ask ourselves what is written on &quot;subway walls and tenement halls,&quot; the answer is clearly graffiti.  Yet here the graffiti artist is being described as a &lt;em&gt;prophet&lt;/em&gt;.  In both cases, Simon is instructing us to pay closer attention to the marginalized and the ignored of society, and to give their forms of expression greater respect and attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this, he is in some ways in conversation with Bob Dylan, whose song, &lt;a href=&quot;https://bobdylan.com/songs/times-they-are-changin/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Times They Are A-Changin',&quot;&lt;/a&gt; he covers on the same album where &quot;The Sound of Silence&quot; debuted.  Where Dylan instructs &quot;writers and critics who &lt;em&gt;prophesize&lt;/em&gt; with your pen,&quot; as well as mothers, fathers, senators and congressmen, to reserve judgment on their children and the future they are bringing forth, Simon is telling the same people that the future has already been written down for them in the last places they would think to look.  Simon's respect for graffiti also prefigures (or prophesies, if you will) the forthcoming adoption of graffiti, and its intrinsic social criticism, as the central visual expression of the hip-hop cultural movement (and its subsequent acceptance as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banksy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a mainstream, but still socially critical, art form&lt;/a&gt; in more recent times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Peter Shor noted earlier, there is a notable instance of a prophecy being &quot;written on a wall&quot; in the Old Testament &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belshazzar%27s_feast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book of Daniel&lt;/a&gt;.  Like Simon's prophecy, the one in &lt;em&gt;Daniel&lt;/em&gt; is a warning, in this case about the immanent fall of the king.  It is from here we draw the common English expression &quot;the writing's on the wall&quot; as a premonition of doom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:16:33.440" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:16:33.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3875" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:38:40.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:38:40.357" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:38:40.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3876" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:38:40.357" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding The Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer. Use with the [geoffrey-chaucer] tag. If asking about a section written in verse, use with [poetry]." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T17:19:00.130" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T17:19:00.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3877" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:41:17.727" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:41:17.727" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:41:17.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3878" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:41:17.727" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the video game adaptations of literature, literary aspects of video games (e.g. song lyrics, script, etc.) or how a video game relates to some piece of literature." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T19:31:23.177" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T19:31:23.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3879" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:43:53.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:43:53.603" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:43:53.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3880" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:43:53.603" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works or respective lives of the theatrical partnership Gilbert and Sullivan, which consists of composer Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) and librettist W. S. Gilbert (1836-1911)." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:15:30.103" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:15:30.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3881" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:48:34.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T17:48:34.077" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T17:48:34.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3882" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T17:48:34.077" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author Stephenie Meyer or about any of her literary works, most famously the Twilight series." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T16:28:29.700" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T16:28:29.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3884" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3885" CreationDate="2017-10-11T19:06:16.297" Score="5" ViewCount="621" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first verse &lt;em&gt;My Thanksgiving&lt;/em&gt; by Don Henley (from &lt;em&gt;Inside Job&lt;/em&gt;) reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lot of things have happened&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since the last time we spoke&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some of them are funny&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some of 'em ain't no joke&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I trust you will forgive me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If I lay it on the line&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I always thought you were a friend of mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it sound like the song is addressed to an &quot;ordinary&quot; friend that he just hasn't seen in awhile. The next verse seems to reinforce that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes I think about you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wonder how you're doing now&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And what you're going through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines from the next verse, however, makes this sound like a romantic relationship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last time I saw you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We were playing with fire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We were loaded with passion&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a burning desire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it sound like the passion is for each other; I suppose that it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that the passion referred to here wasn't for each other, but this seems like an odd interpretation to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the next verse refers to this individual as &quot;my friend&quot; in the present tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now the trouble with you and me, &lt;strong&gt;my friend&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is the trouble with this nation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't really sound like a former romantic partner, more like a friend that he hasn't seen in a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the nature of this relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-12T12:53:21.087" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T13:50:52.593" Title="What is the nature of the friendship in Don Henley's &quot;My Thanksgiving&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;don-henley&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3884" CreationDate="2017-10-11T20:49:07.557" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines about passion and desire do strongly imply a romantic relationship, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; when taken out of context. Here is the full stanza. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last time I saw you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We were playing with fire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We were loaded with passion&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a burning desire&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;For every breath, for every day of living&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And this is my Thanksgiving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, the passion and desire clearly isn't for each other, it's for life itself. This stanza considered in whole, as combined with the other lines you cited, plus the below quote from late in the song, instead suggest two platonic friends who were once young (and full of the passion of youth) together, and are now getting old together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I don't mind saying that I still love it all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wallowed in the springtime&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now I'm welcoming the fall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T00:13:37.523" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T00:13:37.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-11T22:16:31.393" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The man who wrote the diary displays a very strange reaction to what (for me) appears to be a negligible accident - having his and his friend's (with whom he was kissing) glasses entangle and fall on the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He picks them up, (some other woman comes in?), and he leaves in a hurry, despite him liking the woman he was together with at the moment, and her asking him to stay. He even goes as far as remarking that he felt as if he had stumbled upon a corpse in the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this scene about? Why did he leave her, and what did the glasses have to do with this? The whole story of the book hinges on this breakup, and yet the breakup isn't explained, even in the slightest detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T22:16:31.393" Title="What exactly happened with the glasses?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky&gt;&lt;autobiography-of-a-corpse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3887" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3888" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and literary works of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, the Russian author. Use with the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T22:18:23.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3889" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3890" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novelette by Sigizmund Krzhizhanivsky. Use with the [sigizmund-krzhizhanovsky] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" LastActivityDate="2017-10-11T22:18:45.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3884" CreationDate="2017-10-12T14:06:03.113" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text is obviously ambiguous, but I think you could make an argument that the song is about rejecting the romantic feelings of someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics begin with the line &quot;I always thought you were a friend of mine.&quot; However, the lyrics also make it clear that something happened that damaged their relationship: the narrator says &quot;Sometimes I think about you / I wonder how you're doing now / And what you're going through&quot; which makes it clear that the narrator and the friend haven't seen each other in a while. What could have caused the estrangement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics heavily imply that that the last time the narrator and the friend were together, they had a romantic encounter. This obviously is implied with the phrase &quot;We were loaded with passion and a burning desire.&quot; But I think the more revealing passage comes from near the end of the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here in this fragmented world, I still believe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In learning how to give love, and how to receive it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I would not be among those who abuse this privilege&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a romantic encounter that ended the relationship? Talking about how it's important to not only &quot;give love&quot; but also &quot;receive it&quot;? It seems plausible to me that this is about a friendship where one person wanted a friendship, the other person wanted a romantic relationship, and the conflict between the two caused the relationship to end (the last time they saw each other was during the romantic encounter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is thankful: in the fifth verse the narrator notes that they have &quot;family and friends,&quot; &quot;satisfying work,&quot; and &quot;a back that bends&quot;. Conspicuously absent from that list is any mention of a romantic relationship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thankfulness seems to stem from learning to accept things as they are, even if that means that they don't get everything that they want. The narrator notes that &quot;an angry man / Can only get so far / Until he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be / With the way things are,&quot; which implies that the narrator is trying to accept that the relationship won't happen and to try and be thankful for the things that have happened--the narrators friends, family, etc. Hence the title of the song: the narrator is trying to be thankful for everything even though one thing didn't work out. And hence the final verse of the song, where the narrator expresses thankfulness for not only &quot;every breath [and] every day of living&quot; but also &quot;for everything that broke my heart.&quot; They want to move on and avoid fixating on this one event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T16:40:43.570" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T16:40:43.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2017-10-12T18:07:47.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ruthlessness for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruthlessness can appear sadistic, but with sadism, the intent is to cause suffering for the purpose of pleasure/satisfaction.  With ruthlessness, the goal is to achieve an outcome.  A sadist can be ruthless in how they approach their sadism, but not all ruthlessness is sadistic in intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found nothing in the books to indicate that Gale is sadistic, only that he is angry about the condition of the districts, and willing to kill without remorse to achieve the goal of overthrowing the established order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gale is a soldier.  The job of the soldier is to kill without remorse, with the most effective means available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gale's ruthlessness, his willingness to kill for &lt;em&gt;expedience&lt;/em&gt;,* is a factor in her choosing Peeta over Gale.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Katniss, a hunter as opposed to a soldier, kills only when necessary for survival. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; In the battle for District 2 (&lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;), Gale wants to suffocate everyone inside the mountain fortress by cutting off the ventilation and trapping everyone inside.  This inclination is partly as retribution for the destruction of District 12, and partly practical in that allowing survivors entails some risk, which is actualized when Katniss is subsequently wounded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T16:40:22.107" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T16:40:22.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3797" CreationDate="2017-10-12T23:54:46.687" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am answering from work, so the research I can do to &quot;prove&quot; this is fairly limited, nor can I provide any specific anecdotal evidence to back this up.  So, take both of those statements into consideration when reading my answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major thematic element within BDSM erotica (and I assume, reality) is the use/appeal(?) of humiliation.The person in the dominant role may use humiliation to make the person in the submissive role feel &quot;small&quot; or feel as if s/he relies on the dominant person to make them feel valued.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, people who practice BDSM sometimes call it &quot;power exchange&quot;. This reflects the fact that the submissive person is giving up control of his/her sexual experience to the dominant partner, giving the dominant person all of the power within the sexual relationship. The submissive person actually experiences pleasure from feeling as if s/he has no control over his/her sexual experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the words &quot;slut&quot; and &quot;whore&quot; evoke a similar lack of sexual control on the part of the to whom the word is directed. A &quot;slut&quot; could be defined as someone who enjoys sex so much, or whose libido is so strong that s/he has a difficult time saying no to sexual experiences. A whore might be defined as someone who is willing to do whatever their customer pays for. In either case, these two specific words suggest a person who has limited power over their own sexual encounters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I have not read &quot;Pack Challenge,&quot; I imagine that readers who respond positively to BDSM and/or sexual humiliation would probably have minor or positive reactions to the use of these words within the book.  But those readers who do not find those things sexually appealing probably perceive the words as simply insulting, negative and unappealing.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*In hopes of avoiding negative comments before they occur, let me point out that BDSM frequently relies on roleplaying, and as such may have very little in common with how the participants treat or feel about each other in non-sexual situations.  In other words, a sexually submissive person might get incredible pleasure from feeling as if their wants, needs and value is completely dependent on the desires of their dominant partner. Outside of sexual situations, that submissive person could easily be completely self-confident, assertive and emotionally secure, regardless of how s/he is treated by the dominant person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1967" LastActivityDate="2017-10-12T23:54:46.687" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-13T10:20:25.577" Score="5" ViewCount="1158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for the title of a book I read as a kid around 10 years ago, in German (in Germany). The book was already quite old then, hardcover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s about a civilization of little people who live on a single tree, kind of like Terry Prattchett’s Carpet people, just on a tree (also inside the trunk and branches). All I remember about the story is that the protagonist, a boy, is on the run for the most part of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked and it’s not The Minpins and not the Faraway Tree as there was no mention of any humans and the whole story takes place in the tree. It’s not necessarily a children’s book and it was about 400 pages long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2315" LastEditorUserId="2318" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T17:38:33.330" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T22:55:25.513" Title="Book with little people living in a tree" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3895" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-13T12:58:56.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-13T12:58:56.270" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T12:58:56.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3896" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-13T12:58:56.270" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Seagull&quot; is a play by Russian author Anton Chekhov. Use this tag with the [anton-chekhov] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:28:07.010" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T09:28:07.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3700" CreationDate="2017-10-13T15:59:27.907" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Please note: I'm not a expert in Christian/Lewis in particular's theology; this is my impression primarily from the text of the book.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter, Edmund, Lucy and the rest don't know they're dead until the very end of The Last Battle. At the time the discussion of Susan occurs, everyone--including the reader--thinks they simply were pulled through another portal to Narnia, right before, during, or instead of the crash. Peter thinks that Susan didn't come with them because she's no longer a friend of Narnia and didn't come on the train + through the portal with them, not because she's still alive. (The real reason is both, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So we got into the train—that's kind of thing people travel in in our&#xA;  world: a lot of wagons chained together—and the Professor and Aunt&#xA;  Polly and Lucy came with us. We wanted to keep together as long as we&#xA;  could. Well there we were in the train. And we were just getting to&#xA;  the station where the others were to meet us, and I was looking out of&#xA;  the window to see if I could see them when &lt;strong&gt;suddenly there came a most&#xA;  frightful jerk and a noise: and there we were in Narnia&lt;/strong&gt; and there was&#xA;  your Majesty tied up to the tree.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There's not much to tell,&quot; said Peter. &quot;Edmund and I were standing on&#xA;  the platform and we saw your train coming in. I remember thinking it&#xA;  was taking the bend far too fast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And what happened then?&quot; said Jill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, it's not very easy to describe, is it, Edmund?&quot; said the High&#xA;  King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Not very,&quot; said Edmund. &quot;It wasn't at all like that other time when&#xA;  we were pulled out of our own world by Magic. There was a frightful&#xA;  roar and something hit me with a bang, but it didn't hurt. And I felt&#xA;  not so much scared as—well, excited. Oh—and this is one queer thing.&#xA;  I'd had a rather sore knee, from a hack at rugger. I noticed it had&#xA;  suddenly gone. And I felt very light. And then—here we were.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It was much the same for us in the railway carriage,&quot; said the Lord&#xA;  Digory, wiping the last traces of the fruit from his golden beard.&#xA;  &quot;Only I think you and I, Polly, chiefly felt that we'd been&#xA;  unstiffened. You youngsters won't understand. But we stopped feeling&#xA;  old.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;After the shock and the noise,&quot; said Lucy, &quot;we found ourselves here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it's reasonable for no one to say &quot;here's how Susan is reacting to the death of her whole family&quot;, given that, well, her family doesn't know they all died. They expect to go back to our world. The last time they saw Susan, they were all alive and Susan was &quot;silly.&quot; (Note: Lewis's opinion, not mine, etc.) The omnicient narrator doesn't bring it up at the time because at that point, the reader is also not supposed to know this. The revelation that they're in Heaven doesn't happen until the very, very end of the novel (literally the second to last paragraph), at which point there's enough grand-scale wrapping up to do, and enough on the characters' mind, that the narration doesn't return to Susan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You do not yet look so happy as I mean you to be.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lucy said, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;We're so afraid of being sent away, Aslan.&lt;/strong&gt; And you have&#xA;  sent us back into our own world so often.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No fear of that,&quot; said Aslan. &quot;Have you not guessed?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;There was a real railway accident&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; said Aslan softly. &quot;Your father&#xA;  and mother and all of you are—as you used to call it in the&#xA;  Shadow-Lands—dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The&#xA;  dream is ended: this is the morning.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the&#xA;  things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful&#xA;  that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the&#xA;  stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever&#xA;  after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All&#xA;  their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only&#xA;  been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning&#xA;  Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which&#xA;  goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one&#xA;  before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why The Last Battle doesn't bring it up. Re Lewis: presumably, Susan grieved for her family. She may even have turned to religion in her grief, which would bring her back towards the path to Aslan's country, though Lewis said would be a longer journey for her. However, that doesn't change the fact that the reason she's still alive is that she's, erm, a teenager who likes nylons and lipsticks &lt;strong&gt;rather than Aslan&lt;/strong&gt;--that's what makes her &quot;silly&quot; according to Lewis, that state of mind; not her reaction to a specific event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2017-10-13T15:59:27.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1488" CreationDate="2017-10-13T20:44:12.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some reflection, the simple answer may be that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Dog is the friend that is also foe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assessment is based on the capitalization of Dog, and mythological conception of Sirius, the &quot;dog star&quot; that appears in time of harvest (a boon to mankind) but is also believed to bring madness, disease and death [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D22%3Acard%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iliad 22.1&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reference from Homer is consistent with the harvest theme of the passage, and the seemingly inconsistency of keeping &quot;far hence&quot; the &quot;friend to men&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scope of the poem is broad, and there is room for a range of more specific interpretations, but the horror of the first World War cannot be discarded--the Waste Land was published just 4 years after the conclusion of the man-made catastrophe and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;global flu pandemic that followed&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dog could symbolize war or the aftermath of war, or the instinctual nature of humans (bestial aspect in a benign form) blithely digging at the skeletons of the recent past (i.e. resurrecting &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKcAYMb5uk4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the horror&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Baudelaire quote at the end carries the implication that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Other&lt;/a&gt;, the &quot;foe&quot;, is also the self, thus the Dog, Stetson and the narrator are all reflections of each other--man is man's greatest foe.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Dog represents the bestial nature of man&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This supports the friend/foe idea, and is further supported by a main theme of Eliot's poetry in general, and this poem and the Four Quartets in particular, about the conflict between the material and the ideal world, i.e. the conflict between the flesh and the spirit.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preceding passages are directly related to the excerpt and critical in interpreting it. They provide the setting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unreal City, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I had not thought death had undone so many.  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,   &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.  &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!   &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That corpse you planted last year in your garden, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? &lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land-56d227a99ddeb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;, Section I: The Burial of The Dead&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wasteland is about spiritual emptiness in an industrialized society still reeling from the carnage of World War I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot presents purgatorial imagery--an unreal city devoid of sunlight occupied by the living dead, spiritually exhausted (eyes fixed upon their feet as opposed to the heavens[A]), streaming across a bridge on their way to work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William_Street,_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King William Street&lt;/a&gt; is key--this is the historical center of the London banking district.  The deadening bells of St Mary Woolnoth deepen choice--Eliot is presenting a church enforcing the strictures of an industry that is the opposite of religion[B], focused entirely on worldly gain, absent remorse.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blake's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43673/london-56d222777e969&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;London&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is partly about self-enslavement, partly about dehumanization in an industrial society, and &lt;em&gt;Garden of Love&lt;/em&gt; is about the inversion of love in the context of religion.  Baudelaire's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Au Lecteur&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, upon which this section ends, is the most obvious referent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among the jackals, vultures, scorpions, snales and vermin, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ... &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is one more ugly, more wicked, more filthy! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which never makes great gestures or loud cries &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who would gladly reduce the earth to ruin &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yawning, swallow up the world:&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ennui, eyes loaded with involuntary tears, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who smokes a hookah and dreams of the scaffold &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;To the Reader&quot;, Charles Baudelaire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ennui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ennui&lt;/a&gt;, in this poem also a proper noun (&quot;C'est l'Ennui!&quot;), is often translated as mere boredom, but that is the most benign definition.  It may make more sense in Baudelaire, who is jaded, but in reference to The Wasteland, stronger definitions apply: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/enervation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ennervation&lt;/a&gt;, a feeling of being &lt;strong&gt;drained of vitality&lt;/strong&gt;; fatigue. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/lassitude&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lassitude&lt;/a&gt;, a state of physical or &lt;strong&gt;mental weariness&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/apathy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apathy&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;strong&gt;lack of concern&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/indifference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indifference&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;lack of sympathy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/accidie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acedia&lt;/a&gt;, mental or &lt;strong&gt;spiritual apathy&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baudelaire's Ennui is more sinister for &quot;dreaming of the scaffold&quot;, which can have several meanings, all related to a love of death, including the guillotine (violent, bloody upheaval), and even one's own destruction (death wish). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/eic/article-abstract/XXXVIII/2/131/439556/Stetson-in-The-Waste-Land?redirectedFrom=PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This essay&lt;/a&gt;, speculating on the seemingly anomalous choice of &quot;Stetson&quot;, notes that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_Eliot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valerie Eliot&lt;/a&gt; explained the character as &quot;not referring to anyone in particular, but simply [meaning] any superior bank clerk: a person in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chairish.com/product/175101/vintage-mallory-stetson-derby-bowler-hat?gclid=EAIaIQobChMItJrysanu1gIVWDuBCh1TzgkcEAQYASABEgL8EfD_BwE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bowler hat&lt;/a&gt;, black jacket and striped trousers.&quot;[C]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't say if TS thought WWI was a conflict caused by bankers, but it was certainly a devastating war fought for no good reason, and the best explanation I've come across is John Keegan's assertion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A History of Warfare&lt;/a&gt; that the cause was simply that Europe was a powder keg after a century of massive armament in the wake of the success of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_Army#The_Soldier-King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regimental system&lt;/a&gt;. Banking, in part, arose as a means of allowing sovereigns to fund wars with debt.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;War is certainly related to this passage in the reference to Mylae--the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mylae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Mylae&lt;/a&gt; was Rome's first great naval triumph (Britain's power was based on it's navy), directly led to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punic_Wars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subsequent conflicts&lt;/a&gt; (there were 3 Punic Wars), and was one of the largest conflicts in history at the time between the two dominant military/economic powers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship of money and conflict/dehumanization would seem to be theme of these passages and of the Wasteland overall.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carthage, which was razed after defeat in the Punic Wars, is subsequently referenced in Section III of The Waste Land, The Fire Sermon, but the allusion carries a double meaning in that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dido, legendary Queen of Carthage&lt;/a&gt;, famously immolates herself for love after Aeneas leaves her to found Rome.  (Purgation, and in particular, the convolution of love and fire, are the central theme of Eliot's later &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Quartets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Quartets&lt;/a&gt;, largely composed during the time of the bombing raids on London in the second World War.)   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emptiness of material gain in the face of mortality is unequivocally demonstrated later in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the profit and loss. &lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land-56d227a99ddeb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;, Section IV: Death By Water&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the death is not entirely literal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A current under sea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He passed the stages of his age and youth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Entering the whirlpool.&lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;ibid.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phlebas is both living and dead, a metaphor for the dehumanized condition of people in the modern era.   Eliot goes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias#Comparison_of_the_two_poems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/a&gt; for the conclusion of the passage, to reinforce his point as to the folly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gentile or Jew &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.&lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;ibid.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Gentile and Jew&quot; is also not meant to be taken entirely literally, but as an inclusion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Other&lt;/a&gt; (the Jew) in the family of man.  The adversary is yourself, which is also the final implication of the Baudelaire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know him, reader, this delicate monster&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hypocrite reader, my semblance, my friend.[D]  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ennui&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;To the Reader&quot;, Charles Baudelaire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ON THE DOG&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagery of dogs is related to ruin in the Iliad, which begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of the mania sing, Goddess, of Peleus’ godlike son Achilles, [E]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the terrible destruction, the agony laid on countless Achaeans, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the multitude of stalwart souls cast into Hell before their time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of the bodies of heroes spoil, for vultures and hounds&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0217%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iliad 1.1-5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s pretty f---ing hardcore, and no accident Homer leads to Euripides, the Iliad to the Trojan Women.  Notice in particular &lt;em&gt;there is no mention of Trojans in these opening lines of the Iliad, but only of the Greeks themselves, and their suffering and shame.&lt;/em&gt;[F]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Dog represents the friend that is also foe &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which may also be the self, or humanity in general.  The dog is also a reflection of the bestial part of ourselves, taking a benign appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Dog digging up the remains may indicate the danger of revisiting past destruction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The body in the grave could be the first World War, and the potential threat of a reprise.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the question of &quot;Has it begun to sprout?  Will it bloom this year?&quot; reinforces the idea gain derived from the death&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, this would be cycle of life type stuff, generation out of destruction, a major theme in the later &lt;em&gt;Four Quartets&lt;/em&gt;, but not in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, in the wake of the deadliest calamity in human history up to that point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not merely a comment on the First World War, or even of wars exclusively, but on the history of mankind in general, and the relationship, in many cases, of inhumanity to material gain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the face of, or wake of, destruction, the banker's primary concern is the bottom line.  The blitheness of the passage reinforces the concept of casual inhumanity, which may be the greatest horror of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ON THE CAPITALIZATION OF DOG&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Capitalization suggests a proper noun.  Offhand, I can think of two relevant allusions, both deriving from Greek mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maera_(hound)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maera&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legendary hound who &lt;strong&gt;leads Erigone to the grave&lt;/strong&gt; of Icarius. On discovering it, both the hound and Erigone leap from a cliff to their death.  Hecuba, Queen of Troy, in one account is said to transform into the Maera[G] over grief for her lost children.  In that form, the Maera is understood as a curse--the &quot;black bitch of the sea&quot; who brings death --relating to the aquatic theme in The Waste Land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius#Etymology_and_cultural_significance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sirius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...even so fast and furiously did the limbs of Achilles bear him onwards. King Priam was first to note him as he scoured the plain, all radiant as the star which men call Orion's Hound, and whose beams blaze forth in time of harvest more brilliantly than those of any other that shines by night; brightest of them all though he be, he yet sends an ill sign for mortals, for he brings fire and fever in his train - even so did Achilles' armor gleam on his breast as he sped onwards.&quot; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D22%3Acard%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iliad, Book 22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Achilles the Destroyer is the dog of war, a symbol of progress rushing relentlessly onward, but ultimately doomed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOOTNOTES:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A] Looking upward to God was very famously reinforced by Donne in the Holy Sonnets &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44113/holy-sonnets-thou-hast-made-me-and-shall-thy-work-decay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thou Hast Made Me, And Shall Thy Work Decay&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: &lt;em&gt;&quot;I dare not move my dim eyes any way, / Despair behind, and death before doth cast / Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste / By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh. / Only thou art above, and when towards thee / By thy leave I can look, I rise again;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  Eliot wrote a book on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0151000964&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which discusses Dante and Donne. I don't know if the title is intentionally a reference to William James' earlier and highly influential &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Varieties of Religious Experience&lt;/a&gt;, but it seems not unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[B] &quot;And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.&quot;  Matthew 21:12–13&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[C] The linked image depicts a vintage Mallory Stetson derby bowler hat.  I personally like to think that Eliot, who was originally American, and would have certainly been aware of the gunslingers mythos of the Old West, was using that term to give a sort of frontier feel.  Modern financialism, and financialism in general, has always been, in part, about &quot;pushing the envelope&quot;. (Successfully pushing the envelop includes management of risk.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[D] Baudelaire uses “mon semblable”,  translated as “my fellow” by Google. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/semblable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Semblable&lt;/a&gt;” in English means “counterpart” or “equal”.  In contemporary English, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/semblance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semblance&lt;/a&gt; is typically used in a pejorative sense, as in “similar in appearance but not in reality”, but the traditional usage is simple “resemblance”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[E] Achilles &quot;mania&quot; is generally translated, not improperly, as “rage” and “wrath”, but I think in this context, the direct rendering of the greek &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0073%3Aentry%3Dmh%3Dnis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;μῆνιν&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mania&lt;/a&gt;) is more instructive.  Here mania can mean obsession, excessive exuberance, overactivity detrimental to one's health, &lt;em&gt;(Achilles' mania has fatal consequences;)&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[F] The dread of having one's body unburied and defiled is related to its shamefulness in an honor culture. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[G] From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0098%3Acard%3D1252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euripides' Hecuba&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  It will soon cease, when ocean's flood—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hecuba&#xA;  Shall convey me to the shores of Hellas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  No, but will close over you when you fall from the masthead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hecuba&#xA;  Who will force me to take the leap?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  Of your own accord you will climb the ship's mast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hecuba&#xA;  With wings upon my back, or by what means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  You will become a dog with fiery glare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hecuba&#xA;  Dead or alive shall I complete my life here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  Dead; and to your tomb shall be given a name—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hecuba&#xA;  Recalling my form, or what will you tell me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polymestor&#xA;  “The hapless hound's grave,” a mark for mariners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T20:22:22.210" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:22:22.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3899" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1913" CreationDate="2017-10-14T06:29:27.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's just the twins showing off, as in each iteration they talk very profoundly about showcasing their abilities.&#xA;(&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If the academy awarded Oscars for Best Orison, you'd be a shoo-in. Truly, it was a masterpiece. Cubist, postmodern, superlatives fail me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Page 138])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be more of a shock factor as well, as Jonah says that filling them (victims) with dread makes them tastier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Page 82)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastEditorUserId="2317" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T00:06:12.997" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T00:06:12.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3894" CreationDate="2017-10-14T10:30:50.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book that immediately sprang to mind when I saw your question is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minpins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Minpins&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Roald Dahl&lt;/strong&gt;. It's a beautifully illustrated children's book about a boy who discovers a civilisation of tiny people living in trees and helps them to defeat the monster who terrorises their forest. I &lt;em&gt;loved&lt;/em&gt; it as a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6Kwr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/I6Kwr.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;front cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He escapes what he is sure must be the Spittler by climbing up a tree as high and as fast as he can. When he comes to a rest, he notices windows opening all over the branches, and discovers a whole city of little people, the Minpins, living inside the tree. The leader of the Minpins, Don Mini, tells Little Billy that the monster waiting under the tree is not the Spittler (which the Minpins have never heard of), but the Red-Hot Smoke-Belching Gruncher, who grunches up everything in the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;However, I suspect your question may be too broad as stated. Little people living in a tree is a reasonably common trope, so there must be &lt;strong&gt;multiple books that match your description&lt;/strong&gt;. Please &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/posts/3894/edit&quot;&gt;edit your question&lt;/a&gt; to tell us more about the book, as has already been suggested in comments. The more we know, the easier it'll be to identify the right book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T10:30:50.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3901" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3902" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" Score="0" Body="&quot;My Side of the Mountain&quot; is a 1959 book by Jean Craighead George. It focuses on a boy who runs away from the city to live in the woods. Use this tag with the [jean-craighead-george] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:13:24.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3903" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:20:48.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:20:48.130" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:20:48.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3904" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:20:48.130" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) or his life as a writer. He was a Japanese author who wrote novels such as &quot;I Am a Cat&quot;, &quot;Botchan&quot;, and &quot;Kokoro&quot;." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T09:19:07.933" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T09:19:07.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3905" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:30:00.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:30:00.283" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:30:00.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3906" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:30:00.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Lyonesse trilogy by Jack Vance, consisting of the three books &quot;Suldrun's Garden&quot;, &quot;The Green Pearl&quot;, and &quot;Madouc&quot;. Should be tagged with [jack-vance]." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:15:00.173" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:15:00.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3907" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3908" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author John Holbrook Vance, better known as Jack Vance (1916-2013), or about any of his literary works, mostly in science fiction and fantasy." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" LastActivityDate="2017-10-14T18:31:32.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4536" CreationDate="2017-10-15T18:31:42.507" Score="6" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;My father is adamant that he has heard a poem which contains a phrase like “it was all done in Berlin in the thirties”. Possibly read by Kenneth Williams. But Google search has let us down. Can anyone suggest what this poem was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was definitely a poem, in English. Twentieth century, and obviously post 1930s. He thinks he heard it read on television, rather than reading it himself, so publication location unknown. The theme of the poem was that although people claim to be doing something new, in fact everything has been done before, in Berlin, in the thirties. So probably a drily humorous piece. Dad thinks that there was a repeated refrain, like 'it was all done in Berlin in the 30s, it was all done in the 30s in Berlin'. Guesses at 3 verses ('not an epic').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2323" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T17:02:46.340" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:02:46.340" Title="Which poem contains a phrase like &quot;it was all done in Berlin in the thirties”" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3741" CreationDate="2017-10-15T20:24:27.700" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say firstly that this question relies on what you mean by the term 'accurate', as when we normally describe a translation as 'accurate' we mean that the meaning conveyed when translated is as close to the original as possible. However, in a literary work this is far more difficult to verify because, in the view of the majority of contemporary literary critics, meaning does not rest in the hands of the author. (I'd recommend reading Barthes' &lt;em&gt;Death of the Author&lt;/em&gt; for the justification of this approach)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A translation by the author may highlight certain aspects of a text that the author intended to highlight in its original, for example the author may alter their translation to further the importance of certain themes that they deem important, but that readers or translators may not favor. So, translation by the author may maintain authorial intent more than a translation done by a professional translator, but if this is accurate depends on how much you value that intent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, some authors who do 'translate' their works do not even do so directly. Although not comprehensive, Haruki Murakami describes in &lt;em&gt;What I Talk About When I Talk About Running&lt;/em&gt; how in 'translation' he writes his works twice; firstly in Japanese, and then again in English, with no attempt to directly convert the Japanese into English, as he feels that he must choose new, limited vocabulary which he finds to be creatively useful. In contrast, Seamus Heaney describes in the preface to &lt;em&gt;Aeneid VI&lt;/em&gt; how whenever he translates either from his own work or from others, he treats it as 'schoolwork' and does attempt to do a translation as closely to the original as possible. Therefore the comparativeness of translation will depend on the author, as there is no perfect method, it seems. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is questionable to what extent an 'accurate' translation of literary texts is even possible. Emily S. Apter in &lt;em&gt;Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability&lt;/em&gt; highlights the fact that many languages have untranslatable words, or words of significance that do not carry over to other languages. Because of this it may be questioned to what extent it is possible to 'accurately' translate any literary text, although translators with a rather keen understanding of language may be at an advantage over authors in this respect, I would recommend reading the rationale usually described in the preface to most translated texts for an insight into how this problem can be approached. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: it may be said that translation done by authors although rare may preserve authorial intent, but this only adds to accuracy if you favor authorial intent as a source of meaning, which would be regarded as a rather unusual view in contemporary literary criticism. If you don't favor authorial intent, this becomes mostly subjective as meanings one reader might pick up on may be preserved in one translation while other meanings some notice may be lost. Translation is not an objective process, and it never will be, so accuracy is dependent entirely on your personal reading of the original text. I know this may not feel entirely satisfying, but as with many problems in literature, there is not one perfect answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2319" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-10-15T21:06:19.250" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T21:06:19.250" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-15T21:27:26.943" Score="1" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading books I sometimes have trouble concentrating on the book and I can't visualize it. I'm often sitting and reading a book, and while there are details in the book, I can't seem to focus on the book. Instead, it feels fuzzy, and then I can't remember what I was reading a few minutes later. I then have to reread it several times to be able to remember the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried going to sleep earlier and removing distractions from around me, but that's still not helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some techniques for concentrating on a book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2324" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T04:39:24.747" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T04:39:24.747" Title="How do I concentrate while reading a book?" Tags="&lt;reading&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2017-10-23T16:44:03.207" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2017-10-15T21:40:06.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an undergrad who has to walk the line between reading books quickly and understanding them in depth I find that quietly reading aloud is surprisingly helpful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By reading aloud you are forced to slow down and focus on the individual words of the text, preventing you from lazily skipping sections or phasing out. I've found this encourages more critical and meaningful interaction with texts, as you are forced to think about what you reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, reading aloud may more easily reveal the cadence and metre of texts (as someone primarily interested in poetry this is useful for me, but reading some prose such as &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; aloud reveals rhythms I may not otherwise have noticed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, reading aloud is in many ways more enjoyable; although it may seem childish there is something deeply satisfying about slightly changing your voice for different characters, and may reveal (particularly in drama) a truer portrayal of speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not just me recommending this, at my institution at least, all Literature students are encouraged to read their set texts aloud. While I understand this may be tiring over long periods or inappropriate if you read in public, I hope that this technique might help to revitalize your reading somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2319" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T21:40:06.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3560" CreationDate="2017-10-15T22:42:35.307" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who has struggled through an essay on characterization in Angela Carter's &lt;em&gt;The Bloody Chamber&lt;/em&gt; using Jungian archetypes I may be able to shed some light on the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The archetypal approach, in my experience, is quite controversial and has always been niche (I have never encountered in my studies a contemporary academic or critical work using Jungian archetypes on any text) because of the same reasons that I struggled with when using them in my work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the actual list of Jungian archetypes is quite short and by no means comprehensive- it is almost useless for any characters who are three dimensional, as archetypes prescribe predictable behaviors and qualities that aren't present in the kinds of character driven fiction that have been popularized since the 18th century. For example, I argued that attempt to pin the protagonist of &lt;em&gt;The Bloody Chamber&lt;/em&gt; down is entirely reductionist, as even though she is not particularly complex, because she is at times both passive and resistant to control, she does not fit an archetype. It may be evident here how simplistic archetypes are when working with complex characters. As a critic, I am simply not interested in any kind of critical lens that limits my ability to explore different avenues of interpretation, and archetypal criticism does just that, it is my feeling that this is the view of the majority of contemporary critics as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, more in regards to the cultural limitations of Jungian archetypes, the foundation of this lens has been attacked quite successfully (although attacks have come from both literary and psychological sources, Andrew Neher's &lt;em&gt;Jung's Theory of Archetypes: A Critique&lt;/em&gt; is a succinct attack on the foundation of archetypes, although I used C.C. Drake's &lt;em&gt;Jung and His Critics&lt;/em&gt; primarily in my work). The foundation of archetypal criticism relies on the view that these archetypes are fundamental and transcendental across all cultures-Jung believed they were an inherent part of human psychology. However, there was little evidence for this in the first place as it is quite easy to apply any arbitrary archetypes to almost any myth (a method archetypal critics used to demonstrate the truth of their method) as these stories were not focused on the characters for their own sake, but rather the imparting of supposedly universal truths. However, as critics have noted, Jung draws from a Eurocentric set of archetypes, primarily featured in Norse myth, and to suggest that what is European is fundamental is both culturally problematic and empirically wrong, in cases where these archetypes do not fit myths from non-European traditions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, archetypal criticism tends to become quite prescriptivist, as unless archetypes are just dismissed altogether for characters who are anything other than flat, the attempts to fit characters into archetypes tend to reduce those characters to descriptions that are inadequate or uninteresting. In contemporary criticism, the text precedes the critic, whereas in archetypal critic, the critic precedes the text; meaning that archetypal analyses tend to be an attempt to fit the text into predefined assumptions, rather than looking at the text as it really is and seeing what can be learned from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: in my experience archetypal criticism is not wholly useful for round characters, and in many cases flat characters; but I can imagine it may be a point of curiosity when dealing with older texts that are not driven by characters or deliberately allude to archetypes (&lt;em&gt;The Wasteland&lt;/em&gt; is a rather famous example of allusion to archetypal figures such as the Sailor). In general, critics want their lens to expand the scope of their analysis, not limit it-and as archetypes tend to be prescriptivist and are from a set list, archetypal criticism limits the lens. In my view, which appears to be the popular view, archetypal criticism is not particularly well supported to begin with, and in the face of complex characters from a variety of cultures, it tends to be an inadequate lens to work with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that my answer is contentious and in many ways subjective, but as someone currently involved in academia, I can confirm at least in my institution and experience of criticism; this is broadly the view on archetypes. If you would like a more pro-archetypal view, I would recommend reading Jung's &lt;em&gt;Man and His Symbols&lt;/em&gt;, the source of Jungian archetypes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2319" LastActivityDate="2017-10-15T22:42:35.307" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2646" CreationDate="2017-10-16T05:16:47.057" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My comment about Borges got me web searching and this time I was able to find the author, by researching South American female contemporaries of Borges. She is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarice_Lispector&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clarice Lispector&lt;/a&gt; (b. 1920, d. 1977). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you Google &quot;Clarice Lispector cockroach&quot; you can find references to her story &quot;The Fifth Story&quot; about cockroaches who are frozen like &quot;statues&quot; by the borax poison the protagonist sets out. I was also able to find mention of the egg story--it is &quot;The Egg and the Chicken&quot; and here is an excerpt from the strange story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seeing the egg is impossible. The egg is supervisible just as there are supersonic sounds. No one can see the egg. Does the dog see the egg? Only machines see the egg. The construction crane sees the egg. — When I was ancient an egg landed on my shoulder. — Love for the egg cannot be felt either. Love for the egg is supersensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That quote is from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/the-complete-stories-by-clarice-lispector.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NY Times review&lt;/a&gt; of a short story collection of hers, that does a good job of explaining what her stories are like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sortof amused that the author's name does indeed have a 'la' in it as I had guessed--C&lt;em&gt;la&lt;/em&gt;rice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1626" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T08:54:05.277" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T08:54:05.277" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3917" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3918" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" Score="0" Body="Will Hobbs is an author, who mostly writes books set in wild, natural places. Use this tag for questions about him and his works, along with the title tag when applicable." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T09:52:00.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2017-10-16T11:30:27.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t have any suggestions for helping you visualise, but I would suggest that you have a think about whether you &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to visualise. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everyone is that kind of reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; and I only visualise if it is clear that the author is explaining something where the physical look or position of things is actually essential to a plot point that I need to understand. In those situations I have to take myself &lt;em&gt;out of&lt;/em&gt; the story and build up the picture like I’m building flatpack furniture; ‘the instructions say that &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; was to the left, so where does &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; go?’. Then once I’ve built that model I’m off again, but that part is a different skill and experience from the rest of my reading, much more conscious and deliberate where the rest is just absorption. I’m not alone in this, if &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=1&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjricSq6PTWAhVpDcAKHVPyC-gQFggmMAA&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2Fbooks%2Fcomments%2F48uiqz%2Fto_what_degree_do_you_visualize_whats_happening%2F&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw0ePhAOJ1EcMLvLbRMASdQP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Reddit thread&lt;/a&gt; is anything to go by. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although people often default to an assumption that human comprehension and memory is all picture and text based, that isn’t universally the case. In my experience you can hold concepts in your mind without words or images, even if you might need words or images to communicate them to someone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of looking for supporting articles for this answer I have discovered that I may, to a degree at least, have what is called ‘aphantasia’, as per t&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/jun/04/aphantasia-no-visual-imagination-impact-learning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his article in The Guardian newspaper&lt;/a&gt;.  But note, the article says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“We know that children with aphantasia tend not to enjoy descriptive&#xA;  texts, and this may well influence their reading comprehension,” says&#xA;  neurologist Adam Zeman of the University of Exeter who, together with&#xA;  his colleagues, gave the condition its name last year. “But there&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;isn’t any evidence directly linking it to learning disabilities&lt;/strong&gt; yet.”   (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pretty much always skip over descriptive paragraphs, or lightly skim them, as they bore me to tears, but are generally not particularly essential to the plot. If I force myself to read them, I won't remember the detail of them later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lack of habitual visualising has never impacted on my ability to do the 3D questions in IQ tests (the which shape does this unfolded box make questions), or stopped me having a career as a landscape designer. I can design without it being a process of transcribing something I’ve pictured, and I can understand a plan someone else has drawn without it transporting me to a mental model of the site. If our brains can create structures the way &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencealert.com/new-study-discovers-your-brain-actually-works-in-up-to-11-dimensions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article describes&lt;/a&gt;  it can be no surprise that there are more ways than just by pictures and words for our minds to hold ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are sites which will tell you that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/visual_imagery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;visualisation is essential to reading and comprehension&lt;/a&gt;,  I know that if &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; had come across teachers who pushed this idea when I was in school it would have greatly deterred me from reading, and reading has been one of the great joys of my life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that you have added some more to the question about fuzziness and lack or recall since I drafted this. I can't speak to that aspect other than to suggest that you have a think about whether other areas of life are affected the same way, and don't be shy of seeking a medical opinion if this is a &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; in your ability to read effectively, as there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; conditions, stress, thyroid function or even a need for new glasses etc which can cause what sufferers often term 'mental fog'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd still recommend that you not stress about lack of visualisation, unless of course that is something you have always previously been able to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T11:30:27.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3912" CreationDate="2017-10-16T19:27:27.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the leading suggestion: reading aloud. But in a situation that does not permit reading aloud, I find it helpful to listen to an audio recording of the book while reading a paper copy. This might be a good plan while trying to read on a bus, for example; and it also might appeal to readers who get frustrated with texts (like Shakespeare) that contain many strange words. It obviously requires a book for which you can find an audio recording, but that list is long. There are many free downloads, for example at &lt;a href=&quot;https://librivox.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LibraVox&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amazon.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt; has audio books for Kindle, some of these free; and then there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.audible.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Audible&lt;/a&gt;. And public libraries carry many books on CD. If you are reading for pleasure, you could start with the list of available audio books, and choosing from that list get the accompanying paper copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastActivityDate="2017-10-16T19:27:27.703" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3955" CreationDate="2017-10-17T04:01:39.610" Score="2" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after their wedding anniversary celebration (p. 152 in my edition), Hank Reardon recalls Lillian coming down from New York on her own initiative to see his Mills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Hank] remembered the day when Lillian came from New York to his office, &lt;strong&gt;of her own sudden choice&lt;/strong&gt;, and asked him to take her through his mills. He heard a soft, low, breathless tone - &lt;strong&gt;the tone of admiration&lt;/strong&gt; - growing in her voice, as she questioned him about his work and looked at the place around her. He looked at her graceful figure moving against the bursts of furnace flame, and at the light swift steps of her high heels stumbling through drifts of slag, as she walked resolutely by his side. &lt;strong&gt;The look in her eyes, when she watched a heat of steel being poured, was like his own feeling for it made visible to him. When her eyes moved up to his face, he saw the same look, but intensified to a degree that seemed to make her helpless and silent.&lt;/strong&gt; It was at dinner, that evening, that he asked her to marry him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did she react that way to seeing the Mills? Why did intensifying it &quot;seem to make her helpless and silent&quot;? Admittedly, she never could've matched his genius (a fact that she was well aware of), but then again, neither could Eddie Willers. Eddie Willers openly admitted that he couldn't match Dagney or Hank Reardon's talent, and yet he's a thoroughly moral character. Why is it that Eddie's respect for talent make him moral, and yet Lillian's (apparent) admiration of the Mills made her seem &quot;helpless and silent&quot;? Why did she react that way to the Mills in the first place, and why didn't she continue to express admiration for the Mills later in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T12:44:55.000" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:05:49.640" Title="Why did Lillian Reardon appear to admire the Steel Mills?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-17T11:18:51.380" Score="2" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;While skimming through answered &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;story-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; questions on another SE site to look for good short stories to read, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?93139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Good Work&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, written in 1959 by the American author Theodore L Thomas, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://quackingduckblog.wordpress.com/2016/02/28/the-good-work-by-theodore-l-thomas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read here&lt;/a&gt;. It paints a grim picture of life in a future world, with a population of 350 billion, in which everyone lives on dull food called Standard Fare unless they can somehow, by some miracle, find a job. At the end of the story it transpires that the jobs people are given by the government are entirely useless; they only work for the sake of having work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this story a commentary on any kind of real-world society?&lt;/strong&gt; Either a society which actually exists or has existed, or a model proposed by political theorists of the time. My first thought, due to the header &quot;Loosener, Tightener, Socialism&quot; on the blog post linked above, was that it might be a satire on Soviet socialism, but I'm open to any plausible interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A good answer might be based on comparison of the text of this story to such societies as described or actualised in the real world, or potentially on an analysis of the author's political views e.g. as expressed in his other writings.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-17T11:26:39.670" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T11:26:39.670" Title="Is &quot;The Good Work&quot; by Theodore L Thomas a commentary on any kind of real-world society?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;politics&gt;&lt;theodore-l-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3778" CreationDate="2017-10-17T14:37:27.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: contains unmarked spoilers for the entirety of &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Let's consider Gale's role in the plot of &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, analysing his character in depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Gale equated with District 13&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gale is a wholehearted supporter of District 13 and the rebellion: he's a soldier serving Coin, and more than willing to kill for his cause. In this he contrasts with the more pacifist Peeta - it's not clear how much of Peeta's televised call for a ceasefire is genuine and how much he was forced to say by the Capitol, but in the vote for a 76th Hunger Games he's the first (and most vehement) to vote no. This contrast between Gale and Peeta unifies the romantic subplot with the main plot of the war: for Katniss, choosing Gale would equate to choosing anger and hatred of the Capitol, while choosing Peeta equates to choosing hope and recovery from the past. She says as much in the last chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the night I feel [desire for Peeta], I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale's fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why Gale's personality is so important to the plot. Throughout most of the first half of &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, when Katniss is working firmly with the rebellion, she's doing so under Gale's influence. He's her closest friend in Thirteen, even if she does occasionally lambaste him for his obedience to Coin. When she takes off on her own mission to assassinate Snow, abandoning Coin's orders, it's after Peeta has rejoined her. And her final choice to kill Coin is motivated by the same event - Prim's death - as her choice to abandon Gale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We conclude that &lt;strong&gt;Gale is inextricably tied to District 13 and to hatred of the Capitol.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Katniss is firmly on the side of District 13, he remains her friend despite his dedication and willingness to kill for the cause of the war. When she comes to see that the District 13 leadership is as bad as the Capitol leadership, then surely by extension the District 13 soldiers are as bad as the Capitol ones? From this point of view, Gale is just like a Peacekeeper: not inherently bad, but committing murders in the service of a bad leader. It is perhaps symbolic that he ends up working in District 2, where many of the Peacekeepers came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The differences between Gale and Coin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps comparing Gale to a Peacekeeper is too harsh. He is Katniss's childhood friend, after all, and certainly has no ill-will towards her. Her break with him is less drastic than her break with Coin. What are the differences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, obviously, Coin is a leader and therefore responsible for a lot more than the more lowly Gale. But there's more to it than that. Consider the death of Prim - the main motivator for Katniss in turning against Coin and Thirteen. She's pretty much &lt;em&gt;certain&lt;/em&gt; that Coin was behind it: the leader of the rebellion is ultimately responsible for actions such as the hovercraft bombing the children. The thing with Gale is that Katniss &lt;em&gt;will never know&lt;/em&gt; whether or not he was indirectly involved in Prim's death. Even he doesn't know. He might have been, but all that's certain is that he was a willing participant in the organisation that orchestrated her death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the message here is that &lt;strong&gt;by joining such an organisation, you might end up being implicated in atrocities without even knowing about it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm tempted to say that this uncertainty about Gale's level of involvement in Prim's death can be symbolically linked to uncertainty about whether he's sadistic or simply ruthless. But in truth, his character is never in question: it's absolutely certain that he wasn't &lt;em&gt;knowingly&lt;/em&gt; involved in Prim's death. His motives are pure - to destroy the Capitol and liberate the people of the districts - and it's only his methods that are sometimes dubious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sadistic or ruthless?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I would conclude that Gale is not sadistic, merely ruthless. Both he and Peeta are at times &lt;strong&gt;doing the wrong thing for the right reason&lt;/strong&gt;. When Peeta calls for a ceasefire, he's wrong to do so, but some of his reasoning is valid - as Beetee puts it (&lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the downfall of Snow), &quot;[w]e have to stop viewing one another as enemies&quot;. When Gale advocates extreme measures against the people of District 2 and the Capitol, he's wrong to do so, but he's motivated by his hatred of their leadership and his grief over the fate of his home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To support this conclusion, let's look at the way he talks about bombing the Nut:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Is it really so necessary that we take the Nut? Or would it be enough to disable it?&quot; [...] &quot;Think of it as a wild dog den,&quot; Gale continues. &quot;You're not going to fight your way in. So you have two choices. Trap the dogs inside or flush them out.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's being completely practical at this point - the Nut is a problem to be solved, a nut to be cracked, and he's considering it in the most expedient way possible. It's only when people express compassion for the 'enemy' inside that he bursts out emotionally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But her anger only seems to infuriate him and he yells, &quot;We watched children burn to death and there was nothing we could do!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have to close my eyes a minute, as the image rips through me. It has the desired effect. I want everyone in that mountain dead. Am about to say so. But then...I'm also a girl from District 12. Not President Snow. I can't help it. I can't condemn someone to the death he's suggesting. &quot;Gale,&quot; I say, taking his arm and trying to speak in a reasonable tone. &quot;The Nut's an old mine. It'd be like causing a massive coal mining accident.&quot; Surely the words are enough to make anyone from 12 think twice about the plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But not so quick as the one that killed our fathers,&quot; he retorts. &quot;Is that everyone's problem? That our enemies might have a few hours to reflect on the fact that they're dying, instead of just being blown to bits?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Back in the old days, when we were nothing more than a couple of kids hunting outside of 12, Gale said things like this and worse. But then they were just words. Here, put into practice, they become deeds that can never be reversed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You don't know how those District Two people ended up in the Nut,&quot; I say. &quot;They may have been coerced. They may be held against their will. Some are our own spies. Will you kill them, too?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I would sacrifice a few, yes, to take out the rest of them,&quot; he replies. &quot;And if I were a spy in there, I'd say, 'Bring on the avalanches!'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know he's telling the truth. That Gale would sacrifice his life in this way for the cause - no one doubts it. Perhaps we'd all do the same if we were the spies and given the choice. I guess I would. But it's a coldhearted decision to make for other people and those who love them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He doesn't care about his enemies' suffering; he has no compassion for them; but this is the attitude of a ruthless man, not a sadistic one. He doesn't want to kill them just for the sake of killing them; the capture of the Nut is strategically vital in the war, and that's the objective he's trying to achieve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the traps he and Beetee were developing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is what they've been doing. Taking the fundamental ideas behind Gale's traps and adapting them into weapons against humans. Bombs mostly. It's less about the mechanics of the traps than the psychology behind them. Booby-trapping an area that provides something essential to survival. A water or food supply. Frightening prey so that a large number flee into a greater destruction. Endangering off-spring in order to draw in the actual desired target, the parent. Luring the victim into what appears to be a safe haven - where death awaits it. At some point, Gale and Beetee left the wilderness behind and focused on more human impulses. Like compassion. A bomb explodes. Time is allowed for people to rush to the aid of the wounded. Then a second, more powerful bomb kills them as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That seems to be crossing some kind of line,&quot; I say. &quot;So anything goes?&quot; They both stare at me - Beetee with doubt, Gale with hostility. &quot;I guess there isn't a rule book for what might be unacceptable to do to another human being.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sure there is. Beetee and I have been following the same rule book President Snow used when he hijacked Peeta,&quot; says Gale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, Gale's emotional response, justifying his actions in war by comparing them to those of the Capitol, is only a &lt;em&gt;response&lt;/em&gt; to criticism of his ideas. He doesn't care about the lives of his enemies, but he also doesn't kill them &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; for the sake of killing them - these are tools of war, to be used in war, motivated by the purpose of war. The fact that they kill so nastily is just part of their usefulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR: like Peeta's pacifism, Gale's belligerence can lead him to wrong decisions but is ultimately caused by good motives. He's a man too dedicated to a cause, but not an evil one.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-17T14:37:27.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3924" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T00:51:31.690" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to read &lt;em&gt;A Grain of Wheat&lt;/em&gt;, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. However, I'm very unfamiliar with the history and culture of Kenya, to the point where I know practically nothing about it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I do know this: that the history of Kenya is long and complicated, and the culture of Kenya is, well, a &lt;em&gt;culture&lt;/em&gt;. Absorbing it &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; before reading this book seems a little unnecessary, bordering on impossible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then, is: what should I already know (or familiarize myself with) before going into this book? Do I need geopolitical context? What key elements of Kenyan culture and history should I read about before I pick up this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-10-18T01:03:13.767" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T04:02:33.093" Title="Before reading &quot;A Grain of Wheat,&quot; what historical facts and cultural context are useful to know?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;a-grain-of-wheat&gt;&lt;ngugi-wa-thiongo&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3925" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3930" CreationDate="2017-10-18T09:03:22.257" Score="6" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &quot;Seasons of Glass and Iron&quot;, winner of the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, may be read in full &lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/seasons-glass-iron/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. I just read it last night, and a single passage confused me, in the story of how Amira came to be on her glass hill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The king’s daughter read an unspeakable conclusion in her father’s eye, and in a rush to keep it from reaching his mouth, said, Suppose you placed me atop a glass hill where none could reach me, and say that only the man who can ride up the hill in full armor may claim me as his bride?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was this &quot;unspeakable conclusion&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; It can't be to marry her off to some prince, as he'd already said this was impossible for political reasons - nor can it be to put her on the glass hill, since that was &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; proposal to forestall him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T09:48:27.473" Title="What &quot;unspeakable conclusion&quot; was Amira's father about to reach?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;amal-elmohtar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T14:45:05.697" Score="8" ViewCount="3951" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_Bride#Buttercup.27s_Baby&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;As mentioned on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, in some later editions of The Princess Bride, the first chapter of Buttercup's Baby, which Goldman said was a  sequel, appears at the end.  A sequel was never realized, and one might argue that he was never serious about Buttercup's Baby, though my impression from an interview (see also Wikipedia link) was that he seriously did want to write a sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that he wrote more of Buttercup's Baby than 1 chapter?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All of Goldman's &quot;real-world&quot; stories about The Princess Bride (e.g., things about Morgenstern) are made up.  Is there any evidence that Chapter 1 of Buttercup's Baby was really intended to be the beginning of the sequel he wanted to write?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note:&lt;/em&gt; I read the 25th anniversary edition, but do not have the 30th, which according to Wikipedia has hints about a sequel plot, so I do not know what is in there, or if that was serious or just fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T10:59:23.753" Title="How much of the sequel to the Princess Bride was written?" Tags="&lt;the-princess-bride&gt;&lt;william-goldman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-18T17:48:52.990" Score="5" ViewCount="1164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently finished writing a paper on &lt;em&gt;Robinson Crusoe&lt;/em&gt; for my English class on the rise of the novel. We had read the novel concurrently with excerpts from Ian Watt's &lt;em&gt;The Rise of the Novel&lt;/em&gt;, in which he argued that the works of Defoe, Richardson (we then read &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt;) and Fielding - which Watt categorized as the early novels - used what he called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism#United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;formal realism&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Moreover, he stated that these were some of the first - if not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; first - significant pieces of literature to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robinson Crusoe&lt;/em&gt; bears many hallmarks of formal realism (as I understand them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The presentation of people and events as &quot;evidence&quot;, to use Watt's phrasing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An attention to detail even in cases where it might seem overboard. For instance, some sections of Crusoe's journal seem . . . unnecessary. At the least, as we discussed, it's not clear that they're intended to advance the plot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The implication that this is an authentic presentation of the events as they occurred.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this has me a little curious as to the thought processes of Defoe and company (although I'll stick to Defoe, for simplicity). Was Defoe aware that he was using a new sort of realist techniques, and was this usage intentional? Put another way, are the indicators of formal realism in &lt;em&gt;Robinson Crusoe&lt;/em&gt; part of an effort by Defoe, or just elements of the writing that were noticed long after the fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T15:31:55.550" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T15:31:55.550" Title="To what extent did Defoe attempt to apply formal realism in Robinson Crusoe?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;realism&gt;&lt;daniel-defoe&gt;&lt;robinson-crusoe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3925" CreationDate="2017-10-18T18:42:04.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Expanding from my comment. Warning for disturbing themes and also a lot of links to fairy tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Seasons of Glass and Iron&quot; pulls from several fairy tales. It looks to me that variations on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_on_the_Glass_Hill&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Princess on the Glass Hill&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Pig&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Enchanted Pig&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Bull_of_Norroway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Black Bull of Norroway&lt;/a&gt; are most prominent--however, there are references to many others scattered throughout. Tabitha thinks of her brother with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talaria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;winged sandals&lt;/a&gt;, and of women forced to wear &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;shoes of glass&lt;/a&gt;; ... &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_(Snow_White)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;shoes of iron heated red–hot&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Amira references &quot;words of desire [that] tumbled from men’s lips like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamonds_and_Toads&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;diamonds and toads&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; and &quot;a story about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Swans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;nettle shirts thrown up to swans.&lt;/a&gt;&quot; Therefore, I think it's reasonable to look at other fairy tales for inspiration as to what the king and Amira could have meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what we know his requirements are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amira get married  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amira stay nearby so the king can keep an eye on her  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He (the king) not be forced to choose a husband from the&#xA;neighbors, for fear of showing favoritism or upsetting the political&#xA;balance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also doesn't spin Amira's &quot;ball so the men can find husbands&quot; suggestion into a competition for her hand--in fact, Amira is the one who brings up the idea of her being a prize in a contest. So, what could he mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggestion (though it's a guess only, of course): &lt;strong&gt;the king could marry Amira himself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meets all his requirements, would almost certainly be considered &quot;unspeakable&quot; by Amira (and disgusting by Tabitha, when she reacts later), and is a motif found in several other fairy tales. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donkeyskin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_King_Who_Wished_to_Marry_His_Daughter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter&lt;/a&gt; are two of the most prominent, but there are a variety of stories that involve this--usually because the daughter is the only one beautiful enough to fulfill some sort of condition. However, as this story is pretty explicitly about the patriarchy and various people's roles in it, I think it makes sense that the king's reasoning would be changed a little here, especially as he's shown to take pity on and emphasize with the men re his daughter's &quot;irresistibility,&quot; as well as to meld with the other tales more seamlessly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T18:42:04.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1356" CreationDate="2017-10-18T19:01:26.253" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1358/71&quot;&gt;Rand al'Thor's answer&lt;/a&gt; is excellent. It shows that we repeatedly see Holmes referring to Moriarty with grand language, supposedly placing him on a pedestal above all other criminals. At the same time, if we look at the backstory behind Doyle's writing of &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of The Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;, we see cracks in the idea that Moriarty is really Holmes' arch-nemesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I decided to go back through &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;. I was curious to see how Holmes referred to other criminals he encountered. Let me go through some of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;John Clay, from &lt;em&gt;The Red-Headed League&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Clay is, according to Holmes, a &quot;murderer, thief, smasher and forger&quot; who, in this adventure, is making a clever attempt at robbing a large bank in London. We see Holmes and other characters make several telling references to Clay, both before and after the stakeout (emphasis mine; all quotes besides the first are from Holmes himself):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He's a young man . . . but &lt;strong&gt;he is at the head of his profession&lt;/strong&gt;, and I would rather have my bracelets on him &lt;strong&gt;than on any criminal in London&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- Inspector Jones, of Scotland Yard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have had one or two little turns also with John Clay, and &lt;strong&gt;I agree with you that he is at the head of his profession&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have had &lt;strong&gt;one or two little scores of my own&lt;/strong&gt; to settle with Mr. John Clay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpreted &quot;his profession&quot; to include all of the activities mentioned, not merely forgery, in which case, he could have overlapped with some of Moriarty's endeavors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Colonel Moran and other Moriarty associates, from &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Empty House&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Moran is, as has been alluded to before, Moriarty's number 2 man (certainly inferior to Moriarty, but at the top of London's crime network for the two years after Moriarty's death). He's an accomplished hunter, absolutely ruthless, and, as we find out, the murderer of Ronald Adair (and a would-be assassin of Holmes). By the time the story begins, Holmes has already helped catch two other major criminals associated with Moriarty. From this adventure (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were at least three others [besides Moriarty] whose desire for vengeance upon me would only be increased by the death of their leader. &lt;strong&gt;They were all most dangerous men.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The trial of the Moriarty gang left two of its most dangerous members, &lt;strong&gt;my own most vicious enemies&lt;/strong&gt;, at liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Colonel Moran is] &lt;strong&gt;the most cunning and dangerous criminal&lt;/strong&gt; in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Charles Augustus Milverton, from &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt; Milverton is a blackmailer by trade, fond of preying on the rich and well-to-do. He is brilliant and arguably one of the only truly &quot;evil&quot; antagonists Holmes faces. From the adventure (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[He is] &lt;strong&gt;the worst man in London.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but &lt;strong&gt;the worst of them never gave me the repulsion I have for this fellow.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is &lt;strong&gt;as cunning as the Evil One.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I considered him &lt;strong&gt;one of the most dangerous men&lt;/strong&gt; in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milverton and Holmes meet face-to-face apparently for the first time in this story. However, each knows the other's reputation. For instance, Milverton is disappointed that Holmes did not do &quot;something original&quot; when trying to capture him at the meeting,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What becomes clear is that Holmes uses these labels - especially the ones concerning the worst criminals in London - only relatively. Once Moriarty is gone, Moran becomes the most formidable. When Moran is caught, Milverton steps up. We see the title of &quot;Most dangerous man in London&quot; is temporary; indeed, each villain only rises briefly. For instance, we see as late as &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Copper Beeches&lt;/em&gt; - not too long before &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Final Problem&lt;/em&gt; - that London is apparently boring. As Holmes puts it,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . . the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, this means that either Holmes is not aware of Moriarty, or Moriarty has not yet come to prominence (alternatively, it could just be that Doyle had not planned out Moriarty yet, which is the likely out-of-universe explanation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, too, that Holmes has had multiple encounters with all of these characters. He is well aware of their movements and their plots, and at times regards them all as the worst - mini-Moriartys, so to speak.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess my points are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moriarty is ephemeral, like any villain. He shows up in a few stories, briefly becomes a major plot point (but only because Doyle &lt;em&gt;intended him to&lt;/em&gt;), and then is essentially lost. Even though he may have been the most dangerous &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt;, he's not around long enough to be a convincing &quot;archenemy&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other antagonists, before and after Moriarty, have garnered notoriety in Holmes' mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moriarty became remembered as Holmes' arch-enemy only in &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Final Problem&lt;/em&gt;. If we remove authorial intent, it's somewhat puzzling as to how he suddenly becomes so important.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; By the way, looking back at &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1077/71&quot;&gt;an old answer of mine&lt;/a&gt;, it seems that all three characters were inspired by real-life people. Coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T13:46:47.473" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T13:46:47.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3616" CreationDate="2017-10-18T23:57:21.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hmm, good question. Let's look carefully at how Gaiman describes stories of &amp;quot;male&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;female&amp;quot; type in his essay &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.neilgaiman.com/Cool_Stuff/Essays/Essays_By_Neil/All_Books_Have_Genders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All Books Have Genders&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books have sexes; or to be more precise, books have genders. They do in my head, anyway. Or at least, the ones that I write do. And these are genders that have &lt;strong&gt;something, but not everything, to do with the gender of the main character of the story&lt;/strong&gt;. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novels are a slightly different matter. &lt;em&gt;Neverwhere&lt;/em&gt; is a Boy's Own Adventure (Narnia on the Northern Line, as someone once described it), with &lt;strong&gt;an everyman hero, and the women in it tended to occupy equally stock roles&lt;/strong&gt;, such as the Dreadful Fiancee, the Princess in Peril, the Kick-Ass Female Warrior, the Seductive Vamp. Each role is, I hope, taken and twisted 45% from skew, but they are stock characters nonetheless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, is a girl's book, even though it also has an everyman hero, young Tristran Thorne, not to mention seven Lords bent on assassinating each other. That may partly be because &lt;strong&gt;once Yvaine came on stage, she rapidly became the most interesting thing there&lt;/strong&gt;, and it may also be because the &lt;strong&gt;relationships between the women&lt;/strong&gt; - the Witch Queen, Yvaine, Victoria Forester, the Lady Una and even Ditchwater Sal, were so much more complex and shaded than the relationships (what there was of them) between the boys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What possible meanings can we assign to these descriptions so as to interpret them in such a way that the story of Salim and the jinn is &amp;quot;female&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;male&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clearly, this isn't about the gender of the main character, the first criterion mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It also isn't about inter-female relationships being more interesting than inter-male relationships, as mentioned in the context of &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nor is it about having developed female characters in the story, as mentioned in the context of &lt;em&gt;Neverwhere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; it? What makes a short story about two men &amp;quot;female&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, let's &lt;strong&gt;ignore the gender of the &lt;em&gt;characters&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; for a moment, since clearly that's NOT the criterion Gaiman used for the Salim/jinn story, and look again at his comparison of &lt;em&gt;Neverwhere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Neverwhere&lt;/em&gt; has an everyman hero, with many other characters in it occupying stock roles (that also goes for the Sadistic Villains, the Helpful Rogue, and the Hidden Mastermind);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; has an everyman hero, with another character who becomes the most interesting thing on stage after their appearance, and various complex inter-character relationships.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still ignoring the gender of the characters, the story of Salim and the jinn fits the second of these categories much better than the first. We have an &lt;strong&gt;everyman hero&lt;/strong&gt; - he's in a strange city, he's looking for a job, he's out of luck. He meets an &lt;strong&gt;unexpectedly fascinating stranger&lt;/strong&gt; who dominates the rest of the story. The &lt;strong&gt;relationship between them&lt;/strong&gt; is more interesting than any standard roles they fit into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These criteria are probably what defined this story, in Gaiman's head, as female. Again, it &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; be anything to do with the gender of the characters, so it must be some other aspect of the story; and ignoring all characters' genders, this definitely looks more like &lt;em&gt;Stardust&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;Neverwhere&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-18T23:57:21.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3933" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18512" CreationDate="2017-10-19T00:35:45.520" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &amp;quot;The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade&amp;quot; by Edgar Allan Poe details a great many wonders of the more modern world being described by Scheherazade to her husband, in terms familiar to them, in such a way as to sound preposterous to people of their time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my edition of the Collected Works of Poe, this story comes with multiple footnotes to specify the exact nature as we know it of each wonder that Scheherazade describes. Footnotes are also included in, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ehyper/poe/shehera.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this online version&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are the footnotes part of Poe's original text of the story, identical since its first publication?&lt;/strong&gt; Or were they added later by an editor seeking to make the story more easily understandable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T15:04:57.087" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T05:42:29.397" Title="Were the footnotes included in the original text of the 1002nd Tale of Scheherazade?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3935" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3941" CreationDate="2017-10-19T02:53:17.613" Score="13" ViewCount="8133" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the end of the book it is said that the culprit believes, even though the crimes commited were perfect and police will be unable to solve it, there are three clues left that can help identify the Killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are these three clues?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2037" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T09:47:45.243" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T00:55:30.597" Title="What were the three clues mentioned at end of Agatha Christie's And There Were None?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;and-then-there-were-none&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3943" CreationDate="2017-10-19T03:04:26.987" Score="5" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Master and Margarita&quot;, after hearing from Berlioz that Jesus was a fictional character, Woland starts to describe the meeting between procurator Pilate and prisoner Yeshua Ha-Notsri, saying that &quot;he was there, hiding&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always assumed that he indeed was somewhere in the background, but then I've found this fragment, that describes Pilate reaction, when shortly after deciding to let Yeshua go (well &quot;imprisoning&quot; him in procurator's mansion), he finds that Yeshua is also accused of questioning Cesar's rule: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pilate another parchment.&#xA;       'What else is there? ' enquired Pilate and frowned.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Having  read the further evidence  a change  came over his  expression.&#xA;  Whether it  was blood flowing back into his neck and  face or from something&#xA;  else that  occurred,  his skin changed from yellow to red-brown and his eyes&#xA;  appeared to collapse. Probably caused by the increased blood-pressure in his&#xA;  temples, something happened to the Procurator's  sight. &lt;strong&gt;He seemed to see the&#xA;  prisoner's head vanish  and  another appear in  its place,  bald and crowned&#xA;  with a spiked golden diadem. The skin  of the forehead was split by a round,&#xA;  livid  scar  smeared  with  ointment.  A  sunken,  toothless  mouth  with  a&#xA;  capricious, pendulous lower  lip.&lt;/strong&gt; Pilate had  the  sensation  that the pink&#xA;  columns of his balcony  and the roofscape of Jerusalem below and  beyond the&#xA;  garden had all vanished, drowned in the thick foliage of cypress groves. His&#xA;  hearing, too,  was  strangely  affected--there  was a  sound  as of  distant&#xA;  trumpets,  muted and threatening, and  a nasal voice could clearly be  heard&#xA;  arrogantly intoning the words: ' The law pertaining to high treason . . .'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that supposed to be a vision of dead Yeshua (but then &quot;golden diadem&quot;?), the ascension of Yeshua-as-Jesus (but then I've never heard about mutilated Jesus described as &quot;toothless&quot;) or maybe it is Woland/Satan that Pilate sees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T08:08:15.707" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T09:49:03.403" Title="Did Pilate have a vision of Woland/Satan?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;master-and-margarita&gt;&lt;mikhail-bulgakov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3937" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-19T03:17:41.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T03:17:41.390" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T03:17:41.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3938" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-19T03:17:41.390" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Master and Margarita&quot;, the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov. Use with the [russian-literature] and [mikhail-bulgakov] tags." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T08:12:30.710" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T08:12:30.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3939" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-19T08:10:19.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T08:10:19.023" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T08:10:19.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3940" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-19T08:10:19.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Russian novelist and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) or his life as a writer. Use with the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:14:19.470" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:14:19.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3941" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2017-10-19T09:08:13.403" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoilers for the book follow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the killer is found with a bullet through the forehead. This is the &quot;mark of Cain&quot;. Cain was the first murderer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the Lord said to him, Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance&#xA;  shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark on Cain, lest&#xA;  anyone finding him should kill him (Genesis 4:15).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The precise nature of the mark is not revealed, and there is uncertainty as to whether it was in fact a physical mark due to the difficulty of translating from the Hebrew. However, if it was a physical mark it must have been very obvious to serve its purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How, then, do we deduce that the wound is to be interpreted as a mark? Because the killer in the book is &lt;em&gt;playing God&lt;/em&gt;. As Lombard remarks in the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is to say, he’s played God Almighty for a good many months every&#xA;  year. That must go to a man’s head eventually. He gets to see himself&#xA;  as all powerful, as holding the power of life and earth—and it’s&#xA;  possible that his brain might snap and he might want to go one step&#xA;  farther and be Executioner and Judge Extraordinary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second clue is that the actual killer is the only one who is not actually guilty of murder. His &quot;crime&quot; was sending Seton to the gallows in spite of a lack of conclusive evidence. However, our killer justifies this by pointing out that Seton was certainly guilty of a great many other things and nevertheless deserved to hang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final clue harks back to the poem that gave the book its original (now seen as offensive) title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Four little Indian boys going out to sea;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A red herring swallowed one and then there were three.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the fate of Dr. Armstrong, who is discovered washed up on the beach. The killer had identified Armstrong as the weakest and most gullible member of the group and had tricked him into helping further his plan by deception. A &quot;red herring&quot; is a trick or a distraction and the inference is that the clue should help identify Armstrong as somehow being implicated in the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T09:08:13.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3928" CreationDate="2017-10-19T09:12:44.487" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No. Nothing else has ever been officially published regarding the sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes. In a 2007 interview with Pictures Magazine, Goldman says he would love to write a sequel, but has been unable to do so to his satisfaction:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I desperately want to write it, and I sit there and nothing happens&#xA;  and I get pissed at myself. I got lucky with The Princess Bride the&#xA;  first time, and I'd love to get lucky again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T09:12:44.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3936" CreationDate="2017-10-19T09:49:03.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Canonical interpretation is that it was a vision of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiberius&lt;/a&gt; - roman emperor of that time. One of the reliable sources for this is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%91%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81_%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gasparov's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakko.wordpress.com/2016/05/01/%D0%B1-%D0%BC-%D0%B3%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2-%D0%B8%D0%B7-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D1%8E%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B9-%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%B4-%D0%BC%D0%BE%D1%82%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%BD/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;text&lt;/a&gt; of about the structure of the novel, but no one argues with this interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as usual for Bulgakov, it also could be the reference to some real person from Bulgakov's time. Gasparov (and others) cautiously suggest that it could be a reference to Lenin. Some clues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Crowned head&quot; is the head of the empire ruler.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tiberius wasn't bald, but Lenin was. By the way in Russian text Bulgakov uses the word &quot;плешивый&quot;, that means exactly &quot;almost bald&quot;, &quot;going bald&quot;. It's not the same as &quot;completely bald&quot; which is &quot;лысый&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also lost in translation, Bulgakov writes about &quot;капрейские сады&quot; meaning &quot;gardens of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capri&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Capri&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (in your text they became &quot;cypress groves&quot;). That could be a reference to the meetings between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxim_Gorky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maxim Gorky&lt;/a&gt; and Lenin on Capri. (Meaning that Bulgakov's Pilate is Gorky, Gasparov elborates more on this topic).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further in  the novel there are Pilate's words to Tiberius. Gasparov assumes it is hidden quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Mayakovsky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mayakovsky's&lt;/a&gt; poem where the poet speaks about Lenin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tiberius is the name related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiber&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiber&lt;/a&gt;, Lenin is the name related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lena_River&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lena&lt;/a&gt;, also river.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T09:49:03.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4040" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:17:39.313" Score="3" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters#Dr._Robert_Stadler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; describes Dr. Robert Stadler from &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A former professor at Patrick Henry University, and along with colleague Hugh Akston, mentor to Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld. He has since become a sell-out, one who had great promise but squandered it for social approval, to the detriment of the free. He works at the State Science Institute where all his inventions are perverted for use by the military, including the instrument of his demise: Project X (Xylophone). The character was, in part, modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom Rand had interviewed for an earlier project, and his part in the creation of nuclear weapons. To his former student Galt, Stadler represents the epitome of human evil, as the &quot;man who knew better&quot; but chose not to act for the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It cites Ayn Rand's journals as a source for these claims, which I unfortunately do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have access to at this time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way was Stadler based on Oppenheimer? Since Stadler's defining characteristic was being the man that knew better, did Ayn Rand view Oppenheimer in the same way? What did Oppenheimer know better than to do - work on nuclear weapons? (Wikipedia seems to imply as much). If so, why did she oppose his involvement with that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can see how Project X was analogous to nuclear weapons in one sense, but Dr. Stadler was only loosely aware of the project (although he was admittedly ignorant largely by his own choice) whereas Oppenheimer personally supervised the research into the nuclear bomb, so does this analogy &quot;break down&quot; at some point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the exact nature of the analogy between Stadler and Oppenheimer? Is Wikipedia's assessment of the analogy accurate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T13:50:43.803" Title="In what way was Dr. Robert Stadler based on Robert Oppenheimer?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3945" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4039" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:20:59.023" Score="4" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a follow-up question to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3944/in-what-way-was-dr-robert-stadler-based-on-robert-oppenheimer&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;. I thought that it was better to post this as a second, related question though to avoid the original question from being too broad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters#Dr._Robert_Stadler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; describes Dr. Robert Stadler from &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A former professor at Patrick Henry University, and along with colleague Hugh Akston, mentor to Francisco d'Anconia, John Galt and Ragnar Danneskjöld. He has since become a sell-out, one who had great promise but squandered it for social approval, to the detriment of the free. He works at the State Science Institute where all his inventions are perverted for use by the military, including the instrument of his demise: Project X (Xylophone). The character was, in part, modeled on J. Robert Oppenheimer, &lt;strong&gt;whom Rand had interviewed for an earlier project&lt;/strong&gt;, and his part in the creation of nuclear weapons. To his former student Galt, Stadler represents the epitome of human evil, as the &quot;man who knew better&quot; but chose not to act for the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate? Did such an interview take place? If so, what was the subject of the interview, and what did they talk about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Ayn Rand use the material from the interview? If so, how, and on which project?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Rand believe Oppenheimer to be evil at the time that she interviewed him, or did she only come to that opinion later? If she believed him to be evil at the time, why did she interview him? Was Oppenheimer aware of her opinion of him? If so, why did he consent to the interview?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T13:48:33.613" Title="Did Ayn Rand interview Robert Oppenheimer, and if so, how did she use the material?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3946" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:40:57.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T18:40:57.023" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T18:40:57.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3947" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:40:57.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (born 1938) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T15:13:15.687" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:13:15.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3948" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:41:34.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-19T18:41:34.623" LastActivityDate="2017-10-19T18:41:34.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3949" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-19T18:41:34.623" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'A Grain of Wheat' (1967), a novel by the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o. Use with the [ngugi-wa-thiongo] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:44:29.083" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:44:29.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3954" CreationDate="2017-10-19T19:20:32.103" Score="1" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Dagney Taggert went to see Dr. Robert Stadler at the State Science Institute, in explanation for his mistrust of humans and human reason, he told the story of his three students:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;These three men, these three who held all the hope which the gift of intelligence ever proffered, these three from whom we expected such a magnificent future - one of them was Francisco d'Anconia, who became a depraved playboy. Another was Ragnar Danneskjold, who became a plain bandit. So much for the promise of the human mind.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who was the third one?&quot; [Dagney] asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He shrugged. &quot;The third one did not achieve even that sort of notorious distinction. He vanished without a trace - into the great unknown of mediocrity. He is probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that Ayn Rand couldn't reveal that his third student was John Galt at that point, but why did he say that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Stadler &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; shown considerable degree of obliviousness (both feigned and real - he appeared to be only dimly aware of the statement issued by Dr. Floyd Farris, he had to be reminded that Taggart Transcontinental was building a new branch line from Rearden Metal, and he pretended not to know about the properties of Rearden Metal); he appeared to have lost much of his will for personally investigating things at that point (such as Floyd Farris's activity). Was he simply too oblivious to know the phrase &quot;Who is John Galt?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, is he kidding himself about it being a different John Galt? (I have a vague recollection that that's the case from later in the book, but I can't remember exactly where). Or is he lying? And why didn't he actually state John Galt's name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T07:45:08.443" Title="Why did Robert Stadler claim that John Galt was &quot;probably a second assistant bookkeeper somewhere&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3957" CreationDate="2017-10-20T06:40:38.940" Score="11" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this in a horror anthology, and thought it was called &quot;I, Monster&quot; but could find nothing through Google on this. Also thought it was an R Chetywnd Hays story, but again it seems invisible now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I loved this story as a teen - plot as follows (Major Spoilers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A young woman is in hiding in a house, kept there because she is hideous / bestial and human society would attack her. She is in love with the gardener at the house, peeking at him from hiding, admiring his 'strong back' and other fine features as he works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She escapes and is hounded down and killed by a mob. As they kill her they recite a pseudo religious litany about how repulsive and dangerous 'beasts' like her are, but in describing the features of these beasts it becomes apparent that she is a beautiful young girl, and the mob are adorned with horns, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2340" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T11:02:15.813" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T22:52:59.610" Title="Short Horror Story in which protagonist is a monstrous freak in hiding?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3956" CreationDate="2017-10-20T06:52:43.147" Score="3" ViewCount="3328" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.ca/How-Read-Novels-Like-Professor/dp/0061340405&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to Read Novels Like a Professor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2008) by Thomas C. Foster. p. 247 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  The big, often very uncomfortable, ideas run rampant in those disquieting categories, “minority” and “postcolonial” fiction. That’s nearly inevitable. How can a novel by an African American or African Caribbean writer not take stock of the legacy of slavery and racist mistreatment? How can an African or Indian novel, or any other from a former outpost of empire, not speak to, among other things, the experience of oppression or the chaos that so often follows when the oppressor withdraws? Chinua Achebe has a famous essay of complaint against Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, itself a pretty dense little novella of ideas, but his better rejoinders are his fiction from Things Fall Apart forward. The essay states his ideas; the novels embody them. History, as I suggest elsewhere, is the one inescapable fact. Stephen Dedalus’s “&lt;strong&gt;History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake, [bold mine]&lt;/strong&gt;” is merely a sign of his callowness. Writers as outwardly different as Salman Rushdie, R. K. Narayan, Kiran Desai, Caryl Phillips, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, and Edward P. Jones have in common the making of fiction filled with ideas in response to what history has handed them. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't the time (or erudition!) to read &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; yet, but what does the bold mean? Trying to awake from history appears silly to me, because history (however nightmarish) can't be changed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-10-20T10:52:18.790" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T21:12:57.667" Title="What does Stephen Dedalus mean: &quot;History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake”?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2017-10-20T07:14:45.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Galt did disappear - he went straight to 20th Century Motor corp in a junior position, and the developments there escaped the public domain, except for the oblique 'Who's John Galt' the origins of which are a mystery to all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took '2nd Asst Book Keeper' to indicate Stadlers indoctrination into the social justice movements destroying the US at the time. Stadler deploys it as a slur against Galt for moving straight into a commercial concern, signalling his distaste that he didn't apply himself to public work, the 'public good' etc. Book keeper indicates Stadler thought a great engineer was only going to be in it for the money, basically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to how Stadler doesn't name check him - the first two are famous men in the headlines. Galt is not, bar the epiphet, which I have to assume Stadler was entirely unaware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2340" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T07:14:45.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3921" CreationDate="2017-10-20T09:05:49.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suppose you could interpret it as follows?:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tone of admiration&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lillian was a jaded socialite, presumably had never set foot in a factory, and was struck by the scale and danger of the enterprise. Also the (postmodern?) philosophical antics of her NY cabal are akin to Critical Theory / Cultural Marxism and she may have been awed by her capability to get closer to 'the mark' which Reardon represented to them. The topsy turvy anti-logic she later is identified as ascribing to would perhaps not have equipped her with the foreknowledge needed to immediately process the awesome scale of the scene. In short, it takes her by surprise. Also, the mill is a dangerous place, she may have intuited that it was not the place to apply her values at leisure, while the fires raged around her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, re the above - pay attention to the action: her, immaculately dressed, tip toeing around the mill floor in her heels. This is a first for her. The other significant action is that she is speechless. She doesn't commend what he is doing or even condemn it. She says nothing. She is simply out of her element. From what we understand she already knows she is at odds with what she sees, but she has a romantic interest in Hank (which is later of course explained to be purely malicious), so we know she is scheming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the scene is written from Hanks perspective. He is incredibly lonely, and perhaps the whole point of the scene is that Hank cons himself, as much as Lillian cons him? Besides her action of visiting him there she actually does nothing else which isn't effectively passive or likely manipulative. In the face of this Hank makes the mistake of seeing what he wants to see - that Lillian appreciates what he does, even though her actions do not prove it in and of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2340" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:05:49.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3953" CreationDate="2017-10-20T09:23:58.890" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To understand this, once needs to know a little Irish history. Essentially Ireland has been an island riven by violence almost continually for over a thousand years. First it was the Vikings, raiding, pillaging and settling. Then it was the Normans followed by the Tudors who, through the reformation, then lead a bloody, divisive series of religious wars which sucked in people from all over the United Kingdom. The repercussions of this are still being felt today and were very much in evidence at the time that Ulysses was written. This is the &quot;nightmare&quot; of Ireland's history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How Stephen frames his statement is purposefully cryptic: it's possible that it's meant to be one of those things which sounds quite profound but is in fact relatively meaningless. He is a teacher, and clearly a clever and well-learned one at that. However, during the scene where he utters this phrase he's been cornered by Mr. Deasy, the headmaster who, although an authority figure, seems far less imaginative than Stephen. Deasy is trying to reverse roles and place Stephen in the role of the pupil in order to press his authority: Stephen resents this and says a number of cryptic things to Deasy apparently with the purpose of confusing him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- That is God.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- What? Mr Deasy asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement is also a direct rejection of two other interpretations of history that have been pressed upon Stephen. In the first chapter, Haines says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Haines detached from his underlip some fibres of tobacco before he spoke.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  -- I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This frames History as something impersonal and relegated to the past (i.e. the English can &quot;blame&quot; it, squarely and without repercussions). Stephen's characterization is of history as something that is both ongoing (&quot;history is&quot;) and personal (&quot;I am trying&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deasy, on the other hand, agrees that history informs the present but seems it as moving toward a single, unified outcome which has been decreed by divine will. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that, since God is merciful, the terrors of the present (and the past) will lead toward a positive outcome. It also, like Haine's statement, uses history as a way to avoid blame: in this case the blame can be placed on those who choose to reject the gospel. Stephen's characterisation of it as a &quot;nightmare&quot; refutes all aspects of Deasy's opinion, since a nightmare is awful, uncertain and something over which you have no choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last history which Stephen invokes with this statement is his own. Compared to the other characters we have met so far in Ulysses, Stephen is not high in wealth or social status, yet he finds himself at University in the company of the wealthy, the well-connected and the powerful. He feels guilt about his behavior around his mother's death. His own history is - comparatively - a nightmare, which he is trying to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-10-20T09:23:58.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3952" CreationDate="2017-10-20T13:12:25.647" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?874014&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Monster&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a 1970 short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Chetwynd-Hayes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R. Chetwynd-Hayes&lt;/a&gt;, was reprinted in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?297813+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fantasy Tales&lt;/em&gt;, Spring 1991&lt;/a&gt; which is available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Fantasy_Tales_New_Series_06v12_1991-Spring#page/n34/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;. The story seems also to be the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/32601/short-story-post-nuclear-holocaust-the-human-race-has-mutated-into-an-ape-like&quot;&gt;this old question&lt;/a&gt; on the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A young woman is in hiding in a house, kept there because she is hideous / bestial and human society would attack her.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Child, can you not see?” The Uncle snapped out the &#xA;  question. “Put out your hand. Now I will lay mine alongside. &#xA;  Look. Mine is shaped by the Almighty, yours ... Do not &#xA;  force me to describe what your eyes must see. Look at my &#xA;  face, then feel your own, the skin — the monstrous growth &#xA;  that covers your head. Can’t you understand that I feel sick in &#xA;  your presence, and I have gazed upon you for nigh on sixteen &#xA;  years. Think how that young man would react were he to see &#xA;  you as you are. He would hand you over to the temple elders &#xA;  for burning, as indeed I should have long since.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She is in love with the gardener at the house, peeking at him from hiding, admiring his 'strong back' and other fine features as he works.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sin in Caroline’s heart became a canker, and Satan &#xA;  Atomo, no doubt gloating over his conquest, made sure &#xA;  temptation was always before her. The young man seemed &#xA;  to live in the garden. He hoed the black earth that glowered &#xA;  beneath the linen-white flowers, he trimmed the dark green &#xA;  grass with a scythe, and all the time his naked brown back &#xA;  screamed its untranslatable message to Caroline, so that &#xA;  her mind became a hothouse of searing, forbidden thoughts. &#xA;  She kept away from the window for as long as she could, &#xA;  walked round and round the room, and prayed silently to &#xA;  Almighty Jehovah for forgiveness, but always, whenever &#xA;  her attention flagged, she came back to that fatal hole in &#xA;  the curtain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She escapes and is hounded down and killed by a mob. As they kill her they recite a pseudo religious litany about how repulsive and dangerous 'beasts' like her are,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The priest raised his voice to a near scream.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;And what shall there be on the head?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;There shall be two ears.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;And how shall the ears be shaped?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;They will be large, and black, and shall hang down, even &#xA;  to the shoulders.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;And what shall be on the face?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;There shall be two eyes, one large, one small, and two &#xA;  noses, and twin tusks will grow forth from the cheeks, and &#xA;  the lips shall be black and spread wide, and the teeth shall &#xA;  never be covered. Thus saith the Almighty Jehovah.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;And what shall be on the hands?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Two fingers, and they shall have talons, even as the &#xA;  feet hath two toes, and a small tail, not more than twelve &#xA;  inches long, shall hang from the spine, even as Jehovah has &#xA;  decreed.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;but in describing the features of these beasts it becomes apparent that she is a beautiful young girl, and the mob are adorned with horns, etc.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Caroline was crying now, not because they had lighted the &#xA;  faggots, but because she could see her reflection in the bronze &#xA;  mirror. She was ugly — it was good that all this ugliness was &#xA;  about to be burnt. She had no lovely brown wrinkled skin; &#xA;  hers was obscenely white and smooth; her head, instead of &#xA;  being nobly domed and ridged, was covered with a grotesque &#xA;  mop of corn-coloured growth, which covered her horrible &#xA;  small ears; she only had one nose, and her eyes were both the &#xA;  same size, but, and this was worst of all, not delicately addled, &#xA;  but blue, surrounded with white, and fringed by the same &#xA;  hideous growth that marred her head. Each hand had four long &#xA;  fingers and a shorter one that stuck out at an angle, and there &#xA;  were five toes to each foot. Her lips were red, not black, and &#xA;  covered her teeth, which should have been irregular, one &#xA;  behind the other; hers were disgustingly white and even. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T08:22:41.067" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T08:22:41.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3575" CreationDate="2017-10-20T18:24:02.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3682/why-did-people-appear-to-remember-what-was-going-on-at-the-time-they-left-englan&quot;&gt;Why did people appear to remember what was going on at the time they left England when they returned from Narnia?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books aren't very explicit on this point, so here are a few possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Their time in the &quot;other world&quot; takes on a &quot;dreamlike quality&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While they're in one world, the world that they just left has a &quot;dreamlike quality&quot; - there was some sense in which Narnia was like an extended dream while they were in England (and &lt;em&gt;vice versa&lt;/em&gt; for England while they were in Narnia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would explain why, for example, they seem to have remembered details about what was going on when they left England when they returned. They evidently didn't remember the lamp-post until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; they got back to England (prior to getting back to England, they only had a vague recollection of having seen it before), and they didn't seem all that disoriented when they got back to England. They appear to have remembered where they were and why they were there. (They even remembered to apologize to the Professor for losing some of his coats). This is much like you remember your whereabouts when you wake up from a dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The influence of the world itself&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world itself seems to have a good deal of influence on the characters' behavior, thought patterns, and even skills. It will often take hours or days in Narnia for characters to regain all of the skills that they had gained last time they were there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would imply that, when they return to England, they don't really retain &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of their adult-like traits or skills, which would seem to make it easier for them to transition back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;They &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; have trouble, but the books didn't address that&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books actually don't describe much about their lives outside Narnia. In fact, in most cases, the books spend only as much time in England as is required to set up the story. (An obvious counterexample, though, is when Caspian and Aslan go to England briefly, but even then they're clearly &quot;out of context&quot; - that's fundamentally Narnians setting something about our world right, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; just a story about England). After all, the books are the Chronicles of &lt;strong&gt;Narnia&lt;/strong&gt;, not the chronicles of the characters' lives in England - the books are fundamentally about Narnia. One could argue that, in one sense, they're even more about Narnia than they are about the characters themselves - i.e. the books are fundamentally &quot;about&quot; things that certain people did &lt;em&gt;In Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; merely about those particular characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Genuine plot hole&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite possible that this is a genuine plot hole, and that C. S. Lewis either didn't think of it or didn't think that it was important enough to the stories to address. (The latter point could be related to the previous point - i.e. it's not important because the books aren't &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the characters' actions outside of Narnia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T12:13:44.567" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:13:44.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3981" CreationDate="2017-10-20T23:01:42.460" Score="3" ViewCount="1007" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm working through the long poem &quot;V&quot; by Tony Harrison (&lt;a href=&quot;http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/CziganyikZsolt/Tony_Harrison_V.doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here&lt;/a&gt;). The narrator is describing the graffiti scrawled by football supporters, with &quot;V&quot; denoting &quot;versus&quot;, as in &quot;Leeds V [another team]&quot;. In the middle of this, he stops to draw a contrast with a different kind of V written up in public:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Half this skinhead's age but with approval&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I helped whitewash a V on a brick wall.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No one clamoured in the press for its removal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or thought the sign, in wartime, rude at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably this V, in the context of the war, stands for Victory. My question is ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the point of this stanza about the old V as contrasted with the new V?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it say about the 'skinhead' graffiti artist or the narrator's perception of him, or about the narrator himself? Why is it included, and what does it add to the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T15:32:17.060" Title="What's the significance of the stanza about V for victory in Tony Harrison's V?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;tony-harrison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2894" CreationDate="2017-10-21T09:23:46.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the last comment of @Mithrandir, &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; does not include such a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for that, the beginning of &lt;em&gt;ASiS&lt;/em&gt; shows that Holmes regularly received visitors, and that Lestrade came by frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Presently, however, I found that he had many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society. There was one little sallow rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow who was introduced to me as Mr. Lestrade, and who came three or four times in a single week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows us that Holmes &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; solving cases at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Sign of the Four&lt;/em&gt;, we see that he was going through... a lull, it could be said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My mind,&quot; he said, &quot;rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession,—or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only reason he took Cocaine was because he was bored. The time during &lt;em&gt;ASiS&lt;/em&gt;, I believe, which was spent during the 'expression of extreme vacancy', was actually him thinking on some cases he had acquired, instead of Cocaine or Morphine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="372" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T09:23:46.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3963" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-21T10:00:41.397" Score="3" ViewCount="652" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it must have something to do with the subject of free will and how war can mess up one's head. What do you think? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2343" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T11:41:58.693" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T22:57:52.450" Title="What is the purpose of aliens and time travel in Slaughterhouse-Five?" Tags="&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;&lt;slaughterhouse-five&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-21T16:10:07.933" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a technical term, used by professional translators, and are there 'notorious' instructive examples for the following danger when translating a text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have to translate a text T from language L_1 to language L_2. More precisely, I have to translate a transcript of a discussion. I have now arrived at person P_1 uttering sentence S, which I have to translate as accurately as possible into L_2 Suppose S contains a word W_1, and that W_1 is 'pure L_1'.  In particular, W_1 is not a loanword at all, and sounds 'very L_1'. In my case W_1 is, in a sense, &lt;em&gt;deeply&lt;/em&gt; embedded and hidden within the language L_1, there is little chance that an L_2-speaker would understand the use of W_1, unless they are very knowledgable in L_1.) So no now I have to translate W_1. The crucial factor is the following:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a word W_2 in L_2 which by itself would be a very good translation of W_1, but there is the following problem: W_2 exists in L_1 as a well-known loanword. Therefore, if I were to translate W_1 by W_2, readers may mistakenly think that that P_1 actually &lt;em&gt;did use the loanword when speaking L_1&lt;/em&gt;, which P_1 did not do. (As I said, P_1 used the very 'purely L_1'word W_1.) Aiming at accuracy and wanting to avoid such misunderstandings, this rules out translating W_1 by W_2, as apposite a translation it may be. In a sense, the very usualness of W_2 in both languages W_1 and W_2 makes it impossible to use W_2 as a translation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Example.&lt;/strong&gt; A good example (not the one I am actually motivated by; in my case, the translating situation is also &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; 'English-&gt;German', as it is in the following example) is the following: suppose you have to carefully translate, from English to German, the following dialogue in a novel of well-known English-speaking novelist (I invented the following; should it be similar to a passage in an existing novel, this is accidental; also, if this is not evident enough: the names are made-up and in alphabetic order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose that in the novel Alice is has dual German und US citizenship and works as a civil servant in the US during the 1980s. Supose that in the novel she is now having a conversation about 'Bob' with someone (who is irrelevant for the question and remains unnamed). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice: I finally knew how bad Bob's character is when I saw Bob's glee at Chris' having mislaid the file and having been disciplined for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let L_1=English, L_2=German, P_1=Alice,  S=&quot;I finally knew how bad Bob's character is when I saw Bob's glee at Chris' having mislaid the file and having been disciplined.&quot;, W_1=glee, W_2=Schadenfreude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By itself, it W_2 would be a good translation of W_1. More extensively, it would be a good translation to translate: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice: Ich wusste endlich was für einen schlechten Charakter Bob hat als ich seine Schadenfreude darüber sah, dass die Akte von Chris verschlampt und er dafür diszipliniert worden war. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Schadenfreude is a common loanword in English,&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;worse, the novel leaves no doubt about Alice knowing German, despite working in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;problem&lt;/em&gt; with this translation (if one aims at very careful translation) is, therefore, the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Readers of the German version are likely to think that Alice actually used 'Schadenfreude' in the &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; conversation she was having. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one prefers to avoid that, translating W_1 as W_2 is not an option. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, as in my actual problem, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it's also no problem at all to find an alternative; e.g., I would, in the above example, write &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice: Ich wusste endlich was für einen schlechten Charakter Bob hat, als ich seine &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A4me_(Kommunikation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Häme&lt;/a&gt; darüber sah, dass die Akte von Chris verschlampt und er dafür diszipliniert worden war. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word 'Häme' is about as 'pure German' as 'glee' is 'pure English', and therefore &lt;em&gt;much&lt;/em&gt; to be preferred over 'Schadenfreude' when translating S. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could summarize what I am asking as a question for examples and/or technical terms for &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;not only preserving the meaning in a translation, and not only the 'register', but, even more, also paying attention to whether a word is a loanword.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;my problem is to convince someone else that this is not quite a correct way act as a translator, and it would be good to have more examples and/or technical terms for this subtlety; and not for the sake of convincing, but since the alternative is just not a good translation.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of why I am asking this is precisely the &lt;em&gt;lengthiness&lt;/em&gt; of the explanation I gave above. My motivation is (I think) very altruistic: I am corresponding with someone about this translation, a translation which is of critical importance, and I simply think that the use of W_2 (which my correspondent unfortunately unthinkingly &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; use to translate W_1 in their attempt at translating T) could be misleading or even harmful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly fine to simply explain my concerns to my correspondent in the way I did above, yet it would be a helpful addition if there were a 'pithier'/briefer and attested and documented documentation of this subtlety somewhere. I am not asking this to have a better 'ammunition' in the conversation I am having, rather simply to make my correspondent understand my concern, which currently it seems they do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1939" LastEditorUserId="1939" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T07:38:08.167" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T07:38:08.167" Title="Is there a term/example for the danger in translating an idiomatic term by a loanword which exists in the language from which one is translating?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3965" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3966" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel by Daniel Defoe. Use with the [daniel-defoe] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" LastActivityDate="2017-10-21T16:17:25.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-21T16:48:13.733" Score="4" ViewCount="805" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've started reading &lt;em&gt;A Grain of Wheat&lt;/em&gt; by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.socialiststories.com/liberate/A%20Grain%20of%20Wheat%20-%20Ngugi%20wa%20Thiong%27o.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here&lt;/a&gt;), and it contains quite a few of what I assume are Kenyan dialect words. Not enough to make it unreadable for me - most of them are roughly guessable from context - but I feel like knowing their precise meanings might increase my understanding or appreciation of the text. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jembe&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;panga&lt;/strong&gt; - some kind of agricultural tools?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;shamba&lt;/strong&gt; - a piece of land, perhaps?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uhuru na Kazi&lt;/strong&gt; - Google tells me that this phrase means &quot;freedom and work&quot;, but in the book it seems to have a deeper cultural meaning which I feel is important but don't understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;micege, mikengeria, bangi&lt;/strong&gt; - some kind of plants?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these and more just from the first two chapters of the book. I'd like to find a comprehensive list of the dialect words used in the book with their meanings. &lt;strong&gt;Does such a list exist anywhere already?&lt;/strong&gt; If not, I would award a bounty to any answerer who compiles one themselves from the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partial answers are acceptable - I'd be grateful for help with any of these words, especially &quot;Uhuru na Kazi&quot;, which seems to have some significance in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T09:45:04.643" Title="Meanings of the Kenyan dialect words used in &quot;A Grain of Wheat&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ngugi-wa-thiongo&gt;&lt;a-grain-of-wheat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3967" CreationDate="2017-10-21T19:25:00.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sure, I can take a crack at this. I took some time to familiarize with the terminology as I was reading this book. My caveat is that I'm not as knowledgeable on the topic as I really could be to answer this in total confidence, so take what I say with a grain of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used a number of sources during the course of my own research, but it seems &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bR01nddOUboC&amp;amp;lpg=PA61&amp;amp;ots=ZLTwblGYNj&amp;amp;dq=micege%20kenya&amp;amp;pg=PA61#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the book &quot;X-kit Lit Series Fet: a Grain of Wheat&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (ISBN 9781770254978) actually contains a relatively complete list of terms. I suggest using this as a starting point for any research. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uhuru na Kazi&lt;/strong&gt; - You're right, this means &quot;freedom and work,&quot; when directly translated. But its cultural implication here is a little stronger. The movement called themselves &lt;em&gt;the Uhuru movement&lt;/em&gt;, which made Uhuru na Kazi more of a rallying cry than something idiomatic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase was originally the slogan of Tanganyika, a separate push against British rule, in what's now Tanzania. Since this borders Kenya, and because of cultural diffusion and its direct relevance, this was still an important phrase in Kenya at the time of the uprising. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;jembe&lt;/strong&gt; - A hoe. Long handle, sharp edge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;panga&lt;/strong&gt; - A farm tool that doubled as a weapon. It had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.classicwholesalers.co.za/static/img/items/052-003114-p.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long, flat blade, with a curved tip.&lt;/a&gt; Similar to jembe, but covering use cases more oriented towards harvesting and threshing. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the fact that farm tools double as weapons is pertinent to understanding some of the things characters say, and isn't explained as such in-text, except contextually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;shamba&lt;/strong&gt; - A plot of land. That's as much as I've been able to gather on this, and it's served as a functional definition throughout the course of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sufuria&lt;/strong&gt; - A flat-bottomed, deep, handle-less pot. Used as a pot, for all intents and purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;micege, mikengeria&lt;/strong&gt; - Weeds. Former is a weed known as &quot;black jack,&quot; apparently, though I can't find taxonomic information about it. Latter is known as &quot;wandering willie.&quot; Though it must be a similar species, and not exactly the species that goes by that name - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradescantia_fluminensis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;wandering willie&quot; is native to South America&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bangi&lt;/strong&gt; - This is &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; weed - cannabis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T09:45:04.643" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T09:45:04.643" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4077" CreationDate="2017-10-22T01:32:04.813" Score="3" ViewCount="2169" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of Gatsby when Tom and Nick meet, after their conversation Nick states that Tom: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace — or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons — rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't Nick tell Tom it was Daisy, not Gatsby in the car. (and does Tom already know that)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does Nick say he is: (My friend told me it has something to do with character but I don't understand it) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;rid of my [his] provincial squeamishness forever.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of Tom walking into a jewelry store?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T22:42:22.760" Title="Tom and Nick's meeting in the Great Gatsby" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3970" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3971" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel by Kurt Vonnegut. Use together with the [kurt-vonnegut] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:00:41.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3972" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3973" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English poet and playwright Tony Harrison, or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:01:50.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3974" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3975" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US science fiction and fantasy author David Weber, or about any of his literary works (most famously the 'Honorverse', a collection of military sci-fi novels about a character named Honor Harrington)." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:03:47.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3976" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3977" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" Score="0" Body="For questions about the collection of military sci-fi novels by David Weber centred on the character of Honor Harrington. Use together with the [david-weber] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T10:06:38.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3978" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3979" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" Score="0" Body="For questions about Daniel Defoe as a writer, or about any of his literary works, most famously the novel Robinson Crusoe." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T11:11:40.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3980" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4280" CreationDate="2017-10-22T12:34:14.633" Score="16" ViewCount="1063" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy is best known for his tragic romances, novels which are really miserable and depressing to read. However, not all of them are equally so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;, one of his first novels, actually has a happy ending for the main characters!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mayor of Casterbridge&lt;/em&gt; ... I didn't finish this one, but in spite of its often gut-wrenching twists and turns, at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; of the main characters end up contentedly married.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, Hardy's last novel, is the most heartbreaking and emotionally rending book I've ever read, and I consider it a great survival feat simply to force oneself to finish reading it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a clear trend to the tragic in Hardy's writing over time?&lt;/strong&gt; I've only read a few of his novels, so I can't really say whether this conclusion is correct or a hasty one based on too few data points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If so, why?&lt;/strong&gt; Can we work out a reason for the change in the tone of Hardy's writing, based on events in his own life? Did his personal life get worse over time, inspiring more pessimism in his writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T23:50:25.837" Title="Did Thomas Hardy's books get more miserable with time, and was this because of his own life?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3960" CreationDate="2017-10-22T15:14:29.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As someone who has studied Harrison quite intensely I would hope to give an at least well reasoned view on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that this stanza highlights the way in which our perception and understanding of symbols, words and actions are determined predominantly by changing social norms dictated by the upper classes. As 'no-one clamoured in the press for its removal' Harrison highlights the arbitrary nature of this symbols; we have an example of graffiti that was an approved of set against the same symbol that was frowned upon-in this case the Vs the skinhead draws on graves. The symbol stays the same, what changes is society-one reading might be that Harrison is suggesting the upper classes more keenly attack the actions of the lower classes in the present compared to his youth, but I would say Harrison is making a more general point about the way we understand meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout his works, Harrison addresses the fact that over time our perception of language has changed according to social norms. For example, in 'Them and [uz]' Harrison brings attention to the fact that 'all poetry...'s been dubbed by [Λs] into RP' here Harrison highlights the fact that voices that were originally demotic or working class e.g. Keats and Wordsworth are now perceived as upper class voices because the English upper class ([Λs]) have 'dubbed' them to suit their purposes. The poetry is the same, much like the V, but our understanding of it has changed due to social norms and views on what kinds of socioeconomic classes get to produce and consume certain forms of art. It may be said that by doing this, Harrison highlights the way in which symbols and words may be appropriated by those in power-the fact that V is used with such versatility in the poem, and with so many meanings, shows how meaning is contextual in Harrison's view, for better or for worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Harrison may be addressing the fact that certain acts are deemed more acceptable in wartime or times of supposed crisis. The act of graffiti in the poem may reflect other acts that 'in wartime' are acceptable. Therefore Harrison, who is an established War Poet, may be addressing briefly the hypocrisy of a society that condemns some acts in peacetime but allows in wartime. Considering that Harrison's poetry is at times very clearly shaped by his experience of seeing war crimes and the use of nuclear weapons in his childhood, this could be a nod to one of Harrison's main sources of anger and concern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are free to completely reject these readings of course, and although there is not a great amount of critical work on Harrison; I'd recommend for this particular theme reading Harrison's &lt;em&gt;School of Eloquence&lt;/em&gt; (1978), watching the film poem version of &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt; and to get a particular sense of the way in which he reclaims texts at least taking a casual glance at some of his dramaturgy; &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries&lt;/em&gt; (1985), &lt;em&gt;The Labourers of Herakles&lt;/em&gt; (1996) and &lt;em&gt;The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus&lt;/em&gt; (1988) all give a flavour of this. In terms of literary criticism, &lt;em&gt;Holocaust Poetry: Awkward Poetics in the Work of Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Hill, Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes&lt;/em&gt; by Anthony Rowland is well argued and, if you can access it, &lt;em&gt;Public Poetry in the Work of Tony Harrison&lt;/em&gt; by Lenka Filopova is a good overview. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2319" LastEditorUserId="2319" LastEditDate="2017-10-22T15:32:17.060" LastActivityDate="2017-10-22T15:32:17.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-22T20:08:02.943" Score="12" ViewCount="1759" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the &lt;em&gt;Oz&lt;/em&gt; books, we see that Ozma has several indicators of perhaps being gay: She never takes a boyfriend, she has a... erm... &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; close friendship with Dorothy, and some people claim that she is in a relationship with Dorothy in book six.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was also a boy for the large majority of her childhood, so perhaps her transition wasn't as smooth as it appeared to be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ozma being lesbian is also a popular theory on the Internet — see &lt;a href=&quot;https://newwwoz.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-characters-of-oz-ozma.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything in the text to indicate that Ozma is gay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1535" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T01:57:39.883" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T00:01:00.147" Title="Is Ozma a lesbian character?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;l-frank-baum&gt;&lt;oz&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="3983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15449" CreationDate="2017-10-23T14:26:41.133" Score="3" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a book/short story on Wattpad about a young man (22-27) who is a sniper for a S.W.A.T. team. In the beginning of the book he is forced to take a kill shot due to something silly that one of his team members did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later falls in love with a woman who has a small son (3-5). At the end of the story the man saves the kid from a building (which was on fire if I recall correctly). He jumps out of a 2nd story window with the kid on his back. But because he and the woman argued before that occurred, he thinks that her admission of love was due to the fact that he saved her son and &quot;owes him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2350" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T20:07:52.963" Title="Book about young S.W.A.T. agent that falls in love with a woman that has a child (Wattpad)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3984" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-23T22:47:20.030" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it involved some sort of romantic subplot, but I'm not sure. I also remember it having the discussion of death, maybe of the main characters mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most significant thing I remember is the main character talking about an experiment: A large amount of water was put in a vat, and it was watched to detect the disappearance of electrons/(protons/something like that). There was also a scene where the main character was sitting on a roof looking out over a town, and sees a flash that he thinks is one of the particles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was set in the United States in modern-ish time.&#xA;I read it within the last ten years.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It was a printed book, I think the cover was colorful but maybe not.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;It was in English and not a translation (that I know of).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I read it in the U.S.A., I think I got it from a public library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2351" LastEditorUserId="2351" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T18:19:10.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T14:22:19.877" Title="YA book involving disappearing subatomic particles?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3996" CreationDate="2017-10-24T01:20:00.023" Score="10" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Goldilocks sits in Mama and Papa bears' chairs, but does not break them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After she'd eaten the three bears' breakfasts she decided she was feeling a little tired.  So, she walked into the living room where she saw three chairs.  Goldilocks sat in the first chair to rest her feet.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This chair is too big!&quot; she exclaimed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So she sat in the second chair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This chair is too big, too!&quot;  she whined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when the bears come home, they somehow discover someone had been sitting in the chairs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Someone's been sitting in my chair,&quot; growled the Papa bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Someone's been sitting in my chair,&quot; said the Mama bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Mama and Papa bear see that led them to believe someone had been sitting in their chairs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2352" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T02:39:28.907" Title="How did Mama and Papa bear know someone was sitting in their chairs?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3046" CreationDate="2017-10-24T02:14:22.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I shall offer a different word on this, unconcerned with the technical issue of the meaning of a supposed epistemological solipsism, rather bringing out what I take to be Orwell's meaning. The plight of the individual under the &quot;jackboot&quot; of power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, by analogy, could be understood as the problem of legal positivism, in the ancient sense, that Justice is whatever the current law is. Here it is transferred to the existential plane. The individual losses their identity in the rapid surge of the collective, as guided by the activity of advanced and remote outposts, in this case, as embodied by the all-seeing O'Brien, master of the clearest logic. It's very like Antigone. There is someone absorbed, so to say, in their mores, for instance the feeling that it is terrible and impious not to bury one's dead kin. And O'Brien comes along and says, well, you know my dear, that is sheer superstition. We shall simply throw the body in the trash, quite sanitary isn't it? If the rational becomes indistinguishable from rationalization, trick, ideology, then the individual losses their mornings and becomes despondent, even despairs. Unless, of course, they are a hero, than they are shattered against the devastation of utter power and clockwork evil.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2217" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T02:14:22.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T11:02:37.690" Score="3" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Ferdinand#Reception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for &lt;em&gt;The Story of Ferdinand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book was released nine months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and was seen by many supporters of Francisco Franco as a pacifist book.&lt;sup&gt;[8]&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;strong&gt;It was banned in many countries&lt;/strong&gt;, including in Spain (where it remained banned until after Franco's death).&lt;sup&gt;[7]&lt;/sup&gt; In Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler ordered the book burned (as &quot;degenerate democratic propaganda&quot;), while it was the only American children's book available for sale in Stalinist-era Poland.&lt;sup&gt;[7]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going to the reference marked &lt;sup&gt;[7]&lt;/sup&gt;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1986/11/09/ferdinand-the-bulls-50th-anniversary/3325d6dc-cc68-4be7-9569-408439896098/?utm_term=.47e6b7651e78&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Washington Post&lt;/a&gt;, there's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Nazi Germany, Hitler burned the translation for being &quot;degenerate democratic propaganda.&quot; When Berlin fell in 1945, 30,000 copies were immediately printed and freely distributed among the children in a mission of peace. In its 50 years, it has been translated into 60 languages and is said to have sold at least 2.5 million copies world-wide. It has been pirated -- and rewritten -- in the Soviet Union. It was the only American children's book available in Stalinist Poland, and a square in Warsaw has been renamed &quot;Ferdinand.&quot; It remained banned in Spain until Franco's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but I don't see anything about the 'many countries' that the Wikipedia page claims that it was banned in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this Wikipedia page accurate, that it was banned in many countries? Which countries has it been banned in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T11:02:37.690" Title="In which countries was &quot;The Story of Ferdinand&quot; banned?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;the-story-of-ferdinand&gt;&lt;munro-leaf&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3989" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3990" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Story of Ferdinand&quot; is a 1936 childrens novel by Munro Leaf, about a bull who does not want to take part in bullfights. Use this tag with the [munro-leaf] tag." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T11:03:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4008" CreationDate="2017-10-24T13:45:01.440" Score="3" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that La Fontaine's &lt;em&gt;Fables&lt;/em&gt; is heavily inspired by Greco-Roman classic literature, especially Aesop's fables, but I'm sure there are other sources of inspiration for La Fontaine's 12 books of fables. Are there any tracing back to Antiquity, possibly historical or mythological in nature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm specifically looking for sources that inspired the works in Books 7 to 9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorDisplayName="user2354" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:47:56.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T19:47:56.903" Title="What/who are the exact sources of inspiration, deriving from Antiquity, for Fables, written by La Fontaine?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;la-fontaine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T16:55:09.247" Score="6" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Mann's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddenbrooks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buddenbrooks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in part 10, Thomas Buddenbrook finds himself reading a treatise on philosophy, which elevates him above his day to day care to a level where he can see the pettiness of this life and how death should be welcomed as it erases the singular person. However, this state soon escapes him and he goes back to his complacent life as a merchant. The book is never named, but appears to have been Schopenhauer's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_as_Will_and_Representation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The World as Will and Representation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some deeper significance to this episode, beyond underlining just how stifled Thomas has become through him feeling compelled to continue the family business? To what extent could readers have been expected to recognise the book as Schopenhauer's treatise when &lt;em&gt;Buddenbrooks&lt;/em&gt; first came out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T16:55:09.247" Title="How significant is Schopenhauer's philosophy in Buddenbrooks?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-mann&gt;&lt;buddenbrooks&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="3997" CreationDate="2017-10-24T19:44:51.573" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early on in the book, the engineer running the Comet stopped for hours at a broken signal and spent hours waiting for someone to tell him what to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later we see that almost every engineer working for Taggart Transcontinental volunteered for the first run of the John Galt Line (and that numerous other staff members volunteered for other positions as well). The only exception were 3 who were incapable of doing so for various reasons (e.g. the fact that one of them was in jail for reckless driving).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that the aforementioned engineer of the &lt;em&gt;Comet&lt;/em&gt; was either one of the three or had left the company by then, but there's a good chance that he was one of the people to volunteer. Even if he &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt;, odds are there were plenty of people like him who volunteered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, Dagney decided who got to drive it by randomly drawing a name. There's no indication that either her or Eddie had done anything to screen out the obviously bad engineers. She drew one of the best engineers on the line, but that appears to be more luck than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did all of the engineers volunteer? And why would Dagney leave the selection to chance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T05:46:43.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T05:46:43.493" Title="Why did all of the Taggart Transcontinental engineers volunteer to drive the first train on the John Galt Line?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-24T19:47:27.530" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_Shrugged_characters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of characters in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; describes Mr. Thompson as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Thompson is the &quot;Head of the State&quot; for the United States. He is not particularly intelligent and has a very undistinguished look. He knows politics, however, and is a master of public relations and back-room deals. Rand's notes indicate that she modeled him on President Harry S. Truman, and that she deliberately decided not to call him &quot;President of the United States&quot; as this title has &quot;honorable connotations&quot; which the character does not deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way was he based on Harry S. Truman? Why Harry Truman in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T19:47:27.530" Title="Why and how is Mr. Thompson based on Harry S. Truman?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9326" CreationDate="2017-10-24T20:05:08.587" Score="6" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;people thus situated, who have warm imaginations, generally amuse themselves by conjuring up an idol of perfection to which they attach all kinds of merit, probable or improbable. They invest the first face or figure that takes their fancy, with these imagined charms, no matter whether they accord or not, and then fall in love with the image they have created—whilst the delusion under which they labour, makes them see every action of the beloved object under a false light; just as &lt;strong&gt;people wearing green spectacles fancy the whole creation tinged with emerald&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, an obvious allusion to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_City&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emerald City&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wonderful_Wizard_of_Oz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wonderful Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L._Frank_Baum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L. Frank Baum&lt;/a&gt;. Except that it was written in 1827, a few decades before Baum was born, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Loudon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jane C. Loudon&lt;/a&gt;, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/loudon/jane/mummy/complete.html#chapter5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be a coincidence, but I wonder. Have other authors suggested people with red glasses seeing a world made or rubies, and people with yellow glasses seeing a world made of citrine? Or was Frank making a reference to Loudon? Or were they both part of a larger movement, and if so is it purely an arbitrary tradition or is it based on some symbolism of emeralds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the literary history of green spectacles match that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rose-colored_glasses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rose-colored glasses&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that I'm asking why emeralds and not other gems. The association between emeralds and green, and the symbolism of gems as precious and nice-looking, are obvious.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:21:00.327" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T10:16:49.083" Title="Seeing the world through green-tinted glasses" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;l-frank-baum&gt;&lt;jane-c-loudon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3985" CreationDate="2017-10-24T22:13:31.167" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the 1839 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Story_of_the_Three_Bears_(1839)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition&lt;/a&gt; of Robert Southey's &lt;em&gt;The Story of the Three Bears&lt;/em&gt; it was because their chairs' cushions were disturbed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Somebody in my chair has sat!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With voice so gruff and great&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Huge bear said, when he saw that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His cushion was not straight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Somebody in my chair has been!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The middle Bear exclaim'd;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seeing the cushion dinted in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By what may not be named.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wording was slightly different in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=yul.11369938_004_00;view=1up;seq=357&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first edition&lt;/a&gt; (of 1837). The history of this story (and its publication history)  is interesting and complex: see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldilocks_and_the_Three_Bears&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on it. In particular, the identity of the home invader has changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T01:04:48.790" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T01:04:48.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3993" CreationDate="2017-10-24T22:15:32.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;For the same reason that a lot of people responded positively to Reardon's speech at his trial.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Hank Reardon reflected at his trial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guilt is ours, [Hank] thought. If we who were the movers, the providers, the benefactors of mankind, were willing to let the brand of evil be stamped upon us and silently to bear punishment for our virtues - what sort of &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; did we expect to triumph in the world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He looked at the people around him. They had cheered him today; they had cheered him by the side of the track of the John Galt Line. But tomorrow they would clamor for a new directive from Wesley Mouch and a free housing project from Orren Boyle, while Boyle's girders collapsed upon their heads. They would do it, because they would be told to forget, as a sin, that which had made them cheer Hank Reardon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were they ready to renounce their highest moments as a sin? Why were they willing to betray the best within them? What made them believe that this earth was a realm of evil where despair was their natural fate? He could not name the reason, but he knew that it had to be named. He felt it as a huge question mark within the courtroom, which it was now his duty to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a real sense, then, people &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; to believe the truth. Given a reason, they could &amp;quot;come out of their stupor&amp;quot; in a sense. These people, while they were &amp;quot;caught up&amp;quot; in the bad philosophy of the day, apparently lacked the fundamental malice of Jim Taggart and Wesley Mouch. They were still capable of responding to the truth, unlike people like Dr. Robert Stadler (who knew better) or Wesley Mouch (who was fundamentally malicious and power-hungry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of why Dagney seemingly chose at random, the book doesn't really answer this. However, I suspect that the fact that someone volunteered would, in and of itself, seem to suggest that they were up for the job. In that moment, they saw the value of the John Galt Line, which suggested that they would be able to run it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-24T22:15:32.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3998" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-24T23:07:18.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_C._Loudon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jane C. Loudon&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; Jane Webb, was a 19th century English author. With *&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mummy!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century&lt;/a&gt;, a novel published in 1827 and set in 2126, she was a pioneer of science fiction (a genre that would only emerge as such almost a century later). Like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written a few years earlier, &lt;em&gt;The Mummy!&lt;/em&gt; borrows some of the trappings of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic novel&lt;/a&gt;, but builds on scientific innovation rather than on the supernatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;External links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/44664&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jane Loudon on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/loudon/jane/mummy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mummy!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (and &lt;a href=&quot;https://librivox.org/search?title=The+Mummy!+A+Tale+of+the+Twenty-Second+Century&amp;amp;author=LOUDON&amp;amp;reader=&amp;amp;keywords=&amp;amp;genre_id=0&amp;amp;status=all&amp;amp;project_type=either&amp;amp;recorded_language=&amp;amp;sort_order=catalog_date&amp;amp;search_page=1&amp;amp;search_form=advanced&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;audiobook&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T12:26:23.447" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T12:26:23.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="3999" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-24T23:07:18.817" Score="0" Body="Jane Webb, later known as Jane C. Loudon, was a 19th century British author of a science fiction novel &quot;The Mummy!&quot; and several gardening books. Use this tag for questions about her or her works." OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T12:27:06.470" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T12:27:06.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3963" CreationDate="2017-10-25T04:56:17.037" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's admittedly been a little while since I read the book, but here are a few thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Billy Pilgrim is coming unglued at this point. Keep in mind that Billy Pilgrim survived a major plane crash, which appears to have caused some degree of brain damage. That being said, we obviously can't take Billy Pilgrim's view of events entirely seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue of free will is also a major concern here. The aliens have a very different view of time; rather than viewing events and history as linear and unfolding in potentially unpredictable ways, from their perspective everything has already occurred, in a sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their view of time is analogous to a novel or movie in some ways: you could read it straight through, you could skip around, or you could read it and then revisit the parts you liked best. If a character you like dies in a particular chapter, you can just go back and read the parts where the character's still alive. If you could just go back to the chapters where the character's still alive, does death really have the same meaning? Or does the character just happen to be doing badly in that particular chapter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another interesting question: if the whole book's already written, do the characters have freewill? If I could predict with 100% certainty what you'll do tomorrow, would that mean that you would have no choice &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; to do it? Classical formulations of freewill require that, given choices A and B, there actually has to be a logical possibility of choosing either. In other words, even if you &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; chose A, you &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have chosen B instead. Under that version of freewill, if I knew with absolute certainty in advance that you &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; choose A, then that would mean that there was no logical possibility of you choosing B (meaning that you'd have no freewill).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, classical freewill depends on the idea that there are actual multiple possible futures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is in contrast to soft determinism, which argues that you could have freewill even if it was logically necessary that you choose A. That doesn't really enter the book that I recall, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T22:57:52.450" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T22:57:52.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-25T14:41:55.237" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alabaster and Syenite can't use they powers directly on guardians, but they could make a lot of indirect things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such as rise several stone columns in a radious from the island forcing the guardians to reach by swiming or backoff, buying time for Innon and people to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or make a bed of razor-like spikes behind surface, then make a shake to generate a tide difference so, when the ships aproach, they broke its bilge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How it is possible for the guardians to reach meov island? in N.K. Jemisin - The fifth season&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2359" LastEditorUserId="2359" LastEditDate="2017-10-25T18:24:18.877" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T18:24:18.877" Title="How it is possible for the guardians to reach meov island? in N.K. Jemisin - The fifth season" Tags="&lt;n-k-jemisin&gt;&lt;the-fifth-season&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3702" CreationDate="2017-10-25T15:08:14.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; write about other universes, but none of them were (at least explicitly) about the universes described in Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stumbled on this interesting quote from a letter on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Reading_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; regarding the book's reading order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think I agree with your [chronological] order for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would suggest that C. S. Lewis didn't know &quot;in advance&quot; how many Narnia books he would write. This would seem to at least open the possibility that he would have written more Narnia books at some point. Even if he had &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to stop writing at 7 books, that isn't necessarily conclusive evidence that he &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; have written more. It's certainly not unheard of for authors to continue to add to the canon of their works long after the fact (notably, for example, J. K. Rowling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The counter to the above argument, of course, is that the original question was whether C. S. Lewis &lt;strong&gt;intended&lt;/strong&gt; to write about the other universes. The fact that he &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have written about them doesn't necessarily prove that he actually &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is the only book that even mentions that there are other parallel universes. While &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; was admittedly the second-to-last book, the fact that none of the other books (even &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, which was written after &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;) even mention it strongly suggests that he didn't particularly intend to write about the other ones. In fact, from a plot perspective, the main reason they visit Charn at all was to bring the White Witch into Narnia. He also kind of needed the Wood between the Worlds to make the plot of &lt;em&gt;Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also have the fact that the magic rings used to reach the Wood Between the Worlds were buried at the end of the book, clearly implying that the characters didn't intend for anyone to use them ever again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Narnia series was published at the rate of approximately 1 book a year from 1950 - 1956. C. S. Lewis died in 1963 without writing any more books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; series is the Chronicles of &lt;strong&gt;Narnia&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact that Narnia ended in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;, and the fact that the series covers Narnia from beginning to end, suggests that he didn't intend to write about any of the others (at least in the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;). They fundamentally wouldn't be the chronicles of Narnia at that point, they'd be the chronicles of other universes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some C. S. Lewis scholars, most notably Michael Ward in &lt;em&gt;Planet Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, have argued that the choice of 7 books was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; coincidental. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/aprilweb-only/4-21-52.0.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Christianity Today&lt;/em&gt; describes that further. To quote from that book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the medieval reckoning, there were seven &quot;planets&quot;: Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Saturn. Was it possible, Ward wondered, that each of the seven Narnia books was written under the sign of a different planet? Looking closely at the Narnia Chronicles side-by-side with Lewis' 1935 poem, and other of his writings that touch on the planets, especially his posthumously published book, &lt;em&gt;The Discarded Image&lt;/em&gt;, a retrieval of the medieval worldview, Ward found that indeed there is such a correspondence: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe corresponds to Jupiter, Prince Caspian to Mars, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to the Sun, The Silver Chair to the Moon, The Horse and His Boy to Mercury, The Magician's Nephew to Venus, and The Last Battle to Saturn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll withhold judgment on whether that theory is true or not, but if it is, that would strongly suggest that C. S. Lewis &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; intend to continue the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems likely, though, that if he intended to write about other universes, he most likely would've just published them as a separate book (rather than trying to expand the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; series, which was always intended to be primarily about Narnia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-25T15:08:14.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4004" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4049" CreationDate="2017-10-26T02:32:16.820" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the end of Gatsby, and my friend told me that the end of Gatsby relates to the American dream. Can someone help me the analyze the end of Gatsby? What I have analyzed so far: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'Gatsby's wonder' - I think this means how he was hoping to be with Daisy and was stuck on that idea (did he ever stop trying to be with her - if so, when)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last sentence's meaning: &lt;code&gt;So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The valley of ashes and how it relates to the American dream.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there other important ideas that I am missing in my analysis? If so, can someone guide me on the right path?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2237" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T21:03:42.313" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T20:59:39.843" Title="Analyzing the end of Gatsby" Tags="&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3524" CreationDate="2017-10-26T02:36:58.843" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The heat in that chapter was related to the tension between Gatsby and Tom, as Tom had just found out Daisy was cheating with him with Gatsby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2364" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T02:36:58.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3985" CreationDate="2017-10-26T02:39:28.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chairs were disorganized and put in an unorderly fashion, suggesting that they had recently moved, along with the seat cushions (as stated in the other answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2364" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T02:39:28.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T07:27:28.953" Score="12" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the song &quot;Come to Me&quot; was probably not intended as a treatise on astronomical timekeeping or 19th-century French child-rearing, some of Fantine's lines (taken at face value) fit together for a remarkably specific implication about her daughter's bedtime. Cosette is roughly 8 years old at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it's past your bedtime&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the bedtime is &lt;em&gt;earlier&lt;/em&gt; than the &quot;now&quot; of the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;soon it will be night ... Don't you see the evening star appearing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;now&quot; is twilight, just after sunset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't you hear the winter wind is crying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is winter, so we know that sunset is relatively early. Because in this period I believe clocks were set locally by the sun rather than by time zones, the sun would be highest at noon and would set &lt;em&gt;no later than&lt;/em&gt; 6 pm in the winter. The lines seem to fit together like a logic puzzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the month of Fantine's death known? &lt;a href=&quot;http://lesmiserables.wikia.com/wiki/Fantine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Once source&lt;/a&gt; puts it in December, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.angelfire.com/pq/lesmis/chron.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another&lt;/a&gt; in March -- both consistent with the &quot;winter&quot; reference. At the latitude of Montreuil-sur-Mer, sunset would be about 4:15 pm in December, reaching 6 pm in March. The expectation for 8-year-old Cosette to be in bed before 6 pm, and possibly much sooner, seems unreasonably early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many potential ways to explain the apparent implications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fantine is emotional and hallucinating as she dies, and her time references are not precise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fantine has not been caring for Cosette day-to-day and may not know what a reasonable bedtime for her child would be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Bedtime&quot; might mean the time to &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; getting ready for bed -- although in modern English it seems to refer to &quot;lights out&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attempting a scientific interpretation of the lyrics is inappropriate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or maybe the lyrics are actually telling us something interesting, that children in this time and place did go to bed &lt;em&gt;very early&lt;/em&gt; by modern standards, perhaps due to the need to get up and perform chores well before dawn.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any literary or historical insight on the interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2365" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T09:21:50.440" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T09:21:50.440" Title="When was young Cosette's bedtime?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3991" CreationDate="2017-10-26T13:06:31.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vast majority of his &lt;em&gt;Fables&lt;/em&gt; have origins from Ancient Greece. For example, the earliest origins of The Mouse and the Oyster (&lt;em&gt;Le Rat et l'Huître&lt;/em&gt;), fable 9 of Book VIII, come from a Greek Anthology poem in the 1st century AD by Antiphilus of Byzantium&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;. Another example, The Hawk and the Nightingale (&lt;em&gt;Le Milan et le Rossignol&lt;/em&gt;), fable 18 of Book IX, derives its origins from Hesiod's poem Works and Days, written in around 700 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/greekanthology03newyuoft#page/44/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Greek Anthology by G. P. Putnam's Sons, page 44&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorDisplayName="user2354" LastEditDate="2017-10-26T13:11:52.500" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T13:11:52.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-26T16:18:15.597" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Power of Fables (&lt;em&gt;Le pouvoir des Fables&lt;/em&gt;), fable 4 of Book VIII of &lt;em&gt;Fables&lt;/em&gt; written by La Fontaine, is addressed to Paul Barillon, the French ambassador to England under Louis XIV. I know that La Fontaine was a critic of French society to say the least, why address his thoughts on the literary importance of the fable to him in particular, or more importantly, to the position?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T00:06:22.727" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T21:34:54.293" Title="Why is The Power of Fables, in Book VIII of Fables by La Fontaine, addressed to Paul Barillon, the French ambassador to England?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;la-fontaine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3792" CreationDate="2017-10-26T20:34:26.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Passive resignation vs. cynical resignation makes a huge difference here. Also, look at the difference in their life situation, attitude, and behavior: the newspaper vendor was still working and making his own living, whereas the bum was living off of other people at that point. He evidently wasn't working or producing any goods or services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, resignation to what? The newspaper vendor &quot;had resigned himself to the lonely obscurity of his little stand.&quot; He used to own a factory, the factory failed, and now he was resigned to his reduced circumstances. He still seemed to hold to positive morals: he recognized what was happening to people and disliked it, and he apparently hadn't fallen prey to it himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bum, on the other hand, appears to be resigned to the causeless uneasiness, and perhaps to the entire philosophy and lifestyle of looting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-26T20:34:26.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-27T07:55:30.063" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dan Brown's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Symbol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Symbol&lt;/a&gt;, Sato convinces Bellamy and Langdon to help her by  showing them a footage of weird masonic rites, attended by key US personalities. The video was shot by the antagonist of the book (Mal'akh) and revealing it publicly would trigger a national crisis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did she get that file?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2369" LastEditorUserId="2369" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T09:19:09.727" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T09:19:09.727" Title="How did Sato get the file?" Tags="&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;the-lost-symbol&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4019" CreationDate="2017-10-27T12:56:00.770" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eἰς τὸν λειμῶνα καθίσας,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἔδρεπεν ἕτερον ἐφ' ἑτέρῳ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;αἰρόμενος ἄγρευμ' ἀνθέων&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἁδομένᾳ ψυχᾷ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Eurip. &lt;em&gt;frag.&lt;/em&gt; 754.] &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;['He sat in the meadow and plucked with glad heart&#xA;the spoil of the flowers, gathering them one by one.']&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the page before the preface of &lt;em&gt;Palgrave's Golden Treasury&lt;/em&gt;: Palgrave, Francis Turner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this &lt;em&gt;Eurip.&lt;/em&gt; mentioned in the text? I found the Greek text &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jstutters/poegen/blob/master/palgrave.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T23:06:05.967" Title="Where is this Greek extract from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-28T09:30:39.767" Score="2" ViewCount="1575" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read the short story &quot;Seasons of Glass and Iron&quot;, winner of the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/seasons-glass-iron/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;may be read in full online&lt;/a&gt;. Since the main characters are both women and the only way men appear in the story is as their oppressors (Tabitha's husband, Amira's father and suitors), I was getting a distinct feminist vibe from it, but I'm not sure if I'm reading too much into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, is the story's message/moral about men?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T09:25:46.577" Title="What is the message of &quot;Seasons of Glass and Iron&quot; in terms of men?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;amal-elmohtar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4018" CreationDate="2017-10-28T14:54:08.330" Score="3" ViewCount="637" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing that we're actually shown is Snape's modifications to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Draught_of_Living_Death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Draught of Living Death potion&lt;/a&gt;. Some of his modifications, like crushing the bean instead of cutting to release more juice, seem like reasonable things to try. Even adding juice from 1 extra bean seems like a reasonable thing to try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the stirring directions (7 times clockwise, 1 time counterclockwise) seems absurdly specific. The directions say to stir twice clockwise. How do you get from &quot;stir twice clockwise&quot; to &quot;stir 7 times clockwise and once counterclockwise&quot;? How did he know to do 7 times rather than 6 or 8? Yeah, I know that 7 is a magically significant number, but 1 (the number of counterclockwise stirs) isn't, and neither is 2 (the number of stirs in the original directions), so really, I could ask how either of them came up with &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; of their numbers for stirs - it seems quite arbitrary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, his &lt;em&gt;Levicorups&lt;/em&gt; spell shows multiple attempts to get it right. How did he &quot;figure it out&quot; - guess at the incantation or something? What might his previous experiments have looked like, and what were the results likely to have been? Presumably, they had &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; effect given that he had written them down, but the fact that he crossed them out implies that successive attempts were better somehow. Better how, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; How did Snape figure out the stuff he had written in his book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-28T18:23:23.247" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T13:14:32.870" Title="How did Snape figure out the stuff he had written in his Advanced Potion-Making book?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4017" CreationDate="2017-10-28T17:29:49.697" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably because Snape was, like Dumbledore and Voldemort, incredibly smart and willing to tread off the beaten path. It's not that uncommon to invent new spells/magic things: Fred and George do it all the time for their magic shop. No offense to Fred and George, but if they can do it, Snape definitely can. Hermione doesn't do it because inventing new things/using untested spells is not approved by the ministry of magic (quote from HBP):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So you just decided to try out an unknown, handwritten incantation and see what would happen?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why does it matter if it's handwritten?&amp;quot; said Harry, preferring not to answer the rest of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Because it's probably not Ministry of Magic approved,&amp;quot; said Hermione. &amp;quot;And also,&amp;quot; she added, as Harry and Ron rolled their eyes, &amp;quot;because I'm starting to think this Prince character was a bit dodgy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inventing spells is also dangerous: Luna's mother died inventing a spell (from Order of the Phoenix: &amp;quot;'Yes,' said Luna simply, 'my mother. She was a quite extraordinary witch, you know, but she did like to experiment and one of her spells went rather badly wrong one day.&amp;quot;). So you have to be willing to take risks and bend the rules, which isn't something that Hermione does often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the specific process that is used to invent new spells/magic thingies: we never actually got a description of this process. This makes sense because the Harry Potter books focus on Harry Potter's perspective, and Harry never shows that much interest in the theory of magic. I'm sure if the books focused on Fred and George, we would get much more information about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T21:51:42.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4013" CreationDate="2017-10-28T23:06:05.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hypsipyle&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euripides#Lost_and_fragmentary_plays&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lost or fragmentary play&lt;/a&gt; written around 410 BC by the Greek playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euripides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euripedes&lt;/a&gt;. This particular fragment might have survived from its inclusion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/plutarch/symposiacs/chapter4.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book IV of &lt;em&gt;Symposiacs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the Greek/Roman biographer and essayist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch&lt;/a&gt;, who lived between AD 46 – AD 120. So this is likely a fragment of &lt;em&gt;Hypsipyle&lt;/em&gt; that we only know about because Plutarch quoted it in his book ~500 years after the play was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2017-10-28T23:06:05.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3202" CreationDate="2017-10-29T00:07:22.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He means that they will never stay together permanently.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least that's Yennefer's conclusion about how to interpret it. She explains as much to Geralt several stories later in &amp;quot;Something More&amp;quot;, the final story in &lt;em&gt;Sword of Destiny&lt;/em&gt;, after the two of them meet by chance one Beltane and make love together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Do you remember when we met in the Owl Mountains? And that golden dragon… What was he called?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Three Jackdaws. Yes, I do.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘He told us…’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I remember, Yen.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She kissed him where the neck becomes the collarbone and then nuzzled her head in, tickling him with her hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘We’re made for each other,’ she whispered. ‘Perhaps we’re destined for each other? But nothing will come of it. It’s a pity, but when dawn breaks, we shall part. It cannot be any other way. We have to part so as not to hurt one another. We two, destined for each other. Created for each other. Pity. The one or ones who created us for each other ought to have made more of an effort. Destiny alone is insufficient, it’s too little. Something more is needed. Forgive me. I had to tell you.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I know.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that Villentretenmerth was being intentionally unclear and ambiguous (as prophets so often are), but this interpretation does seem to make sense. It wouldn't be as interesting if he was merely telling them that their relationship wouldn't produce children, since they both know they're sterile already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yennefer's words about the &amp;quot;limits of possibility&amp;quot; being &amp;quot;very far away&amp;quot; also fit with this interpretation. The limits are those which prevent them ever from staying together for long; the limits being very far away means they can still be together for a while at least. With the interpretation in terms of children, it wouldn't make sense for the limits to be &amp;quot;very far away&amp;quot; - either they can have children or they can't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T00:07:22.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4021" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4030" CreationDate="2017-10-29T04:11:03.760" Score="0" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Brand New Day&lt;/em&gt; by Ryan Star contains the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I stayed in one place for too long&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gotta get on the run again&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I saw the one thing that I want&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hell bent, get outta bed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm throwing rocks at your window&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You're tying the bed sheets together&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They say we are dreaming too big&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I say this town's too small&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dream&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Send me a sign&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Turn back the clock&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Give me some time&lt;br&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  I need to break out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make a new name&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let's open our eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the brand new day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the narrator need more time? Time for what? And who is he asking to give him more time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T13:49:42.293" Title="Why does the narrator ask to &quot;give me some time&quot; in &quot;Brand New Day&quot; by Ryan Star?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;ryan-star&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4022" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4023" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US writer Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:11:07.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4024" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4025" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English author Richmal Crompton (1890-1969), or about any of her literary works, most famously the children's book series Just William." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:55:25.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4026" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4027" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Just William series by Richmal Crompton, or about any of the books in this series. Use with the [richmal-crompton] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T12:56:06.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4028" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4029" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author and philosopher Robert Maynard Pirsig (1928-2017), or about any of his literary works, most famously the philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T13:02:33.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4021" CreationDate="2017-10-29T13:49:42.293" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Turning back the clock,&quot; literally, would be to allow the narrator to re-live those hours/days/etc. It would give the narrator time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I stayed in one place too long&quot; gives the sense of wasted time — that the narrator is accustomed to constant movement, not putting down roots — and &quot;give me some time&quot; might mean the person wishes he could re-live some of the time he spent &quot;in one place&quot; and use it to go somewhere else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since turning back time is a physical impossibility, he's not addressing any real person; it's just a philosophical cry into the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T13:49:42.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4031" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4032" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US writer Richard Kadrey or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T14:03:37.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4033" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4034" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US horror fiction author R.L. (Robert Lawrence) Stine, or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" LastActivityDate="2017-10-29T14:16:09.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T00:16:43.840" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Snowgoons &quot;Get Off the Ground&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yih_bMc5B7o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yih_bMc5B7o&lt;/a&gt;) there's the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm with the Switzerland wolves we bout to spit some jewels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2389" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T09:38:41.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T09:38:41.203" Title="What does &quot;I'm with the Switzerland wolves we bout to spit some jewels&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T01:00:07.860" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;At around 3:10 in Snowgoons Get Off the Ground (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yih_bMc5B7o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yih_bMc5B7o&lt;/a&gt;), Ruste Juxx starts rapping. Why is his portion accompanied by heavy breathing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the associated lyrics (taken from genius: &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Snowgoons-get-off-the-ground-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://genius.com/Snowgoons-get-off-the-ground-lyrics&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Machine gun skunk I blow dolo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That's why your bitch jocked me like Polo&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I ain't gotta go get it cause I got it on me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I smell like palm trees, nothing but exotic on me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hoes get erotic on me, I put the pipe down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stick the pipe in her mouth tell her pipe down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now lick a shot for niggas doing life inside&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grabbing you by the neck, sticking the knife inside&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's B-R-double-O-K, double A-K brining trouble your way&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Knock niggas out, they can't get off the ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shell cases found, the cops get off the ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So put a muzzle on that bi-suiter rap shit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nigga knuckle up, cock rugers back bitch&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ruste Juxx bullets blow out your brain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Think it's a game, listen to Lil' Fame&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2389" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T09:38:34.527" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T09:38:34.527" Title="Why the breathing in Snowgoons Get Off the Ground" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3945" CreationDate="2017-10-31T04:30:44.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, such an interview did, in fact, take place. From the &lt;em&gt;Journals of Ayn Rand&lt;/em&gt; (edited by David Harriman), film producer Hal Wallis (&lt;em&gt;Casablanca&lt;/em&gt;) contracted Ayn Rand to work for him and write a screenplay about the Atomic Bomb. She interviewed Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer several times for that project, but the movie was never made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hal Wallis sold the rights to MGM after she finished about a third of the script. MGM, who was already making a film about the Atomic Bomb, apparently wasn't actually interested in producing the script, just in killing off a competing project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, the interview focused on the making of the atomic bomb. Some of the questions discussed in the interview (also discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3944/in-what-way-was-dr-robert-stadler-based-on-robert-oppenheimer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When did he start in Chicago? (Summer, 1942).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When did he start in New Mexico?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How was he picked to be the head of Los Almos - was he chosen or did he volunteer? When and how did he hear about the project?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Incidents to show progress of the work? Were there crucial turning points, i.e. milestones of the progress?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What points or events stand out in your mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the material wasn't directly used in a different book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3944/in-what-way-was-dr-robert-stadler-based-on-robert-oppenheimer&quot;&gt;but it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the inspiration for Dr. Robert Stadler in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T13:48:33.613" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T13:48:33.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3944" CreationDate="2017-10-31T04:33:38.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As described in my answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3945/did-ayn-rand-interview-robert-oppenheimer-and-if-so-how-did-she-use-the-materi&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, Ayn Rand interviewed Dr. Oppenheimer multiple times for a movie she was writing about the Atomic Bomb. That movie was never actually made; the only place that she seems to have published any of the material was &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, where it inspired the character Dr. Robert Stadler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an essay on how she intended to approach that film, she commented, first, that making such a movie was actually a great responsibility in a sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the bomb itself, she commented in the same essay that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first question we have to ask ourselves is: what is the &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; danger of the atomic bomb to mankind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The specific danger is that the bomb constitutes a weapon of total destruction and if it exists at a time when men and nations are bent on a course of destruction, it will wipe out mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, we cannot permit ourselves to preach anything that will push men further along that course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She then goes on to argue that violence and coercion is intrinsic to statism (as seen in, for example, Hitler and Stalin). Thus,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An atomic bomb is safe only in a free society - because a free society does not function through violence and does not cause wars. Such a weapon would be dangerous in the world at any time. At a time when most of mankind has embraced the faith of Statism - a world suicide is most surely ahead of us, unless men learn a different faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, evidently, she wasn't too thrilled about the Bomb and saw it as a potential tool for statists (which Project X in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; ended up being).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She actually interviewed Dr. Oppenheimer a number of times, which ranged on topics related to the project itself to various personal matters. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When did he start in Chicago? (Summer, 1942).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When did he start in New Mexico?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How was he picked to be the head of Los Almos - was he chosen or did he volunteer? When and how did he hear about the project?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Incidents to show progress of the work? Were there crucial turning points, i.e. milestones of the progress?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What points or events stand out in your mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentioned, among other things, the fact that the project was in such a remote location, in a town that was essentially run by the Army, as an obstacle to hiring people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite significantly, Dr. Oppenheimer was originally a theoretical physicist who hated lab work (not unlike Dr. Stadler).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, one of Oppenheimer's achievements that came up in the interviews was his &quot;theory of cosmic ray particles - that neutron particles were cosmic rays - 1936.&quot; Significantly, one of Dr. Robert Stadler's major achievements was his research on cosmic rays, and that research was used prominently in creating Project X.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor includes the following note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;AR's meetings with Oppenheimer proved useful later: he became the model for Robert Stadler in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;. In a 1961 interview, she recalled: &quot;Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It's the type that Oppenheimer projected - that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly. Even his office was what I described for Stadler - that almost ostentacious simplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T13:50:43.803" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T13:50:43.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2017-10-31T08:28:19.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means what Snowgoons mean by it, in other words it isn’t a pre-existing phrase with a set meaning, at least it isn’t in mainstream use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; take from it is that he is equating the quality of his rhymes and flo with the quality of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.watch-wiki.net/index.php?title=IWC_Destriero_Scafusi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swiss-made watche&lt;/a&gt;s which have high caché and many jewels as part of their mechanics. But the lyricist may have a different frame of reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that ‘wolves’ flows better than ‘jewellers’ but there is a history in literature of minority populations being referred to as wolves as seen in Arnds P. (2015) &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137541635_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gypsies and Jews as Wolves in Realist Fiction&lt;/a&gt;. In: Lycanthropy in German Literature. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In nineteenth-century literature, the wolf metaphor undergoes a shift from its religious and moral contextualization to a paradigm by which the presence of minorities who were perceived as threatening to communities and the nation at large is fictionally represented. While Kleist’s invocation of the battle in the Teutoburg Forest has shown us the nation united against foreign invaders, some of the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, both in Germany and abroad, increasingly associate wolves not only with foreign invaders but also with ethnic minorities, specifically Slavs, Jews, and ‘Gypsies’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Jewish watchmakers have always been a significant part of the Swiss industry, but I think any connection here is a stretch as the use of the term ‘wolves’ would then be derogatory, and the lyricist does not seem to have that intent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of ‘wolves’ may be no more than a poetic term for people in Switzerland, arising from an association of them and wolves both inhabiting snowy, mountainous regions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T08:28:19.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T09:34:53.803" Score="11" ViewCount="1732" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hear this term thrown around a lot, in connection to a variety of different works. They don't all share the same central themes, though - at least not necessarily. But they do all tend to be connected in a pretty basic way: they're all fairly grim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online definitions circularly say that &quot;Dostoevskian&quot; means &quot;in the style of Fyodor Dostoevsky,&quot; which isn't particularly helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What aspects of his works are typically specifically referred to by this term? Do people mean to say that a work is nihilistic, or explores seemingly irrational behavior? Or do they mean something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T00:40:35.590" Title="What do people mean when they refer to a work as &quot;Dostoevskian&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2017-10-31T14:42:21.347" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://newsroom.carleton.ca/2017/08/22/an-interview-with-hugo-award-recipient-amal-el-mohtar/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what the author has to say&lt;/a&gt; about the story's origins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few years ago, my seven-year-old niece asked me to tell her a fairy tale to while away a long car ride. I wanted to, but found myself hesitating over which to tell her, because the only ones coming to mind featured women being rescued by men or tormented by other women. So I decided to make one up, and told her about a woman trapped in iron shoes climbing up to a woman trapped on a glass hill before they ran off together to have adventures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me that speaks of an absence of agency of central female characters in the fairy tales that came to her mind. It isn't clear if she is talking about the standard slate of bowdlerised western fairly tales alone or if she includes tales from her parent's Lebanese heritage, but if you look at her statement, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; clear that she isn't reacting to 'men as oppressor' stories. She is reacting to 'women as tormentors, men as rescuers, central character as a passive pawn. The message of many fairytales which feature a central young woman, is 'be good, be pretty, endure and obey, and if you do all that well enough, perhaps your prince will come.' they endorse passivity, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty literally snooze their way through their own eponymous tales while Princes toil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those kind of tales present a world in which the central young woman are bound romantically, sexually and dynastically to their heroic rescuer, gratitude binds the marriage, not compatibility. But it isn't all about the menz. It is often women who deal out the privations, cast the curses, dole out the chores, abandon in the woods, feed up for the oven...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while i suppose it can be described as having a 'feminist vibe', I think this tale is much more about young women's agency. It's a story about young women who initially accept the roles they are cast in, as rescuers of the men in their lives. One's beauty is a burden to her father, one must suffer to lift a (possible) curse on her husband - and note that these are not classical fairy tale roles - but come, through their friendship, to decide that actually, they've carried the burden long enough, and lay it down to go and 'have adventures together'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think you &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; find a 'message about men' in there if you want one, but I read it as much more of a story of empowerment of young women than one which is about men &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a message about anything it’s about taking and keeping responsibility for your own life and decisions, existing as your own person not as an adjunct to others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the young women in this story is to be themselves, not to be a lens through which we see men.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-10-31T21:08:55.623" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T21:08:55.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4037" CreationDate="2017-10-31T19:21:43.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mr. Goon may be referring to the Swiss banking industry, until very recently a major facilitator of international money-laundering per the prior inviolability of the anonymity of account holders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of references that lead me to believe this may be a possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You not soldiers you stock brokers&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;To turn your safe into my personal bank and burn your paper&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the lyrics seem to rely on a large amount of free-association the passages can nonetheless be analyzed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goon does seem to have some linguistic knowledge in presenting a wordplay &amp;quot;Mandible like Canibus&amp;quot;, referring to the root of the word for dog (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dcaninus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;canis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), although it's unclear if rapper &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canibus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canibus&lt;/a&gt; was intending to use the &lt;a href=&quot;http://latindictionary.wikidot.com/noun:canis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin dative&lt;/a&gt; ending, &amp;quot;going to the dogz&amp;quot;, or if it was merely a cannabis reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also in support, &amp;quot;pounds of fish&amp;quot; is likely a play on &amp;quot;pound of flesh&amp;quot;, which likely references not only the Van Damme movie, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shylock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shylock&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_of_Venice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merchant of Venice&lt;/a&gt;, a play about medieval banking practices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;bout&amp;quot; is contraction of &amp;quot;about&amp;quot;, typically presented as 'bout (although the omission derive from the transcription.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Spitting jewels&amp;quot; refers to the rhymes and witticisms Goon promises to deliver in the pending lyrics.  Whether or not they achieve the goal I leave to the listener to determine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T20:25:55.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T20:07:39.770" Score="2" ViewCount="2217" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison for a class, and I'm confused by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important part of Milkman's life story is that his mother (Ruth) breastfed him later than normal. It's how he got his name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She felt him. His restraint, his courtesy, his indifference, all of which pushed her into fantasy. She had the distinct impression that his lips were pulling from her a thread of light. It was as though she were a cauldron issuing spinning gold. Like the miller's daughter--the one who sat at night in a straw-filled room, thrilled with the secret power Rumpelstiltskin had given her: to see golden thread stream from her very own shuttle. And that was the other part of her pleasure, a pleasure she hated to give up. So when Freddie the janitor, who liked to pretend he was a friend of the family and not just their flunky as well as their tenant, brought his rent to the doctor's house late one day and looked in the window past the evergreen, the terror that sprang to Ruth's eyes came from the quick realization that she was to lose fully half of what made her daily life bearable. Freddie, however, interpreted her look as simple shame, but that didn't stop him from grinning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I be damn, Miss Rufie. When the last time I seen that? I don't even know the last time I seen that. I mean, ain't nothing wrong with it. I mean, old folks swear by it. It's just, you know, you don't see it up here much….” But his eyes were on the boy. Appreciative eyes that communicated some complicity she was excluded from. Freddie looked the boy up and down, taking in the steady but secretive eyes and the startling contrast between Ruth's lemony skin and the boy's black skin. “Used to be a lot of womenfolk nurse they kids a long time down South. Lot of 'em. But you don't see it much no more. I knew a family--the mother wasn't too quick, though--nursed hers till the boy, I reckon, was near 'bout thirteen. But that's a bit much, ain't it?” All the time he chattered, he rubbed his chin and looked at the boy. Finally he stopped, and gave a long low chuckle. He'd found the phrase he'd been searching for. “A milkman. That's what you got here, Miss Rufie. A natural milkman if ever I seen one. Look out, womens. Here he come. Huh!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in Milkman's life, he is upset about this, but Ruth defends herself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You nursed me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Until I was…old. Too old.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruth turned toward her son. She lifted her head and looked deep into his eyes. “And I also prayed for you. Every single night and every single day. On my knees. Now you tell me. What harm did I do you on my knees?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does Ruth breastfeed Milkman?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is this a scandal?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2393" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T21:19:32.223" Title="Why does Ruth breastfeed Milkman, and why is this considered scandelous?" Tags="&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;song-of-solomon-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13674" CreationDate="2017-10-31T20:16:21.977" Score="2" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a part of the &lt;em&gt;Book of Mythicality&lt;/em&gt; by Rhett and Link, in the chapter about picking a fight (I believe), there's a couple of pages dedicated to an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autostereogram&lt;/a&gt;.  I've never been very good at these and I was unable to see the image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the image?  Why was this particular image chosen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:15:59.847" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:15:59.847" Title="What image was in the Autostereogram?" Tags="&lt;book-of-mythicality&gt;&lt;rhett-mclaughlin&gt;&lt;link-neal&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4038" CreationDate="2017-10-31T20:48:29.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the lyrics (supplied via an edit, but pending approval) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'd say the use of breathing has double meaning, indicating the convolution of sex and death&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Death Drive is a concept deriving from Freudian theory, proposed by Sabina Spielrein in her paper &quot;Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being&quot;.  From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text Dr. Spielrein's paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arizonapsychoanalyticsociety.com/downloads/sabrina.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be found here&lt;/a&gt;. [&lt;em&gt;Journal of Analytical Psychology&lt;/em&gt;, 1994]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a very high level, it has to do with a desire to re-enact traumas, and the idea that erotic, as well as violent, inclinations can originate in trauma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics are almost a textbook example of the conflation of violence and eroticism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hoes get erotic on me, I put the pipe down  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stick the pipe in her mouth tell her pipe down &lt;br&gt;  Now lick a shot for niggas doing life inside  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grabbing you by the neck, sticking the knife inside &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.metrolyrics.com/get-off-the-ground-lyrics-snowgoons.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metrolyrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that double meanings are heavily utilized: &quot;pipe&quot; initially means weed pipe but subsequently the male sexual organ; &quot;lick a shot&quot; uses firearms vocabulary in conjunction with ejaculation; &quot;grabbing you by the neck&quot; in this context refers not only to murder by strangulation, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotic_asphyxiation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;erotic asphyxiation&lt;/a&gt;; &quot;knife&quot; refers both to a stabbing weapon and the male sexual organ.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the breathing sounds indicate excitement, which could be erotic, set against the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crunky&lt;/a&gt; (dark) production and violent imagery of the lyrics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Also: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-bejeezus-out-me/201407/oprah-carl-jung-and-remarkable-essay-about-sex-and-death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oprah, Carl Jung, and a Remarkable Essay about Sex and Death&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T20:48:29.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-10-31T20:52:40.627" Score="3" ViewCount="579" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, and I'm also confused by this question. Malcom, Ruth's wife, claims that Ruth had sex with her dead father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In the bed,” he said, and stopped for so long Milkman was not sure he was going to continue. “In the bed. That's where she was when I opened the door. Laying next to him. Naked as a yard dog, kissing him. Him dead and white and puffy and skinny, and she had his fingers in her mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruth claims that she didn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milkman leaned his head against the cold handbar that was attached to the seat in front of him. He held it there, letting its chill circle his head. Then he turned to his mother. “Were you father when he was dead? Naked?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No. But I did kneel there in my slip at his bedside and kiss his beautiful fingers. They were the only part of him that wasn't…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2393" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T21:20:02.570" Title="Did Ruth sleep with her father?" Tags="&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;song-of-solomon-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4004" CreationDate="2017-10-31T20:59:39.843" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The green light on the other side of the lake symbolizes the american dream. He is separated from the other side by the large which represents the separation of class. Notice how Gatsby lives on the West Egg whereas all the old money folks live on the East Egg. The gap between the social statuses of Gatsby and Tom is what ensures that Gatsby, even though he is rich, will never be truly able to grasp the american dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1752" LastActivityDate="2017-10-31T20:59:39.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4042" CreationDate="2017-11-01T00:40:35.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot; Do people mean to say that a work is nihilistic, or explores seemingly irrational behavior? Or do they mean something else entirely?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They may mean both. Dostoevsky's work is characterized by social realism, rather in Dickensian style, concerned with financial hardship mixed with a non-academic psychology of hidden and demented impulses (something wholly lacking in Dickens, or, only appearing somehow through the suggestion of strange narrative twists) which stem from man's deep struggle with his existentially unsheltered condition, where he stands within the irrational forces of existence. His work is often full of a peculiar humorous quality which is not exactly pleasure in the suffering of the other, but something indeterminate in the proximity of the exorbitant striving of exceptional and unusual persons.  Intellectual problems are worked through at the highest level, in dialogue and through the concrete action of the plot. A decided non-denominational Christian bent constantly played against the moral essence of nihilism, the &quot;everything is permitted&quot;, and the piercing forces of cosmic indifference, man's malice and rapine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2217" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T00:40:35.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4051" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T02:49:01.730" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do characters in Lawrence Block's books ever meet each other? For example, Matthew Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr, do they know each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2394" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T18:26:52.603" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T18:26:52.603" Title="Do characters in Lawrence Block's books ever meet each other?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;lawrence-block&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4052" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4055" CreationDate="2017-11-01T06:05:08.863" Score="4" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you identify this book? Here's what I remember of it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A civilization had their home world ravaged by some kind of disaster.  Using &quot;Greater&quot; magic they made a portal to another world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about this civilization a long time after this disaster and there are two types of magic, &quot;Lesser&quot; and &quot;Greater&quot;. Lesser magic is parlor tricks and small scale magic, whilst greater magic is capable of controlling the elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main protagonist pursued a lesser mage and convinced the mage to teach him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometime after he learned lesser magic, mages that study greater magic kidnap him after learning that he has the potential to learn greater magic (Greater magic is more rare than lesser).  The boy is taught how to use greater magic in a tower where he is unable to speak and is put through a harsh training that almost erases all aspects of what he learned as a lesser mage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that i remember about greater magic is their capacity to &quot;teleport&quot;; every location that a mage wishes to go to must have a mural on the ground that the mage must go and memorize in order to return there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember something about an arena where the main protagonist (after learning both lesser and greater magic) goes to. In the arena is an old friend of his (?), and that person is fighting to the death against others. The main protagonist gets mad and uses his abilities as a mage to wreck the arena and to threaten/terrify the nobility that were amusing themselves using the arena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end the main protagonist ends up making a giant school and proceeds to teach both lesser and greater magic in order to train students and make magic less &quot;taboo&quot; and rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me if anyone knows a story/series that fits this description and if you need more details I may be able to help. It has been a while since I read this book though so some details might be messed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2395" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T13:42:40.447" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T13:42:40.447" Title="Book about &quot;lesser&quot; and &quot;greater&quot; magic, with main protagonist who learns both?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4016" CreationDate="2017-11-01T09:25:46.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the story's message is about &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;, so much as it is about toxic relationships, and common expectations from women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both characters come from existing fairy-tales (I've seen them pegged as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enchanted_Pig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“The Enchanted Pig”&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_on_the_Glass_Hill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“The Princess on the Glass Mountain”&lt;/a&gt;), so what the story's doing is not creating new characters -- it's juxtaposing them, and allowing them to meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each character feels very iconic, representative of fairy-tale logic, and its portrayal of love and romance. And in most immediate ways, the two characters are stark opposites. Amira is demure; sheltered; a prize to be fought for, and locked away from the cruel world until she is won. Whereas Tabitha is scarred, trying to atone, forced into a cruel quest. Amira is forever trapped in place; Tabitha must forever trudge onwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the two of them are compared side by side, when they meet and recognize each other, we see how alike they are. How their pain is the same pain. How each of them has been forced to conform to demands they never took on willingly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And look what happened when I did,” says Tabitha stiffly. “It was a&#xA;  test of loyalty, and I failed it. You did nothing wrong.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That’s funny,” says Amira, unsmiling, “because to me, every day feels&#xA;  like a test: Will I move from this hill or not, will I grasp at a bird&#xA;  or not, will I toss an apple down to a man when I shouldn’t, will I&#xA;  speak too loudly, will I give them a reason to hurt me and fall off&#xA;  the hill, and every day I don’t is a day I pass—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That’s different. That’s dreadful.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t see the difference!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tabitha says, still more gently, “Mine are not the only iron shoes in the world.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each one is trapped in their own narrative, trying to make fairy-tale ideas of romance work in practice, because they think that if the romance doesn't work &quot;like it's supposed to,&quot; that's their own failure and their own responsibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I told my story poorly,” she says, finally. “I told it selfishly. I did not speak of how good he was—how he made me laugh, the things he taught me. I could live in the iron shoes because of his guidance, because of knowing the poison berry from the pure, because he taught me to hunt. What happened to him, the change in him”—Tabitha feels very tired—“it must have had to do with me. I was meant to endure it until the curse broke, and I failed. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But each of them can recognize how the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; one has been abused. When each of them tells their story, the other's immediate response is outrage and indignation on her friends' behalf. What they cannot admit in their own situation, they can fight for, to care for another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That indignation isn't against &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;. It's against fairy-tale logic of how relationships between men and women are meant to work. It's against ideas that women need to &quot;prove&quot; themselves to men, need to be protected by and from men, need to be the ones to &quot;fix&quot; anything that's wrong with any relationship, no matter how bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The things that Tabitha and Amira overcome are not &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;, but society's expectations of women&lt;/strong&gt; -- which they themselves have internalized. That's the story's climax, its closing insight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Do you truly believe,” she says, with all the care she pours into&#xA;  keeping her spine taut and straight on her glass seat, “that I had&#xA;  nothing to do with those men’s attentions? That they would have&#xA;  behaved that way no matter what I looked like?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Yes,” says Tabitha firmly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Then is it not possible”—hesitant, now, to even speak the&#xA;  thought—“that your husband’s cruelty had nothing to do with you? That&#xA;  it had nothing to do with a curse? You said he hurt you in both his&#xA;  shapes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Tabitha”—and Amira does not know what to do except to reach for her hand, clutch it, look at her in the way she looks at the geese, longing to speak and be understood—“you did nothing wrong.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tabitha holds Amira’s gaze. “Neither did you.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the story's conclusion is for the two women not to remain trapped by their toxic relationships. They strike out afresh -- leaning on each other for support.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, as I read it, is a decidedly feminist message, but one that's a whole lot more about women (and how we perceive them) then it is about men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T09:25:46.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3925" CreationDate="2017-11-01T09:48:27.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that the story heavily implies that Amira is lesbian. It's absolutely explicit that she finds the idea of a (heterosexual) marriage &quot;monstrous&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how her previous ideas, before &quot;chose me a prince,&quot; let her avoid marriage entirely. And even &quot;find me a prince&quot; could be a purely political marriage. So really &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; conclusion forcing Amira into &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; marriage, is pretty much &quot;unspeakable.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Kitkat's answer is excellent, and the threat of incest may well be implied here, I think that option dulls the very open criticism towards power dynamics we consider far less shocking. The keys to the portrayal of Amira's story, in my eyes, are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once upon a time there was a rich king who had no sons, and whose only daughter was too beautiful. She was so beautiful that men could not stop themselves from reaching out to touch her in corridors or following her to her rooms, so beautiful that words of desire tumbled from men’s lips like diamonds and toads, irresistible and unstoppable. &lt;strong&gt;The king took pity on these men&lt;/strong&gt; and drew his daughter aside, saying, Daughter, only a husband can break the spell over these men; only a husband can prevent them from behaving so gallantly toward you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the king's daughter is threatened with rape and harassment, the king takes pity on the &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;, and lays full responsibility on the shoulders of the &lt;em&gt;daughter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this simple aside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The king’s daughter, &lt;strong&gt;who did not want a husband&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A categorical statement. Not &quot;didn't wish to marry against her will,&quot; but rather &quot;did not want &lt;strong&gt;a husband&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The horror of this sub-story is the way harassment and rape are considered &quot;inevitable,&quot; and &quot;the woman's fault,&quot; that &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; is held responsible for &quot;fixing&quot; the situation regardless of the cost to her. (And, let's be honest -- marrying, in such a society, would be little protection indeed; maybe &lt;em&gt;looking&lt;/em&gt; more proper outwardly, but not actually keeping pawing arms off of her.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of horror doesn't need incest to make it worse, or anything else that isn't already clearly laid out. The situation itself is the horror; succumbing to it is unspeakable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T09:48:27.473" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4052" CreationDate="2017-11-01T12:00:15.687" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Magician&lt;/em&gt; by Raymond E. Feist&lt;/strong&gt;, first book in the Riftwar Saga, a trilogy which started off &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Riftwar_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Riftwar Cycle&lt;/a&gt;, a huge conglomeration of a dozen different trilogies and series set in the same two worlds, Midkemia and Kelewan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This series is possibly unique among the fantasy I've read in that it's set in &lt;em&gt;two entirely separate and imaginary universes&lt;/em&gt; - not our own world and another, nor a single imaginary world. It also does a good job of building Midkemia using standard fantasy tropes so that we can quickly accept it and then making Kelewan seem just as weird and alien to us as it does to the Midkemians.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The division between the &lt;a href=&quot;http://midkemia.wikia.com/wiki/Greater_Path&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greater Path&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://midkemia.wikia.com/wiki/Lesser_Path&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lesser Path&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://midkemia.wikia.com/wiki/Magic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;magic&lt;/a&gt; is not known at the start of the book, because the first half of it is set entirely on Midkemia, where only the Lesser Path is known, and of course known simply as &quot;magic&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main protagonist, Pug, becomes apprentice to a magician in Midkemia, but performs poorly. During the Riftwar - a huge war between Midkemia and Kelewan, the magicians of the latter having found a way to cross between worlds using 'rifts' - he is captured and serves as a slave in Kelewan for many years. Eventually his ability to perform magic (of the Greater Path, the only type known in Kelewan) is discovered, and he undergoes rigorous training with the magicians of Kelewan, called Great Ones. He emerges as a new person, with a new name (Milamber) and the black robe of a Great One.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One thing that i remember about greater magic is their capacity to &quot;teleport&quot;; every location that a mage wishes to go to must have a mural on the ground that the mage must go and memorize in order to return there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is definitely the case: many noble estates in Kelewan have a special room with a tiled floor which Great Ones can use to travel from one place to another by magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also remember something about an arena where the main protagonist (after learning both lesser and greater magic) goes to. In the arena is an old friend of his (?), and that person is fighting to the death against others. The main protagonist gets mad and uses his abilities as a mage to wreck the arena and to threaten/terrify the nobility that were amusing themselves using the arena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is the point at which Pug/Milamber becomes an 'undesirable' in Kelewan. Despite being a Great One, he acts against the system and the War-Leader in stopping these gladiatorial games. Later he returns to Midkemia and his old friends there, in order to escape punishment for his actions on Kelewan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end the main protagonist ends up making a giant school and proceeds to teach both lesser and greater magic in order to train students and make magic less &quot;taboo&quot; and rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the very end of &lt;em&gt;Magician&lt;/em&gt;: Pug and his old master Kulgan setting up an academy, using the books and resources of the ultra-mysterious ultra-powerful figure Macros the Black who put an end to the Riftwar and the rifts themselves, in order to teach magic to people in Midkemia.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I'm struggling to find a good online summary of this book which is thorough enough to include all the details you mention. There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magician_(Feist_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://midkemia.wikia.com/wiki/Magician_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikia page&lt;/a&gt;, and a 'synopsis' on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crydee.com/raymond-feist/book-synopsis/magician&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feist's website&lt;/a&gt;, but none of these is particularly detailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T12:00:15.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T14:27:25.023" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;All I remember from this book is that one of the characters makes up a story for a child about a troll who lives under the bathtub and eats soap. I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the person telling the story was a nursemaid-type figure, but might have been another child. The novel seemed old-fashioned to me, so I pictured a claw-foot tub with the troll hiding in the shadows underneath, not a built-in tub sealed against the wall. I think the troll in the story was about a foot tall, with no clothes on. The novel had no fantasy elements, and this was clearly a made-up story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might have been one of the Hugo and Josephine books, but I no longer have access to a copy and I can't find anything online. I read it probably in the 2000s, in English (but I can't rule out that it was a translation). I think it was pretty old by then, though, with yellowing pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastActivityDate="2017-11-01T14:27:25.023" Title="novel where someone tells a story about a troll that lives under the bathtub and eats soap" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-01T21:32:38.060" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Snack foods tend to be highly emphasized in McDonagh's plays, touched on in this article: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academia.edu/3450312/The_Lord-Lieutenants_Biscuit_and_the_Irishmans_Spud_Irelands_Iconic_Snacks_Blasphemed_in_Martin_McDonaghs_Leenane_Trilogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Lord-Lieutenant’s Biscuit and the Irishman’s Spud: Ireland’s Iconic Snacks Blasphemed in Martin McDonagh’s Leenane Trilogy&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; By Christopher Morrison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But McDonagh's use of snacks in a dramatic context is not restricted to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_McDonagh#The_Leenane_Trilogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leenane Trilogy&lt;/a&gt;--they are something of an obsession in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cripple_of_Inishmaan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cripple of Inishmaan&lt;/a&gt;, and they are often a point of passionate, sometimes violent, contention.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked article goes into great detail on the historical and sociopolitical implications of McDonagh's use of snacks, but that type of thematic foundation alone is not sufficient to carry a dramatic work.  McDonagh's plays are celebrated and highly popular outside of Ireland, so there must also be a more immediate, relatable, and universal purpose for the device.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-01T21:56:56.973" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T15:00:15.953" Title="Why is there so much emphasis on snack foods in the plays of Martin McDonagh?" Tags="&lt;theater&gt;&lt;martin-mcdonagh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4045" CreationDate="2017-11-01T22:36:56.100" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ruth breastfeeds Milkman to fulfill her own sexual desires:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Her passions were narrow but deep. Long deprived of sex, long&#xA;  dependent on self-manipulation…she saw her son’s imminent death as the&#xA;  annihilation of the last occasion she had been made love to”&#xA;  (Morrison, 134).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's scandalous b/c Milkman is way too old:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be seen when Ruth stares at Milkman &quot;from a wish to avoid seeing his legs dangling almost on the floor”(Morrison, 13)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2398" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-02T09:59:57.437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-02T09:59:57.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4062" CreationDate="2017-11-02T21:45:43.377" Score="1" ViewCount="1733" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some live performances (e.g. from the album &quot;The Song Remains the Same&quot;, which was recorded live in 1973), Robert Plant stated that &quot;I think that [Stairway to Heaven] is a song of hope.&quot; Why did he say that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T01:30:41.913" Title="Why did Robert Plant call &quot;Stairway to Heaven&quot; a &quot;song of hope&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;led-zepplin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2501" CreationDate="2017-11-02T22:37:50.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading the entire poem, I think it is clear that he is talking about a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DESDE el fondo de ti, y arrodillado,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;un niño triste, como yo, nos mira.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is the father of the child, but he does not want to have a child (&amp;quot;YO NO lo quiero, Amada&amp;quot;/ &amp;quot;AMO el amor de los marineros / que besan y se van. / Dejan una promesa. / No vuelven nunca más.&amp;quot;, etc.). So he is saying that he does not want to be tied (&amp;quot;amarre&amp;quot;), so he does not want anything to tie/unite them (the kid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2403" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T02:32:33.310" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T02:32:33.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8780" CreationDate="2017-11-02T23:50:27.463" Score="4" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember very well that I was reading somewhere or I've seen it on the TV that Federico García Lorca said something like &quot;I'm a capitalist and a socialist and a communist and an anarchist and a monarchist&quot; but I just can't find this quote anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am completely sure that this quote exists and I'm also sure that he said this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T09:16:07.027" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T09:36:23.917" Title="Looking for a quote: &quot;I'm a capitalist and a socialist and a communist and an anarchist and a monarchist&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4059" CreationDate="2017-11-03T10:32:44.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a facetious answer to this, which is: because that's how he felt that day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it's less facetious than it first appears. Page himself has said in interview that he has little clear idea of what the lyrics mean - if they mean anything - and his interpretation of them changes frequently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Depending on what day it is, I still interpret the song a different way - and I wrote it&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It’s like an orgasm at the end. It’s whatever you want it to be.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If you absolutely hated Stairway to Heaven, nobody can blame you for that because it was so ... pompous&quot;&#xA;  - Interview, Q magazine, 1988&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I struggle with some of the lyrics from particular periods of time. Maybe I was still trying to work out what I was talking about. [ . . . ] Every other f***er is.&quot;&#xA;  - PR event, 2012&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we know that an artist's interpretation of their own work is only one window on to its meaning, so let's take a look at the lyrics. There's a lot of mysticism, wrapped around a fable of a woman who thinks she can buy happiness with money. There are two aspects of the song that are worth attention in this context. Here's some individual lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiving ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ooh, it really makes me wonder ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, there are two paths you can go by ...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sorts of lines, together with the mystical nature of the lyrics, imply that uncertainty is a key part of living. The woman is &quot;sure&quot;, she &quot;knows&quot; that she can buy her staircase and will &quot;get what she came for&quot;, yet the tone of the song suggests she is wrong. Not only can you not buy happiness, but there is little which is certain in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, then, some more individual lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There's a songbird who sings ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I look to the west ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's just a spring clean for the May queen ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There's still time to change the road you're on ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The piper's calling you to join him ...    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are all motifs of hope: birdsong, the west (where the sun rises), the spring, time for change, time to join. In particular the very end of the song is packed with messages of hope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if you listen very hard&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The tune will come to you at last&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When all are one and one is all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To be a rock and not to roll  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we concentrate, we will find the tune - a metaphor for the a spiritual outcome - that we've been looking for. And in doing so we will become closer together - more like one - and that will bind us, cement us is place and in peace. It's significant this is the denouement of the song, since it goes out on this positive message after having wound cryptically along for much of its length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary then, the song was written deliberately to invite multiple, shifting interpretations, but one of those is certainly a message of hope and comfort since that's the tone on which it concludes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T10:32:44.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4063" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-03T14:02:17.027" Score="4" ViewCount="1890" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is being said that he committed suicide out of desperation. the Defense lawyer, Fetyukovich, actually stated Smerdyakov did not kill himself out of guilt and remorse, but because he knew there was no longer a way for him to fulfill his dreams with the money he took, given that he was terminally ill. The lawyer used this as a means to prove that the fact that Smerdyakov didn't confess to the murder before killing himself is NOT proof of his innocence. I don't necessarily agree with this explanation and it may very well be that this is not the actual reason for the suicide, since we were only given the supposition of a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing that came to mind was that Smerdyakov killed himself out of ambition and malice, as if he wanted Ivan to find himself alone and realize he was the only real murderer (at least the only one still alive). I thought he made a purpose out of playing this prank on Ivan, a purpose he thought was worth dying for. Maybe he felt like he lacked value, he was indifferent to life, but nonetheless he was angry at the privileges his brothers had. So he decided to show his brother he's no better, and then give his life away just like returning his ticket to God. Again, by actually returning the ticket he was able to do what Ivan only dreamed of having the strength for. Or maybe he didn't believe in God at all, but still wanted to show Ivan he's braver and could do the things Ivan was afraid of even admitting. Anyways, I feel like it all revolves around Ivan, even the murder. Smerdyakov was obsessed with Ivan's opinion of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know what everybody else thought of Smerdyakov's suicide, I'm really excited to learn about how other readers understood this scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2405" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T16:06:20.843" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T18:08:10.653" Title="Why did Smerdyakov kill himself in the Brothers Karamazov?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-03T15:59:28.490" Score="5" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the meter used in Clementine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drove she ducklings to the water&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every morning just at nine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Struck her foot against a splinter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fell into the foaming brine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in Schiller's Ode to Joy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freude, schöner Götterfunken, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tochter aus Elysium, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wir betreten feuertrunken,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most descriptions I've seen of trochaic tetrameter don't mention the possibility of the lost syllable on alternate lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;==&amp;gt; Later. Thank you Tsundoku for your superb answer. StackExchange, weirdly, says I haven't enough reputation to comment on your answer, but I feel the need to acknowledge it somehow, so let me break protocol by doing so here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2407" LastEditorUserId="12300" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T12:43:48.797" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T16:47:54.693" Title="Is there a name for a version of trochaic tetrameter with lines of 8|7|8|7 syllables?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4065" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4066" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Brothers Karamazov&quot; (also &quot;The Karamazov Brothers&quot;), the novel by Fyodor Dostoyevski. Use with the [russian-literature] and [fyodor-dosotyevski] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-03T16:08:01.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4068" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4099" CreationDate="2017-11-03T16:45:20.560" Score="1" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Taggart periodically refers to the Orren Boyle as a &quot;fat slob.&quot; Granted, Orren Boyle was notoriously inept, doesn't appear to actually produce all &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much steel (and what little he produces appears to go mostly to those with political pull), and routinely failed to deliver on orders, but it's not like Jim was about to admit that. (In fact, he refused to cancel an order of steel with Associated Steel even after it was months late and Orren Boyle had nothing to offer but excuses for why it wasn't really his fault).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Jim consider Orren Boyle a &quot;slob?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-11-03T19:04:59.483" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T03:19:38.373" Title="Why did Jim Taggart refer to Orren Boyle as a &quot;fat slob&quot; behind his back?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4085" CreationDate="2017-11-03T19:22:30.830" Score="3" ViewCount="12230" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Do it again&quot; by Steely Dan starts with the following verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the mornin' you go gunnin' for the man who stole your water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And you fire till he is done in but they catch you at the border&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the mourners are all singin' as they drag you by your feet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the hangman isn't hangin' and they put you on the street&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following chorus is repeated after each of the three verses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turinin' 'round and 'round&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You go back, Jack, do it again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you know she's no high climber then you find your only friend&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a room with your two timer, and you're sure you're near the end&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then you love a little wild one, and she brings you only sorrow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All the time you know she's smilin'; you'll be on your knees tomorrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the third verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now you swear and kick and beg us that you're not a gamblin' man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then you find you're back in Vegas with a handle in your hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your black cards can make you money so you hide them when you're able&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the land of milk and honey you must put them on the table&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, exactly, is &quot;it&quot;? What does Jack do again? Is it the thing named in the previous verse - i.e. the guy kills again after he gets off for the first murder, continues to be in relationships with women he knows are bad for him, and continues to gamble after swearing it off?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T22:45:19.223" Title="What does Jack do again in the Steely Dan song?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;steely-dan&gt;" AnswerCount="8" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4070" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5136" CreationDate="2017-11-03T19:26:29.467" Score="5" ViewCount="922" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third verse and chorus of &quot;Do It Again&quot; by Steely Dan is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now you swear and kick and beg us that you're not a gamblin' man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then you find you're back in Vegas with a handle in your hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your black cards can make you money so you hide them when you're able&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the land of milk and honey you must put them on the table&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turinin' 'round and 'round&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You go back, Jack, do it again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;back, Jack...&quot; sounds so much like &quot;blackjack&quot; that evidently a fair number of people think that that's what they're singing. (I'll admit that I did until I looked up the lyrics). Is this purely coincidental, or was it intentional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T20:06:21.980" Title="Does this phrase deliberately sound like &quot;blackjack&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;steely-dan&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4076" CreationDate="2017-11-04T15:42:49.107" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What did Lucanus mean by &quot;The sin of thousands always goes unpunished&quot; in Book V of &lt;em&gt;Pharsalia&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2414" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T20:50:10.380" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T20:50:10.380" Title="Meaning of &quot;The sin of thousands always goes unpunished&quot;?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;lucan&gt;&lt;pharsalia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-04T18:39:38.733" Score="2" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the kids go into the future in &lt;em&gt;The Story of the Amulet&lt;/em&gt;, it looks like gender roles have perhaps disappeared. Some of the relevant quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no one in the room, but in the next gallery, where the Assyrian things are and still were, they found a kind, stout man in a loose, blue gown, and stockinged legs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Story of the Amulet&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I may be interpreting this incorrectly, but in my experience a 'gown' is usually a type of dress, with the exception of a 'dressing-gown', which is more like a bathrobe. This could be incorrect, as I'm a modern American and the book is rather old and British.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More telling is this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Why, we're all working people,' said the lady; 'at least my husband's a carpenter.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Good gracious!' said Anthea; 'but you're a lady!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Ah,' said the lady, 'that quaint old word! Well, my husband will enjoy a talk with you...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Story of the Amulet&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems rather clearer:' lady'is a 'quaint old word', and both men and women work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, this young boy seems to be wearing a dress in this illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/88/Pg_307--The_story_of_the_amulet.png/400px-Pg_307--The_story_of_the_amulet.png&quot; alt=&quot;courtesy of Wikisource&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I interpreting this correctly? Have gender roles disappeared in this future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T11:42:35.283" Title="Are gender roles gone in the future in &quot;The Story of the Amulet&quot; by E. Nesbit?" Tags="&lt;e-nesbit&gt;&lt;psammead-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-05T05:36:20.777" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flatland&lt;/em&gt; opens with the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows—only hard with luminous edges—and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen. Alas, a few years ago, I should have said &quot;my universe:&quot; but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I must admit that I'm still early on in the book, but I couldn't help but notice the resemblance to Plato's Cave: first, the phrase &quot;very much like shadows&quot;, then the fact that the narrator now has a &quot;higher view.&quot; Am I understanding this correctly, or am I reading too much into it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T17:29:31.150" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T18:04:06.410" Title="Is this quote from Flatland a reference to Plato's Cave analogy?" Tags="&lt;flatland&gt;&lt;edwin-abbott-abbott&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4072" CreationDate="2017-11-05T22:35:10.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That the sins committed by the mass public are unpunished and ignored. Sometimes people don't even recognize the actions as crimes but as social norms (ie downloading music off the internet). Also, sometimes the crime is so unusual there is not even a law for it, so then it becomes a question of moral punishment. Basically, if enough people do it, no one gets punished because of the size of the population committing it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2421" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T22:35:10.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3969" CreationDate="2017-11-05T22:42:22.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nick did not tell Tom that Daisy was driving because then Myrtle's husband would have gone after Daisy instead of Gatsby. I also believe that Gatsby asked Nick not to tell anyone that it was Daisy driving to avoid any legal or moral trouble.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tom going into the jewelry store may show that Tom is over Gatsby and is now focusing on the materialistic side of the 1920s and his wealth. There's a quote that states &quot;They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…&quot;. So perhaps this meant that Tom did not care anymore and was moving on with his life. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2422" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T22:42:22.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2843" CreationDate="2017-11-05T22:47:30.253" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Owl Eyes&quot; is seen in the library exclaiming that Gatsby was real because the books were filled with stories. He is important because he confirms to the reader that Gatsby is to make his entrance soon. He is also one of the few people who sees Gatsby as a person and not just a myth. This can also be seen when he appears at Gatsby's funeral, giving both himself and Gatsby humane qualities. You can also connect him to Eckleburg's eyes in which he sees all (all of Gatsby), and realizes that they are real. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2423" LastActivityDate="2017-11-05T22:47:30.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4073" CreationDate="2017-11-06T11:41:47.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may depend on what you mean by &amp;quot;gender roles&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Genders seem to be less stereotyped than they once were ...&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Taking care of children isn't just a woman's task:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good many people were sitting on the seats, and on the grass babies were rolling and kicking and playing - with very little on indeed. Men, as well as women, seemed to be in charge of the babies and were playing with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Going out to work isn't just a man's task:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Why, we're all working people,' said the lady; 'at least my husband's a carpenter.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Good gracious!' said Anthea; 'but you're a lady!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;... but the genders still seem clearly separate from each other.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every person they meet is clearly described as either male or female: the &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; in the museum, the little &lt;em&gt;boy&lt;/em&gt; expelled from school, his &lt;em&gt;mother&lt;/em&gt; whom they call a lady. It's still easy for the children to tell men and women apart from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, the clothes they wear aren't described as being androgynous. Given all the other things in the future London which are remarked upon as being very strange and unfamiliar, I expect it would have been at least mentioned if the boy was wearing clothes more associated with girls. As Peter Shor notes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/4073/are-gender-roles-gone-in-the-future-in-the-story-of-the-amulet-by-e-nesbit#comment9512_4073&quot;&gt;a comment&lt;/a&gt;, young boys wearing dresses wasn't unheard of in the time the book was written and set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your quote about &amp;quot;lady&amp;quot; being a &amp;quot;quaint old word&amp;quot; is interesting, but remember that the word &amp;quot;lady&amp;quot; has more connotations than &amp;quot;woman&amp;quot;. It suggests being ladylike, possibly even noble or of high social standing. In this utopian future, class boundaries seem less pronounced or even non-existent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'But does everyone have rooms like this, poor people and all?' asked Anthea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'There's a room like this wherever there's a child, of course,' said the lady. 'How refreshingly ignorant you are! - no, I don't mean ignorant, my dear. Of course, you're awfully well up in ancient History. But I see you haven't done your Duties of Citizenship Course yet.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'But beggars, and people like that?' persisted Anthea 'and tramps and people who haven't any homes?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'People who haven't any homes?' repeated the lady. 'I really DON'T understand what you're talking about.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'It's all different in our country,' said Cyril carefully; and I have read it used to be different in London. Usedn't people to have no homes and beg because they were hungry? And wasn't London very black and dirty once upon a time? And the Thames all muddy and filthy? And narrow streets, and - '&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'You must have been reading very old-fashioned books,' said the lady. 'Why, all that was in the dark ages! My husband can tell you more about it than I can. He took Ancient History as one of his special subjects.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps women are no longer expected to be 'ladylike', and certainly they're not expected to stay at home and look after the children while their husbands go out to work. But there is still a concept of men and women, who are still distinguishable from each other by the way they look and probably the way they act and dress too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T11:41:47.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4083" CreationDate="2017-11-04T17:12:39.690" Score="13" ViewCount="788" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Terry Pratchett's book &lt;em&gt;Raising Steam&lt;/em&gt;, there is an explanation of the phrase &quot;Have seen the big horse&quot; where the author uses the sentence &quot;Maybe it's a Big Horse I'm Morporkian&quot;. What exactly does this sentence mean? Can somebody explain it for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2442" OwnerDisplayName="kumold" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T00:49:13.130" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T00:49:13.130" Title="What does &quot;Maybe it's a Big Horse I'm Morporkian&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;discworld&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2017-11-04T17:33:52.970" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a pun on ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=16923&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner&lt;/a&gt;’, a song written as a morale booster during the Second World War by Hubert Gregg, but made famous by Flanagan and Allan as an expression of pride in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Ln3sidFtIAU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;heard on You Tube&lt;/a&gt; if the Apple Music version on the Songfacts link above isn’t accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" OwnerDisplayName="Spagirl" LastActivityDate="2017-11-04T17:33:52.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4092" CreationDate="2017-11-06T17:40:23.563" Score="7" ViewCount="2706" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the War of the Worlds, I have noticed that H.G. Wells has presented several themes that would not be alien to something that Lovecraft would compose. There's a deep anti-anthropocentric feeling in that the Martians came down to southern Great Britain and completely demolished civilization within a short time. The Martians themselves could also be considered truly extraterrestrial in that their biology is unlike anything on Earth and their motivations for the invasion is only hinted at being an attempt in colonization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I am aware that the book was Wells criticizing Great Britain for taking land from native societies on other continents, I can't help but think that the War of the Worlds may have been a potential inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft in that this book and his short stories later on share many themes in mankind being incredibly insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2265" LastEditorUserId="2265" LastEditDate="2017-11-06T17:52:08.787" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T09:54:52.453" Title="Could the War of the Worlds be considered a proto Cosmic Horror story?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-war-of-the-worlds&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2017-11-06T21:11:43.367" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Jack appears to do again and again is making a mess of his life in a country that is supposedly a &quot;land of milk and honey&quot;. He does things in anger (first stanza), makes bad decision in relationships (middle stanzas) and starts gambling (final stanza).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He kills someone for stealing water (which is normally an abundant resource), so he gets arrested. (Why he gets released is not so clear.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He starts a relationship with a woman and then finds out that she and his only friend cheat on him. This time he does not get arrested but feels he is &quot;near the end&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The next woman only brings him sorrow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the last stanza, he has become a gambler but he denies it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of the above, the wheel that goes round and round sounds like an unusual version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wheel of fortune&lt;/a&gt;. Since Jack never comes out on top, it sounds more like a &quot;wheel of &lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;fortune&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: See also the first &lt;a href=&quot;http://songmeanings.com/songs/view/103338/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interpretation listed on SongMeanings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2017-11-06T21:11:43.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4091" CreationDate="2017-11-06T21:19:28.977" Score="-4" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pressure pushing down on me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pressing down on you no man ask for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under pressure that brings a building down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Splits a family in two&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Puts people on streets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense does pressure &quot;put people on streets&quot;, and why does it do that? Is this referring to &quot;the man on the street&quot; and implying that people are either going about the &quot;daily grind&quot; because of pressure, or that people are about to &quot;crack&quot; under the pressure of the daily grind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The later line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Insanity laughs under pressure we're breaking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems to suggest the latter interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is there a completely different interpretation entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T06:03:15.670" Title="Why does pressure &quot;put people on streets&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;queen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4107" CreationDate="2017-11-06T21:23:30.213" Score="1" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chorus to &lt;em&gt;Learning to Fly&lt;/em&gt; by Tom Petty is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm learning to fly, but I ain't got wings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Coming down is the hardest thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what sense is the narrator &quot;learning to fly&quot; without wings? And why is &quot;coming down&quot; the hardest thing (given that there's no means to get &quot;up into the air&quot; in the first place)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T21:54:37.187" Title="How is the narrator &quot;learning to fly&quot; without wings?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;tom-petty&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4089" CreationDate="2017-11-06T21:27:16.173" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why is the narrator of &quot;Free fallin'&quot; by Tom Petty free falling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeah I'm free, free fallin'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the narrator &quot;free falling&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;free falling&quot; imply some form of destructive freedom or loss of control?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T00:57:06.323" Title="Why is the narrator &quot;free falling&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;tom-petty&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4088" CreationDate="2017-11-07T00:57:06.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase 'free-falling' does more than imply a loss of control. It denotes it; specifically, in literal use, the absence of &quot;check or restraint&quot; and &quot;propulsion or drag&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://oed.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Figurative uses draw on those literal senses, and so also on the loss of any control afforded by check, restraint, propulsion or drag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether the phrase implies &quot;some form of destructive freedom&quot; (OP) is another question. The state (of being 'free-falling', of being 'in free fall') is not inherently destructive, but is inherently free (of restraint, etc., as mentioned); it is the cessation of the state that may or may not be destructive. Yet the state may, sans context suggestive otherwise, as likely as destructive things, end in bliss, or pleasure, or any of a spectrum of desirable things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absent suggestive context, 'free-falling' does not necessarily imply &quot;destructive freedom&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T00:57:06.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T02:39:24.277" Score="10" ViewCount="2138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Beckett's play Breath is thirty-five seconds long and consists of two cries. The script is online &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20170702180457/http://www.samuel-beckett.net/breath.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the script specify that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish.  Hold for about five seconds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rubbish&lt;/em&gt;.  No verticals, all scattered and lying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the point of the rubbish? How does it relate the rest of the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2428" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T01:57:47.023" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T01:57:47.023" Title="Why the rubbish in Samuel Beckett's play Breath?" Tags="&lt;samuel-beckett&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4086" CreationDate="2017-11-07T06:03:15.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I interpret it, the pressure of the daily grind is literally tearing people apart. It breaks buildings, it breaks families (likely speaking of divorce, here - the pressure getting so great that it chips away at the family until they can't take it and they divorce, or otherwise become estranged from each other), and it breaks people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this song is speaking about the extreme pressures of modern life - the daily grind and this whole idea of having to have the most and be the best and richest and work the hardest, which can take a great toll on people, to the point where it can cause people to fall into poverty, and thus lose their homes and end up living on the streets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chorus emphasizes this idea of the pressure of the world and of life, and how no one wants to be a part of it, but there is no escaping it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It's the terror of knowing what the world is about&#xA;Watching some good friends screaming&#xA;'Let me out'&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once people realize the stress that just trying to keep your ahead above water in modem society entails, it becomes this self serving endless circle, where you can't get ahead and the pressure of knowing that makes it harder to get ahead, so eventually you are so far behind that you can potentially end up on the streets in extreme poverty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T06:03:15.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4084" CreationDate="2017-11-07T09:54:52.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to answer a question like this with a definitive no, and it's an interesting notion, but it seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters, Lovecraft was never shy of naming his inspirations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is safe to say that Blackwood is the greatest living weirdist despite  unevenness and a poor prose style.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - letter to Willis Conover, 10 January 1937&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think The Yellow Sign is the most fascinating product of Chambers’s pen, &amp;amp; altogether one of the greatest weird tales ever written.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - letter to J. Vernon Shea, 28 January 1933&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Machen is a Titan—perhaps the greatest living author—and I must read everything of his.&quot;&#xA;  - letter to Frank Belknap Long, 3 June 1923&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;When I write stories, Edgar Allan Poe is my model.&quot; &#xA;  - letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, 20 January 1916&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Smith is an American Baudelaire—master of ghoulish worlds no other foot ever trod.&quot;&#xA;  - letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, 14 December 1921&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that he wore his heart on his sleeve when it comes to his opinion of other authors, if Wells had been an major inspiration, we should expect to see mention of him in Lovecraft's correspondence. In fact he does tip hat to Wells, but only once in his famous essay &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supernatural Horror in Literature&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett Prest with his famous Varney, the Vampyre (1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, &lt;strong&gt;H. G. Wells&lt;/strong&gt;, and Robert Louis Stevenson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, you will note, is merely a historical reference rather than an enthusiastic endorsement. He is also lumping Wells in with &quot;gothic horror&quot;, which is a different sub-genre to the weird fiction Lovecraft felt his work belonged to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you turn to Lovecraft's named inspirations, the other problem with the conjecture in this question becomes clear: &quot;cosmic horror&quot; predates even H.G. Wells. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Chamber's &lt;em&gt;The King in Yellow&lt;/em&gt; (1895), a series of linked stories about a play which drives people insane. While not &quot;cosmic&quot; in Lovecraftian sense, it deals with similar themes: the inability of humanity to deal with its own narcissism. The &quot;other world&quot; in Chambers is not outer space, but artistic perfection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A clearer example is Algernon Blackwood whose stories The Willows (1907) and The Wendigo (1910) were regularly praised by Lovecraft. Both have a similar theme of people lost in a vast, uncaring wilderness and encountering there forces beyond their understanding. The nature of those forces is never clear but they are at best indifferent and at worst actively hostile to the protagonists. This is a clear template for much of Lovecraft's work, although again the &quot;other world&quot; is the wilderness in place of a different dimension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, however, &quot;cosmic horror&quot; starter earlier with an author not normally seen as a horror writer at all: Franz Kafka. The abiding themes of his work may not be horrific in the traditional sense but are nevertheless disturbing. His protagonists find themselves in dire straits for obscure or inexplicable reasons and, in seeking help, find themselves faced with a bizarre and indifferent bureaucracy. Here the uncaring &quot;other world&quot; is the byzantine machinery of the state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft's lasting legacy is specifying the &quot;other world&quot; of cosmic horror as the cosmos itself. In doing so, he gave a new sense of scale and an aptitude of the fantastic to the concept of humanity facing an uncaring world. These aspects proved a fertile furrow for both Lovecraft and the writers that he, in turn, inspired. But the original concept of the indifferent world predates both Lovecraft and Wells. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T09:54:52.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4090" CreationDate="2017-11-07T10:15:54.283" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The rubbish is a metaphor for life.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breath was written to be performed as part of a revue called &lt;em&gt;Oh! Calcutta&lt;/em&gt; which was openly sexual. Breath itself opens with the sounds of birth, followed by breathing while the lights go up and down, and ends with another cry. Given the nature of the revue of which it is a part, one may interpret this as a metaphor for birth, life and death - the results of sex, and a comment on the animalistic impulses that drives it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beckett himself essentially confirmed this in his description of the work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My contribution to the Tynan circus is a forty second piece entitled BREATH … It is simply light coming up and going down on a stage littered with miscellaneous unidentifiable muck, sychronised with sound of breath, once in and out, the whole (ha!) begun and ended by the same tiny vagitus-rattle. I realized when too late to repent that it is not unconnected with    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On entre, on crie&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Et c’est la vie.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On crie, on sort,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Et c‘est la mort.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If this fails to titillate I hand in my aprob&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Damned to Fame: the Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation of the French is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We enter, we shout&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that's life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We shout, we go out,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's death.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(An aside: the meaning of &quot;aprob&quot; is unclear. It seems likely to be a mis-spelled contraction of either approbate or the latin approbante. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/417563/what-does-aprob-mean-in-this-quote-from-beckett&quot;&gt;this question on English SE&lt;/a&gt; for more details.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the closing remark on titillation makes it clear that Beckett was making a satirical take on the content of the revue. Further evidence is given by Beckett's negative reaction to the actual staging of the play in which naked actors lay among the rubbish: he called the producer a &quot;liar&quot; and a &quot;cheat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of Beckett's other work revolve around rubbish. In his play &lt;em&gt;Endgame&lt;/em&gt;, two of the character emerge from rubbish bins. The characters in &lt;em&gt;Waiting for Godot&lt;/em&gt; are tramps. His characters are often attached to possessions which appear to the audience as oddments and scrap. Indeed, Beckett's inclination to showcase discarded objects in his work is a continuing source of academic interest - see Beckett's Art of Salvage by Julie Bates for an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Breath is very short, but other works by Beckett use rubbish as an analogy for life or for the world. In &lt;em&gt;Ill Seen, Ill Said&lt;/em&gt; the line &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So on. Till fit to finish with all at last. All the trash. In unbroken night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would seem to indicate the world moving toward a state of &quot;trash&quot;. In &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt;, the titular character describes meeting his wife in a rubbish dump, in a passage which then goes on to include strong sexual connotations. &lt;em&gt;All That Fall&lt;/em&gt; opens with a journey toward &quot;Boghill&quot; and feature a dung-carrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's with all the rubbish? Beckett defies obvious interpretations. Given the themes of mortality which he returns to however, it's possible to see rubbish as a metaphor for life itself. In life, we accrue possessions and attach importance to them: we pass favoured ones on to our offspring. They are at once essential and absurd, useless and tender, bulwarks we gather to shield us against death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T14:31:51.977" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:31:51.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4156" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:24:53.893" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard this in audio form, probably on a cassette or maybe CD, borrowed from a public library in England in the early noughties (2001-2006). I don't know how old it was, or whether or not it was an audio adaptation of a published novel. Essentially it was a version of the Iliad (I don't &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it also included the Odyssey, but I'm not certain) retold for a younger modern audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It began with Odysseus as a young boy being attacked by a wild boar and rescued by his grandfather, who'd left the court after behaviour &quot;not fitting for a member of the royal family, eh?&quot; (I remember this phrase), and who teaches the young Odysseus the value of cunning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later on, a huge crowd of princes are pressed together for some occasion - possibly the wedding of Helen and Menelaus, or a competition for Helen's hand? Odysseus is too small to push his way to the front, but he tricks Big Ajax into going somewhere else so that he can take his place. When Big Ajax realises he's been tricked, a fight breaks out. Agamemnon breaks it up and shouts that &quot;this isn't a football match&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Odysseus pretends to be mad in order not to have to join the Trojan War, he shouts &quot;Plough the field! Plough the field! Plough the field!&quot; and &quot;Sow the seed! Sow the seed! Sow the seed!&quot; These lines I remember &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; clearly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During the voyage to Troy, Philoctetes is showing off his archery skill, shooting burning arrows off the ship and shouting things like, &quot;This one's for Hector! This one's for Paris! This one's for - AAAARGH!&quot; as he shoots the arrow into his foot. &quot;Who's AAAARGH?&quot; someone else inquires. &quot;Odysseus jogged me!&quot; Philoctetes yells. Later, when the smell of his gangrenous foot becomes unbearable, Odysseus is the one who tricks him into being stranded on Lemnos (&quot;Oh, &lt;em&gt;Lemnos&lt;/em&gt;! I thought it was &lt;em&gt;Limnos&lt;/em&gt;! My mistake.&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope these details, and the specific quotes, will be enough for someone to identify this among the many Iliad retellings that have been published in the last few thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T16:43:22.003" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T16:25:46.073" Title="Retelling of Odysseus story with humour and anachronisms (audiobook)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;audiobook&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Ann Leckie or about any of her literary works, most famously her Imperial Radch trilogy and associated stories." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:32:15.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4097" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4098" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Imperial Radch trilogy by Ann Leckie and other stories set in the same world. Use with the [ann-leckie] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T11:33:51.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4068" CreationDate="2017-11-07T16:17:00.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the story makes it quite clear that their &quot;friendship&quot; isn't genuine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; is explicitly formulated in Aristotelian terms (even its 3 parts are named after the 3 laws of logic, which were originally investigated by Aristotle), you could argue that their friendship is, in one sense, a &quot;utilitarian friendship,&quot; which Aristotle viewed as the &quot;lowest level&quot; of friendship - it doesn't necessarily involve genuine liking, and isn't necessarily based on virtue (which both of them lacked anyway). The sole basis for their relationship is the fact that they're useful to each other in some sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another defining characteristic of looters was their refusal to truly acknowledge or appreciate the ways in which people are useful to them - for example, they were completely indifferent to Hank Rearden even while they benefited from his metal. Even when they gave a banquet solely in his honor, Hank remarked to Dagney that they didn't truly care about acknowledging him or his accomplishments and they were still indifferent to his metal (much to his frustration - he hoped that the banquet at least reflected them being &quot;gracious losers&quot; in some sense, but it wasn't even that). They went through the motions of honoring him and holding the banquet because they had some sense that that's what you do in situations like that. This is why you can have the doublethink of having a utility-based relationship while refusing to truly acknowledge the nature of that relationship or even the fact that the other person was useful to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the utility was the fact that they helped each other in their lack of virtue - for example, Orren Boyle helped ram through the anti-dog-eat-dog rule, which everyone knew was explicitly designed to destroy Dan Conway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, their friendship was utilitarian, but they didn't truly acknowledge the other person's usefulness to them, and even this &quot;utility&quot; was just enabling their lack of virtue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the existence of this doublethink, it's hardly surprising that their &quot;friendship&quot; was also defined by some degree of treachery, back-stabbing, and mutual disloyalty. After all, that's the entire basis of their relationship to begin with. Orren Boyle is useful to Jim in the beginning of the novel primarily because he helped him stab Dan Conway in the back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that he called Boyle a &quot;fat slob&quot; in particular was likely due to the fact that, quite bluntly, he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a fat slob (although it is still somewhat curious that Jim acknowledges that fact). He was notoriously inept, and in spite of having steel plants that were far larger than even Hank Rearden's plants (Associated Steel had 60 open-hearth furnaces vs. Rearden's 20) he never seems to get around to actually producing much steel. (A third of his furnaces were completely idle, and the rest of them were producing 300 tons of steel per furnace per day, compared with Hank Rearden who was producing an average of 750 tons of steel per furnace). He routinely misses deadlines for orders and has nothing but excuses for why he &quot;couldn't help it.&quot; Even when he does ship stuff, it's often of inferior quality; in at least one incident, defective steel girders his company shipped caused a building collapse, killing several workers. (Ironically, he also made steel track that was evidently far heavier than was actually required for safety and durability).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly more to the point, Jim recognizes Boyle's treachery and back-stabbing - for example, he calls Boyle a &quot;fat slob&quot; in reference to the fact that Boyle was evidently trying to sabotage the building of the John Galt Line (&quot;if that fat slob thinks he can...&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T03:19:38.373" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T03:19:38.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T17:16:09.720" Score="8" ViewCount="882" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Hamlet has a famous monologue about how to properly perform a play. During one portion of the monologue, he has some harsh words for people who improvise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O, reform it altogether. And let those that play&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      your clowns speak no more than is set down for them;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      too; though, in the mean time, some necessary&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      question of the play be then to be considered:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      that's villanous, and shows a most pitiful ambition&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      in the fool that uses it. Go, make you ready.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's so bad about improvising? Does this passage reflect Shakespeare's view on the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2430" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T22:11:16.137" Title="Why doesn't Hamlet like improvisation?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4100" CreationDate="2017-11-07T17:44:02.350" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether this passage reflects Shakespeare's view on improvising is hard to say. However, Sam Plumb made several interesting comments on &lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.shakespearesglobe.com/post/160017107968/improvisation-research-in-action&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Globe blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strictly speaking, improvising was illegal since all play texts needed to submitted to the Master of the Revels for approval before they could be performed. (And yes, some plays were sent back with requests to alter passages. And, of course, checking whether actors improvise requires someone to attend a performance with a manuscript at hand.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There appears to be evidence in the first quarto of Hamlet (the so-called bad quarto) &quot;that Richard Burbage, the first Hamlet, may have had to adapt his lines to the contingencies of each new performance. In lines not included in the later quarto and folio texts, the prince makes reference to up-to-the-minute catchphrases from current playhouse fools:&quot;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then you have some again that keeps one suit of jests… as thus: ‘Cannot you stay till I eat my porridge?’ and ‘You owe me a quarter’s wages!’ and ‘My coat wants a cullison!’ and ‘Your beer is sour!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are examples of other play texts containing permissive stage directions such as &quot;Enter Forrester, missing the other taken away, &lt;em&gt;speaks anything&lt;/em&gt;, &#xA;and exit&quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Trial of Chivalry&lt;/em&gt;, iii, 3; emphasis added). However, Plumb does not provide any examples from Shakespeare's plays.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert Armin, who often played the fool in Shakespeare's plays, seems to have been a &quot;pioneer of ‘scripted improvisation’&quot;. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://muse.jhu.edu/article/537244&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catherine A. Henze&lt;/a&gt; has argued that examples of songs as scripted improvisation increased after Robert Armin joined the Chamberlain's Men.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there is evidence that there was improvisation in Shakespeare's plays and that some of it had been scripted. Perhaps those lines from Hamlet are aimed at those who took it too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T11:04:54.040" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T11:04:54.040" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T17:54:02.380" Score="2" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm watching Kevin Spacey's production of Shakespeare's Richard III. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO7B3HBqHrU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's a link to a youtube video with some highlights&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the production decisions that I don't really understand is the decision of make Kevin Spacey's character, Richard, a hunchback. So... why is Richard a hunchback?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T17:09:09.177" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T17:09:09.177" Title="Why is Richard a hunchback in Kevin Spacey's portrayal of Richard III?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T18:51:23.667" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stjepan Sejic's &lt;em&gt;Sunstone&lt;/em&gt; was first published as a webcomic on his DeviantArt account (and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://shiniez.deviantart.com/gallery/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;still available there&lt;/a&gt;), as was his &lt;a href=&quot;https://nebezial.deviantart.com/gallery/47267490/death-vigil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Death Vigil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://sigeel.deviantart.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Linda Sejic&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;Blood Stain&lt;/em&gt; is published on her DeviantArt first, before being published by Image Comics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question is - why? Why would Image Comics publish something that has already been read by a lot of people online? Even if there are people who haven't read it, it's entirely possible they'll go to the artist's website and read the chapters there (legally and with the artist's blessing), instead of buying the published book (of course, the published version is more polished, but it's still the same).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those kind of (webcomic to print) comics profitable for publishing houses? (I only know of Image Comics doing this) Or is there some other motivation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T10:35:51.047" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T10:35:51.047" Title="Why would Image Comics publish &quot;Sunstone&quot;, after it was released as a webcomic?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;stjepan-sejic&gt;&lt;sunstone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4104" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4138" CreationDate="2017-11-07T20:29:57.860" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can somebody please explain the proverb 'worth so many beeves' in Oscar Wilde's The Rise of Historical Criticism? Here is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The origin of the common proverb ‘worth so many beeves,’ in which we discern the unconscious survival of a purely pastoral state of society before the use of metals was known, is ascribed by Plutarch to the fact of Theseus having coined money bearing a bull’s head. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T18:08:28.453" Title="'worth so many beeves' proverb" Tags="&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4102" CreationDate="2017-11-07T20:32:41.870" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1103/pg1103.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard III&lt;/a&gt;, Act I, scene 3, lines 245-246 Queen Margaret tells Elizabeth that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The day will come that thou shalt wish for me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To help thee curse this poisonous bunch-back'd toad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and indeed, in In Act IV, Scene IV, lines 79-81 Queen Elizabeth does so curse Richard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O, thou didst prophesy the time would come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That I should wish for thee to help me curse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That bottled spider, that foul bunch-back'd toad! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, in the second Quarto, the last line read &quot;hunch-back'd&quot;, but it is retained as above in the texts I've found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/3henryvi/3henryvi.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry VI, part 3, act III&lt;/a&gt;, scene 2, lines 1648-1650, Richard (here still called Gloucester), laments his looks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To shrink mine arm up like a wither'd shrub;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To make an envious mountain on my back,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where sits deformity to mock my body;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is pretty clear Shakespeare thought of him as a hunchback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T20:32:41.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4895" CreationDate="2017-11-07T20:48:50.517" Score="8" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt; is an incomplete manuscript posthumously attributed to C. S. Lewis. There has been widespread controversy about whether it was actually written by C. S. Lewis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What evidence do scholars offer for and against it being written by C. S. Lewis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:15:43.940" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:19:10.423" Title="What evidence do scholars offer on both sides as to the authorship of The Dark Tower?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-dark-tower-lewis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4087" CreationDate="2017-11-07T21:42:36.150" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Rolling Stone magazine, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/tom-petty-50-greatest-songs-w506653/learning-to-fly-w506739&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/tom-petty-50-greatest-songs-w506653/learning-to-fly-w506739&lt;/a&gt;, quote:&#xA; &quot;Petty claims to have gotten the words almost verbatim from watching a television interview with a pilot. &quot;He said there's not much to learning to fly; the difficult thing is coming down, and I thought, 'Yeah, that's true,'&quot; Petty recalled. The song, which also contains allusions to the just-ended Gulf War (&quot;The sea may burn&quot;), was pulled together in an evening with (Jeff) Lynne, who came up with chords to go under Petty's melody. It became one of his most inspirational tunes. &quot;I wanted that song to be a kind of redemptive song,&quot; Petty said. &quot;Only in the vaguest way.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the most basic sense, the narrator is learning to fly the way any human without wings has to learn, in an aeroplane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1964" LastEditorDisplayName="user1964" LastEditDate="2017-11-07T21:54:37.187" LastActivityDate="2017-11-07T21:54:37.187" CommentCount="3" CommunityOwnedDate="2017-11-07T21:42:36.150" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4102" CreationDate="2017-11-07T21:57:28.800" Score="14" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Kevin Spacey's Richard III has a hump because Shakespeare wrote the character that way.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His physical deformities (which include but aren't limited to a hunched back) are a defining part of his personality and motivation, and inform how people interact with him. As for why Shakespeare wrote him that way...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)60762-5/fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard III had scoliosis.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't pronounced enough to give him a hunch, but for a lot of political reasons it was expedient for Richard's posthumous biographers to demonize the king. A twisted body is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leicestershire-27610788&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;convenient rhetorical shorthand for a twisted mind&lt;/a&gt;, and his scoliosis was a useful thing to exaggerate for effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare doubled down on this, describing Richard III as &amp;quot;rudely stamp'd&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;deformed, unfinish'd,&amp;quot; with a hunched back, a limp, and a withered arm.&#xA;In fact, Shakespeare makes Richard's fictional deformity the direct cause of his (equally fictional) villainy, thus tying propaganda neatly together with story and creating an extremely memorable villain we love to hate. It made for good theater, and he was writing in a country ruled by the royal line that overthrew Richard, so it was good for business all around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been the common impression of Richard III ever since:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Laurence Olivier &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-P0xHwjxiI&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;portrayed Richard III&lt;/a&gt; with padded clothing, a limp, and a false nose--and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/apr/01/richard-iii-laurence-olivier-reel-history-accurate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;critics consider it understated&lt;/a&gt; compared to other portrayals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shows like &amp;quot;Red Dwarf&amp;quot; can expect the average audience member to recognize Richard III &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JNaymmtbq4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;through the hunch alone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2014-07-03/viz-media-adds-jojo-bizarre-adventures-battle-tendency-requiem-of-the-rose-king-manga/.76272&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a re-imagining of the character doesn't include the hunch&lt;/a&gt;, it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1226451605?book_show_action=true&amp;amp;from_review_page=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commented&lt;/a&gt; on, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1321834496?book_show_action=true&amp;amp;from_review_page=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;repeatedly&lt;/a&gt;, by lay readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academics have known for a very long time that Richard didn't have any pronounced deformity, but he's stuck with the hump in pop culture. In particular, removing the deformity from performances of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt; robs the character of his primary motive--so it's not done very often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T09:17:39.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-07T22:49:21.093" Score="2" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;If we go by the text of Shakespeare's Richard III, Richard has a hunchback. In Act I, scene 3, line 246, Queen Margaret describes Richard as a &quot;poisonous bunch-back'd toad.&quot; And in act IV, scene 4, line 81 Queen Elizabeth also describes Richard as &quot;that foul bunch-back'd toad.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the 1955 Laurence Olivier adaptation of Richard III, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcytoo2SVxQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it doesn't look like Laurence Olivier's character has a hunchback&lt;/a&gt;. There's a subtle padding around the back that makes Richard look slightly slouched, but it's very unemphasized compared to, say, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO7B3HBqHrU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kevin Spacey adaptation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this detail changed? Does this change make sense in the context of the themes of the play and what we know about the character of Richard III?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T23:05:32.873" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T23:05:32.873" Title="Why is Richard portrayed without a hunchback in the 1955 Laurence Olivier adaptation of Richard III?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T17:13:26.580" Score="5" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;Author Audrey Niffenegger chose to include an excerpt from &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; at the end of her debut novel &lt;em&gt;The Time Traveler's Wife&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now from his breast into his eyes the ache&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of longing mounted, and he wept at last,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Longed for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Spent in rough water where his ship went down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Few men can keep alive through a big surf&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  her white arms round him pressed as though forever.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, there is a straightforward comparison between the two works. Both include couples whose relationship can be characterized by the woman waiting faithfully for her male partner while he goes off on (largely unwanted) adventures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, the female character makes this comparison herself during the novel. It strikes me that an author would be unlikely to go to the lengths of including an excerpt — and have a character draw attention to it — to illustrate something that obvious. Why was this particular passage chosen? Are there any deeper thematic and literary connections between the two works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:32:15.403" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:32:15.403" Title="What are the parallels between The Odyssey and The Time Traveler's Wife?" Tags="&lt;the-odyssey&gt;&lt;audrey-niffenegger&gt;&lt;the-time-travelers-wife&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2017-11-08T17:27:49.977" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been listening to Steely Dan since 1976 so I'm going to say there's little question in my mind it's a metaphorical reference to his addiction &amp;amp; best friend Black Jack.  I think of the Stones &quot;Wild Horses&quot; which I'm convinced references heroin addiction.&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vMcRj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T17:27:49.977" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2017-11-08T17:32:13.443" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short answer: addiction runs his life, just one more time and ill hit the jackpot, drifter, grifter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T17:32:13.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4135" CreationDate="2017-11-08T19:40:18.223" Score="8" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking for the original text of Rabelais' novels in French, I found that different editions have &lt;strong&gt;significant differences.&lt;/strong&gt; Let's compare the first sentence in the beginning of the first chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3ARabelais_-_Pantagruel%2C_ca_1530.djvu/16&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edition of circa 1530&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Ce ne sera point chose inutile ne oysifve de vous remembrer la premiere source et origine dont nous est nay le bon Pantagruel : car ie voy que tous bons historiographes ainsi ont traicte leurs chronicques, non seulement des Grecs, des Arabes, et Ethnicques, mais aussi les auteurs de la saincte escripture, comme monseigneur sainct Luc mesmement, et sainct Matthieu.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pantagruel/%C3%89dition_Marty-Laveaux,_1868/Chapitre_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edition of 1868 by Marty-Laveaux:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Ce ne sera chose inutile ne oysifve, veu que sommes de sejour, vous ramentevoir la premiere source et origine dont nous est né le bon Pantagruel : car je voy que tous bons hystoriographes ainsi ont traicté leurs Chronicques, non seullement les Arabes, Barbares et Latins, mais aussi Gregoys, Gentilz, qui furent buveurs eternelz.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205144z/f52.image&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edition by Louis Moland:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Je vous remetz à la grande chronique pantagrueline recognoïstre la genealogie et antiquité dond nous est venu Gargantua. En icelle vous entendrez plus au long comment les géans nasquirent en ce monde, et comment d'iceux, par lignes directes, issit Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel ; et ne vous faschera si pour le présent je m'en déporté, combien que la chose soit telle que, tant plus seroit remembrée, tant plus elle plairoit à vos seigneuries, comme vous avez l'autorité de Platon, in Philebo et Gorgia, et de Flacce, qui dit estre aucuns propos, tels que ceux cy sans doubte, qui plus sont délectables quand plus souvent sont redits.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the first two editions bear close resemblance, the third one reads as a completely different work. At first, I assumed that the third edition was created much later by some editor trying to &quot;improve&quot; the original text. But later I saw that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1200/1200-h/1200-h.htm#link2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt; is based on the third edition and it was first published in 1653.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain why such a well-known classic work is published containing such radically different texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2438" LastEditorUserId="2438" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T16:00:24.387" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T15:30:32.840" Title="Why different editions of Rabelais' &quot;Gargantua and Pantagruel&quot; novels contain different texts?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;francois-rabelais&gt;&lt;gargantua-and-pantagruel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4115" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8267" CreationDate="2017-11-08T18:24:36.967" Score="2" ViewCount="2612" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the book of Joseph Conrad called Heart of Darkness, page 1, it says &quot;between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea&quot;&#xA;The problem is that, as far as I understand, he never clarified that before. Have you noticed or have an answer for that sentence?&#xA;Here an image of the page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNhBG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DNhBG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;book&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1630" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T20:21:54.387" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T17:34:55.397" Title="What does &quot;between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea&quot; mean in Heart of Darkness?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;heart-of-darkness&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4115" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:05:51.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator of the story is supposed to be a human being that has lived a life. He is referring to something else in his [fictional] past life, it is a way of immersing the reader in the story and creating intimacy, Conrad is not referring to something else in the same book. He is trying to make you imagine that this narrator has told this story before, and perhaps to diminish the melodrama of the metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because perhaps he did not like the sound of the raw line &quot;Between us there was the bond of the sea;&quot; it sounds too dramatic for a speaker. But by interrupting it and claiming it has been said before, then the dramatic sound of it becomes more of a favored phrase of this character (the narrator):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider if I say: &quot;I make the world's best apple pie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus: &quot;I make, as I like to say, the world's best apple pie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second version, my claim is weakened. You would not expect as much from my apple pie, relying on the second version, as you might, relying on the first version. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conrad probably added the interjection to humanize the narrator and intentionally weaken the dramatic intensity of the statement, while keeping the statement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Amadeus" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:05:51.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4102" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:28:46.400" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's pretty well covered in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjJEXkbeL-o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous opening monologue to Richard III&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor made to court an amorous looking glass; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I, that am rudely stamped and want love’s majesty &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To strut before a wanton ambling nymph; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that so lamely and unfashionable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That dogs bark at me as I halt by them—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have no delight to pass away the time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unless to see my shadow in the sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And descant on mine own deformity. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Richard III, Act I, Scene I&lt;/sub&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is our introduction to the character, in his own words, it becomes challenging to portray him without some outward deformity (i.e. it would raise questions in the audience about why Richard perceives himself in that way, contrary to actual physical appearance.  Still, it could be a quite interesting choice--if I were staging &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Menagerie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Glass Menagerie&lt;/a&gt; I'd reduce Laura's limp to the point of imperceptibility to reinforce the idea that her real illness is her relationship with her mother;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T20:28:46.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4109" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:45:31.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the words of Olivier himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's called acting.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quip derives from a very famous anecdote about acting technique, which reportedly occurred on the set of Marathon Man.  Dustin Hoffman, having stayed up for days to be able to convey his character's exhaustion and confusion, seeing Olivier sitting comfortably in his chair, waiting to shoot, asked Olivier how he was able to make his own performance so real. Olivier is said to have replied: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Dear boy, it's called acting — you should try it.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This anecdote is primarily a comment on the divide between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_acting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;method acting&lt;/a&gt;, in particular as taught by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Strasberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strasberg&lt;/a&gt;, and the more traditional, but highly rigorous and effective &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Shakespeare_Company&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;RSC&lt;/a&gt; training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it may shed light on Olivier's choice to downplay the outward deformity--Olivier was considered the greatest actor of his age and his Richard III film portrayal probably still ranks at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Olivier downplayed the humpback because he could--he's that good&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relying on a prosthesis to define the character could be regarded as a crutch, not required for an actor of such consummate skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To emphasize the points in this answer, I'll compare portrayal of Richard III and Laura from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Shakespeare_Company&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glass Menagerie&lt;/a&gt;.  Both have a physical impairment that influence their characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the deformity is pronounced physically in performance, as is generally the case, the audience interpretation is that the physical condition drives the character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the deformity is downplayed, as with the Olivier, the audience interpretation is that the character is burdened more by the psychological effects than the physical.  (i.e. the deformity looms much larger in their mind that the physical actuality.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter case may be considered much more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:47:51.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:47:51.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4123" CreationDate="2017-11-08T20:59:11.840" Score="5" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Crow Hears Fate Knock On The Door&amp;quot;, The lines ending the second part of the song are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He walked, he walked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letting the translucent starry spaces&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blow in his ear cluelessly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what did Hughes possibly mean in the last line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to blow &amp;quot;cluelessly&amp;quot;? What could it be that the spaces are clueless about, unaware of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, in the preceding lines, Crow is the one who seems clueless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He plucked grass-heads [...] Waiting for first instructions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He found a dead mole [...] stared at the goblets, feeling helpless&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the fact that after those line the &amp;quot;spaces&amp;quot; are depicted as &amp;quot;clueless&amp;quot; seems kind of off this song theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T09:17:25.623" Title="What does it mean when spaces blow in Crow's ear cluelessly?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4100" CreationDate="2017-11-08T21:12:31.230" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Christopher Strobbe's answer is excellent, and I'll add this thought because, in my experience, the greatest literature operates on many levels. This is especially important for Dramatic literature, in that stage productions require an actor as vehicle to get the audience to connect with the material, which requires the actor being able to connect to the character's motivations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the joke about censors (Master of Revels) would likely have been appreciated by much of the audience at the Globe, it's not sufficient to make the immediate reality of Hamlet in the scene convincing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, from the standpoint of the character of Hamlet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The play itself is a trap for Claudius laid by Hamlet, so Hamlet can gauge his reaction and validate his suspicious as to Claudius' hand in the murder of Hamlet's father.  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the actors go off script, it could ruin the trap.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-08T21:22:41.657" LastActivityDate="2017-11-08T21:22:41.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-08T21:14:35.760" Score="8" ViewCount="1174" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm watching two adaptations of Romeo and Juliet that take two different approaches to the play: Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film Romeo + Juliet and Zeffirelli's 1968 film Romeo and Juliet. There are some obvious differences between the two: one is set in 14th century Italy, and the other is set in the modern day. But there are some subtler differences between the two adaptations. In particular, I'm thinking of the very different approaches the two films take towards the fight scene between Mercutio and Tybalt, and Tybalt's death. I found clips of both scenes on Youtube: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjunMlGnlKU&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's the 1996 version of the scene&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1DNpQC43CQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's the 1968 version&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1968 version, the fight is treated as some sort of extended joke. Mercutio and Tybalt do all sorts of comedic routines with their swords, all the characters are laughing (including Mercutio, Tybalt, and the extras), and it appears to be an accident that Tybalt kills Mercutio, judging by Tybalt's shocked expression. Meanwhile, in the 1996 version, the characters appear to be very angry. They're clearly trying to kill each other, and the ominous music adds to this feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What justifies the differences in approaches here? Which portrayal goes better with what we know about the characters and the themes of the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2441" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:24:09.407" Title="Is the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt a joke, or is it serious?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4121" CreationDate="2017-11-08T21:58:21.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect Zeffirelli was commenting on the transition between boyhood and adulthood in the context of consequences, and how easily a simple mistake can have severe implications. (Compare to teens drunk driving--it's all fun and games until someone dies.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zeffirelli's scene is played as teenage boy, full of bluster, having fun in the traditional male pastime busting on their rivals.  The fatal blow is sudden and unexpected.  Reality and adulthood comes crashing down, just like it will for Romeo and Juliet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the extravagant staging of the Luhrmann, the reality of the teens he presents is much more serious.  John Leguizamo's portrayal of Tybalt, as I recall, is much more straightforward, focusing on his rage and viciousness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible Luhrmann was commenting on gang culture of the time, but more likely that his choice for the scene is in service of a very straightforward adaptation focused on the raw passion of youth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In terms of why the difference, no significant director wants to merely repeat the work of predecessors, and the Zefferelli's is highly celebrated. The desire to go a different direction for his film would have certainly been a factor in Luhrmann's choices, to distinguish his work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of what makes dramatic literature so resilient is the range of interpretation that can be applied by actors, directors and dramaturges across every generation and production.  Thus, no one interpretation is ever definitive or absolute. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both scenes work within the context of the films they are a part of. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T18:28:21.790" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T18:28:21.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4119" CreationDate="2017-11-09T12:19:52.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ted Hughes' Crow cycle is a series of interlinked poems which can be understood, as a whole, to be a folkloric cycle inspired by the Christian tradition. When doing readings, Hughes would introduce this with a spoken word monologue sometimes called &lt;em&gt;The Quarrel in Heaven&lt;/em&gt; in which God creates the cosmos and Crow becomes God's companion, seeking to understand and improve on his creation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further episodes which reflect a biblical narrative include &lt;em&gt;Apple Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, which describes Adam and Eve's fall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The serpent stared in surprise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At this interloper.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But God said: &quot;You see this apple?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I squeeze it and look-cider.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;Crow, Blacker than Ever&lt;/em&gt;, which mirrors the crucifixion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Crow nailed them together,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nailing heaven and earth together-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So man cried, but with God’s voice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And God bled, but with man’s blood.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this relevant to the quoted work, &lt;em&gt;Crow Hears Fate Knock on the Door&lt;/em&gt;? If the Crow poems are a meditation on Christianity, then a key aspect of this exploration is contrasting the instinctual religious impulse with the modern desire for rationality, for evidence and experimentation. There are examples all through the cycle, but let's quote one from &lt;em&gt;Hears Fate&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He looked in front of his feet at the little stream&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chugging on like an auxiliary motor&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fastened to this infinite engine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He imagined the whole engineering&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of its assembly, repairs and maintenance —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And felt helpless.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crow is trying to fulfill his role as the explorer of the cosmos through detached observation, but is failing. He is &quot;helpless&quot; to explain both the emotional appeal of the stream and its intricate series of connections to the wider world via rationality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the purpose of the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He plucked grass-heads and gazed into them&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Waiting for first instructions.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He studied a stone from the stream.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He found a dead mole and slowly he took it apart&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then stared at the goblets, feeling helpless.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which Crow is examining the grass, the stone and the dead mole, seeking to understand them by a fixed process. In the first instance this process is tuition, the second observation and the third experimentation - the processes we gradually teach to children as ways of furthering an understanding of the natural world. But to Crow, they are not insightful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context we can understand the couplet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Letting the translucent starry spaces&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Blow in his ear cluelessly   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To mean that, as he walks, Crow is seeing and thinking (&quot;blow in his ear&quot;) about the night sky and its implications and finding himself &quot;clueless&quot; as to what it means. Yet at the same time the sky itself is &quot;clueless&quot;: it has no sense of its own purpose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, although many a human mind has looked into the starry night and been inspired to wonder on their place in creation, the poem implies that this is a futile quest: there may be no sense in it at all, or at least not one that humanity can understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Violence in the Poetry of Ted Hughes: An Organic Growth, K.T Baby, 1996&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes, Keith Sagar, 2000   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-10T09:17:25.623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T09:17:25.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4124" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T13:54:56.743" Score="11" ViewCount="4122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the myth, Cupid only comes to Psyche in the dark, so she doesn't know who he is or what he looks like. &#xA;What's Cupid's motivation for hiding his identity? Was he planning to do that indefinitely if Psyche hadn't disobeyed his order and took a peek at his face? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2445" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T01:56:17.060" Title="In Cupid and Psyche, why does Cupid hide himself from Psyche?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;apuleius&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3342" CreationDate="2017-11-09T17:01:21.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, rap lyrics require feet with long and short syllables. However, this isn't true just for rap; many other song lyrics require long and short syllables as well. Consider &lt;em&gt;Yesterday&lt;/em&gt;, by the Beatles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read it and keep all the syllables the same length, it loses a lot: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it seems as though they're here to stay.  Oh, I believe in yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there are even some poems that need to be read with long and short syllables as well. Consider John Masefield's &lt;em&gt;Sea Fever&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCYsLqV2CyU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the poet reading it.  Note how, for example, &lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sail's&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grey&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;dawn&lt;/em&gt; are much longer than most of the other syllables. Again, if you try to read it and keep all the syllables the same length, it doesn't sound anywhere near as good. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, many songs are essentially poems set to music, and sound perfectly fine if all syllables are the same length. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, rap has some of the most complicated syncopations in English song lyrics and poetry, so I suspect that rap songs are quite a bit more likely to require long and short syllables than any other kind of English verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T01:25:07.787" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T01:25:07.787" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-09T17:31:44.003" Score="9" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name for the literary technique of opening a chapter with a series of summary phrases? An example from &lt;em&gt;Three Men in a Boat&lt;/em&gt; by Jerome K. Jerome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chapter II&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plans discussed.—Pleasures of “camping-out,” on fine nights.—Ditto, wet nights.—Compromise decided on.—Montmorency, first impressions of.—Fears lest he is too good for this world, fears subsequently dismissed as groundless.—Meeting adjourns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We pulled out the maps...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other books I'm aware of that do this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;To Say Nothing of the Dog&lt;/em&gt; by Connie Willis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Going Postal&lt;/em&gt; by Terry Pratchett&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Making Money&lt;/em&gt; by Terry Pratchett&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2446" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T03:45:06.220" Title="What are chapter summary phrases called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4100" CreationDate="2017-11-09T18:27:15.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hamlet refers to the improvisation of clowns, rather than of actors in general. His reasoning is explicit: he doesn't want the audience to laugh. The play has a point (&quot;some necessary question of the play&quot;), and he doesn't want it lost on the audience just to satisfy some clown's &quot;pitiful ambition&quot; (to be noticed, attract attention, and possibly patronage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare incorporated clowns into most of his tragedies, including Hamlet. The Gravedigger scene is an excellent example of black comedy, as is the Porter in Macbeth. While Hamlet's &quot;The Mousetrap&quot; doesn't appear to have any comic scenes (we see what is, presumably an abbreviated form of it), it's important to Hamlet that the clowns not change the tone of the play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clowning had a strong improv tradition, inherited from Commedia dell'Arte. They would start with a plot outline, but the actual text would be improvised (and it was sometimes called &quot;commedia improvviso&quot;). Shakespeare and his contemporaries often followed old, well-known stories, and wrote specific dialogue for them: it wasn't improvisation, but it reflects the way audiences were coming to see a &lt;em&gt;production&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;story&lt;/em&gt;. The would usually already know the story: Hamlet goes out his way to clue them in with a dumbshow (mime) before The Mousetrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is thus some tension between the clowns, who see it as their job to make people laugh, and the playwright who has a dramatic goal in mind. The clowns can play with the tension created by the dramatic scenes, but if they break it entirely, then the purpose of the play is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making people laugh is always a hit-and-miss operation. All theater requires actors to feel out what is working for this audience, but comedies get explicit feedback in the form of laughter. The laughter is contagious: it communicates not just to the actors, but to other audience members. (Having one person laugh in an audience is a huge help: a &quot;shill&quot; can be the difference between audiences who are slightly amused and audiences having the time of their lives.) So a comic actor has plenty of motivation, and expertise, to play up to what's working today -- which may be totally different from what worked yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Or at the matinee. Matinee audiences are particularly problematic, and actors today often dread them. They have a tendency to pull out all the stops just to get something. For Shakespeare, of course, all performances at the Globe were matinees.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would view Hamlet's talk of improvisation to refer specifically to comedy, and possibly just to this performance of this show. The &quot;Advice to the Players&quot; speech is often taken as coming directly from the author, and there's certainly good reason to take it more generally (especially, as I said, since Hamlet's play doesn't seem to have any clowns). So it may well also be Shakespeare telling Will Kemp to tone it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2017-11-09T22:11:16.137" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T22:11:16.137" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2017-11-09T19:47:04.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One traditional term for it may have been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Argument&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm basing this on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loeb_Classical_Library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loeb Editions&lt;/a&gt; of the Greek Dramas where there is a synopsis of the play presented at the beginning under the heading &quot;Argument&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those particular translations tend to be from the late 19th &amp;amp; early 20th Century though, and that usage of the term feels distinctly outmoded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rejecting terms like preface, introduction and forward, more mundane choices would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Synopsis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Summary&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abridgement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;classier&quot; term could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/precis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;précis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOTE: I do seem to recall there is a specific &quot;old-timey&quot; term for this, but it's escaping me at the moment.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2017-11-09T19:47:04.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4126" CreationDate="2017-11-10T03:45:06.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nicholas Dames, in an article in &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;, calls them &lt;em&gt;explanations&lt;/em&gt;, although he doesn't indicate if this is a technical term, or simply his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Explanations proliferated. Take “The History of Charlotte Summers” (1750), commonly attributed to Sarah Fielding, in which the languid Miss Arabella Dimple, lying half naked in bed, calls her maid Polly to fetch her “the first Volume of the Parish Girl I was reading in the Afternoon.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/chapter-history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicholas Dames, The Chapter: A History, The New Yorker, October 29, 2014&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T03:45:06.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3391" CreationDate="2017-11-10T05:59:41.193" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems she meant his attempt in comforting them, as in the instance of the 1930s women were busied with the hospitality of children while men worked laborious jobs and were generally uninvolved in the personal lives of their children (untrue in Atticus’ case, but the point remains).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2317" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T05:59:41.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4124" CreationDate="2017-11-10T10:50:53.997" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a test. Cupid is the &lt;em&gt;heart,&lt;/em&gt; Psyche is the &lt;em&gt;mind.&lt;/em&gt; The story is about trusting your emotions over your reason (or gossip, or relatives, come to that) when it comes to love/marriage. He wanted her to trust him (to trust in her emotions) until he was satisfied that she was loyal to him and not her birth family, or until she proved that she had conquered her own doubts and would obey her husband (appalling now, but an appropriate sentiment at the time). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tests in Greek mythology are not indefinite, although Psyche fails this one without the terms ever being announced, so we don't know how long it might have gone. In mythological terms, &quot;until she fell in love with him&quot; is probably a good rough deadline. She would have had to fake it ’til she made it, so to speak. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T10:50:53.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-10T11:54:41.420" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a point that pops some what frequently in the series, that there's no real &quot;good&quot; and &quot;evil&quot; (or rather, that's Geralt's point of view), and there's only the &quot;lesser evil&quot;, and the hardest part, of course, is to choose it from all the other evils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the main antagonist, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Vilgefortz,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is simply evil. He simply admits his only goal is world domination, and he won't hesitate to perform vile experiments on young girls to obtain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the cast of other characters, who have personalities and different traits, he seems extremely flat. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2017-11-10T11:54:41.420" Title="Why does &quot;The Witcher&quot; series, being mostly about shades of grey instead of black and white, have such an obviously evil antagonist?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4366" CreationDate="2017-11-10T15:53:59.573" Score="2" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a poem that talks about nature and the changing seasons (maybe Summer to Autumn, or Autumn to Winter) that ends with &lt;strong&gt;&quot;...whispers, snow!&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've Googled the phrase with and without punctuation and have read more poems about Autumn (that are also apparently metaphors about death) so before I sink even further into a black gloom, can anyone provide the poem and poet where this phrase appears?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2449" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T15:29:12.277" Title="Poem that ends with &quot;...whispers, snow!&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4114" CreationDate="2017-11-10T23:42:10.387" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third one reads as a completely different work because it is, in fact, a completely different work. The first two are different versions of the same work, both by Rabelais.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first paragraph of chapter I “&lt;em&gt;De l'origine et antiquité du grand Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;” of &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, (full title: &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel, Roy des dipsodes, restitué à son naturel, avec ses faictz et prouesses espoventables : composez par feu M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence&lt;/em&gt;). This is the original 1532 text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is the last revision of (1) made by Rabelais. (Pléiade, “&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel —— Notes et variantes”&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1239–1241)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first paragraph of chapter I “&lt;em&gt;De l'origine et antiquité du grand Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;” of &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt; (full title: &lt;em&gt;La vie treshorrificque du grand Gargantua, pere de Pantagruel, jadis composee par M. Alcofribas abstracteur de quinte essence. Livre plein de Pantagruelisme&lt;/em&gt;). As indicated in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k205144z/f4.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt;, this is the text of the 1542 edition by François Juste, which is the latest one that was reviewed by Rabelais (Pléiade, &lt;em&gt;Gargantua — note sur le texte&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1057).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt; was written and published first, in 1532, but &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;, written and published in 1534, is the first story in internal chronological order. Pierre de Tours made an edition combining both works with &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt; in 1542, and most subsequent editions combining the two works put them in the same order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can expect a lot of variation on the spelling. Not only was French spelling not yet standardized in Rabelais's time, but it was undergoing a lot of changes in which Rabelais participated. Rabelais was a partisan of including etymological information in spelling and devised his own system. (Pléiade, “&lt;em&gt;Notice sur la langue de Rabelais&lt;/em&gt;”, II, p. XXXVII–XLIII; Huchon: Rabelais, p. 131-317) He and his printers revised the spelling between editions of some of his work. Additionally, as 16th century French is hard to read for people who lived in the 18th century and later, many later editions have modernized the spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rabelais made many minor revisions to the text of the first two books (&lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;), and fewer on the next two (&lt;em&gt;Tiers livre&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Quart livre&lt;/em&gt;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cinqui%C3%A8me_Livre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cinquième livre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is another story: it was published posthumously and there are debates as to which parts were actually written by Rabelais and thus many different claims to authenticity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the opening paragraph of chapter I of &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, the most significant change is the  replacement of the mention of Luke and Matthew, biographers of Christ, by “Greeks and pagans”. Rabelais made this change for the 1537 edition by Denis de Harsy (Pléiade, “&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel —— Notes et variantes”&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1240). This was one of several changes that removed direct religious references, especially to the New Testament (&lt;em&gt;ib.&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1232).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pléiade) &lt;em&gt;Rabelais — Œuvres complètes&lt;/em&gt;, coll. Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, Gallimard, 1994. Notes by Mireille Huchon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Huchon: Rabelais) Mireille Huchon, &lt;em&gt;Rabelais grammairien&lt;/em&gt;, Droz, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T15:30:32.840" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T15:30:32.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-11T00:40:45.373" Score="9" ViewCount="876" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Iliad, fate and the will of the gods are two distinct concepts. This is shown when Zeus is tempted to save his son, Sarpedon, from his predestined death in battle, though he ultimately chooses not to. However, in the Odyssey, fate and the will of the gods are merged: the majority of gods decrees that Odysseus will go home, and this is thus his fate. Additionally, Tiresias' prophecies are &quot;what the gods wish.&quot; Why does this discrepancy exist, considering that the Odyssey is a sequel of sorts to the Iliad?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2450" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T10:20:15.487" Title="Why does the portrayal of fate in the Odyssey differ from that of the Iliad?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2017-11-11T05:14:46.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Fitzgerald himself come up with the title? I believe so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I disagree with the claim that it is likely that Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald's editor, came up with the title. We have the correspondence between Perkins and Fitzgerald, and it's clear from this correspondence that Fitzgerald was unhappy with the title. Also, Perkins is certainly the first person to bring it up in the correspondence between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But was Fitzgerald and Perkins' only communication through letters? It seems highly unlikely. When Fitzgerald started writing &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, he lived in Great Neck (West Egg) on Long Island, only a short train ride from New York City and his editor's office. So it's entirely possible that Fitzgerald first proposed the title to Perkins in a face-to-face conversation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his letter, Maxwell Perkins says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I always thought that &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot; was a suggestive and effective title, — with only the vaguest knowledge of the book, of course. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would Perkins have had the presumption to come up with a title of a book that he knew very little about? I suspect not. Further, if he was proposing the title for the first time in this letter, wouldn't he have been more likely to use the wording &lt;em&gt;&quot;I think ...&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and not &lt;em&gt;&quot;I always thought ...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. It seems much more likely to me that Fitzgerald first suggested the title in a conversation with Perkins, but later decided he didn't like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did Fitzgerald come up with the title? Some people have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dailysun.bowdoin.edu/2013/01/the-little-known-novel-that-inspired-the-great-gatsby-and-other-books-the-economists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory&lt;/a&gt; that Fitzgerald borrowed his title from a French novel by Alain-Fournier called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Grand Meaulnes,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a literal translation of which might be &lt;em&gt;The Great Meaulnes&lt;/em&gt;. This book was quite celebrated at the time, and Fitzgerald is likely to have read it. (&lt;em&gt;Le Grand Meaulnes&lt;/em&gt; is an untranslatable title, as it can mean either &lt;em&gt;Tall Meaulnes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Great Meaulnes&lt;/em&gt;, and the author clearly intended both meanings to be significant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the plots of the books are not that close, there are a number of interesting similarities. Both are narrated in first person, and the narrators of both books have a remarkable degree of admiration, probably unwarranted, for the title characters. This might help explain the titles. The narrators of both books think that Meaulnes and Gatsby are great,  despite the fact that they're quite selfish, and have other flaws.  The plot of both books revolves around the title character's love for a woman: in both books, the title character meets her when she is quite young; they are separated for a number of years; and then they are reunited, with not entirely favorable results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T23:25:55.923" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T23:25:55.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4104" CreationDate="2017-11-11T08:36:39.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The proverb as representative, in historical criticism&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;that is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/historical-criticism-literary-criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critical analysis of a text based on its historical, cultural and social context&lt;/a&gt;&amp;thinsp;&amp;mdash;&amp;thinsp;of a postulated purely pastoral state of society, references the notion of cattle as wealth in such a society (however pure): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...our picture of the uses of cattle beyond subsistence in Neolithic Europe...[provides] enough evidence to suggest strongly that cattle were valued as wealth as well as calories.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/151754/Cattle_as_wealth_in_Neolithic_Europe_Wheres_the_beef&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Cattle as weath in Neolithic Europe: Where's the beef?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Nerissa Russell, Chapter 5 in the 1998 &lt;em&gt;The Archeology of Value&lt;/em&gt; [link requires registration for access].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilde contrasts that historical criticism of the classical proverb (as an &quot;unconscious survival&quot; of pastorial society) with the 'historical criticism' of Plutarch, who knew or claimed to know the origin of the proverb in the simple historical fact of coins made by Theseus depicting a bull's head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two critical analyses are not incompatible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2427" LastEditorUserId="2427" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T18:08:28.453" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T18:08:28.453" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4143" CreationDate="2017-11-11T12:48:50.600" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;To ask I need a quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Thus saith the Lord concerning the kind of Assyria, He shall not come into this city, nor shoot an arrow there, nor come before it with shields, nor cast a bank against it ... For I will defend this city to save it for mine own sake.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Isaiah 37:33, 35&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quoted in &quot;The Sign And The Seal&quot; by Graham Hancock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase 'nor cast a bank against it'? I ran some Google searches on &quot;cast a bank&quot; and all led me to the same paragraph. Is some kind of wall-breaking weapon or device meant here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1895" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T20:05:06.437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T20:05:06.437" Title="What is the meaning of 'cast a bank'?" Tags="&lt;graham-hancock&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;the-sign-and-the-seal&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1571" CreationDate="2017-11-11T17:51:52.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Despite Lermontov's preface, I cannot help but feel that there is a degree of sincerity in calling Pechorin a hero. The narrator even addresses this question at the end of the first part where the English translation is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some readers will probably want to know what I think of Pechorin's character. My reply may be found in the title of this book. &quot;But that is wicked irony!&quot; they will say. I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote shows it is not entirely ironic. There are very heroic characteristics in Pechorin - he is brave in the face of death, totally clear sighted and desperately magnetic. Everyone has so much evil in them but most deceive themselves and pretend that they are far more righteous than they actually are. Pechorin refuses to do this. He is aware of all his faults and does not try to justify them. The narration gives the reader such a vivid image of Pechorin's character that we cannot help but relate to him and therefore feel sympathy for him. He is not a good man nor a man that I would advise anyone to carry as a role model but his magnetism makes it impossible for him not to be considered as one of the greatest romantic heroes in literature. A truly fantastic book, he is the best Russian prose writer in my opinion and his poetry is second only to Pushkin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2456" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-11T19:35:20.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T19:35:20.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4141" CreationDate="2017-11-11T20:04:34.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&quot;cast a bank&quot; means to build a ramp.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the archaic meaning of &quot;cast&quot; as in item 1, subitem 9 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cast#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(archaic) To throw up, as a mound, or rampart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bible, Luke xix.48&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Thine enemies shall cast a trench [bank] about thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the meaning of &quot;bank&quot; as in a bank &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; something, as in item 2 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/bank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A long, high mass or mound of a particular substance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;‘a grassy bank’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    ‘a bank of snow’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this interpretation of the quote is confirmed by other versions (translations) of this specific biblical passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He will not enter this city&#xA;  or shoot an arrow here.&#xA;  He will not come before it with shield&#xA;  or &lt;strong&gt;build a siege ramp against it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+37%3A33-37&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New International Version&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;propterea haec dicit Dominus de rege Assyriorum non introibit civitatem hanc et non iaciet ibi sagittam et non occupabit eam clypeus et &lt;strong&gt;non mittet in circuitu eius aggerem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+37%3A33-37&amp;amp;version=VULGATE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vulgate Latin version&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mittet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mittet&lt;/a&gt; is a form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mitto#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mitto&lt;/a&gt;, roughly meaning to extend, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aggerem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aggerem&lt;/a&gt; is a form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agger#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;agger&lt;/a&gt;, meaning a rampart or dyke)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-11T20:04:34.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-12T09:33:15.353" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a problem translating a particular idiom to an other language (Arabic if this is relevant). The idiom is as in the title: &quot;People of that age [middle aged people in their 40's] become little more than children. You drag the horizon of youth along with you, &lt;strong&gt;like the reverse of walking to the end of the rainbow.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every reference I found on the internet is about a pot of gold at the end of the &lt;strong&gt;rainbow&lt;/strong&gt;. Whereas I can remember two other versions of it. The first being that a child reaching the end of the rainbow either turns them into the opposite sex or makes them an adult. Obviously the latter is the version intended by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: Are there any geographical or cultural distribution for these differences? Like American children believe that the rainbow will make them adults and the British children will find a pot of gold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked this question on ELU and was told to ask it here. (i.e.: Don't send me back there)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2461" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T11:34:55.737" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T11:34:55.737" Title="Origin of “walking to the end of the rainbow”" Tags="&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4145" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-12T18:43:28.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T18:43:28.253" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T18:43:28.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4146" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-12T18:43:28.253" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of US writer Norton Juster (1929–2021) or his life as a writer. He was best known for his whimsical children's books such as &quot;The Phantom Tollbooth&quot; and &quot;The Dot and the Line&quot;." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T11:09:14.887" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T11:09:14.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4147" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4148" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" Score="0" Body="For questions about the short fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Use with the [norton-juster] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T18:44:14.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4149" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-12T21:52:10.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;AJ Hall writes fiction in both original and established worlds, as well as editing a variety of non-fiction republications. Her personal website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://ajhall.shoesforindustry.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ajhall.shoesforindustry.net&lt;/a&gt;, with an &lt;a href=&quot;http://ajhall.shoesforindustry.net/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt; as well as details on her existing and upcoming books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:34:47.560" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:34:47.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4150" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-12T21:52:10.053" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of AJ Hall or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:34:06.280" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:34:06.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4151" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-12T21:57:26.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-12T21:57:26.227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-12T21:57:26.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4152" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-12T21:57:26.227" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2002 novel &quot;Lust Over Pendle,&quot; by AJ Hall. Use this tag with the [a-j-hall] tag." OwnerUserId="151" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:15:50.317" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:15:50.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4153" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4155" CreationDate="2017-11-13T05:30:29.217" Score="8" ViewCount="1186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story almost ten years ago and forgot its name. Google search isn't helping me to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story goes like this:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The murderer kills his ex, not out of spite, but for love; not love for his ex, but for his poultry farm that he so much adored and cared for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A detective then follows him, determined to bring him into justice, but it did not faze him. Instead of getting nervous, he stays calm and starts to write a detective story, a story that explains the murder in great detail and what he did with the dead body, and yet, the detective has nothing to do, he knows, but he can't do anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was probably written by a writer who wrote only this one detective story in his lifetime and was awarded for it after his death (his family got the award money) [This information may be incorrect, I don't remember much].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me the name of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Major Spoiler Alert]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Motivation to kill&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She came back probably a year after she left him for someone else, who was a bit more masculine, aggressive and possessive. He knew, even though that type of character attracted her at first but in the end, she will get bored and come back. Well, it did happen, she fled and came to him in secret without telling anyone. Then she was telling her stories, how she fled, how she etc. etc. blah, blah. He pretty much guessed that she now wants to live with him again. But things have changed for him, he is now more interested in raising poultry than loving a woman. He started thinking, &quot;If we get together, I will have to give her time which I don't have. A bit of time off my schedule will hamper my raising my poultry, not to mention, it's a delicate season for them. A little bit of unawareness can cause an epidemic and all my hard work for the whole season will be gone, just like that. I can't have that, sorry.&quot;&#xA;After thinking like that he was searching for a solution in his head. Thinking very hard, he finally decided that murder is the only solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What he did to the body&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he did to the dead body was really gruesome but ingenious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He made a kind of poultry feed out of it (using some sort of machine), the bones were turned into something like powdery substance. Then he fed it to them, they gave him lots of eggs. He sold his poultry with a condition to give him back the bones after eating. He then processed these bones to make fertilizer for his lands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eggs, some he sold and some he hatched and sent some second generation of poultry to the detective along with a copy of his published story book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2462" LastEditorUserId="2462" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T11:42:36.950" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T18:32:41.990" Title="A crime/detective story where the protagonist tells his murder story in great detail and still roams free" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-13T10:22:23.633" Score="4" ViewCount="37571" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quote is scattered throughout the Web:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through action, a Man becomes a Hero&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through death, a Hero becomes a Legend&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through time, a Legend becomes a Myth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And by learning from the Myth, a Man takes action&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen it attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://platinumscars.deviantart.com/journal/Epic-Quote-from-One-Piece-580479115&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eiichiro Oda&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/blackknightpage/posts/333736176746040?comment_id=916799645106354&amp;amp;comment_tracking=%7B%22tn%22%3A%22R0%22%7D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Campbell&lt;/a&gt;, and many others. Where is it originally from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T22:05:10.407" Title="Where is this quote about Man, Hero, Legend and Myth from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4153" CreationDate="2017-11-13T11:22:07.050" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story appears to be &lt;em&gt;Being a Murderer Myself&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur Williams and is most famous for being &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.themoviewaffler.com/2014/11/hitchcock-in-reverse-arthur-1959.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;adapted by James P Cavanagh as 'Arthur' for the fifth season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The story was originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948&#xA;I can't find an online copy of the story, but a synopsis from &lt;a href=&quot;https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Alfred_Hitchcock_Presents_-_Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hitchcock Zone&lt;/a&gt; says of the episode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arthur Williams is a chicken farmer who is also a confirmed bachelor. He wants to be rid of his gold-digging girlfriend. He strangles and kills her. The police suspect Arthur, but cannot find the body. Later Arthur offers them a gift for their troubles: chickens. The chickens are quite fat from a special feed that was made up, in part, from his girlfriend's body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T11:22:07.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4094" CreationDate="2017-11-13T16:25:46.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it! Googling &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=odysseus+%22plough+the+field%22+%22sow+the+seed%22&amp;amp;ie=utf-8&amp;amp;oe=utf-8&amp;amp;client=firefox-b-ab&amp;amp;gfe_rd=cr&amp;amp;dcr=0&amp;amp;ei=grEJWrbEEIKq4gS7z4q4BQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;odysseus &quot;plough the field&quot; &quot;sow the seed&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; gave me precisely two results: this question on Literature SE, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KpDTDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT20&amp;amp;lpg=PT20&amp;amp;dq=odysseus+%22plough+the+field%22+%22sow+the+seed%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=XjXOkL5l0H&amp;amp;sig=rxLDWdP8haeNi_RUWRtVX-QKdqA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwihzPrG5rvXAhWJpaQKHUi-DTYQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=odysseus%20%22plough%20the%20field%22%20%22sow%20the%20seed%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books version&lt;/a&gt; of the book &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odysseus: the Greatest Hero of Them All&lt;/em&gt; by Tony Robinson and Richard Curtis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hallo sunshine,&quot; he beamed. &quot;Say hello to your grandpa.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Grandfather!&quot; said Odysseus in amazement. &quot;I thought you'd died years ago.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; laughed the wizened old man. &quot;They threw me out of court and pretended I was dead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why would they do that?&quot; asked Odysseus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Because I was always telling lies and nicking things.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh dear,&quot; said Odysseus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Not quite what you'd expect of a member of the Royal Family, eh?&quot; said his grandfather, and then burst out laughing again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Plough the field. Plough the field. Plough the field,&quot; jibbered Odysseus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's mad,&quot; said Eumaeus, but Odysseus took no notice. He started to throw something into the crazy furrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sow the seed. Sow the seed. Sow the seed,&quot; he chanted. But it wasn't seed. It was biscuit crumbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's stark staring bonkers,&quot; said Menelaus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] shouted Philoctetes, the greatest archer in Greece. &quot;When the fleet gets to Troy, we'll burn his palace to the ground.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;HOORAY!&quot; went the sailors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Philoctetes fired again. &quot;This one's for Hector, Priam's eldest son. He may be the Trojan hero, but our hero Achilles will smash his head to pieces!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;HOORAY!&quot; went the sailors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And this one's for Paris, Priam's youngest son. He stole our Queen Helen, but I'll steal his life away with an arrow deep into his heart!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By now the sailors were going mad. &quot;HOORAY!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then Philoctetes fired another burning arrow. &quot;And this one's for AAAARGH!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Who's Aaaargh?&quot; asked Big Ajax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I shot an arrow through my foot. Odysseus jogged me!&quot; screamed Philoctetes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Apparently you're on Lemnos, not Limnos. Limnos is somewhere totally different. Look, I tell you what. We'll come and pick you up when we've beaten the Trojans.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An audio version of this story also &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04yd73v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appeared on the BBC in 1986&lt;/a&gt;, read by Tony Robinson himself. I guess by the 2000s it had made its way to public libraries as an audiobook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T16:25:46.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4157" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4158" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" Score="0" Body="For questions about Ken Liu's Dandelion Dynasty series or about any of the books in it. Use with the [ken-liu] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:35:50.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4159" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4160" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US-Chinese author and translator Ken Liu or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:36:33.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4161" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:45:13.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:45:13.363" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:45:13.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4162" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:45:13.363" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'A View From the Bridge' (1955) by Arthur Miller. Use with the [arthur-miller] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:41:58.073" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:41:58.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4163" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4164" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US writer Arthur Miller (1915-2005) or about any of his literary works, including plays and essays." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T17:46:03.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2017-11-13T17:58:51.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fate is controlled by the Fates, whom no god can contradict. According to Walter Otto's The Homeric Gods (Walter F. Otto, The Homeric Gods: The Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion. 1929. Translated by Moses Hadas, Thames and Hudson, 1979), the Fates are a holdover from a primordial religious belief preceding the Olympians, including Chronos, Gaia, the Furies, etc. If the Odyssey was composed later, it makes sense for their job to be subsumed by the newcomers, rendering them superfluous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book's back in the library, so I can't find an exact quote, but this is the closest note I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kindly and benevolent to those who remained loyal to them, terrible to any who--whether out of willfulness or necessity--disregarded them, they enclosed the life of the community and of the individual by their unalterable ordinances. They are a multiplicity but belong to the same realm, and they are not only related to one another but all flow together into a single large essence. This we can see in the divinities in which they are represented: all belong to the earth, all have a share in life as in death; whatever their individual traits may be, all may be designated as deities of earth and of death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This marks the sharpest of distinctions from the new gods, who belong neither to the earth nor to the elemental in general and have no dealings with death. But the ancient world of gods was not forgotten even in later times and never wholly lost its power and its sanctity. --p17&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that Otto's approach reads the Homeric epics alongside earlier (and later) religious cult beliefs, so it's more cultural history than straight-up textual analysis--although his readings are in my opinion quite brilliant. For example, if we take (as he does) the gods to be the name given by the Greeks to a certain kind of thought or emotion that comes seemingly unbidden, then Athena, goddess of wisdom, is in &amp;quot;fact&amp;quot; the name for the reassertion of reason over emotion; hence, in the scene where Achilles swallows his anger against Agamemnon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Athena suddenly touched him [Achilles]. The sense of her coming is the victory of reason. This describes her better than long discussions of her nature can do. --p48&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to an altruistic commenter, I can now offer some more evidence from Otto. He does indeed group the Fates with the primordial religion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this plainly indicates that we are dealing with denizens of that primeval world of gods whose earthiness and whose ties to earth distinguish them sharply from the Olympians. Like so many of the figures of that gloomy and austere sphere, the Moirai [Fates] too administer a sacred ordinance and are inexorable avengers of any who transgress it. --p267&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in that religion, the Fates primarily allotted death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Moirai stand, in the sphere of the ancient earth-religion, as dark powers which determine death. Determination of death is the proper sense of the notion of allotment or share which the name Moira implies. --p268&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with the rise of the Olympians, the mechanism by which death is allotted is shifted almost wholly to the Olympians, so that they seem to act in accordance with a necessity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primeval image of the scales is therefore not employed by Homer with its original meaning; it serves merely as a visible expression of the necessity whose moment has now arrived. --p274&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of the actions of the Moirai,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A life which is finished is always [abandoned by its god and] destroyed by the tutelary deity of another life which is opposed to it. --p279&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-14T10:20:15.487" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4063" CreationDate="2017-11-13T18:08:10.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your take. Smerdyakov could only get out of Ivan's shadow by doing what Ivan couldn't, but since his existence was defined by his detestation of Ivan, he had nothing left to live for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T18:08:10.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2478" CreationDate="2017-11-13T19:02:39.973" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not only does it cast doubt on Rodolpho's masculinity, the context in which this quote comes from suggests a lot more of Eddie and his attitude towards Rodolpho. While I quite agree with the word choices Matt highlighted, and his description of those words, some of the implications given are a little restrictive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;looked so sweet there, like an angel – you could kiss him he was so sweet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just read this line (as well as the entire passage of where it came from) as it is before slicing it up, it just reeks of some fishy going on. Why is this description elaborated so concisely? It almost sounds genuine, coming straight from Eddie's own observations of Rodolpho, unaffected by his desperation of ridding him. Yes, you could say the repetition of 'sweet' only emphasises Eddie's attempt on demeaning him, however, the abundance of detail (of Rodolpho's dress making) preceding this just begs to imply a natural progression of Eddie's mindset, of which views Rodolpho as an entity of repressed affection. Moreover, irony can be suggested by the fact he accuses Rodolpho of being homosexual, yet revealing signs of sexual confusion himself, which could be explained by a fear of admission or exposure. I believe this has foundation, especially since it can be supported by Eddie kissing Rodolpho in Act 2 (pg 52 for me), which could be seen as an act of dominance, but the co-existance of both these quotes implies, as an aggregate, the former view. Also, notice Eddie's tone when speaking to Alfieri. His sentences are shorter (2&lt;sup&gt;nd&lt;/sup&gt; quote, note increment of length/clarity of 1&lt;sup&gt;st&lt;/sup&gt; for comparison), and his ideas are detached and unfounded. The fact his mind is in such a mess when conversing with Alfieri allows for slips of true self-revelation and honesty, despite his intention being otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, I think including this interpretation alongside Matt's is important and undermentioned, whilst also not debasing his.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2248" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T19:02:39.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4170" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4171" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" Score="0" Body="&quot;La Fiesta Del Chivo&quot; (English: &quot;The Feast of the Goat&quot;) is a 2000 novel by Mario Vargas Llosa about the assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Use this tag with the [spanish-literature] and [vargas-llosa] tags." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T21:06:57.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4172" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4173" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" Score="0" Body="Mario Vargas Llosa (1936 - present) is a Peruvian author. Use this tag for questions about his works. For works originally written in Spanish, use the [spanish-literature] tag as well." OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T21:09:54.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4136" CreationDate="2017-11-13T21:58:52.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a complex subject, and worthy of a thesis, but I'll attempt to briefly address it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D16%3Acard%3D394&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sarpedon incident&lt;/a&gt; is interesting in that Zeus only &lt;em&gt;contemplates&lt;/em&gt; altering fate.  One could say that his ultimate decision to let Sarpedon die is a confirmation of the inviolability of fate.  In the same way, the gods, most notably Poseidon, may &lt;em&gt;argue&lt;/em&gt; about Odysseus' fate, but ultimately he does return to Ithaca. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find this video elucidating: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJrYdg8wJK0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barry Powell, translator of The Odyssey, explains that fate is in the hands of the Gods and it overrides all circumstances&lt;/a&gt;. (Oxford University Press)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/3291820?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer's Conception of Fate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (James Duffy, The Classical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 8, pp. 477-485) the author asserts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homer does not state that the power of fate is disassociated from Zeus and that it is an independent power in itself.  Anything that is effected by fate in the poems is also accomplished by the divine power which represents the highest deity, Zeus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duffy makes the point, regarding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calypso_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calypso&lt;/a&gt;, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The poet says that it was fated for Odysseus to return to his home, but it was Zeus who ordered his release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duffy concludes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fate or destiny cannot be looked upon in Homer as having its centre in the undefined or in power, nor does it acquire a personality which manifests itself by exercising a power beyond or above the gods.  The prayers of the Homeric heroes are not addressed to fate or to any unseen power, but are directed to Zeus except for a few which are offered to other Olympians.  No character ever expresses a belief in a power called fate by which Zeus and the other Olympians are confronted and which they cannot subordinate.  The only solution for the much-discussed question of fate and destiny in Homer is to interpret it as an abbreviation of &lt;em&gt;Dios &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Dmoi%3Dra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moira&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (divine fate) or &lt;em&gt;Dios &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D*ai)%3Dsa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aisa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (divine fortune) as originating from Zeus and so regard fate and the will of Zeus as identical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duffy specifically addresses the Sarpedon incident. In the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, Duffy's thesis would seem to be confirmed in that Zeus asks Hera whether he should save his son or kill him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, woe is me, for that it is fated that Sarpedon, dearest of men to me, be slain by Patroclus, son of Menoetius! And in twofold wise is my heart divided in counsel as I ponder in my thought whether I shall snatch him up while yet he liveth and set him afar from the tearful war in the rich land of Lycia, or whether I shall slay him now beneath the hands of the son of Menoetius.” &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D16%3Acard%3D394&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iliad, 16.433-438&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual word used is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0058%3Aentry%3Ddama%2Fzw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;δαμάσσω&lt;/a&gt; (damasso) in the first person, singular, subjunctive, as in &quot;should I slay him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In terms of the conception of fate differing in the two works, Duffy comments on this in the opening of his essay:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homer's conception of fate or destiny generally engages the attention of critics and commentators.  It is conceded by them that the poet's conception of fate is the same in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless, you are in very good company in contemplating this subject!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might venture that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fate in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; is primarily driven by Zeus' will&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fate is the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; is primarily driven by Athena's will&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because Athena is the patron of Odysseus, and although Zeus is all-powerful, he states that Odysseus' deliverance derives from Athena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, answered her, and said: “My child, what a word has escaped the barrier of thy teeth! Didst thou not thyself devise this plan, that verily Odysseus might take vengeance on these men at his coming? &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D5%3Acard%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odyssey, 5.21-24&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Athena, the favorite child of Zeus, influences her father to exert her will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personal Thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's telling from a literary standpoint that these questions continually arise, and I'm not sure the ambiguity would have been unintended.  Literature is generally strengthened by ambiguity in that different minds over many generations can interpret the work in different ways. Thus, ambiguity may be understood as a strategy to kindle and sustain interest--it serves the function of raising questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that Homer has subversive elements.  While the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; reinforce the power of the gods, and of Zeus in particular, the works also undermine the gods in reducing their dignity (the gods are subject to the same foibles as humans, and do not always behave well,) while elevating the dignity of humanity (Hector, Andromache, Priam, Patroclus, Achilles) by showing mortals at their noblest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly Homer was undermining the power of fate by showing it is subject to the will of Zeus, but also making the point that fate is capricious in that it is a function of the whims of the gods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-13T23:42:20.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-13T23:42:20.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9138" CreationDate="2017-11-15T06:37:31.503" Score="5" ViewCount="759" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, natural means of reproduction are no longer necessary and most of the population is sterile. Why would the government choose to have some people remain fertile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible reason I have speculated is that it could improve the economy through the purchasing and usage of contraceptives, but then why not make everyone fertile?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2469" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T23:24:29.747" Title="In Brave New World, why are some people not sterile?" Tags="&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3594" CreationDate="2017-11-15T09:07:31.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea is obviously one expression of God as he is in the context of Narnia. So Narnia is another world that God (or the Emperor-beyond-the-sea as He is called here) is lord of, where He has made Himself known to the inhabitants and sent part of Himself in the form of Aslan for their redemption. Judging from your question,  I assume you have not read all seven of the Narnian chronicles- the &lt;em&gt;Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; clarify this point very well. In the former book, King Caspian and his crew take the boat through the Eastern Ocean (that's the sea) searching for the end of the world and some other interesting items. Here comes the kicker, beyond the unexplored Eastern Ocean and the end of the world lies Aslan's Country, where the Emperor-beyond-the-sea resides. &lt;strong&gt;Aslan's country and the land of the Emperor-beyond-the-sea are one and the same&lt;/strong&gt;, it's just that we the readers know Aslan better and will more readily comprehend this otherworldly place if we associate it with him and not the more mysterious Emperor, hence the name and the confusion there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2470" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T10:30:15.937" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T10:30:15.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3592" CreationDate="2017-11-15T09:12:46.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The emperor-over-the-sea is the Narnian equivalent of the Father of the holy Christian trinity and Aslan is of course the son. The emperor acts indirectly through Aslan and is in that sense extremely active. Aslan is always doing something even if it doesn't look like it and by extension, the emperor is always doing something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2470" LastActivityDate="2017-11-15T09:12:46.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4179" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4185" CreationDate="2017-11-15T21:05:09.593" Score="6" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I read the book &lt;em&gt;The Wonderful Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt;, but Wikipedia confirms my memory of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the four protagonists appear individually before the Wizard, he has a different appearance for each of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Scarecrow sees a beautiful woman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Tin Woodsman sees a monster&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Cowardly Lion sees a ball of fire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are all jumbled.  It was the Scarecrow who was afraid of fire, the Woodsman who could not love, and the Lion who was afraid of monsters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there a purpose to this?  Was it meant to imply that the Wizard was an idiot?  Some other symbolism that I just didn't see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2475" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T11:01:11.423" Title="Wizard's appearances in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" Tags="&lt;l-frank-baum&gt;&lt;oz&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4182" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8552" CreationDate="2017-11-14T20:47:36.917" Score="5" ViewCount="1007" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Richard Scarry's Busytown books, Lowly is always sleeping over at Huckle's house. What's the deal with that? Does Lowly have a family of his own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" OwnerDisplayName="TheAsh" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-15T23:45:16.903" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T20:01:12.063" Title="In Richard Scarry's Busytown books, does Lowly Worm have a family?" Tags="&lt;richard-scarry&gt;&lt;busytown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4182" CreationDate="2017-11-16T01:18:39.610" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's not just &amp;quot;sleeping over&amp;quot; at Huckle's house; he actually &lt;em&gt;lives&lt;/em&gt; there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Or2E.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9Or2E.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image from book&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone helps to make breakfast at the Cat family house where I live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems to be a fully integrated (perhaps adopted?) part of the Cat family. See also how Mother Cat treats him like one of her own children:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tQW8d.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tQW8d.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Another image&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He left muddy footprints all over Mother Cat's clean floor. &amp;quot;Lowly,&amp;quot; said Mother Cat. &amp;quot;You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; you should never come into the house with a muddy foot.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had to give Lowly a bath. My! He's a slippery little fellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then she dried him off, and he got dressed for supper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the supper table, everyone ate with his fork. Nobody ever eats with his fingers or his foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After supper, Daddy gave everyone a piggyback ride to bed. Good night, all!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I found these images &lt;a href=&quot;https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/media/images/70128000/jpg/_70128994_lowlyworm2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://static.wixstatic.com/media/cecdc6_9bc1eca9fbd14e08a2ca776e107d4ad5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure exactly which Scarry book they're from.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, Lowly is the only worm ever mentioned in the Busytown books. &lt;strong&gt;His family, as far as we're concerned, is the Cat family.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting, though, that the Richard Scarry books don't invest much effort into striving for consistency. They're meant for young children, not nitpicking adults. For example, Lowly drives a car (in the shape of an apple) and joins a spaceflight to the moon - both activities normally reserved for adults - but he also goes to school together with Huckle, suggesting that he's meant to be a child. So don't expect to be able to analyse Scarry's worldbuilding in great detail; there will be all sorts of details which simply aren't addressed anywhere in the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T01:18:39.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4179" CreationDate="2017-11-16T11:01:11.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wizard wasn't just trying to frighten them; he was trying to appear mysterious and inscrutable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Scarecrow, who didn't have any brains, could not understand a wise and powerful woman. When he told his friends about her, the Tin Woodsman wasn't too worried; he'd been engaged before. But the Wizard appeared to him in a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; shape: a great monster. So not only can the Wizard change shape, species, and gender, he can make himself into something wild which can't be reasoned with. The Lion might have been able to deal with a wild monster, being King of the Beasts, but fire can't be beaten with brute strength &amp;mdash; and now the Wizard can turn himself in to a raw &lt;em&gt;element.&lt;/em&gt; What hope could they have of defeating him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each case, the Wizard was trying to present himself as something intimidating and unknowable, with a dash of fear on the side. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T11:01:11.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-16T19:46:52.667" Score="4" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Babes In Toyland has long been one of my favorite rock bands for the raw power of the music and vocals, but I've always felt as though there is a complexity to the lyrics of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwksFza7T2o&amp;amp;list=RDtWZ9ihZ_TUw&amp;amp;index=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Won't Tell&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, compared to, say, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWZ9ihZ_TUw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruise Violet&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.  Even the simple phrase &quot;Figure out your problem with me is you&quot; is kind of a mind-bender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I won't ever tell on you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ever see me do&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wait forever for you  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Figure out your problem with me is you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I won't be like you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ever see right through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wait forever for you &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Figure out your problem with me is you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I won't ever tell on you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ever see right through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wait forever for you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Figure out your problem with me is you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You come running through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Figure out your problem with me is you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I won't ever tell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/music/preview/Thvci3mr2h3jarchxvnq7kpq6ci?lyrics=1&amp;amp;utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=search&amp;amp;utm_campaign=lyrics&amp;amp;pcampaignid=kp-songlyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Lyrics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts or insights are appreciated, also commentary on the song by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat_Bjelland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bjelland&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T20:06:02.797" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T22:00:30.053" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Won't Tell&quot; by Babes in Toyland?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;babes-in-toyland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4189" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-16T21:42:40.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-16T21:42:40.923" LastActivityDate="2017-11-16T21:42:40.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4190" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-16T21:42:40.923" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American punk rock band Babes in Toyland. Use with the [song-lyrics] tag when needed." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:44:27.403" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:44:27.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4191" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T01:39:10.570" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago I read a novel, set in London, about a poor young man, I believe the son of Jewish immigrants, who started with a pushcart and rose to become a prosperous businessman. I can't remember anything about it except his first sexual experience, when a street-wise girl put her hand down his pants and he was so flustered that he came right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently my son loaned me the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Matter_of_Honour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Matter of Honor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jeffrey Archer, and I told him I'd read it years ago, thinking it was the same book. Of course I was wrong. I only mention this because what's driving me crazy is how I've conflated these books in my memory, and what was the book that I'm trying to recollect.&#xA;I think it was very much an 80's book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2483" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T13:49:29.483" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T13:50:26.457" Title="Young London pushcart-merchant rises to wealth: identify the novel?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2041" CreationDate="2017-11-17T02:34:15.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love Anthony Trollope for his characters but, sadly, he often characterizes Jews in late 19 century London as prosperous but dangerous moneylenders to the elite (&quot;The Eustace Diamonds&quot; and &quot;The Duke's Children&quot;). Some of his least sympathetic characters, who are probably Jewish, although it is not totally clear to the reader, are psychopaths: Ferdinand Lopez (&quot;The Prime Minister&quot;) and Mr. Bonteen (The Pallister Series). One of his most complex and interesting, although reprehensible and abusive, characters is almost certainly Jewish, Mr. Melmotte in &quot;The Way We Live Now,&quot; who rises from neglected orphanhood to great wealth and influence while who also abusing his wife and daughter. But, arguably, one of Trollope's most intelligent and noble and most fleshed-out characters is rumored by some of her peers to be Jewish, and who is definitely the widow to a Jewish businessman (Madame Goesler in the Palliser Series). In his shorter fiction Trollope shows that has sympathy for the historically persecuted Jews while still negatively describing their features and personality traits (&quot;Lotta Scmidt and Other Stories&quot;). Sadly, Trollope, like many authors of his time as well as those who came well before and after, despite being a remarkably empathetic observers of human psychology, was a purveyor of antisemitism. So many authors and artist were, from well before the 1900 century, not the least of which was Shakespeare. Bigotry against Jews was baked in to the European and American culture from the middle ages and before. It's a fact that sullies great authors and poets from times past. Bigotry is apparently a human flaw. See the American authors, many of whom were also anti-Semitic, that partook in anti-African American stereotypes that were prevalent from the 1900 century up until the very recent '60s and '70s, maybe even the '80s, in American culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a happier note, one author who is a standout in a non-bigoted sense is the late 1900 century American author William Dean Howells. Although not taking on or propagating antisemitism, he was clearly against anti-black racism and the anti-labor sentiments of his time. His father ran an abolitionist paper before the Civil War and Howells himself was very explicitly a socialist. He bravely, and uniquely, stood up for men who were put on trial for an anarchist bombing, the Hey Market Affair, which they were clearly innocent of by having alibis showing they weren't even present. Even his best friend, Mark Twain, wouldn't stand up for the men when they were on trial for their lives, basically saying, and I'm paraphrasing, they're radicals who deserve to put to death their non patriotic views, so who cares about saving them. (They were put to death.) At the same time, Howells shines a realistic spotlight on his characters who make clearly racist comments, like the adolescent the daughter in &quot;A Hazard of New Fortunes&quot; who observes that New York is getting &quot;Mickey&quot; (as in too many Irish immigrants) in the late 1800s novel. In the same story, an old Southern gentleman writes a book in defense of slavery after the Civil War that one of Howell's most optimistic and likable characters (Fulkerson) publishes in his new literary magazine. Fulkerson is also sympathetic to the side of greedy capitalists against the striking streetcar workers demanding livable wages. Unlike Trollope, Howells shows his sympathetic characters while not making observations as a narrator that apparently agree with the bigotry of his time.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authors and artists hold a mirror to the attitudes of their times. Some partake in the prejudices, some observe and condemn by observing. As a reader, I love Trollope for being a marvelous story teller and I try to understand, though deplore, his apparent bigotry. But I love Howells more for being an author who was brave and prescient enough to rise above the prejudices of his time to observe characters just as minutely without agreeing with his society's horrible stereotypes on race and class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2485" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T02:34:15.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4195" CreationDate="2017-11-17T02:42:47.533" Score="3" ViewCount="283" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the Jules Verne novel &lt;em&gt;20,000 Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/em&gt; in the translation by Anthony Bonner published in 1962 by Bantam Books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 20 around the 16th paragraph on pg. 163 begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On January 2, we had traveled 11,340 miles, or 5,250 leagues from our point...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did some research and it appears that a league is defined as three miles on land.  Correspondingly a &quot;nautical league&quot; is defined as three nautical miles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, whether or not the author is referring to leagues or nautical leagues (as long as the appropriate mile unit is used) this math doesn't seem correct.  It seems to suggest that a league is just 2.16 miles.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where is my error in this?  Is there an error in the text or have I misunderstood the definition of the unit &quot;league.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2484" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T14:55:11.797" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T14:55:11.797" Title="Distance unit of Leagues and Miles" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;20000-leagues-under-the-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4228" CreationDate="2017-11-17T07:26:51.723" Score="0" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the dictionary &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/epilogue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epilogue&lt;/a&gt; means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a speech or piece of text that is added to the end of a play or book,&#xA;  often giving a short statement about what happens to the characters&#xA;  after the play or book finishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read book sometime I skip epilogue section and finished my reading because it generally have details about what happens to characters and some other details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But last time when I read &lt;strong&gt;1st To Die&lt;/strong&gt; by James Patterson, which is a suspense thriller, important details about the suspense were revealed in the Epilogue. The &quot;end&quot; of the book is really good one, and I was originally going to just finish the book and skip the Epilogue, but for some reason I continued with epilogue section. It turns out that there was a twist in the story and that actual suspense was revealed. If I didn't read epilogue, I would've missed actual reason for killing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it common to reveal suspense or other important plot details in Epilogue section? Or is this just a new trend to add a conclusion in that section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How important Epilogue is relating to the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read a decent number of suspense-thriller books and this is the only example I've seen so far where there was a conclusion added in Epilogue section.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2089" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T14:20:07.507" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T02:20:36.853" Title="Is it common to reveal suspense in epilogue?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;writing-process&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4193" CreationDate="2017-11-17T10:29:26.517" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on this book&lt;/a&gt; says that a league here is something called a &quot;metric&quot; league, or 4 kilometres. With that figure, a league turns out to be 2.16 nautical miles, or 2.485 miles in modern units.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, multiple passages indicate that the 2.16 figure is intentional:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/164/164-h/164-h.htm#chap0201&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part 2, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the 21st to the 23rd of January the Nautilus went at the rate of&#xA;  two hundred and fifty leagues in twenty-four hours, being five hundred&#xA;  and forty miles, or twenty-two miles an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;540/250 = 2.16&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/164/164-h/164-h.htm#chap0204&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part 2, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We had made 16,220 miles, or 7,500 (French) leagues from our&#xA;  starting-point in the Japanese Seas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16220/7500 = 2.1627&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Vingt_mille_lieues_sous_les_mers/Partie_2/Chapitre_11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The original French&lt;/a&gt; shows that the Wikipedia reference, which seems to be some translation, is correct (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mais bientôt ces derniers représentants de la vie animale disparurent,&#xA;  et, au-dessous de trois lieues, le Nautilus dépassa les limites de&#xA;  l’existence sous-marine, comme fait le ballon qui s’élève dans les&#xA;  airs au-dessus des zones respirables. Nous avions atteint une&#xA;  profondeur de &lt;strong&gt;seize mille mètres, — quatre lieues&lt;/strong&gt;, — et les flancs&#xA;  du Nautilus supportaient alors une pression de seize cents&#xA;  atmosphères, c’est-à-dire seize cents kilogrammes par chaque&#xA;  centimètre carré de sa surface !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16000 metres in 4 leagues (a &lt;strong&gt;lieue&lt;/strong&gt; is a league) makes 4 kilometres a league.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2017-11-17T10:29:26.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T14:27:28.437" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In her book, &lt;em&gt;Hermogenes and the Renaissance&lt;/em&gt;, Annabel Patterson cites a paper by George Kustas (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301708?journalCode=viator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘The Function and Evolution of Byzantine Rhetoric’ in Viator, University of California Press, Vol I, 1970&lt;/a&gt;) that discusses the structure of &lt;em&gt;Art of Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her summary of the paper (n6, pp 6/7), Patterson states, without elaborating further, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it was in the sixth century that the body of Hermogenes’ work was divided into the sections now recognised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the question: what was the structure of Hermogenes’ &lt;em&gt;Art of Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt; prior to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2489" LastEditorUserId="2489" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:49:27.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:49:27.173" Title="What was the structure of Hermogenes’ ‘Art of Rhetoric’ prior to the 6th C CE?" Tags="&lt;hermogenes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-17T21:51:19.740" Score="3" ViewCount="2241" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beatrix Potter is much beloved of children and adults alike.  Known mostly for cozy stories like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Rabbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Rabbit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, she almost seemed to break the mold with the lesser known classic &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Two_Bad_Mice#Plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tale of Two Bad Mice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which may well be her most transgressive narrative.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's well known than Hunca Munca and her husband got their names from Fielding's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Thumb&lt;/a&gt;, but what does the character of Hunca Munca represent in context? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2017-11-17T22:07:08.287" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T21:38:33.083" Title="What does Hunca Munca from &quot;The Tale of Two Bad Mice&quot; represent?" Tags="&lt;beatrix-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4213" CreationDate="2017-11-18T16:57:28.733" Score="7" ViewCount="1563" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, there are many references to the afterlife, god, and what the consequences of his actions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My question is this: &lt;em&gt;Did Hamlet's pre-conceptions about the afterlife ultimately affect his choice to kill his uncle or not?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, why did Hamlet not kill Claudius when he had the perfect chance? Why did he then change his mind and wildly shove the rest of the poison in his mouth later? Why does Hamlet not feel the proper motivation to kill him beforehand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thorough explanation would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1549" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T19:21:36.717" Title="How do Hamlet's thoughts and doubts about the afterlife affect him?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4203" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4206" CreationDate="2017-11-18T22:04:21.797" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_You_Give_a_Mouse_a_Cookie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A boy gives a cookie to a mouse. The mouse asks for a glass of milk. He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that the whole point of the book (and its sequels) is that the story is a neverending loop, how can the mouse repeat his actions? Shouldn't he get stopped by the trimming his whiskers part? After all, once they're trimmed, they're trimmed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T22:29:01.790" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T22:42:05.357" Title="How can the mouse in &quot;If You Give A Mouse A Cookie&quot; repeat his actions?" Tags="&lt;laura-numeroff&gt;&lt;if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4204" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-18T22:28:34.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-18T22:28:34.497" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T22:28:34.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4205" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-18T22:28:34.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alan Turing (1912 – 1954), the English mathematician. Specifically, the way his works relate to literature, or their literary analysis." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:53:14.620" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:53:14.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4203" CreationDate="2017-11-18T22:42:05.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mouse whiskers, like those of male humans, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fancymicebreeders.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=15&amp;amp;t=4687&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grow back after having been trimmed or even removed entirely.&lt;/a&gt; So it's possible for the whisker-trimming to take place as part of a never-ending loop: by the time the sequence of events returns to the whisker-trimming stage, the whiskers have grown back enough to be trimmed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reality this would probably take a lot longer than a single day to happen, but the writer is using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;artistic licence&lt;/a&gt; to truncate the circular series of events into a manageably short narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-18T22:42:05.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4209" CreationDate="2017-11-19T01:21:04.223" Score="11" ViewCount="2665" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the many recurring gags in &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; is Sergeant Shadwell's obsession with nipples. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the first questions he asks Newt when recruiting him to the Witchfinder Army is how many nipples he's got.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Aziraphale recruits &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; in turn to help deal with the Adam situation, he asks suspiciously how many nipples this Antichrist has, and Aziraphale lies to convince him to help.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, when he &quot;pops the question&quot; to Madame Tracy, it's not a marriage proposal but the question of how many nipples she's got.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of this obsession with nipples?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it just something to make certain readers snigger? Is there actually a traditional connection between witchcraft and nipples? Something else I'm missing? Many of what seem to be meaningless jokes in &lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; have actually turned out to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3621/is-the-name-crowley-in-good-omens-a-reference-to-the-famous-occultist#comment8990_3626&quot;&gt;obscure cultural references&lt;/a&gt;, so I wonder if this is another such case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T06:05:18.937" Title="Why is Sergeant Shadwell obsessed with nipples?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4208" CreationDate="2017-11-19T05:57:12.630" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sergeant Shadwell is looking for one of the traditional signs of witchcraft.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the answer to the question, “Is there actually a traditional connection between witchcraft and nipples” is yes.&#xA;Specifically, it was believed that a witch would often have a &lt;em&gt;familiar&lt;/em&gt;: a demon in the shape of an animal, or an animal bound to their will through magic, or something along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, the witch would grow an additional “witch’s teat,” by which these demons could be fed on blood. This teat could also be used for other satanic purposes. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_mark&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Per Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The witches’ teat is associated with the perversion of maternal power&#xA;by witches in early modern England. The witches’ teat is associated&#xA;with the feeding of witches’ imps or familiars; the witch’s familiar&#xA;supposedly aided the witch in her magic in exchange for nourishment&#xA;(blood) from sacrificial animals or from the witch’s teat. It is&#xA;also where the devil supposedly suckles when he comes at night to bed&#xA;his faithful servants, sometimes impregnating them with his seed. Once&#xA;the devilish half-breed has been conceived, the cambion may only feed&#xA;upon this teat and no other. Folklore suggests that on the 7th day of&#xA;the 7th week of consecutive feeding upon the teat, the cambion would&#xA;grow to adulthood immediately and begin wreaking havoc with a range of&#xA;demonic powers inherited from its supernatural father. However, should&#xA;the ritual be disrupted during the 49-day period, the process has to&#xA;restart all over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the most famous Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, (to whom Shadwell undoubtedly owes a great deal) had a particular fixation on the presence of the “devil’s teat” as a way of identifying witches. Here, for example, Hopkins insists that such teats will be identified by numerous skilled observers, who can rule out any putative natural cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: Many poore People are condemned for having a Pap, or Teat about&#xA;them, whereas many People (especially antient People) are, and have&#xA;been a long time troubled with naturall wretts on severall parts of&#xA;their bodies and other naturall excressencies, as Hemerodes, Piles,&#xA;Childbearing, &amp;amp;c. and these shall be judged only by one man alone and&#xA;a woman, and so accused or acquitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Answ&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parties so judging can justifie their skill to any, and shew good&#xA;reasons why such markes are not meerly naturall, neither that they can&#xA;happen by any such naturall cause as is before expressed, and for&#xA;further answer for their private judgements alone, it is most false&#xA;and untrue, for never was any man tryed by search of his body, but&#xA;commonly a dozen of the ablest men in the parish or else where, were&#xA;present, and most commonly as many ancient skilfull matrons and&#xA;midwives present when the women are tryed, which marks not only he,&#xA;and his company attest to be very suspitious, but all beholders, the&#xA;skilfulest of them, doe not approve of them, but likewise assent that&#xA;such tokens cannot in their judgements proceed from any the above&#xA;mentioned Causes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Discovery of Witches&lt;/em&gt;, Matthew Hopkins&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various other objections that Hopkins addresses in this work, many of which center around the use of the “devil’s teat” to identify witches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T06:05:18.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T09:36:38.243" Score="3" ViewCount="640" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do have an idea of what Whitman is telling in the last stanza and the whole poem but what confuses me is the usage of the word &quot;spheres&quot; in the second stanza of &quot;A Noiseless Patient Spider&quot;. A thorough explanation of the usage and the meaning of the word is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have given the poem below:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Noiseless Patient Spider&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;BY WALT WHITMAN&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A noiseless patient spider,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And you O my soul where you stand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2493" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T10:25:21.030" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T12:30:34.803" Title="Usage of the word &quot;spheres&quot; in &quot;A Noiseless Patient Spider&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4210" CreationDate="2017-11-19T12:30:34.803" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;From context, I'd take this to be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;celestial spheres&lt;/a&gt;, an old cosmological idea that originated in antiquity. Briefly, each planet, including the sun and moon, where thought to inhabit their own sphere, while all stars were fixed in the outmost sphere (and God's heaven being placed beyond the stars). The spheres were invisible, but at least in the some schools of thought, they were thought to make a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musica_universalis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;music&lt;/a&gt;. They were a commonplace in medieval cosmological thought, and are a part of the cosmological vision in Dante's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradiso_(Dante)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paradisio&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. They are thus a concept both related to a Christian view of the Heavens, and the actual celestial objects, which fits nicely with the rest of Whitman's poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the spheres themselves, and the &quot;music of the spheres&quot; survived in mainly poetical contexts after they had been dismissed by science, and you can still find occasional references to them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T12:30:34.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-19T12:50:34.817" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dog_of_Flanders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dog of Flanders&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is popular in Japan and known as a very sad story. However, I heard that this story is about a loser and isn't very popular in Western countries. Is this true that it's less popular in Western countries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2495" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-19T13:15:11.197" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:57:02.863" Title="Was the book &quot;A Dog of Flanders&quot; less popular in Western countries than in Japan?" Tags="&lt;a-dog-of-flanders&gt;&lt;ouida&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4201" CreationDate="2017-11-19T19:21:36.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hamlet wants revenge for his father's murder. If he kills Claudius at the moment he's praying, Hamlet thinks, Claudius's soul will be pure and he'll be forgiven, and can therefore get into Heaven. King Hamlet died without a final confession/absolution/sacrament etc. and so his soul is wandering in Limbo. (I think that's the correct theological interpretation, but feel free to correct me if I have the doctrine wrong.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet therefore wants to wait until Claudius is &quot;dirty&quot; again spiritually speaking so that his death will send him to Hell, or at least keep him out of Heaven. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, stabbing Claudius while he's praying is pretty cold-blooded. Making him drink the poison after Hamlet has watched Laertes die from the poison on the blade meant for Hamlet &amp;mdash; and put there BY Claudius &amp;mdash; is a rash act done much more in anger, and is vengeance for Laertes and the attempted murder of Hamlet as well (not to mention the death of Ophelia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Hamlet is way more pissed at the end of the play than he is in that moment when he comes across Claudius quietly praying. His opinion of the afterlife is not the only deciding factor staying his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-11-19T19:21:36.717" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4212" CreationDate="2017-11-19T20:11:21.107" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer does not attempt to judge the book's popularity in Western countries in general, but in Flanders, where the story is set, and where I come from. (Antwerp is in Flanders.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel was published in English in 1872 by Marie Louise de la Ramée (using the pseudonym Ouida). I never heard of her while studying English literature at university. The first time I heard about the story was through the comic strip adaptation in the Belgian/Flemish series &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_and_Suzy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suske en Wiske&lt;/a&gt;, in an album named &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Het_dreigende_dinges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Het dreigende dinges&lt;/a&gt; (Dutch for &quot;the threatening thing&quot;; Willy Vandersteen, who invented the series, liked alliterations in titles). It was only after the publication of this comic strip that &lt;em&gt;A Dog of Flanders&lt;/em&gt; was translated into Dutch (in 1987). (&quot;Suske en Wiske&quot; is one of the most popular comic strip series in Flanders; you could not grow up in Flanders after the 1950s without knowing Suske en Wiske.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this, you could still come across articles such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://zoeken.gent.bibliotheek.be/detail/Jan-Corteel/Vlaanderen-en-Antwerpen-ontdekken-na-meer-dan/Artikel-uit-tijdschrift/?itemid=%7Clibrary%2Fmarc%2Fvlacc%7C1254313&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Vlaanderen en Antwerpen ontdekken na meer dan honderd jaar hun geheime ambassadeur in Japan en Korea : een hond van Vlaanderen&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (sorry, just a library catalogue entry). The title means &quot;After more than 100 years Flanders and Antwerp discover their secret ambassador in Japan and Korea: a dog of Flanders&quot;; the title implicitly suggests the relative obscurity of the story in Flanders in the early 1990s. I think the story is still quite obscure for people who haven't read the Suske en Wiske comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.fr/Chien-Flandres-Traduit-conte-No%C3%ABl-ebook/dp/B06XVDFS2X/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French translation&lt;/a&gt; of the book (possibly self published by the translator) but I have not been able to find a German or a Spanish translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T18:57:02.863" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:57:02.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4353" CreationDate="2017-11-20T07:10:35.160" Score="5" ViewCount="524" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the Mandible's family genealogy as to have a reference while reading the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is &lt;a href=&quot;http://a.co/awec8G5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047&lt;/em&gt; by Lionel Shriver&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not an English native reader so having this would help me to focus on the story.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If anyone knows where to find one it would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2503" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T08:54:18.947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:53:58.347" Title="What is the Mandibles family tree in &quot;The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047&quot;?" Tags="&lt;the-mandibles-a-family-2029-2047&gt;&lt;lionel-shriver&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3110" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:41:41.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because O-san was told to yank the rice-cake out of the cat's mouth, though she wanted to see the cat dancing longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Japanese sentence is 御三は御馳走を半分食べかけて夢から起された時のように、気のない顔をして. I think &quot;listless&quot; and &quot;half-hearted&quot; are appropriate for 気のない rather than &quot;vacant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2495" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T14:48:05.767" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T14:48:05.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4219" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4220" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" Score="0" Body="For questions about Monica Ali, the Bangladeshi-born British writer, or about any of her literary works, most famously the novel Brick Lane." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T10:56:55.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4221" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4222" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2003 novel Brick Lane by Monica Ali. Use together with the [monica-ali] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T10:57:21.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4199" CreationDate="2017-11-20T12:00:04.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;First up, it is likely that Hunca Munca's name is not relevant to her role in the story. According to her biographer, Judy Taylor, Potter rescued two mice from a trap and decided to name them and keep them as pets. The development of the tale came some months later, when Potter observed that the female mouse kept a tidy nest and, when given the opportunity to explore, chose to &quot;steal&quot; a small doll rather than doll's house food. Given that the genesis of the story came from the mouse's behaviour, well after she was named, it is possible there is no strong link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not mean that Hunca Munca's role is not of interest to further analysis. While it might seem odd to go digging for literary meaning in a children's tale, many such stories offer an underlying moral which is worthy of investigation. With an older book such as this there is also added historical interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most striking things about the tale is that the mice are &quot;bad&quot; - transgressive, as the OP notes. They are not merely bad in their destruction of the doll's house: there are also suggestions they are bad parents. They live in a squalid hole and have a large number of children. In contrast the doll's house that they enter is clean, polite and refined. The response of the mice to this is impulsive aggression and theft. The things they choose to steal are also instructive: they take food and bedding, but reject more refined objects like a bird cage and a book case. It is not hard to view this as a metaphor in which the mice represent the working class &quot;vermin&quot; and the dolls a more genteel middle or upper class society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Victorian era in which Potter lived was a time when there was much awareness and debate of the value of social responsibility. A number of Potter's tales, including &lt;em&gt;Mrs Tittlemouse&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Peter Rabbit&lt;/em&gt;, suggest that Potter came down firmly against social help in favour of individual responsibility. The &lt;em&gt;Two Bad Mice&lt;/em&gt; break the taboo of ownership by entering and stealing from the house. They take responsibility for this of their own choice, through cleaning and paying for the damage they have done. It is also interesting that the nurse wants to punish them in a far more severe manner, by killing them in a trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where, then does Hunca Munca, in particular fit in to this? Her role in the story is almost entirely as a servant and care-giver. She chooses to steal bedding from the house. In recompense, she chooses to clean - every morning - while Tom Thumb gives money once per year. This is a strong reflection of Victorian social stereotypes. A woman is interested in children and in cleanliness, every day. A man, meanwhile, can earn money and enjoys the flexibility and power this provides. In this there is a glimmer of a comparison with her namesake from Tom Thumb: both are passive, servile, happy to accept a fate others have assigned to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to place the reactionary morals of Two Bad Mice against Potter's life. She faced discrimination from the establishment by choosing to marry down in class and, later, by conducting her own business affairs. Quite why Potter chose to re-enforce the very morals that her actions fought against is a matter for conjecture, but it's hard to read her tales in any other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Taylor, Judy. Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Kutzer, M. Daphne. Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T21:38:33.083" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T21:38:33.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3595" CreationDate="2017-11-20T14:24:04.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quote is from his short story &lt;em&gt;A Rose For Emily&lt;/em&gt;. The full quote is: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue&quot;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to give the whole sentence, because the final words &quot;of that pallid hue&quot; give the answer: it's e) a drowning victim. None of the others are likely to be pale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;motionless&quot; nature of the water indicates the static, unchanging nature of the life she lived, as does the comparison to a &quot;long submerged&quot; corpse. Her inability to change has, in effect, rendered her already dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence is rhetorical because in the context of the sentence, Miss Emily is still alive. Comparing her with a corpse is, therefore, a rhetorical device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of metaphor is also instructive. Death and decay are the central themes of &lt;em&gt;A Rose For Emily&lt;/em&gt;. They recur as a rhetorical device throughout the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-20T14:29:04.517" LastActivityDate="2017-11-20T14:29:04.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4194" CreationDate="2017-11-20T23:49:02.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it common to reveal suspense or other important plot details in Epilogue section?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is not very common in my considerable reading experience but not unheard of.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How important is Epilogue relating to the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epilogue is an integral part of the text of the literary work, unlike post-text sections like Author's note and Acknowledgements, and it is entirely possible and plausible that an important story element is presented in the epilogue, as you found out yourself.  It depends on how the author wants to conclude their novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the great literary novel &quot;Possession&quot; by A.S.Byatt, something very important is revealed on the very last page, though it is actually labeled 'post script' rather than 'epilogue.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read a number of other novels whose names I cannot recollect right away, where information introduced in the epilogue 'twisted' or clarified the meaning of the ending. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, a novel does not end before the epilogue. So I think a reader who skips the epilogue and 'finishes' the reading early,  runs the very real risk of sometimes never getting to know some important piece of information that might even possibly change the complexion of how we understand and recollect the entire work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;please be sure to read the epilogue every time OK!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="2159" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T02:20:36.853" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T02:20:36.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4229" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4230" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American postmodern novelist Tim O'Brien." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:09:18.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4231" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4232" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" Score="0" Body="For questions about Ursula Le Guin's science-fiction feminist novel The Left Hand of Darkness." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:10:13.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4233" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4234" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" Score="0" Body="For questions about Tim O'Brien's 1990 collection of short stories on the Vietnam War, The Things they Carried. Use this tag with the tim-o-brien tag." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:12:27.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4235" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4236" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" Score="0" Body="For question on Beatrix Potter's illustrated children's story The Tale of Mr. Tod. Use this tag with the beatrix-potter tag." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:14:20.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4237" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:15:43.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:15:43.230" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:15:43.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4238" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:15:43.230" Score="0" Body="For questions about James Joyce's 1922 modernist novel &quot;Ulysses&quot;. Use this with the [james-joyce] tag." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:02:55.817" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:02:55.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4239" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4240" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" Score="0" Body="For questions about Susanna Clarke's 2004 fantasy novel Jonathan Strange &amp; Mr Norrell. Use this with the susanna-clarke tag." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:17:17.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4241" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:18:29.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T14:18:29.427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T14:18:29.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4242" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T14:18:29.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist and academic Toni Morrison (born 1931) and her works. Morrison's novels include The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987)." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:10.777" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:10.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4243" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:23:21.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:23:21.957" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:23:21.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4244" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:23:21.957" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the work of the German author Thomas Mann (1875 – 1955), who wrote novels such as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, novellas such as Death in Venice, essays and other works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:43:34.673" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:43:34.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4245" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:25:15.470" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:25:15.470" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:25:15.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4246" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:25:15.470" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Honoré de Balzac's novel Le Père Goriot / Father Goriot (1819). Use this tag with the [honore-de-balzac] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:39:38.877" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:39:38.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4247" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:27:14.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:27:14.657" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:27:14.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4248" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:27:14.657" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Virginia Woolf's experimental novel The Waves (1931). Use this tag with the [virginia-woolf] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:38:29.123" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:38:29.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4249" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:29:29.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:29:29.137" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:29:29.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4250" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:29:29.137" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Jules Verne's 1871 science fiction novel 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea' ('Vingt Mille Lieues sous les merse). Use this tag with the [jules-verne] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T16:43:12.630" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T16:43:12.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4251" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:30:44.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:30:44.823" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:30:44.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4252" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:30:44.823" Score="0" Body="Questions related to works whose authorship is unknown or doubtful." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:40:35.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:40:35.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4253" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:32:19.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:32:19.993" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:32:19.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4254" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:32:19.993" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1872 novel A Dog of Flanders published by Marie Louise de la Ramée under the pseudonym Ouida. Use this tag with the [ouida] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:37:57.107" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:37:57.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4255" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:35:08.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:35:08.890" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:35:08.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4256" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:35:08.890" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the French monk, physician, humanist and author François Rabelais († 1553), who is best remembered for his series of novels about Gargantua and Patagruel." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:43:44.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:43:44.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4257" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:36:38.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:36:38.047" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:36:38.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4258" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:36:38.047" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novels about Gargantua and Pantagruel by the sixteenth-century French author François Rabelais. Use this tag with the [francois-rabelais] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T20:00:55.297" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T20:00:55.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4259" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:38:36.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:38:36.847" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:38:36.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4260" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:38:36.847" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Thomas Mann's 1901 novel Buddenbrooks. Use this tag with the [thomas-mann] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-21T19:40:22.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-21T19:40:22.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4274" CreationDate="2017-11-21T19:44:54.023" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; on C.P. Snow's article/lecture/book &lt;em&gt;The Two Cultures&lt;/em&gt;, about the divide between science and the humanities in academia. The Wikipedia page seems to have a contradiction, and I haven't got the original text to check, so I'm not sure which is right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, at the beginning of the Wikipedia page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Its thesis was that &quot;the intellectual life of the whole of western society&quot; was split into the titular two cultures – namely the sciences and the humanities – and that this was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then later on, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snow's Rede Lecture condemned the British educational system as having, since the Victorian era, over-rewarded the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) at the expense of scientific and engineering education [...] By contrast, Snow said, German and American schools sought to prepare their citizens equally in the sciences and humanities, and better scientific teaching enabled these countries' rulers to compete more effectively in a scientific age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote marks around &quot;the intellectual life of the whole of western society&quot; suggests it's a direct quote, but surely Germany and America are also part of western society, and yet Snow apparently held them up as better examples than Britain in this respect. What was he really saying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did &quot;The Two Cultures&quot; condemn Britain specifically, or the west in general?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:30:13.767" Title="Was C.P. Snow's &quot;The Two Cultures&quot; about Britain specifically or western culture in general?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;c-p-snow&gt;&lt;the-two-cultures&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11669" CreationDate="2017-11-22T06:13:33.773" Score="6" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Beerbohm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Max Beerbohm&lt;/a&gt;'s 1916 novelette &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enoch_Soames&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Enoch Soames&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (available &lt;em&gt;e.g.&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/760&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;) is the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil for the privilege of spending an afternoon in a library (the reading room of the British Museum) 100 years in the future, in the year 1997, so that he can see how he is remembered by posterity. (It wasn't worth it.) The author and narrator, Beerbohm, questions his friend Soames upon his return from the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That's right. Try to remember everything. Eat a little more bread. What did the reading-room look like?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Much as usual,&quot; he at length muttered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Many people there?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Usual sort of number.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;What did they look like?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Soames tried to visualise them. &quot;They all,&quot; he presently remembered, &quot;looked very like one another.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;My mind took a fearsome leap. &quot;All dressed in Jaeger?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Yes. I think so. Greyish-yellowish stuff.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;A sort of uniform?&quot; He nodded. &quot;With a number on it, perhaps?—a number on a large disk of metal sewn on to the left sleeve? DKF 78,910—that sort of thing?&quot; It was even so. &quot;And all of them—men and women alike—looking very well-cared-for? very Utopian? and smelling rather strongly of carbolic? and all of them quite hairless?&quot; I was right every time. Soames was only not sure whether the men and women were hairless or shorn. &quot;I hadn't time to look at them very closely,&quot; he explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soames has copied out a passage from a book, which tells us a little more about life in that fictional future (spelling reform and socialism):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From p. 234 of &lt;em&gt;Inglish Littracher 1890–1900&lt;/em&gt;, bi T. K. Nupton, published bi th Stait, 1992:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Fr. egzarmpl, a riter ov th time, naimd Max Beerbohm, hoo woz stil alive in th twentieth senchri, rote a stauri in wich e pautraid an immajnari karrakter kauld 'Enoch Soames'—a thurd-rait poit hoo beleevz imself a grate jeneus an maix a bargin with th Devvl in auder ter no wot posterriti thinx ov im! It iz a sumwot labud sattire but not without vallu az showing hou seriusli the yung men ov th aiteen-ninetiz took themselvz. Nou that the littreri profeshn haz bin auganized az a department of publik servis, our riters hav found their levvl an hav lernt ter doo their duti without thort ov th morro. 'Th laibrer iz werthi ov hiz hire,' an that iz aul. Thank hevvn we hav no Enoch Soameses amung us to-dai!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question:&lt;/strong&gt; The world of 1997 described here—bald heads, uniforms with numeric badges, and the rest—is obviously meant as parody. Can you identify the specific work(s) of utopian or visionary literature that most likely inspired it? (I'm not sure if we should be looking at works that were current in 1916 when the story was published, or in 1897 when it is set.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T08:22:19.210" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T20:08:25.403" Title="Vision of the future in Max Beerbohm's &quot;Enoch Soames&quot;" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;max-beerbohm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4267" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4268" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1976 speculative fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Use together with the [marge-piercy] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T13:43:17.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4269" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4270" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US writer Marge Piercy or about any of her literary works, which include both poetry and novels." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T13:44:08.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3524" CreationDate="2017-11-22T15:11:16.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should first ask who cares &quot;in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!&quot; Who could the narrator know cares? The only person the narrator could know this about is the narrator himself. And if the narrator is talking about himself, it's a rhetorical statement; he is really reminding himself that he &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; be attracted to the conductor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept this interpretation, it's a subtle signal that Nick Carraway is gay or bisexual. There are other signals of this in the book, some less subtle. See this essay: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wattpad.com/58007976-gay-implications-in-the-great-gatsby%27s-nick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gay Implications in The Great Gatsby's Nick Carraway&lt;/a&gt;. At the time that Fitzgerald wrote, it was difficult or impossible to get a novel published if it discussed homosexuality in more direct terms, so clues like this were the only way to convey this information to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T13:50:30.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T13:50:30.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4272" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:21:53.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T18:21:53.583" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:21:53.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4273" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:21:53.583" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the English novelist Marie Louise de la Ramée (1839 – 1908), who published her works using the pseudonym Ouida." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T20:04:04.203" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T20:04:04.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4261" CreationDate="2017-11-22T18:30:13.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;He says that England is an exaggerated case of the general view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...this cultural divide is not just an English phenomenon: it&#xA;  exists all over  the western world. But it probably seems at its&#xA;  sharpest in England, for two reasons. One is our fanatical belief in&#xA;  educational specialisation, which is much more deeply ingrained in us&#xA;  than in any country in the world, west or east. The other is our&#xA;  tendency to let our social forms crystallise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.csus.edu/indiv/m/mayesgr/sciencehumanvalues/twoculturessnow.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T18:30:13.767" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4275" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-22T19:35:13.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-22T19:35:13.080" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T19:35:13.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4276" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-22T19:35:13.080" Score="0" Body="Questions related to &quot;The Two Cultures&quot; by the novelist and scientist C. P. Snow, which was published as a New Statesman article in 1956, delivered as a lecture in 1959, and published as a book in 1963. Use this tag with the [c-p-snow] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T10:53:45.900" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T10:53:45.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4103" CreationDate="2017-11-22T20:13:54.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a couple of reasons why a web comic might become published:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A single, physical, consolidated book is easier to read, rather than going from page to page to read a panel.  It's also easier to take to different places to enjoy, rather than having a desktop screen or laptop (old-school e-readers wouldn't handle this material well while newer kindle fires could).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another source of revenue. People that REALLY enjoy a web comic might find it as a way of contributing money to the author to buy the physical book.  People like to receive things for money, so it's a good way to support the artist and still get something in return.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2017-11-22T20:13:54.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4278" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8486" CreationDate="2017-11-22T22:26:01.997" Score="7" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1986, and, along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, is regarded as the catalyst for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Age_of_Comic_Books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dark Age of Comics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More violent than previous mass market titles, these works also brought more psychological depth to the characters, which is often a function of past trauma and how it expresses itself.  (i.e. characters whose response to trauma is hyper-violent.  Compare to, say, Peter Parker, who also had a family member murdered, but avoids killing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mention the Dark Knight primarily because &lt;em&gt;The Punisher&lt;/em&gt; (1987) can be seen as a version of Miller's archetype--possessing no super-powers, only superior skill, and strategy, and motivated to kill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I read the original &lt;em&gt;Punisher&lt;/em&gt; series as a lad, but I recall the psychological template was conveyed as the rationale/motivation for Punisher's lack of mercy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is definitely a major theme in the Netflix series, in the tradition of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Blood&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Blood&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1982), which created the foundation for the Rambo archetype, and was one of the early post-Vietnam War films to deal with the psychological impact of war and violence. See also: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Home_(1978_film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coming Home&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1978) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deer_Hunter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Deerhunter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1978)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't recall Marvel title heroes before Punisher who were killers, and although the Punisher character had made appearances in Marvel series prior to getting it's own title, the formal launching of &lt;em&gt;The Punisher&lt;/em&gt; title would seem to be a direct response to the new landscape in comics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interested in thoughts on the subject, particularly in relation to the evolution of the modern costumed hero, and any comments by the authors, publisher or critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T00:57:27.303" Title="Was the Marvel &quot;Punisher&quot; title a response to Frank Miller's &quot;The Dark Knight Returns&quot;?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-23T09:09:13.137" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the proper, &lt;strong&gt;published&lt;/strong&gt;, translation in the only AFAIK existing English version of the book S.N.U.F.F. by Victor Pelevin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grim uploaded the germ of his perplexity and sadness in the &lt;em&gt;creative&#xA;  unit&lt;/em&gt;, touched axes &quot;heartier&quot;, &quot;sincerier&quot; and then the sub-axis&#xA;  &quot;salinger&quot;, which popped in the terminal sectors of the intimate&#xA;  afterburner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This software takes into consideration everything ever said by humans, all the countless choice of meanings they made during centuries as were retained in information archives. It was as if Grim's fingers controlled an army of dead souls, who would move word cubicles for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(found about somewhere about the beginning of the last fifth of the book; but Pelevin mentions this device many times throughout the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: while back in 2012 this device seemed a total fiction, today &lt;a href=&quot;https://datascience.stackexchange.com/questions/24878/gans-possible-for-text-as-well&quot;&gt;there are recent scientific methods&lt;/a&gt; indeed allowing generating meaningful texts &lt;em&gt;with a design to perfect this routines&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1693" LastEditorUserId="1693" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T12:32:11.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T12:32:11.913" Title="What is the creative device naming used for text generation in Pelevin's S.N.U.F.F.?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;victor-pelevin&gt;&lt;s-n-u-f-f&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3980" CreationDate="2017-11-23T13:25:09.420" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could say that Thomas Hardy's work became more miserable as time went on; however, this is not explicitly true as even his earliest work was riddled with tragedy, including &lt;em&gt;A Pair of Blue Eyes&lt;/em&gt;, Hardy's third book, written before his fourth book &lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;, in which the narrative's heroine, Elfride, is rejected by her fiancé and dies in childbirth (after marrying another man, simply because he found out that she had been engaged to another man before him). This is clearly more heavy on tragedy than the latter book, so it is questionable whether his literature got progressively more tragic; I would say no as it is not consistently worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This underlying obsession with brutal realism and tragedy stems from his own deeply unhappy life, specifically his doomed marriage to &lt;a href=&quot;http://spartacus-educational.com/JgiffordEH.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emma Gifford&lt;/a&gt;. Initially they were happy together, but Emma was a higher social class to the poorer Hardy, which caused a rift in their relationship as Emma began to 'look down on him', including his novels, allegedly saying they were only fit for servants to read. Hardy was so deeply unhappy that he wrote in one statement that &lt;em&gt;&quot;a marriage should be dissolvable as soon as it becomes a cruelty to either of the parties - being then essentially and morally no marriage.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; This acted as inspiration to many of the terrible relationships in his novels, such as Bathsheba's conflict in choosing between the three suitors and Tess and Alec's toxic marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1912, Emma died, and Hardy was driven almost mad with grief (strange, considering their mutual disdain for each other when she was alive) and became the subject for many of his poems, exemplified in &lt;em&gt;The Voice&lt;/em&gt; with the grief-stricken opening line of &quot;Woman much missed how you call to me, call to me&quot;, and his tragic novels. However, the novels written before he met Emma including &lt;em&gt;A Pair of Blue Eyes&lt;/em&gt;, were also tragic, which mars the theory that it was influenced by his personal life. Nevertheless, it can definitely be said that overall his literary subject matter was drawn from his relationship with Emma and her later death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information about Thomas Hardy's personal life, take a look at Claire Tomalin's &lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T20:31:48.290" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T20:31:48.290" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4281" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:56:03.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T14:56:03.800" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T14:56:03.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4282" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:56:03.800" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1958 novel Things Fall Apart by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. Use this tag with the [chinua-achebe] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:45:52.903" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:45:52.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4283" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:57:43.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T14:57:43.983" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T14:57:43.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4284" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:57:43.983" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides by the American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. Use this tag with the [jeffrey-eugenides] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:45:46.430" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:45:46.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4285" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:58:53.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T14:58:53.417" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T14:58:53.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4286" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T14:58:53.417" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American writer Jeffrey Eugenides, or about any of his literary works, e.g. novels such as The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:12:20.953" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:12:20.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4287" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:00:36.717" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:00:36.717" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:00:36.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4288" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:00:36.717" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1897 science fiction novel The War of the Worlds by the English author H. G. Wells. Use this tag with the [h-g-wells] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:45:56.997" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:45:56.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4289" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:01:17.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:01:17.063" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:01:17.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4290" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:01:17.063" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English author H. G. Wells (1866 – 1946) or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:10:37.877" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:10:37.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4291" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:14:22.880" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:14:22.880" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:14:22.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4292" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:14:22.880" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2005 novel The Accidental by the Scottish author Ali Smith. Use this tag with the [ali-smith] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:26:49.167" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:26:49.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4293" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:14:54.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:14:54.730" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:14:54.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4294" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:14:54.730" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Scottish author Ali Smith or any of her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T15:26:45.357" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T15:26:45.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-23T15:38:56.213" Score="2" ViewCount="943" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &quot;Boom Like That&quot; contains the following verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or my name is not Kroc, it's Kroc with a K&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like crocodile but not spelt that way now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Mark-knopfler-boom-like-that-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The lyrics are available online&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Kroc spelt with a K? It seems like a random thing to say, but that particular phrase comes up several times during the song, so I assume it's important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="648" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T16:37:22.280" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T22:17:04.397" Title="Why is Kroc spelt with a K in Mark Knopfler's &quot;Boom Like That&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4296" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:04:35.647" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Stoker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bram Stoker&lt;/a&gt; (1847 – 1912) is best known for the novel &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt; (1897) but published a dozen other novels and a number of short stories. His novels are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snake%27s_Pass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Snake's Pass&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1890)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven Golden Buttons&lt;/em&gt; (1891)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Watter%27s_Mou%27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Watter's Mou'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1895)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shoulder_of_Shasta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shoulder of Shasta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1895)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1897)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Betty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Miss Betty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1898)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystery_of_the_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystery of the Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1902)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jewel_of_Seven_Stars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Jewel of Seven Stars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1903)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_(Stoker_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1905)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Athlyne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lady Athlyne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1908)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_the_Shroud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lady of the Shroud&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1909)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lair_of_the_White_Worm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lair of the White Worm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1911)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two short story collections were published during his lifetime:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Sunset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Under the Sunset&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1881)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowbound:_The_Record_of_a_Theatrical_Touring_Party&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1908).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T19:20:23.207" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T19:20:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4297" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:04:35.647" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Irish author Bram Stoker (1847 – 1912) and his works. Stoker is best known for the novel *Dracula* (1897)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T19:20:23.207" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T19:20:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4298" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:06:28.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:06:28.740" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:06:28.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4299" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:06:28.740" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1897 Gothic novel Dracula by the Irish author Bram Stoker. Use this tag with the [bram-stoker] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:28:21.283" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:28:21.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4300" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:08:18.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:08:18.450" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:08:18.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4301" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:08:18.450" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Italian author Carlo Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini, 1826 – 1890) and his works. Carlo is best known as the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio, from which the iconic puppet originated. Questions about his works should be tagged under [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:18:51.793" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:18:51.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:09:30.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:09:30.630" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:09:30.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:09:30.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) or his life as a writer. " OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:20:06.350" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:20:06.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4304" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:10:15.873" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:10:15.873" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:10:15.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4305" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:10:15.873" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2015 science fiction novella Binti by the American/Nigerian author Nnedi Okorafor. Use this tag with the [nnedi-okorafor] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:28:08.190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:28:08.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4306" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:11:17.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nnedi.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.nnedi.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T20:14:07.797" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T20:14:07.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4307" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:11:17.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor (born 1974) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T20:14:07.797" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T20:14:07.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4295" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:13:02.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Knopfler himself, this song is about Ray Kroc, the entrepreneur who manipulated a small California burger joint away from its two founders and into the McDonalds fast-food empire.&#xA;There's an article about it here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/track-of-the-day-boom-like-that-by-mark-knopfler/513740/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2017/01/track-of-the-day-boom-like-that-by-mark-knopfler/513740/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Knopfler’s portrayal, he’s a guy who sets out to “drown” his competition and does it, shaking hands and smiling all the while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kroc started out selling milkshake mixers to the McDonald brothers, eventually buying them out and aggressively expanding the franchise. Before composing the song, Knopfler read books about Kroc's life and business philosophy. The singer found inspiration in some quotes that were attributed to Kroc. He says, &quot;I remember coming across a quote in a book. It was something like, 'If the opposition is going to drown, put a hose in their mouth.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the business philosophy of Kroc, it could be a play on words, i.e., my name may be Kroc with a K, but I act like a croc spelt with a c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1964" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T22:17:04.397" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T22:17:04.397" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4309" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:14:33.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:14:33.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:14:33.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4310" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:14:33.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about Steven Hall's 2006 debut novel. Use with the [steven-hall] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:24:24.100" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:24:24.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4311" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:15:40.947" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:15:40.947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:15:40.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4312" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:15:40.947" Score="0" Body="For questions about Steven Hall or his works, which include works such as &quot;The Raw Shark Texts&quot;, a novel, and &quot;Crysis 3&quot;, a video game." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:27:14.940" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:27:14.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4313" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:17:00.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:17:00.343" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:17:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4314" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:17:00.343" Score="0" Body="For questions about Henry Reed (1914  – 1986), a British poet, and his works." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:24:18.287" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:24:18.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4315" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:18:30.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:18:30.087" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:18:30.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4316" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:18:30.087" Score="0" Body="For questions about Stanislaw Lem's 1961 book Solaris. Use with the [stanislaw-lem] and the [polish-literature] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:25:02.227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:25:02.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4317" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:19:56.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:19:56.153" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:19:56.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4318" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:19:56.153" Score="0" Body="For questions about Italo Calvino's collection of short stories about the senses, published posthumously. Use with the [italo-calvino] and the [italian-literature] tags." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:24:29.777" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:24:29.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4319" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:22:25.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:22:25.420" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:22:25.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4320" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:22:25.420" Score="0" Body="For questions about spoken word poet Darius Simpson and his works." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:24:58.543" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:24:58.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4321" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:22:45.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:22:45.347" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:22:45.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4322" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:22:45.347" Score="0" Body="For questions about the spoken word poet Scout Bostley and her works." OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:24:51.583" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:24:51.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4323" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:49:22.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:49:22.573" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:49:22.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4324" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:49:22.573" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1894 comedy Candida (published 1898) by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Use this tag with the [george-bernard-shaw] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:08:46.650" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:08:46.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:51:17.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:51:17.970" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:51:17.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:51:17.970" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel Bleak House (1852 – 1853) by the English author Charles Dickens. Use this tag with the [charles-dickens] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:11:02.940" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:11:02.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4327" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:52:39.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:52:39.643" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:52:39.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4328" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:52:39.643" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author and literary critic David Lodge (born 1935) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:08:36.750" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:08:36.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:53:23.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:53:23.800" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:53:23.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:53:23.800" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1883 novel by Carlo Collodi, from which the famous puppet Pinnochio originated. Use this tag with the [carlo-collodi] tag." OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:10:23.307" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:10:23.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:54:21.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:54:21.277" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:54:21.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:54:21.277" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author and activist China Tom Miéville (born 1972) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:10:39.770" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:10:39.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4333" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:55:48.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:55:48.067" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:55:48.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4334" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:55:48.067" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. Use this tag with the [mark-twain] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:08:41.860" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:08:41.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:57:32.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T17:57:32.323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T17:57:32.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T17:57:32.323" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Amy Tan (born 1952) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:10:44.397" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:10:44.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4337" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:01:46.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:01:46.940" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:01:46.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4338" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:01:46.940" Score="0" Body="The compilation of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled within a few centuries of 1000 AD. Also known as Arabian Nights in English, per the title of the original 1706 English-language edition. Use this tag with the [arabic-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="43" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:09:39.480" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:09:39.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4339" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:02:54.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:02:54.313" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:02:54.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4340" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:02:54.313" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian political analyst and philosopher Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (Алекса́ндр Ге́льевич Ду́гин, born 1962) and his work. For his works originally in Russian, please use the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:19:15.870" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:19:15.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4341" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:04:53.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:04:53.790" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:04:53.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4342" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:04:53.790" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the series of spy novels Alex Rider by the British author Anthony Horowitz. Use this tag with the [anthony-horowitz] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:10:29.970" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:10:29.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4343" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:05:35.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:05:35.630" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:05:35.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4344" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:05:35.630" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British author Anthony Horowitz (born 1955) and his works, such as the &quot;The Gatekeepers&quot; and &quot;Alex Rider&quot; series'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:08:31.720" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:08:31.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4345" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:14:05.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:14:05.013" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:14:05.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4346" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:14:05.013" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1980 novel Earthly Powers by the English author Anthony Burgess. Use this tag with the [anthony-burgess] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:37:59.647" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:37:59.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4347" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:15:40.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:15:40.787" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:15:40.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4348" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:15:40.787" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author Edward Morgan Forster (1879 – 1970) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:38:03.413" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:38:03.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4349" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:16:53.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:16:53.863" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:16:53.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4350" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:16:53.863" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1924 novel A Passage to India by the English author E. M. Forster. Use this tag with the [e-m-forster] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:37:55.767" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:37:55.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4351" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:18:56.267" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:18:56.267" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:18:56.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4352" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-23T18:18:56.267" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1989 novel The Joy Luck Club by the American author Amy Tan. Use this tag with the [amy-tan] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-23T18:38:06.993" LastActivityDate="2017-11-23T18:38:06.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4215" CreationDate="2017-11-23T21:30:02.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only part way through. I needed the same help but couldn't find anything out there. So I've drawn my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; this is it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXZGj.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EXZGj.png&quot; alt=&quot;Family tree&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2510" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T13:53:58.347" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T13:53:58.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2361" CreationDate="2017-11-24T03:19:47.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://carlphillipsexpress.wordpress.com/1988/05/14/2020-ad-revelations-of-the-mind-on-the-road-to-utopia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this screenplay&lt;/a&gt;, which starts with residents going about their lives in an attractive street, having dinner etc., but all awaiting the pre-arranged time at which their mob is going to assemble in front of one man's house to throw his family out because they found out he was previously in prison (although not for murder). When the mob confronts the man, he stands his ground and the crowd eventually disperses after some residents agree that what they are doing is wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find the original story (if there is one). Here's a quote from the screenplay (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WILLIAM:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (In a low voice.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You, and this whole homeowner’s association, can go to hell. (Beat, then in a thunderous voice.)I OWN this house. God gave me the strength to survive the past four year in a manmade hell. He also gave me, and my family, the right to live in this house. Any man who tries to take that away from me is going to have to climb over a stinking pile of his neighbor’s bones to do it! You good people are going to have to kill me, here, tonight! Are you ready for that? (Beat.) How about it, Mr. Breydon? Don’t bother to tell ME what is fair. You’re the head man here. You be the first!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The crowd, rocked back on their heels, doesn’t know what to make of this turn of events.&lt;/strong&gt; Behind WILLIAM, framed in the doorway, we see TINA. The sound of the rocking chair can still be heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2513" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T17:01:40.090" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T17:01:40.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T03:28:53.763" Score="0" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Fifty Shades of Grey&lt;/em&gt;. There's one passage that I don't understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I close my eyes and take a deep, purifying breath, trying to recover what’s left of my equilibrium. No man has ever affected me the way  Christian Grey has, and I cannot fathom why. Is it his looks? His civility? Wealth? Power? I don’t understand my irrational reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, this seems like a stupid question. Anastasia spends the next paragraph talking about how handsome he is. On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;Fifty Shades of Grey&lt;/em&gt; seems to be popular, and presumably the language has some role in its popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Anastasia describe her reaction as &amp;quot;irrational&amp;quot;? Why can't she understand it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2515" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T22:40:29.097" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T01:04:45.487" Title="Why does Anastasia describe her reaction to Christian as &quot;irrational&quot;?" Tags="&lt;e-l-james&gt;&lt;fifty-shades-of-grey&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T09:51:48.677" Score="10" ViewCount="1154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some paperback editions have a front cover which is a centimetre or two shorter than the actual book. I first noticed this on &lt;em&gt;House of Leaves&lt;/em&gt;, where I thought that it's just part of the whole experimental deal (representing the house whose inside is larger than the outside, and/or just putting the book firmly into uncanny valley), but since then I've seen a couple of other books which do this, like this paperback edition of Ken Liu's &lt;em&gt;The Paper Menagerie&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLTH8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lLTH8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;House of Leaves and The Paper Menagerie paperbacks&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm assuming this is actually a thing that is done for some books, and googling confirms that. However, I haven't found any good sources on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-11-24T12:35:41.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-24T12:35:41.680" Title="Why do some paperbacks have shortened front covers?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T15:12:22.520" Score="5" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/02/jk-rowling-hermione-harry-ron-married&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In an interview&lt;/a&gt;, JKR says that Hermione would not have married Ron:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She told the magazine: &quot;I wrote the Hermione-Ron relationship as a&#xA;  form of wish fulfilment. That's how it was conceived, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more&#xA;  to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione&#xA;  ended up with Ron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I know, I'm sorry, I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some&#xA;  fans, but if I'm absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective&#xA;  on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for&#xA;  reasons of credibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Am I breaking people's hearts by saying this? I hope not.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The author said the duo would have likely needed relationship&#xA;  counselling, while Watson herself also doubted the couple's potential&#xA;  longevity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think there are fans out there who know that too and who wonder&#xA;  whether Ron would have really been able to make her happy,&quot; Watson&#xA;  told the Sunday Times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in the books, Hermione does marry Ron and not Harry. So JKR's proclamation that Hermione would not marry Ron seems odd to say the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what we know about the two characters, is this correct? Should JKR's word overrule the text of the books in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2518" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T12:06:25.397" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T07:42:13.537" Title="JKR says that Hermione shouldn't have married Ron. Is this correct?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3526" CreationDate="2017-11-24T15:19:42.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Little Women&quot; series is foremost a &lt;em&gt;bildungsroman&lt;/em&gt;, literally 'education novel' from the German (where it originated, in the first half of the 18th century), meaning a 'coming of age' narrative in which the protagonist(s) mature in either or both age, wisdom and/or morality. Morality is a &lt;strong&gt;very&lt;/strong&gt; significant part of this genre and the progression of the protagonist(s) to (a) moral and wise character(s) is depicted as a key part to the narrative. This can be exemplified in Jo's heartbreaking rejection of Laurie's marriage proposal, in which she shows wisdom far beyond her years as she recognises that Laurie's fierce passion for her is not a good basis for a marriage. Instead she eventually marries Professor Bhaer, an older but a much more sensible husband than the charming but impulsive Laurie. This is a stark contrast to Joe's characteristic of being somewhat childish (in a good way!) behaviour seen earlier in the novel, such as her over-enthusiastic renditions of plays. She also metamorphoses from being rebellious, outspoken and often angry to a profoundly psychologically mature woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This psychological progression of Jo's is characteristic of the &lt;em&gt;bildungsroman&lt;/em&gt; genre. Dickens is another novelist who widely uses this technique, especially in &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Oliver Twist&lt;/em&gt;. In terms of L.M Alcott's novels being a backlash to immoral works of the period, this &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; be referring to the boom in Gothic or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/Late-Victorian-literature#ref308678&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sensation Novels&lt;/a&gt; in the 1850s-60s which were written to achieve the goal of shocking and scaring readers. Charles Darwin's &lt;em&gt;The Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt; was also written in this period which was and still is a controversial work. Her novels remained innocent, as a silent protest to her contemporaries. &#xA;For more about the &lt;em&gt;bildungsroman&lt;/em&gt; genre, &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.britannica.com/art/bildungsroman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; explains it well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:30:27.213" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:30:27.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4361" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-24T16:47:26.373" Score="6" ViewCount="659" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen the word canon used &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/search?q=canon&quot;&gt;occasionally on this site&lt;/a&gt;. I've also seen it used quite extensively on &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/canon&quot;&gt;Stack Exchange's science fiction and fantasy site&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I know what the word means, but I went looking for a definition on Stack Exchange and couldn't find one. Given that the word is used occasionally on this site as well, I think this question could also be useful here as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is canon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T14:31:58.950" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T14:31:58.950" Title="What exactly is canon?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;canon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4361" CreationDate="2017-11-24T17:44:23.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When it comes to literature, there are two related but slightly different definitions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/canon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To cite the Oxford Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, canon is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The works of a particular author or artist that are recognized as genuine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll see the word canon used in both contexts. People talk about whether, say, a particular statement about a particular series is canonical, e.g. is this website published by an author canonical? But you'll also see people talking about the &quot;literary canon&quot; or the &quot;musical canon&quot; or the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;western canon&lt;/a&gt;.&quot; Both uses essentially mean the same thing: the word canon is trying to deliminate whether a particular work is worth considering when answering a particular question, whether that question is &quot;who is Hagrid's father&quot; or &quot;what works of music are worth teaching in schools&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key word in both definitions is recognized. If you read the definition closely, you'll see that it doesn't say who recognizes things as canon or how works are recognized. And there is quite a bit of debate about what counts as canon. For example, take a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1725/is-information-from-pottermore-considered-canonical/1728#1728&quot;&gt;following debate&lt;/a&gt; over on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange website about whether Pottermore--a website published by the author of the Harry Potter series--is a genuine contribution to that author's body of work. Another example: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/a/4786/92775&quot;&gt;do half completed works by Tolkien, which were then published posthumously by his son, count as canon&lt;/a&gt;? Needless to say, there is actually a great deal of subjectivity involved in determining what is canon and what isn't. Ultimately, it comes down to personal choice rather than objective truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T21:27:29.217" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T21:27:29.217" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4359" CreationDate="2017-11-25T11:31:27.193" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on the textual evidence, I disagree with JKR. In HP4, when Hermione first appears in her ball gown, Harry merely says that &quot;she didn't look like Hermione at all.&quot; It's merely implied and not stated that she looks better than usual. Also starting in HP4, Ron gets jealous of Krum and Hermione is annoyed at Ron for not understanding her feelings, which is why she sends that flock of birds to attack him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a structural level, Harry has always been the key connecting element of his group of friends, even beyond the fact that he's the focalizer of the narrative. He befriends Ron, then befriends Hermione (or at least she isn't annoyed at his stupidity), and only after the Halloween troll do Ron and Hermione become friendly. So it's more likely that Harry is friendzoned from the start, whereas Hermione's negative feelings toward Ron are later transformed into positive ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, following along with Harry's POV, we never see him surprised at Hermione's romance with Ron. And given all that Harry has to deal with, I think it's better for Hermione not to be with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="2463" LastEditDate="2017-12-10T11:32:28.793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-10T11:32:28.793" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4355" CreationDate="2017-11-25T12:05:46.727" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The FSOG series was originally written as an all-human AU fanfic of &lt;em&gt;Twilight.&lt;/em&gt; Ana and Christian are expies (exported characters) of Bella and Edward. In erotic fanfic, it's common for Character A to feel an intense, unexplainable draw towards Character B when the writer intends for A and B to end up together. (This can be disconcerting if you misread the tags and think you're reading, for example, a story about Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes and it turns out to be about Steve and Sam Wilson.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a surprise if she feels the attraction simply because &lt;em&gt;she does.&lt;/em&gt; Neither the FSOG series nor the source series are well written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet notes in his comments that the question here is about the choice of the word &amp;quot;irrational.&amp;quot; There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no reason for that particular word. FSOG is badly-written fanfic based on badly-written source material. If the attraction were in fact irrational, that setup comes from widely-used fanfic tropes and clichés, which are not in and of themselves problematic. Since Ana does pile on the reasons why she'd be attracted to Christian, her attraction is not irrational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So James might have been word-salading because she's not a particularly attentive writer, or, presuming she had an editor, the editor didn't catch the mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T00:27:30.083" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T00:27:30.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4134" CreationDate="2017-11-25T15:29:12.277" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I started looking into this because I thought that I recognised the quote, but it rapidly led me to the same saturation of Autumn poems described above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I finally found a variation on the phrase in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Something told the wild geese&quot;, by Rachel Field. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an excerpt from the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Something told the wild geese&#xA;  &lt;br/&gt;It was time to go,&#xA;  &lt;br/&gt;Though the fields lay golden&#xA;  &lt;br/&gt;Something whispered, &quot;snow.&quot;... '&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yourdailypoem.com/listpoem.jsp?poem_id=522&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; a link to this poem in case it's the one you were looking for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T15:29:12.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4367" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:34:09.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:34:09.327" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:34:09.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4368" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:34:09.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American playwright August Wilson (1945 – 2005) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T23:22:20.557" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:22:20.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4369" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:35:49.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:35:49.180" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:35:49.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4370" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:35:49.180" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Gertrude Chandler Warner (1890 – 1979) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:37:15.453" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:37:15.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4371" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:40:43.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:40:43.710" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:40:43.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4372" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:40:43.710" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 'Tartan of Thyme' novels by Panama Oxridge. Use this tag with the [panama-oxridge] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:44:09.183" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:44:09.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4373" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:43:10.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:43:10.957" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:43:10.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4374" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:43:10.957" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1936 Dutch novel 'Pieter Bas, Memoires of Gedenkschriften van Mr. P. Bas' by Godfried Bomans. Use with the [dutch-literature] and [godfried-bomans] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:33:23.757" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:33:23.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4375" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:45:40.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:45:40.513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:45:40.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4376" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:45:40.513" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1947 novel The Elephant and the Kangaroo by T. H. White. Use with the [t-h-white] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:34:01.080" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:34:01.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4377" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:46:48.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:46:48.767" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:46:48.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4378" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:46:48.767" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Jean Craighead George (1919 – 2012) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:47:47.407" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:47:47.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4379" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:48:27.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:48:27.610" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:48:27.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4380" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:48:27.610" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Jim Corbett's 1952 book My India. Use with the [jim-corbett] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:35:17.357" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:35:17.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:50:01.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:50:01.500" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:50:01.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:50:01.500" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian science fiction and fantasy author Sergei Lukyanenko (born 1968) and his work. Use with [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T22:10:32.590" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T22:10:32.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4383" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:54:08.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:54:08.520" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:54:08.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4384" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:54:08.520" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the cycle of novels by Sergei Lukyanenko that started with Night Watch (1998) and continued with Day Watch, Twilight Watch, Final Watch, New Watch and Sixth Watch. Use this tag with the [sergei-lukyanenko] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:36:47.837" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:36:47.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4385" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:55:43.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:55:43.907" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:55:43.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4386" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:55:43.907" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English writer and Puritan preacher John Bunyan (1628 – 1688) or about any of his literary work, most famously the allegory The Pilgrim's Progress." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:40:26.720" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:40:26.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4387" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:56:42.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:56:42.640" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:56:42.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4388" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:56:42.640" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1678 allegory The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. Use this tag with the [john-bunyan] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:37:56.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:37:56.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4389" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:58:32.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T16:58:32.760" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T16:58:32.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4390" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T16:58:32.760" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Egyptian author Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966) or about any of his literary work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:43:58.223" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:43:58.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4391" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:00:40.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:00:40.107" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:00:40.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4392" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:00:40.107" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the book Social Justice in Islam (1949), a work of religious social criticism by Sayyid Qutb. Use this tag with the [sayyid-qutb] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:44:03.890" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:44:03.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4393" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:02:18.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:02:18.580" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:02:18.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4394" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:02:18.580" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1997 novel The Straight Man by the American author Richard Russo. Use with the [richard-russo] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:34:39.383" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:34:39.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4395" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:04:09.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:04:09.953" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:04:09.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4396" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:04:09.953" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English essayist, parodist and caricaturist Henry Maximilian &quot;Max&quot; Beerbohm (1872 – 1956) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:38:20.603" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:38:20.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4397" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:06:19.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:06:19.543" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:06:19.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4398" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:06:19.543" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 16-century Aztec manuscript Huexotzinco Codex or Huejotzingo Codex." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:42:29.223" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:42:29.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4399" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:07:15.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:07:15.327" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:07:15.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4400" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:07:15.327" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author Anthony Marra or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:39:30.317" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:39:30.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4401" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:08:49.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:08:49.010" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:08:49.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4402" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:08:49.010" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Anthony Marra's debut novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2014). Questions regarding this book should be tagged with [anthony-marra]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T20:21:00.997" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:21:00.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4403" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:10:03.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:10:03.363" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:10:03.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4404" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:10:03.363" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English author Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810 – 1865) or about of her literary work, most famously novels such as &quot;Cranford&quot; and &quot;Wives and Daughters&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:47:07.280" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:47:07.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4405" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:11:08.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:11:08.427" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:11:08.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4406" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:11:08.427" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford (1851 – 1853). Use with the [elizabeth-gaskell] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:38:01.480" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:38:01.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4407" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:43:16.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:43:16.200" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:43:16.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4408" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:43:16.200" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British surreal comedy group Monty Python who created the sketch comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus and several films." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:51:59.503" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:51:59.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4409" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:45:14.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:45:14.217" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:45:14.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4410" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:45:14.217" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American teacher and author Bella &quot;Bel&quot; Kaufman (1911 – 2014) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:52:02.263" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:52:02.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4411" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:46:21.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:46:21.527" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:46:21.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4412" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:46:21.527" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1964 novel Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman. Use this tag with the [bel-kaufman] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:51:47.263" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:51:47.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4413" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:47:32.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:47:32.917" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:47:32.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4414" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:47:32.917" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author Hilary Mantel (born 1952) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:25:02.447" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:25:02.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4415" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:48:47.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:48:47.833" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:48:47.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4416" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:48:47.833" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2009 historical novel &quot;Wolf Hall&quot; by the English author Hilary Mantel. Use this tag with the [hilary-mantel] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:26:15.303" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:26:15.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4417" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:52:01.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:52:01.670" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:52:01.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4418" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:52:01.670" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Iranian writer Iraj Pezeshkzad (born 1928) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:25:09.607" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:25:09.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4419" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:53:22.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:53:22.967" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:53:22.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4420" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:53:22.967" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1973 coming of age novel &quot;My Uncle Napoleon&quot; by the Iranian author Iraj Pezeshkzad. Use this tag with the [iraj-pezeshkzad] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:26:26.127" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:26:26.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4421" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:56:34.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:56:34.443" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:56:34.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4422" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:56:34.443" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Romanian-born German author and Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller (born 1953) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:25:49.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:25:49.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4423" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:57:35.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:57:35.297" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:57:35.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4424" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:57:35.297" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2009 novel &quot;The Hunger Angel&quot; (German: &quot;Atemschaukel&quot;) by Herta Müller. Use this tag with the [herta-muller] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:27:30.873" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:27:30.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4425" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:58:57.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T17:58:57.570" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T17:58:57.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4426" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T17:58:57.570" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American cartoonist Larry Gonick (born 1946) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:21:42.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:21:42.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4427" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:00:23.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:00:23.073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:00:23.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4428" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:00:23.073" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2005 novel &quot;Kokopelli &amp; Company in Attack of the Smart Pies&quot;, by Larry Gonick. Use this tag with the [larry-gonick] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T11:53:01.247" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T11:53:01.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4429" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:26:22.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:26:22.023" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:26:22.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4430" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:26:22.023" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English philosopher, statesman, scientist, and author Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:26:48.780" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:26:48.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4431" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:28:00.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:28:00.597" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:28:00.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4432" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:28:00.597" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British philosopher, logician, mathematician, social critic, political activist and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russel (1872 – 1970) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:31:02.223" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:31:02.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4433" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:29:09.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:29:09.847" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:29:09.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4434" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:29:09.847" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American cartoonist, graphic novelist, illustrator and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (born 1961) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:30:48.753" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:30:48.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4435" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:30:03.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:30:03.767" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:30:03.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4436" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:30:03.767" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American comic book writer and novelist Gregory &quot;Greg&quot; Rucka and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:33:10.890" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:33:10.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4437" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:31:23.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:31:23.877" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:31:23.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4438" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:31:23.877" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1951 novel &quot;The Old Man and the Sea&quot; by Ernest Hemingway. Use this tag with the [ernest-hemingway] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:32:56.130" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:32:56.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4439" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:33:06.650" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:33:06.650" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:33:06.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4440" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:33:06.650" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American writer Elliot S. Maggin or Elliot S! Maggin (born 1950) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:33:15.980" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:33:15.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4441" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:34:16.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:34:16.513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:34:16.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4442" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:34:16.513" Score="0" Body="Questions related to &quot;Superman: Last Son of Krypton&quot; (1978) by Elliot S. Maggin. Use this tag with the [elliot-s-maggin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:34:44.603" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:34:44.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4443" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:37:49.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:37:49.577" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:37:49.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4444" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:37:49.577" Score="0" Body="Questions related any of the four poems (&quot;Burnt Norton&quot;, &quot;East Coker&quot;, &quot;The Dry Salvages&quot; and &quot;Little Gidding&quot;) known as Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. Use this tag with the [t-s-eliot] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:38:56.447" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:38:56.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4445" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:39:55.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:39:55.167" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:39:55.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4446" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:39:55.167" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Japanese film director, screenwriter, animator and manga artist Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿, born 1941) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:40:25.460" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:40:25.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4447" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:40:44.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:40:44.930" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:40:44.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4448" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:40:44.930" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the commercial selling of books, including bestseller lists." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:46:38.300" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:46:38.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4449" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:44:26.510" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:44:26.510" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:44:26.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4450" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:44:26.510" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the series of five fantasy and suspense novels known as 'The Power of Five' or 'The Gatekeepers' (in the USA) by Anthony Horowitz. Use this tag with the [anthony-horowitz] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:46:46.967" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:46:46.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4451" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:46:29.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:46:29.350" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:46:29.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4452" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:46:29.350" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author and filker Seanan McGuire (born 1978) and her work. She also published under the pseudonym Mira Grant." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:46:53.553" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:46:53.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4453" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:47:52.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:47:52.277" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:47:52.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4454" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:47:52.277" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the InCryptid series of novels by Seanan McGuire. Use this tag with the [seanan-mcguire] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:48:13.643" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:48:13.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4455" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:49:39.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:49:39.087" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:49:39.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4456" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:49:39.087" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1905 play Major Barbara by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Use this tag with the [george-bernard-shaw] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T20:40:05.560" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:40:05.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4457" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:51:15.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:51:15.127" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:51:15.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4458" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:51:15.127" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English novelist, poet, playwright and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803 –  1873) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:20:20.847" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:20:20.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4459" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:52:15.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:52:15.740" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:52:15.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4460" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:52:15.740" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Use this tag with the [edward-bulwer-lytton] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:30.783" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:30.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4461" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:53:37.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:53:37.410" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:53:37.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4462" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:53:37.410" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud (born 1960) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:21:19.160" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:21:19.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4463" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:54:43.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:54:43.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:54:43.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4464" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:54:43.140" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English writer Evelyn Waugh (1903 – 1966) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:14:31.853" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:14:31.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:57:42.483" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:57:42.483" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:57:42.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:57:42.483" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:42.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:42.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:58:43.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T18:58:43.070" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T18:58:43.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T18:58:43.070" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Use this tag with the [oscar-wilde] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:21:05.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:21:05.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:00:28.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:00:28.957" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:00:28.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:00:28.957" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American mystery drama television series Twin Peaks (1990 – 1991) by Mark Frost and David Lynch." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:39.393" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:39.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:02:55.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:02:55.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:02:55.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:02:55.587" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American director and screenwriter David Lynch (born 1946) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:34.483" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:34.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4473" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:11:18.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:11:18.190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:11:18.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4474" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:11:18.190" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British poet, essayist and novelist Philip Edward Thomas (1878 – 1917)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:20:16.623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:20:16.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4475" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:16:24.250" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:16:24.250" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:16:24.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4476" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:16:24.250" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter (1930 – 2008)  and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:20.150" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:20.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4477" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:19:06.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:19:06.410" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:19:06.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4478" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:19:06.410" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the one-act play The Dumb Waiter by Harold Pinter. Use this tag with the [harold-pinter] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:21:15.843" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:21:15.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4479" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:20:42.463" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:20:42.463" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:20:42.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4480" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:20:42.463" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Brooke Bolander and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:21:09.657" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:21:09.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4481" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:21:58.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:21:58.807" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:21:58.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4482" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:21:58.807" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:26:12.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:26:12.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4483" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:23:07.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:23:07.840" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:23:07.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4484" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:23:07.840" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American poet, writer and editor Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:26:21.813" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:26:21.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4485" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:25:13.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://nkjemisin.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nkjemisin.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T20:42:45.260" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T20:42:45.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4486" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:25:13.703" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American writer and blogger Nora K. Jemisin (born 1972) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.013" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4487" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.010" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4488" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:26:18.010" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the The Inheritance Trilogy, a fantasy trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. Use this tag with the [n-k-jemisin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:26:26.067" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:26:26.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4489" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:27:49.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:27:49.683" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:27:49.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4490" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:27:49.683" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel Mallory's Oracle, the first novel in the Kathy Mallory series by Carol O'Connell. Use this tag with the [carol-oconnell] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:44:09.623" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:44:09.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4491" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:28:30.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:28:30.643" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:28:30.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4492" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:28:30.643" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Carol O'Connell (born 1947) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:43:50.437" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:43:50.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4494" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:31:14.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:31:14.433" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:31:14.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4495" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:31:14.433" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Steven Pressfield (born 1943) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:44:00.833" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:44:00.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4496" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:32:25.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:32:25.257" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:32:25.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4497" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:32:25.257" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1998 historical fiction novel Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. Use this tag with the [steven-pressfield] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:43:56.370" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:43:56.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:33:39.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:33:39.403" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:33:39.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:33:39.403" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American comic book letterer and logo designer Todd Klein (born 1951) and his work. When asking about a comic, please use the [comics] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:43:40.677" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:43:40.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:36:00.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:36:00.473" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:36:00.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:36:00.473" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the area of studies known as library and information science or LIS." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:43:46.413" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:43:46.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4502" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:40:16.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:40:16.070" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:40:16.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4503" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:40:16.070" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the general public's access to books, especially through public libraries and school libraries. Access to books, especially for children, is strongly related to literacy." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:44:18.833" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:44:18.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4504" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:42:39.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:42:39.813" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:42:39.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4505" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:42:39.813" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the fantasy novel The Scar by the English writer China Miéville. Use this tag with the [china-mieville] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:44:34.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:44:34.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:44:23.910" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:44:23.910" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:44:23.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:44:23.910" Score="0" Body="Question related to William Shakespeare's comedy Much Ado About Nothing (written around 1598 – 1599). Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T22:36:35.297" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T22:36:35.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4508" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:46:11.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:46:11.577" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:46:11.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4509" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:46:11.577" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Trenton Lee Stewart (born 1970) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:28.767" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:28.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4510" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:48:01.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:48:01.667" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:48:01.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4511" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:48:01.667" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any part of the series of novels by Trenton Lee Stewart that started with The Mysterious Benedict Society (2007). Use this tag with the [trenton-lee-stewart] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:24.607" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:24.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4512" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:50:31.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:50:31.130" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:50:31.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4513" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:50:31.130" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American writer and artist of comics Bill Willingham (born 1956) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:19.010" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:19.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4514" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:51:33.243" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:51:33.243" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:51:33.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4515" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:51:33.243" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Serbian-American poet Charles Simic (born 1938) and his work. His works of poetry should be tagged under [poetry]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:18:09.153" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:18:09.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4516" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:52:42.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:52:42.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:52:42.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4517" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:52:42.147" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1930 novel As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. Use this tag with the [william-faulkner] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:46.380" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:46.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4518" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:54:22.667" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:54:22.667" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:54:22.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4519" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:54:22.667" Score="0" Body="Questions related to William Shakespeare's comedy Love's Labour's Lost (written in the mid-1590s). Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T20:39:47.330" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:39:47.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4520" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:55:50.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:55:50.373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:55:50.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4521" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:55:50.373" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the New Zealand (Māori) poet Hone Tuwhare (1922 – 2008) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:41.120" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:41.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4522" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:57:28.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:57:28.390" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:57:28.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4523" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:57:28.390" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Portuguese writer and poet Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho (1847 – 1921) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:13.423" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4524" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:58:35.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T19:58:35.067" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T19:58:35.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4525" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T19:58:35.067" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Brazilian-born Portuguese poet António Cândido Gonçalves Crespo (1846 – 1883) and his work. Use this tag with the [portuguese-literature] tag. When asking about a poem, please use the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:38:11.630" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:38:11.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4526" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-25T20:01:23.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:01:23.857" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:01:23.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4527" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-25T20:01:23.857" Score="0" Body="Questions related to William Blake's 1789 collection of poems Songs of Innocence, which was later expanded and published as Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794). Use this tag with the [william-blake] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-25T20:33:37.107" LastActivityDate="2017-11-25T20:33:37.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T20:19:31.560" Score="7" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Harold Pinter's &lt;em&gt;The Birthday Party&lt;/em&gt; (1957), Goldberg (a Jewish character) wishes Stanley a happy birthday and says &quot;well over the fast.&quot; What does he mean by it? I know that this expression is usually used by the Jewish people as a kind of holiday greetings! But how come Goldberg uses the expression at a birthday party?!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GOLDBERG. Lift your glasses. Stanley—happy birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MCCANN. Happy birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LULU. Happy birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MEG. Many happy returns of the day, Stan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GOLDBERG. And well over the fast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2522" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:47:16.587" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T23:42:51.977" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;well over the fast&quot; in the following passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harold-pinter&gt;&lt;the-birthday-party&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-25T23:28:37.307" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you probably know, Bob Dylan, a musician, was awarded the Nobel prize. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jun/05/bob-dylan-delivers-nobel-prize-literature-lecture-just-in-time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;He was the first musician to receive the Nobel prize&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nobel committee, notably, seemed to avoid the word music when explaining why the prize was awarded. The press release simply states that the prize was awarded to Dylan &quot;for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition&quot;, i.e. that the committee is awarding the prize based on Dylan's ability as a poet. Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Dylan as a &quot;great poet in the English tradition&quot;; a poet, not a songwriter. And Danius also said that Dylan &quot;should be read&quot;; that's an odd statement to say about a musician, whose works are intended to be listened to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this made me wonder: how does the Nobel committee define literature? I suspect that they describe Dylan as a poet because they consider poetry literature. But I then decided to look for a explanation for where exactly they draw the line, but I wasn't able to find one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the Nobel committee define literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:49:02.737" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:49:02.737" Title="How does the Nobel committee define literature?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;awards&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;&lt;nobel-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2017-11-26T01:37:04.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ordinarily, in Regency England, to get married you had to announce your intention in church on three successive Sundays before the wedding.  This was called &lt;em&gt;reading the banns&lt;/em&gt;, and is described in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.  This poses a problem for Regency Romance couples: they  could not legally get married in less than 4 weeks after their initial decision. But there was an exception: one could get a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_license&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;special license&lt;/a&gt; from the Archbishop of Canterbury) (or, presumably, from his secretariat or chancery or whatever it was called).  Another way to get married in less than 4 weeks was to go to Scotland, where the laws were different.  The closest town in Scotland seems to have been Gretna Green (just north of Carlisle, where those nice bikkies come from).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T01:37:04.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T04:22:37.730" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And now incense was burned in a bass thurible. The old priest held up &#xA;  his two hands for silence, and through a long pregnant time of the most &#xA;  perfect stillness the thread of gray incense smoke rose straight and &#xA;  unwavering before the god, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Island&lt;/em&gt; Ch. 10, Pg. 200&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thurible is a metal censer, so brass would make more sense than bass. Is this a typo that was never caught?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1028" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T11:37:56.767" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T17:03:16.290" Title="In Huxley's Island, what is a &quot;bass thurible?&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T05:05:10.740" Score="4" ViewCount="187" Body="&lt;p&gt;Closer to the end of the book, Sheymov's contact from CIA refused to go with his plan to fake their family death when defecting. In &lt;em&gt;Chapter 11&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Misha&quot; refuses to help with the plan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Victor nodded, then introduced his embellishment. “Good. Now, Misha, I will need your help on something else. We’ll have a tremendously greater advantage if the KGB is not aware that I’m in the United States.” Victor paused. “&lt;strong&gt;How about leading them to believe we’re dead&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Caught completely off guard, Misha stared at Victor, trying to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. Misha chuckled: “&lt;strong&gt;Look, let’s just keep this professional, OK? We don’t have time to fantasize.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Misha, just listen to me. I think we’ve got a real opportunity here. For example, the three of us could go to the countryside, rent a rowboat, and capsize it. If it’s abandoned near a large water system with a fairly strong current, it would be perfectly natural not to find our bodies. I know for certain that in a number of such drownings every year the bodies simply never turn up.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “&lt;strong&gt;No, Victor. Now you listen to me. Without mentioning the fact that a stunt like that would rob us of at least eighteen hours’ lead time, I can guarantee that nobody in Washington is going to approve it. Our highest priority is to deliver you safely, without taking any avoidable risks. So just forget it, and let’s concentrate on the task at hand&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in Chapter 11, he tells his wife about this and that he's still interested in the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What did your contact think of our ‘dying’?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “According to the Americans, ‘&lt;strong&gt;playing dead’is not a good idea. From a conventional point of view, I suppose I have to agree. And that idea with the rowboat has to be abandoned. We can’t pull it off without the Americans’ help. Besides, they’ve got a point, it would rob us of eighteen hours. Nevertheless, I’m still determined to try to lead the KGB to believe that we’re dead. I’m going to do my damndest to pull it off&lt;/strong&gt;. The fact is, there’s zero risk in it. If we succeed, we’ll have a tremendous advantage—not to mention that it would make things much easier for those we leave behind.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, in the last &lt;em&gt;chapter 12&lt;/em&gt;, it indicates that the death faking indeed happen, but I don't think it was described how. All we see is that Victor is worried about being recognized, which would destroy his plan to be assumed to be dead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I know, but it’s a tough call. Uzhgorod is in the border zone. On the one hand the Border Guards will every now and then raid trains like this one. They ask everyone for full identification and want to know exactly where you’re going and who you’ll be staying with. That’ll blow up everything I’ve been lining up so carefully. &lt;strong&gt;Also, our being here would be registered, and good-bye to any hope that they’d count us dead&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last &quot;&lt;em&gt;About the author&lt;/em&gt;&quot; section confirms this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1980, after establishing a contact with the CIA, Victor and his wife, Olga, and their five-year-old daughter were exfiltrated from Moscow. &lt;strong&gt;The KGB were even persuaded that they were dead&lt;/strong&gt;. For his contribution to the national security of the United States, Sheymov was awarded the CIA’s highest medal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what exactly did they do to pretend to be dead if the plan with the rowboat was rejected as it needed help from Americans?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:48:50.597" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:48:50.597" Title="How did Sheymov manage to convince KGB that he and the family were dead?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;tower-of-secrets&gt;&lt;victor-sheymov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4728" CreationDate="2017-11-26T05:11:27.923" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the introduction, the author explains that he'll use third person to refer to himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After much thought, I decided to write this book as a third-person account&lt;/strong&gt;. For me it is a natural form of expression. One of the characteristics of intelligence is that one develops the habit of viewing oneself from aside, to ensure objectivity of judgment. That habit becomes second nature, and I believe events are seen more clearly from this vantage point. Besides, in this introduction I have almost exhausted my reserve of Is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an established term for this literary device, especially for autobiographical books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T11:20:59.770" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T12:54:32.350" Title="What's the name of the literary device used by Sheymov to refer to himself in 3rd person?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3551" CreationDate="2017-11-26T08:45:34.393" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were four possibilities for those who wanted to get married in 19th century England:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Banns. This meant that you had to have the upcoming wedding announced three Sundays in a row from the parish pulpet. Unless someone spoke out against the marriage, you then had a three-month window open to legally marry. However, this was seen as something for those too poor to afford anything else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ordinary licence. Could be gotten from the local clergyman or the Doctors' Commons in London, and let you get married in a parish where one of the parties had lived for at least fourteen days. This was the most common way, even if it cost a few pounds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Special license. You applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury, who at his discretion could then grant you this, which allowed you to marry anywhere, at any time. A special licence was expensive, and thus a sign of high social class.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Civil license. After 1836, this could be obtained from the superintendent-registrar, and was for people who wanted to get married outside the Church of England (e.g. Jews or Catholics).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none of the above was available to you, you could also get married outside of England, most typically in Gretna Green in Scotland. The Scottish Presbyterian Church only required that you pledged yourself to your partner in the presence of a witness, up until 1856, when a requirement of a 21-day residency was imposed. This option was used when the other were closed, as for example for people up to the age of 21, who until 1823 required parental consent to get married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew&lt;/em&gt;, by Daniel Pool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T08:45:34.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3910" CreationDate="2017-11-26T10:43:19.473" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I finally managed to track down the answer to my question, after finding a reference to it in Kenneth Williams' diaries. The poem is by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Baxter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanley Baxter&lt;/a&gt;, whom Kenneth Williams knew in the second World War when they were both performing in the Combined Forces Entertainment unit. The poem is actually entitled 'Berlin in the &lt;em&gt;Twenties&lt;/em&gt;', not the Thirties. As far as I'm aware it has never been published. I believe that it was first broadcast in the one BBC Radio 4 programme referenced in Williams' diaries - on 14th February, 1970 - in which Williams read a varied selection of poetry. I don't know of any other broadcast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the kind help of Kenneth Williams' biographer I have now seen the poem (as transcribed by Williams himself, he thinks) but for copyright reasons am not able to reproduce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2323" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T10:43:19.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T12:20:02.627" Score="3" ViewCount="1844" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the things that always bothered me about the Half Blood Prince movie is that there's a scene where Hermione is tipsy. I can't find a good clip of the scene online, but there's a lot of references to its existence online. For example &lt;a href=&quot;http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Hogsmeade_HP6%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wired.com/2009/07/half-blood-prince/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this scene included in the movie but not the book, and does it fit in with what we know about Hermione's character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T03:10:54.043" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:42:03.490" Title="Does it fit in with Hermione's character for her to be tipsy?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4537" CreationDate="2017-11-26T12:20:02.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this scene in the books? No, it obviously isn't. But I think there's a really good argument that the scene from the movie, or at least a scene similar to it, deserves to be in the books. Hear me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the movies are noticing is that there's a significant subtext that students are drinking drinks that are stronger than butterbeer at Hogwarts. Here's a quote from Order of the Phoenix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry didn't answer, but flung himself out of the room and began to fight his way through the milling crowds outside. Two floors up he met Seamus and Dean, who hailed him jovially and told him they were planning a dusk-till-dawn end-of-exams celebration in the common room. Harry barely heard them. He scrambled through the portrait hole while they were still arguing about how many black-market Butterbeers they would need and was climbing back out of it, the Invisibility Cloak and Sirius's knife secure in his bag, before they noticed he had left them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Harry, d'you want to chip in a couple of Galleons? Harold Dingle reckons he could sell us some Firewhisky -'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's not just that students are smuggling drinks into Hogarts. Some of the professors--notably Slughorn in the Half Blood Prince--are giving students alcohol!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Pick-me-up, that's what he needs,&amp;quot; Slughorn continued, now bustling over to a table loaded with drinks. &amp;quot;I've got Butterbeer, I've got wine, I've got one last bottle of this oak-matured mead ... hmm ... meant to give that to Dumbledoor for Christmas ... ah well ...&amp;quot; he shrugged &amp;quot;... he can't miss what he's never had! Why don't we open it now and celebrate Mr Weasley's birthday? Nothing like a fine spirit to chase away the pangs of disapointed love ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Teachers are giving students drinks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students are smuggling in drinks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Students also have access to things like refilling charms that would guarantee them an unlimited supply of drinks.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry, but I can't look at this situation and not think that students wouldn't have access to alcohol and that, a significant portion of them at least, and most likely the older students, wouldn't be drinking it. Obviously, I'm not saying that everyone at Hogwarts would drink, but a significant portion of students would, and it would be a part of the social life at Hogwarts; people would drink at parties and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But despite all this, the trio's experience with alcohol appears to be nonexistent. The first time Harry is affected by a drink is in Deathly Hallows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; Harry said aloud, and they all looked at him, surprised: the Firewhisky seemed to have amplified his voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, in the Half Blood Prince, when Harry is with Hagrid and Slughorn in Hagrid's cabin, he apparently is so inexperienced with alcohol that he needs the felix felicis potion to tell him not to get drunk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Slughorn and Hagrid drank deeply. Harry, however, with&#xA;the way ahead illuminated for him by Felix Felicis, knew that he&#xA;must not drink, so he merely pretended to take a gulp and then set&#xA;the mug back on the table before him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it very unlikely that at least one member of the trio wouldn't have experienced alcohol at Hogwarts. Yes, there are some rules about alcohol--Hermione tells off Ron for suggesting that they drink Firewhisky in the Order of the Phoenix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'You know what?' Ron murmured, looking over at the bar with enthusiasm. 'We could order anything we liked in here. I bet that bloke would sell us anything, he wouldn't care. I've always wanted to try Firewhisky -'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'You - are - a - prefect,' snarled Hermione.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Oh,' said Ron, the smile fading from his face. 'Yeah...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I have huge doubts about the strictness of these rules--Slughorn offered Harry a drink on more than one occasion. And regardless, I just can't see Ron, for example, not drinking at Hogwarts if that was part of the social life there. I don't think any of the trio are teetotalers or have a commitment to not drink--they all drank the firewhisky after Moody's death. So it seems like at least one of them would have gotten drunk at Hogwarts. And the fact that we the reader don't get to experience this with the trio is a huge loss in terms of our ability to be at Hogwarts and share their experiences. And the fact that the movies do take us to that particular aspect of the characters lives is an aspect where they are, in my opinion, better than the books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why Hermione in this particular scene in the Half Blood Prince movie? To be clear, I don't see any reason why Hermione specifically should be the one shown being tipsy, and not Ron and Harry. But I do think that odds are at least one of them has gotten drunk at Hogwarts. And in the context of the scene--Hermione just dropped a huge hint to Ron about their relationship--I think it makes sense for Hermione to be drinking at that particular moment, even if most of the time at Hogwarts she wouldn't want to drink because of her responsibilities as a prefect. Remember, these rules are most likely not that strict, and while Hermione cares about the rules she, like any other person, isn't a robot who follows them every moment of her life. Obviously, there is some subjectivity here, but on the balance I think it makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an instance where the films picked up something that was never stated explicitly but was hinted at. The funny thing about stories is that they are constantly retold and reinterpreted. If we go by the books--the version of the story that comes after extensive revision by the author, but the version that has not yet been subject to reinterpretation by fanfiction, by movie producers, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/4359/jkr-says-that-hermione-shouldnt-have-married-ron-is-this-correct&quot;&gt;even by the author herself&lt;/a&gt;--then no, Hermione never got drunk in this particular moment. But adding this additional scene makes the subtext explicit. It provides a window into life at Hogwarts that previously could only exist in the reader's mind. I think it makes for a richer, better story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T02:42:03.490" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4355" CreationDate="2017-11-26T14:15:47.183" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several (possibly conflicting) reasons for the use of the term &quot;irrational&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, as the quote you offered indicated, her self-image is that of someone not  passionately falling for someone. So, this seems out of character for her, from her own point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, the whole notion of falling for someone because of their wealth/power internally conflicts with many ideals of feminism (I don't have a strong proof that Anastasia is feminist, but given her demographic characteristics, it's an overwhelming probability she is, or at the very least, is convinced she should be).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third, while BDSM isn't in the picture yet when that quotation is made, it does foreshadow the future conflict; that of BDSM (the &quot;power&quot; is mentioned here, which is the basis for most of BDSM) vs. feminist views. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_BDSM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feminism has a lot of tension regarding BDSM&lt;/a&gt;, which is complicated and probably offtopic here to explain in detail; but suffice it to say that Fifty Shades type of &quot;BDSM&quot; seems to be universally derided by &lt;strong&gt;both&lt;/strong&gt; anti-BDSM feminists &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;AND&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; BDSM practitioners regardless of feminism, though for different reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't exactly helped by a parallel tension between sex-positivity and typical &quot;sex is negative&quot; view common to USA. Ms. Steele seems to view herself as what is socially described as a &quot;good girl&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T14:15:47.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T17:22:50.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T17:22:50.113" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T17:22:50.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T17:22:50.113" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2009 novel The Lost Symbol by the American writer Dan Brown. Like Angels &amp; Demons and The Da Vince Code, this novel involves the character Robert Langdon. Use this tag with the [dan-brown] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T17:26:37.340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T17:26:37.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4542" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T17:35:25.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T17:35:25.183" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T17:35:25.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4543" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T17:35:25.183" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American writer Lyman Frank Baum (1856 – 1919) and his works. Baum is mainly known for his children's books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T18:38:10.797" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T18:38:10.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4544" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T18:57:41.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T18:57:41.527" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T18:57:41.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4545" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T18:57:41.527" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English novelist Philip Pullman (born 1946) and his work. His work includes the His Dark Materials trilogy." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:29:37.053" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:29:37.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4546" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T18:59:21.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T18:59:21.933" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T18:59:21.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4547" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T18:59:21.933" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Philip Pullman's 2000 novel The Amber Spyglass, which is the third part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Use this tag with the [philip-pullman] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:30:27.373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:30:27.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:28:17.183" Score="5" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been browsing through &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/glossaryoftudors00skea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Walter W. Skeat (completed by A. L. Mayhew and published in 1914). It contains several entries that should sound familiar to readers of J. R. R. Tolkien's work. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;azoch&lt;/strong&gt;, ‘azoth’, the alchemist's name for quicksilver. B. Jonson, Alchemist, ii. 1 (Surly). Also spelt &lt;em&gt;assogue&lt;/em&gt;. F. &lt;em&gt;assogue&lt;/em&gt;; Span. &lt;em&gt;azogue&lt;/em&gt;, quicksilver; Arab. &lt;em&gt;az-zāūq&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;zāūq&lt;/em&gt; is adapted from Pers. zhiwah (jivah), quicksilver. See NED., Ducange, and Dozy, Glossaire (s.v. Azogue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bilbo&lt;/strong&gt;, a sword of excellent quality. Merry Wives, iii. 5. 112. Hence, one who wears a bilbo, id. i. 1. 165. From Bilbao (E. Bilboa) in Spain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One easily recognizes the names &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_Orc_characters#Azog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Azog&lt;/a&gt; and Bilbo. (Azog is actually white in the film version; his role in the novel is much smaller.) Tolkien was professor of Anglo-Saxon, but the above example don't derive from Old English (Old English origins of dictionary entries are always mentioned in Skeat's &lt;em&gt;Glossary&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: did J. R. R. Tolkien, or possibly his son Christopher Tolkien, ever write about how he drew inspiration for certain character names from literature written in Early Modern English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T18:28:39.917" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:28:39.917" Title="Tolkien character names inspired by Early Modern English" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4549" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:35:50.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T19:35:50.860" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T19:35:50.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4550" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:35:50.860" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English writer Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) and his work, which includes novels such as Brave New World and Eyeless in Gaza, non-fiction works such as The Doors of Perception, and short stories, poetry and essays." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:29:32.393" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:29:32.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4551" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:50:20.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T19:50:20.683" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T19:50:20.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4552" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:50:20.683" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Aldous Huxley's final novel Island (1962), which is a utopian counterpart to his 1932 novel Brave New World. Use this tag with the [aldous-huxley] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:29:27.653" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:29:27.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:55:26.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T19:55:26.073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T19:55:26.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T19:55:26.073" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American writer, artist, and academic Audrey Niffenegger (born 1963) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T23:22:08.520" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:22:08.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4555" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:17:26.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:17:26.350" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:17:26.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4556" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:17:26.350" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American journalist and author Lionel Shriver (born 1957) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:30:20.947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:30:20.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4557" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:18:32.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:18:32.343" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:18:32.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4558" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:18:32.343" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2016 novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver. Use this tag with the [lionel-shriver] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:30:47.957" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:30:47.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:20:49.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:20:49.907" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:20:49.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:20:49.907" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English poet Ted Hughes (Edward James Hughes, 1930 – 1998) and his work. Hughes also published several translations of literary works. When asking about a poem, please use the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:30:07.820" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:30:07.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4561" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:39:21.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T20:39:21.503" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T20:39:21.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4562" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:39:21.503" Score="0" Body="Questions related to &quot;The Time Traveler's Wife&quot;, Audrey Niffenegger's debut novel (2003). Use this tag with the [audrey-niffenegger] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:02:47.507" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:02:47.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4563" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4903" CreationDate="2017-11-26T20:57:18.817" Score="11" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bulgakov describes the appearance of the Archibald Archibaldovich (chief of the security of the MASSOLIT restaurant) in quite a peculiar way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At  midnight  there appeared a vision in this hell. On  to the verandah&#xA;  strode a  handsome, black-eyed man with  a  pointed beard and wearing a tail&#xA;  coat. With  regal gaze he  surveyed his  domain. According to some romantics&#xA;  there had once been a time when  this noble figure had worn not  tails but a&#xA;  broad  leather belt  round  his  waist, stuck with  pistol-butts,  that  his&#xA;  raven-black hair had been tied up  in a scarlet kerchief and  that  his brig&#xA;  had sailed the Caribbean under the Jolly Roger.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;       But that, of  course, is pure fantasy--&lt;strong&gt;the Caribbean  doesn't exist, no&#xA;  desperate  buccaneers sail it,  no  corvette ever chases  them, no  puffs of&#xA;  cannon-smoke  ever  roll across  the waves&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite peculiar - maybe indeed the romanticised pirates akin to Jack Sparrow did not exist, but definitely there were pirates/privateers/bandits in the geographical region called &quot;Caribbean&quot; that anyone can find on the map. Was the existence of the Caribbean Islands somehow censored by the Soviet Union or was it Bulgakov's personal opinion? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, this whole paragraph of text is quite weird, because it seems that the narrator suddenly changed from the third to the first person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look  at that&#xA;  scraggy tree, look at the iron railings, the boulevard. . . . And the ice is&#xA;  floating in the  wine-bucket and  at  the  next table  there's  a  man  with&#xA;  ox-like, bloodshot  eyes and it's pandemonium. . . . Oh gods--poison, I need&#xA;  poison! . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the point of this strange outburst from the (until this time) impersonal narrator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: TvTropes suggest that characters in the book (mainly Master, Woland and Berlioz) are meant to be the narrator. This would make sense if the author of the paragraph was Behemot or Korovyev goofing around...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T02:18:30.797" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T20:18:41.793" Title="Why does the narrator of &quot;Master and Margarita&quot; say that Caribbean are fiction?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;master-and-margarita&gt;&lt;mikhail-bulgakov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4564" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:36:35.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:36:35.733" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:36:35.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4565" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:36:35.733" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Sappho, Greek poet from the island of Lesbos (c. 630 – c. 570 BC) and her work. Use with [greek-literature]" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:01:20.970" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:01:20.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4566" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:38:24.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:38:24.547" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:38:24.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4567" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:38:24.547" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder (born 1952) and his work. Gaarder published Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy in 1991." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:47:54.970" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:47:54.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4568" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:42:33.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:42:33.550" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:42:33.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4569" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:42:33.550" Score="0" Body="For questions about genres as they relate to literature.  Note that questions asking for the genre of a work are off-topic." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:40:27.217" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:40:27.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4570" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:43:48.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:43:48.160" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:43:48.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4571" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:43:48.160" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British writer and reporter Graham Hancock (born 1950) or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:45:54.877" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:45:54.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4572" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:45:44.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:45:44.493" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:45:44.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4573" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:45:44.493" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American novelist, playwright and screenwriter Cormac McCarthy (Charles McCarthy, born 1933) or about any of his literary works, such as books including All the Pretty Horses (1992) and No Country for Old Men (2005)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:46:34.297" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:46:34.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4574" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:48:59.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:48:59.227" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:48:59.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4575" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:48:59.227" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author, journalist and poet Stella Gibbons (1902 – 1989) and her works. Her best known work is her debut novel &quot;Cold Comfort Farm&quot; (1932)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:15.473" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:15.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4576" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:49:40.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:49:40.643" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:49:40.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4577" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:49:40.643" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Stella Gibbons' debut novel &quot;Cold Comfort Farm&quot; (1932). Use this tag with the [stella-gibbons] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:36:20.547" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:36:20.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4578" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:53:38.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:53:38.480" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:53:38.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4579" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:53:38.480" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English novelist, playwright and scriptwriter J. B. Priestley (1894 – 1984) and his work. His works include the play &quot;An Inspector Calls&quot; (1945) and the novel &quot;The Good Companions&quot; (1929)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:37:05.450" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:37:05.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4580" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:55:31.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T21:55:31.167" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T21:55:31.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4581" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T21:55:31.167" Score="0" Body="Questions related to J. B. Priestley's 1945 play &quot;An Inspector Calls&quot;. Use this tag with the [j-b-priestley] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:44.333" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:44.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4582" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:01:30.783" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:01:30.783" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:01:30.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4583" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:01:30.783" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Yann Martel's third novel &quot;Beatrice and Virgil&quot; (2010). Use this tag with the [yann-martel] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:36:26.257" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:36:26.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4584" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:03:45.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:03:45.093" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:03:45.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4585" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:03:45.093" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American science fiction and fantasy writer Gene Wolfe (born 1931) and his work. His works include &quot;The Book of the New Sun&quot;, &quot;Peace&quot; and &quot;The Fifth Head of Cerberus&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:37:19.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:37:19.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:06:44.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:06:44.093" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:06:44.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:06:44.093" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any of the novellas in the collection &quot;The Fifth Head of Cerberus&quot; (1972) by Gene Wolfe. Use this tag with the [gene-wolfe] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:37.927" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:37.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4588" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:08:25.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:08:25.670" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:08:25.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4589" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:08:25.670" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English poet, journalist and literary critic James Fenton (born 1949) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:51.377" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:51.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4590" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:11:37.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:11:37.620" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:11:37.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4591" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:11:37.620" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982) and his work, which includes &quot;The Man in the High Castle&quot; (1962),  &quot;Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&quot; (1968) and &quot;A Scanner Darkly&quot; (1977)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:01.907" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:01.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4592" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:15:59.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:15:59.973" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:15:59.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4593" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:15:59.973" Score="0" Body="Questions related to E. L. James (pseudonym of Erika Mitchell, born 1963) and her works. She is best known for the &quot;Fifty Shades&quot; series of novels." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:38:30.190" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:38:30.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4594" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:17:00.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:17:00.507" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:17:00.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4595" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:17:00.507" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) by the British author E. L. James. Use this tag with the [e-l-james] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:03:44.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:03:44.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4596" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:18:19.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:18:19.147" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:18:19.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4597" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:18:19.147" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American freelance writer, artist and illustrator Ursula Vernon (born 1977) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:37:25.903" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:37:25.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4598" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:20:19.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:20:19.497" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:20:19.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4599" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:20:19.497" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891 – 1892). Use this tag with the [thomas-hardy] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:18.537" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:18.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4600" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:22:15.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:22:15.180" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:22:15.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4601" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:22:15.180" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any of the stories in Agatha Christie's short story collection The Listerdale Mystery (1934). Use this tag with the [agatha-christie] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:22.637" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:22.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4602" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:26:53.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:26:53.187" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:26:53.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4603" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:26:53.187" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English playwright, television screenwriter and actor Stephen Mallatratt (1947  – 2004) and his work. His work includes a stage adaptation of Susan Hill's novella The Woman in Black." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:28.320" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:28.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4604" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:28:37.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:28:37.867" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:28:37.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4605" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:28:37.867" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Susan Hill's novella &quot;The Woman in Black&quot; (1983) or Stephen Mallatratt's stage adaptation." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:36:34.627" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:36:34.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4606" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:32:04.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:32:04.257" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:32:04.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4607" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:32:04.257" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American jazz rock band Steely Dan. The band was founded by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, issued 7 albums in the years 1972 – 1982 and a few more albums after 1990." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:03:50.567" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:03:50.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4608" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:33:28.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:33:28.547" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:33:28.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4609" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:33:28.547" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author and journalist Arthur Ransome (1884 – 1967) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:36:42.527" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:36:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4610" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:43:23.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:43:23.530" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:43:23.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4611" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:43:23.530" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any part of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. Use this tag with the [arthur-ransome] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:32.167" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:32.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4612" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:45:07.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:45:07.447" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:45:07.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4613" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:45:07.447" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American novelist, short story writer, folklorist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891 – 1960). Her works include the 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:36.210" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:36.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4614" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:47:26.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:47:26.390" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:47:26.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4615" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:47:26.390" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American singer-songwriter Tom Petty (1950 – 2017) and his songs." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:09:29.673" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:09:29.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4616" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:50:44.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:50:44.320" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:50:44.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4617" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:50:44.320" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018) and her work. Her work includes the science fiction novels 'The Left Hand of Darkness' (1969) and 'The Dispossessed' (1974), and the Earthsea series of fantasy novels and stories." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T20:50:19.130" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T20:50:19.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4618" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:59:44.163" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T22:59:44.163" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T22:59:44.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4619" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T22:59:44.163" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the concept of &quot;unreliable narrator&quot;, which, according to Wayne C. Booth, is a narrator who does not speak for or act in accordance with the norms of the work (The Rhetoric of Fiction, 1961). The narrator's unreliability is not necessarily a matter of deceit; the narrator may also be mistaken about certain things." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:01.947" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:01.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4620" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T23:01:06.413" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:01:06.413" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:01:06.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4621" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T23:01:06.413" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American short story writer, essayist and biographer Washington Irving (1783 – 1859) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:05.163" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:05.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4622" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-26T23:03:30.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:03:30.610" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:03:30.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4623" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-26T23:03:30.610" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American writer Nancy Etchemendy (born 1952) and her work. She has written science fiction, fantasy, horror and children's novels." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-26T23:04:09.537" LastActivityDate="2017-11-26T23:04:09.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T04:58:50.883" Score="4" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read William Hope Hodgson's &lt;em&gt;The House on the Borderland&lt;/em&gt;. Is the implication that the man's relationship with his live-in sister inclines to incest? Are the swine intended as symbols of lust (as is the classic interpretation of the pig)?  Is there a psychological interpretation of his vision of the death of the universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1088" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:43:38.220" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T21:10:54.840" Title="Symbolism in The House on the Borderland?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-hope-hodgson&gt;&lt;the-house-on-the-borderland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4626" CreationDate="2017-11-27T16:57:16.020" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Jenkins,' he repeated. 'Surely you don't mean Jefferson Jenkins, the social reformer? I mean the man who's fighting for the new cottage-estate scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as any Cabinet Minister in the world, if you'll excuse my saying so.'&#xA;'Yes; Hoggs told him it would have to be cottages,' said Fisher. 'He said the breed of cattle had improved too often, and people were beginning to laugh. And, of course, you must hang a peerage on to something; though the poor chap hasn't got it yet. Hullo, here's somebody else.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;the new cottage-estate scheme&amp;quot; mean? a scheme to build cottages for the peerage instead of their regular estate? Does &amp;quot;... people were beginning to laugh&amp;quot; imply that people are getting better living conditions because &amp;quot;the breed of cattle had improved too often&amp;quot;? And what does it mean to hang someone on to something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can make out of it is that peasants are getting richer, which makes the governors uncomfortable and willing to do something about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more context, the whole story is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://chesterton.thefreelibrary.com/The-Man-Who-Knew-Too-Much/1-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any corrections to my writing are appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2527" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T23:53:33.207" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T23:53:33.207" Title="What did G. K. Chesterton mean by these two paragraphs from the first chapter of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4625" CreationDate="2017-11-27T17:26:02.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that Jenkins has embarked on a social reform agenda to build “cottage estates”, i.e., public housing: a tract of cottages for the poor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dialogue suggests that the speakers don’t think he is doing this out of sincerity, but because he hopes to get a Peerage out of it. A Peerage can be awarded for extraordinary achievement in some field. The idea is that Jenkins first thought that he could get his Peerage for animal husbandry, improving cattle by selective breeding. But many people have already done that, to the point where another person attempting to improve cattle would yield diminishing returns, at least as far as the possibility of a Peerage is concerned. Hence Jenkins turned to social reform as a more likely route to getting a Peerage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T17:26:02.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4628" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T18:07:54.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T18:07:54.280" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T18:07:54.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4629" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T18:07:54.280" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T15:39:36.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T15:39:36.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-27T19:20:42.323" Score="10" ViewCount="8082" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1431/were-all-of-shakespeares-plays-fully-in-iambic-pentameter&quot;&gt;Shakespeare is pretty well known for writing in iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt;. One important exception to this are the witches in Macbeth, who speak in everything from trochaic meter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Double, double toil and trouble;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3079/catalectic-trochaic-tetrameter-or-acephaleous-iambic-tetrameter-scanning-kubla/&quot;&gt;catalectic trochaic tetrameter&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fair is foul, and foul is fair:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hover through the fog and filthy air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To occasionally iambic tetrameter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Third Witch: That will be ere the set of sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And everything in between.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are the witches speaking in a primarily trochaic meter and not an iambic meter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:36:36.097" Title="Why do the witches in Macbeth rarely speak in iambic pentameter?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4631" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T19:55:34.267" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:55:34.267" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T19:55:34.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4632" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T19:55:34.267" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Anton Chekhov's last play, The Cherry Orchard (1903). Use this tag with the [anton-chekhov] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T20:40:26.020" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:40:26.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4633" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T19:57:46.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T19:57:46.170" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T19:57:46.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4634" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T19:57:46.170" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, published anonymously as &quot;By the Author of Sense and Sensibility&quot;. Use this tag with the [jane-austen] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:37:15.633" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:37:15.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:04:41.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:04:41.560" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:04:41.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:04:41.560" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (1905 – 1997). He is mainly know for his book Man's Search for Meaning." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:37:42.847" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:37:42.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:07:20.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:07:20.600" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:07:20.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:07:20.600" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian author Victor Pelevin (born 1962), whose works include the novels Omon Ra (1992),  Generation P (1999) and S.N.U.F.F. (2011)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:37:11.713" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:37:11.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4639" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:34:56.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:34:56.433" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:34:56.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4640" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:34:56.433" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac (1799 –  1850) and his work. He is best known for the series of interlinked novels entitled &quot;La Comédie humaine&quot;, which includes titles such as Le Père Goriot (Old Goriot, 1835), Le Colonel Chabert  (1844), Eugénie Grandet (1834) and La Cousine Bette (1846). Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:30:59.763" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:30:59.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4641" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:42:25.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:42:25.830" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:42:25.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4642" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:42:25.830" Score="0" Body="Questions related to William Shakespeare's play Richard III, which was probably written around 1592. The play concludes the first tetralogy of Shakespeare's history plays, which also contains the three parts of Henry VI. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T21:05:29.030" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T21:05:29.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4643" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:53:21.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;His works include the:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt; series which includes &lt;em&gt;The Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt; (1985), &lt;em&gt;Speaker for the Dead&lt;/em&gt; (1986), &lt;em&gt;Xenocide&lt;/em&gt; (1991), &lt;em&gt;Children of the Mind&lt;/em&gt; (1996), and &lt;em&gt;Ender in Exile&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Later novella &lt;em&gt;A War of Gifts&lt;/em&gt; (2007) and novel &lt;em&gt;Ender's Shadow&lt;/em&gt; (1999) and the &lt;em&gt;Shadow&lt;/em&gt; saga series take place in the same universe at the same time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also wrote the series of novels entitled &lt;em&gt;The Tales of Alvin Maker&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T20:34:30.223" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T20:34:30.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4644" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:53:21.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist, critic, essayist and columnist Orson Scott Card (born 1951) or his life as a writer. His works include the novel 'Ender's Game' (1985), its sequel 'Speaker for the Dead' (1986) and the series of novels entitled 'The Tales of Alvin Maker'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T20:34:00.863" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T20:34:00.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4645" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:54:14.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:54:14.417" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:54:14.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4646" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:54:14.417" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1985 novel Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Use this tag with the [orson-scott-card] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T21:05:31.933" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T21:05:31.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4647" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:56:27.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T20:56:27.800" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T20:56:27.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4648" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T20:56:27.800" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1899 novella Heart of Darkness by the Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad. Use this tag with the [joseph-conrad] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T21:05:22.457" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T21:05:22.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4649" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:22:00.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:22:00.263" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:22:00.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4650" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:22:00.263" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2015 science fantasy novel The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, which was awarded the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2016. Use this tag with the [n-k-jemisin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:53.697" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:53.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4651" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:25:08.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:25:08.610" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:25:08.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4652" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:25:08.610" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the life and work of Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis ( c. 124 – c. 170 AD) a Numidian who wrote Latin-language prose, most notably the Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. Questions about his works should use the [latin-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:35:30.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:35:30.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4653" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:27:24.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:27:24.647" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:27:24.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4654" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:27:24.647" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel The Golden Ass (Asinus aureus) or the Metamorphoses by Apuleius. Use this tag with the [apuleius] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:56:43.880" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:56:43.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4655" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:29:49.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:29:49.830" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:29:49.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4656" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:29:49.830" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author William Hope Hodgson (1877 – 1918) and his work. His novels include The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:33.500" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:33.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4657" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:30:48.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:30:48.237" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:30:48.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4658" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:30:48.237" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1908 novel The House on the Borderland by the British author William Hope Hodgson. Use this tag with the [william-hope-hodgson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:56:25.497" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:56:25.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4659" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:35:32.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:35:32.043" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:35:32.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4660" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:35:32.043" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any of the novels in the series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The five parts are The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984) and Mostly Harmless (1992). Use this tag with the [douglas-adams] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:56:52.017" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:56:52.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4661" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:40:52.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:40:52.800" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:40:52.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4662" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:40:52.800" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British rock band Qeen and their song lyrics. When asking about a song, please use the [song-lyrics] tag as well." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T08:24:11.367" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T08:24:11.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4663" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:42:37.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:42:37.010" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:42:37.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4664" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:42:37.010" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator Porpentine Charity Heartscape and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:43.127" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:43.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4665" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:44:12.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:44:12.233" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:44:12.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4666" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:44:12.233" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the game With Those We Love Alive (2014) by Porpentine. Use this tag with the [porpentine] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:19.787" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:19.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4667" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:47:36.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:47:36.433" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:47:36.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4668" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:47:36.433" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) and her work. Adichie has published novels, short stories and nonfiction. Her novels include Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:13.407" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:13.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:49:03.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:49:03.410" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:49:03.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:49:03.410" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Purple Hibiscus (2003), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel. Use this tag with the [chimamanda-ngozi-adichie] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:44:26.867" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:44:26.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4671" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:51:50.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:51:50.330" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:51:50.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4672" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:51:50.330" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Roman poet Marcus Annaeus Lucanus or Lucan (39 AD – 65 AD) and his work. He is best known for Pharsalia or De Bello Civili." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:38:32.153" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:38:32.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4673" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:54:26.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T22:54:26.393" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T22:54:26.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4674" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T22:54:26.393" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Lucan's epic poem Pharsalia or De Bello Civili / On the Civil War. The war in question is the one between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great. Use this tag with the [lucan] and [latin-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:09:26.337" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:09:26.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4675" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:02:22.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:02:22.863" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:02:22.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4676" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:02:22.863" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the play The Birthday Party (1957) by the British playwright Harold Pinter. Use this tag together with the [harold-pinter] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:06:31.817" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:06:31.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4677" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:05:12.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:05:12.760" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:05:12.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4678" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:05:12.760" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Charles Percy Snow or C. P. Snow (1905 – 1980) and his work. His fiction includes the Strangers and Brothers series. He is also known for his 1959 lecture The Two Cultures about the gulf between the sciences and the humanities." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T07:45:06.103" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T07:45:06.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4679" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:06:14.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:06:14.587" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:06:14.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4680" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:06:14.587" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the science fiction novel S.N.U.F.F. by the Russian author Victor Pelevin. Use this tag with the [victor-pelevin] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-27T23:07:14.073" LastActivityDate="2017-11-27T23:07:14.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4708" CreationDate="2017-11-27T23:51:32.663" Score="5" ViewCount="1170" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem appears to consist of two parts that are very different from each other.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One evening in February I came near to dying here.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The car skidded sideways on the ice, out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  on the wrong side of the road. The approaching cars –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  their lights – closed in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name, my girls, my job&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  broke free and were left silently behind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  further and further away. I was anonymous&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The approaching traffic had huge lights.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They shone on me while I pulled at the wheel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in a transparent terror that floated like egg white.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The seconds grew – there was space in them –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they grew as big as hospital buildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You could almost pause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and breathe out for a while&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  before being crushed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then something caught: a helping grain of sand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or a wonderful gust of wind. The car broke free&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and scuttled smartly right over the road.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A post shot up and cracked – a sharp clang – it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  flew away in the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then – stillness. I sat back in my seat-belt&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and saw someone coming through the whirling snow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to see what had become of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    II&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have been walking for a long time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  on the frozen Östergötland fields.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have not seen a single person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In other parts of the world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  there are people who are born, live and die&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in a perpetual crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To be always visible – to live&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in a swarm of eyes –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a special expression must develop.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Face coated with clay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The murmuring rises and falls&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  while they divide up among themselves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the sky, the shadows, the sand grains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I must be alone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ten minutes in the morning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and ten minutes in the evening.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  – Without a programme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everyone is queuing at everyone's door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2534" LastEditorUserId="2534" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T22:22:55.590" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:47:57.527" Title="In the poem &quot;Alone&quot; by Tomas Transtromer, what is the significance of the two parts and how do they relate to each other?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;tomas-transtromer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4682" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:00:33.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T09:00:33.277" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T09:00:33.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4683" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:00:33.277" Score="0" Body="Questions about a writer's precise selection of words as determined by a number of factors, including denotative and connotative meaning, specificity, level of diction, tone, and audience." OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:41:47.010" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:41:47.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:23:54.227" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the author of this book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title/subtitle was something about mystery/secret, Delphi oracles... But since this was a translation, it is quite possible the original title is different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was about strange things and coincidences in the world, hexagonal patterns... I read the book about  13 years ago.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Unfortunately, I do not remember much else and my online searches failed miserably.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it in my own language, Bulgarian, but I believe the original language is English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author's name was plain - Robert, Tom - something like that. I do not remember much of the book itself but it was telling about finding hexagonal patterns everywhere in nature and lots of other stuff. That is why I would like to reread it - because I have forgotten most of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, someone here might have read it. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. It is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sirius_Mystery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sirius Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Temple and I don't remember any alien references in the book itself.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The book was of &quot;normal&quot; size - i.e., around 300 pages more or less. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PPS. The book is not famous, nor the author. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="389" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:43:21.443" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:43:21.443" Title="Book about the secret of Delphi oracles and hexagonal patterns" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4685" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:38:15.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T09:38:15.373" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T09:38:15.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4686" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T09:38:15.373" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the concept of &quot;narrator&quot; in literature, i.e. the &quot;voice&quot; that appears to speak or tell a story. The narrator can usually not simply be equated with the author. There are various types of narrators, e.g. the omniscient narrator and the unreliable narrator." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T11:07:09.087" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T11:07:09.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4684" CreationDate="2017-11-28T15:31:50.193" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which centers on a religious controversy but the characters discuss Fibonacci sequences and the golden ratio etc. appearing in nature so I can imagine references to hexagonal patterns occurring although I read it many years ago and don’t recall the specifics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author’s name is short (Dan) and the main character’s name is actually Robert, the name mentioned in the question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2513" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T15:31:50.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4688" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:41:40.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:41:40.130" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:41:40.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4689" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:41:40.130" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1894 novel Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain. Use this tag with the [mark-twain] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T18:08:58.047" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T18:08:58.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:46:29.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:46:29.030" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:46:29.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:46:29.030" Score="0" Body="Questions related to any of the novels in the Psammead series by Edith Nesbit. The series consists of Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). The Psammead itself is a creature that can grant wishes. Use this tag with the [e-nesbit] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T17:01:32.973" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T17:01:32.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4692" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:49:06.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:49:06.457" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:49:06.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4693" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:49:06.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English author Edith Nesbit (1858 – 1924) or about any of her literary work, including children's classics such as Five Children And It." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T17:01:13.583" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T17:01:13.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4694" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:53:50.870" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:53:50.870" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:53:50.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4695" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:53:50.870" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the representation of reality, especially with regard to human experience, in literature. This includes but is not limited to the realist movement that began in France in the 1850s." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T18:08:49.450" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T18:08:49.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4696" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:56:50.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:56:50.293" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:56:50.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4697" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:56:50.293" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author and illustrator Richard McClure Scarry (1919 – 1994). Scarry wrote or illustrated many books for children, include the series about Busytown." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T18:08:54.913" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T18:08:54.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4698" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:59:10.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T16:59:10.840" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T16:59:10.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4699" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-28T16:59:10.840" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Busytown, a series of books by Richard Scarry. The characters in the books are  anthropomorphic animals that live in a fictional town named Busytown. Use this tag with the [richard-scarry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-28T18:08:52.350" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T18:08:52.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4630" CreationDate="2017-11-28T17:24:50.247" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The metre in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is already fairly irregular but the lines spoken by the Witches or &quot;Weird Sisters&quot; still stand out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act 1, scene 3, Banquo describes the witches as follows (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/playmenu.php?WorkID=macbeth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) What are these &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  So wither'd and so wild in their attire,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That look not like the inhabitants o' the earth, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aught &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That man may question? (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) you should be women,  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And yet your beards forbid me to interpret  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That you are so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on their appearance, they clearly stand apart from normal human beings. Giving them tetrameter to speak instead of iambic pentameter carries over this &quot;weirdness&quot; into the verse. What's more, many (though clearly not all) of their lines also rhyme. This can be seen in the first examples quoted in the question. There are also a few examples in Act 1, scene 3, before the arrival of Macbeth and Banquo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I myself have all the other, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And the very ports they &lt;strong&gt;blow&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  All the quarters that they &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I' the shipman's card.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I will drain him dry as &lt;strong&gt;hay&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  Sleep shall neither night nor &lt;strong&gt;day&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Hang upon his pent-house &lt;strong&gt;lid&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  He shall live a man &lt;strong&gt;forbid&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Weary se'nnights nine times &lt;strong&gt;nine&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Shall he dwindle, peak and &lt;strong&gt;pine&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Though his bark cannot be &lt;strong&gt;lost&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Yet it shall be tempest-&lt;strong&gt;tost&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Look what I have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhyme isn't just a bit of fancy dress for verse; it makes verse more memorable. It has even be argued that the rhyming tetrameters do not simply set them apart from the other characters but put them &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; nobility. (&quot;Ordinary people&quot;  speak in prose, noble characters usually speak in blank verse, while rhyming lines are normally reserved for a special purpose. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-do-witches-macbeth-speak-rhyme-176851&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why do the witches in 'Macbeth' speak in rhyme?&lt;/a&gt; on eNotes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T17:24:50.247" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4630" CreationDate="2017-11-28T17:56:01.233" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trochaic meter (consisting of singular &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trochee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochees&lt;/a&gt;) is the exact opposite of iambic meter: trochaic meter a metrical foot made up of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. Conversely, iambic meter is made up of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. As a result, this puts emphasis on the beginning of the words in the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DOU&lt;/strong&gt;ble, &lt;strong&gt;DOU&lt;/strong&gt;ble, &lt;strong&gt;TOIL&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;TROU&lt;/strong&gt;ble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FI&lt;/strong&gt;re &lt;strong&gt;BURN&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;CAUL&lt;/strong&gt;dron &lt;strong&gt;BU&lt;/strong&gt;bble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This haunting 'loud-then-quiet' effect acts to intimidate the audience and gain attention to what they are saying as the first syllables are weighted, with the end syllables (perhaps less important) melting away. You may have noted a similar device at the beginning of many of Shakespeare's plays where they open with a loud scene such as a fight (like in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;) or a shipwreck (like in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;) or even the three scary witches from Macbeth!&#xA;Contextually, this was because the crowds were often rowdy and so a loud opening to a play was essential in arresting the audience's attention. This mainly creates distinct chanting rhythm that characterises the witches' speech and aims to evoke a sinister atmosphere, as oppose to the poetic, songlike iambic meter - the trochaic meter is almost hypnotising. &lt;strong&gt;It sets the scene&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shmoop.com/macbeth/writing-style.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://thatgroup202.wordpress.com/rhyme-and-meter-in-macbeth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Elizabethans had a preoccupation with the supernatural and there is a pattern between trochaic meter and supernatural beings in his plays &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/faq/macbethfaq/witchmetre.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(&lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;. Not only is it used by the witches, but also the fairies in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;; here, Puck addresses Oberon, King of the Fairies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CAP&lt;/strong&gt;tain &lt;strong&gt;OF&lt;/strong&gt; our &lt;strong&gt;FAI&lt;/strong&gt;ry &lt;strong&gt;BAND&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HEL&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;strong&gt;NA&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;HERE&lt;/strong&gt; at &lt;strong&gt;HAND&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/shak13.ela.lit.super/supernatural-elements-in-william-shakespear/#.Wh2edbacbOQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; programme is very good if you're interested).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall, the use of trochaic meter adds a chanting, arresting quality to the witches' spells as well as separating them from the mortal world who mainly speak in iambic pentameter in the instances when they speak in verse or blank verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:36:36.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5825" CreationDate="2017-11-28T21:36:51.663" Score="6" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forget them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to make sure that &amp;quot;the very landscape of liberty&amp;quot; refers to the openness of the moors and commons he is walking in; or have I missed something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second half of the sentence, I think it's all about the fact that young people make a big deal of their ideas and beliefs, thinking that they are what they believe in. Growing more experienced over the years, they start to notice the rupture between their ideologies and their reality, so they tend to &amp;quot;try to forget them&amp;quot; and focus more on who they really are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please, correct me if I get anything wrong, and thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more context, here's a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/man_knew_much/1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Man Who Knew Too Much&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2527" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T17:12:17.320" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T17:12:17.320" Title="What did G. K. Chesterton mean by this sentence from the first chapter of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3358" CreationDate="2017-11-28T23:18:14.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible answer is that he simply doesn't think about that - that's part of the irony. He doesn't know exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he wants to live for a long time, just &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; he does, and that intentional boredom is (supposedly) one way to do that. The author is deliberately causing the character to behave in an absurd manner. A major theme in the text is the characters' regular lack of reflection on the reason for their behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally the characters will even realize how absurd their behavior and/or situation is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few random examples - Major Major gets promoted to a major by chance due to his name. Colonel Cathcart promotes him to Squadron Commander to solve a headcount problem, informing him that it doesn't actually mean anything. Major Major keeps getting the same papers back for him to sign until he signs &quot;Washington Irving&quot; on them (which were largely pointless to begin with), at which point they stop coming back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are hundreds examples in the book of bureaucratic absurdity, and absurd behavior from various characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; The character just doesn't think about why he's doing it. It's &lt;em&gt;supposed&lt;/em&gt; to be ridiculous behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T23:18:14.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4704" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4705" CreationDate="2017-11-28T23:28:44.347" Score="4" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Dagney Taggart spent time in the Valley, she asked to be allowed to attend John Galt's lectures on physics. He refused on the grounds that he didn't want to give her information or ideas that could be used to help people on the outside, and that all of his students had a practical need for it (implication: she didn't). Some of his students included (among others) Dwight Sanders (formerly an aircraft manufacturer), Ted Nielsen (formerly a motor manufacturer), Quentin Daniels (professional physicist), and Owen Kellogg (formerly a manager for Taggert Transcontinental).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of those make perfect sense - physics has obvious applications to manufacturing aircraft and motors. I don't understand what Owen Kellogg would do with the information, though; also, it seems like if it was useful for Owen Kellogg, it would be equally useful for Dagney (which John Galt strongly implies that it's not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not wanting to give her information that could be helpful to outsiders before she had joined them makes perfect sense, but why the practicality objection? Why was Owen Kellogg on the list of people who had a practical use for the information but she wasn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T09:32:35.057" Title="Why did Owen Kellogg have a practical need for physics but Dagney didn't?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2017-11-28T23:51:37.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; answers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's not logical - this is a genuine mistake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Owen Kellogg was planning on going into a different profession. (I don't think that that one is the most likely explanation because it's at least implied that the other people intended to go back to their former professions once they &quot;re-emerged&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kellogg would be in a more &quot;hands-on&quot; role in managing the Railroad than Dagney after the strike. While Dagney &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; done some fairly &quot;hands-on&quot; work (e.g. serving as her own contractor to build the John Galt Line), this was an anomaly. She did that only after there was literally no one left who could complete the John Galt Line and all of the remaining contractors in the country were even worse than Ben Nealy had been (which is saying something given that he was evidently pretty inept). Once the strike was over, Dick McNamara and other competent people would be available to perform those jobs again and she'd presumably go back to just being a manager. (In fact, with her brother Jim gone, she'd presumably be the CEO). I think that this is the most likely of the three possible explanations I've offered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-28T23:51:37.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4732" CreationDate="2017-11-29T05:41:28.367" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;When she was in the Valley, Francisco D'Anconia showed Dagney details of his plans for a Smelter and walked her through them in detail. However, John Galt had said that Dagney wouldn't be permitted access to any knowledge or ideas because they could be used to help those on the outside. Also, earlier in the book, he had been working on the plans for the smelter when Hank Reardon came to his suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel and Francisco refused to show Hank the plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why did he show Dagney the plans even though he knew that she was still a scab?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T17:03:14.770" Title="Why did Francisco D'Anconia show Dagney Taggart the Smelter plans?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4681" CreationDate="2017-11-29T14:47:57.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At first glance, these feel like two different poems. The first is an ethereal description of the terror of being involved in a car crash. The second reads like a plea for quiet and solitude in an overcrowded world. Where is the connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is in the second stanza of the first part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name, my girls, my job&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  broke free and were left silently behind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  further and further away. I was anonymous&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  like a boy in a playground surrounded by enemies.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this moment of supreme terror, the poet is alone and he fears his family and friends will be left equally alone by the event of his death. The final metaphor is instructive: we can be &quot;alone&quot; even when surrounded by people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part is also about being alone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have been walking for a long time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  on the frozen Östergötland fields.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have not seen a single person.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I must be alone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ten minutes in the morning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and ten minutes in the evening.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here it seems clear that being alone is something to be courted and treasured for the brief windows of peace it produces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole poem, then, is a commentary on the human state of being alone. It is a paradox, a state that we fear (part 1) and desire (part 2) in equal measure, depending on circumstance. Because of this paradox, we can never be truly satisfied either in company or alone. As a complete work, it invites us to compare and contrast our experiences of being alone and to think about the complexities that result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting that the second half of the poem seems angrier than the first. The loneliness of the car crash is accepted as an accident, while the crowding of modernity is resented as an deliberate intrusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T14:47:57.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2017-11-29T16:11:24.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that the poem was written in 1919, Yeats could be seeing referring to the  rise of fascism in German. Think about it; &quot;...rides towards Bethlehem to be born?&quot; The birthplace of Christianity and a powerful symbol to the Jewish faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2562" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T16:11:24.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4713" CreationDate="2017-11-29T17:33:29.093" Score="10" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;OK, I know this question isn't about literary analysis or anything but I posted this on ELU and it was put on hold (as off-topic) and I was advised to post it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is alliteration &lt;strong&gt;exclusively&lt;/strong&gt; adjacent words beginning with the same letter, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whispering willows waved&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or&lt;/strong&gt; can it be words close together but &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; adjacent as well, for example in S T Coleridge's &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The &lt;strong&gt;fair&lt;/strong&gt; breeze blew, the white &lt;strong&gt;foam flew&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;furrow followed free&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were the &lt;strong&gt;first&lt;/strong&gt; that ever burst&#xA;Into that silent sea.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would not count articles such as 'the' and 'a' as separating words)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the 'f' sound in the words &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;first&amp;quot; still classed as alliteration in conjunction with the alliteratory phrases &amp;quot;foam flew&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;furrow followed free&amp;quot;? Or are they too separate to be alliteration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If words between the alliteratory words is permitted, then how many? I have tried to research this but have been unsuccessful in finding a rule that clarifies whether or not several (let's say more than two) non-allitoratory words between alliteratory words 'takes away' the alliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T18:15:22.320" Title="Is alliteration adjacent words and/or close together words starting with the same letter? If words between are permitted then how many?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4741" CreationDate="2017-11-29T17:51:05.237" Score="8" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two main characters are around age 13. They find? steal? a time machine from someone and end up back in Medieval England. But it's not them exactly - their consciousnesses get put into other bodies. The protagonist finds himself in some knight's body, while the deuteragonist initially gets put into the knight's horse! Later he gets thrown into the knight's squire (and the squire is mid-sentence when it happens, it's a rather bizarre scene). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from the fish-out-of-water aspects, the main conflict is some evil knight, who eventually challenges knight-boy to a duel. I'm pretty sure the kid wins, but I don't remember the rest of the plot, and I don't remember how they get back to their own bodies and time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to remember that when the two are discussing whether to actually use the time machine, they talk about how the protagonist has hatched a lot of hair-brained schemes, including trying to sell some gross treats that turned out to be &quot;worse, not better, than they looked.&quot; That might all be from another book entirely though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say the deuteragonist's name was Max.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was adapted into an animated film (not feature length - it might have been an episode in an anthology series) that I remember watching too. In it there's some knight with chicken pox, and he tells people not to touch him because he's cursed with &quot;little red itchy dots.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have read this book sometime prior to 2000, probably more c. 1996.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2245" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T11:20:39.223" Title="Trying to remember a junior fiction story about boys who go back to medieval times" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4710" CreationDate="2017-11-29T19:21:04.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dr. L. Kip Wheeler's glossary of literary terms defines &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_A.html#alliteration_anchor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliteration&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The glossary entry then goes on to provide several examples, from Dryden's &lt;em&gt;Absalom and Achitophel&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In pious times, ere priestcraft did begin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Before polygamy was made a sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines alliterate on &lt;strong&gt;p&lt;/strong&gt;. As you can see, there are several words between the alliterating words. The important factor is not so much the number of words but the &lt;strong&gt;alliteration between stressed syllables&lt;/strong&gt; (as determined by the meter). I have never seen a definite number of syllables that can be between alliterating syllables. (As others on this site have observed, literary theory is not an exact science.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tree lines from &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt; quoted in the question,  there is quite some &quot;distance&quot; (measured in syllables) between &quot;free&quot; and &quot;first&quot;. However, Coleridge put so many words beginning with &quot;f&quot; in the first two lines that the effect still lingers on in the third line. For this reason, claiming that &quot;first&quot; still alliterates with &quot;free&quot;, sounds uncontroversial to me. However, the effect of the internal rhyme between &quot;first&quot; and &quot;burst&quot; in the third line sounds at least as strong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T19:21:04.760" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="178" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:03:58.533" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, it is not possible to determine whether Shakespeare invented the words that had not been recorded before they appeared in his works. It is possible that at least some of these words &lt;strong&gt;circulated in spoken language before Shakespeare picked them up&lt;/strong&gt;. Of course, I am not claiming that Shakespeare invented none of the words that were first recorded in his works. Typesetting errors may be a hint, but these could also result from bad handwriting. (Sidenote: Typesetters did not necessarily work from a manuscript by Shakespeare. They might work from the author's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foul_papers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;foul papers&lt;/a&gt;, a fair copy, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_book&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prompt book&lt;/a&gt;, or in some cases, especially many plays in the First Folio, from an earlier printed version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;The Shakespeare Miscellany&lt;/em&gt; (Penguin, 2005) by David Crystal (a linguist) and his son Ben Crystal (an actor),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there are &quot;357 instances where Shakespeare is the &lt;strong&gt;only recorded user&lt;/strong&gt; of a word in one or more of its senses&quot; (emphasis added),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;1035 instances where Shakespeare is the &lt;strong&gt;first of several people using a word&lt;/strong&gt;, in one or more senses, but the later usages do not occur until at least &lt;strong&gt;twenty-five years later&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (and this 25-year gap makes is plausible that Shakespeare was the first user),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot; 642 instances where Shakespeare is the &lt;strong&gt;first of several people using a word&lt;/strong&gt;, in one or more senses, but the later usages of the word occur &lt;strong&gt;within twenty-five years&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (so it's less likely that Shakespeare invented them).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shakespeare Miscellany&lt;/em&gt; also lists these words; the first category on pages 108–109; the second category on pages 114–117. The sum of the first two categories is &lt;strong&gt;1392&lt;/strong&gt;; if you add the third, which is more doubtful, you get &lt;strong&gt;2034&lt;/strong&gt; new words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two provisos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As already mentioned in the question, these numbers are based on comparisons with the first recorded usage recorded in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; and may therefore need to be revised when other Early Modern English texts are found and analysed. (See &lt;em&gt;The Shakespeare Miscellany&lt;/em&gt;, p. 64.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The number is also influenced by what scholars include in the &lt;strong&gt;Shakespeare canon&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, Eric Sams' edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_III_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edward III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a play that was traditionally not part of the Shakespeare canon, contains a painstaking analysis of words in the play that predate the first recorded usage in the OED. For example, &lt;em&gt;The Shakespeare Miscellany&lt;/em&gt; does not treat &lt;em&gt;Edward III&lt;/em&gt; as part of the Shakespeare canon, but the play was included in the second edition of the &lt;em&gt;Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; (2005). (Another can of worms is scenes in Shakespeare plays that may have been written by other dramatists, such as Christopher Marlowe, George Peele and George Wilkins.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Shakespeare was not the only author who coined new words. The page &lt;a href=&quot;https://exhibits.lib.ku.edu/exhibits/show/english-language/middle-and-early-modern&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle and Early Modern English: From Chaucer to Milton&lt;/a&gt; notes (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the early modern period, &lt;strong&gt;between 10,000 and 25,000 new words entered the English vocabulary&lt;/strong&gt;, primarily loan words adapted from Latin and foreign languages. Accordingly, many early modern writers stand as the first evidence for a particular word in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. As of May 9, 2017, Shakespeare is cited 1495 times as the first evidence of a word; dictionary writers Thomas Blount (1618–1679), Randle Cotgrave (d. 1634?), and John Florio (1553–1625) are cited as the first evidence for 1466, 1350, and 1201 words respectively; and John Milton holds 556 first citations for a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These numbers are not fixed for all time, since scholars are still discovering older citations of words whose creation was originally attributed to (for example) Milton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T15:26:26.373" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T15:26:26.373" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4715" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:10:41.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:10:41.303" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:10:41.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4716" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:10:41.303" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Swedish poet, psychologist and translator Tomas Gösta Tranströmer (1931 –  2015), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:52:39.317" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:52:39.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4717" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:12:37.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:12:37.017" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:12:37.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4718" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:12:37.017" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹 Murakami Haruki, born 1949) and his work. His works include Norwegian Wood (1987), Kafka on the Shore (2002) and 1Q84 (2009–10)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:52:48.140" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:52:48.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:22:13.483" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:22:13.483" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:22:13.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:22:13.483" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus (flouirshed AD 161–180) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:52:43.340" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:52:43.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4721" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:57:25.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T21:57:25.837" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T21:57:25.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4722" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-29T21:57:25.837" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the computer security expert and author Victor Sheymov and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T07:35:34.880" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T07:35:34.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4723" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-29T22:02:58.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-29T22:02:58.950" LastActivityDate="2017-11-29T22:02:58.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4724" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-29T22:02:58.950" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Tower of Secrets by security expert and former KGB member Victor Sheymov. The book is a non-fiction work based on Sheymov's own career in the KGB. Use with the [victor-sheymov] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T00:49:40.727" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T00:49:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5085" CreationDate="2017-11-29T23:07:23.990" Score="9" ViewCount="1721" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just finished reading American Psycho, and I'm confused why the book took the time to devote entire chapters to Bateman's love of different 80's artists. Specifically, Bateman spends upwards of ten pages just talking about why he loves Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis And The News with no impact on the immediate plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, everything Bateman is knowledgeable about (clothing, food, art, shampoo, bottled water) reinforces how incredibly shallow his life and the 80's yuppie culture is, so it would make sense that his love of specific music would function the same way. There's also some precedence to music being used to portray a dying culture in the book, such as deafening INXS playing in clubs, Bateman's use of sound systems as status symbols, or the use of walkmans to block out human interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Bateman's explanation of music is far more nuanced than his exposition on anything else. He may talk about how a certain combination of clothing is desirable offensive or about how a certain club scored highly on Zagat, but he never goes into detail on why he feels that way. Arguably he feels nothing at all. When he talks about music in the dedicated chapters he writes intimately about why the music is good and he treats the artists as complex and valuable people, moreso than any other person he interacts with directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After thinking about it, I think there's good arguments from both sides. Is there a specific takeaway that I'm supposed to get from the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="529" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T17:55:12.240" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T17:55:12.240" Title="What is meant to be gleaned from Patrick Bateman's love of specific musicians in American Psycho?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;american-psycho&gt;&lt;bret-easton-ellis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4726" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4731" CreationDate="2017-11-30T02:34:52.737" Score="7" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most or all of Thomas Hardy's novels are set in the region of &amp;quot;Wessex&amp;quot;, which (as defined by him) covers a vast swathe of England, as you can see from the map provided in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/429/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4Di8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u4Di8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Wessex&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable towns in Wessex include &amp;quot;Christminster&amp;quot; - a very thinly veiled version of Oxford, and an important location in &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; - and &amp;quot;Casterbridge&amp;quot;, a fictionalised Dorchester and the main setting for &lt;em&gt;The Mayor of Casterbridge&lt;/em&gt;. The list goes on: there are dozens of real towns and villages whose names have been changed for Hardy's novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did he change these place names?&lt;/strong&gt; Why not either call them &amp;quot;Oxford&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Dorchester&amp;quot;, etc., or create entirely fictional towns like Anthony Trollope's Barchester?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T14:45:15.213" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T14:45:15.213" Title="Why did Thomas Hardy fictionalise the place names in his Wessex?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4533" CreationDate="2017-11-30T11:05:38.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is simply known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;third-person narration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This technique is far from new. A notable user of third-person narration was Julius Caesar in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commentarii de Bello Gallico / Commentaries on the Gallic War&lt;/a&gt;, written in the first centure BCE. For a slightly older example, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xenophon's Anabasis&lt;/a&gt;, written in the fourth century BCE. Both are autobiographical narratives using a third-person perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T12:54:32.350" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T12:54:32.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3950" CreationDate="2017-11-30T13:57:10.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Later, when Dagney saw Stadler on a different occasion, it becomes clear that Dr. Stadler didn't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to believe that &quot;who is John Galt?&quot; referred to the John Galt he knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were silent, then [Robert Stadler] said, &quot;I knew a John Galt once. Only he died long ago.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who was he?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I used to think that he was still alive. But now I'm certain that he must have died. He had such a mind that, had he lived, the whole world would have been talking of him by now.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;But the whole world &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; talking of him.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He stopped still. &quot;Yes...&quot; he said slowly, staring at a thought that had never struck him before, &quot;yes... why?&quot; &lt;strong&gt;The word was heavy with the sound of terror.&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who is he, Dr. Stadler?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why are they talking of him?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who was he?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He shook his head with a shudder and said simply, &quot;It's just a coincidence. The name is not uncommon at all. It's a meaningless coincidence. It has no connection with the man I knew. That man is dead.&quot;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;He did not permit himself to know the full meaning of the words he added: &quot;He has to be dead.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had apparently never occurred to him that &quot;Who is John Galt?&quot; was referring to the John Galt he knew. Once he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; think of it, though, he was absolutely terrified by the possibility that the John Galt he knew was the one that they were talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before that, he was also evidently rather disgusted and disappointed that no one &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; heard of John Galt yet, because he was &lt;em&gt;expecting&lt;/em&gt; that he would become famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When John was captured and asked to see Robert Stadler, Dr. Stadler begged not to be forced to see him. As soon as he went in to see John, he immediately started protesting that &quot;he couldn't help it&quot; and started trying to rationalize his behavior (in fact, before John even said anything if I remember correctly - I couldn't locate the quote for that, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Stadler's office at the State Science Institute was described as &quot;a small room that looked like the office of the bookkeeper of an unsuccessful firm.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T07:45:08.443" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T07:45:08.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2017-11-30T14:50:32.343" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a surprisingly literal interpretation to this poem. Yeats describes a sphinx-like beast arising in the desert. It is entirely possible that this is the &quot;rough beast&quot; to which he refers, and that the metaphorical nature of the creature is there simply to add depth to the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats had a bizarre but fully developed mystical belief system, which he outlined in a relatively obscure book called &lt;em&gt;A Vision&lt;/em&gt;. A central tenet of this belief was that history repeats itself in cycles, which he called &quot;gyres&quot;. The connection to the first part of the poem is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second part of the poem, Yeats mentions the &lt;em&gt;Spiritus Mundi&lt;/em&gt;, which is another part of his belief system. The litertal translation is &quot;spirit of the world&quot;, which Yeats held to be a collective soul or folk memory, a repository of all cultural history throughout the world. That, of course, makes Christian culture a tiny fragment of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats saw the Spiritus Mundi in a vision, which he describes in terms that have a very literal parallel in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... there rose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yeats, Autobiographies: Reveries Over Childhood and Youth and the Trembling Veil, 1926&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: the poem can be read literally. The &quot;rough beast&quot; is the resurrection of a thousand dead gods in a single image. It is terrifying only because it will wipe out our Christianised, homogenised culture and return us to a primal state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is no doubt that Yeats was well aware of the symbolic values of his verse, because he talked about them himself. In a 1936 letter he wrote that the poem was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;written some 16 or 17 years ago and foretold what is happening&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, of course, refers to the rise of Facism in Europe. However, it seems likely that, here, Yeats may be assigning himself an undue level of foresight. The poem was written in January 1919. While the world was indeed &quot;falling apart&quot; in the aftermath of the first world war and the influenza epidemic, making it easy to fear for the future, it seems unlikely anyone could have been so specific about those fears as to foree the Nazis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;- W. B. Yeats's &quot;A Vision&quot;: Explications and Contexts, 2012.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- A Preface to Yeats, 1978       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T20:39:27.153" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T20:39:27.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4726" CreationDate="2017-11-30T15:16:38.000" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As user Fabjaja notes in the comments, Wessex was originally a kingdom in Anglo-Saxon Britain. While some of its peers survive in modern nomenclature (such as the county of Essex), Wessex had not. The name would have been largely unfamiliar to readers in Hardy's time - it is almost entirely thanks to his writing that it re-entered the modern vocabulary. Although not in common usage, most folk nowadays would understand that it refers to the geographical area where the books were set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He first used the term in chapter 50 of &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;. Prior to this he had already written four novels, none of which used the word, instead referring to the area by its proper name, the county of Dorset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; was the most popular of his books to date, however, and he attributed this partly to its setting in a semi-mythical rural England. The name recurs in the very first sentence of the next novel, &lt;em&gt;The Hand of Ethelberta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth remembering that in Hardy's time, novels often started life as serials, and print runs were small. So, as his popularity increased, he had the opportunity to revise and edit subsequent editions of his books. He appears to have used this opportunity to change the place-names in his early books into fictional ones in his expanding mythology, making it seem more pre-planned than it really was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons why he did this, then, are partly commercial - his audience liked it. At the time, Dorset was one of the least populated parts of the country. City folk found its rural rituals fascinating. In 1912 he wrote in his &lt;em&gt;General Preface to the Novels and Poems&lt;/em&gt;:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the region designated was known but vaguely;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems they preferred it in fictionalised form than in actual place names they might be vaguely familiar with. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy, however, also felt that mythologising it offered him more creative freedom. Again in the &lt;em&gt;General Preface&lt;/em&gt; he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I considered that our magnificent heritage from the Greeks in dramatic literature found sufficient room for a large proportion of its action in an extent of their country not much larger than the half-dozen counties here reunited under the old name of Wessex&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy was creating what he saw as his own Greek fiction, a creative space in which he could work in the manner of the classical masters of antiquity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Williams, Merryn. Thomas Hardy and Rural England. London: Macmillan, 1972.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kay-Robinson, Denys. The Landscape of Thomas Hardy. Exeter, England: Webb and Bower, 1984.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T13:44:14.093" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T13:44:14.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4706" CreationDate="2017-11-30T17:03:14.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dagney had no practical use for a smelter, but Hank Reardon did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also unlikely that she would've stolen what was clearly Francisco's intellectual property in order to give it to someone else. That clearly would've been morally different than, for example, paying Quentin Daniels to reverse-engineer the abandoned motor (especially given that she believed that the inventor was likely dead). Even though she was a scab, the strikers still believed that she was moral. John Galt even told her the password to the power plant (which was the oath that everyone took to join the strike) because he knew that she wouldn't actually say that until she said it in the sense that he meant it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Dagney wasn't permitted to attend John Galt's physics lectures (or other meetings that centered on exchanging useful ideas and information) because that was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; intellectual property. There was no reason she couldn't use that information to benefit Taggart Transcontinental and/or other people (such as Hank Reardon) who were still &quot;on the outside&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/4704/why-did-owen-kellogg-have-a-practical-need-for-physics-but-dagney-didnt&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for details on whether Dagney had a practical use for the content of John Galt's physics lectures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T17:03:14.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4733" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-11-30T19:32:03.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T19:32:03.197" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T19:32:03.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4734" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-11-30T19:32:03.197" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1991 novel American Psycho by the American author Bret Easton Ellis. Use with the [bret-easton-ellis] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-11-30T23:53:25.607" LastActivityDate="2017-11-30T23:53:25.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13639" CreationDate="2017-11-30T20:19:04.997" Score="7" ViewCount="1374" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is Keats saying in the last three lines here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And such too is the grandeur of the dooms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We have imagined for the mighty dead;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All lovely tales that we have heard or read:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An endless fountain of immortal drink,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Keats (1818). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/endymionapoeticr24280gut/24280.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Endymion&lt;/em&gt;, Book I, lines 20-24&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Keats referring to &quot;tales&quot; of an afterlife / immortality in heaven? If so, why are those &quot;tales&quot; an &quot;endless fountain&quot;? Because there are so many different views on life after death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or could he perhaps be saying that &quot;tales that we have read&quot; grant their authors immortality? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what might be the significance of the aquatic imagery (&quot;fountain&quot;, &quot;drink&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2355" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T14:45:57.780" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T20:32:43.983" Title="What are the &quot;lovely tales&quot; in Keats' &quot;Endymion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;endymion&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-01T02:11:44.407" Score="5" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my current controlling idea of my essay on the poem &amp;quot;On Pleasure&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The speaker challenges the idea of pleasure in the minds of the&#xA;audience, and argues that pleasure is an unavoidable part of life;&#xA;only by accepting this, and giving and receiving pleasure, can one&#xA;enjoy life to the fullest.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is pretty difficult to understand for me, so I was wondering if it accurately illustrates the point the author is trying to make, and covers the entire poem. Also, is it more of a summary, or does it actually goes into the deeper meaning behind the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem, quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.katsandogz.com/gibran/onpleasure.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kahlil Gibran on Pleasure&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pleasure is a freedom-song, But it is not freedom. It is the&#xA;blossoming of your desires, But it is not their fruit. It is a depth&#xA;calling unto a height, But it is not the deep nor the high. It is the&#xA;caged taking wing, But it is not space encompassed. Ay, in very truth,&#xA;pleasure is a freedomsong. And I fain would have you sing it with&#xA;fullness of heart; yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the&#xA;singing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all, and they are&#xA;judged and rebuked. I would not judge nor rebuke them. I would have&#xA;them seek. For they shall find pleasure, but not her alone; Seven are&#xA;her sisters, and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.&#xA;Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots&#xA;and found a treasure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs&#xA;committed in drunkenness. But regret is the beclouding of the mind and&#xA;not its chastisement. They should remember their pleasures with&#xA;gratitude, as they would the harvest of a summer. Yet if it comforts&#xA;them to regret, let them be comforted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to&#xA;remember; And in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all&#xA;pleasures, lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it. But even&#xA;in their foregoing is their pleasure. And thus they too find a&#xA;treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands. But tell me,&#xA;who is he that can offend the spirit? Shall the nightingale offend the&#xA;stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars? And shall your flame&#xA;or your smoke burden the wind? Think you the spirit is a still pool&#xA;which you can trouble with a staff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure you do but store the desire in&#xA;the recesses of your being. Who knows but that which seems omitted&#xA;today, waits for tomorrow? Even your body knows its heritage and its&#xA;rightful need and will not be deceived. And your body is the harp of&#xA;your soul, And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or&#xA;confused sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now you ask in your heart, &amp;quot;How shall we distinguish that which is&#xA;good in pleasure from that which is not good?&amp;quot; Go to your fields and&#xA;your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee&#xA;to gather honey of the flower, But it is also the pleasure of the&#xA;flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a&#xA;fountain of life, And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, And&#xA;to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a&#xA;need and an ecstasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the&#xA;bees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2573" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T05:20:37.073" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:20:37.073" Title="Is my controlling idea for my poem analysis accurate?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4765" CreationDate="2017-12-01T09:19:47.677" Score="9" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. Among the criticisms I felt fair to level at it was that Shadow, the central protagonist, is very much a blank slate. We rarely get any insight to his inner thought processes, and his speech and actions don't seem to imbue him with much character at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading around, it seems other people have picked up on this too. He is commonly described as &quot;taciturn&quot;, which is a rather more charitable way of implying what I'm saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder whether it might be a deliberate choice on the part of the author. So: is there any given reason, or any literary or stylistic value to the lack of character in Shadow's character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:39:26.823" Title="Why is there so little character to the character of Shadow in American Gods?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4711" CreationDate="2017-12-01T11:32:48.393" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You posted a lot of information. That's good and what we ask you to do in the Tag info, so thank you for that (we do also ask you to explain your searches so far and what titles you have rejected as a result). I looked at that information to try and identify the most distinguishing features, the ones that would not be shared with &lt;em&gt;lots&lt;/em&gt; of other books. I decided that while there were several details that would be corroborative, the thing most likely to be unique was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a character being transferred &lt;em&gt;into a horse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You had also identified that they had a time machine and that the book was 'Junior fiction.' 'Junior fiction' isn't a term I've heard used much and I thought its inclusion might unnecessarily limit search returns, so I substituted the more frequently used 'YA' (for 'young adult') and the query I constructed was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;YA novel &quot;time machine&quot; &quot;into a horse&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your book came up as the fifth result on the first page. The book is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Max and Me and the Time Machine' by Gery Greer and Bob Ruddick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iWwq5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iWwq5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;#39;Max and Me and the Time Machine&amp;#39; by Gery Greer and Bob Ruddick.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Steve brings home a time machine he bought for $2.50 at a garage sale, Max is suspicious. &quot;There' s no such thing as time travel. &lt;em&gt;Or&lt;/em&gt; time machines.&quot; Then they both end up in the year 1250 in medieval England &amp;mdash; Steve as Sir Robert Marshall and Max as his horse! &amp;mdash; and Max must admit the machine works.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sir Robert soon finds himself in the midst of a duel to the death with the Hampshire mauler, defending not only his honor, but his life. Can Max rescue him? Will the machine return him in time to spare his life? The 20th century never looked so good.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0064402223&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T11:20:39.223" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T11:20:39.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4742" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4743" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Shades of Grey series by Jasper Fforde, currently consisting of a single book, &quot;Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron&quot; (published 2009). Use with the [jasper-fforde] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T12:57:47.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4744" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:11:05.910" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:11:05.910" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:11:05.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4745" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:11:05.910" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American science fiction and horror writer Dan Simmons (born 1948) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:52:08.207" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:52:08.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4746" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:14:04.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:14:04.087" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:14:04.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4747" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:14:04.087" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the series of science fiction novels entitled the Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. The series includes &quot;Hyperion&quot; (1989), &quot;The Fall of Hyperion&quot;, &quot;Endymion&quot;, &quot;The Rise of Endymion&quot; and a few short stories. Use this tag with the [dan-simmons] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:53:01.337" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:53:01.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4748" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:19:57.207" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:19:57.207" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:19:57.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4749" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:19:57.207" Score="0" Body="For questions about the historical romance genre as a whole. Historical romance novels have a plot that is set in the past, and this broad definition makes the genre's definition rather vague. Do not use this tag for questions about specific historical romance novels (instead, use tags for the novel and author), or for genre-classification questions (which are off-topic)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:28:08.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:28:08.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4750" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:28:47.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:28:47.917" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:28:47.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4751" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:28:47.917" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author and illustrator Laura Numeroff (born 1953) or about any of her literary works. She is best known for her children's book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (1985)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:41:11.690" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:41:11.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4752" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:29:50.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:29:50.627" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:29:50.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4753" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:29:50.627" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Laura Numeroff's children's book &quot;If You Give a Mouse a Cookie&quot; (1985). Use this tag with the [laura-numeroff] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:53:08.650" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:53:08.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4754" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:33:29.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:33:29.287" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:33:29.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4755" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:33:29.287" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the comic fantasy novel &quot;Raising Steam&quot;, the fortieth novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Use this tag with the [terry-pratchett] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:52:38.273" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:52:38.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4756" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:58:24.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T14:58:24.977" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T14:58:24.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4757" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T14:58:24.977" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Gloria D. Miklowitz (1927 – 2015) and her work. Miklowitz wrote more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books for young adults." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:02:54.197" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:02:54.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4758" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:01:20.157" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:01:20.157" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:01:20.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4759" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:01:20.157" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 – 1924) or about any of her literary works, including the children's novels Little Lord Fauntleroy (published in 1885–1886) and The Secret Garden (1911)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:40:47.757" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:40:47.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3353" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:01:53.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three of the most important reasons appear to be a) the fact that he was dead b) the fact that most of the bureaucrats evidently hadn't heard of him (based on the fact that CID men come looking for him) and c) the fact that he was a major literary figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point a) is important to the irony - if Major Major signs his name with the name of a living person, it comes back for him to sign again. If he signs it with the name of a dead person, it doesn't come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some extent, it also likely symbolizes the soul-crushing effects of the bureaucracy. Yossarian and Major Major are simply taking the next logical step of signing their name as someone who's already dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually kind of like the running gag with T. S. Eliot that Ex-PFC Wintergreen started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T16:37:59.947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T16:37:59.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4761" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:05:07.947" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:05:07.947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:05:07.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4762" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:05:07.947" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Emily Fox-Seton, one of the titles used for republications of the novels &quot;The Making of a Marchioness&quot; (1901) and its sequel &quot;The Methods of Lady Walderhurst&quot; by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Use this tag with the [frances-hodgson-burnett] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:52:23.753" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:52:23.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4763" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:10:05.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:10:05.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:10:05.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4764" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:10:05.107" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the non-fiction book The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997, in Russian) by the Russian political analyst Aleksandr Dugin. Use this tag with the [aleksandr-dugin] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T15:40:23.463" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:40:23.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4740" CreationDate="2017-12-01T15:39:26.823" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The author describes the novel as having a sort of external third-person viewpoint ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/jul01/interview-with-neil-gaiman-7011&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; with Neil Gaiman in which he says that Shadow isn't like most point-of-view characters: we don't get inside his head much, but rather experience events together with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I actually wrote the entire first chapter in the first person. That was my first try at Shadow. It really felt odd. It didn't feel right. So I put it aside for a while to figure out what was wrong with it. I then realized that this is a character that we really need to see from the &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt;. Yes, we're going to be with Shadow throughout the books. I also began to suspect that at the end of the book we were going to have to follow some other characters around, I wasn't sure how reliable a narrator he would be. For the body of the book, we do see everything Shadow does, not exactly through his eyes but standing next to him, so to speak. He was a very weird character to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this perspective, perhaps it makes more sense that Shadow seems underdeveloped. We're not seeing that much of his personality and soul because he is by nature a private person, not opening up easily to others, and - even though he's the protagonist - we're not really properly inside his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... and describes Shadow as a 'mirror', reflecting others rather than projecting himself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same interview, Gaiman says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the strangest things I found when writing Shadow is that he has no personality unless he's with somebody. At which point he will adopt a personality, or occasionally mirror them. His speech patterns are ever so slightly flexible. People would get very confused. Someone who's in the middle of the book said about Shadow, &amp;quot;But he's just this big, dumb guy.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, he's not,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;He was &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; big, dumb guys at the time, so he was talking like a big, dumb guy.&amp;quot; There are some lovely little weird moments. I love the moment when he pretends to be Andy Haddock, head of A-1 Security Services, for a couple of paragraphs and he has some wonderful little conversations with various people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting, though, that Gaiman sees Shadow as one of those characters who's really taken on a life of his own. He describes in the afterword to the &amp;quot;author's preferred edition&amp;quot; of &lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt; (I don't have the book to hand right now, but will add quotes later) how Shadow was difficult to write; he seemed such a fully-formed character that he could only be written in 'his' way and would reject others. This should probably be borne in mind when considering the reliability of the author's word about his character: even Gaiman himself says that Shadow is his own separate entity rather than just a facet of the author's mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But of course, the apparently featureless Shadow ends up being the centre-point of events.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, by taking Shadow at face value as a featureless, characterless &amp;quot;blank slate&amp;quot;, you're making the same mistake that Odin and Loki did when they underestimated him. He's not just the dumb lackey that Mr Wednesday used him as; he has his own kind of power, and his own intelligence, which enabled him to see the real purpose of the war where all the other gods had failed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is exactly the point. We don't see his inner thought processes, or much depth to his character, but he ends up having strength and insight which everyone else lacks. Doesn't this give us the impression of a man who keeps himself to himself but who nevertheless has intelligence, emotions, and personality, just not that he chooses to outwardly display? And isn't that exactly the type of man Shadow is supposed to be? Surely it's a good portrayal, then. It's much harder to convey the sense of a character being a 'closed book' if you also show the readers all their thoughts and feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://americangodsneilgaiman.weebly.com/characters.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this reviewer&lt;/a&gt; puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shadow has many roles.  Gaiman has created a character who, by all appearances, seems to be an average, somewhat uninteresting guy.  As we read the novel, Shadow's character become more and more complex and we realize how he is the pivot on which the story turns. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of Gaiman's brilliance in creating Shadow's character is that Shadow's character seems to be flat and boring. [...] But Shadow goes through great trials and is the pivot point of this novel. Everyone in the novel is centered around Shadow in some way.  As we get to know Shadow we realize how complex he is. Sometimes it seems that the book is really about Shadow and his personal transformation, and the war between the Gods is just a backdrop for Shadow's story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T15:39:26.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4766" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:44:56.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:44:56.937" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T16:44:56.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4767" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:44:56.937" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Jay Williams (1914 – 1978) and his work. Williams wrote  science fiction (often for children), fantasy, historical fiction and non-fiction." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:08:17.363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:08:17.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4768" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:46:26.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:46:26.797" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T16:46:26.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4769" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:46:26.797" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 1979 children's book The Magic Grandfather by Jay Williams. Use this tag with the [jay-williams] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:09:55.333" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:09:55.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4770" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:49:59.873" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:49:59.873" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T16:49:59.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4771" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:49:59.873" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American author Wilbur Monroe Leaf (1905 – 1976) and his work. Munro Leaf wrote and illustrated nearly 40 children's books, including the classic The Story of Ferdinand (1936)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:08:21.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:08:21.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:51:16.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:51:16.810" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T16:51:16.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:51:16.810" Score="0" Body="Questions related to color or colors in a work of literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:34:29.063" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:34:29.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:53:50.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T16:53:50.233" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T16:53:50.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T16:53:50.233" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American crime writer Lawrence Block (born 1938) and his work. Block has written several series of novels, for example, those around the private investigator Matthew Scudder and those around the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:08:26.320" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:08:26.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:01:54.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:01:54.070" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:01:54.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:01:54.070" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) and her work. She is best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818) but also wrote short stories, biographies and travelogues. She was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley in the years 1816 – 1822." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:21:25.733" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:21:25.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:03:43.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:03:43.720" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:03:43.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:03:43.720" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Use this tag with the [mary-shelley] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4780" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:35:48.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:35:48.683" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:35:48.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4781" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:35:48.683" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British science fiction and fantasy author Mary Gentle (born 1956) and her work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:48:45.273" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:48:45.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4782" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:37:29.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:37:29.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:37:29.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4783" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:37:29.953" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the young-adult fantasy novel A Hawk in Silver (1977) by Mary Gentle. Use this tag with the [mary-gentle] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:35:53.617" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:35:53.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3351" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:38:50.037" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments give several examples of its use prior to the publication of Catch-22. It's difficult to know the extent to which Heller was aware of these, but at a minimum, he technically wasn't the inventor of the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@PeterShor mentioned the OED citation &quot;1949 Amer. Speech ... The magician may speak of disappearing or vanishing a card.&quot; @user14111 also mentioned &quot;1897 Chem. News 19 Mar. 143 We progressively disappear the faces of the dodecahedron.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite possible that Heller &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; that he invented the term. On the one hand, he had degrees in English and taught English in college, so presumably would've been aware of the existence of the OED; that being said, it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; that he had read the entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Yossarian was baffled by the use and insisted that the word made no sense in its context would suggest that the characters didn't know about the usage, and possibly that the author didn't, either. While that technically doesn't prove the point, I think that the most likely explanation is that Heller simply didn't know about other usages and thought that he was inventing the phrase (which he technically didn't). &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3566/did-heller-base-his-sarcastic-swipe-at-academia-on-any-actual-example&quot;&gt;It wouldn't be the first time he invented (or tried to invent) terms, either&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Heller didn't technically invent the usage, but it's quite possible (even perhaps likely) that he &lt;em&gt;thought&lt;/em&gt; that he did. Either way, the book was instrumental in popularizing the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:38:50.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4785" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:39:16.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:39:16.443" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:39:16.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4786" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:39:16.443" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American novelist and short story writer Michael Chabon (born 1963) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:21:41.500" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:21:41.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4787" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:40:17.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:40:17.720" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:40:17.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4788" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:40:17.720" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &amp; Clay (2000) by Michael Chabon. Use this tag with the [michael-chabon] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:48:55.907" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:48:55.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4789" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:47:54.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:47:54.260" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:47:54.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4790" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:47:54.260" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the &quot;symphonic fairy tale for children&quot; Peter and the Wolf (1936) by the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev. The composition involves a narrator who tells the story (of Peter and the wolf) scene by scene, followed by the orchestra illustrating the scene through music. Use this tag with the [sergei-prokofiev] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:48:41.040" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:48:41.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4791" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:50:11.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:50:11.273" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:50:11.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4792" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:50:11.273" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891 – 1953) and his work. His work includes seven completed operas and the musical fairy tale Peter and the Wolf." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:48:49.267" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:48:49.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4793" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:54:24.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T19:54:24.860" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T19:54:24.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4794" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T19:54:24.860" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the style of a literary work or a specific author, i.e. the way in which word choice, sentence structure, imagery, figurative devices, repetition and other aspect of language are used to achieve certain effects. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:22:03.343" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:22:03.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6772" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:01:54.497" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of the book, when Eddie Willars confronted Jim Taggart about the poor condition of the Rio Norte Line, they had the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Jim, what are you saying? Does it matter that no one blames us - when the road is falling apart?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  James Taggart smiled; it was a thin smile, amused and cold. &quot;It's touching, Eddie,&quot; he said. &quot;It's touching - your devotion to Taggart Transcontinental. If you don't look out, you'll turn into one of those real feudal serfs.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;That's what I am, Jim.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Eddie say that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T17:31:59.167" Title="Why did Eddie refer to himself as a &quot;feudal serf&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4796" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:20:55.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T20:20:55.277" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T20:20:55.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4797" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:20:55.277" Score="0" Body="The Dark Tower is an incomplete science fiction manuscript attributed to C. S. Lewis (although this attribution has been disputed). Use with the [C-S-Lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:33:50.840" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:33:50.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4813" CreationDate="2017-12-01T20:39:17.730" Score="1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, Owen Kellogg was described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dagney Taggart] knew that the superintendent of the Ohio Division was no good and that he was a friend of James Taggart. She had not insisted on throwing him out long ago only because she had no better man to put in his place. Good men were so strangely hard to find. But she would have to get rid of him, she thought, and she would give his post to &lt;strong&gt;Owen Kellogg, the young engineer&lt;/strong&gt; who was doing a brilliant job as one of the assistants to the manager of the Taggart Terminal in New York; it was Owen Kellog who ran the Terminal...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat ambiguous. What kind of engineer was he - engineer as in a train driver, or engineer as in &quot;the subject taught in college&quot;? It's used in both senses in the book - Dagney studied engineering in college, William Hastings and John Galt were described as engineers, and Pat Logan was described an an &quot;engineer of the Taggart Comet on the Nebraska Division&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/4704/why-did-owen-kellogg-have-a-practical-need-for-physics-but-dagney-didnt&quot;&gt;John Galt implies that Owen Kellogg has a practical use for physics&lt;/a&gt; (with the possible implication that Dagney didn't). The exact reasons for Galt's statement are discussed more in that question, but does this suggest that he was an engineer in the same sense as William Hastings? Having a practical use for physics would be consistent with an engineering background (although you'd then have to ask why Dagney didn't have a need for it, given that she had an engineering background too).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the fact that he was helping to manage the Taggart Terminal rather than working in the research department would seem to suggest that he was an engineer in the same sense as Pat Logan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, when Owen and Dagney were stuck on a &quot;frozen train&quot; that had been abandoned by its crew, there was no discussion of having Owen Kellogg take over as engineer (even temporarily). This is a bit of an argument from silence, though, and it seems unlikely that he and Dagney would be able to run the train alone without other crew members in any case (so they still would've needed to send for a crew anyway, especially given that Owen Kellogg didn't intend to go all the way to the train's destination).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T17:47:10.357" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T17:47:10.357" Title="What kind of engineer was Owen Kellogg?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-01T21:25:02.373" Score="5" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Shakespeare wrote around 40 plays (depending on how the Shakespeare canon is defined). Except for some of his history plays (&lt;em&gt;Henry IV&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt;) and possibly &lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt; (not a real sequel of &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 2&lt;/em&gt; but another play involving Falstaff) Shakespeare did not write any continuations or sequels to any of his own plays. Marlowe, by contrast, wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tamburlaine the Great&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as a two-part play. But what about &lt;strong&gt;plays by other dramatists that continue the plot of a Shakespeare play&lt;/strong&gt;? Do any such plays exist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am excluding history plays from this question; there are history plays by several contemporaries of Shakespeare that tackle the same material—often based on Holinshed's &lt;em&gt;Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;—in a different way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_literature#Jacobean_period:_1603.E2.80.9325&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacobean period&lt;/a&gt; ended in 1625 with the death of King James, i.e. nine years after Shakespeare's death. Although the works I am looking for may have been written during Shakespeare's lifetime, I expect that the number of such works is very low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T16:55:01.357" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T16:55:01.357" Title="Tudor or Jacobean plays that are sequels to a Shakespeare play?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;theater&gt;&lt;sequel&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4800" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T21:43:53.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T21:43:53.533" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T21:43:53.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4801" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T21:43:53.533" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the theater in England between the early 1560s and 1642 (the closing of the theaters ordered by the Long Parliament). This covers theatrical works written during the reigns of Elizabeth I (Tudor), James I and Charles I (Stuart). Notable dramatists in this period include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:48:22.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:48:22.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4802" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:33:42.717" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:33:42.717" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:33:42.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4803" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:33:42.717" Score="0" Body="Questions related to works of literature that continue the story of an earlier work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:48:26.153" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:48:26.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4804" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.563" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4805" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:35:04.563" Score="0" Body="Questions related to books as physical objects, e.g. their size, colors, etc." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:48:28.830" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:48:28.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4806" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:36:52.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:36:52.607" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:36:52.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4807" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:36:52.607" Score="0" Body="Questions related to works of literature which are transmitted through speech or song." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T12:00:56.597" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T12:00:56.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4808" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:38:59.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:38:59.553" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:38:59.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4809" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:38:59.553" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Canadian author Amal El-Mohtar and her work. El-Mohtar has published short fiction, poetry, essays and reviews." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T11:59:34.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T11:59:34.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4810" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:40:20.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-01T22:40:20.573" LastActivityDate="2017-12-01T22:40:20.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4811" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-01T22:40:20.573" Score="0" Body="Questions related to F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby (1925). Use this tag with the [f-scott-fitzgerald] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T11:59:43.363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T11:59:43.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5018" CreationDate="2017-12-02T04:36:03.990" Score="0" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eddie Willers periodically ate dinner in the Taggart cafeteria with the Mystery Worker (who is, of course, later identified as John Galt). They discuss a lot of different things, including the state of the world and Taggart Transcontinental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, given the fact that much of the concrete information Eddie supplies to the Mystery Worker is promptly used by the Strikers to the detriment of Taggart Transcontinental, why didn't Eddie ever put two and two together (especially given how obviously pointed a few of the Mystery Worker's questions were)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Eddie Willers mentioned that Dick McNamara was going to be the contractor on the John Galt Line to the Mystery Worker, and he disappeared shortly after that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentions their great need of diesel engines and who they'll be ordering them from. The Mystery Worker pointedly asked about how critical the diesels were, and the would-be manufacturer promptly disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing for Quentin Daniels (although admittedly the disappearance of Daniels was kind of overshadowed by the simultaneous disappearance of Dagny herself, along with the fact that Quentin Daniels was working for Dagny directly rather than through Taggart Transcontinental).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were a number of other strange occurrences with information that Eddie shared with the Mystery Worker. So why didn't Eddie ever figure out who he was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T16:49:15.370" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T04:00:29.640" Title="Why didn't Eddie Willers ever connect some of the disappearances to his conversations with the Mystery Worker?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4798" CreationDate="2017-12-02T05:05:58.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;He clearly has &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; knowledge of engineering as a field of occupation. Upon finding a broken phone with Dagny, he is able to evaluate if the wiring and determine that the current is on. Not exactly rocket surgery, but also not what an average non-technical &quot;manager&quot; is able to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She handed the receiver to him without a word. She held the flashlight, &#xA;  while he went swiftly over the instrument, then tore it off the wall &lt;strong&gt;and &#xA;  studied the wires&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The wire's okay,&quot; he said. &quot;The current's on. It's this particular &#xA;  instrument that's out of order&lt;/strong&gt;. There's a chance that the next one might be &#xA;  working.&quot; He added, &quot;The next one is five miles away.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no other information on Kellogg available in the book to clarify his specialty aside from him attending Galt's class on physics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T05:05:58.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4704" CreationDate="2017-12-02T09:32:35.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's another possible interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, Galt seems to select two kinds of people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;True leaders/geniuses. Rearden. Sanders. Daniels&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Those that would undermine Taggart T company. It's an interesting question about &quot;why&quot;, but he was pretty happy about grabbing people who aren't shown to be extra genius such as Owen Kellogg and McNamara  - merely very competent. The main quality outside competence seems to be &quot;undermine Taggart &lt;strong&gt;despite Dagny's effort&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; - at the moment, she represented the opposite force to Galt, he wanted to break the old society and she was working with all her abilities to keep it alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, including Owen Kellogg and McNamara may be for the same exact reason: they are ex-connected to Taggart. This kills two birds with one stone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;first, it pressures Dagny to defect to the Gulch (these two get access to Galt's ideas). She was already jealous of Daniels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Really?&quot; she said, almost with a touch of jealousy. &quot;How can he afford &#xA;  anything that expensive?&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;second, once Galt's goal is achieved, he'd obviously like Dagny to rebuild Taggart Transontinental - and the same people he stole from her, will be returned, up-leveraged with access to Galt's lecture ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T09:32:35.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4930" CreationDate="2017-12-02T11:33:55.407" Score="8" ViewCount="4620" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 10 of Dickens's &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;, Pip goes to the pub to find Joe, as told by his sister. When he enters the pub, Joe and Mr. Wopsle are sitting at a table next to a mysterious man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away and looking hard at me all the time, nodded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pip would have immediately recognised him if it was Magwitch, considering the trauma he caused him, so it probably isn't. Is it Compeyson? If it is we don't get the tell-tale detail of the large scar across his face that defines his appearance in the rest of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man then indicates for Pip to sit next to him and Pip declines. Then he proceeds to 'grill' Joe about who Pip is after he hears his name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stranger looked at me again - still cocking his eye, as if he were expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun - and said, &amp;quot;He's a likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Pip,&amp;quot; said Joe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Christened Pip?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No, not christened Pip.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Surname Pip?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; said Joe, &amp;quot;it's a kind of family name what he gave himself when a infant, and is called by.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Son of yours?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; said Joe, meditatively - not, of course, that it could be in anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was discussed over pipes; &amp;quot;well - no. No, he ain't.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Nevvy?&amp;quot; said the strange man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, &amp;quot;he is not - no, not to deceive you, he is not - my nevvy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What the Blue Blazes is he?&amp;quot; asked the stranger. Which appeared to me to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is Magwitch, he would not need to ask all of these questions since he had met Pip and knew his name as well as meeting Joe when he was captured in the marshes as a runaway convict, so I don't think it is him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man also mentions this at the pub, when he is told Mr. Wopsle is the church clerk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Aha!&amp;quot; said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. &amp;quot;The lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This detail supports that perhaps it was Magwitch, since he first appears and meets Pip there, but Compeyson was also loose on the marsh near the church as he was recaptured whilst fighting Magwitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the man begins to stir his rum and water with the file that Pip had given Magwitch to break his shackles at the very beginning of the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He stirred his rum-and-water pointedly at me, and he tasted his rum-and-water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and he tasted it: not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be Joe's file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's strange that he was asking Pip's name just a few minutes ago but is now showing him the file, a very pointed symbol of Pip's frightening encounter with Magwitch in the first chapter. Maybe he was making sure it was Pip and not another boy? (this possible unsureness and need for clarification suggests is is not Magwitch)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since he only let Pip see on purpose, he must either be one of the convicts or a messenger from the convicts. Either way this is a dramatic device used by Dickens to foreshadow the reappearance of Magwitch in Chapter 39 (when he reveals himself as Pip's mysterious benefactor, because he just before he leaves the pub he gives Pip some coins wrapped in two one-pound notes, which symbolises Pip's imminent unexpected inheritance) but is it actually one of the convicts? We know that Magwitch was eventually deported to Australia somewhere between Chapter 5 (when he is arrested in the marsh just after Christmas dinner) and Chapter 39. It is not stated when he does leave the country, but surely after his arrest to the prison ship he would not have been able to be at the pub, which is another consideration that seems to suggest that it cannot be him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence in the book (or comments by Dickens) that points to who this man is?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T13:55:07.473" Title="In Great Expectations, who is the man at the pub in Chapter Ten?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4799" CreationDate="2017-12-02T17:06:16.143" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, the only Elizabethan or Jacobean play that is a sequel to a Shakespeare play is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Woman%27s_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Fletcher, a play that was first performed in 1609 – 1610. The play is a mock sequel to Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Taming_of_the_Shrew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, Petrucio &quot;tames&quot; Katharina. In Fletcher's &quot;sequel&quot;, Petruchio is a widower again and remarries, but this time he is the one who gets &quot;tamed&quot; by his wife Maria. The play is also interesting for other reasons: its performance was prohibited for some time by the Master of the Revels until some adaptations were made, and it has survived in manuscript form (unlike any of Shakespeare's plays, unless you count Shakespeare's presumed contribution to &lt;em&gt;Thomas More&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also looked at the description of Ben Jonson's masque &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon,_the_Faery_Prince&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oberon, the Faery Prince&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (performed in January 1611), but apart from the character Oberon, it has too little in common with Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night%27s_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to count as a sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T17:06:16.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4817" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T17:12:22.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T17:12:22.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T17:12:22.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4818" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T17:12:22.913" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations (1860 – 1861), the author's penultimate completed novel. It is a bildungsroman about the personal development of the orphan Philip Pirrip, nicknamed Pip. Use this tag with the [charles-dickens] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T17:46:42.867" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T17:46:42.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4819" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-02T17:56:11.343" Score="6" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had &lt;strong&gt;S.&lt;/strong&gt; by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams on my shelf for ages and finally want to dig into it. From what I've read about it, there is a ton of layers to the book: the printed book itself, pencilled notes, notes in coloured pens from two characters added at 4(?) different times, physical inserts between the pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now I'm wondering, how do you go about reading it to get the most from the experience? Do you try to take in everything at once? Read through the book multiple times, layer by layer? How do you know which timeline of the notes the inserts belong to? Can notes from later times spoil the plot from earlier times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried googling around a bit, but the recommendations seem to be all over the place, and I'm also a bit wary of spoilers. Since the book has been out for a few years, I figured some people have come up with some decent strategies to enjoy the book as much as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a consensus among fans on the best way to read it (or an &quot;officially&quot; recommended way), or at least could anyone give a comprehensive overview of the different approaches to the book and their pros and cons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="298" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T18:09:02.873" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T18:12:58.827" Title="How to read S.?" Tags="&lt;ergodicity&gt;&lt;j-j-abrams&gt;&lt;doug-dorst&gt;&lt;s&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4820" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-02T18:08:42.213" Score="6" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having studied Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part I&lt;/em&gt; and seen a performance of it in Stratford, I'm still uncertain of how we're meant to view the character of Henry Percy (Harry Hotspur).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly he's a foil to the other Prince Harry, and the main antagonist of the story, the fight between the two Harrys coming at the climax of the play. But is he portrayed as an evil villain, or simply someone who happens to be on the opposite side to the protagonist? Cf. for example Richard III, who's definitely portrayed as a villain in the eponymous play - I never got the same feeling about Hotspur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:29:13.017" Title="Is Harry Hotspur portrayed as a villain in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;henry-iv-part-i&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4821" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:12:28.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:12:28.857" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:12:28.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4822" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:12:28.857" Score="0" Body="Questions related to William Shakespeare's history play Henry IV, Part 1. It is part of Shakespeare's tetralogy about the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV (two plays) and Henry V. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T21:16:59.797" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T21:16:59.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4823" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:14:55.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:14:55.030" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:14:55.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4824" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:14:55.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist and short story writer Doug Dorst or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T20:10:01.217" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T20:10:01.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4825" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:17:04.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:17:04.900" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:17:04.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4826" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:17:04.900" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American film director, producer and screenwriter Jeffrey Jacob Abrams (born 1966) and his work. Although mainly known for his film work, he also co-authored a novel, S., with Doug Dorst." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T21:16:55.347" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T21:16:55.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4827" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:20:12.897" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:20:12.897" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:20:12.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4828" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:20:12.897" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2013 novel S., a collaboration between the film director J. J. Abrams and the author Doug Dorst. Use this tag with the tags [doug-dorst] and [j-j-abrams]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T21:15:42.270" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T21:15:42.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4829" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:26:20.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:26:20.977" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:26:20.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4830" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:26:20.977" Score="0" Body="Questions related to science and technology studies (or science, technology and society studies, STS), an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences that studies the relationship between  society, politics and culture on the one hand, and scientific research and technological innovation on the other." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T20:12:32.600" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T20:12:32.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4831" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:32:19.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:32:19.877" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:32:19.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4832" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:32:19.877" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Anne Frank (1929 – 1945), a Jewish girl whose diary Het Achterhuis (English: The Secret Annex or The Diary of a Young Girl) was published posthumously in 1947. The diary describes her life while she and her family were hiding in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T20:10:34.477" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T20:10:34.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4833" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:35:37.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:35:37.533" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:35:37.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4834" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:35:37.533" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French aviator, novelist and journalist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 –  1944) and his work. He is best known for his novella Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) but he won several awards for his other work. Questions about his works originally in French should include the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:19:12.237" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:19:12.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4835" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:37:11.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T19:37:11.477" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T19:37:11.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4836" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T19:37:11.477" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the authorship of a literary work or the author of a specific quote." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T21:16:42.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T21:16:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4837" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T20:43:54.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T20:43:54.827" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T20:43:54.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4838" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T20:43:54.827" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British and Irish playwright, screenwriter and film director Martin McDonagh (born 1970) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T21:16:47.413" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T21:16:47.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4839" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-02T21:07:53.373" Score="11" ViewCount="3770" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), Hamlet is on a voyage with his two friends, Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, to give a letter to a foreign ruler. However, Hamlet discovers that the letter they are carrying orders the foreign ruler to put him (Hamlet) to death. So Hamlet changes the letter so that it asks for Guildenstern and Rosencrantz to be put to death, and then leaves the boat to return home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this seems a little bit unfair to Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. For one thing, they didn't write the letter--Claudius did (the letter had the king's seal). For another, as far as I can tell there isn't any evidence that Guildenstern and Rosencrantz knew about the contents of the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asked about this, Hamlet tells Horatio that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, man, they did make love to this employment;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      They are not near my conscience; their defeat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Does by their own insinuation grow:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      'Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Between the pass and fell incensed points&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Of mighty opposites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which, again, I don't really think is fair. There's no evidence that &quot;they did make love to this employment,&quot; and saying that its &quot;dangerous when the baser nature [Guildenstern and Rosencrantz] comes Between the pass and fell incensed points Of mighty opposites [Hamlet and Claudius]&quot; seems pretentious rather than a valid moral explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something here? Do Guildenstern and Rosencrantz deserve their deaths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T10:27:18.833" Title="Do Guildenstern and Rosencrantz deserve to die?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-02T21:58:18.457" Score="6" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French singer-songwriter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Ferrat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Ferrat&lt;/a&gt; (1930 – 2010) wrote a number of controversial songs. One of his most beautiful songs, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ma_France_(chanson)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ma France&lt;/a&gt; (1969), was banned from the radio for two years. It's last lines are as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elle tient l’avenir, serré dans ses mains fines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Celle de &lt;strong&gt;trente-six à soixante-huit chandelles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ma France&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English (my own translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She [France] holds the future in her fine hands&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That of thirty-six to sixty-eight candles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  My France&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by the words &quot;trente-six à soixante-huit chandelles&quot;? According to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_21885.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article by Manuel Talens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This verse of consonant rhyme (belle / chandelles) refers to two important dates of French left history during the 20th Century, 1936 and 1968. The first one was the year of Léon Blum's Front Populaire victory in parliamentary elections, whereas the second one was the year of the French May insurrection. Ferrat introduces a play of words with chandelles, which is part of a French language boxing idiomatic expression voir les trente-six chandelles — literally &quot;to see the thirty-six candles&quot; — equivalent to the English language &quot;to see stars&quot; after a blow on the head. This ingenious rhetoric metabole permutation of both numbers allows the singer to metaphorically represent the failure of the 1968 students uprising at the hands of the French Republic's repressive apparatus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I showed this to a teacher of French (a native speaker) whose favourite singer is Jean Ferrat, she was sceptical. So my question is: did Manuel Talens get the meaning of &quot;trente-six à soixante-huit chandelles&quot; right or is there a better explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T13:57:31.630" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T04:53:36.427" Title="Meaning of &quot;trente-six à soixante-huit chandelles&quot; in Jean Ferrat's Ma France" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;jean-ferrat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T22:12:17.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T22:12:17.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T22:12:17.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T22:12:17.173" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French singer-songwriter and poet Jean Ferrat (1930 – 2010) and his songs. In addition to writing his own lyrics, he often sang poems by Louis Aragon, whom he had befriended. When asking about song lyrics, please use the [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T10:34:47.770" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T10:34:47.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-02T22:17:57.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-02T22:17:57.273" LastActivityDate="2017-12-02T22:17:57.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-02T22:17:57.273" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English writer, poet, philosopher and dramatist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) and his work. His works include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and the Father Brown stories (1910–1935)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T10:34:55.310" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T10:34:55.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1961" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:25:38.953" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Voarchadumia&amp;quot; , at least, is a thing: a famous alchemy book of the 1500's. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=wvxUAAAAcAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voarchadumia contra alchimiam&lt;/a&gt; by Johannes A. Pantheus (on Google Books) for the book itself and the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/000269805X77781?journalCode=yamb20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interpretation and the Hieroglyphic Monad: John Dee's Reading of Pantheus's Voarchadumia&lt;/a&gt; by Hilde Norrgrén (2013) for modern scholarly interest in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;luro vopo vir&amp;quot; is also a thing: a fragment from a ciphered text (alleged to be) by Roger Bacon (1219-1292, ish) giving a recipe for gunpowder.  Google the phrase to read more. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder#Mainland_Europe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on gunpowder&lt;/a&gt; pooh-poohs the authenticity of the cipher text. (The article  does not contain the words &amp;quot;luro vopo vir&amp;quot; directly, but footnote chasing and cross-referencing with the results of googling the phrase will make it clear that that's what its about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ben Jonson apparently went to great pains to get his alchemy patter right in &lt;em&gt;The Alchemist&lt;/em&gt;, and a learned discussion of his sources appears in my students' &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Alchemist.html?id=Wx0FGDn0uDsC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition of the play&lt;/a&gt; (the 1974 Yale Press edition).  Williams possibly did not solve the patter problem as rigorously as Jonson, and instead relied on little bits and pieces available in the e-&lt;em&gt;Umwelt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added, Sept 2019: &lt;em&gt;Tripsarecopsem&lt;/em&gt; appears&#xA;in James Campbell Brown's early 20th century &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/historyofchemist00browuoft/historyofchemist00browuoft_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of Chemistry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, as if these obstacles were not sufficiently great, the&#xA;alchemists resorted to anagrams and enigmas. As examples&#xA;of the first M. Poisson gives &amp;quot; seganissegade &amp;quot; for &amp;quot; genie des&#xA;sages,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot; tripsarecopsem &amp;quot; for &amp;quot;esprit, corps, arae.&amp;quot;&#xA;Without a clue to their interpretation, such anagrams were&#xA;absolutely without meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he quotes Albert Poisson&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kfA3AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA41&amp;amp;lpg=PA41&amp;amp;dq=Tripsarecopsem&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Y6GIIOWXWB&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1s_Uq25_J5ySTFt_U8TgbxhVQqKA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwialLan-brkAhUyTt8KHaHFAzs4ChDoATAGegQIBhAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theories et&#xA;Symboles des Alchimistes&lt;/em&gt; (Paris, 1891).&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;This is evidence that the word was well known in scholarly circles in the last century; the word itself seems to be associated with the fictional &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Trevisan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bernard of Treviso&lt;/a&gt;, not to be confused with Bernardo Trevisano (d.1720).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:10:19.820" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:10:19.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4846" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4847" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" Score="0" Body="E. L. Konigsburg was an American author, primarily of children's and young adult books.  She is notable for being one of very few writers to win 2 Newbery medals, sharing this distinction with only 5 other authors." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:40:56.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4848" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4849" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" Score="0" Body="&quot;The View from Saturday&quot; (1996) is a children's novel by E. L. Konigsburg.  It won a Newbery medal, the author's second." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:43:13.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4850" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4851" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Stars Are Legion&quot; is a book by Kameron Hurley.  Use this tag with the [kameron-hurley] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T00:46:11.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4852" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4853" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" Score="0" Body="Kameron Hurley is an American author, writing science fiction and fantasy.  Her works include &quot;The Stars Are Legion&quot; (2017), &quot;The Mirror Empire&quot; (2014), and &quot;God's War&quot; (2011)." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T02:00:48.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T11:25:04.630" Score="7" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;WARNING!&lt;/strong&gt; The following post contains minor &lt;strong&gt;spoilers&lt;/strong&gt; about the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mikhail Bulgakov - &lt;em&gt;A Country Doctor's Notebook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonnie Jo Campbell - &lt;em&gt;American Salvage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;D. W. Wilson - &lt;em&gt;Once your Break a Knuckle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jhumpa Lahiri - &lt;em&gt;Interpreter of Maladies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fyodor Dostoevsky - &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fyodor Dostoevsky - &lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James Joyce - &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Willa Cather - &lt;em&gt;Death Comes for the Archbishop&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading &lt;em&gt;A Country Doctor's Notebook&lt;/em&gt; by Mikhail Bulgakov. I think what I liked about the short stories was that each wrapped up nicely with a wholesome, &quot;And all was well ever after&quot; feeling. Modern short stories I've read&amp;mdash;&lt;em&gt;American Salvage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Once You Break a Knuckle&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Interpreter of Maladies&lt;/em&gt;&amp;mdash;almost seem to compete at being the most cynical or disheartening. Bulgokov reminded me that not all literature had to be this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this isn't the first time I've felt this way about some Russian work. For example, Dostoevsky's anecdote in &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt; about Elder Zosima's youth as a soldier. And also, how the children came to love Ilyusha. And in the anecdotes in &lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt; about the innocent Prince Lev. Am I just cherry-picking examples based on my experience, or, is there a cultural tendency for Russian literature to give off a positive vibes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to think of where I've experienced this &quot;niceness&quot; &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; of Russian literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The way the children lifted Stephen and cheered, &quot;Hur-oo! Hur-oo!&quot; in James Joyce's &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The way Father Latour found safety again and again in a setting of desolation and hardship in Willa Cather's &lt;em&gt;Death Comes for the Archbishop&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's only 2 of about 30 non-Russian works I've read, versus 5 of 15 Russian works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="112" LastEditorUserId="112" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T08:12:22.693" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T08:12:22.693" Title="Are positive, parable-like vibes a noted pattern in Russian literature (at least for short stories and anecdotes)?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-03T15:54:03.003" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sidorio, the main antagonist of the Vampirates series, has several stand-alone scenes dotted through the second novel, &lt;em&gt;Tide of Terror&lt;/em&gt;. Although the series as a whole is almost entirely narrated in the past tense, these scenes with Sidorio on his own (and some of his scenes with Stukeley too, IIRC) are for some reason narrated in the present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is the tense changed for the Sidorio scenes?&lt;/strong&gt; What does this inconsistency add to the tale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T15:54:03.003" Title="Why are Sidorio chapters narrated in the present tense in Tide of Terror?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;justin-somper&gt;&lt;vampirates&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4856" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vampirates&lt;/em&gt; is a fantasy series by the British author Justin Somper, set in the year 2505 and onwards. The story revolves around twins Connor and Grace Tempest, who leave their hometown after their father's death and are picked up by two very different ships: one of pirates and one of vampires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are six &lt;em&gt;Vampirates&lt;/em&gt; novels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Demons of the Ocean&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tide of Terror&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blood Captain&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Black Heart&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Empire of Night&lt;/em&gt; (2010)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Immortal War&lt;/em&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as one short story, &quot;Dead Deep&quot;, written for World Book Day 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4857" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Vampirates series, consisting of six novels and one short story, by the British author Justin Somper. Use together with the [justin-somper] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T15:57:26.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4858" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4859" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British author Justin Somper or about any of his literary works, including the two fantasy series &quot;Vampirates&quot; and &quot;Allies &amp; Assassins&quot;." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T15:58:30.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4860" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:45:42.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:45:42.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:45:42.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4861" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:45:42.107" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English rock band Led Zeppelin, which was active in the years 1968–1980, with several reunions between 1985 and 2007." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:58:16.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:58:16.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4862" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:50:36.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:50:36.987" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:50:36.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4863" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:50:36.987" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English writer and illustrator Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943) and her work. Potter is best known for her children's books, which include The Tale of Peter Rabbit." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:37:20.510" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:37:20.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4864" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:54:39.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:54:39.653" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:54:39.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4865" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:54:39.653" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867) and his work. Baudelaire is best known for his poem collection Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), but he also wrote essays, art criticism and highly regarded translations of E. A. Poe's stories. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag. Questions about his poems should be tagged under [poetry]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:18:16.163" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:18:16.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4866" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:57:13.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:57:13.593" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:57:13.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4867" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T16:57:13.593" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English poet Charlotte Mew (1869 – 1928) and her work. When asking about a poem, please use the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T16:58:11.623" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T16:58:11.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4868" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:01:45.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:01:45.387" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:01:45.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4869" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:01:45.387" Score="0" Body="Questions related to comedy, which is usually understood as works that are intended to be humorous. Use this tag for questions about the concept of comedy as a whole, not just about specific works of comedy. The concept dates back to Ancient Greece and has evolved a lot since then. Not everything that bears the label of comedy is currently perceived as humorous of funny." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T09:53:28.083" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T09:53:28.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4870" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:05:33.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:05:33.760" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:05:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4871" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:05:33.760" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English historian and writer Edward Gibbon (1737 – 1794) and his work. He is best known for his multi-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:37:23.603" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:37:23.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4872" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:11:52.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:11:52.957" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:11:52.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4873" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:11:52.957" Score="0" Body="Questions related to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work in six volumes by Edward Gibbon. The work is notable because of its heavy use of primary sources, its idiosyncratic and often humorous style, and for its theory that Christianity contributed to the fall of the Roman empire. Current historians consider Gibbon's views outdated. Use this tag with the [edward-gibbon] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:37:10.800" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:37:10.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4874" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:14:45.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:14:45.940" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:14:45.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4875" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:14:45.940" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the British writer Diana Wynne Jones (1934 – 2011) and her work. She mainly wrote fantasy novels for children and adults, including the novel Howl's Moving Castle." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:36:56.597" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:36:56.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4876" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:16:04.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:16:04.850" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:16:04.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4877" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:16:04.850" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the fantasy novel Fire and Hemlock (1984) by Diana Wynne Jones. Use this tag with the [diana-wynne-jones] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:37:04.583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:37:04.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4878" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:19:44.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T17:19:44.673" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:19:44.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4879" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:19:44.673" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda or both. Both works were written down in the 13th century in Iceland and contain Icelandic and Norse myths. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-03T18:37:16.057" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T18:37:16.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4819" CreationDate="2017-12-03T17:42:25.913" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There isn't a wrong way to read it&lt;/strong&gt; and notes from from later times &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; spoil the plot from earlier times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I prefer reading all of the notes and the novel at once. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However J.J Abrams himself has said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Many people who have read the book have told me how they have approached it and they all have taken different methods. People say why not make it an interactive book, but it is just analogue. You can pick this thing up and ignore the handwriting and just read the printed text, then go back and read the handwriting, or read them simultaneously. You can use the ephemera, the letters and postcards and look at them as you go along. Someone took all those things out and put it in a pile and read the book then went back to read the inserts. Everyone has a different way of approaching this thing which I think will make the experience of S different for everyone.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scotsman.com/what-s-on/film/jj-abrams-on-new-book-s-and-filming-in-scotland-1-3171809ilm/jj-abrams-on-new-book-s-and-filming-in-scotland-1-3171809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://scotsman.com/what-s-on/film/jj-abrams-on-new-book-s-and-filming-in-scotland-1-3171809ilm/jj-abrams-on-new-book-s-and-filming-in-scotland-1-3171809&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastActivityDate="2017-12-03T17:42:25.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4881" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T00:37:09.573" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to identify a story that is about a family of gorillas which gets attacked by hunters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book starts by focusing on a male gorilla and his two mates, and their offspring. They live in a forest. There is some detail about the different personalities of these two mates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day, a group of hunters led by a man of Western European descent arrive in the forest, and attack the family of gorillas. The male gorilla attempts to defend himself and his family, but is shot along with the rest. The only survivor is the youngest offspring, who turns out to have been the target of the hunt: a young gorilla to be recruited into a circus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The leader rests in a tent in the hunters' camp, with the caged young gorilla in front of him, and is otherwise alone. He has his rifle by his side and is drinking alcohol. He dozes off, but is awoken by the sound of a large man. He introduces himself and they talk to each other. The man says that once upon a time, the hunter was one of them (the large man's group). But one day, the hunter did something the others could not do: he smiled. The man says that the hunter then left his group to go out into the world. He gets up and angrily walks towards the hunter, and the man's torso turns out to have bullet holes. The hunter realises that this &quot;man&quot; is a 600lb gorilla. He picks up his gun and shoots the gorilla. He wakes up and finds that he has shot the gorilla infant in its cage. His whole trip has been in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this story in the late 1990s or the early 2000s in Kerala, India. It was in Malayalam and possibly in my elder sister's SSLC textbook, but I suspect that the original was written in English. The units of measurements were pounds rather than metric. The textbook was not overly thick, and I think it contained other stories as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not the 1861 work &lt;em&gt;The Gorilla Hunters&lt;/em&gt;, nor the 1992 novel &lt;em&gt;Ishmael&lt;/em&gt;. None of the gorillas that appear in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_gorillas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia category of fictional gorillas&lt;/a&gt; are related, nor are the works listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillas_in_popular_culture#Magazines_and_literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magazines and literature section of its page on gorillas in popular culture&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2640" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:32:30.953" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:32:30.953" Title="Gorilla family gets attacked by hunter for circus" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T02:48:14.957" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a childrens novel with infrequent illustrations from maybe 10+ years ago. I think it was set in Australia or maybe South Australia? I'm going to start by describing the aforementioned creatures, as they're probably the most distinct and recognisable part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're sorta like slightly taller Furbys, more egg-shaped, with distinct arms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They're especially squishy and stretchy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They always, always agree to things. Saying &quot;Oh, no doubt, no doubt&quot; and other things. It's implied to be more just a derpyness/innocence to them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I want to say that their names began with a &quot;Woo&quot; or maybe ended in &quot;ble&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These things were targeted by another made up race, and I want to call them the Gretchins or something. The latter species tries to enslave them, eat them, etc. but all of their plans fail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the climax of the book,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The blobs all fuse into one giant version of themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I really remember, other than the book in general being REALLY weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2641" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T07:29:06.493" Title="A story starring agreeable, fuzzy blob/animal creatures" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T05:06:19.553" Score="11" ViewCount="5042" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across the following passage in Dan Brown’s fiction, “Inferno”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] their physical being and cosmic importance shrinking to the size of&#xA;  a mere speck in the face of God … an atom in the hands of the Creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him&lt;/strong&gt;. Martin Luther&#xA;  had spoken those words in the sixteenth century, but the concept had&#xA;  been part of the mind-set of builders since the earliest examples of&#xA;  religious architecture.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; p. 52 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not clear with the meaning of “Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean until a man recognizes himself as a being no more than nothing, God cannot help him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you put this line in plain English so that I can understand the gist of the quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2637" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T18:18:29.613" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T21:52:54.707" Title="What does “Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;inferno&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2017-12-04T09:20:49.133" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your surmise appears to be correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I only was able to find this quoted, not in English translations of Luther himself, however, where it is quoted, it is better understood, if the quote is extended to include previous sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;God creates out of nothing&lt;/strong&gt;. Therefore, until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.&quot;&#xA;// &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-34/colorful-sayings-of-colorful-luther.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christianity Today&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret this that until a man is humble and understands himself to be nothing, he is not ready to listen to and accept God's will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that according to other answers to this question, the quote might only reflect Dan Brown's idea of what Martin Luther said and is not neccessarily in any way a correct rendition or intepretation of Luther's words themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastEditorUserId="2647" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:48:38.637" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:48:38.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2017-12-04T11:11:58.843" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a more direct way of phrasing a reasonably common biblical theme (e.g. 2 Kings 4:6) of &quot;empty vessels&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only in Judaeo-Christian scripture, but in many religions and philosophical writings it is repeated that one must become an empty vessel, to be filled with either knowledge, Holy Spirit, or other things regarded as good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This concept transcends to modern day, as can be seen for example in training of the soldiers: &quot;first your break them, empty them of their previous emotions, believes, allegiances, and then you fill them with discipline, training etc.&quot;, which while questionable thing to do, is very much real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of &quot;unlearning&quot; permeates our society, be it education system, military, religious or even workplace situations. In a religious context, the quote &quot;Until a man is nothing, God can make nothing out of him.&quot; is a less metaphoric way of putting the same concept into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2650" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T11:45:16.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T11:45:16.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2017-12-04T11:29:20.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no definite answer here, only interpretations are possible here. My thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your translation is really terrible. In Russian text there no &quot;romantics&quot;, they are &quot;mystics&quot;. This &quot;black-eyed man&quot; is definitely Archibald and some mystics even tell a story that once upon a time he was a pirate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;But that, of course, is pure fantasy&quot; - this is even worse. In original it is &quot;These sweet-talking mystics are telling lie, there is no such thing as the Caribbean sea...&quot;. Here the narrator is taking the side of an average writer here, in Griboedov, who quickly dismisses all the nonsense those mystics are telling him. Of course, the narrator doesn't say that Carribean doesn't exist, these are words of limited mind: what Carribean? I don't know any Carribean, leave me alone, with the wine and good food.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;there's a man with ox-like, bloodshot eyes and it's pandemonium. . . . Oh gods--poison, I need poison!&quot;. &quot;Pandemonium&quot;? What? It's more like &quot;here's a man with ox-like, bloodshot eyes and it's scary, it's really scary&quot;. Of course, it's scary, because narrator describes the hell to us (he even called it &quot;hell&quot; earlier, see the beginning of your quote). And &quot;poison, I need poison&quot; are the exact words Pilat said earlier (if this wasn't lost in your translation).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope it was helpful. I haven't found any reliable analysis of this scene, so, again, other interpretations are possible. (And I hope there are other translations, this one is being really cruel to Bulgakov).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original Russian text for the passage in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;И было в полночь видение в аду. Вышел на веранду черноглазый красавец с кинжальной бородой, во фраке и царственным взором окинул свои владения.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Говорили, говорили мистики, что было время, когда красавец не носил фрака, а был опоясан широким кожаным поясом, из-за которого торчали рукояти пистолетов, а его волосы воронова крыла были повязаны алым шелком, и плыл в Караибском море под его командой бриг под черным гробовым флагом с адамовой головой.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Но нет, нет! Лгут обольстители-мистики, никаких Караибских морей нет на свете, и не плывут в них отчаянные флибустьеры, и не гонится за ними корвет, не стелется над волною пушечный дым. Нет ничего, и ничего и не было! Вон чахлая липа есть, есть чугунная решетка и за ней бульвар… И плавится лед в вазочке, и видны за соседним столиком налитые кровью чьи-то бычьи глаза, и страшно, страшно… О боги, боги мои, яду мне, яду!..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="1178" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:08:13.930" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:08:13.930" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4839" CreationDate="2017-12-04T11:32:53.260" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hamlet was never very close with these two, and accuses them immediately: &quot;I know the good king and queen have sent for you.&quot; Unlike his real friend Horatio, they have no reason to come to the hinterlands of Denmark other than to spy for Claudius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two come and go with the king and queen to the play which Hamlet stages, and then they bring the message from Gertrude that she wants to see him after it. It's pretty obvious that they are working for Claudius at least, and Hamlet knows Claudius killed his father. So they share in his evil to some degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He finally accuses them of lying to him and trying to manipulate him, like playing a recorder: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HAMLET: 'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      your lingers and thumb, give it breath with your&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Look you, these are the stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;GUILDENSTERN: But these cannot I command to any utterance of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      harmony; I have not the skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HAMLET: Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      the top of my compass: and there is much music,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      cannot play upon me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says it again after he kills Polonius, and Claudius sends them to him to find Polonius's body: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ROSENCRANTZ: Take you me for a sponge, my lord?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HAMLET: Ay, sir, that soaks up the king's countenance, his&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      rewards, his authorities. But such officers do the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      king best service in the end: he keeps them, like&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      an ape, in the corner of his jaw; first mouthed, to&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      be last swallowed: when he needs what you have&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      gleaned, it is but squeezing you, and, sponge, you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      shall be dry again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Claudius sends Hamlet off with the two, and on &quot;a plain in Denmark&quot; they run into Prince Fortinbras of Norway and some of his soldiers. Fortinbras is attacking a little chunk of Poland purely because it's &quot;supposed&quot; to belong to Norway (&quot;Truly to speak, and with no addition,/ We go to gain a little patch of ground/ That hath in it no profit but the name.&quot;) and the captain of the group tells Hamlet that 20,000 men may die in the fight. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet feels prodded morally by the willingness of twenty thousand men to die for a useless patch of ground, and realizes that he has to go back to Denmark and avenge his father's murder: &quot;O, from this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he boards the ship with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in this frame of mind. When he secretly reads the letter signed by Claudius which orders his execution, he doesn't know if R&amp;amp;G are in on the execution plot, but he knows that they are working for the king. He has to escape one way or another. It's not pleasant, but he figures that if they're going to throw in their lot with an incestuous murderer, they deserve whatever they get. So he rewrites the letter to send &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; to their deaths. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't that they showed up and innocently accompanied him on the ship; they've been actively reporting on him to Claudius for a chunk of the play, and trying to manipulate him for the king's nefarious ends, and Hamlet knows it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T00:00:07.597" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T00:00:07.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T12:14:11.107" Score="4" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the beginning of Martin's &amp;quot;Dying of the Light&amp;quot; novel, there is the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behind it was a stillness and a smoky darkness, an unmoving curtain that hid the farther stars. A cloud of dust and gas, he thought. The Tempter's Veil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The beginning came long after the end&lt;/strong&gt;: a whisperjewel. It was wrapped in layers of silver foil and soft dark velvet, just as he had given it to her years before. He undid its package that night, sitting by the window of his room that overlooked the wide scummy canal where merchants poled fruit barges endlessly up and down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spent a long time on this, but I can't make any sense of &amp;quot;The beginning came long after the end&amp;quot;. What does Martin mean by this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T23:39:25.330" Title="What does &quot;The beginning came long after the end&quot; mean in George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;dying-of-the-light&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4891" CreationDate="2017-12-04T13:05:05.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whisperjewel is a piece of jewelry. He has given it to &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; - presumably at the start of a romantic relationship. From the passage, we do not know more about her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading shows that this jewel came back into the possession of the protagonist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship has ended, it's over. But the piece of jewelry reminds him of the beginning of that relationship, he reminisces. Hence the beginning (the jewelry and associated memories) came long after the end (of the relationship).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2654" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T15:48:36.700" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T15:48:36.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2017-12-04T15:34:45.797" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words are not literally Luther's and even the idea behind does not quite fit his thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First for the literary reference: WA 43, 176, 12. Luther says there: &quot;ego nihil sum&quot; (I am nothing) and explains how this is the prerequisite that God can work with man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, saying &quot;until&quot; is completely wrong. For Luther man was, is and always will be nothing before God. It is God who lifts this nothing above nothingness.&#xA;Compelled by the Holy Spirit (and in comparison to the requirements of the Law) a sinner will come to faith in Christ. These are the four soli: By the Grace of God alone we are saved (sola gratia) if we accept the offer by faith alone (sola fide). Our access is Scripture alone (sola scriptura) and it is all done by Christ alone (solus Christus).  As Luther would say it with Heb 12:2: Christ is the author and finisher of man's faith. Therefore there is never an &quot;until&quot; in Luther's thinking: man was, is and always will be nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Dan Brown, as with so many other things in his writings, misunderstood Luther or simply didn't use the time required for proper research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2659" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T15:34:45.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4106" CreationDate="2017-12-04T16:51:15.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL; DR&lt;/strong&gt; - Two statistical/computer analyses take both sides, so we still don't know. However, given the advances in computing between 2009 and now, and the methods used, I would personally lean towards favoring the second paper that feels The Dark Tower was written by Lewis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are really only two actual academic instances that I can find discussing the attribution. (I am not counting the Lindskoog/Hooper mess, as that is squabbling, not scientific).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first (arguing against it being a CS Lewis work), was published in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stat.tugraz.at/AJS/ausg092/092Thompson.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Austrian Journal of Statistics in 2009&lt;/a&gt;. They used a word analysis to compare Dark Tower (TDT) samples against Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. (These were chosen for thematic consistency). This paper concludes that TDT was not written by Lewis, or that he had a really bad day when doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, we saw moderately strong evidence differentiating the vocabulary in The Dark Tower from that of Out of The Silent Planet and Perelandra. While the “rare words” test again showed little discriminatory ability, the “slope” test and, to a greater extent, the “new words” test, rejected the hypothesis of Lewis authorship consistently more than would be expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall then, it does appear that word usage in The Dark Tower is inconsistent with that found in Out of The Silent Planet and Perelandra. This may be attributable to the fact that a manuscript in rough draft form (such as The&#xA;Dark Tower) would inherently display word usage different from a final, polished work or perhaps, as Poe (2007, p. 45) suggests, that The Dark Tower was written when Lewis had “. . . a bad day . . . [or simply] . . . committed a flawed plotline to paper”. However, it is also consistent with the claim that C. S. Lewis did not, in fact, write The Dark Tower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/dsh/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/llc/fqx043/4652887?redirectedFrom=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;computer analysis recently published&lt;/a&gt; (In the last couple of weeks) differs. Apologies, as I was unable to obtain the full article, but it compared TDT with works not only by Lewis, but Hooper and a known hoax letter by a third author. This comparison suggested that TDT was indeed written by Lewis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initial experiments found that the first six chapters of The Dark Tower were stylometrically consistent with Lewis’s known works, but the incomplete Chapter 7 was not. This may have been due to an abrupt change in genre, from narrative to pseudoscientific style. Using principal components analysis, it was found that the first and subsequent components were able to separate genre and individual style, and thus a plot of the second against the third principal components enabled the effects of genre to be filtered out. This showed that Chapter 7 was also consistent with the other samples of C. S. Lewis’s writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ETA: Lindskoog was an author who was convinced that Reverend Hooper (Briefly personal secretary to Lewis and later curator of his legacy in various capacities) forged many works, including TDT. She has been largely discredited, but people still believe her allegations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2016/01/25/lindskoog-affair/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is a nice article&lt;/a&gt; exploring the allegations/divisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1337" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:19:10.423" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4977" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:09:08.110" Score="-1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Virtually all of the Strikers were American - it included, for example, Judge Narragansett (Illinois), Midas Mulligan (Chicago, IL), John Galt (Ohio), Ted Nielsen (Colorado), Roger Marsh (Colorado), Hank Reardon (Minnesota and Pennsylvania), Dagny Taggart (New York), among others. The two recorded exceptions were Ragnar Danneskjöld (born in Norway, and possibly living at least part of the time in Norway while he was a Pirate) and Francisco D'Anconia (who was born in Argentina and was the only person definitely recorded to have lived outside of the U.S. much of the time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is mentioned in passing that most of the People's States were barely getting by on handouts from the U.S., so presumably if the U.S. was no longer able to export anything, their governments would collapse along with the U.S.'s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was John Galt's speech ever broadcasted in those countries? What was the plan for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T16:33:17.990" Title="Did the Strikers assume that the Strike would change other countries as well?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4897" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:52:10.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T17:52:10.583" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:52:10.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4898" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:52:10.583" Score="0" Body="Questions related to George R. R. Martin's first novel, Dying of the Light (1977). Use this tag with the [george-r-r-martin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T18:02:28.080" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T18:02:28.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4899" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:53:47.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T17:53:47.347" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:53:47.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4900" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:53:47.347" Score="0" Body="Questions related to adaptations of literary works. Adaptations can be other works of literature, or works in other media, such as film or song." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T18:02:39.023" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T18:02:39.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4901" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:59:23.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T17:59:23.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T17:59:23.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4902" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T17:59:23.680" Score="0" Body="Questions related to allegories, i.e. a type of text in which a metaphor is extended throughout the entire narrative. Examples include the cave allegory in Book VII of Plato's Republic, and Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene, in which the several knights stand for different virtues." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T18:02:34.587" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T18:02:34.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4563" CreationDate="2017-12-04T18:48:35.213" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having read both the original version and a Latvian translation, I would say that the original tries to to say that the Caribbean does not exist &lt;em&gt;in relation to Archibald Archibaldovich&lt;/em&gt;. Ie. It is a different way of saying that he isn't and never has been a pirate, to whom he is compared and the restaurant is not a pirate ship in Carribean. The idea of imagining restaurant as a Carribean pirate ship is reinforced slightly later when Archibald reprimands restaurant doorman, who in turn  imagines seeing Archibald as a pirate and himself as having to walk the plank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be possible to interpret this differently, as with any text, but there is really not much need. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extended answer, to allow for some interpretation and to include also the second question (about the poison):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, Bulgakov in this work is very frequently overlaying the reality of Soviet-times Moscow with something else. In fact, you could say this is one of the core things about the novel. His characters are often seeing or imagining seeing additions to that reality which make the reader think of the other 2 &quot;realities&quot; described in M&amp;amp;M: (1) the time and place of the crucifixion of Jesus, and (2) the &quot;addendum&quot; of fantastic reality imposed on present-day Moscow by Voland and his entourage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This device is used in this scene in restaurant, when the narrator asks us to imagine the reality of a Carribean pirate ship superimposed on the restaurant. He then proceeds to tell us that this superimposed reality is a myth and there is nothing but the Soviet-time Moscow, which (the narrator) finds unbearable,  and thus asks for the poison. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This asking for poison is once more superimposing the reality of Pontius Pilates/Jesus time, where Pilates is the one dreaming of poison due to his unbearable headache, which he attributes partially due to smells and flavours of cypresses and palm trees, which mingle with the aroma of food, and all together can be imagined in the restaurant as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Прокуратору казалось, что розовый запах источают кипарисы и пальмы в&#xA;  саду, что к запаху кожи и конвоя примешивается проклятая розовая&#xA;  струя. От флигелей в тылу дворца, где расположилась пришедшая с&#xA;  прокуратором в Ершалаим первая когорта двенадцатого молниеносного&#xA;  легиона, заносило дымком в колоннаду через верхнюю площадку сада, и к&#xA;  горьковатому дыму, свидетельствовавшему о том, что кашевары в&#xA;  кентуриях начали готовить обед, примешивался все тот же жирный розовый&#xA;  дух. О боги, боги, за что вы наказываете меня?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The restaurant passage &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted that the writer is asking us to disbelieve Carribean pirates as they are unimaginable in Soviet-time Moscow as any romantic and mystical things are. That could be a reasonable interpratation in line with the whole novel and with equating narrator to the writer. But, as I said, it is not absolutely neccessary, in my opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastEditorUserId="2647" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T20:18:41.793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T20:18:41.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4904" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T18:56:46.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T18:56:46.010" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T18:56:46.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4905" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T18:56:46.010" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Agatha Christie's novel Death Comes as the End (1944). Unlike Christie's other novels, Death Comes as the End is not set in the 20th century but in Thebes in 2000 BC. Use this tag with the [agatha-christie] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:24:47.043" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:24:47.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4906" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:01:00.163" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:01:00.163" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:01:00.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4907" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:01:00.163" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Iranian-born French graphic novelist and cartoonist Marjane Satrapi (born 1969) and her work. She became famous because of her graphic novels &quot;Persepolis&quot; and &quot;Persepolis 2&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T05:19:03.967" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T05:19:03.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4908" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:03:32.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:03:32.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:03:32.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4909" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:03:32.527" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi, which are based on the author's own life. Use this tag with the [marjane-satrapi] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:24:13.730" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:24:13.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4910" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:07:33.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-04T19:07:33.513" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:07:33.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4911" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:07:33.513" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Evelyn Waugh's 1938 novel &quot;Scoop&quot;, which is a satire on journalism. Use this tag with the [evelyn-waugh] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T05:18:54.570" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T05:18:54.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:31:22.700" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the meaning of &amp;quot;you should worry&amp;quot; in the following lines from Pinter's Birthday Party (emphasis mine)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LULU. You’re tickling me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GOLDBERG. &lt;strong&gt;You should worry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LULU. I’ve always liked older men. They can soothe you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They embrace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2661" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:42:42.947" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;you should worry&quot; in the following lines from Pinter's Birthday Party?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harold-pinter&gt;&lt;the-birthday-party&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4883" CreationDate="2017-12-04T19:35:46.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means a man must give up all of his self-importance and pride in order to be a servant of God, that as long as he (emotionally) hangs on to what he was before finding God, God cannot (or will not) transform him into what he should be with God. It is a demand for surrendering yourself to God's will &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; without reservations as to what God may do with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2662" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T19:35:46.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4915" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4891" CreationDate="2017-12-04T21:56:52.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The beginning&lt;/em&gt; is the beginning of the chain of events related in the novel &lt;em&gt;Dying of the Light&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The end&lt;/em&gt; is the end of the relationship with the woman he gave the whisperjewel to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it's not clear at all whether Martin intends you to understand this passage completely at this point in the novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T21:56:52.987" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="22" CreationDate="2017-12-04T22:54:34.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This subject is covered in most detail in the book &amp;quot;Limping Fate&amp;quot;. Unfortunately, there is no English translation yet. This book is written in a form of two interleaved novels (not unlike Master and Margarita). The first novel, sometimes published separately under the same name, describes a few days in life of a Soviet writer. The second, also published separately as &amp;quot;Ugly Swans&amp;quot;, was mentioned in the comments to your question; in this book it is a secret and unfinished Magnum Opus of the writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer bears some resemblance to the collective image of the Brothers: he writes SF (though most of his published works are military prose), he served at the Far East as a military translator, and so on. Among the events of his life, both contemporary and past, the motive of censorship indeed appears from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In '52, the Armed Forces received an order to destroy all ideologically antagonistic literature. Our regiment had a trophy library of some Manjurian noble... Naturally, no-one had the time to separate chaff from wheat... In spite of the strict orders, the literate officers picked some books from the flames...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In present:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the questions HR asked my daugter were pretty weird. What did I tell her about my pre-war Leningrad friends? Did she see any of them personally? ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Father, did you do anything wrong?&amp;quot; - A terrible thought hit me: what if they printed me again in another country without the Writers Union approval?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Valentin told me that The Quarterly Observer wanted nothing to do with him after the last troubles. In The Provincial News no one had an opinion on his book. They were waiting for the boss to return. When he does, the opinion will magically appear... I asked him, will he fight for the name. To hell with the name, he replied, let it be The Old Sage instead of The Old Fool, but he'll keep the rape scene: let them cut it out, they get paid for it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, for the most part the book mentions censorship only in passing, and anyway it was written in the 80's when the censorship got relaxed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2658" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-04T22:54:34.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4918" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4919" CreationDate="2017-12-05T13:52:45.143" Score="10" ViewCount="964" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Piggy was an outsider, not by accent, which did not matter, but by fat, and ass-mar, and specs, and a certain disinclination for manual labor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding has always been that England is an intensely accent-conscious society, because accent is a class marker, and that class markers matter even more in English boarding schools than elsewhere (see Orwell's &quot;Such, Such Were the Joys&quot;). So why would Piggy's working-class accent not matter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I'm not English, and most of what I know about this subject comes from fiction. So maybe my premises are wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2678" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T15:28:01.490" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T20:57:54.773" Title="Why does Piggy's accent not matter?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2017-12-05T14:17:33.907" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this serves to reinforce the idea that these children are very far from the society and norms they grew up with. The children don't care about the sociological trappings of class and wealth that can be inferred from an accent. They dislike Piggy at a much more visceral level based on his physical appearance and behavior. His accent might have mattered back home, but on the island, it is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1574" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T14:17:33.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5008" CreationDate="2017-12-05T16:07:01.273" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The text doesn't directly answer this, so this more of a question about the &quot;world&quot; of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; than about the text itself, but I'm curious as to how the Strikers would go about rebuilding the world after the Strike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is very clear that part of Ragnar Danneskjöld's purpose in capturing gold for the Strikers is to ensure that the world would have sufficient capital to rebuild, which he wanted to happen. I'm curious about other details, too, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Strike would presumably put an end to looting and its philosophy (implying that people who survived the Collapse would be expected to change; there's no discussion about what would happen to the people what wouldn't change). However, how would it put an end to incompetence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Valley didn't have enough of a population to supply &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the necessary jobs to sustain the U.S. Economy after they re-emerged. Even if we include the people who disappeared to places other than the Valley after Galt's speech, it doesn't seem like there'd be enough people to fully restore the U.S. economy in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the widespread incompetence that existed prior to the end of the Strike, how would the Strikers be able to fill jobs with competent people once they re-emerged? Is the assumption that people would be willing to learn actual skills and &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; competent once they stopped being Looters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T19:44:31.770" Title="How would the Strikers re-emerge if there were so few competent people left in the world?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;worldbuilding&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4921" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-05T16:08:25.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions regarding how authors construct a &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; associated with their text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For questions about building your own &amp;quot;world,&amp;quot; you should ask on &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Writing Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T19:40:00.140" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T19:40:00.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4922" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-05T16:08:25.930" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding how authors construct a &quot;world&quot; associated with their text. For questions about building your own &quot;world,&quot; you should ask on Worldbuilding Stack Exchange or Writing Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T19:39:54.097" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T19:39:54.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5072" CreationDate="2017-12-05T16:26:10.653" Score="2" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dagny Taggart] thought of the evening last winter, when [Hank Reardon] came in, took a small package from his pocket and held it out to her, saying, &quot;I want you to have it.&quot; She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment of a pendant made of a &lt;strong&gt;single pear-shaped ruby&lt;/strong&gt; that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler's box... &lt;strong&gt;[the stone looked] like a sparkling drop of blood.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, when Cheryl Taggart finally realized how evil her husband Jim was, she visited Dagny to discuss the matter. They emphasized their connection to each other and discussed philosophy, with Dagny calling her her &quot;sister... by choice&quot; (&lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; through Jim, as emphasized by Cheryl).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon returning home, she discovered the fact that Jim had just had an affair with Hank Reardon's wife. She confronted him on that as well as his &quot;overall&quot; evil, demanding to know why he had married her in the first place. At the end of their confrontation, she concluded that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You... you're a killer... for the sake of killing...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, [Jim] swung out blindly and struck her in the face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She fell against the side of an armchair, her head striking the floor, but she raised her head in a moment and looked up at him blankly, without astonishment, as if physical reality were merely taking the form she had expected. &lt;strong&gt;A single pear-shaped drop of blood went slithering slowly from the corner of her mouth.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second scene, Jim's evil is on full display, ultimately expressing itself in physical abuse of his wife. This is an expression of the basic violence and destructiveness of his philosophy as well as of his personal evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the former scene, Hank Reardon gives Dagny a gift simply for the pleasure of seeing her wear the pendant. It's a reflection of his love of life and the depth of their feelings of each other. It is reflected shortly thereafter in a physical expression of that (in contrast with the second scene, where this is the result of a physical expression of Jim's evil and his feelings of contempt for his wife).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this deliberate on the author's part? Did she &lt;em&gt;intend&lt;/em&gt; these scenes to be parallel, or was this purely coincidental?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T20:21:41.650" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T18:35:50.970" Title="Was Jim Taggart's physical abuse of his wife supposed to parallel and contrast with Hank Reardon's gift of the Ruby Pendant to Dagny Taggart?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3683" CreationDate="2017-12-05T17:46:18.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original rule of the Pevensies lasted for 14-16 years, starting in year 1000 and they returned to London in either 1014 or 1015 while hunting the White Stag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelionscall.com/books-and-movies/timeline/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;laid out here&lt;/a&gt; in a columnar format (With a date of 1015), and you can see it in an interactive childrens page available on the publisher's website, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harpercollinschildrens.com/kids/gamesandcontests/features/narniachronology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HarperCollins&lt;/a&gt; (With a date of 1014). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interactive scrollbar lists the time as 1000-1014, while accounts on the web vary between 1014 and 1015 for when they actually returned. So depending on the months, between 14 to 16 years is the time of ruling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These come from something Lewis created himself, &quot;Outline of Narnian History so far as it is known...&quot;, as referenced in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VYC8Ks0vRncC&amp;amp;pg=PA79&amp;amp;lpg=PA79&amp;amp;dq=Outline%20of%20Narnian%20History%20so%20far%20as%20it%20is%20known...&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=rf9q4bBV_d&amp;amp;sig=-CgHVtcAttRz6JeRVSsOhk8Rgxc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiG7fysx_PXAhVl54MKHVaNA0YQ6AEIOzAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Outline%20of%20Narnian%20History%20so%20far%20as%20it%20is%20known...&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring the Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (Page 79). This references a couple of other works, one of which is &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=KxhKAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Walter%20Hooper,%20Past%20Watchful%20Dragons&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjzltTZyPPXAhVD1IMKHTfbCPEQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=outline%20of%20narnia&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Past Watchful Dragons&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Hooper, which reprints the timeline (Pages 41-44).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find any direct publications by CS Lewis, just references to this timeline and publications featuring it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1337" LastEditorUserId="1337" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T19:13:07.167" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T19:13:07.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-05T18:59:47.650" Score="5" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford&lt;/a&gt; (1550–1604) was a courtier who wrote a number of love poems. Several of his poems appeared in print in a number of anthologies and miscellanies (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford#Literary_reputation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), e.g. in &lt;em&gt;The Paradise of Dainty Devises&lt;/em&gt; (1576), &lt;em&gt;The Phoenix Nest&lt;/em&gt; (1593), &lt;em&gt;England's Helicon&lt;/em&gt; (1600) and &lt;em&gt;The Teares of Fancie&lt;/em&gt; (1593). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I haven't been able to find, however, is when his (surviving) poems were first published together in single volume, possibly with just his poems. I assume this would have been after his death, but I would like to know whether this was before or after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that infamous conspiracy theory&lt;/a&gt; reared its head in the 1920s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T07:40:22.630" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:40:22.630" Title="First book of Edward de Vere's poems?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;edward-de-vere&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4926" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-05T19:01:35.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T19:01:35.603" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T19:01:35.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4927" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-05T19:01:35.603" Score="0" Body="For questions about Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550 – 1604) or about any of his literary works. Although contemporary sources claim that Edward de Vere wrote both plays and poems, only poems have survived." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T23:37:36.260" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T23:37:36.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3701" CreationDate="2017-12-05T20:54:18.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;C. S. Lewis can be fairly described as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclusivism#Christianity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christian Inclusivist&lt;/a&gt; – he believed that Christianity was true, but was not willing to claim that &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Christians&quot; would be saved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is different from &lt;em&gt;universalism&lt;/em&gt; – though not his favorite doctrine, he did believe in the existence of hell, and that some would go to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some will not be redeemed.  There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power.  But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord's own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. (&lt;em&gt;The Problem of Pain&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As opposed to Christian Exclusivism, in which saving knowledge of Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reformed.org/documents/wcf_with_proofs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Westminster Confession of Faith 1-1&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john+14%3A6&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 14:6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+4%3A12&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acts 4:12&lt;/a&gt;), Lewis (and many others) take what they consider a more hopeful approach – that some, though not knowing about Jesus Christ or not explicitly following him, will nonetheless be saved (cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+9%3A40&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark 9:40&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17%3A23%E2%80%9328&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acts 17:23–28&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Peter+3%3A9&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 Peter 3:9&lt;/a&gt;, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis makes this position more explicit in &lt;em&gt;Mere Christianity&lt;/em&gt;, using the example of &quot;a Buddhist of good will&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.  (Book 4, Chapter 10, &quot;Nice People or New Men&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is precisely what appears in this passage in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;.  Aslan repudiates Tash and his wicked followers, so this isn't universalism.  But despite following a false god, Aslan saves Emeth, because of his good motives and good will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="76" LastEditorUserId="76" LastEditDate="2017-12-05T23:24:23.823" LastActivityDate="2017-12-05T23:24:23.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4929" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-06T01:34:24.353" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many novels of the same period that have this quote in them based on my perusal through the Internet Archive but could anyone please tell me what the original source of the quote was? Thanks. It seems to have been a popular quote as so many 19th-century novels use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest one I've found so far is &lt;em&gt;A life's lessons&lt;/em&gt; by Catherine Grace Frances Moody Gore. It was published in 1856. However, I have no definite proof that this was the origin of the quote, only that it is the earliest work that &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; can find and I could be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1808" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T10:19:46.177" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T10:19:46.177" Title="&quot;It might be for years, and it might be for ever,&quot; - What is the original novel this quote appeared in?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2017-12-06T09:51:06.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The stranger is an associate of Magwitch.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no particular evidence to support this, beyond commonly accepted interpretations of the text, which are based on a series of circumstancial observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the stranger has Magwitch's file. Pip is certain that it is the same file and the stranger shows it to Pip in a semi-secretive manner, using it to stir his drink, demonstrating this information is to be kept from the others. This suggests the stranger - like Magwitch - may also be in trouble with the law. Therefore we know that the stranger is associated in some way with Magwitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second is what the stranger gives to Pip: a shilling wrapped in paper which later turns out to be two pound-notes. This is a fairly substantial sum of money at the time the book was set, equivalent to about £180 today. Certainly more than a lad like Pip would likely have. From this we infer that the money is supposed to be seen as a reward from Magwitch to Pip to aid in his rescue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any additional information, and the presumption that Dickens put it in there for a reason, the only conclusion we can reach is that this is some friend or associate of Magwitch from the criminal underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, then, is the reason for this slightly confusing scene? It serves two purposes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first is a foreshadow of the plot to come. It demonstrates that Magwitch now has means enough to spare a fair sum of money to Pip and that he is a generous man who feels deep gratitude for Pip's aid. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is to highlight what Pip has learned about the British class system and how that system corrupts people. As an innocent boy, Pip saw only a man in trouble and desired to help. Now he is older and wiser, he has learned to see convicts as dangerous rather than desparate and he fears them. He has nightmares about the file. Or perhaps what he fears is more the effect that associating with them might have on his newly-revealed chances of rising through the class system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-11-05T11:14:17.233" LastActivityDate="2018-11-05T11:14:17.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4931" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:22:25.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:22:25.920" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:22:25.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4932" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:22:25.920" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Rupert Bear stories, a series of English comic strips about a young bear named Rupert living in the village of Nutwood. The comics first appeared in the Daily Express in the 1920s, but changed to their current form in 1936. They are also republished in the &quot;Rupert Bear annuals&quot; each year." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:29:43.227" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:29:43.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4933" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:26:08.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:26:08.017" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:26:08.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4934" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:26:08.017" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the English schoolmaster and theologian Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838 – 1926) and his work. He is best known for his novella Flatland." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:39:03.013" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:39:03.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4935" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:27:38.817" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:27:38.817" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:27:38.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4936" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T11:27:38.817" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the satirical novella Flatland (1884) by Edwin A. Abbott. Use this tag with the [edwin-abbott-abbott] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T11:39:07.980" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T11:39:07.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4929" CreationDate="2017-12-06T12:07:23.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching for your quoted phrase online brings up a number of results all of which place the words inside inverted commas, suggesting they are all quoting something, as you surmised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the results is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAIGUS18980712.2.42?query=Robert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Zealand newspaper of 1898&lt;/a&gt;, which makes reference to the words being from an 'old song' rather than from a novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a favourite old song that spoke of a parting and said, &amp;quot;It&#xA;might be for years and it might be for ever,&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Armed with this additional information one can search for the quote with the addition of 'song' and 'lyrics'. This readily brings up references to the song 'Kathleen Mavourneen', which does indeed 'speak of a parting' and was extremely popular in its day, and judging by the number of modern recordings available, remains so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a song written in 1837, composed by Frederick Crouch with lyrics by a&#xA;Mrs. Crawford&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Mavourneen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song evidently acquired a degree of cultural significance through becoming the signature concert tune of Irish soprano Catherine Hayes, and its theme of separation has spoken to many separated by war and migration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the information that the words are in fact lyrics, other sources abound including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bellsirishlyrics.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bells Irish Lyrics&lt;/a&gt;, which gives the lyrics, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bellsirishlyrics.com/kathleen-mavourneen.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;including these lines&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh have you forgotten how soon we must sever?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oh have you forgotten this day we must part?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It may be for years and it may be forever&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oh why are you silent thou voice of my heart?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It may be for years and it may be forever;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then why are you silent Kathleen Mavourneen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/R7b1gL-qrgo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a recording from 1906&lt;/a&gt; by opera singer Adelina Patti.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase, as you have observed, occurs in many novels. Included in their number is Dickens' &lt;em&gt;The Pickwick Papers&lt;/em&gt; (1836):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In bidding adieu to the modern Babylon, where we have undergone many vicissitudes, I trust not ignobly, Mrs. Micawber and myself cannot disguise from our minds that we part, &lt;em&gt;it may be for years and it may be for ever&lt;/em&gt;, with an individual linked by strong associations to the altar of our domestic life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GPUNAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=annotated%20dickens%20%22it%20may%20be%20for%20ever%22&amp;amp;dq=annotated%20dickens%20%22it%20may%20be%20for%20ever%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjcgfWzq9XZAhWDYVAKHa0yB0kQ6AEIKTAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clarkson N. Potter's &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Dickens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a line from Julia Crawford's lyric 'Kathleen Mavourneen', set to music by F. H. Crouch and published in 1835 but performed earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to the song being &lt;em&gt;performed&lt;/em&gt; earlier may be quite pertinent as, while &lt;em&gt;The Pickwick Papers&lt;/em&gt; was published a year later than the year Potter gives for 'Kathleen Mavourneen', the date cited in Wikipedia, referencing 'The Annual American Catalogue' as source would have the song post-dating the novel. On consideration, this may simply reflect British and American publication dates, however, this would also seem to place Dickens' incorporation of the line as contemporaneous with its initial popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst not contemporaneous with the song or its early use, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=srr_rtOEx5YC&amp;amp;lpg=PA128&amp;amp;dq=%22It%20may%20be%20for%20years%20and%20it%20may%20be%20for%20ever%22&amp;amp;pg=PA128#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22It%20may%20be%20for%20years%20and%20it%20may%20be%20for%20ever%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce: Early Poetry through Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; by Zack R. Bowen&lt;/a&gt; cites Kathleen Mavourneen as the source of the 'sarcastic misquotation'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May be for months and may be for never&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which James Joyce uses in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;St. Martin’s Eve: A Novel&lt;/em&gt; (1866), Ellen Wood clearly identifies the song by name when it is performed by one of the characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rose who hated dullness as she hated poison, started up and opened the piano, hoping perhaps to dispel is, and began to look amidst the pile of music. She chose an old song; and out-of-date by gone song that she had not sung for months, perhaps years. &lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; came she to hunt it up? It was a strange coincidence; little less than a fatality. The song was &amp;quot;Kathleen Mavourneen.&amp;quot; Had any one asked Rose to sing it, she would gave cast back a sarcasm on the &amp;quot;perverted taste,&amp;quot; on &amp;quot;English ideas,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;vandalism,&amp;quot; and commenced instead some new Italian of German thing, and screamed through it in defiance. On this night she began the song of her own accord; and i say it was a fatality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;to think that from Erin and thee I must part -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It may be for years, and it may be for ever -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus far had Rose sung, when deep sobs startled her. They came from Adeline. She had been leaning back in her grandmamma's fauteuil, pale and quiet, but full of inward agitation. The song seemed singularly applicable to her, and she had listened to its words ad they went on with an oppressed heart. Singularly applicable! She was leaving her country, her home, and her dear parents, it might be for years and it might be forever, in these moments of sadness, a straw will unhinge the outward composure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is interesting here is that the lyrics are quoted accurately as 'may be' while the character Adeline paraphrases to 'might', thus creating the line which the question originally asks about. So while this quotation is supportive evidence of 'Kathleen Mavourneen' being the original source, it may be possible that M. Harrow was correct and &lt;em&gt;St Martin's Eve&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt; from which their quoted line originates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:03:43.153" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:03:43.153" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4938" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:05:47.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:05:47.450" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:05:47.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4939" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:05:47.450" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the American science fiction and fantasy author Diane Duane (born 1952) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T19:54:22.427" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T19:54:22.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4940" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:07:07.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:07:07.283" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:07:07.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4941" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:07:07.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs of the American hip hop trio Digable Planets, which formed in 1987. Questions regarding their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:24:51.690" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:24:51.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4942" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:09:24.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:09:24.407" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:09:24.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4943" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:09:24.407" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Pakistani Urdu poet, philosopher, biographer and scholar Jaun Elia (1931 – 2002) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T18:26:10.490" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T18:26:10.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4944" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:15:55.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:15:55.437" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:15:55.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4945" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:15:55.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Australian-born novelist James Clavell (1921 – 1994) and his works. He is best known as the author of novels that are set in Asia, such as Tai-Pan (1966) and Shōgun (1975). Several of his works were turned into TV mini-series." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T19:54:14.480" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T19:54:14.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4946" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:18:08.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:18:08.600" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:18:08.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4947" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:18:08.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English children's author and illustrator Martin Handford (born 1956) and his works. He is best known for his 'Where's Wally?' books." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T19:54:18.683" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T19:54:18.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4948" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:26:38.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:26:38.620" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:26:38.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4949" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:26:38.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about James Clavell's first novel, King Rat (1962). The story is set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp during World War II. Use this tag with the [james-clavell] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T18:26:23.560" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T18:26:23.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4950" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:29:10.007" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:29:10.007" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:29:10.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4951" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:29:10.007" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Northern Irish poet, playwright and translator Seamus Heaney (1939 – 2013) and his works. Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T18:26:00.067" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T18:26:00.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4952" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:31:57.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T17:31:57.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T17:31:57.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4953" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T17:31:57.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Swedish author and teacher Selma Lagerlöf (1858 – 1940) and her work. She is best known for her children's novel The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906 – 1907). She was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T18:31:43.697" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T18:31:43.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-06T20:53:23.320" Score="7" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the English renaissance, plays were primarily written for performance and play manuscripts were usually not sold to a printer before the play had had a successful run in the theatre. A number of plays have survived in manuscript form, e.g. John Bale's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Johan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Johan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (rediscovered in the 1830s), Thomas Heywood's &lt;a href=&quot;http://cord.ung.edu/heywcali.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Escapes of Jupiter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Philip Massinger's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parliament_of_Love&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Parliament of Love&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Believe_as_You_List&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Believe as You List&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Maiden%27s_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Second Maiden's Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (contested authorship), Richard Brome's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_English_Moor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Moor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Thomas_More_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Thomas More&lt;/a&gt; (collaborative work, possibly containing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/shakespeares-handwriting-in-the-book-of-sir-thomas-more&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's only surviving literary manuscript&lt;/a&gt;). Apparently, some researchers also include Thomas Heywood's &lt;em&gt;The Captives&lt;/em&gt; and Walter Mountfort's &lt;a href=&quot;http://digitalrenaissance.uvic.ca/doc/Launching_MS1/complete/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Launching of the Mary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Manuscripts+and+their+Makers+in+the+English+Renaissance.-a0171658498&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Library,_MS_Egerton_1994&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library's &lt;strong&gt;MS Egerton 1994&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but not all the manuscripts in this collection are considered autographs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;how many English Renaissance plays (roughly from years the 1550 – 1625) have survived in manuscript form&lt;/strong&gt;? (These manuscripts can be in the handwriting of the original authors or contemporary copies.) I am not asking for an exhaustive list of plays but a source that discusses the (number of) surviving manuscripts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T07:39:53.187" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:39:53.187" Title="How many manuscripts of English Renaissance plays have survived?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4955" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T20:55:25.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T20:55:25.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T20:55:25.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4956" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T20:55:25.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about Graham Hancock's 1992 book The Sign and the Seal: The Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. Use this tag with the [graham-hancock] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:31:14.587" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:31:14.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4957" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T20:57:54.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T20:57:54.107" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T20:57:54.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4958" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T20:57:54.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English novelist and poet Emily Jane Brontë (1818 – 1848) and her works. She used the pseudonym Ellis Bell and is best known for her novel Wuthering Heights." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:31:20.363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:31:20.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4959" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T21:02:29.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:02:29.943" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:02:29.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4960" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T21:02:29.943" Score="0" Body="For questions about the genre of epistolary novels: novels which take the form of a series of documents, typically letters but sometimes also diary entries, newspaper clippings, and other types of documents. If your question is about a particular epistolary novel, such as Dracula or Frankenstein, use the specific tags for that novel and author instead." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:51:16.867" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:51:16.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4961" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-06T21:06:06.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:06:06.153" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:06:06.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4962" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-06T21:06:06.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about James Joyce's final novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Use with the [james-joyce] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-06T21:25:27.337" LastActivityDate="2017-12-06T21:25:27.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4964" CreationDate="2017-12-06T23:58:30.593" Score="13" ViewCount="5322" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, it is Macbeth himself, the eponymous antihero, who meets the witches upon the heath and first conceives the idea to murder his king. It is he who kills Duncan, seizes the throne, has Macduff's family and his friend Banquo killed too, and holds onto power until he is finally killed by Macduff at the end of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But much of this is done only due to the urging of his wife, Lady Macbeth, who scorns his 'weakness' whenever he hesitates in performing foul deeds. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MACBETH: We will proceed no further in this business:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      He hath honour'd me of late; and I have bought&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Golden opinions from all sorts of people,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Not cast aside so soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LADY MACBETH: When you durst do it, then you were a man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And, to be more than what you were, you would&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Be so much more the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.1.7.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, Scene VII&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it Macbeth or Lady Macbeth who's the true villain of the play?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T11:11:09.830" Title="Is Macbeth or Lady Macbeth the real villain in Shakespeare's play?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4963" CreationDate="2017-12-07T10:12:14.827" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lady Macbeth is the villain. Macbeth is, in fact, a tragic hero.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time I ever read Macbeth I was struck by the feeling of sympathy I had for the eponymous character at the end of the play. He had - surely - brought on his own downfall and demise and deserved his fate. Why the strange twinges of empathy for such a monster?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, from the very beginning, Shakespeare sets Macbeth up not as an active protagonist, but as an instrument of fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening scenes of the play set Macbeth up as a person of great stature. He is a captain, honoured by the King and loved by his friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he hath lost &lt;em&gt;noble Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; hath won.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is also honoured by the witches, although it is not clear whether or not this is in mockery. In any respect, the witches tell Macbeth he will gain further honour and titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This begs another open question: when the witches deliver their prophecies unto Macbeth, are they binding him to fate? Or are they corrupting him with promises, like devils tempting a mortal's weakness? Because it's clear that Macbeth's great weaknesses are pride and ambition. So the witches' words seem calculated to send Macbeth down the path to red ruin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is never answered, but that makes it at least a possibility that Macbeth is no longer in charge of his destiny. And even if he is, he's being manipulated by diabolical forces which are impossible for him to resist due to his character flaws. Either way, when his inevitable fall comes, we can see him sympathetically as a victim of circumstance as well as the tyrant and murderer he has become.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with Lady Macbeth. She is described in much less glowing terms. In fact, at the end of the play, Malcolm says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Producing forth the cruel ministers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of this dead butcher and his fiend-like queen,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her behaviour, in contrast to Macbeth's, is purposefully callous. Macbeth initially does not want to kill the king - it is his wife who persuades him to do so. Note this is partly because she is impatient for the power and riches that it brings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is too full o' the milk of human kindness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To catch the &lt;em&gt;nearest way&lt;/em&gt;: thou wouldst be great;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Impatience is a poor excuse for murder. Note also that she attempts to persuade Macbeth to do the deed in truly nefarious means – insulting her husband and claiming she herself would not hesitate to &lt;em&gt;violently kill a child&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And live a coward in thine own esteem,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would, while it was smiling in my face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have done to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that she, too, is in the grip of evil magic and her actions are beyond her control. Evil spirits are invoked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The raven himself is hoarse&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Under my battlements. Come, you spirits&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But note a key difference. Macbeth met the witches either by chance or at their behest. His wife is deliberately inviting the devil to make her even more wicked than she already is. Every cruel choice she makes is of her own volition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, of course, it catches up with her in her nightmares. And now the audience might feel a twinge of sympathy - yet it is clear she has brought this on herself, by choice. One of the many fascinating things about Macbeth, besides its open questions of fate and destiny, is how it shows us an unusually tender side to villainy in all its forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-15T11:11:09.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4966" CreationDate="2017-12-07T11:50:16.087" Score="1" ViewCount="4129" Body="&lt;p&gt;An example of such a text (from Michael Morpurgo's &lt;em&gt;Private Peaceful&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I see men running, staggering, falling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I am coughing, retching, choking.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I have to breathe now, I can't run without breathing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Half blinded by my mask I trip and fall, crashing my head against the trench wall, knocking myself half senseless.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I am on my hands and knees vomiting violently.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I wrench off my mask, gasping for good air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the effect of using present tense and first-person narration in prose fiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2694" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T17:28:59.477" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:28:59.477" Title="What is the effect of a text written in present tense and first-person?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2017-12-13T07:48:45.533" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="4966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4965" CreationDate="2017-12-07T14:48:39.887" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Examining them independently first of all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The first-person narrative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is defined by the use of personal pronouns, 'I' and 'my' it creates the effect of seeing and experiencing the events of a text through the character's or narrator's eyes, like in your example with &lt;em&gt;I see&lt;/em&gt;. Furthermore, it evokes a distinctly &lt;strong&gt;personal&lt;/strong&gt; angle from the text.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is a &lt;strong&gt;subjective&lt;/strong&gt; viewpoint, we become one with the narrating character as we only see and interpret events through the narrator's perspective and we do not gain an objective insight (this is sometimes a criticised quality to first-person narrative as it is often considered unreliable, as the way the narrator sees an event may contradict other characters' experiences).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Deepens the reader's insight and emotional understanding of the character - we get to know the inner thoughts and emotions of a character which would otherwise be impossible with third-person narrative. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://penandthepad.com/authors-use-first-person-narrative-point-view-1697.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) This is also a great asset in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/bildungsroman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bildungsroman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; novels, as we gain a deeper understanding of the protagonist's development, since first-person shows psychological as well as external maturation (third-person often only demonstrates the latter). Ultimately, it helps to evoke &lt;strong&gt;empathy&lt;/strong&gt; from the reader towards the narrating character; third-person narration is often much colder and detached.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First-person can &lt;strong&gt;(this is not always the case)&lt;/strong&gt; also be used as an outlet for the author to broadcast their personal opinions when they appear to assume the voice of their narrating character. This can be seen in Charlotte Brontë's &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, where she speaks through Jane criticising elite society's attitude towards governesses (&lt;em&gt;reference: Susie Campbell, Critical Studies: Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Present tense&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Above all creates &lt;strong&gt;immediacy&lt;/strong&gt;, the events are described as occurring in the moment that we read it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Using both present tense and first-person narrative together&lt;/strong&gt; you can apply and converge all the effects of first-person narration to the immediacy of the present tense. It creates a more powerful exciting atmosphere than past tense first-person. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/the-pros-and-cons-of-writing-a-novel-in-present-tense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;reference&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It conveys the spectacular effect of landing the reader in both the actions and emotions that the narrating character is experiencing. The 'in the now' impact of the present tense enable the reader to undergo changes unexpectedly like the narrator without the hindsight of past tense first-person. The use in the text you gave as an example is particularly effective to this degree as it is about a battle -  the reader feels all the fear, suspense and danger that the soldier is feeling, like the cinematic effect of a camera mimicking a characters visual field and movements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The issue with this is that it can occasionally feel monotonous in a quieter environment as the narration does not shift from the immediate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T09:59:23.973" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T09:59:23.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4967" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4971" CreationDate="2017-12-07T16:16:12.717" Score="5" ViewCount="285" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &amp;quot;Inertia&amp;quot; by Rudy Rucker (which I found via &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/175612/31394&quot;&gt;this ID question&lt;/a&gt; on another site, and which is published to be read in full at the author's website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks/completestories/#_Toc18&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), the near-&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlewhack&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Googlewhack&lt;/a&gt; phrase &amp;quot;pulchritudinous callipygosity&amp;quot; appears in a piece of dialogue near the start:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Campbell’s dead, more’s the pity.” Harry sucked a last drop out of the beaker and smacked his lips. “I’m commencin’ to feel &lt;em&gt;pret&lt;/em&gt;-ty damn good.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You learn to talk that way at the prep-school?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Collegiate Academy. Oh, my, yes. Those sweet girls. Bless their hearts. The cardioid curve, dear Fletcher, is, of course, a traditional symbol for pulchritudinous callipygosity, and when I speak of blessing, I think, &lt;em&gt;selbstverständlich&lt;/em&gt;, of the censer and thurible, the spray of holy anointment, and the fullness of emotion appropriate to such …”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maundering on in such fashion, Harry drifted over to my equipment and began hefting this object and now that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Harry on about, and why is he talking like this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling the phrase &amp;quot;pulchritudinous callipygosity&amp;quot; gives me only three results, none of which explains its meaning, while &amp;quot;censer and thurible&amp;quot; are apparently some incense vessels used in religious ceremonies. It might be some sort of euphemism, but I'm not getting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, beyond the question of meaning, why is Harry giving vent to his loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution? He doesn't seem to talk like this all the time - he does use some long words when talking about advanced physics, but it's kind of necessary in that context. Even in the rest of their conversation while drunk, he talks normally most of the time, except in this one paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:37:43.740" Title="Pulchritudinous callipygosity" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;rudy-rucker&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4967" CreationDate="2017-12-07T19:33:49.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me it seems a veiled reference to sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cardiod shape = shape of heart is likened to shape of &quot;beautiful buttocks&quot; (as per @Fabjaja comment) and extrapolation on &quot;blessing&quot; (spray &amp;amp; censer, etc) kind of makes one think of the whole paragraph  as allegory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastEditorUserId="2647" LastEditDate="2017-12-07T20:11:02.393" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T20:11:02.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-07T20:45:46.783" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the Strikers re-emerged, there would've been numerous abandoned factories and equipment (including, presumably, factories and equipment that had been abandoned by the Strikers themselves). While the original owners may have been around in some cases, in many other cases there wouldn't be any clear ownership of these factories (e.g. if the owners were dead). If some of them were in at least somewhat salvageable condition, would the Strikers be able to rightfully use them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the book doesn't directly answer this, how would someone gain the rights to the property in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Economist and political philosopher Murray Rothbard (who was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; associated with Ayn Rand), for example, argued that property rights (e.g. to the rights to land ownership in a previously-undiscovered area) &quot;originally&quot; derived from being able to make productive use of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Ayn Rand have some kind of view of how property rights could &quot;originate&quot; in the first place? Is it similar to Rothbard's or different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most direct hint to this in the book is when Dagny and Hank visited the 20th Century Motor Factory, seeing if anything was salvageable from it. (They discover the prototype of John Galt's motor along with a partial manual related to it, which they promptly take with them; Dagny promptly goes through considerable trouble to try to find the original inventor and, when she failed to find John Galt, hired Quintin Daniels to try to reverse engineer it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that this was meant to be descriptive rather than prescriptive (i.e. the fact that the book records that Dagny and Hank did that doesn't necessarily mean that Ayn Rand thought that they were doing the right thing), but &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; this an implicit endorsement of a view that's analogous to Murray Rothbard's? Was the fact that they were able to at least try to put it to productive use and the fact that there was no longer any clear ownership in the company a basis for them to claim at least some kind of a property right over it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T20:45:46.783" Title="Under Ayn Rand's philosophy, would the Strikers have the right to use and/or re-open abandoned factories and equipment?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4970" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6223" CreationDate="2017-12-07T20:54:16.767" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart searched the abandoned 20th Century Motor Company, they found the prototype of John Galt's motor along with some documents describing it. However, the documents related to it were incomplete, missing what Robert Standler and some other characters described as the most important parts (e.g. John Galt's definition of energy and some other basic facts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Galt later told Dagny that he left the prototype there because it was their rightful property, given that they had paid him to develop it. He also wasn't too concerned that they'd actually use it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the manual? It seems odd that a lot of the manual was there, but it was only missing the most important parts. For example, if someone used the missing pages as fuel for a fire or something like that (like a lot of the other paper in the plant was), wouldn't they have just burned the whole thing? Why bother using only a few pages? Did John Galt (or William Hastings, John Galt's boss who later joined the Strike) remove the most important pieces? If so, why didn't they regard the manual as the new owners' property, too? If they didn't remove it, why did John Galt and William Hastings risk someone reading the documents and learning the secret of the motor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T18:15:13.783" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:46:53.383" Title="Did John Galt remove part of the manual for his engine from the 20th Century Motor Company?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4967" CreationDate="2017-12-07T21:37:43.740" Score="9" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;pulchritude&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;pulchritudinous&lt;/em&gt; mean (physical) “beauty” and “beautiful” respectively.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(See quotations for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=pulchritude&amp;amp;oldid=44215879#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pulchritude&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=pulchritudinous&amp;amp;oldid=47684324#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;pulchritudinous&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;callypygian&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;callipygous&lt;/em&gt; both mean “having shapely, beautiful buttocks” (from the Greek prefix &lt;em&gt;calli-&lt;/em&gt; beautiful, as in &lt;em&gt;calligraphy&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;calisthenics&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;(See quotations for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=callipygian&amp;amp;oldid=48174182#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;callipygian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=callipygous&amp;amp;oldid=47695087#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;callipygous&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The intended meaning of &lt;em&gt;pulchritudinous callipygosity&lt;/em&gt; is therefore straightforward, although the phrase is pleonastic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The cardioid curve is the one given the equation &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; = &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;(1 - cos &lt;em&gt;&amp;theta;&lt;/em&gt;) in polar coordinates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cv8CJ.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Cv8CJ.gif&quot; alt=&quot;cardioid static&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QeGFU.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QeGFU.gif&quot; alt=&quot;cardioid animated&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Above image from &lt;a href=&quot;http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Cardioid.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;MathWorld&lt;/a&gt;; see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cardioid&amp;amp;oldid=808586121&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the story, Harry has recently been teaching at the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My near-bankruptcy had finished Harry right off: he’d been my research and development department. I was still making a little money with consulting, but I had no work at all for Harry. He was making ends meet by teaching high-school physics. Rumpled genius Harry was teaching at the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When Harry says “I’m commencin’ to feel &lt;em&gt;pret&lt;/em&gt;-ty damn good”, the narrator Joe Fletcher finds the language (or register) out of character for Harry, being more suitable coming from high-school or college girls, and asks Harry if his new place of employment is where he picked it up: “You learn to talk that way at the prep-school?”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies, Harry has presumably been teaching things like the cardioid curve (perhaps because the cardioid comes up in physics in the context of microphones: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Null_(physics)&amp;amp;oldid=805070778#Microphones&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/88852/is-there-a-physical-reason-why-the-detection-pattern-of-microphones-and-antennas&quot;&gt;Physics.SE&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the fact that in academia, men are overrepresented (relative to the general population) in physics, and women in the humanities, it is likely that most of the students (and the teachers) at the Collegiate Academy for Young Ladies are leaning towards the humanities. The stereotype about the humanities, especially as seen by physicists, with or without postmodernism (consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&amp;amp;id=2106#comic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.math.tohoku.ac.jp/~kuroki/Sokal/bricmont/node1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;) is that they meander on saying things like this being a symbol for that, use circumlocution in the service of impenetrability, pepper their sentences with needless jargon and foreign words (&lt;em&gt;selbstverständlich&lt;/em&gt; simply means &quot;of course&quot;), and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So overall, my impression is that in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You learn to talk that way at the prep-school?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The Collegiate Academy. Oh, my, yes. Those sweet girls. Bless their hearts. The cardioid curve, dear Fletcher, is, of course, a traditional symbol for pulchritudinous callipygosity, and when I speak of blessing, I think, selbstverständlich, of the censer and thurible, the spray of holy anointment, and the fullness of emotion appropriate to such …”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maundering on in such fashion…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry is simply using the reminder of “learn to talk that way” to &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; talk in the way of typical language encountered at the Collegiate Academy either by the students or (more likely) by the teachers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2017-12-07T21:37:43.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4972" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4973" CreationDate="2017-12-07T21:59:33.940" Score="0" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Dagny visited William Hastings's wife, she showed absolutely no sign of any alignment with the Looters or Moochers - she was very straightforward with Dagny and showed none of the basic &quot;whininess,&quot; evasiveness, or self-righteous rationalization that was characteristic of the other Looters. She didn't make any effort to defend the Plan that caused John Galt (and her husband, who was John Galt's immediate supervisor at the plant) to quit the 20th Century Motor Corporation, and she seemed to understand why her husband wouldn't work under those conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was also evidently unaware of the Strike, even though her husband was one of the first people that John Galt had approached about it. She said that her husband had informed her that he was retiring and had asked her not to ask him why, and that he seemed (uncharacteristically) conflicted for about a year before deciding to do so (and that he seemed very peaceful after deciding to do so). She also mentioned that her husband went on vacation for a month with some of his friends every year (presumably to Galt's Gulch). Obviously, none of those facts were enough for her to realize the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't she ever approached to join?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T19:30:16.503" Title="Why didn't William Hastings's wife know about the Strike?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4972" CreationDate="2017-12-07T21:59:33.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the book is quite explicit about the fact that spouses weren't automatically &quot;in&quot; - the only way you could go to Galt's Gulch is if you were fully aligned with the Strikers' philosophy and took the appropriate oath yourself. As one woman told Dagney while she was in Galt's Gulch,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,&quot; said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. &quot;They're the profession I've chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. I believe that you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. &lt;strong&gt;You know, of course, that there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own conviction.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, there are a few possible explanations here, and the book doesn't conclusively establish which one is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first possibility is that she wasn't working at the time anyway. The book doesn't really specify whether she ever worked or, if she did, how productive she was. Once her husband retired, though, they started living on their savings (which implied that she wasn't working at the time that her husband retired). That being said, it may have been unnecessary for her to join the Strike. (This would be somewhat analogous to the case of Dan Conway, who never joined the Strike and doesn't seem to have been asked to join - although his case may have also been partially motivated by his moral philosophy, or by the fact that he had basically completely &quot;given up&quot; at this point - he was so badly broken by the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule fiasco that he completely lost his &quot;will to fight,&quot; and Dagny believed that he would never be a man of action again).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second possibility is that she wasn't fully aligned with their morality. Not being aligned with the Looters was decidedly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the same as being aligned with the Strikers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third possibility - which I think is the least likely, given William Hastings's marriage to her and his early knowledge of the Strike - is that it was an oversight on their parts. There were numerous people that were &quot;overlooked&quot; for a variety of reasons. (Notable examples include Cheryl Taggart, Eddie Willers, and &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; Dan Conway, although there could've been a number of different reasons that Dan Conway never joined the Strike - that's discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1837/how-should-we-view-dan-conway&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point (and this was probably only a minor point either way): the book is quite clear that she didn't really know John Galt; she only saw him very briefly on a train platform when her husband pointed him out to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T19:30:16.503" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T19:30:16.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-08T04:26:41.380" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I remembered a book that I had a hilarious encounter with when I was younger. Read the blurb on the back, grabbed it, and brought it to school in middle school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was effectively a Sci-Fi smut story (And the school was a religious school). And from what I remember it wasn't even written that well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I can't remember much about the book but due to the hilarity of the circumstances I originally saw it, I'm curious if anyone can help me identify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I know/think I know&#xA;It was from the 70s or 80s, with a yellow cover with a round bit of artwork on it.&#xA;The story started out with the Protagonist Male and Female companion in an escape craft/lifeboat&#xA;They had decided to go naked to &quot;spare their outfits from wear and tear&quot; or some other absurdly forced concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some time later&lt;/em&gt; they are retrieved/rescued/wind up in the care of some alien. This alien sets up some sort of place to watch over them and apparently has the goal of getting them to have sex. They refuse? And the alien tries to get them with an aphrodisiac of some sort. Eventually at some point they're attacked by a bicycle whose handlebars spin around and knives come out the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't actually read the whole thing, just bits and pieces here and there - Even my young-teen self thought the writing wasn't that grand. I want to find it to see just how accurate my memories of it are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2697" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T04:26:41.380" Title="Help finding 70s-80s sci-fi smut-ish book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4976" CreationDate="2017-12-08T04:51:27.083" Score="3" ViewCount="950" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was browsing through a library, and a book caught my eye.  I pulled it out to look, and the opening paragraph was so stupid that I immediately put it back.  I went back a few weeks later because I wanted to show someone else this amazing thing.  :-)  But it wasn't there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was about Pearl Harbor, but I don't remember whether those words were on the cover.  What was so memorable (and the reason I want to find it again) was the stupid intro, something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a day like any other. Fathers getting ready for work; children&#xA;  getting ready for school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried parts of those sentences in the Google Books exact phrase, but no hits.  I must be remembering some of the words wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catija found something similar (and &lt;strong&gt;equal&lt;/strong&gt; in the author's apparent ignorance of which weekday), but I don't think it was the same book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, Google has apparently not scanned the book Catija found.  Searching &quot;people at Pearl Harbor were going about their morning&quot; gets a &lt;em&gt;not found, perhaps you want (this SE post).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2698" LastEditorUserId="2698" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T20:45:08.493" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T20:45:08.493" Title="I'd like to find a particular book about Pearl Harbor" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4975" CreationDate="2017-12-08T05:54:34.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm posting this as an answer because it seems incredibly similar to what you're talking about... enough so that I feel it's worth posting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Voices from the Camps: Internment of Japanese Americans During World War II&lt;/em&gt; by Larry Dane Brimner starts with a chapter about Pearl Harbor with the chapter title &quot;A date which will live in infamy&quot;. The first paragraph doesn't contain the text you remember, but the third one does, pretty closely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the Japanese planes advanced, people at Pearl Harbor were going about their morning routines. Children were getting ready for school. Adults were preparing for the workday ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a scan of the book on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/voicesfromcampsi00brim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org&lt;/a&gt;, which is the source of this image:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tdbRE.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tdbRE.png&quot; alt=&quot;First page of &amp;quot;Voices from the Camps&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a short book, only 110 pages and is classified as &quot;juvenile literature&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T05:54:34.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4896" CreationDate="2017-12-08T16:33:17.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, they did.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, as Ragnar Danneskjöld told Hank Reardon,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you know the condition of existence in those People's States? Since production and trade - not violence - were decreed to be crimes, the best men of Europe had no choice but to become criminals. The slave-drivers of those States are kept in power by the handouts from their fellow looters in countries not yet fully drained, such as this country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right after finding out the exact nature of Project X, Robert Stadler objected to the (supposed) necessity of it, pointing out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With the whole world starving and all of those People's States barely subsisting on handouts from this country - where do you see any danger of war?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Hank Reardon said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you anything left to loot? If you didn't see the nature of your policy before - it's not possible that you don't see it now. Look around you. All those damned People's States all over the earth have been existing only on the handouts which you squeezed for them out of this country. But you - you have no place left to sponge on or mooch from. No country on the face of the globe. This was the greatest and last. You've drained it. You've milked it dry. Of all that irretrievable splendor, I'm only one remnant, the last. What will you do, you and your People's Globe, after you've finished me? What are you hoping for? What do you see ahead - except plain, stark, animal starvation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, once production was shut down in the U.S., there'd be nothing left to &quot;prop up&quot; the socialist governments. Presumably, they'd collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, John Galt's speech evidently &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; carried everywhere in the world. Originally, Mr. Thompson was supposed to broadcast a speech that would be broadcast globally on every radio station and television channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the front pages of the newspapers and the shouts of the radio voices had explained it: &quot;To counteract the fears and rumors spread by the enemies of the people, Mr. Thompson will address the country on November 22... &lt;strong&gt;Mr. Thompson's address will be carried by every radio station in this country and in all countries throughout the world, wherever radio waves may still be heard.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that John Galt gave a speech instead of Mr. Thompson, presumably his speech was heard everywhere that Mr. Thompson's speech would've been heard. While John Galt chose not to broadcast on television, his speech would have presumably been heard globally via radio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T16:33:17.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4978" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6415" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:00:18.223" Score="0" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Dagny crashes in Galt's Gulch, we learn that Ellis Wyatt has been experimenting with new ways of producing oil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there's no textual evidence that he was researching new &lt;em&gt;applications&lt;/em&gt; of oil (unlike Hank Rearden, who actively researches new applications for his metal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: the main applications of oil are engines of various kind (diesel engines, airplane engines, car motors). John Galt's motor obsoleted oil-burning engines; there's absolutely no reason that you'd ever develop anything but an electric motor. The fact that John developed the prototypes of the motor while he was at the 20th Century Motor Company, it seems likely that it was likely originally &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; for use as part of car engines. Dagny pointed out that it could be used to replace a lot of other existing motors, too, such as engines for trains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the existence of Rearden Metal would drastically reduced energy consumption anyway because it was so much lighter than steel. For example, Hank Rearden told Dagny that he wanted to eventually make planes out of his metal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that oil is also used in plastic manufacturing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eia.gov/tool/faqs/faq.php?id=34&amp;amp;t=6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's currently not the primary source of raw material for plastic making in the U.S.&lt;/a&gt;. According to the linked article,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although crude oil is a source of raw material (feedstock) for making plastics, it is not the major source of feedstock for plastics production in the United States. Plastics are produced from natural gas, feedstocks derived from natural gas processing, and feedstocks derived from crude oil refining. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is unable to determine the specific amounts or origin of the feedstocks that are actually used to manufacture plastics in the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petrochemical feedstock naphtha and other oils refined from crude oil are used as feedstock for petrochemical crackers that produce the basic building blocks for making plastics. EIA data can only identify those oil-derived feedstocks specifically designated as petrochemical feedstock by petroleum refineries in EIA’s refining surveys, which break out into Naphtha For Petrochemical Feedstock Use and Other Oils For Petrochemical Feedstock Use. However, the petrochemical industry also consumes large quantities of hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGL), which may be produced by petroleum refineries or natural gas processing plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2016, most of the HGL produced in the United States (85%) were byproducts of natural gas processing, and the remaining 15% were from crude oil refineries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point being oil production isn't even the main source of raw material for plastic anymore. (I have no idea if this was the case at the time that the book was written, though, or the extent to which it's true in other countries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://alaska.conocophillips.com/what-we-do/oil-production/what-is-oil-used-for/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list&lt;/a&gt;, oil is used in some quantity in a number of everyday household items (even things like, for example, toothpaste and deodorant). However, I doubt that any of these applications come anywhere near the amount of oil that's consumed for cars, airplanes, certain types of energy production, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, it seems like the majority of the use of oil would be for legacy purposes (e.g. cars, airplanes, etc. that hadn't been retrofitted with non-oil-based motors yet). Even in some of these, the amount of oil consumed would be reduced over time. For example, if they started manufacturing boxcars out of Reardon Metal, the overall weight of freight trains would've been reduced, which would've reduced the need for oil (even if Taggart Transcontinental was still using Diesel engines). In other words, the largest application of his product was becoming obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why wasn't Ellis Wyatt doing more about the fact that the largest application of his only product was becoming obsolete?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:51:59.170" Title="Why wasn't Ellis Wyatt researching new applications of oil (or at least diversifying his product line)?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4979" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:48:13.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T20:48:13.103" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T20:48:13.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4980" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:48:13.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American mathematician, computer scientist and science fiction author Rudy Rucker (born 1946) and his works. Rucker is an influential cyberpunk author." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:22:23.700" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:22:23.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4981" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:55:15.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-08T20:55:15.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-08T20:55:15.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4982" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-08T20:55:15.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about haiku, a very short type of Japanese poetry. Use this tag when asking about haiku as a whole. Use with the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:24:08.670" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:24:08.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4983" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:43:06.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T18:43:06.253" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T18:43:06.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4984" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:43:06.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature written in Urdu, an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in Pakistan and India." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:23:00.193" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:23:00.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4985" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:49:48.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T18:49:48.363" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T18:49:48.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4986" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:49:48.363" Score="0" Body="Questions about the story collection 'The SEA Is Ours: Tales from Steampunk Southeast Asia' (2015), which contains contributions by Jaymee Goh, Kate Osias and other authors." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:23:05.240" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:23:05.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4987" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:59:09.717" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T18:59:09.717" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T18:59:09.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4988" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-09T18:59:09.717" Score="0" Body="Questions about Theodore L. Thomas (1920 - 2005) and his works. Thomas wrote science fiction short stories and collaborated on two novels with Kate Wilhelm." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:22:31.713" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:22:31.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4989" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:01:50.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T19:01:50.160" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T19:01:50.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4990" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:01:50.160" Score="0" Body="Questions about any of the works in &quot;The Expanse&quot;, a series of science fiction novels, novellas and stories by James S. A. Corey. The first part in the series is Leviathan Wakes (2011). Use this tag with the [james-s-a-corey] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:22:12.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:22:12.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4991" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:04:21.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T19:04:21.040" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T19:04:21.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4992" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:04:21.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1892 novel The American Claimant by Mark Twain. Use this tag with the [mark-twain] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-09T20:22:26.480" LastActivityDate="2017-12-09T20:22:26.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16435" CreationDate="2017-12-09T19:33:36.830" Score="5" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the book, after John Galt decided to go on strike, he first went to Francisco D'Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjöld. As John Galt stated in his speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was the three of us who started what I am now completing. It was the three of us who resolved to avenge this country and to release its imprisoned souls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very early on, they also approached William Hastings (who had been John Galt's boss at the 20th Century Motor Company) and Hugh Akston (who had taught them at the Patrick Henry University). (William Hastings joined approximately a year later).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Halley appears to have been a very early Striker, having already retired many years prior to the start of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Midas Mulligan and Judge Narragansett were also early Strikers. (In fact, Midas Mulligan was the one who established Galt's Gulch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can a complete timeline be derived from the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T14:07:23.987" Title="Is there a chronology of exactly when the various Strikers quit?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4995" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4996" CreationDate="2017-12-10T06:38:01.883" Score="5" ViewCount="477" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Jane is at Moor House looking in at the Rivers sisters reading German, she writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At a later day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line: though when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on sounding brass to me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does that make any sense? Did she remember after studying German for several years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2704" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T18:50:47.763" Title="How does Jane Eyre remember the German words Diana Rivers says?" Tags="&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4995" CreationDate="2017-12-10T17:53:01.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the quote in context, we find that Jane overheard Mary addressing her sister thus:&#xA;'Listen Diana, Franz and old Daniel are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which he has awakened in terror - listen!'&#xA;She then reads the account, a portion of which is then repeated by Diana, although it is not understood by Jane at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later in the book, after Jane receives her uncle's inheritance, she lives with her cousins, the Rivers, for a while. During this time, she works at learning German, until her cousin St.John Rivers persuades her to learn Hindustani instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt Jane asks Mary and Diana which German book contains the characters of Franz and Daniel, and is able to identify the quote in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the story, the Rivers sisters are learning German by working their way through German literature 'with no master but a lexicon.'&#xA;The line in question makes a deep impression on both sisters. The only way I can see that Jane would know it was the right quote would be by relying on the memories of Diana and Mary as to what they were reading the night in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to remember one or two words spoken in a foreign language, or at least how they generally sounded, even if you can't remember the whole sentence. I can accept that Jane could have remembered the word Nacht at the end of the quote, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1964" LastEditorDisplayName="user1964" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T18:50:47.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T18:50:47.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4997" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5114" CreationDate="2017-12-10T21:06:08.383" Score="8" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for the narrative device that, as opposed to Chekhov’s gun, involves purposely including accounts of events or things in the narrative that are inconsequential to the main story. This serves merely to add an extra sense of realism to the story and not to be confused with a red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember once reading about a prominent author (maybe Dostoevsky or Tolstoy) who suggested that it provided an extra sense of realism to the storytelling, but now I can’t find the reference anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this device called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2708" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T18:58:43.330" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T18:58:43.330" Title="What is the narrative device that involves using inconsequential elements in the story?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="4999" CreationDate="2017-12-10T22:02:41.210" Score="6" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the poem &quot;An Evening Walk&quot; by William Wordsworth (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FAR from my dearest Friend, 'tis mine to rove&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where peace to Grasmere's lonely island leads,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Leads to her bridge, rude church, and cottaged grounds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her rocky sheepwalks, and her woodland bounds;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where, undisturbed by winds, Winander sleeps&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Mid clustering isles, and holly-sprinkled steeps;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where twilight glens endear my Esthwaite's shore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And memory of departed pleasures, more.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fair scenes, erewhile, I taught, a happy child,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The echoes of your rocks my carols wild:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The spirit sought not then, in cherished sadness,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A cloudy substitute for failing gladness,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In youth's keen eye the livelong day was bright,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sun at morning, and the stars at night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alike, when first the bittern's hollow bill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was heard, or woodcocks roamed the moonlight hill.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the line &quot;The echoes of your rocks my carols wild&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2709" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T00:31:23.040" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T00:54:36.140" Title="What does the line &quot;The echoes of your rocks my carols wild&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="4999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4998" CreationDate="2017-12-11T00:54:36.140" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The echoes of your rocks&quot; is an indirect object, and &quot;my carols wild&quot; is a direct object.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the only way I can make sense of this sentence. The words &quot;a happy child&quot; are a descriptive comment on the pronoun &quot;I&quot;. So we could rewrite these phrases as follows, for clearer meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(original)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I taught, a happy child, [t]he echoes of your rocks my carols wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(rewrite)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a happy child, I taught my wild carols to the echoes of your rocks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is reminiscing nostalgically about his carefree childhood spent in this place. He used to sing childish songs (&quot;carols wild&quot;) there, which echoed off the rocks. Poetically, he &quot;taught&quot; these songs to the echoing rocks, who sang them back to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With verbs like &quot;taught&quot; (or &quot;gave&quot;, &quot;sent&quot;, etc.) which can take both direct and indirect objects simultaneously, the indirect object always goes before the direct object in English. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I taught the lads a lesson&quot; = &quot;I taught a lesson to the lads&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Did she give you a letter?&quot; = &quot;Did she give a letter to you?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Send them the answer&quot; = &quot;Send the answer to them&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;I taught the echoes of your rocks my carols wild&quot; = &quot;I taught my carols wild to the echoes of your rocks&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T00:54:36.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5000" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:02:06.337" Score="2" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shira Glassman's Mangoverse novels, Rivka/Captain Riv is a woman pretending to be a man in order to work as a guard for the Queen (and later becomes Captain of the guards). It's noted that she wears a mask over the lower part of her face. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of mention of the reasons other people think she's wearing it (usually because they assume, due to the many tales of her exploits, that it is due to some great disfiguring injury or the like), but I can't really recall a mention explicitly in the books that states her actual reasoning. I assume it's to help hide her feminine features, but do any of the books (&lt;em&gt;The Second Mango, Climbing the Date Palm, A Harvest of Ripe Figs,&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Olive Conspiracy&lt;/em&gt;) or the short story collection (&lt;em&gt;Tales from Perach&lt;/em&gt;, which I have not read yet) actually state why she does this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T01:02:06.337" Title="Is there ever a clear explanation of why Rivka wears a mask over her face?" Tags="&lt;shira-glassman&gt;&lt;mangoverse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2349" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:12:28.970" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd argue that they aren't connected. Not because of direct textual evidence, but because of a lack of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Challenger makes the entire world shake and scream; d uring one of his stories, everyone dies for an hour or two. These are noticeable things - you'd expect them to be mentioned in Holmes stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not to say that they couldn't take place in the same world. But I'd expect there to be some kind of mention if they did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T01:12:28.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5002" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:17:45.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T01:17:45.907" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T01:17:45.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5003" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:17:45.907" Score="0" Body="For questions about the queer Jewish feminist author Shira Glassman, or about any of her works (fantasy or contemporary), most famously the Mangoverse series. " OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T01:22:49.533" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T01:22:49.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5004" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:19:04.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T01:19:04.453" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T01:19:04.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5005" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-11T01:19:04.453" Score="0" Body="For questions about Shira Glassman's 'Mangoverse' fantasy series. Use with the [shira-glassman] author tag. " OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T16:27:22.983" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T16:27:22.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5007" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-11T14:24:46.017" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the end of The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale meet in the woods and talk. At the end of this conversation they seem intent on returning to Europe to marry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this plan at all plausible? After all, she's married to someone else, and they are adulterers. Was there really a country in Europe where they could have married? Was there any way to justify this action religiously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a certain point of view, it would seem more plausible that they should arrive in Europe and lie to the community that they join there. Hester might claim that she and Dimmesdale are simply a married couple and the parents of Pearl; or she might claim to be the widow of Pearl's father, and then arrange a wedding ceremony with Dimmesdale after arriving in their new community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that would be adultery, wouldn't it? They would simply be pretending that they are married to each other, regardless of the lie that satisfied the legal or social scrutiny. Can we suppose that both of them have rejected morality so totally, suddenly and simultaneously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T17:31:13.003" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T17:31:13.003" Title="Near the end of The Scarlet Letter, is it plausible that Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale will marry?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;&lt;the-scarlet-letter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4920" CreationDate="2017-12-11T19:44:31.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few possible answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the world wasn't &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; devoid of competent individuals. Ragnar Danneskjöld had found competent people to trade with even in the various People's States. There were a large number of at least &lt;em&gt;somewhat&lt;/em&gt; competent people in the country, too; for example, Minnesota had produced &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gangs of unemployed that were roving the country actually included a fair number of competent people. For example, Jeff Allen (a bum who hitched a ride with Dagny who was able to tell her who John Galt was) was evidently competent (although he had been suffering the consequences of his involvement in the fiasco at the 20th Century Motor Company). Also, Hank Rearden dealt with a gang of unemployed that was described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rearden, that evening, his coat collar raised, his hat slanted low over his eyes, the snow drifts rising to his knees, was tramping through an abandoned open-pit coal mine, in a forsaken corner of Pennsylvania, supervising the loading of pirated coal upon the trucks which he had provided. Nobody owned the mine, nobody could afford the cost of working it. But a young man with a brusque voice and angry, dark eyes, who came from a starving settlement, had organized a gang of the unemployed and made a deal with Rearden to deliver the coal... Watching him at the job of loading the trucks, Rearden thought that the boy, if born a generation earlier, would have become a great industrialist; now, he would probably end his brief life as a plain criminal in a few more years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the bum that Eddie Willers encountered in the beginning of the book appeared to be intelligent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary problem in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; wasn't that none of the Looters &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; ability (which many of them admittedly didn't), it's that they refused to &lt;em&gt;exercise&lt;/em&gt; it. In particular, the &quot;cardinal sin&quot; of objectivism is the refusal to exercise your mind. Clearly, not everyone has equal ability, but everyone has the same moral capacity. For example, Francisco D'Anconia told Hank Rearden that, while Eddie Willers couldn't have invented Rearden Metal, he &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; match Hank and Francisco in morality. Presumably, if enough of the Looters were willing to change, they could become competent (either relatively quickly due to the fact that they were actively using their existing ability and intelligence, or over time because they were learning and growing over time).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, both the Strikers and the people who quit after hearing John Galt's speech were already producing enough for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, even relatively late in the Strike, there were still people who were able to produce. Many of them were unable to actually produce or deliver their goods for a variety of reasons (e.g. the harvester company that &quot;went under&quot; because they couldn't get steel, the Minnesota farmers who couldn't deliver their harvest because Taggart Transcontinental's trains didn't show up, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, many of the people who were working but had been forced to &quot;hide&quot; their abilities (e.g. the Taggart Tower Director) would still be available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fifth, there are still plenty of people whose main problem is cowardice, not incompetence. For example, the text doesn't actually say that Mr. Mowen was especially incompetent as far as I know, just that he was a coward who was afraid to continue to use Rearden Metal after the State Science Institute's statement on the matter. He presumably &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have been at least reasonably good manufacturer if he changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there were many competent people that had simply abandoned their jobs (such as Pat Logan and the rest of the crew that was on a particular run of the Comet). It's unclear exactly what had happened to them, but they may have become available as well. (This is especially the case given that the main reason they abandoned their jobs in the first place was Directive 10-289).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T19:44:31.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5009" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:25:38.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Melmoth the Wanderer&lt;/em&gt;, written by Charles Robert Maturin in 1820, is a Gothic novel about a man selling his soul to the devil and being bound to searching the world for someone to take his place and encountering a variety of lost souls during those travels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melmoth_the_Wanderer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T20:40:10.827" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T20:40:10.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5010" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:25:38.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about Charles Robert Maturin's 1820 Gothic novel &quot;Melmoth the Wanderer&quot;. Use with the [charles-robert-maturin] tag." OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T20:41:01.320" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T20:41:01.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5011" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:36:08.850" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt; is a play of classic German literature written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and comprised of two parts, &lt;em&gt;Faust: A Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; (orig.: &lt;em&gt;Faust. Eine Tragödie&lt;/em&gt;, 1808) and &lt;em&gt;Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; (orig.: &lt;em&gt;Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil in fünf Akten&lt;/em&gt;, 1832). It is loosely based on the common legend of Doctor Faustus and his deal with the devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T20:40:39.133" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T20:40:39.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5012" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:36:08.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's two-part play 'Faust' as comprised of 'Faust: A Tragedy' (1808) and 'Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy' (1832). Use this tag with [johann-wolfgang-von-goethe] and [german-literature]. For Christopher Marlowe's play 'Doctor Faustus' use the tag [doctor-faustus]." OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T11:05:06.377" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T11:05:06.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5013" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5100" CreationDate="2017-12-11T20:57:05.943" Score="11" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_Leigh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I have not stood long on the strand of life,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And these salt waters have had scarcely time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To creep so high up as to wet my feet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A woman's always younger than a man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At equal years, because she is disallowed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Maturing by the outdoor sun and air,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You think a woman ripens as a peach,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm young in age, and younger still, I think,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a woman. But a child may say amen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I, incapable to loose the knot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of social questions, can approve, applaud&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Beyond the &lt;strong&gt;vulgar white&lt;/strong&gt; of personal aims.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Accept my reverence.'  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it &quot;vulgar white&quot;? Does it refer to white paper, or white clothes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T11:29:40.390" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T11:43:57.440" Title="What is &quot;vulgar white of personal aims&quot;? Why is it &quot;white&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5014" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-11T22:07:10.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2017-12-11T22:07:10.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-11T22:07:10.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5015" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-11T22:07:10.903" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of the Victorian-era English poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 – 1861)." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T13:21:38.560" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T13:21:38.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5016" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5020" CreationDate="2017-12-12T00:53:13.760" Score="3" ViewCount="1370" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snufkin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the character of Snufkin in the Moomin series of children's books by Tove Jansson is based on her real-life friend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos_Wirtanen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atos Wirtanen&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tove Jansson based the character of Snufkin on her friend and one-time fiancé, Atos Wirtanen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But neither of the above-linked Wikipedia pages includes any source for this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Snufkin really based on Atos Wirtanen? In what aspects of him does this come across?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T11:40:17.270" Title="Is Snufkin based on Atos Wirtanen?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;moomin-series&gt;&lt;tove-jansson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5046" CreationDate="2017-12-12T03:51:04.000" Score="2" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But, Miss Taggart -&quot; [Mr. Thompson said.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I didn't come here to argue.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She was at the door when he sighed and said, &quot;I hope he's still alive.&quot; She stopped. &quot;I hope they haven't done anything rash.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A moment passed before she was able to ask, &quot;Who?&quot; and to make it a word, not a scream.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He shrugged, spreading his arms and letting them drop helplessly. &quot;I can't hold my own boys in line any longer. I can't tell what they might attempt to do. There's one clique - the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs faction - that's been after me for over a year to adopt stronger measures. A tougher policy, they mean. Frankly, what they mean is: to resort to terror. Introduce the death penalty  for civilian crimes, for critics, dissenters, and the like. Their argument is that since people won't co-operate, won't act for the public interest voluntarily, we've got to force them to. Nothing will make our system work, they say, but terror.... We're trying to keep the Ferris boys in check, but... you see, they're set against any surrender to John Galt. They don't want to deal with him. They don't want us to find him. I wouldn't put anything past them. If they found him first, they'd - there's no telling what they might do... That's what worries me. Why doesn't he answer? Why hasn't he answered us at all? What if they've found him and killed him? I wouldn't know...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he actually telling the truth here? It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; perfectly true that certain people were arguing for extreme measures sooner, that Mr. Thompson had resisted such extreme measures, and that it was Mr. Thompson's idea to negotiate with John Galt rather than to kill him like Robert Stadler wanted to. Is he &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; worried that they'd killed him? Or is this a veiled threat (i.e. &quot;either cooperate or I'll let the dogs off the leash&quot;)? Or is he trying to manipulate her into trying to contact John Galt knowing that he's having her watched? Or is it some combination of the above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-04-21T15:09:05.823" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T15:09:05.823" Title="Was Mr. Thompson actually worried that John Galt might be dead?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4812" CreationDate="2017-12-12T04:00:29.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When John Galt gave his radio address, Eddie immediately recognized him as the Mystery Worker. He quickly connected him to all of the disappearances, including the fact that he was actively destroying Taggart Transcontinental. He also noticed, significantly, that the last day he saw John Galt was the night that Dagny left for Utah (when both of them went after Quentin Daniels and Dagny followed John to the Gulch). He even inferred the nature of the relationship between him and Dagny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking to Dagney, he said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ive talked to him... I've been talking to him for years... in the Terminal cafeteria... He used to ask questions... all sorts of questions about the railroad, and I - God, Dagny! was I protecting the railroad or was I helping to destroy it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Both. Neither. It doesn't matter now.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I could have staked my life that he loved the railroad!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;He does.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;But he destroyed it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;I used to talk to him,&quot; he said, after a while. &quot;His face... Dagny, it didn't look like any of the others, it... it showed that he understood so much... I was glad, whenever I saw him there, in the cafeteria... &lt;strong&gt;I just talked... I don't think I knew that he was asking questions...&lt;/strong&gt; but he was... so many questions about the railroad... and about you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Galt helped him in a very visceral way. He doesn't appear to have been fully aware of the amount of information he gave John until after the fact. (He didn't even realize, for example, that he had told John Galt the location of the cabin in the woods that she went to after Directive 10-289 went into effect, which enabled Francisco D'Anconia to find her and try to persuade her to come to Galt's Gulch with him).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T04:00:29.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-12T09:30:03.907" Score="6" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Slaughterhouse Five&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, suffers from PTSD caused by the mental trauma of having been in the war. He deals with this by imagining that he has come unstuck in time and can relive various moments of his life in whatever order he pleases. In the novel, because of this ability, Billy knows the exact manner and time of his death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Billy Pilgrim says now that this really is the way he is going to die, too. As a time- traveler, he has seen his own death many times, has described it to a tape recorder. The tape is locked up with his will and some other valuables in his safe-deposit box at the Ilium Merchants National Bank and Trust, he says...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just before his assassination, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'No, no,' says Billy serenely. 'It is time for you to go home to your wives and children, and it is time for me to be dead for a little while-and then live again.' At that moment, Billy's high forehead is in the cross hairs of a high-powered laser gun. It is aimed at him from the darkened press box. In the next moment, Billy Pilgrim is dead. So it goes.&#xA;  So Billy experiences death for a while. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this possible if Billy's time-traveling abilities were just hallucinations caused by PTSD?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2717" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T04:15:21.213" Title="How did Billy Pilgrim know the manner and time of his death?" Tags="&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;&lt;slaughterhouse-five&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5016" CreationDate="2017-12-12T10:00:05.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes he was&lt;/strong&gt;. This is confirmed on the Moomin Series official &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.moomin.com/en/blog/who-inspired-tove-when-creating-snufkin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snufkin was inspired by Tove Jansson herself, her brother Lars, but above all Tove’s boyfriend from the beginning of the 1940’s, Atos Wirtanen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jansson claimed (see page at end of answer) that Snufkin's love of nature was reflective of her own fascination with the natural world (which is evident in the artistic bohemian/fairytale-like atmosphere of the Moomin's world). However, it is reiterated that Atos and Snufkin shared the most in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their shared aspects there are some both visual and metaphorical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Snufkin reminds Atos a lot with his looks – hat and pipe were common for both of them. Also backpack describes how they were coming and going all the time. Atos’ view of free life where the material assets are unnecessary is also one of the best known traits of Snufkin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The syntax is a bit iffy here because the website is translated from the original Finnish!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is Snufkin and Wirtanen side by side where you can see a resemblance with the coat and hat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eWgem.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eWgem.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Snufkin&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G39Rp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G39Rp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Wirtanen&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snufkin's characteristic 'tramp' appearance was also inspired by Wirtanen as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Atos’ view of free life where the material assets are unnecessary is also one of the best known traits of Snufkin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website goes on to say that Moomintroll was Jansson's alter ego and so the close friendship that Moomintroll and Snufkin have with each other mirrors Jansson and Wirtanen's relationship. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.moomin.com/en/blog/moomin-characters-as-toves-self-portraits/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; page also details her characters and their inspiration and examines Wirtanen and Snufkin amongst others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T11:40:17.270" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T11:40:17.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5021" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-12T10:41:16.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions about the Irish clergyman and author Charles Robert Maturin (1782 – 1824) and his works. Maturin wrote several Gothic plays and novels, including the novel &quot;Melmoth the Wanderer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T16:06:05.907" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T16:06:05.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5022" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-12T10:41:16.703" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Irish clergyman and author Charles Robert Maturin (1782 – 1824) and his works. Maturin wrote several Gothic plays and novels, including the novel &quot;Melmoth the Wanderer&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-12T16:06:21.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-12T16:06:21.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-13T01:43:00.520" Score="5" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Pern novels, what happens when a rider dies of old age? Does the dragon go &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; without them? It's implied that dragons never die of old age themselves, so I'm asking about the riders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a second note, is this ever recorded in the books?  I would assume that there would be something about the Oldtimers dying off, but as far as I can tell they just &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, without much explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T01:54:25.357" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T19:59:53.323" Title="What happens when a rider dies of old age?" Tags="&lt;dragonriders-of-pern&gt;&lt;anne-mccaffrey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5026" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5047" CreationDate="2017-12-13T02:00:16.547" Score="6" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Aivas, the artificial intelligence discovered in the Pern books, ever mentioned in some of the prequels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any reference to it in books set before the time it was discovered, including in Dragonsdawn and the other early books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T02:50:27.527" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T01:55:54.113" Title="Is Aivas ever mentioned before it is discovered?" Tags="&lt;anne-mccaffrey&gt;&lt;dragonriders-of-pern&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5027" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5612" CreationDate="2017-12-13T02:04:53.667" Score="3" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of &lt;em&gt;Madouc&lt;/em&gt;, book 3 of Jack Vance's &lt;em&gt;Lyonesse&lt;/em&gt; series, Shimrod is studying a strange device with multiple (seven?) balls or discs moving around like planets. They move apparently asynchronously, but occasionally two and rarely three move together in unison. As he watches it, four, five, six, and finally all seven of the balls start moving in unison, until they appear to be all a single object. He goes to tell Murgen, but Murgen doesn't respond to his calls, and it is then that Shimrod discovers the plot to free Joald.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is this device, and what does it signify?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T19:56:17.463" Title="What is the device Shimrod found with multiple balls moving together, and what does it signify?" Tags="&lt;jack-vance&gt;&lt;lyonesse-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-12-13T11:10:34.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern,&lt;/em&gt; when Moreta and Holth die &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; because they were too exhausted to envision their destination properly, Orlith (Moreta's queen) stays only long enough to see her eggs reach the Hatching Grounds, and then goes &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; on her own the morning of Impression. McCaffrey describes how Orlith is writhing on the ground in agony immediately after Moreta's loss because she &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; go &lt;em&gt;between&lt;/em&gt; just yet, until her eggs hatch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Robinton dies of old age at the end of &lt;em&gt;All the Weyrs of Pern,&lt;/em&gt; his fire-lizard Zair dies as well (although he doesn't go &lt;em&gt;between,&lt;/em&gt; oddly enough; he just lies on Robinton's chest and dies). Dragons were bred from fire-lizards with genetic enhancements, so there's a strong correlation in their behavior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that, I don't recall reading about any riders who die dragonless and leave the dragon around to re-Impress. There are several riders who lose dragons and don't die, Lytol/L'tol and Brekke being the most prominent, but not the reverse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T11:10:34.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5030" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:15:00.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:15:00.217" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:15:00.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5031" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:15:00.217" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American-born Irish writer Anne McCaffrey (1926 – 2011) and her work. She is best known for the fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern, which consists of three trilogies, many other novels by Anne McCaffrey, and several books co-authored with Todd McCaffrey." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:06:09.557" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:06:09.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5032" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:16:13.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Dragonriders of Pern&lt;/em&gt; series is a sci-fi/fantasy series of novels and short stories set on the fictional planet of Pern. The series was started by Anne McCaffrey in 1967. Other contributing authors include Todd McCaffrey, Gigi McCaffrey and Jody Lynn Nye. There are also several non-novels about this universe, such as &lt;em&gt;The Atlas of Pern&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though publication order is the intended (and recommended) reading order, a list of books by their in-universe chronological order can be found in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1441/what-is-the-chronological-order-of-the-dragonriders-of-pern-series&quot;&gt;Sci-fi/Fantasy SE question&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for any and all questions about the series and/or its world, alongside [anne-mccaffrey], even if asking about books that were not written by her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T00:09:53.247" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T00:09:53.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5033" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:16:13.040" Score="0" Body="Question about any of the books in the fantasy series Dragonriders of Pern, largely written by Anne McCaffrey. Use with [anne-mccaffrey]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T00:08:35.300" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T00:08:35.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5034" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:25:05.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:25:05.577" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:25:05.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5035" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:25:05.577" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Swedish-speaking Finnish author Tove Jansson (1914 – 2001) and her work. She wrote books for children (the Moomins series, which also includes comic strips), and books and short stories for adults." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:05:51.340" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:05:51.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5036" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:26:42.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:26:42.260" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:26:42.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5037" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:26:42.260" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Moomins series of books (including a comic strip) by the  Swedish-speaking Finnish author and illustrator Tove Jansson. Use this tag with the [tove-jansson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:05:58.907" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:05:58.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5038" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:30:33.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T17:30:33.327" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T17:30:33.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5039" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T17:30:33.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850) and his works. In addition to his own work, e.g. Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) and The Prelude (1850), he wrote the influential Lyrical Ballads (1798) in co-operation with Samuel Taylor Coleridge." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:06:14.223" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:06:14.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5040" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:59:19.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T18:59:19.847" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T18:59:19.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5041" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T18:59:19.847" Score="0" Body="Questions about the perspective or perspectives used in works of literature, i.e. the point of view from which a story (or part of it) is told. In other words, &quot;Who is the narrator?&quot; Typical examples are first-person perspective, second-person perspective, third-person perspective and alternative perspective." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T20:37:04.077" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T20:37:04.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5048" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:17:03.390" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly before the Sphere visits him, A Square had a dream about Lineland. The king of Lineland was unconvinced by A Square's arguments in favor of a second dimension. A Square's efforts to convince the King included analogies, describing things that he wouldn't be able to see without being in a higher dimension, and moving in ways that would be impossible for someone of their world (e.g. seeming to disappear and to then reappear). The king of Lineland accuses him of being a magician and tries to kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He views the king of Lineland with disgust as a fool. When he's visited by the Sphere, though, he reacts to being told about the existence of a third dimension in almost exactly the same way that the king of Lineland had reacted to being told of a second dimension, even though the Sphere made the exact same kind of arguments that A Square himself had just used. Why didn't he recognize the obvious double standard here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T12:20:31.487" Title="Why did A Square react the way he did to the Sphere?" Tags="&lt;edwin-abbott-abbott&gt;&lt;flatland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5073" CreationDate="2017-12-13T20:18:59.047" Score="5" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full disclosure: I haven't entirely finished the book yet, so I'm hoping that this isn't an obvious question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Sphere visited A Square, he was aware of A Square's dream about Lineland and seemed familiar with its content. The Sphere stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you not remember - for I, who see all things, discerned last night the phantasmal vision of Lineland written upon your brain - do you not remember, I say, how, when you entered the realm of Lineland, you were compelled to manifest yourself to the King, not as a Square, but as a Line, because that Linear Realm had not Dimensions enough to represent the whole of you, but only a slice or section of you? In precisely the same way, your country of Two Dimensions is not spacious enough to represent me, a being of Three, but can only exhibit a slice or section of me, which is what you call a Circle. (From Chapter 16, &quot;How the Stranger vainly endeavoured to reveal to me in words the mysteries of Spaceland&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did he know that? He merely vaguely states that he &quot;sees all things.&quot; Most of the other things the sphere describes would be easy to learn if you really were 3D (rather than flat), but this is an obvious exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:42:08.767" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T18:19:47.823" Title="How did the Sphere know about A Square's dream?" Tags="&lt;edwin-abbott-abbott&gt;&lt;flatland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5044" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:14:23.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-13T21:14:23.823" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T21:14:23.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5045" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:14:23.823" Score="0" Body="Questions about adaptations of works of literature to a different medium or a different literary genre, or adaptations of works in other media (e.g. film) as works of literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T03:33:50.740" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T03:33:50.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5017" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:15:18.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two factors to be considered here: first, Mr. Thompson seems to genuinely &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to find John Galt and to negotiate with him. His belief seems perfectly sincere (or, at least, as sincere as the Looters get). He at least tells himself that he doesn't want to hurt John Galt, just negotiate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, he (correctly) believes that Dagny knows more than she's letting on. He's already given orders to have her followed day and night, and had questioned her closely about Galt's whereabouts on several occasions. (In fact, that's what Dagny was doing in his office before that exchange in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, he seems aware that John Galt's their last chance to make the system work and that, as such, he needs John alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, it was perfectly true that the Ferris-Lawson-Meigs group was after outright terror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said: it was both. He was legitimately worried that John Galt was dead, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; he was trying to manipulate Dagny into giving him any information that she had been &quot;holding out&quot; on (either because he assumed that she cared about and/or was protecting Galt to some degree - which she was - or that he thought that she wouldn't allow that kind of a catastrophe to happen to him given their obvious need).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-13T21:15:18.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5026" CreationDate="2017-12-13T21:24:51.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aivas is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Dragonseye&lt;/em&gt;, which is set just before the second Pass, by name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Clisser&quot;, Bethany began in her soft, persuasive voice, &quot;we have known from our reading of the Second Crossing that the artificial intelligence, the Aivas, turned itself off.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It addition, it is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Dragonsdawn&lt;/em&gt;, which covers the landing to the beginning of the first Pass.  Aivas isn't referred to by name, so I'm not certain whether this refers to Aivas specifically, but I think so. In the first section of the book, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only voice-activated device still operable was the surface interface with the main computer banks on the Yokohama, but it was rarely used anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, in the context of the first Threadfall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ezra Keroon spent that day on the link with the Yokohama's mainframe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T01:55:54.113" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T01:55:54.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5042" CreationDate="2017-12-14T12:20:31.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is part of the satirical nature of the novel.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flatland&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland#As_a_social_satire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-known as a satirical novel&lt;/a&gt;. The satire lies partly in its commentary on the social hierarchy of Victorian Britain (as denoted by the different types of polygon in Flatland), but also in the way &lt;strong&gt;the society is unable to accept new ideas&lt;/strong&gt;. Even when they see others refusing to accept &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; new ideas, they lack the introspection necessary to notice the same blindness in themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I've read (but can't find a source for this now) that in around 1900 the French Academy of Sciences declared that there were no more important inventions to be made, that science had more or less reached its pinnacle. They would have laughed at the idea of anyone saying that in 1800, but they failed to see that it was just as ridiculous to say it in 1900, or at any other time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Scientists can ridicule theories of the past which have been disproved, without being able to accept that their own modern theories could be disproved just as easily. It's easy for physicists of today to laugh at the idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invisible aether permeating reality&lt;/a&gt;, or of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caloric_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heat as a substance which flows&lt;/a&gt;, but less easy for them to contemplate the idea that their own modern models of reality, such as string theory, could be equally wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Atheists can scoff at religious folk for believing God exists without proof of his existence, while they themselves believe God doesn't exist without proof of his non-existence. They can see the illogicality in others' &quot;faith&quot; that God exists, but - despite the parallelism - they fail to see the illogicality in their own &quot;faith&quot; that God doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nationalists, supporters of sports teams, proponents of &quot;Mac vs PC&quot; or &quot;Star Wars vs Star Trek&quot; or &quot;vim vs emacs&quot; - many people who are in one of those groups but not another might again fail to spot the parallels. People might criticise rabid sports fans for their irrational hatred of opposing teams, without realising that the same applies to their own rabid nationalism and irrational hatred of opposing countries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's a common theme in politics nowadays to turn arguments against one party around to attack another party in the same way. In US terms, Democrats might criticise the Republican party for doing XYZ and having leaders who do ABC, without accepting that the Democrat party and its leaders have also done very similar things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypocrisy and failure to use analogy for introspection&lt;/strong&gt; are common themes in society, in Edwin Abbott's day and even still today. It's not at all strange or unrealistic for A. Square to fail to see that the same arguments he applied to the Linelanders can also be applied to the Flatlanders. People find it easy to see the world they know, but even having tried to convince more ignorant people of its existence, they have trouble accepting that they themselves are more ignorant than others and that there's more to the world than &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; can see too. &quot;Those arguments don't apply to me! The Linelanders were wrong because there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; more than one dimension, but there &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; more than two dimensions!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's true that in the real world the analogies are usually less stark and clear. Perhaps not &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of the arguments used by proponents of A criticising B also apply &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; to A as well. This is why even intelligent people can sometimes fail to see how their own arguments can be used against them. But &lt;strong&gt;by using a caricaturised, unrealistically clear version, Abbott is making a more general point.&lt;/strong&gt; This is a common technique used in satire in general: don't portray the world exactly as it is to make your points about it, but instead build a simplified version in which those points come out more clearly. The transitions from 1 to 2 dimensions and from 2 to 3 dimensions are much more similar to each other than many of the other comparisons I've discussed above, so it seems &lt;em&gt;even more&lt;/em&gt; ridiculous that A. Square fails to grasp that similarity. But this is only an exaggerated version of the same ridiculousness of people failing to grasp other, less close, similarities in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T12:20:31.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5049" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:47:24.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:47:24.980" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T15:47:24.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5050" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:47:24.980" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;Rhett &amp; Link's Book of Mythicality: A Field Guide to Curiosity, Creativity, and Tomfoolery&quot; (2017) by Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. Use with the tags [rhett-mclaughlin] and [link-neal] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:10:14.123" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:10:14.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5051" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:55:40.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T15:55:40.837" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T15:55:40.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5052" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T15:55:40.837" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs of the Australian singer Clare Reynolds. Questions about her songs should be tagged under [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T20:20:56.290" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:20:56.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5053" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:01:09.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:01:09.807" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:01:09.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5054" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:01:09.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Dirk Gently book series by Douglas Adams or about any of the books in it, namely Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). Use this tag with the [douglas-adams] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:09:47.717" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:09:47.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5055" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:05:23.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:05:23.333" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:05:23.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5056" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:05:23.333" Score="0" Body="Questions about folktales or folk tales, i.e. stories that have been orally passed down from generation to generation. For myths and legends, use the [myths] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:39:10.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:39:10.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:14:12.517" Score="10" ViewCount="1616" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love his writing, but I don't know why he is considered one of the great fiction writers in English.  Why was James Joyce's writing so &quot;revolutionary&quot; for its time?  I know that at one time originally it was considered risque for some reason, but I could ask the same thing about Ernest Hemingway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2729" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T04:52:17.860" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T04:52:17.860" Title="Why was/is James Joyce's writing revolutionary for its time?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5058" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:14:43.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:14:43.860" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:14:43.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5059" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:14:43.860" Score="0" Body="Questions about the extent to which works of literature accurately depict historical events, figures, customs, ideas, etcetera." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:00:34.870" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:00:34.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5060" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:17:12.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:17:12.477" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:17:12.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5061" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:17:12.477" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer and editor Holly Black (born 1971) and her works. She is best known for the series of children's fantasy books The Spiderwick Chronicles." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:00:40.857" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:00:40.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5062" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:22:17.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:22:17.833" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:22:17.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5063" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:22:17.833" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Lebanese writer, poet and visual artist Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) or about any of his literary works. He is best known for his books The Prophet and Broken Wings." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:35:43.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:35:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5064" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:28:07.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:28:07.063" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:28:07.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5065" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:28:07.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Koran or Quran, the central religious text of Islam, which was written in the first half of the seventh century CE. Should be tagged with [arabic-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:25:22.613" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:25:22.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5066" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:32:35.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:32:35.830" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:32:35.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5067" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:32:35.830" Score="0" Body="Questions related to literary criticism, the branch of the humanities that studies and interprets literature. For literary theory, use the [theory] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:00:24.120" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:00:24.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5068" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:34:50.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:34:50.577" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:34:50.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5069" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:34:50.577" Score="0" Body="Questions about L. Ron Hubbard or Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (1911 – 1986) and his works. Hubbard is best known as the founder of the Church of Scientology. Before that, he was known for his science fiction and fantasy stories." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T17:00:30.793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T17:00:30.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5070" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:43:54.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T16:43:54.313" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T16:43:54.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5071" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-14T16:43:54.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about Manfred: A dramatic poem (1816 – 1817) by the English romantic poet Lord Byron. Use this tag with the [lord-byron] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-14T18:20:31.617" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T18:20:31.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4923" CreationDate="2017-12-14T17:19:58.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yes, it was a deliberate parallel.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are few purely coincidental or insignificant details in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;. One of the text's major goals is to show the &amp;quot;interconnectedness&amp;quot; of various events and causes. This was due to Ayn Rand's belief that everything had a cause, and that in order to solve today's problems you must look at their causes. (Compare this to characters like Jim that insist that it's not important to examine causes and that the important thing is the situation you actually find yourself in now). As the book states about Wesley Mouch,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The men who now sat in front of [Wesley Mouch's] desk had been taught that the law of causality was a superstition and that one had to deal with the situation of the moment without considering its cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, as John Galt says in his radio speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles. The law of causality is the law of identity applied to action. All actions are caused by entities. The nature of an action is cause and determined by the nature of the entities that act; a thing cannot act in contradiction to its nature. An action not caused by an entity would be cause by a zero, which would mean a &lt;em&gt;zero&lt;/em&gt; controlling a &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt;, a non-entity controlling an entity, the non-existent ruling the existent - which is the universe of your teachers' desire, the &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt; of their doctrines of causeless actions, the &lt;em&gt;reason&lt;/em&gt; of their revolt against reason, the goal of their morality, their politics, their economics, the ideal they strive for: the reign of the zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is clearly contrasting the &amp;quot;goodness&amp;quot; of Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart (and the purity of their relationship) with the evil of Jim Taggart. Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart's relationship naturally builds up both people because they're trading value for value - &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; parties are receiving something of value, and providing the other person with something of value in return. (From Ayn Rand's perspective, that's the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; valid way to deal with people, as described in John Galt's radio speech and numerous other places in the book). Jim Taggart's relationships, however, diminish both parties (culminating in his wife's eventual tragic suicide, which he desperately tries to convince himself and Dagny wasn't really his fault). Jim was a killer for the sake of killing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T18:35:50.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5043" CreationDate="2017-12-14T18:19:47.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of the other things the sphere describes would be easy to learn if you really were 3D (rather than flat), but this is an obvious exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may seem obvious to us that dreams are a non-physical phenomenon and wouldn't be visible to someone living in a higher dimension, but I have some possible counter-arguments to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How do we know that our thoughts wouldn't be visible to someone who could see every atom of our brain spread out as though on a map?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroimaging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imaging of the brain&lt;/a&gt; is still very much an ongoing topic of research in every field from medicine to mathematics, and very little is truly understood about how things like thoughts, emotions, and dreams actually work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Try to imagine, from our three-dimensional perspective, what it would be like for a four-dimensional being to look 'down' on our world. Imaging of the brain would suddenly be a trivial problem, as they'd not only be able to see the exact structure of our brain, but also be able to see every single part of it at the same time, laid out as if on a map. They could see our bones and nervous system, perhaps even the electrical impulses travelling along conduits inside our body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are you really sure that &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; level of physical knowledge of someone's brain wouldn't be enough to determine their thoughts? At least for a higher-dimensional observer who'd made a study of lower-dimensional beings - they probably wouldn't simply be able to read off mental images from physical interactions, but an expert in lower-dimensional medical studies might well be able to deduce a surprising amount from the precise details of those electrical signals inside the brain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much was known about the structure of the brain when &lt;em&gt;Flatland&lt;/em&gt; was written?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not much, I imagine. See, for example, the following chronology of brain imaging (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(08)00265-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PJGg5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PJGg5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;timeline&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned above that we don't know much even today about how things like thoughts and dreams actually work. In 1884 we knew even less. Today we think of thoughts as being the effect of electric impulses in the brain; perhaps at that time many people imagined actual images, imprinted somewhere in our heads, of what we see in our &quot;mind's eye&quot;. If there really is such physical evidence &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt; in our bodies, it would be easily visible to a higher-dimensional being.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-14T18:19:47.823" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5075" CreationDate="2017-12-10T19:50:18.067" Score="13" ViewCount="552" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trying to find the title of an old short story I read roughly 5 years ago. If memory serves, The protagonist was a man in his late 20s to early 30s and the story takes place in Europe shortly before the beginning of World War I. The man traveled to the countryside as per the directions of his physician as a means to get fresh air to remedy his poor health. I can't remember if the character was truly suffering from tuberculosis, but his ailment appeared to be related to his lungs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon arriving at his new town, he goes to pay a visit to the home of a friend's acquaintance that also lived there, and was waiting for tea when a young girl struck up a conversation when the two of them were alone in the parlor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She tells him about a tragedy that struck the estate a year prior, when a hunting party left one morning and drowned in the swamps behind the property, before leaving the protagonist alone to wait. Her account turns out to be false and is revealed by the narrator to be an on-the-spot fabrication created to make the protagonist believe that he had seen a ghost when he saw the hunting party wander out from the tree line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other detail I can remember was that the author would later die as a result of participating in either the First or the Second World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7702" OwnerDisplayName="user93468" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:52:39.313" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T08:57:44.193" Title="Short story about Gentlemen being told a tale by a young woman" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5074" CreationDate="2017-12-10T20:04:14.080" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is (I believe) a short tory by Saki (H.H. Munro) called &quot;The Open Window&quot;. It seems to be available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/OpeWin.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It is a wonderful story, as is almost everything Saki wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Jamie Radcliffe" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T08:57:44.193" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T08:57:44.193" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5076" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-14T21:35:39.967" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read this book twice. This book is about a girl who babysits a neighbour's baby, and saves the baby from a serial killer.  She confronts the killer, but due to the shock/trauma of being in that incident she forgets the face of the killer. She seeks psychiatric treatment to find the killer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the killer is really &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; the doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book has a purple cover featuring a house. The title may be &lt;em&gt;The Dark&lt;/em&gt; or similar. I have searched countless books regarding this name but found nothing on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more details about the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attempt of the murder took place on night with clouds and lightning. Not sure if there was rain. The killer had a pistol in his hand and was descending down the stairs, when the girl sees his face in a flash of lightning. Earlier, the girl goes into the upper room when the lights are cut off by the killer. The baby she later saves is in the living room downstairs. She remembers that the baby is in the house and rushes downstairs. I think she takes the baby and is going to go hide upstairs when she sees the killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was probably from 2002-2010, it was an American teen fiction novel, set in the 21st century America.  I read it in American English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2730" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T16:58:53.423" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T16:58:53.423" Title="Finding Thriller/Murder - Mystery Novel involving a girl who forgets the killer due to shock" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6414" CreationDate="2017-12-14T23:44:16.493" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dagny Taggart] did not ask why those men chose to make all their crucial decisions at parties of this kind; she knew that they did. She knew that behind the clattering, lumbering pretense of their council session, committee meetings, and mass debates, the decisions were made in advance, in furtive informality, at luncheons, dinners and bars, the graver the issue, the more casual the method of settling it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Dagny wouldn't ask it, I will - why did they make all their crucial decisions at parties?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere in the book (I think it's at Jim Taggart's wedding), it's mentioned that parties were at least partially a way to tell who was able to manipulate whom. Is there a connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:43:57.730" Title="Why did the Looters make so many decisions at parties?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-15T07:44:25.373" Score="5" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good day to all, I have recently read a book, and I totally cannot remember the title of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I recall, it’s a New York best seller and it’s quite popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s go into the story of the book &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with a middle-aged man going into a sleazy bar and purchases a lap dance. He was enthralled by the dancer and followed her into an alley. After a kiss, this dancer killed the middle-aged man and the story jumps into the introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An Irish woman who worked with the US government who wanted to do some good in the Middle East is suddenly called into the US President office to help with some investigation. The daughter of the US president was approached by some man through social media and told the president that over the next few days, he will release some dirty secrets about the US president. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast forward &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Irish woman continued to investigate and found out that the dancer was a new comer who started work on the day that the man died. It was revealed later that the man who died was the one who was leaking the secrets. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast forward &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The president wanted the man dead and told his closest advisors that he wanted to kill that man but the president didn’t commit any orders to kill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some parts of the story I am unable to remember. But please help me find out what is the name of the book and author. It’s killing me &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks very much in advance and have a pleasant day &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2731" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2017-12-15T15:07:15.027" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T12:18:37.927" Title="Story ID - Recent Thriller, US Government, Middle East" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5057" CreationDate="2017-12-15T09:56:00.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joyce's work was revolutionary in a number of ways. In most of them it was not that he innovated new techniques, but in the degree to which he pushed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To start with, it is worth considering what the novel traditionally looked like at the end of the 19th century. Victorian literature was almost entirely written as a linear narrative with an omniscient narrator. All the great authors of the era - Dickens, Bronte, Hardy - wrote in this style. This is sometimes known as &lt;em&gt;realism&lt;/em&gt;: the attempt to paint a literary picture of belivable characters in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce, by contrast, was more interested in literature as an artistic technique. He used metaphor, motifs and symbolism far more heavily, leading to works that - like a painting - invited multiple interpretations. These were not new tools to authors, of course: Joyce's innovation was the extent to which he deployed them. Indeed as his career went on, traditional structures like plot and character began to play second fiddle to artistic motifs. You can see this in the second half of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; and, at its most extreme, in the nonlinear word soup of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; which defies any traditional approach to reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this, he aligned himself with modernist painters like Picasso. The novel was still a relatively new form compared with other kinds of art, and many critics saw it as &quot;low&quot; populist art, for mass public consumption. Joyce was pushing its boundaries into alignment with avant-garde art in other fields. Arguably we thus have him to thank for the damaging split between popular and highbrow literature that persists to this day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stream of Conciousness was also not new - I vaguley remember reading something very much like it Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt;. But again, his approach to it was entirely new. Rather than writing it in the traditional &quot;omniscient&quot; point of view, he let it flow freely, often into near-nonsense, just as thoughts and ideas sometimes blindside us through the day. Arguably this was the death-knell of the first-person narration that had been dominant up to this point. Also, arguably, it was more &quot;realistic&quot; than the realism of preceeding novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lead to the portrayl of inner thoughts and feelings which broke taboos in subject matter. Yet again, Joyce was not the first here, but he pushed the envelope much further than other authors had done. His frank protrayals of sex and defecation are well known (his letters to his wife reveal he was a something of a scat fetishist himself). But it's also worth remembering that he was unusually blunt when it came to politics, particularly the troubled politics of his native Ireland, which were not considered a fit subject for fiction at the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other literary figures of his era, such as Hemingway, remained constrained by the traditional realistic approach to the novel. Joyce was - and to some extent remains - unique. I'm not aware of anything else like &lt;em&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/em&gt;. He recognised that an author's style of writing is a constraint on what they wrote about. Prior authors had seen this as a regrettable limitation but Joyce embraced it: by jettisoning style, he left himself free to portray the world as he saw fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2017-12-15T09:56:00.210" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5081" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-15T16:00:30.863" Score="12" ViewCount="2087" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opening line of Edgar Allan Poe's short story &quot;The Man of the Crowd&quot; is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was well said of a certain German book that &quot;er lasst sich nicht lesen&quot;- it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is this &quot;certain German book&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there a real text which Poe is referring to here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched the internet for the phrase &quot;er lasst sich nicht lesen&quot;, but most of the results just seem to point back to this Poe story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T03:53:20.783" Title="Which German book was Poe referring to?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5081" CreationDate="2017-12-15T20:04:49.557" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortulus_Animae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hortulus Animae&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hortulus_Anim%C3%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;or better in French&lt;/a&gt;) is the usual answer.  See, for instance, section 3 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deman/mieszkowski/mieszkowski.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this essay:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just as one need not know precisely which &quot;certain German book&quot; Poe is referring to in order to proceed to the second paragraph and beyond—again, we do not learn the identity of this book until the story's last sentence—so one does not need to be able to decipher every word or phrase to make headway with the tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not pretend to understand this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase that Poe quotes,  &quot;er lasst [or &quot;lässt] sich nicht lesen&quot; does not seem to appear in the text, at least my brief skim through the digital image of a copy at &lt;a href=&quot;http://digi.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/diglit/is00365000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heidelberg&lt;/a&gt;, nor is it a phrase that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; be expected to appear.  A later printing of the book is described in Isaac D'Israeli's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21615/21615-h/21615-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curiosities of Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in these terms, in his section &quot;Religious Nouvellettes&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shall notice a class of very singular works, in which the spirit of romance has been called in to render religion more attractive to certain heated imaginations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the fifteenth century was published a little book of prayers, accompanied by figures, both of a very uncommon nature for a religious publication. It is entitled Hortulus Animæ, cum Oratiunculis aliquibus superadditis quæ in prioribus Libris non habentur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a small octavo en lettres gothiques, printed by John Grunninger, 1500. &quot;A garden,&quot; says the author, &quot;which abounds with flowers for the pleasure of the soul;&quot; but they are full of poison. In spite of his fine promises, the chief part of these meditations are as puerile as they are superstitious. This we might excuse, because the ignorance and superstition of the times allowed such things: but the figures which accompany this work are to be condemned in all ages; one represents Saint Ursula and some of her eleven thousand virgins, with all the licentious inventions of an Aretine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and much more of a similar kidney.  D'Israeli does not approve, and might well have written that this book ought not be read.  (The possibility that Poe knew of &lt;em&gt;Hortulus&lt;/em&gt; through  D'Israeli is given in a footnote in the Library of America edition of Poe, edited by Patrick F. Quinn. The form of  Poe's footnote citing the &lt;em&gt;Hortulus&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;{*1} The “Hortulus Animæ cum Oratiunculis Aliquibus Superadditis” of Grünninger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is plausibly a shortened form of D'Israeli's citation.)  The phrase &lt;em&gt;sich nicht lesen&lt;/em&gt; does not appear in D'Israeli's book.  Were there German editions of &lt;em&gt;Curiosities&lt;/em&gt;, or German analogues of &lt;em&gt;Curiosities&lt;/em&gt;, in which Poe might have seen the phrase in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added 21 December.  Among the German disparagers of the &lt;em&gt;Hortulus&lt;/em&gt; was Martin Luther, whose own &lt;em&gt;Betbüchlin&lt;/em&gt; [sic] (of 1522) or &lt;em&gt;Personal Prayer Book&lt;/em&gt; starts with this negative assessment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among the many harmful books and doctrines which are misleading and deceiving Christians and give rise to countless false beliefs, I regard the personal prayer books as by no means the least objectionable. They drub into the minds of simple people such a wretched counting up of sins and going to confession, such un-Christian tom-foolery about prayers to God and his saints! Moreover, these books are puffed up with promises of indulgences and come out with decorations in red ink and pretty titles; one is called &lt;em&gt;Hortulus animae&lt;/em&gt;, and another &lt;em&gt;Paradisus animae&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.  These books need a basic and thorough reformulation if not total extermination.  And I would also make the same judgment...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various old editions are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.prdl.org/author_view.php?s=140&amp;amp;limit=20&amp;amp;a_id=8&amp;amp;sort=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt;; I have looked at the 1544 Wittenburg edition, and have checked the above translation, which I cribbed from  p 231,232 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=OL42DgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA231&amp;amp;lpg=PA232&amp;amp;#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Luther on the Psalter&quot; by C. A. Aurelius&lt;/a&gt; in T. J. Wengert &lt;em&gt;Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't it be cool if Poe's source for &quot;er lässt sich nicht lesen&quot; was some other piece of writing by Luther?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T03:53:20.783" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T03:53:20.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5078" CreationDate="2017-12-16T04:54:14.257" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;FOUND IT - YAY &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the 2010 thriller, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7829007-the-chosen-one&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chosen One&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Sam Bourne. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the game of Washington politics, the stakes are as high as they get - and not everyone is prepared to play by the rules... Newly-elected US President Stephen Baker is flying high after signing a popular bill giving new rights to victims of domestic violence. But in Vic Forbes he has a ruthless enemy who is in possession of a crucial piece of knowledge that could destroy his career. When Forbes is found murdered the conspiracy theorists go into overdrive. Did the President order his killing, or was it his opponents? Ex-Presidential advisor Maggie Costello is called in to investigate. As she digs further she finds evidence of a conspiracy that reaches back into history and the heart of the US establishment...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Managed to find out the name of the book by some luck and brain scratching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to all who read, edit and upvote and May you have a pleasant day ahead &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2731" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T12:18:37.927" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T12:18:37.927" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5098" CreationDate="2017-12-16T06:58:12.143" Score="6" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Elon Musk's biography, &lt;em&gt;Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future&lt;/em&gt;, who can be identified as the intended audience besides from Elon's critics, admirers, and wanna-be entrepreneurs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, how would you describe Ashlee Vance's tone? Is this a good answer: admiring yet ambivalent? Candid/frank and colloquial? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2736" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T11:00:55.690" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T01:01:59.113" Title="Elon Musk biography: who is the intended audience and how would you describe the tone?" Tags="&lt;ashlee-vance&gt;&lt;elon-musk-tesla-spacex-quest&gt;&lt;biography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4725" CreationDate="2017-12-16T07:54:37.250" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel is intended to be somewhat of a dark comedy with levels of illogical reasoning.  It is a satire on the yuppie culture of the mid 1980's.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;take away&quot; that I got from the novel is the absurdity of consumerism and how it can not only shape someone's identity, but entirely consume it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several reasons why Patrick Bateman spends an excessive amount of time describing these specific musical artists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These artists were at the peak of their career when the novel was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.billboard.com/articles/6296671/bret-easton-ellis-regrets-linking-huey-lewis-and-the-news-to-american-psycho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;set&lt;/a&gt;. According to the author, Bret Easton Ellis, the novel was set in the time period 1986 - 1987. These artists were on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.billboard.com/archive/charts/1986/hot-100&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;top 40 billboard&lt;/a&gt; with one or more songs and were the &quot;popular&quot; artists at this particular time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was staying true to the time, 1986 or 1987, and I thought that those&#xA;  three pop acts would be in Bateman's headspace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick Bateman does not really have his own identity.  He forms an identity by what he reads and listens to.  He then attempts to educate others on these ideals like they are his own opinion.  Such as music, fashion, current affairs and the &quot;hot&quot; restaurants of the time. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick Bateman just wants to &quot;fit in&quot;.  This is why he spends to much time talking about popular musical artists of that time.  He becomes an expert on these artists.  He reads critics reviews on them and memorizes every lyric.  If they are being played on the radio and are best selling artists, then obviously the majority of people are listening to them. This would include his friends and colleagues...whom he desperately wants to impress.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The novel is narrated by an untrustworthy source.  Patrick Bateman is telling this story in the first person.  Everything that he says is only meant to be heard by the reader. He is trying to sell us this music as if it's some sort of rare art form.  He's attempting to justify the music he's listening to so that the reader will understand and agree with him that it's the &quot;cool&quot; thing to be listening to.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick Bateman's fixation on these artists is just confirming that he is superficial and shallow.  He has no real connection to the music or the artists.  The only reason that he is listening to and analyzing their music is because they are &quot;popular&quot;.  This is confirmed when he attends a U2 concert.  He claims to have never heard of the band, but he goes to their concert (because Donald Trump likes them, of course).  He has some sort of feeling and emotion in response to their music.  This is really the only time that Patrick shows any kind of &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; emotion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T07:54:37.250" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5087" CreationDate="2017-12-16T18:09:35.590" Score="9" ViewCount="1006" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jorge Luis Borges claims, in his &lt;em&gt;Book of Imaginary Beings&lt;/em&gt;, that the author Robert Louis Stevenson attributed some of the stranger ideas in his writing to fantastical creatures such as brownies who inspired him. This quote from Borges can be found for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/807933-the-famed-author-robert-lewis-stevenson-declared-that-he-d-trained&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The famed author Robert Lewis Stevenson declared that he'd trained his Brownies to be writers. As he slept, they would whisper fantastic plots in his ear -- for example, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and the diabolical Mr. Hyde, and that episode in &quot;Olalla&quot; when a young man from an old Spanish family bites his sister's hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Stevenson actually say this?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it just part of Borges's storytelling?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T18:35:17.527" Title="Did Stevenson really claim to have been inspired by brownies?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5086" CreationDate="2017-12-16T18:34:04.973" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Yep.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson writes in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-chapter-on-dreams-by-robert-louis-stevenson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Chapter on Dreams&lt;/a&gt;, which you can see a book scan at that link, and a text version at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/30990/30990-h/30990-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenburg&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a person than myself;—as I might have told you from the beginning, only that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;—and as I am positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little further with my story. &lt;strong&gt;And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself.&lt;/strong&gt; That part which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For myself—what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the general elections—I am sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Molière’s servant. I pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the sitting at the table, 188 which is about the worst of it; and when all is done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in the profits of our common enterprise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Stevenson, &lt;em&gt;A Chapter on Dreams&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I found this by Googling &lt;code&gt;stevenson &amp;quot;Brownies&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;, finding this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/a-chapter-on-dreams-by-robert-louis-stevenson#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library page&lt;/a&gt;, looking at the scan, seeing the quote I mentioned above, then Googling &lt;code&gt;stevenson a chapter on dreams&lt;/code&gt; and finding a link to the Project Gutenburg page.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T18:35:17.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5088" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:36:30.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:36:30.903" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T19:36:30.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5089" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:36:30.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about biographies, i.e. publications that provide a detailed description of a person's life." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T20:24:15.873" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T20:24:15.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5090" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:38:06.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:38:06.780" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T19:38:06.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5091" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:38:06.780" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American business columnist and author Ashlee Vance (born 1977) or about any of his literary works. He is best known for his biography of Elon Musk, &quot;Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future&quot; (2015)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:56:43.263" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T19:56:43.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5092" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:39:38.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T19:39:38.687" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T19:39:38.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5093" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-16T19:39:38.687" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future' (2015), a biography of Elon Musk published by Ashlee Vance. Use this tag with the [ashlee-vance] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T20:24:21.353" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T20:24:21.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5094" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-16T20:16:25.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T20:16:25.750" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T20:16:25.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5095" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-16T20:16:25.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the French author Jean de La Fontaine (1621 – 1695) and his works. He is best known for his Fables, which were published in 12 volumes from 1668 to 1694. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:31:14.700" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:31:14.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-16T20:58:02.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-16T20:58:02.340" LastActivityDate="2017-12-16T20:58:02.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-16T20:58:02.340" Score="0" Body="Questions about manga (漫画), a type of comics in a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century. Manga are typically, though not always, printed in black-and-white. Manga-influenced comics also exist in other parts of the world." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T15:49:27.513" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T15:49:27.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5084" CreationDate="2017-12-17T01:01:59.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Elon's critics, admirers, and wanna-be entrepreneurs&quot; is a pretty broad category, I think just saying the intended audience is merely people who are interested in Musk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of tone, I would say candid and colloquial. There is a moment where Vance describes Musk repeatedly asking him [Vance] if he thought he [Musk] was crazy. I feel like Vance leaving this in the book shows that he wants people to understand Musk but also to realize that Musk is just as human as the rest of us are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2738" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T01:01:59.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5099" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T03:01:52.707" Score="10" ViewCount="1260" Body="&lt;p&gt;I never quite understood why Lenina wears green if she is a beta, since betas don't wear green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2741" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T01:52:39.227" Title="In Brave New World, If Lenina is a beta, why does she wear green?" Tags="&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5013" CreationDate="2017-12-17T09:16:30.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Metaphor, mainly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn’t able to find any exposition of the meaning of this particular passage. However, I think the meaning is fairly straightforward. Here “white” doesn’t refer to the color of “long-clothes” or anything concrete previously mentioned in the poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather, I believe “white” here is being used as a metaphor for &lt;strong&gt;purity&lt;/strong&gt;. It’s not precisely the white of clothing&amp;mdash;thought I suspect the origin of the metaphor owes something to the idea of a white robe as not having gotten dirty yet (see, e.g. the symbolism of white clothing in Revelation in the Christian Bible). The contrast here is between self-interest, which pretends to be “christian,” and is far more common (i.e. vulgar), and true “christian” values, which are more rarefied. The “thoughts” here referenced are Romney’s: he works as a social activist, which Aurora genuinely admires. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So: personal aims are “white” because they have the &lt;em&gt;appearance&lt;/em&gt; of purity, and are “vulgar” because apparent charity born out of self-interest is far more common than genuine kindness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastEditorUserId="254" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T09:21:36.137" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T09:21:36.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T15:49:46.347" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chapter 21 of the second edition of &lt;em&gt;Flatland&lt;/em&gt; contains the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I AWOKE rejoicing, and began to reflect on the glorious career before me. I would go forth, methought, at once, and &lt;strong&gt;evangelize&lt;/strong&gt; the whole of Flatland. Even to Women and Soldiers should the &lt;strong&gt;Gospel&lt;/strong&gt; of Three Dimensions be proclaimed. I would begin with my Wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text contains numerous references like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the author's point in referring to this as a Gospel, and speaking of evangelizing and making converts? Is he intending to parody Christianity here and, if so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T15:49:46.347" Title="Was Edwin Abbott trying to make fun of Christianity in this part of Flatland?" Tags="&lt;edwin-abbott-abbott&gt;&lt;flatland&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2382" CreationDate="2017-12-17T17:45:49.300" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The first time the Rupert Annuals repeated a story was in 1953.&lt;/strong&gt; But before the year I remember (2006), there were only seven years in which old stories were repeated (1953, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1988), and the only time any story from later than 1940 was repeated was for the 50th anniversary special (1986), which made a point of containing one story from each decade. Since the earliest annual I owned was 1949, this explains why I never noticed repetition until recently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The year I remember (2006) was when repetition of old stories really became a trend.&lt;/strong&gt; In fact, since 2010, there has been only &lt;em&gt;one new story each year&lt;/em&gt;, the rest being recycled older stories. Apparently Rupert annuals have gone so far downhill that they're mostly surviving on reruns. I'm glad I got out when I did, so that Rupert can remain a treasured childhood memory without being spoiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above conclusions were drawn from examining raw data in the form of all titles of all Rupert stories since the start of modern Rupert in 1936. (I didn't check the earlier Tourtel stories, since the form was so different then that repetition would be impossible: at most, a post-Bestall story might be based on the same &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; as a Tourtel story, and inspiration is different from wholesale copy-pasting.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My data was taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rupertbear.co.uk/rupert-annuals_PC5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; (which has a page for each year, listing that year's story titles and sometimes extra info such as facsimile editions) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geocities.ws/gravitygrave/Rupert/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; (which has a page for each decade, listing the story titles from every year in that decade). I've cross-referenced the two against each other to check for consistency; in the data below, brackets in story titles denote small differences between the two sources (usually minor things such as uncertain hyphenation) while entire stories in brackets were listed in one source but not the other (there are only two of these). Since my second source only covers the '30s to '90s, all data from 2000 onwards is taken from the first source alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perhaps not necessary for me to include all my raw data in this answer. I do so, not only to make my research reproducible, but also because this may now be &lt;strong&gt;the only place on the internet with &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; Rupert story titles gathered on a single page&lt;/strong&gt;. All my searching hasn't yielded another such page - if there was one, it would have made my data collection far easier and quicker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;RAW DATA FOLLOWS.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1936 The New Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Wonderful Kite&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Algy and the Cannibals&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Autumn Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Bill and the Pearls&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Christmas Adventure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1937 More Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Snow Machine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Flying Bottle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Floods&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Algy and the Smugglers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Chinese Crackers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Dog Toby&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1938 The New Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the (Black) Daffodils&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Edward and the Paper Chase&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert in Mysteryland&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ruby Ring&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cuckoo Clock&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Pong Ping&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Peter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Bill in the Treetops&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1939 The Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert's Adventures in the Snows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Jack-in-the-Box&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Bonfire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Strange Airman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Half Crowns&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Courier Bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Goblin Cobbler&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Beppo and the Kite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1940 Rupert's Adventure Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Uncle Bruno&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Bill and the Bluebells&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Silver Trowel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Iceberg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Air Smugglers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Marvellous Bat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and King Frost&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pedlar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1941 The Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Red Egg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Baby Badger&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mystery Pond&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Forest Fire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lost Boat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Woodman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sugar Bird&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1942 More Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Cartwheels&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Odmedod&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wrong Presents&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Old Ruin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Plane&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sea Serpent&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert at Sandy Bay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1943 More Rupert Adventures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Circus Dog&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Piper&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Banjo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Good Turn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Tiger Lily&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Birthday&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Iron Key&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Golly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Black Moth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Big Game Hunt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's River Adventure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1944 Rupert in More Adventures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Rollo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Old Map&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Tiny Flute&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mystery Voice&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Yellow Cloak&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Snuffy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Granny Goat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Rainy Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Strange Party&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Dutch Doll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1945 A New Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Reindeer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cuckoo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Turnips&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Jock&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Willie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Fairy Cycle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Music Man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Winter Journey&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Bingo's Trail&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1946 New Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert on Coon Island&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Rastus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blue Mountain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Rupert and the Prince of China?)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Beppo and the Duck&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Podgy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rocket Plane&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Bingo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Magic Dart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1947 More Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Top Hat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Black Cat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Young Dragon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Bill and the Merboy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Paper Kettle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Woffle Fly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Koko&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wavy Wand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Christmas Tree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1948 The Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Jack Frost&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blue Balloon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Magic S(t)ock&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sleepy Pears&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Rosalie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rainbow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Puppy Hunt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Cedric&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Hobby(-)Horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1949 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Ninky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Young Imp&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Magic Top&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Island Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Uncle Grizzly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Twins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the New Pal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Algy and the Bee&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Pong(-)Ping's Party&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1950 Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert's Silver Trumpet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Margot's House/Horse&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Jumping Fish&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gooseberry Fool&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Paper Plane&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Three Guides&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Travel Machine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Big Bang&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Empty Cottage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1951 The New Rupert Rook&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Dr Lion&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Ting(-)Ling&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Mr Punch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lucky Man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Elfin Bell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Runaways&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Queer Path&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Dull Day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1952 More Rupert Adventures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Mare's Nest&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sea(-)Sprites&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Elephants&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Arrows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Beppo and the Caravan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snuff(-)box&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1953 More Adventures of Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Miranda&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Green Buzzer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Algy and the Cannibals (&lt;strong&gt;1936&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Missing Pieces&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert in Mysteryland (&lt;strong&gt;1938&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert at Rocky Bay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1954 The New Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Friendly Sea(-)Lion&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sketch Book&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Castaway&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Backroom Boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Dragon Pills&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1955 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and (the) Poll Parrot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blue Firework&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Autumn Primrose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Unknown Journey&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cough Drop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1956 The Rupert Book&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Blue Moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Unlucky Simon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Bandits' Cave (aka Rupert's Climbing Adventure)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Flying Sorcerer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1957 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Crackerjack&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pine Ogre&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lion Rock&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wind Whistle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1958 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Water(-)Lily&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the New Bonnet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ice Flowers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Spring Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Train Journey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1959 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Copper Bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the River Rescue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Butterflies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Hazel Nut&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Toy Scout&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1960 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Crystal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Morwenna&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Ozzie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Diamond Leaf&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1961 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Hearth(-)Rug&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pepper Rose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Black Spark&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the New Boat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert at/and Greyrocks Cove&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1962 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Dragon Fly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Robins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Niagara&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Bad Dog&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Coral Island&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1963 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Birthday Present&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Golden Acorn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lost Cuckoo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Inventor&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cold(-)Cure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1964 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Dover Sole&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Distant Music&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Compass&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Dog(-)Roses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rock Pool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1965 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and (the) Gaffer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Winter Woolley&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Old Hat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Rusty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1966 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Magic Ball&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Secret Boat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and (the) Billy Goat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Spring Chicken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1967 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Lost List&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Jackdaw&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Floppity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Carved Stick&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1968 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and (the) Truant&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fiddle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fire(-)bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rolling Ball&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1969 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Whistlefish&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Old Chimney&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snowball&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Raggety&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fishing Rod&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1970&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Outlaws&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blunderpuss&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Paper Fall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sky(-)Boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1971 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Gomnies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Popweed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Early Bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Windlings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1972 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert's Deep Sea Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Learner&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rugger Match&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Gwyneth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1973 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Bouncers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Housemouse&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Waterfall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Flying Boat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1974 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Iron Spade&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Jenny Frost&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Secret Path&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Bells&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1975 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Little River&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Thinking Cap&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Broken Plate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blue Star&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Winter Sale&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1976 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Jumping Men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Young Kevin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Hot Water&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Windy Day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1977 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Winkybickies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fire-Lighter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Septimus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Silent Land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1978 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Rivals&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Squire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Boffit&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Secret Shell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Odd Party&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1979 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Penguins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Moon Moths&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ice Skates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Capricorn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1980 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Flavours&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mixed Magic&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blizzard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ocean Office&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1981 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Castle Trap&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wicked Uncle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Buzzing Box&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wrong Sweets&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Rupert and the Silent Dog?)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Baby Cloud&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1982 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Pong(-)Ping (&lt;strong&gt;1938&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Umbrella Boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gemlins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snow Puzzle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Red Box&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1983 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Black Circle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Dragon Race&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Santa Paws&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Autumn Adventure (&lt;strong&gt;1936&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1984 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Two Moons&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wee Man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Igloo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wonderful Kite (&lt;strong&gt;1936&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cuckoo Clock (&lt;strong&gt;1938&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1985 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(note: this 50th anniversary special made a point of containing one story from the 30s, one from the 40s, and so on, so they had a good excuse for repetition in this case)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert, Bill and the Pearls (&lt;strong&gt;1936&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert at/and Pong-Ping's Party (&lt;strong&gt;1949&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Unknown Journey (&lt;strong&gt;1955&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snowstorm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pirate Boys&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Windmill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1986 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Strange Airman (&lt;strong&gt;1939&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Rika&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Worried Elves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Dragon Mystery&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mulp Gulper&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Iceberg (&lt;strong&gt;1940&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1987 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the River Pirates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Worg Seeds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lotus Isle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Hamish&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Old Tom's Trove&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1988 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert on Um Island&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Go-Cart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sleeping Village&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert, Beppo and the Kite (&lt;strong&gt;1939&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Terry's Return&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Podgy's Christmas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1989 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Boomerarrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Knight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Thaw&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Power Flower&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Algy's Misadventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Rika's Return&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1990 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Little Yum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sea Queen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Eastern Isle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Train&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Willie's Present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1991 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Angry Sea&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sacred Crows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the River Rogues&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Twilight Fan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Stolen Snowman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1992 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Falling Leaf&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wool Gatherers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sea Urchin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gardens Mystery&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Missing Snow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1993 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and Ottoline&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Chinese Creeper&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rosalie's Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sands of Time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the April Fool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1994 Rupert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Spaceship&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Peacock Hedge&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Beachcombers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Queen's Visit&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Uncle Boris&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1995 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Pharaoh's Treasure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Star Gazer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Odmedod's Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Noisy Firework&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Tree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1996 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Dragon Dance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lost Sheep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pirates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mail Train&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Deep Freeze&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1997 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Song Snatcher&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Magic Chalk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Whale&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Water Boatman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Santa's Present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1998 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Missing Cakes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Goose Chase&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Raft&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sundial&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pumpkin Pie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Uncle Polar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1999 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Forest Throne&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gold-Rush&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Skylark&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Apple Trees&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas List&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2000 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Fool's Prize&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rust Mites&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Strawberries&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Harvest Moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Smokescreen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Cake&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2001 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Coronation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Seaweed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Birthday Adventure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pearl Fishers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Nut Hatch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Box&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2002 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Broken Wand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Artist&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Whizz Watch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cloud Catchers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Play&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Fairy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2003 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Water Bottle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ringer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Late Start&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lost Shell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Blue Vase&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the White Path&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2004 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Sky Pirates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Golden Pipe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Summer Roses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Runaway Balloon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Screen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Reindeer Rescue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2005 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Speaking Pool&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wind Chimes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sum Bean&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Secret&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Golden Apples&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sparklers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gaffer's Guest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2006 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Chimney Sweeper&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Peacock Hedge (&lt;strong&gt;1994&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Presents Mix-up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Missing Snowmen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Little Yum (&lt;strong&gt;1990&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2007 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Sleeping Village (&lt;strong&gt;1988&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Little Train (&lt;strong&gt;1990&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Algy's Misadventure (&lt;strong&gt;1989&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Podgy's Christmas (&lt;strong&gt;1988&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Metal Horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2008 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Ice-Cream Van&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fairy Tales&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Branch Line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2009 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Dam&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Golden Carp&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Lost Sheep (&lt;strong&gt;1996&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Cut&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2010 The 75th Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert at School&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Queer Path (&lt;strong&gt;1951&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert's Birthday Surprise&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snowbird&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2011 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Little Plane (&lt;strong&gt;1942&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Ozzie (&lt;strong&gt;1960&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Mail Train (&lt;strong&gt;1996&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Robo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2012 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Blue Moon (&lt;strong&gt;1956&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the River Pirates (&lt;strong&gt;1987&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Bosun's Chair&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2013 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Cart Race&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rugger Match (&lt;strong&gt;1972&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Baby Cloud (&lt;strong&gt;1981&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Missing Snow (&lt;strong&gt;1992&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2014 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Boffit (&lt;strong&gt;1978&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Ocean Office (&lt;strong&gt;1980&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Nut Hatch (&lt;strong&gt;2001&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Snowflake&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2015 The 80th Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Mulp Gulper (&lt;strong&gt;1986&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Coral Crown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Noisy Firework (&lt;strong&gt;1995&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Carved Stick (&lt;strong&gt;1967&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Santa Paws (&lt;strong&gt;1983&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Box (&lt;strong&gt;2001&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2016 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Iceberg (&lt;strong&gt;1940, 1986&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Fiddle (&lt;strong&gt;1968&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gardens Mystery (&lt;strong&gt;1992&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Gemlins (&lt;strong&gt;1982&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snowball (&lt;strong&gt;1969&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Green Man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2017 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Boomerarrow (&lt;strong&gt;1989&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pepper-Rose (&lt;strong&gt;1961&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Secret Shell (&lt;strong&gt;1978&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Sundial (&lt;strong&gt;1998&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Snow Puzzle (&lt;strong&gt;1982&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Birds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Goblin Cobbler (&lt;strong&gt;1939&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2018 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Sugar Bird (&lt;strong&gt;1941&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the May Queen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Coral Island (&lt;strong&gt;1962&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Turnips (&lt;strong&gt;1945&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and Bill in the Treetops (&lt;strong&gt;1938&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Flavours (&lt;strong&gt;1980&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Christmas Tree (&lt;strong&gt;1995&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2019 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert and the Go-Cart (&lt;strong&gt;1988&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Skylark (&lt;strong&gt;1999&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Wonderful Kite (&lt;strong&gt;1936, 1984&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Bearcycle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Windmill (&lt;strong&gt;1985&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Deep Freeze (&lt;strong&gt;1996&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2020 The Rupert Annual&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rupert's Deep Sea Adventure (&lt;strong&gt;1972&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Rainbow (&lt;strong&gt;1948&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Apple Trees (&lt;strong&gt;1999&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Pumpkin Pie (&lt;strong&gt;1998&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Time Machine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rupert and the Stolen Snowmen (&lt;strong&gt;1991&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T22:41:15.837" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T22:41:15.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6783" CreationDate="2017-12-17T19:50:24.837" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Just what did Hugh Akston teach?&quot; asked the earnest matron.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Francisco answered, &quot;He taught that everything is something.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Your loyalty to your teacher is laudable, Senor d'Anconia,&quot; said Dr. Pritchett dryly. &quot;May we take it that you are an example of the practical results of his teaching?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Dr. Pritchett said that nothing is anything, that the mind is impotent, and that there's no such thing as objective morality or knowledge, why was he critical of Francisco's lifestyle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it similar to the reason that Jim Taggart complained about the San Sebastian Mines affair in spite of the fact that Francisco had followed their morality literally? For example, the widely-held morality held that need took precedence over actual competence in selecting job applicants; accordingly, Francisco turned the operation of the mine over to an incompetent mining specialist that needed a job rather badly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere in the book, Jim Taggart describes Dr. Pritchett's philosophy as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Have you ever heard of &lt;em&gt;The Metaphysical Contradictions of the Universe&lt;/em&gt;, by Dr. Simon Pritchett?&quot; She shook her head, frightened. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;How do you know what's good, anyway? Who knows what's good? Who can ever know?&lt;/strong&gt; There are no absolutes - as Dr. Pritchett has proved irrefutably. &lt;strong&gt;Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion.&lt;/strong&gt; How do you know that the bridge hasn't collapsed? You only &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it hasn't. How do you know that there's a bridge at all? You think that a system of philosophy - such as Dr. Pritchett's - is just something academic, remote, impractical? But it isn't. Oh, boy, how it isn't!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, on what basis does Dr. Pritchett criticize Francisco? By his own philosophy, isn't it just a matter of opinion whether there's anything wrong with Francisco's (supposed) lifestyle? Or is the fact that he &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; actually have any basis for said criticism part of the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T14:40:06.473" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:53:12.827" Title="Why did Dr. Pritchett criticize Francisco d'Anconia's (supposed) lifestyle given his own philosophy?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5025" CreationDate="2017-12-17T19:59:53.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember that duels were stopped at first blood, because if a dragon rider died, his dragon would go between. I think that was when F'lar and Lessa came dressed in green to the fair, but F'lar dueled with the oldtimer, thread was falling somewhere, and F'lar gained ascendancy. The comment was something like, &quot;He isn't dead; the dragon is still here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2745" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T19:59:53.323" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5193" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:00:37.830" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several of Shakespeare's plays, women disguise as men (for a variety of reasons). For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Portia disguises as a lawyer; Jessica disguises as a man when eloping with her non-Jewish lover.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, Rosalind disguises as Ganymdede, and her friend Celia as Aliena.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Stubbs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Stubbes or Stubbs&lt;/a&gt;, writing before the start of Shakespeare's career as a dramatist, criticised this type of crossdressing in his book &lt;em&gt;Anatomie of Abuses&lt;/em&gt; (1583). So what was the first English Renaissance play that involved women disguising as men?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; in response to various comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crossdressing may have been a feature of a number of plays from classical antiquity, but this is only of limited relevance to my question. A thousand years passed between the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the English Renaissance. The theatrical tradition had been interrupted; the most common types of plays in Medieval England were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_play&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mystery plays&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_play&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;morality plays&lt;/a&gt;, which were based on a Christian tradition and far removed from the ancient Greek and Roman plays.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross-dressing seems innocuous now (at least in the West), but this was not the case in Shakespeare's time. &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sumptuary laws&lt;/a&gt; that regulated who could wear what types of clothes or materials; several such laws from the reign of Henry VIII were re-enacted in 1565. For example, only the nobility was allowed to wear imported woollen fabrics; only those with an income of £ 100 per year were allowed to wear satin, damask, silk, camlet or tafetta. The goal of these laws was to keep the &quot;natural&quot; class distinctions intact. (Source: G. Blakemore Evans, ed.: &lt;em&gt;Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: A New Mermaid Background Book&lt;/em&gt;. 1988. Pp. 129f.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cross-dressing was frowned upon; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy+22&amp;amp;version=KJ21&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deuteronomy 22:5&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for all who do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.&quot;. &quot;Cross-dressing&quot; could be as simple as women wearing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bodices&lt;/a&gt; done up with buttons (buttons were very &quot;masculine&quot;) or a hat; people were shocked and complained you couldn't tell the sexes apart. (Source: Ruth Goodman: &lt;em&gt;How to Be a Tudor&lt;/em&gt;. 2015. Pp. 67, 85.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T20:21:10.763" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:31:14.893" Title="First English Renaissance play where women disguise as men?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5106" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:15:47.613" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T20:15:47.613" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:15:47.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5107" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:15:47.613" Score="0" Body="Questions about time travel, i.e. the movement between various points in time, which may involve the use of a time machine." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T15:49:37.777" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T15:49:37.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5108" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:31:48.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T20:31:48.223" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:31:48.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5109" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-17T20:31:48.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fictional superhero Superman, a character that was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and that appeared in many comic books published by DC Comics. Superman has also appeared in television programs, films, and video games. Use this tag with the appropriate author tags, for example [jerry-siegel] and [joe-shuster]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-17T20:36:25.413" LastActivityDate="2017-12-17T20:36:25.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-17T21:07:52.197" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a 1950s - 1960s short story about two pals trapped on top of an oil tank. Two guys are killing time messing around in an abandoned oil storage tank farm. They climb up a rusty ladder (or at least one does, can't recall) and part of it breaks off.  There they are, on top of this 100 foot oil tank -- nobody around for miles -- no way down, no way to call for help -- sun is beating down on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a happy story.  I think this was in a paperback collection of &amp;quot;macabre&amp;quot; stories.  Can't Google up the slightest trace of this story, so it's probably an obscure author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Binky the Tormented" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:29:06.723" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:29:06.723" Title="1950s - 1960s short story about two pals trapped on top of an oil tank" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5110" CreationDate="2017-12-17T22:10:25.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Vertical Ladder&amp;quot; by William Sansom has some similarities, but only one boy is left trapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dared to by a girl he fancies, a youth attempts to climb to the top of&#xA;a disused gas tank via a metal ladder bolted to the side of it, but&#xA;soon finds he has bitten off more than he can chew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pandaemonian.blogspot.bg/2014/03/the-second-pan-book-of-horror-stories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories (1960)&lt;/a&gt; (31 March 2014) on the Pandaemonian blog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He can't go down - his friends had removed the wooden ladder which connected the iron one to the ground and left him. And he finds the real top rungs missing... the platform jutting five feet above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:16:39.760" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:16:39.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3324" CreationDate="2017-12-18T07:44:43.670" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Little Lady of the Big House&amp;quot; by Jack London. It can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6455&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gutenberg.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story concerns a love triangle. The protagonist, Dick Forrest, is&#xA;a rancher with a poetic streak (his &amp;quot;acorn song&amp;quot; recalls London's&#xA;play, &amp;quot;The Acorn Planters&amp;quot;). His wife, Paula, is a vivacious,&#xA;athletic, and sexually self-aware woman, who falls in love with Evan&#xA;Graham, an old friend of her husband's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Lady_of_the_Big_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Little Lady of the Big House&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tractor scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Behold,” he said, “the one-man and no-horse farm where the farmer&#xA;sits on the porch. Please imagine the porch.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the center of the field was a stout steel pole, at least twenty&#xA;feet in height and guyed very low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a drum on top of the pole a thin wire cable ran to the extreme&#xA;edge of the field and was attached to the steering lever of a small&#xA;gasoline tractor. About the tractor two mechanics fluttered. At&#xA;command from Dick they cranked the motor and started it on its way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This is the porch,” Dick said. “Just imagine we’re all that future&#xA;farmer sitting in the shade and reading the morning paper while the&#xA;manless, horseless plowing goes on.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alone, unguided, the drum on the head of the pole in the center&#xA;winding up the cable, the tractor, at the circumference permitted by&#xA;the cable, turned a single furrow as it described a circle, or,&#xA;rather, an inward trending spiral about the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No horse, no driver, no plowman, nothing but the farmer to crank the&#xA;tractor and start it on its way,” Dick exulted, as the uncanny&#xA;mechanism turned up the brown soil and continued unguided, ever&#xA;spiraling toward the field’s center. “Plow, harrow, roll, seed,&#xA;fertilize, cultivate, harvest—­all from the front porch. And where the&#xA;farmer can buy juice from a power company, all he, or his wife, will&#xA;have to do is press the button, and he to his newspaper, and she to&#xA;her pie-crust.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, she wounds herself mortally with a rifle in what her husband is certain is a suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doctor Robinson made his examination. When he arose with an air of&#xA;finality, Dick looked his question. Robinson shook his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Nothing to be done,” he said. “It is a matter of hours, maybe of&#xA;minutes.” He hesitated, studying Dick’s face for a moment. “I can ease&#xA;her off if you say the word. She might possibly recover consciousness&#xA;and suffer for a space.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How long?” she queried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not long,” came his answer. “You can ease off any time.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You mean...?” She glanced aside curiously at the doctor and back to&#xA;Dick, who nodded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It’s only what I should have expected from you, Red Cloud,” she&#xA;murmured gratefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:26:17.007" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:26:17.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4997" CreationDate="2017-12-18T13:26:12.147" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think what you are looking for is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/naturalism-art&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary Naturalism&lt;/a&gt;. This began as a reaction to the prevailing modes of surrealism and Romanticism of the period (late nineteenth-century) and was an off-shoot and more &lt;strong&gt;advanced form of realism&lt;/strong&gt;. As such is it often called 'extreme' realism and is somewhat synonymous with the effects of realism; it depicts events and other objects &lt;strong&gt;as they are&lt;/strong&gt;, often to the degree of being judged unnecessary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a side effect, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/determinism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;determinism&lt;/a&gt; is usually (although not absolutely) associated with Naturalism, and uses pessimistic realism to determine an unchangeable outcome of a character's life, usually tragedy, which explains why many of Tolstoy's works do not end happily. This however is not about inconsequential details and acts on a much larger scale to the narrative.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This technique was primarily employed by Emile Zola and many American authors, including Edith Wharton in her novel &lt;em&gt;The House of Mirth&lt;/em&gt;, which I will use here as an example for the technique, where she details everyday items inconsequentially:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when it came to hunting for&#xA;  missing napkins, or helping to decide whether the backstairs needed&#xA;  re-carpeting, Grace's judgment was certainly sounder than Lily's: not to&#xA;  mention the fact that the latter resented the smell of beeswax and brown&#xA;  soap, and behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of&#xA;  itself, without extraneous assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The napkins, carpet and the smell of beeswax and soap contribute nothing effectual to the narrative apart from injecting an extra sense of realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of Russian literature, Tolstoy was know to use it in his novel &lt;em&gt;The Death of Ivan Ilyitch&lt;/em&gt; (especially in Ilyitch's eventual anti-climactic death from a fall whilst hanging up curtains). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes he even had moments of absent-mindedness during the court sessions and would consider whether he should have straight or curved cornices for his curtains. He was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once when mounting a step- ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, he mad a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the cornices distract Ilyitch during court sessions but do not create much impact in themselves apart from being realistic, since people do, after all, remember little unrelated details.&#xA;Furthermore, the way his deterioration drags on is also reminiscent of the realism of Naturalism as the insignificant details seem to prioritise the content of the narrative. Overall, the whole story is about the realistic qualities of an ordinary man's inconsequential life and so Naturalism is a necessity in achieving this effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, &lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt; also features Naturalistic descriptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he was dressed, Stepan Arkadyevitch sprinkled some scent on himself, pulled down his shirt-cuffs, distributed into his pockets his cigarettes, pocketbook, matches, and watch with its double chain and seals, and shaking out his handkerchief, feeling himself clean, fragrant, healthy, and physically at ease, in spite of his unhappiness, he walked with a slight swing on each leg into the dining-room, where coffee was already waiting for him, and beside the coffee, letters and papers from the office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is evident here that the overwhelmingly list-like details appear to be redundant, however it really does paint a solid realist picture of the presented scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Leo_Tolstoy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; page explains Tolstoy's tendencies to realism if you are specifically after his use of Naturalism/realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-18T17:16:11.420" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T17:16:11.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5118" CreationDate="2017-12-18T19:41:46.413" Score="33" ViewCount="7663" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; had a 10-year run (from November 18, 1985 to December 31, 1995). Bill Watterson was born July 5, 1958, meaning that he was 28 when the strip started, 38 when it concluded, and is now 59. The strip concluded almost exactly 22 years ago as of today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That seems like a very long time to be retired. It's also in stark contrast to writers like C. S. Lewis who continued to write and lecture throughout most of their lives and to writers like J. K. Rowling who can't seem to leave the original books alone even after finishing them. It's also very different than Charles Schulz (author of &lt;em&gt;Peanuts&lt;/em&gt;), who wrote for over 50 years until his death in 2000 in his late 70's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's very little publicly available about his activities since retiring, and he doesn't seem to have done all &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much related to the strip (apart from his involvement in a recent exhibit about it). He also seems to have expressed little interest in doing a new strip or anything like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="497" LastEditDate="2017-12-19T05:24:31.813" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T05:24:31.813" Title="Why has Bill Watterson ('Calvin and Hobbes') been retired for so long?" Tags="&lt;bill-watterson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="621" CreationDate="2017-12-18T19:49:13.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related question on Sci Fi SE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/156481/did-calvin-ever-realise-that-hobbes-was-not-real&quot;&gt;Did Calvin ever realise that Hobbes was not real?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do realize that this is a somewhat old question, but I'm first going to challenge the premise of the question a little bit: what do you mean by &quot;real&quot;? Real in what sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If by &quot;real&quot; you mean &quot;what would a video camera show?&quot;, that's ambiguous by design (as some of the other answers have pointed out). Watterson &lt;em&gt;deliberately&lt;/em&gt; didn't resolve that in the strip; he consciously tried to make it not be provable either way from the strip. In fact, even in a strip where Calvin takes photographs of Hobbes, Calvin and his dad just see different things, so it doesn't really resolve which view was &quot;true.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the important thing is the characters' point of view, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; who's &quot;correct.&quot; In fact, I'm not even convinced that the question is even meaningful in terms of the strip. From the perspective of Calvin's parents, Hobbes is a toy; from Calvin's point of view, he's real. You &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; argue that there's a real sense in which the different points of view are equally &quot;correct&quot; in terms of the universe of the comic strip. Either way, it's not important, &quot;provable,&quot; or even necessarily meaningful to ask about which is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T19:49:13.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5116" CreationDate="2017-12-18T20:30:14.250" Score="45" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Probably because of his perfectionism in the art he creates.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Extensive interview quotes follow. Skip to the end for a summary.&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tcj.com/the-bill-watterson-interview/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview from 1989&lt;/a&gt;, when &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; was still going strong, Watterson explains that he was never aiming to become hugely successful or popular, that he writes within firm self-imposed limits which he doesn't want to leave, even if that makes his writing more difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Well, in the last three years, have the fantasy sequences gotten easier? You seem to be doing less of them these days. Is there a reason?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: At first it was fun simply to juxtapose fantasy with reality [...] That was originally a fun device, but the burden on the strip has been to make each switch more clever. The juxtaposition alone can get predictable if it’s just done over and over in the same way. Each time it’s got to be done with some unpredictability: some cleverness to it so that it doesn’t become moribund. So, yes, &lt;strong&gt;I’m doing fewer because it’s getting more and more difficult. But I still try to do the fantasies as they interest me. There’s a limitation to them.&lt;/strong&gt; They’re fun to read and they’re certainly fun to draw, but they don’t have the emotional weight to them that an interaction between two interesting characters does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same interview, Watterson seemed very cynical about the idea of licensing his work to other forms of media, claiming that this would degrade quality to an extent which wouldn't be acceptable to him, the creator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You’ve rejected licensing your strip’s characters. Why?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: Basically, I’ve decided that licensing is inconsistent with what I’m trying to do with Calvin and Hobbes. &lt;strong&gt;I take cartoons seriously as an art form, so I think with an issue like licensing, it’s important to analyze what my strip is about, and what makes it work.&lt;/strong&gt; [...] I’m not interested in removing all the subtlety from my work to condense it for a product. The strip is about more than jokes. I think the syndicate would admit this if they would start looking at my strip instead of just the royalty checks. Unfortunately, &lt;strong&gt;they are in the cartoon business only because it makes money, so arguments about artistic intentions are never very persuasive to them. I have no aversion to obscene wealth, but that’s not my motivation either.&lt;/strong&gt; I think to license Calvin and Hobbes would ruin the most precious qualities of my strip and, once that happens, you can’t buy those qualities back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I’m sure some of the readers will say to all this,  “Come on. The comic strip is a popular art form.” What’s wrong with indulging the public’s interest?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: Nothing, so long as it doesn’t compromise the art itself. In my case, I’m convinced that licensing would sell out the soul of Calvin and Hobbes. &lt;strong&gt;The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize. Once you’ve given up its integrity, that’s it. I want to make sure that never happens. Instead of asking what’s wrong with rampant commercialism, we ought to be asking, “What justifies it?”&lt;/strong&gt; Popular art does not have to pander to the lowest level of intelligence and taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this points towards a man who, when he became unable to continue his comic strip with a standard of quality that he felt was acceptable, would point-blank refuse to let it be continued at all. Neither to carry on himself, continuing to make money but allowing his standards to fall, nor to permit anyone else to continue in his place. This is also touched upon in &lt;a href=&quot;http://bob.bigw.org/ch/interview.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another interview&lt;/a&gt; (date unknown, but still during &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;'s heyday):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you see yourself doing this forever?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: I'd like to, yeah, if the market will bear it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes exclusively?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: Yeah, I'm really enjoying the work. I feel that the characters have a lot of potential. I'd like to have the opportunity to draw this strip for years and see where it goes. It's sort of a scary thing now to imagine; these cartoonists who've been drawing a strip for twenty years. I can't imagine coming up with that much material. If I just take it day by day, though, it's a lot of fun, and I do think I have a long way to go before I've exhausted the possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do you think you'll ever need a ghost?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: No, that's against what I believe about comic strips. In fact, I'd go even further and say &lt;strong&gt;I don't think a strip should ever be continued after the death or retirement of a cartoonist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Well, you know, a lot of the very good ones used assistants.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: Yeah, Pogo did. Schulz has a good comment on that: &quot;It's like Arnold Palmer having someone to hit his chip shots.&quot; I spent five years trying to get this stupid job and now that I have it I'm not going to hire it out to somebody else. The whole pleasure for me is having the opportunity to do a comic strip for a living, and now that I've finally got that I'm not going to give it away. It also gives me complete creative control. &lt;strong&gt;Any time somebody else has their hand in the ink it's changing the product, and I enjoy the responsibility for this product.&lt;/strong&gt; I'm willing to take the blame if the strip goes down the drain, and I want the credit if it succeeds. So long as it has my name on it, I want it to be mine. I don't know, if you don't have that kind of investment in it...&lt;strong&gt;I guess that's the difference between looking at it as an art and looking at it as a job. I'm not interested in setting up an assembly line to produce this thing more efficiently.&lt;/strong&gt; There are certainly people who could letter the strip better than I do; I don't enjoy lettering very much, but that's the way I write and that belongs in the strip because the strip is a reflection of me. If cartoonists would look at this more as an art than as a part time job or a get-rich-quick scheme, I think comics overall would be better. I think there's a tremendous potential to be tapped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly this is from long before he quit writing &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;, but when asked whether he'd stick with that strip exclusively, his answer was yes. This may be part of the reason why he hasn't continued writing since: he preferred to have his name associated with one successful product than risk going downhill in the future for the sake of cashing in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-our-interview-bill-watterson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;much more recent interview&lt;/a&gt; (2013) where Watterson talks about what he's done since finishing &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;. This is perhaps the most relevant in answering your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There is a tendency to rehash and regurgitate properties with sequels and remakes. You had an idea, executed it, then moved on. And you ignored the clamor for more. Why is it so hard for readers to let go?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;WATTERSON: Well, coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment. You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that &lt;strong&gt;predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although he hasn't continued writing since &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;, he's still been creating art, in the form of paintings. He explained that he doesn't display this because he can't handle the level of publicity and fame that &lt;em&gt;Calvin &amp;amp; Hobbes&lt;/em&gt; gave him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;According to your collection introductions, you took up painting after the strip ended. Why don’t you exhibit the work?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My first problem is that I don’t paint ambitiously. It’s all catch and release—just tiny fish that aren’t really worth the trouble to clean and cook. But yes, my second problem is that &lt;strong&gt;Calvin and Hobbes created a level of attention and expectation that I don't know how to process.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Bold emphasis mine in all the above quotes.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;There is at least one source which may contain more info to answer your question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://library.osu.edu/blogs/cartoons/2015/03/10/new-bill-watterson-retrospective-book-exploring-calvin-and-hobbes-shines-new-light-on-wattersons-thought-process-inspirations/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the book &lt;em&gt;Exploring Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which contains far more lengthy interviews with Watterson than any of what I've quoted above. But I haven't found a copy of this book, and the interviews above seem to paint a reasonably clear picture already of the answer to your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;he didn't continue writing because he didn't feel he could keep on satisfying his own standards of quality, and refused to work at a lower standard;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;he didn't expand his universe because he felt that would compromise the original art;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;he didn't stay in the public eye because he was uncomfortable with the attention.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-18T20:30:14.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5119" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8819" CreationDate="2017-12-18T20:57:27.407" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I can't understand it...&quot; said [Jim] Taggart miserably. &quot;The top experts of the National Council of Metal Industries...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who's the president of the National Council of Metal Industries, Jim? Orren Boyle, isn't it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Taggart did not turn to her, but his jaw snapped open. &quot;If that fat slob thinks he can -&quot; he started, but stopped and did not finish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't Jim finish his sentence? If Orren Boyle thinks he can &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T13:57:57.167" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T13:57:57.167" Title="Why did Jim Taggart interrupt himself?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6771" CreationDate="2017-12-18T22:53:21.933" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Cheryl Taggart] moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half-trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she can find: &quot;You... you're a killer... for the sake of killing...&quot; &lt;strong&gt;It was too close to the unnamed&lt;/strong&gt;; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jim Taggart's evil is, of course, on full display here - not only in his disgraceful physical and emotional abuse of his wife, but also in the violence and destructiveness that's central to his philosophy of life. Of course, later he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; realize the truth about himself when he realizes - to his horror - that he wanted Dr. Ferris to kill John Galt (even though it would mean his own death).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this what he's trying to evade here - the fact that he doesn't &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to live, the fact that he claims to want to live while seeking to destroy everything that actually makes life possible? Or is &quot;the unnamed&quot; something else here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T17:20:59.737" Title="What knowledge was Jim Taggart trying to evade when he hit his wife?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5121" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T01:17:44.573" Score="7" ViewCount="1340" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably an easy question, but why does Anne call Richard a Hedgehog in Act I, Scene II of Richard III:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dost grant me, hedgehog? then, God grant me too&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Thou mayst be damned for that wicked deed!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      O, he was gentle, mild, and virtuous!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the feeling I'm missing some sort of reference here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T04:11:47.610" Title="Why does Anne call Richard a Hedgehog in Act I, Scene II of Richard III?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5121" CreationDate="2017-12-19T04:00:59.250" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;My OED says &quot;hedgehog&quot; can be a term of obloquy, and gives this speech (among others) as an example of its use in this sense.  My students' edition of Shakespeare says it might be a reference to Richard's heraldic badge, which was a boar. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_badges_of_England#List_of_royal_badges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; lists these for Richard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a Boar Argent, armed and bristled Or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the White rose of York&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a Sun in splendour&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a White falcon with a virgin's face holding a white rose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurs to me that both might be true, and &quot;hedgehog&quot; is also meant as a diminutive form of &quot;boar&quot;, in a contemptuous, put-downy  kind of way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In zoology, of course, a hedgehog is not a kind of pig, but its name, the OED says (p188, vol 5, 1st edition) analyzes into &quot;hedge&quot; + &quot;hog&quot;, the first because of this animal's habitat, the second because of its pig-like snout.  So in a word-play sense, a hedgehog &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a  pig, but a small pig. A boar is a big pig (using &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt; in their surface meanings of reference to size, and not moral quality), and this is the sense in which I'm suggesting &quot;hedgehog&quot; might be used as a diminutive in Anne's speech.  Rhetorically, of course, to say something is small can be to belittle it, to put it down; similarly with a thing's symbol.   According to this suggestion Anne might be  saying Richard (that is, the man whose symbol or badge is a boar) has a pig-like snout, but might also be  saying he is of small &lt;em&gt;moral&lt;/em&gt; stature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By popular demand: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1335661&amp;amp;partId=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;    is another source for the fact that the boar was Richard's badge.  As with the previous evidence, it was chosen because it was easy to find.  Unlike the previous one, this is associated with a national museum: it describes an artifact (a boar badge) with a &quot;Treasure number&quot; (whatever that is), T359.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And another: Brewer's &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of phrase and fable&lt;/em&gt; (1970 &quot;Centenary Edition&quot;, p.129) has an entry  (in its entirety)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Boar, The.&lt;/strong&gt; Richard III. &lt;em&gt;See&lt;/em&gt; BLUE BOAR.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That spoiled your summer fields and fruitful vines&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       ...  this foul swine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lies even now in the center of this isle,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Near to the town of Leicester, as we learn.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;           SHAKESPEARE: &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, v, ii.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if you look elsewhere in the play you will see &quot;boar&quot; used many times as a synonym for King Richard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-12-21T23:40:16.833" LastActivityDate="2017-12-21T23:40:16.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4815" CreationDate="2017-12-19T05:35:30.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question itself is a fascinating observation, but the questions answers itself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Pip sees the file carried by the mysterious man, Pip as the narrator states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...and I knew that he knew my convict...&quot;`&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;my convict&quot; is Pip's description of Magwitch, so clearly from the context of the quoted passage itself, Dickens shows alert readers that the man in question is an associate of Magwitch.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the quoted passage, Dickens also skillfully shows that Pip is being spied on, but it is not shown yet what cause the miscreants have for their activities.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2711" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T13:55:07.473" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T13:55:07.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5057" CreationDate="2017-12-19T06:22:42.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The questioner loves James Joyce's writing but wonders why his work is considered &quot;revolutionary&quot;.  This question is not so easy to answer in a short Stack Exchange post, and many books have been written about James Joyce. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Joyce advances avant-garde literary techniques that began with Laurence Sterne's &lt;em&gt;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Joyce as a fiction writer pioneered several literary techniques, most notably the stream of consciousness technique where the narrator's thoughts wander, and are related to the reader without a rational commentary.  The effect creates a deep level of ambiguity in what the character is referring to.  Even a sense of time and place may be obscured.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Joyce pioneered a technique of playing with language, substituting, in some cases, words that are etymologically related or are homophones of the token word.  This makes James Joyce's writing notoriously difficult and often readers of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; use some sort of companion to assist in understanding the text.  This should not daunt the reader who wants to read Joyce as Joyce himself wanted to be understood by the Common Reader.  To demonstrate how this is possible, a short quotation from &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, James Joyce's most difficult work, will be quoted without commentary.  An alert reader will notice that the passage is controversial even today, particularly with very staunch conservatives who are inflexible, intolerant and have religious views that border on totalitarian thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In the name of Annah the Allmazifal, the Everliving, the Bringer&lt;br&gt;&#xA; of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be&lt;br&gt;&#xA; run, unhemmed as it is uneven!&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Joyce pushed the formal boundaries of the novel to the ultimate limit.  His techniques and style influenced other pioneering writers such as the nobel prize winning William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf who acknowledged James Joyce to be the better writer.  One can recognize  inflections of Joyce's work in nobel laureate Ari Zimmerman's first novel.  Zimmerman cites William Burroughs as an influence, whose literary experimentations owe a debt to James Joyce.  Nobel laureate, Saul Bellow, also plays with narrative techniques that were invented by James Joyce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2711" LastEditorUserId="2711" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T03:10:01.207" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T03:10:01.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T06:53:46.153" Score="4" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;What form of poem (ie. sonnet, limerick, haiku, etc.) is Edgar Guest's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/a-child-of-mine-by-edgar-albert-guest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Child of Mine&lt;/a&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2758" LastEditorUserId="2758" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T04:37:18.770" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T04:37:18.770" Title="What form of poem is &quot;A Child of Mine&quot; by Edgar Guest?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-guest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T11:54:15.310" Score="8" ViewCount="772" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Coleridge wrote this really fun poem, &lt;em&gt;Metrical Feet: Lesson for a Boy&lt;/em&gt;, that names and gives examples of the various types of metric feet. I've included a copy and scanned the poem to make the various feet clearer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tro&lt;/strong&gt;chee &lt;strong&gt;trips&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt;lemn &lt;strong&gt;sort&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot!&lt;/strong&gt; yet &lt;strong&gt;ill&lt;/strong&gt; able&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Ev&lt;/strong&gt;er to &lt;strong&gt;come&lt;/strong&gt; up with &lt;strong&gt;dac&lt;/strong&gt;tyl tri&lt;strong&gt;sy&lt;/strong&gt;llable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I&lt;strong&gt;am&lt;/strong&gt;bics &lt;strong&gt;march&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt;;—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a &lt;strong&gt;leap&lt;/strong&gt; and a &lt;strong&gt;bound&lt;/strong&gt; the swift &lt;strong&gt;An&lt;/strong&gt;apæsts &lt;strong&gt;throng&lt;/strong&gt;;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious about the first line, which is supposedly an example of trochees. On one hand, there are three trochees in the first line (&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Tro&lt;/strong&gt;chee &lt;strong&gt;trips&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; to&quot;). On the other hand, the first line isn't exactly trochaic meter--compare it to actual trochaic meter such as &quot;Double, double toil and trouble /  Fire burn and caldron bubble.&quot; It's missing an unstressed syllable at the end of the line. Rather, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3079/catalectic-trochaic-tetrameter-or-acephaleous-iambic-tetrameter-scanning-kubla&quot;&gt;the first line is acephaleous iambic tetrameter&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't Coleridge omit the final unstressed syllable from his line about trochees, which makes it not quite trochaic meter? For every other line (iambic, dactyl, etc) he uses exactly the meter associated with that type of metric foot. (This is kind of the point of the poem.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2017-12-20T15:46:16.117" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T04:07:27.310" Title="Why isn't Coleridge's line about trochees missing an unstressed syllable?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T15:49:03.430" Score="9" ViewCount="1672" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frederick Forsyth's 1971 novel &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Jackal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Day of the Jackal&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; remains an immortal political thriller that defined the 'assassination novel' in popular consciousness. What has always intrigued me is the small but significant Charles Calthrop plot-element. This was a person in the novel whom police agencies supposed to be the real identity behind the Jackal. Wikipedia notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Calthrop is the name of a former small-arms salesman who was in the Dominican Republic at the time Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was shot. The SIS later heard a rumour that Calthrop has helped the partisans kill Trujillo by shooting the driver of his armoured car, causing it to crash. In the book, the British police originally think Calthrop is the Jackal's real name, until the real Calthrop shows up at the end, after the Jackal's assassination attempt was thwarted. The authorities were misled by the fact that chacal (i.e., Cha[rles] Cal[throp]) is French for &amp;quot;jackal&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal_(The_Day_of_the_Jackal)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Jackal, fictional character, 'The Day of the Jackal' - &lt;strong&gt;Novel&lt;/strong&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main Wikipedia article elaborates that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lebel does everything he can to discover the Jackal's identity. He first calls upon his &amp;quot;old boy network&amp;quot; of foreign intelligence and police contacts to inquire if they have any records of a top-class political assassin. Most of the inquiries are fruitless, but in the United Kingdom, the inquiry is eventually passed on to the Special Branch of Scotland Yard, and another veteran detective, Superintendent Bryn Thomas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search through Special Branch's records turns up nothing. However, one of Thomas's subordinates suggests that if the assassin were an Englishman, but primarily operated abroad, he would most probably come to the attention of the Secret Intelligence Service. Thomas makes an informal inquiry with a friend of his on the SIS's staff, who mentions hearing a rumour from an officer stationed in the Dominican Republic at the time of President Trujillo's assassination. The rumour states that a hired assassin stopped Trujillo's car with a rifle shot, allowing a gang of partisans to finish him off. Additionally, Thomas also learns that the assassin was an Englishman, whom he is able to identify as Charles Calthrop (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checking out the name of Charles Calthrop, Thomas finds a match to a man living in London, said to be on holiday. While Thomas confirms that this Calthrop was in the Dominican Republic at the time of Trujillo's death, he does not feel it is enough to inform Lebel, until one of his junior detectives realises that the first three letters of his Christian name and surname form the French word for Jackal, Chacal (...) the Special Branch raids Calthrop's flat, finding his passport, and deduce that he must be travelling on a false one (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Epilogue] In London, the Special Branch are cleaning up Calthrop's apartment when the real Charles Calthrop storms in and demands to know what they are doing. Once it is established that Calthrop really has been on holiday in Scotland and has no connection whatsoever with the Jackal, the British are left to wonder &amp;quot;If the Jackal wasn't Calthrop, then who the hell was he?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Jackal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Day of the Jackal - &lt;strong&gt;Novel&lt;/strong&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the name of Calthrop cropped up in a high level international enquiry about the possible real identity of the Jackal, but the police became excited about its possibilities when the person was found missing and his name parts seemed to spell out &amp;quot;cha-cal&amp;quot; which is French for &amp;quot;jackal&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically the Jackal was probably unaware of the name Calthrop and never used it as an alias, as far as I can recollect. However, what was revealed as false coincidence at the very end, actually energized the search for the Jackal, and gave the police focus and hope: in particular, the discovery of Calthrop's passport in his house created the impetus to look for recently faked or stolen passports and led them to discover the Jackal's assumed identities through genuinely good detective work, which in turn helped the authorities launch a massive manhunt that put him under various forms of pressure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how important was the Charles Calthrop element in foiling the assassination?  Did the wild coincidence mean pure bad luck for the Jackal, or was the investigators'   policy of following up every possible lead (especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_interest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;persons of interest&lt;/a&gt; who were untraceable during that crucial time window) simply an example of good and meticulous detection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Please include adequate references to support your answer, so as to avoid any objection of being &amp;quot;primarily opinion based.&amp;quot;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T22:21:36.253" Title="Was the Charles Calthrop plot-element in The Day of the Jackal an example of pure coincidence or good detection?" Tags="&lt;plot-element&gt;&lt;frederick-forsyth&gt;&lt;the-day-of-the-jackal&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5132" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T22:11:46.753" Score="3" ViewCount="8207" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the final passage of Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;Song of Solomon&lt;/em&gt; to be a bit confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As fleet and bright as a lodestar, he wheeled towards Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could &lt;em&gt;ride&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've thought about it, but I'm not quite sure why it's important to &quot;surrender to the air&quot;? How does that lead to the ability to &quot;ride&quot; the air? Any insight into the meaning of &quot;If you surrendered to the air, you could &lt;em&gt;ride&lt;/em&gt; it&quot; would be appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T04:24:16.557" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T17:03:00.453" Title="What does the phrase &quot;If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;song-of-solomon-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T22:26:54.927" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://nebulas.sfwa.org/about-the-nebulas/nebula-rules/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the rules for the Nebula awards.&lt;/a&gt; It turns out that the rules governing the award specifically state that a work has to belong to &amp;quot;the genres of science fiction, fantasy, or a related fiction genre&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eligibility&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a. All works first published in English, in the United States, during the calendar year, in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, or a related fiction genre are eligible for the Nebula Awards® in their respective categories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I read the entire rules document, and I couldn't find a definition of &amp;quot;science fiction, fantasy, or a related fiction genre&amp;quot; anywhere in the document. Which naturally leads to the question: for the purposes of deciding whether a work is eligible to be nominated for a Nebula award, what does &amp;quot;science fiction, fantasy, or a related fiction genre&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T08:35:25.383" Title="For the purposes of being eligible for a Nebula award, what counts as &quot;science fiction, fantasy, or a related fiction genre&quot;?" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-19T23:01:16.623" Score="4" ViewCount="625" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading about a little kerfuckle in the Harry Potter community over the character of Blaise Zabini, who was revealed in &lt;em&gt;The Half Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; (more than half way through the series, despite being introduced in the first book) to be black. Specifically, some members of the Harry Potter community continued to depict Blaise Zabini as white in various fanfiction/fanart after the publication of the Half Blood Prince. This was interpreted by other fans as whitewashing. The fanlore wiki has &lt;a href=&quot;https://fanlore.org/wiki/Blaise_Zabini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pretty good summary of this&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is whitewashing, and is portraying Blaise Zabini as white an example of whitewashing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T10:51:29.483" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T10:51:29.483" Title="Is it whitewashing to depict Blaise Zabini as white?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5134" CreationDate="2017-12-19T23:28:19.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, whitewashing is basically exactly what it sounds like. It's taking a canonically PoC (Person of Colour) character and portraying them as white instead, either through art or film or fanfic or what have you. Basically, taking away any reference to their race and making them look/act like a white person, even though the canonical media states/references them being...not that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case, where canon clearly establishes Blaise as being Black, fanfic authors saying he has features associated with whiteness, or artists drawing him as such, are whitewashing. They're removing any reference to his canonically PoC description as established in the books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very common in films, where PoC roles will be cast instead with white people. Note that this is different from blackface or yellowface where the white people are made up to look like they're a different race - instead, the whole idea of them being non-white is completely removed from their representation in the (usually visual) work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2017-12-19T23:28:19.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2017-12-20T03:55:58.040" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no proof that the lyrics were supposed to sound like &quot;blackjack&quot;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Fagen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald Fagan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Becker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter Becker&lt;/a&gt; of Steely Dan wrote the lyrics to this song. I have not found any first hand source from them or any other members of Steely Dan that the line was supposed to sound like &quot;blackjack&quot;. The general belief is that the lyrics represent a man's failure to learn from his mistakes.  Hence, the &quot;Go back Jack do it again&quot; line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a piece written about the lyrics of the song on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.musicbanter.com/lyrics/Steely-Dan-Do-It-Again.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;musicbanter&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Walter Becker and Donald Fagan are well known for writing provocative&#xA;  lyrics that deal with controversial themes. Due to this reputation,&#xA;  many fans look deeply into the meaning of Steely Dan's lyrics. While&#xA;  this works for certain songs, &quot;Do It Again&quot; is not one of those songs.&#xA;  The general belief is that the lyrics, which touch upon an old time&#xA;  western scene, infidelity, abuse of trust, and gambling, are merely&#xA;  metaphoric scenarios used to describe man's complete failure to learn&#xA;  from past mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This general ineptitude is examined in each example. Overwhelming&#xA;  guilt plagues the subject of the first example. He apparently received&#xA;  a very lucky break with a much-needed second chance. However, he will&#xA;  most likely fall right into the same trap, making the same type of&#xA;  mistakes, acting on the same impulses without thinking of the&#xA;  consequences, and finding himself once again with the deck stacked&#xA;  against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second example used in the song deals with being used by a two&#xA;  timing woman. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The third scenario describes an apparent gambling problem, which&#xA;  represents the vices, addictions, and compulsive tendencies that&#xA;  someone is most likely to repeat over and over again, regardless of&#xA;  the trouble that they bring to themselves and their loved ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third scenario does describe an apparent gambling problem and some may interpret this literally as the table game &quot;blackjack&quot;.  That really does not appear to be the case.  I have heard this song several times and I have never heard &quot;blackjack&quot;.  I have always heard &quot;back Jack&quot; as the lyrics were intended.  However, everyone hears lyrics differently.  I still sing the incorrect lyrics even when I know that they are incorrect.  It's a force of habit with some songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T03:55:58.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5128" CreationDate="2017-12-20T14:57:28.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was very difficult to find analysis let alone explanation of this poem so I apologise for any unsupported reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; in trochaic tetrameter, because there are four &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/trochee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochees&lt;/a&gt; in the first line, as you highlighted in your copy (numbers indicate stress number):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TRO&lt;/strong&gt;(1)chee &lt;strong&gt;TRIPS&lt;/strong&gt;(2) from &lt;strong&gt;LONG&lt;/strong&gt;(3) to &lt;strong&gt;SHORT&lt;/strong&gt;(4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With scansion symbols it looks like this (- = stressed, ˘ = unstressed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R8xAr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R8xAr.png&quot; alt=&quot;Trochee stresses&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four stresses to the line (resulting in a tetrameter) each with the stress on the first, not the following, syllable (resulting in trochaic meter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic tetrameter is the reverse of trochaic tetrameter as the unstressed syllable comes before the stressed syllable. If it was iambic, the stresses would look like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tro&lt;strong&gt;CHEE&lt;/strong&gt; trips &lt;strong&gt;FROM&lt;/strong&gt; long &lt;strong&gt;TO&lt;/strong&gt; short&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you try to say the line with the stresses like this, it is really awkward. The trochaic tetrameter just fits better.&#xA;(Using iambic stressing on the line would also only result in three stresses making it iambic trimeter.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in fact the same rhythm and stress pattern and meter, as the lines from &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DOU&lt;/strong&gt;ble, &lt;strong&gt;DOU&lt;/strong&gt;ble, &lt;strong&gt;TOIL&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;TROU&lt;/strong&gt;ble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FI&lt;/strong&gt;re &lt;strong&gt;BURN&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;CAUL&lt;/strong&gt;dron &lt;strong&gt;BU&lt;/strong&gt;bble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stress is on the first syllables and there are four stresses to each line. &lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, there is an extra unstressed syllable at the end of these lines when compared to S. T. Coleridge's poem's line. Nevertheless, it is the stressed syllables which define the meter and the missing unstressed syllable at the end of the S. T Coleridge line therefore makes the meter &lt;strong&gt;catalectic trochaic tetrameter&lt;/strong&gt; (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalectic&lt;/a&gt; line is a metrically incomplete line of verse, lacking a syllable at the end or ending with an incomplete foot).&#xA;In the question you linked, it can be deduced that catalectic trochaic tetrameter and acephalous iambic tetrameter are somewhat difficult to separate; however, since this poem's form is meant to mirror the content, it is (catalectic) trochaic tetrameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next line of the poem does not correspond with the first but corresponds with the third because is it describing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spondee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spondees&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From long to long in solemn sort&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition for spondees is: a metrical foot consisting of two long or stressed syllables, which the line is describing with &amp;quot;long and long&amp;quot;. The second line is also separate from the first with a semicolon at the end of the first, so they are definitely unrelated. The real question is why is the second line not in spondees? I cannot find any explanations for this, apart from that the stressed 'o' sounds in the line act to emphasise the spondees in the next line. Also, in old copies of S. T. Coleridge's poems, where the lines are scanned, line 2 is sometimes left unscanned (along with the second part of the poem, which deviates away from describing meter and addresses his son), so maybe it is not meant to have a definite meter (sort does make a rhyming couplet with short so that could be the reason for this rogue line). Regardless of line 2, the line about trochees is definitely in catalectic trochaic meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T15:11:20.137" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3357" CreationDate="2017-12-20T16:41:15.757" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it really isn't all that different, but the bureaucracy is so soul-crushing that that's about the only thing they can do to reduce the monotony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yossarian did actually occasionally sign different names - for example, in one case, he signed as the Chaplain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, part of the advantage of using that particular name (for Major Major, at least) was the fact that stuff signed with that particular name never came back to him, so I'd imagine he would probably be reluctant to try entirely new names (given that he found one that &quot;worked&quot;) in case he got hassled to re-sign the same papers over and over again as a result. Reversing the name provided at least the illusion of variation and autonomy with much lower risk of getting the documents back again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T16:41:15.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5134" CreationDate="2017-12-20T18:15:28.253" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whitewashing is distinct but related things.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Changing an existing non-white character to be a white one. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using white characters in a setting that would typically have non-whites. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White actors, directors, writers, singers (i.e. content creators) receiving the majority of awards and accolades.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that it is white people being accused off this action fits perfectly with an already existing definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/whitewash&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;whitewash&lt;/a&gt; (or whitewashing):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A deliberate attempt to conceal unpleasant or incriminating facts about a person or organization in order to protect their reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context it means that the white community is making deliberate attempt to conceal the contributions of the non-white community to the arts because it is considered unpleasant. This is why it is such &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/blog/what-is-whitewashing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a big deal&lt;/a&gt;, it is a form of racism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are going to argue against any racist undertones being associated, the primary definition is to basically paint something white (as one would expect). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A solution of lime and water or of whiting, size, and water, used for painting walls white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For works of art your would be taking a non-white character and almost literally &quot;painting&quot; them white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, portraying Blaise as white would be considered whitewashing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or at least it would be &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the race of the character was established. If the race of the character is not established or even hinted at it seems reasonable that one would assume the Blaise would be white given the context of the story (majority white nation, white author, majority of established characters are white; unlike say Cho Chang, who based on the name would reasonably be considered of Eastern Asia descent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the canon fact of Blaise's race was established, continuing to portray him as white is whitewashing. Since we are dealing with fan-fiction the waters are a bit muddy, the writer of the fan-fiction is essentially creating their own story and own character. However, it is easy to see why the &quot;accusation&quot; of whitewashing would be made in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T18:15:28.253" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2017-12-20T19:04:00.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Certainly there are those that consider music to be literature.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the organization &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pen-ne.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PEN New England&lt;/a&gt; (a chapter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://pen.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PEN America&lt;/a&gt;) which among other things&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;confers over $150,000 to writers in the fields of fiction, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, drama, or poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is one of them, having in 2012 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mprnews.org/story/2012/02/29/daily-circuit-song-lyrics-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;awarded their first-ever Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence&lt;/a&gt; to Chuck Berry and Leonard Cohen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even further proof is that Bob Dylan was awarded the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan &amp;quot;for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=2631&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;asked about the award&lt;/a&gt; Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy said;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He can be read and should be read, and is a great poet in the English tradition&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems that the argument to be made is that songs are poetry.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, songs tell a story and (once writing was thing) are generally written as text. It just so happens that text is meant to be performed. Continuing from the above interview&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Has the Swedish Academy widened the horizon of the Nobel Prize in Literature?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it may look that way, but really we haven't. In a way if you look back (far back) to two thousand five hundred years or so you discover Homer and [?], and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed, often with instruments, and it the same way with Bob Dylan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my interpretation of that boils down to... We consider poems and plays to be literature, songs are just shorter more musical versions of that. An opinion piece I found sums it pretty nicely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common sense that poetry exists in a world of pure language, but a poem is, in fact, both the music and the words. Poetry’s sonic aspects—such as syllable sounds, rhyme, rhythm, assonance, dissonance, and meter—are meant to “accompany” the content, to set the mood, to refer to and elicit a sensory experience related to the emotions and images of the poem. They also refer back to the long history of language, echoing sounds and rhythms of the past, placing the poem in history, linking it to a timeless tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/137811/bob-dylans-songs-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Bob Dylan’s Songs Are Literature BY CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER October 14, 2016&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T19:04:00.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3391" CreationDate="2017-12-20T21:25:40.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Its clear to see in To Killing A Mockingbird that Atticus cares for his children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aunt Alexandra comes to visit the children because she feels they need some&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;feminine influence&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;after all they have no mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aunt Alexandra is shocked by Jem's description of Cousin Joshua and asks Atticus to speak to his children about their&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;gentle breeding&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and she expects him to remind the children that they are not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;run of the mill people&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this chapter Atticus talks to the children and tells Scout to be more ladylike and Jem to become more of a gentlemen. The children (being their age) do not properly grasp the context Atticus talks about and Scout begins to cry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Atticus says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Get more like Cousin Joshua every day, don't I? Do you think I'll end up costing the family five hundred dollars?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was trying to reassure his children by suggesting that maybe he might cost the family money like Cousin Joshua. Scout however recognizes Atticus' efforts to comfort her and she understands what he was trying to do, she respects Atticus trying to comfort them but she realizes that he lacks a mothers ability to nurture their children as it does not come naturally to him. Scout is referring to the absence of their motherly role in their family more than being sexist or prejudiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1531" LastActivityDate="2017-12-20T21:25:40.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5142" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5332" CreationDate="2017-12-21T04:42:17.917" Score="1" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the press conference that Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden gave announcing the opening of the John Galt/Rio Norte Line, Rearden stated that the formula was secret:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Inasmuch as &lt;strong&gt;the formula of Rearden Metal is my own personal secret&lt;/strong&gt;, and in view of the fact that the Metal costs much less to produce than you boys can imagine, I expect to skin the public to the tune of a profit of twenty-five per cent in the next few years.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What do you mean, skin the public, Mr. Rearden?&quot; asked the boy. &quot;If it's true, as I've read in your ads, that your Metal will last three times longer than any other and at half the price, wouldn't the public be getting a bargain?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh, have you noticed that?&quot; said Rearden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, earlier in the book, Dagny and Jim were arguing about whether to order the rails for the Rio Norte/John Galt Line from Orren Boyle or Hank Rearden, and about whether they should be made out of steel or Rearden Metal. Dagny claimed to have seen the formula for Rearden Metal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Then what on earth do you know about Rearden Metal?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That it's the greatest thing ever put on the market.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Because it's tougher than steel, cheaper than steall and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;But who says so?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Jim, I studied engineering in college. When I see things, I see them.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What did you see?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Rearden's formula&lt;/strong&gt; and the tests he showed me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, too, his research staff would've known about it, as would his Mills Superintendant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, why did Hank Rearden call the formula his &quot;personal secret&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T18:36:03.643" Title="Why did Hank Rearden call the formula for his metal his &quot;personal secret,&quot; given that several other people in the book knew about it?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5143" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9272" CreationDate="2017-12-21T21:03:24.693" Score="7" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She said her name quite simply, as if it meant&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not much indeed, but something,–took my hands,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And smiled, as if her smile could help my case,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dropped her eyes on me, and let them melt.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Is this,' she said, 'the Muse?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                            'No sibyl even,'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I answered, 'since she fails to guess the cause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which taxed you with this visit, madam.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                                     'Good,'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She said, 'I like to be sincere at once;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The visit might have taxed me. As it is,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My fair Aurora, in a frank good way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;It comforts me entirely for your fame&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As well as for the trouble of my ascent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To this Olympus. '&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                  There, a silver laugh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The steep stair somewhat justified.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this sentence? The blue color of Aurora's eyes provides comfort, so that the visitor is not feeling meek, even despite Aurora's fame? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the meaning of &quot;so chiefly&quot;? &quot;Since your eyes are the &lt;strong&gt;main&lt;/strong&gt; source of blue color in you&quot;? But what could this mean? That there is nothing &quot;blue&quot; in Aurora besides her eyes? Meaning, Aurora is not sad (blue)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T11:11:58.613" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:19:17.087" Title="Meaning of &quot;you wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes ... it comforts me entirely for your fame&quot; in Aurora Leigh" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9270" CreationDate="2017-12-21T21:33:51.997" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'- That is said&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Austerely, like a youthful prophetess,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who knits her brows across her pretty eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To keep them back from following the grey flight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of doves between the temple-columns. Dear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Be kinder with me. Let us two be friends.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm a mere woman–the more weak perhaps&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through being so proud; you're better; as for him,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He's best. Indeed he builds his goodness up&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So high, it topples down to the other side,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And makes a sort of badness; there's the worst&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have to say against your cousin's best!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And so be mild, Aurora, with my worst,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For his sake, if not mine.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;' - I own myself&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Incredulous of confidence like this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Availing him or you.'&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the sentence in bold? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I own&quot; = &quot;I admit&quot;? &quot;To avail&quot; = &quot;To assist&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I admit that I am incredulous of confidence like this being of assistance to him or you&quot;? I still can't understand the meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this &quot;confidence&quot; that assists her or him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T12:21:52.840" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:19:45.873" Title="Meaning of &quot;I own myself incredulous of confidence like this availing him or you&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5362" CreationDate="2017-12-22T04:36:03.297" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Mr. Weatherby's voice came on the wire, it sounded cautious: &quot;Yes, Miss Taggart? Of what service can I be to you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You can tell your boss that if he doesn't want me to quit again, as he knows I did, he is never to call me or speak to me. Anything your gang has to tell me, let them send &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; to tell it. I'll speak to you, but not to him. You may tell him that my reason is what he did to Hank Rearden when he was on Rearden's payroll. If everybody else has forgotten it, I haven't.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It is my duty to assist the nation's railroads at any time, Miss Taggart.&quot; Mr. Weatherby sounded as if he were trying to avoid the commitment of having heard what he heard; but a sudden note of interest crept into his voice as he asked slowly, thoughtfully, with guarded shrewdness, &quot;Am I to understand, Miss Taggart, that it is your wish to deal exclusively with &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; in all official matters? May I take this as your policy?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She gave a brief, harsh chuckle. &quot;Go ahead,&quot; she said. &quot;You may list me as your exclusive property, use me as a special item of pull, and trade me all over Washington. But I don't know what good that will do you, because I'm not going to play the game, I'm not going to trade favors, I'm simply going to start breaking your laws right now - and you can arrest me when you feel that you can afford to.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that Mr. Weatherby tried to &quot;cash in&quot; on this connection? It doesn't seem like there's all &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; much contact between them later in the book (apart from a dinner that they were both at, and Dagny was mostly there so that they could pretend that she agreed with their decision).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T18:09:03.313" Title="Did Mr. Weatherby ever try to &quot;cash in&quot; on his access to Dagny?" Tags="&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2017-12-22T06:31:09.363" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the negation of &quot;can music be considered literature?&quot; The negation is: &quot;music cannot be considered literature.&quot; From a strictly logical perspective, that would mean that there is no music that is also literature - there's not even one example of it. In other words, from a strictly logical perspective, all you have to do is find a single example of music that's also literature to prove that music &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, by way of analogy, how you'd prove that there are unicorns, or that Leprichons exist. The simplest way to do so would be to find one; if you do find them, then clearly Leprichons exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall singing &quot;The Sea&quot; as an undergraduate, which was set to a text by William Dean Howells. Beethoven's &quot;Ode to Joy&quot; was similarly based on a Friedrich Schiller text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are thousands of songs based on religious texts as well. Notably, Handel's Messiah is taken very directly from Biblical texts, as are some of his other songs. Johann S. Bach also set many Biblical texts to music, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Matthew_Passion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew 26 and 27&lt;/a&gt;. In contemporary music, there's a band called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Korah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sons of Korah&lt;/a&gt; whose songs are set (usually very literally) to the New International Version translation of various Psalms. I personally sang or chanted numerous Biblical texts as part of the weekly liturgy (in fact, typically at least 1 - 2 per week) in choir while I was in college.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point in mentioning that is that those don't magically cease to be literature simply by virtue of having been set to music. Handel's Messiah is just as much literature as the underlying Biblical texts that it's based on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My criteria, then: if the underlying text is literature, the music is literature, too. Note that I'm being a little cagy on the issue of the exact definition of literature, which I think is a separate issue - my point is simply &quot;if the lyrics are literature, the song is literature too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that this reasoning applies equally to things that were published as music first and were either published as literature on its own later (or have never been published as literature at all). For example, &quot;Hotel California&quot; and some other Eagles songs are very poetic, as are many U2 songs; I think you'd have a hard time arguing that those aren't literature, even though they've never actually been published separately in any collections of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more obvious case is Bob Dylan, some of whose works &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; been published independently of the music as literature (in poetry collections) and have been the subject of academic literary study. Even though they were songs before they were published as poetry, that doesn't change the fact that the song lyrics &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can actually read Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize in Literature lecture &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which includes some interesting thoughts on the question of whether his works are poetry. (I actually think that it would be worth creating a separate Q&amp;amp;A to discuss his lecture, but I haven't had time to write a question on it yet). He makes an interesting analogy: yeah, music was meant to be sung, but by the same token, Shakespeare was meant to be performed. If we want to argue that music isn't literature, we'd have to make the same argument about Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, and a host of other playwrites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, if we don't have a problem with plays being literature, why do we have a problem with music being literature, too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T06:31:09.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5148" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5154" CreationDate="2017-12-22T06:52:11.683" Score="5" ViewCount="437" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 1, p. 23 of &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why do you want me to think that this is great architecture?&quot; He pointed to the picture of the Parthenon.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That,&quot; said the Dean, &quot;is the Parthenon!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;So it is.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I haven't the time to waste on silly questions.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;All right, then.&quot; Roark got up, he took a long ruler from the desk, he walked to the picture. &quot;Shall I tell you what's rotten about it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It’s the Parthenon!&quot; said the Dean.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes, God damn it, the Parthenon.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The ruler struck the glass over the picture.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Look,&quot; said Roark. &quot;The famous flutings on the the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in the wood—when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the historical basis for Roark's argument? Is this accurate? Is there some kind of reference that explores this further?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt; the first book to use this line of reasoning, or was a similar line of argument used elsewhere? How do people who disagree with Roark's conclusions respond to these arguments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T18:22:26.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T20:46:35.143" Title="What is the historical basis for Roark's claim about the Parthenon?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9281" CreationDate="2017-12-22T10:29:50.027" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt; - what is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;gambled&lt;/strong&gt; here? It's hard to understand. I first thought his wasted right hand was somehow pinned to his left one using the brass button, but the dictionaries have only the &quot;game-of-chance&quot; meaning for the word &lt;strong&gt;gamble&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two hours afterward,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Within St. Margaret’s Court I stood alone,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Close-veiled. A sick child, from an ague-fit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose wasted right hand &lt;strong&gt;gambled&lt;/strong&gt; ’gainst his left&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With an old brass button; in a blot of sun,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jeered weakly at me as I passed across&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The uneven pavement; while a woman, rouged&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon the angular cheek-bones, kerchief torn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thin dangling locks, and flat lascivious mouth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cursed at a window, both ways, in and out,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By turns some bed-rid creature and myself,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘Lie still there, mother! liker the dead dog&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You’ll be to-morrow. What, we pick our way,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T13:07:15.733" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T13:07:15.733" Title="Meaning of &quot;gambled&quot; in &quot;whose wasted right hand gambled against his left&quot; (Aurora Leigh)" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5150" CreationDate="2017-12-22T14:34:48.387" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of the word gamble is a bit incomplete. While the most common usage is with games on chance (i.e. betting money), broader sense is an risk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/gamble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gamble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[as a verb]  Take risky action in the hope of a desired result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[as a noun] A risky action undertaken with the hope of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how I would interpret the line is that since the child's right hand is wasted, that is a &amp;quot;risk&amp;quot; to try to get the button away from his left. The child is playing a game with themselves the &amp;quot;desired result&amp;quot; being the right hand winning the button from the left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T14:34:48.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2017-12-22T14:59:32.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking the rest of the passage in context, it seems that the &amp;quot;speaker&amp;quot; does not think to highly on themselves and has no self esteem. It seems there is a group of three people; the speaker, Aurora, and a man (Aurora's cousin) about they are speaking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker is saying that Aurora's cousin is so &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; that it is almost a bad quality within him, and that is worst thing the speaker can say about him. The speaker also seems to think that Aurora is a much better woman than her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So breaking down the lines you have highlighted, I would interpret the word in question this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You correct on the usage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/own&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;formal no object&lt;/em&gt;] Admit or acknowledge that something is the case or that one feels a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is another meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/avail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;avail&lt;/a&gt; that I think will make more clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;archaic (of an action)&lt;/em&gt;] be of no help at all to someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And tie is all together with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/incredulous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incredulous&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(of a person or their manner) unwilling or unable to believe something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to give us the an interpretation of: &lt;strong&gt;I admit I am unable to believe in my confidence which is of no help to you or him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T14:59:32.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5143" CreationDate="2017-12-22T15:18:29.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would agree with your first interpretation in that Aurora's eyes are comfort to the speaker and allow them to overcome any shyness or reservations about the encounter. Aurora has way with her eyes that she can just look at you and make you feel at ease. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the passage you quote, there is no hint of an underlying sadness within Aurora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T15:18:29.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5148" CreationDate="2017-12-22T16:30:19.630" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The historical part of - &quot;The famous flutings on the the famous columns—what are they there for? To hide the joints in the wood&quot; - is accurate. When using squared shapes (i.e. lengths of wood) to build a circular structure (the column) ou will have visible joints. See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.worthingtonmillwork.com/bid/216467/What-Are-Fluted-Architectural-Columns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;picture&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lcnW3.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lcnW3.png&quot; alt=&quot;fluting in cloumns&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice how the curves (the fluting) serves to hide the joint in way the flows into the circular structure. Without the fluting those joint are more visible. With a solid piece of marble this is not needed as one can carve and shape the stone in anyway they like without having joints at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However,  I don't think Roark's primary argument is &quot;historical&quot; at all really... it boils down to &quot;First vs Best&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Roark says - &quot;Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way.&quot; - and &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is an argument as old as time and will be made when comparing older works of art to newer ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who should we admire more William Shakespeare or Thomas Lanier &quot;Tennessee&quot; Williams?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who should we admire more George Herman &quot;Babe&quot; Ruth or Derek Jeter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who should we admire more Michelangelo or Salvador Dali? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These of course are all subjective questions that whole novels could be written on. Just because you were first doesn't make you the best, but just because you were the best doesn't mean you be recognized as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even still Roark's argument was that the Greeks were not even creative, they merely copied what was already done, just with a new material. It would be more like if Dali was famous for painting the Mona Lisa but he used watercolors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the end, art is almost a wholly subjective field for critique.&lt;/strong&gt; Roark simply has this view on Greek architecture, regardless of what the masses or experts tell him. He just uses the historical claim to show he has at least applied some level of critical thinking to the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T16:30:19.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5155" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-22T18:24:42.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-22T18:24:42.577" LastActivityDate="2017-12-22T18:24:42.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5156" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-22T18:24:42.577" Score="0" Body="For questions related to &quot;The Fountainhead&quot;, a novel by Ayn Rand. Use together with the [ayn-rand] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T03:03:47.917" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T03:03:47.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2017-12-22T20:34:21.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem is alluding to the Book of Revelation. The &quot;rough beast&quot; is the Anti-Christ. The scene is set for the final showdown and the Second Coming. Thus, with its unremitting pessimistic tone notwithstanding, the poem at least gives humankind the possibility of redemption. That having been said, the persona is not necessarily espousing a traditional Christian world view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written is 1919, the poem is a reaction to the Great War. It conveys the persona's horror at the slaughter that the war unleashed and its socio-political aftermath in language heavy with religious significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's opening stanza portrays a society spinning out of kilter. &quot;The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold&quot; are metaphors for the rise of radical politics. But we should be in no doubt that this is as much a spiritual crisis as it is a worldly one: &quot;the falconer&quot; and &quot;the centre&quot; are also God. &quot;Turning and turning in the widening gyre&quot; also alludes to the view of a cyclical nature of history expressed elsewhere by the poet. It continues by emphasising the scope of the crisis...&quot;and everywhere The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned&quot;. these are allusions to the Book of Revelation (see comment below) and the Christian sacraments(?) respectively and once again emphasise a spiritual dimension to the crisis befalling humankind. &quot;The worst&quot; the persona says &quot;are full of passionate intensity&quot; emphasising their lustful, animalistic (and sinful?) natures, while &quot;the best lack all [moral(?)] conviction&quot;. The best, at least, lack the conviction to act. One is &quot;full&quot; while the other &quot;lack[s]&quot;. One thinks but does not act, while the other acts but does not think. Society is beset by chaos, as represented by imagery of &quot;The blood-dimmed tide&quot; and, especially, animals imagery laden with negative connotations: &quot;rough beast&quot;, &quot;indignant dessert birds&quot;, and the errant falcon. The worst give in to their primitive urges and themselves become agents of chaos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza begins with the persona's plaintive cry: &quot;Surely some revelation is at hand&quot;. And seemingly it is. The persona is assailed by a fantastical vision &quot;somewhere in sands of the desert&quot;, an allusion to the Temptation of Christ, of &quot;A shape with lion body and the head of a man&quot;... is this then the &quot;rough beast&quot;? maybe - but it seems more likely to be a personification of the physical and spiritual crisis at hand, the &quot;Spiritus Mundi&quot;, rather than the &quot;rough beast&quot; as the persona uses the phrase &quot;The darkness drops again&quot; to draw a distinction between the two. The hybrid creature may personify humankind's duel natures: reason/instinct, head/heart, order/chaos, reactionary/radical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;That twenty centuries of stony sleep&quot; alludes to the almost two thousand years since the birth of Christ. The &quot;rough beast&quot;, its centuries long wait now ended, makes its way to the appointed place for the final confrontation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The persona equates the slaughter of the Great War and it socio-political ramifications with the biblical end times, although this should not be taken literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(work in progress but constructive criticism is welcome)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2788" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T17:24:35.773" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T17:24:35.773" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T15:07:10.977" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To have our books&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Appraised by love, associated with love,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While we sit loveless! is it hard, you think?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At least 'tis mournful. Fame, indeed, 'twas said,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Means simply love. It was a man said that.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then there's love and love: the love of all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;strong&gt;To risk, in turn, a woman's paradox,&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is but a small thing to the love of one.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You bid a hungry child be satisfied&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a heritage of many corn-fields: nay,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He says he's hungry,–he would rather have&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That little barley-cake you keep from him&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While reckoning up his harvests. So with us;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Here, Romney, too, we fail to generalise!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We're hungry.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder what the meaning of the phrase in bold could be. It must be an allusion to some paradox or some story, or some saying, mustn't it?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2017-12-23T16:09:40.080" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T18:10:33.850" Title="Meaning of &quot;to risk, in turn, a woman's paradox&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2667" CreationDate="2017-12-23T15:38:41.157" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &#xA;&quot;adj :   of little or no use; vain; fruitless: a bootless search.&#xA;[Old English bōtlēas, from bōt compensation; Old Norse bótalauss]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2791" LastActivityDate="2017-12-23T15:38:41.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5162" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9390" CreationDate="2017-12-23T20:44:33.833" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Till We Have Faces&lt;/em&gt; says the following about &quot;The Fox&quot; (the Greek slave who was a tutor):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had all sorts of sayings to cheer himself up with: &quot;No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city&quot;, and &quot;everything is as good or bad as our opinions make it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm particularly interested in the second quote. This is very much like the teachings of the Stoics, which was popular in Greece and Rome at various points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Marcus Aurelius (Roman):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epictetus (Greek) said similar things. For example, from his &lt;em&gt;Enchiridion&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When, therefore, anyone provokes you, be assured that it is your own opinion which provokes you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;The Fox&quot; a Stoic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-16T09:09:13.033" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T09:09:13.033" Title="Did &quot;The Fox&quot; hold to Stoic philosophy?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;till-we-have-faces&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-23T21:14:15.057" Score="10" ViewCount="606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/41904250#41904250&quot;&gt;recently learned&lt;/a&gt;, while listening to the flow of wisdom, music, and monologue that flows from &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/187246/lauir?tab=recent&quot;&gt;lauir&lt;/a&gt;, that there's a type of poem called a '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grook&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grook&lt;/a&gt;'. Quoting from the Wikipedia page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The grooks are multi-faceted and characterized by irony, paradox, brevity, precise use of language, rhythm and rhyme, and an often satiric nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... this doesn't help much. What does it mean by 'precise use of language'? Or 'rhythm and rhyme'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What defines a 'Grook'? Is there a set of rules that will define a poem as a 'Grook'?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T02:11:03.997" Title="What makes a poem a Grook?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5163" CreationDate="2017-12-23T21:29:23.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clear from web pages such &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.danishnet.com/culture/piet-hein-1905-1996/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as this one&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.piethein.com/page/piet-hein-16/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; that (unlike &quot;sonnet&quot; or &quot;limerick&quot; or &quot;tanka&quot;) the term &quot;grook&quot; or &quot;gruk&quot; is not a widely used term for a recognizable verse form but rather a  word invented by   Piet Hein for the poems he  wrote.  It is possible someone other than Hein has written grooks, but the Internet does not seem to know about them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hein, with his starkly elegant &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.piethein.com/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;design work&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superellipse#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for a suprising instance), seems to have become a Danish culture hero.  But I do not think his poetry is much imitated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-12-24T13:49:45.767" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T13:49:45.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9283" CreationDate="2017-12-24T06:27:16.940" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until at last, as one, whose heart being sad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On hearing lovely music, suddenly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dissolves in weeping, I brake out in tears&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before her . . asked her counsel . . 'had I erred&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'In being too happy? would she set me straight?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'For she, being wise and good and born above&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'The flats I had never climbed from, could perceive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'If such as I, might grow upon the hills;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'And whether such poor herb sufficed to grow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'For Romney Leigh to break his fast upon't,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Or would he pine on such, or haply starve?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She wrapt me in her generous arms at once,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And let me dream a moment how it feels&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To have a real mother, like some girls:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But when I looked, her face was younger . . ay,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Youth's too bright not to be a little hard,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;And beauty keeps itself still uppermost&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That's true!–Though Lady Waldemar was kind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She hurt me, hurt, as if the morning-sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should smite us on the eyelids when we sleep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And wake us up with headache.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, &quot;A young person is too intelligent, and thus is a little cruel&quot;. But what is the meaning of the next line, &quot;and beauty keeps itself still uppermost&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T12:07:48.407" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T12:07:51.817" Title="Meaning of &quot;and beauty keeps itself still uppermost&quot; (Aurora Leigh by Liz Browning)" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16434" CreationDate="2017-12-24T07:37:06.547" Score="5" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hugh Akston stated that, when he first met John Galt, John asked a question on Plato's metaphysics that he would've been proud to get from someone who had studied philosophy for six years, a question that Plato didn't have the sense to ask himself. What was the question (or what might it have been)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T23:48:49.393" Title="What philosophy question did John Galt ask?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2570" CreationDate="2017-12-24T15:07:50.683" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Een heilige van de horlogerie&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Frederik_Hermans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Willem Frederik Hermans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to apoligise because it turns out to be a Dutch book after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a rough translation of the plot from Dutch, as described &lt;a href=&quot;https://peterprong.blogspot.de/2008_09_01_archive.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Constantin Brueghel, the son of a Dutch cheese farmer who emigrated to France and a French woman, is a graduate philosopher who has a doctorate with a thesis on Time and Duration. He has not eaten much cheese from cheese, and a job in education says little to him, so he takes a job with his uncle. He is responsible for the clocks in a local empty palace. And so Constantin is responsible for the excitement of 1473 bells and pendules, spread over 297 halls and rooms. The builder of the palace - some duke at the time of Napoleon - had stipulated in his will that his belongings would be transferred to the congregation, provided that the clock collection would be preserved and ministered. And so the ironic fate of a doctoral student about Time and Duration wants to fill his days with the excitement of clocks ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T11:03:30.503" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T11:03:30.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-24T16:14:36.390" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Poe's short story &amp;quot;Three Sundays in a Week&amp;quot; (which can be read in full &lt;a href=&quot;http://xroads.virginia.edu/%7Ehyper/poe/3sundays.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), the protagonist and his intended bride need to outwit his uncle, who has decreed that they can only get married &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;when three Sundays come together in a week&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. They achieve their goal by arranging a conversation with two sea captains who have crossed the International Date Line in opposite directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, so understandable. What puzzles me is the constant references to one &amp;quot;Doctor Dubble L. Dee&amp;quot;. The uncle refers to this gentleman in almost every sentence, but is interrupted by one of the others before he can finish saying anything about him. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UNCLE. &amp;quot;Yes, yes, yes--I remember it very well--very queer indeed! Both of you gone just one year. A very strange coincidence, indeed! Just what Doctor Dubble L. Dee would denominate an extraordinary concurrence of events. Doctor Dub--&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KATE. [&lt;em&gt;Interrupting.&lt;/em&gt;] &amp;quot;To be sure, papa, it is something strange; but then Captain Pratt and Captain Smitherton didn't go altogether the same route, and that makes a difference, you know.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UNCLE. &amp;quot;I don't know any such thing, you huzzy! How should I? I think it only makes the matter more remarkable, Doctor Dubble L. Dee--&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KATE. Why, papa, Captain Pratt went round Cape Horn, and Captain Smitherton doubled the Cape of Good Hope.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UNCLE. &amp;quot;Precisely!--the one went east and the other went west, you jade, and they both have gone quite round the world. By the by, Doctor Dubble L. Dee--&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does Dubble L. Dee signify? Why does the uncle keep mentioning him, and why do the others keep interrupting every time he does?&lt;/strong&gt; Does LLD stand for something relevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-24T16:14:36.390" Title="Why all the fuss about Doctor Dubble L. Dee?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9269" CreationDate="2017-12-24T21:15:33.277" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book has some truth in it, I believe:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And truth outlives pain, as the soul does life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I know we talk our Phædons to the end&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through all the dismal faces that we make,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O'er-wrinkled with dishonouring agony&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From any mortal drug. I have written truth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I a woman; feebly, partially,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Inaptly in presentation, Romney'll add,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because a woman. For the truth itself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That's neither man's nor woman's, but just God's;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  None else has reason to be proud of truth:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Himself will see it sifted, disenthralled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And kept upon the height and in the light,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As far as, and no farther, than 'tis truth;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For, – now He has left off calling firmaments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And strata, flowers and creatures, very good,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;He says it still of truth, which is His own&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this last sentence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God has named all the things in the world (&quot;left off calling ...&quot;). This work of his is done. Now God &quot;says it&quot;. What is &quot;it&quot; here? I can't even begin to untangle this sentence.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T12:24:46.173" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T12:24:46.173" Title="Meaning of &quot;He says it still of truth, which is his own&quot; (in &quot;Aurora Leigh&quot;)" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5191" CreationDate="2017-12-24T21:54:06.090" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus is Art&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Self-magnified in magnifying a truth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which, fully recognized, would change the world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And shift its morals. If a man could feel,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not one day, in the artist's ecstasy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But every day, feast, fast, or working-day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The spiritual significance burn through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hieroglyphic of material shows,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Henceforward he would paint the globe with wings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And reverence fish and fowl, the bull, the tree,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And even his very body as a man,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which now he counts so vile, &lt;strong&gt;that all the towns&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Make offal of their daughters for its use&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On summer-nights&lt;/strong&gt;, when God is sad in heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To think what goes on in his recreant world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He made quite other; while that moon he made&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To shine there, at the first love's covenant,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shines still, convictive as a marriage-ring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before adulterous eyes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man believes that his body is vile. Because of that, citizens of towns kill women and turn them into offal? Something gruesome and totally cryptic. And whose is &lt;strong&gt;its&lt;/strong&gt; use? I cannot understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the author trying to describe?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T12:12:24.947" Title="Meaning of &quot;that all the towns make offal of their daughters for its use on summer-nights&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6586" CreationDate="2017-12-25T03:59:01.777" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Equality 7-2521/Prometheus (from &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;) a model for John Galt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few major similarities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Significantly, Equality calls himself Prometheus once he realizes that he has a right to exist as an individual. Francisco d'Anconia also compares John Galt to Prometheus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both were inventors&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps most significantly is this quote from &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have learned that my power of the sky was known to men long ago; they called it Electricity. It was the power that moved their greatest inventions. It lit this house with light which came from globes of glass on the walls. &lt;strong&gt;I have found the engine which produced this light. I shall learn how to repair it and how to make it work again.&lt;/strong&gt; I shall learn how to use the wires which carry this power...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Galt's main invention in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; is his motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both called people out of the Looter society. The end of &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt; is quite explicit about Promethius's desire to have his house be a center of &quot;the Resistance,&quot; in effect. Similarly, Galt's Gulch is the center of the Strike.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both were driven in part by their love of the book's primary female character (Dagny Taggart in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; and the Golden One/Gaia in &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equality 7-2521/Prometheus stated that &quot;I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. &lt;strong&gt;I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others.&lt;/strong&gt; I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.&quot; Compare that to the Oath that all of the Strikers take in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major difference, of course, is that, unlike Equality 7-2521, John Galt never accepted the looters' creed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:50:24.743" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T23:22:06.430" Title="Is Equality 7-2521 a model for John Galt?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;anthem-rand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5173" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5192" CreationDate="2017-12-25T05:02:44.800" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So it is:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We covet for the soul, the body's part,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To die and rot. Even so, Aurora, ends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our aspiration, &lt;strong&gt;who bespoke our place&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So far in the east&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;who bespoke our place so far in the east&quot;? What possibly could it mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, is there a good version of &quot;Aurora Leigh&quot; online with a parallel translation into plain English, i.e. with comments and annotations? It's well-nigh impossible to understand a good third of the poem.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T10:20:52.337" Title="Meaning of &quot;who bespoke our place so far in the east&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5175" CreationDate="2017-12-25T10:42:14.157" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Aurora Leigh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have you learnt &#xA;  No more of women, 'spite of privilege,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than still to take account too seriously&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of such weak flutterings? Why, we like it, sir,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We get our powers and our effects that way.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The trees stand stiff and still at time of frost,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If no wind tears them; but, let summer come,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When trees are happy,–and a breath avails&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To set them trembling through a million leaves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In luxury of emotion. Something less&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It takes to move a woman: let her start&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And shake at pleasure,&lt;strong&gt;–nor conclude at yours&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The winter's bitter,–but the summer's green.'  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;nor conclude at yours&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let a woman to start (= jerk in surprise) and shake at pleasure (as she pleases). But what is the meaning of &quot;nor conclude at yours&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T15:41:19.837" Title="Meaning of &quot;not conclude at yours&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5174" CreationDate="2017-12-25T15:41:19.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the phrase  &quot;let her start&#xA;And shake at pleasure,–nor conclude at yours,&quot; should be understood   something like &quot;let her start and shake at [her] pleasure, and not conclude at your [pleasure]&quot;, or, more loosely, &quot;let her start and stop when she wants, not when you want&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, the ambiguity of &quot;start&quot;.  Does it mean &lt;em&gt;jolt&lt;/em&gt; or does it mean &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt;, as my paraphrases here take it? (My OED lists both, with the &lt;em&gt;jolt&lt;/em&gt; sense coming before the &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; sense.) The occurrence in &quot;start and shake&quot; makes the &lt;em&gt;jolt&lt;/em&gt; sense seem more likely, but the opposition with &quot;conclude&quot; makes the &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; sense more likely.  Is it allowed for a poet to use a word in two senses at once?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T15:41:19.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8755" CreationDate="2017-12-25T16:16:41.387" Score="7" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/barrett/aurora/aurora.html#1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poor child! I would have mended it with gold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Until it gleamed like St. Sophia's dome&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When all the faithful troop to morning prayer:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But he, he nipped the bud of such a thought&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With that cold Leigh look which I fancied once,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And broke in, 'Henceforth she was called his wife.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'His wife required no succour: he was bound&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'To Florence, to resume this broken bond:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Enough so. Both were happy, he and Howe,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'To acquit me of the heaviest charge of all–'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  –&lt;strong&gt;At which I shut my tongue against my fly&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And struck him; 'Would he carry,–he was just,–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'A letter from me to Aurora Leigh,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'And ratify from his authentic mouth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'My answer to her accusation?'–'Yes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'If such a letter were prepared in time.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  –He's just, your cousin,–ay, abhorrently.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Is it some saying or proverb?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-25T16:33:27.633" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T19:08:15.950" Title="Meaning of &quot;I shut my tongue against my fly&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4839" CreationDate="2017-12-25T16:37:25.097" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether you think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deserve to die depends to some extent on the moral framework you use. When writing Hamlet, Shakespeare was working in the tradition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;revenge tragedy&lt;/a&gt; (although the play is almost an anti-revenge tragedy) and he was using a story that ultimate goes back to a Nordic tradition. So there are several moral frameworks you can use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moral framework of the Nordic tradition where the story originates (but to which Shakespeare probably had no access).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moral framework of the age of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxo_Grammaticus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saxo Grammaticus&lt;/a&gt;(c. 1150 – c. 1220). Saxo's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesta_Danorum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gesta Danorum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains the story of the downfall of Amleth, Prince of Denmark.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moral framework of the age of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_de_Belleforest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;François de Belleforest&lt;/a&gt;, whose &lt;em&gt;Hstoires tragiques&lt;/em&gt; contains a translation of Saxo's Amleth story (1570).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moral framework of Shakespeare's own age, which presumably also produced a now lost &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that is often attributed to Thomas Kyd. (There are also many similarites between Thomas Kyd's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, such as a ghost, madness, and a play-within-the-play.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The moral framework of our own age, let's say of early 21st-century Western Europe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here we go:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the old Nordic tradition, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hr%C3%B3lfs_saga_kraka&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hrólfs saga kraka&lt;/a&gt;, which may have influenced Saxo, violence and revenge often requires little &quot;justification&quot; and can easily lead to a cycle of violence. Family feuds and the quest for revenge are common themes in e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/norol/00&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Norse literature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/saxos-legend-of-amleth-in-the-gesta-danorum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saxo's version of the story&lt;/a&gt;, Amleth feigns madness to shield himself from his uncle Fengo or Fengi, who has killed his father Horwendil and married his mother Gerutha (Amleht's father and mother, of course; this isn't Oedipus). Fengo gets suspicious and sends Amleth to England with two escorts (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare's version). The two escorts are carrying a letter instructing the King of England to immediately kill Amleth. Amleth discovers the letter and replaces it with another one ordering the execution of the two escorts and asking for the hand of English princess in marriage. (There are a number of important differencees between Saxo's and Shakepseare's versions. For example, in Saxo's version, Fengo's guilt is known from the start, and there is no ghost demanding vengeance.) In Saxo's version, Amleth's revenge does not depend on overcoming moral or psychological barriers but on overcoming barriers that are of a practical nature. The same appears to apply to Amleth's plotting of the death of his two escorts. It is not a matter of &quot;justification&quot; but what you can get away with. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare may have known Saxo's version only through François de Belleforest's version and/or through the hypothetical &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. For simplicity's sake, I will treat de Belleforst, the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (writting in 1600–1601) as belonging to the same period. For moral views on revenge, I'll refer to Francis Bacon's essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/4.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Of Revenge&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Bacon's essay starts with the following words: &quot;Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.&quot; This reflects a totally different view on social order than Saxo's story. But the next sentences have greater relevance to Hamlet's plot against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (my emphasis): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for &lt;strong&gt;it is a prince's part to pardon&lt;/strong&gt;. And Solomon, I am sure, saith, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;It is the glory of a man to pass by an offence&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Prince&quot; here means &quot;ruler&quot;, not &quot;the king's son&quot;. Nevertheless, based on Bacon's condemnation of revenge, Hamlet should have devised a different way to extricate himself from Claudius's plot, and Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's deaths are not justified.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there's early 21-st century Europe, where I live. Within this framework, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not deserve to die for carrying a letter, the contents of which they do not know (III.iii.1-25 mention the stability of the kingdom as a reason for sending Hamlet away), or for spying on Hamlet on behalf of Claudius (which Hamlet truly hates, especially from former schoolfriends; see IV.ii). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern &quot;deserve&quot; to die depends on whether you look at it from a medieval point of view (including Saxo Grammaticus) or not. We can find a condemnation of revenge both in the English Renaissance and in our own age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Hamlet's plot against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is probably not so much a question of whether it can be justified, as an illustration of something else: that Hamlet can kill on the spur of the moment or when he sees his own life in danger (Polonius; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern  (see V.II.29ff: &quot;Being thus be-netted round with villainies/...&quot;); and finally Claudius) but not when he has time to think about what the consequences are (e.g. he does not kill Claudius during his prayers, because the King would then die repentant and go to heaven).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-25T17:05:37.143" LastActivityDate="2017-12-25T17:05:37.143" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15775" CreationDate="2017-12-25T17:38:58.970" Score="7" ViewCount="720" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;The Boxcar Children&lt;/em&gt; to my niece awhile back. At one point, they're walking along a road and run into a fork in a road. The fork has a sign pointing to Silver City and Greenfield. Both are actual places in New Mexico, but they're over 300 miles from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silver City, NV is a near ghost town at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greenfield, CA and Silver City, CA are similarly hundreds of miles away (189 miles by the shortest car route).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The baker, who was chasing them, said that he didn't think that they could've made it as far as Silver City, which suggests that they were, in fact, far from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the book referring to actual places? If so, where? Where are the books set?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T07:26:02.390" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T07:26:02.390" Title="Where are Greenfield and Silver City in The Boxcar Children?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-boxcar-children&gt;&lt;gertrude-chandler-warner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-26T07:25:10.007" Score="1" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/burt1k1/tale17.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Arabian Nights&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each morn that dawns I wake in travail and in woe,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And strange is my condition and my burden &lt;strong&gt;gars me pine&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many others are in luck and from miseries are free,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Fortune never load them with loads the like o' mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &amp;quot;gars me pine&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2801" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T19:00:28.633" Title="In &quot;Sinbad the Seaman and Sinbad the Landsman&quot;, from Arabian Nights, what does gars me pine mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-26T07:29:01.533" Score="4" ViewCount="421" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the speech of Howard Roark, or at most places in the book, altruists are shown to be in negative light/evil. But this criticism seems to constructed by deliberately painting such characters as evil. Altruism is not evaluated ideally as egotism is. All is virtuous of egotists and all is evil of altruists.Does this not weaken the philosophy of objectivism as the comparison is not fair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example in the speech :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the sufferings of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is not the suffering that we should treat as highest virtue, but the act of relieving the suffering. Did not the people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Mandela held relieving the suffering of others as prime motive of their lives? Did they enslave people or liberate them? So can't these be called altrusits who initiated human progress in their regions by gaining independence for their people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I completely agree with virtues of egotism mentioned in the book. But I disagree with some of the vices of altruism mentioned. She says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man who attempts to live for others is a dependent. He is a parasite in motive and makes parasites of those he serves. The relationship produces nothing but mutual corruption. It is impossible in concept. The nearest approach to it in reality—the man who lives to serve others—is the slave&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;living for others&quot; here is meant in a sense in which Peter Keating lives, for other's appreciation to him etc. But this is how the character is pictured in the book. Can't &quot;living for others&quot; imply as life of say, Mahatma Gandhi or any &quot;honest&quot; social worker? An implication where self-sacrifice means sacrificing one's happiness, personal goals to serve others but similarly not selling one's soul to others. These people rather can be said to have strongest of souls in human history. Are these not the fountainheads of human progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gautam Buddha renunciated everything as a king. His personal happiness was gained through relief of suffering of people, he liberated people. Unlike Toohey who made them dependant. Why can't the character be someone like Buddha rather than Toohey. Hence, is this is not unfair vilification of altruism? This defeats the rationality of her philosophy to some extent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, isn't the evaluation of altruism seem partial or conveniently alienated in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2517" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T19:32:51.783" Title="Isn't Ayn Rand a bit irrational in her criticism of altrusim in The Fountainhead?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-26T08:17:13.037" Score="4" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/40302/was-there-a-person-made-the-quote-about-poetry-that-poincar%C3%A9-responded-to/40304#40304&quot;&gt;Over on Skeptics&lt;/a&gt;, Laurel found some partial information in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=3K24AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=%22poetry+is+the+art+of+giving%22+the+same+name+to+different+things&amp;amp;q=%22quoted+that+mot+to+a+poet%22&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote from &lt;em&gt;Mathematics as a culture clue and other essays&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I once quoted that mot to a poet, and got the quick response:&#xA;  &quot;Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know which poet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&#xA;The mot was made by mathematician Poincaré: &quot;Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Follow up: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5220/1015&quot;&gt;Is poetry the art of giving different names to the same thing?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastEditorUserId="1015" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T17:18:24.953" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T17:18:24.953" Title="Who said &quot;Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5182" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:35:39.537" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T12:35:39.537" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T12:35:39.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5183" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:35:39.537" Score="0" Body="Questions about Aurora Leigh (1856), an epic novel in blank verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Use this tag with the [elizabeth-barrett-browning] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T13:21:23.950" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T13:21:23.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5179" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:44:13.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gar#Etymology_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gar&lt;/a&gt; is a northern English and Scottish word that can mean to &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt;, to &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;.  The phrase &quot;gars me pine&quot; means roughly &quot;makes me feel sad&quot;. The OED has many citations showing different shades of meaning, few from the last century or so. If you google &quot;gars me pine&quot; you will find it in places like the 1885 poetry of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=_KNAAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA89&amp;amp;lpg=PA89&amp;amp;dq=gars+me+pine&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=A9Kf5ffEBH&amp;amp;sig=DI-R3Ck3hEDT9Iu2utAV0IZfu2A&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjdz86F1KfYAhVRUd8KHZyOALIQ6AEILzAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gars%20me%20pine&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alick Murray&lt;/a&gt; whose poem &quot;Oh! Cauld Cauld&quot; says   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's no th' cauld that gars me pine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor nature's looks sae bleak an' drear ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But as th' earth lo'es warm sunshine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To me Love's smiles are sunlicht dear!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At times I've seen a gowden chink&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Break thro' th' veil o' stormy clouds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An' hope assures a bonnie blink&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will rend fell anger's frowning shrouds!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That is, his sweetheart's cold looks make him feel sad, but sometimes she gives a hint that she &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; like him.)  This was apparently published the same year Burton published his &lt;em&gt;Arabian Nights&lt;/em&gt;, so the phrase was not completely unknown or incomprehensible to Burton and his audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T16:22:22.387" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T16:22:22.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5185" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:46:16.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T12:46:16.913" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T12:46:16.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5186" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:46:16.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English author, journalist, and spy Frederick Forsyth (born 1938) and his works. He is best known for thrillers such as The Day of The Jackal, The Odessa File, The Dogs of War, and The Fourth Protocol." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T19:08:57.517" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T19:08:57.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5187" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:51:39.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T12:51:39.730" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T12:51:39.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5188" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-26T12:51:39.730" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1971 thriller The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. The novel is about a professional assassin's attempt to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. In 1973, the novel was adapted into a film directed by Fred Zinnemann. Use this tag with the [frederick-forsyth] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-26T13:21:47.320" LastActivityDate="2017-12-26T13:21:47.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5180" CreationDate="2017-12-26T20:47:57.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, as a disclaimer, I actually don't agree with objectivism, but I'll try to summarize her position/arguments here. I think that this represents at least some of the arguments and claims that she may have advanced in responding to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, I don't think that she's ignoring &quot;ideal&quot; altruism. I think that the books probably would've been more balanced if not all of the altruists were so unambiguously evil, but I think that that's not exactly the same thing as saying that she's ignoring &quot;ideal&quot; altruism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, there are actually some altruistic characters in her books who aren't &lt;em&gt;entirely&lt;/em&gt; evil, just mistaken. (Consider, for example, Dan Conway in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, who is presented in a largely positive light even though he agrees with at least some of the altruists' basic moral premises).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the perspective of objectivism, though, altruism &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; evil, regardless of the character or motivations of the individuals who are practicing it. In other words, she's not ignoring &quot;ideal&quot; altruism - she's saying that it doesn't exist. Every case that people point to to justify altruism either isn't actually altruism (addressed below) or isn't actually good. Sacrifice, including self-sacrifice, are specifically &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; noble pursuits from her perspective. To quote from &lt;em&gt;The Objectivist Ethic&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Objectivist ethics holds that &lt;em&gt;human&lt;/em&gt; good does not require human sacrifices and cannot be achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. It holds that the &lt;em&gt;rational&lt;/em&gt; interests of men do not clash - that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as &lt;em&gt;traders&lt;/em&gt;, giving value for value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to understand is that, in objectivism, individuals exist for &lt;em&gt;their own sake&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; for the sake of their fellow man. Individuals have a right to exist in and of themselves. The creed that demands that one person sacrifice their own interest for the sake of someone else's is, in objectivism, fundamentally cannibalistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This premise is also based on the premise that there are intrinsically conflicts of interest between men. For example, according to this view, if I have money, it's because someone else doesn't. If I succeed, it's at the expense of everyone who didn't. If I have a job, it's at the expense of the people who remain unemployed. Clearly, these examples are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; correct - my success doesn't come at the expense of people who aren't successful, for example, and Ayn Rand goes to great lengths to refute this argument. To quote steel magnate Hank Rearden (from &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I work for nothing but my own profit - which I make by selling a product they need to men who are willing and able to buy it. I do not produce it for their benefit at the expense of mine, and they do not buy it for my benefit at the expense of theirs: I do not sacrifice my interests to them nor do they sacrifice theirs to mine; we deal as equals by mutual consent to mutal advantage - and I am proud of every penny that I have earned in this manner. I am rich and I am proud of every penny I own. I make my money by my own effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of every man I dealt with - the voluntary consent of those who employed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who work for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my product. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask me openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services are worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for less than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I wish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is evil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever standard you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living, as every honest man must. &lt;strong&gt;I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to support it... I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow men than you can ever hope to accomplish - but I will not say it, because I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my right to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a justification for their seizure of my property or their destruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others was the purpose of my work - my own good was my purpose, and I despise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you do not serve the public good - that nobody's good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices&lt;/strong&gt; - that when you violates the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction... &lt;strong&gt;If it were true that men could achieve their good by turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own - I would refuse.&lt;/strong&gt; I would reject it as the most contemptable evil, and I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being's right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public be damed, I will have no part of it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from the main character of &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others. I covet no man's soul, nor is my soul theirs to covet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the oath that ends up being central to &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rand also argues that, by definition, &quot;sacrifice&quot; involves giving up something of greater value in exchange for something of lesser value. Again, quoting from &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sacrifice is a surrender of a value. Full sacrifce is the surrender of all values. If you wish to achieve full virtue, you must seek no gratitude in return for your sacrifice, no praise, no love, no admiration, no self-esteem, not even the pride of being virtuous; the faintest trace of any gain dilutes your virtue. If you pursue a course of action that does not taint your life by any joy, that brings you no value in matter, no value in spirit, no gain, no profit, no reward - if you have achieved this state of total zero, you have achieved the ideal of moral perfection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are told that moral perfection is impossible to man - and, by this standard, it is. You cannot achieve it so long as you live, but the value of your life and of your person is gauged by how closely you succeed in approaching that ideal zero which is &lt;em&gt;death&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another important note: valuing another does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; involve sacrificing yourself. Again from &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor's child and let your own child die, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you give money to help a friend, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a sacrifice...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Rand, giving your child milk isn't sacrifice because you value your child. Keeping your child alive &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, benefiting you. It's only a sacrifice if you value the milk (or what you could've purchased with the equivalent cash) more than you value your child. By giving the child the milk, you're trading a lesser value (the milk) in exchange for a greater value (the survival of your child).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of the altruistic concept of &quot;virtue&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you renounce all personal desire and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue [according to the altruistic standard]: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate -  &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These ideas are explored at length in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;The Virtue of Selfishness&lt;/em&gt;. (The latter book has a deliberately provocative title by the way; she defines &quot;selfishness&quot; as &quot;rational self-interest&quot; and explores what kinds of goals and ends are proper to humans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said: I do agree with you that the Buddha, Mother Theresa, and others present a legitimate problem for objectivism - not in the sense that they were sacrificing their personal happiness and goals, but in the sense that it seems like they really weren't. Specifically, by all appearances, Mother Theresa was largely helping strangers, so under Ayn Rand's philosophy she ought to have been much more unhappy than she appears to have been. I'm hardly an expert on either her life or on the Buddha's life, but if they genuinely enjoyed helping others it seems like they fall outside of the categories that Rand has set up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as an illustration of Ayn Rand's tendency to set up false dilemmas: from her perspective, it doesn't really make sense that Mother Theresa could &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; value strangers in the way that she did (or for the reasons that she did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm inclined to think that her ideology is more incomplete (due to several faulty premises and false dilemmas) than flat-out wrong or irrational. This would be especially true if, for example, we tweaked the premises a little bit: for example, the existance of God would significantly alter certain aspects of the system. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/atlas-shrugged-fifty-years-later&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. John Piper's article on the topic&lt;/a&gt; describing that in greater detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; In objectivism, self-sacrifice is specifically &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; good. People must deal with each other by trading value for value. It's wrong to give (or to accept) the unearned. (Again, I don't necessarily agree with this, I'm mostly summarizing her argument to give a more complete picture). With that said, yes, people like the Buddha and Mother Theresa who appear to have genuinely &lt;em&gt;enjoyed&lt;/em&gt; helping others don't seem to fit into her system very well, so her philosophy appears to be incomplete at a minimum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T19:32:51.783" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T19:32:51.783" CommentCount="20" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5171" CreationDate="2017-12-27T00:51:10.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible reading: “its” is “his very body as a man.”  So, it could be a very circumlocutionary way of saying something like, “The physical urges of men are so base, women in every town die because of them.”  Or, perhaps, that women are degraded, abandoned and treated like garbage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some context within the poem for the metaphor of daughters being killed for the use of men’s bodies was when Marian in Book 6 says she was “not seduced, but simply murdered,” that is, raped, and Aurora thinks to herself, “Marian is dead?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2806" LastEditorUserId="2806" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T12:12:24.947" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T12:12:24.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5173" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:10:37.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I won’t claim to have the definitive answer, but one recurring theme in the poem is the morning sun as the source of the soul and of divine inspiration.  Aurora is even called out within the poem as a name that means the dawn.  Some instances of it include Aurora opening the window and her soul to the morning sun, Marian having been born to humble origins, but facing the east and inspired by some spirit, and Aurora’s suitor calling her a “Chaldean” who loves her “Eastern” books (meaning ancient Greek; Chaldea is now part of modern Turkey).  There are some other references to the east in the poem, like her saying that her aunt who wants her to say yes to his proposal is blowing a wind from the east, and perhaps to the garden east of Eden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, the previous stanza is talking about something like Plato’s conception of the soul (to which there are many allusions in the poem) and the next is talking about aspiring to be closer to God.  So the metaphor is, at least in part, about humans as coming from the east and wandering, like beasts, to the west in search of food and comfort. while our higher selves aspire to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2806" LastEditorUserId="2806" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T10:20:52.337" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T10:20:52.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5105" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:31:14.893" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more research, I found the answer to my question. According to &lt;em&gt;The Growth Of English Drama&lt;/em&gt; by Arnold Wynne (p. 176), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[George Peele's play] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Clyomon_and_Sir_Clamydes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; merits a passing notice if only because it contains the earliest known example of a girl disguised as a page, the Princess Neronis waiting upon her lover in that office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the play was probably written around 1570, it predates John Lyly's play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallathea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gallathea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was written around 1588, and in which two women disguise as men. (&lt;em&gt;Gallathea&lt;/em&gt; was the earliest example I was aware of when I posted the question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:31:14.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5194" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:48:59.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T03:48:59.620" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:48:59.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5195" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:48:59.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English-born American poet Edgar Guest (1881 – 1959) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:48:50.800" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:48:50.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5196" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:53:33.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T03:53:33.533" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:53:33.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5197" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:53:33.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer and game designer Neal Stephenson (born 1959) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:02.873" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:02.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:58:10.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T03:58:10.153" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T03:58:10.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T03:58:10.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Welsh poet and priest Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913 – 2000) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:40.727" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:40.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5200" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:00:57.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T04:00:57.300" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:00:57.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5201" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:00:57.300" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet, writer and soldier Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967) and his works. Sassoon was one of the leading poets of First World War." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:54.690" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:54.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:04:42.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T04:04:42.420" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:04:42.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:04:42.420" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Indian freedom fighter and poet Sarojini Naidu (1879 - 1949) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:50:00.057" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:50:00.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5204" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:10:06.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T04:10:06.813" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:10:06.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5205" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:10:06.813" Score="0" Body="Questions about Sheldon &quot;Shel&quot; Silverstein (1930 – 1999), an American poet, singer-songwriter, cartoonist, screenwriter and author of children's books." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:49:22.143" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:49:22.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5206" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:25:49.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T04:25:49.640" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T04:25:49.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5207" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-27T04:25:49.640" Score="0" Body="Questions about Toni Morrison's 1977 novel Song of Solomon. Use this tag with the [toni-morrison] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-27T08:48:57.710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T08:48:57.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4839" CreationDate="2017-12-27T15:38:43.530" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The deaths of Hamlet's friends are another step in the dissolution of Hamlet's character. He in unable to bear the burden of avenging his father and consequently causes the deaths of innocents:  Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz,  Guildenstern, Laertes, and his mother. His actions are in direct contrast to Laertes comment, &quot; I'll kill him in a churchyard,&quot; and Fortinbras making war for a piece of land that would not be large enough to bury the soldiers lost to capture it. Hamlet is a character confronted by an overwhelming burden, but it was a burden that he couldn't bear; and as a result, caused the deaths stated above,   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2808" LastActivityDate="2017-12-27T15:38:43.530" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5211" CreationDate="2017-12-27T17:00:57.397" Score="12" ViewCount="1468" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_First&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She liked the English and the Hebrew tongue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And said there was analogy between 'em;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She proved it somehow out of sacred song,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But I must leave the proofs to those who've seen 'em;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But this I heard her say, and can't be wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And all may think which way their judgments lean 'em,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;'T is strange—the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The English always used to govern &lt;strong&gt;d—n&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this word? &lt;strong&gt;Darn&lt;/strong&gt;? But what could &lt;strong&gt;govern darn&lt;/strong&gt; possibly mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;darn&quot; would not rhyme. Anyway, I'm not a native speaker, so it's doubly hard for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T15:36:33.560" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T13:34:11.840" Title="Meaning of &quot;d-n&quot; in &quot;'T is strange—the Hebrew noun which means 'I am,' the English always used to govern d—n&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T17:19:30.360" Score="3" ViewCount="2519" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the one writer you have studied foreshadow events or ideas to come later in their works, and what is the effect of such foreshadowing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was one of the questions which I have been assigned to. I am supposed to answer this question with reference to The Great Gatsby. One of my pointers is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, foreshadowing is also used to allude to us that things are about to turn horribly sour for Gatsby. This literary device was used in chapter 5, during Gatsby’s meeting with Daisy. On the day that Gatsby and Daisy met, it poured heavily. Meanwhile, inside the house, as Gatsby was reclining, “His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock, and from this position, his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy”. While conversing, “the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers, and set it back in place.” Nick also notes that “I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This series of events that occur consecutively cleverly alludes to us what is about to happen to Gatsby. Firstly, the rain that was pouring during the meeting set the tone for future events to come. It alluded to us that although things appeared to be going well for Gatsby, trouble was just outside the door. Next, the defunct clock that Gatsby leaned on as he stared down at Daisy also represented his life as a whole. Gatsby was constantly shown to be living in the past, in the love that he and Daisy once had. That is depicted through the broken clock that represented Gatsby’s life being frozen in time. The clock then begins to tilt, almost crashing to the ground. This warns us that this frozen life of Gatsby’s is about to fall apart. Even when Gatsby attempts to put things back together, as shown through him setting the clock back in its place, his life will ultimately fall apart and he might even lose it. This is foreshadowed through the fact that everyone else still believed for a moment, that the clock had smashed to pieces on the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, I felt like this analysis was a bit too hopeful. Like I was drawing conclusions from an otherwise minor event in the story. I just found it weird that Fitzgerald would have chosen to write that bit about the clock tipping over if it had no special meaning to it. So I felt that I had to analyse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my analysis here too far fetched? Any advice on how it could be otherwise interpreted? Or whether this event in the story should need analysis at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2809" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T18:03:05.293" Title="Foreshadowing in The Great Gatsby" Tags="&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2021-05-17T12:22:11.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5209" CreationDate="2017-12-27T18:46:54.693" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very subtle piece of wordplay, so it makes for an excellent question. The meaning, believe it or not, is &lt;strong&gt;God&lt;/strong&gt;, and your answer &quot;damn&quot;. This is analysed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/docview/1300107428?pq-origsite=gscholar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Ingenious Jest in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a paper by John I. Ades in &lt;em&gt;Papers on Language and Literature&lt;/em&gt; 24(4) (1988), p. 446.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Hebrew sacred name for God is YHVH, usually vocalized as &quot;Yahweh&quot; or &quot;Yahveh.&quot; In Byron's day (as in many scholarly circles yet) it was thought that &quot;Yahweh&quot; derives from a form of the Hebrew verb &quot;to be&quot; used in Exodus 3:14-15, where, in reply to Moses's request for God's name, God replies, &quot;I am&quot;. Thus, &lt;em&gt;mutatis mutandis&lt;/em&gt;, the &quot;I am&quot; that Byron wittily asserts the English use to &quot;govern d--n&quot; is, of course, &quot;God&quot;; producing the mild oath, &quot;goddamn.&quot; We see here the extraordinary lengths to which Byron would go to set up a jest. In stanza XIV Byron neatly accomplishes three objectives: he displays his etymological wit, he trivializes Donna Inez's (Lady Byron's) learning, and he fixes a satirical barb in the hide of the English gentry for habitually taking the Lord's name in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the Hebrew noun which means 'I am'&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is God, which is also used by the English to &quot;&lt;em&gt;govern damn&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in the phrase god-damn. (Presumably it's damn, not darn as you guessed, to rhyme with &quot;I am&quot; in the previous line.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interpretation of YHVH as &quot;I am&quot; is supported by the English Standard Version of the Bible itself, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+3%3A14-15&amp;amp;version=ESV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as reproduced here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word Lord, when spelled with capital letters, stands for the divine name, YHWH, which is here connected with the verb hayah, “to be” in verse 14.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T10:00:43.240" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T10:00:43.240" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-27T20:45:42.917" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_First&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This heathenish cross restored the breed again,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Ruin'd its blood, but much improved its flesh;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For from a root the ugliest in Old Spain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Sprung up a branch as beautiful as fresh;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sons no more were short, the daughters plain:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But there's a rumour which I fain would hush,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'T is said that Donna Julia's grandmamma&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Produced her Don more heirs at love than law&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this imply that she had extramarital relations, and these heirs had other fathers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T15:57:39.590" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T09:40:05.503" Title="Meaning of &quot;Produced her Don more heirs at love than law&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5213" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5219" CreationDate="2017-12-27T21:02:42.217" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_First&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Happy the nations of the moral North!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Where all is virtue, and the winter season&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sends sin, without a rag on, shivering forth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       ('T was snow that brought St. Anthony to reason);&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Where juries cast up what a wife is worth&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       By laying whate'er sum in mulct they please on&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The lover, who must pay a handsome price,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because it is a marketable vice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that in northern countries it was customary to fine an adulterous male? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it imply that an adulterous male had no recourse for his passion except to find a prostitute (but then why &quot;juries&quot; - I doubt that the price of a prostitute was ever set by a jury)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T15:57:31.480" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T14:15:51.077" Title="Meaning of &quot;Where juries cast up what a wife is worth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T01:25:36.983" Score="5" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 1983 National Theater production of The Merchant of Venice has an interesting take on a moment in act 3 scene 4. According to Shakespeare's script,  Portia is giving Lorenzo instructions, and in doing so, mentions Jessica, Lorenzo's wife, twice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PORTIA:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My people do already know my mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And will acknowledge you and Jessica&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      In place of Lord Bassanio and myself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And so farewell, till we shall meet again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LORENZO:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;JESSICA:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wish your ladyship all heart's content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PORTIA:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I thank you for your wish, and am well pleased&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      To wish it back on you: fare you well Jessica.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the 1983 adaption, the actress playing Portia adds a small detail that isn't in the script: she forgets Jessica's name twice,  pauses,  and has to be reminded of Jessica's name by Jessica herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was that detail added? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T17:57:08.427" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T07:10:49.037" Title="In the 1983 adaptation of The Merchant of Venice, why doesn't Portia know Jessica's name?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5727" CreationDate="2017-12-28T03:01:33.313" Score="2" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point in &lt;em&gt;Les Miserables&lt;/em&gt;, Victor Hugo inserted a fairly lengthy disclaimer (I don't recall the exact chapter number) explaining that his knowledge of Paris was basically accurate but several decades out of date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did he spend so much time explaining the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T07:05:21.057" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T07:05:21.057" Title="Why did Victor Hugo take several pages to say that his knowledge of Paris was woefully out of date?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5223" CreationDate="2017-12-28T06:30:01.643" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_First&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Byron:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LXXXVIII&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh Love! in such a wilderness as this,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Where transport and security entwine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here is the empire of thy perfect bliss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And here thou art a god indeed divine.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The bard I quote from does not sing amiss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       With the exception of the second line,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For that same twining &quot;transport and security&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are twisted to a phrase of some obscurity.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LXXXIX&#xA;  The poet meant, no doubt, and thus appeals&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To the good sense and senses of mankind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The very thing which every body feels,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       As all have found on trial, or may find,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That no one likes to be disturb'd at meals&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Or love.—I won't say more about &quot;entwined&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or &quot;transport,&quot; as we knew all that before,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;But beg 'security' will bolt the door&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this line? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit cryptic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T16:05:32.690" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T16:05:32.690" Title="Meaning of &quot;but beg security will bolt the door&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5213" CreationDate="2017-12-28T12:08:31.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may refer to the Common Law Tort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_conversation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘criminal conversation’&lt;/a&gt;, where ‘conversation’ means ‘sexual intercourse’. Criminal proceedings could be brought by a spouse, usually the husband, against a third party seeking compensation for breach of fidelity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suits for criminal conversation reached their height in late 18th and early 19th-century England, where large sums, often between £10,000 and £20,000 (worth upwards of £10–20 million in today's terms), could be demanded by the plaintiff, for debauching his wife. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article further cites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sir Richard Worsley lost his case against George Bisset, after it had been found that he had colluded in his own dishonour by showing his friend his wife, Seymour Dorothy Fleming, naked in a bath-house (technically he won the case, as the fact of adultery was not contested, but the jury awarded only one shilling damages).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which appears to confirm that juries would ‘cast up’ (calculate) the compensation due to the husband in respect of the value of his wife. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cases brought were private prosecutions, and the sum is technically compensation for damages experienced by the spouse who brought the case, rather than a fine for breaking the law. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These cases have no direct relevance to prostitution, referring solely to a situation where a spouse is ‘debauched’ by a third party. The compensation is to the partner of the debauched individual, rather than the individual themself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T14:15:51.077" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T14:15:51.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5220" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5422" CreationDate="2017-12-28T12:39:47.393" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5181/1015&quot;&gt;There was a poet&lt;/a&gt; who said this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poetry is the art of giving different names to the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are copied all over the internet. But is this true? In the comments of that post @Randal'Thor and @JoshuaEngel say that this is a poor description of poetry. Why is that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;FYI:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Skeptics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/q/40302/28910&quot;&gt;Was there a person made the quote about poetry that Poincaré responded to?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Mathematics: &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/2582929/157643&quot;&gt;How correct is the quote that &quot;mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things&quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastEditorUserId="1015" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T16:37:56.240" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:06:38.430" Title="Is poetry the art of giving different names to the same thing?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5221" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5222" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" Score="0" Body="Don Juan is a long poem by Lord Byron, in seventeen cantos with the last one unfinished. Use this tag with the [lord-byron] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T15:37:33.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5216" CreationDate="2017-12-28T15:56:15.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The verb &quot;beg&quot; goes with &quot;I&quot;, and &quot;security&quot; is personified.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron first quotes Campbell's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gertrude_of_Wyoming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Gertrude of Wyoming&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and then comments on the phrase &quot;transport and security&quot; from it. The words &quot;entwined&quot; and &quot;transport&quot; are both interpreted sexually - the poem suggests the idea of lovers, their bodies &lt;em&gt;entwined&lt;/em&gt;, being &lt;em&gt;transported&lt;/em&gt; by their uncontrollable urges. He coyly doesn't go into the details explicitly, because &quot;we knew all that before&quot;; instead, he focuses on &quot;security&quot;, unsubtly foreshadowing the lack of security in Juan and Julia's affair which ultimately led to their discovery:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I won't say more about &quot;entwined&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or &quot;transport,&quot; as we knew all that before,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But [I] beg [that] &quot;security&quot; will bolt the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rephrased: &lt;em&gt;the personified &quot;security&quot; should bolt the door on the lovers, so that they can enjoy their &quot;transport&quot; and being &quot;entwined&quot; without fear of being disturbed.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-28T15:56:15.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8842" CreationDate="2017-12-28T19:27:50.803" Score="3" ViewCount="507" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Tales of Goldstone Wood&lt;/em&gt; series is notorious for non-chronological writing, and the publication order doesn't at all reflect &quot;in-universe&quot; time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper chronological order of the books in the series? Is there any reason to read them in publication order (rather than chronological order)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T18:18:25.850" Title="What is the chronological order of the Tales of Goldstone Wood books?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;anne-elisabeth-stengl&gt;&lt;tales-of-goldstone-wood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5225" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12131" CreationDate="2017-12-28T19:34:06.537" Score="4" ViewCount="1291" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne Elisabeth Stengl &lt;a href=&quot;http://anneelisabethstengl.blogspot.com/2017/01/doings-at-drakenheath-looking-to-2017.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;announced&lt;/a&gt; in January 2017 that she was writing a new series under a pen name, but refused to disclose what the series was or what the pen name would be. The text of the announcement is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the project into which I am currently channeling all my efforts. I have two and a half novels written in the series, and lots more in the works. BUT . . . after much thought and consideration, I have decided to pursue this series under a pen name. It's very different work from Goldstone Wood--much darker and more adult (not dirty. I don't write dirty books). I kind of doubt that most of you loyal imps will take to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you discover this new series on your own and enjoy it, great! But I'm not going to market it here, under this name, and I'm probably not going to let anyone know my new pen name, at least not at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author evidently isn't too dilligent about updating her blog, though. Is there evidence that such a book was published and, if so, what's the book/series? What name was it written under?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T12:07:41.850" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T05:39:01.220" Title="Did Anne Elisabeth Stengl ever write a book under a pen name like she announced that she would? If so, what was it?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;anne-elisabeth-stengl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-28T20:14:13.933" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was in school, meaning early 2000's, I read a book that seemed older at the time. It was a biography of Einstein and also delved into explaining some of the science and math behind his theories at the appropriate times. I remember illustrations with stick figure based simple line drawings to accompany these segments. I cannot remember the title and looking through the biographies of Einstein is daunting to say the least, but I've tried. Note that this book may no longer be published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Illustrations of note are a baseball being thrown on a train and frames of reference being draw as rectangles traveling through space. Again, these are simple stick figures and line drawings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone perhaps point to some possibilities I can look into getting. I'd like to try to find another copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2817" LastEditorUserId="2817" LastEditDate="2018-06-25T20:07:48.487" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T20:07:48.487" Title="Which Biography of Einstein" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;biography&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5227" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-29T02:54:20.053" Score="-1" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.potw.org/archive/potw219.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this poem&lt;/a&gt;, when comparing the caged bird to suppressed black people in America, is the poet using metaphor or symbol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2819" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T12:40:57.217" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T09:59:12.160" Title="What is the poetic technique used in &quot;I know why the caged bird sings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;paul-laurence-dunbar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5368" CreationDate="2017-12-29T03:11:46.740" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked for a while but cannot find if there is an original publication of Khrushchev's memoirs in Russian. I'd much rather read it in its original language since I speak Russian, but I can only find English versions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2820" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T12:42:37.357" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T10:21:35.990" Title="Is there a Russian edition of Khrushchev Remembers?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;nikita-khrushchev&gt;&lt;khrushchev-remembers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1743" CreationDate="2017-12-29T15:49:07.923" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Le Carre's claim that he doesn't know is hogwash. Or whitewash.  Whatever.  Someone who writes and thinks as he does does nothing without intention.  The complete answer may be of a larger context due to the fact that Le Carre is of and from and works for British intelligence.  Don't let anything fool you that he &quot;resigned&quot; or &quot;retired&quot;. Doesn't happen.  He just moved into the PR department.  Along with his contemporary, Len Deighton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you read Le Carre's legend (I'm sorry, life history) you learn his father was a legendary con man who went afoul of the both the law and the &quot;boys&quot;.  So he was exposed to the &quot;bent&quot; or crooked life early on.  A &lt;strong&gt;&quot;square John&quot; (John le Carre)&lt;/strong&gt; is someone who is honest, forthright, and living straight.  From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/square-john&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An ordinary honest person; a good citizen; a noncriminal person who can be victimized by, and is contemptuously regarded by, criminals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Substitute the word &quot;Spy&quot; for &quot;Criminals&quot;, and I think you have it. I think he is having a little fun with us, because I would say there is certainly nothing &quot;on the square&quot; about his story, role, or story sources.  The fact that he will not reveal this tells us it is his private joke and he wants to keep it that way, knowing that to reveal it would expose something he (and his handlers) does not wish known. I'm sure all his buddies in MI-6 get the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this appears to be a lot of conjecture; however, the evidence is all there if you read between the lines, know a bit about how intelligence services really work, and know the code. To me, the smoking gun: the solid, unrefutable proof, is given away by the definition of &quot;Square John&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2823" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T17:47:16.590" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T17:47:16.590" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5232" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T18:57:28.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T18:57:28.170" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T18:57:28.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5233" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T18:57:28.170" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American composer and lyricist, Stephen Sondheim and his works, including his musicals Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Into the Woods." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T20:44:43.173" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T20:44:43.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5234" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T18:59:49.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T18:59:49.980" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T18:59:49.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5235" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T18:59:49.980" Score="0" Body="For questions about Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods. Use this tag with the [stephen-sondheim] tag." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T20:44:33.040" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T20:44:33.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5236" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:37:05.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T19:37:05.057" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:37:05.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5237" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:37:05.057" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Anne Elisabeth Stengl (born 1950) or her life as a writer. She is the author of the fantasy series 'Tales of Goldstone Wood'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:15:51.187" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:15:51.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5238" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:38:11.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T19:38:11.860" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:38:11.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5239" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:38:11.860" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fantasy series Tales of Goldstone Wood by Anne Elisabeth Stengl. Use this tag with the [anne-elisabeth-stengl] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T21:01:32.193" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T21:01:32.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5240" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:40:03.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T19:40:03.343" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T19:40:03.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5241" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-29T19:40:03.343" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American poet, novelist and playwright Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872 – 1906)  and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2017-12-29T21:01:43.893" LastActivityDate="2017-12-29T21:01:43.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5242" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-29T21:23:13.990" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find the title of a novel I read back in the 1990s. The only thing I recall about it is the somewhat absurdist premise of a man being hired to paint a green square on a patch of ground. Thanks in advance for your help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, it was a hardcover edition, and was likely published between the 1960s-1990s. It took place during a contemporary time period. Written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2824" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2017-12-30T13:20:56.710" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T13:20:56.710" Title="Book about man hired to paint green square" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5225" CreationDate="2017-12-30T12:07:20.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Unknown.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've scoured the internet for information about this, and it seems that right now, it's not known what Stengl's pen name could be, or even whether or not she's yet published her new series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://anneelisabethstengl.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/doings-at-drakenheath-looking-to-2017.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;announcement on her blog&lt;/a&gt; was less than a year ago (27 January 2017), and she explicitly says that she doesn't want her new pen name associated with her real name, &quot;at least not at first&quot;. She also mentions that she isn't planning to update that blog much in the foreseeable future. So she's pretty much dried up as a source of information, and we need to look elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sometimes happens that when an author switches to a new pen name, enthusiastic fans still manage to identify them, from their writing style or other clues. But if anyone has done this for Ms Stengl, they don't seem to have publicised their discovery - perhaps out of respect for her wish to keep the two names separate. &lt;a href=&quot;http://jenelleschmidt.com/dravens-light/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Some of her fans&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;http://kmshea.com/2017/08/02/a-sohma-surprise/#comment-52917&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;their sadness at her change&lt;/a&gt;, but nobody mentions having discovered her new identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1170/17&quot;&gt;Sometimes&lt;/a&gt; the author under their new pen name even leaves clues pointing back to their real name for sufficiently astute readers. But this is impossible to check without knowing where to look for the new pen name, and again there's no evidence of this on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered if perhaps Stengl kept the same publisher for her new series. But &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rooglewoodpress.com/authors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rooglewood Press&lt;/a&gt;'s list of authors includes photos of all of them, so this doesn't seem possible (unless Stengl changed her appearance as well as her nom de plume).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short - it looks like the secret remains with Stengl and her family, friends, agents, and publishers. For now, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T12:07:20.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-30T15:15:37.813" Score="7" ViewCount="10519" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the exact text (&lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Act 2 Scene 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arragon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fire seven times tried this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seven times tried that judgment is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That did never choose amiss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some there be that shadows kiss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such have but a shadow’s bliss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no problems in understanding the text before and after this but I can't seem to 'get' the meaning of this particular extract.&#xA;I think that these lines roughly translate to :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following has been tested seven times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who consider their judgement seven times&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are never wrong (?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few people who chase illusions(without digging deeper) and such people only have illusory bliss , ie, they think that they're happy when truly, they're not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if that's correct. I would really appreciate it if someone could explain to me, where I'm going wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, I would really like to know what the deal about the number 'seven' is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2827" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T11:43:32.390" Title="What's the meaning of the text in the scroll that the Prince of Arragon finds in the silver casket in Act 2, Scene 9 of The Merchant of Venice?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5248" CreationDate="2017-12-30T19:47:13.073" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this children's novel by getting it from the library, but I gave it back and can't find it again no matter where I search. The plot is about a boy whose father believes that &quot;signs,&quot; omens, and events show that the end of the world is coming soon. The family has to build an underground shelter to prepare for this,  but the boy starts having doubts and has to choose between family and the outside. The cover includes a starry,  dark night sky. The title is three words: first one is &quot;chasing,&quot; &quot;running,&quot; or something similar, the second is &quot;the,&quot; and the third is &quot;night, &quot; &quot;dark, &quot; &quot;stars, &quot; or something similar. I have been looking up combinations of such words,  but the results so far weren't of the book I was looking for. It was published fairly recently. In the version I read, there was an advertisement for another book,  which was about children who were told they lived after the world's end, but the tale they were told was doubtful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2826" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T22:15:43.967" Title="Novel about boy facing the apocalyptic beliefs of his family" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-30T22:00:16.750" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cluny the Scourge's armor is described thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His long ragged black coat was made of batwings, fastened at the throat with a mole skull. The immense war helmet he wore had the plumes of a blackbird and the horns of a stag beetle adorning it. From beneath the slanted visor his one eye glared viciously out at the Abbey before him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cluny is described as being a very large rat. Beetles are generally... quite smaller than a rat, especially one the size of Cluny. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Cluny have stag beetles' horns on his helmet? Wouldn't they be tiny? Or are stag beetles larger in &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T23:39:51.253" Title="What are stag beetles like in the world of Redwall?" Tags="&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5246" CreationDate="2017-12-30T22:15:43.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22875507-watch-the-sky&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watch the Sky&lt;/a&gt; by Kirsten Hubbard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3grX1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3grX1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The signs are everywhere, Jory's stepfather, Caleb, says. Red leaves&#xA;  in the springtime. Pages torn from a library book. All the fish in the&#xA;  aquarium facing the same way. A cracked egg with twin yolks.&#xA;  Everywhere and anywhere. And because of them Jory's life is far from&#xA;  ordinary. He must follow a very specific set of rules: don't trust&#xA;  anyone outside the family, have your works at the ready just in case,&#xA;  and always, always watch out for the signs. The end is coming, and&#xA;  they must be prepared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;School is Jory's only escape from Caleb's tight grasp, and with the&#xA;  help of new friends Jory begins to explore a world beyond his family's&#xA;  farm. As Jory's friendships grow, Caleb notifies Jory's mother and&#xA;  siblings that the time has come for final preparations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They begin an exhausting schedule digging a mysterious tunnel in&#xA;  anticipation of the disaster. But as the hold gets deeper, so does the&#xA;  family's doubt about whether Caleb's prophecy is true. When the stark&#xA;  reality of his stepfather's plans becomes clear, Jory must choose&#xA;  between living his own life or following Caleb, shutting his eyes to&#xA;  the bright world he's just begun to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T22:15:43.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5247" CreationDate="2017-12-30T23:39:51.253" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Size doesn't matter ...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may find &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/48832/31394&quot;&gt;Are the Redwall creatures their natural real-world size?&lt;/a&gt; an interesting read. The long and the short of it is: &lt;strong&gt;don't worry too much about the animals' size in the Redwall series&lt;/strong&gt;. The author didn't pay too much attention to consistency there, and if you try to analyse it too much, you'll lose your immersion in the story. We don't generally notice much difference in size between mice, hedgehogs, squirrels, moles, rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets, etc. - they interact with each other much as humans would. Badgers, some birds, and possibly hares are noticeably bigger, but the relative sizes aren't always consistent. Just go with the flow and don't worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian Jacques has &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwall.org/faq.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;said the following&lt;/a&gt; in response to questions from fans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the animals in your stories walk on all fours or, do they walk erect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The creatures in my stories are as big or small as your imagination wants them to be. My imagination does not see them on all fours.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have just started your books. I have read Redwall and am now working on Mattimeo. At the beginning of Redwall there is the &amp;quot;riderless horsecart&amp;quot; and now in Mattimeo there is mention of a ship that sank. Are there humans somewhere in the realm of Redwall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No, there are no humans, my first book Redwall did mention the horse and cart but no humans are ever in the stories and I don't intend that they should ever be. The ships are generally crewed by vermin.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His answer to the first question supports what I said above (based on my memory of reading all the Redwall books) about lack of consistency: the size of the animals isn't usually all that relevant to the story, so you can imagine them however you want. (And when it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; relevant, it's not always consistent, so thinking too hard about it will break your suspension of disbelief.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Relevant to the second part of the quote above, there's something else to take into account: what &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EarlyInstallmentWeirdness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; has dubbed &lt;strong&gt;Early Installment Weirdness&lt;/strong&gt;. At the time of &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, the earliest published book in the series, a lot of what would later become established tropes of the Redwall universe were still in flux. Horses never appear in any of the later books; vehicles such as carts do, but the animals (regardless of species) always seem to fit into them in a comparable way to how humans do in reality, rather than an entire army of vermin fitting into a single cart. So it may be that this mention of a stag beetle's horns fitting nicely on a rat's helmet is something that would never have happened in later books. Generally, you should worry even less about inconsistencies in &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; than in later books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;... but stag beetles are actually pretty big.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, all that aside, it's not too weird for a stag beetle's horns to be of noticeable size on the helmet of a rat. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ptes.org/campaigns/stag-beetles/stag-beetle-facts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stag beetles of the type found in Britain&lt;/a&gt; can be nearly 8cm long, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_rat#Description&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brown rats&lt;/a&gt; are around 20-25cm long, not counting their tails. Assuming that Cluny is an unusually large rat, and that the beetle he used was also unusually large (he'd want an impressive battle helm), it would be a little under one-third his size. Imagine a half-metre-long stag beetle compared to an average human man; that doesn't sound too unrealistic for using its horns as a helmet ornament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So your premise that &amp;quot;Beetles are generally... quite smaller than a rat&amp;quot; is incorrect. However, I'll stress again that all of this is way overkill for thinking about animal sizes in the Redwall series. Cf., for example, Urgan Nagru the Foxwolf, who was a fox wearing a wolf's skull on his head:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phkvG.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phkvG.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Foxwolf&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foxes are considerably smaller than wolves in reality, yet nobody batted an eye at this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last piece of evidence for beetle size in the Redwall series is the water beetle Grubwhacker in the book &lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt; (one of very few other mentions of beetles throughout the series), who seems to be roughly the size of a large dog when compared to the shrew Log-a-Log:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An old black water beetle sat by the fire. [...] He sat stroking the beetle's back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I call this fellow Grubwhacker. He lives nearby, comes in and out of here for his food, just like a pet.&amp;quot; [...] Taking a loaf and a piece of cooked fish, he placed them upon Grubwhacker's back, where they could be carried without falling off. Log-a-Log patted his pet affectionately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Go on Grubwhacker,&amp;quot; he told him. &amp;quot;Back to your missus and the little uns.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beetle trundled off obediently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it doesn't seem unrealistic for a creature this size to have its mandibles on a rat's helmet. Bear in mind, too, that your quote doesn't even say the horns are a major part of the helmet - just that they're &amp;quot;adorning it&amp;quot;. They could conceivably be much smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2017-12-30T23:39:51.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5227" CreationDate="2017-12-31T03:15:55.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Metaphor and symbolism are related,  but in symbolism,  the thing another object stands for is generally more complex and abstract than in metaphor. Therefore,  in this case, the bird itself represents oppressed black people, so metaphor is used for the specific case you ask about. &#xA;Here is some information that supports this contention: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1173/is-there-a-fine-line-between-symbolism-and-metaphors-in-literature&quot;&gt;Is there a fine line between symbolism and metaphors in literature?&lt;/a&gt; - English SE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scepticalprophet.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/the-difference-between-metaphors-and-symbols/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Difference Between Metaphors and Symbols&lt;/a&gt; - The Sceptical Prophet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2826" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T09:59:12.160" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T09:59:12.160" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5260" CreationDate="2017-12-31T16:06:11.163" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_First&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The unexpected death of some old lady&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or gentleman of seventy years complete,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who've made &quot;us youth&quot; wait too—too long already&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For an estate, or cash, or country seat,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Still breaking, but with stamina so steady&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That all the &lt;strong&gt;Israelites&lt;/strong&gt; are fit to mob its&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Next owner for their double-damn'd post-obits.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does he use the word &lt;strong&gt;Israelites&lt;/strong&gt;? The poem is about English persons. He is probably alluding to something, but I don't know to what exactly.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T14:50:02.093" Title="Meaning of &quot;Israelites&quot; in Byron's Don Juan: &quot;That all the Israelites are fit to mob its next owner for their double-damn'd post-obits&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5257" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5258" CreationDate="2017-12-31T19:27:48.600" Score="-1" ViewCount="620" Body="&lt;p&gt;When she gave actual prophecies, Sybill Trelawney had a completely different &quot;persona,&quot; not remembering what she said afterwards. Was she named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_(Schreiber_book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;the&quot; Sybil&lt;/a&gt; (the one known for multiple personality disorder)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:09:13.133" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:09:13.133" Title="Was Sybill Trelawney named after &quot;the&quot; Sybil?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5257" CreationDate="2017-12-31T19:52:13.097" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;JKR has stated this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sybill's first name is a homonym of 'Sibyl', which was a female clairvoyant in ancient times. My American editor wanted me to use 'Sibyl', but I preferred my version, because while it keeps the reference to the august clairvoyants of old, it is really no more than a variant the [sic] unfashionable female name 'Sybil'. Professor Trelawney, I felt, did not really qualify as a 'Sibyl'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/sybill-trelawney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Pottermore)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page for 'Sibyl', we see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sibyls were women that the ancient Greeks believed were oracles. The earliest sibyls, according to legend, prophesied at holy sites. Their prophecies were influenced by divine inspiration from a deity; originally at Delphi and Pessinos, the deities were chthonic deities. In Late Antiquity, various writers attested to the existence of sibyls in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So - &lt;strong&gt;no, she wasn't named after Sybil Dorsett; she was named after the sibyls of legend&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T12:54:22.460" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T12:54:22.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5259" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2017-12-31T22:22:13.617" Score="6" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of the musical itself is &quot;Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat&quot;, which implies that the coat is a focus - the whole musical is named after it! The musical also ends with the &quot;Any Dream Will Do&quot; reprise, and the very last part of the musical is the &lt;em&gt;give me my colored coat&lt;/em&gt; song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the coat remains pretty much unmentioned for like the whole musical. It's mentioned in the introductory &quot;Any Dream Will Do&quot;. It's introduced in &quot;Joseph's Coat&quot;, then mentioned offhand in &quot;Joseph's Dreams&quot;. It gets ripped in the next song, but only barely gets mentioned in this song. In the &quot;One More Angel&quot; song, while the visuals show Jacob holding the ripped coat and everything, the song itself only has the &lt;em&gt;his bloodstained coat is tribute&lt;/em&gt; part - a single message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, it's only mentioned briefly in &quot;Go Go Joseph&quot;, with &lt;em&gt;you and your dreamcoat ahead of your time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this, as far as I can see, it's not mentioned until the last song, with &lt;em&gt;give me my colored coat&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why, if the musical was named after this singular article of clothing, did the coats play such a small part?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T01:41:26.970" Title="If Joseph's coat is so important, why does it get ignored for most of the musical?" Tags="&lt;joseph-and-technicolor-dreamcoat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5255" CreationDate="2017-12-31T22:25:37.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's a reference to money lenders, who were (or were perceived to be) Jewish.  Heirs of rich people would borrow money to support their life styles, money to be paid back (under the terms of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/post-obit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;post-obit bond&lt;/a&gt;) when they inherited the family fortune.  (Or so it works out in novels by Georgette Hayer, Bulwer-Lytton, &#xA;Disraeli, etc.) The OED has a bunch of citations, including a different Byron one. So on the death of the wealthy ancestor, the once-poor heir would be pestered by the money lenders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T14:50:02.093" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T14:50:02.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5261" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-31T23:40:20.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T23:40:20.223" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T23:40:20.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5262" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-31T23:40:20.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about the writings of Nikita Khrushchev (1894 – 1971), who led the Soviet Union as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T07:59:01.867" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T07:59:01.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5263" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2017-12-31T23:41:46.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2017-12-31T23:41:46.353" LastActivityDate="2017-12-31T23:41:46.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5264" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2017-12-31T23:41:46.353" Score="0" Body="Questions about Khrushchev Remembers (1970), the memoirs of the Russian politician Nikita Khrushchev. Use this tag with the [nikita-khrushchev] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T07:58:57.650" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T07:58:57.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5259" CreationDate="2018-01-01T01:41:26.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least some of the plot emphasis probably reflects the underlying text: really, the text only mentions the coat twice: first, when Jacob gave it to him (Genesis 37:3), secondly, when Joseph visits his brothers while wearing it (v. 23), and third when Joseph's brothers sell him into slavery, dye the tunic with goat's blood, and bring it to their father as &amp;quot;evidence&amp;quot; that he was killed by wild animals (v. 31 - 33).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primary reason that the text even mentions it in the first place is as an illustration of Jacob's blatant favoritism (which was a major factor in his brothers' jealousy), and so that the brothers could use it later to fake Joseph's death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his sons, because he was the son of his old age; and he made him a varicolored tunic. (Genesis 37:3, NASB)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when Joseph shows up wearing it to check on his brothers, they were finally so resentful by his (perceived) arrogant behavior that they decide to kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Here comes that dreamer!” they said to each other. “Come now, let’s kill him and throw him into one of these cisterns and say that a ferocious animal devoured him. Then we’ll see what comes of his dreams.” (21-22)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only due to the dissuasion of Ruben (the oldest) that they refrain from killing him. Instead, Judah convinced them (while Ruben was gone) that it would be pointless to kill him and that they should sell him into slavery instead. At this point, they decide to fake his death and make it look like an accident:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;31 Then they got Joseph’s robe, slaughtered a goat and dipped the robe in the blood. 32 They took the ornate robe back to their father and said, “We found this. Examine it to see whether it is your son’s robe.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;33 He recognized it and said, “It is my son’s robe! Some ferocious animal has devoured him. Joseph has surely been torn to pieces.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, then, (as previously mentioned) the cloak served two purposes in the text: as a symbol of Jacob's favoritism and as a means for the brothers to cover up the fact that they sold him into slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting side note: some translations don't even refer to it as &amp;quot;multicolored&amp;quot; - for example, the translators of the New International Version, feeling that the word was somewhat ambiguous, merely referred to it as an &amp;quot;ornate&amp;quot; tunic without any mention of it being multicolored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance of the coat, then, is primarily that it's the instigator of the story. It's symbolic of Jacob's favoritism, the favoritism that set the events of the story into motion, and is the means by which the brothers sell him into slavery and make it look like Joseph was killed by wild animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The musical, of course, adds the symbolism of Joseph wearing the coat again when he was reunited with his father. (The text doesn't actually mention anything like this occuring, but it's good symbolism for the musical). In the musical, it's symbolic of loss and regain - it's both something that (indirectly) instigates the story and something that's there at the end of the story as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original text, it's only actually essential to the plot itself at two points: the point where Jacob gave it to him (as a symbol of his favoritism) and the point at which the brothers sell him into slavery. The musical take it one step further and uses it as a metaphor for the entire storyline as well as the theme of loss and regain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T01:41:26.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5272" CreationDate="2018-01-01T13:39:21.230" Score="6" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started reading C.S. Lewis's book &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, the third in his Space Trilogy (and I'm devouring it - what a story!) The following passage, from when Mark first meets Miss &amp;quot;Fairy&amp;quot; Hardcastle, isn't quite clear to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be misleading to say that he liked her. She had indeed excited in him all the distaste which a young man feels at the proximity of something rankly, even insolently, sexed and at the same time wholly unattractive. And something in her cold eye had told him that she was well aware of this reaction and found it amusing. She had told him a good many &lt;strong&gt;smoking-room stories&lt;/strong&gt;. Often before now Mark had shuddered at the clumsy efforts of the emancipated female to indulge in this kind of humour, but his shudders had always been consoled by a sense of superiority. This time he had the feeling that he was the butt; this woman was exasperating male prudery for her diversion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3 (emphasis mine; full text available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-thathideousstrength/lewiscs-thathideousstrength-00-h.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried searching the internet for &lt;code&gt;smoking-room stories&lt;/code&gt;, but the results are things like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smoking_Room&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wdl.org/en/item/13060/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; which aren't useful at all. &lt;strong&gt;What does this phrase mean?&lt;/strong&gt; It seems to be part of the characterisation of Miss Hardcastle, so I'd like to understand it better, even though by now I've got far enough to know exactly what kind of person she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T20:15:59.643" Title="What are &quot;smoking-room stories&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5267" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5268" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis, or about any of its constituent novels: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Use with the [c-s-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T14:04:36.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5270" CreationDate="2018-01-01T16:23:18.633" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Senhor Don Alfonso stood confused;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Antonia bustled round the ransack'd room,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, turning up her nose, with looks abused&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Her master and his myrmidons, of whom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not one, except the attorney, was amused;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       He, like Achates, &lt;strong&gt;faithful to the tomb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So there were quarrels&lt;/strong&gt;, cared not for the cause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Knowing they must be settled by the laws.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the words in bold? I read about Achates, and probably he was faithful to some tomb in the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;, but what is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;so there were quarrels&lt;/strong&gt;? I cannot understand it.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T16:58:47.023" Title="Meaning of &quot;faithful to the tomb, so there were quarrels&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5269" CreationDate="2018-01-01T16:58:47.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;like Achates, faithful to the tomb&quot; means &quot;like Achates, who was [Aeneas's] faithful friend forever&quot;.  Just as Achates would join any fight Aeneas was in, so too the attorney would join any legal fight his clients were in.  A paraphrase of the sentence might be: &quot;Only the attorney was amused, because no matter what the dispute was about, it would be settled legally, and he would faithfully support  his client's interests, just like Achates  would fight for Aeneas no matter what.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T16:58:47.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5284" CreationDate="2018-01-01T17:45:16.737" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Julia, in fact, had tolerable grounds,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alfonso's loves with Inez were well known,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But whether 't was that one's own guilt confounds—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But that can't be, as has been often shown,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A lady with apologies abounds;—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It might be that her silence sprang alone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From delicacy to Don Juan's ear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To whom she knew his mother's fame was dear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand &quot;&lt;strong&gt;a lady with apologies abounds&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; = &quot;a lady is full of apologies&quot;, i.e. a lady usually apologizes a lot? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that does not seem to fit the overall meaning; She is acting brazenly here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-01T18:38:19.677" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:47:29.610" Title="Meaning of &quot;a lady with apologies abounds&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5266" CreationDate="2018-01-01T20:15:59.643" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wordy, but fun to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From context, &quot;smoking-room stories&quot; means something like off-color stories, dirty stories, steamy stories. One dictionary entry for the adjectival form of &quot;smoking-room&quot; glosses it as &quot;Marked by indecency; obscene: smoking-room humor.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you google &quot;smoking-room humor&quot; you will get many relevant hits, of varying degrees of sordidness.  (All subsequent examples were found this way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one extreme, an odd 1899 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=NU9DAAAAYAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;My smoking room companions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by William King, apparently devoid of sordidness but full of piffle. Only slightly more relevant but more fun to read is Mark Twain's 1898 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/2895-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Following the equator&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where in chapter 1 he describes the captain of an ocean liner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our young captain was a very handsome man, tall and perfectly formed, the very figure to show up a smart uniform’s finest effects. ... He avoided the smoking room. He had no vices. He did not smoke or chew tobacco or take snuff; he did not swear, or use slang or rude, or coarse, or indelicate language, or make puns, or tell anecdotes, or laugh intemperately, or raise his voice above the moderate pitch enjoined by the canons of good form. When he gave an order, his manner modified it into a request. After dinner he and his officers joined the ladies and gentlemen in the ladies’ saloon, and shared in the singing and piano playing, and helped turn the music. ... The electric lights burned there as late as the ladies and their friends might desire; but they were not allowed to burn in the smoking-room after eleven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here there is no statement of anything improper in the smoking room, but the fact that the captain  preferred the gentilities of the ladies' saloon to the smoking room does allow us to surmise  that tobacco, slang, puns and anecdotes, etc. might be found there.  (Chapter 2 also has a smoking room episode.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other  hits  are more to the point.  Jean Harrell's 1995 &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=HXc2MNp7ffIC&amp;amp;pg=PA244&amp;amp;lpg=PA244&amp;amp;dq=%22smoking-room+humor%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2oT_d0b5eH&amp;amp;sig=7suvQ8Wa3PSy0hTNB3dlXt3x-I0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjGkdrhw7fYAhWQQ98KHVzUCbw4ChDoAQgvMAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22smoking-room%20humor%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caravagio and his two cardinals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has this zinger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps the most generic token of how group nudity evokes boasting is the phrase &quot;locker room humor,&quot; which seems to survive, while the synonym &quot;smoking room humor&quot; has faded as women took to smoking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This usage is found in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1990/spring/esquire-v-walker-2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1990 report&lt;/a&gt; of a 1943 law case against &lt;em&gt;Esquire magazine&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Postal authorities called only nine witnesses, drawn largely from Washington society, to prove its claim that Esquire's smoking-room humor overstepped the bounds of mailability. Clergy played an important role. Among the many clippings in the case file is one that shows the Methodist resident bishop of Washington, Edwin Hughes, eyeing the Varga girl for April 1943. The bishop is quoted as saying &quot;I wouldn't care to exhibit this in my Sunday School class.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From all of this I would conclude that Harrell's description is close to what Lewis had in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T20:15:59.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5275" CreationDate="2018-01-01T22:18:01.680" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My breast has been all weakness, is so yet;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But still I think I can collect my mind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My blood still rushes where my spirit's set,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       &lt;strong&gt;As roll the waves before the settled wind;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart is feminine, nor can forget—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To all, except one image, madly blind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this line? &quot;Settled wind&quot; is a wind that has settled, isn't it? If it has settled, how can any waves roll ahead of it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T22:35:16.200" Title="Meaning of &quot;As roll the waves before the settled wind&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5276" CreationDate="2018-01-01T22:23:36.477" Score="4" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My breast has been all weakness, is so yet;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But still I think I can collect my mind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My blood still rushes where my spirit's set,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       As roll the waves before the settled wind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart is feminine, nor can forget—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To all, except one image, madly blind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of these lines? What kind of needle/pole is it? Why does the needle shake, and why does the pole stand? And why are they compared to her heart? And how can a heart vibrate &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; a soul? So cryptic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T23:33:29.130" Title="Meaning of &quot;So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole, as vibrates my fond heart to my fixed soul&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5273" CreationDate="2018-01-01T22:35:16.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;settled wind&quot; means the same as a steady wind: one whose &lt;em&gt;direction&lt;/em&gt; has settled. (For some reason, the best sources I can find for this are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.proz.com/kudoz/spanish_to_english/ships_sailing_maritime/1470500-viento_entablado.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation sites&lt;/a&gt;.) This is as opposed to shifting winds - those whose direction keeps changing, making them hard to predict and to steer by. The important thing about wind is usually its direction, not its strength, until you get up to &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; strong winds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the wind direction keeps changing, the waves tend to be more confused and harder to steer in. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.boatsafe.com/nauticalknowhow/waves.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article about waves&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, a change in wind direction over existing waves can create confusion and hence larger waves. If a wind has been blowing northeast over an open body of water for three days and suddenly switches to northwest over that same body of water, new wavelettes will form within the existing system of waves. The energy of both systems will multiply to create larger waves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas waves rolling before a settled wind - one in a single fixed direction - will be able to move clearly and smoothly without interference. If the wind keeps blowing in the same direction for a prolonged period, these waves can increase in size due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_feedback&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;positive feedback&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;This is the situation which the speaker in your quote is using as a simile: her blood is rushing in the direction her &quot;spirit's set&quot;, smoothly and without hesitation, just as waves roll in the direction of a steady (&quot;settled&quot;) wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T22:35:16.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5274" CreationDate="2018-01-01T23:33:29.130" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &quot;needle&quot; is a magnetic needle, and the &quot;pole&quot; one of the earth's poles.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the image that immediately springs to mind upon hearing the words &quot;needle&quot; and &quot;pole&quot; together, and it fits with the metaphor. The writer is telling her lover that her heart gravitates towards him just as the compass needle towards the pole. The pole &quot;stands&quot; still, and the needle moves around (&quot;shakes&quot;) before deciding firmly to point at it. In her mind, her lover is likewise a &quot;fix'd&quot; thing, and her emotions quiver around (&quot;vibrate&quot;) before deciding firmly to point at him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-01T23:33:29.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5319" CreationDate="2018-01-02T14:23:36.087" Score="5" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching the entire internet (or mostly) and can't find when &lt;em&gt;Frühling&lt;/em&gt; by Hermann Hesse was first published. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find that in 1948, Richard Strauss wrote the album &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Last_Songs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Last Songs&lt;/a&gt; in which he turns said poem into a song. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Hesse#Becoming_a_writer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesse published his first collection of poems in 1896&lt;/a&gt;, the poem must have been published between 1896 and 1948. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/four-last-songs-the-poems-that-comprise-the-final-song-cycle-by-richard-strauss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One website claims&lt;/a&gt; that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... between 1945 and his death in 1962 he [Hermann Hesse] wrote some&#xA;  50 poems, among them the three that Strauss set to music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was true, the poem must've been published between 1945 and 1948.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first stanza of the poem is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In dämmrigen Grüften&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  träumte ich lang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  von deinen Bäumen und blauen Lüften,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  von deinem Duft und Vogelgesang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T15:49:22.813" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:55:46.633" Title="In which year was Frühling by Hermann Hesse published?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;hermann-hesse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5278" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-02T14:51:31.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T14:51:31.710" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T14:51:31.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5279" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-02T14:51:31.710" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German-born novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877 –  1962) and his works. Hesse is best known for novels such as Demian (1919), Siddhartha (1922), Der Steppenwolf (1927) and Das Glasperlenspiel (1943; The Glass Bead Game). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T18:36:21.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T18:36:21.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5280" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5413" CreationDate="2018-01-02T15:08:14.783" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been searching the entire internet (or mostly) and can't find when &lt;em&gt;Frühlingsbotschaft&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Heine was first published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I double-checked and it is not part of his collections &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Gedichte_(Heine,_1822)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gedichte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, published 1822&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Drei_und_drei%C3%9Fig_Gedichte_von_Heinrich_Heine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drei und dreißig Gedichte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, published 1824&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Buch_der_Lieder&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Buch der Lieder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1826 &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Neue_Gedichte_(1844)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neue Gedichte&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1844&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Vermischte_Schriften_1_(Heine_1854)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vermischte Schriften 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1854&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Heinrich_Heine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia doesn't list it under his works&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two verses of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Liebliches Geläute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T16:55:59.400" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T12:32:12.990" Title="In which year was Frühlingsbotschaft by Heinrich Heine published?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;heinrich-heine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:27:30.637" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the very end (Act III, Scene 11) of Emmanuel Roblès's play &lt;em&gt;Montserrat&lt;/em&gt;, Izquierdo replies to Father Coronil's, after asking if he had regretted his decision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;ENGLISH:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. He only talked to me about the joy of others!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FRENCH:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Non. Il me parlait seulement de la joie des autres !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he mean by this exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorDisplayName="user2354" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T15:36:15.820" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T15:36:15.820" Title="What is the meaning of Izquierdo's ending statement?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;emmanuel-robles&gt;&lt;montserrat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5282" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:31:25.143" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T17:31:25.143" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:31:25.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5283" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:31:25.143" Score="0" Body="For questions about the French author Emmanuel Roblès or about any of his literary works (in which case, please use the appropriate title tag alongside this one). Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:31:27.270" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:31:27.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5271" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:38:26.407" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I've read Don Juan, but from what I can remember -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Byron isn't talking about Julia apologizing here.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stanza happens in between Alfonso first showing up in Julia's bedroom under the impression that Juan is there, which he is. Alfonso finds nothing and leaves. The stanza in question happens after Antonia suggests putting Juan in the closet before Alfonso returns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'A lady with apologies abounds;—&#xA;It might be that her silence sprang alone&#xA;From delicacy to Don Juan's ear,&#xA;To whom she knew his mother's fame was dear.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;From what I can remember, this stanza specifically is Byron making reference to the fact that previously, Julia had complained about Alfonso &amp;amp; Inez and also lied/made up excuses about herself and Juan to ease Alfonso's suspicions, but is strangely silent there and then.&lt;/strong&gt; The stanza's end pretty much says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Julia usually had infinite excuses and apologies, but her silence at the moment might be because Don Juan loves and respects his mother and Julia doesn't want him to hear her slander Inez (in regard to his mother's love of Alfonso), so she stays silent despite it ruining her alibi.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In short: 'a lady with apologies abound' &lt;strong&gt;does&lt;/strong&gt; mean 'a lady full of apologies', but not in the sense that she is apologizing at that point in time in the story. Instead, it's more of Alfonso's observation that a core personality trait of Julia's is strangely absent, despite her previous excuses/lies.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2840" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:47:29.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5285" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5286" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1948 play by the French author Emmanuel Roblès. Use with the [emmanuel-robles] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T17:47:38.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2018-01-02T19:16:41.983" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage alludes to silver, purified by smelting seven times, as in Psalm 12:6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The words of the Lord are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silver does double duty here, both as the color of the box, and as the surface of a mirror. The box warned that “Who chooseth me shall have as much as he deserves”. His desert is a &quot;portrait of a blinking idiot&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The box suggests that he should kiss it (&quot;Some there be that shadows kiss&quot;), as a narcissist kissing their own image in a mirror. And that's the only kissing he'll be getting today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a third image of silver a few lines down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There be fools alive, iwis,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Silvered o'er—and so was this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is to say, &quot;There are certainly fools with too much money, and you're one of them&quot;. Silver, like gold, and unlike lead, represents money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T19:16:41.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5289" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-02T21:20:35.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-02T21:20:35.543" LastActivityDate="2018-01-02T21:20:35.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5290" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-02T21:20:35.543" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German novelist and poet Heinrich Heine (1797 - 1856), well known for his poetry which was set into Lieder (songs) by famous musicians like Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. He was the last author of the Romantic era and transformed travel stories and feuilletons into a type of art. Because of his political engagement - Heine was member of the Young Germany movement - and his ethnic background the Nazi regime banned most of his works." OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="1929" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T14:16:37.543" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:16:37.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-03T08:20:48.827" Score="7" ViewCount="1028" Body="&lt;p&gt;In perhaps the most famous song of the &lt;em&gt;Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/PVWpgmiIbas?list=PLC805BF8932938306&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Close Every Door&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, we see these lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close every door to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keep those I love from me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Children of Israel are never alone &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For I know I shall find&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My own peace of mind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For I have been promised&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A land of my own&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then later, at the end of the song, we see:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close every door to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keep those I love from me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Children of Israel are never alone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For we know we shall find&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our own peace of mind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For we have been promised&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A land of our own &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does it change to the plural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-06-03T07:51:02.347" LastActivityDate="2018-06-03T07:51:02.347" Title="In &quot;Close Every Door&quot;, why does 'for I know I shall find' change to the plural the second time?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;joseph-and-technicolor-dreamcoat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5292" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5297" CreationDate="2018-01-03T11:09:43.900" Score="3" ViewCount="1072" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend is composing a poem, and for a rhyme's sake she needs the name of an English-language poet whose name rhymes with Stowe and who lived in the times of R.L. Stevenson or earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came up with &quot;Poe&quot; but she said she already used this surname. I would be grateful for any suggestions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally it would be a poet whom Stevenson knew - not necessarily personally; a poet of whom he knew by reading his works will do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this question is on-topic; sorry if it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T11:31:59.037" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T16:58:27.553" Title="Looking for an English-language poet whose name rhymes with Stowe and who lived in the time of Stevenson or earlier" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1883" CreationDate="2018-01-03T13:19:05.143" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was mainly due to the Victorian interpretations of several events and actions in the novel and subsequent comments from contemporary critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly, Tess committed murder&lt;/strong&gt; when she killed Alec. Although the reader of course sympathises with Tess after all Alec did to her, it was still murder, and therefore immoral, in the eyes of Victorian law and hence Tess was heavily criticised for this act... and given the death penalty. Contemporary critic R. H. Hutton described Tess' actions thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'though pure in instinct, she was not faithful to her pure instinct'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore as an aside, Hardy hints his views on Tess' crime and punishment (and thus Victorian society's views) in this line at the very end of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Justice&amp;quot; was done&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Ch. 59&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of the quotation marks suggests Hardy's contempt of contemporary views on a situation like Tess'. They are unforgiving and condemn her without consideration of the crimes that the 'victim' (Alec) committed. The stress here is that he is criticising the same people who then criticised the subtitle of &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly, Tess became an adulteress&lt;/strong&gt; when she married Angel and then married Alec when Angel travels to Brazil, however she really thought he would never return, which makes it excusable in our eyes. But this adultery would have been shocking and inexcusable to the Victorians and would certainly have been classed as immoral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thirdly, it was interpreted that, after Alec assaulted her, Tess lost what was called her 'physical purity'&lt;/strong&gt; and hence Hardy came under fire for his subtitle of 'A Pure Woman (...)' since this contradicted the contemporary commonly accepted ideas of purity. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/you-aint-ruined-how-thomas-hardy-took-on-victorian-era-purity-culture/276289/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; article explains it well if you want to go into it.) I will paraphrase the basic idea: &lt;em&gt;The Victorian idea was that 'purity' was lost in such a situation regardless whether consent was given. Virtue was synonimized with this 'purity' and hence Tess would not have been considered pure by many contemporary readers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there has been ambiguity over the scene in which Tess is violated by Alec (although it is usually decided that it was non-consensual - discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1907/was-tess-raped?rq=1&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; question) there were obviously those who believed it to be a seduction and hence a fault and immorality on Tess' part. This was fueled by the commonly accepted belief at the time that (quoted from the thesis below):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Olwen Hufton claims that the common Victorian belief was that pregnancy (...) “was held to demonstrate [the woman’s] active consent”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, many thought that Tess was additionally &lt;em&gt;morally&lt;/em&gt; impure due to this event, due to the fact she &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; conceive Sorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Furthermore, there are also aspects of misogyny&lt;/strong&gt;, as while Angel committed a consensual immoral act and Tess forgave him for it, when she confessed that she was violated as a young girl, an involuntary act in her case, he 'cannot' forgive her &lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lorenwebster.net/In_a_Dark_Time/2009/11/15/tess-a-pure-woman/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&#xA;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Forgive me as you are forgiven! &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; forgive &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, Angel.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You–yes, you do.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But you do not forgive me?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another. My God–how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque–prestidigitation as that!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Ch. 35&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though Angel admits that she was &amp;quot;more sinned against than sinning&amp;quot; he cannot forgive her as society's expectations were very different for women. They were expected to be strictly moral  but men's actions to the contrary were brushed under the carpet. In our time we cannot comprehend this injustice, but as early 20th century critic Norman Page noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'what is fairly obvious to the modern reader, however, would not have been obvious to all Victorian readers'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; was Hardy's attempt at criticising this double standard among other negative aspects of Victorian society, a criticism which again caused controversy among his contemporaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In regards to anti-Tess critics, Mowbray Morris published a heavily critical review soon after &lt;em&gt;Tess&lt;/em&gt; was published, in the &lt;em&gt;Quarterly Review&lt;/em&gt;, but I have been unable to find a copy to find exact explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Main reference for points 1, 2 and 3 from &lt;a href=&quot;https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/316800/BA%20Igitur%20Final%20Tess%20of%20the%20D%27Urbervilles%20Sophie%20Buckingham%203922464.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; thesis from Utrecht University, in addition to specific cited sources&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T10:36:31.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5292" CreationDate="2018-01-03T14:31:41.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christopher Marlowe&lt;/a&gt; would have been known through his work to Stevenson.  But it hardly scans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T14:31:41.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5292" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:32:52.900" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson lived from  1850 to 1894, so the following poets are candidates for the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crowe_%28poet%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Crowe&lt;/a&gt; (1745–1829).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Flecknoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Flecknoe&lt;/a&gt; (c. 1600 – 1678).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Ingo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. Ingo&lt;/a&gt; (lived c. 1800; only one poem, though).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bedford_Leno&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Bedford Leno&lt;/a&gt; (1826 – 1894).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Minot_%28poet%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laurence Minot&lt;/a&gt; (1300? – 1352?; contemporaries may have pronounced his name in a way that does not rhyme with Stowe).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Roscoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Roscoe&lt;/a&gt; (8 March 1753 – 30 June 1831), author of the poem for children &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Butterfly&amp;#39;s_Ball,_and_the_Grasshopper&amp;#39;s_Feast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caldwell_Roscoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Caldwell Roscoe&lt;/a&gt; (1823–1859).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Rowe_%28writer%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicholas Rowe&lt;/a&gt; (/roʊ/; 1674 – 1718), well known for his edition of Shakepeare's works, but also a poet and dramatist in his own right.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christopher Marlowe / &quot;Kit&quot; Marlowe&lt;/a&gt; (1564 – 1593).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T16:58:27.553" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T16:58:27.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5298" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:45:28.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:45:28.990" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:45:28.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5299" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:45:28.990" Score="0" Body="Requests to find the name of an author, based on biographical and/or literary data." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T16:09:13.323" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T16:09:13.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5300" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:49:16.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:49:16.527" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:49:16.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5301" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:49:16.527" Score="0" Body="Questions related to anthems, a type of musical composition, either with a religious or political lyrics (national anthems), or a hymn of praise or loyalty." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T16:09:22.647" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T16:09:22.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:53:48.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T15:53:48.663" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T15:53:48.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-03T15:53:48.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about Ayn Rand's dystopian novella &quot;Anthem&quot;, published in 1938. Use this tag with the [ayn-rand] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2018-01-03T16:09:33.043" LastActivityDate="2018-01-03T16:09:33.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5836" CreationDate="2018-01-04T05:44:12.447" Score="4" ViewCount="1241" Body="&lt;p&gt;U2 has an album named &quot;Songs of Innocence&quot; and a second, more recent album named &quot;Songs of Experience&quot;. These appear to at least be named after the William Blake poetry. What is the relationship between the CDs and the William Blake poetry? How did the poetry inspire the CDs and song lyrics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T11:49:34.727" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T11:49:34.727" Title="Why are the U2 CDs named after &quot;Songs of Innocence&quot; and &quot;Songs of Experience&quot; by William Blake?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;&lt;u2&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5908" CreationDate="2018-01-04T08:38:18.873" Score="2" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Ana Castillo mean by these lines in &lt;em&gt;Peel My Love Like an Onion&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, he was dark. He still is except that it is not easy to think of him as still existing, and everywhere my gaze turns he isn't there. What's the expression? Water, water everywhere . . . I was full—a vessel, a huge pre-Columbian pot, a copal-burning brassier, a funeral urn, a well, Jill's bucket up and down, a bruja's kettle simmering over the fire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Peel My Love Like an Onion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2850" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T13:11:21.020" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T13:11:21.020" Title="What do these lines mean in the opening paragraph of Peel My Love Like an Onion?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;peel-my-love-like-an-onion&gt;&lt;ana-castillo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5317" CreationDate="2018-01-04T10:33:03.803" Score="4" ViewCount="277" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Problem of Thor Bridge&lt;/em&gt;, Holmes begins running through the background of his latest case before telling Watson that he has a client:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The fact is that the problem, though exceedingly sensational, appeared to present no difficulty. The interesting personality of the accused does not obscure the clearness of the evidence. That was the view taken by the coroner's jury and also in the police-court proceedings. It is now referred to the Assizes at Winchester. I fear it is a thankless business. I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot change them. Unless some entirely new and unexpected ones come to light I do not see what my client can hope for.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Your client?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;Ah, I forgot I had not told you. I am getting into your involved habit, Watson, of telling a story backward.&lt;/strong&gt; You had best read this first.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Holmes often takes small jabs at the liberties Watson takes in chronicling his cases for the public, I don't totally understand this comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way did Holmes consider Watson to be telling some (or all?) of his stories &quot;backward&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="296" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T11:04:46.953" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T07:36:20.023" Title="What did Holmes mean when he referred to Watson's habit &quot;of telling a story backward&quot;?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5310" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:35:57.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T11:35:57.810" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T11:35:57.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5311" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:35:57.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Mexican-American Chicana author Ana Castillo (born 1953) and her works. Castillo has published poetry, novels, short stories, translations and non-fiction." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T21:41:05.697" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:41:05.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5312" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:43:55.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T11:43:55.380" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T11:43:55.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5313" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-04T11:43:55.380" Score="0" Body="Questions about Ana Castillo's 1999 novel &quot;Peel My Love Like an Onion&quot;. Use this tag with the [ana-castillo] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T21:41:16.537" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:41:16.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T12:41:01.700" Score="4" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the pretty end of Hemingway's story 'The Old Man and The Sea', was the fish all eaten by sharks? Did Santiago have his own share?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2858" OwnerDisplayName="ClaudiaSTP" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T12:45:59.393" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T13:33:07.687" Title="In &quot;The Old Man and the Sea&quot;, what happened to the ridiculous fish?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;the-old-man-and-the-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5314" CreationDate="2018-01-04T13:19:20.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sharks ate almost all of it, leaving only the skeleton, head, and tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from the text (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One came, finally, against the head itself and he knew that it was over. He swung the tiller&#xA;  across the shark’s head where the jaws were caught in the heaviness of the fish’s head which would&#xA;  not tear. He swung it once and twice and again. He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark&#xA;  with the splintered butt. He felt it go in and knowing it was sharp he drove it in again. The shark let&#xA;  go and rolled away. That was the last shark of the pack that came. &lt;strong&gt;There was nothing more for&#xA;  them to eat&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He stopped for a moment and&#xA;  looked back and saw in the reflection from the street light the great tail of the fish standing up well&#xA;  behind the skiff’s stern. &lt;strong&gt;He saw the white naked line of his backbone and the dark mass of the head&#xA;  with the projecting bill and all the nakedness between&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arguably, the fish head contains some meat, but the point is that the main prize was lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T13:33:07.687" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T13:33:07.687" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5291" CreationDate="2018-01-04T13:37:08.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it is a transition from his belief that &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; will return home, to instead refer to the belief that &lt;strong&gt;the &quot;children of Israel&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; as a whole will find their home. This transition can be seen in the musical progression as it goes from his solo performance of the chorus to the ensemble echoing him until, at the end of the song, they're singing in concert with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, of course, could be seen as a commentary on the existence of a country of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Israel&lt;/a&gt; as a home for the Israelites, particularly due to the progressive annexation of Palestine, which is why there was a controversy in Australia when one school changed the lyrics from &quot;children of Israel&quot; to &quot;children of Kindness&quot;, resulting in the lyricist, Sir Tim Rice refusing permission for the change and stating that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/02/sir-tim-rice-criticises-teachers-changing-israel-lyrics-joseph/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the song is not supposed to be about &quot;Israel and Palestine&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He added: &quot;I mean Joseph is an innocent story straight from the Bible and these people in New Zealand thought we were making statements about Israel and Palestine - bonkers.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew Lloyd Webber backing him on this decision, stating that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.playbill.com/article/andrew-lloyd-webber-weighs-in-on-joseph-lyric-controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the song is about the connection that Joseph makes with Israel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Andrew Lloyd Webber, the show’s composer, recently shared his displeasure with the attempt to make unauthorized changes to their work. “Tim is quite right. You cannot re-invent a bible story,” he told The Guardian. “That song is a serious moment and a key point in the show. It is about the connection Joseph suddenly makes with Israel. Tim was paraphrasing the bible and it should be kept that way.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my mind, Andrew Lloyd Webber's statement backs my initial assertion on musical grounds that the transition from &quot;I&quot; to &quot;We&quot; signifies Joseph identifying with the entirety of his people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T21:43:01.013" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:43:01.013" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5309" CreationDate="2018-01-04T16:28:14.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us first remember how a Sherlock Holmes story is often constructed: a client appears, talks to Sherlock, and he then moves into action and begins gathering clues. At some point, Sherlock forms a theory about the case, while everything still seems very mysterious to Watson and the reader. Perhaps Sherlock himself starts to act in a strange way. After some crisis, everything is explained and is usually seen to have been very logical all along, and Holmes strange acting turns out to have either been a way to gain confirmation or a way to position himself so as to better be able to catch the crook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, it is easy to see why Holmes thinks that the stories are told backwards. To him, the events usually goes: problem, gathering clues, deduction, seeking confirmation and conclusion, but the stories are instead told in an order so that the deduction is placed at the end. Considering how highly he values his methods, and in particular the deductive parts, this is to him an unnecessary distortion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T07:36:20.023" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T07:36:20.023" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5333" CreationDate="2018-01-04T17:34:28.427" Score="11" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What shall I do with this absurdity —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Decrepit age that has been tied to me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As to a dog's tail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never had I more&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Excited, passionate, fantastical&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Imagination, nor an ear and eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That more expected the impossible —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And had the livelong summer day to spend.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Until imagination, ear and eye,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can be content with argument and deal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In abstract things; or be derided by&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A sort of battered kettle at the heel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57587/the-tower-56d23b4072cea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only interested in the first stanza for now. I have mixed feelings&#xA;about the first stanza. I like the image of decrepit age being something tied to a dog's tail. It really serves to show how foreign age is to the poet's soul; it is simply not a part of him, but something he tows along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the idea that age excites his imagination more, but when its song is dormant he must content himself with an old friend — Plato or Plotinus, interesting reading choices. He seems to be saying that Plato and Plotinus come in handy until the imagination is ready to soar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, when the poet is ready to sing, when the imagination is ready to soar, there is no song, no beauty. Only this alternate possibility that things will go wrong, and the poet will be derided by a &amp;quot;battered kettle at the heel&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this phrase even mean? I can only think of a tea kettle. Why would it be battered? What image is he trying to show? What point is he trying to make?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="124" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:41:00.550" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:41:00.550" Title="What does &quot;kettle at the heel&quot; mean in this Yeats poem, &quot;The Tower&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5277" CreationDate="2018-01-04T18:55:46.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted two editions of Hermann Hesse's poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Gedichte&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Volker Michels (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1953; reprinted in 1977 and again with an afterword and dates in 1992).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Gedichte&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 10 in: Hermann Hesse: &lt;em&gt;Sämtliche Werke&lt;/em&gt; (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2002; this is part of a 20-volume edition of Hesse's works, edited by Volker Michels).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both editions, the poem &quot;Frühling&quot; is part of a section titled &quot;Aus den Jahren 1899–1902&quot; (&quot;From the years 1899–1902&quot;); in the collected works, Volker Michels dates the poem to April 1899. It is not entirely clear from the information in these editions whether the poem was part of the volume &lt;em&gt;Gedichte&lt;/em&gt; that Hesse published in 1902. Hesse wrote around 1400 poems, 800 of which were printed in 15 collections he published during his lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, Hesse wrote several other poems titled &quot;Frühling&quot;, namely in 1907 (first line: &quot;Der laue März und der feuchte April&quot;), another one in 1907 (first line: &quot;Es fahren leise junge Wolken durchs Blaue&quot;), yet another one in May 1907 (first line: &quot;Wieder schreitet er den braunen Pfad&quot;), one in 1909 (first line: &quot;Seit wir, wilde Knabenhorden&quot;) and one on 25 March 1915 (first line: &quot;Am Waldrand tränen die Knospen&quot;). So someone who doesn't check the first lines may get the dates mixed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first collected edition of Hesse's poems, &lt;em&gt;Gesammelte Dichtungen&lt;/em&gt; (in 6 volumes), was published in 1952; since this is several years after the Four Last Songs, this edition can't have been Strauss's source. The only other volume of Hesse's poems from the years 1945–1962 was &lt;em&gt;Stufen&lt;/em&gt;, which contains a selection that Hesse made at the request of his publisher. This selection was meant to replace the much bigger volume &lt;em&gt;Die Gedichte&lt;/em&gt; from 1924, which had gone out of print. This 1924 edition already contained a section titled &quot;Aus den Jahren 1899–1902&quot; (see above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hesse also wrote three poems titled &quot;September&quot;; the one that Strauss set to music dates from 23 September 1927. &quot;Beim Schlafengehen&quot;, the third of Strauss's Four Last Songs, dates from July 1911. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So James McColley Eilers is definitely mistaken when &lt;a href=&quot;http://intranslation.brooklynrail.org/german/four-last-songs-the-poems-that-comprise-the-final-song-cycle-by-richard-strauss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he claims&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;between 1945 and his death in 1962 he wrote some 50 poems, &lt;strong&gt;among them the three that Strauss set to music&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T18:55:46.633" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T19:48:45.470" Score="9" ViewCount="1092" Body="&lt;p&gt;The third verse of &quot;Hallelujah&quot; by Leonard Cohen goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You say I took the name in vain &#xA;  I don't even know the name&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But if I did well really what's it to you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There's a blaze of light in every word&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It doesn't matter which you heard&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The holy or the broken Hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by the 'holy' and 'broken' Hallelujahs? Is this a reference to something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T14:56:48.600" Title="What are the 'holy' and 'broken' Hallelujahs?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-04T20:08:36.390" Score="16" ViewCount="9466" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 24, Holden goes to Mr. Antolini's place to stay for the night. He crashes on the couch, and suddenly is woken up by Mr. Antolini stroking his (Holden's) hair while he sleeps. There are, then, two passages that caught my eye:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know more damn perverts, at schools and all, than anybody you ever met, and they're always being perverty when &lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When something perverty like that happens, I start sweating like a bastard. That kind of stuff's happened to me about twenty times since I was a kid. I can't stand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, throughout the whole book, I'd been getting the impression that Holden was a depressed individual — as in, actually clinically depressed, not just that &quot;that kind of stuff makes me depressed&quot; kinda talk he's always having — but was attributing it to his little brother Allie's death.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then this happens, right near the end of the book, and it seems like it connects a few more things: his apparent depression, why he's sexually awkward (see the scene with the prostitute, and how he describes how &quot;something always happens&quot; when he's about to lose his virginity), why he seems to hate adults a lot more than children and younger folks... and why he wants to protect the children as &quot;the catcher in the rye,&quot; as he describes to Phoebe in chapter 22.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Holden seems to actually get physically sick after the interaction with Mr. Antolini, mentioning he passed out, and almost vomited several times when he felt like laughing. This bit would suggest, I believe, a physical reaction to what might be, to some degree, repressed memories of past abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Holden in fact molested as a child? Is there any other sort of evidence that I'm overlooking here? Perhaps from the book itself, or an earlier draft, or a note from the author? Or, given the many similarities between the narrative in &lt;em&gt;The Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt; and Salinger's early life (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/209/3&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), is it possible that Salinger himself was molested as a child?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-16T16:12:15.797" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T16:20:57.363" Title="Was Holden Caulfield molested as a child?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;&lt;catcher-in-the-rye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5327" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:04:32.400" Score="7" ViewCount="518" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rush's &lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt; includes the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, &lt;strong&gt;his mind is not for rent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To any God or government&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Always hopeful yet discontent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He knows changes aren't permanent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But change is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this arguing that religion is essentially tyrannical? In particular, does the fact that the phrase refers to &quot;God &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; government&quot; imply that there's an equivalence between surrendering to either one (tyrannical government, tyrannical God)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T17:24:58.163" Title="Does Rush's &quot;Tom Sawyer&quot; promote an anti-religious view?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;rush&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5323" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:07:07.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T21:07:07.677" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:07:07.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5324" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:07:07.677" Score="0" Body="For questions related to the literary aspects of the music of Canadian progressive rock band Rush, the band as a whole, or to the lives of individual members. Consider using together with the [song-lyrics] or [music] tags." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-01-04T21:41:11.727" LastActivityDate="2018-01-04T21:41:11.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2018-01-04T21:46:57.853" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Addressing your question from a somewhat literal perspective, the &amp;quot;holy&amp;quot; Hallelujah is likely that of the first verse, &amp;quot;The baffled king composing hallelujah&amp;quot; where as the &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; Hallelujah is that that the female of the song (Bathsheba based on the bathing reference) drew from him, &amp;quot;She broke your throne, and she cut your hair / And from your lips she drew the hallelujah&amp;quot;. My reasoning is essentially that the first versus associates the Hallelujah with God, which fits the definition of &amp;quot;holy&amp;quot; whereas the second is paired up with imagery of broken thrones and cut hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've heard there was a secret chord&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That David played, and it pleased the Lord&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But you don't really care for music, do you?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The minor fall, the major lift&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The baffled king composing hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‹chorus›&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your faith was strong but you needed proof&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You saw her bathing on the roof&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She tied you to a kitchen chair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She broke your throne, and she cut your hair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And from your lips she drew the hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From that context, the third verse seems like it would be contrasting the sacred and the profane joys in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You say I took the name in vain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't even know the name&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But if I did, well really, what's it to you?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's a blaze of light in every word&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It doesn't matter which you heard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The holy or the broken hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I've yet to find a statement by Leonard Cohen on the subject, only what others have stated. Complicating matters, Leonard Cohen initially wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(Leonard_Cohen_song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;80 different verses&lt;/a&gt; according to Wikipedia, and changed them for different performances, only keeping the final verse the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did my best, it wasn't much&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And even though it all went wrong&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll stand before the lord of song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T14:56:48.600" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T14:56:48.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5326" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16572" CreationDate="2018-01-04T23:26:19.527" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suzanne Collins &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Collins#Publications&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published&lt;/a&gt; a book a year from 2003 - 2010 (most notably &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; books in 2008, 2009, and 2010). Since then, she only published a 40-page children's book in 2013. Granted, the movies were coming out between 2012 and 2015, but she's only listed as a screenwriter on the first movie, and the final &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; movie came out in November 2015 (over 2 years ago as of the writing of this question).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have her literary activities been since then? Has she been involved in any significant literary projects since &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; books (other than the movies)? Has she confirmed involvement in other projects, or stated an intention to become involved in or start a project in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T20:12:38.233" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T09:35:07.197" Title="Does Suzanne Collins intend to write additional fiction?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5327" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5322" CreationDate="2018-01-05T12:16:02.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Geddy Lee is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Geddy_Lee%20and&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;explicitly, openly atheist&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/rush/rollthebones.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Roll the Bones&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (the &lt;em&gt;bones&lt;/em&gt; referring to dice) is explicitly about &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=3335&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rejecting the idea&lt;/a&gt; that a god or faith directs anything, so quite probably your answer is yes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ETA&lt;/strong&gt; I should also have noted &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rush.com/songs/freewill/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Freewill&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is another song with lyrics which reject the idea of a god directing human actions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-01-06T15:48:59.660" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T15:48:59.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2832" CreationDate="2018-01-05T12:50:48.673" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Santiago (the old man) considered the marlin as his brother, and not his prey, He didn't really want to kill him at the really beginning, but he knew that he had to do it because if he can't fish anything then he'll starve. Of course he cannot rely on the small boy always! Also, Santiago was thinking of selling the fish to their town's market to make some more money. He was certainly getting a tired at that time, because he had been sailing for 3 days without proper sleep. He wouldn't have bothered to do anything but to tie the fish to the side of the boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2858" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T12:50:48.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5331" CreationDate="2018-01-05T12:54:23.350" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;How should one view the names &lt;strong&gt;Christian&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Christiana&lt;/strong&gt;, the two central characters of John Bunyan's &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt;: as allegorical (i.e. &quot;followers of Christianity&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;Christiana&lt;/strong&gt; being a feminine version of &lt;strong&gt;Christian&lt;/strong&gt;), or as proper names (like John, or Robert, etc.)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Older translations of The Pilgrim's Progress into other languages tend to favor the first, while newer ones, the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am asking the question because I need to translate those names, and in my native language they are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, not all characters in the novel are named allegorically. For instance, Christian's boys are named Matthew, Joseph, Samuel, and James. Also, their hosts in the second part are named Gaius and Mnason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2859" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-01-05T14:21:13.950" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T18:15:24.647" Title="Proper interpretation of the names Christian and Christiana in Pilgrim's Progress" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;pilgrims-progress&gt;&lt;john-bunyan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5330" CreationDate="2018-01-05T18:15:24.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, it's not just a proper name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christiana is, according to several sites I've looked at (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.behindthename.com/name/christiana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), simply the Latin form of &quot;Christian.&quot; Even in English (ignoring the Latin meaning), as you noted this can simply be a &quot;feminized&quot; version of the word &quot;Christian.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note: if you drop the letter &quot;a&quot; from the end, this is simply &quot;Christian.&quot; In order to argue that this was &quot;just&quot; a proper name in the same sense that &quot;John&quot; or &quot;Joe&quot; was, you'd have to argue that this linguistic relationship was purely a coincidence (which strikes me as wildly implausible, both from a linguistic perspective and from the perspective of the text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;best&quot; way to translate this would, I think, be if you could simply &quot;feminize&quot; the word &quot;Christian&quot; somehow. (Many languages have at least &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; way of doing that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to say that Matthew, Joseph, Samuel, and James aren't allegorical (or, at least, symbolic). I can't defend a specific allegorical &quot;meaning&quot; for these names offhand, but I think it's very significant that all of these are Biblical names - for example, Samuel was a priest, prophet, judge in Israel. Joseph was the name of both a Biblical patriarch and the father of Jesus. Matthew wrote one of the Gospels, and James was also a prominent leader of the early church and Biblical author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T18:15:24.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5142" CreationDate="2018-01-05T18:36:03.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a &quot;personal secret&quot; in the sense that it was &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; secret - he &quot;owned&quot; the metal as well as the formula. Clearly, he would've had to disclose certain details to select individuals in the course of doing business (e.g. revealing the formula to Dagny Taggart because he needed to convince her to be the first customer); however, him choosing to disclose it to certain individuals doesn't make it any less &quot;his&quot; secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, research staff, his Mills superintendent, Dagny Taggart, etc. would have had a non-disclosure agreement or some other equivalent kind of protection for the secret (or at least some kind of understanding that they wouldn't reveal it), although the book doesn't reveal the exact legal arrangement. In any case, I can't really imagine Dagny Taggart going around revealing the information to everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T18:36:03.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5318" CreationDate="2018-01-05T18:44:16.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The kettle is (metaphorically) the thing that's been tied to the dog's tail, probably by a mischievous child, and is now dragging behind its rear heels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it battered? If it's been tied to the dog's tail all day, of course it's battered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-01-05T18:44:16.760" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-05T22:15:12.250" Score="7" ViewCount="594" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm intrigued by this passage in Lois Lowry, &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 10.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He watched as the man rose and moved first to the wall where the speaker was. It was the same sort of speaker that occupied a place in every dwelling, but one thing about it was different. This one had a switch, which the man deftly snapped to the end that said OFF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jonas almost gasped aloud. To have the power to turn the speaker &lt;em&gt;off!&lt;/em&gt; It was an astonishing thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 20, the Giver implies that the switch controls not only the speaker, but also the microphone that the Giver's secretary listens to.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You may stay here tonight. I want to talk to you. But you must be quiet now, while I notify your family unit. No one must hear you cry.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Giver waited silently . Finally Jonas was able to quiet himself and he sat huddled, his shoulders shaking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Giver went to the wall speaker and clicked the switch to ON.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Yes, Reveiver. How may I help you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Notify the new Receiver's family unit that he will be staying with me tonight, for additional training.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I will take care of that, sir. Thank you for your instructions,” the voice said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this trying to reference George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;?  In that novel, too, every apartment has a television that cannot be silenced, so Smith is astonished that the inner party member O'Brien has a television that can be turned off completely.  O'Brien also seemed to imply that turning off the television turns off the surveillance, although O'Brien lied while the Giver tells the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T15:28:31.583" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T15:28:31.583" Title="Is the speaker with an on-off switch a reference to Orwell?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;lois-lowry&gt;&lt;the-giver&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5335" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9703" CreationDate="2018-01-06T08:27:09.060" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their poet, a sad trimmer, but no less&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       In company a very pleasant fellow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had been the favourite of full many a mess&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Of men, and made them speeches when half mellow;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And though his meaning they could rarely guess,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Yet still they deign'd to hiccup or to bellow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The glorious meed of popular applause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Of which the first ne'er knows the second cause.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the line in bold? What is the &lt;strong&gt;first cause&lt;/strong&gt; and what is the &lt;strong&gt;second cause&lt;/strong&gt;? How can a cause &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt; another cause? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T19:18:55.280" Title="Meaning of &quot;Of which the first ne'er knows the second cause&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5356" CreationDate="2018-01-06T12:44:17.557" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh beautiful! and rare as beautiful&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But theirs was love in which the mind delights&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To lose itself when the old world grows dull,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And we are sick of its hack sounds and sights,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Intrigues, adventures of the common school,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Its petty passions, marriages, and flights,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where Hymen's torch but brands one strumpet more,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Whose husband only knows her not a wh-re.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to make sure: is the meaning here &quot;only her husband &lt;em&gt;thinks&lt;/em&gt; that she is not a whore, but all the rest &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; that she is&quot;?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T18:17:00.383" Title="Meaning of &quot;Whose husband only knows her not a whore&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9713" CreationDate="2018-01-06T12:46:42.877" Score="5" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has a strange quick jar upon the ear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       That cocking of a pistol, when you know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A moment more will bring the sight to bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Upon your person, twelve yards off, or so;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A gentlemanly distance, not too near,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       If you have got a former friend for foe;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But after being fired at once or twice,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The ear becomes more Irish, and less nice.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this? I looked up &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Irish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the meanings of &lt;em&gt;Irish&lt;/em&gt; in Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, but remained a bit puzzled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ear becomes &quot;more filled with anger/passion&quot;? What is &quot;less nice&quot;? Maybe the ear is clipped by the bullet, and becomes malformed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:19:49.437" Title="Meaning of &quot;The ear becomes more Irish, and less nice&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5322" CreationDate="2018-01-06T20:29:16.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Rush sings that &quot;his mind is not for rent / To any God or government&quot;, they compare the mind to a place you can live in or use in exchange for some form of payment. What the &quot;payment&quot; would be is left unstated; in the case of religion, it is typically some form of heaven or paradise you might go to after death; in the case of government, it may be government functions such as social security, health care, education etc. But, as I said, this is left unstated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you rent a place, you can typically redecorate it. Rush's Tom Sawyer does not want a god or a government to &quot;redecorate&quot; his mind; he does not want to relinquish control over his mind to a god or government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean the song &quot;promotes&quot; an &quot;anti-religious view&quot;? That depends on how you defined these words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/promote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;promote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;To advocate or urge on behalf of (something or someone); to attempt to popularize or sell by means of advertising or publicity&quot; and &quot;To encourage, urge or incite&quot;. To promote something clearly goes beyond merely expressing it. The song &lt;em&gt;expresses&lt;/em&gt; resistance to control by a god or a government, but it does not say that others should take the same stance. However, it can still be maintained that Rush &lt;em&gt;promotes&lt;/em&gt; these ideas by pointing out how songs can work in society and that successfully and convincingly &lt;em&gt;expressing&lt;/em&gt; certain ideas essentially comes down to promoting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the question whether those lines are &lt;strong&gt;anti-religious&lt;/strong&gt;. Wiktionary defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antireligious#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;antireligious&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;Opposed to religion&quot;. This is both vague and ambiguous. One can be opposed to religion in one's personal life (i.e. rejecting it personally without rejecting it in society) or against religion in general (i.e. religion should not exist it all). Having said this, &quot;antireligious&quot; is still ambiguous in a different way, because &quot;religion&quot; is ambiguous. According to Wiktionary, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/religion#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; can mean both &quot;The belief in and worship of a supernatural controlling power, especially a personal god or gods&quot; and &quot;Any practice to which someone or some group is seriously devoted&quot;. (Wiktionary also lists a few other meanings, but the two meanings listed here should be sufficient to illustrate a specific ambiguity.) Some people, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Boghossian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Boghossian&lt;/a&gt;, have argued that these concepts should be clearly distinguished; the first concept should be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/faith#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;faith&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, while the community aspect should be called &quot;religion&quot;. From this point of view, the above lines from Rush's &quot;Tom Sawyer&quot; are &lt;strong&gt;anti-faith&lt;/strong&gt; (on a personal level, at least) but not anti-religious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-06T20:29:16.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-07T15:26:55.957" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus lived -- thus died she; never more on her&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Shall sorrow light, or shame. She was not made&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through years or moons the inner weight to bear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Which colder hearts endure till they are laid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By age in earth: her days and pleasures were&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Brief, but delightful -- &lt;strong&gt;such as had not staid&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Long with her destiny&lt;/strong&gt;; but she sleeps well&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By the sea-shore, whereon she loved to dwell.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase in bold?  &quot;Such days, brief but delightful, had not staid long, thanks to her (tragic) destiny&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T12:25:49.517" Title="Meaning of &quot;such as had not staid long with her destiny&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-07T15:53:50.383" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the racist novel &lt;em&gt;Hunter&lt;/em&gt; (1989), written by United States neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, the character Harry Keller opines in Chapter 30 as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Our aim is to keep the race from going down the drain, if we can. More than that, it's to get the race back on an upward path again, to get it back to work &lt;strong&gt;preparing the way for a higher race to come&lt;/strong&gt; (....)&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;We identify with our race, with an idealization of our race - more than that, with the process of which our race is the principal agent, the &lt;strong&gt;process&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;higher organization&lt;/strong&gt;, the process which is the active principle of God.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of an Aryan race evolving into a higher future race appears in the work of &amp;quot;theosophist&amp;quot; Helena Blavatsky and is an important part of the ideology of the &amp;quot;anthroposophist&amp;quot; Rudolf Steiner. Note that the emergence of a new race is different from the strengthening of an existing supposedly &amp;quot;higher&amp;quot; race that was supported by Cambridge-educated eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, even when the &amp;quot;higher&amp;quot; one causes the &amp;quot;lower&amp;quot; one to become &amp;quot;extinct&amp;quot;, as Galton advocated. Keller specifically talks of a &amp;quot;path&amp;quot;, of a divine &amp;quot;process&amp;quot; of &amp;quot;higher organization&amp;quot;, and of preparing the way for a future &amp;quot;higher race&amp;quot; which is not simply an existing race made stronger or that has &amp;quot;extinguished&amp;quot; &amp;quot;lower&amp;quot; races.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Keller a follower of Rudolf Steiner? If not, is Macdonald giving him some other specific and recognisable strand of racist ideology?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2866" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T18:16:12.843" Title="Is the Harry Keller character in Andrew Macdonald's racist novel &quot;Hunter&quot; a follower of Rudolf Steiner?" Tags="&lt;andrew-macdonald&gt;&lt;hunter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5341" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:15:57.980" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just now a black old neutral personage&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the third sex stept up, and peering over&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The captives, seem'd to mark their looks and age,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And capabilities, as to discover&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If they were fitted for the purposed cage:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No lady e'er is ogled by a lover,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Horse by a blackleg, broadcloth by a tailor,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fee by a counsel, felon by a jailor,   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As is a slave by his intended bidder.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'T is pleasant purchasing our fellow-creatures;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all are to be sold, if you consider&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their passions, and are dext'rous; some by features&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are bought up, others by a warlike leader,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some by a place -- as tend their years or natures;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The most by ready cash -- but all have prices,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;From crowns to kicks,&lt;/strong&gt; according to their vices.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;from crowns to kicks&lt;/strong&gt;? From the top of your head to the tips of your toes? Or &quot;ranging from a crown (say, made of gold) to a pocket or wallet full of money&quot;? The Merriam-Webster dictionary provided me with the &quot;pocket, wallet&quot; meaning for &lt;strong&gt;kick&lt;/strong&gt;.  I never knew about this meaning of &quot;kick&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T01:48:53.397" Title="Meaning of &quot;from crowns to kicks&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5342" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5343" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" Score="0" Body="For questions about Andrew Macdonald, the pseudonym used by the US author and white nationalist William Luther Pierce, or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T18:17:10.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5344" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5345" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel Hunter, written by the US white nationalist William Luther Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. Use with the [andrew-macdonald] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T18:18:11.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8372" CreationDate="2018-01-07T19:40:11.147" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Fifth#XLVIII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 5, stanza 48&lt;/a&gt;, from Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some talk of an appeal unto some passion,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Some to men's feelings, others to their reason;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The last of these was never much the fashion,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       For reason thinks all reasoning out of season.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some speakers whine, and others lay the lash on,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But more or less continue still to tease on,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With arguments according to their &quot;forte;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;But no one dreams of ever being short&lt;/strong&gt;. --  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he mean &lt;strong&gt;being short of arguments&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T14:01:58.883" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T08:55:44.757" Title="Meaning of &quot;but no one dreams of ever being short&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5341" CreationDate="2018-01-07T23:00:10.673" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In that stanza he's talking about buying people, and that line doesn't make sense unless it's describing the totality of the person being purchased—lock, stock, and barrel, so to speak. So I'm pretty sure &quot;from crowns to kicks&quot; means something on the order of &quot;from head to toe.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2074" LastActivityDate="2018-01-07T23:00:10.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5341" CreationDate="2018-01-08T01:22:46.500" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'T is pleasant purchasing &lt;strong&gt;our fellow-creatures&lt;/strong&gt;; &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;all are to be sold&lt;/strong&gt;, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these lines, I think Byron is talking here about the variety of things that can be used to metaphorically &quot;buy&quot; people. I guess it is a matter of opinion whether the image of humanity as all being metaphorical slaves of some sort is particularly accurate, and it could be considered to devalue the unique harms of actual, literal slavery, but it seems to exist in other works of literature also. Compare these quotes from &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 47&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Seneca, accessed via Wikisource:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Slaves!&quot; No, they are &lt;strong&gt;our fellow-slaves&lt;/strong&gt;, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Show me a man who is not a slave&lt;/strong&gt;; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...some by features&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Are bought up, others by a warlike leader,&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Some by a place -- as tend their years or natures;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The most by ready cash --  but &lt;strong&gt;all have prices&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines seem to be listing different kinds of things by which people's allegiances can be &quot;bought&quot; or controlled. For some people, &quot;features&quot; are enough to buy them (I'm guessing this refers to pleasant features of someone else's face or body?), for other people, &quot;a warlike leader&quot; is enough to &quot;buy&quot; their support; for other people, &quot;a place&quot; is what will &quot;buy&quot; them; and others will be &quot;bought&quot; by cash (i.e. bribes). This interpretation seems to me to be supported by a footnote I found by Coxe in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=DhH8U9AfVNEC&amp;amp;pg=PA655&amp;amp;lpg=PA655&amp;amp;dq=%22some%20by%20features%20Are%20bought%20up%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=dFLzMVYan1&amp;amp;sig=tB5HoeyKutBZKf4il9YhuMRAsJE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjR9ZTOlcfYAhUCYyYKHSA9AOEQ6AEIPjAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22some%20by%20features%20Are%20bought%20up%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The works of lord Byron, with notes by T. Moore [and others]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1842) that relates this passage in Byron to Robert Walpole, a famous politician, who is supposed to have said &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Walpole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All those men have their price&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (p 655).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From crowns to kicks, according to their vices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would read this as describing the wide range of &quot;prices&quot; for different people: some people are &quot;bought&quot; by things that are typically thought of as good, while others are &quot;bought&quot; by things that are typically thought of as bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Crowns&quot; here I assume refers to the coins. I think &quot;kicks&quot; is just a metaphor for bad treatment, which might actually cause some people to be more obedient like a stereotypical dog that is kicked but still loves its master. (It seems possible to me that it could even be a subtle allusion to masochism.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a source that describes this as a &quot;double pun&quot;, but I'm not sure how to determine which of the potential interpretations Byron intended, or if he really intended all of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;39: &lt;em&gt;From Crowns to kicks:&lt;/em&gt; a double pun, &lt;em&gt;crowns&lt;/em&gt; being either regal headgear or five-shilling coins, and &lt;em&gt;kicks&lt;/em&gt; being either blows with the foot or sixpences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/don_juan_canto_5.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DON JUAN CANTO FIFTH&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Peter Cochran, p 13; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://petercochran.wordpress.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Cochran's Website&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information that &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pyBTAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA164&amp;amp;lpg=PA164&amp;amp;dq=kick%20%22sixpence%22%20slang&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=YLdyxoGRaD&amp;amp;sig=zzUA-BHhVIKkkxHXwACJfQMotO4&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwivx-K8oMfYAhVCKyYKHW_BAfQQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=kick%20%22sixpence%22%20slang&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;kick&quot; was a slang term for sixpence&lt;/a&gt; was new to me, and certainly seems like it might be relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1273" LastEditorUserId="1273" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T01:48:53.397" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T01:48:53.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8034" CreationDate="2018-01-08T11:05:42.847" Score="4" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Fifth#CLIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 5, stanza 154&lt;/a&gt;, from Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His majesty saluted his fourth spouse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       With all the ceremonies of his rank,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who clear'd her sparkling eyes and smooth'd her brows,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       As suits a matron who has play'd a prank;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  These must seem doubly mindful of their vows,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To save the credit of their breaking bank:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To no men are such cordial greetings given&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As those whose wives have made them &lt;strong&gt;fit for heaven&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;made them fit for heaven&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a cuckolded husband be &quot;fit for heaven&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(According to the plot, &quot;his majesty&quot; is a sultan who has been cuckolded by one of his wives: she ordered Don Juan bought on the slave market and brought to her in female disguise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T12:51:02.200" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T12:51:02.200" Title="Why is a cuckolded husband &quot;fit for heaven&quot; in Byron's Don Juan?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5350" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5387" CreationDate="2018-01-08T11:32:43.837" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'T was the boy's &quot;mite,&quot; and, like the &quot;widow's,&quot; may&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Perhaps be weigh'd hereafter, if not now;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But whether such things do or do not weigh,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       All who have loved, or love, will still allow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Life has nought like it. God is love, they say,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And Love's a god, or was before the brow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of earth was wrinkled by the sins and tears&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of -- but Chronology best knows the years.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the lines in bold? &#xA;I looked up the meanings of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mite#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mite&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm completely puzzled at the meaning of the lines. The oddly placed quotations marks do not make it easier to understand.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T14:26:51.877" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T14:33:52.700" Title="Meaning of &quot;'T was the boy's &quot;mite,&quot; and, like the &quot;widow's,&quot; may Perhaps be weigh'd hereafter, if not now&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5339" CreationDate="2018-01-08T12:25:49.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is suggesting the woman died young but had a good life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;such as had not staid long with her destiny&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staid in Byron's day was used as the past participle of the verb to stay. Today we would use the word stayed. With this in mind the quote's meaning is easier to understand, particularly if it is split into two parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such as had not &lt;strong&gt;stayed&lt;/strong&gt; long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fairly clearly saying that the woman was only there for a short period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With her destiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Destiny is the pre-ordained path you take through life. Your destiny describes your birth, life, and death. This means that the longer your destiny the longer your life. Since the woman was only with her destiny for a short period of time she completed her destiny quickly and so must have lived a short life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall this quote, and most of the stanza, is saying that the woman died young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="53" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T12:25:49.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-08T13:01:49.713" Score="9" ViewCount="341" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marcel Proust wrote a seven-volume French novel called &lt;em&gt;A la Recherche du Temps Perdu&lt;/em&gt;. The original French title of the last volume was &lt;em&gt;Le Temps Retrouvé&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that in these titles Proust intended an allusion to one of the aphorisms that Ben Franklin included in his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8_c_vS40kMcC&amp;amp;pg=PA32&amp;amp;dq=lost%20time%20is%20never%20found%20again&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiqhe7Dr8jYAhXLMSYKHfg5AM84ChDoAQhKMAY#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22lost%20time%20is%20never%20found%20again%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poor Richard’s Almanac&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lost time is never found again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the French translation of Franklin's book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=TjYUAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=franklin%20Bonhomme%20Richard&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjZgdnGiszYAhXEg-AKHdS5AgEQ6AEIJzAA#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=perdu&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, this aphorism is translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le tems perdu ne se retrouve jamais&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the important words in this translation also appear in Proust’s titles, and the meaning of the titles seems to resonate the meaning of the aphorism. This supports the conclusion that Proust was alluding to Franklin’s words as they appeared in the &lt;em&gt;Feuillets du Bonhomme Richard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that’s right, and Proust intended to allude to Franklin’s words, then it would seem natural that the English translations of the titles should revert to Franklin’s words. The titles should be translated &lt;em&gt;The Search For Lost Time&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Time Found Again&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should they be? Suppose that a French author wrote a book called &lt;em&gt;The Sound And The Fury&lt;/em&gt;, and that an English translation was to be published. It would be common sense to call the English translation &lt;em&gt;The Sound And The Fury&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;Noise and Rage&lt;/em&gt;, even if &lt;em&gt;Noise and Rage&lt;/em&gt; was an equally accurate translation of the French title. The reason it would be common sense is that the French title suggested to French readers some connection to Hamlet’s soliloquy, and the best English title would preserve this suggestion, as &lt;em&gt;The Sound And The Fury&lt;/em&gt; does, but as &lt;em&gt;Noise and Rage&lt;/em&gt; fails to do. Of course other titles might actually be chosen, and perhaps for good reason; but common sense would suggest &lt;em&gt;The Sound And The Fury&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Proust’s books, common sense did not prevail. In English translations published over the years Proust’s last title, Le Temps Retrouvé, has been rendered variously:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0141180366&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finding Time Again&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000MMQ03W&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Past Recaptured&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0375753125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time Regained&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This strikes me as strange. Why did the English translations not use Franklin’s words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possibility is that they did not believe, and perhaps did not even consider, that Proust was alluding to Franklin. Another possible reason would seem to be that they did believe that Proust was alluding to Franklin but thought other phrases made better titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, evidence relevant to this question might include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;logical reasoning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the words of Proust and his editors, translators and publishers, perhaps expressed in diaries, correspondence or even advertising&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;similar words attributed to other authors before Franklin's time, or contemporary with him, suggesting that the idea (that lost time cannot be found again) was already a commonplace and that the similarity in wording (between Franklin’s aphorism and Proust’s titles) is a meaningless coincidence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T09:54:55.843" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T09:54:55.843" Title="Why is the last title in Proust's &quot;Search For Lost Time&quot; not consistently translated as &quot;Time Found Again&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;marcel-proust&gt;&lt;in-search-of-lost-time&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5355" CreationDate="2018-01-08T14:29:54.483" Score="8" ViewCount="3551" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, let me start by saying that English is not my first language; thus, I am really struggling to understand the language used in such classic novels as those of Jane Austen's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've just finished reading Sense and Sensibility. I find it hard to understand the income of Edward and Elinor after they married. As I understand (I might be wrong) Elinor brought 3 thousand pounds into her marriage, but I am not quite clear how much Edward was bringing. I think he was left with just 2 thousand, but, in the last chapter, there is this line,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What she would engage to do towards augmenting their income was next to be considered; and here it plainly appeared, that though Edward was not her only son, he was by no means her eldest; for while Robert was inevitably endowed with a thousand pounds a year, not the smallest objection was made against Edward's taking orders for the sake of two hundred and fifty at the utmost; nor was anything promised either for the present or in future, beyond the ten thousand pounds, which had been given with Fanny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So did Edward have 2 or 10 thousand pounds? What would be the interest of his money combined with Elinor's? And plus with the maximum of 250 pounds per year from his work, how much income did they both enjoy? And was it enough to live on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2868" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T12:34:05.917" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T12:34:05.917" Title="Can you explain the financial situation of Edward and Elinor Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;sense-and-sensibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4057" CreationDate="2018-01-08T15:00:15.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at Morrison's &quot;Bread and Butter to Boiling Oil: From Wilde's Afternoon Tea to the Beauty Queen of Leenane,&quot; New Hibernia Review, Volume 14, Number 3, Autumn 2010, you will see that McDonagh could have taken the idea of insane battles over the most trivial of foodstuffs from the famous scene in The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde 1895). In this, Cecily and Gwendolyn &quot;politely&quot; trade insults through the medium of cakes, bread and butter, and unwanted sugar.It is such a well known scene that McDonagh's conscious or unconscious elaboration of its comic motivations by means of Tayto crisps and Kimberley biscuits, and so forth, may resonate with anyone familiar with Earnest, a perennial favorite throughout the English speaking world.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T15:00:15.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5353" CreationDate="2018-01-08T17:36:25.737" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elinor owned about 1000 pounds (we are told this in chapter 2), Edward 2000. The interest from this would have been 150 pounds a year (5 percent was what you got from government bonds, so this is the golden standard when calculating interest. Austen used this herself, as will be seen). The living that Edward had been presented by Colonel Brandon generated about 200 pounds a year, though there were some possibility of renegotiation with the parishers (so that they would perhaps reach the figure of 250 in the quote). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;350 pounds would perhaps have been possible to live on, but it would not have been strictly genteel. For comparison, this is less than what the Price family had in Mansfield Park. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, things do get better. The passage you quote essentially says that Robert was given a thousand pounds a year of the income of the elder Ferrars, while Edward, when Robert now also had what was seen as an objectionable choice, had risen in the graces. Thus, he had been promised to be given the same amount (10000 pounds) that had been set as Fanny's dowry. This would more than double their income.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarize their economy:&#xA;They &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; 1000 pounds that came with Elinor, 2000 that Edward owned when he was disowned, plus the 10000 from above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their &lt;em&gt;income&lt;/em&gt; was thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;about 200-250 pounds from Edward's living.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;50 pounds of interest from Elinor's money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;100 pounds of interest from Edward's money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;500 pounds of interest from Edward's &quot;new&quot; money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember chapter 17, when Elinor and Marianne discussed what money they hoped for after their marriages? Marianne thought 2000 pounds a year would be sufficient. Elinor thought that 1000 pounds would be &quot;wealth&quot;. Well, she didn't quite reach that, but she did get almost there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer owes a lot to John Mullan's &lt;em&gt;What matters in Jane Austen?&lt;/em&gt;, which reminded me of details and gave some useful comparisons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2018-01-08T23:21:27.130" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T23:21:27.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5336" CreationDate="2018-01-08T18:17:00.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm tempted to say this belongs on ELU, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost. It's not clear &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; the husband thinks, but I'd say it's implied that he's blissfully ignorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more prosaic rendering would be &lt;em&gt;“it's only [her] husband who doesn't know that she is a wh-re”&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastActivityDate="2018-01-08T18:17:00.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5334" CreationDate="2018-01-08T18:36:14.157" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of surveillance by governments and of a privileged caste demanding and receiving privacy isn't unique to Orwell, but that scene certainly does sound as though it's pretty much a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1o8qBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA310&amp;amp;ots=wGr3n2fguP&amp;amp;dq=%22known%20as%20straight%20lift%22&amp;amp;pg=PA311#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22straight%20lift%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“straight lift”&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, Book Two, Chapter Eight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As O’Brien passed the telescreen a thought seemed to strike him. He stopped, turned aside and pressed a switch on the wall. There was a sharp snap. The voice had stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia uttered a tiny sound, a sort of squeak of surprise. Even in the midst of his panic, Winston was too much taken aback to be able to hold his tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You can turn it off!’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘we can turn it off. We have that privilege.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Giver does appear to be intentionally a retelling of themes found in other “dystopian future” novels: particularly, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; quotes a review suggesting it references Ray Bradbury's &lt;em&gt;Farenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story has been told before in a variety of forms—Ray Bradbury's&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; comes to mind—but not, to my knowledge, for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but one or two aspects are closer to &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, such as the general repression of individuality and “colour” - somewhat figuratively in &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, quite literally in &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The society has taken away pain and strife by converting to &amp;quot;Sameness&amp;quot;, a plan that has also eradicated emotional depth from their lives.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Community lacks any color, memory, climate, or terrain, all in an effort to preserve structure, order, and a true sense of equality beyond personal individuality.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[protagonist] has never seen a sled, or snow, or a hill for even the memory of these things has been given up to assure security and conformity (called Sameness). Even color has been surrendered, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas in &lt;em&gt;Farenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; much of that sameness stems from hedonistic lifestyles and the “rebels” are the quiet ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T01:49:50.840" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5361" CreationDate="2018-01-09T07:18:13.730" Score="6" ViewCount="1154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating Robert E. Howard's short story &quot;The Hyena&quot;. It was published in 1927. There is a character called Senecoza and Howard (and the protagonist) always refer to him as &quot;the fetish man&quot;. And this guy can turn himself into a hyena, but the reader only learns this fact at the end of the story. Now, I know &quot;fetish&quot; means idols or power objects. But I'm not sure what a fetish man is exactly. Is he someone like a voodoo priest? Does he do magic? This is the only bit of information I could manage to find: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A fetish man was thought to be more than human; he was divine, even infallible. Thus did chiefs, kings, priests, prophets, and church rulers eventually wield great power and exercise unbounded authority.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://urantia-book.org/newbook/ub/ppr088_1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Uratia Book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a vague idea, but I want to know more because I have to come up with a proper translation for the term. So if anyone has further information, I would love to hear it. Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T08:43:56.767" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T08:25:20.477" Title="What is a &quot;fetish man&quot; in African tribal culture?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;robert-e-howard&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8101" CreationDate="2018-01-09T11:11:45.457" Score="6" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Sixth#LII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 6, stanza 52&lt;/a&gt;, from Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dudù, as has been said, was a sweet creature,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Not very dashing, but extremely winning,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the most regulated charms of feature,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Which painters cannot catch &lt;strong&gt;like faces sinning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Against proportion -- the wild strokes of nature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Which they hit off at once in the beginning,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Full of expression, right or wrong, that strike,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And pleasing or unpleasing, still are like&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this all in plain English - especially the part in bold?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My attempts at deciphering this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She had a symmetrical face (&quot;regulated charms of feature&quot;)? Hm.. Or, to the contrary, her face and body were not symmetrical?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Painters fail to reflect such &quot;asymmetrical charms&quot; in their paintings? In comparison, they fail to reflect &quot;faces that sin against proportion&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Painters &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hit_off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hit off&lt;/a&gt;&quot; = &quot;describe in few characteristic strokes of a brush&quot; - in the beginning of their work upon a portrait. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;that strike&quot; refer to? The strokes left on the canvas by the painters &quot;strike&quot; the viewers as very interesting/beautiful? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;still are like&quot; leaves me completely baffled. Such strokes on the canvas, reflecting the irregular but characteristic features, are all alike, no matter who is being painted? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've reread the stanza many times but I cannot get a grip on its meaning. Once I think I understand some particular phrase, the general meaning starts to crawl apart because it fails to dovetail with other phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T20:17:09.670" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T20:17:09.670" Title="Meaning of a stanza in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-09T14:09:00.193" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Isaac Asimov's short story “Gold”, Laborian is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.asimovreviews.net/Stories/Story098.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clearly&lt;/a&gt; a self-insertion of Asimov himself, and the story in the story is Asimov's own book &lt;em&gt;The Gods Themselves&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering though, what about the other major character in this short story?  Is the film producer Jonas Willard invented completely from scratch?  Or did Asimov get inspiration for that character from someone, such as a contemporary real world film producer or director?  The character is described in a positive way in the end, so I'm wondering if Asimov is indirectly complimenting someone from the real world with this unusually self-reflecting story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-09T16:49:07.597" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T16:49:07.597" Title="Was Jonas Willard inspired by anyone in particular?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5358" CreationDate="2018-01-09T17:10:06.573" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll only address the question from the translation requirement POV: what would you call a person who uses fetishes for magic, given the culture is African (as opposed to, say, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Vodou&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haitian&lt;/a&gt;), but in the context of Western literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given various factors, I feel this would be more appropriate than actually giving a nuanced description of such a person in African culture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the age of the book, when Western fiction would often have stereotypical portrayals of African culture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;various lines in the book itself (&quot;I was but newly come to the East Coast, new to African ways [...]. Because I came from Virginia, race instinct and prejudice were strong in me [...].&quot;) suggesting that the book itself does not intend to portray African culture accurately&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's first look up &lt;em&gt;fetish&lt;/em&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fetish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; : an object (such as a small stone carving of an animal) believed to have magical power to protect or aid its owner; &lt;em&gt;broadly&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;  : a material object regarded with superstitious or extravagant trust&#xA;  or reverence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fetish in this context is like a voodoo doll in that it lets someone access magic. Unlike voodoo dolls, fetishes don't have to be doll-like. They can be plain objects or even parts of bodies (human or animal). Correspondingly, a fetish man is like a voodoo priest in that they access magic using an external object, often with an accompanying ritual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For translation, I'd suggest that you look up some translations of &lt;em&gt;Tarzan&lt;/em&gt; novels. There are a few witch doctors in them, and some of those witch doctors use fetishes. Since the these books are pretty popular and mostly public domain in some countries, you might find good quality translations already existing in your language, which you can then rely on for familiarity for the readers. For example, from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500201h.html#chap4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tarzan and the Leopard Men&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (particularly appropriate since it was published in the same era, and also has a hyena fetish):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Brandishing his hyena tail, he leaped toward Muzimo. &quot;Die!&quot; he&#xA;  screamed. &quot;Nothing can save you now. Before the moon has risen the&#xA;  third time you will be dead. My fetish has spoken!&quot; He waved the hyena&#xA;  tail in the face of Muzimo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The white man stood with folded arms, a sneer upon his lips. &quot;I am&#xA;  Muzimo,&quot; he said; &quot;I am the spirit of the ancestor of Orando. Sobito&#xA;  is only a man; his fetish is only the tail of Dango.&quot; As he ceased&#xA;  speaking his hand shot out and snatched the fetish from the grasp of&#xA;  the witch-doctor. &quot;Thus does Muzimo with the fetish of Sobito!&quot; he&#xA;  cried, tossing the tail into the fire to the consternation of the&#xA;  astonished villagers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The books are horribly racist and misrepresentative of African culture, but still likely to be familiar with fans of science fiction or fantasy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a personal opinion, the exact name used for someone who uses fetishes for magic is not very important. Burroughs uses the term &lt;em&gt;witch doctor&lt;/em&gt;, or even &lt;em&gt;shaman&lt;/em&gt;. Usually, I have seen fetish magic applied in fiction by magicians in a tribal context. For example, with terms like &lt;em&gt;shouldermen&lt;/em&gt; (guess the fetish!) or &lt;em&gt;bonecaster&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;the Malazan Book of the Fallen&lt;/em&gt;, the meaning is apparent if you have seen such tribal magic elsewhere in fiction. I think you could use whichever of these terms or their translations is most likely to be familiar with your target audience without much loss of fidelity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T08:25:20.477" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T08:25:20.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5146" CreationDate="2018-01-09T18:09:03.313" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't actually hear all that much about Mr. Weatherby after this, so the text doesn't directly answer this. There are only a few references to him later in the book: Jim Taggart referred to him in passing during his meeting with Lillian Rearden, and he appeared at a dinner meeting about the state of the railroad industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the book notes of the party that Clem Weatherby was the least influential person at the dinner in spite of (or, perhaps, because of) being the technical expert on railroads. (Dagny was, of course, only there so that they could pretend that she agreed with their decisions). Also, it was Jim Taggart (not Clem Weatherby) that convinced her to attend the meeting in the first place. While the text doesn't specify either way, this at least hints at the possibility that Mr. Weatherby either wasn't successful in trading Dagny (which would make sense given her prediction that trying to trade her probably wouldn't do him any good) or that he didn't try in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-01-09T18:09:03.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T00:59:01.047" Score="6" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;Spokes&quot; by Paul Auster (of which you can read the first few verses &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=32184&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, or the whole poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/20595535?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; if you have Jstor access) seems to be about things in nature - birds, plants, eggs. The only mention of a &quot;hub&quot; and &quot;wheel&quot; are in the third-to-last verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Into the hub the shell implodes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Persists in a pun of loam and rock,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Rising as stick, to invade, to drive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Out the babble that worded its body&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   To emerge, to wait for future&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Blows-city in root, in deed, unsprung, even out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Of the city. Get out. The wheel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Was deception. It cannot turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't really understand the meaning of this poem, either literally or metaphorically, so as a first step to increasing my comprehension and appreciation: &lt;strong&gt;why is the poem called &quot;Spokes&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; What do wheels, and their spokes and hubs, have to do with the process of nature as described in the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T11:57:08.330" Title="Why is this poem by Paul Auster entitled &quot;Spokes&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;paul-auster&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5365" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5366" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US writer Paul Auster (born 1947) or about any of his literary works, which include novels, poems, screenplays, and essays." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T01:16:41.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5364" CreationDate="2018-01-10T10:10:00.093" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A key theme of this poem is conflict, or perhaps the gap, between the actuality of nature, our perception of it and the frustrations and disconnects that result from our attempts to describe it with our limited language. A couple of early examples expressing these themes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Between branch and spire - the word&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Belittles its nest, and the seed, rocked&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By simpler confines will not confess.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Speech could not cobble the swamp,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And so you dance for a brighter silence  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an echo of the mystical Jewish tradition known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabbalah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kabbalah&lt;/a&gt;. According to this, God c&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/creation-mysticism-fashioning-the-world-from-letters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reated the universe&lt;/a&gt; partly using the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;By means of the twenty two letters, by giving them a form and shape, by mixing them and combining them in different ways, God made the soul of all that which has been created and all of that which will be. It is upon these same letters that the Holy One (blessed be he) has founded his high and holy name.&quot;&#xA;  - from the &lt;em&gt;Sefer Yetsirah&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kabbalistic scholars believed that since God used language to create the cosmos it might be possible, therefore, to use that same language to divine the will of God. This connects back to the poem's thesis of our problems connecting to nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this relate to the poem's title? The wheel is a recurring theme in Kabbalistic imagery. Indeed the creation story in this tradition is sometimes portrayed as turning a wheel. The wheel also occurs in other semi-mystic Asian religions, such as the Buddhist prayer wheel and wheel of fortune. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can infer this from the several references to God and creation in the poem. It mirrors the act of God's creation with the creative act of the artist or poet. Indeed at one point, it refers to the wheel as part of a literal act of creation through language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But gales nourish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chance: breath, blooming, while the wheel scores&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its writing into earth.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most wheels have an even number of spokes. This one, however, has 13 - the number of stanzas in the poem. This is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The wheel&#xA;  Was deception. It cannot turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An expression of the flaws that arise in using language to try and understand or express nature. The poet is expressing guilt at his inability to use his own creation to accurately do justice to that of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spokes was Auster's first published poem. He would return to its themes of perfect and imperfect language in the plots of his novels &lt;em&gt;City of Glass&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Brooklyn Follies&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References: &#xA;- Unsaying: Mystical Aspiration and Negativity in Paul Auster’s Poetry, François Hugonnier, Caliban: French Journal of English Studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T13:14:11.367" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T13:14:11.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5228" CreationDate="2018-01-10T10:21:35.990" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you can easily buy it at Russia, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/137961608/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/137961608/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/137961612/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.ozon.ru/context/detail/id/137961612/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digital versions also exist and are easily findable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T10:21:35.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2018-01-10T11:20:48.513" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The twist of Liza-Lu and Angel together at the end of &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; is odd, like you say, and does seem somewhat unnecessary. However, there are some points which can explain why Hardy added it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly, it contributed some sort of resolvement to the ending&lt;/strong&gt;. Tess is given the death penalty for her murder of Alec. We see this almost through Liza-Lu and Angel's eyes as they wait in Wintoncester for Tess's death to be signalled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed. Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Justice&amp;quot; was done, and the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; Ch. 59 &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The finality of these sentences is crushing to the reader and really defines the tragedy of the novel. But there is no &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure#D%C3%A9nouement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dénouement&lt;/a&gt; (or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0286.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;narrative closure&lt;/a&gt;) yet, nor the necessary catharsis (a key part of tragedy, the release of tension and anxiety) that this stage should induce. Yes, Tess is dead and that is somewhat a closure in itself, but there is no &lt;em&gt;emotional&lt;/em&gt; closure; the short sentence &amp;quot;It was a black flag.&amp;quot; is flat, emotionless and provides no release for the reader from the tragedy so Liza-Lu and Angel's union and subsequent reaction to Tess's death aimed to induce the necessary catharsis. Helena Michie's &lt;em&gt;Sororophobia: Differences Among Women in Literature and Culture&lt;/em&gt; notes that the fulfillment of emotional satisfaction was essential to the Victorian reader and hence explains Liza-Lu's role:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By embodying principles of literary closure, Liza-Lu forces herself awkwardly, absurdly, onto the novel, undercutting the tragic dignity of Hardy's ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This 'closure' was a contemporary 'principle', and although tragedy is often viewed now as heartbreaking but also in many cases a fitting ending to a narrative, in Hardy's day, readers liked warm and fuzzy endings more; although classics were still appreciated, with the birth of the novel, audiences generally wanted satisfying happy endings. There could also be an element of irony in this resolution as in his book, &lt;em&gt;The Descent of the Imagination: Post-Romantic Culture in the Later Novels of Thomas Hardy&lt;/em&gt;, Kevin Z. Moore claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angel and Liza-Lu evoke only to mock the redemptive possibilities of the romantic epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Secondly, Hardy has made Liza-Lu symbolically act as the person Tess could have been&lt;/strong&gt; had Alec not violated and consequently disgraced her. Tess's ideal life would have been to never have met Alec, marry Angel when she first met him and lived a simple but happy life together. Interestingly, Liza-Lu's original name was Tess in the earlier drafts of the novel before Hardy renamed her. Tess describes Liza-Lu thus when she asks Angel to marry Liza-Lu:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;She is so good and simple and pure.&lt;/strong&gt; O, Angel--I wish you would marry her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O, if you would!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That's nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws continually about Marlott; and &lt;strong&gt;'Liza-Lu is so gentle and sweet, and she is growing so beautiful.&lt;/strong&gt; O, I could share you with her willingly when we are spirits! If you would train her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your own self! ... &lt;strong&gt;She had all the best of me without the bad of me;&lt;/strong&gt; and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if death had not divided us.... Well, I have said it. I won't mention it again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; Ch.58 &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tess views herself as &amp;quot;good and simple&amp;quot; but not pure like her sister; she is the 'unblemished', 'unsullied' version of Tess:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;a spiritualized image of Tess, slighter than she, but with the same beautiful eyes&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As a side note, the irony of the Angel and Liza-Lu match is that in the Victorian era, it was forbidden to marry your sister-in law as she was considered to be like a sister by blood, hence Angel's comment &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;And she is my sister-in-law&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;; this does make their prospective marriage even more bizarre. So perhaps the match was also included to exude shock from contemporary readers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liza-Lu is known to be nearly sixteen (4 years younger than Tess), the age Tess was when she went to the Chase with Alec, and so Tess sees their union as a chance for Liza-Lu to achieve Tess's own aspirations, marry Angel, and not fall prey to disgrace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r9wnDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT153&amp;amp;lpg=PT153&amp;amp;dq=why+did+liza+lu+marry+angel&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=X3GCOTtfdC&amp;amp;sig=btaAmj-E4JauTLLLherwCdNDPes&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=why%20did%20liza%20lu%20marry%20angel&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why didn't you stay and love me when I--was sixteen; living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced on the green? O, why didn't you, why didn't you!&amp;quot; she said, impetuously clasping her hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; Ch. 31 &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;Angel and Liza-Lu's union is essentially the embodiment and fulfillment of Tess's last wish.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T08:46:34.130" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5370" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-10T14:08:55.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T14:08:55.520" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T14:08:55.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5371" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-10T14:08:55.520" Score="0" Body="For questions about nursery rhymes, traditional poems or songs for children." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T19:10:54.040" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T19:10:54.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5364" CreationDate="2018-01-10T16:16:48.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the basis of Matt Thrower's excellent answer, I'd venture to say that &amp;quot;spokes&amp;quot; may even express a play on words: God &lt;strong&gt;spoke&lt;/strong&gt;, and the universe was created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spokes also transmit the movement from the hub to the outer perimeter of the wheel, and this could be reminiscent of the Big Bang theory. That initial dense mass from which the universe is said to have originated has been often described as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/02/16/lifting-the-curtain-on-the-cosmic-egg-and-the-big-bang/3e7448c5-101c-490f-a843-0df7c557c4bc/?utm_term=.d3440e1bef65&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;egg&lt;/a&gt;, and this explains the enigmatic egg that appears at the beginning and at the end of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the egg gravitates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Into the hub the shell implodes [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The egg limits renunciation [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] it carries its&#xA;own birth, and if it shatters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;acclaim its fall and contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The egg is synonymous with the beginning of life, and conveys the idea of potential being. But unlike the explosive big bang, the &amp;quot;perfect work of God&amp;quot;, in the case of the poet, his &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot;, his seed of creation, implodes and only reaches the rim of the wheel by means of the imperfect spokes of his wheel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T20:19:01.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-10T17:23:19.587" Score="13" ViewCount="1574" Body="&lt;p&gt;We previously had a question asking &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1431/2191&quot;&gt;Were all of Shakespeare's plays fully in iambic pentameter?&lt;/a&gt;, but of course, it wasn't just Shakespeare who used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt;; it became the prevalent metre in English poetry and drama around the middle of the sixteenth century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French poetry and verse drama, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_alexandrine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French alexandrine&lt;/a&gt; was the dominant metre from the 17th through the 19th century. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any linguistic or other verifiable reason for this difference in preferred metre? Note: I don't believe it has anything to do with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kenyonreview.org/2016/04/iambic-pentameter-nothing-heart/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;heartbeat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T13:49:14.810" Title="Why did the alexandrine become the &quot;natural&quot; metre for French verse drama, whereas English renaissance drama adopted the iambic pentameter?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5374" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-10T19:02:53.870" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T19:02:53.870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T19:02:53.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5375" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-10T19:02:53.870" Score="0" Body="Questions about Jane Austen's 1811 novel 'Sense and Sensibility'. Use this tag with the [jane-austen] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T20:06:46.433" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T20:06:46.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5376" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-10T19:10:36.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T19:10:36.253" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T19:10:36.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5377" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-10T19:10:36.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer Robert E. Howard (1906 – 1936) and his work. Much of his work was published in the magazine 'Weird Tales' and included sword and sorcery stories, westerns and horror stories. He also created the character Conan the Barbarian." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T20:06:42.843" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T20:06:42.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="294" CreationDate="2018-01-10T19:52:55.103" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tumblr user by the name of SnicketSleuth who has proposed a brilliant theory. There's such an overwhelming amount of evidence for it that I've personally decided that's the answer Handler hid that he wanted us to find. You can read the theory online &lt;a href=&quot;https://snicketsleuth.tumblr.com/post/137367403165/what-is-the-sugar-bowl-secret&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://snicketsleuth.tumblr.com/post/156492794265/does-the-sugar-bowl-contain-a-horseradishapple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://snicketsleuth.tumblr.com/post/157752087740/was-the-sugar-bowl-empty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;,  but here's a summary as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short version goes like this: the sugar bowl is actually empty. V.F.D. is a morally questionable organization. Even the noble side. They try to do good, but they go about it in dubious ways (kidnapping children in the middle of the night to make them join, Beatrice and Bertrand murdering Olaf's parents, etc.) Some young members opposed these questionable actions, so to keep them in check, the older generation told them it was all for the greater good - to protect the sugar bowl. If they carried out the questionably moral missions they were given, they would share the sugar bowl secret with them. It was all B.S. of course. Just manipulation. However, after the schism happened, most of the older generation was killed. The only people left alive was the new generation, who never learned the sugar bowl secret. They had no idea it was actually empty since they had been taught to believe it was so important. So when the sugar bowl gets lost, everyone tries to find it. Those few people in the new generation who had somehow figured out that it was empty had to make sure they found it first so the others wouldn't find it and open it and realize it was empty, thus exposing decades of lies, as that would likely worsen the schism even more. It's canon that at some point, the sugar bowl was in Esmé's possession. It's also canon that Esmé firmly believes Beatrice stole it from her, even though Snicket admits that was actually him. Assuming Esmé had Olaf burn down the Baudelaire Mansion as revenge for the sugar bowl theft, perhaps there's evidence that the sugar bowl was the reason for the fire, and if there's evidence, it could probably exonerate Snicket from the arson accusations. Irony plays a huge role in the series and the sugar bowl being empty would be as ironic as can be because it would mean all deaths were for nothing. Anyways, I suck at explaining. Go read snicketsleuth's full explanation. All credit goes to him/her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2878" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-10T22:55:29.880" LastActivityDate="2018-01-10T22:55:29.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13936" CreationDate="2018-01-11T00:26:06.533" Score="6" ViewCount="427" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Thomas Hardy poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-darkling-thrush/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Darkling Thrush&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, one line seems to scan quite jarringly compared to the even iambic meter of the others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;land's&lt;/strong&gt; sharp &lt;strong&gt;fea&lt;/strong&gt;tures &lt;strong&gt;seemed&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;me&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The &lt;strong&gt;Cen&lt;/strong&gt;tury's &lt;strong&gt;corpse&lt;/strong&gt; out&lt;strong&gt;leant&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Its &lt;strong&gt;crypt&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;cloud&lt;/strong&gt;y &lt;strong&gt;ca&lt;/strong&gt;no&lt;strong&gt;py&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The &lt;strong&gt;wind&lt;/strong&gt; its &lt;strong&gt;death&lt;/strong&gt;-lam&lt;strong&gt;ent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt;cient &lt;strong&gt;pulse&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;germ&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;birth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was &lt;strong&gt;shrunk&lt;/strong&gt;en &lt;strong&gt;hard&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;dry&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every spirit upon earth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seemed &lt;strong&gt;fer&lt;/strong&gt;vor&lt;strong&gt;less&lt;/strong&gt; as &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these lines have a nice clear even rhythm, save only &quot;And every spirit upon earth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The natural way I would read this as prose would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;ery &lt;strong&gt;spir&lt;/strong&gt;it up&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;earth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that has two adjacent stressed syllables and sounds weird in the context of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The best way to make it fit in with the surrounding lines would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;ery &lt;strong&gt;spir&lt;/strong&gt;it &lt;strong&gt;up&lt;/strong&gt;on &lt;strong&gt;earth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the word &quot;upon&quot; normally has the stress very firmly on the second syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these is the better way to scan the line? Perhaps it was intended to stand out from the rest by its different rhythm for some reason? Or perhaps &quot;upon&quot; was pronounced with the stress on the first syllable in Hardy's time? Any light thrown upon this would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T18:37:54.060" Title="Scanning the line &quot;And every spirit upon earth&quot; in Thomas Hardy's &quot;The Darkling Thrush&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2018-01-11T03:44:52.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The holy &quot;Hallelujah&quot; (literally &quot;God be praised&quot;) would be then calling God in prayer, the broken one - calling him in vain.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one of the version of the songs, there is this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And remember when I moved in you &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the holy dove was moving too &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every breath we drew was Hallelujah &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the singer was praising the Lord with every breath. Now if you look at the lyrics of the part in OP, you'll notice that the singer is being chided for &quot;taking the name in vain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You say I took the Name in vain &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I don't even know the Name &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course against the commandment &quot;Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain&quot;. So in another words, the singer apparently called God while not addressing him in prayer - judging by the rest of the song it was something akin to &quot;Oh God, she is so beautiful!&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You saw her bathing on the roof &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you [...] &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  And from your lips she drew the hallelujah&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was of course a blasphemy, but then the singer argues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It doesn't matter which you heard &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The holy or the broken Hallelujah&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you can take another part of the song :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe there's a God above &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All I've ever learned from love &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's not a cry that you hear at night &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's not somebody who's seen the light &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in different version&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's no complaint you hear tonight &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's not some pilgrim who's seen the light &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it's a cold and it's a lonely(/broken )Hallelujah &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone (who lost the loved one) is not wordlessly crying or praying (seeing the light) at night - they instead keep sobbing and calling God (as in &quot;Oh God, Oh God, why?&quot; ), in such a &quot;broken&quot;, blasphemous hallelujah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T19:35:43.413" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T19:35:43.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5379" CreationDate="2018-01-11T04:06:18.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon is a weird word because both &quot;up&quot; and &quot;on&quot; tend to be unstressed. Compare &quot;on earth&quot; with &quot;uphold&quot;. Even though the word &quot;upon&quot;, by itself, scans with the stress placed on the &quot;on&quot;, the presence of a stronger syllable after the &quot;on&quot; (&quot;earth&quot;) means that the &quot;on&quot; will also be unstressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a such thing as a &quot;promoted stress&quot; where a syllable that is normally slack (unstressed) has a slight stress because it is surrounded by syllables with even less stress. For example: &lt;strong&gt;Shall&lt;/strong&gt; I com&lt;strong&gt;pare&lt;/strong&gt; thee &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;sum&lt;/strong&gt;mer's &lt;strong&gt;day&lt;/strong&gt;?  scans with a slight stress on &quot;to&quot; because it helps for the passage into the normative meter and because relative to &quot;thee&quot; and &quot;a&quot; &quot;to&quot; has more stress. But that doesn't apply here because &quot;up&quot; has significantly less stress than the surrounding syllables so it would be a mistake to scan it as having stress.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's established that &quot;it&quot; and &quot;up&quot; don't have stress. That leaves &quot;on&quot; and &quot;earth&quot;. This is very tricky. On one hand, as I've mentioned earlier, &quot;on&quot; has a slight tendency to be less stress relative to a word like &quot;earth&quot;. But on the other hand, unusual meter can change that. The trochaic tetrameter &quot;&lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt;y &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt;line &lt;strong&gt;fight&lt;/strong&gt;ers &lt;strong&gt;fight&lt;/strong&gt;ing&quot; is a really nice illustration of this: the trochaic meter of that sentence puts the stress on the &quot;on&quot; even though normally &quot;line&quot; would have stress instead of &quot;on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice is between &quot;And &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;ery &lt;strong&gt;spi&lt;/strong&gt;rit upon &lt;strong&gt;earth&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;And &lt;strong&gt;ev&lt;/strong&gt;ery &lt;strong&gt;spi&lt;/strong&gt;rit up&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; earth&quot;. In terms of the mechanics of meter; I think both scansions are valid, as in if you read the poem out loud either way it works. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the greater context of the poem, I think there are a few differences between the two readings that the reader should keep in mind when making a decision. The main thing to keep in mind is that having three unstressed syllables in a row draws a lit of attention to that particular line. In contrast, &lt;strong&gt;spi&lt;/strong&gt;rit up&lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; earth&quot; draws a lot less attention: two unstressed syllables instead of three means you don't get that attention grabbing three short syllables, and the last syllable being unstressed makes the line less forceful, counteracting the attention grabbing effect of the two unstressed syllables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I like having the extra emphasis on this line. The word spirit implies a certain sense of excitement, and I want the scansion to reflect the contrast between the spirit of the second to last line with the &quot;fervorless&quot; last line. This is a theme that does come up elsewhere in the poem so I think its reasonable to assume that the contrast is important: Hardy also contrasts the joyful &quot;full-hearted evensong&quot; with the &quot;frail, gaunt and small&quot; body of the thrush creating the song (and Hardy also has some interesting meter around that portion of the poem as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can understand not emphasizing that line if you want to emphasize the bleakness of Hardy's description of winter in that stanza. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T03:35:31.630" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T03:35:31.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-11T11:50:54.490" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/obituary-professor-kenneth-muir-5598317.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kenneth Muir&lt;/a&gt; (1907–1996) was an eminent and very productive Shakespeare scholar. Wikipedia has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Muir_(scholar)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;short article about him&lt;/a&gt; that leaves out many lesser-known facts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he directed a number of plays, including &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; (which he also edited for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/troilus-and-cressida-the-oxford-shakespeare-9780199536535&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he translated at least one of Racine's plays;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the 1930s, he knew poets such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Spender&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Spender&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Auden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. H. Auden&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in 1933, Oxford University Press published a volume of his poems: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/nettle-and-the-flower-and-other-poems/oclc/1494580&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Nettle and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which contained a poem dedicated to W. H. Auden),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he later published hundreds of poems in magazines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of the research I have done, I have not been able to find an edition or even an anthology of Kenneth Muir's poetry. In the absence of that, has anybody ever compiled a bibliography listing his poems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T12:33:13.080" Title="Have Kenneth Muir's poems ever been published as a collection?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;kenneth-muir&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5383" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-11T11:53:27.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T11:53:27.617" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T11:53:27.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5384" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-11T11:53:27.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about Kenneth Muir (1907–1996) and his works. Muir is mainly known as a Shakespeare scholar but also published hundreds of poems of his own." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T12:33:35.787" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T12:33:35.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5382" CreationDate="2018-01-11T12:33:13.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/97p393.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Kenneth Muir&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the British Academy&lt;/em&gt; 97 (1998), pp. 393–409):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a selective bibliography of Kenneth Muir’s writings, 1937–79, in&#xA;  the book of essays in his honour, &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare’s Styles&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and  G. K. Hunter (Cambridge, 1980). A more comprehensive bibliography  will  appear  in  his  Autobiography, forthcoming  from Liverpool University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the book &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Styles: Essays in honour of Kenneth Muir&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Shakespeare_s_Styles.html?id=nDB1QgAACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, but there's no preview so that I can check the bibliography. His autobiography is even harder to track down - Google seems to have no record of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, this is only a signpost to a signpost, but it's the best I've been able to find in the way of a bibliography. Muir's poems don't seem to have been put together in any anthology or collection. I've even searched the online catalogue of one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit#United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UK legal deposit libraries&lt;/a&gt;, without success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T12:33:13.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5386" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5390" CreationDate="2018-01-11T13:08:59.837" Score="10" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, when I see old books on Archive.org, I see mysterious &quot;Printed for...&quot; and can't understand what does it mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/byrthlyfandacte00caxtgoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a link to 1817 reprint of Le Morte D'Arthur&lt;/a&gt;, prepared by William Upcott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the title page, you can see this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4K4nF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4K4nF.png&quot; alt=&quot;Title page, stating &amp;#39;for&amp;#39;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In normal text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;London:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Printed from Caxton's Edition, 1485,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_Row&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paternoster-Row&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Davison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Davison&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitefriars,_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Whitefriars&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1817&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Davison is a publisher, who lived in Whitefriars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But who are these Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown? And what does Paternoster Row mean in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T10:45:25.460" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:27:44.473" Title="What does &quot;Printed for...&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5350" CreationDate="2018-01-11T14:33:52.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In plain English the line is saying &quot;The boy's mite was like the widow's mite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is most likely a reference to the story from the Christian Bible, specifically in the book of Mark, Chapter 12, Verse 41-44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sat down opposite the treasury and observed how the crowd put money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow also came and put in two small coins worth a few cents. Calling his disciples to himself, he said to them, 'Amen, I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the other contributors to the treasury. For they have all contributed from their surplus wealth, but she, from her poverty, has contributed all she had, her whole livelihood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the story is of how a poor widow gave all she had to the church and therefore was view as giving the most of all those that had donated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without further context, I am guessing the boy in &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt; made a similar gesture of giving all he had to something or someone. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T14:33:52.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-11T15:32:24.320" Score="10" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Views on whether or not tragedy provides a fulfilling end to a work have changed over the centuries and it has slipped in and out of popularity in contemporary works of a given period. Great literary classics, such as &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, have always been respected regardless of prevailing literary modes. Nevertheless, the presence of tragedy in literature has fluctuated from its beginning in Ancient Greece, then to its obvious comeback in Shakespeare's day, as well as to the present seeming revival in modern literature. This therefore suggests changing attitudes towards literary tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tragedy &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be considered just as a fulfilling ending as a happy one, so &lt;strong&gt;when and why did popularity for tragedy change over the centuries?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prompted by Rand al'Thor's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3394/whats-the-significance-of-liza-lu#comment10663_5369&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T16:11:47.480" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T22:36:55.140" Title="Why did attitudes change towards tragedy?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;tragedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5388" CreationDate="2018-01-11T15:32:24.320" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four main historical &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;periods&lt;/a&gt; in which tragedy was a substantial part of literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Attica, Greece, 5th Century BC, the 'birth of tragedy'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespearean England, 16th and 17th Centuries, when Shakespeare published many popular tragedy plays;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;France, 17th Century, French playwrights revived the classic Greek tragedy&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Europe and America, latter half of 19th Century, Thomas Hardy broke the prevailing fashion of the Victorian 'Marriage Plot' and paved the way to further tragedies by other authors with his controversial tragedies &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;. Also Grimms's Fairy Tales were published around the same time (1812), which featured dark, tragic endings to some characters' stories.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post Greek tragedy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After the rise of the Greek tragedy, the Romans tried, and failed, to introduce tragedy into their literature. Although Roman authors such as Seneca wrote epic works, they did not take off as they were largely based on Greek plays and lacked the novelty and innovation that the Greeks had possessed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, after the fall of the Roman Empire around 500 AD, barbarians invaded the formerly 'cultured' lands and seemingly snuffed out the idea of tragedy. Christianity brought literature in the form of religious plays, but tragedy remained elusive. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Renaissance revival and fall&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first hint of popular tragedy after this was Geoffrey Chaucer's works; however, this was tragedy in the sense of misfortune to a character rather than death. Next came Shakespeare's revered and successful tragedies, most famously &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;. This boom in popularity for tragedy was due to the beginning of the Renaissance era at that time, which sought to promote arts of all kinds. Plays depicting the realism reflective of normal life became increasingly favoured, which subsequently developed into displaying the tragic aspects of life. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tragedy again fell at the wayside at the growth of Puritans in England, who &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theatredatabase.com/17th_century/closure_of_the_theaters_001.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;closed theatres&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Post Renaissance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After Puritanism fell, tragedy was still suppressed with the introduction of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;novel&lt;/a&gt; in the 18th Century, with Daniel Defoe's &lt;em&gt;Robinson Crusoe&lt;/em&gt; often regarded as the first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Almost coincidentally, the Enlightenment period began to flourish which was associated with economy and hence satirical, society and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_novel#Romantic_period&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic&lt;/a&gt; novels came into being which largely provided the 'happy ending' of marriage or success. Writers such as Jane Austen wrote novels in this genre as well as the Bronte sisters later on in many of their novels (&lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt; excepted which did deal with themes of death, Gothic horror and unresolved lost love; even &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; paralleled this to some extent with Jane's childhood tragedies and the tragic relationship between Rochester and Bertha Mason). Also, Gothic novels, such as Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, aimed to thrill audiences not induce the emotion of tragedy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Late 19th - 21st Century&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The late 19th Century marked a surge in tragedy; Thomas Hardy's tragic works as well as Ibsen's tragic dramas marked a clear departure from the contemporary modes, in whose footsteps followed Arthur Miller's plays (notably &lt;em&gt;Death of a Salesman&lt;/em&gt;) in the mid-20th Century.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the same time (1930s - 50s), however, cinema began to promote the &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7976192.stm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'happily ever after' ending&lt;/a&gt; especially in Disney's fairy-tale adaptations, who reversed the often dark conclusions of traditional fairy-tales. This caused tragic literature to yet again fall out of favour.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, now, Shakespeare's tragedies are celebrated as some of the finest works of literature as well as the fact that tragedy is featuring in modern works, which suggests that modern audiences appreciate both tragedy and the optimism of the happy ending.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/tragedy-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reference&lt;/a&gt; for whole answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T22:36:55.140" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T22:36:55.140" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2018-01-11T16:02:40.410" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The information points to a separation of the jobs of publisher/retailer on the one hand and the techical work of printing on the other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a long time after the invention of the printing press, the same person could be both printer and bookseller. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caxton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Caxton&lt;/a&gt;, who probably brought the printing press to England, not only printed and sold book, but also printed some of his own works (mostly translations). When you look at other early printers, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynkyn_de_Worde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wynkyn de Worde&lt;/a&gt; (Caxton's successor) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pynson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Pynson&lt;/a&gt;, the terms printer and publisher appear to be used interchangeably, although the technical jobs of creating type, typesetting, bookbinding etc. are of a different nature than e.g. regularising spelling, arranging the creation of illustrations or arranging contracts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting comment in the Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jaggard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Jaggard&lt;/a&gt;, a contemporary of Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In their era, most members of the stationers guild were either printers or booksellers; both were businessmen with their own establishments, journeymen and apprentices, though in anachronistic modern terms printers could be regarded as blue-collar while the booksellers were white-collar retailers. Most commercial publishing was done by booksellers, who chose their books and commissioned printers to print them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 19th century, some people still combined the jobs of printer, publisher and bookseller, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baxter_(publisher)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Baxter&lt;/a&gt; (1781–1858, known for his &lt;em&gt;Baxter's Bible&lt;/em&gt;). However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Chapman_(publisher)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Chapman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hall_(publisher)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Hall&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapman_%26_Hall&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;company they founded&lt;/a&gt; are just described as publishers, not printers. (Chapman &amp;amp; Hall published Dickens, Thackeray, Robert Browning, Trollope, ...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp274-281#p4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter Thornbury, writing about Paternoster Row&lt;/a&gt; at the end of the 19th century,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before the close of the eighteenth century the house of Longman and Rees had become one of the largest in the City, both as publishers and book-merchants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Printing is not mentioned here. I assume that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longman#Fourth_and_fifth_generations&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman &amp;amp; Co&lt;/a&gt; outsourced the technical work of printing, in this case to Thomas Davison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T16:21:11.090" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T16:21:11.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5391" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-11T19:09:03.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T19:09:03.640" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T19:09:03.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5392" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-11T19:09:03.640" Score="0" Body="For questions about tragedy in literature, or the genre, in general. Not to be used for questions about specific works of tragedy." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T22:29:51.820" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T22:29:51.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5393" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-11T19:12:21.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T19:12:21.457" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T19:12:21.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5394" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-11T19:12:21.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1993 dystopian novel 'The Giver' by Lois Lowry. Use this tag with the [lois-lowry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-11T22:29:58.670" LastActivityDate="2018-01-11T22:29:58.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-12T01:40:06.667" Score="10" ViewCount="13092" Body="&lt;p&gt;A simple rhyming song which I heard growing up and which still gets stuck in my head every so often:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My friend Billy had a ten foot willy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He stuck it through the neighbour's door. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;OR&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; He showed it to the girl next door.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She thought it was a snake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hit it with a rake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And now it's only four foot four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little searching on the internet has convinced me that this is a somewhat well-known ditty, at least in England, so not just made up by someone I knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the origin of this song?&lt;/strong&gt; Where and when did it first appear, and is there any hint of an original author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've found the same question asked on another forum, &lt;a href=&quot;https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/1978929/who-wrote-the-naughty-rhyme-my-friend-billy-had-a-ten-foot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who Wrote The Naughty Rhyme &quot;My Friend Billy Had a Ten Foot...&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but without any serious answers (the top answer &quot;&lt;em&gt;My mate did. Yours sincerely, Billy.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is absolutely hilarious and absolutely useless). I've also found an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2017/05/25/my-friend-billy-has-a-ten-foot-willy-nominated-for-award/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; crediting it to one James &quot;Nipper&quot; Jenkins, but given that the same site has an article &quot;&lt;em&gt;Pfizer cuts research into Alzheimer's, but can't remember why - more soon&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, I'd consider it somewhat less than reliable.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T07:38:31.413" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:38:31.413" Title="What's the origin of the rhyme &quot;My friend Billy had a ten foot willy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5386" CreationDate="2018-01-12T09:40:42.643" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Printed for&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;printed for some booksleller or several booksellers&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular case, &amp;quot;Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown&amp;quot; are actually one bookseller, not several:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Longman had three sons. Of these, Thomas Norton Longman (1771–1842) succeeded to the business. In 1804 two more partners were admitted, and the former apprentice Brown became a partner in 1811; in 1824 the title of the firm was changed to Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown &amp;amp; Green.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Longman (publishing company)&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:27:44.473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:27:44.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5397" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14139" CreationDate="2018-01-12T14:56:40.007" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Russians, having built two batteries on&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       An isle near Ismail, had two ends in view;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The first was to bombard it, and knock down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       The public buildings and the private too,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No matter what poor souls might be undone.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       The city's shape suggested this, 't is true;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Form'd like an amphitheatre, each dwelling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Presented a fine mark to throw a shell in.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second object was to profit by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       The moment of the general consternation,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To attack the Turk's flotilla, which lay nigh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Extremely tranquil, anchor'd at its station:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But a third motive was as probably&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To frighten them into capitulation;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;A phantasy which sometimes seizes warriors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unless they are game as bull-dogs and fox-terriers.&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fantasy to frighten an enemy into capitulation sometimes seizes warriors (it seizes them as strong as bull-dogs and fox-terriers) - but if these warriors are game (i.e. they are to be frightened into capitulation themselves) it does not seize them? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right? I'm not sure because there's no comma after &quot;game&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T07:28:48.373" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T13:37:50.817" Title="Meaning of &quot;A phantasy which sometimes seizes warriors, unless they are game as bull-dogs and fox-terriers&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5403" CreationDate="2018-01-12T17:53:25.213" Score="6" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Seventh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Medals, rank, ribands, lace, embroidery, scarlet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are things immortal to immortal man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As purple to the Babylonian harlot:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An uniform to boys is like a fan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To women; there is scarce a crimson varlet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But deems himself the first in Glory's van.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But Glory's glory; and if you would find&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What that is -- &lt;strong&gt;ask the pig who sees the wind!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At least he feels it, and some say he sees,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because he runs before it like a pig;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or, if that simple sentence should displease,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say, that he scuds before it like a brig,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A schooner, or -- but it is time to ease&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This Canto, ere my Muse perceives fatigue.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The next shall ring a peal to shake all people,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like a bob-major from a village steeple.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand, the stanzas describe a pig that sees (feels) the wind and &quot;he&quot; (the pig) runs in the direction the wind is blowing. But what is the meaning of all this?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should a pig that feels the wind know something about Glory?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T14:02:38.713" Title="Meaning of &quot;pig who sees the wind&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5373" CreationDate="2018-01-12T19:32:54.453" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two parts to this question: why does English use iambic meter while French doesn't, and why does English have 10 syllables in each line of iambic pentameter, while French has 12 syllables per line in an alexandrine. To answer the second question first, it may be pure chance that French settled on 12 syllables per line, while English settled on 10. There are lots of English poems in iambic meter with 8, 10, or 14 syllables per line, and they all work fine. And the dominant meter in French was the decasyllable before it was displaced by the alexandrine in the 17th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that French doesn't use iambic meters is because it's almost impossible to write iambic poetry in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I can explain any further, I need to say something about stress patterns in English and French and some of the rules that govern alexandrines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, every word has some accented syllables, and poetry has to accommodate these. You can emphasize words by using stress, but these emphases fall on top of the phonemic stress patterns already present within the words. In French, there is no stress pattern associated with the words; the stress accents are associated with phrases, and always fall on the last syllable of every phrase. (Except for mute e's, which are never accented. Most of these are pronounced in songs and poems, but only a relatively small fraction are pronounced in usual speech.) So if a word is pronounced alone, its last syllable always has an accent, but if it's in the middle of a phrase, it probably won't. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alexandrine has 12 or 13 syllables in every line, depending on whether they end with a mute e. The lines are divided into two halves (hemistiches) of 6 syllables each. There is always an accent on the 6th and 12th syllables of each line, and there usually is one other accented syllable in each hemistich. To give an example, from Baudelaire's &lt;em&gt;Chant d'automne&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Autumn Song&lt;/em&gt;), the first two lines are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bien&lt;strong&gt;tôt&lt;/strong&gt; nous plonge&lt;strong&gt;rons&lt;/strong&gt; // dans les &lt;strong&gt;froid&lt;/strong&gt;es té&lt;strong&gt;nèb&lt;/strong&gt;res;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A&lt;strong&gt;dieu,&lt;/strong&gt; vive clar&lt;strong&gt;té&lt;/strong&gt; // de nos ét&lt;strong&gt;és&lt;/strong&gt; trop &lt;strong&gt;courts&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Short&lt;strong&gt;ly&lt;/strong&gt; we will plum&lt;strong&gt;met&lt;/strong&gt; // into the &lt;strong&gt;cold&lt;/strong&gt; dark&lt;strong&gt;ness&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fare&lt;strong&gt;well&lt;/strong&gt;, vivid bril&lt;strong&gt;liance&lt;/strong&gt; // of our sum&lt;strong&gt;mers&lt;/strong&gt; too &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I've tried to choose words that have the same number of syllables to translate the French, and I've bolded the accented syllables in French and the corresponding syllables in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an entirely English illustration, here is Roy Campbell's translation of the first two lines into iambic pentameter, followed by my translation of the first two lines into an English version of the French alexandrine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt;to &lt;strong&gt;froz&lt;/strong&gt;en &lt;strong&gt;shades,&lt;/strong&gt; like &lt;strong&gt;leaves,&lt;/strong&gt; we'll &lt;strong&gt;tum&lt;/strong&gt;ble.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A&lt;strong&gt;dieu,&lt;/strong&gt; short &lt;strong&gt;sum&lt;/strong&gt;mer's &lt;strong&gt;blaze,&lt;/strong&gt; that &lt;strong&gt;shone&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;mock.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We will &lt;strong&gt;soon&lt;/strong&gt; be en&lt;strong&gt;gulfed&lt;/strong&gt; // by the &lt;strong&gt;cold&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;dark&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dear &lt;strong&gt;sum&lt;/strong&gt;mer, fare thee &lt;strong&gt;well&lt;/strong&gt;! // Your &lt;strong&gt;vis&lt;/strong&gt;it was too &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this last line would be iambic hexameter if you put stress on the words &lt;em&gt;fare&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;. But you wouldn't if it was a French alexandrine. When reading alexandrine poetry, there is a strong tendency to parse it so exactly two syllables are stressed in each hemastich (although this isn't always possible). Similarly, when reading iambic poetry, there is a strong tendency to put some stress on every other syllable, even those (like &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; in the example above) that wouldn't be stressed ordinarily. And again, this isn't always possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to get a line of iambic verse in French, it needs to consist entirely of two-syllable phrases. This is quite a bit shorter than French phrases usually are. Lines of iambic hexameter are rare in French poetry. The penultimate line of part I of the above poem, &lt;em&gt;Chant d'automne&lt;/em&gt; is one. Baudelaire quite deliberately wrote it as iambic hexameter,  and I am sure it took some effort his part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pour &lt;strong&gt;qui&lt;/strong&gt;? — C'é&lt;strong&gt;tait&lt;/strong&gt; hi&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; l'é&lt;strong&gt;té&lt;/strong&gt;; voi&lt;strong&gt;ci&lt;/strong&gt; l'au&lt;strong&gt;tomn&lt;/strong&gt;e!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For &lt;strong&gt;whom&lt;/strong&gt;? — It &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; yester&lt;strong&gt;day&lt;/strong&gt; sum&lt;strong&gt;mer&lt;/strong&gt;; look: &lt;strong&gt;here's&lt;/strong&gt; au&lt;strong&gt;tumn&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, I'm bolding the English corresponding to the accented syllables in the French.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've had a few more thoughts about why alexandrines came to be dominant in French poetry.  French poetic meters are generally composed from parts with an even number of syllables, almost always 4, 6, and 8. Decasyllables are broken into 4+6 syllables, while alexandrines are broken into 6+6. Thus, in some sense, alexandrines are more symmetric, and this may be more pleasing. (Although maybe I'm wrong about this, since decasyllables were more dominant for several centuries, although alexandrines were also used during this period.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-01-17T13:49:14.810" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T13:49:14.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5400" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-12T20:58:13.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-12T20:58:13.640" LastActivityDate="2018-01-12T20:58:13.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5401" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-12T20:58:13.640" Score="0" Body="Questions about the theme or themes of one or more works of literature. &quot;Theme&quot; refers to a central idea or message in a literary work. A theme typically unifies the literary work and should not be confused with a &quot;motif&quot;, which is a (smaller) recurring element; see the tag [motif]." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T13:17:19.887" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T13:17:19.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5398" CreationDate="2018-01-13T03:31:34.873" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a discussion of what Byron is saying here, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=XM3tDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA289&amp;amp;lpg=PA289&amp;amp;dq=%22ask+the+pig+who+sees+the+wind%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=VucX4c1Aeb&amp;amp;sig=RBijTzxN0voz1ZPCY8vLDsDEYTc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwid9Ib-_dPYAhVr4YMKHcUaD_wQ6AEILjAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ask%20the%20pig%20who%20sees%20the%20wind%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R.P. Lessenich's &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Romantic Disillusionism and the Sceptical Tradition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is in the service of such debauched monarchs and politicians, spoiled by luxury, located far from and virtually not even interested in the scene of action, that the soldiers risk their lives and vainly die in pursuit of immortality that glory will hardly confer on them. The soldiers promptly swallow the deadly bait laid out for them in the shape of an embroidered unform and medals... They see glory and run before it as pigs were proverbially ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently there was a folk belief or folk saying that pigs can see the wind.  This is seen in line 1108 of Part 2, Canto III of Samuel Butler's 1684 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4937/pg4937.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hudibras&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, with the line &quot;As pigs are said to see the wind&quot;. (Footnote 139 of an edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/don_juan_canto_7.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto VII of &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; pointed me to &lt;em&gt;Hudibras&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google will lead to many occurrences, including an &lt;a href=&quot;http://secondat.blogspot.com/2006/08/pigs-are-said-to-see-wind-emerson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay by Emerson&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBWRSahGz9c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YouTube videos&lt;/a&gt; and in the lyrics of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cowboylyrics.com/lyrics/highwaymen/death-and-hell-24702.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnny Cash&lt;/a&gt; and in discussions of folklore.  One  occurrence is in a bizarrely bad  anonymously written  story &quot;The Pirate and the Cruiser&quot; anthologized in Marguerite Gardiner, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marguerite_Gardiner,_Countess_of_Blessington&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Countess of Blessington's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=w68lAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA149&amp;amp;lpg=PA149&amp;amp;dq=blessington+pigs+see+the+wind&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=aiHfid0C5l&amp;amp;sig=7mQ2LmpmphXILNPjEW7CaL-8ies&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwih6siD9tPYAhUDmoMKHQ-ND70Q6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=blessington%20pigs%20see%20the%20wind&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Honey-Moon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The crew laughed at Peter's prophecy; but it was not such a hearty laugh as was the general custom. That pigs see wind was not altogether disbelieved, and that the pig's snout was pointed right ahead was beyond a doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a small world:  the anthologist knew Byron, having met him in 1823, soon  after Canto VII was written, and wrote a book about him.  The story itself seems to have first appeared in the &lt;em&gt;United service journal, and naval and military magazine;&lt;/em&gt;  October, 1836.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T14:02:38.713" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T14:02:38.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5412" CreationDate="2018-01-13T07:28:22.967" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Eighth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The troops, already disembark'd, push'd on&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      To take a battery on the right; the others,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who landed lower down, their landing done,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Had set to work as briskly as their brothers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Being grenadiers, they mounted one by one,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Cheerful as children climb the breasts of mothers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O'er the entrenchment and the palisade,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Quite orderly, as if upon parade.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And this was admirable; for so hot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      The fire was, that were red Vesuvius loaded,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Besides its lava, with all sorts of shot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And shells or hells, it could not more have goaded.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of officers a third fell on the spot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;A thing which victory by no means boded&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To gentlemen engaged in the assault:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hounds, when the huntsman tumbles, are at fault&lt;/strong&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when a huntsman stumbles over something, he blames his hounds. But how does that explain that &quot;since 33% of the officers died in the attack, this was a sign that the army was to be victorious&quot;?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two observations seem unrelated to me. Am I missing something?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T15:13:59.247" Title="Meaning of &quot;Hounds, when the huntsman tumbles, are at fault&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5406" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T10:02:17.363" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Eighth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By Jove! he was a noble fellow, Johnson,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And though his name, than Ajax or Achilles,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sounds less harmonious, underneath the sun soon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      We shall not see his likeness: he could kill his&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Man quite as quietly as blows the monsoon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Her steady breath (&lt;strong&gt;which some months the same &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seldom he varied feature, hue, or muscle,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And could be very busy without bustle;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this phrase? &quot;The monsoon remains at the same low intensity for some months&quot;? Why is the word *still** italicized? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T09:18:23.933" Title="Meaning of &quot;which some months the same still is&quot; in Byron's 'Don Juan'" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5408" CreationDate="2018-01-13T12:42:09.017" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Eighth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But those who scaled, found out that their advance&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Was favour'd by an accident or blunder:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The Greek or Turkish Cohorn's ignorance&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Had palisado'd in a way you'd wonder&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To see in forts of Netherlands or France&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      (Though these to our Gibraltar must knock under) --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Right in the middle of the parapet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just named, these palisades were primly set:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So that on either side some nine or ten&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Paces were left, whereon you could contrive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To march; a great convenience to our men,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      At least to all those who were left alive,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who thus could form a line and fight again;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And that which farther aided them to strive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was, that they could kick down the palisades,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which scarcely rose much higher than grass blades.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first thought that &quot;Ignorance had palisadoed &lt;strong&gt;cohorns&lt;/strong&gt; there, just like you may see in forts of Netherlands&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is there the possessive &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt; after &quot;cohorn&quot;? Okay.. let's try to assume that &quot;Cohorn's ignorance&quot; is subject in this clause. This &quot;ignorance&quot; had &quot;palisadoed&quot; something - but what exactly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &quot;palisades not higher than grass blades&quot;? What is he talking about? I can't wrap my mind around this, and thus I fail to understand these three lines. What do they mean, in plain English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T12:54:46.410" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T13:11:41.770" Title="Where is the object in this clause in Byron's Don Juan?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5407" CreationDate="2018-01-13T13:11:41.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Palisado&lt;/strong&gt; is an obsolete form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/palisade#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;palisade&lt;/a&gt;, which as a verb means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To equip with a palisade&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... a palisade (noun) in this context being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A wall of wooden stakes, used as a defensive barrier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a verb, &quot;palisade&quot; is usually transitive (has an object), but in context its meaning as an intransitive verb is clear: the object is implied without being mentioned. We can get some idea of the usage of the verb by checking the examples on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/palisado&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wiktionary page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1853, Mary Howitt., &lt;em&gt;Strife and Peace&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The sea breaks upon this coast against a &lt;strong&gt;palisadoed&lt;/strong&gt; fence of rocks and cliffs, around which swarm flocks of polar birds with cries and screams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;1816, Robert Kerr, &lt;em&gt;A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 17:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;At Chaco they had a little earthen fort, with a small ditch &lt;strong&gt;palisadoed&lt;/strong&gt; round it, and a few old honeycombed guns without carriages, and which do not defend the harbour in the least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cohorn&lt;/strong&gt;, in this verse, apparently refers to a Dutch engineer. At least according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AjZQBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Cochran, ed., &lt;em&gt;Aspects of Byron's Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; in the chapter &quot;Mary Shelley's Fair-Copying of Don Juan&quot;, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At VIII, 46, 3, 3, Byron has to identify the Dutch engineer as &quot;Cohorn&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OK, now let's look at your bolded lines again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Greek or Turkish Cohorn's ignorance&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had palisado'd in a way you'd wonder&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To see in forts of Netherlands or France&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating this into &quot;plain English&quot;, as you asked for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ignorant Greek or Turkish engineers had done a bad job of fortifying the defences - you wouldn't see that in Dutch or French forts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt; of &quot;palisado'd&quot; here is implied by context: it's the parapet being stormed by &quot;our men&quot;. The &lt;strong&gt;subject&lt;/strong&gt; is the &quot;ignorance&quot; only symbolically: it was the 'Cohorn' who palisado'd the parapet, but it was their ignorance which screwed up the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T13:11:41.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5404" CreationDate="2018-01-13T14:34:43.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;litotes&lt;/a&gt;. (Using &quot;understatement to emphasize a point by stating a negative to further affirm a positive, often incorporating double negatives for effect&quot;, says the mother of all knowledge.) &quot;By no means boded&quot; = &quot;did not augur well&quot; = &quot;looked bad&quot;.  Because a third were killed, it seemed that victory was not not certain [here I'm doing it, too], that is, victory was unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T14:34:43.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T15:47:43.150" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's assume there is some John Doe, who is an author of Some Book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was published by Some Publisher in 1800, in 2 volumes. Then, it was published again in 1805, by the same publisher, with minor corrections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in 1810 it was published again, by the same publisher, but in 3 volumes, with images, preface, glossary, on handmade paper and in very limited quantity (only 300). And much more pricey, of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this pricey &quot;version&quot; was published again, in 1815, by the same publisher, with minor corrections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th editions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do we have 1st and 2nd and again 1st and 2nd editions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edition_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about &quot;edition&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and it seems this question could be answered differently, i.e. from the bibliographical point of view, and from the publisher's point of view, and the publisher's point of view isn't consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please give me some light on it. Probably there exists some strong and rigid classification for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-13T23:59:14.743" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T23:59:14.743" Title="The proper way to count &quot;edition&quot; numbering" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-13T16:26:21.423" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Host&lt;/em&gt;, Melanie's aunt Maggie and her daughter Sharon, who Melanie was trying to find when she got caught by the souls and tried to jump down an elevator shaft, are shown to be quite bitter and angry - never really interacting with Wanderer and always keeping a distance from everyone... except when there's an argument when Kyle brings Sunny to the caves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know why they are so bitter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-01-13T16:26:21.423" Title="Why are Maggie and Sharon so bitter and angry?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;stephenie-meyer&gt;&lt;the-host&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5404" CreationDate="2018-01-13T16:28:55.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't agree that this is litotes, since there is no positive to be wrung from the negative constructions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's parse the passage a bit more deeply. First stanza summation: &lt;strong&gt;The grenadiers had landed ashore and immediately pushed their way past the defenses in an orderly fashion.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second stanza summation: &lt;strong&gt;The actions of the grenadiers were admirable, even in the face of intense opposing fire that relentlessly cut the attackers down. But even if they had faced a volcano of fire, it could not have pushed them forward as much as the fear of failure, of being blamed for defeat.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the final four lines (you only bolded three, but four are necessary since the final sentence includes four):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of officers a third fell on the spot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A thing which victory by no means boded&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To gentlemen engaged in the assault:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, casualties were occurring at an alarming rate, which suggested to the &quot;gentlemen&quot; (which is a class marker, since in that era only the upper class could &quot;buy their colors,&quot; i.e., become officers) that victory was certainly in jeopardy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hounds, when the huntsman stumbles, are at fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the huntsman (in this case, likely the commander of the attack) falls, it is human nature to lay the blame elsewhere. I believe the statement is merely a reflection that subordinates are all too often blamed for their leader's failures. Or, as you'll hear frequently in business and military circles, &quot;shit flows downhill.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2074" LastEditorUserId="2074" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T15:13:59.247" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T15:13:59.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5280" CreationDate="2018-01-13T18:58:10.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted Heinrich Heine: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sämtliche Werke&lt;/em&gt;. Düsseldorfer Ausgabe&lt;/strong&gt;, in 16 volumes, published by Hoffmann und Campe in the 1990s. The register of titles and first lines (in volume 16) does not list &amp;quot;Frühlingsbotschaft&amp;quot;, but it does list the first line &amp;quot;Leise zieht durch mein Gemüth&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem starting with the line &amp;quot;Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt&amp;quot; is poem VI of &lt;strong&gt;Neuer Frühling&lt;/strong&gt;, which was included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Neue_Gedichte_(1844)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neue Gedichte&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published by Hoffmann und Campe in 1844. So you could find &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Leise_zieht_durch_mein_Gem%C3%BCth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the poem&lt;/a&gt; via the wikisource page that was referenced in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Düsseldorfer Ausgabe, the poem is on page 14 of volume 2 (&lt;em&gt;Neue Gedichte&lt;/em&gt;). According to the notes and comments (page 350f), the poem was probably written between the winter of 1830/1831 and May 1831. The poem may have had a third stanza, which was apparently dropped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the text is in the public domain by now, you can find the entire text below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;VI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leise zieht durch mein Gemüth &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Liebliches Geläute. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Klinge, kleines Frühlingslied, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Kling’ hinaus in’s Weite. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kling’ hinaus, bis an das Haus, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wo die Blumen sprießen. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wenn du eine Rose schaust, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sag’ ich lass’ sie grüßen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T12:32:12.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2018-01-14T03:05:49.827" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; is not existentialist, but nihilist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no God, no meaning, no free will, and (most impressively in this work) no absolute moral judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He shoots because the Sun is in his eyes. This is nature's hand, i.e. as literature &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; is naturalism. The view came into literature after Darwin's theory was popularized as a vindication of atheism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T03:05:49.827" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5420" CreationDate="2018-01-14T18:59:33.647" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;, published before 1923, can I find the full, unabridged, uncensored version of Caxton's 1485 text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know, Heinrich Oskar Sommer's work is perfect, but it's too hard to read, for obvious reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;a href=&quot;http://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/publication/beardsley-birth-life-and-acts-of-king-arthur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F.J.Simmons edition&lt;/a&gt;? It has modernized spelling, and it says they used Upcott's* text and fixed it by comparing with Sommer's edition. But I'm not sure, because, as we all know, written words are not always true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I chose the year 1923 due to copyright reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Upcott's edition is much better known as Southey's edition, but in fact Southey just wrote the preface, and has nothing to do with the text itself. The text is based on Caxton's 1485 edition, but contains a lot of errors and some strange replacements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T00:05:59.300" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T00:05:59.300" Title="Unabridged edition of Le Morte d'Arthur published before 1923" Tags="&lt;le-morte-darthur&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;thomas-malory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5418" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-14T19:45:34.557" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T19:45:34.557" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T19:45:34.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5419" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-14T19:45:34.557" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Le Morte d'Arthur' or 'Le Morte Darthur' (original spelling), by Sir Thomas Malory (1485). Use with [thomas-malory]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T21:37:49.057" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T21:37:49.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5417" CreationDate="2018-01-14T20:58:31.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would go for either of the following editions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. &lt;strong&gt;John Rhys (1906)&lt;/strong&gt;. (Everyman's Library 45 &amp;amp; 46.) London: Dent; London: J. M. Dent; New York: E. P. Dutton. You can find libraries that have it through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/morte-darthur/oclc/27780322&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Morte Darthur&lt;/em&gt;: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table,. Ed. &lt;strong&gt;A. W. Pollard (1903)&lt;/strong&gt;. 2 vol. New York: Macmillan. This seems to be the edition that some websites provide for free:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on archive.org: &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20080925231822/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu:80/toc/modeng/public/Mal1Mor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.archive.org/web/20080825140058/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu:80/toc/modeng/public/Mal2Mor.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on Project Gutenberg: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In a version available on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fulltextarchive.com/page/Le-Morte-Darthur/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full Text Archive&lt;/a&gt;, A. W. Pollard writes: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the most anxious care has been taken to produce a text modernised as to its spelling, but in other respects in accurate accordance with Caxton's text, as represented by Dr Sommer's reprint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-14T22:33:53.047" LastActivityDate="2018-01-14T22:33:53.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5421" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T07:04:28.043" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;By and large, I have found the writing style in the &lt;em&gt;Malazan Book of the Fallen&lt;/em&gt; to be consistent across the first seven novels. They were all written by Steven Erikson. However, I feel there is a distinct shift in style in the eight book, &lt;em&gt;Toll the Hounds&lt;/em&gt;, also written by Erikson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Toll the Hounds&lt;/em&gt; seems to feature numerous passages of a style similar to, for example, the concluding section of Book Two's Chapter 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Night seeps into Darujhistan, a thick blinding fog in which people&#xA;  stumble or hide as they walk the alleys and streets. Some are drawn&#xA;  like moths to the lit areas and the welcoming eternal hiss of gas from&#xA;  the wrought iron poles. Others seek to move as one with the darkness,&#xA;  at least until some damned piece of crockery snaps underfoot, or a&#xA;  pebble is sent skittering. And everywhere can be seen the small&#xA;  glitter of rodent eyes, or heard the slither of tails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Light glows through shutters and bubbled glass windows, but never mind&#xA;  the light and all peaceful slumber and discourse and all the rest such&#xA;  illumination might reveal! Dull and witless the expectations so&#xA;  quickly and predictably surrendered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Followed by quick peeks on the actions of Lady Challice, Torvald Nom,&#xA;  a guard, an ironmonger (?), Harllo Jr and a Great Raven, and this&#xA;  final passage:]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And this was a night like any other, a skein of expectations and&#xA;  anticipations, revelations and perturbations. Look around. Look&#xA;  around! On all sides, day and night, light and dark! Every step taken&#xA;  with the firm resolve to believe in the solid ground awaiting it.&#xA;  Every step, one after another, again and again, and no perilous ledge&#xA;  yawns ahead, oh no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Step and step, now, step and step &amp;mdash;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what to call this sort of writing, but it generally features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a quick third-person overview of a bunch of characters,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;flowery descriptions of the scenery, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;exhortations to the reader to do something (look at, or appreciate the irony of, or take pity on, something or the other)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a short length (2-3 pages at most)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of writing is not unusual in itself*, but I don't think the previous 7 books had many, if any, instances of it, whereas &lt;em&gt;Toll the Hounds&lt;/em&gt; has multiple such instances - and I am not even halfway through it!&#xA;Personally I find such sections tedious, making the entire book far more hard reading than the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a noticeable change in Erikson's writing style in this book? If so, what triggered it? Has he talked about it somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* It reminds me of 19th - early 20th century writings, for some reason. Dickens? O'Henry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T07:04:28.043" Title="(Why) Is there a shift in style in Toll the Hounds?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;steven-erikson&gt;&lt;malazan-book-of-the-fallen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5220" CreationDate="2018-01-15T13:06:38.430" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you define &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_P.html#poetry_anchor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[a] variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from L. Kip Wheeler's glossary of literary terms), you get a very broad definition that also covers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epic poetry&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. Derek Walcott's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeros&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Omeros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1990, the most recent example I'm aware of) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verse_drama_and_dramatic_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;verse drama&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. Mike Barlett's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Charles_III_%28play%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Charles III&lt;/a&gt; (2014). (I mention these recent examples to show that these genres are not really dead or can be revived at any moment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epic poetry and verse drama cannot simply be reduced to &quot;giving different names to the same thing&quot;. Since they are examples of poetry, poetry in general cannot be reduced to &quot;giving different names to the same thing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T13:06:38.430" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5423" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-15T15:17:07.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T15:17:07.480" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T15:17:07.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5424" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-15T15:17:07.480" Score="0" Body="For questions about Canadian author Steve Rune Lundin, best known as Steven Erikson for writing the Malazan Book of the Fallen series" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T19:33:56.650" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T19:33:56.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:52:06.440" Score="3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;It Can't Happen Here&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The novel &lt;a href=&quot;http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/28/media/it-cant-happen-here-1984-best-sellers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appeared on Amazon.com's list of bestselling books&lt;/a&gt; after the 2016 USA presidential elections, along with George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; and, lower down the list, Margaret Atwood's &lt;em&gt;The Handmaid's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, Ray Bradbury's &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; and Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an article in The New York Times Book Review titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/books/review/classic-novel-that-predicted-trump-sinclar-lewis-it-cant-happen-here.html?_r=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Reading the Classic Novel That Predicted Trump&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, professor Beverly Gage (who did not necessarily choose the article's title), wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It Can’t Happen Here” is a work of dystopian fantasy, one man’s effort in the 1930s to imagine what it might look like if fascism came to America. At the time, the obvious specter was Adolf Hitler, whose rise to power in Germany provoked fears that men like the Louisiana senator Huey Long or the radio priest Charles Coughlin might accomplish a similar feat in the United States. (...)&#xA;  In 1935, Lewis was trying to prevent the unthinkable: the election of a pseudo-fascist candidate to the presidency of the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The persons mentioned in the book are partly real and historical—e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_Long&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huey Long&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franklin D. Roosevelt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Coughlin&lt;/a&gt;—, partly fictional, e.g. the presidential candidates Berzelius &quot;Buzz&quot; Windrip (Democrate) and Walt Trowbridge (Republican). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book mentions a number of persons, organisations, etc. that modern readers are usually not familiar with, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_State_Political_Directorate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OGPU&lt;/a&gt; (the Soviet Union's secret police at the time), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Streicher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julius Streicher&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9la_Kun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Béla Kun&lt;/a&gt;, Salvemini (actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaetano_Salvemini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaetano Salvemini&lt;/a&gt;) and Oswald Spengler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Decline of the West&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also mentions many persons, organisations, etc. that non-American readers may not be familiar with, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Buchman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Buchman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lothrop_Stoddard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lothrop Stoddard&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Townsend#The_Townsend_Plan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Townsend Plan&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NRA&lt;/a&gt; (no, not that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other NRA&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Emergency_Relief_Administration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FERA&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Community_Center&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;YMHA&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Army_of_the_Republic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GAR&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caspar_Milquetoast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caspar Milquetoast&lt;/a&gt;. The abbreviations are not expanded; many of the names are probably also unfamiliar to many American readers today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also mentions many authors and book titles (novelists etc.); it is up to the reader to figure out how these names are relevant in the context where they are mentioned (which is almost impossible if you are not familiar with their works).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is usually clear whether a name is fictional or not, especially if you know a bit about the history of English literature. Wikipedia can be a great help, but the lists of names can become really long, for example when in chapter 22, Lewis lists celebrities and journalists that get arrested: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Moley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raymond Moley&lt;/a&gt;, Frank Simonds, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Kent&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heywood_Broun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heywood Broun&lt;/a&gt;, Mark Sullivan (not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sullivan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;identifiable on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Browder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earl Browder&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Pierce_Adams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franklin P. Adams&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Seldes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Seldes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frazier_Hunt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frazier Hunt&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garet_Garrett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garet Garrett&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granville_Hicks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Granville Hicks&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_James&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwin James&lt;/a&gt; (presumably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Leland_James&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morss_Lovett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Morss Lovett&lt;/a&gt;. This is a single enumeration on the same page (p. 219 in Penguin's 2017 reprint). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there's a lot of name dropping and it is rather tedious to look up every unfamiliar or half-familiar name and book title just to make sure you aren't overlooking any hidden meanings and allusions. For this reason, I would like to know if there is an &lt;strong&gt;annotated edition&lt;/strong&gt; of Sinclair Lewis's novel &lt;em&gt;It Can't Happen Here&lt;/em&gt; that would meet the following &lt;strong&gt;criteria&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For every name, organisation or book title that is real, this should be mentioned. Readers can then safely assume that the other names are fictional. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For every author or book title where the content of the work would clarify something that is said in the book, the annotations should explain what information is relevant in that context. The same applies to politicians and the ideas they represented. E.g. who was Gaetano Salvemini (p. 202)? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If events described in the novel have a historical parallel in Nazi Germany, Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Russia, this should be explained. For example, both a BBC journalist and a French journalist visiting the USA during Windrip's presidency note that the people are perfectly happy; they don't seem to know that the country has both labour camps and concentration camps, and they don't comment (or did not notice?) on racist policies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/1296784-it-can-t-happen-here?page=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; lists an annotated Kindle edition (ASIN: B00751IMZM), but I can't find a trace of it on Amazon, so I don't know whether it fits my criteria. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B00DGZKU88&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kindle version from Signet Classics&lt;/a&gt; doesn't appear to have annotations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T03:48:46.093" Title="Is there an annotated edition of 'It Can't Happen Here' for non-American readers?" Tags="&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;it-cant-happen-here&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5426" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:54:31.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T17:54:31.600" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T17:54:31.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5427" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:54:31.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel 'It Can't Happen Here' or the 1936 play adaptation. Use this tag with the [sinclair-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T19:34:11.723" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T19:34:11.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5428" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5446" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:55:22.777" Score="9" ViewCount="683" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my best knowledge, all four boatmates in Moby Dick are &lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt; men from the New England. The boatmates are the men in charge of the small whaling boats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ahab - Quaker(?) from New England, possibly Nantucket.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Starbuck - a thoughtful and intellectual Quaker from Nantucket.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stubbs - a good-humored, easy, and careless man from Cape Cod.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flask - A short, stout man hailing from Martha's Vineyard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The harpooners in each boat are all &lt;em&gt;non-white&lt;/em&gt;. Each is a harpooner for the corresponding boatmate above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fedallah - a Zoroastrian Parsi from India. He prophesies the end of Ahab.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queequeg - from a fictional island called Rokovoko in Polynesia, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tashtego - a Wampanoag native American from Martha's Vineyard, and a personification of the hunter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Daggoo - from a coastal village in Africa with a noble bearing and grace.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The descriptions of their characters come from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Moby-Dick_characters#Crewmates&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there anything from Herman Melville's writings that explain why the men in charge of each boat is white while the men holding the harpoons are non-white?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no commentary by Melville himself, is there any literary analysis that might provide insights into why he chose these characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="679" LastEditorUserId="679" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T02:36:47.280" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:52:20.310" Title="Is there any significance to the races of mates and harpooners in Moby Dick?" Tags="&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5429" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:58:08.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T17:58:08.907" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T17:58:08.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5430" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-15T17:58:08.907" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist and short-story writer Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951) and his works. Lewis wrote novels such as 'Babbitt' (1922), 'Arrowsmith' (1925), 'Elmer Gantry' (1927) and 'It Can’t Happen Here' (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T19:34:15.817" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T19:34:15.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-15T19:21:29.417" Score="5" ViewCount="932" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a line from O. Henry's &lt;em&gt;A Retrieved Reformation&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The detective Ben Price is confident that Jimmy, now out on parole, has been to crack safes and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He'll do his bit next time without any short time or clemency foolishness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;clemency foolishness&quot;? Does it mean foolish enough to do offense that is not easily pardoned or anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-01-15T23:13:42.423" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T12:04:04.660" Title="What is the meaning of this sentence from A Retrieved Reformation?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5373" CreationDate="2018-01-15T22:16:07.633" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm adding my own answer to complement Peter Shor's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an interview, the Shakespeare scholar Kenneth Muir talks, among other things, about his translations of Racine and Corneille. When asked how he translated the alexandrines, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/rZkzA_fFgYc?t=8m54s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muir responds&lt;/a&gt; that he translated them into pentamers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I decided that alexandrines would not be taken by an English audience, that rhymed verse is suspect and has been ever since Dryden's day, really. And I think that blank verse [is the thing where] most people are at home in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asked, &quot;Have you ever thought (...), when you were translating from French tragedy ... Did you get anywhere near seeing &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; the alexandrine became as it were the &quot;natural&quot; form of expression in French verse, whereas only a ten-syllable line is the national expression in English? What is it to do with the nature of the languages?&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/rZkzA_fFgYc?t=9m37s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muir responds&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Muir: Oh, it's, I think, for example, the way you stress E's ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gardner: E's, that lengthens out the line ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Muir: Yes, and it's also the whole scansion of a French alexandrine; it's quite different. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip Gardner (one of the interviewers) points out that there are occasions when French verse comes very close to English, e.g. some of the poems in Théophile Gautier's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89maux_et_Cam%C3%A9es&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Émaux et Camées&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently, in some of the poems, the stresses fall exactly where you would expect them in English octosyllabic lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this is interesting, it lacks some detail and precision. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An important difference between English and French is that English is a language with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony#Stress_timing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;stress-timed rhythm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, while French has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrony#Syllable_timing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;syllable-timed rhythm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another relevant feature of French is that word stress is always on the last voice vowel, while word stress in English varies. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://arcade.stanford.edu/dibur/robert-marteau-and-french-blank-alexandrine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Pavel&lt;/a&gt; also points out that the &#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;silent vowels (&lt;em&gt;voyelles muettes&lt;/em&gt;) (...) were audible in classical French versification, which defined the verse by the number of syllables it contained, the silent ones included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pavel also states that &quot;according to many specialists in prosody, it [the classical French alexandrine] didn’t require a definite metrical pattern.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, this does not mean that no metric pattern can be detected by attentive readers or listeners.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kent.edu/neh-grant/richard-jones&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Jones&lt;/a&gt; compared four English translations of Racine's &lt;em&gt;Phèdre&lt;/em&gt;—by Richard Wilbur, R.C. Knight, Robert Lowell and Margaret Rawlings—he found that they all used pentameters. This corresponds with what Kenneth Muir said. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas French counts the number of syllables per line, English counts the number of feet per line. Gretchen McCulloch points out in her article &lt;a href=&quot;http://stories.schwa-fire.com/language_of_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Language of Poetry&quot;&lt;/a&gt; that the importance of stressed syllables in English is illustrated by limericks. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;limerick&lt;/a&gt;, the number of stressed syllables per line is 3, 3, 2, 2, 3, respectively, but the number of syllables can vary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above does not imply that English verse drama couldn't use anything else than iambic pentameter or that French verse drama couldn't use anything else then alexandrines, but it shows that the both languages' &quot;affordances&quot; (Gretchen McCulloch's term) make the opposite less likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-15T22:16:07.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5591" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:23:16.637" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Demonata series by Darren Shan, Grubbs's uncle Dervish (introduced in the first book and a major character from there onwards) is very rich: he lives in a mansion with all mod cons, has teams of lawyers to handle the situation at the end of book 1, and so on. As Grubbs puts it in book 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(my uncle—he mucho reeeech)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did all Dervish's money come from?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did he inherit a huge pile of cash? But his brother, Grubbs's father, never seemed to be on the same financial level as Dervish.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did he earn it all himself somehow? But he's not that old (in his thirties, I'd guess, though I don't remember for sure), and our glimpse of his younger self in book 2 doesn't &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; much like an up-and-coming business mogul or the like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is elaborated upon somewhere in book 1? This is the only book I don't actually have to hand (since I borrowed it from the library years ago before buying the rest).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T17:43:08.583" Title="Why is Dervish so rich?" Tags="&lt;darren-shan&gt;&lt;the-demonata&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5439" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:24:25.903" Score="3" ViewCount="1320" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember having an amazing teacher of literature who used to tell us about a symbolist poet (most probably British) who once said something like: &quot;When I wrote this poem, only God and I knew what it meant; now, only God knows.&quot; The idea was that he had been so far-fetched in linking ideas to compose the poem that, as time went by, the meaning had become elusive even for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, I would like to know the name of the poet who said this, his exact words, the context in which he said them (an interview, an article, a lecture), and the poem he was referring to. I guess there must be some record of his words for my teacher to have been able to quote them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:32:29.467" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:47:28.467" Title="Who was the poet who said something like &quot;Now only God knows (what I meant to say in that poem)&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5435" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Demonata&lt;/em&gt; is the second series of young adult horror novels by the bestselling Irish author Darren Shan. It consists of ten books with three different point-of-view characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord Loss&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Demon Thief&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Slawter&lt;/em&gt; (2006)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bec&lt;/em&gt; (2006)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blood Beast&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Demon Apocalypse&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Death's Shadow&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wolf Island&lt;/em&gt; (2008)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dark Calling&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hell's Heroes&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord Loss sows all the sorrows of the world&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Lord Loss seeds the grief-starched trees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the centre of the web, lowly Lord Loss bows his head&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mangled hands, naked eyes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Fanged snakes his soul line&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Curled inside like textured sin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Bloody, curdled sheets for skin&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the centre of the web, vile Lord Loss torments the dead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Over strands of red, Lord Loss crawls&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Dispensing pain, despising all&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Shuns friends, nurtures foes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Ravages hope, breeds woe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Drinks moons, devours suns&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Twirls his thumbs 'till the reaper comes&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the centre of the web, Lush Lord Loss is all that's left&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5436" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Demonata, a ten-book series by the Irish author Darren Shan. Use with the [darren-shan] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:31:25.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5437" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="81" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:37:10.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mollie represented the Aristocrats. She enjoyed all the benefits of society and generally being pampered. But as soon as she was required to do work and be equals with the rest of the farm animals, she left and fled to somewhere else that would let her regain her benefits without doing work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A fat red-faced man in check breeches and gaiters, who looked like a publican, was stroking her nose and feeding her sugar. her coat was newly clipped and she wore a scarle ribbon round her forelock&quot; (Orwell 46, 47)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mollie didn't have any clear, or lasting loyalty, only following those who would provide her comfort with minimum/no workload, much like the Aristocrats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2901" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:52:14.727" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:52:14.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5434" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:45:41.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR: probably Robert Browning and &quot;Sordello&quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;This quote is commonly attributed to the German &lt;em&gt;mathematician&lt;/em&gt; Karl Weierstrass:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7245194-when-i-wrote-this-only-god-and-i-understood-what&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing. Now, God only knows.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ― Karl Weierstrass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some detailed research by &lt;a href=&quot;https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/09/24/god-knows/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator&lt;/a&gt; (which I found thanks to our comrades at &lt;a href=&quot;https://hsm.stackexchange.com/a/5396&quot;&gt;HSM Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, so hat-tip to them) has thrown up many different people who've said this or similar quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This comical anecdote has an extensive history with similar comments attributed to Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Jakob Böhme, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and others. Well-known writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and G. K. Chesterton were amused enough to record the remark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest instance they've managed to find was attributed to the German writer &lt;strong&gt;Johann Paul Friedrich Richter&lt;/strong&gt; in an article of &lt;strong&gt;1826&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The works of JOHN PAUL RICHTER are almost uninteresting to any but Germans, and even to some of them. A worthy German, just before RICHTER’S death, edited a complete edition of his works, in which one particular passage puzzled him. Determined to have it explained at the source, he went to JOHN PAUL himself, and asked him what was the meaning of the mysterious passage. JOHN PAUL’S reply was very German and characteristic. “My good friend,” said he, “when I wrote that passage, God and I knew what it meant. It is possible that God knows it still; but as for me, I have totally forgotten.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- 1826 August 9, The Morning Chronicle, Issue 17755, The Mirror of Fashion, Quote Page 3, Column 1, London, England. (19th Century British Newspapers: Gale)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then it's been attributed to a number of other writers, including other Germans such as Jakob Böhme and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. The first &lt;em&gt;British&lt;/em&gt; poet found associated with this quote by QI was &lt;strong&gt;Robert Browning&lt;/strong&gt;, in an article of &lt;strong&gt;1890&lt;/strong&gt;, concerning his poem &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Sordello&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;; it's quite probable that this is the one that you heard about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Browning himself, ‘in the philosophic afternoon of life,’ frankly confessed its difficulties, and referred to it with a grim smile as ‘the entirely unintelligible Sordello.’ And to an anxious admirer who asked him to explain its meaning he replied, ‘When I wrote it, only God and I knew; now God alone knows!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KukWAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22now+God%22&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=snippet&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1890 July, The Church Quarterly Review, Volume 30, (Issue Start Page 273), Article III; Robert Browning, Start Page 313, Quote Page 319, Spottiswoode &amp;amp; Co., London.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:45:41.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5443" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5444" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" Score="0" Body="Darren Shan is a bestselling Irish author most famous for his young adult horror series, &quot;The Saga of Darren Shan&quot; and &quot;The Demonata&quot;. When asking questions about his books, use this tag together with the relevant series tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T00:58:48.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5428" CreationDate="2018-01-16T09:34:24.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes. The mixture is a metaphor allowing Melville to explore the unequal relationship between whites and non-whites in Melville's time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that throughout the book, whiteness, in general, is used as a symbolism for evil. Moby Dick itself is white and Ahab believes the whale is wicked. Indeed the concept has an entire chapter to itself: chapter 42, &lt;em&gt;The Whiteness of the Whale&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another key theme in &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; is the savagery of whaling itself. He does not shy away from describing the messy, awful business of killing and butchering the whale in gory detail. This is contrasted with the relatively egalitarian nature of the ship itself, where the crew pull together to survive the dangerous task and are paid according to their skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, stereotypes persist. The mates are white, their harpooners are people of colour. In this, the equality of the crew is reversed because the mates are directly dependent on the harpooners. They may be in charge of a boat, but without the harpooner, they have no chance of catching a whale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see this rendered symbolically during a chase where Flaks literally stands on Daggoo. Daggoo invites him to do so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon this, Daggoo, with either hand upon the gunwale to steady his way, swiftly slid aft, and then erecting himself volunteered his lofty shoulders for a pedestal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Good a mast-head as any, sir. Will you mount?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That I will, and thank ye very much, my fine fellow; only I wish you fifty feet taller.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereupon planting his feet firmly against two opposite planks of the boat, the gigantic negro, stooping a little, presented his flat palm to Flask’s foot, and then putting Flask’s hand on his hearse-plumed head and bidding him spring as he himself should toss, with one dexterous fling landed the little man high and dry on his shoulders. And here was Flask now standing, Daggoo with one lifted arm furnishing him with a breastband to lean against and steady himself by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an apt and very obvious metaphor for the way whites use blacks to their advantage. Indeed it's repeated in another white-black pairing: white Captain Ahab ominously treading the decks above Pip, the black cabin boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melville makes additional use of the race contrast between whites and blacks to highlight the hypocrisy of the former believing the latter to be &amp;quot;savage&amp;quot;. Starbuck, in western terms, is the most learned and &amp;quot;civilised&amp;quot; man aboard the ship. Yet in Chapter 59, &lt;em&gt;Squid,&lt;/em&gt; it is Starbuck who is alarmed and turns to superstition upon sighting the giant squid (note again that the terrible squid is white).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again, Starbuck still gazing at the agitated waters where it had sunk, with a wild voice exclaimed - &amp;quot;Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What was it, Sir?&amp;quot; said Flask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The great live Squid, which they say, few whale-ships ever beheld, and returned to their ports to tell of it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, it is the savage Queequeg who understands the scientific significance of the sighting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If to Starbuck the apparition of the Squid was a thing of portents, to Queequeg it was quite a different object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When you see him 'quid&amp;quot;, said the savage, honing his harpoon in the bow of his hoisted boat, &amp;quot;then you quick see him 'parm whale.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because, of course, Sperm Whales feed upon Giant Squid. Thus Melville neatly reverses the common tropes of the white scientist and the unlearned savage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this theme is repeated through the character of Stubb. His behaviour, especially in contrast to the quiet and civilised Starbuck, is relatively savage. He makes crude jokes at the expense of others and then admonishes them for not taking it in good humour. He likes his shark steak underdone and rare. So it is possible for the white man to be more savage than the supposed savages who serve under him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melville uses the concept of savagery to come full circle and point out that for all are western trappings of civilisation, we are all savages and animals to boot, no better than the whales we hunt. This is best illustrated by a quote from chapter 65, &lt;em&gt;The Whale as a Dish&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go to the meat market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal's jaw? Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who naliest geese to the ground and feistiest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If westerners are content to torture geese to tickle their tastebuds, can they really claim to be any more civilized than a tribal African, or an angry whale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diacronia.ro/ro/indexing/details/A2963/pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Question of Race in Moby-Dick, Iustin Sfariac, Universitatea Petru Maior, 2003&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:52:20.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5447" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:52:47.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:52:47.257" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:52:47.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5448" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:52:47.257" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English writer Thomas Malory (c. 1415 – 1471) and his work. Malory is credited with writing 'Le Morte d'Arthur' (The Death of Arthur), a prose work based on sources such as  Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of the Kings of Britain', and two anonymous English works called the 'Alliterative Morte Arthure' and the 'Stanzaic Morte Arthur'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T13:07:41.910" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T13:07:41.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5449" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:55:16.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T12:55:16.590" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T12:55:16.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5450" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T12:55:16.590" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fantasy book series 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' by the Canadian author Steven Erikson. The series consists of ten volumes published in the years 1999 to 2011. Use this tag with the [steven-erikson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T16:19:07.303" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T16:19:07.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T13:04:31.780" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Pillars of the Earth&lt;/em&gt; following a destructive fight between Jack and Alfred, Philip concedes that the Builder's Lodge should set the punishment but made it clear that he would not tolerate both Jack and Alfred working on the Kingsbridge site any longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that he had plans for Jack to enter the monastery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Philip deliberately make this ultimatum knowing the master builders would favour Alfred (the master mason) over Jack so he could recruit him as a novice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2907" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T16:25:40.840" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T16:25:40.840" Title="Did Philip manipulate Jack?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ken-follett&gt;&lt;the-pillars-of-the-earth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5431" CreationDate="2018-01-16T13:07:06.183" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without reading the story itself, just from what  you have put in the question (detective talking about a criminal on parole who's committing a crime), I'd think that it isn't just &quot;clemency foolishness&quot;. The foolishness here is the short prison time (counting parole) and clemency offered to prisoners when they show repentance &amp;mdash; which, naturally, won't sit well with the detectives who put in time and effort into building a case only to see a wheedling criminal back on the streets in no time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, parole violators usually lose any possibility of further parole or pardon of their sentence, so the detective thinks that if Jimmy is out on parole and has committed a crime, he's going back and not coming out again anytime soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T13:07:06.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5453" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:54:51.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T15:54:51.270" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T15:54:51.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5454" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T15:54:51.270" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1989 historical novel 'The Pillars of the Earth' by Ken Follett. Use this tag with the [ken-follett] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T18:42:10.613" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T18:42:10.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5455" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:05:03.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T16:05:03.573" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T16:05:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5456" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:05:03.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Welsh author Ken Follett (born 1949) and his works. His books include 'Eye of the Needle' (1978), the spy thriller 'The Man from St. Petersburg' (1982) and the historical novel 'The Pillars of the Earth' (1989)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T18:40:46.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-16T18:40:46.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:29:25.127" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Eighth#LXVIII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 8, stanza 68&lt;/a&gt;, from Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So much for Nature: -- by way of variety,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now back to thy great joys, Civilisation!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the sweet consequence of large society,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  War, pestilence, the despot's desolation,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The millions slain by soldiers for their ration,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The scenes like Catherine's boudoir at threescore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With Ismail's storm to soften it the more.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; in the final line of the stanza? The boudoir? What does it mean then, &quot;to soften the boudoir&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T08:06:00.430" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T08:06:00.430" Title="Meaning of &quot;With Ismail's storm to soften it the more&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="81" CreationDate="2018-01-16T16:34:39.237" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before the rebellion, Mollie is a vain horse that likes eating sugar and wearing ribbons in her manes. (She has a lump of sugar at the time of the first meeting.) After the rebellion, she still wants to wear ribbons and she tries to avoid work (by showing up late and leaving early). She is very unlike Boxer, whose motto is, &amp;quot;I will work harder.&amp;quot; In other words, she shows no real change in attitude after the rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, she disappears; the pigeons later report that she has been seen wearing a ribbon and eating lumps of sugar. This shows again that she has not changed since the rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mollie represents those in Russian society who did not want to change for the sake of the Socialist cause, who wanted to keep the luxury they knew before the Russian Revolution and went into &lt;strong&gt;exile&lt;/strong&gt;. This corresponds to many people in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_nobility#Russian_revolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian aristocracy&lt;/a&gt; and bourgeosie. However, she does not join something like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_%C3%A9migr%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;white émigré&lt;/a&gt; organisation, something that would have made sense if Snowball had joined her later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that she is seen pulling a cart can be interpreted in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She sticks to her old way of life, including the vanity and luxury (ribbons and sugar, respectively).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She does work that would be below the station of an aristocrat, just like many Russian emigrés had to keep their head above water by working as taxi drivers, labourers, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one important difference between Mollie and the Russian aristocracy: the aristocrats fled Russia mostly in order to survive, whereas Mollie left Animal Farm before Napoleon and his dogs start killing suspected dissenters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T20:04:25.930" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T20:04:25.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-16T17:01:43.430" Score="5" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really can't get the differences of the female role in society and how they are seen by their families and by the society in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we compare the portrayal of the female role in society between &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Tess of the D'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2908" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T11:38:56.263" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T11:38:56.263" Title="Comparison of the portrayal of the female role in society between Jane Eyre and Tess?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;tess-of-the-durbervilles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5461" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5462" CreationDate="2018-01-16T18:44:15.077" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Eighth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That drinks and still is dry. At last they perish'd --&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       His second son was levell'd by a shot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His third was sabred; and the fourth, most cherish'd&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Of all the five, on bayonets met his lot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The fifth, who, by a Christian mother nourish'd,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Had been neglected, ill-used, and what not,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because deform'd, yet died &lt;strong&gt;all game and bottom&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To save a sire who blush'd that he begot him.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;all game and bottom&quot;, especially of &quot;bottom&quot;? &quot;All game&quot; means &quot;quite willing to meet his death&quot;, I think. What does &quot;bottom&quot; mean (or &quot;all bottom&quot;)?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked in the dictionaries, but haven't found any suitable meaning. My only guess is quite weak - that he fell &quot;bottom-most&quot; and all the others fell upon him, or maybe that those who killed him fell upon him. But that is apparently not the case.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2018-01-16T18:59:38.933" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T00:44:24.000" Title="Meaning of &quot;all game and bottom&quot; in Byron's &quot;Don Juan&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5461" CreationDate="2018-01-17T00:44:24.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My OED (1st edition) gives under sense 14 for &quot;bottom&quot; the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Physical resources, 'staying power', power of endurance; said esp. of pugilists, wrestlers, race-horses, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives five  citations of this sense, dating from 1774 through 1852, including one to this passage in DJ.  Others: &quot;Though the Savages held out and, as the phrase is, had better bottoms, yet for a spurt the Englishmen were more nimble and speedy.&quot;  &quot;They ... have their manes and tails cropped ... under the supposition that it adds to their strength and bottom&quot; and &quot;For solidity, bottom, and a courage that never wavers, they [British troops] are incomparable&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T00:44:24.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5471" CreationDate="2018-01-17T02:34:32.107" Score="2" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this in elementary school, so it was probably late 1980s to early 1990s (I was in elementary school between 1985 and 1992) in Ashland, KY. I don't think it was illustrated, or if it was, it was just a few sparse pen-and-ink drawings to set the scene. The basic plotline is that the male protagonist, somewhere in middle school to high high school, falls in with another male around the same age. This male is implied to be from a well-to-do family, but largely unattended. I remember a scene where they were sitting in the living room by a fire, drinking something from glasses (probably alcohol) and the rich boy punctuates his point by hurling his glass into the fire, inspiring the other boy to do the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two of them shared a mutual dislike for a male teacher, I think with bushy eyebrows, who had a name like &quot;Mr. Gulag&quot; because they made a joke about &quot;Mr. Gulag's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gulag&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in regards to detention. Anyhow, they decide to kidnap him, maybe just to put a scare in him, maybe to do something more nefarious. I don't remember many of the details... I think they ambush him in the parking lot with a chloroform-soaked rag. Wherever it is they take him, they have him tied up with rough ropes. After that, all I remember is that the rich boy is getting out of control, suggesting more criminal acts to do as &quot;revenge&quot; against this teacher who's far too tough on him, while the main protagonist realizes just how far in over their heads they are and tries to talk him down. The teacher manages to get them conversing and eventually convinces them to let him free in exchange for him not turning them in, or maybe for pleading clemency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember a lot of the characters. Either they were all Caucasian or not enough fuss was made about their race to make it worth noting. I want to say that the richer boy was dark-haired and that the teacher was grey-haired with bushy eyebrows. The part which has stuck with me so much was that his name sounded like &quot;gulag&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:16:54.880" Title="Short story (or maybe a small book) about two students kidnapping a teacher" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T07:34:33.740" Score="7" ViewCount="300" Body="&lt;p&gt;The recurring character Ariadne Oliver (present in a number of Agatha Christie's novels) seems to be at least partially self-insertion by Christie. At the very least, both write mystery fiction stories featuring a foreign detective. Besides this superficial resemblance, how much does she actually resemble Christie herself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2911" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T17:32:51.807" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T12:39:50.430" Title="How much of Ariadne Oliver's character is self-insertion by Agatha Christie?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5466" CreationDate="2018-01-17T07:57:21.073" Score="14" ViewCount="6109" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner_(1817)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Water, water, every where,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And &lt;strong&gt;all the boards did shrink&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Water, water, every where,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor any drop to drink.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this phrase in plain English? What are &quot;boards&quot; here? Sides of the ship? Both sides of the ship were trying to get away from water? I can't understand this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T19:12:51.940" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T19:12:51.940" Title="Meaning of &quot;all the boards did shrink&quot; in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" Tags="&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2018-01-17T10:09:22.507" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct in that the boards are the planks of wood from which the ship is constructed.  Although nautically, &quot;boards&quot; is more often used to refer to the decking than to the hull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In hot dry conditions, wood will shrink.  It was common in the 18th Century for wooden sailing ships travelling from Europe to the tropics to suffer shrinkage of the deck boards.  This often required the decks to be recaulked to prevent leaks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, wood treatment improved.  Significantly reducing the risk of such shrinkage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the phrase is being used to set the scene of hot weather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T10:09:22.507" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9348" CreationDate="2018-01-17T14:38:08.490" Score="5" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading Poetry Foundation's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-hardy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on Thomas Hardy&lt;/a&gt;, I came across this description of his epic drama &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dynasts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, set during the Napoleonic Wars and published in 1904-1908:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hardy also pioneered a new kind of verse. According to John Wain’s introduction to the 1965 St. Martin’s Press edition of the dramatic poem, in composing &lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt; Hardy took “one of those sudden jumps which characterize the man of genius. ... He wrote his huge work in accordance with conventions of an art that had not yet been invented: the art of cinema.” &lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt;, following this view, is “neither a poem, nor a play, nor a story. It is a shooting-script.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What about the writing of this story makes it so distinctive?&lt;/strong&gt; In what sense is it cinematic? What exactly makes it so different from other poems, plays, and stories of the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T14:44:00.463" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T14:44:00.463" Title="What makes the writing style of The Dynasts so distinctive?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;the-dynasts&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" Score="0" Body="The Dynasts is an epic drama by Thomas Hardy, set during the Napoleonic Wars and published in three parts between 1904 and 1908. Use this tag with the [thomas-hardy] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T14:38:51.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5463" CreationDate="2018-01-17T15:07:25.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2433045.Gruel_and_Unusual_Punishment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gruel and Unusual Punishment&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jim Arter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merry prankster Arnold Dinklighter admits that he detests Mr. Applin,&#xA;the supervisor of detention--a place where Arnold spends most of his&#xA;time--but is not sure he likes the joke his pal Eddie wants to play on&#xA;Applin: to kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Applin's detention room is known as &amp;quot;The Gulag.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jim-arter/gruel-and-unusual-punishment/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Kirkus review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a bitter tale about misfits out to get a hated teacher, Arnold&#xA;Dinklighter, repeating seventh grade, spends most of his time&#xA;suspended from school, cooking up annoying pranks, being paddled by&#xA;the principal, harassing classmates, or in detention, supervised by&#xA;history teacher &amp;quot;Apeface&amp;quot; Applin. Unlit by any spark of generosity&#xA;or kindness, Arnold despises everything and everybody (&amp;quot;The last time&#xA;there was any color to your marriage was when your eyes were black and&#xA;Dad's nose was red,&amp;quot; he says playfully to his bleary, incompetent&#xA;mother), but he finds a companion in new student Edward Straight,&#xA;whose hostility and uncontrollable temper make him an instant&#xA;discipline problem. The two agree that Applin must suffer, though&#xA;Edward's talk of &amp;quot;taking him out&amp;quot; does make Arnold uneasy. Though&#xA;title, names, and other cues suggest a comedy, there's little here&#xA;that's funny and Arnold's too unlikable to get much sympathy. In a&#xA;soapy denoument, Arnold saves Applin from Edward's knife attack, then&#xA;takes the teacher to meet his mother; she announces that she has&#xA;another son, institutionalized since infancy, and Applin suggests that&#xA;she seek counseling--a suitably inane conclusion to this weak first&#xA;novel.~(Fiction. 11-14)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be the glass scene you remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, you can count on me, thick or thin.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I imagine you'll be&#xA;rather thick.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;This will be great,&amp;quot; Edward said, talking quickly.&#xA;&amp;quot;We're going to take care of the Apeface. That stupid idiot Apeface.&amp;quot;&#xA;Edward laughed wildly, took a final drink of his pop, and threw the&#xA;glass across the pool and against the fence. I was surprised by the&#xA;suddenness of it and the sound of the shattering glass. I was just as&#xA;surprised when Edward looked at me and nodded with a strange gleam in&#xA;his eye. I shrugged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0v1ECZbdK8cC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gruel and Unusual Punishment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1993) by Jim Arter, on Google Books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:16:54.880" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:16:54.880" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5431" CreationDate="2018-01-17T18:17:41.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/67493/origin-of-slang-doing-a-bid-for-prison-time&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; solves the crux of the problem. Here, Ben Price is confident that Jimmy Valentine could, in a way, dodge the judiciary; he was to serve full term in jail. To show him clemency is just another name of foolishness; now, that mistake must not be repeated. During O. Henry's time (around 1900) 'bit' has the currency to mean legal punishment. In  the use of underworld terms, O. Henry is the master craftsman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their PDF version of the story, pans.pasd.com at page 239 in the footnote writes explaining the line under reference (He'll do his bit ... foolishness.) : He will serve his full term in prison without anyone shortening the lengh of it or pardoning him. So the words should be viewed from the judge's perspective towards the offender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastEditorUserId="2075" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T12:04:04.660" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T12:04:04.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6281" CreationDate="2018-01-17T18:45:32.997" Score="6" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Tenth#V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 10, stanza 5&lt;/a&gt;, from Byron's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don Juan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We left our hero, Juan, in the bloom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Of favouritism, but not yet in the blush;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And far be it from my Muses to presume&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       (For I have more than one Muse at a push)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To follow him beyond the drawing-room:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       It is enough that Fortune found him flush&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of youth, and vigour, beauty, and &lt;strong&gt;those things&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which for an instant clip enjoyment's wings&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm feeling a bit dense. I don't understand what Byron's talking about. It must be some apparent thing, something related to sex probably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T08:59:38.987" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T09:01:06.040" Title="Meaning of &quot;and those things which for an instant clip enjoyment's wings&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5474" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-17T20:40:24.500" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember a short story I read in high school about a sniper or lone gunman who fires into a parade of crowded people, killing dozens and, through a chain of events, disrupts the entire political and economic stability of the country (which was his intent from the start). He isn't tried or even caught for his crime by the end of the story. And I remember the description of the shooting to be fairly graphic in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is somewhat of a dystopian tale set in an unnamed country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2914" LastActivityDate="2018-01-17T20:40:24.500" Title="Short story: lone gunman disrupts an economy" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-18T17:29:28.373" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to remember a short story I heard some time ago.&#xA;I'm hoping someone can shed some light on the name of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know very little of its origin. I'm not sure if it was originally a book and the narrative and details provided are very vague so I will preemptively apologize. &#xA;I have put parts of the story that I am (even more) unsure of in parentheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story went something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a king (who is paranoid of losing his power?) who gradually divides his kingdom into smaller and smaller sections (this may have been contrasted with a (previous king or king in another kingdom?) who is kind and wise). Eventually everyone is contained in their own one person cell (to stop a rebellion?). (Something happens with an old man? or some young child that has only know life in one person cells?). The citizens are then freed (can't recall how).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember the punchline of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a bit of a long shot but any help is much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2917" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T20:00:52.450" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T20:00:52.450" Title="Story of a divided kingdom?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:17:17.233" Score="7" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, we see this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this 'certain obliterator of historic records' referring to a real person, or inspired by anyone in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T08:34:59.640" Title="Who's this 'certain obliterator of historic records' in &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5477" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5478" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel Jude The Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy. Use together with the [thomas-hardy] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T20:24:23.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5476" CreationDate="2018-01-18T20:41:58.667" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'certain obliterator of historic records' is referring to a real person. It is widely thought that it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Edmund_Street&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Edmund Street&lt;/a&gt;, who was a Gothic revival architect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy &lt;a href=&quot;http://public.gettysburg.edu/academics/english/hardy/contexts/art/architecture.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;worked&lt;/a&gt; for revival architects before his literary career progressed (he met his wife, Emma Gifford, on one of his architectural employments), so Street would have been the kind of employer he worked for (although it is unknown whether he did work for Street).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reference: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=IBorMX-MFlQC&amp;amp;pg=PA356&amp;amp;dq=certain+obliterator+of+historic+records&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjkwp31reLYAhVJJsAKHWcHAVMQ6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=certain%20obliterator%20of%20historic%20records&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Companion to Thomas Hardy&#xA;edited by Keith Wilson&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that people think the 'obliterator' was Street was that he had demolished and rebuilt a 12th Century church of St Mary, in Great Fawley, a situation very like the one in &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;. More importantly, Hardy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawley,_Berkshire#In_film,_fiction_and_the_media&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;based&lt;/a&gt; Marygreen on Great Fawley as well as Jude's surname, Jude Fawley. (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8aX0AgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT102&amp;amp;lpg=PT102&amp;amp;dq=Thomas+hardy+ge+street&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=QBMGdrYji-&amp;amp;sig=T3DzFfLB0agkKsVmrr07Pfu0iAU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Thomas%20hardy%20ge%20street&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy: The World of his Novels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by J. B. Bullen):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The twelfth- or thirteenth- century church of St. Mary has been demolished, and, with complete disregard for its venerable history, its stones used in a callously utilitarian way. (...) The 'obliterator of historic records' at Great Fawley was G. E. Street, a distinguished Gothic revival architect, famous for the Law Courts in London, who was first apprenticed to William Morris in the 1850s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is often taken that Street was the culprit as he was based in the model town for Marygreen, and he is an 'obliterator' as he destroyed the old, historically significant 12th Century church with a new Gothic one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T11:49:11.823" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T11:49:11.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5476" CreationDate="2018-01-18T21:03:05.497" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think this is more of a general commentary on the state of the English countryside at the time, rather than a reference to any particular person.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such commentary appears a lot in Hardy's writing. In fact, the very idea of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy%27s_Wessex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wessex&lt;/a&gt; is predicated on his desire to romanticise rural life in southwest England. As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/4731/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, he was trying to create a sort of 'Greek mythology' based in a land more familiar to him than Greece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his characters (such as Tess Durbeyfield/d'Urberville) are almost caricaturised in their ruralness, and they and their surroundings and way of life are contrasted heavily with modernity in all its forms. Here's another example (referencing the train to which Tess and Angel take the milk cans from the farm to be transported to London):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again as if what it touched had been uncongenial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the passage you quote is to contrast &amp;quot;the original church&amp;quot;, with its quaintness so typical of the English countryside, with the new &amp;quot;modern Gothic&amp;quot; building, described in much less romantic terms and &amp;quot;unfamiliar to English eyes&amp;quot;. It's a gentle putdown to the spread of modern ways and architecture in the rural regions that Hardy loved so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the person who orchestrated the replacement of the ancient historical building is described in disdainful terms as an &amp;quot;obliterator of historic records&amp;quot;. A person we don't care for, whose exact identity is far less important than their symbolic status as a representative of the spread of unseemly speed and modernity in rural England. As for &amp;quot;certain&amp;quot;, I think this word is used in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/29975?rskey=hc8i38&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the OED's&lt;/a&gt; sense A.II.7, probably &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; with perhaps a hint of &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; Used to define things which the mind definitely individualizes or particularizes from the general mass, but which may be left without further identification in description; thus often used to indicate that the speaker does not choose further to identify or specify them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;e.&lt;/strong&gt; Sometimes euphemistically: Which it is not polite or necessary further to define.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling the person &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a certain&lt;/em&gt; obliterator of historic records&amp;quot; doesn't mean they're someone we should know about, or a person of interest in any sense. In fact, it's more the opposite: they're a particular individual, but not one whose identity needs specifying - perhaps even one about whom it is distasteful to speak further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(The first half of this answer is partly inspired by discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yRCgCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA22&amp;amp;lpg=PA22&amp;amp;dq=In+place+of+it+a+tall+new+building+of+modern+Gothic+design,+unfamiliar+to+English+eyes,+had+been+erected+on+a+new+piece+of+ground+by+a+certain+obliterator+of+historic+records+who+had+run+down+from+London+and+back+in+a+day.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Sn8VXbEYEb&amp;amp;sig=2fAU_chKRqWo_NMf7dHZ-rw7N40&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjAhcKTreLYAhUBaFAKHSpPCd4Q6AEINDAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=In%20place%20of%20it%20a%20tall%20new%20building%20of%20modern%20Gothic%20design%2C%20unfamiliar%20to%20English%20eyes%2C%20had%20been%20erected%20on%20a%20new%20piece%20of%20ground%20by%20a%20certain%20obliterator%20of%20historic%20records%20who%20had%20run%20down%20from%20London%20and%20back%20in%20a%20day.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jane L. Bownas and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M7SO0Vhi9SIC&amp;amp;pg=PA204&amp;amp;lpg=PA204&amp;amp;dq=In+place+of+it+a+tall+new+building+of+modern+Gothic+design,+unfamiliar+to+English+eyes,+had+been+erected+on+a+new+piece+of+ground+by+a+certain+obliterator+of+historic+records+who+had+run+down+from+London+and+back+in+a+day.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=vNVpBR7oQt&amp;amp;sig=wBlPI7682ttdKtgR3qhzRYF4BBc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjAhcKTreLYAhUBaFAKHSpPCd4Q6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Patrick R. O'Malley.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T21:20:56.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5953" CreationDate="2018-01-18T21:41:29.013" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the scene early on in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; where Dagny Taggart told her brother Jim that she had canceled his order with Associated Steel in favor of purchasing Rearden Metal track instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dagny] had turned to go, when [Jim] spoke again - and what he said seemed bewilderingly irrelevant. &quot;That's all right for you, because you're lucky. Others can't do it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Do what?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Other people are human. They're sensitive. They can't devote their whole life to metal and engines. You're lucky - you've never had any feelings. You've never felt anything at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip Rearden later demanded that Hank give him a job. During the course of their discussion, he stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You haven't any feelings. You've never felt anything at all. You've never &lt;em&gt;suffered&lt;/em&gt;!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was as if a sum of years hit Rearden in the face, by means of a sensation and a sight... You've never suffered, the dead stare of the eye was saying, you've never felt anything, because only to suffer as to feel - there's no such thing as joy, there's only pain and the absence of pain; only pain and the zero, when one feels nothing - I suffer, I'm twisted by suffering, I'm made of undiluted suffering, that's my purity, that's my virtue - and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, yours is to relieve me of my pain - cut your unsuffering body to patch up mine, cut your unfeeling soul to stop mine from feeling - and we'll achieve the ultimate ideal, the triumph over life, the zero!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrases are clearly parallel. Was Hank's realization basically what Jim Taggart was saying here - &quot;you've never felt anything at all&quot; meaning that only to suffer is to feel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the text says that Jim's comments &quot;&lt;strong&gt;seemed&lt;/strong&gt; bewilderingly irrelevant&quot; (which seems to imply that they actually weren't irrelevant after all). How does Hank's realization here make it Jim's comments relevant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T18:32:06.897" Title="Is Jim Taggart's claim that Dagny &quot;never felt anything&quot; parallel to Philip Rearden's claim that Hank never suffered?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5464" CreationDate="2018-01-18T23:40:54.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poirot.us/oliver.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; suggests that Oliver was an exaggeration of herself. I expect she had fun doing that!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ariadne Oliver is a successful detective novelist that appears in two short stories (with Parker Pyne in Parker Pyne Investigates) and seven novels (six of them with Hercule Poirot). The middle-aged writer of detective stories is broad-shouldered and has &quot;rebellious&quot; gray hair, sometimes accentuated with hair extensions. Ariadne Oliver is known for her love for apples and her strong belief in woman's intuition. She is also the creator of the Finnish detective Sven Hjerson, of whom she has a great dislike. &lt;strong&gt;The character of Mrs. Oliver is an exaggerated version of Agatha Christie herself (Agatha has shown dislike towards Poirot, her creation, and Agatha was known for eating apples, too).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't answer your question to what extent the character actually resembles Christie, but it does vindicate your theory. It could be interesting to assess a biography of Christie against the character. (It may well have been done already, but I haven't found it. Yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2667" LastActivityDate="2018-01-18T23:40:54.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1641" CreationDate="2018-01-19T01:33:03.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Orwell's manuscript of the novel, the action took place first in 1980, then 1982, and finally 1984. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The masterpiece that killed George Orwell&lt;/a&gt; by Robert McCrum (&lt;em&gt;The Observer&lt;/em&gt;, 10 May 2009).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiously, Chapter 2 of Part 2, when Winston meets Julia in the countryside on a Sunday afternoon, states that it was the second of May. That would actually place it in 1982. You can check this using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.free-online-calculator-use.com/day-of-the-week-calculator.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Find Day of the Week Calculator for Past or Future Date&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2919" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T19:27:42.820" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T19:27:42.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5491" CreationDate="2018-01-19T06:07:04.947" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Tenth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Canto The Tenth, XLIX):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this high post of honour's in abeyance,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For one or two days, reader, we request&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You'll mount with our young hero the conveyance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which wafted him from Petersburgh: the best&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Barouche, which had the glory to display once&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fair czarina's autocratic crest,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When, a new lphigene, she went to Tauris,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Was given to her favourite, and now &lt;em&gt;bore his&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the last line? It gravels me. I don't understand what's going on there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crest symbol was given to the favorite of Catherine the Great? So that he could display it on his vehicles? But what is &amp;quot;...and now &lt;em&gt;bore his&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;? Now the barouche bore the coat of arms belonging to Don Juan's family?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I googled and found a footnote to &amp;quot;favorite&amp;quot;, but that footnote does not explain the meaning of the line to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZ33Q.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OZ33Q.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of footnote&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Transcript of screenshot:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[1] The empress went to the Crimea, accompanied by the Emperor Joseph, in the year — I forget which. — [The Prince de Ligne, who accompanied Catherine in her progress through her southern provinces, in 1787, gives the following particulars:—&amp;quot;We have been traversing, during several days, an immense tract of deserts formerly inhabited by hostile Tartar hordes, but recovered by the arms of her majesty, and at present ornamented from stage to stage with magnificent tents, where we are supplied with breakfast, collation, dinner, supper, and lodging; and our encampments decorated with all the pomp of Asiatic splendour, present a noble military spectacle. The empress has left, in each town, presents to the amount of 100,000 rubles. Each day of rest is marked by the gift of some diamonds, by balls, by fireworks, and by illuminations extending for leagues in every direction. During the last two months I have been daily employed in throwing money out of our carriage-windows, and have thus distributed the value of some millions of livres.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Lettres et Pensèes&lt;/em&gt;. — E.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[2] When his lordship travelled to Pisa, &amp;quot;seven servants, &lt;em&gt;five carriages&lt;/em&gt;, nine horses, a monkey, a bull-dog and mastiff, two cats, three peafowls, and some hens (I do not know whether I have classed them in order of rank), formed part of his &lt;em&gt;live&lt;/em&gt; stock.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Medwin&lt;/em&gt;. — E.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T11:09:14.667" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T11:09:14.667" Title="Meaning of &quot;Was given to her favorite, and now bore his&quot; in Byron's Don Juan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T08:42:57.033" Score="3" ViewCount="262" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was a young boy I viewed one filmed book from Agatha Christie on television with David Suchet. Now I would love to read that book but I forgot its name. I remember only few facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the end of the film. There was a woman, an Irish woman. She and her followers were somewhere in the countryside in a castle. There was a politician of the British parliament as a prisoner. This group of people fought against Britain in many ways. At the end of this film the Irish woman stood on the roof of the castle and she said words such &lt;em&gt;&quot;erin cobra&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (I remember it sounded something like that), then she put a pistol to her head and committed suicide and her body fell on the ground. The British politician was alive. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which book was this episode based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2923" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T13:39:49.557" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T13:39:49.557" Title="Which Agatha Christie book was this adaption with an Irish woman committing suicide based on?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T11:00:54.100" Score="4" ViewCount="534" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, we see this line about the old church being taken down and replaced, and the old church being broken up and used for different things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Above all, the original church, hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped, had been taken down, and either cracked up into heaps of road-metal in the lane, or utilized as pig-sty walls, garden seats, guard-stones to fences, and rockeries in the flower-beds of the neighbourhood. In place of it a tall new building of modern Gothic design, unfamiliar to English eyes, had been erected on a new piece of ground by a certain obliterator of historic records who had run down from London and back in a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the fate of the church tell us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T12:32:13.697" Title="What does the fate of the old church tell us in &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5487" CreationDate="2018-01-19T12:32:13.697" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is part of a wider Hardy theme of romanticising the old-fashioned ruralness of the SW England countryside and disdaining the march of modernity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such commentary appears a lot in Hardy's writing. In fact, the very idea of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy%27s_Wessex&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wessex&lt;/a&gt; is predicated on his desire to romanticise rural life in southwest England. As mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/4731/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, he was trying to create a sort of 'Greek mythology' based in a land more familiar to him than Greece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of his characters (such as Tess Durbeyfield/d'Urberville) are almost caricaturised in their ruralness, and they and their surroundings and way of life are contrasted heavily with modernity in all its forms. Here's another example (referencing the train to which Tess and Angel take the milk cans from the farm to be transported to London):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again as if what it touched had been uncongenial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the passage you quote is to contrast &amp;quot;the original church&amp;quot;, with its quaintness so typical of the English countryside, with the new &amp;quot;modern Gothic&amp;quot; building, described in much less romantic terms. It's a gentle putdown to the spread of modern ways and architecture in the rural regions that Hardy loved so much. Note that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The old church is connected directly to the everyday lives of ordinary people living nearby, its stones used in their homes and gardens and pigsties. This emphasises how well it fitted into the local community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The new church is described as &amp;quot;unfamiliar to English eyes&amp;quot;. It's so outlandish to have modern architecture in this rural English village that it literally seems foreign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The old church is described as &amp;quot;hump-backed, wood-turreted, and quaintly hipped&amp;quot;. This may sound like a criticism, but do take into account how quaintness is often one of the defining characteristics of Englishness. (No source for this except personal experience - I've lived in England for most of my life.) It's &lt;em&gt;traditional&lt;/em&gt;, its odd structure familiar and beloved to the locals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with the simple, unadorned words used to describe the new church: &amp;quot;a tall new building&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;erected on a new piece of ground&amp;quot;. There's no hint of beauty or romanticism here. It's not even described as a church, just a &amp;quot;building&amp;quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The person who orchestrated the replacement is described in disdainful terms as an &amp;quot;obliterator of historic records&amp;quot;. A person we don't care for, whose exact identity is far less important than their symbolic status as a representative of the spread of unseemly speed and modernity in rural England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this person (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5479/17&quot;&gt;George Edmund Street&lt;/a&gt;, most likely) hadn't even cared to stay in the village for longer than a day. The new church must have taken longer than that to build, but Hardy makes it sound as though it was a duff job knocked up in a day, as opposed to the old building with its centuries of history. Clearly, it wasn't a labour of love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(The first half of this answer is partly inspired by discussion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yRCgCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA22&amp;amp;lpg=PA22&amp;amp;dq=In+place+of+it+a+tall+new+building+of+modern+Gothic+design,+unfamiliar+to+English+eyes,+had+been+erected+on+a+new+piece+of+ground+by+a+certain+obliterator+of+historic+records+who+had+run+down+from+London+and+back+in+a+day.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Sn8VXbEYEb&amp;amp;sig=2fAU_chKRqWo_NMf7dHZ-rw7N40&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjAhcKTreLYAhUBaFAKHSpPCd4Q6AEINDAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=In%20place%20of%20it%20a%20tall%20new%20building%20of%20modern%20Gothic%20design%2C%20unfamiliar%20to%20English%20eyes%2C%20had%20been%20erected%20on%20a%20new%20piece%20of%20ground%20by%20a%20certain%20obliterator%20of%20historic%20records%20who%20had%20run%20down%20from%20London%20and%20back%20in%20a%20day.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy and Empire: The Representation of Imperial Themes in the Work of Thomas Hardy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jane L. Bownas and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M7SO0Vhi9SIC&amp;amp;pg=PA204&amp;amp;lpg=PA204&amp;amp;dq=In+place+of+it+a+tall+new+building+of+modern+Gothic+design,+unfamiliar+to+English+eyes,+had+been+erected+on+a+new+piece+of+ground+by+a+certain+obliterator+of+historic+records+who+had+run+down+from+London+and+back+in+a+day.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=vNVpBR7oQt&amp;amp;sig=wBlPI7682ttdKtgR3qhzRYF4BBc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjAhcKTreLYAhUBaFAKHSpPCd4Q6AEIMTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Patrick R. O'Malley. The second half is based on my own close reading.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T12:32:13.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-19T19:08:21.390" Score="2" ViewCount="3478" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martin Luther King, Jr. said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me in simple terms what he means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2925" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T17:21:11.400" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T09:00:49.150" Title="Interpretation of Martin Luther King's essay" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;martin-luther-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5489" CreationDate="2018-01-19T20:25:10.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are two separate quotes from a single address that King delivered at Morehouse College in 1948.  In context, the address is a critique of education, particularly education that does not improve people morally or mentally. &lt;a href=&quot;https://projects.seattletimes.com/mlk/words-education.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://projects.seattletimes.com/mlk/words-education.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Thinking intensively&quot; is &quot;intelligence&quot;.  &quot;Thinking critically&quot;, which here seems to mean &lt;em&gt;assessing what you are told against a moral standard&lt;/em&gt;, is &quot;character.&quot;  So the two sentences say the same thing, but in different words, and in a different order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, they express King's belief that the goal of education is not the simple gain or memorization of knowledge, but rather the ability to think and judge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-01-19T20:30:34.463" LastActivityDate="2018-01-19T20:30:34.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5485" CreationDate="2018-01-20T02:34:16.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it means that Catherine's barouche, which bore her crest on her trip to the Crimea in 1787, was now Don Juan's and bore his crest.  (The classical name of the Crimea was Tauris, which was visited by Iphigenia in a play by Euripides under somewhat different circumstances from Catherine's visit.  To call  Catherine a new  Iphigenia seems absurd to me, but I lack  imagination.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-20T02:34:16.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5492" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5993" CreationDate="2018-01-20T18:46:37.727" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Guy de Maupassant's short story &quot;The Wrong House&quot; (available on Project Gutenberg along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;all of Guy de Maupassant's short stories&lt;/a&gt;), Quartermaster Varajou wishes to find a brothel, and asks a waiter in the local pub in the small town of Vannes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The girls, ah! ah!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Yes, the girls, where can one find any here?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Girls?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Why, yes, girls!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The boy approached and lowering his voice, said: “You want to know where they live?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Why, yes, the devil!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “You take the second street to the left and then the first to the right. It is number fifteen.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Varajou follows these directions and ends up at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; the house of the Judge of the Supreme Court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did the waiter direct him to this house?&lt;/strong&gt; It seems unlikely to have been a deliberate prank, so presumably the waiter misinterpreted Varajou's request. What did he think he meant? Or did Varajou simply take the wrong turning, going left from the cafe instead of right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-20T18:55:37.850" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T01:59:52.740" Title="Why did the waiter send Varajou where he did?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-20T22:48:21.647" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently procured a copy of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Hardy. Upon opening it, something struck me as odd: It says 'part first' instead of 'first part' or 'part one'. I've never seen this before, and it seems... ungrammatical to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2AAyIm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2AAyIm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;tableofcontents&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a printing error? A style that I've never seen before? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:10:43.300" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:10:43.300" Title="Why does my copy of &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot; use 'part first' instead of 'first part' or something like that?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;&lt;misprint&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5493" CreationDate="2018-01-21T00:40:18.640" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you enter the google books search &quot;part second&quot; you will see this construction was a perfectly normal practice in the 1700 and 1800s.  Here are some of the hits I got: to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Ploughboy.html?id=s7_aAQAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ploughboy: A Poem, Part Second&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (W. Cook, 1855), to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Sadlier_s_Catholic_first_reader.html?id=-kHanAAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sadlier's Catholic first reader: part second, Part 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (James A. Sadlier, 1883), and to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Zoonomia_Or_the_Laws_of_Organic_Life.html?id=LhR6AQAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Zoonomia ; Or, the Laws of Organic Life: Part Second. By Erasmus Darwin, M.D.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of 1797.  There are many others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;part the second&quot; is more common, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Both_Sides_of_the_Gutter_Part_the_Second.html?id=OeNWAQAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Both Sides of the Gutter: Part the second&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by P. Byrne.&#xA;  Both it and &quot;part second&quot; mean, of course, &quot;the second part&quot;.  You are possibly familiar with Carroll's &lt;em&gt;The Hunting of the Snark&lt;/em&gt;, whose cantos are &quot;Fit the first&quot;, &quot;Fit the second&quot;, which is more of the same sort of thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For yet more instances of this construction, try google books &quot;chapter fifth&quot;:  I got hits on Walter Scott, Jules Verne, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your question: your book says &quot;Part first&quot; and so on because that's what the author wrote.  This style  seems odd or ungrammatical to you only because you are imperfectly familiar  with 19th century English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a speculative aside:  I think usages like &quot;Part the first&quot; and so on might once have been more common than &quot;Part one&quot;, with the ordinal form of numbers being more common in such contexts than the cardinal form, and that the use of Arabic or Roman numbers in spelling might be connected with this shift.  To this day when we read aloud  the written words &quot;King Richard III&quot; we actually say &quot;King Richard the third&quot;, and sometimes when we see &quot;December 25&quot; we say &quot;December twenty-fifth&quot; or &quot;December the twenty-fifth&quot;.   Although written English is &quot;alphabetic&quot;,  the phonetic basis or theory of the alphabet (which in English is applied  in notoriously  quirky ways, but still applied) does not govern the pronunciation of Arabic or Roman numerals.  According to this speculative theory,  the usage &quot;Part first&quot; that OP reports would once have been a correct reading of &quot;Part 1&quot; and its use here reflects both the conservative habit of using ordinals in this context and an archaizing tendency to avoid the use of Arabic numbers in the form &quot;Part 1&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T13:40:05.627" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T13:40:05.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T14:31:39.230" Score="2" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Choice is a subtle form of disease.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;- Don DeLillo, Running Dog&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this quote mean? Can someone explain it, please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I googled a lot but didn't get any proper explanation. And if this kind of question is not allowed here, let me know. I will remove the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2890" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:25:20.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T00:22:00.373" Title="What does &quot;Choice is a subtle form of disease&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;running-dog&gt;&lt;don-delillo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9135" CreationDate="2018-01-21T14:31:41.853" Score="5" ViewCount="1097" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading Mansfield Park, and so far after (5 books) it is my favorite. However there are some things which I may unintentionally skip over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that Maria was a selfish person who thought she herself could do no wrong. However I believe that she must have known that leaving her husband and going with Henry Crawford would be frowned upon. I don't understand why she would do this. I don't think selfish is a good enough reason since she was of high birth and proper education. Is there any other reason that I might miss in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also the last chapter gives me the impression that Henry was still in love with Fanny (I love her too) even right up to the moment when he went off with Maria. So why did he do it? He knew Maria was married. He knew Fanny's opinion of him was softened, and he still loved her. So I don't understand why he would do something like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2868" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:23:18.720" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T19:39:17.543" Title="In Mansfield Park, why did Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford get together?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;mansfield-park&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" Score="0" Body="Running Dog is a 1978 novel by the US writer Don DeLillo. Use this tag with the [don-delillo] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:26:21.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" Score="0" Body="Mansfield Park is an 1814 novel by the English novelist Jane Austen. Use this tag with the [jane-austen] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T15:27:21.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5493" CreationDate="2018-01-21T16:04:23.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this a printing error? A style that I've never seen before? Something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitely not a printing error; it's a style you've never seen before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; isn't even the only Thomas Hardy novel to use this type of style; see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tess_of_the_d%27Urbervilles#Summary_of_the_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is divided into &quot;Phase the First&quot;, &quot;Phase the Second&quot;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The famous Coleridge poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/181/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is also divided, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5503/17&quot;&gt;at least in some editions&lt;/a&gt;, into &quot;Part the First&quot;, &quot;Part the Second&quot;, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In fact, this style is so well known as a staple of older literature that it's even used in the spoof novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/William_Shakespeare_s_The_Phantom_of_Men.html?id=LzelBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare's The Phantom of Menace: Star Wars Part the First&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Ian Doescher.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5494/17&quot;&gt;kimchi lover's excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; goes into more detail on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; this style might have been used back then. But for sure it's not a &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; thing, or even a Thomas Hardy thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T16:13:49.797" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T16:13:49.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5503" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T16:12:45.907" Score="2" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coleridge's famous poem &quot;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&quot; has its constituent parts titled differently in different editions / online sources. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/181/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lit2Go&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;Part the First&quot;, &quot;Part the Second&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;Part I&quot;, &quot;Part II&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/151/151-h/151-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;Part the First&quot;, &quot;Part the Second&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Coleridge/the_rime_of_the_ancient_mariner.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poets' Graves&lt;/a&gt; has &quot;Part I&quot;, &quot;Part II&quot;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; version here? &lt;strong&gt;How were the parts titled when the poem was first published?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T19:12:57.330" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T19:12:57.330" Title="What were the original titles/structure in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?" Tags="&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5503" CreationDate="2018-01-21T18:06:36.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an exact answer to the original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TROTAM was first published in Bristol in 1798 in a collection by Coleridge and Wordsworth, &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;.  As one might expect, the very first edition is rare, and subsequent editions numerous.  The earliest version I have found on-line is of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/lyricalballadswi00word#page/n17/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1798 London&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;edition.   It titles the poem as &quot;&quot;THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE,/ IN SEVEN PARTS.&quot; The parts are labelled simply &quot;I.&quot; , &quot;II.&quot;, on up through &quot;VII.&quot;, (without the word &lt;em&gt;part&lt;/em&gt;) each starting on a fresh page, with fancy rules above and  below the  numbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T18:06:36.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T20:17:20.460" Score="6" ViewCount="1192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know which is the Persian text for the below poem by Rumi ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose to love you in silence…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For in silence I find no rejection,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose to love you in loneliness…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For in loneliness no one owns you but me,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose to adore you from a distance…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For distance will shield me from pain,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose to kiss you in the wind…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the wind is gentler than my lips,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I choose to hold you in my dreams…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For in my dreams, you have no end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/3239983-i-choose-to-love-you-in-silence-for-in-silence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I choose to love you in silence…&lt;/a&gt; on Goodreads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2932" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:14:52.480" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:14:52.480" Title="Which original Persian poem of Rumi does this refer to?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T21:17:14.520" Score="3" ViewCount="408" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fallen London&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which is essentially a choose your own adventure story that you can read online. I've gotten to the story about the Comtessa, and I'm at a bit of a dilemma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjyko.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sjyko.png&quot; alt=&quot;Description of the Comtessa, with choice of action&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is a bit contradictory about the relationship between the two characters: on one the Comtessa's eyes are &quot;frightened&quot;, but on the other hand their relationship is apparently &quot;true love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the nature of the relationship between the Comtessa and the clay manservant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user111" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditorDisplayName="user111" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T10:26:12.983" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T20:01:37.597" Title="What is the nature of the relationship between the Comtessa and the clay manservant?" Tags="&lt;interactive-fiction&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-21T21:24:51.870" Score="3" ViewCount="4573" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cat Stevens's Moonshadow talks about losing body parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if I ever lose my hands, lose my plough, lose my land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh if I ever lose my hands, oh if.... I won’t have to work no more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if I ever lose my eyes, if my colours all run dry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes if I ever lose my eyes, oh if.... I won’t have to cry no more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the song do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-21T21:35:32.970" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T02:22:20.903" Title="Why does Cat Stevens's Moonshadow talk about losing legs and eyes?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;cat-stevens&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2018-01-21T22:46:07.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perhaps deciding how to interpret their relationship is part of the choice you're making at this stage of the game.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is common in literature, there appears to be more than one possible answer to your question, deriving from different but equally valid interpretations of the story. Because this is &lt;em&gt;interactive&lt;/em&gt; fiction, your choice of interpretation may actually influence how the story develops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first choice is if you decide to put more emphasis on the fact that her eyes are &quot;&lt;em&gt;frightened&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and take this as proof that she isn't truly happy with the state she's in. In this case, &lt;strong&gt;the manservant's claim that she loved him could be either a lie or a delusion.&lt;/strong&gt; She's frightened of what he's doing to her, out of his misguided attempt to create a happy life for the two of them, and it's your duty to rescue her or at least put her out of her misery.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second choice is if you decide to believe the manservant's tale of true love. In this case, the fear in her eyes could be fear of &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; and what you might do to her in your misguided attempts to help, or &lt;strong&gt;she might be afraid of the petrification even though she desires it.&lt;/strong&gt; It's possible to be frightened even of a process which is necessary for you to have a happy life (dentist visits, anyone?) Her fear doesn't necessarily contradict the purported &quot;true love&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to you to decide whether their relationship is truly a loving one as the manservant claims, or something more sinister that needs to be ended. And that choice of interpretation is part of the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-21T22:46:07.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5507" CreationDate="2018-01-22T11:49:40.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonshadow_(song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (which cites a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=288&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slightly dubious source&lt;/a&gt; that I can't verify), Stevens felt the message of this song was &quot;uplifting&quot; and he has called it an &quot;optimist's anthem&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This song was, of course, written before his conversions to Islam but as &lt;em&gt;Morning Has Broken&lt;/em&gt; suggests he has been religious all his life. In the bible, St. Paul advocates that all Christians should keep &quot;faith, hope and love. Indeed, Moonshadow contains other religious themes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Did it take long to find me? I asked the faithful light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title Moonshadow can be taken literally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So there I was on the edge of the water on a beautiful night with the moon glowing, and suddenly I looked down and saw my shadow. I thought that was so cool, I'd never seen it before.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Yusuf Islam interview with Chris Isaak, 2009   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;faithful light&quot; here is a wordplay both on the light of the Moon and the light of God, and how an appreciation of the former can lead to one of the latter. An optimistic interpretation thus seems fitting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the melody and chorus are uplifting, the cited verses go against the grain and appear rather grim. Reading the whole verse it seems clear that this is a case of dramatic contrast. Stevens suggests a number of pretty dire occurrences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if I ever lose my hands, lose my plough, lose my land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then finds a positive note in each:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I won’t have to work no more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doing so, he highlights how important it is to remain hopeful and optimistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worth noting that his choice of body parts is interesting in itself. His linking of &quot;hands&quot; with &quot;plough&quot; and &quot;lands&quot; is decidedly anachronistic in tone. &quot;Eyes&quot; are mentioned in the Bible repeatedly, especially as a figurative motif (i.e. &quot;an eye for an eye&quot;, &quot;speck in your brother's eye&quot;). And in terms of the mouth, silence (&quot;I won't have to talk no more&quot;) has long been seen as a religious virtue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this would tend to support the interpretation that this is a song about hope, inspired by its importance in Christianity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T11:49:40.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5511" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5522" CreationDate="2018-01-22T16:57:34.897" Score="6" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to recall the name of a book which follows the cast of a fantasy story when no one is reading. The characters in the book act out the story much like actors on a stage, and when someone is reading the story the characters can look up and see them. When the book is closed everyone is 'off duty'. The second book in the series involves the book being uploaded to the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="783" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T18:47:06.367" Title="Book about what book characters do when no one is reading" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5512" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5515" CreationDate="2018-01-22T17:32:20.757" Score="4" ViewCount="670" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Do you have a Wish?' he asked, referring to this organization, The Genie Foundation, which is in the business of granting sick kids one wish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'No' I said. 'I used my Wish pre-Miracle.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'What'd you do?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I sighed loudly. 'I was thirteen,' I said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Not Disney,' he said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I said nothing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'You did not go to Disney World.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I said nothing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'HAZEL GRACE!' he shouted. 'You did not use your one dying Wish to go to Disney World with your parents.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Also Epcot Center,' I mumbled.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Oh, my God,' Augustus said. 'I can't believe I had a crush on a girl with such cliché wishes.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;― &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/732580-do-you-have-a-wish-he-asked-referring-to-this&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Green, &lt;em&gt;The Fault in Our Stars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does 'Pre-Miracle' refer to? I didn't get this extract. Please explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10324" OwnerDisplayName="user9181286" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-22T22:15:37.593" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T22:15:37.593" Title="What does &quot;pre-Miracle&quot; mean in this extract from the book &quot;The fault in our stars&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-fault-in-our-stars&gt;&lt;john-green&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5512" CreationDate="2018-01-22T18:17:03.597" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not read the book and the quote you give doesn't give enough context to say. But &quot;pre&quot; is a prefix meaning &quot;before&quot;. So &quot;pre-miracle&quot; means &quot;before the miracle&quot;. So most likely something happened to this girl that she considered a miracle. Perhaps a literal miracle, she prayed to God and then with no good medical explanation she recovered from her illness. Or perhaps she's using &quot;miracle&quot; figuratively here, just to mean something really good happened to her, not necessarily involving the supernatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context this girl apparently had some terrible disease. Did she recover from this disease? If not, did something else very good happen to her? Met the love of her life, had some profound insight on the meaning of life, etc?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7447" OwnerDisplayName="Jay" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T18:17:03.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5512" CreationDate="2018-01-22T19:17:40.880" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also did not read the book. I would think it was a wish given when younger, before a &quot;miracle&quot; (like a new miracle drug) prevented her from dying. It sounds to me she feels as if she wasted her wish on a frivolous and childish vacation before she knew she would live longer, and the character 'Augustus' sounds the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that he asks if she HAS a wish implies he thinks she could still make one, so she is still sick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Amadeus" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T19:17:40.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5512" CreationDate="2018-01-22T20:38:19.467" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier in the novel, the narrator, Hazel, tells of her &quot;Cancer Miracle&quot;: she was about to die, but the (fictitious) drug &lt;em&gt;Phalanxifor&lt;/em&gt; made her tumors shrink and &quot;resulted in a bit of purchased time&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Hazel refers to the time &quot;pre-Miracle&quot; in your quote, she means before that successful treatment, meaning (I guess) that her parents took her to Disneyland when they thought she was going to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I found the answer to your question by searching for &quot;miracle&quot; in the&lt;/em&gt; Look inside &lt;em&gt;feature on Amazon.&lt;strong&gt;de&lt;/strong&gt; (the German site, because the relevant page did not display to me on Amazon.com).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Cloudchaser" LastActivityDate="2018-01-22T20:38:19.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-22T23:09:33.093" Score="4" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;In part first, II, I see this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And who's he?&quot; asked one, comparatively a stranger, when the boy entered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Well, ye med ask it, Mrs. Williams. He's my great-nephew&amp;mdash;come since you was last this way.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does 'med ask it' mean? I tried Googling &lt;code&gt;med ask it&lt;/code&gt;, but all I found was free consulting with a doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T08:36:42.837" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T08:36:42.837" Title="What does 'you med ask' mean, from &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5517" CreationDate="2018-01-23T01:09:50.377" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/153&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg etext&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, I found a dozen other instances of &quot;med&quot;, such as these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now don't you interrupt, my boy. Never interrupt your senyers. Move the fore hoss aside, Bobby; here's som'at coming… You must mind that I be a-talking of the college life. 'Em lives on a lofty level; there's no gainsaying it, though I myself &lt;strong&gt;med&lt;/strong&gt; not think much of 'em. As we be here in our bodies on this high ground, so be they in their minds—noble-minded men enough, no doubt—some on 'em—able to earn hundreds by thinking out loud. And some on 'em be strong young fellows that can earn a'most as much in silver cups. As for music, there's beautiful music everywhere in Christminster. You &lt;strong&gt;med&lt;/strong&gt; be religious, or you &lt;strong&gt;med&lt;/strong&gt; not, but you can't help striking in your homely note with the rest. And there's a street in the place—the main street—that ha'n't another like it in the world. I should think I did know a little about Christminster!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear that &quot;med&quot; represents a dialectal pronunciation of &quot;might&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T01:09:50.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T01:40:30.967" Score="4" ViewCount="610" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 10 of the Project Gutenberg ebook&lt;/a&gt; - or Volume 2, Chapter 3, Page 102 of Penguin Classics edition of &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rage was without bounds; I sprang on him, impelled by all the&#xA;feelings which can arm one being against the existence of another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He easily eluded me and said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Be calm! I entreat you to hear me before you give vent to your hatred&#xA;on my devoted head. Have I not suffered enough, that you seek to&#xA;increase my misery? Life, although it may only be an accumulation of&#xA;anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it. Remember, thou hast made&#xA;me more powerful than thyself; my height is superior to thine, my&#xA;joints more supple. But I will not be tempted to set myself in&#xA;opposition to thee. I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and&#xA;docile to my &lt;strong&gt;natural lord&lt;/strong&gt; and king if thou wilt also perform thy&#xA;part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to&#xA;every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even&#xA;thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember that I am thy&#xA;creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel,&#xA;whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss,&#xA;from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good;&#xA;misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monster calls Victor his &amp;quot;natural lord.&amp;quot; What exactly does this title mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2939" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T04:11:16.270" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T04:11:16.270" Title="Does &quot;Natural Lord&quot; in Frankenstein mean &quot;Father&quot; or something to that effect?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2018-01-23T06:50:14.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;natural lord and king&quot; (or just &quot;natural lord&quot;) refers to the king. There are various examples of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;texts about and by King Charles II:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... That we do not represent this day the Person of a Tyrant or Usurper as some of late have done, but the Per∣son of our natural Lord and King, Charles the second, by the Grace of God of England, Scotland, France and Ireland King ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?cc=eebo;c=eebo;idno=a38752.0001.001;node=A38752.0001.001%3A2;seq=5;vid=61832;page=root;view=text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech by the Lord Chancellor of Ireland&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... as you ought to doe to your true and natural lord and king ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a translation of a letter from King Charles II excerpted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=YiQ7AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA339&amp;amp;lpg=PA339&amp;amp;dq=%22natural%20lord%20and%20king%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The third part of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;By Gilbert Burnet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;About King Harold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, ultimately, nothing can alter his status as a natural lord:&#xA;  Harold is a legitimate king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=O5k6DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT98&amp;amp;lpg=PT98&amp;amp;dq=%22natural%20lord%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing&lt;/em&gt; by Emily A. Winkler&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32954/32954-h/32954-h.htm#Page_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Black Arrow&lt;/em&gt; by R. L. Stevenson&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No natural lord of mine,” said the man in the smock. “I followed the&#xA;  Walsinghams; so we all did down Brierly way, till two years ago, come&#xA;  Candlemas. And now I must side with Brackley! It was the law that did&#xA;  it; call ye that natural? But now, what with Sir Daniel and what with&#xA;  Sir Oliver—that knows more of law than honesty—I have no natural lord&#xA;  but poor King Harry the Sixt, God bless him!—the poor innocent that&#xA;  cannot tell his right hand from his left.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;court proceedings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... as a false traitor against the most illustrious and excellent&#xA;  prince James the second, by the Grace of God of England, Scotland,&#xA;  France and Ireland, king, and his natural lord ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=4FVTAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA385&amp;amp;lpg=PA385&amp;amp;dq=%22natural%20lord%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;By Thomas Bayly Howell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;natural&quot; aspect, as far as I can tell, arises from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the principle of  divine right&lt;/a&gt; - the king is the king &lt;em&gt;by grace of God&lt;/em&gt;, and as such, is naturally the subject's lord (unlike other positions in the nobility, which are usually positions created by human law and not God's natural law).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context, I do not think the monster is calling Frankenstein his natural lord and king, but is instead talking about the country's king. Note how this conversation starts with Frankenstein berating the monster for the murders he committed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Devil,” I exclaimed, “do you dare approach me? And do not you fear&#xA;  the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head? Begone,&#xA;  vile insect! Or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust! And, oh!&#xA;  That I could, with the extinction of your miserable existence, restore&#xA;  those victims whom you have so diabolically murdered!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the monster's response to that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...  How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I&#xA;  will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will comply&#xA;  with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you&#xA;  refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the&#xA;  blood of your remaining friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these lines, it seems to me that the monster is saying he will not further violate the king's law - provided Frankenstein fulfills his responsibilities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T06:50:14.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T15:56:54.840" Score="4" ViewCount="497" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently saw an episode of the Hercule Poirot series where he was portrayed as religious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have recently read the book the episode was based on and there is nothing about religion in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the other Poirot books I have read (and I've read most of them) I don't remember any specific references to Poirot being religious (except the occasional Mon Dieu!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is if in her &lt;strong&gt;books&lt;/strong&gt; Agatha Christie ever specifically indicates that Poirot is religious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T16:20:22.063" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T19:36:17.907" Title="Is Hercule Poirot religious?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;hercule-poirot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2018-01-23T16:05:11.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4117.The_Great_Good_Thing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Great Good Thing&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Roderick Townley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn't get to live it very often.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sylvie has been a twelve-year-old princess for more than eighty years,&#xA;  ever since the book she lives in was first printed. She's the heroine,&#xA;  and her story is exciting -- but that's the trouble. Her story is&#xA;  always exciting in the same way. Sylvie longs to get away and explore&#xA;  the world outside the confines of her book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When she breaks the cardinal rule of all storybook characters and&#xA;  looks up at the Reader, Sylvie begins a journey that not even she&#xA;  could have anticipated. And what she accomplishes goes beyond any&#xA;  great good thing she could have imagined...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14979.Into_the_Labyrinth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Into the Labyrinth&lt;/a&gt;'s description is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What a relief when the old storybook is republished and the characters&#xA;  who live inside it suddenly discover they have Readers again -- lots&#xA;  of Readers! Princess Sylvie finds herself rushing to get to her place&#xA;  whenever a new Reader -- whether in Boston or Bangkok -- opens the&#xA;  book. Her mother, the queen, is especially frazzled when the popular&#xA;  story is loaded onto the Web: a weightless, &quot;virtual&quot; world of&#xA;  unforeseen challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T16:05:11.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5511" CreationDate="2018-01-23T18:47:06.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thursday_Next&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thursday Next&lt;/a&gt;&quot; series by Jasper Fforde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The series takes place in a &quot;book world&quot; where the &quot;actors&quot; live. Thursday Next is a detective with the ability to travel between the book world and the real world. The first book is &lt;em&gt;The Eyre Affair&lt;/em&gt; and is followed by &lt;em&gt;Lost in a Good Book&lt;/em&gt;, although I was not able to find the internet thing you mentioned. The series also takes place in an alt history setting if that helps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T18:47:06.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:24:47.740" Score="3" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lassalle_fragt_Herrn_Herbert_nach_Sonja&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lassalle fragt Herbert nach Sonja. Die Szene ein Salon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a three-act play by the German author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christoph_Hein&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christoph Hein&lt;/a&gt;. The play was first performed in 1980 in East Germany and criticizes Marxism. In the 1860s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Lassalle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferdinand Lasalle&lt;/a&gt; founded the first German labour party (one of the first socialist parties in Europe) but is not very active in the play. His private matters get in the way of his party work, so a delegation of workers needs to be sent away three times during the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lassalle's mother, Ms Lassal (no typo here!), who lives with her son, doesn't seem to have any impact on what is going on; the summary in the German Wikipedia article about the play does not even mention her. However, she is one of only four characters who appears in each of the three acts and she is the first character to appear in the first act, so it is unlikely that she meaningless. We learn early in the play that she secretly steals pieces of cake from the kitchen and that she puts her fingers in the jam in the kitchen; later we even learn that she wets her bed every night. So she is too out of the ordinary to be meaningless, but what does she represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:24:47.740" Title="The mother in C. Hein's play 'Lasalle fragt Herrn Herbert nach Sonja'" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;christoph-hein&gt;&lt;lassalle-fragt-herrn-herbert-nach-s&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5492" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:25:19.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure, but here’s a guess. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://ld.johanesville.net/maupassant-10-boule-de-suif?page=12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original&lt;/a&gt;, we see that the judge is referred to as “le premier président de Mortemain,”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mais Padoie, saisi soudain d’une colère folle, balbutia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—Où … où … où nous sommes.... Malheureux … misérable … infâme.... Où&#xA;  nous sommes … Chez monsieur le premier président!… chez monsieur le&#xA;  premier président de Mortemain … de Mortemain … de … de … de …&#xA;  Mortemain.... Ah!… ah!… canaille!… canaille!… canaille!…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t find a real town named Mortemain (perhaps this is the judge who deals with the legal matter of mortmain?), but the fact that this was translated to “judge” makes me think that the author is talking about the &lt;em&gt;président&lt;/em&gt; of a  &lt;em&gt;Parlement&lt;/em&gt;, which office Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assures me&lt;/a&gt; only existed up to the Revolution (meaning the story is set before Maupassant was born, but that’s not impossible, I suppose). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, during the pre-Revolution period, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/news/lauren-collins/adieu-to-mademoiselle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;believe,&lt;/a&gt; “mademoiselle” would have referred to a unmarried woman of &lt;em&gt;quality&lt;/em&gt;, which is to say an upper-class woman. “Demoiselle,” which is what Varajou says when the translation says he’s looking for “girls,” would just be any unmarried woman, but of course Varajou means to talk about prostitutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he’s talking to a waiter who might not be so smart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Tell me, where does one amuse oneself here?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man looked stupid, and replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I do not know, sir. Here, I suppose!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or might be elderly and potentially hard of hearing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Thank you, old man. There is something for you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And who, most importantly, probably speaks very good Breton and very poor French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The peasants did not understand his explanations, the collector did&#xA;  not understand their line of argument. He spoke French, they spoke&#xA;  Breton, and the clerk who acted as interpreter appeared not to&#xA;  understand either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Varajou says “demoiselles,” the waiter hears “mademoiselles.” And in a small, sleepy town…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sauntered slowly through the quiet Breton town, so sleepy, so calm,&#xA;  so dead, on the shores of its inland bay that is called “le Morbihan.”&#xA;  He looked at the little gray houses, the occasional pedestrians, the&#xA;  empty stores, and he murmured….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…the only young “ladies” are going to be the daughters of the judge!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No wonder the waiter was confused!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:25:19.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5526" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:29:43.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-23T19:29:43.473" LastActivityDate="2018-01-23T19:29:43.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5527" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-23T19:29:43.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German dramatist, novelist and translator Christoph Hein (born 1944) and his works. One of his best known plays is 'Die Wahre Geschichte des Ah Q' (1983); one of his best known prose works is the novella 'Der fremde Freund' (or 'Drachenblut'). Questions about his works should be tagged under [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T20:21:22.313" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T20:21:22.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5528" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5531" CreationDate="2018-01-24T00:15:17.840" Score="5" ViewCount="330" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading up on the works of the great, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/23/obituaries/ursula-k-le-guin-acclaimed-for-her-fantasy-fiction-is-dead-at-88.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recently deceased&lt;/a&gt;, author Ursula le Guin, I found the following tidbit on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_King&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; about her short story &quot;Winter's King&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Le Guin revised the story, focusing on pronoun gender, for its inclusion in her 1975 short story collection &lt;em&gt;The Wind's Twelve Quarters&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Wikipedia neither goes into more detail nor includes a citation for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What exactly was changed between the two editions of this story, and why did she change it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T01:42:24.587" Title="How and why were pronoun genders changed in &quot;Winter's King&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T01:10:59.313" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an essay in school--I think a survey course on British literature--that compared the music of Beethoven to the soliloquies of Hamlet; the essay said that Beethoven's music is &quot;spoken&quot; privately, not knowing it has an audience, while Rossini's music is paradelike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea what this might be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2940" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T13:07:42.470" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:08:25.610" Title="Looking for an essay comparing Beethoven to Hamlet" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5528" CreationDate="2018-01-24T02:47:35.197" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;First general information: Gethenians are androgynous for about 3 weeks every month (period called &amp;quot;somer&amp;quot;), then they develop gender (male or female - any Gethenian can both sire or bear children) based on pheromones produced by nearby people - exposed to male pheromones Getenian would turn female and vice versa. This time of the month is called &amp;quot;kemmer&amp;quot; and it is treated as special, bonding time within community, although people who purposefully extend their sexual period are treated as perverts (hence in the books humans are often viewed as such).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now when it comes to the gender pronouns - from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://theliterarylink.com/afterword.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1994 afterword&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Left Hand of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; Le Guin addressed this issue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having invented a race of people who are essentially sexless except for a few days a month, when they become very highly sexed either as male or female, and for the duration of pregnancy and lactation, when of course they remain female having discovered the Gethenians, what was I to call them? &lt;strong&gt;In 1967, when I wrote the book, I called them all &amp;quot;he.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; I believed then that the masculine pronoun in English was genuinely generic, including both male and female referents. This is a pleasant and convenient belief. Unfortunately, the more you look at it, the less credible it becomes. Even more unfortunately, it has been adopted as one of the Thirty Nine Articles of Antifeminism. Some years after the book was published, I lapsed from the faith, and have remained unregenerate ever since. &amp;quot;He&amp;quot; means what it says, no more, no less alas!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the author decided to change it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has often been suggested to me that the way to avoid the false generic &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; is to use &amp;quot;she,&amp;quot; at least part of the time. Dr. Spock calls his Generic Baby he in one chapter and she in the next; this is a nice solution to his problem, but it won't do for my Gethenians. It would merely seem as if they were always alternating male and female kemmer, and never were in somer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le Guin experimented with her own pronouns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I use a for a genderless equivalent of he or she; en for her or him; es for her, his, hers; and enself for herself, himself. The pronoun &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; will probably look to many readers as if it should be pronounced like the letter, rhyming with &amp;quot;see.&amp;quot; I pronounce it with the short &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; sound as in &amp;quot;yet&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;them.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But she wasn't entirely happy with that, because it was starting to look too strange. So in the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the reprinting (and all subsequent reprintings) of the Gethenian based story &amp;quot;Winter's King,&amp;quot; I kept malegendered nouns such as king, lord, but changed all the pronouns for Gethenians in somer to the feminine.&lt;/strong&gt; The effect is very interesting, and was effective, I think, at short story length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that wasn't the end of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second of the following texts, I have done the same thing to the first chapter of Left Hand, changing all pronouns for Gethenians in somer to the feminine. But this time I also feminized the personal nouns king becomes queen, lord becomes lady.[...] But when all is made feminine, it is as untrue to Gethenian reality as when all is made masculine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pursuing these experiments, I have repronoun'd a couple of passages where people in somer go into kemmer and come out again. In the tale &amp;quot;Estraven the Traitor,&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;I use my invented somer pronouns, switching to English gendered pronouns at the appropriate moment.&lt;/strong&gt; I rather like the shock effect. In a passage from chapter 18, I keep to the usage of the original text, calling Estraven he, until &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; goes into kemmer and becomes definitively, in anybody's language, she.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="11224" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T01:42:24.587" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T01:42:24.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-24T21:11:43.820" Score="7" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a children's novel, aimed at perhaps 7–10 year olds, that I read in the mid '90s; between 1993 and 2000. I must have read the story in Dutch. I believe the story was originally in English, but it may have been written in Dutch or another non-English language originally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting is pre-modern. It is set in a kingdom where so many candles burn that it is never dark. The king is afraid in the dark and ordered the candles to be lit. His subjects have never seen the night sky, never seen the stars or even the moon. They are not aware of the difference between day and night. When the king realises it is a bit dark underneath his throne, he orders a candle to be lit there. If I recall correctly, with bad consequences for the throne — it catches fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, some events (perhaps it was the throne catching fire) lead to this to change.  They extinguish the candles and observe the night sky.  The residents marvel and are not afraid at all and wonder why they did not do this before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect it may be rather obscure story, commissioned by some astronomical society or so for a special event on celebrating the night sky. That's just a wild guess, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I probably borrowed it from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oba.nl/openingstijden/detail.199295.html/oba-diemen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;local library&lt;/a&gt; in Diemen at some point during the 1990s, but I'm not sure about that either.  I'm quite sure the story was published in a standalone book and not part of a larger collection — at least not in the form I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've posted another version of this question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19505160-children-s-story-about-a-king-who-was-afraid-of-the-dark-pre-modern-kin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on a goodreads forum&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="542" LastEditorUserId="542" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T10:27:28.293" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T10:27:28.293" Title="I'm looking for a (possibly Dutch) children's story about a king who was afraid of the dark" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5536" CreationDate="2018-01-25T02:38:35.797" Score="5" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;All Quiet on the Western Front&lt;/em&gt;, the narrator says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the meantime we receive visitors, a couple of wireless-men, who are generously invited to the feed. They sit in the living-room where there is a piano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please explain to me what &quot;Wireless-men&quot; means? I've looked on google, and I can't find anything remotely useful. It might just be because I'm bad at using it though :P. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd greatly appreciate any help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2872" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-25T16:13:00.990" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T02:02:40.693" Title="What does &quot;Wireless-men&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;all-quiet-on-the-western-front&gt;&lt;erich-maria-remarque&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-25T22:18:03.827" Score="7" ViewCount="1850" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found numerous sources that attribute the quote &quot;If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane&quot; to Robert Frost but for the life of me, I cannot find when / where he actually said / wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="30" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T21:26:09.020" Title="Where did the Robert Frost Quote &quot;If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane&quot; come from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5534" CreationDate="2018-01-26T00:05:38.457" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.168305/2015.168305.Im-Westen-Nichts-Neues#page/n235/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original German text&lt;/a&gt; reads, on page 232 in the linked edition: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Inzwischen ist Besuch gekommen, zwei Funker, die &#xA;  freigebig zum Essen eingeladen werden. Sie sitzen im &#xA;  Wohnzimmer, wo ein Klavier steht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German word &quot;Funker&quot; means radio operator.  (From the German word &lt;em&gt;Funke&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;spark&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;funkeln&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;to sparkle&quot;, etc.  The &lt;em&gt;funk&lt;/em&gt;  morpheme was used in the vocabulary of the   early 20th century development of radio, when the &quot;spark gap radio&quot; was the hot &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spark-gap_transmitter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;technology&lt;/a&gt;.  It  lives on in modern German in the words &lt;em&gt;Funk&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;radio&quot;,  &lt;em&gt;Rundfunk&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;broadcast&quot;, &lt;em&gt;funken&lt;/em&gt; = &quot;to communicate by radio&quot;, etc.  Cf. the English slang &quot;Sparks&quot; for a radio-man at sea.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As several of the comments indicate, &quot;wireless man&quot; was used as an informal equivalent of &quot;wireless operator&quot; in the early part of the last century.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-01-26T02:02:40.693" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T02:02:40.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2018-01-26T12:39:48.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Cummings’ opinion, the ladies do not spend enough time thinking about the things Cummings feels are important, such as “if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.” The way Cummings describes the moon in this final line is a sharp contrast to the way he describes the Cambridge ladies. He uses an explosion of adjectives to describe the details of the sky and moon; details that this section of society overlooks in favor of meaningless things. The message Cummings is trying to send with this poem, and with many of his poems, is that details matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2951" LastActivityDate="2018-01-26T12:39:48.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T19:42:40.447" Score="4" ViewCount="838" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Mann (born in 1875) emigrated from Germany in 1933; in that same year, the first part of his &quot;Joseph and His Brothers&quot; was published in Germany. He was a well known author by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Vladimir Nabokov (born in 1899, i.e. nearly 25 years younger) lived in Germany until 1937. That is, Nabokov could have known the works by Mann. Especially since Nabokov was a &quot;west oriented&quot; Russian novelist, i.e. he knew English and French literature well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know whether Nabokov did know works by Mann and whether they have influenced him in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like both of them very much, and it would fascinate me if one of them knew of or had influenced the other's works (or the other way around).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2954" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T18:03:20.097" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T13:11:37.413" Title="Did Vladimir Nabokov know Thomas Mann's Works?" Tags="&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;&lt;thomas-mann&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-26T21:46:05.820" Score="4" ViewCount="752" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the Persian text for the below poem of Rumi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/472665-the-garden-of-the-world-has-no-limits-except-in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quotable Quote on GoodReads&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2932" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T04:10:15.970" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T04:10:15.970" Title="What is original Persian poem of Rumi for &quot;The garden of the world has no limits, except in your mind&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5538" CreationDate="2018-01-26T22:30:03.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently Nabokov did know of Mann's works.  As documented in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Mu4ycvVhlQUC&amp;amp;pg=PA57&amp;amp;dq=perplexed+and+amused+by+fabricated+notions+about+so-called+great+books&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjRt8jO5PbYAhWllOAKHVLQBEgQ6AEIKzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=perplexed%20and%20amused%20by%20fabricated%20notions%20about%20so-called%20great%20books&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strong Opinions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which I found  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?48219-Thomas-Mann-what-the-hell-is-all-the-fuss-about/page2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/521097-strong-opinions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; via a Google search for &quot;nabokov mann&quot;), he held no high opinion of Mann:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ever since the days when such formidable mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann were being accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by fabricated notions about so-called &quot;great books.&quot; That, for instance, Mann's asinine &quot;Death in Venice,&quot; or Pasternak's melodramatic, vilely written &quot;Dr. Zhivago,&quot; or Faulkner's corn-cobby chronicles can be considered &quot;masterpieces&quot; or at least what journalists term &quot;great books,&quot; is to me the sort of absurd delusion as when a hypnotized person makes love to a chair. My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are, in this order: Joyce's &quot;Ulysses&quot;; Kafka's &quot;Transformation&quot;; Bely's &quot;St. Petersburg,&quot; and the first half of Proust's fairy tale, &quot;In Search of Lost Time.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T13:11:37.413" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T13:11:37.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5543" CreationDate="2018-01-27T07:07:56.580" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;While in a Barnes &amp;amp; Noble in the US during our recent holiday (December 2017), I came across a very large and very heavy book (possibly dark red in colour) containing a number of Peanuts comics. I believe it was every strip published from the 50s up until the end in 2000, because I checked the first and last pages to make sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intended to take a photo of it or write down the ISBN so I could purchase it back home (it was too heavy to bring back), but my phone was flat so I wasn't able to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now looking on B&amp;amp;N and Amazon, I can't seem to find the book. I can find the individual volumes (e.g. 1950-1952) but not the single, large book that I saw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the book I'm referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2956" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-01-27T21:58:57.257" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T21:58:57.257" Title="Complete, single book of Peanuts comics?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5541" CreationDate="2018-01-27T21:31:20.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nearly 18,000 Peanuts strips were published in the newspapers, so a single volume would run to about 3,000 pages even if you managed to squeeze six strips on a page.  Needless to say, no such single volume exists.  As kimchi lover notes, there is a 26-volume set that contains all the strips (plus some &quot;extras&quot;), but this doesn't sound like what you saw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess is that you saw &lt;a href=&quot;http://aaugh.com/wordpress/2017/08/review-celebrating-snoopy/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;Celebrating Snoopy&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which matches your description of a large, dark red volume.  It is 10&quot; by 13&quot; and runs to 560 pages, and it came out just a few months ago.  Obviously, it doesn't contain all the strips, but it contains a lot of them.  If you want as many strips as possible in a single volume, either this book or the companion volume &lt;i&gt;Celebrating Peanuts&lt;/i&gt; (which came out in hardcover at the 60th anniversary in 2010 and in softcover at the 65th anniversary in 2015) is your best bet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2957" LastActivityDate="2018-01-27T21:31:20.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5544" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5575" CreationDate="2018-01-28T04:45:39.933" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Puccini's &lt;em&gt;Turandot&lt;/em&gt;, after Calaf successfully answers her riddles, Turandot begs her father not to make her marry him. (That's pretty rich given that the opera implies that she had at least 26 people killed for not being able to answer the riddles, but that's an issue for a different question). In response, Calaf states that he wants her to love him too and offers to call the whole thing off if she can discover his name by dawn. Why does he offer this? I understand that he wants her to love him, but why does he think that that would help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T07:13:25.523" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T00:10:16.903" Title="Why did Calaf offer Turandot the deal?" Tags="&lt;music&gt;&lt;turandot&gt;&lt;giacomo-puccini&gt;&lt;opera&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5545" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-28T07:14:56.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T07:14:56.967" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T07:14:56.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5546" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-28T07:14:56.967" Score="0" Body="For questions about Turandot, an Italian opera by Giacomo Puccini. Use together with the [Giacomo-Puccini] tag. You may also want to consider tagging the [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T18:14:48.153" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T18:14:48.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5547" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-28T07:15:45.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T07:15:45.190" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T07:15:45.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5548" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-28T07:15:45.190" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Italian opera composer Giacomo Puccini. If asking about a specific work, consider tagging it. Some questions may also warrant the [music] or [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-01-29T01:33:07.580" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T01:33:07.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5552" CreationDate="2018-01-28T13:01:42.880" Score="2" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the book. The author of the article I'm translating mentions him and his novel, I need to include the exact translation of the title but I'm not sure what he meant. Is it a home, a fireplace, an oven or something else? I figured since it is a book about a journey and being in a cloister suggests one is far from home,  hearth may mean home here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T18:31:59.990" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T19:35:42.870" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;hearth&quot; in Charles Reade's work The Cloister and the Hearth?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;charles-reade&gt;&lt;the-cloister-and-the-hearth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5733" CreationDate="2018-01-28T16:26:05.613" Score="2" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Dagny Taggart crash-landed in the Valley, most people thought she was dead. Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia, and others spent a lot of time frantically looking for the wreckage of her plane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francisco stopped in the Valley briefly to tell John Galt what had happened and what he was doing (at which point John showed him Dagny).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After realizing that she was alive, he asked John if they could send word that she was alive &quot;in case anyone felt like I did&quot; about Dagny's death (I don't have the exact quote in front of me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always assumed that he was referring to Hank Rearden, who he presumably knew by then loved Dagny. Was he also referring to Eddie Willars? Did he know that Eddie had feelings for Dagny too, or just that they had been friends for a long time? Who was Francisco referring to here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T23:36:07.063" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T23:36:07.063" Title="Who was Francisco d'Anconia thinking about when he asked John Galt to send word about Dagny?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5549" CreationDate="2018-01-28T16:39:43.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a long read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikpedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloister_and_the_Hearth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary&lt;/a&gt; of the book states that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cloister and the Hearth&lt;/em&gt; often describes the events, people and their practices in minute detail. Its main theme is the struggle between man's obligations to family and to Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glance here and there in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38895/38895-h/38895-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;text&lt;/a&gt; shows that &quot;hearth&quot; means &quot;fireplace&quot;, and metaphorically, &quot;home&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the most literal sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chap 69&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A huge wood fire burned on the hearth, and beside it hung the patient’s clothes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chap 94&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At night when they sat round the peat fire he bade them observe how beautiful the brass candlesticks and other glittering metals were in the glow from the hearth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chap 96&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They landed at the little house. It was as clean as a penny, the hearth blazing, and supper set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few vaguely metaphoric uses of the word, such as this, in Chap 46&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...We keep not open house, but yet we are not poor enough to grudge a seat at our hearth in a cold day to a wayfarer with an honest face, and, as I think, a wounded man. So, end all malice, and sit ye down!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which does make sense literally, but also in the slightly extended sense of &quot;our home&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the main use, in the book's  title, and in many chapter titles, is metaphoric.  This is explained at the end of Chap 73 (&quot;The Hearth&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You, who know what lies in that word, enlarge my little sketch, and see the young mother nursing and washing, and dressing and undressing, and crowing and gambolling with her first-born; then swifter than lightning dart your eye into Italy, and see the cold cloister; and the monks passing like ghosts, eyes down, hands meekly crossed over bosoms dead to earthly feelings.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the valley of Grindelwald the traveller has on one side the perpendicular Alps, all rock, ice, and everlasting snow, towering above the clouds, and piercing to the sky; on his other hand little every-day slopes, but green as emeralds, and studded with cows and pretty cots, and life; whereas those lofty neighbours stand leafless, lifeless, inhuman, sublime. Elsewhere sweet commonplaces of nature are apt to pass unnoticed; but, fronting the grim Alps, they soothe, and even gently strike, the mind by contrast with their tremendous opposites. Such, in their way, are the two halves of this story, rightly looked at; on the Italian side rugged adventure, strong passion, blasphemy, vice, penitence, pure ice, holy snow, soaring direct at heaven. On the Dutch side, all on a humble scale and womanish, but ever green. And as a pathway parts the ice towers of Grindelwald, aspiring to the sky, from its little sunny braes, so here is but a page between&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “the Cloister and the Hearth.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the contrast is between two worlds, the world of action and the domestic world. (Green, cow-studded Holland versus  Italy, with its blasphemy, strong passion, vice.) Most chapters are simply numbered, lacking titles; of those with titles most are either &quot;The Hearth&quot;, &quot;The Cloister&quot;, or &quot;The Cloister and the Hearth&quot;, naming the scene of the chapter. The passage quoted above is at the end of Chap 73, &quot;The Hearth&quot;; the next, Chap 74, &quot;The Cloister&quot; starts out &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE new pope favoured the Dominican order. The convent received a message from the Vatican, requiring a capable friar to teach at the University of Basle. Now Clement was the very monk for this: well versed in languages, and in his worldly days had attended the lectures of Guarini the younger. His visit to England was therefore postponed though not resigned; and meantime he was sent to Basle; but not being wanted there for three months, he was to preach on the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T19:35:42.870" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T19:35:42.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel &quot;The Cloister and the Hearth&quot; (1861) by Charles Reade. Use with the [charles-reade] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T18:35:21.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5560" CreationDate="2018-01-28T18:56:17.870" Score="8" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Perelandra&lt;/em&gt;, the second book of CS Lewis's planets trilogy, the protagonist Ransom is wounded in the heel by the Un-Man/Weston. We learn in the third book, &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, that the wound never really heals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the symbolism behind this wound?&lt;/strong&gt; Since there's so much hidden religious significance in the series and Lewis's works in general, I'm sure there's more to this than meets the eye: either the simple fact of the wound itself, how he got it, or maybe its precise placing in his heel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T06:33:35.960" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T06:33:35.960" Title="What is the symbolism of Ransom's heel wound?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5564" CreationDate="2018-01-29T03:26:11.437" Score="3" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;All Quiet on the Western Front&lt;/em&gt;, Paul remarks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I become quiet. &quot;Pardon me, Herr Doctor, I will keep still but do not chloroform me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the doctor threatens to chloroform him when he thrashes around in pain during surgery. This doctor was just introduced in the last paragraph: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is all right. The surgeon pokes around in the wound and a blackness comes before my eyes.&#xA;  &quot;Don't carry on so,&quot; he says gruffly, and hacks away. The instruments gleam in the bright light like&#xA;  marvellous animals. The pain is insufferable. Two orderlies hold my arms fast, but I break loose&#xA;  with one of them and try to crash into the surgeon's spectacles just as he notices and springs&#xA;  back. &quot;Chloroform the scoundrel,&quot; he roars madly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book says nothing about &quot;Herr Doctor&quot; and a quick Google search reveals that this is German for &quot;the Doctor.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;If the entire book was translated to English (it was apparently originally written in a German newspaper), why were these two words the only ones not completely translated?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't seen any other place in the entire book where there are German words (except for possibly last names). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2872" LastEditorUserId="2872" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T03:01:07.570" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T19:06:48.270" Title="Why is there German in the English version of All Quiet on the Western Front?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;all-quiet-on-the-western-front&gt;&lt;erich-maria-remarque&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2081" CreationDate="2018-01-29T09:43:57.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Burns died relatively young, possibly of a heart condition, at the age of 37. He had been expressing staunch support for two unpopular causes, the French revolution and Scotting political reform. As a result, his work had fallen in popularity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly before his death, his cottage at Alloway in Ayrshire had been sold to a local shoemaker's guild. Later, one of its members turned into an alehouse. It opened in early 1801 and the band of the local militia played on what they thought was Burns' birthday, 29th of January. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Burns supper was not on the date of his birthday, but of his death, in the same year. Because of his relative youth, he left many friends who were disappointed by his diminishing popularity. Nine of them - eight men and a woman - held the first supper at the Alloway cottage to celebrate his life and work. They ate sheep's head and haggis, speaking Burns' famous poem &quot;Address to a Haggis&quot; before consuming the latter, and drank wine and ale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the attendees were, like Burns, members of the Masons. As a result, the evening was designed to proceed a little bit like a Masonic ritual with a set running order and recitations of verse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evening was felt to be such a success by the participants that they decided to make in bi-annual event, celebrated on the anniversaries of both his birth and death. Celebrants discovered that according to parish records his birthday was, in fact, the 25th of January, not the 29th. After five years of this, it was changed to a single date, the 25th of January, because this was during the least busy time of the agricultural year. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During this time, the popularity of the event had spread. &quot;Burns clubs&quot; sprang up, loose organisations who held a supper every year. Paisley and Greenock were among early places to create such a club, with their record books dating back to around 1802-1805. In 1806 the first supper was held in England, by Glaswegian students at Oxford University. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After mentions in the press, the popularity of the celebration skyrocketed between 1810 and 1830. 1812 was the earliest record of a supper outside of Britain, held by Scottish army officers in India. In 1844 a great festival in Ayrshire spread knowledge of the celebration internationally, leading to the foundation of Burns clubs in expat colonies of Scots. In 1885 the Burns Federation was founded, bringing many of the clubs together under one organisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;- Scotland: A Very Short Introduction, Prof. Rab Houston&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- The Ultimate Burns Supper Book, Clark McGinn    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-01-29T09:43:57.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5555" CreationDate="2018-01-29T10:04:50.057" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The symbolism is not invented by CS Lewis, but borrowed from the old Celtic myth of the Fisher King, who in turn is part of the Grail sagas of the Middle Ages. In the late Arthurian literature, Arthur himself is awkwardly imported, and there is some evidence that its origin is from Ireland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by implication, the wounded heel is not really a symbol, but a legendary leftover of Celtic religion whose meaning was lost in translation, interpretation, and perhaps Christian pruning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, we know Lewis's Ransom was a Christ figure. Not the sinless Lamb of God, but both the Pendragon and a ransom for others. In this framework, the wound is clearly a mark of self-sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pauline doctrine is clear: To reign with Christ is to suffer with Him. Romans 8:17,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastEditorUserId="2895" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T03:08:32.353" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T03:08:32.353" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5555" CreationDate="2018-01-29T23:09:36.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer goes back to Genesis 3:15 -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis3:15&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 3:15 (NIV)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case God is speaking to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; the &quot;he&quot; is speaking of Eve's descendants (any and all of them) and hence including, in the story, Ransom. Weston thus represents - well, is - the metaphorical serpent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastEditorUserId="2773" LastEditDate="2018-02-03T02:07:16.560" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T02:07:16.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5561" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-28T10:10:58.307" Score="19" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about a short-story with a surprise ending.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story is about an atomic energy agency van that accidentally gets off the road down a steep slope and hits a small tree. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People on the road stop and look down. They identify the van to belong to the Atomic Energy Agency, and while they're watching, they see two apparently unharmed men exit the van, and desperately run like hell away from the it, disappearing far away downwards into the bushes, not even looking back. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assuming some container with radioactive material must have been damaged in the crash, the spectators phone the Agency to come with help, and some time afterwards they watch the rescue team from the agency slowly and carefully descend the steep slope towards the van. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Unexpectedly, as soon as the group arrive at close distance, they also break in crazy running spree, and also disappear into the woods down away.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Presuming there is a real danger of radioactive contamination, the spectators get into their cars and skip away as fast as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The next day, a 4-line back page news notice was published in the local newspaper, explaining that the van had no radioactive material whatsoever and the atomic group personnel had received intensive medical treatment for &lt;em&gt;wasp stings&lt;/em&gt;.         &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Luiz Jorge Cavalcanti" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T00:42:26.850" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T00:42:26.850" Title="Short story about an atomic energy agency van, with a funny surprise ending" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5561" CreationDate="2018-01-28T11:01:51.683" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &quot;Critical Mass&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Mass_(Arthur_C._Clarke_short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?52986&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISFDB&lt;/a&gt;) by Arthur C. Clarke, first published in 1949. From Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This comic story describes the relationship between a village and a nuclear research facility located near it. On the day that the story takes place, a truck carrying a mysterious cargo has an accident, and the driver flees. The terrified villagers are about to begin an evacuation, when the narrator discovers that the cargo were merely hives of bees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2975" OwnerDisplayName="Ubik" LastActivityDate="2018-01-28T11:01:51.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="938" CreationDate="2018-01-30T03:25:59.363" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;He read &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt; by CS Lewis. He responded, &quot;This could actually happen.&quot; He wrote &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, his own version with Lewis's religious themes removed. Incidentally, THS is the superior book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2895" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T03:25:59.363" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5557" CreationDate="2018-01-30T19:06:48.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Herr' is a German Honorific (words that are used when addressing a person that can indicate and connote a great variety of different qualities) that is used to convey the highest level of respect.  In English, honorifics serve a similar purpose but don't carry the same importance in conversation as they do in a language like German or Russian, where using a more diminutive honorific can be considered a serious affront.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   In this scene Paul wishes to avoid the use of chloroform on him at all costs, and so he gathers himself and implores the Doctor in the most respectful and polite way.  By including 'Herr', the translator allowed the text to communicate how Paul wished to extol and flatter the Doctor into forgoing the use of chloroform in a more robust way than if the text simply read &quot;Pardon me, Doctor, I will..&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2973" LastActivityDate="2018-01-30T19:06:48.270" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5567" CreationDate="2018-01-30T19:31:54.413" Score="2" ViewCount="3241" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is widely attributed to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, but I cannot find the source. Where did he say or write this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2974" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T19:35:38.603" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T00:39:10.753" Title="Where did Rilke say or write &quot;The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;rainer-maria-rilke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-30T20:00:22.877" Score="9" ViewCount="541" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, I came across this bit in Part First, chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man who had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come; &lt;strong&gt;but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew&lt;/strong&gt;. This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the mist might rise.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Hardy here exposing his own anti-Semitic prejudices here, or was he merely commenting on the general sentiment in England at the time relating to Judaism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-01-30T20:20:09.560" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T10:16:48.370" Title="Was Thomas Hardy expressing his own religious intolerance or commenting on the general anti-Semitic sentiment of the time?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5565" CreationDate="2018-01-31T00:39:10.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems to be from the poem &quot;Der Schauende&quot;, variously translated into English as &quot;The Man Watching&quot; or &quot;The Beholder&quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://martyrion.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/man-watching-der-schauende-by-rainer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original German text&lt;/a&gt; of this quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  von immer Größerem zu sein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been translated into English in a number of ways, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winning does not tempt that man.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  by constantly greater beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetry-chaikhana.com/blog/2015/06/05/rainer-maria-rilke-the-man-watching/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Bly translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winning does not tempt that man.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His growth is this: to be defeated&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  by ever greater forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/man-watching-ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His growth is: to be the deeply defeated&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  by ever greater things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/man-watching-ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Snow translation (apparently)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;I think I got lucky finding this. When I searched Google for &quot;rilke The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things&quot;, most of the results were lists of Rilke quotes including this as a platitude, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9371-the-purpose-of-life-is-to-be-defeated-by-greater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rainer_maria_rilke_147753&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brainyquote&lt;/a&gt;, but one or two hits mentioned this poem, including &lt;a href=&quot;http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/man-watching-ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;, which gave me the name of the poem I needed to search for to find out more.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T00:39:10.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5608" CreationDate="2018-01-31T03:12:06.297" Score="9" ViewCount="892" Body="&lt;p&gt;I notice that a lot of popular recent fiction,&#xA;for example Robert Jordan's  &quot;Wheel of Time&quot; , and George R.R. Martin's &quot;A Song of Ice and Fire&quot; are written in &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person,_subjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;limited/subjective third-person point of view&lt;/a&gt; (POV)&lt;/strong&gt;; both were written after 1990. In this style, only the part of the story that is known to the POV character is narrated, with the POV character usually changing from chapter to chapter or section to section. Even though the story is narrated from a character's POV, the writing is in the third person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas, if we compare to Tolkien's &quot;Lord of the Rings&quot; (1950s), which  is otherwise relatively similar in theme and structure,&#xA;it was written in &lt;strong&gt;omniscient third person point of view&lt;/strong&gt;, where the narration does not try to limit itself to what's known to a single character. I note similarities for  Robert E. Howard's Conan books (1930s), when they have multiple main characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my view point is only limited, I've not conducted a formal study, and I have huge selection bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has there been a change in the relative frequency of &quot;limited third-person point of view&quot;, vs &quot;omniscient third person point of view&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, the &lt;strong&gt;limited third-person point of view&lt;/strong&gt; a recent innovation, and unheard-of 100 years ago.&#xA;Ideal evidence would be if this were backed up by a formal survey counting published books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2978" LastEditorUserId="2978" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T08:36:56.067" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T13:15:57.640" Title="Use of &quot;limited third-person point of view&quot;, vs &quot;omniscient third person point of view&quot; over the past century or so" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5566" CreationDate="2018-01-31T09:34:44.047" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an impossible question to answer definitively without a supporting quote from the author. No such quote appears to exist: I haven't been able to source anything in which Hardy discusses his religious or racial views. However, we can place this in the wider context of the time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy was born in 1840, at which point acceptance of Jews in British society had turned a corner. Catholics had been emancipated by a series of laws passed in 1829, and Jews hoped that this set a precedent for religious freedom across the board. They were not disappointed: Parliament engaged with the issue and by 1837, matters had advanced to the point where Queen Victoria knighted a Jew, Moses Haim Montefiore. By 1858 Jewish emancipation had been enshrined in law, there was a Jew in the House of Commons, a Jewish baronet, and a Jew sitting as Mayor of London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change in attitudes was reflected in contemporary literature. Strong arguments can be made that the work of both George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray contain purposeful themes critiquing discrimination against Jews.This does not, of course, mean that anti-semitism vanished over these years. H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel &lt;em&gt;She&lt;/em&gt; contains a chapter in which two characters have a virulently anti-semitic discussion. However, there can be little doubt that it did diminish. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy, therefore, would have been raised at a time when it was not the prevailing cultural attitude. He lived in cosmopolitan London as a student in the 1860's, exactly the time and place in which this chain of events was reaching its zenith. He was also well known for his views on social reform and liberalism. It, therefore, seems unlikely that Hardy would have held much in the way of subconscious antisemitic bias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, then, is the reason for this passage? In the novel - which is set in a period roughly contemporary or slightly before its 1895 publication date - Jude is presented as someone who has doubts about the prevailing spirituality of the time. He seems fascinated by an ancient well in the village, which he feels is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the only relic of the local history that remained absolutely unchanged&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the new church is seen as the destructive force which bulldozed the remainder of that history, &quot;obliterating&quot; the graves of local families and retaining no record of the original chapel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jude is thus someone who is likely to have doubts about the efficacy of prayer as a means of getting things done, turning to it only because it is a socially accepted norm. By offering the suggestion that the only reason for the failure of prayer is due to a man's trousers (breeches) being made by a &quot;wicked Jew&quot;, Hardy is ridiculing the notion that prayer works at all. The inclusion of the word &quot;wicked&quot; is as a shorthand to highlight both the non-Christian nature of the Jewish tailor and the idiocy of the suggestion that trousers are sufficient to cause a prayer to fail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- The Jewish Encyclopedia: Volume 5&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Thomas Hardy: The &quot;dream-country&quot; of His Fiction, Anne Alexander     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-01-31T11:10:33.813" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T11:10:33.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-01-31T17:39:26.270" Score="3" ViewCount="1127" Body="&lt;p&gt;George RR Martin's fantasy series &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; takes a lot of inspiration from real-world history: Hadrian's Wall becomes the Wall in the North, Yorkists and Lancastrians become Starks and Lannisters, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/180251/31394&quot;&gt;the French Foreign Legion (maybe?) becomes the Night's Watch&lt;/a&gt;. What about that other organisation of men who take oaths for life and swear to celibacy, the &lt;strong&gt;Kingsguard&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is the Kingsguard based on or inspired by any real-world organisation?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Answers based on quotes from GRRM, compelling similarities, or any other good evidence will be welcomed.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T16:21:43.417" Title="What was the real-world inspiration for the Kingsguard?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5572" CreationDate="2018-01-31T19:32:23.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been (elite) guard units throughout history, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praetorian_Guard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cohortes praetoriae&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerus_Batavorum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;numerus Batavorum&lt;/a&gt; during the Roman Empire, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushtigban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pushtigban&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gond-i_Shahanshah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gond-i Shahanshah&lt;/a&gt; of the Sassanid Empire, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, due to the celibacy, the first organisation that comes to mind is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_Swiss_Guard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pontifical Swiss Guard&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Recruits to the guards must be &lt;strong&gt;unmarried&lt;/strong&gt; Swiss Catholic males between 19 and 30 years of age who have completed basic training with the Swiss Armed Forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more recent source of inspiration may have been the Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evzones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evzones or Evzonoi&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prospective recruits had to be of good health and character, over 17 and under 40 years of age, and &lt;strong&gt;preferably unmarried&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some members of the Kingsguard are of noble descent (most notably Jaime Lannister), but they don't need to be, unlike, for example, the Vatican's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_Guard_(Vatican)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noble Guard&lt;/a&gt; (1801-1970).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't think that the oath is &quot;for life&quot; in these organisations; George R. R. Martin likes taking historical examples to an extreme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T19:32:23.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2018-01-31T21:00:26.683" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chapter 1: from Piggy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Didn't you hear what the pilot said?  About the atom bomb?  They're all dead.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2982" LastActivityDate="2018-01-31T21:00:26.683" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5544" CreationDate="2018-02-01T00:10:16.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one sense, it's a counter to her own riddles: for the suitors, who were unable to answer Turandot's riddles, their punishment is death. Calaf however knows that Turandot's greatest fear isn't death, but to submit herself to a foreign suitor- and hence, or so she believes, risk reliving the tragedy which befell her ancestor, Princess Lo-u-Ling, who ruled peacefully until one day she was raped and killed by a foreign prince (&quot;In questa reggia&quot;, from Act II) - and hence, he offers her a chance to save herself from her fear as well with a riddle, just as she offered her suitors a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Calaf sees that Turandot loathes him and begs her father to annul the marriage, he realises that should he take her then and there, he would be doing it as an act of force in some sense. So when she asks of him, &lt;em&gt;Mi porterai con la forza?&lt;/em&gt;, he tells her instead (&quot;Tre enigmi m'hai proposto&quot;) that he wants her &quot;burning of love&quot; for him (&lt;em&gt;ti voglio ardente d’amor&lt;/em&gt;). He offers her a chance to refuse him once again, and puts his own life on the line in order to show her that his love is truly sincere and genuine, in a way that fairly honours her agency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2983" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T00:10:16.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5496" CreationDate="2018-02-01T00:22:00.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Selvy, the character to which this line is attributed, is a government agent that follows a very strict, detached approach not just to his job but to his life as a whole: everything from the unfurnished apartment he lives in to the way in which he can passively and unemotionally observe his assailants while being pinned under heavy gunfire to his obsessive fixation and self-identification with cleaning and assembling his gun paint a portrait of a man that is fundamentally alienated from his emotions and from himself, a man who has chosen the certainty of unquestioned orders over all else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What ends up getting him killed is precisely this kind of Manichean duality to which he unquestioningly adheres; it's a glitch in the system which ultimately exposes him as a double agent, which mistakenly marks him for death and leads to his execution. In this sense, he has realised in some ways the inherent deathward-ness of the way he's lived his life, devoid of choice and responsibility for the consequences of the choices he has not made: even finally having come to terms with this however, he still refuses to make any choices, and obeys his programming - both the draconian rigidity of the sinister government forces which moulded me, and his own emotional coldness and detachment - to the very end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2983" LastActivityDate="2018-02-01T00:22:00.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T11:52:46.100" Score="3" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;strong&gt;major spoilers follow!&lt;/strong&gt; (If that wasn't already clear from the title.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was having a discussion with someone yesterday about John Wyndham's novel &lt;em&gt;The Midwich Cuckoos&lt;/em&gt;, specifically its ending, and we couldn't agree on the morality of the final act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the moral of the story?&lt;/strong&gt; When Zellaby sets the bomb to kill all the Children, is this an act of heroism or of murder? Is he ridding the village (and the planet) of a threat which would eventually have destroyed us, or is he killing dozens of sentient creatures just because they were superior to us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-01T12:09:54.427" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T21:00:11.547" Title="Morality of the ending of The Midwich Cuckoos" Tags="&lt;moral&gt;&lt;john-wyndham&gt;&lt;the-midwich-cuckoos&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-01T20:14:37.877" Score="8" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little known fact about William Blake is that his poems in &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; were published in a painted form. As the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2007-n45-ron1728/015815ar/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Blake and the Music of the Songs&lt;/a&gt; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the characteristics of Blake’s work that makes it so interesting—and so challenging to study—is its use of diverse media. Since Blake believed that “Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts,” [2] it is appropriate that he used each of these “sister arts” to express his artistic vision, pursuing, as he put it in a letter to George Cumberland, the vocations of “Poet Painter &amp;amp; Musician as the Inspiration comes” (qtd. in Bentley, Blake Records 95). [3] And yet, literary scholarship has not always attended to Blake’s multi-media mode of practice. During the first half of the twentieth century, indeed, readers commonly considered only Blake’s written words when interpreting his poetry, and whole books of academic criticism were written containing hardly a reference to the visual and verbal designs that are such crucial parts of the illuminated writing. [4] But in the past thirty years or so, following the guidance of critics like David V. Erdman, W. J. T. Mitchell, and the editors of the William Blake Archive, Blake scholars have come to insist that the poetry must be read in its original engraved and painted form rather than in the barren typescript versions still presented in many literary anthologies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping someone here could explain why most publishers made the decision to only publish the text of the poems and ignore the artwork associated with those poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2988" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T10:43:03.023" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T10:43:03.023" Title="Why weren't Blake's poems published in their original painted form?" Tags="&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T02:49:30.660" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a story from my childhood. It was about a mouse that was worried about a noise in its house every night. The mouse asked all of the other animals to help it find the source of the noise, that ended up being an owl that lived in the mouse's attic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it being in a collection of short stories that was already pretty old in the early 90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be much appreciated! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2990" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T02:49:30.660" Title="Children's story about a mouse with a noise in the house" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T12:24:14.667" Score="4" ViewCount="4241" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's short poem &quot;London&quot;, from his &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; collection (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;), starts as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wander through each chartered street,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Near where the chartered Thames does flow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A mark in every face I meet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Marks of weakness, marks of woe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does &quot;chartered&quot; mean in this context?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T18:51:34.580" Title="What does &quot;chartered&quot; mean in Blake's poem &quot;London&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T13:03:13.357" Score="7" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence have the word &quot;song&quot; in their title. Why is that? Are they actually songs? Or is the word &quot;song&quot; a metaphor for something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2992" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T15:36:21.257" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T15:36:21.257" Title="Are Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence actually songs? Or is the word song a metaphor?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;music&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5583" CreationDate="2018-02-02T13:12:58.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a substantial body of evidence that the title &quot;Songs of Innocence&quot; points to the fact that the poems were intended to be sung. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/ron/2007-n45-ron1728/015815ar/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Blake and the Music of the Songs&lt;/a&gt;, Kevin Hutchins outlines several pieces of evidence for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The romantic period sought to draw on the historic connection between music and poetry. As Hutchins writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the most famous poems of the period thus had musical titles, titles representing the poet or poetic narrator as a veritable singer: Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, Byron’s Hebrew Melodies, Whitman’s Song of Myself, and Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience are among the most famous Romantic texts figuring poetry as song. In all of these works, music functions as a metaphor for the poetry’s connection to a primal origin yoking graphic text to the living human voice in what is arguably its most passionate mode of articulation: that of song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Blake would frequently sing his poems. Hutchins writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Writing of events that occurred between 1782 and 1784, John Thomas Smith—an acquaintance of Blake’s for over forty years and a childhood playfellow to his younger brother Robert—provided an answer to this question, noting that Blake “wrote many … songs to which he also composed tunes,” and that “he would occasionally sing [them] to his friends” (2.458). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Smith wrote: “I have often heard him read and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit” (2.458).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only did Blake sing his poems, but he was described as being very musically talented!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence points to the fact that the word song points to the fact that the poem is a song that can (or should?) be sung. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2992" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T13:12:58.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T16:54:21.250" Score="5" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;A little known fact is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5583/are-songs-of-experience-and-songs-of-innocence-actually-songs-or-is-the-word-so&quot;&gt;William Blake was a talented musician who would sing his poems&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately no sheet music of his poems exist, meaning the actual melodies he specifically used are unknown. But musicians have adapted Blake's poetry into song, and through that we can get glimpses of the music of Blake's poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in Sherri Poterfield's adaptation of William Blake's The Tiger. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5jn8Kh37o&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a really nice recording of a performance of Poterfield's piece on YouTube&lt;/a&gt;; listening to the video will give a better sense of the piece than reading the lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the things that interests me is that while the very first line of Blake's text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tiger tiger burning bright&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poterfield made the decision to begin with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tiger tiger burning brightly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reason for that change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2993" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T17:47:26.170" Title="Bright or brightly?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;music&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5586" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5601" CreationDate="2018-02-02T17:07:00.607" Score="3" ViewCount="335" Body="&lt;p&gt;Highway 61 is an actual highway that goes north from New Orleans and ends up in Minnesota.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Dylan choose this particular highway, and how does it affect how we understand the song lyrics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T13:29:46.190" Title="Why did Bob Dylan choose Highway 61 for &quot;Highway 61 Revisited&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;bob-dylan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5622" CreationDate="2018-02-02T17:15:32.277" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bob Dylan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel Literature Prize Literature&lt;/a&gt; starts off with the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I'm going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does, in fact, go about it in a rather roundabout way, describing various books and their influence on him and his music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He concludes with the following paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So what does it all mean? Myself and a lot of other songwriters have been influenced by these very same themes. And they can mean a lot of different things. If a song moves you, that's all that's important. I don't have to know what a song means. I've written all kinds of things into my songs. And I'm not going to worry about it – what it all means. When Melville put all his old testament, biblical references, scientific theories, Protestant doctrines, and all that knowledge of the sea and sailing ships and whales into one story, I don't think he would have worried about it either – what it all means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Odysseus in The Odyssey visits the famed warrior Achilles in the underworld – Achilles, who traded a long life full of peace and contentment for a short one full of honor and glory –  tells Odysseus it was all a mistake. &quot;I just died, that's all.&quot; There was no honor. No immortality. And that if he could, he would choose to go back and be a lowly slave to a tenant farmer on Earth rather than be what he is – a king in the land of the dead – that whatever his struggles of life were, they were preferable to being here in this dead place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's what songs are too. Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, &quot;Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he making the argument that song lyrics can be literature (in spite of being primarily a performance literature) in the same way that Shakespeare is literature in spite of being intended to be performance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can we infer about Bob Dylan's definition of literature from this lecture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T20:03:30.583" Title="What is Bob Dylan's definition of literature in his Nobel Prize lecture?" Tags="&lt;bob-dylan&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-02T17:27:30.620" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Hand of Fate&lt;/em&gt; by The Rolling Stones, the main character gets in a gunfight with a man over his ex-wife. He killed the guy, claiming that he was just defending his girlfriend against her violent, alcoholic ex-husband. He promptly fled, believing that he would go to prison over the incident if he was caught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hand of fate is on me now&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It pick me up and knock me down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;I'm on the run, I'm prison bound&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hand of fate is heavy now&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I killed a man, I'm highway bound&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wheel of fortune keeps turning round&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Turning round, turning round&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I should have known it was a one horse town&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My sweet girl was once his wife&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;He had papers the judge had signed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wind blew hard, it was stormy night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;He shot me once, but I shot him twice&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hand of fate is on me now&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It pick me up and it kicked me right down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kicked me right down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kicked me right down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I had to save her life&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yeah, I gunned him twice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yeah, and I watched him die, watch out boy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yeah, I watched him die&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, exactly, are the papers that the judge had signed, and why did her ex-husband have them? Is this referring to divorce papers, or some other papers that the ex-husband had acquired?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, does the line that &quot;He shot me once, but I shot him twice&quot; imply that this was also self-defense, or was the main character the instigator here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the main character really was acting in self-defense and/or defense of her like he claimed, why did he think that he would go to prison over the incident? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T17:27:30.620" Title="Why did the main character in &quot;Hand of Fate&quot; by the Rolling Stones believe that he was going to prison?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;rolling-stones&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5582" CreationDate="2018-02-02T20:36:20.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sense is that Blake is talking about ownership, and the idea that the natural rights of people to the land and its resources is restricted by the artificial laws of man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Charter&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(noun)&lt;/em&gt; formal written instrument bestowing privileges and rights, serving as legal evidence of them,&quot; c. 1200, from Old French chartre (12c.) &quot;charter, letter, document, covenant,&quot; from Latin chartula/cartula, literally &quot;little paper,&quot; diminutive of charta/carta &quot;paper, document&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/charter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a huge issue in the industrialization of England, where peasants were ejected from the land as herding replaced farming in many areas, and were forced into the cities to find work in restrictive, unnatural, and generally horrific, conditions.  &quot;Blackened walls&quot; is surely a reference to the soot of the London factories, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.libraries.wsu.edu/spring2015/2015/01/18/carbon-emissions-since-the-time-of-the-industrial-revolution/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;London itself was literally &quot;blackened&quot; in the industrial era&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also suspect that there is a wordplay on &quot;chart&quot;, in the sense that everything in the modern world is mapped, and that this rigid formalization restricts the sense of newness and wonder associated with discovery. Maps are, likewise, artificial representations, a means of definition and restriction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chart&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(verb)&lt;/em&gt; 1837, &quot;to enter onto a map or chart,&quot; from &lt;strong&gt;chart&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(noun)&lt;/em&gt; 1570s, &quot;map for the use of navigators,&quot; from Middle French charte &quot;card, map,&quot; from Late Latin charta &quot;paper, card, map&quot;. Charte is the original form of the French word in all senses, but after 14c. (perhaps by influence of Italian cognate carta), carte began to supplant it. English used both carte and card 15c.-17c. for &quot;chart, map,&quot; and in 17c. chart could mean &quot;playing card,&quot; but the words have gone their separate ways and chart has predominated since in the &quot;map&quot; sense.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;SOURCE: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/chart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all falls under the theme of the &quot;&lt;strong&gt;mind forged manacles&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, which is the key line in the poem, thematically and rhythmically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SEE ALSO: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Love_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Garden of Love&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Great question, btw.  The use of &quot;chartered&quot; in this poem is something I think about not infrequently. :)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-02-02T20:56:45.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-02T20:56:45.180" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5433" CreationDate="2018-02-03T17:43:08.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It doesn't look like anyone has noticed this Tumbleweed-eligible question, so I found the answer myself :-)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dervish's wealth is mostly from a family fortune which his brother didn't touch, but he also earned a little from the antiques trade.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I managed to dig out a copy of book 1, and found the relevant passage in chapter 4 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I dabble in antiques,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Rare books are my speciality - particularly books regarding the occult.&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You must be good at it, to afford a place like this,&amp;quot; I say, sliding away from the larger questions and issues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's a hobby,&amp;quot; he demurs, leading me down a long corridor full of framed portraits and photographs. &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The money's good, but I don't worry too much about it.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Then how do you pay for all this?&amp;quot; I ask nosily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dervish quickens his pace. I think he's avoiding the question, but then he stops at one of the older portraits and points at it. &amp;quot;Recognise him?&amp;quot; [...] &amp;quot;He was your great-great-great-grandfather. Bartholomew Garadex. That's our original family name, on our paternal side - it got shortened to Grady around your greatgrandfather's time.&amp;quot; [...] &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Bartholomew was a sublimely clever man. He started with nothing but had amassed a fortune by the time of his death. We're still living off of it - at least, I am. Cal preferred to make his own way in the world, and only dipped into the family coffers in emergencies.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How much is left?&amp;quot; I enquire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Quite a lot,&amp;quot; Dervish says vaguely. &amp;quot;Your great-great-grandfather - one of old Bart's boys -  wasted most of it. Then his son - the one who changed the family name - restored it. &lt;strong&gt;It's been fairly constant since, much of it tied up in bonds and properties which yield steady profits.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T17:43:08.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-03T18:35:06.543" Score="4" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, and I came across this line in Part First, VI:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...I must save money, and I will; and one of those colleges shall open its doors to me&amp;mdash;shall welcome whom now it would spurn, if I wait twenty years for the welcome.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I'll be D.D. before I have done!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? What is &quot;D.D.&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T19:18:05.523" Title="What does &quot;I'll be D.D. before I have done!&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5592" CreationDate="2018-02-03T18:54:41.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Doctor of Divinity.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is Jude ambitiously planning out his future life as an academic clergyman in Christminster (Oxford). From the same passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then he continued to dream, and thought he might become even a bishop by leading a pure, energetic, wise, Christian life. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&amp;quot;]Yes, Christminster shall be my Alma Mater; and I'll be her beloved son, in whom she shall be well pleased.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he succeeds in getting into Christminster to study theology, he might well aspire to become a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Divinity&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;D.D. or Doctor of Divinity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tragedy_of_Two_Ambitions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Tragedy of Two Ambitions&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hardy/thomas/lifes/chapter3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here&lt;/a&gt; which bears some resemblances to &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;  and &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2502&amp;amp;context=cq&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been described&lt;/a&gt; as a &amp;quot;short story prelude&amp;quot; to the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You’ll be a bishop, Joshua, before you have done!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Ah!’ said the other bitterly, shaking his head. ‘Perhaps I might have been — I might have been! But where is my D.D. or LL.D.; and how be a bishop without that kind of appendage? Archbishop Tillotson was the son of a Sowerby clothier, but he was sent to Clare College. To hail Oxford or Cambridge as alma mater is not for me — for us! My God! when I think of what we should have been — what fair promise has been blighted by that cursed, worthless —’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here again we see an ambitious youth referring to the D.D. and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legum_Doctor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LL.D&lt;/a&gt; in his hope to become a successful academic at Oxford or Cambridge (here referred to by name rather than as part of Hardy's fictionalised Wessex).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-03T19:18:05.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5602" CreationDate="2018-02-03T21:08:47.830" Score="5" ViewCount="622" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just been reading Thomas Hardy's &lt;em&gt;A Few Crusted Characters&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hardy/thomas/lifes/chapter8.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text available online&lt;/a&gt;), which is essentially a collection of short stories or vignettes loosely bound together by a framing story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of it all strongly reminds me of Chaucer's &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;: the framing story is about a group of people travelling together and referred to mostly by occuption (&quot;the curate&quot;, &quot;the parish clerk&quot;, &quot;the seedsman&quot;, etc.), and each traveller in turn tells a story to the rest about some local people. However, I haven't read enough to know whether this is a widespread 'genre' of storytelling in which &lt;em&gt;A Few Crusted Characters&lt;/em&gt; was just one of many, or if Hardy was taking inspiration directly from Chaucer's classic, or indeed if both Chaucer and Hardy were inspired by some yet older tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Hardy inspired directly by Chaucer, or what?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T17:02:59.277" Title="Was Hardy's &quot;A Few Crusted Characters&quot; based directly on the Canterbury Tales?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-04T00:05:40.570" Score="8" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me the authors on the Oscar Wilde restaurant in NYC?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DT1sG.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DT1sG.png&quot; alt=&quot;Facade of the 'Oscar Wilde restaurant' in NYC.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2997" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T09:51:24.230" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T09:51:24.230" Title="Who are the authors in this facade?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5597" CreationDate="2018-02-04T04:50:32.657" Score="7" ViewCount="1184" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chimney Sweeper&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; opens like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When my mother died I was very young,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And my father sold me while yet my tongue&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must admit that I'm very new to William Blake's material, so I hope I'm not missing something obvious, but I'm slightly baffled as to why this is a &quot;Song of Innocence&quot; rather than a &quot;Song of Experience.&quot; Or is the &lt;em&gt;loss&lt;/em&gt; of innocence the point of the poem? Is Blake being ironic in categorizing it as a Song of Innocence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T13:46:15.037" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T13:46:15.037" Title="Why is &quot;The Chimney Sweeper&quot; in Songs of Innocence rather than Songs of Experience?" Tags="&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5596" CreationDate="2018-02-04T05:19:29.997" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In some ways, you're right - it'd kinda fit in both. That said, chimney sweeps were mainly children, because, well, they were small enough to fit in the chimneys and not get stuck. They were also easily replaceable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I think this poem fits in &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; more than &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; because it's all about that loss of innocence. Children are supposed to be carefree and, well, &lt;em&gt;innocent&lt;/em&gt;. They're not supposed to know the dark underbellies of the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this poem however, he's contrasting this idea of childlike innocence, which is what we expect, with the idea of the needs of adults (clean chimneys) stripping that away for their own ends. Death is really their only way out (as we notice in Tom's dream: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And by came an angel who had a bright key,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he opened the coffins and set them all free;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's only by dying in these horrible conditions that they will get their childhood back - in a sense, they'll regain that innocence upon death. They'll get to be the free and playful children they couldn't be in life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the last line shows that even though they leave in a bleak, dark world that will effectively destroy their innocence, they still do keep it in a way. (At least Tom does):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though he's just dreamed of death being his only escape and his only real chance at innocence, he still retains some innocence about the ways of the world, as he believes that if he just does a good enough job of being a chimney sweep, he won't come to that deadly end. That's a somewhat innocent and naive way of thinking of the world, even though he's constantly living in a situation that should teach him the complete opposite is true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that said, I think this does fit more as a &lt;em&gt;Song of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;Song of Experience&lt;/em&gt; because even though in some ways these children should have no innocence left, they do, in that resilient child sort of way, push back and retain it, even though the world is trying really, really hard to disabuse them of the entire notion of innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T16:18:12.643" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T16:18:12.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5598" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5599" CreationDate="2018-02-04T18:10:34.397" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;When did the bacteriologist take the cab in the Wells short story &quot;The Stolen Bacillus&quot;? First he was running towards him, and then near the end we come to know that he is in a cab. Is it that him taking the cab isn't shown?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3002" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-04T18:18:40.363" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T18:33:32.693" Title="When did the bacteriologist take the cab in &quot;The Stolen Bacillus&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5598" CreationDate="2018-02-04T18:33:32.693" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, the bacteriologist must have got in a cab &amp;quot;offstage&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our first look at the scene in the street is from the point of view of Minnie, the bacteriologist's wife. Initially, the anarchist is in a cab, being pursued by the bacteriologist on foot, who in turn is pursued by Minnie in another cab:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window. Down the street a slender man was getting into a cab. The Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he did not wait for it. 'He has gone mad!' said Minnie; 'it's that horrid science of his'; and, opening the window, would have called after him. The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same idea of mental disorder. He pointed to the Bacteriologist, said something to the cabman, the apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished, the horse's feet clattered, and in a moment the cab, Bacteriologist hotly in pursuit, had receded up the vista of the roadway and disappeared round the corner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] She hastily put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his hat and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and hailed a cab that opportunely crawled by. 'Drive me up the road and round Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running about in a velveteen coat and no hat.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Velveteen coat, ma'am, and no 'at. Very good, ma'am.' And the cabman whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to this address every day in his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Some few minutes later&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, we see the scene from the point of view of a group of cabmen at Haverstock Hill. By this time, all three parties involved in the chase are in cabs: first the anarchist in a great hurry, then the bacteriologist in hot pursuit, then his wife with his hat and coat pursuing him in turn. &lt;strong&gt;Thus, it must have been some time in those &amp;quot;few minutes&amp;quot; offstage that the bacteriologist gets in a cab.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quote above taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/hg-wells/short-story/the-stolen-bacillus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the story's full text available online&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-04T18:33:32.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-05T06:05:29.780" Score="1" ViewCount="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Rachel Rising&lt;/em&gt; #38 the readers learn that Lilith once met a banker she had known some 60 years before that, and her acquantance with said banker helped save the factory she worked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why would she do that? Firstly, she hates Manson and wants to see it destroyed for good. Secondly, she seems to hate humanity in general, so helping anyone doesn't look like the sort of thing she'd do. And yet, she quite intentionally saved the factory from being closed, in a town she hates most. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T06:05:29.780" Title="Why did Lilith help the factory if she wanted Manson destroyed?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rachel-rising&gt;&lt;terry-moore&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5586" CreationDate="2018-02-05T10:03:14.517" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Highway 61 ran through Duluth in Minnesota, where Dylan was born. Growing up, he saw it as a route not only out of his home town but one that went to places that spoke to him, musically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I'd started on it, always had been on it and could go anywhere, even down in to the deep Delta country. It was the same road, full of the same contradictions, the same one-horse towns, the same spiritual ancestors ... It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the homes and birthplaces of various famous blues and folk artists, it becomes clear why the route had such a fascination for a young musician. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Muddy Waters and Bukka White lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where the road joins Route 49.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The crossroads with 49 is the site of a legend in which Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil for the secret of mastering the Blues.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarksdale was also the birthplace of John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Little Junior Parker and Willie Brown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;61 runs via Indianola where BB King and Albert King Scott were born.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on: Highway 61 is also of relevance in the lives of such luminaries as Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and Ike Turner. Bessie Smith, sometimes known as &quot;Empress of the Blues&quot; was killed in a car crash on the road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a lot of these artists predate Dylan by some years, and the musical fame of Highway '61 does as well. He was simply following a long tradition of writing songs about the road. It's sometimes known as the &quot;blues highway&quot; and has been the subject of numerous previous recordings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Highway 61 Blues by Big Joe Williams (1952)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Highway 61 by Sunnyland Slim (1956)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;61 Highway by Mississippi Fred McDowell (1964)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this list is hardly exhaustive - dozens have artists have recorded songs about the Highway and there well be many more that predate Dylan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to draw many direct relevancies between this information and the lyrics of the song, but there are some. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Georgia Sam&quot; is a pseudonym of another Blues musician from the environs of Highway 61, Blind Willie McTell. Dylan was a fan and wrote a 1983 song named after him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Roving Gambler is the name of a traditional Blues song which Dylan has himself covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that one of the themes of the song seems to be a critique of American capitalism. There are several places one could draw this allusion, but in particular verse three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I got forty red, white and blue shoestrings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a thousand telephones that don’t ring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do you know where I can get rid of these things?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Louie the King said &quot;Let me think for a minute son&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he said &quot;Yes, I think it can be easily done&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just take everything down to Highway 61&quot;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If correct, it is possible to interpret this verse (and the wider song) as a metaphor for the way the US economy thrives by hawking low-quality products to the poor, represented by Highway 61, the road to the deep south. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-02-05T13:29:46.190" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T13:29:46.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5594" CreationDate="2018-02-05T15:12:26.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Short of finding a definitive statement from Hardy, it is impossible to be sure. But it is very likely that &lt;em&gt;A Few Crusted Characters&lt;/em&gt; was influenced by &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have three lines of evidence. First, we know that Hardy was familiar with &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;. Here's JoAnna Stephens Mink, in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Iz8lDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA124&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Love, deception, and disguise in A Few Crusted Characters&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hardy's careful structure of &lt;em&gt;Crusted Characters&lt;/em&gt; has literary precursors, but he subverts the convention of Boccaccio's &lt;em&gt;Decameron&lt;/em&gt; and Chaucer's &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, with which his London readers would have been familiar. Several parallels suggest that Hardy had these literary masterpieces in mind when organizing Crusted Characters. In fact, only three years before writing the stories, he included &quot;Boccaccio / Canty Tales&quot; on the list of &quot;Books read or pieces looked at this year&quot; in his note for December 31, 1887.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the claim in the last sentence, Mink cites Florence Emily Hardy (1933), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.459346/2015.459346.The-Life-Of-Thomas-Hardy-1840-1928#page/n221/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Thomas Hardy: Compiled Largely from Contemporary Notes, Letters, Diaries, and Biographical Memoranda, as Well as from Oral Information in Conversations Extending Over Many Years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, contemporary reviewers took it for granted that the structure of &lt;em&gt;A Few Crusted Characters&lt;/em&gt; was inspired by Chaucer. For example, a reviewer in &lt;em&gt;The Literary Era&lt;/em&gt; (1894) wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what are we to say of the colloquial sketches, entitled &quot;A Few Crusted Characters,&quot; which form the latter portion of the book? Here on the van of &quot;Burthen, Carrier to Longpuddle,&quot; we meet a party of country folk, and everyone tells a story after the manner of the Canterbury tales&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; is one of the best-known works in English literature. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-canterbury-tales-by-geoffrey-chaucer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library&lt;/a&gt; notes that it was &quot;enormously popular in medieval England, with over 90 copies in existence from the 1500s&quot;. It has inspired many works over the centuries, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;sequels and interpolations, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plowman%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plowman's Tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prologue_and_Tale_of_Beryn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Beryn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (15th century);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;adaptations of the individual tales, such as Shakespeare &amp;amp; Fletcher's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Noble_Kinsmen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (c. 1613) and Dryden's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palamon_and_Arcite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Palamon and Arcite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1700), both based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knight&amp;#39;s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Knight's tale&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;works using a similar narrative structure, such as Longfellow's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_of_a_Wayside_Inn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tales of a Wayside Inn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1863).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrative framework in which a group of storytellers each tell their tale is not, of course, original to the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;. Chaucer himself was influenced by Boccaccio's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Decameron&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1353), and Boccaccio by John of Capua's &lt;em&gt;Directorium Vitae Humanae&lt;/em&gt;, a translation of Ibn al-Muqaffa's &lt;em&gt;Kalīlah wa Dimnah&lt;/em&gt;, itself ultimately a translation of the Sanskrit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchatantra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Panchatantra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Nonetheless, Chaucer remains the most well-known model for this kind of frame narrative in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T17:02:59.277" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T17:02:59.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5566" CreationDate="2018-02-05T16:27:01.440" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the answer will become clear if you re-read the passage (starting from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm#1-3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the chapter&lt;/a&gt; so that you have the full context) and carefully distinguish the points of view. When I do this, I interpret the passage as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jude's point of view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the tiles. He might not be able to come so far as this for many days. Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see Christminster might be forwarded. People said that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What people said to Jude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even though they sometimes did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jude's point of view again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had read in a tract that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it said in the tract that Jude read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;a man who had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found afterwards that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the other man claimed, according to the tract that Jude read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;      &lt;p&gt;the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jude's point of view again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the mist might rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the offensive phrase is attributed to &quot;another man&quot; by the writers of the tract that Jude read, and even in context it is an transparently absurd and post-hoc excuse for the failure of prayer. Accordingly it seems more likely that Hardy was satirizing the anti-Semitic tendency of writers of religious tracts, and the absurdity of their claims about the efficacy of prayer, than that he was expressing his own anti-Semitic views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The efficacy of prayer was a popular subject for tract writers. See for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JgA3AAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Remarkable escapes from peril&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published by the Religious Tract Society of Great Britain, which is full of incidents like this (page 117):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But mark the power of prayer. In the following winter, while he was still wearing mourning apparel for his son, a letter was delivered to Mr. Richmond, in the handwriting of the very son whom he sorrowed over as being &#xA;  dead, explaining that circumstances had prevented him from setting sail in the &lt;em&gt;Arniston&lt;/em&gt; on her return voyage. Thus miraculously was he alone, of all that large crew, preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-02-05T16:27:01.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5655" CreationDate="2018-02-05T23:53:52.533" Score="8" ViewCount="5806" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &quot;London&quot;, a short poem in William Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; collection (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;free to read online&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In every cry of every man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     In every infant’s cry of fear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In every voice, in every ban,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     The mind-forged manacles I hear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the &quot;mind-forged manacles&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think understanding this should be the key to appreciating the whole poem. The first verse is mostly scene-setting, and the last two are about specific examples of misery in London. The phrase &quot;mind-forged manacles&quot; seems to be the core of this poem. How are the metaphorical manacles forged by minds - and by whose minds? The people's themselves, or their oppressors'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T09:09:09.307" Title="What are the &quot;mind-forged manacles&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T04:57:42.807" Score="6" ViewCount="2151" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am aware that Tolstoy wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/editions/19119920-stories-for-children&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stories specifically for children&lt;/a&gt;. However, I would also like to know which of his other stories of his vast &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bibliography&lt;/a&gt; are suitable (i. e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_appropriateness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;age appropriate&lt;/a&gt;) for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I know that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.compassbookratings.com/reviews/index.php/review/view/7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compass Book Ratings&lt;/a&gt; recommends Anna Karenina for people above the age of 18 due to profanity, violence and sex occurring in the book. But they do not have content ratings for any of his other stories. Other examples of content ratings for books include &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.commonsensemedia.org/about-us/our-mission/about-our-ratings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Sense Media&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://mybookcave.com/mybookratings/why-rated-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My Book Ratings&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fictionratings.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fiction Ratings&lt;/a&gt; – none of which provide content ratings for any stories by Tolstoy however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3006" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:21:08.813" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:21:08.813" Title="Which of Leo Tolstoy's stories are appropriate for children?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5517" CreationDate="2018-02-06T11:03:22.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Specifically ‘med’ represents (West) Berkshire dialect. Desmond Hawkins (1989), &lt;em&gt;Hardy at Home: The People and Place of His Wessex&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As [Hardy’s] practice developed he tended to simplify and standardize the conventions he needed to convey the forms of rustic speech. To suggest the distinctive sound of a Devonshire voice he concentrated on a single feature, the richly fluted ‘u’ vowel, which he rendered as ‘tew’ for ‘to’, ‘dew’ for ‘do’ etc., in ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2996/2996-h/2996-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; he took the word ‘might’ in its Wessex forms of ‘mid’ and ‘med’ as the single definitive indicator of Berkshire speech: “Well ye med ask it,” says Jude’s great-aunt Drusilla.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; Drusilla Fawley lives in the fictional Marygreen in Wessex, which represents the real &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawley,_Berkshire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fawley in Berkshire&lt;/a&gt;, birthplace of Hardy’s grandmother, Mary Head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T11:03:22.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5568" CreationDate="2018-02-06T13:15:57.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this answer, I'm going to address only the speculation from the last paragraph of the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, the limited third-person point of view a recent innovation, and unheard-of 100 years ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is far from the case: in fact, by the early 20th century the limited third-person point of view was well along the road to taking over English fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this answer, I'm going to summarize the development of the limited third-person point of view, based on the account in Wayne Booth's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_C._Booth#The_Rhetoric_of_Fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rhetoric of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1961), which I commend to you. In what follows, if I don't give a citation for a point you can assume that I got it from Booth. Necessarily this is going to have to skip over a mass of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Austen&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A point Booth makes is that there isn't a sharp distinction betweeen &amp;quot;omniscient&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;limited&amp;quot; modes of third-person narration, but rather, there is a continuum in the degree of omniscience of the narrator. Early third-person novels, such as Henry Fielding's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_C._Booth#The_Rhetoric_of_Fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1749), freely used the narrative voice to jump between scenes and characters, and to discurse and soliloquize directly to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But already by Jane Austen's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/158/158-h/158-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1813) there is a more sparing use of the narrative voice. The narrative begins in omniscient mode, passing moral judgment on the characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and showing the viewpoints of different characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The happiness of Miss Smith was quite equal to [Emma's] intentions. Miss Woodhouse was so great a personage in Highbury, that the prospect of the introduction had given as much panic as pleasure; but the humble, grateful little girl went off with highly gratified feelings, delighted with the affability with which Miss Woodhouse had treated her all the evening, and actually shaken hands with her at last!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, nearly all the scenes are ones where Emma is present and a witness or participant in the events and dialogue, and gradually the narrative settles on Emma's point of view almost exclusively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it came to such a pitch as this, she was not able to refrain from a start, or a heavy sigh, or even from walking about the room for a few seconds—and the only source whence any thing like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Booth points out that this narrative strategy has a particular rhetorical effect. In &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; there is a delicate balancing act between impartial judgment of Emma's faults and sympathy for her predicament. The omniscience of the opening helps establish the former and the gradual adoption of Emma's point of view the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ford&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the early 20th century, this flexible use of the omniscient narrator came to be criticised as an unrealistic approach that interfered with the reader's suspension of disbelief. Ford Madox Ford presents this criticism in &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks12/1203251h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Novel: from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1930). First, the omniscient narrator draws the fictionality to the reader's attention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The struggle—the aspiration—of the novelist down the ages has been to evolve a water-tight convention for the framework of the novel. He aspires—and for centuries has aspired—so to construct his stories and so to manage their surfaces that the carried-away and rapt reader shall really think himself to be in Brussels on the first of Waterloo days or in Grand Central Station waiting for the Knickerbocker Express to come in from Boston though actually he may be sitting in a cane lounge on a beach of Bermuda in December. This is not easy. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Samuel] Richardson, going a good deal further, has left it on record that he was actually bothered by the problem of the novelistic convention and that he racked his brain a long time before arriving at the one he finally adopted [i.e., the epistolary novel]. He asked himself, that is to say, how the reader was to be convinced that the author—and by analogy still more his characters—how could they know all the details that go to making up a book? If, to reduce the matter to its most elementary form, Sir Charles Grandison is walking in the Yew Walk, how can he know what characters are present and what conversations are being carried on in the Cedar Parlour, and since, to satisfy the reader, the author is to be supposed to be cognizant of all that passes in his novel, how is he to know simultaneously what is happening in both places?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the moral judgments of the omniscient narrator prevent readers from making their own judgments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate, with or after Stendhal, it became evident that, if the novel was to have what is called &lt;em&gt;vraisemblance&lt;/em&gt; [verisimilitude], if it was so to render life as to engross its reader, the novelist must not take sides either with the virtuous whose virtues cause them to prosper or with the vicious whose very virtues drive them always nearer and nearer to the gallows or the pauper's grave. […] So that it is not so much the function of the novelist to hold the balance straight as, dispensing with all scales or instruments for measuring, to show all the human beings of his creation going about their avocations. He has, that is to say, to render and not to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;James&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry James adopted a particular solution to these problems, the &amp;quot;lucid reflector&amp;quot; (the phrase comes from his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/notesonnovelists00jameiala#page/406/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes on Novelists&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1914). In the preface to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/432/432-h/432-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ambassadors&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1903) he described his solution to the problems of realism and objectivity (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… every question of form and pressure, I easily remember, paled in the light of the major propriety, recognised as soon as really weighed; that of &lt;strong&gt;employing but one centre and keeping it all within my hero's compass&lt;/strong&gt;. The thing was to be so much this worthy's intimate adventure that even the projection of his consciousness upon it from beginning to end without intermission or deviation would probably still leave a part of its value for him, and a fortiori for ourselves, unexpressed. I might, however, express every grain of it that there would be room for—on condition of contriving a splendid particular economy. Other persons in no small number were to people the scene, and each with his or her axe to grind, his or her situation to treat, his or her coherency not to fail of, his or her relation to my leading motive, in a word, to establish and carry on. But Strether's sense of these things, and Strether's only, should avail me for showing them; I should know them but through his more or less groping knowledge of them, since his very gropings would figure among his most interesting motions, and a full observance of the rich rigour I speak of would give me more of the effect I should be most &amp;quot;after&amp;quot; than all other possible observances together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To précis this characteristically Jamesian paragraph, he decided to introduce a character (Strether) who was an observer of the main action of the story, and ensured that the narrative consisted only of Strether's observations and reflections on them. (Booth notes that this decision had a warping effect on the novel. We know from James's notes that he intended the subject of &lt;em&gt;The Ambassadors&lt;/em&gt; to be the romance of Chad Newsome and Marie de Vionnet. But by introducing Strether as the &amp;quot;reflector&amp;quot; and limiting the narration to Strether's point of view, the main subject changed to that of Strether's intermediation between the other characters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The victory of limited narration was essentially complete by the mid-20th century. Ford's &amp;quot;to render and not to tell&amp;quot; became the modern writing-class orthodoxy &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Show,_don%27t_tell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;show, don't tell&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. But Booth points out that this limits the kinds of stories that writer can tell. In particular, without a reliable omniscient narrator to guide them, the reader might fail to understand the writer's intentions, for example the subtle balance between judgment and sympathy in &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; might be missed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T13:15:57.640" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5609" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T15:57:02.383" Score="1" ViewCount="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the readers learn the true version of the event from James, he says Rachel was but a child (15? 12?) during those events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Rachel is very old. Her &quot;reboot&quot; mechanism has her come back to life with an amnesia (almost) every time she dies. Does it also make her come back in a younger body? How else can it be explained that Rachel (presumably having lived initially to the same visible age as Lilith) was a child during the witch hunt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T15:57:02.383" Title="How old exactly was Rachel during the witch hunt in Manson?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rachel-rising&gt;&lt;terry-moore&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2329" CreationDate="2018-02-06T16:14:06.580" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The opening chapters of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; make it clear that the &quot;Admiral Benbow&quot; must be within a few miles of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynmouth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lynmouth&lt;/a&gt; in Devon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stevenson/robert_louis/s848aw/part5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detailed account&lt;/a&gt; of the writing of &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;. Although this does not mention the &quot;Admiral Benbow&quot; or its location, it does include the passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;… how troublesome the moon is! I have come to grief over the moon in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/372&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Otto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,* and so soon as that was pointed out to me, adopted a precaution which I recommend to other men—I never write now without an almanack. With an almanack, and the map of the country, and the plan of every house, either actually plotted on paper or already and immediately apprehended in the mind, a man may hope to avoid some of the grossest possible blunders. With the map before him, he will scarce allow the sun to set in the east, as it does in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7005/7005-h/7005-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Antiquary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. With the almanack at hand, he will scarce allow two horsemen, journeying on the most urgent affair, to employ six days, from three of the Monday morning till late in the Saturday night, upon a journey of, say, ninety or a hundred miles, and before the week is out, and still on the same nags, to cover fifty in one day, as may be read at length in the inimitable novel of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rob Roy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;Prince Otto&lt;/em&gt; (1885) postdates &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; (1883), nonetheless the passage shows that (unlike Sir Walter Scott) Stevenson cared about geographic accuracy and detail, and so he may have had in mind a specific location for the &quot;Admiral Benbow&quot;, and we might be able to deduce it if we pay close attention to the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Admiral Benbow&quot; is somewhere on the coast of England where the topography consists of small coves backed with cliffs. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm#Page_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When it [the rum] was brought to him [Billy Bones], he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste, and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. &quot;This is a handy cove,&quot; says he, at length; &quot;and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm#Page_26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the winter, sunlight can be seen reflecting from the sea before it shines into the cove, hence the cove faces west, north-west, or north. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm#Page_11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was one January morning, very early—a pinching, frosty morning—the cove all gray with hoar-frost, the ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low, and only touching the hill-tops and shining far to seaward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A coast road to Bristol passes the inn. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm#Page_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a seaman put up at the &quot;Admiral Benbow&quot; (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bristol)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To reach Bristol requires an overnight journey by stage-coach. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27780/27780-h/27780-h.htm#Page_53&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Next moment we had turned the corner, and my home was out of sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mail picked us up about dusk at the &quot;Royal George&quot; on the heath. I was wedged in between Redruth and a stout old gentleman, and in spite of the swift motion and the cold night air, I must have dozed a great deal from the very first, and then slept like a log up hill and down dale, through stage after stage; for when I was awakened at last, it was by a punch in the ribs, and I opened my eyes to find that we were standing still before a large building in a city street, and that the day had already broken a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Where are we?&quot; I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Bristol,&quot; said Tom. &quot;Get down.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How long would this journey have been? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecoach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The stagecoach traveled at an average speed of about five miles per hour, with the total daily mileage covered being around 60 or 70 miles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look at a map of southwest England shows that the only places meeting all the requirements are in north Devon. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynmouth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lynmouth&lt;/a&gt; fits the bill perfectly: it has a north-facing cove, cliffs, a coast road, and it's 75 miles from Bristol. Too far east of Lynmouth and you lose the cliffs; too far west and you lose the coast road and can't reach Bristol overnight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Stephen Brooks agrees with my analysis in &lt;em&gt;English Spring&lt;/em&gt; (1930):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Countisbury Headland juts into the Channel just up the coast from Lynmouth. Its huge curve might be the back of some great creature escaped from chaos. It is a long climb and it is steep. The road is cut against the headlands and has an unobstructed view. Lundy's Isle, far out at sea, marks the entrance of the Channel. A northern smudge of land is Wales. There is smoke of frequent ships. If one follows the Countisbury Hill a few miles farther towards Porlock and peers down into each hollow of the rocky shore many hundred feet below, he will presently see the very scar and beach where Stevenson placed the Admiral Benbow Inn of his &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;—the very path on which Blind Pew came tapping in the night. It is a chapter so exciting that one shudders even in daylight on the safe road above. Few books have had their origins so carefully recorded as has &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;. We know that its genesis was a wholly fictitious map that Stevenson once drew. We are informed of the story's progress from day to day until at last the sheets went off to London to be printed. But Stevenson never gave a precise location to the Admiral Benbow Inn, nor told where he got the couplet of verses that was bellowed so often by old Bill Bones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* If you're wonder how Stevenson came to grief over the moon in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/372&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Otto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, here's the passage from chapter 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thence he proceeded alone to where, in a round clearing, a copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambologna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gian Bologna&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.pinimg.com/originals/21/a9/d7/21a9d72e4c0117ebbae3dd90efda4ded.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mercury&lt;/a&gt; stood tiptoe in the twilight of the stars. The night was warm and windless. &lt;strong&gt;A shaving of new moon had lately arisen&lt;/strong&gt;; but it was still too small and too low down in heaven to contend with the immense host of lesser luminaries; and the rough face of the earth was drenched with starlight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the evening twilight, a new moon should be &lt;em&gt;setting&lt;/em&gt;, not rising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T10:59:18.587" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T10:59:18.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2196" CreationDate="2018-02-06T17:54:18.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Christopher Priest's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/30/jack-vance-dies-96-science-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obituary for Vance&lt;/a&gt; (2013) in &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Early in the 1980s Vance was diagnosed with glaucoma, but an attempted operation went wrong and afterwards he was declared legally blind. He continued to write with Norma's assistance, and later with the aid of special computer display software …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The loss of his sight must have made it difficult for Vance to consult the text of &lt;em&gt;Suldrun's Garden&lt;/em&gt; (1983) when composing &lt;em&gt;The Green Pearl&lt;/em&gt; (1985) and &lt;em&gt;Madouc&lt;/em&gt; (1989), and it seems likely that the slips are a consequence of Vance having to rely on his fallible memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll see from the extracts that you quoted that it's not just the &quot;Knight of the Empty Helmet&quot; who fails to appear in the later books. &quot;Shan Farway&quot; too is absent; the fish that swallowed the green pearl changes from a &quot;turbot&quot; to a &quot;flounder&quot;; the person who &quot;proudly wears the pearl ... and is impelled to curious excesses of conduct&quot; is Red Flary (a man, not a woman). And there are many other minor inconsistencies, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How many people did the witch Desmei make in her vats? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Three. &lt;em&gt;GP&lt;/em&gt;: Two.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How long has Valdez been spying for Casmir? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Since before Aillas became king. &lt;em&gt;GP&lt;/em&gt;: He can only have been doing so since Aillas became king, since Valdez is Yane, who was enslaved in Castle Sank until he escaped with Aillas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What was the origin of the placename ‘Twitten’s Corner’, where stands an iron post? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Twitten himself was compressed into a post and placed there by the magician Murgen. &lt;em&gt;GP&lt;/em&gt;: The post was placed there by Twitten.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who made the prophecy about Suldrun’s son? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Desmei. &lt;em&gt;GP&lt;/em&gt;: Persilian.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who appointed the devils Vus and Vuwas to guard Swer Smod? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Murgen’s enemies. &lt;em&gt;M&lt;/em&gt;: Murgen.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of the mad king of Pomperol? &lt;em&gt;SG&lt;/em&gt;: Deuel. &lt;em&gt;GP&lt;/em&gt;: Deul.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I find the inconsistencies are one of the charming aspects of the series.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T17:54:18.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5027" CreationDate="2018-02-06T19:56:17.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It’s a model of the ‘superimposed worlds’ that indicates when it is possible to open a magic portal to the demon world ‘Xabiste’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Magic portals to other worlds&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is established in the &lt;em&gt;Lyonesse&lt;/em&gt; series that magicians can access other worlds or dimensions through magic portals. In &lt;em&gt;Suldrun’s Garden&lt;/em&gt; Melancthe persuades Shimrod to visit ‘Irerly’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In the forest nearby a door opens into the otherwhere Irerly. One of us must go through this door and bring back thirteen gems of different colours, while the other guards the access.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That would seem to be dangerous work. At least for whomever enters Irerly.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] Melancthe went to the door. She pulled at a heavy iron latch, drew it ajar, to display a wall of blank rock. […] From her cape Melancthe brought a curious hexagonal pattern, which she touched to the centre of the stone, where it clung. After a moment the stone dissolved to become luminous mist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of Irerly is otherworldly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Irerly conditions were less easy than Shimrod had hoped. The sheath of sandestin-stuff lacked consistency and allowed sound and two other Irerlish sentiments, &lt;em&gt;toice&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;gliry&lt;/em&gt;, to chafe against his flesh. […] Shimrod experienced a startling set of dislocations: a sound that reached him as a jet of ill-smelling liquid; other scents were red cones and yellow triangles […] Vision expressed itself as taut lines striking across space, dripping fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, in &lt;em&gt;The Green Pearl&lt;/em&gt;, Visbhume tricks Glyneth into stepping through a door into ‘Tanjecterly’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She stepped from the hut, but where was the forest? She looked out on a strange landscape; where could she be? Two suns hung at the zenith of a heathergrey sky, lazily circling each other: one green, the other lemon-yellow. Short blue grass grew along a hillside sloping down to a slow gentle river, which flowed from right to left and out on a wide flat plain. Where the river met the horizon an object like a black moon hung in the sky, and the very look of the object caused Glyneth a spasm of unreasonable fear, even horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the ‘Pantological Index’, Tanjecterly is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one of a set, or cycle, of ten superimposed worlds, which includes our own. Interconnections are difficult to find and evanescent in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirming this description, Visbhume says that the portals between worlds can only be opened according to a complex schedule:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“At a certain pulse, time is static both here and on Earth, and the gate can be opened at one node or another. See the black moon which moves around the northern sky? It strikes a radius with a central pole and somewhere along the radius a node can be opened, if pulses are in synchrony. It is a matter of exacting calculation, since time moves at different rates here and on Earth. Sometimes here time goes fast and on Earth slow, and sometimes the opposite. Only when time runs at the same rate, as determined by the pulses, can the gates be opened.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The device&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murgen assigns Shimrod the task of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the analysis and classification of material confiscated from the wizard Tamurello […] Many [artifacts] showed no obvious utility, and Shimrod frequently puzzled as to their purpose or, conversely, their lack of purpose. For a month he had been studying such a contrivance: an assembly of seven disks of transparent material, rolling around the periphery of a circular tablet of black onyx. The disks swam with soft colours, and showed pulsing black spots of emptiness, forming and dying apparently at random. Shimrod could conceive no practical purpose for the device. A clock? A toy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A device with multiple revolving disks suggests an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;orrery&lt;/a&gt; (a mechanical model of the solar system which can be used to predict the motions of the planets). Could this be something analogous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shimrod found the disks a source of perplexity. They moved independently of each other, or so it seemed, so that in their circuit of the tablet, one might pass another, and in turn be overtaken by still a third. At times two disks rolled in tandem, so that one was superimposed upon the other, as if an attraction held them together for a few instants. Then they would break apart and each would once more roll its own course. At rare intervals, even a third disk might arrive while two disks rolled together, and for a space the third disk also would linger, for a period perceptibly longer than if just two disks were together. Shimrod once or twice had observed what would seem to be a very rare chance, when four disks chanced to roll together around the tablet, and then they clung together for perhaps twenty seconds before parting company. […] Was [it] a toy, or a complex curio, or &lt;strong&gt;an analog representing some larger process&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis.) At the climax of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a fact, five of the disks had joined to roll as one around the periphery of the tablet. Further, the disks showed no disposition to separate. And what was this? A sixth disk came rolling to overtake the five, and as Shimrod watched, it edged close, shuddered, merged into place with the others. Shimrod watched in fascination, certain that he was witnessing an important event or, more likely, the representation of such an event. And now the seventh and last disk came to join the others, and the seven rolled as one. The single disk changed in colour, to become marbled maroon and purple-black; it rolled lethargically, and showed no disposition to break apart. At the centre a black spot grew dense and large. Shimrod bent to look through the hole; he saw what appeared to be a landscape of black objects outlined in golden fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Xabiste&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Madouc&lt;/em&gt; we start to encounter references to ‘Xabiste’, which seems to be one of these other worlds. Early in the book, Murgen says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Desmei in her creation of Melancthe and Carfilhiot used a demon magic derived from Xabiste. The green gas may itself be Desmei, in a form imposed upon her by the condition of Xabiste.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the climax of the story, the conjunction of the disks coincidences with the capture of Murgen by otherworldly arms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murgen sat stiff and still in his chair, gripped by six long thin arms, putty-gray in color, sparsely overgrown with coarse black hairs. The arms terminated in enormous hands, two of which gripped Murgen’s ankles; two more pinioned his wrists; the final two covered his face, leaving only his two gray eyes visible. The arms extended from a slit or a notch opening into another space directly behind Murgen’s chair. The aperture admitted, along with the arms, a faint suffusion of green light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which have emerged from ‘Xabiste’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shimrod turned back to the table. The way into Xabiste was closing; to Shimrod's horror the arms, rather than disengaging, were drawing Murgen, chair and all, back through the slit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T19:56:17.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5628" CreationDate="2018-02-06T20:40:37.737" Score="3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a childrens book published in the early 1980s which was about a pair of islands. On one island the people were rich and valued money above all else and on the other island the people were not.&#xA;The island with the rich people began to sink beneath the ocean as a result.&#xA;The cover had a beautiful illustration of the two islands with a third sunken island clearly visible in the illustration presumably indicating that it had happened before.&#xA;My memory is of a hardback book perhaps 3mm thick and about 1ft square in size.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3010" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T17:05:05.870" Title="Childrens book about an island that sinks beneath the ocean" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-06T21:00:07.883" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have for some reason always imagined him as very tall and strong, but in a discussion today learned that I somehow seem to be the only one.&#xA;Are there any mentions of the body features of Dr Watson in the books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3011" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T21:00:07.883" Title="How tall was Dr John Watson from Sherlock Holmes by Doyle" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5621" CreationDate="2018-02-06T22:08:32.600" Score="7" ViewCount="251" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis' narrator states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However far I went I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains, and bookshops of the sort that sell The Works of Aristotle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming he means the bookstores were basic and catered to the needs of schoolchildren.  Are there any other thoughts on what sort of bookshops sell The Works of Aristotle?  To what purpose might Lewis refer to Aristotle at this point in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3009" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T17:22:50.510" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T22:50:52.473" Title="What sort of bookshops sell The Works of Aristotle?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-great-divorce&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2436" CreationDate="2018-02-06T23:32:28.413" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is generally believed that Shakespeare based &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Holinshed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael Holinshed&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Volume 5 (1587). This is not just because Shakespeare's version of the story closely follows Holinshed's, but because Shakespeare consistently uses Holinshed's phrases and repeats his mistakes. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cr4_AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA268&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holinshed describes&lt;/a&gt; the encounter with the three witches thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It fortuned as Macbeth and Banquo journeyed towards Forres, where the king then lay, they went sporting by the way together without other company, save only themselves, passing thorough the woods and fields, when suddenly in the midst of a land, there met them three women in strange and wild apparel, resembling creatures of elder world, whom when they attentively beheld, wondering much at the sight, the first of them spake and said, &quot;All hail Macbeth, thane of Glamis&quot; (for he had lately entered into that dignity and office by the death of his father Sinel). The second of them said, &quot;Hail Macbeth thane of Cawder.&quot; But the third said, &quot;All hail Macbeth that hereafter shalt be king of Scotland.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've modernized the spelling in this and other extracts from Holinshed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; not only has essentially the same dialogue as this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FIRST WITCH&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SECOND WITCH&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THIRD WITCH&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but also repeats the mistake about Macbeth's father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MACBETH&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stay, you imperfect speakers, tell me more:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By Sinel's death I know I am thane of Glamis;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth's father was actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Findl%C3%A1ech_of_Moray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Findláech mac Ruaidrí&lt;/a&gt; (Finlay of Moray).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cr4_AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA274&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holinshed describes&lt;/a&gt; the prophecy and the Macbeth's death as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And surely hereupon had he put Macduff to death, but that a certain witch, whom he had in great trust, had told that he should never be slain with man born of any woman, nor vanquished till the wood of Birnam came to the castle of Dunsinane. By this prophesy Macbeth put all fear out of his heart, supposing he might do what he would, without any fear to be punished for the same, for by the one prophesy he believed it was impossible for any man to vanquish him, and by the other impossible to slay him. This vain hope caused him to do many outrageous things, to the grievous oppression of his subjects. At length Macduff, to avoid peril of life, purposed with himself to pass into England, to procure Malcolm Canmore to claim the crown of Scotland. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But after that Macbeth perceived his enemies' power to increase, by such aid as came to them forth of England with his adversary Malcolm, he recoiled back into Fife, there purposing to abide in camp fortified, at the castle of Dunsinane, and to fight with his enemies, if they meant to pursue him; howbeit some of his friends advised him, that it should be best for him, either to make some agreement with Malcolm, or else to flee with all speed into the Isles, and to take his treasure with him, to the end he might wage sundry great princes of the realm to take his part, &amp;amp; retain strangers, in whom he might better trust than in his own subjects, which stole daily from him: but he had such confidence in his prophesies, that he believed he should never be vanquished, till Birnam wood were brought to Dunsinane; nor yet to be slain with any man, that should be or was born of any woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Malcolm following hastily after Macbeth, came the night before the battle unto Birnam wood, and when his army had rested a while there to refresh them, he commanded every man to get a bough of some tree or other of that wood in his hand, as big as he might bear, and to march forth therewith in such wise, that on the next morrow they might come closely and without sight in this manner within view of his enemies. On the morrow when Macbeth beheld them coming in this sort, he first marvelled what the matter meant, but in the end remembered himself that the prophesy which he had heard long before that time, of the coming of Birnam wood to Dunsinane castle, was likely to be now fulfilled. Nevertheless, he brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly, howbeit his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when Macbeth perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight, whom Macduff pursued with great hatred even till he came unto Lumphanan, where Macbeth perceiving that Macduff was hard at his back, leapt beside his horse, saying, &quot;Thou traitor, what meaneth it that thou shouldst thus in vain follow me that am not appointed to be slain by any creature that is born of a woman, come on therefore, and receive thy reward which thou hast deserved for thy pains,&quot; and therewithall he lifted up his sword thinking to have slain him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Macduff quickly avoiding from his horse, yet he came at him, answered (with his naked sword in his hand) saying: &quot;It is true Macbeth, and now shall thine insatiable cruelty have an end, for I am even he that thy wizards have told thee of, who was never born of my mother, but ripped out of her womb:&quot; therewithall he stepped unto him, and slew him in the place. Then cutting his head from his shoulders, he set it upon a pole, and brought it unto Malcolm. This was the end of Macbeth, after he had reigned 17 years over the Scottishmen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given how closely this corresponds to Shakespeare's version of the story, this seems to put paid to the hypothesis that Shakespeare got it from Magnus. Nonetheless, we might ask the question about Holinshed. Did Holinshed get the story from Magnus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holinshed's source is thought to have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Boece&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hector Boece&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/boece/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historia Gentis Scotorum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1527). The coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane is described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/boece/12eng.html#25&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;XII.25–6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] mox ad novum castellum Dounsinnam castra ponit, certum animo atque constitutum habens hostes illic opperiri, nam turpe ducebat, nullo experto certamine, regno exire. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is, in Dana F. Sutton's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon he [Macbeth] encamped at Dunsany, having made up his mind to await his enemy there. For he thought it would be a disgrace to quit the throne without having fought a battle. But some of his friends urged him either to make peace with Malcolm on acceptable conditions, or to take the royal treasury and beat a retreat to the Hebrides, where he could hire mercenaries more reliable than the men who were draining away from him every day. But the Fates hurried the man onwards, for he was convinced that he was unconquerable until Birnam Wood had been brought there, so that death was not threatening him, since the soothsayers had predicted that he was not going to be killed by a man born of woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Malcolm followed Macbeth as quickly as he could, and on the day before he gained his victory he and his army halted next to Birnam Wood. When they had rested a while and attended to their bodily needs, he ordered them all to go into the forest, and for each man to cut of as large a branch as he could carry. Then he began his march during the first watch of the night. Crossing the Tay, at dawn they came in sight of their enemies, holding up their branches. When Macbeth saw this, he was frightened by the strange sight, thinking this was an ill omen for himself and his destiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You'll see that this is essentially identical to Holinshed's version, and again, this rules out the hypothesis that Holinshed got the story from Magnus. The first edition of Boece's &lt;em&gt;Historia Gentis Scotorum&lt;/em&gt; (1527) precedes Magnus's &lt;em&gt;Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus&lt;/em&gt; (1555), so the former can't be derived from the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boece gives his source for the early history of Scotland as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Richard] Vairement [fl. 1260s], a Spaniard who became Archdeacon of St. Andrews, [who] chronicled the events of our nation from its inception down to the reign of Malcolm III Canmore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately Vairement's chronicle has been lost, so we can't trace the story any further. But it is certainly possible that the Scottish and Danish versions of the legend ultimately derive from a common source. In Vairement's day the Western Isles were still (at least nominally) ruled by Norway and it would not be surprising if legends were transmitted from Scotland to Scandinavia or vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-06T23:40:12.140" LastActivityDate="2018-02-06T23:40:12.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-07T03:28:58.567" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Winston is being held prisoner, O'Brien walks in the room for the first time and the conversation goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Winston:&lt;/strong&gt; They got you too!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O'Brien:&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, they got me a long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that O'Brien, like Winston, was once a rebel, but was caught and converted? If so, how come O'Brien hasn't been shot already? We learn in the book that even if people are reformed, they still get killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3012" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T04:30:10.567" Title="1984 - What does O'Brien mean by this sentence?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-02-07T15:21:44.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2018-02-07T04:30:10.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that it is unclear. (SparkNotes &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/character/obrien/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;concurs&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My feeling is that O'Brien's statement is honest (and not a calculated lie) because of the followup:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘They got me a long time ago,’ said O’Brien with a mild, almost&#xA;  regretful irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O'Brien is clearly a talented actor, but that &quot;mild, almost regretful irony&quot; &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; genuine to me. (I'm not sure how to describe it any better than that; I do realize that this is a pretty flimsy proof.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &quot;how come O'Brien hasn't been shot already?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because. We don't know all that much about how the Party makes decisions; maybe they thought that O'Brien was more useful to them alive than dead. We do see that they kill Winston, even after he breaks -- perhaps they had no use for Winston, but O'Brien was more useful to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, no one knows. (This may be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/1984/character/obrien/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the point of O'Brien&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="481" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T04:30:10.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5615" CreationDate="2018-02-07T12:10:13.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He might mean boring bookstores rather than ones which sold &quot;modern,&quot; more interesting fiction/adventure/romance etc. stories. The other images are of abandoned and broken buildings and businesses &amp;mdash; places without hope, where no one wants to be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that &lt;em&gt;The Great Divorce&lt;/em&gt; is a Christian book, explicitly about various people giving up their earthly obsessions so they can accept God/Heaven as the true thing they should focus their attentions on (or not, and never reaching Heaven). This Springsteen kind of street is a place where the shopkeepers keep clinging to their dreams no matter how obviously they have failed, and Lewis is implying that if they would just let go of these mortal concerns, they would be welcome in Heaven. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T12:10:13.350" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5624" CreationDate="2018-02-07T12:29:47.963" Score="4" ViewCount="11542" Body="&lt;p&gt;While O'Brian is torturing Winston, he reveals that Julia betrayed Winston almost immediately. Does this mean that she never reached room 101? If she did reach it, do we have any hints as to what her worst fear might have been? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3012" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T00:40:11.197" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T02:16:55.527" Title="In 1984, did Julia ever reach room 101? If so, what was her worst fear?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5615" CreationDate="2018-02-07T16:14:11.703" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we can reasonably infer that the work Lewis is referring to is &lt;em&gt;The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher&lt;/em&gt;, which, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_Masterpiece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;per Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, is a sex manual and book of midwifery, falsely claiming to be the work of Aristotle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a work of pretentious smut. Just the sort of thing that Lewis liked to rail against.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the answer is: Smutty bookshops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user406" LastEditorDisplayName="user406" LastEditDate="2018-02-07T22:50:52.473" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T22:50:52.473" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5587" CreationDate="2018-02-07T20:03:30.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I read Dylan correctly, he, a contrarian if ever there was one, is actually arguing that his songs are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; &quot;literature&quot; as the term is commonly understood.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this also implies his award is a mistake.  Not many people would deliver a Nobel Prize lecture suggesting that their award was an error, but again, this is Bob Dylan we're talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once we let go of the assumption that he clearly must be defending his suitability for the award, the piece reads much more naturally as a defense &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; his songs being primarily considered as literature (rather than as living works that must be performed to truly be appreciated). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T20:03:30.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5620" CreationDate="2018-02-07T23:05:05.217" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A similar question was raised in the scifi stack exchange. The answer pretty much covers what you ask. &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/108383/what-did-julia-do-to-winston-in-1984&quot;&gt;Julia's fate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell never says what they confronted Julia with in room 101. In the end, it doesn't matter; all that matters is that room 101 contains a person's ultimate breaking point, their absolute worst fear culled from a lifetime of data. The specifics are irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Part III, Ch. 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable–something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The government did to Julia exactly the same thing they did to Winston - force them to betray each other by showing each of them their own, personal nightmare, the one thing that the mere threat alone is enough to break their will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell never says that Julia had been given a lobotomy (trans-orbital pre-frontal lobotomies don't leave much of an external scar). She seems to be lucid when she says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Part III, Ch. 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something–something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's open to interpretation, but my own feeling is that the scar is simply left over from the &quot;mundane&quot; torture inflicted before room 101. She does appear to be in worse health than Winston, but I think Julia was much more &quot;alive&quot; than Winston ever was, so she had much farther to fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What happens to you here is for ever.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2667" LastActivityDate="2018-02-07T23:05:05.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5620" CreationDate="2018-02-08T00:39:54.457" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Did Julia really betray Winston almost immediately?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that what you call a revelation was, more likely, nothing more than a torturer's ploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What have you done with Julia?’ said Winston.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O’Brien smiled again. ‘She betrayed you, Winston. Immediately — unreservedly. I have seldom seen anyone come over to us so promptly. You would hardly recognize her if you saw her. All her rebelliousness, her deceit, her folly, her dirty-mindedness — everything has been burned out of her. It was a perfect conversion, a textbook case.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 3, Chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Winston and Julia have had no contact since their capture, he has no way of knowing whether or not this is true. Much of what O'Brien tells him is, at least in some sense, false - almost the entire Part Three of the novel is about O'Brien playing mind games with Winston, brainwashing him into the psychosis and mental paralysis that is the final state of the true Oceanian citizen and Big Brother follower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And certainly &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it's not true that Julia capitulated right away, O'Brien would have good reason to make up this lie for Winston. &lt;strong&gt;A person can resist longer if they believe they have some solidarity.&lt;/strong&gt; This relates to the concept of a &amp;quot;minority of one&amp;quot; which Winston comes back to a couple of times in the story. It's much easier to hold out mentally, even under torture, if you know that someone else - especially someone you love, and who loves you - shares your worldview and your position. You can cling to that knowledge and use it to anchor yourself in your own views. But if you don't know that, if you think you might be all alone and everyone else in society loves Big Brother and sees the world differently from you, it's much harder to hold true to your own views and not capitulate to the majority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is similar to the well-known interrogation technique of telling one suspect that the other has already confessed (even if they haven't), in an attempt to force a confession more quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The good cop-bad cop routine is described and encouraged, as is the tactic of playing one suspect against another to build mutual distrust, even indicating that other suspects have already confessed, whether they have or not. [...] Questions should intimidate a suspect into thinking the police already know facts they, indeed, do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=blxuzGLFpRYC&amp;amp;pg=PA15&amp;amp;lpg=PA15&amp;amp;dq=interrogation+other+suspects+already+confessed&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=d2eYVQh6Ot&amp;amp;sig=66M6An6_tTNvWNelUIee6Hd_aYc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiczOfvhZXZAhXKCcAKHSbZDB8Q6AEISzAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=interrogation%20other%20suspects%20already%20confessed&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roger W. Shuy, &lt;em&gt;The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2: &amp;quot;Language of the Police Interrogation&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;there's no reason to believe Julia really did betray Winston almost immediately.&lt;/strong&gt; It's possible she did, but it seems unlikely from what we know of her character - if anything, she's surely mentally stronger than Winston, suggesting she would have held out longer - and certainly O'Brien has good reason to tell Winston she did even if it's not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Did Julia go to Room 101?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very probably yes. There's a suggestion of symmetry between Winston and Julia: when they meet each other again at the end, it seems as though they've both been through similar experiences and emerged similarly changed. Their conversation is almost totally symmetrical, except that she describes the experience which we've already seen him undergo in Room 101:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I betrayed you,’ she said baldly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I betrayed you,’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She gave him another quick look of dislike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘they threaten you with something something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to so-and-so.” And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn’t really mean it. But that isn’t true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there’s no other way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘All you care about is yourself,’ he echoed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And after that, you don’t feel the same towards the other person any longer.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel the same.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There did not seem to be anything more to say. The wind plastered their thin overalls against their bodies. Almost at once it became embarrassing to sit there in silence: besides, it was too cold to keep still. She said something about catching her Tube and stood up to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘We must meet again,’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we must meet again.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 3, Chapter 6&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symmetry of their dialogue, coupled with Julia's description of what happened to her, strongly suggests that &lt;strong&gt;they both passed through Room 101, and it had the same effect on both of them&lt;/strong&gt;. They don't need to go into detail explaining it to each other - they both know what happened. It's a dreadful kind of shared experience: the sharing of mutual betrayal, just like in the song. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me ...&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What was in Julia's Room 101?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to this, we have no idea. She's no more inclined to talk to him about the details of her experience than he is to tell her about the rats, and he's not inclined to ask either. The story is Winston's story; it's his head we see into, and his experiences that we share. Julia is as much a secondary character as O'Brien, and we never really find out her deepest secrets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T00:39:54.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5625" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5754" CreationDate="2018-02-08T01:09:19.233" Score="9" ViewCount="448" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Little_House_on_the_Prairie_books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little House series&lt;/a&gt; of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, including perhaps the most famous &lt;em&gt;Little House on the Prairie&lt;/em&gt;, tell the story of her childhood in the American West.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How autobiographical are they, really?&lt;/strong&gt; How closely do they stick to her real experiences, and how much of the writing is embellished or made-up incidents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm mostly asking about the 8-9 original books written by LIW herself. The books written by other authors after her death presumably have much higher fiction-to-fact ratios.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T08:58:42.583" Title="How autobiographical are Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books?" Tags="&lt;biography&gt;&lt;realism&gt;&lt;laura-ingalls-wilder&gt;&lt;little-house-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5596" CreationDate="2018-02-08T01:47:16.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are actually two &quot;Chimney Sweeper&quot; poems: one in Innocence and one in Experience.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see them both in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text of &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by Ctrl+F'ing for &quot;chimney&quot;. The Innocence one which you're asking about runs as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When my mother died I was very young,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And my father sold me while yet my tongue&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And so he was quiet, and that very night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And by came an angel, who had a bright key,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And got with our bags and our brushes to work.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its counterpart from Experience runs as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A little black thing among the snow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Crying! ‘weep! weep!’ in notes of woe!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘Where are thy father and mother?  Say!’—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘They are both gone up to the church to pray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Because I was happy upon the heath,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And smiled among the winter’s snow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They clothed me in the clothes of death,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And taught me to sing the notes of woe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘And because I am happy and dance and sing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They think they have done me no injury,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And are gone to praise God and His priest and king,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who made up a heaven of our misery.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you view them side by side like this, it's pretty clear why the one you read counts as a Song of Innocence. It &lt;em&gt;opens&lt;/em&gt; in a grim way, yes, but the vision of heaven towards the end of the poem goes a long way towards counterbalancing that effect. The way I see it, this poem is about &lt;strong&gt;finding hope even in the middle of despair&lt;/strong&gt;, which is what puts it in Innocence. The chimney-sweeping children lead miserable lives on earth, but the fact that God is smiling on them gives them hope for a better life afterwards. Thus even a poor wretched child living in poverty can find some cause for happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Experience version, by contrast, is extremely dark and cynical all the way through. The child in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; poem has been taught misery by its own parents, and the only mention of God is in conjunction with the &quot;priest and king&quot;, the rich and worldly men who &quot;make up a heaven of our misery&quot;. This is a vastly different vision of heaven from the one in the Innocence poem: a heaven for the rich built upon the wretched labour of the poor, rather than a heaven where the poor can finally find happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some of the Songs of Innocence are entirely 'innocent', about childen and nature and joy. But others have some shades of the world's evils in them, the 'innocence' stemming from the fact that goodness and joy can survive amidst, or even overcome, such evil.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, many of the Songs of Experience involve themes which are more often associated with Innocence - but these are always, in the end, overcome by darker themes. See, for example, &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot;, in which the clod's hopeful outlook is overshadowed by the pebble's gloomy pessimism; or &quot;The Garden of Love&quot;, which is about a place of hope and innocence which is finally bound up and besmirched by darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all of the Songs are one-dimensional. Many of them contain elements of both Innocence and Experience, and their classification depends on which elements end up victorious. (I think some of them have even been variously classified in &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Innocence &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Experience at different points, but I'm not 100% certain on that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T01:47:16.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9242" CreationDate="2018-02-08T02:00:21.107" Score="6" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can't recall the name of the book that I read being a kid about a decade ago. It's written by a renowned English author who grew up as a blue-collar labor worker in 19th or 20th century England. As a matter of fact, he materialized many of his experiences in another book, which talks about a young poor hard-working man falling in love with a beautiful lady from aristocracy and working his way up by educating himself and becoming literate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short story or novel in question is about a weakened man, who was betrayed by his companion on a trip. He had no food or water and was exhausted to death. Soon after, he encountered an injured half-dead wolf and had to wrestle with him. The story emphasizes the physical as well as the psychological struggle, turmoil, and pain that the man endured. After winning the battle, he was rescued by a ship crew and was well fed and cared for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fascinating story by an extremely well known author, but I just can't remember either his name or the name of his book! Would be very glad if you could help me out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3015" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T02:52:54.657" Title="What is the name of the book in which an exhausted man wrestles with a wounded wolf?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5613" CreationDate="2018-02-08T12:47:44.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0805238131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sea People&lt;/a&gt; by Jörg Müller and Jörg Steiner &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MvcMH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MvcMH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The superiority of the differing ways of life on two neighboring&#xA;  islands is put to the test when gold is discovered on one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the reviews on amazon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The Sea People is a simple story about two islands. One is peopled by&#xA;  a proud, disciplined, organised people, the other by an easygoing,&#xA;  slow-paced, fun-loving people. Driven by their king's greed, the proud&#xA;  people eventually bring both people - and both islands - to the edge&#xA;  of ruin.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It vividly details the changing circumstances of 'the Sea People' as&#xA;  they trade their traditional values for material success and&#xA;  security.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2018-02-08T17:05:05.870" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T17:05:05.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5629" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5650" CreationDate="2018-02-08T18:24:29.073" Score="4" ViewCount="2378" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time one of the characters, Mrs Alexander, reveals to Christopher that his mother and Mr Shears were having an affair. Later, however, she seems surprised when Christopher reveals that his mother isn't, in fact, dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If she was aware of such an intimate detail such as the affair I'd imagine she would also know Christopher's mother was still alive or at least expect to have heard of her death. Is this over-sight on the writer's part or is there something I missed in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1571" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T01:00:54.810" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T02:38:54.013" Title="The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time: How much does Mrs Alexander know?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;curious-incident-dog-in-night-time&gt;&lt;mark-haddon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-08T21:14:32.040" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;During Dijkstra's visit to Pont Vanis to see king Esterad, the former calls Yennefer a traitor, to which the king retorts that she's not, and that he can provide relevant proof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; does king Esterad know Yennefer is not a traitor, and what kind of proof did he have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-02-08T21:14:32.040" Title="What (and how) does Esterad Tissen know about Yennefer and Tannedd?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5632" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-09T10:14:43.727" Score="3" ViewCount="1694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a poem called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vigil Strange I ept on the field one night&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Walt Whitman (reproduced below). One question I was asked about this poem is 'what is the subject of this poem?' For my understanding, it seems to ask 'what is the theme of this poem', so my answer is 'friendship and camaraderie in time of war', but it is wrong. The correct answer is 'reminiscence'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering what the 'what is the subject of this poem' means. Doesn't it mean 'themes' of the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vigil strange I kept on the field one night;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When you my son and my comrade dropt at my side that day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One look I but gave which your dear eyes return’d with a look I shall never forget,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One touch of your hand to mine O boy, reach’d up as you lay on the ground,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then onward I sped in the battle, the even-contested battle,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till late in the night reliev’d to the place at last again I made my way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Found you in death so cold dear comrade, found your body son of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bared your face in the starlight, curious the scene, cool blew the moderate night-wind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Long there and then in vigil I stood, dimly around me the battle-field spreading,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vigil wondrous and vigil sweet there in the fragrant silent night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But not a tear fell, not even a long-drawn sigh, long, long I gazed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then on the earth partially reclining sat by your side leaning my chin in my hands,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Passing sweet hours, immortal and mystic hours with you dearest comrade—not a tear, not a word,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vigil of silence, love and death, vigil for you my son and my soldier,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As onward silently stars aloft, eastward new ones upward stole,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vigil final for you brave boy, (I could not save you, swift was your death,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I faithfully loved you and cared for you living, I think we shall surely meet again,)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till at latest lingering of the night, indeed just as the dawn appear’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My comrade I wrapt in his blanket, envelop’d well his form,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Folded the blanket well, tucking it carefully over head and carefully under feet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And there and then and bathed by the rising sun, my son in his grave, in his rude-dug grave I deposited,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ending my vigil strange with that, vigil of night and battle-field dim,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And buried him where he fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2984" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T10:23:43.857" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T10:23:43.857" Title="What does it mean to ask 'what is the subject of this poem'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5633" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-09T11:13:27.117" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T11:13:27.117" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T11:13:27.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5634" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-09T11:13:27.117" Score="0" Body="Questions about the poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) and his works. His most notable works include 'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge' (1910) and the 'Duino Elegies'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T12:14:25.503" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:14:25.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-09T11:15:15.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T11:15:15.010" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T11:15:15.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-09T11:15:15.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Lassalle fragt Herbert nach Sonja. Die Szene ein Salon' (1980) by the German author Christoph Hein. Use this tag with [christoph-hein] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T12:15:08.793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:15:08.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:11:59.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T12:11:59.147" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:11:59.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:11:59.147" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German author Erich Maria Remarque (1898 – 1970) and his works. He is best known for his novel 'Im Westen nichts Neues' (1928, 'All Quiet on the Western Front'). Use with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T22:10:21.230" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T22:10:21.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5639" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:13:00.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-09T12:13:00.110" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:13:00.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5640" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:13:00.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about Erich Maria Remarque's 1928 novel 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (German: 'Im Westen nichts Neues'. Use this tag with [erich-maria-remarque] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:19:29.423" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:19:29.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5486" CreationDate="2018-02-09T12:44:22.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As ShreevatsaR said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase you heard is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_go_bragh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erin go Bragh&lt;/a&gt;, said by Irish Freedom sympathisers who kidnapped the Prime Minister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poirot_Investigates#The_Kidnapped_Prime_Minister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;short story&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0676177/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;episode&lt;/a&gt; both go by the name: The Kidnapped Prime Minister. The short story is in the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poirot_Investigates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poirot Investigates&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastActivityDate="2018-02-09T12:44:22.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5642" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5647" CreationDate="2018-02-09T13:59:39.437" Score="4" ViewCount="976" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the recommendation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=42762384#42762384&quot;&gt;BESW&lt;/a&gt;, I recently read the short story &quot;The City Born Great&quot; by N.K. Jemisin. Set in New York, it's all about the 'birth' of a city, and the struggle of these cities against some vague 'Enemy'. The (unnamed) protagonist struggles to help New York to 'breathe' and be 'born', with the help of a man named Paulo, who apparently personifies the city of Sao Paulo. At the end of the story, the protagonist himself has taken on this adviser role in another city, and he now seems to personify New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this personification process work?&lt;/strong&gt; So many questions are raised - how did his role change from midwife to bearer of the city's soul? how did he become rich after the transformation? will he still have a normal human lifespan, and if so what happens to the city when he dies? - which, as far as I can tell, are left unanswered in the story. So my question is, first, is any of this actually answered somewhere that I've missed - and if not, &lt;strong&gt;why is so much left unanswered?&lt;/strong&gt; What does it add to the story to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; explain these things to us?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T15:58:43.227" Title="The personification process in &quot;The City Born Great&quot;" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;n-k-jemisin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5643" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14559" CreationDate="2018-02-10T02:45:23.900" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after he was expelled from the Stanton Institute of Technology, Hoard Roark has the following encounter with Mrs. Keating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He stood looking at her. She knew that he did not see her. No, she thought, it was not that exactly. He always looked straight at people and his damnable eyes never missed a thing, it was only that he made people feel as if they did not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, in his interaction with the Dean, the Dean had a similar feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was that? None of the characters in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;We the Living&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt; were described like that (even major heroic figures like John Galt). Why was Roark in particular described like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T21:43:59.417" Title="Why did people feel like Howard Roark didn't see them?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5645" CreationDate="2018-02-10T11:50:18.813" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Matthew Arnold's 'Thyrsis: A Monody, to Commemorate the Author's Friend, Arthur Hugh Clough' we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What though the music of thy rustic flute&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Kept not for long its happy, country tone;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Lost it too soon, and learnt a stormy note&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Of men contention-tost, of men who groan,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Which task'd thy pipe too sore, and tired thy throat--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      It fail'd, and thou wage mute!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Yet hadst thou always visions of our light,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And long with men of care thou couldst not stay,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And soon thy foot resumed its wandering way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Left human haunt, and on alone till night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Tost&quot; (line 4) seems to be the past participle form of &quot;toss&quot;. So can I assume that the phrase &quot;contention-tost&quot; in the same line means &quot;throwing away disagreements&quot; and &quot;reconciling with each other&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole poem is here:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43608/thyrsis-a-monody-to-commemorate-the-authors-friend-arthur-hugh-clough&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43608/thyrsis-a-monody-to-commemorate-the-authors-friend-arthur-hugh-clough&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3024" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T12:52:25.093" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T13:20:52.880" Title="What does &quot;contention-tost&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;matthew-arnold&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5644" CreationDate="2018-02-10T13:20:52.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You made a good find that &quot;tost&quot; is the past participle of &quot;toss&quot;, but I don't think &quot;contention-tost&quot; means that contentions are tossed &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt;. More the opposite, in fact: the men are tossed &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; contention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, consider the &lt;strong&gt;context&lt;/strong&gt;. The flute learns &quot;&lt;em&gt;a stormy note / Of men contention-tost, of men who groan&lt;/em&gt;&quot;: in conjunction with storminess and groaning, it doesn't sound like &quot;contention-tost&quot; is something peaceful and conciliatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it by &lt;strong&gt;analogy&lt;/strong&gt; with the word &quot;storm-tossed&quot;. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/storm-tossed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;storm-tossed&lt;/a&gt; sea is one &lt;em&gt;tossed by the storm&lt;/em&gt; - wild and dangerous. Similarly, a contention-tossed man would be one &lt;em&gt;tossed by contention&lt;/em&gt; - argumentative or bellicose, perhaps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, this isn't the only appearance of the word &quot;contention-tost&quot; in English literature. Let's check a few more examples of the word being used in context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus Corinth had its partisans of old,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With zeal as flaming as their love was cold:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some cry'd up Paul, and some Apollos prais'd,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And some for Cephas clam'rous voices rais'd;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till &lt;strong&gt;on the waves of fierce contention tost&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their ark was founder'd, Christ and Truth were lost!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M7NYAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA108&amp;amp;lpg=PA108&amp;amp;dq=contention-tost&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=FTXSQe5zDO&amp;amp;sig=17QepfExKVGVp7kWjqO8DTUqinc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwihrcLGtJvZAhUpD8AKHYrnDQwQ6AEIMTAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=contention-tost&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Timothy Touch'em, &quot;The Age of Frivolity&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When waters cover'd all the Earth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When Ocean's deepest Bed was driven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With all his tow'ring waves to Heaven,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And &lt;strong&gt;in the fierce Contention tost&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The bounds of Sea and Land were lost&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DsvtYPzxJU0C&amp;amp;pg=PA42&amp;amp;lpg=PA42&amp;amp;dq=contention-tost&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=vUEzJJmzgL&amp;amp;sig=KPrcp5AqBCy2T4esOve6x0LHfU0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwihrcLGtJvZAhUpD8AKHYrnDQwQ6AEILjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=contention-tost&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Morgan, &quot;Long Ashton&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there we are. After all this evidence, it seems quite clear now that &lt;strong&gt;&quot;men contention-tost&quot; means men made unruly by contention.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T13:20:52.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-10T14:11:53.320" Score="4" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was reading about Waka poetry and then about the tanka meter, when I came across several poems by Ono no Komachi and Narihira. The ついにゆく poem from Narihira has 8 syllables rather than 7 in the last line and the first line in Komachi’s 花の色は has 6 syllables rather than the standard 5 right? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if this was allowed or is there a special rule where some sounds were combined or maybe I’m supposed to turn a blind eye and the meter is more of a ‘guideline’ rather than actual rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3025" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-10T14:20:58.047" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T14:20:58.047" Title="A break in the 5-7-5-7-7 meter?" Tags="&lt;meter&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5642" CreationDate="2018-02-10T15:58:43.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you already realized, many of these questions are left unanswered in the story. And while I would leave digging up any secondary material that might adress them (if existing) to other answers, I'll rather try to reason &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they might have been left open and how this, in my opinion, adds to the story. This might represent largely my own opinion, but I'll try to reason based on the text where possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now first of all, from a rather pragmatic viewpoint, it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;just&amp;quot; a short story and there is only so much room for establishing a detailed rule set for how all this actually works. We're getting glimpses of the overarching universe this is set in, by mention of other cities that underwent this process and the presence of some kind of &amp;quot;Enemy&amp;quot;. However, all that is left quite vague, &lt;strong&gt;just enough as to support the actual story&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even apart from mere spatial considerations, the purpose of the story seems more to lay on &lt;strong&gt;depicting a crucial moment in this setting, throwing you right into the events&lt;/strong&gt;. We &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; get some information about the protagonist, but that is more of a &amp;quot;timeless&amp;quot; nature (male, African American, poor, no parental connections), not so much &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; he came to be. And as few information we get about his past, as few we also get about his future, because that's not what the story is about. In the same way the epilogue is about passing on the baton to L.A., not about what happened to the protagonist in the meantime. Concentrating too much on any transformation the protagonist went through after these events might &lt;strong&gt;distract from the overarching themes of city development and the immediacy of the story&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, I think the story also &lt;strong&gt;profits much from the largely vague and metaphorical narration it employs. Many of its concepts seem to be left &lt;em&gt;deliberately&lt;/em&gt; vague and intangible&lt;/strong&gt;. If you think about the concept of the &amp;quot;Enemy&amp;quot;, we don't really know who or what that is. As much as we get from the story, it is something great and old, down at a deep dark place (an almost Lovecraftian evil with its tentacle-bearing undescribable eternal grandeur). And its way of attacking stays equally vague, there are only some hints that they manifest themselves largely as natural disasters to us, when it talks about New York experiencing earthquakes or the allusion to the &amp;quot;failed&amp;quot; cities of Atlantis and Pompeii.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fight itself has parts that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; quite real, but not noticed as that by everyone else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ground jolts and people think, &lt;em&gt;Huh, subway’s really shaky today&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the evening news that night, ten construction sites will report wrecking-ball collapses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other parts are much more odd and metaphorical&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when it comes at me I hip-check it with the BQE, backhand it with Inwood Park, drop the South Bronx on it like an elbow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To drive this lesson home I cut the bitch with LIRR traffic, long vicious honking lines; and to stretch out its pain I salt these wounds with the memory of a bus ride to LaGuardia and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just to add insult to injury? I backhand its ass with Hoboken, raining the drunk rage of ten thousand dudebros down on it like the hammer of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the protagonist himself describes it &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;It’s real but it’s not.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; It is clear noone else but him actually experiences this fight as he does. In the same way the Mega Cop incident, while being the most substantially unnatural description throughout the story, is also only really noticed as that by the protagonist himself. The people on the FDR honk and scream at him, but seem to just pass over the Mega Cop without noticing, as if it was just devoured by the very city itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now &lt;strong&gt;all this vagueness gives the story a very metaphorical quality&lt;/strong&gt;. All this &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; actually happen or have happened in our own reality without us really noticing. And I'd go farther and say that all this &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; happened in our reality already to these or any other cities. To me it comes down to being a metaphor for nothing else but the moment a city becomes &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than just an agglomeration of people or a geographic location with a lot of houses, it becomes &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; of its own identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt;. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like . . . like black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.) As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of . . . something to . . . something. Whatever cities are made of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to make the turn back from all those ramblings to your actual question, I think keeping with this metaphorical quality requires a balance between not grounding the concepts talked about in the story with &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much of an elaborately established rule set. &lt;strong&gt;It's the ideas' vagueness that makes them easily connectable to our own reality&lt;/strong&gt; and, in my opinion, gives them an &lt;strong&gt;idealogical grandeur that might be lost from explaining&lt;/strong&gt; away the mysteries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, however, there is one question you ask that I think &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be answered to some degree from the text. When you ask if the protagonist will have a normal human lifespan after merging with or embodying the city, I think we could issue an educated guess that he won't. Very early in the story, where Paulo is first described, the protagonist alludes to his age and already suggests that it is much greater than it appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he seems older than he looks—way, way older. There’s only a tinge of gray at his temples, nice and distinguished, but he feels, like, a hundred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we set that in relation to the later reveal that he is the embodiment of São Paulo, we can see how that earlier allusion could be more than just a figure of speech and it might very well be that &lt;strong&gt;Paulo bears an age larger than his human appearance's&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, that again is only a hint. On the other hand, this age of &amp;quot;a hundred&amp;quot; might very well be a &lt;strong&gt;less literal allusion to the age and soul of São Paulo &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; it was genuinely born&lt;/strong&gt; and before Paulo became its representative. So he might still just be a man of normal human age with an &amp;quot;old soul&amp;quot; underneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-10T15:58:43.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5506" CreationDate="2018-02-10T17:42:21.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after this storylet was first released, there was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.failbettergames.com/dissecting-the-comtessa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a blogpost by the game's chief writer/designer, Alexis Kennedy&lt;/a&gt;, which sheds some light on the thinking behind the storylet. Kennedy says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we define the resolution to the Comtessa’s story as a reflective choice. That is to say, it’s a choice you make based entirely on how you view your character, and what you think your character’s priorities are. To make the decision, you first have to decide what kind of decision you want to see it as.... This storylet invites the player to play God for a moment. And that’s why I think the two choices work: because either one of them could be humane or cruel or lazy or greedy or spiteful or generous or whatever you feel, and what the player does is decide their motivation and then pick the option they think fits it. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ and there is no ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ either.... there’s a pseudo-tragic thing going on here in that both choices, kill her or leave her, are nasty, both feel extreme and both feel like sacrifice.... The game won’t tell you your motivation – but you need to have one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the Comtessa's situation is designed to be ambiguous, and the purpose of the storylet is to force you to make a decision based on inadequate evidence, purely as a reflection of how you see your character. You don't get to know for sure which choice is &quot;right&quot;; there is no &quot;right&quot; or &quot;wrong&quot; or &quot;best&quot; choice here. You don't get any clear signals beforehand, and you don't get any strong indications afterwards: whichever choice you make, you're going to have reasons to think it was the right choice and reasons to think it was wrong. You have to make whichever choice you think you can live with, and if it haunts you afterwards, well... there's always laudanum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the nature of the relationship between the Comtessa and the Clay Man? You will never know for sure. But you have to choose, even without knowing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3026" LastEditorUserId="3026" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T20:01:37.597" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T20:01:37.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3533" CreationDate="2018-02-10T18:28:32.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: What Woolf meant by “man’s sentence” is that its style, typical of early 19th century writing by men, is “too loose, too heavy, too pompous” to properly represent women’s experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A Room of One’s Own&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage from section 4 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Room of One’s Own&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1929) is only comprehensible in context, and in even so it is notoriously difficult. Here is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But whatever effect discouragement and criticism had upon their [Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë’s] writing—and I believe that they had a very great effect—that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them (I was still considering those early nineteenth-century novelists) when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help. For we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lamb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lamb&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Browne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Browne&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Makepeace_Thackeray&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thackeray&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sterne&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dickens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_De_Quincey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;De Quincey&lt;/a&gt;—whoever it may be—never helped a woman yet, though she may have learnt a few tricks of them and adapted them to her use. The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully. The ape is too distant to be sedulous.* Perhaps the first thing she would find, setting pen to paper, was that there was no common sentence ready for her use. All the great novelists like Thackeray and Dickens and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balzac&lt;/a&gt; have written a natural prose, swift but not slovenly, expressive but not precious, taking their own tint without ceasing to be common property. They have based it on the sentence that was current at the time. The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: &lt;strong&gt;“The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.”&lt;/strong&gt; That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Gibbon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gibbon&lt;/a&gt; and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charlotte Brontë&lt;/a&gt;, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Eliot&lt;/a&gt; committed atrocities with it that beggar description. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jane Austen&lt;/a&gt; looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize this paragraph, the argument Woolf is making is that women’s literature expresses women’s experience and inheritance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For we think back through our mothers if we are women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so it requires a different kind of sentence from men’s literature in order to express itself adequately:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own for her to lift anything substantial from him successfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hence it is a mistake for women writers to try to model their own sentences after men’s sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the quoted passage which I emphasized in bold is intended as an exemplar of men’s prose in the early 19th century, when Austen and Brontë were writing. It should be apparent that Woolf is using ‘sentence’ here as metonymy for ‘sentence structure’, ‘prose style’ and even ‘prose form’. The problem that women writers have to grapple with, according to Woolf, is not only one of finding their own subject matter, but of finding a style for expressing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;On Application to Study&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “man’s sentence” comes from the essay ‘On Application to Study’ from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/plainspeakopin00hazluoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plain Speaker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1826) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hazlitt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Hazlitt&lt;/a&gt;. So when Woolf writes, “behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest,” she means that Hazlitt’s style (and the style of his contemporaries) was modelled on the style of these 18th century men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, the “man’s sentence” is from a discussion of the extraordinary productivity of certain artists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paul_Rubens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rubens&lt;/a&gt; alone. There are works of theirs in single collections enough to occupy a long and laborious life, and yet their works are spread through all the collections of Europe. […] The cartoons of Raphael alone might have employed many years, and made a life of illustrious labour, though they look as if they had been struck off at a blow, and are not a tenth part of what he produced in his short but bright career. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the forms of nature, or the human form divine, stood before the great artists of old, nor required any other stimulus to lead the eye to survey, or the hand to embody them, than the pleasure derived from the inspiration of the subject, and “propulsive force” of the mimic creation. &lt;strong&gt;The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.&lt;/strong&gt; It is idle to suppose we can exhaust nature; and the more we employ our own faculties, the more we strengthen them and enrich our stores of observation and invention. The more we do, the more we can do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Undoubtedly Woolf selected this passage for its subject as well as its prose style. Artistic productivity requires resources (not least a room of one’s own) that were only rarely available to women. Jane Austen wrote &lt;em&gt;Mansfield Park&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/12/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a tiny writing table&lt;/a&gt; in the corner of the front hall at Chawton Cottage, a situation of inadequate privacy, as Woolf points out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The sedulous ape&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* You may have wondered about the meaning of the gnomic sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ape is too distant to be sedulous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an allusion to Robert Louis Stevenson’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/381/381-h/381-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memories and Portraits&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1887):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.  I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts.  &lt;strong&gt;I have thus played the sedulous ape&lt;/strong&gt; to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Sedulous’ means ‘diligent, assiduous, persistent’. So Woolf means that although Stevenson may have been able to acquire a prose style by aping his distinguished models, women writers are too distant (have concerns and experiences that are too different) from these models to profit by this approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A man’s sentence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what, exactly, makes Woolf’s quote from Hazlitt a “man’s sentence”? Woolf did not provide any further elucidation in &lt;em&gt;A Room of One’s Own&lt;/em&gt; and it seems that many readers and critics have had difficulty with it. For example, Elizabeth Dodd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers have puzzled over her statement that there is a basic kind of “man’s sentence”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-18480-4_12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sandra Gilbert&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most famous yet most opaque passages in &lt;em&gt;A Room of One’s Own&lt;/em&gt; appears in Chapter 4, when Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of ‘a woman’s sentence’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in her essay ‘Women and Fiction’ (1929) Woolf was more explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To begin with, there is the technical difficulty—so simple, apparently; in reality, so baffling—that the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is &lt;strong&gt;too loose, too heavy, too pompous&lt;/strong&gt; for a woman’s use. Yet in a novel, which covers so wide a stretch of ground, an ordinary and usual type of sentence has to be found to carry the reader on easily and naturally from one end of the book to the other. And this a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis.) The quote from Hazlitt is certainly &lt;em&gt;loose&lt;/em&gt; (consisting of airy generalizations rather than specifics), &lt;em&gt;heavy&lt;/em&gt; (didactic, exhortatory) and &lt;em&gt;pompous&lt;/em&gt; (self-assured and self-certain). And it is easy to see that these are attributes that make the style unsuitable for rendering experiences characterized by uncertainty or humility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems very gender-essentialist to us now. Surely women have just as much right as men to write in a pompous style? But we’re not obliged to take Woolf’s essay as a prescription for men’s and women’s writing in all places at all times, as if she were as didactic and generalizing as Hazlitt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T10:58:22.763" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5629" CreationDate="2018-02-11T01:00:38.367" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mrs Alexander knew about Christopher's mother's affair, but not about her 'death'.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same conversation when she tells Christopher about the affair, he tells her that his mother died. She was shocked to hear this, but she took Christopher's word for it. Perhaps she'd known her neighbours well enough to know about the affair (or perhaps she'd heard about that through gossip from &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; neighbours who knew them better), but she probably assumed that Christopher's mother had gone away with Mr Shears and she simply hadn't heard about her death. Perhaps the affair was common knowledge in the neighbourhood, and Mrs Alexander assumed that the death was something less talked about (scandal always makes for better gossip than tragedy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all, if the lie about Christopher's mother's death was good enough to fool Christopher himself - her own son, and a boy with a shrewd and enquiring mind - surely it can't have been something that a neighbour who didn't know the family very well could have seen through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then  she  sucked  in  another  big  breath  and  said,  “Because...  because  I  think  you  know  why your father doesn’t like Mr. Shears very much.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then I asked, “Did Mr. Shears kill Mother?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “Kill her?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “Yes. Did he kill Mother?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “No. No. Of course he didn’t kill your mother.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “But did he give her stress so that she died of a heart attack?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Christopher.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “Or did he hurt her so that she had to go into hospital?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “Did she have to go into hospital?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “Yes. And it wasn’t very serious at first, but she had a heart attack when she was in hospital.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “Oh my goodness.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;I said, “And she died.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;And Mrs. Alexander said “Oh my goodness” again, and then she said, “Oh, Christopher, I am so, so sorry. I never realized.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then  I  asked  her,  “Why  did  you  say  ‘I  think  you  know  why  your  father  doesn’t  like  Mr. Shears very much’?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mrs.  Alexander  put  her hand  over  her  mouth and  said, “Oh  dear,  dear,  dear.”  But  she  didn’t answer my question.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So  I  asked  her  the  same  question  again,  because  in a  murder  mystery  novel  when  someone doesn’t  want  to  answer  a  question  it  is  because  they  are  trying  to  keep  a  secret  or  trying  to  stop someone  from  getting  into  trouble,  which  means  that  the  answers  to  those  questions  are  the  most important answers of all, and that is why the detective has to put that person under pressure.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But  Mrs.  Alexander  still  didn’t  answer.  Instead  she  asked  me  a  question.  She  said,  “So  you don’t know?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “Don’t know what?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And  she  said,  “I  shouldn’t  have  said  what  I  said.  And  if  I  don’t  explain,  you’ll  carry  on wondering what I meant. And you might ask your father. And I don’t want you to do that because I don’t  want  you  to  upset him.  So  I’m  going  to  explain  why  I  said  what  I said.  But  before  I  do  that you have to promise not to tell anyone I said this to you.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I asked, “Why?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And she said, “Christopher, please, just trust me.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And  I  said,  “I  promise.”  Because  if  Mrs.  Alexander told  me  who  killed  Wellington,  or  she told me that Mr. Shears had really killed Mother, I could still go to the police and tell them because you are allowed to break a promise if someone has committed a crime and you know about it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;And  Mrs.  Alexander  said,  “Your  mother,  before  she  died,  was  very  good  friends  with  Mr. Shears.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I said, “I know.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And  she  said,  “No,  Christopher.  I’m  not  sure  that  you  do.  I  mean  that  they  were  very  good friends. Very, very good friends.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I thought about this for a while and said, “Do you mean that they were doing sex?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Mrs. Alexander said, “Yes, Christopher. That is what I mean.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter '97' (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T01:00:38.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5657" CreationDate="2018-02-11T16:27:21.027" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why were John Galt and Howard Roark both from Ohio? Was Ayn Rand making a deliberate parallel here, and why Ohio in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-23T20:34:53.180" Title="Why were Howard Roark and John Galt both from Ohio?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5652" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-11T17:36:54.623" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This novel may have been written prior to the 70s. People could sign up for a motivational course for potential life changing results, however once a waiver was signed the requirements for 'life change'  were revealed to be very unusual, often pitting attendees against each other. In the end, the challenges truly did inspire transformation, likely because of the hardships endured. The most difficult part of the 'course' was having to spend time in an area, 'the pit', thst afforded the deepest challenges but the most transformative results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3029" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T17:36:54.623" Title="The Pit (perhaps)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4070" CreationDate="2018-02-11T20:06:21.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It speaks to addiction and just like black jack ( black tar herion/opium) back jack speaks to his inability to break the cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2437" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T20:06:21.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5604" CreationDate="2018-02-11T20:25:46.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original punctuation of the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Blake_London.jpg&amp;amp;imgrefurl=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_(William_Blake_poem)&amp;amp;h=1475&amp;amp;w=931&amp;amp;tbnid=80clArRlBRtmOM:&amp;amp;tbnh=160&amp;amp;tbnw=100&amp;amp;usg=__QW8b69C0m9KLKesKVYDWPJx60NI%3D&amp;amp;vet=10ahUKEwjo2IDUpZDZAhVkoFkKHQ-uDp0Q_B0IsgEwEg..i&amp;amp;docid=PTU5MaFPVYfxzM&amp;amp;itg=1&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjo2IDUpZDZAhVkoFkKHQ-uDp0Q_B0IsgEwEg#h=1475&amp;amp;imgdii=80clArRlBRtmOM:&amp;amp;tbnh=160&amp;amp;tbnw=100&amp;amp;vet=10ahUKEwjo2IDUpZDZAhVkoFkKHQ-uDp0Q_B0IsgEwEg..i&amp;amp;w=931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems to be&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wander thro' each charter'd street,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And mark in every face I meet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Marks of weakness, marks of woe,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In every cry of every Man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In every Infants cry of fear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In every voice: in every ban,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The mind-forg'd manacles I hear  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How the Chimney-sweepers cry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Every blackning Church appalls,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the hapless Soldiers sigh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Runs in blood down Palace walls  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But most thro' midnight streets I hear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How the youthful Harlots curse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Blasts the new-born Infants tear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where I'm using commas everywhere, because I can't tell Blake's commas from his periods in his punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the colon after &lt;em&gt;voice&lt;/em&gt; requires that there is a comma at the end of the first stanza, i.e., after &lt;em&gt;woe&lt;/em&gt;. And then, the first 2½ lines of the second stanza are all describing where the poet hears &lt;em&gt;marks of weakness, marks of woe.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the &lt;em&gt;mind-forged manacles&lt;/em&gt; are mainly connected to the &lt;em&gt;bans&lt;/em&gt;. That is, when people are forbidden from doing something. I would thus interpret the &lt;em&gt;mind-forged manacles&lt;/em&gt; as being forged by the people themselves, and forcing them to follow the bans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret the next stanza as the Church (the building, not the institution) feeling guilty when the oppressed chimney-sweepers clean it, and the Palace (again the building) feeling guilty when the soldiers guard it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think you should look at Blake's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45950/the-garden-of-love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Garden of Love&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for help in interpreting the last stanza, but I haven't reached a satisfactory interpretation of it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-02-11T20:31:11.260" LastActivityDate="2018-02-11T20:31:11.260" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5651" CreationDate="2018-02-12T10:43:04.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ayn Rand's husband, Frank O'Connor, was born in Lorrain, Ohio. When in the process of creating great works it sometimes helps to stay grounded through your most solid partner-rock. &lt;a href=&quot;https://atlassociety.org/commentary/commentary-blog/6101-5-things-to-know-about-frank-o-connor-ayn-rand-s-husband&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best available summary here.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3034" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-02-12T17:07:25.627" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T17:07:25.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5661" CreationDate="2018-02-12T11:29:09.310" Score="3" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;We were discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny,_the_Champion_of_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Danny the Champion of the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and how he:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lives in a Caravan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is part of a pheasant poaching community&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend said: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well he's obviously a [Romani] isn't he?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there evidence to suggest that Danny the Champion of the World is a Romani (Gypsy)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3035" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T12:06:01.513" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:37:38.203" Title="Is Danny the Champion of the World one of the Romani people?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;roald-dahl&gt;&lt;danny-the-champion-of-the-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1837" CreationDate="2018-02-12T11:40:32.040" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dan Conway is the Bill Gates and/or Albert Schweitzer of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ie., egalitarian, I'm no better, &lt;em&gt;one civilization is as good as the next&lt;/em&gt;, today's terrorist is tomorrow's freedom-fighter ...etc.&#xA; The &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; is that he gives a huge tip to the cleaner after they deliver his death blow at that final meeting. He believes in competition but is resigned to submission to the power of majority rule as evidenced by his response to Dagny's pleas to return.&#xA; Galt and his strike would crumble from within if this anti-heirarchy mentality prevails. Oddly enough Dr.J.B.Peterson realizes this but remains in denial of the value of Ayn Rand's identification of this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The battle is sill individualism vs. popular culture, Galt's way of fighting it is the best, most human way. Withdraw your sanction and come and join us in developing the motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moral Code:Motive Power:Motor Unit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indivisible, (Integrated) and Perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I mean it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3034" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T11:40:32.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="179" CreationDate="2018-02-12T14:59:36.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, each of the original 58 books are stand alone stories and you won't miss anything if you read them in random order. The incredible thing is that they all happen in one year so they solve more than a mystery a week and in probably half of them travel to distant locations to do so. However, I would recommend starting with one of the earlier books, say first 10 or so as they will better set the tone of true Hardy Boys flavor. If you go to a library or find an older one in a thrift store, you will see some have 25 chapters instead of 20 and are the pre-revision stories of which many were compeltely rewritten with a new plot. So, the early ones written before 1960 were revised in the 60's and early 70's. When you start getting into the ones written in the 70's, some of them are good stories but they have a little bit of a different tone that I don't find to convey the classic Hardy Boy feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3036" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T14:59:36.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5658" CreationDate="2018-02-12T16:36:39.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 1, The filling station:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caravan was our house and our home. It was a real &lt;strong&gt;old gypsy wagon&lt;/strong&gt; with big wheels and fine patterns painted all over it in yellow and red and blue. My father said it was at least one hundred and fifty years old. &lt;strong&gt;Many gypsy children&lt;/strong&gt;, he said, had been born in it and had grown up within its wooden walls. With a horse to pull it, the old caravan must have wandered for thousands of miles along the roads and lanes of England. But now its wanderings were over, and because the wooden spokes in the wheels were beginning to rot, my father had propped it up underneath with bricks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is evidence to relate Danny to Gypsies but it isn't ever clear whether Danny himself is one. The passage above could be taken as talking of Gypsies as though from the outside - a lack of familiarity and calling the caravan an &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; gypsy caravan could imply it is no longer a gypsy caravan. On the other hand it could refer only to its age - this is clearly part of the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poaching isn't limited to any particular group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Slightly more definitive proof:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Why Mrs Clipstone's?' I asked. 'What's she got to do with it?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;Mrs Clipstone delivers everyone's pheasants&lt;/strong&gt;,' my father said. 'Haven't I told you that?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'No, Dad, you haven't,' I said, aghast. I was now more stunned than ever. Mrs Grace Clipstone was &lt;strong&gt;the wife of the Reverend Lionel Clipstone, the local vicar.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Always choose a respectable woman to deliver your pheasants,' my father announced. 'That's correct, Charlie, isn't it?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So clearly everyone is involved in poaching, not just a Romani community if, indeed, one is present at all. The following extract suggests Danny and his father are apart from a gypsy community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We couldn’t afford things like that.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then how did you roast your pheasants?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ah,” he said.&#xA;“That was quite a trick. &lt;strong&gt;We used to build a fire outside the caravan and roast them on a spit, the way the gypsies do&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T23:37:38.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5604" CreationDate="2018-02-12T18:31:18.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/Blake-The-Complete-Poems/Stevenson/p/book/9781405832809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. H. Stevenson's edition of Blake's complete poems&lt;/a&gt; (in the series Longman Annotated English Poets), the original phrase was &quot;german-forged manacles&quot;, &quot;suggesting the strength of skilled workmanship&quot; (Stevenson, p. 220). &#xA;By contrast, &quot;mind-forged&quot;, according to Stevenson, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[emphasizes] that the fetters are not inevitable, but created in the twisted minds both of the oppressor and of the sufferer who accepts the chains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Blake hears in people's cries and voices are expressions of these fetters that are a product of oppression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the punctuation (which was discussed in several comments): Stevenson's edition doesn't have a colon but an m-dash (&lt;code&gt;—&lt;/code&gt;). Stevenson provides a modernised text, since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Blake_London.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have a punctuation mark at the end of that line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T18:31:18.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5582" CreationDate="2018-02-12T18:51:34.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/Blake-The-Complete-Poems/Stevenson/p/book/9781405832809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. H. Stevenson's edition of Blake's poems&lt;/a&gt;, the editor explains that the charters (see the definition in DukeZhou's answer) used to represent a source of freedom. One of the charters that are relevant to London is the charter that William the Conqueror granted to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_and_Medieval_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;city&lt;/a&gt; in 1067, &quot;which upheld previous Saxon rights, privileges and laws&quot; (Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_and_Medieval_London#Norman_invasion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norman and Medieval London&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson does not mention any particular charter but points out that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;these charters have not granted liberty or privilege to most of the city's people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-02-12T18:51:34.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5679" CreationDate="2018-02-13T07:22:20.197" Score="3" ViewCount="1180" Body="&lt;p&gt;The New Yorker has written a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fantastic piece&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Shelley's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following commentator &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347530&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Torn by revolution, gasping at the quick pace of technological change, divided by debates over racial equality, early 19th Century Europe produces a crop of batshit-crazy writers, and Mary Shelley. She writes a book that treats on themes of parenthood, which is completely misunderstood for two centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that the 'revolution' is the Industrial Revolution - because there isn't a political revolution at that time I can pin down. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is there evidence to suggest that Frankenstein was influenced by revolution, the pace of technological change and debates over racial equality?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3035" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T12:10:29.883" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T00:44:42.753" Title="Was Frankenstein was influenced by revolution, the pace of technological change and debates over racial equality?" Tags="&lt;mary-shelley&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5667" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5672" CreationDate="2018-02-13T14:17:16.780" Score="6" ViewCount="3930" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a bunch of the books, I think the first one was the &lt;em&gt;The Hunt for Red October&lt;/em&gt;, but then I don't know whats next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3042" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T15:03:44.323" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T17:22:45.930" Title="Is there a specific order to read Tom Clancy works?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;tom-clancy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5670" CreationDate="2018-02-13T14:26:22.443" Score="5" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoilers abound in this question about this sci-fi horror short, so you might want to read it at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8492&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; first. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The narrator of this story is eventually revealed to be insane. It is strongly implied that he is delusional, wearing a cheap metal circlet which he believes to be a crown. This calls into question the validity of much of his tale of Imperial conquest and &quot;suicide booths&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are two key points during the tale when things the narrator believes appear to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; First, he tells Hawberk that Wilde knows where to find a rare and valuable piece of armour. Second, it is implied that Wilde is quite correct to believe that Hawberk is a secret descendent of the &quot;Marquis of Avonshire&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first of these, in particular, would seem to me to suggest that the tale should be taken at face value, depriving it of much of its mystery, impact and value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a deliberate clue left by the author as to the narrator's reliability, and if so, why is it there? Or is there another way of interpreting this information which leaves the mystery intact? What other clues can we glean from the text about the truth of the narrator's tale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T18:19:26.423" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T18:19:26.423" Title="How unreliable is the narrator in The Repairer of Reputations?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;robert-w-chambers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5677" CreationDate="2018-02-13T16:16:42.513" Score="14" ViewCount="11348" Body="&lt;p&gt;In J.M. Barrie's play &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;what was Captain Hook's name before losing his hand?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3043" OwnerDisplayName="Marine1" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T16:52:09.843" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:27:41.177" Title="What was Captain Hook's name before losing his hand?" Tags="&lt;peter-pan&gt;&lt;j-m-barrie&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5670" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5668" CreationDate="2018-02-13T16:58:42.420" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: There is no way to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a feature of unreliable narrators, that once the reader admits the possibility of their unreliability, there is no firm ground to stand on. If the narrator could be mistaken about one thing, he could be mistaken about anything. The only truth of the matter, after all, is that everything in ‘The Restorer of Reputations’ was invented by Robert W. Chambers, including the narrator. But reading a story as if it were nothing but a collection of lies is deeply unsatisfactory, so it is natural to grope about for some kind of foundation of fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading a story like ‘The Restorer of Reputations’ we have a choice in how to approach the unreliability of the narrator, once it is suspected or established. For example, we might take the narrator completely at his word and make it a story about the rightful king of future America, foiled in his quest for the throne, and unfairly diagnosed as criminally insane. We instinctively shrink from this interpretation, I think, because in this case the subject matter would be vile. But there is nothing in the text that rules out this possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(An author might, after all, deliberately write such a story in order to highlight the vileness of its literary tropes, as for example Norman Spinrad does in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iron Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. But I’m inclined to think that this is not the case here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might, alternatively, decide to interpret direct narration of events as being reliable, while allowing the narrator’s opinions or beliefs to be mistaken. In this interpretation it’s a story set in a future quasi-fascist America whose narrator goes insane due to a fall from his horse and subsequently joins a massive conspiracy run by the blackmailer Mr Wilde. But various aspects of the narrative make this unsatisfactory. For example, the narrator is convinced that his diadem is real:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I lift, from its velvet crown, a diadem of purest gold, blazing with diamonds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas his cousin Louis claims otherwise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Come, come, old fellow,” he cried, “take off that brass crown and toddle into the study. Are you going to a masquerade? What's all this theatrical tinsel anyway?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the “take the narrator completely at his word” interpretation this is not a problem because in that version Louis is lying about the diadem in order to convince the narrator that he is insane.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the “direct narration is reliable” interpretation is untenable. But if we can’t trust the direct narration of events, then anything in the story could be false. As it says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Repairer_of_Reputations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once Hildred's delusional nature is revealed, it calls into question the other facts of the story, which may all be delusional, as well. For example, the Prussian-style military parades could merely be police on patrol, and the suicide booths may simply be subway entrances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this interpretation, the ‘clues’ identified in the post are just further parts of the delusion: perhaps Hawberk lies about finding the fragments of armour in order to appease the dangerous narrator; and maybe the narrator is mistaken in his interpretation of Hawberk’s and Constance’s reaction to hearing the title “Marquis of Avonshire”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critic Wayne Booth wrote about the problem of unreliable narrators in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_C._Booth#The_Rhetoric_of_Fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rhetoric of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, with regard to the works of Henry James:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No amount of care, no amount of intelligence, no amount of background reading, can yield the kind of security about ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25500/25500-h/25500-h.htm#THE_LIAR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Liar&lt;/a&gt;’ that all readers can feel about ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1093/1093-h/1093-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Beast in the Jungle&lt;/a&gt;.’ [… A] story can hold together only if such perplexities are kept within certain boundaries—wide as those boundaries may be. Our very recognition of complexity depends upon the clarity of our vision of the elements which go to make it up. […] Once on this road we cannot turn back; we cannot pretend that things are as simple as they once seemed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The Restorer of Reputations’ has perplexities that go beyond all reasonable bounds. But a story in which everything is delusional is just words on paper and not worth the reading. So I think most readers will be driven to take a middle view in which much of the narration is reliable, but not all, and they can’t be sure exactly which parts. This uncertainty and unease about what’s ‘real’ and what’s not contributes to the uncanny atmosphere of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T12:15:45.950" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T12:15:45.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-13T17:22:38.303" Score="4" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are the &quot;first watchman&quot; and &quot;watchman&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; actually the same character, or are they different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Shakespeare doesn't pay much attention to minor characters, I couldn't figure this out by myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3002" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-13T22:36:11.123" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:48:27.183" Title="Watchman characters in Much Ado About Nothing" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5667" CreationDate="2018-02-13T17:22:45.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hunt for Red October&lt;/em&gt; is the fourth book in a (currently) 24-long series, known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/171703-jack-ryan-universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jack Ryan series&lt;/a&gt; by Tom Clancy. That link has the books by publication date, but you might prefer them by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryanverse#Chronological_order&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chronological order&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without Remorse (1970)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patriot Games (1981)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Red Rabbit (circa spring of 1983)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hunt for Red October (1985)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1987)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clear and Present Danger (1988)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sum of All Fears (1991–92)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debt of Honor (1995–96)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Executive Orders (1996)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rainbow Six&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bear and the Dragon (2000)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Teeth of the Tiger (2005, based on the age of Jack Ryan Jr.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clancy has other series, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/101174-john-clark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Clark series&lt;/a&gt;, which encompasses Rainbow Six and other books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1180" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T17:22:45.930" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5669" CreationDate="2018-02-13T19:22:40.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the only name ever given to Captain Hook is James and he is in some instances known as Captain James Hook. I think this is one of those situations where the character doesn't have an origin (canon) past the story they belong to and in more than one version of the tale it is even remarked that James Hook became Captain Hook before he lost the hand to the crocodile; in other words his name was always &quot;Hook&quot; and it's an ironic twist. The only mention I am aware of is from the original play which states that &quot;Hook&quot; is not his real name but that he can't reveal his real name. For me, in real world terms, that means he never had one. He has never been given one in literature (as far as I know) and so the label we are left with is James Hook. In keeping with the theme of the literature it is possible he was even lying about his surname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hook&quot; is actually a somewhat common surname and I believe either by original design or retrospectively through public opinion, the name Hook has been accepted as Captain Hook's actual surname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting however that the Peter Pan story is over a century old and the attention to detail in constructing a universe was very different in a time that typically wouldn't spawn multiple prequel/sequel and origin stories out of every successful IP. A label is enough for these characters who would then be fleshed out by descriptions of their attire/personality/accomplishments/etc. Captain Hook as originally imagined was probably never supposed to be more than &quot;Captain Hook&quot; just as the crocodile was never anything more than &quot;The Crocodile&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find particularly interesting certain aspects such as the name of his ship, &quot;Jolly Roger&quot;. It can give the impression that the focus was more on cuteness (for want of a better term) than historical accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3044" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T07:22:14.723" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T07:22:14.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5632" CreationDate="2018-02-13T19:41:52.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually it is difficult at times to differentiate between subject matter and theme of a work of art , one dissolves into the other. The only yard-stick is how one presents his case. Rand alThor shows where they mix and mingle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in general, theme is the topic and a subject embodies that topic. For convenience's sake we would limit our discussion to a literary work only. Subject is what the work of art is about. So the subject matter is rather straight forward. For the theme you have to delve deep because subject matter hold the theme and is embodied in it. It may so happen that they may be same as shown by the learned critic in his comment for your example, but not always. Theme is what the author or poet wants to say or mean. In an allegory, subject matter is a means to an end (the theme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us explain. The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde is an innocent story of a giant and children (subject matter) but at heart it is about autocracy and communism (theme)— compassion and love where God resides. &#xA;Or Frost's Stopping by Wood on A Snowy Evening. It is about poets personal experience on a snowy evening, hence its subject matter. But at heart it is about man torn between the rival claims of material world and yearning for aesthetic pursuit, hence its theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T19:41:52.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5675" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5734" CreationDate="2018-02-13T21:07:59.907" Score="5" ViewCount="1111" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2016, Bantam published a &lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones: The Illustrated Edition&lt;/em&gt; with a hard cover, a foreword by John Hodgman, maps by Jeffrey L. Ward and illustrations by Michael Komarck and Michael S. Miller. (See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Game-Thrones-Illustrated-Song-Fire/dp/0553808044/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon.de&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same year, Harper Collins UK published &lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones. 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition&lt;/em&gt;, also with a hard cover, a foreword by John Hodgman, maps by Jeffrey L. Ward and illustrations by Michael Komarck and Michael S. Miller. (See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Game-Thrones-20th-Anniversary-Illustrated/dp/0008209103/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon.de&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both editions are 896 pages long. Are these two editions just the American and the British edition of the exact same book, or are there any differences that I overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T13:04:15.777" Title="Difference between editions of A Game of Thrones from 2016" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5669" CreationDate="2018-02-13T22:45:24.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere (cannot find it*) that Barrie, being a Scotsman, had as a youth idolized Captain James &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;ook, who though born in England, was the son of a Scotsman. Cook was killed while in Hawaii, a somewhat mysterious unknown island at the time, and Barrie imagined his personal hero being forever entrapped in a mystical land. Cook also was reputedly cruel to natives, a trait shared with Hook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*The theory gets a nod in this article, but it doesn't mention the Scottish connection I had read about earlier:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.literarytraveler.com/articles/jm-barrie-england/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Real Life and Fictional Characters Who Inspired J.M. Barrie’s Captain Hook&lt;/a&gt; by Rachel McGinnis (30.05.2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3046" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:27:41.177" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:27:41.177" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5669" CreationDate="2018-02-13T22:48:50.553" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We don't know.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text suggests that he was originally a well-known figure (known for something other than being a villainous pirate), probably from the English aristocracy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was often thus when communing with himself on board ship in the quietude of the night. It was because he was so terribly alone. This inscrutable man never felt more alone than when surrounded by his dogs. They were socially inferior to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze&lt;/strong&gt;; but as those who read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her, and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained the passion for good form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 14, &amp;quot;The Pirate Ship&amp;quot; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A note on terminology: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;public school&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in the British sense does not mean a public-sector school; it refers to an elite group of private schools, including Eton, Winchester, Harrow, and Rugby. This is where the children of the British ruling class are educated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that Barrie has a particular person in mind when writing this passage; probably it was just for effect, to give Hook an air of mystique and add more depth to his character. Certainly his public-school background and adherence to &amp;quot;good form&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; give him more depth, and (at least in my view) it's one of the more memorable things about him, making him more than &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; a villainous murderer. And to give him a specific name, link him to an actual real-life figure of the British aristocracy, would take away from that mystique. It's better for the story that we don't know his true name; then each reader can exercise their own imagination to come up with whichever possibility would be most interesting or scandalous for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-13T22:48:50.553" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5678" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5730" CreationDate="2018-02-13T23:14:06.603" Score="9" ViewCount="762" Body="&lt;p&gt;The character Captain Hook, main protagonist of J.M. Barrie's &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan&lt;/em&gt;, definitely attended a British public school:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze; but as those who read between the lines must already have guessed, he had been at a famous public school; and its traditions still clung to him like garments, with which indeed they are largely concerned. Thus it was offensive to him even now to board a ship in the same dress in which he grappled her, and he still adhered in his walk to the school’s distinguished slouch. But above all he retained the passion for good form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 14, &amp;quot;The Pirate Ship&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In later interpretations of the story by authors other than Barrie - for example, Geraldine McCaughrean's excellent 'sequel' &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; - Hook is portrayed as specifically an old Etonian: that is, an alumnus of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;perhaps the most famous public school of them all&lt;/a&gt;. I'm curious whether this specifically is supported by the original text, or if it was first made up by someone other than Barrie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Barrie's original &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan&lt;/em&gt;, is there evidence that Hook was an Etonian?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T10:11:43.973" Title="Was Captain Hook an Etonian in the original text?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-m-barrie&gt;&lt;peter-pan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5666" CreationDate="2018-02-14T00:44:42.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, there is evidence&lt;/strong&gt; to suggest that Frankenstein was influenced by revolution, the pace of technological change and debates over racial equality. (It's also a book about parenthood.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been helpfully pointed out - the revolution in context of the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is the&lt;/a&gt; French Revolution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If “Frankenstein” is a referendum on the French Revolution, as some critics have read it, Victor Frankenstein’s politics align nicely with those of Edmund Burke, who described violent revolution as “a species of political monster, which has always ended by devouring those who have produced it.” The creature’s own politics, though, align not with Burke’s but with those of two of Burke’s keenest adversaries, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Victor Frankenstein has made use of other men’s bodies, like a lord over the peasantry or a king over his subjects, in just the way that Godwin denounced when he described feudalism as a “ferocious monster.” (“How dare you sport thus with life?” the creature asks his maker.) The creature, born innocent, has been treated so terribly that he has become a villain, in just the way that Wollstonecraft predicted. “People are rendered ferocious by misery,” she wrote, “and misanthropy is ever the offspring of discontent.” (“Make me happy,” the creature begs Frankenstein, to no avail.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can see&lt;/a&gt; that this is about the pace (or rather the horrors and regret) of technological change:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Frankenstein,” the story of a creature who has no name, has for two hundred years been made to mean just about anything. Most lately, it has been taken as a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley technologists, an interpretation that derives less from the 1818 novel than from later stage and film versions, especially the 1931 film, and that took its modern form in the aftermath of Hiroshima. In that spirit, M.I.T. Press has just published an edition of the original text “annotated for scientists, engineers, and creators of all kinds,” and prepared by the leaders of the Frankenstein Bicentennial Project, at Arizona State University, with funding from the National Science Foundation; they offer the book as a catechism for designers of robots and inventors of artificial intelligences. “Remorse extinguished every hope,” Victor says, in Volume II, Chapter 1, by which time the creature has begun murdering everyone Victor loves. “I had been the author of unalterable evils; and I lived in daily fear, lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness.” The M.I.T. edition appends, here, a footnote: “The remorse Victor expresses is reminiscent of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s sentiments when he witnessed the unspeakable power of the atomic bomb. . . . Scientists’ responsibility must be engaged before their creations are unleashed.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can see&lt;/a&gt; the book is about racial equality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the many moral and political ambiguities of Shelley’s novel is the question of whether Victor Frankenstein is to be blamed for creating the monster—usurping the power of God, and of women—or for failing to love, care for, and educate him. The Frankenstein-is-Oppenheimer model considers only the former, which makes for a weak reading of the novel. Much of “Frankenstein” participates in the debate over abolition, as several critics have astutely observed, and the revolution on which the novel most plainly turns is not the one in France but the one in Haiti. For abolitionists in England, the Haitian revolution, along with continued slave rebellions in Jamaica and other West Indian sugar islands, raised deeper and harder questions about liberty and equality than the revolution in France had, since they involved an inquiry into the idea of racial difference. Godwin and Wollstonecraft had been abolitionists, as were both Percy and Mary Shelley, who, for instance, refused to eat sugar because of how it was produced. Although Britain and the United States enacted laws abolishing the importation of slaves in 1807, the debate over slavery in Britain’s territories continued through the decision in favor of emancipation, in 1833. Both Shelleys closely followed this debate, and in the years before and during the composition of “Frankenstein” they together read several books about Africa and the West Indies. Percy Shelley was among those abolitionists who urged not immediate but gradual emancipation, fearing that the enslaved, so long and so violently oppressed, and denied education, would, if unconditionally freed, seek a vengeance of blood. He asked, “Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because the creature reads as a slave, “Frankenstein” holds a unique place in American culture, as the literary scholar Elizabeth Young argued, a few years ago, in “Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor.” “What is the use of living, when in fact I am dead,” the black abolitionist David Walker asked from Boston in 1829, in his “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,” anticipating Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” by a century and a half. “Slavery is everywhere the pet monster of the American people,” Frederick Douglass declared in New York, on the eve of the American Civil War. Nat Turner was called a monster; so was John Brown. By the eighteen-fifties, Frankenstein’s monster regularly appeared in American political cartoons as a nearly naked black man, signifying slavery itself, seeking his vengeance upon the nation that created him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/12/the-strange-and-twisted-life-of-frankenstein?currentPage=all&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can see&lt;/a&gt; the book is about parenthood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pregnant again only weeks later, she was likely still nursing her second baby when she started writing “Frankenstein,” and pregnant with her third by the time she finished. She didn’t put her name on her book—she published “Frankenstein” anonymously, in 1818, not least out of a concern that she might lose custody of her children—and she didn’t give her monster a name, either. “This anonymous androdaemon,” one reviewer called it. For the first theatrical production of “Frankenstein,” staged in London in 1823 (by which time the author had given birth to four children, buried three, and lost another unnamed baby to a miscarriage so severe that she nearly died of bleeding that stopped only when her husband had her sit on ice), the monster was listed on the playbill as “––––––.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3035" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T00:44:42.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2018-02-14T04:37:22.207" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple instances of &quot;slouching&quot; being associated with Eton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=p-MoDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT27&amp;amp;lpg=PT27&amp;amp;dq=eton%20slouch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony Powell's description&lt;/a&gt; of the &quot;world-famous&quot; slouch of Eton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A boy of fifteen was walking slowly along the far side of the road&#xA;  with one hand in his pocket and the other supporting a pile of books,&#xA;  which rested like a field-marshal's baton against his thigh. His top&#xA;  hat was at the back of his head and he wore exceptionally short&#xA;  trousers and light-coloured socks. One of his shoulders was higher&#xA;  than the other and a slight sag at the knees made him an almost&#xA;  perfect specimen of the world-famous Eton slouch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is used, for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://hookswaltz.blogspot.jp/2013/06/slouching-towards-eton.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post discussing Hook and Eton&lt;/a&gt;. Passages elsewhere in the book imply Powell went to Eton soon after the Great War.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;em&gt;Eton College Chronicle&lt;/em&gt; itself, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://archives.etoncollege.com/Filename.ashx?tableName=ta_chronicles&amp;amp;columnName=filename&amp;amp;recordId=1750&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;June 2, 1910 edition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is in reality something not unconnected with the famous Eton&#xA;  Slouch, and is fought tooth and nail by earnest people like Lord&#xA;  Roberts and the Bishop of Birmingham.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=pE_iiLuveb0C&amp;amp;pg=PT105&amp;amp;lpg=PT105&amp;amp;dq=eton%20slouch%20-boot%20-hat%20-madden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Eton&lt;/em&gt;, by Nick Fraser&lt;/a&gt;, an Old Etonian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With its clothes, its slouch, its odd fashions combining with&#xA;  irremovable customs, Eton is frequently depicted as if it were the&#xA;  originator of the British toff style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A Major General criticized the Eton Volunteer Corps' slouching (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31179495&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 1906 newspaper article&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Many of the boys walk in the most extraordinary way. I would advise&#xA;  you to put more life and 'go' into your walk, whether in the street,&#xA;  at Lord's cricket ground, or elsewhere. Instead of slouching, walk as&#xA;  if you thought some thing of yourselves. As a Guards' officer once&#xA;  said to his men: 'Try and walk as if you had a sovereign in your &#xA;  pocket.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.madameulalie.org/bott/resting.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1906 article, by P.G. Wodehouse&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Bourchier’s Eton slouch is the admiration of all who see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have several instances of various classes of people, some of them Etonians themselves, associating a characteristic slouch with Eton &amp;mdash; especially in the early twentieth century (around the same time &lt;em&gt;Peter and Wendy&lt;/em&gt; came out). From this, the very passage quoted in the question can be taken as evidence that the public school in question is Eton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T04:37:22.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5364" CreationDate="2018-02-14T11:57:08.330" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poetry is subjective but I would say that this poem is a pretty accurate description of Paris. The whole poem reeks of betrayal and warning, perception and reality. This poem is the author coming to terms with his expectations of the city and the reality of what it actually was for him. The alluring perfume if the city has faded away and now he grows bitter with distaste towards it. The city by the authors view is slow to progress and he feels as he has been betrayed for his reasons of living there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paris is constructed of  a wheel and spoke city layout. Which makes perfect poetic scenes why in the climax of the poem he would warn others that the city is a lie and that the wheel does not turn; it does not progress. If you look carefully at a map of Paris, or an old map, you can clearly view this structured spoke &amp;amp; wheel layout in the streets and around landmarks. There are many other references to the city in the poem as well. From stick (Eiffel tower), bells (Notre Dame), swamps (Paris was built on a swamp), invade, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul Auster also lived in Paris for a few years in the early 70's. So I believe the spoke &amp;amp; wheel references are to the structure of the city's layout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3049" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T11:57:08.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3215" CreationDate="2018-02-14T14:10:38.487" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a printed version of the Saxon version in the late 1980's. I do not know who changed it or when, but it was around before the &quot;alt-right&quot; came into existence as a recognized thing. Possibly it was changed by a pre-&quot;alt-right&quot; political author with similar views. I like both versions. I was not aware that what I had read was not the original until recently, so it is a challenge to think of it as English instead of Saxon for me. I don't see anything nefarious in it. Poetry, myths, folk tales and even famous literature has always gradually morphed over time as views and language changes. I still like to know the original, but change is unavoidable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3051" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T14:10:38.487" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5683" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:10:12.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:10:12.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:10:12.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5684" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:10:12.680" Score="0" Body="Questions about texts written by the American activist Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 –  1968)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:48.810" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:48.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5685" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:13:07.897" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:13:07.897" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:13:07.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5686" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:13:07.897" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist, playwright and essayist Don DeLillo (born 1936) and his works. His works include the novels 'Libra' (1988) and 'Underworld' (1997)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:16.217" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:16.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5687" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:14:40.423" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:14:40.423" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:14:40.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5688" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:14:40.423" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British singer-songwriter Cat Stevens (born 1948) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:27.480" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:27.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5689" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:17:54.310" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:17:54.310" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:17:54.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5690" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:17:54.310" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American author, vlogger, writer and editor John Green (born 24 August 1977) and his works. His works include the novels 'Looking for Alaska' (2005) and 'The Fault in Our Stars' (2012)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:01.353" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:01.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5691" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:18:53.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:18:53.443" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:18:53.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5692" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:18:53.443" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Fault in Our Stars' (2012) by John Green. Use this tag with the [john-green] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:48.293" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:48.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5693" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:25:10.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:25:10.643" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:25:10.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5694" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:25:10.643" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:34.460" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:34.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5695" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:26:41.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:26:41.253" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:26:41.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5696" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:26:41.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chilean poet, mathematician and physicist Nicanor Parra (1914 – 2018) and his works. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:13.210" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:13.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5697" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:31:20.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:31:20.737" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:31:20.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5698" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:31:20.737" Score="0" Body="Questions about opera, an art form originating in Europe in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining a libretto (text) and a musical score." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:38.797" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:38.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5699" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:32:53.897" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:32:53.897" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:32:53.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5700" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:32:53.897" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English novelist and dramatist Charles Reade (1814 – 1884) and his works. He is best known for the novel 'The Cloister and the Hearth' (1861)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:26.203" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:26.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5701" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:34:29.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:34:29.547" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:34:29.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5702" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:34:29.547" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English science fiction writer John Wyndham (1903 – 1969) and his works. He is best known for the novels 'The Day of the Triffids' (1951) and 'The Midwich Cuckoos' (1957)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:06.847" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:06.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5703" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:35:38.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:35:38.700" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:35:38.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5704" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:35:38.700" Score="0" Body="Questions about John Wyndham's 1957 science fiction novel 'The Midwich Cuckoos'. Use this tag with the [john-wyndham] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:11.610" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:11.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5705" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:37:33.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:37:33.930" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:37:33.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5706" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:37:33.930" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Great Divorce' (1946) by C. S. Lewis. Use this tag with the [c-s-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:38.853" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:38.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5707" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:39:26.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:39:26.617" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:39:26.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5708" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:39:26.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867 – 1957) and her works. She is best known for the series of novels 'Little House on the Prairie'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:53.307" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:53.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5709" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:40:17.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:40:17.940" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:40:17.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5710" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:40:17.940" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of novels 'Little House on the Prairie' by the American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867 – 1957). Use this tag with the [laura-ingalls-wilder] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:44.613" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:44.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5711" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:41:37.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:41:37.197" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:41:37.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5712" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:41:37.197" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:24:38.330" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:24:38.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:43:18.310" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;About 3/4 of the way through Agatha Christie's &lt;em&gt;'And Then There Were None'&lt;/em&gt; (pub c.1940), is this paragraph, describing a book, or maybe a story in some other kind of format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She broke off, went on: &quot;I read a story once - about two judges that came to a  small American town from the Supreme Court.  They administered justice - Absolute  Justice. Because - they didn't come from this world at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious at random, whether this passage described an actual book or short story, or perhaps whether a book or short story was written subsequently on that theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3053" LastEditorUserId="3053" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T00:08:12.077" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T00:08:12.077" Title="Identifying a story described within an Agatha Christie book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5714" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:43:53.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:43:53.090" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:43:53.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5715" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:43:53.090" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1975 children's book 'Danny, the Champion of the World' by Roald Dahl. Use this tag with the [roald-dahl] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:24:53.963" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:24:53.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5716" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:45:18.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:45:18.367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:45:18.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5717" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:45:18.367" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American artist and fiction writer Robert William Chambers (1865 – 1933) and his works. He is best know for the short story collection 'The King in Yellow' (1895)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:20.880" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:20.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5718" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:47:20.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:47:20.593" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:47:20.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5719" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:47:20.593" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist Tom Clancy (1947 – 2013) and his works. His novels include 'The Hunt for Red October' (1984), 'Patriot Games' (1987), 'Clear and Present Danger' (1989) and 'The Sum of All Fears' (1991)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:06.083" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:06.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5720" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:48:40.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:48:40.453" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:48:40.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5721" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:48:40.453" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish novelist and playwright James Matthew Barrie (1860 – 1937) and his works. He is best known as the creator of Peter Pan." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:26:33.713" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:26:33.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5722" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:49:52.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T19:49:52.543" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T19:49:52.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5723" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T19:49:52.543" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up' by J. M. Barrie. The story was published as a play in 1904 and as a novel in 1911. Use this tag with the [j-m-barrie] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:25:21.847" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:25:21.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5724" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-14T20:44:30.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T20:44:30.433" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:44:30.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5725" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-14T20:44:30.433" Score="0" Body="Questions about the collection of poems entitled 'Songs of Experience' by William Blake, published in 1794. These poems are usually published together with the earlier 'Songs of Innocence' from 1789 and then given the title 'Songs of Innocence and of Experience'. Use this tag with the [william-blake] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-14T23:45:03.997" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T23:45:03.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5671" CreationDate="2018-02-14T20:48:27.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/Ado.html#line-3.3.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folger edition&lt;/a&gt; identifies the Watchman lines with various characters, including First and Second Watch, and George Seacoal (whose name is mentioned but not listed in the dramatis personae).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an editorial decision based on their analysis of the style and subject of each line. The lines are identified just as &quot;Watch&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/Bran_F1/129/?work=ado&amp;amp;zoom=800&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say it's not so much about Shakespeare's attention to minor characters as the sloppiness of the original editing. The First Folio was assembled from a variety of not-entirely-reliable (and probably not-entirely-legible) sources. The original performances presumably had definitive answers to these questions, with the author present, but that would be lost over the next couple of decades before the Folio was prepared. (There was a Quarto edition much earlier which was likely used as a key source for the Folio.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can take the Folger editors' word for their decisions, or make your own. Since the play identifies two watchmen by name (Seacole and Oatcake), who are different from the First Watchman (who speaks those names), you've got flexibility to determine for yourself who is who. I don't believe that a close reading would support giving all Watchman lines to be First Watchman, though I haven't done that analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I note that the Folger edition takes one line labeled as Watch 2 and assigns it to Seacole, then gives a different Watch line to Second Watchman. So... yeah.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-02-14T20:48:27.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5215" CreationDate="2018-02-14T22:08:28.760" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: If you don’t like Hugo’s prose, why are you reading &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lengthy disclaimer is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/135/135-h/135-h.htm#link2HCH0109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just one paragraph long&lt;/a&gt;, a drop in the ocean of this novel, so I will take the liberty of quoting it in full, in the 1887 translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Florence_Hapgood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isabel Hapgood&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The author of this book, who regrets the necessity of mentioning himself, has been absent from Paris for many years. Paris has been transformed since he quitted it. A new city has arisen, which is, after a fashion, unknown to him. There is no need for him to say that he loves Paris: Paris is his mind’s natal city. In consequence of demolitions and reconstructions, the Paris of his youth, that Paris which he bore away religiously in his memory, is now a Paris of days gone by. He must be permitted to speak of that Paris as though it still existed. It is possible that when the author conducts his readers to a spot and says, “In such a street there stands such and such a house,” neither street nor house will any longer exist in that locality. Readers may verify the facts if they care to take the trouble. For his own part, he is unacquainted with the new Paris, and he writes with the old Paris before his eyes in an illusion which is precious to him. It is a delight to him to dream that there still lingers behind him something of that which he beheld when he was in his own country, and that all has not vanished. So long as you go and come in your native land, you imagine that those streets are a matter of indifference to you; that those windows, those roofs, and those doors are nothing to you; that those walls are strangers to you; that those trees are merely the first encountered haphazard; that those houses, which you do not enter, are useless to you; that the pavements which you tread are merely stones. Later on, when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements. All those places which you no longer behold, which you may never behold again, perchance, and whose memory you have cherished, take on a melancholy charm, recur to your mind with the melancholy of an apparition, make the holy land visible to you, and are, so to speak, the very form of France, and you love them; and you call them up as they are, as they were, and you persist in this, and you will submit to no change: for you are attached to the figure of your fatherland as to the face of your mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People often refer to Hugo’s novelistic essays as ‘digressions’, but is this really fair? Later in the novel, Hugo writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Where the subject is not lost sight of, there is no digression&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So let’s call them ‘parentheses’ instead. This particular parenthesis has multiple effects, of which I will limit myself to five.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it is delightful to read. The prose is almost poetic in places, and there are striking turns of phrase such as the paradox “that you entered those houses which you never entered”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it controls the pace of the story. The parenthesis appears at the start of chapter I of book V of volume II. At the end of book IV Valjean suspected that Javert was close to tracking him down at his lodgings at the Gorbeau house, and took flight with Cosette. It is a tense moment in the plot: the reader is in suspense as to how close Javert has come to a capture, and whether and how Valjean will escape the pursuit. By placing a parenthesis at this point in the text, Hugo pauses the story and prolongs the suspense, making the reader stop and consider what has happened, turning a tense moment into a cliffhanger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This tactic, of inserting a parenthesis at a tense point in the narrative to heighten the dramatic effect, is one that Hugo uses several times in &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;. For example, at the end of book V Valjean has escaped Javert by climbing over the wall of the convent in the Rue Petit-Picpus, but does not yet know whether he and Cosette will be welcome there. This is followed by two lengthy parentheses: book VI covering the history of the Rue Petit-Picpus, and book VII (itself called “Parenthesis”) analyzing the relation of the convent to French society. Only in book VIII does Hugo return to the drama, so for nineteen chapters the reader has been on tenterhooks about the fate of Valjean and Cosette.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, it adds to the verisimilitude of the narrative. By raising the possibility that the descriptions might no longer be correct, Hugo implies, without coming out and saying so, that they are correct with respect to the time in which the novel is set. If we believe that the geography is accurate, then we might find it easier to believe in the events of the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, it reminds us of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo#Political_life_and_exile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugo’s exile&lt;/a&gt;. The reason why Hugo’s knowledge of the streets of Paris was not up to date was because he had fled France in 1851 after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat_of_1851&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coup d’état&lt;/a&gt; of Louis Napoléon. Although the emperor promulgated a general amnesty in 1859, Hugo chose not to return as that would have meant subjecting his writings to the censorship of the Second Empire. &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1862, while Hugo was living in Guernsey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fifth, it’s a touching expression of Hugo’s feelings of homesickness. When he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Later on, when you are no longer there, you perceive that the streets are dear to you; that you miss those roofs, those doors; and that those walls are necessary to you, those trees are well beloved by you; that you entered those houses which you never entered, every day, and that you have left a part of your heart, of your blood, of your soul, in those pavements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who can doubt that the &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; of this passage is Hugo himself, sitting in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauteville_House#/media/File:Hauteville_House_Lookout.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;study&lt;/a&gt; in Hauteville House in St Peter Port, looking out over the water to France, and remembering his former home in Paris?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-15T09:40:29.880" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T09:40:29.880" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5731" CreationDate="2018-02-15T00:42:06.590" Score="5" ViewCount="6291" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's very short poem &quot;The Sick Rose&quot;, from his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, runs as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O rose, thou art sick!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     The invisible worm,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That flies in the night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     In the howling storm,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has found out thy bed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Of crimson joy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And his dark secret love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Does thy life destroy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a surface meaning here about a rose being destroyed by parasites in the flowerbed (although I don't know what kind of worms &quot;fl[y] in the night, In the howling storm&quot; - does this line too have deeper significance, beyond specifying some particular members of the animal kingdom?) But the second verse at least has strong sexual undertones: the predator that destroys life with &quot;his dark secret love&quot; in &quot;thy bed [of] joy&quot; sounds a lot like a rapist or an incubus. I'm not sure what the rose symbolises in this reading of the poem though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: &lt;strong&gt;what does this poem really mean?&lt;/strong&gt; I feel like I'm seeing half of the direct surface reading and half of the deeper hidden meaning, but not fully grasping either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T19:18:43.687" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T01:22:20.083" Title="What is the meaning of Blake's poem &quot;The Sick Rose&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5678" CreationDate="2018-02-15T10:11:43.973" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The Novel (1911)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 14 of Peter Pan and Wendy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it, but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his mind: why do they find Smee lovable? He pursued the problem like the sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made him so? A terrible answer suddenly presented itself—&amp;quot;Good form?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had the bo'sun good form without knowing it, which is the best form of all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He remembered that you have to prove you don't know you have it before you are eligible for Pop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#Prefects&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pop is an Eton social club&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Play (1904)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for confirmation outside the novel (1911) the original text  was actually the play (1904) where Hook's final words are (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incredible boy has apparently forgotten the recent doings, and is sitting&#xA;on  a  barrel  playing  upon  his  pipes.  This  may  surprise  others  but  does  not  surprise HOOK. Lifting a blunderbuss he strikes forlornly not at the boy but at the barrel, which is hurled across the  deck. PETER remains  sitting  in  the  air  still  playing  upon  his  pipes.  At  this  sight  the  great heart of HOOK breaks. That not wholly unheroic figure climbs the bulwarks murmuring &lt;strong&gt;'Floreat Etona,'&lt;/strong&gt; and  prostrates  himself  into  the  water,  where  the  crocodile  is  waiting for  him  open mouthed. HOOK knows the purpose of this yawning cavity, but after what he has gone through he enters it like one greeting a friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where 'Floreat Etona' (may Eton Flourish) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is the motto of Eton College&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A talk at Eton College (1927) entitled &amp;quot;Captain Hook at Eton&amp;quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further Barrie gave a &lt;a href=&quot;http://monstaah.angelfire.com/woldnewtonbeyond/captain-hook-at-eton.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;talk at Eton college&lt;/a&gt; in 1927 entitled &amp;quot;Captain Hook at Eton&amp;quot; where he opens with the words (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This talk with you arises out of a sort of challenge from the Provost. I was here this year on June 4, and in a speech at luncheon the Provost challenged me to disprove this terrible indictment, “James Hook, the pirate captain, was a great Etonian but not a good one.” Now in my opinion &lt;strong&gt;Hook was a good Etonian though not a great one&lt;/strong&gt;, and it is my more or less passionate desire to persuade you of this—to have Hook, so to speak, set up for good—that brings me here this afternoon in spite of my better judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1571" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T10:11:43.973" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5728" CreationDate="2018-02-15T14:32:47.657" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There is no one answer: a key part of this poem's appeal is its ambiguity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, it seems a poetic description of a rose flower sickening and dying due to a parasitic infection. However, the opening lines make it clear it should not be read literally: no &quot;worm&quot; is &quot;invisible&quot;, nor does it &quot;fly&quot;. So how can we interpret the metaphor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, what is a &quot;worm&quot;? It could be a parasite or disease, sure, but it's also another word for a snake. The rose in its bed might represent the state of nature, the garden of Eden. In this interpretation, it is a poem about how &quot;secret love&quot; made &quot;sick&quot; and &quot;destroy&quot;[ed] the &quot;rose&quot; of humanity's state of grace in the Biblical narrative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Bible, we also learn of demons which tempt humanity into further sin in order to ensnare their souls. According to medieval legend, a particular class of demon is the incubus or succubus which visits sleeping victims, offering to slake their lustful appetites. In this second interpretation, the &quot;worm&quot; is a symbol of corruption. Like a demon it &quot;flies in the night&quot; and shares its &quot;dark secret love&quot; with the mortal &quot;rose&quot; which it wishes to &quot;destroy&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forbidden fruit of Eden and the demonic temptations are, of course, sex. This is the third interpretation. The &quot;bed&quot; here is one of sexual pleasure, as represented by the &quot;crimson joy&quot; of the rose and the &quot;howling storm&quot; of orgasm. Red is a colour associated with passion and with life. Worms, however, are both phallic in form - hinting at the potential of violence - and a symbol of death. Here, the &quot;rose&quot; of passion is &quot;sick&quot; with the knowledge of mortality and ageing which gradually eat away at beauty and sexual pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourth, we can interpret the poem as one about relationships in a less directly sexual manner. The &quot;worm&quot; that &quot;flies by night&quot; is suggestive of the &quot;invisible&quot; fear and negativity we sometimes experience during the night, especially during a &quot;howling storm&quot;. It's a sad but realistic way for poisonous thoughts to enter a relationship, perhaps the relationship to the person you share your &quot;bed&quot; with, your &quot;rose&quot;, poisonous thoughts which might come to &quot;destroy&quot; that love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sticking with emotion, a fifth interpretation is offered via another Blake poem in the same volume, &lt;em&gt;A Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt;. This is a much less metaphorical work that tells a fairly straightforward story about how nurturing anger can lead to brutal, even deadly consequences. Here the &quot;howling storm&quot; is emotional turmoil and the &quot;worm&quot; the seed of bitterness or anger which slowly &quot;destroy&quot;[s] the &quot;rose&quot; of a sound and positive personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most striking things about this poem is that almost all these interpretations are interlinked. Biblical sin is often sexual, sex combines with life and death in an endless cycle, society shames sexual misconduct leading to shame and anger. This deep interlinking of themes makes the poem almost impossible to pin down to a single interpretation. Its strength is that by hinting vaguely about sex and relationships, it retains the potential to offer wisdom across that whole aspect of the human experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T14:32:47.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T15:34:17.967" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to write a critical commentary for the passage near the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6124/6124-h/6124-h.htm#link2H_4_0017&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter XV&lt;/a&gt;) where she has her first 'Fit'. I've been trying to search for secondary criticism that discusses the instances where Pamela addresses letters only to her mother. Is there a reason she does this? It is her father who responds to the letters, so why would she set out to write just to her mother on certain occasions. I can't seem to find a pattern, can anyone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3059" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:46:35.837" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T15:46:35.837" Title="Richardson's Pamela: Letters addressed only to her mother" Tags="&lt;pamela&gt;&lt;samuel-richardson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5551" CreationDate="2018-02-15T19:58:50.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He was likely referring primarily to Hank Rearden (and likely secondarily to Eddie Willers as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francisco was already well aware that Dagny was having an affair with Hank Rearden due to his earlier confrontation with Hank in Dagny's apartment. (It's also possible that he would've heard about it from John Galt, who also knew about the affair, but this seems less likely). Given the fact that both him and Hank Rearden were heavily involved in the search (and the fact that Hank Rearden had publicly offered $100,000 - the equivalent of almost $900,000 in 2018 dollars - for anyone who could help locate the site of the wreckage of her plane), he was presumably well aware of how much Dagny meant to Hank and would've known that Hank felt like he did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Eddie Willers had recently revealed that he had feelings for Dagny too, and he was a longtime friend to both Dagny and Francisco, so it seems likely that he was referring to both. Presumably, Hank would've been at the forefront of his mind, though, given his involvement in the search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-15T19:58:50.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5675" CreationDate="2018-02-15T21:35:42.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am inclined to say that they are the same book, just produced under different publishers.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;amp;field-keywords=A%20Game%20of%20Thrones.%2020th%20Anniversary%20Illustrated%20Edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching&lt;/a&gt; on Amazon (in the United States) for &quot;A Game of Thrones: 20th Anniversary Illustrated Edition&quot;. I am presented with the two different covers that your searches also provided. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ZzGU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1ZzGU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;agot amazon search&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will notice that the Harper cover is shown second even though it is an exact title match while the Bantam &quot;original&quot; edition is listed shown first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digging a bit deeper the Harper edition is listed as one of seventy-one other formats for &lt;em&gt;A Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt;, while the Bantam is listed as its own work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rh6Ba.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rh6Ba.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;agot edition list&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond that the Bantam edition shows a preview with some of the illustrations, while the Harper edition preview reverts back to a standard preview. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5675/difference-between-editions-of-a-game-of-thrones-from-2016/5734#comment11075_5675&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;, the blurb on the German Amazon site for the Harper edition and on American Amazon for the Bantam are almost an exact match&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Published in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of George R. R. Martin's landmark series, this lavishly illustrated special edition of A Game of Thrones-with gorgeous full-page illustrations in every chapter-revitalizes the fantasy masterpiece that became a cultural phenomenon. [German Amazon]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Published in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of George R. R. Martin’s landmark series, this lavishly illustrated special edition of A Game of Thrones—featuring gorgeous full-page artwork as well as black-and-white illustrations in every chapter—revitalizes the fantasy masterpiece that became a cultural phenomenon. [American Amazon]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Beyond that I see no reason why a book by the same author, same foreword, same maps, same illustrator, and same number of pages would differ between publishers beyond the cover.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2018-02-16T13:04:15.777" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T13:04:15.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-15T23:44:10.570" Score="4" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is Sartre's metaphor meaning in &lt;em&gt;the Words&lt;/em&gt; when saying :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;The  human race  became  a  small  committee  surrounded  by affectionate  animals.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is when he begins to become familiar with all the writers of his grandfather's library. He tells us about his child perception of their duties : they had to write masterpieces as far as they were writers. Why should anyone praise them as far as they are only doing their duties, he asks as a child. As a narrator, now an adult, he acknowledges he got it all wrong about them. Are the small comitee the writers and the commoners the affectionate animals ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He uses lots of references in this part of the book. He also talks about Charles V &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;when  I  was  told  that  Charles  V  had  picked  up Titian's  brush,  I  was  not  at  all surprised. What of  it ?  That  was  what  princes  were  made  for.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which I don't get neither ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3043" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T16:38:24.727" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T16:38:24.727" Title="Why did &quot;the human race became a small committee surrounded by affectionate animals&quot; for Sartre in the Words?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jean-paul-sartre&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5820" CreationDate="2018-02-16T06:07:27.737" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point, Dagny Taggart confronts Francisco d'Anconia about what she believed to be his corruption. As part of that, they had the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you... know Ellis Wyatt?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Sure.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Do you know what this might do to him?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes. He's the one who's going to be wiped out next.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Do you... find that... amusing?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Much more amusing than the ruin of the Mexican planners.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Francisco knew that Ellis Wyatt would presumably join the Strike (which he did). With that said, though, in what sense did he consider this amusing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T12:21:49.117" Title="Why was Francisco d'Anconia amused by Ellis Wyatt's imminent demise?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5739" CreationDate="2018-02-16T10:05:07.623" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading an interesting snippet somewhere about this story of a submarine. It gets entangled in some time loop and proceeds to fall/descend into the ocean at a constant rate. There was some mention of the crew, and how they come to terms with their situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find it on Google multiple times, but not much luck. Anyone heard of a similar story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3064" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T11:39:32.583" Title="Story about a free falling submarine" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5738" CreationDate="2018-02-16T11:39:32.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This does not quite match the details in the post (in particular, there is no ‘time loop’), but could this be &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1250057795&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2014) by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adamroberts.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adam Roberts&lt;/a&gt;? In this fantasia on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jules Verne&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/164/164-h/164-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the French submarine &lt;em&gt;Plongeur&lt;/em&gt; suffers a malfunction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vanes on the exterior of the vessel tilted, and more air was pumped from the main tanks; at the same time, the four smaller orientational tanks shifted ballast between them. The &lt;em&gt;Plongeur&lt;/em&gt; tilted forward and resumed its descent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost at once, disaster struck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a cacophonous report, like a cannon firing. The whole vessel shook and trembled. An alarm sounded a flute-like, almost musical noise. The angle of the deck did not increase, but the boat began to fall much faster. Nobody on the bridge needed to look at the suddenly spinning numbers of the depth gauge—everybody registered the suddenly accelerating descent in their guts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The depth gauge spins deeper and deeper, past one hundred thousand metres, far beyond the deepest oceanic trench. The &lt;em&gt;Plongeur&lt;/em&gt; should have been crushed by the pressure, but somehow it survives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So, we must address the possibility that ours is … is no longer a terrestrial location. […] I do not preten to be able to explain how the transition occurred—or where we now find ourselves. But I am emboldened to go further in my speculations. […] I suggest we have slipped from our material dimension into another. […] Imagine that we have passed through some … portal. Imagine that we have moved from the finite Atlantic into an infinite ocean. A body of water literally without limit.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel goes to describe the wonders and horrors of this infinite ocean, and the emotional and intellectual response of the crew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can see some of the author’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20111109023139/http://europrogovision.blogspot.com/2011/08/what-would-pressure-be-inside-infinite.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;early thoughts on this novel&lt;/a&gt; on his blog.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T11:39:32.583" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5572" CreationDate="2018-02-16T16:21:43.417" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly some inspiration came from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Garter#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Order of the Garter&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During a general &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/The_Kingsguard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview&lt;/a&gt; regarding question on the Kingsguard he mentioned the Knights of the Garter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Institutions like the Kingsguard change over time. The original Knights of the Garter were warriors all, the strongest, bravest, deadliest men of their time, with an average age under thirty. The present Knights of the Garter are octogenarians, and their parades are processions of wheelchairs and walkers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most direct comparison I can see is that the Order was formed to help Edward III pursue his claim on the French throne. The Kingsguard helped Aegon I keep his throne... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T16:21:43.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3738" CreationDate="2018-02-16T16:49:03.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ygritte wants to know how special she is.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon had just gone on and on about how much he loved her and what he loved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know I want you,&amp;quot; he heard himself say, all his vows and all his honor forgotten. She stood before him naked as her name day, and he was as hard as the rock around them. He had been in her half a hundred times by now, but always beneath the furs, with others all around them. He had never seen how beautiful she was. Her legs were skinny but well muscled, the hair at the juncture of her thighs a brighter red than that on her head. Does that make it even luckier? He pulled her close. &amp;quot;I love the smell of you,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I love your red hair. I love your mouth, and the way you kiss me. I love your smile. I love your teats.&amp;quot; He kissed them, one and then the other. &amp;quot;I love your skinny legs, and what's between them.&amp;quot; He knelt to kiss her there, lightly on her mound at first, but Ygritte moved her legs apart a little, and he saw the pink inside and kissed that as well, and tasted her. She gave a little gasp. &amp;quot;If you love me all so much, why are you still dressed?&amp;quot; she whispered. &amp;quot;You know nothing, Jon Snow. Noth—oh. Oh. OHHH.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Storm of Swords - Jon III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this talking and complimenting is not something Ygritte is used to. In he above passage it confirms that they have laid together many times, but never been fully nude together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, her asking if this was common in the South is her way of determining if Jon was treating her as he would &amp;quot;a Lady&amp;quot;. If he answers yes, she is special because Jon thinks of her in the same way he does a Lady. If not, she might be even &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; special as Jon has done something he isn't used to doing and it was very pleasurable to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either way Ygritte has learned something about Jon and the way he feels about her. In the end she ends up learning more than she expected...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T16:49:03.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3418" CreationDate="2018-02-16T20:40:33.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mostly we have evidence from symbolism used from different points of view. None of this is explicitly confirmed, but where there is smoke there is Fire and Blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The Mummer's Dragon&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daenerys has a vision in the House of the Undying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then phantoms shivered through the murk, images in indigo. Viserys screamed as the molten gold ran down his cheeks and filled his mouth. A tall lord with copper skin and silver-gold hair stood beneath the banner of a fiery stallion, a burning city behind him. Rubies flew like drops of blood from the chest of a dying prince, and he sank to his knees in the water and with his last breath murmured a woman's name. . . . mother of dragons, daughter of death . . . Glowing like sunset, a red sword was raised in the hand of a blue-eyed king who cast no shadow. &lt;strong&gt;A cloth dragon swayed on poles amidst a cheering crowd.&lt;/strong&gt; From a smoking tower, a great stone beast took wing, breathing shadow fire. . . . mother of dragons, slayer of lies . . . Her silver was trotting through the grass, to a darkling stream beneath a sea of stars. A corpse stood at the prow of a ship, eyes bright in his dead face, grey lips smiling sadly. A blue flower grew from a chink in a wall of ice, and filled the air with sweetness. . . . mother of dragons, bride of fire . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clash of Kings - Daenerys IV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few visions are straightforward, such as Viserys's death (by name) and Rhaegar's death (rubies from a dying prince), but the rest are open to much speculation. The dragon on poles is what is important to the story of fAegon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on in Meereen, &lt;a href=&quot;http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Quaithe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quaithe&lt;/a&gt; appears to Daenerys in a vision/dream and warns her of this mummer's dragon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No. Hear me, Daenerys Targaryen. The glass candles are burning. Soon comes the pale mare, and after her the others. Kraken and dark flame, lion and griffin, the sun's son and the mummer's dragon. Trust none of them. Remember the Undying. Beware the perfumed seneschal.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons - Daenerys II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the symbols are much more clear. Kraken and Dark Flame are Victarion and Moqorro. Lion and Griffin are Tyrion and Jon Connington. The sun's son is Quentyn Martell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the mummer's dragon... so a dragon, but a fake dragon... Who do we know that is claiming to be a Targaryen without much evidence?  Who do we know was a mummer in his earlier life? &lt;strong&gt;All signs point to fAegon.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Illyrio's Wife and the Golden Company&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the plan to put fAegon on the throne is to win the support of the Golden Company which is Illyrio's half of the plot. The Blackfyre sigil is a black dragon on a red field, the reverse of the Targaryen sigil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Golden_Company&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Company&lt;/a&gt; is its own story, but to make a long story short, they were formed by &lt;a href=&quot;http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Aegor_Rivers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aegor &amp;quot;Bittersteel&amp;quot; Rivers&lt;/a&gt;, who fled Westeros after the first Blackfyre Rebellion. They were known for never breaking a contract, which they have done to support fAegon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Myr.&amp;quot; Illyrio smirked. &amp;quot;Contracts can be broken.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There is more coin in cheese than I knew,&amp;quot; said Tyrion. &amp;quot;How did you accomplish that?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magister waggled his fat fingers. &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Some contracts are writ in ink, and some in blood. I say no more.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons - Tyrion II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I admire your powers of persuasion,&amp;quot; Tyrion told Illyrio. &amp;quot;How did you convince the Golden Company to take up the cause of our sweet queen when they have spent so much of their history fighting against the Targaryens?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Illyrio brushed away the objection as if it were a fly. &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Black or red, a dragon is still a dragon.&lt;/strong&gt; When Maelys the Monstrous died upon the Stepstones, it was &lt;strong&gt;the end of the male line of House Blackfyre&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot; The cheesemonger smiled through his forked beard. &amp;quot;And Daenerys will give the exiles what Bittersteel and the Blackfyres never could. She will take them home.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These quote show that The Golden Company is bound to the Blackfyres by blood (&amp;quot;Beneath the gold, Bittersteel.&amp;quot;), but that they will also support a Targaryen because any dragon is better than no dragon. However, this seems dubious as the Golden Company never came to the aid of Aerys during Robert's Rebellion nor did they aid Viserys when he sought their help (&amp;quot;They ate his food and heard his pleas and laughed at him.&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is interesting is that Illyrio mentions it was the end of the male line, specifically the male line. Why might that be important, take a look at the description of his wife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Illyrio thrust his right hand up his left sleeve and drew out a silver locket. Inside was a painted likeness of a woman with &lt;strong&gt;big blue eyes and pale golden hair streaked by silver.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Serra. I found her in a Lysene pillow house and brought her home to warm my bed, but in the end I wed her. Me, whose first wife had been a cousin of the Prince of Pentos. The palace gates were closed to me thereafter, but I did not care. The price was small enough, for Serra.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we know Targaryens are known for their silver hair, and since Blackfyres are a bastard branch they would likely share the same traits.  When questioned by Tyrion about his motives Illyrio responds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I told you, my little friend, not all that a man does is done for gain. Believe as you wish, but even fat old fools like me have friends, and &lt;strong&gt;debts of affection to repay.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds like fAegon could be Serra's son (possibly Illyrio's as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Promise me, &lt;s&gt;Ned&lt;/s&gt; Illyrio!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-17T00:03:24.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="692" CreationDate="2018-02-16T21:26:50.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two other answers have shown the directly George denies the connection, but  ice dragons do (might) exist in Planetos...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of all the queer and fabulous denizens of the Shivering Sea, however, the greatest are the ice dragons&lt;/strong&gt;. These colossal beasts, many times larger than the dragons of Valyria, are said to be made of living ice, with eyes of pale blue crystal and vast translucent wings through which the moon and stars can be glimpsed as they wheel across the sky. Whereas common dragons (if any dragon can truly be said to be common) breathe flame, ice dragons supposedly breathe cold, a chill so terrible that it can freeze a man solid in half a heartbeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sailors from half a hundred nations have glimpsed these great beasts over the centuries, so mayhaps there is some truth behind the tales. Archmaester Margate has suggested that many legends of the north—freezing mists, ice ships, Cannibal Bay, and the like—can be explained as distorted reports of ice-dragon activity. Though an amusing notion, and not without a certain elegance, this remains the purest conjecture. As ice dragons supposedly melt when slain, &lt;strong&gt;no actual proof of their existence has ever been found.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World of Ice and Fire - Beyond the Free Cities: The Shivering Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George also published a series of short stories set in what is known as the &amp;quot;Thousand Worlds&amp;quot;. So while he says the two works are not the same world, they still might be connected... Alas, he has shot down this theory too...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Q:] &lt;em&gt;Asimov and Heinlein, late in life, both seemed to feel the urge to merge all of their books and stories into one huge continuity.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A:] So far I do not feel the urge. &lt;strong&gt;No, Westeros is not one of the Thousand Worlds.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://grrm.livejournal.com/464984.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Not a Blog, &amp;quot;Last Year (Writing, Editing, Producing)&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess we have to accept that at most the ice dragons in &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; are a homage to &lt;em&gt;The Ice Dragon&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T12:45:21.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="407" CreationDate="2018-02-16T21:44:16.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Tyrion tells us in his own response to Robb...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It means he is not welcome and as a sign disrespect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Any man of the Night's Watch,&amp;quot; the dwarf repeated, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;but not me,&lt;/strong&gt; do I take your meaning, boy?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robb even goes as far as to point the sword directly at Tyrion making the threat perfectly clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Robb stood and pointed at the little man with his sword.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;I am the lord here while my mother and father are away, Lannister. I am not your boy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;If you are a lord, you might learn a lord's courtesy&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; the little man replied, ignoring the sword point in his face. &amp;quot;Your bastard brother has all your father's graces, it would seem.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tyrion in well aware of what is going on even takes a small verbal jab at Robb to which Robb jabs right back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Jon,&amp;quot; Bran gasped out from Hodor's arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dwarf turned to look at him. &amp;quot;So it is true, the boy lives. I could scarce believe it. &lt;strong&gt;You Starks are hard to kill.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;You Lannisters had best remember that&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; Robb said, lowering his sword. &amp;quot;Hodor, bring my brother here.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not until after Tyrion presents Bran with the special saddle does Robb soften.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robb Stark finally sheathed his sword. &amp;quot;I … I may have been hasty with you,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You've done Bran a kindness, and, well …&amp;quot; Robb composed himself with an effort. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The hospitality of Winterfell is yours if you wish it&lt;/strong&gt;, Lannister.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Tyrion has already had enough of Robb and leaves anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Spare me your false courtesies, boy&lt;/strong&gt;. You do not love me and you do not want me here. I saw an inn outside your walls, in the winter town. I'll find a bed there, and both of us will sleep easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all confirmed directly by George R. R. Martin at an event with fans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another subject was guest rights. He mentioned the time the Tyrion came to Winterfell and Robb met him with bare steel across his lap. That meant that there was no guest rights for Tyrion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/1272/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;So Spake Martin, ARCHON MEETING, October 5, 2001&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-16T21:44:16.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T01:02:15.527" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently finished reading &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, and despite my great enjoyment of most of the story, I felt let down by the ending. It was so ... unsatisfying ... to resolve all the conflict by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; taking advantage of a loophole in the celestial laws which enabled the foreign Oyeresu to act more directly than had been thought possible, and sending them to Belbury to slaughter everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, it felt as though, in the final analysis, Ransom's 'Round Table' crew (the Dimbles, the Dennistons, Mr McPhee, Miss Ironwood, and the rest) contributed nothing to the victory. Jane did, because her visions helped to give them the knowledge they needed of the N.I.C.E.'s activities, but all the rest seem like pointless bit characters, rather than (as I'd hoped) each one contributing something indispensable and all of them working together to defeat the N.I.C.E. &lt;strong&gt;What was the point of Ransom gathering all those comrades if they never actually contributed anything to the struggle?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T23:31:11.353" Title="Do the Round Table crew in &quot;That Hideous Strength&quot; actually contribute anything to events?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-17T22:54:20.990" Score="2" ViewCount="937" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently listening to the One Voice Children's Choir's cover of &quot;This Is Me&quot; by Keala Settle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtube.com/watch?v=uhzi7Shi2H0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtube.com/watch?v=uhzi7Shi2H0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the chorus goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the sharpest words wanna cut me down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm gonna send a flood, gonna drown them out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am brave, I am bruised&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am who I'm meant to be, this is me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Send a flood of... what? What does 'I'm gonna send a flood' mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T14:19:37.087" Title="What does 'gonna send a flood' mean in &quot;This Is Me&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;keala-settle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5747" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:10:39.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:10:39.530" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:10:39.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5748" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:10:39.530" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Measure for Measure', written in 1603 or 1604 by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:37:10.930" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:37:10.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5749" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5750" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Pearl, a 1947 novella by the US author John Steinbeck. Use this tag with the [john-steinbeck] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:35:12.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5751" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5752" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" Score="0" Body="For questions about Karen Joy Fowler's fourth novel *Wit's End*, published in 2008. Use with the [karen-joy-fowler] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T00:48:31.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-18T00:56:43.560" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;I'd like to request no spoilers beyond the start of the 6th novel.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very end of the 4th S&amp;amp;W novel, Lawrence says &amp;quot;I like you&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet Lawrence embraced Holo. And then—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I like you.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He kissed her right cheek ever so lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Love is never once used by Lawrence toward Holo so far in the story. I even ran the search function to check the PDF, I'm certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, in the next book, at the very start, on the same day that the previous novel left off, Holo teases Lawrence about saying &amp;quot;I love you&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was so happy, yes—happy that you said you loved me. So please—&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best I can tell, the author meant to write &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; in the previous novel, or else my PDF copy is simply wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the explanation behind this? I'm afraid to do a Google search on the topic since I'm only starting the 6th novel and searching &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; in regards to a romance that I'm 6 of 17 books through is just begging to run into all sorts of spoilers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3067" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T22:30:14.613" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T22:30:14.613" Title="At the start of 6th Spice and Wolf light novel, what's up with the discrepancy between &quot;like&quot; and &quot;love&quot;?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;spice-and-wolf&gt;&lt;isuna-hasekura&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5625" CreationDate="2018-02-18T08:58:42.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The majority of the characters in the &quot;Little House&quot; books were real people.  The majority of the places described in these books were real places.  There was, however, artistic license (for lack of better term) used for the storytelling in these books.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to state that I was fortunate enough to attend a guided tour of &lt;a href=&quot;http://discoverlaura.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Laura Ingalls Wilder Historical Society&lt;/a&gt; in De Smet, South Dakota approximately 10 years ago.  The tour guide explained to the group that some of the places that we were being shown and the people that we were learning about were actual people and places that were depicted in her books.  However, due to the harsh reality of homesteading life, the majority of the storytelling in her books was fictionalized. (as described by my tour guide)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laura Ingalls Wilder began writing her memoir (that would later be an autobiography titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Autobiography:_Pioneer_Girl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pioneer Girl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) in 1930 at the encouragement of her daughter due to financial difficulties the family was facing because of the stock market crash of 1929.  The memoirs were originally intended for a novel targeting an adult audience, but were edited and revised and essentially marketed as fictional children's books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/25/laura-ingalls-wilder-memoir-little-house-prairie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; published in 2014 by The Guardian quotes Wilder biographer and publishing director:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wilder's fiction, her autobiography, and her real childhood as she&#xA;  lived it are three distinct things,&lt;/strong&gt; but they are all closely&#xA;  intertwined, and readers will enjoy seeing how they reflect one&#xA;  another. Even more interesting, though, are the places where one story&#xA;  differs from another, and Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Edition explores&#xA;  these differences too,&quot; said Nancy Koupal, the publisher's director.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The majority of the characters in her books are real.  Her mother, father, sisters, Reverend Alden and Mr. Edwards.  However, their character is usually beyond reproach in her books.  The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-laura-ingalls-wilder-20141130-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memoirs&lt;/a&gt; of Ms. Wilder seem to depict certain characters differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the revelations are startling: a wealthy neighbor asks to&#xA;  adopt 10-year old Laura, a sign of the Ingalls family's severe&#xA;  financial struggles; at one point, &lt;strong&gt;Pa threatens to skip town without&#xA;  paying rent; the real-life Rev. Alden, saintly in the books, turns out&#xA;  to be &quot;a pious fraud and a cheat.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain stories that &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; completely true and not overstated.  One example is Laura's sister, Mary going blind.  As described in one of the books of the series, &lt;em&gt;By the Shores of Silver Lake&lt;/em&gt;, Laura attributes Mary's blindness to scarlet fever.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ingalls&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Ingalls&lt;/a&gt; did actually go blind due to what they thought at the time was scarlet fever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be stated that there has been much controversy surrounding the authorship of the &quot;Little House&quot; books.  Many accuse Ms. Wilder's daughter, Rose Wilder Lane of being the ghostwriter of her mother's books.  This is due to the correspondence between mother and daughter during the time the book(s) were being written as well as Ms. Lane being a respected author herself (though not nearly as celebrated as her mother).  This led mother and daughter to have several conflicts.  However,  Ms. Lane did the editing and &quot;embellishments&quot; using her mother's stories as sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wilder’s writing was both uniquely her own and a product of&#xA;  collaboration with her daughter. Wilder provided a base of&#xA;  plainspoken language and deeply felt storytelling; Lane embellished,&#xA;  shaped and “heightened the drama.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter had their conflicts, they were both concerned with making money on the books.  This is what caused the stories to be &quot;embellished&quot; or &quot;dramatized&quot; to appeal to a younger audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first book in the “Little House” series began as a memoir that&#xA;  Wilder called “Pioneer Girl.” With revisions, subtractions and&#xA;  additions, Wilder and Lane worked through an obstacle course of&#xA;  reversed decisions by prospective publishers, as well as a shift in&#xA;  the target audience, from adults to children. “Little House in the Big&#xA;  Woods” crossed the finish line of publication in 1932, as “juvenile”&#xA;  literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Little House&quot; series of books depict real people, places and &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; real stories when pertaining to major life events.  For the most part, the books are embellished and/or dramatized versions of Laura Ingalls Wilder's memoirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:  There was also a popular and long-running television series based on the &quot;Little House&quot; books titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_House_on_the_Prairie_(TV_series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little House on the Prairie&lt;/a&gt; that aired from 1974 - 1982.  This series featured characters and places from the book series, but took drastic creative liberty with the story telling (as should be expected from a television show).  This is just another example of the real people from Laura Ingalls Wilder's stories being exaggerated for dramatic purposes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="18" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T08:58:42.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5756" CreationDate="2018-02-18T12:41:39.460" Score="8" ViewCount="444" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read a story by Leonid Andreyev many years ago. I would like to read it again but I don't know where / how to find it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about a guy that one day decides to kill his friend. His friend was a writer as far as I remember. He decides that in order to get away with the murder he would start to act a bit crazy, and once the people in his and the friend's circle started to think something was wrong with him, he would commit the murder. The system would lock him in a asylum for a while and then he would pretend to get better and get out. He puts the plan into motion and succeeds. However, after he is locked in the asylum, he starts to doubt whether he was a sane person pretending to be crazy, or he had been crazy all along, thinking he was sane pretending to be crazy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing line of the story refers to the same thing, that no one could tell for sure whether he was crazy or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the title, names or other details, but the story is rather unique. Can anybody help me with the title of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3068" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-18T12:57:53.457" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T13:38:09.473" Title="Leonid Andreyev novel about man pretending to be crazy in order to get away with murder" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leonid-andreyev&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5755" CreationDate="2018-02-18T13:38:09.473" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This story was surprisingly difficult to find: partly because Andreyev apparently wrote quite a number of stories about murderers and/or lunatic asylums, partly because there are so many different English translations of the title of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dilemma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this story&lt;/a&gt;, written in 1902 and entitled &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Мысль&quot; (&quot;Mysl&quot;)&lt;/strong&gt; in the original Russian - a title which has been variously translated as &quot;Thought&quot;, &quot;Mind&quot;, &quot;Reason&quot;, &quot;A Thought&quot;, or &quot;A Dilemma&quot;. From the foreword:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like Hamlet, our hero is &quot;sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;&quot; like him, too, he feigns insanity to carry out his subtle schemings, yet here is the vital difference: in spite of his modernity, Dr. Kerzhentseff harks back to the primitive for the motive of his murder. Practically he seeks revenge, while Shakespeare's hero is unquestionably the more noble (and more lovable), for he seeks justice itself. But that is another hair-splitting distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dr. Kerzhentseff's forceful logic confounds not only himself, but the experts, who inevitably are bound to disagree as to the prisoner's mental status, and the big question to the end remains unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And some relevant excerpts from the text of the story itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His plan to pretend to be mad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rôle of a madman did not strike me as being very difficult of enactment. Some of the necessary directions I got from books; others I had to obtain—like any actor worthy of the name—through my own creative faculty; the rest had to be left to be recreated by the public itself, whose emotions had been developed through constant contact with books and the theatre, where, by means of two or three vague contours, it had been taught to recreate live types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The murder itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hand of Alexis remained where it was, while he, pale, still keeping his eyes upon me, smiled incredulously with his lips alone. Tatiana Nikolayevna uttered a strange cry, but it was too late. I struck him with the sharp edge nearer the temple than the eye. And when he fell I bent over and struck him two more times. The district attorney declared that I had struck him several times, because his head was badly crushed. But that is untrue. I struck him only &lt;em&gt;three times&lt;/em&gt;: once when he was standing, and twice on the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His first thought that he might truly be mad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My eyelids began to grow heavy, and I wanted to sleep, when languidly, very simply, like the other thoughts, there entered into my head a new thought, dominating with all the qualities of my thought: clearness, preciseness and simplicity. Languidly it entered and remained. Here it is, speaking, as it were, in the third person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;It is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentseff is really insane. He thought that he simulated, but he is really insane—insane at this very instant.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From near the very end of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I, Dr. Kerzhentseff, shall prove that. I will simulate normality. I will attain freedom. I will spend the remainder of my life in learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;All quotes are from the John Cournos translation, first published in 1910 and freely available from Wikisource on the page linked above.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;How I found it:&lt;/strong&gt; it took many attempts, but the successful Google search terms were &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=firefox-b-ab&amp;amp;dcr=0&amp;amp;biw=1181&amp;amp;bih=529&amp;amp;ei=D3uJWqjoHajPgAaL9Jj4DA&amp;amp;q=leonid+andreyev+story+murder+pretend+insane+asylum&amp;amp;oq=leonid+andreyev+story+murder+pretend+insane+asylum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;leonid andreyev story murder pretend insane asylum&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. That led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Bq40DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT246&amp;amp;lpg=PT246&amp;amp;dq=leonid+andreyev+story+murder+pretend+insane+asylum&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=0Q_jgT4HjZ&amp;amp;sig=EjGxE5cHtFVhoUnZzTrlIhR-77g&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiQ59LcxK_ZAhULSsAKHTqVCFgQ6AEIQDAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; two &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pPs2DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT123&amp;amp;lpg=PT123&amp;amp;dq=leonid+andreyev+story+murder+pretend+insane+asylum&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=31-MTA7KlX&amp;amp;sig=3KQOIsoIg3AZY58SOYoWUwy_zeo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiQ59LcxK_ZAhULSsAKHTqVCFgQ6AEIPTAI#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;books&lt;/a&gt;, both of which were about the Czech writer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Kohout&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kohout&lt;/a&gt;, one of whose plays drew heavily on this particular Andreyev story. Then the problem was to find the text (or even a synopsis or review) of the story, for which I needed to try many different alternative translations of the title. Eventually I found the Wikisource page linked above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T13:38:09.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5758" CreationDate="2018-02-18T21:19:16.973" Score="3" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;From E. Nesbit's &lt;em&gt;The Enchanted Castle&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter V, when Gerald is telling the policeman Johnson about the burglary he witnessed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Was it you give the warning, and they sent for the police?&amp;quot; Johnson was leaning eagerly forward, a hand on each knee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, that was me. You can let them think it was you, if you like. You were off duty, weren't you?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was,&amp;quot; said Johnson, &amp;quot;in the arms of Murphy --&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, the police didn't come quick enough. But &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; was there - a lonely detective. And I followed them.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- (text available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pUB-AQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT1538&amp;amp;lpg=PT1538&amp;amp;dq=%22I+was,%22+said+Johnson,+%22in+the+arms+of+Murphy+%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3536/pg3536-images.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does he mean, &amp;quot;in the arms of Murphy&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; There's no character called Murphy in the book, as far as I remember, and it hardly seems likely to refer to Johnson's lover. I've tried searching for the phrase on the internet, but all I found was pubs called Murphy's Arms and coats of arms of families called Murphy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T22:26:59.253" Title="What does &quot;in the arms of Murphy&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-enchanted-castle&gt;&lt;e-nesbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5757" CreationDate="2018-02-18T22:31:13.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Murphy&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;colloq&lt;/em&gt;. Now &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt;. = Morpheus &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; Frequently in &lt;strong&gt;in the arms of Murphy&lt;/strong&gt;: asleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morpheus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morpheus&lt;/a&gt; was the Greek god of dreams; hence a metonym for &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s citations include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1750   T. Smollett &lt;em&gt;Roderick Random&lt;/em&gt; (ed. 3) I. xiv. 110   When Murfy sends his puppies to the heys of slipping mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1823   M. Wilmot &lt;em&gt;Let.&lt;/em&gt; 3 Sept. (1935) 194   I am cheating Murphy, who is making me yawn till my jaws are almost dislocated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1841   F. Marryat &lt;em&gt;Poacher&lt;/em&gt; xi   We dropped into the arms of Murfy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these citations all precede the founding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_Brewery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Murphy's Brewery&lt;/a&gt; in Cork in 1856, so it seems doubtful that there was originally any connotation of drunkenness in the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In episode 2 (&amp;quot;Nestor&amp;quot;) of James Joyce's &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/fr100003.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1922) we meet Gumley, night-watchman for Dublin corporation, who is apt to sleep on the job:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slightly disturbed in his sentrybox by the brazier of live coke the watcher of the corporation stones who, though now broken down and fast breaking up, was none other in stern reality than the Gumley aforesaid, now practically on the parish rates, given the temporary job by Pat Tobin in all human probability from dictates of humanity knowing him before shifted about and shuffled in his box before composing his limbs again in to &lt;strong&gt;the arms of Morpheus&lt;/strong&gt;, a truly amazing piece of hard lines in its most virulent form on a fellow most respectably connected and familiarised with decent home comforts all his life who came in for a cool 100 pounds a year at one time which of course the doublebarrelled ass proceeded to make general ducks and drakes of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much later on, in episode 16 (&amp;quot;Eumaeus&amp;quot;) we meet Gumley again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow they passed the sentrybox with stones, brazier etc. where the municipal supernumerary, ex Gumley, was still to all intents and purposes wrapped in &lt;strong&gt;the arms of Murphy&lt;/strong&gt;, as the adage has it, dreaming of fresh fields and pastures new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-18T22:31:13.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T03:31:28.040" Score="5" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading “Bourne Identity”, closer to the end of the book an agency called  Consular Operations is introduced. Since I had never heard of such thing, I’ve searched, and discovered that it is likely fictional: “consular operations” as a phrase is relatively common terminology amidst diplomatic/foreign relations types, but no such agency appear to exist within or without U.S. Department of State. During my search I have also found that the agency appears more prominently throughout Ludlum’s works, such as in “Janson Directive” (soon to be a major motion picture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if it is fictional, what could be Ludlum’s inspiration for such an agency? Are there historical examples of U.S. or other countries’ foreign ministries running their own undercover intelligence or special operations, and not merely providing diplomatic cover for their respective intelligence and CI agencies, such as CIA, GRU, MI-6 etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side question, while looking it up I’ve discovered that Shadowrun role-playing universe also has Consular Operations agency. Given that Shadowrun was introduced in 1989, at the height of Ludlum’s fame, is it fair to say that it is a direct reference, or merely a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3072" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T19:54:19.207" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T00:12:52.387" Title="Consular Operations in Robert Ludlum’s books" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;robert-ludlum&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5760" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:22:02.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:22:02.903" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:22:02.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5761" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:22:02.903" Score="0" Body="For questions about English writer Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), author of epistolary novels Pamela, Clarissa, and Charles Grandison." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:44:40.823" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:44:40.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5762" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:23:29.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:23:29.907" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:23:29.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5763" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:23:29.907" Score="0" Body="For questions about Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), an epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson. Use in conjunction with [samuel-richardson]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:44:45.827" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:44:45.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5764" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:24:23.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:24:23.017" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:24:23.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5765" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-19T09:24:23.017" Score="0" Body="For questions about A Room of One's Own (1929), the book about women's writing by Virginia Woolf. Use in conjunction with [virginia-woolf].&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T09:44:35.177" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T09:44:35.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1650" CreationDate="2018-02-19T17:24:21.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be that Nat Taggart was loosely based on James J. Hill, but I believe there is equally strong evidence that he was based on William Henry Vanderbilt. Consider this line from Atlas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Jim, do you remember the story they tell about Nat Taggart? He said&#xA;  that he envied only one of his competitors, the one who said 'The&#xA;  public be damned!' He wished he had said it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Vanderbilt#%22Public_be_damned!%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Henry Vanderbilt who made that statement&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, since Dagny said that it was Nat Taggart's competitor who said that, there is strong evidence that Nat was based on a competitor to Vanderbilt, which may very well have been Hill. But you could also argue that Nat was based on Vanderbilt. The reason I say that is because Rand obviously admired Vanderbilt, practically gushing over his quote, in Atlas. The phrase about the competitor could simply be a redirect so as not to be too blatantly biographical and have it be said that her characters were all &quot;based on somebody&quot;. I don't think she intended that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could also argue that Hank Rearden was based on Vanderbilt, since he (Rearden) made numerous statements similar in tone to &quot;the public be damned&quot;, especially at his public trial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this line by Rearden at his trial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I say the strongest evidence is that Rearden is loosely based on Vanderbilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T20:38:34.373" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T20:38:34.373" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-19T17:37:41.080" Score="5" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;strong&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/strong&gt; many times and have often wondered why Ayn Rand makes opaque and ambiguous references to the US Congress and the President of the United Status. For example, she refers to Congress as &lt;em&gt;&quot;the legislature&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the President as &lt;em&gt;&quot;head of state&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. She never refers to either of those by their common names or titles. The terms she uses are extremely unorthodox; I have never heard of the US Congress referred to as &quot;the legislature&quot; (that term is often used for state legislatures however) and I have never heard POTUS referred to as &quot;head of state&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few speculations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She was afraid of directly and unambiguously criticizing elected leaders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She was more interested in painting a metaphor than in leveling political criticisms.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She wanted her work to be more timeless and global in nature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not confident in my speculations and would like to hear other perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T05:39:35.380" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T05:39:35.380" Title="Why did Rand use opaque references to government bodies and offices in Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5759" CreationDate="2018-02-19T18:30:49.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is a reflection of the by now well-known fact that the UK secret intelligence service used &quot;Passport Control Officer&quot; as a cover for its agents, in the pre-World War II era.  According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Intelligence_Service#Inter-War_period&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In August 1919, Cumming created the new passport control department, providing diplomatic cover for agents abroad. The post of Passport Control Officer provided operatives with diplomatic immunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Cumming was &quot;C&quot;, the real-world equivalent of &quot;M&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T18:30:49.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5767" CreationDate="2018-02-19T18:38:39.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have the exact reference in front of me, but Ayn Rand deliberately referred to Mr. Thompson as the &quot;Head of State&quot; (rather than the President of the United States) because she felt that the title of &quot;President of the United States&quot; was still an honorable title that wouldn't be fitting to someone like Mr. Thompson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware of a quote from her describing a specific reason that she referred to Congress as &quot;the legislature.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's at least hinted that there had been major structural changes to the government. The first fact that at least hints at that was the references to &quot;the legislature&quot; and &quot;Head of State&quot; that you mentioned. Secondly, the fact that Colorado seemed to enjoy considerably more liberty than the rest of the country (but was still evidently part of the U.S.) may imply that it enjoyed at least some degree of autonomy that's different than the current structure. Third was the fact that so much was done by regulatory actions from Wesley Mouch (although that's seen as borderline illegal and somewhat irregular at several points in the novel; for example, Wesley evidently didn't have the legal authority to directly seize patents when he issued Directive 10-289, and he's at least occasionally seen whining about his supposed need for broader powers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the fact that Judge Narragansett was seen editing the Constitution may imply that the U.S. was still at least nominally following the Constitution (although it's uncertain what, if any, amendments to it had been passed at that point).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous two paragraphs, of course, aren't definitively answered in the book (just hinted at).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T18:38:39.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5770" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5771" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Robert Ludlum (1927 - 2001) or about any of his literary works, many of which are spy thrillers such as the Bourne Trilogy." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" LastActivityDate="2018-02-19T19:55:51.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5772" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5773" CreationDate="2018-02-20T07:06:19.193" Score="3" ViewCount="668" Body="&lt;p&gt;Primary Source: George Bernard Shaw. &lt;em&gt;Man and Superman&lt;/em&gt; (1903), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Cmp-CgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PT38&amp;amp;dq=%22but%20a%20lifetime%20of%20happiness%22%20shaw&amp;amp;pg=PT38#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22but%20a%20lifetime%20of%20happiness%22%20shaw&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Secondary Source: &lt;em&gt;What's It All About?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=D_HSUS2gD4oC&amp;amp;lpg=PA104&amp;amp;ots=SH05nPRaGp&amp;amp;dq=%22unrelenting%20happiness%20is%20not%20a%20natural%20or%20even%22&amp;amp;pg=PA104#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22unrelenting%20happiness%20is%20not%20a%20natural%20or%20even%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 104 Bottom.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Finally, we surely have to accept that &#xA;  uninterrupted happiness is beyond us. When George Bernard Shaw &#xA;  wrote, 'But a lifetime of happiness! No man could bear it: it would &#xA;  be hell on earth,' he was exaggerating the truth that unrelenting &#xA;  happiness is not a natural or even healthy condition for human &#xA;  beings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Tanner allege the intolerability of eternal happiness? Did Shaw believe this too? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T23:25:48.657" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T23:25:48.657" Title="A lifetime of happiness: why could no man bear it? Why hell on earth?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;man-and-superman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5772" CreationDate="2018-02-20T09:48:16.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: In context this is sarcasm: for ‘happiness’, read ‘unhappiness’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3328/3328-h/3328-h.htm#link2H_4_0002&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I of &lt;em&gt;Man and Superman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, we learn that in his will, the late Mr Whitefield appointed Roebuck Ramsden and Jack Tanner guardians to his daughter Ann. Tanner does not relish this responsibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANNER. It’s only too hideously true. Ramsden: get me out of it somehow. You don’t know Ann as well as I do. She’ll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she’ll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She’ll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat. […] She has the law on her side; she has popular sentiment on her side; she has plenty of money and no conscience. All she wants with me is to load up all her moral responsibilities on me, and do as she likes at the expense of my character. I can’t control her; and she can compromise me as much as she likes. I might as well be her husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He sees one way out of this unwanted duty, that is, for Ann to marry her suitor Octavius (whereupon the guardianship will be dissolved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANNER. Tavy: you must marry her after all and take her off my hands. And I had set my heart on saving you from her!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;OCTAVIUS. Oh, Jack, you talk of saving me from my highest happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TANNER. Yes, a lifetime of happiness. If it were only the first half hour’s happiness, Tavy, I would buy it for you with my last penny. &lt;strong&gt;But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear that ‘happiness’ here is sarcastic. Marriage is conventionally described as ‘happiness’, but Tanner predicts that a lifetime of marriage to Ann would actually be unbearable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This illustrates the importance of checking the original source. In the quoted passage from &lt;em&gt;What's It All About?&lt;/em&gt;, Julian Baggini seems to have taken the quote from &lt;em&gt;Man and Superman&lt;/em&gt; as if it were meant literally, something which he could surely not have done if he had read or seen the play.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T09:57:54.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" Score="0" Body="For questions about the play Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw, written in 1903 and first performed in 1905. Use with the [george-bernard-shaw] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T12:25:35.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:07:02.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T13:07:02.350" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:07:02.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:07:02.350" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev (1871 – 1919) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T14:15:09.357" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T14:15:09.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:08:26.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T13:08:26.030" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:08:26.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:08:26.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the children's fantasy novel 'The Enchanted Castle' (1907) by Edith Nesbit. Use this tag with the [e-nesbit] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T14:14:57.610" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T14:14:57.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5780" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:11:18.117" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T13:11:18.117" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T13:11:18.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5781" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:11:18.117" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of five fantasy novels 'The Trials of Apollo' by Rick Riordan. Use this tag with the [rick-riordan] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T14:15:05.390" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T14:15:05.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5782" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5784" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:18:47.707" Score="30" ViewCount="2987" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;em&gt;The Three-Decker&lt;/em&gt;, by Rudyard Kipling, there is one line where the meter is slightly different from all the other lines. I Googled that line, not expecting to find anything, and Google Books &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=kUUcAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA384&amp;amp;dq=our+titled+berths+we+took+dealer+in+surprises&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwizs8rWybTZAhUJU98KHbyoDd0Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=our%20titled%20berths%20we%20took%20dealer%20in%20surprises&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;came up with this&lt;/a&gt; from the magazine &lt;em&gt;The Academy&lt;/em&gt; (1896).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very last literary device (or vice) which we should expect to find Mr. Kipling using is the pun. Yet he is ever a dealer in surprises, and here in that delightful piece of fancy &amp;quot;The Three-Decker&amp;quot; (one of the four literary ballads in &lt;em&gt;The Seven Seas&lt;/em&gt;), we came upon this distressing stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By ways no &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gaze&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; could follow, a course unspoiled of &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Cook,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Per Fancy, fleetest &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in man,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; our titled berths we took&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And a Church of England parson, for the Islands of the Blest.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The italics, we admit, are our own. We employ them in the hope&#xA;that Mr. Kipling may see his error emphasised, and repent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that answered my question about the discrepancy in the meter: Kipling did it for the sake of the pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is the pun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-17T23:53:50.437" Title="What is the pun in Kipling's poem &quot;The Three-Decker&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5837" CreationDate="2018-02-20T13:25:36.837" Score="4" ViewCount="1624" Body="&lt;p&gt;The twinned poems &quot;The Little Girl Lost&quot; and &quot;The Little Girl Found&quot; from William Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read online&lt;/a&gt;) are about a little girl called Lyca who gets lost from her parents and &quot;seek[s] her Maker&quot; in the desert among the wild beasts, while her parents seek her and eventually meet God (?), who takes them to find her with the beasts &quot;In [his] palace&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any significance to the name Lyca?&lt;/strong&gt; Given the religious themes in a lot of Blake's poetry, I suspect these poems may tell a version of some biblical story, or at least have some deeper meaning than a direct description of events. Does &quot;Lyca&quot; refer to some other character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T11:27:41.200" Title="Is there any significance to Blake's choice of the name Lyca?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5782" CreationDate="2018-02-20T14:11:09.053" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are puns on the names of tourist agencies and operators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ways no gaze could follow&lt;/em&gt; has the double meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;routes that go beyond the horizon (or otherwise out of sight);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;routes that are not available as package tours from Henry Gaze &amp;amp; Sons, nor found in their publication &lt;em&gt;Gaze's Tourists Gazette&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unspoiled of Cook&lt;/em&gt; has the double meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;never visited by the navigator and explorer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Captain James Cook&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;not spoiled by crowds of tourists taking package holidays with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cook_%26_Son&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Cook &amp;amp; Son&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fleetest in man&lt;/em&gt; has the double meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the fastest of human faculties;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ships of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inman_Line&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inman Line&lt;/a&gt;, which included winners of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Riband&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blue Riband&lt;/a&gt; for fastest crossing of the Atlantic. In support of this reading, note that the scansion is regular if you put the stress on &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; (as required by this reading) and irregular if you put the stress on &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt; (as required by reading 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Surprisingly, the two lines with the puns do not appear in all editions of &lt;em&gt;The Seven Seas&lt;/em&gt;. See my &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5793/3003&quot;&gt;follow-up question&lt;/a&gt; for more about this puzzle.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T13:17:30.583" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T13:17:30.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1884" CreationDate="2018-02-20T14:37:02.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This line is right before the final stanza of the poem. The poem ends:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you chant, O magicians?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Spells for the aeons to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What do you weave, O ye flower-girls?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With tassels of azure and red?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Crowns for the brow of a bridegroom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chaplets to garland his bed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sheets of white blossoms new-garnered&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To perfume the sleep of the dead.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza, by mentioning the bed of a bridegroom, and immediately following it by mentioning sheets &quot;to perfume the sleep of the dead,&quot; conveys the message that life is short. (Even though the flower-girls are not in fact weaving the chaplets and the sheets for the same person.) This message is further emphasized by the phrase &quot;aeons to come&quot; immediately before this stanza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-02-20T14:49:06.627" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T14:49:06.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5787" CreationDate="2018-02-20T15:11:28.583" Score="8" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Arthur C. Clarke's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood%27s_End&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Childhood's End&lt;/a&gt;, there is a small allusion to a Chesterton story, when the characters Stormgreen and Van Ryberg discuss their theories about the nature of the Overlords (Chap. 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I admit, &amp;quot; said van Ryberg, &amp;quot;that some of my theories haven't been very&#xA;successful . But tell me what you think of this one. &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Must I?&amp;quot; sighed Stormgren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pieter didn't seem to notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It isn 't really my idea, &amp;quot; he said modestly . &amp;quot;I got it from a story of&#xA;Chesterton’s. &lt;strong&gt;Suppose the Overlords are hiding the fact that they've got nothing to hide?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That sounds just a little complicated to me, &amp;quot; said Stormgren, beginning to take slight interest .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'What I mean is this, &amp;quot; van Ryberg continued eagerly . &amp;quot;I think that &lt;strong&gt;physically they're human beings like us. They realize that we'll tolerate being ruled by creatures we imagine to be- well, alien and super-intelligent. But the human race being what it is, it just won 't be bossed around by creatures of the same species&lt;/strong&gt; . &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Very ingenious, like all your theories, &amp;quot; said Stormgren. &amp;quot;I wish you'd give them opus numbers so that I could keep up with them. The objections to this one... &lt;em&gt;[they're interrupted when another character arrives in the scene]&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching in google for &lt;code&gt;chesterton history mentioned in &amp;quot;childhood's end&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;, I did not find an answer. The only thing I found is this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shmoop.com/childhoods-end/allusions.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of allusions from Shmoop&lt;/a&gt;, where Chesterton is shown, but not the specific story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;which Chesterton story is alluded in Childhood's End&lt;/strong&gt;? Did Arthur C. Clarke say which story is that, or is it possible for someone more versed in Chesterton works to discover that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3077" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T14:12:21.957" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T14:12:21.957" Title="Which Chesterton story is alluded to in Childhood's End?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;arthur-c-clarke&gt;&lt;childhoods-end&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5786" CreationDate="2018-02-20T15:46:08.633" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/223/223-h/223-h.htm#link2H_4_0007&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Purple Wig&lt;/a&gt;’ (published in &lt;em&gt;The Pall Mall Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, May 1913, and collected in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/223/223-h/223-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wisdom of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1914), the narrator, Francis Finn, a freelance reporter, is investigating a legend pertaining to the Duke of Exmoor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the story goes that a man-servant listening at the keyhole heard the truth in a talk between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_VI_and_I&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;King&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Carr,_1st_Earl_of_Somerset&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carr&lt;/a&gt;; and the bodily ear with which he heard grew large and monstrous as by magic, so awful was the secret. And though he had to be loaded with lands and gold and made an ancestor of dukes, the elf-shaped ear is still recurrent in the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finn meets the present Duke of Exmoor, who wears a purple wig. Father Brown suspects that this is a form of misdirection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I dare say he’s got good reason to cover his ears, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas#Ears_of_a_Donkey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;like King Midas&lt;/a&gt;,” went on the priest, with a cheerful simplicity which somehow seemed rather flippant under the circumstances. “I can quite understand that it’s nicer to cover them with hair than with brass plates or leather flaps. But if he wants to use hair, why doesn’t he make it look like hair? There never was hair of that colour in this world. It looks more like a sunset-cloud coming through the wood. Why doesn’t he conceal the family curse better, if he’s really so ashamed of it?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Duke’s wig is eventually forcibly removed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What can it mean? Why, the man had nothing to hide. His ears are just like everybody else’s.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes,” said Father Brown, “that is what he had to hide.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was the story that van Ryberg had in mind in &lt;em&gt;Childhood's End&lt;/em&gt;, then it is another of his unsuccessful theories: the Overlords do have something important to hide about their appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The story has elements of anti-Semitism that are typical of Chesterton. In particular, we can guess from his name and profession, and from the nickname ‘Elisha’ that Exmoor gives him, that the informer, money-lender and lawyer, Isaac Green, the villain of the story, is Jewish.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-20T17:34:01.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-20T20:27:10.373" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; and the television series &lt;em&gt;Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronn_(character)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bronn&lt;/a&gt; is a low-born &quot;sellsword&quot; (i.e. a mercenary)&#xA;who, in the first few seasons of the television series, he is coupled with the high-born Tyrion Lannister. When Tyrion Lannister flees King's Landing, Bronn starts to assist Jaime in military campaigns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire_characters#Illyrio_Mopatis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Illyrio Mopatis&lt;/a&gt; is introduced in the first episode in the series as a wealthy man in Pentos. &#xA;But long before that, according to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE34IaJnDTQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History and Lore video&lt;/a&gt; Illyrio was actually a mercenary who took Varys under his wings, who was at that time a young thief; together they started a scheme that made both of them rich.&#xA;Varys later leaves Illyrio to become an adviser to Aerys Targaryen in King's Landing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are a few parallels (two couples; two sellswords, both of whom eventually become rich) and a few things that are inverted (Varys was in the service of former sellsword Illyrio; sellsword Bronn in the service of Tyrion Lannister).&#xA;So here's my question: do George R. R. Martin's novels draw attention to such parallels and, if yes, what are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T13:32:05.450" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T16:27:21.537" Title="Did George R. R. Martin Conceive Bronn as a Younger, Cynical Version of Illyrio Mopatis?" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2061" CreationDate="2018-02-21T04:05:20.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Communities of the Light Ones and the Dark Ones can be interpreted as a political allegory. Here is a dialog from the first book &amp;quot;Night Watch&amp;quot;, Story 2, Chapter 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; «A Dark Magician can heal; a Light Magician can kill,» I said. «That's the truth. Do you know what the difference is between Light and Darkness?»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Svetlana:&lt;/strong&gt; «No, I don't. For some reason, they don't teach us that. I expect it's hard to formulate clearly?»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; «Not at all. If you always put yourself and your own interests first, then your path leads through the Darkness. If you think about others, it leads toward the Light.»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast between interests of the society and one's personal interests is a typical comparison of socialism and capitalism. I don't see an analogy for the Watches in the real life though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the descriptions of  major conflicts of the 20th century the Light Ones participate on the communist/socialist side:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Revolution&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; A passionate heart, clean hands, a cool head… Surely it was no accident that during the Revolution and the Civil War, almost all the Light Ones had attached themselves to the Cheka? And most of those who didn't had died, at the hands of the Dark Ones, or even more often at the hands of those they were defending. &lt;em&gt;(Night Watch, Story 3, Chapter 3)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; «A new revolution?»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Olga:&lt;/strong&gt; «We didn't want the last one. It was all supposed to happen almost completely without bloodshed. You understand: We can win only through ordinary people. When they become enlightened, when their spirit is uplifted. Communism was a wonderfully well-calculated system, and it's all my fault that it wasn't realized.» &lt;em&gt;(Night Watch, Story 3, Chapter 3)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. World War 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Olga:&lt;/strong&gt; «Of course. You don't get sudden eruptions of hatred like that during times of peace. That son of a bitch Adolf… he had plenty of admirers, but he would have been incinerated in the very first year of the war. And the whole of Germany with him. The situation with Stalin was a different case, adoration on a monstrous scale like that is a powerful shield. Anton, I'm a simple Russian woman…«—the smile that flitted across Olga's face showed what she really felt about the word «simple»—«and I spent all the last war shielding the enemies of my own country against curses. &lt;em&gt;(Night Watch, Story 1, Chapter 3)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while Olga was protecting Hitler during WW2, she was doing it on an order against her own loyalties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Cold War&lt;/strong&gt; The watches were not involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The puny conflict between the USA and the Islamic world was nothing in comparison… Even the old Cold War between the USA and the USSR that was now a part of history hadn't come close to the war of the Watches. They were just childish games for foolish human beings. &lt;em&gt;(Day Watch, Story 3, Chapter 1)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Accusations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a few occasions the Light Ones are blamed for the failures of communism, and support of nazism.  Such accusations are made by the Dark Ones, but are not admitted by the Light Ones.  Such statements are either left without a response, or are rebuked. When the Light Ones respond they shift the blame for the tragedies onto the Dark Ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Zabulon:&lt;/strong&gt; «There's no point in beating about the bush. In the last hundred years the forces of Light have launched three global experiments. The revolution in Russia. The Second World War. And now this new project. Following the same scenario.»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; «I don't know what you're talking about,» I said. I suddenly had this desperate, aching feeling in my chest. &lt;em&gt;(Night Watch, Story 3, Chapter 5)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edgar:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;At the time the Night Watch and the Day Watch were fighting for the right to conduct a social experiment,&amp;quot; Edgar told me. &amp;quot;Communism, as you know, was invented by the Light Ones…&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;And subverted by the Dark Ones,&amp;quot; I couldn't resist remarking. &lt;em&gt;(Twilight Watch, Story 2, Chapter 4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Semyon:&lt;/strong&gt; «Very neat,» said Semyon. «I remember during the Civil War I was sent to capture a were-tiger. The bastard worked in the Cheka, and pretty high up too…« &lt;em&gt;(Night Watch, Story 2, Chapter 1)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE 2&lt;/strong&gt; Arina's Story&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soviet Union is presented as a joint experiment by Night Watch, Day Watch and Inquisition. The Light Ones were hoping to build a better society. The Dark Ones were hoping that it would create hostility towards Soviets. Dark witch Arina was ordered to remoralize large number of people in USSR (e.g. make them believe in communism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Svetlana:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;What are you accused of?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arina:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;On the instructions of an unidentified Light One I modified the recipe for a potion and so ruined a joint experiment by the Inquisition, the Night Watch, and the Day Watch.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arina:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;The experiment was supported by all the Others,&amp;quot; Arina said. &amp;quot;The Dark Ones believed that the appearance of thousands of convinced communists in the leadership of the country-the bread plant's output mostly went to the Kremlin and the People's Commissariats-wouldn't improve anything. On the contrary, it would only provoke hostility to the Soviets in the rest of the world. But the Light Ones believed that after a hard, but victorious war against Germany-the likelihood of that was already clear to the clairvoyants by then-the Soviet Union could become a genuinely attractive society. There was a secret report… basically, people would have built communism by 1980…&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt; snip &amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arina:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;... but they were supposed to have built a city on the moon in the '70s. And fly to Mars, and something else. The whole of Europe would have been communist. And not under constraint either. And by now here on earth we'd have had a huge Soviet Union, a huge United States… I think Britain, Canada, and Australia were part of it… And there was China left on its own.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anton:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;So the Light Ones miscalculated?&amp;quot; I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Arina:&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;No.&amp;quot; Arina shook her head. &amp;quot;They didn't miscalculate. Of course, the blood would have flowed in rivers. But what came at the end of it all wouldn't have been too bad. Far better than all the regimes we have now… The Light Ones overlooked something else. If things had gone that way, then around about now people would have learned that the Others existed.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;(Twilight Watch, Story 2, Chapter 7)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2438" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T14:47:56.233" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5806" CreationDate="2018-02-21T10:01:14.717" Score="5" ViewCount="3606" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the poem &quot;A Roadside Stand&quot; by Robert Frost. I am confused by the reference to &quot;N&quot; and &quot;S&quot; signs in tree poem. What do those signs refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little old house was out with a little new shed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In front at the edge of the road where the traffic sped,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A roadside stand that too pathetically pled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or if ever aside a moment, the out of sorts&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;At having the landscape marred with the artless paint&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Of signs that with the N turned wrong and S turned wrong&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You have the money, but if you want to be mean,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why keep your money (this crossly) and go along.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hurt to the scenery wouldn't be my complaint  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read somewhere that these are the direction signs for north and south. But I personally think that these are the letters on the seller's shop which actually are in the name of the shop. I think so because the writer says that, these signs offered wild berries for sale. If it were the direction signs, the writer won't have said that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-22T12:37:14.297" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T12:37:14.297" Title="What are the 'N' and 'S' signs in the 'A Roadside Stand' by Robert Frost?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5813" CreationDate="2018-02-21T10:52:22.780" Score="2" ViewCount="2387" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does author want to convey by saying/using 'this crossly' as two instances in the poem? What do they signify/show?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to anyone who takes his time to help me out :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little old house was out with a little new shed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In front at the edge of the road where the traffic sped,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A roadside stand that too pathetically pled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At having the landscape marred with the artless paint&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You have the money, but if you want to be mean,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why keep your money &lt;strong&gt;(this crossly)&lt;/strong&gt; and go along.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hurt to the scenery wouldn’t be my complaint&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here far from the city we make our roadside stand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And ask for some city money to feel in hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To try if it will not make our being expand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is in the news that all these pitiful kin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To live in villages, next to the theatre and the store,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where they won’t have to think for themselves anymore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The thought of so much childish longing in vain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sadness that lurks near the open window there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That waits all day in almost open prayer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just one to inquire what a farmer’s prices are.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And one did stop, but only to plow up grass&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In using the yard to back and turn around;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And another to ask the way to where it was bound;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And another to ask could they sell it a gallon of gas&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They couldn’t &lt;strong&gt;(this crossly)&lt;/strong&gt;; they had none, didn’t it see?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, in country money, the country scale of gain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or so the voice of the country seems to complain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I can’t help owning the great relief it would be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then next day as I come back into the sane,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wonder how I should like you to come to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And offer to put me gently out of my pain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original sources: [&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dojhF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nXXTc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned&lt;/a&gt;] [&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XuwCx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;images&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="2773" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T05:16:22.227" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T05:16:22.227" Title="Use of 'this crossly' in the 'A Roadside Stand' by Robert Frost?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T13:15:31.737" Score="8" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rudyard Kipling’s collection &lt;em&gt;The Seven Seas&lt;/em&gt; (1896) contains the poem ‘The Three-Decker’, whose third verse is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of cook,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first couplet of this verse is made up of puns on the names of late 19th-century tourist agencies and operators, as described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5784/3003&quot;&gt;my answer to Peter Shor’s question&lt;/a&gt;. But while researching this answer I noticed that editions of &lt;em&gt;The Seven Seas&lt;/em&gt; have different text for this couplet. The original British edition (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/sevensea00kipl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Methuen and Co., London, 1896&lt;/a&gt;) gives the version quoted above (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/sevensea00kipl#page/134/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 135&lt;/a&gt;). But the U.S. edition (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/sevenseask00kipl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;D. Appleton &amp;amp; Company, New York, 1897&lt;/a&gt;) gives this verse as follows (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/sevenseask00kipl#page/118/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 119&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Carambas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;serapés&lt;/em&gt; we waved to every wind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We smoked good Corpo Bacco when our sweethearts proved unkind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We also took our manners to the Islands of the Blest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several features of the replacement couplet are unsatisfactory or puzzling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Waving &lt;em&gt;serapés&lt;/em&gt; (Spanish–American shawls) makes sense, but waving &lt;em&gt;carambas&lt;/em&gt; does not. &lt;em&gt;Caramba!&lt;/em&gt; is a Spanish &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;minced oath&lt;/a&gt;, so waving it requires a very loose sense of the word “wave” (or else it is surprisingly rude: &lt;em&gt;caramba&lt;/em&gt; is a euphemism for &lt;em&gt;carajo&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;penis&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kipling’s poem constructs an extended conceit between the Victorian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-volume_novel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-volume novel&lt;/a&gt; (known as a &lt;em&gt;three-decker&lt;/em&gt;) and a ship with three decks. Thus the ship is populated with tropes from these novels: “stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs” and so on. But considered as literary tropes, &lt;em&gt;carambas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;serapés&lt;/em&gt; seem to belong to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Western fiction&lt;/a&gt; rather than Victorian melodramas.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Corpo Bacco” looks like Italian for “body [of] Bacchus”, presumably an oath (compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/perbacco#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;perbacco&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), but in the context of the replacement couplet it seems to be a kind or brand of tobacco. Is this some kind of joke?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you search on Google Books for the phrase “Corpo Bacco”, there are (discounting duplicates) only two hits: Kipling’s poem in its U.S. edition, and the poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fzAaAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA183&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Camp Song&lt;/a&gt;’ from &lt;em&gt;The New Monthly Magazine&lt;/em&gt; for May 1853, signed ‘G.W.T.’ (perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Walter_Thornbury&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Walter Thornbury&lt;/a&gt;?):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Corpo Bacco!&lt;/em&gt; how we battled,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Camped and marched the wide world over.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Caramba!&lt;/em&gt; I’m like the Calmuc,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    In my own land but a rover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can it be a coincidence that here we have &lt;em&gt;caramba&lt;/em&gt; too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A footnote explains that the italicized phrases in the poem are “oaths of all languages, picked up by the mercenary in different countries.” So in &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; poem “Corpo Bacco” and “Caramba!” make perfect sense: they are oaths picked up in Italy and Spain respectively. It looks to me very much as though the writer of the replacement couplet was pulling a prank by taking oaths from ‘Camp Song’ and sneaking them past the publisher by deploying them in misleading contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who decided to change this couplet, Kipling or his U.S. publisher, and why? (Did they doubt that their U.S. readers would understand the puns?)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did Kipling even write the replacement couplet, or is it editorial meddling? Was it common for editors to rewrite parts of poems like this?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a connection to ‘Camp Song’ by ‘G.W.T.’?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T15:37:16.923" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T15:37:16.923" Title="Why does Kipling's poem ‘The Three-Decker’ differ between editions?" Tags="&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;the-seven-seas&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5794" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-21T13:53:41.517" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T13:53:41.517" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T13:53:41.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5795" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-21T13:53:41.517" Score="0" Body="For questions about particular editions of literary works, or about the differences between editions." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:27:09.340" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:27:09.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5816" CreationDate="2018-02-21T14:21:10.450" Score="14" ViewCount="2045" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I bumped into an article where &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68681/is-it-poetry-or-is-it-verse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Poetry Foundation’s president, John Barr, takes a look at what separates “serious” poetry from the rest&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Poetry being an art form, obviously no such definition will ever satisfy everyone, nor should it, but I still found the distinction made in the article interesting and worthy of consideration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, there is plenty of poorly written verse out there, but there is&#xA;  also plenty of poorly written poetry—and sometimes the verse is the&#xA;  better crafted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robert Service’s “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174348&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cremation of Sam McGee&lt;/a&gt;,” with no help from the&#xA;  critical establishment, is still going strong after a century, while&#xA;  most early Yeats is read today only because it was written by Yeats.&#xA;  To use verse as a pejorative term, then, is to lose the use of it as a&#xA;  true distinction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;George Orwell gives us another way to think about this when he&#xA;  describes Kipling as “a good bad poet.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;”A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in&#xA;  memorable form—for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things—some&#xA;  emotion which very nearly every human being can share.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Into this same pot Orwell puts “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174586&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade&lt;/a&gt;,” the&#xA;  work of Bret Harte—and presumably that of Robert Service. “There is a&#xA;  great deal of good bad poetry in English,” says Orwell; by&#xA;  implication, there is even more bad bad poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What other well-known examples of such &quot;good bad poetry&quot; are there? Are there other concepts or names for this kind of thing, that might make the search easier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3088" OwnerDisplayName="Ilmari" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T18:58:19.960" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T06:13:17.813" Title="Terminology and examples for what George Orwell calls &quot;good bad poetry&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5798" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:38:29.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T16:38:29.387" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T16:38:29.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5799" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:38:29.387" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novelist and short-story writer Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) and her works. She is best known for her novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea' (1966); after the publication of this novel, readers rediscovered her older work, such as the novel 'Voyage in the Dark' (1934)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:50:04.590" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:50:04.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5800" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:39:46.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T16:39:46.657" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T16:39:46.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5801" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:39:46.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about the postcolonial novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea' (1966) by Jean Rhys, which is written as a prequel to Charlotte Brontë's novel 'Jane Eyre'. Use this tag with the [jean-rhys] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:50:14.243" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:50:14.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5802" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:43:14.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T16:43:14.010" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T16:43:14.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5803" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-21T16:43:14.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about the anonymous English poet known as the &quot;Pearl Poet&quot; or the &quot;Gawain Poet&quot;, the author who presumably wrote the alliterative poem 'Pearl' and the chivalric romance 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' (14th century)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:27:22.560" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:27:22.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5797" CreationDate="2018-02-21T17:07:11.423" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe &quot;good bad poem&quot; is a description specific to Orwell.  The more common term for critically disdained poetry is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/doggerel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;doggerel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.  This can either mean a poem in verse that is structurally flawed (irregular rhythm, off rhymes, &lt;em&gt;etc.&lt;/em&gt;), particularly when done deliberately and for comic effect, or conversely --and a closer match to what Orwell and Barr describe --a poem of no particular &quot;literary merit,&quot; which is &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; regular, to monotonous effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea here is that there exist poems without any of the attributes we associate with &quot;good good&quot; poetry --complex structure, evocative metaphors, spiritual depth, and so forth --and yet which have their own merits that may be overlooked by the critics.  These poems, perhaps comic, perhaps melodramatic, tell a story or express an emotion in a memorable and indelible way, and thus may outlast the more abstruse critics' darlings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one time, ordinary people more commonly wrote poetry, and so if you go back enough years, you'll find an endless supply of &quot;bad&quot; and potentially &quot;good bad&quot; doggerel to be found in the notebooks of amateurs.  You'll also find a veritable wellspring in popular anthologies of best-loved poems, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/048627165X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the one by Martin Gardner&lt;/a&gt;, which includes the critically scorned but much beloved verses Orwell and Barr mention by Service and Harte, along with numerous others that would probably make their lists, such as by Thayer, Longfellow and Kipling. If, however, you're looking for something more up to date, the closest contemporary analog is probably rap music, which (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131125923&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;until quite recently&lt;/a&gt;) received no critical recognition or respect, despite clearly being the most dominant and influential verse form of modern times.  Having been dismissed for so many years as a &quot;bad bad&quot; art form by the critics, it is now a fertile field for a critical reevaluation that might potentially find some of it to be &quot;good bad&quot; or even &quot;good good.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:23:36.050" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:23:36.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5797" CreationDate="2018-02-21T18:19:53.630" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orwell's original essay&lt;/a&gt; is primarily about Rudyard Kipling, and I don't believe he ever worked out a full theory of &quot;good bad poetry&quot;. He cites other examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I&#xA;  should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems — I am&#xA;  deliberately choosing diverse ones — are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When&#xA;  all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret&#xA;  Harte's ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny&#xA;  Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of&#xA;  sentimentality, and yet — not these particular poems, perhaps, but&#xA;  poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who&#xA;  can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized&#xA;  anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact&#xA;  that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all popular poems; many of them are still familiar. What they have in common is that they have very strong, straightforward meters, applied with significant rigor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell's problem with them is that they're &quot;sentimental&quot;, which is, uh, problematic. It's hard for me to untangle that from &quot;popular&quot;. They are conceptually fairly simple, which contributes to their popularity. They're not as rich -- at least in Orwell's estimation -- as &quot;real&quot; poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell distinguishes poetry from &quot;verse&quot;, by which he seems to mean Hallmark card doggerel. That exemplifies all of these features even more strongly: very straightforward and strong meters; easy, obvious, and repetitive rhymes; simple, strong emotional resonances. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it interesting that he excepts poems before 1790. Shakespeare himself wrote some deliberately bad poetry, as in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The raging rocks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And shivering shocks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shall break the locks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of prison gates;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Phibbus' car&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shall shine from far&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make and mar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The foolish Fates.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since so much of the essay is based around TS Eliot, I suspect another example may be Memory, which was added to the play &lt;em&gt;Cats&lt;/em&gt; that is otherwise made primarily of Eliot's poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Midnight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not a sound from the pavement&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Has the moon lost her memory&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She is smiling alone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the lamplight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The withered leaves collect at my feet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the wind begins to moan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Memory&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All alone in the moonlight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I can smile happy your days (I can dream of the old days)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Life was beautiful then&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I remember the time I knew what happiness was&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let the memory live again  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are song lyrics, which may be exempted, but the text seems to illustrate the style. It's the standout from &lt;em&gt;Cats&lt;/em&gt; for exactly the reasons &quot;good bad poetry&quot; is so popular: very strong emotions and straightforward imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:19:53.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5791" CreationDate="2018-02-21T18:35:37.307" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;N&quot; and &quot;S&quot; are letters that are frequently mistakenly written backwards by children, and others of a low level of literacy.  For that reason, if written on backwards on a sign they denote a barely literate writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes letters are deliberately reversed to give a &quot;folksy&quot; touch to a piece of writing, but in this case, Frost explicitly calls them &quot;artless&quot; mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It all goes along with the poem's larger theme of poor country people who are despised and ignored by the wealthier, more sophisticated urbanites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T18:53:41.143" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T18:53:41.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-21T19:40:05.460" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that Shaw's play is a fictionalized account of Caesar and Cleopatra's relationship. But how is G. B. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) different from the eponymous characters' true relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3091" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T23:12:30.843" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T23:12:30.843" Title="How is G. B. Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) different from the eponymous characters' true relationship?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;caesar-and-cleopatra&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5808" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5809" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" Score="0" Body="For questions about The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte), a 1979 fantasy novel by Michael Ende originally written in German. Use with the [michael-ende] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" LastActivityDate="2018-02-21T23:27:59.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5815" CreationDate="2018-02-22T12:56:31.073" Score="7" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blake's &quot;The Blossom&quot;, part of his &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;, is a very short poem about a sparrow and a robin. The part about the robin reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pretty, pretty robin!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under leaves so green&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A happy blossom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hears you sobbing, sobbing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pretty, pretty robin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Near my bosom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is the robin &quot;sobbing&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Apart from that it (almost) rhymes with &quot;robin&quot;, of course. Do the birds in this poem symbolise something else, perhaps something human? The part about a &quot;cradle narrow&quot; made me think of a baby, which could also fit with &quot;sobbing&quot;, but then what's the difference between the sparrow and the robin - do they symbolise two different babies, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T00:08:02.013" Title="Why is the robin &quot;sobbing&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T14:29:50.080" Score="5" ViewCount="661" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other day, I came across this rather sinister poem by Charles Causley, set to music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Innocent's Song    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who's that knocking on the window,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who's that standing at the door,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What are all those presents&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Laying on the kitchen floor?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who is the smiling stranger&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With hair as white as gin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is he doing with the children&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And who could have let him in?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why has he rubies on his fingers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A cold, cold crown on his head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why, when he caws his carol,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Does the salty snow run red?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why does he ferry my fireside&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a spider on a thread,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His fingers made of fuses&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And his tongue of gingerbread?     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why does the world before him&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Melt in a million suns,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why do his yellow, yearning eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Burn like saffron buns?    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Watch where he comes walking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of the Christmas flame,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dancing, double-talking:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Herod is his name.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be taken at face value as a poetic rendering of Herod's order for the murder of children at what would become Christmas-time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, several of the lines, particularly the reference to &quot;fuses&quot; and &quot;melt in a million suns&quot; make it clear this is a metaphor. Apparently, Causley's work often shows a strong anti-war sentiment, which seems a likely interpretation. However, conflating it with Christmas and the murder of innocents seems an odd choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the un-named figure in the poem has a sense of the mythic about it, and the legends of South West England are another common theme in Causley's poems. This fits better with the Christmas setting, but seems to jar with the &quot;fuses&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there additional interpretations that I have missed, and is there a central theme threading all the various metaphors together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T08:11:04.590" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:08:58.593" Title="What metaphor(s) are represented by the mysterious figure in Charles Causley's &quot;Innocent's Song&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;charles-causley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5792" CreationDate="2018-02-22T18:23:40.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; refers to the preceding phrase or dialogue; &lt;em&gt;crossly&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;gruffly&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;with ill grace&lt;/em&gt;. The repetition is purely for emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;meaning&lt;/em&gt;, from context, is that people who live along the big highways resent the traffic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case, although many of them are more than willing to sell produce, or a painting, to the passing motorists (represented metaphorically as the cars themselves rather than the drivers) in order to have a share of the affluence possessed and represented by the city folk, they are less willing &lt;em&gt;(you can keep your money)&lt;/em&gt; to do so when the impatient motorist relieves their frustration by whining at the proprietor &lt;em&gt;(being mean)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second case, the motorist is asking desperately for help in some random location, short of gas, and hoping against hope that one of these rural dwellers has a supply of fuel of which they can spare a little (and are not begging, but asking to buy it). The askee is again grumpily responding, but presenting the asker as foolish to expect such a thing, and (perhaps a little unfairly) questioning their observational skills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final stanza is a confession that the author isn't superior to the country folk after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T18:23:40.887" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T18:56:18.510" Score="1" ViewCount="2121" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fitter Happier&amp;quot; by Radiohead has the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fitter, happier&lt;br&gt;&#xA;More productive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Comfortable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Not drinking too much&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At ease&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A patient, better driver&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A safer car, baby smiling in back seat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Sleeping well, no bad dreams&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No paranoia&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Careful to all animals, never washing spiders down the plughole&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Keep in contact with old friends, enjoy a drink now and then&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Will frequently check credit at moral bank, hole in wall&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Favours for favours, fond but not in love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Charity standing orders on sundays, ring-road supermarket&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Car wash, also on sundays&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows, nothing so ridiculously teenage&lt;br&gt; and desperate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Nothing so childish&lt;br&gt;&#xA;At a better pace, slower and more calculated&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;No chance of escape&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Now self-employed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Concerned, but powerless&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;An empowered and informed member of societ, pragmatism not idealism&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Will not cry in public&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Less chance of illness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tires that grip in the wet, shot of baby strapped in backseat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A good memory&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Still cries at a good film&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Still kisses with saliva&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;No longer empty and frantic&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Like a cat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tied to a stick&lt;br&gt;&#xA;That's driven into&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Frozen winter ****, the ability to laugh at weakness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Calm, fitter, healthier and more productive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;A pig in a cage on antibiotics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not coincidentally, the entire thing is read in a robotic, synthesized voice. Clearly, this is referring to the &amp;quot;deadening,&amp;quot; entrapping effects of the lifestyle in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_Computer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; describes this as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fitter Happier&amp;quot; is a short musique concrète track that consists of sampled musical and background sound and spoken-word lyrics recited by a synthesised voice from the Macintosh SimpleText application. The voice belongs to &amp;quot;Fred&amp;quot;, a synthesised voice included with Macintosh computers. Yorke wrote the lyrics &amp;quot;in ten minutes&amp;quot; after a period of writer's block while the rest of the band were playing. He described the words as a checklist of slogans for the 1990s, and he considered the lyrics &amp;quot;the most upsetting thing I've ever written&amp;quot;, and said it was &amp;quot;liberating&amp;quot; to give the words to a neutral-sounding computer voice. Among the samples in the background is an audio loop from the 1975 film Three Days of the Condor. The band considered using &amp;quot;Fitter Happier&amp;quot; as the album's opening track, but decided the effect was off-putting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steve Lowe called the song &amp;quot;penetrating surgery on pseudo-meaningful corporations' lifestyles&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;a repugnance for prevailing yuppified social values&amp;quot;. Among the loosely connected imagery of the lyrics, Footman identified the song's subject as &amp;quot;the materially comfortable, morally empty embodiment of modern, Western humanity, half-salaryman, half-Stepford Wife, destined for the metaphorical farrowing crate, propped up on Prozac, Viagra and anything else his insurance plan can cover.&amp;quot; Sam Steele called the lyrics &amp;quot;a stream of received imagery: scraps of media information, interspersed with lifestyle ad slogans and private prayers for a healthier existence. It is the hum of a world buzzing with words, one of the messages seeming to be that we live in such a synthetic universe we have grown unable to detect reality from artifice.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this song comparable to &amp;quot;Hotel California&amp;quot; in a way - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave (&amp;quot;No chance of escape&amp;quot;)? Or am I missing the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-02T11:13:14.197" Title="Is &quot;Fitter Happier&quot; by Radiohead referring to the perceived futility and &quot;entrapment&quot; of the middle-class suburbia lifestyle?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;radiohead&gt;&lt;ok-computer&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5811" CreationDate="2018-02-22T18:57:16.583" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Executive summary: the sparrow is the lover, and the robin is the child [thank you @PeterShor for cutting through the undergrowth]. Which might well invalidate my interpretation below :o)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why a robin?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you go &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/birdsong.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; you'll find a link to a sample of robin birdsong, with the narration [emphasis mine]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unusually among British birds, both male and female robins sing. The Spring song is a rich warble which fades quickly, but in Autumn it becomes &lt;strong&gt;wistful and rather sad&lt;/strong&gt;, and is often the only birdsong you’ll hear on cold, foggy Autumn evenings. Robins regularly sing at night, especially under streetlamps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What's the difference between the sparrow and the robin?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems likely Blake's intent was to show how two people in apparently identical circumstances can seem very happy or very sad. Given the odesmith’s approach to life, the title of the collection, and the context (a lot of relatively “clean” sexual imagery exists in the rest of the poems) this may be contrasting blithe, &lt;em&gt;naïve&lt;/em&gt;, youthful spirits with &lt;em&gt;sad and wiser men&lt;/em&gt; like Coleridge’s wedding guest. Nowadays we might call the latter &lt;em&gt;jaded&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Comparison with &lt;em&gt;The Clod and the Pebble&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be compared with its companion poem, &lt;em&gt;The Clod and the Pebble&lt;/em&gt;, which also illustrates two opposing responses to the world and to “love” in particular. I think that case is slightly different, largely because it’s clearer there why the responses are different. The clod speaks of what the Greeks¹ termed &lt;em&gt;agápē&lt;/em&gt; (ἀγάπη), and the pebble of what they dubbed &lt;em&gt;érōs&lt;/em&gt; (ἔρως), but the pebble deprecates the latter by implying it is &lt;em&gt;selfish&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other opinions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a.k.a. &lt;em&gt;remember please always to call it “research”.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think anything beyond that is too debatable (I've had a quick Google search and found two almost diametrically opposed analyses) to commit to a single concrete answer…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one end of the spectrum are the rather down-to-earth views of the poem’s imagery (the whole natural &lt;em&gt;cycle-of-life&lt;/em&gt; thing, with commentators varying in their perceptions of how full the glass is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gradesaver.com/songs-of-innocence-and-of-experience/study-guide/summary-the-blossom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a description of the poem&lt;/a&gt; on a popular &lt;em&gt;Cliff's Notes&lt;/em&gt;–style website says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The poem hides a secret cynicism about nature.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[…]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whether a sparrow finds a home in its branches or a robin weeps, the tree, or specifically its blossom, is indifferent and merely looks on.  Blake’s view of nature here is of a material world, operating on materialistic principles, with no vital essence to give it personality or feeling.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas, for example, &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge History of English Literature&lt;/em&gt; (though it refers to &lt;em&gt;The Blossom&lt;/em&gt; merely in passing) has this to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every other instance shows sorrow and difficulty to be but&#xA;occasions for the immediate manifestation of sympathy. God,&#xA;as the tender Father, the angels, the shepherd, the mother,&#xA;the nurse, or even the humbler forms of insect and flower, as&#xA;in The Blossom, or A Dream, — all are expressions of the same&#xA;universal ethic of love.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a celebration of that ethic, rather than cynicism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://stuffjeffreads.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/sexual-symbolism-in-the-blossom-by-william-blake/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog post&lt;/a&gt; suggests a rather more “adult” reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon first reading, I got the sense of sexual symbolism here. I asked myself if I was maybe reading too much into the poem, but after reading it over a couple more times, the imagery became stronger and I definitely concluded that Blake was expressing sexuality, particularly the loss of virginity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to point out the obvious imagery in the &lt;em&gt;arrow&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cradle narrow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the more spiritual, symbolic, ethereal, wispy end of the spectrum, we have &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&amp;amp;context=cq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; from the now-defunct &lt;em&gt;Colby Quarterly&lt;/em&gt;. It begins by lambasting the “sexual imagery” interpretation, with the scathing if somewhat pathetic critique:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;FOR SEVERAL DECADES &amp;quot;The Blossom,&amp;quot; from William Blake's Songs of&#xA;Innocence, has been subject to a sexual interpretation, ….&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;…the poem presents an&#xA;allegory of sexual intercourse, going &amp;quot;into considerable detail in presenting the sexual act and the sexual parts.&amp;quot;  Such a reading, however, does injustice to the breadth of Blake's vision; and as John Holloway has pointed out, &amp;quot;not only does it strike us, once we have deciphered it, as a ridiculous and unnecessary way of wrapping up something about 'sexual intimacy'; it is so particularly ridiculous as to be aware of the male sexual organ as a sort of pet.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then continues to extol the &lt;em&gt;naïve&lt;/em&gt; but sympathetic Madonna-with-child view of the piece:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker in &amp;quot;The Blossom&amp;quot; is surely a mother with her child. In the&#xA;foliage design a mother holds her child, madonna-like, and in some&#xA;copies he is clearly nursing at her breast. She is given wings and, in at&#xA;least one copy (Z), a halo². To see this madonna and child as a Cupid/Psyche couple in order to save the sexual interpretation seems a bit far-fetched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll leave the Freudian interpretation of those authors’ apparent disgust of &lt;em&gt;coitus&lt;/em&gt; to the reader³ ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ C S Lewis used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a selection of Greek words for “love”&lt;/a&gt; as the foundation for his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Loves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Four Loves&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and rebuts the criticism of ’erōs as a “selfish” love. It’s worth noting that he’s talking about &lt;em&gt;romantic love&lt;/em&gt; rather than only &lt;em&gt;sexual desire&lt;/em&gt; in general.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;² Each poem was accompanied by rather elegant illustrations, mainly “nature-themed”. See below. Larger version &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Songs_of_Innocence_and_of_Experience%2C_copy_Z%2C_1826_%28Library_of_Congress%29_object_11_The_Blossom.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;³ Where do they think the child came from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Gu1t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Gu1t.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image from Library of Congress&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T00:08:02.013" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5797" CreationDate="2018-02-22T19:29:40.227" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Orwell’s ‘good bad’ poetry is ‘bad’ because it is superficial (lacking in aesthetic, intellectual, psychological or moral depth), but ‘good’ because it is skilfully written and enjoyable to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Orwell’s examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell gave eight examples of ‘good bad’ poems, in addition to the works of Rudyard Kipling. I’ll give four lines from each, but follow the links for the full poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/654.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bridge of Sighs&lt;/a&gt;’ (1844) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hood&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Hood&lt;/a&gt;, about a young woman drowned in the Thames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Take her up tenderly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lift her with care;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fashion’d so slenderly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Young, and so fair!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘When all the world is young, lad’ from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25564/25564-h/25564-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Water Babies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1863) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Kingsley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Kingsley&lt;/a&gt;, on the theme of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempus_fugit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;tempus fugit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When all the world is young, lad,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And all the trees are green;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every goose a swan, lad,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And every lass a queen;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Maud,_and_other_poems/The_Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade&lt;/a&gt;’ (1854) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred, Lord Tennyson&lt;/a&gt;, about a disastrous maneouvre at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Balaclava&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of Balaclava&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Charge,” was the captain’s cry;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their’s not to reason why,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their’s not to make reply,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their’s but to do and die,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12337/12337-h/12337-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dickens in Camp&lt;/a&gt;’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Harte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bret Harte&lt;/a&gt;, which imagines a California pioneer reading aloud a novel by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Dickens&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then, while round them shadows gathered faster,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And as the firelight fell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He read aloud &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Curiosity_Shop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the book&lt;/a&gt; wherein the Master&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Had writ of “Little Nell.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/603.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna&lt;/a&gt;’ (1816) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Wolfe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Wolfe&lt;/a&gt;, about the burial of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Moore_(British_Army_officer)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;General Moore&lt;/a&gt; after his death at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Corunna&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Coruña&lt;/a&gt; in 1809:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Slowly and sadly we laid him down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    From the field of his fame fresh and gory;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    But we left him alone with his glory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/592.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jenny Kissed Me&lt;/a&gt;’ (1838) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Hunt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leigh Hunt&lt;/a&gt;, also on the theme of &lt;em&gt;tempus fugit&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say I’m growing old, but add,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Jenny kiss’d me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/42/688.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ballad of Keith of Ravelston&lt;/a&gt;’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Thompson_Dobell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sydney Dobell&lt;/a&gt;, about a wicked lord and a dead cowherd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The murmur of the mourning ghost&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That keeps the shadowy kine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ‘O Keith of Ravelston,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    The sorrows of thy line!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/297/431.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casabianca&lt;/a&gt;’ (1826) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicia_Hemans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Felicia Hemans&lt;/a&gt;, about the death of Giocante de Casabianca at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Nile&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of the Nile&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boy stood on the burning deck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Whence all but he had fled;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The flame that lit the battle’s wreck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Shone round him o’er the dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The great tradition&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to appreciate the context in which Orwell was making his literary judgments, we have to think our way back into the mindset of the educated classes of England in the first half of the 20th century. The literary education of the upper classes was based on a ‘Great Tradition’ (in the words of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Tradition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. R. Leavis&lt;/a&gt;) that ran from Homer through the classical Greek and Latin writers, through Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton down to Eliot and James. The tradition is characterized by aesthetic complexity, intellectual depth, psychological observation, and moral seriousness; or at least it can be interpreted as respecting those goals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this stratum of society (to which Orwell belonged, however precariously: he was educated at Eton), ‘good’ literature consisted of the works of the great tradition and its followers, and ‘bad’ literature was everything else: comic and sentimental verse, folk songs, detective stories, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;penny dreadfuls&lt;/a&gt;’, ‘three-decker’ melodramas, music hall, Western fiction, science fiction, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The late 20th century exploded the idea of the Western literary canon so successfully that this attitude seems quite blinkered to us now. Nonetheless, &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part27&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;G. K. Chesterton&lt;/a&gt; apparently felt it necessary to write an essay pointing out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. […] There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good epic and a bad one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12245/12245-h/12245-h.htm#A_DEFENCE_OF_DETECTIVE_STORIES&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A defence of detective stories&lt;/a&gt;’, 1900.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Rudyard Kipling&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell introduced his idea of the ‘good bad’ poem in the essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rudyard Kipling&lt;/a&gt;’ (1942), in which he reviewed the collection &lt;em&gt;A Choice of Kipling’s Verse&lt;/em&gt;, edited by T. S. Eliot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2819/2819-h/2819-h.htm#link2H_4_0007&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gunga Din&lt;/a&gt;’ or ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2819/2819-h/2819-h.htm#link2H_4_0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danny Deever&lt;/a&gt;’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2819/2819-h/2819-h.htm#link2H_4_0014&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;such lines as&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/122/29.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Felix Randal&lt;/a&gt;’ or ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/360/5/118.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;When icicles hang by the wall&lt;/a&gt;’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily […] if one describes him simply as a good bad poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point Orwell gave the eight examples, and then commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet—not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Orwell seems to have had in mind is that the ‘good bad poem’ panders to popular taste, but nonetheless it is a good example of its type: it is constructed with skill and enjoyable to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick note on ‘sentimentality’. The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sentimental&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 1.a. […] Addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s the superficiality that Orwell is complaining about, not the emotion. For example, consider the first of Orwell's examples, Thomas Hood's ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bartleby.com/101/654.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bridge of Sighs&lt;/a&gt;’. This eloquently expresses the poet’s sadness, but doesn’t go any further than that. The young woman in the poem has drowned herself because she was homeless, probably due to a pregnancy, but the main matter of the poem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;how beautiful her corpse looks&lt;/a&gt; and how her sins are forgiven now she is dead. If there is a moral, it is only “Alas! for the rarity / Of Christian charity”. This is liable to strike the modern reader as a superficial response: surely some thought ought to be given to the sexual double standard and the cruelty of the patriarchal society that shunned her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Good bad books&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell elaborated his thoughts on ‘good bad’ literature in the essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part27&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good bad books&lt;/a&gt;’ (1945):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chesterton&lt;/a&gt; called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Raffles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raffles&lt;/a&gt; and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration. I imagine that by any test that could be devised, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carlyle&lt;/a&gt; would be found to be a more intelligent man than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trollope&lt;/a&gt;. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-23T11:35:23.200" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T11:35:23.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T19:43:15.027" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently, some of the lyrics to Radiohead's &quot;Airbag&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/12157549/Radiohead-OK-Computer-song-lyrics-inspired-by-William-Blake-poems.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;were found written in the margins of a volume of Songs of Innocence and Experience&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this song inspired or influenced by Songs of Innocence and Experience? Was the writer effectively trying to categorize this as a &quot;Song of Experience&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-02-22T19:43:15.027" Title="How did &quot;Songs of Innocence and Experience&quot; inspire &quot;Airbag&quot; by Radiohead?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;songs-of-innocence&gt;&lt;ok-computer&gt;&lt;radiohead&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-22T23:41:05.103" Score="5" ViewCount="890" Body="&lt;p&gt;By looking up what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitab_al-Miraj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kitab al-Miraj&lt;/a&gt; was, you can see many similarities to the Divine Comedy: a traveler's journey through the afterlife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that Dante plagiarized this work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3098" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T01:30:08.213" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T15:32:13.553" Title="Did Dante plagiarize the Divine Comedy from Kitab al-Miraj?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;kitab-al-miraj&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5606" CreationDate="2018-02-23T02:15:47.030" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sex in Anna Karenina? Whoever put that rating must have had a wild imagination. I'd rather restrict it for drug use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be serious, Anna Karenina is not suitable for a reader below 18 just because such reader wouldn't understand a thing of what is going on. This applies to most of Tolstoy's writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cossacks may be an exception. Just find a good translation - it is arguably a best piece of prose written in Russian, at least in its timeframe. Sebastopol Stories are definitely good for a 12+ years old (in Soviet Union it was a mandatory reading for 6th graders). After the Ball (mandatory reading for 8th graders) could also be an exception, but I don't recommend it for the abundance of trivial morality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T02:15:47.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5737" CreationDate="2018-02-23T11:39:26.067" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Schadenfreude. Francisco hates government planners and policy makers. He likes to see them fail. But what is it that he finds amusing? He knows something they don't know and he knows people better than the planners and policy makers. If they knew that thing, they wouldn't have done it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll try to explain with an analogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person A is preparing a surprise party for Person B. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is talking about preparations to person C. Person C claimed to everyone that person A is a bad party planner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person A likes strawberries. Because of that, you can say that party is strawberry themed. Strawberry cake, strawberry juice. Even the punch bowl has strawberries in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thing is, Person B is allergic to strawberries. Person C knows that, Person A doesn't. Person C finds it amusing not to tell Person A about the allergy and can't wait for the surprise party to fail, so C can take B for a beer after the ruins of that party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastActivityDate="2018-02-23T11:39:26.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5818" CreationDate="2018-02-23T14:22:05.297" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dante was probably influenced and inspired by various Muslim sources, including the &lt;em&gt;Kitab al-Miraj&lt;/em&gt;, but the similarities are not strong enough to claim plagiarism.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conjecture dates from 1919 and was first proposed by Miguel Asín Palacios, a Spanish priest. His theories, published in &lt;em&gt;La Escatología Musulmana en la Divina Comedia&lt;/em&gt; (Islamic Eschatology in the Divine Comedy), were not solely about the &lt;em&gt;Kitab al Miraj&lt;/em&gt;, but conjectured that Dante's book was influenced by several strands of Islamic thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of the two books, there are more parallels than the relatively common theme of describing a journey into the afterlife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both Miraj and Dante take their journeys while dreaming, encountering a wolf and a lion as they set off.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both have a divine guide, who describes to the traveller the strange lands they are about to encounter. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The layers of heaven and hell are the same in both books, as are the punishments for some of the sins.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When both travellers stand before God they are blinded and guided forward with prayers by their companions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not an implausible supposition, either. Europe in Dante's time - particularly Spain under Alfonso X - had close ties to the Muslim world. Dante's mentor, Brunetto Latini stayed at Alfonso's court. A number of well-known contemporary scholars including Thomas Aquinas were influenced by Arabic thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also evidence that Dante had access to the &lt;em&gt;Kitab al Miraj&lt;/em&gt;. During his stay with Alfonso X, Brunetto Latini met Bonaventura de Siena who had translated the book into Latin. It's possible a copy was provided to Latini and from him to Dante, although we have no direct evidence for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expert consensus on the matter, however, appears to be that while Dante was influenced by Islamic sources, &lt;em&gt;The Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; does not owe a direct debt to the &lt;em&gt;Kitab al Miraj&lt;/em&gt;. Some of the parallels are not unique to the latter work but can be found in other sources such as the &lt;em&gt;Hadith&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Resalat Al-Ghufran&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, while there are several notable similarities, they make up only a small part of Dante's work. And some of the crossovers, such as associating God with a blinding light, or with lions and wolves, are common images across the Abrahamic religions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Francesco Gabrieli, &quot;New light on Dante and Islam&quot;, Diogenes, 2:61–73, 1954   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Guenon, René (1925). The Esoterism of Dante.     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alfonso X, the Learned: A Biography, H. Salvador Mart Nez        &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="3088" LastEditDate="2018-02-25T09:19:36.523" LastActivityDate="2018-02-25T09:19:36.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5859" CreationDate="2018-02-23T23:35:31.077" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen the story many times: Percy and Mary Shelley (not yet wed) paid an a visit to Lord Byron in 1816. Attributed now to the eruption at Mount Tambora, this year was unseasonably cool. Spending extended periods indoors, the group at least once resorted to reading ghost stories. From this, a writing competition was born. They were to write their own horror story. The work by Mary eventually resulted in Frankenstein. The work by Byron inspired a work that later inspired Dracula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these the only works known from that &quot;competition&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3102" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-02-24T01:24:18.367" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:55:18.250" Title="Stories From the Year Without a Summer" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4702" CreationDate="2018-02-24T15:02:09.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; mean here? The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;very,&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; A.I.2. With limitation (usually expressed by &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; or a possessive) to particular instances: The true or real; that is truly or properly entitled to the name. Now &lt;em&gt;arch.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the “great tableland of moors and commons” is the &lt;em&gt;true&lt;/em&gt; landscape of liberty, that suggests that there might also be a &lt;em&gt;false&lt;/em&gt; landscape of liberty. What this might be, Chesterton does not explicitly say, but the next sentence begins “For his errand at Torwood Park was a political one” and so in context it seems likely that the landscape of politics is indicated. This foreshadows the theme of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Knew_Too_Much_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Man Who Knew Too Much&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which turns out to be the compromises and corruption of the political world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forget them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do you “try to forget” something or someone? Because the memory is painful to you. Why might remembering your politics be painful? Because you betrayed or abandoned your ideals, or failed to live up to them. Again, this foreshadows the theme of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T15:02:09.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-24T19:09:26.390" Score="6" ViewCount="729" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot; from William Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and Experience&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read online&lt;/a&gt;) is just three verses long and compares two different descriptions of love, attributed to a clod of clay and a pebble respectively. The clod says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love seeketh not itself to please,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor for itself hath any care,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But for another gives its ease,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And builds a heaven in hell's despair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pebble responds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love seeketh only Self to please,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To bind another to its delight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Joys in another's loss of ease,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And builds a hell in heaven's despite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd always thought of this poem as describing two different outlooks on love, perhaps by an optimist and a pessimist, or a believer and a cynic, or a youthful lover and a jaded sceptic. I'd assumed that the &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; being described is the same thing both times, except in how different people perceive it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5815/17&quot;&gt;his answer about a different poem&lt;/a&gt;, Will Crawford analyses &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot; as describing two different &lt;em&gt;types&lt;/em&gt; of love: specifically, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient Greek terminology&lt;/a&gt;, agápē (love between human and God) and érōs (romantic love). This sounded interesting enough that I'm posting a new question about it to learn more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the evidence that &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot; is about two different types of love, rather than two different people's perceptions of love?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-24T19:09:26.390" Title="Is the comparison in &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot; between different types of love?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5832" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5842" CreationDate="2018-02-25T20:56:54.090" Score="11" ViewCount="537" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading 19th century literature in the 21st century, it is often striking how often the plot turns on often quite outrageous coincidences. Frequently this happens when a relatively small cast of characters interact over a lengthy novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take two examples, the Creature in &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; kills Victor's brother and friend without knowing who they are; and the narrative of &lt;em&gt;David Copperfield&lt;/em&gt; spans at least two decades in which no more than ten major characters work for each other, live with each other, drown at sea together, or just generally turn up in the same place together without any convincing explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did contemporary readers just accept this? Were they put off? Was the coincidence necessary to reassure them that it wasn't real in some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3115" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T20:55:36.240" Title="How did contemporary readers respond to coincidence in 19th century novels" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5833" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5835" CreationDate="2018-02-25T23:28:36.290" Score="8" ViewCount="2043" Body="&lt;p&gt;At some point during &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_VII:_The_Dark_Tower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower VII: The Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Roland's ka-tet has to save Stephen King, who ultimately seems to be a representation of one of the tower's beams, from getting hit by a car during one of his walks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part, like others of King's depictions, seems to be a largely autobiographical fictionalization of King's real accident in 1999. In fact, apart from the ka-tet's intervention and the ultimate reason for the accident, it even seems to depict the driver and the circumstances leading to the accident quite similarly to how they supposedly happened in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does, however, not paint the driver Bryan Smith in an all too favourable light, being basically a reckless stoner and coward. While the circumstances of the accident and maybe even his characterization don't seem all too far from reality and after what he did Bryan Smith sure shouldn't have much reason to complain, it raises some moral questions about King treating his accident publicly at the expense of Bryan Smith this way, especially in light of Smith already being dead by then (he died in 2000, on King's birthday actually).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;has there ever been any public criticism of how derogatorily King depicted this real person in the story&lt;/strong&gt;? Is this just ignored because it is ultimately only a fictionalization? Or was it ignored because it &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; spread too far from reality? Or has Bryan Smith just not been seen in the moral position to complain after what he did? (I might well have interpreted his depiction as more derogatory than it was, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T11:46:29.743" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T11:46:29.743" Title="Has there been any criticism of Bryan Smith's depiction in The Dark Tower series?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;the-dark-tower-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T00:13:31.463" Score="14" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;in the last day or so there's been &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.resetera.com/threads/fantasy-author-terry-goodkind-publicly-shames-his-own-cover-artist-on-social-media.25564/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;something&lt;/a&gt; of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/805ns8/author_terry_goodkind_shames_his_own_cover_artist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;furore&lt;/a&gt; over Terry Goodkind's public criticism of the cover art on his latest novel, &lt;em&gt;Shroud of Eternity&lt;/em&gt;. He made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/terrygoodkind/photos/a.395754121821.178804.111426611821/10155072794701822/?type=3&amp;amp;theater&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;post on Facebook&lt;/a&gt; ridiculing the cover art, which has received a lot of attention and a direct response from the understandably offended illustrator, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u5rIU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u5rIU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of Goodkind's post and responses&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.resetera.com/threads/fantasy-author-terry-goodkind-publicly-shames-his-own-cover-artist-on-social-media.25564/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;image source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goodkind's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/terrygoodkind/posts/10155075475256822&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eventual response&lt;/a&gt; to the storm of criticism he received included the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dissatisfaction with the art isn't the artist's fault, of course; the art was commissioned and directed by the publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intention of our contest was to instead encourage my publisher to devote more thoughtful consideration with the artwork they wrap around my books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A previous post by Goodkind on social media, coming in between the two Facebook posts linked above (which I can't find directly now - perhaps it's been deleted - but it can be seen quoted e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/805ns8/author_terry_goodkind_shames_his_own_cover_artist/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bastien, we never worked together. I've never met nor have I ever even spoken with you. We've never exchanged a message before today. And I never told you what to create for this cover. All of that was between you and the publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goodkind's responses suggest that &lt;strong&gt;the cover art was worked out between the publisher and the illustrator, without consulting him (the author)&lt;/strong&gt;. Without judging the rights or wrongs or who said what or indeed &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; about this particular case, I'm curious about whether this is common practice in today's novel publishing industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it common practice in publishing for cover art to be designed without direct input from the author?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes/clarifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm asking about situations where the author is still alive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it makes a difference, assume first publication rather than a new edition of an existing novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T23:48:58.713" Title="Is it common practice for cover art to be designed without direct input from the author?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;illustrators&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5833" CreationDate="2018-02-26T01:08:01.183" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what degree of 'notability' you're looking for in criticism of how harshly King portrayed Smith in his book, but certainly there has been public criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a Cracked article entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cracked.com/article_21566_6-famous-works-art-you-didnt-know-were-vicious-insults.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;6 Famous Works of Art You Didn't Know Were Vicious Insults&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen King is described as passive-aggressive and living in permanent rage at Smith. To be fair, this article itself is also pretty rude about Smith:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stephen King Gets Endless Revenge on the Driver Who Almost Killed Him&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Smith -- a drug user with 11 prior driving offenses -- was rushing to get some &quot;Marzes bars&quot; from the store. Yes, one of the most prolific authors in human history was almost killed because some mulleted gomer with a gun-inspired dog had a hankering for an endangered candy bar. Smith thought he'd hit a deer at first, but then he noticed a pair of bloodied glasses on his passenger seat and summoned up all his brainpower to realize that he'd never seen a deer at the optometrist's office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] King's first act of revenge was to buy the minivan that almost killed him for 1,500 dollars so he could beat the shit out of it with a sledgehammer, because that's the sort of therapy you can have when you're rich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then things got creepier. [...] Smashing his tormentor's van with a sledgehammer and seeing Smith's physical and mental departure from this plane of existence wasn't enough for King, who had to make sure Smith lived on in infamy. His Dark Tower series is like 11 Bibles long and difficult to explain, but in it you'll find a character who has a Rottweiler named Bullet, drives a blue minivan, and is generally an all-around mouth-breather. He's an irresponsible, mentally deficient drug addict, and his name is -- cue gasp of surprise -- Bryan Smith. Smith is looking to score some drugs when he hops in his van, and almost strikes a fictionalized King, who's saved by the sacrifice of hero Jake Chambers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[caption on image of Stephen King wearing a manic grin] &quot;Don't forget to mention that he has a small penis. Like, just the tiniest thing you ever did see.&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;King's passive-aggressive jab was written years after Smith's death and served as the ultimate cherry on top of his rage sundae. Thanks to King's ceaseless anger, Bryan Smith is immortalized as a drug-addled asshat who damn near kills a beloved character, because in horror, even death can't spare you from revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In her blog read-through of the &lt;em&gt;Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt; series on the Tor Books website, reviewer Suzanne Johnson opines that King's portrayal of Smith is so insulting that it might have been grounds for libel charges if Smith were still alive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How much of this Bryan Smith stuff is true? I found myself wondering this throughout the whole chapter. I know he had a long string of traffic violations and was charged with &quot;driving to endanger&quot;. He claimed he was distracted by his dogs, and died just over a year after the accident from a painkiller overdose. Guess I'm just conscious of the litigious nature of society, and Bryan Smith the character is definitely portrayed as simple and stupid and so utterly irresponsible that it seems like prime defamation of character charges. Maybe if one is dead one's character can't be defamed? Anyway, he compares Smith's intelligence to that of Sheemie, who &quot;could be Bryan Smith's litter-twin&quot;. Which, now that I think about, is quite an insult to Sheemie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Again, we're hit with lots of comments about the stupidity of the hapless Bryan Smith, &quot;the sort of person who cannot fix the radio without looking at it&quot;. Then again, if you're writing about the careless, thoughtless dude who almost killed you, turning him into a three-dimensional character might not be possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tor.com/2014/04/14/a-read-of-the-dark-tower-constant-reader-tackles-the-dark-tower-in-this-haze-of-green-and-gold-chapter-1-mrs-tassenbaum-drives-south/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also have to wonder if there was some legal maneuvering that went on behind the scenes so King could portray Smith as such an idiot without fear of litigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tor.com/2014/04/21/a-read-of-the-dark-tower-constant-reader-tackles-the-dark-tower-part-three-in-this-haze-of-green-and-gold-chapter-2-qves-ka-ganq/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, although I think this somewhat misses the point of your question, there were also some fairly prominent claims that Smith was treated unfairly in &lt;em&gt;real life&lt;/em&gt; due to King's fame and public regard. &lt;a href=&quot;http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1999-11-04/news/9911040365_1_stephen-king-oxford-county-accident&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; from the Chicago Tribune - in 1999, before Smith's death and subsequent immortalisation in King's writing - summarises these claims, quoting Smith's lawyer, other people from Maine, and the hard-to-pin-down 'public opinion':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The klieg-light attention has come as a surprise to a lot of peripheral figures in the case, but none more than Smith. Since he was indicted Sept. 30 on the felony charge of aggravated assault, which could carry a prison term of 10 years, Smith has charged that he is being treated harshly &quot;just because it's Stephen King.&quot; And last week, Smith's lawyer, John Jenness of Paris, Maine, filed a motion requesting a change of venue for the trial, arguing that the aura of fame surrounding King in Oxford County has made it impossible for his client to get a fair trial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Oxford County assistant district attorney, Joseph O'Connor, says the charges are harsh because Smith's driving was extremely irresponsible. With jury selection not due to start until next spring, he said, it's too early to decide whether Oxford County jurors are biased. In any case, he said, it would be difficult to find a place where King was not well-known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Realistically, where are you going to change the venue to?&quot; he asked. &quot;Timbuktu?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sympathy poured into Bangor from around the world during the weeks after the accident. But since then, as information about Smith and the incident has come out, people in King's hometown have had time to fine-tune their opinions--in sometimes surprising ways. Scott Bryson, 23, said he and his friends were surprised by a newspaper report that Smith turned around &quot;for three or four seconds.&quot; After he saw that, he agreed with King's position that the state should take away Smith's license.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Bill Watson, 30, who cooks in a downtown restaurant, said King's request had turned his sympathy into exasperation. He sees Smith, who has a long series of traffic violations, as a &quot;little guy&quot; who has &quot;paid (his) penance&quot; and should be allowed to put his life back together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think Steve has gone overboard,&quot; Watson said. &quot;He came up because he wanted to get away from the big city, but what he's doing is big city.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those who have tried to gauge public opinion in the wake of the assault charge have been surprised at how suspicious Mainers are of favoritism. Of the 50 letters the Bangor Daily News received on the subject after the indictment, four out of every five thought Smith was being treated unfairly, said Bruce Kyle, the paper's assistant editorial page editor. And when Charles Horne, news director of the Bangor talk radio station WVOM, opened up phone lines on the subject, he was &quot;a bit surprised&quot; at how wary Mainers were that King would be favored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There was no question that the tide of opinion was against the charge,&quot; Horne said. &quot;What a lot of people were saying was Bryan Smith made the mistake of hitting a celebrity.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some observers said they weren't surprised to see Mainers react this way, and chalked it up to the state's deep-running populism--what one lawyer termed the &quot;underdog effect.&quot; Judy Potter, who teaches trial law at the University of Maine, said she wouldn't be surprised if Mainers &quot;bent over backwards to make sure they weren't&quot; treating Smith unfairly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T01:08:01.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5307" CreationDate="2018-02-26T01:50:34.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The resemblance is mostly thematic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bono&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bono&lt;/a&gt; (lead vocalist and primary lyricist of U2), the main thing they took from Blake was the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; of comparing innocence and experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you're talking about innocence, you've probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it's possible to recover it with wisdom. I'm not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/bono-on-u2s-new-album-taking-on-donald-trump-w503260&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An analysis by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.atu2.com/contact/bio.src?ID=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tassoula E. Kokkoris&lt;/a&gt;, probably the closest thing there is to an 'expert on U2', goes into more detail about similarities in theme and ideas between Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and Experience&lt;/em&gt; and the eponymous U2 songs. This was written before the release of U2's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt;, but it's pretty insightful nonetheless. Do &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.atu2.com/news/william-blake-and-the-inspiration-behind-u2s-songs-of-innocence.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read it in full&lt;/a&gt;, as it backs up its arguments with relevant quotes from both Blake poems and U2 songs, but I'll quote the most important parts here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In obvious terms, the band took the name for their current (and presumably next) album from [Blake's] poetry books. In a broad sense, the themes Blake explores in his texts (childhood innocence, social injustice, poverty, conflicting aspects of religion) are identical to those of U2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bono is quoted as saying the Songs Of Innocence album is all about &amp;quot;first journeys&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;falling in love.&amp;quot; We can only assume that the second volume will reflect an older perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Blake released these works of art in a new and inventive way for his time is also a parallel, as (love it or hate it) U2 released their album via iTunes in a way no other band had ever before. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the way the songs are presented - heavy on the visuals, with books and pages falling from the stage and sky, respectively, each night - mimics the spirit of Blake's ancient copperplates; conveying images in a way that had never before been seen. No other lead singers have leapt into a cage mid-show that displayed their childhood street as they sang along to the description of it. Nor have concertgoers clamored to collect ripped pages of books they were (most likely) forced to read in young adulthood, searching for the symbolism as they Google paragraphs of old text on their smartphones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kokkoris notes that both the Blake poems and the U2 songs have an underlying theme of &lt;strong&gt;appreciation of nature&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An undeniable infusion of nature is repeated throughout William Blake's collection. Whether he's &amp;quot;weeping in the evening dew&amp;quot; or has &amp;quot;smil'd among the winters snow&amp;quot;, he's embracing the natural world. [...] Similarly, U2 lyrics on &lt;em&gt;Songs Of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; are rich with landscapes and environmental descriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nature is also used to describe a memorable childhood place. In Blake's The Ecchoing Green, it's a location where kids played in their youth [...] For Bono, the beauty found in his best friend's yard brings comfort to &amp;quot;Cedarwood Road&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are countless other references to nature in both works that mention the ocean, the sky, stars and seasons. A relatable and universal way for each artist to convey a mood - even if over 200 years apart in delivery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also compares their attitudes towards religion. Both Blake's poems and the U2 songs display a &lt;strong&gt;positive portrayal of God but a more negative portrayal of the church&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though neither Blake's poems nor U2's album could be considered strictly religious, they're both laced with references to Christianity. God and the church are both celebrated and condemned in each collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Blake's poem The Divine Image, he urges non-judgment and shows that God is compassionate [...] In &amp;quot;Lucifer's Hands&amp;quot;, U2's singer delights in God &amp;quot;saving&amp;quot; him through music&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, Blake takes God to task for the suffering of the poor in Holy Thursday [...] And in U2's &amp;quot;Sleep Like a Baby Tonight&amp;quot;, shades of priestly abuse are evident&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Blake's time, he was considered radical for his vocal opposition to the Church of England. While Bono, The Edge, Larry and Adam are probably known more for their political voice, all but Adam have previously identified as religious, so it's a slight about-face to see them so blatantly criticize the church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Ra'T note: Blake's&lt;/em&gt; Songs of Innocence and Experience &lt;em&gt;are &lt;strong&gt;definitely&lt;/strong&gt; religious. Many of them are very explicit in praising God, who even appears in person in some of them. What they don't do is consistently praise &lt;strong&gt;established&lt;/strong&gt; religion, in the form of the Church, but it's not really cognitive dissonance to both love God and hate the Church establishment.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T01:50:34.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5783" CreationDate="2018-02-26T11:27:41.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blake's poems are cryptic and invite multiple interpretations. To my amazement, while researching this question I found that the 26 stanzas of these two poems inspired, among other things, an academic paper that runs to &lt;em&gt;154 pages&lt;/em&gt;! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as you might expect, there are a lot of theories. Most of them relate in some way to Greek mythology, which is a continuing theme in Blake's poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that Lyca's name is derived from a Greek word, Laikos, meaning &quot;harlot&quot;. In this interpretation, one can see a certain amount of sexuality in the poems, especially the first one. Lyca is said to be &quot;lovely&quot;, and there are references to her &quot;bosom&quot; and her &quot;naked&quot;[ness]. It is possible to read the whole thing as a parable for the awakening of female sexuality, with the Lion representing masculinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential Greek root is the word for &quot;light&quot;. I was unable to find the Greek etymology here, but it may be &quot;Lampo&quot; meaning to glitter or shine. In this interpretation, the light is that associated with purity, and possibly even immortality. We know from &lt;em&gt;Lost&lt;/em&gt; that Lyca is a virgin and the ending of &lt;em&gt;Found&lt;/em&gt; hints at a certain timelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting that these poems are not the only places we find the name Lyca. One source confirms that the name is &quot;invented, classical in type&quot; but also that Blake used it in the draft of another poem, &lt;em&gt;Laughing Song&lt;/em&gt;. This uses the same AABB rhyme scheme as the &lt;em&gt;Little Girl&lt;/em&gt; poems, but is much more lighthearted and positive in tone, concerning itself with the pleasure of the natural world in springtime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I can find no direct connection to the name, one theory is that Lyca represents the Greek goddess Persephone, the personification of Spring. In her legend she is abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld, leading to her mother, Demeter, searching the earth for her. It's not hard to see the parallels between this narrative and that of &lt;em&gt;Lost&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Found&lt;/em&gt;, nor to the spring theme of &lt;em&gt;Laughing Song&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is notable that the heroine of Philip Pullman's &lt;em&gt;His Dark Materials&lt;/em&gt; trilogy is called Lyra. Pullman has confirmed that Blake's work was influential on the books and the close similarity between the two names and their respective roles in symbolising the loss of innocence is impossible to ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Blake: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Fuller, D.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Name of Blake's Lyca Re-Examined; Peterfreund, Stuart; American Notes &amp;amp; Queries; May 75, Vol. 13 Issue 9, p133&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blake's &quot;The Little Girl Lost&quot;: An Initiation into Womanhood; Greco, Norma A.; Colby Quarterly; Vol 19, Issue 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Raine, Kathleen. &quot;The Little Girl Lost and Found and the Lapsed Soul.&quot;; The Divine Vision: Studies in the Poetry and Art of William Blake; ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto, 1968.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T11:27:41.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5838" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T13:45:08.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T13:45:08.210" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T13:45:08.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5839" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T13:45:08.210" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (c. 1265 – 1321) and his works. In addition to the 'Divine Comedy', Dante also wrote 'La Vita Nuova' (&quot;The New Life&quot;), the Latin treatise 'De vulgari eloquentia' (&quot;On the Eloquence of Vernacular&quot;) and several other works. Questions regarding his works should include the tag [italian-literature] or [latin-literature] depending on the work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:25:25.953" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:25:25.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5840" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T13:58:37.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T13:58:37.893" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T13:58:37.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5841" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T13:58:37.893" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German writer of fantasy and children's fiction Michael Ende (1929 – 1995) and his works. Ende is best known for 'Die unendliche Geschichte' (1979, &quot;The Neverending Story&quot;), 'Momo' (1973) and 'Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer' (1960, &quot;Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver&quot;)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T14:24:27.040" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T14:24:27.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5832" CreationDate="2018-02-26T13:59:59.770" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a vast subject; entire books have been written on the subject of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jfSn73FICsoC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;coincidence in fiction&lt;/a&gt;. So I’ll attempt a very brief survey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Were coincidence plots popular?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Dickens&lt;/a&gt; was the most popular novelist in English in the mid-19th century, and his novels are full of coincidences. In his introduction to the 2002 Penguin edition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/730&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oliver Twist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1837–9), Philip Horne listed a few of the more conspicuous ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pocket picked by Charley and the Dodger when Oliver first goes out from Fagin’s house happens to be that of Mr. Brownlow, the oldest friend of Oliver’s father, and once in love with Oliver’s aunt (now dead), who happens to have on his wall a portrait of Oliver’s mother, which so resembles Oliver Mr. Brownlow is awestruck. When Sikes takes Oliver after his recapture to commit his second crime, at Chertsey, hours away from London, it turns out to be the house where Oliver’s other aunt, Rose Maylie, lives. Oliver’s father’s will, destroyed by the father’s wife, happens to have stipulated that Oliver inherits only if “in his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act of dishonour, meanness, cowardice or wrong”—such a stain is just what falling into Fagin’s hands puts Oliver at risk of; Oliver’s legitimate but wicked brother Edward Leeford (‘Monks’) happens to be the only one to know of this will, and to see and recognize Oliver, whom he has never seen (this time by his uncanny resemblance to their common father), on the one occasion he is away from Fagin’s (and rescued by Mr. Brownlow). Somehow Monks connects with, and somehow finds, Fagin, whom he employs to recapture and criminalize him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other novels that make use of coincidence were and remain immensely popular, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1260&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Bront%C3%AB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charlotte Brontë&lt;/a&gt; (1847; in which Eyre, wandering the moors, is rescued and taken in by the Rivers family, who turn out to be her cousins, whom she has never previously met) or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/135&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victor Hugo&lt;/a&gt; (1862; in which Valjean, fleeing the police in the back alleys of Paris, meets the man whose life he saved many years previously in a distant town in another part of France).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a little contemporary criticism of Dickens’ coincidences. In 1842, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Allan Poe&lt;/a&gt; wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/criticsm/gm42dc01.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;long review&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/917&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Barnaby Rudge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in which, among more pressing concerns, he touches briefly on coincidences thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are many &lt;em&gt;coincidences&lt;/em&gt; wrought into the narrative those, for example, which relate to the nineteenth of March; the dream of Barnaby, respecting his father, at the very period when his father is actually in the house; and the dream of Haredale previous to his final meeting with Chester. These things are meant to &lt;em&gt;insinuate&lt;/em&gt; a fatality which, very properly, is not expressed in plain terms—but it is questionable whether the story derives more, in ideality, from their introduction, than it might have gained of verisimilitude from their omission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Poe this is clearly a question of balance: coincidences detract from the quality of &lt;em&gt;verisimilitude&lt;/em&gt;, but add to the quality of &lt;em&gt;fatality&lt;/em&gt;, and he values both qualities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Aside: Poe’s review refutes the idea, raised in comments, that “readers back then were much less nitpicky”. The review is a monument of nitpicks! But Poe’s nitpicks are directed at the effects Poe values, which are &lt;em&gt;dramatic unity&lt;/em&gt;, which he thinks is spoiled by the inclusion of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Riots&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gordon Riots&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;suspense&lt;/em&gt;, which he thinks is spoiled by the sloppy way the mystery plot is handled. Poe recognizes that coincidences are unrealistic, but realism is far from his most important concern.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What did readers make of coincidences?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to think about this kind of question is to turn it around:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reading 21st century literature, it is striking how often the plot turns on outrageous elements of fantasy. For example, in the ‘Harry Potter’ novels the characters cast spells, drink potions, and fly about on broomsticks. Did contemporary readers just accept this? Were they put off? Was the magic necessary to reassure them that it wasn’t real in some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously contemporary readers understand that magic is a literary convention in the fantasy genre. We know that it’s not realistic, but since we don’t require fantasy novels to be realistic, that’s not a problem. Instead, we appreciate the dramatic or comic situations that that author can create using magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidence does something similar in the 19th century novel: it’s an economical and effective means for the author to create dramatic or comic situations, and it “carries with it an element of surprise or astonishment that derives from the lack of apparent causal connection” (Thomas Vargish, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0813910625&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Providential Aesthetic in Victorian Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). If Oedipus kills a stranger, that’s homicide, but if by coincidence the stranger is his father, then that’s tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vargish argues that early 19th century English culture was steeped in the Christian idea of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_providence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;divine providence&lt;/a&gt;’, that is, a belief that the world is ordered by “a Supreme Being who foresees and controls human events for some divine purpose”. In this view of the world, coincidences are the traces of the divine plan, that rewards the virtuous and punishes the wicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it was true of all authors—surely like any trope it drifted from its origins—but Dickens seems to have thought about coincidence plots in this way. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/lettersofcharles00dickuoft#page/94/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an 1859 letter to Wilkie Collins&lt;/a&gt; he wrote, apparently in response to the latter’s suggestion about a change to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/98&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to build up an event in a more convincing manner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not positively say that the point you put might not have been done in your manner; but I have a very strong conviction that it would have been overdone in that manner—too elaborately trapped, baited, and prepared—in the main anticipated, and its interested wasted. […] I think that the business of art is to lay all that ground carefully, not with the care that conceals itself—to shew, by a backward light, what everything has been working to—but only to &lt;em&gt;suggest&lt;/em&gt;, until the fulfillment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways all art is but a little imitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What happened to coincidence?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It never went away, it just &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ContrivedCoincidence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;changed its appearance&lt;/a&gt;. Watch any television crime series and you’ll see that it’s commonplace for the murderer to be revealed as someone who coincidentally appeared earlier in the episode; or for the detective to see or hear something unrelated to the mystery that coincidentally suggests the solution; or for an innocent suspect to appear guilty because of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuiltByCoincidence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;coincidental similarity&lt;/a&gt; with the criminal or the crime. Coincidence remains an economic way of creating drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But certainly literary novels no longer include the same kinds of egregious coincidence as Dickens, Brontë, and Hugo. That’s a consequence of the success of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary realism&lt;/a&gt; in the mid-to-late 19th century. Originating in France with the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stendhal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stendhal&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor%C3%A9_de_Balzac&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balzac&lt;/a&gt;, realism was a reaction against the prevailing mood of romanticism. The progress of science, and especially the publication of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1228&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1859, made it hard to hold on to the idea of a providential universe, and the rise of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_novel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;social novel&lt;/a&gt; required a realistic treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the publication of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/145&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Middlemarch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1871–2), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Eliot&lt;/a&gt; found it necessary to apologise for making use of a coincidence (by which the rogue Raffles happens upon a letter which he can use to blackmail Bulstrode):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the stone which has been kicked by generations of clowns* may come by curious little links of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe. To Uriel watching the progress of planetary history from the sun, the one result would be just as much of a coincidence as the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;: “clown, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 1.a. A countryman, rustic, or peasant.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One has to go somewhat later to find full-throated denunications of the use of coincidence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gissing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Gissing&lt;/a&gt;, an important realist novelist and critic, was scathing on the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have left it to this place to speak of the sin, most gross, most palpable, which Dickens everywhere commits in his abuse of “coincidence”. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1023&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the supreme example of his recklessness. It seems never to have occurred to him, thus far in his career, that novels and fairy tales should obey different laws in the matter of incident. When &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/730&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oliver Twist&lt;/a&gt; casually makes acquaintance with an old gentleman in the streets of London, this old gentleman of course turns out to be his relative, who desired of all things to discover the boy. When Steerforth returns to England from his travels with Emily, his ship is of course wrecked on the sands at Yarmouth, and his dead body washed up at the feet of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/766&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Copperfield&lt;/a&gt;, who happened to have made a little journey to see his Yarmouth friends on that very day. In &lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt; scarcely a page but presents some coincidence as glaring as these. Therein lies the worthlessness of the plot, which is held together only by the use of coincidence in its most flagrant forms. Grant that anything may happen just where or when the interest of the story demands it, and a neat drama may pretty easily be constructed. The very boldness of the thing prevents readers from considering it; indeed most readers take the author’s own view, and imagine every artificiality to be permitted in the world of fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.93229/2015.93229.Charles-Dickens#page/n61/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Charles Dickens: A Critical Study&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1898.) For Gissing, realism is the most important thing, or maybe the only thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T20:55:36.240" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T20:55:36.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T14:18:35.677" Score="-1" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1960s the French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Goldmann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucien Goldmann&lt;/a&gt; developed a theory known as &amp;quot;genetic criticism&amp;quot; (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;Sciences humaines et philosophie. Suivi de structuralisme génétique et création littéraire&lt;/em&gt;, 1966). This theory uses several terms whose meaning is not immediately obvious, e.g. &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;collective subject&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot; (French: &amp;quot;homologie&amp;quot;) in Goldmann's genetic structuralism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3039" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T02:16:55.097" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T17:14:11.490" Title="Meaning of homology in Lucien Goldmann's genetic structuralism" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;lucien-goldmann&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5844" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:06:32.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:06:32.400" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:06:32.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5845" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:06:32.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English rock band The Rolling Stones, which formed in London in 1962. Their best known members are Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. One of their most famous songs is &quot;(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction&quot; (1965)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:43:40.890" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:43:40.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5846" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:08:12.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:08:12.567" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:08:12.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5847" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:08:12.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1890) by Oscar Wilde. Use this tag with the [oscar-wilde] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:43:51.230" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:43:51.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5848" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:46:05.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:46:05.700" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:46:05.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5849" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:46:05.700" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Caesar and Cleopatra' (1898) by George Bernard Shaw. Use this tag with the [george-bernard-shaw]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:43:09.260" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:43:09.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5850" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:48:20.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:48:20.687" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:48:20.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5851" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:48:20.687" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Cornish poet, schoolmaster and writer Charles Causley (1917 – 2003) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:43:44.610" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:43:44.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5852" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:50:01.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:50:01.407" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:50:01.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5853" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:50:01.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Japanese author Isuna Hasekura (支倉 凍砂 , born 1982) and his works, such as the &quot;Spice and Wolf&quot; series and the &quot;Billionaire Girl&quot; series." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:42:41.467" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:42:41.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5854" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:52:24.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T17:52:24.390" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T17:52:24.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5855" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-26T17:52:24.390" Score="0" Body="Questions about the poetry collection 'The Seven Seas' (1896) by Rudyard Kipling. Use this tag with the [rudyard-kipling] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-26T21:43:47.890" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:43:47.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5595" CreationDate="2018-02-26T19:02:40.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Heaney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seamus Heaney&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/facts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iCI22m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Seamus Heaney.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Se%C3%A1n_O%27Casey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sean O'Casey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gettyimages.in/detail/517356848&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Source: Bettmann&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MnqLIm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Sean O'Casey, Playwright, Smoking Pipe.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Bernard Shaw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/resource/ggbain.15967/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Publisher: Bain News Service&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5jfawm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;G. B. Shaw.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Beckett&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Butler Yeats&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw57227/WB-Yeats?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;W.B. Yeats by Howard Coster, 1935&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hlKm6m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;W. B. Yeats.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Behan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brendan Behan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joyce&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Joyce&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5K3am.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;James Joyce by Boris Lipnitzki, Paris, 1934&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5K3am.png&quot; alt=&quot;James Joyce.&quot; title=&quot;James Joyce by Boris Lipnitzki, Paris, 1934&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O%27Nolan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian O'Nolan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_O%27Nolan#/media/File:Brian_O%27Nolan.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Source: The Guardian&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7uev1m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Brian O'Nolan.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Kavanagh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patrick Kavanagh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T09:51:11.773" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T09:51:11.773" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-02-26T21:24:05.350" Score="5" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Tower_VI:_Song_of_Susannah&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Eddie and Roland pay a visit to Stephen King in 1977, after learning that he apparently wrote about Pere Callahan's story. In order to learn what is really going on and how King knows about Roland and the Tower, he hypnotizes him, which leads to King telling about an event from his early childhood, where he had to saw wood in the barn of his uncle and was attacked by a group of little red spiders coming from dead chickens, only to be saved by Eddie and Cuthbert Allgood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;In  the  barn.&quot;  King's  voice  dropped.  His  lips  had  begun  to  tremble.  &quot;Auntie  sent  me  out  because we tried to run away. [...] Me and my brother Dave. They caught us and brought us back. They said we were bad, bad boys.&quot; [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;That was your punishment.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;Yes.&quot; A tear welled in the corner of King's right eye. It slipped down his cheek to the edge of his beard. &quot;The chickens are dead. [...] Uncle Oren says it was avian flu. Their eyes are open. They're . . . a little scary.&quot; [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;You couldn't leave the barn?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;Not  until  I  saw  my  share  of  the  wood.  David  did  his.  It's  my  turn.  There  are  spiders  in  the  chickens.  Spiders  in  their  guts,  little  red  ones.  Like  specks  of  red  pepper.  If  they  get  on  me  I'll  catch the flu and die. Only then I'll come back. [...] I'll be a vampire. I'll be a slave to him. His scribe, maybe. His pet writer. [...] The Lord of the Spiders. The Crimson King, Tower-pent.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;Christ, Roland,&quot; Eddie whispered. He was shuddering. What had they found here? What nest had they exposed? &quot;Sai King, Steve, how old were you — are you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &quot;I'm seven.&quot; A pause. &quot;I wet my pants. I don't want the spiders to bite&#xA;   me. The red spiders. But then you came, Eddie, and I went free.&quot; He smiled radiantly, his cheeks gleaming with tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently this early experience was the first moment where Stephen King was tempted or attacked by the Crimson King in order to drag him and his creative powers onto his side and where he was ultimately drawn to the ways of Gan instead by Eddie and Cuthbert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I wonder is &lt;strong&gt;how much this event actually resembles a real event, or even trauma, from Stephen King's childhood&lt;/strong&gt;. Many parts of the finctionalized King's story in &lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt; seem autobiographical to some degree. Was all of this childhood story just made up or does this resemble a real sitaution that happened to Stephen King? Could we even go as far as this experience, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it happened, influencing the imagery of the Crimson King as a big red spider or was that just retrofitted into the existing, possibly less traumatic, real memory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-02-26T21:24:05.350" Title="Is the Crimson King's first attack on Stephen King based on a real experience from the author's childhood?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;the-dark-tower-king&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5834" CreationDate="2018-02-27T06:41:33.120" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my experience, having worked in-house in the publishing industry for more than 10 years, it is quite usual for the cover to be decided by anyone other than the author. It's usually done through consultations in long meetings between the publisher, production and marketing who have commissioned designers to make about a zillion options.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagine once authors are sufficiently popular, however, they may be able to make a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edited to add:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am involved in educational and academic publishing in Australia. Our covers are done by designers rather than illustrators – except in the case of children's books. Even then, an illustrator is usually commissioned by the publisher. The author is certainly welcome to make suggestions for the cover illustration, but again, the ultimate decision remains largely with the publisher/ marketing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2667" LastEditorUserId="2667" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T23:48:58.713" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T23:48:58.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5823" CreationDate="2018-02-27T11:47:36.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Essentially, Yes. The other stories were abandoned.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that famous night, there were four people trying their hands at ghost stories: Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, his wife to be Mary Godwin and John Polidori who was not known as a writer but was serving as Byron's physician.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We won't go over the genesis of &lt;strong&gt;Mary&lt;/strong&gt;'s tale, &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, as this is well known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Byron&lt;/strong&gt; was unsatisfied with his effort, a tale about Vampirism, and abandoned it. It was later appended to one of Byron's poems, &lt;em&gt;Mazeppa&lt;/em&gt;, by its publisher John Murray without Bryon's approval. Byron was not happy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shall not allow you to play the tricks you did last year with the prose you post-scribed to 'Mazeppa,' which I sent to you not to be published, if not in a periodical paper, – and there you tacked it, without a word of explanation, and be damned to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story became variously known as &lt;em&gt;Fragment of a Novel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A Fragment&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Burial: A Fragment&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polidori&lt;/strong&gt; also began and abandoned a story. Mary Shelley recalled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole — what to see I forget — something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Byron's fragmentary tale also inspired him to begin work on his own Vampire story, which he went on to complete at the urging of a friend. It's worth noting that the relationship between Polidori and Byron was fraught, and it's possible that the novel is also meant as a metaphor for the strains Byron put upon the physician, &quot;sucking&quot; the life out of him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That manuscript lay forgotten for three years and was then discovered and published by journalist Henry Colburn who published it as &lt;em&gt;The Vampyre&lt;/em&gt; without Polidori's permission, in fact attributing it to Byron. Polidori fought to reclaim his attribution but eventually fell into depression and died at the age of 25, possibly by suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shelley&lt;/strong&gt;, apparently, tried to write something inspired by his childhood but was first to give up the task. As a poet, he struggled to write fluid, engaging prose. Instead, he spent the time encouraging Mary's effort. She recalled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This unsatisfactory manuscript was, presumably, lost. There is not further mention of it in any of the sources I could find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Works of Lord Byron: Embracing His Suppressed Poems, and a Sketch of His Life. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Co., 1854, p. 897.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. Author’s Introduction to the Standard Novels Edition. OneWorld Classics. 1818 (last ed. 2008).    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Polidori, John William (2009), Rossetti, William Michael, ed., The diary, Cornell, NY: Cornell University Library      &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T20:55:18.250" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T20:55:18.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5860" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:31:34.633" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:31:34.633" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:31:34.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5861" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:31:34.633" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs of the American actress and singer Keala Settle (born 1975)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:14:34.953" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:14:34.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5862" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:33:31.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:33:31.090" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:33:31.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5863" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:33:31.090" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Japanese series of novels 'Spice and Wolf' (狼と香辛料 Ōkami to Kōshinryō) by Isuna Hasekura (支倉 凍砂). Use this tag with the [isuna-hasekura] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:14:21.833" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:14:21.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5864" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:35:14.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:35:14.677" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:35:14.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5865" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:35:14.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of eight novels 'The Dark Tower' by Stephen King. Use this tag with the [stephen-king] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:15:54.387" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:15:54.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5866" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:37:50.713" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:37:50.713" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:37:50.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5867" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:37:50.713" Score="0" Body="Questions about current or historical practices in publishing that affected or would affect many or most publications in a specific period and/or place (country, city, ...). In this type of questions, specific works may be cited as examples. However, for questions concerning the publication of specific works, use the [tag:textual-history] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T10:09:30.780" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T10:09:30.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5868" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:49:47.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T13:49:47.750" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T13:49:47.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5869" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T13:49:47.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Kokopelli's Flute' (1995) by Will Hobbs. Use this with the [will-hobbs] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:15:57.270" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:15:57.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5870" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12276" CreationDate="2018-02-27T14:32:05.337" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arnold Wesker's play Chips with Everything is an examination of class attitudes in Britain through the window of the armed forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one scene a group of conscripts sing the peculiar English folk song Cutty Wren. This portrays a group of unlikely characters discussing the hunting, killing and eating of a small bird in bizarre detail, ending with an exhortation to &quot;give it to the poor&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origins of the song are disputed, but one theory dates it back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_peasants%27_revolt_of_1381&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peasants Revolt&lt;/a&gt;, with the wren standing in for King Richard II. The originator of this theory, A. L. Lloyd is known to have been an acquaintance of the playwright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the play, the song is sung by a group of conscripts, but the stage directions state they are to sing each verse with increasing aggression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of this song, and the style in which it is sung, in the context of the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T18:27:48.040" Title="Why is the folk song Cutty Wren included in Arnold Wesker's play Chips With Everything?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;arnold-wesker&gt;&lt;chips-with-everything&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5871" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T15:12:00.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:12:00.443" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:12:00.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5872" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T15:12:00.443" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English dramatist Arnold Wesker (1932 – 2016) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T19:24:26.403" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T19:24:26.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5873" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T15:13:26.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T15:13:26.107" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T15:13:26.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5874" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T15:13:26.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Chips with Everything' (1962) by Arnold Wesker. Use this tag with the [arnold-wesker] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T19:24:20.263" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T19:24:20.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5788" CreationDate="2018-02-27T16:27:21.537" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't see quite the connection that you have made here. The situations are really quite different. Also, don't forget the show is vastly different from the books...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few key differences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Varys and Illyrio were both poor when they met and teamed up and worked together to become rich. Bronn is the poor one and uses a chance encounter to befriend himself to Tyrion (who is already rich) and then become rich.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bronn doesn't help Jaime in campaigns as he does on the show. In the books Bronn goes off to Stokeworth after marrying Lollys (we see this in the show). The Dorne subplot is completely different and in the books timeline Daenrys has not made it back to Westeros yet, so we don't know if Bronn will be involved with that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons&lt;/em&gt; Tyrion spend a bit of time with Illyrio and never is Bronn brought up his thoughts. A few people do remind Tyrion of Bronn, namely Griff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The river had perils, the dwarf knew, but Griff himself struck Tyrion as more dangerous than any of them. He reminded Tyrion of Bronn, though Bronn had a sellsword's black humor and Griff had no humor at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dance with Dragons - Tyrion IV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Martin had wanted us to draw some parallel between Bronn and Illyrio he would have had the perfect opportunity during Tyrion's conversations. Beyond that I have never run across any mentions of similarities between the two in any of of Martin's interviews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T16:27:21.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5877" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-27T21:10:13.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-02-27T21:10:13.457" LastActivityDate="2018-02-27T21:10:13.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5878" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-27T21:10:13.457" Score="0" Body="For questions about the play 'The Winter's Tale' by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-19T19:36:41.360" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T19:36:41.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5879" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6406" CreationDate="2018-02-27T22:45:22.233" Score="6" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the start of chapter 25 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/996&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Miguel de Cervantes, Sancho Panza is not allowed to speak (to Don Quixote).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Quixote took leave of the goatherd, and once more mounting Rocinante bade Sancho follow him, which he having no ass, did very discontentedly. They proceeded slowly, making their way into the most rugged part of the mountain, Sancho all the while dying to have a talk with his master, and longing for him to begin, so that there should be no breach of &lt;strong&gt;the injunction laid upon him&lt;/strong&gt;; but unable to keep silence so long he said to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Senor Don Quixote, give me your worship's blessing and dismissal, for I'd like to go home at once to my wife and children with whom I can at any rate talk and converse as much as I like; for to want me to go through these solitudes day and night and not speak to you when I have a mind is burying me alive. If luck would have it that animals spoke as they did in the days of Guisopete, it would not be so bad, because I could talk to Rocinante about whatever came into my head, and so put up with my ill-fortune; but it is a hard case, and not to be borne with patience, to go seeking adventures all one's life and get nothing but kicks and blanketings, brickbats and punches, and with all this to have to sew up one's mouth without daring to say what is in one's heart, just as if one were dumb.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I understand thee, Sancho,&amp;quot; replied Don Quixote; &amp;quot;thou art dying to have the &lt;strong&gt;interdict I placed upon thy tongue&lt;/strong&gt; removed; consider it removed, and say what thou wilt while we are wandering in these mountains.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did this happen? I don't remember Don Quixote disallowing him to do so at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1618" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T19:29:47.090" Title="In Don Quixote, why wasn't Sancho Panza allowed to speak in the black mountains?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;don-quixote&gt;&lt;miguel-de-cervantes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5834" CreationDate="2018-02-28T01:53:37.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've worked in the publishing industry for over 15 years, and in my experience, authors have a lot of control over the covers of their books. The publisher would find a suitable illustrator, and then we would set up a meeting between the author and the illustrator where they discussed their ideas for the cover. The author didn't have final say over the cover, but they were involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3120" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T01:53:37.250" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5883" CreationDate="2018-02-28T09:41:45.637" Score="6" ViewCount="3079" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the poem 'A Roadside Stand' by Robert Frost, and I have accumulated a few questions through the poem. So, I will be posting some questions from the same poem, if you can please answer my other questions as well. Thanks to all :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, in this paragraph what does Robert Frost mean by 'trusting sorrow'? Is this usable with the same meaning in daily life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-for-students.com/a-roadside-stand.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can read the whole poem. Below I have given the particular paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hurt to the scenery wouldn't be my complaint&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So much as the &lt;strong&gt;trusting sorrow&lt;/strong&gt; of what is unsaid:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here far from the city we make our roadside stand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And ask for some city money to feel in the hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To try if it will not make our being expand,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T11:11:15.290" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T12:24:05.313" Title="What does 'trusting sorrow' mean here?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5882" CreationDate="2018-02-28T11:32:05.247" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Roadside Stand describes a small-time farmer trying to sell their produce from a stall by a busy road. The farmer is poor, wanting only a small slice of city wealth, and feels bitter that drivers won't even look at the stand, let alone stop and buy something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context the &quot;trusting sorrow&quot; is a neat encapsulation to express what is described over following few lines: &lt;strong&gt;that modern life offers an unspoken promise, which is not being kept&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here far from the city we make our roadside stand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And ask for some city money to feel in hand    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This expresses the desire of poor country folk to share in just a little of the city's wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That the party in power is said to be keeping from us    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a reference to media and politics. The &quot;moving-pictures’ promise&quot; is that on-screen, people do well if they work hard. It's not just cinema but a representation of the &quot;American dream&quot;, which finds perhaps its clearest expression in Hollywood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The farmer is working hard, not wanting to fall back on charity or the state, but is not being rewarded. This is alluded to later in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those that feel the pinch of rural poverty in spite of hard work often blame their plight on the metropolitan establishment, politicians who favour the cities where they live over the more sparsely populated countryside. Hence it's the &quot;party in power&quot; whose policies are stopping wealth from flowing out of the city into the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus &quot;trusting sorrow&quot; is a phrase to briefly express that the farmer &quot;trusts&quot; the unspoken &quot;moving-pictures’ promise&quot; and is &quot;sorrowful&quot; that politicians have been &quot;keeping from us&quot; the wealth of the city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T12:24:05.313" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T12:24:05.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5884" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-28T14:53:49.693" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T14:53:49.693" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T14:53:49.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5885" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-28T14:53:49.693" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel The Ingenious Nobleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615. Use with the tags [miguel-de-cervantes] and [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T12:25:42.810" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T12:25:42.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5886" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-28T14:54:52.213" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T14:54:52.213" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T14:54:52.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5887" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-28T14:54:52.213" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616) and his life as a writer. He has been called the greatest writer in the Spanish language and is best known for his novel 'Don Quixote'. Use with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T22:11:19.750" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T22:11:19.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5888" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-02-28T19:21:21.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-02-28T19:21:21.677" LastActivityDate="2018-02-28T19:21:21.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5889" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-02-28T19:21:21.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Kitab al Miraj' (&quot;Book of the Ascension&quot;), an 11th-century Muslim book about Muhammad's ascension into Heaven. Use with the [al-qushairi] author tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T10:40:26.423" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T10:40:26.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-01T01:31:50.407" Score="3" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Carmilla&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Sheridan Le Fanu, Chapter 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first change I experienced was rather agreeable. It was very near the turning point from which began the descent of Avernus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Wikipedia it says Avernus is an ancient name for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avernus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crater in Italy&lt;/a&gt;, but that doesn't seem to fit exactly. I looked it up on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Avernus&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CAvernus%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bXAHd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bXAHd.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram Viewer result for &amp;quot;Avernus&amp;quot; in the range 1800–2000&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word was very common in the 19th century. Does anyone know what it means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3125" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T06:22:32.580" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T06:22:32.580" Title="What does the word 'Avernus' mean in Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sheridan-le-fanu&gt;&lt;carmilla&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5890" CreationDate="2018-03-01T09:54:20.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The crater &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avernus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avernus&lt;/a&gt;, outside &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cumae&lt;/a&gt;, was thought by the Romans to be an entrance to the underworld where souls spent the afterlife. Aeneas visits it in Virgil's &lt;em&gt;The Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Till, coming where Avernus, dark as night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gapes, with rank vapours from its depths uprolled.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;, Book Six, XXVIII &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18466/18466-h/18466-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translation E. Fairfax Taylor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &quot;descent of Avernus&quot; means a descent into the afterlife. In later, Christian contexts, the Roman afterlife was thought of as a version of Hell (not that strange; the word &quot;hell&quot; is the same as one of the places the Norse dead dwelt. Remember also that Virgil is Dante's guide through Hell in &lt;em&gt;Divina Commedia&lt;/em&gt;). So, &quot;descent of Avernus&quot; is here equivalent to &quot;road to Hell&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T09:54:20.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5890" CreationDate="2018-03-01T10:32:06.427" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &quot;Descent of Avernus&quot; is an allusion to Virgil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;. In context in &lt;em&gt;Carmilla&lt;/em&gt;, where the narrator Laura is describing her slide into a mysterious illness or ‘fascination’, it has the implication that it will be easy for her to succumb to the malady and difficult for her to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford Classical Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Avernus, a deep volcanic crater, now a lake, near Puteoli. Its appearance inspired the belief that it led to the Underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In book VI of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virgil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the Trojan prince &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeneas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aeneas&lt;/a&gt; visits the Underworld to speak with his dead father Anchises. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumaean_Sibyl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cumaean Sybil&lt;/a&gt; had previously warned him that the Underworld is easy to enter but hard to leave:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tros Anchisiade, &lt;strong&gt;facilis descensus Averni&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  hoc opus, hic labor est.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roughly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Trojan, son of Anchises, &lt;strong&gt;the descent of Avernus is easy&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Night and day the dismal doors of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%ABs_Pater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dis&lt;/a&gt; stand open;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But to reclimb the stair and escape to the breezes above,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That is toil, that is labour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; have &lt;em&gt;descensus Averno&lt;/em&gt;, the descent &lt;em&gt;into&lt;/em&gt; Avernus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the most well-known passages in the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;the descent of Avernus&lt;/em&gt; is widely used to mean that it is easy to slide into evil or into disaster, and hard to get out again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decline in frequency of &quot;Avernus&quot; in the Google Ngram results is just a consequence of the general decline of classical reference. In the 19th century, the Greek and Latin classics were a pillar of the education of the middle and upper classes, hence a natural source of allusions and quotations. Not so much now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T12:34:47.413" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T12:34:47.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5893" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-01T10:54:44.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T10:54:44.673" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T10:54:44.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5894" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-01T10:54:44.673" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Irish writer Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 – 1873) and his works. He is best known for Gothic novels such as 'Uncle Silas' (1864) and 'Carmilla' (1871–72)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T20:12:03.460" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T20:12:03.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5895" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-01T10:55:51.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T10:55:51.533" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T10:55:51.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5896" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-01T10:55:51.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Gothic novella 'Carmilla' (1871–72) by Sheridan Le Fanu. Use this tag with the [sheridan-le-fanu] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T20:11:59.100" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T20:11:59.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2932" CreationDate="2018-03-01T21:31:03.677" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the message in one of the first scenes of &quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot; is that there is more going on in the world that people care to notice. Holmes quizzes Watson on the number of stairs in the house not to encourage Watson to pay more attention (although he probably accomplishes that), but make the point that people live in their own worlds much of the time--that they miss the details. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if Doyle wanted his readers to have a more open mind to things like fairies, ghosts, messages from beyond, etc., morals of &quot;pay attention&quot; or &quot;keep an open mind&quot; would harmonize with this stance pretty nicely, even if his stories feature a lack of fairies, ghosts, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3129" LastEditorUserId="3129" LastEditDate="2018-03-01T21:42:29.757" LastActivityDate="2018-03-01T21:42:29.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-02T02:02:54.380" Score="3" ViewCount="791" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ray Bradbury's famous short story &quot;All Summer in a Day&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://staff.esuhsd.org/danielle/English%20Department%20LVillage/RT/Short%20Stories/All%20Summer%20in%20a%20Day.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can be read online&lt;/a&gt;, is about a girl from Earth, Margot, who's ostracised by her classmates on Venus. They've never seen the sun, but she has. Refusing to believe that it will appear on Venus that day, they lock her into a cupboard, and only remember her - with shame - after the sun has already been and gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was there any real event which inspired this story?&lt;/strong&gt; E.g. in Bradbury's own childhood, or those of his kids or other people he knew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T16:09:53.513" Title="Was &quot;All Summer in a Day&quot; based on any real childhood event?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5900" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-02T08:45:59.073" Score="2" ViewCount="1884" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the poem 'A Roadside Stand' by Robert Frost, and I have accumulated a few questions through the poem. So, I will be posting some questions from the same poem, if you can please answer my other questions as well. Thanks to all :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-for-students.com/a-roadside-stand.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can read the whole poem. Below I have given the particular paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost says that the good-doers enforce benefits on the rural farmers, soothe them out of their wits and teach them how to sleep they sleep all day.&#xA;Here I want to know a few things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, How do they enforce benefits? I mean, in what possible way? What possible benefits are being talked about here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, How do they soothe them out of their wits by enforcing benefits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last, and most important, How do they make them sleep how they sleep all day? I mean, do they don't work in the day? How do they make them to not work in the day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know a little bit about what the poet actually wants to say, but I have very blurred information. So, it will be of grrrrrreat help if someone could elaborately answer the questions I put :)&#xA;Really, Thanks a looooooot to anyone who makes any efforts :D&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is in the news that all these pitiful kin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To live in villages, next to the theatre and the store,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where they won’t have to think for themselves anymore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T20:34:13.493" Title="How did &quot;they make them sleep all day&quot; in A Roadside Stand?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5902" CreationDate="2018-03-02T09:56:21.013" Score="3" ViewCount="903" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the poem &quot;A Roadside Stand&quot; by Robert Frost, and I have accumulated a few questions through the poem. So, I will be posting some questions from the same poem, if you can please answer my other questions as well. Thanks to all :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Robert Frost says, &quot;I can't help owning the great relief it would be to put these people at one stroke out of their pain&quot;, What exactly is he owning? Is he owning the 'thought' of putting people out of their pain at one stroke? or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will really appreciate anyone who would give an elaborate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-for-students.com/a-roadside-stand.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; you can read the whole poem. Below I have given the particular paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, in country money, the country scale of gain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or so the voice of the country seems to complain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I can’t help &lt;strong&gt;owning&lt;/strong&gt; the great relief it would be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then next day as I come back into the sane,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wonder how I should like you to come to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And offer to put me gently out of my pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T11:03:50.537" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T11:03:50.537" Title="What is Robert Frost 'owning' in these lines?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5901" CreationDate="2018-03-02T12:25:27.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/owning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;To own&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;transitive verb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a : to have or hold as property : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/possess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;possess&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b : to have power or mastery over&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;wanted to &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; his own life&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;: to acknowledge to be true, valid, or as claimed : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/admit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;admit&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; a debt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it's not used in the first sense, but in the second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frost is saying that he can't help but &lt;em&gt;admit&lt;/em&gt; that there is great relief in being able to put these people out of their misery. However, when he comes to his senses, he considers how he would feel if someone were to offer the same for him ... which is arguably more than what he would offer to those people &amp;mdash; &lt;em&gt;a choice&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T22:07:36.327" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T22:07:36.327" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5909" CreationDate="2018-03-02T14:20:51.543" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is confusion about the definition of Alliteration and Rhyme. Some people define alliteration as the repetition of consonants, while others restrict alliteration to only the case when two consecutive words begins with the same letter (or something). As a result, I am always in doubt in Poetry exams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question: Is there really a true definition for alliteration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3131" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T15:06:44.193" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T19:10:53.120" Title="Is there an official definition for alliteration?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-03-03T19:11:14.030" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5904" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-02T14:56:20.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T14:56:20.180" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T14:56:20.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5905" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-02T14:56:20.180" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs of the English rock band Radiohead, formed in 1985. When asking about the lyrics of a song, please use the [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T15:17:19.400" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T15:17:19.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5906" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-02T14:59:05.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T14:59:05.493" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T14:59:05.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5907" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-02T14:59:05.493" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs on 'OK Computer' (1997), Radiohead's third studio album. Use this tag with the [radiohead] tag, and, if applicable, the [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-03-02T15:17:49.887" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T15:17:49.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5308" CreationDate="2018-03-02T17:08:22.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from the first paragraph of the novel, so we can expect it to establish background, raise questions, and intrigue the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written in the first person, so we are getting the thoughts of the narrator, and the mode is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness_(narrative_mode)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stream of consciousness&lt;/a&gt;: that is, an attempt to depict the unfiltered flow of thought, of images, ideas and feelings quickly passing through the narrator’s mind. Let’s look in detail at the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, he was dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We assume that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; is a man known to the narrator. &lt;em&gt;Dark&lt;/em&gt; could mean dark-featured, dark-skinned, dark-haired, dark-tempered, or some or all of them. Who is he? Someone important in the novel, we expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He still is except that it is not easy to think of him as still existing, and everywhere my gaze turns he isn’t there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has gone away. Or died? (Though “he still is” makes this seem less likely.) It seems that the narrator was close to him, and is continually reminded of his absence. He may be the father or son or lover of the narrator; based on the title of the novel we suspect the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What’s the expression? Water, water everywhere…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator tries to remember a quotation from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/151/151-h/151-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1798) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Taylor Coleridge&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Water, water, every where,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all the boards did shrink;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Water, water, every where,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor any drop to drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did this quotation occur to the narrator? In Coleridge’s poem, the sailors have been drifting in the ocean, until “every tongue, through utter drought, / Was withered at the root”. They are surrounded by water and yearning desperately for it, but it is salt and they cannot drink it. So in &lt;em&gt;Peel My Love Like an Onion&lt;/em&gt; the narrator is likely also yearning for something that can’t be had, and we can guess that this is the dark man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was full—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full of what? In the context of the allusion to &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;, full of love for the dark man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a vessel,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the idea of fullness suggests to the narrator other things that can be full, in a process of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_association_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free association&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a huge pre-Columbian pot,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Columbian_era&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pre-Columbian&lt;/a&gt;’ refers to the cultures of the Americas before they had significant contact with Europe. So what suggested ‘pre-Columbian’ to the narrator? Maybe the narrator is native American? Or the dark man is? Or the narrator lived somewhere where pre-Columbian earthenware could be seen or found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a copal-burning brassier,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copal&lt;/a&gt; is an aromatic resin that is burned in central American religious ceremonies, and &lt;em&gt;brassier&lt;/em&gt; must be a variant spelling of &lt;em&gt;brazier&lt;/em&gt;. Again, this suggests that narrator is native American or has spent time with native Americans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a funeral urn,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By association of incense-burning with funerals, the narrator recalls that someone died; perhaps the dark man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a well, Jill’s bucket up and down,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator remembers the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_and_Jill_(nursery_rhyme)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nursery rhyme&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack and Jill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Went up the hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To fetch a pail of water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack fell down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And broke his crown,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Jill came tumbling after&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Broke his crown” is again suggestive of death. “Jack” could represent the dark man and “Jill” the narrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a bruja’s kettle simmering over the fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bruja&lt;/em&gt; is Spanish for &lt;em&gt;witch&lt;/em&gt;. Conventionally witches brew potions in kettles or cauldrons. The image is sinister, perhaps suggested by the images of death. The use of the Spanish language suggests that the narrator is from a Hispanic background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s a lot of material for such a short paragraph! Of course we can’t be sure that we’ve correctly understood everything in  this dense sequence of allusions and associations. Not everything that passes through someone’s mind is significant. But we have a rough feeling for the character and background of the narrator, and some hypotheses and forebodings about what is to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T17:08:22.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5903" CreationDate="2018-03-02T17:59:52.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, there is, at least in one context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are talking about most kind of poetry, alliteration is a rhetoric effect. It does not need an exact definition, because what you are interested in is how &lt;em&gt;effective&lt;/em&gt; it is in making the poem achieve something. You can set up rules for yourself, but others might follow different rules, while still thinking that they are using alliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you are talking about the old Norse and Anglosaxon poetry, then alliteration do have a definition, since it is part of the metre. Apart from the structure with stressed and unstressed syllables, lines are held together with alliterations. The rules for this are fairly simple:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Each consonant sound alliterate with itself, and only itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All vowel sounds alliterate with eachother.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alliterations can be separated by other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will give an example out of &lt;em&gt;Hávamál&lt;/em&gt;, where I've marked the alliterations (the structure is two short lines that alliterate with eachother, then one longer line with an internal alliteration, and then this is repeated):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;D&lt;/strong&gt;eyr fé,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;eyja frændr,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  deyr &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;jalfr it &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;ama,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;k veit einn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;t &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;ldrei deyr:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;ómr um &lt;strong&gt;d&lt;/strong&gt;auðan hvern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are more rules for where the words with alliterations should be placed; Snorri's &lt;em&gt;Edda&lt;/em&gt; has an entire part dedicated to the different verse forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Sources&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lars Lönnroth's &lt;em&gt;Den poetiska Eddan&lt;/em&gt; has a useful foreword on eddic poetry, which the above is mostly based on. For scaldic poetry, I would suggest a good edition of Snorri's &lt;em&gt;Edda&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T17:59:52.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6045" CreationDate="2018-03-02T20:01:42.047" Score="2" ViewCount="940" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stanza 1 of &quot;London&quot; by William Blake is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wander thro' each charter'd street,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And mark in every face I meet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Marks of weakness, marks of woe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am curious about the usage of the word &quot;mark&quot; in this context. The word clearly has a double meaning, as it is used by Blake as both a verb and a noun. While I acknowledge that in line 4, &quot;mark&quot; most likely means &quot;stain&quot;, I had a different interpretation. Could &quot;mark&quot; be used as a name, so that Blake would be referring to Marks with weakness and woe? As a common name, it could help reinforce the widespread suffering the poem is about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3134" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T15:13:05.650" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T18:02:10.523" Title="Could &quot;mark&quot; in &quot;London&quot; by William Blake be meant as a name?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5900" CreationDate="2018-03-02T20:34:13.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a variant on the longstanding &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_welfare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critique of charity/welfare&lt;/a&gt; as robbing people of meaningful work and giving them a &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Xtc-leisure-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suffocating idleness&lt;/a&gt; instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By being given charity instead of work, the poor in Frost's poem sleep all day instead of spending their time productively.  The end result is that they cannot sleep peacefully at night, the way one does after a hard day's physical labor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In American politics, this is a prominent conservative viewpoint.  It, itself, has been criticized as reactionary and heartless, and as idealizing the hardships of poverty and physical labor.  In Frost's hands, it is arguably a bit self-satirizing --this is a poem all about a urban middle-class person's varied, contradictory, ambivalent and quite possibly wrong (or wrong-headed) thoughts about the rural poor and their experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2018-03-02T20:34:13.493" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1135" CreationDate="2018-03-03T21:42:46.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t feel it does.  Conformity in AWT was to serve evil, while in AWD it was for a positive benefit.  Conformity itself just “is”.  How it’s used is what makes it good or evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3138" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T21:42:46.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5915" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5916" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Madeleine L'Engle (1918-2007) or about any of her works, most famously the Time Quintet which started with &quot;A Wrinkle in Time&quot;." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" LastActivityDate="2018-03-03T21:49:22.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5928" CreationDate="2018-03-03T23:57:34.150" Score="10" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I start to read the opening paragraphs of Michael Ende's &lt;em&gt;Momo&lt;/em&gt;, I think for a moment &quot;wait, is this set thousands of years ago and I forgot?&quot; before realising those paragraphs are only backstory to explain the existence of the amphitheatre. Given the modern technology such as cars in the story, the main part of the book is clearly set in at least the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting question is &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; is it set. The author is German, but many of the characters' names (Beppo, Guido, Salvatore) sound more Spanish or Italian. Is there more evidence, perhaps in minor textual details or even extratextual commentary by the author, to support any particular setting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T01:16:25.497" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T01:16:25.497" Title="Where is Momo set?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;momo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="425" CreationDate="2018-03-04T02:57:41.547" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheelbarrow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot;&lt;/a&gt; presumably has some &quot;hidden meaning&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my own explication via transliteration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so much depends upon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a red wheel barrow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  glazed with rain water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  beside the white chickens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so much depends upon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ONE MAN&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  AS the CORPOREALIZATION OF the MESSIAH&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  therefore, SING, LET US REJOICE FOR the SON&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's why. Using @ = aleph, KH = het, kh = khaf, 3 = aiyin, a: = vowel &quot;aye&quot;&#xA;                    and [T] for the ancient sound of the shin             &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wheelbarrow = KHaDoFeN &amp;lt; Aramaic KHaD = one + @oFeN = wheel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;red wheelbarrow = KHaDoFeN @aDoM&#xA;                           KHaD BeN-@aDaM = one + man/human/person&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;rain water = Ma:-GeSHeM. Glazed = Z'khookhi.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;with rainwater glazed = B'Ma:GeSHeM Z' khookhi&#xA;                                  B'MaGSHiM MaSHiaKH = as [the] corporealization of + [the] Messiah&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Beside the = 3aL YaD Ha-&#xA;                 3aL YaDa: Ha- = by means of, through; because of [this]&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;white chickens =  TaRNaGoLoT LaVaN&#xA;                       [T]aR NaGiLaT LaBeN = sing, let us rejoice + for [the] son&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Williams do this with conscious intent?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Did Williams know enough Hebrew to implement this process? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this poem were written by Lewis Carroll, I would say &quot;yes&quot;. Carroll was fluent in all of the languages mentioned in The Hunting of the Snark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Williams&lt;/a&gt;’s mother was a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Perhaps he learned some Hebrew from his mother?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Perhaps he “engineered” this poem by doing the exact opposite of what I did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3140" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T14:26:19.580" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T14:26:19.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8820" CreationDate="2018-03-04T04:51:16.020" Score="1" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a labor meeting, Ellsworth Toohey said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... and so, my friends,&quot; the voice was saying, &quot;the lesson to be learned from our tragic struggle is the lesson of unity. We shall unite or we shall be defeated. Our will - the will of the disinherited, the forgotten, the oppressed - shall weld us into a solid bulwork, with a common faith and a common goal. This is the time for every man to renounce the thoughts of his petty little problems, of gain, of comfort, of self-gratification. This is the time to merge his self in a great current, in the rising tide which is approaching to sweep us all, willing or unwilling, in to the future. History, my friends, does not ask questions or acquiescence. It is irrevokable, as the voice of the masses that determine it. Let us listen to the call. &lt;strong&gt;Let us organize, my brothers. Let us organize. let us organize. Let us organize.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, at the inaugural meeting of the &quot;youth group&quot; he organized for architects and allied professions, his speech included the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... You are crusaders in the cause of the underpriviledged and the unsheltered. Not by what we are shall we be judged, but by those we seve. &lt;strong&gt;Let us stand united in this spirit. Let us - in all matters - be faithful to this new, broader, higher perspective. Let us organize&lt;/strong&gt; - well, my friends, shall I say - a nobler dream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This actually sounds remarkably like the previous speech. Is he basically just giving variants of &quot;let us organize&quot; speeches over and over again to different audiences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T21:02:12.150" Title="Is Ellsworth Toohey just giving the same speech over and over again?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5927" CreationDate="2018-03-04T04:56:11.730" Score="6" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first time that Peater Keating hears Ellsworth Toohey speak, it's described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was not a voice, it was a miracle. It unrolled as a velvet banner. It spoke English words, but the resonant clarity of each syllable made it sound like a new language spoken for the first time. It was the voice of a giant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keating stood, his mouth open. He did not hear what the voice was saying. He heard the beauty of the sounds without meaning. He felt no need to know the meaning; he could accept anything, he would be led blindly anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountainhead#Ellsworth_Toohey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Toohey was at least partially inspired by Harold Laski, and Ayn Rand even attended some of his lectures as part of her research for the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, was Harold Laski actually as good of a public speaker as Toohey is described as being? Was Rand basing Toohey's speaking style on Laski's speaking style, or on someone completely different? Or was his speaking style not inspired by anyone in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T20:14:16.743" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T21:44:39.913" Title="Was Ellsworth Toohey's public speaking style modeled after Harold Laski?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9424" CreationDate="2018-03-04T11:55:21.593" Score="7" ViewCount="3078" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C8SLAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT92&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Magical Earth&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulzar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gulzar&lt;/a&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;Green Poems&lt;/em&gt;, 2014) contains these lines (in the English translation by Pavan K. Varma):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is something indeed in the earth of my garden&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is this earth magical?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The earth knows how to do magic!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sherbet, or milk, or water&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Anything may fall, it absorbs them all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How much water does it drink?!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It gulps down whatever you give&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Be it from a jug or a bucket&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Amazingly, its stomach never fills&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I have heard that &lt;strong&gt;it can even hide a river inside!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The earth knows how to do magic!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it poetically mean that earth can hide a river inside? Better give a summary of the poetic non literal lines in the poem &quot;The Magical Earth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T16:40:53.017" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:01:25.727" Title="What does Gulzar actually mean by saying that Earth can hide a river inside?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;hindi-literature&gt;&lt;gulzar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5925" CreationDate="2018-03-04T13:54:41.693" Score="4" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a novel. The main character whose name is Charlie (I think) goes on a Europe trip, and he ends up in France with a friend of his. Now I am not too sure it was set in France but it seems so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway they go to a club and he meets a prostitute. I think her name started with ‘L’ ... Louisa or something like that. He offers to let her stay with him for a few days. He comes to think of her as a friend and learns that her husband is in jail for murder. The night her husband killed someone he also slept with her and she felt guilty that her child would be a product of sin. Then she and her mother in law try to help her husband but they fail. And weirdly she becomes a prostitute to pay for her husband’s sins. She wants to punish herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlie’s friend lives a self imposed life of hardship to be prepared for anything ... after he hears her story and sees his friend’s odd way of living he becomes disillusioned with life. What started as a fun trip becomes difficult for him. He comes home melancholy and I think the novel ends like this “it seemed like the bottom had fallen off the world&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it’s by Somerset Maugham but I am not sure. I was always haunted by the story. Any help would be appreciated :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3144" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T15:20:05.917" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T15:20:05.917" Title="Novel about a woman who becomes a prostitute to pay for her husband's sins" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="99" CreationDate="2018-03-04T14:06:27.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As acknowledged above, the cat probably represents opportunistic, underground criminals who persisted after the revolution. Her attempts to lure the wild birds by offers of camaraderie are simply a modified form of her (presumed) exploitation of weaker beasts pre-Animalism. Bribery was said to be ubiquitous in Soviet Russia and the cat managing to charm the authorities could well be a reflection of this. Her impunity also captures the confused relationship Marxism-Leninism had with crime; despite the totalitarian policing, criminality that wasn’t directed against the state was ideologically couched as a hangover of capitalism and to be regarded as a mental disorder. This is possibly why the other animals are so forgiving of the way she shirks work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that she is explicitly feminine and depicted as seductive may also be an allusion to prostitution specifically. Supposedly, prostitution surged after implementation of the New Economic Policy and initial attempts by police to crack down on the practice were foiled by the lack of recourse to any penal code; again, the failure of the pigs to do anything more than question the cat captures this ineffectuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her non-appearance later in the novel could correspond with the clearer codification of a penal code in the Soviet Union and the attendent punishment of law-breakers, although personally I think she just carried on with her ways and since ultimately there wasn’t any more to say about underground crime under Stalin than in any other territory, Orwell didn’t elaborate on the allegory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3145" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T08:11:03.540" LastActivityDate="2019-03-17T08:11:03.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5923" CreationDate="2018-03-04T14:40:18.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your intuition was right: it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a Somerset Maugham novel. I tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=somerset+maugham+novel+charlie+prostitute&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching Google&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;somerset maugham novel charlie prostitute&lt;/code&gt; and found the novel &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Christmas Holiday&lt;/em&gt; (1939) by W. Somerset Maugham&lt;/strong&gt;. The description on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/397539.Christmas_Holiday&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; is enough to verify that it's the one you're looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Christmas, Charley Mason's father granted him a trip to Paris, all expenses paid. It should have been a lark, but on his first night Charley meets a woman whose story will forever change his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Lydia has seen tragedy. The Russian Revolution displaced her family, left her homeless, fatherless. And for reasons that elude Charley, Lydia pines for a man half a world away--a dope dealer and murderer whose sins Lydia seeks to absolve through her own self- destruction. Haunting, erotic, deeply effecting, Christmas Holiday explores two souls capsized by compassion--and the confusion that engulfed a generation in the days between the Great Wars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist is Charley (almost Charlie!), a young man from England who's on holiday in France. The friend of his is called Simon. The prostitute's name is Lydia - not Louise, but it does begin with L. Her husband is Robert Berger, a man in prison who never appears 'onstage' in the story. The last sentence of the story is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a fact he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn’t even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you come to think of it, and he didn’t just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T14:40:18.563" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5933" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:13:27.543" Score="13" ViewCount="5405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope not to ask a very silly question. As the title says, I want to know the place where Homer was born. According to some quick searches on the web, he was born in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ionia&lt;/a&gt;. But it seems strange for me that he narrates the Trojan War from an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achaeans_(Homer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Achaean&lt;/a&gt; point of view, and not a Trojan one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think I am missing something. Maybe you can help with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1630" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T15:06:17.120" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:06:17.120" Title="Where was Homer born?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5920" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:17:24.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Journals of Ayn Rand&lt;/em&gt; (p. 113 in my edition) cite the following comments from an interview she gave in 1961:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Laski was the soul of Ellsworth Toohey in the flesh. After seeing Laski, I just had to remember how he lectured - his mannerisms, the pseudo-intellectual snideness, the whole manner of speaking on imortant subjects with inappropriate sarcasm as his only weapon, acting as if he were a charming scholar in a drawing room, but you could sense the bared teeth behind the smile, you could feel something evil - and I would know how Toohey would act in any circumstances; it gave me the complete sense of a life of that type. &lt;strong&gt;Toohey is larger scale than Laski, who was a cheap little snide socialist&lt;/strong&gt;, but Laski projected Toohey's essential characteristics. Even his appearance was ideal. I drew a sketch during the lecture, with the narrow cadaverous face and glasses and big ears, and I gave it all to Toohey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her journals, she describes his manner as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He looks terribly at ease, a little weary, a little bored - not offensively so, just gracefully so. (He leans limply sidewise against the stand.)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Simplicity and clarity of sentences - yet a few &quot;exquisite&quot; words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, yes, a lot of the mannerisms are explicitly based on Laski, as are some aspects of his public speaking style, but Laski doesn't appear to have been nearly as skilled as Toohey was, and Toohey is deliberately &quot;larger scale.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2245" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T21:44:39.913" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T21:44:39.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5917" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:29:10.973" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are multiple hints that the unnamed city the plot takes place in is a reminiscence of &lt;em&gt;Genzano di Roma&lt;/em&gt;. Ende has lived there during the writing of Momo, and the Italian background (the names, but also the ancient amphitheatre) hint at that. Apparently, Ende himself has acknowledged the influence in an interview, but I could not find the original interview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;„Das ist für uns ein Geschenk, eine große Ehre“, betont&#xA;Gabbarini. Die Geschichte über das Mädchen, das es mit den Zeitdieben&#xA;aufnimmt, verfasste Ende in seiner Wahlheimat. Die Berge um den 25&#xA;000-Einwohner-Ort, insbesondere der Monte Giove, seien seine&#xA;Inspiration für die Schildkröte Kassiopeia gewesen, sagt der&#xA;Bürgermeister.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is a gift, and a great honour&amp;quot;, stresses Gabbarini [major of Genzano di&#xA;Roma]. The story about the girl who combats the Men in Grey&#xA;has been written by Ende in this residency of his. The mountains&#xA;surrounding the small village - most of all Monte Giove - were&#xA;inspirations for the tortoise Kassiopeia, said the major.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merkur.de/lokales/garmisch-partenkirchen/tausende-blumen-ehren-michael-ende-3073859.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;News Coverage of a festival dedicated to Michael Ende in Genzano di Roma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding when it takes place, there are no hints at that and I haven't found anything Ende has stated about that matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, it feels like the 1950s. I haven't lived during that time, but the rise of capitalism and the modern monetary system was most present in Germany during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaftswunder&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wirtschaftswunder&lt;/a&gt;, and Ende acknowledges &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sozialoekonomie.info/Weiterfuhrende_Informationen/Momo_UnendlicheGeschichte/Ende-Brief.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Momo being a criticism of modern economics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the open smoking and the prominence of cigars is something attributed to the 1950s in German literature - as far as I know. An entire subplot of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Faber_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homo faber by Max Frisch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, set in the 1950s is concerned with a tobacco plantation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T21:29:10.973" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:37:09.100" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Modern literature very much disputes that Homer existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing is known for certain about Homer himself, and his very existence is now disputed; the Iliad and Odyssey may have different authors, if either can be said to have an author at all. The epics are certainly the product of a long oral tradition, probably dating back to at least the 12th century B.C. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=8pXhAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA366&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Portrait Bust&quot;. britishmuseum.org. The British Museum.&#xA;  Jump up ^ Wilson, Nigel. Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. Routledge. p. 366.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the question of where he was born or where he lived is void. The Iliad and Odyssey are both Greek poems, hence they are narrated from a greek point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastActivityDate="2018-03-04T21:37:09.100" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5931" CreationDate="2018-03-04T21:58:15.280" Score="10" ViewCount="1025" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a story in my reading book in third or fourth grade about a man who got tricked into agreeing to three bets with the devil because the man was a great gambler. The man won all three bets and in rage the devil cursed him so that all the forces of hell would make sure he never won another bet. The man tried everything but couldn't win. When lamenting to a friend the friend suggested they could still beat things out by betting against things people wanted to happen such as betting it would rain during a picnic for people who did not want it to rain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the title and author of this story if anyone knows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3150" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-03-04T23:40:16.807" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T07:50:50.890" Title="Story about a man who wins three bets with the devil" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5930" CreationDate="2018-03-04T22:12:41.917" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?76256&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Satan and Sam Shay&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Arthur_Jr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Arthur&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;. . . a man who got tricked into agreeing to three bets with the devil . . .&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am told that sin has somewhat declined since Satan met Sam Shay. I cannot vouch for this, but they say that production has definitely fallen off since that evening when Sam Shay won three wagers from the Devil. And this is the tale of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The man won all three bets and in rage the devil cursed him so that all the forces of hell would make sure he never won another bet.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glaring down from his great height, Satan directed an awful gaze upon Sam Shay.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;This is an ill night's work you have done!&quot; he cried, in a voice that shook with rage, so that the skyscrapers nearby trembled a bit, and the next day's papers carried an item concerning a small earthquake. &quot;Hear me well, Sam Shay! From this moment onward, never shall you win another wager! All the forces of hell will be marshalled to prevent you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The man tried everything but couldn't win.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ten dollars,&quot; said he to his acquaintance, &quot;to a dime that Seven doesn't win.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The bookie gave him an odd glance. For Seven was the trailer, forty lengths behind and losing distance steadily. Any mortal eye could see that she couldn't win, and it came to him Sam might be daft.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Twenty dollars!&quot; said Sam Shay. &quot;To a five-cent piece!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;They were odds not to be resisted, and the bookie nodded.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;Taken!&quot; he agreed, and the words were scarce out of his mouth before Seven put on a burst of speed. She seemed to rise into the air with the very rapidity of her motion. Her legs churned. And she whisked forward so fast her astonished jockey was but an ace from being blown out of the saddle by the very rush of air. Closing the gap in a manner quite unbelievable, she came up to the leaders and, with a scant yard to the finish, shot ahead to win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When lamenting to a friend the friend suggested they could still beat things out by betting against things people wanted to happen such as betting it would rain during a picnic for people who did not want it to rain.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sam,&quot; he said, voice hoarse, &quot;you have never heard that there's people willing to pay good money to insure the weather'll be as they want it upon a certain day? Have you never heard of insuring against storms, Sam, and against accidents, sickness, twins and such misfortunes? And insuring isn't really betting. It's but a business—a legitimate money-making business.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T07:50:50.890" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T07:50:50.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-05T01:14:41.497" Score="9" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've owned two copies of Michael Ende's &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; in my life - both English translations, one paperback with a blue cover, one hardback with a red cover inside the dustcover. Both of them clearly distinguished in the text between the parts of the story happening in the Outer World (Bastian in the school attic, etc.) and the parts happening in Fantastica. It's important to distinguish them, because sometimes the nipping back and forth is on the order of paragraphs rather than chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first used ordinary Roman text for the Fantastica parts and italics for the Outer World parts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second used green text for the Fantastica parts (very dark green - I thought it was black at first) and red text for the Outer World parts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What other methods have been used to distinguish the text of the two strands of the story?&lt;/strong&gt; (Answers from different translations, audiobooks, Braille copies, etc. are also acceptable, if that's OK without making the question too broad.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T01:14:41.497" Title="What methods have been used to distinguish the text between the two strands of The Neverending Story?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2018-03-05T02:33:49.677" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;A great deal of what is believed to have happened this long ago is based on accounts written centuries later and/or archaeological finds that are open to interpretation. If Homer did exist, it shouldn't surprise us that there would be no evidence of it. If Homer didn't exist, it shouldn't surprise us that for a couple thousand years most people said he did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While any sort of evidence of the existence (or non-existence) of Homer is scant and speculative, there is a good reason why someone from Ionia in Asia Minor some number of centuries before the peak of classical Athens would write from the Greek perspective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the traditional (and by traditional I mean the Ancient Greek tradition) date of the Trojan War, Ionian Greeks colonized the area where Troy supposedly was. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Greek tradition, the cities of Ionia were founded by&#xA;  colonists from the other side of the Aegean. Their settlement was&#xA;  connected with the legendary history of the Ionic people in Attica,&#xA;  which asserts that the colonists were led by Neleus and Androclus,&#xA;  sons of Codrus, the last king of Athens. In accordance with this view&#xA;  the &quot;Ionic migration&quot;, as it was called by later chronologers, was&#xA;  dated by them one hundred and forty years after the Trojan War, or&#xA;  sixty years after the return of the Heracleidae into the Peloponnese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People think the author of the Illiad may be from there because he accurately describes a handful of distinct climate patterns, geographical features, and uses their dialect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2656" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T02:33:49.677" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5940" CreationDate="2018-03-05T10:41:14.690" Score="4" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &quot;A Roadside Stand&quot; by Robert Frost, which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-for-students.com/a-roadside-stand.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can read online&lt;/a&gt;. Below I have given the particular paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the line -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To put these people at one stroke out of their pain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost wants to kill the country people at one stroke to relieve their pain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the line -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And offer to put me gently out of my pain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he asks the reader to put him 'gently' out of his pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he particularly mean by 'gently' here? Does he mean 'slow death'? How could we put him 'gently' out of his pain? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, in country money, the country scale of gain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or so the voice of the country seems to complain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I can't help owning the great relief it would be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then next day as I come back into the sane,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wonder how I should like you to come to me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And offer to put me &lt;strong&gt;gently&lt;/strong&gt; out of my pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3085" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T23:49:49.500" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T23:49:49.500" Title="Putting 'gently' out of pain" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5901" CreationDate="2018-03-05T14:32:32.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As @muru described, owned has two meanings.  The more familiar meaning denotes possession, but there's a less common secondary meaning of &quot;admitting something is true,&quot; sometimes used in the construction &quot;own up (to the truth).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frost is using the term primarily in the second sense, but with strong connotations of the first.  In other words he is both admitting to his shameful thought and taking responsibility for his possession of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the thought is shameful:  &quot;Put out of their pain&quot; may sound benign, but it's a euphemism for euthanasia (&quot;mercy killing&quot;).  So he's suggesting it would be better to kill the rural poor than let them continue living their miserable lives --a postively Hitlerian solution to their &quot;problem.&quot;  In the next breath however, he extends a little more empathy and imagines them suggesting that he be the one to be put out of his misery (mercy killed) instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T14:32:32.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5937" CreationDate="2018-03-05T15:03:07.140" Score="4" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for book I've came across aprox ten years ago, I think it was fairly recent book (certainly the edition was).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had two main characters (boy and girl, I think) that were on some kind of partly-detective quest. Large part about it revolved around the architecture of Frank-Lloyd Wright (one of his houses in particular). That also led them to discover beauty of geometry and they learned a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1812" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:55:54.000" Title="Children book with two main characters exploring Fibonacci sequence, Golden ratio" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5936" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:11:29.117" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blueballiettbooks.com/wright3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wright 3&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 2006 children's novel by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Balliett&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blue Balliett&lt;/a&gt;, a sequel to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_Vermeer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chasing Vermeer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary by Vijay Fafat from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf1039&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mathematical Fiction&lt;/a&gt; site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the second mystery book with Calder, Petra and Tommy, where the events take place after those in &lt;a href=&quot;http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf1038&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Chasing Vermeer&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The main theme in the book is the impending destruction / tear-down of famous Frank Lloyd Wright house - &quot;The Robie House&quot; - on the University of Chicago campus. The art students of the university school are convinced this is akin to murder and try to find ways of saving the landmark. At the same time, some thieves are trying to rob the Robie House. And the kids hear that Wright had encoded his visage, his soul, into the house, which is a mystery they feel they must crack.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;All ends well, with hints of some supernatural elements about a living house thrown in. As a bonus, they finally find Wright's hidden code in the form of a stick-figure, skeletal man drawn on a glass window, with body parts set in dimensions which form a Fibonacci sequence (&quot;It’s a Fibonacci man! Wright coded himself in Fibonacci numbers!&quot;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;As in &quot;Chasing Vermeer&quot;, the children communicate through a mathematical code, though the code used in this book is new (&quot;Wright Sandwich Code&quot;, which uses pentominoes as a coding mechanism). Similarly, the book contains illustrations in which there are hidden fish-figures. It turns out that book chapters whose numbers are part of the Fibonacci sequence contain the same number of fish but illustrations in other chapters do not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T16:55:54.000" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:55:54.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5938" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:47:33.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T16:47:33.950" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:47:33.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5939" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:47:33.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fantasy novel 'Momo' (also known as 'The Grey Gentlemen'; 1973) by the German author Michael Ende. Use this tag with the [michael-ende] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T20:24:01.267" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T20:24:01.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5934" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:48:10.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever be the method, it's not likely to be a &lt;em&gt;slow&lt;/em&gt; death. A slow, drawn-out death would only prolong the suffering, thus defeating the purpose of relieving the pain of the victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frost is talking about euthanasia here, and euthanasia is usually seen as humane, unlike say capital punishment. &#xA;I don't think Frost is as concerned about the means of killing as he is with intent behind it - the &quot;good&quot; intention of relieving the suffering of life (compare with the &quot;evil&quot; intention of punishment, in the case of capital punishment). One is therefore easily associated with gentle actions, but not the other. Think of a doctor administering poison to a patient suffering a painful disease and of an executioner doing the same to a criminal - the former is at once associated with a gentleness, a kindness in the action, but the latter evinces brutality and ruthlessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you absolutely must have a method, think of how euthanasia is likely to be performed, or modern day humane executions: it could very well be via poison, but not likely to be hanging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:48:10.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5941" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:49:27.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T16:49:27.377" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T16:49:27.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5942" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-05T16:49:27.377" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Indian poet, lyricist and film director Gulzar (Sampooran Singh Kalra, born 1934) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T20:24:06.663" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T20:24:06.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-05T17:40:05.643" Score="7" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &quot;Scheinriese&quot; (illusory giant), most notably Mr. Tur-Tur from Michael Ende's &lt;em&gt;Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver&lt;/em&gt;, is a being which when seen from a distance appears to be a giant, inadvertently frightening everyone who beholds them, yet decreases in size as one approaches them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This term has entered the German language with negative connotations and is used when an issue is dramatised (e.g. a German soccer team is an illusionary giant and only appears strong on paper).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering whether there are any other instances of such a being or idea occurred, whether Ende's idea had a predecessor or was inspired by something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T11:37:55.910" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T11:37:55.910" Title="Predecessors/Inspirations of Scheinriesen (Illusionary Giants)" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;jim-button-luke-the-engine-driver&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5944" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-05T17:45:29.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T17:45:29.707" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T17:45:29.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5945" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-05T17:45:29.707" Score="0" Body="For questions about Michael Ende's children novels Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960) and Jim Button and the Wild 13 (1962). Although a children's book, Ende is heavily criticising the Nazi past with multiple allusions (some of which got lost in translation). Use this tag with the [michael-ende] tag." OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="1929" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T20:23:56.103" LastActivityDate="2018-03-05T20:23:56.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-05T21:07:51.480" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1756/1756-h/1756-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Uncle Vanya&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Chekhov, I noticed a usage of the word &quot;philosophy&quot; that seemed out of place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ASTROFF. A woman can only become a man's friend after having first&#xA;  been his acquaintance and then his beloved—then she becomes his&#xA;  friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VOITSKI. What vulgar &lt;strong&gt;philosophy&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HELENA. It is tedious, yes, and dreary! You all abuse my husband and&#xA;  look on me with compassion; you think, &quot;Poor woman, she is married to&#xA;  an old man.&quot; How well I understand your compassion! As Astroff said&#xA;  just now, see how you thoughtlessly destroy the forests, so that there&#xA;  will soon be none left. So you also destroy mankind, and soon fidelity&#xA;  and purity and self-sacrifice will have vanished with the woods. Why&#xA;  cannot you look calmly at a woman unless she is yours? Because, the&#xA;  doctor was right, you are all possessed by a devil of destruction; you&#xA;  have no mercy on the woods or the birds or on women or on one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VOITSKI. I don't like your &lt;strong&gt;philosophy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the word makes sense, it seemed like an awkward usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there any particular purpose to the using that particular word, like a historical, culture, etc. context? Or is it just an artifact of translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3160" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-05T22:09:07.557" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T10:38:58.733" Title="Understanding the usage of &quot;Philosophy&quot; in Uncle Vanya" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;&lt;uncle-vanya&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5950" CreationDate="2018-03-06T06:35:46.600" Score="8" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am translating my article to English, which heavily uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blind men and an elephant&lt;/a&gt; tale. Since the metaphor is important, I wonder how it would be perceived in the West, especially in the US. Do you know how familiar or exotic it is to a Westerner? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: &quot;We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable&quot;. So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. In the case of the first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said &quot;This being is like a thick snake&quot;. For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said, &quot;elephant is a wall&quot;. Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f8/Blind_men_and_elephant3.jpg/525px-Blind_men_and_elephant3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastEditorUserId="1015" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T08:22:53.423" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T02:56:25.750" Title="How familiar would the &quot;Blind men and an elephant&quot; tale be in the West?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5949" CreationDate="2018-03-06T11:35:09.730" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story of the Blind Men and the Elephant &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; well-known in the West.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps mostly due to the version of the tale written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Godfrey_Saxe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Godfrey Saxe&lt;/a&gt;, a 19th-century US poet who retold the story as a poem, attributing it to &amp;quot;a Hindoo fable&amp;quot;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_poems_of_John_Godfrey_Saxe/The_Blind_Men_and_the_Elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can read his version here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also been told as a song in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leave_Your_Sleep&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;21st-century album&lt;/a&gt; by a US singer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also mentions other retellings and references to this story throughout western culture, in everything from scientific literature to children's stories (all with citations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is seen as a metaphor in many disciplines, being pressed into service as an analogy in fields well beyond the traditional. In physics, it has been seen as an analogy for the wave–particle duality.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#cite_note-19&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[19]&lt;/a&gt; In biology, the way the blind men hold onto different parts of the elephant has been seen as a good analogy for the Polyclonal B cell response.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#cite_note-20&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[20]&lt;/a&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story enjoys a continuing appeal, as shown by the number of illustrated children's books of the fable; there is one for instance by Paul Galdone and another, Seven Blind Mice, by Ed Young (1992). [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Touching the Elephant&lt;/em&gt; was a 1997 BBC Radio 4 documentary in which four people of varying ages, all blind from birth, were brought to London Zoo to touch an elephant and describe their response.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant#cite_note-24&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[24]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I don't think you need to replace it by another story. It will do perfectly well as it stands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T11:35:09.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5951" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5952" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" Score="0" Body="For questions about Michael Ende's children novels Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960) and Jim Button and the Wild 13 (1962). Although a children's book, Ende is heavily criticising the Nazi past with multiple allusions (some of which got lost in translation). Use this tag with the [michael-ende] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T11:38:41.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5481" CreationDate="2018-03-06T18:32:06.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim's comments were relevant because it explained his behavior in the proceeding scene. His philosophy was destructive to being able to live on earth. His later involvement in creating and enacting Directive 10-289, which demanded that everything stayed exactly as it was, demonstrated his commitment stagnation (which he rationalized by saying that it would give people a sense of security). Ultimately, the book reveals that he didn't even &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to live. (He discovers that to his horror when the Looters capture and ultimately torture John Galt in an effort to secure his cooperation; Jim begged Dr. Ferris to kill Galt, even though he knew full well that Galt was his last chance of surviving).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Philip Rearden didn't appear to have been directly involved in Directive 10-289, he was evidently involved in the Fair Share law that forbade people to own multiple businesses through his involvement in Friends of Global Progress (which seemed to exist primarily for the purpose of lobbying for that policy). Based on his conversation with Hank right before he met with the government officials about the proposed Steel Unification Plan, he may have been at least aware of it. At a minimum, he seemed aware of why they had frozen Hank's accounts (the belief that Hank couldn't disappear without money).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither, for that matter, did Hank Rearden's family: in his last conversation with his family shortly before he joined the Strike, Hank realized to his shock and horror that they didn't even &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to live - if they had, they would've known how to value him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, these texts &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; parallel. Ultimately, Jim Taggart and Philip Rearden were striving towards the same ideal - stagnation and ultimately destruction of the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T18:32:06.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2143" CreationDate="2018-03-06T18:41:24.487" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;He actually understood a fair amount about his situation towards the end of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His feeling here is at least partially represented by a giant calendar that a mayor had had erected over the city so that people could tell the date in the same way that they told the time. He realized shortly after returning to the office that the phrase that the Calendar represented to him was &quot;your days are numbered.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was present with Dagny when they went to what was supposed to be Mr. Thompson's radio speech on the national crisis (which turned into a lengthy speech by John Galt instead), and he heard the entire speech. He had, of course, spent a fair amount of time with John Galt even before that speech without realizing who he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He even realized (and admitted) that he had feelings for Dagny towards the end of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also realized fairly early on how dependent he was on the Railroad, at one point expressing the belief that if the Railroad went down he'd &quot;go down with the ship.&quot; He also knew that, since he lacked the creative genius of Dagny Taggart or Hank Rearden, he'd need Dagny's help to be able to recreate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of who he was trying to convince that it didn't bother him: I think it was probably both of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T02:30:06.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T02:30:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3345" CreationDate="2018-03-06T19:16:37.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's most likely what C. S. Lewis was thinking of, but he wouldn't necessarily expect his readers to be aware of that fact. Uncle Andrew does, in fact, appear to hold to a variant of this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, who is he referring to here? &quot;Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom&quot; and &quot;profound students and great thinkers and sages.&quot; The first sentence could be seen as referring especially to magicians, or it could be referring more generally to anyone who had &quot;secret knowledge&quot; of some kind. (I think that the former is more likely). He seems to be including magicians (like himself) in the category of &quot;profound students and great thinkers and sages&quot;, who have special moral rules that don't apply to &quot;ordinary&quot; people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, then, is &quot;who are the 'profound students and great thinkers and sages'?&quot; Does being one of them make you an Übermensch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that we have to assume, for starters, that Uncle Andrew thinks that it makes you &lt;em&gt;something like&lt;/em&gt; an Übermensch. At a minimum, he seems to think that being one exempts you from &quot;ordinary&quot; moral rules, which are just for &quot;common people&quot; (kids, servants, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google's dictionary defines an ubermensch as &quot;the ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–85).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in a word, yes - C. S. Lewis (who presumably would've been familiar with with this concept) was most likely thinking of this concept when he wrote this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; Yes, he did consider himself an Übermensch (or, at least, something very much like one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T19:16:37.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5962" CreationDate="2018-03-06T22:39:35.677" Score="7" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy's short poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47265/at-lulworth-cove-a-century-back&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;At Lulworth Cove a Century Back&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a sort of ode to Keats, who apparently left England from near Lulworth Cove on his way to Rome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Good. That man goes to Rome — to death, despair;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And no one notes him now but you and I:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A hundred years, and the world will follow him there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And bend with reverence where his ashes lie.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently Hardy once corresponded with a biographer of Keats who wanted to know exactly where he left England in 1820, and this correspondence inspired the poem quoted above. But why was Hardy in particular considered an authority on Keats and being consulted by his biographers? And why did he consider it a noteworthy enough thing to write a whole poem about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the connection between Keats and Hardy?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T13:19:29.423" Title="What was the connection between Hardy and Keats?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1487" CreationDate="2018-03-06T23:18:21.693" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many opinions who Homer was, man or woman, bard etc. I think Homer was Odysseus because his descriptions were too perfect, like he was witness to those events. The Iliad started with Odysseus and continued with him in the Odyssey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odysseus's island Ithaca (better say Penelopa's island) is today's island named Unije off the Croatian coast. It is posted on the WEST of the archipelago Kvarner (really Kephalenia), following Homer's descriptions. This island is geographically and linguistically adequate for the claim that it is the Homeric Ithaca. One interesting thing: near the coast there is a village named Homer (Gorski kotar, Croatia). Nobody knows why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Homer's epics talk about historical events. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3171" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-06T23:23:25.093" LastActivityDate="2018-03-06T23:23:25.093" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2438" CreationDate="2018-03-07T04:04:49.423" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a book called Blind Like Me. I read it in the early 1960's.  He was blinded by a firecracker.  The cover didn't look like that, but that was 30 years earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3174" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T04:04:49.423" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5956" CreationDate="2018-03-07T14:47:36.517" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: (i) Keats’ biographer Sidney Colvin consulted Hardy, not as an expert on &lt;em&gt;Keats&lt;/em&gt;, but rather as an expert on &lt;em&gt;Lulworth Cove&lt;/em&gt;. (ii) Hardy (wrongly) believed that Keats had written ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_star,_would_I_were_steadfast_as_thou_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bright Star&lt;/a&gt;’ at Lulworth Cove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Keats and Severn&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keats suffered from tuberculosis, and in 1820 his doctors advised him to move abroad to a warmer climate. On 17 September 1820 he embarked from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravesend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gravesend&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;em&gt;Maria Crowther&lt;/em&gt;, along with his friend &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Severn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Severn&lt;/a&gt;, whose journal and letters are the main historical sources for this part of Keats’ life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Maria Crowther&lt;/em&gt; was beset by adverse winds as it beat down the English Channel, and this meant that the passengers were able to put ashore at various places, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dungeness&lt;/a&gt; (or “Dundee Ness” as Severn spells it), Portsmouth, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Studland&lt;/a&gt;. On or about 1 October 1820, the ship was becalmed off the Dorset coast, somewhere between Studland and Portland, and the passengers went ashore. Severn wrote several accounts of this episode. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ynEEAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA157&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter dated 21 January 1846&lt;/a&gt;, printed in the &lt;em&gt;Union&lt;/em&gt; magazine for that year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present exquisite Sonnet was written under such interesting circumstances that I cannot forbear making them public. Keats and myself were beating about in the British Channel in the autumn of 1820, anxiously waiting for a wind to take us to Italy, which place, together with the sea-voyage, were deemed likely to preserve his life; for he was then in a state of consumption, which left but the single hope of an Italian sojourn to save him. The stormy British sea, after a fortnight, had exhausted him; and on our arrival off the Dorsetshire coast, having at last the charm of a fine and tranquil day, we landed to recruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shores, with the beautiful grottoes, which opened to fine verdure and cottages, were the means of transporting Keats once more into the regions of poetry; he showed me these things exultingly, as though they had been his birthright. The change in him was wonderful, and continued even after our return to the ship, when he took a volume (which he had a few days before given me) of Shakespeare's Poems, and in it he wrote me the subjoined Sonnet, which at the time I thought the most enchanting of all his efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his autobiography ‘My Tedious Life’ (1873; printed in &lt;em&gt;Joseph Severn: Letters and Memoirs&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Grant F. Scott, 2005) he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ariving on the Doncaster coast Keats was persuaded to land with me &amp;amp; for a moment he became like his former self, he showed me the splendid caverns &amp;amp; grottos with a poets pride, as tho’ they had been his birthright &amp;amp; when we returned to the ship he wrote for me in vol of Shakespeare’s Poems that magnificent sonnet [‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_star,_would_I_were_steadfast_as_thou_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art&lt;/a&gt;’] … I am not aware if this was not the first transcript of the fine Poet[r]y for it seemed inspired by our recent visit to the seacoast—I believe certainly that this sonnet was the very last poetical effort the poor fellow ever made …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages from Severn have raised two questions for biographers of Keats. First, where exactly are these “splendid caverns and grottos”? And second, how much (if anything) can we read into Severn’s phrase “as though they had been his birthright”? Keats was born and raised in London and there was no evidence that he had any connection with Dorset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Complicating these questions is the problem that Severn is far from reliable—where they can be corroborated, his recollections have often proved to be incorrect. In the passage from ‘My Tedious Life’, “Doncaster” must be a mistake for “Dorchester”, and ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_star,_would_I_were_steadfast_as_thou_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bright Star&lt;/a&gt;’ was not “the very last poetical effort the poor fellow ever made”—it is now thought to have been composed in 1818 or 1819.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is worse, some biographers have, unconsciously or otherwise, embellished Severn’s accounts. In particular, William Sharp, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cu31924008749420#page/n83/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1892), quoted Severn as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a moment he became like his former self. &lt;strong&gt;He was in a part that he already knew, and&lt;/strong&gt; showed me the splendid caverns and grottos with a poet’s pride, as though they had been his &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; birthright. When we returned to the ship he wrote for me &lt;strong&gt;on a blank leaf in a folio volume&lt;/strong&gt; of Shakespeare’s Poems &lt;strong&gt;which had been given him by a friend, and which he gave to me in memory of our voyage, the following&lt;/strong&gt; magnificent sonnet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parts emphasized in bold are interpolations by Sharp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Severn’s unreliable memories, and the creative embellishments of biographers like Sharp, led to the general belief that Keats had a family connection with Dorset; that he had visited Lulworth Cove in 1820; that he had composed ‘Bright Star’ there or aboard ship soon afterwards; and that it was the last poem he wrote. In this context, it is natural that Hardy should write a poem linking his own visit to Lulworth Cove in 1920 with Keats’ (supposed) visit in 1820, and reference the composition of ‘Bright Star’ in the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as the evening light scants less and less&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He looks up at a star, as many do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Colvin and Hardy&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1914, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Colvin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sidney Colvin&lt;/a&gt; was working on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/johnkeatshislife00colvrich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;John Keats: his life and poetry; his friends, critics and after-fame&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (published in 1917), and was researching these questions. Hardy was a friend, or at least a literary acquaintance, of Colvin’s, and the latter must have written to Hardy for help with the location of the “splendid caverns and grottos” described by Severn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy had lived in Dorset for much of his life, was familiar with the Dorset coast, and had used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulworth_Cove&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lulworth Cove&lt;/a&gt; (under the light disguise of ‘Lulwind Cove’) as the location of Sergeant Troy’s disastrous swim in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/107/107-h/107-h.htm#47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter XLVII of &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so he was a natural authority for Colvin to consult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.182921/2015.182921.The-Colvins-And-Their-Friends#page/n363/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Colvins and their Friends&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1928), Edward Verrall Lucas quotes two of Hardy’s letters in reply. First, 14 June 1914:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dear Colvin,—We have been weighing probabilities in the question of the “splendid caverns and grottoes” of Severn, that you write about, and have come to the conclusion that he must mean “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durdle_Door&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Durdle Door&lt;/a&gt;,” close to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulworth_Cove&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lulworth Cove&lt;/a&gt;. […] Why we think it must have been Durdle Door is that it impressed my wife just in the same way when she first saw it as a girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see it from the inside (which would give the impression) they would have landed in the cave*, &amp;amp; have walked over tide cliff to the west, &amp;amp; down behind the “Door.” The walk would have taken them only a few minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a smuggler’s cave in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worbarrow_Bay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worbarrow Bay&lt;/a&gt;, But it is difficult to find, though in Keats’s time it would most likely have been clearer. The only other cave I know about here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_Hole,_Portland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cave Hole, Portland&lt;/a&gt;. But that is difficult of access except at low and quiet tides. […]—Sincerely yours, Thomas Hardy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.S.&lt;/em&gt;—I assume that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swanage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swanage&lt;/a&gt; would be too far east. There are, of course, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilly_Whim_Caves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tilly-Whim Caves&lt;/a&gt; near that place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Lucas has “cave” but I think this must be a misread or misprint for “cove” (that is, Lulworth Cove). The tide cliffs are to the west of Lulworth Cove, and there is a path above them that runs, after a mile or so, down behind Durdle Door (pictured below). It is about twenty minutes’ walk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DOlgQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DOlgQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Durdle Door&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second letter, 29 July 1914:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dear Colvin,—“Beautiful grottoes” is certainly rather an exaggerated description of what one finds at Durdle Door, and Stair Hole close by, yet an enthusiastic young Londoner &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; on a first impression use such words. Besides, if not Durdle Door, Stair Hole, &amp;amp;c., what place can it be that Severn meant? The “Door” is an archway in the cliff, as you know: Stair Hole has caves &amp;amp; fissures into which the sea flows, &amp;amp; there is another cave at Bat’s Corner, also close at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At any rate I cannot think of another point on the Dorset coast, easily accessible from a boat, which so well answers the description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “cottages” would be those of the adjoining Lulworth Cove &amp;amp; village, but they do not, of course, face the “grottoes,” as Severn seems to imply. I put that down to his fancy, as such a position would hardly be possible&#xA;anywhere. With kind regards—Sincerely yours, Thomas Hardy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T15:38:52.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5970" CreationDate="2018-03-07T16:32:52.450" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is the female warrior Maximou? Is it true that she never lost a battle? Was she a typical Amazon who lacked beauty? Read about her in a magazine which called her a relative of someone called Phillopapos. She supposedly appears in a medieval Greek literary work called Akritis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3179" LastEditorDisplayName="user3179" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T11:15:21.433" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T12:18:31.080" Title="Maximou - female warrior in Greek literature?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5926" CreationDate="2018-03-07T16:53:58.893" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My opinion is - Homer is Odysseus. There are many versions about Homer's origins, but I believe Odysseus was Homer in old age, disappointed with his wife Penelope. He was born in Troy, but he was banished from Troy together with his parents on Ithaca, where Icarius king of Kephalenia gave him his daughter. Troy is in Istria, and there are villages - Disjoti (Odysseus), Tikali (Anticlea) and Liretov Brig (Laertus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T20:22:28.310" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T20:22:28.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1126" CreationDate="2018-03-07T17:22:36.247" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Homer wants to say his story was a real event, not only a heroic saga or myth. Because of that, he gave us this &quot;geographical map&quot;, for reconstruction of locations in the future. Maybe he was a witness of great movement of peoples after the Trojan War. This question is very important, it was in my mind for a long time. Also is hardly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-07T20:19:13.707" LastActivityDate="2018-03-07T20:19:13.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9" CreationDate="2018-03-08T04:58:54.050" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that the Sherlock Holmes stories (with exception to &quot;His Last Bow&quot;, &quot;The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone&quot;, &quot;The Adventure of the Lion's Mane&quot;, and &quot;The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier&quot;) are entirely narrated by Dr. Watson, who could be unaware of his friend's feelings towards him if this is an unrequited love Holmes has for Watson. Throughout the stories, Watson remains fairly oblivious to Holmes's true emotions, with the only time he really becomes aware that Holmes has any sort of feelings for him, romantic or otherwise, being during the infamous scene in &quot;The Three Garridebs&quot; when Watson is shot in the leg and Holmes panics, thinking that his friend may be fatally injured. Once Watson has confirmed that he is alright, Holmes tell Evans, the man who shot Watson, &quot;If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive,&quot; and Watson notes that, &quot;It was worth a wound - it was worth many wounds - to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind the cold mask.&quot; This is the one time that readers, as well as Watson himself, are made of aware of the love that Holmes is capable of feeling, and indeed does feel for Watson, despite Holmes's own claims that he is an emotionless being. If Holmes is so good at hiding even the fact that he cares for Watson at all, is it really such a stretch to assume that Holmes could be hiding romantic feelings for his friend as well? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something that should also be taken into consideration was that in the time Watson is supposedly documenting his adventures with Sherlock Holmes, homosexuality was considered a serious crime, although that did not stop certain people from engaging in homosexual love affairs. However, if Holmes and Watson had been in a romantic relationship, it is not likely that Watson would have wanted to disclose it to the public, which ties into the original poster's comment about Watson not explaining why he and Holmes had left London for several weeks in 1895. If Watson had been a real person having a love affair with another man in the late 1800s, it would make sense that he would edit details of his relationship with Holmes when recounting their stories, and even make Holmes seem more averse to romance than he actually was so that readers would not suspect anything. All this is not to say that Arthur Conan Doyle intentionally queer coded Holmes and Watson's relationship, just that there are certainly arguments that can be made for the two characters being romantically involved, or at least for Holmes being in love with Watson. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3184" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T04:58:54.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5963" CreationDate="2018-03-08T12:05:46.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acritic_songs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acritic songs&lt;/a&gt; are a collection of poetry from the Byzantine Empire, written in medieval Greek and dating back to around the 9th century. They're very significant in the history of Greek literature - see for instance Chapter 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=p3GHlQL9mbAC&amp;amp;dq=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kōnstantinos Dēmaras, &lt;em&gt;A History of Modern Greek Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is devoted to them and other works inspired by them such as &lt;em&gt;The Chronicle of Moreas&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Achilleid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the most famous of these epic poems is one called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digenes_Akritas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Digenes Akrites&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Διγενῆς Ἀκρίτης, variously transliterated e.g. &lt;em&gt;Digenis Akritas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Digenes Akritis&lt;/em&gt;, etc.) It's about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/Digenis-Akritas-Byzantine-epic-hero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;semi-legendary Byzantine hero&lt;/a&gt; Basileios, titled Digenes Akrites (roughly &amp;quot;mixed-blood border defender&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digenis Akritas, also called Digenis Akritas Basileios, Byzantine epic hero celebrated in folk ballads (Akritic ballads) and in an epic relating his parentage, boyhood adventures, manhood, and death. Based on historical events, the epic, a blend of Greek, Byzantine, and Asian motifs, originated in the 10th century and was further developed in the 12th century. It was recorded in several versions from the 12th to the 17th century, the oldest being a linguistic mixture of popular and literary language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digenis Akritas, the ideal medieval Greek hero, is a bold warrior of the Euphrates frontier, the son of a Saracen emir converted to Christianity by the daughter of a Byzantine general; he was a proficient warrior by the age of three and spent the rest of his life defending the Byzantine Empire from frontier invaders. The feeling for nature and strong family affections that permeate the epic anticipate the great Cretan national romance, Erotókritos (mid-17th century) by Vitséntzos Kornáros, and much modern Greek popular poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Maximou&lt;/strong&gt;, a female warrior, appears as a character in &lt;em&gt;Digenes Akrites&lt;/em&gt;, in a rather unlikely passage in which the hero first defeats her in combat and then is seduced by her. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rboWBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA407&amp;amp;lpg=PA407&amp;amp;dq=maximou+amazon&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=5pl7OpLkP1&amp;amp;sig=TNLn7u2CzEKzkexXUS7Ex8cWfBU&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiKvofkztzZAhUIJMAKHa1HA2sQ6AEIQzAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=maximou%20amazon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adrienne Mayor, &lt;em&gt;The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One episode describes single combat between Digenes and an Amazon named Maximou (&amp;quot;Daughter of the Greatest&amp;quot;). She was &amp;quot;a descendant of the Amazon women brought back from among the Brahmins of India by the emperor Alexander.&amp;quot; Leading a band of male rebel fighters, Maximou rides a milk-white horse with red mane, tail, and hooves (dyed with henna, a Persian custom brought to India). But for the duel she arrives on a black warhose (see chapter 11 for color choice of war horses). Wearing a green turban embroidered in gold and a breastplate over a tunic of purple silk, the Amazon carries a shield with an eagle device and an Arab spear and sword. They clash and fight strenuously. After Digenes kills Maximou's horse, they retreat to the woods where the Amazon removes her armor. Her &amp;quot;gossamer-thin silk shift reveals her lovely limbs and breasts&amp;quot;, and the hero is smitten with lust. They have sex. In some versions Digenes later stalks and murders &amp;quot;the promiscuous creature&amp;quot; for seducing him. In this, Digenes seems to revert to the old Greek mythic script of killing the foreign Amazon. Some modern scholars believe that Maximou was originally the heroine of an earlier oral legend (perhaps about Amazons who returned with Alexander?), and that she was rather clumsily incorporated into this Christian moralizing epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found an entire article about Maximou and her role in &lt;em&gt;Digenes Akrites&lt;/em&gt;, which you can read here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.purplemotes.net/2017/03/19/amazon-maximou/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Amazon Maximou ultimately failed in gambit for women’s privilege&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. You may not agree with its interpretation of the story (I don't), but it does provide a lot of direct (translated) quotes from the text, which might be useful if you want to see exactly what she said and did in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I can find about Philopappous is that he was another war leader and some kind of (probably older) kinsman to Maximou. You can see part of an exchange between him and Maximou in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Gd4ifVQxKtwC&amp;amp;pg=PA341&amp;amp;lpg=PA341&amp;amp;dq=digenes+akritis+philopappous&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=KaXYTnYsAy&amp;amp;sig=hMiEDqm3bS0q4lsTHs70LiWkI6k&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwipgdT71dzZAhXnAMAKHdSeDHUQ6AEIOjAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Jeffreys, ed., &lt;em&gt;Digenis Akritis: The Grottaferrata and Escorial Versions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but unfortunately, there on Google Books, I at least can't view the pages to either side in order to get context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your specific questions about Maximou:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is it true that she never lost a battle?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;: she was defeated by Digenes Akrites in battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Was she a typical Amazon who lacked beauty?&lt;/em&gt; Again, by the text, &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maximou’s shift was gossamer-thin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and it revealed her limbs as in a mirror&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and her breasts rising just a little above her chest.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And my soul was wounded, for she was beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is unlikely to be an accurate description of the real Maximou, if there was a real Maximou. But according to &lt;em&gt;Digenes Akrites&lt;/em&gt; at least, she was beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T12:18:31.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5971" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5995" CreationDate="2018-03-08T12:15:08.833" Score="12" ViewCount="1025" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known that the home of Odysseus, as described in Homer's &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, was the island of Ithaca. There's a modern-day Greek island called Ithaca, and according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithaca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Modern Ithaca is generally identified with Homer's Ithaca, the home of Odysseus, whose delayed return to the island is the Odyssey's plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5957/17&quot;&gt;heard&lt;/a&gt; a conflicting theory which says that the Odyssean Ithaca was actually an island in what's now Croatia. I'm interested to know the evidence for both (or any other) theories, based on the description of Ithaca in the Iliad and Odyssey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What evidence supports different possibilities for Homer's Ithaca in modern geography?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T09:23:18.037" Title="Where was the Odyssean Ithaca?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5934" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:09:55.297" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;@muru's answer is once again correct, but I do feel there's a little additional nuance to explore here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frost is actually mocking himself with the modifier &quot;gently.&quot;  If someone offers to kill you, you're unlikely to care whether or not they are &quot;gentle&quot; about it.  When Frost puts himself in the place of the prospective victim, he can finally seen how ridiculous, patronizing, insulting and alarming his offer of euthanasia is.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wouldn't care to be put out of his pain, gently or not, and neither would the rural poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T17:09:55.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:25:38.007" Score="12" ViewCount="731" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I recently read &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; to my children, they were puzzled by this passage, and I could offer no help:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Falkor,” Atreyu asked, “do you suppose the Childlike Empress cares what becomes of Bastian?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Maybe not,” said Falkor. “She draws no distinctions.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then,” said Atreyu, “she is really a …”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Don’t say it,” Falkor broke in. “I know what you mean, but don’t say it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it that Atreyu is not supposed to say?  Answers with support, please, I can make my own guesses myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T04:30:21.323" Title="In the &quot;Neverending Story&quot;, what judgement do Falkor and Atreyu make of the Childlike Empress?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5974" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:28:47.703" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T17:28:47.703" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T17:28:47.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5975" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:28:47.703" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Greek tragedian Euripides (c. 480 – c. 406 BC) and his works. He is known for plays such as 'Medea' (431 BC), 'Electra' (c. 420 BC) and 'The Trojan Women' (c. 415 BC). When asking about a work originally written in Greek, please use the [greek-literature] tag, as well as any other applicable tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T23:51:12.723" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T23:51:12.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5976" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:31:32.097" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T17:31:32.097" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T17:31:32.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5977" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:31:32.097" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Icelandic historian, poet and politician (1179 – 1241) and his works. He is best known as author of the Prose Edda." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T23:49:57.750" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T23:49:57.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5978" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:33:04.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T17:33:04.617" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T17:33:04.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5979" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:33:04.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about Anton Chekhov's play 'Uncle Vanya' (1898). Use this tag with the [anton-chekhov] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T23:49:18.753" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T23:49:18.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5980" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:42:24.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-08T17:42:24.357" LastActivityDate="2018-03-08T17:42:24.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5981" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-08T17:42:24.357" Score="0" Body="Questions about post-modernism or postmodernism in literature, a hard-to-define type of literature that emerged after World War II and is characterised by such features as unreliable narrators, fragmentation, paradox and a reaction against a (real or perceived) dogmatic following of Enlightenment thinking." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T11:47:50.250" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T11:47:50.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5984" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5998" CreationDate="2018-03-09T09:45:22.237" Score="0" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually when writing poems or literature, the authors looks for words that can convey their ideas faithfully. The same thing happens to the readers, when suddenly they understand the problem so clear. Mostly they're already available in the language, but sometimes one need to create a new one. In my language that kind of words are called &quot;fine words&quot;, but how would English call it? It's the same thing with technical terms in academic fields, but what is an equivalent term in poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T13:11:53.460" Title="What is the correct term for &quot;fine words&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2018-03-09T13:41:32.723" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Perhaps it's deliberately meant to be ambiguous.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly there's a recurrent theme in &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; of ambiguous endings and unfinished tales: just look at how often variations of the phrase &quot;that's another story and will be told another time&quot; are repeated throughout the novel. Ende is leaving a lot to our imagination, deliberately so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this fits well with the theme of the story. One of the main goals of the heroes is to make humans start coming to Fantastica again; by exercising &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; imaginations to finish off all the unfinished parts of the story, we in turn 'enter' Fantastica in some sense. The more time we spend with these characters, in this world, especially when we actively make up stories about them ourselves, the more we contribute to Fantastica. Like Bastian, we can start off by passively reading the story and end up by creating more of it ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can you can make your own guesses yourself. Go ahead! Finish Atreyu's sentence, finish all the half-told stories, continue to create Fantasica just as Bastian did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But what's the actual answer?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same question has been discussed a lot already by many readers and fans, and there doesn't seem to be a single correct answer. My paragraphs above justify why it's OK for there not to be one, but of course there have been various answers suggested, some more plausible than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stjo.hn/the-neverending-story/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the analysis of St John Karp&lt;/a&gt;, a blogger who wrote extensively about &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; because, in his words, &quot;despite how famous and well-loved this novel is, I have never seen any critical analysis that does it justice&quot;. He has a surprisingly negative take on the Childlike Empress:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is a ruler who &quot;never judged anyone. She never interfered with anyone ... In her eyes all her subjects were equal ... every creature, whether good or bad, beautiful or ugly, merry or solemn, foolish or wise - all owed their existence to her existence.&quot; Fantastica is founded on the co-existence of good and evil - a light snake and a dark snake perpetually eating each other's tail - and an empress who is herself two-faced. For while she has the appearance of sweetness and light, her strategy for ruling Fantastica is astoundingly nasty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly true that &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; has a theme of duality: the two parts of the same story feeding into each other; the black and white snakes eating each other's tails; the constant cycle of the Nothing consuming Fantastica and being beaten back by human imagination; the Acharis and the Shlamoofs; Perilin and Goab; and of course the following quote which feeds directly into Karp's analysis of the story as being about an endless symbiotic cycle of good and evil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A hero like Hynreck,&quot; said Hydorn, &quot;is really to be pitied in a world without monsters. See what I mean?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, Bastian didn't see. Not yet at any rate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Monsters,&quot; said Hykrion, winking at Bastian and stroking his huge moustache, &quot;monsters are indispensable if a hero is to be a hero.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 17 (Q)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heroes and monsters need each other, because either one without the other would make for a non-story. Just like Perilin and Goab, or the Nothing and the human arrivals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karp says, following the ancient Romans, that there are two kinds of power: authority and influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have cribbed my understanding of power from ancient Roman philosophy. I have no reason to think Ende had the Romans in mind, but they still give us a handy vocabulary for talking about power. The Romans described &lt;em&gt;imperium&lt;/em&gt;, which meant the authority to command - when you say jump, everybody jumps or else gets thrown to the lions; and &lt;em&gt;auctoritas&lt;/em&gt;, which meant personal influence - when you say jump, everybody jumps because you're a really nice guy and they respect you. &lt;em&gt;Auctoritas&lt;/em&gt; was far and away the more desirable kind of power because it meant everybody loved you. &lt;em&gt;Imperium&lt;/em&gt; was necessary too, but over-using it was the hallmark of a tyrant. People would soon feel abused and resentful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the Childlike Empress uses only &lt;em&gt;auctoritas&lt;/em&gt;. Although she holds absolute power in Fantastica, she never uses it in any way, and she is absolutely loved and respected by her people - love and respect which she would presumably lose if she were ever to start using her power as &lt;em&gt;imperium&lt;/em&gt;. When Bastian tries to turn to &lt;em&gt;imperium&lt;/em&gt;, his best friend raises up an army to overthrow him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Childlike Empress won't lift a finger to govern Fantastica. Actually she can't, not without losing her authority and risking self-immolation. That's why she needs Bastian - she can't run the place herself, so she brings humans to Fantastica to do it for her. She acts like a siren, luring perfectly normal humans onto the rocks. But she's more than happy to let these people wreck themselves, she encourages them by giving them a deceptive charter, &quot;DO WHAT YOU WISH&quot;. The temptation is to think you can &quot;do anything [you] feel like&quot;, but the hidden meaning is that &quot;you must do what you really and truly want&quot;. The Childlike Empress is so Janus-faced that she even gives Bastian his very first corrupt idea. It's only by gazing into the Empress' eyes that Bastian gets the idea to change his appearance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;In the golden mirror of her eyes, he saw, small at first as though far in the distance, a reflection which little by little grew larger and more distinct. It was a boy of about his own age; but this boy was slender and wonderfully handsome. His bearing was proud and erect, his face was noble, manly - and lean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Childlike Empress doesn't just give Bastian the rope to hang himself, she also kicks the stool out from under him. What a bitch. Well, I say bitch, but we'll never know what the Fantasticans might have called her. Atreyu and Falkor have a fascinating exchange in which they realize that their empress has a darker side, and yet Falkor refuses to speak ill of her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“Falkor,” Atreyu asked, “do you suppose the Childlike Empress cares what becomes of Bastian?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“Maybe not,” said Falkor. “She draws no distinctions.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“Then,” said Atreyu, “she is really a …”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“Don’t say it,” Falkor broke in. “I know what you mean, but don’t say it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What word could possibly have finished that sentence? The only one I can think of is &quot;monster&quot;, the same word used to describe Ygramul, the sphinxes, Gmork, Smerg, Xayide's metal golems and, by extension, Bastian at the depths of his corruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karp's conclusion is that the missing word is &quot;&lt;strong&gt;monster&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. But in the end, it doesn't matter what the exact word is. It's clearly something negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, this is during the period when Atreyu and Falkor are beginning to doubt what Bastian is doing, but well before Xayide shows up and they fall out with him completely. They're beginning to turn against what seems to be the established tide of events; daring to criticise the person who, however gently, guides that tide must be part and parcel of the same thought process. And stifling their own criticisms is also consistent with their current state of mind: they haven't really spoken out against Bastian yet, and as Fantasticans they'd be even more loath to speak against the Childlike Empress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T13:41:32.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5986" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-09T14:46:00.713" Score="2" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://mason.gmu.edu/~lsmithg/ahegel.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Hegel's account of Greek tragedy, the conflict is not between good and evil but between goods that are each making too exclusive a claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Hegel's interpretation of the play &lt;em&gt;Antigone&lt;/em&gt; written by Sophocles?&#xA;Does he say that the crisis in the play can be attributed to a clash between good and good instead of good and evil? If yes then what does he mean by being good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3179" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:11:53.213" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:11:53.213" Title="Hegel on Antigone" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;sophocles&gt;&lt;georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel&gt;&lt;antigone-sophocles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5988" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-09T15:48:26.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-09T15:48:26.507" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T15:48:26.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5989" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-09T15:48:26.507" Score="0" Body="Questions about the musical 'Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat' by Tim Rice (lyrics) and  Andrew Lloyd Webber (music)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T00:55:30.797" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T00:55:30.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2018-03-09T16:23:35.860" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;It is important to distinguish between the original text and the English translation. If one only allows for text-immanent interpretation and considers the translation the sole text, all my following arguments are pointless. Furthermore, I'm not saying that the interpretation of Atreyu considering the queen to be a monster is wrong per se, but I want to explain how this couldn't be the original intent of the author. Nevertheless, modern literature usually rejects the author as an instance of authority and claims that the reader is the authority: Even if the author intended A, that doesn't mean the story is about A if no reader agrees with the author. Or likewise, if the author claims a story is not B, it can still be considered B if the readers agree that it is B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Rand al'Thor's answer is just as valid. Actually, my answer supports Rand al'Thor's interpretation, just not the fact that they would call her &lt;em&gt;monster&lt;/em&gt;. .&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Beginner's Guide to German&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the way the German language is constructed, a German sentence (even an unfinished one) at word level bears more information than the English counterpart. German relies less on context and more on explicitness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German, every noun has a grammatical gender, it's either masculine, female or neutral. Adjectives and articles get inflected depending on the gender of the noun they belong to. As an example, &lt;code&gt;a sun&lt;/code&gt; would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;eine&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt; Sonne&lt;/code&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; (female), &lt;code&gt;a moon&lt;/code&gt; would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;ein&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt; Mond&lt;/code&gt; (male), and &lt;code&gt;a car&lt;/code&gt; would be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;ein&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;code&gt; Auto&lt;/code&gt; (neutral)2&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Taking a closer look at the original&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German quote of the above extract is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;»Glaubst du, Fuchur [Falkor]«, fragte Atreju, «daß es der Kindlichen Kaisern gleichgültig ist was aus Bastian wird?«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;»Wer weiß«, antwortete Fuchur [Falkor], »sie macht keine Unterschiede.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;»Aber dann«, fuhr Atreju fort, »ist sie wahrlich &lt;strong&gt;eine&lt;/strong&gt;...«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that the form of the article &lt;code&gt;a&lt;/code&gt; that is used here is female. Although we do not know what follows, at some point a female noun must come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, because of the context, everything hints at the fact that it is going to be &lt;code&gt;adjective&lt;/code&gt; + &lt;code&gt;empress&lt;/code&gt; (which is female in German). &lt;code&gt;Monster&lt;/code&gt;, and most other insults are male and thus can not be meant by Atreyu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A Possible Interpretation&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Ende had cut the article, making the stub &lt;em&gt;Then she really is...&lt;/em&gt;, the ambiguity of what she is would be preserved in German as well. But Ende deliberately put the &lt;em&gt;eine&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll reiterate that everything hints at the missing words being a negative adjective and empress. As an example, &lt;em&gt;monstrous empress&lt;/em&gt;. This seems like a small difference to monster, but in German that difference is quite large. Monster would have been neutral, as I said above. But calling anyone a neutral thing (basically an inanimate object) is almost always derogatory. An important part of NS Propaganda is the principle of dehumanisation: the humanity of Jews was being stripped away by referring to them with a neutral gender or comparing them to animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atreyu does not dehumanise the Childlike Empress with the negative adjective because it must still be of female grammatical gender. Also, by acknowledging her position of authority (referring to her as Empress), he basically gives the reason for not finishing that sentence. Whatever she does, however she abuses Bastian, she's still their Empress and as such has to be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while Atreyu probably is upset with the behaviour of his Empress, he not only never articulates his disapproval but if he did would have mitigated the harshness of criticism greatly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1: Please don't ask why the sun is female and the moon is male despite the moon being female in most romanic languages (Latin, French, Spanish, Italien etc. Also, please don't ask me why inanimate objects are supposed to have a gender. It's just the way it's always been...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;2: Yes, occasionally different genders can have the same form. Both the masculine and the neutral form of &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; are &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;ein&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. You see, this language never was meant to be easy...&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T16:23:35.860" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5984" CreationDate="2018-03-09T16:26:32.953" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're referring to the creation of a completely new word, &quot;neologism&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/neologism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a new word, usage, or expression&lt;/a&gt;) might be what you're looking for. However, neologism doesn't have a value judgement associated with it: a neologism could be good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3195" LastActivityDate="2018-03-09T16:26:32.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5992" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-09T20:17:26.117" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Digenes Akrites&lt;/em&gt;, why did Maximou challenge Digenis to a second duel immediately after being defeated once? Also, did Maximou offer herself to Digenis after their duel or did he force himself on her?&#xA;Here are some lines I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She springing back and in a grip of fear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Crouched down, and said, &quot;Let me not die, young man;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I erred woman-like, Philopappos told me.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I respected, her, hearing her words,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pitied the wondrous beauty that was hers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And left her there and turned against the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is immediately after their first duel which Digenis wins. Shortly after this, Maximo says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blessed your father, and your mother who bore you,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the blessed mother's breasts which nourished you;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For such another man I never saw.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I beg you then my master to fulfil&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One more request, that by it you may know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More strictly my experience in war:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bid me to go away and mount my horse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in the morning I will come to this place,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That we may singly fight, none present with us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And you shall see, good friend, my bravery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here she praises her opponent and immediately challenges him to a second duel. Did she expect to win the second time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3179" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user3179" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T15:43:15.963" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T20:51:10.983" Title="Why did Maximou behave in this way towards Digenis Akrites?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;digenes-akrites&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5492" CreationDate="2018-03-10T01:59:52.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something got lost in translation here. The word “&lt;em&gt;girls&lt;/em&gt;” gives the wrong impression. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://ld.johanesville.net/maupassant-10-boule-de-suif?page=12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French original&lt;/a&gt; (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_soir%C3%A9e_(nouvelle,_1883)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“&lt;em&gt;Une Soirée&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/a&gt;) is “&lt;em&gt;demoiselles&lt;/em&gt;”, which can refer to any unmarried woman. Read the scene again, but substitute “&lt;em&gt;ladies&lt;/em&gt;” for “&lt;em&gt;girls&lt;/em&gt;”. Varajou asks the waiter where to have fun, and the waiter's idea of having fun is to sit there and have a drink. Varajou then asks where to meet ladies, and the waiter points him to a house where there are ladies holding reception. Varajou was never explicit about what kind of ladies he's looking for, so the waiter's response is not that unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;”Supreme Court“ may also give a wrong impression. The master of the house is an important person, and is a judge, but he's the “&lt;em&gt;premier président de Mortemain&lt;/em&gt;”. (In modern times, “&lt;em&gt;premier président&lt;/em&gt;” means the head judge in an appeals court, I don't know if the structure of courts was exactly the same in Maupassant's time, but it wouldn't have been too different in terms of how to place that person socially.) That means he's a locally important person. The waiter directed Varajou to a house in the neighborhood with (probably marriageable) ladies of good family. For scale: the population of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannes#D%C3%A9mographie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vannes&lt;/a&gt; in 1883 was about 20,000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story plays on the opposition between Varajou and the sleepy town of Vannes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He, himself, was one of those noisy roysterers for whom the greatest pleasures in life are the cafe and abandoned women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Abandoned women” is a once again dubious translation of “&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fille_publique&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fille publique&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;” which specifically means a prostitute and not just a “loose woman”. That's in contrast with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the quiet Breton town, so sleepy, so calm, so dead, on the shores of its inland bay that is called “le Morbihan.” He looked at the little gray houses, the occasional pedestrians, the empty stores, and he murmured:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Vannes is certainly not gay, not lively. It was a sad idea, my coming here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this town, the people playing billiards in the café are experiencing some of the best entertainment there is. From the waiter's point of view, if Varajou is looking for ladies, he must be looking for an evening's pleasant chat with upper-class ladies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T01:59:52.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-10T08:06:29.637" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Wall Jumper&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Schneider the very last line is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The city outside, with its fire walls, garden walls, border walls - those  walls will still be standing when no one is left to move beyond them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first impression of this line is that it means the physical walls will outlast humanity, which seems to me to be wrong and not really consistent with the book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone could enlighten me as to the meaning of this line in the book, that would be amazing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3196" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T15:10:10.663" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T15:10:10.663" Title="In The Wall Jumper, what is the meaning of the very last line about walls still standing?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;peter-schneider&gt;&lt;the-wall-jumper&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="5995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5971" CreationDate="2018-03-10T10:23:29.473" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Homer’s Ithaca is somewhere in the Ionian islands but his descriptions are hard to reconcile, so pending a really convincing archaeological find it is impossible to be sure how the descriptions relate to reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why do we think there might be a real ‘Ithaca’?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important first question, one that is often neglected, do we have any reason to expect the ‘Ithaca’ in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; to correspond to any real place? The &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; is full of characters and incidents that are obviously fictional: gods, cyclopes, sea monsters, sailors transformed into swine, and so on. Is there any reason to suspect the existence of a foundation of history under the superstructure of legend? We don’t want to be in the position of hunting for the island of Lilliput (no matter if it is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;described&lt;/a&gt; as being “north-west of Van Diemen’s Land”, at a latitude of 30° 2′ S).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a brief summary of some of the evidence for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;historicity of Homer’s works&lt;/a&gt;. I’ll write ‘Homer’ as a shorthand for whoever put the poems into the form in which they were written down, some time in the 8th century BCE, without taking a position on exactly how this happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Troy was destroyed and its location lost, but when it was rediscovered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Calvert&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Calvert&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Schliemann&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heinrich Schliemann&lt;/a&gt; in the late 19th century it was where Homer had described it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homer describes a Greece in which the major powers included Agamemnon’s Mycenae, Nestor’s Pylos, and Idomeneus’ Knossos. By the classical period these were places of little account compared to Sparta and Athens. Nonetheless, archaeologists have confirmed Homer’s account by finding rich Bronze Age palace complexes at all three sites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer describes equipment and tactics that must have been unfamiliar at the time the poems were written down. For example, in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; the Achaeans and the Trojans have chariots, although these disappeared from Greece after the end of the Mycenaean period. And the combatants have shields that are described as ‘circular’ (like the shields of classical Greece) but which nonetheless cover the warrior’s whole body. Archaeological finds from the Mycenaean period have revealed that Mycenaeans put much store in chariots, and had large shields of rectangular or figure-of-eight shape, for example as depicted on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=447686&amp;amp;partId=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘Lion Hunt’ dagger&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cb23W.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cb23W.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Five Myceanaean warriors confront a lion, two with large rectangular shields, and two with large figure-of-eight shields&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer uses grammatical forms that had died out of Greek by the time that the poems were composed, such as the &lt;em&gt;-oio&lt;/em&gt; ending in the genitive case (which had become &lt;em&gt;-ou&lt;/em&gt; by Homer’s time). This suggests that Homer’s works draw on a long-standing oral tradition. The decipherment of Linear B tablets confirms that these grammatical forms were in use in the Mycenaean period.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homer uses vocabulary that had vanished from Greek, or changed its meaning, by the time that the poems were composed. In classical Greek, a &lt;em&gt;basileus&lt;/em&gt; is a king but in Homer he is a subordinate leader (Ithaca has many of them) subject to the &lt;em&gt;anax&lt;/em&gt;. Again, decipherment of Linear B revealed that Mycenaean society was organized as described in Homer, for example in tablets found at Mycenae the king is &lt;em&gt;wanax&lt;/em&gt; (spelled &lt;em&gt;wa-na-ka&lt;/em&gt; due to the deficiencies of Linear B) and a subordinate leader is &lt;em&gt;basileus&lt;/em&gt; (spelled &lt;em&gt;qa-si-re-u&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What evidence can we expect?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve gone into the question of historicity in such detail in order to show what kind of evidence we might expect to find: Homer might have had personal knowledge of the location and physical geography of Ithaca, or been able to draw on a tradition that described it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an important difficulty is that the exact meaning of the text is hard to determine. The language is poetic, allusive, and archaic. A particularly important and troublesome case is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=9:card=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; 9.25–6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;αὐτὴ δὲ χθαμαλὴ πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  πρὸς ζόφον,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here χθαμαλὴ seems to mean ‘near the ground’; πανυπερτάτη ‘highest/furthest of all’; and πρὸς ζόφον ‘towards the dark’, that is, to the west (as opposed to πρὸς ἠῶ ‘toward the dawn’ meaning ‘east’). This troubled the geographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strabo&lt;/a&gt; in the first century BCE; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/44885/44885-h/44885-h.htm#FNanchor_639&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Geography&lt;/em&gt; 10.12&lt;/a&gt; he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But this line seems to imply some contradiction; for χθαμαλὴ is low, and depressed, but πανυπερτάτη expresses great height, as he describes it in other passages […] The expression does imply contradictions, which admit however of some explanation. They do not understand χθαμαλὴ to signify in that place ‘low’, but its contiguity to the continent, to which it approaches very close; nor by πανυπερτάτη great elevation, but the farthest advance towards darkness, (πρὸς ζόφον), that is, placed towards the north more than all the other islands, for this is what the poet means by ‘towards darkness’, the contrary to which is towards the south (πρὸς νότον).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this interpretation of the text seems very strained, presumably to fit with Strabo’s knowledge of the actual geography of Ithaca; a plainer reading of Homer would be that Ithaca lies low to the sea and furthest to the west.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This issue is ubiquitous when trying to resolve Homer’s descriptions: there is a great deal of difficulty just in interpreting the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What does Homer say about Ithaca?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These extracts are from the translations by A. T. Murray, via the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perseus Digital Library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0134:book=2:card=615&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; 2.631–7&lt;/a&gt;: And Odysseus led the great-souled Cephallenians that held Ithaca and Neritum, covered with waving forests, and that dwelt in Crocyleia and rugged Aegilips; and them that held Zacynthus, and that dwelt about Samos, and held the mainland and dwelt on the shores over against the isles. Of these was Odysseus captain, the peer of Zeus in counsel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; Ithaca is frequently given the epithets ἀμφίαλος (ἀμφί = around; αλος = sea; Murray uses ‘sea-girt’); τρηχείης (jagged or rugged); and εὐδείελος (clear or distinct, perhaps because it is visible from afar).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=3:card=51&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; 3.81&lt;/a&gt;: We have come from Ithaca that is below Neion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=4:card=593&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 4.605–8&lt;/a&gt;: But in Ithaca there are no widespread courses nor aught of meadow-land. It is a pasture-land of goats and pleasanter than one that pastures horses. For not one of the islands that lean upon the sea is fit for driving horses, or rich in meadows, and Ithaca least of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=4:card=625&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 4.670–1&lt;/a&gt;: I may watch in ambush for him as he passes in the strait between Ithaca and rugged Samos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=4:card=795&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 4.844–6&lt;/a&gt;: There is a rocky isle in the midst of the sea, midway between Ithaca and rugged Samos, Asteris, of no great size, but therein is a harbor where ships may lie, with an entrance on either side.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* The text has ἀμφίδυμοι (double); some translators prefer this to mean that there were two harbours, rather than one harbour with two entrances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=9:card=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 9.21–9&lt;/a&gt;: But I dwell in clear-seen Ithaca, wherein is a mountain, Neriton, covered with waving forests, conspicuous from afar; and round it lie many isles hard by one another, Dulichium, and Same, and wooded Zacynthus. Ithaca itself lies close in to the mainland* the furthest toward the gloom, but the others lie apart toward the Dawn and the sun—a rugged isle, but a good nurse of young men; and for myself no other thing can I see sweeter than one's own land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* See discussion above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=13:card=93&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 13.96–114&lt;/a&gt;: There is in the land of Ithaca a certain harbor of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and at its mouth two projecting headlands sheer to seaward, but sloping down on the side toward the harbor. These keep back the great waves raised by heavy winds without, but within the benched ships lie unmoored when they have reached the point of anchorage. At the head of the harbor is a long-leafed olive tree, and near it a pleasant, shadowy cave sacred to the nymphs that are called Naiads. […] Two doors there are to the cave, one toward the North Wind, by which men go down, but that toward the South Wind is sacred, nor do men enter thereby; it is the way of the immortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=13:card=329&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 13.344–51&lt;/a&gt;: But come, I will shew thee the land of Ithaca, that thou mayest be sure. This is the harbor of Phorcys, the old man of the sea, and here at the head of the harbor is the long-leafed olive tree, and near it is the pleasant, shadowy cave, sacred to the nymphs that are called Naiads. This, thou must know, is the vaulted cave in which thou wast wont to offer to the nymphs many hecatombs that bring fulfillment; and yonder is Mount Neriton, clothed with its forests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0138:hymn=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hymn to Apollo&lt;/em&gt; 422–9&lt;/a&gt;: So the ship ran on its course and came to Arena and lovely Argyphea and Thryon, the ford of Alpheus, and well-placed Aepy and sandy Pylos and the men of Pylos; past Cruni it went and Chalcis and past Dyme and fair Elis, where the Epei rule. And at the time when she was making for Pherae, exulting in the breeze from Zeus, there appeared to them below the clouds the steep mountain of Ithaca, and Dulichium and Same and wooded Zacynthus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What’s wrong with modern Ithaca?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t match Homer’s description: it’s not the most westerly (or northerly) of a group of islands; it doesn’t have a steep forested mountain; and it doesn’t have a harbour with two projecting headlands and a cave with two entrances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This discrepancy has troubled the readers of Homer for a long time. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strabo&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Asteria, called by Homer Asteris, is no longer what it was. There is no good anchorage there now. Neither is there in Ithaca the cavern, nor yet the temple of the nymphs described to us by Homer. It seems more correct to attribute this to change having come over the places, than either to the ignorance or the romancing of the poet. This however, being uncertain, must be left to every man’s opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What are the possibilities?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer clearly indicates that Ithaca is one of a group of four islands; the others being Dulichium, Same (or Samos), and Zacynthus. This quartet of names repeatedly occur together: I quoted 9.21 above, but there’s also the following formula:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=1:card=230&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Od.&lt;/em&gt; 1.245&lt;/a&gt;: For all the princes who hold sway over the islands—Dulichium and Same and wooded Zacynthus—and those who lord it over rocky Ithaca, all these woo my mother and lay waste my house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is repeated at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=16:card=90&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;16.122&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136:book=19:card=89&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;19.130&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These four islands are close to Elis (according to the &lt;em&gt;Hymn to Apollo&lt;/em&gt;) and to Nestor’s palace at Pylos (according to the description of Telemachus’ voyage); and so must be the Ionian islands. In my opinion other candidates (suggestions have included Spain, Sicily, and the Baltic!) require doing far too much violence to the clear meaning of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are five large islands in the Ionian: Corfu, Lefkada, Cephalonia, Ithaca, and Zakynthos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uPCfX.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uPCfX.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ionian islands&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone agrees that Zacynthus = Zakynthos, but how do the others correspond? The problem here is that Homer’s specifications are hard to reconcile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer’s Ithaca is χθαμαλός: if this means ‘close in to the mainland’ it best fits Lefkada; if ‘low-lying’, then Corfu.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer’s Ithaca is πανυπερτάτη εἰν ἁλὶ κεῖται πρὸς ζόφον: if this means ‘furthest west’ it best fits Cephalonia; if ‘furthest north’, then Corfu or Lefkada.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer’s Ithaca has a steep forested mount Neriton (or Neritum, or Neion), which best fits Cephalonia, the mountain being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Ainos&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Ainos&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Homer’s Ithaca has no meadows, and is least suitable of the Ionian islands for grazing horses, which best fits Ithaca.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The strait between Homer’s Ithaca and Same contains a small rocky island (Asteris) with two harbours (or one harbour with two entrances) where ships may lie. A plausible candidate for Asteris is the modern Arkoudi, which would mean that Homer’s Ithaca and Same are the modern Ithaca and Lefkada.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The four islands are visible from a ship sailing from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elis&lt;/a&gt;, according to the &lt;em&gt;Hymn to Apollo&lt;/em&gt;, which means Corfu cannot be one of them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been many attempts to resolve these contradictory descriptions; I consulted the following when writing this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert Bittlestone (2005). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=80Pg-LVkTVMC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odysseus Unbound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frank Brewster (1920). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/310733?seq=15&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ithaca: A Study of the Homeric Evidence&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Harvard Studies in Classical Philology&lt;/em&gt; 31 pp. 125–66.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A. D. Fraser (1928), ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/263712?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer’s Ithaca and the Adjacent Islands&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Classical Philology&lt;/em&gt; 23:3 pp. 213–8.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John R. Underhill (2009). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.odysseus-unbound.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NG_July_2009_Underhill.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Relocating Odysseus’ Ithaca&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Nature Geoscience&lt;/em&gt; 2 pp. 455–8.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of them convinced me that they had really solved all these points. Fraser has Ithaca = Cephalonia; Dulichium = Corfu; Same = Lefkada and Asteris = Ithaca, but doesn’t explain points 1, 4 or 6. Bittlestone suggests that the Paliki peninsula on Cephalonia was formerly a separate island, but that earthquakes and uplift have since joined them, thus allowing Paliki = Ithaca, satisfying the ‘furthest west’ description, but this doesn’t explain points 4 or 5: if Paliki is Ithaca, then there are no plausible candidates for Asteris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems most likely to me that Homer made a mistake somewhere, or that his interpreters have failed to get at the intended meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-03-12T11:26:05.627" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T11:26:05.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="5997" CreationDate="2018-03-10T11:11:57.670" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Need an interpretation for a quotation from 'Elia Kazan's The Arrangement' which is 'I was going to pull that big damp stone off from over him and let the light of day hit him.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the context which is rather slang:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The son of a bitch was a fraud, and I was going to pull that big damp stone off from over him and let the light of day hit him. He was able to live the way he lived for one reason only: his father had left him a bundle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T15:41:06.683" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T15:41:06.683" Title="Need an interpretation for a rather slang quotation from 'Elia Kazan's The Arrangement'" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elia-kazan&gt;&lt;the-arrangement&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5996" CreationDate="2018-03-10T12:01:34.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the implication is that the son of a bitch is a worm — as in an invertebrate which lives under rocks in damp soil because sunlight and dry air are too hot and dry for it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphor is that the SOB inherited a lot of money when his father died, and he's using it to protect himself from the consequences of his actions. The narrator is likening this money to a rock protecting a worm from the sun. If the narrator pulls off the rock (exposes the SOB somehow, by taking away his money, maybe?), then the &quot;light of day&quot; (public exposure) will hit the worm (the SOB) and make things hot and uncomfortable (expose him for being a fraud, disrupt his posh lifestyle). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T12:01:34.520" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5984" CreationDate="2018-03-10T13:11:53.460" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible term is &lt;em&gt;mot juste&lt;/em&gt;, which means (in English), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the exactly right word or phrasing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mot%20juste&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See Merrian-Webster&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it also means the same thing in French. We generally use the French phrase in English because there's no good equivalent English word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T13:11:53.460" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="5999" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:28:53.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:28:53.977" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:28:53.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6000" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:28:53.977" Score="0" Body="For questions about the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 –  1831) and his writings. In the context of literary theory, he is especially known for his views on aesthetics, expressed in his 'Lectures on Aesthetics' ('Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik', 1820 – 1829)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T19:47:21.197" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T19:47:21.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6001" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:31:16.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;His plays include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ajax&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone_(Sophocles_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antigone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oedipus Rex&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(Sophocles_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Electra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_at_Colonus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oedipus at Colonus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of his plays have survived only in fragments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:12:16.167" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:12:16.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6002" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:31:16.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Greek tragedian Sophocles (c. 497/6 – winter 406/5 BC) or his life as a writer. These questions should also be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T04:12:02.783" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T04:12:02.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:37:40.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:37:40.273" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:37:40.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:37:40.273" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Antigone' by Sophocles, written in or before 441 BC. Use this tag with the [sophocles] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T18:34:58.130" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:34:58.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6005" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:49:19.747" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:49:19.747" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:49:19.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6006" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:49:19.747" Score="0" Body="Questions about the epic poem 'Digenes Akritas' or 'Digenes Akrites', which is one of the few surviving examples of the Acritic songs that emerged in the Byzantine Empire around the ninth century. Questions regarding this work should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:24:41.487" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:24:41.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6007" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:53:09.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:53:09.973" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:53:09.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6008" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:53:09.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German writer Peter Schneider (born 1940) and his works. His works include the novels 'Der Mauerspringer' (1982, 'The Wall Jumper') and 'Lenz' (1973)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T09:48:27.043" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T09:48:27.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6009" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:54:12.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:54:12.273" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:54:12.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6010" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:54:12.273" Score="0" Body="For questions about Peter Schneider's novel 'The Wall Jumper' or 'Der Mauerspringer' (1982). Use this tag with the [peter-schneider] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:10:30.570" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:10:30.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6011" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:59:37.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T16:59:37.307" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T16:59:37.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6012" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T16:59:37.307" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Greek-American director, producer, writer and actor Elia Kazan (1909 – 2003) or about any of his written works. While Kazan is probably best remembered for his film career, he also wrote novels such as 'America America' and 'The Arrangement'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:11:11.183" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:11:11.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6013" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:00:52.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:00:52.090" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:00:52.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6014" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:00:52.090" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Arrangement' by Elia Kazan. Use this tag with the [elia-kazan] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T18:35:09.430" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T18:35:09.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6015" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:16:44.640" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The figure of Antigone has inspired many plays, for example by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone_(Euripides_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euripides&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone_(Anouilh_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Anouilh&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone_(Brecht_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bertolt Brecht&lt;/a&gt;. For this reason, questions about a specific play inspired by Antigone should use the syntax &lt;code&gt;[antigone-author]&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This particular tag is for the Ancient Greek tragedy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigone_(Sophocles_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antigone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sophocles&lt;/a&gt;. Part of his trilogy of Theban plays, it was written around or before the year 441 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:21:20.270" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:21:20.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6016" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-10T17:16:44.640" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Antigone' by Sophocles, written in or before 441 BC. Use this tag with the [sophocles] and [greek-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-10T17:18:07.600" LastActivityDate="2018-03-10T17:18:07.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6018" CreationDate="2018-03-10T19:50:30.850" Score="13" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's so strange to me that we all praised and adore things, but would never consider supporting them in a modern setting. There are many examples of this: poetry (very unpopular nowadays; not in the amount of it, but by the respectability of it), obscure, but interesting essays like A Hanging, by Orwell. But not least of these is the most impressive, which is the epic poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These epics, like the &lt;em&gt;Illiad&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, et al., are praised and taught almost as if they are a standard for incredible writing and story telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I simply cannot see any modern writer putting forth an epic poem; and further still, I could reasonably suspect that it would not find its way to the best seller list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting question of psychology of why we praised past things, but would never wish to see them in a modern setting, or find them pretentious, but I will stick with a simpler question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What specifically happened to the epic poem? Where did it leave us and when? And why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3173" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T20:18:42.853" LastActivityDate="2021-05-03T20:18:42.853" Title="What happened to the epic poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6017" CreationDate="2018-03-10T21:31:24.513" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The epic poem gradually disappeared after the Middle Ages. Late examples include Ludovico Ariosto's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_Furioso&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orlando furioso&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1516 – 1532) &#xA;and Torquato Tasso's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_Delivered&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Gerusalemme liberata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1581).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By that time, the humanists had started attacking the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalric_romance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chivalric romance&lt;/a&gt; (which could be in prose or in verse).&#xA;For example, in &lt;em&gt;English Literature In The Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama&lt;/em&gt; (1954), C. S. Lewis writes (p. 29):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Erasmus would forbid a young prince to read 'Arthurs and Lancelots' which 'smacke of tyrannie and moreouer rude (&lt;em&gt;ineruditi&lt;/em&gt;), foolish and anile' (&lt;em&gt;Inst. Principis Christiani&lt;/em&gt;, ii).&#xA;  Montaigne congratulates himself on an education which had made Ovid his nursery book and kept him from hearing even the names of Amadis, Huon, and such trumpery (I, xxv).&#xA;  Vives condemns book 'such as are Amadis and Florisand in Spain or Lancelot and the Round Table in France, the which were made and compiled of idle fellows (&lt;em&gt;hominibus otiosis&lt;/em&gt;) and stuffed fulle of leasings' (&lt;em&gt;De Causis&lt;/em&gt;, ii).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epic poem can't simply be equated with the chivalric romance, but some of the criticism would also apply to epic poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Cervantes published a parody on chivalric romances (especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amad%C3%ADs_de_Gaula&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Amadís de Gaula&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) that became a great success: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (volume 1 in 1605, volume 2 in 1615).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this background, Milton's epic poems &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1667) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Regained&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Regained&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1671) are exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does not mean there have no epic poems since Milton. However, Alexander Pope's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rape of the Lock&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1819–1824) are satires on the genre. Two more recent, non-satyrical, examples are Christopher Logue's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Music_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;War Music&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeros&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Omeros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1990) by Nobel Prize laureate Derek Walcott.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T17:00:00.020" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T17:00:00.020" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6019" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6068" CreationDate="2018-03-11T05:18:46.017" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the discussion of Directive 10-289, Fred Kinnan said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His smile disappeared, and with a sudden, bitter look of weariness he added, &quot;...I'm not going to say that I'm working for the welfare of my public, because I know I'm not. I know that I'm delivering the poor bastards into slavery, and that's all there is to it. And they know it, too. But they know that I'll have to throw them a crumb once in awhile, &lt;strong&gt;if I want to keep my racket&lt;/strong&gt;, while with the rest of you they wouldn't have a chance in hell. So that's why, if they've got to be under a whip, they'd rather &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; held it, not you - you drooling, tear-jerking, mealy-mouthed bastards of the public welfare! Do you think that outside your college-bred pansies there's one village idiot you're fooling? &lt;strong&gt;I'm a racketeer - but I know it and my boys know it, and they know that I'll pay off&lt;/strong&gt;. Not out of the kindness of my heart, either, and &lt;strong&gt;not a cent more than I can get away with&lt;/strong&gt;, but at least they can count on that much. Sure, it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it's not me who's built this kind of world - &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; did - so I'm playing the same as you've set it up and I'm going to play it for as long as it lasts - which isn't going to be long for any of us!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly was he gaining from his racket (other than getting power by having a stranglehold on the Unification Board)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T22:34:52.050" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T22:40:47.323" Title="What was Fred Kinnan gaining from his racket?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3289" CreationDate="2018-03-11T14:32:40.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's start by listing the titles of all the Songs, and noting that you can read them in full &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/010zY.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/010zY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Lists of poems&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll now discuss various possible pairings among these poems, but bear in mind that there's no definitive answer to this. Arguments could be made for many different ways of pairing up, and we're never going to have a perfect bijection. It's almost an exercise in combinatorics!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Common titles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest poems to pair off are those which have identical titles in both Innocence and Experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Introduction&quot; and &quot;Introduction&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Admittedly this pair don't have all that much in common besides both having the same title and coming at the start of their respective collections.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Chimney-Sweeper&quot; and &quot;The Chimney-Sweeper&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Structually this pair don't have much in common either, but they're both about children who clean chimneys, almost the only mention of such among these Songs. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5626/17&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt; which compares them in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Holy Thursday&quot; and &quot;Holy Thursday&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, not much in common except the titles: the Innocence poem is more descriptive with longer lines, the Experience poem more abstract with simpler structure.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Divine Image&quot; and &quot;A Divine Image&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. At first glance these don't have much in common either ... but both are about certain capitalised traits, virtues and vices respectively: the Innocence poem makes much of &quot;&lt;em&gt;Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, while the Experience poem bemoans &quot;&lt;em&gt;Cruelty&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Jealousy&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Terror&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and &quot;&lt;em&gt;Secrecy&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Nurse's Song&quot; and &quot;Nurse's Song&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. The parallelism between these two is perhaps the clearest of all, with even some of the lines being identical across both poems.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;A Cradle Song&quot; and &quot;A Cradle Song&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Again, these two share some lines as well as their titles, and the essential nature of both poems is the same - watching over a sleeping child - although of course their attitude and outlook are different.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Little Boy Lost&quot; and &quot;A Little Boy Lost&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Another case where the poems have little in common beyond their titles: the boy in the Innocence poem very literally gets lost from his father while walking, whereas the boy in the quite horrific Experience poem is taken by a priest to be tortured for speaking wrongly about love. (I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition in these poems!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opposite/complementary titles&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some poems in Innocence and Experience can also be paired off because their titles are somehow 'opposite' to each other, as indeed are the collection titles &quot;Innocence&quot; and &quot;Experience&quot; themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Lamb&quot; and &quot;The Tyger&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. There is certainly parallelism here beyond the titles: in both poems, the writer asks the respective animal &quot;&lt;em&gt;who made thee&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. The comparison is even made explicity by the line in &quot;The Tyger&quot; which says &quot;&lt;em&gt;Did He who made the lamb make thee?&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Infant Joy&quot; and &quot;Infant Sorrow&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. These are two very different takes on the birth of a newborn baby. No direct parallelism in the text, but the topic is similar enough for them to be paired.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Divine Image&quot; and &quot;The Human Abstract&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. As above with the two Divine Image poems, both of these spend a lot of time on capitalised traits. In fact, this time &quot;&lt;em&gt;Mercy&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Pity&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and &quot;&lt;em&gt;Peace&lt;/em&gt;&quot; star in both poems, although of course the attitude and outlook are very different between Innocence and Experience.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Little Boy Found&quot; and &quot;The Little Girl Found&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Not that boys vs girls is at all an Innocence-Experience comparison, but I noticed that both of these poems tell very similar stories, although at different lengths. In both, God appears to reunite a lost child with their parents in a &quot;&lt;em&gt;dale&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;dell&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. (In fact, &quot;The Little Girl Found&quot; seems like a very un-Experience-like poem!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other parallelisms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;12&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Echoing Green&quot; and &quot;The Garden of Love&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I mention these two because I found a few sources which describe them as paired poems, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/assets/uploads/preview_files/Blake_preview-preview.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://carlabithellblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/04/compsrison-between-the-echoing-green-and-the-garden-of-love/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, but to be honest I can't see the connection myself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Blossom&quot; and &quot;The Clod and the Pebble&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I hadn't realised it until &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5815/17&quot;&gt;recently&lt;/a&gt;, but both of these poems can be interpreted comparisons between different kinds of love, symbolised by the robin/sparrow and clod/pebble respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Doubtless there are more parallels which can be drawn between specific Songs of Innocence and of Experience. I've just picked out those correspondences which I found most obvious, and even here the same Song of Innocence can be paired with more than one different Song of Experience. Again, there's no definitive or unique answer to this, and nor should there be. Blake wrote his poems to be open to more than one interpretation, and he didn't compose them to correspond to each other with mathematical precision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A'sim Na'aji Abbass Mohammed Rageh, &quot;Blake’s philosophy in composing poems with common and opposite titles in &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.naspublishers.com/particle/download/1041&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here as PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://crossref-it.info/textguide/songs-of-innocence-and-experience/13/1646&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Themes and related poems in the &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and Experience&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/assets/uploads/preview_files/Blake_preview-preview.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blake’s Songs: an EMC Study Guide&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other sources linked above, and of course my own reading and comparison of the poems.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T14:32:40.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:42:03.497" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;Nantas&lt;/em&gt; (1878) by Émile Zola, the last words of the short story are Flavie's final statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;ENGLISH:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I love you!&quot;, she cried to his neck, sobbing, tearing this confession from her pride, from all her being tamed, &quot;I love you because you are strong!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;FRENCH:&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Je t’aime ! cria-t-elle à son cou, sanglotante, arrachant cet aveu à son orgueil, à tout son être dompté, je t’aime parce que tu es fort ! »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Flavie announce her love for Nantas and say that he is strong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:38:07.927" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T17:50:07.653" Title="What is the meaning of Flavie's final statement?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;emile-zola&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6023" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:43:13.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T15:43:13.550" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T15:43:13.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6024" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:43:13.550" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the short story Nantas (1878), written in French by Émile Zola. Use with the [emile-zola] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:32:13.550" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:32:13.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6025" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:45:15.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T15:45:15.437" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T15:45:15.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6026" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:45:15.437" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the works of Émile Zola, an 19th-century French writer, or the man himself." OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:33:09.293" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:33:09.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:46:05.873" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T15:46:05.873" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T15:46:05.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:46:05.873" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the works of Émile Zola, a 19th-century French writer, or the man himself. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:32:19.877" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:32:19.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6029" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6043" CreationDate="2018-03-11T15:46:39.833" Score="10" ViewCount="3646" Body="&lt;p&gt;The British vet and writer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Herriot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Wight&lt;/a&gt; is best known for his series of semi-autobiographical stories written under the pen name James Herriot, recounting details of his experience as a country vet in North Yorkshire. In these books, he himself appears as James/Jim Herriot, rather than his real name of Alfred/Alf Wight, and his friends &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Sinclair_(veterinary_surgeon)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Sinclair_(veterinary_surgeon)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian&lt;/a&gt; Sinclair appear as Siegfried and Tristan Farnon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name James Herriot apparently comes from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Herriot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scottish goalkeeper&lt;/a&gt; whom he saw on television. What about the names Siegfried and Tristan Farnon? Where did these names come from and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T17:00:26.607" Title="Where did the names Siegfried and Tristan Farnon come from?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;james-herriot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6031" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:07:12.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;James Herriot was the pen name of veterinary surgeon and writer Alfred Wight (1916-1995), who is best known for his series of semi-autobiographical stories about his life as a country vet in North Yorkshire. The books are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If Only They Could Talk&lt;/em&gt; (1970)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet&lt;/em&gt; (1972)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let Sleeping Vets Lie&lt;/em&gt; (1973)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vet in Harness&lt;/em&gt; (1974)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vets Might Fly&lt;/em&gt; (1976)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vet in a Spin&lt;/em&gt; (1984)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lord God Made Them All&lt;/em&gt; (1981)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Every Living Thing&lt;/em&gt; (1992)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the US, the first six of these were published in pairs as &lt;em&gt;All Creatures Great and Small&lt;/em&gt; (books 1-2), &lt;em&gt;All Things Bright and Beautiful&lt;/em&gt; (books 3-4), and &lt;em&gt;All Things Wise and Wonderful&lt;/em&gt; (books 5-6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jamesherriot.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Herriot website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Herriot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:47:33.590" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:47:33.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6032" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:07:12.190" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British veterinary surgeon and writer James Herriot (pen name of James Alfred Wight, 1916 – 1995) or about any of his literary works, most famously the semi-autobiographical book series inspired by his experience as a veterinary surgeon in rural Yorkshire." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:31:42.163" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:31:42.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6033" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:12:06.163" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:12:06.163" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:12:06.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6034" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-11T16:12:06.163" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author, political activist and lecturer Helen Keller (1880 – 1968), who was born deaf and blind, or about any of her literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-11T16:33:47.630" LastActivityDate="2018-03-11T16:33:47.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3434" CreationDate="2018-03-12T01:09:37.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's Hastings.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I looked up the author, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Mary_Gentle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Gentle&lt;/a&gt;, who was born in Eastbourne on the south coast of England. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastbourne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eastbourne&lt;/a&gt; itself was then my first guess, but it didn't seem to fit: there's no castle in the town (the closest one being &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pevensey_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pevensey&lt;/a&gt; a few miles away), and to the west of the town lies the massive &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachy_Head&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beachy Head&lt;/a&gt;, rather than a &amp;quot;West Hill&amp;quot; which divides the &amp;quot;Old Town&amp;quot; from the modern portion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to be put off, however, I started widening my net. Assuming that the towns Mary Gentle is most familiar with would be somewhere reasonably close to Eastbourne, I checked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_settlements_in_East_Sussex_by_population&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of towns in East Sussex&lt;/a&gt;. Since we want a town that's fairly large but also fairly isolated, not surrounded by suburbs and smaller towns like Brighton, my next guess was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hastings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hastings&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia article for this town (emphasis mine) was already enough to make me strongly suspect it's the one we're looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hastings is situated where the sandstone beds, at the heart of the Weald, known geologically as the Hastings Sands, meet the English Channel, forming tall cliffs to the east of the town. &lt;strong&gt;Hastings Old Town is in a sheltered valley between the East Hill and West Hill (on which the remains of the Castle stand).&lt;/strong&gt; In Victorian times and later the town has spread westwards and northwards, and now forms a single urban centre with the more suburban area of St Leonards-on-Sea to the west.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with the description of Surcombe in &lt;em&gt;A Hawk in Silver&lt;/em&gt;: Holly is on the East Hill and extending her gaze westwards to see first the Old Town, then the West Hill and the Castle, then the modern town which has spread out westwards, then another small town, then a long sweep of land ending twenty miles away at a chalk headland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next town to the west of Hastings is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexhill-on-Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bexhill&lt;/a&gt; (corresponding to &amp;quot;Combe Marish&amp;quot; in the story). Between Bexhill and Hastings is a stretch of low-lying land, Glyne Gap, which is now home to a retail park but could well have been marshland decades ago. The next &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; town is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastbourne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eastbourne&lt;/a&gt;, which probably corresponds to &amp;quot;Deepdean&amp;quot;, and certainly the &amp;quot;Chalkspit&amp;quot; jutting out into the channel must describe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachy_Head&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beachy Head&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of East Hill, from immediately before the passage quoted in the question, also fits exactly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesus, today's hot! Coming to the end of South Street, she looked undecidedly down the main road to the overcrowded beach. Not a hope. I gotta get out of here for a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She threaded her way quickly through the crowds to the Fishmarket. A few minutes later she was at the top of Tackleway Steps, at the foot of the East Hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where it faces the sea this is a sandstone cliff pocked with caves. On the town side a steep gorse and bramble-covered slope has one twisting stairway leading up it. At the summit a grey rock juts out like a ship's prow. Beyond that lies high, wide and grassy downland, the gorse-yellow Fire Hills and Starshell Cove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/south+street+hastings/@50.856312,0.5494611,15z?dcr=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;South Street&lt;/a&gt; in Hastings, which meets the &amp;quot;main road&amp;quot; (London Road) close to the beach. The East Hill &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a sandstone cliff, looking sheer from the sea side but with a path up behind it. Beyond it to the east is a wide sweep of downland and a bay with a naturist beach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are images of the East Hill at Hastings, and of the Old Town &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; the East Hill. (Click for full-size versions.) The second picture is much like what Holly would have been seeing in the passage quoted in the question. Note how the main road really does wind like a dragon through the town!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdLOm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XdLOmm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hastings East Hill&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SjnKS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SjnKSm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Hastings from the East Hill&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most clinching of all, the road just on the town side of the East Hill is indeed called Tackleway. This seems to be the only distinctive name which isn't altered in the novel - perhaps as a sort of Easter egg, a nudge and a wink to people familiar with Hastings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's check everything on a map (the red indicated point near the right-hand side is Tackleway):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/67Tuo.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/67Tuo.png&quot; alt=&quot;Hastings from Google Maps&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's virtually 100% certain that the town being portrayed by Gentle's &amp;quot;Surcombe&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;Hastings&lt;/strong&gt;. A fitting place, perhaps, for an invasion from the sea to take place!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-12T01:09:37.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6038" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-12T23:44:39.487" Score="8" ViewCount="478" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;The Lily&quot; by William Blake must be one of the shortest of his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt; collection&lt;/a&gt;, only four lines long:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The modest Rose puts forth a thorn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The humble sheep a threat’ning horn:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While the Lily white shall in love delight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor a thorn nor a threat stain her beauty bright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly there must be some hidden meaning behind this. Blake's poems tend to have a lot of religious themes, either overt or in subtext, and it's quite implausible for one of the Songs of Experience to be just a description of nature. Also, I can't really see anything &quot;experience&quot;-related in the surface meaning. Most of the &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; have something dark or threatening about them, but this seems very benign. Understanding the subtext would probably help me to understand its placement in this collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it significant that the Lily has no sharp or threatening parts? &lt;strong&gt;What do the Rose, the sheep, and the Lily symbolise?&lt;/strong&gt; (Is it significant that the sheep is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; described as a lamb, which is a recurring motif in Blake's poetry?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got good answers to questions like this here before. Hoping to get lucky again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T19:17:20.347" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T19:17:20.347" Title="What is the deeper meaning of Blake's &quot;The Lily&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6074" CreationDate="2018-03-13T04:56:48.043" Score="3" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shortly after he lost a commission on the Cosmo-Slotnick Building, sculpture Steven Mallory took a shot at Ellsworth Toohey as he was getting out of his car to deliver a radio address (which missed by an inch). Ellsworth Toohey took it very calmly, giving the address exactly as planned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After finding out about the news, Peter Keating was initially worried about whether the newspaper would still be publishing Ellsworth Toohey's column the next day, which was to speak very flatteringly of him. Once he realized that Toohey wasn't dead, though, his reaction changed (especially upon learning the identity of the assailant):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keating stared - his throat dry - at the name of the assailant. It was Steven Mallory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the inexplicable frightened Keating, particularly when the inexplicable lay, not in tangible facts, but in that causeless feeling of dread within him. There was nothing to concern him directly in what had happened, except his wish that it had been someone else, anyone but Steven Mallory; and that he didn't know why he should wish this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Toohey found out who it was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he heard the name, Toohey's glance remained fixed somewhere between the shoulder of one man and the hat brim of another. Then Toohey - who had stood calmly while a bullet struck an inch from his face against the glass of the entrance door below - uttered one word and the word seemed to fall at his feet, heavy with fear: &lt;em&gt;&quot;Why?&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mallory himself indicated that him and Toohey had never met in person, he knew none of Toohey's friends, and that he didn't think that Toohey had anything to do with him losing the commission (which was perfectly true). The main connection was that Toohey had criticized him in his column at one point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being the case, why were Toohey and Keating so frightened by the Mallory's action?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T20:21:18.007" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T07:48:41.670" Title="Why were Ellsworth Toohey and Peter Keating so afraid of the identity of Ellsworth Toohey's assailant?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-14T04:45:50.627" Score="7" ViewCount="630" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1984 by George Orwell, Goldstein's book &lt;em&gt;The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism&lt;/em&gt; is given roughly 30 pages of text, is largely drawn out, and seems unimportant compared to the rest of the novel. What is its significance? Couldn't the book largely be summed up in a page or two of summary from the narrator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3212" LastActivityDate="2018-03-14T04:45:50.627" Title="What is the significance of Goldstein's book in 1984?" Tags="&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6041" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6042" CreationDate="2018-03-14T05:51:36.033" Score="7" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, Eustace put a cursed arm ring on, which resulted in him becoming a dragon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the arm-ring itself have any special symbolism (e.g. he was entrapped by his own greed and was utterly unable to free himself of it), or is it merely the means by which he's turned into a dragon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T17:15:35.013" Title="What is the symbolism of Eustace's arm ring?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6041" CreationDate="2018-03-14T14:13:21.393" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main point of the arm-ring is that it's a piece of treasure Eustace is trying to hoard for himself. He puts it on because he's selfish and grasping, like a dragon. &lt;em&gt;That's&lt;/em&gt; why he turns into a dragon, not any curse attached to the ring in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sleeping on a dragon’s hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But an arm-ring in particular resembles manacles or chains, here one that he chose to put on (even though it didn't in fact fit). The thing he thought he wanted ends up imprisoning him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What woke him was a pain in his arm. ... [P]resently it occurred to him that the bracelet which he had shoved up above his elbow had become strangely tight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being caught by the bracelet and trapped in the body of a dragon amount to the same thing here, since they both stem from Eustace's poor character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wanted to get back among humans and talk and laugh and share things. He realised that he was a monster cut off from the whole human race. An appalling loneliness came over him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was already cut off from the others by his own selfishness; now his outside matches his inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arm-ring stays on his arm when he turns back into a human, but it no longer traps him. It's not mentioned during his description of his transformation, but when he gets back to camp and starts to tell his story to Edmund, he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...And that beastly arm-ring was hurting like anything—&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Is that all right now?&quot; [said Edmund.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eustace laughed—a different laugh from any Edmund had heard him give before—and slipped the bracelet easily off his arm. &quot;There it is,&quot; he said, &quot;and anyone who likes can have it as far as I'm concerned.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, no one does like. Even if they might otherwise have wanted to bring it home as a memento, everyone seems to be thoroughly put off treasure-hoarding by this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Lord Octesian's arm ring had a curious fate. Eustace did not want it and offered it to Caspian and Caspian offered it to Lucy. She did not care about having it. “Very well, then, catch as catch can,” said Caspian and flung it up in the air. This was when they were all standing looking at the inscription. Up went the ring, flashing in the sunlight, and caught, and hung, as neatly as a well-thrown quoit, on a little projection on the rock. No one could climb up to get it from below and no one could climb down to get it from above. And there, for all I know, it is hanging still and may hang till that world ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastEditorUserId="1305" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T17:15:35.013" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T17:15:35.013" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6029" CreationDate="2018-03-14T23:03:25.847" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @rand-althor for finding the citation!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://newsok.com/article/2114866&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article, an interview with the author&lt;/a&gt; includes a brief explanation of the choices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Siegfried&lt;/strong&gt; was taken from the heroic character of German legend who had inspired composer Richard Wagner. The strong personality traits of his associate had not been lost on Herriot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;After I decided on Siegfried for Donald, &lt;strong&gt;Tristan&lt;/strong&gt; became the obvious name for Brian,&quot; the writer said. Tristan was a young romantic. That seemed to fit perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turned out that my “Norse” recollection wasn’t completely off-beam either: the German &lt;strong&gt;Siegfried&lt;/strong&gt; character is, it seems, basically the same as the Norse &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigurd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sigurd&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia). These legends (in their German version) inspired Wagner's series of four operas, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Ring_des_Nibelungen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Ring des Nibelungen&lt;/strong&gt; (a.k.a. &lt;strong&gt;The Ring Cycle&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, of which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_(opera)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Siegfried&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Tristan&lt;/strong&gt; character on the other hand is found in another Wagner opera, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_und_Isolde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tristan und Isolde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (English translation left as an exercise for the reader), which he composed as a diversion after completing the first two acts of &lt;em&gt;Siegfried&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastEditorUserId="2773" LastEditDate="2018-03-15T17:00:26.607" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T17:00:26.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6044" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-15T14:28:17.923" Score="6" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Orwell did not like Kipling at all. I quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this essay by Orwell&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this essay also shows that Orwell had read at least some of Kipling's poetry. I couldn't help noticing some similarities between two of the three party slogans in George Orwell's book &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;Kipling's poem &lt;em&gt;The White Man's Burden&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell: &amp;nbsp;War Is Peace&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kipling: Take up the White Man's burden—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The savage wars of peace—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Orwell: &amp;nbsp;Freedom Is Slavery&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kipling: The cry of hosts ye humour&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;(Ah, slowly!) toward the light:—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;“Why brought ye us from bondage,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;“Our loved Egyptian night?”   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence as to whether Orwell's slogans were inspired in part by Kipling's poem?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And please, let's not get into an argument about whether Kipling was entirely pro-imperialism when he wrote these lines—this question has been hashed out altogether too often.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T14:28:17.923" Title="Were the three slogans in Orwell's 1984 partly inspired by Kipling's poem &quot;The White Man's Burden&quot;?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5910" CreationDate="2018-03-15T15:10:36.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sense of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;mark&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (to &lt;em&gt;take note of&lt;/em&gt;) is found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;¹:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Notice or pay careful attention to.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;‘he'll leave you, you mark my words!’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn’t look like it’s intended to refer to a name, just a simple word play (you could just about get away with using &lt;em&gt;spot&lt;/em&gt; instead, since that also has meanings which include &lt;em&gt;notice&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;stain&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ Oxford &lt;em&gt;Living&lt;/em&gt; Dictionaries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T15:10:36.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5992" CreationDate="2018-03-15T15:54:57.560" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, it is quite evident that Maximou fights the second duel just for the sake of showing off her skill at warfare.There is a stark contrast between the two duels as the two combatants are more amicably disposed towards each other in the second.&#xA;Unfortunately, Digenis wins the second fight and Maximou's response to her defeat suggests that she was hoping to win. Digenis and Maximou's lovemaking appears to be consensual although Maximou's compromised situation after her defeat leaves this open to debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3221" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T15:54:57.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6047" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6022" CreationDate="2018-03-15T17:50:07.653" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: very much personal opinion; you should consider posting on the French Language SE for better feedback on the original text. In particular to check on the intended sense of &lt;em&gt;arrachant&lt;/em&gt;, as I’m a little uneasy about my understanding there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance I wondered if &lt;em&gt;arrachant&lt;/em&gt; was meant in the sense of being torn between her pride and &quot;being tamed&quot; could perhaps mean upbringing, but on closer examination that didn't hold up. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/arracher/5353?q=arrachant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arrachant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; isn’t the right word for that sense of torn (&lt;a href=&quot;http://lyricstranslate.com/en/Notre-Dame-de-Paris-French-cast-Dechire-lyrics.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;déchiré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/dompter/26406&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;dompté&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; here is more about &lt;em&gt;self-control&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the impression — or I think Zola is trying to give the impression — that she rather hates herself for feeling as she does about him. She’s been &lt;em&gt;conquered&lt;/em&gt; : she’s a wild horse, he’s the rider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words her confession of love is being torn from her, grating against her usual pride and, for want of a better word, &lt;em&gt;poise&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2773" LastActivityDate="2018-03-15T17:50:07.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-15T20:13:03.913" Score="10" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was homeschooled, and we studied a lot of history through historical fiction. I was pretty young at the time, so I can't remember them all, but a few have stuck out to me. Unfortunately, I can no longer recall their titles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was one particular historical fiction book which I would like to read again. I can't remember much about it. I can't even remember what era of history it was in, save for a very general idea. I was hoping that anyone who might have read this book would be able to point me in the right direction. All the details I can recall are below. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The time period might be the middle ages or closely thereafter. I vaguely recall a castle. Something also tells me it was about the War of the Roses, though this could be completely wrong. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The location is either England or possibly France. Most likely England. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do not remember the main character's name, only that he is a boy somewhere in his teens. I do not recall him being wealthy, though no memory of him exactly being poor has surfaced either. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One side character's name is either Cecilia or perhaps just Cilia. This character has a younger sister, whose name I do not recall. I do not believe this character is an actual historical figure, though I could be wrong. She is also in her teens. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An antagonist (perhaps even the main antagonist) is a wealthy lady. I remember absolutely nothing else about her, except that Cecilia seemed to be either serving her, or was her daughter. Whatever it was, the relationship wasn't good. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book is likely old. We would have read it back in the 2000's, and it was old back then, and likely already out of print. A very rough estimate would have it being published in the later half of the 1900's. Note that I'm only saying this because virtually all of the historical fiction we read was old and out of print. There were a few newer books every now and then, and it could be one of those. Odds are against that, however. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is unfortunately all I remember. I realize it isn't much to go off of. I would appreciate a few title suggestions I could look into if you aren't sure. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If no one has any ideas, I will gladly delete this question within a few days, so that the answered question percentage doesn't drop unnecessarily lower. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="303" LastEditorUserId="303" LastEditDate="2019-02-08T23:24:33.007" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T19:54:54.870" Title="Looking for a historical fiction book set in England, possibly about the War of the Roses" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6049" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T02:34:31.877" Score="6" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Doomed City&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Град обреченный&quot;), when Andrei finally (spoilers, kind of) finds the Red Building and enters it, he sees a surreal host of people expecting him to a game of chess with some grandmaster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the game, while they both sacrifice some of their pieces, Andrei somehow realises he isn't actually supposed to play against his opponent, but that they're on the same side, in a sense. And yet he leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the Red Building? What does it represent? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What did the game of chess represent?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who was Andrei's opponent?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What happened to other people who entered the building? Where did they go?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How and why was Katzmann different, how was he able to enter and leave the building?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T11:33:15.017" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T07:12:15.830" Title="What was the Red Building, the chess game, and who was the chess genius?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;the-doomed-city&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6051" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-16T09:13:12.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T09:13:12.700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T09:13:12.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6052" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-16T09:13:12.700" Score="0" Body="Questions about Helen Keller's autobiography 'The Story of My Life' (1903). Use this tag with the [helen-keller] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T14:42:09.810" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T14:42:09.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6053" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-16T09:16:46.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-16T09:16:46.643" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T09:16:46.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6054" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-16T09:16:46.643" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novel 'The Doomed City' (Russian: 'Град обреченный', 1975) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Use with [strugatsky-brothers] and [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T22:09:42.150" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T22:09:42.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6056" CreationDate="2018-03-16T10:36:08.253" Score="8" ViewCount="722" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recurring phrase in Michael Ende's &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;, often seen when some character or characters drop out of the story, is &amp;quot;.. but that's another story and shall be told another time&amp;quot;. I believe this is what's being referenced by Bastian, Atreyu, and Falkor near the very end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Water asks you,&amp;quot; Falkor translated, &amp;quot;whether you completed all the stories you began in Fantastica.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No,&amp;quot; said Bastian. &amp;quot;None of them really.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Falkor listed awhile. His face took on a worried look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In that case, it says, the white snake won't let you through. You must go back to Fantastica and finish them all.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;All the stories?&amp;quot; Bastian stammered. &amp;quot;Then I'll never be able to go back. Then it's all been for nothing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Falkor listened eagerly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What does it say?&amp;quot; Bastian wanted to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hush!&amp;quot; said Falkor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a while he sighed and said: &amp;quot;It says there's no help for it unless someone promises to do it in your place. But no one can do that.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I can! I will!&amp;quot; said Atreyu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the whole theme of the book - sucking readers into the story in order to continue it themselves - I think these unfinished tales are a very important thing for readers to appreciate and make note of. For anyone who wants to do what Bastian did and continue telling the Neverending Story, these stories are an easy place to start: loose strands left over which any other storyteller can continue working with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are all the &amp;quot;other stories to be told at other times&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T03:45:24.840" Title="What are all the stories left unfinished in The Neverending Story?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2018-03-16T10:48:26.567" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I actually made a list of all of these many years ago, which deserves to be recorded for posterity. Here they are, in the order that they appear in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The four messengers: Gluckuk, Vooshvazool, Pyornkrachzark, and Blubb.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the long waiting period, the four so unalike messengers became good friends. From then on they stayed together. But that's another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 1 (A)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The old centaur Cairon.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Cairon never went back to the Ivory Tower. But he didn't die and he didn't stay with the Greenskins in the Grassy Ocean. His destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected paths. But that is another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3 (C)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The gnome couple Engywook and Urgl.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, Engywook became very famous; in fact, he became the most famous gnome in the world, but not because of his scientific investigations. That, however, is another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 7 (G)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Grograman, the Many-Coloured Death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Bastian leaves Grograman, promises to come again.] Bastian didn't know that he would not keep his promise. Much much later someone would come in his name and keep it for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 15 (O)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hero Hynreck and Princess Oglamar.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Hero Hynreck, he actually succeeded in reaching Morgul, the Land of the Cold Fire. He ventured into the petrified forest of Wodgabay, crossed the three moats of Ragar Castle, found the lead axe, and slew the dragon Smerg. Then he brought Oglamar back to her father. At that point she would gladly have married him. But by then he didn't want her any more. That, however, is another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 17 (Q)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The faithful mule Yikka.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Yikka] really did find the white, winged stallion. They married and she had a son who was a white, winged mule. His name was Pataplan and he made quite a name for himself in Fantastica, but that's another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 21 (U)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Three Deep Thinkers: Ushtu, Shirkry, and Yisipu.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That night the usual harmony of the Three Deep Thinkers was disturbed by a first radical difference of opinion, which years later led to the breakup of the community. Then Ushtu the Mother of Intuition, Shirkry the Father of Vision, and Yisipu the Son of Reason each founded a cloister of his own. But that is another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 21 (U)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The sword Sikanda.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there Sikanda lies to this day. For not until far in the future will one come who can wield it without danger - but that is another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 23 (W)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The three knights Hykrion, Hysbald, and Hydorn.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Hykrion, Hysbald, and Hydorn] felt bound by the oath of fealty they had sworn to Bastian and resolved to search all Fantastica for him. That was all well and good, but which way were they to go? They couldn't agree, so deciding that each would search separately, they parted and hobbled off each in a different direction. All three had countless adventures, and Fantastica knows numerous accounts of their futile quest. But these are other stories and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 24 (X)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bastian and others in the real world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bastian Balthazar Bux,&amp;quot; [Mr Coreander] grumbled. &amp;quot;If I'm not mistaken, you will show many others the way to Fantastica, and they will bring us the Water of Life.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Coreander was not mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's another story and shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 26 (Z)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I managed to find them all in the text of the book, but do let me know if I missed any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T13:59:18.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6057" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13658" CreationDate="2018-03-16T19:53:48.457" Score="7" ViewCount="1879" Body="&lt;p&gt;3&lt;sup&gt;rd&lt;/sup&gt; stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We passed the School, where Children strove&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At Recess – &lt;strong&gt;in the Ring&lt;/strong&gt; –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the Setting Sun –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've heard of attempts justifying an allegory to the nursery rhyme &quot;Ring a Ring o' Roses&quot;, referring to the Great Plague (I am not convinced). In constrast, an article &quot;Where children strove at recess&quot; by David Leverenz treats this as a kind of confinement: &lt;em&gt;'inorganic ring of the setting sun'&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;'my perspectives need a wider ring than the psychoanalytical schoolyard offers'&lt;/em&gt;. Some other interpretations I found were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'through the cycle of their existence, &quot;in a ring&quot;'&lt;/em&gt; - Richard Chase&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;'absorbed 'in the Ring' of childhood's games'&lt;/em&gt; - Charles R. Anderson&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found these interpretations at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poem/712-because-i-could-not-stop-death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern American Poetry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some ways to weigh the possibilities and pin down the exact meaning and effective consequences of the usage of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2248" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-08T17:13:39.820" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T17:13:39.820" Title="What does &quot;in the Ring&quot; mean in &quot;Because I could not stop for Death&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;emily-dickinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-16T22:14:38.977" Score="3" ViewCount="4537" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading some analysis of &quot;The Raven&quot;, I've become confused about how syllables are counted. For example, in the second line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few sources say there are 15 syllables, and that it ends with half a foot. However, I count 17 syllables, and it doesn't seem to be trochaic octameter unless I count &quot;many a&quot; as 2 syllables (MA-nya) and curious as 2 (CU-rious). Is it correct to do so, or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3227" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T23:13:50.320" Title="Meter and number of syllables per line in &quot;The Raven&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6058" CreationDate="2018-03-16T23:13:50.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;unless I count &quot;many a&quot; as 2 syllables (MA-nya) and curious as 2 (CU-rious).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't sound too unnatural to me. &lt;em&gt;(Disclaimer: I speak with a British accent, which Poe didn't.)&lt;/em&gt; Let's check how it fits with the meter of the rest of the first verse of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once&lt;/strong&gt; u&lt;em&gt;pon&lt;/em&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;mid&lt;/strong&gt;night &lt;strong&gt;drear&lt;/strong&gt;y, &lt;strong&gt;while&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;pond&lt;/strong&gt;ered, &lt;strong&gt;weak&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;wear&lt;/strong&gt;y,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Ov&lt;/strong&gt;er &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;y a &lt;strong&gt;quaint&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;cur&lt;/strong&gt;ious &lt;strong&gt;vol&lt;/strong&gt;ume &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; for&lt;strong&gt;got&lt;/strong&gt;ten &lt;strong&gt;lore&lt;/strong&gt;—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;While&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;nod&lt;/strong&gt;ded, &lt;strong&gt;near&lt;/strong&gt;ly &lt;strong&gt;nap&lt;/strong&gt;ping, &lt;strong&gt;sudd&lt;/strong&gt;en&lt;em&gt;ly&lt;/em&gt; there &lt;strong&gt;came&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;tap&lt;/strong&gt;ping,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;As&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; one &lt;strong&gt;gent&lt;/strong&gt;ly &lt;strong&gt;rap&lt;/strong&gt;ping, &lt;strong&gt;rap&lt;/strong&gt;ping &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; my &lt;strong&gt;cham&lt;/strong&gt;ber &lt;strong&gt;door&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;'&lt;strong&gt;Tis&lt;/strong&gt; some &lt;strong&gt;vis&lt;/strong&gt;it&lt;em&gt;er&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; I &lt;strong&gt;mutt&lt;/strong&gt;ered, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;tap&lt;/strong&gt;ping &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; my &lt;strong&gt;cham&lt;/strong&gt;ber &lt;strong&gt;door&lt;/strong&gt;—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;              &lt;strong&gt;On&lt;/strong&gt;ly &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;noth&lt;/strong&gt;ing &lt;strong&gt;more&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is entirely based on my own reading of the poem, and I'm no expert in scansion. I have heard recitations of the poem from several more experienced readers, but I don't remember how much their scansion differed from mine.) &lt;strong&gt;Bold&lt;/strong&gt; syllables are definitely stressed; &lt;em&gt;italic&lt;/em&gt; ones are weakly stressed and perhaps it's arguable that they're stressed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we count both bold and italic syllables as stressed, then every line contains &lt;strong&gt;eight trochaic feet&lt;/strong&gt;, when &quot;many a&quot; and &quot;curious&quot; each count as two syllables. That would make it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_octameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochaic octameter&lt;/a&gt;, an analysis with which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; - citing Kopley and Hayes, &quot;Two verse masterworks: 'The Raven' and 'Ulalume'&quot; - agrees. Wikipedia also says - citing Sova, &lt;em&gt;Edgar Allan Poe: A to Z&lt;/em&gt; - that Poe himself said it's a mixture of octameter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acatalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;acatalectic&lt;/a&gt;, heptameter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalectic&lt;/a&gt;, and tetrameter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalectic&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the distinction is academic when it comes to the particular line you're talking about. Either way, that line has seven or eight feet, and the rhythm is every other syllable being stressed. That requires &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt; / ya / &lt;strong&gt;quaint&lt;/strong&gt; / and / &lt;strong&gt;cur&lt;/strong&gt; / ious / &lt;strong&gt;vol&lt;/strong&gt; / ume&lt;/em&gt;&quot; rather than &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt; / y / a / &lt;strong&gt;quaint&lt;/strong&gt; / and / &lt;strong&gt;cur&lt;/strong&gt; / i / ous / &lt;strong&gt;vol&lt;/strong&gt; / ume&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. In short, the answer to your final sentence is yes, it's correct to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-16T23:13:50.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6049" CreationDate="2018-03-17T07:12:15.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: such questions are practically impossible to answer. Anyway,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the Red Building? What does it represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Katzman put it, the Red Building is &lt;em&gt;a delirium of an agitated shame&lt;/em&gt;. I am not sure I translate it correctly; Russian совесть is very hard to translate. It refers to our ability to tell right from wrong, and particularly to an ability to feel the shame when choosing wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who was Andrei's opponent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; wears an unmistakable mask of Stalin. It is hinted that whoever enters the Building has its own opponent (or rather has its own experience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T07:12:15.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6061" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6066" CreationDate="2018-03-17T10:19:05.660" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing specific can be said from the context and only one thing came up in my google search. I know it's a name, and it's probably Arabic in origin. But it just doesn't add up to the story really. It's in the last sentence of the following paragraph: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You doctors,&quot; continued Levinson, &quot;spend your efforts treating symptoms instead of causes. Because I am tired, I must go somewhere and rest; because I can't sleep, I must get out somewhere and exercise; because I have no appetite, I must go away from my business! Why don't you find why I am tired, and can't sleep or eat? I should run my business like that and in a year I'd be broke—machullah!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I only found it on a thread about favorite words (not poker related words) in a poker forum: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I've always heard it pronounced gunef or even ganef and in my experience it's meaning is more angle-shooter than out and out crook although I have certainly heard it used in the context of a guy who's business went &quot;machullah&quot; or busto and had all of his property in his wife's name.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I guess it's something about bankruptcy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm translating this story and really need to know its exact meaning and what language it is from. Thanks! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T20:48:45.887" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T20:48:45.887" Title="What is &quot;machullah&quot; in Stanley G. Weinbaum's short story Graph?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;stanley-g-weinbaum&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6061" CreationDate="2018-03-17T12:03:23.450" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I found out the meaning, 'going machullah' means 'going bankrupt'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T12:03:23.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5992" CreationDate="2018-03-17T15:53:09.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I must admit that working out an answer to this question was somewhat challenging. In &lt;em&gt;Digenis Akrites&lt;/em&gt;, the amazon Maximo fights Digenis purely on the insistence of her relative Philopappos, who intended to abduct Digenis' wife,Evdokia. Maximo falls into the trap (the suggestion is that she would never willingly have had anything to do with an attack on Digenes).The author writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus having spoken old man Philopappos&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made Maximo in all respects submissive—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For woman's mind is easily deceived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The battle between Digenis and Maximo is described in the text from a first person point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the battlefield Maximo realises she has been tricked into fighting a solitary man without an army of his own. She finds it unethical to attack him with an army and resolves to fight Digenis on her own.This is what she tells Philopappos:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You thrice accurst old man,&quot; she answered him,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;So me and my people you troubled for one man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To whom I will cross alone, boasting with God's help&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I will bring back his head, not needing you?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the battle that follows Digenis emerges the victor and Maximo expects to be killed. She pleads for her life and Digenis spares her for her &quot;wondrous beauty&quot; as is quoted in the question.She thanks him for his mercy, blesses him for his valour, and asks that they may meet again in the morning in single combat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One more request, that by it you may know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More strictly my experience in war:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bid me to go away and mount my horse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in the morning I will come to this place,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That we may singly fight, none present with us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And you shall see, good friend, my bravery.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;With joy, O Maximo,&quot; I said to her,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Go where you will, and you shall find me here.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maximo wishes to redeem herself.Is there any indication that she wishes to throw the duel? None at all. Why on earth would she challenge him then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the second duel, there is nothing at stake. Digenis has spared Maximo once and is looking forward to the second duel &quot;with joy&quot;.The antagonists apparently wish to pit their skills against each other: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when we were come near we both embraced&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Greeting each other lovingly, as was fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maximo is disarmed which apparently implied defeat.She was seized by great fear and is the first one to bring up the topic of intercourse, &lt;strong&gt;albeit within the framework of marriage&lt;/strong&gt;. This makes rape seem somewhat far-fetched. There is nothing to indicate that Maximo was forced into having sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am a virgin still by none seduced.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You alone have conquered, you shall win me all;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And have me helpmate too against your foes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digenis undoubtedly finds Maximou attractive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My soul was wounded, she was beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They proceed to have sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better example of rape (and of male chauvinism) in a similar situation can be found in Irish mythology (the duel between Aoife and Cu Chulainn). Here, Aoife has to choose between death and Cu Chulainn. I'm not sure the situation is so grave for Maximo here. Her defeat did not imply offering herself to the victor as it did for Aoife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3223" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditorDisplayName="user3223" LastEditDate="2018-04-07T20:51:10.983" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T20:51:10.983" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-17T03:21:54.910" Score="5" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book had a scene where a girl and her friend are riding on horseback through the woods when they come across a train bridge. They decide to ride on it despite one of them not wanting to. The bridge leads into a tunnel. They are halfway through when a train is coming behind them and they are trying to race their horses out before they get hit. The girl makes it out just in time. I think she may have jumped the horse off the bridge and got lost from her friend (can't remember much after the tunnel).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="lmariom1" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T20:35:26.937" Title="YA book with a girl on horseback almost getting hit by a train" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6064" CreationDate="2018-03-17T17:57:42.560" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are describing a scene from &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_Blanc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Point Blanc&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the second novel of the Alex Rider series by &lt;strong&gt;Anthony Horowitz.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist of this book is Alex Rider, a teenage James Bond style secret agent.  In this book, he has to infiltrate Point Blanc, a special school for selected teenage kids of millionaire parents.  Alex has to infiltrate the school by adopting the cover identity of Alex Friend, son of a rich businessman Sir David Friend.  To prepare for the role, Alex spends a few weeks on the estate of David Friend with his family, who are in to the deception.  Alex rides a horse with David's daughter Fiona, and saves her in a railway tunnel in the way you describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also recall the event described in the first chapter of the book.  In this, the millionaire Michael J. Roscoe falls to their death in an elevator shaft.  An assassin has reprogrammed the elevator so the door opened when the elevator wasn't on the right storey, but also installed a holographic projector that projected a realistic image of the elevator car so that the businessman doesn't notice this.  The chapter seems unconnected to the rest of the book at first, though importance in the story is revealed later.  If you have read this in English original, you can find &lt;a href=&quot;http://alexrider2.s3.amazonaws.com/79c027b04e74e73d3a05060e2ffea57c.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text of this first chapter as a free sample on the publisher's website&lt;/a&gt; to see if it rings the bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alexrider.com/books/point-blanc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GoH8.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cover image of Point Blanc&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Cover image of &lt;em&gt;Point Blanc&lt;/em&gt; taken from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alexrider.com/books/point-blanc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;publisher's website&lt;/a&gt;.  Note that the book has been republished under different covers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T20:35:26.937" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T20:35:26.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6061" CreationDate="2018-03-17T20:39:41.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right. The word &quot;machullah&quot; has Jewish origins and connotes bankruptcy. Here is a quote from Hearst's magazine Vol 37:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mr. Raynor,&quot; said Benno, impressively, &quot;I'm what they call in Jewish,&#xA;  machullah. It's like broke and busted only it's worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, consider the following excerpt from &lt;em&gt;The Jew in Old American Folklore&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition, peculiar language humor about failure is created. An&#xA;  example is this late (1885) report from the West Coast forwarded to&#xA;  the East and adorned with a whole row of names: &quot;Have we a holiday&#xA;  called 'Machullah?' I ask because there are a number of stores closed,&#xA;  and if anyone is asked for the reason, the answer is 'Machullah,.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user3223" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T20:39:41.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6067" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6632" CreationDate="2018-03-17T22:34:04.073" Score="4" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6019/what-was-fred-kinnan-gaining-from-his-racket&quot;&gt;What was Fred Kinnan gaining from his racket?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In their discussion of Directive 10-289, Fred Kinnan said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, if you want to talk practice,&quot; said Fred Kinnan, &quot;then let me tell you that we can't worry about businessmen at a time like this. What we've got to think about is jobs. More jobs for the people. In my unions, every man who's working is feeding five who aren't, not counting his own pack of starving relatives. If you want my advice - oh, I know you won't go for it, but &lt;strong&gt;it's just a thought&lt;/strong&gt; - - issue a directive making it compulsory to add, say, one-third more men to every payroll in the country.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Good God!&quot; yelled Taggart. &quot;Are you crazy? We can barely meet our payrolls as it is! There's not enough work for the men we've got now! One-third more? We wouldn't have any use for them whatever!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Who cares whether you'd have any use for them?&quot; said Fred Kinnan. &quot;They need jobs. That's what comes first - &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; - doesn't it? - not your profits.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things here: first, the formula &quot;it's just a thought&quot; is used quite regularly by looters who are afraid to take a firm stance on anything. This seems somewhat out of character for Fred Kinnan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, is Fred Kinnan actually accepting part of the Looters' creed here? He doesn't seem to make any pretense of accepting their ideas later in the same meeting - for example, he openly admits that he's going along with Directive 10-289 because he's a racketeer, not because he thinks (or pretends) that he's acting in the public interest. How much of their philosophy does Fred Kinnan accept at this point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-17T22:41:07.323" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T23:20:37.690" Title="How much of the Looters' philosophy did Fred Kinnan actually accept?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6019" CreationDate="2018-03-17T22:40:47.323" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6067/how-much-of-the-looters-philosophy-did-fred-kinnan-actually-accept&quot;&gt;How much of the Looters&amp;#39; philosophy did Fred Kinnan actually accept?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the key phrase here comes at the end of that speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...Sure, it makes me sick sometimes, it makes me sick right now, but it's not me who's built this kind of world - you did - so I'm playing the same as you've set it up and I'm going to play it for as long as it lasts - which isn't going to be long for any of us!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's playing the game that the Looters created because he doesn't see an alternative. Earlier, he said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you think that the country will stand for [Kinnan stacking the Unification Board with his own men]?&quot; yelled Taggart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Stop kidding yourself,&quot; said Kinnan. &quot;The country? If there aren't any principles anymore - and I guess the doc is right, because there sure aren't if &lt;strong&gt;there aren't any rules to the game and it's only a question of who robs whom&lt;/strong&gt; - then I've got more votes than the bunch of you, there are more workers than employers, and don't you forget it, boys!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From his perspective, it's &quot;rob or be robbed,&quot; and he might as well be the robber if that's his only choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-17T22:40:47.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T08:37:58.540" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rudyard Kipling is famous for &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Book&lt;/em&gt;, and also infamous for the poem &lt;em&gt;The White Man's Burden&lt;/em&gt;. As the former takes place in a British colony and given Kipling's attitude displayed in the latter, are there subtle elements of racial discrimination and imperialistic beliefs incorporated in &lt;em&gt;The Jungle Book&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T08:37:58.540" Title="Are there elements of racial superiority in 1894's Jungle Book?" Tags="&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6070" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-18T20:56:43.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-18T20:56:43.043" LastActivityDate="2018-03-18T20:56:43.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6071" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-18T20:56:43.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American science fiction writer Stanley Grauman Weinbaum (1902 – 1935) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T17:51:38.397" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T17:51:38.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6075" CreationDate="2018-03-18T23:24:29.287" Score="9" ViewCount="2544" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of Shakespeare's comedy &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; is about the group of main characters Viola, Sebastian, Orsino, and Olivia, and the affections requited and unrequited between them. But there's also a subplot surrounding Olivia's steward Malvolio and her other servants, which seems completely unrelated to the rest of the play. It adds more slapstick comedy to the play which might otherwise be rather more serious, but also has a dark element when Malvolio is imprisoned and tormented before vowing revenge on his tormentors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this subplot part of the play? What does it add to the story?&lt;/strong&gt; Are we just meant to laugh at the fooling around of the servants, or to be affected by Malvolio's pathos? Does it connect in some metaphorical or symbolic sense to the main plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T17:39:27.937" Title="What does the Malvolio subplot add to Twelfth Night?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;twelfth-night&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-18T23:37:33.280" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Julian May's science fantasy book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Many-Colored_Land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Many-Colored Land&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, tells the adventures of a disparate group of time travellers (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Many-Colored_Land#Group_Green&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Group Green&lt;/a&gt;) who travel into the early Pleistocene Era. The characters are finely drawn, and seem to be almost archetypal in nature, rather than mere stereotypes. I have always wondered how well they correspond to Jungian (or other) archetypes. For example. Stein (a brawler if ever there was one) would correspond to the hero, Aiken Drum would correspond to the trickster, Sister Amery to the maiden, and Elizabeth Orme to the nurturing mother. Is this reasonable, or am I clutching at straws? Is there a better correspondence in literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other characters in this book and the series (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Saga of the Exiles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) are up for grabs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h1&gt;Group Green&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Elizabeth Orme&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elizabeth was a talented metapsychic practitioner on the human-colonised ski-resort planet Denali, but suffered severe injuries which resulted in the loss of her metapsychic abilities. Unable to cope with the trauma of this, she travelled to the Pliocene hoping to travel freely in a hot air balloon. But in an ironic twist, the shock of time travel caused her operant powers to return. The Tanu race regard her with awe as no other naturally operant metapsychics have come through the gate, and treat her as something of a celebrity. Elizabeth is a peace-loving redactor with little interest in politics, but her knowledge of advanced Milieu metapsychic techniques and her high level of metapsychic power make her an important player in the Tanu court, whether she likes it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Aiken Drum&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A persistent troublemaker, young Aiken Drum refused to be bent to the will of society. Offered the choice of incarceration, docilization or euthanasia, he instead chose Exile to the Pliocene. Always landing on his feet, his quick wits and schemes earned him respect from his fellow time travelers, and his latent metapsychic abilities earned him a silver torc from the Tanu. But a greater future lies ahead for this maverick Scot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Felice Landry&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Felice starts the book as a tremendously talented athlete, with superhuman strength and coercive power (in short-lived, weak control of others minds), but with barely submerged psychopathy. She chooses to go into Exile when she is banned from her sport after two other players accused her of deliberately hurting them. In Exile she discovers her powers are stronger than she had previously expected but refused to be taken by the Tanu. Later in the book, Felice joins the Lowlives helping them discover that 'Blood-Metal' (aka iron) can kill the 'Exotics'. She is determined to get a Gold Torc throughout the book, confident that it will make her powerful enough to take on the Tanu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Richard Voorhees&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Richard is an ex-spacer who came to Pliocene after being sued by an alien space crew who he refused to help whilst on a mission for a client. Richard tries to act tough throughout the book and often refuses to help other people, especially the Lowlives, but always comes through for them in the end. Richard is most notable in the book for killing the first Tanu to die in the book, in the process discovering iron to be a potent weapon against them. He also flies the aircraft at the end of the book, as the only one with enough experience to work out how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Bryan Grenfell&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bryan works as an anthropologist in the Galactic Milieu but goes into Exile in pursuit of his love, Mercy. When he arrives in the Many Colored Land, he is regarded as special by the Tanu, who allow him to work bareneck, without a torc, while he is there. In the time where Bryan is the main view-point he often quotes &quot;There is a lady sweet and kind&quot; by Thomas Ford:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;There is a lady sweet and kind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Was never face so pleas'd my mind;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    I did but see her passing by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And yet I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Stein Olsen&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An ex-driller with psychological scars from the death of his mother. He is of immediate interest to the Tanu, who want him as a competitor in the ritual Great Combat due to his heroic physique. With the help of Elizabeth, he is mentally healed by the human woman Sukey, with whom he falls in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Annamaria Roccaro&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A nun who develops complex relationships with Claude and Felice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Claude Majewski&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A retired, widowed palaeontologist, planning to see the 'fossil Zoo'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Many-Colored_Land#Group_Green&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: The Many-Colored Land: Group Green&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:57:44.593" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:57:44.593" Title="Jungian archetypes in The Many Coloured Land" Tags="&lt;julian-may&gt;&lt;the-many-colored-land&gt;&lt;jungian-archetypes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6039" CreationDate="2018-03-19T07:48:41.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keating was aware of how tremendously talented Mallory was though he wouldn't accept it himself. Because accepting that would mean accepting his own lack of worth. And this conflict of them (men like Mallory and Roark) and us (Keating himself and Toohey's seeming admiration of his work) was nestled deep in his soul though he wasn't consciously aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he hears that it was Mallory, and not some stray robber, who shot Toohey he perhaps glanced into this conflict and rebounded in fear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="677" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T07:48:41.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6072" CreationDate="2018-03-19T15:27:39.077" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subplot had several purposes; it is a contextual and dramatic device, adds comedy, is a metaphorical parallel of the main plot and is a satire on the Puritanical hold on contemporary society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address one aspect of &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it was included in the play; the comic subplot is a &lt;strong&gt;contextual device&lt;/strong&gt; and was a common occurrence in Renaissance plays (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xkErDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA59&amp;amp;dq=twelfth+night+subplot+renaissance&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renaissance Culture in Context: Theory and Practice, by Jean R. Brink, William F. Gentrup&lt;/a&gt;, p.54); it can be seen in some of Shakespeare's other plays, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, with Caliban, Trinculo and Stephano, &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt;, Falstaff in &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, two subplots (Oberon and Titania's quarrel and Bottom turned into a donkey) in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; as well as Wagner and the Three Scholars in Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;. Also contextually, Shakespeare's theatres were often &lt;a href=&quot;http://www2.cedarcrest.edu/academic/eng/lfletcher/henry4/papers/mthomas.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;rowdy and attracted all social classes&lt;/a&gt;, and some only attended the theatre for straightforward entertainment (as oppose to the serious, thought-provoking love stories between the other characters); hence the need for the drama (the main plot is somewhat slow-burning and so the subplot maintains action) and comic, slapstick buffoonery of Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Maria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you say it is mainly to &lt;strong&gt;add comedy&lt;/strong&gt; to the comedy that is &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;. This is because the main plot isn't exactly a light or funny one: Viola believes her brother was killed in the shipwreck at the beginning and she is left vulnerable and alone to survive in a strange country. She falls in love with her employer, Orsino, and is unrequited for a large part of the play due to her disguised identity. She describes her emotional suffering from both the supposed death of her brother and her love for Orsino to the oblivious Orsino:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She sat like patience on a monument,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Smiling at grief&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really, this main storyline is rather quite dark, as you say. So the subplot acts as a release and also contrast to this when Malvolio is deceived by a forged love note which leads to an awkward but amusing confusion when he believes Olivia loves him and then acts accordingly. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=g4iWHbXax14C&amp;amp;pg=PA157&amp;amp;dq=the+subplot,+in+contrast,+is+entirely+comic+and+even+farcical+in+tone.&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjvreClu_jZAhVDCMAKHYCSA-EQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=the%20subplot%2C%20in%20contrast%2C%20is%20entirely%20comic%20and%20even%20farcical%20in%20tone.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Reference)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, the subplot acts as a &lt;strong&gt;parallel to the main plot&lt;/strong&gt;. Self-love and misguided infatuation are featured in both: Orsino really is more in one with the idea of himself being in love, evident in the opening lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If music be the food of love, play on;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give me excess of it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Malvolio is excessively proud and pretentious when he believes Olivia loves him, with her even commenting directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are sick of self love, Malvolio&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two plots also share strong, independent female characters, Viola in the main plot and Maria in the subplot. Viola has managed to survive the shipwreck and secure herself in Illyria and Maria was the brain behind the scheme to trick Malvolio. Both women find love in the end also; Maria and Sir Toby and Viola and Orsino.&#xA;Therefore, the subplot supports the main plot by unifying itself through shared, central subjects as well as adding &lt;em&gt;complexity&lt;/em&gt; to an otherwise somewhat simple story arc of love and losing and finding a brother.&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8JEMHRN6NEMC&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=twelfth+night+subplot+depth&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjm2qbDo_jZAhUqBcAKHXL1C4YQ6AEIQTAE#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=twelfth%20night%20subplot%20depth&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Reference)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the trickery and imprisonment that Maria, Toby and Andrew inflict on Malvolio is a reaction to his Puritanical behaviour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This darker part of the subplot is an &lt;strong&gt;anti-Puritan satire&lt;/strong&gt; by Shakespeare, as 19th century critic, Joseph Hunter commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Malvolio he [Shakespeare] has made the Puritan at once detestable and ridiculous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malvolio's constant reprimands to the other characters' drinking and feasting symbolises the Puritans' disapproving view on the twelfth night of Christmas' festivities and the other characters' treatment of him mirrors the Elizabethans' view of Puritanism; Yes, it could be seen as cruelty and the audience may sympathise with Malvolio, but this is mainly an individual decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T15:27:39.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6076" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:16:49.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:16:49.540" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:16:49.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6077" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:16:49.540" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's comedy 'Twelfth Night, or What You Will', which was probably written around 1601–02. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:56:03.987" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:56:03.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:18:43.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:18:43.567" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:18:43.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:18:43.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel 'The Idiot' (Идио́т, published 1868–69). Use this tag with the [fyodor-dostoyevsky] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:56:17.897" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:56:17.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6080" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:21:06.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:21:06.837" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:21:06.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6081" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:21:06.837" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American science fiction, fantasy, horror and science writer Julian Clare May (1931 – 2017) or about any of her works, which include the 'Saga of Pliocene Exile' and 'Galactic Milieu Series' books. She has also used pseudonyms including Lee N. Falconer and Ian Thorne." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:55:38.640" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:55:38.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6082" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:22:39.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:22:39.397" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:22:39.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6083" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:22:39.397" Score="0" Body="Questions about Julian May's book 'The Many-Colored Land' (1981), the first book of the 'Saga of Pliocene Exile'. Use this tag with the [julian-may] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-19T18:55:59.357" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:55:59.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6084" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6085" CreationDate="2018-01-19T04:05:54.620" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reminded of this when I ran into the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldofjohnflanagan.com/rangers-apprentice/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ranger's Apprentice&lt;/a&gt; series while researching another book. It was a fantasy book, I think, that I read in early college, around 1999, in English, maybe as a paperback. The main character winds up as the apprentice to a forest ranger of some flavor. At some point, a metal canteen becomes horribly dented (maybe during a fight?) and the ranger fixes it by filling the canteen with grain and then adding water before capping it. The expanding grain causes the dents in the canteen to be pushed out. Said ranger later dies, although I don't remember if it was from wounds in battle, or from disease or old age (although for some reason, my brain keeps coming back to the idea of him dying of rabies after being wounded subduing an animal with the disease). Later, the protagonist is with a group that's trying to get into a city which is walled and locked up. He convinces them to follow his plan, which involves wedging two nested pipes into the doorway of the gate into the city, which are filled with soaked grain, the idea being that the expansion will cause the pipes to push out with great force, breaking the gates. They plant the devices, with some losses, and at first, it looks like the devices are doing nothing, and the loss was for naught, but then they start working and break the gates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not 100% certain that it was a fantasy series now that I think about it. I think the mentor was indeed described as a &quot;ranger&quot;, and I have a hazy memory of orcs and a darkness spell, but I might be channeling &lt;a href=&quot;http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Montolio_Debrouchee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mooshie&lt;/a&gt; from the Drizz't books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only other things I remember was an early scene involving a religious order where a religious brother tried to convince one of the nuns that semen was liquid communion, and some other scene involving the main character &quot;curing&quot; an epileptic through sex, only to see them get into an honor battle and having their head smashed in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="Sean Duggan" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:53:13.370" Title="Book involving the apprentice of a ranger who fixes a dented canteen with swollen grain, learns to use that to break gates" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6084" CreationDate="2018-03-19T18:30:35.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed Gary Jenning's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raptor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and therefore neither Fantasy nor Sci-Fi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOLcd.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOLcd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover of the paperback of *Raptor*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Raptor is an historical novel set in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. It purports to be the memoirs of an Ostrogoth, Thorn, who has a secret: he is a hermaphrodite and takes on the name, &quot;Thorn the Mannamavi&quot;, &quot;a being uninhibited by conscience, compassion, remorse- a being as implacably amoral as the juika-bloth and every other raptor on this earth.&quot; Thorn discovers his sexuality rather unorthodoxly during his early teens. After he is banished from both a monastery and, later, a convent, he travels throughout the dying Roman Empire on a quest to meet his fellow Ostrogoths (even though it was never confirmed that Thorn was an Ostrogoth; he simply assumed it by reaching several logical conclusions), meeting several characters; among the most crucial to the storyline: Theodoric and the retired Roman legionary-turned-woodsman Wyrd, with whom he forms close friendships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thorn lives his life chiefly as a man but can easily pass for a woman (he is beardless, has shoulder-length hair, and is relatively small-statured), and he uses this ambiguity for his own benefit. Throughout his life, Thorn conducts affairs with both men and women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyrd is the &quot;ranger&quot; who is never referred to as such, but simply as a woodsman. He does die of what sounds like rabies (&lt;em&gt;hundswoths&lt;/em&gt; or &quot;dog-madness&quot; in the book). There is the scene with the canteen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.... What did get hurt was my handsome leather-and-tin water flask — a deep dent that nearly bent it double — and I was inconsolable at having clumsily damaged that gift of great value and utility. But Wyrd told me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Do not grieve so, urchin. While I am skinning and brittling this fine doe for our meal, you go and thresh the bushes and grasses roundabout for every kind of seed you can collect.&quot;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I returned, holding my smock hem up for a hamper, and with it full of assorted seeds, he said:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Pour them into the dented flask, as full as it will hold. Now take this&quot; — he handed me his own flask — &quot;and pour water in, to the brim. Now cork the flask as tightly as you can and put it aside and forget it&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... But while Wyrd and I were still gobbling and slurping, I heard a distinct popping noise from the direction of my unrolled blankets. I went to look, and found that my flask was unbent and undented and, except for a slight scuff on the leather binding, as good as new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the scene where the same principle is used to break a gate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.... The unearthly air-quivering noise was coming from the gate itself, for it was being strained and imperceptibly deformed at every point where I and my men had inserted a container, and it was loudly complaining in its agony. The keening now became mixed with other noises: the groans of stubborn old wood being bent, the splinterings of overstressed wood giving way, the screeches of spikes and bolts being twisted....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thorn does grow up in a monastery where they are sexually assaulted by one of the brothers, who does make the analogy of semen to &quot;liquid communion&quot;. Gudinand is the lover who suffers from epilepsy and dies during a duel with staffs (he's winning until he suffers from his fit, not due to stress but from the joy of nearly winning), unable to mount a defense or even raise his finger to beg for mercy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="Sean Duggan" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T18:30:35.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6086" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6094" CreationDate="2018-03-19T20:23:50.253" Score="5" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Iolanthe, by Gilbert and Sullivan, Phyllis sings (after discovering the &quot;betrayal&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So the richest and rankiest of you all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My sorrowful heart shall choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll be a countess, shall I not? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the peers say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rank, it seems, is vital,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Countess&quot; is the title,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, countess, countess the title, the title, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the only candidates are two earls which seems a bit odd, given that half the House courts her. I see a few options:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No dukes or marquesses are available.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She just picked a title (and nobody wished to contest that). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marchioness wouldn't fit in the song and duchess would be unrealistic.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps I'm missing some historical context or a subtle joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4235" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T22:03:04.323" Title="Why are two earls the rankiest of all?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;gilbert-and-sullivan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2295" CreationDate="2018-03-19T22:17:17.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that this is an old question, but Brandon has said (can't find the reference, sorry) that keteks are based on an (originally) Hebraic poetic form called chiasmus/reverse parallelism.  They are everywhere in the bible ideas are put in an ABCCBA form.  For example:&#xA;A: No one can serve two masters;&#xA;B: for either he will hate the one&#xA;C: and love the other,&#xA;C: or he will be devoted to one&#xA;B: and hate the other.&#xA;A: You cannot serve God and wealth.&#xA;(Matt 6:24)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chiasmus can be very short (those who call evil good and good evil), or longer like the above example, or spanning the structure of whole books. Brandon took that (he is a devout Christian after all) and formalized and tightened it into a Ketek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4236" LastActivityDate="2018-03-19T22:17:17.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-20T02:51:53.510" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chapters are days in his life. He's old, lives alone in a basement apartment, his health deteriorates as the book progresses and it's more and more difficult for him to get out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One story I remember was him meeting his daughter on the street or in a store (they weren't seeing each other on a regular basis) and then she told him she drinks her urine for health reasons and he was surprised that she has a sense of humor but she wasn't joking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around the middle of the book he met an old judge who sent him to jail and regretted doing so (I think the old man was a doctor and performed a mercy killing but maybe it was something else), they became kind of friends and used to meet in a park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there was also another unrelated story in that book (or maybe it was related but not in a clear way) about a man being accused of a crime of a sexual nature because of his coat. He wasn't guilty but was impacted heavily buy the investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it happened in the 20th century. I might be wrong about the writer being Scandinavian and maybe I misremember some of the details I described.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4237" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T22:17:03.880" Title="Told from the point of view of an old man who lives alone and rarely goes out, written by a Scandinavian author" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6089" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-20T12:19:08.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T12:19:08.520" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T12:19:08.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6090" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-20T12:19:08.520" Score="0" Body="Questions about the dystopian novel 'The Handmaid's Tale' (1985) by Margaret Atwood. Use this tag with the [margaret-atwood] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T15:50:34.080" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T15:50:34.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2018-03-20T17:00:29.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/countess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, the wife of an earl is indeed a countess, as is a woman who holds an earldom in her own right. We just never came up with &quot;earless&quot;, which certainly doesn't look right on a page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, for example, the wife of Edward Stanley, 19th Earl of Derby is Caroline Emma Stanley (Neville), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geni.com/people/Caroline-Stanley-Neville-Countess-of-Derby/6000000005750424251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Countess of Derby&lt;/a&gt;. If Phyllis marries an earl, her title would also be Countess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastEditorUserId="20" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T21:58:57.383" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T21:58:57.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6092" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6088" CreationDate="2018-03-20T17:18:41.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found it:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjell_Askildsen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kjell Askildsen&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1936788.Thomas_F_s_siste_nedtegnelser_til_almenheten?from_search=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas F's Last Notes to the Public&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it in Hebrew and it looks like there is no English translation, probably that's why people here are not familiar with it. Shame, it's a great book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It matches the story based on the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is about a man who is informed by a stark and somewhat sinister police man that he is suspected of having committed a heinous crime. Living with this suspicion becomes unbearable and he ends up completely dominated by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matches the story about a man being accused of a crime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The second story though, the titular Thomas F.... It is a first-person account of a very aged misanthrope, a sort of short diary of events and memories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Matches the old man part.&#xA;Both quotes are from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/259532451?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The Daughter is also mentioned in another &lt;a href=&quot;http://biblibio.blogspot.co.il/2013/10/review-thomas-fs-last-notes-to-public.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a surprise meeting with a daughter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjell_Askildsen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kjell Askildsen&lt;/a&gt; is a 20th century Scandinavian(Norwegian) author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did I find it? I looked at different 20th century Scandinavian authors but couldn't find it. Got no responses here so I checked &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;story-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; tag info looking for ways to improve my question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paragraph about translation gave me the idea to search in Hebrew(Israel is a small market and I didn't think there are translations to Hebrew that don't exist in English) searching for &quot;סופרים נורבגים&quot; Norwegian writers in Hebrew I found a different book by Askildsen &lt;a href=&quot;https://indiebook.co.il/product-category/%D7%A1%D7%95%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%9D/%D7%A9%D7%9C-%D7%90%D7%A1%D7%A7%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%93%D7%A1%D7%9F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Great Deserted Landscape&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the author looked familiar and searching his name in Hebrew &quot;של אסקילדסן&quot; immediately shows the book I was looking for which I recognized when I saw it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4237" LastEditorUserId="4237" LastEditDate="2018-03-20T22:17:03.880" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T22:17:03.880" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6106" CreationDate="2018-03-20T21:03:44.710" Score="7" ViewCount="2871" Body="&lt;p&gt;The popular nursery rhyme &quot;Oranges and Lemons&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oranges and lemons,&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Clement’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You owe me five farthings,&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Martin’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When will you pay me?&#xA;  Say the bells of Old Bailey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I grow rich,&#xA;  Say the bells of Shoreditch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When will that be?&#xA;  Say the bells of Stepney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not know,&#xA;  Says the great bell of Bow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here comes a candle to light you to bed,&#xA;  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has apparently a darker meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Various theories have been advanced to account for the rhyme, including: that it deals with child sacrifice; that it describes public executions; and that it describes Henry VIII’s marital difficulties. Problematically for these theories the last two lines, with their different metre, do not appear in the earlier recorded versions of the rhyme. &#xA;  &lt;sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://anilbalan.com/2016/03/20/oranges-and-lemons/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can understand the public execution theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gaol stood on the current site of the Old Bailey, next to St Sepulchre’s church (the bells of Old Bailey in the rhyme). The sound of that church’s “great” tenor bell striking 9am on a Monday morning would signal the start of any hangings due to take place that week. The prisoners on death row were visited the night before by the bell man of St Sepulchre, who would hold a candle in one hand and ring the execution bell in the other. &#xA;  &lt;sup&gt;ibid&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have problems understanding why this would suggest child sacrifice, something that would be abhorrent in XVII century Europe and probably not heard of since the fall of the pre-Columbian Aztec empire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it just meant to be a simple scary story, beware of the boogeyman? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T10:53:38.160" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T10:54:26.753" Title="Why is &quot;Oranges and Lemons&quot; supposed to describe child sacrifice?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6086" CreationDate="2018-03-20T22:03:04.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think your missing the joke, I believe that Gilbert emphasized the &quot;riches&quot; rather than the &quot;rank&quot; when choosing her two engaged, However I can address your points of concern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly in response to your third theory, the term &quot;earl&quot; does not appear in any of the songs in Iolanthe, so that I can definitely debunk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly I can address your first point. My first thought was that there were no Dukes or Marquises in the show. I was woefully mistaken. In the operetta it lists the chorus as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chorus of Dukes, Marquises, Earls, Viscounts, Barons, and Fairies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so there were Marquises and Dukes to be chosen. I would say that either none of them were in the running to marry her (as you said), or the Earls were richer than they were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also have to bear in mind that Phyllis maybe was not in the most sane state of mind, having just seen her boyfriend cheat on her and discovering that faeries were real. She could have just picked the first two she saw. This could confirm your 2nd point, if she is not thinking clearly and doesn't really care.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2018-03-20T22:03:04.323" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2018-03-21T02:10:56.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Spoilers,duh)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Stan reacts so &quot;strongly&quot; to it returning because he says before 1984 (when the losers were kids) that he says he saw IT in her &quot;TRUE FORM&quot;. I think even when years have passed, he is still VERY scared, and thinks he knows what they are up against, and thinks they can't defeat IT. He is also the most skeptical of the losers, and seems to believe It is real, but he knows he doesn't WANT to. He saw It in the photo album, and still refused to believe until enforcement from the other losers. He is the most reluctant, and that makes him more vulnerable to It and Bower's Gang. In the reboot though, they cut some scenes where Stan is really scared. So we'll have to see what happens in 2019!!!   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4239" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T02:10:56.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:06:46.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:06:46.497" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:06:46.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:06:46.497" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Jungian archetypes in works of literature, i.e. &quot;highly developed elements of the collective unconscious&quot;, for example, the great mother, the father, the devil, the wise old man, the trickster and the hero." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:21:50.460" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:21:50.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6098" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:11:07.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:11:07.670" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:11:07.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6099" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:11:07.670" Score="0" Body="Questions related to wordplay in works of literature, i.e. a clever use of words, typically for the purpose of amusement. Examples include puns, phonetic mix-ups, obscure words and meanings, and double entendres," OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:21:44.593" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:21:44.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6100" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:16:46.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:16:46.173" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:16:46.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6101" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-21T13:16:46.173" Score="0" Body="Questions about the relation between works of literature and a specific cultural context. Cultural context does not necessarily refer to the context in which the work originated; it can also refer to the reception in a different cultural context." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T13:21:57.387" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T13:21:57.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18712" CreationDate="2018-03-21T14:47:35.610" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only recently started the book, so forgive me if I'm missing something that's made obvious later in the book, but does the title of &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; have a double meaning? Bastian assumes when he starts reading that it just means that you can keep reading the book as long as you want, but does it mean that you might literally be unable to stop reading it or &quot;get out of&quot; the story? That would technically be a &quot;neverending story.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T17:29:31.300" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:05:25.657" Title="Does the title of &quot;The Neverending Story&quot; have a double meaning?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6104" CreationDate="2018-03-21T14:56:21.530" Score="4" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only recently started the book, so I'm hoping that I'm not missing something that's made clear in the book later, but the first character introduced in the book is named Bastian Balthazar Bux (whose names start entirely with the letter &quot;B&quot;). The second character introduced is Carl Conrad Coreander (whose names start entirely with the letter &quot;C&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why &quot;B&quot; and &quot;C&quot;? These are obviously consecutive letters, but if the author is going with consecutive letters then why not &quot;A&quot; and &quot;B&quot; or something like that? It seems a little weird to just start at &quot;B&quot; and &quot;C&quot; here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-21T16:19:42.770" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T19:12:11.507" Title="Why do the names of the first two characters introduced in &quot;The Neverending Story&quot; start with B and C?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6103" CreationDate="2018-03-21T16:19:29.597" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In the original, it's B and K, not B and C.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_unendliche_Geschichte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bastian Balthasar Bux&lt;/strong&gt; ist ein zehn oder elf Jahre alter, in sich gekehrter Junge. Sein Vater hat den Tod seiner Frau, Bastians Mutter, nie verkraftet, flüchtet sich in seine Arbeit und beachtet seinen Sohn kaum noch. In der Schule ist der Junge ein Außenseiter und wird von seinen Klassenkameraden schikaniert. Auf der Flucht vor ihnen rettet sich Bastian in das Antiquariat des Buchhändlers &lt;strong&gt;Karl Konrad Koreander&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably Karl Konrad Koreander was changed to Carl Conrad Coreander in the English translation because it looks much more English that way. Carl and Conrad are much more commonly seen as English names than Karl and Konrad, and Coreander would probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriander&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;look more familiar&lt;/a&gt; to an English speaker than the more German-looking Koreander.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it clearly wasn't designed to be two consecutive letters. As for why they both have triple initials at all, that would make an interesting follow-up question if there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; any significance to it, although my gut feeling is that there isn't. The similarity between their names serves to form a (very tenuous) bond between the two, foreshadowing the very end of the book, as well as giving Bastian a point to score over the grumpy shopkeeper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My name is Bastian,&amp;quot; said the boy. &amp;quot;Bastian Balthazar Bux.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That's a rather odd name,&amp;quot; the man grumbled. &amp;quot;All those B's. Oh well, you can't help it. You didn't choose it. My name is Carl Conrad Coreander.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That makes three C's.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hmm,&amp;quot; the man grumbled. &amp;quot;Quite right.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-21T16:19:29.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6093" CreationDate="2018-03-22T10:19:26.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: There is no hidden meaning in ‘Oranges and Lemons’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tommy Thumb’s Song Book&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with all the theories about a hidden meaning in ‘Oranges and Lemons’ is that the earliest printed versions do not contain the “chopper” lines. The verse first appeared in print in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Thumb%27s_Pretty_Song_Book&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1744); I can’t find a facsimile of the original, but archive.org has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/tommythumbssongb00loveiala#page/22/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint from 1815&lt;/a&gt; which has the same text (but with  differences in spelling and punctuation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xp2at.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/h2dQm.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;LONDON BELLS.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two ſticks and an Apple,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at White-chapel;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Old father bald pate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at Aldgate;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Maids in white aprons,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at St Cathrines;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oranges and lemons,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at St Clements;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When will pay me;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at Old Bailey;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I am rich,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at Fleetditch;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When will that be?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at Stepney;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I am old,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring the bells at St Pauls.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(“When will pay me” must be a misprint for “When will you pay me”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Halliwell’s collection&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest instance of the “chopper” lines that I can find is from James Orchard Halliwell’s &lt;em&gt;The nursery rhymes of England, collected chiefly from oral tradition&lt;/em&gt; (1842). Google Books has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=alsCAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA156&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth edition (1853)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MhLzu.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fDk7o.png&quot; width=&quot;300&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[At the conclusion, the captive is privately asked if he will have oranges or lemons (the two leaders of the arch having previously agreed which designation shall belong to each), and he goes behind the one he may chance to name. When all are thus divided into two parties, they conclude the game by trying to pull each other beyond a certain line.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gay go up, and gay go down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To ring the bells of London town.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bull’s eyes and targets,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Marg’ret’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Brickbats and tiles,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Giles’.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Halfpence and farthings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Martin’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oranges and lemons,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Clement’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pancakes and fritters,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of St. Peter’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two sticks and an apple,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells at Whitechapel.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Old Father Baldpate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the slow bells at Aldgate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You owe me ten shillings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells at St. Helen’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pokers and tongs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells at St. John’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kettles and pans,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells at St. Ann’s.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When will you pay me?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of Old Bailey.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I grow rich,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of Shoreditch.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pray when will that be?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Say the bells of Stepney.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am sure I don’t know,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Says the great bell of Bow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here comes a candle to light you to bed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And here comes a chopper to chop off your head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See below for a clearer description of the children’s game somewhat inadequately described in the bracketed paragraph.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing this version with the 1744 version reveals typical signs of oral transmission and improvement: ‘ring’ has been replaced throughout with ‘say’, which better suits the metre; the word ‘slow’ has been inserted into the Aldgate line to improve the rhythm; the archaic reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Fleet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fleetditch&lt;/a&gt; (which had been culverted in the mid-18th century) has been replaced by Shoreditch, and the poor rhyme ‘old’/‘Pauls’ has been replaced by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_and_imperfect_rhymes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;perfect rhyme&lt;/a&gt; ‘know’/‘Bow’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this version, the first two and last two lines stick out as interpolations. The rest of the verse is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accentual_verse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;accentual&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimeter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dimeter&lt;/a&gt;, that is, with two stresses per line, and an irregular complement of unstressed syllables. But the first two lines are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_tetrameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic tetrameter&lt;/a&gt; and the last two lines are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dactylic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tetrameter&lt;/a&gt;. It seems possible that the last two lines in particular came from some other verse, now lost, and became attached to ‘Oranges and Lemons’ somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Household Words&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volume 9 of Charles Dickens’ magazine &lt;em&gt;Household Words&lt;/em&gt; (1851) printed a piece ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fe5LAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA384&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Witch in the Nursery&lt;/a&gt;’ commenting (I think humorously or sardonically) on the imagery of children’s rhymes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cruel and unprincipled things sung or said to young children in so many of our popular nursery rhymes and tales, the wanton, reckless acts, no less than abominable reasons adduced for them, or consequences drawn from them, are something quite surprising. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few off-hand murders “for tiny hands” are all we will offer […] The four next, all of which we find in Halliwell’s Collection, are more practically hideous than we were previously aware our nursery literature, rich as we knew it to be in these things, could furnish:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Here comes a candle to light you to bed:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here comes a chopper!—to chop off your head.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volume 45 of &lt;em&gt;Fraser’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt; (1852) printed ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DPUEAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA564&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nusery Literature&lt;/a&gt;’, a reply to the &lt;em&gt;Household Words&lt;/em&gt; piece. This piece shows that the rhyme was well-known in England in the early-to-mid 19th century, and it describes the kind of game that children might have played with the use of the rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are told that the direct tendency of the nursery rhymes is to pervert and destroy the innocence and generosity of childhood, to foster violence, and to encourage wanton and reckless cruelty, killing, theft, and greed. To make out this case, a vast number of verses are quoted, which make up an imposing array of horrors and improprieties very likely to bring our old friends into unmerited disrepute. Most of these purport to be taken from Halliwell. We have in our possession the authentic edition of Halliwell’s collection, published by the Percy Society, and not one half of the jingles cited are to be found there; neither are they in Bitson’s collection, called &lt;em&gt;Gammer Gurton’s Garland&lt;/em&gt;, still less in &lt;em&gt;Mother Goose’s Melodies&lt;/em&gt;, which is the oldest and most genuine of all, containing only rhymes and ditties in circulation all over England, while the collections of Ritson and Halliwell comprise many of merely local interest. The censured ditties which are to be found in any of the three authorities above mentioned are invariably misunderstood and misrepresented — rhymes, reflections, games, tales, and riddles being jumbled together without explanation : so that lines, sentences, and couplets, being respectively isolated from the context, present images as unlike their real appearance as do the moon and the ocean in the hands of a subjective cockney poet. For instance,—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here comes a candle to light you to bed:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here comes a chopper to chop off your head,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is given as a solitary couplet of exceeding ‘practical hideousness,’ whereas, as every schoolboy knows, these two lines belong to the middle of the game called ‘Oranges and Lemons,’ in which every individual of the company is elected to belong to one of two parties by means of a compulsory process not very remote from that liberty of choice which is usually enjoyed by the fighting champions of mighty chiefs. The two children who represent the leaders form an arch with united and upraised arms, under which the others pass in a string, the last being taken prisoner by the down-dropping arms which encircle his neck while the lines are repeated, and the captive makes choice of one of the two parties. When the whole are disposed of in this manner, the two parties form, and the second division of the game proceeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Fraser’s&lt;/em&gt; writer knew the “chopper” lines only in the context of ‘Oranges and Lemons’. But if they had previously been a “solitary couplet”, or part of some other verse, then their use in the children’s game would explain how they became attached to ‘Oranges and Lemons’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is just speculation: children’s games and oral transmission don’t leave much in the way of written evidence, so it is impossible to know with any certainty how it happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-03-22T10:54:26.753" LastActivityDate="2018-03-22T10:54:26.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6110" CreationDate="2018-03-22T21:50:29.013" Score="5" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Arthurian texts and I know that it's considered a romance, but there is there such a big difference between modern romance, love stories, and medieval romances, which can be tales of adventure. My question is this: did medieval romances develop into the modern romance genre we know today? If not, why and when did the difference occur?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4248" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T11:10:30.517" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T17:59:27.233" Title="Did medieval romances develop into modern romances?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-22T22:14:21.777" Score="5" ViewCount="1355" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the novel, Victor Frankenstein is horrified at the fact that he created his monster. However, he does not discuss any emotional or moral reservations towards the act of creating the monster and the monster itself. In fact, when he is talking with the monster in the Alps he says that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him and sometimes felt a wish to console him, but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;revealing that the disgust seems purely physical. Furthermore, to me it seems that Frankenstein cannot have hated his monster solely for the murders it committed since he hated the monster the moment he created it. This makes it seem that the hatred is rather shallow and unrealistic. Of course, Frankenstein may have felt disgust for the creature, however, to call something abhorrent despite the fact that it showed kindness and compassion seems to extreme of a reaction. Is there anything about the culture of the time period that explains this or did they have a different world view that makes this hatred less unrealistic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4249" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T09:42:11.070" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T09:42:11.070" Title="Frankenstein's Repulsion towards his Monster" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6108" CreationDate="2018-03-23T02:47:21.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/427129/are-there-specific-texts-such-as-french-english-poetry-in-which-the-word-roman&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; English SE discussion, the history of &lt;strong&gt;romance&lt;/strong&gt; in literature was covered fairly extensively; and we basically concluded that &lt;strong&gt;romance&lt;/strong&gt; originally meant stories or histories styled poetically (i.e. in rhyme or verse) that were subsequently put to music in songs and ballads sung by troubadours, bards, or minstrels -- who were frequently rewarded for their skills with favors from pretty ladies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Like modern groupies or really devoted fans of that sort of entertainment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that manner, the idea of love affairs eventually became culturally and socially associated with &lt;strong&gt;romance&lt;/strong&gt; (which in medieval times was defined quite simply as &lt;em&gt;poetry&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2802" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T02:47:21.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1135" CreationDate="2018-03-23T03:37:47.470" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You make a lot of good points here. I would like to offer a slightly different perspective, though, that add something to this. To me, A Wind in the Door is all about growing up, which you touch on in your comments. I don’t see conformity as the real issue here, certainly not in the same way as in A Wrinkle in Time. In AWT, the crucial point is that IT was using force to elicit compliance and conformity from the residents of Camazotz for ITs own benefit – all taking, no giving. Camazotz no doubt represents Meg’s view of her experiences at school, but it also stands as a warning about what can happen, has happened, if certain parts of Man’s sinful nature are allowed to operate unchecked. This theme returns a couple of times in AWD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In AWD the issue, to me, is not so much that Sporos must conform to some vague cosmic plan, but rather that he needs to be true to his own nature. His task is to step up and take his own unique place in the world. The idea of a unique individual embedded in a social matrix is a major part of the message of AWD. It is first overtly stated in the scene where Jenkins, still unnerved by his Echthroi impersonators, realized “Nobody should be exactly like anybody else.” (chap. 7, p. 128) This stands in distinct contrast to the situation in Camazotz, where everyone was exactly alike, and highlights the difference between forced conformity and the natural order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two examples are again contrasted in the final scene. On the one hand we have the adult fara Senex filling his role in the natural order. He helps the mitochondrion function properly, giving energy and life to Charles Wallace. In turn, Charles Wallace provides the environment where the farae can live and thrive. It is a mutually beneficial relationship, each serving the other. On the other hand is the immature farandola Sporos, who temporarily buys the Echthroi lie that he doesn’t have to, indeed shouldn’t, grow up. The young farandolae cannot fill an adult role, so they maintain a parasitic existence on the adult farae. In fact, so long as they are under the influence of the Echthroi they revel in their parasitism. It is all taking and no giving again, just like IT. But Sporos and the others cannot become other than adult farae; that is their nature. Their only options are either to become adults and take their place in the world, or remain parasites, kill their host, and die. Yet each is an individual, just as Senex is an individual. They will not be cookie-cutter replica farae. Each one will bring his own personality to his new role and make his unique contribution to the natural order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Meg sees the situations beginning to look hopeless, she panics and falls back on her sinful nature. She is ready to invade the dance, grab Sporos, smack him around, plant his punk butt, and make him deepen. Senex stops her, saying, “Not that way. Not by force.” He might just as well have said, “No, Meg, that’s the way things work on Camazotz.” (Except he could not know of Meg’s experiences there.) Instead, Calvin, Meg, and Proginoskes get Sporos to see and understand the truth of the natural order. They “raise him up in the way he should go” so to speak. Fortunately for all, it works and Sporos leads all the delinquent farandolae to deepen and become adults, and Charles Wallace recovers. The key point is that Sporos made the transition voluntarily, based on his understanding of the natural order. He and the others then come into proper relationship with each other, their host, and the universe, as Proginoskes said. That it was voluntary is what makes the difference. That’s why there is not really a contradiction here. Instead, it is a contrast between people being forced into roles for which they are not naturally suited, like the little boy on Camazotz who was not very good at bouncing a ball, solely for the benefit of the coercive authority, and people who are true to their nature and take their unique place in the world in a web of mutually beneficial relationships. For L’Engle, the quality of one’s life is defined by the nature of one’s relationships. A lesson for our times, possibly even more so than when the story was first written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4252" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T03:37:47.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6112" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6113" CreationDate="2018-03-23T09:05:10.940" Score="6" ViewCount="2430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;chafed&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I like her,&amp;quot; said Daisy, &amp;quot;I think she's lovely.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the rest offended her—and inarguably, because it wasn't a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented &amp;quot;place&amp;quot; that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village—appalled by its raw vigor that &lt;strong&gt;chafed&lt;/strong&gt; under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excerpt from &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Daisy, Tom and Nick went to Gatsby's party, where Daisy was astonished at its unmasked hedonism. Throughout the party, she was more and more aware of the difference between her &amp;quot;old money&amp;quot; society and the &amp;quot;new money&amp;quot; society at Gatsby's party. Therefore, she came to dislike everyone present except one very famous actress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not grasp what &amp;quot;chafed&amp;quot; means. How could the raw vigor be chafed under the old euphemisms? Does it mean that the euphemisms curbed their raw vigor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T01:52:18.190" Title="What does &quot;chafed&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6112" CreationDate="2018-03-23T10:09:01.277" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this would be an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt;, a figure of speech where a part of something is used to represent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the &quot;raw vigor&quot; of the new money society and the &quot;euphemisms&quot; employed by the old money society represent their respective societies. The &lt;em&gt;nouveau riche&lt;/em&gt; find themselves restricted and suffocated under the mores and norms of the unwelcoming traditional society, and thus they &lt;em&gt;chafe&lt;/em&gt; under it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chafe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To chafe&lt;/a&gt;, here, is to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;: to feel irritation, discontent, or impatience : &lt;strong&gt;fret&lt;/strong&gt; - &lt;em&gt;chafes&lt;/em&gt; at the&#xA;  rules&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old money have, over decades and centuries, developed a highly indirect (hence, euphemistic) and repressed society, whereas the new money would be far more direct. No doubt they feel some irritation and impatience for the silliness and lack of forthrightness of the old money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T10:57:21.723" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T10:57:21.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6112" CreationDate="2018-03-23T10:11:45.500" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;old euphemisms&quot; are hinting at the genteel elegance which is supposed to be a hallmark of &quot;old money&quot; — basically, an oligarchic &lt;em&gt;noblesse oblige,&lt;/em&gt; a way of behaving which Old Money people lived by and taught to their children. If your family had been wealthy a long time, you knew it, everyone knew it, and there were certain standards to uphold. Flaunting your wealth in ostentatious licentiousness is both vulgar and wasteful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;new money&quot; people are coming in and just living it up — wildness, decadence, debauchery, without any restraint or propriety. It's more than conspicuous consumption; it's conspicuous bacchanalia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The New Money people haven't lived with their money for very long, and they've never been taught the rules of etiquette and behavior which govern Old Money. These rules are the &quot;old euphemisms&quot; which would constrain their excesses. So they are &quot;chafing&quot; beneath the rules. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next part of the sentence is basically saying that these young partiers are spending through their new money so wildly and carelessly that they're going to run dry shortly, going from nothing (where they started) back to nothing (no money again) with nothing to show for having been wealthy, where Old Money knows to cultivate and invest and leave something for the children to inherit. New Money has no respect. The partiers just look for the next party, the next source of New Money to entertain them, without any thought of the wreckage they're leaving behind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T10:11:45.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:31:46.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T12:31:46.623" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:31:46.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:31:46.623" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of children's puzzle books “Where's Wally?” (“Where's Waldo?&quot; in the US and Canada) by the British illustrator Martin Handford. Use this tag with the [martin-handford] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:33:23.333" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:33:23.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:47:23.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T12:47:23.540" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:47:23.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:47:23.540" Score="0" Body="Questions about the spoken-word performers collectively known as &quot;The Last Poets&quot;. The group or groups arose from the African-American civil rights movement's black nationalist movement in the USA in the 1960s." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:32:45.777" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:32:45.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6120" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:50:04.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T12:50:04.383" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T12:50:04.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6121" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T12:50:04.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American cartoonist Terry Moore and his works. Moore is known for series such as 'Strangers in Paradise' and 'Rachel Rising'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:32:51.197" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:32:51.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6122" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:02:19.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:02:19.333" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:02:19.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6123" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:02:19.333" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author Shelly Laurenston or about any of her literary works, such as the book series 'Magnus Pack', 'The Gathering' and 'Call of Crows'. She also writes under the pseudonym G. A. Aiken." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:15:32.730" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:15:32.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:17:12.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:17:12.253" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:17:12.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:17:12.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about satire, a genre of literature that attacks vices, follies and shortcomings with scathing humour. Do NOT use this tag for all questions about satirical literature, but only for questions about the genre itself, e.g. about the history of satire or whether a particular work counts as satire." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T15:56:58.347" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T15:56:58.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6126" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:28:33.483" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:28:33.483" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:28:33.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6127" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T13:28:33.483" Score="0" Body="Questions about racism, the belief or ideology based on the assumption that there are human races and that one or more of these races are superior to other races. This belief has often manifested itself in literature, both explicitly and in more subtle or even unintentional ways. Use this tag, together with the appropriate book/author tags if applicable, for questions about racism in literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T13:34:11.663" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T13:34:11.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-23T18:31:40.667" Score="8" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/index2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inferno&lt;/a&gt; in Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, sinners are punished by a process that either resembles or contrast with the major sin they committed. For example, the violent are submerged in a river of boiling blood: true tyrants are fully submerged; those who were less violent aren't completely submerged. Usurers crouch on the sand with heavy bags of money around their necks. Those who cause discord are punished by being cut asunder with a great sword, and the process is repeated when they are healed. Gluttons get attacked by a three-headed dog that tears off and parts of their body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt;, Bran Stark loves climbing but becomes paralysed after being pushed out of a high window, so he can never climb again. Ned Stark greatly values honour and loyalty but ends up getting executed on a charge to treason. Jaime Lannister self-identifies with his sword-fighting skills; after Locke chops off Jaime's &quot;sword hand&quot;, one of Jaime's later comments is that he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; that hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.herts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/183796/GOT-2017-delegates.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Game of Thrones 2017 conference&lt;/a&gt;, Matteo Barbagello presented a paper which &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[showed] how the simple assumption that Westeros is in truth the embodiment of Hell relates to Dante Alighier’s depiction of Hell in the Divine Comedy, a place where, according to the law of contrapasso, the punishment fits the crime. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I have not been able to find Barbagello's paper &quot;The One we are Living in: Westeros and the Dantesque Interpretation of Death&quot;. However, finding such relationships is one thing; it is something else to claim that George R. R. Martin drew inspiration for this from Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. So my question is, is there any evidence, e.g. from interviews, that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrapasso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contrapasso&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; inspired George R. R. Martin in this way? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T22:36:27.807" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T22:36:27.807" Title="Is there evidence that the fate of some &quot;A Song of Ice and Fire&quot; characters was inspired by the &quot;Divine Comedy&quot;'s contrapasso?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6136" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T18:34:21.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T18:34:21.820" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T18:34:21.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6137" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T18:34:21.820" Score="0" Body="Questions about Dante Alighieri's narrative poem 'Divina Commedia' ('Divine Comedy'), written in the years 1308 – 1320. Use this tag with the tags [dante-alighieri] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:25:13.600" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:25:13.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-23T19:20:40.037" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Yesterday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The World of Yesterday&lt;/a&gt; by Stefan Zweig. I believe that in this book there was the following, real-life story: Shortly before the outbreak of World War II several intellectuals, including the author, discussed whether or not a big war (like World War I) was possible. They agreed it wasn't because they believed that peoples of Europe were too tired from the first war to want a second one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find the exact quote in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Die-Welt-Gestern-Stefan-Zweig-ebook/dp/B00CF3YN6C/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=&amp;amp;sr=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kindle edition&lt;/a&gt;, but couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Stefan Zweig write this? If yes, where (book, chapter)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user658" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T11:08:45.577" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T11:08:45.577" Title="Did Stefan Zweig tell this anecdote in The World of Yesterday&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;stefan-zweig&gt;&lt;the-world-of-yesterday&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6139" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-23T19:54:13.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-23T19:54:13.313" LastActivityDate="2018-03-23T19:54:13.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6140" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-23T19:54:13.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lyrics written by the American rock singer-songwriter Ryan Star (born 1978)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T01:49:44.700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T01:49:44.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6142" CreationDate="2018-03-24T07:36:49.563" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;made notes for a little thesis&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Collins &lt;strong&gt;made notes for a little thesis&lt;/strong&gt; pointing out the&#xA;  inferiority of the original mosaics to their photographs. Here was&#xA;  planted the seed of what became his life's harvest. When, many years&#xA;  later, there appreared the first massive volume of his still&#xA;  unfinished work on Byzantine Art, I was touched to find among two&#xA;  pages of polite, preliminary acknowledgements of debt, my own name:&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;&quot;...to Charles Ryder, with the aid of whose all-seeing eyes I first&#xA;  saw the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia and San Vitale...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an excerpt from &lt;em&gt;Brideshead Revisited&lt;/em&gt; by Evelyn Waugh. The narrator Charles went on a trip to Ravenna in Italy with his scholarly friend named Collins. Although Charles found the place boring, Collins took this opportunity to prepare for his little thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not grasp what &quot;make notes for&quot; meant in this context, and thus found it difficult to understand what exactly Collins did in the underlined part.&#xA; Did he just scribbled here and there for his little thesis? Or did he actually make a formal first draft for the thesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T20:27:23.203" Title="What does &quot;made notes for a little thesis&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6141" CreationDate="2018-03-24T12:23:58.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s a lot of middle ground between scribbling things here and there and writing a draft. Collins looked at the art and &lt;strong&gt;made notes&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e., he wrote down his thoughts and impressions. That’s a very common first step in any research project. It doesn’t mean that the researcher makes random jottings on any old scraps of paper that happen to be lying around. Rather, Collins probably had a notebook for the express purpose of writing down descriptions of the mosaics and his reactions to them. Those notes would probably consist of such material as questions about the mosaics, speculations about why they seem inferior to their photographs, and subjective impressions of them. They might incorporate some sketches of the mosaics as well.  The notes would not be organized into a formal argument; they are the raw materials for one. Looking over those notes later, Collins would structure them into a &lt;strong&gt;little thesis&lt;/strong&gt; making his case that the photographs are better than the mosaics themselves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T20:27:23.203" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T20:27:23.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-24T12:47:23.733" Score="5" ViewCount="4082" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a bibliographical reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Author] [book name]-5th ed.,pp.3-6,ch.3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the &quot;pp&quot; stand for? I don't recognize this abbreviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4268" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T15:25:19.720" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T01:08:33.313" Title="What is pp in books?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8081" CreationDate="2018-03-24T13:03:11.373" Score="3" ViewCount="1253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and finding it difficult to grasp the meaning of &quot;which comes at the two changes of the year&quot; in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the&#xA;  street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where&#xA;  there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They&#xA;  stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night&#xA;  with that mysterious excitement in it &lt;strong&gt;which comes at the two changes&#xA;  of the year&lt;/strong&gt;. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the&#xA;  darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the&#xA;  corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalks really&#xA;  formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees—he&#xA;  could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck&#xA;  on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitsgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Gatsby is telling the narrator Nick how he and his lover Daisy walked down the street and kissed for the first time on an autumn night five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not understand what were the two changes of the year in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T15:39:17.663" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T05:40:14.190" Title="What does &quot;which comes at the two changes of the year&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6143" CreationDate="2018-03-24T14:06:53.993" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;pp&quot; refers to a page range, e.g. &quot;pp. 3-6&quot; means page three through page six.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what citation style you're using, but this convention is used in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MLA citation style&lt;/a&gt;, as well as some other citation styles that I can't remember off the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LiteratureSE user &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/4274/aethelbald&quot;&gt;Aethelbald&lt;/a&gt; has suggested that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pp stands for the Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pari_passu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pari&#xA;  passu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; meaning&#xA;  side-by-side or at-the-same-rate or on-an-equal-footing... here it&#xA;  means equally and throughout pages 3 thru 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other contributors, however, disagree&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/997/kevin&quot;&gt;Kevin&lt;/a&gt; notes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wiktionary also lists &quot;p.&quot; as meaning &quot;page,&quot; singular, and&#xA;  specifically describes &quot;pp.&quot; as the plural of &quot;p.&quot; This is obviously&#xA;  not a&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;productive&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  pluralization method&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/965/hobbs&quot;&gt;hobbs&lt;/a&gt; adds that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are a few cases, in Latin-derived abbreviations, where a plural&#xA;  is made by doubling the last letter. &quot;MS.&quot; =&gt; &quot;MSS.&quot; (manuscript/s),&#xA;  &quot;op.&quot; =&gt; &quot;opp.&quot; (opus/opera). This is one of those, since &quot;page&quot; has&#xA;  its origin in &quot;pagina&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4270" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T01:08:33.313" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T01:08:33.313" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6144" CreationDate="2018-03-24T16:13:18.237" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably the solstice in December. One could consider the solstices as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; two changes in the year (others may well consider the equinoxes to be the two changes). However, Christmas is around the December solstice, and Western story-telling often treats Christmas as a magical and exciting time, so I think this refers to the solstice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 1, Daisy talks about the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; solstice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us&#xA;  all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year&#xA;  and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and&#xA;  then miss it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prof. Barbara Hochman, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=klMWVELASj0C&amp;amp;q=two%20changes#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=two%20changes&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in an essay on &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, feels that it is telling that the solstices are mentioned both at the beginning and the &quot;climactic midpoint&quot; of the novel. Her analysis of the book is interesting, you might want to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;included in &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Harold Bloom, 2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T16:13:18.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6143" CreationDate="2018-03-24T18:14:34.440" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pp&lt;/strong&gt; stands for the Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pari_passu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pari passu&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; meaning side-by-side or at-the-same-rate or on-an-equal-footing.  In this case, Citations has already given the correct answer and I'm just filling in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4274" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-03-24T18:30:08.107" LastActivityDate="2018-03-24T18:30:08.107" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6149" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T02:32:17.433" Score="5" ViewCount="1405" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and would very much like to know what &amp;quot;an affront to the common store of life&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to&#xA;take our stiff straw hats.  &amp;quot;Madame expects you in the salon!&amp;quot; he&#xA;cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra&#xA;gesture was &lt;strong&gt;an affront to the common store of life&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerlald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Nick and Gatsby visited Daisy and Tom Buchanan's house to lunch together. But because it was a very hot day, the butler's gesture indicating the direction seemed unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I could not grasp what was the common store of life. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Does &amp;quot;life&amp;quot; indicate all human beings? Or all creatures? Does the author have an idea that all creatures share the same store of life...?&#xA;I could not understand exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T08:16:23.677" Title="What does &quot;an affront to the common store of life&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6196" CreationDate="2018-03-25T03:49:57.510" Score="2" ViewCount="2856" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and finding it difficult to grasp what &quot;The master's body&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Through the hall of Buchanans' house blew a faint wind, carrying&#xA;  the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at&#xA;  the door. &lt;br&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The master's body!&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; roared the butler into the mouthpiece.&#xA;  &quot;I'm sorry, madame, but we can't furnish it—it's far too hot to touch&#xA;  this noon!&quot;  &lt;br&gt; What he really said was: &quot;Yes...Yes...I'll see.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Nick and Gatsby went over to Daisy and Tom Buchanan's house to lunch together. However, since it was a very stifling day, the butler seemed to be feeling the urge to reject his madame's order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I could not grasp what the &quot;body&quot; meant. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA; I would very much appreciate your help. :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T09:48:27.263" Title="What does &quot;the master's body&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2018-03-25T05:09:33.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Her innocence was broken by the end of the manga.&lt;/strong&gt; She once hoped for humanity to be saved, then she willingly murdered the progenitors even though she knew they would have been the best humanity that everyone hoped for. She recognized her sin and kept the secret of how humans are adapted for the permanently polluted Earth and couldn’t handle the purity of the old world, even though everyone hopes that they’ll see a cleaner world again. Humanity is forever changed and she leaves it up to nature to choose if humanity lives or dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She’s not Mary Sue ish just because she’s a good person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4277" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T10:56:56.833" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T10:56:56.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6153" CreationDate="2018-03-25T10:24:16.927" Score="7" ViewCount="814" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and encountered these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Shall we all go in my car?&amp;quot; suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green&#xA;leather of the seat. &amp;quot;I ought to have left it in the shade.&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;Is it&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;standard shift&lt;/strong&gt;?&amp;quot; demanded Tom. &lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;Well, you take my coupe and let&#xA;me drive your car to town.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Daisy and her husband Tom invited her relative Nick and her friend Jordan and her lover Gatsby to their house for a luncheon. But it was such a stifling day, and Daisy was confused to see the visible tension between her husband and her lover. So she ended up insisting that they all should go to town in this heat, and that was why Gatsby suggested that they start in his car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not understand what was a standard shift car in the 1920's. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Was there the automatic transmission in the 1920's, and the standard shift was a concept opposed to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T21:11:04.553" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:11:04.553" Title="What was &quot;standard shift&quot; in the 1920's?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6152" CreationDate="2018-03-25T12:13:37.120" Score="9" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Most likely this refers to the number of gears.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;standard shift&quot; nowadays refers to the type of transmission: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_transmission&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;manual transmission&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_transmission&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;automatic transmission&lt;/a&gt; according to which is considered &quot;standard&quot; in a given context (e.g. manual is generally more common in Europe, automatic in the United States). However, automatic transmission was only developed in 1921, one year before the setting of &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and didn't start being used in cars until the 1930s. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_transmission&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The automatic transmission was invented in 1921 by Alfred Horner Munro of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada [...]. Being a steam engineer, Munro designed his device to use compressed air rather than hydraulic fluid, and so it lacked power and never found commercial application.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nwtgearboxes.co.uk/who-invented-the-automatic-gearbox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; The first automatic transmission using hydraulic fluid may have been developed in 1932 by two Brazilian engineers, José Braz Araripe and Fernando Lehly Lemos; subsequently the prototype and plans were sold to General Motors who introduced it in the 1940 Oldsmobile as the &quot;Hydra-Matic&quot; transmission.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.autoindustriya.com/auto-tech-road-safety/of-fluids-and-automatic-transmissions.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly &lt;strong&gt;this phrase in &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; doesn't refer to manual vs automatic transmission&lt;/strong&gt;, because automatic transmission in cars simply wasn't a thing back then. So what &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, one thing which was changing in car gear systems even before the introduction of manual transmission was &lt;strong&gt;the number of different gears&lt;/strong&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manual_transmission#Ratio_count&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until the mid-1950s (earlier in Europe and later in the US, on average) vehicles were generally equipped with 3-speed transmissions as standard equipment. 4-speed units began to appear on volume-production models in the 1930s (Europe) and 1950s (USA) and gained popularity in the 1960s; some exotics had 5-speeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this paragraph doesn't mention is that 4-speed transmission was already a thing even in the 1920s on some very high-end luxury cars. In particular, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Silver_Ghost&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost&lt;/a&gt;, said to be &quot;the best car in the world&quot;, was manufactured as a 4-speed transmission from 1913 to 1926, while almost all other cars were still 3-speed transmissions. (This is comparable to the modern &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_991&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Porsche 991&lt;/a&gt; starting with 7-speed transmission which most of us have never seen.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gatsby's car, although its make isn't specified in the novel, is certainly high-end luxury and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/why-page-127-did-tom-ask-gatsby-his-car-had-241153&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite possibly a Rolls-Royce&lt;/a&gt;. Hence the question of whether the car's gearstick is standard shift (3-speed transmission) or the new alternative (4-speed transmission). This fits with &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6152/what-was-standard-shift-in-the-1920s#comment11622_6152&quot;&gt;Peter Shor's observation in a comment&lt;/a&gt; that, in context, the alternative to standard shift seemed to be harder than standard shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T12:13:37.120" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T13:09:25.317" Score="8" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first half of &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; is about Bastian reading a fantasy story about Atreyu's adventures in Fantastica. The second half is about Bastian's own adventures in Fantastica, a world which he basically recreates from nothing, becoming a completely different person himself in the process, before returning to his own world to find that he's still the same person as originally and only a single night has passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;is it possible that Bastian never actually went to Fantastica?&lt;/strong&gt; Is this a valid and consistent reading of the story, or does it  not make sense with everything that happened?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bastian's adventures leave a permanent effect on him, making him more brave and confident. But the same effect could have come from a vivid hallucination in which he had all the experiences detailed in the second half of the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The conversation at the very end between Bastian and Mr Coreander hints at a more metaphorical interpretation of Fantastica and the whole story, but I can't quite solidify this idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Years after reading &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; as a child, I came to the conclusion that there are many different ways to interpret the story, and I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; this may be one of them: that Bastian's whole experience was a dream or hallucination after reading a story he loved, which changed his personality literally overnight. But I'm not certain if it's a totally consistent model of the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T17:00:57.197" Title="Is it possible that Bastian's journey to Fantastica was purely metaphysical?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-25T20:19:13.080" Score="6" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a postscript to the English translation of Liu Cixin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Three-Body Problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Ken Liu drew attention to his approach to the translation work. Ken Liu writes that &quot;differences in linguistic structure and cultural references, are actually easy to resolve&quot;. In some cases, he used footnotes for this. (The German translation has endnotes for most of the same names and concepts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Ken Liu also pointed out that (emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there are more subtle issues involving &lt;strong&gt;literary devices and narrative techniques&lt;/strong&gt;. The Chinese literary tradition shaped and was shaped by its readers, giving rise to different emphases and preferences in fiction compared to what American readers expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He adds that he he &quot;tried to &lt;strong&gt;adjust&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; some of the narrative techniques that American readers (and presumably readers in the West in general) would be more familiar with, but he does not go into any details. This leads me to the question what narrative techniques and literary devices in the Chinese original would justify this type of adaptation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is not about primarily about the very obvious change of moving the three chapters set during the Cultural Revolution to the beginning of the book, since this was Liu Cixin's preferred order anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T14:15:31.157" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T14:15:31.157" Title="What narrative techniques and literary devices in The Three-Body Problem required or justified adjustment in the English translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;liu-cixin&gt;&lt;the-three-body-problem&gt;&lt;ken-liu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6157" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:12:28.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T21:12:28.130" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T21:12:28.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6158" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:12:28.130" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) and his works. He is known for works such as 'The Royal Game' ('Schachnovelle', 1941), 'Amok' (1922) and 'Letter from an Unknown Woman' ('Brief einer Unbekannten', 1922)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T04:49:09.907" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T04:49:09.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6159" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:17:08.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T21:17:08.793" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T21:17:08.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6160" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:17:08.793" Score="0" Body="Questions about Stefan Zweig's memoir 'The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European' ('Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers'), published in 1942 after the author's suicide. Use this tag with the [stefan-zweig] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T22:32:47.727" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T22:32:47.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6161" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:18:59.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T21:18:59.430" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T21:18:59.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6162" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:18:59.430" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin (刘慈欣, born 1963) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T01:49:40.057" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T01:49:40.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6163" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:21:14.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T21:21:14.223" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T21:21:14.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6164" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-25T21:21:14.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chinese science fiction novel 'The Three-Body Problem' (三体, 2006) by Liu Cixin. Use this tag with the [liu-cixin] and [chinese-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-25T22:33:36.637" LastActivityDate="2018-03-25T22:33:36.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8866" CreationDate="2018-03-26T04:49:00.823" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Golden Daughter&lt;/em&gt;, Sunan took an exam to become as Presented Scholar in the Center of Learning. He passed the test, but wasn't permitted to join due to his parentage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You will be pleased to know,&quot; Overseer Rangsun said, his voice mild as a spring breeze, &quot;that you far exceeded all expectations and achieved the top score of this year's Gruung... Unfortunately, due to the circumstances of your birth and less-than-desirable parentage, the Center of Learning does not feel that it can accept you into the Middle Court.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he offered him a position as a Crouching Shadow. Was that the main reason he was permitted to take the exam in the first place? The Overseer didn't seem aware of his uncle's (supposed) death until shortly before telling Sunan about their decision, and Sunan had been studying for the exam under his uncle for years. Given those facts, how could they possibly have known that Sunan would be expected to replace his uncle? And if that &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; their plan, why was Sunan permitted to take the exam in the first place if they never intended to accept him as a scholar even if he passed the exam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T03:01:16.133" Title="Why was Sunan permitted to take the exam to be a Presented Scholar?" Tags="&lt;anne-elisabeth-stengl&gt;&lt;tales-of-goldstone-wood&gt;&lt;golden-daughter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6168" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T09:17:35.513" Score="4" ViewCount="1804" Body="&lt;p&gt;The beginning of the Lovecraft story &quot;Dagon&quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, &lt;strong&gt;though never fully realise&lt;/strong&gt;, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/d.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(source)&lt;/a&gt;, emphasis added&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet over the course of the story they detail exactly what they know, and goes pretty heavy on the description of the horror that they feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do they say that the readers will never fully realize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T15:32:29.193" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T15:32:29.193" Title="Why, in &quot;Dagon&quot; by Lovecraft does the narrator say that the readers will &quot;never fully realize&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6183" CreationDate="2018-03-26T13:58:23.490" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and came to wonder how the oil tank looked like in Wilson's garage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and,&#xA;breathing hard, unscrewed &lt;strong&gt;the cap of the tank&lt;/strong&gt;. In the sunlight his&#xA;face was green.&lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;I didn't mean to interrupt your lunch,&amp;quot; he said.&#xA;&amp;quot;But I need money pretty bad, and I was wondering what you were going&#xA;to do with your old car.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;How do you like this one?&amp;quot; inquired&#xA;Tom. &amp;quot;I bought it last week.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt; &amp;quot;It's a nice yellow one,&amp;quot; said&#xA;Wilson, as he strained at &lt;strong&gt;the handle&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Gatsby and Daisy were driving to the town in Tom's blue car, and Tom, Nick and Jordan in Gatsby's yellow car. Because the gasoline was not enough in the yellow one, the latter group stopped at Wilson's garage to fill it up. At their order, Wilson screwed open the cap of the tank, which had the handle. Later in the text, it is found out that the tank also had a pump.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I first imagined was a small, handy oil tank, which you could pick up and tilt. But later I found out that it also had a pump, so I was confused as to how the oil tank looked like in the 1920's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T13:01:21.210" Title="How did the oil tank look like in Wilson's garage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6168" CreationDate="2018-03-26T15:18:28.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;It's a literary device, leveraging the reader's imagination to increase the horror.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the most effective horror stories work by leveraging the reader's imagination rather than describing horrific things directly. Detailed descriptions (or images, in a film/TV context) of gore often don't work as well as more subtle creeping horror. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blair_Witch_Project&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Blair Witch Project&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most famous horror films, uses this technique to great effect: no ghost, witch, or monster is ever seen; there's no CGI or on-screen deaths; the film is terrifying because of what it &lt;em&gt;implies&lt;/em&gt; without showing outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(More or less the same technique can be used in psychological torture: rather than making specific threats about exactly what they intend to do to their victim, an effective torturer can just send for, say, cooking oil and salt, or a basket of figs and some mice, and the victim's mind will make up worse uses for these things than the torturer themselves ever could.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In literature, Lovecraft was also a great user of this technique. I only read a few of his stories before deciding that they were all too similar to each other and giving up on the rest, but many of his characters have horrific experiences which are &lt;strong&gt;never described explicitly&lt;/strong&gt;, because it's more effective to describe them vaguely and let the reader imagine the rest. For example, this excerpt from near the end of the short Lovecraft story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/rw.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Rats in the Walls&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area—an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream—we turned to that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before the searchlights shewed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation which the peasants will never forget.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment of ecstatic fear. I must have been musing a long time, for I could not see any of the party but the plump Capt. Norrys. Then there came a sound from that inky, boundless, farther distance that I thought I knew; and I saw my old black cat dart past me like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown. But I was not far behind, for there was no doubt after another second. It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their surroundings aren't described in much detail, but the horror story is extremely effective, partly because it leaves us unsure as to what they actually witnessed. Partly also because of the extended foreshadowing and leadup to the ultimate horror, and the spine-chilling ending that comes just after the passage quoted above, but &lt;strong&gt;the lack of detailed information is definitely a part of what makes it stick in the mind&lt;/strong&gt;: long after finishing the story, we keep thinking about (maybe even having nightmares about) exactly what they saw, what was down there in those black and hideous depths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Dagon&amp;quot;, it's clear right from the start of the story that this incomplete-information device will be used. (Actually it's pretty likely even from before you start reading the story, if you know how Lovecraft writes, but be that as it may.) The narrator is setting us up for that creeping, lingering horror that comes from letting our own imaginations run amok on what we didn't fully grasp from the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond a meta-reference to a Lovecraftian literary device, this also increases the horror in a more literal sense. The narrator is telling us that nobody who hasn't actually experienced it can really appreciate it. That accentuates the horror right from the start. We know we're going to read a horror story, and we're also being told that &lt;strong&gt;we can never be affected as much as the narrator was&lt;/strong&gt;. Once again, this leaves it to us to imagine the true extent of the effect on the narrator, and to try to comprehend how twisted his mind is after what he's seen. Same idea again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I challenge your claim that the story is going heavy on description and exact details. In typical Lovecraft fashion, it &lt;em&gt;starts off&lt;/em&gt; detailed, but as the grotesqueness increases, the detail decreases, until we're left with the vaguest of vague descriptions of the final sight which literally &lt;em&gt;drove the narrator insane&lt;/em&gt;. Here's an excerpt from the final paragraphs before he wakes up in a San Francisco hospital (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Doré. I think that these things were supposed to depict men—at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. &lt;strong&gt;Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint.&lt;/strong&gt; Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. &lt;strong&gt;Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds.&lt;/strong&gt; I think I went mad then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, &lt;strong&gt;I remember little.&lt;/strong&gt; I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. &lt;strong&gt;I have indistinct recollections&lt;/strong&gt; of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's not what I call a detailed description. The monster is hardly described at all in any specific way, except that it has scaly arms. We don't know its shape, its exact size, what sounds it made, really anything about what it looked like. Even the carved creatures described earlier aren't described properly, and the very clear implication is that to do so would cause us to never sleep soundly again. By leaving out all these details, of course, Lovecraft is disturbing our sleep far more than he would have by leaving them in. &lt;strong&gt;Our imaginations can create monsters far more grotesque and awful than a writer's pen could possibly achieve.&lt;/strong&gt; That, in a nutshell, is the key to Lovecraftian writing, and to a lot of really successful and memorable horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Gold star to whoever gets this reference without Googling.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T15:18:28.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6171" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-26T16:20:55.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T16:20:55.893" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T16:20:55.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6172" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-26T16:20:55.893" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Golden Daughter' (2014) by Anne Elisabeth Stengl. Use this tag with the [anne-elisabeth-stengl] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-26T22:36:23.027" LastActivityDate="2018-03-26T22:36:23.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T18:08:43.630" Score="13" ViewCount="1580" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;, the main turning point is when Bastian gives the Childlike Empress her much-needed name, saves Fantastica, and enters into the story himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This name is &quot;Moon Child&quot;, or &quot;Mondenkind&quot; in the original German.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything is the significance of this name?&lt;/strong&gt; Since the whole story revolves around names and particularly Bastian's skill at naming things, and this particular name is of such vital importance to the plot, surely the author put a lot of thought into choosing it. Why &quot;Moon Child&quot;? Does this name have some deeper meaning, or even wordplay in the original German? Does it tie in somehow to the main themes of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T22:08:27.153" Title="Why &quot;Moon Child&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-26T19:58:34.680" Score="12" ViewCount="600" Body="&lt;p&gt;Loosely related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1402/was-paradise-lost-the-first-major-work-of-literature-to-give-sympathy-for-the-d&quot;&gt;Was Paradise Lost the first major work of literature to give &amp;quot;sympathy for the devil&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Lucifer/Satan appears to have at least some heroic characteristics, such as courage and (apparent) dedication to his comrades. His tragic flaw, of course, is his arrogance, with him declaring at one point &quot;Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also set the events of the story in motion, including fomenting an all-out rebellion in Heaven as well as the fall of man, through his arrogance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, is he actually a tragic hero of sorts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T18:28:59.847" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T22:03:55.407" Title="Is John Milton's Lucifer a tragic hero?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="937" CreationDate="2018-03-26T23:49:48.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_R._Shapiro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fred R. Shapiro&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yale_Book_of_Quotations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Yale Book of Quotations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; attributes &quot;Genius . . . an infinite capacity for taking pains&quot; to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hopkins,_Jane_Ellice_(DNB12)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jane Ellice Hopkins&lt;/a&gt;, English reformer, 1836–1904&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Work Amongst Working Men&lt;/em&gt; ch. 4 (1870). The 1884 fifth edition of that book (with the author's name given as Ellice Hopkins) is available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/workamongstworki00hopk_0#page/53/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;, and the quotation can be found on p. 53 (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a mistake to suppose that plain and suitable commonplaces will go down with working-men. Working-men emphatically want strong meat, thoughts as racy as their own expressions; they reject sweet pap fit for children. But if any one supposes that my power of speaking to them was a gift that came naturally to me, without any effort on my part, let them, once for all, dispossess themselves of any such idea. &lt;strong&gt;Gift, like genius, I often think, only means an infinite capacity for taking pains.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me that the writer is not coining the definition of genius as &quot;an infinite capacity for taking pains&quot; but rather alluding to it as a familiar saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T08:21:16.520" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T08:21:16.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6178" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-27T09:49:39.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T09:49:39.970" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T09:49:39.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6179" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-27T09:49:39.970" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British playwright, novelist and short story writer William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) and his works. He is best known for the novels 'Of Human Bondage' (1915), 'The Moon and Sixpence' (1919), 'Cakes and Ale' (1930) and 'The Razor's Edge' (1944). If asking about one of his plays or novels, use this tag with the appropriate title tag. If asking about one of his short stories, use this tag together with [short-stories]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T10:01:34.210" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T10:01:34.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6180" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-27T09:50:45.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T09:50:45.513" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T09:50:45.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6181" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-27T09:50:45.513" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Cakes and Ale, or, The Skeleton in the Cupboard' (1930) by William Somerset Maugham. Use this tag with the [somerset-maugham] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T10:40:03.260" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T10:40:03.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-27T10:47:13.887" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, work that Jude does is masonry - stones and menial labor. His ambition is to become a scholar - books and mental labor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to see how these relate to each other - how is Jude doing masonry related to his ambitions? Is this to provide a contrast, or is there something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T10:47:13.887" Title="How does Jude's work with masonry relate to his ambition of becoming a scholar?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6169" CreationDate="2018-03-27T11:37:23.247" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are attributing the handle to the wrong object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cap covers the entry hole to the gasoline tank in the car.&#xA;The handle is used to dispense the gasoline from the pump. In this context Pump means the above ground parts of the Gas Stations fuel tank.&#xA;This image from &lt;a href=&quot;https://aoghs.org/transportation/first-gas-pump-and-service-stations/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Oil &amp;amp; Gas Historical Society&lt;/a&gt; should make it clearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bF4s2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bF4s2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;an S.F. Bowser Model 102 “Chief Sentry” gas pump shown in old black and white image, with attendant working handle while hose snakes into car&amp;#39;s gas tank&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Manufactured in 1911, an S.F. Bowser Model 102 “Chief Sentry” pumped gas on North Capitol Street in Washington D.C., in 1920. The Penn Oil Company’s pump’s topmost globe, today prized by collectors, survived only as a bulb. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T13:01:21.210" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T13:01:21.210" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6204" CreationDate="2018-03-27T14:47:08.497" Score="5" ViewCount="1018" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and would like to know what &quot;if we had room for him&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Biloxi?&quot; He concentrated with an effort. &quot;I didn't know him. He was a&#xA;  friend of Daisy's.&quot;&lt;br&gt; &quot;He was not,&quot; she denied. &quot;I'd never seen him&#xA;  before. He came down in the private car.&quot;&lt;br&gt; &quot;Well, he said he knew&#xA;  you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around&#xA;  at the last minute and asked &lt;strong&gt;if we had room for him&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;br&gt; Jordan&#xA;  smiled.&lt;br&gt; &quot;He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was&#xA;  president of your class at Yale.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Daisy, her husband Tom, her lover Gatsby, her relative Nick, and her friend Jordan engaged a suite parlor in the Plaza Hotel to have some mint julep on this stifling day. As Mendelssohn's Wedding March was heard from the ballroom below, Daisy and Tom recalled that their wedding day was also very hot and that someone named Biloxi even fainted. Biloxi was carried into Jordan's house because it was very close to church, and stayed there for three weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I could not grasp what &quot;if we had room for him&quot; means here. Did Asa Bird—presumably their friend—bring Biloxi, who wasn't their friend and thus was uninvited, at the last minute of their wedding and asked if they had some vacant seat for him? Or did Asa Bird bring the fainted Biloxi to them and asked some space to lay him down? Or was Asa Bird finding a room for him to stay for a while?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am completely clueless. I would very much appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T11:42:11.760" Title="What does &quot;if we had room for him&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6189" CreationDate="2018-03-27T15:08:09.677" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got to thinking awhile back: many high-level politicians (such as Paul Ryan, current Speaker of the House in the U.S.), media figures, etc. cite &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; as a major influence. Then I got to thinking: has anyone actually tried to measure exactly &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; influential it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone come up with a quantitative measure of how influential particular books are? I assume that studies would study how be influential they are relative to &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; - for example, how influential something is in politics. Are there high-quality studies on this topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T20:07:37.997" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T22:50:15.193" Title="Is there a standard way to measure how influential a particular book is?" Tags="&lt;sociology-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5797" CreationDate="2018-03-27T16:03:09.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in the critic Dwight MacDonald's essay, &quot;Masscult and Midcult&quot;, which I read as a child in a book of essays called &quot;Against the American Grain&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this essay Mr. MacDonald attempts to develop a classification for things that he thought were &quot;art&quot; (or &quot;good&quot;, if you prefer) which he termed High Culture, and things that he thought were pretending to be &quot;art&quot;/&quot;good&quot;, which he called Midcult. And the stuff that had no such pretensions was &quot;Masscult&quot;. In Orwellian terms, that last would probably be called &quot;prolefeed&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This attempt at classification has some similarities to Orwell's &quot;good bad book/poetry&quot;. Though I think MacDonald's more elaborate attempts were much less successful. Much of the time it just comes across as a sort of pretentious literary equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials or some such. However, MacDonald himself clearly took his ideas very seriously, and attempts at this kind of cultural classification are so rare that I think it is worth mentioning. If you can find a copy of this essay, it's worth reading, at least.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would have been a bit more interested if he had had the courage to buck conventional literary wisdom. But by his thesis, all the books that he considers to be &quot;good&quot; are miraculously all the books that the literary establishment deems to be good. Indeed a fortunate coincidence!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the bye, Orwell and MacDonald admired each other, and engaged in an extensive correspondence at the time when MacDonald was editor of the magazine &quot;Partisan Review&quot;, to which Orwell was a contributor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="142" LastEditorUserId="142" LastEditDate="2019-06-18T06:13:17.813" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T06:13:17.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6186" CreationDate="2018-03-27T16:51:08.793" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You've probably heard about the New York Times bestseller list, which measures how many copies of a book have been sold, which is a quantitative measurement that can be used to determine influence. So yes, people have used numeric measurements to determine the influence of books, and the use of these numbers goes well beyond academia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of this question asks for a &quot;standard way&quot;. A standard is just something that is agreed upon, and given how many people rely on the New York Times bestseller list, it surely is the answer to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this isn't the question that you meant to ask. There are a lot of unstated assumptions in this question that you need to, well, state. To be nice, I did provide a little easter egg in this question: an unstated answer to your unstated question. Can you find it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4289" LastEditorUserId="4289" LastEditDate="2018-03-27T16:56:28.460" LastActivityDate="2018-03-27T16:56:28.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6186" CreationDate="2018-03-27T18:53:33.480" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question posed in your title is that there is not yet any &lt;em&gt;standard way&lt;/em&gt; to measure 'influence.' The fact is that analyses of this type are a kind of wild, wild west where 'standard' methods have yet to develop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studies of this kind are a variant of computational humanities where the focus is on algorithmic text mining of large, unstructured databases. In literary humanities, Franco Moretti pioneered the use of statistical tools for this purpose. Moretti's at Stanford and has a group focused on 'distant reading' or 'quantitative formalism'. These methods are spreading widely throughout the academic world with many 'classically' trained, close readers objecting to their dissemination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One quick way to get at least some insight into online usage of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; is the Google Trends search tool. By querying the keyword 'Atlas Shrugged' for the US for the time span from 2004-2018, one can see that there was little interest in the book until April 2011, followed by a second spike in October 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oU65y.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oU65y.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Google Trends 'Interest' in Atlas Shrugged, 2004–2018&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metric displayed in the chart is described by Google as 'interest' but it's more accurately described as the ratio of keyword search activity divided by total search activity on Google. The weekly values that result are rescaled by dividing the weekly values by the maximum value for the time series. This creates the spike in April 2011 equalling 100%. That said this little analysis isn't very satisfying in that it only goes back to 2004 and is quite narrow in its specification. GT offers little by way of an explanation for these spikes in 'interest.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A direct answer to your concern with the &lt;em&gt;influence&lt;/em&gt; of Rand's book is a more complicated question that would have to include not just her book but the related influence of other libertarian or neo-liberal thinkers such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Alan Greenspan, and many more. In other words the answer to your second question is &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt;, there are not yet any &amp;quot;high-quality studies on this topic,&amp;quot; at least that I'm aware of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are &amp;quot;high-quality&amp;quot; studies done on other areas and aspects of text mining that could be brought to bear in addressing your specific question. For instance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1512221112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this paper&lt;/a&gt; by Rule, et al., &lt;em&gt;Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014&lt;/em&gt; does a wonderful job of analyzing the themes of the Presidential State of the Union addresses going all the way back to George Washington. The graphics are beautiful. This is the kind of work that could be brought to bear in answering your query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Link to PDF of the paper: Rule, Alix; Cointet, Jean-Philippe; Bearman, Peter S.: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/112/35/10837.full.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexical shifts, substantive changes, and continuity in State of the Union discourse, 1790–2014&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences&lt;/em&gt;, 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T22:50:15.193" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T22:50:15.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6192" CreationDate="2018-03-28T01:08:05.020" Score="6" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an early childhood book - something around the age range of the &lt;em&gt;Frog and Toad&lt;/em&gt; books - 1st-2nd grade (US). I actually thought for a long time that it was in the &lt;em&gt;Frog and Toad&lt;/em&gt; books but I can't find any evidence of it in those books. I do think that the characters in the books were animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a long list of items that were on offer at a small picnic and I clearly remember one of the items was tongue. If I remember correctly, the list was also run together as if it were a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was part of the curriculum in the school I attended as a first or second grader and we had a picnic with all of the items from the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T02:29:41.593" Title="Children's book with a picnic list including tongue" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6208" CreationDate="2018-03-28T01:20:16.653" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading Gene Stratton-Porter's &quot;A Girl of the Limberlost.&quot; It's the first time I've ever read anything by her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not read anything by Eleanor H. Porter, but have seen a &quot;flickification&quot; of her &quot;Pollyanna.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their writing styles, or motifs, anyway, seem similar; were they related? A quick internet search turned up nothing; wondering if anybody knows &quot;off the top of their head&quot; whether they only share part of a surname and a general style of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T20:08:06.140" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T20:08:06.140" Title="Was Eleanor H. Porter related to Gene Stratton-Porter?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;eleanor-h-porter&gt;&lt;gene-stratton-porter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6190" CreationDate="2018-03-28T02:29:41.593" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like Rat's picnic from &quot;The Wind in the Willows&quot;, by Kenneth Grahame.  One of the picnic items is cold tongue, and Rat runs all the items together as he is telling Mole (as if he is talking quickly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the passage from chapter one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Mole waggled his toes from sheer happiness, spread his chest with&#xA;  a sigh of full contentment, and leaned back blissfully into the soft&#xA;  cushions. 'WHAT a day I'm having!' he said. `Let us start at once!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;`Hold hard a minute, then!' said the Rat. He looped the painter&#xA;  through a ring in his landing-stage, climbed up into his hole above,&#xA;  and after a short interval reappeared staggering under a fat, wicker&#xA;  luncheon-basket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;`Shove that under your feet,' he observed to the Mole, as he passed it&#xA;  down into the boat. Then he untied the painter and took the sculls&#xA;  again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'What's inside it?' asked the Mole, wriggling with curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'There's cold chicken inside it,' replied the Rat briefly;&#xA;  `coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssan&#xA;  dwichespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater----'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'O stop, stop,' cried the Mole in ecstacies: `This is too much!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Do you really think so?' enquired the Rat seriously. `It's only what&#xA;  I always take on these little excursions; and the other animals are&#xA;  always telling me that I'm a mean beast and cut it VERY fine!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T02:29:41.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6193" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8021" CreationDate="2018-03-28T03:35:24.510" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the discussion of Directive 10-289, Jim Taggart said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jim Taggart spoke first. His voice was low, but it had the trembling intensity of an involuntary scream: &quot;Well, why not? Why should they have it, if we don't? Why should they stand above us? If we are to perish, let's make sure that we all perish together. Let's make sure that we leave them no chance to survive!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't that &quot;tip him off&quot; as to his real motives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T15:49:02.290" Title="Why didn't Jim Taggart realize his real motive for saying this?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6194" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8865" CreationDate="2018-03-28T03:42:13.377" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Golden Daughter&lt;/em&gt; describes the Wood as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Wood is bigger by far than any mortal mind can comprehend. It is not a world in itself but rather the seat of worlds, containing with its vastness doorways into every realm...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds at least superficially like the Wood between the worlds in &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;. With that said, there are some significant differences (such as the fact that you don't enter world through visible pools of water, the fact that it doesn't instantly make you &quot;sleepy&quot; and forget what you were doing, and the absence of Rings or other similar devices).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this an intentional parallel (the differences notwithstanding)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T14:02:46.857" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T02:53:38.940" Title="Was the Wood in Tales of Goldstone Wood inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;anne-elisabeth-stengl&gt;&lt;tales-of-goldstone-wood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6150" CreationDate="2018-03-28T09:48:27.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paragraphs in the question follow a description of a heatwave:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the weather is followed by descriptions of its effect on the bodies of the passengers in the train. The combination of heat and perspiring bodies suggests sex to the narrator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! hot! hot! hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it.. .?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph has &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3524/3003&quot;&gt;been discussed previously&lt;/a&gt; here on Literature; it is the narrator who cares whose flushed lips the conductor kissed, though he might try to deny or minimize his feelings. Whether Carraway is momentarily attracted to the conductor, or whether the conductor’s sweating hand has triggered a memory for him, is unclear. But either way, Carraway is thinking about sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is an ellipsis and the narration jumps to the Buchanans’ house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Standing at the door, Carraway can hear the butler talking on the telephone, but the words, carried on the faint wind, are hard to understand. “Faint” is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transferred epithet&lt;/a&gt;: the sound, as well as the wind, is faint. What the butler really said was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes...Yes...I’ll see.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but what Carraway imagines he hears is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The master’s body! I’m sorry, madame, but we can’t furnish it—it’s far too hot to touch this noon!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this daydream Carraway imagines that a woman is on the phone (perhaps he is thinking of Myrtle Wilson in particular) and in a humorous transgression of social mores she has requested access to “the master’s” (that is, Tom Buchanan’s) body. What kind of body is this and why might Carraway daydream about it? There is a description of Buchanan in Chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body — he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage — a cruel body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carraway does not much like Buchanan, but on the evidence of this sexually charged description he certainly appreciates Buchanan’s body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this brief daydream is hinting: at Buchanan’s extra-marital affair; at Carraway’s knowledge of the affair; at Carraway’s feelings of attraction to masculine bodies; and at a general sense of transgression of social boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T09:48:27.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T09:58:33.397" Score="6" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my copy of &lt;em&gt;The Souls of Black Folk&lt;/em&gt;, the essay &quot;Of the Black Belt&quot; references Jews as the inheritors of much property and land in the deep South. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A footnote in the book, however, reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In later editions of &lt;em&gt;The Souls of Black Folk&lt;/em&gt;, Du Bois changes all references to &quot;Jews&quot; to &quot;immigrants.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? What prompted him to make that change?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T18:42:51.970" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T18:42:51.970" Title="What prompted Du Bois to change &quot;Jew&quot; to &quot;Immigrant&quot; in &quot;Of the Black Belt&quot;?" Tags="&lt;the-souls-of-black-folk&gt;&lt;w-e-b-du-bois&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:29:31.753" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T10:29:31.753" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T10:29:31.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:29:31.753" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist and author William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868 – 1963) and his works. He is best known for 'The Souls of Black Folk' (1903)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T13:57:00.810" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T13:57:00.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6200" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:31:34.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T10:31:34.170" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T10:31:34.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6201" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:31:34.170" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Souls of Black Folk' (1903) by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. The book is an important work in the history of sociology. Use this tag with the [w-e-b-du-bois] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T13:56:53.187" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T13:56:53.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:33:48.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-28T10:33:48.077" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T10:33:48.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:33:48.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the social production and/or the social implications of specific works of literature or the works of specific authors." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T06:35:17.327" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T06:35:17.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6184" CreationDate="2018-03-28T10:38:27.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a description of the Fay–Buchanan marriage in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 4:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In June [1919] she [Daisy Fay] married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole floor of the Muhlbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_railroad_car&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;private cars&lt;/a&gt;” are privately hired rail passenger cars, and the “Muhlbach Hotel” is a light disguise for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seelbach_Hotel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seelbach Hotel&lt;/a&gt; in Louisville, Kentucky.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Biloxi’ was a gatecrasher at the wedding. He told Tom that he was a childhood friend of Daisy’s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he told Daisy that he was at university with Tom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but both of these claims were lies. Then at the wedding ‘Biloxi’ faints (or pretends to faint) and so gets carried to the Bakers’ house, where he stays until he is kicked out. It seems that ‘Biloxi’ is an accomplished freeloader. He may have known Asa Bird, but more likely he lied his way into her acquaintance via the supposed connection to Daisy, and then parlayed this into an invitation to the wedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when ‘Biloxi’ “asked if we had room for him” it means that he asked Tom if there was room for him at the wedding party. Presumably this would have included a room at the Muhlbach Hotel for the duration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The anecdote about ‘Biloxi’ reminds the reader (and the characters) of Gatsby, whose claims about his background are also suspected of being false. In particular, Tom launches straight into a disparagement of Gatsby’s claim to have been at Oxford University:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not exactly.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes — I went there.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting: “You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Yale University, where ‘Biloxi’ claimed to have been president of Tom’s class, is in New Haven, Connecticut.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T11:34:35.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T12:42:00.617" Score="3" ViewCount="388" Body="&lt;p&gt;About 10 years ago I read &lt;em&gt;the Maltese Falcon&lt;/em&gt;. It was a good read, but I remember being shocked by the blatant homophobia. Raymond Chandler's &lt;em&gt;the Big Sleep&lt;/em&gt; was more subtle about it, but definitely still homophobic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, homophobia was a lot more prevalent then. However, this doesn't explain why it became so much more prevalent in detective fiction. I'm sure Conan Doyle would have been homophobic, but he didn't make Moriarty gay... Either it didn't occur to him, or he didn't think his audience would respond to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T14:39:29.780" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T01:06:46.230" Title="Why did homophobia become a feature of detective fiction in the mid-20th century?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6205" CreationDate="2018-03-28T13:06:54.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question. Regarding your observation about the &lt;em&gt;greater&lt;/em&gt; prevalence of concerns with homophobia in detective fiction vs other fiction genres, that seems like a bit of a stretch conclusion...maybe even premature. In other words, more cross-genre evidence is required in support of the claim. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's worth noting (as you've done) is that there has been a slow diffusion or evolution in US culture with dominant or majority attitudes towards homosexuality from 'the love that dare not speak its name' to its tolerance and acceptance in &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; segments of society. It may seem hard to understand today but when Chandler and Hammett were writing (the 30s) cultural prohibitions were such that it would have been considered &lt;em&gt;avant garde&lt;/em&gt; just to broach the topic. One 'safe' way of doing this was to mention it while simultaneously expressing disgust or hatred for the preference. Tracking these attitudes back to 19th c England and Sherlock Holmes is more complicated but one good index of their times is the case of Oscar Wilde, the gay writer, playwright and Victorian contemporary of Conan Doyle, and his imprisonment for 'gross indecency with men' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing to bear in mind is that such shifts in cultural attitudes are like pendulum swings. There may be tolerance with LBGT issues in the 'dominant' US culture today but that can change pretty quickly with a reimposition of repressive attitudes and hatred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T01:06:46.230" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T01:06:46.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-28T17:23:40.373" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the famous novel by Mikhail Lermontov &quot;Hero of our time&quot; Pechorin, the main hero of the novel is presented to have all the vices of human-kind. The prologue Lermontov says that, I paraphrase, the more clever reader will see in Pechorin him/herself, and other people, that Pechorin is the accumulation of all our short-comings. That is how he comes up with the ironic title &quot;Hero of Our Time&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I cannot help, but be one of those people who are drawn to him, due to his bravery in the face of death, ability to read people, understand the faults that other characters have. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy he manipulates into kidnapping his sister was egoistic and shortsighted. The gypsy girl was a thief. Reshinsky was the archetype of a &quot;nice guy&quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the last words of the novel &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Some readers will probably want to know what I think of Pechorin's character. My reply may be found in the title of this book. &quot;But that is wicked irony!&quot; they will say. I don't know.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seem to say that the title is not completely ironic. Pechorin was certainly a man who has caused a lot of grief, but he caused them, perhaps only except the Cherkez girl, Bela, due to weakness of other characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say he is a hero, one with clear sight and honesty to himself. I just want to understand what makes his character so &quot;Unhero-like&quot; why is he a man to be despised? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is different. What I am asking is not why the title is hero when he &quot;obviously&quot; was not a hero. I am asking what makes him &quot;obviously not a hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4292" LastEditorUserId="4292" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T20:23:33.380" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T20:23:33.380" Title="Was Pechorin really &quot;not a hero&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;mikhail-lermontov&gt;&lt;a-hero-of-our-time&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-03-29T15:48:00.053" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6191" CreationDate="2018-03-28T20:07:36.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Doesn't look like it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each of these (female) authors, the &quot;Porter&quot; in her name was her &lt;em&gt;married&lt;/em&gt; name, taken from her husband. So if their shared surname is not a coincidence, it must come from a blood relation between their husbands, not the women themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_H._Porter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eleanor H. Porter&lt;/a&gt; (née &lt;strong&gt;Eleanor Emily Hodgman&lt;/strong&gt;, daughter of Francis Fletcher Hodgman and Llewella French née Woolson) was married to &lt;strong&gt;John Lyman Porter&lt;/strong&gt;. That John Lyman Porter is most probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/john-lyman-porter_22175627&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (from Vermont, close to Eleanor's native New Hampshire and the couple's later home Massachusetts), son of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/john-lyman-porter_100068982&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Lyman Porter Sr.&lt;/a&gt;, son of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancestry.co.uk/genealogy/records/enos-porter_95317813&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enos Porter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Stratton-Porter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gene Stratton-Porter&lt;/a&gt; (née &lt;strong&gt;Geneva Grace Stratton&lt;/strong&gt;, daughter of Mark Stratton and Mary née Shallenberger) was married to &lt;strong&gt;Charles Dorwin Porter&lt;/strong&gt;. This Charles Dorwin Porter, an Indiana drugstore owner, was well enough known that several generations of his family tree &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coltechpub.com/hartgen/htm/porter.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have been traced out online&lt;/a&gt;. So we know that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coltechpub.com/hartgen/htm/porter.htm#name7684&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he&lt;/a&gt; was the son of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coltechpub.com/hartgen/htm/porter.htm#name7683&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Pomeroy Porter&lt;/a&gt; from Ohio, son of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coltechpub.com/hartgen/htm/porter.htm#name7712&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Porter&lt;/a&gt; from Indiana, son of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coltechpub.com/hartgen/htm/porter.htm#name7714&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patrick Porter&lt;/a&gt;, an immigrant from Ireland. Nowhere in this genealogical history is an Enos or John Lyman mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that the shared part of the writers' names (a common enough surname, Porter) is a coincidence. There's also no sign of any blood relation between the women, their parents' birth surnames being entirely different. Perhaps the similarity you observed in their writing styles was just something common to writers in the north-east US in that time period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-03-28T20:07:36.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6210" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-29T08:58:33.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T08:58:33.553" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T08:58:33.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6211" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-29T08:58:33.553" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Russian author and painter Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (Russian: Михаи́л Ю́рьевич Ле́рмонтов; 1814 – 1841) and his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T09:18:00.703" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T09:18:00.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6212" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-29T09:00:15.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T09:00:15.467" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T09:00:15.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6213" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-29T09:00:15.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about Mikhail Lermontov's novel 'A Hero of Our Time' (Russian: Герой нашего времени; first published in 1840). Use this tag with the tags [mikhail-lermontov] and [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:53:43.500" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:53:43.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6135" CreationDate="2018-03-29T12:00:59.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;George has certainly made many references and homages in A Song of Ice and Fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the only direct mention I can find of Dante by Martin is the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two thousand years after the assassination of Julius Caeser, people are still debating whether or not that was an honorable act. Dante put Brutus and Cassius in the lowest level of hell for what they did, right next to Judas Iscariot, but Shakespeare wrote that Brutus was &quot;the noblest Roman of them all.&quot; - &lt;em&gt;So Spake Martin, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/Entry/Matters_of_Honor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Matters of Honor&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, June 19, 2001&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with such an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.westeros.org/Citadel/FAQ/Entry/Are_there_any_nods_to_other_works_in_the_series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extensive list&lt;/a&gt; where &quot;there are too many to readily list&quot; and over &lt;a href=&quot;http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/784-references-and-homages/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1,700 fan found references&lt;/a&gt; to other works, I would say nothing is out of the realm of possibility!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T17:35:29.100" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T17:35:29.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6217" CreationDate="2018-03-29T13:55:50.273" Score="5" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the title and author of a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the action takes place in XXth century's USA, in an alternative history.&#xA;Statistical and political analyses made huge progresses, to the point that they can forecast with a 100% accuracy the result of upcoming elections.&#xA;A president is about to be elected, and their analysis show that the result of the election will actually be decided by a single man.&#xA;They start looking for this man, to ask him to vote, and, actually, to decide who will be the next president.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does that ring a bell?&#xA;I'm sorry if the plot I described is vague, I never read that book, just remember hearing someone mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4296" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:46:46.300" Title="Looking for a Fiction Book where One Vote Decides the Result of the Election" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6216" CreationDate="2018-03-29T14:46:46.300" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchise_%28short_story%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Franchise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 1955 short story by Isaac Asimov. In &lt;em&gt;Franchise&lt;/em&gt;, Asimov's grand computer, Multivac, selects a single person to answer a series of questions which determines the result of the election.&#xA;Also see &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/14333/47234&quot;&gt;this similar post on the Sci-Fi and Fantasy SE&lt;/a&gt;, which includes a fuller description and a link to the story in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T14:46:46.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6218" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-29T16:10:50.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T16:10:50.340" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T16:10:50.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6219" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-29T16:10:50.340" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist Eleanor H. Porter (1868 – 1920) and her works. She is best known for her novel 'Pollyanna' (1913)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T21:15:42.670" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T21:15:42.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6220" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-03-29T16:12:11.693" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T16:12:11.693" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T16:12:11.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6221" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-03-29T16:12:11.693" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American author and nature photographer Gene Stratton-Porter (1863 – 1924) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T21:15:38.700" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T21:15:38.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6154" CreationDate="2018-03-29T18:58:28.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;During Bastian's return from Fantastica, the following sequence of events takes place (starting on page 388 in my Dutton 1997 edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quickly Bastian cupped his hands, gathered as much of the Water of Life as he could hold, ran to the gate, and flung himself into the empty darkness beyond.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [He] put on his his shoes and coat, and saw to his surprise that they were wet as they had been the day when it had rained so hard.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Even if he had spilled the Water of Life, he wanted to go home to his father&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had always read this as Bastian somehow bringing the Water across the barrier between the two worlds, and thus as the one solid counter to the idea that it all takes place in Bastian's head.  However, as pointed out in the comments, Bastian is unaware that his entire journey took place overnight, and thus that his garments are indeed still wet from his previous night's rains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that said, given that this is a work of reconstructivist art, I don't think the dual interpretations are either unintentional or incompatible.  Ende is telling us that this is simultaneously both Real AND in all in Bastian's head, those are not different things within the larger framework Ende is creating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-03-31T15:32:01.873" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T15:32:01.873" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6223" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4970" CreationDate="2018-03-29T19:28:35.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that all but the most important parts of the manual were intact, presumably one of them &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; remove it. (Most likely, it was William Hastings who removed it, given that John Galt simply walked out of the factory and William Hastings didn't quit until the next day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the selectively-removed page, we also have the fact that John evidently regarded the knowledge about the motor as his intellectual property. Later in the book, he's seen collecting royalties on the power plant from Midas Mulligan, and at the end of the book he agrees to do a job for Taggart Transcontinental designing new engines based on his motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fundamentally, the book treats it as &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; motor, not just the 20th Century Motor Company's motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T19:41:01.727" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T19:41:01.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-29T20:54:03.140" Score="6" ViewCount="723" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pretty spoiler heavy question since it involves the book's end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alan Garner's YA novel The Owl Service sees three characters roughly re-enacting a tragic love triangle from Welsh myth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alison, the only girl, is clearly Blodeuwedd. From the events of the book we can work out that Gwyn, a working class Welsh boy made good, is the trickster-hero Lleu. Roger, the snobby English prep school boy is, therefore, Gronw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger and Gwyn begin as friends, but as the legend plays out, they begin to hate each other. Roger instigates this, viciously taunting Gwyn about his attempts to climb up the social ladder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the conclusion of the book, the two boys learn that to avert the coming tragedy, one of them must put aside their hate. Once this was clear, I had presumed Gwyn would be the one to yield, since in the sense of &quot;justice&quot; he is the injured party: someone who has been abused by life and by Roger's insults and by Alison's rejection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it seems he cannot. Instead, Roger takes the step and ends the book in the role of hero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only clue to Gwyn's motivation is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gwyn turned his head and looked at Roger. Roger saw the question form in his eyes, and he saw that Gwyn knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me what Gwyn &quot;knows&quot; or why it stops him from releasing his hate of the English children. What message, then, does the redemption of the bullying snob Roger and the failure of the striving Gwyn, give to the reader in terms of the social politics of the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T01:30:57.327" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T04:13:24.017" Title="What point is the end of The Owl Service trying to make?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;&lt;alan-garner&gt;&lt;the-owl-service&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-29T20:59:02.573" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.themanchesterreview.co.uk/?p=7897&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Nnedi Got Her Curved Spine&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Nnedi Okorafor details a story about a woman named Nnedi, who, while in the woods, was taken in by intelligent baboons and taught their first written language, which she then took back to her people, thus introducing writing to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nnedi Okorafor writes at the end of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many years later, while considering all this and just before I wrote what would become my first published novel Zarah the Windseeker, I wrote this short piece of “creative nonfiction”. I call it nonfiction because it is a true story. I call it creative because it is told through the lens of fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while looking up the term &quot;creative nonfiction&quot;, I found this definition, on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.creativenonfiction.org/online-reading/what-creative-nonfiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CreativeNonfiction.org&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The words “creative” and “nonﬁction” describe the form. The word “creative” refers to the use of literary craft, the techniques ﬁction writers, playwrights, and poets employ to present nonﬁction—factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid, dramatic manner. The goal is to make nonﬁction stories read like ﬁction so that your readers are as enthralled by fact as they are by fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I took this to mean stories such as Laura Ingalls Wilder's &lt;em&gt;Little House on the Prairie&lt;/em&gt; series - a true story told in a way that reads like a novel. &quot;How Nnedi Got Her Curved Spine&quot; doesn't seem to fit that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something here? Misunderstanding the definition of creative nonfiction? Or what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-03-29T21:42:53.880" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T04:24:24.817" Title="How does &quot;How Nnedi Got Her Curved Spine&quot; meet the definition of creative nonfiction?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;nnedi-okorafor&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6225" CreationDate="2018-03-29T22:18:44.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This strikes me more as referencing Tolkien's attitude towards myths and Christianity in particular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was [... that] the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From a letter to Arthur Greeves in October 1931 by C.S. Lewis.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien argued that myth was more than just a story. It is much as when he argued in &lt;em&gt;Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics&lt;/em&gt; that &quot;We do not deny the worth of the hero by accepting Grendel and the dragon.&quot; Just because the story of Nnedi has talking baboons doesn't mean it doesn't have worth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, I looked up Nnedi Okorofar. She has severe scoliosis, and had to have her vertebrae fused together - according to Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was diagnosed with scoliosis at the age of 13, a condition that worsened as she grew older. At age 19, she underwent spinal fusion surgery to straighten and fuse her spine; a rare complication led to Okorafor becoming paralyzed from the waist down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(She did eventually relearn to walk through intensive physical therapy, but only with the use of the cane.) There's truth in the story she wrote - that's the nonfiction - but there's also talking babooons. There's the myth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-03-29T22:18:44.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6261" CreationDate="2018-03-29T23:21:29.363" Score="5" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt; is set in the town of Ephesus, which is apparently a seaport with ships within walking distance of where the action takes place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DROMIO OF SYRACUSE:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Master, there is a bark of Epidamnum&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      That stays but till her owner comes aboard,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And then, sir, she bears away. Our fraughtage, sir,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I have convey'd aboard; and I have bought&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      The oil, the balsamum and aqua-vitae.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      The ship is in her trim; the merry wind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Blows fair from land: they stay for nought at all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      But for their owner, master, and yourself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ANTIPHOLUS OF EPHESUS:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How now! a madman! Why, thou peevish sheep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      What ship of Epidamnum stays for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DROMIO OF SYRACUSE:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A ship you sent me to, to hire waftage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the real town of Ephesus, whose spectacular ruins still exist to this day, actually lies &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/maps/place/Celsus+Library+-+Ephesus/@37.9432542,27.3288561,14z/data=!4m12!1m6!3m5!1s0x14bead49aab09aad:0x68960e46cc67902!2sEphesus+Archaeological+Museum!8m2!3d37.9489313!4d27.3676408!3m4!1s0x0:0x5a34f178897461c5!8m2!3d37.9392054!4d27.3409206&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;several kilometres from the sea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this one of Shakespeare's geographical errors, akin to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://press.princeton.edu/titles/6273.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;coast of Bohemia&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;? Or was Ephesus really once a seaport which now lies further from the sea, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandwich,_Kent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sandwich&lt;/a&gt; in Kent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T09:36:38.217" Title="Did Shakespeare err in using Ephesus as a port setting?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-comedy-of-errors&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3569" CreationDate="2018-03-30T01:44:31.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This only applies to some of the translations, but there's actually a very simple reason: &lt;em&gt;chemist&lt;/em&gt; does not rhyme with &lt;em&gt;Trismegist&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;alchemist&lt;/em&gt; does. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;chemist&lt;/em&gt; has the stress on the first syllable, and would require a double (or feminine) rhyme like &lt;em&gt;menaced&lt;/em&gt;—which is still only a very good near-rhyme (I actually can't think of any perfect rhymes for &lt;em&gt;chemist&lt;/em&gt;). On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;alchemist&lt;/em&gt; has secondary stress on the third syllable and can be rhymed with &lt;em&gt;Trismegist&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;resist&lt;/em&gt; (both of which are used for rhymes in at least one of the translations on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/099&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt;). A different translation uses the word &lt;em&gt;scientist&lt;/em&gt;, which avoids both the inaccuracy of &lt;em&gt;alchemist&lt;/em&gt; and the fact that there are no perfect rhymes for &lt;em&gt;chemist&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also note that an unrhymed translation on that website does use the word &lt;em&gt;chemist.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T01:51:07.157" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T01:51:07.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6240" CreationDate="2018-03-30T14:13:40.177" Score="3" ViewCount="1537" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and encountered these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The voice begged again to go.&lt;br&gt; &quot;&lt;em&gt;Please,&lt;/em&gt; Tom! I can't stand this&#xA;  any more.&quot;&lt;br&gt; Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions,&#xA;  whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.&lt;br&gt; &quot;You two start&#xA;  on home, Daisy,&quot; said Tom. &quot;In Mr. Gatsby's car.&quot;&lt;br&gt; She looked at&#xA;  Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.&lt;br&gt; &quot;Go on.&#xA;  He won't annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little&#xA;  flirtation is over.&quot;&lt;br&gt; They were gone, without a word, &lt;strong&gt;snapped out,&#xA;  made accidental, isolated, like ghosts&lt;/strong&gt;, even from our pity.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Daisy, her husband Tom, her lover Gatsby, her relative Nick, her friend Jordan came to the suite parlor in the Plaza Hotel to have some cold drink on the stifling day. The room became the battlefield between her husband and her lover, when each began to claim that it was him that Daisy loved. Tom had made some small &quot;investigation&quot; regarding Gatsby's past, and revealed the information during the argument that he earned his money through not very honorable routes. At this astounding information, Daisy felt her love toward Gatsby fail. Seeing the two already crumbling, Tom generously allowed Gatsby to drive her home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the last sentence especially difficult to understand. How could they have been &quot;snapped out&quot;? And I could not grasp what &quot;accidental&quot; means here either—does it mean that their encounter was reduced to a merely accidental one, not a destined one? And what does it indicate that they have become &quot;isolated&quot; and &quot;like ghosts&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T21:38:51.653" Title="What does &quot;snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-30T14:17:35.217" Score="9" ViewCount="3646" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Verlaines's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_de_Lune_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Claire de Lune&quot;&lt;/a&gt; he speaks of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They play musical instruments, so one assumes them to be musical artists, but what exactly are masques and bergamasques?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2719" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-03-30T15:46:37.767" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:46:28.330" Title="What exactly are masques and bergamasques?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;paul-verlaine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6232" CreationDate="2018-03-30T17:46:28.330" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line is a bit of a pun. A &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;masque&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is a masked ball, and in this case refers to the kind of music played at masques. The name actually has a somewhat convoluted history, originally referring to a masked drama in France, then to a stylized dance in Elizabethan England, and that use re-exported back to France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the name a &quot;bergamasque&quot; is not a kind of masque. The name comes from Bergamo, a city in Italy. It refers to the kind of music there, based on a folk dance. That dance is thus Bergamo-esque (bergamasco in Italian, and bergamasque in French, giving rise to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergamask&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bergamask&lt;/a&gt; in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;masques and bergamasques&quot; puts together two styles of dance and music, both of which have Renaissance origins, even though the names are not actually related. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-03-30T17:46:28.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6269" CreationDate="2018-03-31T11:13:38.500" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you please let me know what &quot;the facts about themselves&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was in no great pains to keep in touch with England. I followed&#xA;  local advice for my itinerary and had no settled route, so that much&#xA;  of my mail never reached me, and the rest accumulated until there was&#xA;  more than could be read at a sitting. I used to stuff a bundle of&#xA;  letters into my bag and read them when I felt inclined, which was in&#xA;  circumstances so incongruous—swinging in my hammock, under the net, by&#xA;  the light of a storm-lantern; drifting down river, amidships in the&#xA;  canoe, with the boys astern of me lazily keeping our nose out of the&#xA;  bank, with the dark water keeping pace with us, in the green shade,&#xA;  with the great trees towering above us and the monkeys screeching in&#xA;  the sunlight, high overhead among the flowers on the roof of the&#xA;  forest; on the veranda of a hospitable ranch, where the ice and the&#xA;  dice clicked, and a tiger cat played with its chain on the mown&#xA;  grass—that they seemed voices so distant as to be meaningless; their&#xA;  matter passed clean through the mind, and out, leaving no mark, like&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;the facts about themselves&lt;/strong&gt; which fellow travelers distribute so freely in American railway trains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=2_0OYCTfFOkC&amp;amp;pg=PT227&amp;amp;dq=facts%20about%20themselves%20which%20fellow%20travellers%20distribute%20so%20freely&amp;amp;hl=ko&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjvjvCQtZbaAhWEyrwKHcfDBX8Q6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=facts%20about%20themselves%20which%20fellow%20travellers%20distribute%20so%20freely&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evelyn Waugh, &lt;em&gt;Brideshead Revisited&lt;/em&gt;, Book Three&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator Charles, as an architecture painter, travelled Latin America for two years in search of inspiration. He didn't particularly seek to keep in touch with his homeland, and the letters he received sounded so remote to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not grasp what &quot;the facts about themselves&quot; means. &lt;br&gt; &#xA;Also, in order to know what &quot;themselves&quot; is, I looked up &quot;fellow travelers&quot; and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_traveller&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the related information on the Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, and assumed that they were communist sympathizers, but I could not be sure about that either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T10:50:48.513" Title="What does &quot;the facts about themselves&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T16:58:29.517" Score="6" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Michael Ende's &lt;em&gt;Momo&lt;/em&gt;, the tortoise Cassiopeia seems to be something of a mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Professor Hora is easier to grasp: he appears to be a sort of personification of &lt;em&gt;time itself&lt;/em&gt;, sending everyone's own allotment of time to them, with the flow of time all across the world stopping when he sleeps. What he gives, the men in grey poison and steal; they're essentially &lt;em&gt;time parasites&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Cassiopeia? She doesn't seem to serve any vital role in Professor Hora's work or the normal operation of time, mostly acting as an advisor, confidante, and helper to Momo. Her power of seeing half an hour into the future is one unmatched (as far as I remember) by any other person or creature in the story. She's the only thing able to move during the time-stop, apart from those with external sources of time like Momo's flower or the men in grey's cigars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What manner of being is she, really?&lt;/strong&gt; Why are so many unique abilities found in a single tortoise? Is she something else taking the form of a tortoise - and why a tortoise specifically? Are there more like her anywhere in the universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T18:08:06.033" Title="Who or what is Cassiopeia?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;momo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-03-31T17:54:09.173" Score="9" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Jude is in the church, when he was following Sue, we see this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...was like the dew of the Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this line about the atmosphere mean? I'm assuming it's meant to be metaphorical, but I'm not sure what it's meant to be a metaphor &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T22:06:54.283" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T22:06:54.283" Title="What does this passage about the atmosphere blowing from Cyprus and the Galilee mean in &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6231" CreationDate="2018-03-31T21:38:51.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 1 we read &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Why candles?” objected Daisy frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To ‘snap out’ a candle you extinguish the flame by literally snapping your fingers next to it as described and shown on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://supernatural.wonderhowto.com/how-to/snuff-out-spell-candle-by-snapping-your-fingers-342439/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website and video&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to their becoming ‘accidental’ it may mean that the importance of their interactions were diminished from seeming momentous and significant to something that only happened by chance and was of no consequence, as you suggest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s too long since I’ve read the book to offer a view on the other two phrases. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2018-03-31T21:38:51.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6242" CreationDate="2018-04-01T08:42:35.717" Score="3" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I remember borrowing a physical copy of the book at the library, but I never got to finish it before returning it.)&#xA;The name is Hispanic, and in the novel some key scenes happen early on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A kid runs away to join the circus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dad becomes a reclusive inventor, while living in the same house as the rest of his family.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A different kid attempts to have relations with a gypsy stuck in the form of a frog, when the same circus comes back to town.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4311" LastEditorUserId="4311" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T08:47:41.607" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T11:10:32.587" Title="Looking for a Hispanic book where everyone has the same name?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6241" CreationDate="2018-04-01T11:10:32.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of your description sounds like &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;One Hundred Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt; by Gabriel Garcia Marquez&lt;/strong&gt;. This book follows the history of the  Buendía family in the fictional village of Macondo in Colombia - there's the Hispanic connection you were looking for, and &amp;quot;everyone has the same name&amp;quot; because they're the same family. In fact, as well as the same surname, many of the first names are also repeated from one generation to the next, especially Aureliano, José, and Arcadio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A kid runs away to join the circus.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must be the second José Arcadio, first son of the original patriarch. See below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The dad becomes a reclusive inventor, while living in the same house as the rest of his family.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would be the original José Arcadio Buendía, patriarch of the family and founder of the village Macondo. He takes an interest in alchemy thanks to the inspiration of the gypsy Melquiades. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For years the town is solitary and unconnected to the outside world with the exception of the annual visit of a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets, telescopes and ice. The leader of the gypsies, Melquiades, maintains a close friendship with José Arcadio Buendía who becomes increasingly withdrawn, obsessed with investigating the mysteries of the universe presented to him by the gypsies. Ultimately he is driven insane, speaking only in Latin, and is tied to a chestnut tree by his family for many years until his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A different kid attempts to have relations with a gypsy stuck in the form of a frog, when the same circus comes back to town.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my identification is right, then there are two details you've got wrong here. First, this kid is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a different kid but the same one as in your first bullet point. Second, the gypsy is not literally stuck in the form of a frog: she's described metaphorically as a &amp;quot;frog&amp;quot; due to her thin, weak body, but she's a human girl. The magic/fantasy elements in the book are not that explicit! From the novel itself (emphasis mine), showing José Arcadio's encounter with the gypsy &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; his subsequent departure with the gypsy caravan (not technically a circus):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;José Arcadio and the gypsy girl did not witness the decapitation. They went to her tent, where they kissed each other with a desperate anxiety while they took off their clothes. &lt;strong&gt;The gypsy girl [...] was a languid little frog&lt;/strong&gt;, with incipient breasts and legs so thin that they did not even match the size of José Arcadio's arms, but she had a decision and a warmth that compensated for her fragility. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;José Arcadio's companion asked them to leave them alone. And the couple lay down on the ground, close to the bed. The passion of the others woke up José Arcadio's fervor. On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out into a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud. But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery that were admirable. José Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration […] It was Thursday. On Saturday night, &lt;strong&gt;José Arcadio wrapped a red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Opinion section:&lt;/strong&gt; I never managed to finish this book either, but not because I had to return it to the library. It's pretty grim in many ways: the family starts off relatively normal, but as the story evolves, we see assassinations, mysterious deaths, incest and other sexual aberrations, and even gruesome deaths of children. The story isn't even saved by having a clear plot that makes you want to read on and find out what happens next. There's no underlying storyline: it's rather a series of more or less disjointed vignettes of different people in the same family and what they do with their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T11:10:32.587" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T12:06:35.117" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In part 5 of Strugastkys' &lt;em&gt;The Doomed City&lt;/em&gt;, when Andrei and his group find the central square, there are countless empty places where statues used to be, and all of them have strange writings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later the missing statues turn out to be in the Pantheon, where Andrei delivers a speech about... greatness? For some reason, the statues turn away from him to another speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the statues? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why the speech? What did it represent?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who was the other speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T12:06:35.117" Title="What is the symbolism of the statues and the meeting at the Pantheon in &quot;The Doomed City&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;the-doomed-city&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6244" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T13:55:39.910" Score="8" ViewCount="553" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed something remarkable about one of Baudelaire's poems that I can't find any mention of on the web. My question is whether anybody has noticed this before, and whether there's some reason why it isn't known better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is &lt;em&gt;Chant d'automne.&lt;/em&gt; In part I, the poet hears the sound of firewood being tossed onto a paved courtyard, and this noise develops in his mind into a scaffold being built, a tower being assaulted by a battering ram, and finally to a coffin being nailed shut. What I noticed was that the rhythm of this &lt;em&gt;bruit mystérieux,&lt;/em&gt; as Baudelaire calls it, can be heard fading in and out of the meter of the poem, taking the form of sequences of anapests, punctuated by triple iambs, and culminating in a whole line in iambic hexameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is part I of the poem, with the syllables stressed by the rhythm marked in bold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Chant d'automne  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Charles Baudelaire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts !&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  J'entends déjà tomber avec des chocs funèbres&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Le bois retentissant sur le pavé des cours.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tout l'hi&lt;b&gt;ver&lt;/b&gt; va ren&lt;strong&gt;trer&lt;/strong&gt; dans mon &lt;strong&gt;êtr&lt;/strong&gt;e : co&lt;strong&gt;lèr&lt;/strong&gt;e,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Hain&lt;/strong&gt;e, fris&lt;strong&gt;sons&lt;/strong&gt;, hor&lt;strong&gt;reur&lt;/strong&gt;, labeur &lt;strong&gt;dur&lt;/strong&gt; et for&lt;strong&gt;cé&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Et, comme le soleil dans son enfer polaire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mon cœur ne sera plus qu'un bloc rouge et glacé.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;J'écoute en frémissant chaque &lt;strong&gt;bûch&lt;/strong&gt;e qui &lt;strong&gt;tomb&lt;/strong&gt;e ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  L'écha&lt;strong&gt;faud&lt;/strong&gt; qu'on bâ&lt;strong&gt;tit&lt;/strong&gt; n'a &lt;strong&gt;pas&lt;/strong&gt; d'é&lt;strong&gt;cho&lt;/strong&gt; plus &lt;strong&gt;sourd&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mon es&lt;strong&gt;prit&lt;/strong&gt; est pa&lt;strong&gt;reil&lt;/strong&gt; à la &lt;strong&gt;tour&lt;/strong&gt; qui suc&lt;strong&gt;comb&lt;/strong&gt;e&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sous les &lt;strong&gt;coups&lt;/strong&gt; du bé&lt;strong&gt;lier&lt;/strong&gt; infatigable et lourd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il me &lt;strong&gt;sembl&lt;/strong&gt;e, ber&lt;strong&gt;cé&lt;/strong&gt; par ce &lt;strong&gt;choc&lt;/strong&gt; mono&lt;strong&gt;ton&lt;/strong&gt;e,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Qu'on &lt;strong&gt;cloue&lt;/strong&gt; en &lt;strong&gt;grand&lt;/strong&gt;e &lt;strong&gt;hât&lt;/strong&gt;e un cer&lt;strong&gt;cueil&lt;/strong&gt; quelque &lt;strong&gt;part&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pour &lt;strong&gt;qui&lt;/strong&gt; ? – C'é&lt;strong&gt;tait&lt;/strong&gt; hi&lt;strong&gt;er&lt;/strong&gt; l'é&lt;strong&gt;té&lt;/strong&gt; ; voi&lt;strong&gt;ci&lt;/strong&gt; l'au&lt;strong&gt;tomn&lt;/strong&gt;e !&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ce bruit mystérieux sonne comme un départ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhythm reappears in part II, in lines 4–7, where it seems to represent mortality; although note that in part II, the rhythm requires that one has to read line 6 with stresses on &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;pour&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and not on &lt;em&gt;&lt;b&gt;mêm&lt;/b&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;, which might be a more natural reading (so maybe it isn't quite the same rhythm in part II, but I think Baudelaire is certainly doing something with the rhythm in part II).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems impossible that in 150 years of scholarly study of Baudelaire, one of the most famous French poets, nobody would have noticed this rhythm. On the other hand, none of the readings of this poem that I found on the internet seem to take any notice of this rhythm; I can find no mention of it whatsoever on the web (although maybe my French googling skills are lacking); and I found one scholar who said that parts I and II of the poem are related only by the themes of mortality and autumn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can personally testify that it's actually quite hard to notice this rhythm. Even after I discovered it in part I, it took me quite a long time to realize that it reappears in part II.  And maybe somebody who is used to reading English poetry has an easier time hearing the rhythm, as iambic and anapestic meters are common in English poetry and virtually never occur in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible reason that this might not be better known is that there may be no good way to read this poem so that the meter gives the impression of falling logs for native French speakers. (I can't really tell; I'd like to hear a native French speaker's opinion on this.) Baudelaire experimented in his poetry a certain amount, and maybe this is one of his experiments that didn't work. But certainly, if you set this poem to music, you could emphasize the rhythm quite easily. And neither of the two musical settings of this poem I found on the internet do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T13:38:29.730" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T13:38:29.730" Title="In Baudelaire's &quot;Chant d'automne&quot;, why isn't the hidden rhythm better known?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;charles-baudelaire&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6245" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T15:59:57.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T15:59:57.833" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T15:59:57.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6246" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T15:59:57.833" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Comedy of Errors', one of Shakespeare's early plays. It is a farcical comedy that involves two sets of identical twins. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T18:01:59.987" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T18:01:59.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6247" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T16:04:22.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T16:04:22.627" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T16:04:22.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6248" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T16:04:22.627" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English novelist Alan Garner (born 1934) and his works. Garner's early novels are often labelled as &quot;children's literature&quot;, even though the author never consciously set out to write for children." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T18:01:50.727" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T18:01:50.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6249" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T16:33:54.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T16:33:54.283" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T16:33:54.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6250" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T16:33:54.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about Alan Garner's 'The Owl Service', a fantasy novel for young adults first published in 1967. Use this tag with the [alan-garner] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T18:02:21.370" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T18:02:21.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T16:43:43.643" Score="13" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;, the eponymous (anti?)hero meets the demon Mephistopheles on what seems to be Easter Sunday, during local celebrations of Easter. Given the religious themes in the story, this surely can't be a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is their meeting on Easter Day in particular?&lt;/strong&gt; What symbolic significance does this have in terms of Faust's life and actions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T18:30:42.250" Title="What's the significance of Faust's meeting being on Easter Day?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;faust&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T17:20:11.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T17:20:11.933" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T17:20:11.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T17:20:11.933" Score="0" Body="Questions about the French author and poet Paul Verlaine (1844 –1896) and his works. He published works such as the collection of poetry 'Fêtes galantes' (1869), the volume of literary criticism 'Les Poètes maudits' (1884 and 1888) and autobiographical works such as 'Confessions' (1895). Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:32:34.433" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:32:34.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6254" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6262" CreationDate="2018-04-01T17:26:12.550" Score="8" ViewCount="1638" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Theseus tells Hippolyta:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THESEUS:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And won thy love doing thee injuries,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I will wed thee in another key,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does he say this? How is it possible to woo someone with a sword? Why did Hippolyta give him her love in return for injuries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have unfortunately run into obstacles right at the outset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T12:52:16.653" Title="How did Theseus woo Hippolyta by doing her injuries?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;a-midsummer-nights-dream&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6255" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T17:32:39.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe achieved early fame with his epistolary novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Leiden des jungen Werthers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ('The Sorrows of Young Werther', 1774).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other works include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Bildungsroman &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Meister%27s_Apprenticeship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1795/96)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (part one, 1808; part two, 1832)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The collection of poems &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West%E2%80%93%C3%B6stlicher_Divan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;West-östlicher Divan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1819, 1827)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And stand-alone poems such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlk%C3%B6nig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Erlkönig&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:26:19.103" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:26:19.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6256" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T17:32:39.543" Score="0" Body="Questions about German writer and statesman Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) or his works. Questions about his works should be tagged with [german-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:26:06.830" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:26:06.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-01T18:35:43.103" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In her testimony at the lawsuit over the Stoddard Temple, Dominique Francon mentioned that her father had refused to testify against Roark and that he thought that they &quot;weren't behaving like gentlemen.&quot; Why is this? Is this Guy Francon's better attributes on display?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T18:35:43.103" Title="Why wouldn't Guy Francon testify against Howard Roark?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6258" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-01T19:42:46.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-01T19:42:46.930" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T19:42:46.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6259" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-01T19:42:46.930" Score="0" Body="Questions about the comedy 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T16:07:10.713" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T16:07:10.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6254" CreationDate="2018-04-01T20:18:13.207" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mythindex.com/greek-mythology/H/Hippolyte.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hippolyta&lt;/a&gt; is queen of the Amazons. (You may be more familiar with her as &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NENWLEndR0dQRQ_1_a/Wonder-Woman-Set-Photos-Hippolyta-Connie-Nielsen.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wonder Woman's mother&lt;/a&gt;; she's the third woman from the left, next to Diana, in this photo.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amazons are known mythologically for being fierce warriors. To woo (court, date, interest) a warrior, you might spar, or fight. Theseus is saying that instead of courting her with flowers and poetry, he did it by battling her in a swordfight. He earned her affections by getting through her literal defenses and injuring her with his sword, proving he was an equal or better fighter. The queen of a warrior race is a mighty warrior herself, and isn't going to settle for someone who can't fight as a consort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Theseus says that while he &lt;em&gt;won&lt;/em&gt; her with violence (fighting, injuries, which a warrior accepts as normal and possibly desirable to some extent), their wedding will be full of celebrating and fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-04-01T20:18:13.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6228" CreationDate="2018-04-02T09:36:38.217" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephesus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ephesus&lt;/a&gt; was a port on the estuary of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BC%C3%A7%C3%BCkmenderes_River&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Kaystros&lt;/a&gt;, but silt from the river filled in the harbour during the Roman era. Stock et al. (2013) describe the geological history thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Situated approximately 70 km south of Izmir, Ephesus is located on the southern flank of the Küçük Menderes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graben&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;graben&lt;/a&gt;. During the last six millennia, the surroundings of the ancient city experienced major palaeogeographical changes. These were caused by the progradation of the Küçük Menderes (ancient name: Kaystros) delta and the resulting shoreline changes which fundamentally affected the development of the city of Ephesus and particular of its harbour. The advancing delta progressively silted the harbour areas. Thereafter, new harbours were built further to the west.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paper has a map showing the progressive movement of the shoreline to the west:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/81WMx.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/81WMx.png&quot; alt=&quot;Geology of the Küçük Menderes delta&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare was of couse unaware of the geological history of Ephesus. But he knew that Ephesus was a port in the Roman era, because this is clear in the New Testament. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/TheGenevaBible1560/geneva_bible1560#page/n1077/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acts 18:21 says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But [the Apostle Paul] bade them fare wel, ſaying, I muſt nedes kepe this feaſt that commeth, in Ieruſalem: but I will returne againe vnto you, if God wil. So he ſailed from Epheſus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve quoted this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Bible&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1560 Geneva Bible&lt;/a&gt; translation, which is the version that Shakespeare was familiar with. The Geneva Bible was printed with a number of maps, including this one of the eastern Mediterranean, showing Ephesus on the Aegean shore of Asia Minor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W972d.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/W972d.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Map of Eastern Mediterranean from the Geneva Bible, with Ephesus on the Aegean shore of Asia Minor&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Friederike Stock, Anna Pint, Barbara Horejs, Sabine Ladstätter, Helmut Brückner (2013). “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040618213001341&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In search of the harbours: New evidence of Late Roman and Byzantine harbours of Ephesus.&lt;/a&gt;” &lt;em&gt;Quaternary International&lt;/em&gt; 312:57–69.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T09:36:38.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6254" CreationDate="2018-04-02T11:23:01.327" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lauren Ipsum's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6260/17&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is correct, as far as the meaning in the play itself goes, but it's also worth noting that Shakespeare's portrayal of Theseus and Hippolyta was based on a much older story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many variations of this story in different retellings of Greek mythology. Sometimes Theseus marries Hippolyta, sometimes another Amazon woman; sometimes they go to war again afterwards and she ends up being killed. But the stories seem to agree that there was a war between Theseus (possibly together with Heracles) and the Amazons (led by Hippolyta). From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyta#Adventure_of_Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the myth of Theseus, the hero joined Heracles in his expedition, or went on a separate expedition later, and was actually the one who had the encounter with Hippolyta. Some versions say he abducted her, some that Heracles did the abducting but gave her to Theseus as spoils, and others say that she fell in love with Theseus and betrayed the Amazons by willingly leaving with him. In any case, she was taken to Athens where she was wed to Theseus, being the only Amazon to ever marry. In some renditions the other Amazons became enraged at the marriage and attacked Athens. This was the Attic War, in which they were defeated by Athenian forces under Theseus or Heracles. In other renditions Theseus later put Hippolyta aside to marry Phaedra. So Hippolyta rallied her Amazons to attack the wedding ceremony. When the defenders closed the doors on the attackers, either Hippolyta was killed, Theseus directly killed her in the fight, she was accidentally killed by another Amazon, Molpadia, while fighting by Theseus’ side, or was accidentally killed by her sister Penthesilea during this battle or in a separate incident. This killer was in turn slain by Theseus or Achilles. Some stories paint Theseus in a more favorable light, saying that Hippolyta was dead before he and Phaedra were wed, and this battle did not occur. Further complicating the narratives, a number of ancient writers say the Amazon in question was not Hippolyta at all, but her sister Antiope, Melanippe, or Glauce. Moreover, there are combined versions of the tale in which Heracles abducts and kills Hippolyta while Theseus, assisted by Sthenelus and Telamon, abducts and marries Antiope. There are also stories that Hippolyta or Antiope later bore Theseus a son, Hippolytus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particular recounting of the story, which matches the version of Shakespeare in which Theseus and Hippolyta first go to war and then get married, is that of &lt;a href=&quot;http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Theseus*.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch, &quot;The Life of Theseus&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, part of his &lt;em&gt;Parallel Lives&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, then, such were the grounds for the war of the Amazons, which seems to have been no trivial nor womanish enterprise for Theseus. [...] Now for a long time there was hesitation and delay on both sides in making the attack, but finally  p63 Theseus, after sacrificing to Fear, in obedience to an oracle, joined battle with the women. [...] And after three months, he says, a treaty of peace was made through the agency of Hippolyta; for Hippolyta is the name which Cleidemus gives to the Amazon whom Theseus married, not Antiope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &lt;strong&gt;Theseus goes to war with the Amazons and later marries Hippolyta&lt;/strong&gt;, just as is suggested in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;. Plutarch's version of the story is based on that of Cleidemus, but the latter unfortunately appears to have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=R4SHCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT66&amp;amp;lpg=PT66&amp;amp;dq=cleidemus+theseus&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=fNY0wcqD0m&amp;amp;sig=LyJCTpQimdXejihGUud1WDTMj-o&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjooeynuZvaAhVsJcAKHSs9D64Q6AEIZjAG#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=cleidemus%20theseus&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lost&lt;/a&gt;. However, the influence of Plutarch's writing on Shakespeare is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2867020?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;well documented&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/essays/plutarchshakespeare.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not restricted to &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to be generally accepted that Shakespeare's Theseus and Hippolyta are based on Plutarch's, who went to war and then were married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T11:23:01.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6254" CreationDate="2018-04-02T12:42:57.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Introduction&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare took the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta from his sources, most likely &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch’s&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;biography of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; and Chaucer’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales/The_Knight%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Knight’s Tale&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Shakespeare uses these characters in his own story, which does not correspond closely to Greek mythology. In the myth, Theseus, king of Athens, fought the Amazons and abducted an Amazon woman (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hippolyta&lt;/a&gt; in some accounts; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiope_(Amazon)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antiope&lt;/a&gt; in others), and this led to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attic_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attic War&lt;/a&gt;. But in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night’s Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Theseus and Hippolyta are witty aristocrats presiding over a festival of love and marriage. We can’t expect to find psychological realism in this kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mashup&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Shakespeare has Theseus say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And won thy love doing thee injuries,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he is simply alluding to the myth, which his audience could be assumed to be familiar with. Theseus fought the Amazons (“woo’d thee with my sword”) and abducted Hippolyta (“won thy love doing thee injuries”). By &lt;em&gt;injuries&lt;/em&gt; here Shakespeare means “wrongful actions or treatment” and not necessarily “bodily wounds”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are psychologically realistic ways to interpret this: perhaps Hippolyta really did fall in love with Theseus and so her abduction was consensual. Or perhaps she is making the best of a horrible situation by allowing Theseus to believe that she loves him. But we can’t expect the text of the play to help us out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Plutarch&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/shakespearesplu00nortgoog#page/n328/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;biography of Theseus&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch&lt;/a&gt; has some trouble organizing the many different versions of the story of Theseus and the Amazons. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas North&lt;/a&gt;’s translation (first edition 1579):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philochorus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philochorus&lt;/a&gt;, and some other hold opinion, that he went thither with Hercules against the Amazons: and that to honour his valiantness, Hercules gave him Antiopa the Amazon. But the more part of the other historiographers, namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellanicus_of_Lesbos&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hellanicus&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pherecydes_of_Syros&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pherecides&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herodotus&lt;/a&gt;, do write, that Theseus went thither alone, after Hercules’ voyage, and that he took this Amazon prisoner; which is likeliest to be true. For we do not find that any other who went this journey with him, had taken any Amazon prisoner besides himself. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bion_of_Borysthenes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bion&lt;/a&gt; also the historiographer, this notwithstanding, saith, that he brought her away by deceit and stealth. For the Amazons (saith he) naturally loving men, did not fly at all when they saw them land in their country, but sent them presents, and that Theseus enticed her to come into his ship, who brought him a present: and so soon as she was aboard, he hoised his sail, and so carried her away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover Plutarch’s sources disagree on the name of the Amazon woman that Theseus abducted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For this historiographer [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleidemus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clidemus&lt;/a&gt;] calleth the Amazon which Theseus married, Hippolyta, and not Antiopa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, the outlines of the story are fairly clear: Theseus went to the land of the Amazons, fought there against the Amazons, and returned to Athens with a prisoner, who was either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolyta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hippolyta&lt;/a&gt;, queen of the Amazons, or her sister &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiope_(Amazon)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antiope&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare was familiar with North’s translation of Plutarch, and used it as a major source for the plays &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night’s Dream&lt;/em&gt; there are only passing indications that Shakespeare had consulted Plutarch, but here’s one in Act II Scene I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;OBERON. How canst thou thus, for shame, Titania,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From Perigouna, whom he ravished?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make him with fair Aegles break his faith,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With Ariadne and Antiopa?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;North’s translation of Plutarch has the same spellings of these names of Theseus’ lovers: &lt;em&gt;Perigouna&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perigune&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Perigune&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Ægles&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegle_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aegle&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Antiopa&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiope_(Amazon)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antiope&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chaucer&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s choice of ‘Hippolyta’, rather than ‘Antiopa’ as in North's translation of Plutarch, is likely to have been influenced by Chaucer. In the prologue to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Canterbury_Tales/The_Knight%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Knight’s Tale&lt;/a&gt;, Chaucer gives a brief account of the myth, using the name ‘Ypolita’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in his tyme swich a conquerour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He conquered al the regne of Femenye,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That whilom was ycleped Scithia,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And weddede the queene Ypolita,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And thus with victorie and with melodye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T12:52:16.653" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T12:52:16.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6238" CreationDate="2018-04-02T13:54:38.563" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Galilee, where Jesus lived and preached, is a metonym for Christian morality; Cyprus, where Aphrodite emerged from the sea, for pagan sexuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the references are obscure, I think it’s possible to figure out the meaning from the context. At the end of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm#2-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book II chapter II&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, Jude Fawley is struggling between his infatuation with Sue Brideshead, and his Christian morality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He [Jude] affected to think of her [Sue] quite in a family way, since there were crushing reasons why he should not and could not think of her in any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first reason was that he was married, and it would be wrong. The second was that they were cousins. It was not well for cousins to fall in love even when circumstances seemed to favour the passion. The third: even were he free, in a family like his own where marriage usually meant a tragic sadness, marriage with a blood-relation would duplicate the adverse conditions, and a tragic sadness might be intensified to a tragic horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then at the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm#2-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter III&lt;/a&gt;, Jude attends the church of Cardinal College and hears the choir singing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Psalms#Psalm_119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalm 119&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he thinks he sees a way to reconcile his passion for Sue with his Christianity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl for whom he was beginning to nourish an extraordinary tenderness was at this time ensphered by the same harmonies as those which floated into his ears; and the thought was a delight to him. She was probably a frequenter of this place, and, steeped body and soul in church sentiment as she must be by occupation and habit, had, no doubt, much in common with him. To an impressionable and lonely young man the consciousness of having at last found anchorage for his thoughts, which promised to supply both social and spiritual possibilities, was like the dew of Hermon, and he remained throughout the service in a sustaining atmosphere of ecstasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(“The dew of Hermon” is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Psalms#Psalm_133&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalm 133&lt;/a&gt;: “Behold, how good and how pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity! […] as the dew of Hermon, that descended upon the mountains of Zion”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We suspect that Jude is fooling himself, and that by ‘social’ he really means ‘sexual’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though he was loth to suspect it, some people might have said to him that the atmosphere blew as distinctly from Cyprus as from Galilee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Metaphor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even if we don’t recognize the references, the metaphor must be that ‘Galilee’ represents Christian fellowship and morality, and ‘Cyprus’ pagan religion and sexual love. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galilee&lt;/a&gt; is the region of Palestine where Jesus lived and carried out his ministry. Cyprus was sacred to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aphrodite&lt;/a&gt;, the Greek goddess of love. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hesiod,_the_Homeric_Hymns_and_Homerica/The_Theogony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesiod’s &lt;em&gt;Theogony&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kronos&lt;/a&gt; castrated his father &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ouranos&lt;/a&gt;, he threw the severed genitals into the sea, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, afterwards, she came to sea-girt Cyprus, and came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass grew up about her beneath her shapely feet. Her gods and men call Aphrodite, and the foam-born goddess and rich-crowned Cytherea, because she grew amid the foam, and Cytherea because she reached Cythera, and &lt;strong&gt;Cyprogenes because she was born in billowy Cyprus&lt;/strong&gt;, and Philommedes because she sprang from the members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Translation by Hugh Gerard Evelyn-White.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Theme&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to Cyprus as the birthplace of Aphrodite is somewhat obscure, but it dovetails with one of the major themes of &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, that is, the contrast between the pagan sensuality of classical religion and the chaste austerity of Christianity. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm#1-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book I chapter V&lt;/a&gt; the young Jude addresses a prayer to the goddess Diana:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a day when Fawley was getting quite advanced, being now about sixteen, and had been stumbling through the “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Saeculare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carmen Sæculare&lt;/a&gt;,” on his way home, he found himself to be passing over the high edge of the plateau by the Brown House. The light had changed, and it was the sense of this which had caused him to look up. The sun was going down, and the full moon was rising simultaneously behind the woods in the opposite quarter. His mind had become so impregnated with the poem that, in a moment of the same impulsive emotion which years before had caused him to kneel on the ladder, he stopped the horse, alighted, and glancing round to see that nobody was in sight, knelt down on the roadside bank with open book. He turned first to the shiny goddess, who seemed to look so softly and critically at his doings, then to the disappearing luminary on the other hand, as he began:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;a href=&quot;https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Carmen_Saeculare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phœbe silvarumque potens Diana!&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then he regrets this and resolves to restrict himself to the study of Christianity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reaching home, he mused over his curious superstition, innate or acquired, in doing this, and the strange forgetfulness which had led to such a lapse from common sense and custom in one who wished, next to being a scholar, to be a Christian divine. It had all come of reading heathen works exclusively. The more he thought of it the more convinced he was of his inconsistency. He began to wonder whether he could be reading quite the right books for his object in life. Certainly there seemed little harmony between this pagan literature and the mediæval colleges at Christminster, that ecclesiastical romance in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/153/153-h/153-h.htm#2-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book II chapter III&lt;/a&gt;, following immediately on the Cyprus/Galilee passage, Sue meets a pedlar selling miniature statuettes of classical deities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were in the main reduced copies of ancient marbles, and comprised divinities of a very different character from those the girl was accustomed to see portrayed, among them being a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_de_Milo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Venus of standard pattern&lt;/a&gt;, a Diana, and, of the other sex, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Belvedere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apollo&lt;/a&gt;, Bacchus, and Mars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Venus is, of course, the Roman name for Aphrodite. Sue buys a Venus and an Apollo, but then is embarrassed by her impulse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they were paid for, and the man had gone, she began to be concerned as to what she should do with them. They seemed so very large now that they were in her possession, and so very naked. Being of a nervous temperament she trembled at her enterprise. When she handled them the white pipeclay came off on her gloves and jacket. After carrying them along a little way openly an idea came to her, and, pulling some huge burdock leaves, parsley, and other rank growths from the hedge, she wrapped up her burden as well as she could in these, so that what she carried appeared to be an enormous armful of green stuff gathered by a zealous lover of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, anything is better than those everlasting church fallals!” she said. But she was still in a trembling state, and seemed almost to wish she had not bought the figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally peeping inside the leaves to see that Venus’s arm was not broken, she entered with her heathen load into the most Christian city in the country by an obscure street running parallel to the main one, and round a corner to the side door of the establishment to which she was attached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When her landlady confronts her about the purchases Sue pretends the two statuettes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“St. Peter and St.—St. Mary Magdalen.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later on, after Sue has unwrapped them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally she looked up at the statuettes, which appeared strange and out of place, there happening to be a Calvary print hanging between them, and, as if the scene suggested the action, she at length jumped up and withdrew another book from her box—a volume of verse—and turned to the familiar poem—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The world has grown grey from thy breath!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So again we have a contrast between Venus and Galilee. The poem that Sue reads is Swinburne’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hymn_to_Proserpine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hymn to Proserpine&lt;/a&gt;’ which imagines a pagan believer lamenting the triumph of Christianity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T19:21:12.150" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6265" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-02T14:21:18.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T14:21:18.217" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T14:21:18.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6266" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-02T14:21:18.217" Score="0" Body="Questions about a type of novels that typically involves a mysterious death or a crime to be solved, a closed circle of suspects (each with a credible motive) and a detective who solves the crime. Use this tag for general questions about the genre, NOT for any question involving a mystery novel." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-02T15:25:02.767" LastActivityDate="2018-04-02T15:25:02.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6251" CreationDate="2018-04-02T15:35:49.947" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Easter sure comes with a significant religious meaning, it seems to be &lt;strong&gt;distinctly its more earthly and mundane aspects that are emphasised&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;. Though, the connections to resurrection aren't there for nothing either and surely intertwined with its less religious importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take a look at the situation when we're introduced to Easter, through the Easter bells ringing right when Faust is about to end his life, we see that Faust himself doesn't care too much about the religious aspects either, they only remind him of the experiences that are beyond his reach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Original&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Translation&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Die Botschaft hör' ich wohl, allein mir fehlt der Glaube &lt;br&gt; Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind. &lt;br&gt; Zu jenen Sphären wag' ich nicht zu streben, &lt;br&gt; Woher die holde Nachricht tönt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;I hear your message, but faith fails me: &lt;br&gt; The marvelous is faith’s dearest child. &lt;br&gt; I don’t attempt to rise to that sphere, &lt;br&gt; From which the message rings:&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than that, it makes him &lt;strong&gt;recall the memories of his youth&lt;/strong&gt;, where he was still striving full of energy and free from the hopeless realization of scholarly impotence that he's facing now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Original&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Translation&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Da klang so ahndungsvoll des Glockentones Fülle, &lt;br&gt; Und ein Gebet war brünstiger Genuß; &lt;br&gt; Ein unbegreiflich holdes Sehnen &lt;br&gt; Trieb mich durch Wald und Wiesen hinzugehn, &lt;br&gt; Und unter tausend heißen Thränen, &lt;br&gt; Fühlt' ich mir eine Welt entstehn. &lt;br&gt; Dieß Lied verkündete der Jugend muntre Spiele, &lt;br&gt; Der Frühlingsfeier freies Glück; &lt;br&gt; Erinnrung hält mich nun, mit kindlichem Gefühle, &lt;br&gt; Vom letzten, ernsten Schritt zurück.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;The bell notes filled with presentiments, &lt;br&gt; And a prayer was pleasure's call: &lt;br&gt; A sweet yearning, beyond my understanding, &lt;br&gt; Set me wandering through woods and fields, &lt;br&gt; And while a thousand tears were burning &lt;br&gt; I felt a world around me come to be. &lt;br&gt; Love called out the lively games of youth, &lt;br&gt; The joy of spring's idle holiday: &lt;br&gt; Memory's childish feelings, in truth, &lt;br&gt; Hold me back from the last sombre way.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This relates back to his earlier mournings of reaching a dead end in his studies and in what we are able to learn and know. We see this also in his earlier conversation with his student Wagner, a &amp;quot;bookworm&amp;quot; par excellence, where he looks down cynically onto Wanger's optimism towards gaining knowledge from reading the thoughts of past researchers who came to the same hopeless realization that Faust is facing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He basically has &lt;strong&gt;lost his will to strive and experience&lt;/strong&gt; (and ultimately to live) for there is nothing to gain anymore, and the Easter bells are calling back that &lt;strong&gt;youthfull naiveté and optimism&lt;/strong&gt; to some degree. And you'll notice how he says that it's &amp;quot;spring's idle holiday&amp;quot;. It is the mundane qualities of Easter as a &lt;strong&gt;social holiday and the beginning of spring&lt;/strong&gt; that calls him back to life, not the sublime religiosity that only proclaims spheres he can't and won't reach anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is strengthened by the following scene at the city gates, where we first see all kinds of merry folk going about their holiday business, as well as in the &amp;quot;Osterspaziergang&amp;quot;, one of &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;'s most famous monologues while he walks the streets with Wagner. It sets off by classic natural descriptions of &lt;strong&gt;spring's awakening and winter's retreat, while then juxtaposing that with the social awakening of civilization&lt;/strong&gt; from winter's drabness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Original&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Translation&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Vom Eise befreit sind Strom und Bäche, &lt;br&gt; Durch des Frühlings holden, belebenden Blick,  &lt;br&gt; Im Thale grünet Hoffnungs-Glück;  &lt;br&gt; Der alte Winter, in seiner Schwäche,  &lt;br&gt; Zog sich in rauhe Berge zurück.  &lt;br&gt; … &lt;br&gt; Überall regt sich Bildung und Streben,  &lt;br&gt; Alles will sie mit Farben beleben;  &lt;br&gt; Doch an Blumen fehlts im Revier,  &lt;br&gt; Sie nimmt geputzte Menschen dafür.  &lt;br&gt; Kehre dich um, von diesen Höhen  &lt;br&gt; Nach der Stadt zurück zu sehen.  &lt;br&gt; Aus dem hohlen finstren Thor  &lt;br&gt; Dringt ein buntes Gewimmel hervor.  &lt;br&gt; Jeder sonnt sich heute so gern.  &lt;br&gt; Sie feyern die Auferstehung des Herrn,  &lt;br&gt; Denn sie sind selber auferstanden,  &lt;br&gt; …  &lt;br&gt; Ich höre schon des Dorfs Getümmel,  &lt;br&gt; Hier ist des Volkes wahrer Himmel,  &lt;br&gt; Zufrieden jauchzet groß und klein:  &lt;br&gt; Hier bin ich Mensch, hier darf ich’s sein.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Rivers and streams are freed from ice  &lt;br&gt; By Spring's sweet enlivening glance.  &lt;br&gt; Valleys, green with Hope's happiness, dance:  &lt;br&gt; Old Winter, in his weakness, sighs,  &lt;br&gt; Withdrawing to the harsh mountains.  &lt;br&gt; …  &lt;br&gt; Change and growth are everywhere,  &lt;br&gt; He enlivens all with his colours there,  &lt;br&gt; And lacking flowers of the fields outspread,  &lt;br&gt; He takes these gaudy people instead.  &lt;br&gt; Turn round, and from this mountain height,  &lt;br&gt; Look down, where the town's in sight.  &lt;br&gt; That cavernous, dark gate,  &lt;br&gt; The colourful crowd penetrate,  &lt;br&gt; All will take the sun today,  &lt;br&gt; The Risen Lord they'll celebrate,  &lt;br&gt; And feel they are resurrected,  &lt;br&gt; …  &lt;br&gt; I hear the noise from the village risen,  &lt;br&gt; Here is the people's true Heaven,  &lt;br&gt; High and low shout happily:  &lt;br&gt; Here I am Man: here, dare to be!&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same how spring reinvigorates nature as well as humanity, the same it reinvigorates some of Faust's life spirits, be it only the more mundane spirits &lt;strong&gt;realizing that there is more in life than just knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;. This can be seen as well in relation to his ealier struggles that contrast the gaining of knowledge and ascension into higher spheres with his clinging to the enjoyment and experience of earthly life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Original&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Translation&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Du bist dir nur des einen Triebs bewußt,  &lt;br&gt; O lerne nie den andern kennen!  &lt;br&gt; Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,  &lt;br&gt; Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;  &lt;br&gt; Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust,  &lt;br&gt; Sich an die Welt, mit klammernden Organen;  &lt;br&gt; Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust,  &lt;br&gt; Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;You only feel the one yearning at best,  &lt;br&gt; Oh, never seek to know the other!  &lt;br&gt; Two souls, alas, exist in my breast,  &lt;br&gt; One separated from another:  &lt;br&gt; One, with its crude love of life, just  &lt;br&gt; Clings to the world, tenaciously, grips tight,  &lt;br&gt; The other soars powerfully above the dust,  &lt;br&gt; Into the far ancestral height.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to sum up, &lt;em&gt;to me&lt;/em&gt; Easter here, by marking the return of spring as well as in its significance as a joyful holiday, serves as both a &lt;strong&gt;reinvigoration of Faust's spirits&lt;/strong&gt; and his nature to strive as well as a &lt;strong&gt;reminder of the mundane qualities of life and the merits of experience and enjoyment&lt;/strong&gt; contrasted to  studying and book-based knowledge which Faust feels to have wasted his life on. And this in turn might just bring him into the &lt;strong&gt;proper mindset for a fruitful temptation by Mephisto&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't claim the above explanations to be the end of the story, though. I'm far from an expert on the topic and all that is based on a reread inspired by the question. I'm sure this has been studied time and time again and there might be more to Easter's significance under the hood. And even when seeing this angle of spring and revitalization, the connection to Christian resurrection isn't too hard to draw, in fact the very words of the work already do that (neither would the celebration of Jesus's resurrection at the very beginning of nature's be entirely coincidental in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The English translation presented here was taken from the website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Fausthome.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry in Translation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="12702" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T18:30:42.250" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T18:30:42.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6235" CreationDate="2018-04-03T00:56:53.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possible way to read this passage is that Charles does not pay much attention to news from home, no more than he pays to the nattering chatter of other passengers on the train in America.  Some people think Americans are especially given to striking up unwanted conversations with strangers on the train; in some cultures this can be regarded as a form of rudeness, an invasion of solitude and hence of privacy.  Such facts about themselves as they offer (&quot;my uncle Orley -- he came from Altoona -- was very fond of chili sauce, and said it was healthy, but he died of cancer at age 43&quot;, say) slip out of Charles's consciousness, and leave no mark on his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: in this passage, &quot;fellow traveller&quot; means &quot;a traveller sharing location with me for a period of time&quot;, not &quot;Communist sympathizer&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T00:56:53.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6273" CreationDate="2018-04-03T19:25:57.900" Score="8" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading through J.R.R. Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Fall of Arthur&lt;/em&gt; and in I.29 - I.33 it says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] But what foe dareth &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  war here to wake or the walls assail &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of this island-realm while Arthur liveth, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  if the Eastern wolf in his own forest &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  at last embayed must for life battle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is from the speech of Mordred at the beginning; he is encouraging Arthur to go off to war against the east so he can begin his treachery to gain the throne, as far as I can tell.) Is it a correct interpretation to say that the &quot;Eastern wolf&quot; are the &quot;heathen kings&quot; to the east? I'm not sure if there's more to this reference than that...was Fenris wolf, for example, chained to the east? Does this allude to anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T02:14:53.310" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T02:14:53.310" Title="What is the &quot;Eastern wolf&quot; in this poem?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;&lt;the-fall-of-arthur&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6272" CreationDate="2018-04-03T19:51:10.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is indeed a resonance with Norse mythology. In &lt;em&gt;Völuspá&lt;/em&gt;, stanza 39 according to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Regius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Codex Regius&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, or 24 according to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauksb%C3%B3k&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hauksbók&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (there are otherwise only variations of tense between them in this stanza), we are told of a giantess in an eastern forest, giving birth to a brood of wolves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The giantess old  &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  in Ironwood sat, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the east, and bore   &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  the brood of Fenrir; &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  Among these one   &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  in monster's guise &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was soon to steal   &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the sun from the sky. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/poe/poe03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Völuspa, translated by Henry Adams Bellow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother of Fenrir is called Angrboða in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyndlulj%C3%B3%C3%B0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyndluljóð&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The sun is said by Snorri to be chased by the wolf &lt;em&gt;Sköll&lt;/em&gt;, who will catch up to it and devour it at Ragnarök. (Sköll is sometimes conflated with Fenrir in other poems).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to if and how this resonance is important, it is more difficult to say without access to &lt;em&gt;The Fall of Arthur&lt;/em&gt;, but it could range from the entirely coincidental (&quot;wolf in forest&quot; and &quot;east&quot; are not so specific so as to make it totally improbable), via subconscious influence and general allusion to a specific reference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that Tolkien did have the &lt;em&gt;Völuspá&lt;/em&gt; in mind, but that he used it mostly for the effect of the imagery, and perhaps for the suggestion of world-shattering events (in the &lt;em&gt;Codex Regius&lt;/em&gt;, the stanza comes right before the events of Ragnarök, in &lt;em&gt;Hauksbók&lt;/em&gt;, it comes before the Aesir-Vanir war). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could be a further suggestion of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Battle of Maldon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as well, where the Viking host invading form the east are called &quot;slaughter-wolves&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T07:03:41.153" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T07:03:41.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-03T21:55:37.283" Score="4" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Fandom For Robots&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, written by Vina Jie-Min Prasad for Uncanny magazine,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; concerns a robot entering into the fandom of a particular anime TV series. As a member of &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;an online sci-fi/fantasy community&lt;/a&gt; myself, I can tell that this is a broadly accurate depiction of such fandoms in general. But as someone with absolutely no knowledge of anime, I have no idea if the fictional series&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hyperdimension Warp Record&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;HyperWarp&lt;/em&gt;, is a thinly-veiled reference to some particular real anime series, or if it's just meant to be a generic portrayal based on anime fandom as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the text of the story (&lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/fandom-for-robots/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which you can read in full online&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyperdimension Warp Record (超次元 ワープ レコード Chōjigen Wāpu Rekōdo, literal translation: Super Dimensional Warp Record) is a Japanese anime series set in space in the far future. The protagonist, Ellison, is an escapee from a supposedly inescapable galactic prison. Joined by a fellow escapee, Cyro (short for Cybernetic Robot), the two make their way across the galaxy to seek revenge. The targets of their revenge are the Seven Sabers of Paradise, who have stolen the hyperdimensional warp unit from Cyro’s creator and caused the death of Ellison’s entire family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Episode seven of HyperWarp comes with the revelation that the Second Saber, Ellison’s identical twin, had murdered their parents before faking her own death. After Cyro and Ellison return to the Kosmogram, the last segment of the episode unfolds without dialogue. There is a slow pan across the spaceship’s control area, revealing that Ellison has indulged in the human pastime known as “crying” before falling asleep in the captain’s chair. His chest binder is stained with blood from the wound on his collarbone. Cyro reaches over, gently using his grabbing claw to loosen Ellison’s binder, and drapes a blanket over him. An instrumental version of the end theme plays as Cyro gets up from his seat, making his way to the recharging bay at the back of the ship. From the way his footfalls are animated, it is clear that Cyro is trying his best to avoid making any noise as he walks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The credits play over a zoomed-out shot of the Kosmogram making its way to the next exoplanet, a tiny pinpoint of bright blue in the vast blackness of space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preview for the next episode seems to indicate that the episode will focus on the Sabers’ initial attempt to activate the hyperdimensional warp unit. There is no mention of Cyro or Ellison at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does this seem to be a reference to a particular real-life anime series?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Hat-tip to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037?m=43642098#43642098&quot;&gt;@BESW&lt;/a&gt; for making me aware of this story in the first place.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T21:55:37.283" Title="Is &quot;Hyperdimension Warp Record&quot; parodying/referring to a particular anime?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-03T23:00:41.137" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect, as stated in the above answers, that she is a beta. Another good reason is that it's made quite clear that fraternizing between castes is frowned upon. It's unlikely that a gamma girl would be pursued by alpha-plus men.&#xA;I figured the reason for her wearing green was because (and I could be wrong) there are not such strict rules for casual clothing. Maybe in their work environments, and in conditioning centers as children, they adhere to more of a uniform. Perhaps (maybe only for those of upper-castes) they have a little more freedom to make fashion choices (which would be good for the economy after all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4326" LastActivityDate="2018-04-03T23:00:41.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6235" CreationDate="2018-04-04T10:50:48.513" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people find themselves in the company of others who they expect never to see again they will sometimes reveal things about themselves that they would not reveal to people they know or expect to meet again.  They might blurt out that they had given a child up for adoption, or confess that they were an alcoholic, for example. It is indicative of the character's (Waugh's?) arrogance that he is dismissive of this type of communication which is not peculiarly American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4274" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T10:50:48.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6277" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:08:09.203" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T12:08:09.203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T12:08:09.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6278" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:08:09.203" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Australian writer Tim Winton (born 1960) or about any of his literary works, which include novels, children's books, non-fiction books, and short stories." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T13:32:14.543" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T13:32:14.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6279" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:12:21.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T12:12:21.790" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T12:12:21.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6280" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:12:21.790" Score="0" Body="Questions about J. R. R. Tolkien's unfinished poem 'The Fall of Arthur', published posthumously in 2013. Use this tag with the [j-r-r-tolkien] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T18:16:31.587" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T18:16:31.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5473" CreationDate="2018-04-04T12:19:26.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These lines are somewhat obscure, but maybe they can be understood in the context of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Tenth#VI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;immediately following stanza&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But soon they grow again and leave their nest.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       ‘Oh!’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Psalms#Psalm_55&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;saith the Psalmist&lt;/a&gt;, ‘that I had a dove’s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pinions to flee away, and be at rest!’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And who that recollects young years and loves,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though hoary now, and with a withering breast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And palsied fancy, which no longer roves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Beyond its dimm’d eye’s sphere,—but would much rather&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sigh like his son, than cough like his grandfather?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here Byron makes a contrast between the “youth, and vigour, beauty” of the hero, and the “hoary” “withering” age of—whom? Someone “that recollects young years and loves”, so this would seem to presage the old age of Don Juan, when his seductions will be at an end, and memory is all he has left of his youth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the reason why “those things … for an instant clip Enjoyment’s wings” is that youth and vigour bring with them a presentiment of age and death; but only for a moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron repeats this contrast between youth and age a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Don_Juan_(Byron)/Canto_the_Tenth#IX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;couple of stanzas later&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Juan was not meant to die so soon.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       We left him in the focus of such glory&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As may be won by favour of the moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Or ladies’ fancies—rather transitory&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Perhaps; but who would scorn the month of June,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Because December, with his breath so hoary,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Must come? Much rather should he &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;court the ray&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To hoard up warmth against a wintry day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T09:01:06.040" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T09:01:06.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6296" CreationDate="2018-04-04T16:41:58.080" Score="3" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading WB Yeats play &lt;em&gt;On Baile's Strand&lt;/em&gt; in which the protagonist Cú Chulainn kills a young man whom he later recognizes as his son. How did he not recognize him earlier? Fintain, a character in the play says of the victim's mother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I overheard her telling that she never had but one lover, and that he&#xA;  was the only man who overcame her in battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find any such event in the play. Can anyone throw some light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4329" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T16:47:30.917" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T19:57:10.697" Title="Why could Cú Chulainn not recognise his own son?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;&lt;on-bailes-strand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6283" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-04T16:52:04.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T16:52:04.647" LastActivityDate="2018-04-04T16:52:04.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6284" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-04T16:52:04.647" Score="0" Body="For questions about W.B. Yeats' play On Baile's Strand. Use in conjunction with [william-butler-yeats]." OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T18:16:26.780" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T18:16:26.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-04T18:49:26.623" Score="13" ViewCount="653" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chapter 12 of James Joyce's Ulysses, Cyclops, consists mostly of a first-person comic narrative of men drinking in a pub. The conversation is frequently interrupted, however, by a number of deadpan pastiches of varied style and length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these I understood - there are passages mocking spiritualism and Irish nationalism, for example - some I failed to interpret. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What interested me, though, is that some of these pastiches contain long lists, usually of names. They are so long - a page or more - as to be awkward and rather pointless to read. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example, chosen at random - and one of the shorter ones, at that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for princes and raspberries from their canes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another, added in since some readers might think the above example is just someone an author amusing themselves making a list. This one should hopefully make clear how apparently pointless most of the lists are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Amongst the clergy present were the very rev. William Delany, S. J., L. L. D.; the rt rev. Gerald Molloy, D. D.; the rev. P. J. Kavanagh, C. S. Sp.; the rev. T. Waters, C. C.; the rev. John M. Ivers, P. P.; the rev. P. J. Cleary, O. S. F.; the rev. L. J. Hickey, O. P.; the very rev. Fr. Nicholas, O. S. F. C.; the very rev. B. Gorman. O. D. C.; the rev. T. Maher, S. J.; the very rev. James Murphy, S. J.; the rev. John Lavery, V. F.; the very rev. William Doherty, D. D.; the rev. Peter Fagan, O. M.; the rev. T. Brangan, O. S. A.; the rev. J. Flavin, C. C.; the rev. M. A. Hackett, C. C.; the rev. W. Hurley, C. C.; the rt rev. Mgr M'Manus, V. G.; the rev. B. R. Slattery, O. M. I.; the very rev. M. D. Scally, P. P.; the rev. F. T. Purcell, O. P.; the very rev. Timothy canon Gorman, P. P.; the rev. J. Flanagan, C. C. The laity included P. Fay, T. Quirke, etc., etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think of many reasons why a list or two might suit this chapter. The chosen names may be illuminating to more erudite readers than I. It may be a pastiche in and of itself of the list-motif in Irish myth, given that nationalism is a theme of the chapter. It may be mocking the portentous nature of those who like to write lists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these, however, seem to explain the use of lists as a repeating motif. Almost a lists of lists, if you will. What does this motif signify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-04-04T19:29:12.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:19:41.960" Title="What is the purpose of all the lists in chapter 12 of Joyce's Ulysses?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6286" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-05T02:36:33.560" Score="8" ViewCount="3260" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the Alpha characters I can think of--Bernard, Helmholtz, Mustapha Mond, the DHC, Henry Foster--are men. And none of the female characters seem to be Alphas. Lenina is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/4/115&quot;&gt;probably a Beta&lt;/a&gt;. Linda is stated to be a Beta-Minus. Fanny Crowne is probably also a Beta or Beta-Minus since she works in the Fertilizing Room and it seems like all the technicians at the Hatchery are Betas (Linda worked in the Bottling Room).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some minor circumstantial evidence against the existence of female Alphas; at the beginning of Chapter 4 it says &quot;The lift was crowded with men from the Alpha Changing Rooms&quot;, as if the Alpha Changing Rooms are all-male. But the door Lenina opens towards the start of Chapter 3 just says &quot;Girls' Dressing-Room&quot;, not &quot;Beta Girls' Dressing-Room&quot;. I'm not entirely convinced by this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if female Alphas exist? Can we infer their existence or non-existence from evidence in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T05:53:36.980" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T05:53:36.980" Title="In Huxley's &quot;Brave New World&quot;, are there female Alphas?" Tags="&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6285" CreationDate="2018-04-05T09:55:48.650" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_schema_for_Ulysses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gilbert schema&lt;/a&gt; for understanding Ulysses, created by Joyce for his friend Stuart Gilbert, the technique that is used in the &quot;Cyclops chapter&quot; (a designation that also comes from the schema) is &quot;gigantism&quot;. This normally means the overgrowth of the entire body or certain parts of it, which seems an apt likeness for the kind of long lists the question is about. That the chapter connected to the giant cyclops should use a technique with such a name seems like one of the more self-evident parts of the schema.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(According to the Linati schema, also made by Joyce, the technique is instead &quot;alternating asymmetry&quot;, which is not quite as self-evident).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T07:58:02.353" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T07:58:02.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6307" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:30:36.407" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Civil War: a Narrative&lt;/em&gt;, Shelby Foote periodically uses the phrase &quot;airline miles&quot; to mean &quot;distance on a straight line.&quot; I can't recall offhand hearing this phrase anywhere else; why this phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commercial air travel was still fairly new then. The first volume was published in 1958, the same year as the introduction of the Boeing 707, which was the first commercially successful passenger jet. Was that an influence at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T13:23:04.277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T17:44:23.320" Title="Why does Shelby Foote use the phrase &quot;airline miles&quot; in The Civil War: a Narrative?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;shelby-foote&gt;&lt;the-civil-war-a-narrative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6324" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:31:09.217" Score="8" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the beginning of Joseph Conrad's novella &lt;em&gt;The Duel&lt;/em&gt;, the character D'Hubert visits the house of the hussar Feraud, where he tries to obtain information about Feraud's whereabouts from his maid.  he is eventually successful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Thanks, my dear! I don't know what I would have done without you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After manifesting his gratitude in an aggressive way, which at first&#xA;  was repulsed violently, and then submitted to with a sudden and still&#xA;  more repellent indifference, Lieut. D'Hubert took his departure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: what is the meaning of this second paragraph?  There's a rather obvious (and rather nasty) interpretation, which is backed up by the fact that there are several references earlier on to the maid's attractiveness, and D'Hubert's attraction to her.  I do hope I'm wrong about this, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4333" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T18:41:22.237" Title="Does D'Hubert rape the maid at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's 'The Duel'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6298" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:35:37.067" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Civil_War:_A_Narrative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page on &lt;em&gt;The Civil War: a Narrative&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says the following about the publication history:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1964 [Shelby Foote] began Volume 3, Red River to Appomattox, but found himself repeatedly distracted by the ongoing events in the nation and was not able to finish and publish it until 1974. Writing the third volume took as many years as had the first two combined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were these &quot;ongoing events&quot; primarily the Vietnam War, or did it include other events as well? Why were these events distracting to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T13:23:24.737" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T13:23:24.737" Title="Why did Volume 3 of &quot;The Civil War: A Narrative&quot; take so long to write?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;shelby-foote&gt;&lt;the-civil-war-a-narrative&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6291" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:36:53.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T18:36:53.210" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T18:36:53.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6292" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:36:53.210" Score="0" Body="The Civil War: a Narrative is a 3-volume history of the American Civil War written by Shelby Foote between 1958 and 1974. Use together with the [shelby-foote] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T12:03:32.967" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T12:03:32.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6293" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:37:47.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-05T18:37:47.277" LastActivityDate="2018-04-05T18:37:47.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6294" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-05T18:37:47.277" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novelist and historian Shelby Foote or about any of his literary works. He is best known for &quot;The Civil War: a Narrative&quot;, which is a 3-volume history of the American Civil War." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T12:03:27.310" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T12:03:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6282" CreationDate="2018-04-05T19:37:17.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cú Chulainn is a famous character from Irish myth, and the accidental slaying of his son is part of the legend. &lt;em&gt;On Baile's Strand&lt;/em&gt; is a retelling of parts of the myth, with some added subplots and comedy. Yeats, being Irish, would have presumed his audience was familiar with the rest of the story already. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the myth, the young Cú Chulainn travels to Scotland to train with the famed warrior-woman Scáthach. While there he fights against Scáthach's fierce rival Aífe and becomes the first person to beat her. He agrees to spare her life in exchange for her bearing him a son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the son is 8, and already a fierce warrior, he travels to Ireland to find his father. In some versions of the tale he is sent by his mother to kill Cú Chulainn in revenge for his marrying another woman, and she tells him never to identify himself to his foes. For whatever reason, the boy fails to claim his identify and is slain by Cú Chulainn, who has never seen his son, as an invader. When Cú Chulainn finds out, he is grief stricken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a good &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BA_Chulainn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page on Cú Chulainn&lt;/a&gt;. Here's what it says specifically about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BA_Chulainn#C%C3%BA_Chulainn_kills_his_son&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;death of his son&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eight years later, Connla, Cú Chulainn's son by Aífe, comes to Ireland in search of his father, but Cú Chulainn takes him as an intruder and kills him when he refuses to identify himself. Connla's last words to his father as he dies are that they would have &quot;carried the flag of Ulster to the gates of Rome and beyond&quot;, leaving Cú Chulainn grief-stricken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fullest version of this story is known as &lt;em&gt;Aided Óenfhir Aífe&lt;/em&gt; (The Death of Aífe's Only Son) and is found in a manuscript known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Book_of_Lecan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Yellow Book of Lecan&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently Yeats used this text as the basis for &lt;em&gt;On Baile's Strand&lt;/em&gt; as well as a poem, &lt;em&gt;Cúchulain's Fight with the Sea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been unable to source a definite translation, but here is the relevant text from &lt;a href=&quot;http://lairbhan.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/aided-oenfir-aife.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;what appears to be one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What was the cause of the death of Cú Chulainn's son? Not difficult.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cú Chulainn went for weapons instruction to Scáthaig the Foam-white daughter of Airdgeme in Letha to gain mastery of feats with her and he went to Aífe daughter of Airdgeme and he left her pregnant and said she would bear a son.&#xA;  ‘Take this thumb-ring of gold to hold', he said, ‘until it is fit for the boy. When it is fit, let him come to seek me in Ireland and not give way to a single man on the road and not declare himself to a single man and not refuse combat to a single man.’    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The son went one day seven years afterwards to seek his father.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(snip)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then he went after the boy in the water, until with deception the gaí bulga was used, because no person had been taught that weapon by Scáthach but Cu Chulainn alone. He shot it at the boy through the water, so that his entrails were at his feet.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘It is that indeed,’ he said, ‘this Scáthach did not teach me! Woe that you have wounded me!’ said the boy.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘It is true,’ said Cú Chulainn. He took the boy then in his two arms, and carried him over there and carried him before the men of Ulster.&#xA;  ‘Here is my son to you, oh Ulstermen,’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/aoife.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another possible translation&lt;/a&gt;, a little more embellished for the modern reader, courtesy of user @rand-althor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my memory serves me correctly, there's a longer and more detailed version of the story, compiled from a variety of sources, in Thomas Kinsella's translation of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A1in_B%C3%B3_C%C3%BAailnge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Táin Bó Cúailnge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in which he included a number of stories relevant to, but not directly part of &lt;em&gt;The Tain&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;- ^ James MacKillop, Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 5-6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T19:57:10.697" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T19:57:10.697" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11366" CreationDate="2018-04-06T12:59:37.933" Score="7" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the Childlike Empress reaches the home of the Old Man of Wandering Mountain, she has to climb a ladder made out of letters, his message to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her wide white gown was in tatters, for it had caught on every bend and crossbar of the message-ladder. Oh well, she had known all along that letters were hostile to her. She felt the same way about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is there hostility between her and letters?&lt;/strong&gt; Especially given that her realm exists only in books which are made out of letters. I doubt this is just a throwaway phrase with no particular significance, given the nature of this story and all its meta levels, but whatever the significance is, I'm missing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T16:54:52.497" Title="Why are letters hostile to the Childlike Empress?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6290" CreationDate="2018-04-06T13:21:26.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possibly the American Civil Rights Movement.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living as he did in Tennessee, in the American South, Foote would have seen a lot of changes during the decades surrounding his writing of &lt;em&gt;The Civil War: A Narrative&lt;/em&gt;. The fact that he was writing about the US Civil War, as a man from the South, would only have complicated this further for him. From the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://gardenandgun.com/articles/shelby-footes-war-story/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Shelby Foote's War Story: How a Memphis novelist’s history of the Civil War made history itself&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Jon Meacham (links added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Foote undertook his narrative of what he would later call “the crossroads of our being” in the years in which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;civil rights movement&lt;/a&gt; forced the South to confront the war’s worst legacy: segregation. He began work in the months after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brown v. Board of Education&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; decision came down, published his second volume in the year of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_on_Washington_for_Jobs_and_Freedom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;March on Washington&lt;/a&gt;, and completed the trilogy as the struggles over affirmative action were taking shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foote also wrote himself, in notes on the second volume:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am obligated to the governors of my native state and the adjoining states of Arkansas and Alabama for helping to lessen my sectional bias by reproducing, in their actions during several of the years that went into the writing of this volume, much that was least admirable in the position my forebears occupied when they stood up to Lincoln. [...] I suppose, or in any case fervently hope, it is true that history never repeats itself, but I know from watching these three gentlemen [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Barnett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ross Barnett&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orval_Faubus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orval Faubus&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Wallace&lt;/a&gt;] that it can be terrifying in its approximations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's understandable how current events in the world around him were so distracting to him, when they fitted so closely with the very events he was writing about in his historical narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T13:21:26.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6300" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-06T14:53:30.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T14:53:30.907" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T14:53:30.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6301" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-06T14:53:30.907" Score="0" Body="A courtroom drama or legal drama is a work of fiction giving prominence to the legal process and usually if not always featuring a courtroom trial or civil litigation as the major event. Lawyers and judges are often important characters. In addition, some great works of literature in various languages that are not all about a court case alone, have featured the legal process as an integral plot element." OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="2159" LastEditDate="2018-04-07T06:58:10.540" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T06:58:10.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6303" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6309" CreationDate="2018-04-06T15:21:04.233" Score="4" ViewCount="1154" Body="&lt;p&gt;Artax was evidently profoundly affected by the Swamp of Sadness, eventually sinking into a deep depression. However, the Swamp had no effect whatever on Atreyu, which Artax thought was likely due to him wearing the Amulet. That being the case, why didn't Artax just go back and wait for Atreyu outside of the swamp?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T10:28:32.010" Title="Why didn't Artax just wait for Atreyu outside the Swamp of Sadness?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6304" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-06T15:25:20.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-06T15:25:20.620" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T15:25:20.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6305" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-06T15:25:20.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about a type of thriller in which the major characters are lawyers and their employees." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-07T06:58:20.047" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T06:58:20.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-06T15:25:26.130" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Swamp of Sadness apparently had no effect on Atreyu, which Artax thought was likely due to him wearing the Amulet. That being the case, he's later obliged to consciously resist the paralyzing effect of Morla's eyes. Why did Morla's eyes have an effect when the Swamp didn't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T15:25:26.130" Title="Why did Morla's eyes have a paralyzing effect on Atreyu?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6288" CreationDate="2018-04-06T17:44:23.320" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the original sense of the word &lt;em&gt;airline&lt;/em&gt;. Now obsolete, it survived in works on surveying and military history into the 1960s. The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;airline&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 1. a. Chiefly &lt;em&gt;U.S.&lt;/em&gt; A direct line through the air; a straight line between two points on the earth's surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with citations dating back to the early 19th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1829   J. F. Cooper &lt;em&gt;Wept of Wish-ton-wish&lt;/em&gt; ii. 27   This clearing, which by an air line might have been half a mile from the place where his horse had stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1852   G. Grote &lt;em&gt;Hist. Greece&lt;/em&gt; IX. ii. lxx. 160   If we measure on Kiepert's map the rectilineal distance, the air-line is 170 English miles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s earliest citations for the sense &amp;quot;air transport service&amp;quot; are from 1890.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-06T17:44:23.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6303" CreationDate="2018-04-07T10:28:32.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Beforehand, they didn't know the effect of the swamp.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Atreyu and Artax first reach the swamp, it looks gloomy and forbidding but no more than that. Despite the name, they didn't realise that anyone entering it would get so depressed that they sank into the swamp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The little horse uttered one last soft neigh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You can't help me, master. It's all over for me. &lt;strong&gt;Neither of us knew what we were getting into. Now we know why they are called the Swamps of Sadness.&lt;/strong&gt; It's the sadness that has made me so heavy. That's why I'm sinking. There's no help.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3 (C), emphasis mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Afterwards, it was too late.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time they realised what was happening, Artax was already too far gone to be saved. The above quote is from when only the horse's head is protruding from the black water. When they stop, he's already sunk in up to his belly. Most importantly, he &lt;strong&gt;doesn't care&lt;/strong&gt;. Part of the effect of the Swamps of Sadness is depression and apathy, and someone in that state is unlikely to be able to make the effort required to pull themselves all the way out of the bog and back to safety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;With every step we take, the sadness grows in my heart. I've lost hope, master. And I feel so heavy, so heavy. I can't go on!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But we must go on!&amp;quot; cried Atreyu. &amp;quot;Come along, Artax!&amp;quot; He tugged at the bridle, but Artax stood still. He had sunk in up to his belly. And he made no further effort to extricate himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Artax!&amp;quot; cried Atreyu. &amp;quot;You mustn't let yourself go. Come. Pull yourself out or you'll sink.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Leave me, master,&amp;quot; said the little horse. &amp;quot;I can't make it. Go on alone. Don't bother about me. I can't stand the sadness anymore I want to die!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Artax lacks the willpower even to try to extricate himself, let alone to survive slogging back to the outside of the swamp. Atreyu tries his best to pull him out, but there's nothing he can do. &lt;strong&gt;It's not just drowning in the black water that kills Artax; it's his own apathy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-07T10:28:32.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6441" CreationDate="2018-04-07T11:40:13.380" Score="8" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chapter 14 of Joyce's Ulysses, The Oxen of the Sun, frequently changes writing styles as it unfolds. Joyce was attempting to mimic the development of the English language, from its Latin roots through to modern-day street slang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these passages are extremely difficult to understand. Here's an example modelled on the work of early Roman historians:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the prosperity of a nation more efficaciously asserted than by the measure of how far forward may have progressed the tribute of its solicitude for that proliferent continuance which of evils the original if it be absent when fortunately present constitutes the certain sign of omnipollent nature's incorrupted benefaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another, which mimics the work of Aelfric, a 10th century Anglo-Saxon writer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before born babe bliss had. Within womb won he worship. Whatever in that one case done commodiously done was. A couch by midwives attended with wholesome food reposeful cleanest swaddles as though forthbringing were now done and by wise foresight set: but to this no less of what drugs there is need and surgical implements which are pertaining to her case not omitting aspect of all very distracting spectacles in various latitudes by our terrestrial orb offered together with images, divine and human, the cogitation of which by sejunct females is to tumescence conducive or eases issue in the high sunbright wellbuilt fair home of mothers when, ostensibly far gone and reproductitive, it is come by her thereto to lie in, her term up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: not being familiar with the overwhelming majority of historical styles employed, it is not clear to me whether or not the incomprehensibility of the text is a consequence of the style it's mimicking? Or to put it another way, could Joyce have attempted this literary history lesson while leaving the text easier for the reader to follow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T10:51:58.300" Title="Is the impenetrability of Chapter 14 of Ulysses deliberate, or a consequence of its stylistic pastiches?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11869" CreationDate="2018-04-08T04:45:26.567" Score="6" ViewCount="860" Body="&lt;p&gt;Papa. Mama. Sister. Brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Berenstain Bears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they have real names? Or are those their real names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know Papa's middle initial is Q. What does that stand for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:41:22.313" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T01:39:19.343" Title="Do the Berenstain Bears have real names?" Tags="&lt;berenstain-bears&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6313" CreationDate="2018-04-08T11:04:33.400" Score="6" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to track down two books from the same collection that I read back in 2004 (they may have been published many years before then however)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember the series being called &quot;Armada war stories&quot;, but I do not recall the titles of the actual books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first book was about an operation during world war two, where two commandos sailed from the UK to a Norway in a little fishing boat, with their mission being to train the locals to engage in guerrilla resistance fighting against the Nazis who are occupying the area. I vaguely remember the boat being loaded with military equipment rather than fish, and the commandos sailing it were concerned that they might be inspected by German patrols and found out. The operation goes horribly wrong: one of the commandos is killed, while the other is severely disabled (If I recall correctly he loses the use of his legs). The remainder of the book describes this commando being assisted by an underground chain of resistance fighters to get to Sweden. I recall at one point he is laid on a sleigh, because his legs have been amputated, and people are dragging him up this really snowy mountain. Then there is a bit where the sleigh is parked in a tiny shed up the mountain for an extended period. The cold and snow were unbearable. I vaguely remember an action sequence where the sleigh is flying down a hill at top speed while nazis on skis are chasing it and shooting (but this is incredibly vague and may not have actually occurred in the book). I recall that when they finally get to sweden, they are dismayed because the first thing they see is a nazi soldier. I forget the conclusion of the tale but I think it was a happy ending/successful escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second book was about the experiences of some prisoners of war who were stuck in a nazi concentration camp. They were attempting to escape by digging a tunnel out of the camp. This digging of the tunnel was complicated by the fact that the camp was using seismic sensors to detect underground movement, so if they just tried to go ahead and dig the tunnel they would be found out. The way they get around this is by convincing the camp authorities to let them do some athletics out in the courtyard. They would carry out a vaulting block - with a POW hiding in it - and place it in the middle of the courtyard. The POW hiding in the block would start to dig, while the other POWs were vaulting over the block. Due to the impact to the ground caused by the vaulting, the seismic sensors were going nuts and this masked the fact that they were also digging a tunnel out of the compound. The guy who was digging the tunnel would bring back all the dirt with him at the end of the day, and distribute it among the other prisoners. The other prisoners would load their pockets with it and then shuffle around the courtyard slowly shaking it back out onto the ground. This carried on for months and amazingly they were not discovered, despite the fact that their tunnel was being dug right underneath the noses of the guards, out in plain sight in the middle of the courtyard. Once the tunnel is complete, a couple of the POWs successfully escape, complete with forged documents. I'm not sure how the story ends because I never finished the book. I got up to the part where they had just got out of the camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are able to help me identify even one of these books, that would go a long way to identifying the other because I'm pretty sure they were part of the same series. I would really love to track them down and read them again. I hope someone on here knows their titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4340" LastEditorUserId="4340" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T11:42:05.817" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T15:55:05.030" Title="Trying to track down two war story books (world war two)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6312" CreationDate="2018-04-08T14:38:43.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first  story sounds like a version of &lt;em&gt;We Die Alone&lt;/em&gt; by David Howarth,&#xA; an account of Jan Baalsrud's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Baalsrud&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ordeal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second story sounds like  Paul Brickhill's 1950 account &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Great Escape&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or a derivative rewrite. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalag_Luft_III#The_Great_Escape&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; for an account of the events. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-04-08T15:55:05.030" LastActivityDate="2018-04-08T15:55:05.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-08T20:34:19.350" Score="5" ViewCount="2636" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall long ago (30-40 years ago?) hearing or reading a story (maybe a short story, or a tale or joke told in a story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Country setting: Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn or Little House on the Prairie type environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Young lady (school teacher?) is skinny dipping (swimming nude) in the local watering hole or stream or pond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A group of young teens (some of her students?) come along a see her and start spying on her, but she quickly sees them. She tries telling/asking them to leave but they won't, and they start messing with her clothes she left on the shore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She starts getting mad and yelling at them to go away, but they come even closer, so she is moving around trying to keep them from seeing her body in the water. While she is moving she bumps into something on the bottom. Feels it and realizes it's an old washtub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now she has something to cover herself with, she pulls it up and holds it in front of her and charges up on shore. Chasing the kids around the clearing who have her clothes, and telling them to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About this time, she says something like &amp;quot;You kids know what I think...?&amp;quot;&#xA;And the kids reply something like &amp;quot;Yeah, you think there is a bottom in that washtub&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4342" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T21:18:06.373" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T21:18:06.373" Title="Short story about a lady (teacher?) caught skinny dipping by kids" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T11:24:16.670" Score="7" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alan Garner's novel The Owl Service has a small cast of characters, three of whom are female. On reflection, all three appear to be portrayed in a rather negative light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Alison is something of a passive, empty vessel, who rarely states any desires of her own and, in the course of the novel, is to some extent &quot;possessed&quot; by the vengeful Blodeuwedd.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nancy is an angry and bitter woman who, although there is some justification for her ill-temper, takes it out by ill-treating her son.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mother&quot; is not an active character in the novel, and is never given a name, but is a constant background presence. Other characters are motivated to satisfy her sometimes irrational desires, implying she is neurotic and petulant.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore there is Blodeuwedd herself, whose fury powers the entire plot of the book and cannot ever seem to be satisfied, in spite of the implied deaths of many men down the centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the lack of any positive female role models make the book sexist? If not, why not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T11:24:16.670" Title="Is The Owl Service sexist in its negative portrayals of women?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;&lt;the-owl-service&gt;&lt;alan-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6224" CreationDate="2018-04-09T11:48:57.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The ending is less political than it first appears but is, rather a device to push the reader to re-evaluate the themes of the book.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had no intention of answering this myself, but since it attracted no other answers I did a little digging and found a relevant paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/43308347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One More Time: The Conclusion of Alan Garner's &amp;quot;The Owl Service&amp;quot;, C. W. Sullivan III, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Vol. 9, No. 1 (33), pp. 46-54&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ending of the book has been divisive among critics. One called it &amp;quot;right intellectually&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;confused and not a strength&amp;quot;, for example. Others, however, felt it is a &amp;quot;great strength&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;inevitable&amp;quot;. One of the cornerstones of this opinion is that by ignoring the sentimental outcome of having the sympathetic Gwyn as the motive force, it makes the reader re-examine their assumptions about the story, leading to deeper reflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Significantly the author himself has said that either boy could have averted the tragedy at the heart of the myth. This could be evidence that he chose the ending purely for its shock power, as above, rather than its political significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the book ends on a positive note, there is evidence that the story is doomed to repeat itself again. Huw, the character who seems to have the most insight into previous iterations of the cycle, implies at several points that although Blodeuwedd usually comes in anger (&amp;quot;as owls&amp;quot;), it is not inevitable and that sometimes - as in the book's ending - she comes peacefully, &amp;quot;as flowers&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She wants to be flowers ... but you make her owls&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You have made her owls.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She is coming, and will use what she finds, and you have only hate in you.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She wants to be flowers, and you make her owls.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is correct, then the fact Blodeuwedd is pacified at the end of the book means it is not the end of the cycle and that she will come again. This means that Roger's victory is far less important than it first appears. He may have saved Alison or Gwyn, or he may not, but he has not laid Blodeuwedd to rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T11:48:57.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6321" CreationDate="2018-04-09T16:34:01.057" Score="7" ViewCount="3287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and encountered these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to&#xA;  be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen&#xA;  volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they&#xA;  stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint,&#xA;  promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and&#xA;  Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other&#xA;  books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a&#xA;  series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the &lt;em&gt;Yale News&lt;/em&gt;—and&#xA;  now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become&#xA;  again &lt;strong&gt;that most limited of all specialists&lt;/strong&gt;, the &quot;well-rounded man.&quot;&#xA;  This isn't just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at&#xA;  from a single window, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator Nick moved into West Egg, and determined to read many books on banking and securities, as well as literary works, in order to become the &quot;well-rounded man.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand especially what &quot;limited&quot; means. Does it indicate that the well-rounded men have limited knowledge compared to other specialists? Or does it indicate that the well-rounded men are so rare compared to other specialists? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also could not grasp how the concept that the well-rounded man was limited leads to the epigram that life is more successfully viewed from a single window. I think the well-rounded man has many windows, for he knows about everything albeit shallowly, so I couldn't see the connection here. Or, is the author being ironic here, saying that the well-rounded man is a failure because he has so many windows from which he looks out at life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I would like to know how the well-rounded men are &quot;limited&quot; and how the concept of being a well-rounded man is connected to looking at life from a single window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T18:08:25.887" Title="What does &quot;that most limited of all specialists&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6320" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-09T18:19:08.347" Score="5" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The city is an interesting place - an ensemble of people from all around the world, and even from different times (though the 20th century seems to be prevalent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their occupations, genders, beliefs, and everything else seems to be as diverse as possible, except one thing: there just aren't any great, or probably even decent, artists. Writers, actors, painters, film directors - all mediocre at best, while there are certainly great engineers and scientists (&quot;No Mendeleevs, but on a solid international level&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? Given the whole novel is a reflection on the life of the authors in the Soviet Union (it is, isn't it?), why are there no great artists in that world? Are they not chosen to be invited there, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-04-09T18:19:08.347" Title="Indeed, why doesn't the City have any great artists?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;the-doomed-city&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6317" CreationDate="2018-04-10T01:45:23.487" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;that most limited of all specialists&quot; refers to &quot;the well-rounded man&quot; in this sentence. When we refer to a &quot;well-rounded&quot; person, we refer to someone who generally knows a little about a lot of things, and is able to appreciate a lot of things. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They're the sort of person that knows who painted the Mona Lisa and perhaps The Ambassadors (if you're wondering on the latter, it's Hans Holbein the Younger), has read Romeo and Juliet and perhaps The Catcher in the Rye, knows what particles make up an atom, and so forth. In other words, they can catch basic allusions and references made by others. (This is a bit of an exaggeration to make a point, but ah, well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They specialize in knowing a little bit about everything. On the other hand, another specialist (think a savant, here) might make a point to know everything there is to know about Beowulf but have no clue that Julius Caesar is really more about Brutus, and yet another might be a stellar particle physicist but not know a femur from a tibula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is the first type of specialist, the well-rounded one, more useless? A savant-type specialist knows everything (or darned well near it) there is to know about a particular topic. When a problem comes up, they are almost assuredly able to solve it, or at least get the ball rolling. But the well-rounded specialist? They have no idea how to do anything of any depth in any field, because they've only skimmed the surface in a lot of fields, instead of going very in depth in one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit of a rephrasing of the expression, &quot;Jack of all trades, useful at none&quot; (or something like that, anyway). As for the second part of your question, the author is, I believe, referring to the fact that it's easier to be able to see only one perspective on an issue as opposed to being able to see multiple views on an issue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T01:45:23.487" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6289" CreationDate="2018-04-10T04:34:03.360" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was definitely an unwanted attention (groping, kissing), I don't believe it would be a full forced intercourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While maids and servants in the XVIII and XIX century were often abused and even raped by their masters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. Some servants suffered terrible abuse including beatings and rape. The chances of a master being held to account were remote.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If a pretty maid attracted her roving master's eye she had little choice but to accept her fate. Refuse and she would soon be packing her bags for an uncertain future without references. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/348130/The-real-life-Downton-Abbey-The-true-story-of-servants&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An actual physical attack (and at that time, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indecent_assault&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;indecent assault&lt;/a&gt; wouldn't be seen as one) at someone's else maid would be akin to damaging someone else's property - from D'Hubert could know, the maid could be already Lieut. Feraud lover (willingly or not, doesn't matter) and sleeping with someone's else lover would be faux pas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T04:34:03.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="76" CreationDate="2018-04-10T10:03:15.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there were a reason behind it, that's why i'm here; but since there is not, other than what Salvatore decided in the hurry, the simple answer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A genetic mutation. In real life brown is the color for human eyes and from somewhere (don't where and it doesn't really matter) humans have gotten blue eyes and the mix with blue and brown has caused a genetic mutation for the offspring to have green eyes. Maybe Drizzt was the first to have a genetic mutation of having lavender eyes, like a human would randomly get blue eyes instead of brown eyes. Also, there is a very rare eye color for humans, purple. What causes it? I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More magical approach for the reason for Drizzt's eyes is because he is a good person and not chaotic and evil. Much like enlightened good monks have blue, evil monks have red and neutral ones have purple, which is the mix of two. This does let me to think Drizzt would be neutral, but no, Drizzt is definitely a very kind person. So let's just scrap the monk theory, he after all is a ranger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last possibility could be that since Underdark is the size of the planet (afaik) there are likely to be more dark elf societies other than just the ones in Menzoberranzan, this means that while Menzoberranzan people have red eyes, some other dark elves from other societies could have other eye colors (like there now are), so it's possible that somewhere in Drizzt's family line, there has been someone from somewhere else, who didn't have red eyes, possibly purple and then the child got red eyes, but generations pass and Drizzt inherits his great grandfather's purple eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these theories are just that, theories, in no way canon, BUT based on human genetical facts. But Forgotten Realms is a place of magic, the real reason might as well be &quot;Poof, magic!&quot; We don't know the reason, but i hope my theories sheds some light on the matter and states that, even though we don't know the reason, there IS a reason (possibly, and hopefully :D, one of my theories) and not just utter non-sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4353" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T10:03:15.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6289" CreationDate="2018-04-10T12:58:24.053" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Censorship&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until the second half of the 20th century, it was not easy to publish literature in English that described sex in detailed or explicit terms. In England, literature was censored according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscene_Publications_Act_1857&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obscene Publications Act 1857&lt;/a&gt;; and in the U.S. according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comstock laws&lt;/a&gt;. These laws, prosecuted by private organizations like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Vigilance_Association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Vigilance Association&lt;/a&gt; in England, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Society_for_the_Suppression_of_Vice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New York Society for the Suppression of Vice&lt;/a&gt;, made it necessary for mainstream writers like Conrad to approach sex obliquely, using implication, ellipsis, allusion and symbolism in place of explicit description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This code relied on a common understanding between writers and readers of what was permissible to say and what could plausibly be read into the gaps. But sixty years after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;R. v. Penguin Books Ltd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth_v._United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Roth v. United States&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; it can be hard to accurately reconstruct what the original audience would have understood from a work, and easy to miss some implications and read too much into others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Evidence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Conrad’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2305/2305-h/2305-h.htm#link2H_4_0007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Duel&lt;/a&gt;’ is a fictional account of a real rivalry between two cavalry officers in Napoleonic France. ‘Feraud’ represents &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Fournier-Sarlov%C3%A8ze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;François Fournier-Sarlovèze&lt;/a&gt;, known as ‘Napoleon’s Devil’ and ‘the worst subject of the Grande Armée’ for his duelling, fraud, political conspiracy, dishonesty and other crimes. ‘D’Hubert’ represents &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Dupont_de_l%27%C3%89tang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre Dupont de l'Étang&lt;/a&gt;, whose only brush with the law seems to have been his court-martial for surrendering at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bail%C3%A9n&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bailén&lt;/a&gt; in 1808. Thus, rape might be in character for Feraud, but not for D’Hubert.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘The Duel’ was published in 1908. Based on comparable passages in contemporary works (see below for details), readers of mainstream fiction in this period would not have been expected to deduce a rape or attempted rape merely from the hint of “manifesting his gratitude in an aggressive way”. It seems more likely that a less serious sexual assault, such as a kiss, is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The maid is not alone in the house: there is a landlady and at least one more servant, a gardener (who is deaf, but D’Hubert would not know that):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And if you want any witnesses, I’ll send word to the old girl to put her head out of a window at the back. Stay! There’s the gardener. He’ll do. He’s as deaf as a post, but he has two eyes in his head.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A subsequent interaction with the maid suggests that she is scared of Feraud but not of D’Hubert:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The pretty maid had opened the door. Lieut. Feraud brushed past her brusquely, and she raised her scared and questioning eyes to Lieut. D’Hubert, who could do nothing but shrug his shoulders slightly as he followed with marked reluctance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Compare the brief clause “which at first was repulsed violently” with the detailed description of the maid’s behaviour after the first duel, when she mistakenly believes that D’Hubert intends to kill the wounded Feraud:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The affair was ugly enough as it stood, and Lieut. D’Hubert addressed himself at once to the task of stopping the bleeding. In this task it was his fate to be ridiculously impeded by the pretty maid. Rending the air with screams of horror, she attacked him from behind and, twining her fingers in his hair, tugged back at his head. Why she should choose to hinder him at this precise moment he could not in the least understand. He did not try. It was all like a very wicked and harassing dream. Twice to save himself from being pulled over he had to rise and fling her off. He did this stoically, without a word, kneeling down again at once to go on with his work. But the third time, his work being done, he seized her and held her arms pinned to her body. Her cap was half off, her face was red, her eyes blazed with crazy boldness. He looked mildly into them while she called him a wretch, a traitor, and a murderer many times in succession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the reader were expected to believe that D’Hubert raped the maid, then surely Conrad would have written a description more like this one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first part of ‘The Duel’ is set in Strasbourg in “a short interval of peace”. A cavalry officer might be reckless about rape in enemy territory during wartime, but it was a different matter in a city in peacetime France where he would risk discovery and court-martial. In particular, after the maid attacks D’Hubert he is worried for his reputation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This did not annoy him so much as the conviction that she had managed to scratch his face abundantly. Ridicule would be added to the scandal of the story. He imagined the adorned tale making its way through the garrison of the town, through the whole army on the frontier, with every possible distortion of motive and sentiment and circumstance, spreading a doubt upon the sanity of his conduct and the distinction of his taste even to the very ears of his honourable family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Comparison&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To try to understand what readers might have expected to encounter, here are some passages describing rapes and attempted rapes in works approximately contemporary with ‘The Duel’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forsyte_Saga#The_Man_of_Property_(1906)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Man of Property&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1906) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Galsworthy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Galsworthy&lt;/a&gt;, Irene Forsyte &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/manofproperty00gals#page/282/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;refuses consent&lt;/a&gt; to her husband Soames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He answered: “I want to know how long this state of things between us is to last? I have put up with it long enough.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Will you please leave my room?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Will you treat me as your husband?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Then, I shall take steps to make you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Do!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/manofproperty00gals#page/314/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;couple of chapters later&lt;/a&gt; he rapes her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The morning after a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his rights and acted like a man, he breakfasted alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He breakfasted by gaslight, the fog of late November wrapping the town as in some monstrous blanket till the trees of the Square even were barely visible from the dining-room window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not swallow attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of the night before, and break down the resistance which he had suffered now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted helpmate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands—of her terrible smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame of the single candle, before silently slinking away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Veronica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ann Veronica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1909) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. G. Wells&lt;/a&gt;, the newspaper proprietor Ramage &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/annveronica00well_0#page/170/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attempts to rape the heroine&lt;/a&gt; after a dinner but she resists him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then before she could say a word to arrest him he was at her side. “Don’t!” she said, weakly, as he had bent down and put one arm about her and seized her hands with his disengaged hand and kissed her—kissed her almost upon her lips. He seemed to do ten things before she could think to do one, to leap upon her and take possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ann Veronica’s universe, which had never been altogether so respectful to her as she could have wished, gave a shout and whirled head over heels. Everything in the world had changed for her. If hate could kill, Ramage would have been killed by a flash of hate. “Mr. Ramage!” she cried, and struggled to her feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“My darling!” he said, clasping her resolutely in his arms, “my dearest!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Mr. Ramage!” she began, and his mouth sealed hers and his breath was mixed with her breath. Her eye met his four inches away, and his was glaring, immense, and full of resolution, a stupendous monster of an eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She shut her lips hard, her jaw hardened, and she set herself to struggle with him. She wrenched her head away from his grip and got her arm between his chest and hers. They began to wrestle fiercely. Each became frightfully aware of the other as a plastic energetic body, of the strong muscles of neck against cheek, of hands gripping shoulder-blade and waist. “How dare you!” she panted, with her world screaming and grimacing insult at her. “How dare you!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheik_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sheik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Hull&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. M. Hull&lt;/a&gt;, Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abducts and rapes&lt;/a&gt; the heroine Diana Mayo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The warm sunshine was flooding the tent when Diana awoke from the deep sleep of exhaustion that had been almost insensibility, awoke to immediate and complete remembrance. One quick, fearful glance around the big room assured her that she was alone. She sat up slowly, her eyes shadowy with pain, looking listlessly at the luxurious appointments of the tent. She looked dry-eyed, she had no tears left. They had all been expended when she had grovelled at his feet imploring the mercy he had not accorded her. She had fought until the unequal struggle had left her exhausted and helpless in his arms, until her whole body was one agonised ache from the brutal hands that forced her to compliance, until her courageous spirit was crushed by the realisation of her own powerlessness, and by the strange fear that the man himself had awakened in her, which had driven her at last moaning to her knees. And the recollection of her abject prayers and weeping supplications filled her with a burning shame. She loathed herself with bitter contempt. Her courage had broken down; even her pride had failed her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without claiming that this is any kind of definitive survey of the period, I note that although in these passages the reader has to do some imaginative reconstruction, the essential facts of what has happened are clear and the reader isn’t left in any doubt as to whether rape has or hasn’t occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-07T18:41:22.237" LastActivityDate="2019-04-07T18:41:22.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-10T14:38:39.850" Score="4" ViewCount="458" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently revising for my main exams and I'm not too sure on why Dickens wrote the novella. I know he wanted the poverty of children and families to change but how could I write this for a exam?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2960" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-10T19:58:50.067" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T18:17:51.467" Title="Why did Dickens write A Christmas Carol" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-christmas-carol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6325" CreationDate="2018-04-10T15:23:51.223" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dickens had a variety of motivations in writing &lt;em&gt;A Christmas Carol&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Financial&lt;/strong&gt;. Dickens earned a living as an author, and sales of his previous novel, &lt;em&gt;Martin Chuzzlewit&lt;/em&gt;, were slowing. As a result, his publishers were threatening to reduce his income. At the same time, his wife was expecting a fifth child so his expenses were due to increase. He needed to write something popular simply because he needed the income.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Social&lt;/strong&gt;. Prior to the Victorian era when Dickens lived, Christmas celebrations were largely religious in nature. During his life celebrations, as we know them today with a tree, cards and presents, were becoming more popular. A tale promoting these themes thus seemed likely to find a ready audience. Christmas also held a strong interest for Dickens and he had written stories with a Yuletide theme before such as &lt;em&gt;A Christmas Dinner&lt;/em&gt; and the inclusion of a Christmas episode in &lt;em&gt;The Pickwick Papers&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Political&lt;/strong&gt;. The plight of the poor was a long-standing theme in Dickens' prior work, since his own childhood had been touched by poverty following his father's imprisonment as a debtor. Events in 1843 before he started work on &lt;em&gt;A Christmas Caro&lt;/em&gt;l brought these feelings to the fore. He witnessed child labour and the suffering it caused in both Cornwall and London. A Parliamentary report, the &lt;em&gt;Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission&lt;/em&gt; was published on the subject. Dickens wanted to respond to this with a pamphlet of his own but felt a moving Christmas narrative would reach a wider audience, and prove more moving than a polemic essay.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Kelly, Richard Michael (2003). &quot;Introduction&quot;. In Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Callow, Simon (2009). Dickens' Christmas: A Victorian Celebration.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-10T15:23:51.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6331" CreationDate="2018-04-11T06:54:44.167" Score="4" ViewCount="9421" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and came to be curious as to what &quot;the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people—his&#xA;  imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The&#xA;  truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his&#xA;  Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if&#xA;  it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father's&#xA;  business, &lt;strong&gt;the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty&lt;/strong&gt;. So&#xA;  he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy&#xA;  would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to&#xA;  the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young Gatsby found his humble family background unsatisfactory; that was why he began to imagine himself as somebody different, divine. Thus he started to reach for a higher goal in his life, such as earning a huge amount of money or winning Daisy's love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not understand especially what &quot;the service of&quot; meant. Does it mean that he provided such beauty? Or that he believed in such beauty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since &quot;His Father's business&quot; has some Biblical undertone in it, I would like to know whether the boldfaced phrase also has such a tone in it. I am not much knowledgeable when it comes to the Bible, so I would like to know whether there is some description that Jesus serviced some beauty, just like Gatsby, because I think that could give me some hint as to what was indeed &quot;a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T10:50:09.687" Title="What does &quot;the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6333" CreationDate="2018-04-11T08:39:41.877" Score="4" ViewCount="1924" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and came to be curious as to the meaning of &quot;ramifications&quot; and &quot;by which&quot; in these sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields,&#xA;  of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since seventy-five. The&#xA;  transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire&#xA;  found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and,&#xA;  suspecting this, an infinite number of women tried to separate him&#xA;  from his money. &lt;strong&gt;The none too savory ramifications by which&lt;/strong&gt; Ella Kaye,&#xA;  the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and&#xA;  sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid&#xA;  sub-journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable&#xA;  shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz's destiny in&#xA;  Little Girl Bay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator Nick is telling how Gatsby first came into being. Before he became Gatsby, he was named James Gatz; but when he met Dan Cody, who would start him in business and leave him inheritance, he decided to change his name to Jay Gatsby. When he met Gatsby, Dan Cody was soft-minded and was liable to be swayed by women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what &quot;ramifications&quot; and &quot;by which&quot; meant. Are the ramifications some flaws in his character derived from his soft-mindedness? Or the negative results, or rumors, caused by the fact that Ella Kaye pushed him out to the sea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I would also like to know what &quot;by which&quot; means. Does that mean Ella Kaye played Madame de Maintenon by the none too savory ramifications? If it is the case, what does &quot;by&quot; mean here? Did she use, or took the advantage of, the ramifications?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T19:08:29.167" Title="What does &quot;The none too savory ramifications by which&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6329" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-11T08:53:37.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T08:53:37.733" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T08:53:37.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6330" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-11T08:53:37.733" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novella 'A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas' by Charles Dickens, first published in 1843. Use this tag with the [charles-dickens] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T11:11:51.320" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T11:11:51.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6327" CreationDate="2018-04-11T11:38:02.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The phrase is purposefully biblical and is used to denote Gatsby's inflated but empty ego.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's provide a dictionary definition of the unusual word &quot;meretricious&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;apparently attractive but having no real value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the &quot;vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty&quot; is something impressive but ultimately empty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to making this statement, the author indicates that the biblical undertones here are to be taken literally. Gatsby's self-image is that of a &quot;son of God&quot;, so his &quot;Father's work&quot; means the work of God. The implication is clear: that Gatsby's ego is so huge as to believe himself to be divine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fitzgerald may have taken this striking metaphor from the work of philosopher Ernest Renan, whom he is known to have admired. Renan's book, &lt;em&gt;The Life of Jesus&lt;/em&gt;, posits the idea that Jesus was a historical figure who invented himself as the son of God and became so invested in his self-deception that he allowed himself to be crucified. This is not dissimilar to Gatsby's life in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key difference between Jesus and Gatsby here, however, is that Jesus wanted to spread a positive message of peace and love. Gatsby, however, creating himself in his own image, is instead spreading an empty &quot;meretricious&quot; message which appears superficially attractive but contains nothing of value. The text does not make clear that he's spreading his beliefs, but the religious overtones still suggest a certain level of proselytizing going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can also be read as a metaphor for the corrupting influence of capitalism. Ancient society looked up to religious ideals of self-improvement. Modern society worships only the tawdry business of acquisition. A quest for genuine self-improvement has been replaced by one in which the show of making the effort is more important than the outcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- The Mystery of Ungodliness: Renan's Life of Jesus as a Subtext for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and “Absolution”, Bryce J. Christensen, 1986, Christianity and Literature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T10:50:09.687" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T10:50:09.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-11T15:17:21.670" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paperback Probably from the 80s. Cover may have had the exterior short of an office tower (~20 floors) with a man suspended on a rope swinging outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man goes to his companies office in the tower, (The building is pretty deserted, its either a holiday, or after hours/early morning) He is in a side room (Snack room? Xerox room? Coffee break area?) when he sees armed men walk past toward his office talking on the radio clearly looking for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now he is dodging around up and down to various floors trying to avoid the armed men. He can't call out, (Phone lines are cut) or use the elevator (they have either shut it down or put it in emergency mode where it will only go to the ground floor where they have more men waiting)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhere along the chase he gets rappelling gear (I think from breaking into an Adventure Outfitters Shop office, or taking if from one of the men whom he is able to ambush) and using it to transfer to another floor, by rappelling down the elevator shaft, or the outside of the building. (i.e. they know he is above 16th floor, have men stationed on 15th, so he repels down to 12th to leapfrog past them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns into a Die Hard type situation, with him scrambling around trying to avoid them and/or take them out. (If I recall correctly, except for the team leader, they are not highly trained special forces types, just well trained and armed Security guards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why they are after him.&lt;/strong&gt; From overhearing them, or hearing them talk on a radio he got from one of them he ambushed, or by talking with them over the radio he got from one of them. They tell him why they want him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Apparently a day or two before the story stats, while visiting a research lab in the course of his job. (or visiting a facility that had a secret research lab) He became infected with a deadly virus. I think an animal got lose and either scratched or bit him or more likely got lose and contaminated some object that he later touched. Because no one at that time he is there realizes he was infected until they review the tapes after he has already left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The virus he has contracted is Lethal, has a short incubation period, a highly contagious period, then after the contagious period stops rapidly breaks down your body and you die a few days later. (ie, 3 days after exposure, you can pass the virus to anyone through contact or fluid exchange (Kissing, splatter with blood, spitting, coughing on them) but that phase only last 2-3 days, after that you can not spread the virus, but your going to be dead in a couple days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; I believe the men after him are the security team from the research lab, who are trying to kill him BEFORE he becomes contagious. But do NOT want the authorities know know about the situation. (Lab was doing illegal research?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4342" LastEditorUserId="4342" LastEditDate="2018-04-11T15:53:09.260" LastActivityDate="2018-04-11T15:53:09.260" Title="80s? Infected Man trapped in an Office tower with people trying to kill him" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6328" CreationDate="2018-04-12T00:28:53.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, first, the whole beginning of your quote is basically saying: Cody was rich, but as he was getting older and presumably had a soft spot for women or wasn't super clever, many women tried to marry him for his money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ramifications means consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Madame de Maintenon is actually a historical figure. She was the second wife of King Louis XIV of France, but her marriage wasn't actually official; she was of a different social rank than the King, so she was never officially queen. However, she had a lot of influence at court. She is often depicted in works as ambitious, greedy, and evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's try to tackle the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening here is that Ella Kaye is acting like Madame: she's clever, so she takes advantage of Cody, she's greedy for Cody's money, and she's &quot;evil&quot; - she doesn't actually love Cody; that's why she effectively kicks him out to see on a yacht and steals all his money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;none too savory ramifications&quot; immediately follows the section on Cody being &quot;on the verge of soft-mindedness&quot;, indicating that Ella is using the consequences of Cody's soft-mindedness, thus the &quot;by which&quot;: the consequences of Cody's soft-mindedness are how Ella accomplishes her unsavory deed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, as Will Crawford says, instead of ramifications, it actually says machinations, the phrase makes even more sense. Machinations are schemes/plots. In other words, it's saying that Ella's not-so-savory (evil/non-legal) plans to gain power and money by marrying Cody were common knowledge to journalists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T19:08:29.167" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T19:08:29.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6334" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6335" CreationDate="2018-04-12T09:40:23.047" Score="3" ViewCount="521" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, and came to be curious as to what &quot;the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop&#xA;  and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy&#xA;  ground. I looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I&#xA;  had found marvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night&#xA;  three months before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the&#xA;  funeral, or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses, and&#xA;  he took them off and wiped them to see &lt;strong&gt;the protecting canvas unrolled&#xA;  from Gatsby’s grave.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter9.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 9&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the narrator Nick, Gatsby's father, and a priest went to the cemetery where Gatsby was to be buried. However, as they went into the cemetery, a man came in, who turned out to be the man whom Nick met in one of Gatsby's parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what was the &quot;protecting canvas&quot; and how it unrolled from Gatsby's grave. I guessed, since it was raining, the canvas cloth was covering the pit in which Gatsby was to be laid down. But as people arrived, the cloth was now &quot;unrolled.&quot; So I wonder why it was described as the &quot;protecting&quot; canvas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:31:52.407" Title="What does &quot;the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6334" CreationDate="2018-04-12T13:23:59.340" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no great mystery to this: it literally means what it says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newly-dug graves are often covered with canvas to &lt;strong&gt;protect&lt;/strong&gt; them from the rain. Otherwise, the dug earth would turn to mud. This is especially true before the coffin is lowered into the hole. Not only is the expanse of bare earth greater, but making the hole blend in with the green grass makes it less frightening and worrying for the mourners to behold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1OBsH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1OBsH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A dug-up grave covered with rolls of green-colored canvas.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrasing ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rain poured down his thick glasses, and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is slightly odd, and at first, glance makes it sound as though the man is watching the canvas unrolling. But it's only some confusion around the tense. You can also read it as meaning &amp;quot;he saw the canvas, which was already unrolled&amp;quot; or that &amp;quot;he saw the canvas, which someone was in the process of unrolling&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The canvas is being unrolled, presumably, so that the grave can be filled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T02:31:52.407" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:31:52.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6345" CreationDate="2018-04-12T16:05:44.183" Score="2" ViewCount="1175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd really like to know what violence has to do with your typical bodice ripper romance novel. I've found either this term in some definitions, and others which hint at something like it, such as forcefulness or manhandling. Usually they describe the seduction of the heroine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bodice ripper is a pejorative term for romance in general that has&#xA;  been recycled to refer to a specific sub-genre of historical&#xA;  romance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/genres/bodice-ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;goodreads.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a modern Gothic novel or historical romance, usually in paperback&#xA;  format, featuring at least one passionate love scene,&#xA;  characteristically one in which the heroine vainly resists submitting&#xA;  to the villain or hero.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionary.com/browse/bodice--ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a historical romance novel that includes scenes of sexual passion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bodice+ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The covers of these novels tended to feature scantily clad women being&#xA;  grabbed by the hero, and caused the novels to be referred to as&#xA;  bodice-rippers.&lt;br&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_novel#Birth_of_modern_romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sexually explicit romantic novel; usually in a historical setting&#xA;  and always with a plot involving the seduction of the heroine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/bodice-ripper.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phrases.org.uk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the definitions start to hint at forcefulness or violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An historical romance where the heroine has lots of non-consensual&#xA;  sex, which becomes consensual.&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bodice%20ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;n. Informal A romantic novel or film marked by seduction of a female&#xA;  protagonist, sustained drama, and sometimes violence.&lt;br&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bodice+ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American&#xA;  Heritage Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;informal. a romantic novel, usually on a historical theme, that&#xA;  involves some sex and violence&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bodice+ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a historical or Gothic romance typically featuring scenes in which the&#xA;  heroine is subjected to violence &lt;br&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bodice%20ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the most eyebrow-raising one, found a bit lower at The Free Dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noun  1.  bodice ripper - a romantic novel containing scenes in which&#xA;  the heroine is sexually violated&lt;br&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/bodice+ripper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordNet 3.0, Farlex clipart&#xA;  collection. 2003-2008. Princeton University&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was quite surprised to find this sort of language used to describe this particular genre. By that I mean the bodice ripper romance novel in particular, whose name seems to have pejorative tones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4362" LastEditorUserId="4362" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T16:28:58.637" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:38:05.870" Title="What does violence have to do with a 'bodice ripper' romance novel?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;historical-romance&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6336" CreationDate="2018-04-12T20:40:08.033" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bodice-ripper is a novel in which passionate sex is described.  A bodice is the upper part of a dress.  The rampant male, so demented by desire he can't wait any longer, tears (rips) off the bodice to reveal the breasts of his beautiful and lustful but uncertain and resisting quarry.  But it ends well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The desire is always mutual, but the lady may be obliged by a marriage or promise of fidelity to someone else, or she might be in the thrall of some patriarch or matriarch who does not approve.  Or, he might be married to a vile or mad woman but fortunately she will sooner or later be dispatched by plot developments that release him from his ghastly captivity to be the loving and kind partner for that fortunate bodice lady.  She was so lucky that when she said no he heard yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The violence is always a manifestation of sexual frustration. You can see that bodice rippers  are not exactly today's type of novel!  We don't have sexual frustration any more, no not us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4274" LastEditorUserId="4274" LastEditDate="2018-04-12T20:45:11.363" LastActivityDate="2018-04-12T20:45:11.363" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-13T02:21:35.233" Score="4" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ &lt;a href=&quot;https://krimalta.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/etymology-anacrusis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source :&lt;/a&gt; ] Interestingly, &lt;strong&gt;anakrouein&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;anacrusis&lt;/strong&gt; is also found in Greek poetry,  where the first syllable is not accented. Being the sea-faring people as they were, starting a poem with anacrusis felt like pushing a ship back from the dock, signalling a start of a voyage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the last sentence overhead. I don't know about Ancient Greek marine navigation, but I'd divine that ships don't always reverse when leaving port? They can leave by dock by going forward and turning away? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T07:04:55.993" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T01:59:22.047" Title="How does anacrusis simulate a ship's pushing back from dock?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-13T02:59:10.613" Score="10" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Нет, конечно. Насколько я помню, мы ничего об этом Супермене и не знали тогда. Я уже писал, что Максим был нашим ответом начальству: не хотите серьезной литературы? Пожалуйста! Вот вам залипуха о приключениях комсомольца 22-го века. Почему-то нам, дуракам молодым, казалось, что мы таким образом способны специально раздражить начальство. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Впрочем, начальство, действительно, впало в раздражение, но совсем по другому поводу&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course not. As far as I remember, we did not know anything about this Superman. I already wrote that &lt;strong&gt;Maxim was our response to the authorities&lt;/strong&gt;: You do not want serious literature? Here you go! Here you have a pulp about the adventures of a 22-century Komsomol member. For some reason, it seemed to us,  young fools, that in this way we were able to especially annoy our superiors. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;However, the superiors, indeed, were irritated, but quite for quite a different reason&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rusf.ru/abs/int_t09.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boris Strugatsky Off-Line Interview, 7/2000&lt;/a&gt;, Q#26&lt;/em&gt;, discussing  why Maksim Kammerer from &quot;&lt;em&gt;Inhabited Island&lt;/em&gt;&quot; was such a &quot;superman&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly was that reason that Strugatsky's &quot;superiors&quot; (presumably, publishing/censorship/literature board bosses) were irritated with seemingly wholly pro-Soviet &quot;Inhabited Island&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T19:14:05.970" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T06:41:36.237" Title="What ticked off Soviet bosses about &quot;Inhabited Island&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;prisoners-of-power&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6341" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-13T16:31:33.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T16:31:33.893" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T16:31:33.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6342" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-13T16:31:33.893" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American crime fiction writer and essayist James Ellroy (born 1948) and his works. He published novels such as 'The Black Dahlia' (1987) and 'L.A. Confidential' (1990)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T06:58:07.777" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T06:58:07.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6343" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-13T16:34:09.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-13T16:34:09.607" LastActivityDate="2018-04-13T16:34:09.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6344" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-13T16:34:09.607" Score="0" Body="Questions about the neo-noir novel 'L.A. Confidential' (1990) by James Ellroy. Use this tag with the [james-ellroy] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T06:58:03.393" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T06:58:03.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6336" CreationDate="2018-04-13T17:38:24.707" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Lots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Introduction&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The post isn’t very clear about exactly what it’s asking, so I’m going to interpret it as asking the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the term ‘bodice-ripper’ mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In what context did the term originate?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To what extent do these novels feature violence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How do readers and critics interpret the violence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Meaning&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bodice-ripper&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;colloq.&lt;/em&gt; a sexually explicit romantic novel, &lt;em&gt;esp.&lt;/em&gt; one in a historical setting with a plot involving the seduction of the heroine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest citation given is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1979   &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1979/09/02/archives/long-island-weekly-she-uh-he-writes-romantic-novels-long-islanders.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;N.Y. Times&lt;/em&gt; 2 Sept. xxi. 2/5&lt;/a&gt;   Vanessa Royall is..enjoying a good reputation and lucrative income as the author of the sort of breathless historical romances (the latest is ‘Come Faith, Come Fire’) that are known in the publishing trade as bodice-rippers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term is pretty transparent: a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;bodice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an item of clothing worn by women in 16th to 18th century Europe (a popular setting for historical romances), and its laces might be &lt;em&gt;ripped&lt;/em&gt; during enthusiastic or coercive sex. So a suggestion of violence is implicit in the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Context&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1979 citation above says that ‘bodice-ripper’ was “known in the publishing trade”. It seems likely to have been a recent coinage, because a similar article in &lt;em&gt;New York Magazine&lt;/em&gt; just a year earlier goes through a list of descriptions of the genre without mentioning the term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And that brings us to the &lt;em&gt;Historical Romance&lt;/em&gt;, aka the Erotic Historical, the Sweet Savage Romance, or irreverently, the Hysterical Romance. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cdECAAAAMBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA46&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turner, 1978&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern genre of historical romance is often described as beginning with the publication in 1972 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flame_and_the_Flower&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_E._Woodiwiss&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kathleen E. Woodiwiss&lt;/a&gt;, which is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;one of the most famous in the bodice-ripper tradition. These books are typically set in the past, and the hero is a great deal older, more brutal, and more rapetastic than the heroine […] This novel is, in many ways, the Platonic ideal of the bodice ripper. The heroine’s bodice is, in fact, ripped; the hero is appropriately arrogant and hard-edged before being brought low by the power of love; swashes are buckled; buckles are swashed; villains are suitably hideous; and the adventure runs at quite the fever pitch. No noun or verb is left unmodified, and Woodiwiss works simile and metaphor to limp exhaustion. It was a runaway bestseller and spawned countless books that followed, with various degrees of success, that particular formula, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary_Rogers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rosemary Rogers&lt;/a&gt;’s infamous &lt;em&gt;Sweet Savage Love&lt;/em&gt;. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/bookinfo/beyond-heaving-bosoms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tan and Wendell 2009&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important contribution to the success of &lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;, and the novels that followed it, was an innovative publishing model:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The woman who started the whole fad is Avon executive editor Nancy Coffey, who, six years ago, launched &lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt; upon a world that hadn’t known what it wanted till it got it. As she tells it, to get her through one potentially unendurable weekend, she plucked a huge manuscript from the “slush pile” (unsolicited manuscripts). She couldn’t put the damned thing down, she couldn’t get it out of her head, and eventually she persuaded the company to publish it as an Avon Spectacular, a paperback original with all the promotion and advertising support that, till then, only a best-seller reprint merited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a new idea with a new—fateful—angle. Nobody reviewed paperbacks. In the case of a hot-blooded melodrama with more verve than style, might that fact not turn out to be a plus? And why not convey the book directly to its natural drugstore, chain-store, subway-riding paperback audience rather than going through usual farce of snide notices from ex-English-major critics? It worked. And how. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cdECAAAAMBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA46&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turner, 1978&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were immensely popular books: Turner gives a table of sales showing that as of 1978, &lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt; had sold 2,655,500 copies; &lt;em&gt;Sweet Savage Love&lt;/em&gt; 2,729,000; and many other works in the genre exceeded a million sales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Violence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plots of ‘bodice-rippers’ make frequent use of violence, sexual coercion and rape. In &lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;, the heroine Heather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kills a man who was attempting to rape her. Two men, who mistake her for a prostitute, seize her and escort her onto a ship. The captain of the ship, Brandon Birmingham, rapes Heather. Brandon tries to bribe Heather by offering to set her up in an affluent house as his mistress. She angrily declines. An enraged Brandon then takes Heather hostage and attempts to rape her again. The rape left Heather pregnant, and she reveals what happened to her aunt and uncle. Brandon is tracked down and a magistrate forces him and Heather to marry. [Condensed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flame_and_the_Flower&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary in Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Sweet Savage Love&lt;/em&gt;, the heroine Ginny:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;finds herself enduring chapter after chapter of rape and forced prostitution, eventually stabbing her prime tormentor, the sexual sadist Beal, and finding some succor (if not happiness) as the consensual mistress of the gracious French officer Michel. Steve, in turn, gets whipped, branded, shacked, imprisoned, homosexually molested (though not raped), and staked out in the blazing sun for ants to consume, sure all along that Ginny has laughingly betrayed him to this fate. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eAckDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lyons and Selinger, 2016&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers and critics interpret the violence in these novels in many ways. I’ll describe five approaches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the functions of fiction is to portray dramatic situations and heightened emotions, and violence is a tool for creating such portrayals. Showing a character suffering harm encourages the reader to pity and sympathize, and showing their endurance and resilience encourages admiration.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By heightening the heroine’s sufferings at the hands of the hero, her victory over him at the end is magnified:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A great deal of our satisfaction in reading these novels comes, I am convinced, from the elements of a revenge fantasy, from our conviction that the woman is bringing the man to his knees and that all the while he is being hateful, he is internally grovelling. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mhiRAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR69&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modleski, 1982&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sexual double standard meant that until the sexual revolution of the mid-20th century it was considered acceptable for men, but not for women, to engage in premarital sex, and so rape was used as a fictional device allowing the heroine to have sex without being responsible for it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Romance heroes from the 1970s and earlier were often actors in rape fantasies and other sexual brutalities because the romance industry thought that women would not accept premarital sex unless the heroine was coerced. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ja_Ia-oZo4wC&amp;amp;pg=PA23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zidle, 1999&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The violence is a dramatically heightened portrayal of real historical conditions, carrying an implicit criticism of them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Brandon victimizes Heather at the start of [&lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;], and almost does it again halfway though, because he has internalized what the novel presents as patriarchally warped notions of female sexual coyness and male sexual authority, notions which the novel itself implicitly critiques. […] The novel is not about “making rape romantic,” then, but rather about the utopian hope that romance—including happy, mutual, exuberant sexual love—can still be found in the face of a culture of rape. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eAckDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lyons and Selinger, 2016&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The violence is a symptom and reflection of the patriarchal culture in which it was written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a rule, feminism and the blockbuster historical romance novels have been seen as in tension with one another, or on a collision course. Nancy Coffey recalls that the Hearst Building was picketed by feminists because Avon, owned by Hearst, was  “publishing such dreck,” work that was, in the protesters' eyes, profoundly damaging to women. “What does it all mean,” Turner muses, a little smarmily, in 1978, “this fantasy of ravishment and degradation which appears to have overtaken the women of the liberated seventies?” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eAckDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lyons and Selinger, 2016&lt;/a&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We see Rogers’ novels (and other bodice rippers) as arguing for a redfinition of rape that supports patriarchal and oppressive attitudes. Rape in these novels is shown not as an act of violence, not as a physical assault with real physical and mental consequences, but as an act of welcomed passion. […] The novels offer women a way of explaning the threats of and acts of verbal and physical violence that are a part of so many male-female interactions, a way that does not identify male violence as unacceptable. [Castagna and Radespiel, 1990].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Katherine Anne Ackley, ed. (1990). &lt;em&gt;Women and Violence in Literature: An Essay Collection&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Garland.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;JoAnn Castagna and Robin L. Radespiel (1990). ‘Making Rape Romantic: A Study of Rosemary Rogers’ “Steve and Ginny” Novels’. In Ackley.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger, eds. (2016). &lt;em&gt;Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom?&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Routledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anne K. Kaler, Rosemary E. Johnson-Kurek, eds. (1999). &lt;em&gt;Romantic Conventions&lt;/em&gt;. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sarah Frantz Lyons and Eric Murphy Selinger (2016). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=eAckDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: &lt;em&gt;The Flame and the Flower&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Sweet Savage Love&lt;/em&gt;, and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance&lt;/a&gt;’. In Gleason and Selinger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tania Modleski (1982). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mhiRAgAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies for Women&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Routledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Candy Tan and Sarah Wendell (2009). &lt;a href=&quot;http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/bookinfo/beyond-heaving-bosoms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Simon and Schuster.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice K. Turner (1978). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cdECAAAAMBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA46&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘The Tempestuous, Tumultuous, Turbulent, Torrid, and Terribly Profitable World Of Paperback Passion’&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;New York Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, February 13, 1978.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abby Zidle (1999). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ja_Ia-oZo4wC&amp;amp;pg=PA23&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Bodice-Ripper to Baby-Sitter: The New Hero in Mass-Market Romance&lt;/a&gt;’. In Kaler and Johnson-Kurek.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Postscript&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In comments, Zebrafish expressed some confusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can hardly imagine any two things further apart than rape and romance, and so in this respect am even more confused as to how such a story could fall in the genre of a romance novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romance is a genre in which (archetypally) the protagonists overcome obstacles on the road to love and marriage; the obstacles being differing social stations; prejudice; parental objections; misunderstandings; prior engagements; and so on. The writers of ‘bodice-rippers’ in the 1970s added rape and violence to this catalogue of obstacles. (They weren't the first to do so; writers like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._M._Hull&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. M. Hull&lt;/a&gt; had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sheik_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;done the same 50 years previously&lt;/a&gt;, and ultimately the trope goes back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damsel_in_distress&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;damsel in distress&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every reader has their own dividing line where the violence becomes unacceptable. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janice_Radway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Janice Radway&lt;/a&gt; carried out a sociological study of how readers engaged with romantic fiction, the results being published in 1984 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=KbsiAwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and in it she notes that readers categorize books as “good” and “bad” romances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All of [the study subjects] mentioned Rosemary Rogers’s books as perfect examples of bad romances. Although most confessed that they like her first novel, &lt;em&gt;Sweet Savage Love&lt;/em&gt; (1974), all asserted that beginning with &lt;em&gt;Dark Fires&lt;/em&gt; (1975), her work had become progressively offensive and pornographic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the best way to understand these works would be to read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T12:38:05.870" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:38:05.870" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6369" CreationDate="2018-04-14T07:11:17.357" Score="3" ViewCount="1714" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, I encountered these sentences and came to be curious as to what &quot;our identity with this country&quot; means in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow,&#xA;  began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and&#xA;  the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild&#xA;  brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we&#xA;  walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware&#xA;  of &lt;strong&gt;our identity with this country&lt;/strong&gt; for one strange hour, before we&#xA;  melted indistinguishably into it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost&#xA;  Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the&#xA;  street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of&#xA;  holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of&#xA;  that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little&#xA;  complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where&#xA;  dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter9.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 9&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, Nick recalls his memories he had in West. He used to return to West at Christmas time, and travel in the train.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I could not understand why and how they were aware of their &quot;identity with this country&quot; for that one hour, because for me &quot;identity&quot; seems quite the same with melting &quot;indistinguishably into it again&quot; which follows after the comma. So for me the sentence read like 'we knew that we were the same with this country for one hour, and then mixed into the air indistinguishably again,&quot; so the two phrases felt repetitive and redundant. Does &quot;identity&quot; have some special meaning that I couldn't guess?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T19:42:31.967" Title="What does &quot;our identity with this country&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T07:40:11.943" Score="2" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;p&gt;Christa A. Tuczay writes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00155870500282719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Motifs in ‘The Arabian Nights’ and in Ancient and Medieval European Literature: A Comparison”&lt;/a&gt; that automata remain a recurring motif in The Arabian Nights and that their destruction reflects a “demonic origin”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The flying horse falls down, living dolls vanish, and so on, whenever Allah's name is spoken, thus indicating the demonic origin of the devices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this observation relevant in the context of “The Story of the Magic Horse” specifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4366" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-14T08:52:12.187" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T15:08:03.807" Title="Automata in the Arabian Nights, specifically &quot;The Story of the Magic Horse&quot;" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6395" CreationDate="2018-04-14T12:23:40.063" Score="2" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall in an old interview (from the 70s), Eric Clapton said that his dog's name was “Jeep.” I have remembered this all these decades because it seemed like such an odd name to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I am reading Dr. Dolittle, and find that his dog was named “Jip.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that &quot;Jip&quot; and &quot;Jeep&quot; may be pronounced the same way and, in fact, the interviewer may have spelled the name of Clapton's dog &quot;Jeep&quot; when the proper spelling of the pet pooch was actually &quot;Jip.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, then Hugh Lofting's book (&lt;em&gt;Dr. Dolittle&lt;/em&gt;) may indeed be where Clapton got the name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know &quot;the rest of the story&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T23:45:59.363" Title="Did Eric Clapton name his dog after Dr. Dolittle's Pooch?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6317" CreationDate="2018-04-14T12:46:05.900" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Limited&lt;/em&gt; in this case connotes &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;unusual&lt;/em&gt; but Fitzgerald's choice of this word may have another layer of meaning in that his character imagines that by possessing a few books, he can become &lt;em&gt;well-rounded&lt;/em&gt;. In other words Fitzgerald may be criticizing his character's intellectual aspirations as being, in reality, quite limited since he equates his ambitions with purchase...a consumer's view of intellect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T12:46:05.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T19:19:34.867" Score="14" ViewCount="1076" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a student, I read metafictional novels such as &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; by Jean Rhys and &lt;em&gt;If on a winter's night a traveler&lt;/em&gt; by Italo Calvino. When I checked the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metafiction&lt;/a&gt;, I found, much to my surprise, that it lists &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; as an example. The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/a&gt; does not explain why this trilogy would be metafiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, can anyone explain why these books would be examples of metafiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:35:58.137" Title="In what way is The Lord of the Rings metafiction?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;metafiction&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-14T19:39:27.290" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; and encountered the following paragraph in the discussion on time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One may have some attraction towards coupling this Aristotelian view with what is called eternalism about events and things. We considered privileging the present, or the present and past, but the eternalist takes all events as equally real even if from one perspective they are future. I don’t know whether the 2020 Olympic Games will pass off successfully or not, but, if they do, an eternalist takes them just to be as much a part of reality as anything. This may sound confusing. Trading on the image of the block again, the eternalist takes reality to be one huge block of everything that ever was and will be. We are located some place in the middle, able to look back at what occurred earlier than us but unable to see what is later than our perspective. But it’s all just as real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't help thinking about the Tralfamadorians in &lt;em&gt;Slaughterhouse-Five&lt;/em&gt;. Was Kurt Vonnegut aware of the metaphysics of time? Was he thinking of this view when he wrote the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-14T19:39:27.290" Title="Was the Tralfamadorian view of time based on a real metaphysical position?" Tags="&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;&lt;slaughterhouse-five&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2018-04-14T23:09:42.670" Score="15" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, storytelling, and directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artefacts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From Wikipedia's description of metafiction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd say Lord of the Rings fulfills this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Self consciousness about language:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien was  a philologist. His &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; was constructing languages. To begin with, each species or group of people generally has their own distinctive language, which fits in with that species' characteristics, and also follows normal language patterns (i.e., the languages are realistic). A list of languages mentioned LotR (not complete):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Elven languages, such as Quenya&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dwarvish language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the language of the Rohirrim&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the common speech, Westron&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Black Speech&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the language(s) of the orcs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so on and so forth. Further, names also fit in with culture and language - think Ghan-buri-ghan vs. Elrond vs. Nazgul vs. Khazad-dum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Literary form&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form of Lord of the Rings is that of an epic. It's meant to emulate stories like Beowulf, or the Norse sagas, or the Finnish Kalevala, or the Oedipus cycle. Further, it is presented as such: in the foreword, Tolkien describes translating and transcribing the story he is about to tell from the Red Book of Westmarch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Storytelling&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A not insignificant portion of the Lord of the Rings is tales from the past, or reminiscing of the way things were. Think of the story told in the council of Elrond of how the ring came to be, and how it was passed to Frodo, or the story of Luthien and Beren told in the hollow of Weathertop, or the song sung by Gimli in Moria, or the song sung by Legolas just inside of Lothlorien, or the stories told by the Ents of the Entwives, or the reference of the barrow-wights to the past kings that lay there, or...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The list clearly goes on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, there's some meta references - in the foreword, Tolkien mentions how he got the story, through the Red Book of Westmarch, which was copied and past down, and in LotR it's described how the Red Book was written, first by Bilbo, then Frodo, and finally Sam. There's also the appendices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Status as artefacts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, see above about the Red Book of Westmarch and the appendices. Second, things like the image provided, showing the inscription on Balin's tomb in the Chamber of Mazurbal act as &amp;quot;artefacts&amp;quot;. He also describes hobbits in the foreword, and the family trees, almost as a historian or an archaeologist might. See also the section on the literary form of the work, and how LotR comes across as a true epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other Notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the definition of metafiction can be awfully confusing. Some definitions define metafiction as drawing attention the fictionality of the work - breaking the fourth wall, so to speak. Others define it as presenting the fiction as artefacts. Let me quote a paper on The Lord of the Rings' status as metafiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien also set out to reproduce that singular effect of which he speaks, the effect of the work reaching us as an echo of an echo (of an echo …) from a remote antiquity, expending his art in increasing the distance between the (mostly) Modern English text the reader would be holding in his or her hands and the fictional characters and events of which it told. For this purpose, he integrated his major works of fiction into an intricate metafictional structure, presenting them within their fiction precisely as such echoes of echoes: translations of redactions of ancient works, telling of things even more ancient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/389563/summary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Books of Lost Tales: Tolkien as Metafictionist&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His work rather clearly fits the second sort of definition, but whether it fits the first sort of definition is debatable. Does The Lord of the Rings draw attention to its status as fiction? I'd argue it draws attention to its status as something other than a normal book; the foreword and the continued references to the Red Book of Westmarch do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, though, the scenes in LotR where we see Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam writing in the Red Book of Westmarch indicates that this that we are reading is a story, albeit a &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; one. So perhaps this fits the first type of definition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T18:25:20.737" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6339" CreationDate="2018-04-15T07:50:58.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think anybody can have a definite answer here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is that the same Mak Sim portrayed by someone else (say Adamov of the previous generation, or Kazantzev, or even Efremov) would go unnoticed by both начальство and the audience alike. Начальство was irritated by the authors much more than by a character. Recall how popular were they, and how much non-conformant were they perceived; this is a good enough reason for irritation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastEditorUserId="3099" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T08:10:42.777" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T08:10:42.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6357" CreationDate="2018-04-15T09:42:37.157" Score="12" ViewCount="2577" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;, AURYN, the medallion of the Childlike Empress, bears the following inscription (at least while Bastian is carrying it - it's never 100% confirmed that it had the same writing in the first half of the book when Atreyu had it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DO WHAT YOU WISH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious interpretation of this is that it means &quot;do whatever you want, man&quot;. But it could also be interpreted along the lines of &quot;wishes become actions/reality&quot;: what you &lt;em&gt;wish&lt;/em&gt;, you then &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt;, thanks to the Golden-Eyed Commander of Wishes. I think I've also read somewhere about a third interpretation, which now I can't remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I've only read a translated version of the story. Double meanings and other such nuances of language can very easily differ between one language and another, and are almost impossible to grasp in a given language without a close familiarity with that language. So, without being able to speak German myself, I pose the question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can the inscription on AURYN be interpreted, in the original story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are both of the above interpretations valid for the German version of the inscription? Are there other possible interpretations which look less valid in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T05:43:00.367" Title="How can the inscription on AURYN be interpreted?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6338" CreationDate="2018-04-15T10:28:25.653" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The quoted claim seems to be a speculation or flight of fancy based on a linguistic coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Meanings&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In classical Greek, ἀνάκρουσις has two senses, according to Liddell and Scott (1889), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=a)na/krousis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;pushing back,&lt;/em&gt; especially &lt;em&gt;pushing a ship back, backing water&lt;/em&gt;; of a horse, with the bit: metaphorically, reaction against depression; return.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;in Music, first beginning of a tune&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English, the word has another meaning. According to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anacrusis&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; ‘A syllable at the beginning of a verse before the just rhythm’ (Kennedy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sense of the word was coined by philologist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Jakob_Hermann&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Elementa Doctrinae Metricae&lt;/em&gt; (‘elements of the doctrine of metres’), 1817. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/elementadoctrin00hermgoog#page/n33/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for its first appearance in Hermann’s original Latin, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wAvKQJBqxxEC&amp;amp;pg=PA3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for the 1830 English translation by John Seager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of sources for my claim that it was coined by Hermann:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In such metres the first arsis was by Hermann called the “anacrusis,” a name which has been adopted by other modern writers. [William Smith (1890). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0063:entry=rhythmica-cn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: John Murray.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So far as I am aware, anacrusis is not mentioned by an ancient metrist, but is an &quot;invention&quot; of Hermann. [Richard Wellington Husband (1914). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3287525&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Old and the New in Metrics&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The Classical Journal&lt;/em&gt; 9:5 pp. 212–221.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Backing water&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be remembered that ancient Greek ships were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;galleys&lt;/a&gt;: they could sail if winds were favourable, but under other conditions they were powered by oars. In oared vessels, &lt;em&gt;to back water&lt;/em&gt; means to reverse the action of the oars so that the vessel reverses direction without turning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at the sources to see how this sense of ἀνάκρουσις was employed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herodotus&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histories_(Herodotus)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in a description of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Salamis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of Salamis&lt;/a&gt;, 480 BCE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hdt.+8.84.2&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0126&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;8.84.2&lt;/a&gt; The Athenians say that the fighting at sea began this way, but the Aeginetans say that the ship which had been sent to Aegina after the sons of Aeacus was the one that started it. The story is also told that the phantom of a woman appeared to them, who cried commands loud enough for all the Hellenic fleet to hear, reproaching them first with, “Men possessed, how long will you still be &lt;strong&gt;backing water&lt;/strong&gt;?” [Translation by A. D. Godley, 1920.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diodorus_Siculus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diodorus Siculus&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_historica&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bibliotheca historica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in another description of the battle of Salamis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Diod.+11.18.6&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0084&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;11.18.6&lt;/a&gt; The Athenians, observing the disorder among the barbarians, now advanced upon the enemy, and some of their ships they struck with their rams, while from others they sheared off the rows of oars; and when the men at the oars could no longer do their work, many Persian triremes, getting sidewise to the enemy, were time and again severely damaged by the beaks of the ships. Consequently they ceased merely &lt;strong&gt;backing water&lt;/strong&gt;, but turned about and fled precipitately. [Translation by C. H. Oldfather, 1989.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thucydides&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Peloponnesian_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of the Peloponnesian War&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in an account of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Expedition#Second_Battle_of_Syracuse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second battle of Syracuse&lt;/a&gt; in 414 BCE, in which the Syracusan fleet was able to trap the Athenian ships in the harbour of Syracuse and push them onto shore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Thuc.%207.36.5&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;7.36.5&lt;/a&gt; This charging prow to prow which had hitherto been thought want of skill in a helmsman, would be the Syracusans' chief manoeuvre, as being that which they should find most useful, since the Athenians, if repulsed, would not be able &lt;strong&gt;to back water&lt;/strong&gt; in any direction except towards the shore, and that only for a little way, and in the little space in front of their own camp. The rest of the harbor would be commanded by the Syracusans; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Thuc.%207.36.6&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;7.36.6&lt;/a&gt; and the Athenians, if hard pressed, by crowding together in a small space and all to the same point, would run foul of one another and fall into disorder, which was, in fact, the thing that did the Athenians most harm in all the sea-fights, they not having, like the Syracusans, the whole harbor &lt;strong&gt;to retreat over&lt;/strong&gt;. As to their sailing round into the open sea, this would be impossible, with the Syracusans in possession of the way out and in, especially as Plemmyrium would be hostile to them, and the mouth of the harbor was not large. [Translation by Richard Crawley, 1910.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in a speech by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicias&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicias&lt;/a&gt; in which he is trying to encourage the Athenians after their defeat at sea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Thuc.%207.62.3&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;7.62.3&lt;/a&gt; We have also discovered the changes in construction that we must make to meet theirs; and against the thickness of their cheeks, which did us the greatest mischief, we have provided grappling-irons, which will prevent an assailant &lt;strong&gt;backing water&lt;/strong&gt; after charging, if the soldiers on deck here do their duty;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the military problem was that the Syracusans, with their heavier but less numerous ships, were able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_ram&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ram&lt;/a&gt; the Athenian ships, and then back water in order to gain space to make another ramming attempt. Application of grappling hooks would prevent this manoeuvre and force the Syracusans to engage in hand-to-hand fighting on the decks of the two entangled ships.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find no evidence for the claims quoted in the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that classical Greeks described an unaccented initial syllable as an &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt;. This sense of the word is a 19th-century coinage by Hermann.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that classical Greeks used the word &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt; to describe the start of a voyage. All the uses that I was able to find are in the context of naval warfare, and describe reversing oars in order to retreat from contact with an enemy.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T20:23:10.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T20:23:10.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6355" CreationDate="2018-04-15T12:09:43.330" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German version reads &lt;em&gt;Do what you want&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;code&gt;Tu Was Du Willst&lt;/code&gt;). The ambiguity could exist in German as well with &lt;em&gt;Tu Was Du Wünscht&lt;/em&gt;, albeit that would be a less common phrase and kids probably had trouble understanding it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote that follows the inscription (chapter M, p.199 in my edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Wichtig war allein, dass die Worte die Erlaubnis, nein, geradezu die Aufforderung ausdrückten, alles zu tun, wozu er Lust hatte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Important was only that these words allowed, no, almost demanded him to do anything he felt like doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, this takes away the ambiguity. However, as the translator has changed the translation (wish instead of want), he made the deliberate choice to include the second interpretation you are referring to, and I personally find that interpretation compelling storyline, it’s just a bummer that Ende didn’t include the ambiguity on a word level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as the focus of the second half of the Never-Ending Story lies on the issue of becoming a world dominator being able to do whatever one wishes, I wouldn’t say that Ende neglected or refuted the interpretation. He simply overlooked the possibility [citation needed]. That’s my interpretation, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T12:09:43.330" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6358" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-15T18:16:32.360" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T18:16:32.360" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T18:16:32.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6359" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-15T18:16:32.360" Score="0" Body="Questions about metafiction, a type of fiction that self-consciously draws attention to its status as an artefact. Metafiction became prominent in the 1960s but there are earlier examples, such as Laurence Sterne's novel 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman' (1759)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T05:35:26.957" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T05:35:26.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6338" CreationDate="2018-04-15T19:06:29.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answer says, the word &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt; for a preliminary unaccented syllable seems to have been invented by Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann. Besides backing water, there may be another possible place where Hermann could have gotten the name from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/anacrouse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French dictionary&lt;/a&gt; at the etymology of &lt;em&gt;anacrouse&lt;/em&gt;, they pointed me to the Pythian games—contests held in Delphi every four years, honoring the God Apollo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a very specific musical contest in these games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then found a description of the relevant contest in the Pythian games in a translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44885/44885-0.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strabo's Geography&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This is the only place I can find where this contest was described, and thus if the contest is where Hermann got the name, he probably found it in Strabo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strabo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strabo&lt;/a&gt; was a Greek geographer and historian who lived in the first century BCE. The following sentences (which are nearly the only relevant material) are an excerpt from Strabo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was anciently a contest held at Delphi, of players on the cithara, who executed a pan in honour of the god.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The players on the cithara were accompanied by players on the flute, and by citharists, who performed without singing. They performed a strain (Melos), called the Pythian mood (Nomos). It consisted of five parts; the anacrusis, the ampeira, cataceleusmus, iambics and dactyls, and pipes.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the ancient greeks indeed seem to have used ἀνάκρουσις for the first movement of a musical composition, or at least for this specific musical composition in the Pythian games. Although this is somewhat different than the meaning Johann Hermann assigned it in 1817, one can see why Johann Hermann might have chosen &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt; for this meaning. Johann Hermann says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those times we call &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt;; because they are, as it were, a kind of introduction or prelude to the numbers which the ictus afterwards begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt; was used by Greeks as a name for the first movement of musical compositions, while composers in Hermann's day used the terms &lt;em&gt;introduction&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;prelude&lt;/em&gt; for the first movement, this might be where Hermann got the name from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt; used for the first movement of the composition in the Pythian games, and did this have anything to do with its use in sea battles? I don't know. But certainly the idea that starting a song with a few unaccented syllables is like pushing a ship back from the docks seems to be an invented etymology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T01:59:22.047" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T01:59:22.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6355" CreationDate="2018-04-15T19:45:30.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL; DR:&lt;/strong&gt; There is an ambiguity, intended by the author, between &quot;do what you wish&quot; and &quot;find your true will&quot; which is important for the development of the main character Bastian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Long answer:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the question we can look at what the author himself said or wrote about it. The following comment is from a typescript from his literary estate. I quote it according to the German &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figuren_und_magische_Gegenst%C3%A4nde_in_der_Unendlichen_Geschichte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt; was to be filmed, Michael Ende disagreed with director Wolfgang Peterson who wanted to change the inscription in the film to &quot;do what you dream&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do what you dream!&quot; Diese Inschrift ist nun wirklich das Gegenteil dessen, was die Botschaft meines Buches meint. Petersen glaubt, dass mein Englisch vielleicht nicht ausreiche, um zu erkennen, dass es sich dabei um die richtige sinngemäße Übersetzung von &quot;Tu, was du willst!&quot; handele. Er vergisst dabei nur – obgleich ich es ihm gesagt habe –, dass der Satz ursprünglich aus dem Englischen stammt, und zwar von dem Schriftsteller Aleister Crowley (gestorben 1947), und dort heißt: &quot;Do what thou wilt&quot; (feierliches Kirchenenglisch). Das &quot;Do what you dream!&quot; ist Petersens Interpretation, und zwar die falsche. &lt;strong&gt;Es ist genau der Irrtum, dem auch Bastian unterliegt und um dessentwillen er aus Phantásien nicht mehr zurückfindet. Auch er meint zunächst, es ginge darum, zu tun, was man wünscht, ersehnt, gern möchte.&lt;/strong&gt; [...] &lt;strong&gt;Seinen &quot;Wahren Willen&quot; finden, heißt ganz und gar nicht, zu tun, was man möchte.&lt;/strong&gt; Diese Formel &quot;Tu, was du willst!&quot; geht über Rabelais bis zum Heiligen Augustin zurück. In Phantásien kann man seinen &quot;Wahren Willen&quot; auch nicht tun, man kann ihn dort nur finden. Eben deshalb führt er einen in die Menschenwelt zurück.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (apologies for my English):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do what you dream!&quot; This inscription is really the opposite of what the message of my book means. Petersen believes that my English may not be enough to realize that this is the appropriate translation of &quot;Tu, was du willst!&quot;. He only forgets – although I told him – that the sentence originally comes from English, from the writer Aleister Crowley (died 1947), and there it says: &quot;Do what thou wilt&quot; (solemn church English). The &quot;Do what you dream!&quot; is Petersen's interpretation, and it’s the wrong one. &lt;strong&gt;It is precisely this error that Bastian also makes and that is why he cannot find his way back from Phantásia. He also thinks at first that it’s about doing what he wishes, longs for, wants to do.&lt;/strong&gt; [...] &lt;strong&gt;Finding one's &quot;True Will&quot; does not at all mean doing what one wants.&lt;/strong&gt; This formula &quot;Do what you want&quot; goes back via Rabelais to Saint Augustine. In Phantásia you can't do your True Will either, you can only find it there. That's why it leads you back to the human world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4372" LastEditorUserId="4372" LastEditDate="2018-04-15T20:34:59.667" LastActivityDate="2018-04-15T20:34:59.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6374" CreationDate="2018-04-16T02:24:18.590" Score="4" ViewCount="1442" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a survival-story chapter book in the library. I read the book, and loved it. Now I've moved, and the library is hours away and I can't remember the name of the book. I remember the following about the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was about a runaway boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He took a pocket knife, $40, flint and steel, and maybe a hatchet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He used fire to hollow out a tree and lived in it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He (I believe) met several friends, and had an adventure where a poacher was after him&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book used the words &quot;In which&quot; before chapter names (A trivial detail). It was a paperback chapter book (Junior or YA), in English. I read it at a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; small library, maybe five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4374" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T13:50:19.763" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T13:50:19.763" Title="Book about a runaway kid who lives in a hollow tree" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T05:06:41.887" Score="7" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I looked at a PDF of the Epic of Gilgamesh, and it was very pretty. Then, I decided that I wanted to purchase the physical copy of the book. While the version that I read online, which I thought was very thorough, was only of maybe 30 pages, the books to buy from Amazon were sometimes 130 pages, some well into the 200s, and none less than 50. I imagine that the version I read could not have been one in entirety, and I found it odd that these books had so many different lengths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3173" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T21:09:26.847" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T21:09:26.847" Title="What is the 'full' version of The Epic of Gilgamesh?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T05:37:55.290" Score="1" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0190633816&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2017). p. 215 Middle. Note for Ch. 1, para. 1.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Or &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; it [referent beneath] will occur. Stanislaw Lec famously said: “&lt;strong&gt;Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.&lt;/strong&gt;” Stanislaw Lec, it should be noted, was remarkably successful in delaying his own demise. Sentenced to death for a second attempt to escape a German work camp during the Holocaust, he was taken to dig his own grave. He used the shovel to kill his guard and successfully escaped.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'it' refers to p. 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  To gain some clarity, one helpful distinction is between different domains within which optimists and pessimists might disagree. One such domain is the realm of the facts. An optimist might believe that some terrible fate will not befall him, whereas a pessimist might believe that he will fall victim to that fate. They both agree that the fate is terrible, but they have differing views about whether it will occur.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct that the emboldened quote's an allegory? What's its hidden meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literal meaning is false, as optimists and pessimists can differ on love, justice, value of life.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T20:21:53.223" Title="“Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.”" Tags="&lt;stanislaw-lec&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T06:48:17.187" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20030308190616/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=HawRapp.sgm&amp;amp;images=images%2Fmodeng&amp;amp;data=%2Ftexts%2Fenglish%2Fmodeng%2Fparsed&amp;amp;tag=public&amp;amp;part=1&amp;amp;division=div1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rappaccini's Daughter&lt;/a&gt; by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Dr. Rappaccini uses his own daughter as a subject in his great experiment, resulting in her living a life of isolation and eventually causing her death. Oblivious to his daughter's pain throughout, Rappaccini was a fairly early example of what was to become a common literary and cinematic archetype: the cold-hearted scientific genius whose human empathy is decapacitated by an all-consuming lust for knowledge. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in tracing the evolution of this Rappaccini literary archetype, especially in relation to the Scientific Revolution in Europe that began 250 or so years before Hawthorne penned his short tale. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there instances of the archetype in literature prior to the&#xA;Scientific Revolution? (Non-European literatures included.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are the earliest examples of the archetype appearing in&#xA;literature after the start of the Scientific Revolution?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the frequency of the archetype's appearances in literature&#xA;increase as the Scientific Revolution progressed between the 17th and&#xA;19th centuries?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not well-read enough to begin answering these questions, and they've been itching me since reading  Hawthorne's story a few weeks ago. I'll be grateful for any light cast on them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4375" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T07:48:47.637" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T07:48:47.637" Title="Antecedents for Hawthorne's Dr. Rappaccini" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T07:59:48.607" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kategriffin.net/books/the-gameshouse-novellas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gameshouse&lt;/a&gt; by Claire North ( AKA &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Webb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catherine Webb&lt;/a&gt; ) two things occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'The Serpent' : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The player, Thene, has a 'roman coin' that she uses when an opposition piece ( her husband, Jacamo de Orcelo ) is about to assassinate her 'king' or main piece. This causes Jacamos gun to backfire, thus preventing the assassination and killing Jacamo instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'The Master' :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Right at the end when all the pieces have been played and Silver and the Gamesmaster are alone, instead of shooting the Gamesmaster, Silver 'Flips' the roman coin. Throughout the last gasps of the book, the Gamesmaster implores Silver not to flip the coin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SO (the question) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Does the romain coin represent 'luck' ? In 'The Serpent' a misfiring gun can only be explained by luck (good for the player, bad for the husband). In 'The Master' it is explained that they're playing chess (albeit on a worldwide scale) and, in chess, luck plays no part...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="203" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T08:05:09.757" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T08:05:09.757" Title="Claire North - The Gameshouse - Does this piece represent luck?" Tags="&lt;claire-north&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6346" CreationDate="2018-04-16T13:45:21.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you have identity with a country, or particular part of a country, it means you and it are indivisible.  The key word here that sorts out the melting issue is &lt;em&gt;aware&lt;/em&gt;.  They had identity all the time. Then they became &quot;aware of their identity&quot;and about an hour later they stopped being aware of it. They stopped being aware of it, but they still &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; the identity because that was a simple immutable fact of their lives.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4274" LastEditorUserId="4274" LastEditDate="2018-04-16T19:42:31.967" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T19:42:31.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T21:49:29.590" Score="4" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to have an illustrated picture book that was about a native american tale. Honestly it has been a long time, so the story is a bit fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The art was spectacular, very colorful. Desert with  cliffs. Almost blob like sections of color as the rocks. Lots of heartlines in characters. (not Paul Goble style). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story: It was about two brothers and maybe like a coming of age story. Like they ended up going into the desert alone and having to overcome monsters. One monster was an eagle and the brother sneaked into the nest to take something and then it was chasing after him and they were falling from a cliff. I think he ended up getting hurt. There might have been another monster and the boys might have split up to each follow their own path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long shot I know, but had to ask. Book used to be at my parents house but now it is MIA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4378" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T21:49:29.590" Title="Help identify Native American Children's Book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T21:50:51.070" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there anything positive about the character of Stanley in the play &lt;em&gt;A Streetcar Named Desire&lt;/em&gt;? I vaguely remembered that he supported Blanche to meet with that man... Is there anything more about Stanley that is positive? If yes then please help me to point out what it is in the play... Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4379" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T06:10:57.733" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T06:10:57.733" Title="Is there anything positive about Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;a-streetcar-named-desire&gt;&lt;tennessee-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-16T21:53:12.090" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the title and author of a book. It's fiction and involves a murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure when I read it or when it was written, but I believe the story predates the founding of Google. It's all about how data mining will rule the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The husband is a lawyer and his wife is a software engineer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wife is working on something similar to Google. The husband is going to handle the sale of the software. He gets killed before the sale goes through. She has an important mentor. He stresses how important the software will be - both for power and money. She turns to him after her husband is killed. As it turns out, he is part of the group that kills the lawyer to stop the sale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4377" LastActivityDate="2018-04-16T21:53:12.090" Title="I'm looking for a crime fiction book. Husband, a lawyer, is killed. His wife is a software engineer. The setting may predate Google" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6365" CreationDate="2018-04-17T02:34:52.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.aina.org/books/eog/eog.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the online version you read was by AINA&lt;/a&gt; (the Assyrian International News Agency), which indeed sits at 27 pages (and is the third result when I Googled &quot;Epic of Gilgamesh&quot;), note that the PDF pages are US Letter-sized. Most print books would have pages with half those dimensions (well, not quite half, but ...) or a fourth of the area, and so around 4 times the page count (100+). This edition is by N. K. Sandars, who is also the editor of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=agjLXHJo9bgC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 1972 Penguin Classics edition&lt;/a&gt;, which has 127 pages. (The one &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6365/what-is-the-full-version-of-the-epic-of-gilgamesh#comment11847_6365&quot;&gt;Gallifreyan&lt;/a&gt; talks about would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=FeOhPwAACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 2003 edition&lt;/a&gt;, which has 228 pages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T02:34:52.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6363" CreationDate="2018-04-17T02:45:52.997" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds very much like &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My Side of the Mountain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jean Craighead George.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CEEmI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CEEmI.png&quot; alt=&quot;1st edition cover of My Side of the Mountain&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam Gribley is a 12-year-old boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters. He decides to run away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The novel begins in the middle of Sam's story, with Sam huddled in his treehouse home in the forest during a severe blizzard. Frightful, Sam's pet peregrine falcon, and The Baron, a weasel, share the home with him. In flashback, Sam reminisces about how he came to be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam heard about his grandfather's abandoned farm near Delhi, New York, learned wilderness survival skills by reading a book at the New York City Public Library, and how Sam's father permitted him to go to Delhi so long as Sam let people in the town know that he is staying at the farm. Unable at first to locate the farm, Sam tries to survive on his own but finds his skills are not up to the task. He meets Bill, a man living in a cabin in the woods, who teaches him how to make a fire. Sam goes into town, and is told where his grandfather's land is. Sam finds the farm, but discovers the farmhouse is no longer standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam forages for edible plants and traps animals for food. He uses fire to make the interior of the hollow tree bigger. Seeing a peregrine falcon hunting for prey, Sam decides he wants a falcon as a hunting bird. Sam goes to town and reads up on falconry at the local public library. He steals a chick from a falcon's nest and names the bird Frightful. Later, Sam hides in the woods for two days after a forest ranger, spotting the smoke from Sam's cooking fire, came to investigate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fall, Sam makes a box trap to catch animals to eat, and catches a weasel. Sam calls the weasel The Baron for the regal way the animal moves about. When a poacher illegally kills a deer, Sam steals the carcass, smokes the meat, and tans the hides. Frightful proves very good at hunting. Sam prepares for winter by hunting, preserving wild grains and tubers, smoking fish and meat, and preparing storage spaces in hollowed-out trunks of trees. Finding another poached deer, Sam makes himself deerskin clothing to replace his worn-out clothes. Sam notices a raccoon digging for mussels in the creek, and learns how to hunt for shellfish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T13:38:56.257" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T13:38:56.257" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6400" CreationDate="2018-04-17T04:27:08.797" Score="5" ViewCount="1559" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire storyline of &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; is precipitated by Iago's resentment over being passed over for a promotion in favor of Cassio. That being said, why doesn't it seem to occur to Othello that Iago might have reacted this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T23:54:21.513" Title="Why didn't it occur to Othello that Iago might be upset about being passed over for the promotion?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;othello&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6378" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-17T09:54:15.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T09:54:15.200" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T09:54:15.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6379" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-17T09:54:15.200" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Claire North (pen name of Catherine Webb, born 1986), who has published several science-fiction novels and novellas. Her first book, 'Mirror Dreams' (2002), was published when she was 14 years old." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T12:43:45.537" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:43:45.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6380" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-17T09:57:10.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T09:57:10.087" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T09:57:10.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6381" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-17T09:57:10.087" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American playwright Tennessee Williams (1911 – 1983) or about any of his works, which include 'The Glass Menagerie' (1944), 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947), 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' (1955) and 'Sweet Bird of Youth' (1959)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T11:08:06.360" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T11:08:06.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6382" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-17T10:01:15.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T10:01:15.500" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T10:01:15.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6383" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-17T10:01:15.500" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947) by Tennessee Williams. The play was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948 and was turned into a film directed by Elia Kazan. Use this tag with the [tennessee-williams] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T12:43:50.097" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:43:50.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-17T10:04:28.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T10:04:28.797" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T10:04:28.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-17T10:04:28.797" Score="0" Body="Questions about William Shakespeare's tragedy 'Othello', which was probably written in 1603. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T12:43:56.607" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T12:43:56.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6376" CreationDate="2018-04-17T16:56:27.697" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Iago isn't entirely consistent in his motivations. He also blames Othello for sleeping with his wife, something he says in soliloquy, which is usually treated as truthful. Iago's primary mention of a motivation against Cassio is in a speech to Roderigo, to whom he lies on more than one occasion. Iago's motives are famously unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is to say that Othello may simply not have noticed them. People are passed over for promotion all the time without turning to complex, Rube Goldbergian revenge plots. Iago acts as Othello's friend, and Othello may simply believe that Iago is a good soldier who accepts the chain of command. Othello may even believe that Iago is motivated to show good discipline in order to receive promotion next time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Othello is remarkably obtuse. Iago is aided by a series of coincidences. He had absolutely no reason to hope that Cassio might engage in an entire scene about his love for Bianca without once mentioning her name, which would have spoiled the whole plan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many ways for an actor and director to resolve that tension. But I would say that most of them will revolve around Othello's genuine compassion for Iago, and Iago's remarkable skill in convincing Othello that the friendship is returned. That, and simple disbelief that Iago would engage in so convoluted a plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T16:56:27.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6388" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-17T18:51:28.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T18:51:28.973" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T18:51:28.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6389" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-17T18:51:28.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Polish aphorist and poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec (1909 – 1966) or about any of his literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-17T19:22:54.733" LastActivityDate="2018-04-17T19:22:54.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6393" CreationDate="2018-04-17T23:11:22.143" Score="2" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Crow Communes&quot;, The lines following the communion - after Crow tore off a mouthful of God - describes the results of this act, in two phases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, Crow seems unsure of what his act might achieve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Will this cipher divulge itself to digestion &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Under hearing beyond understanding?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, he feels it does something to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet, it’s true, he suddenly felt much stronger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Crow, the hierophant, humped, impenetrable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Half-illumined. Speechless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand what Hughes is trying to convey with each phase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for the first phase: What does it mean to decipher something &quot;Under hearing beyond understanding?” (FWIW, Hughes' read-aloud of this sentence separates it into two clauses)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As for the second phase: What is actually happening to Crow? Why is he &quot;humped&quot;? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T00:01:11.053" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T22:16:13.540" Title="What happens to Crow after communion?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6392" CreationDate="2018-04-18T09:07:38.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crow Communes&lt;/em&gt; is a parody of the Christian rite of communion, where the celebrants consume bread and wine and believe that it either represent or mystically becomes the flesh and blood of Christ. In the poem Crow literally eats a piece of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Crow poems are a cycle, and it's worth considering what has come before this ghastly communion. God has been trying to teach Crow to be more human, to understand love. The result is merely horror, symbolic of religion's failure to elevate humanity to peace and contentment. God has given up and is asleep at the start of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, then &quot;under hearing beyond understanding&quot; attempts to describe the metaphysical nature of what Crow is attempting to gain. Religious insight cannot be taught - it is &quot;beyond hearing&quot;. And, like most mystical experiences, it is based on sense and emotion more than logical comprehension - it is &quot;beyond understanding&quot;. Instead of rationality, Crow's communion reveals a more sentimental insight.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;What is happening to crow&quot; is that he has, finally, gained some of the insight that God was trying to teach him (futilely - see above) in the previous poems. It is, however, of limited use. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the revelation crow is described as a hierophant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a person, especially a priest, who interprets sacred mysteries or esoteric principles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that this interpretation will occur through a flawed human vessel. Then Crow is &quot;impenetrable&quot;, only &quot;half&quot; illumined, &quot;speechless&quot; and, in the next line &quot;appalled&quot;. The implication is that for all the divine insight Crow has gained, he can do nothing useful with it. It's incomplete, incommunicable and actually very worrying and dangerous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later poems in the cycle hammer home this theme. In &lt;em&gt;Crow's Theology&lt;/em&gt; he uses the divine insight to imagine his own God, who is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;much bigger than the other&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Loving his enemies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And having all the weapons.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, one who is tragically flawed and created in Crow's own lust for power. Later is &lt;em&gt;Truth Kills Everybody&lt;/em&gt; in which crow is symbolically &quot;blasted to nothing&quot; by the knowledge he has obtained. Learning, in other words, has the dangerous capacity to destroy the self and rebuild it anew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's return to the word &quot;humped&quot; because it's a really interesting choice. At first sight, it's not obvious how it's relevant to the message of the line. One thing it does achieve is a metrical disruption, balancing a subject against a predicate, making the line stand out to the reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, other words could be used to the same effect. So, why &quot;humped&quot;? I have no references for these suggestions, but it occurs to me that it could be because of the multiple meanings behind the word. In the initial reading, &quot;humped&quot; suggests a mound of flesh, an image that crow has literally become bigger and stronger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In British slang, however, it can also mean a bad mood - someone can &quot;have the hump&quot; when they are angry or depressed. So it's indicative that Crow is beginning to regret his meal, a foreshadowing of the &quot;appalled&quot; with which the poem ends. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also has another slang meaning, though, which is the sexual act. The whole Crow cycle deals with the act of creation: of the universe of crow himself, of crow's understanding of the world. Crow's new insight is, in some ways, an act of creation itself and he'll later use it to &quot;create&quot; his own theology. So the insertion of a word that can be read as the human equivalent of creation seems fitting in the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Al-Husseini, Sahar. (2010). Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes' Poetry.     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Radin, P., The Trickster, NY, Greenwood, 1969     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Twentieth-century Literature in Retrospect, ed Reuben Arthur Brower    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-04-18T09:26:52.263" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T09:26:52.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6366" CreationDate="2018-04-18T09:13:52.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is an allegory - Stanislaw Lec was well known from them, often comparing two opposite concepts and pointing that there is not much difference between them, in example &lt;sup&gt;(my own translation)&lt;/sup&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;List of things we've got from Heaven:  1. Satan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe Hell is at the bottom of the Paradise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no Heaven or Hell - only a mote of dust. For some it is Paradise, for other it is Hell. For the poorest it is our world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am so full of optimism, that I can't take it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe God wants me to be an atheist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Jerzy_Lec&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source (in original)&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now lets get to the meaning of the “Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.”: It means that both kinds of people are very similar in the end, having (deep down) similar thoughts; there are not so different people. They both believe in the same things, but with different perspectives - like the &amp;quot;end of the world&amp;quot;: Optimist might believe that the end will never happen (or in distant future), pessimist that it will happen soon, but both believe in the concept of the end of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-18T20:21:53.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6348" CreationDate="2018-04-18T09:40:37.403" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;On his autobiography, Clapton mentions his dog Jeep only once. Recalling the spring of 1976, when after a year of touring across the world he returned to his country estate Hurtwood, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When we had a copule of dogs living there - Jeep, a weimaraner, my&#xA;first dog since childhood, and Sunshine, a golden retriever - we would&#xA;let them crap in the house because we were too stoned to clear it up.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Clapton: The Autobiography, pg. 169)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the interviewer (or multiple other sources, including George Harrison song &amp;quot;I remember Jeep&amp;quot;) didn't misspell Clapton's dog name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know of any source that reveals the origin of Clapton's dog name, but you can be pretty certain that it was not named after Dr. Dolittle's dog Jip, as the spelling and pronunciation are different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T23:45:59.363" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T23:45:59.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6376" CreationDate="2018-04-19T09:00:13.617" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something about the way the question is phrased bothers me, so I’m going to start this answer with a discussion of ‘why’ questions (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/search?q=why&quot;&gt;of which there are many&lt;/a&gt; here at Literature Stack Exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of question asks for an explanation of the actions of a character. The implication is that the actions are sufficiently implausible or ‘out of character’ that they require explanation. This can be reasonable in cases where the character is long-established so that there is an independent body of knowledge about how they behave, against which to evaluate their actions and determine whether they are ‘in character’ or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is nothing like the situation in &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;. His promotion of Cassio over Iago is more or less the first thing we learn about Othello. We’re not in a position to hold Othello’s character constant and consider his actions in that light; instead we have to observe his actions and consider his character in &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; light. Our question ought not to be, ‘why did Othello do this thing?’, but rather ‘what does this thing tell us about Othello?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considered this way round, the evidence of the play is that Othello is a poor judge of people, and prone to acting on impulse without considering the consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He promotes Cassio over Iago without considering the effect on Iago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He marries Desdemona in secret, even though he ought to know that this will offend her powerful father Brabantio. (In the event he is easily able to obtain Brabantio’s consent, so it would have been politic to have done this first.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He dismisses Cassio from his service after the fight with Roderigo and Montano without hearing an explanation. (If he had gone into the business, he would have heard that Roderigo had provoked the quarrel, and might have wondered why.) This is sure to create an enmity with Cassio and his supporters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He is easily fooled by Iago into believing in Desdemona’s infidelity, and doesn’t take independent steps to test this conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with regard to the promotion of Cassio, it seems to me that Iago overreached himself. Iago’s strategy is to flatter Othello and paint himself as honest and loyal. He is all, “My lord, you know I love you” and Othello falls for it. But this strategy backfired because it led Othello to believe that Iago is completely dependable and subservient, and so his pride wasn’t going to be hurt by the promotion of Cassio over him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Iago is so enamoured of his own deceit that he also fails to consider the consequences of his actions. A little forethought ought to have told him that if the business with Rodrigo, or with the handkerchief, ever came out, then he would be in a very awkward position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T09:00:13.617" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6401" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6405" CreationDate="2018-04-19T11:33:10.800" Score="12" ViewCount="731" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've long been confused about what exactly comprises the &lt;strong&gt;steampunk&lt;/strong&gt; genre. Of course I realise that genres aren't usually things for which one can pin down exact definitions, but I don't even have a proper 'feel' for the steampunk genre or where its boundaries are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; is full of &lt;code&gt;citation-needed&lt;/code&gt; notes, and I'm somewhat suspicious of its attempts at defining the genre. For example, it cites &lt;strong&gt;steam power&lt;/strong&gt; as being a required part of steampunk stories (which also makes sense given the name &lt;em&gt;steam&lt;/em&gt;punk, of course), but I'm pretty sure that many 'steampunk' things are actually based on other technologies such as clockwork: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gears are a common device used to make objects steampunky&lt;/a&gt;. But I'm not really sure where else to look to get a proper idea (if not a rigorous definition) of what it means to be steampunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; steampunk, really? What makes a work of literature steampunk or not?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-21T08:45:14.347" Title="What is steampunk?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6237" CreationDate="2018-04-19T18:08:06.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first thing I think of when thinking of a tortoise is its longevity. Also note that Cassiopeia has her own time (which is why she cam move when time has stopped), and if I remember correctly, Hora, when saying this, also says that she will still live after all others are gone. Because of this, I think she's the personification of eternity. Eternity will last even past the end of time itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thing I immediately think when thinking of tortoises is slowness. Which fits eternity: Eternity means no lack of time, so you can afford to be slow, to take your time. This also contrasts with the accelerated world where people try to save time, and lose it to the time thieves exactly for this reason. So while the humans experience that their time saving doesn't get them more time, quite the opposite, Cassiopeia is the opposite: She is efficient exactly by taking her time; note also how Momo, when following Cassiopeia, wonders how you can move so slowly, and yet at the same time progress so quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3220" LastActivityDate="2018-04-19T18:08:06.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6401" CreationDate="2018-04-20T00:24:16.680" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;UrbanDictionary.com provides as good a range of definitions as any, as many as 11 by a current count. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=steampunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=steampunk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the top voted response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Steampunk is a subgenre of speculative fiction, usually set in an&#xA;  anachronistic Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate history setting.&#xA;  It could be described by the slogan &quot;What the past would look like if&#xA;  the future had happened sooner.&quot; It includes fiction with science&#xA;  fiction, fantasy or horror themes.  Medieval Steampunk: Speculative&#xA;  fiction set during the Middle Ages.  Victorian Steampunk: A modern&#xA;  Science Fiction work (post-1930s) that is set in the early parts of&#xA;  the industrial revolution.  Western Steampunk: Science fiction set in&#xA;  the American Old West.  Industrial/Modern Steampunk: Science fiction&#xA;  taking place in the late industrial age, early modern age; i.e. World&#xA;  War 1, World War 2&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Examples of steampunk: &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Wild Wild West, Final Fantasy 7,  Van Helsing,  The Time Machine,  Hellboy,  Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second most popular definition hits on several elements that are essential to a full understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(contains) prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy,&#xA;  such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the&#xA;  works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, or real technological&#xA;  developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, in 2013 an IBM group's Social Sentiment Index prediction of cultural trends claimed that &lt;em&gt;steampunk&lt;/em&gt; was soon to emerge as a mainstream pop culture force. E.g., see this blog post ... &lt;a href=&quot;https://cultureby.com/2014/08/steampunk-cometh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://cultureby.com/2014/08/steampunk-cometh.html&lt;/a&gt;   IBM was wrong as this Google Trends graphic based on &lt;em&gt;steampunk&lt;/em&gt; as a keyword demonstrates:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YOJnp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YOJnp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metric spikes kind of cyclically around Halloween each year after 2013 but clearly shows a relentlessly downward trend. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said there are more interesting examples in cultural production where steampunk aesthetics have played a role. These include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Gibson's novels, Beastie Boys' &lt;em&gt;Pauls Boutique&lt;/em&gt;, Lang's &lt;em&gt;Metropolis&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Riddick, Mad Max: Fury Road&lt;/em&gt;, Cirque du Soleil &lt;em&gt;Kurious, John Wick 2, Eiffel Tower&lt;/em&gt;, David Lynch &lt;em&gt;Dune&lt;/em&gt;, Barcelona’s &lt;em&gt;Umbraculo&lt;/em&gt;, a vast greenhouse in the Parc de la Ciutadella, steampunk Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;TNT’s Will, Game of Thrones, The Mummy&lt;/em&gt; (2017), &lt;em&gt;The Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt; (2017)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there's this Youtube vi, &lt;em&gt;What’s so punk about steampunk?&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJkIhEhApdc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJkIhEhApdc&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T00:24:16.680" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-20T06:09:43.240" Score="5" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kling' hinaus bis an das Haus,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  wo die &lt;strong&gt;Veilchen&lt;/strong&gt; sprießen:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wenn du eine Rose schaust,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sag', ich lass sie grüßen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the original text &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Veilchen&lt;/strong&gt; spriessen&quot; or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Blumen&lt;/strong&gt; spriessen&quot;? I have seen both versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4407" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2018-04-20T18:56:34.120" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T13:30:46.357" Title="Did Heine write “wo die Blumen sprießen” or “wo die Veilchen sprießen” in Frühlingsbotschaft?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;heinrich-heine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6401" CreationDate="2018-04-20T12:29:09.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term was coined by science fiction author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._W._Jeter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;K. W. Jeter&lt;/a&gt; in a letter to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_(magazine)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Locus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in April 1987:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear &lt;em&gt;Locus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enclosed is a copy of my 1979 novel &lt;em&gt;Morlock Night&lt;/em&gt;; I’d appreciate your being so good as to route it to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?3053&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Faren Miller&lt;/a&gt;, as it’s a prime piece of evidence in the great debate as to who in &amp;quot;the Powers/Blaylock/Jeter fantasy triumvirate&amp;quot; was writing in the &amp;quot;gonzo-historical manner&amp;quot; first. Though of course, I did find her review in the March &lt;em&gt;Locus&lt;/em&gt; to be quite flattering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective for Powers, Blaylock and myself. Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like &amp;quot;steampunks,&amp;quot; perhaps….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—K.W. Jeter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here &amp;quot;gonzo&amp;quot; means a style of writing &amp;quot;characterized by factual distortion and exaggerated rhetorical style&amp;quot; [&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;] popularized by the journalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hunter S. Thompson&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeter modelled the term &amp;quot;steampunk&amp;quot; after &amp;quot;cyberpunk&amp;quot;, which was coined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Bethke&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bruce Bethke&lt;/a&gt; and used as the title of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a novel&lt;/a&gt; first published in 1983.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;punk&amp;quot; part of the word comes from the rock’n’roll terminology of the 1970s, &amp;quot;punk&amp;quot; meaning in this context young, streetwise, aggressive, alienated and offensive to the Establishment. A punk disillusion, often multiple—with progressive layers of illusion being peeled away—is a major component of these works. [Peter Nicholls, &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/cyberpunk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science Fiction Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Jeter’s &amp;quot;steampunk&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;Victorian fantasy&amp;quot; written in the &amp;quot;gonzo-historical manner&amp;quot;, and with a &amp;quot;punk&amp;quot; attitude, the exemplars being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jeter’s own &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock_Night&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Morlock Night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1979), a sequel to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. G. Wells&lt;/a&gt;’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1895) in which the Morlocks travel back from the far future of Wells’ story to Victorian London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anubis_Gates&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Anubis Gates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1983) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Powers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tim Powers&lt;/a&gt;, a fantasy combining time travel, Egyptian gods and the English Romantic poets. (The historical part is set in the Regency rather than the Victorian era.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Kelvin’s Machine&lt;/a&gt;’ (1985) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Blaylock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James P. Blaylock&lt;/a&gt;, set in Victorian Europe and featuring a time machine created by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Thomson,_1st_Baron_Kelvin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Kelvin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, an original manifesto like this doesn’t necessarily capture the ways in which a subgenre evolves. Peter Nicholls and Dave Langford, writing in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/steampunk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science Fiction Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, describe three key features that characterized steampunk as it developed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An atmosphere derived from Victorian Gothic literature, and especially the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Dickens&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These recall not so much the actual nineteenth-century as a nineteenth century seen through the creatively distorting lens of Charles Dickens, whose congested, pullulating nineteenth-century landscapes—mostly of London, though the industrial Midlands nightmare exposed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Times_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hard Times&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1854) is also germane—were the foul rag-and-bone shop of history from which the technological world, and hence the world of sf, originally sprang. Somewhere behind most early steampunk visions are filthy coal heaps or driving pistons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Victorian era as a branching point for an &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/alternate_history&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;alternate history&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is as if, for a handful of sf writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one way or the other, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/jonbar_point&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonbar Point&lt;/a&gt; peculiarly relevant to sf itself. It was a city of industry (though there was actually more industry in the midlands and the north), science, Technology, commerce and above all finance, where the modern world was being born. At the same time it was a claustrophobic city of nightmare where the cost of this growth was registered in filth and squalor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Victorian design as a source of retro aesthetic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steampunk by circa 2007 was also becoming a genre of couture, describing a clothing style with retro elements, most commonly from the Victorian era with such retro-tech accessories as motorists’ or pilots’ goggles (preferably brass-framed) and clockwork components. This design aesthetic fed back into art objects, paintings, and more books—often young-adult—which attracted more young writers. Steampunk in this expanded sense became a widespread phenomenon that is still current. […] From being an insignificant and very small subgenre in 1987, by 2011 Steampunk had developed into a way of life, just as comparable terms for style, such as &amp;quot;punk&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;goth&amp;quot;, had done before it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T12:29:09.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5879" CreationDate="2018-04-20T19:29:47.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note that Sancho's request in Ch 25 is not the first time he has asked for the injunction against his speaking be lifted. In Ch 21 (Mabrino's helmet) Sancho asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As they went along, then, in this way Sancho said to his master, &quot;Senor, would your worship give me leave to speak a little to you? For since you laid that &lt;strong&gt;hard injunction of silence on me&lt;/strong&gt; several things have gone to rot in my stomach, and I have now just one on the tip of my tongue that I don't want to be spoiled.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual injunction comes in Ch 20. This is after the fulling hammers are revealed to be just that and Sancho has mercilessly (and &quot;insubordinately&quot;) mocked Don Quixote. Our knight remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...and &lt;strong&gt;one thing for the future bear in mind, that thou curb and restrain thy loquacity in my company&lt;/strong&gt;; for in all the books of chivalry that I have read, and they are innumerable, I never met with a squire who talked so much to his lord as thou dost to thine; and in fact I feel it to be a great fault of thine and of mine: of thine, that thou hast so little respect for me; of mine, that I do not make myself more respected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which Sancho says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...you may be sure &lt;strong&gt;I will not open my lips henceforward&lt;/strong&gt; to make light of anything of your worship's, but only to honour you as my master and natural lord.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotes from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/996&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ormsby&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4410" LastActivityDate="2018-04-20T19:29:47.090" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6413" CreationDate="2018-04-21T15:05:11.147" Score="10" ViewCount="23806" Body="&lt;p&gt;Douglas Adams evidently named Paul Neil Milne Johnstone the worst poet in the universe in the original &lt;em&gt;Hitchiker's Guide&lt;/em&gt; radio broadcast. Why him? Evidently they went to school together, but I still don't understand exactly what motivated Douglas Adams to name him the worst poet. Also, how did Johnstone react to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T21:17:16.560" Title="Why did Douglas Adams call Paul Neil Milne Johnstone the worst poet?" Tags="&lt;douglas-adams&gt;&lt;the-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6416" CreationDate="2018-04-21T18:45:21.347" Score="5" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roger Lancelyn Green is famous for his compilations of classic myths and tales for kids (I myself have a copy of his Egyptian myths and Norse myths along with his &lt;em&gt;King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table&lt;/em&gt;). In his version of the tale of King Arthur, he says, on page 12 (Puffin Classics edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A little while after his birth at dark Tintagel, Uther, who hearkened to my words, gave the child [Arthur] into my [Merlin's] care, and I bore him to Avalon, the Land of Mystery ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that he [Arthur] should be the greatest king this land shall ever know; and that he should live long - longer than any man shall ever know. These, the virtues of a good and generous prince, the Dwellers in Avalon gave to Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking for example in Project Gutenberg's copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1251/1251-h/1251-h.htm#link2HCH0003&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/a&gt; there seems to be no mention of Avalon (though there is of course mention of the Lady of the Lake) and Merlin simply says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know a lord of yours in this land, that is a passing true man and a faithful, and he shall have the nourishing of your child, and his name is Sir Ector [...] And when the child is born let it be delivered to me at yonder privy postern unchristened. So like as Merlin devised it was done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does Green get this childhood excursion to Avalon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T08:52:09.997" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T08:52:09.997" Title="From what did Roger Lancelyn Green get this?" Tags="&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;&lt;roger-lancelyn-green&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6410" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-22T05:20:15.980" Score="15" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if this is the correct place for this question. I was reading some Lord of the Rings-lore the other day and it got me thinking about the location of &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; in storytelling. In LOTR, Mordor is located to the east of where the protagonists of the story live and I got this feeling that this isn't unique to LOTR and is a common motif in many (Western) stories but I wasn't able to think of any of the top of my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a common motif or am I just imagining this? If this is not imagined, is this reversed in stories told by Eastern authors, i.e. evil coming from the west?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4411" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T14:58:20.200" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T14:58:59.600" Title="Is it a common motif in (western) storytelling that the antagonists are located to the east?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8762" CreationDate="2018-04-22T16:06:27.073" Score="11" ViewCount="8480" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I finished &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;. But when I first read it, I remember the opening jumping out at me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was love at first sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first &lt;em&gt;impression&lt;/em&gt; on this opening was that Heller was taking a rather progressive (for his time) stance about relationships in the military. However, after this declaration, this &quot;love&quot; is never touched upon again in the novel&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What surprises me in this statement is Heller's choice of the word &quot;love&quot; which connotes a strong, impassioned emotion. Even granting the possibility that &quot;love&quot; could refer to a wide range of emotions, from the romantic to mere fondness, from what I can gather, even referring to Yossarian's relationship with the chaplain as &quot;fondness&quot; is stretching things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in what sense did Yossarian love the chaplain? I'm looking for either instances in the story which demonstrate this (and which I probably missed when I first read the book) or interviews/documents from Heller which would explain the interesting, if strange, choice of opening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; As it has been a while since I finished &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;, I am relying more on my notes from the time and cursory skim through the opening chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4413" LastEditorUserId="4413" LastEditDate="2018-04-22T16:16:10.167" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T22:11:39.810" Title="In what sense did Yossarian love the chaplain?" Tags="&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6411" CreationDate="2018-04-23T11:37:07.327" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be that he didn't: that this is purely coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heller had long nurtured an ambition to be a novelist and was working as an advertising copywriter when he began &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;. The inspiration came to him in a flash and was, pretty much, the exact sentence that he used to open the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, 'Someone' fell madly in love with him,&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/books/review/the-enigma-of-joseph-heller.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Enigma of Joseph Heller, New York Times, 2011&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having imagined the sentence, Heller then sketched out the idea for the novel over the course of about 90 minutes, during which the 'Someone' became Yossarian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the pat answer is that the opening inspired Heller to begin the novel, and so he stuck with it even though it's not mentioned again and doesn't entirely make sense in light of later character developments. It's also a great opening line in the sense that it immediately capture's the reader's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that's also the less interesting answer. What can we infer about the characters from Yossarian's love of the Chaplain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most readers will equate &quot;love&quot; here with sexual love. However, as the opening of the novel unfolds it becomes clear that this is wrong. That &quot;love&quot; here denotes something which is more romantic than homosexual. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot we can read into this. First is the concept of &quot;brothers in arms&quot;, the strong emotional attachments that men form with one another under the duress and terror of combat. Some soldiers look back on those bonds with fondness because nothing so intense exists in peacetime. By opening the novel with this sentiment, and then rapidly establishing a strong anti-war tone, Heller is suggesting that this recollection is fake or false. That conflict is so terrible as to invalidate the upsides that it creates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, although not directly progressive in terms of LGBT rights, it also hints at the fluidity of human sexuality. Yossarian loves the chaplain, perhaps even feels physical desire for him, but never acts on that desire and never feels regret for not doing so. He is, as later becomes clear, heterosexual, but has no problem admitting that he feels a romantic attachment to another man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fluidity can be seen as an expansion of the novel's constant theme of absurdity and contradiction. In Catch-22, very little actually makes sense. Why should love and sexuality be any different? One could even imagine this is deliberate on Yossarian's part, a purposeful rejection of societal norms in line with the purposeful rejection of peace and logic entailed by war itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T11:37:07.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6408" CreationDate="2018-04-23T15:10:22.930" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems likely that Adams was just taking an opportunity to get one more adolescent dig in at an old friend and rival, who thus got to be immortalized as the &quot;worst poet in the universe.&quot;  Sources claim that Adams was a regular contributor to Johnstone's high school English zine, and that the two of them jointly received &lt;a href=&quot;http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Paul_Neil_Milne_Johnstone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a prize in English&lt;/a&gt; while attending the Brentwood School in Essex.  The poem attributed to him in the book as an example of his wretchedness was &lt;a href=&quot;https://everything2.com/title/Paul+Neil+Milne+Johnstone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;actually written by him&lt;/a&gt; (I'm guessing as another high school joke).  An old schoolmate of both of them &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3622330/An-acre-of-England-its-cheaper-than-a-second-hand-car.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;remembers Johnstone&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;unbearably pompous for a 19-year old&quot; but Adams as only slightly less so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His name was disguised in the print editions of &lt;em&gt;The Hitchhiker's Guide&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings,&quot; after he complained, apparently not because of being called the &quot;worst poet&quot; but because his complete actual home address was included in the original broadcast (which seems like a reasonable concern).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in other words, Adams was both trolling Johnstone and doxing him, doubtlessly for his own personal amusement.  Would any one among us do less for an old high-school friend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They lay. They rotted. They turned&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Around occassionally.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bits of flesh dropped off them from&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Time to time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sank into the pool's mire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They also smelt a great deal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;by &lt;a href=&quot;https://everything2.com/title/Paul+Neil+Milne+Johnstone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Neil Milne Johnstone&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   AKA Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-04-23T15:24:50.410" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T15:24:50.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5077" CreationDate="2018-04-23T20:43:57.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, you must understand the purpose of parties. First, as Francisco d'Anconia told Hank Rearden, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mr. Rearden, you do not know these people's way of doing business or how they interpret your presence here. In your code, &lt;strong&gt;but not in theirs&lt;/strong&gt;, accepting a man's hospitality is a token of good will,  declaration that you and your host stand on terms of a civilized relationship. Don't give them that kind of sanction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Hank's wife had quite bluntly told Jim Taggart that her husband's presence at the wedding was evidence that she could &quot;deliver&quot; him whenever she wanted. She also pointed out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... your guests are quite impressed. I can practically hear them thinking all over the room. Most of them are thinking: 'If &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; has to seek terms with Jim Taggart, we'd better toe the line.' And a few are thinking: 'If &lt;em&gt;he's&lt;/em&gt;afraid, we'll get away with much more.' This is as you want it, of course - and I wouldn't think of spoiling your triumph - but you and I are the only ones who know that you didn't achieve it single-handed.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text makes it quite clear here (and elsewhere) that a large part of parties is to establish and reinforce the social &quot;pecking order,&quot; showing who has influence over who and who. The fact that people thought that Jim Taggart was able to force Hank Rearden into attending the party meant that most people assumed that Hank Rearden was afraid of Jim Taggart for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;in furtive informality&quot; is important here as well. In a sense, this likely helped them feel less anxious about the import and impact of what they were doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:43:57.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4978" CreationDate="2018-04-23T20:51:59.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a few possible answers here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, while the text doesn't say that Wyatt was exploring new applications, it doesn't say that he wasn't either. So it's quite possible that he was, but that the text didn't mention it - Dagny just happened to have seen him working on that project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second possibility is that Wyatt thought that the problem of restarting production as quickly as possible after the Strike ended was a much more urgent problem, and that he'd have time to explore new applications after he solved that problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A third possibility is that he thought that other applications of oil would allow him to sell as much oil as he was capable of for the time being. If that was the case, most likely he assumed that the economy would grow with his ability to produce oil. For example, demand for plastic and other items produced from oil would likely grow as the economy improved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, of course, the final possibility is that that's just a plot hole, but that's not a particularly &quot;in-universe&quot; explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-04-23T20:51:59.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6409" CreationDate="2018-04-23T23:11:20.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good question, interesting to research.  Short answer: Green got it from&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Layamon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Layamon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Green says in his Author's Note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gone on to make use of the pseudo-history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the verse chronicle of Layamon.  These have given me a few ideas and details for Book One - but in essentials it is almost entirely Malory,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had previously checked that the detail the OP asked about was not in&#xA;Geoffrey of Monmouth's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Regum_Britanniae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of the Kings of Britain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so I turned to a modern English translation of Layamon's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14305/pg14305.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which has this to say about that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There Uther the king took Ygaerne for queen; Ygaerne was with child by Uther the king, all through Merlin's craft, before she was wedded. The time came that was chosen, then was Arthur born. So soon as he came on earth, elves took him; they enchanted the child with magic most strong, they gave him might to be the best of all knights; they gave him another thing, that he should be a rich king, they gave him the third, that he should live long; they gave to him the prince virtues most good, so that he was most generous of all men alive. This the elves gave him, and thus the child thrived. After Arthur, the blessed lady was born, she was named Anna, the blessed maiden; and afterwards she took (married) Loth, who possessed Leoneis (Lothian), she was in Leoneis lady of the people. Long lived Uther with mickle bliss here, with good peace, with much quiet, free in his kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important bit here is that &amp;quot;the elves took him&amp;quot;.  This, I suppose is what Tennyson based his version of this detail in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/610/pg610.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which has passages like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gareth was glad. Or if some other told,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How once the wandering forester at dawn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Far over the blue tarns and hazy seas,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On Caer-Eryri's highest found the King,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A naked babe, of whom the Prophet spake,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'He passes to the Isle Avilion,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He passes and is healed and cannot die'—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gareth was glad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;describing the scuttlebutt that Gareth heard in the scullery.  Here &amp;quot;the Prophet&amp;quot; is Merlin.  And  elsewhere in the &lt;em&gt;Idylls&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then from the castle gateway by the chasm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Descending through the dismal night—a night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In which the bounds of heaven and earth were lost—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beheld, so high upon the dreary deeps&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It seemed in heaven, a ship, the shape thereof&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A dragon winged, and all from stern to stern&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bright with a shining people on the decks,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And gone as soon as seen. And then the two&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dropt to the cove, and watched the great sea fall,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wave after wave, each mightier than the last,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Till last, a ninth one, gathering half the deep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And down the wave and in the flame was borne&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who stoopt and caught the babe, and cried &amp;quot;The King!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here is an heir for Uther!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to what the prophet said of the naked babe, look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12753/12753-h/12753-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1862, by James Knowles (apparently with the complicity of Tennyson) with this version of Merlin's prophecy, paraphrased from Geoffrey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When their battle was done, the king desired Merlin to tell him what it meant. Whereat he, bursting into tears, cried out this prophecy, which first foretold the coming of King Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Woe to the red dragon, which figureth the British nation, for his banishment cometh quickly; his lurkingholes shall be seized by the white dragon—the Saxon whom thou, O king, hast called to the land. The mountains shall be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run blood; cities shall be burned, and churches laid in ruins; till at length the oppressed shall turn for a season and prevail against the strangers. For a Boar of Cornwall shall arise and rend them, and trample their necks beneath his feet. The island shall be subject to his power, and he shall take the forests of Gaul. The house of Romulus shall dread him—all the world shall fear him—and his end shall no man know; he shall be immortal in the mouths of the people, and his works shall be food to those that tell them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here  &amp;quot;Boar of Cornwall&amp;quot;  is Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Layamon and Tennyson posit a different CV for Arthur than Malory does: childhood with the elves in Avalon, rather than with Sir Ector.  Green uses elements of both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T11:37:31.880" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-04-24T00:12:36.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Norse myth associates the east with evil...&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Voluspa, 1999 Larrington translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the east falls, from poison valleys &lt;br&gt;&#xA;a river of knives and swords, Cutting it is called&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(stanza 36)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the east sat an old woman in Iron-wood &lt;br&gt;&#xA;and nurtured there offspring of Fenrir;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;a certain one of them in monstrous form &lt;br&gt;&#xA;will be the snatcher of the moon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(stanza 40)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hrym drives from the east, he has his shield before him,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;the great serpent writhes in giant rage ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(stanza 50; Hrym is a giant and captain of Naglfar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ship journeys from the east, Muspell's people are coming &lt;br&gt;&#xA;over the waves, and Loki steers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;There are the monstrous brood with all the raveners,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The brother of Byleist is in company with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(stanza 51, Byleist is brother of Loki; this last line is a kenning, a common poetic device in eddaic and skaldic poetry)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted, however, that as per stanza 52, &amp;quot;Surt comes from the south&amp;quot; (the stanzas seem to be misnumbered in my edition or something, it goes stanzas 47, 49, 50, 51, 48, 52, and then carries on up from 52 as normal).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, evil does primarily seem to come from the east in Norse myth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;...but not many other types of myth seem to.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Finnish myth, Louhi  is a wicked queen of the land known as Pohjola; Pohjola is located in the far north; to quote the Kalevala: &amp;quot;In these dismal Northern regions / In the dreary land of Pohja&amp;quot;. To quote wikipedia here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the idea of an otherworldly far north is a widespread motif in both Classical and medieval European literature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be, at the minimum, no association of the east with the evil in Finnish myth as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek myth was actually influenced a bit by the east, but the closest thing I could find to an association of evil with the east was Dionysus fighting all the way to India and then getting stopped there, but that had a sort of positive light, as it was a weird drunken revelry war thing. Dionysus is weird. Anyway, interestingly, as you move into Roman myth (which is obviously closely associated with Greek myth) it incorporates stuff from Eastern mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the cult of Sun was introduced in Rome after Aurelian's successful campaigns in Syria. The Asiatic divinities Mithras (that is to say, the Sun) and Ba'al were combined with Apollo and Helios into one Sol Invictus, with conglomerated rites and compound attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not a negative connotation at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tolkien influence explains this&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I can see very little beyond Norse association of the east with evil. This does make some sense wrt Tolkien though, because he was heavily influenced by Norse myth, and was one of his predominant studies. It should be noted that Tolkien was also heavily influenced by the Kalevala especially wrt the story of Turin Turambar. Another note, though, to quote Tolkien's letter 229:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The placing of Mordor in the east was due to simple narrative and geographical necessity, within my 'mythology'. The original stronghold of Evil [Thangorodrim] was (as traditionally) in the North; but as that had been destroyed, and was indeed under the sea, there had to be a new stronghold, far removed from the Valar, the Elves, and the sea-power of Númenor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/18304/is-tolkien-prejudiced-against-the-east&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; sci fi and fantasy question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T21:24:28.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6418" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-24T08:21:06.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T08:21:06.723" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T08:21:06.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6419" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-24T08:21:06.723" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British biographer and children's writer Roger Lancelyn Green (1918 – 1987) and his works. He studied under C. S. Lewis at the University of Oxford. His books include 'King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table' (1954), 'Robin Hood' (1956) and 'Tales of the Greek Heroes' (1958)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T14:07:03.627" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T14:07:03.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-24T15:26:12.577" Score="4" ViewCount="1506" Body="&lt;p&gt;Available, freely, online, is Nick Bostrom's &lt;a href=&quot;https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/a&gt;, an essay or short story about a fictional dragon's tyranny and effect on/cost to society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CGP Grey adapted it into a narrated animation&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the themes in the story a metaphor for? I understand that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.popmatters.com/representing-a-disease-in-that-dragon-cancer-2495456912.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dragons are sometimes used metaphorically to refer to cancer&lt;/a&gt;, has that got to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4420" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T16:26:34.757" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T12:45:43.797" Title="What is Nick Bostrom's 'Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant' an analogy of?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;nick-bostrom&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6427" CreationDate="2018-04-24T16:42:19.033" Score="6" ViewCount="603" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pour wine and dance, if manhood still have pride,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Bring roses, if the rose be yet in bloom;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     The cataract smokes on the mountain side.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Let there be no foot silent in the room,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Nor mouth with kissing nor the wine unwet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Our Father Rosicross is in his tomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In vain, in vain; the cataract still cries,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     The everlasting taper lights the gloom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     All wisdom shut into its onyx eyes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Our Father Rosicross sleeps in his tomb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;pull down the blinds&quot; mean in that context? How is it related to the 'party' held in the second stanza?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=12616&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T17:30:04.780" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T08:46:35.833" Title="What does &quot;pull down the blinds&quot; mean in Yeats's poem &quot;The Mountain Tomb&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6422" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-24T18:58:45.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-24T18:58:45.797" LastActivityDate="2018-04-24T18:58:45.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6423" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-24T18:58:45.797" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of the Swedish philosopher and writer Nick Bostrom (born 1973)." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T18:17:00.013" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T18:17:00.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6424" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6434" CreationDate="2018-04-24T21:47:25.640" Score="13" ViewCount="1274" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;em&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt;, I liked the idea of &quot;nets,&quot; and had some good ideas to put on there, but could never find them or what they are. Any idea, or is this just another fictional part of &lt;em&gt;Ender's Game&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4421" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-01-07T10:32:58.707" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T17:52:25.173" Title="What are the nets in Ender's Game? Are they based on anything in real life?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;enders-game&gt;&lt;orson-scott-card&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6451" CreationDate="2018-04-24T22:30:23.823" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Seuss bibliography&lt;/a&gt; lists a number of books that were published posthumously. While I do realize that it's not uncommon to have posthumous works, several of these books are apparently quite old. For example, &lt;em&gt;What Pet Should I Get?&lt;/em&gt; is believed to have been written in the 1950s or 1960s, and &lt;em&gt;Daisy-Head Mayzie&lt;/em&gt; was written in 1973. Given that Dr. Seuss was publishing books until 1990, why did it take so long to publish these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T23:52:52.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T23:52:52.553" Title="Why were &quot;Daisy-Head Mayzie&quot; and &quot;My Many Colored Days&quot; not published until after Dr. Seuss's death?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;dr-seuss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T00:29:32.913" Score="6" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read a short story by Ambrose Bierce, 'Monk and the Hangman's daughter', I found a strange expression as below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At length we reached the bank of a stream whose silvery waters presented a most refreshing sight. In its crystal depths between the rocks we could see beautiful golden trout as large as the carp in the pond of our monastery at Passau. Even in these wild places Heaven had provided bountifully &lt;strong&gt;for the fasting of the faithful&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just wondered if they used to eat some golden trout after fasting in those years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Bierce use that expression in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4422" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-04-25T08:28:31.097" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T13:45:23.923" Title="Had fasting anything to do with golden trout in Middle Ages?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6421" CreationDate="2018-04-25T08:46:35.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeats was Irish, and in literal terms this is a reference to the Irish Catholic funeral custom of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(ceremony)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wake&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Blinds&quot; here refers to a window-covering. In Yeats' era, wooden shutters, sometimes known as blinds, were commonly used to shut out light instead of curtains. Covering windows to signify a death is a practice which dates back to Victorian times, both ensuring privacy for the mourning family and a notice to possible visitors that a death has occurred inside the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Wake is an extension of this mourning, during which mourners &lt;a href=&quot;https://rip.ie/article.php?AID=32&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;spend a night in the house with the corpse&lt;/a&gt;. Although sombre, attendees at a Wake often do their best to celebrate the life of the deceased: there will be food and alcohol and sometimes music and dance. Hence the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pull down the blinds, bring fiddle and clarionet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let there be no foot silent in the room,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor mouth with kissing nor the wine unwet.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as you might expect, the windows are usually covered during the wake. Hence: &quot;pull down the blinds&quot;. Mirrors are also traditionally covered, although a window may be left open in the room where the corpse is resting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the line also has symbolic meaning. &quot;Pull down the blinds&quot; is suggestive of closure, of an ending: it is an act undertaken at the end of each day. It takes place as dark is closing in, and brings further darkness, shutting out all outside light from the room. Hence it is, as a phrase, a powerful euphemism for death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T08:46:35.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6420" CreationDate="2018-04-25T12:39:25.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dragon is a metaphor for Death, particularly by old age and by disease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ties directly into Grey's previous recent video, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C25qzDhGLx8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Why Die?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, where he makes the same argument but without the metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By providing a manifestation, a dragon &amp;quot;responsible&amp;quot; for death, and people accepting its inevitability, Bostrom argues that the world has accepted the &lt;em&gt;fact&lt;/em&gt; of Death as inevitable, even when that might no longer be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bostrom himself writes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the original text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stories about aging have traditionally focused on the need for graceful accommodation. The recommended solution to diminishing vigor and impending death was resignation coupled with an effort to achieve closure in practical affairs and personal relationships. Given that nothing could be done to prevent or retard aging, this focus made sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today we face a different situation. While we still lack effective and acceptable means for slowing the aging process, we can identify research directions that might lead to the development of such means in the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many distinguished technologists and scientists tell us that it will become possible to retard, and eventually to halt and reverse, human senescence. (...) Our situation with regard to human senescence is closely analogous and ethically isomorphic to the situation of the people in the fable with regard to the dragon. Therefore, we have compelling moral reasons to get rid of human senescence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument is not in favor or life-span extension per se. Adding extra years of sickness and debility at the end of life would be pointless. The argument is in favor of extending, as far as possible, the human health-span.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T12:45:43.797" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1919" CreationDate="2018-04-25T17:13:52.047" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this poem is very challenging, with many different interpretations.&#xA;However, the link to power in this poem would be about the power of paper - throughout the poem, paper is shown with different connotations to life. The fact that paper is so powerful could also link to civilisation itself, and humankinds power and intelligence. Even fragile paper can record such important things such as family life, transactions national borders or religion. The connotations behind each type of paper mentioned can be analysed too - Does a kite represent childhood and freedom? Does a paper reciept show a commercialised society? &#xA;Does all of humankinds power come down to something as simple as paper?&#xA;As you mentioned Ozzymandias, which is about a statue in effect, there are links between the two poems, and how humankind records things, like powerful people.&#xA;Hope this helped a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4427" LastActivityDate="2018-04-25T17:13:52.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-25T21:36:21.443" Score="6" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I see it, &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; has two main sections, namely Section A (“dreamland” [1-617.29]) and Section B (“anna’s interior monologue” [617.30-628]). Section A and Section B are my terms and there is no structural division between A and B. Structurally, the novel has Parts I - IV, with my Section A being the last 10 pages of Part IV &lt;em&gt;(Part IV has only a single chapter beginning on page 593)&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; ends with a woman’s interior monologue as she just awakes (Section B). A reader of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; will find Section B “easy” familiar reading. There are a few strangenesses encountered, especially near the beginning of the monologue, i.e., when Anna is closer to sleep. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing. Lpf! Folty and folty all the nights have falled on to long my hair. Not a sound, falling. Lispn! No wind no word. Only a leaf, just a leaf and then leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce has noticed that such &quot;leafy speafing&quot; is more consistent with our own interior “monologues” than the language that he used for Molly (just listen to yourself). Joyce renders a better interior monologue in &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; than in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. But a good old-fashion modernist interior monologue nonetheless. Ten pages of devastating beautiful fluid sensible reading. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I’m loothing them that’s here and all I lothe. Loonely in me loneness. For all their faults. I am passing out. O&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Section A, on the other hand, consists of 617 pages with not one “readable” paragraph. With familiarity, Part I is fairly &quot;clear&quot;, but as the night progresses, so the text becomes murkier and murkier.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The universe of Section A is that place you find yourself when dreaming. It is also that place you find yourself when you are having a two way argument with your “partner”, entirely in your head, while washing the dishes alone after the divorce. The characters are “you”, and your “partners” (who have many forms and voices all “spoken” by you), and all the characters from all your dreams, and waking life (&quot;heliopolis&quot;), days stacked upon nights stacked upon days, etc. The “narrators” too are of that world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is argued as to who is the dreamer. From my reading of texts about &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, many feel there is one dreamer, although some prefer “us all as the dreamer” (tenable) or even a few multiple dreamers (less tenable). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If there is a unique dreamer, then who is it?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I got to the end I was betting on Issy (I). &lt;em&gt;[I didn’t think a man could dream the wake. The dreamer knows girls and women from the inside. The dreamer knows so much sexual abuse from the inside.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, all texts that I have read posit a male dreamer (Kevin or HCE).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then Section A ends with dawn breaking and “the smog lofting”. “The grand fooneral will now shortly occur” [617]. And then, Anna’s monologue, with numerous consistent referents to the previous 617 page dream world.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Surely the dreamer is&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; -  Anna? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the structure is such that this character is obviously the dreamer, and before arguing &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; other position (Kevin, us all, etc) one would first have defeat the simplest position &lt;em&gt;(Occam's razor: this character dreams the wake)&lt;/em&gt;? One would also have to explain who dreams Section B, or how Section B is located ontologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of answer I am looking for is something like &quot;This character cannot be the dreamer since...&quot; or &quot;It is much more likely that... since...&quot;. I would also be interested in any references to arguments that this character is or is not the dreamer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[... The pure uninterrupted interior monologue begins 619.20. 617.30-619.19 is a transition, but more &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; than &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T23:26:02.717" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T23:26:02.717" Title="In Finnegans Wake, surely the dreamer is this character?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6426" CreationDate="2018-04-25T22:46:50.273" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, in the Catholic church, eating fish is allowed during periods of fasting.  See, for instance, this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasting#Roman_Catholicism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; article.  So the presence of the golden trout is  doubly good for the protagonists: not only is tasty food available, but it is the kind of food that they are allowed to eat even during fast periods. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The figure of the gluttonous monk was a medieval commonplace, as in the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;. (If you google &quot;monk gluttony&quot; you will find many instances.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few paragraphs before the trout, the text has this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I observed this error of the women, and saw how the maidens kept their eyes upon me, I became frightened, and wondered if I could resist should temptation accost me; and often I thought, with fear and trembling, that vows and prayer and penance alone do not make one a saint; one must be so pure in heart that temptation is unknown. Ah me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the girls looked at the narrator in a way that made him, um,  notice.  So here we have a hint of two sins, gluttony and lust, in the first few pages of the story.  Without reading the rest of the story, it looks to me like the author is setting up the narrator as a man of malleable morals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-26T13:45:23.923" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T13:45:23.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6435" CreationDate="2018-04-26T06:21:38.790" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0393337693&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2009). p. 49.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Second, the Confucian tradition, of which Japan and Korea are a part, has little use for the idea that knowledge is valuable for its own sake. This starkly contrasts with the ancient Greek philosophical tradition, which prized such knowledge above all other kinds. (I emphasize the term &lt;em&gt;philosophical&lt;/em&gt; tradition in the preceding sentence. &lt;strong&gt;There is an amusing passage in &lt;em&gt;The Republic&lt;/em&gt; where an Athenian businessman castigates Socrates for his pursuit of abstract knowledge, telling him that although it is admittedly attractive in the young, it is disgusting in a grown man. [Emboldening mine]&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where in the Republic does an Athenian businessman castigate &amp;quot;Socrates for his pursuit of abstract knowledge&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T00:21:40.470" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T00:21:40.470" Title="Where in the Republic does an Athenian businessman castigate &quot;Socrates for his pursuit of abstract knowledge&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;plato&gt;&lt;republic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1919" CreationDate="2018-04-26T08:50:49.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an old adage: &quot;history is written by the victors&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paper that lets the light&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  shine through, this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is what could alter things.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Paper&quot; - even paper so aged and feeble that it can't stop light - has the power to &quot;alter things&quot;. The people who control what is written, published and read are in control of a great deal of power, the power of information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the kind you find in well-used books,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the back of the Koran, where a hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  has written in the names and histories,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  who was born to whom,    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminds us that, whether you believe they were divinely guided or not, humans wrote the holy books. Those holy books were so powerful they dictated the entire course of civilisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern society, in spite of the advent of digital communication, paper still commands enormous power. Think of birth certificates, legal forms, all the paper that feeds the bureaucracy of the state. And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fine slips from grocery shops&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that say how much was sold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and what was paid by credit card     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paper remains fundamental to our finance - it proves what we bought, what we own. Some money is even made of paper. And in the modern age, money is the surest route to power, while the amount each of us has exerts enormous power over our lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maps too. The sun shines through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  their borderlines, the marks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that rivers make, roads,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  railtracks, mountainfolds,     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We live in an age of renewed international conflict. Paper maps control where the winners think the borders lie. This is an interesting stanza because while a paper map can't really lie about where rivers and mountains are, these natural features are juxtaposed with artificial ones, road and rail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An architect could use all this,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  place layer over layer, luminous    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paper controls where these go, who owns them - same goes for something as essential as the house you live in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If buildings were paper, I might&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  feel their drift, see how easily&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they fall away on a sigh, a shift    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as paper is fragile, power is fragile. History - and modern media - is littered with examples of how quickly the mighty can fall. Look at Lehmann Brothers - literally ruined overnight by a paper trail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;turned into your skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As paper thins and fails so does human skin, withered with age. In spite of all our power, we cannot escape mortality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final thought. Light is an omnipresent feature throughout the poem. Light is often used as a metaphor for the ultimate power: the divine. In the poem, this power is never answered to directly, it simply exists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T08:50:49.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6424" CreationDate="2018-04-26T11:09:32.750" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Nets' are basically the Internet as predicted/guessed by Orson Scott Card&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that the World Wide Web, the modern form of the Internet, was not invented until 1990, 5 years after Ender's Game was published. Orson Scott Card accurately predicted how much influence the nets would have, years before they became a daily part of people's lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://enderverse.wikia.com/wiki/Nets&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While there’s plenty of time for Internet discussions to turn around, I suppose, I can’t help but think that Card wasn’t terribly prescient with this prediction. In Ender’s Game, “the nets” are democratic and participative — anyone can join them, as long as they have the intellect to keep up — but there’s no problem with too much noise, trolls, spammers, and plain old stupidity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mediadisruptus.com/2008/08/09/enders-game-and-the-intelligent-nets/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more disscussion can be found &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hatrack.com/cgi-bin/ubbmain/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002605;p=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T11:09:32.750" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6432" CreationDate="2018-04-26T11:20:36.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book III&lt;/a&gt; there is a passage somewhat like yours:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The subjects of poetry have been sufficiently treated; next follows style. Now all poetry is a narrative of events past, present, or to come; and narrative is of three kinds, the simple, the imitative, and a composition of the two. ... Poets and musicians use either, or a compound of both, and this compound is very attractive to youth and their teachers as well as to the vulgar. But our State in which one man plays one part only is not adapted for complexity. And when one of these polyphonous pantomimic gentlemen offers to exhibit himself and his poetry we will show him every observance of respect, but at the same time tell him that there is no room for his kind in our State; we prefer the rough, honest poet, and will not depart from our original models.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the contrast is not between abstract and useful knowledge, but between elaborate and simple literary styles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T11:20:36.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2072" CreationDate="2018-04-26T22:40:08.760" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have vague memories of such scenes (always with Germans, beer, and laughter; death is a flexible point) in several books of Nabokov -- &lt;em&gt;Защита Лужина&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Смех в темноте&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Laughter in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, and possibly &lt;em&gt;The Real Life of Sebastian Knight&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One I was able to find quickly is this, from Отчаяние, chapter 5: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ничего о таких вещах я не слыхал, и не знаю, — довольно гру- бо&#xA;  возразил Феликс. — У тетки моей был сын, который паясничал на&#xA;  ярмарках, — вот все, что я знаю, — был он пьяница и разврат- ник, и&#xA;  тетка моя все глаза из-за него выплакала, пока он, слава Богу, не&#xA;  разбился на смерть, грохнувшись с качелей. Эти кинема- тографы да&#xA;  цирки — — ” Так ли все это было? Верно-ли следую моей памяти, или же,&#xA;  вы- бившись из строя, своевольно пляшет мое перо? Что-то уже слиш- ком&#xA;  литературен этот наш разговор, смахивает на застеночные бе- седы в&#xA;  бутафорских кабаках имени Достоевского; еще немного, и появится&#xA;  “сударь”, даже в квадрате: “сударь-с”, — знакомый взвол- нованный&#xA;  говорок: “и уже непременно, непременно...”, а там и весь мистический&#xA;  гарнир нашего отечественного Пинкертона. Меня да- же некоторым образом&#xA;  мучит, то есть даже не мучит, а совсем, совсем сбивает с толку и,&#xA;  пожалуй, губит меня мысль, что я как то слишком понадеялся на свое&#xA;  перо... Узнаете тон этой фразы? Вот именно. И еще мне кажется, что&#xA;  разговор-то наш помню пре- восходно, со всеми его оттенками, и всю его&#xA;  подноготную (вот опять, — любимое словцо нашего специалиста по&#xA;  душевным лихо- радкам и аберрациям человеческого достоинства, —&#xA;  “подноготная” и еще, пожалуй, курсивом). Да, помню этот разговор, но&#xA;  пере- дать его в точности не могу, что-то мешает мне, что-то жгучее,&#xA;  нестерпимое, гнусное, — от чего я не могу отвязаться, прилипло, все&#xA;  равно как если в потемках нарваться на мухоморную бумагу, — и,&#xA;  главное, не знаешь, где зажигается свет. Нет, разговор наш был не&#xA;  таков, каким он изложен, — то есть может быть слова-то и бы- ли именно&#xA;  такие (вот опять), но не удалось мне, или не посмел я, передать особые&#xA;  шумы, сопровождавшие его, — были какие-то провалы и удаления звука, и&#xA;  затем снова бормотание и шушу- кание, и вдруг деревянный голос, ясно&#xA;  выговаривающий: “Давай, Феликс, выпьем еще пивца”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastActivityDate="2018-04-26T22:40:08.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6546" CreationDate="2018-04-27T08:18:02.177" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dennis Brown's &lt;em&gt;The Poetry of Postmodernity&lt;/em&gt;, in the chapter dedicated to Ted Hughes' Crow, the author &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=NCWBDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA80&amp;amp;lpg=PA80&amp;amp;dq=%22under%20hearing%20beyond%20understanding%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=eWnL0qHk8g&amp;amp;sig=wH_NBbuYnEn8IK90vQ_-XtWHhf8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjr5vbp_dnaAhURyKQKHUfFAA8Q6AEIPTAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crow reads like some checklist of postmodernist techniques [...]&#xA;[Including] allusions to the Bible or Dante (with a sly parody of&#xA;Eliot's later style - &amp;quot;Will this cipher divulge itself to digestion /&#xA;Under hearing beyond understanding&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Crow Communes&amp;quot;, 25)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poetry of Postmodernity&lt;/em&gt;, pg. 80&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the author refer to regarding Eliot's later style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Note: The author passed away in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/nov/06/obituaries.mainsection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2006&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T06:27:22.440" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T06:27:22.440" Title="Why does Dennis Brown say Hughes's Crow is &quot;a sly parody of Eliot's later style&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6439" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-27T10:00:29.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T10:00:29.913" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T10:00:29.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6440" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-27T10:00:29.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Pakistan-born British poet, artist and documentary filmmaker Imtiaz Dharker (born 1954) and her literary works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T11:50:36.067" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T11:50:36.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6310" CreationDate="2018-04-27T10:51:58.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To respond to what I think is the core of your question, yes, it is possible to translate the style of old forms of literature while still being quite readable for a present day audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a number of reasons why this is problematic and why Joyce would never have done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, the passages here mimic a translated style, in doing so these styles are not necessarily similar to other translations in Present Day English (PDE). Firstly, because PDE translations of Latin or Old English texts need to make quite fundamental changes like reconstructing the syntax as both Latin and OE use suffixes to mark case, and have a considerably less rigid word order, doing so is effectively an act of new textual creation. Therefore, unless you were to learn Latin or OE, it's likely you'll find that translations are difficult to compare in terms of style and will be more influenced by the time at which they were translated than the actual source text. This means its difficult to say how readable comparable texts are, because it's an oversimplification to compare those texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Joyce is likely doing, and what he does in ever chapter after chapter 11 is unpack certain properties of language in order to experiment with form. Given that every chapter in Ulysses after Sirens is some kind of textual experiment, whether it be trying to recreate music, a series of questions and answers like a catechism or in this case a series of parodies, it would appear that Joyce is stress testing the novel form by putting his narrative through a series of challenging formal constraints. The reason why these passages are so challenging is because Joyce is here emptying words of meaning in order to better fulfil formal constraints, for example, many of the syntactic and lexical choices made here are made not to more clearly communicate meaning, but instead to sound more like what readers expect those texts to sound like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, as with the whole of Ulysses, Joyce wrote the text in the manner that he did specifically for it to be examined, he said that it would be his way of becoming 'immortal', so he frequently makes decisions to be deliberately opaque and overly obscure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, while you could find translations of texts that are more readable, Joyce would've never done it in Ulysses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS Beware the schema, they are not the keys to meaning they are often sold as and it's unclear whether they were even written during the production of the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2319" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T10:51:58.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6442" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-04-27T19:55:09.000" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-04-27T19:55:09.000" LastActivityDate="2018-04-27T19:55:09.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6443" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-04-27T19:55:09.000" Score="0" Body="&quot;Samson Agonistes&quot; is a 1671 drama in verse by John Milton. Use with the [john-milton] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-04-28T13:21:57.743" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T13:21:57.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1709" CreationDate="2018-04-27T23:30:36.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As I understand it, Nuvoletta ... disappeared in the end of the excerpt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, no one ever disappears, at least not for very long, because they always have to begin again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &lt;em&gt;song&lt;/em&gt; you are studying misleadingly ends (159.6-10)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Nuvoletta reflected for the last time in her little long life&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and she made up all her myriads of drifting minds in one. She&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;cancelled all her engauzements. She climbed over the bannistars;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;she gave a childy cloudy cry: Nuée! Nuée! A lightdress fluttered.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She was gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the very next lines in the &lt;em&gt;book&lt;/em&gt; are (159.10-18)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And into the river that had been a stream ... there fell a tear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a singult tear, the loveliest of all tears ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for it was a leaptear.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But the river tripped on her by and by,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;lapping   as though her heart was brook:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why, why, why! Weh, O weh!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the background of Nuvoletta (whom I suppose is a character in the novel) that makes such metaphor appropriate?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nuvoletta is a form of Issy (I), the canonical girl child.&#xA;Issy has 28=(7x4) &amp;quot;nubied companions&amp;quot; (157.13). &amp;quot;Hence&amp;quot; Issy is 29, the leap-year child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has witnessed her twin brothers quarrelling across the banks of a river.&#xA;The text of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; is a river, and the mother of these&#xA;three children, Anna (ALP), is all rivers (&amp;quot;Missis-liffi&amp;quot; 159.12), in the never ending cycle river-sea-cloud-river.&#xA;As such,  Anna is the renewer. Of course Anna was/is an Issy, and Issy must become an Anna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nuvoletta attempts to get her brothers' attention using &amp;quot;all the winsome wonsome ways&amp;quot; (157.31), but fails, ultimately because they are men (&amp;quot;There are menner&amp;quot; 158.5)&#xA;like their (step?) father HCE (&amp;quot;conclaved with &lt;strong&gt;H&lt;/strong&gt;eliogobbleus and &lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;ommodus and &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;nobarbarus&amp;quot; 157.26).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Washerwomen (themselves forms of Anna) come and take the boys home, leaving Nuvoletta alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After leaping (suicide?), Nuvoletta becomes a tear, but falls into the river (her mother Anna). We know the tear is Novuletta (Issy),&#xA;since the tear is a &amp;quot;leaptear&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;leaptear → leapyear&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Nuvoletta is reborn and flowing again, and no matter how she feels, she &amp;quot;canna&amp;quot; (Anna) remain at rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what will happen if Anna stops flowing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As I understand it, Nuvoletta is likened to wind, dew, and cloud ....&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issy is often likened to objects that participate in the water cycle other than the river and sea: dew, cloud, rain, puddles, tears, drops of urine etc.  I don't think she is likened to wind, but I stand to be corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the event suggest and signify?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a simple level, the event suggests that even though Nuvoletta might be so sad that she wishes to die, her mother can heal &amp;quot;her heart [that] was brook&amp;quot;. Because that is what mothers do. It signifies &amp;quot;death&amp;quot; leading to &amp;quot;rebirth&amp;quot; via Anna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, every Anna is/was an Issy. Anna has such desperate feelings, only worse: everyone depends on her for rebirth.  What happens when Anna leaves?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am passing out. O&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor know. Nor miss me. (627.33)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tear must become a river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T14:07:40.760" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T14:07:40.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-28T14:45:55.060" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid I read a children's story (it was part of a short series) about a boy who travelled to another planet, possibly as a sidekick or travelling companion to someone else. The person who owned the spaceship had it painted with a futuristic paint that made it match its surroundings. The paint was given to him by aliens he had helped out prior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, they travel to a planet (possibly surrounded by crystal moons) with a large tower, and the boy needs to get in to the tower (which I believe was also a large crystal, or at least very large and bright) for some reason, possibly to retrieve an item or save someone. He was able to use the low gravity to get into the tower to do what he had to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy eventually had to escape the tower, and had troubles finding the spaceship, as it had changed colour to match the surroundings. He and the ship's owner eventually escaped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A whole bunch of Googling suggested that it might be &quot;The Sometimes Invisible Spaceship&quot;, but there's no photos or plot description available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this story sound familiar to anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2956" LastActivityDate="2018-04-28T14:45:55.060" Title="Children's story about a boy who travels in a spaceship that can turn invisible" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-28T18:42:49.570" Score="8" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are numerous concordances that list all of the words, and their frequency of use within each of Shakespeare's plays. However, I am interested in the presence and frequency of use of words &lt;em&gt;across&lt;/em&gt; those plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, I would like to compare the frequency of the term &lt;em&gt;beauty&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;Hamlet&quot; with its use in &quot;The Tempest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this can be done manually by looking up the instance in the separate concordances of each of the plays, is there a project or program that does this for all of the plays (or some subset of them)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4434" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:26:36.493" Title="Comparing frequency of word use across Shakespeare's plays" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6447" CreationDate="2018-04-28T19:17:07.637" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Folger Shakespeare Library's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folger.edu/online-resources/digital-asset-platform&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miranda Digital Asset Platform&lt;/a&gt; is due for launch and release in the fall of 2018. As stated on their website the goal is to &amp;quot;build a full digital asset platform&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A digital analysis of Shakespeare's plays using off-the-shelf plagiarism software was recently published that may offer a more immediate answer to your query: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/books/plagiarism-software-unveils-a-new-source-for-11-of-shakespeares-plays.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (by Michael Blanding,&lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, 7 February 2018).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T05:26:36.493" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:26:36.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6447" CreationDate="2018-04-29T00:09:08.147" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have used this in the past: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Shakespeare: Concordance&#xA;of Shakespeare's complete works&lt;/a&gt;. For example, you can type “beauty” into the box and get &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/o/?i=763867&amp;amp;pleasewait=1&amp;amp;msg=sr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; that shows the occurrences in each work. Here's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, showing that there are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&amp;amp;searchtype=exact&amp;amp;works[]=hamlet&amp;amp;keyword1=beauty&amp;amp;sortby=WorkName&amp;amp;pleasewait=1&amp;amp;msg=sr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;5 occurrences&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&amp;amp;searchtype=exact&amp;amp;works[]=tempest&amp;amp;keyword1=beauty&amp;amp;sortby=WorkName&amp;amp;pleasewait=1&amp;amp;msg=sr&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 occurrences&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QMzG0.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QMzG0.png&quot; alt=&quot;output&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In this case there seems to be a bug—after clicking on &lt;em&gt;Tempest&lt;/em&gt; I see just one result—so I'd prefer to download data and write a program myself... but this may be useful to you as a start, and you can report a bug to the site owners.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T00:09:08.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-29T01:45:46.487" Score="9" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read the Iliad, and I was surprised by how many of the events surrounding the fall of Troy that I had heard about here and there were left out. What are the oldest extant sources for the other parts of the myth not touched on in the Iliad? For example, the golden apple, the Trojan horse, the slaying of Achilles by Paris, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4435" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-04-29T19:13:18.243" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T21:45:24.523" Title="What are the other (aside from the Iliad) classical sources for the saga of Troy?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6425" CreationDate="2018-04-29T23:50:52.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For &lt;em&gt;My Many Coloured Days&lt;/em&gt;, probably because he didn't find a good enough illustrator.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My Many Coloured Days&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; the only posthumously published Seuss work to be written entirely by the man himself, was written in 1973. But the author wanted to find a great colour artist to complement his writing for the story, and apparently he never found one that satisfied him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accompanying a manuscript Dr. Seuss wrote in 1973, was a letter outlining his hopes of finding &amp;quot;a great color artist who will not be dominated by me.&amp;quot; The late Dr. Seuss saw his original text about feelings and moods as part of the &amp;quot;first book ever to be based on beautiful illustrations and sensational color.&amp;quot; The quest for an artist finally ended—after the manuscript languished for more than two decades—at the paint brushes of husband-and-wife team Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seussville.com/books/book_detail.php?isbn=9780679875970&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seussville&lt;/a&gt; (official website)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For &lt;em&gt;What Pet Should I Get&lt;/em&gt;, the manuscript was only discovered after his death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted by Matt Thrower in a comment, Seuss himself never sent &lt;em&gt;What Pet Should I Get&lt;/em&gt; to a publisher. It was rediscovered after his death in a box of old notes, together with projects he'd classified as failures. Apparently he'd thought it wasn't worth publishing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, died in 1991, his widow, Audrey Geisel, decided to renovate their hilltop house in La Jolla, Calif. She and an assistant cleared out his office, donating most of his valuable illustrations and early drafts to the University of California, San Diego, and stashing some doodles and abandoned sketches in a box.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn’t until October 2013, when they decided to have the rest of his notes and sketches appraised, that they closely examined the contents of that box. They found a set of brightly colored alphabet flash cards, some rough sketches titled “The Horse Museum,” and a manila folder marked “Noble Failures,” with whimsical drawings that he had been unable to find a place for in his stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But alongside the orphaned sketches was a more complete project labeled “The Pet Shop,” 16 black-and-white illustrations, with text that he had typed on paper and taped to the drawings. The pages were stained and yellowed, but the story was all there, in Dr. Seuss’ unmistakable rollicking rhymes. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through painstaking work and a meticulous, almost forensic reconstruction of Mr. Geisel’s creative process, those abandoned pages have yielded an unexpected new Dr. Seuss book, now called “What Pet Should I Get?” When Random House publishes it on Tuesday, with a first printing of one million copies, it will add a surprising coda to Dr. Seuss’ sizable canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/books/dr-seuss-book-a-discovery-in-a-box-and-then-a-reconstruction.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New York Times&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other works were republished or rewritten by others.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Seuss_bibliography#Posthumous&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of posthumous Seuss stories&lt;/a&gt;, it seems as though:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oh, Baby, the Places You'll Go!&lt;/em&gt; (sounds more like a pop song, doesn't it) was mostly written by Tish Rabe as an adapted version of Seuss's original &lt;em&gt;Oh, the Places You'll Go!&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hooray_for_Diffendoofer_Day!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hooray for Diffendoofer Day!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was put together by Jack Prelutsky based on incomplete notes by Seuss;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bippolo_Seed_and_Other_Lost_Stories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horton_and_the_Kwuggerbug_and_More_Lost_Stories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Horton and the Kwuggerbug and More Lost Stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were only republications of stories which had already been published during Seuss's lifetime.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only remaining mystery, then, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy-Head_Mayzie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daisy-Head Mayzie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't been able to find any information on why this was only published posthumously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-04-29T23:50:52.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="99" CreationDate="2018-04-30T11:36:09.713" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the cat represents the elite group of people who are always on job hunting,  the fact that she leaves and comesbback at supper time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4439" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T11:36:09.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6455" CreationDate="2018-04-30T15:18:34.233" Score="4" ViewCount="879" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Harrison likes to quote Rilke's &quot;Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know where it comes from? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4443" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T12:41:37.673" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T12:41:37.673" Title="Rilke's quotation by Jim Harrison" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;rainer-maria-rilke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-30T15:58:29.967" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recurring name in the cast of Molière's plays is named Sganarelle. If they were all the same person, the story of his life would look something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Flying Doctor&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is a servant to Valère&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dom Juan&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is a servant to Dom Juan and apparently unmarried&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The School For Husbands&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is supposed to marry Isabella, but she ends up marrying someone else&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Forced Marriage&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is &quot;52 or 53&quot; years old and is forced to promise to marry Dorimène who is actually in love with Lycaste&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sganarelle, or The Imaginary Cuckold&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is married and he and his unnamed wife suspect each other of cheating on each other&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Doctor Despite Himself&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle is married to Martine and they fight with each other before she takes revenge on him&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love the Doctor&lt;/em&gt;: Sganarelle's wife is dead and he has a daughter whom he doesn't want to let marry&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the plays in which Sganarelle is married show him and his wife fighting (&lt;em&gt;Sganarelle&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;em&gt;The Doctor Despite Himself&lt;/em&gt; act 1, scene 1) and he attests to that fact after her death (&lt;em&gt;Love the Doctor&lt;/em&gt;, act 1, scene 1). Every Sganarelle also seems to have similar mannerisms: For example, his fanciful quotations of Aristotle and philosophers (&lt;em&gt;The Doctor in Spite of Himself&lt;/em&gt; act 1, scene 1; &lt;em&gt;Dom Juan&lt;/em&gt; act 1, scene 1; &lt;em&gt;Love the Doctor&lt;/em&gt; act 1, scene 1) and his intense fear of being cuckolded (throughout every play in which he appears, with the possible exceptions of &lt;em&gt;The Flying Doctor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dom Juan&lt;/em&gt;). In addition, they both seem to live close enough to a place where non-standard French is spoken (&lt;em&gt;Dom Juan&lt;/em&gt; act 2; &lt;em&gt;The Doctor in Spite of Himself&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While some of his potential spouses seem to have different names (indeed in &lt;em&gt;Love the Doctor&lt;/em&gt; act 1, scene 1 he says he only had one wife), the only named one he is shown as having actually married is Martine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence that some &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; all of these characters named Sganarelle were or weren't intended to be the same person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4442" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T11:27:13.767" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T11:27:13.767" Title="Are all or some of the characters named Sganarelle the same person?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;moliere&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6453" CreationDate="2018-04-30T19:36:04.323" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Conversations with Jim Harrison&quot;, Harrison said (&lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/y6vnrhl6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I had to speak at Sam Lawrence's memorial service in New York and I&#xA;  was flipping through books again. Stephen Mitchell's translation of&#xA;  the Duino Elegies. At the end there are what show business calls &quot;out&#xA;  takes&quot;, intended lines that Rilke didn't use. I said one at the&#xA;  memorial service: &quot;Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conversations with Jim Harrison, pg. 134.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in Stephen Mitchell's translation, the lines are actually a bit different (&lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/ycvwrxfe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Protect yourself better &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;protect yourself wanderer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;with the road that is walking too&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Duino Elegies &amp;amp; The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition, pg. 215&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that Harrison, being a poet, made them more poetic. The German original lines are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wahre dich besser &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wahre dich Wandrer &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mit dem selber auch gehenden Weg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rilke wrote them on 1922, at the time he was staying at Château de Muzot, writing &quot;Sonnets to Orpheus&quot; and completing the &quot;Duino Elegies&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2018-04-30T20:31:39.553" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T20:31:39.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6450" CreationDate="2018-04-30T21:45:24.523" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Collectively, the stories are called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic Cycle&lt;/a&gt;. They tell the whole story of the Trojan War, from the Judgment of Paris to the death of Odysseus. It includes the Iliad and the Odyssey (though the term &quot;Epic Cycle&quot; is often used just to refer to non-Homeric books).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like those two, the Epic Cycle is based on older, oral stories, possibly dating back as far as the original events. Their authors are unknown, just as the tradition of Homer's authorship is doubtful. They are assumed to have been written around the same time as the Iliad and Odyssey, plus or minus a century or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, most of these books are lost. We know them from other tellings of the myths. We know their stories from critical analysis of them in other books, including Aristotle. Occasionally these include fragments of a few lines, but the books are effectively gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stories were well known by then, and many authors told them: Ovid, Pausanias, Lucian, etc. The story of the Trojan Horse is best known from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/658&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quintus of Smyrna&lt;/a&gt;. Like other myths, authors felt free to tell and re-tell the stories, adding details that eventually became &quot;canon&quot;. They may or may not have known the versions in the Epic Cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T21:45:24.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-04-30T23:56:22.943" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;em&gt;Look Who's Back&lt;/em&gt;, about the experiences of Adolf Hitler reawaking in 2011 Germany, necessarily contains a certain amount of detail - even if only in Hitler's internal monologue - about the Third Reich, Nazi Germany, and Hitler's personal life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much research did Timur Vermes do during the writing of this book?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm interested in both &lt;em&gt;how much&lt;/em&gt; detail he included - is it mostly common knowledge to Germans, or did he dig up a lot of obscure historical facts as well? - and &lt;em&gt;how accurate&lt;/em&gt; it all is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-04-30T23:56:22.943" Title="How thoroughly was &quot;Look Who's Back&quot; researched?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;timur-vermes&gt;&lt;look-whos-back&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-01T01:28:36.643" Score="6" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Malory's &lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt; it's very heavily implied that Merlin enchanted the stone and the sword in it so it only could be pulled out by the true king of Britain/Arthur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the day came when the Archbishop of Canterbury, &lt;strong&gt;on the advice of Merlin&lt;/strong&gt;, summoned the nobility to London for Christmas morning. In his message the Archbishop promised that the true succession to the British throne would be miraculously revealed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(pg 5, Keith Baines version, bolding my own)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then after the church service, all the nobles file out to the courtyard and see the sword/stone with the inscription.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, nowhere that I can find in Malory does he come right out and say that Merlin enchanted the stone so only Arthur/the true king could pull it out. Do we know Merlin did this for sure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T00:03:45.410" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T00:03:45.410" Title="Do we know Merlin enchanted the sword/stone thing?" Tags="&lt;le-morte-darthur&gt;&lt;thomas-malory&gt;&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T01:29:20.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-01T01:30:53.963" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T01:30:53.963" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T01:30:53.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-01T01:30:53.963" Score="0" Body="For questions about the set of legends about King Arthur. Various sources for this legend include the Mabinogion, Le Morte d'Arthur, the Brut, Historia Regum Britanniae, and others." OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-05-01T09:35:37.207" LastActivityDate="2018-05-01T09:35:37.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-01T10:03:03.087" Score="5" ViewCount="2593" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &amp;quot;Quality&amp;quot; by John Galsworthy and there are some phrases and lines which I could not grasp. I thought that this site would be the perfect place to ask this question. Below are some lines from the story from the beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I knew him from the days of my extreme youth, because he made my father's boots; inhabiting with his elder brother two little shops let into one, in a small by-street--now no more, but then most fashionably placed in the West End.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tenement had a certain quiet distinction; there was no sign upon its face that he made for any of the Royal Family--merely his own German name of Gessler Brothers; and in the window a few pairs of boots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that it always troubled me to account for those unvarying boots in the window, for he made only what was ordered, reaching nothing down, and it seemed so inconceivable that what he made could ever have failed to fit. Had he bought them to put there? That, too, seemed inconceivable. He would never have tolerated in his house leather on which he had not worked himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, they were too beautiful--the pair of pumps, so inexpressibly slim, the patent leathers with cloth tops, making water come into one's mouth, the tall brown riding boots with marvelous sooty glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred years. Those pairs could only have been made by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot--so truly were they prototypes incarnating the very spirit of all foot-gear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These thoughts, of course, came to me later, though even when I was promoted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, some inkling haunted me of the dignity of himself and brother. For to make boots--such boots as he made--seemed to me then, and still seems to me, mysterious and wonderful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My Questions:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &amp;quot;two little shops let into one&amp;quot; mean? Does it mean that Does it mean that the shop consisted of two &amp;quot;shops&amp;quot; and there was one entrance into the shop?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &amp;quot;reaching nothing down&amp;quot; mean? I think it means that he did not make more shoes than required, that is, he only made what was required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;the tall brown riding boots with marvelous sooty glow, as if, though new, they had been worn a hundred years&amp;quot; mean? I think it means that by looking at those shoes one could understand that the shoes were the epitome of endurance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;These thoughts, of course, came to me later, though even when I was promoted to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, some inkling haunted me of the dignity of himself and brother.&amp;quot; mean? I am unsure of its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;When one grew old and wild and ran up bills, one somehow never ran them up with Gessler Brothers. It would not have seemed becoming to go in there and stretch out one’s foot to that blue iron-spectacled glance, owing him for more than — say — two pairs, just the comfortable reassurance that one was still his client.&amp;quot; mean? I think that the first sentence means that the shoes made by him were affordable so one never fell into debts with them. I am unsure of the second part of the paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T10:07:09.377" Title="Meaning of some phrases and lines in &quot;Quality&quot; by John Galsworthy" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-01T21:26:09.610" Score="6" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Princess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Light Princess&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by George MacDonald, the king consults &quot;two very wise Chinese philosophers&quot; about the princess's condition.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; The philosophers are named &quot;Hum-Drum&quot; and &quot;Kopy-Keck.&quot; The story is full of puns, and these faux-Chinese names would seem to be no exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hum-Drum is described as &quot;a Materialist... slow and sententious&quot;; his name is clearly a play on the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/humdrum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humdrum&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;lacking variety or excitement; dull; boring.&quot; So far, so good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not coming up with a similar play on words for Kopy-Keck, who is &quot;a Spiritualist... quick and flighty.&quot; Kopy sounds like &quot;copy,&quot; perhaps, but &quot;Keck&quot; has me stumped. (I don't think the sense of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/keck#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to vomit&lt;/a&gt;&quot; has any bearing!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-name-Kopy-Keck-allude-to&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Quora post&lt;/a&gt; suggests &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/copycat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copycat&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; but I am unconvinced:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The post's author tries to explain the connection between &quot;copycat&quot; and &quot;quick and flighty&quot; by saying that cats are quick; but cats don't really have anything to do with the usual meaning of &quot;copycat.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/copycat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; informs that &quot;copycat&quot; is first attested in American English in 1884, although the word is &quot;probably at least a generation older&quot;; still, it seems unlikely that MacDonald, a Scottish writer, would be making a pun on the term in a story published in 1864, twenty years earlier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in any case, it's unclear that Kopy-Keck has a tendency to &quot;copy&quot; anything. He propounds a theory that the princess has no gravity because her soul is from another planet and therefore is not attracted to the Earth, and he suggests that she can be cured by being taught extensively about the Earth so that she takes an interest in it. I can see the connection here to being a &quot;Spiritualist,&quot; but that's it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the question: &lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of the name Kopy-Keck? Is it a pun or play on words? If so, on what?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Chapter 7, &quot;Try Metaphysics&quot;--&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/697/697-h/697-h.htm#chap07&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available at Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1091" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T13:48:12.447" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T00:11:37.753" Title="What is the significance of the name &quot;Kopy-Keck&quot; in The Light Princess?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-light-princess&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;george-macdonald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 3.0" />
  <row Id="6467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6466" CreationDate="2018-05-02T08:42:09.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The essay Jesting in Earnest by Daniel Gabelman, included in the book &lt;em&gt;Re-Embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850&lt;/em&gt; seems to imply the pun in the name may be &quot;Copy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kant&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. Here's the relevant passage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kopy-Keck, perhaps a caricature of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_Society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metaphysical Society&lt;/a&gt; and their misapplication of Kant and the idealists, believes the princess needs to study every possible history of the earth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kant contributed strongly to the field of Metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with abstract thought. His connection with the title of the story is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Keck&quot; for &quot;Kant&quot; seems a linguistic stretch, but there is evidence this is correct. First, your original Quora source suggests that &quot;Keck&quot; is a valid Chinese name, so it may be that MacDonald was attempting to keep it as authentic sounding as possible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Keck&quot; is a legitimate Chinese name (see: Keck Kiong Te) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hum&quot; is also a potential Chinese name component, as it is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tan_(surname)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pronunciation of the surname &quot;Tan&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in certain Chinese languages and dialects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, footnote 13 in the current edition of the book, presumably added by the editor U. C. Knoepflmacher, alludes to this being the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;given the &quot;materialist&quot; and &quot;spiritualist&quot; affiliations of the two madmen, their names may suggest the absurd misapplication of the philosophical positions held, respectively, by Hume and Kant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case &quot;Hum-Drum&quot; does not just mean boring and everyday, but is also a nice play on the name &quot;Hume&quot;. Given that this name, then, is a double pun, it may well be that the similarity between Kopy Keck and copycat is also intentional - a joke on &quot;Kant's copycats&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kant's ideas on religion are complex and continue to invite debate, to the point where there is disagreement on whether or not he was an atheist. The Metaphysical society, however, attempted to use his ideas (and those of other philosophers) to understand God from an objective viewpoint in a marriage of religion and science. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, after ten years of fruitless debate, they gave up having produced little of value. They &quot;copied&quot; Kant without really understanding his ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is so, then Kopy-Keck is a manifestation of spiritual thinking, while Hum-Drum is a manifestation of empirical science. Given that both present ridiculous ideas and are inflexible in their application, the message may be that extremes are inherently ridiculous. That only by looking at both science and spirit can we &quot;cure the Princess&quot; i.e. come to understand the human condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T11:23:56.057" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T11:23:56.057" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6468" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-02T16:14:16.173" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the LA Times article, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-rivka-galchen-20140504-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Rivka Galchen talks about putting a female twist on iconic stories&quot; by Carolyn Kellogg&lt;/a&gt;, it is claimed that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The stories all have female narrators, and all (save one) are inspired by iconic short stories written by men. Galchen's stories are witty and delightfully intelligent, riffing on works by David Foster Wallace, James Joyce and Haruki Murakami. Each illustrates how the presence of women, as authors and narrators, might have inflected canonical stories.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article mentions three specific correspondences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The titular story &quot;American Innovations&quot; : Gogol's &quot;The Nose&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Lost Order&quot; : Thurber's &quot;Walter Mitty&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Region of Unlikeness&quot; : Borges' &quot;The Aleph&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the correspondence for each story. I am especially curious to know which story does not map to a previously written work, and also what is the story that corresponds to Galchen's &quot;Real Estate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference, here is the list of stories in her book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lost Order&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Region of Unlikeness&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sticker Shock&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;American Innovations &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wild Berry Blue&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real Estate&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dean of the Arts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Late Novels of Gene Hackman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Once an Empire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4451" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T16:14:16.173" Title="What is the correspondence between each story in Rivka Galchen's &quot;American Innovations&quot; and previously written stories?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:21:32.883" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T17:21:32.883" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T17:21:32.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:21:32.883" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German journalist, author and translator Timur Vermes (born 1967) and his works.  He is best known for his satirical novel 'Er ist wieder da' (2012; 'Look Who's Back')." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T09:30:39.617" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:30:39.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:23:05.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T17:23:05.903" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T17:23:05.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:23:05.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about the German novel 'Er ist wieder da' (2012; 'Look Who's Back') by Timur Vermes, in which Hitler wakes up in Berlin in 2011. Use this tag with the [timur-vermes] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T09:30:48.267" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:30:48.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6473" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:50:12.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T17:50:12.457" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T17:50:12.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6474" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:50:12.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish author, poet and Christian minister George MacDonald (1824 – 1905) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T08:16:33.723" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T08:16:33.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6475" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:52:10.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-02T17:52:10.020" LastActivityDate="2018-05-02T17:52:10.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6476" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-02T17:52:10.020" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fairy tale 'The Light Princess' by the Scottish author George MacDonald. Use this tag with the [george-macdonald] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-03T09:30:28.707" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T09:30:28.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4970" CreationDate="2018-05-03T17:46:53.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that this is a big hole in the book. John Galt basically used paid company time and laboratory to develop magical pixie dust that powered his society. Not only did he not give his employers what they paid for, but he used it without their permission. Story would have been a bit different if rest of the society was run on the magical energy while Galt's strikers had to dig for coal and drill for oil with no energy to get them started. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you could say that patents are government enforced monopolies, except that Ayn Rand made a huge deal about Rearden signing away patent rights to his metal for everyone to use.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, book refers to Francisco D'anconia's copper mines, when in fact they belong to his shareholders, including Jim Taggart. And the whole society is aiding and abetting a pirate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4466" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T17:46:53.383" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3565" CreationDate="2018-05-03T21:13:54.857" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From what I can find, they existed in written form from quite early in the 13th century, and it wasn't until the 19th century that the veracity of the event was challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A4ngerkrieg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki on Sangerkreig&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest poetic accounts, dating from the 13th century, describe specific episodes of the contest such as the Fürstenlob and the Rätselspiel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fürstenlob (&amp;quot;princely praise&amp;quot;) was a contest among six minstrels: Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Walther von der Vogelweide, Biterolf, Reinmar von Zweter, Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heinrich Schreiber. The six singers were placed before the Count and Countess of Thuringia, in order to determine which best understood how to sing praises of a prince. Heinrich von Ofterdingen was the most eloquent, but earned the envy of the other minstrels, who tricked him into earning a death sentence. Heinrich gained the protection of Countess Sophia and a one-year reprieve, during which he went to Hungary and sought the assistance of the sorcerer Klingsor. Heinrich and Klingsor returned to Thuringia to resume the contest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Rätselspiel (&amp;quot;mystery game&amp;quot;) was the subsequent poetic duel between Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Hungarian sorcerer Klingsor. Wolfram proved himself capable and eloquent, and when Klingsor grew weary he summoned a demon to continue the duel. When Wolfram began to sing of the Christian mysteries, the demon was unable to respond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BzhG0Aa6T7QC&amp;amp;pg=PA400&amp;amp;lpg=PA400&amp;amp;dq=poem%20ratselspiel&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=4tMfroqCOK&amp;amp;sig=t9q7G3vGAX6f9j-gB4wFZi2K87k&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjbvL3Wt-raAhUCmuAKHT_uDWQQ6AEwB3oECAAQOw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=poem%20ratselspiel&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book Kierkegaard Journals&lt;/a&gt; also references it as a 1260 work of anonymous poems (Much snipped) and also mentions the Furstenlob and the Ratelspiel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the anonymous cycle of poems &amp;quot;Sangerkrieg auf der Wartburg&amp;quot; [Poetic Contest at the Wartburg Castle] from ca. 1260 ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&amp;amp;sl=de&amp;amp;u=http://www.minnesang.com/saengerkrieg.html&amp;amp;prev=search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brothers Grimm also describe it in their German Legends&lt;/a&gt; from 1816 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original poetry, which is at least partially in almost all medieval song manuscripts, &lt;strong&gt;must have been written down in the 50s of the 13th century&lt;/strong&gt;, the dating of the singer war by the Brothers Grimm is - but if you look at those involved - but sure chosen wisely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it looks like the legend arises from works in the 1250's, and only relatively recently was the veracity of the events challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1337" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-03T21:13:54.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6484" CreationDate="2018-05-04T00:21:39.640" Score="6" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before long the madness of intoxication broke out; they attacked one another with fists and knives, and it looked as if they would do murder. Suddenly the Saltmaster’s son, who had stood looking on, leaped among them, caught two of the combatants by the hair and knocked their heads together with such force that the blood started from their noses, and I thought surely their skulls had been crushed like egg-shells; but they must have been very hard-headed, for on being released they seemed little the worse for their punishment. After much shouting and screaming, Rochus succeeded in making peace, which seemed to me, poor worm, quite heroic. The music set in again: the fiddles scraped and the pipes shrieked, while the boys with torn clothes and scratched and bleeding faces, renewed the dance as if nothing had occurred. Truly, this is a people that would gladden the heart of &lt;strong&gt;a Bramarbas or a Holofernes!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's from 'Monk and Hangman's Daughter' by Ambrose Bierce (1892).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't figure out in what context the author use this 'a Bramarbas or a Holofernes' in the above paragraph, which seems to be far-fetched or even isolated to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English speak, so my question may be too odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4469" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-05-04T01:33:03.790" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T07:52:24.607" Title="A real meaning of a Bramarbas or a Holofernes?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;ambrose-bierce&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6482" CreationDate="2018-05-04T07:52:24.607" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holofernes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holofernes&lt;/a&gt; is a character in the biblical Book of Judith (which is considered canonical in Catholic and Orthodox tradition, but not in Protestant). He was a Assyrian general under king Nebuchadnezzar, who invaded nations and destroyed their temples in order that they should instead worship the king. When laying siege to a Hebrew town, the widow Judith seduced him and cut off his head. Holofernes was later (in e.g. Dante) considered as an example of pride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bramarbas seems to be the German title of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bramarbas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;play by Holberg&lt;/a&gt;, where the title character is a soldier &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.se/books?id=cYg16N_l94YC&amp;amp;pg=PA26&amp;amp;lpg=PA26&amp;amp;dq=Jakob%20von%20Tyboe&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=khoRm2pxm2&amp;amp;sig=Y33ilf9_E0EkwFzTNrNh9YdWoIY&amp;amp;hl=sv&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiTtuaByOvaAhXLblAKHVvgCbg4ChDoAQgwMAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Jakob%20von%20Tyboe&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;who brags about his (imaginary) exploits&lt;/a&gt;; &quot;bramabasieren&quot; seems to have become a German word for this sort of bragging.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Bierce tries to use the two names to characterize the people as proud, strident and combatative, but not necessarily very effective fighters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-05-04T07:52:24.607" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14429" CreationDate="2018-05-04T11:53:49.163" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is my first question on this website, so I am not completely sure that this is the most adequate one (I could have also tried Philosophy stack exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the chapter &quot;L'exil d'Hélène&quot; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89t%C3%A9_(Camus)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'été&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Summer&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Helen's exile&quot;) of Camus, there is a quote attributed to Hegel : &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seule la ville moderne, ose écrire Hegel, offre à l'esprit le terrain où il peut prendre conscience de lui-même.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(English translation &quot;Only the modern city,” Hegel dares write, “offers the mind a field in which it can become aware of itself.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, no reference is provided for this quote, and the fact that it was not given in German makes it difficult to find additional information about it. Therefore, I would like to know if someone had encountered something similar in Hegel's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4471" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T19:24:51.687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T23:13:19.630" Title="On a quote of Hegel in L'été (Summer) of Camus" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-04T22:04:25.023" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why didn’t Theodore Roethke serve in WW2? He should have been in his mid 30s during WW2, but I can’t find any references to his service (or lack of service). Anyone know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4475" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-05T14:43:39.557" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T02:11:02.323" Title="Why didn’t Theodore Roethke serve in WW2?" Tags="&lt;theodore-roethke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4548" CreationDate="2018-05-05T16:08:52.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Bilbo:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hobbits spoke Westron, the common tongue, but retained what little was left of their own language for things like personal names and days of the week:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in those days* also they forgot whatever languages they had used before, and spoke ever after the Common Speech, the Westron as it was named, that was current through all the lands of the kings from Arnor to Gondor, and about all the coasts of the Sea from Belfalas to Lune. Yet they kept a few words of their own, as well as their own names of months and days, and a great store of personal names out of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Prologue, part I., &amp;quot;Concerning Hobbits&amp;quot; (pg 4 in my copy).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*: &amp;quot;those days&amp;quot; were when the hobbits had for the most part stopped their wanderings and had begun to settle in Bree, near what became the Shire.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo being a proper name, it must have come from their old language. Knowing that the dwarven names come from the Elder Edda, and so forth, it is not unreasonable to assume there is a source for these proper names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letter 25 notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hobbit-names [are] from Obvious Sources proper to their kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question then, of course, is what exactly these &amp;quot;Obvious Sources&amp;quot; are. (The phrase &amp;quot;proper to their kind&amp;quot; is also intriguing as many have compared hobbits to the British servicemen in war who Tolkien so admired - see for example the work of Joseph Loconte.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Letter 72, Tolkien writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hobbits of that class have very Saxon names as a rule&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is quite enlightening. The dictionary notes of Saxon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;relating to the Anglo-Saxons, their language (Old English), or their period of dominance in England (5th–11th centuries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the word origin of Bilbo, it seems to come from &lt;em&gt;bilboa&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bilbao&lt;/em&gt;, both of which are purely English in origin. Tolkien, as a professor of English, would probably been aware of these words, and might have been influenced by it, especially as Bilbo owns the sword Sting, of Elvish make (therefore a good blade).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another twist to this (thanks to the comments for pointing this out) - the &amp;quot;that class&amp;quot; here refers to hobbits of the class of Samwise and his Gaffer; Bilbo as a Baggins would not be of this class but a higher one, and thus this line crumbles a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will note that also in Letter 25 it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of the Hobbits was remarkably like English [...] Their family names remain for the most part as well known and justly respected in this island as they were in Hobbiton and Bywater.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also seems to indicate that the proper names were English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Azog:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The orcish languages were not exactly consistent, as often the orcs of different regions would due to arguing come up with their own often very different dialects; the languages were often limited and angry, a true perversion of the elvish languages. It is therefore surprising to me that a possible source could come from English, as the orcish and black speeches may well have come from Hittite and Hurrian (&lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com/questions/438/what-similarities-does-the-black-speech-in-tolkien-have-to-hurrian&quot;&gt;see here&lt;/a&gt;), and it also seems odd that Tolkien would wish to associate the language of his native country with some of the most repugnant creatures in his works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Tolkien Gateway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning and origin of the name Azog is unknown. It is most likely a name in the Black Speech (e.g., the similarity between azog and nazg), though Mágol may also be a possibility. Andreas Moehn has noted an apparent but tentative link with Mannish, in the Adunaic word zagar meaning &amp;quot;sword&amp;quot;, in which case Azog might refer to &amp;quot;warrior&amp;quot; or anything similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Nazg means [finger]-ring or [magic]-ring.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it did come from Black Speech, as likely, that would indicate a very low probability that that is association with your 'azoch'/'azoth'. Adunaic, on the other hand, is more interesting. Adunaic was the speech of the Numenoreans, which derived to some extent from the Elvish languages (as the Numenoreans were those who were gifted by the Elves, so they were very aware of Elvish languages) though with some distinctions. For example, it has some of the characteristics of Khuzdul (the language of the dwarves), and also has noun classes. Westron then derived from Adunaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of the Rohirrim is an archaic relative of Westron similar to Old English, therefore by taking this route it is not completely unlikely that 'Azog' may have had its origins in 'azoch'/'azoth', but for in-universe reasons I am disinclined to believe this the case (as stated above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is yet a third possible route. The black speech (probably) was based upon, as said earlier, hittite and hurrian, and a not insignificant selection of orcish dialects were probably based upon this as the orcs were created (or rather perverted) by Morgoth, and Sauron was his lieutenant (see Silmarillion) but there were some orcish dialects that were based upon Westron, according to Robert Foster's &lt;em&gt;Guide to Middle-Earth&lt;/em&gt; under 'Westron', though it should be noted that this book was published before the History of Middle Earth series and its associated information came out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the orcs Azog was among used such a Westron-based language, I would still, however, have some doubt in my mind as to whether this was an association Tolkien would make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It then gets more confusing when one comes to the 'Orc' section in the same book. Here it says that the more Westron based orcish dialects were used for communication between tribes, whereas more black-speech based dialects which varied dramatically from tribe to tribe were used within tribes. If this is the case then the personal name of Azog probably still came from this black-speech based dialect; under 'Black Speech' it says that many Mordor orcs, indeed, had their names in a &amp;quot;debased&amp;quot; form of black speech; then again, Azog wasn't necessarily a Mordor-orc, though he could have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;An important note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that Westron is represented as English in the book, but the whole book is represented as translated, so the names that we're referencing weren't the &lt;em&gt;actual&lt;/em&gt; names, but the translated names, which I'll admit gets kind of confusing. For more information on this bit, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; or Appendix F of the Lord of the Rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize the situation as best I can: since Westron was the most commonly spoken language in Middle Earth, Tolkien treated that language as English and then &lt;em&gt;worked from there&lt;/em&gt; so that languages closely related to Westron, like the language of the Rohirrim, were treated accordingly. Thus the language of the Rohirrim comes out much like Old English. In other words, Tolkien as the translator represented this world as if it was ours and the legends in our tongues (sort of; his own versions of our tongues with a few others added in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;General resources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would check the &lt;a href=&quot;https://conlang.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;conlang stack exchange&lt;/a&gt; which allows questions on Tolkien's languages. I'd also take a look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://folk.uib.no/hnohf/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; (one of the most detailed and well-sourced descriptions I've found of Tolkien's various languages). Finally, check out the History of Middle Earth, especially, in the case of this question, volume 12, &lt;em&gt;The Peoples of Middle Earth&lt;/em&gt;, which, to quote the above site,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Peoples of Middle-earth gives many more &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; forms of the names Anglicized by Tolkien than the ones mentioned in the appendices to LotR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final small note: Tolkien didn't exactly like Shakespeare; he wrote the story of the Ents marching on Orthanc because he did not like the way the marching of the forest was portrayed in Macbeth; he also did not like Shakespeare's writing of Elves. Hopefully this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-05T20:32:03.683" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-05T22:11:19.147" Score="3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading Douglas Adam's &lt;em&gt;The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul&lt;/em&gt;, I came across this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognized at all thatshe was dreaming, she realized she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins. &#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any specific reason for why penguins in particular, or just comic effect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T01:27:15.613" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T01:27:15.613" Title="Why are there penguins in the subconscious?" Tags="&lt;douglas-adams&gt;&lt;the-long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul&gt;&lt;dirk-gently&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9067" CreationDate="2018-05-06T00:33:16.713" Score="11" ViewCount="1062" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston goes to a pub and asks an old prole about life in the olden days. But it's all in vain, because the man can't remember anything Winston thinks is important, so Winston gives up and leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later that evening, he finds an old antique shop run by another prole named Mr Charrington. He has a higher opinion of Charrington than the other proles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His spectacles, his gentle, fussy movements, and the fact&#xA;  that he was wearing an aged jacket of black velvet, gave him a vague air&#xA;  of intellectuality, as though he had been some kind of literary man, or&#xA;  perhaps a musician. His voice was soft, as though faded, and his accent&#xA;  less debased than that of the majority of proles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They chat about antiques, and then a child's nursery rhyme and its relation to the old churches of London. Later on Winston comes to (wrongly) trust Charrington enough to rent his upstairs room with Julia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: why doesn't Winston ask Charrington the same things he tried to get the first prole to answer? It seems like Charrington is smarter and has a better memory, he's interested in history, likes conversation, and as far as Winston knows he's friendly. Heck, there isn't even a telescreen spying on them (or so he thinks). This has bugged me since the first time I read the book -- the answers are all right there in front of you for the taking, Winston!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Obviously it suits the purposes of the story that Winston not have an easy reliable source of historical info, but it seems like such an oversight / plot hole that perhaps there's a reason for it I've overlooked.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4482" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T13:07:29.717" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T11:13:24.427" Title="Why doesn't Winston ask Mr Charrington about life before the Revolution?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6494" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2066" CreationDate="2018-05-06T02:56:50.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Was he familiar with Twain?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I really couldn't find much on this topic, here is what I found. As a comment mentioned,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there's Clyde Kilby's observation that he &amp;quot;was pleasantly surprised at the familiarity he showed with American literature, especially that of Mark Twain&amp;quot; (TOLKIEN &amp;amp; THE SILMARILLION, pages 30-31)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from &lt;a href=&quot;http://sacnoths.blogspot.com/2010/06/did-tolkien-read-steinbeck.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt;; the same however also points out that what was believed to be a reference to Steinbeck was in fact not, and a comment on the blogpost by Hammond and Scull, two of the foremost researchers of Tolkien and authors of (among other works) the massively definitive J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide, said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wayne has read Mark Twain, whose books were required in American schools, while Christina's knowledge of them from an English upbringing is second-hand; and talking about this, we agreed that although neither of us has read a word of, say, G.A. Henty, we both recognize titles such as With Clive in India as typical of his works, and we've read enough about British children’s literature to know what kind of books Henty produced. Which in turn made us wonder how much Twain Tolkien had actually read when he spoke with Kilby, as opposed to having enough familiarity through other avenues to carry on a casual conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which also seems to cast doubt on Tolkien having known of Mark Twain. Then, I found this little gem, a transcript of a letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Naomi Mitchel which seems to clearly indicate that Tolkien was indeed aware of at least some of the works of Mark Twain - the letter contrasts Michel's book, &lt;em&gt;The Chapel Perilous&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope that the Chapel Perilous went and is going well [though I seldom see or read reviews, and but for a cutting agency should not see my own – In spite of them I do not read them all] A curious and rather disturbing blend. I hope you won’t mind my mentioning “a Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.” I only do so, because of the shattering difference. Of course there are the deliberate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mechanical anachronisms in both. the hello–girls and telephones, and electrified wire; and dwarfs with photographic apparatus: I don’t like ‘em, of course, and think it better if the satire arises out of the material as it is; but there are umbrellas in the Shire—but M.T. [Mark Twain]was merely vulgarly romantic, whereas you undermine, or (perhaps fairer) transform the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sethkaller.com/item/1195-23221-J.R.R.-Tolkien-Writes-his-Proofreader-with-a-Lengthy-Discussion-of-the-Lord-of-the-Rings,-Including-Criticism-of-Radio-Broadcasts-of-his-Work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;With &lt;em&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that &lt;em&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt; was not one of Twain's more...&lt;em&gt;popular&lt;/em&gt; works. To quote Wikipedia on the matter,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twain's opinion notwithstanding, critics, then and now, have not labeled Recollections his best work. Today, the book is hardly read or acknowledged in the mainstream, especially compared to Twain's comedic works, such as Huckleberry Finn, Pudd 'nHead Wilson, and Tom Sawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court&lt;/em&gt; could probably be added to the list of &amp;quot;more popular comedic&amp;quot; works.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, at the minimum, Tolkien was probably familiar with the legends of Joan of Arc. &lt;a href=&quot;https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/textmatters/article/view/2251/1902&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; for example, compares the character of Eowyn to Joan of Arc and cites multiple others that do the same. In the digging I've done up to this point, a bunch of sites cite (sorry, bad pun) Eowyn as a Joan of Arc figure, and as a reader of the stories, I do have to agree that that seems like a pretty clear analogy (though on the other hand, if you're trying to write a female character that &amp;quot;does something&amp;quot; into a medieval society, a Joan of Arc character is kind of what you're going to get at first pass; take that how you will).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is also of note is that Twain based the book off of actual sources of the story of Joan of Arc - to quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2874/2874-h/2874-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the book itself&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Authorities examined in verification of the truthfulness of this narrative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J. E. J. QUICHERAT, Condamnation et Rehabilitation de Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;J. FABRE, Proces de Condamnation de Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;H. A. WALLON, Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;M. SEPET, Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;J. MICHELET, Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;BERRIAT DE SAINT-PRIX, La Famille de Jeanne d'Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;La Comtesse A. DE CHABANNES, La Vierge Lorraine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Monseigneur RICARD, Jeanne d'Arc la Venerable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Lord RONALD GOWER, F.S.A., Joan of Arc. JOHN O'HAGAN, Joan of Arc.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;JANET TUCKEY, Joan of Arc the Maid.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it could very well be that Tolkien was not in fact familiar with this particular tale of Twain but &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; familiar with the source material from which Twain drew. On the other hand, these sources are primarily in French, and to quote letter 213:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance I dislike French&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm not sure he would have necessarily read these sources which are mostly in French, it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tl;dr:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, he was probably familiar with Twain, and he might have had a passing familiarity with the story of Joan of Arc, but he probably did not have the level of awareness necessary to have Theoden be influenced by the Dauphin/Joan of Arc, and even if he was, Twain was probably not the transmitter in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all of this must be taken with a grain of salt; see Rand al'Thor's comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T14:14:47.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-06T11:01:19.647" Score="6" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does this sentence mean in chapter 01 of &lt;em&gt;Peel My Love Like an Onion&lt;/em&gt; by Ana Castillo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But you must be really in love for the cliché to bounce back like a boomerang smack dab between the eyes with the ring of the gospel truth to your born-again ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2850" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T13:12:44.030" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T05:47:14.667" Title="What does this sentence about a cliché bouncing back like a boomerang mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ana-castillo&gt;&lt;peel-my-love-like-an-onion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-06T13:14:21.343" Score="6" ViewCount="2382" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Courage isn't having the strength to go on - it is going on when you don't have strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who said this quote? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/149171-courage-isn-t-having-the-strength-to-go-on---it&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Napoleon Bonaparte&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/233139-courage-is-not-having-the-strength-to-go-on-it&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodore Roosevelt&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4487" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T13:27:55.320" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T14:39:17.827" Title="Who said this quote? Napoleon Bonaparte or Theodore Roosevelt?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:28:03.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T17:28:03.523" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T17:28:03.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:28:03.523" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American short story writer, journalist, poet and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce (1842 – circa 1914) and his works. One of his best-known works is the satirical 'The Devil's Dictionary'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T15:39:56.513" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T15:39:56.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:29:11.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T17:29:11.810" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T17:29:11.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:29:11.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American poet Theodore Roethke ( 1908 – 1963) and his work." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T15:40:00.397" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T15:40:00.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6502" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:30:56.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-06T17:30:56.280" LastActivityDate="2018-05-06T17:30:56.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6503" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-06T17:30:56.280" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul' (1988) by Douglas Adams. Use this tag with the [douglas-adams] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T15:39:52.460" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T15:39:52.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17397" CreationDate="2018-05-06T19:41:30.667" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Picador edition of Pynchon's &lt;em&gt;V&lt;/em&gt;, there is a V of Vs on (pre) page 7, and each chapter title is structured as a V.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the first edition also contain a V of Vs, and similarly structured chapter titles? &lt;em&gt;(Jonathan Cape in UK)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[... This use of the V (particularly the V of Vs) has always shaped my interpretation of the symbolism of V, and am now wondering if I should draw anything from these structural usages. ...]&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T21:07:54.010" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T16:20:46.847" Title="Any differences in structure between editions of Pynchon's V?" Tags="&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;&lt;v&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6487" CreationDate="2018-05-07T02:11:02.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything definitive online, but I wonder if his history of mental illness had something to do with it. The timeline isn't totally clear from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/theodore-roethke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this short bio on the Poetry Foundation website&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biography.com/people/theodore-roethke-40275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one on Biography&lt;/a&gt;, but sometime before the U.S. entered WW2 Roethke had suffered a series of mental breakdowns severe enough that he had needed to be admitted to a sanitarium. Looking at some historical data (&lt;a href=&quot;http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/NeuropsychiatryinWWIIVolI/appendixa.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this study, for instance&lt;/a&gt;) draftees could be disqualified for mental illnesses like manic depression. Perhaps this disqualified Roethke from military service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4488" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T02:11:02.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T08:37:52.870" Score="7" ViewCount="2425" Body="&lt;p&gt;What did Pope intend to say by &amp;quot;Whatever is, is right&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/039308096X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Well-Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2 edn 2016), p. 86 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Related to this is one final question: What is fiction &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; to do? Why are you&#xA;reading a novel at all? Are you expecting to find out some truth about human nature?&#xA;Should a novel reveal some difficult, hard-to-face truth about ourselves? Do novels&#xA;show the inevitable end of certain paths? Or are they, instead, agents of moral&#xA;change? Do they show us models so that we can amend our ways? This idea—that&#xA;fiction provides us with a model—itself has a certain assumption behind it: There is&#xA;some standard of human behavior which applies to all of us, in all cultures, and our&#xA;quest in life is to uncover it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The opposing idea was once expressed by Alexander Pope in the phrase,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Whatever is, is right.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; The novel doesn't set out an ideal, because to assume that&#xA;there is such a thing as an unchanging standard of behavior governing all people at all&#xA;times is narrow minded and myopic. The novel has no business in providing models.&#xA;It simply explores realities: It opens numerous doors for you to peer through, but&#xA;makes no suggestions as to which threshold you should cross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/need-clairfication-bigger-picture-epistle-1-essay-186233&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Wollston/whatever.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; don't explain simply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T14:54:11.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T14:54:11.450" Title="What did Pope intend to say by &quot;Whatever is, is right&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;alexander-pope&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6513" CreationDate="2018-05-07T09:01:48.470" Score="5" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/039308096X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Well-Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2 edn 2016), p. 49 Middle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  If you don't have a reading partner who can meet with you face to face, you can &#xA;  conduct discussions by letter (or email, as long as you treat these dialogues as formal, &#xA;  requiring proper vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, not resorting to the &#xA;  shorthand of e-communication). In 1814, Thomas Jefferson, obviously feeling &#xA;  isolated on his Virginia mountaintop, wrote to John Adams that Plato is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;one of the race of genuine sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first, &#xA;    by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly, by the adoption and incorporation of &lt;strong&gt;his &#xA;    whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity&lt;/strong&gt;. His foggy mind is forever presenting &#xA;    the semblances of objects which, half seen through a mist, can be defined neither in &#xA;    form nor dimensions.... But why am I dosing you with these antediluvian topics? &#xA;    Because I am glad to have some one to whom they are familiar, and who will not &#xA;    receive them as if dropped from the moon.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T21:26:29.740" Title="What did Jefferson intend to say by Plato's &quot;whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity&quot;?" Tags="&lt;plato&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-07T15:03:55.147" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/039308096X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Well-Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2 edn 2016), p. 165 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I modified the book's format, as the author quoted scantly and the omitted sentences were short enough to be restored.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Solzhenitsyn's autobiography is the story not just of himself, but of all &#xA;  these prisoners, told in clear detail to make the abstract idea of imprisonment concrete, so that the rest of the world will finally take notice. But &#xA;  Solzhenitsyn the man changes throughout the story as well. He learns that &#xA;  he too is evil: &quot;In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to &#xA;  be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor.... And it was only when I lay there on rotting &#xA;  prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.&quot; In his &#xA;  imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn learns that revolution is the wrong solution to &#xA;  oppression. &quot;Even in the best of hearts,&quot; he concludes,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;there remains...an &#xA;    unuprooted small corner of evil.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Since then I have come to understand the &#xA;    truth of all the religions in the word: They struggle with the evil &lt;em&gt;inside a &#xA;    human being&lt;/em&gt; (inside every human being). [It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, &#xA;    but it is possible to constrict it within each person.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And since that time I have come to understand the falsehood of all the revolutions in history: They destroy only &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;those carriers&lt;/em&gt; of evil &#xA;    contemporary with them&lt;/strong&gt; [(and also fail, out of haste, to discriminate the &#xA;    carriers of good as well). And they then take to themselves as their &#xA;    heritage the actual evil itself, magnified still more.&#xA;      The Nuremburg Trials have to be regarded as one of the special &#xA;    achievements of the twentieth century: they killed the very idea of evil, &#xA;    though they killed very few of the people who had been infected by it. (Of &#xA;    course, Stalin deserves no credit here. He would have preferred to explain &#xA;    less and shoot more.) And if by the twenty-first century humanity has not &#xA;    yet blown itself up and has not suffocated itself—perhaps it is this &#xA;    direction that will triumph?] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T17:54:24.257" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T17:54:24.257" Title="What did Solzhenitstyn('s translator) intend to say by 'those carriers of evil contemporary with them'?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;aleksandr-solzhenitsyn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6508" CreationDate="2018-05-07T16:41:39.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote from Solzhenitsyn's &lt;em&gt;Gulag Archipelago&lt;/em&gt; in original Russian reads as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;С тех пор я понял ложь всех революций истории: они уничтожают только современных им носителей зла (а не разбирая впопыхах — и носителей добра), само же зло, еще увеличенным, берут себе в наследство.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my rough paraphrase, he's saying that any revolution will remove the symptoms, but not the cause of the illness - the illness being evil, and the symptoms being its contemporary carriers (i.e. the people being overthrown). Why contemporary? Because once the revolution (read: the new powers that be) are done with the previous evil, they'll fill that niche themselves. See, e.g. &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, for an example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solzhenitsyn is disillusioned by the revolution that happened in Russia and let to the Soviets' rise to power, probably because of their treatment of people who did not agree with their vision of the country's future and were vocal about it, like Solzhenitsyn himself (though one didn't even need to be vocal to be sent far far away). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T16:41:39.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6437" CreationDate="2018-05-07T20:34:31.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;By Eliot's later work, this is almost certainly referring to Four Quartets, Eliot's most post-modern poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T. S. Eliot bibliography &amp;gt; Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've read a lot of Eliot, there is a great deal of evolution between Prufrock (1917) and the Quartets (1940-43).  Rather than attempting a breakdown of the differences between the Wasteland (1921) and the Quartets, I'll use an example of the convolutional passages that feature strongly in the latter work.  The Quartets begin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time present and time past&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are both perhaps present in time future,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And time future contained in time past.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If all time is eternally present&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All time is unredeemable.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What might have been is an abstraction&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Remaining a perpetual possibility&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only in a world of speculation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What might have been and what has been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Point to one end, which is always present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meter of the Hughes excerpt seems a direct reference to &amp;quot;time before and time after&amp;quot;, featured in part III of Burnt Norton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a place of disaffection&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Time before and time after&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In a dim light: neither daylight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Investing form with lucid stillness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Turning shadow into transient beauty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With slow rotation suggesting permanence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor darkness to purify the soul&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Emptying the sensual with deprivation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cleansing affection from the temporal.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over the strained time-ridden faces&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Distracted from distraction by distraction&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Filled with fancies and empty of meaning&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tumid apathy with no concentration&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That blows before and after time,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Time before and time after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, the Hughes passage feels more in the spirit of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/The-Hollow-Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hollow Men (1925)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shape without form, shade without colour,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Paralysed force, gesture without motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cipher&amp;quot; in the Hughes relates to the layers and layers of meaning in Four Quartets, which is closer to the &amp;quot;neurolinguistic code&amp;quot; some very smart people have used in reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Eliot, this is partly a function of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The intolerable wrestle with words and meanings&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oedipa.tripod.com/eliot-2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;East Coker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hughes' The Crow is regarded partly as an attack on Christianity, where both the Wasteland and Four Quartets can be understood as an attempt to reconcile Western and Eastern religious ideals.  (Specifically Christianity and Hinduism.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hughes society also categorizes Crow as an attack on humanism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thetedhughessociety.org/crow/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crow: from the Life and Songs of the Crow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot's work, by contrast, is highly humanistic.  If you're interested in this theme in Hughes, I'd highly recommend the poetry of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Jeffers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robinson Jeffers&lt;/a&gt;, who precedes Hughes, per Jeffers' central theme of inhumanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T06:17:00.463" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T06:17:00.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6507" CreationDate="2018-05-07T20:58:21.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;By &quot;Plato's whimsies&quot; he almost certainly means the idea of the Ideal Forms, or more in general, the metaphysical idea of their being another layer of &quot;Reality&quot; deeper and more real than our own, and from which our own is a forever imperfect copy.  These ideas were made explicitly religious by the Neoplatonists, and then incorporated into Christian theology via the work of St Augustine and other early Christian theologians --this work being the &quot;artificial Christianity&quot; Jefferson is also deriding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jefferson describes Plato's Ideals as foggy and misty.  This is because of Plato's claim that we can only grasp them in part here (in the ordinary world), and that any version of them we envision is necessarily incomplete and inaccurate.  Jefferson's language probably deliberately echoes St. Paul's famous metaphor of &quot;seeing in a mirror, darkly&quot; as the natural condition of moral, earthly life.  Also note that his description of Plato as a &quot;genuine sophist,&quot; is a backhanded compliment at best, since Plato consistently portrayed the sophists (who were pre-Socratic philosophers) as superficial wisdom peddlers constantly being bested by Socrates. (This would be like calling Jesus a &quot;genuine Pharisee.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jefferson is further suggesting that it is only because of (what he would probably view as) the historical accident of a syncretic synthesis of Christian and Platonic ideas that Plato's reputation and philosophies survive at all, despite what he sees as their blatant silliness.  His last statement implies that most modern thinkers wouldn't give such obsolete ideas even the ghost of a thought, but that it is enjoyable to talk them over, even dismissively, with someone else educated in the ancient Classics and Christian theology.  (It is, however, worth noting that we still study Plato, even two more centuries past the time of Jefferson.  Furthermore his &quot;whimsies&quot; were already 300 years old at the time of Christ --and twice that by the time Augustine learned them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-05-07T21:26:29.740" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T21:26:29.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6506" CreationDate="2018-05-07T21:05:34.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In the passage&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph here proposes (through a somewhat rhetorical line of questioning) that novels are meant to help provide a moral model for society:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they show us models so that we can amend our ways&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second paragraph proposes the exact opposite, by arguing that there is no standard moral model. That is, it argues that there is no &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; system of moral beliefs, and that whatever someone considers right or wrong, is right or wrong - thus the Alexander Pope quote, &amp;quot;Whatever is, is right&amp;quot;. In this case it reformulates the purpose of the novel into&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;simply explor[ing] realities: it opens numerous doors for you to peer through, but makes no suggestions as to which threshold you should cross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, instead of providing a definitive moral model it gives you suggestions for moral models that could be followed, but doesn't necessarily encourage you to follow one or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In the poem&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote the relevant section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All Discord, Harmony, not understood;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;All partial Evil, universal Good:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;One truth is clear, &amp;quot;Whatever IS, is RIGHT.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is more along the lines that as fallible humans, we cannot really know what is truly right - &amp;quot;All [...] not understood&amp;quot; meaning we don't have the full knowledge of the situation. His last two lines here sum up his point: &amp;quot;And spite of Pride&amp;quot; (though we make think we are wiser and would like to believe otherwise) &amp;quot;in erring Reason's spite&amp;quot; (in spite of the fact many philosophers and moralists believe they have found out their morals using sound, unbreakable logic) &amp;quot;One truth is clear&amp;quot; (amidst all the things we &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; might be right but aren't sure) &amp;quot;Whatever IS, is RIGHT&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, I'm not completely sure that Pope was quoted exactly as he would've liked to be, but the point still stands, I believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-07T21:05:34.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6515" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3894" CreationDate="2018-05-08T06:32:10.083" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe it's 'Tobie Lolness' ( Timothée de Fombelle)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4490" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T06:32:10.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6516" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:35:15.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T08:35:15.193" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T08:35:15.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6517" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:35:15.193" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) and his works. Pope is best known for the mock-epic 'The Rape of the Lock' (1721), 'The Dunciad' and 'An Essay on Criticism' (1711)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T14:11:01.310" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:11:01.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6518" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:40:49.470" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T08:40:49.470" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T08:40:49.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6519" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:40:49.470" Score="0" Body="Questions about the  Russian novelist, historian and short story writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918 – 2008) or about any of his works, which include the novels 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich' (1962),  'Cancer Ward' (1968) and 'The Gulag Archipelago' (1973). Questions about his works originally in Russian should include the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:19:03.750" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:19:03.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6520" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:51:44.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His works have come down to us in the form of dialogues, often involving his teacher Socrates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His major works include &lt;em&gt;Apology of Socrates&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Phaedo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Symposium&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Republic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:40:30.410" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:40:30.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6521" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T08:51:44.580" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Greek philosopher Plato (428 or later – 348/347 BC) or his works. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:40:47.970" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:40:47.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-08T13:05:44.100" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Middlemarch by George Eliot Dorothea Brook's nickname is Dodo. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or actually to be exact her sister, Celia Brook's nickname for her is Dodo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this an allusion to Dorothea's almost extinct kind?&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am presuming her kind to be the 'Mother Teresa' type; which the book's underlying moral seems to suggest can no longer exist (i.e. good deeds and greater causes are no longer, everyday kindness and little steps are all that can be taken).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="186" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T08:30:50.897" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T08:30:50.897" Title="Is Dorothea's nickname metaphorical?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-eliot&gt;&lt;middlemarch&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6523" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T13:57:49.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T13:57:49.767" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T13:57:49.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6524" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T13:57:49.767" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life' (1871–1872) by George Eliot. Use this tag with the [george-eliot] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T14:28:04.343" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T14:28:04.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6525" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6856" CreationDate="2018-05-08T15:11:07.270" Score="6" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a quote from Tomas de Quincey's &quot;Confessions of an English Opium-Eater&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Quincey's clearly talking about the stupidity of the Turkish opium-eaters and that they're telling lies about the experience of eating opium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, though, is about the connection between equestrian statues and wooden logs. As I can see from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_statue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiki&lt;/a&gt; (sorry for Wiki, but this article clearly has good references), those statues are made of stone, marble etc. What statues is Quincey talking about? Is it a specific kind of equestrian statues? Was it typical for some period in the history to build such statues? Are those some toys for children he's referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1944" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:26:37.930" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:26:37.930" Title="Equestrian statues and wooden logs, what's the connection?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;thomas-de-quincey&gt;&lt;confessions-of-english-opium-eater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2970" CreationDate="2018-05-08T16:45:50.903" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a part of the answer is the 'fact' that British graffiti at the time was marked by an emphasis on message rather than imagery. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvqxem/origins-of-london-graffiti-197&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;London's Original Graffiti Artists Were Poets and Political Revolutionaries&lt;/a&gt; by George Stewart-Lockhart on &lt;em&gt;Vice&lt;/em&gt;, 24 September 2014.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4494" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:18:46.587" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:18:46.587" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:02:21.073" Score="7" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1962, the famous British explorer Eric Shipton named one of the main summits of Cordillera de Darwin in Tierra del Fuego (Patagonia) as &quot;Mount Lady Jane&quot;.&#xA;After talking to a member of the expedition, it turned out that the name came from a limerick on which Lady Jane was a prostitute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is funny, because one of the expedition members had a &quot;pee bottle&quot; he used to pee inside the tent. But when they were storm bound due to the ferocious patagonian weather, all four expedition members ended up sharing the same &quot;pee bottle&quot; that, due to its promiscuity was then nicknamed &quot;Lady Jane&quot;. The &quot;pee bottle&quot; turned out to be an important asset of the expedition, offering excellent services, therefore they decided to name a mountain after &quot;her&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below, you can see an aerial picture annotated by Eric Shipton indicating their route and the proposed geographical names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tsona.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tsona.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;I've spent many hours looking for that limerick online, but I haven't been able to find it. As you most likely already realized, English is not my first language, making the search even harder, perhaps it is a well know limerick in some places. Therefore, I wonder if anyone here knows something about that limerick, or has clues or suggestions on where to look for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also consider that the recollections of the expedition member I interviewed might not be very precise after 56 years. Maybe Lady Jane wasn't exactly a prostitute, but a character that would make sense in the context described above. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4495" LastEditorUserId="4495" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T22:48:51.207" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T17:29:53.923" Title="Looking for an old limerick mentioning a character named &quot;Lady Jane&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6528" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:38:04.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T17:38:04.620" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T17:38:04.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6529" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:38:04.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English essayist Thomas De Quincey (1785 – 1859) and his works. His essays include 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821) and 'On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth' (1823)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T20:12:37.863" LastActivityDate="2018-05-09T20:12:37.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6530" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:39:27.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-08T17:39:27.653" LastActivityDate="2018-05-08T17:39:27.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6531" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-08T17:39:27.653" Score="0" Body="Questions about the essay 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater' (1821) by Thomas De Quincey. Use with [thomas-de-quincey] and [essays]" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T00:10:34.173" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T00:10:34.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-09T05:41:45.247" Score="7" ViewCount="3782" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I loved her like certain dark things are to be loved, in between shadow and soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain this? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What dark things are being talked about? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://redpoppy.net/poem37.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full text in Spanish and English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alternate translation: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49236/one-hundred-love-sonnets-xvii&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;One Hundred Love Sonnets&lt;/em&gt; XVII&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4497" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-05-09T20:36:58.787" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T15:54:20.337" Title="Explanation of a line from the poem &quot;I do not love you &quot; by Pablo Neruda" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;pablo-neruda&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15029" CreationDate="2018-05-02T21:32:21.197" Score="13" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;Searching for a work of metafiction I read about five years ago, probably published originally in the early 2000s.  It's a bizarre fable about a young man who develops an obsession with a girl, a stranger to him, who is in a coma.  I seem to think there may have been a motorcycle involved.  He tells her a series of increasingly lurid and dreamlike fairy tales about him and her, where each story is nested inside the last, like the &lt;em&gt;Arabian Nights&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, the characters are named only with letters, and even the &amp;quot;base level&amp;quot; of reality has a strongly allegorical feel, implying that each of alternate fantasy versions of the story is as valid as the original.  It seems like Kafka and/or Nabokov may have been an influence.  I believe the narrator has a mundane job of some sort, like accountant, and is apprenticed to his uncle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't find it entirely successful as a book—partly because it never felt grounded in &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; stable reality—but it was memorable, at least in its conceit, if not by title and author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" OwnerDisplayName="Chris Sunami" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T10:27:47.770" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T10:27:47.770" Title="Postmodernist fantasy with nested stories structure" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2018-05-09T21:24:53.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd really like to see the full text of your translation.  It differs from the two translations I posted in the body of your question.  In the latter cases, they use the English &quot;obscured&quot;, but yours uses the literal translation of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/spanish-english/oscuras&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;darkness&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/obscure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology of obscure&lt;/a&gt;, the direct use of the English term, as opposed to the literal translation is apropos, and could be more what Neruda intended--Romance languages are much closer to Latin roots than English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My recollection is that &quot;shadow&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.oxforddictionaries.com/translate/spanish-english/sombra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sombra&lt;/a&gt;) appears not infrequently in Neruda.  I get a very &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jungian sense of shadow&lt;/a&gt; in the poem, and in Neruda in general--he was certainly writing in a period when Jung loomed large in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neruda is making the point that he doesn't love the object of desire in such concrete, if poetic, ways, or love her the for obvious things.  &quot;o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego&quot; (arrow of carnations that propagate fire) is a reference to Cupid's arrow and the more conventional gift of flowers that inspires romantic love [See: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dianthus_caryophyllus#Symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Symbolism of Carnations]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dark&quot; is surely meant in terms of obscure, abstract, difficult to quantify or qualify.  He loves her for reasons he can't explain.  The idea that &quot;I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where&quot; is liberating, because it does not require rationale or justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a referent on &lt;em&gt;osucra&lt;/em&gt; = obscure, see &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Obscure_Object_of_Desire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cet Obscur Objet du Désir&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Ese Oscuro Objeto del Deseo&lt;/em&gt;/That Obscure Object of Desire&lt;/a&gt; (Buñuel, 1977)  (Essentially, &lt;em&gt;oscura&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;oscura&lt;/em&gt;, and literal darkness is metaphoric only--literally it is inability to see something clearly, which can include darkness as the cause, but not exclusively.  So the translation to &quot;dark&quot; is likely based on idiom.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the idea that loving for concrete reasons may be somewhat artificial.  But real love is not bound by symbols or convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;----------&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a sense of Neruda's admiration of the more obscure aspect, one might look at one of my personal favorites: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.polyglot.pitt.edu/materials/poemas/pies_letra.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tus Pies&lt;/a&gt; (aka &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Pablo-neruda-your-feet-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Your Feet&lt;/a&gt;).  Here he writes a wonderful love poem, made more remarkable for the non-standard choice of feature to praise.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is consistent with Whitman's invocation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1891/poems/27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Song of Myself&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Welcome is every organ and attribute of me, and of any one hearty and clean. Not an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be  less familiar than the rest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-05-11T19:50:22.960" LastActivityDate="2018-05-11T19:50:22.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6536" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6537" CreationDate="2018-05-10T09:16:56.437" Score="6" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Camus's essay &lt;em&gt;The Sea Close By&lt;/em&gt; there's a sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This life rebellious to forgetfulness, rebellious to memory, of which Stevenson speaks.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (page 5 of Penguin Classics 2013).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me to which work &amp;amp; author he's alluding please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4502" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T17:03:00.287" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:03:00.287" Title="Allusion by Albert Camus to another author" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6536" CreationDate="2018-05-10T23:10:09.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is conjectural, but just  before the passage in question, Camus writes something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We sail across spaces so vast they seem unending. Sun and moon rise and fall in turn, on the same thread of light and night. Days at sea, as similar each to the other as happiness . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which to me echos some (but not all) of this passage in R. L. Stevenson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/464/464-h/464-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the South Seas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a few days we sailed with a steady trade, and a steady westerly current setting us to leeward; and toward sundown of the seventh it was supposed we should have sighted Takaroa, one of Cook’s so-called King George Islands.  The sun set; yet a while longer the old moon—semi-brilliant herself, and with a silver belly, which was her successor—sailed among gathering clouds; she, too, deserted us; stars of every degree of sheen, and clouds of every variety of form disputed the sub-lustrous night; and still we gazed in vain for Takaroa.  The mate stood on the bowsprit, his tall grey figure slashing up and down against the stars, and still&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;'nihil astra praeter&#xA;Vidit et undas.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of us were grouped at the port anchor davit, staring with no less assiduity, but with far less hope on the obscure horizon.  Islands we beheld in plenty, but they were of ‘such stuff as dreams are made on,’ and vanished at a wink, only to appear in other places; and by and by not only islands, but refulgent and revolving lights began to stud the darkness; lighthouses of the mind or of the wearied optic nerve, solemnly shining and winking as we passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In common: the dream-like passage of time at sea, the sun and moon doing their thing.  Not in common: the anxiety about getting to Takaroa, the rebellion of the soul against memory and oblivion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in a comment, Camus is possibly reflecting, and changing, whatever he read in Stevenson, making it richer and rarer, and thereby less Googleable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-10T23:10:09.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2201" CreationDate="2018-05-12T06:37:32.427" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Three Witches appear multiple times in the Sandman series, often showing a penchant for trickery and subtle jokes. Here, they are giving Dream a hard time about their names, comparing several Triple Goddesses and throwing in some pop culture references for fun.&#xA;This implies that they consider themselves to embody aspects of the Triple Goddess, across many cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos: The Fates, Greek mythology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Morrigan: three sisters of war, Irish mythology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tisiphone, Alecto, Megaera: The Furies, Greek mythology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Diana, Mary, Florence: The Supremes, R&amp;amp;B trio (Florence was replaced by Candy/Cindy in a later lineup)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Three Graces: aka The Charities, Greek &amp;amp; Roman mythology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cynthia, Mildred, Mordred: hostesses of The Witching Hour comic by DC (Mordred should have been Morgaine in Arthurian legend)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cynthia is also an alternate name for Artemis, of the Selene-Artemis-Hecate trio&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maiden, Mother, Crone: many versions of the Triple Goddess carry these titles, allowing Dream to dodge the thorny issue of which names to use&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Miscellaneous/Sandman/sandman02.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Annotated Sandman. Edited and largely written by Greg Morrow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;del&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bookdrum.com/books/the-sandman-preludes-and-nocturnes/9781852863265/bookmarks-51-75.html?bookId=15466&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sandman: Preludes &amp;amp; Nocturnes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/del&gt; (unresponsive link, verified on 26.12.2020).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Three_Witches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three Witches&lt;/a&gt;, in DC Database.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Triple_deity&amp;amp;oldid=840407704#Triple_goddess_stone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Triple deity&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4508" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T05:33:25.433" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:33:25.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6539" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-12T17:32:53.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-12T17:32:53.393" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T17:32:53.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6540" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-12T17:32:53.393" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973) and his works. His works include the collection 'Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair' (1924) and the 'Canto General' (1950). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T08:02:11.353" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T08:02:11.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6541" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6506" CreationDate="2018-05-12T22:32:16.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a very popular idea of 17th and 18th centuries philosophy. In a &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; broad stroke, with gross simplification: everything is a manifestation of the single underlying Idea, and since the Idea itself is right, its manifestations must also be right. One may call this Idea God, or Music of Spheres, or Law of Nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hegel summarized it in his famous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was vernünftig ist, das ist Wirklich; und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is reasonable is real, and what is real is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, while Pope is concerned with &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. which exists), Hegel does not; he only cares about &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. which admits to reason). This lets him reverse the implication. Pope doesn't say the &amp;quot;whatever is RIGHT, IS&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;To avoid simplification I'd have to write few volumes.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-12T22:32:16.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2596" CreationDate="2018-05-13T03:29:05.360" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chamber of Secrets (p. 106) we read as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry looked bemusedly at the photograph Colin was brandishing under&#xA;  his nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A moving, black-and-white Lockhart was tugging on an arm Harry&#xA;  recognized as his own. He was pleased to see that his photographic&#xA;  self was putting up a good fight and refusing to be dragged into view.&#xA;  As Harry watched, Lockhart gave up and slumped, panting, against the&#xA;  white edge of the picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would seem to indicate that the demeanor of the subjects in wizard photographs is representative of their real life character traits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T03:29:05.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2018-05-13T04:01:42.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty clear from the time-travel narrative in Prisoner of Azkaban that the past cannot actually be changed by going back in time, because the present has already happened in accordance with the results of all subsequent time travel (Buckbeack had never been killed; Harry had already cast the patronus). Thus, it would be impossible to go back in time and kill Voldemort, for if someone in the future had gone back and killed Voldemort then he would have been dead all along. As he had not been dead all along, such meddling is inherently impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(While this answers the question in the theoretical sense, it does not seem that the characters actually understand that this is how time-travel works, so perhaps it does not explain why they didn't try despite it being impossible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T04:01:42.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="128" CreationDate="2018-05-13T10:37:13.197" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: They didn't use the Time-Turner to defeat Voldemort because it would have been narratively unsatisfying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Time-Turners don't go back that far&quot; does not answer the question. Time-Turners are completely fictional, so they can do whatever Rowling wants. So why not make them go back that far? Rowling's explanation (&quot;if wizards could go back and undo problems, where were my future plots?&quot;) is more to the point but it's incomplete. What exactly would go wrong if the future plots were &quot;the wizards use the Time-Turner to defeat Voldemort&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, there are at least four things that would go wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would get repetitive and boring pretty quickly. Serial fiction has to ring the changes on its plots in order to remain entertaining and engaging. Suspense is a more important dramatic quality than consistency. If dilemmas are too often resolved by &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StoryBreakerPower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cranking up the Time-Turner&lt;/a&gt; then the audience is going to drift away in search of something more interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ResetButton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reset button&lt;/a&gt;&quot; via time travel would rob events of their consequences and thus (once anticipated) of the audience's emotional response to them. If a character's death can be reversed then why should we feel sad when they are killed?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would be unsatisfying to have the heroes succeed because of their use of an artefact. Such a victory would seem arbitrary because there would be no reason why villains should not have had the artefact instead. Most readers would prefer the heroes to succeed because of their virtues, not because of their inventory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The heroes' use of the Time-Turner would necessitate giving the villains comparable powers, otherwise there would be little suspense. But this would severely distort the story and its themes would become lost or incoherent. Instead of being about the heroes uncovering the cowardice and corruption of the preceding generation and trying to do better, it would become some kind of &quot;time police&quot; or &quot;time war&quot; story, and this was not the kind of story that Rowling wanted to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T10:37:13.197" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6527" CreationDate="2018-05-13T17:29:53.923" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limerick is a type of poem which is short-form (therefore easy to write) and, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerick_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;often humorous and sometimes obscene&quot;. It's been greatly used by casual writers of poetry; there are a vast number of limericks which were never formally published and whose original sources are unknown or anonymous, and many of these are coarse or obscene. Given all of this, it's likely to be &lt;strong&gt;very hard&lt;/strong&gt; to find a definite source for a limerick about which all we know is that it featured a lady named Jane who was a prostitute (or perhaps promiscuous). You greatly underestimate the wealth of limerick literature if you think there's likely to be just one or a few such limericks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To support my claim here, I'll quote and link to some examples of limericks which could fit the bill. Please note that some of these are &lt;strong&gt;VERY NSFW&lt;/strong&gt;! I've hidden the text of the limericks behind spoilertags for this reason, but most of the links also contain many other limericks which are even dirtier; click them at your own risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.tasteless.jokes/jXrULSr306M&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; by Googling &lt;code&gt;dirty limericks Lady Jane&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; There once was a woman named Jane&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Whose face was exceedingly plain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   But down in her cellar,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   She was a real live-heller,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; So the boys came again and again.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realising that a limerick about a lady called Jane would probably start with some variant of &quot;There once was a lady named Jane&quot; as the first line, I tried Googling that instead, and found multiple possible results. &lt;a href=&quot;http://hardsoft.us/LIM/gyl.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This link&lt;/a&gt; has a few limericks about women called Jane, but none of them quite seem to match what you describe. I found the following limerick at &lt;a href=&quot;http://jbryant.eu/pages/limerick.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;, with a similar variant &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stensones.com/limericks.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; There was a young lady called Jane&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Who liked a fuck now and again.&lt;br&gt;&#xA; Not just now and again&lt;br&gt;&#xA; But NOW!, and AGAIN!,&lt;br&gt;&#xA; And AGAIN!, and AGAIN!, and AGAIN!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must also remember that many of these limericks are only recorded because nowadays, in the internet age, &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt; is. A dirty ditty of the 2010s is likely to end up somewhere on the internet to be laughed at; a dirty ditty of the 1950s might have been long lost, never written down in the first place, and exist only in the imperfect memories of people who were young back then. So the particular limerick that Eric Shipton or his expedition comrades remembered might not even exist in written form to be found - it could have been just something he remembered from the schoolyard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: finding a specific limerick from 60+ years ago, based only on the information that it featured a lady called Jane who slept with a lot of men, is a nigh impossible task.&lt;/strong&gt; Unless it happened to be a particularly well-known limerick like the young man from Quebec or the pelican whose beak holds more than his belli-can, but in this case it doesn't seem so. It's more likely to be just one of many obscure, half-forgotten ditties that have been invented by poets, authors, schoolboys, and toilet wall graffitiers for decades untold, few of which have stuck in cultural memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;By the way, I also found &lt;a href=&quot;http://publications.americanalpineclub.org/articles/13201212981/Cordillera-de-Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;your article&lt;/a&gt; while researching this question :-) Sorry not to have been of more help!&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T17:29:53.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6437" CreationDate="2018-05-13T21:50:28.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;@DukeZhou correctly referred me to Eliot's Four Quartets. After reading it thoroughly, I think that the passage quoted on the question refers to the following lines of the last part of the third quartet - The Dry Salvages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For most of us, there is only the unattended&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moment, the moment in and out of time,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That it is not heard at all, but you are the music&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hints followed by guesses; and the rest&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here the impossible union&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of spheres of existence is actual [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note 2 important things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eliot refers to Incarnation, which is a central Christian idea, especially in the context of the Eucharist rite, also known as the Holy Communion. The title of the poem whose lines are quoted in the question is &amp;quot;Crow Communes&amp;quot;, and the &amp;quot;digestion&amp;quot; mentioned refers exactly to this Christian sacrament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eliot writes about a moment when a music is being heard, and refer to it as a &amp;quot;hint&amp;quot; which is only &amp;quot;half guessed [...], half understood&amp;quot;. Accordingly, Hughes writes about a &amp;quot;cipher&amp;quot;, being divulged &amp;quot;under hearing&amp;quot;, and which is &amp;quot;beyond understanding&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To end with, here's an interesting piece of information regarding Eliot's reference of the Incarnation (read it &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=Ofro_B_JrmIC&amp;amp;pg=PA227&amp;amp;lpg=PA227&amp;amp;dq=%22The%20hint%20half%20guessed,%20the%20gift%20half%20understood,%20is%20Incarnation.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=_EfP_7GoSX&amp;amp;sig=L_xPSS9enc9mK2MHz7zy61eYGzA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjd4eOQwoPbAhXFZlAKHWlKDwM4ChDoAQgrMAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=is%20incarnation&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Eliot would not be drawn to comment when the capital 'I' of&#xA;'Incarantion' was questioned by a reader of an early draft: was this&#xA;simply the embodiment of the spirit or the full Chrisitian sense of&#xA;the word? One must surely say that for Eliot it was the latter [...]&#xA;But the reader must make of it what sense he can: a non-doctrinal&#xA;meaning may be open to him, but he needs also to be aware that the&#xA;meaning would not have satisfied the author.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;T. S. Eliot: The Poems, Martin Scofield, pg. 227&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading about the Incarnation in the context of Eliot work, see here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3266&amp;amp;context=etd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://davidwithun.com/2017/10/22/what-then-did-he-mean-incarnational-semiotics-4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=egqxgEKkgbYC&amp;amp;pg=PT55&amp;amp;lpg=PT55&amp;amp;dq=%22The%20hint%20half%20guessed,%20the%20gift%20half%20understood,%20is%20Incarnation.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=pxCiL_e02z&amp;amp;sig=-GZg-eCZdp_j-WmebElHybqojI8&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjSk5SjxoPbAhUCC-wKHcFEDyQ4FBDoAQgwMAM#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22The%20hint%20half%20guessed%2C%20the%20gift%20half%20understood%2C%20is%20Incarnation.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T06:21:24.853" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T06:21:24.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6392" CreationDate="2018-05-13T22:16:13.540" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I continued researching to better understand what did Hughes had in mind when writing this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that these lines are a sly parody of an Eliot's paragraph in Four Quartets. You can read about it in my other &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6546/2432&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, but in short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot refers to the Incarnation (which is a concept closely related to the Communion rite) as a fundamental event, an &amp;quot;impossible union of spheres of existence&amp;quot;, and depicts it as only &amp;quot;half understood&amp;quot;. Hughes plays with these statements, taking them literaly, and thus parodies them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, and what about depicting Crow as &amp;quot;humped&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a clever word play on an earlier line of this poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God's shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Crow &amp;quot;tore off a mouthful&amp;quot; out of God, he became a kind of a mountain - humped - himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-13T22:16:13.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T07:00:24.823" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/039308096X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Well-Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2 edn 2016), p. 286 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  For Aristotle, tragedy is always a moral enterprise: Capable men, he &#xA;  writes &quot;should not be shown changing from prosperity to disaster because &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;[1.] that is not terrible or pitiful&lt;/strong&gt;, but simply repulsive; and dissolute men should &#xA;  not be shown changing from bad fortune to good, because &lt;strong&gt;[2.] it doesn't engage &#xA;  even sympathy&lt;/strong&gt;, let alone pity or terror.&quot; Pity and terror are best aroused &#xA;  a good man is shown going from good fortune to bad; and the most &#xA;  pitiable things of all are acts done by blood relations to each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Isn't Aristotle misanthropic in belitting downfalls?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why doesn't it? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's the source of this quote?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T15:05:22.260" Title="Why did Aristotle write that downfalls are not 'terrible or pitiful', and triumph unsympathetic?" Tags="&lt;aristotle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6549" CreationDate="2018-05-14T15:05:22.260" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source is Aristotle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, presumably written around 335 BC. In the publicly accessible translation by F. A. Fyfe (Harvard University Press &amp;amp; Heinemann, 1932), the quote is in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1452b&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 1452b of the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since then the structure of the best tragedy should be not simple but complex and one that represents incidents arousing fear and pity—for that is peculiar to this form of art—it is obvious to begin with that one &lt;strong&gt;should not show worthy men passing from good fortune to bad&lt;/strong&gt;. That does not arouse fear or pity but shocks our feelings. &lt;strong&gt;Nor again wicked people passing from bad fortune to good&lt;/strong&gt;. That is the most untragic of all, having none of the requisite qualities, since it does not satisfy our feelings or arouse pity or fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Aristotle says that wicked people passing from bad fortune to good does not satisfy our feelings, he is most likely referring to our sense of poetic justice. In order to understand his rejection of tragedies about &quot;worthy men passing from good fortune to bad&quot;, I think one should read on since &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1453a&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle writes&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There remains then the mean between these. This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virt[u]ous and just, and yet &lt;strong&gt;it is through no badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw in him&lt;/strong&gt;, he being one of those who are in high station and good fortune, like Oedipus and Thyestes and the famous men of such families as those. The successful plot must then have a single and not, as some say, a double issue; and the change must be not to good fortune from bad but, on the contrary, &lt;strong&gt;from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have described&lt;/strong&gt;, or of one who is better rather than worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the issue is not with downfalls as such but the cause of these downfalls: not simply bad fortune (&quot;bad luck&quot;) but a flaw in the character itself. Since nobody is flawless, this is neither misanthropic nor belittling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T15:05:22.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T15:32:04.533" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/gothic/gothic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Lilia Melani&lt;/a&gt; admits that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[1.] To most modern readers&lt;/strong&gt;, however, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Castle of Otranto&lt;/em&gt; is dull reading; except for the villain Manfred, the characters are insipid; the action moves at a fast clip with no emphasis or suspense&lt;/strong&gt;, despite the supernatural manifestations and a young maiden's flight through dark vaults. &lt;strong&gt;[2.] But contemporary readers found the novel electrifying original and thrillingly suspenseful&lt;/strong&gt;, with its remote setting, its use of the supernatural, and its medieval trappings, all of which have been so frequently imitated and so poorly imitated that they have become stereotypes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why's 2 true? How weren't the masterworks beneath just as electrifying, original, suspenseful, which  educated &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.intriguing-history.com/periods-history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georgians&lt;/a&gt; would've read?  All page numbers refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/039308096X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Well-Educated Mind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (2 edn 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(p. 89) John Bunyan's &lt;em&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt; (1607)  features &quot;the monster Apollyon&quot;, &quot;goblins who haunt the Valley of the Shadow of Death&quot;, and &quot;another pilgrim taken to a mysterious door at the city's foot and thrust through: &quot;Then I saw,&quot; he ends, soberly, &quot;that there was a way to Hell, even from the Gates of Heaven.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(p. 280) Aeschylus's &lt;em&gt;Agamenon&lt;/em&gt; (c. 458 BC) features &quot;the goddess Artemis, who loved Troy, blew great winds on the fleet to keep the Greeks from sailing.&quot;  Then Agamenon sacrified &quot;daughter Iphigenia&quot; &quot;Against the wild objections of his wife.&quot; Agamenon's &quot;father, Atreus, punished Agamenon's brother Thyestes for sleeping with Atresus' wife by roasting Thyestes' children and serving them to his brother.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other supernatural thrillers  are Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; (p. 287) and &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; (p. 359).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 64:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the nineteenth century, the soap opera of choice was the “Gothic novel,” a story of mystery and vague supernatural threat, set in fantastic and menacing places (or in central Europe, which, for most readers, amounted to the same thing). Gothic heroines languished in ruined castles, threatened by ancient spells, insane wives, and mysterious noblemen who avoid sunlight and mirrors. Here is Emily of the wildly popular &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of Udolpho&lt;/em&gt;: plucky but not too bright, wandering through the strange echoing castle of Count Morano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prof. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ledoux.camden.rutgers.edu/cv/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ellen Malenas Ledoux&lt;/a&gt; outlines &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.camden.rutgers.edu/2013/07/english-professor-authors-book-examining-social-reform-in-gothic-writing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that Gothic literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“explore the darker impulses of human nature, such as paranoia, barbarism and the taboo,” explains Ledoux. “Some of the markers of Gothic literature aren’t often what one would think; it doesn’t have to be supernatural, but deals with confusion about boundaries, such as those between what is alive and dead, or animal and human.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;us[s]e dark elements to uncover social atrocities, or to offer alternative solutions to these issues. “In a fantasy world, you can offer an alternative vision of something that you can’t through realistic writing,” explains Ledoux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Informed by genre and reader-response theories, the [Ledoux's] book illustrates how Gothic scenes depicting violence and heightened emotion challenged conventional thinking and normative behaviors, revealing the Gothic’s transgressive spirit as a dynamic force within the sociopolitical landscape of the 18th- and 19th-century Atlantic world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/STOJftffOqs?t=4m48s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Ted-ed video at 4:48&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-goth-and-gothic/answer/Anna-Szpak-2?share=2c416bb7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora post&lt;/a&gt; instance the polysemy of 'Gothic', but they and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/Gothic?ref=etymonline_crossreference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etymonline&lt;/a&gt; don't  headline the underlying semantic notions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The history of the word gothic is embedded&#xA;  in thousands of years worth of countercultural movements,&#xA;  from invading outsiders becoming kings&#xA;  to towering spires replacing solid columns&#xA;  to artists finding beauty in darkness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T02:29:38.163" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T02:29:38.163" Title="Why did 18th-century readers judge Gothic literature countercultural or 'Gothic'?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-14T16:13:19.213" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-14T16:13:19.213" LastActivityDate="2018-05-14T16:13:19.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-14T16:13:19.213" Score="0" Body="Questions about the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) and his works. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]. Two of his works are particularly relevant to literature: the 'Poetics' (written around 335 BC) and the 'Rhetoric' or 'Art of Rhetoric'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:12:23.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:12:23.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-14T18:02:00.553" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book around 8 months back in my aunt's home. However, I can't seem to remember the book's name although I remember it was a pretty well-known phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book seemed to be of the 21st Century and I read it in English. I also can't seem to remember the name of the Author but I am vaguely sure it was a pseudonym. The book was about a man who entered into a relationship with a shady woman and then had to kill people so that he could get enough money and settle out. The man was (I think) an insurance agent. The woman was playing a doublegame with him and was ready to dump him for another man. The plot covers how the man killed people and was then caught at the end by the company's private detective at the very last moment.  I can remember that the detective had a name that was also commonly found in other works of the same author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T19:34:15.460" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T19:34:15.460" Title="Book about a man who entered a relationship with a shady woman and then had to kill people" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6558" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-15T03:08:00.113" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a children's book that has one page with a picture of the rabbit sitting on a boy's lap. The rabbit looks to be sleeping but it is actually nibbling a hole in the boy's shirt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember having it read to me around 1960. I don't think I have seen it in the last 58 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;The book was in English and was illustrated throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4515" LastEditorUserId="4515" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T08:03:25.070" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T08:03:25.070" Title="Name of kid's book about rabbit who nibbles hole in shirt" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6559" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6561" CreationDate="2018-05-15T04:24:30.523" Score="7" ViewCount="1139" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few months ago, I participated in a debate, where the topic to be debated upon was &quot;An unbiased text is a myth&quot;, which is to say that all texts have their share of bias. I was on the &quot;against&quot; side of the debate, and lost miserably, and I'm not sure why, because I did mention Police Reports and even referred to several News Articles which I made out to be unbiased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the debate however, I approached the judge and asked her what was wrong with my argument, to which she replied by pointing out to all places in the texts which contained bias, and said that even police reports contain a significant amount of bias (which I still don't understand to this day, considering all they write about is their observations and a summary of the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of this, is there actually such a thing as an unbiased text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4516" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T11:04:05.260" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T17:17:11.407" Title="Is there such a thing as an unbiased text?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6564" CreationDate="2018-05-15T06:27:57.060" Score="7" ViewCount="2427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading some poetry and I stumbled upon the four-line &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/poetry_in_motion/atlas/newyork/western_wind/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Western Wind' by Anonymous&lt;/a&gt;, written in the 16th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Western wind when wilt thou blow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the small rain down can rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Christ if my love were in my arms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and I in my bed again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this poem inspired by symbolism used in previous works associated with the West Wind and/or Zephyr in English literature? I’m asking if the west wind in English literature or artistic thought carries any symbolism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4517" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T21:07:19.437" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T00:13:15.910" Title="What is the symbolism of the Western Wind (or Zephyr)?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2018-05-15T08:14:08.093" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, I have to ask: do you have a clear definition for bias? Think on this for a moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at some of the meanings given, for instance, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bias&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a : an inclination of temperament or outlook; especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment : prejudice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;b : an instance of such prejudice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;c : bent, tendency&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe you're only thinking of &quot;unreasoned judgement/preujdice&quot; when talking about bias. If that was all, sure, there might be texts which are unbiased about something (but not, in general, unbiased about everything)*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was that the debate topic using such a narrow definition? If not, &lt;em&gt;Everyone&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;em&gt;biases&lt;/em&gt;: tendencies to favour or disfavour things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... considering all they write about is their observations and a summary of the case ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is inherently biased for several reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People often fail miserably at accounting for their own biases even when simply observing something (so they might unconsciously ignore things) - &lt;strong&gt;biased observation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even for the things that they do manage to observe, people do not write down every last bit of minutiae, but only selected bits - &lt;strong&gt;biased reporting&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A summary is by definition a product of the writer's judgement on what is important and what isn't from the larger text (which has already gone through conscious and unconscious filtering), and therefore is a direct application of their biases.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what we have in such a report is whatever's left after all of the writer's biases have been applied. A different person could have observed and chose to report about slightly different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... several News Articles which I made out to be unbiased ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you considered your own biases? Do you believe yourself to be perfectly unbiased and informed? &lt;em&gt;Can&lt;/em&gt; any biased person judge that a text is unbiased?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Note&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 + 1 = 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to be unbiased about most things, but rather biased against base 2 arithmetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T08:14:08.093" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6562" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-15T17:32:13.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T17:32:13.473" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T17:32:13.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6563" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-15T17:32:13.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Pierre et Jean' (1888) by the French author Guy de Maupassant. Use this tag with the [guy-de-maupassant] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-15T19:09:32.900" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T19:09:32.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6560" CreationDate="2018-05-15T21:27:57.383" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Greek mythology, Zephyr (or Zephyrus or Zephros) was the personification of the west wind. The west wind was the bringer of spring and early summer. He also served Cupid (because he fell in love with Hyacinth, etc). Because of this, in European tradition, the west wind has always been considered favorable and mild. On the other hand, in poems like Percy Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Ode to the West Wind&lt;/em&gt;, he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is kind of strange, because in Greek mythology the situation was the exact opposite - the west wind brought spring, not autumn. In other poems and works, the situation is quite different - see for example Chaucer, who wrote of the &quot;swete breth&quot; of Zephyr, or Shakespeare, who said in &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They are as gentle / As zephyrs blowing below the violet, / Not wagging his sweet head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your poem seems to agree with the general &quot;west wind is good&quot; interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Western wind when wilt thou blow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the small rain down can rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Christ if my love were in my arms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and I in my bed again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third and fourth lines here, the author is mourning (&quot;if [only] my love were in my arms&quot;) and so in the first line the author is sort of pleading for their luck to change - when will the Western wind blow and return fortune so that their love comes back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the fact that your poem mentions &quot;my love&quot; is interesting, because Zephyr was also related to love. As mentioned above, he served Cupid, and this was because Zephyr loved Hyacinth, and so did Apollo, but Hyacinth chose Apollo, so in a fit of jealousy when Zephyr saw the two together playing with a discus, Zephyr caused the wind to blow at the discus, which ended up hitting Hyacinth in the head and killing him (stories vary, but some believe Zephyr intended the discus to hit Apollo in the head, not Hyacinth). Apollo was furious but Cupid took him under his protection because the act was out of love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Western Wind here may thus also connect to the third line because of Zephyr's longing for Hyacinth, just as the author of the poem longs for their love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-05-15T21:27:57.383" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-16T19:51:13.790" Score="3" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading &lt;em&gt;Pierre et Jean&lt;/em&gt;, we know that Pierre is the legitimate son of Maréchal yet Madame Roland confessed to Jean instead that he is his true son. Why is this the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T19:51:13.790" Title="Why did Madame Roland confess to Jean that he is the legitimate son of Maréchal instead of Pierre?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;pierre-et-jean&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6568" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-16T19:58:23.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-16T19:58:23.580" LastActivityDate="2018-05-16T19:58:23.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6569" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-16T19:58:23.580" Score="0" Body="For questions directly regarding Pierre et Jean, a psycho-realist and naturalist novel by Guy de Maupassant written in 1887. Use this tag with the [guy-de-maupassant] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerDisplayName="user2354" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T06:40:43.980" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T06:40:43.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6570" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6581" CreationDate="2018-05-16T21:29:31.893" Score="5" ViewCount="348" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 5 fo &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;, which states the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The dragon] spoke, as did Ged, in the Old Speech, for that is the tongue of dragons still. Although the use of Old Speech binds a man to truth, it is not so with dragons. It is their own language, and they can lie in it, twisting the true words to false ends, catching the unwary hearer in a maze of mirrorwords each of which reflects the truth and none of which leads anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why could Dragons lie in Old Speech? Are they essentially telling half-truths, technically true but misleading statements, etc., or can they actually tell a &quot;direct&quot; lie?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T17:30:51.487" Title="Why could Dragons lie in Old Speech?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T05:41:22.300" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read the book as a kid, I was certain that the &quot;fish&quot; is a narwhal. I'm rereading it now, many years later, and a quick Google search told me I was wrong all these years: the fish is a marlin.&#xA;However, in the same book, the old man recalls seeing a big marlin in the past. So he knows what marlin is and what it looks like. Why does he keep referring to the fish as a &quot;fish&quot; and never mentions it to be a marlin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4525" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T05:41:22.300" Title="In &quot;The Old Man and the Sea&quot; why doesn't the Old Man recognize that the fish is a marlin" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2469" CreationDate="2018-05-17T10:10:03.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;One should read this quote with the preceding lines in mind, for example, when &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=muchado&amp;amp;Act=1&amp;amp;Scene=1&amp;amp;Scope=scene#104&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beatrice says to Benedick&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I wonder that you will still be talking, Signior &#xA;  Benedick: nobody marks you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come &#xA;  in her presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatrice expresses disdain for Benedick, and the words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swears he loves me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;are a continuation in the same vein. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human speech, unlike the barking of a dog to a crow, has meaning to humans; Benedick's words have as little meaning to her as a dog's barking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One should not too quickly jump to the conclusion that she considers Benedick's words as &quot;annoying noise&quot; (see Mithrandir's answer). It was perfectly possible for Elizabethans to consider the sound of barking as pleasant. Witness the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;http://opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=midsummer&amp;amp;Act=4&amp;amp;Scene=1&amp;amp;Scope=scene#1667&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act IV, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, where Hyppolita talks about a hunting experience (emphasis mine): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was with Hercules and Cadmus once, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Such &lt;strong&gt;gallant chiding&lt;/strong&gt;: for, besides the groves, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The skies, the fountains, every region near  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;So musical a discord&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;such sweet thunder&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case, the hounds were chosen in such a way that their combined barking is somehow &quot;harmonious&quot;. (I think there is at least one other play where Shakespeare mentions this sort of thing.) The barking of a single dog may still sound monotonous though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my interpretation of Beatrice's words is that she finds Benedick's talk both less meaningful and more monotonous than the barking of a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T10:10:03.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6573" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-17T10:33:36.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T10:33:36.047" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T10:33:36.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6574" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-17T10:33:36.047" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'A Wizard of Earthsea' (1968), a fantasy novel for children and young adults by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is the first novel in the Earthsea series. (Two short stories in 'Tales from Earthsea' (2001) are set before the events in 'A Wizard of Earthsea', namely &quot;The Finder&quot; and &quot;The Bones of the Earth&quot;, but were written later.) Use this tag with the [ursula-le-guin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T11:22:00.400" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T11:22:00.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6575" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-17T10:38:00.807" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novels in the &lt;em&gt;Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; universe include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; (1968),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tombs of Atuan&lt;/em&gt; (1971),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Farthest Shore&lt;/em&gt; (1972),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tehanu&lt;/em&gt; (1990),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Other Wind&lt;/em&gt; (2001),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the short stories in &lt;em&gt;Tales from Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; (2001),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the short stories &amp;quot;The Rule of Names&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Word of Unbinding&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:10:59.060" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:10:59.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6576" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-17T10:38:00.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about the cycle of novels and short stories by Ursula K. Le Guin that are set in the &quot;Earthsea&quot; universe. These include the novels 'A Wizard of Earthsea' (1968), 'The Tombs of Atuan' (1971), 'The Farthest Shore' (1972), 'Tehanu' (1990) and 'The Other Wind' (2001), the short stories in 'Tales from Earthsea' (2001) and the short stories &quot;The Rule of Names&quot; and &quot;The Word of Unbinding&quot;. Use this tag with the [ursula-le-guin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T11:22:13.197" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T11:22:13.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6570" CreationDate="2018-05-17T11:03:04.550" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Old Speech is not like other languages in the world of Earthsea. In &amp;quot;A Description of Earthsea&amp;quot;, the last chapter of &lt;em&gt;Tales from Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; (2001), Ursula Le Guin also calls it the True Speech and the Language of the Making (&amp;quot;with which Segoy created the islands of Earthsea at the beginning of time&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few other comments on the Old Speech from &amp;quot;A Description of Earthsea&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dragons are born knowing the True Speech, or, as Ged put it, &amp;quot;the dragon and the speech of the dragon are one.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorcerers and witches learn a few words of it; wizards learn many, and some come to speak it almost as fluently as dragons do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Speech is also the language of spells; none of the other languages (Hardic, Kargish and Osskili) serve for the making of spells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Old Speech is written using True Runes (at least by humans; dragons have no writing). About lying, Le Guin write (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human beings cannot lie in that language. Dragons can; or so the dragons say; and &lt;strong&gt;if they are lying, does that not prove that what they say is true?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Le Guin does not really &lt;em&gt;explain&lt;/em&gt; why humans cannot lie in True Speech, and the dragons' claim that they can has apparently not been verified by humans. This seems to be why Le Guin resorts to a variation on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;liar's paradox&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see the bolded text in the above quote). If a dragon were to say, &amp;quot;I am lying&amp;quot;, and he/she is indeed lying, then the dragon is telling the truth, which means that it is actually lying. (The problem here is that the statement works both at the level of &amp;quot;object language&amp;quot; and at the level of &amp;quot;meta language&amp;quot;; one might argue that the two levels should be kept apart.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le Guin plays a logical game with the claim instead of explaining whether the dragons can lie or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update in response to a comment: The quote from &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;, may look like a direct statement that the dragons can lie, but I consider that as written from the point of view that is &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; the Earthsea universe, while &amp;quot;A Description of Earthsea&amp;quot; is written by an &lt;em&gt;outside&lt;/em&gt; observer of that same universe. This outside view can be seen in statements such as &amp;quot;while the Hardic runes, like Chinese characters, can accommodate widely varying pronunciations and shifts of meaning&amp;quot; (in the section &amp;quot;Literature and the Sources of History&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T16:01:55.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T11:59:21.423" Score="4" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to understand the narrator in The Idiot. He seems like an omniscient narrator, talking of characters in third person. But, in Chapter I of Part One, while describing know-it-alls, the narrator says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I have known scholars, writers, poets, political activists, who sought and found their highest peace and purpose in this science, who positively made their careers by it alone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he mid-narration self-insert into the character of Myshkin? Does this happen throughout the novel? Is it possible that the narrator is &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt; or am I looking too much into it? Sure feeling like an Idiot right now :P&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation I'm reading is that by Pevear &amp;amp; Volokhonsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4528" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T11:59:21.423" Title="Narrator in The Idiot" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-idiot&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6579" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T14:11:47.950" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was re-reading &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; recently, the 6th book in the Narnia series. Towards the end of the novel, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; when they've freed Rilian,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;he had always reached these outlets by going in a ship&#xA;  across the Sunless Sea&quot; (ch. 13)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the gnomes and the &quot;stately figures taller than men&quot; bear a resemblance to D&amp;amp;D's deep gnomes and drow. Forgotten Realms seems to have the varying levels as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any direct evidence (i.e. quotes from designers or hidden Narnian references) implying that the Underdark was inspired by the world in &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T17:45:26.207" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:45:26.207" Title="Is there any direct evidence tying the D&amp;D Underdark to Narnia?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6580" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-17T17:15:08.333" Score="8" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1998, Shambhala Publications published a translation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tao Te Ching&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (in pinyin: &lt;em&gt;Daodejing&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dao De Jing&lt;/em&gt;) by Ursula Le Guin. The &lt;em&gt;Dao De Jing&lt;/em&gt; was written in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical Chinese&lt;/a&gt;, so it takes much more than just &quot;knowing Chinese&quot; to undertake a translation task like this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shambhala.com/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-896.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to the publisher&lt;/a&gt;, Le Guin had studied the &lt;em&gt;Dao De Jing&lt;/em&gt; for more than forty years and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She has consulted the literal translations and worked with Chinese scholars to develop a version that lets the ancient text speak in a fresh way to modern people, while remaining faithful to the poetic beauty of the work. Avoiding scholarly interpretations and esoteric Taoist insights, she has revealed the &lt;em&gt;Tao Te Ching&lt;/em&gt;'s immediate relevance and power, its depth and refreshing humor, in a way that shows better than ever before why it has been so much loved for more than 2,500 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can find the same blurb on the website of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/99496/lao-tzu-tao-te-ching-by-ursula-k-le-guin/9781570623950/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PenguinRandomHouse&lt;/a&gt;, which distributes Shambhala's books.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above description of the translation process is rather vague, so I would like to know if any further details are available, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which &quot;literal translations&quot; did Le Guin consult?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which scholars did she work with?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What kind of interaction did she have with those scholars? (E.g. did she just ask questions about specific passages or did she also ask them to review passages that she had translated?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How long did the process take?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T08:21:48.303" Title="How did Ursula Le Guin translate the Tao Te Ching / Dao De Jing?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;dao-de-jing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6570" CreationDate="2018-05-17T17:30:51.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; has a third-person narrator who is &quot;omniscient&quot; in the sense that the narration dips into the thoughts of multiple characters. But the narration is also limited in the sense that it purports to be a story told within the fictional world, and so the narrator doesn't know everything, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If Estarriol of Iffish kept his promise and made a song of that first great deed of Ged's, it has been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think you can read the quoted passage about dragons and the Old Speech either way. The phrase &quot;twisting the true words to false ends&quot; might indicate that dragons are limited to prevarication, misdirection and ambiguity, but it could also be the case that dragons can tell a bald lie. Or it could be that the narrator does not know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the role of the passage in the story, I can see some further points of interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The passage emphasises the magical nature of the Old Speech. Languages are normally productive: if you can say &lt;em&gt;the sky is blue&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the grass is green&lt;/em&gt; then you can say &lt;em&gt;the sky is green&lt;/em&gt; (a lie) by simple interpolation. So it is surprising to learn that the Old Speech is different in this respect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It establishes the power of dragons (even the most powerful mage is constrained when speaking the Old Speech, but dragons are less so, or not at all), and thus emphasises the threat facing Ged at this point in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ambiguity over whether dragons can lie or not adds to their mysterious nature.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The passage reminds the reader of the power of true names (which are words the Old Speech), which will be the means by which Ged defeats the dragon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It suggests that the dragon's offer to tell Ged the name of the shadow is not to be trusted, and so leaves open the possibility that the shadow is nameless, as previously claimed by Archmage Gensher, maintaining the suspense on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last sentence of the dragon's offer is particularly tricky, in line with the &quot;misdirection and ambiguity&quot; interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I know what you want, wizard. I, too, can offer you safety, for I know what alone can save you. There is a horror follows you. I will tell you its name.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Spoilers for &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The way that I interpret Yevaud's offer is that he &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; know the name of the shadow (because the name of the shadow is also &quot;Ged&quot;, and if he knew that, then he could bind and defeat Ged, which he doesn't). Nonetheless, Yevaud &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; tell Ged the name of the shadow, because he can say, &quot;You and your shadow have the same name.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T17:30:51.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6583" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-17T19:32:28.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T19:32:28.653" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T19:32:28.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6584" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-17T19:32:28.653" Score="0" Body="For questions involving Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy tabletop role-playing game first published in 1974. Questions with this tag should relate to literature as defined by the Help Center, not for questions about the actual game (which should go in Roleplaying Games SE)." OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T07:48:19.443" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T07:48:19.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4624" CreationDate="2018-05-17T21:02:28.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are conflating the Recluse's sister, who is alive, with the Recluse's lost love, who is dead. He does get to spend eons cuddling with his lost love on the Sea of Sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see what you mean about the sister, but I don't think so. It is stated that his sister is his maid and cook. I didn't notice anything that implied she was more than that. He is closer to his dog Pepper than to her. When his dog turns into a pile of ash after millennia, he wonders if his sister met the same fate, but can't be bothered to find out. It seems like she is there only to, as a &quot;weaker&quot; person, almost succumb to the pigmen the way the Recluse succumbed to the giant, phosphorescent pigman at the end. And to make us wonder if he is imagining it all, since she never directly sees the pigmen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4533" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-17T21:10:54.840" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T21:10:54.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5172" CreationDate="2018-05-17T23:22:06.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthem&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1938 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/a&gt; in 1957 -- 19 year later. It seems that &lt;strong&gt;Equality 7-2521&lt;/strong&gt; is an early prototype for &lt;strong&gt;John Galt&lt;/strong&gt;, much like the partially-completed remnant of the motor found in the ruins of the Twentieth Century Motor Company was an early prototype for Galt's working motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarities you point out are striking, and it's clear that the embryo for John Galt was growing in Anthem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T23:22:06.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1771" CreationDate="2018-05-17T23:34:52.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think your second hunch is closer to the truth: &lt;em&gt;&quot;she exaggerated their irrationalities for the purpose of illustrating her philosophy&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although a huge fan of Atlas Shrugged, I have often been bothered by the far-fetched stupidity of many of the antagonists. But upon deeper reflection, I have concluded that these antagonists are caricatures that were constructed to illustrate irrational traits that actually do exist in those with the looter mindset to this day, albeit more subtly. Taking it one step further, I believe Rand was utilizing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato's Theory Of Forms&lt;/a&gt; in constructing these exaggerated models of human archetypes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while you'd be hard-pressed to find people in the real world who are actually very much like any of the antagonists in Atlas Shrugged, each antagonist has philosophies and traits that can be discovered in many people in the world, both then and now. If Rand had kept her characters more realistic and subtle, much of the literary power of the book--and her ideological aims--would have been diluted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-05-17T23:34:52.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6588" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6624" CreationDate="2018-05-17T23:47:37.237" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;John Galt was a genius&lt;/strong&gt;. He invented &quot;the motor&quot; and executed the greatest strike in world history. And it's clear that he understood the danger he was always in (out in the world) and how the looters operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it has always been puzzling to me why, at the end of Atlas Shrugged, Galt thought it was a good idea to go back to the world so quickly after the final crash and bring all the strikers with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted, the lights had gone out in NYC, the Taggart bridge had collapsed, and the nation was near starvation. But the political leaders such as Mr. Thompson and all his cronies were still--at least to some degree--in power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the strikers had come back and started fixing everything, why would anyone believe that Thompson's gang wouldn't have immediately started exploiting them, regulating them, taxing them to death, and controlling them? I would have thought that the strikers needed to wait long enough for the current government leaders to be swept from power and run out of town, clearing the way for the strikers' return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rand makes it clear that the strikers cared little for political power, so we cannot assume that upon their return they would have tried to step into the shoes of political power in order to achieve their goals. They simply would have gone back to work, and once again been exploited by the looting politicians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, we don't know how much time passed between the rescue flight back from the State Science Institute and the moon-lit walk in the valley in which Galt declares to Dagney that &quot;we're going back&quot;, but it certainly seems as though very little time had elapsed. Weeks? Days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-06-02T20:34:50.000" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T20:34:50.000" Title="Was John Galt foolish in wanting to return to the world so quickly?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6589" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-18T07:28:44.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T07:28:44.840" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T07:28:44.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6590" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-18T07:28:44.840" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Dao De Jing' or 'Tao Te Ching', a Chinese philosophical text dating from the 6th-century BC that is attributed to Laozi (or Lao-Tzu). The work is one of the fundamental texts of Taoism. Use this tag with the [chinese-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-18T16:56:25.077" LastActivityDate="2018-05-18T16:56:25.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2018-05-18T11:32:09.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the whole poem here is what I understood ( I understood this poem as a man writing about a woman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He began by saying he doesn't love her because she is pretty to the eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he says dark things, he might have meant that she is unusual. She is something not everyone can understand. It might also mean that she is something which can't be acknowledged openly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in between shadow and soul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he loved her openly, it remained in the shadows. His love for her was limited to the shadows and his soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2330" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T13:12:18.530" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T13:12:18.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T16:12:51.440" Score="5" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ursula Le Guin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earthsea&lt;/a&gt; series of books and stories, there is a kind of &lt;strong&gt;hierarchy&lt;/strong&gt; for people who practice magic: witches and sorcerers on one level, and wizards and mages on a higher level. Witches and sorcerers received no training on Roke. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Witches and sorcerers are easy to distinguish, since &lt;strong&gt;witches&lt;/strong&gt; are women and &lt;strong&gt;sorcerers&lt;/strong&gt; are men. However, women cannot receive training on Roke, so wizards and mages are all men. While reading the first four books in the series (&lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Tombs of Atuan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Farthest Shore&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Tehanu&lt;/em&gt;), I got the impression that the terms &lt;strong&gt;wizard&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;mage&lt;/strong&gt; are sometimes used to refer to the same person. Is this correct, or is there a distinction that I overlooked?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T18:20:23.827" Title="Are wizard and mage used interchangeably in Le Guin's Earthsea series?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-18T20:51:31.463" Score="7" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the motivation and argument supporting my question is long, but the question itself is fairly short, I will state the question as a spoiler. If the answer turns out to be indeed yes, then it would certainly spoil a brave first reading of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Surely, HCE and Finnegan are distinct characters in Heliopolis (aka. the 'real' world, as opposed to dreamland), but Finnegan is dead by the time the novel begins? Finnegan is Anna's first husband, HCE a second. Further, in Anna's monologue, surely the monologue is primarily addressed to Finnegan, not HCE?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish to first introduce the current accepted interpretations of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, and rail against these  on purely aesthetic grounds.&#xA;I will then pose questions suggesting an alternative reading, which now appears obvious to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; aside, Joyce has stayed with me, unlike most of the &quot;difficult&quot;  postmodern texts, because Joyce's texts always &lt;em&gt;resolve&lt;/em&gt;. The more you read the clearer Joyce becomes. Confusions clear into beauty. Once upon a time (and a very good time it was) I could not parse &quot;a moocow coming down along the road&quot;! Later for &quot;Chrysostomos&quot; and &quot;Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit&quot;. There are &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; many readers' guides to &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; that (1) members of this forum would mostly agree on, and, (2) make an initial reading of Ulysses a pleasurable task. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twenty odd years ago, I began reading &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, and was immediately dismayed. No matter how I tried I could not parse even a few pages in. Armed with &lt;em&gt;A Skeleton Key&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;A Reader's Guide&lt;/em&gt; I forced my way through. I was very disapointed and neither of the texts lead to &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;resolving&lt;/em&gt; for me. To this day, every text I have read on &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; seems hollow. Until recently so did &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the conventional wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book discusses, in an unorthodox fashion, the Earwicker family,&#xA;  comprising the father HCE, the mother ALP, and their three children&#xA;  Shem the Penman, Shaun the Postman, and Issy. Following an unspecified&#xA;  rumour about HCE, the book, in a nonlinear dream narrative, follows&#xA;  his wife's attempts to exonerate him with a letter, his sons' struggle&#xA;  to replace him, Shaun's rise to prominence, and a final monologue by&#xA;  ALP at the break of dawn. The opening line of the book is a sentence&#xA;  fragment which continues from the book's unfinished closing line,&#xA;  making the work a never-ending cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The introductory chapter (I.1) establishes the book's setting as&#xA;  &quot;Howth Castle and Environs&quot; (i.e. the Dublin area), and introduces&#xA;  Dublin hod carrier &quot;Finnegan&quot;, who falls to his death from a ladder&#xA;  while constructing a wall. Finnegan's wife Annie puts out his&#xA;  corpse as a meal spread for the mourners at his wake, but he vanishes&#xA;  before they can eat him. A series of episodic vignettes follows,&#xA;  loosely related to the dead Finnegan, most commonly referred to as&#xA;  &quot;The Willingdone Museyroom&quot;, &quot;Mutt and Jute&quot;, and &quot;The&#xA;  Prankquean&quot;. At the chapter's close a fight breaks out, whiskey&#xA;  splashes on Finnegan's corpse, and &quot;the dead Finnegan rises from his&#xA;  coffin bawling for whiskey and his mourners put him back to rest”,&#xA;  persuading him that he is better off where he is. The chapter ends&#xA;  with the image of the HCE character sailing into Dublin Bay to take a&#xA;  central role in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Part IV consists of only one chapter, which, like the book's opening&#xA;  chapter, is mostly composed of a series of seemingly unrelated&#xA;  vignettes. After an opening call for dawn to break, the remainder&#xA;  of the chapter consists of the vignettes &quot;Saint Kevin&quot;, &quot;Berkely and&#xA;  Patrick&quot; and &quot;The Revered Letter&quot;. ALP is given the final&#xA;  word, as the book closes on a version of her Letter and her final&#xA;  long monologue, in which she tries to wake her sleeping husband,&#xA;  declaring &quot;Rise up, man of the hooths, you have slept so long!&quot;,&#xA;  and remembers a walk they once took, and hopes for its re-occurrence.&#xA;  At the close of her monologue, ALP – as the river Liffey – disappears&#xA;  at dawn into the ocean. The book's last words are a fragment, but they&#xA;  can be turned into a complete sentence by attaching them to the words&#xA;  that start the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motifs I have seen suggest something like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan/HCE  = Bloom, Joyce, Adam, etc., the master builder &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the average man, overloaded with Homer, ?, Jesus, etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ALP = Molly, Nora, Eve, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;CAD = Blazes Boylan, Gogarty, The Snake?, etc., but also with  overtones of CAD~Finnegan/HCE &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really? The genius who took Stephen to Bloom and Molly (with Boylan), had nowhere further to take this key structure than into the abstract? &lt;em&gt;No fundamental movement?&lt;/em&gt; Sure Shaun and Shem is interesting, but we have already met Stephen+Mulligan. Come on. &quot;(please stoop)&quot;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce taunts us with the question &quot;Who is he?&quot; and tempts us with tidbits of answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[261.26]&#xA;  Terror of the noonstruck by day, cryptogam of each nightly bridable.&#xA;  But, to speak broken heaventalk, is he? &lt;strong&gt;Who is he?&lt;/strong&gt; Whose is he? Why is&#xA;  he? Howmuch is he? Which is he? When is he? Where is he? How is he?&#xA;  And what the decans is there about him anyway, the decemt man? &lt;strong&gt;E&lt;/strong&gt;asy,&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;alm your &lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;aste! Approach to lead our passage!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the answers I have met in texts about &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; seem empty. He is every man, but impossible to pin down. &lt;em&gt;But isn't Bloom every man?&lt;/em&gt; Finnegan is a mythical/historical pre-shadow to HCE. &lt;em&gt;But what about Bloom and Homer?&lt;/em&gt; Finnegan is but one form of HCE in dreamland with no referent in Heliopolis. &lt;em&gt;So why the title to the novel?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the corollary question: Who is she?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Joyce I know from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, wouldn't leave these questions without proper resolution. I don't think Joyce would leave it so open that all possible answers are the solution to the problem. I hope. A bit unrewarding for the amount of work the reader must put in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And why no real drama for us to sink our teeth into? For example, both &lt;em&gt;A Reader's Guide&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake: A Plot Summary&lt;/em&gt; read Anna's monologue as Anna awaking her husband HCE, in her mind, and then taking him on a stroll down memory lane. Is that really it? Not unlike Molly's monologue but without Blazes Boylan! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SPOILERS FOLLOW&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An Alternative&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel ends with a woman's interior monologue. Part IV is a single chapter that begin in dreamland, with dawn breaking, and ends with ALP delivering an interior monologue, as the rain falls softly, but persistently, outside. Ten pages of uninterrupted interior monologue.&#xA;A single paragraph readable to anyone familiar with Molly's monologue. By Occam's Razor, the owner of this monologue is the owner of dreamland, i.e., ALP dreams the wake (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6430/in-finnegans-wake-surely-the-dreamer-is-this-character&quot;&gt;In Finnegans Wake, surely the dreamer is this character?&lt;/a&gt;). So that answers &quot;Who is she?&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna's monologue is primarily addressed to a male &quot;you&quot; whom she 'awakes'. &quot;Rise up, man of the hooths, &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; have slept so&#xA;long!&quot;. There is also a &quot;him&quot;.&#xA;While &quot;there’s a great poet in &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &#xA;&quot;so has &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; as bored me&#xA;to slump.&quot;&#xA;While mostly addressed to &quot;you&quot;, often about &quot;him&quot;, &#xA;the reader must cope with sudden pronoun-referent shifts characteristic of any realistic interior monologue. As ALP thinks about &quot;him&quot;, &quot;you&quot; is prone to change in referent, i.e., &quot;you&quot; refers to &quot;him&quot; suddenly.&#xA;And naturally, there are few proper nouns, none definitive!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But who are these male &quot;you&quot; and &quot;he&quot;? We are back to the question &quot;Who is he?&quot; but with a twist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna/Joyce, frustratedly, give us the answer as we transition into the monologue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[619.10] &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Here gives your answer, pigs and scuts!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hence we’ve lived in two&#xA;  worlds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is another he what stays under the himp of holth.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The herewaker of our hamefame is his real namesame  who will get himself&#xA;  up and &lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;rect, &lt;strong&gt;c&lt;/strong&gt;onfident and &lt;strong&gt;h&lt;/strong&gt;eroic  when but, young as of old, for my&#xA;  daily comfreshenall, a &lt;strong&gt;wee one&lt;/strong&gt; woos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alma Luvia, Pollabella. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;P.S. Soldier Rollo’s sweetheart. And she’s about fetted up now with nonsery reams. And rigs out in regal rooms with the ritzies. Rags! Worns out. But she’s still her deckhuman amber too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soft morning, city! Lsp! I am leafy speafing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In Heliopolis there is a he other than HCE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While HCE, the &quot;herewaker&quot; will get up and face a new day in Heliopolis, HCE is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;he what stays under the himp of holth&quot;. &quot;He is another he&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That other &quot;he what stays under the himp of holth&quot;, will &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; be getting up to roam Heliopolis, because&#xA;&lt;em&gt;he is dead&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;In &lt;em&gt;Heliopolis&lt;/em&gt;, he &quot;stays under the &lt;strong&gt;himp of holth&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&#xA;&quot;under our  our &lt;strong&gt;mounding’s mass&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &#xA;&quot;and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the &lt;strong&gt;knock out&lt;/strong&gt; in the park&#xA;where oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy&quot;.&#xA;Sad, but true.&#xA;Infact,&#xA;&quot;one yeastyday he sternely&#xA;struxk his tete in a tub for to watsch the future of his fates but ere&#xA;he swiftly stook it out again, by the might of moses, the very water was eviparated&quot;, since he &lt;em&gt;had no future&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&quot;He addle liddle phifie Annie&#xA;ugged the little craythur&quot;.&#xA;But then,&#xA;&quot;wan warning Phill filt tippling full. His howd feeled heavy, his hoddit did shake. (There was a wall of course in erection) Dimb! He stottered from the latter. Damb! he was dud. Dumb&quot;! The rest is herstory. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This other he is Finnegan, ALP's &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; husband. He has been dead for many years by the time the novel begins. He died without completing his &quot;masterwork&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of chapter one,&#xA;&quot;good Mr Finnimore, sir&quot; is urged to &quot;take your laysure like a god&#xA;on pension and don’t be walking abroad&quot; since &quot;you’d only lose yourself&#xA;in Healiopolis now&quot;.&#xA;Finn is kept up to date about &quot;the lads is attending school nessans regular, sir,&#xA;spelling beesknees with hathatansy and turning out tables by&#xA;mudapplication&quot; (Shaun and Shem)&#xA;and &quot;queer Behan and old Kate&quot; (Saunderson and Kate)&#xA;and &quot; your missus in the hall&quot; (ALP),&#xA;but no mention is made of Issy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan and Anna are the parents of the twins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Issy is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; born of Finn and Anna. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issy is born of Anna and &quot;that samesake sibsubstitute of a hooky salmon&quot;. &quot;There’s already a big rody ram lad at random on the premises&quot;, namely HCE, and it is HCE, not Finnegan, &quot;who will be&#xA;ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough&quot;. &#xA;He is Anna's &quot;P.S.&quot;. He is &quot; Soldier Rollo&quot;.&#xA;Oh, and he is &quot;ensectuous&quot;, which means, amongst other terrible things, raping your daughter: &quot;went nudiboots with trouters into a liffeyette when she was barely in her tricklies&quot;. HCE is horrible. &quot;Rolloraped&quot;. Here comes every man. #metoo #mishemishe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Issy is born of Anna and HCE. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HCE is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the biological father of the twins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in Anna's monologue, who is &quot;you&quot; and who is &quot;he&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[HCE]  will get&#xA;  himself up [...] when but, young as of old,&#xA;  for my daily comfreshenall, a &lt;strong&gt;wee one&lt;/strong&gt; woos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver of Anna's confession, her father confessor, does not seem to be HCE, but rather some &quot;wee one&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who is this &quot;wee one&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us resist jumping ahead to the monologue for clues, and attempt rather to let Joyce reveal the answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &quot;wee&quot; means small, one possibility is Issy. But the &quot;you&quot; in Anna's &quot;comfreshenall&quot; is most certainly male and hence not Issy.  Issy  features large in the monologue, but as &quot;she&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently for me, the pun dropped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Definition of wee. 1 : very small : diminutive. 2 : very early&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The receiver of the confession, the &quot;wee one&quot;, is the earlier one, i.e., Finnegan. He only existed earlier, and now only exists in the &quot;wee&quot; hours. &lt;em&gt;(Of course, Finn is also late.)&lt;/em&gt; The symbol of &quot;wee one&quot; as small one is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; valid, since Anna will shortly tell &quot;you&quot; that &quot;You’re but a puny&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anna primarily addresses her interior monologue to Finn, not HCE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Heliopolis&lt;/em&gt;, Anna &quot;resurrects&quot; Finn every morning in her daily waking morning interior monologue. He must begin again. Anna is conscious of this activity. In &lt;em&gt;dreamland&lt;/em&gt; too is Finn nightly resurrected, but that is obvious, and Anna is not conscious of it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is supported by the monologue itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[619.25] Rise up, man of the &lt;strong&gt;hooths&lt;/strong&gt;, you have slept so long! Or&#xA;  is it only so mesleems? On your &lt;strong&gt;pondered palm&lt;/strong&gt;. Reclined from cape to&#xA;  pede. With pipe on bowl. Terce for a fiddler, sixt for makmerriers,&#xA;  none for a &lt;strong&gt;Cole&lt;/strong&gt;. Rise up now and aruse! &lt;strong&gt;Norvena&lt;/strong&gt;’s over. I am leafy,&#xA;  your goolden, so you called me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that it is the &quot;man of the &lt;strong&gt;hooths&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; that Anna 'awakes', rather than the man of the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[622.16] &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; know where I am bringing you? You&#xA;  remember? When I ran berrying after hucks and haws. With you drawing&#xA;  out great aims to hazel me from the hummock with your sling. Our&#xA;  cries. I could lead you there and I still by you in bed. Les go dutc&#xA;  to Danegreven, nos? Not a soul but ourselves. Time? We have loads on&#xA;  our hangs. Till Gilligan and Halligan call again to hooligan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is Finnegan, not HCE, that Anna 'awakens' for this daily early morning &quot;helpyourselftoastrool&quot;. The primary &quot;you&quot; is Finnegan. There is also, however, a &quot;he&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[619.31] But there’s a great poet in &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; too. Stout Stokes would take you offly. So has &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; as bored me to slump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The secondary &quot;he&quot; is HCE. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[627.36] And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s&#xA;  sad and weary I go back to &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;, my cold father, my cold mad&#xA;  father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size&#xA;  of &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt&#xA;  saltsick and I rush, my only, into &lt;strong&gt;your&lt;/strong&gt; arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You&quot;, &quot;my cold father&quot; confessor, is Finnegan, and &quot;him&quot; is HCE. That's drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[... Note that John Gordon has &quot;you&quot;=HCE, because there is no Finnegan, and no explanation as to who might the &quot;he&quot; of the monologue might be. Further he has &quot;wee one&quot; = Issy, with no explanation as to why Anna confesses to a male. William York Tindal has the &quot;you&quot; in the monologue being HCE, although morphing into Finn at times, and with no analysis of the &quot;you&quot; and &quot;he&quot; in the monologue ...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alternative Motif&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan = Bloom, Joyce, Adam, etc., &lt;em&gt;but dead&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;before&lt;/strong&gt; completing their &quot;master work&quot;. Finns sin, &quot;finfin&quot;, is an affair with Kate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ALP = Molly, Nora, Eve, etc., but after the death of their first husband (Finn), but now married to HCE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HCE = Blazes Boylan, Gogarty, The Snake?, etc., i.e., the average man, and he is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; nice. HCE's sin is, amongst other things, an 'affair' with Issy. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce is able to look beyond his death, and truly write a &quot;Book of the Dead&quot;, since he still lives in Nora's mind. Nora, has had to move on, and here comes everybody. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Finnegan/Joyce/Bloom/Adam died (in this story) without completing their &quot;master work&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; in Joyce's case), ALP/Nora/Molly/Eve still reads this work, and dreams with its language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[623.31] Scratching it and patching at with a prompt from a primer. And what&#xA;  scrips of nutsnolleges I pecked up me meself. Every letter is a hard&#xA;  but yours sure is the hardest crux ever. Hack an axe, hook an oxe,&#xA;  hath an an, heth hith ences. But once done, dealt and delivered,&#xA;  tattat, you’re on the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;As an example of how this reading makes things clearer, consider the mystery of the four wise men &quot;mamalujo&quot;. Who are they? Look in any text on &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; and you will find the answer disappointing. With this reading, however, they are certainly Finnegans childhood friends, still very much alive tonight.&lt;/s&gt;(1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary of Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Surely, HCE and Finnegan are distinct characters in Heliopolis, but Finnegan is dead by the time the novel begins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Like HCE, Finnegan too has a referent in Heliopolis (not only in dreamland).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan is not HCE.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan was Anna first husband, but is dead before the novel begins. He died without completing his &quot;master work&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnegan and Anna are the biological parents of the twins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HCE is Anna's husband/partner by the time the novel begins.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;HCE and Anna are the biological parents of Issy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Further, in Anna's monologue, surely the monologue is primarily addressed to Finnegan, not HCE?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expected Answers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In am expecting answers of the forms, &quot;No Finnegan is unlikely to be Anna's first husband because...&quot;, or, &quot;No, in the monologue, Anna is more likely to be addressing her (current and only) husband HCE, because ...&quot;, etc. Explanation, however, would need to be given to the &quot;pigs and scuts&quot; answer, as well as to the &quot;you&quot; and &quot;he&quot; in Anna's monologue. I am also interested in any references to analyses of Anna's monologue. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Y'all know about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.audible.com/pd/Classics/Finnegans-Wake-Audiobook/B005N11CTY?ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_2&amp;amp;pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&amp;amp;pf_rd_r=JG92K8K2YWZ2ET8WN0GF&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; beautiful but abridged reading  and   &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.waywordsandmeansigns.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these&lt;/a&gt; complete readings &lt;em&gt;(some beautiful, some terrible, but between the lot of them, good readings of all chapters)&lt;/em&gt;, right? &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;,  is best appreciated in spoken word. &#xA;Most precious of all is &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/download/WaywordsAndMeansignsRicorso/Iv.1GrazianoGalati.mp3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;, which despite its title, is a reading of Part IV (with Anna's monologue) riverrunning into a reading of I.1. Enough to make you cry.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://editura.mttlc.ro/fwliniarized/FW%20LINEARIZED%20full%20text%20pp%203-628.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The text of course is online in many forms.&lt;/a&gt; This is a call to arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HgCjtd2iPU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;And now there is this!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) It has become clear to me that the four wise men, Mamalujo, are Anna's childhood friends. In fact the very first Mark-Iseuld-Tristam triangle is Mark=Mark-of-the-Mamalujo, Iseuld=Anna, and Tristam=Finnegan! Way back when they were teenagers/young-adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) While Finnegan is certainly not Issy's father, it has become clear to me that neither is HCE. Who is Issy's father? This becomes a puzzle of Finnegans Wake, there are 1001 possibilities, and currently I think it is Saunderson. HCE suspects the Cad: &quot;for the honours of our mewmewe mutual daughters&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) HCE is almost certainly not married to Anna. He wishes he was! By Irish law all Anna's inherited property (house and inn/hotel) belonged to her husband Finnegan, who had thrown her (as the Prankquean) out after Issy was born. The house and inn were all his, and divorce was impossible in Ireland at the time. But then he fell from a ladder and died. The property is Anna's again. &quot;O foenix culprit!&quot; Is our freed bird going to give it all away again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T18:46:33.973" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T18:46:33.973" Title="In Finnegans Wake, surely these two characters are different, and one is dead?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6600" CreationDate="2018-05-19T06:55:46.803" Score="2" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: Benatar, David. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0199549265&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Better Never to Have Been&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2008 1 edn). pp. 36 Bottom - 37 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  The judgements supported by the asymmetry of &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/52303/8572&quot;&gt;(3) and (4)&lt;/a&gt; are&#xA;  not universally shared. For example, positive utilitarians—who&#xA;  are interested not only in minimizing pain but also in maximizing&#xA;  pleasure—would tend to lament the absence of additional possible&#xA;  pleasure even if there were nobody deprived of that pleasure.&#xA;  On their view, there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a duty to bring people into existence if&#xA;  that would increase happiness. This is not to say that all positive&#xA;  utilitarians &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; reject the view about the asymmetry of (3) and&#xA;  (4). Positive utilitarians who are sympathetic to the asymmetry&#xA;  could draw a distinction between (i) promoting the happiness of&#xA;  people (that exist, or will exist independently of one’s choices) and&#xA;  (ii) increasing happiness by making people. This is the now famous&#xA;  distinction between (i) making people happy and (ii) making happy&#xA;  people. Positive utilitarians who draw this distinction could then,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;consistent with positive utilitarianism, judge only (i) to be a&#xA;  requirement of morality. This is the preferable version of positive&#xA;  utilitarianism. Taking (ii) also to be a requirement of morality&#xA;  mistakenly assumes that the value of happiness is primary and the&#xA;  value of persons is derivative from this. However, it is not the case&#xA;  that people are valuable because they add extra happiness. Instead&#xA;  extra happiness is valuable because it is good for people—because&#xA;  it makes people’s lives go better. To think otherwise is to think&#xA;  that people are mere means to the production of happiness. &lt;strong&gt;Or,&#xA;  to use another famous image, it is to treat persons as mere vessels&#xA;  of happiness. But unlike a mere vessel&lt;/strong&gt;, which is indifferent to how&#xA;  much of a valued substance it contains, a person cares about how&#xA;  much happiness he has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T07:59:11.013" Title="What's the source for the allusion of 'mere vessels of happiness'?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3539" CreationDate="2018-05-19T10:47:11.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My main guess is because the original intent of Kipling’s poem was to illustrate anti-German sentiment in the buildup to World War I (something Kipling was very much on board with). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These people who keep recirculating the wrath of the awakened Saxon are not anti-German, in fact many of them likely revel in their connection to Germanic culture. English is a national identity, limited only to the people from England really. Anglo as a term can start to encompass those in the Anglo-sphere, like North America and Australia/NZ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Saxon is vague, stresses the connection of Anglo people to Germany and the Germanic tribes, and can be seen as a blanket term to include all manner of white and specifically Northern European/Germanic Supremacists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short these racists want to be as all inclusive as possible with their bigotry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4539" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T10:47:11.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6601" CreationDate="2018-05-19T13:11:10.750" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a partially Hindi (there is only a couple of lines in Hindi; rest is in English) song titled as &amp;quot;9 Parts of Desire&amp;quot;. Here is the YouTube link to that song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBp4Y7CjRwg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBp4Y7CjRwg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song has lyrics like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parde ke peeche (Behind the veil)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burns a fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parde ke peeche (Behind the veil)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;9 parts of desire.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does exactly this line mean? What is it referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="47" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T21:04:59.563" Title="What's the meaning of the line &quot;9 Parts of Desire&quot; in this song?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;trickbaby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2099" CreationDate="2018-05-19T15:51:52.577" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: basically any language with strong etymological connections to English (plus Hebrew).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of information about languages in &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Appendix_F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Appendix F of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (itself a condensed version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/The_Appendix_on_Languages&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Appendix on Languages&quot;, Volume 12 Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;The History of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), in which Tolkien strictly maintained the conceit that LotR itself was a true story and he had merely translated and modernised it. It's worth reading Part II of this appendix, &quot;On Translation&quot;, in full, if only to appreciate the extent of Tolkien's imagination and creativity at least in matters of language, but here I'll provide only the most relevant excerpts to understand the essentials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In presenting the matter of the Red Book, as a history for people of today &#xA;  to read, the whole of the linguistic setting has been translated as far as &#xA;  possible into terms of our own times. Only the languages alien to the Common &#xA;  Speech have been left in their original form; but these appear mainly in the &#xA;  names of persons and places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Common Speech, as the language of the Hobbits and their narratives, has&#xA;  inevitably been turned into modern English. In the process the difference &#xA;  between the varieties observable in the use of the Westron has been lessened.  Some attempt has been made to represent these varieties by variations in the &#xA;  kind of English used; but the divergence between the pronunciation and idiom of the Shire and the Westron tongue in the mouths of the Elves or of the high men of Gondor was greater than has been shown in this book. Hobbits indeed spoke for the most part a rustic dialect, whereas in Gondor and Rohan a more antique language was used, more formal and more terse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;LotR&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix F, Part I &quot;On Translation&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As part of this process, he says, he not only translated the Common Speech into more-or-less modern English, but also created linguistically suitable connections between other Middle-earth languages and their 'translations'. This is a device he used so as not to break &lt;em&gt;linguistic&lt;/em&gt; suspension of disbelief - something which most readers would have noticed or cared about far less than he, a professional linguist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Translation of this kind is, of course, usual because inevitable in any &#xA;  narrative dealing with the past. It seldom proceeds any further. But I have gone beyond it. I have also translated all Westron names according to their senses. When English names or titles appear in this book it is an indication that names in the Common Speech were current at the time, beside, or instead of, those in alien (usually Elvish) languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Westron names were as a rule translations of older names: as Rivendell,&#xA;  Hoarwell, Silverlode, Langstrand, The Enemy, the Dark Tower. Some differed in &#xA;  meaning: as Mount Doom for &lt;em&gt;Orodruin&lt;/em&gt; 'burning mountain', or Mirkwood for &lt;em&gt;Taur e-Ndaedelos&lt;/em&gt; 'forest of the great fear'. A few were alterations of Elvish names: as Lune and Brandywine derived from &lt;em&gt;Lhûn&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Baranduin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This procedure perhaps needs some defence. It seemed to me that to present &#xA;  all the names in their original forms would obscure an essential feature of the times as perceived by the Hobbits (whose point of view I was mainly concerned to preserve): the contrast between a wide-spread language, to them as ordinary and habitual as English is to us, and the living remains of far older and more reverend tongues. All names if merely transcribed would seem to modern readers equally remote: for instance, if the Elvish name &lt;em&gt;Imladris&lt;/em&gt; and the Westron translation &lt;em&gt;Karningul&lt;/em&gt; had both been left unchanged. But to refer to Rivendell as Imladris was as if one now was to speak of Winchester as Camelot, except that the identity was certain, while in Rivendell there still dwelt a lord of renown far older than Arthur would be, were he still king at Winchester today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also goes into a lot more detail about precisely which languages and dialects of Middle-earth correspond to which in the real (sorry, modern) world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Most Hobbit names: ENGLISH.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name of the Shire (&lt;em&gt;Sûza&lt;/em&gt;) and all other places of die Hobbits have &#xA;  thus been Englished. This was seldom difficult, since such names were commonly made up of elements similar to those used in our simpler English place-names; either words still current like &lt;em&gt;hill&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;field&lt;/em&gt;; or a little worn down like &lt;em&gt;ton&lt;/em&gt; beside &lt;em&gt;town&lt;/em&gt;. But some were derived, as already noted, from old hobbit-words no longer in use, and these have been represented by similar English things, such as &lt;em&gt;wich&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;bottle&lt;/em&gt; 'dwelling', or &lt;em&gt;michel&lt;/em&gt; 'great'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Older Hobbit names: FRANKISH or GOTHIC.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some old families, especially those of Fallohide origin such as the &#xA;  Tooks and the Bolgers, it was, however, the custom to give high-sounding &#xA;  first-names. Since most of these seem to have been drawn from legends of the &#xA;  past, of Men as well as of Hobbits, and many while now meaningless to Hobbits &#xA;  closely resembled the names of Men in the Vale of Anduin, or in Dale, or in the Mark, I have turned them into those old names, largely of Frankish and Gothic origin, that are still used by us or are met in our histories. I have thus at any rate preserved the often comic contrast between the first-names and surnames, of which the Hobbits themselves were well aware. Names of classical origin have rarely been used; for the nearest equivalents to Latin and Greek in Shire-lore were the Elvish tongues, and these the Hobbits seldom used in nomenclature. Few of them at any time knew 'the languages of the kings', as they called them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Buckland names: CELTIC.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The names of the Bucklanders were different from those of the rest of the &#xA;  Shire. The folk of the Marish and their offshoot across the Brandywine were in many ways peculiar, as has been told. It was from the former language of the southern Stoors, no doubt, that they inherited many of their very odd names. These I have usually left unaltered, for if queer now, they were queer in their own day. They had a style that we should perhaps feel vaguely to be Celtic elements in England, I have sometimes imitated the latter in my translation. Thus Bree, Combe (Coomb), Archet, and Chetwood are modelled on relics of British nomenclature, chosen according to sense: &lt;em&gt;bree&lt;/em&gt; hill, &lt;em&gt;chet&lt;/em&gt; &quot;wood*. But only one personal name has been altered in this way. Meriadoc was chosen to fit the fact that this character's shortened name. Kali, meant in the Westron 'jolly, gay', though it was actually an abbreviation of the now unmeaning Buckland name Kalimac.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Older Hobbit names, and Rohirrim: OLD ENGLISH.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have not used names of Hebraic or similar origin in my transpositions. &#xA;  Nothing in Hobbit-names corresponds to this element in our names. Short names &#xA;  such as Sam, Tom, Tim, Mat were common as abbreviations of actual Hobbit-names, such as Tomba, Tolma, Matta, and the like. But Sam and his father Ham were really called Ban and Ran. These were shortenings of &lt;em&gt;Banazîr&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ranugad&lt;/em&gt;, originally nicknames, meaning 'half-wise, simple' and 'stay-at-home', but being words that had fallen out of colloquial use they remained as traditional names in certain families. I have therefore tried to preserve these features by using Samwise and Hamfast, modernizations of ancient English &lt;em&gt;samwís&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;hámfoest&lt;/em&gt; which corresponded closely in meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Having gone so far in my attempt to modernize and make familiar the &#xA;  language and names of Hobbits, I found myself involved in a further process. The Mannish languages that were related to the Westron should, it seemed to me, be turned into forms related to English. The language of Rohan I have accordingly made to resemble ancient English, since it was related both (more distantly) to the Common Speech, and (very closely) to the former tongue of the northern Hobbits, and was in comparison with the Westron archaic. In the Red Book it is noted in several places that when Hobbits heard the speech of Rohan they recognized many words and felt the language to be akin to their own, so that it seemed absurd to leave the recorded names and words of the Rohirrim in a wholly alien style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In several cases I have modernized the forms and spellings of place-names &#xA;  in Rohan: as in &lt;em&gt;Dunharrow&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Snowbourne&lt;/em&gt;; but I have not been consistent, for I have followed the Hobbits. They altered the names that they heard in the same way, if they were made of elements mat they recognized, or if they resembled place-names in the Shire; but many they left alone, as I have done, for instance, in &lt;em&gt;Edoras&lt;/em&gt; 'the courts'. For the same reasons a few personal names have also been modernized, as Shadowfax and Wormtongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This assimilation also provided a convenient way of representing the &#xA;  peculiar local hobbit-words that were of northern origin. They have been given the forms that lost English words might well have had, if they had come down to our day. Thus &lt;em&gt;mathom&lt;/em&gt; is meant to recall ancient English &lt;em&gt;máthm&lt;/em&gt;, and so to represent the relationship of the actual Hobbit &lt;em&gt;kast&lt;/em&gt; to R. &lt;em&gt;kastu&lt;/em&gt;. Similarly &lt;em&gt;smial&lt;/em&gt; (or smile) 'burrow' is a likely form for a descendant of &lt;em&gt;smygel&lt;/em&gt;, and represents wen the relationship of Hobbit &lt;em&gt;tran&lt;/em&gt; to R. &lt;em&gt;trahan&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Sméagol&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Déagol&lt;/em&gt; are equivalents made up in the same way for the names &lt;em&gt;Trahald&lt;/em&gt; 'burrowing, worming in', and &lt;em&gt;Nahald&lt;/em&gt; 'secret' in the Northern tongues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The language of Dale: NORSE.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The still more northerly language of Dale is in this book seen only in the &#xA;  names of the Dwarves that came from that region and so used the language of the Men there, taking their 'outer' names in that tongue. I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only &lt;em&gt;suggested&lt;/em&gt; in Appendix F (&quot;still more northerly&quot;), but it's made more explicit in &quot;The Appendix on Languages&quot; from HoME. It's also quite obvious just from looking at the Dwarven names: take &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durinn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Durin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvalinn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dwalin&lt;/a&gt; for examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In perusing the Appendices, I also found some relevant information earlier than Appendix F.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Quenya is based on LATIN.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In transcribing the ancient scripts I have tried to represent the original sounds (so far as they can be determined) with fair accuracy, and at the same time to produce words and names that do not look uncouth in modern letters. The High-elven Quenya has been spelt as much like Latin as its sounds allowed. For this reason &lt;em&gt;c&lt;/em&gt; has been preferred to &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; in both Eldarin languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;LotR&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix E &quot;Writing and Spelling&quot;, Part I &quot;Pronunciation of Words and Names&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there's also a likening of Elvish languages to Latin and Greek in the above quotes from Appendix F. Occasional comparisons between them are scattered throughout the Appendices.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, one more comparison (thanks to @heather for putting me onto this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dwarvish is based on HEBREW.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belying Tolkien's claim (quoted above) that he &quot;&lt;em&gt;ha[s] not used names of Hebraic or similar origin&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, there are at least two sources for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The dwarves of course are quite obviously - wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.uv.es/~fores/jrtoa2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;BBC interview with Tolkien, 1971&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The language of the Dwarves [...] is Semitic in cast, leaning phonetically to Hebrew (as suits the Dwarvish character).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Letter to W.R. Matthews, 1964&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading about this e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/513824/summary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renee Vink, &quot;“Jewish” Dwarves: Tolkien and Anti-Semitic Stereotyping&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Tolkien Studies&lt;/em&gt; 10 (2013), pp. 123-145&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the languages we've seen referred to are English, Frankish, Gothic, Celtic, Old English, Norse, and Latin. All of these were used to inspire Middle-earth names, since the primary language of the story is English and names originating from other languages were required in order to maintain the illusion that the book is non-fiction translated from the Red Book of Westmarch. So Tolkien had to draw upon a bunch of other languages whose influence is often seen in English. Hebrew is the exception, just as Dwarvish is an exceptional language in Middle-Earth: only distantly related to any of the other languages mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T18:44:07.157" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T18:44:07.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-19T18:18:36.033" Score="6" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each time a human comes to Fantastica, the whole world is essentially 'rebooted'. We see this in chapter 13, where Bastian and the Childlike Empress start off in total empty nothingness, before he begins to make wishes and the world begins to be (re)created around them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, some features of the world remain unchanged. Not only the Childlike Empress herself; also, for example, Atreyu and Falkor, or the country of the Sassafranians (mentioned in both halves of &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;, before and after Bastian's arrival).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This raises the question: was there really total nothingness before Bastian started to make wishes? Did Atreyu, Falkor, the Sassafranian country, and so on exist only because he wished for them? (If so, Atreyu has a remarkable amount of free agency for someone recreated only through Bastian's will.) Could anything he remembers from the previous Fantastica be recreated? (But that would include many things that had been swallowed by the Nothing.) In short:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much of Fantastica survives between iterations - what and why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Informed and supported speculation, based on the text or other good evidence, is acceptable.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T18:18:36.033" Title="How much of Fantastica remains the same between iterations?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6592" CreationDate="2018-05-19T18:20:23.827" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The section &amp;quot;A Description of Earthsea&amp;quot; at the end of &lt;em&gt;Tales from Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; (2001) is explicit about the hierarchy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Witchery&lt;/em&gt; was restricted to women. All magic practiced by women was called “base craft”, even when it included practices otherwise called “high arts,” such as healing, chanting, changing, etc. Witches were to learn only from one another or from sorcerers. (…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sorcery&lt;/em&gt; was practiced by men—its only real distinction from witchery. Sorcerers trained one another, and had some knowledge of the True Speech. Sorcery included both base crafts as defined by Halker (finding, mending, dowsing, animal healing, etc.) and some high arts (human healing, chanting, weatherworking). (…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;wizard&lt;/em&gt;, as Halkel [the first archmage] defined the term, was a man who received his staff from a teacher, himself a wizard, who had taken special responsibility for his training. It was usually the Archmage who gave a student his staff and made him a wizard. (…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mage&lt;/em&gt; remained an essentially undefined term: a wizard of great power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story &amp;quot;The Finder&amp;quot;, also in &lt;em&gt;Tales from Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;, is set in the years that lead up to the establishment of the school on Roke and its rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quote is an example of the informal use of the term &amp;quot;mage&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highdrake’s mastery of spells and sorcery was not much greater than his pupil’s, but he had clear in his mind the idea of something very much greater, the wholeness of knowledge. And that made him a mage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Highdrake was a mage whose &amp;quot;true name&amp;quot; has been lost.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story also tells how the roles of men and women with regard to wizardry on Roke get reversed. Thirty years before Otter/Tern/Medra (the finder from the story's title) arrives on Roke, the island had been attacked by pirates. They could do this because one of the male wizards on the island had lowered the island's magic defences, so the pirates could attack it simply by force. The majority of the survivors were women, and they had little trust in men. In addition, women had always been the leaders in the league of the Hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Medra's arrival on the island, Roke begins to attract more people who want to learn wizardry, so more men come to the island. During discussions about the establishment of a school and how it should be run, some of the men want to exclude women from learning wizardry. Ember/Elehal tells Medra,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; men, and they make that important beyond anything else. To them, the Old Powers are abominable. And women’s powers’s are suspect, because they suppose them all connected with the Old Powers. As if those Powers were to be controlled or used by any mortal soul! But they put men where we put the world. And so they hold that a true wizard must be a man. And celibate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;wizard&amp;quot; is the &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; term, whereas &amp;quot;mage&amp;quot; is less well defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-19T18:20:23.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6594" CreationDate="2018-05-19T21:29:20.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know the source of the allusion.  It might be one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears in Chaper II of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/110/110-h/110-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tess of the D'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46389/46389-h/46389-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confucius&lt;/a&gt; (on pp. 71 and 94 of the book linked here) is said to have said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tzŭ Kung asked, saying: What, Sir, is your opinion of me?—I would liken you, Tz‘ŭ, replied the Master, to a vessel limited in its function.—What sort of vessel? asked Tzŭ Kung.—A richly ornamented sacrificial vessel, was the reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The higher type of man is not like a vessel which is designed for some Special use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general &quot;vessel&quot; can mean a ship or boat, or a container for liquids.  I suppose your quotation takes it in the latter sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T11:19:24.093" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T11:19:24.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6596" CreationDate="2018-05-20T16:02:05.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe, from what I'm reading, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ali&lt;/a&gt;, the first Shi'a imam, said, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Almighty God has created the sexual desire in ten parts; then He gave nine parts to women and one to men &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Was%C4%81%27il_al-Sh%C4%AB%CA%BFa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wasā'il al-Shīʿa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; volume 14, page 40; I could not come across a copy of this online so I cannot confirm that citation. But that does seem to be where that line comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=sSxZCAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT47&amp;amp;dq=wasa%27il+vol+14&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjpjtLN1JTbAhUGn1MKHUsVBcgQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=nine%20parts&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; it quotes the rest of the hadith this is from as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if the Almighty God had not given the women equal parts of shyness, then each man would have nine women related to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that this book also seems to cite volume 14, page 40 as the source for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T21:04:59.563" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T21:04:59.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-20T18:58:02.117" Score="12" ViewCount="1648" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love IBS's books and have read many of them, but I fail to understand how such niche writing garnered a Nobel Prize in Literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The audience of his brilliant books are Jews, old Jews, Judeophiles and maybe 1% just randoms. But how many European Jews really are there to read his books to bring a prize of global glory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4544" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-20T19:07:21.613" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T19:45:51.797" Title="Why did Isaac Bashevis Singer win the Nobel Prize for Literature?" Tags="&lt;nobel-prize&gt;&lt;yiddish-literature&gt;&lt;isaac-bashevis-singer&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6602" CreationDate="2018-05-20T19:42:54.390" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because the Nobel committee felt his writing expressed &quot;universal human conditions&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1978/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;official Nobel Prize website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978 was awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer &lt;em&gt;&quot;for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life&quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Singer's stories themselves were written in Yiddish and therefore only accessible (pre-translation) to a rather small audience, it seems the Nobel committee felt that they expressed something far bigger than the Yiddish-speaking or Jewish communities, something which any human could identify with regardless of their cultural background.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I know this isn't much info to go on, but it's all we're going to get for a long time. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_organizations/nobelfoundation/statutes.html#par10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Statutes of the Nobel Foundation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A prize-awarding body may, however, after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however, be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the decision in question was made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they won't be releasing any more information about the reasoning for their decision until around 2028 - still another ten years to go! Anything else we can say now would be informed speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T19:42:54.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6602" CreationDate="2018-05-20T19:45:51.797" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think there were several factors here, though of course we don't know all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Not really niche&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, I'd like to address the point of audience. While you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The audience of his brilliant books are Jews, old Jews, Judeophiles and maybe 1% just randoms&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, he also wrote English translations of a lot of his works which were of course originally published in Yiddish, meaning the general public could access them. According to Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translations of dozens of his stories were frequently published in popular magazines such as Playboy and Esquire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;meaning that they did have a wider audience than just those who could read Yiddish or who sought out his works. Singer was also well known because he was one of the leaders of the Yiddish literary movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Doesn't have to be popular&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;em&gt;Time Magazine&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://time.com/3484744/nobel-prize-literature-winner-patrick-modiano/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;puts it&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Swedish Academy has always seemed to swing between wildly popular writers (William Golding, Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison) and those who are more niche (Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Singer's work wasn't very well known, the popularity of the author's work isn't a requirement for being picked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What the committee says&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I might point out that the Nobel committee itself issues a statement explaining its reasoning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, from Singer's own acceptance speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and indeed, the prize helped propel the Yiddish literary movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T19:45:51.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6607" CreationDate="2018-05-20T19:59:16.257" Score="10" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching another question, a couple of us have found what appears to be a contradiction in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for Isaac Bashevis Singer&lt;/a&gt;. The introductory section of the article says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a leading figure in the Yiddish literary movement, writing and publishing only in Yiddish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Bashevis_Singer#Language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section 2.3 on language&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He edited his novels and stories for their publication in English in the United States; these versions were used as the basis for translation into other languages. He referred to his English version as his &quot;second original.&quot; This has led to an ongoing controversy whether the &quot;real Singer&quot; can be found in the Yiddish original, with its finely tuned language and sometimes rambling construction, or in the more tightly edited American versions, where the language is usually simpler and more direct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these claims on Wikipedia is cited to anything else, and the language section in particular is full of &lt;em&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/em&gt; notes. So what is the truth of the matter? Did Singer write his stories only in Yiddish, and merely permit others to translate them into English? Or did he write the English versions himself as well? Please include support for your answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T20:51:09.553" Title="Did Isaac Bashevis Singer write only in Yiddish, or also in English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;yiddish-literature&gt;&lt;isaac-bashevis-singer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-20T20:28:38.733" Score="6" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I estimate that generally the latest edition of a book is preferred unless you're after collection value or if an older version is preferred for some reason, for example due to original cover. In non-fiction new or updated chapters may be added. Translated fiction literature perhaps sees the most revisions. But even if the new edition has only been expanded by the author, the differences are still valuable information to be had and can be used to compare the book to its release period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I find information about the editions of a book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4546" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T13:47:27.327" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T13:47:27.327" Title="How can I find information about the editions of a book?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6605" CreationDate="2018-05-20T20:32:15.190" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe he translated at least some of his works into English himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, Singer published a story in the Yiddish press, and then used tear sheets or clippings to translate it into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-isaac-bashevis-singer-2018-05-07&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/newly-discovered-isaac-bashevis-singer-story-published-180968923/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smithsonian&lt;/a&gt; implies that he did it himself, but sometimes with the help of editors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He published them first in Yiddish language publications before having them translated or translating them himself with the help of editors into English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://articles.latimes.com/2006/nov/05/books/bk-meyers5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LA Times&lt;/a&gt; also backs up the second Wikipedia quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he later helped translate his own works into English, he cut and changed the text, tightened the narrative and created what he called a &amp;quot;second original.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the bibliography found by Mithrandir in chat on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1978/singer-bibl.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel prize website&lt;/a&gt;. It seems to show that he helped with some of his works, that others entirely did the full translation of others, and then Joseph Singer, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Joshua_Singer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;who seems to be his nephew&lt;/a&gt;, helped with yet others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In yet another fabulous source found by Mithrandir in chat, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the spring semester, starting in January, he and I taught together a class in creative writing at the University of Miami. On Sundays i came down to his condominium in Surfside, had breakfast with him, and worked with him on his writing - a process described roughly as &amp;quot;translating&amp;quot;. The tags at the end of these stories usually read &amp;quot;Translated by the author and Lester Goran&amp;quot; (or some other name over the years, sometimes Singer's wife, Alma, or other times &amp;quot;translated by the author&amp;quot;). It was actually a clerical refinement of transcription more than a literary exercise. He read to the &amp;quot;translator&amp;quot; in English, putting his Yiddish into a form the auditor could understand, and then the translator put the words down into grammatical or, at best, more idiomatic usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from the fourth page of &lt;em&gt;The Bright Streets of Surfside:  The Memoir of a Friendship with Isaac Bashevis Singer&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=8oizcQ34O98C&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;see here for the Google Books copy&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, again &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/44718410#44718410&quot;&gt;from Mithrandir in chat&lt;/a&gt;: check the books. While I can't seem to access the ebook version myself, the picture in chat should suffice for proof - it says &amp;quot;Translated by the author and [person]&amp;quot; in multiple spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;In summary:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the situation is simply that he wrote and published his works first in Yiddish, always (his earlier works were translations of others' work into Yiddish) and then later when his works were better known, he translated his own works with the help of an editor. So while perhaps the Wikipedia article is not ideally worded, there is no true contradiction: Yiddish was the primary language in which he wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This all then of course brings up the question: how much of the translation was him, and how much the editor. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/julyaugust/feature/isaac-bashevis-singer-master-storyteller&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;One article&lt;/a&gt; I found in the &lt;em&gt;Magazine for the National Endowment of the Humanities&lt;/em&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Translated&amp;quot; is a bit of a misnomer for Singer's work later in his career. Although he continued to write in Yiddish, as he grew more successful, he came to think of the Yiddish originals as templates for the finished English versions. Originally, it arose from necessity; most of his translators did not speak Yiddish. &amp;quot;He sat with them, he would dictate or he would orally translate a version to them in English,&amp;quot; says Stavans. &amp;quot;And they would type whatever they had, and then go home to turn it into something more polished. Then they would come back and he would approve it. The result was the English was considered a second original rather than a translation.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Stavans is referring to &amp;quot;Ilan Stavans, a professor at Amherst College and editor of the Library of America's edition of Singer's complete stories.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilan_Stavans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Stavans here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I think is quite enlightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T20:51:09.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6606" CreationDate="2018-05-20T21:00:43.113" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your question &quot;How can I find information about the editions of a book?&quot; has no simple general answer. There is a whole field of learning devoted to it: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;bibliography&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  Basic questions in that field are: what are the various editions of such and such a book, where and when did they appear, what are the relationships between them, what are the differences between them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answers here depend on the purpose of the questions.  Often, for instance, publishers will print essentially the same book with identical contents but different title-and-copyright pages showing (say) London as the place of publication of the one edition and New York as the other. For some purposes I suppose this counts as one edition, for others, as two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the era, and kind of book, and importance of the book, there might be shortcuts.  Library catalogs often help a lot.  For very recent books (after the invention of the ISBN, say) there are various databases used by the book-selling industry.  You can ask experts in the subject matter of the book in question. For instsance, if I wanted to know about the various editions of the work of the cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, I'd ask a friend who is a scholarly &lt;em&gt;Peanuts&lt;/em&gt; fiend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-05-20T21:00:43.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6643" CreationDate="2018-05-20T23:22:41.217" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does this quote from Anne Frank's Diary mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Who besides me will ever read these letters? From whom but myself&#xA;shall I get comfort? As I need comforting often, I frequently feel&#xA;weak, and dissatisfied with myself; my shortcomings are too great. I&#xA;know this, and every day I try to improve myself, again and again.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this quote mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4548" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T02:54:06.833" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T02:54:06.833" Title="In Anne Frank's Diary, what does this quote mean? &quot;Who besides me will ever read these letters? From whom but myself shall I get comfort?...&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;&lt;the-diary-of-a-young-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6611" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-21T05:31:59.300" Score="5" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Black features fairly prominently in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fantasy-magazine.com/new/new-fiction/blacktheir-regalia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black, Their Regalia&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Darcie Little Badger - it's in the title, and black is fairly prominent throughout the story. The Apparently Siblings play neoclassical alt-metal fusion and look goth, wearing black a lot. For their saving-the-world dance, they wear black. When they meet the Plague Eater, it's described as &quot;&lt;em&gt;...ground crumbled, and darkness enveloped their world, a darkness so absolute, even phosphenes vanished.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, in the copy I have the story is printed with a black background, and the whole thing feels rather &quot;dark&quot; in color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XjY0ym.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XjY0ym.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is black being portrayed, though? As a positive thing? Negative thing? Just powerful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T18:15:29.870" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T16:13:32.673" Title="How is black being portrayed in &quot;Black, Their Regalia&quot; by Darcie Little Badger?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;darcie-little-badger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6594" CreationDate="2018-05-21T07:59:11.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not convinced that &quot;mere vessels of happiness&quot; is in fact a &quot;famous image&quot; as claimed by Benatar. If it were famous then I would expect to be able to find more instances of the image using tools like Google Book Search or Google Scholar, but I have been unable to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest that I have been able to find is in Singer (1981):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But pure Classical Utilitarianism treats people as &lt;strong&gt;replaceable vessels containing quantities of happiness&lt;/strong&gt;, so that it is all right to kill a person if one can replace her with another person who will be just as happy, and there are no side-effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not the same image! Singer's objection is about treating people as &lt;em&gt;replaceable&lt;/em&gt; vessels (that is, aggregation of utility does not take into account the separation of persons), but Benatar's objection is about treating people as &lt;em&gt;mere&lt;/em&gt; vessels (that is, as means rather than ends).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would have to put [citation needed] on Benatar's claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Reference&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter Singer (1981). &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-0149.1981.tb01024.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reply to Dr Harris&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Analytic Philosophy&lt;/em&gt; 22:4, pp. 198–200.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T07:59:11.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6614" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:28:01.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T16:28:01.797" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T16:28:01.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6615" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:28:01.797" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Polish-born Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902 – 1991) and his works. He wrote novels such as 'The Magician of Lublin' (English translation, 1960), short stories and a number of autobiographical works. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Use this tag with the [yiddish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T19:50:34.547" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T19:50:34.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6616" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:29:22.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T16:29:22.183" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T16:29:22.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6617" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:29:22.183" Score="0" Body="For questions about works of literature originally written in Yiddish. Use this tag for any questions about such works, not just for the body of Yiddish literature as a whole." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T19:51:02.830" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T19:51:02.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6618" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:30:33.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T16:30:33.057" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T16:30:33.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6619" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-21T16:30:33.057" Score="0" Body="For questions about lyrics by the London-based band Trickbaby. Use with the [song-lyrics] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-21T19:50:25.127" LastActivityDate="2018-05-21T19:50:25.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6621" CreationDate="2018-05-21T20:41:18.463" Score="3" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told that Charles Causley wrote a poem on the way home from the funeral of Louis Macneice.  The fellow that mentioned it to me couldn't remember the title¹ but he wanted to read it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹Perhaps this would &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3562/the-name-of-a-poem-about-a-poet-being-happy-that-someone-has-forgotten-the-title&quot;&gt;make Causley happy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2698" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T00:51:39.617" Title="Title of poem written by Causley after Macneice's funeral?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6620" CreationDate="2018-05-22T00:44:28.400" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I believe it is called, rather unsurprisingly, &lt;em&gt;Death of a Poet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Firstly, the poem appeared in an anthology of poetry of his written between 1951 and 1975, and since MacNeice died in 1963, this is the right time frame. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UPwIAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=inauthor:%22Charles+Causley%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiI_42miZjbAhUstlkKHd8BDJ4Q6AEIUzAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contents of this collection&lt;/a&gt; as listed in Google Books includes &lt;em&gt;Death of a Poet&lt;/em&gt; which seemed to me a reasonable title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search produced &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&amp;amp;t=121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this forum page&lt;/a&gt; which seems to confirm this and points to the Penguin Anthology &lt;em&gt;Worlds&lt;/em&gt;, but I couldn't find this anthology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to the notes in the Penguin anthology 'Worlds', [Causley's 'Death of a Poet']'s about Louis MacNiece &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the Causley Trust &lt;a href=&quot;http://causleytrust.org/charles-causleys-irish-influence-by-cahal-dallat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also points to this same poem&lt;/a&gt; saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Death of a Poet also reverberates with MacNeice, not just prescribing his own funeral and pallbearers, a common enough ‘folk’ thing to do, but with Charles’s the parson boomed echoing Louis’s My father made the walls resound/ He wore his collar the wrong way round…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-22T00:51:39.617" LastActivityDate="2018-05-22T00:51:39.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6623" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T03:23:29.963" Score="1" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not remember much detail about this book my mother once read to me when I was little. What I do remember is that the protagonist was a boy surviving in a forest. He made his home out of a big tree which he hollowed out. There was a long winter. He had a bunch of animal friends, and I think one was a hawk or a falcon. I think he grew up in the woods if I remember correctly. I think he saved the forest from hunters or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure; it was like 13 years ago that I heard it, but it has been on my mind. Any suggestions would help. I very vaguely remember the book cover; if I were to see it again, I could tell that it was the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4560" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T17:24:01.260" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T20:55:19.287" Title="Book about a boy surviving in a forest with animal friends" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-06-07T09:43:03.627" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6588" CreationDate="2018-05-23T04:47:35.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We're not told exactly how much time passed, but I agree with you - it doesn't seem like a lot of time in the book. The book glosses over the details of what happened in the interim. John Galt is also admittedly somewhat vague as to why he thought that it was time to go back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They could not see the world beyond the mountains, there was only a void of darkness and rock, but the darkness was hiding the ruins of a continent: the roofless homes, the rusting tractors, the lightless streets, the abandoned rail But far in the distance, on the edge of the earth, a small flame was waving in the wind, the defiantly stubborn flame of Wyatt's Torch, twisting, being torn and regaining its hold, not to be uprooted or extinguished. It seemed to be calling and waiting for the words John Galt was now to pronounce.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;The road is cleared,&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; said Galt. &quot;We are going back to the world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little vague as to exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; he thought that the road was cleared (just that he thought that it was), but we can make a few inferences. First, the text doesn't actually explicitly state that Mr. Thompson was still in power; it's actually reasonable to assume that he wasn't (or, at least, that he was so thoroughly discredited by John Galt's radio speech, John's actions at the state dinner where he was supposed to pretend cooperation, John's successful escape, and the mass chaos following the destruction of the Taggart Bridge that having him removed wouldn't be too hard):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The plane was above the peaks of the skyscrapers when suddenly, with the abruptness of a shudder, as if the ground had parted to engulf it, the city disappeared from the face of the earth. &lt;strong&gt;It took them a moment to realize that the panic had reached the power stations&lt;/strong&gt; - and that the lights of New York had gone out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, that moment was one of the major goals of the Strike:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Dagny] remembered the story Francisco had told her: &quot;He had quit the Twentieth Century. He was living in a garret in a slum neighborhood. He stepped to the window and pointed to the skyscrapers of the city. He said that we had to extinguish the lights of the world, and when we would see the lights of New York go out, we would know that our job was done.&quot;... She knew that now, at this hour, their plane was carrying all that was left of New York City.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, many of the Looters themselves (like Jim Taggart) had finally realized the truth (or, like Orren Boyle, had been incapacitated and/or bankrupted). There's also a strong possibility that some of the Looters died in the aftermath of the bridge collapse; for example, it's strongly implied that Hank Rearden's family may well have starved to death. (This is as opposed to, for example, the Looters and the people who formed armed and apparently at least somewhat self-sufficient camps after John Galt's speech, who presumably would've been preserved from that kind of a fate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T04:47:35.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T08:29:07.330" Score="4" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bone_Clocks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bone Clocks&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mitchell_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Mitchell&lt;/a&gt; a character is introduced in the section 'Crispin Hershey’s Lonely Planet'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character named 'Soleil Moore' pops up three times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Hay-on-Wye book fair where she gives Crispin her first collection of poetry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A literary event in Shanghai where she gives Crispin another volume of poetry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bard College, USA where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Crispin is then visited by Soleil Moore, whom he does not remember and who is horrified that he has not read the works she gave him. She tells him he is part of &amp;quot;the Script&amp;quot; and that humans are being used and abused by higher beings and she hoped that Crispin would help her publish her works so that they would become widespread knowledge. She then goes to Plan B and shoots Crispin, knowing that the murder will make her and her work infamous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing more is mentioned about Soleil in the book and it's never revealed whether her poetry actually does reveal what is going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has there been any insight (whether from the author or speculation) as to who this character is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, as is often the case with David Mitchell's characters, does She appear in any other stories ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T19:52:47.770" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T19:52:47.770" Title="Who is Soleil Moore, The Bone Clocks character?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;david-mitchell&gt;&lt;the-bone-clocks&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6626" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-23T10:53:43.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T10:53:43.217" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T10:53:43.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6627" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-23T10:53:43.217" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Bone Clocks' (2014) by British writer David Mitchell. Use this tag with the [david-mitchell] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T11:11:38.867" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T11:11:38.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6623" CreationDate="2018-05-23T12:05:29.840" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick Google search lead me to the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Side_of_the_Mountain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;My Side of the Mountain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jean Craighead George. Could that be the book you meant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is about Sam Gribley, a 14-year-old boy who intensely dislikes living in his parents' cramped New York City apartment with his eight brothers and sisters. He decides to run away to his great-grandfather's abandoned farm in the Catskill Mountains to live in the wilderness. The reader meets Frightful, Sam's pet peregrine falcon, and The Baron, a weasel that Sam befriends. Roughly the first 80 percent of the novel is Sam's reminiscences during a snowstorm about how he came to be in a home made out of a hollowed-out tree, while the remainder of the novel is a traditional linear narrative about what happens after the snowstorm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4561" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-23T20:55:19.287" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T20:55:19.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2018-05-23T19:23:17.647" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Russian text the word used is &quot;вернуть&quot; (to return) which in this context I have always understood to be intentional wordplay to the  Russian &lt;a href=&quot;https://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/ushakov/754098&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ввернуть&lt;/a&gt; - which means among other things &quot;to screw in&quot; (eg a corkscrew into a cork). In part because in the book earlier there are several references to using screws and screwing motions and implements for torture. So, Gur, in my reading, is implying  that Rumata will be discovered and punished. The indirect way of saying that would be typical of Soviet- style communication. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T19:23:17.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2193" CreationDate="2018-05-23T21:34:31.973" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My Dad wrote this poem in 1957 for an act he performed for Tops in Blue when he was in the Air Force stationed at Ramey Air Force base in Puerto Rico. His name is Bermen Gasten Taylor. He is presently living in north Georgia in a town called Chattsworth, and has no idea of the life this poem has taken on itself.&#xA;Please respond to this post if you were stationed on Ramey A.F.B. In 1957, and saw the show, or if you know someone who was, and saw the performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4564" LastEditorUserId="4564" LastEditDate="2018-05-23T21:59:41.707" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T21:59:41.707" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6631" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-23T22:02:32.997" Score="9" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I bought a &lt;strong&gt;One Thousand and One Nights&lt;/strong&gt; book hoping that I would read 1001 stories. But then I find out that the number of stories varies depending on the version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some versions have 200 - 300 stories (not nights), which encompass far less than the 1001 nights. Richard Francis Burton's version has indeed 1001 nights (in 10 volumes plus 6 supplementary), but it is not the only version, as other compilations exist in the Middle East or Egypt organized by scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be a good modern source for accessing the 1001 nights in One Thousand and One Nights - in terms of accessibility and faithfulness to the original work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4565" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T15:05:02.143" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:05:02.143" Title="What are the 1001 stories in One Thousand and One Nights?" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6067" CreationDate="2018-05-23T23:20:37.690" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with your statement that &lt;em&gt;&quot;he openly admits that he's going along with Directive 10-289 because he's a racketeer&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. In discussions with the looters, Kinnan is aloof and jaded, and seems to despise them. He plays along with them as long as they'll keep his racket going. He knows they know it's a racket, but they're terribly afraid of unions because of their collective power and because it would be politically unpopular to cut them off or throw them under the bus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kinnan is a crook, an exploiter, and a realist. But he is not a killer like Floyd Ferris or James Taggart. Consider the following from each:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Floyd Ferris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Nobody knows,&quot; said Dr. Ferris. &quot;We've been unable to find any &#xA;  information or explanation. But it must be stopped. In times of&#xA;  crisis,  economic service to the nation is just as much of a duty as&#xA;  military service.  Anyone who abandons it should be regarded as a&#xA;  deserter. I have recommended  that we introduce the death penalty for&#xA;  those men, but Wesley wouldn't agree  to it.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fred Kinnan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Take it easy, boy,&quot; said Fred Kinnan in an odd, slow voice. He sat &#xA;  suddenly and perfectly still, his arms crossed, looking at Ferris in a&#xA;  manner  that made it suddenly real to the room that Ferris had&#xA;  proposed murder.  &quot;Don't let me hear you talk about any death&#xA;  penalties in industry.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Taggart:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Go ahead!&quot; cried Taggart. &quot;What are you waiting for? Can't you make&#xA;  the  current stronger? He hasn't even screamed yet!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What's the matter with you?&quot; gasped Mouch, catching a glimpse of &#xA;  Taggart' s face while a current was twisting Gait's body: Taggart was&#xA;  staring at it intently, yet his eyes seemed glazed and dead, but&#xA;  around that inanimate stare the muscles of his face were pulled into&#xA;  an obscene caricature of enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, like honor among thieves, it seems that Kinnan cares about the truth. He has no interest in lying to himself or others, and refuses to be drawn in when the looters start propagandizing each other and trying hard to believe it. In short, he won't tolerate BS and occasionally puts a stop to it when he hears it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: Kinnan accepts &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of the looters' philosophy because he knows it's all BS. But he embraces the power structure the looters have set up because he gets power and money from it, and he is unashamed to game the system to his benefit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-05-23T23:20:37.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6633" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-24T07:30:39.290" Score="4" ViewCount="1153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, the famous novel written by Charlotte Bronte. In his account of how he was cheated on by the opera-dancer Celine Varens, Rochester didn't really explain why he thought Varens had cheated on him. (Maybe, when he was abridging his account, he thought he didn't have to tell Jane on what grounds he thought that Varens was cheating on him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the novel detail how Rochester knew, or whether Varens actually was, unfaithful to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4566" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T15:37:58.363" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T15:37:58.363" Title="Was Mr Edward Rochester mistaken in thinking Celine Varens was cheating on him?" Tags="&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6633" CreationDate="2018-05-24T13:07:35.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming Rochester’s account to be honest, I think we can reconstruct his reasoning from the details that he included. When Céline arrived at her hotel late that night, she was wrapped in a cloak, which Rochester interpreted as an attempted disguise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The carriage stopped, as I had expected, at the hotel door; my flame (that is the very word for an opera inamorata) alighted: though muffed in a cloak—an unnecessary encumbrance, by-the-bye, on so warm a June evening—I knew her instantly by her little foot, seen peeping from the skirt of her dress, as she skipped from the carriage-step.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Céline was accompanied by a young man, and on seeing him Rochester was instantly jealous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Bending over the balcony, I was about to murmur ‘Mon ange’—in a tone, of course, which should be audible to the ear of love alone—when a figure jumped from the carriage after her; cloaked also; but that was a spurred heel which had rung on the pavement, and that was a hatted head which now passed under the arched &lt;em&gt;porte cochère&lt;/em&gt; of the hotel. You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the pair came up to Céline’s room, Rochester recognized the young man, and believed he was the kind of man likely to have a sexual affair with Céline (a &lt;em&gt;roué&lt;/em&gt; is “A debauched or dissolute man; a rake, a libertine, a playboy” [&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;]):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“… there was her companion in an officer’s uniform; and I knew him for a young roué of a vicomte—a brainless and vicious youth whom I had sometimes met in society, and had never thought of hating because I despised him so absolutely.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rochester spied on the pair from the balcony, observing their behaviour when they believed themselves unseen. According to Rochester’s account, they used this opportunity to mock him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A card of mine lay on the table; this being perceived, brought my name under discussion. Neither of them possessed energy or wit to belabour me soundly, but they insulted me as coarsely as they could in their little way: especially Céline, who even waxed rather brilliant on my personal defects—deformities she termed them.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this amounts to proof that Céline was &lt;em&gt;sexually&lt;/em&gt; unfaithful to Rochester. But according to his account he had proof of &lt;em&gt;emotional&lt;/em&gt; duplicity, and the rest seemed to him likely to follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, Rochester believed he had one further piece of evidence, namely the paternity of Adèle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But unluckily the Varens, six months before, had given me this filette Adèle, who, she affirmed, was my daughter; and perhaps she may be, though I see no proofs of such grim paternity written in her countenance: Pilot is more like me than she.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Pilot was Rochester’s dog, “a lion-like creature with long hair and a huge&#xA;head”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-05-24T13:56:40.710" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T13:56:40.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6633" CreationDate="2018-05-24T15:37:39.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6634/17&quot;&gt;Gareth Rees's answer&lt;/a&gt; is correct (he just beat me to it &lt;code&gt;:-)&lt;/code&gt;), showing how Mr Rochester's story indicates his lover's infidelity as clearly as it could be without him actually finding them &lt;em&gt;in flagrante delicto&lt;/em&gt;. However, since your question seems to be casting doubt on Mr Rochester's status as a &lt;a href=&quot;http://narrative.georgetown.edu/wiki/index.php/Reliable_narrator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reliable narrator&lt;/a&gt;, I thought it would be interesting to examine the issue of whether or not, or to what extent, we can take his story at face value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Within the frame of the narrative, Mr Rochester is a reliable narrator.&lt;/strong&gt; Although Jane doubts and mistrusts him in various ways throughout the story, it never occurs to her to believe he has fabricated or misrepresented his own past. Indeed, soon after the conversation in which he tells her of Celine Varens, her thoughts show that she disapproves of some of his past actions but doesn't think to disbelieve his story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes?  No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire.  Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me.  He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others.  He was moody, too; unaccountably so; I more than once, when sent for to read to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl blackened his features.  But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say &lt;em&gt;former&lt;/em&gt;, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate.  I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged.  I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled.  I cannot deny that I grieved for his grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are clearly intended, like Jane, to take his story at face value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even after she discovers that he has lied to her about being a bachelor, she is quick to forgive him in her heart, and doesn't think to doubt the rest of his life story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, never more could it turn to him; for faith was blighted—confidence destroyed!  Mr. Rochester was not to me what he had been; for he was not what I had thought him.  I would not ascribe vice to him; I would not say he had betrayed me; but the attribute of stainless truth was gone from his idea, and from his presence I must go: &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; I perceived well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.  There was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his manner; and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and mien—I forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart’s core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intent of the story is that Mr Rochester is an essentially good man - with plenty of past indiscretions, to be sure, but that he is honest except for the one great secret he kept hidden - from &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;, not just his new intended bride - for so many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However, there are alternative readings of the story.&lt;/strong&gt; It is possible to construe Mr Rochester in an entirely different manner: to argue that Jane's belief in him was due more to her infatuation than his essential honesty, and to cast a different light upon his life. Even his first wife Bertha, seemingly the villain of the piece, can be viewed sympathetically, her insanity the result of ill-treatment rather than a mental defect. For more on this reading of the novel, I refer you to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Sargasso_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a retelling from Bertha's point of view. (I haven't read it myself, but it sounds interesting!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this interpretation, it is possible to disbelieve almost anything Mr Rochester says about his past. If his version of Bertha - the insane woman devoid of virtue whom he was tricked into marrying by his family and hers - is a lie, then so also could be his version of Celine Varens. Perhaps she was true and faithful to him, and he merely grew tired of her, moved on to other women, and made up the story about her unfaithfulness to make himself look better. We only have his word for it, and if his word comes into doubt, then so does all of his past life except the parts and details which have been somehow confirmed by other means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T15:37:39.143" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2613" CreationDate="2018-05-24T18:06:54.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;These speeches by the characters are opposite each other because of the opposite ideas. As you stated, the Inspector is a mouthpiece for Priestly, and Priestly was a believer in socialism, whereas Birling represents more Capitalist views. The speeches are opposite because they show the differences in ideas between these two ideologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Birlings states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the way some of these cranks talk and write now, you'd think everybody has to look after everybody else as if we were all mixed up together like bees in a hive- community and all that nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which shows how Mr Birling is disregarding community and wants to take no part in it preferring to only support himself and his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Inspector states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...all intertwined with our lives and what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which shows how the Inspector, and therefore Priestly believes that we need to have a sense of community and should take responsibility for each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this way, the speeches are polar opposites because the ideologies in which the characters represent as shown in this speeches contract. Whereas Birling takes a more capitalist view, which is the opposite of the socialist view expressed by the Inspector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that throghout the play Birling expresses his captalist views which are contrasted by the Inspectors socialist views however it is in these speeches we see that contrast expressed most as the phrases &quot;you'd think everybody has to look after everybody else&quot; and &quot;we are responsible for each other&quot; highlights the difference in their views and making them polar opposites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2507" LastActivityDate="2018-05-24T18:06:54.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-25T21:23:25.483" Score="6" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JBmPq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JBmPq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Le Guin books&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of her books bear the name &quot;Ursula Le Guin&quot;; others, &quot;Ursula K. Le Guin&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Why is this?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it a time thing, i.e. she changed from not using the K to using it, or vice versa, at some point in her writing career? Did some publishers use the K and others not? Some other pattern/explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="57" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T11:21:51.543" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T16:04:02.527" Title="When did Ursula (K) Le Guin use the K on her books and when not?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2018-05-26T05:49:22.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;1001 Nights&quot; refers to the story that links all the other stories together (framing device); the story of the king who slays his unfaithful wife and decides to marry a new woman each day and kill her the next morning. When he marries Shaharazad she begins telling him a story (and stories within that story) that takes all night and still isn't finished by morning. The king postpones her execution for one day so he can hear the rest of the tale the following night. Shaharazad keeps this up for 1001 nights but the &quot;Thousand Nights and A Night&quot; is (I think) a loose collection of folktales without a definite text.&#xA;Richard Burton was an amazing guy, but his translation is not fun to read. I liked the Penguin Press paperback edition I read years ago. Any version not aimed at kids will have a lot of sex and violence- think Game of Thrones not Aesop's Fables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4575" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T05:49:22.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6640" CreationDate="2018-05-26T11:21:29.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, she always went by Ursula K. Le Guin¹. This is not another case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iain_Banks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iain “Maybe” Banks&lt;/a&gt;. (By the way, K is not a middle initial, it's the initial of her maiden name. I don't know why she chose to write under that name.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time and even later many female SF authors hid the fact that they were female by using a pseudonym that either had a male first name (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Norton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;André Norton&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tiptree_Jr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Tiptree, Jr.&lt;/a&gt;) or had only initials (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Cherryh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. J. Cherryh&lt;/a&gt;). UKL did this once: when she submitted the short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41107&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nine Lives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Playboy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vogue.com/article/ursula-le-guin-steering-the-craft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;she agreed to have it published under the name ”U. K. LeGuin“&lt;/a&gt;, with a bibliography that did not reveal that she was a woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ursulakleguin.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website&lt;/a&gt; always uses the name “Ursula K. Le Guin” (except when she cites articles about her that use a shorter form of her name) and the initials “UKL”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some books style her name as “Ursula Le Guin”, but as far as I can tell this is an abbreviation chosen by the publisher. Looking through my shelves, it seems that Gollancz mostly uses “Ursula Le Guin” (but not always: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?130261&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 2004 paperback of &lt;em&gt;The Birthday of the World and other stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has “Ursula Le Guin” on the cover but “Ursula K. Le Guin” everywhere inside the book), most other publishers use “Ursula K. Le Guin”, and a few waver. For example the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?130341&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orion 2003 trade paperback edition of &lt;em&gt;The Other Wind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; uses “Ursula Le Guin” on the cover and states ”Text copyright Ⓒ Ursula Le Guin 2001“ but “The rights of Ursula K. Le Guin to be identified as the author (…)”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be a trend for non-US publishers to drop the K, but my shelves are not a statistically significant sample. A look through &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/searchAdvanced&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search results in the US Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt;² does seem to confirm this trend, but it is not systematic. Most of the entries with “Ursula Le Guin” are British editions or US reprints of British editions, but there are a few which don't correspond to any particular work or publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote as “Ursula K. Le Guin”. She once allowed a publisher to hide her first name, but she did not consider herself as having written under a pen name, rather as having had her gender hidden in one particular publication of that work. Some of her books show her name as “Ursula Le Guin”, but this is an abbreviated form of her name that does not seem to have any significance. I'm not aware that she ever wrote about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt; Except before her marriage to Mr Le Guin, but as far as I know and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; confirms, she didn't publish anything before her marriage, unless it was an academic publication during her graduate studies. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;² &lt;sub&gt; Sorry, I can't find a persistent URL for the results. &lt;/sub&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-26T16:04:02.527" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T16:04:02.527" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6609" CreationDate="2018-05-26T18:08:30.330" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted the Dutch edition &lt;em&gt;Het achterhuis: dagboekbrieven 12 juni 1942 - 1 augustus 1944&lt;/em&gt; (Edited by Anne's father Otto Frank and Mirjam Pressler. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2010). This edition of the diary does not contain an entry for 7 November 1942; there is nothing between the entries of 5 and 9 November 1942. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are four (!) versions of Anne Frank's diary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version A is Anne's original diary, which she started writing on 12 June 1942.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version B is a reworked version by Anne. She started working on this in February 1942, after a Dutch minister in exile (in London) said on the radio, that after the War, testimonies about the suffering of the Dutch should be collected and published. Version B was a version destined for publication; while working on it, Anne continued writing version A.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version C is a version that Anne's father Otto Frank (the family's only war survivor) published in 1947. This was a shortened version based on versions A and B.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Version D is the version that is usually published (and translated) today. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diary entry for 7 November 1942 does not exist in version A; it is something that Anne added in version B. This is a long letter about how Anne's parents habitually side with her older sister Margot when there is some sort of conflict. This leads her to the question whether God is testing her and whether she should try to become &quot;good&quot; without guiding examples. This then leads to the paragraph cited in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diary entries are written as letters to &quot;Kitty&quot;; in an early diary entry from 20 June 1942 (actually, the first entry in version B) that she did not have a true friend, i.e. someone with whom she could talk about intimate things, so her diary might serve that role. So the diary entries are not simply observations with a date above them but letters to the diary/Kitty with a salutation and a closing line. So the claim, in Yaskskier's answer, that &quot;letters&quot; in the quote refers to &quot;letters of the alphabet&quot; is factually wrong. (The Dutch word for &quot;letter&quot; in the sense of written message is &quot;brief&quot;; the Dutch word for &quot;letter (of the alphabet)&quot; is &quot;letter&quot;, so there can be no mistake.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement that the letters will not be read by anyone refers to the fact that she would never let anyone read her diary (or &quot;diary letters&quot;, as the title of the Dutch edition says). This statement comes from the 20 June 1942 entry (the first) in version B and therefore refers to version A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comfort she does not get refers to her relationship with other family members. The 7 November entry also says that Anne is in many respects the opposite of her mother and asks whether anyone could really satisfy their children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She writes that she wants to improve herself in order to satisfy the demands by other people. She probably also hopes that this would help her overcome the unequal treatment of her and Margot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-05-26T18:08:30.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6657" CreationDate="2018-05-27T03:58:40.683" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ged's first master, Ogion, taught him for a time before he went to Roke. The book commented that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ogion's seemed a long road towards mastery, a slow bypath to follow, when he might go sailing before the seawinds straight to the Inmost Sea, to the Isle of the Wise, where the air was bright with enchantments and the Archmage walked amidst wonders.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Master,&quot; he said, &quot;I will go to Roke.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were Ogion's teaching methods so different than the teaching methods on Roke (especially given that he had gone to Roke himself)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were the teaching methods he displayed in the book specific to Ged?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T15:05:21.193" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T12:22:20.093" Title="Why were Ogion's teaching methods so different than the teaching methods in Roke?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6648" CreationDate="2018-05-27T04:02:56.477" Score="3" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Ged went to Roke, they had the following encounter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They went down to the quays, where the Harbormaster came hastening to welcome Ogion and ask what service he might do. The mage told him, and at once he named a ship bound for the Inmost Sea aboard which Ged might go as passenger. &quot;Or they will take him as windbringer,&quot; he said, &quot;if he has the craft. They have no weatherworker aboard.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;He has some skill with mist and fog, but none with seawinds,&quot; the mage said, putting his hand lightly on Ged's shoulder. &quot;Do not try any tricks with the sea and the winds of the sea, Sparrowhawk; you are a landsman still. Harbormaster, what is the ship's name?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;&lt;em&gt;Shadow&lt;/em&gt;, from the Andrades, bound to Hort Town with furs and ivories. A good ship, Master Ogion.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The mage's face darkened at the name of the ship&lt;/strong&gt;, but he said, &quot;So be it. Give this writing to the Warder of the School on Roke, Sparrowhawk. Go with a fair wind. Farewell!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T04:27:44.877" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T14:58:34.603" Title="Why was Ogion troubled by the name of the ship that Ged took to Roke?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6646" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6683" CreationDate="2018-05-27T04:18:48.217" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did one become a Wizard in &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;? Is magic basically just a skill that anyone could theoretically acquire with study, or did one have to be born with certain abilities before you even had the theoretical capability of learning to use it (like in the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series)? What's to stop &quot;ordinary&quot; people from studying things like True Speech and using them successfully?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T15:04:50.540" Title="How did one become a Wizard in A Wizard of Earthsea?" Tags="&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6645" CreationDate="2018-05-27T14:58:34.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage you quote comes only two pages after Ged's first encounter with terrifying magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As he read it, puzzling out the runes and symbols one by one, a horror came over him. His eyes were fixed, and he could not lift them till he had finished reading all the spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then raising his head he saw it was dark in the house. He had been reading without any light, in the darkness. He could not now make out the runes when &#xA;  he looked down at the book. Yet the horror grew in him, seeming to hold him bound in his chair. He was cold. Looking over his shoulder he saw that something was crouching beside the closed door, a shapeless clot of shadow darker than the darkness. It seemed to reach out towards him, and to whisper, and to call to him in a whisper: but he could not understand the words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The door was flung wide. A man entered with a white light flaming about him, a great bright figure who spoke aloud, fiercely and suddenly. The darkness and the whispering ceased and were dispelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Impatient with the slow pace of his education under Ogion, and eager to impress the girl he's been spending time with, Ged tries to perform magic that he's not ready for yet. The result is that he apparently summons some form of evil into the house, which only his master is able to dismiss. Note the use of the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;shadow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; to describe the thing that appears and whispers to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ogion then warns Ged about the danger inherent in the practice of magic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this; that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again the word &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;shadow&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is used as a metaphor for supernatural danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mere two pages later, when Ogion is enquiring about a ship to take Ged to Roke, they are told about the ship called &lt;em&gt;Shadow&lt;/em&gt;. Doesn't it seem like an ill omen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Of course, all of this foreshadows [pun unintended] later events in the story, the appearance of a much greater and deadlier &quot;shadow&quot; to a more experienced and knowledgeable Ged, which then dominates much of the narrative thereafter. But even now we've already seen enough to appreciate that the word &lt;em&gt;Shadow&lt;/em&gt; carries dark connotations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-27T14:58:34.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6652" CreationDate="2018-05-27T15:11:26.317" Score="6" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Very related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3592/why-does-the-emperor-over-the-sea-play-such-a-small-role-in-the-chronicles-of-na&quot;&gt;Why does the Emperor-Over-the-Sea play such a small role in the Chronicles of Narnia?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3594/why-is-the-emperor-beyond-the-sea-named-that&quot;&gt;Why is the Emperor Beyond the Sea named that?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia refer to Aslan's father as &quot;the Emperor beyond the Sea.&quot; He is never shown to act in Narnia directly, beyond creating the Deep Magic. Aslan created Narnia and is the only one seen directly acting in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; effectively endorsing deism here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T14:43:17.483" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T07:28:07.367" Title="Does The Chronicles of Narnia promote deism?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6650" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6672" CreationDate="2018-05-27T15:14:20.600" Score="11" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; famously tells readers to &quot;&lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; me Ishmael.&quot; Is this implying that this might not have been his real name? If so, why would he lie about that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T21:29:33.897" Title="Does &quot;call me Ishmael&quot; imply that that might not be his real name?" Tags="&lt;herman-melville&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6661" CreationDate="2018-05-27T15:18:35.563" Score="6" ViewCount="701" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6650/does-call-me-ishmael-imply-that-that-might-not-be-his-real-name&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;call me Ishmael&amp;quot; imply that that might not be his real name?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ishmal in &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; has sometimes been called an example of an unreliable narrator. Why do some people think that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I linked to a possible example, but are there other concrete examples of Ishmael lying (or possibly lying)? If not, why do people say that he's unreliable? Or does the fact that he was the sole survivor of the events itself imply that it was difficult or impossible to independently verify a lot of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-27T15:24:56.360" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T07:57:38.227" Title="Why is Ishmael sometimes seen as an unreliable narrator? Does he ever actually lie in the text?" Tags="&lt;herman-melville&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6649" CreationDate="2018-05-28T17:23:43.047" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although Aslan was more of an immediate presence to Narnia than the&#xA;  Emperor, he and his father worked in perfect unity. The Emperor was&#xA;  often referred to as &quot;Aslan's great Father, the Emperor-over-the-sea&quot;&#xA;  and other such titles. He was greatly respected by his son and all who&#xA;  honoured the Lion. [Wikipedia]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do feel not the the charge of deism can be sustained. The following are examples of Aslan's interventions, that I have scoured from cobwebs and Wikipedia. Surely Aslan's interventions are akin to Christ's miracles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; Aslan calls Eustace and then &lt;strong&gt;catches him&lt;/strong&gt; as he falls of the cliff and then &lt;strong&gt;blows him to safety&lt;/strong&gt; and destiny. &lt;strong&gt;Aslan also blows Jill&lt;/strong&gt; all the way to Narnia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Aslan creates the gate&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia further suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Narnia, as they knew it, is no more, as 1,300 years have passed and their castle is in ruins, while all Narnians have retreated so far within themselves that &lt;strong&gt;only Aslan's magic&lt;/strong&gt; can wake them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aslan appears and congratulates Eustace and Jill on achieving their goal, then returns them to the stream in his country where Jill first met him. The body of King Caspian appears in the stream, and Aslan instructs Eustace to drive a thorn into the lion's paw. Eustace obeys, and &lt;strong&gt;Aslan's blood flows over the dead King, who is revived&lt;/strong&gt; and returned to youth. &lt;strong&gt;Aslan allows Caspian to accompany Eustace and Jill back to their own world for a brief time&lt;/strong&gt;, where they drive off the bullies before Caspian returns to Aslan's Country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aslan transforms the cabbie's horse into a winged horse&lt;/strong&gt; named Fledge, and Digory and Polly fly on him to a distant garden high in the mountains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aslan kills the Witch. &lt;strong&gt;Aslan breathes life into those she has turned to stone&lt;/strong&gt; on the battlefield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely arguing deism in the &lt;em&gt;Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; is akin to arguing deism in the &lt;em&gt;New Testament&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T07:28:07.367" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T07:28:07.367" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6653" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6656" CreationDate="2018-05-28T18:07:00.177" Score="5" ViewCount="992" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Milan Kundera's &lt;em&gt;The Unbearable Lightness of Being&lt;/em&gt;, at some point one of the main characters - Thomas, that is a Czech doctor - in the house of one of his lovers decides to piss in the sink. The author says that this behavior was quite common among the Czech doctors in that period. Is this a real fact or not? Why? Does it have any particular meaning in this book? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4583" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-28T19:51:47.890" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T08:03:38.407" Title="Pissing in a sink in The Unbearable Lightness of Being" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;czech-literature&gt;&lt;milan-kundera&gt;&lt;the-unbearable-lightness-of-being&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T03:55:45.473" Score="0" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know where, if I may, get an online copy of the original translation of Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark in English, entitled &lt;em&gt;Camera Obscura&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Winifred Roy in 1936, then attributed to Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4588" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T16:41:50.620" Title="Original Translation of Camera Obscura by Vladimir Nabokoff-Sirin" Tags="&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6653" CreationDate="2018-05-29T06:42:28.997" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peeing in the sink is a metaphor for having a mistress. And it was indeed quite common among Czech doctors of that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me explain. Urine is, by itself, sterile. But it is also resource rich environment for growth of bacteria. If you leave it for a short time then clean it up, nothing bad will happen. If you don't... it festers, bacteria grow and it gets nasty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, when the child is potty trained for the first time, the sink is far too high for peeing in. By the time child is of enough height for that to be viable, the habit is ingrained. Toilet is for peeing in, sink is not. There is nothing by itself morally wrong in peeing in the sink. It is not inherently good or evil act. It is chaotic and not lawful one, but good or evil? No. It just makes us uncomfortable. Being highly educated, the doctor knows that fact. He also knows all the consequences of peeing in the sink (if you watched the show &quot;Breaking bad&quot;, there's similar scene with Walter White).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same goes with marriage. Most of us are taught as children that we will marry one person and be with that person for the rest of our lives. Mistress/ side lover doesn't get into that rosy picture. Uneducated people do not think about having a mistress. It is simply not done. Even if they do have one, they do not usually think about all the possible consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the metaphor. Being educated, the doctor doesn't think about obeying all the norms of society just because they are norms. Somebody says: &quot;It is simply not done.&quot; the doctor says &quot;Why? Why not? If you clean it up afterwards, it is perfectly viable alternative. During the war, we did it all the time. You just didn't have the time to go to the toilet, with all those wounded so it was either that or pissing your pants and sink is much easier to clean than the pants.&quot; and if someone would bring it up &quot;Did you know that doctor So and So pissed in the sink yesterday?&quot; the others would say &quot;We all did it at least once, we had to. Now shut up. You just don't speak about those things.&quot; and the same could be said about another man having a lover. The doctor did it for convenience, because he felt like it and because he knew all the consequences of his actions and chose to do them anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody else has different interpretation, please correct me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T08:03:38.407" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T08:03:38.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6644" CreationDate="2018-05-29T11:42:25.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference between Ogion’s mode of teaching and that of the School of Wizardry on Roke is a dramatization of the themes of &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;. There is a sense in which Ogion stands at the end of the metaphorical road that Ged has to travel in the course of the novel, and so the disagreement between the two of them in chapter 2 prefigures the lessons that Ged is going to learn in the remainder of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, I think, three parts to this. First, Ogion is an ascetic: he does not value material wealth or fame. Though the folk of Re Albi owe Ogion their lives and property for saving the city from the earthquake, nonetheless his standard of living remains similar to that of the neighbouring farmers and herders:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mage’s house, though large and soundly built of timber, with hearth and chimney rather than a firepit, was like the huts of Ten Alders village: all one room, with a goatshed built onto one side. There was a kind of alcove in the west wall of the room, where Ged slept. Over his pallet was a window that looked out on the sea, but most often the shutters must be closed against the great winds that blew all winter from the west and north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ged, on the other hand, desires fame and the respect of his peers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet other cravings were in him that would not be stilled, the wish for glory, the will to act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this leads him into the disastrous rivalry with Jasper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Ogion believes that power over other people is hollow and that compulsion is not true learning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ged, my young falcon, you are not bound to me or to my service. You did not come to me, but I to you. You are very young to make this choice, but I cannot make it for you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several occasions where Ged’s attempts to compel others to his will leads to disaster or near-disaster. In &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; his summoning of the spirit of Elfarran on Roke Knoll leads to the release of the shadow; and his attempt to compel Pechvarry’s son to turn back from the country of the dead nearly causes his own death. In &lt;em&gt;The Farthest Shore&lt;/em&gt; he attempts to teach the sorcerer Cob to desist from the Pelnish Lore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I made him go with me into the Dry Land, though he fought me with all his will and changed his shape and wept aloud when nothing else would do.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this backfires terribly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I was in Paln,” he said to Ged, “after you, in your pride, thought you had humbled me and taught me a lesson. Oh, a lesson you taught me, indeed, but not the one you meant to teach!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Ogion does not act until he understands the consequences of his actions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ged, listen to me now. Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light? This sorcery is not a game we play for pleasure or for praise. Think of this: that every word, every act of our Art is said and is done either for good, or for evil. Before you speak or do you must know the price that is to pay!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is dramatized by Ogion’s refusal to change the weather merely for his own convenience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside. In a land where sorcerers come thick, like Gont or the Enlades, you may see a raincloud blundering slowly from side to side and place to place as one spell shunts it on to the next, till at last it is buffeted out over the sea where it can rain in peace. But Ogion let the rain fall where it would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, Ged is prone to thoughtless and reckless action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the first two-thirds of &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; consists of Ged learning the lessons that Ogion was prepared to teach him, but learning them instead in the only way he was capable of, that is, through bitter experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I have walked with great wizards and have lived on the Isle of the Wise, but you are my true master, Ogion.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T12:22:20.093" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T12:22:20.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8268" CreationDate="2018-05-29T12:17:50.227" Score="4" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The bus went past a pale Athenian railroad station brought to life by the &#xA;  blue shirted redcaps out in front&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the description that gives the name of the place Athens. There's also a mentioning of the university. Then there's a monument to general Lafayette. The problem is that there are at least two cities/towns called Athens in the USA with universities, in Georgia and in Ohio. The story is considered to be biographical. But I can't find biographical facts connected with the place. I would appreciate any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4590" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T15:17:28.693" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T15:22:32.600" Title="Where do the events take place in &quot;Afternoon of an Author&quot; by F. Scott Fitzgerald?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6659" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-29T12:39:59.913" Score="5" ViewCount="641" Body="&lt;p&gt;Niccolò Machiavelli's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discourses on Livy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written between 1513 and 1519, are not as famous as &lt;em&gt;The Prince&lt;/em&gt;, but possibly his best work. Its Italian title, &lt;em&gt;Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio&lt;/em&gt;, literally means &quot;Discourses on the first decade/ten books of Titus Livius&quot;, i.e. the first ten books of Livy's history work &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Urbe_Condita_Libri&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita Libri&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that one should read at least these first ten books of Livy's history of Rome? Or, if it is not absolutely necessary, what would be the specific benefits of doing this? After glancing over the introduction to an English translation of the &lt;em&gt;Discourses&lt;/em&gt; I was none the wiser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T19:27:18.147" Title="Necessity or benefits of reading Livy before Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;niccolo-machiavelli&gt;&lt;discourses-on-livy&gt;&lt;titus-livius&gt;&lt;ab-urbe-condita-libri&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:35:45.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of reasons why Ishmael might be considered unreliable, although none of them is conclusive. In most cases, there is an alternative explanation for Ishmael's seeming duplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts, of course, with the famous opening &quot;Call me Ishmael&quot; which can be read in the context of an assumed name. I won't pursue this further as you have an independent question on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening then goes on to cast Ishmael as a troubled individual, as indeed he might be given his story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodologically knocking people's hats off&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These do not seem to be ruminations of an entirely sound mind. And if the mind is not sound then nor may be the story that it is relating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is striking, for example, that past the opening chapters of the book, we hear very little about Ishmael. He rarely describes his own part in the narrative or his actions aboard the ship. We learn little about him: there are only two mentions in the whole book about his family, for example, an uncle and a step-mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem peculiar omissions for a man describing a narrative and suggest he may have something to hide. Alternatively, however, it may simply be a literary device. Melville needed a survivor to tell the tale, but the tale is really Ahab's. So it makes sense that the focus of the story moves more toward the captain as it unfolds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the book, Ishmael describes on the thoughts, feelings and motivations of many other characters. He often does this in moments when he is not present. There are many examples: a particularly extreme one is chapter 109, a short chapter which describes in detail a conversation between Ahab and Starbuck in the captains' cabin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A relatively lowly crew member such as Ishmael simply would not have been present at such a meeting, let alone able to relate in such detail. However, again, Melville has constrained himself by his choice of narrative device. Often, to tell the story, it is necessary to relate incidents outside of Ishamel's direct experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast, however, Ishmael is hazy about many of the details of his own life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some years ago – never mind how long precisely….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn that he is a sailor who has previously only served on merchant's vessels. This fails to explain how he seems to have an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of whaling. Far more, you would imagine, than a novice whaler could learn on their first and only voyage. Yet again, though, Melville wants to talk about whaling, in detail, so he has to furnish Ishmael with this knowledge in order to include the desired content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are occasions when Ishmael makes some very odd narrative decisions. Take this, for example, from chapter 54:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For my humor's sake, I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Lima, to a lounging circle of my Spanish friends, one saint's eve, smoking upon the thick-gilt tiled piazza of the Golden Inn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would Ishmael take the trouble to let us know that he's telling us a story in a given &quot;style&quot;, rather than simply relating the story? This may be a stylistic flourish my Melville, but it may also be an indication that Ishmael isn't telling the whole truth when he relates his tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T15:35:45.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6662" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:52:02.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T15:52:02.807" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T15:52:02.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6663" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:52:02.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Italian diplomat, politician and writer Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) and his works. Machiavelli wrote non-fiction works such as 'The Prince' and the 'Discourses on Livy', and fiction works such as the comedies 'La Mandragola' and 'Clizia'.  Use this tag with the tag [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:15:56.727" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:15:56.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6664" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:55:14.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T15:55:14.733" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T15:55:14.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6665" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:55:14.733" Score="0" Body="Questions about Machiavelli's 'Discourses on Livy' ('Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio'), a work of political history and philosophy that was written after the author's political career in Florence and published posthumously in 1531. Use this tag with the tags [niccolo-machiavelli] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:15:47.417" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:15:47.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6666" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:57:58.483" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T15:57:58.483" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T15:57:58.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6667" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T15:57:58.483" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Roman historian Titus Livius or Livy (64 or 59 BC – AD 12 or 17) and his works. Livy is the author of 'Ab Urbe Condita Libri' / 'Books from the Foundation of the City'. Use this tag with the [latin-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:16:04.577" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:16:04.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6668" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:00:01.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:00:01.230" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:00:01.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6669" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:00:01.230" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Ab Urbe Condita Libri' / 'Books from the Foundation of the City', a work on the history of Rome by Titus Livius or Livy. Use this tag with the tags [titus-livius] and [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:16:00.830" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:16:00.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6670" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:02:30.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:02:30.227" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:02:30.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6671" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:02:30.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Czech-born writer Milan Kundera (born 1929) and his works. His best-known works are 'The Joke' (1967), 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' (1979) and 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' (1984). Use this tag with the [czech-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-29T16:15:38.087" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:15:38.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2018-05-29T16:03:31.827" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is an implication that Ishmael might not be the narrator's real name. However, it is also possible to read the sentence as merely a friendly greeting - perhaps an introduction via a nickname. The question remains open and is never resolved in the progress of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is likely deliberate. Although Ishmael is the narrator of the tale, his name and identity have three different symbolic significances. The fact these are not resolved encourages the reader to be open to other interpretations of Ishmael's identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and most obvious is the Biblical Ishmael. In the Bible, Ishmael is an outcast who wanders in the wilderness, much as the Ishmael of Moby-Dick wanders in the sea (actually described as &quot;the wilderness of waters&quot; in chapter 88). The Biblical character is saved from death by the miraculous appearance of a well, while his whaling counterpart is saved from the wreck of his ship &quot;by a margin so narrow as to seem miraculous&quot;. Ishmael is thus to be seen as an explorer, at odds with other men, a recurring feature of characters in Melville's fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is that Ishmael is a stand-in for Melville himself. There are similarities in their back-stories: both began their years at sea as merchant sailors before moving to a whaling ship, for example. Part of his motivation in writing Moby-Dick was to set down his experiences of a lifestyle that was beginning to vanish in the face of increasing industrialisation. The most striking example of this, however, is the story of Ishmael's uncle, D'Wolf, which is actually a real story of Melville's real-life uncle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third and most tenuous is Ahab himself. As the novel progresses, the view switches away from Ishmael and toward Ahab instead, to the point where Ishmael is supposedly able to relate Ahab's inner thoughts and feelings. Indeed critics differ as to whether it is Ishmael or Ahab who is the real protagonist of the novel - see the different view of Abrams and Bezanson in the references for example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed it is possible to construct an argument that Ishmael &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;, in fact, Ahab and that this is the reason why he gives an assumed name. It would explain, for instance, why Ishmael is able to relate so much of Ahab's private minutiae and how come, as a first-time whaler, he knows so much technical detail on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wright, Nathalia. (1949). Melville's Use of the Bible. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.    &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;D'Wolf, John, Captain (1779-1872). A Voyage to the North Pacific and a Journey through Siberia. Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Company, 1861.   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abrams, M.H. (2011). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Tenth edition, Wadsworth. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bezanson, Walter E. (1953). &quot;Moby-Dick: Work of Art&quot;. Reprinted in Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Second Norton Critical edition 2002&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T16:03:31.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6650" CreationDate="2018-05-29T21:29:33.897" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ishmael may actually be Ahab.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more of an extension to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6672/17&quot;&gt;Matt Thrower's broader answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I found this theory and the evidence for it so interesting that I felt it should be written down, and it does answer the question by providing an alternative possibility for the name of Ishmael. This answer is heavily based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://danialexis.net/2014/05/27/the-whale-is-a-lie/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Whale is a Lie&lt;/a&gt;, a blog post written by Verity Reynolds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Points of view.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the story is ostensibly narrated solely by Ishmael, the only survivor, some parts seem to relate things that Ishmael couldn't have known - such as Ahab's inner thoughts, or the meeting between Ahab and Starbuck without anyone else present. Admittedly we do also see the inner thoughts of Starbuck, and Ishmael can't be &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Ahab and Starbuck. But Reynolds has an explanation for this which fits into the &quot;Ishmael = Ahab&quot; theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we finally get the point of view of someone other than Ishmael or Ahab, the point of view we get is Starbuck’s, as the first mate considers shooting Ahab in order to save the ship and crew from his surely-disastrous pursuit of Moby-Dick.  In particular, Starbuck considers shooting Ahab with the same gun Ahab threatened Starbuck with in a previous scene – a scene that took place in the closed cabin, with only Ahab and Starbuck present, and to which Ishmael was neither privy nor capable of extrapolating from the deck.  (In fact, Ishmael doesn’t report it as if he’s extrapolating from outside the scene, but as if he’s there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This sudden shift to Starbuck’s perspective, though, is consistent with a narrator (Ahab) struggling with a fierce desire to court death that conflicts with his duty to his ship and crew.  The original dispute is over whether the crew ought to hoist the oil-casks to determine which is leaking (Starbuck) versus whether they ought to damn the casks full speed ahead (Ahab).  Starbuck’s position, which is consistent with the duty of a whaling ship’s captain, eventually prevails, but not until after Ahab points a loaded gun at his first mate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Starbuck’s meditation on killing Ahab to save the ship, then, reads as a foil concocted by a guilty captain/narrator who knows his desire for vengeance places him firmly in the wrong.  It’s also consistent with Starbuck’s role as Ahab’s foil in a number of other guilt-related ways; the narrator reminds us several times that both Ahab and Starbuck are married men with young children, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Descriptive detail.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story goes into detail in explaining the names of various people, ships, and inns ... but not those of Ishmael and Ahab. Not explaining his own name makes sense, as it's not a new thing to him and he wouldn't have any particular reason to think about it and its background. But why omit explaining someone else's name? Unless that someone else is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; the same person.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Knowledge and experience.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's made clear at the beginning of the book that Ishmael hasn't been on a whaling voyage before ... but he seems to have an awful lot of knowledge and even experience about whaling. This would be consistent with an experienced whaler telling a story while pretending to be a newbie: signs of their knowledge would slip through occasionally despite their best efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if Ishmael really is Ahab, that would explain the first line of the story: &quot;[My real name is Captain Ahab, but you can] call me Ishmael.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-05-29T21:29:33.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T04:51:00.307" Score="4" ViewCount="1530" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Five-Ideas-Fight-Freedom-Matters/dp/1780747616&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Five Ideas to Fight For&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.blackstonechambers.com/barristers/lord-lester-herne-hill-qc/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony Lester QC&lt;/a&gt;. p. 88 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Coalition politics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though it is a model law, the Act was attacked when the coalition came to power. Senior Conservative ministers sought to thwart it for ideological reasons. One of Prime Minister Cameron’s close advisers apparently wanted to abolish it completely. Liberal Democrat ministers blocked that foolish proposal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    The government issued a ‘Red Tape Challenge’ to scrap unnecessary regulation burdening business. The EHRC was an obvious target of the austerity cuts. The equality side of its work became &lt;strong&gt;a grin without a cat&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;44&lt;/sup&gt; It had a large budget that was hard to justify because of the EHRC’s lacklustre performance and weak financial control. The budget was radically cut and its helpline was taken away, even though it had proved a vital link with potential victims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;44 ‘ “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but &lt;strong&gt;a grin without a cat&lt;/strong&gt;! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life.” ’ Lewis Carroll, &lt;em&gt;Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Am I correct that the author's signification overhead is 'false front'?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'What was Carroll's intended signification? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T04:53:29.617" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T09:52:37.880" Title="What did Lewis Carroll mean by 'a grin without a cat'?" Tags="&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;&lt;alice-in-wonderland&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6674" CreationDate="2018-05-30T05:27:16.170" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot vouch for knowing either author's mind, but Carroll used 'a grin', a feature not usually thought of in connection with cats (skulls or dolphins are more related to a 'grin', for instance), to stand without its supposed bearer, the cat. Thus a 'false front' would not be an equivalent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally 'a grin' is not material. It is the nounification of an action, thus it cannot stand alone, it has to be produced by something. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is this last aspect of Carroll's usage that I suspect Lester tried to evoke: An action or effect without apparent actor or medium, perhaps also including the ambiguity of a grin - it is not as prima facie pleasant as a smile, though it can be thoroughly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4594" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T09:52:37.880" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T09:52:37.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6674" CreationDate="2018-05-30T09:47:54.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Carroll's story, the Cheshire Cat is sitting on the branches of various trees, talking to Alice as she's walking along. The cat appears and disappears suddenly, but completely. At the end of the scene, she says the cat's teleportation is startling her, so it fades away slowly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Call it what you like,’ said the Cat. ‘Do you play croquet with the Queen to-day?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I should like it very much,’ said Alice, ‘but I haven’t been invited yet.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You’ll see me there,’ said the Cat, and vanished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice was not much surprised at this, she was getting so used to queer things happening. While she was looking at the place where it had been, it suddenly appeared again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘By-the-bye, what became of the baby?’ said the Cat. ‘I’d nearly forgotten to ask.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It turned into a pig,’ Alice quietly said, just as if it had come back in a natural way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I thought it would,’ said the Cat, and vanished again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice waited a little, half expecting to see it again, but it did not appear, and after a minute or two she walked on in the direction in which the March Hare was said to live. ‘I’ve seen hatters before,’ she said to herself; ‘the March Hare will be much the most interesting, and perhaps as this is May it won’t be raving mad—at least not so mad as it was in March.’ As she said this, she looked up, and there was the Cat again, sitting on a branch of a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Did you say pig, or fig?’ said the Cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;I said pig,’ replied Alice; ‘and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘All right,’ said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,’ thought Alice; ‘but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &amp;quot;grin&amp;quot; (the facial expression) is hovering in space, and the rest of the cat's face and body are gone (or invisible). This is not physically possible in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GI0k6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GI0k6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cat&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ex90t.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ex90t.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;grin&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as far as the political commentary, it's a bit hard to glean without more context, but I'll give it a go: the writer is saying that the Equality and Human Rights Commission had imposed rules on various other bodies (I guess?) to help people who needed assistance. It was not well-run, so even though it was doing good and important work (the grin), politicians saw the EHRC as something to cut so they could say they were doing &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; to reduce paperwork and spending. The &amp;quot;grin&amp;quot; of equality did not have the political or bureaucratic support it needed to continue — it was left isolated. Without the &amp;quot;body&amp;quot; of support from the government, the EHRC was gutted, and the work of helping people was curtailed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;False front&amp;quot; has nothing to do with the story or the metaphor. Both are talking about one thing which should be irrevocably attached to a larger whole but were severed from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T09:47:54.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6742" CreationDate="2018-05-30T10:05:40.183" Score="5" ViewCount="1485" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ursula Le Guin wrote both fantasy novels (especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earthsea cycle&lt;/a&gt;) and science fiction (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainish_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haynish cycle&lt;/a&gt;). The Wikipedia articles about these two cycles don't say whether a specific reading order makes sense (except that one story is said to be about Ged's last days). In addition, there are a number of novels and stories that aren't part of any series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a reader who wants to gain an understanding of the development of Le Guin's ideas (e.g. ideas about socio-political organisation, the environment, taoism and feminism), is there a recommended reading order for her work? Simply chronological? First one cycle, then another cycle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-05-30T10:37:23.127" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T02:14:21.267" Title="Is there a specific order to read Ursula Le Guin's novels and stories?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T14:40:30.040" Score="4" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sam Parkhill is obviously a character you love to hate, but I was left baffled when the Martians gave him land deeds to half of Mars, especially after he shot one of them.  Why would they do that?  Were the deeds real?  Why did they chase down Sam so vigorously to talk to him specifically?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I assume not, but did Sam return to Earth in the end?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The 150 Martians that give Same the deeds... it seems like they are still alive at the end of the book with no mention.  Perhaps at the end of the book there are still quite a few humans and martians left on the planet?  If so, was anything else written to talk about all of the people still on Mars, and maybe they all found a way to live in peace in the end?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4596" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T18:28:22.497" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T18:28:22.497" Title="Just finished the Martian Chronicles. &quot;The Off Season&quot; left me baffled" Tags="&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;the-martian-chronicles&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2988" CreationDate="2018-05-30T14:58:16.703" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although Vekzhivi's answer is not bad, I think I can add a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling of &amp;quot;cristopher&amp;quot; varies between editions. For example, the Norton Critical Edition of the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; (edited by V. A. Kolve and G. Olson, 1989) has the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Cristofre on his brest of silver shene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editors add that &amp;quot;Cristofre&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;St. Christopher medal&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevill Coghill translated the relevant lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A medal of St. Christopher he wore &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of shining silver on his breast, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saint Christopher is or was the patron saint of travellers, but &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; is this and &lt;strong&gt;what made the medal recognisable&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several legends related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Christopher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saint Christopher&lt;/a&gt;; one of them is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.christianiconography.info/goldenLegend/christopher.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Legend&lt;/a&gt;, compiled by Jacobus de Voragine. See especially the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then went Christopher to this river, and made there his habitacle for him, and bare a great pole in his hand instead of a staff, by which he sustained him in the water, and bare over all manner of people without ceasing. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he awoke and went out, but he found no man. And when he was again in his house, he heard the same voice and he ran out and found nobody. The third time he was called and came thither, and found a child beside the rivage of the river, which prayed him goodly to bear him over the water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then Christopher lift up the child on his shoulders, and took his staff, and entered into the river for to pass. And the water of the river arose and swelled more and more: and the child was heavy as lead, and alway as he went farther the water increased and grew more, and the child more and more waxed heavy, insomuch that Christopher had great anguish and was afeard to be drowned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when he was escaped with great pain, and passed the water, and set the child aground, he said to the child: Child, thou hast put me in great peril; thou weighest almost as I had all the world upon me, I might bear no greater burden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the child answered: Christopher, marvel thee nothing, for thou hast not only borne all the world upon thee, but thou hast borne him that created and made all the world, upon thy shoulders. I am Jesu Christ the king, to whom thou servest in this work. And because that thou know that I say to be the truth, set thy staff in the earth by thy house, and thou shalt see to-morn that it shall bear flowers and fruit, and anon he vanished from his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of story explains the origin of his name: &amp;quot;Christophoros&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Christ-Bearer&amp;quot;. It also explains why he is the patron saint of travellers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a medal of Saint Christopher would be very recognisable, since it would show a man carrying a child on his back, like this medal on &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Saint_Christopher_Medal.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikimedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g2wRZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g2wRZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;bronze St. Christopher medallion with the name &amp;quot;Saint Christophe&amp;quot; inscribed on the edge&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T14:58:16.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2001" CreationDate="2018-05-30T15:07:49.793" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To me the censorship angle is there on the surface, but when you look more deeply, if you wanted to argue that it wasn't about censorship, the book itself does support that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does clearly say in the book that the people slowly stopped caring about books, and most didn't mind the Firemen burning the books.  People just wanted to live a life of fast driving and of online distraction.  He talks about how the books raised philosophical arguments, which made people argue and be unhappy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the main character forces one of his wife's guests to face reality after reading a poem, she simply erupts into tears.  Then everyone there is &lt;strong&gt;SURE&lt;/strong&gt; that the books are bad, and they are glad to see them burn.  His wife (and her guests) called the firemen to come burn the books in her own home after this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also talks about some of the men at the end of the book, how they lost their jobs at universities because people had simply stopped enrolling in the programs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real genius of the book, for me, was his wife's internet &quot;parlor&quot; addiction, and the sleeping pills.  The government didn't really cause that; the human condition did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4596" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T15:07:49.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2001" CreationDate="2018-05-30T17:31:06.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firemen were analogous to &lt;em&gt;The Banner&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt; - they didn't create the problem, they just capitalized on existing desires. They destroyed books because people &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; them destroyed. Firemen existed for the same reason that &lt;em&gt;The Banner&lt;/em&gt; existed - to pander to the will of the masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, the fact that the government was merely responding to the will of the majority - the government wasn't somehow forcing this from the top down on an unwilling population, but rather the majority was basically asking the government do do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this censorship? Well, it depends on how you define it. Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; censorship as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or &quot;inconvenient&quot; as determined by government authorities &lt;strong&gt;or by community consensus&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, then, is whether anyone's speech was being suppressed. The relevant dictionary definition of &quot;suppress&quot; here is &quot;forcibly put an end to.&quot; We see that there were at least a small number of people who were at least trying to preserve books (including the main character towards the end of the novel), so clearly not &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; wanted censorship. This implies that there was, in fact, a coercive element to this (even if the majority at least tacitly went along with - or even wanted - it to happen). So the minority who still wanted books were being suppressed by the will of the majority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said: yeah, it's censorship. The fact that it was done at the behest of the majority rather than being imposed in a top-down fashion by the government doesn't mean that it wasn't government-imposed censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, then, is whether that's what the novel is actually &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt;. There are two major dynamics here: the effect (the fact that the government was censoring at the behest of the majority), and the cause (why the majority wanted the government to do the censoring in the first place). According to Ray Bradbury, the latter is actually the primary focus of the book: why did the majority do that in the first place? How did things get so bad that the majority of people wanted books to be burned? This position can easily be defended from the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T17:31:06.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6682" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T19:09:14.933" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compare and contrast the way Offred in Margaret Atwood’s &lt;em&gt;The Handmaid’s Tale&lt;/em&gt; and Beatrice in William Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Much Ado about Nothing&lt;/em&gt; view romantic love. Discuss 2 similarities and 2 differences (4 points). Explain how Offred’s and Beatrice’s views of love change over the course of the novel and the play (2 points).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my attempt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Similarities &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both crave for a romantic relationship.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Differences: &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beatrice shows that she doesn’t like men at first and claims that she never wants to get married. Offred has nothing against marriage and in fact marries the man she has an affair with (her husband).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beatrice doesn’t believe in love and marriage but in the end falls in love with Benedick and marries him. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know the exact difference in views of love for Offred though. Please help me with another similarity and difference too. Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4597" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T16:21:19.367" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T16:21:19.367" Title="Comparison between Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing and Offred of The Handmaids tale" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;&lt;the-handmaids-tale&gt;&lt;margaret-atwood&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6646" CreationDate="2018-05-30T20:16:33.043" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the essay ‘A Description of Earthsea’, included in &lt;em&gt;Tales of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;, Le Guin writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the Hardic-speaking people of the Archipelago, the ability to do magic is an inborn talent, like the gift for music, though far rarer. Most people lack it entirely. In a few people, perhaps one in a hundred, it is a latent, cultivable talent. In a very few people it is manifest without training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which would appear to answer the question, but I prefer to take a different view of the matter, by looking at the way the characters describe their world. (“Infinite are the arguments of mages,” as Vetch says in &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two words that are used many times by characters in the Earthsea novels to describe magical abilities are &lt;em&gt;skill&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; (or, less often, &lt;em&gt;strength&lt;/em&gt;). The word &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; in particular occurs more than a hundred and thirty times in &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; alone. What exactly the speakers mean by these words is hard to know, but they often appear together as if opposed or contrasted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He has either skill or power, or the doorkeeper wouldn’t have let him in. Why shouldn’t he show it, now as well as later? Right, Sparrowhawk?” [&lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I have both skill and power,” Ged said. [&lt;em&gt;AWoE&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She spoke now very softly. “Benderesk is Lord and Inheritor of the Terrenon, but he cannot use the thing, he cannot make it wholly serve his will. Nor can I, alone or with him. Neither he nor I has the skill and power. You have both.” [&lt;em&gt;AWoE&lt;/em&gt; chapter 7]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Because every instant since I set foot in the cavern under the Tombstones, I have striven to keep them still, to keep them unaware. All my skills have gone to that, I have spent my strength on it.” [&lt;em&gt;The Tombs of Atuan&lt;/em&gt; chapter 9]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I have no skill, I don’t think I have any power, but there were mages among my forefathers” [&lt;em&gt;The Farthest Shore&lt;/em&gt; chapter 1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Would you have your power back, the skills, the names? I can give you that.” [&lt;em&gt;TFS&lt;/em&gt; chapter 6]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all the skill of his life’s training and with all the strength of his fierce heart, Ged strove to shut that door, to make the world whole once more. [&lt;em&gt;TFS&lt;/em&gt; chapter 12]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like any wizard, Ogion had been supported by the people his skills and powers served [&lt;em&gt;Tehanu&lt;/em&gt; chapter 7]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were men of great skill and power in Losen’s pay. [‘The Finder’, &lt;em&gt;Tales of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few wizards had crossed his path strong enough to make him wary of them, but he had never known one with skill and power equal to his own. [‘The Finder’]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these two attributes, &lt;em&gt;power&lt;/em&gt; seems to be something innate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she found that he knew nothing, and yet had spellbound the goats to come to him and follow him, then she saw that he must have in him the makings of power. [&lt;em&gt;AWoE&lt;/em&gt; chapter 1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He lived in Havnor. They accounted him a mere sorcerer, but in native power he was a great mage.” [&lt;em&gt;TFS&lt;/em&gt; chapter 5]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For he had hoped—from the very beginning he had hoped—that the reason the Archmage had chosen him and him alone for this voyage was that he had some inborn power, descended from his ancestor Morred, which would in the ultimate need and the blackest hour be revealed [&lt;em&gt;TFS&lt;/em&gt; chapter 9]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas &lt;em&gt;skill&lt;/em&gt; seems to be something learned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So bolstering up his pride, he set all his strong will on the work they gave him, the lessons and crafts and histories and skills taught by the grey-cloaked Masters of Roke [&lt;em&gt;AWoE&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Jasper said only, “When I have learned skills worthy of my Masters here and worthy of your praise, my lady, then I will gladly come”  [&lt;em&gt;AWoE&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key thing to note is in the very first quotation given above, “He has either skill or power, or the doorkeeper wouldn’t have let him in”. The Master Doorkeeper decides whom to admit as a pupil to the School of Wizardry on Roke, so the implication is that &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; skill or power suffices to enter the School, that is, innate power is not necessary to study magic. Of course, this is a line of dialogue, and the speaker (Jasper) may not be right. But bolstering this implication is the lack of mention in the Earthsea novels of anyone being &lt;em&gt;innately incapable&lt;/em&gt; of magic: this suggests that there is no equivalent of the ‘muggles’ in the Harry Potter novels. So I prefer to imagine that ‘A Description of Earthsea’ is incorrect, and the people of Earthsea are innately endowed with varying &lt;em&gt;aptitude&lt;/em&gt; for magic, not &lt;em&gt;ability&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-05-30T20:16:33.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-30T21:48:35.683" Score="1" ViewCount="362" Body="&lt;p&gt;When he met with Roark about the Wynand Building, Gail Wynand repeatedly spoke of his death as if it were imminent, and his life as if it were essentially over at that point. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I told you once that this building was to be a monument to my life. There is nothing to commemorate now. The Wynand Building will have nothing - except which you give it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have not mentioned the financial part of the undertaking. It is an open secret that the so-called Wynand empire is dead. It is sound and doing as well as ever throughout the country, with the exception of New York City. It will last my lifetime. But it will end with me. I intend to liquidate a great part of it... I presume you will want to make the structure efficiently economical in maintenance costs. But you do not have to consider the return of the original investment. &lt;strong&gt;There's no one to whom it must return.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he implying that he's going to unwind his empire and then commit suicide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-05-31T01:22:56.033" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T10:10:15.547" Title="Does Gail Wynand imply that he's going to kill himself at the end of The Fountainhead?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6685" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-05-31T18:44:16.097" Score="3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of the title of Muriel Spark's short story &quot;You Should Have Seen the Mess&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4602" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T18:17:39.987" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T10:28:03.647" Title="What is the significance of the title &quot;You Should Have Seen the Mess&quot; by Muriel Spark?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;muriel-spark&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6687" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-01T01:17:14.083" Score="16" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like help finding a novel I loved as a child. The points I can remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was set and written in mid-20th century England, perhaps the 1950s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps aimed at schoolchildren of the time - a little older than the average Enid Blyton book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A man (an uncle?) laid a convoluted treasure trail for two pairs of late-teen boys that were rivals during their school holidays&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The trail started with them finding a straw “body” in a rowing boat with a clue on it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rowing and cricket featured heavily (the rivals ended up on opposite teams of a village contest)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They had to travel lots around various mid-England towns following clues (clues pointed to the towns such as “Sale” and “Matlock”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eventually they were mixed up in a greater plot (perhaps some burglars?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copy I had was an old small green cloth hardback with the title imprinted in small black letters on the spine. I suspect it used to have a dust cover that was long-lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Happy to answer any more questions, though I’m not sure how much more I can remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4604" LastEditorUserId="4604" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T23:34:26.113" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T04:44:25.497" Title="What is this mid-20th century British adventure novel?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6688" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:50:23.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T08:50:23.707" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T08:50:23.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6689" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:50:23.707" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist Muriel Spark (1918 – 2006) and her works. She is best known for the novels 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' (1961), 'The Mandelbaum Gate' (1965), 'The Driver's Seat' (1970) and 'Memento Mori' (1959)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T10:57:26.397" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T10:57:26.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:54:04.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T08:54:04.857" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T08:54:04.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:54:04.857" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Mousetrap' (first performed in 1952) by Agatha Christie. It is famous for being the longest running in London's West End, with the longest initial run of any play in history. Use this tag with the [agatha-christie] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T10:57:20.763" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T10:57:20.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6692" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:55:54.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T08:55:54.600" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T08:55:54.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6693" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-01T08:55:54.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' (Czech: 'Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí', 1984) by the Czech-born author Milan Kundera. Use this tag with the tags [milan-kundera] and [czech-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-01T10:57:13.970" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T10:57:13.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2008" CreationDate="2018-06-01T11:19:00.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way that this question is worded implies a particular theory about how literature is interpreted (that is, it's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory-ladenness&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;theory-laden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; question). The implicit theory seems to be that we interpret literature by treating it as if it were documentary evidence for a fictional universe. In this theory, there is a single fictional universe, and our task as readers is to determine facts about that universe by interpreting the texts we are given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks about how to resolve the difficulty that arises when there are multiple texts apparently describing the same fictional universe: in this situation we have to decide which texts are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(fiction)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;canonical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and which are not. The theoretical picture thus looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rtsZG.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not suggesting that you necessarily &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; this theory. But the question as asked only makes sense within a picture like this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theory resembles the situation in &lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt;, where what actually happened is a matter of fact, but our knowledge about what happened is based on a collection of unreliable and incomplete texts (combined with physical evidence like archaeology and genetics). In history, when we ask a question like, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;did Richard III order the murder of Edward V?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, we know there is a fact of the matter even if our texts don't give us any confidence in what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this really the best theory about literature? When we ask a question like, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Heathcliff-Murderer-Puzzles-Nineteenth-Century-Classics/dp/0192834681&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Did Heathcliff murder Hindley Earnshaw in &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, there is no fact of the matter independent of the texts. We are free to imagine a fictional universe in which Heathcliff murdered Hindley, and also to imagine a fictional universe in which Hindley died accidentally. The theoretical situation is more like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w0jvA.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this picture I've drawn the interpretations in different shapes to suggest that &quot;imagining a fictional universe&quot; is not the only kind of way in which we might interpret a text: we might have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;formalist interpretation&lt;/a&gt; looking at syntactic features of the text like vocabulary and metre, or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalytic_literary_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;psychoanalytic interpretation&lt;/a&gt; relating the text to theories of mind, or a political interpretation relating the text to political and social movements, or many other kinds of approaches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-06-01T11:19:00.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-01T21:44:31.887" Score="1" ViewCount="252" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading &quot;1001 Nights&quot;, the first book, and I realized that a lot of characters seem to be very fond of expressing themselves through poetry, this seems to be true (I haven't finished the book yet) from the Caliph to a peasant fisherman. Not only that, but powerful men being impressed by recitations have saved many lives throughout the book. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My edition is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0140449388&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights: Volume 1 (Penguin Classics)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights#Poetry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if there was a specific motive, maybe historical, regarding the choice of poetry, rather than the author's, whoever it may be, own preference. Therefore, I didn't think that the first Wikipedia article answered my question. But reading the second (which I hadn't read) seems to answer my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was the early poems' importance to Islamic scholarship, though, which would lead to their preservation. Not only did the poems illuminate life in the early years of Islam and its antecedents but they would also prove the basis for the study of linguistics of which the Qur'an was regarded as the pinnacle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4605" LastEditorUserId="4605" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T14:10:03.950" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T14:10:03.950" Title="Why is poetry so important in 1001 Nights?" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T14:25:20.017" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was just reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/issue/october-2017-turkish-short-stories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish Short Stories&lt;/a&gt; from the October 2017 issue of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words Without Borders&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, the story &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/october-2017-turkish-short-stories-the-little-bathroom-sine-ergun-ayca-turk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Little Bathroom&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Sine Ergün (published freely online, and translated into English by Ayça Türkoğlu, so you can read it in full at the linked page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story begins by introducing the flatmates Selen, Onur, and İnanç, who are all described as &lt;em&gt;strange&lt;/em&gt; in one way or another. Later on we learn that the second, unused, bathroom in their flat is some kind of magical place, although exactly what kind of magic isn't really described in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What's the connection between the residents' 'strangeness' and the magic in the bathroom?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not only thinking of an in-universe connection (did the magic make them strange? could only strange people live in such a flat?) but also a thematic connection in the story (does reading about strange people prepare us for a magic bathroom?) I'd be interested in answers based on either or both of these lines of thinking. At the moment, their strangeness and the bathroom's magic seem to me like two unconnected phenomena, but I'm guessing there's something I haven't picked up on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T15:20:48.603" LastActivityDate="2019-03-02T15:20:48.603" Title="What connects the strangeness of the people and the magic of the bathroom?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;turkish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T16:20:08.000" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;On page 75 of &lt;em&gt;A Reader's Guide to Finnegan Wake&lt;/em&gt;, in analysis of the line &quot;to league his lot, palm and patte, with a papishee &lt;em&gt;[62.9]&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, Tindall links &quot;papishee&quot; with both ALP &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Nora, but without any justification. A quick google reveals that this link is now well repeated, without any further justification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does any Joyce lover know how &quot;papishee&quot; relates to Nora Barnacle?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the correct answer is most probably negative (there is no direct relation to Nora),  I would most certainly accept an answer such as &quot;I have read Richard Ellman's &lt;em&gt;James Joyce&lt;/em&gt; and do not recall James ever referring to Nora in such a manner.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T18:53:17.183" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T19:27:00.213" Title="Joyce, Nora Barnacle and Papishee" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-02T21:06:47.837" Score="1" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Their_Eyes_Were_Watching_God#Inspirations_and_influences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The all-black Eatonville of &lt;em&gt;Their Eyes Were Watching God&lt;/em&gt; is based on the all-black town of the same name in which Hurston grew up. The town's weekly announced in 1889, &quot;Colored People of the United States: Solve the great race problem by securing a home in Eatonville, Florida, a Negro city governed by negroes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How similar are the fictional and real towns? Was it directly modeled after the real town, or simply inspired by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-06-02T21:06:47.837" Title="Was the Eatonville of &quot;Their Eyes Were Watching God&quot; modeled exactly on the real town of the same name or simply inspired by it?" Tags="&lt;zora-neale-hurston&gt;&lt;their-eyes-were-watching-god&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T06:26:19.137" Score="4" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: Rebecca Gowers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plain-Words-Rebecca-Gowers/dp/0241960347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plain Words&lt;/em&gt; (2014 ed)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 270 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  The fact is not that officials do uniquely badly but that they are &#xA;  uniquely vulnerable. Making fun of them has always been one of &#xA;  the diversions of the British public. The fun sometimes has a touch &#xA;  of malice in it, but the habit springs from qualities in the British &#xA;  character that no one would like to see atrophied. The field for its &#xA;  exercise and the temptation to indulge in it are constantly growing. &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;De facto&lt;/em&gt; executive power, which during the seventeenth and eighteenth &#xA;  centuries moved from the King to Ministers, is being diffused lower &#xA;  still by the growth of social legislation. The theory that every act of &#xA;  every official is the act of his Minister is wearing thin. [The preceding sentence isn't in the 2014 edn, but was in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.531110/2015.531110.complete-plain_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this online edition&lt;/a&gt; that Google yielded.] &lt;strong&gt;Tennyson's “fierce &#xA;  light that beats upon a throne and blackens every blot” is no longer &#xA;  focused on the apex; it shines on the whole pyramid.&lt;/strong&gt; So many &#xA;  people have to read so many official instructions. These offer a &#xA;  bigger target for possible criticism than any other class of writing &#xA;  except journalism, and they are more likely to get it than any other &#xA;  class, because a reader’s critical faculty is sharpened by being told — &#xA;  as we all so often have to be nowadays — that he cannot do something &#xA;  he wants to, or must do something he does not want to, or that he &#xA;  can only do something he wants to by going through a lot of tiresome &#xA;  formalities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned from Google that the emboldened quote is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Idylls_of_the_King#The_Coming_of_Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. But what exactly did Tennyson intend by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'beat upon'?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;'blackens every blot'?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a light is shining on a throne, then wouldn't it brighten, and not blacken, the blots on the throne?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T17:29:35.023" Title="What did Tennyson intend to say, by 'fierce light that beats upon a throne and blackens every blot'?" Tags="&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T16:59:56.827" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Idiots-Literary-Theory-Criticism/dp/1615642412&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2013 1 ed). p. 90.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the medieval period through the Renaissance, Plato's argument that &#xA;  physical beauty should be seen as an emanation or reflection of ideal &#xA;  beauty really took off. Writers such as Dante, Edmund Spenser, and &#xA;  Baldassare Castiglione, among others, wrote poems of &quot;courtly love,&quot; in &#xA;  which a lover sees his or her attraction to a beloved &lt;strong&gt;as a reflection of love &#xA;  for the soul&lt;/strong&gt;. By contemplating earthly beauty and love, the lover would &#xA;  draw closer to the divine beauty and truth of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how you can love the soul? Whose soul? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T17:53:51.573" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T17:53:51.573" Title="What does 'reflection of love for the soul' intend to say?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T17:48:41.683" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Idiots-Literary-Theory-Criticism/dp/1615642412&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2013 1 ed). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hpzyr0w4M8EC&amp;amp;lpg=PT274&amp;amp;ots=KXLUtrI05N&amp;amp;dq=%22derrida%27s%20own%20writing%20often%20signifies%22&amp;amp;pg=PT274#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22derrida%27s%20own%20writing%20often%20signifies%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 235.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deconstruction and a focus on the materiality of writing have also been&#xA;important for Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s theories of Signifyin(g) (see&#xA;Chapter 14). In fact, Derrida's own writing often Signifies on the&#xA;subjects he is addressing—which is one reason many people find&#xA;Derrida's writing rather difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there examples where Derrida's Signifying makes something readable unreadable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/14/books/playing-not-joking-with-language.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhodes Scholar John Wideman explains Signifying&lt;/a&gt; in 1988:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IF you look up ''signifying'' in a dictionary, you'll find a set of definitions. If you hear the word used by a black person, chances are you'll need something more than a dictionary to understand what the speaker means. The word ''signifying'' is situated where Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his new book situates the critic of comparative black literature, ''at a sort of crossroads, a discursive crossroads at which two languages meet, be these languages Yoruba and English, or Spanish and French, or even (perhaps especially) the black vernacular and standard English.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To identify the concept of signifying drawn from Afro-American oral tradition and signal its difference from, as well as convergence with, another universe of discourse, Mr. Gates employs a capital letter to distinguish black usage: Signifying. Since this seemingly innocent naming - assigning upper case to black, lower case to white - also implies hierarchy and pecking order, it is itself an example of Signifying. Signifying is verbal play - serious play that serves as instruction, entertainment, mental exercise, preparation for interacting with friend and foe in the social arena. In black vernacular, Signifying is a sign that words cannot be trusted, that even the most literal utterance allows room for interpretation, that language is both carnival and minefield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:11:14.443" Title="How does Derrida's Signifying obfuscate his writing?" Tags="&lt;jacques-derrida&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T17:52:55.660" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source:  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Idiots-Literary-Theory-Criticism/dp/1615642412&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Idiot's Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2013 1 ed). p. 241.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In fact, when you see language as something that uses you, reflects your unconscious, &#xA;  and determines your very identity, you can no longer treat language as a passive &#xA;  tool for your own purposes. For example, you can't &quot;just write down what you're &#xA;  thinking,&quot; because each of the important concepts in that phrase—write, you, and &#xA;  thinking—all overlap. &lt;strong&gt;This is why Lacan's writing itself, like Derrida's, can seem so &#xA;  difficult to read. Typically, neither writer is simply explaining a point, but performing &#xA;  an example of a point.&lt;/strong&gt; It's rather like poetry—you can reduce a poem to a summary, &#xA;  but you're well aware that the real meaning of the poem is not contained in the para- &#xA;  phrase but in the experience of the poem itself (see Chapter 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are some examples where they perform 'an example', rather than simply explaining?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please see the titled question. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:07:05.463" Title="How does Lacan and Derrida performing an example of a point, obfuscate their writing?" Tags="&lt;jacques-derrida&gt;&lt;jacques-lacan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-03T18:56:43.560" Score="4" ViewCount="1931" Body="&lt;p&gt;The beginning of &lt;em&gt;Their Eyes Were Watching God&lt;/em&gt; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. For some they&#xA;  come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon,&#xA;  never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes&#xA;  away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is&#xA;  the life of men.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, women forget all those things they don't want to remember,&#xA;  and remember everything they don't want to forget. The dream is the&#xA;  truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the use of &quot;man&quot; here in the &quot;human&quot; sense, or in the male sense? If it's drawing a comparison between these two sexes, what does &lt;em&gt;Their Eyes Were Watching God&lt;/em&gt; mean by this comparison?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T17:13:57.247" Title="Is the beginning of &quot;Their Eyes Were Watching God&quot; drawing a comparison of men and women?" Tags="&lt;zora-neale-hurston&gt;&lt;their-eyes-were-watching-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6492" CreationDate="2018-06-04T02:25:27.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging from what I have read of Douglas Adams, this is most likely just for comedic effect. Usually when something absurd yet meaningful happens in most of his works it has some contribution to the plot or characters (e.g., the refrigerator eventually becomes a god of guilt). Other than instances like that, Adams's books are full of funny but mostly random details, such as the I Ching calculator's problem with anything greater than the number four. These really don't serve any specific reason within the story, and probably would only occasionally represent something of particular interest to Adams (as far as I know). Here it mostly seems that he's poking fun at the psychology a bit and the well-known but false idea that we only use one-tenth of our brains. After all, what could be more ridiculous than &lt;em&gt;penguins&lt;/em&gt; in one's subconscious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUwPt.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qUwPt.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Sorry for the gif! Kind of.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, look at them, they're goofy enough without any encouragement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2856" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T02:25:27.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6722" CreationDate="2018-06-04T07:12:51.333" Score="12" ViewCount="2896" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence I'm referring to is this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘And what if I am wrong,’ he cried suddenly after a&#xA;  moment’s thought. ‘What if man is not really a scoundrel,&#xA;  man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind—then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there&#xA;  are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the very last sentence of the second chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read a German version but that doesn't really matter. The translation is very similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't fully understand what this sentence really means. Can someone explain it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be an important sentence since we don't get to hear much from Raskolnikov in this chapter besides this sentence. Or maybe the question is: What does Raskolnikov mean with this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T14:17:51.150" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T14:17:51.150" Title="What does the last sentence in chapter 2 of Crime and Punishment really mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6702" CreationDate="2018-06-04T10:16:15.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(NB: I am not black, so please take anything I say on the topic of Signifying in African-American culture with the appropriate grains of salt.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two things being discussed here: Derrida's theory of &quot;the signifier and the signified,&quot; and &quot;Signifying,&quot; African-American vernacular patterns. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia does a good job of explaining &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signifyin%27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Signifying&lt;/a&gt;, IMHO, but roughly, it's &quot;adding new layers of meaning to words by way of culture.&quot; So you have to be in and/or familiar with the culture to understand the new layers of meaning added to the word(s). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derrida's theory said that you had A, the signified (the Platonic ideal of meaning) of a word. Then you had B, the signifier, which is &quot;all the words you use to convey the meaning of A.&quot; Derrida felt that the harder you worked at getting B to convey the meaning of A, the farther A and B were pushed apart by the pile of words between A and B. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's an extremely simplified version of &lt;em&gt;différance,&lt;/em&gt; the name of his theory. It's hard to explain; my Lit Crit teacher back in college probably spent two entire 90-minute lectures on it. It's self-ironic &amp;mdash; it's a theory about how the harder you try to explain something the more you obfuscate it, and the more you talk about the theory of &lt;em&gt;différance,&lt;/em&gt; the more confusing it becomes. The &lt;em&gt;Guide&lt;/em&gt; you're referencing is describing that experience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time since I read Derrida, and never in the original French, so yes, it's entirely possible that the more he talked about his theory, the less comprehensible it was. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Venturino's additional comment is that Derrida was using in-culture references to add yet another layer of meaning on top of his academic discourse, making his already difficult theory practically indigestible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="175" LastEditDate="2018-06-04T20:35:38.480" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T20:35:38.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2018-06-04T10:34:58.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tindall is not to be recommended. Too little detail and much of it &quot;without any further justification&quot;. You are much better with an up to date (4th) edition of McHugh's Annotations, and the Skeleton Key, or with Rose &amp;amp; O'Hanlons Understanding FW (harder to get). As you have gathered, the passage you refer to is one of many accounts of the marriage of Protestant immigrant HCE with Catholic (papishee) ALP in Dublin, the 7th city of Christendom. Terms like 'papist' and 'papishee' are obviously borrowed from the vocabulary of hostile Protestantism and have little relevance to the relation of Joyce &amp;amp; Nora Barnacle, who were both Catholics by upbringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4611" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T10:34:58.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-04T06:24:34.367" Score="5" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long time ago an old man told us a story, but I couldn't remember it very well—so I'm just wondering what was the exact story he told us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was about a court process where somebody was judged. And another man, woke up in the night, took his horse and rushed to the court building where the process was going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somehow... because the Big Ben tower rang 13 times that midnight, the man that was judged was saved. I'm not sure what was the role of the horseman... but I just remember him as part of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this story and which is its source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried looking on the internet and I found this, asking a similar question (however, I don't remember the old man mentioning the rifle...):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CUr7u.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CUr7u.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/526713.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4615" OwnerDisplayName="Ionică Bizău" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-04T14:47:21.783" Title="The Story of a horseman who rushed to arrive in the court and Big Ben clock rang 13 times" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2018-06-05T00:07:12.597" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As to 1, the sun &quot;beating&quot; is a common way of saying the sun was shining very brightly, oppressively brightly.  One of the senses of &quot;to beat&quot; in the OED is &quot;transf. Of water, waves, wind, weather, the sun's rays, and other physical agents: To dash against, impinge on, strike, violently assail&quot;; one of the citations is to Spenser: &quot;The Sunnebeame so sore doth vs beate.&quot; (1579). (The 1962 movie &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_of_Arabia_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lawrence of Arabia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; had a scene where the protagonists had to cross the &quot;Devil's Anvil&quot;, an especially hot bit of desert; here the figure is that just as a blacksmith's hammer beats the anvil, so the Devil beats the anvil (the Nefud Desert) with his hammer (the bright sunlight). The Devil, of course, is associated with heat and fire.  The 1967 rock band, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Anvil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devil's Anvil&lt;/a&gt;, borrows this kenning, both in its name and its  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9tzswEa-3pI/maxresdefault.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;album art&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for 2, dirt is more visible in bright light than in dim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson means something like &quot;intense scrutiny is focused on the monarch, and flaws become visible.&quot;  Gowers means something like &quot;and on all the rest of the government, too.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T01:23:27.397" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T01:23:27.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6712" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T00:12:18.597" Score="10" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edx.org/course/dante-tra-poesia-e-scienza-0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a MOOC about Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy&lt;/a&gt; by the The University of Naples Federico II, in which a certain professor named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docenti.unina.it/#!/professor/5241464641454c454749474c494f47474c52464c3437443038423930354e/curriculum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raffaele Giglio&lt;/a&gt; starts a video (published in September 2017) in which he recites some verses from the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I already become very suspicious about any credibility of this professor when he immediately afterwards uses the following vague words: &quot;the greatest Humanity poet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(English subtitle track:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=25&amp;amp;v=Lj7l8jz_vfk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;They were written by our great poet, the greatest Humanity poet, Dante Allighieri,...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Italian subtitle track, for reference:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Li ha scritti il nostro grande poeta, anzi il poeta più grande dell'umanità, Dante Alighieri,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my question relates to &lt;strong&gt;whether or not there is a general consensus among scholars with regards to the following two claims&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(English subtitle track:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=34&amp;amp;v=Lj7l8jz_vfk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;...in his comedy, the book which, after the bible, has been translated into the most languages and dialects in the world, and is the top printed work of all time, after the Bible.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Italian subtitle track, for reference:)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...nella sua commedia, l’opera che dopo la bibbia è più tradotta nelle lingue e dialetti del mondo ed è quella più stampata sempre dopo la bibbia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOTE:&lt;/strong&gt; It seems to be fashionable for some professors to shout that a book of their interest is the second most translated book in the world. In April 2016 for example, Alfredo Moro, who lectured at the University of Cantabria, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tvm.com.mt/en/news/don-quijote-de-la-mancha-is-the-second-most-translated-book-after-the-bible/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;claimed this for Don Quixote.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4614" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T10:00:26.903" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:21:44.213" Title="Dante Alleghieri's Divine Comedy &quot;has been translated into the most languages in the world &amp; top printed work after the Bible&quot;?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6707" CreationDate="2018-06-05T00:34:57.867" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English translation is very close to the original text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ну а коли я соврал, — воскликнул он вдруг невольно, — коли действительно не подлец человек, весь вообще, весь род то есть человеческий, то значит, что остальное всё — предрассудки, одни только страхи напущенные, и нет никаких преград, и так тому и следует быть!..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that &lt;em&gt;scoundrels&lt;/em&gt; adapt themselves to difficulties of life, accept the unfairness. But the &lt;em&gt;true man&lt;/em&gt; would rebel, break the rules, rise above the barriers and do anything he wants. And that's the way it should be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/strong&gt; The ending of chapter 2 discusses how family of Sonya Marmeladova started using her and accepted it as a new normal. Raskolnikov calls them &lt;em&gt;scoundrels&lt;/em&gt;.  As for &lt;em&gt;&quot;rising above the barriers&quot;&lt;/em&gt; that's what the whole story is about. Actions of Raskolnikov are based on his beliefs that a &lt;em&gt;true man&lt;/em&gt; can do whatever he wants, ignoring the society norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2438" LastEditorUserId="2438" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T13:43:32.140" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T13:43:32.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6766" CreationDate="2018-06-05T04:49:02.987" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1038/793&quot;&gt;this reading challenge proposal&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;em&gt;The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed&lt;/em&gt;, which collects short stories, etc. that were generated (written?) by a computer program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this fit in with any commonly-accepted definitions of literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T15:00:20.300" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T00:45:20.673" Title="Do computer-generated poetry, stories, etc. fit in any common definition of literature?" Tags="&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;&lt;computer-generated-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T05:05:00.950" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6714/does-computer-generated-poetry-stories-etc-fit-in-any-common-definition-of-li&quot;&gt;Does computer-generated poetry, stories, etc. fit in any common definition of literature?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the associated reading challenge proposal that inspired the questions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1038/793&quot;&gt;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1038/793&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The linked proposal is for a reading challenge for &lt;em&gt;The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed&lt;/em&gt;, much of which is computer-generated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My other linked question asks how this fits into common definition of literature. However, I'd like to ask a more specific question here: someone else pointed out that this kind of text really can't be analyzed from an authorial intent perspective because there's no intent behind the text whatever (see, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese Room argument&lt;/a&gt; - it obviously makes no sense to try to claim that the computer was trying to communicate something specific). How would advocates of authorial intent theories of meaning respond to this? Do their definitions of literature usually explicitly require some kind of conscious intent on the author's part for something to even be considered literature in the first place? In other words, from their perspective, would they say &quot;that's not really literature&quot; or even &quot;that fundamentally doesn't even have any meaning at all&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that a third possible response would be that the method of construction means that, in some sense, the programmer was the real author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any prominent advocate of authorial intent actually analyzed this type of situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T15:00:56.130" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T15:00:56.130" Title="Do advocates of authorial intent theories consider conscious intent on the author's part mandatory for something to constitute literature?" Tags="&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;&lt;computer-generated-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-05T10:03:43.390" Score="2" ViewCount="728" Body="&lt;p&gt;Machiavelli's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discourses on Livy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a treatise on government, especially republican government. Machiavelli often cites examples from Roman history (not just from Livy's work), for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Junius_Brutus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucius Junius Brutus&lt;/a&gt;, who overthrew king Tarquinius Superbus and became founder of the Roman republic, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Junius_Brutus_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Junius Brutus&lt;/a&gt;, who took the lead in the assassination of Caesar, a deed that was meant to protect the Roman republic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 16 of Book I, Machiavelli writes (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) the state that is free and newly established comes to acquire enemies and not friends. In the desire to remedy these disadvantages and the disorders which the aforementioned difficulties bring along with them, there is no more powerful remedy, nor one more valid, safe, and necessary than to &lt;strong&gt;kill the sons of Brutus&lt;/strong&gt;, who, as history documents, were led to conspire together with other young Romans against their native city for no other reason that they were unable to enjoy the extraordinary privileges under the consuls that they had enjoyed under the king, so that it seemed to them that the liberty of the people had become their slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quoted from &lt;em&gt;Discourses on Livy&lt;/em&gt;, translated with an introduction and notes by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella; Oxford University Press, 2003, page 63.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Machiavelli is against tyranny and both Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Junius Brutus acted to end or prevent tyranny (respectively), it is not clear to me why he would advocate &quot;kill[ing] the sons of Brutus&quot; here. (I assume it does not refer to their biological sons; Machiavelli does not advocate killing children for the sins of their fathers. The annotated edition I quoted above does not have an endnote about the sons of Brutus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-05T11:24:30.070" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T11:24:30.070" Title="Who are &quot;the sons of Brutus&quot; in Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;niccolo-machiavelli&gt;&lt;discourses-on-livy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6716" CreationDate="2018-06-05T10:57:53.670" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarquinian_conspiracy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tarquinian conspiracy&lt;/a&gt;. After the overthrow of Tarquinius, the last Roman King, and the founding of the Roman republic, a number of Romans, including two sons and two brothers-in-law of Lucius Junius Brutus, were found to be plotting to restore the kingdom and put Tarquinius back on the throne. The conspiracy was discovered, and the conspirators were put to death. All this is told by Livy in &lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt; 2.3-5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the general sense here is that one should put matters of the state even above familial ties, and punish traitors as harshly as possible, no matter who they might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T10:57:53.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2018-06-05T13:15:22.347" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One way to address this question is by &lt;em&gt;quantifying&lt;/em&gt; the relative importance of Dante vis-a-vis other poets. &lt;a href=&quot;http://pantheon.media.mit.edu/methods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT's Pantheon&lt;/a&gt; project is one resource for this. The link is to their webpage describing their methodology. Basically, Pantheon's project is an attempt at measuring Global Historical Popularity. Among the metrics they employ for selecting global popularity is &lt;em&gt;the number of languages in Wikipedia&lt;/em&gt; into which an historical figure's work has been translated (minimum of 25 for inclusion into list). Among the limitations to their approach is the fact that the metrics are based solely on Wikipedia which is far from objective as it heavily weighted towards historically Western figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without getting lost in the weeds of what Pantheon does and how they do it, Dante Alighieri ranks 3rd among &lt;em&gt;Writers&lt;/em&gt;, a pre-determined Pantheon classification. First is Homer, then Shakespeare. Dante is followed by Virgil and Sophocles is fifth. The image below can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://pantheon.world/profile/person/Dante_Alighieri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt;. Based on Pantheon and Wikipedia, Dante has been translated into 137 wiki language editions, Homer into 141 and Shakespeare into 163. Clearly the number of translations is not the only factor used in generating the results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante was an indisputably great poet. That MIT's Pantheon ranks him 3rd is an almost arbitrary decision since any and all rankings can be reformulated to produce virtually any desired result, e.g., see Malcolm Gladwell's takedown of college rankings in his &lt;em&gt;New Yorker&lt;/em&gt; article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/14/the-order-of-things&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Order of Things&lt;/a&gt; (February 2011)  or this infographic summarizing all of the factors Google uses in creating its Pagerank metric for keyword searches ... : &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-ranking-algorithm-infographic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ultimate Guide to Google Ranking Factors in 2019&lt;/a&gt; (by Sam Kusinitz).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBjQv.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cBjQv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:21:44.213" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:21:44.213" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6700" CreationDate="2018-06-05T15:41:11.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of the Tennyson quote is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tennyson/alfred/idylls/dedication.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eulogy to Prince Albert&lt;/a&gt;, in the Dedication of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idylls_of_the_King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (and therefore the implied context of a connection to King Arthur?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not swaying to this faction or to that;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not making his high place the lawless perch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of winged ambitions, nor a vantage-ground&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For pleasure; but through all this tract of years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wearing the white flower of a blameless life,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Before a thousand peering littlenesses,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In that fierce light which beats upon a throne,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And blackens every blot: for where is he,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who dares foreshadow for an only son&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A lovelier life, a more unstained, than his?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or how should England dreaming of his sons&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hope more for these than some inheritance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of such a life, a heart, a mind as thine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first and last parts of this excerpt are clearer than the middle part, at least to me. Tennyson is talking about an exemplary royal who never acted poorly or misused his position, and saying that a life such as his is the best anyone could ever hope for their sons. That leaves the few lines that Gowers quoted and that you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before a thousand peering littlenesses,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In that fierce light which beats upon a throne,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And blackens every blot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this refers to those who might criticise Albert: the &amp;quot;peering littlenesses&amp;quot; being something akin to busybodies, &amp;quot;little&amp;quot; people who &amp;quot;peer&amp;quot; at his life in an attempt to find fault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With power comes responsibility, and with fame comes visibility: a royal figure will naturally face more scrutiny than someone in a lesser position. Tennyson refers to this fact by a colourful metaphor: the scrutiny to which royals are subjected corresponds to &amp;quot;fierce light&amp;quot; shining upon the &amp;quot;throne&amp;quot; which metonymises the monarchy, and any misdemeanour of theirs which comes to light under such scrutiny corresponds to a &amp;quot;blot&amp;quot; revealed by that fierce light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a more modern example, consider Donald Trump. His utterances on Twitter nowadays make international headline news, in a way which they never did before he became president of the USA. His position of power exposes him to more scrutiny - and more criticism - than he would have had otherwise. The &amp;quot;fierce light&amp;quot; of the media shines upon everything he says, and each time he misspeaks it's like a &amp;quot;blot&amp;quot; on his presidential record, made blacker and more visible by the attention accorded to his position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the sun to &amp;quot;beat upon&amp;quot; a surface is a common phrase: see, for example, the derived adjective &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sunbeat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sunbeat&lt;/a&gt;. It is perhaps most often heard in the phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beat-down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;beat down&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sun beats down, it shines very strongly and makes the air very hot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No: a bright light makes dark blots seem darker, not brighter. In the shade, darker and less dark patches are more similar, and the blackest parts don't stand out so much. In bright sunshine, the blackest blots remain black while the rest is lit up, and stand out more by their contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the Gowers text which refers to the Tennyson quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory that every act of every official is the act of his Minister is wearing thin. [...] So many people have to read so many official instructions. These offer a bigger target for possible criticism than any other class of writing except journalism, and they are more likely to get it than any other class&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the writer is saying here is that government officials, not just the ministers who lead the government, are liable to receive fierce criticism from the public. To illustrate her point, she contrasts it with the Tennyson quote and says that his &amp;quot;fierce light&amp;quot; (public scrutiny and criticism) no longer shines only upon the apex (the highest echelons of society) but upon the whole pyramid (underlings as well as their superiors).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-05T17:29:35.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6720" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-06T09:50:36.213" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dante's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Comedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written in the years 1308-1320, is a long narrative poem in which the poet is also a protagonist in the story. The story also includes many real characters, such as Virgil and many Florentines who had been involved in the struggle between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelphs_and_Ghibellines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Guelphs and the Ghibellines&lt;/a&gt;. However, it is obviously not an autobiographical work, since Dante's journey through hell, purgatory and paradise is not a real event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to the question whether the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; is the earliest work of literature in which the author is also a protagonist in the story. This should not be confused with works in which the protagonist is the narrator but not the historical author; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative#Types_of_narrators_and_their_modes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;narrator&lt;/a&gt; and author are two different concepts. (I am also excluding philosophical dialogues from this question, otherwise &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato#Dialogues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato's dialogues&lt;/a&gt; might be a valid answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-06T11:01:55.247" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T11:52:45.867" Title="What is the oldest non-biographical work of literature in which the author is also a protagonist?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-06T11:09:16.823" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sergei Lukyanenko's &lt;em&gt;Watch&lt;/em&gt; series, there are several different &quot;grades&quot; of magical power, from seventh-grade all the way up to first-grade and then beyond. As I understand it, everyone above first-grade power is called a Higher Magician (or Higher Vampire, etc.): they are &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Higher Ones&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But another title I've seen used now and then is &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Great One&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Gesar and Zabulon are sometimes addressed or referred to as Great Ones, and I think so is Foma/Thomas the Rhymer in Edinburgh, Rustam in Uzbekistan, and a very few others. But when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Anton becomes a Higher One&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at the end of &lt;em&gt;Twilight Watch&lt;/em&gt;, nobody in &lt;em&gt;Last Watch&lt;/em&gt; ever refers to him as &quot;Great One&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the difference between a Higher One and a Great One?&lt;/strong&gt; Is &quot;Great One&quot; a loosely defined term of respect for extremely experienced and high-ranking Higher Ones? Does it mean something not directly related to magical power? (Do the original Russian terms make anything clearer?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T11:09:16.823" Title="What's the difference between a Higher One and a Great One?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;sergei-lukyanenko&gt;&lt;night-watch-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6707" CreationDate="2018-06-06T11:20:16.520" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Rodion says he could be wrong, he means his words for the previous sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hurrah for Sonia! What a mine they've dug there! And they're making&#xA;  the most of it! Yes, they are making the most of it! They've wept over&#xA;  it and grown used to it. Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he says that man must be a scoundrel to accept the fact that their own daughter works as a prostitute in order to support the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean that man is the scoundrel, if &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is acceptable in the world of man, then there is no morality at all, and all the notions of good and bad are just superstitions produced by fear. And there are no barriers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's how I understand this passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T11:20:16.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6720" CreationDate="2018-06-06T11:52:45.867" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As written, the most obvious answer would probably be a lyrical poet, writing in first person. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sappho&lt;/a&gt;'s poetry (ca 600 BCE) appears to be among the first in the Western tradition to use such a device. To what degree it is biographical can of course be debated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first writing that is definitely fiction is probably Lucian of Samosata's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A True Story&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, written in the second century CE. In it we can read about the fantastical travels of the narrator, who at one point erect a monument on which we can read that his name is &quot;Lucian&quot;. He and his company travels beyond the Pillars of Hercules, are taken by a whirlwind to the Moon, witness a war between the forces of the Moon and those of the Sun, travel in the belly of a giant whale, go to the Islands of the Blessed and meet the heroes of the Trojan War. &lt;em&gt;A True Story&lt;/em&gt; is often cited as the earliest science fiction novel, containing a lot of elements we recognize from modern offerings of the genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-06-06T11:52:45.867" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6704" CreationDate="2018-06-07T03:35:49.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's both, or rather it deliberately shifts in meaning as you read it --part of what makes this one of the most striking beginnings in American literature.  There are important textual clues to how this is meant to be interpreted, but one must also keep in mind the time period and cultural context.  When it was published, in 1937, a novel by a black woman author would have been very unusual.  Hurston's aims with the book were particularly ambitious for the times.  She wanted to reach a mainstream literary audience, which would have been largely made up of educated middle and upper-class white readers, but she wanted to present a story that was firmly and specifically rooted in a poor, rural black experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her strategy for doing this is all there in these opening paragraphs.  &quot;Ships at a distance have have &lt;strong&gt;every man's&lt;/strong&gt; wish on board.&quot;  This sentence situates the book within the European literary tradition --it is a classic literary thesis statement like &quot;It is a truth universally acknowledged...&quot; or &quot;It was the best of times..&quot;  Hurston knew when writing it that she could reliably expect her audience both to read &quot;every man&quot; as meaning &quot;all humans&quot; (since that was the then-standard reading of that phrase) but to reference it largely to white males (since that was the standard reference group of the times).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It thus makes it all the more striking when the paragraph ends by contrasting the life of women, because it forces you to go back and mentally change the first reference from a neutral one to a gendered one, and simultaneously make room in your mind for the story of a woman when you were expecting a man.  It makes you subtly aware that your previous &quot;universal&quot; frame of reference was actually exclusionary.  From there, Hurston is prepared to take you the rest of the way on your journey, into the frame of reference of a young black woman, whom she has thus established as worthy of literary attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T17:13:57.247" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T17:13:57.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T06:28:22.513" Score="6" ViewCount="1058" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am planning to buy &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of War&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Sun Tzu (in English translation) but I've found versions of 90 pages, 170 pages and 200 pages. What is the difference between these versions? Is there a standard version or a comprehensive translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4624" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T14:53:04.367" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T14:53:04.367" Title="Difference between translations of Sun Tzu's &quot;The Art of War&quot;?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;sun-tzu&gt;&lt;the-art-of-war-sun-tzu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6726" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-07T11:50:50.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T11:50:50.477" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T11:50:50.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6727" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-07T11:50:50.477" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Art of War&quot; by Sun Tzu. Use in conjunction with [sun-tzu]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T12:49:58.570" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T12:49:58.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6729" CreationDate="2018-06-07T11:51:45.720" Score="6" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this at one of my grandparents in the early 1980s, but unfortunately, many of those books have been lost over the years between sticky-fingered grandchildren, general wear and tear, and my surviving grandparents trying to reduce their footprint. I want to say it was two books, probably under 50 pages, hardback, both by the same author. It was a series of misheard phrases in the form of sentences, sometimes a single page and sometimes a two page spread, over a beautiful illustration (I want to say watercolors) of what a child might think they hear. Ones that have stuck with me over the year was one with the mother having a &quot;frog in her throat&quot;, showing said frog peeking its head out of her mouth, one where they talk about their family having a &quot;coat of arms&quot; with the illustration showing them opening a closet with a coat covered in arms. There were at least two entries involving a confusion between &quot;prince&quot; and &quot;prints&quot;, one involving a &quot;blue prince&quot;, one with the &quot;foot prince in the snow&quot;. I know there were more, but those are the ones that are coming to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T14:21:13.757" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T14:21:13.757" Title="Looking for a book (possibly a pair of them) with whimsical illustrations of misheard phrases" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6728" CreationDate="2018-06-07T11:57:16.377" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;And, of course, right after I post my question, a few further searches found the books. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/616032.The_King_Who_Rained&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The King who Rained&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/270411.A_Chocolate_Moose_for_Dinner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Chocolate Moose for Dinner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Fred Gwynne are the books I was looking for. The key came when I started searching for combinations of the phrases I remembered and came upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://missfernandez.wordpress.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; which was discussing using it for a lesson plan on homonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phrases from the book: (Will be in a handout)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A king who rained for forty years&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Forks in the road&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A mole on his nose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lambs gamble on the lawn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A frog in her throat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A little hoarse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I’m a little deer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hold up her train&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two coats&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A head on beer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Big Bills&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Play Bridge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Coat of Arms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Live in the present&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bear Feet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Foot Prince in the snow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Blue Prince for the new room of our house&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Boars coming to dinner&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fairy Tails&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They didn't mention the title of the book, but I tried the first term and that brought me to a page on Gwynne's book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T12:10:57.243" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T12:10:57.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3184" CreationDate="2018-06-07T19:48:45.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevill_Coghill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nevil Coghill's&lt;/a&gt; translation, where the relevant lines are translated as follows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I have told you shortly, in a clause,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The rank, the array, the number and the cause (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In a clause&quot; is not translated; the Norton Critical Edition and the Riverside Chaucer both gloss &quot;in a clause&quot; as &quot;briefly&quot;. Preserving &quot;in a clause&quot; also preserves the metre and avoids using an obvious synonym of &quot;shortly&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Soothly&quot; is also used in other parts of the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. in line 117 of the General Prologue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Coghill's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a proper forester, I guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In line 468 of the General Prologue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Coghill's translation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had gap-teeth, set widely, truth to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these two examples, &quot;soothly&quot; is interpreted as &quot;truly, in truth&quot; (see the &lt;em&gt;Chaucer Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by N. Davis et al).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where does &quot;shortly&quot; come from? The British library has a website where you can consult and compare &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caxton's two editions of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The 1476 edition says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now have I tolde you shortly in a clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (illustrated) 1483 edition says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now have a told you shortly in a clause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is only in difference: the 'e' at the end of 'tolde'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/general-prologue-hengwrt-manuscript-canterbury-tales#poemline-764&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hengwrt manuscript&lt;/a&gt; renders the line as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now haue I toold yow / soothly in a clau{s}e&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is a matter of conflicting sources for modern editions. For example, Nevill Coghill says in his translation that he consulted both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_William_Skeat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter W. Skeat's&lt;/a&gt; seven-volume edition of Chaucer's works (Oxford, 1897) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Norris_Robinson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. N. Robinson's&lt;/a&gt; edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1933), and that where the editions didn't agree, he made his own choices. This explains some of the differences between translations. If they thought &quot;shortly&quot; was authoritative, they may have thought it was repetitive (due to &quot;in a clause&quot;); if they thought &quot;soothly&quot; was authoritative, they may have wondered how to render this into modern English at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: R. M. Lumiansky's prose translation (Simon &amp;amp; Schuster, 2001) has the following rendition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I have told you very briefly about the rank, the dress, and the number of these pilgrims, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lumiansky wrote in his introduction,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have tried to reproduced Chaucer's phrases exactly, almost word for word, in natural, idiomatic, colloquial, modern English, which will convey to the modern reader the same effects that Chaucer's idiomatic Middle English conveyed to his audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In this quote, &quot;almost&quot; is the operative word.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T16:31:39.410" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T16:31:39.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:00:34.650" Score="6" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 4 of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, Dagny is walking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She walked on. She stopped at the window of a bookstore. The window displayed a pyramid of slabs in brownish-purple jackets, inscribed:  The Vulture Is Molting. “The novel of our century,” said a placard. “The penetrating study of a businessman’s greed. A fearless revelation of man’s depravity.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this supposed to be telling us about the state of the world at that time? What does it mean that the novel of the century is a &quot;fearless revelation of man's depravity&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T03:46:18.643" Title="What are we supposed to learn about the reality in &quot;Atlas Shrugged&quot; from &quot;The Vulture is Molting&quot;?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:09:19.807" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bookeater recently asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1100/2191&quot;&gt;when Sun Zi's &lt;em&gt;Art of War&lt;/em&gt; was first adopted outside China&lt;/a&gt;. However, Sun Zi was not the only author who wrote a treatise on this topic. Machiavelli wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_War_(Machiavelli)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dell'arte della guerra&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; around 1519-1520 and it was the only of his theoretical works that was printed during his lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is a bit like the reverse of Bookeater's question: When was Machiavelli's treatise &lt;em&gt;The Art of War&lt;/em&gt; first translated into Chinese? A &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=machiavelli+%22art+of+war%22+%22chinese+translation%22&amp;amp;t=ffsb&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simple web search&lt;/a&gt; did not help; I find mostly links about translations of Sun Zi's treatise ... Doing a search for 翻译 (the Chinese word for &quot;translation&quot;) on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%A6%AC%E5%9F%BA%E9%9B%85%E7%B6%AD%E5%88%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese Wikipedia article about Machiavelli&lt;/a&gt; gives no results. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E5%85%B5%E6%B3%95+%E9%A9%AC%E5%9F%BA%E9%9B%85%E7%BB%B4%E5%88%A9+%E7%BF%BB%E8%AF%91&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search in Chinese&lt;/a&gt; brings up pages that I can't read with my basic level of Chinese. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-28T23:12:53.570" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T23:12:53.570" Title="When was Machiavelli's Art of War first translated into Chinese?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;niccolo-machiavelli&gt;&lt;the-art-of-war-machiavelli&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6733" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:26:52.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T21:26:52.990" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T21:26:52.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6734" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:26:52.990" Score="0" Body="Questions about the treatise 'Dell'arte della guerra' ('The Art of War') by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was written in the years 1519-1520 and published in 1521. Use this tag with [niccolo-machiavelli] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T06:09:50.147" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T06:09:50.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6735" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:27:48.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T21:27:48.380" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T21:27:48.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6736" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:27:48.380" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding literature originally written in the Turkish language, whether written/published in Turkey or anywhere else. This tag is also appropriate for literature written in Old Anatolian Turkish and Ottoman Turkish." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:00:04.227" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:00:04.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6737" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:28:23.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T21:28:23.980" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T21:28:23.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6738" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:28:23.980" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding literature originally written in the Czech language, whether written/published in Czechia or anywhere else." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T21:37:41.627" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T21:37:41.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6739" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:40:53.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T21:40:53.637" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T21:40:53.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6740" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:40:53.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Ukrainian-born author Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol (1809 – 1852) and his works. He is best known the play 'The Government Inspector', the novels 'Dead Souls' and 'Taras Bulba', and stories such as 'The Nose' and 'Nevsky Prospekt'. Use this tag with the tag [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-07T22:01:32.377" LastActivityDate="2018-06-07T22:01:32.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-07T21:49:36.913" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is a vaultlike door? Is this a common adjective for a door?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does yawn of appetite mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you please paraphrase/rephrase these sentences and explain their relevance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 1, &amp;quot;Found Objects&amp;quot;, of Jennifer Egan's &lt;em&gt;A Visit From the Goon Squad&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through &lt;strong&gt;the vaultlike door of a toilet stall&lt;/strong&gt;. Inside the rim of the bag, barely visible, was a wallet made of pale green leather. It was easy for Sasha to recognize, looking back, that the peeing woman's blind trust had provoked her: We live in a city where people will steal the hair off your head if you give them half a chance, but you leave your stuff lying in plain sight and expect it to be waiting for you when you come back? It made her want to teach the woman a lesson. But this wish only camouflaged the deeper feeling Sasha always had: that at, tender wallet, offering itself to her hand-it seemed so dull, so life-as-usual to just leave it there rather than seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously (&amp;quot;I get it,&amp;quot; Coz, her therapist, said), and take the fucking thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sasha sighed. She'd told Coz the plumber story about a month ago, and he'd found a way to bring it up at almost every session since. The plumber was an old man, sent by Sasha's landlord to investigate a leak in the apartment below hers. He'd appeared in Sasha's doorway, tufts of gray on his head, and within a minute-boom-he'd hit the floor and crawled under her bathtub like an animal fumbling its way into a familiar hole. The fingers he'd groped toward the bolts behind the tub were grimed to cigar stubs, and reaching made his sweatshirt hike up, exposing a soft white back. Sasha turned away, stricken by the old man's abasement, anxious to leave for her temp job, except that the plumber was talking to her, asking about the length and frequency of her showers. &amp;quot;I never use it,&amp;quot; she told him curtly. &amp;quot;I shower at the gym.&amp;quot; He nodded without acknowledging her rudeness, apparently used to it. Sasha's nose began to prickle; she shut her eyes and pushed hard on both temples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening her eyes, she saw the plumber's tool belt lying on the floor at her feet. It had a beautiful screwdriver in it, the orange translucent handle gleaming like a lollipop in its worn leather loop, the silvery shaft sculpted, sparkling. &lt;strong&gt;Sasha felt herself contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite&lt;/strong&gt;; she needed to hold the screwdriver, just for a minute. She bent her knees and plucked it noiselessly from the belt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4628" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-09T16:44:53.983" Title="Meaning and significance of &quot;vaultlike door&quot; and &quot;contract around the object in a single yawn of appetite&quot; in Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6677" CreationDate="2018-06-08T02:14:21.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the first four Earthsea books in my adolescence, and in the last several years have been reading Le Guin's adult works and re-reading Earthsea.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that there is no strict order that you need to read them in aside from reading Earthsea novels chronologically.  You do not need to read any of the Earthsea short stories before starting with &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hainish cycle novels may be nice to read in the order they were written, especially if you're reading with the intention of understanding Le Guin's development as a writer, but from a story perspective, there's not a lot of strong relationships between the books.  (Full Disclosure: out of the novels, I have currently read only &lt;em&gt;Left Hand, Dispossessed, Four Ways,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Telling&lt;/em&gt;).  The only caveat I have is that you should try to read the short story &quot;Old Music and the Slave Women&quot; (in &lt;em&gt;Birthday of the World&lt;/em&gt;) after you have read &lt;em&gt;Four Ways to Forgiveness&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't see any reason to specifically read Earthsea before or after her adult works. Earthsea is completely separate from everything else she wrote, so you could read it before, during, or after your other reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, roughly chronological order is probably good, but don't get too worried if &lt;em&gt;Left Hand of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; is checked out of the library on your next trip and you have to start with &lt;em&gt;The Dispossessed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T02:14:21.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2018-06-08T04:01:28.947" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First of all, that book is actually an antithesis of &quot;&lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;&quot; itself - the book about how bad and evil the entrepreneurs are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This point of view is shared even by vitriolic critics of Rand, e.g. Adam Weiner in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7IHNDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA210&amp;amp;dq=How+Bad+Writing+Destroyed+the+World:+Ayn+Rand+and+the+Literary+Origins+of+the+Financial+Crisis+vulture+is+molting&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiaqYDl7sPbAhVDPsAKHbLfC9UQuwUILjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=vulture%20is%20molting&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How Bad Writing Destroyed the World: Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Early in the novel, walking through Manhattan, Dagny pauses before a bookstore window display of a new novel, &lt;em&gt;The Vulture is Molting&lt;/em&gt;: &quot;The novel of our century,&quot; &quot;The penetrating study of a businessman's greed.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, which reconstitutes businessmen into virtuous vultures, is the antidote to this imaginary novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, the fact that the book with such an ideology is &quot;the novel of our century&quot; (meaning, a culturally acclaimed successful bestseller), tells you that the world at the time welcomed that ideology of considering the productive people &quot;vultures&quot; and &quot;depraved&quot;. It wasn't just the head of the State who was the problem - it was the masses in society who shared in the same worldview.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. In a deep, deep extra irony - I assume, unintentional - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.4vultures.org/2015/08/02/new-paper-published-on-feather-moult-in-bearded-vultures/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moulting in vultures is a difficult and energy/effort consuming long process&lt;/a&gt;, so it is indeed somewhat analogous to entrepreneurs creating something and building a company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T10:36:15.157" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T10:36:15.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-08T13:24:13.520" Score="8" ViewCount="592" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22what+does+the+author+mean%22&amp;amp;t=ffsb&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What does the author mean?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22what+does+the+author+want+to%22&amp;amp;t=ffsb&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What does the author want to say/convey/express/...?&lt;/a&gt; are questions we heard countless times during literature classes at school. In other words, it is a common didactic device. However, in the 1940s, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, both representatives of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorial_intent#New_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Criticism&lt;/a&gt;, formulated their theory of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/fallacy.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;intentional fallacy&lt;/a&gt;, claiming that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See also the older question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1784/2191&quot;&gt;What is the “Intentional Fallacy”?&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, did older theories actually posit that the author's intention was the standard for interpreting and judging literature? Or have questions about authorial intent always been a teaching device that had little value in (academic) literary theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T18:24:17.373" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T15:59:42.570" Title="Was authorial intent ever taken seriously in academic literary theory?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6746" CreationDate="2018-06-08T14:50:38.170" Score="6" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Pelican Julius Caesar has I.2.140 as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;men at sometime were masters of their fates &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(even noting the archaic meaning of &quot;sometime&quot; as at one time) while the Arden Julius Caesar has it as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;men at some time are masters of their fates &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a &lt;a href=&quot;http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22men%20at%20sometime%20were%20masters%20of%20their%20fates%22%20vs%20%22men%20at%20some%20time%20are%20masters%20of%20their%20fates%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google search&lt;/a&gt; results lists many (admittedly not particularly scholarly) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kawecolony.com.ng/2017/07/analysis-of-julius-caesar.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;articles&lt;/a&gt; that use both without seeming to notice the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the textual sources for this difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4630" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T07:36:51.327" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:36:51.327" Title="What texts are the sources for the difference between &quot;sometime were&quot; and &quot;some time are&quot; in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6745" CreationDate="2018-06-08T15:37:24.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of Shakespeare's plays were printed individually in quarto editions during Shakespeare's lifetime, but &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is one of the plays that was first printed after Shakespeare's death in the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt; of 1623. As a consequence, the First Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is the only authoritative text of the play, and any variations you see are a consequence of decisions by editors. One such decision is to what extent to modernise punctuation and spelling. For the line you cite, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/JC_F1/scene/1.2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt; had the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Men at sometime, are Masters of their Fates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/JC_M/scene/1.2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;modern spelling&quot; edition&lt;/a&gt; of the Internet Shakespeare uses the following spelling and punctuation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Men at some time are masters of their fates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The Internet Shakespeare notes that &quot;at some time&quot; means &quot;sometimes, occasionally&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what you see in the Pelican and Arden editions that you cite are two degrees of modernisation, unless &quot;sometime&quot; in the Pelican edition is a printing error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: The change from &quot;are&quot; to &quot;were&quot; appears to go beyond mere modernization, as orome pointed out in a comment. Arthur Humphreys' edition of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; for the Oxford Shakespeare (1984, not the text included in the single-volume edition of Shakespeare's plays that is also titled &quot;The Oxford Shakespeare) has the following note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;F reads 'at sometime', which &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; defines as '... in former times, formerly', its last example being of 1579. If Shakespeare wrote 'Men at sometime were ...' Cassius, very fittingly, would be lamenting Rome's fall from sturdy independence (see ll. 150-61). But the evidence is not certain enough to warrant emending F's 'are' to 'were' (as John Jowett suggests).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;('F' refers to the First Folio; &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jowett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Jowett&lt;/a&gt; is one of the general editors of the Oxford Shakespeare - both the series of single-play editions and the single-volume edition.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Pelican edition's change to 'were' brings the verb tense in agreement with an older meaning of 'sometime' and slightly changes the meaning of Cassius' words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T18:40:02.377" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T18:40:02.377" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6747" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-08T16:43:56.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T16:43:56.377" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T16:43:56.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6748" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-08T16:43:56.377" Score="0" Body="Questions about the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and his works. His writings have been published in volumes such as 'Écrits' ('Writings') and 'Le Séminaire' ('The Seminar'). Lacan was believed to be a charlatan by Noam Chomsky and several other critics." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-08T23:21:06.237" LastActivityDate="2018-06-08T23:21:06.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6731" CreationDate="2018-06-08T18:09:59.047" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Immediately before this, Dagny had learned (much to her chagrin) that Dick McNamara had inexplicably vanished right before he was supposed to start work on the Rio Norte/John Galt Line. There was no warning, no explanation of why he left, and no indication of where he went. In the aftermath,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was late when [Dagny] left her office. Outside, on the sidewalk at the door of the building, she paused, looking at the streets. She felt suddenly empty of energy, of purpose, of desire, &lt;strong&gt;as if a motor had crackled and stopped&lt;/strong&gt;... she felt the wish to find a moment's joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire. I need it to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one's fuel... She thought: It has taken so much to build this city, it should have so much to offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the statement in bold comes to be very significant in the novel later because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; the story was precipitated by John Galt walking out of the 20th Century Motor Company and promising to stop the motor of the world (which he did by organizing a strike of the most capable members of society, thus bringing about a global economic collapse and the demise of the Looter governments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of what she was looking for, she heard a symphony on the radio that sounded like &quot;a long screech without shape, as of cloth and flesh being torn at random... if music was emotion and emotion came from thought, then this was the scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helplessness, of man's self-abdication.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after that, she sees the scene you describe. So, rather than finding someone else's accomplishments, she finds a tribute to man's self-abdication and irrationality and a condemnation of the most accomplished members of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After seeing these and a couple of other things like it, she reflected on the experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What had she hoped to find? - she thought, walking on. These [i.e. the music, the book, etc.] were the things men lived by, the forms of their spirit, of their culture, of their enjoyment. She had seen nothing else anywhere, not for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stands in stark contrast to Richard Halley's Fourth Concerto, which she listened to when she got home:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a &quot;No&quot; flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no necessity for pain - &lt;strong&gt;why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?&lt;/strong&gt; - we who hold the love and the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced for it, and by whom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the book, music, etc. are in stark contrast to the city's potential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt; It's an illustration of the general cultural decay, an illustration of the fact that people were rejecting that which could offer them joy and life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-09T03:46:18.643" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T03:46:18.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6741" CreationDate="2018-06-09T16:31:04.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;vaultlike door&lt;/em&gt; is a door that has some of the attributes of a vault. It's not that common, but its meaning is clear. This door is presumably vaultlike because it's very heavy (unlike most stall doors in bathrooms), as the sound of peeing only faintly comes through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A yawn of appetite&lt;/em&gt; is a metaphor whose exact meaning is less clear. Presumably, it's &lt;em&gt;appetite&lt;/em&gt; because she really wants the screwdriver, and &lt;em&gt;yawn&lt;/em&gt; because it's completely encompassed by her attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T16:31:04.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2970" CreationDate="2018-06-09T20:11:16.783" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The signs of the profits are the referral to the “Neon” god.  It has created human loneliness and/or “inhumane” treatment of each other.  In the  sake of the name of technology therefore allowing time spent not interacting as social beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sound of Silence is what we’ve become, some 50 years later.  50 more years from now, how will society be?  Will we have Earth left?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4634" LastActivityDate="2018-06-09T20:11:16.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-10T11:12:22.413" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;The character of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A4in%C3%A4m%C3%B6inen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Väinämöinen&lt;/a&gt; is central to the Finnish epic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalevala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Kalevala&lt;/a&gt;. But from reading about him and the stories online, I can't figure out whether he was a god or a mortal man. Some of the myths claim that he played a role in the creation of the world (but as the first man rather than as a god?) Later on he seems to have a more human role, e.g. seeking a bride for himself. It seems that he must have lived for a very long time, but is he immortal or simply long-lived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Väinämöinen: a god, an immortal, a hero, a human, ... ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T03:05:13.307" Title="In the Kalevala, what is Väinämöinen?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;finnish-literature&gt;&lt;the-kalevala&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14436" CreationDate="2018-06-10T16:44:34.893" Score="6" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;For people who are interested in literary theory, there are many introductions and many anthologies. What I am looking for is slightly different: &#xA;an anthology of literary theory that illustrates each theory by applying it to one or more works of literature, with the additional &quot;constraint&quot; that it is the same works that are selected to illustrate each theory.&#xA;I once held such a book in my hands. I think one of the works that was used as an illustrated was Kate Chopin's &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;. One of the other works may have been a Shakespeare play (probably Hamlet).&#xA;Since the book was an anthology, the essays had not been written specifically for this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism&lt;/em&gt; doesn't match my criteria because the essays were not chosen based on the works they discuss.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: An Anthology&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan is also a good anthology but does not match my criteria either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book I am looking for selects two or three works of literature (let's call them A, B and C) and a number of theories. The book was then be built up as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theory 1, e.g. formalism: an essay applying formalist criticism to work A, another essay from the formalist school applying it to work B, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theory 2, e.g. structuralism: a structuralist interpretation of work A, another structuralist interpretation of work B, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned before, I once held such a book in my hands, but searching the web has not helped me find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T10:37:29.793" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T16:24:38.547" Title="Anthology of literary theory that illustrates each theory by applying it to the same works" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16122" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:42:59.490" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia famously advocated a form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textualism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;textualism&lt;/a&gt;, interpreting legal texts as reasonable readers at the time of the law's writing would've understood it. (This is, of course, distinguished from &quot;Original Intent&quot; - comparable to Authorial Intent in literary theory - and &quot;Living Constitution&quot; theorists).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has this had any influence on literary theory or hermeneutics (the method of interpretation of religious texts)? Are there any literary theorists who agree with him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T14:58:11.657" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T15:27:58.763" Title="Has Antonin Scalia's version of textualism influenced literary theory or hermeneutics?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6758" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6759" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" Score="0" Body="Textualism is a method of interpreting legal texts most famously advocated by the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, which emphasizes understanding texts in the way that original readers would've understood the text." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:44:49.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6760" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6761" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" Score="0" Body="Hermaneutics is the theory and methods of how to interpret religious and philosophical texts." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-11T15:45:39.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:45:33.430" Score="10" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a short story from the 60's-70's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was part of an anthology, perhaps from one of the magazines at the time (since it wasn't award winning material). A scientist (or doctor) at a hospital (college?) had an annoying pompous boss who was going to present irrefutable proof of man's descent from apes.  The protagonist, (mainly for revenge) presented counter evidence about the similarities between humans and pigs, internally (since omnivores tend to have similar digestive tracts, and catch the same parasites); developmentally, (pig embryos &amp;amp; fetuses are often used as examples, or were, since they were very similar to human embryos and fetuses.) and even externally, (relatively hairless, sunburn, sweat, even put on 'sunscreen'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also mentioned the old &quot;Long Pork&quot; line of cannibalistic societies (maybe apocryphal). The punch line, I believe, was about the fact that the father of the scientific method was, of course, named &quot;Bacon&quot;. Any help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Aaron Smith" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T09:14:24.537" Title="Short story about a scientist who (half jokingly) presented the theory that humans evolved from pigs, instead of apes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6762" CreationDate="2018-06-11T15:57:25.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like Alan E Nourse' &lt;em&gt;Family Resemblance&lt;/em&gt;. Iirc it appeared in an anthology entitled &lt;em&gt;Tiger By the Tail&lt;/em&gt;. It was first published in &lt;em&gt;Astounding&lt;/em&gt; in April 1953 and later in Groff Conklin's &lt;em&gt;Science Fiction Adventures in Mutation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to various physical similarities between pigs and men, it is also pointed out that they resemble each other psychologically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why are pigs used for conditioning experiments now,  in preference to rats and dogs and cats? &lt;em&gt;Because they react more like man&lt;/em&gt;. The pig stands far above cats and dogs nd rats and many monkey species on the intelligence scale. And what other animal, Dr Hogan, besides man, is so consistently lazy, gluttonous, dirty, selfish, treacherous, or pugnacious?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It finished with a crack about &quot;Roger Bacon&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4640" OwnerDisplayName="Mike Stone" LastEditorUserId="4640" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T09:14:24.537" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T09:14:24.537" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-11T18:43:20.603" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original title of Machiavelli's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourses_on_Livy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discorsi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;em&gt;Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio&lt;/em&gt;, literally (according to Wikipedia) &quot;Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy&quot;. &quot;Decade&quot; here refers to the first ten books of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_Urbe_Condita_Libri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Livy's &lt;em&gt;Ab urbe condita&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. However, the tenth book ends with the end of the war against the Samnites in 292 BC., while the &lt;em&gt;Discorsi&lt;/em&gt; also discuss events and topics from later books. So why does the title specifically mention the first ten books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-07-22T02:02:18.513" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T03:04:03.957" Title="Why did Machiavelli specifically mention Livy's first ten books in the title of the Discorsi?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;niccolo-machiavelli&gt;&lt;discourses-on-livy&gt;&lt;ab-urbe-condita-libri&gt;&lt;titus-livius&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2961" CreationDate="2018-06-12T06:42:42.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want you can interpret the books this way. But I honestly just think that she didn't care about such things. I believe that the way a Quidditch game ends simply serves as her goal to write a compelling story. It's useful when the main character can be super important in something. In the end, it is a book for children (specifically the first few) so it doesn't have to be super complex. I believe her books simply have some flaws that she either didn't care for because they don't hinder the way she can tell a story, or that she didn't realize exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So No. I don't think the inconsistencies in the Harry Potter books are symbolic or allegorical. But that's fine she still wrote some cool books which I enjoyed tremendously in my childhood. But again. if you wanna read or interpret the books this way, you totally can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T15:41:17.510" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:41:17.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2018-06-12T07:18:19.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;any commonly-accepted definitions of literature?&quot; I think so. I believe that a commonly accepted definition of literature is something like a grouping of writings. If your definition of Literature includes something to do with art, then you first have to define art. And dependent on whether or not nonhuman things can make then defines if computer-generated poetry is art and then Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes computer-generated poetry fits in a broad definition of Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think any definition of literature that includes computer-generated works is still useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T07:18:19.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6802" CreationDate="2018-06-12T12:02:01.570" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Poems_by_William_Wordsworth_(1815)_Volume_1.djvu/149&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Female Vagrant&lt;/a&gt;&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But ill they suited me; those journeys dark&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O'er moor and mountain, midnight theft to hatch!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To charm the surly House-dog's faithful bark,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or hang on tip-toe at the lifted latch.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The gloomy lantern, and the &lt;strong&gt;dim blue match&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The black disguise, the warning whistle shrill,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And ear still busy on its nightly watch,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Were not for me, brought up in nothing ill:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Besides, on griefs so fresh my thoughts were brooding still.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this &quot;dim blue match&quot;? A match which, after being struck, glows only blue, without producing the red flame?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T17:55:45.577" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T15:55:12.993" Title="Meaning of &quot;dim blue match&quot; in &quot;The Female Vagrant&quot; by Wordsworth" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6768" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-12T13:14:39.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T13:14:39.827" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T13:14:39.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6769" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-12T13:14:39.827" Score="0" Body="Questions about literature originally written in the Finnish language, regardless where it was published. For literature written in Swedish but published in Finland, use the tag [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T14:20:22.157" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T14:20:22.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6770" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-12T14:24:44.740" Score="5" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;In July 2016, the UK voted to leave the EU in the (in)famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum,_2016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brexit referendum&lt;/a&gt;. The Guardian recently reported that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/28/british-linguaphobia-has-deepened-since-brexit-vote-say-experts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;British 'linguaphobia' has deepened since Brexit vote, say experts&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (28 May 2018). In other words, the foreign language deficit in the UK has gotten worse since the Brexit vote. However, has the outcome of the Brexit referendum also had an impact on sales of foreign language literature, including translations, e.g. from French, Spanish, German etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T11:20:38.917" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T11:20:38.917" Title="Has the Brexit referendum had a negative impact on sales of foreign-language literature in the UK?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5120" CreationDate="2018-06-12T17:10:35.710" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you got it. Jim was terrified to face the truth about himself: that he is a destroyer and that he is evil. It's too ghastly a fact for him to acknowledge. Cheryl touched this nerve and it unraveled his facade and placed a crack in his veneer. That was intolerable for him. Ironically, in hitting her, he actually confirmed her discovery about him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the following quote from Owen Kellogg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What makes you think that Ivy Starnes's purpose is life?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a recurring theme in the book. The producers love and pursue LIFE, while the looters seem to want the opposite: DEATH.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T17:20:59.737" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T17:20:59.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4795" CreationDate="2018-06-12T17:31:59.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eddie knew that he was not a power player of TT and never would be. He was a devoted hired hand, much like the feudal serfs of medieval Europe. He knew he didn't have Dagny's mind nor Jim's bloodline, and thus would never be part of the TT aristocracy. He was the average guy, the ordinary man -- but a good, loyal, and hard worker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is what makes him the feudal serf of TT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T17:31:59.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6773" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8643" CreationDate="2018-06-12T17:43:43.807" Score="4" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Wordsworth's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://eng-poetry.ru/Poem.php?PoemId=173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Idiot Boy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And now she's high upon the down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And she can see a mile of road,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh cruel! &lt;strong&gt;I'm almost three-score&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such night as this was ne'er before,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There's not a single soul abroad.&quot;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;I'm almost three-score&quot;? &quot;I'm almost 60 years old&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would conflict with &quot;boy&quot;, as it is unlikely that she gave birth to him at an advanced age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2018-06-12T18:17:55.880" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T11:48:30.093" Title="Meaning of &quot;I'm almost three-score&quot; in &quot;The Idiot Boy&quot; by Wordsworth" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1453" CreationDate="2018-06-12T21:28:49.460" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have you heard Bob Dylan's &quot;The times they are a-changing?&quot; I think it means just that. As we grow and progress, we must embrace the new great ideas that come with progress as a society instead of blindly sticking to old ways just because we've done them before &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4641" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T21:28:49.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6775" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6776" CreationDate="2018-06-12T23:26:20.747" Score="3" ViewCount="3121" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Kipling's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IF&lt;/a&gt;, there is this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To achieve that, it seems you would have to be so closed off, insulated, and emotionally barricaded that you really couldn't have meaningful relationships at all. Almost necessarily, close friends can hurt you, else they wouldn't be close friends. Is this really what Kipling is advocating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T00:04:44.253" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T23:47:49.700" Title="Explain &quot;If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6775" CreationDate="2018-06-12T23:48:16.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This really depends on how you interpret &quot;harm&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://englicist.com/summary-analysis/poem-if-rudyard-kipling-summary-explanation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;found a site&lt;/a&gt; that interprets the poem a small section at a time. For that line it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We should build ourselves strong enough, mentally and physically, so that neither enemies nor loving friends can hurt us. Moreover, we should develop healthy relationship with everyone around us, and should not allow anyone to harm us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on the physical spectrum that would mean making yourself capable of defending your person from physical harm. So, that seems simple enough. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, where I think it gets more complicated is with the mental/emotional side. There's plenty of room between making oneself an island, barricading others out and being &quot;adult&quot; enough to take criticism without taking it personally. In my interpretation, the latter is what Kipling is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that I struggle with openly listening to others talk about my faults and what I should improve on. It's so much easier to argue or shut them down or push them out of my life. Being an adult, according to Kipling, involves being able to listen to those statements without being hurt by them and having it impact your relationship with the other person. Letting others be honest with you and accepting it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no indication that one has to accept what is said or change oneself - only that you're open to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastActivityDate="2018-06-12T23:48:16.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T00:04:59.107" Score="5" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.ca/Yes-Scientifically-Proven-Ways-Persuasive/dp/1416576142&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive&lt;/em&gt; (2009)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 80. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Oscar Wilde, “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.” A similarly disdainful Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the &lt;strong&gt;hobgoblin&lt;/strong&gt; of little minds.” And finally, Aldous Huxley noted, “The only truly consistent people are dead.” Why is it more likely that these famous authors made these statements when they were young whippersnappers rather than when they were elderly sages, and what could this mean for your attempts to influence others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-phrase-a-foolish-consistency-is-the-hobgoblin-of-little-minds-adored-by-little-statesmen-and-philosophers-and-divines-mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the quote&lt;/a&gt;. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin#Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; doesn't explain the origin of the following signification? It differs from the original that portrays hobgoblins as guileful. Was there some semantic shift?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term &quot;hobgoblin&quot; is used sometimes to mean a superficial object that is a source of (often imagined) fear or trouble. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T10:09:46.970" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T10:09:46.970" Title="Why did Emerson choose 'hobgoblin' in his quote 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ralph-waldo-emerson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6777" CreationDate="2018-06-13T02:32:46.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sense 2 of &quot;Hobgoblin&quot; in my OED is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;fig.&lt;/em&gt; An object which inspires superstitious dread or apprehension; a bogy, bugbear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives citations dating from 1709 to 1841-2, the latter being the very Emerson quotation you ask about.  Emerson (then aged in his late 30's, so hardly a whippersnapper) apparently used the word correctly in a way it had been used for more than a century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T02:32:46.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T05:17:23.110" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;'meter' and 'rhythm' are termed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/58595/difference-between-meter-and-rhythm-in-poetry&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt; and music. So what are their parallels? Their differences? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/1133954723&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Listening to Music&lt;/em&gt; (2013 7 ed, but ∃ 8 ed)&lt;/a&gt; by Yale Prof. &lt;a href=&quot;https://yalemusic.yale.edu/people/craig-wright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Craig Wright&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p. 463] &lt;strong&gt;meter&lt;/strong&gt;: the gathering of beats into regular&#xA;  groups&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p. 465] &lt;strong&gt;rhythm&lt;/strong&gt;: the organization of time in music,&#xA;  dividing up long spans of time into&#xA;  smaller, more easily comprehended units&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0205599095&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Literature&lt;/em&gt; (2007 15 ed, but ∃ 16 ed)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p. 1590] &lt;strong&gt;meter&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. (723–726, 771–775)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[p. 1592:] &lt;strong&gt;rhythm&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in poetry, a pattern of stressed and unstressed sounds; in prose, some sort of recurrence (for example, of a motif) at approximately identical intervals. (717–718, 725)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-13T10:04:22.973" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T10:04:22.973" Title="'meter' vs. 'rhythm': How do their meanings in poetry differ from those in music?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T05:20:08.457" Score="4" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well over 50 years ago I read a short story about an organ in a building (church or music hall?) which I believe had been slated for demolition. Rather than suffer the indignity of destruction at others' hands, the organ began playing itself with such power and force that the vibrations brought the building down upon the organ. Does anyone know the title of this short story and the name of the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4642" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T20:01:22.873" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T20:01:22.873" Title="Short story about a condemned organ" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-13T10:42:50.850" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;The captain of the &lt;em&gt;Hispaniola&lt;/em&gt; in Robert Louis Stevenson's &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; is a man named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Alexander_Smollett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Smollett&lt;/a&gt;. There's also a Scottish writer named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Smollett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tobias Smollett&lt;/a&gt;, and there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LmZaDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA211&amp;amp;lpg=PA211&amp;amp;dq=was+captain+Smollett+in+Treasure+Island+named+after+Tobias+Smollett?&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=pjQZHP8uH9&amp;amp;sig=EdGUplcAARci_kv8OkWSjnzV9oI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj57aeLzc_bAhUL4IMKHbyKCqYQ6AEIVDAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=was%20captain%20Smollett%20in%20Treasure%20Island%20named%20after%20Tobias%20Smollett%3F&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speculation&lt;/a&gt; that the fictional Smollett was named after him. What is the evidence for this, beyond the shared surname?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T10:42:50.850" Title="Was Stevenson's Captain Smollett named after Tobias Smollett?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5103" CreationDate="2018-06-13T16:53:12.827" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dr. Pritchett, like all the looters, had a double standard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although he espoused mushy logic so that the unsuspecting public could be more easily duped, controlled, and herded, he still wanted the producers (like Francisco) to remain exacting, disciplined, and productive. The reason is because he still wanted to eat, go to parties, have running water, electric light, etc. He understood all too well that if the producers and industrialists began to go mushy like the mush he pretended to believe in, he would starve, the lights would go out, and the world would crash down around him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Deep down in places he didn't like to confront, Pritchett knew that there was a direct connection between Francisco's lifestyle and his own quality of life - which is why it frightened and irritated him when he observed Francisco [apparently] being a bum and a playboy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-06-13T16:53:12.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6784" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6786" CreationDate="2018-06-14T07:11:38.243" Score="9" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; was originally published in &quot;The Russian Messenger&quot;. I read that it was a Monthly journal. But how exactly was &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; formatted in its initial release? Was one Chapter released per month with each publication of the Russian Messenger? Or did they release Part One in one journal release? I also don't really know how The Russian Messenger was formatted in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T15:02:22.577" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T07:32:55.253" Title="How was Crime and Punishment originally published?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6784" CreationDate="2018-06-14T12:05:28.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was published during 1866 in the issues 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12. Dostoyevsky was still writing the novel in 1866 during the publication and finished it only in November or December.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;January issue with part one (number III):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DVgfC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DVgfC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;January 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;February issue with part two (it says &quot;Part 1, chapters VIII-XIII&quot;) (number II):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gEHJQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gEHJQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;February 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;April issue with part three (it says &quot;Part 2, chapters I-VI&quot;)  (number VI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvIXR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vvIXR.png&quot; alt=&quot;April 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;June issue with part four, chapters I-IV (it says &quot;Part 2, chapters VII-IX&quot;)  (number VIII)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZC4Fc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZC4Fc.png&quot; alt=&quot;June 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;July issue with part four, chapters V-VI, part five, chapters I-III (it says &quot;Part 2, chapters X-XIII&quot;)  (number XI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LCiPd.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LCiPd.png&quot; alt=&quot;July 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;August issue with part five, chapters IV-V (it says &quot;Part 2, chapters XIV-XV&quot;) (number VIII)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FBBTV.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FBBTV.png&quot; alt=&quot;August 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;November issue with part six, chapters I-VI (it says &quot;Part 3, chapters I-VI&quot;) (number II):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZpmjP.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZpmjP.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;November 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;December issue with part six chapters VII-VIII and epilogue (it says &quot;The ending&quot;) (number IV):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xii7H.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xii7H.png&quot; alt=&quot;December 1866&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="1178" LastEditDate="2018-06-15T07:32:55.253" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T07:32:55.253" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6787" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-14T13:41:03.137" Score="4" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1980s and 1990s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Historicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Historicism&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(cultural_studies)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cultural Materialism&lt;/a&gt; were two related and very influential schools of literary theory. Below are a few influential titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dukeupress.edu/Radical-Tragedy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jonathan Dollimore (first edition, 1984),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (1985),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alternative Shakespeares&lt;/em&gt;, edited by John Drakakis (first edition, 1985),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/The-Subject-of-Tragedy-Routledge-Revivals-Identity-and-Difference-in/Belsey/p/book/9781138015395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Catherine Belsey (1985),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3680145.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen Greenblatt (1983),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520061606/shakespearean-negotiations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen Greenblatt (1989),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture&lt;/em&gt; by Stephen Greenblatt (1990).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all schools of literary theory have studies Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but New Historicism and Cultural Materialism seemed to intensify this interest. Is this impression correct? If yes, why was this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T19:54:25.087" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T11:02:12.300" Title="Why did New Historicism and Cultural Materialism develop such an intense interest in Shakespeare and his contemporaries?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6788" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-14T14:02:36.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T14:02:36.047" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T14:02:36.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6789" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-14T14:02:36.047" Score="0" Body="Questions about The Kalevala, a 19th-century Finnish work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral sources. Use this tag with the [finnish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-14T23:40:21.553" LastActivityDate="2018-06-14T23:40:21.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6404" CreationDate="2018-06-15T18:52:31.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted Heinrich Heine: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sämtliche Werke&lt;/em&gt;. Düsseldorfer Ausgabe&lt;/strong&gt;, in 16 volumes, published by Hoffmann und Campe in the 1990s. (This is the same edition I consulted for &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5280/2191&quot;&gt;this related question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines quoted in the question come from a poem starting with the line &quot;Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt&quot;, i.e. poem VI of &lt;strong&gt;Neuer Frühling&lt;/strong&gt;, which was included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Neue_Gedichte_(1844)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Neue Gedichte&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published by Hoffmann und Campe in 1844. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Düsseldorfer Ausgabe, the poem is on page 14 of volume 2 (&lt;em&gt;Neue Gedichte&lt;/em&gt;). According to the notes and comments (page 350f), the source of the line &quot;wo die Veilchen sprießen&quot; is the second reprint of &lt;em&gt;Reisebilder von H. Heine. Zweiter Theil&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1831 (the first edition was published in 1827). However, the variant with &quot;Blumen&quot; appears to be the authoritative one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T12:31:19.090" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T12:31:19.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6795" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6797" CreationDate="2018-06-15T18:53:07.987" Score="14" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell that its sculptor well those passions read&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do get that it says that the one who made the statue did a really good job of bringing the haughty Pharaoh's emotions to life; that a subordinate clause promptly follows (starting with a 'which') the subject of which are these &quot;passions&quot; again; and that the next line brings the focus back to the sculptor and reverses the power dynamics, describing the sculptor instead as the one who literally plays with these &quot;passions&quot; and in whose hands the preservation of the Pharaoh's memory and legacy solely lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't get is the structure in the last bit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the last line just an extension of the adjective phrase (&quot;stamped on those [..]&quot;) in the second line? If that is indeed the case, shouldn't there be a &quot;by&quot; in middle? &quot;stamped on these lifeless things &lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt; the hand that [...]&quot;? It'll be a case of omission then. But what for? Merely for the sake of brevity? For added effect? Or for more impact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it developing the &quot;sculptor&quot; clause at the beginning further, as in the sculptor consists of &quot;the hand that mocked [...]&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="401" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T16:57:34.520" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T16:57:34.520" Title="Sentence structure of a stanza in &quot;Ozymandias&quot;—how the grammar works?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-15T20:35:34.410" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two lines which disturbs me a little on &lt;em&gt;One's self I sing&lt;/em&gt; from Whitman. It reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One's self I sing, a simple separate person,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that behind democracy is an En-Masse behaviour?&#xA;So, he sings to a person with no face, not to a real person but to an abstract one (indeed an average one). Am I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1630" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user1630" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-15T21:00:47.307" Title="Whitman's idea of democracy" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6795" CreationDate="2018-06-16T02:04:13.650" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;passions&lt;/strong&gt; survive the hand that mocked [the passions] and the heart that fed [the passions].&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That means that the passions (by being impressed on the lifeless statue) outlived both the sculptor's hand and the pharaoh's heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this definition of &lt;em&gt;survive&lt;/em&gt; is confusing you, or if it's just the convoluted syntax in general. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/survive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;survive&lt;/strong&gt;: 1.2 &lt;em&gt;[with object]&lt;/em&gt; Remain alive after the death of (a particular person)&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;‘he was survived by his wife and six children.’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple more comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mock&lt;/em&gt; here means either &lt;em&gt;to mimic&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to mimic derisively&lt;/em&gt;. Which of these meanings did Shelley intend? Or did he deliberately leave it ambiguous? I can't say for sure; he used it with both of these meanings in other poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an implied &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; after &lt;em&gt;fed&lt;/em&gt;, and dropping it is one of the things that makes the grammar confusing. I'm not sure whether dropping this &lt;em&gt;them&lt;/em&gt; is strictly grammatical, but poetic license excuses a lot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T18:31:40.943" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T18:31:40.943" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-16T07:37:45.043" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is known that some of Blake's work was burned by Frederick Tatham. Is there a list of lost works from other surviving or referenced material that we know of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4658" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T07:37:45.043" Title="William Blake's Lost Works?" Tags="&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2970" CreationDate="2018-06-16T20:47:10.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;...The Words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe these lyrics, and the rest of the song hinge on the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, 5:1-31.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the banquet of King Belshazzar of Babylonia, the last pagan Babylonian king to rule over the Jews, all are feasting on golden plates and goblets, the sacred Jewish vessels, when a ghostly hand appears and begins to write on the wall. The King summoned all of his conjurers and diviners, to whom he offered great riches if they could decipher the writings. None could. So Daniel, a lonely Jew exiled in Babylon, was sent for. He had interpreted other signs and portents and it was hoped that he could interpreted the writings on the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daniel cursed the King for his cruelty, his greed, his thoughtlessness, his selfishness and his unkindness. He interprets the prophetic message: Belshazzar's kingdom will be destroyed and it will be given to the Persians and Medes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belshazzar makes good his word and makes Daniel 3rd in power in the kingdom, an honor Daniel does not wish. Later that night Belshazzar is killed and his kingdom is captured by the Persians and Medes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;writing on the wall&quot; has become slang for events have been foretold, things haver been coming for some time with no one paying attention, bad things are about to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Paul Simon personally witnessed every day the inequities of our society where so few have so much and so many have so little. He saw sick people suffer when there existed resources to help everyone. No one wanting war and yet violence existing everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in the song, Paul Simon becomes &quot;Daniel&quot;, the lonely Jew, and Paul curses our society for it's cruelty, it's greed, it's thoughtlessness, It's selfishness and it's unkindness. A society that, despite it's frantic claims, is also a soulless, godless, &quot;pagan&quot; one, whose &quot;Neon God,&quot; is one of commercialism, self aggrandizement, greed and worship of the dollar bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a society of hypocrisy and lies, so strong and loud that it deafens rational thought, quiets compassionate action, silences truthful words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the &quot;words of the prophets&quot; warning of destruction &quot;are written on the Subway walls, and tenement halls,&quot; is, I believe, because these words are not mysterious, not cryptic, need no interpreter or conjurers to divine them, they are so clear, so self-evident that even the most simple, the most common people can understand them. And they have always, in their hearts, knew that that the madness of our self-created society couldn't last forever. It is The People, in fact, who are the ones that have written the words on their own walls, not some God or supernatural presence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul's prophetic dream has, I believe, come true with epidemics of addictions of all kinds, meaningless sex, nomadic marriages, the emptiness of hypocritical religions, endless war, guns and gun violence, abuse of The Weak, new diseases, faithless rulers, a race for escape to fantasy worlds of movie, TV, video games, anything to relieve boredom or gain a moment's instant gratification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see even more reason to fear &quot;the sounds of silence&quot; today with a true demagogue as our &quot;leader,&quot; a man who can not breath without lying. His callousness, his cruelty, his greed, his thoughtlessness, his selfishness and his unkindness his lifelong to pleasure himself at ever turn, no matter what the cost to anyone else, makes me fear as a nation and society, but also all of the other nation's of the worlds also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just my interpretation.   -Pete&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4660" LastActivityDate="2018-06-16T20:47:10.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6811" CreationDate="2018-06-17T04:08:55.937" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like help in identifying a novel based on the following details:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Novel length: &lt;strong&gt;Paperback, ~300 pages&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Language: &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Date read: &lt;strong&gt;Early '90s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Publication of novel: Based on its condition, I'd guess mid/late '80s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Setting: &lt;strong&gt;Post-WWII Africa, presumably '60s or '70s&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Novel cover: The edition I read had a predominantly silver cover, possibly with a lion on it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story Outline&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The opening scene is a British soldier in the protective detail for some foreign dignitary/politician. &lt;strong&gt;This soldier has an artificial leg&lt;/strong&gt; (one of the attackers notices this and humourously thinks &lt;em&gt;'A soldier with a tin leg'&lt;/em&gt;). They are attacked, and use a bright light to dazzle the attackers and successfully repel the attack. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Key Plot: &lt;strong&gt;A small group (maybe 10) British soldiers led by the above soldier are sent to an African nation to help its ruler fight back against a revolution.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The revolutionary group is either known as &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Jato&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, or uses that word as a rallying cry. There is also some association of the word &quot;lions&quot; with the group.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The British leader of that group is at one point captured by the revolutionaries, he is respected by their leader, and is imprisoned in their camp in the jungle.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The British leader escapes from that camp by &lt;strong&gt;triggering a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_explosion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dust explosion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in a grain silo/storage shed, and then having an exhausting return to the capital city.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a parallel storyline about a lady doctor (Western/white) who is working in that country, around the midpoint/second half of the novel she is almost raped by native soldiers, but is saved. I believe she also gets involved in a romantic relationship with said soldier.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;At its conclusion, the revolutionaries have succeeded in taking over the country, i.e. our hero's mission failed&lt;/strong&gt;.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The revolutionary leader allows the British soldiers to depart via plane (implying that while they were on opposing sides, they were professionals doing the job, just as he sees himself as a patriot doing his).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been searching for this novel for years, to no avail. My searches usually get lost in Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO, which is nothing to do with this novel's plot point or use of Jato), or in the word 'lions' which usually leads me to Ken Follett.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would appreciate it if you could help point me towards this novel.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1001" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-06-17T14:06:03.403" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T20:57:57.850" Title="Identify a novel about British soldiers assisting African ruler" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-17T16:21:44.303" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a Judy Blume fan, and I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Fudge?from=Literature.FudgeAMania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; on TV Tropes. I noticed that they listed a lot of common themes and patterns. Are authors aware of these things when they first write their stories, or is it usually done subconsciously, leaving it up to analysts to interpret them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4662" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T14:56:11.663" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T14:56:11.663" Title="Do authors ever think about the literary devices going into their work, including any political allegories?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-06-21T15:59:40.977" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2018-06-18T06:03:59.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That would be my understanding, yes. Either because of wind the match is burning weakly or because a flame is coloured according to what is burning, so there might have been 19th century matches that were dipped in a chemical which produced blueish flame. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T06:03:59.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5579" CreationDate="2018-06-18T19:10:59.863" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This almost certainly has to do with the technology of printing, and the economics of publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are currently many modern editions of Blake's illuminated works, and they contain much detail and many colors.  To the best of my knowledge, the printing technology for mass reproduction of complex color images wasn't readily available:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alois Senefelder, the inventor of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#Lithography_(1796)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lithography&lt;/a&gt;, introduced the subject of colored lithography in his 1818 Vollstaendiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography), where he told of his plans to print using colour and explained the colours he wished to be able to print someday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Senefelder recorded plans for chromolithography, printers in&#xA;other countries, such as France and England, were also trying to find&#xA;a new way to print in colour. Godefroy Engelmann of Mulhouse in France&#xA;was awarded a patent on chromolithography in July 1837.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromolithography#Origins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chromolithography (wiki)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the final Blake illustrations dates are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Book of Job (1823-1826)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress (1824-1827, &lt;em&gt;unfinished&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dante, The Divine Comedy (1825-1827, &lt;em&gt;unfinished&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any process for mass reproduction of detailed, colored images prior to mechanized color lithography would have been extremely labor intensive and expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blake did reproduce and sell his artwork, but he was using an older process known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intaglio_(printmaking)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;intaglio&lt;/em&gt; (etching)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Blake has become most famous for his relief etching, his commercial work largely consisted of intaglio engraving, the standard process of engraving in the 18th century in which the artist incised an image into the copper plate, a complex and laborious process, with plates taking months or years to complete, but as Blake's contemporary, John Boydell, realised, such engraving offered a &amp;quot;missing link with commerce&amp;quot;, enabling artists to connect with a mass audience and became an immensely important activity by the end of the 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although etching did allow Blake to mass produce his art, the output would would have been trivial compared to industrial printing, analogous to a modern printmaker who numbers their runs in the hundreds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blake's poetry would have been interesting to an audience far broader than those who could afford hand made reproductions, or even color lithography, prior to the twentieth century, so there would have been a strong business case for printing the text only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-18T19:10:59.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T03:25:09.957" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;One peculiar thing about the City (in the first two parts of the novel, at least) is that everyone must switch their jobs every once in a while, the job being chosen by a machine based in the person's previous record. The punishment for refusing to change jobs or evading them is being sent to labout on the marshes (as explained by Wan who's had experience with this). As an aside, the mayor seemed to remain the mayor (&lt;em&gt;seemed&lt;/em&gt; to me) while other characters changed jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few questions here: what purpose does this system serve? Is it a part of the Experiment, or something made up by the government? How is it related to the real situation in USSR as it was during Strugatskys' time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T03:46:41.547" Title="What was the point of the job-switching lottery?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;strugatsky-brothers&gt;&lt;the-doomed-city&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T06:22:52.510" Score="2" ViewCount="401" Body="&lt;p&gt;What poetic techniques are used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Palmer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vance Palmer's&lt;/a&gt; poem &quot;The Farmer Remembers the Somme&quot;? I all ready have juxtaposition, personification, repetition and imagery. But i am looking for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will they never fade or pass!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The mud, and the misty figures endlessly coming&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  In file through the foul morass,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And the grey flood-water ripping the reeds and grass,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And the steel wings drumming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hills are bright in the sun:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  There's nothing changed or marred in the well-known places;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  When work for the day is done&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  There's talk, and quiet laughter, and gleams of fun&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  On the old folks' faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have returned to these:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The farm, and the kindly Bush, and the young calves lowing;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  But all that my mind sees&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Is a quaking bog in a mist - stark, snapped trees,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And the dark Somme flowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4664" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T20:52:12.353" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T10:10:22.537" Title="What poetic techniques are used in The Farmer Remembers the Somme?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;vance-palmer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T14:06:20.100" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;We currently have several questions about &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/auhorial-intent&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;auhorial-intent&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;auhorial-intent&lt;/a&gt;, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/608/2191&quot;&gt;How much weight is given to authors' intentions in literary analysis?&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2008/2191&quot;&gt;How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these questions assume that statements by the author about his or her intentions are available. However, for most of the history of literature, I think such statements are not available. (The examples in the other questions are about 20th- or 21st-century literature, though older examples can probably be found elsewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When all an author has left behind are his literary works, and we have no letters, diaries or other sources of contemporary statements about his or her own works, how can a reader ascertain that he or she has identified the author's intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T11:58:03.983" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T11:58:03.983" Title="How can readers ascertain that they have identified the author's intent?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6862" CreationDate="2018-06-19T15:52:06.010" Score="8" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/We_send_the_Wave_to_find_the_Wave_%E2%80%94&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A poem&lt;/a&gt; by Emily Dickinson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We send the Wave to find the Wave—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An Errand so divine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Messenger enamored too,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Forgetting to return,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;We make the wise distinction still&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Soever made in vain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sagest time to dam the sea is when the sea is gone—   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;We make the wise distinction still&quot;? What is &quot;distinction&quot; here? I can't grasp the basic meaning - I don't need a complex interpretation, just the basic meaning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I understand it thus: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We send the wave to find the wave. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, &quot;we make a wave and we are sitting and waiting till it hits another wave and returns&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An errand so divine. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, let it be divine. Maybe by &quot;wave&quot; the author means some spiritual effort, an effort to understand some other person. Hence, a divine errand. It's hazy, but I get the general feeling. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The messenger enamored too. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wave is enamored? It's getting hazier. The wave fell in love with another wave (another person?). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Forgetting to return. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It fell in love and forgot to return. Okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;We make the wise distinction still. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What? Here I crush into a concrete wall. I don't understand this line at all. We sent our wave, it fell in love and forgot to return. But what is &quot;distinction&quot; and how does one &quot;make a distinction&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Soever made in vain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that this relates to &quot;distinction&quot; but that does not help my understanding. &quot;This distinction is always made in vain; there is always no use of this distinction&quot; - but what is &quot;distinction&quot;? Distinguishing two waves between each other? But we did not see our target wave, and the wave we sent got lost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sagest time to dam the sea is when the sea is gone —&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the sea consisted of only two waves. And now that our wave got lost and the first wave was not even seen by us, the sea is gone and we can put a dam on the dry surface.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a plain English explanation of this poem somewhere. I googled but found literary criticism, which does not help. I need at least to grasp the basic meaning.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T12:13:34.803" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T19:49:00.700" Title="Meaning of &quot;We make the wise distinction still, soever made in vain&quot; in a poem by Dickinson" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;emily-dickinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6744" CreationDate="2018-06-19T15:59:42.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wimsatt and Beardsley's essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/fallacy.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Intentional Fallacy&lt;/a&gt; wasn't flogging a dead horse, nor did it bury the concept of authorial intent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most influential statements of intentionalism is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. D. Hirsch's&lt;/a&gt; book &lt;em&gt;Validity in Interpretation&lt;/em&gt; (1967). In an essay entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.denisdutton.com/intentionalism.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Why Intentionalism Won’t Go Away&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Denis Dutton describes Hirsch's stance as follows (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hirsch’s intentionalism stands apart from that of someone like Tolstoy because it is not so much a particular conception of art which motivates him to adopt it as it is a strongly held view of criticism. For Hirsch, unless we have a standard of interpretive correctness, &lt;strong&gt;criticism loses its status as a cognitive discipline&lt;/strong&gt;. Without a notion of the author’s meaning as a guide — almost a regulative ideal, it would seem — &lt;strong&gt;criticism would be unable to decide between competing interpretations of works of literature&lt;/strong&gt; (or art). The result, for Hirsch, would be chaos: anybody’s interpretation as good as anybody else’s. Hirsch does not deny, of course, that works of art may mean different things to critics or to audiences in different historical epochs. This is in fact how it is that works of art can have different significances to people. But &lt;strong&gt;the meaning of a text is always one and the same thing: it is a meaning that the work had for its maker, the artist or writer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hirsch's brand of intentionalism isn't the only one; there is also a weaker form known as &lt;strong&gt;hypothetical intentionalism&lt;/strong&gt;. One representative of this type of intentionalism, Alexander Nehamas, argues that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;interpretation is a matter of attributing an intended meaning to a hypothetical author, distinct from the historical writer. This view allows the interpreter to find meaning even in features of the work that may have been mere accidents on the part of the historical writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00180.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Teaching and Learning Guide for: Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning&lt;/a&gt; by Sherri Irvin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, one can say that intentionalism is not dead but is the subject of theoretical debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T15:59:42.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6810" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-19T18:18:52.257" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have come across this quote from Northrop Frye's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the social judgment against the absurd is closer to the comic norm than the moral judgment against the wicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by it? Can anyone explain it to a non-expert? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4668" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T12:34:22.457" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T23:02:25.257" Title="What is the function of comedy for Frye?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;comedy&gt;&lt;northrop-frye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6800" CreationDate="2018-06-19T20:57:57.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Conflict of Lions&quot; by Terence Strong &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The lion of revolution is coming, insidious and menacing, to the quiet&#xA;  West African republic of Free Guinea. In the hiatus following the&#xA;  Falklands War, a group of hardened SAS troops is sent as a safeguard&#xA;  against rumblings of political discontent against the moderate elected&#xA;  government. It is intended to provide the ideal location for the men&#xA;  to rest after the violent burst of full-blooded warfare in the South&#xA;  Atlantic. And so it does – that is, until a tourist is found dead on&#xA;  the beach. In the remote territory up country, the forces of violence&#xA;  and terror are gathering and it is certain that innocent blood will be&#xA;  spilled. That is when the legendary SAS captain returns. To the only&#xA;  woman he has ever loved. And to a brooding land of fear and unrest,&#xA;  swept by a rising tide of revolutionary fervour and bloodlust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jato appears to be the revolutionary leader, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=N9_3AgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT84&amp;amp;dq=jato%20%22Conflict%20of%20lions%22&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjBkfyXzuDbAhWB0qYKHQjpAsQQ6AEIJjAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=jato%20%22Conflict%20of%20lions%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;excerpt&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then Jato stepped forward... “My people!” he said. And the sound&#xA;  of his voice thrilled her, as it carried firmly across the clearing.&#xA;  “I bring you a message. The Lion has returned to Free Guinea. The Lion&#xA;  of Freedom is here!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-06-19T20:57:57.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6823" CreationDate="2018-06-19T22:02:45.193" Score="7" ViewCount="376" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The poem&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the following poem by Whitman, called Savantism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THITHER, as I look, I see each result and glory retracing itself and &#xA;  nestling close, always obligated; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thither hours, months, years--thither trades, compacts, &#xA;  establishments, even the most minute; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thither every-day life, speech, utensils, politics, persons, estates; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thither we also, I with my leaves and songs, trustful, admirant, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a father, to his father going, takes his children along with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I'm not a native speaker it is quite difficult, but I have understood almost all the other poems. &lt;a href=&quot;http://josh-pphs-blog.blogspot.com/2011/03/savantism.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Going through the web &lt;/a&gt; found that it's not clear what it mean even for native speakers. Of course, there is not necessarily one interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My attempt&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm quite puzzled in this case but in the first line, I suppose he means it's better to set glory apart. Then he enumerates more things but I can't see the relation with savantism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help to understand it? I am not asking for a complete explanation, just some help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1630" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T15:37:37.830" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T03:48:29.453" Title="Savantism by Whitman" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6813" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6814" CreationDate="2018-06-19T22:27:25.577" Score="5" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following quote, attributed to author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herb_Caen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Herb Caen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have a memory like an elephant. I remember every elephant I've ever met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my efforts to identify the source of this quote via Google has come up empty. The search results push me toward quote collections that attribute this quote to him without citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herb_Caen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; does not attribute this quote to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a publication or book citation for this quote? Barring that, an interview or biographical article which provides conversational context for when he made this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4669" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:18:33.720" Title="What is the source of Herb Caen's &quot;I have a memory like an elephant.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6814" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6813" CreationDate="2018-06-19T22:27:25.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is kind of hard to decipher, but this quote appears in the first paragraph of a reprinted article on the SFGate website, titled &lt;strong&gt;Poor Herbert's almanac, April 22&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt; At the bottom of the article, it gives the citation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This column originally appeared in The Chronicle on Oct. 12, 1969.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had seen this article in my initial search, but the first paragraph read like a bunch of quips, so I thought it was just another random collection of quotes. I decided to take a deeper look at it, and discovered it seems to be the source of the original quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;†&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Poor-Herbert-s-almanac-April-22-3495845.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poor Herbert's almanac, April 22&lt;/a&gt; by Herb Caen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4669" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:18:33.720" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:18:33.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6815" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2018-06-20T00:00:03.373" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible Stan is obsessive-compulsive? In the book, King makes it clear how neat Stan is, even referring to him as the smallest adult in Derry. In the bathroom-cleaning scene in the book, the care with which Stan cleans the blood off the wallpaper is deliberately pointed out. When he's thinking to himself about IT in the laundromat, he seems more bothered by the &quot;wrongness&quot; of IT than its blood lust; order is the most important thing to him, and disruption of that order bothers him more than anything. It's also mentioned throughout the adult part of the book that Stan couldn't stand being dirty, and, although I can't remember where this part is, one of the grown-up kids goes so far as to say that maybe Stan decided he would rather be dead than dirty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he is obsessive-compulsive, he would be at higher risk of suicide, and I believe Stan is higher risk in general, because he was ready to kill himself after they got out of the tunnels, when they were cutting their palms. He decides to not slit his wrist at that time, but I believe that if he knew IT were still alive he would have gone through with it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4672" LastEditorUserId="4672" LastEditDate="2018-06-20T00:33:59.370" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T00:33:59.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6816" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11032" CreationDate="2018-06-20T01:09:12.593" Score="6" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Michael Herr's book about the Vietnam War, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispatches_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dispatches&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he describes Operation Pegasus—the relief of the besieged USMC garrison at Khe Sahn in 1968—in the following way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pegasus was almost elegant in its tactics and scope. Stendhal would have loved it (he would have called it &quot;an affair of outposts&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone explain what it was about Stendhal that would have prompted a remark like that: &quot;he would have called it an 'affair of outposts'&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4673" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:42:07.133" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:42:07.133" Title="Stendhal reference in Michael Herr's &quot;Dispatches&quot;" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;stendhal&gt;&lt;michael-herr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1327" CreationDate="2018-06-20T14:35:16.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Analysis of literary texts that is based purely on the text itself and not historical context, the author's biography etcetera is not so much a &quot;section&quot; of literary theory&#xA;but an approach practised by several schools of literary theory. This approach is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;formalism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Wikipedia defines as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a school of literary criticism and literary theory having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text. It is the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_formalism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian formalism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Russia, 1910s to 1930s) included critics such as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov and Roman Jakobson. &#xA;Some émigrés from this (rather loose) group later became members of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_linguistic_circle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prague linguistic circle&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the best known formalist movement is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New Criticism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iep.utm.edu/literary/#H3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary Theory&lt;/a&gt; in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;New Criticism,&quot; so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods, was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. &quot;New Criticism&quot; stressed close reading of the text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept &quot;explication du texte.&quot; As a strategy of reading, &quot;New Criticism&quot; viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;close reading&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (mentioned in a previous answer) comes from this school of literary criticism, &#xA;especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._A._Richards&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I. A. Richards'&lt;/a&gt; book &lt;em&gt;Practical Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (1929)&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Empson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Empson's&lt;/a&gt; book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Types_of_Ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less well-known, perhaps, is the German approach known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werkimmanente_Interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;werkimmanente Interpretation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;Werkimmanent&quot; means &quot;what is intrinsic in the 'work'&quot;.&#xA;This approach emerged in Germany after World War II. One reason is that after the period of National-Socialism, critics wanted to exclude political, social and historical considerations from the study of literature.&#xA;There was probably also a more material reason for this: so many books had disappeared that accessing sources for the study of political, social and historical contexts was simply difficult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of books and articles from these schools of criticism (in addition to those already mentioned) include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Understanding Poetry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a textbook first published in 1938)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleanth Brooks: &lt;em&gt;The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry&lt;/em&gt; (1947)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;René Wellek and Austin Warren: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theory of Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1948, with several later editions; Wellek came for the Prague linguistic circle; standard reference book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wolfgang Kayser: &lt;em&gt;Das sprachliche Kunstwerk. Eine Einführung in die Literaturwissenschaft&lt;/em&gt; (1948; many times reprinted; possibly never translated into English).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;W. K. Wimsatt: &lt;em&gt;The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry&lt;/em&gt; (1954) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Monroe C. Beardsley: &lt;a href=&quot;http://faculty.smu.edu/nschwart/seminar/fallacy.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Intentional Fallacy&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affective_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Affective Fallacy&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T14:35:16.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2018-06-20T20:22:33.717" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it refers to the stoïc connotation of freedom. Freedomnis all about state of mind and has nothing to do with physical constraints. Suppose you are in a room that is unlocked. You are free to think whatever you wish. Now we lock the room. What does it change to your thinking? Nothing at all unless you let the same key lock not only the room but also your attitude towards it. I think personally that this interpretation holds also in view of the ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-20T20:22:33.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6725" CreationDate="2018-06-21T01:22:26.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original Art of War is composed of slightly over 6000 Chinese characters. In translation, the average English version clocks in at 10,000 words, about the length of an in-depth New Yorker magazine article. Differences in various translators book lengths are primarily due to how much supplementary information they provide along with the original text. Some, like Sawyer and Ames provide lengthy introductions and textual notes. Others like Denma and Minford republish the original text but then add extracts from the various historical commentators who have opined on the work over the centuries. Preferred translations, obviously, are subjective, but I think the Ames, Sawyer or Mair versions are good. Minford has the shortest translation (about 7300 words) so is closest to reading it in the original Chinese, but be advised that this makes the text more difficult to comprehend for the modern reader. Just be sure to avoid the translations by Gary Gagliardi and Colin Thorne as they are hacks who clearly don’t understand how to translate Classical Chinese script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4681" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T15:14:37.153" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T15:14:37.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T08:15:44.463" Score="6" ViewCount="4855" Body="&lt;p&gt;Margeret Atwood's &lt;em&gt;Hag-Seed&lt;/em&gt; is a metafictional retelling of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Many elements of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; are clearly recognizable (e.g. Felix is very obviously Prospero), while others have interesting twists (e.g. Felix's daughter is a combination of Miranda and Ariel -- and there are other characters who echo Miranda and Ariel as well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one iconic character seems to be missing. &lt;strong&gt;Where is Caliban?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no clear reference to a Caliban character (as we have with Felix/Prospero, Tony/Antonio, Lonny/Lorenzo...). Nor is there any character who seems to take on Caliban's narrative role (e.g., attempting to undermine Felix, threatening something dear to him) or any of his thematic elements (e.g. being warped and misshapen; being mistreated by Felix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that the book simply isn't focused on that facet of the story (as, indeed, the book is focused on some elements of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; and not others), but the book's very title is &lt;em&gt;Hag-Seed&lt;/em&gt;, a direct reference to Caliban. This seems to suggest that elements of Caliban should be central to the story -- &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- and if so, what and where are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T11:30:09.780" Title="In Margeret Atwood's &quot;Hag-Seed,&quot; where is Caliban?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;margaret-atwood&gt;&lt;hag-seed&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6807" CreationDate="2018-06-21T08:49:13.297" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In many cases, we can infer the author's intent from the way the work is presented. The author may present numerous scenes that show character A in an unflattering light, from which we deduce that she considers A to be a villain. Looking at the way a book was received in its time also gives us a good sense of how the author may have seen it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When modern scholars talk about interpreting a book differently from the author's intent, it is often because we have a particular analysis that sheds a light on the book from an angle unlikely to have been considered by the author - say, a Marxist or a psychoanalytic reading. Or it maybe because we consider each reader's response subtly different, and see no reason to privilege the author's specific interpretation over those ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T08:49:13.297" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6812" CreationDate="2018-06-21T15:34:21.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just for clarity, I believe the intended meaning of &quot;savantism&quot; in the poem title is not related to &quot;Savant Syndrome&quot; or terms such as &quot;idiot savant&quot; and &quot;autistic savant&quot;, concepts that I believe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;emerged in the field of psychology towards the end of Whitman's life&lt;/a&gt;. I think the savantism of the title more likely refers to the cultivation of learning and knowledge, as reflected in th first definition &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordnik.com/words/savant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my interpretation, the poem is about the human endeavor to cultivate knowledge, on the collective and individual scale, and what it says is profound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line hints at how all pieces of knowledge relate to one another, and the &quot;glory&quot; inherent in each act of expanding knowledge (one's own knowledge or humanity's collective knowledge). The second two lines speak of how knowledge and its cultivation underpin all aspects of civilisation - &quot;trades, compacts, establishments&quot;, and fifth line talks of how the same underpins all aspects of everyday life - &quot;speech, utensils, politics, persons, estates&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whitman then connects all this to the field of knowledge that he has personally chosen to devote his life to -- &quot;my leaves and songs&quot;, in other words his poetry (which can be considered a type of knowledge). And his attitude towards the task is &quot;trustful, admirant,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As a father, to his father going, takes his children along with him.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the image of fathers visiting fathers with children in tow, we see Whitman realizing how his lifelong devotion to poetry is merely the pursuit of a type of knowledge by one person among billions over the centuries, and it makes us (me at least) realize that one's own individual endeavors to accumulate that stuff that underpins everthing, and thereby construct one's life, is likewise just one effort among the efforts of billions of the past and future generations. In this way learning and the cultivation of knowledge are like a common link connecting all people through history, and the poem gives a sense of the sacredness of that link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image of fathers visiting fathers also speaks to the process of knowledge being handed down through generations and the collective and human aspects of its accumulation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4375" LastEditorUserId="4375" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T03:48:29.453" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T03:48:29.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-21T15:57:29.453" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Help me ID a book, seen on subway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book in new condition, undersized hardcover, red cloth cover.  No dustjacket in evidence, but probably originally had one. Endpapers clearly had maps on them, probably regional maps, not city maps. Title appeared to be &quot;City Of &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, where the &quot;something&quot; had an S somewhere in the middle.  Title appeared solely on spine.  Title font was blocky, with triangular serifs, similar to the font used in the &quot;Blades In The Dark&quot; logo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Further notes: I saw it today, in Boston.  The book is in English, and appeared to be fiction.  Page count appeared to be somewhere around 200, possible higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4685" LastEditorUserId="4685" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T17:58:36.097" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T15:38:49.840" Title="Identify A Red Book Glimpsed On Subway, &quot;City Of...&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6825" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9685" CreationDate="2018-06-21T17:48:26.353" Score="6" ViewCount="386" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Liu Cixin's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Three-Body Problem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2006/2008),&#xA;the inhabitants of the planet Trisolaris communicate with each other using telepathy and are unable to lie. In Ursula Le Guin's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Left Hand of Darkness&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1969), Genly Ai is capable of &amp;quot;mindspeech&amp;quot; (essentially telepathy) and says it is impossible to lie when using mindspeech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;telepathy&lt;/a&gt; dates from the late 19th century, although similar concepts in other cultures may predate the coinage of the word (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishin-denshin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ishin-denshin&lt;/a&gt;, which is also perceived as a sincere form of communication [*]).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters who don't lie can also be found in fiction. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mahabharataonline.com/stories/mahabharata_character.php?id=59&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yudhisthira&lt;/a&gt;, a character from the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, is said to a unable to lie, but this has nothing to do with telepathy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: &lt;strong&gt;What is the earliest work of literature in which a character (or several) is capable of telepathy and is unable to lie using that form of communication?&lt;/strong&gt; (Silent forms of prayer to a divine or semi-divine being are outside the scope of this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[*] It would probably inaccurate to translate &amp;quot;ishin-denshin&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;telepathy&amp;quot;, though. There is only a vague similarity in that it is an unspoken form of communication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T08:23:07.767" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T08:23:07.767" Title="Earliest work of fiction in which characters using telepathy can't lie" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6826" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:04:46.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T18:04:46.077" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:04:46.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6827" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:04:46.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about a motif, i.e. a recurring element, such as a specific phrase or formulation, a character type, a type of incident or a device, which, through repetition, may contribute to a specific literary aspect, such as theme or mood. Motif should not be confused with &quot;theme&quot; (see the tag [theme]), which is a central idea or message that unifies a work of literature. However, the repetition of a motif can contribute to the identification of a theme." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T13:18:25.803" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T13:18:25.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6828" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:09:12.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T18:09:12.767" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:09:12.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6829" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:09:12.767" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's play 'The Tempest', probably written in 1610–1611. In addition to being the last play that Shakespeare wrote alone, the play is also notable for being the only Shakespeare play that respects the three unities (unity of action, unity of time and unity of place)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T01:06:54.227" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T01:06:54.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6830" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:17:16.360" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T18:17:16.360" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:17:16.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6831" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:17:16.360" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Canadian literary critic and literary theorist Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991). His works of literary criticism include 'Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake' (1947), 'The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance' and 'The Great Code: The Bible and Literature'. His most notable theoretical work is 'Anatomy of Criticism'.  " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T19:30:49.307" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T19:30:49.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6832" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:37:18.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T18:37:18.083" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:37:18.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6833" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:37:18.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about the French author Stendhal (pseudonym of Marie-Henri Beyle, 1783 – 1842) and his works. His best known novels are 'Le Rouge et le Noir' ('The Red and the Black', 1830) and 'La Chartreuse de Parme' ('The Charterhouse of Parma', 1839). Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:29:57.607" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:29:57.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6834" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:44:25.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-21T18:44:25.533" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:44:25.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6835" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:44:25.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French Algerian-born philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930 –  2004). Derrida had a significant influence on the theory and the analysis of literature, for example through the concepts of &quot;deconstruction&quot; (which American literature professors developed into a form of analysis) and &quot;différance&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T11:20:33.040" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T11:20:33.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6764" CreationDate="2018-06-21T18:56:49.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a remnant for Machiavelli's original goal of writing a running commentary of the first ten books in Livy's &lt;em&gt;A Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Several other passages in the book may also be remnants of this original goal, namely those where Machiavelli quotes a sentence from Livy at the start of a chapter, e.g. at the start of Book 2, chapter 2, and Book 2, chapter 23.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Machiavelli was mainly interested in the republic as a form of government, it is not clear why he would focus only on Livy's first ten books, since these books cover Roman history up to 292 BC, while the end of the republic is covered much later (books 117-133).&#xA;The final form of the &lt;em&gt;Discourses on Livy&lt;/em&gt; is not simply a commentary on Livy's work, even though that is Machiavelli's most important source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-06-21T18:56:49.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6846" CreationDate="2018-06-22T04:52:34.327" Score="5" ViewCount="1107" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a claim that Lewis Carroll was on drugs of some sort when he wrote &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; (or that the book is about drug use). Regardless of the truth (or lack thereof) of these claims, what are the origins of these claims? Can they be traced back to any specific individual(s) or time period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T19:52:17.023" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T19:52:17.023" Title="What are the origins of the claim that Lewis Carroll was on drugs (or writing about drugs) when he wrote Alice in Wonderland?" Tags="&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;&lt;alice-in-wonderland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3421" CreationDate="2018-06-22T06:19:12.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...why Night and Time? Of all possible entities (or of all possible names), why those two? ... What can we learn about the Endless from their parentage? What symbolism, if any, does it carry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Mr Gaiman likes Greek myth...&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Night (Gr. Νύξ; Lat. &lt;em&gt;Nox&lt;/em&gt;) is the mother of Sleep/Dream both in Hesiod (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hes.+Th.+212&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theogony&lt;/em&gt;, 213&lt;/a&gt;) and—albeit implicitly—in Homer (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0134%3Abook%3D14%3Acard%3D242&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, XIV, 259&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;...but he's not beholden to it.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's off and Hesiod doesn't give any father for &amp;quot;Sleep and the tribe of Dreams&amp;quot;, just that they were borne by Night along with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;hateful Doom and black &lt;strong&gt;Fate&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Death&lt;/strong&gt;... And again the goddess murky Night, &lt;strong&gt;though she lay with none&lt;/strong&gt;, bare &lt;strong&gt;Blame&lt;/strong&gt; and painful Woe, and the Hesperides who guard the rich, golden apples and the trees bearing fruit beyond glorious Ocean. Also she bore the Destinies and ruthless avenging Fates... Also deadly Night bore Nemesis... and after her, Deceit and Friendship and hateful Age and hard-hearted &lt;strong&gt;Strife&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he changed around some of the siblings and added a father he felt was appropriate. In this kind of cosmology, they couldn't themselves be unbegotten or the product of first-order beings like Earth and Chaos because some form of the Christian G-d and His hierarchy are above and beyond them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T06:19:12.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11115" CreationDate="2018-06-22T13:17:23.297" Score="3" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Elsworth Toohey and Peter Keating were arguing about Cortland and Toohey was trying to force Keating to admit that Howard Roark had designed the whole thing, they had the following exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's worse... what you're doing... it's much worse..&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Than what?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Than what I did to Lucius Heyer.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What did you do to Lucius Heyer?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I killed him.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What are you talking about?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That's why it was better. Because I let him die.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Stop raving.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why do you want to kill Howard?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I don't want to kill him. I want him in jail...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toohey never pressed for details on what he meant by that. What &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; happened is that Peter went to Heyer's house to try to talk him into retiring so that he could be made a partner. Their argument caused Heyer so much stress that he ended up having another stroke and dying. Peter realized that, at some level, he had subconsciously &lt;em&gt;wanted&lt;/em&gt; that to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't Toohey press for details or do anything about that? Granted, under his sympathetic facade Toohey was an uncaring jerk who was just after power, but still... why did he just leave it at that? Was he being an uncaring jerk here, or did he think that Peter was just raving and not take his confession seriously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T13:17:44.040" Title="Why did Ellsworth Toohey ignore Peter Keating's confession?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3025" CreationDate="2018-06-22T13:27:58.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You're overthinking it&lt;/strong&gt;. As the '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough/The_Myth_of_Adonis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;great mother goddess&lt;/a&gt;', Ishtar is literally the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough/Isis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'many-named', the 'thousand-named', the 'myriad-named'&lt;/a&gt; and—while &lt;a href=&quot;https://readcomics.io/images/manga/the-sandman/45/10.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can guess&lt;/a&gt; at why the character Morpheus goaded her into suicide by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3107/1226&quot;&gt;calling her by her lesser names&lt;/a&gt;—the author Gaiman is just taking the occasion to point out her other names and former importance, amid her present squalor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...is [there] a reason that Ishtar insists on that name, as opposed to the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ishtar is her stage name at the strip club.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dancers don't want Johns bringing their personal business and lives into the clubs or with shutting up their coworkers once they catch wind of it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://readcomics.io/images/manga/the-sandman/45/2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She goes by Ishtar these days&lt;/strong&gt; for everyone, including her coworker and roommate&lt;/a&gt;. So she coldly shuts off his nonsense. Gaiman is writing at both the level of gods interacting with one another and the pedestrian life of a stripper amid her Johns. He hits both notes very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why Ishtar and not the others? Eh, &lt;a href=&quot;https://readcomics.io/images/manga/the-sandman/45/8.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'it goes way back...'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T13:27:58.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:17:21.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T15:17:21.063" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T15:17:21.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:17:21.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about Margaret Atwood's novel 'Hag-Seed' (2016), which is a retelling of William Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'. Use this tag with the [margaret-atwood] tag. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T21:21:26.797" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T21:21:26.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:19:56.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T15:19:56.183" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T15:19:56.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-06-22T15:19:56.183" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T21:21:31.620" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T21:21:31.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3165" CreationDate="2018-06-22T16:41:12.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, you already sourced everything so this seems kind of needless, but I'm still under 125 rep... so sure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kleinletters.com/Blog/delirium-speaks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Per this blog post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Mr Gaiman had ideas about how the characters' &lt;em&gt;voices&lt;/em&gt; sounded and Mr Klein was responsible for translating that into lettering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For Delirium&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most unusual was the style used for Delirium. Our idea [&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;] was to make it seem unfocused and constantly varying in pitch and loudness, which I accomplished by making the lettering continually larger and smaller, and in wavy lines... This was fun in small amounts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sandman: Overture&lt;/em&gt; came after hand-lettering comics was dead at DC, so the lettering there is based on fonts Mr Klein created from his former work, except for Delirium. Her bits, he had to do by hand again, scanning and adjusting things in Photoshop, including her speech balloons' shading, which had formerly been someone else's department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kleinletters.com/NeilGaimanLettering.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Per this blog post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Mr Klein fought against using negatives of his work to give Morpheus his black speech balloons. DC's editor Karen Berger wanted it and it happened, but Mr Klein was right that the original comics included various smears and misprints because of the variable quality of the reversed photostats. It's been cleaned up in reprints and he came around to appreciating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.tr/books?id=dcB7DQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA193&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Per this interview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Hanging Out with the Dream King&lt;/em&gt;, which Google Books blocks pages of, the lettering was taken rather seriously with an eye towards immersion and effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were... cases where we needed a particular historical reference, like the Shakespeare issue, the final issue[,] where I did a lot of research to get something that would be an approximation of what Shakespeare's handwriting might have looked like. You do have to keep it appropriate, but sometimes little things like that can really add to the storyline, I think, as far as the style or the font used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life being what it is, we didn't always get the full intended effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...once you've established something for a character, you have to go back to it every time the character reappears. This can be a problem sometimes, because there were some cases where Neil would write a character with a note saying, &amp;quot;Let's do something exotic, like curlicues.&amp;quot; I would say, &amp;quot;Well, that's fine, but how often are we going to see this character, because it's going to take me a lot of time and I don't want to spend an extra hour per page. Is this going to be a regular character?&amp;quot; And he would say, &amp;quot;Oh, don't worry, this is just a one-time appearance.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Mr Gaiman sometimes gamed that system:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, two issues later, the character would be back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For Desire:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...the art to me suggested art nouveau. But I had to do something I could letter consistently without too much difficulty. Real art nouveau lettering is not designed to be hand lettered, so I had to come up with some kind of a compromise that would work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For Destiny &amp;amp; Destruction&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some of the other lettering styles for the Endless included Destiny's, whose speech was rendered in italics, and Destruction's heavy lettering, with heavy black border.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was just meant to give the impression that he spoke loudly, and to differentiate him from the others a little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Delight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...[It] was something Neil suggested. He wanted it to be not as full-blown in its effect. So I tried to come up with something that was half-way between normal lettering and the full-blown Delirium style for Delight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Mathew the Raven:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's what I was going for—you drop a bunch of pick-up sticks on the ground and it spells some letters. That's the effect I was going for. And Mathew's a raven, who has kind of a rough, scratchy voice, so that was part of it. Also, I just felt it gave it an untidy look that matched his character, an untidy approach to life, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the dog Barnabus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...his upper and lower-case style, I just thought, fit his personality for some reason. It's kind of a rounded, maybe slightly childish style that I thought worked for him. He has a typical dog character that suggested that to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Issue #18,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...he wanted to come up with a concept where we wouldn't have the [cats] actually speaking. So we came up with a combination of a thought balloon and a speech balloon, so it would have some aspects of both. We used that in a few other places as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1226" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T16:41:12.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6837" CreationDate="2018-06-22T19:45:36.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coleridge&lt;/a&gt;, for example, the question &quot;Was Carroll on drugs?&quot; does not exist in the &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt;. As a consequence, there is not a single whiff of drugs in either the Wikipedia entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis Carroll&lt;/a&gt; nor the entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google scholar searches yields only the the medical condition called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice in Wonderland syndrome&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice in Wonderland syndrome is a disorienting neuropsychological&#xA;  condition that affects perception. People experience size distortion&#xA;  such as micropsia, macropsia, pelopsia, or teleopsia. Size distortion&#xA;  may occur of other sensory modalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is often associated with migraines, and the use of psychoactive&#xA;  drugs. It can also be the initial symptom of the Epstein–Barr virus&#xA;  (see mononucleosis).&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt; AiWS can be caused by abnormal amounts of&#xA;  electrical activity causing abnormal blood flow in the parts of the&#xA;  brain that process visual perception and texture.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anecdotal reports suggest that the symptoms are common in&#xA;  childhood,&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; with many people growing out of them in their teens. It&#xA;  appears that AiWS is also a common experience at sleep onset,&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/aiwl5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;  has been known to commonly arise due to a lack of sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching Google books in tight date ranges, 1900-1950, 1950-1960, 1960-1970, etc, yields only the above medical condition. The first reference to the question &quot;Was Carroll on drugs?&quot; seems to be the 1993 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/carroll/aiwl5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Opium as a Possible Influence upon the Alice Books&lt;/a&gt;, which seems to be a &quot;blog post&quot;, unpublished at least (and hence not in any of the Wikipedia entries).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not a question in the literature, the question &quot;Was Carroll on drugs?&quot; &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;be&lt;/strong&gt; a question, since it has an answer, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://metro.co.uk/2015/07/04/25-things-you-never-knew-about-alice-in-wonderland-5267597/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we reconcile the fact that &quot;Was Carroll on drugs?&quot; is a question with an answer, but not a question in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hypothesise that whenever &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;reader&lt;/em&gt;, read a surreal text, a few of &lt;em&gt;us&lt;/em&gt; ask the question &quot;is it about drugs, man?&quot; Now we have Google to immediately give the answer. In &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; case, the answer is no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T19:45:36.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6859" CreationDate="2018-06-22T20:57:17.317" Score="7" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the name and author of a late 80s/early 90s fantasy/sci-fi story whose ending loops back to its beginning due to &quot;time damage&quot;. Our hero, at the end, is about to begin the plot all over again, thanks to &quot;time problems&quot;. It is a fat book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flyleaf notes &quot;references&quot; to &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never finished the book, but from the beginning the &quot;time damage&quot; problems are apparent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T22:28:30.410" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T11:49:38.827" Title="The name of a fantasy story whose end loops back to the beginning?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9638" CreationDate="2018-06-22T21:32:31.533" Score="11" ViewCount="1097" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, which is generally believed to be the last plays that Shakesepare wrote alone, Prospero breaks his staff and drowns his book. This has often been read as Shakespeare telling us that he will stop writing plays. (Random online examples: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/03/08/big-magic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Big Magic&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;, March 2010; &lt;a href=&quot;http://anthropoetics.ucla.edu/ap2102/2102vanOort/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Girard’s Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/logan/263306/logan-forbidden-planet-and-the-tempest&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Logan, Forbidden Planet, and The Tempest&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has always seemed a projection of biographically oriented readers who ignored or did know about Shakespeare's collaborative works, both before and after &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. After 1611, Shakespeare co-authored &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry VIII&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Noble_Kinsmen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and possibly the lost &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Cardenio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cardenio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Collaborative play-writing was very normal in Shakespeare's times, as can be seen from the examples of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumont_and_Fletcher&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rowley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Rowley&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dekker_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Dekker&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the origin of the symbolic reading of the breaking of the staff that interprets this act is Shakespeare saying goodbye to play-writing? Who was the first critic or biographer who came up with this interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I consulted the following works in vain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stephen Greenblatt: &lt;em&gt;Will in der Welt. Wie Shakespeare zu Shakespeare wurde&lt;/em&gt;. München: Pantheon, 2015. (German translation of &lt;em&gt;Will in the World&lt;/em&gt;. Greenblatt discusses &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; especially on pages 445-450 and mentions that the play makes the impression that it was a farewell to the theatre.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hans-Dieter Gelfert: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;. 2nd edition. München: C. H. Beck, 2014. (Short introduction to Shakespeare.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frank Günther: &lt;em&gt;Unser Shakespeare. Einblicke in Shakespeares fremmd-verwandte Zeiten&lt;/em&gt;. München: dtv, 2014. (Günther has been working on a translation of all of Shakespeare's plays; doesn't mention the above theory.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hans-Dieter Gelfert: &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare in seiner Zeit&lt;/em&gt;. München: C. H. Beck, 2014. (Doesn't mention the theory at all.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ulrich Suerbaum: &lt;em&gt;Der Shakespeare-Führer&lt;/em&gt;. 2nd edition. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Page 2018 mentions that the theory that Prospero was a kind of self-portrait dates from the 19th century.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bill Bryson: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare wie ich ihn sehe&lt;/em&gt;. München: Goldmann, 2008. (German translation of &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The World as a Stage&lt;/em&gt;. The German translation has no index and I couldn't find any discussion of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; or any of the other romances.) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kurt Kreiler: &lt;em&gt;Der Mann der Shakespeare erfand. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford&lt;/em&gt;. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2009. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxfordian conspiracy theory&lt;/a&gt;, but you never know ...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charlotte Lyne: &lt;em&gt;Alles über Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;. München &amp;amp; Wien: Thiele, 2009. (Page 201: mentions the theory without questioning it; claims that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was Shakespeare's last play.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T06:23:30.950" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T06:23:30.950" Title="Origin of symbolic interpretation of Prospero's breaking of his staff?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3206" CreationDate="2018-06-22T22:47:04.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/y4lPPN_Qcc4?t=36m55s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;As already linked&lt;/a&gt;, Neil Gaiman&amp;mdash;the guy who created the series and created its backstory&amp;mdash;is of the opinion that these guys are complete rubbish. Your rebuttal, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3206/1226&quot;&gt;as far as I can make out&lt;/a&gt;, is essentially &quot;nuh-uh&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, there's &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt; of intellectual firepower and counterexamples to support your denial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This question already has an answer here:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2009/the-author-of-a-literary-work-disagrees-with-critics-about-meaning-whos-right?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;The author of a literary work disagrees with critics about meaning—who's right?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;6 answers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2008/how-much-weight-should-we-give-authors-declarations-of-their-intent-after-the-f&quot;&gt;How much weight should we give authors' declarations of their intent after the fact?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/593/duplicate-questions-about-authorial-intent&quot;&gt;Duplicate questions about authorial intent?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/authorial-intent&quot;&gt;Questions tagged 'Authorial-intent'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in this case, Gaiman's interpretation is completely supported by the story. There's real magic in this universe and these people have access to some of the real stuff, but &lt;strong&gt;they're dilettantes&lt;/strong&gt; and have no real idea what they're doing. They capture the wrong spirit and don't know what to do with it; they are protected by magic talismans they can't keep jaded lovers from stealing; they can't watch or test one another's protection except by continually trying the one or two spells they know over and over and over. They're incompetent know-nothing try-hards at every point we encounter them, and &lt;strong&gt;vastly&lt;/strong&gt; below the scale of Thessaly and other sorcerers that the story takes seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the extent that sure-they-captured-the-wrong-one and sure-he-was-weak-at-the-time, but still-they-captured-one-so-they're-cool can be taken seriously, well, go back and give the full context of Gaiman's quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I point out it's rather hard to talk about a prequel in a story the first episode of which takes place 9 billion years ago and which carries on up to now and which many episodes of which are deep in the past but &lt;em&gt;Sandman&lt;/em&gt; #1 begins with Morpheus Lord of Dreams being captured by a bunch of completely rubbish English sort of Crowleyesque hedge magicians... and he is captured. He is summoned. He is captured. He is dressed for war and captured incredibly easily and we never know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My point is, although we don't know any of their achievements, evidence points that they were real, qualified magicians, not to the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again the evidence points &lt;em&gt;the other way&lt;/em&gt;. There's no great narrative tension or mystery if the Lord of Dreams is captured incredibly easily by the Great Magi Lords of Creation. The irony &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the point and is underscored every time we meet these guys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3218/1226&quot;&gt;Mr Crown was ungenerous&lt;/a&gt;. Crowley &amp;amp; co. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/06/modern-porn-mimics-aleister-crowleys-sex-magick-philosophies/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;weren't charlatans so much as sexual deviants&lt;/a&gt; (/adventurers/etc.) who used showmanship for a patina of respectability and a draw for new recruits. Gaiman engages, shows they were beginning to grok some True Mysteries, but shows that they were at the bottom end of the totem pole as a way of opening up his new series. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making them skillful or wise magicians makes &lt;em&gt;less&lt;/em&gt; sense and opens up plotholes regarding their inability to &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; anything with Morpheus and their unimportance to the rest of the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1226" LastEditorUserId="1226" LastEditDate="2018-06-22T22:56:47.310" LastActivityDate="2018-06-22T22:56:47.310" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8054" CreationDate="2018-06-24T12:50:05.227" Score="8" ViewCount="538" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is &quot;My Heart's in the Highlands&quot; by Robert Burns (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/360/8/24.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.bartleby.com/360/8/24.html&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart’s in&#xA;  the Highlands a-chasing the deer;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chasing the wild deer, and&#xA;  following the roe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The birthplace&#xA;  of valor, the country of worth;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, &#xA;   The hills of the Highlands forever I love.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Farewell to the&#xA;  mountains high covered with snow;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell to the straths and green&#xA;  valleys below;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods; &#xA;   Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart ’s in the&#xA;  Highlands, my heart is not here;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart’s in the Highlands&#xA;  a-chasing the deer;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my question:&#xA;does the author's use of parallelism reinforce the poem's strong&#xA;visual images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book says parallelism only adds to the poem's rhythm and elicits an emotional response from the reader with only such explanation about images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this poem, parallelism does not affect the strong visual images in&#xA;  any way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not? For example, in this excerpt, doesn't it help to produce stronger images by applying the same structure of lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell to the&#xA;  straths and green valleys below;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell to the forests and&#xA;  wild-hanging woods;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring&#xA;  floods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:04:21.067" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:04:21.067" Title="Doesn't Burns' use of parallelism reinforce &quot;My Heart's in the Highlands&quot; visual images?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-burns&gt;&lt;sat-ii-success-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-24T13:57:14.567" Score="3" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the &quot;Address to the Graduating Class&quot; by Faulkner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Years ago, before any of you were born, a wise Frenchman said, “If&#xA;  youth knew; if age could.” We all know what he meant: that when you&#xA;  are young, you have the power to do anything, but you don’t know what&#xA;  to do. Then, when you have got old and experience and observation have&#xA;  taught you answers, you are tired, frightened; you don’t care, you&#xA;  want to be left alone as long as you yourself are safe; you no longer&#xA;  have the capacity or the will to grieve over any wrongs but your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So you young men and women in this room tonight, and in thousands of&#xA;  other rooms like this one about the earth today, have the power to&#xA;  change the world, rid it forever of war and injustice and suffering,&#xA;  provided you know how, know what to do. And so according to the old&#xA;  Frenchman, since you can’t know what to do because you are young, then&#xA;  anyone standing here with a head full of white hair, should be able to&#xA;  tell you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But maybe this one is not as old and wise as his white hairs pretend&#xA;  or claim. Because he can’t give you a glib answer or pattern either.&#xA;  But he can tell you this, because he believes this. What threatens us&#xA;  today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the&#xA;  bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us,&#xA;  which is nothing, since in doing that, it will have robbed itself of&#xA;  its only power over us: which is fear of it, the being afraid of it.&#xA;  Our danger is not that. Our danger is the forces in the world today&#xA;  which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality,&#xA;  his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and&#xA;  bribery—giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and&#xA;  valueless money which he has not worked for; the economies or&#xA;  ideologies or political systems, communist or socialist or democratic,&#xA;  whatever they wish to call themselves, the tyrants and the&#xA;  politicians, American or European or Asiatic, whatever they call&#xA;  themselves, who would reduce man to one obedient mass for their own&#xA;  aggrandizement and power, or because they themselves are baffled and&#xA;  afraid, afraid of, or incapable of, believing in man’s capacity for&#xA;  courage and endurance and sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is what we must resist, if we are to change the world for man’s&#xA;  peace and security. It is not men in the mass who can and will save&#xA;  Man. It is Man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall&#xA;  have the power and the will to choose right from wrong, and so be able&#xA;  to save himself because he is worth saving;—Man, the individual, men&#xA;  and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or&#xA;  bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to&#xA;  choose between justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice&#xA;  and greed, pity and self;—who will believe always not only in the&#xA;  right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but&#xA;  the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and&#xA;  pity and compassion are done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty&#xA;  and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed. If&#xA;  you, not just you in this room tonight, but in all the thousands of&#xA;  other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next&#xA;  week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as individuals, men&#xA;  and women, you will change the earth; in one generation all the&#xA;  Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins and all&#xA;  the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and the simple&#xA;  politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or&#xA;  ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s&#xA;  fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face&#xA;  of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I see mainly two groups of words that can show the author's perspective: &quot;we,&quot; &quot;us&quot; and &quot;you,&quot; &quot;your.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What I thought is that because this speech is motivational and gives life advice, it has the second person point of view. Because you do write a how-to-do-something or what-to-do articles by using this perspective, right?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, my book says the perspective is the first person. Even though I see a lot in the speech was said about &quot;us,&quot; I doubt if it's not more about &quot;you&quot; (since it was intended for the graduates whom the speaker could see and address; hence the word &quot;address&quot; in the title).&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Could you help with what's wrong here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, could here be two perspectives? I saw such a possibility as well though again, my book says otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T19:11:15.290" Title="What is Faulkner's point of view in the &quot;Address to the Graduating Class?&quot;" Tags="&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3094" CreationDate="2018-06-24T15:04:13.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, English language poems (at least ones that aren't in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/accentual-verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;accentual meter&lt;/a&gt;) have feet. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One illustration of this is Masefield's poem &lt;em&gt;Sea Fever&lt;/em&gt;. When he first published it in 1902, the first stanza ran:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later changed the first line to start &quot;I must go down ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? This explanation is pure speculation, but it shows that the meter of English poetry requires more than just knowing where the stressed syllables are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Masefield intended the scansion of his first line to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I | múst dówn | to the séas | agáin, | to the lóne|ly séa | and the ský,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where &quot;I&quot; is an &lt;em&gt;anacrusis&lt;/em&gt;—an extra syllable that comes before the first foot—and &lt;em&gt;must down&lt;/em&gt; is the first of the many spondees in the poem (e.g., &lt;em&gt;tall ship,&#xA;wheel's kick, wind's song, white sail's, grey mist, sea's face, grey dawn&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, readers of English poetry were so used to iambs that most people read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I múst | dówn to | the séas | agáin, | to the lóne|ly séa | and the ský,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a scansion that stresses all the same syllables, but doesn't sound anywhere near as good. So Masefield added &lt;em&gt;go&lt;/em&gt; so that the scansion would be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I múst | go dówn | to the séas | agáin, | to the lóne|ly séa | and the ský,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which isn't as good as his originally intended scansion, but much better than the unintended scansion that most people used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, regardless of whether this is the actual reason that Masefield changed the poem, this is an example of a poem that has two scansions that are quite different even though they stress all the same syllables, showing that the foot is a meaningful concept in English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T15:26:54.687" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T15:26:54.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6525" CreationDate="2018-06-24T17:33:18.110" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;He means they sit completely still, as still as statues. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They sit on logs, so the statues they most resemble are statues of people mounted on horseback (equestrian statues) - the horse being the equivalent of the log. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the ‘torpor’ he describes elsewhere in the para:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With respect to the torpor supposed to follow, or rather (if we were to credit the numerous pictures of Turkish opium-eaters) to accompany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that also. Certainly, opium is classed under the head of narcotics; and some such effect it may produce in the end: but the primary effects of opium are always, and in the highest degree, to excite and stimulate the system: this first stage of its action always lasted with me, during my noviciate, for upwards of eight hours; so that it must be the fault of the opium-eater himself if he does not so time his exhibition of the dose (to speak medically) as that the whole weight of its narcotic influence may descend upon his sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are absurd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But that the reader may judge of the degree in which opium is likely to stupify the faculties of an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating the question illustratively, rather than argumentively) describe the way in which I myself often passed an opium evening in London, during the period between 1804-1812. It will be seen, that at least opium did not move me to seek solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the torpid state of self- involution ascribed to the Turks. I give this account at the risk of being pronounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary: but I regard /that/ little: I must desire my reader to bear in mind, that I was a hard student, and at severe studies for all the rest of my time: and certainly had a right occasionally to relaxations as well as the other people: these, however, I allowed myself but seldom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4700" LastEditorUserId="4700" LastEditDate="2018-06-24T17:40:51.197" LastActivityDate="2018-06-24T17:40:51.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6824" CreationDate="2018-06-25T15:38:49.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been identified as &lt;em&gt;City Of Bastards&lt;/em&gt; by Andrew Shvarts.  -JW&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4685" LastActivityDate="2018-06-25T15:38:49.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6847" CreationDate="2018-06-26T11:49:38.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Delany's book &lt;em&gt;Dhalgren&lt;/em&gt; loops around to the beginning. The first line is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to wound the autumnal city, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the last sentence is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel takes place in Bellona, a city that has been through some catastrophe and been severely damaged. I don't recall the catastrophe being specifically attributed to &lt;em&gt;time damage&lt;/em&gt;, and lots of things other than time have been damaged in the city. However, time was one of the things that was damaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T11:49:38.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5214" CreationDate="2018-06-26T16:25:33.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lorenzo and Jessica arrived at Belmont near the end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=merchantvenice&amp;amp;Act=3&amp;amp;Scene=2&amp;amp;Scope=scene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It is clear from Gratiano's words that he knows who they are (&quot;But who comes here? Lorenzo and his infidel?&quot;); Bassanio also greets Lorenzo by name, whereas Portia merely says that &quot;&lt;em&gt;They&lt;/em&gt; are entirely welcome.&quot; (i.e. not you).&#xA;Jessica speaks exactly seven (contiguous) lines in this scene, namely about Shylock's wish to have Antonio's flesh; due to Portia's follow-up, it is safe to assume that she has heard these words.&#xA;However, there is no further spoken exchange between Jessica and the other characters in this scene, and &lt;strong&gt;nobody mentions her name&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would justify that in the next scene at Belmont (Act 3, scene 4) Portia has already half-forgotten the name of this very new acquaintance.&#xA;Without knowing any other details about the production (its director, the main characters, other aspects), it is hard to say whether this lapse of memory has any additional significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Wikipedia lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_National_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Theatre&lt;/a&gt; productions of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; in 1970 (directed by Jonathan Miller) and 1999 (directed by Trevor Nunn) but none for 1983.&#xA;That does not mean that there was no such production in 1983 but only that it may not have been notable enough to be listed, so additional details may also be hard to find.&#xA;(Or was it a different &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Theater/Theatre&lt;/a&gt;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-06-26T22:42:08.777" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T22:42:08.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6854" CreationDate="2018-06-26T19:11:15.290" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The perspective you are talking about is generally applied to narration, not oratory or addresses.  That said, this seems like it would be &quot;2nd person&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T19:11:15.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6808" CreationDate="2018-06-26T19:28:34.723" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loosely, based on Dickenson's artistic obsession with &quot;eternity&quot;, my thought is:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This poem involves our connection with the eternal (god, heaven, the dear departed.)   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The waves may be people who die, off to the hereafter, whom we hope will return to validate the reality of heaven, and, by extension, God.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The errand (the journey of death) is so divine (literally) that the messenger forgets everything in the face of eternal bliss (enamored) and never returns to validate.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despite that (we make the distinction still), regardless of knowledge (potentially in vain), it does not make sense to cut ourselves off from the feeling of connection to the eternal (dam the sea) so long there is, at least, that feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(It's been a while since I went deep on this poet I consider most significant of all of her contemporaries, but I think this interpretation jibes well with the rest of her extensive work on this subject;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-06-26T19:49:00.700" LastActivityDate="2018-06-26T19:49:00.700" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2018-06-27T03:12:19.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first reference of the Phoenician sailor comes from Socrates' dialogue with Ischomachus in Xenophon's book, Oeconomicus. The dialogue was about orderliness and the Phoenician sailor is referenced as a man who kept his ship in perfect order, with every tool in its place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figure T.S. Eliot was very familiar with classical literature like Xenophon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe he is saying that Order as such has drowned in Modern times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4710" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-06-27T03:41:27.990" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T03:41:27.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6825" CreationDate="2018-06-27T14:47:30.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know what the earliest use of telepathy in a work of fiction is, but I don't think there was much in the way of fiction about whole societies of telepaths (without which the lying thing doesn't come into play, since if you're the only telepath in the room, you can still lie) until John W. Campbell became an influential figure in science fiction.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Campbell was fascinated by the potential of psychic ability, and encouraged all writers contributing to &lt;em&gt;Astounding Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt; to send him stories about people with such gifts, and explore the implications of that. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest story I know of dealing with telepathic mutants is Olaf Stapledon's &lt;em&gt;Odd John&lt;/em&gt; (1935), but Stapledon didn't really develop the telepathy idea much, having other concerns.  I don't think he really got into whether telepaths could deceive each other.  (Been a while since I read it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once the idea hopped the puddle to the SF pulps, it got more systematic. A.E. Van Vogt came out with &lt;em&gt;Slan&lt;/em&gt; (1946), which deals with a race of scientifically created telepathic supermen, feared and hated by normals (Stan Lee never invented anything), but the protagonist spends most of his time away from fellow Slans, learning to use his superior intelligence, as well as his telepathy.  But there is a love interest, a fellow Slan, and there is that idea that there is this special communion between them, the sharing of thoughts and feelings.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alfred Bester published &lt;em&gt;The Demolished Man&lt;/em&gt; in 1952, and that might be the best book ever written about telepaths as a group, what it would be like to be able to communicate without speaking.  Very inventive and idealistic, but the antagonist is a non-telepath who wants to hide his crime from the psi-cops by means of using what we'd now call an 'ear-worm'--a TV theme song written by a girlfriend of his.  He just thinks it to himself, and it blocks telepaths from accessing his deeper thoughts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, telepaths don't even try to lie to each other in that book--there's enormous trust and fellow feeling between them--the hero can't hide his feelings from a friend, a fellow telepath who is in love with him--he loves her back, but not in the same way. Bester's point is that we'd be better off if we really could see into each others' minds, get rid of all the secrets.  But in some ways, we end up identifying more with the individualist murderer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there was &lt;em&gt;Mutant&lt;/em&gt; (1953), by Henry Kuttner (under a pseudonym he shared with his wife, C.L. Moore, but I think this one was mainly his).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a series of connected short stories about how telepathic mutants had to fight for survival, and eventually created a world where they are the norm--they hear each others' thoughts all the time.  Again, they never try to lie to each other, and it's implied that would be futile.  Now and then, they have to fly high up in gliders, to get away from the surface noise, relax.  But they still have to return to the interconnected-ness of the hive mind eventually, or they'll perish of loneliness.  (Most of these stories can be read as metaphors for ordinary social interaction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now most people have seen the movie &lt;em&gt;Village of the Damned&lt;/em&gt; (1960, based on John Wyndham's &lt;em&gt;The Midwich Cuckoos&lt;/em&gt; (1957).  The scary little blonde kids with the glowing eyes.  Very popular.  But they're all of one mind about everything, so they wouldn't try to lie to each other.  The character played by George Sanders in the movie can briefly block them out by thinking very intently about a brick wall.  (Would this work?  How would I know?)  But this is just a variation on the jingle in Bester's book, which Wyndham had quite certainly read.  The idea of a society of telepathic people got darker as time went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Octavia Butler wrote the best novel ever about telepathy when she came up with &lt;em&gt;Mind of My Mind&lt;/em&gt; (1977) a prequel to a book she'd published a year earlier, about a future world where telepaths/telekinetics battle with each other and with animalistic creatures descended from humans mutated by an alien virus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, telepaths are portrayed as being part of a collective--Butler calls it 'The Pattern' and they can't lie to each other with their thoughts.  They are very dangerous to each other, however, because their gift tends to make them very unstable, if not outright psychotic--so they enter each others' minds cautiously, until the heroine of the book finds a way to bring them all together.  The antagonist there is the creator of them all, a very early mutation, who isn't telepathic himself, but can psychically feed on hs children (who he's created by selective breeding over millennia), taking over their bodies, and learning everything they know in the process.  He can be deceived, but not for very long.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I don't know who first came up with the idea that telepaths could block each other out, create psychic shields.  But my take is that for the most part, telepaths in science fiction have been portrayed as not wanting to lie to each other, wanting a greater sense of sharing, of community. And perhaps a diminished sense of individuality, but Butler to some extent questioned that.  Her telepaths are very competitive, and it's much less positive than in earlier Campbell-influenced takes on the idea.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are so many science fiction stories about telepaths, you could read for a year, and not scratch the surface.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4711" LastActivityDate="2018-06-27T14:47:30.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6867" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-28T08:55:26.383" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.badreligion.com/albums/13/The_Process_Of_Belief&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;You Don't Belong&quot; by Bad Religion&lt;/a&gt; obviously references the SoCal punk scene they were a part of. In it, a number of people are mentioned by name.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Missy was a teen blue video star,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tom took his life in his mother's car,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Milo went to college but you knew about that,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Todney played our records,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jimmy&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; started riots,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Laurie was always quiet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  she was battling depression  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack wore a skirt but he knew how to scrap,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Billy went to county on a class one possession,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wendy went to school while her daddy shot smack,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eugene kept a list,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mugger was security,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mary she kept her purity,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  we were all in it together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—&quot;You Don't Belong&quot; by Bad Religion, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.badreligion.com/albums/13/The_Process_Of_Belief&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyrics from their homepage&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are they?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are obvious, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Goes_to_College&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milo who went to college&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_on_the_ROQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rodney who played their records&lt;/a&gt;, but is it known who the others are?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has the band ever talked about it in interviews?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw some speculation on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thebrpage.net/discography/song.asp?songName=You+Don%27t+Belong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a discussion board&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Missy &amp;mdash; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tom &amp;mdash; Tom Clement, known from &quot;I Give You Nothing&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Milo &amp;mdash; Milo Aukerman, from the Descendents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rodney &amp;mdash; Rodney on the ROQ&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jimmy&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;&lt;/sup&gt; &amp;mdash; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laurie &amp;mdash; possibly Laurie Anderson&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jack &amp;mdash; Jack Grisham, from TSOL&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Billy &amp;mdash; Brett Gurewitz himself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wendy &amp;mdash; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eugene &amp;mdash; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mugger &amp;mdash; a roadie for Black Flag&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mary &amp;mdash; ?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;dagger;: The lyrics on their official homepage have him as Jimmy, but a number of other sources have him as GG, referring to either Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn or New York punk icon GG Allin.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/q/2169/137&quot;&gt;I've asked this question over on the Music Fans Stack&lt;/a&gt;, but didn't get a satisfactory answer. So I'm giving it a shot over here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T07:22:29.567" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T07:22:29.567" Title="Who are the people referenced in “You Don't Belong” by Bad Religion?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6868" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-28T13:04:22.283" Score="7" ViewCount="1246" Body="&lt;p&gt;I study French literature and I want to carry out a research in comparative literature which compares two books written by soldiers of the World War (one of them by a French soldier and the other one by a German soldier).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My problem is that I cannot find a good method for this subject. Books concerning comparative literature, talk about the influence of one book on another book (the theory of intertextuality), but my research is not about the influence, and I want to compare two different points of view about a phenomenon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a master thesis and I have enough space for comparing many aspects such as characters,Narrative point of view,theme, etc. I want to know the method/theory with which I should do that. The main problem about which I want to talk is to &lt;strong&gt;show how the soldiers of the two fronts thought about the war(WWI)&lt;/strong&gt;. I hope that my question is clear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11853" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T11:48:34.523" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T14:27:26.403" Title="Method for comparing two works of literature" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;adaptation-comparison&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6870" CreationDate="2018-06-28T13:43:17.650" Score="6" ViewCount="1026" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember part of a story, maybe a short story.  In it, people are handicapped in different ways depending on what they're good at.  People that are really strong have weights attached to them.  People that are really smart have devices that interrupt their train of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this was done to make everyone on the same level, to make life fair and equal for everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I read this back in high school, so around 2004.  I don't think it was a new short story at that point though.  It was in English and I read it in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A part of the story that I specifically remember was a brother and sister talking.  Her brother had a large weight attached to him, and she talked about removing some of the weight, but there were severe punishments for those that mess with their &quot;handicap&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="16" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T14:02:02.960" Title="Short story where people are handicapped in the name of fairness and equality" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6869" CreationDate="2018-06-28T14:02:02.960" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Harrison Bergeron&amp;quot;, by Kurt Vonnegut&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoth &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the year 2081, the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the Constitution dictate that all Americans are fully equal and not allowed to be smarter, better-looking, or more physically able than anyone else. The Handicapper General's agents enforce the equality laws, forcing citizens to wear &amp;quot;handicaps&amp;quot;: masks for those who are too beautiful, loud radios that disrupt thoughts inside the ears of intelligent people, and heavy weights for the strong or athletic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One April, 14-year-old Harrison Bergeron, an intelligent and athletic teenager, is taken away from his parents, George and Hazel Bergeron, by the government. They are barely aware of the tragedy, as Hazel has &amp;quot;average&amp;quot; intelligence (a euphemism for stupidity), and George has a handicap radio installed by the government to regulate his above-average intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also mention the scene with the siblings (although it's actually husband and wife) you mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noticing his exhaustion, Hazel urges George to lie down and rest his &amp;quot;handicap bag&amp;quot;, 47 pounds (21 kg) of weights locked around George's neck. She suggests taking a few of the weights out of the bag, but George resists, aware of the illegality of such an action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was first published in 1961, so certainly old enough to match. It's in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by doing a Google search for &lt;code&gt;handicap for equality short story&lt;/code&gt;, and finding the Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-06-28T14:02:02.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6872" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-29T04:39:09.870" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;During a meeting with some governmental officials that precipitated him joining the Strike, Hank Rearden demanded to know why they thought that their policies would work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Who will improve [conditions]?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Mr. Rearden, people don't just stand still!&amp;quot; cried Holloway. &amp;quot;They do things, they grow, they move forward!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to the discussion of Directive 10-289, which mandated that everything remain as it was. After learning that labor leader Fred Kinnan would have substantial power over the structure of the economy, Jim Taggart commented &amp;quot;I don't care. It doesn't matter. &lt;strong&gt;He'll have to hold things still. Everything will have to remain as it is.&lt;/strong&gt; Just as it is. Nobody will be permitted to change anything.&amp;quot; When Fred Kinnan asked how things were supposed to improve if everything was supposed to stay the same, Wesley Mouch's response basically boiled down to &amp;quot;don't be so cynical.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the sudden change here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T00:59:45.450" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T00:59:45.450" Title="Why did Tinky Holloway seem to contradict the principle behind Directive 10-289?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7969" CreationDate="2018-06-29T04:50:50.360" Score="8" ViewCount="1250" Body="&lt;p&gt;Francisco d'Anconia at one point claims that &quot;There are seven million people in the city of New York, at present.&quot; According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_New_York_City&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the 1930 population was 6.9 million, the 1940 population was 7.4 million, and the 1950 population was 7.9 million.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, traffic lights are still mechanical, as one of them &quot;screeched&quot; while changing. It's seen as very odd - practically unheard-of - for a woman to run a major corporation. These, along with the widespread use of radio and various other facts, seems to suggest the lifestyle of people living in the 1950s (right around the time of the novel's 1957 publication),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, is &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; an &quot;alternative history&quot; of sorts, or is it set in the future (or near future)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T06:38:05.973" Title="Was Atlas Shrugged set in the future or the present?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2018-06-29T15:07:01.393" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a quote from Xenophon, something said by the pilot's mate on a perfectly ordered Phoenician trading ship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There is no time left, you know,” he added, “when God makes a tempest in the great deep, to set about searching for what you want, or to be giving out anything which is not snug and shipshape in its place. God threatens and chastises sluggards.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/2015*/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/x/xenophon/x5oe/complete.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mate knows perfectly how the ship is organized and states that he is ready for anything that might come his way. The ship itself belongs to a rich Phoenician merchant and carries &amp;quot;an endless quantity of goods and gear of all sorts&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the association with Xenophon's &lt;em&gt;The Ship&lt;/em&gt; provides one possible way to read the two lines by Eliot. There is a perfectly organized ship with an impeccably organized mate - the Phoenician Sailor - and it has drowned. This is bitter irony (the impeccable mate failed after all), and it is the &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; of the poem who has supposedly suffered this fate.&#xA;And since the Phoenician ship is the ship of a rich man, filled with endless goods, one might think that the pearls instead of eyes is a figurative expression of being blinded by concern for wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mate of the ship also talks about God making a &lt;em&gt;tempest&lt;/em&gt;. And Eliot's second line is a direct quote of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; by Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full fathom five thy father lies; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Of his bones are coral made; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those are pearls that were his eyes; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel%27s_Song&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot manages to establish a direct link between Xenophon and Shakespeare: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is talk about being ready for a tempest by a Phoenician in Xenophon's &lt;em&gt;The Ship&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is singing about a shipwreck and pearl-eyes in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and both are conjoined in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, where it is the Phoenician Sailor who has pearls for eyes because he drowned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might see this as a powerful way of speaking of the modern &lt;em&gt;Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; by associating the Classics and the Renaissance (&amp;quot;rebirth of the classics&amp;quot;) to write of contemporary distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4717" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T02:30:48.437" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:30:48.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6875" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-29T20:56:41.880" Score="5" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of Dahlmann's contact with the &quot;enormous cat&quot; in this short story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that &#xA;  the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated  by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4719" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T17:14:19.700" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T17:14:19.700" Title="In &quot;The South&quot; by Jorge Luis Borges, what is the significance of the cat?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6903" CreationDate="2018-06-29T21:00:26.460" Score="5" ViewCount="778" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Time of Contempt&lt;/em&gt;, when Geralt fights Vilgefortz on the isle of Thanedd, it is implied that Vilgefortz is not human, or at least not &lt;em&gt;merely&lt;/em&gt; human (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few weeks later, having been healed by the dryads and the waters of Brokilon, Geralt wondered what mistakes he had made during the fight. And came to the conclusion that he hadn't made any. His only mistake was made before the fight. He ought to have fled before it even began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sorcerer was fast, his staff flickering in his hands like lightning. Geralt's astonishment was even greater when, during a parry, the staff and sword clanged metallically. But there was no time for astonishment. Vilgefortz attacked, and the Witcher had to contort himself using body-swerves and pirouettes. He was afraid to parry. The bloody staff was made of iron; and magical to boot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four times, he found himself in a position from which he was able to counterattack and deliver a blow. Four times, he struck. To the temple, to the neck, under the arm, to the thigh. Each blow ought to have been fatal. But each one was parried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No human could have parried blows like that.&lt;/strong&gt; Geralt slowly began to understand. But it was already too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as far as I know this is never explained, neither in &lt;em&gt;The Time of Contempt&lt;/em&gt; nor in any of the following books in the series. What is Vilgefortz, if not merely an extremely skilled human?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4582" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T21:44:36.440" Title="Is Vilgefortz more than human?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5566" CreationDate="2018-06-30T10:16:48.370" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Hardy is not being anti-Semitic here.  The passage you quote is a satire against the praying man: it's about how we rationalize why prayer doesn't work.  The man's prayers weren't answered, so he assumes it's because his pants were tailored by a Jew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4724" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T10:16:48.370" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6659" CreationDate="2018-07-01T19:27:18.147" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Now that I've finished reading an annotated translation of the &lt;em&gt;Discourses on Livy&lt;/em&gt; (translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella. Oxford University Press, 2008), I can answer my own question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Livy's &lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt; is Machiavelli's main source of citations and references, so there is a benefit in reading that book. However, &lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt; is a long work and it is by no means Machiavelli's only source: the author also cites many other Roman and Greek authors and makes many references to the more recent history of Italy (mainly 1440 - 1510). So in order to be fully prepared for reading the &lt;em&gt;Discorsi&lt;/em&gt;, one would also need to be familiar with the following works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_(Tacitus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Annals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histories_(Tacitus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Tacitus;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Histories_(Polybius)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Polybius;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Plutarch (also known as &lt;em&gt;Parallel Lives&lt;/em&gt; or simply &lt;em&gt;Plutarch's Lives&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;several of Xenophon's works, especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyropaedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cyropaedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (also cited in &lt;em&gt;The Prince&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiero_(Xenophon)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hiero&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which is otherwise considered a minor work);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_historica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bibliotheca historica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Diodorus Siculus;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a book about the history of Florence, e.g. Machiavelli's own &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_Histories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Florentine Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (written after the &lt;em&gt;Discorsi&lt;/em&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a book about the history of Italy, e.g. Francesco Guicciardini's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Guicciardini#The_History_of_Italy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of Italy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a lot to read, and Machiavelli often doesn't mention what the source of a specific statement of event is. This means that an annotated edition is very valuable for anyone who is not an expert in Ancient historiography and Italian history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worthwhile, though not necessary, to read a modern history of the Roman republic, in order to contrast a modern account of Roman history with the version that Machiavelli was familiar with. Machiavelli and the authors he cited did not have access to the archaelogical data and critically edited historical sources that present-day historians have, and this led to an overreliance on oral and written traditions. If Machiavelli had had access to a modern account of the history of Roman republic, it is unlikely that he would have glorified many of the historical figures he mentions in the &lt;em&gt;Discorsi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-01T19:27:18.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6890" CreationDate="2018-07-01T20:43:13.440" Score="4" ViewCount="260" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bold part of this passage from &lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Affair at Styles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Howard shook hands with a hearty, almost painful, grip. I had an&#xA;  impression of very blue eyes in a sunburnt face. She was a&#xA;  pleasant-looking woman of about forty, with a deep voice, almost manly&#xA;  in its stentorian tones, and had a large sensible square body, with&#xA;  feet to match—these last encased in good thick boots. &lt;strong&gt;Her&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;conversation, I soon found, was couched in the telegraphic style.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4729" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T14:48:56.393" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T14:48:56.393" Title="What does Agatha Christie mean with &quot;in a telegraphic style&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8377" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:24:41.320" Score="9" ViewCount="3479" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;On The Face of It&quot; by Susan Hill (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/levt106.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 5-10 minute read&lt;/a&gt;) is part of my curriculum, and I'm genuinely confused as to why the author decided to kill Mr Lamb at the end. The entire story is about optimism reigning over pessimism... but then the main character falls off a ladder and dies, while thinking that he's lonely and Derry would never come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be asking for too much, but it just doesn't make literary sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3007" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-16T09:59:31.543" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T09:59:31.543" Title="In &quot;On The Face of It&quot; by Susan Hill, why did the author decide to kill Mr. Lamb at the end of the story?" Tags="&lt;susan-hill&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6886" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6887" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Susan Hill, the English author. Use with the relevant work tags as appropriate." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T12:41:48.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6888" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6889" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1975 play by English author Susan Hill. Use with the [susan-hill] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T12:48:08.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6882" CreationDate="2018-07-03T16:06:27.307" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;When people actually sent telegraphs, they were charged at so much per word. Therefore a prudent correspondent would pare the words down to the minimum necessary to communicate information.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style#Example&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_style#Example&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Telegram style, telegraph style, telegraphic style or telegraphese[1] is a clipped way of writing that attempts to abbreviate words and pack as much information into the smallest possible number of words or characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miss Howard's speech exhibits this characteristic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Weeds grow like house afire. Can't keep even with 'em. Shall press&#xA;  you in. Better be careful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might otherwise have been expressed as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The weeds are growing like a house on fire, I can't keep even with&#xA;  them. I shall pressgang you into helping me, so you had better be&#xA;  careful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T16:06:27.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6875" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:24:10.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every time I read the story I find new meaning, and I suspect I will always feel as thought I am missing more than I am recognizing &lt;em&gt;(the magic of Borges!)&lt;/em&gt;   Without going into it too deeply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perception is a major factor in the story.  The imaginary line of the Rividavia that marks the South. Dahlmann's perception of himself as two people, one travelling across the country, the other trapped in a sanitarium.  (It's unclear which Dahlmann is the actual--the journey to the South may be an hallucination--but the journey is real, regardless.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, the cat's reality is distinct from the man's, in the eternal present as opposed to trapped by awareness of past and future.  The conceptual divide between man and magical beast is both imaginary and real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cat is content in the moment, and not driven to seek redemption in the way Dahlmann does.  For Dahlmann, caught up in the illusion of past and future, his quest reveals itself to be a trap.  Perhaps, had Dahlmann been content in the present, his life would not be unraveling. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the same token, at the very end of the story, Dahlmann is almost entirelyin the present.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Firmly clutching his knife, which he perhaps would not know how to wield, Dahlmann went out into the plain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining question about the future (will he know how to wield the knife?) will be answered presently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dahlmann could be understood to finally have embraced his animal nature, reduced to the primal struggle for survival.  In the impending, ultimate moment, Dahlmann's identity will no longer be split between past, present and future selves: he will be one with himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that Dahlman's physical brush with the cat's imaginary world, distinct from the non-physical imaginary worlds of books which had heretofore been his life,  awakened this potential in him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-07-11T19:17:09.657" LastActivityDate="2018-07-11T19:17:09.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-02T00:47:07.270" Score="79" ViewCount="5220" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Peanuts, Snoopy sleeps and does other activities on top of his doghouse. Since the doghouse has a pointy roof, shouldn't he fall down? Why doesn't the below happen every time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/584cz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/584cz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Snoopy rolling off dog-house&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason provided, in the comic or any extratextual material, as to why he is able to do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" OwnerDisplayName="TheAsh" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-07T22:04:23.807" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T14:08:02.883" Title="Snoopy can balance on an edge atop his doghouse. Is any reason given for this?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;peanuts&gt;&lt;charles-m-schulz&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6892" CreationDate="2018-07-02T00:47:07.270" Score="152" Body="&lt;h2&gt;His brain sends a message to his ears, which lock him to the top of the doghouse.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Schulz seems to have addressed this question only once, in the 25th anniversary book &quot;The Peanuts Jubilee&quot;. I haven't found this anywhere online (including the Peanuts Wikia) so I thought I'd upload it and share it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The more Snoopy moved into his life of fantasy, the more important it became for his doghouse to remain in side view. You simply cannot have a dog doing and thinking the things that Snoopy does on a realistic doghouse. The image is much more acceptable when the doghouse is drawn only from the side. When necessary, it almost loses its identity completely. Snoopy's typewriter could never balance on the peak the way it does and, of course, Snoopy himself is somewhat of a mystery when one examines his sleeping pose closely. I once inquired of a veterinarian how birds stay on tree limbs when they fall asleep. He told me that their claws receive a message from their brain after they have fallen asleep, which tightens a certain muscle, keeping them from tumbling off the branch. He said a similar thing occurs to horses, allowing them to sleep while standing. Humans do not have this ability. When I am asked how Snoopy remains on top of his doghouse after falling asleep, I am now able to say that his brain sends a message to his ears, which lock him to the top of his doghouse.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt; Sources &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lzTg7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezatL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Update:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/peanuts/comments/8virs7/theres_a_canon_reason_how_snoopy_stays_balanced/e1oy1jv/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A commenter on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that Charles Schulz references this in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1963/04/29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;April 29, 1963 strip&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dzezd.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Dzezd.gif&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" OwnerDisplayName="TheAsh" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T14:08:02.883" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T14:08:02.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6895" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6896" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" Score="0" Body="For the &quot;Peanuts&quot; comic strip series, created, written, and drawn by Charles M. Schulz. Use with the [comics] and [charles-m-schulz] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T17:45:05.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6897" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:48:33.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-03T17:48:33.023" LastActivityDate="2018-07-03T17:48:33.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6898" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-03T17:48:33.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American works of American cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) or his life as a writer. He is most known for his long-running &quot;Peanuts&quot; comic strip. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:20:45.250" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:20:45.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2018-07-04T22:44:42.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are willing to believe that the poem is an allegory of Coleridge's seven days of creation / epochs of the Earth (as described in notebook entries circa 1818/1819 and a more extensive entry dated 27 May 1828 anticipating a Magnum Opus of his own), especially in light of Coleridge appending a long quote from Thomas Burnet as an epigram to the 1817 Sibylline Leaves publication of Rime, then the line can be read as a metaphor.  Thomas Burnet, in his &quot;Sacred Theory of the Earth&quot; (likely read by Coleridge in 1796 and mentioned in an ambitious yet rare early notebook entry in the same year), compares planet Earth to a ship in the sea of space.  Moreover, the generally shared view between Isaac Newton and Burnet as evinced by a letter from the former to the latter, was that the landscape formed through &quot;ye breaking out of vapours from below before the earth was well hardened, the setting and shrinking of ye whole globe after ye upper regions or surface began to be hard&quot;.  That is to say, the water was everywhere, but in vapour form and thus impotable, and that planet earth did shrink.  Burnet then refers to the sea as a kind of &quot;slime&quot; during this evolutionary process.  See Briggs/Toor in Journal of Romanticism, Vol 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4744" LastActivityDate="2018-07-04T22:44:42.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T01:40:54.720" Score="5" ViewCount="3760" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Stephen Chbosky’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Perks Of Being A Wallflower&lt;/a&gt;,” Charlie seems to have some social skill issues, and seems clueless to the norms of teenage interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence, either from the book or from comments made by the author, that Charlie has Asperger’s or any other form of autism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T14:08:07.453" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T14:19:32.363" Title="Does Charlie in “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower” have a mild form of autism?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;stephen-chbosky&gt;&lt;the-perks-of-being-a-wallflower&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6876" CreationDate="2018-07-05T04:27:16.690" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Vilgefortz was a prodigy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people describe Vlgefortz as extremely talented man - he is young (relatively speaking) but already obtained considerable power. On top of that, one of his parents was a sorcerer - something that doesn't happen often (and something he has in common with Geralt), since magic users are usually sterile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘The Druid Circle in Kovir,’ the wizard took a moment ‘found me in the gutter in Lan&#xA;  Exeter. They took me in and educated me.[..]‘And then,’ continued Vilgefortz ‘during some druidic rituals my talents surfaced. Talents&#xA;  that clearly and without a doubt allowed them to determine my origins. I was conceived, of&#xA;  course, by accident, by two people, of whom at least one of them was a sorcerer.’ &lt;sup&gt;&quot;Time of Contempt &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People born from sorcerers are special - not always in a good way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No one is born a wizard. We still know too little about genetics and the mechanisms of heredity. We sacrifice too little time and means on research. Unfortunately, we constantly try to pass on inherited magical abilities in, so to say, a natural way. Results of these pseudo-experiments can be seen all too often in town gutters and within temple walls. We see too many of them, and too frequently come across morons and women in catatonic state, dribbling seers who soil themselves, seeresses, village oracles and miracle-workers, cretins whose minds are degenerate due to the inherited, uncontrolled Force. [...] But I repeat: no one is born a wizard. And no one should be born one! &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/The_Poisoned_Source&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Poisoned Source&quot; by Tissaia de Vries&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case of Geralt, it manifested as an unusual strong resistance to the mutagens, allowing him to survive the more advanced procedures in Kaern Morhen. In case of Vilgefortz it could manifest itself in skill in both magic and physical combat (especially since he had experience as a soldier). On top of that, his talent in magic (and as shown later - complete lack of empathy and morals) would also easily let him experiment into turning himself into powerful combatant. This can be actually pretty common thing - sorcerer Istredd from &quot;A shard of ice&quot; was also (apparently) very skilled in sword fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T10:52:21.333" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T10:52:21.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2018-07-05T11:04:53.693" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is possible but very unlikely.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.scriptmag.com/features/writer-profiles/screenwriter-noveliststephen-chbosky-rebel-with-a-cause-2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this interview the author&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen Chbosky, based the character of Charlie on himself, and some of the plot on his own teenage years in Pittsburgh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SM&lt;/strong&gt;: How did your personal experiences translate into the film?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;SC&lt;/strong&gt;: There were certain years I remembered very well. I remember in 7th grade, I was painfully shy and didn’t venture out of my shell very often, even though I desperately wanted to ... Charlie was just an expression of how I felt deep in my heart – observing everyone and everything and really just wanting everyone to be happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find no mention of any of these diagnoses applying to Chboksy himself, so if he based Charlie's character on his own, it would seem vastly unlikely that he intended to portray Charlie as being on the autistic spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth noting that, while Charlie has some social issues, he is also empathic and sensitive to the emotions of others. For example, his appreciation that Patrick's romantic moves toward him are motivated by being on the rebound from his relationship with Brad. Also, note in the quote above that Chbosky claims Charlie is &amp;quot;observing&amp;quot; everyone and wants them to be &amp;quot;happy.&amp;quot; These are, if anything, the opposite of what one except to observe of someone on the spectrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T13:23:21.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6906" CreationDate="2018-07-05T11:52:36.307" Score="8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;To those familiar with Shakespeare, do you know where this phrase comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robust grass endures mighty winds; loyal ministers emerge through ordeal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4750" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T13:36:33.453" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T16:25:34.163" Title="Identify a possible quote by Shakespeare" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6905" CreationDate="2018-07-05T13:29:55.817" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read all of Shakespeare's works and the quote does not even sound like a Shakespeare quote. Most of Shakespeare's works are written in a type of verse known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt; and the quote cannot be scanned as a succession of iambs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Shakespeare also used prose in his plays, but I couldn't find any examples of the words &quot;robust, &quot;ordeal&quot; or &quot;emerge&quot; or the phrase &quot;loyal ministers&quot; in Shakespeare's works. (Shakespeare did use &quot;endure&quot;, &quot;robustious&quot;, &quot;mighty&quot;, &quot;loyal&quot; and &quot;minister&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As one of the comments pointed out, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.giga-usa.com/quotes/authors/li_shimim_a001.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GIGA Quotes&lt;/a&gt; attributes the quote to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Taizong_of_Tang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Li Shimin&lt;/a&gt; (personal name of emperor Taizong of Tang). However, the Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E8%95%AD%E7%91%80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;萧瑀 / Xiao Yu&lt;/a&gt;, who served as chancellor during the reign of Tang Taizong, mentions the following poem, which looks longer than the quote in the question and which is attributed to emperor Taizong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;疾風知勁草，板盪識誠臣。勇夫安識義，智者必懷仁 (traditional Chinese characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;疾风知劲草，板荡识诚臣。勇夫安识义，智者必怀仁 (simplified Chinese characters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are translations of some of the words from the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;疾风 (jí​fēng): storm or strong wind&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;劲草 (jìng​cǎo): tough upright grass; (figuratively) a staunch character&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;臣 (chén): state official or subject in dynastic China &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I won't try to write my own translation; you can't simple translate Classical Chinese by simply looking up words in a modern Chinese dictionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-05T16:25:34.163" LastActivityDate="2018-08-05T16:25:34.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6905" CreationDate="2018-07-05T17:09:35.460" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote appears to be taken from a poem by the emperor Taizong (personal name Li Shimin) of China. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao_Yu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that Emperor Taizong wrote a poem to his chancellor Xiao Yu that contains these two lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only in a gust of wind can the strong among the grass be known,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Only in turmoil can the faithful subjects be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines differ slightly in meaning from the OP's quote. However, it appears that the original Chinese poem is terse enough that it might support both translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original Chinese and another translation can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poems/li/page-5/41910786/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The Chinese characters are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;疾风知劲草&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  板荡识诚臣&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  勇夫安识义&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  智者必怀仁&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different translation found by Google books is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A strong wind reveals the strength of grass,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A time of lawlessness makes a forthright person recognizable.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How can a temerarious fellow discern justice?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A wise man is bound to cherish benevolence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T03:41:41.250" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T03:41:41.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:45:20.533" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1986, Harry Mulisch's 1982 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assault&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De aanslag&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Assault&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was turned in to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Assault_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a film&lt;/a&gt; directed by Fons Rademakers. Screenwriter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Soeteman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerard Soeteman&lt;/a&gt; said about the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ik heb het boek dan ook alleen bewerkt tot scenario omdat Rademakers dat aan mij vroeg en ik nog bij hem in het krijt stond. &lt;em&gt;De Aanslag&lt;/em&gt; is van alle kanten bij elkaar gejat: van ‘De perzik der onsterfelijkheid’ van Wolkers tot Het Meisje met het rode Haar, van Rashomon van Akira Kurosawa tot ‘Het behouden huis’ van W.F. Hermans.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nlfilmdoek.nl/artikelen/special/de-drie-nederlandse-oscarwinnende-films/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neerlands Filmdoek&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I adapted the book into a screenplay only because Rademakers asked me and because I still owed him. &lt;em&gt;The Assault&lt;/em&gt; is full of stolen materials/ideas: from &lt;em&gt;The peach of immortality&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Wolkers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolkers&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;The Girl with the Red Hair&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theun_de_Vries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theun de Vries&lt;/a&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;Rashomon&lt;/em&gt; by Akira Kurosawa to &lt;em&gt;Het behouden huis&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Frederik_Hermans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. F. Hermans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this statement is true, what exactly did Harry Mulisch &quot;steal&quot; from the works that Soeteman mentions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-06T10:14:18.630" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T10:14:18.630" Title="Did Harry Mulisch plagiarise other works in his novel The Assault / De aanslag?" Tags="&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;&lt;harry-mulisch&gt;&lt;the-assault&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6910" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:51:09.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T18:51:09.120" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T18:51:09.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6911" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:51:09.120" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Dutch author Harry Mulisch (1927 – 2010) and his works. Mulisch is best known for his novels, e.g. &quot;De aanslag&quot; (&quot;The Assault&quot;, 1982) and &quot;De ontdekking van de Hemel&quot; (&quot;The Discovery of Heaven&quot;, 1992). Use this tag with the [dutch-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T19:42:53.193" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T19:42:53.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6912" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:52:05.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T18:52:05.903" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T18:52:05.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6913" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-05T18:52:05.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1982 novel &quot;De aanslag&quot; (&quot;The Assault&quot;) by the Dutch author Harry Mulisch. Use this tag with the [harry-mulisch] and [dutch-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-05T19:42:38.500" LastActivityDate="2018-07-05T19:42:38.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3133" CreationDate="2018-07-06T05:58:34.030" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;All of them?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't speak to authorial intent here, but it seems to me that the answer isn't necessarily one particular social group. Rather, they might represent the prejudice that grows up around virtually any marginalized and stigmatized racial, ethnic, or religious group (and perhaps even others). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider your description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A group, referred to by a brief slur.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Human (in the Sculpted's case &lt;em&gt;basically&lt;/em&gt; human in appearance, behavior....) but from a different background than the majority group. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Relegated to jobs with a low social status. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Feared for competing for jobs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Despised by religious zealots. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are we talking about, here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we talking about Jews in medieval Europe, to some extent the medieval Middle East, or the 1800s-1900s United States (continuing to some extent to the present)? Barred from trades in the Middle Ages out of fear of  competition, discriminated against in the early US, hated by Christian fundamentalists for &quot;killing Jesus&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we talking about African-Americans in the historical and current United States, barred from employment by segregation or discrimination, feared for competition? Whose opposition in obtaining equality has often been religiously motivated white supremacists&amp;mdash;many members of the &quot;Religious Right,&quot; for instance? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we talking about women in many situations throughout history, even? Relegated to low-wage, low-status jobs, limited to spaces that, though not generally &lt;em&gt;physically&lt;/em&gt; very separated (not great for the survival of one's society) were often &lt;em&gt;socially&lt;/em&gt; very separate, railed against fundamentalists of various religions (e.g. by Christians for being responsible for original sin)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could say the same thing about Muslims in many countries, African immigrants in Europe, Chinese immigrants to some South American countries currently. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for living in &quot;vapor,&quot; sure, that's a specific element, but it really could be considered simply pollution, to which many groups have been relegated. Sure, the Sculpted don't seem to be so affected by it, but this &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; SF. It extrapolates from current social structures, but it need not be bound by them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could even argue that the situation of the Sculpted doesn't merely &lt;em&gt;represent&lt;/em&gt; that aforementioned prejudice&amp;mdash;it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; that prejudice. It's the natural result, within the fiction of the story, of a new group threatening the established position of the old. It would only be surprising if it were absent. To various degrees, the dominant groups in most places in history have sought to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Avoid competition from other groups, often by barring them from occupations or segregating them.   &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mock them through insults.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Justify this through religion, and through harsh religious condemnation. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where they can't take this all the way for other social reasons (for example, women and men living in separate parts of town is mostly infeasible; separating out sexual minorities can be tough when the dominant group can't tell the difference), they usually carry out  the other portions of this set of behaviors anyway: barring competion, coming up with religiously motivated oppression, and mockery and insults. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, possibly the author had a specific group in mind while writing it. But they &lt;em&gt;needn't&lt;/em&gt; have. It draws on features common to a variety of despised groups. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T05:58:34.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6918" CreationDate="2018-07-06T12:53:48.530" Score="6" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember this story about a man living in a castle. I think he wanted to escape and he decided to reach the tallest tower in the castle. He climbs the wall from the inside and when he’s finally at the top, he moves a heavy object and he figures the castle is actually underground. I think that at the surface is a cemetery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The style was gothic, I would say XIX century  vibe, maybe Poe? I read it in Italian, in Italy, maybe 10 years ago. I am quite sure it was a translation from English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the short story I’m talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4759" LastEditorUserId="1305" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T20:54:13.673" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T20:54:13.673" Title="Which short story describes a man climbing a tower and then discovering he’s underground?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6917" CreationDate="2018-07-06T13:21:11.563" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Outsider&lt;/a&gt; (1921) by Howard P. Lovecraft, which definitely has aspects of Gothic fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Outsider&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;. Below are a few excerpts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. (...) Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trapdoor of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believing I was now at prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on the level through the grating nothing less than the &lt;em&gt;solid ground&lt;/em&gt;, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-06T13:21:11.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6925" CreationDate="2018-07-07T14:41:34.407" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Henry Cameron and Howard Roark were struggling to keep the office open, they had a number of failed bids. They were paid a modest sum for the proposals themselves, but apparently the fee didn't even cover the cost of the electricity they used while creating the plans, in spite of their efforts to conserve it (e.g. Only using a few lamps, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems like a slightly odd reason to lose money on the project, at least by modern standards with cheap electricity. How much did electricity cost back then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T02:59:05.967" Title="How expensive was electricity during The Fountainhead?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11114" CreationDate="2018-07-07T14:50:06.930" Score="2" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of his life, Henry Cameron told Howard Roark that he didn't hate anyone anymore, just Gail Wynand because he represented &quot;the triumph of overbearing vulgarity.&quot; He told Howard that he'd have to fight Wynand. (The irony, of course, is that Wynand later became a major client and close personal friend to Howard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn later, of course, that Wynand didn't create that, he just profited off it. On the other hand, Ellsworth Toohey both understands - and is actively causing - the problem, to the point that Stephen Mallory took a shot at him over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Cameron think that the problem was Wynand whereas Mallory recognized that it was actually Toohey? Did Cameron just not know about Toohey, or did he misjudge Wynand and Toohey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T10:18:49.180" Title="Why did Henry Cameron say that Howard would have to fight Gail Wynand?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-07T14:55:07.107" Score="1" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point, Henry Cameron tried to fire Howard Roark and get him to quit architecture because he knew what kind of a struggle Howard would have later. However, towards the end of his life he told Howard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you remember the day when I tried to fire you? Forget what I said to you then. It was not the whole story... Don't be afraid... it was worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did he say that? What did he mean by &quot;worth it&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-07T14:55:07.107" Title="Why did Henry Cameron tell Roark that it was all worth it?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6921" CreationDate="2018-07-08T02:59:05.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;This is a really guesstimate-y answer. Proceed with caution.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's dark around 12 hours a day, and assuming they worked 16 hours a day (we also assume here my ridiculous assumptions will balance out) we have 4 hours of electricity use per day. Assume they used three lamps - one for each desk and maybe a main light. A normal lightbulb is around 60 watts, according to google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll do this calculation for a month's work, as that is a nice unit. (Did they work on weekends? I'll assume they did.) This gives us 4*30 = 120 hrs a month. Then we have 120*60 = 7200 watt hours per bulb, *3 = 21,600 watt hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then convert to kilowatt hours, i.e., divide by 1000. This gives 21.6 kwh. &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=osu.32435028594869;view=1up;seq=22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is a dandy little table of electricity prices in 1940 (look at page 17 for New York). We'll look at column for the minimum price, assuming that Roark and Cameron went as cheap as possible. We'll also look at Manhattan. Apparently Manhattan prices were $0.90 for 10 kwh, &lt;strong&gt;so it would've cost Roark and Cameron around $1.80 for electricity per month by this estimation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you'll agree with me something here doesn't make a ton of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to ping me in the comments if you feel I made any particularly unreasonable assumptions. I'll probably update this a bit as I read more about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-07-08T02:59:05.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-08T06:15:37.567" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;From: Philip Johnson-Laird &lt;a href=&quot;https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/philip-nicholas-johnson-laird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BA PhD Psychology (UCL)&lt;/a&gt;, Stuart Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton.    (Author isn't  a logician.)    &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.ca/How-We-Reason-Philip-Johnson-Laird/dp/0199551332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How We Reason  (1st edn 2008)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=UjYsJN0krNYC&amp;amp;lpg=PA103&amp;amp;ots=JcZfCye9AO&amp;amp;dq=%22the%20syllogistic%20sin%20took%20root%22&amp;amp;pg=PA103#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22the%20syllogistic%20sin%20took%20root%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 103.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;How We Make Deductions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could one not almost say that the&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cold serpent on the poisonous tree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was l'esprit de géométrie,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That Eve and Adam till the Fall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Were totally illogical&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But as they tasted of the fruit&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The syllogistic sin took root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; From W. H. Auden. Bold emphasis added. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yEY6O.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Screenshot&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned from Google that these lines are from Auden's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0R-aO9bolKcC&amp;amp;pg=PA210&amp;amp;lpg=PA210&amp;amp;dq=%22Syllogistic+sin%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=4sWNh_ox7Z&amp;amp;sig=iT7fG-dFdr13iJ7JobjIl72YnBo&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwihvYGY6I7cAhWLy4MKHfuVANAQ6AEIODAE#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Syllogistic%20sin%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Year Letter (January 1, 1940) to Elizabeth Mayer&lt;/a&gt;. I know that &amp;quot;l'esprit de géométrie&amp;quot; is French for &amp;quot;the spirit of geometry, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/avoir-lesprit-de-g%C3%A9om%C3%A9trie.923265/#post-6434583&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wordreference thread&lt;/a&gt; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French philosopher Pascal defined two fundamental &amp;quot;spirits&amp;quot; of thought. The &amp;quot;spirit of geometry&amp;quot; was the calculating and deductive kind, while the &amp;quot;esprit de finesse&amp;quot; (spirit of finesse) was immediate intuition without proofs or verification. The author is saying he is of the rational and deductive kind, which is why he goes on to emphasize that he &lt;em&gt;deduced&lt;/em&gt; the other two passengers had buckled their seat belts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But how do these lines relate to logical deduction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What do they mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why would the cold serpent have &amp;quot;l'esprit de géométrie&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Before the Fall, Eve and Adam were sinless. So how were they &amp;quot;totally illogical&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To what syllogism is 'syllogistic sin' referring? Can someone please write it in full?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:17:35.133" Title="Why does Auden relate logical deduction to Adam and Eve's Fall?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wystan-hugh-auden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6933" CreationDate="2018-07-08T16:53:38.040" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone please let me know the meaning of the following lines taken from Edward Albee's play &lt;em&gt;Three Tall Women&lt;/em&gt;. The lines are spoken by character A, an elderly woman, expressing her view of the &quot;happiest moment&quot; of the life which she means to be the time of death. My problem is particularly with the part specified in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Coming to the end of it, I think, &lt;strong&gt;when all the waves cause the greatest woes to subside, leaving breathing space&lt;/strong&gt;, time to concentrate on the greatest woe of all—that blessed one—the end of it&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4769" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-08T18:41:31.060" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:11:38.993" Title="What is the meaning of these lines in Albee's Three Tall Women?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edward-albee&gt;&lt;three-tall-women&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-09T06:14:12.127" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first saw this quote here: Philip Johnson-Laird &lt;a href=&quot;https://dof.princeton.edu/about/clerk-faculty/emeritus/philip-nicholas-johnson-laird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BA PhD Psychology (UCL)&lt;/a&gt;, Stuart Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Princeton.     &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.ca/How-We-Reason-Philip-Johnson-Laird/dp/0199551332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How We Reason&lt;/em&gt;  (1st edn 2008)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 245. I emboldened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/conversations/thomas-babington-macaulay-wh-auden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Walter de la Mare,”  1963&lt;/a&gt;. I think this refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0571054110&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Choice Of de la Mare's Verse. Selected with an Introduction by W.H. Auden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Human beings are blessed with the power to remember; consequently, to grow old means for us not to discard but to accumulate; in every old man there still lives a child, an adolescent, a young man and a middle-aged one. It is commonly believed that children are, by nature, more imaginative than adults, but this is questionable. It is probably the case only in cultures like our own which put a higher social and economic value upon practical and abstract thinking than upon wonder and images; in a culture which put a high value on imagination and a low one on logic, &lt;strong&gt;children might well appear to be more rational than adults, for a child is not, by nature, more &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In all cultures, however, there is one constant difference between children and adults, namely, that, for the former, learning their native tongue is itself one of the most important experiences in their lives, while, for the latter, language has become an instrument for interpreting and communicating experience; to recapture the sense of language as experience, an adult has to visit a foreign country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; signify here?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If children aren't more &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;, then how can they appear more rational? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-09T09:33:56.813" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:07:33.230" Title="Does Auden contradict himself in &quot;children might well appear to be more rational than adults, for a child is not, by nature, more anything&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wystan-hugh-auden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6931" CreationDate="2018-07-10T04:45:34.167" Score="6" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;About 15 years ago I read a popular history (in the sense of popular science, not popular politics) of the 20th century which includes a short poem that I believe went as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What have we not done for this country?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some of us gave speeches;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Others gave our lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem has stayed with me for years and I would like to know the name of its author. I can no longer remember the name of the book I read it in, and Google has been unhelpful in finding a source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the poem was translated from its original language and believe the poet was Hungarian, though I'm not 100% sure about that. It was definitely written in the 20th century and it is definitely from a country that was behind the iron curtain. Please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4777" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T05:41:38.887" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:24:46.053" Title="Who wrote the poem that begins &quot;What have we not done for this country&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:02:47.710" Score="6" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a quote that goes something like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We should all be grateful to grammarians for saving us in fifty years&#xA;  from a grievous error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's by Proust, but Google doesn't seem to agree. Anyone know this or can find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll take any quote with a similar sentiment, really. The basic idea of it is that grammar may be annoying and nitpicky now, but one day you'll find yourself in a situation where being grammatically precise will be crucial. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="401" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T18:11:40.817" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:11:40.817" Title="Tracking down a literary quote about grammar" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6929" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:04:29.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The great Turkish poet Orhan Veli Kanık wrote so neatly on the “great&#xA;Turkish lies” more than half a century ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What have we not done for this country? Some of us have orated Some&#xA;of us have died.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/opinion/burak-bekdil/why-fair-is-just-a-four-letter-word-in-turkish-87497&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why ‘fair’ is just a four-letter word in Turkish&lt;/a&gt; (Hürriyet Daily News).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:24:46.053" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:24:46.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6928" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:07:33.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auden is comparing two situations. In our society, children appear more imaginative than adults because adults learn rationality during growth. In a society that prizes imagination more than rationality, in which adults would supposedly learn imagination during growth, the children would thus &quot;appear&quot; more rational than adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Auden says that both are wrong, &quot;for a child is not, by nature, more &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:07:33.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6927" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:11:38.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &quot;all the waves&quot; here refers to the passage of time, which is made up of one thing (&quot;wave&quot;) after another. With the passage of time, even the &quot;greatest woes&quot; lose their power of immediacy, leaving a space of calm (&quot;breathing space&quot;) in which one may contemplate death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:11:38.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6926" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:17:35.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adam and Eve were expelled for partaking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, i.e., the ability to rationally decide what is good or bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this understanding, the prelapsarian state is akin to one of pure instinct (&quot;illogical&quot; should technically be &quot;alogical&quot;), whereas the postlapsarian state is one of rational judgment (i.e., the ability to employ logic, for which &quot;syllogism&quot; is a metonym).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T07:17:35.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6868" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:25:51.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comparison presumes some similarities and some differences. It sounds like you want to use these similarities and differences to say something about how each author saw the war, probably also how they're the same and how they're different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From your brief outline, the similarities seem to stem from two facts: They're both fighting in the same war, and they both wrote books about it. It's also likely that they're both of similar age. The main difference is that they're from different countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I would compare the two books according to the tropes, themes, motifs, or military engagements that they share (the similarities of &quot;fighting&quot; and &quot;writing&quot;), analyze how they each treat these elements, and try to account for any differences, perhaps by appealing to either ideological or literary history (the difference of &quot;countries&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="2463" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T14:13:26.313" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T14:13:26.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6714" CreationDate="2018-07-10T07:54:45.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It fits well with reader-response theory. In &quot;How to Recognize a Poem When You See One&quot; (collected in &lt;em&gt;Is There a Text in This Class?&lt;/em&gt;), Stanley Fish recounts how he wrote a list of motifs on the blackboard for his Medieval Literature class, and asked his subsequent Literary Theory class to interpret this &quot;poem,&quot; which they did successfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this means is that, according to Fish, &quot;literature&quot; is in the eye of the beholder, so this would apply well to computer-generated literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastEditorUserId="2463" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T00:45:20.673" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T00:45:20.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6703" CreationDate="2018-07-10T08:07:05.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;1.&#xA;Lacan: Basically everything in &lt;em&gt;Ecrits&lt;/em&gt;, in which on the last page of the Overture he says that he wants to make the reader work to understand him (&quot;must pay the price with elbow grease&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derrida: Also basically everything, but especially &quot;Limited Inc a b c . . .&quot; collected in &lt;em&gt;Limited Inc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&#xA;Usually when we explain something, we presuppose prior knowledge--in the author's example, we have to know what &quot;write,&quot; &quot;you,&quot; and &quot;think&quot; mean to understand the meaning of &quot;just write down what you're thinking.&quot; Since these two theorists often interrogate the meaning of fundamental terms such as these, you could imagine how confusing (or obfuscatory) the writing might be that has to explain things using these terms without attributing fixed meanings to them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:07:05.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6945" CreationDate="2018-07-10T08:08:54.773" Score="0" ViewCount="1249" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tell me what the following line means from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreshreads.com/forgetting/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forgetting&lt;/a&gt; by Robet Lynd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The fishing-rod of reality is forgotten by him as he day-dreams over the fears of the fishing-rod of Utopia.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially, “the fears of the fishing-rod of Utopia”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T13:33:34.707" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T13:33:34.707" Title="Meaning of “the fears of the fishing-rod of Utopia” in Forgetting by Robert Lynd" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-lynd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6702" CreationDate="2018-07-10T08:11:14.443" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first quote seems to be saying that Derrida's playful (but instructive) use of language often makes it hard to understand him. If that's what you're looking for, you can take a look at &quot;Limited Inc a b c . . .&quot; (collected in &lt;em&gt;Limited Inc&lt;/em&gt;), in which he uses more or less 26 sections to reply to John Searle, but only makes his points explicitly near the end of the essay. In all the previous sections, he's basically performing (or &quot;Signifying on,&quot; the author of your first quote might say) the same points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2463" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:11:14.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1145" CreationDate="2018-07-10T08:30:28.057" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I appreciate both the question raised and the clarificatory reply provided by Karan Desai.  Having been a student of Hindi Literature I would like to provide as full a reply as possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harivansh Rai Bachchan had in 1926 married Shyama and she expired in 1936.  Prior to marrying Amitabh Bachchan's mother Teji in 1941, Harivansh Rai went through a depressive phase, wherein some of his best poetic works were created. In 1938 Harivansh Rai published a collection of short poems under the title &quot;Nisha Nimantran&quot; [Invitation to Night/Darkness]. The above mentioned poem is for this compendium. The whole poem is reproduced below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;strong&gt;मानव पर जगती का शासन,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;जगती पर संसृति का बंधन,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;संसृति को भी और किसी के प्रतिबंधों में रहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;साथी, सब कुछ सहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;strong&gt;हम क्या हैं जगती के सर में!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;जगती क्या, संसृति सागर में!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;एक प्रबल धारा में हमको लघु तिनके-सा बहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;साथी, सब कुछ सहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;strong&gt;आओ, अपनी लघुता जानें,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;अपनी निर्बलता पहचानें,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;जैसे जग रहता आया है उसी तरह से रहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;साथी, सब कुछ सहना होगा!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem refers to Harivansh Rai's own despondence on the death of his wife Shyama and it took him nearly five years to get over this tragedy. In this poem he talks about the arrows and pains the world (read fate) has shot at him and as a being he has no option to bear the slings and stones thrown at him. The second stanza makes it clear &quot;What are we on the head of the world, what are we in the ocean of creation - in a strong current we flow along like twig wherever the current takes us&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this answers user AJ's question satisfactorily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4767" LastEditorUserId="4767" LastEditDate="2018-07-10T08:35:41.533" LastActivityDate="2018-07-10T08:35:41.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-11T14:20:24.113" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just discovered the book &lt;em&gt;The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Peter Dear (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/462.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Pennsylvania Press&lt;/a&gt;, 1991). To me, that seems like an oxymoron: how can scientific arguments be literary?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just someone doing weird things, or is there actually an argument for treating scientific arguments as literary texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4783" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T14:08:24.543" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T14:16:37.807" Title="The literary study of scientific argument" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;science-and-technology-studies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6938" CreationDate="2018-07-11T17:18:36.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22feats+of+the+fishing-rod+of%22&amp;amp;rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS737US737&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj_yObe0JfcAhWMn4MKHY_6Bh0Q_AUIECgB&amp;amp;biw=790&amp;amp;bih=431&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mistranscribed.&lt;/a&gt; It is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the feats of the fishing-rod of Utopia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;feats&lt;/em&gt; is replaced by &lt;em&gt;fears&lt;/em&gt;, the line does not make very much sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in case you're still confused, what the actual line means is that he forgets about the real fishing-rod while he's thinking about all the amazing things that the imaginary fishing-rod of Utopia has done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-12T15:26:34.123" LastActivityDate="2018-07-12T15:26:34.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-11T19:47:11.790" Score="4" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &amp;quot;Birches&amp;quot; by Robert Frost. I am having difficulty in understanding the meaning of a part of a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; for the full poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this part (of a line):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...And not one but hung limp, not one was left&#xA;For him to conquer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it meaning that all the trees except one hung limp and that he had conquered every tree?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:37:19.420" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:37:19.420" Title="What is the literal meaning of this line in &quot;Birches&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="6949" CreationDate="2018-07-12T16:36:24.763" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I read a story demonstrating how people can lure one another to do unwanted things with absolutely good intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was about a family, which enjoyed their spare time sitting around a dinner table in their house in a rural area amid summer heat. Then someone suggests driving to a city to visit something there. And everyone agrees, although nobody of them really wanted to go. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they come back home, they feel tired and sick, their weekend completely messed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I totally forgot where I met this text. Does someone know it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4786" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T12:49:28.203" Title="A story about how a family messed their weekend" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6948" CreationDate="2018-07-12T18:59:30.360" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you're thinking of this (possibly fictitious*) anecdote from the&#xA;1974 article &quot;The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement&quot; by Jerry B. Harvey. Via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On a hot afternoon visiting in Coleman, Texas, the family is comfortably playing dominoes on a porch, until the father-in-law suggests that they take a trip to Abilene [53 miles (85 km) north] for dinner. The wife says, &quot;Sounds like a great idea.&quot; The husband, despite having reservations because the drive is long and hot, thinks that his preferences must be out-of-step with the group and says, &quot;Sounds good to me. I just hope your mother wants to go.&quot; The mother-in-law then says, &quot;Of course I want to go. I haven't been to Abilene in a long time.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The drive is hot, dusty, and long. When they arrive at the cafeteria, the food is as bad as the drive. They arrive back home four hours later, exhausted.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of them dishonestly says, &quot;It was a great trip, wasn't it?&quot; The mother-in-law says that, actually, she would rather have stayed home, but went along since the other three were so enthusiastic. The husband says, &quot;I wasn't delighted to be doing what we were doing. I only went to satisfy the rest of you.&quot; The wife says, &quot;I just went along to keep you happy. I would have had to be crazy to want to go out in the heat like that.&quot; The father-in-law then says that he only suggested it because he thought the others might be bored.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The group sits back, perplexed that they together decided to take a trip which none of them wanted. They each would have preferred to sit comfortably, but did not admit to it when they still had time to enjoy the afternoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This anecdote gets cited in other discussions of group decision-making so you could have heard it almost anywhere, even if you didn't read the original article. (People will sometimes say &quot;Let's not take a trip to Abilene&quot; to head off this sort of mistake, the way you might say &quot;Okay, enough about the bikeshed.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Upon further investigation, it appears that the version I've quoted above is paraphrased from the original article. In the article, Harvey tells the story in the first person and includes more detail (the brand of thermometer on the porch, for instance) than I would expect if the story were made up to illustrate a point. Combined with the fact that he was actually from Texas, this inclines me to think that it actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastEditorUserId="1305" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T12:49:28.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T12:49:28.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2009" CreationDate="2018-07-13T08:04:22.567" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adding to the earlier replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author is the creator of the book. Usually the author makes his viewpoint clear in the preface / introduction. If the author fails to do so, then it is open to the reader to interpret the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In jurisprudence (law courts) there is a law for interpreting statutes - (1) read the law and understand it as it stands on a plain reading i.e. the normal understanding of the word. For e.g. if at some place the word 'he' is used one cannot interpret it to apply to men and women unless the same is clarified somewhere : all statutes define 'he' to apply to both men and women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) if the plain reading results in nonsense, try the background material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) if still ambiguous refer to marginal notes and, if required to the Parliamentary debates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraph should answer the question - it is the author knows what he has written.  If his writings are ambiguous give the interpretation on plain reading - do not go by the books review - the critic or his employer may have an axe to grind. If the author says that the book is about something, then it is about that and nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However if the plain reading results in a nonsensical interpretation then the reader has to look elsewhere. One should not forget that reviewers too are human beings.  They have their own prejudices and biases and this often reflects in their reviews. So the reviews should be taken with a pinch of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader should try to come to his own conclusions after reading books where the plain reading either results in an ambiguity or leads to a conclusion different from what the author intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Books are relevant to the environment in which they are written and most of us tend to interpret it in the present context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Dickens wrote 'Oliver Twist' the story of an orphan's life in an orphanage and his subsequent escape therefrom only to fall into the grip of criminals, etc. In Victorian type that was the state of orphanages - the government hardly cared. Today's Governments cannot ignore the state of orphanages, they regulate them. So if I feel that 'Oliver Twist' describes situations that are more fantasy than reality, I would be as far from truth as possible. But that is what we, the readers, tend to do generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically with regard to &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; (I have not read the book) I think one should accept what the author says unless your reading leads you to the conclusion that the book is about censorship - Ray Bradbury's explanation notwithstanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ultimately it is the reader, not the reviewer, who has to decide, because it is he who buys the book paying for it, from which the author earns his royalty.&lt;/strong&gt;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4767" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T08:04:22.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7966" CreationDate="2018-07-13T13:10:43.670" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;A number of years ago, I read about an American academic who had been publishing about literary criticism and theory but then at some point (in the 1990s or the early 2000s) decided to move away from that and to start writing fiction (novels, as far as I can remember). He also explained his reasons for doing so in a journal article. Unfortunately, I can't remember the person's name, nor his reasons for moving his &quot;career change&quot;. So who was this person and what were his arguments for moving away from literary criticism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T16:20:13.593" Title="Academic who abandoned literary criticism and started writing novels?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6943" CreationDate="2018-07-13T14:16:37.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly possible to analyse a scientific text such as a journal article from a literary point of view. &#xA;This implies looking at aspects such as word choice, the description of the research method, authorial presence and other stylistic aspects.&#xA;When one compares scientific articles from the seventeenth century from articles from today, it is obvious that the style of scientific publicatiois has changed significantly.&#xA;Joseph E. Harmon cites two examples in his paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1195&amp;amp;context=poroi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Understanding Scientific Communication: A Collaboration with Alan G. Gross&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Poroi&lt;/em&gt;, 2014).&#xA;First, the seventeenth-century biologist Martin Lister:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The 21 st of April, 1665, about eight in the morning, I&#xA;  bored a hole in the body of a fair and large Birch, and put&#xA;  in a Cork with a Quill in the middle; after a Moment or&#xA;  two it [a sap] began to drop, but yet very softly: Some&#xA;  three Hours after I returned ̧ and it had filled a Pint&#xA;  Glass, and then it droped exceeding fast, viz. every Pulse&#xA;  a Drop: This Liquor is not unpleasant to the Taste, and&#xA;  not thick or troubled; yet it looks as though some few&#xA;  drops of Milk were split in a Bason of Fountain Water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with the style in &quot;Tormation of a DNA-soluble RNA Hybrid and Its Relation to the Origin, Evolution, and Degeneracy of Soluble RNA&quot; (1962) by H. M. Goodman and A. Rich:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A plateau appears as a mass ratio of sRNA to DNA of&#xA;  0.025 per cent. Thus, only a very small portion of the&#xA;  DNA is able to accept an sRNA molecule in hybrid&#xA;  formation. Furthermore, these results show that the&#xA;  preparation does not contain ribosomal RNA, since&#xA;  DNA-ribosomal RNA hybrids contain six times more&#xA;  RNA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been several studies on this topic, such as &lt;em&gt;Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Bazerman (University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse&lt;/em&gt; (University of South Carolina Press, 1989).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This type of research is associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100107530&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;linguistic turn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A change in emphasis in the discourse of the humanities and social sciences reflecting a recognition (beyond the bounds of linguistics itself) of the importance of language in human meaning-making. The linguistic turn in the humanities came in the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, see also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100418551&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rhetorical turn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A change in emphasis in the discourse of the humanities and social sciences reflecting a recognition (outside the academic field of rhetoric itself) that rhetorical forms are deeply and unavoidably involved in the shaping of realities. Form and content are inseparable; language is not a neutral medium and our choice of words matters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientific texts can be seen as a way of &quot;human meaning-making&quot; (see &quot;linguistic turn&quot;) and as text that use rhetorical forms, so nothing stands in the way of studying them from these points of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Literary Study of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies&lt;/em&gt; (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) does not simply look at literary aspects but also at the interplay between literary aspects on the one hand and social and historical forces on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T14:16:37.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6954" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-13T14:31:19.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T14:31:19.313" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T14:31:19.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6955" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-13T14:31:19.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American playwright Edward Albee (1928 – 2016) and his works. His best-known play is 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (1962)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T15:20:19.560" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T15:20:19.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6956" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-13T14:32:28.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T14:32:28.380" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T14:32:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6957" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-13T14:32:28.380" Score="0" Body="Questions about Edward Albee's 1991 play 'Three Tall Women'. Use this tag with the [edward-albee] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-13T15:20:11.730" LastActivityDate="2018-07-13T15:20:11.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6959" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-14T06:10:39.773" Score="6" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;At Junior School, in the mid-1950s, I came across a poem entitled &quot;The Boaster&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IIRC it ran to several verses, each one ending in &quot;I'm from our village, our village. I'm my father's son&quot;, and otherwise consisted of various silly boasts. One that sticks in my mind is &quot;I've in town three houses fine. When I've bought them they'll be mine&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never come across it online. Does anyone else recognise it or know where it is in print? I'm pretty sure it was an English rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4640" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T20:59:02.783" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T20:59:02.783" Title="Trying to find a poem called &quot;The Boaster&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="6960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2915" CreationDate="2018-07-14T12:50:52.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Richmal Crompton did say in a radio interview that when she started writing these 'Just William' stories, her intention was to write those stories for adults about children. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen to the interview :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmEcUabNmYQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmEcUabNmYQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant transcript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well I began to write them entirely for adults about children. And they were published in these magazine stories, adult magazines, for adults about children. But they've gradually drifted onto the shelves of junior libraries in libraries and shops. So now I find myself occasionally writing down a bit, but I try not to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4787" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-07-17T09:32:09.980" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T09:32:09.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7971" CreationDate="2018-07-14T14:07:17.170" Score="7" ViewCount="431" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem's central line that establishes the theme of power:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the &amp;quot;king of kings&amp;quot; part happen to be a subtle reference to the English papacy by any chance? I don't know much about the European church system (not that I'm supposed to know anyway, given that I'm from South Asia), but it did come up in a few chapters of our History textbook. There were only 2/3 paragraphs at best on that topic and from what I've gathered, the Church used to wield more power than any king in Europe (I've no idea how much geographic area it spans). So basically the pope (the head of the Church) ruled over all the kings and could arguably be called the &amp;quot;king of kings&amp;quot;. Sorry if I get anything horrendously wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is Percy Shelley condemning the extent of the Church's power here? I'm aware this theory/interpretation is far too far-fetched to be what Percy really intended to convey, but it does explain the line somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Note&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that there has been an misunderstanding. All the answers below address whether the pope, at any point in history, used to be referred to as &amp;quot;king of kings&amp;quot; either informally or as an official title. But I never did suggest such a thing in the first place. I meant that because the pope had once been powerful I suppose calling him &amp;quot;king of kings&amp;quot; would not be too unreasonable. I was merely inviting the idea of the pope being a possible candidate for the &amp;quot;king of kings&amp;quot; Percy talks of here. I certainly didn't mean that the pope really could have ever been called so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, don't get me wrong: I never claim the Pope is necessarily a &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; candidate for Ozymandias. I was simply suggesting the notion of that &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;being possible to some extent&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The very purpose of this question was opening this up to more interpretation. Note that I also say: &amp;quot;I'm aware this theory/interpretation is far too far-fetched to be what Percy really intended to convey [...]&amp;quot;. I've admitted myself that I don't find the whole thing being very likely either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="401" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T16:24:35.577" Title="Could Ozymandias be interpreted as referring to the power of the Church/pope?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="15" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="7968" CreationDate="2018-07-17T00:15:59.060" Score="7" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;What’s the oldest free public library in North America?&#xA;I personally think that this question will be of at least some interest to regular users of this board,as well as some history buffs!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="2455" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T00:59:49.373" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T00:59:49.373" Title="Oldest library in America?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;library-and-information-science&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6952" CreationDate="2018-07-17T09:50:04.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more searching, I found that the academic and author I was looking for is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lentricchia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Frank Lentricchia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In literary theory and criticism he wrote, among other ones, the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo27989983.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;After the New Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1980), in which he reviews and evaluates the &quot;critical theory&quot; (not just literary theory, since he also discusses the impact of a number of philosophers and Claude Lévi-Strauss) that came after the formalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Criticism&lt;/a&gt; (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://bq.blakearchive.org/14.4.lentricchia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nelson Hilton's review&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo5953992.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Criticism and Social Change&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1983/84);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0596.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James, Wallace Stevens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Wisconsin Press, 1987);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as co-editor, with Thomas McLaughlin: &lt;a href=&quot;http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3627086.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Critical Terms for Literary Study&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (second edition, University of Chicago Press, 1990);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;with Jody McAuliffe: &lt;a href=&quot;http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3622462.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crimes of Art and Terror&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 2003).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/frank-lentricchia/the-edge-of-night/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apparently&lt;/a&gt; he was once called &quot;the Dirty Harry of contemporary literary theory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He published &lt;em&gt;The Edge of Night&lt;/em&gt; in 1994. This was followed in 1996 by the article &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Franca_(magazine)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lingua Franca&lt;/a&gt; (the same magazine in which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sokal affair&lt;/a&gt; was revealed). This article is not publicly accessible in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/archives/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;magazine's archives&lt;/a&gt; but it is mentioned in several other places on the Web, e.g. in a review of Lentrichhia's novel &lt;em&gt;Lucchesi and the Whale&lt;/em&gt; by Mark W. Hornburg (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet Lentricchia eventually left his department and, in 1996, in the pages of Lingua Franca, this giant of academic criticism &lt;strong&gt;denounced his field&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;calling for a return to the pure pleasures of reading&lt;/strong&gt;. In the article, &quot;Last Will and Testament of an Ex-literary Critic,&quot; the professor said he had been functioning within the academy as a divided soul, performing for his graduate students as &quot;an historian and polemicist of literary theory, who could speak with passion, and without noticeable impediment, about literature as a political instrument.&quot; But the &quot;secret me,&quot; wrote Lentricchia, was &quot;me-the-reader&quot;--who &lt;strong&gt;felt so filled up by the experience of reading that talking about it felt inauthentic&lt;/strong&gt;. His personal encounters with literature were so pleasurable, he said, that they were like &quot;erotic transport.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same review also mentions that, at Duke University's English Department, &quot;Lentricchia was responsible for recruiting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Fish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanley Fish&lt;/a&gt; as department head in 1985&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shortened version of &quot;Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic&quot; was published in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literarymatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/LiteraryMatters_2-4.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ALSC Newsletter&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 2, Number 4 (Fall 1996)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;em&gt;Lucchesi and the Whale&lt;/em&gt; (2001), Lentricchia published a number of other novels, including &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4950-the-italian-actress.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Italian Actress&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2009) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mhpbooks.com/books/the-accidental-pallbearer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Accidental Pallbearer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2013).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T16:20:13.593" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T16:20:13.593" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7960" CreationDate="2018-07-17T13:37:50.343" Score="6" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Probably Not&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;First of all, it's inaccurate to say that &quot;the Church used to [w]ield more power than any king in Europe.&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Church certainly used to wield more temporal power &lt;em&gt;than it does now&lt;/em&gt;, and was more widely regarded as a &lt;em&gt;moral authority&lt;/em&gt; that regular kings should submit to. But relations between the Papacy and various European monarchs were varied and complicated. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Boniface_VIII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pope Boniface VIII&lt;/a&gt; did declare that temporal power was subject to Rome, but then the king of France arrested him and forced the Papacy to move to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avignon_Papacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avignon&lt;/a&gt; for 67 years, so it's hard to claim that the Pope was the most powerful guy around. Throw in a long list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investiture_Controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;investiture controversies&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Rome_(1527)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the sack of Rome&lt;/a&gt;, and circa one zillion emperors and monarchs conquering various parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the territory ruled by the Pope&lt;/a&gt;---and that's just what I can think of off the top of my head! At no time was the Pope actually in charge of all the kingdoms of Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;More pertinently to your question, I've never heard of any tradition of referring to the Pope* as the &quot;king of kings,&quot; even at the height of the Church's political power (wherever you place that).&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title&lt;/a&gt; has been around for a while and was originally used by various Assyrian and Persian emperors, as well as by Caeserion (son of Julius Caesar). God is also referred to as &quot;King of King of Kings&quot; in Judaism (to indicate his superiority to the above regular old emperors). The most prominent use of &quot;King of Kings&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kings#Christianity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christianity&lt;/a&gt; is in reference to Jesus Christ (see 1 Timothy 6:17, Revelation 17:14, and Revelation 19:16), not to the Pope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;In short, it's just a &lt;strong&gt;very high-up royal title&lt;/strong&gt;, often used to claim &lt;strong&gt;divinity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is mocking grandiose and hubristic claims to (godlike) power by mortal men. Shelley may well have considered the papacy (or certain popes) to be making such doomed claims, but the title &quot;king of kings&quot; is not a specific reference to the papacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Edit based on your clarification&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think &quot;the pope being a possible candidate for the 'king of kings' Percy talks of here&quot; is likely for a couple reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As mentioned above, the Popes were never really &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; powerful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When &quot;king of kings&quot; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Kings#Historical_usage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regular human kings and emperors&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. apart from its use to refer to Jesus Christ), it generally refers to a king who's the boss of a lot of other kings who are subordinate to him &lt;em&gt;but still basically the same kind of king&lt;/em&gt;. When the Pope claims that all the rulers of Christendom should obey him, though, he's not saying that he's the Emperor and they're just client kings. He's making a different kind of claim, namely that they should obey him because they're subject to God, and he's the leader of God's Church, the Vicar of Christ, etc. So it would be unlikely that he would come to mind when readers hear &quot;king of kings,&quot; or that Percy intended that he should, even obliquely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;*Note&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm not sure what you mean by &quot;the English papacy.&quot; &quot;The papacy&quot; typically refers to the office of the Pope or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bishop of Rome&lt;/a&gt;, head of the Catholic Church, which doesn't have anything to do with England. In the early 1530s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_VIII_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry VIII of England&lt;/a&gt; broke away from the Catholic Church and declared himself the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Supremacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; but still did not style himself &quot;king of kings.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1305" LastEditorUserId="1305" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T18:00:51.053" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T18:00:51.053" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7963" CreationDate="2018-07-17T14:22:27.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sturgislibrary.org/history/oldest-library/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; provides a couple of options, depending on your exact definitions of &quot;oldest,&quot; &quot;free,&quot; &quot;public,&quot; and &quot;library.&quot; There is not a complete consensus. Note that the source for many of these is the library's own website, so ymmv. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Library Company of Philadelphia&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1731&lt;/strong&gt;: first subscription library (aka, membership dues), but did allow borrowing books for free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Darby Library&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1743&lt;/strong&gt;: the oldest library in continuous service, but was a subscription library until the late 1800s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Redwood Library and Athenæum&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1746&lt;/strong&gt;: oldest library building continuously in use; originally a subscription library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Library Company of Burlington&lt;/strong&gt;, founded 1757: originally a subscription library, but was the first to construct a library building, in &lt;strong&gt;1789&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Franklin Public Library&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1790&lt;/strong&gt;: originally a collection of books donated to a town by Ben Franklin and lent to citizens free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Scoville Memorial Library&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1803&lt;/strong&gt;: the first library to be open to the public free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Peterborough Town Library&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1833&lt;/strong&gt;: the oldest free tax-supported public library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Boston Public Library&lt;/strong&gt;, founded &lt;strong&gt;1844&lt;/strong&gt;: first publicly supported free municipal library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Sturgiss Library&lt;/strong&gt;: oldest &lt;em&gt;building&lt;/em&gt; that currently houses a library, built &lt;strong&gt;1644&lt;/strong&gt;--however, the library itself is newer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T14:22:27.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7969" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2018-07-17T16:26:52.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although Rand's writing in Atlas is certainly forward-thinking, I haven't seen much literary evidence of it being set in the future. Everything seems very contemporary 1940s and 1950s. Two exceptions may be futuristic devices such as the Harmonizer (symbolizes a nuclear weapon) and the motor. But everything else seems to be set comfortably in those mid-twentieth-century decades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though I do see some evidence of &lt;em&gt;alternative history&lt;/em&gt; in that governmental entities are referred to differently, such as &quot;head of state&quot; instead of POTUS, and &quot;the legislature&quot; instead of Congress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-07-17T16:26:52.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-17T21:30:13.773" Score="5" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;Those who are in &lt;strong&gt;Galt's Gulch&lt;/strong&gt; are there by invitation only. Dagny crashed the gate, but was clearly still on the future invite list. However, I find it interesting who got invited to Galt's Gulch and why. The obvious invitees are the high-performing titans of industry such as Hank Rearden, Dagny, Ellis Wyatt, and Ken Danagger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the more-surprising invitees include the following: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the young brakeman of the Comet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nameless writer -- &quot;fishwife&quot; in the valley (possibly an autobiographical insertion)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the young woman who owned the bakery shop and her two sons&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kay Ludlow (the actress)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these were industrialists nor titans of industry. Though, we can safely assume that they were ideologically sound, which is to say they believed in meritocracy, capitalism, objective reality, etc. But if ideology is the only criterion, then is Rand suggesting that the few hundred people who lived in the valley were the ONLY people on earth with that ideology? Seems doubtful. Were they just lucky to have been discovered by one of the agents or a member of the valley? An elite few who had the right ideas &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; were lucky enough to know someone in Galt's secret network?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T07:05:19.153" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T02:43:10.187" Title="What were John Galt's criteria for being invited to Galt's Gulch?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7960" CreationDate="2018-07-17T21:36:57.247" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ozymandias is the Greek version of Ramesses the Great's throne name. Writing about a statue of him, the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote of a large statue with the inscription&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;King of Kings Ozymandias am I. If any want to know how great I am and where I lie, let him outdo me in my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here already &quot;King of Kings&quot; is used in the description. Ozymandias the poem was written as a part of a poetry &quot;competition&quot; of sorts between Shelley and Smith, and Smith's poem (on the same topic) &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; includes the phrase &quot;King of Kings&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where might the phrase King of Kings come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ramesses is called &quot;the Great&quot; for a reason. He is widely considered one of the most powerful pharaohs of Egypt &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; (and the pharaohs rules for a long time). He conquered many areas (and thus was literally a &quot;king of kings&quot;) and when he died was buried in the Valley of Kings (and there, one gets the meaning along the lines of &quot;king among kings&quot;, or great among the others that filled his role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, there's another aspect to the phrase King of Kings. King of kings is probably Jewish in origin (consider Holy of holies, etc; the phrase in modern Christianity is used to refer to Jesus/God). One of its first recorded uses is to refer to Nebuchadnezzar. I won't go into all the details of who he is, but the relevant part of his story is in Daniel 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the second year of his reign [he] is troubled by a dream. He summons his magicians and astrologers to interpret it, but demands that they first tell him what the dream was. They protest that no man can do such a thing, and Nebuchadnezzar orders that they all be executed. This decree also falls on Daniel, but he, through the agency of his God, is able to tell the king the dream. It was a dream of a great statue with a head of gold, arms and chest of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of mingled iron and clay. A great stone, not cut by human hands, fell on the feet of the statue and destroyed it, and the rock became a mountain that filled the whole world. Daniel then interprets the dream: it concerns four successive kingdoms, beginning with Nebuchadnezzar, which will be replaced by the everlasting kingdom of the God of heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, one of the earliest rulers to be referred to as &quot;king of kings&quot; dreamed of a falling statue that represented the world's kingdoms. Shelley would probably have been well aware of this, having received the standard education of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to the pope. The pope at one point crowned the Holy Roman Emperor (thus being &quot;king of kings&quot; in a roundabout way) but never really was referred to as that. The Holy-Roman-Emperor-crowning wasn't really a thing anymore in Shelley's day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing as there's a very good interpretation of &quot;king of kings&quot; not involving the pope, it seems doubtful to me that the &quot;true&quot; interpretation does involve the pope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However. (There's always a however.) The pope while Shelley was alive was Pope Pius X. And later in his papacy he referred to himself as a &quot;prisoner of the Vatican&quot; due to his extreme loss of power. Seeing as the papacy had earlier been a very powerful institution, this loss of power may to some extent reflect the loss of power in &lt;em&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the thing to consider here is that it probably wasn't so much an outright &quot;aha, I am so clever, I will use this to refer to the papacy's loss of power!&quot; but more of a &quot;simmering stew&quot; with thoughts combining (maybe even mostly subconsciously) to form the poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not 100% related, but in talking about Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Essay on Christianity&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://thehumandivine.org/2016/05/08/essay-on-christianity-by-percy-bysshe-shelley/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shelley believed that it was the Church which was the real source of atheism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in fact, Shelley did not have a &quot;proper&quot; Church burial but was instead burned on a pyre as his friends did not believe a Church burial would fit him. In the end, Shelley, while probably a deist, did not like the Church, which does indeed suggest further that he would not mind mocking it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T15:48:50.360" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T15:48:50.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-18T09:38:40.420" Score="6" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading about English Renaissance theatre, discussions centre on authors, theatre companies and theatre buildings in and around London. For example, the first English playhouses were the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_(theatre)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Lion&lt;/a&gt;, which opened 1567 just outside London, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Theatre&lt;/a&gt;, which opened in 1576, also just outside London, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtain_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Curtain Theatre&lt;/a&gt;, which opened in 1577, also just outside London. Several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Renaissance_theatre#Establishment_of_playhouses&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;other playhouses&lt;/a&gt; were constructed in the 1580s and 1590s, all just outside the City of London. (The London authorities didn't like playhouses. One reason was the influence of the puritans, who didn't like theatre in general. Another reason was that places where many people gathered together could facilitate the spread of diseases such as the Plague. Plague epidemics always led to the temporary closing of theatres.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the books I have read about Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I have not found a single mention of permanent playhouses outside the London area. Theatre companies went on tour in England, especially when playhouses in London were closed because of the Plague, but it seems they performed in guildhalls and other buildings that normally did not serve as a playhouse. This leads me to the question &lt;strong&gt;where the first permanent playhouse outside London was constructed&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.britevents.com/features/the-oldest-theatres-in-britain/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oldest Theatres in Britain&lt;/a&gt; mentions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theatre,_Lancaster&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grand Theatre in Lancaster&lt;/a&gt; is &quot;the third oldest theatre in England&quot;. However, I think this means that it is the third oldest &lt;em&gt;surviving&lt;/em&gt; theatre; it is perfectly possible that other playhouses outside London were built before 1782 (the year in which the Grand Theatre opened) but that they just haven't survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.buildinghistory.org/buildings/entertainment.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dublin's first theatre opened in 1637&lt;/a&gt;, but Dublin is outside &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;England&lt;/a&gt;. I am specifically looking for playhouses in &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T15:22:16.900" Title="Where was the first English playhouse outside London built?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-18T10:15:35.590" Score="2" ViewCount="472" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;The Origin&lt;/em&gt; by Dan Brown, and wondered if Ambra Vidal ever thought about whatever happened to Sienna Brooks - Langdon's muse from &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;?&#xA;Or Sienna must have vetted Langdon knowing his past, did she ever wonder what happened to Sophie Neveu - Langdon's muse from &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more specific, when a new character meets with Langdon, they might also remember his previous adventures but they never seem to mention... even in a casual conversation, and that makes me curious.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Considering all Langdon novels are a journey, the new characters do not much muse over the previous stories or victories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the other way around .. does Langdon keep in touch with any of his previous muses? Except for Sienna, I think he ended on a decently good note with everyone including Sophie Nauve, Vittoria Vetra, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4799" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T11:01:23.150" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T11:01:23.150" Title="Do the new characters ever wonder about olders muses of Robert Langdon?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;dan-brown&gt;&lt;inferno&gt;&lt;origin-langdon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3103" CreationDate="2018-07-18T10:56:55.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Read Sandburg's poem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/omaha/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Omaha&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. I think you'll see that he does not:  &quot;...Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Eats and swears from a dirty face.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Omaha works to get the world a breakfast. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4800" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-07-18T11:03:24.747" LastActivityDate="2018-07-18T11:03:24.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2018-07-19T11:25:11.367" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, LOTR is actually a book in the Middle Earth written primarily by Frodo. Hence the metafiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4803" LastActivityDate="2018-07-19T11:25:11.367" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-19T22:44:37.387" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know from reading the &lt;em&gt;Xanth&lt;/em&gt; novels that the demon Xanth put another demon in charge of providing the humans with their specific talents (magic abilities that they can use at will). Now my question is this: how did that particular demon get his/her job in the beginning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figured that it was a direct order from the demon Xanth to begin with, but I want more opinions before I make judgment.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second Xanth book it’s established that the demon Xanth was the source of the land of Xanth’s magic if it helps. Bink was the protagonist in the first two Xanth books and he &lt;strong&gt;temporarily&lt;/strong&gt; removed Xanth's magic (the land, &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the demon) the first book was &quot;a spell for chameleon&quot; if it helps, the second book is “the source of magic “.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="2455" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T17:05:52.267" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T17:05:52.267" Title="How did the daemon appointed by Xanth get his position?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7972" CreationDate="2018-07-20T14:37:02.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can find in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Mj05AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&amp;amp;dq=%22drury+lane%22+liverpool%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjZm9HY-a3cAhVEnOAKHYx_DX4Q6AEILDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22drury%20lane%20theatre%20was%20opened%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Annals of the Liverpool stage: from the earliest period to the present time &lt;/a&gt; from Google books, the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In June, 1759, the Drury Lane Theatre was opened with the tragedy of &lt;em&gt;The Orphans&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book states that there were playhouses around in Liverpool before that, at least since 1740, and even that the Drury Lane Theatre was around before then. However, it seems that many of these earlier theatres were actually warehouses, either temporarily or permanently converted into stages. The Drury Lane Theatre seems to have been rebuilt in 1759 specifically as a theatre, so this should satisfy the criteria of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Liverpool the first? I don't know; I presume similar theatres in other regional English cities were established around the same time, but they may be harder to find references to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these first playhouses were illegal, although I assume that nobody ever prosecuted their owners. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zNY6AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA182&amp;amp;dq=An+act+for+enabling+his+majesty+licence+playhouse&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi2i9PfyLDcAhWFzlkKHdMZCKwQ6AEIVzAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=An%20act%20for%20enabling%20his%20majesty%20licence%20playhouse&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Theatre: A Monthly Review and Magazine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; explains that dramatic performances were forbidden outside of London, and that an act of Parliament was required to make them legal. The Orchard Street Theatre in Bath had been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;enlarged to double its former dimensions and had grown into a valuable property, but it was still unprotected by the law ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The owners of the Orchard Street Theatre thus sought an act of Parliament making their theatre legal, and this became the first theatre licensed by the King. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many more were licensed later I can find in Google books the following, although I suspect that this is not the complete list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0aRFAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA452&amp;amp;dq=%22his+majesty+to+licence+a+playhouse+in+the+city+of+bath%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwizgMSAybDcAhWrtlkKHeJHCbkQ6AEILDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22his%20majesty%20to%20licence%20a%20playhouse%20in%20the%20city%20of%20bath%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1768:&lt;/a&gt; An Act to enable His Majesty to licence a Playhouse in the City of Bath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=zMgHAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA197&amp;amp;lpg=PA197&amp;amp;dq=%22an+act+for+reducing+the+laws+relating+to+rogues%22+playhouses&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=L6b-pNLrDQ&amp;amp;sig=5pn5ksqGW8_qmwLV4nea2IksUQI&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwibmICSyLDcAhXuqFkKHVCJB0IQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22an%20act%20for%20reducing%20the%20laws%20relating%20to%20rogues%22%20playhouses&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1768:&lt;/a&gt; An Act for enabling His Majesty to Licence a Playhouse in the city of York &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8qRFAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA74&amp;amp;dq=%22an+act+for+reducing+the+laws+relating+to+rogues%22+playhouse&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjWsaPj763cAhXhSt8KHfAVCVMQ6AEILzAB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1771:&lt;/a&gt; An Act to enable his Majesty to license a Playhouse in the Town of Liverpoole&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=w6M3AAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA106&amp;amp;dq=%22an+act+for+reducing+the+laws+relating+to+rogues%22+playhouse&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjWsaPj763cAhXhSt8KHfAVCVMQ6AEIKTAA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1775&lt;/a&gt;: An act for enabling his Majesty to license a playhouse in the town of Manchester&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=w6M3AAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA106&amp;amp;dq=playhouse+lancaster&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjIg4u89q3cAhVDZN8KHZtrAqQQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=playhouse&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1777&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;  An act to enable his Majesty to licence a theatre in the city of Chester&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=qvE9AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA623&amp;amp;dq=%22an+act+for+reducing+the+laws+relating+to+rogues%22+playhouse+tyne&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjcsNqN8q3cAhXvlOAKHRtFDP4Q6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22an%20act%20for%20reducing%20the%20laws%20relating%20to%20rogues%22%20playhouse%20tyne&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1788&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;  An Act to enable his Majesty to licence a Play-house in ... the Town of Newcastle upon Tyne&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These acts explain that these licenses were necessary because of a law dating from the 10th year of King George's II reign (1737) that forbade playhouses outside of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Westminster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the City of Westminster&lt;/a&gt; without a license from the king. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T16:17:35.203" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T16:17:35.203" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7980" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-20T17:57:37.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-20T17:57:37.030" LastActivityDate="2018-07-20T17:57:37.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7981" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-20T17:57:37.030" Score="0" Body="For questions whose answers can't be objectively evaluated as correct or incorrect, but which are still relevant to this site. Please be specific about what you are after." OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-07-21T19:20:51.097" LastActivityDate="2018-07-21T19:20:51.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-20T19:41:06.220" Score="4" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I mean, one of the main reasons people wanted to leave Earth was because of the war. Then why did they go back to Earth when the war started? I understand that people cared for their families and friends, but even so, in real life most people won't return to a war zone after they escaped. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4806" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-19T00:52:07.857" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T02:01:55.293" Title="In The Martian Chronicles, why did everyone leave Mars when the war started?" Tags="&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;the-martian-chronicles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8736" CreationDate="2018-07-21T00:48:50.010" Score="5" ViewCount="912" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whatever happened to Scrooge’s partner after he gave his warning about the three ghosts? I know it’s way before Christmas, but I just have to know! It just seems strange to me that he’s never mentioned again in the book. Granted in at least one publication he was redeemed severely at the end of it, but it was ONLY one publication and a magazine at that, so that publication probably isn’t canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T20:12:52.457" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T09:20:41.090" Title="What happened to Marley in A Christmas Carol?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-christmas-carol&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-21T17:51:44.263" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The force is strong with this one&quot; is apparently a &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheForceIsStrongWithThisOne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trope&lt;/a&gt; and its meaning has already been discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/133797/89356&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy SE&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Star Wars franchise&lt;/a&gt; started in 1977, but the ability to sense somebody else's powers is also an element in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea cycle, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Earthsea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first novel&lt;/a&gt; of which was published in 1968, almost a decade before Star Wars. In Earthsea, someone with magic powers (including witches) can sense whether someone else also has these abilities, even when they are underdeveloped. However, an untrained person who has this gift does not seem to have this ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Heinlein's novella &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic,_Inc.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magic, Inc.&lt;/a&gt; (1940) has a &quot;witch smeller&quot;, but I am not sure this person has any magic or supernatural abilities similar to that of a witch. So it may not be an example of what I am looking for. All the other works listed in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://allthetropes.wikia.com/wiki/Supernatural_Sensitivity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supernatural Sensitivity&lt;/a&gt; in the All The Tropes Wiki are more recent than Le Guin's first Eathsea stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if Ursula Le Guin invented this trope; I assume it is older. So where does it come from? In other words, what is the oldest work of literature that use this trope?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T19:45:45.663" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T19:45:45.663" Title="What is the literary origin of the ability to sense somebody else's powers or &quot;force&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8012" CreationDate="2018-07-22T04:39:59.833" Score="3" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Directive 10-289 went into effect, there were a large number of people who simply couldn't stand living under the circumstances created by the directive anymore and simply vanished. Most of them don't appear to have joined the Strike; at a minimum, when Dagny went to the Valley, Pat Logan (engineer of the Comet, and engineer on the first freight train on the John Galt Line) was apparently &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; there (even though on the face of it he seems like he'd be an excellent candidate for joining the Strike). Where exactly were they going, and how did they survive? Are there any clues in the book as to their ultimate fate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T21:36:05.473" Title="Where did the Deserters go?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-22T23:31:53.527" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Help me remember the name of this book from my youth.  I don't remember much about it but it was the story of a group of school kids who go on a field trip to a fort. I think something happens at the fort, like they are transported back in time and experience life in colonial (civil war maybe) time. They may have even taken part in resisting a siege. I know that isn't much to go on, but I'd love to find it and re-read it :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my responses to the Guide for this type of question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When did you read the story, and how old was it?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the story when I was a kid, so I'd say at least 20 years ago, and I have no idea if it was an old book already at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Medium and appearance&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember what the cover looked like, but I remember it was a book, and not a magazine or a story from a textbook or anything like that.  My feeling was that it was a typical length for a YA book, probably no more that 200 pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What language did you read it in, and was it translated?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English, and I doubt if it was translated but you never know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where did you read this story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very likely that I read this story either in the public library, or I checked it out from the library.  I did a lot of &quot;summer reading&quot; events when I was a kid and I took crap-tons of books out of the library in those days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4808" LastEditorUserId="2455" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T19:32:21.687" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T19:32:21.687" Title="Story about school kids who go on a field trip to a fort" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-24T06:31:08.083" Score="3" ViewCount="938" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &quot;Birches&quot; by Robert Frost. I am having difficulty in understanding the meaning of a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please refer to this link for the full poem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They click upon themselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;click upon themselves&quot; mean? Does it mean that the trees collide with other trees and exhibit a to and fro motion or does it mean that the trees hit the ground and then return back to their original position? I could not understand how &quot;and turn many-colored/ As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel&quot;. How do they turn many colored and does &quot;enamel&quot; here mean the ice covering the bark of the tree or the bark of the tree itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-24T10:18:13.750" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T10:18:13.750" Title="Meaning of this line from &quot;Birches&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7995" CreationDate="2018-07-24T09:35:36.090" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The trees are covered in ice, and &quot;as the breeze rises&quot;, they make clicking sounds as different ice-covered parts of the tree collide. The breeze (or &quot;stir&quot;) cracks the &quot;enamel&quot; - the ice covering, and so as it falls off, the many different colours - white, green grey - are revealed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T09:35:36.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-24T15:01:56.830" Score="1" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt; issue of 13 February 2013, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-poet-of-piercing-valentines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brad Leithauser discussed some of Robert Graves's love poems&lt;/a&gt;, including the quatrain &quot;Love Without Hope&quot;. (I think the poem is still copyrighted, even though it has been reproduced on many websites.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's second verse says the bird-catcher,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leithauser comments (my emphasis), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Normally, the sweeping off of a tall hat would suggest elegance, but not here. (&lt;strong&gt;We know what the top of his head must look like.&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really? Why is this worth mentioning? (If it's just an ordinary bunch of hair, why even mention it?) What would the top of the bird-catcher's head look like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T08:09:35.633" Title="What does the top of the bird-catcher's head look like?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-graves&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7997" CreationDate="2018-07-24T16:12:48.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are live larks in the hat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explanatory edit requested by Gallifreyan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone has been imprisoning live birds in their hat, we can assume that their hair will be at least messy and perhaps covered in feathers and bird droppings. So, as Leithauser points out, Graves has transformed the gallant gesture of a gentleman into something that's at the same time more scruffy and more heartfelt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4821" LastEditorUserId="4821" LastEditDate="2018-07-26T08:09:35.633" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T08:09:35.633" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="7999" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:26:12.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-24T19:26:12.837" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T19:26:12.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8000" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:26:12.837" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet, historical novelist and critic Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) and his works. As a novelist, he is best known for &quot; I, Claudius&quot; (1934)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-24T19:35:07.103" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T19:35:07.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8001" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:38:43.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-24T19:38:43.350" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T19:38:43.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8002" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-24T19:38:43.350" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English-American poet Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973) and his works. In addition to poems, he also wrote libretti for several operas, including Igor Stravinsky's &quot;The Rake's Progress&quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-24T22:46:46.570" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T22:46:46.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8003" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8004" CreationDate="2018-07-24T23:09:21.110" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have lost one of my favourite poems, &lt;em&gt;Climbing Tintagel&lt;/em&gt;, which I think is by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicki_Feaver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vicki Feaver&lt;/a&gt;. I read it in a library book that had works by three (women) poets many years ago. I can't find it online even though I remember many of the lines more-or-less accurately... something like this (line breaks omitted as I don't recall them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ghosts don't exist, you said, except as legends in our head. But if they did, and we could choose a haunting place, we wouldn't moon about in graveyards, or return to clank around our enemies. We'd go back to where&#xA;  We once were happiest, following Arthur and his queen up cliff and crag [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can I find this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="248" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-25T13:00:10.547" LastActivityDate="2018-07-25T13:00:10.547" Title="Where can I find the text of the poem &quot;Climbing Tintagel&quot; by (I think) Vicki Feaver?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8003" CreationDate="2018-07-24T23:59:17.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's in &lt;i&gt;The Handless Maiden&lt;/i&gt; by Vicky Feaver. Published by Cape Poetry. Available on Amazon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2667" LastActivityDate="2018-07-24T23:59:17.193" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-25T12:54:15.807" Score="13" ViewCount="2200" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent discussion in on online course about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/how-to-read-a-novel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Read a Novel&lt;/a&gt;, someone suggested that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Winston Smith&lt;/a&gt; in Orwell's novel &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; is an unreliable narrator. L. Kip Wheeler's glossary of &quot;Literary Terms and Defnitions&quot; defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_U.html#unreliable_narrator_anchor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unreliable narrator&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses with surface accuracy, but misinterpets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. Often the writer or poet creating such an unreliable narrator leaves clues so that readers will perceive the unreliablity and question the interpretations offered. Examples of unreliable narrators arguably include &quot;Geoffrey the pilgrim&quot; in the  &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; , the character of Forest Gump in the movie of the same name, and possibly Wilson in &quot;The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Wikipedia has an article about the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;unreliable narrator&lt;/a&gt;, with a list of examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a narrator, Winston Smith does not appear to be intent on hiding certain facts from the reader, so in what way can he be considered as an unreliable narrator? Or is he reliable after all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T10:39:23.877" Title="Is Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984 an unreliable narrator?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8006" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8013" CreationDate="2018-07-25T20:39:54.880" Score="3" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;John McWhorter &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1627794719&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Words on the Move&lt;/em&gt; (2016)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=vKqTCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA73&amp;amp;ots=2xIbBLOtDF&amp;amp;dq=%22it%27s%20easy%20to%20see%20how%20one%20gets%20from%20yelling%20to%20crying%22&amp;amp;pg=PA86#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Polonius%20opens%20his%20%20farewell%20speech%20to%20Laertes%20&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 86.&lt;/a&gt; Emboldening mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Commonly we are told that Shakespeare's language is&#xA;&amp;quot;high,&amp;quot; such that the challenge can be met by making a&#xA;certain effort. Related to this is the idea that Shakespeare's&#xA;language is poetic, requiring more effort to process than&#xA;the phraseology of Neil Simon. Then someone will say that&#xA;the language comes across best with careful acting technique,&#xA;ideally wielded by British people.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  All claims except the one about Brits are true. However,&#xA;many will be nagged by a feeling that there is more to the&#xA;story, and there is. When, in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Polonius opens his&#xA;farewell speech to Laertes (&amp;quot;Neither a borrower nor a lender&#xA;be&amp;quot;) with &amp;quot;And these few precepts in thy memory / &lt;strong&gt;See thou&#xA;character&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; rising to a challenge can take us only so far. We&#xA;can indeed process &lt;em&gt;precepts&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;thy&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; with the aforesaid&#xA;rising. But what does Polonius mean by &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt;? Neither&#xA;intonation, facial expression, being British, nor rising will&#xA;get across that in Shakespeare's time that word meant&#xA;&amp;quot;write,&amp;quot; as in the characters that one writes. Polonius is&#xA;telling Laertes, in short, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Note these things well.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please compare the two emboldened imperatives.  I can understand how &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/character&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘character’ signified writing&lt;/a&gt;. But how did ‘see’ semantically shift to signify ‘note/record’? I.e., even after this explanation, this meaning of 'see' still feels bizarre. Can someone please make it more natural?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet Study Guide on SparkNotes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T19:19:53.013" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T19:19:53.013" Title="In Early Modern English, how did 'see' semantically shift to mean 'note/record'?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8006" CreationDate="2018-07-26T01:06:52.897" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your premise is wrong here: &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean &lt;em&gt;note&lt;/em&gt; in this passage; &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;make sure&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;thou character&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;you write it down&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in thy memory see thou character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;make sure that you make a record of this in your memory, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which means more or less the same thing as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;note these things well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;See&lt;/em&gt; still can mean &lt;em&gt;make sure&lt;/em&gt;: from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/see&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionaries Online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See:&lt;/strong&gt; 6 &lt;em&gt;[no object]&lt;/em&gt; Ensure.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;[with clause]&lt;/em&gt; ‘see that no harm comes to him’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T01:06:52.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8008" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8005" CreationDate="2018-07-26T09:34:19.613" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winston is the only character whose point of view we have access to in the novel, a necessary precursor for the potential of an unreliable narrator. After all, without an external perspective, we can never be sure what he's not telling us, nor whether the context in which he presents the information is accurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take, for example, the way he blames himself for his mother's fate. He tells Julia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know, that until this moment I believed I had murdered my mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until this point, his mother has only appeared in hazy recollections and in bizarre dreams in which she (and his sister) are trapped in a pit while he is at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the story, it is implied that she was taken by the party because she refused to conform to their ideals. However, the lack of detail makes it difficult to be certain. It seems plausible that Winston may be hiding something, perhaps downplaying or omitting his own role in the eventual fate of his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can apply a similar thought process to other characters. Syme, for example, seems to exhibit a level of intelligence that Winston enjoys but which he clearly perceives as a potential threat to the party. Syme later disappears, and we are given no further detail. Has Syme been taken by the party apparatus, or has Winston reported him? Did he, in fact, even exist, or is he an invention of Winston's terrified mind? Without external validation, we cannot be certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, we are asked to take at face value Winston's feeling that he is rare, perhaps even unique, in his free thinking. He regularly judges those around him as brainwashed partisans, unthinking victims of the party's propaganda. It never seems to occur to him that just as he is terrified of revealing his opinions and secrets, everyone else might be in the same position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could make a similar argument, perhaps, about any novel which is narrated by a single character and which contains any loose ends. Winston, however, has potential motivations to be unreliable. His conditioning under the totalitarian state will have primed him to keep secrets. The stress of his existence in such an awful world may have driven him mad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest reason we might suspect Winston's reliability, though, is made clear at the conclusion of the novel. - spoiler ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston is brainwashed by the party and learns to love Big Brother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... meaning we can no longer be certain of the accuracy of anything he has said, in the entire novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T10:39:23.877" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T10:39:23.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7985" CreationDate="2018-07-26T13:56:54.530" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reposting Joshua Engel's comment as an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The impression I get is that because he's dead, he's unredeemable. The point is that Scrooge has to mend his ways before it's too late. Conceivably he gets some kind of bonus points for taking the trouble to appear to Scrooge, but he doesn't really have a story arc here. He's just deceased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4821" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-03T16:17:24.307" LastActivityDate="2018-11-03T16:17:24.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6646" CreationDate="2018-07-26T15:04:50.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees's answer covers the most important points, i.e. how to become the sort of wizard that the school of Roke approved of. The last novel in the Earthsea cycle, &lt;em&gt;The Other Wind&lt;/em&gt;, mentions that there is another category of wizards in the world of Earthsea. One of the people at Lebannon's court is Seppel, a wizard from Paln, whom many people try to avoid (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Paln, the greatest island west of Havnor, had the reputation of being an uncanny place. The Pelnish spoke Hardic with a peculiar accent, using many words of their own. (...)&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Their wizards did not go to Roke for their training. The Pelnish Lore, which called upon the Old Powers of the Earth, was widely believed to be dangerous if not sinister.&lt;/strong&gt; Long ago the Grey Mage of Paln had brough ruin on his island by summoning the souls of the dead to advise him and his lords, and that tale was part of the education of every sorcerer: “The living should not take counsel of the dead.” (…) And fifteen years ago, when &lt;strong&gt;the wizard Cob had used the Pelnish Lore&lt;/strong&gt; to cross between life and death, the Archmage Sparrowhawk had spent all his own power to defeat him and heal the evil he had done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The wizard Cob is a character in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farthest_Shore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Farthest Shore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the book does not provide any details about how potential wizards are discovered or how they get their training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T15:04:50.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6959" CreationDate="2018-07-26T20:58:42.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this was a fun one to research ... Skip to the end if you just want the answer, but I'm going to go through the whole research process in case anyone else can pick up the trail and do better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not knowing how many of the details you'd remembered precisely, I decided that the rhyme between &quot;fine&quot; and &quot;mine&quot; was something unlikely to be &lt;em&gt;mis&lt;/em&gt;remembered. So I tried a Google search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-ab&amp;amp;ei=uyxaW8CxF43PwQKx6aq4Dw&amp;amp;q=poem+%22houses+fine%22+when+i%27ve+bought+them+%22they%27ll+be+mine%22&amp;amp;oq=poem+%22houses+fine%22+when+i%27ve+bought+them+%22they%27ll+be+mine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;poem &quot;houses fine&quot; when i've bought them &quot;they'll be mine&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and found three results, two being this Lit.SE question and one &lt;a href=&quot;https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=79364&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this forum thread&lt;/a&gt;, where someone remembered the following lines from a poetry collection called &lt;em&gt;Time and Tune&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Over there three houses fine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I've bought them they'll be mine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm from our village, our village&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm my father's son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now we've got something to go on! I looked up about this &lt;em&gt;Time and Tune&lt;/em&gt; and learned that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Time_and_Tune&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's a very long-running course for teaching music to British schoolchildren&lt;/a&gt;. It started in 1951, which fits with your memory being from the mid '50s, and apparently is still running today.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Next I searched for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-ab&amp;amp;ei=NS5aW57aBYLTwQKg9ofgAw&amp;amp;q=bbc+%22time+and+tune%22+boaster&amp;amp;oq=bbc+%22time+and+tune%22+boaster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;bbc &quot;time and tune&quot; boaster&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and discovered that indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=158547&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there was at least one poem called &quot;The Boaster&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: this title appears in both the 1956 Spring collection and the 1961 Summer collection. Could either/both of these be what you're looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No, or at least maybe. A forum poster named Michael Thomas &lt;a href=&quot;https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=149342&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was asking after&lt;/a&gt; a poem called &quot;The Boaster&quot; from 1956 or 1961, and he was directed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=5930&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, that poem is called &quot;The Boaster&quot; but isn't the one you're looking for. However, it's not what Michael Thomas was looking for either; in fact, it seems he was looking for the same thing as you:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Nigel: thank you for your reply. It wasn't that one, though it's a great song and thank you for posting it. I remember a couple of lines from the one I'm trying to find:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I've in town three houses fine&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I've bought them they'll be mine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm from our village, our village,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm my father's son.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with thanks and best wishes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Michael&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not sure where to go next. Searching the Mudcat site for instances of the word &quot;boaster&quot; only turned up the pages that I've already linked above. Even searching Google for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-ab&amp;amp;ei=SjVaW8O1BMWd6AS-5p-wBQ&amp;amp;q=bbc+%22time+and+tune%22+%22the+boaster%22&amp;amp;oq=bbc+%22time+and+tune%22+%22the+boaster%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;bbc &quot;time and tune&quot; &quot;the boaster&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; didn't give me any more information beyond what's already above.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: the poem you're looking for is somewhere in the BBC &lt;em&gt;Time and Tune&lt;/em&gt; collection, probably from either Spring 1956 or Summer 1961, although at least one of these may also be a completely different poem entitled &quot;The Boaster&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T20:58:42.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7991" CreationDate="2018-07-26T21:36:05.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can make an educated guess based on a few clues left in the book. Consider the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were whispered rumors of covered wagons traveling by night&#xA;  through  abandoned trails, and of secret settlements armed to resist&#xA;  the attacks of  those whom they called the &quot;Indians&quot;—the attacks of&#xA;  any looting savages, be  they homeless mobs or government agents.&#xA;  Lights were seen, once in a while,  on the distant horizon of a&#xA;  prairie, in the hills, on the ledges of  mountains, where no buildings&#xA;  had been known to exist. But no soldiers could  be persuaded to&#xA;  investigate the sources of those lights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who were not Strikers and not Looters lived as they could, self sufficiently and off the grid. It's reasonable to assume that Pat Logan and others like him lived in one of these secret settlements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-07-26T21:36:05.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8006" CreationDate="2018-07-27T09:47:50.650" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question assumes that &quot;see&quot; is the only verb in the sentence and that &quot;character&quot; is a noun. This results in the following analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;these few precepts&quot;: direct object,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;in thy memory&quot;: locative &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct_(grammar)#Semantic_function&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adjunct&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;see&quot;: predicate (main verb?),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;thou&quot;: subject,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;character&quot;: another direct object? An &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complement_(linguistics)#Predicative,_subject_and_object_complements&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;object complement&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analysis assumes that &quot;see&quot; (or &quot;look&quot;, in some editions) can take an object and object complement, and I don't think this is the case. (See the entries in C. T. Onions's &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correct analysis is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;these few precepts&quot;: direct object,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;in thy memory&quot;: locative adjunct,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;see&quot;: auxiliary verb,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;thou&quot;: subject,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;character&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;main verb&lt;/strong&gt;; meaning: engrave, inscribe (figuratively).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resulting meaning is: &lt;strong&gt;See to it that you inscribe these precepts in(to) your memory&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Character&quot; is also used as a verb in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/two_2_7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt;, 2.7.4&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do conjure thee,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Who art the table wherein all my thoughts&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Are visibly &lt;strong&gt;character'd&lt;/strong&gt; and engraved, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also occurs in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/2kh6_3_1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;2 Henry VI&lt;/em&gt;, 3.1.302&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Show me one scar &lt;strong&gt;character'd&lt;/strong&gt; on thy skin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some editions of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; use &quot;Look&quot; instead of &quot;See&quot;. &quot;See&quot; is the version from the First Folio (1616); the second quarto or Q2 has &quot;Looke&quot; (which is then modernised to &quot;Look&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some editions point out that &quot;character&quot; is here accented on the second syllable. (They add that this is also the case in line 2 of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/122.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 122&lt;/a&gt;, but John Kerrigan's edition of the sonnets says nothing about the scansion of that line.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works consulted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Onions, Charles Talbut; Eagleson, Robert D.: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. [1986] Enlarged and Revised Throughout by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 [1988]. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by T. J. B. Spencer. Introduced by Anne Barton. The New Penguin Shakespeare. London: Penguin, 1980.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Bernard Lott. New Swan Shakespeare: Advanced Series. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1990 [1968].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by G. R. Hibbard. The Oxford Shakespeare. [1987] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Cyrus Hoy. Norton Critical Editions. [W. W. Norton &amp;amp; Company, 1963] Second Edition. New York; London: W. W. Norton &amp;amp; Company, 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. [Methuen, 1982] London: Routledge, 1993.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-04T16:34:02.727" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T16:34:02.727" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:39:22.657" Score="3" ViewCount="767" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a recent discussion in an online literature course, someone thought that the young woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Wallpaper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Yellow Wallpaper&lt;/a&gt; and the character Septimus Warren Smith in Virginia Woolf's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs_Dalloway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mrs. Dalloway&lt;/a&gt; were both threatened by inactivity imposed on them by pompous medical men. This led to the question whether Virginia Woolf had read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story. Date-wise it is possible, since &quot;The Yellow Wallpaper&quot; was published in &lt;em&gt;The New England Magazine&lt;/em&gt; in 1892, and &lt;em&gt;Mrs. Dalloway&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1925. However, I'm not sure whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_England_Magazine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New England Magazine&lt;/a&gt;, which ceased publication in 1917, had enough circulation outside the USA, or whether the short story was sufficiently well-known to come to Woolf's notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there any evidence that Virginia Woolf read Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story before 1925? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T12:00:36.830" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T12:00:36.830" Title="Did Virginia Woolf read The Yellow Wallpaper before publishing Mrs. Dalloway?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;&lt;charlotte-perkins-gilman&gt;&lt;mrs-dalloway&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8015" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:41:12.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T10:41:12.197" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T10:41:12.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8016" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:41:12.197" Score="0" Body="&quot;Mrs. Dalloway&quot; (1925), a modernist novel by Virginia Woolf. Use with the [virginia-woolf] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-29T18:04:28.890" LastActivityDate="2019-08-29T18:04:28.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8017" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:43:04.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T10:43:04.063" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T10:43:04.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8018" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:43:04.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about the short story &quot;The Yellow Wallpaper&quot; by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, first published in 1892. Use this tag with the [charlotte-perkins-gilman] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T13:05:47.073" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T13:05:47.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8019" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:46:55.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T10:46:55.573" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T10:46:55.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8020" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-27T10:46:55.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860 – 1935) or about any of her literary works. She is best known for the novel &quot;Herland&quot; (1915), the short story &quot;The Yellow Wallpaper&quot; (1892) and the monograph &quot;Women and Economics&quot; (1898)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-27T11:59:14.523" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T11:59:14.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6193" CreationDate="2018-07-27T15:49:02.290" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jim Taggart, along with most the looters, are in a constant battle of self-contradiction. We learn from Hugh Akston that contradictions don't exist. Yet Jim and the others try to live with their contradiction of wanting to strangle everything superior and good while at the same time wanting the superior and good people to go on producing so they don't starve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, Jim cannot be tipped off by his own contradictions nor his rising insanity. He's aware of it already, but constantly hides it deep down so he doesn't have to confront it. When, after the torture of John Galt, Jim is finally forced to confront his contradiction and insanity, his mind implodes, and he is never the same again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T15:49:02.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4925" CreationDate="2018-07-27T16:34:29.390" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more searching, especially on WorldCat, I have come to the conclusion that the first edition of Edward de Vere's poems was &lt;strong&gt;Thomas Looney's&lt;/strong&gt;, published in &lt;strong&gt;1921&lt;/strong&gt;. You can find this edition in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/poems-of-edward-de-vere-seventeenth-earl-of-oxford/oclc/906155669&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Thomas_Looney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Looney's&lt;/a&gt; main claim to fame (or shame) is the invention of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship&lt;/a&gt;. According to this theory, Edward the Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, wrote Shakespeare's play, including those published after 1604 that allude to events that took place after his death (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gunpowder Plot&lt;/a&gt; of November 1605).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;introduction&lt;/strong&gt; to Looney's edition of &lt;em&gt;The Poems of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford&lt;/em&gt; is available on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org/intro-to-poems-of-de-vere/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;website of the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship&lt;/a&gt;. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.forgottenbooks.com/en/books/ThePoemsofEdwardDeVere_10098161&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;digitised version of the entire book&lt;/a&gt; can be downloaded from the website Forgotten Books. For a web version of the poems, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Edward_de_Vere_(1550-1604)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An earlier edition of Edward de Vere's poems also included poems by a few of his contemporaries. See especially &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/poems-of-thomas-lord-vaux-edward-earl-of-oxford-robert-earl-of-essex-and-walter-earl-of-essex-for-the-first-time-collected/oclc/69662890&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The poems of Thomas, Lord Vaux ; Edward, Earl of Oxford ; Robert, Earl of Essex ; and Walter, Earl of Essex : for the first time collected&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;strong&gt;1872&lt;/strong&gt; (&quot;Printed for private circulation; 156 copies only&quot;). Some people may be able to download the digitised version linked from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://core.ac.uk/display/59436413&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry in Core.ac.uk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-27T16:34:29.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-27T17:09:42.530" Score="4" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I recently watched a performance of &lt;em&gt;Ruddigore&lt;/em&gt; and later read that the second act was almost completely redone and that the overture was changed. However, I cannot seem to find anything regarding the original draft of the musical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does anyone know of a source for the original script, or what changes (plot wise) happened to make it mildly/well received instead of despised?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Also I wasn't sure whether to ask on TV and Film or here, but since it is regarding the original script I think it falls more here. If anyone has a better suggestion, please feel free.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4831" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-07-28T09:26:06.453" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T09:26:06.453" Title="What changes were made to Ruddigore?" Tags="&lt;gilbert-and-sullivan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8025" CreationDate="2018-07-27T22:13:36.723" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come accross the expressions 'putter, putter!' and 'chop, chop' in the novel 'The Arrangement' by Elia Kazan. I need interpretation. Here is the paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He'd continue his joking, fixing me with that eye, a god in malevolence as well as in power, his eyebrows hard as scimitars, and he'd demand, &quot;How much money did you make today?&quot; &#xA;  Now what kind of goddam question was that to ask a kid just starting high school? He'd glare at me so it was impossible for me to answer, my lips were so dry. But he'd drink his oozou, nibble pieces of that crusty goat cheese, and wait. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Putter, putter&lt;/strong&gt;,&quot; he'd say, referring I suppose to the evidence of my nerves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But my father had one more blast for me. He'd serve himself and my mother, he'd serve my younger brother, Michael, and then me. As he gave me my plate, he'd look at me with such disappointment, such profound disillusionment-oh God, it hurt! Then he'd say, &quot;Don't worry, my boy, I expect nothing from you, Shakespeare! &lt;strong&gt;Putter, putter! Chop, chop&lt;/strong&gt;! I expect nothing. I need nothing.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T19:41:44.823" Title="Are the words 'putter' and 'chop' some kind of mimetic words or what in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-arrangement&gt;&lt;elia-kazan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8024" CreationDate="2018-07-28T19:41:44.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the context that the father &quot;expect[s] nothing from [the narrator]&quot;, putter is describing the actions of the son &lt;em&gt;puttering around&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/putter%20around&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Putter Around&lt;/a&gt;: to spend time in a relaxed way doing small jobs and other things that are not very important&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas &lt;em&gt;putter&lt;/em&gt; (not the golf club) alone has quite a negative connotation as well...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/putter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Putter&lt;/a&gt;: to move or act aimlessly or idly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second passage the father is essentially mocking his son by adding &lt;em&gt;chop, chop&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chop-chop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chop-Chop&lt;/a&gt;: without delay, quickly (Chinese Pidgin English, reduplication of &lt;em&gt;chop&lt;/em&gt;, fast)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father is saying &quot;do nothing, quickly&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2018-07-28T19:41:44.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8026" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-28T20:16:00.713" Score="11" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/74/74-h/74-h.htm#c33&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXIII of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Tom explains &quot;ransom&quot; to Huck.  But in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter II of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Tom has no idea what ransoming is.  Is this just Twain forgetting what his character knew?  Or perhaps Twain is breaking continuity to be able to include the humor/satire of the ransom discussion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4834" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T14:25:55.663" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T14:25:55.663" Title="Why does Tom Sawyer forget what &quot;ransom&quot; means?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;adventures-of-tom-sawyer&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-29T01:04:30.697" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to find a poem by Simon Armitage where he goes on a tour about him in disguise only to find that the tour guide doesn't know much about him. What was its name and what collection is it in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="piove" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-07-29T13:41:39.057" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T13:41:39.057" Title="Looking for a poem by Simon Armitage" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;simon-armitage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-29T06:04:50.210" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;After he developed a number of highly successful buildings, Guy Francon was established enough in his reputation that he no longer had to do much actual design work on his own. Peter Keating privately admitted to Katie - his then-girlfriend - that he saw Francon as an &quot;old fraud.&quot; Even so, the book said that there was at least some method to his madness, and that he was apparently really good at finding clients. Peter Keating apparently lacked the same ability, and the between an economic downturn and Keating's overall ineptitude the firm went seriously downhill after Francon's retirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There isn't a lot of evidence of him dropping in on the firm to give advice or help, though (at least that I recall); is there any evidence of how he felt about the decline in the firm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T06:04:50.210" Title="How did Guy Francon feel about the decline of his (former) firm after his retirement?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8027" CreationDate="2018-07-29T12:50:17.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've finally found it, the title is &quot;Bringing It All Back Home&quot; in the collection &quot;Seeing Stars&quot;, it's the second from last piece there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4835" LastActivityDate="2018-07-29T12:50:17.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8031" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-30T01:30:26.587" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Halted&quot;, &quot;Fed&quot; and &quot;Eased&quot; from first stanza of &quot;Spring Offensive&quot; by Wilfred Owen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Halted against the shade of a last hill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, finding comfortable chests and knees&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Carelessly slept. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4281" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T13:18:07.837" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T13:18:07.837" Title="Is this a pararhyme?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wilfred-owen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5349" CreationDate="2018-07-30T14:24:07.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know how it originated, but the idea that cuckolds go to heaven is apparently an old English proverb/saying, not one that was invented by Byron. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2XtWDhgljvkC&amp;amp;pg=PA342&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; by Gordon Williams, gives a number of similar examples in the entry for &quot;Cuckolds are Christians&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tilley has 'In rain and sunshine cuckolds go to heaven' (R12; the thought occurs from 1591, but this form is cited from 1659). The simplified &quot;&lt;em&gt;Cuckolds go to Heaven&lt;/em&gt;' occurs in Spinke, &lt;em&gt;Quackery Unmask'd&lt;/em&gt; (1711) 8; and Leanerd, &lt;em&gt;Rambling Justice&lt;/em&gt; (1678) Epil. declares: 'both Fools and Cuckolds go to Heaven'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(p. 342)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1273" LastActivityDate="2018-07-30T14:24:07.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-31T08:35:12.767" Score="4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Mulisch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harry Mulisch&lt;/a&gt; prefaces his novel &lt;em&gt;De aanslag&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Assault&lt;/em&gt;) with a quote from C. Plinius Caecilius Secundus, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pliny the Younger&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Overal was het al dag, maar hier was het nacht, neen, meer dan nacht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation (from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.attalus.org/old/pliny6.html#16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. B. Firth's translation&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elsewhere the day had dawned by this time, but there it was still night, and the darkness was blacker and thicker than any ordinary night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from a letter from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus (&lt;em&gt;Epistles&lt;/em&gt;, Book VI, letter 16). However, what is the relevance of this quote to the novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T14:09:35.327" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T14:09:35.327" Title="Relevance of Pliny the Younger quote in The Assault (De aanslag) by Harry Mulisch?" Tags="&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;harry-mulisch&gt;&lt;the-assault&gt;&lt;pliny-the-younger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8036" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8037" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus or Pliny the Younger (61 – c. 113) and his works. Pliny is best known for his letters, of which 247 have survived." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:46:30.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8038" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8039" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet, playwright and novelist Simon Armitage (born in 1963) and his works. His has published more than 20 poetry collections and many other books, including a translation of Homer's Odyssey." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T10:48:47.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8040" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8035" CreationDate="2018-07-31T17:29:39.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before writing the actual answer, it is important to point out that the assault mentioned in the book's title is the shooting of a Dutch policeman who &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborationism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collaborated&lt;/a&gt; with the Nazis during World War II. The shooting is perpetrated by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch resistance&lt;/a&gt; and takes place in the winter of 1945, a period that the Dutch also remember because of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%9345&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famine&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his letter to Tacitus, Pliny the Younger tells the story of how his uncle &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pliny the Elder&lt;/a&gt; died, namely during the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eruption_of_Mount_Vesuvius_in_79&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79&lt;/a&gt;, which destroyed Pompeii, Herculaneum and Stabiae. He died while trying to rescue relatives who lived closer to the volcano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pliny the Younger reports in his letter that on 24 August, &quot;a cloud of unusual size and shape had made its appearance&quot; over Mount Vesuvius, and this cloud caused the darkness mentioned in the quote that prefaces the novel &lt;em&gt;De aanslag&lt;/em&gt;. There are at least three passages in the novel that mention smoke clouds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first passages can be found at the start of the &quot;Second episode - 1952&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;De aswolk uit de vulkaan stijgt naar de stratosfeer, draait om de aarde en regent nog jaren later op alle continenten neer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ash cloud from the volcano rises to the stratosphere, revolves around Earth and years later still descends on all continents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to other continents looks strange, until Anton, the book's main character, meets his former neighbour Karin again in the book's penultimate chapter and learns that Karin and her father had emigrated to New Zealand soon after the end of World War II, where her father committed suicide in 1948.&#xA;However, after reading the the book's &quot;First episode - 1945&quot;, the ash cloud is also linked with the burning of the house where Anton lived as a child. Since the Nazis found the collaborator's dead body in front of Anton's house, they burn it down without asking questions about what happened. We later learn that Anton is the family's only survivor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another &quot;eruption&quot; takes place near the end of the &quot;Third episode - 1956&quot;, when Anton meets the son of the victim of &quot;the assault&quot;. There is a problem with the stove in Anton's room; eventually, the lid flies off and a cloud of soot rises from the stove and covers everything in the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is another &quot;eruption&quot; during Anton's second and last meeting with the only surviving perpetrator of &quot;the assault&quot; (near the end of the &quot;Fourth episode - 1966&quot;). This time it is an ashtray that begins to produce an extraordinary amount of smoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these two &quot;eruptions&quot; take place when Anton or the character that Anton is talking to learns important new facts related to the assault itself or the question of guilt or blame related to that assault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-07-31T17:29:39.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8045" CreationDate="2018-08-01T01:49:31.973" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;McWhorter, J. &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanstudies.columbia.edu/people/john-h-mcwhorter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD  Linguistics (Stanford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/006052085X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Power of Babel&lt;/em&gt; (2003)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 24 Middle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;  Russian is such a case, and it creates little ripples of semantic &#xA;  ambiguity in translations. &lt;strong&gt;In his translation of the short piece &#xA;  &quot;Father's Butterflies&quot; by his father, Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri &#xA;  Nabokov has a neat little reference to &quot;the terrible turtles who &#xA;  direct learned journals.&quot; [mine]&lt;/strong&gt; Yet &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt; as used in English rings a little &#xA;  weak here in itself; the soul of this phrase is Russian, in which the &#xA;  word &lt;em&gt;strašnyj&lt;/em&gt; connotes &quot;terrible&quot; in the sense the word once had in &#xA;  English, &quot;terrifying&quot; like Maurice Sendak's &quot;Wild Things.&quot; The &#xA;  Russian connotation is the nightmarish iniquity of mediocre &#xA;  thinkers holding considerable power over one's output and career &#xA;  path, whereas taken as &quot;English,&quot; &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt;, having been diluted into &#xA;  referring to things like slow traffic, has a less cosmic ring and &#xA;  sounds more like a passing disparagement of the editors' talents. &#xA;  Dmitri Nabokov's translation takes advantage of the contrast in the &#xA;  semantic evolutions of &lt;em&gt;terrible&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;strašnyj&lt;/em&gt; to convey a feeling of &#xA;  Russian through English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling &lt;code&gt;nabokov &quot;terrible turtles&quot;&lt;/code&gt; yielded no explanations of the literary reference emboldened overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T02:32:43.147" Title="Please explain the reference to Nabokov's 'the terrible turtles who direct learned journals'?" Tags="&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6496" CreationDate="2018-08-01T05:47:14.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The New York Times provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/castillo-peel.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an excerpt&lt;/a&gt; that includes the sentence in question. The context is the experience of falling in love:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was in love once. When you are in love no single metaphor is enough.&#xA;  No metaphor appears just a tad cliched. You are dizzy with desire.&#xA;  Yes, dizzy, virtual vertigo. Someone catch me, I'm falling in love.&#xA;  Nothing too serious, no ambulance will be necessary. Just a few days of bed rest is needed, I'm sure. With him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This experience of being in love is full of metaphors that have become so commonly used they've become clichés - &lt;em&gt;falling&lt;/em&gt; in love being the most obvious - and yet the person in love doesn't see these metaphors as in any way tired or overused, because the experience itself is so powerful that metaphors aren't sufficient to describe it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love that is riddled with cliches but has never happened to either of&#xA;  you quite that way before, therefore it cannot be a cliche for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the sentence in question is saying that when you are truly smitten by love, what previously seemed like a tired cliché takes on an entirely unexpected freshness, depth of meaning and almost physical force. You hear the cliché with &quot;born-again ears&quot; and it strikes you as &quot;gospel truth&quot; (one could add further religious metaphors about &quot;revelation&quot; and &quot;epiphany&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression &quot;bounce back like a boomerang&quot; is a bit clumsy - boomerangs arc through the air, they don't bounce - but is intended to convey that the cliché about love that you had previously thrown away as jaded or meaningless has come back to you with renewed meaning and power. The cliché hits you &quot;smack dab between the eyes&quot; - &quot;smack dab&quot; meaning &quot;exactly&quot;, but with the extra dimension of collision or force - and suggests that this new awareness of the power of clichés to express the immensity of &quot;being in love&quot; is far from a gentle awakening. On the contrary, it comes as a shock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2018-08-01T05:47:14.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3431" CreationDate="2018-08-01T19:17:19.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hamlet arranges a scene so the players do not think R&amp;amp;G are too close to him, so they won't tell R&amp;amp;G about the changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your hands. The appurtenance&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of welcome is fashion and ceremony.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let me comply with you in this garb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  lest my extent to the players&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which must show fairly outwards.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should more appear like entertainment&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  than yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet similarly berates Polonius in front of the players:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow that lord,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and look you mock him not [hint-hint].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the play Claudius is put off his guard by Hamlet directing his first question to Gertrude:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Madam, how like you this play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Claudius thinks &quot;So this is all he's up to, ridiculing our hasty marriage?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare has your question covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4852" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-02T08:53:48.593" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T08:53:48.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8042" CreationDate="2018-08-02T01:25:00.893" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Quote source&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In his translation of the short piece &amp;quot;Father's Butterflies&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; by his father, Vladimir Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov has a neat little reference to &amp;quot;the terrible turtles who direct learned journals.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the quote says, the piece &amp;quot;Father's Butteflies&amp;quot; should have the quote. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/04/nabokov1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; Peter Shor &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/8042/please-explain-the-reference-to-nabokovs-the-terrible-turtles-who-direct-learn#comment13890_8042&quot;&gt;kindly provided&lt;/a&gt;, which is to that work, in part 4, about 2/3rds of the way down the page (ctrl-F is particularly useful to find this):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like to think he was not mistaken here, and that, in time, men will appear who are more alert than Murchison, more educated than I, more talented and lively than the &lt;strong&gt;terrible turtles who direct learned journals&lt;/strong&gt;, and that the elaboration of my father's thoughts, jotted in the hasty hand of a testament in the night preceding a dubious departure, when holster, gloves, and compass intrude momentarily on the sedentary life of the desk, and pursued here in a haze of filial love, piety, inspiration, and mental helplessness, will create a worthy monument to him, visible from every corner of natural science.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All bolding my own. Thanks to Peter Shor for finding the link.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Meaning and context of essay&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the meaning, a wee bit of context. The essay is about butterflies and a classification for them that Nabokov proposed along with some other plans. While his writing is apparently very difficult to understand, Dmitri is suggesting that Vladimir was not mistaken that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a maximally accurate exposition of the principles of such a study would still allow minds that at last understood them a chance to consummate the plan outlined by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Dmitri is suggesting that the plans he outlined could be done by someone who is &amp;quot;more educated than [himself]&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;more alert than Murchison&amp;quot; (Murchison was the author of a 300-page explanation of Count Godunov's thirty-page treatise, and is referenced earlier in the treatise as someone &amp;quot;whose lepidopterological knowledge is very limited&amp;quot;), and finally &amp;quot;more talented and lively than the terrible turtles who direct learned journals&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We thus reach the meat of the matter. As the quote you quoted in your question points out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Russian connotation is the nightmarish iniquity of mediocre thinkers holding considerable power over one's output and career path&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which conveys the main point. I'll just add to it slightly by saying that this makes sense as it references the talents of the &amp;quot;turtles&amp;quot; implying that they are not very talented, and also that they are &amp;quot;terrible&amp;quot;, one connotation of which can mean &amp;quot;having great, awful power&amp;quot;. Since the quote you referenced in your question talks about the word &amp;quot;terrible&amp;quot; not fully conveying the awfulness in the original Russian, this meaning makes the most sense to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the turtles part - note this connects to the fact that Dmitri points out that the he is looking for men who are &amp;quot;more [...] lively&amp;quot; than the turtles. A turtle is sluggish, by definition has a lack of liveliness. This connects with the lack of talent (their brain is &amp;quot;sluggish&amp;quot;) and also just their ineptitude - incapable people can be referred to as &amp;quot;slow&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the paragraph in which the turtles appear, Dmitri laments the unfinished-ness of a life's work, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bitterness of interrupted life is nothing compared to the bitterness of interrupted work: the probability that the former may continue beyond the grave seems infinite when compared to the inexorable incompletion of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-02T02:32:43.147" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8046" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8459" CreationDate="2018-08-02T07:57:20.150" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_beastandman.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beast and Man in India&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Lockwood Kipling (father of the more famous Rudyard Kipling), which is freely available on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/40708/40708-h/40708-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;, has the following cryptic dedication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TO THE OTHER THREE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SPmq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SPmq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;strange picture&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Who are &amp;quot;the other three&amp;quot;? The other three &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:14:02.913" Title="What does the dedication &quot;To The Other Three&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-lockwood-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8047" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8051" CreationDate="2018-08-02T19:16:35.567" Score="3" ViewCount="588" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a quote about travel attributed to the writer Paul Theroux: &amp;quot;Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.&amp;quot;  It shows up on web sites like Goodreads and Brainyquotes, but there is no citation information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this from one of his books or was this from an interview in a newspaper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4860" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T14:02:42.240" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:02:42.240" Title="What is the source of Paul Theroux's quote: &quot;Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;paul-theroux&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8048" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8052" CreationDate="2018-08-02T20:51:52.547" Score="4" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a quote about travel attributed to the writer Paul Theroux:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is used by a lot of writers on the Internet, but there is no citation information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikiquote this quote is from an interview with Theroux in the British newspaper the Observer (London, October 7, 1979).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried finding this interview by doing research at the library but with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this quote/interview be found in any published collections of Theroux's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4860" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T19:07:05.990" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T19:07:05.990" Title="What is the source of Paul Theroux's quote: &quot;Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;paul-theroux&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8049" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8061" CreationDate="2018-08-03T00:49:56.730" Score="10" ViewCount="860" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_90&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 90&lt;/a&gt; by Shakespeare: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, while the world is bent my deeds to cross,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;And do not drop in for an after-loss:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah! do not, when my heart hath 'scaped this sorrow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To linger out a purposed overthrow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When other petty griefs have done their spite,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But in the onset come: so shall I taste&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At first the very worst of fortune's might;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     And other strains of woe, which now seem woe,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/90&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare-sonnets.com has this to say&lt;/a&gt; about the phase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;drop in for an after loss&lt;/em&gt; - the phrase is not properly understood. It may be a gaming metaphor, or, in view of &lt;em&gt;rearward, conquered, overthrow, onset, loss&lt;/em&gt;, which follow, a military one. SB gives an extensive note with details of slightly later examples from gaming and warfare. The general idea seems to be that of an unexpected loss resulting from a sudden hazard or cast in a game, or an unforeseen development after a battle, when the result was already supposedly determined. The modern meaning of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt;, 'to call on unexpectedly, or casually' is not relevant here, and is not attested until much later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't understand the meaning. I'd be grateful for any answers with &quot;plain-English&quot; interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, what is &quot;drop in&quot; here? Who (or what) is doing the dropping? To which word does the preposition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; relate?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My brain fails to come up with any meaning of the phrase, and thus slides back to something akin to &quot;and do not suddenly appear ..&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T17:14:25.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T12:34:56.267" Title="Meaning of &quot;And do not drop in for an after-loss&quot; in Shakespeare's sonnet 90" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8049" CreationDate="2018-08-03T03:19:10.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not 100% sure on this, but here are my thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two lines talk about the narrator being in some kind of trouble - &amp;quot;while the world is bent my deeds to cross&amp;quot; (or make look bad) and the line right after your bolded line talks about when the other person has &amp;quot;'scaped this sorrow&amp;quot; (the troubles of the first two lines) &amp;quot;Give not a windy night a rainy morrow&amp;quot; - i.e., don't make this bad situation worse/continue the pain, as I read it. See the later lines - &amp;quot;If thou wilt leave me, do not leave me last&amp;quot; - what could hurt more than losing your last supporter? If they hated you from the beginning, fine, but if they helped you and then, at the last, left you...that's a lot to deal with, especially as the narrator seems to care for this person - &amp;quot;And other strains of woe, which now seem woe / Compared with loss of thee, will not seem so.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this context we can look a little more clearly at your line. The first two lines reflect the end - &amp;quot;hate me [...] if ever, now&amp;quot;, don't &amp;quot;leave me last&amp;quot;. The next line, &amp;quot;Join with the spite of fortune, make me bow&amp;quot;, echoes the first line - the &amp;quot;spite of fortune&amp;quot; seems to reflect the hate of the first line, and the &amp;quot;join [...], make me bow&amp;quot; seems to be with the friend/lover being the one doing the hating. Where's the &amp;quot;now, not later&amp;quot; represented? In the next line. The &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; at the beginning shows the connection with the previous line, and the &amp;quot;:&amp;quot; at the end explains the meaning - &amp;quot;do not leave me last&amp;quot;, which here is rephrased as &amp;quot;do not drop in for an after-loss&amp;quot;. I read the &amp;quot;drop in&amp;quot; as a sort of &amp;quot;piling on&amp;quot; done at the last moment, and the &amp;quot;after-loss&amp;quot; seems to reflect the thought that they had already been through the thick of it only to confront the greatest loss of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tl;dr: &amp;quot;do not drop in for an after-loss&amp;quot; is asking the friend/lover of the narrator not to leave him and his side at the very end of the battle he's fighting with the &amp;quot;spite of fortune&amp;quot;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T03:19:10.033" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8047" CreationDate="2018-08-03T11:52:17.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Happy_Isles_of_Oceania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (New York: Putnam, 1992), chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’ve been all over the Pacific,” the man next to me said. He was from California. His name was Hap. “Bora-Bora. Moora-Moora. Tora-Tora. Fuji.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Fiji,” his wife said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And Haiti,” he told me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Tahiti,” his wife said, correcting him again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh God,” he said, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_Atoll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnston Island&lt;/a&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What was that like?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sinister little island, with the Stars and Stripes flying over it, is 800 miles west of Honolulu, and was formerly a launching site for H-bombs. More recently, nuclear waste was stored there, along with nerve gas and stacks of hydrogen bombs. A recent accident had left one end of Johnston Island radioactive.* Few Americans have heard of it. The anti-nuclear New Zealanders can tell you where it is and why it terrifies them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Who said I got off the plane?” Hap said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We’re members of the Century Club,” his wife said. “You can only join if you’ve been to a hundred countries.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What does ‘been to’ mean? Pass through the airport? Spend a night? Get diarrhea there?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Guess he’s not a member!” Hap said, joyously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tourists don’t know where they’ve been,&lt;/em&gt; I thought. &lt;em&gt;Travellers don’t know where they’re going.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was easy to find using &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books search&lt;/a&gt;, which I commend to you.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Is Theroux referring to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fishbowl#Bluegill_Prime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bluegill Prime accident&lt;/a&gt;, in which a nuclear-armed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PGM-17_Thor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PGM-17 Thor&lt;/a&gt; ballistic missile exploded on the launch platform? This accident was in July 1962 and so hardly ‘recent’ in 1992 but Cold War secrecy probably made it hard for Theroux to check the date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T11:52:17.153" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8048" CreationDate="2018-08-03T12:32:24.433" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://theguardian.newspapers.com/search/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching the &lt;em&gt;Observer&lt;/em&gt; archives&lt;/a&gt; for 7th October 1979 shows that it wasn’t an interview, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://theguardian.newspapers.com/search/#query=theroux&amp;amp;ymd=1979-10-07&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just a quote&lt;/a&gt; in the quotations column:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Pdzq.png&quot; alt=&quot;Scanned fragment from the Observer: &amp;quot;TRAVEL is glamorous only in retrospect.—Mr Paul Theroux&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Search&lt;/a&gt; easily finds the original interview, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1979/09/20/paul-theroux-restless-writer-of-the-rails/ca09ec70-ba15-43ef-9188-fa8c7b3b3e01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Theroux, Restless Writer Of the Rails&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Paul Hendrickson, in the &lt;em&gt;Washington Post&lt;/em&gt;, 20th September 1979:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now that he thinks about it—he has finished breakfast and is sitting erect; his tinted glasses bounce yellow light—what does travel have to do with fun anyway? Fun isn’t the point. The point is discovery. Discovery has its own rewards. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect,” he says, a little resignedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I updated Wikiquote so that it has the original source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T08:07:19.877" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T08:07:19.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6497" CreationDate="2018-08-03T14:39:17.827" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest instance that I can find via &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Book Search&lt;/a&gt; for this quotation is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9RtVJIHRdMAC&amp;amp;pg=PA81&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mourning After: How to Manage Grief Wisely&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1993) by &lt;strong&gt;Stanley P. Cornils&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparatively speaking, there are not many things in this world which are impossible. According to the older laws of aerodynamics, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bumblebees-cant-fly/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bumblebee cannot fly&lt;/a&gt; because its fuselage is too big for its wing area. Fortunately, the bumblebee doesn’t know this; he just flies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have the confidence that you will never meet anything you can’t handle. You may not believe this now, but if you will apply all the resources at your disposal, including those within yourself, you will discover it. Courage isn’t having the strength to go on; it’s going on when you don’t have the strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There was a 1967 edition titled &lt;em&gt;Managing Grief Wisely&lt;/em&gt; but I was unable to check whether or not it contains the quotation of interest.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly I doubt whether Napoléon or Roosevelt said or wrote this. In the case of Napoléon there are volumes and volumes of correspondence and anecdotes, but none of them has anything like the quotation in the post. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Napoléon: ses opinions et jugemens sur les hommes et sur les choses&lt;/em&gt; (1838) by Jean-Joseph-Stanislas-Albert Damas-Hinard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TVwqQP30wggC&amp;amp;pg=PA322&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the only entries under &lt;em&gt;courage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rien ne donne plus de courage et n’éclaircit plus les idées que de bien connaître la position de son ennemi. (&lt;em&gt;Correspondance de Napoléon avec le ministre de la marine&lt;/em&gt;, lettre du 25 mai 1805.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Nothing gives more courage or better clarifies ideas than knowing accurately the position of one’s enemy.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Un homme qui manque de courage n’est pas Français. (&lt;em&gt;Correspondance inédite, officielle et confidentielle de Napoléon Bonaparte&lt;/em&gt;, lettre au général Marmont, du 15 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frimaire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;frimaire&lt;/a&gt; an vii—5 décembre 1798.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A man who lacks courage is not French.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T14:39:17.827" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6853" CreationDate="2018-08-03T21:02:02.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at this claim in context. It comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/SAT-II-Success-Literature-Petersons/dp/0768909597&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;SAT II Success: Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2002) by Margaret Moran and W. Frances Holder. This is a test-taking guide for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT_Subject_Test_in_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SAT Subject Test in Literature&lt;/a&gt;, which is a multiple-choice standardized test given to college applicants in the United States. So the claim has to be understood in context as a helpful piece of advice to students preparing to take this particular test, not necessarily as a true fact about the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the question under discussion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.&lt;/strong&gt; The author’s use of parallelism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I. reinforces the poem’s strong visual images.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;II. adds to the poem’s rhythm.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;III. elicits an emotional response from the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A) I only (B) II only (C) III only (D) I and II (E) II and III&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is the answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;7.&lt;/strong&gt; The correct answer is (E). In this poem, &lt;strong&gt;parallelism does not affect the strong visual images in any way&lt;/strong&gt;; therefore, rule out item I and any answers that include item I, choices (A) and (D). You may recall that many of Burns’ poems were written to be sung. Read the poem again. Parallel structure does add to the rhythm, item II, and the repetition of “My heart’s in the Highlands” cannot help but elicit an emotional response from the reader, item III. Therefore, choice (E) is the correct answer, because it includes both II and III.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “strong visual images” requires some interpretation. The poem does not actually contain any &lt;em&gt;visual&lt;/em&gt; images: it only contains &lt;em&gt;descriptions&lt;/em&gt; that might, for some readers, elicit &lt;em&gt;mental&lt;/em&gt; images. Presumably “visual images” is being used as jargon for this. (Personally, I think the phrase is unhelpful because of the way it conflates the poem and the reader, and because people vary widely in their ability to form mental imagery, but you can’t fight city hall.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean for a description to be “strong”? Well, the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;strong, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 23. a. Of literary or artistic work: vigorous or forceful in style or execution; making a distinct impression on the mind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take “strong” in the first half of this definition (“vigorous or forceful in style or execution”), then item I must be wrong: repetition of “Farewell” can’t change the style or execution of “mountains high covered with snow”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we take “strong” in the second half of this definition (“making a distinct impression on the mind”) then item I could be right: repetition of “Farewell” could draw the descriptions to the reader’s attention and so make more of an impression on their mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it comes down to ambiguity in the definition of words, I’m afraid. This is the trouble with multiple-choice tests: they are cheap to mark but lack all scope for nuance. In a written essay the student would have the opportunity to explain how they interpreted “strong”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-03T21:02:02.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8055" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8065" CreationDate="2018-08-03T22:37:53.697" Score="8" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following segment from Atlas Shrugged:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But I don't know what's wrong with it.&quot; The man sighed, bewildered.&#xA;  &quot;I don't  know what to do.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's the vibrator that's out of order,&quot; said a voice behind them;&#xA;  they  whirled around; Galt was struggling for breath, but he was&#xA;  speaking in the brusque, competent tone of an engineer. &quot;Take it out&#xA;  and pry off the aluminum cover. You'll find a pair of contacts fused&#xA;  together. Force them apart, take  a small file and clean up the pitted&#xA;  surfaces. Then replace the cover, plug it back into the machine—and&#xA;  your generator will work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passage above, Galt explains to his tormentors how to fix the torture device that had broken and they knew not how to fix. Although the irony makes a powerful statement, Galt is in fact violating his sacred creed by giving his enemies the tools of his own destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As proof, Galt earlier says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am the first man who would not do penance for my virtues or let them&#xA;  be used as the tools of my destruction. I am the first man who would&#xA;  not suffer martyrdom at the hands of those who wished me to perish for&#xA;  the privilege of keeping them alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems like he is violating his principles in fixing the torture machine for them. Why did he do it? Was it merely an irresistible literary device for Rand that &quot;the real John Galt&quot; wouldn't have done?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T01:20:10.533" Title="Why did John Galt explain how to fix the torture device?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-04T05:33:45.060" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;After her supposed death in the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Piercing the Darkness&lt;/em&gt;, Sally Roe started writing to Tom Harris after learning about the bogus lawsuit against him. However, she puts her real name on the envelope, which caused her letters to be intercepted by her pursuers. Why did she do that? It seems like a rather clumsy mistake by someone who would rather not be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T22:10:02.267" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T22:10:02.267" Title="Why did Sally Roe use her real name on the envelope for her letters to Tom Harris?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;frank-peretti&gt;&lt;piercing-the-darkness&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1418" CreationDate="2018-08-04T06:22:31.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Nicholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;, Dickens uses the word &lt;em&gt;genius&lt;/em&gt; thirty-three times, using five out of the ten major senses of the word in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. There must be a deliberate playfulness in employing the word in so many of its meanings. Here’s a survey of the various senses employed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its boarding-houses are musical, and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian &lt;strong&gt;genius&lt;/strong&gt; of a little wilderness of shrubs, in the centre of the square.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 1a in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.a. With reference to classical pagan belief: […] a guardian spirit similarly associated with a place, institution, thing, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘“What are you then?” asked the baron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘“A &lt;strong&gt;genius&lt;/strong&gt;,” replied the figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘“You don’t look much like one,” returned the baron scornfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘“I am the &lt;strong&gt;Genius&lt;/strong&gt; of Despair and Suicide,” said the apparition. “Now you know me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4. Chiefly with &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;. A quasi-mythological personification of something immaterial (as a virtue, custom, institution, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0010&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 10&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I think I have caught it now,’ said Miss La Creevy. ‘The very shade! This will be the sweetest portrait I have ever done, certainly.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It will be your &lt;strong&gt;genius&lt;/strong&gt; that makes it so, then, I am sure,’ replied Kate, smiling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 7b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7.b. Natural ability or capacity; quality of mind; attributes which suit a person for his or her peculiar work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well, so it is,’ rejoined Crowl; ‘and I’ll tell you what’s more—I think these two geniuses, whoever they are, have run away from somewhere.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 8b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8.b. An exceptionally intelligent or talented person, or one with exceptional skill in a particular area of art, science, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but Crowl is being sarcastic: he actually suspects Nicholas and Newman of being escaped felons of some kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/967/967-h/967-h.htm#link2HCH0034&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 34&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘’Gad, Nickleby,’ said Mr. Mantalini, retreating towards his wife, ‘what a demneble fierce old evil &lt;strong&gt;genius&lt;/strong&gt; you are!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2. Either of two mutually opposed spirits imagined as accompanying a person throughout his or her life and exerting either a good or bad influence. Hence in extended use: a person who exerts a good or bad influence over another’s character, conduct, or fortunes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T06:22:31.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8058" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8059" CreationDate="2018-08-04T08:09:15.727" Score="10" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hermetic.com/parsons/i-hight-don-quixote-i-live-on-peyote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I Hight Don Quixote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jack Parsons&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;disgusting, fantastic, obscene;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So I hied for my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To see if the air was still clean.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oh, I hight Don Quixote, I live on peyote,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;marihuana, morphine and cocaine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if I visit the city again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he mean: &amp;quot;I may do something to a bank clerk or store hand, and be damned for this&amp;quot;? Or &amp;quot;I may be mistaken for a bank clerk or store hand&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T15:24:07.140" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T15:24:07.140" Title="Meaning of &quot;may I be twice damned for a bank-clerk or store hand&quot; in &quot;I hight Don Quixote&quot;, a poem by Jack Parsons" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;jack-parsons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8058" CreationDate="2018-08-04T08:49:09.953" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;He emphatically will not visit the city again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I’m damned if&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;informal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used to say that you will certainly not do something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’m polite to his ex-wife when I meet her, but I’m damned if I’m going to invite her over for dinner”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/i-m-damned-if&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'm damned if&lt;/a&gt; in the Cambridge English Dictionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He’s saying, “I swear that I will not visit the city again, and as proof that I will not break this oath, if I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; break this oath then I ask to be damned to live the doubly-hellish (“twice damned”) life of a bank clerk or shop worker”. There’s a secondary meaning of “if I were to return to the city then I would have to live the doubly-hellish life of a person who lives in the city”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, his punishment for returning to the city would be the fact of having to live in the city, which would be like being sent to Hell then being sent from there to an even worse Hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s clever and witty, I like it a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4700" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:58:07.417" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:58:07.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2224" CreationDate="2018-08-04T10:44:13.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source for Hamlet was the story of Amleth, told by Saxo Grammaticus in the 13th century (as retold by François de Belleforest). Amleth is also sent to England with a letter telling the King to kill the bearer, and he also opens it and alters the message. The story can also be found in other Norse sources, and some elements of it can be found in older sagas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the story with the letter was part of the base story Shakespeare used when he wrote his play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Cedric Watts, in his introduction to the Wordsworth Shakespeare, though I suspect any similar text would contain the information as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T10:44:13.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8049" CreationDate="2018-08-04T18:14:06.197" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've changed my answer. To summarize, &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; means to arrive singly, in this case after the main mass of visitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm right, and this is the meaning, then to &lt;em&gt;drop in for an after-loss&lt;/em&gt; would mean to make an appearance after all of the poet's other misfortunes and cause a final misfortune (an &lt;em&gt;after-loss&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paraphrasing: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;if you're leaving me, give me the bad news now, when I am beset by all my other misfortunes, and don't wait and tell me later.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do I think this? To find what Shakespeare meant by the intransitive phrasal verb &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt;, we need to look for other uses of it in Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare appears to be the first to use &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; with anything near this sense. But here is an instance of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; from the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=COFmAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA425&amp;amp;dq=%22dropping+in%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjL1Kab-tPcAhUQj1kKHQGHC1UQ6AEIOTAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22dropping%20in%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of the Head-Corner-Stone,&lt;/em&gt; by Edmund Bunny&lt;/a&gt; in 1611, only two years after &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Sonnets&lt;/em&gt; were published, and one or two decades after they were written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… but that divers of the Israelites (such as shog’d aside for the time, to avoide the danger of the enemies Sword, and afterward came dropping in againe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant meaning of the obsolete word &lt;em&gt;shog&lt;/em&gt; here seems to be &lt;em&gt;to move to the side&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;to go away&lt;/em&gt;. So these people went away to avoid the danger, but &lt;em&gt;came dropping in&lt;/em&gt; when it was safe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; here seems to be the OED's definition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;intr. To come in one by one or at intervals,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which the OED has first attested in 1697.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also another use of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; with this meaning in the 17th century, that the OED seems to have missed. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ARPrqxvLLJAC&amp;amp;pg=PA262&amp;amp;lpg=PA262&amp;amp;dq=%22Other+vessels+are+dropping+in+;+25+colliers+passed+by+Bridlington,%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=RQTpnFacye&amp;amp;sig=aF7Imx69m5HGJoG-8HGnJn3asfE&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiH2OOmn4zdAhUFneAKHeemBGYQ6AEwAXoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Other%20vessels%20are%20dropping%20in%20%3B%2025%20colliers%20passed%20by%20Bridlington%2C%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1668:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other vessels are dropping in; 25 colliers passed by Bridlington, and as many lie in the bay for Newcastle, expecting a fair wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so far from the modern meaning &lt;em&gt;to make an informal or unexpected appearance at somebody's house&lt;/em&gt;, which is first attested in &lt;em&gt;The Diary of Samuel Pepys&lt;/em&gt; in 1667:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At noon dined at home, and Mr. Hater with me, and Mr. Pierce, the surgeon, dropped in, who I feared did come to bespeak me to be godfather to his son, which I am unwilling now to be, having ended my liking to his wife, since I find she paints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, looking at this quote, it's not clear to me whether &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; here has the modern meaning of &lt;em&gt;to make an informal appearance&lt;/em&gt; or the meaning of &lt;em&gt;to arrive singly, after the meal has started&lt;/em&gt;. So it's easy to see how the &lt;em&gt;arrive singly&lt;/em&gt; meaning turned into the &lt;em&gt;make an informal or unexpected visit&lt;/em&gt; meaning. If it does indeed mean &lt;em&gt;arrive singly&lt;/em&gt; here in Pepys, it's very similar to Shakespeare's use of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer some of the rest of your questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is dropping in?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;em&gt;thou&lt;/em&gt; of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; relate to?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Drop in&lt;/em&gt; is a phrasal verb here; &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; is a particle, not a preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tsundoku has a different answer, in which he explains everything that was wrong with a previous version of my answer. Let me try to explain why his interpretation (which follows a suggestion of John Kerrigan) is probably incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He claims that &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;fall upon&lt;/em&gt;, based on a single use of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;. The use of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; is transitive, while the use in Sonnet 90 is intransitive. To see why this makes a difference, let's look what happens when we substitute &lt;em&gt;fall upon&lt;/em&gt; in Sonnet 90:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And do not fall upon for an after-loss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;       That's horrible—&lt;em&gt;fall upon&lt;/em&gt; needs an object after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The meaning &lt;em&gt;to arrive singly&lt;/em&gt; fits the sonnet's theme extremely well. Furthermore, this meaning of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; is associated with drops of water, which arrive one at a time, and the line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give not a windy night a rainy morrow,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;echoes this theme of water droplets. The meaning &lt;em&gt;to fall upon&lt;/em&gt; does not fit as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary of my previous answer:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, here is the main argument from my original answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to have meant something like &amp;quot;to make an appearance on the scene&amp;quot; in Shakespeare's time. Did it need to be an unexpected or informal one? I can't tell, but I think it's quite likely. Both Shakespeare's use and another contemporary use&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I found of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt; could easily have the connotation of informal or unexpected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Bunny's given above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T12:34:56.267" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T12:34:56.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3019" CreationDate="2018-08-04T18:34:10.203" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest version of this story appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/anewspiritage02horngoog#page/n200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A New Spirit of the Age&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Henry_Horne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard H. Horne&lt;/a&gt; (1844), page 196:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When somebody expressed his surprise to Shelley, that Keats, who was not very conversant with the Greek language, could write so finely and classically of their gods and goddesses, Shelley replied ‘He &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a Greek.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horne gives no source for this anecdote. It seems very unlikely that he was his own source: Horne was born in 1802 and went to school at Edmonton near London; he was fifteen when Shelley left England for the last time in 1818.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-04T18:34:10.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8049" CreationDate="2018-08-04T18:47:00.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sonnet 90 continues from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 89&lt;/a&gt;, hence the &quot;Then&quot; at the beginning of the poem. These sonnets are part of a &lt;strong&gt;sequence (sonnets 88 - 93) about fear of losing the friend's love&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sonnet 89, the poet says to the friend: &quot;If you deserted me because of a fault (or worse) on my part, I would support your arguments against me, since I cannot love someone that you hate.&quot;&#xA;Sonnet 89's last word, &quot;hate&quot;, returns as sonnet 90's second word. Line 2 says that the entire world is determined to thwart his actions. It is not clear whether this is hyperbole (the friend's rejection is inflated to a general conspiracy) or whether the poet/narrator is also experience problems that are unrelated to the relationship. (The verb &quot;join&quot; in line 3 supports the latter interpretation.) Either way, if the break in their relationship is to come, it should come now rather than later (&quot;if ever, now&quot; from line 1). Loosing the friend is the loss that is the sonnet's subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;After-loss&quot; (line 4) is not used anywhere else in Shakespeare, but is is formed in a similar way to a number of other words in Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after-debt (&quot;He nere payes after-debts, take it before&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/allswell/allswell.4.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;All's Well That Ends Well&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV, Scene 3&lt;/a&gt;): probably a debt to be paid at a later time, outstanding debt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after-dinner: (&quot;an after-dinner's sleep&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/measure/measure.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;after-inquiry: (&quot;jump the after-inquiry on your own peril&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/cymbeline/cymbeline.5.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, Act V, Scene 4&lt;/a&gt;): subsequent investigation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;after-loss&lt;/strong&gt; most likely means &quot;something that comes after a loss&quot;, in this sonnet, after the loss of the friend's love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Drop in&lt;/strong&gt; means &quot;fall upon&quot;, here in a figurative sense. Another instance of &quot;drop in&quot; in the sense of &quot;fall upon&quot; (in a literal sense) can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/cleopatra/cleopatra.3.13.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, Scene 13&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah, dear, if I be so,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  From my cold heart let heaven engender hail,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And poison it in the source; and the first stone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Drop in&lt;/strong&gt; my neck: as it determines, so&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Dissolve my life!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;For&lt;/strong&gt; does here not have the common modern meaning indicating purpose, as &quot;You came for gold, ye slaves.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.5.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt;, Act V, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;). &quot;For&quot; here mean &quot;as; by way of&quot;. Here are a few examples of this usage elsewhere in Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This token serveth for a flag of truce&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryvi/1henryvi.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for / thy dowry&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Which I gave him for cordial, (...)&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/cymbeline/cymbeline.5.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, Act V, scene 5&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So line 4 means &lt;strong&gt;&quot;do not fall upon me (figuratively), thereby adding to the loss&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. As mentioned before, line 1 says that the poet prefers the shorter pain (&quot;if ever, now&quot;). In addition, lines 5-8 continue this thought, using other words: do not persecute me after (&quot;in the rearward&quot;) of my current distress, do not come like a rainy morning after a windy night, to protract the destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to John Kerrigan's thoroughly annotated edition of &lt;em&gt;The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint&lt;/em&gt; (The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1986), &lt;strong&gt;drop in for an after-loss&lt;/strong&gt; means &quot;fall upon me, as a belated loss&quot; (page 286).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kerrigan adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The received interpretation of &lt;em&gt;drop in&lt;/em&gt;, 'call in casually', relies on usage not current until a century later, and is bathetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Reading &quot;drop in&quot; as &quot;call in casually&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bathetic&lt;/a&gt; because its banality stands in stark contrast to the high poetic style of Shakespeare's sonnets. (That alone should have alerted any astute reader of poetry.) Colin Burrow, editor of &lt;em&gt;The Complete Sonnets and Poems&lt;/em&gt; in The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2002) agrees with this reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A response to Peter Shor's interpretation&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Shor found an occurrence of &quot;dropping in&quot; that, according to him, may have the meaning &quot;to make an appearance on the scene&quot;, namely in &lt;em&gt;Of the Head-Corner-Stone&lt;/em&gt; by Edm[und] Bunny (1611). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is part of the context for &quot;dropping in&quot; in Bunny's &lt;em&gt;Of the Head-Corner-Stone&lt;/em&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As touching those that did succeede, although they are no part of this people, but meere strangers vnto them, and at this time might rather be held to bee of the number of their enemies also: yet because they goe oft-times vnder the names of Israelites, and not vnlikely, but that diuers of the Israelites (such as shog'd aside for the time, to auoide the danger of the enemies Sword, and afterward &lt;strong&gt;came dropping in&lt;/strong&gt; againe) did afterward come in and dwell among them, at least because these doe now hence-forward inhabit that Land where the Israelists dwelt before, therefore it shall bee good to see the Story of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The interpretation &quot;to make an appearance on the scene&quot; is vague. The context of this instance of &quot;[came] dropping in&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Of the Head-Corner-Stone&lt;/em&gt; is a commentary on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Chronicles+30&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2 Chronicles 30, 1-13&lt;/a&gt;, where &quot;Hezekiah sent word to all Israel and Judah and also wrote letters to Ephraim and Manasseh, inviting them to come to the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem and celebrate the Passover to the Lord, the God of Israel.&quot; The people who &quot;came dropping in&quot; were people who had moved outside Israel and came back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of the Head-Corner-Stone&lt;/em&gt; was printed in 1611 by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jaggard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Jaggard&lt;/a&gt;, who also printed many of Shakespeare's works, including the False Folio (1619) and the First Folio (1621). Shakespeare's sonnets were printed just two years earlier (1609, by a different printer) but probably mostly written in the 1590s. Peter Shor claims in a comment, &quot;If a usage was around in 1611, I don't see why it's unlikely to have been around in the 1590s.&quot; This ignores that fact Early Modern English developed in an era of great linguistic change, so words and meanings could come into fashion and disappear again fairly quickly. From the 1590s to 1611 is long enough for new words and meanings to be added to the language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, as I mentioned before, the interpretation &quot;visit informally&quot; (which clearly does not apply to the above passage from Bunny's book) is simply to mundane for the context of Shakespeare's sonnet. Readers who do not understand this should (1) read much more English Renaissance literature and (2) learn to recognise bathos. For examples of bathos, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/bathos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopaedia Britannica&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-bathos-1689162&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ThoughtCo&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literarydevices.com/bathos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.com&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/bathos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.net&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literaryterms.net/bathos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryTerms.net&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T19:58:09.173" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T19:58:09.173" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8064" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15195" CreationDate="2018-08-05T16:10:56.163" Score="4" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;Currently I can only read with Chinese and English. So if his works are originally wrote in French, I may choose Chinese version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4867" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T21:52:37.597" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:52:37.597" Title="Did Maugham originally write in French or English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;william-somerset-maugham&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8055" CreationDate="2018-08-06T01:20:10.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subsequent paragraph explains this seeming contradiction: Galt was running the risk that the machine would be fixed, in order to win a larger battle: to scare the torturers (&lt;em&gt;and the way I read it, he was pretty sure that he would win and the risk was not too big&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mechanic was staring at Galt; he was holding Galt's glance — &lt;strong&gt;and even he was able to recognize the nature of the sparkle in the dark green eyes; it was a sparkle of contemptuous mockery&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Galt lets it be known that he's so much better, so much stronger, than the opponents, that even with a working torture machine they can't break him. And that breaks &lt;strong&gt;them&lt;/strong&gt;, in turn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He made a step back. In the incoherent dimness of his consciousness, in some wordless, shapeless, unintelligible manner, &lt;strong&gt;even he suddenly grasped the meaning of what was occurring in that cellar&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He looked at Galt — he looked at the three men — he looked at the machine. &lt;strong&gt;He shuddered, he dropped his pliers and ran out of the room&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Galt burst out laughing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The three men were backing slowly away from the machine&lt;/strong&gt;. They were struggling not to allow themselves to understand what the mechanic had understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Galt did win with this gambit, breaking not just the mooks but the main anagonists, first Taggart (in a long explanation of Taggart's mental state that I will omit here but is worth reading); then Mouch and Ferris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mouch and Ferris did not ask themselves or wonder what it was that had happened to Taggart: they knew that they must never attempt to discover it, under peril of sharing his fate. They knew who it was that had been broken tonight. They knew that this was the end of James Taggart, whether his physical body survived or not&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He saved them from the necessity of admitting to themselves that they wanted &lt;strong&gt;to escape Galt's eyes. Galt was watching them; his glance was too austerely perceptive&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the moment, their only certainty was that &lt;strong&gt;they had to escape from that cellar&lt;/strong&gt; — the cellar where the living generator was left tied by the side of the dead one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T01:20:10.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2018-08-06T01:51:01.820" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: It is meant by author to be set in indeterminable &amp;quot;close future to the reader&amp;quot; time, but can be pegged from textual clues to possibly be set in 1945-1957&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.noblesoul.com/orc/books/rand/atlas/faq.html#Q2.1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Objectivism Reference Center's Atlas Shrugged FAQ&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.2 When is the story set in time?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time setting for Atlas Shrugged is not specified in the novel. It is typically interpreted as being either the near future, or the present in an alternate version of reality. &lt;strong&gt;The social mores presented in the story suggest the US in the 1940s and 50s (when Rand was working on the novel), while the economic and political conditions resemble a cross between the early 1900s and a dystopian future&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rand's own description of the time setting to one fan was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;You ask whether Atlas Shrugged represents the present or the future. The answer is: both. To be exact, the action of Atlas Shrugged takes place in the near future, about ten years from the time when one reads the book&lt;/strong&gt;. (Letters of Ayn Rand, p. 613)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rand made this comment in 1963, and indicates a shifting timeframe: &lt;strong&gt;the novel is always considered to be in the future, regardless of when it is read, and therefore it has no specific time setting other than &amp;quot;near future.&amp;quot; Reinforcing this idea of a non-specific time setting, Rand comments on the time setting in The Art of Fiction, saying that &amp;quot;Atlas Shrugged is of no period&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (p. 163).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the futuristic and alternative history interpretations are discussed by Mimi Reisel Gladstein in her book about the novel, Atlas Shrugged: Manifesto of the Mind (pp. 40-44), and in Robert Hunt's &amp;quot;Science Fiction for the Age of Inflation: Reading Atlas Shrugged in the 1980s,&amp;quot; in the anthology Coordinates: Placing Science Fiction and Fantasy (pp. 85-87).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The FAQ is not official, the ORC is not affiliated with Ayn Rand Institute or any other organization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.conservapedia.com/Atlas_Shrugged_(chronology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conservapedia's Atlas Shrugged Chronology article&lt;/a&gt; took the pains to assemble a set of textual clues that place the novel in the years around 1950s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I won't copy every bullet point of the article (which is worth reading for its painstaking detail), but the reference things such as state of transportation technology (rail vs. air service), telecommunications (phone access vs telegaph, radio vs. TV), cyclotrons, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most likely span of the years of the great strike is 1945-1957, with the novel's major action taking place in the last three years of this period. This novel, then, qualifies as an alternate history of the United States of America, and of the civilized world. In this version of history, the United States did not intervene in the War of the Reds and the Whites in Russia, and probably did not participate in the First World War. That War probably ended with every country on earth, except America, becoming a Communist state. In addition, prohibition cannot have occurred, because alcoholic drinks flow freely in many settings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Politically, the United States would have been in the hands of the proponents of Progressivism, which was in fact a potent-enough force in the election of 1912 to field a third party candidate for President (Theodore Roosevelt) who actually out-polled the losing major-party candidate in that race, William Howard Taft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(they speculate that Mr. Thompson was the anti-Harry-S-Truman based on Rand's own statements).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T02:16:53.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7970" CreationDate="2018-08-06T02:43:10.187" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They had all four qualities: they had the right ideas, they had the talent, they had networking (by accident or not) with Gulch recruiters, &lt;strong&gt;and they were willing to take the Striker's oath&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that in the example of the baker you mentioned, when discussing her children:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“They represent my particular career, Miss Taggart,” said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. “&lt;strong&gt;They're the profession I've chosen to practice&lt;/strong&gt;, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can't practice successfully in the outer world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on Dagny's observations of the children, the woman seems to be an exemplary mother - not just a person who had kids, but a parent who managed to shape them into the bright, inquisitive, non-beat-down little humans. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe you've met my husband, he's the teacher of economics who works as linesman for Dick McNamara. You know, of course, that &lt;strong&gt;there can be no collective commitments in this valley and that families or relatives are not allowed to come here, unless each person takes the striker's oath by his own independent conviction&lt;/strong&gt;. I came here, not merely for the sake of my husband's profession, but for the sake of my own. &lt;strong&gt;I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, she:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Believed in the right ideas and was committed to rationality&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Had the right connection to be aware of the Gulch (her husband) and thus have an option to be invited&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Was willing to take the Striker's oath.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the connection/networking is likely important for another reason: the person you are connected to has the best ability to judge whether you are a genuine fit for the Gulch. Nobody would know the difference between Hank Rearden's wife and McNamara's wife more than their husbands.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It shows that Rand didn't just fall into &quot;the only worthwile people are engineers or managers&quot; trap. Anyone who is rational, creative and talented, is a good fit. Thus, Kay Ludlow and Richard Halley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr. Akton points this out to Dagny:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Don't be astonished, Miss Taggart,” said Dr. Akston, smiling, “and &lt;strong&gt;don't make the mistake of thinking that these three pupils of mine are some sort of superhuman creatures. They're something much greater and more astounding than that: they're normal men—a thing the world has never seen—and their feat is that they managed to survive as such&lt;/strong&gt;. It does take an exceptional mind and a still more exceptional integrity to remain untouched by the brain-destroying influences of the world's doctrines, the accumulated evil of centuries—to remain human, since the human is the rational.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T02:43:10.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2787" CreationDate="2018-08-06T10:34:51.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This is mostly expanding on points made in comments, but I think it is worth having the details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The multiple-choice answers for this question are all wrong. This should be clear from the parallelism in Bacon’s sentence structure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reading maketh a full man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  conference [maketh] a ready man and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  writing [maketh] an exact man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reading&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;writing&lt;/em&gt; are actions, so the parallelism strongly suggests that &lt;em&gt;conference&lt;/em&gt; is an action too, and so can’t be a meeting, gathering, get-togther, or group of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look at the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; finds the appropriate meaning in sense 4a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;conference&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 4. a. The action of conferring or taking counsel […]: Conversation, discourse, talk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;'s second citation is from the very passage we are considering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1597   Bacon &lt;em&gt;Ess.&lt;/em&gt; f. 1&lt;sup&gt;v&lt;/sup&gt;   Reading maketh a full man, conference a readye man, and writing an exacte man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(D) is correct. This question is straightforward, since Bacon supplies his own gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some books are to be tasted […]: &lt;strong&gt;that is&lt;/strong&gt;, some books are to be read only in parts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question seems to be based on a failure to parse the logical structure of Bacon’s text. Nothing in the passage says that meaner books &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be approached in a particular way. What Bacon says is that summarization is only appropriate for meaner books, otherwise the result will be ‘flashy’. That is, Bacon’s implication goes in one direction (&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you are going to read in summary, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it should be a meaner book) but the question appears to understand it in the reverse direction (&lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; you are going to read a meaner book, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it must be in summary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Flashy’ here is used in sense 2b in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flashy&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 2. †b. Insipid, tasteless, vapid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1625   Bacon &lt;em&gt;Ess.&lt;/em&gt; (new ed.) 293   Distilled Bookes, are like common distilled Waters, Flashy Things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This question seems to be based on a misunderstanding. An ‘object’ is an &lt;em&gt;end&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;purpose&lt;/em&gt;, but the phrases in the first sentence of the quoted passage are &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;ends&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to contradict and confute&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to believe and take for granted&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to find talk and discourse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to weigh and consider&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacon’s first sentence of the essay (not included in the extract quoted in the test) gives his opinion about the objects of study:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Like question 3, this seems to be based on a failure to parse the logical structure. Bacon says that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a man reads little, &lt;em&gt;and if&lt;/em&gt; he wishes to pretend to know things, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; he needs to have much cunning. But the question seems to read Bacon as saying that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; a man reads little, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; he must pretend to know things.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacon’s language is not so very archaic, and any difficulties in identifying the meaning of words like ‘conference’ and ‘flashy’ are easily resolved using a comprehensive dictionary, so the miscomprehensions in these questions seem pretty egregious. But possibly that’s because English was not the first language of the writer: the questions are from the 2016 Prelims Exam of the Uttar Pradesh Public Service Commission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T10:34:51.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8069" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3568" CreationDate="2018-08-06T10:52:48.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is based on real events in the history of Scotland, as filtered and embellished though chronicle and tradition, and so the answer, unsatisfactory though it may be, is that Macbeth went to Dunsinane because that’s what it said in Shakespeare’s historical sources, whereas the prophecy is legendary and so not something that the historical Macbeth would have needed to take into account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s main source for the play was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Holinshed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael Holinshed&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1587), which says (spelling modernized):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But after that Macbeth perceived his enemies’ power to increase, by such aid as came to them forth of England with his adversary Malcolm, he recoiled back into Fife, there purposing to abide in camp fortified, at the castle of Dunsinane, and to fight with his enemies, if they meant to pursue him; howbeit some of his friends advised him, that it should be best for him, either to make some agreement with Malcolm, or else to flee with all speed into the Isles, and to take his treasure with him, to the end he might wage sundry great princes of the realm to take his part, &amp;amp; retain strangers, in whom he might better trust than in his own subjects, which stole daily from him: but he had such confidence in his prophesies, that he believed he should never be vanquished, till Birnam wood were brought to Dunsinane; nor yet to be slain with any man, that should be or was born of any woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holinshed’s &lt;em&gt;Chronicles&lt;/em&gt; were based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Boece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hector Boece&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/boece/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historia Gentis Scotorum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1527), which says more or less the same (XII.25, in Dana F. Sutton’s translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon he [Macbeth] encamped at Dunsany, having made up his mind to await his enemy there. For he thought it would be a disgrace to quit the throne without having fought a battle. But some of his friends urged him either to make peace with Malcolm on acceptable conditions, or to take the royal treasury and beat a retreat to the Hebrides, where he could hire mercenaries more reliable than the men who were draining away from him every day. But the Fates hurried the man onwards, for he was convinced that he was unconquerable until Birnam Wood had been brought there, so that death was not threatening him, since the soothsayers had predicted that he was not going to be killed by a man born of woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunsinane_Hill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dunsinane Hill&lt;/a&gt; near Collace in Perthshire is a strong defensive position, rising 250 metres from the surrounding plain, and it is the site of an ancient British hill fort, so it would not be surprising for Macbeth to have camped here when retreating from Malcolm’s invading army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9RjbO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9RjbO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dunsinane Hill, from Wikipedia&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare seems to have taken Holinshed’s “castle of Dunsinane” as referring to a stone castle with rooms and walls, but nothing like that has been found at Dunsinane Hill. There’s evidence of a defensive earthwork which was likely surmounted by a wooden stockade, but no traces of buildings. Hill forts like this are thought to have been generally used as refuges in times of emergency, not as fortified settlements like medieval castles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boece (and hence Holinshed) says that Macbeth’s and Malcolm’s armies fought an engagement near Dunsinane, but that Macbeth, being defeated, fled north to make a last stand at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumphanan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lumphanan&lt;/a&gt; in Aberdeenshire. Shakespeare simplified this part of the story by having Macbeth come to his end in “Another part of the field” (Act V Scene VIII).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T10:52:48.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6285" CreationDate="2018-08-06T13:24:55.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To add to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6287&quot;&gt;andejons' answer&lt;/a&gt; regarding the Gilbert schema's technique of &quot;gigantism&quot;, I'd suggest Joyce may also have been referencing, parodying or even honouring the 16th century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gargantua and Pantagruel&lt;/a&gt; by François Rabelais. It's the story, told over five books, of two giants, and is replete with numerous lists and catalogues, some of which go on for several pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Significantly, book four - &quot;The Fourth Book of Pantagruel&quot; - describes an epic sea voyage, and can itself be viewed as a parody of The Odyssey. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of lists in the Fourth Book: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 30 consists of a bit over two pages listing Lent's internal organs; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 31 is two pages of Lent's external parts; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 32 starts with a recitation of 36 of Lent's physical actions; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 40 has three pages of lists of &quot;the brave and valiant cooks who went into the sow, even as the Greeks did into the Trojan horse&quot;; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 59 lists &quot;how and what the Gastrolaters sacrifice to their Ventripotent God&quot; (two pages of things);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 60 provides a similar list for sacrifices &quot;on the interlarded Fast-days&quot; (two more pages); and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 64 lists about 100 kinds of creature that won't be eaten now that Pantagruel's friends have filled their bellies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not be in the least surprised if Joyce had delighted in the sheer extravagance and absurdity of Rabelais, and was paying tribute to the Fourth Book in the Cyclops chapter of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-08-07T22:30:40.733" LastActivityDate="2018-08-07T22:30:40.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3182" CreationDate="2018-08-06T13:27:46.383" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the question exaggerates the amount of confusion over the names in &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;. The convention of the place and period is that women took their surname from their father, and then changed it to their husband’s when they married. Emily Brontë could be certain that her readers would be familiar with this social convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;em&gt;Catherine&lt;/em&gt; first appears in chapter III:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint.  This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small—&lt;em&gt;Catherine Earnshaw&lt;/em&gt;, here and there varied to &lt;em&gt;Catherine Heathcliff&lt;/em&gt;, and then again to &lt;em&gt;Catherine Linton&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader will recognize that these are the doodlings of a girl considering the possibilities for her future husband; which name is the original is confirmed in the next paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a fly-leaf bore the inscription—‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book,’ and a date some quarter of a century back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that if this Catherine was annotating her bible 25 years ago, then she cannot be the young woman of chapter II who “did not look seventeen”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is any lingering confusion over the relations between the characters, this is dispelled by Nelly Dean, in chapter IV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘He [Heathcliff] had a son, it seems?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, he had one—he is dead.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And that young lady, Mrs. Heathcliff, is his widow?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Where did she come from originally?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Why, sir, she is my late master’s daughter: Catherine Linton was her maiden name.  I nursed her, poor thing!  I did wish Mr. Heathcliff would remove here, and then we might have been together again.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What!  Catherine Linton?’ I exclaimed, astonished.  But a minute’s reflection convinced me it was not my ghostly Catherine.  ‘Then,’ I continued, ‘my predecessor’s name was Linton?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It was.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And who is that Earnshaw: Hareton Earnshaw, who lives with Mr. Heathcliff?  Are they relations?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No; he is the late Mrs. Linton’s nephew.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The young lady’s cousin, then?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes; and her husband was her cousin also: one on the mother’s, the other on the father’s side: Heathcliff married Mr. Linton’s sister.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using only the information in this passage, the reader can draw the following family tree, which contains all the main protagonists of the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yxCRR.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is additionally possible to deduce, from “‘Catherine Earnshaw, her book’, and a date some quarter of a century back” that she must be the Earnshaw who married Mr Linton, the mother of Catherine Heathcliff, and that the ‘Hindley’ who appears in her diary is likely to be her brother, the father of Hareton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, the duplication of names does stand out as a feature of &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;. Most writers are careful to make their characters memorable (for readers who are not paying enough attention) by giving them distinct and distinctive names. But if the purpose of the duplication is not confusion, then what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One effect is to emphasize the symmetry between the situations of the two generations of protagonists. The older triangle of Catherine, Edgar and Heathcliff came to disaster and misery; this creates suspense as to whether the younger triangle of Catherine, Linton and Hareton will end likewise, or whether the survivors will somehow escape the shadow of their parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another effect is to emphasize the social isolation of the setting. The society of Wuthering Heights is so limited that the elder Catherine has to choose between her adopted (or maybe half-) brother and the boy next door, while the younger Catherine ends up marrying both her cousins. And just as potential marriage-partners are limited, so apparently are names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is as if, in keeping with the ingrown, self-generating nature of the society, the fund of names that can be drawn upon is too small; there are not enough names to go around. Thus the same first name can serve for both mother and daughter (Catherine); a name originally used as a last name can become a first name (Linton); a single letter, “H,” can obscurely connect as many as three characters (Hindley, Heathcliff, and Hareton). These doublings or overlappings of names reinforce the sense of an unhealthy proximity or likeness between characters who should remain different; they insist upon that general threat of incest that overhangs this society, the threat of a union between characters who are &lt;em&gt;too “alike.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William R. Goetz (1982), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/29532190&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genealogy and incest in &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;”, &lt;em&gt;Studies in the Novel&lt;/em&gt;, 14:4, pp. 359–376.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T13:27:46.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2418" CreationDate="2018-08-06T14:47:41.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before answering the question, I would like to point out that there are four versions of Anne Frank's diary. To avoid repetition, I refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6643/2191&quot;&gt;an earlier answer about the diaries&lt;/a&gt;, where I listed the four versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diaries (or at least a version edited by Anne's father Otto Frank) were first published in 1947, but the first &lt;strong&gt;critical edition&lt;/strong&gt; was published only in 1986: &lt;em&gt;De Dagboeken van Anne Frank&lt;/em&gt;, edited by David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom (Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie) Den Haag &amp;amp; Amsterdam, 1986. This critical edition (800 pages long) takes all versions of the diary into account. It also contains images of pages written by Anne to compare her handwriting in various manuscripts - mainly in order to defend the diaries against the accusation of forgery. (These accusations came mostly from right-wing extremists.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This critical edition of the diaries (or at least the German translation to which I have access) does not contain the floor plan from the question. However, the same floor plan (with labels in Dutch) is also included in the Dutch edition &lt;em&gt;Het achterhuis: dagboekbrieven 12 juni 1942 - 1 augustus 1944&lt;/em&gt; (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2010) in a section with images in the middle of the entry for 18 january 1944. However, Anne's description of the building (not just the part where they are hiding) can be found in the diary entry for &lt;strong&gt;9 July 1942&lt;/strong&gt;. In this edition of the diary, the &lt;strong&gt;floor plan is not attributed to anybody&lt;/strong&gt; (neither below the drawing, nor on the copyright page at the beginning of the book), nor explicitly linked to any diary entry. For this reason, it is probably not a drawing by Anne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the house still exists (even though it came close to being demolished in the 1950s), so its accuracy can be checked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_Amsterdam#Prinsengracht&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prinsengracht&lt;/a&gt; 265 in Amsterdam and there was &lt;strong&gt;no reason to base the drawing solely on Anne's diary entry&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you see in the floor plan are the &lt;strong&gt;three upper floors of the &lt;em&gt;entire building&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, not just the secret annex, i.e. without the ground floor and the attic. While the Franks, the Van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer lived in the secret annex, the ground floor and the three upper floors in the front part of the house remained in use by the company that Otto Frank had started before the German invasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the level marked as &lt;strong&gt;1er étage&lt;/strong&gt;, you find &quot;bureau de devant&quot;, which was the office used by Miep Gies, Jo Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl, the &quot;bureau sur la cour&quot; (the office used by Victor Kugler), and at the back a private office (&quot;bureau privé&quot;) and the kitchen (&quot;cuisine&quot;). In the narrow passage between the front part and the back part, you find the flight of stairs that leads to the famous bookcase-door (&quot;porte armoire&quot; on the &quot;2e étage&quot;) that hid the access to the secret annex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the eight people who were hiding there were arrested, the furniture and other objects were removed by the company Puls. When Otto Frank returned as only survivor after the war, the annex was empty, and he always wanted this emptiness to be preserved. (Furniture was only put back in the secret annex on specific occasions, i.e. for filming or photographs.) Restoration was necessary before the building could be opened to visitors, but the floor plan remained the same, except for changes on the ground floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A semi-three-dimensional rendering of the floor plan can be found in several books, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;van der Lans, Jos; Vuisje, Herman: &lt;em&gt;Het Anne Frank Huis: een biografie&lt;/em&gt;. Amsterdam: Boom, 2010. ISBN 978-90-8506-939-3. (In Dutch; history of the building from the 17th century to the early 2000s, so it is to some extent also a history of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Frank_Foundation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anne Frank Stichting&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Anne Franks Hause. Eine bebilderte Reise durch Annes Welt&lt;/em&gt; (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 2004; a book with mainly images; the floor plan is less detailed than in the Dutch book).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T14:47:41.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-06T16:11:07.050" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=0Qv2nuJF7yYC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PA136#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22layering%20of%20roles%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;layering of roles&quot;&lt;/a&gt; precisely mean in the following sentence quoted from &lt;em&gt;Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;by Anthony Francis Caputi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the generation of Neveux, Jean Giraudoux, and Jean Anouilh, the term “Pirandellisme” meant “pure intellectual game,” and Pirandellian structures meant characters seen as &lt;strong&gt;a layering of roles&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3024" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T16:28:03.457" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T16:28:03.457" Title="What does &quot;layering of roles&quot; mean in this sentence?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2018-08-06T17:37:07.020" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;em&gt;Metzler Lexikon literartischer Symbole&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Metzler Lexicon of Literary Symbols&amp;quot;), edited by Günter Butzer and Joachim Jacob (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2012), the east has been a symbol for three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;salvation,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;barbarism and the uncivilised,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;threat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three real-world phenomena contributed to these meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the association of the east with sunrise and salvation symbols,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the separation between the Western Roman Empire and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eastern Roman Empire&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;collective societies in the east (Slavs, Asia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a longer description of the origin of the concepts that the east represents as a symbol (still based on the &lt;em&gt;Metzler Lexikon literartischer Symbole&lt;/em&gt;, p. 309-310):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Salvation&lt;/strong&gt;: In the Bible, Paradise was in the East; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three Magi&lt;/a&gt; came from the East; light, in a figurative sense, was associated with the east in the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_oriente_lux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ex oriente lux&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; motif. Even during the Enlightenment (see e.g. Montesquieu's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_Letters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lettres persanes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) expected to learn from cultures in the east.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;barbaric and uncivilised&lt;/strong&gt;: In Greek historiography, the uncivilised were located in the east, such as the Persian empire in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histories_(Herodotus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herodotus' &lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ca. 440 BC) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xenophon's &lt;em&gt;Anabasis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (ca. 370 BC). During the Middle Ages, the &amp;quot;East&amp;quot; was mainly the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ottoman Empire&lt;/a&gt;. During the Enlightenment, Europeans often located the border between their own &amp;quot;civilised&amp;quot; world and the eastern &amp;quot;uncivilised&amp;quot; world at the border between Prussia and Poland. For example, Goethe's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iphigenia_in_Tauris_(Goethe)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iphigenia in Tauris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is situated in the Krim area, i.e. at the border of the civilised and the uncivilised world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Threat&lt;/strong&gt;: After the Middle Ages, the association between the east and menace/threat due to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish Empire&lt;/a&gt; (as it was then known). During the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorm%C3%A4rz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vormärz&lt;/a&gt; in the 19th century, Russia also became associated with the idea of a menace, e.g. after the crushing of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_Uprising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;November Uprising&lt;/a&gt; in Poland in 1830-31. Another infamous example of the &amp;quot;menace&amp;quot; idea is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yellow peril&lt;/a&gt;, an idea that became very strong after 1870.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T14:58:59.600" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T14:58:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3568" CreationDate="2018-08-06T17:56:57.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR: Macbeth's interpretation of the prophecies was that he would never be defeated, so he didn't think he needed to avoid Dunsinane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In act IV, the witches gave Macbeth three prophecies. &#xA;The first is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;beware Macduff; beware the thane of Fife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for none of woman born shall harm Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Macbeth shall never vanquished be until&#xA;  Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill&#xA;  shall come against him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combined, Macbeth interpreted both of these prophecies as that he could never be defeated. After the second prophecy, Macbeth says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then live, Macduff: what need I fear of thee? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the third, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That will never be. &#xA;  Who can impress the forest, bid the tree &#xA;  Unfix his earth-bound root?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is listed in the website &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoManOfWomanBorn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; under the category &quot;No Man of Woman Born&quot;, and they list a lot of similar prophecies with conditions that the recipients interpreted as &quot;never&quot;, but which actually came true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Agamemnon couldn't be killed in his house or out of it, naked or clothed, feasting or fasting. He was killed in his bath house, covered with a net, while eating an apple.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-08-06T19:06:45.927" LastActivityDate="2018-08-06T19:06:45.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6285" CreationDate="2018-08-06T19:02:54.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parody of long lists in the original Odyssey or in epic poetry in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Odyssey grinds to a halt when the travelers arrive in Hades and see all the most beautiful women in history, both real and fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Iliad has several catalogues. The most famous is the Catalogue of Ships in Book 2, some 250 lines just listing all the Greek commanders and how many ships each one brought from his domains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Canterbury Tales starts with a list of all the people going on the trip. It lasts for 858 lines. Presumably, the finished product was going to have all of them tell four stories to the group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EpicCatalog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic Catalog&lt;/a&gt; on TV Tropes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4700" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:19:41.960" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:19:41.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8085" CreationDate="2018-08-07T14:49:40.287" Score="5" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;What was the original price (first edition/first printing by Allen &amp;amp; Unwin, London) of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; books when they were first sold in 1954/1955? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4874" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T14:30:12.810" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T22:27:24.770" Title="How much did The Lord of the Rings cost when it was first published in 1954/1955?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-07T21:06:23.993" Score="8" ViewCount="247" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult not to notice that the vast majority of heroes in Atlas Shrugged are unmarried and have no kids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dagny Taggart - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Galt - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Francisco - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hugh Akston - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ellis Wyatt - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quentin Daniels - unmarried, no kids&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(many others)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few notable exceptions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rearden is married but his wife is a malicious looter and his brother is a mooch and a weasel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ragnar Danneskjöld is married to Kay Ludlow, and there are a few children in the valley.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is certainly a trend and commonality that the heroes don't have families. Why is this? Is Rand anti-family? We know she was happily married, but I believe had no kids. Perhaps family connections in Atlas would have presented plot difficulties? Is she making a statement that families get in the way of industrial achievement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2018-11-08T00:27:59.717" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T00:27:59.717" Title="What is Ayn Rand's view of marriage and children?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8049" CreationDate="2018-08-08T01:03:08.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sonneteer's voice here is pleading with the love object to leave now - while there are many other burdens troubling him - rather than leaving after the time of troubles have passed and therefore plunging him into another period of despair. The clue to the meaning of line 4 &quot;And do not drop in for an after-loss,&quot; is also found in lines 6 &amp;amp; 7, and can basically be swapped out for them: &quot;Come in the rearward of a conquered woe;&quot; &amp;amp; &quot;Give not a windy night a rainy morrow&quot; contain the same sentiment: &quot;don't crush me after I've shrugged off all the burdens that press on me now.&quot; Quite selfish, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears as though the etymologies and definitions for &quot;drop in&quot; and &quot;after-loss&quot; are murky at best, and on a whimsical first read line 4 could be taken as an Elizabethan plea to forbid post-breakup booty calls. Restricting the dropping in for such an &quot;after-loss&quot; seems fitting to the tone of the poem, but I may digress. I'm not 100% sure the precise meanings are irrelevant when it comes to to understanding the gist of the sonnet, but without them it's still a fairly obvious premise to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3193" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T01:03:08.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-08T01:29:10.217" Score="3" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago I used to write poetry, and there was one particular stanza that has always stuck with me and seemed inherently rhythmic, but I’m not familiar with the relevant terminology and so I’m not able to articulate what I’m hearing when I recite it. If possible, could someone please break down the meter and timing? A -~\—~/~—/-~ style representation would be helpful where a tilde represents a stressed syllable and a dash represents a short one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was quite an absurd occurrence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which gave rise to reason for&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seven words of swift deterrence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which I’ll now relate through more&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had to take a guess&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;- - ~ / - - ~ / - - -&#xA;- - ~ / - ~ / - ~&#xA;- - ~ / - ~ / - - -&#xA;- - ~ / - ~ / - ~&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or to write it with stress in caps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it was QUITE / an abSURD / occurrence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  which gave RISE / to REA- / -son FOR&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  seven WORDS / of SWIFT / deterrence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  which I’ll NOW / reLATE / through MORE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apologies, my question is a tad broad, but I’d just like to hear any information and analysis that you can provide of this stanza, particularly the timing/meter. It would also be good if you could provide brief definitions of any technical terminology you employ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, apologies if this is the wrong site. If that is the case, please recommend somewhere else that I can ask!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4340" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T09:01:05.007" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T09:01:05.007" Title="Analysis of a self-written stanza in terms of meter?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6144" CreationDate="2018-08-08T05:40:14.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Scott Fitzgerald is referring to Spring and Autumn.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;two changes of the year&quot; are the transition from dormancy to growth (corresponding to &lt;strong&gt;Spring&lt;/strong&gt;), and from maturity to dormancy (corresponding to &lt;strong&gt;Autumn/Fall&lt;/strong&gt;). Some countries define the start of these two seasons as the respective &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;equinoxes&lt;/a&gt;. In a sense this is a somewhat arbitrary assignment, as the transition from one state to the other is a gradual one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, it would be reasonable to say that by the equinox, the transition is well underway. In fact, amongst other things the equinox marks the point at which the &lt;em&gt;rate of change&lt;/em&gt; (e.g. the lengthening of the day) is at its greatest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, the summer or winter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solstice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;solstice&lt;/a&gt; marks the peak of growth or depth of dormancy, respectively. Far from being a time of change, they represent the &lt;em&gt;maximum expression&lt;/em&gt; of the nature of that half of the year. The days are long (or short), and there's not much difference between a few weeks before the solstice and a few weeks after the solstice (other than an almost imperceptible change from lengthening to contracting, or vice versa). Those familiar with sine curves will recognise that the solstices represent the two points in the cycle at which the rate of change equals zero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T05:40:14.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8080" CreationDate="2018-08-08T11:31:19.503" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not an expert on scansion, but here's how I would read your stanza. &lt;strong&gt;Bold&lt;/strong&gt; denotes a clear stress, and &lt;em&gt;italics&lt;/em&gt; a secondary stress, on a particular syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;strong&gt;quite&lt;/strong&gt; an ab&lt;strong&gt;surd&lt;/strong&gt; oc&lt;strong&gt;cur&lt;/strong&gt;rence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Which&lt;/strong&gt; gave &lt;em&gt;rise&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;rea&lt;/strong&gt;son &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Sev&lt;/strong&gt;en &lt;strong&gt;words&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;swift&lt;/strong&gt; de&lt;strong&gt;ter&lt;/strong&gt;rence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Which&lt;/strong&gt; I’ll &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt; re&lt;strong&gt;late&lt;/strong&gt; through &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;~ - / ~ - / - ~ - / ~ -&#xA;~ - / ~ - / ~ - / ~&#xA;~ - / ~ - / ~ - / ~ -&#xA;~ - / ~ / - ~ / - ~&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your reading sounds odd to me, because I think there should be more stressed syllables than that. It's not reasonable to include long words like &quot;occurrence&quot; and &quot;deterrence&quot; and not stress any of the syllables in them. Again I'm not an expert, but here are some thoughts to justify my reading&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever there's an 'interesting' word - something that adds colour to the poem, not just a pronoun or other common word - it should have at least one stressed syllable. Hence stressing SEVen and ocCURrence etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Words like &quot;it&quot; and &quot;which&quot; may or may not be stressed depending on context, but I'd normally stress &quot;which&quot; at the start of a sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stresses I've proposed also make for a nice rhythmic reading, with (almost) every second syllable stressed. It's something close to trochaic tetrameter, as user14111 mentioned in a comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way, nice poem!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T11:31:19.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5457" CreationDate="2018-08-08T13:15:33.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Catherine’ is empress &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catherine II&lt;/a&gt; ‘the Great’ of Russia, and in the poem she has taken Don Juan as her lover and protégé, as she did &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Potemkin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grigory Potemkin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Orlov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grigory Orlov&lt;/a&gt;, and others in reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It’ refers to the boudoir, but by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt; ‘boudoir’ refers to Catherine herself. This is clear from ‘at threescore’: the empress was 61 years old in 1790. So Byron is using ‘soften’ with this meaning (sense 6 in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To make (a person) more sympathetic, gentle, lenient, or emotional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Ismail’s storm’ refers to the the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Izmail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;capture of the fortified city of Izmail&lt;/a&gt; from the Ottoman Empire. This city, on the lower reaches of the Danube, was besieged early in 1790 by Russian forces commanded by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Suvorov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Suvorov&lt;/a&gt;, and stormed on 22 December. The victory and the southern extension of her empire must have pleased Catherine, and made her better disposed to reward her favourites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T13:15:33.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8077" CreationDate="2018-08-08T14:31:07.877" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkienbookshelf.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tolkien Bookshelf&lt;/a&gt; specialises in rare books by or about Tolkien. It has images of many older and original editions, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkienbookshelf.com/pages/books/1390/j-r-r-tolkien/the-lord-of-the-rings-1st-uk-edition-1st-impressions-with-original-dustjackets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lord of the Rings, 1st UK Edition, 1st Impressions with Original Dustjackets&lt;/a&gt; (London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin, 1954) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkienbookshelf.com/pages/books/1810/j-r-r-tolkien/the-lord-of-the-rings-comprised-of-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-the-two-towers-and-the-return-of-the-king&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lord of the Rings, Comprised of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and the Return of the King, 1st UK Edition, 1st Impressions, with Custom Clamshell Case&lt;/a&gt; (London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin, 1954).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look carefully at the images of the dust jackets, you can see that they all have the same price: &lt;strong&gt;21 s net&lt;/strong&gt;. This means that the three volumes together would have cost 63 shillings (net).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now 20 s = 1 £, but how much is that in today's money? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Currency converter: 1270–2017&lt;/a&gt; of the National Archives can help: you select the closest year (1955) and set 1£ and 1s for the price of a single volume. According to the converter, this amounts to £25.06 in 2017 (for a single volume).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T22:27:24.770" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T22:27:24.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8077" CreationDate="2018-08-08T15:10:59.563" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien himself reflected on the original prices of his works, which was &lt;strong&gt;twenty-one shillings&lt;/strong&gt; (one Guinea) each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The price seems to have been high for the times but set because that was the lowest amount for expenses to be paid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very many thanks for remembering the ageing Professor, and bracing him up with your letter. &lt;strong&gt;I know  21/-  is  a  frightful  price,&lt;/strong&gt;  but  don't  forget  that  I  have  to  sell  an  awful  lot  before  the  ghastly expenses are paid off. The fact that I get not a halfpenny until that is done, does not matter so much, as this: if enough are sold I may be able to publish more. So add to your great kindness in inducing such as &lt;strong&gt;you can to beg borrow or steal a guinea rather than a copy!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letter 136, To Rayner Unwin, 24 March 1953&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien wanted the publications to be a bit more fancy but that would have cost more money...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pictures are far too expensive, even if I had sufficient skill to do them and cut out artist's fees. I tried, but alas! can only draw v. imperfectly what I can, and not what I see. The wrapper is all that survived of three separate designs I made, one for each pan. Part I was to have been all black with red and gold letters, and the three opposing rings: Narya (red), Vilya (blue), Nenya (white). . . . .1 But  it  was  reduced;  and  the  lovely  (I  thought)  facsimiles  of  the  3  burned  pages  of  the  Book  of Mazarbul also vanished – &lt;strong&gt;so that folk could have the thing at the trifling cost of 21/-!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letter 151, To Hugh Brogan, 18 September 1954&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T15:10:59.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8086" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8087" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" Score="0" Body="Questions about Rudyard Kipling's father John Lockwood Kipling (1837 – 1911), who was an art teacher, illustrator and museum curator." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T17:13:36.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8088" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8089" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist Frank Peretti (born 1951) and his works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" LastActivityDate="2018-08-08T17:18:59.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8093" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8095" CreationDate="2018-08-08T20:12:26.123" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time I started a story but never finished it. Now I cannot find it because I forgot the author and title. I remember it being from a famous author but not his most famous work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story starts with a reporter hired to research terrible sounds coming from western Carolina mountains (Asheville). It turns out that something has opened up in the earth (like a volcano) and shot out a supersonic &quot;vehicle&quot; that is tearing across the nation. Citizens and news media are terrified of this new menace to the civilized world and cannot capture it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is as far as I got. I would love to pick up from there and find out what happens. Does this sound familiar to anybody?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4881" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T01:02:13.087" Title="A classic fiction about a mysterious thunder that comes from the Carolina mountains" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8093" CreationDate="2018-08-09T01:02:13.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like Jules Verne's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_World_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Master of the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There is an &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on-line copy&lt;/a&gt; so you can easily check.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T01:02:13.087" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6149" CreationDate="2018-08-09T08:16:23.677" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In ‘common store of life’ the words are being used in the following senses (in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;common&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 1. a. ‘Belonging equally to more than one’ (Johnson); possessed or shared alike&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;store&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 5. a. collective possessions; accumulated goods or money&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;life&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 6. a. vitality or energy conveyed in action, thought, or expression; liveliness in feeling, manner, or aspect; animation, vivacity, spirit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is thus briefly entertaining a fancy whereby the energy needed to sustain activity in the intense heat comes from a limited stock that is shared between people, and so if one person makes an unnecessary gesture then they are depleting the stock of energy available to everyone else, which is thus an ‘affront’ (an attack or insult). This is an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypallage&lt;/a&gt;: the affront is really to the other people who share in the common store, not to the store itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T08:16:23.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8097" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-09T12:08:15.647" Score="5" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1838, the Flemish author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendrik_Conscience&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hendrik Conscience&lt;/a&gt; published the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_of_Flanders_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;De Leeuw van Vlaenderen, of de Slag der Gulden Sporen&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;The Lion of Flanders, or the Battle of the Golden Spurs&quot;), which is based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Golden_Spurs&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of the Golden Spurs&lt;/a&gt; (Dutch: Guldensporenslag) near Kortrijk on 11 July 1302, and the events leading up to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel was very significant because its publication &quot;coincided with the emergence of the Flemish Movement which supported an increasingly assertive Flemish political identity&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_of_Flanders_(novel)#Reception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.) The book's success earned Conscience the epithet of &quot;the man who taught his people to read&quot;. Eventually, 11 July became the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Flemish_Community&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Day of the Flemish Community&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French suffered a crushing defeat during the battle and lost a significant part of their nobility, so it would not be surprising if that were reflected (or at least mentioned) somewhere in a French work of literature written before 1838. However, the French Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataille_de_Courtrai_(1302)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bataille de Courtrai (1302)&lt;/a&gt; does not mention any French works that refer to the battle. So was Conscience's &lt;em&gt;De Leeuw van Vlaanderen&lt;/em&gt; really the first work of literature that at least mentions this battle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T12:08:15.647" Title="Was Hendrik Conscience's novel The Lion of Flanders (De Leeuw van Vlaanderen) the first work inspired by the Battle of the Golden Spurs?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;hendrik-conscience&gt;&lt;de-leeuw-van-vlaanderen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8098" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8099" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Serbian language." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T12:36:24.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5359" CreationDate="2018-08-09T20:12:43.817" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to this passage is “like” meaning “to the same extent as”, but I will gloss the whole thing. When I give a numbered sense of a word, it’s from the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With the most regulated charms of feature,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Regulate” means “make regular or even in form” (sense 3), so this means that Dudù's looks were well-proportioned and symmetrical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which painters cannot catch like faces sinning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Against proportion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Like” means “to the same extent as” (sense B1a), so this means that painters cannot capture well-regulated faces as well as they can ill-proportioned faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— the wild strokes of nature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Wild” means “of strange aspect; fantastic in appearance” (sense 14b) or “aimed wide of the mark, or at random” (sense 15); and “stroke” means “movement of the brush in painting” (sense 16a) or “line of a face or form” (sense 18) so this is another description of ill-proportioned faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which they hit off at once in the beginning,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Hit off” means “reproduce successfully” (as you correctly noted in the post), so this means that painters are able to quickly and successfully sketch ill-proportioned faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Full of expression, right or wrong, that strike,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Strike” means “impress or arrest (the eye, view, sight)” (sense 65), so this means that whether the painter captures the ill-proportioned subject’s expression accurately or not, the result nonetheless impresses the viewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And pleasing or unpleasing, still are like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Like” means “bearing a faithful resemblance to the subject” (sense 5) so this means that whether or not the effect pleases the viewer, the portrait (of the ill-proportioned subject) is still a faithful representation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T20:12:43.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5745" CreationDate="2018-08-09T23:31:11.353" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read this book a few times (one of my faves), and although you make a compelling point, I mildly disagree with your premise that &quot;they never actually contributed anything to the struggle&quot;. Admittedly, they were not heroic front-lines combatants against Belbury as were Merlin, the bear, and to some extent Jane. But they were behind-the-curtain assistants in the struggle. Consider the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Dimbles helped to comfort and welcome Jane, and offered her needed advice in her marriage. Mrs. Dimble helped prepare the love quarters at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;McPhee provided a worldly/rationale backdrop against which Ransom could better explain spiritual principles.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Miss Ironwood helped care for Ransom.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that C.S. Lewis is making a larger point in all of this: most good people don't actually conquer evil in the way that God (or a prophet) does. But in playing our little roles, and not fighting against Him, we do in fact assist in meaningful ways in the battle against evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2018-08-09T23:31:11.353" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8108" CreationDate="2018-08-10T09:19:20.770" Score="6" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading &lt;em&gt;One to Count Cadence&lt;/em&gt; from James Crumley (first published 1969), I read this sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name on the passport was Robert Jordon; it was a joke; nobody&#xA;  laughed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite searching for the name &quot;Robert Jordon&quot;, I don't get the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could somebody explain it to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2657" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T13:14:46.443" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T13:38:48.453" Title="What is the joke in the name &quot;Robert Jordon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-10T10:10:33.693" Score="7" ViewCount="1725" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Swift published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1726 as a satire on human nature. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulliver%27s_Travels#Major_themes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Published seven years after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Defoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel Defoe&lt;/a&gt;'s wildly successful &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robinson Crusoe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the typical stuff that children's books are made of, but today, &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; is typically included in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_classic_books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists of children's books&lt;/a&gt;, especially the parts situated in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When exactly did people begin treating &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; as a children's book?&lt;/strong&gt; The Wikipedia articles on the book itself and Jonathan Swift don't provide information about this, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22gulliver%27s+travels%22+%22children%27s+book%22+reception+history&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;search about the book's reception history&lt;/a&gt; did not help either. There are a number of online articles and blogposts that point out that the back was not written as a children's book, but they don't say when the change in perception occurred. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/eight-surprising-things-its-time-you-knew-about-gullivers-travels-180967328/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gulliver’s Travels Wasn’t Meant to Be a Children’s Book And More Things You Didn’t Know About the Literary Classic&lt;/a&gt; on the Smithsonian's website, and, in German, &lt;a href=&quot;http://cbuecherkiste.de/gullivers-reisen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gullivers Reisen&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T15:20:39.837" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T16:41:05.040" Title="When did people begin to regard Gulliver's Travels as a children's book?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;&lt;gullivers-travels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about Hendrik Conscience's 1838 novel 'De leeuw van Vlaanderen' ('The Lion of Flanders'). Use this tag with [hendrik-conscience] and [dutch-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T10:47:59.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8107" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8124" CreationDate="2018-08-10T11:55:34.557" Score="8" ViewCount="354" Body="&lt;p&gt;While re-reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/730/17&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt;, I was wondering how we know that, for example, the story &quot;The Final Problem&quot; is set in 1891. Presumably it's mentioned somewhere in the story. I recall the occasional mention of years in the Sherlock Holmes canon, but now I'm wondering how many such mentions there are - thus, how many of the stories can be located precisely in time, and how many are drifting in vaguer periods such as &quot;the 1890s&quot; or &quot;after Watson's marriage&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How many times is the exact year mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes canon?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By 'canon' I mean the original stories by Conan Doyle. I would also reluctantly accept extratextual statements by Doyle, but not anything from Sherlock Holmes stories by other authors.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T09:41:38.820" Title="How many of the original Sherlock Holmes stories are fixed in time?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8103" CreationDate="2018-08-10T13:38:48.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't have much evidence to support this, but I think this might be a reference to Robert Jordan, the main character of Ernest Hemingway's celebrated &lt;em&gt;For Whom the Bell Tolls&lt;/em&gt;. Both are soldiers, to start. (I don't know anything else about either though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, there's this snippet from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2001-10-26/83407/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview with Crumley in &lt;em&gt;The Austin Chronicle&lt;/em&gt; in 2001&lt;/a&gt;, about 40 years after this book was published:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crumley taught part-time at various universities for 14 years before putting down roots in Missoula, Montana, a town that seems to breed and nurture writers the way Austin sprouts guitar players. &amp;quot;There are probably 70 or 80 working writers and another 200 who write,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;so I have all the advantages of being around a university without having to go up there and put up with their bullshit.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But how did so many writers end up in Missoula?&amp;quot; I asked him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We never figured it out,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;We don't know. But this is where, you know, Hemingway's hero, Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, was headed. After the Spanish Civil War, he was gonna come up to Missoula and teach Spanish.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, coming from Crumley, &amp;quot;Robert Jordon&amp;quot; could be a hat-tip to the character who inspired so many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a tenuous connection at best, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T13:38:48.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2957" CreationDate="2018-08-10T15:20:29.973" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel may be &quot;The Inimitable Jeeves&quot; by P.G. Wodehouse. It concerns mainly the events associated with a secondary character, Bingo Little, who falls in love with almost all the women he meets. He is the target of scorn from the principle character, Bertie. From memory, I believe he makes the reference regarding seven-tenths of women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4885" LastActivityDate="2018-08-10T15:20:29.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="672" CreationDate="2018-08-11T16:11:21.893" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In western culture, &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; has been a symbol for &lt;strong&gt;death&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;mourning&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;sin &amp;amp; evil&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;the strange or the &quot;other&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, but also of humility, and of writing and literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Black as a symbol of &lt;strong&gt;death&lt;/strong&gt; (sometimes associated with &lt;strong&gt;night&lt;/strong&gt;) goes at least as far back as Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, where Death and Ker (plural: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keres&lt;/a&gt;) are black. Black is also the colour of the personified death in Statius's &lt;em&gt;Thebaid&lt;/em&gt; and in Seneca's &lt;em&gt;Oedipus&lt;/em&gt;. Hesiod's &lt;em&gt;Theogony&lt;/em&gt; also mentions &quot;black Ker&quot;. In Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, Hell and the devils are black.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Black as a symbol of &lt;strong&gt;mourning&lt;/strong&gt; can also be found in Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. It is also the colour of black bile, which, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism#Black_bile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory of the four humours&lt;/a&gt;, causes &quot;melancholy&quot; or depression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Black as a symbol for the &lt;strong&gt;devil&lt;/strong&gt;, sin and evil can be found in the Bible (Acts 26, 18).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In western culture, &lt;strong&gt;white&lt;/strong&gt; has been a symbol of &lt;strong&gt;innocence&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;virginity&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;virtue&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;holy&lt;/strong&gt; but sometimes also of death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White as a symbol of &lt;strong&gt;innocence, virginity and virtue&lt;/strong&gt; goes at least as far back as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelations+3&amp;amp;version=KJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book of Revelation (3, 4f)&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments; and they shall walk with me in white: for they are worthy. He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; (...).&quot; (King James Version). For this reason, the white lily has often been used as an emblem for the Virgin Mary. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White as a symbol of &lt;strong&gt;the sacred&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;godly wisdom and sublimeness&lt;/strong&gt; can be traced back to Exodus (chapters 26-27), where the tabernacle should have a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bible-history.com/tabernacle/TAB4The_White_Linen_Fence.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;white linen fence&lt;/a&gt;. The god &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hellenicgods.org/colors-associated-with-the-olympian-gods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apollo&lt;/a&gt; was also associated with white.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More recently, white has also been associated with the &lt;strong&gt;power of untamed nature&lt;/strong&gt; over humans, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;White Fang&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(White as a symbol of death is much more recent; there are several examples in 19th-century German literature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Works of literature that specifically use the &lt;strong&gt;contrast between black and white&lt;/strong&gt; are also old. For example, in Plutarch's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theseus&lt;/a&gt;, Theseus promises to his father to return on a ship with white sails if he survived, otherwise the ship would have black sails. Due to an unforeseen incident on the way back, the sailors forget to put up the white sails, and Theseus's father Aegeus, seeing the black sails, commits suicide before the ship reaches the harbour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Theseus myth uses a distinction between white and black sails, not on black and white as skin colour. An example of this can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Bodel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Bodel's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;La Chanson des Saisnes&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Song of the Saxons&quot;, late 12th century, France), in which Saxons and black Nubians fight against white Franks. The Saxons are the enemies and are portrayed as oriental Saracens. In this way, &quot;white&quot; and the Franks (&quot;we&quot;) are associated with the good side, and the &quot;others&quot; (Saxons and black Nubians) and black with the bad side of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Main source: Günter Butzer and Joachim Jacob (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Metzler Lexikon literarischer Symbole&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Sometimes, the meaning of &quot;white&quot; is unclear. One example of this is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse#White_Horse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;white rider&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the first of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-Chapter-6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation, 6, 1-2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I saw when the Lamb opened one of the seals, and I heard, as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying, Come and see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering, and to conquer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This figure has sometimes been interpreted as Jesus, because is described as riding a white horse in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-Chapter-19/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation, 19, 11&lt;/a&gt; and sometimes as the antichrist. (See Hope Bollinger: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.christianity.com/wiki/end-times/who-are-the-four-horsemen-in-revelation-their-meaning-and-significance.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who Are the Four Horsemen in Revelation? Their Meaning and Significance&lt;/a&gt; and &#xA;Douglas S. Winnail: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/magazines/2004/november-december/the-mysterious-first-horseman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mysterious First Horseman!&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T12:01:02.817" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T12:01:02.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8104" CreationDate="2018-08-11T16:41:05.040" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a few more searches, I discovered the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/trl/2016/04/curators-choice-gullivers-travels.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Curator's Choice: Gulliver's Travels&lt;/a&gt; on the Toronto Reference Library Blog (21 April 2016). This blog post mentions an abridged edition for children by Francis Newbery, published in &lt;strong&gt;1776&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. 50 years after the publication of the original work. It contains &lt;strong&gt;only the first two of Gulliver's voyages&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. to Lilliput and Brogdingnag. The title is &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Captain Gulliver in a Voyage to the Islands of Lilliput and Brogdingnag — Abridged from the Works of The Celebrated Dean Swift&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Vera Tweddell (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rbscp.lib.rochester.edu/2459&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Rochester Library&lt;/a&gt;), this 'appears to be the first &quot;juvenile&quot; edition of Gulliver, published at the end of the eighteenth century, and of the greatest scarcity.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The British Library has this edition in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-adventures-of-captain-gulliver&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;collections&lt;/a&gt;: it is a chapbook edition (&quot;pocket book&quot; in more modern parlance) with woodcut illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Toronto Reference Library blog post also mentions that Benjamin Tabart's &lt;em&gt;Tabart's Improved Edition of the Voyages &amp;amp; Travels of Capt. L. Gulliver&lt;/em&gt;, published in &lt;strong&gt;1805&lt;/strong&gt; in four volumes, contained &lt;strong&gt;all four voyages in abridged form&lt;/strong&gt;. This edition even had coloured plates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that &lt;em&gt;Gullivers Travels&lt;/em&gt; was adapted to a children's book much earlier than I expected when I posted the question. Even the &quot;adult&quot; edition of the book had been popular with children from the start. In November 1726, John Gay wrote to Swift, &quot;From the highest to the lowest it is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-11T16:41:05.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8112" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-12T00:10:34.727" Score="6" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are gaps in typesetting, which appear to run through a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;River (typography)&lt;/a&gt;, Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was looking for examples of poetry that took advantage of this kind of phenomenon in typography. But in general, one could argue that any poem with unusual text alignment or disposition plays with typography, so to narrow it down I'd specify that the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every line must be aligned left or justified,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must preserve its layout in (or be designed specifically for) &lt;code&gt;monospaced&lt;/code&gt; typefaces.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a general category for this kind of work? I'm struggling to find a single example of such text, so it would help me to narrow down my search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4888" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T20:19:19.067" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T20:19:19.067" Title="Style of poetry that plays with typographic rivers" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-12T02:46:10.047" Score="3" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the end of the novel &lt;em&gt;The Godfather&lt;/em&gt;, Michael Corleone takes his vengeance on the other families, as well as those who betrayed him. Before this, though, he cleans house, setting up a secret &lt;em&gt;regime&lt;/em&gt; for Rocco Lampone, promising Clemenza and Tessio their own Families in a year, and ousting Tom Hagen from the position as &lt;em&gt;consigliere&lt;/em&gt;.  Tom, naturally, feels hurt, but several months later has this bit of dialogue with Michael:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Corleone Family is a lot stronger than anybody thinks, but I hoped&#xA;  to make it foolproof.” He smiled at Hagen. “I guess you’ve figured&#xA;  everything out by now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hagen nodded. “It wasn’t hard. Except why you wanted me out of the&#xA;  action. But I put on my Sicilian hat and I finally figured that too.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom must be more Sicilian than me because I can't figure it out.  &lt;strong&gt;Why did Michael remove Tom Hagen from the Corleone business?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4890" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-12T13:38:17.890" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T23:04:35.530" Title="Why did Michael Corleone remove Tom Hagen from the family business?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;the-godfather&gt;&lt;mario-puzo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3245" CreationDate="2018-08-12T16:56:37.787" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; starts in the middle depends on what the subject of the poem is. If the subject is &lt;em&gt;the whole Trojan War&lt;/em&gt;, then certainly the poem starts in the middle, and finishes well before the end. But is that really the subject? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0133&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;opening line&lt;/a&gt; of the poem is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, “sing, goddess, the rage of Peleus’ son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Achilles&lt;/a&gt;”. If the subject of the poem is &lt;em&gt;the rage of Achilles&lt;/em&gt; (and μῆνιν, &lt;em&gt;rage&lt;/em&gt;, is the very first word) then the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; begins at the beginning, with the cause of Achilles’ rage (the quarrel with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agamemnon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agamemnon&lt;/a&gt; over the captive Trojan women &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chryseis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chryseis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briseis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Briseis&lt;/a&gt;), continues with its consequences (Achilles sulks; the battle goes poorly for the Achaeans; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patroclus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patroclus&lt;/a&gt; impersonates Achilles and is killed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hector&lt;/a&gt;), and ends with its resolution (Agamemnon returns Briseis to Achilles; Achilles kills Hector; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Priam&lt;/a&gt; begs the return of his son’s body).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T16:56:37.787" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-12T17:52:35.570" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Thomas Thorpe published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_sonnets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shake-speares Sonnets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; [sic!] in 1609, the sonnets (or at least a subset of them) had already circulated in manuscript for some time. Francis Meres already mentioned these circulating manuscripts in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladis_Tamia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Palladis Tamia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1598.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the sonnets had previously been published by William Jaggard in 1599 in the anthology &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passionate_Pilgrim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Passionate Pilgrim&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. However, of the 20 poems in this anthology, only five are considered authentically Shakespearean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know with certainty what sort of manuscript &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Thorpe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thorpe&lt;/a&gt; used for the 1609 edition of the sonnets, but scholars now regard him as a reputable publisher. William Jaggard is less reputable, both because of &lt;em&gt;The Passionate Pilgrim&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;False Folio&lt;/a&gt; of 1619. His access to manuscript of authentic Shakespeare sonnets must have been limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the sonnets had circulated privately in manuscript form, it is worth asking &lt;strong&gt;whether any such manuscripts have survived&lt;/strong&gt;. If yes, &lt;strong&gt;how many of them&lt;/strong&gt;? And &lt;strong&gt;were any sonnets more popular than others&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The question title intentionally reads &quot;manuscripts of Shakespeare sonnets&quot; instead of &quot;manuscripts of Shakespeare's sonnets&quot;, because such manuscripts may have been incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T21:01:40.527" Title="How many Elizabethan or Jacobean manuscripts of Shakespeare sonnets have come down to us?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3245" CreationDate="2018-08-12T19:36:44.397" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a whole cycle of poems detailing the Trojan war and its aftermath. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. Of these, only the two attributed to Homer have survived intact. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you could think of it as starting in the middle, or you can think of it as being one installment in a long series, most installments of which have now been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the audience would have known the outlines of the whole story already, so there was no need to start it with a summary of &quot;what has gone before&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T19:36:44.397" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8116" CreationDate="2018-08-12T21:01:40.527" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700&lt;/a&gt; (CELM) has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of manuscripts of Shakespeare sonnets&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; (‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’) — c.1650s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-6&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; (‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’) — 12 manuscripts, mostly c.1630–1650; earliest c.1620s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;8&lt;/a&gt; (‘Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?’) — c.1627–c.1673&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;32&lt;/a&gt; (‘If thou survive my well-contented day’) — mid 17th century&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;33&lt;/a&gt; (‘Full many a glorious morning have I seen’) — c.1650s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;68&lt;/a&gt; (‘Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn’) — c.1650s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;71&lt;/a&gt; (‘No longer mourn for me when I am dead’) — mid 17th century&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;106&lt;/a&gt; (‘When in the chronicle of wasted time’) — 2 manuscripts, c.1630s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;107&lt;/a&gt; (‘Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul’) — c.1650s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;116&lt;/a&gt; (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’) — c.1630s–1650s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-15&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;128&lt;/a&gt; (‘How oft when thou, my music, music play’st’) — late 17th century&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/shakespearewilliam.html#ShW-work-16&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;138&lt;/a&gt; (‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’) — c.1640s&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So none of the surviving manuscripts are from the Elizabethan period, and only possibly the earliest copies of sonnet 2 are from the Jacobean period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. Blakemore Evans, in the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the sonnets, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9cYmAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA214&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;notes that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of most of these sonnets the manuscript copies are derived from the printed texts (either the 1609 Q[uarto] or the 1640 &lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in the case of the copies of sonnet 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;eleven bear witness to a text of 2 that is believed to represent an earlier state of Shakespeare’s text, of which the Q[uarto] text is generally considered to be a later revision&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-12T21:01:40.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8120" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-13T08:20:14.903" Score="7" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the foreword to my copy of &lt;em&gt;The Hunchback of Notre Dame&lt;/em&gt;, Elizabeth Massie writes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Victor Hugo's early novel, &lt;em&gt;Notre Dame de Paris&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1831 and set in medieval Paris of 1482, was the work that made his reputation outside his native France. First translated into English in 1833 by William Hazlitt the Younger as &lt;em&gt;Notre Dame of Paris&lt;/em&gt;, the novel was released only a few months later in a second translation as &lt;em&gt;The Hunchback of Notre Dame&lt;/em&gt;, and has been known to English speakers by this title ever since.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this title changed? Why not keep the title more accurate to the original French title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T04:37:35.133" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T04:37:35.133" Title="Why was &quot;Notre Dame de Paris&quot; changed from &quot;Notre Dame of Paris&quot; to &quot;The Hunchback of Notre Dame&quot; when it was re-published in English?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;the-hunchback-of-notre-dame&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8120" CreationDate="2018-08-13T12:10:34.473" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=hCpKDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;q=wren%201993&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it's claimed that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The original title of Hugo's work was &lt;em&gt;Notre Dame de Paris&lt;/em&gt;, making no mention of the disfigurement of Quasimodo, highlighting that the cathedral itself, rather than Quasimodo, was to be the central character. […] The shift in emphasis towards Quasimodo as a main character in the English title is a result of the original translator of the work into English, Frederic Shoberl, being aware that gothic novels were more popular in England than romance: see (Wren, 1993, pp v-xix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cited source is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wren, K. (1993). &lt;em&gt;Introduction Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre-Dame&lt;/em&gt;. London: Wordsworth Classics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=hZtfvHDFHE4C&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Google Books scan of this book&lt;/a&gt; doesn't have the introduction available, so I can't investigate this claim further. Hopefully someone can build on this to write a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T12:14:01.813" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T12:14:01.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8112" CreationDate="2018-08-13T13:25:01.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Hollander describes poems of this type as &lt;em&gt;pattern poems&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;shaped verse&lt;/em&gt; in his book &lt;em&gt;Types of Shape&lt;/em&gt;. Here's a useful quote from the backcover of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This book is a collection of pattern poems - poems whose printed&#xA;  format presents a picture of some familiar object that is also the&#xA;  subject of the text. Patterned poems, also called shaped verse, are&#xA;  part of a long tradition that extends from Alexandrian Greek poets to&#xA;  Lewis Carroll and beyond. The poems in this book, written by the poet&#xA;  John Hollander, are on subjects ranging from a beach umbrella and a&#xA;  popsicle to time, love and idea. First published in 1969, the book has&#xA;  now been expanded to include ten recent poems in addition to the&#xA;  original 25, plus an introduction in which Hollander reflects on what&#xA;  a shaped poem is and how and why he wrote them. There are also&#xA;  explanatory comments for each poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note that in creating his pattern poems Hollander only occasionally holds his shapes to your first requirement of 'left alignment.' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other work, Hollander deprecatingly describes 'left aligned' poetry as &lt;em&gt;jagged edge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="4230" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T23:38:51.553" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T23:38:51.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8112" CreationDate="2018-08-13T17:25:25.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The best-known type of poetry that plays with text alignment is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;concrete poetry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The term was coined in the 1950s (Meid: 468) and should not be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;visual poetry&lt;/a&gt; (Knörrich: 121).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Swiss poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Gomringer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eugen Gomrigner&lt;/a&gt; was probably the first to write some sort of theory of concrete poetry, although he used the term &quot;Konstellation&quot; (in 1953, and in his 1954 Manifest &lt;em&gt;Vom Vers zur Konstellation&lt;/em&gt;. The Swedish poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96yvind_Fahlstr%C3%B6m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Öyvind Fahlström&lt;/a&gt; possibly coined the term &quot;concrete poetry&quot; in 1953 in his work &lt;em&gt;Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben&lt;/em&gt;, which wasn't published until 1968 (Meid: 468).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before I started researching my answer, the oldest examples of concrete poetry I knew of were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Wings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Easter Wings&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44358/the-altar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Altar&lt;/a&gt; by George Herbert. However, several sources, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://design.zemniimages.info/concrete-poetry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Concrete Poetry&quot; on the Zemni Book Design site&lt;/a&gt; mention examples from Greek antiquity: several examples by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simmias_of_Rhodes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simnias of Rhodes&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://art.famsf.org/andrew-hoyem/pan-pipes-theocritus-plate-1-portfolio-shaped-poetry-san-francisco-arion-press-1981&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pan Pipes&lt;/a&gt; by Theocritus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Offline sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knörrich, Otto: &lt;em&gt;Lexikon lyrischer Formen&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2005.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meid, Volker (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Sachlexikon Literatur&lt;/em&gt;. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992/1993.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;von Wilpert, Gero: &lt;em&gt;Sachwörterbuch der Literatur&lt;/em&gt;. Eighth edition. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-13T17:25:25.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8107" CreationDate="2018-08-13T18:07:28.670" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the final list I've made, after sifting through &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, and the four novels in some detail. This comprises the entirety of the Sherlock Holmes canon. It's possible I've missed something - there's quite a lot to go through - but I've certainly found most of the dated stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note that I have determined Watson's marriage to be in 1888, from &quot;The Sign of the Four&quot; and &quot;The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor&quot;. Therefore, I consider that to be a fixed point, and many stories can be dated based on that alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Exact date mentioned (23)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Scandal in Bohemia&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One night—it was on the twentieth of March, 1888—I was returning from a journey to a patient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Five Orange Pips&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1887&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The year ’87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Man with the Twisted Lip&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1889&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One night—it was in June, ’89—there came a ring to my bell, about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Speckled Band&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1883&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was early in April in the year ’83 that I woke one morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb: &lt;strong&gt;1889&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was in the summer of ’89, not long after my  marriage, that the events occurred which I am now about to summarise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Reigate Squires&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1887&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was some time before the health of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes recovered&#xA;  from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of ’87.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story takes place starting around April 14th.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Final Problem&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1891&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the winter of that year and the early spring of 1891, I saw in the papers that he had been engaged by the French government upon a matter of supreme importance, and I received two notes from Holmes, dated from Narbonne and from Nimes, from which I gathered that his stay in France was likely to be a long one. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I saw him walk into my consulting-room upon the evening of April 24th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite clearly documented by Watson, as I would expect, given how important this case was.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Empty House&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1894&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair under&#xA;  most unusual and inexplicable circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1895&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On referring to my note-book for the year 1895 I find that it was upon Saturday, the 23rd of April, that we first heard of Miss Violet Smith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This adventure runs on for a while, chronologically, but I believe it ends in 1895, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of Black Peter&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1895&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year ’95.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, we also read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this memorable year ’95 a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This includes the one at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Three Students&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1895&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was in the year ’95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great University towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1894&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our&#xA;  work for the year 1894 I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such&#xA;  a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Abbey Grange&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1897&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was on a bitterly cold and frosty morning during the winter of ’97 that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1892?!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wait, &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;? Holmes was gone from 1891 to 1894? This doesn't make sense. I suspect that Watson has mixed up his notes - or Doyle's made a mistake. He must be off by a couple years.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1895&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Devil's Foot&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1897&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes’s iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Creeping Man&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1903&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903 that I received one of Holmes's laconic messages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Three Garridebs&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1902&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I repeat, however, that this enables me to fix the date, which was the latter end of June, 1902, shortly after the conclusion of the South African War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Illustrious Client&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1902&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the upper floor of the Northumberland Avenue establishment there is an isolated corner where two couches lie side by side, and it was on these that we lay upon September 3, 1902, the day when my narrative begins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier&quot; (notably, this is one of the first stories &quot;written&quot; by Holmes): &lt;strong&gt;1903&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I find from my notebook that it was in January, 1903, just after the conclusion of the Boer War, that I had my visit from Mr. James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Lion's Mane&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1907&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Towards the end of July, 1907, there was a severe gale, the wind blowing up-channel, heaping the seas to the base of the cliffs and leaving a lagoon at the turn of the tide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1896&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One forenoon—it was late in 1896—I received a hurried note from Holmes asking for my attendance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;His Last Bow&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1914&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, I chose August for the word, and 1914 for the figures, and here we are.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is said by one of the characters, explaining how the date of the meeting played into their plans.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Exact date can be calculated to within a year (9)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Red-Headed League&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1890&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full anthology was published in 1892, but this story appeared in 1891, so the reference is to 1890. This is further confirmed by a sign described by the client:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Red-headed League&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dissolved&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  October 9, 1890&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1887 or 1888&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the gossips away from this four-year-old drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, we can do the math and subtract four years from 1891/1892. Watson also mentions that it was &quot;a few weeks&quot; before his marriage, putting his wedding in 1887 or 1888. Other stories imply it's 1888.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have another bit later on that confirms this - Holmes doing some reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“ ‘Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral.’ Hum! ‘Arms: Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable. Born in 1846.’ He’s forty-one years of age, which is mature for marriage.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies 1887 or 1888, depending on the exact birthday of St. Simon.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Stock-Broker's Clerk&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shortly after my marriage I had bought a connection in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above, I determined Watson's marriage to be in 1888, according to the stories. Therefore, we can assume this time. However, Holmes also remarks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, my dear Watson,” said he, striding into the room, “I am very delighted to see you! I trust that Mrs. Watson has entirely recovered from all the little excitements connected with our adventure of the Sign of Four.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Sign of the Four&quot; is set in 1888; I therefore suspect &quot;The Stock-Broker's Clerk&quot; to be in 1888, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Crooked Man&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day’s work had been an exhausting one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, we have good evidence that Watson married in 1888, so I'd put this story in 1888, too.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Naval Treaty&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three&#xA;  cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods. I find them recorded in my notes under the headings of “The Adventure of the Second Stain,” “The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,” and “The Adventure of the Tired Captain.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I again say 1888 here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Resident Patient&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1881&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot be sure of the exact date, for some of my memoranda upon the matter have been mislaid, but it must have been towards the end of the first year during which Holmes and I shared chambers in Baker Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes and Watson first roomed together in 1881, as per &quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot;, setting this in 1881 or 1882.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Norwood Builder&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1894&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the time of which I speak Holmes had been back for some months, and I, at his request, had sold my practice and returned to share the old quarters in Baker Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Holmes returns early in 1894, and although &quot;some months&quot; is vague, it still likely sets this one in 1894.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Second Stain&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watson notably refrains from dating this one (&quot;It was, then, in a year, and even in a decade, that shall be nameless&quot;), but we saw this referenced in the opening to &quot;The Naval Treaty&quot; as happening in the July after Watson's marriage, which I determined to be in 1888. Watson, therefore, appears to have outwitten himself, and given away the date after all!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Dying Detective&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1890&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I listened earnestly to her [Mrs. Hudson's] story when she came to my rooms in the second year of my married life and told me of the sad condition to which my poor friend was reduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, we know Watson married in 1888, so this should be 1890-ish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Vaguer dates (7)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A Case of Identity&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;Around 1888 or 1890&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah,” said he, “I forgot that I had not seen you for some weeks. It is a little souvenir from the King of Bohemia in return for my assistance in the case&#xA;  of the Irene Adler papers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be either in 1888 or 1889, shortly after Holmes solved the case, or &quot;some weeks&quot; could mean this is after &quot;The Red-Headed League&quot; was solved, in 1890-ish.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The 'Gloria Scott'&quot; &lt;strong&gt;After 1875?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?” he asked. “He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Finally, he invited me down to his father’s place at Donnithorpe, in&#xA;  Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was Holmes' first ever case, and occurred in his college years. We experience it through Holmes narrating it to Watson, later on. If we could determine those dates, we could determine when this case occurred, although not when Holmes related it to Watson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; it takes place at least after 1875. The 'Gloria Scott' sank in 1855, and Trevor's father said that &quot;For more than twenty years we have led&#xA;peaceful and useful lives&quot; after the sinking. However, Hudson claims it's much later, when talking to the father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“ ‘Hudson it is, sir,’ said the seaman. ‘Why, it’s thirty year and more since I saw you last.’&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sets the story at 1885 at least, if we can trust Hudson. But this seems rather late, and, as we find out, Hudson isn't really a man to be trusted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Musgrave Ritual&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;Around 1880&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now and again cases came in my way, principally through the introduction of old fellowstudents, for during my last years at the University there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods. The third of these cases was that of the Musgrave Ritual, and it is to the interest which was aroused by that singular chain of events, and the large issues which proved to be at stake,&#xA;  that I trace my first stride towards the position which I now hold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“For four years I had seen nothing of him [Reginald Musgrave] until one morning he walked into my room in Montague Street.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Holmes waxing about his college days (and shortly thereafter) to Watson, so this occurred about four years after &quot;The 'Gloria Scott'&quot;. However, Holmes' description of this as &quot;his first stride&quot; suggests it was more than merely five years before much of his adventures with Watson - making me even more distrustful of Hudson's claim. I therefore think that 1875-ish is a reasonable date for &quot;The 'Gloria Scott'&quot;, and 1880 or so is a reasonable rough date for &quot;The Musgrave Ritual&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Dancing Men&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;1898?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Last year I came up to London for the Jubilee&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hilton Cubitt, the client, is narrating here. If this is a Jubilee of Queen Victoria, then this is strange. She took the throne in 1837, so I would expect Cubitt to be referring then to the year 1892 or 1897. I'd bet that it's the latter, and that this is set in 1898, but I don't have solid proof for this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Priory School&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;After 1900&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“ ‘Holdernesse, 6th Duke, K.G., P.C.’—half the alphabet! ‘Baron Beverley, Earl of Carston’—dear me, what a list! ‘Lord Lieutenant of Hallamshire since 1900. Married Edith, daughter of Sir Charles Appledore, 1888.’&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Holmes reading from a dictionary, so it must be after 1900. I'm going to say 1900 or 1901, given that &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; ends around 1901, but I really have no more ideas than that.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter&quot;: &lt;strong&gt;Between 1895 and 1897&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We were fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street, but&#xA;  I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February&#xA;  morning some seven or eight years ago and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1903 and 1904, putting this sometime between 1895 and 1897.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Adventure of the Retired Colourman&quot; - published in &lt;em&gt;The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; - is hard to date. A few lines from Holmes describing Josiah Amberly place it after 1897, and seemingly around 1899:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Holmes glanced over some notes which he had scribbled upon the back of an envelope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Retired in 1896, Watson. Early in 1897 he married a woman twenty years younger than himself—a good-looking woman, too. if the photograph does not flatter. A competence, a wife, leisure—it seemed a straight road which lay before him. And yet within two years he is, as you have seen, as broken and miserable a creature as crawls beneath the sun.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;The four novels&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot; begins with narration from Dr. Watson, describing his military career:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as Assistant Surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. [. . .] I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Anglo-Afghan_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Second Anglo-Afghan War&lt;/a&gt; was from 1878 to 1880; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maiwand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Maiwand&lt;/a&gt;, in which Watson was wounded, took place in July of 1880. He then spent several months on a hospital before returning to England, meaning that he arrived home in &lt;strong&gt;1880 or 1881.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;The Sign of the Four&quot;, Mary Morstan alludes to the date in her first meeting with Holmes, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have not yet described to you the most singular part. About six years ago—to be exact, upon the 4th of May, 1882—an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then places us in &lt;strong&gt;1888&lt;/strong&gt;, give or take. We see that Watson has proposed to Miss Morstan at the end of the story, and she accepts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, and there is the end of our little drama,&quot; I remarked, after we had set some time smoking in silence. &quot;I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honor to accept me as a husband in prospective.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time of &quot;A Scandal in Bohemia&quot; - in 1888 (see above) - Watson is married, implying that the wedding took place that year:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/731/71&quot;&gt;&quot;The Valley of Fear&quot; takes place &lt;strong&gt;around 1889&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; I haven't been able to find as much evidence as I found for the previous two stories - see my linked answer for the details. We do, though, know that it takes place towards the end of the decade:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those were the early days at the end of the ’80’s, when Alec MacDonald was far from having attained the national fame which he has now achieved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Hound of the Baskervilles&quot; is set in &lt;strong&gt;1889&lt;/strong&gt;, which we know from a humble stick. James Mortimer was given his walking stick in 1884 (upon leaving Charing Cross Hospital, to marry), it clearly must be later than that. It is presumably quite some time later, because, as Watson observes, Mortimer &quot;has done a great amount of walking with it.&quot; Finally, Holmes gives us even more detail when he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And he left five years ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that the current year is 1889.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other chronologies&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been reading some other chronologies put together by Sherlockian scholars. A notable one &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diogenes-club.com/hoybaringgould.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was done by William S. Baring-Gould&lt;/a&gt; a half century ago, on. I'm pleased to see that it matches up with what I have for many of the cases, but there are some discrepancies I'd like to address when I have the time - so this answer will be updated when I've had a chance to sort it all out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastEditorUserId="71" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T23:42:42.847" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T23:42:42.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5163" CreationDate="2018-08-13T18:22:18.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, a poem is a grook when it was published by the Danish scientist and poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet_Hein_(scientist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Piet Hein&lt;/a&gt; in one of his volumes of &quot;grooks&quot;. Grooks are simply what Hein called his own poems; it is &lt;strong&gt;not a well-defined term that has been used to describe poems by other authors&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you compare the examples on the Danish blog &lt;a href=&quot;http://tosommerfugle.blogspot.com/2012/07/piet-hein-trste-gruk-om-frihed.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;En sommerfugls selvmord &lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grook&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article &quot;grook&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia article &quot;Gruk&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Danish Wikipedia article &quot;Gruk&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, it becomes clear that there is no fixed length or rhyme scheme. They are witty and short, so it can be argued that they are a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;epigrams&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked in vain for the term &quot;grook&quot; (or, in German, &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Gruk&quot;&lt;/a&gt;) in the following reference works for literary terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Knörrich, Otto: &lt;em&gt;Lexikon lyrischer Formen&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2005. (&quot;Lexicon of lyrical forms&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lamping, Dieter (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Handbuch der literarischen Gattungen&lt;/em&gt;. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2009. (&quot;Manual of literary genres&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meid, Volker (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Sachlexikon Literatur&lt;/em&gt;. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992/1993.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;von Wilpert, Gero: &lt;em&gt;Sachwörterbuch der Literatur&lt;/em&gt;. Eighth edition. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a poet, Piet Hein is fairly obscure. I did not find his name in the following reference works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harenberg Lexikon der Weltliteratur. Autoren - Werke - Begriffe&lt;/em&gt;. In five volumes. Dortmund: Harenberg Lexikon Verlag, 1995.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;GEO Themenlexikon&lt;/em&gt; volumes 28-30: &quot;Literatur. Schriftsteller, Werke, Epochen&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul, Fritz (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Grundzüge der neueren Skandinavischen Literaturen&lt;/em&gt;. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991. (This is a history of Scandinavian literatures from the Reformation to the late 20th century.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Glauser, Jürg (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Skandinavische Literaturgeschichte&lt;/em&gt;. 2nd edition. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2016. (A history of Scandinavian literatures from 800 to 2015.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brøndsted, Mogens (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Nordische Literaturgeschichte. Band II: Von 1860 bis zur Gegenwart&lt;/em&gt;. German translation. München: Wilhelm Fink, 1984. (Page 626 only mentions Hein's characterisation of modernist poetry: &quot;If you have no ideas, write in an obscure way.&quot; (Danish: &quot;Hvis du ingen tanker har,/ gør da ej din tale klar&quot;)) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-14T08:25:38.953" LastActivityDate="2018-08-14T08:25:38.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-14T08:44:55.907" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second half of 1943, Anne Frank received a children's bible from her father. Her older sister Margot objected to the idea of giving Anne a Bible on Hannukah, so her father thought giving it on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas_Day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saint Nicholas Day&lt;/a&gt; would be more suitable. (It seems that the Frank family, though Jewish, celebrated Saint Nicholas Day while hiding in the secret annex.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant diary entry (3 November 1943) does not mention the language of that children's bible being mentioned, but it was most likely in Dutch. (See the diary entry from 17 November 1942, where using German is frowned upon.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to the question, when was the first Dutch children's bible? (It would be even more interesting to know what bible adaptation Anne received, but if there was more than one Dutch children's bible by 1943, I assume we won't be able to find out which one Anne got.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T19:49:35.630" LastActivityDate="2018-11-28T22:01:55.363" Title="First Dutch children's bible" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T01:50:36.417" Score="2" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were also memories of another kind. They stood out in his mind disconnectedly, like pictures with blackness all round them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was in a cell which might have been either dark or light, because he could see nothing except a pair of eyes. Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. The eyes grew larger and more luminous. Suddenly he floated out of his seat, dived into the eyes, and was swallowed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials, under dazzling lights. A man in a white coat was reading the dials. There was a tramp of heavy boots outside. The door clanged open. The waxed-faced officer marched in, followed by two guards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Room 101,' said the officer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man in the white coat did not turn round. He did not look at Winston either; he was looking only at the dials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was rolling down a mighty corridor, a kilometre wide, full of glorious, golden light, roaring with laughter and shouting out confessions at the top of his voice. He was confessing everything, even the things he had succeeded in holding back under the torture. He was relating the entire history of his life to an audience who knew it already. With him were the guards, the other questioners, the men in white coats, O'Brien, Julia, Mr Charrington, all rolling down the corridor together and shouting with laughter. Some dreadful thing which had lain embedded in the future had somehow been skipped over and had not happened. Everything was all right, there was no more pain, the last detail of his life was laid bare, understood, forgiven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the ticking instrument, and why is he swallowed up into a pair of eyes? Why is Julia and Mr Charrington with him and what is the dreadful thing that was skipped over?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4904" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T08:24:01.220" Title="What does this passage of 1984 mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T09:01:11.107" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;The Island of Doctor Moreau&lt;/em&gt;, after the protagonist gets off the island, we see that he has developed a sort of revulsion towards other humans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I look about me at my fellow-men; and I go in fear. I see faces, keen and bright; others dull or dangerous; others, unsteady, insincere, — none that have the calm authority of a reasonable soul. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them; that presently the degradation of the Islanders will be played over again on a larger scale. I know this is an illusion; that these seeming men and women about me are indeed men and women, — men and women for ever, perfectly reasonable creatures, full of human desires and tender solicitude, emancipated from instinct and the slaves of no fantastic Law, — beings altogether different from the Beast Folk. Yet I shrink from them, from their curious glances, their inquiries and assistance, and long to be away from them and alone.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Island of Doctor Moreau&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 22: &quot;The Man Alone&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just Prendick suffering from PTSD, or is it meant to imply something about humans in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T14:03:44.743" Title="What is the implication about humans in general at the end of &quot;The Island of Doctor Moreau&quot;?" Tags="&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-island-of-doctor-moreau&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8129" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T10:06:22.103" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read (long ago!) a Rex Stout / Nero Wolfe novel in which Nero Wolfe describes what he thinks would be the perfect crime (i.e., a crime performed without any preparation just taking advantage of circunstances). I cannot find in which book. Can you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4907" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T13:02:58.020" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T09:21:49.557" Title="Nero Wolfe novel in which Wolfe describes a perfect, unprepared crime" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;&lt;rex-stout&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T10:44:21.743" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Books about literaty theory have a long tradition; Aristotle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; dates back to the 4th century BC. Books about how to write literature also go back a long way, for example, Horace's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_Poetica_(Horace)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (around 19 BC). And, of course, people have been studying and commenting on literature for many centuries. However, since many questions on this site are about the analysis or interpretation of literature, it seems worth asking when people (presumably academics) started teaching others how to do this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English-speaking world, I assume that this started with the establishment of literature departments at universities during the 19th century. According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://etcweb.princeton.edu/CampusWWW/Companion/english_department.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E.D.H. Johnson&lt;/a&gt;, writing about the Department of English at Princeton (my emphasis),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until well through the nineteenth century, English studies at Princeton, as elsewhere, were regarded as incidental to preparation for the ministry, law, or public life, and as a result instruction &lt;strong&gt;concentrated on grammar and composition, rhetoric, and elocution&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He continues,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the Rev. James W. Alexander, Professor of Belles- Lettres, delivered in 1838 what should probably be regarded as the first course of lectures in English literature, &lt;strong&gt;official recognition of this subject&lt;/strong&gt; in the College catalogue had to wait until &lt;strong&gt;1864&lt;/strong&gt; when John S. Hart was listed as ``Lecturer on English Literature.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Paul Watt (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dur.ac.uk/cncs/researchconversation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Criticism in late nineteenth-century England: Towards the regulation and reform of a profession in crisis&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), writers in 19th-century England found that the quality of criticism had declined significantly, so &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the 1880s, however, concrete plans were hatched by English newspaper editors, intellectuals and critics—as well as assertive newspaper readers—to lift the standard of criticism in England. The highest priorities were the &lt;strong&gt;establishment of training programs for aspiring critics&lt;/strong&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;formulation of principles and methods to guide them&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to imply that such &quot;principles and methods&quot; did not exist in the 1880s, even though some literature departments had been established by that time. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/5423a1c4-bcfe-3c21-8dcd-0ebf353a9207?component=be8ae1c0-8fd5-38ff-a63c-b44a86259931&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Scotland&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Chair of English Language and Literature&lt;/strong&gt; at Glasgow University was established by the Universities Commission of &lt;strong&gt;1858&lt;/strong&gt;, its first Professor being John Nichol (1862-1889), making it &lt;strong&gt;one of the oldest Chairs in English Literature in Britain&lt;/strong&gt;. Although English Literature had been taught in the University in one form or another for a century already by such well-known figures as Adam Smith , the first holders of the Chair of English Language and Literature had little precedents to follow, and none had ever attended a class in English or held a degree in the subject. These men determined the content and direction of the English class. Notable early occupants of the post included Andrew Cecil Bradley (1889-1900) and Walter Raleigh (1900-1904).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._C._Bradley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A. C. Bradley&lt;/a&gt; is still remembered for his influential work &lt;em&gt;Shakespearean Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1904 and reprinted many times.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But none of the above sources, nor the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary criticism&lt;/a&gt; make mention of books that teach readers how to analyse and interpret literature. So what was the first such book? Note that I am not interested in books that explain literary &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;, but books like Terry Eagleton's &lt;em&gt;How to Read Literature&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Poem&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T10:44:21.743" Title="What was the first book that taught readers how to analyse and interpret literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8131" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T10:57:27.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V. S. Naipaul&lt;/a&gt; (1932 – 2018) published both fiction and non-fiction. His novels include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mystic_Masseur_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mystic Masseur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1957);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_House_for_Mr_Biswas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A House for Mr Biswas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1961);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Free_State&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In a Free State&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1971; Booker Prize Winner);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bend_in_the_River&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Bend in the River&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1979);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Enigma_of_Arrival&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Enigma of Arrival&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1987);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_a_Life_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Half a Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2001).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:55:50.967" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:55:50.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8132" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T10:57:27.723" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Trinidadian-British writer V. S. Naipaul (Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, 1932 – 2018) and his works. He is known for novels such as 'A House for Mr Biswas' (1961), 'In a Free State' (1971), 'A Bend in the River' (1979) and 'The Enigma of Arrival' (1987). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T10:57:27.723" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T10:57:27.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-07-20T18:51:02.277" Score="11" ViewCount="6186" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=e6VqgWouUmUC&amp;amp;pg=PA33&amp;amp;lpg=PA33&amp;amp;dq=admire+girl+young+know+%22bite+her+fingers%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=8FlDs2ZAAA&amp;amp;sig=Iii5QPmHjunRBM8lcVeeG1IeVNY&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwit1PansK7cAhVQmeAKHZNrBVQQ6AEIODAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=admire%20girl%20young%20know%20%22bite%20her%20fingers%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;book of short stories&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masti_Venkatesha_Iyengar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maasthi Venkatesa Iyengar&lt;/a&gt;, translated from Kannada to English, there is a story set in colonial India in which two male characters are discussing marriage. One character asks a second character why he wouldn't marry a young girl, as was the custom at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I need to find the right girl. I know an officer who got married only six months ago. He is about thirty and his wife is twenty-five, I am told. They will be able to talk lovingly to each other. Let's say I married a very young girl. She may take my words spoken in love as words spoken in anger....If one gets married, it should be to a girl who is mature. Otherwise, one should remain a bachelor. That's why I am not marrying now.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Is there any other reason?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A man should marry a girl he admires. What we have now are arranged marriages. How can one admire a girl with milk stains on one side of her face and wetness on the other, or &lt;strong&gt;so young that she doesn't even know how to bite her fingers&lt;/strong&gt;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help understanding the bolded text, or why biting (or not biting) one's fingers is an indicator of extreme youth or immaturity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://brainly.in/question/2753558&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;same question&lt;/a&gt; on other &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.meritnation.com/ask-answer/question/what-does-this-line-mean-how-can-one-admire-a-girl-with-milk/author-and-the-book/6095956&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Q&amp;amp;A sites&lt;/a&gt; but I don't understand the answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Alan West" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T13:29:51.450" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T20:32:20.893" Title="Meaning of &quot;How can one admire a girl...so young she doesn't know how to bite her fingers&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;maasthi-venkatesa-iyengar&gt;&lt;kannada-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8134" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-06-30T11:56:17.830" Score="0" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Consider the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Wakes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Six Wakes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a science fiction novel by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mur_Lafferty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mur Lafferty&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She and a good quantity of the synth-amneo fluid floated out of her vat, only to collide gently with the orb of blood floating in front of her. &lt;strong&gt;The surface tension of both fluids held&lt;/strong&gt;, and the drop bounced away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you please explain the meaning of the sentence in bold above? I do not understand in which sense the verb &quot;hold&quot; is used in the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.orbitbooks.net/orbit-excerpts/six-wakes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this extract&lt;/a&gt; from the novel for more context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="ckok" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T14:11:04.287" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:43:50.283" Title="What does &quot;the surface tension held&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;six-wakes&gt;&lt;mur-lafferty&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8134" CreationDate="2018-06-30T12:17:44.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can use 'hold' to mean 'not break' or 'continue as before'. The man was suspended above the abyss by a rope, which fortunately held. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hold verb (CONTINUE) ​ [ I or T ] to cause to stay or continue in the&#xA;  same way as before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hold (Cambridge)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Harvey" LastActivityDate="2018-06-30T12:17:44.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8128" CreationDate="2018-08-15T14:03:44.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The implication seems to be that humans are not as different from the grotesque Beast Folk as we would like to think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most good works of speculative fiction are really saying something about the real world. Whether there's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio_of_a_Space_Tyrant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very clear real-world analogy&lt;/a&gt;, or something that every political party could interpret as a reference to its opponents, the most thought-provoking sci-fi and fantasy books are those with some &lt;strong&gt;message or moral about our own world&lt;/strong&gt;. Usually this goes unspoken, left for the reader to pick up on by themselves, but here the author apparently wished to make it explicit and leave readers with a sense of unease just as they finish the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the story is about animals which have been 'made human', given the characteristics of humans. Since they revert to their bestial natures in the end, one might think that the moral of the story is something like &lt;strong&gt;&quot;you can't change a creature's essential nature&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; - a beast will always be a beast, no matter what you do to it. Wouldn't that be cosy? As long as there aren't evil scientists doing nutty experiments, society won't regress to bestiality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But no, Wells wants to leave you with a more disturbing possibility. Perhaps, just as the ability to become human was somewhere inside those beasts, &lt;strong&gt;the ability to become beasts is somewhere inside every human.&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps we're not as different from the beasts as we imagine, but it takes someone with experience of the Beast-Folk hybrids to really see the similarity. The implication then would be that the tale of Doctor Moreau's island is not just an aimless fantasy, but an exaggeration of something that could happen in our own society if people lost control of themselves. It brings the story &quot;closer to home&quot;, in a way. Prendick goes to live alone because &lt;strong&gt;he sees the same potential for destruction in our society that he saw in the Beast Folk&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe he's just imagining it, suffering from PTSD. If that helps you sleep at night ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T14:03:44.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:48:03.277" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a hard time understanding the logic behind Tyler getting fired. Here is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For three years Tyler had been doing film buildup and breakdown for a chain of movie houses. A movie travels in six or seven small reels packed in a metal case. &lt;strong&gt;Tyler's job was to splice the small reels together into single fivefoot reels that self-threading and rewinding projectors could handle.&lt;/strong&gt; After three years, seven theaters, at least three screens per theater, new shows every week, Tyler had handled hundreds of prints. &lt;strong&gt;Too bad, but with more self-threading and rewinding projectors, the union didn't need Tyler anymore.&lt;/strong&gt; Mister chapter president had to call Tyler for a little sit-down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I am getting hung up on the second bold sentence. If Tyler's job is to splice reels for the self-threading and rewinding projectors, why would more of those projectors get him laid off? It seems like that would give him more work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4909" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:55:07.287" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:55:07.287" Title="In Fight Club, why does Tyler get fired from projectionist union?" Tags="&lt;plot-element&gt;&lt;chuck-palahniuk&gt;&lt;fight-club&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8140" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8141" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist Chuck Palahniuk (born 1962) and his works. Palahniuk is best known for the novel 'Fight Club' (1996)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:56:51.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8142" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8143" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Fight Club' (1996) by Chuck Palahniuk. Use this tag with the [chuck-palahniuk] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T15:57:38.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8144" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8145" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer and podcaster Mur Lafferty (born 1973) and her works." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:00:56.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8146" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8147" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Six Wakes' (2017) by Mur Lafferty. Use this tag with the [mur-lafferty] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:01:59.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8148" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8149" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in India." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:05:06.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8150" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8151" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Indian writer Maasthi Venkatesa Iyengar or Masti Venkatesha Iyengar (1891 – 1986) and his works. Use this tag with the [kannada-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:08:13.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8152" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8153" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Flemish author Hendrik Conscience (1812 – 1883) and his works. His is best known for his novel 'De leeuw van Vlaanderen' ('The Lion of Flanders', 1838). He wrote many other novels, including the historical novels 'Jacob van Artevelde' (1849), 'De loteling' (1850) and 'De boerenkrijg' ('The Peasants' War', 1853). Use this tag with the [dutch-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:14:15.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8155" CreationDate="2018-07-13T17:57:22.063" Score="2" ViewCount="906" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;getting soaked&quot; mean in the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-story-of-my-teeth-an-excerpt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;excerpt&lt;/a&gt; from Valeria Luiselli's novel &lt;em&gt;The Story of My Teeth&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I get off the bus not far from the gates, at a lovely median strip with life-size dinosaur sculptures, and I stay right there among the gentle fiberglass beasts—getting soaked, saying Our Fathers—until my feet swell up and I feel tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Albert daigo" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T19:45:06.757" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T19:45:06.757" Title="What does &quot;getting soaked&quot; mean in this text?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;valeria-luiselli&gt;&lt;the-story-of-my-teeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2018-07-13T18:02:18.520" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the source, higher in the same paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A year later, I buried Mom next to her sisters and brothers in Pachuca, the Beautiful Windy City. It’s always raining there ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'd suggest the author is getting rained upon, thus &quot;getting soaked.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="drewhart" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T16:57:41.423" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T16:57:41.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="221" CreationDate="2018-08-15T16:59:23.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because &quot;everyone knows what is in Room 101&quot;; ie: every person is aware of his or her own worst fear. I don't imagine that O'Brien expected Winston to actually, literally &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what was in the room, but that he was toying with him just a bit, playing a bit of a word game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4910" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T16:59:23.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8133" CreationDate="2018-08-15T19:30:28.243" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Masti here is describing the characteristics of a new born baby. Going through the 3 things which he uses to describe: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;milk stains on one side of her face and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to the milk stains on the cheek caused due to either spilt milk on their cheeks while feeding or because the baby has pushed back the milk from their mouth causing it to spill over on the cheeks. This is quite characteristic of a new born baby who still hasn't learned the art of drinking milk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wetness on the other &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can refer to &#xA;1. saliva: Babies drool starting from when they are born to when they are a few months old. This scene is descriptive of a new born kid drooling causing the saliva to spill on the other cheek. &#xA;2. tears: Babies do tend to cry a lot, there fore the scene is describing wet tears dropping on the other cheek. (However, given that very new born babies don't cry with tears, this might not be the case).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so young that she doesn't even know how to bite her fingers?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now coming to the crux of the question, not knowing how to bite her fingers is a depiction of babies who are less than 3 months old. At the age of 3 months, babies start to grow teeth, and the first thoughts are to suck the thumb, bite the fingers and so on. Therefore not being able to bite their own fingers is a depiction of a very small (neo-natal) baby. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I guess this is common amongst babies in the entire world) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, by using those three adjectives, Masti has painted a beautiful picture, where you can imagine the character wedding a new born infant. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The depiction of small children sucking their thumbs or biting their thumbs to describe their innocence is quite common across the various cultures in India. (This is a question which &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/q/23813/4459&quot;&gt;I've asked on Hinduism Stack Exchange site about a related description&lt;/a&gt;). Similarly, the phrase like &quot;Milk drinking child&quot; is commonly used to describe infants who have not been consuming solid food. Both of these, when used against a grown up person, tends to talk about the innocence of that person if it is used in a positive manner, or the immaturity, if it is used in a negative manner. A couple of examples can be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Look at her, she can't tell the difference between what is bad and what is good. She is still a milk drinking child&quot; : this is talking about her being innocent. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Look at him, he can't tie his own shoelaces. He is still a milk drinking child&quot;  : this is talking about him being immature.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular paragraph, Masti is talking about the innocence aspect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the bigger picture, the character here (Rangappa) is refusing to marry someone who is very young compared to him. He does exaggerate a bit when he describes a younger girl as an infant, but the imagery used by the author is very appealing if you read it in the original language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, Rangappa also describes his feelings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I need to find the right girl. I know an officer who got married only six months ago. He is about thirty and his wife is twenty -five, I am told. They will be able to talk lovingly to each other. Let's say I married a very young girl. She may take my words spoken in love as words spoken in anger. Recently, a troupe in Bangalore staged the play Shakuntala. There is no question of Dushyantha falling in love with Shakuntala if she were young, like the present-day brides, is there? What would have happened to Kalidasa's play? If one gets married, it should be to a girl who is mature. Otherwise, one should remain a bachelor. That's why I am not marrying now.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can grasp the primary aspect here. He is making it clear that a girl should get married only when she is able to understand the feelings of love. A young girl (the one who is not even able to bite her fingers) would certainly have no ability to comprehend the difference between love and anger. He cites an old mythological story as an example for how he feels that marriages should be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The historical perspective is also important here. Masti was from the &quot;Navodaya&quot; age of Kannada literature, where the authors focused more on social aspects rather than discussions about rulers. Child marriages were common in the middle ages (especially during the Mughal rule and the subsequent Sultanates). It had extended into Colonial India as well, but there were a lot of reformers who were trying to advocate the evils of these. This short story by Masti, was one amongst the several in his book &quot;Kelavu Sanna Kathegalu&quot; which was trying to talk about the evils of child marriage, and how &quot;mature&quot; and people &quot;with manners&quot; (hinting about educating children here) should not be indulging in these. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4913" LastEditorUserId="4913" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T20:32:20.893" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T20:32:20.893" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8159" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8160" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about Victor Hugo's 1831 novel 'Notre-Dame de Paris' (literally 'Our Lady of Paris', but normally translated as 'The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'). Use this tag with the tags [victor-hugo] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-15T20:20:30.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8205" CreationDate="2018-08-15T20:20:59.627" Score="6" ViewCount="3454" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read the short story &quot;Shift&quot; by Nalo Hopkinson, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available online&lt;/a&gt;. It's a modern, Caribbean-themed story inspired by Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing which confused me on the first reading was the use of pronouns. The story starts off written in the second person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Did you sleep well?” she asks, and you make sure that your face is fixed into a dreamy smile as you open your eyes into the morning after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then, not long after this, there are some paragraphs written in the first person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She tell me say I must call her Scylla, or Charybdis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't notice this pronoun switch at first, and when I did, I foolishly assumed it was an inconsistency in the writing. Turns out Nalo Hopkinson is a much better writer than that: for the paragraphs in second person, &quot;you&quot; refers to Caliban, while Ariel is &quot;she&quot;; for those in first person, &quot;I&quot; refers to Ariel, while Caliban is &quot;he&quot;, and &quot;you&quot; is used to address the readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question is: why switch pronouns in this way?&lt;/strong&gt; It's confusing on a first read - you only slowly realise that there's more than one viewpoint character - although it's all perfectly consistent once you figure out the pronoun scheme and treat the two types of paragraph separately. What does this stylistic choice add to the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:43:32.580" Title="Why are pronouns used in this way in Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;Shift&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5949" CreationDate="2018-08-16T02:56:25.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give more example, in the introductory textbook about brain dynamics &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/observed-brain-dynamics-9780195178081?cc=vn&amp;amp;lang=en&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Observed Brain Dynamics&lt;/a&gt;, Partha Mitra and Hemant Bokil include these images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/fD901tt.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/r0Ok9hC.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if the tale exists in a research book, then it should be well-known in the culture too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T02:56:25.750" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8163" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T13:50:28.103" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalo_Hopkinson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nalo Hopkinson&lt;/a&gt; was born in Jamaica but grew up in Guyana, Trinidad and Canada. Her novels and stories often use elements from Carribean history and culture, including the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creole&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her novels include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Girl_in_the_Ring_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brown Girl in the Ring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1998)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Robber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2000)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Salt_Roads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Salt Roads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2003)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Moon's Arms&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chaos&lt;/em&gt; (2012)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sister Mine&lt;/em&gt; (2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She has also published collections of short stories:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_Folk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Skin Folk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2001)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_in_Love_With_Hominids&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Falling in Love With Hominids&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2015)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Hopkinson edited several anthologies of short stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has an &lt;a href=&quot;http://nalohopkinson.com/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official website&lt;/a&gt; and a Twitter account (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/Nalo_Hopkinson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@Nalo_Hopkinson&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T10:43:08.883" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T10:43:08.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8164" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T13:50:28.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson (born 1960) and her work. She has published novels such as 'Brown Girl in the Ring' (1998), 'Midnight Robber' (2002) and 'The Salt Roads' (2003), and collections of short stories such as 'Skin Folk' (2001)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T10:33:22.823" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T10:33:22.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8126" CreationDate="2018-08-16T14:28:03.543" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderbijbel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kinderbijbel&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;children's bible&quot;) in the Dutch Wikipedia is not much more than a stub; it contains nothing on the history of children's bibles in Dutch. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bijbelvertaling#Vertalingen_in_het_Nederlands&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bijbelvertalingen&lt;/a&gt; (bible translations) claims that professor &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_van_der_Palm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johannes van der Palm&lt;/a&gt; (1763 - 1840) published the first children's bible in Dutch: &lt;em&gt;Bijbel voor de jeugd. Tafereelen uit de gewijde geschiedenis voor christen-huisgezinnen&lt;/em&gt;, published &lt;strong&gt;1811-1834&lt;/strong&gt;, in 24 volumes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the website &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kinderbijbels.nl/vrijepagina/de-geschiedenis-van-de-kinderbijbel/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kinderbijbels.nl&lt;/a&gt; claims that the first children's bibles are older:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;1640&lt;/strong&gt;, some sort of chilren's bible was translated from English into Dutch, but this publication presents the bible stories in a question-and-answer format.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;1703&lt;/strong&gt; Barend Hakvoord published a volume of bible stories adapted for children. Due to the magnitude of the tasks, the New Testament is summarised in a few pages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These books were published in a period of intense theological disputes. Since the bible was used for developing literacy at school, the translator/adapter's theological point of view was an important issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kro.nl/katholiek/abc/kinderbijbel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kinderbijbel&lt;/a&gt; on the website of the Katholieke Radio Omroep (&quot;Catholic Radio Broadcasting&quot;) in the Netherlands also lists the publications from 1640 and 1703 as the first children's bibles in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://docplayer.nl/32705052-2-als-nu-het-verstand-op-dese-wyze-genoegzaam-geoeffend-is-kinderbijbels-in-nederland-van-van-breen-tot-van-der-palm.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Als nu het verstand op dese wyze genoegzaam geoeffend is': 'Kinderbijbel' in Nederland van Van Breen tot Van der Palm&lt;/a&gt; points out that there were a few precursors to children's bibles before 1640. These were smaller books with selections from the bible, often with illustrations. For example, &lt;em&gt;De Historie Van Den Koninklyken Propheet David&lt;/em&gt; was published around 1600 and was used in schools for two and a half centuries. However, the texts made no concessions to younger readers: the texts come from &quot;normal&quot; bible translations for adults, so the book still contains the passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/1_samuel/18-27.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1 &lt;em&gt;Samuel&lt;/em&gt; 18:27&lt;/a&gt; where David and his men kill 200 Philistines and brings back their ... [unmentionable bodyparts]. In other words, this is not a children's bible in the modern sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T19:18:09.900" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T19:18:09.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8134" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:43:50.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface_tension&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;surface tension&lt;/a&gt; of a liquid such as water is &quot;the elastic tendency of a fluid surface which makes it acquire the least surface area possible&quot; (Wikipedia). It is the result of the attraction of water molecules to each other (cohesive forces). You can see this in action when you fill a glass of water to the brim: when you pour the water in carefully, you will be able to fill the glass so that the surface of the water is just a bit higher than the brim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same cohesive forces also make sure that drop of water or, in Mur Lafferty's story, blood, can float through the air in zero gravity without bursting at the slightest touch. See for example this image of &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Clayton_Anderson_zero_g_edit.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;astronaut Clayton Anderson watching as a water bubble floats in the middeck of space shuttle Discovery&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the droplet does not burst, the surface tension &quot;&lt;strong&gt;holds&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, i.e. the drop's surface &lt;strong&gt;remains intact&lt;/strong&gt;. This is why the orb of blood bounces away instead of blending into the synth-amneo fluid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Synth-amneo fluid is probably synthetic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amniotic_fluid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amniotic fluid&lt;/a&gt; used to preserve cloned bodies until they are needed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:43:50.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8167" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8168" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1896 science-fiction novel 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' by H. G. Wells. Use this tag with the [h-g-wells] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:51:29.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8169" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8170" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer Rex Stout (1886 – 1975) and his works. He is best know for his detective fiction, some of which features the character of detective Nero Wolfe." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:53:30.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8171" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8172" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American author Mario Puzo ( 1920 – 1999) and his works. He is best known for his novel 'The Godfather' (1969), which was adapted into a film trilogy." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T16:59:00.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8173" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8174" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1969 crime novel 'The Godfather' by Mario Puzo. Use this tag with the [mario-puzo] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T17:00:07.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8176" CreationDate="2018-08-16T19:16:12.580" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that there are Red Dwarf books out there. Now my question is, how many Red Dwarf books are there? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I personally only know (by seeing it) of 1 Red Dwarf book myself , but there could be more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T19:43:04.333" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T17:03:24.993" Title="How many Red Dwarf books are there?" Tags="&lt;red-dwarf&gt;&lt;grant-naylor&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8175" CreationDate="2018-08-16T19:30:01.483" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/merchandise/index.cfm?category=books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently four of them&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers&lt;/em&gt; - co-authored by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Better Than Life&lt;/em&gt; - Co-authored by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Last Human&lt;/em&gt;    - by Doug Naylor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Backwards&lt;/em&gt; - by Rob Grant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also various script compilations and such, but I've not included them, as it feels like you're only asking about the tie-in novels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastEditorUserId="25" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T17:03:24.993" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T17:03:24.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8177" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8178" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1931 novel 'The Good Earth' by Pearl S. Buck. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1932. Use this tag with the [pearl-s-buck] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T20:48:13.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8179" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8180" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English writer and lyricist Nick Hornby (born 1957). He is best known for the novels 'High Fidelity' (1995) and 'About a Boy' (1998)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" LastActivityDate="2018-08-16T20:50:39.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-17T10:51:54.040" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest surviving diary by a poet is probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosa_Nikki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tosa Diary&lt;/a&gt; by the tenth-century Japanese poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ki_no_Tsurayuki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ki no Tsurayuki&lt;/a&gt;. More details about this diary can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://thediaryjunction.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-earliest-literary-diary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diary Review blog&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Diary Review blog has several blog posts about &lt;a href=&quot;https://thediaryjunction.blogspot.com/search/label/1500s%20and%20earlier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;European diaries from the 1500s and earlier&lt;/a&gt;, but none of the authors of these diaries were &lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt; figures (although some of them published non-fiction). There is, of course, the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henslowe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;diary&quot; of Philip Henslowe&lt;/a&gt; (that is, &quot;famous&quot; among scholars of English Renaissance drama), but this is really &quot; collection of memoranda and notes that record payments to writers, box office takings, and lists of money lent&quot; (Wikipedia) and not a diary in the usual sense of the word. In addition, Henslowe didn't write any literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The diary of Richard Torkington's pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1517 was for some time believed to be the oldest diary in the English language; its first editor, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._J._Loftie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William John Loftie&lt;/a&gt;, give it the title &lt;em&gt;Ye Oldest Diarie of Englysshe Travell&lt;/em&gt;. The Pilgrim Libraries project has identified a number of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbk.ac.uk/pilgrimlibraries/tag/ye-oldest-diarie-of-englysshe-travell/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;older accounts of pilgrimages&lt;/a&gt;, usually written afterwards rather than during the voyage, and none of them by literary figures. In English, one of the most famous diaries is probably the one by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Pepys&lt;/a&gt;, who was a civil servant and politician rather than an author of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraphs represent the results of my searches so far, which have been unsuccessful. I am looking for the &lt;strong&gt;earliest surviving diary by an author of poetry, drama, stories or novels&lt;/strong&gt;, not treatises, translations or pamphlets. The author &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; primarily be known as an author of poetry, drama, stories or novels, ideally published (or circulated in manuscript form) during their lifetime, but since some people think that &quot;primarily known as ...&quot; is a matter of opinion (e.g. is X better known as a poet or a diarist?), this is only of secondary importance. I am curious to find out whether it says anything about the author's ideas about his craft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:51:43.207" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T21:01:29.907" Title="What was the earliest diary by a European poet, dramatist or novelist?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;diary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8182" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8183" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English novelist and playwright John Galsworthy (1867 – 1933) and his works. He is best known for 'The Forsyte Saga' (1906–1921)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T11:06:40.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8154" CreationDate="2018-08-17T14:30:15.430" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's first get some more &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-story-of-my-teeth-an-excerpt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;context from the excerpt&lt;/a&gt; and highlight a few words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It’s always &lt;strong&gt;raining&lt;/strong&gt; there, and there’s hardly a breath of air. I travel to Pachuca to see her once a month, usually on Sundays. But I never go as far as the cemetery, because I’m allergic to pollen and there are lots of flowers there. I get off the bus not far from the gates, at a lovely median strip with life-size dinosaur sculptures, and I stay right there among the gentle fiberglass beasts—&lt;strong&gt;getting soaked&lt;/strong&gt;, saying Our Fathers—until my feet swell up and I feel tired. Then I go back across the street, carefully dodging the &lt;strong&gt;puddles&lt;/strong&gt;—round as the craters in my childhood notebook—and wait for the bus to take me back to the station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context tells us that it often rains in that area; afterwards, the narrator also avoids the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puddle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;puddles&lt;/a&gt; (small pools of water) that the rain has caused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soak&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;soak&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has several meanings that are relevant here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be saturated with liquid by being immersed in it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To immerse in liquid to the point of saturation or thorough permeation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To penetrate or permeate by saturation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To allow (especially a liquid) to be absorbed; to take in, receive. (usually + up)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sponges, floorcloths and towels are objects that can absorb or soak up water. The result is that they are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soaked&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;soaked&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The human body does not soak up water so easily, due to the skin. When a person says that they were &lt;strong&gt;getting soaked&lt;/strong&gt; when walking through the rain, the rain got through their clothes and reached their skin. So &lt;strong&gt;getting soaked&lt;/strong&gt; is an exaggeration or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hyperbole&lt;/a&gt;. The expressions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soaked_to_the_skin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;soaked to the skin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soaked_to_the_bone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;soaked to the bone&lt;/a&gt; also mean &quot;extremely wet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T14:30:15.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8031" CreationDate="2018-08-17T16:46:15.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pararhyme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pararhyme&lt;/a&gt; is when two or more words (usually at the ends of lines or at least phrases) have &lt;strong&gt;the same pattern of consonants but different vowels&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, &quot;hill/hall/hell&quot; or &quot;fed/food/fad&quot;. The words you've highlighted - &quot;halted&quot;, &quot;fed&quot;, and &quot;eased&quot; - do not have the same pattern of consonants,  namely HLTD, FD, and ZD. So no, they don't form a pararhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only really similar thing about these three words is that they all end in &quot;ed&quot;. But since the &quot;e&quot; is silent anyway, that's not really enough for any sort of rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T16:46:15.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="819" CreationDate="2018-08-17T17:41:52.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's clear from the text that Wang Lung loved his eldest daughter. Chapter 9:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This persistence of the small life in some way won &#xA;  her father’s affection, although if she had been round &#xA;  and merry as the others had been at her age he would &#xA;  have been careless of her for a girl. Sometimes, &#xA;  looking at her he whispered softly: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Poor fool—poor little fool.’ And once when she &#xA;  essayed a weak smile with her toothless gums showing, &#xA;  he broke into tears and took into his lean hard hand her &#xA;  small claw and held the tiny grasp of her fingers over &#xA;  his forefinger. Thereafter he would sometimes lift her, &#xA;  all naked as she lay, and thrust her inside the scant &#xA;  warmth of his coat against his flesh and sit with her so &#xA;  by the threshold of the house, looking out over the dry, &#xA;  flat fields. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only a few of the beans did Wang Lung hide in his &#xA;  own hand and these he put into his own mouth and he &#xA;  chewed them into a soft pulp and then putting his lips &#xA;  to the lips of his daughter he pushed into her mouth &#xA;  the food, and watching her small lips move he felt &#xA;  himself fed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T17:41:52.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1924" CreationDate="2018-08-17T18:02:03.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Du_contrat_social/%C3%89dition_1762/Livre_II/Chapitre_8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 8 in the second &quot;book&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The entire paragraph reads in French (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il est pour les Nations comme pour les hommes un tems de &lt;strong&gt;maturité&lt;/strong&gt; qu’il faut attendre avant de les soumettre à des loix ; mais la maturité d’un peuple n’est pas toujours facile à connoitre, &amp;amp; si on la prévient l’ouvrage est manqué. Tel peuple est disciplinable en naissant, tel autre ne l’est pas au bout de dix siecles. &lt;strong&gt;Les Russes ne seront jamais vraiment policés, parce qu’ils l’ont été trop tôt.&lt;/strong&gt; Pierre avoit le génie imitatif ; il n’avoit pas le vrai génie, celui qui crée &amp;amp; fait tout de rien. Quelques unes des choses qu’il fit étoient bien, la plupart étoient déplacées. Il a vu que son peuple étoit barbare, &lt;strong&gt;il n’a point vu qu’il n’étoit pas mur pour la police&lt;/strong&gt; ; il l’a voulu civiliser quand il ne faloit que l’&lt;strong&gt;agguerrir&lt;/strong&gt;. Il a d’abord voulu faire des Allemands, des Anglois, quand il faloit commencer par faire des Russes ; il a empêché ses sujets de jamais devenir ce qu’ils pourroient être, en leur persuadant qu’ils étoient ce qu’ils ne sont pas. C’est ainsi qu’un Précepteur françois forme son éleve pour briller un moment dans son enfance, &amp;amp; puis n’être jamais rien. L’Empire de Russie voudra subjuguer l’Europe &amp;amp; sera subjugué lui-même. Les Tartares ses sujets ou ses voisins, deviendront ses maitres &amp;amp; les notres : Cette révolution me paroit infaillible. Tous les Rois de l’Europe travaillent de concert à l’accélérer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_02.htm#008&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G.D.H. Cole's translation&lt;/a&gt; (1782), this sounds as follows (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is for nations, as for men, a period of youth, or, shall we say, &lt;strong&gt;maturity&lt;/strong&gt;, before which they should not be made subject to laws; but the maturity of a people is not always easily recognisable, and, if it is anticipated, the work is spoilt. One people is amenable to discipline from the beginning; another, not after ten centuries. &lt;strong&gt;Russia will never be really civilised, because it was civilised too soon.&lt;/strong&gt; Peter had a genius for imitation; but he lacked true genius, which is creative and makes all from nothing. He did some good things, but most of what he did was out of place. He saw that his people was barbarous, but &lt;strong&gt;did not see that it was not ripe for civilisation&lt;/strong&gt;: he wanted to civilise it when it needed only &lt;strong&gt;hardening&lt;/strong&gt;. His first wish was to make Germans or Englishmen, when he ought to have been making Russians; and he prevented his subjects from ever becoming what they might have been by persuading them that they were what they are not. In this fashion too a French teacher turns out his pupil to be an infant prodigy, and for the rest of his life to be nothing whatsoever. The empire of Russia will aspire to conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered. The Tartars, its subjects or neighbours, will become its masters and ours, by a revolution which I regard as inevitable. Indeed, all the kings of Europe are working in concert to hasten its coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;was civilized too soon&quot; is the translation of &quot;ont été [policés] trop tôt&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look up &lt;em&gt;policer&lt;/em&gt; in a modern French dictionary (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/policer/62151?q=policer#61451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online Larousse&lt;/a&gt;), you get a definition such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Littéraire&lt;/em&gt;. Civiliser quelqu'un, un groupe adoucir les comportements par les institutions, par la culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English: to civilise someone or a group by softening their behaviour through institutions and/or culture. However, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://atilf.atilf.fr/tlf.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé TLFi&lt;/a&gt; has longer explanations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. &lt;strong&gt;Réglementer, discipliner&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Il faut que le régime du travail, du crédit et du commerce change; que le salaire et la valeur, ce qu'il y a de plus libre au monde, arrivent à se policer&lt;/em&gt; (PROUDHON, &lt;em&gt;Guerre et paix&lt;/em&gt;, 1861, p.192). &lt;em&gt;À partir du moment où l'on tente de policer la force pulsionnelle, un désir, surtout refoulé, surtout inconscient, déclenche la terreur et l'autopunition&lt;/em&gt; (CHOISY, Psychanal., 1950, p.11). &lt;em&gt;Régler les tarifs douaniers est jeu d'enfant à côté de la tâche de policer toutes ces pratiques&lt;/em&gt; (Univers écon. et soc., 1960, p.38-10).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  B. &lt;em&gt;Littér.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Adoucir et affiner les moeurs (d'une personne ou d'un peuple) par des institutions adaptées, par la culture et la civilisation&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Il ne s'agissait de rien moins que de policer un peuple sauvage&lt;/em&gt; (MICHELET, &lt;em&gt;Mémor.&lt;/em&gt;, 1820-22, p.183). &lt;em&gt;René, on trouve les guerriers de ton pays chez tous les peuples: les plus civilisés des hommes, ils en deviennent, quand ils le veulent, les plus barbares. Ils ne cherchent point à nous policer, nous autres sauvages; ils trouvent plus aisé de se faire sauvages comme nous&lt;/em&gt; (CHATEAUBR., &lt;em&gt;Natchez&lt;/em&gt;, 1826, p.244).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second meaning is relevant here: &quot;to soften and refine the manners/customs (of a person or a people) by means of suitable institutions, through culture and civilisation&quot;. This definition contains all the elements from the Larousse definition but with a different emphasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the dictionary meanings don't explain why the Russians may have been civilised too soon, we need to look at the context. Rousseau is saying that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter the Great&lt;/a&gt;, who reigned Russia in the years 1682 – 1725, introduced his sweeping reforms too soon. The preceding paragraphs in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Du_contrat_social/%C3%89dition_1762/Livre_II/Chapitre_8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;same chapter&lt;/a&gt; explain what he means by &quot;too soon&quot; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Comme avant d’élever un grand édifice l’architecte observe &amp;amp; sonde le sol, pour voir s’il en peut soutenir le poids, le sage instituteur ne commence pas par rédiger de bonnes loix elles-mêmes, mais il examine auparavant &lt;strong&gt;si le peuple auquel il les destine est propre à les supporter&lt;/strong&gt;. C’est pour cela que Platon refusa de donner des loix aux Arcadiens &amp;amp; aux Cyréniens, sachant que ces deux peuples étoient riches &amp;amp; ne pouvoient souffrir l’égalité : c’est pour cela qu’on vit en Crete &lt;strong&gt;de bonnes loix &amp;amp; de méchans hommes, parce que Minos n’avoit discipliné qu’un peuple chargé de vices&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) Les Peuples ainsi que les hommes ne sont dociles que dans leur jeunesse, ils deviennent incorrigibles en vieillissant ; &lt;strong&gt;quand une fois les coutumes sont établies &amp;amp; les préjugés enracinés, c’est une entreprise dangereuse &amp;amp; vaine de vouloir les réformer&lt;/strong&gt; ; le peuple ne peut pas même souffrir qu’on touche à ses maux pour les détruire, semblable à ces malades stupides &amp;amp; sans courage qui frémissent à l’aspect du médecin. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon_02.htm#008&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G.D.H. Cole's translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As, before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legislator does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by &lt;strong&gt;investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them&lt;/strong&gt;. Plato refused to legislate for the Arcadians and the Cyrenæans, because he knew that both peoples were rich and could not put up with equality; and &lt;strong&gt;good laws and bad men were found together in Crete, because Minos had inflicted discipline on a people already burdened with vice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible. &lt;strong&gt;When once customs have become established and prejudices inveterate, it is dangerous and useless to attempt their reformation&lt;/strong&gt;; the people, like the foolish and cowardly patients who rave at sight of the doctor, can no longer bear that any one should lay hands on its faults to remedy them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Rousseau says that the Russians had developed a number of &lt;strong&gt;faults and vices&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Peter the Great should have gotten rid of these before introducing reforms based on ideas from France and Germany&lt;/strong&gt;. The people that Peter the Great reigned was not ready for these reforms; in that sense they were &quot;civilized too soon&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T19:14:52.217" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T19:14:52.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8190" CreationDate="2018-08-17T18:05:16.993" Score="3" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;mannered whimsy&quot; mean in the following passage taken from &lt;em&gt;Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;by Sophie Read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Marvell does, it is true, come off better from this particular&#xA;  comparison: Crashaw's little bit of &lt;strong&gt;mannered whimsy&lt;/strong&gt; cannot compete&#xA;  with the liquid grace of Marvell's simile, even if one acknowledges&#xA;  that this crystallisation (or, perhaps more accurately here, this&#xA;  dissolution—Ricks's choice of term recalls once more the bon-bons of&#xA;  fond critical memory) is a deliberate rhetorical ploy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(More context available via &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=mXNp2Ib4HoUC&amp;amp;pg=PA139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3024" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T18:15:10.643" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T19:39:40.647" Title="What does &quot;mannered whimsy&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sophie-read&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8189" CreationDate="2018-08-17T18:55:25.903" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is a discussion of some poetry by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Crashaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Crashaw&lt;/a&gt; (c. 1613 – 1649) and some other poetry by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Marvell&lt;/a&gt; (1621 – 1678). Both belong to a loose group of poets known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphysical poets&lt;/a&gt;. Ingenuity was an important aspect of their poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant passage from Sophie Read's book quotes the following stanza from Richard Crashaw's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44061/wishes-to-his-supposed-mistress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wishes to his (Supposed) Mistress&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each ruby there,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Or pearl that dare appear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Be its own blush, be its own tear. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The author also mentions Crashaw's poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38550/38550-h/38550-h.htm#V1_1_52&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the wounds of our crucified Lord&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image of a ruby or pearl being its own tear is very ingenious (like many so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceit#Metaphysical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conceits&lt;/a&gt;) and, to some readers perhaps, playful. This is probably why Sophie Read calls it whimsical. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whimsy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary's definition of whimsy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A quaint and fanciful idea; a whim; playfully odd behaviour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In literature, metaphysical poetry is regarded as an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannerism#Mannerism_in_literature_and_music&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mannerism&lt;/a&gt;, a term that is first and foremost associated with painting. In that sense, the above example from Crashaw's poem can be called &quot;mannered&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T19:39:40.647" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T19:39:40.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4954" CreationDate="2018-08-17T18:56:51.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts 1450–1700&lt;/a&gt; (CELM) has a comprehensive list of manuscripts from the period of interest. I sampled some of the authors and I estimate that the catalogue includes roughly 65 manuscripts of plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's hard to be precise because it's not entirely clear what counts as a &quot;play&quot;. Do extracts of plays count? Or musical settings of songs taken from plays? What about the librettos of operas, like John Dryden's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/drydenjohn.html#DrJ-work-152&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The State of Innocence&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? Or the texts of masques, like Thomas Carew's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/carewthomas.html#CwT-work-133&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Visit of the Nine Goddesses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;? And of course, not all of the plays in the CELM are from your tighter period (1550–1625). But here are three examples which are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas Dekker, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/dekkerthomas.html#DkT-work-13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Welsh Embassador&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Copy, in a professional secretary hand, c.1624.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nathan Field, John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/beaumontfletcher.html#B_F-work-25&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Honest Man's Fortune&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Copy in the hand of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Knight_(King%27s_Men)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Knight&lt;/a&gt;, book-keeper and prompter of the King's Company, prepared for use as a prompt book, early 17th century.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas Middleton, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/middletonthomas.html#MiT-work-9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Game at Chess&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Autograph manuscript, 1624.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T18:56:51.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8192" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8210" CreationDate="2018-08-17T19:20:03.963" Score="8" ViewCount="420" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;Shift&quot;, which is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available online&lt;/a&gt;. The central character is a reimagining of Shakespeare's Caliban, a Caribbean black man who finds white women to turn him into whatever they want him to be. For some reason, it seems only &lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt; women (&quot;golden girls&quot;, as he calls them) will do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The kisses of golden girls are chancy things. Once, after the touch of other pale lips, you looked into the eyes of a golden girl, one Miranda, and saw yourself reflected back in her moist, breathless stare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You pass another beautiful golden girl, luxuriantly blonde. She glances at you, casts her eyes down demurely, where they just happen to rest at your crotch. You feel her burgeoning gaze there, your helpless response. Quickly you lean and kiss the shoulder of the woman you’re with. The other one’s look turns to resentful longing. You hurry on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There’s a young black woman sitting on a bench, her hair tight peppercorns against her scalp. Her feet are crossed beneath her. She’s alone, reading a book. She’s pretty, but she looks too much like your sister. Too brown to ever be a golden girl. She looks up as you go by, distracted from her reading by the chattering of the woman beside you. She looks at you. Smiles. Nods a greeting. Burning up with guilt, you make your face stone. You move on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;golden girl&quot; is repeated multiple times in the story, referring to Caliban's love interests or potential love interests. He dismisses the young black woman for being &quot;[t]oo brown&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is Caliban only interested in white women?&lt;/strong&gt; How does this aspect of the story tie in to the underlying racial tensions which are hinted at throughout?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T10:51:49.947" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T08:15:48.727" Title="Why is the colour of Caliban's girls important?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6946" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:00:31.337" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Not one but hung limp&quot; does not mean &quot;all except one hung limp&quot; (even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/but#Preposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;but&quot; in the sense of &quot;except&quot;&lt;/a&gt; exists). In fact it means &quot;&lt;strong&gt;there was not one that did not hang limp&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; or &quot;all hung limp (without exception). This is why the verse continues, &quot;not one was left For him to conquer&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an old usage of &quot;but&quot;. You can find it, for example, in Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/allswell/allswell.2.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;All's Well That Ends Well&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene 3&lt;/a&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Peruse them well:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Not one&lt;/strong&gt; of those &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; had a noble father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of these lines is that the king of France allows Helena, the play's main female character, to choose a husband from among the young noblemen at his court. All of them have a noble father, i.e. there is not one that does not have a noble father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:00:31.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8194" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8195" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Genevan philosopher, writer and musician Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) and his works. He wrote the epistolary novel 'Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse' (1761) and treatises such as 'Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes' (1755), 'Du contrat social' (1762) and 'Émile ou De l’éducation' (1762). He was an influential representative of the Enlightenment. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:41:11.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8196" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8197" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the treatise 'Le contrat social ou Principes du droit politique' ('The Social Contract', 1762) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Use this tag with [jean-jacques-rousseau] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:42:57.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Sophie Read, a researcher at the University of Cambridge specialising in seventeenth-century English literature. In 2013 she published the monograph 'Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:47:37.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8200" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8201" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Grant Naylor, the collective name of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, who collaborated on the television series 'Red Dwarf' and other productions." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:49:58.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British television series 'Red Dwarf' (BBC), written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor under the collective name Grant Naylor. Use this tag with the [grant-naylor] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" LastActivityDate="2018-08-17T20:51:36.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-18T15:21:39.733" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious&#xA;  building in sight, the one place which welcomed strangers and&#xA;  determined their opinion of the charm and luxury of Gopher Prairie—the&#xA;  Minniemashie House. It was a tall lean shabby structure, three stories&#xA;  of yellow-streaked wood, the corners covered with sanded pine slabs&#xA;  purporting to symbolize stone. In the hotel office she could see a&#xA;  stretch of bare unclean floor, a line of rickety chairs with brass&#xA;  cuspidors between, a writing-desk with &lt;strong&gt;advertisements in&#xA;  mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back&lt;/strong&gt;. The dining-room&#xA;  beyond was a jungle of stained table-cloths and catsup bottles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/543/543-h/543-h.htm#link2HCH0004&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinclair Lewis, &lt;em&gt;Main Street&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carol (a librarian at St. Paul Library) and Kennicott (a doctor at a small town called Gopher Prairie), got married and came to their house in Gopher Prairie, Kennicott's hometown, after their honeymoon trip. Even before they unpacked their belongings, Kennicott excused himself for an hour to see how the things were going at his office, leaving Carol alone. Lonely, Carol went outside for a walk, and looked around the buildings in the town. Then she spotted a hotel named Minniemashie House and looked inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not imagine how advertisements looked like. Were the advertisements made of real mother-of-pearl? Or were they just written on the glass so that the letters looked like mother-of-pearl? I just could not imagine this part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T15:21:39.733" Title="What does &quot;advertisements in mother-of-pearl letters upon the glass-covered back&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;main-street&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8161" CreationDate="2018-08-18T15:53:34.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's story &quot;Shift&quot; reuses characters from Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, a play that has frequently been discussed with a specific focus on colonialism/post-colonialism, race and identity. The story reuses several words, phrases and elements from the play. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hopkinson's Ariel calls Caliban his &quot;mooncalf brother&quot;; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; (Act II, scene 2)&lt;/a&gt;, Stephano and Trinculo call Caliban a &quot;moon-calf&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ariel's &quot;Ban ... Ban ... ca-ca-Caliban&quot; in the story echoes Caliban's &quot;'Ban, 'Ban, Cacaliban&quot; at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;. (The exact punctuation and the presence of apostrophes depends on the edition you consult.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;split tree&quot; refers to the &quot;cloven pine&quot; in which Sycorax had imprisoned Ariel before her death and from which Prospero had freed him/her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The paragraph in which Caliban talks about Miranda refers back to Prospero's accusation &quot;thou didst seek to violate / The honour of my child.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; (Act I, scene 2)&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of differences, of course. For example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sycorax is still alive, while in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, she died before Prospero's arrival on the island.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ariel is Caliban's younger sister, while in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Ariel is a kind of spirit that was Sycorax's servant. (Ariel may have been Sycorax's servant before her arrival on the island, and not a &quot;native&quot; of the island. See ActI, scene 2: &quot;Thou, my slave, /&#xA;As thou report'st thyself, wast then her servant; / And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate / To act her earthy and abhorr'd commands&quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The story is set in modern times on an island where Ariel a language inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-based_creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English creoles&lt;/a&gt;, possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jamaican Patois&lt;/a&gt;. (I wouldn't claim it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; pure Jamaican Patois.) Assuming that the island is Jamaica or inspired by it, it may be worth noting that Jamaica was a British colony between 1655 and 1962. The Spanish were chased by the Briths in 1655, they left behind many African slaves. The British later brought more African slaves.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The island in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is most likely a fictional island in the Mediterranean, since King Alonso's ship in the first scene was on its way back from Tunis (for the marriage of Alonso's daughter Claribel to the King of Tunis, see Act II, scene 1) back to Naples. However, the play was probably partly inspired by the shipwreck of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Venture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sea Venture&lt;/a&gt; on Bermuda in 1609, and Ariel says in Act 1, scene 2 that Prospero once asked him to fetch something from the &quot;still-vex'd Bermoothes&quot;. In addition, Gonzalo's speech in Act II, scene 1 (&quot;I' the commonwealth I would by contraries (...&quot;) sounds very similar to an excerpt from Florio's 1603 translation of Montaigne's &lt;em&gt;Essays&lt;/em&gt;, more specifically, the essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Cannibals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Of the Canibales&quot; / &quot;Des Cannibales&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. These references, in addition to Prospero's treatment of both Caliban and Ariel (both are addressed as &quot;slave&quot;), invite retellings from a postcolonial point of view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hopkinson's story, Prospero and Miranda do not appear as characters, nor do the other characters that were on the ship. Caliban is not someone else's slave but has a relationship with an unnamed &quot;golden girl&quot;. Caliban has escaped the sea and his mother (&quot;You had been swimming for her life. (...) &lt;em&gt;She's coming. Sycorax is coming for you.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) and has tried to adopt European or Western culture. Unlike Ariel, he uses grammatically correct English (&quot;like something out of some Englishman book&quot;, in Ariel's words), uses a toothbrush and other products of European civilisation and makes allusions to a fairy tale where a kiss turns a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frog into a prince&lt;/a&gt;. This is a civilisation that has tried to subjugate nature, as can be seen in the &quot;marina algae capsules; iodine pills&quot;: things that come from the sea are available in artificial containers created using technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But his integration into European civilisation is imperfect: he gets the fairy tale backwards and his feet are &quot;floppy, reluctant&quot;, they &quot;plash around&quot;, &quot;they slip and slide and don't want to carry you upright&quot;. He has undergone a change or &quot;shift&quot; (hence the story's title) away from his original nature. Due to this change, he has lost his identity or, to use a play on words, &quot;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt;-dentity&quot;, so he can no longer refer to himself as &quot;I&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence, there is also no &quot;us&quot; or &quot;we&quot; in his language. This is visible in phrases such as &quot;As you both pass the old man&quot;, &quot;You both turn&quot; (Caliban and the &quot;golden girl&quot;), '&quot;Yes, Mother,&quot; you both say&quot; (Caliban and Ariel) and even &quot;the three of you&quot; (Caliban, Ariel and the girl).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story switches between the point of view of Caliban, who refers to himself as &quot;you&quot;, and Ariel, who uses the normal &quot;I&quot;. The switching between both narrators is also noticeable from the difference in grammaticality: Ariel does not conjugate verbs correctly, uses &quot;him&quot; instead of &quot;he&quot; or &quot;his&quot;, &quot;them&quot; instead of &quot;they&quot;, sometimes omits pronouns or the verb &quot;is/are&quot;, often uses &quot;me&quot; instead of &quot;I&quot;, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Sycorax appears as a kind of sea creature, she seizes Caliban with her tentacles and transforms him: &quot;you become a sunflower&quot;, &quot;the change that wreaks you&quot;. To borrow a word from &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; Act 1, scene 2, he undergoes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_change_(idiom)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sea-change&lt;/a&gt;. This is another &quot;shift&quot; (see the story's title), presumably restoring his original nature and identity. This is why the story ends with Caliban finally saying &quot;I&quot; for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, the girl says, &quot;It's not a brush-off&quot;. Through the use of pronouns, the story might be saying that there can be no &quot;we&quot; between the colonizers and the colonized when the colonized betray their own roots. (If one party betrays their roots or feels that they should do so, they aren't interacting on an equal footing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is more to say about this story than what I have written here, but a discussion of the use pronouns did not seem possible without drawing in a lot of other aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T10:43:32.580" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:43:32.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8206" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8207" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Martin Eden' (1909) by Jack London. Use this tag with the [jack-london] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" LastActivityDate="2018-08-18T16:15:16.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14088" CreationDate="2018-08-18T18:18:32.997" Score="9" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;From 16 November 1942 onwards, Anne Frank had to share her room with the dentist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Pfeffer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fritz Pfeffer&lt;/a&gt;, who had a number of habits that Anne couldn't stand. In the German biography &lt;em&gt;Anne Frank&lt;/em&gt; (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlts Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002), Matthias Heyl writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In ihrer überarbeiteten Tagebuchversion revanchierte [Anne Frank] sich damit, dass sie ihm den weder im Niederländischen noch im Deutschen schmeichelhaften Namen «Dussel» verpasste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the reworked version of her diary, [Anne Frank] took revenge on him by giving him the nickname &quot;Dussel&quot;, which is unflattering, both in German and in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(More literally translated: &quot;flattering neither in German nor in Dutch&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German Wiktionary defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Dussel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dussel&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;ungeschickter Mensch&quot; (awkward/inept/unintelligent person). Something similar can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Dussel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online Duden dictionary&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as I know, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vandale.nl/gratis-woordenboek/nederlands/betekenis/dussel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dussel&lt;/a&gt; is not a word in Dutch (my native language). So why would the name be unflattering in Dutch? I am looking for evidence in a reliable &lt;em&gt;offline&lt;/em&gt; source; I have seen too much nonsense on the Web.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T02:52:00.483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T02:52:00.483" Title="In what way is Dussel an unflattering nickname?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;&lt;the-diary-of-a-young-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8209" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8790" CreationDate="2018-08-19T07:44:28.673" Score="4" ViewCount="2344" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &quot;The Dolphins&quot; (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://beamingnotes.com/2018/02/22/summary-of-the-dolphins-by-carol-ann-duffy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary on Beaming Notes&lt;/a&gt;), what does the following line mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;for the world will not deepen to dream in&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unable to understand the usage of &quot;dream in&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;out of love reflects me for myself&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is really unclear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure why the poet uses the word &quot;this&quot; in the third line where the dolphin says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Outside &lt;strong&gt;this&lt;/strong&gt; world you cannot breathe for long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean she could breathe longer outside her previous world, the ocean? If yes, then that's really strange. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4897" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T19:08:46.867" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T10:14:39.120" Title="Interpretation of some lines in The Dolphins by Carol Ann Duffy" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;carol-ann-duffy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8192" CreationDate="2018-08-19T08:59:02.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a strange question for a number of reasons. First of all, it's quite broad and meandering. There's a lot of assumptions in the question that aren't correct and need to be corrected. I mention this as way of explaining and apologizing for the meandering style of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central character is a reimagining of Shakespeare's Caliban, a Caribbean black man who finds white women to turn him into whatever they want him to be. For some reason, it seems only white women (&amp;quot;golden girls&amp;quot;, as he calls them) will do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's actually quite common to use blond hair as a symbol of whiteness --  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/blonde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even the dictionary definition of blond mentions pale skin&lt;/a&gt; and dictionaries aren't great for this kind of task -- but I digress).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story actually is a lot more specific than this. In fact, the funny thing is in this question, you quoted from a paragraph that went into a lot of detail, but you ended the quote before the detail began. Let's take a look at the first quote, the one about Miranda, but let's read the full paragraph -- not the first few sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, after the touch of other pale lips, you looked into the eyes of a golden girl, one Miranda, and saw yourself reflected back in her moist, breathless stare. In her eyes you were tall, handsome, your shoulders powerful and your jaw square. You carried yourself with the arrogance of a prince. You held a spear in one hand. The spotted, tawny pelt of an animal that had never existed was knotted around your waist. You wore something’s teeth on a string around your neck, and you spoke in grunts, imperious. In her eyes, your bright copper skin was dark and loamy as cocoa. She had sighed and leapt upon you, kissing and biting, begging to be taken. You had let her have what she wanted. When her father stumbled upon the two of you writhing on the ground, she had leapt to her feet and changed you again; called you monster, attacker. She’d clasped her bodice closed with one hand, carefully leaving bare enough pitiful juddering bosom to spark a father’s ire. She’d looked at you regretfully, sobbed crocodile tears, and spoken the lies that had made you her father’s slave for an interminable length of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is something that's a lot more specific than &amp;quot;turn him into whatever they want him to be&amp;quot;. Miranda sees Caliban as a exotic racial stereotype (spears, necklaces with bones, wearing furs are standard stereotypes about people from Africa, and Hopkinson even goes as far to clue us into the stereotype isn't real [&amp;quot;an animal that had never existed&amp;quot;]). She finds the stereotype sexually attractive and they have sex. When the father arrives and sees them, Miranda claims that she was raped, and Caliban gets in trouble -- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/06/the_deadly_history_of_they_re_raping_our_women_racists_have_long_defended.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relevant article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's another example of a white woman &amp;quot;turn[ing] him into whatever they want him to be&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ariel sniggers. “That was from his last ooman,” she says. “The two of them always quarrelling. For her, Caliban had a poison tongue.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And spat out biting words, no doubt,” Sycorax says. “He became what she saw, and it affected the children they made. Of course she didn’t want them, of course she left; so Grannie gets to do the honours. He has brought me frog children and dog children, baby mack daddies and crack babies. Brings his offspring to me, then runs away again. And I’m getting tired of it.” Sycorax’s shawl whirls itself up into a waterspout. “And I’m more than tired of his sister’s tale tattling.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clue here is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://fair.org/extra/the-myth-of-the-crack-baby/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;crack babies&amp;quot; are racist stereotypes&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mac%20daddy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a mac daddy is a pimp&lt;/a&gt; so &amp;quot;baby mack daddies&amp;quot; essentially means that the child is predisposed towards crime (another racist stereotype), and frog children and dog children plays on the idea that people who aren't white aren't really human. So while &amp;quot;turn him into whatever they want him to be&amp;quot; is the language the story uses, for the purposes of interpreting the story a good way of reading this is white women see Caliban as racial stereotypes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Caliban only interested in white women? It could be just his taste in women, but I'm sure there's some deeper significance, given the underlying racial tensions hinted at throughout the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a strange way of approaching the story. You're trying to create a difference &amp;quot;dating&amp;quot; (is this &amp;quot;just his taste in women&amp;quot;) and not-&amp;quot;dating&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;deeper significance&amp;quot;). The phrase &amp;quot;deeper significance&amp;quot; implies a view of literature where (to use a tired example) one reads &amp;quot;the curtains are blue&amp;quot;, interprets this as &amp;quot;this symbolizes the characters' depression&amp;quot;, and this knowledge is the &amp;quot;deeper meaning&amp;quot;. However, I can assure you that while the people in this story aren't real, the experiences the story describes absolutely are real. By this I mean that there are real people who have the same &amp;quot;interest in white women&amp;quot; for the exact same reasons Caliban does. The &amp;quot;deeper meaning&amp;quot; to be found here is the task of understanding real people in real world situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth mentioning that while you separate &amp;quot;racial tensions&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;one's taste in women&amp;quot;, there have been more &amp;quot;racial tensions&amp;quot; associated with dating than I could possible keep track of. &amp;quot;Racial tensions&amp;quot; associated with dating are not &amp;quot;unusual&amp;quot;, as you claim in a (now deleted) comment. It wasn't too long ago that there laws about who could date who and who could marry who, and today people get hashtags like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/is-twitter-breaking-french-hate-speech-laws/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#SiMaFilleRameneUnNoir trending on twitter&lt;/a&gt;. I've read more articles (you can google &amp;quot;colorism dating&amp;quot; for a small taste) and heard more stories about racism related to dating than I can keep track of. This point is relevant because the entire story meets your definition of &amp;quot;racial tensions&amp;quot; associated with &amp;quot;one's taste in women&amp;quot;, and the underlying context -- that the story isn't an allegory but describes real people, and that the real people described aren't few and far between but actually quite common -- is quite important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &amp;quot;racial tension&amp;quot; in this story is not &amp;quot;hinted at&amp;quot;. I recognize that there is cultural knowledge that not everyone possesses, and I'm not trying to blame people for not possessing this knowledge, but assuming familiarity with something is not the same as hinting. Relative to other writing about race, this story is actually quite direct. The cultural knowledge related to race necessary for this story is much less obscure than the cultural knowledge needed to understand, for example, the references to &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask &amp;quot;Why is Caliban only interested in white women?&amp;quot; In the story, Ariel asks Caliban the same question (&amp;quot;Why you can’t leave white woman alone? You don’t see what them do to you?&amp;quot;): let's see what the response is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are our mother’s creature,” you hiss at her. “Look at you, trying so hard to be ‘island,’ talking like you just come off the boat.” In your anger, your speech slips into the same rhythms as hers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might seem unrelated to the question but actually it's not. Ariel and Caliban are talking about patterns of speech -- they're contrasting the vernacular of their culture (&amp;quot;talking like you just come off the boat&amp;quot;) with the more formal speech of the white colonizers (&amp;quot;chat like something out of some Englishman book.&amp;quot;) Caliban is essentially making fun of Ariel for refusing to assimilate to the white colonial regime (&amp;quot;Look at you, trying so hard to be ‘island,’&amp;quot;). Since this is his response to Ariel's question of &amp;quot;Why you can’t leave white woman alone?,&amp;quot; he's essentially saying that he's trying to become part of the regime. There's an interesting detail where Caliban reveals he can't truly assimilate -- no matter how hard he tries, his &amp;quot;speech slips into the same rhythms as hers.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's several passages that go into much more detail. For example, here's some insight into Caliban's character from Ariel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caliban have a sickness. Is a sickness any of you could get. In him it manifest as a weakness; a weakness for cream. He fancy himself a prince of Africa, a mannish Cleopatra, bathing in mother’s milk. Him believe say it would make him pretty. Him never had mirrors to look in, and with the mother we had, the surface of the sea never calm enough that him could see him face in it. Him would never believe me say that him pretty already. Him fancy if cream would only touch him, if him could only submerge himself entirely in it, it would redeem him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleopatra allegedly bathed herself in milk to keep her skin pale, so Ariel is essentially saying that Caliban wants to become white (i.e. be &amp;quot;a mannish Cleopatra&amp;quot;). Ariel also reveals that Caliban thinks he's ugly because of his race: Caliban believes &amp;quot;if cream would only touch him, if him could only submerge himself entirely in it&amp;quot; like Cleopatra, then he would no longer think so poorly about himself and his body. The story uses bathing in milk, but actually &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/might-of-white-skin-whitening-cream-pale-colour-lighter-dark-is-beautiful-bollywood-cosmetics-a7910416.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skin lightening is a huge industry&lt;/a&gt; (here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marieclaire.com/beauty/a27678/skin-bleaching-epidemic-in-jamaica/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article about this that specifically focuses on Jamaica&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're probably wondering why all of this leads to Caliban's desire for white women. The very idea of race is that its passed down through descent. This is stated relatively clearly in the story (a bit of symbolic language but a lot easier than the tempest references -- I mention this not to blame you but to emphasize that the &amp;quot;racial tensions&amp;quot; are not &amp;quot;hinted at&amp;quot; in this story):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a time they called porridge “gruel.” A time when you lived in castle moats and fetched beautiful golden balls for beautiful golden girls. When the fetching was a game, and you knew yourself to be lord of the land and the veins of water that ran through it, and you could graciously allow petty kings to build their palaces on the land, in which to raise up their avid young daughters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To break it down: &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; (i.e. Caliban) was the original inhabitant of a land (i.e. &amp;quot;lord of the land and the veins of water that ran through it&amp;quot;), and white people colonized the land (&amp;quot;you could graciously allow petty kings to build their palaces on the land&amp;quot;). What happens next? The white people &amp;quot;raise up their avid young daughters,&amp;quot; i.e. they raise children, and their children are turned into adults and raise children, and the whole thing perpetuates itself. This is why it's a big deal when Miranda's father catches Caliban with Miranda: by having sex with Caliban Miranda is breaking the cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The white women sleep with Caliban because they find their stereotypes about him to be sexually arousing (&amp;quot;The spotted, tawny pelt of an animal that had never existed was knotted around your waist,&amp;quot; etc.). Caliban sleeps with the white women because he desperately wants to be included in whiteness, in that cycle of social reproduction that defines what whiteness is. He's internalized the racist myth that black people are ugly, and white people have the power to turn him into things he's not (again, &amp;quot;The spotted, tawny pelt of an animal that had never existed was knotted around your waist,&amp;quot; etc.). Unfortunately, the white women see him as dehumanizing stereotypes, and that's all they can ever see him as.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You haven’t seen yourself in this one’s eyes yet. You need her to kiss you, to change you, to hide you from your dam. That’s what you’ve always needed. You are always awed by the ones who can work this magic. You could love one of them forever and a day. You just have to find the right one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caliban wants to find &amp;quot;the right one&amp;quot;, the one who can turn him into &amp;quot;a mannish Cleopatra&amp;quot; by seeing him as white and including him in the social reproduction that defines whiteness. The problem is the right one doesn't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth mentioning again that this isn't an allegory: the story describes real people even though the characters are fictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4924" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T12:29:23.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8192" CreationDate="2018-08-19T18:56:30.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My answer about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8161/2191&quot;&gt;pronouns in &quot;Shift&quot;&lt;/a&gt; focused on the opposition between nature (and a person's nature and roots) on the one hand, and technology-based civilisation on the other. My interpretation of the use of pronouns is based on the claim that Caliban tried to get away from his original environment and ignored his nature and roots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story contains another opposition that runs parallel to the above opposition, namely white versus black. Caliban's denial of his roots finds a parallel in the racial opposition: he rejects black women, just like he rejects the girl's suggestion to go to the beach. The third woman's skin is too dark; it reminds him to too much of his roots. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an ingenious reversal of Andersen's fairy tale &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Little Mermaid&lt;/a&gt;, Caliban is a black &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;merman&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (see the feet that are &quot;floppy&quot;, &quot;plash around&quot;, &quot;slip and slide&quot;, indicating that his metamorphosis or &quot;shift&quot; is imperfect), but one who is afraid of returning to the sea and to his roots. When his mother changes him again, he &quot;stand[s] rooted&quot; again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caliban calling the women he dates &quot;golden girls&quot; can be interpreted in various ways. LitProf's answer already mentioned golden in the sense of &quot;blonde&quot;, but gold has many other meanings. Gold is associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_(metaphor)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;golden age&lt;/a&gt; for the ancient Greeks, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;golden ratio&lt;/a&gt; and wealth in general. However, in Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; (a book describing many &quot;shifts&quot;!), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midas#Golden_Touch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Midas's golden touch&lt;/a&gt; turns out to be a curse. And in the Old Testament (&lt;em&gt;Exodus&lt;/em&gt;), the Israelites worship the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_calf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;golden calf&lt;/a&gt;. While &quot;golden girl&quot; can be seen as an expression of admiration, there may also be a suggestion that Caliban is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gold_digger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gold digger&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;A person (usually female) who cultivates a personal relationship in order to attain wealth&quot; (Wiktionary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T18:56:30.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8212" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-19T19:03:46.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-19T19:03:46.913" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T19:03:46.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8213" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-19T19:03:46.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Scottish poet and playwright Carol Ann Duffy (born 1955) and her life as a writer. Questions about her poems should be tagged under the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:18:59.867" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:18:59.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-19T19:48:17.383" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the narrative poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_and_Adonis_(Shakespeare_poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Venus and Adonis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Shakespeare reuses a story from Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; (which he often used as a source of inspiration), but gives it an original spin: Venus's desire is presented as predatory, and Adonis tries to reject her and get away. It is also striking that Venus get many more lines than Adonis. Is Shakespeare trying to steer the reader's sympathy towards Venus giving more attention to her point of view, or are we still supposed to sympathise with Adonis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an online version of the poem, see e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folger.edu/venus-and-adonis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare Folger Library&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-19T19:48:17.383" Title="Does Shakespeare steer the reader's sympathy towards Venus or towards Adonis?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;venus-and-adonis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="340" CreationDate="2018-08-20T08:25:06.970" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just have to say I've only just started reading the books after watching the series. I've read Study in Scarlet and Hound of the Baskerville's (didn't realise Sign of Four, which I just started, was the one that comes after Study in Scarlet) and I'm very content with where I've started. I absolutely loved Scarlet and really enjoyed the flashback personally, and felt like seeing Watson's very first impression of Sherlock is a good place to begin? I'm surprised that no one here has recommended starting with Scarlet, and you all seem to even discourage it haha. Maybe watching the modern series (the Cumberbatch one, and watched the Irons one when I was little) has made getting into the books easier for me, I don't know. But I'm loving them so far and as of now, would recommend a beginner start with Study in Scarlet. I'll update this comment after I've finished the rest of the books (should be done in the next few days) to see if I think there's a better place to start after I've read more! :) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4927" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T08:25:06.970" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8217" CreationDate="2018-08-20T09:52:22.510" Score="4" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;snow in the crevices of a boggy bank&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her cheek near his sleeve, she studied a dozen village pictures. They&#xA;  were streaky; she saw only trees, shrubbery, a porch indistinct in&#xA;  leafy shadows. But she exclaimed over the lakes: dark water reflecting&#xA;  wooded bluffs, a flight of ducks, a fisherman in shirt sleeves and a&#xA;  wide straw hat, holding up a string of croppies. One winter picture of&#xA;  the edge of Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of&#xA;  ice, &lt;strong&gt;snow in the crevices of a boggy bank&lt;/strong&gt;, the mound of a muskrat&#xA;  house, reeds in thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/543/543-h/543-h.htm#link2HCH0002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carol, a librarian at St. Paul Library, and Kennicott, a doctor in a small town called Gopher Prairie, went tramping together. After a walk, sitting on a bank, Kenicott persistently persuaded her to marry him and settle down in Gopher Prairie, saying that it was the nicest town in the world. He even brought some pictures of the town to show her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what were the &quot;crevices&quot; of a &quot;boggy bank.&quot;&#xA;Does &quot;boggy&quot; mean that the bank resembled a bog? And how can there be crevices in the bank...? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T10:18:38.227" Title="What does &quot;snow in the crevices of a boggy bank&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;main-street&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8216" CreationDate="2018-08-20T10:18:38.227" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boggy land often looks lumpy, with large tussocks that make the ground uneven:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g8PeX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Picture of bog - click for larger image.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g8PeX.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;picture of bog&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snow often remains in crevices even after the larger drifts of snow surrounding it have gone. This is because it's harder for direct sunshine to reach hidden crevices, and so it takes longer for snow there to melt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9KGlm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Snow on boggy ground - click for larger image.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9KGlm.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;snow on boggy ground&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when sloping down to a river, boggy ground is likely to remain uneven:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LP7tV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;A boggy bank - click for larger image.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LP7tV.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;a boggy bank&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure how boggy this is, but here's another example of a riverbank with crevices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uC1Dh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Bank with water vole burrows - click for larger image.&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uC1Dh.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;bank with water vole burrows&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;boggy bank&quot; is a riverbank in boggy ground, i.e. boggy land which slopes down to a river. The &quot;crevices&quot; in this riverbank are probably due to the uneven nature of boggy land. There is &quot;snow in the crevices&quot; because that's where snow is most likely to remain even if it doesn't settle, or has melted, elsewhere. And it's nothing to do with the bank that they're sitting on; the bank being described is one in his picture from elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One winter picture of the edge of Plover Lake had the air of an etching: lustrous slide of ice, snow in the crevices of a boggy bank, the mound of a muskrat house, reeds in thin black lines, arches of frosty grasses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T10:18:38.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:52:10.847" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendoline_Riley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gwendoline Riley's&lt;/a&gt; novel &lt;em&gt;First Love&lt;/em&gt; (2017) is about the relationship of the female narrator, Neve, with Edwyn, and how the type of relationships she had with her mother and (especially) her abusive father play a role in it. Neve and Edwyn live in Edwyn's flat near &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Brompton_station&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;West Brompton station&lt;/a&gt; in London. Edwyn grew up in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isleworth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isleworth&lt;/a&gt; in west London. Neve mentions that &quot;[her] parents' old flat was in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiswick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chiswick&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, also in West London. (Chiswick apparently has had some interesting residents, such as Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Ugo Foscolo, Camille Pissarro, E. M. Forster and currently Peter Brook.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Edwyn's point of view, Neve comes from &quot;the North&quot;: she grew up in Liverpool (Gwendoline Riley was born there) and studied in Manchester (like Riley); she also lived in Glasgow for a while. At the start of the novel, Neve's mother lives in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garston,_Liverpool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garston (Liverpool)&lt;/a&gt;. In the chapter about her father's funeral, she mentions relatives living in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aigburth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aigburth&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speke&lt;/a&gt; (both in Liverpool). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names of suburbs, areas and streets are typically mentioned without specifying in which city they are, although that normally becomes clear when you read on. What is not clear, especially to someone from outside the UK, is whether these place names carry any special connotations, e.g. are they upmarket or (more likely?) working-class suburbs? Have they been neglected or are living conditions improving? Or am I completely barking up the wrong tree by looking for this type of information and associations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book does not contain any dates (as far as I can remember), but I assume the &quot;present&quot; is roughly 2017, when the book was published, and since the main character is in her mid-thirties (barely younger than the author herself), she must have grown up in Liverpool between 1980 and the late 1990s. The only clearly datable reference can be found in a passage where Neve thinks back to a past relationship and says that, at that time, she had bought tickets for the documentary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Time_and_the_City&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Of Time and the City&lt;/a&gt; by Terrence Davies, which was released in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of reviews of &lt;em&gt;First Love&lt;/em&gt; and relevant interviews, but they don't give me the information I'm looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/features/gwendoline-riley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gwendoline Riley interview: First Love&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Skinny&lt;/em&gt;, 08.03.2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Joanna Kavenna: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/26/first-love-by-gwendoline-riley-review&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Love by Gwendoline Riley review – miniaturism for existentialists&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, 26.01.2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theresa Munoz: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thenational.scot/news/15087290.Books__Little_warmth_in_Gwendoline_Riley_s_exploration_of_toxic_relations__First_Love/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little warmth in Gwendoline Riley's exploration of toxic relations, First Love&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The National&lt;/em&gt;, 13.02.2017. (This review is not entirely accurate: it claims that Neve is a &quot;successful writer&quot;, while the novel only mentions that she gets a fellowship for a few months in France, and that Edwyn &quot;suffers from an unnamed debilitating disease&quot; although the novel mentions fibromyalgia.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nicola Presley: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marlboroughnewsonline.co.uk/features/arts-entertainment/litfest/2017/7015-litfest-2017-meet-novelist-gwendoline-riley-her-latest-narrator-neve-whose-marriage-comes-with-a-little-black-humour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LITFEST 2017: meet novelist Gwendoline Riley &amp;amp; her latest narrator Neve whose marriage comes with a little black humour&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;marlborough.news&lt;/em&gt;, 18.09.2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T17:09:45.190" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T17:09:45.190" Title="What do the locations mentioned in First Love mean?" Tags="&lt;gwendoline-riley&gt;&lt;first-love-riley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8219" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:55:49.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T16:55:49.127" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T16:55:49.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8220" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:55:49.127" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English writer Gwendoline Riley (born in 1979) and her life as a writer. Her debut novel 'Cold Water', published at the age of 21, won a Betty Trask Award. Her third novel, 'Joshua Spassky', won the 2008 Somerset Maugham Award." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T20:07:43.377" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T20:07:43.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8221" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8222" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 2017 novel 'First Love' by Gwendoline Riley. Use this tag with the [gwendoline-riley] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" LastActivityDate="2018-08-20T16:56:40.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8235" CreationDate="2018-08-20T23:34:14.783" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just stumbled on this translation of Antigone by F. L. Lucas where it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wonders there are many, but there is no wonder wilder than man -  Man&#xA;  who makes the winds of winter bear him,  Through the trough of waves&#xA;  that tower about him, across grey wastes of sea; Man who wearies the&#xA;  Untiring, the Immortal - Earth, eldest of the Gods, as year by year,&#xA;  His plough teams come and go. The care-free bands of birds, Beasts of&#xA;  the wild, tribes of the sea, In netted tolles he takes, The Subtle One&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does someone know in which act / scene this is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4930" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T10:07:04.053" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T13:50:51.173" Title="In which act/scene of Antigone (Sophocles) is this passage?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;antigone-sophocles&gt;&lt;sophocles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2650" CreationDate="2018-08-21T03:30:14.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To expand a bit on DLosc's answer, the first line appears to be a reference to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbinic_Judaism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rabbinic&lt;/a&gt; tradition recorded in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talmud&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hebrewbooks.org/shas.aspx?mesechta=24&amp;amp;daf=107&amp;amp;format=pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tractate Sanhedrin, folio 107a&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rab Judah said in Rab's name: One should never [intentionally] bring&#xA;  himself to the test, since David king of Israel did so, and fell. He&#xA;  said unto Him, ‘Sovereign of the Universe! Why do we say [in prayer]&#xA;  &quot;The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,&quot; but not&#xA;  the God of David?’ He replied, ‘They were tried by me, but thou wast&#xA;  not.’ &lt;strong&gt;Then, replied he, ‘Sovereign of the Universe, examine and try&#xA;  me’ — as it is written, Examine me, O Lord, and try me.&lt;/strong&gt; He answered&#xA;  ‘I will test thee, and yet grant thee a special privilege; for I did&#xA;  not inform them [of the nature of their trial beforehand], yet, I&#xA;  inform thee that I will try thee in a matter of adultery.’&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Straightway, And it came to pass in an eveningtide,&lt;/strong&gt; that David arose from off his bed etc. R. Johanan said: He changed his night&#xA;  couch to a day couch, but he forgot the halachah: there is a small&#xA;  organ in man which satisfies him in his hunger but makes him hunger&#xA;  when satisfied. &lt;strong&gt;And he walked upon the roof of the king's house: and&#xA;  from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very&#xA;  beautiful to look upon.&lt;/strong&gt; Now Bath Sheba was cleansing her hair behind a&#xA;  screen, when Satan came to him, appearing in the shape of a bird. He&#xA;  shot an arrow at him, which broke the screen, thus she stood revealed,&#xA;  and he saw her. &lt;strong&gt;Immediately&lt;/strong&gt;, And David sent and enquired after the&#xA;  woman. And one said, Is not this Bath Sheba, the daughter of Eliam,&#xA;  the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers, and took&#xA;  her, and she came unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified&#xA;  from her uncleanliness: and she returned unto her house. Thus it is&#xA;  written, Thou host proved mine heart; thou hast visited me in the&#xA;  night; thou host tried me, and shalt find nothing; I am purposed that&#xA;  my mouth shall not transgress. He said thus: ‘Would that a bridle had&#xA;  fallen into the mouth of mine enemy [i.e., himself], that I had not&#xA;  spoken thus.’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://halakhah.com/pdf/nezikin/Sanhedrin.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soncino translation&lt;/a&gt;; my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the parts that I bolded, according to this tradition &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David&lt;/a&gt;'s attempt to prove his faith was &lt;em&gt;the direct and immediate cause&lt;/em&gt; of the incident with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathsheba&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bathseba&lt;/a&gt; on the roof. Thus the first three lines of the song flow perfectly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your faith was strong but you needed proof &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You saw her bathing on the roof&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is precisely that his faith was strong but he needed proof that led to seeing her bathing on the roof where her beauty overthrew him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T19:19:51.630" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T19:19:51.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T11:07:57.667" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nalo Hopkinson's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shift&lt;/a&gt;, Caliban has a relationship with a &quot;golden girl&quot;. At some point, Caliban mentions she is cooking oats. At an earlier point in the story he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was a time they called porridge “gruel.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how this fits into the rest of the story. The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;porridge&lt;/a&gt; explains that, &quot;Historically, porridge was a staple food in much of Northern Europe, North Korea, and Russia.&quot; The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gruel&lt;/a&gt; says that, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a thinner version of porridge that may be more often drunk than eaten and may not need to be cooked. Historically, gruel has been a staple of the Western diet, especially for peasants.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article also contains a paragraph on the etymology of &quot;gruel&quot;. That does not really help, nor does the article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oatmeal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oatmeal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After analysing the story for answers to two other questions, I am convinced that it is too carefully crafted for this porridge remark to be meaningless, but I cannot come up with an explanation for its presence in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addition: I don't know whether this is relevant, but in Shakespeare's works, &quot;gruel&quot; is apparently only used in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.4.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV&lt;/a&gt;, where the &quot;Third Witch&quot; says, &quot;Make the gruel thick and slab&quot;. &quot;Porridge&quot; is used in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene&lt;/a&gt;, where Sebastian says about King Alonso, &quot;He receives comfort like cold porridge.&quot;. The word &quot;porridge&quot; also occurs in several other Shakespeare plays (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryvi/1henryvi.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;1 Henry VI&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/troilus_cressida.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T11:03:14.827" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T17:55:58.970" Title="Significance of 'There was a time they called porridge “gruel.”'" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T14:30:54.383" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In reading &quot;Shift&quot; by Nalo Hopkinson, I came across this paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In my mother and father, salt meet with sweet. Milk meet with chocolate. No one could touch her while he was alive and ruler of his lands, but the minute him dead, her family and his get together and exile her to that little island to starve to death. Send her away with two sweet-and-sour, milk chocolate pickney; me in her belly and Caliban at her breast. &lt;strong&gt;Is nuh that turn her bitter?&lt;/strong&gt; When you confine the sea, it don’t stagnate? &lt;strong&gt;You put milk to stand, and it nuh curdle?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure what the &quot;nuh&quot; means in the two bolded sentences. It &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; rather like &quot;no&quot;, but it's obviously not just a pronunciation difference; replacing &quot;nuh&quot; with &quot;no&quot; doesn't really make sense, especially in the first instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;nuh&quot; mean in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:01:28.663" Title="What does &quot;nuh&quot; mean here in &quot;Shift&quot; by Nalo Hopkinson?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2018-08-21T15:00:56.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the website Jamaican Patwah,  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jamaicanpatwah.com/term/nuh/1055&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nuh&lt;/a&gt; has two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No; example: &quot;nuh sad story&quot; (meaning: &quot;no bad news&quot;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not; example: &quot;It nuh di deh&quot; (meaning: &quot;It is not there&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, replacing &quot;nuh&quot; with either of the above meanings in the sentences from &quot;Shift&quot; still does not result in grammatical English. For example, with &quot;not&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; that turn her bitter?&quot; where we would expect something like &quot;Is it not this that turns/turned her bitter?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;You put milk to stand, and it &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; curdle?&quot;  where we would expect something like &quot;[When] you put milk to stand, and it &lt;strong&gt;does not&lt;/strong&gt; curdle?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not unusual for words (pronouns or verbs) to get omitted in Ariel's speech. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Is our mother Sycorax; his and mine.&quot; omits the pronoun &quot;it&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;is a name some Englishman give her by scraping a feather quill on paper&quot; omits the pronoun &quot;it&quot; and possible the relative pronoun &quot;that&quot; (&quot;&lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; is a name &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; some Englishman ...&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;But me and Brother, when she not there&quot; omits the verb &quot;is&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;nuh&quot; functions here as the negative adverb &quot;not&quot;, but other words not to be added to create a complete sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For examples of &quot;nuh&quot; where we would expect &quot;doesn't&quot; or &quot;don't&quot;, see for examples some of &lt;a href=&quot;https://bglh-marketplace.com/2016/02/unaware-of-jamaican-patois-critics-blast-rihanna-for-speaking-gibberish-on-her-new-single-work/comment-page-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rihanna's lyrics&lt;/a&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Him ah go act like he &lt;strong&gt;nuh&lt;/strong&gt; like it [He will act like he &lt;strong&gt;doesn’t&lt;/strong&gt; like it]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Nuh&lt;/strong&gt; badda, text me in a crisis [&lt;strong&gt;Don’t&lt;/strong&gt; bother to text me in a crisis]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T15:07:49.153" LastActivityDate="2018-08-21T15:07:49.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T16:28:28.740" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Kundera mean by this line, towards the end of chapter 2 in &lt;em&gt;The Unbearable Lightness of Being&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copy of Anna Karenina under her arm amounted to false papers; it had given Tomas the wrong idea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-21T16:33:17.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T07:03:03.547" Title="What does this line mean, about Anna Karenina amounting to false papers?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-unbearable-lightness-of-being&gt;&lt;czech-literature&gt;&lt;milan-kundera&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-21T18:43:37.773" Score="9" ViewCount="520" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just read Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apex-magazine.com/a-raggy-dog-a-shaggy-dog/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available for free online&lt;/a&gt; from Apex Magazine). It's an odd, quirky tale about an orchid-loving lady who's constantly setting off the fire alarms and sprinkler systems in the flats where she lives, and the orchidnated rat which she ends up sending off on a mission to find her soulmate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;how does the title connect to the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog&quot; is a quote from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellenbailey.com/poems/ellen_452.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the poem &quot;My Dog&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Emily Lewis, a contributor to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ellenbailey.com/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ellen Bailey's poetry website&lt;/a&gt;. I've read the poem, but I'm still struggling to see its relevance to the Hopkinson story. There's a small pet-like animal in the story - namely, the rat - but Tammy isn't looking for it; she's sending it on a mission. She also treats her orchids like pets, but again she's not looking for them like the narrator of the dog poem. So where's the connection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T16:16:59.903" Title="What is the relevance of the title of Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8226" CreationDate="2018-08-21T22:58:04.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8227&quot;&gt;you have the right answer on what &quot;nuh&quot; means&lt;/a&gt; but you haven't captured her &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of speaking. When trying to read the passage aloud, I find I lapse into something like a Scottish lilt (I'm Australian, so I'm not sure why Scottish comes out here!), but there's definitely a rhythm to her spoken word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, she omits the conjunction (&quot;that&quot;), which is quite common in spoken English but perhaps explains the confusion in &lt;em&gt;hearing&lt;/em&gt; what she says, as it changes the emphasis. So, for the key sentences --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is nuh that turn her bitter? When you confine the sea, it don’t&#xA;  stagnate? You put milk to stand, and it nuh curdle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- my &quot;translation&quot; is something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Isna &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; that turn her bitter? When you confine the sea, don’t it&#xA;  stagnate? You put milk to stand, and don't it curdle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T10:01:28.663" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T10:01:28.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8231" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T01:39:47.183" Score="5" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a great deal of ambiguity or confusion regarding the definition of ‘literary fiction’. Particularly, it is never really made clear to me whether literary fiction can also be speculative fiction at the same time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one hand, ‘literary fiction’ is often defined or talked about in such a way that suggests it has to be based on real life (i.e.: ‘serious’ fiction). But, at the same time, I have come across some definitions that say literary fiction can be ‘cross genre’ (unlike other types of fiction). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So which is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main problem I have with a reality-based definition of literary fiction is that it seems obvious to me that speculative fiction, such as fantasy, romance, sci-fi (especially futuristic) and horror (especially psychological horror), can easily achieve and fulfill the sorts of things that ‘literary fiction’ is usually defined as fulfilling; such as a deep examination of the human condition, presenting a new philosophical outlook, beautiful prose, and so on. Even if most books in these genres don’t do this, there are many that do. Would they therefore be classified as ‘literary fiction’? Or are they excluded because they are speculative and not reality-based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4935" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T01:39:47.183" Title="Does 'literary fiction' neccessarily have to be reality-based, or can it have fantastical themes/elements?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T07:27:52.520" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The extended version is something like this: &quot;to accurately say how things are (or how the world is) is to be truly revolutionary, to say how things (or how the world) should be merely reactionary.&quot; Or &quot;to accurately see things as they really are is to be truly revolutionary...&quot; Who wrote this? I remember reading it long ago but I'm at a loss as to who wrote it. I've searched Orwell, Marx, Matthew Arnold, Wilde, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and a few others. Can't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4938" LastEditorUserId="4938" LastEditDate="2018-08-22T07:38:43.450" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T07:38:43.450" Title="What famous writer said, &quot;to accurately (or precisely) say how things are is to be truly revolutionary?&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8233" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8318" CreationDate="2018-08-22T09:37:53.393" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;Am I sick?&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I mustn't! I mustn't! I'm nervous this afternoon. &lt;strong&gt;Am I sick?&lt;/strong&gt; . . .&#xA;  Good Lord, I hope it isn't that! Not now! How people lie! How these&#xA;  stories lie! They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and&#xA;  happy when she finds that out, but—I'd hate it! I'd be scared to death!&#xA;  Some day but——Please, dear nebulous Lord, not now! Bearded sniffy&#xA;  old men sitting and demanding that we bear children. If THEY had to&#xA;  bear them——! I wish they did have to! Not now! Not till I've got hold&#xA;  of this job of liking the ash-pile out there! . . . I must shut up. I'm&#xA;  mildly insane. I'm going out for a walk. I'll see the town by myself.&#xA;  My first view of the empire I'm going to conquer!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/543/543-h/543-h.htm#link2HCH0004&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinclair Lewis, &lt;em&gt;Main Street&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carol and Kennicott, the newly married, enjoyed their honeymoon trip in Colorado mountains and now arrived at their new home in Gopher Prairie, Kennicott's hometown. But as soon as they arrived, Carol was deeply disappointed at the town's ugliness and the house's dismalness. Nevertheless, she ceaselessly tried to liven herself up, but when she looked out the window towards the ash pile at the back of the church, she finally gave way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether the expression &quot;sick&quot; here literally means that she was ill (from tiredness or whatever), or that she suffered from hyperemesis, since she was talking about bearing children in this text.&#xA;But I could not be sure whether &quot;sick&quot; could mean &quot;hyperemesis&quot; in itself, and was worried that it might be my overinterpretation, so I wanted to ask you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T18:26:57.190" Title="What does &quot;Am I sick?&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;main-street&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-22T10:48:45.803" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;fe&quot; is used three times in the Nalo Hopkinson short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shift&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When my mother who wasn’t my mother yet approach the man who wasn’t my father yet, when she ask him, “Man, you eat salt, or you eat fresh?” him did know what fe say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That was the right answer. For them that does eat fresh, them going to be fresh with your business. But this man show her that he know how fe have respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“At least me nah try fe chat like something out of some Englishman book.” I make the wind howl it back at him: “At least me remember is which boat me come off from!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, and backed by the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thedialectdictionary.com/view/search/Jamaican/1214/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dialect Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; (that I've never used before and have no idea how accurate it is), it looks like it's a Jamaican dialect word for &quot;to&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My confusion arises from the fact that this isn't used consistently for &quot;to&quot;. For instance, right after the first quote, there's this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After his tutors teach him courtly ways from since he was small. After his father teach him how to woo. After his own mother teach him how to address the Wata Lady with respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see &quot;to&quot;, as opposed to the immediately preceding &quot;fe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the reasoning behind where &quot;fe&quot; is used? Does this imply something about the state of the character at that time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:34:35.257" Title="When is &quot;fe&quot; used in Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;Shift&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8223" CreationDate="2018-08-22T13:50:51.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text occurs on this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Antigone.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; Christophe Strobbe posted at&#xA;ACT 1 332 / 384, where it is translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wonders abound in this world yet no wonder is greater than man. None!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Through the wild white of a frenzied sea and through the&#xA;  screaming northerlies beneath him and through all the furious storms&#xA;  around him, through all this, man can pass!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Gods’ most glorious Earth, the imperishable, untiring&#xA;  Earth, this man works with his horses and ploughs, year in, year out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And man traps generations of the light-minded birds in his nets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And man catches the nations of wild beasts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And herds of teeming fish, huge harvest of the sea, man catches&#xA;  in his nets made of mighty cord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So skilful is man!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4930" LastActivityDate="2018-08-22T13:50:51.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8229" CreationDate="2018-08-22T20:07:01.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tammy Griggs, the story's narrator, loves orchids: she makes a living making plant arrangements, which may include orchids, she has tattoos of orchids on her body, her apartment is like an orchid greenhouse, and, one night, she events even goes to bed with an orchid petal in her mouth (a blue orchid petal that she found by a dumpster). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also find out that she has difficulty finding the right kind of person for a relationship. One of her past lovers, Sam, &quot;smelled good&quot; but didn't stay. Since then, she has been mostly unlucky; the other men she has met &quot;just don't smell right&quot;. She places personal ads and chats people up, but without success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orchids can't attract a partner; they need to attract pollinators, typically insects, by means of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150202-three-ways-orchids-trick-insects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scents that mimic pheromones&lt;/a&gt;. One night, Tammy sees or dreams that she sees, a rat that gets attracted to one of her orchids; when it leaves her apartment, it appears to fly away on &quot;gossamer wings&quot;. There seem to be several such rats in the city, which children describe as angels. Tammy thinks that a specific orchid variety, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanilla_planifolia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vanilla planifolia&lt;/a&gt;, must have gotten seeds on a rat's fur; after germinating, these seeds &quot;put roots down into [the rat's] bloodstream&quot;, made petals that could serve as wings grow out of the rat's body, and its &quot;tendrils growing up into [the rat's] brain cells&quot; force the rat to take care of the orchid's pollination. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tammy also tells a story from India about a trick to bond a person to you: you need to cook rice for them and while the rice is boiling, &quot;you have to squat with your naked genitals over the pot.  The steam from the cooking rice will heat you up, and you’ll sweat salty crotch sweat pheromones into the pot to flavour it.&quot; The person who eats the rice will be &quot;yours forever&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that she has access to an &quot;orchid rat&quot;, the Indian story gives her an idea. She has dropped her sweat pheromones on a Vanilla planifolia orchid, so now she tattoos her contact details on the rat's ear and lets the rat climb onto it, so it gets impregnated with her sweat pheromones. Then she lets it go, like a improvised personal Cupid (cf. the angels that the children saw) that uses pheromones instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid#Cupid&amp;#39;s_arrows&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gold-tipped arrows&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way is the dog poem relevant? At the end of the story, Tammy lets the rat go with the words, &quot;go fetch!&quot;, words that are usually spoken to a dog. However, in this case the rat/dog is expected to fetch a partner instead of a stick. The stanza quoted below the story's title comes from a poem about someone who ostensibly wants to find back her dog, which has run away. However, dogs can also be used as a way of meeting other people; especially walking your dog can create many opportunities for meeting new people and possibly meeting a partner. So the end of the story &lt;strong&gt;rewrites the poem as being about a means to find a partner&lt;/strong&gt;. Asking people whether they have seen the dog is a way of meeting new people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can find several points of contrast between the stanza and the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first words: &quot;Have you seen ...&quot; versus &quot;There you are. Right on time.&quot; While the dog is not where it is expected to be, Tammy finds that the rat appears just when she needs her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;[H]e thinks&quot; versus Tammy's comment on the rat, &quot;I think the orchid made you do it&quot;: the dog owner thinks the dog has a mind of its own, while Tammy thinks the orchid controls the rat through &quot;tendrils growing up into [the rat's] brain cells&quot;. As a consequence, &quot;[n]ow [the rat] can only fetch and carry for a plant&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dog perpetrates &quot;mischief&quot; while the rat has &quot;lost the urge to destroy [the orchid]&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the &quot;go fetch!&quot; mentioned above, there is another parallel between the dog and the rat in the sense that the &quot;raggy&quot; and &quot;shaggy&quot; (to describe the dog) is mirrored in the &quot;my ugly, furry friend&quot; in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Without the attribution to Emily Lewis, the stanza would even look like something that Tammy is familiar with and that contributed to the idea of using the rat as a &quot;scent messenger&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: In the introduction or preface to the story in the collection &lt;em&gt;Falling in Love with Hominids&lt;/em&gt;, Hopkinson wrote that the story was &quot;spawned&quot; by one of the word games she played during her stay as writer-in-residence at the University of Columbia in Canada and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is [her] fantastical paean to the trials of geek dating, and to imaginatively overcoming them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T16:16:59.903" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T16:16:59.903" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8228" CreationDate="2018-08-23T07:03:03.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;(This answer is based on the Italian translation of the given book. The reliability of my answer depends, therefore, on the accuracy of the translation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, the phrase you addressed is translated as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L'Anna Karenina che lei teneva sotto il braccio era la carta d'identità falsa con la quale aveva ingannato Tomáš.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to rephrase it in my poor English, only for the sake of showing how the Italian translator wrote it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The copy of &quot;Anna Karenina&quot; that she was holding was the false identity document that fooled Tomáš.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or something similar (again, this is a poor translation!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To finally address your question, in my opinion (based, as said, on my Italian copy) the author here meant that she was deliberately bringing a copy of &quot;Anna Karenina&quot; with herself in order to make she appear, at Tomáš' eyes, different from what she was (or, at least, from what she showed up to be). In the context of the contrapositions that are fundamental in Kundera's book, she tried to appear different from what she actually was, fooling Thomáš. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4583" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T07:03:03.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15090" CreationDate="2018-08-23T08:36:31.620" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a story (possibly an anecdote or parable within a larger work, a la &lt;em&gt;The Grand Inquisitor&lt;/em&gt;) about a person who goes about their life in an intentionally unpleasant way so that they can remain aware of every moment. The example I remember was of them choosing to taking a long, boring route to a given destionation where a shorter one would have sufficed and a more scenic one would have allowed them to be distracted on the journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mentioned the story to my brother and he said it sounded familiar, but we couldn't pinpoint where from. I thought it might have been from &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt; or something by Camus, but I know my brother hasn't read the former and I've had no luck tracking it down in any of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4940" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T13:42:44.267" Title="Story about someone who inconveniences themself in order to maintain awareness of every moment of their life" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17811" CreationDate="2018-08-23T09:23:21.873" Score="6" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to track down a quote that, through a series of examples, expresses the author's desire to renounce any power they may have over someone else (possibly the reader), each followed by their wish that the reader shall reciprocate in kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure I remember one line as mentioning a whip—something along the lines of 'Where I have the whip hand over you, I shall give it up, and where you have the whip hand over me, I shall hope that you would do the same'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote may have been from a non-fiction political or philosophical work, perhaps an anarchist or libertarian text if so (judging by the nature of the quotation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4940" LastEditorUserId="4940" LastEditDate="2020-06-23T15:57:32.650" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T08:12:53.087" Title="Quote about renouncing power over another and hoping they will do the same back" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;politics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2309" CreationDate="2018-08-23T10:43:23.990" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Portia is willingly giving herself to Bassanio. She says that 'one half' of herself belongs to him, and the 'second half' (her share of herself) also belongs to him simply because she was his all along. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4942" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T10:43:23.990" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T12:58:33.803" Score="6" ViewCount="804" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've finished reading Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/shift/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shift&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and I'm baffled by the ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the protagonist's encounter with his family, and his girlfriend tells him to find out who he is, the story ends with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And she leaves you standing there. In the silence, there’s only a faint sound of whispering water and wind in the trees. You turn to look at your mother and sister. “I,” you say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Why is &quot;I&quot; relevant here? Why is he saying this now, and what does he mean by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:48:46.070" Title="What does the last line of Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;Shift&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="829" CreationDate="2018-08-23T13:33:57.323" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;People who want to read Proust's &lt;em&gt;A la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;In Search of Lost Time&lt;/em&gt; should realise that it was not conceived as a series of seven novels but as a novel in seven volumes (though originally planned as a novel in three volumes). Even though plot isn't as important as in many other novels (it's definitely not a plot-driven novel), there are good reasons for starting with the first volume and reading the other volumes in order of publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first volume already introduces many themes that will continue to be developed in the rest of the novel, for example, the narrator's view on art and aesthetics, the role of memory (including involuntary memory), the power of names (e.g. what they evoke versus what they turn out to refer to), the Dreyfuss affair, etcetera.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first volume introduces or at least mentions several characters that later become important, such as Bloch (see also the Dreyfuss affair that is also often mentioned), Palamède de Guermantes (Charlus), Elstir (see the theme of aesthetics), Gilberte Swann, Charles Swan, Odette de Crécy, Norpois and others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the novel expanded from the originally announced three volumes to seven volumes, some parts of the work that belong together got separated from each other. For example, volume 1, &lt;em&gt;Du côté de chez Swann&lt;/em&gt; ends with &quot;Noms de pays : le nom&quot;, which belongs together with the second part of &lt;em&gt;À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs&lt;/em&gt;, &quot;Noms de pays : Le pays&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even though the novel is not plot-driven, there are references back to previous events (e.g. encounters with specific characters), opinions that have changed, relationships that have changed, etcetera.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even though the novel is not plot-driven, it still follows the narrator from childhood to a riper age.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Last but not least, one should simply not miss the beginning of the first volume: &quot;Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. (...)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part that can most easily be read separately is the second part of the first volume, which has sometimes been published separately as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swann_in_Love_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Un amour de Swann&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Swann in Love&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T13:33:57.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8241" CreationDate="2018-08-23T14:08:59.643" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I already briefly mentioned this in my &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8205/2191&quot;&gt;response about the pronouns in &quot;Shift&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but there a few things I can add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story's last lines are spoken by Caliban, who has so far always referred to himself using the pronouns &quot;you&quot; and &quot;your&quot;. Since he seemed incapable of saying &quot;I&quot;, he could not say &quot;we&quot;, either. According to my interpretation, this use of pronouns reflected Caliban's efforts to adopt Western culture, which led a loss of his roots and identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, Caliban's mother Sycorax appears and transforms him. At the end of the process, Caliban &quot;stand[s] rooted&quot; again. This is reflected him using the pronoun &quot;I&quot; for the first time. (At the same time, he looks at his mother and sister, while previously, he had tried to avoid or get away from them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some irony in the fact that this use of &quot;I&quot; is still embedded in a sentence in which Caliban uses &quot;you&quot; to refer to himself. Based on my explanation, one might have expected something like,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I,&quot; I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the last &quot;you&quot; implies is left open. One explanation could be that Sycorax was incapable of restoring Caliban's original identity; the Western influence on or &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; Caliban cannot be uprooted. From the point of view of cultural identity or postcolonial identity, this might imply that returning to the state from before colonialism is not the way to go. Another explanation may be that Sycorax's transformation has worked but that extra effort from Caliban's side is required to complete the process. The mixture of &quot;I&quot; and &quot;you&quot; in the last sentence then represents his first halting step on the way to a new (postcolonial) identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T14:08:59.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8247" CreationDate="2018-08-23T14:43:31.010" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light&quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The other girls in her dormitory marveled at the slightness of her&#xA;  body when they saw her in sheer negligee, or darting out wet from&#xA;  a shower-bath. She seemed then but half as large as they had supposed;&#xA;  a fragile child who must be cloaked with understanding kindness.&#xA;  “Psychic,” the girls whispered, and “spiritual.” Yet so radioactive&#xA;  were her nerves, so adventurous her trust in &lt;strong&gt;rather vaguely conceived&#xA;  sweetness and light&lt;/strong&gt;, that she was more energetic than any of the&#xA;  hulking young women who, with calves bulging in heavy-ribbed woolen&#xA;  stockings beneath decorous blue serge bloomers, thuddingly galloped&#xA;  across the floor of the “gym” in practise for the Blodgett Ladies'&#xA;  Basket-Ball Team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/543/543-h/543-h.htm#link2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinclair Lewis, &lt;em&gt;Main Street&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carol, a student at Blodgett College, had a very slight and thin body. So her friends regarded her as a fragile child, but she was more adventurous than any active young women in her college. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what &quot;rather vaguely conceived&quot; means in particular.&#xA;Does it mean that &quot;sweetness and light&quot; was vaguely expressed?&#xA;And what is &quot;sweetness and light&quot; that was vaguely conceived?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:48:29.967" Title="What does &quot;rather vaguely conceived sweetness and light&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;main-street&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8245" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8246" CreationDate="2018-08-23T14:54:38.850" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;whose shadows were all about her&amp;quot; modifies in this sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ON a hill by the Mississippi where Chippewas camped two generations&#xA;ago, a girl stood in relief against the cornflower blue of Northern&#xA;sky. She saw no Indians now; she saw flour-mills and the blinking&#xA;windows of skyscrapers in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Nor was she&#xA;thinking of squaws and portages, and the Yankee fur-traders &lt;strong&gt;whose&#xA;shadows were all about her&lt;/strong&gt;. She was meditating upon walnut fudge, the&#xA;plays of Brieux, the reasons why heels run over, and the fact that the&#xA;chemistry instructor had stared at the new coiffure which concealed&#xA;her ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/543/543-h/543-h.htm#link2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinclair Lewis, &lt;em&gt;Main Street&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carol fled from her college for an hour and was standing on the hilltop, meditating upon walnut fudge and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not be sure whether &amp;quot;whose shadows were all about her&amp;quot; modifies only &amp;quot;the Yankee fur-traders,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;squaws and portages and the Yankee fur-traders&amp;quot; altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I thought the former was the case, because the squaws and portages and the Yankee fur-traders were separated by a comma; but as I examined the text, squaws and portages also seemed to be capable of leaving shadows about her, so I became confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the expression &amp;quot;shadows,&amp;quot; would it be alright to interpret it that the past existences left traces, or footprints, all about her, who was standing on the hilltop today?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-31T02:24:12.017" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T02:24:12.017" Title="What does &quot;whose shadows were all about her&quot; modify in this text?" Tags="&lt;sinclair-lewis&gt;&lt;main-street&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8245" CreationDate="2018-08-23T15:46:21.843" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shadows&lt;/strong&gt; is modifying only the Yankee fur-traders, as you first thought. The comma makes this clear. The sentence would have worked without it, so it's only there to make this division. As for your second question, as the paragraph dwells on the past, I think that's a very reasonable interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:46:21.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8244" CreationDate="2018-08-23T15:48:29.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Carol trusts in the fundamental goodness of the world, without quite knowing what it is (&quot;vaguely conceived&quot;), and this emboldens her to be more adventurous than the other girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Sweetness and light&quot; is an expression referring to the good and positive things in a culture. It came from Jonathan Swift's parable of the spider and the bee (bees make sweet honey and wax for candles). Matthew Arnold popularised it as a metaphor for what is important in a culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:48:29.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8241" CreationDate="2018-08-23T15:48:46.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This utterance is significant because it marks what could be a turning point in Caliban's life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up till now, he's been seeking out the women he thinks will change him, because &lt;strong&gt;he &lt;em&gt;wants&lt;/em&gt; them to turn him into whatever they want him to be.&lt;/strong&gt; (As has been discussed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8192/17&quot;&gt;other answers&lt;/a&gt; already, this represents Caliban's desire to be part of 'white' society, to leave his island roots behind and become whatever the &quot;golden girls&quot; want him to be.) We see this from the very start of the story, when he tries to get his current girlfriend to kiss him and ask him to be her frog, up until near the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You risk a glance at the woman you’ve dragged into this, the golden girl. She’s standing now, a look of interest and curiosity on her face. “This is all your fault,” you say to her. “If you had kissed me, told me what you wanted me to be, she and Ariel couldn’t have found us.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And you,” says Sycorax, pointing at you with a suckered tentacle, “you need to stop bringing me the fallouts from your sorry love life.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I can’t help it, Mama,” you say. “That’s how women see me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after this exchange, Caliban's mother Sycorax loses her temper and begins to transform him into the way &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; sees him: a little boy. This is the opposite of what he wants: he's seeking to leave behind his roots (and by extension his family, whom he seems to avoid as much as possible).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when his girlfriend steps in and begins to change him, but it doesn't go exactly as he'd hoped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First she turns him into a sunflower, which seems to be more along the lines of what his girlfriends usually do to him. He &quot;stand[s] rooted, waiting for her direction&quot; - once again, looking to the white woman to tell him what to be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then she turns him into a baby waiting for his mother. This isn't the treatment he normally gets from his girlfriends (perhaps because none of the previous ones had met his family before?) - his reaction this time is &quot;Oh, please, end this&quot;. This girl isn't what he expected: she's made of tougher stuff, able to stand up to his family and even to sympathise with his mother.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Next she turns him into a man again, sexually aroused and reaching for her. He's back into familiar territory now: &quot;So familiar, the change that wreaks on you.&quot; But the final change is yet to come.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all this, she asks him the question which, it seems, none of his &quot;golden girls&quot; has ever asked before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Who do you think you are?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caliban is shocked. He looks to &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; for an answer, but her eyes are blank: she doesn't see him as anything any more; &lt;strong&gt;she wants to know what &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; sees himself as.&lt;/strong&gt; This is, in some sense, a level of respect he's not used to. When he's been with white women before, they've always transformed him into whatever &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; want him to be. This one wants him to be himself. In fact, her parting remarks &lt;em&gt;force&lt;/em&gt; him to be himself if he wants to see her again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She looks at you, and her eyes are empty, open, friendly. You don’t know what to make of them. “Um,” she says, “maybe you can give me a call sometime.” She starts walking away. Turns back. “It’s not a brush-off; I mean it. But only call when you can tell me who you really are. Who you think you’re going to become.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When white women look at him, he's used to seeing &lt;em&gt;their&lt;/em&gt; idea of what he's like, and changing himself to adapt to it - whether that's the racial stereotype seen by Miranda long ago, or the dehumanising frogs and dogs whose offspring he's brought to his mother. Now, he's found one who respects him enough to let him be himself ... if he can figure out who that really is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story leaves open the question of what he actually does after that. Maybe he's about to embark on a journey of self-discovery, reclaim his identity and self-respect, and find the girl again. His use of the word &quot;I&quot;, when he's always been a second-person narrator, gives us hope for this outcome. But the story ends there, letting us exercise our own imaginations to speculate about what happens next.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;This personal story of a man and a family reacting to the effects of colonialism could also be interpreted as an allegory for post-colonialism itself. &lt;em&gt;(Disclaimer: this is a topic I don't know much about. I'm trying my best, but if I say something wrong or insensitive, no offence is intended. Please set me right if I'm grossly out of line due to ignorance.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jamaica, and many other countries in the world, have experienced colonial rule: they started off inhabited by indigenous peoples with their own cultures; then European colonists arrived and suppressed that culture with theirs; finally the countries became independent, but still needed time to find their feet and define themselves. I don't know about Jamaica specifically, but in many places the original native culture has been so suppressed by colonists that it's hard to reconstruct in the post-colonial era. Perhaps Caliban represents those who cling to the colonial way of life, while his mother and sister represent those who prefer the old ways. The final sentence of the story indicates a third possibility: &lt;strong&gt;to redefine the culture in a new way, acknowledging their colonial history without being defined by it.&lt;/strong&gt; It's possible for a black island man to be together with a white woman without being defined by her perception of him. It's possible for him to be true to himself without betraying his roots &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; despising the descendants of the colonial oppressors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T15:48:46.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8225" CreationDate="2018-08-23T17:13:06.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Porridge, and the cooking of oats, is a theme that runs through the story, so this reference to porridge does not come from out of nowhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did we learn from your research? That porridge is a thick dish, sometimes sweet, sometimes with more complex additions to make it savory. Gruel, on the other hand, is thin, watery (another ongoing theme), simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in this simpler time, when they called porridge &quot;gruel&quot;, you were &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lord of the land and the veins of water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you had an easy life, you could afford to be gracious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4947" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T17:13:06.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1934" CreationDate="2018-08-23T18:15:43.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had the thought that he was a sort of antithesis to Count Dracula: both dislike the idea of dying, but one of them accepts it as inevitable and the other doesn't. Kind of like how Renfield and Dracula both survive by devouring the life of beings weaker than them; Stoker used humans to show how Dracula has human-like characteristics, but is himself not a human. With the topics raised, and similar themes linked to those topics, the purpose of Swales is to act as Dracula's character foil alongside Renfield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm only on chapter 7 though, so take everything I say with a grain of salt (if this is still useful, if not just ignore it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But I'm content, for [the Angel of Death is] comin' for me.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Mr Swales, page 83&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;[…]what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can[…]&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Dr Seward on Renfield, page 80&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user4948" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-23T18:34:59.797" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:34:59.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8251" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T18:39:41.707" Score="2" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nalo Hopkinson's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/cant-beat-em/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Can’t Beat ‘Em&lt;/a&gt;, people try to deal with a sort of &quot;sink throat monster&quot; that one of the characters calls &quot;glups&quot;.&#xA;While reading the story a second time, I gained the impression that the story has a higher-than-usual percentage of words containing the &lt;code&gt;/ʌ/&lt;/code&gt; sound preceded by an &quot;l&quot; or &quot;m&quot; and followed by an &quot;l&quot;, &quot;m&quot;, &quot;p&quot; or &quot;g&quot;.&#xA;(The IPA symbol &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ʌ/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; represents the vowel that you find in words such as &quot;gut&quot; and &quot;dull&quot;.)&#xA;Examples include &quot;glup&quot; (obviously repeated several times), &quot;slug&quot;, &quot;glugging&quot;, &quot;slugged&quot;, &quot;mug&quot; and &quot;glumly&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of other words come close enough, e.g. &quot;slung&quot; and &quot;pulsed&quot;, however, if I broaden the category too much, the question becomes meaningless, since the syllable structure &lt;code&gt;consonant(s) + /ʌ/ + consonant(s)&lt;/code&gt; is not unusual.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is whether this syllable structured is indeed unusually frequent here (so far, I've only compared this story with Hopkinson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/ally/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ally&lt;/a&gt;, where this syllable structure is less frequent) and what it might mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T18:39:41.707" Title="Meaning of the /ʌ/ sounds in Nalo Hopkinson's story Can’t Beat ‘Em" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T19:08:08.233" Score="6" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;As soon as I started reading Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2017/12/the-reverse-cheshire-cat/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available to read online&lt;/a&gt;), the name &quot;Loyola&quot; jumped out at me. Surely this must be a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignatius_of_Loyola&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ignatius of Loyola&lt;/a&gt;, a Catholic saint and the founder of the Jesuit order. There are a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyola&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lot of things&lt;/a&gt; called Loyola in the world, but I'd wager nearly all of those were named after him, mostly by Jesuits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's the relevance of Ignatius of Loyola to this short story? Why name the main character after him? I don't get the connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-23T19:08:08.233" Title="What's the significance of the name Loyola?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-23T19:54:39.190" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the short stories in my elementary school reading book (late 50s or early 60s) was about a young boy who was unhappy in his home and family. He constantly fantasized about his &quot;real parents&quot; coming to get him and take him away from his ordinary life. I've searched and searched for the story, thinking it was named something like &quot;All the Duke's Children,&quot; but that always takes me down rabbit trails not related to the story I'm thinking of. I do know that sometimes a short story in a reading book was really a selection taken from a larger work and given an arbitrary title, so I may not be able to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="EasyReader" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T09:58:52.120" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T09:58:52.120" Title="Short story read c. 1960: boy unhappy with his family, dreams of being picked up by his &quot;real parents&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T07:17:48.547" Score="4" ViewCount="1894" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several songs mention pink carnations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C_RWToGrCw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A White Sport Coat (and a Pink Carnation)&quot; by Marty Robbins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A white sport coat and a pink carnation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm all dressed up for the dance&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A white sport coat and a pink carnation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm all alone in romance  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A white sport coat and a pink carnation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm in a blue blue mood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RciM7P9K3FA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;American Pie&quot; by Don McLean&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was a lonely teenage broncin' buck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a pink carnation and a pickup truck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I knew I was out of luck&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The day the music died  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs-s0_yGpyg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Machine Gun Blues&quot; by Social Distortion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I just left your town, took all your loot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  bought a pink carnation and a pinstripe suit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a hopped-up V8 Ford and some two-tone shoes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Language of Flowers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flowers&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plants&lt;/a&gt; in general, are known to have symbolic meaning.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_symbolism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, carnations in general mean &quot;fascination; distinction; love&quot; while pink carnations mean &quot;a woman's love, a mother's love&quot;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Other sources on the Internet have pink carnations meaning gratitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What do the pink carnations mean in these songs?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do they have the same meaning? Are any of the later songs inspired by an earlier song? Is there another reason for the pink carnations besides their possible symbolism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/q/5372/137&quot;&gt;I've asked this question over on the Music Fans Stack&lt;/a&gt;, but didn't get a satisfactory answer. So I'm giving it a shot over here.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T15:40:29.620" Title="What's the meaning of a pink carnation, as mentioned in these songs?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T07:49:38.330" Score="7" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot; is obviously making a reference to Lewis Carroll's &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;, with the Cheshire Cat. The two protagonists enter a shop named &quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The weather-blasted chipboard sign over the diner read “The Reverse Cheshire Cat.” The barely visible image showed an alarmed-looking cat clinging upside down from — was that a surveillance camera pole? Prof chuckled. “Bet there’s a story there.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; time in the story the name is mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is &lt;em&gt;Alice in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; being referenced here -  and specifically, the Cheshire Cat - and why is this single mention important enough that it made its way to the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T19:00:24.787" Title="What's with the reference to &quot;Alice in Wonderland&quot; in Nalo Hopkinson's &quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-24T09:55:56.687" Score="4" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the end of &lt;em&gt;Le Côté de Guermantes&lt;/em&gt;, the third volume of Proust's &lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt;, comes back from a visit to baron de Charlus and finds a letter by a young footman to a friend lying on the table. He assumes that the footman has forgotten it there before retiring to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator has spent the entire book (i.e. &lt;em&gt;Le Côté de Guermantes&lt;/em&gt;) talking about his encounters with the upper classes and the nobility (Madame de Villeparisis, Saint-Loup, Madame de Guermantes, Charlus, etcetera), and about the thoughts that these encounters triggered in him. He has shown little interest in servants and the lower classes in general; Françoise is still present, but plays a much smaller role than in the first two volumes; Jupien is introduced in the beginning of the novel but does not become important (and always remains a secondary character) until &lt;em&gt;Sodome et Gomorrhe&lt;/em&gt;. So why does Proust makes his narrator read the footman's letter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Proust's work is now in the public domain, one can find the text of the letter online, for example on &lt;a href=&quot;http://alarecherchedutempsperdu.com/marcelproust/262&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ALaRechercheDuTempsPerdu.com&lt;/a&gt; and on Wikisource. Wikisource provides a scan and the text of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AProust_-_%C3%80_la_recherche_du_temps_perdu_%C3%A9dition_1919_tome_8.djvu/225&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 223&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Proust_-_%C3%80_la_recherche_du_temps_perdu_%C3%A9dition_1919_tome_8.djvu/226&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 224&lt;/a&gt; of the 1919 edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Guermantes Way&lt;/em&gt; (1925), the translation by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Scott_Moncrieff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. K. Scott Moncrieff&lt;/a&gt; (1889 – 1930), is now in the public domain and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96g/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;In that translation, the letter goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Friend and Cousin,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this finds you in good health, and the same with all the young folk, particularly my young godson Joseph whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting but whom I prefer to you all as being my godson, these relics of the heart they have their dust also, upon their blest remains let us not lay our hands. Besides dear friend and cousin who can say that to-morrow you and your dear wife my cousin Marie, will not both of you be cast headlong down into the bottom of the sea, like the sailor clinging to the mast on high, for this life is but a dark valley. Dear friend I must tell you that my principal occupation, which will astonish you I am certain, is now poetry which I love passionately, for one must somehow pass the time away. And so dear friend do not be too surprised if I have not answered your last letter before now, in place of pardon let oblivion come. As you are aware, Madame’s mother has passed away amid unspeakable sufferings which fairly exhausted her as she saw as many as three doctors. The day of her interment was a great day for all Monsieur’s relations came in crowds as well as several Ministers. It took them more than two hours to get to the cemetery, which will make you all open your eyes pretty wide in your village for they certainly won’t do as much for mother Michu. So all my life to come can be but one long sob. I am amusing myself enormously with the motorcycle of which I have recently learned. What would you say, my dear friends, if I arrived suddenly like that at full speed at Les Ecorces. But on that head I shall no more keep silence for I feel that the frenzy of grief sweeps its reason away. I am associating with the Duchesse de Guermantes, people whose very names you have never heard in our ignorant villages. Therefore it is with pleasure that I am going to send the works of Racine, of Victor Hugo, of Pages Choisies de Chenedolle, of Alfred de Musset, for I would cure the land in which I saw the light of ignorance which leads unerringly to crime. I can think of nothing more to say to you and send you like the pelican wearied by a long flight my best regards as well as to your wife my godson and your sister Rose. May it never be said of her: And Rose she lived only as live the roses, as has been said by Victor Hugo, the sonnet of Arvers, Alfred de Musset, all those great geniuses who for that cause have had to die upon the blazing scaffold like Jeanne d’Arc. Hoping for your next letter soon, receive my kisses like those of a brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Périgot (Joseph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reading this letter in an English translation won't be sufficient to find the answer to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T15:13:06.057" Title="Why does the narrator quote a letter by a young footman near the end of Le Côté de Guermantes?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;marcel-proust&gt;&lt;in-search-of-lost-time&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6631" CreationDate="2018-08-24T13:46:19.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The framing story of 1001 nights allows the number of nights to be nowhere close to the number of stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, one story would last for 3 or more nights due to the introduction of so called Red Herrings. Shaharazad would start a story one night, then in that story a character would tell a story to a different character as a way of teaching him some lesson, and that story within a story would end in the middle, on a cliffhanger. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then she would continue the story within a story and end it as a lesson to a character, then continue the original story, which would end on a cliffhanger. Once she finished that story she would return to a minor character of that or a previous story within a story and start a new story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of stories and the number of nights doesn't even have to be close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There once was a prince named A who had a mischievous nature. He would often get bored and his servant named C would try to find a way to keep him amused. They had many funny adventures together. For example, one time &lt;em&gt;(long story ending on a cliffhanger. Next night that story is over)&lt;/em&gt;... The father of prince A, a sultan named B, often despaired about A's fate. B worried that A wouldn't be his worthy successor and that the kingdom would come to ruin once A became sultan. He had reason to worry because of the way B became sultan. Many years ago... &lt;em&gt;(long story of how B became sultan, the night ending on a cliffhanger in the middle of that story)&lt;/em&gt;... So, to prove that his son A would be a good ruler, Sultan B sent him on a quest &lt;em&gt;(long story of a quest)&lt;/em&gt;. During that quest A and C had to take a sleep in an inn. &lt;em&gt;(Long description and story of how the innkeeper got his fortune and why he made an inn at that exact place)&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;  To amuse his prince A and the other patrons, servant C told them a funny story &lt;em&gt;(servant's story)&lt;/em&gt; then they continued on the quest... And so on and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's just one story, stretched on 20 nights, with dozen of smaller stories contained in it! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-24T15:04:23.027" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T15:04:23.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3128" CreationDate="2018-08-24T17:28:29.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a detailed listing of the Library of Congress's classification numbers and their descriptors, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/aba/publications/FreeLCC/freelcc.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress Classification PDF Files&lt;/a&gt;, last updated in February 2018.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Library of Congress Classification system, the range &lt;strong&gt;PN6700-6790&lt;/strong&gt; is assigned to &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Comic books, strips, etc.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Inside that range, the subrange &lt;strong&gt;6725-6728&lt;/strong&gt; is for &lt;strong&gt;&quot;United States&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I assume they put &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2012027187&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The sandman. Vol. 1, Preludes &amp;amp; nocturnes / Neil Gaiman, writer (...). New York : DC Comics, c2010.&lt;/a&gt; because it's a comic published in the United States, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Kieth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sam Kieth&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_Jones_III&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malcolm Jones III&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Klein&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Todd Klein&lt;/a&gt; are/were an American artists, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Dringenberg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mike Dringenberg&lt;/a&gt; appears to be working in the USA. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2006273750&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;American Gods&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, by contrast, is a novel published by an English author and classified at PR6057.A319 A84 2004. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says the novel was first published in 2001; the Library of Congress (LoC) owns a reprint from 2004. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gaiman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neil Gaiman&lt;/a&gt; was born in 1960. The range &lt;strong&gt;PR6000-6049&lt;/strong&gt; is for English literature &quot;1900-1960&quot;, the range &lt;strong&gt;PR6050-6076&lt;/strong&gt; (where they put the novel) is for English literature &quot;1961-2000&quot; and the range &lt;strong&gt;PR6100-6126&lt;/strong&gt; is for &quot;2001-&quot;. The novel is in the range PR6050-6076 because the &quot;[p]eriods reflect the time period during which the author was productive – not when he/she was born&quot; (quoted from &lt;em&gt;Fundamentals of LC Classification: Instructor Manual&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why comics are under PN and not under PR, that is not so clear. However, the &lt;em&gt;Fundamentals of LC Classification: Instructor Manual&lt;/em&gt; (downloadable from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loc.gov/catworkshop/courses/fundamentalslcc/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Catalogers Learning Workshop page&lt;/a&gt;), says that the LCC is &quot;too large for an individual to fully master&quot; and that &quot;parts of its organization still reflect 19th/early 20th century worldview&quot;. In addition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; points out that, &quot;LCC has been criticized for lacking a sound theoretical basis; many of the classification decisions were driven by the practical needs of that library rather than epistemological considerations.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others have also pointed out that classification is not always based on logic. See, e.g. the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/45109-whaddaya-got-finding-graphic-novels-in-an-academic-library.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Whaddaya Got?' Finding Graphic Novels in an Academic Library&lt;/a&gt; by librarian Karen Green: &quot;(...) The Library of Congress has three separate approaches for classifying graphic novels and comics. (...)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T19:18:21.170" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T19:18:21.170" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8255" CreationDate="2018-08-24T17:56:29.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on another of her short stories, &quot;Ally&quot;, we get some insight in Hopkinson's use of the &quot;Cheshire Cat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unlike the Cheshire Cat’s, his smile became a little more real as he&#xA;  quoted back: “‘There’s no use trying. One can’t believe impossible&#xA;  things.’” His smiled cracked. “Maybe it was just the stress. Of&#xA;  everything. Of Iqbal . . .”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (smile of) the Cheshire cat is less real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot;, it appears that many customers of the &#xA;&quot;The Reverse Cheshire Cat&quot; are, like the Cheshire Cat, mostly invisible, at least around cameras (possibly because of the &quot;camera rays&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Camera rays started making people sick. So sick they went away.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prof said, “They died?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The woman shook her head. “They’re in a better place.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Cameras don’t have rays,” Loyola scoffed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You don’t know nothing. The better place is right here, only cameras&#xA;  make it invisible. Friendlier place.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This Cheshire-like invisibility is not less real, rather the reverse, it is more real, a &quot;friendlier place&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T17:56:29.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8181" CreationDate="2018-08-24T20:06:11.553" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I posted my question, I assumed that there would be some diaries by 16th-century authors of fiction, but I have not found anything that fits these criteria so far. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In France, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_d&amp;#39;un_bourgeois_de_Paris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journal d'un bourgeois de Paris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a sort of chronicle or diary by an anonymous Parisian written between 1405 and 1449. &#xA;In Italy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luca_Landucci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luca Landucci (1436–1516)&lt;/a&gt; kept a diary that is an important source of information on daily life in Florence, but he was an apothecary, not an author. &#xA;In England, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dee#Personal_life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dee (1527 – 1608 or 1609)&lt;/a&gt; kept a sporadic diary in the years 1577 to 1601, but he was not an author of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_intime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;journal&lt;/a&gt; lists examples of diaries, starting in the seventeenth century. The earliest European author listed there is the French novelist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas-Edme_R%C3%A9tif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rétif de la Bretonne&lt;/a&gt; (1734 – 1806). The English Wikipedia article does not mention his diary; the Société Rétif de la Bretonne has a &lt;a href=&quot;http://retifdelabretonne.net/editions-de-retif-de-loeuvre-de-la-bretonne-anterieures-a-2012-bibliographie-non-exhaustive/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of the author's publications&lt;/a&gt; that shows that the diary (&quot;journal intime&quot;) coverin the years 1780 – 1787 was published as &lt;em&gt;Mes inscriptions&lt;/em&gt; in 1889. (The original cover actually used the spelling &lt;a href=&quot;https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23319141M/Mes_inscripcions_journal_intime_1780-1847.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mes inscripcions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 – 1832) kept a diary that started in 1775; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Tageb%C3%BCcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Tagebücher&lt;/a&gt; on Zeno.org.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._T._A._Hoffmann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. T. A. Hoffmann&lt;/a&gt; (1776 – 1822) also kept a diary, apparently starting in 1803.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-24T20:06:11.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8683" CreationDate="2018-08-24T21:06:16.040" Score="5" ViewCount="1794" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sexual child abuse features centrally in &lt;em&gt;Gravity’s Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;. While the sexual abuse of children is certainly a valid topic for a novel, I have become more and more disturbed by Pynchon's handling of Slothrop and Bianca. While I can justify the centrally themed child abuse in &lt;em&gt;Lolita&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, I am less sure about &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slothrop was sexually abused as a child by Laszlo Jamf, as part of an experiment involving inducing erections in the kid. It turns out that Slothrop's father had &quot;sold&quot; him, for Jamf's experiments, to pay for Slothrop's education. The entire novel is in essence Slothrop's response to this childhood horror and it's consequences. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Franz Pökler, at the  Zwölfkinder,   fantasizes incest with his daughter  Ilse, who is permited annual summertime visits, although Franz doubts the girl who visits is really is Ilse. Instead of acting on the fantasy, he becomes &quot;Ilse&quot;'s &quot;father&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that there is no problem with Pynchon's handling of these first two examples. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then there is Bianca! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slothrop meets Greta Erdmann, the actress, who is looking for her lost daughter, Bianca. They head for Swinemünde, where  Bianca is supposedly on a boat. The Anubis arrives and Greta and Slothrop board, where they find an giant orgy. Slothrop and Greta participate. Slothrop catches sight of Bianca, who is eleven or twelve, &quot;a knockout.&quot; Mother (Greta) and daughter (Bianca) then perform a public S/M act, with the mother fairly brutally slapping the little girl’s bottom, which Bianca seems to enjoy. Slothrop dreams about Llandudno, &quot;where Lewis Carroll wrote that Alice in Wonderland.&quot; Bianca appears at his bedside, ready and willing. They have sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All very titillating and unreflective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After sex, she asks him to escape with her: &quot;I'm a child, I know how to hide. I can hide you too.&quot; Slothrop leaves without her and Bianca is lost again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only possible reflection demanded for our participation, is that later, Slothrop, when listening to Margherita's story, is overcome by nausea, but it is not even clear at what.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reader to make of Slothrop and Bianca? What is the purpose/meaning/role behind Slothrop and Bianca? Or is this an example of Pynchon's  &quot;proto-fascism&quot;, as he describes some&#xA;of his writings in &lt;em&gt;Slow Learner&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T17:58:25.343" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T19:05:44.540" Title="What’s up with Slothrop the paedophile?" Tags="&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;&lt;gravitys-rainbow&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-25T13:23:40.190" Score="7" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book of the Colombian novelist García Márquez &lt;em&gt;Love in the Time of Cholera&lt;/em&gt; there is the following phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She said: “Not even Jonah’s wife would swallow that story.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find some information about Jonah's wife online but couldn't find anything. Could anybody please help me interpret this sentence? What is so special about his wife? Does the use of the verb &lt;em&gt;swallow&lt;/em&gt; have anything to do with the fish that swallowed Jonah?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4958" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T06:50:13.333" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T06:50:13.333" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Not even Jonah’s wife would swallow that story&quot; in Marquez's &quot;Love in the Time of Cholera&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;gabriel-garcia-marquez&gt;&lt;love-in-the-time-of-cholera&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8262" CreationDate="2018-08-25T14:35:34.997" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does the use of the verb swallow have anything to do with the fish that swallowed Jonah?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exactly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jonah's wife had to &quot;swallow&quot; (accept) the ridiculous story &lt;em&gt;(as an explanation for his disappearance for a few days)&lt;/em&gt; that Jonah had been swallowed by a whale and survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;she&quot; is talking about a story that is so ridiculous that not even Jonah's wife would believe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Márquez is playing with the word &quot;swallow&quot;, linking Jonah's wife's acceptance (swallow the truth) with Jonah's alleged swallowing by a whale. It is  humorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2018-08-25T19:16:18.670" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T19:16:18.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2374" CreationDate="2018-08-25T18:46:09.910" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster's definition of &quot;ode&quot; is not very useful for determining whether a specific poem is an ode: the definition is too vague and it ignores the genre's history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Oxford Companion to English Literature&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Margaret Drabble (revised edition, Oxford University Press, 1995) gives the following definition of &quot;ode&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in ancient literature, a poem intended or adapted to be sung; in modern use, a rhymed (rarely unrhymed) lyric, often in the form of an addres, generally dignified or exalted in subject, feeling, and style, but sometimes (in earlier use) simple and familiar (though less so than a song) [OED].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is still vague, since it defines a poetic genre that can be rhymed or unrhymed, we learn nothing about its length, structure or metre, and it is not clear what &quot;modern&quot; and &quot;earlier use&quot; refer to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Ian Ousby (Cambridge University Press, 1993, 1996) provides the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A lyric poem in rhymed stanzas, generally in the form of an address and exalted in feeling and expression. Famous examples indlude Keats's &quot;To a Nighthingale&quot; and &quot;On a Grecian Urn&quot; and Wordsworth's &quot;Intimations of Immortallity from Recollections of Early Childhood&quot;. The Pindaric ode takes its name from the Greek poet Pindar (522-442 BC) whose work, designed to honour victors in the Greek games, used an elaborate stanzaic pattern of strophe, antistrophe and epode. Abraham Cowley introduced it into English, though he and successors like Dryden and Pope loosened the stanzaic pattern while keeping the poem's public function. Tennyson's &quot;Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington&quot; is a fine late example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About Pindar's &quot;elaborate stanzaic pattern of strophe, antistrophe and epode&quot;, &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Companion to English Literature&lt;/em&gt;'s entry on Pindar tells us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He used a framework of strophe, antistrophe, and epode which his imitators sought to copy, but in Pindar this framework rested on an elaborate prosodic structure that remained unknown until it was worked out by August Boeckh in his edition of the Odes (1811). The 17th- and 18th-cent. writers of Pindarics–Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Gray–employed a much looser prosodic system, so that their odes, although elevated and rich in metaphor, lacked Pindar's architectural quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Cowley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abraham Cowley&lt;/a&gt; (1618 – 1667) published his &lt;em&gt;Pindarique Odes&lt;/em&gt; in 1656. He did not understand the structure and metre of Pindar's Odes; his own &quot;odes&quot; use iambic lines of irregular length and an irregular rhyme scheme (if &quot;scheme&quot; is the right word). See for example the first part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ode_Upon_Liberty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode Upon Liberty&lt;/a&gt;, where the lines vary between three and five iambs in lenght, and the first four lines don't rhyme at all, followed by lines that rhyme in pairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the looseness of these so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindarics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pindarics&lt;/a&gt; appealed to a number of later poets, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dryden&lt;/a&gt; (1631 – 1700) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Pope&lt;/a&gt; (1688 – 1744). One of Pope's most frequently anthologised poems is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_on_Solitude&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on Solitude&lt;/a&gt;, written at the age of 12, which uses an A B A B rhyme scheme for each quatrain; the number of feet in the lines follow the pattern 4, 4, 4, 2. However, the poem is inspired by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horatian theme&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;beatus ille&lt;/em&gt; (happy man); see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/ep.shtml#II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horace's Second Epode&lt;/a&gt;. This poem was not the first English ode inspired by Horace: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Marvell&lt;/a&gt; composed a political address entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44683/an-horatian-ode-upon-cromwells-return-from-ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in 1650. Other 18th-century odes include &quot;The Day of Judgement: An Ode&quot; by Isaac Watts (1706), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/swift/poems-of-swift/83/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ode on the Day of Judgement&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Jonathan Swift (circa 1732), &quot;Ode: Rule, Britannia!&quot; by James Thomson (1740), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44003/ode-to-evening&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ode to Evening&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by William Collins (1746) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44298/the-bard-a-pindaric-ode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Bard: A Pindaric Ode&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas Gray (1757).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time the Romantics started writing odes, its form was already ambiguous: either based on the pindarics (rather than on Pindar's odes) or on Horace. Before Keats wrote his first odes (1815: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.john-keats.com/gedichte/ode_to_apollo.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ode to Apollo&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), Coleridge had already written &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43973/dejection-an-ode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dejection: An Ode&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (first version 1802), and Wordsworth &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1807). Especially Wordsworth's &quot;Immortality Ode&quot; has a very irregular line length. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode:_Intimations_of_Immortality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; insists on calling it a &quot;Pindaric ode&quot;, which is misleading for the reasons mentioned in the paragraph about Cowley, above.) Later, Shelley's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45134/ode-to-the-west-wind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ode to the West Wind&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1819) would use the terza rima, famous from Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes &quot;Ode on Melancholy&quot; an ode is that it takes the form of an address (&quot;No, no, go not to Lethe&quot;), its rhymes (although the rhyme scheme is not entirely regular) and its iambic lines. Note that the title uses the preposition &quot;on&quot; instead of &quot;to&quot;. Some other Romantic odes, including Keats's own &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;To Autumn&quot;&lt;/a&gt; addresses a personified autumn as if addressing a god/goddess or supernatural being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-25T18:46:09.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8280" CreationDate="2018-08-26T02:42:27.707" Score="5" ViewCount="987" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand that Syme was vaporised because he overthought the concept of the newspeak, but would he have regretted being an avid follower of Big Brother and destroyer of language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4961" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T00:07:14.520" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T02:25:01.627" Title="What might Syme have been thinking when he was captured?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T03:47:32.060" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having only read the only “nonfiction“ book of the series: how exactly do the various species go around uplifting their client races anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T18:19:32.740" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T18:19:32.740" Title="How exactly do the various Uplift species go around uplifting their client races?" Tags="&lt;david-brin&gt;&lt;uplift-universe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4115" CreationDate="2018-08-26T11:30:43.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are two parts to this question: the meaning of &quot;between us there was ... the bond of the sea&quot;, and the significance of the interposed clause &quot;as I have already said somewhere&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel is a frame story, in which the unidentified first-person narrator describes being with four friends, plus &quot;the Director of Companies&quot; as their host and captain, aboard a sailboat anchored on the River Thames. This serves as the frame for one of the friends, Charles Marlow, to tell of his journey to the heart of the Belgian Congo and his experiences there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first issue - &lt;strong&gt;the bond between the four friends&lt;/strong&gt; - is easily explained. In my annotated edition by Penguin (2007), Owen Knowles notes that these friends were George Fountaine Weare Hope (a company director, and the owner of the yacht &lt;em&gt;Nellie&lt;/em&gt;), Edward Gardner Mears (a meat salesman), and William Brock Keen (an accountant). Apart from Keen, they were all ex-seamen and had sailed on the &lt;em&gt;Duke of Sutherland&lt;/em&gt;. There are many reverent references in the opening pages to seamen and the sea-faring life - i.e. the shared experience that forms the bond between them. For instance, &quot;there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence&quot; (p. 5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Heart of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; was first published in full with two other stories, one of which was &lt;em&gt;Youth&lt;/em&gt;. Knowles explains that the clause &quot;&lt;strong&gt;as I have already said somewhere&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; refers to the second paragraph of &lt;em&gt;Youth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We all began life in the merchant service. Between the five of us&#xA;  there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the&#xA;  craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yachting, cruising and so on&#xA;  can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is&#xA;  life itself.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T11:30:43.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6658" CreationDate="2018-08-26T15:17:03.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The story is set in Baltimore.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for reference, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.net.au/fsf/AFTERNOON-OF-AN-AUTHOR.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's the text of the short story&lt;/a&gt;, entitled &quot;Esquire&quot; (from the &lt;em&gt;Afternoon of an Author&lt;/em&gt; collection) and dated to August 1936.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The biggest chunk of information about the story's setting comes near the beginning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes, I certainly need to get out,&quot; he thought. &quot;I'd like to drive down the Shenandoah Valley, or go to Norfolk on the boat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But both of these ideas were impractical -- they took time and energy and he had not much of either -- what there was must be conserved for work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenandoah_Valley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shenandoah Valley&lt;/a&gt; is in the northeast of West Virginia state and the northwest of Virginia state. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norfolk,_Virginia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norfolk&lt;/a&gt; is a coastal city in the east of Virginia state. So it seems like the setting of the story must be either Virginia or another nearby state. After consulting a &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/92/Map_of_USA_with_state_names_2.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;map of the US states&lt;/a&gt;, I concluded that the most likely possibilities are Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another big clue comes, as you mentioned, from the statue of Lafayette:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bus was a long time coming but he didn't like taxis and he still hoped that something would occur to him on that upper-deck passing through the green leaves of the boulevard. When it came finally he had some trouble climbing the steps but it was worth it for the first thing he saw was a pair of high school kids, a boy and a girl, sitting without any self-consciousness on the high pedestal of the Lafayette statue, their attention fast upon each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honors_and_memorials_to_the_Marquis_de_Lafayette#Lafayette_in_sculpture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a lot of Lafayette statues&lt;/a&gt; in the US, but only a few in the right part of the country. We can exclude the ones in &lt;a href=&quot;https://friendsoflafayette.wildapricot.org/Erect-a-Statue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yorktown, Virginia&lt;/a&gt; (2005) and Havre de Grace, Maryland (1976) as being too recent, but the one in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafayette_Monument&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baltimore, Maryland&lt;/a&gt; (1924) seems to fit perfectly. It existed when this story was written, and it has a high pedestal on which we could easily imagine kids sitting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QdVvL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Photo of statue in Baltimore&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QdVvL.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;photograph of statue in Baltimore&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, let's look at the passage you quoted in the question. I think this was the main red herring which made this question hard to solve: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The bus went past a pale Athenian railroad station brought to life by the blue shirted redcaps out in front.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't mean the place is a town called Athens in the US - it means the railroad station itself looks &quot;Athenian&quot;, like something out of the original Athens! Just look at the main railroad station of Baltimore, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(Baltimore)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn Station&lt;/a&gt;. Looks like it's built in the style of an ancient Greek temple, right? (Actually it was built in Beaux-Arts style, drawing upon French neoclassicism, but whatever.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QdVvL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Photo of statue in Baltimore&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/H4nb1.jpg&quot; width=&quot;320&quot; alt=&quot;Photograph of Penn Station, Baltimore&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the first passage quoted above: according to Google it takes around 2 hours today to get from Baltimore to Shenandoah Valley by car,  and in the 1930s there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Steam_Packet_Company&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;regular steamships&lt;/a&gt; from Baltimore to Norfolk. Everything seems to be coming together for Baltimore as the location.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, how does this fit in to the biographical history of the author? Well, it turns out that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F. Scott Fitzgerald&lt;/a&gt; spent some unhappy years in Baltimore during the early 1930s. His wife was hospitalised there for a recurring mental illness, and he too was hospitalised many times as well as suffering financially while working on a semi-autobiographical novel. There's even an article &lt;a href=&quot;http://baltimorestyle.com/baltimore_f_scott_fitzgerald_in_baltimore/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;F. Scott Fitzgerald in Baltimore&quot;&lt;/a&gt; published in &lt;em&gt;Baltimore Style&lt;/em&gt;. All of this seems to fit perfectly with the idea that he wrote a short story in 1936 about an unhappy and struggling author living in Baltimore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-26T15:22:32.600" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T15:22:32.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T18:33:16.527" Score="1" ViewCount="2252" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;Howl&quot; by Allen Ginsberg (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49303/howl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can be read online&lt;/a&gt;) is partly a savage general commentary on society and partly an expression of solidarity for the institutionalised fellow writer Carl Solomon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part I of the poem describes &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1131/17&quot;&gt;many writers and artists of the time, with whom Ginsberg was acquainted&lt;/a&gt; - including, but not only, Carl Solomon. Part II is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1633/17&quot;&gt;dark vision of society&lt;/a&gt; - a rant about the evil and despair Ginsberg saw all around him. Part III is entirely addressed to Carl Solomon, every line beginning with &quot;I’m with you in Rockland&quot; (Rockland being a mental asylum where Solomon was kept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;why was Solomon so special to Ginsberg?&lt;/strong&gt; Obviously they knew each other and Ginsberg sympathised with Solomon's plight, but he also knew many of the other unfortunate suffering souls referred to in Part I - what made this particular one more worthy of an ode than the rest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-26T18:33:16.527" Title="Why is Allen Ginsberg's &quot;Howl&quot; dedicated to Carl Solomon specifically?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allen-ginsberg&gt;&lt;carl-solomon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-26T19:26:34.250" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Kunzru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hari Kunzru's&lt;/a&gt; novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/296329/white-tears/9780241977873/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;White Tears&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, two young white men, Carter and Seth, create music reusing old jazz and blues songs. Carter has a lot of recordings that he created by walking through the city wearing a set a headphones into which he had built a powerful microphone. Seth has a big collection of old jazz and blues records, many of which are rare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day, Seth and Carter combine a street recording of someone singing a song with a street recording of some guitar playing that seems to fit the song very well. They post the resulting recording on several websites, pretending it was made by a certain Charlie Shaw, a name they made up. One of the persons who respond to the song is a record collector using the pseudonym &lt;strong&gt;JumpJim&lt;/strong&gt;, who thinks that the music is a 1928 recording by Charlie Shaw that he thought had been lost. In other words, the name that Seth thought was fictitious is the name of a real blues singer who supposedly recorded that song. What follows is a nightmarish descent into America's racist and segregationist past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the question is, what is the meaning of the record collector's pseudonym, JumpJim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T13:48:33.003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T15:05:36.240" Title="Meaning of the name JumpJim in Hari Kunzru's novel White Tears" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;white-tears&gt;&lt;hari-kunzru&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10973" CreationDate="2018-08-26T22:59:15.127" Score="4" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=IbYQAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=the%20arabian%20nights%20translated%20by%20husain%20haddawy&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiztKyd5YvdAhUJMt8KHQxlBCQQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Arabian Nights&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Husain Haddawy&lt;/a&gt;, the following chronology appears in The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies on the 28th night (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She walked before him until she stopped at the door of a house, and&#xA;  when she knocked, an &lt;strong&gt;old Christian&lt;/strong&gt; came down, received a dinar&#xA;  from her and handed her an olive green jug of wine...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the porter lifted the basket and followed her until she stopped at the&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;fruit vendor's...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then she stopped at the &lt;strong&gt;butcher's&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The porter, wondering at all these purchases, placed his basket on his&#xA;  head and followed her until she came to the &lt;strong&gt;grocer's&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The porter carried his basket and followed her until she came to the&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;dry grocer's&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The porter carried the basket and followed her until she came to the&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;confectioner's&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She smiled and walked ahead until she came to the &lt;strong&gt;druggist's&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(p. 80-81)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the order of places that the porter visited was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old Christian &gt; Fruit Vendor &gt; Butcher &gt; Grocer &gt; Dry Grocer &gt; Confectioner &gt;&#xA;  Druggist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, on the 37th night the porter recounts the events as follows (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mistress, you know that the reason I came to this place was that I&#xA;  was hired as a porter by this shopper, who led me from the &lt;strong&gt;vintner&lt;/strong&gt; to&#xA;  the &lt;strong&gt;butcher&lt;/strong&gt;, and from the butcher to the &lt;strong&gt;greengrocer&lt;/strong&gt;, and from the&#xA;  greengrocer to the &lt;strong&gt;fruit vendor&lt;/strong&gt;, and from the fruit vendor to the &lt;strong&gt;dry&#xA;  grocer&lt;/strong&gt;, then to the &lt;strong&gt;confectioner&lt;/strong&gt;, to the &lt;strong&gt;druggist&lt;/strong&gt;, and finally to this&#xA;  house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(p. 104)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, according to the porter the order was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vintner &gt; Butcher &gt; Greengrocer &gt; Fruit Vendor &gt; Dry Grocer &gt;&#xA;  Confectioner &gt; Druggist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly different from the order mentioned above. For a visual aid, here are the two orders next to each other:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old Christian &gt; Fruit Vendor &gt; Butcher &gt; Grocer &gt; Dry Grocer &gt; Confectioner &gt;&#xA;  Druggist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vintner &gt; Butcher &gt; Greengrocer &gt; Fruit Vendor &gt; Dry Grocer &gt;&#xA;  Confectioner &gt; Druggist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is safe to assume that the old Christian from the first version is the vintner from the second version, and that  the grocer from the first version is identical with the greengrocer from the second version, so those discrepancies are taken care of. However, in the first version the fruit vendor was visited between the vintner and the butcher, while in the second version the fruit vendor was visited between the greengrocer and the dry grocer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the explanation for this discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this simply an issue with this particular translation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it an authorial error?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it meant to be part of the story that the porter changed (or forgot) the&#xA;events?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it just to see if the reader is paying attention?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone else ever noted this discrepancy and possibly tried to explain it? (A very quick Google search did not turn up anything.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T12:47:32.323" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T12:47:32.323" Title="How can we explain the porter's order of events in The Arabian Nights?" Tags="&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;one-thousand-and-one-nights&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8273" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Kunzru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hari Kunzru&lt;/a&gt; has published the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Impressionist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Impressionist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2002; winner of the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Noise&lt;/em&gt; (2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Transmission&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2005; &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; Notable Book of the Year in 2005)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;My Revolutions&lt;/em&gt; (2007)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gods_Without_Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gods Without Men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memory Palace&lt;/em&gt; (2013)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twice Upon a Time: Listening to New York&lt;/em&gt; (2014)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;White Tears&lt;/em&gt; (2017)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8274" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British novelist Hari Kunzru (born 1969) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T13:44:48.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8275" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8276" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'White Tears' (2017) by Hari Kunzru. Use this tag with the [hari-kunzru] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T13:45:50.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8278" CreationDate="2018-08-27T15:09:03.963" Score="3" ViewCount="543" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friends are discussing what's the implied meaning of this poem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://unjustlyunread.tumblr.com/post/6557145323/russell-edson-fire-is-not-a-nice-guest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Fire Is Not a Nice Guest&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Russell Edson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people feel like it insinuates a futile effort to save people around. But I think this is not accurate.  However, I didn't know how to comprehend this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4963" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T10:21:38.763" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T10:21:38.763" Title="What's the implied meaning of this poem by Russell Edson?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;russell-edson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8277" CreationDate="2018-08-27T17:24:13.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comments below are not intended as an exhaustive analysis but provide a number of starting points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can look at the poem as working in two semantic realms: nature and society. Western society tends to push social groups that don't fit the categories &quot;white&quot;, &quot;male&quot; and &quot;middle class&quot; towards the periphery and sometimes towards the realm of &quot;nature&quot;. This also applies to people with mental disorders (and to anyone who is considered less intelligent). Fire, hunger (the verb &quot;eat&quot; is repeated several times in the poem) also belong to the semantic real of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem plays with this tension between nature and society. For example, fire is compared to a &quot;guest&quot;, and &quot;guest&quot; as a concept belongs to the realm of society. The poem's narrator addresses the fire as if it were a being capable of language. The fire's behaviour is described in terms that would fit the behaviour of a human being: &quot;do not go upstairs&quot;, &quot;eat (...) for breakfast&quot;, &quot;eating (...) for dessert&quot;, &quot;the fire's whole family had moved in&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem also uses language that is degrading towards the people staying in the psychiatric hospital. First, it calls the institution a &quot;insane asylum&quot;, a term that went out of use in the first half of the 20th century, after academics had started studying mental disorders in a more scientific way. (For example, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.med.upenn.edu/psychiatry/history.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penn State University&lt;/a&gt;, the Chair of Mental Diseases was established in 1901. In Scotland, the Montrose Lunatic Asylum was renamed to Royal Asylum of Montrose in 1913 and to &lt;a href=&quot;http://arccat.dundee.ac.uk/dserve/dserve2/history/thb23hist.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Royal Mental Hospital of Montrose&lt;/a&gt; in 1948. These changes took place several decades after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Packard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Packard&lt;/a&gt;, who had been accused of insanity in 1860, had started the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_History_of_the_Mental_Health_Consumer_Movement/The_Rise_of_the_Consumer_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anti-Insane Asylum Society&lt;/a&gt; in 1868. These are just some (almost) random names and events from the history of psychiatry.) However, the disappearance of the term &quot;insane asylum&quot; does not imply that everything is for the best now: the poem's narrator, who is in charge of the &quot;insane asylum&quot; still calls one of its patients &quot;a dementia praecox&quot;, which is a dehumanizing use of language. (In this context, one might have a look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-psychiatry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anti-psychiatry movement&lt;/a&gt; of the 1960s and 1970s.) And the narrator uses the terms &quot;insane&quot;, &quot;maniac&quot; and &quot;lunatics&quot; throughout the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fire that &quot;eats&quot; the &quot;insane asylum&quot; can be seen as an element of nature that burns everything that society has put in place to take care of the mental hospital patients. According to the view that puts such patients in the real of nature, this may be seen as a kind of liberation. But what is probably more important is that the poem's narrator, who is in charge of the hospital, humanizes the fire while using degrading terms for the patients. This may suggest that the whole mental hospital business is a kind of lunacy. This is strengthened by the psychiatrist/director's comment to the fire, &quot;Hey, that’s where the dusts have built their cities,&quot; which doesn't appear to have rational explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A complete analysis of the poem should also discuss its wordplay and allusions. For example, &quot;eat a log&quot; versus &quot;I could eat a horse&quot; (and visitors to the hospital may be requested to sign a log), &quot;war of nutrition&quot; instead of &quot;war of attrition&quot;, &quot;lunatics out of the attic&quot; versus &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Madwoman_in_the_Attic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Madwoman in the Attic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-27T17:24:13.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2018-08-28T00:06:53.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Was Syme really such an avid follower?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm going to challenge the premise of your question here, because my interpretation of the character is different. We know that (according to Winston's assessment) Syme will ultimately be considered a threat by the Party because he's &lt;em&gt;too intelligent&lt;/em&gt;, but why would that be a threat if said intelligence really is directed 100% in the interests of the Party? If harnessed properly, intelligence is an asset - indeed, a vital asset - to anyone who seeks power and control. Presumably the Thought Police have intelligence (in more ways than one); so does Big Brother himself, if he exists, and many of the Inner Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. [...] Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O’Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- this and all quotes below from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter1.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part I, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Winston (who is, to be sure, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8005/17&quot;&gt;not necessarily a reliable narrator&lt;/a&gt;), those who show least intelligence are those least likely to be vaporised. It's the dumb, unthinking 'sheeple' who will be allowed to continue their lives, and those who think too much will disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's look at what we see of Syme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. [...]  Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,’ he added as an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too — in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syme does act as society expects him to, but it could be more dutiful than really natural.&lt;/strong&gt; His love for Newspeak and the destruction of language is genuine, but it's only &quot;as an afterthought&quot; that he mentions the great and glorious Big Brother as the instigator of this idea. If he were truly natural in his fervent support of the Party, wouldn't he have mentioned B.B. earlier? His gloating about the execution of traitors could also be just a necessity rather than reflecting his real feelings: he knows he's expected to show satisfaction, so he shows it very well. And when he sees blatant lies on the telescreen, he requires doublethink and not just dumb stupidity to swallow them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like “freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Syme sees too lucidly what's going on in society.&lt;/strong&gt; The danger of intelligence in the lower orders is always that it might be too perceptive of the oppression around them and the true nature of the system. It's acceptable for higher-ups like O'Brien to see the world for what it really is, and to use that knowledge for things like psychological torture. But someone at Syme's level who possesses such clarity of thought, and chatters about it over lunch, is dangerous. If too many people realise the true direction of the world they live in, they might do something to stop it. True power lies not only in strength but also in ignorance. (Indeed, perhaps I've inadvertently stumbled upon the true meaning of the slogan &quot;Ignorance is Strength&quot;: the ignorance of the lower orders is the strength of their masters.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Indeed, the above points are aptly summarised in the paragraphs where Winston decides that Syme will surely be vaporised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again: Syme is a zealous member of society, but zeal is easy to portray, easier in fact the more extreme it is. The lady doth protest too much? He's intelligent and educated enough to fake it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again: Syme has too much lucidity of vision, and he's not afraid to say it how it really is. And that's always a problem, when power relies on keeping the lower orders too ignorant to rise up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So, what might he have been thinking when he was captured?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now we're delving more into the realms of speculation, since Syme is a minor character and we don't see into his head well enough to really know exactly how he'd react. But it's worth remembering the concept of &lt;strong&gt;doublethink&lt;/strong&gt;, which someone like Syme would surely have mastered. Even if he secretly hated Big Brother and the Party system, that would only be one part of him; in order to be such a rabid follower, he would have had to internalise it at least to some extent. So he could have been feeling any number of things upon his capture, and very possibly (doublethink!) more than one of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;pleasure that the Thought Police were working so well in weeding out undesirables;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;surprise that a loyal citizen such as himself would be taken;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;resignation to his imminent torture and death;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fear of his imminent torture and death;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;annoyance that he hadn't done better at being a good citizen;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I &lt;em&gt;don't&lt;/em&gt; think he would feel is regret about taking part in the destruction of language. This is an activity he seems to love for its own sake, even apart from its role in the society. He can talk avidly about his work with Newspeak, and only mention as an afterthought that it was Big Brother's idea. He seems to take an artistic pride in this job which is separate from his love or hatred of the Party system. There's no need for doublethink there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:16:00.947" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:16:00.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T10:37:39.320" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading Sherwood Anderson's &lt;em&gt;Winesburg, Ohio&lt;/em&gt;. It is essentially a collection of related short stories compiled into one novel. Why might Anderson have chosen to structure it like this? What are the advantages of this kind of structure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2355" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T10:43:29.963" LastActivityDate="2018-08-28T10:43:29.963" Title="The structure of 'Winesburg, Ohio' by Sherwood Anderson" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;sherwood-anderson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8282" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8317" CreationDate="2018-08-28T10:43:57.487" Score="10" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ulysses is such a well-commented book that it's hard to find questions which have not been widely explored already. However, there's a simple aspect of character motivation I've been unable to clarify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 16, Bloom persuades Stephen that it would be wiser for him to stay the night as a guest in his house. His motivations are clearly partly selfish, but the argument makes sense. Bloom lives much closer than Stephen and it's nearly two in the morning. Stephen accepts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following chapter, however, having enjoyed cocoa at Bloom's house, Stephen's attitude appears to change. He makes an anti-semitic argument, invoking the myth of the blood libel, to his Jewish host. Then, after they urinate in the yard together, he leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Q&amp;amp;A format of chapter 17 focuses largely on Bloom and, as far as I could see, offers no motivation for Stephen's change of attitude or his decision to walk out into the Dublin night in the small hours. Why does he suddenly seem to change his mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T14:05:29.353" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T09:14:10.850" Title="In Ulysses, why does Stephen finally decide not to stay with Bloom?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-28T14:37:06.813" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;We recently had a questions about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8161/2191&quot;&gt;usage of pronouns in Nalo Hopkinson's story &quot;Shift&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In that story, one of the characters uses the pronoun &quot;you&quot; to refer to himself. This is a consequence of something that happened to the character and not because the pronoun &quot;I&quot; does not exist in the language he has learnt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me wonder whether any author had ever created a language that does not have words for &quot;I&quot; or &quot;me&quot;, for example, to suppress the development of individuality or perhaps egoism in those people who learn and use it. (It would be sufficient that certain characters use this language, not necessarily that the entire novel is written in such a language.) If any such novels exist, what is the earliest example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: In order to preserve a answer to a question by curiousdannii: this question is not about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_grammar#Enclitic_pronouns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enclitic pronouns in Arabic&lt;/a&gt; and similar linguistic phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T13:15:57.387" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T13:15:57.387" Title="What was the earliest novel that invented a language without words for &quot;I&quot; or &quot;me&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8254" CreationDate="2018-08-28T18:26:23.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The pink carnations in the songs have the same meaning they do in flower language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being, as you stated &amp;quot;a woman's love&amp;quot;. In the context of the songs I would say it is a boutonniere (&lt;a href=&quot;https://flowerduet.com/choose-best-boutonniere-flowers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as carnations are one of the most common flowers used for this&lt;/a&gt;) given to the teenage boy by his date for the prom dance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Marty Robbins&lt;/strong&gt; song was release in 1957 and it seems his inspiration was off-the-cuff and so there is not likely any deeper meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robbins recalled writing the song in approximately twenty minutes while being transported in a standard automobile. He is said to have had the inspiration for the song while driving from a motel to a venue in Ohio where he was due to perform that evening. During the course of the journey, he passed a local high school, where its students were dressed ready for their prom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.library.unt.edu/explore/partners/UNTML/browse/?start=9&amp;amp;fq=untl_collection%3AJGPC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marty Robbins interviewed on the Pop Chronicles (1969)&lt;/a&gt; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_White_Sport_Coat#cite_note-pc10-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;via Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don McLean&lt;/strong&gt; is bit more complex, American Pie has been the focus of &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20130407124608/http://www.rareexception.com/Garden/Pie.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;countless interpretations&lt;/a&gt; if only because it so chock full of references to other famous singers and pop culture icons. Given the times McLean was generally reminiscing about (the late 1950's and 1960's as &amp;quot;the day the music died is February 3, 1959) a reference to a popular song from 1957 seems appropriate. However McLean has said himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20070528162305/http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_398b.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You will find many &amp;quot;interpretations&amp;quot; of my lyrics but none of them by me. Isn't this fun?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suppose it up to us in the end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Social Distortion&lt;/strong&gt;'s meaning might be a little bit different as it is referring to gangsters in 1920/30's America. Their style contained wearing suits with flower lapels. My speculation would be that they are also calling back to either Robbins or McLean with the specific &amp;quot;pink carnation&amp;quot; reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T15:40:29.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8287" CreationDate="2018-08-28T21:12:18.133" Score="3" ViewCount="1125" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 44 of &lt;em&gt;The Shining&lt;/em&gt;, why does Grady claim not to have murdered his wife and daughters and have no recollection of Mr Ullman while talking to Jack at Derwent's  party, but later says he &quot;corrected&quot; (murdered) them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack: “Weren’t you once the caretaker here? When you … when …”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “Why no, sir. I don’t believe so.” Jack: “But your wife … your daughters …”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “My wife is helping in the kitchen, sir. The girls are asleep, of course. It’s much too late for them.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack: “You were the caretaker. You—You killed them.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “I don’t have any recollection of that at all, sir.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack: “But you—”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “You’re the caretaker, sir, you’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here. The same manager hired us both, at the same time.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack: “Mr. Ullman—”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “I know no one by that name, sir.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jack: “But he—”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grady: “The manager, the hotel, sir. Surely you realize who hired you, sir.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the manager if not Ullman? I'm very confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4956" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-28T23:26:47.227" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T11:50:13.940" Title="In Stephen King's The Shining, what is the meaning of Jack's conversation with Grady?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8288" CreationDate="2018-08-28T23:38:55.683" Score="5" ViewCount="1510" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of Thomas Hardy's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; presumably comes from this famous phrase in Thomas Gray's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegy_Written_in_a_Country_Churchyard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but I can't really see the connection between these two pieces of literature. Of course both are set in rural England, but pretty much all of Hardy's stories are set in his beloved &quot;Wessex&quot;, so why title this one in particular after a famous poem about the English countryside?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is Hardy's novel entitled so, and how does it connect to Gray's poem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:15:32.527" Title="Why the title Far From the Madding Crowd for the Thomas Hardy novel?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;far-from-the-madding-crowd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8285" CreationDate="2018-08-29T08:27:23.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a personal opinion rather than something I can reference, but to me the key to understanding this passage is this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You’re the caretaker, sir, you’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here. The same manager hired us both, at the same time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you unpick this, it's far more startling than Grady's claim not to have killed his family or to know the manager. He's saying Jack has &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; (as in, forever) been the caretaker, and that he, &lt;em&gt;Grady, has too&lt;/em&gt;. Furthermore that the same mysterious &quot;manager&quot; - who by context cannot be Ullman - hired them both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's no concrete interpretation of this passage. But what it suggests to me is an invocation of the timeless evil of male selfishness and privilege. Both Jack and Grady are failed men in the sense that they cannot live up to their responsibilities and then, instead of seeking to make the situation better, take out their frustrations violently on their families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more literal interpretation, which is hinted at in the passage, is that the mysterious hiring manager is the devil and that the hotel is a route to hell. Another way of reading it is that the wicked men &quot;hired&quot; themselves - they took themselves to the hotel as a last chance to save the situation, knowing, deep in themselves, that they would fail due to their character flaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Grady's claim not to have murdered his children, this is explained by the other passage you've already noted. Grady self-justifies his actions as not &quot;murder&quot; or &quot;killing&quot; but necessary &quot;correction&quot;, so he refers to them in the same language. Self-justification by blaming others is a common motif in domestic violence. Think of all the men who claim &quot;she made me do it&quot; in reference to supposed nagging (which, they are unable to see, was often prompted by their own shortcomings in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T08:27:23.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8286" CreationDate="2018-08-29T09:39:42.687" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; largely takes place in the countryside, and the literal meaning of the title, a place far away from the crazed/wild crowd, evokes an atmosphere of calm and tranquillity. This was partly a reaction of Hardy's on account of the birth of industrialisation around the time of writing, when the English countryside was a refuge from the noise and smog of the new industries. Hardy admired the simple way of life of farm and country labourers, which can be seen in the character Gabriel Oak, who embodied this ideal of man's close connection with the natural world. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://public.gettysburg.edu/academics/english/hardy/land/agriculture.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; Gray's idyllic-toned poem possesses vivid countryside imagery, not unlike that in Hardy's own poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44325/the-darkling-thrush&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Darkling Thrush&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and supports the peaceful effect Hardy wished the title to allude to. Additionally, &lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; was Hardy's first real success in novel writing and was made famous through his evocative images of country life as well as being the first time in his literary works in which he introduced his Wessex. As a result, perhaps by mirroring the English countryside, he made his Wessex more familiar to contemporary readers. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Hardy#ref3025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other part is that it is thought to contain an aspect of literary irony in that &quot;Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; similar to &lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;. Writer and literary journalist, Lucasta Miller, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/24/far-from-the-madding-crowd-hardys-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;highlights&lt;/a&gt; the contrasts between the idealised quiet and serenity in Gray's poem and in &lt;em&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;, Hardy &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;disrupts the idyll, and not just by introducing the sound and fury of an extreme plot ... he is out to subvert his readers' complacency&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the novel's title claims otherwise, the turbulent affairs with her three suitors may mean that Bathsheba is in fact in the madding crowd rather than far from it. The abusive Sergeant Troy embodies this especially as Bathsheba almost destroys her life by involving herself with him. By juxtaposing the title with the inner workings of the novel, Hardy is created a literary 'joke' out of an otherwise sincere work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T15:15:32.527" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T15:15:32.527" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8283" CreationDate="2018-08-29T11:19:41.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen online discussions of natural languages that avoid the use of &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; and of constructed languages (outside a literary context) that don't even have pronouns (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zompist.com/elkaril.htm#Assignment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elkaril&lt;/a&gt;, apparently). See for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=238528&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Straight Dope Message Board&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12061&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language Log&lt;/a&gt;. Some of them mention Samuel R. Delaney's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Babel-17&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was published in &lt;strong&gt;1966&lt;/strong&gt;, as an example of a novel that containns a language without the pronoun &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;. From Wikipedia's description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language portrayed at the center of &lt;em&gt;Babel-17&lt;/em&gt; contains interesting linguistic features including the absence of a pronoun or any other construction for &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;. The heroine finds her perceptions (and even her physical abilities) altered once she has learned Babel-17. In this Delany's novel influenced a generation of writers: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Native Tongue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzette_Haden_Elgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suzette Haden Elgin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dispossessed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dispossessed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ursula K. Le Guin&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embassytown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Embassytown&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mi%C3%A9ville&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;China Miéville&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;In Luna Bore Coda&amp;quot; by Joshua Nilles, and, more evidently, the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Story of Your Life&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Chiang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ted Chiang&lt;/a&gt;. It also resembles a few preceding science fiction novels which deal with how languages shape the political and cultural stratum of societies, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Pao&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Languages of Pao&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jack Vance&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ayn Rand&lt;/a&gt;, and language as a weapon was adapted as a plot device in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neal_Stephenson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neal Stephenson's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Snow Crash&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the claims about influence on other authors require citation that provide evidence. The last sentence mentions two other works to look at, but &lt;em&gt;The Languages of Pao&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1957 or 1958, does not appear to contain a language in which using the pronoun &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; is prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Ayn Rand's novella &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Anthem&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;strong&gt;1938&lt;/strong&gt;, singular pronouns are totally absent. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://campus.aynrand.org/campus/globals/transcripts/the-style-and-literary-form-of-anthem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Style and Literary Form of &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; explains,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the first things we discover reading the novel is that the narrator never uses the word “I” when he is referring to himself. He always refers to himself as “we” and he uses the words “us” and “our” when he is talking about himself. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we read on in the story, we discover that this is a feature of the narrator’s entire society. Nobody ever uses any singular pronouns. “I,” “him,” “her”—none of these words are ever used. All they ever use are plural pronouns—“we,” “our,” “they,” “them.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world of &lt;em&gt;Anthem&lt;/em&gt; is a world in which the very word “I” and all other singular pronouns seem to have disappeared completely from the language. And because the people in this society can’t speak of themselves as distinct, single individuals—they don’t have the word to talk about themselves as distinct, single individuals—they can’t think of themselves as single, distinct individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T11:19:41.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8285" CreationDate="2018-08-29T11:50:13.940" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A common motif in King's work is the attribution of mind to non-living beings. (For example, in the story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1408_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1408&lt;/a&gt;, one of my favourites, the room itself is evil and attempts to harm the protagonist.) When Grady says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The manager, the hotel, sir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he's hinting at the answer: the hotel itself has hired him as its &quot;caretaker&quot;, a human body to bond with and cause harm. Ullman, being there only in the tourist season, is unaware of the hotel's true nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1366" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T11:50:13.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T20:19:43.607" Score="1" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Robber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (published in 2000) is prefaced by the poem &quot;Stolen&quot; by David Findlay. According to the novel's colophon, the poem's copyright is dated 1997. However, according to the online magazine &lt;em&gt;Strange Horizons&lt;/em&gt;, which published it under the title &lt;a href=&quot;http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/stolen-song/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stolen Song&lt;/a&gt;, the poem first appeared in Nalo Hopkinson's &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;. Since copyright has obviously not expired, I reproduce only the first few lines here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I stole the torturer's tongue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  it's the first side of me some see&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  the first line you hear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relevance of this poem to the novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T09:37:49.490" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T09:37:49.490" Title="Relevance of Findlay's poem 'Stolen' to Hopkinson's novel Midnight Robber" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;midnight-robber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8292" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T21:02:57.573" Score="2" ViewCount="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story I am thinking of appeared in my 2nd grade (73-74) reading textbook and was set in winter and featured a group of animals.  It was heavily illustrated and showed an injured fox bleeding from the leg.  One of the other animals was responsible and was scolded by the other animals.  Lots of snowy scenes.  Does anyone know what this story might have been?   Another story in the same textbook was a child's version of Florence Nightingale's biography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4971" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-29T22:56:41.713" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T22:56:41.713" Title="2nd grade 1970s child's story with illustrations including an injured fox and another animal being scolded" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8293" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8296" CreationDate="2018-08-29T22:15:05.800" Score="10" ViewCount="1261" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MG1aR71uFg&amp;amp;t=23m55s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heard from a BitCoin motivational speaker:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oscar Wilde said, &amp;quot;Speaking the truth that somebody wants you not to publish is journalism. Everything else is marketing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we all know that Oscar Wilde &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; said (or was that Abraham Lincoln?) not to believe everything attributed to him on the Internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;marketing&amp;quot; makes me think it's from the second half of the 20th century or later. Googling for &amp;quot;everything else is marketing&amp;quot; turns up a &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lot&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of hits, but in a variety of unrelated contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bread and Water. Everything else is marketing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At its base, &amp;quot;Sales&amp;quot; is when money changes hands; everything else is &amp;quot;Marketing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time Controls Risk; Everything Else is Marketing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marketingmo.com/strategic-planning/marketing-function-is-strategic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This piece&lt;/a&gt; attributes to Peter Drucker the sentiment &amp;quot;business has only two functions — marketing and innovation.&amp;quot; It seems like this idea might be the original root of the &amp;quot;X is Y; everything else is marketing&amp;quot; snowclone, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this actually a well-known quotation from anyone in particular?  Where &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; it come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T01:34:42.197" Title="Source of quote: &quot;Speaking the truth that somebody wants you not to publish is journalism. Everything else is marketing.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8291" CreationDate="2018-08-29T23:55:57.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The poem is a nod to the use of Caribbean creoles in the novel.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best source for this is actually something I found as one of the top hits when I searched the web for &lt;code&gt;david findlay stolen&lt;/code&gt; in the hope of finding the full text of the poem. &lt;a href=&quot;http://blacknetart.com/Hopkinson.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's&lt;/a&gt; an essay by Nalo Hopkinson herself (previously published on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sff.net/people/nalo/writing/slide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this defunct site&lt;/a&gt;) in which she explains some of the major cultural themes of the novel. It's worth reading the whole thing, but I'll just quote the most relevant bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm also experimenting with the complex sets of codes that are Caribbean creoles. (I know one pretty well, and bits of two others.) Caribbean cultures are hybrid cultures. Hybridity was a strategy for survival and resistance amongst the enslaved and indentured people. They all came from different cultures with different languages and then had an alien culture and speech imposed on them. They had to find ways to use elements of all the cultures in order to continue to exist. That hybridity is reflected in the languaging we've created. I've tried to reflect that in Midnight Robber, largely in the way the characters use language when they speak, but also in the language of the narrative. I've tried to write the book as it might be written if it were actually an artifact of the fictional culture I've created. &quot;She ain't want to go down in the gully, oui&quot; is standard English for them. So is &quot;She didn't want to go down into that gully.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The stylistic choices are quirky, and much to the patient annoyance of my long-suffering writing group, can seem inconsistent. They aren't really. I realised after a while that I was using a Trinidadian mode of address for emphasis/irony and a Jamaican one to signal opposition; the latter coming at least in part out of my recognition of the ways that Rastafari has created &quot;dread talk&quot; as a language of resistance. I'm fascinated with the notion of breaking an imposed language apart and remixing it. To speak in the hacked language is not just to speak in an accent or a creole; to say the words aloud is an act of referencing history and claiming space. The people of the Nation Worlds in my novel have done that, have left Earth to a place where they can make their own society. Their speech, written and spoken, reflects the reasons they've made that journey. Hence &quot;Stolen Song,&quot; the poem that starts off Midnight Robber (and thank you David Findlay, for permission to quote your work).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; deliberately undermines the standard linguistic tropes of mainstream science fiction, which are influenced by ancient Greek and Roman cultures via American technology. In the Carib-colonised planet of Toussaint,  people speak a mixture of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;creole languages&lt;/a&gt;: stable natural languages which were developed from a mixture of different languages, often reflecting several different cultures coming together. Hence the relevance of the poem about &lt;em&gt;stealing tongues&lt;/em&gt;: speakers of a creole language have &quot;stolen&quot; many of their words and turns of phrase from other languages, but now they've made them their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem, of course, is playing on a double meaning of the word &quot;tongue&quot;. In juxtaposition with &quot;torturer&quot;, it's likely to make the reader think of tongues as in body parts. But a better interpretation, at least in the context of &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;, is to think of tongues as in languages. &lt;strong&gt;In many cases, creole speakers have &quot;stolen&quot; the tongue (language) of the Europeans who once oppressed or enslaved them (their &quot;torturers&quot;).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has also spoken more in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.challengingdestiny.com/interviews/hopkinson.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt; about what she was trying to do with the use of language in &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had a specific project with the second one that's probably summed up best by &quot;Stolen,&quot; the poem at the beginning of it written by David Findlay. The first line of the poem is, &quot;I stole the torturer's tongue.&quot; In many ways, that's what Caribbean Creoles did. I wanted to see what a language might look like that was shaped by its own history. I think part of what was happening was when I would write stories and workshop them, and I would write people speaking the way I know people speak, and if they were speaking Creole I would get comments like, &quot;She can't use a word like this because she's obviously not educated enough.&quot; Educated has nothing to do with your accent, or the way you choose to speak when you're using the vernacular (and every language has its vernaculars). So it was partly my thinking about how to get it across that someone might choose not to sound North American but might nevertheless speak in vernacular. And I have other colleagues who are North American -- I have a friend who's an African American woman who when she writes her black characters in a futuristic context has been told in her workshops, &quot;No one's going to speak like this in the future.&quot; Apparently we're all going to sound American -- white, middle class American. So it was interrogating that a little bit. That kind of hegemony of language. And then trying to figure out: How would you write something futuristic and still keep a sense of the language and a sense of the history of the people in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've blended three English Creoles -- Jamaican, Trinidadian, and there's the occasional Guyanese reference. Which are the places in the Caribbean where I've lived. All of which meant more research into language. I swear, that'll be my first criterion now when I write -- no research. I blended the languages to see what would happen. It isn't so much an ongoing project -- it was a project for that novel. I will always have characters from the places I call home, and I'll always try to make them speak the way they might. That's really difficult to put down, because often we're talking about an oral form. If you tried to directly transcribe the language you use when you're sitting talking with your buddies it would not work in writing. So trying to get a sense of Creoles on paper and still have it be readable and understandable -- and sustain it for 400 pages -- was work. And I'm still trying to work it through with the new novel a little bit -- I'm not doing it as heavily. I'm trying to get a sense across of how the characters think about language. The main characters you meet at first are in Saint-Domingue -- Haiti before the Haitian revolution. They are speaking French Creole. Of course I have to write that in English, but I want to get a sense of how they think about language. Because the language they're speaking is a combination of many African languages and French and probably Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As to why it's so important, Creoles in particular are often subversive languages. They come out of having to take on a language of the colonizer and then change it to meet your own needs. I wanted to get across a strong sense of subversion and even playfulness that can happen when a language grows that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, she was deliberately trying to subvert certain cultural norms, like the association of &quot;standard&quot; English with good education. She wanted to describe a culture in the distant future where people don't speak like typical white middle-class Americans but in the Caribbean vernacular languages that she knows. &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; was, as she says in the same interview, her way of breaking the rule &quot;Never write a whole novel in Creole&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found an &lt;a href=&quot;http://cole-english179.blogspot.com/2014/06/language-and-agency-in-nalo-hopkinsons.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interesting essay&lt;/a&gt; on the use of language in &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; to explore issues of colonialism. There's a lot more to be said about this than will fit in a single Stack Exchange post, but I hope I've at least answered the question of why Findlay's poem is relevant to Hopkinson's novel.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;For the record, the poem was first published in &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;, but now it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://strangehorizons.com/poetry/stolen-song/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available to read online&lt;/a&gt;. The first few pages of the novel are &lt;a href=&quot;https://atebook.net/book/34284/readf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also available online&lt;/a&gt; (as a short excerpt for review, which I believe falls under &quot;fair use&quot;), in case anyone else wants a taste of the use of language in this story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-29T23:55:57.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-29T23:59:20.187" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In at least two of Nalo Hopkinson's short stories that I've read, the main characters are women with an interest in ... &lt;em&gt;unusual&lt;/em&gt; creatures. Namely, &lt;a href=&quot;https://uncannymagazine.com/article/cant-beat-em/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Can't Beat 'Em&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Marisella keeps a 'glup', a sort of sink drain monster, so that she can consume it to become immortal) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.apex-magazine.com/a-raggy-dog-a-shaggy-dog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Raggy Dog, a Shaggy Dog&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Tammy loves her orchids, and keeps a rat which is slowly being taken over by an orchid growing inside it). I'm curious whether this element of her writing was inspired by any unusual pets of her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What pets has Nalo Hopkinson had? Did they influence her writing at all?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2455" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T12:15:54.443" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:15:54.443" Title="Has Nalo Hopkinson had pets which influenced her writing?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8293" CreationDate="2018-08-30T01:34:42.197" Score="11" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This quote has a long history and its true origins are obscure.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began my investigation of this question by doing a web search for &lt;code&gt;quote speaking truth wants publish journalism marketing&lt;/code&gt;. In the results, among a lot of serious discussions about journalism, was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/77244-journalism-is-printing-what-someone-else-does-not-want-printed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads page&lt;/a&gt; which attributes the following quote to &lt;strong&gt;George Orwell&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” ― George Orwell &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I do think this sounds a lot more like George Orwell than Oscar Wilde. The former had worked as a journalist, but also described journalists (in &lt;em&gt;Homage to Catalonia&lt;/em&gt;) as people who lie for a living. So my next search was for the exact quote cited in the Goodreads article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The top result on that search was &lt;a href=&quot;http://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2012/09/25/even-if-it-looks-sounds-walks-and-quacks-like-an-orwell-quote-it-still-might-not-be-an-orwell-quote/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Even if it looks, sounds, walks, and quacks like an Orwell quote, it still might NOT be an Orwell quote&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (25 September 2012), a blog post which points out that it's hard to track down this quote as really being from Orwell. One of the links on that page was to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:George_Orwell#Attribution?_-_%22Journalism_is_printing_something...%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote talk page about George Orwell&lt;/a&gt;, where several contributors were trying to track down an original source for this quote, Orwellian or otherwise. One user claimed (29 June 2012) that the original version is due to &lt;strong&gt;William Randolph Hearst&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.” - William Randolph Hearst&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another user found (24 November 2012) a similar quote from &lt;strong&gt;Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another user found another similar quote from &lt;strong&gt;Horacio Verbitsky&lt;/strong&gt; (in Spanish):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Journalism is to spread what someone does not want you to know; the rest is propaganda.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally - finally! - someone linked to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator page&lt;/a&gt; on this quote, from 20 January 2013. Quote Investigator, by the way, is an absolutely invaluable &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/search?q=%22quote+investigator%22&quot;&gt;resource&lt;/a&gt; for answering &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/quote-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;quote-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;quote-identification&lt;/a&gt; questions here: they do really in-depth research to puzzle out the true origins of a quote, and everything is properly sourced and verifiable. So here's the final answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A version of this quote first appeared on 30 November 1918, in page 18, column 4 of &lt;em&gt;The Fourth Estate: A Newspaper for the Makers of Newspapers&lt;/em&gt;, Ernest F, Birmingham, Fourth Estate Publishing Company, New York. The quote is as follows:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news,” is the sentiment expressed in a little framed placard on the desk of L. E. Edwardson, day city editor of the Chicago Herald and Examiner.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the further history and evolution of this quote, including the many other variants of it and people it's been attributed to, you can read &lt;a href=&quot;https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/20/news-suppress/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the full Quote Investigator article&lt;/a&gt;. Hat-tip also to Barry Popik, whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/if_you_want_something_in_the_paper&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; of 11 July 2014 helped Quote Investigator to improve their article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T01:34:42.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-30T11:02:35.047" Score="2" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's novel &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; contains a story entitled &quot;Tan-Tan and Dry Bone&quot;. It is one of the many elements from Caribbean culture that Hopkinson draws on in the novel. Hopkinson's novel is not the only book that draws on this specific element from Caribbean culture; see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/fiona-french/anancy-and-mr-dry-bone/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anancy and Mr. Dry-Bone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Fiona French, published in 1991.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what is the exact origin or source of inspiration of the story? More specifically, is it just one story or a set of stories involving the same figure? Is it native to one specific island in the Caribbean or West Indies or is it more widely known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T11:02:35.047" Title="Origin of Dry Bone in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;midnight-robber&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8299" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8300" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" Score="0" Body="Questions about Nalo Hopkinson's novel *Midnight Robber* (2000), a coming-of-age story set on a Caribbean-colonised planet. Use this tag with the [nalo-hopkinson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T11:06:44.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8301" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwood_Anderson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherwood Anderson&lt;/a&gt; (1876 – 1941) published a number of novels and four short story collections. His novels are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windy_McPherson%27s_Son&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Windy McPherson's Son&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1916)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marching Men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_White_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poor White&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1920)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many_Marriages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Many Marriages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1923)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Laughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dark Laughter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1925)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar:_A_Midwest_Childhood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tar: A Midwest Childhood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1926)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_the_Lost_Novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alice and The Lost Novel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1929)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beyond Desire&lt;/em&gt; (1932)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kit Brandon: A Portrait&lt;/em&gt; (1936)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His short story collections are &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winesburg,_Ohio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Winesburg, Ohio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triumph_of_the_Egg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions From American Life in Tales and Poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1921)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_and_Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Horses and Men&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1923)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_the_Woods&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Death in the Woods and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1933)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8302" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the American novelist and short story writer Sherwood Anderson (1876 – 1941) or his life as a writer. Anderson is best known for his short story collection 'Winesburg, Ohio'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T13:48:11.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8303" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8304" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer Carl Solomon (1928 – 1993) and his life as a writer. Solomon is best known for 'Report from the Asylum: Afterthoughts of a Shock Patient'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T13:50:03.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8305" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marcel Proust wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; between 1906 and his death in 1922. The novel's last three volumes were published after his death, based on corrected galley proofs and manuscripts. These seven volumes are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Du côté de chez Swann&lt;/em&gt; (1913; English: &lt;em&gt;Swann's Way&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Way by Swann's&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs&lt;/em&gt; (1919; &lt;em&gt;In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Côté de Guermantes&lt;/em&gt; (1920/1921; &lt;em&gt;The Guermantes Way&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sodome et Gomorrhe&lt;/em&gt; (1921/1922; &lt;em&gt;Sodom and Gomorrah&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Prisonnière&lt;/em&gt; (1923; &lt;em&gt;The Prisoner&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Albertine disparue&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;La Fugitive&lt;/em&gt; (1925; &lt;em&gt;The Fugitive&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Temps retrouvé&lt;/em&gt; (1927; &lt;em&gt;Finding Time Again&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Time Regained&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Scott_Moncrieff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. K. Scott Moncrieff&lt;/a&gt; translated the six first volumes, published between 1922 and his death in 1930. The translation was completed by Terence Kilmartin and was revised by D. J. Enright in 1992.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8306" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'À la recherche du temps perdu' ('In Search of Lost Time', 1913 - 1927), a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust. Use this tag with [marcel-proust] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T14:05:48.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8307" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8308" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's epic poem 'Venus and Adonis', first published in 1593 and frequently reprinted during the first few decades after its publication. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T15:06:48.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8367" CreationDate="2018-08-30T15:31:44.400" Score="6" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently learned that Thomas Hardy's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was first published &lt;strong&gt;anonymously&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Cornhill Magazine&lt;/em&gt;. As far as I know, publishing novels as monthly serials was reasonably common in those days (see Dickens, for example), but why wouldn't he put his name on it? Unlike &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marian Evans&lt;/a&gt;, who used a male pseudonym for her novels, Hardy didn't have to struggle against the sexism of the day. Was there another reason for him not to use his real name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did Hardy publish &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; anonymously?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T08:12:20.693" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T08:12:20.693" Title="Why was Far from the Madding Crowd first published anonymously?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;far-from-the-madding-crowd&gt;&lt;anonymity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5899" CreationDate="2018-08-30T15:48:49.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'&quot;Ready  ?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Ready.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Now?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Soon.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Do the scientists really know? Will it happen today, will it?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Look, look; see for yourself!&quot;&#xA;  The children pressed to each other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering out for a look at the hidden sun.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- From &quot;All Summer in a Day&quot; by Ray Bradbury&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has witnessed a total solar eclipse would recognize some similarities. A rare and brief but beautiful event involving shadows (of clouds/moon) and the sun. Few people on the planet have seen it and those fortunate few have a frustrating &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/96261999250/exulansis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exulansis&lt;/a&gt; trying to convey the experience to others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;'Sometimes, at night, she heard them&#xA;  stir, in remembrance, and she knew they&#xA;  were dreaming and remembering gold or a&#xA;  yellow crayon or a coin large enough to buy&#xA;  the world with. She knew they thought they&#xA;  remembered a warmness, like a blushing in&#xA;  the face, in the body, in the arms and legs&#xA;  and trembling hands. But then they always&#xA;  awoke to the tatting drum, the endless&#xA;  shaking down of clear bead necklaces upon&#xA;  the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests,&#xA;  and their dreams were gone.&#xA;      All day yesterday they had read in class&#xA;  about the sun. About how like a lemon it&#xA;  was, and how hot. And they had written&#xA;  small stories or essays or poems about it:&#xA;  I&#xA;  think the sun is a flower,That blooms for just&#xA;  one hour.&#xA;       That was Margot’s poem, read&#xA;  in a quiet voice in the still classroom while&#xA;  the rain was falling outside.'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No it's not like the photographs or the movies. And if you want to see one in person, you'll have to travel to see it or wait an average of 300 years for one to come to you. It's nothing like a total lunar eclipse and any partial solar eclipse you've ever seen was at least 10,000 times brighter and blander. So was this story inspired by a total solar eclipse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Ray Bradbury published &quot;All Summer in a Day&quot; in March 1954, 3 months before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_June_30,_1954&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;June 30, 1954 when a total solar eclipse&lt;/a&gt; would have been visible from northern Wisconsin and parts of Minnesota a few hours drive from his native Waukegan, Illinois. The personal experience of my wife's grandmother seeing this one probably inspired her and the Green Bay astronomy club to take my wife to see one in 1979 which inspired her to take me to see one with me in Antigua 1998, Turkey 2006 and Kentucky 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a short drive from Waukegan, but Ray Bradbury didn't drive. In fact he famously got into trouble the Waukegan police multiple times (as early as 1938?) for the crime of... walking. (and wisecracking, cue Robert Dinero's &quot;I'm walkin' here!&quot;) This famously inspired his short story &quot;The Pedestrian&quot; and subsequent novel, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451#cite_note-bigread-42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Fahrenheit 451.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But though Bradbury didn't drive himself, there is no reason to believe he confined himself to Waukegan (Martian Chrinicle's Green Town.) In fact when I went to UW-Oshkosh on the shore of Lake Winnebago a literary friend told me rumors that his beautiful début story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lake_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Lake (1944)&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was inspired by an occurrence on the beach at Oshkosh's Menominee park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good writers write from experience and Ray Bradbury was a good writer so there is a very good chance that he combined the anticipation of the rare total solar eclipse (an memories of an earlier one) with the nearly universal experience of being bullied or seeing some other outsider be bullied in a school. In my mind this story fits perfectly into a school memory where Peggy (Margot?) a 3rd grade refugee from the troubles in Belfast in 1974 found herself alone and misunderstood in our musty classroom/fallout shelter during what must have been for her, a long, dark and lonely winter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's shocking how well Bradbury understood and empathized with the outsider, the refugee, the immigrant. It almost makes me wonder if he wasn't a Waukeegan born &quot;towney.&quot; Maybe Bradbury himself was an immigrant from somewhere very very far away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4975" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-30T16:09:53.513" LastActivityDate="2018-08-30T16:09:53.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14288" CreationDate="2018-08-30T21:00:13.200" Score="13" ViewCount="460" Body="&lt;p&gt;In several Cthulhu Mythos stories, incantations are made that seemingly reference &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrew terms for the Abrahamic God&lt;/a&gt;. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adonai Sabaoth...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, we have apparent references to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;אדני אלהים (Adonai Elohim, &amp;quot;My Lord God&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;אדני יהוה (Adonai YHWH, &amp;quot;My Lord YHWH&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;אדני צבאות (Adonai Sabaoth, &amp;quot;My Lord of Armies&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we find elsewhere,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an Abrahamic God in the Cthulhu Mythos? Obviously such a deity would not likely be &lt;em&gt;omnipotent&lt;/em&gt; as he is portrayed in the Bible, Quran, and other Abrahamic writings in our world, but is there any indication that a specific god is responsible for the stories that eventually evolved into the Abrahamic religions, or that the Bible and related texts as they exist in the Cthulhu Mythos are intended to reference a specific god that actually exists in that universe (whether or not those texts are fully accurate at describing such god)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T15:25:52.533" Title="Does the Abrahamic God exist in the Cthulhu Mythos?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;&lt;cthulhu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4124" CreationDate="2018-08-30T22:05:02.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cupid hides himself because he is a god, and also because he was ordered by Venus to kill Psyche but instead falls in love with her. So to shield his identity and his true self from Psyche, he only appears in the dark so that she doesn't see the true majesty that he is and so that the message would not get back to Venus who is his mother that he in fact betrayed her trust and orders by not killing Psyche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4976" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T08:28:33.777" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T08:28:33.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T09:36:15.710" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's novel &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; contains a story entitled &quot;How Tan-Tan Learn to Thief&quot;. It is one of the many elements from Caribbean culture that Hopkinson draws on in the novel. &#xA;The story is based on the Caribbean legend about how the first people came to Earth; see the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oocities.org/thetropics/shores/9253/legends3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online version on OoCities.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legend is about the Carib people, who live on the moon and decide to go to Earth in order to clean it.&#xA;Afterwards, they cannot return to the moon and they don't like the fruits of the trees on Earth.&#xA;The deity Kabo-Tano (also known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.native-languages.org/morelegends/tamosi.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tamosi&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;creates a great tree, each branch of which bears a different type of fruit,&#xA;but does not tell the people about the tree. Several animals know about the tree but don't want the people about it.&#xA;The people eventually find it but Kabo Tano tells them to cut it down;&#xA;the cuttings from the tree's branches are then planted in the fields,&#xA;where they grow into different types of plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legend can also be found in books such as &lt;em&gt;Guyana Legends: Folk Tales of the Indigenous Amerindians&lt;/em&gt; by Odeen Ishmael (2011)&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;West-Indian Folk-tales&lt;/em&gt; retold by Philip Sherlock (Oxford University Press, 1966 and many times reprinted; see the first story: &quot;The Coomacka-Tree&quot;).&#xA;Hopkinson changes the story; for example, it is not about the Caribs but about Tan-Tan and Antonio.&#xA;What is the relevance of the story to the novel as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T09:36:15.710" Title="Relevance of the cloud chariot story to the rest of Midnight Robber?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;midnight-robber&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8316" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8320" CreationDate="2018-08-31T11:04:50.247" Score="5" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt;, chapter &quot;Xenophilius Lovegood&quot;, when Mr. Lovegood summons Death Eaters, they arrive using broomsticks instead of simply Apparating to his house. I did not understand this part. I know that upon arriving, the Death Eaters discussed that they were not in a hurry and it could be a false alarm, but all the same, isn't Apparition preferable than travel by broomstick, particularly for Death Eaters who were looking for Harry Potter so fervently?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4980" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T12:17:08.713" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T13:39:40.970" Title="In the chapter 'Xenophilius Lovegood', why did the Death Eaters use broomsticks and not Apparition?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8282" CreationDate="2018-08-31T11:14:23.580" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question has been well discussed. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Ulysses.html?id=OudaAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kenner&lt;/a&gt; Chapter 13. Here is my take. All the quotes are from the penultimate chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the ending &lt;em&gt;Bloom&lt;/em&gt; desires. Bloom gets the son he lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloom  desires Stephen to move in and rent Rudy's room. In Bloom's mind, Stephen can get singing lessons from Molly, tutor Molly in Italian, etc. Bloom dreams of long conversations with Stephen, perhaps even a concert featuring Bloom and Stephen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What various advantages would or might have resulted from a&#xA;prolongation of such an extemporisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the guest: security of domicile and seclusion of study. For the&#xA;host: rejuvenation of intelligence, vicarious satisfaction. For the&#xA;hostess: disintegration of obsession, acquisition of correct Italian&#xA;pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloom would like it to be &lt;em&gt;Bloom and Stephen&lt;/em&gt;, with Stephen in the role as son. But that is a power relation, even a capture. Consider the various meanings of &lt;em&gt;asylum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the proposal of &lt;em&gt;asylum&lt;/em&gt; accepted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Promptly, inexplicably, with amicability, gratefully it was declined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Stephen was not initially &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; opposed to the idea, upon entering the premises with Bloom, he begins to &lt;em&gt;experience&lt;/em&gt; Bloom's dream in the second to last chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the relationship that Stephen is seeking. Stephen certainly has a gaping &lt;em&gt;father-hole&lt;/em&gt; and senses the missing father in Bloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He heard in a profound ancient male unfamiliar melody the accumulation&#xA;of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Stephen does not need &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; father. That is a relationship he &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; move beyond as he becomes a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And his subconscious gives this away. As noted in the OP, Stephen sings a horrible anti-Semitic song about a Christian boy who is captured by a Jew and eventually killed! Given that Bloom is a Jew, this is a &lt;em&gt;shot fired&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then out there came the jew’s daughter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And she all dressed in green.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Come back, come back, you pretty little boy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And play your ball again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I can’t come back and I won’t come back&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Without my schoolfellows all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For if my master he did hear&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He’d make it a sorry ball.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She took him by the lilywhite hand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And led him along the hall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Until she led him to a room&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where none could hear him call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She took a penknife out of her pocket&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And cut off his little head.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And now he’ll play his ball no more&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For he lies among the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen becomes aware that such a relationship is dangerous for him. What he will get from Bloom comes at a mortal cost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Condense Stephen's commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of all, the least of all, is the victim predestined. Once by inadvertence twice by design he challenges his destiny. It comes when he is abandoned and challenges him reluctant and, as an apparition of hope and youth, holds him unresisting. It leads him to a strange habitation, to a secret infidel apartment, and there, implacable, immolates him, consenting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Stephen accepts Bloom's offer, he will &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt; be the predestined victim. The offer comes when Stephen is abandoned, and the apparition of being able to remain a boy is tempting. But if Stephen yields and moves in, he will ultimately be sacrificed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; accept Bloom's offer. While it is tempting to stay a boy, to stay a boy will &amp;quot;kill&amp;quot; him. Rather he must return and face the world. He must move forward, from the known boy to the unknown man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Stephen participate in his dejection?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He affirmed his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding&#xA;syllogistically from the known to the unknown and a conscious rational&#xA;reagent between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon&#xA;the incertitude of the void.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T09:14:10.850" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T09:14:10.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8233" CreationDate="2018-08-31T11:31:03.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;She says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Good lord I hope it is not &quot;that&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If she were casually sick, why would she refer the sickness as that? she should be talking about the sickness that comes with pregnancy. The discussion further about children and childbearing only confirms that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They say the bride is always so blushing and proud and happy when she&#xA;  finds  that out, but—I'd hate it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would a bride blush about sickness unless it is pregnancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2330" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T18:26:57.190" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T18:26:57.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8234" CreationDate="2018-08-31T12:34:35.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, &quot;fe&quot; is Hopkinson's or Ariel's version of &quot;fi&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaican_Patois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jamaican Patois&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;Shift&quot; does not use pure Jamaican Patois, since that would make the story to hard to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on Jamaican Patois lists a number of usages of &quot;fi&quot; but not the one used in the story. The Jamaican Patwah dictionary gives &lt;a href=&quot;http://jamaicanpatwah.com/term/fi/1292&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three definitions of &quot;fi&quot;&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;for&quot; (twice) and &quot;to&quot;. It gives the following example for &quot;to&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Patois&lt;/em&gt;: Mi realli waah dem fi know seh mi deh here &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;: I want them to know that I am here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Donald Winford's paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/414387&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Syntax of Fi Complements in Caribbean English Creole&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Language&lt;/em&gt;, September 1985) contains more examples, e.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mi waan fi go&lt;/em&gt; &quot;I want to go.&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;a jan mi waan fi go&lt;/em&gt; &quot;It's John I want to go.&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;im don fiil fi go ...&lt;/em&gt; &quot;He didn't want to go ...&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;jan trai fi kraas di riba&lt;/em&gt; &quot;John tried to cross the river.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article spends more than thirty pages on how to analyse and parse this type of sentences, but that discussion goes beyond the scope of the question about &quot;fe&quot; in &quot;Shift&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fe&quot; also exists in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Creole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haitian Creole&lt;/a&gt;, which is a French-based creole.&#xA;Omniglot's article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/haitiancreole.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Useful phrases in Haitian Creole&lt;/a&gt; contains two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Long time no see: Sa fè lontan / Sa fe lon temps nou pa we &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pleased to meet you: (...) M'kontan fè konesans ou / Mwe kontan fe konesana ou&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fe&quot; is obviously derived from the French verb &quot;faire&quot; (English: &quot;do&quot; or &quot;make&quot;); in some cases, it can be translated to &quot;fait&quot; (third person singular, present tense):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sa fè lontan&quot; from French &quot;Ça fait longtemps&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Mwe kontan fe konesana ou&quot; from &quot;Moi content faire connaissance vous&quot; (non-standard French)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;Shift&quot; does not use a French-based creole and the meaning &quot;faire&quot; does not fit into the examples from Ariel's sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T12:34:35.257" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8316" CreationDate="2018-08-31T13:15:42.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this specific question is addressed anywhere; however, a general answer may be that his house might have had anti-apparition protection. As Dumbledore explained to Harry in Chapter 4 of &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Professor, why couldn’t we just Apparate directly into  your old&#xA;  colleague’s house?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Because it would be quite as rude as kicking down  the front door,”&#xA;  said Dumbledore. “Courtesy dictates  that we offer fellow wizards the&#xA;  opportunity of denying  us entry. &lt;strong&gt;In any case, most Wizarding&#xA;  dwellings are  magically protected from unwanted Apparators.&lt;/strong&gt; At &#xA;  Hogwarts, for instance — ” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“ — you can’t Apparate anywhere inside the buildings  or grounds,”&#xA;  said Harry quickly. “Hermione Granger  told me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't necessarily explain why the Death Eaters couldn't have Apparated nearby, but then again perhaps they did and only used the brooms for the last little bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T13:39:40.970" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T13:39:40.970" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8270" CreationDate="2018-08-31T15:05:36.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Carter has posted the song online with the title &quot;Graveyard Blues&quot; and sees the first reactions from blues collectors, he tells Seth, &quot;We own that shit!&quot;. This is the clearest formulation of the theme of cultural appropriation in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Seth gets in touch with JumpJim, who tells him how he and an older record collector named Chester Bly drove to the south a few decades earlier in order to unearth rare records by black blues artists. These sections of the novel are set in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jim Crow era&lt;/a&gt;, when laws enforced racial segregation in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JumpJim's handle (we never learn his real name) is another example of appropriation, since it refers to the song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_Jim_Crow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jump Jim Crow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Jump Jim Crow&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Jim Crow&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is a song and dance from 1828 that was done in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackface&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blackface&lt;/a&gt; by white minstrel performer Thomas Dartmouth (T. D.) &quot;Daddy&quot; Rice. The song was supposedly inspired by the song and dance of the character &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_(character)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jim Crow&lt;/a&gt;, a physically disabled African slave (sometimes called Jim Cuff), who is variously claimed to have resided in St. Louis, Cincinnati, or Pittsburgh. (...) &quot;Jump Jim Crow&quot; was a key initial step in a tradition of popular music in the United States that was based on the &quot;imitation&quot; and mockery of black people. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the song dates from 1828, exactly 100 years before Charlie Shaw in the novel supposedly recorded &quot;Graveyard Blues&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T15:05:36.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3062" CreationDate="2018-08-31T16:25:33.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that cauldrons are were strongly associated with fertility and regeneration in ancient Celtic religion; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the king of Prussia in 1915 when this poem was written, was Wilhelm II, eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the King of England in 1915 was George V, also a grandchild of Queen Victoria, who  retained his German surname Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until 1917 when he changed it to Windsor as a result of anti-German sentiment caused by WW1;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the phoenix is also linked to regeneration, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think we should consider the possibility of the two cauldrons representing England and Germany, the two &quot;witches&quot; being the mothers of George (England) and Wilhelm (Germany) respectively (Not negative, merely owners of cauldrons), and the &quot;mother who died yesterday&quot; being Victoria. The point is that the offspring of both 'cauldrons' resembles the mother: Germany and England are not only similar, but are actually family.  What then does that make patriotism? It certainly suggests great irony to the line 'as we love ourselves, we hate our foe', because our 'foe' is actually ourselves, our family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just a thought, because I cannot quite get my head around Edward Thomas' viewpoints here. Yet I cannot shake the opinion that these facts must matter in any interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4981" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T17:22:58.030" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T17:22:58.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-08-31T19:35:20.743" Score="5" ViewCount="751" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a quote by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Spassky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boris Spassky&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A man who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this something that is just related to chess or is it a wider statement about people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4983" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-08-31T20:52:08.450" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:54:45.267" Title="What does this Boris Spassky quote mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;boris-spassky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8323" CreationDate="2018-08-31T20:51:11.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context for this quote can be found in the book &lt;em&gt;The 48 Laws of Power&lt;/em&gt; by Robert Greene. It comes from the famous Fischer-Spassky match in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reykjavik in 1972&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In May of 1972, chess champion Boris Spassky anxiously awaited his rival &#xA;  Bobby Fischer in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two men had been scheduled to &#xA;  meet for the World Championship of Chess, but Fischer had not arrived on &#xA;  time and the match was on hold. Fischer had problems with the size of the &#xA;  prize money, problems with the way the money was to be distributed, &#xA;  problems with the logistics of holding the match in Iceland. He might back &#xA;  out at any moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spassky tried to be patient. His Russian bosses felt that Fischer was humiliating him and told him to walk away, but Spassky wanted this match. &#xA;  He knew he could destroy Fischer, and nothing was going to spoil the &#xA;  greatest victory of his career. “So it seems that all our work may come to &#xA;  nothing,” Spassky told a comrade. “But what can we do? It is Bobby’s &#xA;  move. If he comes, we play. If he does not come; we do not play. &lt;strong&gt;A man &#xA;  who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.&lt;/strong&gt;” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=P_zMW3EHnTEC&amp;amp;pg=PA124&amp;amp;dq=bobby%27s+come+A+man+who+is+willing+to+commit+suicide+has+the+initiative.&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiqqoypi5jdAhUCxhoKHd4dCiIQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=bobby&amp;#39;s%20come%20A%20man%20who%20is%20willing%20to%20commit%20suicide%20has%20the%20initiative.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its immediate context, this is a statement about Fischer's apparent willingness to forfeit the entire tournament for the sake of details. It would be &quot;suicide&quot; for his chess career to walk away from this match - and yet, by holding that possibility in the air, he kept everyone else waiting for him, keeping the &quot;initiative&quot; in a sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the wider context, this ties into Fischer's strategy throughout the tournament. You can read about this in the 2 pages following the above passage in Greene's book. He outplayed Spassky with masterful psychological warfare: bluffing, playing unpredictably, changing his strategy, and always keeping the Russian off-balance. He forfeited two games at the start, which should have made Spassky more confident but instead made him nervous because he had no idea what Fischer was doing. His complaints were part of this overall strategy: by threatening to back out, he seemed to be jeopardising his own chess career, but in fact it was a way of psyching out his opponent, as well as keeping the &quot;initiative&quot;: it was &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; choice whether or not the game would be played at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, as a world-class chess player, Spassky would have been well-versed in matters of strategy. It's certainly possible to interpret his quote as a general aphorism about people. From a chess point of view, Fischer's actions were akin to a &lt;strong&gt;gambit&lt;/strong&gt;: he took huge risks, and sacrificed two games at the start, for the price of an eventual glorious victory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-08-31T20:51:11.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8323" CreationDate="2018-08-31T21:11:41.033" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of the quote is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1972&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1972 World Chess Championship match&lt;/a&gt; between Boris Spassky and his challenger Bobby Fischer. The match had a rocky start, since Fischer initially didn't show up and thereby delayed the start of the match (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1972/07/06/archives/fischer-apologizes-to-spassky-plans-for-match-still-unsettled.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fischer Apologizes to Spassky; Plans for Match Still Unsettled&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, 6 July 1972). In fact, there was uncertainty about whether the match would take place at all; Fischer wanted more prize money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://thefortyeightlawsofpower.tumblr.com/post/163504312757/law-17-keep-others-in-suspended-terror&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 48 Laws of Power&lt;/a&gt; (an unexpected source), gives some more context to the quote (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Spassky tried to be patient. His Russian bosses felt that Fischer was humiliating him and told him to walk away, but Spassky wanted this match. He knew he could destroy Fischer, and nothing was going to spoil the greatest victory of his career. “So it seems that all our work may come to nothing,” Spassky told a comrade. “&lt;strong&gt;But what can we do? It is Bobby’s move. If he comes, we play. If he does not come, we do not play. A man who is willing to commit suicide has the initiative.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Spassky's point of view, Fischer was the person on the suicide mission. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://chess-teacher.com/initiative-in-chess/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;initiative&lt;/a&gt; is an important concept in chess. Apparently, Wilhelm Steinitz said, &quot;Only the player with the initiative has the right to attack&quot;. But it may be better to use the word &quot;opportunity&quot; than &quot;right&quot;, since it means that you have the opportunity to attack because you are not in a position where you need to make defensive moves. You don't need to wait for what is going to happen; you &lt;em&gt;make&lt;/em&gt; things happen. This is also applies to the situation that Fischer put Spassky in: Spassky had to wait for what Fischer was going to do next, there was no way to predict his actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wider application of this is that someone who is on a suicide mission (either in a literal or a figurative sense) will not be constrained by the great personal costs that their actions may require, so it is harder to prepare for what they will do. This puts you in a defensive position where you need to wait for what will happen; the other person has the &lt;strong&gt;initiative&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T15:54:45.267" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T15:54:45.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T03:50:02.667" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Fox, Kate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watching-English-International-Bestseller-Revised/dp/1444785206/ref=dp_ob_title_bk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watching the English&lt;/em&gt; (2014 ed)&lt;/a&gt;.  p. 499  Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Self-deprecating Insult Rule&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of privileged schoolchildren and the English art of indirectness, here is a quote I came across in a posh magazine from a mother whose daughter was in the same house as Kate Middleton (now the Duchess of Cambridge, married to Prince William) at Marlborough, a very grand private boarding school: ‘There was always something slightly galling about having your children at school with the Middletons. Every pristine item of clothing would have a beautifully sewn-in name tape, for instance. It was unthinkable that they would end up resorting to marker pens on labels like the rest of us. There were huge picnics at sports day, the smartest tennis racquets, that kind of thing. It made the rest of us all feel rather hopeless.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To anyone who understands English class-indicators, this mother’s apparently humble statement – all self-denigrating and full of admiration for the Middleton family’s perfections – is not only an indirect boast, but also a subtle snobby put-down. Even if you are not English, if you’ve read the rest of this book, you should have no trouble deciphering the coded insults:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• You will know, as this mother clearly does, that caring about every item of clothing being ‘pristine’, with perfectly sewn-in name tapes, is a middle-middle or even lower-middle indicator. Even the word ‘pristine’ is a sneer: only the suburban bourgeoisie regard it as a term of approbation, and fuss about having everything ‘pristine’ or ‘spotless’. &lt;strong&gt;Remember the lines from Betjeman’s satirical poem. ‘You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes/And I must have things daintily served’?&lt;/strong&gt; (Or if you want a more modern example, think of the desperate social-climber Hyacinth Bucket, in the television comedy Keeping Up Appearances, and her constant fretting over such dainty details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boldened lines refer to &lt;a href=&quot;http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/john_betjeman/poems/785&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this poem&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T15:37:43.907" Title="What did John Betjeman mean by &quot;You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes/And I must have things daintily served&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-betjeman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8327" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T07:37:36.077" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking to place a book read circa 2000 about a couple who move to a cottage in the country, where the woman was an artist and the man was a music producer (I think, bit vague now), and the man has a history of drug use. They meet a local man who had some kind of magical/supernatural power which he uses against them and I seem to think the cottage walls melted at some point. Version I had was a white cover with the cottage on it. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4984" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T08:34:24.770" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T08:34:24.770" Title="Book about an artist/musician couple who move to a new cottage" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3372" CreationDate="2018-09-01T09:08:13.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hands of Love are often referred to God's care, blessing and love directed towards humanity (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-binds-the-hands-of-love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://handsofloveusa.org/who-we-are/biblical-hands-of-love-usa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). So &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblestudytools.com/topical-verses/god-is-love/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Love&lt;/a&gt; is used as a synonym of God. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines can be interpreted as the protagonist, who is on the verge or already in the state of deep religious \ ideological psychosis, fanatic fervour. He is motivated and driven by better ideals, however his actions are going to be destructive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4985" LastEditorUserId="4985" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T11:49:15.933" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T11:49:15.933" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8448" CreationDate="2018-09-01T12:41:04.393" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story I'm looking for I read in the first half of the 2000's, I'm fairly certain the title had the word &quot;Vesuvius&quot; in it, but I'm not absolutely sure.  It was a short novel, not more than an inch thick.  Language is English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was set in Pompeii just before the famous eruption; the main character was a young (Greek possibly?) slave who was a skilled artist.  The main plot revolved around him escaping the city with a wealthy man's daughter, her secret soldier lover, and a smuggler.  A major subplot involved him creating a painting or fresco of the wealthy man's daughter, and he chose to draw her as Andromeda, with the soldier as Perseus, the smuggler as Medusa's head, and her suitor as the monster Cetus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it being unusual in that it was a story about Pompeii where the characters survive the eruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4986" LastEditorUserId="4986" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T23:50:06.927" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T23:23:37.640" Title="Children's story set in Pompeii" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8337" CreationDate="2018-09-01T13:37:47.727" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a comic/graphic novel I once saw, but do not remember its name nor author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some things are remember (or think I remember):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was monochromatic, but instead of the normal black, used a light brown/tan as primary color.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably took place on a beach.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was about a troubled family.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The family had three kids (two boys and one girl, I think)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The youngest kid was somewhat awkward and this was represented by him having a frog/toad head. I'm also pretty positive this kid's name was Peter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4987" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T16:23:28.507" Title="Tan/Brown graphic novel about family in a beach and kid with frog/toad head" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8326" CreationDate="2018-09-01T14:48:21.267" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only  interpretation of the OP's question that makes any sense to me, in light of Fox's very clear language, and Betjeman's heavy-handed irony, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is a &quot;serviette&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revised answer (based in large part on a comment from Spagirl, and supported by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oracle of Delphi&lt;/a&gt;) is that &quot;serviette&quot; is the non-U word for &quot;napkin&quot;.  The line between genteel and non genteel households is drawn between use of the terms &quot;serviette&quot; and &quot;napkin&quot;, not between uncrumpled  ones and uncrumpled.  That Betjeman's narrator worries about the latter shows his non-U ness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T11:53:28.540" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T11:53:28.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8332" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T16:16:07.440" Score="10" ViewCount="6955" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the start of the novel &lt;em&gt;Sister Mine&lt;/em&gt; by Nalo Hopkinson, one of the characters, Makeda, is looking for a new place to live. A certain Milo rents out &quot;units&quot; in what he calls &quot;warehouse living&quot; and shows Makeda what the facilities look like. Makeda thinks to herself,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'd heard about his kind. He was just your average slum landlord. I kissed my teeth in disdain. Milo blinked at the sound, but clearly didn't know what it meant. Any one of my relatives would have, on either side of the Family. Hell, any black person pretty much the world over would have known it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This act of kissing teeth also occurs frequently in Hopkinson's novel &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=kissing%20teeth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urban Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; describes it as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The act of kissing teeth (kmt) means to express disapproval[,] contempt, or dissatisfaction with a situation or person by making a sound through the act of sucking air through one's teeth.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Oft performed by people from the Caribbean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://jamaicanpatwah.com/term/Kiss-teeth/1022&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jamaican Patwah dictionary&lt;/a&gt; describes it as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To make a hissing sound from one’s mouth, usually to signal irritation or annoyance. (In Jamaica, hissing one’s teeth is normally followed by a round of expletives.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after reading these descriptions, it's still not clear what it exactly looks and sounds like. I am looking for a description or other type of resource (e.g. a video) that is sufficiently clear to help me reproduce this action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-01T17:13:47.930" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T10:33:08.900" Title="How do people &quot;kiss their teeth&quot; in Nalo Hopkinson's novels?" Tags="&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;midnight-robber&gt;&lt;sister-mine&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T16:34:56.570" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gustav Schwab‘s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/431071.Gods_and_Heroes_of_Ancient_Greece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gods and Heroes of Ancient Greece&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (OT: &lt;em&gt;Die schönsten klassischen Sagen des Altertums&lt;/em&gt;) is at least to the German audience &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; encyclopaedia of Roman and Greek mythology (despite its title). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Schwab&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gustav Schwab&lt;/a&gt; translated and adapted the most famous works (Aeneid, Iliad etc.) of the ancient world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat similar to Sioned Davies’ version of the old Welsh &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36794219-the-mabinogion?ac=1&amp;amp;from_search=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mabinogion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: It’s a modern adaptation (and translation) of &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; Welsh myths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Edda is the “bible” of Nordic and Icelandic myths. Does there exist an equivalent to the other two works (an English translation into Prose that is accepted as the standard encyclopaedia for Nordic Myths)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1929" LastEditorUserId="1929" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T19:24:35.153" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T19:24:35.153" Title="English standard of the (Prose) Edda?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;norse-mythology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8332" CreationDate="2018-09-01T16:48:42.967" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/10/explained-art-of-kissing-your-teeth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; explains, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The basic manoeuvre is a sucking of air through the teeth from behind&#xA;  pursed lips – or as academics describe it, a &quot;velaric ingressive&#xA;  airstream involving closure at two points in the mouth&quot;. But&#xA;  thereafter there is nuance. There is the short, sharp kiss from the&#xA;  front teeth on either side. Usually this denotes minor irritation or&#xA;  mild disapproval. It may be deployed with a shake of the head and&#xA;  perhaps the glimmer of a smile, recognising the absurdity of what has&#xA;  transpired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moving up the scale, there is the sucking from further back in the&#xA;  mouth. Longer in duration and louder, this responds to episodes&#xA;  occasioning deeper incredulity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This video is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek explanation, but it also shows it well: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSBMqGCdw84&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSBMqGCdw84&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="25" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T16:48:42.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-01T16:57:57.633" Score="1" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/some-like-poetry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Some Like Poetry&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Polish writer Wislawa Szymborska is a musing lament about the unpopularity of poetry among the general population. The middle verse consists of a series of similes which compare liking poetry to liking various other things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one likes compliments and the color blue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one likes an old scarf,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one likes having the upper hand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  one likes stroking a dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; just be a random list of examples of things a person might like, but I'm hoping it's more carefully thought out than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, is the significance of this choice of &quot;likes&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T16:57:57.633" Title="Is there any significance to the choice of similes for poetry in &quot;Some Like Poetry&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;wislawa-szymborska&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8332" CreationDate="2018-09-01T17:05:27.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found an explanation of &amp;quot;kissing teeth&amp;quot; in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2011/09/what-kiss-teeth-suck-teeth-means.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post by Azizi Powell&lt;/a&gt; on Pancocojams, a blog which (in its own words) showcases the customs of people of Black descent throughout the world. In this post, she explains something about the history of the term and the various different words which can be used for it in different parts of the Caribbean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;suck your teeth&amp;quot; is documented as early as 1915 in Jamaica and is also found in Barbados, Belize, and Guyana, Trinidad, and the United States (particularly among African Americans). In Tobago, kiss teeth is called &amp;quot;hiss teeth&amp;quot; and in the Cayman Islands it is called &amp;quot;sucking your mouth&amp;quot;. Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/%7Epatrickp/papers/KSTpapwww.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/papers/KSTpapwww.pdf&lt;/a&gt; The Meaning Of Kiss Teeth [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Caribbean kiss teeth is represented by the initials &amp;quot;KST&amp;quot; (kiss teeth) and &amp;quot;KMT&amp;quot; (kiss my teeth). Among people from the Caribbean, kiss teeth can be represented in writing using the words &amp;quot;Cho!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Chups&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Tchuipe, &amp;quot;Chupes&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Stchuup”, and similarly spelled words. These words are both nouns and verbs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well deserved ode to the tjoerie. The what?!? The tjoerie, which is the Surinamese word for what is known in the French West Indies as 'le tchip' and in the English speaking part of the Caribbean as 'kiss-teeth'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When something or someone becomes too annoying, one always has an effective weapon at their disposal: a long, cricket-like sound of which the effect combined with rolling eyes is deadly insulting. There is no one that does not respect a good tjoerie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also includes a video in her blog post to demonstrate the &amp;quot;tjoerie&amp;quot; in action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/ha9-RAJK65g&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/ha9-RAJK65g&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-01T17:05:27.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8330" CreationDate="2018-09-01T18:09:20.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Got the answer from another website: the book is &lt;a href=&quot;http://dashshaw.com/bottomless.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bottomless Belly Button&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (author's site) and the author is Dash Shaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about three brothers who reunite in a house at the beach after they hear their parents are divorcing. It focuses on the complicated relationships between all of them.It was published in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ffYgm.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ffYgm.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is an example of a page inside:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v2pUZ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v2pUZ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4987" LastEditorUserId="4987" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T16:23:28.507" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T16:23:28.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8447" CreationDate="2018-09-01T20:01:51.650" Score="9" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;The young man in the question takes his bride to his home in the countryside to meet his family. The author describes the following scene in exquisite detail:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's night and the entire family is sitting on the porch of their house&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the brother of the protagonist challenges him to a wrestling match in the dirt, claiming that the protagonist has changed at heart, is an urbanite now and won't dirty himself&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the protagonist hesitates, but then agrees to the challenge and after some struggle wins&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the new bride is very quiet and reticent during all of this, and the protagonist starts wondering if any of this is not to her taste, or if she dislikes this new side of him that she has discovered&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, when they go up to their room and the young man apologizes to his wife, it turns out that she wasn't really angry/sad at all, but loved him all the more for this side of him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4989" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T23:08:50.567" Title="Looking for an O.Henry story where a young man from the country working in the city marries a socialite and then goes for a visit to his home" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5163" CreationDate="2018-09-02T00:49:14.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a important ingredient in all of Piet Hein's grooks that neither of the existing answers mentions. All the poems in his published collections of them were accompanied by a simple drawing. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvEKp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AvEKp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Road to Wisdom Grook&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should these drawing be considered an essential part of a grook? I don't know—one would have had to ask Piet Hein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So maybe the definition of a grook should not simply be &lt;em&gt;a poetic epigram&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;a poetic epigram accompanied by a picture&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T02:11:03.997" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T02:11:03.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5753" CreationDate="2018-09-02T08:02:45.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Japanese to show affection to a loved one they usually use 好き pronounced suki which means to like something like ‘I like sushi’ or to show romantic affection like ‘I like you (romantic sense)’ or even to say ‘I like you (as a person)’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general suki is used rather than 愛してる pronounced aishiteru which means to love. It is a stronger form of affection and is not really used much even amongst couples.  In general the two forms can be interchangeable I guess but the Japanese tend to use suki more than ai or aishiteru. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I’m not a Japanese and I can only speak conversational level Japanese but I read this somewhere (forgot where) but it was a credible source (a native speaking Japanese). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3025" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T08:02:45.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8332" CreationDate="2018-09-02T10:33:08.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kissing teeth, or the &quot;velaric ingressive airstream involving closure at two points in the mouth&quot; may be considered disrespectful and a culpable expression of contempt. It is banned in many French schools and at one time was liable to result in arrest in Britain if done by someone being questioned by police. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11651574/French-schools-ban-teeth-sucking.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French schools ban teeth-sucking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T10:33:08.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8344" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8345" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Sister Mine' (2013) by Nalo Hopkinson. Use this tag with the [nalo-hopkinson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T16:12:54.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5160" CreationDate="2018-09-02T18:10:33.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;paradox&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;2. a.&lt;/strong&gt; An apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition, or a strongly counter-intuitive one, which investigation, analysis, or explanation may nevertheless prove to be well-founded or true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paradox in this case is in the surrounding lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the love of all […] Is but a small thing to the love of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is counter-intuitive because &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; would seem to be greater than &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt;. But in context &lt;em&gt;the love of all&lt;/em&gt; refers to the adulation of readers for a famous writer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To have our books Appraised by love […] Fame, indeed, 'twas said, Means simply love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while &lt;em&gt;the love of one&lt;/em&gt; refers to the love of a child for his mother (hence a &lt;em&gt;woman's&lt;/em&gt; paradox).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T18:10:33.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-02T23:59:22.377" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Charles Dickens wrote two &quot;historical novels&quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, set during the French Revolution, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Rudge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Barnaby Rudge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, set during the Gordon Riots. I find it interesting that both of these books were set against a backdrop of violent uprising. Was Dickens particularly fascinated by that kind of setting, or was it just a coincidence? If the former, what was his attitude towards the idea of revolution (either as expressed via these two novels, or elsewhere in his writings)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-02T23:59:22.377" Title="What was Dickens's attitude towards revolution?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8348" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T00:00:26.553" Score="2" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name &quot;Frankenstein&quot; is famous enough to have entered popular culture, even if people often get confused about whether it refers to the scientist or the monster. But where did Mary Shelley get this name from? Did it come from a particular real-life person, a local legend from somewhere in Europe, some significant hidden meaning? Surely it's more than just a random German-sounding name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:30:49.280" Title="What is the origin of the name &quot;Frankenstein&quot;?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8348" CreationDate="2018-09-03T01:30:08.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;An easy might-be-true answer is in Wikipedia: from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burg Frankenstein,&lt;/a&gt; a castle in Germany, where your predecessors conjectured Shelley visited and &lt;em&gt;possibly&lt;/em&gt; drew inspiration from the castle's legends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story is not universally believed, however. See the essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eberstadt-frankenstein.de/content/066_Any_monster_at_home_English_version.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Frankenstein – the monster’s home?&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Mueller for a forceful denial of every insinuation found in the Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:30:49.280" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:30:49.280" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8350" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T03:26:29.987" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently bought the Harper Perennial Film tie-in edition of &lt;em&gt;The Motorcycle Diaries&lt;/em&gt;. But after that I came to know that the original edition was published by Ocean press. So, is there any difference between the film tie-in edition and the original edition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T07:52:21.803" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T07:52:21.803" Title="Is there any difference between The Motorcycle Diaries Ocean press publication and film tie-in edition?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;diary&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T05:19:37.500" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this short story back in middle school during my literature class when we were studying about folklore. It was about a moon princess being jealous of her sister sun princess so much that she adorned herself in jewels enough to make the night disappear just so she can shine like her sister. People became lost and everything went terrible and the moon became so sad cause all she wanted was the people's attention. He mother advised her to try wearing ash to make her moonlight soft that will help people. I think it was something like this. I just can't remember the title of the short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4999" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T07:51:20.057" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T07:51:20.057" Title="Looking for the title of a folklore which was about moon princess being jealous of her sister sun princess" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8352" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-03T09:52:53.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T09:52:53.047" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T09:52:53.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8353" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-03T09:52:53.047" Score="0" Body="For questions about diaries: records of events kept by an individual. If the question is about a specific diary, please include a tag for the author as well." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T10:15:19.240" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T10:15:19.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T10:14:10.353" Score="8" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the conclusion to &lt;em&gt;Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe&lt;/em&gt;, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, the title character Ari reaches the realization that he is romantically attracted to Dante -- where previously, he firmly rebuffed Dante's explicit interest in him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way he arrives at this isn't portrayed as feeling any romantic or sexual desire of his own. Rather, his overall &quot;platonic&quot; passion for protecting Dante is interpreted by other characters as more than what mere friendship would explain. Hearing this, Ari understands it to be true, and comes to the conclusion that he's been repressing his own feelings and desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are we to understand that Ari &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; felt attracted to Dante, but has concealed that fact from us?&lt;/strong&gt; Just as, for example, he explicitly tells us that he &lt;em&gt;won't&lt;/em&gt; discuss whether he masturbates, or what he thinks about?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or, &lt;strong&gt;is this the first inkling Ari himself has of his attraction?&lt;/strong&gt; Which would mean, for example, that he's lying when he tells Dante their kiss actually did work for him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between &quot;Ari admits feelings he previously kept concealed&quot; vs. &quot;Ari realizes feelings that are brand new to him&quot; seems immensely significant, but the way the book is narrated, the lines between the two are very, very blurry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are we to interpret Ari as an unreliable narrator, or has all his narration reflected his knowledge and feelings at the time of each scene?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T19:05:01.993" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T19:05:01.993" Title="Is Ari an unreliable narrator, or is he oblivious?" Tags="&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;aristotle-and-dante-discover&gt;&lt;benjamin-alire-saenz&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8326" CreationDate="2018-09-03T11:44:30.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines from the Betjeman poem are setting out all the faux pas that middle class arriviste people make while trying to align themselves with the upper-class, unaware that their efforts are comical to the actual upper classes. I would not speculate which group Betjeman is less fond of....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem written and published shortly after Nancy Mitford's &lt;em&gt;The English Aristocracy&lt;/em&gt; in 1955. '&lt;em&gt;How to get on in Society&lt;/em&gt; was published in 'A few Late Chrysanthemums' as well as the anthology &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_Oblige_(book)#%22How_to_Get_on_in_Society%22_by_John_Betjeman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noblesse Oblige: An Enquiry Into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in 1956.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your cited extract there are a number of class indicators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You kiddies have crumpled the serviettes/And I must have things daintily served’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The class indicators are not limited to language, but also include insights to other aspects of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language indicators in the lines are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;kiddies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;serviettes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Serviette' is specified in articles on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'U and Non-U'&lt;/a&gt;, that is 'Upper class and non upperclass' language as defined by Alan S. C. Ross, professor of linguistics in the University of Birmingham and popularised by Mitford in 'The English Aristocracy' and may be one of the best known examples. The 'U' term is'napkin'. Both refer to a fabric item in this context. So Betjeman's use of 'Serviette' tells us the speaker is 'Non-U'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise 'Kiddies' is Non-U, though not included in the U/Non-U wordlists which circulate. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure It would even count as Middle class in current days. My newly professional class mother in the 1970s eschewed 'kid' and 'kiddie' as being downright common, though there may be some regional variation in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other class indicators are the reference to crumpling the serviettes and the desire for dainty serving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a Non-U household may have acquired one or more sets of serviette/napkins equal in quality to those of the U household, in the U household each napkin only serves at one meal time. In the Non-U household it has to serve all day or possibly more than one day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is neatly illustrated by this extract from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Mad Toffs: the British Upper Classes at their Best and Worst'&lt;/a&gt; by  Patrick Scrivenor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the Dukes of Devonshire.... was one day buying silver at Asprey, when he noticed some circular silver rings. he turned to his steward and enquired of him what they were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Those, your Grace, are napkin rings'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'A napkin ring?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Your Grace, when the middle classes breakfast, they take a fresh&#xA;  napkin, and when they have finished, they fold it, and roll it and&#xA;  place it through the rings. They use it again for luncheon, tea and&#xA;  dinner. Only at the end of the day is it sent to be laundered.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Duke was shocked. 'They use the same napkin throughout the day?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'They do, Your Grace.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'My goodness,' said the Duke, 'I had no idea such poverty existed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These stories do not have to be true. They are perfect as parables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, concern at the crumpled state of serviettes can only indicate that the napkins will not be sent to laundry immediately the meal is concluded. They must instead be smoothed, folded, rolled and inserted into their silver rings for re-use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For having things daintily served, like 'kiddies' evidence is harder to cite. My understanding is that it is a matter of &lt;em&gt;approach&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;http://classsystem.blogspot.com/2010/12/phone-for-fish-knives-norman.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog&lt;/a&gt; by Lucy Fisher, author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Talk-Posh-Lucy-Fisher-ebook/dp/B0088ZAUJ0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;qid=1480514611&amp;amp;sr=8-1&amp;amp;keywords=posh%20fisher&amp;amp;linkCode=sl1&amp;amp;tag=worcou-21&amp;amp;linkId=f5eed089941cc4ec85d9fb8720fbfb17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'How to Talk Posh'&lt;/a&gt; suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Upwards don’t try to be dainty. They’d probably call it “fussy” or “twee”. (They have their own kind of insufferable tweeness but that’s another story.) And you don't &quot;serve&quot; food in your own home. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what Kate Fox means by citing the lines is that the Middletons, despite their financial resources and their very best efforts to be 'proper', are doomed to continually give away their lack of 'U-ness' by caring about all the wrong things in all the wrong ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2018-09-03T13:23:06.873" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T13:23:06.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T15:32:27.693" Score="5" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Shakespearean play Hamlet Ophelia became psychologically ill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it because of Hamlet's behavior or how society treated her or what's the real reason behind her sudden illness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Shakespeare leave any reference to the reason behind her illness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastActivityDate="2018-09-03T15:32:27.693" Title="Why was Ophelia psychologically ill in the Shakespearean play Hamlet?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T21:58:17.853" Score="5" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Passing Of The Third Floor Back&amp;quot; a short story by Jerome K. Jerome &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/865/865-h/865-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(available on Project Gutenberg)&lt;/a&gt; we have the following dialogue, without further explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Pennycherry pondered. “He’s not the funny sort, is he?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not that sort at all. Mary Jane was sure of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we meant to understand by &amp;quot;funny sort&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this must be some euphemism for some undesirable and unmentionable characteristic that was clearly understood by the characters, and would have made sense to British readers in 1904.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we meet Mrs. Pennycherry's other lodgers, it would appear she was not over particular, provided they could pay, so who might she have been reluctant to accommodate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T19:02:10.387" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;funny sort&quot; in Jerome K. Jerome's &quot;Passing Of The Third Floor Back&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jerome-k-jerome&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-03T23:48:34.227" Score="5" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Amiri-baraka-somebody-blew-up-america-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Somebody Blew Up America&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by the African-American poet Amiri Baraka, he references a few people at the end of the first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They say it's some terrorist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;some barbaric&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Rab&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in Afghanistan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it wasn't our American terrorists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it wasn't the Klan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or the Skinheads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or them that blows up nigger churches&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or reincarnates us in Death Row&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it wasn't Trent Lott&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or David Duke, or Giuliani&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or Schundler, or Helms retiring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trent Lott was in favour of segregation and David Duke is seen as a Klansman. So it's easy to see why Amiri Baraka is taking aim at them in his politically charged and polemical poem; but why is he taking aim at Giuliani, Schundler and Helms? I don't see any obvious connection with his politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T15:48:15.743" Title="References in the first stanza of Amiri Baraka's poem &quot;Somebody Blew Up America&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;amiri-baraka&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8364" CreationDate="2018-09-04T10:23:22.893" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt; (By H.G. Wells), chapter 17 and 18 appear somewhat contrasting in the description of the night sky. In chapter 17, the author portrays the sight of a faceted pavilion, pier glow, and the moon hung in the first quarter. The next chapter says &quot;the night was very quiet and still, and the new moon was setting over the down&quot;. Both chapters are set on the same night. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please clarify, there might be some mistake in reader's understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5002" OwnerDisplayName="Vaibhav Joshi" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T11:17:32.590" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T06:10:37.517" Title="How can the moon be in the first quarter and in the new moon phase on the same night in H. G. Well's &quot;The Invisible Man?" Tags="&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-invisible-man&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8362" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T13:53:13.483" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jerome K. Jerome's short story &quot;The New Utopia&quot; has a strongly anti-socialist and anti-democratic message. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I  had  spent  an  extremely  interesting  evening.    I  had  dined  with&#xA;  some  very  &quot;advanced&quot;  friends  of  mine  at  the  “National  Socialist&#xA;  Club”.    We  had  had  an  excellent  dinner:  the  pheasant,  stuffed  with&#xA;  truffles,  was  a  poem;  and  when  I  say  that  the  ’49  Chateau  Lafitte&#xA;  was  worth  the  price  we  had  to  pay  for  it,  I  do  not  see  what  more  I can add in its favour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After dinner, and over the cigars (I must say they do know how&#xA;  to  stock  good  cigars  at  the  National  Socialist  Club),  we  had  a  very instructive  discussion  about  the  coming  equality  of  man  and  the&#xA;  nationalisation of capital.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I  was  not  able  to  take  much  part  in  the  argument  myself,  be-&#xA;  cause,  having  been  left  when  a  boy  in  a  position  which  rendered  it necessary  for  me  to  earn  my  own  living,  I  have  never  enjoyed  the time and opportunity to study these questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first person narrator then fell asleep, and woke up in the future. His guide took him on a walk around the city, and said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Why, I thought you understood that all men were now equal.  What would become  of  our  equality  if  one  man  or  woman  were  allowed  to swagger  about  in  golden  hair,  while  another  had  to  put  up  with carrots?    Men  have  not  only  got  to  be  equal  in  these  happy  days, but  to  look  it,  as  far  as  can  be.    By  causing  all  men  to  be  clean shaven,  and  all  men  and  women  to  have  black  hair  cut  the  same length, we obviate, to a certain extent, the errors of Nature.” &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I said:&#xA;  “Why black?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  He  said  he  did  not  know,  but  that  was  the  colour  which  had&#xA;  been decided upon.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  “Who by?” I asked.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  “By THE MAJORITY,” he replied, raising his hat and lowering his eyes, as if in prayer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_K._Jerome#Early_life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He wished to go into politics or be a man of letters, but the death of his father when Jerome was 13 and of his mother when he was 15 forced him to quit his studies and find work to support himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he publicly support the Conservative party, or speak publicly about current political issues, other than in this story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-04T15:26:26.587" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T20:50:02.923" Title="Was Jerome K Jerome politically active?" Tags="&lt;jerome-k-jerome&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-04T14:09:43.190" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hate the Communists and the stupid sods in this country who play&#xA;  their game and think they are just being 'caring, sharing, wonderful&#xA;  people'.…I've seen them back where they came from, back where they&#xA;  don't have to wear the plastic smiles or hide the brass knuckles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is a quote from the main character of the &lt;em&gt;Game, Set and Match&lt;/em&gt; trilogy. Along with Le Carre, Deighton is generally considered to be the greatest living spy novelist. Le Carre is a leftie, and George Smiley seems to be fairly nonpolitical. Does Deighton have the same politics as his main character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T16:04:45.050" Title="What are Len Deighton's political beliefs, if any?" Tags="&lt;len-deighton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8361" CreationDate="2018-09-04T15:25:11.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt; does contain some chronological inconsistencies.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the opening paragraphs of the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/view/93/99&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Tissue of Moonshine: the Mechanics of Deception in &lt;em&gt;The Sea Lady&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; by B.D. Sommerville&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of H.G. Wells’s early scientific romances and fantasies contain internal chronological, spatial or factual contradictions. There is, for example, a contradiction in longitudinal bearings in &lt;em&gt;The Island of Doctor Moreau&lt;/em&gt;  which is the subject of a ‘silent correction’ by Leon Stover.  Two chronological discrepancies have been noted in &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;,  while conflicting geographical and chronological information is given by Bedford in the narrative of &lt;em&gt;The First Men in the Moon&lt;/em&gt;.  The Time Traveller of &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt; contradicts himself about the times of his departure and return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most scholars attribute these discrepancies to error by the author, editor or typesetter. There are good reasons, however, for considering these, and other such contradictions in Wells’s early books, to be a deliberate strategy by him. The most compelling evidence for this view is that they occur only in his scientific romances or fantasies, and not in his novels. In a paper published in 1994, I argued that the chronological contradictions in &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt; are deliberate, and hold the key to an alternative plot which reveals the Time Traveller’s vision of the future to be a dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper he refers to regarding &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt; was published in &lt;em&gt;The Wellsian&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 17 (1994), and it &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/view/259/250&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be downloaded here&lt;/a&gt;. It's an interesting read, but not strictly relevant to answering your question. The more useful references are those cited for his statement about &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;, namely the following sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David Lake, &amp;quot;The Current Texts of Wells’s Early SF Novels: Situation Unsatisfactory (Part 2)&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Wellsian&lt;/em&gt; 12 (Summer 1989), pp. 21-35 (23)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David Lake, &amp;quot;The 1897 Editions of &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Wellsian&lt;/em&gt; 17 (Winter 1994), pp. 30-31 (30)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David Lake, ed., &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;, by H.G. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 149 &amp;amp; 160.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two of these - the &lt;em&gt;Wellsian&lt;/em&gt; articles - can be downloaded from the internet, namely &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/view/341/330&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/view/260/251&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. The second is essentially an erratum/correction to the first, after becoming aware of an edition he hadn't known about before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many slightly different versions of &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;, as can be seen for example in the following excerpts (screencap taken from the first David Lake article cited and linked above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYket.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYket.png&quot; alt=&quot;various versions of the passage following the Invisible Man's death&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In analysing these different versions of the text, Lake also discusses some of the errors which appear in them, ranging from misplaced words (&amp;quot;curious&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;furious&amp;quot;) to chronological discrepancies such as the one you noticed about the dates in February:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The approximate date is given in the first sentence of the novel, all versions: &amp;quot;Early in February&amp;quot;. But an exact date appears in the first line of Chapter 3 (PW, Chapter ) and in PW, P, NY, A3 and Essex it is &amp;quot;the 29th day of February&amp;quot;. The error is particularly glaring in PW, where the discrepant dates are on the same first page of the novel, at the tops of the first and third columns. Howere, Wells only caught the error in time for the Tauchnitz edition, where he emended the Chapter 3 reading to &amp;quot;the 9th day of February&amp;quot;. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Wells did not notice that his correction &amp;quot;9th&amp;quot; left another passage discrepant. This is in Chapter 4, all versions, except PW which omits. The villagers, suspecting Griffin of being on the run from the law, face the problem: &amp;quot;No crime of any magnitude from the middle or end of February was known to have occurred&amp;quot; (A3, p. 27). Since the crime in question could only have been committed by Griffin &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; his arrival, this suits &amp;quot;29th&amp;quot; but not &amp;quot;9th&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also checked the book cited above, &lt;em&gt;The Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt; edited by the same David Lake. It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pZ8fAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;dq=David+Lake%2C+ed.%2C+The+Invisible+Man%2C+by+H.G.+Wells&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=new+moon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, and he does notice one problem with the moon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the new moon was setting over the down&lt;/em&gt;: an impossibility, at well past 2 a.m. (see previous chapter, p. 78). New moons set before midnight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inconsistency you've found is in the same vein as these. Wells &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; known for the chronological discrepancies in his early novels. It may be possible to draw some hidden meaning from such discrepancies, as Sommerville has attempted to do with other Wells stories, but frankly I think that's a little far-fetched, especially with small errors like this which he corrected in some editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T20:10:26.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8359" CreationDate="2018-09-04T15:48:15.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Giuliani pushed the &quot;broken windows theory&quot; of policing, intended to punish people for small infractions. The idea was to make people think of New York as a lawful place rather than one of urban decay, but it was often applied in a racially disparate way. It contributed in part to the US having an outsized prison population, and disproportionate racial representation among prisoners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helms was famously racist (despite an illegitimate child with a black woman). He opposed civil rights legislation and frequently used race-baiting rhetoric. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ItAOKZs4PqIC&amp;amp;pg=PA172&amp;amp;lpg=PA172&amp;amp;dq=Schundler%20racist&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=pitZYulBng&amp;amp;sig=tTEpPSddASrc4ZrDarzg7tyx4p4&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiw94HG1qHdAhWnrFkKHe4UDX8Q6AEwAXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=racial%20component&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A book&lt;/a&gt; claims Schundler &quot;increasingly resorted to issues with a strong racial component&quot; while losing a campaign to a Democrat. That book was written in 2002, referring to events in the 90s. While these are not on a par with the more explicit and persistent racism of the national figures in the poem, as a New Jersey figure it would have a more personal meaning. New Jersey is a state with a very strong liberal basis but also some sharp racial divisions, and this insight prefigures the way New Jersey's current Republican governor has supported a party that has increasingly used racist rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T15:48:15.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8363" CreationDate="2018-09-04T16:04:45.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Len Deighton generally declines to make any strong political statements.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found a few references to his political views from various interviews available online, and he invariably declines to make any real commitments, preferring to remain fairly neutral and nonpolitical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/len-deighton-the-spy-and-i-521520.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Independent, January 2006&lt;/a&gt; (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If there is a common factor, it is his sympathy with what you might call the poor bloody infantry. Even now, &lt;strong&gt;he will not concede that he has any agenda against the generals, the leaders, the politicians&lt;/strong&gt;, even after his most recent book, &lt;em&gt;Blood, Tears and Folly&lt;/em&gt;, a damning overview of the major campaigns of the Second World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What he does say is that people in positions of power, who may be sending people off to be killed, should expect to have their deeds examined in rather more detail than those being sent to be killed. &lt;strong&gt;It is tempting to see it as a straight class issue. But he deflects the question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I was born in a workhouse,&quot; he says. (He was, in Marylebone in London, in 1929, though it was just up the road from the hospital, and his parents were by no means destitute; at that time, his father was a chauffeur and skilled mechanic, &quot;in service&quot; to the family of a senior keeper at the British Museum. His mother was a cook. They all, in fact, lived in a mews near Baker Street.) &quot;It trumps the ace of everybody else, doesn't it? Where do you go that's lower than that? So &lt;strong&gt;I feel free to criticise anyone I choose. I just speak as I find. I'm not a member of any political party. I hesitate before I join hands, as the old saying goes.&lt;/strong&gt; What I say is based on my own experience.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/len-deighton-interview-nobody-could-have-had-happier-life-had/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Telegraph, 2009&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He thinks Britain is even less meritocratic and democratic now than in the Sixties. “But I’m not a militant. I’m not trying to overturn the system, I’m just trying to be a part of it.” He cannot be accused, as John le Carré often is, of being nostalgic for the Cold War. “I think the world is a better place now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.deightondossier.net/Author/Interviews/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Deighton Dossier, March 2012&lt;/a&gt; (bold emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The narrative [of The Ipcress File] seems to twist 'social' norms: the hero is working class, rough around the edges, yet is more cultured, eats better food and better read than his bosses. Did the character's approach reflect perhaps your own worldview at the time in London, when attitudes were changing?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LD: Well, there were already plenty of class warriors around at the time I started writing. John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and Arnold Wesker, who wrote Chips With Everything, were ‘angry young men’. I was of about the same age, but I wasn’t angry.&#xA;  What did I have to be angry about? I had had spent six wonderful years studying art. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I graduated from the Royal College of Art my diploma came from the hand of the Duke of Edinburgh. In the speech he made to us wide-eyed little van Goghs he said that artists were lucky. Artists, he said, could wend their way through all sections of society and all classes too. I took him at his word and despite being born in the Marylebone Workhouse I have found that a clean shirt and sober tie – plus a sense of humour – overcomes many social limitations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am not a class warrior.&lt;/strong&gt; I respect and admire skills and education. Britain’s public schools have a long tradition of teaching the Victorian virtues; a belief in God, loyalty, modesty, justice, prudence, patriotism and sacrifice: I value those characteristics. &lt;strong&gt;When I poke fun at authority it’s not a matter of class, it is because authority is too often given to lazy and incompetent cronies.&lt;/strong&gt; Prejudice of any sort is evil; it is illogical and destructive. ‘Give every boy an equal opportunity,’ I say. Never mind whether he comes from Eton or some workhouse in Marylebone. Girls too, of course!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does, however, call himself a capitalist. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.deightondossier.net/Author/Interviews/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Deighton Dossier, November 2012&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, [Major Erich Stinnes] was based upon a grim-faced East German pen-pusher who had lived in Moscow where he became a 'Germany specialist'; at least, that's what I was told. He turned up rather too often among the people I knew in Berlin. I don’t think he was assigned to watching me (he would have been more friendly had that been the case), but he was a dedicated Marxist while &lt;strong&gt;I was a self-confessed capitalist&lt;/strong&gt;. We didn't become friends!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-04T16:04:45.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8309" CreationDate="2018-09-04T17:20:46.797" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was the policy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornhill_Magazine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cornhill Magazine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; to publish all articles and serializations without a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;byline&lt;/a&gt;, so Hardy surely had no choice in the matter. If you look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cornhillmagazine29londuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 29&lt;/a&gt; (January–June 1874), you’ll see that in the same year the magazine included not only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but also &lt;em&gt;Young Brown: or, the Law of Inheritance&lt;/em&gt; (by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Clare_Grenville_Murray&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eustace Clare Grenville Murray&lt;/a&gt;), &lt;em&gt;Zelda’s Fortune&lt;/em&gt; (by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Edward_Francillon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Edward Francillon&lt;/a&gt;) and many other stories and articles, all anonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cornhillmagazine29londuoft#page/n15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bqNGh.jpg&quot; height=&quot;600&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First page of &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cornhillmagazine29londuoft#page/n15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cornhill Magazine&lt;/em&gt; for January 1874&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Few magazines of the mid-19th century printed bylines, and even today, some serial publications, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist#Editorial_anonymity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Economist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, continue to publish the majority of their content anonymously, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.economist.com/help/about-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arguing that&lt;/a&gt; “what is written is more important than who writes it”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy’s first two published novels, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desperate_Remedies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Desperate Remedies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1871) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Greenwood_Tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Under the Greenwood Tree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1872), also appeared anonymously. But these were published in book form by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tinsley_(publisher)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tinsley Brothers&lt;/a&gt;, so had he wished to do so, Hardy could have published them under his own name. Why did he publish these novels anonymously?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The motivations for publishing anonymously have varied widely with circumstances, but they have included an aristocratic or a gendered reticence, religious self-effacement, anxiety over public exposure, fear of&#xA;  prosecution, hope of an unprejudiced reception, and the desire to deceive. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Authors also chose anonymity if they felt that their authorial persona conflicted with their daily one. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Walter Scott&lt;/a&gt; signed his poetry, but he did not sign &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waverley_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Waverley&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or so he wrote in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HDE6AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA67&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter&lt;/a&gt;, because he felt the dignity of an officer of the court in Edinburgh would be compromised if he were publicly known to be an author of popular fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert J. Griffin (1999), &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/20057576&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anonymity and Authorship&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &lt;em&gt;New Literary History&lt;/em&gt; 30:4, pp. 877–895.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This concern of Scott’s seems to have been Hardy’s too. At the time of the publication of &lt;em&gt;Desperate Remedies&lt;/em&gt; in 1871, he doubted whether he would be able to earn a living through writing, and in the likely event of his having to return to full-time practice of architecture, he feared the burden of literary notoriety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hardy’s wilful purpose in his early novels until &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt; appeared [was] to mystify the reader as to their locality, origin, and authorship by various interchanges and inventions, probably owing at first to his doubt if he would pursue the craft, and his sense of the shadow that would fall on an architect who had failed as a novelist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Florence Emily Hardy (1933), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.459346/2015.459346.The-Life-Of-Thomas-Hardy-1840-1928#page/n89/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Thomas Hardy: Compiled Largely from Contemporary Notes, Letters, Diaries, and Biographical Memoranda, as Well as from Oral Information in Conversations Extending Over Many Years&lt;/em&gt;, p. 74&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Hardy did choose anonymity because of a worry about the potential cost to his reputation, then this was a prudent choice, for a review in &lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt; opened with a savage attack on the novel and on the author for having “prostituted [his powers] to the purposes of idle prying into the ways of wickedness”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an absolutely anonymous story; no falling back on previous works which might give a clue to the authorship, and no assumption of a &lt;em&gt;nom de plume&lt;/em&gt; which might, at some future time, disgrace the family name, and still more, the Christian name, of a repentant and remorseful novelist,—and very right too. By all means let him bury the secret in the profoundest depths of his own heart, out of reach, if possible, of his own consciousness. The law is hardly just which prevents Tinsley Brothers [the publishers] from concealing their participation also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anonymous, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2tU9AQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA481&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt;, 22nd April 1871&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 481–3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T09:38:37.783" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T09:38:37.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8370" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-05T13:17:33.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-05T13:17:33.953" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T13:17:33.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8371" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-05T13:17:33.953" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of the US author Michael Northrop or about his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:14:40.693" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:14:40.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5346" CreationDate="2018-09-05T14:00:08.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s a double meaning in this line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stanza, considered on its own, describes various forms of persuasive argument, together with some satirical commentary. For example, line 4 (“For reason thinks all reasoning out of season”) seems paradoxical: how can ‘reason’ be opposed to ‘reasoning’? Byron is referring us to a particular philosophical sense of the word, current at the time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reason&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;II. 5. c.&lt;/strong&gt; A faculty transcending understanding, by which first principles are grasped &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt;. Associated principally with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kant&lt;/a&gt;, in whose writings reason (German &lt;em&gt;Vernunft&lt;/em&gt;) is opposed to understanding (German &lt;em&gt;Verstand&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sense of the word was preferred by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coleridge&lt;/a&gt;, for example in his quatrain ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reason&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reason&lt;/a&gt;’, and Byron was fond of twitting Coleridge, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shall gentle Coleridge pass unnoticed here,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To turgid ode and tumid stanza dear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lord Byron (1810), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/bardsscotenglish00byrorich#page/20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Bards, and Scotch Reviewers; a Satire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, ll. 249–250.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we suspect that in line 4 the poet is indulging in a little dig at Kant and Coleridge: their ‘Reason’ is quite opposed to ordinary logic and common sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this satirical context, the last line is a complaint about all forms of rhetoric and philosophy, namely that no one keeps his argument &lt;em&gt;short in length&lt;/em&gt;. This is emphasized by the use of ‘whine’ and ‘continue’ in the preceding lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now consider the stanza in the context of the canto. Don Juan and John Johnson have been sold in the slave market of Constantinople and are being escorted by the eunuch Baba to the Sultan’s seraglio. Juan suggests that they attack their guide and escape:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Let’s knock that old black fellow on the head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “And march away–’twere easier done than said.”–&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Johnson is reluctant to acquiesce in this plan because at least as a slave he will get something to eat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Besides, I’m hungry, and just now would take,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like Esau, for my birthright a beefsteak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the book of Genesis 25:29–34, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esau&lt;/a&gt; sells his birthright to his brother &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacob&lt;/a&gt; for a “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mess_of_pottage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mess of pottage&lt;/a&gt;”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point they pass the Sultan’s kitchens and Juan is distracted by the smells of cooking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And nearer as they came, a genial Savour&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Of certain stews, and roast-meats, and pilaus,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Things which in hungry mortals’ eyes find favour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Made Juan in his harsh intentions pause,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this wider context &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt; suggests &lt;em&gt;short of food&lt;/em&gt;, the point being that no form of reasoning or argument is as powerful as physical privation, as Byron goes on to explain in the following stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I digress: of all appeals,—although&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       I grant the power of pathos, and of gold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of beauty, flattery, threats, a shilling,—no&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Method's more sure at moments to take hold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the best feelings of mankind, which grow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       More tender, as we every day behold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than that all-softening, overpowering knell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The tocsin of the soul—the dinner-bell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T08:55:44.757" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T08:55:44.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8373" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8375" CreationDate="2018-09-05T15:44:19.757" Score="4" ViewCount="345" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Betjeman's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Meditation-On-The-A30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Meditation on the A30&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is about a man driving his car and fuming about his unloving wife. In the final verse, he finally turns to action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You're barmy or plastered, I'll pass you, you bastard-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I will overtake you. I will!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As he clenches his pipe, his moment is ripe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the corner's accepting its kill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the final line really mean the man is about to die in a car crash?&lt;/strong&gt; This seems a bit 'off' thematically with the rest of the poem, but I can't think of any other interpretation of &quot;the corner's accepting its kill&quot;. Is there another possible interpretation, or is there some foreshadowing of this, or does the poem really take a darker turn so abruptly at the very end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:54:28.573" Title="Is the man about to die in &quot;Meditation on the A30&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-betjeman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1049" CreationDate="2018-09-05T18:49:40.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Russian Formalism&lt;/strong&gt; was probably the first school in literary theory that looked at poetry and literature in general as true linguistic phenomena. One of its representatives, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Shklovsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viktor Shklovsky&lt;/a&gt; coined the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defamiliarization (ostranenie in Russian; &quot;Verfremdung&quot; in German)&lt;/a&gt;, which refers to the intentional deviation from practical, everyday language in poetry and literature. In a much quoted passage from his article &lt;a href=&quot;https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist-2015-16-2/shklovsky.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Art as Technique&quot; (1917)&lt;/a&gt;, Shklovsky wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived&#xA;  and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects &quot;unfamiliar,&quot; to&#xA;  make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the&#xA;  process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. (...)&#xA;  Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian Formalism focused on how poetic language achieved this; its research focuses on &lt;strong&gt;poetic language&lt;/strong&gt; as such and &lt;strong&gt;not on individual works of literature&lt;/strong&gt;. They were not so much interested in analyses that uncovered the meaning of literary texts but in what mechanisms constitute the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literariness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;literariness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (German: &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literarizit%C3%A4t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literarizität&lt;/a&gt;) of texts. This goal was clearly expressed in the name that a number of linguists and literary critics chose for circle in St. Petersburg: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPOJAZ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPOJAZ&lt;/a&gt;, which was a Russian abbreviation for &quot;Society for the Study of Poetic Language&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike Russian Formalism, &lt;strong&gt;New Criticism&lt;/strong&gt; was not a school in the strict sense of the term, since its principles were only defined in later writings in defence of New Criticism, e.g. Cleanth Brooks's article &quot;The New Criticism&quot; in 1979. There were earlier manifestos, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literariness.org/2016/03/16/the-new-criticism-of-jc-ransom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Crow Ransom in 1941, which already criticised other representatives of New Criticism. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New Criticism emphasised the autonomy of works of literature, which led to cricism that focused on literature's inherent features (or what Germans neatly call &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werkimmanente_Interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;werkimmanente Interpretation&lt;/a&gt;). Also important was the inherent ambiguity of literature, especially after the publication of William Empson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Types_of_Ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1930). The intense focus on the literary text as such is something that New Criticism had in common with Russian Formalism. The New Critics practised &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;close reading&lt;/a&gt;, which looked for nuances in meaning and linguistic effects in texts. (I have never seen the term &quot;close reading&quot; in discussions Russian Formalism.) The New Critics looked for ambiguities; they preferred texts that were complex and may contain ambiguities. This focus is narrower than the focus on the mechanisms of poetic language in Russian Formalism. In addition to ambiguity, New Criticism was also interested in how literary texts achieved unity in spite of ambiguities, paradoxes etc. This became visible in titles such as &quot;The Theme of X in ...&quot;. This also shows an interests of works of literature as such, instead of putting the study of literature in the service of finding the mechanisms of poetic language, as the Russian Formalists had done. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-09-05T18:49:40.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8373" CreationDate="2018-09-05T19:27:54.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say that you think the end of the character’s life is “‘off’ thematically”. I’d invite you to consider the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And puffs at his pitiful life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At breakfast she said that she wished I was dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading these in the context of the character’s building rage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He open the throttle and bubbles with dottle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't go on crawling like this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who dares to come hooting at me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As he clenches his pipe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you get a picture of a man literally spitting and frothing in fury, almost biting through his pipe stem in anger interwoven from the first verse with the concepts of his life and death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the mortal turn of the poem is only as abrupt as the bend in the road. The poem is always building towards the death, just as the road is always leading to the bend and the man's fury builds to a fever pitch in which personal safety is set aside in the overwhelming desire to  be free of the burdens and restrictions imposed by the presence of other people, on the road and in his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sense the man's simmering anger become transferred from the wife who wished he was dead, to the traffic. The anger then bubbles over into the rage which kills him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T15:54:28.573" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T15:54:28.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2018-09-06T11:06:58.503" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cognitive psychology developed the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;schema&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (plural: &lt;em&gt;schemas&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;schemata&lt;/em&gt;) to describe &quot;a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them&quot;. According to Kendray Cherry's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-schema-2795873&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Is a Schema in Psychology?&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A schema is a cognitive framework or concept that helps organize and interpret information. Schemas can be useful because they allow us to take shortcuts in interpreting the vast amount of information that is available in our environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, so good, but the availabiliity of these concepts and shortcuts comes at a price (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, these mental frameworks also cause us to &lt;strong&gt;exclude pertinent information&lt;/strong&gt; to focus instead only on &lt;strong&gt;things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs and ideas&lt;/strong&gt;. Schemas can contribute to &lt;strong&gt;stereotypes&lt;/strong&gt; and make it &lt;strong&gt;difficult to retain new information that does not conform to our established ideas about the world&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have schemas for things, person schemas, social schemas, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-schema&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-schemas&lt;/a&gt; and event schemas. With regard to their role, Kendra Cherry points out that schemas influence what we pay attention to, that they help simplify the world, that they allows us to think quickly, that they can chage they way we interpret incoming information and that they can be &lt;strong&gt;remarkably difficult to change&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of schemas is typically automatic. One potential problem related to schemas is prejudice. Kendra Cherry mentions a study related to gender expectations and stereotypes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In one interesting study, researchers showed children images that were either consistent with gender expectations (such as a man working on a car and woman washing dishes) while others saw images that were inconsistent with gender stereotypes (a man washing dishes and a woman fixing a car).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  When later asked to remember what they had seen in the images, children who help very stereotypes views of gender were more likely to change the gender of the people they saw in the gender-inconsistent images. For example, if they saw an image of a man washing dishes, they were more likely to remember it as an image of a woman washing dishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A related concept is that of a &lt;strong&gt;perceptual set&lt;/strong&gt;. In the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-perceptual-set-2795464&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Definition and Examples of Perceptual Sets in Psychology&lt;/a&gt;, Kendra Cherry defines the concept as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A perceptual set refers to a predisposition to perceive things in a certain way. In other words, we often tend to notice only certain aspects of an object or situation while ignoring other details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She adds that &quot;the way you see the world is heavily influenced (and biased) by your own past experiences, expectations, motivations, beliefs, emotions, and even your culture?&quot; Later in the article, Cherry also mentions schemas, which contribute to these perceptual sets. She gives the following examples of schemas that influence perceptual sets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For example, people have a strong schema for faces, making it easier to recognize familiar human faces in the world around us. It also means that when we look at an ambiguous image, we are more likely to see it as a face than some other type of object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychologists and other disciplines that study how we think (e.g. philosophy) have identified many biases; Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of cognitive biases&lt;/a&gt; is depressingly long. In the context of the current question, biases related to belief and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Social_biases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social biases&lt;/a&gt; are interesting. Wikipedia also has a separate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_memory_biases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of memory biases&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schemas, perceptual sets and biases all influence the way we write texts and how we interpret them. Moreover, they do this &lt;strong&gt;automatically and subconsciously&lt;/strong&gt;. Since these biases can cause reasoning errors, several disciplines are studying how to reduce or mitigate them; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias_mitigation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognitive bias mitigation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias_modification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognitive bias modification&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in everything that we meaningfully call a text (this excludes &quot;1 + 1 = 2&quot; from the other response), bias will unavoidably creep in. We can mitigate it somewhat by having the text reviewed by other people, especially people who don't share all of our biases and who are aware of many existing cognitive biases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T11:06:58.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6885" CreationDate="2018-09-06T12:09:03.590" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I can't tell you for certain why the author decided to end the story this way, but I can explain my interpretation of why this makes the story more powerful. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/authorial-intent&quot;&gt;What the author intended may not be the most interesting or answerable question anyway.&lt;/a&gt; Because we're talking about &lt;em&gt;justifying why a person 'should' have died&lt;/em&gt;, and some of this is going to sound horribly callous, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that I'm speaking purely from the point of view of analysing a story.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sometimes, a single unrecoverable day can have the most impact on a person's life.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's imagine that Mr Lamb hadn't died. Probably Derry would have kept coming back and talking to him, and perhaps changed a lot as a person. But every friendship, every relationship, has its ups and downs. Maybe they would have quarrelled and, in taking leave of Mr Lamb, Derry would have returned to his old attitude to life. Maybe the old man would have lost some mystique in Derry's eyes, his wisdom would have seemed like more platitudes, and Derry would have stopped listening. Certainly there would have been other influences (such as his mother, as we see in Scene 2), trying to persuade Derry not to have anything more to do with Mr Lamb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now, with his newfound friend dead, there's no opportunity for Derry to see new facets of him or argue with him. &lt;strong&gt;He will always remain in the boy's mind associated with that one conversation.&lt;/strong&gt; There's nothing he can do now to lower Derry's opinion of him - and conversely, Derry will never know what more he could have said to inspire him. Maybe Mr Lamb's death will inspire Derry to change his lifestyle in honour of the old man, more than he would have done for a living friend. Maybe this is the first time someone Derry knows has died. What's certain is that this day will always linger in the boy's memory, in a more visceral way than it would have from anything further Mr Lamb could have &lt;em&gt;said&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also: one of the discussion questions at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/levt106.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text&lt;/a&gt; you linked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will  Derry  get  back  to  his  old  seclusion  or  will&#xA;  Mr  Lamb’s  brief  association  effect  a  change  in&#xA;  the kind of life he will lead in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as making Derry more likely to remember and act on the wisdom of Mr Lamb, his unexpected death may also &lt;strong&gt;remind Derry of his own mortality&lt;/strong&gt;. Mr Lamb had lived a long and apparently fulfilling life, and even though it was cut off in an abrupt and unexpected way, some of his memories and wisdom still lived on due to his effects on others. Seeing him dead might shock Derry into realising that one day he too would be dead - and that if he continues avoiding his fellow humans, he'll never have any legacy or way of living on. We all die in the end, but it's better to die mourned and satisfied than unloved and forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, from a completely out-of-world perspective, killing off a character &lt;strong&gt;adds pathos to the story&lt;/strong&gt;. If the last scene was removed, the tale would have been interesting in a more intellectual way: watching two characters discuss life and their respective problems is interesting and thought-provoking, but it lacks the emotional gut-punch of the ending, which perhaps makes the story more effective and memorable to many readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T12:14:24.433" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T12:14:24.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8378" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8396" CreationDate="2018-09-06T12:30:53.313" Score="5" ViewCount="191" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Betjeman's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Meditation-On-The-A30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Meditation on the A30&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is about a man who is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8375/17&quot;&gt;fuming at his wife and driving recklessly&lt;/a&gt;. Everything described in the poem itself is fairly universal, could take place anywhere, so I'm wondering whether there's anything significant in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A30_road&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the A30&lt;/a&gt; specifically as the choice of setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The A30, also known as the Great South West Road, is the third longest road in Britain, the main route from London to the South West, to Cornwall, and ultimately all the way to Land's End. But why did Betjeman decide to use it in the title of his poem? Did this road have some particular significance in his life, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T14:16:50.543" Title="Why is John Betjeman's poem set on the A30 in particular?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;john-betjeman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8379" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8380" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work of the English poet John Betjeman (1906 – 1984) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:21:03.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British author Len Deighton (actually Leonard Cyril Deighton, born 1929) and his works. He is best known as an author of spy novels (e.g. his debut 'The IPCRESS File', 1962)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:23:24.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8383" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8384" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the African-American author (1934 – 2014) and his works. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:25:10.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8385" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:27:13.243" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:27:13.243" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:27:13.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8386" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:27:13.243" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Polish poet, essayist, and translator Wisława Szymborska (1923 – 2012) and her works. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. Questions about her works originally written in Polish should be tagged with [polish-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:16:41.227" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:16:41.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8387" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8388" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian chess grandmaster Boris Spassky (born in 1937). Spassky was  World Chess Champion from 1969 to 1972." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:35:56.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8389" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8390" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English writer and humorist Jerome K. Jerome (1859 – 1927) and his life as a writer. Jerome is best known for his novel 'Three Men in a Boat' (1889)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T13:37:47.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-06T15:33:52.250" Score="13" ViewCount="1799" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem &quot;The Soul selects her own Society&quot; by Emily Dickinson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Soul selects her own Society —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then — shuts the Door —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To her divine Majority —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Present no more —&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing  —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At her low Gate  —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Unmoved&#xA;  — an Emperor be kneeling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon her Mat —&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’ve known her — from an ample nation  —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Choose One —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then — close the&#xA;  Valves of her attention —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like Stone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;SAT II Success: Literature&lt;/em&gt; which I use to prepare for the SAT exam (a multiple-choice test for high school students in the US) asks the following question about the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Which of the following elements of style are not present in the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(A) Metaphors&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (B) Similes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (C) Grammatical irregularities&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (D) Slant rhyme&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (E) Figurative language &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, every choice is present: metaphors (&quot;Valves&quot;), similes (&quot;[l]ike Stone&quot;), grammatical irregularities (punctuation), slant rhyme (&quot;pausing&quot;/&quot;kneeling&quot;), and figurative language (this one includes metaphors and similes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the book says otherwise. Here is an explanation for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The correct answer is (B).&lt;/strong&gt; Remember to pay special attention to the&#xA;  word &lt;em&gt;except&lt;/em&gt; in this question. “Chariots” and “Emperor” are clearly&#xA;  metaphors for wealth and power, which makes choice (A) true. Dickinson&#xA;  is known for her sharp, concrete images, like “Door,” “Chariots,”&#xA;  “Gate,” “Mat,” and “Stone,” making choice (B) untrue because they are&#xA;  not similes. Choices (C), (D), and (E) are clearly evident, and&#xA;  therefore do not meet the criteria of exception. Choice (B) is the&#xA;  right answer.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book says that &quot;[l]ike Stone&quot; only includes an image of stone, but isn't it a simile?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A simile (/ˈsɪməli/) is a figure of speech that directly compares two&#xA;  things. Similes are a form of metaphor that explicitly use connecting&#xA;  words (such as like, as, so, than, or various verbs such as resemble),&#xA;  though these specific words are not always necessary.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is &quot;[l]ike Stone&quot; not a simile in this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:03:05.647" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T00:40:05.883" Title="Does &quot;The Soul selects her own Society&quot; by Emily Dickinson have a simile?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;emily-dickinson&gt;&lt;sat-ii-success-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8391" CreationDate="2018-09-06T17:14:32.303" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book is correct; the last line uses the image a stone but, strictly speaking, not a simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Red,_Red_Rose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Burns&lt;/a&gt; writes, &quot;O My Luve's like a red, red rose&quot;, he makes a comparison between two things: his love and a rose. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/337/507.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book IV of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Milton wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) As when a prowling wolf,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  So clomb the first grand thief into God’s fold;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines compare Satan and the way he moves to a wolf and a wolf's movements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with Dickinson's last stanza. The soul &quot;close[s] the Valves of her attention&quot;: this is a description of an action or a change. However, this action is not compared with anything a stone does. And when you look back from the last line to fine something that is being compared to the stone, you don't find anything; from a syntactic point of view, &quot;I have know her (...) / Like Stone&quot; doesn't seem to make sense either. The stone just sits there as an image, isolated, which somehow fits the theme of the (relative) isolation of the soul. I think that is what the authors of &lt;em&gt;SAT Literature Success&lt;/em&gt; were after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-09-06T17:14:32.303" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8391" CreationDate="2018-09-06T17:14:37.670" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking the elements of style in turn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A) Almost every concrete noun in the poem is used metaphorically, including &lt;em&gt;door&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;chariots&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gate&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;emperor&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nation&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;valve&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(B) You are right that “I’ve known her close the Valves of her attention — Like Stone” contains a simile. There's some ambiguity and ellipsis here: you can read it as “I’ve known her close the valves of her attention like stone [closes the valves of &lt;em&gt;its&lt;/em&gt; attention]” or as “I’ve known her close the valves of her attention [so that it is] like stone” but in either case there is a simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) ‘Grammar’ is sometimes used so as to include spelling and punctuation (in addition to the usual elements of inflection and syntax), so in this sense the unconventional choice of punctuation (dashes instead of commas and stops) counts as a ‘grammatical irregularity’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(D) The poem has two slant rhymes: &lt;em&gt;gate&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;mat&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhyme &lt;em&gt;pausing&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;kneeling&lt;/em&gt; would not normally be described as a ‘slant rhyme’, I think, because the stressed syllables (&lt;em&gt;paus-&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;kneel-&lt;/em&gt;) have no similarity in sound. Rhymes where only the unstressed syllables (here &lt;em&gt;-sing&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;-ling&lt;/em&gt;) are similar, are known as ‘unstressed rhymes’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also “unstressed rhyme,” where the rhyming syllables are both unstressed or weak: e.g., &lt;em&gt;honey / motley&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mysteries / litanies&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;wretchedness /  featureless&lt;/em&gt;. But there is some question whether this constitutes rhyme at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer (eds.), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uKiC6IeFR2UC&amp;amp;pg=PA1187&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: Fourth Edition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 1187&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(E) Metaphors and similes are types of figurative language, so this follows from (A) and (B).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All elements are present in the poem and so this question is unanswerable as written. This isn’t the only case where the book is in error: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/6853/3003&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; for another. I guess &lt;em&gt;SAT II Success: Literature&lt;/em&gt; must have been put together with some haste or lack of care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:03:24.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8394" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17807" CreationDate="2018-09-06T19:27:34.240" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;From George W. M. Reynolds' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysteries_of_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of London&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1844–1845):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah!&quot; said the bookseller, after a pause; &quot;nothing now succeeds unless&#xA;  it's in the comic line. We have comic Latin grammars, and comic Greek&#xA;  grammars; indeed, I don't know but what English grammar, too, is a comedy altogether.&#xA;  All our tragedies are made into comedies by the way they are performed;&#xA;  and no work sells without comic illustrations to it. I have brought out&#xA;  several new comic works, which have been very successful. For instance,&#xA;  'The Comic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wealth of Nations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;';&#xA;  'The Comic &lt;em&gt;Parliamentary Speeches&lt;/em&gt;';&#xA;  'The Comic &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2FnbAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Report of the Poor-Law Commissioners&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,'&#xA;  with an Appendix containing the 'Comic &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2FnbAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA64&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dietary Scale&lt;/a&gt;';&#xA;  and the 'Comic &lt;em&gt;Distresses of the Industrious Population&lt;/em&gt;.' I even propose to bring out a&#xA;  'Comic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Whole_Duty_of_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Whole Duty of Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.'&#xA;  All these books sell well: they do admirably&#xA;  for the nurseries of the children of the aristocracy. In fact they are&#xA;  as good as manuals and text-books.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can identify most of the references here, but I don't know exactly what is meant by &quot;Distresses of the Industrious Population.&quot; I know that the &quot;industrious population&quot; is what we would today call the &quot;working poor,&quot; and that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Law_Commission&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poor-Law Commission&lt;/a&gt; was charged with ameliorating their &quot;distresses&quot;; but was there a specific work of literature, or report, or famous speech, that would have been immediately understood by Reynolds' use of the title &quot;&lt;em&gt;Distresses of the Industrious Population&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T02:10:36.287" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T16:57:57.453" Title="What work is titled &quot;Distresses of the Industrious Population&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8391" CreationDate="2018-09-06T19:50:26.267" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a simile. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simile is a &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; comparison and if we note that we have: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The soul ... unmoved ... like stone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see we have a simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reading is corroborated by reading the rest of the poem: a stone is unworldly and unaffected by the pomp and circumstance of the world. Likewise (Emily's) soul, presumably at the point of time when Emily wrote this poem. She was something of a recluse later on in life - firmly closing the door on the world outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It rather reminds me of Liebniz's &lt;em&gt;Monadology&lt;/em&gt; where souls are described as windowless monads. Which makes me wonder whether she knew of Liebniz and was referring to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T03:39:08.630" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T03:39:08.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8378" CreationDate="2018-09-06T20:34:56.963" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Betjeman fell in love with Cornwall as a child and visited at least yearly until his death. As you say, the road links London and Cornwall: he spent a lot of his life on it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The geography of Devon and Cornwall dictates transport routes: with coasts to north, south and west, the A30 is the main route in and out. When you live in such a place the main connector is something you develop quite a visceral love/hate relationship with. This is more pronounced before roads are upgraded to dual carriageway and motorway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I live in the Highlands and can attest to this kind of relationship with the A9, it both connects us and divides us from the rest of the country, it is a character in our story. For the A9 this can be seen reflected in the role it plays in works by those who rely on it, Michel Faber in Under The Skin, Ian Rankin in Standing in Another Man’s Grave, Christopher Brookmyre in Boiling a Frog and in Black Widow.... and so I suspect it is with Betjeman and the A30, it is the road he knows like the back of his hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly he presumably wrote about it at least in passing before he meditated on it poetically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Shell Guides were developed by Betjeman and Jack Beddington, a friend who was publicity manager with Shell-Mex Ltd, to guide Britain's growing number of motorists around the counties of Britain and their historical sites. They were published by the Architectural Press and financed by Shell. By the start of World War II 13 had been published, of which Cornwall (1934) and Devon (1936) were written by Betjeman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Betjeman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T14:16:50.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6559" CreationDate="2018-09-06T22:39:32.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about the blank page? Having no text it is saying nothing and by saying nothing it can't be read to say one thing as opposed to some other thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not being entirely serious ... because when we say text we already imply some kind of &lt;em&gt;norm&lt;/em&gt;. Here that norm would be actual text and not a blank page. You could call this a &lt;em&gt;bias&lt;/em&gt; against the blank page, a bias against the page with no text, but this misunderstands what norms are, and what they are for. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people begin to ask whether a particular text is biased its because they are contesting the norms within a text - whether &lt;em&gt;covert&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;overt&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T17:17:11.407" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T17:17:11.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-07T13:01:00.697" Score="6" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Dr. Jekyll creates a serum that turns him into Mr. Hyde. Mr. Hyde commits several crimes. Even though Dr. Jekyll recognises Mr. Hyde as evil, he cannot resist the temptation to drink the serum again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The serum is the result of scientific research. Does this mean that there is a hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) anti-science agenda in R. L. Stevenson's novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T18:56:16.553" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T19:08:22.740" Title="Does R L Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have a hidden anti-science agenda?" Tags="&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;strange-case-of-jekyll-and-hyde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8399" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8400" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about  Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. Use this tag with the [robert-louis-stevenson] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T13:04:39.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-07T13:49:42.083" Score="8" ViewCount="1003" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;The Catcher in the Rye&quot; by J. D. Salinger, there are two topics that, in my opinion, are metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first topic is the one of the ducks in the pond and where they go in winter. Looking on the web, it seems that there is some consensus on considering the ducks as an &lt;em&gt;alter ego&lt;/em&gt; for Holden and its problems with his adolescence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second one, is the figure of the catcher in the rye. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, it says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This &quot;catcher in the rye&quot; is an analogy for Holden, who admires in children attributes that he struggles to find in adults, like innocence, kindness, spontaneity, and generosity. Falling off the cliff could be a progression into the adult world that surrounds him and that he strongly criticizes. Later, Phoebe and Holden exchange roles as the &quot;catcher&quot; and the &quot;fallen&quot;; he gives her his hunting hat, the catcher's symbol, and becomes the fallen as Phoebe becomes the catcher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have my own interpretations of these two topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion (just as a reader, since my education background is in STEM), the ducks are all the boys and girls, like Holden, that have a particular sensitivity and predisposition for investigating and questioning the world around them. For them, it is more difficult to accept the adult's world when they are growing up (in the metaphor, to remain in the pond when the winter is coming). From this comes the question that Holden cannot solve: how can these particularly sensitive individuals survive to adolescence? When he asks to the taxi driver, the only answer he receives is about fishes. Obviously, fishes are different from ducks and they can survive the whole winter in the frozen pond. In this metaphor, fishes are like those children that seem to be better dealing with the problem of growing up because they do not question themselves about the adult's world: they accept it as it is without raising any problem, since for them it is totally natural. Moreover, during the night that Holden spend in the park, he looks for other ducks in the grass near the pond (therefore, just outside the society where other human beings live). He does not find any duck, he only risks to hurt himself falling in the pond. In my opinion, this means that individuals with this particular sensitivity are completely isolated from the society, for them it is hard to find people similar to them. Therefore, society seems to not understand the problem since it is not a common problem. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, my interpretation of the catcher is different from the proposed one. In my opinion, the cliff at the end of the field represents the possibility of mental illness during adolescence. Children are playing in the field during the childhood, but growing up they can have to face problems that can put at risk their own life. In this case, the catcher is not somebody that prevents the children from growing, but it is a person (maybe an adult?) that is fundamental in the development of the adolescent for surviving a period of struggle. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question are: &lt;strong&gt;are these interpretations consistent with the whole novel? Is there an &quot;official&quot; interpretation? Is it different from mine and, if yes, how and why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T21:09:04.990" Title="Interpretation of &quot;The Catcher in the Rye&quot; by J. D. Salinger" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;&lt;catcher-in-the-rye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8402" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8403" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" Score="0" Body="Questions related to race, including both racism and its condemnation." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" LastActivityDate="2018-09-07T20:34:40.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8357" CreationDate="2018-09-08T11:38:55.717" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, I would take &quot;funny sort&quot; to be a common  euphemism for  being of eccentric behaviour, suggesting some mild  mental derangement. It could have different connotations, but from the story it seems eccentricity  was what was meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;funny&quot; has two basic meanings, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/funny&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 Causing laughter or amusement; humorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘a funny story’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘the play is hilariously funny’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2 Difficult to explain or understand; strange or odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I had a funny feeling you'd be around’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘it's a funny old world’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I do get some funny looks’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘the funny thing is I can't remember much about it’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘that's funny!—that vase of flowers has been moved’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the phrase &quot;a funny sort&quot; in turn, as far as I know, only refers to the second meaning of &quot;funny&quot;. I only found one place where this was &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/in-a-funny-sort-of-way.2635394/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussed&lt;/a&gt;, and nowhere where it was defined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.lv/search?q=%22a%20funny%20sort%22&amp;amp;oq=%22a%20funny%20sort%22&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.2223j0j7&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google it as a phrase&lt;/a&gt;, you only find it with the meaning &quot;strange&quot; (at least that's what my results showed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;funny sort&lt;/em&gt; of welcome.&#xA;  Complex new visa and immigration regulations are in danger of sending out the wrong message to foreign students and academics, reports Melanie Newman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;funny sort&lt;/em&gt; of democracy.&#xA;  Around the world, Washington endorses then deposes rulers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never ever hear or read anything where &quot;a funny sort&quot; would denote something humorous. Even if the context &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; suggest it (as I believe, it doesn't, in the JKJ story), if we were speaking about, let's say, a play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- What was the play like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- It was a funny sort of play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would presume the speaker means it was a strange one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2647" LastEditorUserId="2647" LastEditDate="2018-09-08T18:45:22.483" LastActivityDate="2018-09-08T18:45:22.483" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8528" CreationDate="2018-09-08T17:01:40.883" Score="14" ViewCount="713" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the opening paragraph of &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, C. S. Lewis introduces us to the (at this point in the story) singularly unlikeable character of Eustace Clarence Scrubb. About his parents, we read the following short summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He didn't call his Father and Mother &quot;Father&quot; and &quot;Mother&quot;, but Harold and Alberta. They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember being confused when I first read this as a child: &quot;vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers&quot; all seem like good things to me, and I was raised on such principles myself, but evidently we're supposed to have a negative impression of the Scrubb family. Looking back at it now, I'm guessing that Lewis was playing into certain stereotypes which contemporary readers would have recognised as signals of a certain &quot;type&quot; of family. Since their diet, dress sense, and furniture aren't really relevant to the story, this must be scene-setting in terms of environment and personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What stereotypes is Lewis trying to play into with this brief description?&lt;/strong&gt; Or to put it another way, upon reading the above-quoted passage, how would contemporary readers likely have described or perceived the Scrubb family? I'm imagining an &quot;oh, right, they're &lt;code&gt;X&lt;/code&gt;-people&quot; reaction, but what's X?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T06:17:46.897" Title="Does the description of Eustace's parents fit some known stereotype?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15215" CreationDate="2018-09-08T17:11:08.443" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brianpatten.co.uk/books.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian Patten&lt;/a&gt; is (or was) one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liverpool poets&lt;/a&gt;; in 1967 he co-published &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mersey_Sound_(anthology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mersey Sound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most successful poetry anthologies in the English language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian Patten also wrote a text entitled &quot;A Fallible Lecture&quot; (sometimes &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20120221225434AAB9BPl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;incorrectly classified as a poem&lt;/a&gt;, even though it's clearly prose), which presents an irreverent look at the history of English literature. It begins with the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eng. Lit was established one sunny afternoon in 1386, when a gang of people went for a walk to a place called Canterbury. They had a great time, telling each other dirty stories, which a man called Chaucer wrote down, thereby establishing the fact that English Literature is based on a collection of dirty jokes. After Chaucer Engl Lit dozed off a little until a man called Shakespeare began writing plays about murder, mayhem and paranoic Danish princes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains comments about Milton writing &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, surviving the plague, blindness and the death of his two daughters, and then writing &lt;em&gt;Paradise Regained&lt;/em&gt;. The Romantic poets die young, &quot;preferably in Italy&quot;. Coleridge is described as waving dead albatrosses in people's faces. The text is funny if you get all the allusions (e.g. who is the &quot;shy librarian from Hull&quot;?) but probably merely strange if you don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I once had a copy of the text but I can't find it any longer. (The above quotes are all from memory.) What I have never found out, however, is where this text was first published. I have used Amazon's preview feature to peek at the content of some of Patten's books but found only poems and children's literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T17:04:59.100" Title="Where was 'A Fallible Lecture' by Brian Patten originally published?" Tags="&lt;brian-patten&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8413" CreationDate="2018-09-08T22:18:02.187" Score="5" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter I of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Brave_New_World_Revisited/Brave%20New%20World%20Revisited%20-%20Huxley%20%281958%29#page/n3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brave New World Revisited&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Aldous Huxley writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] there are nowhere any religious traditions in favor of&#xA;  unrestricted death, whereas religious and social traditions in favor&#xA;  of unrestricted reproduction are widespread. For all these reasons,&#xA;  death control is achieved very easily, birth control is achieved with&#xA;  great difficulty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess: &quot;unrestricted death&quot; could be translated as &quot;restricted life&quot;. So, as life expectancy becomes longer and longer, both variables tend to overpopulation. But that doesn't fit with &lt;em&gt;death control is achieved very easily&lt;/em&gt;. What does Huxley mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user1630" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T16:40:15.213" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T07:11:29.097" Title="What does Aldous Huxley mean by 'death control is achieved very easily'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world-revisited&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-09T05:14:42.803" Score="6" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Matthew and Maggie came with their two children and a  sackful of&#xA;  chickens. Maggie emptied the sack into the yard and  three red banty&#xA;  chickens clucked and scattered. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They are for you,&quot; she told Sarah. &quot;For eating.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sarah loved the chickens. She clucked back to them and fed  them&#xA;  grain. They followed her, shuffling and scratching primly in  the&#xA;  dirt. I knew they would not be for eating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from the novel &quot;Sarah, Plain and Tall&quot;. Did Maggie think the chickens were for eating but Sarah didn't? Or is it about their eggs? Or Is it a Joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2495" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-09T10:54:33.967" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T14:28:59.423" Title="Is &quot;for eating&quot; a joke?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8398" CreationDate="2018-09-09T19:08:22.740" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Stevenson didn’t intend to put an anti-science agenda into &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;, and I don’t see how to make a convincing case for finding it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Introduction&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is ambiguous as written: I am not sure whether you mean to ask whether it is &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to interpret the novel as anti-science, or whether Stevenson &lt;em&gt;intended&lt;/em&gt; this. The word ‘agenda’ suggests intention, so I’ll treat that first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Intention&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson wrote that his initial theme was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson (1888). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/with00stevacrossplainsrich#page/228&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Chapter on Dreams&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Scribner’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, January 1888. Collected in &lt;em&gt;Across the Plains&lt;/em&gt;, 1892.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His biographer gave a substantially similar account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A subject much in his thoughts at this time was the duality of man’s nature and the alternation of good and evil; and he was for a long while casting about for a story to embody this central idea.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Balfour&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Graham Balfour&lt;/a&gt; (1901), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.264200/2015.264200.The-Life#page/n17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 2&lt;/a&gt;, p. 12.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The detail of the powders and the transformation came to Stevenson in a dream:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Stevenson (1888).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the small hours of one morning, I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: “Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.” I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Stevenson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fanny Stevenson&lt;/a&gt;, quoted in Balfour (1901), p. 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson quickly wrote a first draft of the story, but his wife pointed out that he had omitted the intended theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Stevenson, according to the custom then in force, wrote her detailed criticism of the story as it then stood, pointing out her chief objection—that it was really an allegory, whereas he had treated it purely as if it were a story. In the first draft Jekyll’s nature was bad all through, and the Hyde change was worked only for the sake of a disguise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Balfour (1901), p. 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Balfour’s account, Stevenson “realised that he had taken the wrong point of view” and immediately burned the draft manuscript and embarked on a completely new version which became the published text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Stevenson’s intended theme was our “double being” and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the business of the powders, which so many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all, but the Brownies’.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Stevenson (1888).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The ‘Brownies’ being the imaginary spirits “who do one-half my work for me while I am fast asleep” in Stevenson’s fanciful description of his dreams.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, just because an author intended a work to express one theme, does not prevent readers from finding other themes there. And the idea of “double being” is vague and could point at multiple targets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless I think it worth pointing out that although the question raises the &lt;em&gt;idea&lt;/em&gt; that &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt; might be anti-science, nowhere does it actually make anything amounting to an &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt;. And I think that if you tried to make such an argument then you’d find there’s really nothing in the text to support it. Indeed, there’s hardly any mention of science at all: Jekyll is a scientist, yes, but we learn almost nothing about his researches, not even his field of study. There is a bare mention of Jekyll’s “scientific heresies” but no explanation of what they are; and we learn that Lanyon and Jekyll have “differed at times on scientific questions” but not what those questions were. There’s no scientific content in the novel for it to be in opposition to, no target for it to attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might try to argue that the book is a warning that science reveals things that we were not meant to know. But a careful look at “Henry Jekyll’s full statement of the case” shows that it is quite otherwise. Jekyll always knew that he had a double nature, even before he began his scientific research:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/strangecaseofdrj00stevrich#page/108&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, London: Longmans, p. 108.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We might argue that his scientific discoveries had created the evil Hyde persona. But again, it is quite the opposite. Jekyll writes that he was always disposed to “pleasures” that required “profound duplicity” to conceal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/strangecaseofdrj00stevrich#page/106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stevenson (1886), p. 106&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The novel is deliberately vague about what these “pleasures” were: different readers have thus been able to find in &lt;em&gt;Jekyll and Hyde&lt;/em&gt; allegories of alcoholism, drug abuse, homosexuality, and sexually transmitted infection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say that we can’t find in the novel some generalized anxiety about supposed or real scientific discoveries. Some readers have found in the descriptions of Edward Hyde echoes of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Lombroso&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cesare Lombroso’s&lt;/a&gt; pseudo-scientific theory of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_criminology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;criminal atavism&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equating the criminal with atavism, and both with the lower classes, was a familiar gesture by the 1880s, as was the claim that deviance expressed itself most markedly through physical deformity. Stevenson’s middle-class readers would have had as little trouble deciphering the features of the “abnormal and misbegotten” Hyde, his “body an imprint of deformity and decay,” as Stevenson’s middle-class characters do. “God bless me,” exclaims Utterson, “the man seems hardly human. Something troglodytic, shall we say?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Stephen D. Arata (1995), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/93666/mod_resource/content/1/Sedulous%20Ape.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's &lt;em&gt;Jekyll and Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;”, &lt;em&gt;Criticism&lt;/em&gt; 37:2, pp. 233–259.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A ‘troglodyte’ is a cave-dweller, hence a former name for ancient humans.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, even if we accept this interpretation, it doesn’t constitute an attack on science or pseudo-science: in this reading, Stevenson’s novel simply accepts as given the theory of atavism in order to exploit it as a source of horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-09T19:08:22.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8408" CreationDate="2018-09-09T20:25:46.730" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Birth control’ means ‘prevention of births’. Huxley gives as examples, “chemical or mechanical means of contraception”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if ‘death control’ is to be understood analogously, it must mean ‘prevention of deaths’. Huxley gives as example mechanisms, “Penicillin, DDT and clean water”. (The second of these has not aged well: most likely Huxley is referring to the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT#Malaria_control&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DDT to combat malaria&lt;/a&gt;, but this was much more promising in 1958, before it became clear how quickly mosquitos would evolve resistance. However, we can choose to take it as a placeholder for campaigns of disease eradication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, “religious traditions in favor of unrestricted reproduction” refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_birth_control#Roman_Catholicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catholic opposition to most forms of birth control&lt;/a&gt;. So by analogy, if there existed “traditions in favor of unrestricted death” then these would take the form of opposition to ‘death control’; that is, to antibiotics, vaccination, clean water, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huxley’s argument is that death control is politically easy, because the means can implemented “by a few technicians working in the pay of a benevolent government”, whereas birth control &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;depends on the co-operation of an entire people. It must be practiced by countless individuals, from whom it demands more intelligence and will power than most of the world's teeming illiterates possess, and (where chemical or mechanical methods of contraception are used) an expenditure of more money than most of these millions can now afford. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1958 when Huxley was writing &lt;em&gt;Brave New World Revisited&lt;/em&gt; he could perhaps be forgiven for this, as fertility was rising in much of the industrialized world, including England and Wales, where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;total fertility rate&lt;/a&gt; was 2.5 in 1958, and grew almost to 3.0 by 1964 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/birthsummarytablesenglandandwales/2017&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ONS&lt;/a&gt;). It was hard to see that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;demographic transition&lt;/a&gt; was coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T07:11:29.097" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T07:11:29.097" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3007" CreationDate="2018-09-10T03:04:41.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three reasons why Marlow lied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1. Too profound to explain&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marlow keenly felt that his profound experience - of the Belgian Congo in general, and of Kurtz in particular - was beyond explanation to ordinary European citizens. He says that after his return to &quot;the sepulchral city&quot; (Brussels), he found himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a&#xA;  little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to&#xA;  gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly&#xA;  dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose&#xA;  knowledge of life was to me an irritating presence ... [their bearing]&#xA;  was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the&#xA;  face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.&quot; [Penguin edition (2007),&#xA;  p88]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, Marlow had experienced something so profound that even he was struggling to understand it. How could he then bring these petty, mundane city folk into his extraordinary world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, almost the whole novel consists of Marlow telling his untellable tale to his close friends on the yacht anchored in the Thames. Why can he share his tale with them but not with others? On the very first page, the narrator makes it clear that Marlow and his mates share a special bond - &quot;the bond of the sea&quot; - which &quot;had the effect of making us tolerant of each other's yarns--and even convictions.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2. Honouring the man&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marlow venerates Kurtz. He says he himself survived in order &quot;to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I was within a hair's-breadth of the last opportunity for&#xA;  pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have&#xA;  nothing to say. This is the reason why I affirm that Kurtz was a&#xA;  remarkable man. He had something to say. He said it. [...] He had&#xA;  summed up---he had judged. 'The horror!' [...] Better his cry---much&#xA;  better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable&#xA;  defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it&#xA;  was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to the last, and even&#xA;  beyond.&quot; [pp. 87-88]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conrad is at pains to emphasise that Kurtz's last words - &quot;The horror! The horror!&quot; - are utterly defining, both of the man and of the &quot;heart of darkness&quot; (in all its interpretations). Marlow's &quot;impulse of unconscious loyalty&quot; is to the truth not only of Kurtz's greatness, but also of Kurtz's darkness, &quot;the colossal scale of his vile desires&quot;. For reasons already covered above, Marlow feels it impossible to describe the true Kurtz to ordinary folk, and is therefore compelled to conceal Kurtz's &quot;heart of darkness&quot; as a way of honouring his memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3. Protecting the innocent&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the above, in the end Marlow says of Kurtz &quot;there remained only his memory and his Intended---and I wanted to give that up too to the past.&quot; It's as if the burden Marlow carries is too great, and he is ready to pass this burden on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when Marlow arrives at the house of the Intended, Conrad delivers the ultimate crescendo of melodramatic gothic horror. Marlow experiences a powerful vision of Kurtz on his stretcher,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all&#xA;  its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever&#xA;  lived---a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful&#xA;  realities [...] The vision seemed to enter the house with me [...] It&#xA;  was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful&#xA;  rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back along for the&#xA;  salvation of another soul.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the first intimation that Marlow will save the Intended from the full truth, and especially from knowing about &quot;the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation.&quot; Indeed, when she mentions Kurtz's loneliness at the moment of his death, Marlow reassures her that he was there with Kurtz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'I heard his very last words....' &lt;em&gt;I stopped in a fright&lt;/em&gt;.&quot; [my&#xA;  emphasis]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fright is because he is now confronted with the reality: Kurtz's last, defining words are a tormenting yet unutterable legacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I was on the point of crying out at her, 'Don't you hear them?' The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. 'The horror! the horror!'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marlow lies, to the &quot;inconceivable triumph and [...] unspeakable pain&quot; of the Intended. He now feels as if the house will collapse before he can escape from the weeping woman, &quot;that the heavens would fall upon my head.&quot; He wonders whether he should have &quot;rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due&quot; by revealing his true final words in all their appalling greatness. As Marlow explains, in his final words of the novel (&lt;em&gt;last words&lt;/em&gt; being a bit of a theme for Conrad):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But I couldn't. I could not tell her. It would have been too&#xA;  dark--too dark altogether....&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T03:04:41.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8416" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-10T14:57:15.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-10T14:57:15.010" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T14:57:15.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8417" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-10T14:57:15.010" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the Tombquest series of books by Michael Northrop. Use with the [michael-northrop] tag." OwnerUserId="99" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T12:32:28.220" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T12:32:28.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8419" CreationDate="2018-09-10T13:25:01.883" Score="3" ViewCount="826" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a poem on my friend's desktop background on his laptop, and took a screenshot of it because I thought it was cool. In fact, it was a &lt;strong&gt;poem&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know who wrote it, or where it is from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tis true my form is something odd,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But blaming me is blaming God,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could I create myself anew&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would not fail in pleasing you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If I could reach from pole to pole&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or grasp the ocean with a span&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would be measured by the soul,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The mind's the standard of the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the poem begins with &lt;strong&gt;'tis&lt;/strong&gt; instead of &lt;strong&gt;it's&lt;/strong&gt;, then I guess it was written during (correct me if I am wrong) the 18-19th century. It also appears to be very &lt;strong&gt;heartfelt&lt;/strong&gt; and written by someone who might look a little different, perhaps of a different &lt;strong&gt;race&lt;/strong&gt;? Does anyone recognise this poem? Is it in any way familiar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4908" OwnerDisplayName="user477343" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T09:30:43.307" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T09:30:43.307" Title="Does anybody know who wrote this poem, or where it is from?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8418" CreationDate="2018-09-10T13:35:11.453" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called &lt;em&gt;False Greatness&lt;/em&gt;, it's by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Merrick&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Merrick&lt;/a&gt;, the elephant man, kind of the definition of someone who looked different, and was written some time in the later half of the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However it's commonly attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Watts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Watts&lt;/a&gt; from the mid 18th century and in fact he did write the last sentence or two in 1743 as part of an entirely different work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Ash" LastActivityDate="2018-09-10T13:35:11.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-11T06:47:47.843" Score="6" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably read in 70s or early 80s. Probably set in the Caribbeans or Florida Coast, or Gulf Coast. The book may have been a mystery or thriller/adventure type story. It was in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A low IQ man (He is capable, just slow) probably in his 30s finds a girl adrift on a lift raft/or ship wreckage. She is badly burned on her back/backside/back of the legs. He takes her to his cabin/hut he has built on a small island or cove where he lives away from civilization. (He sails to the nearest town occasionally to buy staple foods. (He might have been a Vietnam Vet on disability allowance? Head wound with a plate in his head?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall if she was burned when the small ship (cabin cruiser/yacht/sailboat) she was on was was blown up/caught fire, or went overboard and was very badly sunburned because she had been adrift with no protection for many days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the Protagonist of the story is looking for the girl (Police? or Private Detective?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two scenes I distinctly remember from the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One - A day or two after he finding her, she drowsily wakes up but is still half out of it, in his hut lying on her stomach. She is in great pain from her burned back. He is rubbing some cream/lotion/oil on her and it is soothing most of the burning pain. He is chatting away talking to himself as he applies the ointment. She is mostly drifting in and out, not paying any attention to what he is saying until she hears him say something like &quot;cute burned baby butt&quot; and realizes she is naked and he is rubbing the ointment on her bare butt. Just as she starts to panic, he pats he butt, gets up and says something that makes her realize she is safe he is not assaulting her. (i.e. Thats enough now, I have to go fix some food? catch some fish? work on the boat?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two - The low IQ man is very physically fit and strong, but has a strangely dished in forehead. a few days later (Maybe the girl is telling him her story, or she is asking him about his, he starts getting very distressed or anxious. He stands up goes to the center pole or roof support of the hut, grabs it and starts slamming his head against the pole many times. (The rounded edge of the pole perfectly matches the dished in shape of his forehead) She freaks and finally gets him to stop. He says something like when the bad thoughts/voices get too bad he has to knock them out of his head. They bond together (She keeping him stable. and He hiding her while she heals.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it Might have been a three way triangle/race story between:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Protagonist (Police?/Private Eye?) who is looking for her,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whoever caused her to be in the ocean (destroyed her boat or threw her overboard) who realizes her body never turned up and is looking for her again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and the low IQ man/girl who are trying to avoid everyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the Protagonist knows the low IQ man and would looks out for him. (May have been together in the service) I think before he found the girl he used to come into town every couple months to go to the local bar and get drunk and get into fights or sleep with an ugly old prostitute. I think the protagonist used to occasionally bail him out or give him a place to sleep it off if he got into trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4342" LastEditorUserId="4342" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T06:54:01.757" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T06:54:01.757" Title="70s or 80s Novel, Low IQ man finds/rescues young woman adrift at sea" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8422" CreationDate="2018-09-11T12:20:37.790" Score="4" ViewCount="302" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Anton Chekhov play &lt;em&gt;Uncle Vanya&lt;/em&gt;, Vanya said that the whole estate was bought for 95000 rubles. How much money would that be in today's market?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5029" LastEditorDisplayName="user5029" LastEditDate="2018-09-11T12:59:12.167" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:26:07.717" Title="How much is 95000 rubles from 1897 worth in today's money?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;&lt;uncle-vanya&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8421" CreationDate="2018-09-11T12:51:25.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Approximately 100,000,000 roubles.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a straightfoward conversion due to fluctuations in the value of the rouble after the collapse of communism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;historical currency converter&lt;/a&gt; runs up to 2015 and makes various calculations based on the comparison of the value of important goods and services. It has this to say about the conversion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;95000 Russian rouble [1880-1917] in year 1897 could buy the same amount of consumer goods and services in Sweden as 83676035.7401576 Russian rouble [1998-2015] could buy in Sweden in year 2015. This comparison should be used if the purpose of the analysis is to compare absolute worth over time rather than relative worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to compare the worth of money in different periods is to estimate how much labour power an amount of money could buy. 95000 Russian rouble [1880-1917] in year 1897 was the amount a male worker in Sweden received in wage for 685682.3116743009 hours work. A male worker in Sweden in 2015 received 1031940763.8783861 Russian rouble [1998-2015] in wage for 685682.3116743009 hours worked. This comparison should be used if the purpose of the analysis is to compare relative worth over time rather than absolute worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;95000 Russian rouble [1880-1917] in year 1897 could buy 72486.53282777914 gram gold. The price of 72486.53282777914 gram gold in year 2015 was 164057467.64390242 Russian rouble [1998-2015].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;95000 Russian rouble [1880-1917] in year 1897 could buy 2479039.422710049 gram silver. The price of 2479039.422710049 gram silver in year 2015 was 75838147.48275831 Russian rouble [1998-2015].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The value for goods and services - 83,676,035 - seems like an appropriate one to use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.inflationtool.com/russian-ruble/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this other conversion tool&lt;/a&gt;, which doesn't go back to 1897, inflation since 2015 would make that amount worth 104,500,640 roubles today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-11T13:26:07.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8424" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-12T13:38:32.680" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T13:38:32.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T13:38:32.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8425" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-12T13:38:32.680" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe&quot; (2012) or any subsequent books in the series by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Use with [benjamin-alire-saenz]" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T19:17:52.720" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T19:17:52.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8426" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T14:20:21.800" Score="2" ViewCount="749" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/39/36.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface&lt;/a&gt; to the second edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1800), Wordsworth famously wrote that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later adds (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful &lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;it takes its origin from &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt; recollected in tranquillity: the &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears,&#xA;and an &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt;, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced,&#xA;and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins,&#xA;and in a mood similar to this it is carried on;&#xA;but the &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt;, of whatever kind, and in whatever degree, from various causes,&#xA;is qualified by various pleasures, so that in describing any &lt;strong&gt;passions&lt;/strong&gt; whatsoever,&#xA;which are voluntarily described, the mind will, upon the whole, be in a state of enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Wordsworth had written, &amp;quot;the &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt; is contemplated till (...) the tranquillity gradually disappears,&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;feelings&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;a feeling&lt;/em&gt; (...) is gradually produced&amp;quot;, I would have understood &amp;quot;emotion&amp;quot; as the original experience&#xA;and &amp;quot;feelings&amp;quot; as the derived or perhaps renewed experience that leads to the creation of poetry.&#xA;But I can't see this kind of consistency in the above passage. To make matters worse, he also adds &amp;quot;passions&amp;quot; to the mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the Preface also provide arguments for considering &amp;quot;feelings&amp;quot; as the original experience, or at least closer to it.&#xA;For example, Wordsworth writes (my emphasis),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary &lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt; coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordworth uses the term &amp;quot;emotion&amp;quot; only four times in the Preface, namely in the second quote above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at definitions of &amp;quot;feelings&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;emotions&amp;quot; in present-day psychological sources does not help clarify the difference.&#xA;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201412/whats-the-difference-between-feeling-and-emotion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What's the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?&lt;/a&gt;, Neel Burton makes the following distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an &lt;strong&gt;emotional experience&lt;/strong&gt; is brief and episodic; e.g. I am currently proud of X;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt; can endure for many years and can &amp;quot;predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions&amp;quot;; e.g. I am proud of X;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt; is a broader term that covers both emotional experiences and physical sensations such as hunger and pain.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He adds that &amp;quot;an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences that it gives rise to, even though it might also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back at the Preface, one might say that &lt;em&gt;emotional exeperiences&lt;/em&gt; may be &amp;quot;recollected in tranquility&amp;quot; and so gave rise to a mood that is conducive to writing poetry. Wordsworth uses the word &amp;quot;feelings&amp;quot; for the psychological phenomena that are active in that mood, but that does not accord with Burton's definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thebestbrainpossible.com/whats-the-difference-between-feelings-and-emotions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What’s The Difference Between Feelings And Emotions?&lt;/a&gt;, Debbie Hampton uses other definitions (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Emotions&lt;/strong&gt; are lower level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain, the amygdala, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, creating biochemical reactions in your body altering your physical state. They originally helped our species survive by producing quick reactions to threat, reward, and everything in between in their environments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Feelings&lt;/strong&gt; originate in the neocortical regions of the brain, are mental associations and reactions to emotions, and are subjective being influenced by personal experience, beliefs, and memories. A feeling is a mental portrayal of what is going on in your body when you have an emotion and is the byproduct of your brain perceiving and assigning meaning to the emotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since psychology and neuroscience did not exist in the early 19th century, Wordsworth couldn't have come up with these definitions, but there is a parallel with the distinction between emotions as the original experience and feelings as the result of &amp;quot;recollection&amp;quot; that would have helped me make sense of Wordworth. Am I overlooking something in the Preface and does Wordworth really make a consistent distinction? If yes, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T14:20:21.800" Title="What is the difference between emotions and feelings in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2018-09-12T15:07:29.877" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I read this in middle school I discovered that the culprit's name contains the letters of the anonymous &quot;U. N. Owen&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;J&lt;strong&gt;u&lt;/strong&gt;stice Lawre&lt;strong&gt;n&lt;/strong&gt;ce J&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;hn &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;argrav&lt;strong&gt;e&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've often looked for confirmation of this but haven't found it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5030" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-12T15:30:25.013" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T15:30:25.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-12T16:01:27.290" Score="3" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bastard of Istanbul&lt;/em&gt; is a novel by Elif Şafak which explores Turkish and Armenian culture and history; you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookbrowse.com/excerpts/index.cfm/book_number/1944/the-bastard-of-istanbul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read a summary and 9-page excerpt online&lt;/a&gt;. One of the questions from the &quot;reading guide&quot; at the above link intrigued me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the significance of naming each chapter after an ingredient of the dessert ashure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aşure&lt;/a&gt; is a dessert eaten in both Turkey and Armenia (in the latter it is called anuşabur). It appears to have a lot of cultural significance, and it's mentioned explicitly both in &lt;em&gt;The Bastard of Istanbul&lt;/em&gt; and in another of Şafak's novels. So I think this question is very interesting and worth exploring. &lt;strong&gt;Why are the chapters named after aşure ingredients, and does this tie into the themes of the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-12T16:01:27.290" Title="Why are the chapters in The Bastard of Istanbul named after ingredients of ashure?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-bastard-of-istanbul&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8467" CreationDate="2018-09-13T03:38:56.143" Score="11" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown short story, The Blast of the Book, he makes two references to a story (presumably allegoric) about a woman who collected valueless things. The references are not explained and from the context it seems that the reader is assumed to be familiar with this story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant quotes are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've often had to wait in your office, till you turned up; and of course I passed the time of day with poor Berridge. He was rather a card. I remember once he said he would like to collect valueless things, as collectors did the silly things they thought valuable. You know the old story about the woman who collected valueless things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has nonsense notions of all sorts. About collecting useless things, for instance. Don't you know the story of the woman who bought the two most useless things: an old doctor's brass-plate and a wooden leg?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some point being made with the reference to the old story, but without knowing that context it's hard to know what the point is. What is the original story about the woman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5033" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T07:42:58.090" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T07:56:07.277" Title="What is the story of the woman who collected valueless things?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-13T11:57:46.257" Score="1" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bastard_of_Istanbul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bastard of Istanbul&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was originally written in English (by a Turkish author, and set largely in the eponymous city in Turkey). It's been translated into various other languages, as listed on the linked Wikipedia page, and usually the title is directly translated. The exception is the Turkish translation, whose title is &lt;em&gt;Baba ve Piç&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;strong&gt;Father and Bastard&lt;/strong&gt;. The translation was done by Aslı Biçen, but presumably the author had a lot of input into it, especially something as important as the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Why was the title changed in the Turkish translation?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T11:57:46.257" Title="Why was The Bastard of Istanbul translated into Turkish as &quot;Father and Bastard&quot;?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-bastard-of-istanbul&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1654" CreationDate="2018-09-13T14:56:12.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like others, I have not been able to find the poem you are looking for, but I wonder if the source is actually the last few stanzas of Chaucer’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Criseyde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Criseyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  The stanza that begins with “Go, litel book” is followed by a stanza in which Chaucer comments on his use of English and worries that the language, because it is so “diverse,” might be misunderstood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And for ther is so greet diversitee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In English and in wryting of our tonge,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So preye I god that noon miswryte thee,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ne thee mismetre for defaute of tonge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And red wher-so thou be, or elles songe,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That thou be understonde I god beseche!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But yet to purpos of my rather speche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4882" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-13T16:18:10.703" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T16:18:10.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8439" CreationDate="2018-09-13T16:21:08.460" Score="2" ViewCount="857" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember part of it had the inside of an airplane and you had to look around at all of the people on the airplane for clues. I think another part had a big mansion you were looking for clues in as well. Throughout the book you were searching for clues to solve the main mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I got it at a Scholastic book fair around 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5032" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T12:50:08.570" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T00:22:31.233" Title="Kids book from the 90's: Illustrated “solve the mystery” book I can't remember the name of" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8261" CreationDate="2018-09-13T23:21:48.413" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though I agree it is an uncomfortable part, it may refer to this, which is taken from the Pynchon-wiki page, which is pretty thorough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;466.06 young Shirley Temple&#xA;Compare the following excerpt from a review of Temple's film Wee Willie Winkie written by the novelist Graham Greene, who was then reviewing films for the British magazine Night &amp;amp; Day:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Miss Shirley Temple's case, though, has peculiar interest: infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out with 'The Littlest Rebel'). In 'Captain January' she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in 'Wee Willie Winkie', wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant's palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep. It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers — middle-aged men and clergymen — respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.&quot;&#xA;Greene and the magazine were consequently sued by Twentieth-Century Fox, bankrupting Night &amp;amp; Day and forcing Greene to hide out in Mexico where he drew the inspiration for his novel The Power and the Glory. (Ironically, both Wee Willie Winkie and The Fugitive, an adaptation of The Power and The Glory starring Henry Fonda, were directed by John Ford.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5038" LastActivityDate="2018-09-13T23:21:48.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-14T00:33:14.457" Score="8" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the later parts of Robert Heinlein's &lt;em&gt;The Moon is a Harsh Mistress&lt;/em&gt;, we find out that Manny and Prof are motivated by their anarchist political beliefs.  They argue for these beliefs in the new parliment, and I think those beliefs took a big part of what motivated their active participation in the revolution.  Even in the earlier parts of the book, Manny explains some of his anarchist beliefs, but it's only in the later parts that tell how far he's willing to go to fight for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am not sure about the motivation of Mike.  Is Mike also an anarchist by conviction?  If so, then that would have motivated him to participate in the revolution, just like it did for Manny and Prof.  But Mike didn't participate in the arguments in the parliment in the later parts of the book, or in creating the new free Lunar state in general.  This makes it more difficult to me to determine his true beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine hypothetical alternate motivations for Mike, rather than a deep conviction of anarchy.  He could have had no specific political preference, but went along with the other protagonist's plan to do something that was fun for him.  He could have felt personal sympathy with Mike and the Prof and supported them for that reason.  He could have just found the old government and the Warden so annoying or evil that he went through with the revolution to replace that, even if he didn't know what new government he wanted.  He could even have thought himself more powerful than the other characters (it would be a reasonable assumption), and was planning on a different endgame than an anarchist Luna, but still found the revolution a good starting strategy for whatever his goals were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, my question is, what is Mike's motivation for participating in the revolution?  In particular, what are his political or moral beliefs, and is he a convinced anarchist?  Note that I am not asking about Heinlein's own political beliefs.  That's a separate question that's partly covered by &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/54547/4918&quot;&gt;“How anticommunist was Robert Heinlein?” (on Sci Fi SE)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As usual, I'd like an answer supported by the book, or possibly by interviews with &lt;em&gt;Heinlein&lt;/em&gt; or other books he wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T16:04:03.247" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T16:04:03.247" Title="Is Mike an anarchist in *The Moon is a Harsh Mistress*?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;politics&gt;&lt;robert-a-heinlein&gt;&lt;the-moon-is-a-harsh-mistress&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8435" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-14T00:34:59.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T00:34:59.430" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T00:34:59.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8436" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-14T00:34:59.430" Score="0" Body="The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein, which centers on a lunar colony's revolt against rule from Earth. Use this tag together with the [robert-a-heinlein] tag." OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T12:48:11.813" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T12:48:11.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8437" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-14T00:36:28.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T00:36:28.173" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T00:36:28.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8438" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-14T00:36:28.173" Score="0" Body="Robert A. Heinlein (1907 – 1988) was an American science fiction writer. Often called &quot;the dean of science fiction writers&quot;, he was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of the genre. " OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T13:49:19.273" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T13:49:19.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8432" CreationDate="2018-09-14T13:02:38.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question may be too broad ... there are a lot of illustrated &quot;solve the mystery&quot; books for kids, and neither planes nor mansions are particularly uncommon settings. However, one very possible answer is the first three stories in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usborne_Puzzle_Adventure_series&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Usborne Puzzle Adventure series&lt;/a&gt;, published in the late 1980s. I owned a single-volume copy of all three of these stories, and I've found some images from them online which might jog your memory. It's worth noting that the mansion part and the plane part are two separate stories in the same volume, not part of one overarching mystery. But that's the sort of detail which is easy to misremember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Escape from Blood Castle&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is set in a large mansion/castle, where the main character (a boy of perhaps 10-12) is visiting/rescuing his relative (uncle? cousin?) Boris, who owns the place, from an impostor who's imprisoned the real Boris in a cage. There's a lot of illustrations of detailed plans and booby traps which the main character has to pass through to find Boris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qSD7Y.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qSD7Y.png&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWkhp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oWkhp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;The Curse of the Lost Idol&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is about an ancient Egyptian relic. I'm only mentioning it because it was in the same volume as the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Murder on the Midnight Plane&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is set on an overnight flight to the Tsetse islands. Two siblings(twins?) Sam and Spike, are travelling with about a dozen other people, one of whom dies on the flight. The brother and sister solve the mystery together and identify three of the other passengers as responsible for his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTyAf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTyAf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R1xcg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/R1xcg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9rJWB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9rJWB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T13:02:38.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8440" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-14T14:39:23.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T14:39:23.103" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T14:39:23.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8441" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-14T14:39:23.103" Score="0" Body="The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is a sci-fi novel by Robert A. Heinlein, which centers on a lunar colony's revolt against rule from Earth. Use this tag together with the [robert-a-heinlein] tag." OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-09-14T18:09:51.973" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T18:09:51.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8443" CreationDate="2018-09-14T17:01:00.867" Score="3" ViewCount="10844" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the message being delivered through these lines in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mwkworks.com/desiderata.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desiderata&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by the poet Max Ehrmann?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Especially do not feign affection&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Neither be cynical about love;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  it is as perennial as the grass. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess the first line means that do not pretend to love someone. And I think the second the second line means that one should never doubt someone's love for them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4897" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T07:42:22.420" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T09:48:37.237" Title="What is the meaning of these lines about love from &quot;Desiderata&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;max-ehrmann&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8442" CreationDate="2018-09-14T19:52:14.073" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct about the first line. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than &quot;never doubt&quot;, I'd read the second line more as &quot;don't believe that love is impossible&quot;. The second couplet supports that: while there are many disappointments, and you may feel that you will never find love, it is &quot;perennial&quot;; that is, it keeps returning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line of the stanza is &quot;be yourself&quot;. In the context of the rest that you quoted, I'd interpret it as &quot;Seek out love as you wish to, but be honest about doing so, rather than lying about it if it's not there or by concluding that it can never be there&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a little over-optimistic and simplistic for my taste, but the poem is very popular and clearly rings true for many people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-09-14T19:52:14.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8444" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-15T10:50:22.070" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the literary term for a novel that does not have any dividing sections such as chapters or paragraphs? There may still be punctuation. I am thinking of something like Will Self's &lt;em&gt;Phone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5045" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T10:50:22.070" Title="What is the term for a novel that has no chapters or paragraphs?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8445" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8446" CreationDate="2018-09-15T17:50:52.547" Score="3" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find fiction works where the world of a story is an organization of certain kind (an airport, a bank, an automobile factory etc.). The most prominent writer in this genre is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Hailey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Hailey&lt;/a&gt;. I want to find more and more recent books like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this genre called in the English-speaking world?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My research&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; suggests the name &lt;em&gt;occupational novel&lt;/em&gt;. However, when I look for it at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/genres/occupational-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;, I only find non-fiction books (biographies, mostly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user658" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T16:23:45.253" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T16:23:45.253" Title="What genre did Arthur Hailey's works belong to?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8445" CreationDate="2018-09-15T18:47:11.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/nov/27/guardianobituaries.books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guardian&lt;/a&gt; refers to the Hailey as a germinator of the &quot;factional&quot; genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fruit of diligent research, which in his long (seldom under&#xA;  500-page) novels was sometimes dispensed in barely digested globules,&#xA;  his work laid the groundwork for the &quot;factional&quot; genre, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;which uses&#xA;  authentic backgrounds as a backcloth for human stereotypes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Faction&#xA;  was later employed by many other writers of topical appeal, including&#xA;  Frederick Forsyth and Jeffrey Archer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;factional&quot; is a portmanteau of &quot;fact&quot; and 'fiction&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fiction_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see Non-Fiction novel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T18:47:11.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8338" CreationDate="2018-09-15T23:08:50.567" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/henry/o/voice-of-the-city/chapter10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Defeat of the City&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the protagonist who issues the challenge, but the other details seem to match:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That night when the greetings and the supper were over, the entire family, including Buff, the yellow dog, bestrewed itself upon the front porch. Alicia, not haughty but silent, sat in the shadow dressed in an exquisite pale-gray tea gown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert tore off his coat and vest and hurled them into a lilac bush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Come out here, you landlubber,” he cried to Tom, “and I’ll put grass seed on your back. I think you called me a ‘dude’ a while ago. Come along and cut your capers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom understood the invitation and accepted it with delight. Three times they wrestled on the grass, “side holds,” even as the giants of the mat. And twice was Tom forced to bite grass at the hands of the distinguished lawyer. Dishevelled, panting, each still boasting of his own prowess, they stumbled back to the porch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Alicia moved as though she were about to speak, but she did not. Through it all she sat immovable, a slim, white spirit in the dusk that no man might question or read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By and by she asked permission to ascend to her room, saying that she was tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Robert,” said the calm, cool voice of his judge, “I thought I married a gentleman.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it was coming. And yet, in the face of it, Robert Walmsley was eagerly regarding a certain branch of the apple tree upon which he used to climb out of that very window. He believed he could do it now. He wondered how many blossoms there were on the tree—ten millions? But here was some one speaking again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I thought I married a gentleman,” the voice went on, “but—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why had she come and was standing so close by his side?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But I find that I have married”—was this Alicia talking?—“something better—a man—Bob, dear, kiss me, won’t you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T23:08:50.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8329" CreationDate="2018-09-15T23:23:37.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Shadow of Vesuvius&amp;quot; by Eilís Dillon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Greek slave of a Roman artisan plans his escape from the city of&#xA;Pompeii amid ominous signs of the approaching eruption of Mt. Vesuvius&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be read on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shadowofvesuvius00dill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how Timon (the slave) describes his idea of the painting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Have you thought about how you would like to paint her?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;As Andromeda. I always think of Andromeda as being very tall and slender, with dark hair. I'd have Perseus standing by with the head of the Gorgon in his hand, just about to turn the sea-monster to stone.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-15T23:23:37.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-16T03:53:45.990" Score="8" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reread &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/98/98-h/98-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Charles Dickens recently and was struck at how coincidental it was that Sydney Carton just happened to be in France during the time Charles Darnay was accused the second time.  Darnay had been imprisoned for a year before that.  Why hadn't Carton gone during that time?  How did he know he'd be needed right at that moment?  If he was there for Darnay, why wasn't he at the trial where he was released before he was taken again?  Was he there on other business or just to support Darnay?  Did I miss something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5047" LastEditorUserId="5047" LastEditDate="2018-09-16T22:43:56.293" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T20:23:50.660" Title="What was Sydney Carton doing in France?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-tale-of-two-cities&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-15T10:12:04.520" Score="5" ViewCount="248" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Action Comics &lt;strong&gt;#1000&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was first published in the US earlier this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got the impression that this seemed to be an unheard of before milestone. Most likely due to the fact that such a daunting number might prevent newcomers from getting involved in a comic book series, publishers use retcons, reboots and restarts to wipe the slate clean and also restart the numbering (and of course you can sell a new issue #1).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it might actually have been a rarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/206-comics-and-graphic-novels/64135927&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This discussion - rather rude in places, imho - &lt;/a&gt; seems not to be clear on how to go with having an answer to this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Problems seem to be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are Japanese Manga comic books?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;2000AD&lt;/em&gt; a comic book? (currently on issue &lt;strong&gt;#2086&lt;/strong&gt; - its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_AD_(comics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; calls it a &lt;em&gt;comic magazine&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn is a less fancy term for a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_anthology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;comics anthology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which both &lt;em&gt;Action Comics&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Detective Comics&lt;/em&gt; at least started out as.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beano&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Beano&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (currently on issue &lt;strong&gt;#3949&lt;/strong&gt;) and similar publications comic books?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, they all seem to be comic books (or at least anthologies, which &lt;em&gt;Action Comics&lt;/em&gt; started out as, too), but maybe my intuition is wrong there. My own subjective defintion would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cover (with Artwork)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One or more stories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Misc stuff: e.g. letters to the editor, advertisement, maybe an editorial or an interview with one of the artists etc&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that could be wrong and an official definition might actually exist (maybe back in the day, due to the US censorship laws one was made?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After all that preface, here it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;comic book&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;series did indeed go from #1-#X and which X is the highest?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="118" OwnerDisplayName="BMWurm" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T09:14:49.273" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T09:14:49.273" Title="What is the highest number a comic book issue ever achieved naturally?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-17T09:46:39.290" Score="1" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Elif Şafak's novel &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, in Aziz's correspondence with Ella, he tells her his life story, completing the final part when he meets her in person. Each part of his life he refers to as his &amp;quot;encounter with&amp;quot; a particular letter in the word Sufi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First he tells her about his wife Margot and how he lost her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a boy once. Love opened up my eyes to a more fulfilled life. After I lost the woman I loved, I metamorphosed drastically. Neither a boy nor an adult, I became a trapped animal. This stage of my life I call my encounter with the letter S in the word “Sufi.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After his years of drugs and debauchery, he becomes a photographer, and eventually is recommended to the Sufis as a possible way of smuggling him into the holy cities of Islam:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn’t know anything about Sufism, and I couldn’t have cared less. As long as they offered to help, I was happy to meet the Sufis. To me they were just a means to an end. But then, at the time, so was everyone and everything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life is odd, Ella. In the end I never made it to Mecca or Medina. Not then, not later. Not even after I converted to Islam. Destiny took me on a different route altogether, one of unexpected twists and turns, each of which changed me so profoundly and irrevocably that after a while the original destination lost its significance. Though motivated by purely materialistic reasons at the outset, when the journey came to an end, I was a transformed man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Sufis, who could have known that what I had initially seen as a means to an end would very soon become an end in itself? This part of my life I call my encounter with the letter u in the word “Sufi.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While living with the Sufi brotherhood, he learns about Shams of Tabriz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was intrigued. But it was more than simple curiosity. As I listened to Master Sameed tell me more about Shams, I felt a shiver down my spine, an odd feeling of déjà vu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you are going to think I’m crazy. But I swear to God, at that moment I heard a rustle of silk in the background, first far off, then drawing nearer, and I saw the shadow of someone who wasn’t there. Perhaps it was the evening breeze moving across the branches, or maybe it was a pair of angel wings. Either way, I suddenly knew that I didn’t need to go anywhere. Not anymore. I was sick and tired of always longing to be somewhere else, somewhere beyond, always in a rush despite myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was already where I wanted to be. All I needed was to stay and look within. This new part of my life I call my encounter with the letter f in the word “Sufi.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Finally, in his hotel room in Boston, he tells her about his cancer and subsequent travels around the world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then I retreated to write the novel I had always wanted to write but, in my laziness or lack of courage, had postponed endlessly,” said Aziz with a wink. “You know, it was one of those things I had wanted to do for a long time. I named the book Sweet Blasphemy and sent it to a literary agency in America, not expecting much and at the same time feeling open to all possibilities. A week later I received an intriguing e-mail from a mystery woman in Boston.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ella couldn’t help but smile. A weak smile of respectful compassion, tender and pained. Aziz said ever since that moment nothing had been the same. From a man getting ready to die, he had turned into a man falling in love at a most unexpected time. Suddenly all the pieces that he thought he’d long ago put into place had to be moved. Spirituality, life, family, mortality, faith, and love—he found himself rethinking their meanings again and not wanting to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new and final stage of his life he called his encounter with the letter i in the word “Sufi.” And he said so far this stage had proved to be much more difficult than all the earlier ones, because it had come at a time when he thought he’d worked through most, if not all, of his inner conflicts, a time when he thought he was spiritually mature and fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the connection between these letters and the stages of his life?&lt;/strong&gt; It reminded me of the way Shams assigned significance to the individual letters of Rumi's name earlier in the story (&lt;em&gt;the powerful, lucid R; the velvety U; the intrepid and self-confident M; and the mysterious I, yet to be solved&lt;/em&gt;), and also of the idea that the entire Koran can be encapsulated in the initial letter B, but how do the different letters symbolise different parts and aspects of life? Is mystical significance of letters part of the Sufi belief, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T09:46:39.290" Title="How do the letters S, U, F, I symbolise the stages of Aziz's life?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="248" CreationDate="2018-09-17T13:19:13.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rereading &lt;em&gt;Blood Meridian&lt;/em&gt; after about a dozen years and this is something I just thought about the Epilogue: Could the author have meant simply to refer to the spread of the telegraph in the West, a civilizing influence which would make it harder for &quot;Bad Men&quot; like the judge to thrive? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that he is a creature of mystery and lies, someone that everyone thinks they have encountered before, someone who relies upon no one knowing who he is or verifying his statements. Although fence posts might be suggested the fact that CM mentions fire suggests more strongly to me electricity: &quot;striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there&quot; seems like a poetic description of that substance; indeed, amber, a sort of stone, was strongly associated with electricity in the early history of human understanding of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5051" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-17T17:01:18.067" LastActivityDate="2018-09-17T17:01:18.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5320" CreationDate="2018-09-17T20:21:56.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding of this has always been that the &quot;holy&quot; Halleluy-ah is the Jewish (Old Testament/Old Covenant) one and the &quot;broken&quot; Halleluy-ah is the Christian one. Leonard Cohen had  a lot of trouble figuring out which of these was truer to him, and changed his mind on the matter multiple times throughout his life. It seems that the various women in his orbit, including the one to whom this song is addressed, did not exactly make things clearer--but that at the point when he wrote this song, it seems he thought there was some &quot;light&quot; in both. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sources:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are less biographical than I'd like, but here are some sources which treat Leonard Cohen's religious dilemma (including the majority of articles on Leonard Cohen in &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/leonard-cohen-makes-it-darker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohens-montreal?reload=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/leonard-cohen-a-final-interview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Xr70AgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Christian%20leonard%20cohen&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjV7I2H4MPdAhXPc98KHYvsDtQQ6AEIQDAE#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=crucifixion&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.leonardcohenfiles.com/doron-amsterdam.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Cohen#Religious_beliefs_and_practices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/leonard-cohen%E2%80%99s-biblical-vision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My position, and apparently &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;'s, is that one has first to understand Leonard Cohen as a seriously religious man. Religion is his Berlinian hedgehog and his bête grise; it is his obsession. Most of all (for us), it is his paintbox, and to understand his songs correctly, you have to understand that they are &lt;em&gt;made&lt;/em&gt; of religion and of Scripture. There are some exceptions - &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51F-42POgIg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,&lt;/a&gt;&quot; which I think is the saddest song I've ever heard, is apparently one - but, in general, religiously was how Leonard Cohen wrote -- as it was how Nikolai Gogol wrote and how Fra Angelico painted and how many, many artists now and before have done their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leonard Cohen has &lt;a href=&quot;https://cohencentric.com/2016/07/13/leonard-cohen-bible-not-forced-received-like-honey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;admitted&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Xr70AgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA387&amp;amp;lpg=PA387&amp;amp;dq=I%20know%20what%20it%20takes%20to%20survive.%20I%20know%20what%20a%20people%20needs%20to%20survive%20and%20as%20I%20get%20older%20I%20feel%20less%20modest%20about%20taking%20these%20positions%20because%20I%20realize%20we%20are%20the%20ones%20who%20wrote%20the%20Bible.%20And,%20at%20our%20best,%20we%20inhabit%20a%20biblical%20landscape,%20and%20this%20is%20where%20we%20should%20situate%20ourselves%20without%20apology.%20For%20these%20things,%20for%20the%20burning%20bush,%20for%20those%20experiences,%20those%20are%20the%20experiences%20that%20we%20have%20the%20obligation%20to%20manifest.%20That%20biblical%20landscape%20is%20our%20urgent%20invitation,%20and%20we%20have%20to%20be%20there.%20Otherwise,%20it%E2%80%99s%20really%20not%20worth%20saving%20or%20manifesting%20or%20redeeming%20anything,%20unless%20we%20really%20take%20up%20that%20invitation%20to%20walk%20onto%20that%20biblical%20landscape.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=yMJFlcKOiW&amp;amp;sig=YsfWgJWOxdjcju4quA0eB5KILy0&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwio4tDC7cPdAhVRnOAKHQjqBZcQ6AEwAnoECBwQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=I%20know%20what%20it%20takes%20to%20survive.%20I%20know%20what%20a%20people%20needs%20to%20survive%20and%20as%20I%20get%20older%20I%20feel%20less%20modest%20about%20taking%20these%20positions%20because%20I%20realize%20we%20are%20the%20ones%20who%20wrote%20the%20Bible.%20And%2C%20at%20our%20best%2C%20we%20inhabit%20a%20biblical%20landscape%2C%20and%20this%20is%20where%20we%20should%20situate%20ourselves%20without%20apology.%20For%20these%20things%2C%20for%20the%20burning%20bush%2C%20for%20those%20experiences%2C%20those%20are%20the%20experiences%20that%20we%20have%20the%20obligation%20to%20manifest.%20That%20biblical%20landscape%20is%20our%20urgent%20invitation%2C%20and%20we%20have%20to%20be%20there.%20Otherwise%2C%20it%E2%80%99s%20really%20not%20worth%20saving%20or%20manifesting%20or%20redeeming%20anything%2C%20unless%20we%20really%20take%20up%20that%20invitation%20to%20walk%20onto%20that%20biblical%20landscape.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;much&lt;/a&gt;. But you don't need to read biographies nor interviews to pick this up. You just have to read the holy sources, then read his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastEditorUserId="918" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T20:31:16.500" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T20:31:16.500" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-17T20:36:03.833" Score="4" ViewCount="8182" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Leonard Cohen's &quot;Halleluj'ah&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Baby, I've been here before --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know this room, I've walked this floor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I used to live alone before I knew you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I've seen your flag on the marble arch:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love is not a victory march; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I have a clear and coherent understanding of this song, with the exception of one line: &quot;I've seen your flag on the marble arch.&quot; Based on my understanding of Cohen's work as a whole, I am all but certain that it is a reference to something in the Jewish Scriptural canon, possibly from the Prophets or from later Jewish history. However, my lack of knowledge prevents me from identifying the reference. Can anyone else?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastEditorUserId="918" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T06:00:07.797" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T19:42:32.570" Title="&quot;I've seen your flag on the marble arch&quot;" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;leonard-cohen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8455" CreationDate="2018-09-18T06:07:26.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-what-leonard-cohen-s-hallelujah-is-really-about-1.5460331&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article in &lt;em&gt;Haaretz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Elon Gilad and Ruth Schuster write:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “marble arch” may allude to Titus’ Victory Arch in Rome, a&#xA;  monument celebrating the Roman final victory over the Jews. If so,&#xA;  Cohen is comparing his lover to the Roman victors and himself to the&#xA;  devastated Jews, who had just lost their Temple. Like the revolt, he&#xA;  is crushed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T06:07:26.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-18T11:46:16.880" Score="8" ViewCount="6674" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of Elif Şafak's &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, specifically the book-within-a-book &lt;em&gt;Sweet Blasphemy&lt;/em&gt; which is largely a retelling of the real-life story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shams_Tabrizi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shams&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rumi&lt;/a&gt;, Shams gets married to Rumi's student and foster-daughter Kimya. She's very much in love with him, as we see from the chapters written from her point of view. The wedding night is described from Shams's point of view, and he feels desire for her too, but he refuses to sleep with her as her husband:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I kissed her again. The warmth of her lips sent waves of desire across my entire body. She smelled of jasmine and wildflowers. Stretching out beside her, I inhaled her smell and touched her breasts, so small and firm. All I wanted was to enter her and get lost inside her. She offered herself to me the way a rosebud opens to the rain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pulled away. “I’m sorry, Kimya. I can’t do this.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He steadfastly refuses to sleep with her throughout their marriage, even when she tries all the tricks in the book to seduce him. &lt;strong&gt;Why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall anything about Shams taking an oath of celibacy. Nor can it be anything to do with his being a Sufi, because in Islam there's no such thing as clerical celibates or 'monasticism' in the typical Christian sense. He talks so much about love, so why does he refuse to make love with this girl, despite the fact that she wants to, at least part of him wants to, AND they're married?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T14:53:07.193" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T17:04:40.433" Title="Why did Shams refuse to sleep with Kimya?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8046" CreationDate="2018-09-18T12:31:40.067" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It appears to be a dedication to the author's family.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't got any solid proof for this, but it's the solution I've seen put forward in a number of places, probably all ultimately deriving from J. H. McGivering, &amp;quot;Kipling and Son: a Successful Partnership&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;The Kipling Journal&lt;/em&gt;, December 1970, pp. 7-14. This article can be read either &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kiplingjournal.com/acrobat/KJ176.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as a scanned PDF&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kiplingjournal.com/textfiles/KJ176.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in plain text&lt;/a&gt; at the Kipling Journal website. It's about the strong bonds within the Kipling family, especially between John Lockwood and his son Rudyard. From the very end of the article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much, then, for a quick look at two essentially lovable characters : the father dedicates his book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TO THE OTHER THREE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the son never fails to show his family that gratitude and affection they so richly deserve; in fact that remark addressed to the Curator by the lama might well have been used by either Kipling to the other&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;We be craftsmen together, thou and I&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This piece was also delivered as a talk at the Discussion Meeting of the Kipling Society on 15 July 1970, where apparently it inspired many questions some of which remained unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=rudyard-kipling;1ec8d809.1805&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a response to a question emailed to a Rudyard Kipling mailing list earlier this year&lt;/a&gt;, John Radcliffe said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely the ‘other three’ members of the Kiplings’ family square, which consisted of Alice, Rudyard, Trix, and Lockwood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conclusion was further supported by Mary Hamer, who said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agreed. Bearing in mind also that Christmas number they put together, published as ‘Quartette’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Both Mary Hamer and John Radcliffe are officers in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kipling_Society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Kipling Society&lt;/a&gt;.) Brian Harris, the querent in this email thread, also posted his findings on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-dedication-To-The-Other-Three-in-the-book-Beast-and-Man-in-India-John-Lockwood-Kipling-1891-mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;family square&amp;quot; was indeed used a lot for the four members of the Kipling family - you can find a lot of results online by searching the web for &lt;code&gt;kipling &amp;quot;family square&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; - so it seems reasonable that John Lockwood's dedication was, as many are, to his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:14:02.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction work 'Brave New World Revisited' that Aldous Huxley published in 1958. Use this tag with the [aldous-huxley] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:42:17.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the historical novel 'A Tale of Two Cities', published by Charles Dickens in 1859. Use this tag with the [charles-dickens] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T16:43:59.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8466" CreationDate="2018-09-18T17:21:22.237" Score="8" ViewCount="485" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've searched all over the place for an explicit answer to this question, but I can't find anything. Apparently, there are 27 known copies of the first edition (1605). But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cervantes'&lt;/a&gt; hand-written original is not extant, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5060" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T20:32:59.727" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T15:33:51.257" Title="Is the original manuscript of Don Quixote extant?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;don-quixote&gt;&lt;miguel-de-cervantes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-18T18:11:15.927" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are there any theories on what motivated  O’Shaughnessy to write &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54933/ode-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (also called 'We are the Music Makers') ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, he was not a &quot;world-forsaker&quot; himself. I read that he worked as a herpetologist. So was it that he got inspired by his friends' lives, the way society (probably) looked down upon them, low earning etc. to write the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4897" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-18T18:17:34.827" LastActivityDate="2018-09-18T18:17:34.827" Title="Why did O’Shaughnessy write Ode?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8464" CreationDate="2018-09-18T20:22:50.283" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2016, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes' death, Taberna Libraria published a facsimile edition of all of the author's manuscripts. This edition contains only 12 manuscripts. For a description, see the PDF file &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rae.es/sites/default/files/Autografos_Cervantes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autógrafos de Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra&lt;/a&gt; (in Spanish). The book was published in a limited edition of 1616 copies. King Felipe VI of Spain &lt;a href=&quot;https://tabernalibraria.es/ediciones-conmemorativas/autografos-miguel-cervantes-saavedra/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gifted one copy to Pope Francis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was presented in the building of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rae.es/noticias/presentacion-en-la-rae-de-los-manuscritos-de-miguel-de-cervantes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Real Academia Española (RAE)&lt;/a&gt; in January 2016. It contains facsimiles of &lt;strong&gt;twelve manuscripts&lt;/strong&gt; dated between 1582 and 1604, mostly letters and other documents. (The &lt;em&gt;Quijote&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1605 but printing began in 1604.) It does not contain the manuscript of &lt;em&gt;Don Quijote de la Mancha&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2007, Fracisco Rico, who edited the works of Cervantes, said that &lt;a href=&quot;https://elpais.com/diario/2007/04/22/domingo/1177213958_850215.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;he would prefer not to see the manuscript of &lt;em&gt;Don Quijote de la Mancha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; because it must have been a disaster from a modern point of view, for example because there was no fixed orthography at the time and because Cervantes wrote it with interruptions, in shops, in inns, while on the road, etc. without proper punctuation (at least, based on the manuscripts that have survived). (I assume some irony on Rico's part; in spite of the editorial difficulties, I assume he would still be curious.) He also says that a manuscript might exist somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T15:33:51.257" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T15:33:51.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8429" CreationDate="2018-09-19T02:38:26.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been unable to find any definite story of a parabolic woman who collected valueless things. However a closer reading of the G. K. Chesterton story, especially reading the context of the quotes above, reveal that when the two specific items are mentioned, &lt;em&gt;an old doctor's brass-plate and a wooden leg&lt;/em&gt;, they refer to a (male) character in the story who laid a ruse using a discarded doctor's name plate and an artificial leg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question thus becomes, If the allegorical woman has been used as a metaphor for a particular individual, male or female, to the extent that she is said to have bought one or more apparently useless (but very specific) items that the same individual had bought, is the story of the woman actually a proverb that has been modified to suit the current situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this context it may be inferred that the question &quot;&lt;em&gt;Do you know the story of the woman who collected ----&lt;/em&gt;&quot; with one or more apparently useless items in the blank, is an unusual/old idiom intended to convey that the apparently valueless item in question can, in the right circumstances, be very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the idiom (if indeed it is one) has not been found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5033" LastEditorUserId="5033" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T02:45:39.397" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T02:45:39.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8429" CreationDate="2018-09-19T07:56:07.277" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible source for this idea might be a story from the Bible, 2 Kings, Chapter 4. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Kings+4%3A1-7&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New International Version&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wife of a man from the company of the prophets cried out to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that he revered the Lord. But now his creditor is coming to take my two boys as his slaves.” [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elisha said, “Go around and ask all your neighbors for empty jars. Don’t ask for just a few. Then go inside and shut the door behind you and your sons. Pour oil into all the jars, and as each is filled, put it to one side.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She left him and shut the door behind her and her sons. They brought the jars to her and she kept pouring. When all the jars were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he replied, “There is not a jar left.” Then the oil stopped flowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She went and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts. You and your sons can live on what is left.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here a woman collects seemingly valueless objects (empty jars from her neighbours) and yet they turn out to be her salvation, thanks to a miracle. Given that Father Brown is a Catholic priest, making references to a story from the Bible seems to fit well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I found this by doing a Google search for &lt;code&gt;do you know the story of the &amp;quot;woman who collected&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;. Many of the search results were actually Father Brown stories, but one that wasn't was &lt;a href=&quot;https://faithlikeamushroom.com/2014/08/11/a-lesson-in-faith-from-the-woman-who-collected-jars/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which led me to the Bible story.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T07:56:07.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-19T14:19:32.580" Score="1" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;Mirror of Truth&quot; by Dee Raain is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is seen in the mirror is nothing more than a person with lies and hate.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With sadness and traits&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of discrimination and disgrace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I see is a broken face of sadness.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With no hope to be filled with gladness.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More than can ever resent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To have a heart broken and bent.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I see in the mirror is someone who lost.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At the price of being cost.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With losing someone they love.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And being hurt so bad, it hurts to see them gone.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What I see in the mirror&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is me. The 'I am' and may have already became to be.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is who I am and how part of my life is.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And unlike most for me this is the mirror of truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the above poem, how does the poet use mirrors to highlight negative emotions of humans?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the author describing just himself, or humanity as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Also, is it right to think that in the last stanza, he is accepting his weaknesses, providing a positive touch to the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5063" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-19T14:45:58.760" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T14:45:58.760" Title="How does Dee Raain use the Mirrors to highlight negative human traits in the poem &quot;Mirror of Truth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8470" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8472" CreationDate="2018-09-19T15:47:10.157" Score="3" ViewCount="1281" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to figure out whether or not to use the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/turkish-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;turkish-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;turkish-literature&lt;/a&gt; tag for my questions here about Elif Şafak's novel &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. whether or not the book was originally written in Turkish. This turned out to be a surprisingly hard question to answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Shafak#Bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, for example, lists &lt;em&gt;Aşk&lt;/em&gt; as the Turkish translation of &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, but also says that the Turkish version was published in 2009 and the English version in 2010. Since the author is fluent in both languages, it's possible that she wrote both versions herself nearly simultaneously rather than using a professional translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which came first, the Turkish &lt;em&gt;Aşk&lt;/em&gt; or the English &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T19:00:37.220" Title="Was The Forty Rules of Love originally written in Turkish or in English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8470" CreationDate="2018-09-19T18:10:37.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://tr.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C5%9Fk_(roman)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish page for the novel&lt;/a&gt; lists its original language as English, and names one Kadir Yiğit Us as the English-Turkish translator. There's no reference for it, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elifsafak.us/roportajlar.asp?islem=roportaj&amp;amp;id=258&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there's this interview (in Turkish)&lt;/a&gt; with Elif Şafak and Kadir Yiğit Us, in which they tell the story of how the book was translated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the book was translated and edited by Us, but then edited again by Şafak, to the point she calls &quot;rewriting&quot; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, Şafak seems to have written some (most? all?) of her other novels in English, and gotten some flak for it from the Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T18:10:37.917" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8470" CreationDate="2018-09-19T19:00:37.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Kinda both?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To add to Gallifreyan's answer, I found an English-language interview with Elif Şafak for the Turkish newspaper &lt;em&gt;Zaman&lt;/em&gt;, which used to be available &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.todayszaman.com/arts-culture_safak-looks-forward-to-reaching-the-world-with-the-forty-rules-of-love_186937.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (although the newspaper was terminated in 2016) and can still be read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.elifsafak.us/en/roportajlar.asp?islem=roportaj&amp;amp;id=19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (albeit with the infuriating issue that every Ş is rendered as Þ):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;You say, “Both the English and the Turkish versions of this book are original,” in one of your interviews. What do you mean by that?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, for the last five years I have been writing fiction in both English and Turkish. Several of my novels were originally written in English, then translated into Turkish. Several others were written in Turkish, then translated into English. So I am a writer who enjoys commuting between languages. In “The Forty Rules of Love” I tried a completely new technique. I wrote the novel in English first. Then it was translated into Turkish by an excellent translator. Then I took the translation and I rewrote it. When the Turkish version was ripe and ready, I went back to the English version and rewrote it with a new spirit. In a way I have built two parallel books in the same span of time. It is a bit insane, I have to admit. It is a crazy amount of work. I do this because language is my passion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summarising that: &lt;strong&gt;she wrote it in English first, then took someone else's Turkish translation and rewrote it in Turkish, then rewrote it in English based on that.&lt;/strong&gt; So while it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; accurate to say the book was first written in English, that's not the full story: the final English version seems to have been influenced by the Turkish version, and probably some aspects were first written in Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-19T19:00:37.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8475" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:18:30.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T14:18:30.327" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:18:30.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8476" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:18:30.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French author Alexandre Dumas (1802 – 1870) and his life as a writer. The author is often referred to as &quot;Alexandre Dumas père&quot; (&quot;père&quot; meaning &quot;father&quot;) in order to distinguish him from his son, who is then referred to as &quot;Alexandre Dumas fils&quot; (&quot;fils&quot; meaning &quot;son&quot;).  Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T14:29:57.377" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:29:57.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8477" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8478" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Le Comte de Monte-Cristo' (1844, 'The Count of Monte Cristo') by the French author Alexandre Dumas (père). Use this tag with the tags [alexandre-dumas-pere] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" LastActivityDate="2018-09-20T14:29:37.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-20T23:45:35.137" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the poet here want to clean up this squalid earth and make room for them when everybody in this world is running after wealth, glamour, glory, fame and egotistical nature's distortion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did his eyes meet the empty, blurry, bleak, and beady eyes of void people as contemporary poet T. S. Elliot called them Hollow Man and Stuffed Man who doesn't have the spinal chord to stand up on the justifying and rational ground during Sukanta's lifetime and the poet rebelled against them? Is that the reason why? And he is adamant about his desire to clean up this world. He says as long as I have the breath in my body I will do it... If you look at the last few lines the poet says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have to go away- Still, today till there is life in  body&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earnestly I’ll remove the garbage of this world,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’ll make this world livable for this child before I go –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is my surefooted promise to this newborn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally completing all works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will bless this new child&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the blood from my body,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After that, I’ll be history only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the full poem: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CHHARPATRA (Approval Certificate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sukanta Bhattacharya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The child who has born tonight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From him I came to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has got an approval certificate,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That’s why he expresses his right at the door of world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Through his vigorous cry at his birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Small body, helpless, still his clenched fist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Raised and floated&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some incomprehensible pledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nobody can understand his speech&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some laughs, some give him mild scold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I have realized that language&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has got a letter of new era—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I read the identity of that baby,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In illegible mystic eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arrived a new life, we have to give space for him,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(We) failure in weird world,death and debris on our back&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have to go away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have to go away- Still, today till there is life in  body&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earnestly I’ll remove the garbage of this world,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I’ll make this world livable for this child before I go –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is my surefooted promise to this newborn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally completing all works&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I will bless this new child&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the blood from my body,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After that, I’ll be history only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" OwnerDisplayName="mvr950" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T08:02:50.377" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T08:02:50.377" Title="What does the poet Sukanta Bhattacharya mean when he said he has to make room for the newborn?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;sukanta-bhattacharya&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-21T11:38:28.210" Score="5" ViewCount="238" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &lt;em&gt;King Richard III&lt;/em&gt; by Shakespeare did King Richard III become a villain because of nature selected him to be a disabled person (if we look at the villainous plot of the villain from his circumstance and perspective)? And he became a villain as villainous can be. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here in the soliloquy says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now is the winter of our discontent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,&#xA;  Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that so lamely and unfashionable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That dogs bark at me as I halt by them--&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why I, in this weak piping time of peace,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have no delight to pass away the time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unless to see my shadow in the sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And descant on mine own deformity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To entertain these fair well-spoken days,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am determinèd to prove a villain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hate the idle pleasures of these days.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-21T14:31:53.723" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:36:42.713" Title="Did King Richard III prove a villain because nature chose him to be a disabled person?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8487" CreationDate="2018-09-21T16:12:38.127" Score="2" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem 'The Song of the Reed' by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rumi&lt;/a&gt; includes the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hearken to this Reed forlorn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Breathing, even since 'twas torn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From its rushy bed, a strain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of impassioned love and pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;em&gt;Rumi, Poet and Mystic 1207–1273&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Reynold A. Nicholson.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;rushy bed&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4930" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T08:24:22.150" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T17:55:42.003" Title="What does &quot;rushy bed&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8484" CreationDate="2018-09-21T14:27:38.003" Score="2" ViewCount="391" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw this cartoon a couple decades ago and I believe it was from &lt;em&gt;The Far Side&lt;/em&gt; but I am not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It showed a cowboy-style theme where the champion ping pong player (a king of the mountain) was finally beat by a skilled kid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caption was something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well kid, you beat me. Now every paddle-packing player wanting to make a name&#xA;  for himself will come lookin' for you instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5075" OwnerDisplayName="nothingisnecessary" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T17:37:29.890" Title="Who made the cartoon where the ping pong champion got beat by a kid, and can you share an image?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8483" CreationDate="2018-09-21T17:37:29.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is indeed a Far Side cartoon. In respect of Larson's request to not repost his comics online, I'm only posting a low-res version:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ItBw5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ItBw5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Ping Pong gunslinger&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text at the bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, kid, ya beat me -- and now every punk packin' a paddle and tryin' to make a name for himself will come lookin' for you! ... Welcome to hell, kid.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T17:37:29.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8481" CreationDate="2018-09-21T18:43:45.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The image of Richard III as having a hunchback is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudor_myth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tudor myth&lt;/a&gt;. Henry VII, the first Tudor king, could only become Richard III's successor by having him killed. In order to make Richard III's killing legitimate, it was necessary to put him in a negative light. This included both portraying him as a bad king, accusing of the murders of several members of noble families and the royal family (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princes_in_the_Tower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;princes in the tower&lt;/a&gt;) and representing him as having a hunchback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas More's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More#History_of_King_Richard_III&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of King Richard III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which influenced Shakespeare, has often been cited as an example of Tudor propaganda. However, it appears that More was no mere propagandist; see for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://kingrichardarmitage.rgcwp.com/2013/03/25/sources-sunday-thomas-mores-history-of-king-richard-iii/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sources Sunday: Thomas More’s History of King Richard III&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that Richard III had a hunchback or a disability. If the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhumation_and_reburial_of_Richard_III_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;skeleton that was discovered in Leicester in 2012&lt;/a&gt; is really Richard III's, then he would have had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoliosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scoliosis&lt;/a&gt;, which is characterised by a sideways curve of the spine, which is different from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyphosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hunchback or kyphosis&lt;/a&gt;. One shoulder would have been a bit higher than the other, but he would not have had a withered arm. In the skeleton, both arms have the same length; the skeleton is also more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gracile or feminine&lt;/a&gt; than most men's. (See the Smithsonian video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RFdkY6Ibg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Truth About the Hunchback King&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's play fits into the tradition of portraying Richard III as a tyrant and murderer with a deformed body. It uses the classic trick of conflating physical appearance with moral character (see also the concepts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physiognomy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physiognomy&lt;/a&gt; and the much more recent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phrenology&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening monologue spends a lot of time on Richard's &quot;deformity&quot;: lines 14 - 23 (&quot;But I, that am not shaped ... That dogs bark at me ...&quot;) and lines 26 - 27. Lines 28 and following draws a number of conclusions from this: &quot;I am determined to prove a villain / And hate the idle pleasures of these days.&quot; This is then followed by enumeration of his concrete plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you ignore the first 13 lines, everything seems to follow from Richard's deformity. However, the beginning of line 14 (&quot;But I ...&quot;) shows that Richard is also contrasting himself with his brother, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_IV_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;king Edward IV&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;this sun/son of York&quot;, who is now having a good time in a lady's bedroom. So there is an element of envy involved and this envy is not represented as a consequence of Richard's deformity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-09-21T18:43:45.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4278" CreationDate="2018-09-22T00:57:27.303" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR:  It's not impossible - but it's unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Punisher had a 5-issue mini-series published in 1986, before &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt;. His continuing series launched about a year after the mini-series concluded, making it more likely that the success of the mini-series lead to the continuing title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Punisher&lt;/a&gt; first appeared in &lt;em&gt;The Amazing Spider-Man&lt;/em&gt; #129 (cover dated February 1974). The inspiration for the character was Don Pendleton's Executioner, who appeared in a series of novels around this time. This was also around the time of the original &lt;em&gt;Death Wish&lt;/em&gt; movie (it came out in 1974; the novel it was based on was published in 1972). This sort of character was not unique at that time, in other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the original question, the character appeared as a guest-star in Marvel's comics for years. Originally treated as a part of Spider-Man's cast about once a year through the rest of the 1970s, then started appearing in other character's comics (such as Daredevil and Captain America). He appeared in at least one or two solo stories, in Marvel's black and white magazines (which allowed freer reign for violence and such, as they were not submitted to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Code_Authority&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comics Code Authority&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His 5-issue mini-series in 1986 was his first solo outing in the comics. It was well-received (actually toning down the character slightly, explaining away some of his more extreme actions), and his on-going comic starting about a year after the end of the mini-series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the first issue of his mini-series (given the cover date) would actually have hit the newsstands in 1984, so this predated both &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, his on-going started before &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;'s 12-issue run finished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it was produced around the same time as the other two books, it also occurred around the same time as a potentially more relevant event; the vigilante shooting of four young men by Bernie Goetz in December of 1984.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt; takes place in a dystopic future, and &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt; takes place in the present, but one affected by decades of super-powered people. While &lt;em&gt;Punisher&lt;/em&gt; certainly took place in the Marvel Universe, it rarely featured the kind of super-powered characters seen in the Marvel movies, or even in most of the Netflix shows (&lt;em&gt;Luke Cage&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Jessica Jones&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Iron Fist&lt;/em&gt;). Frank Castle's focus was generally on the mob (as they're the ones responsible for the deaths of his wife and children) and street-level crime, not on super-villains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that comics take a certain amount of time between the decision to publish a new series and when the actual first issue hits the stands. On multiple occasions, Marvel and DC have published comic books featuring similar characters at almost the same time (a team of misfit heroes shunned by society lead by a older man in a wheelchair (X-Men, Doom Patrol), and swamp creatures (Man-Thing, Swamp Thing)). Sometimes, separate paths lead to similar results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems more like the case with the Punisher. The success of the mini-series made it clear there was an interest in the character; other events of the time made it seem like society was ready for an on-going series about a character who was an ordinary man (OK, an ordinary ex-Marine) who was willing to take out the criminal element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that other comics show the same thing. DC started publishing &lt;em&gt;Suicide Squad&lt;/em&gt; in 1987, but laid the groundwork for the group in their &lt;em&gt;Legends&lt;/em&gt; mini-series in 1986 (a year when they basically remade their entire universe). That group had no major compunctions with killing their opponents, either. Again, it's not &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; that the success of &lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt; affected this, but (as stated earlier), given the lead time needed for comic book publishing, it would've been a quick decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final aside: Marvel did publish comics where the lead characters were willing to kill before &lt;em&gt;Punisher&lt;/em&gt;. While it wasn't as prominent or as obvious as the activity in the Punisher's book, &lt;em&gt;S.H.I.E.L.D.&lt;/em&gt;'s stories about a spy agency did include killing their opponents. What's more, Marvel's &quot;army&quot; comics (like &lt;em&gt;Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos&lt;/em&gt;, a predecessor of sorts to &lt;em&gt;S.H.I.E.L.D.&lt;/em&gt;) certainly involved killing their opponents (as did similarly-themed comics published by DC). While I haven't read many of them, I imagine that Marvel's western characters (Two-Gun Kid, Rawhide Kid, Kid Colt Outlaw, etc.) at least killed on occasion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4735" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T00:57:27.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8482" CreationDate="2018-09-22T01:39:12.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reeds (typha, or reedmace) and rushes (bulrush) are often confused, although they belong to different botanical families. In particular, typha (reedmace) is often misnamed as bulrush. Since both plants grow in water, you will often see them intermixed in streams and along riverbanks. So, a &amp;quot;rushy bed&amp;quot; is simply a bed of bulrushes (or typha).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that a &lt;em&gt;reed&lt;/em&gt; is a rustic musical instrument. So the &lt;em&gt;reed&lt;/em&gt; in the poem would be made from the stem of a bulrush (or more properly, reedmace or typha), taken from its &lt;em&gt;rushy bed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Typha_latifolia.jpg/220px-Typha_latifolia.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Typha, or reedmace (reedmace)&quot; /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typha, or reedmace (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Schoenoplectus_lacustris_260605.jpg/220px-Schoenoplectus_lacustris_260605.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bulrush&quot; /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulrush&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulrush (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reed (noun)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.4 (literary) a rustic musical pipe made from a reed or from straw.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;‘as if thy waves had only heard the shepherd's reed’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford Online Dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T17:55:42.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T17:55:42.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8481" CreationDate="2018-09-22T19:35:19.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is worth pointing out that until fairly recently, it was believed that physical disability was a &quot;punishment&quot;; even in the West, a sort of karmic idea was prevalent. Modern ideas of compassion for the disabled might have seemed very foreign to many in the past. &quot;Freak shows&quot;, for example, basically exhibited people with disabilities and I doubt if many visited these out of concern for those being exhibited -- such shows lasted well into the 20th century in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastActivityDate="2018-09-22T19:35:19.370" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T08:25:42.043" Score="2" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tony Hillerman's novel, &lt;em&gt;People of Darkness,&lt;/em&gt; why have a group of Navajos, who followed some form of traditional Navajo religion, accepted B.J. Vines as their religious leader?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's not only a white man, but a rich white man. Why would he be trusted that much? Is this plausible in some way, or is it a hole in the background of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5082" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T07:48:15.703" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T07:48:15.703" Title="In Tony Hillerman's People of Darkness, why do the Navajos accept Vines as a religious leader?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8491" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8501" CreationDate="2018-09-23T13:54:37.193" Score="4" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an English translation of the surviving stanzas of chapter 10 of Pushkin’s &lt;em&gt;Eugene Onegin&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Onegin#Composition_and_publication&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pushkin wrote at least 18 stanzas of a never-completed tenth chapter.&#xA;  It contained many satires and even direct criticism on contemporary&#xA;  Russian rulers, including the Emperor himself. Afraid of being&#xA;  prosecuted for dissidence, Pushkin burnt most of the tenth chapter.&#xA;  Very little of it survived in Pushkin's notebooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5084" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T19:09:53.157" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T11:24:18.780" Title="Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the “lost” chapter 10" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;alexander-pushkin&gt;&lt;eugene-onegin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-23T18:08:30.160" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of Nalo Hopkinson's novel &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; (2000), Tan-Tan, the main character, gives birth to a boy.&#xA;Her friend Melonhead asks how she will name him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tubman.&quot; Tan-Tan surprised herself, coming out with it so quickly. She hadn't been thinking about what to call him. She smiled up at Melonhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Tan-Tan choose the name Tubman?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T14:31:06.607" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T14:31:06.607" Title="Why does Tan-Tan name her child Tubman?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;midnight-robber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8492" CreationDate="2018-09-23T18:08:30.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, the choice of the child's name is not Tan-Tan's decision but the author's.&#xA;The book's setting is a Caribbean-colonised planet (Toussaint) and another planet, New Half-Way Tree, to which criminals get exiled.&#xA;The book references many elements of Caribbean culture, including its carnival tradition (hence the title's Robber Queen) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean_folklore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;folklore&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It does not explicitly reference the history of slavery in the USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People raised in the USA will very likely recognise the reference to Harriet Tubman. (The name was new to me.) &lt;strong&gt;Harriet Tubman&lt;/strong&gt; was born into slavery around 1822 and grew up on a plantation in Maryland where she was badly beaten.&#xA;In 1849 her master Edward Brodess died and his widow began to sell his slaves. In the process, their families were broken up.&#xA;On Monday 17 September 1849 Harriet (then still known as Minty) and her brothers decided to escape.&#xA;However, her brothers became frightened and soon returned to the plantation; Harriett went back with them.&#xA;In October she escaped again, and she would later work for the abolitionist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brown_(abolitionist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Brown&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;(See &quot;17 September 1849: Harriet Tubman makes a bid for freedom&quot;, &lt;em&gt;BBC History Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.historyextra.com/magazine-issue/september-2018/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;September 2018&lt;/a&gt;, p. 8.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why the book's &quot;other narrator&quot;, whose words are printed in a different font, adds, &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Tubman: the human bridge from slavery to freedom.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also a few similarities between Tan-Tan and Harriet Tubman. Edward Brodess' widow published an advertisement with a reward for people who would bring back Minty/Harriet and her brothers.&#xA;Similarly, for much of the book, Tan-Tan is hunted by her father's widow Janisette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Harriet Tubman undertook several missions to rescue other slaves. Her name is strongly associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.harriet-tubman.org/category/underground-railroad/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Underground Railroad&lt;/a&gt;; there is a biography by Charlotte Taylor and Stephen Feinstein that calls her &lt;a href=&quot;http://enslow.com/books/harriet_tubman/4477&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hero of the Underground Railroad&lt;/a&gt; and another one by Anne Schraff that calls here the &lt;a href=&quot;http://enslow.com/books/the_life_of_harriet_tubman/4282&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moses of the Underground Railroad&lt;/a&gt;. Tan-Tan takes on the role of &quot;Robber Queen&quot; who helps people who are being cheater or oppressed. (&lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt; is not a retelling of Harriet Tubman's story, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T21:33:20.850" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T21:33:20.850" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8494" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8495" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;Eugene Onegin&quot;, a novel in verse by Alexander Pushkin. Use with the [alexander-pushkin] and [russian-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" LastActivityDate="2018-09-23T20:27:40.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8497" CreationDate="2018-09-23T22:45:30.190" Score="3" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;I apologize in advance if the details I'm about to provide are too poor or distorted by my memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father told me once of a short story which (if memory serves) is made up of the following plot: In the era of the wild west, some gang is attempting to rob a train. During the robbery, one of the heist men's horses suffered from a gunshot wound and was unable to continue. Once the gang was fleeing, the rider of the wounded horse asked the gang leader to double-ride with him. The leader looked around and said something along the lines of &quot;the mare can't hold both of us&quot;, and rode on. I believe that so far the story was told from the viewpoint of the leader. After the events I described, he wakes up to find himself being a banker many years later (it was all a dream), sitting across a man who's trying to get some sort of loan approved. The banker thought, and finally replied &quot;the mare can't hold both of us&quot;. Upon refusal, the customer killed himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, I'm pretty sure that the author was American (and rather known, probably wrote many short stories). Any help or leads would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5086" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T19:25:43.530" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:25:43.530" Title="Identification of an American short story about a horse that can't carry two train robbers" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8497" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8496" CreationDate="2018-09-24T04:04:07.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Bolivar cannot carry double.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that rings a bell, this is likely to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/o-henry/short-story/the-roads-we-take&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Roads We Take&quot; by O. Henry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bob Tidball and &quot;Shark&quot; Dodson rob a train, and Bob suggests that they ride together on Dodson's horse, Bolivar, when his horse breaks a leg. But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Set still,&quot; said Shark. &quot;You ain't goin' to hit no breeze, Bob. I&#xA;  hate to tell you, but there ain't any chance for but one of us.&#xA;  Bolivar, he's plenty tired, and he can't carry double.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The expression on Dodson's face changed in an instant to one of cold&#xA;  ferocity mingled with inexorable cupidity. The soul of the man showed&#xA;  itself for a moment like an evil face in the window of a reputable&#xA;  house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Truly Bob Tidball was never to &quot;hit the breeze&quot; again. The deadly .45&#xA;  of the false friend cracked and filled the gorge with a roar that the&#xA;  walls hurled back with indignant echoes. And Bolivar, unconscious&#xA;  accomplice, swiftly bore away the last of the holders-up of the&#xA;  &quot;Sunset Express,&quot; not put to the stress of &quot;carrying double.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am telling you that Dodson, of the firm of Dodson &amp;amp; Decker, Wall&#xA;  Street brokers, opened his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences here being that Dodson is a broker, not a banker, and he makes a decision that will bankrupt an old friend of his. It's not known what the decision's consequences are, the story simply ends with the line quoted at the start of this post.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-09-24T07:39:26.853" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T07:39:26.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8481" CreationDate="2018-09-24T19:36:42.713" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking purely of the play in itself, it's usually taken that a character does not lie in soliloquy. If he said that he is &quot;determined to prove a villain&quot; because he is &quot;deformed&quot;, then that is taken as simply truth. Or at least, that he believes it to be the truth. While there are some exceptions and caveats to the rule, any interpretation of the play that takes a character as lying directly to the audience must have an extraordinary justification. After all, the whole point of a soliloquy is that there is nobody else around to here them who can affect the action, and thus no reason to lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it's worth looking closely at the text here, since the question asks if he is &quot;disabled&quot;. He is not, in fact, said to be disabled. What he says primarily in this speech is that he is &lt;em&gt;ugly&lt;/em&gt;. He will dwell on it while looking at at a mirror, and will not be suited for seduction, but he suffers no loss of function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only a single word hints at any kind of handicap: &quot;halt&quot;, which in this context means &quot;limp&quot;. Even so, there's no indication that he cannot walk, or even that he requires a cane to walk with. Perhaps he has the handicap of not being able to run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Henry VI part 3, Richard slays Clifford, in revenge for the death of Richard's brother Rutledge. That play, while not formally part of Richard III, may be be assumed to be in the minds of Shakespeare's contemporary audience. Clifford was himself a formidable adversary. Whatever disabilities Richard had, they did not prevent him from being a serious warrior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in conflict with other things said about Richard elsewhere in the text of Richard III, which do include his hunch back and withered arm. These present serious questions for a director: unlike this text, they are not said in soliloquy, and should not be taken at face value. The withered arm, in particular, is made in the context of a false accusation, and may simply be a lie. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;See how I am bewitch'd; behold mine arm&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is, like a blasted sapling,&#xA;  wither'd up:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And this is Edward's wife, that monstrous witch,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Consorted with that harlot strumpet Shore,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That by their witchcraft&#xA;  thus have marked me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, he says that the withered arm is a recent occurrence: it's not something he was born with, and for all we know it may simply be a lie. An absurd one, if false, but hardly the most audacious of Richard's lies. Lying is his great gift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we may take it as truth that Richard sees his ugliness as a key motivator for his action in the play. But that ugliness itself is not disability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2018-09-24T19:36:42.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2018-09-25T00:51:03.667" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading this book I interpreted that Jonas died, and therefore, Gabe died too. I believe this because Jonas states his favorite memories which could recall something like the life flashing before your eyes. It also says in the book that he saw red, blue, and yellow lights, which could take it to where he was going towards the light. So this is why I interpret that they died!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5090" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T00:51:03.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-25T01:32:31.463" Score="2" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember a quote I read from a Shakespeare book, but it has been at least 10 years so my memory of it is quite low.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The little I remember is a man that is trying to hide enters a woman's room. Somehow she helps him, but for a cost, which prompts the hero to mentions something about she saves him but punishes him at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: After reading the answers and comments on this post, I recollect that the punishment described by the hero would be in the form of a new role he has to perform for the woman (for example, a servant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5091" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T18:05:29.150" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T18:05:29.150" Title="Name of Shakespeare play in which a woman both saves and punishes a man" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8491" CreationDate="2018-09-25T11:17:30.607" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://press.princeton.edu/titles/4739.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Princeton University Press website&lt;/a&gt; says that Nabokov included the remaining fragments of chapter 10 in his commentary on his translation of &lt;em&gt;Eugene Onegin&lt;/em&gt;. This commentary was part of the first edition of Nabokov's translation (four volumes long), and is volume 2 of the current &lt;em&gt;Princeton University Press&lt;/em&gt; edition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-09-25T11:24:18.780" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T11:24:18.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8500" CreationDate="2018-09-25T17:57:17.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a misremembered version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbeline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of Shakespeare's last plays. This play contains a scene where someone hides in a woman's room. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia article (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Posthumus must now live in Italy, where he meets Iachimo (or Giacomo), who challenges the prideful Posthumus to a bet that he, Iachimo, can seduce Imogen, who Posthumus has praised for her chastity, and then bring Posthumus proof of Imogen's adultery. If Iachimo wins, he will get Posthumus's token ring. If Posthumus wins, not only must Iachimo pay him but also fight Posthumus in a duel with swords. Iachimo heads to Britain where he aggressively attempts to seduce the faithful Imogen, who sends him packing. &lt;strong&gt;Iachimo then hides in a chest in Imogen's bedchamber&lt;/strong&gt; and, when the princess falls asleep, emerges to steal from her Posthumus's bracelet. He also takes note of the room and Imogen's partly naked body to be able to present false evidence to Posthumus that he has seduced his bride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the play, Imogen's father, King Cymbeline, forgives Iachimo, and Imogen can marry Posthumus. So I am not sure where the part about the woman saving the man comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-09-25T17:57:17.693" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2018-09-26T02:17:58.490" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Life.  That's what he does again.  This is a song about re-incarnation and the wheel of birth and death.  The eternal journey on a terrestrial plane of milk and honey where we &amp;quot;struggle&amp;quot; when we could flow.  Sometimes joy fuels us and pain applies the brake.  We call the game when its barely started, wishing we'd climbed higher with the game clock ticking. Don't worry (or do) there's always tomorrow or next year (or next life).  But will the game be the same?  The truth: the cards that matter are the ones on the table.  All of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5095" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T22:44:33.883" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T22:44:33.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8558" CreationDate="2018-09-26T05:56:47.407" Score="3" ViewCount="1587" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the key characters in Charles Dickens' &quot;Great Expectations&quot; is a person named Abel Magwitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Magwitch&quot; doesn't appear to be an existing name, nor does it seem to be a word with a different meaning (but perhaps my research is lacking).  Where did Charles Dickens come up with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5096" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T07:54:31.773" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T07:54:31.773" Title="Where did Charles Dickens come up with the name &quot;Magwitch&quot;?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8505" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8508" CreationDate="2018-09-26T08:11:58.977" Score="5" ViewCount="498" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the &quot;Sonnet 29&quot; by Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I all alone beweep my&#xA;  outcast state,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And&#xA;  look upon myself and curse my fate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wishing me like to one more rich&#xA;  in hope,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With what I most&#xA;  enjoy contented least.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet in these thoughts myself almost&#xA;  despising,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Haply I think on thee, and then my state,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like to the&#xA;  lark at break of day arising&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From sullen earth, sings hymns at&#xA;  heaven's gate;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That then I scorn to change my state with kings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;SAT II Success: Literature&lt;/em&gt; which I use to prepare for the SAT exam (a multiple-choice test for high school students in the US) asks the following question about the sonnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In lines 4 through 7, the speaker explains that he envies all of the&#xA;  following aspects of others EXCEPT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(A) hopefulness.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (B) having many friends.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (C) skill as an artist.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (D)&#xA;  a handsome appearance.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (E) contentment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, choices A, B, and D are definitely present (in phrases &quot;[w]ishing me like to one more rich in hope,&quot; &quot;like him with friends possessed,&quot; and &quot;[f]eatured like him,&quot; respectively).&#xA;I also thought that the choice C had been present in the poem in the phrase &quot;[d]esiring this man’s art.&quot; This would leave only choice E, contentment.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, the book says otherwise. Here is an explanation for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The correct answer is (C).&lt;/strong&gt; This question is best approached by eliminating all the right answers. Check each phrase to see if it is&#xA;  in the quatrain: hopefulness = “rich in hope,” choice (A); many&#xA;  friends = “like him with friends possessed,” choice (B); handsome&#xA;  appearance = “featured like him,” choice (D); and intellectual ability&#xA;  = “that man’s scope,” choice (E). The phrase that is not in the quatrain is choice (C), skill as an artist, which is the correct&#xA;  response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've checked the analysis of the sonnet on multiple websites, and they had different explanations for the word &quot;scope&quot; in the poem, including &quot;freedom&quot; and &quot;opportunity.&quot; However, I see how &quot;scope&quot; can mean intellectual ability: wide range of one's knowledge.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Even so, the book indicates &quot;contentment&quot; in the answer choice E and &quot;intellectual ability&quot; in the answer choice E explanation. I personally cannot see how these can be one and the same thing.&#xA;According to the Internet definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Contentment is a state of happiness and satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, this is not connected to one's intellectual abilities.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you help me see how the answer choice C can be correct? I can't be sure if it is some kind of mistake in a book which is why I want to make sure I don't miss or don't understand something. So if there any details that would make choice C sound correct (or &quot;more correct&quot;), please share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:05:11.480" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T12:31:30.050" Title="In the Sonnet 29 by Shakespeare, does the speaker pity himself over lack of skill as an artist or contentment?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;sat-ii-success-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" Score="0" Body="&quot;SAT II Success: Literature&quot; by Margaret Moran and W. Frances Holder is a study guide for the SAT Subject Test in Literature, a multiple-choice examination taken by U.S. high school students.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T09:07:39.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8505" CreationDate="2018-09-26T09:12:30.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the phrase, &quot;this man's art&quot;, &quot;art&quot; can mean &quot;skill&quot;, &quot;learning&quot;, &quot;cunning&quot;, &quot;magic&quot; or &quot;artifice&quot;. In Shakespeare's time, the word &quot;art&quot; usually refers to capabilities that have nothing to do with art in the present-day sense, so option C is what educationalists would call a &lt;a href=&quot;https://community.articulate.com/articles/writing-multiple-choice-questions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;plausible destractor&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for people who are not very familiar with Shakespeare's language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare often uses &quot;scope&quot; often in the phrase &quot;give / have scope&quot;, meaning &quot;give, have free play, liberty or opportunity&quot; (see &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions, 1911). In addition, &quot;scope&quot; can also mean &quot;object, aim&quot; or &quot;licence&quot;, but I don't think these are the primary meanings in Sonnet 29. I have never seen &quot;scope&quot; in the sense of contentment anywhere in Shakespeare (though, of course, my memory is imperfect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contentment is mentioned in line 8 (&quot;With what I most enjoy &lt;strong&gt;contented&lt;/strong&gt; least&quot;), but not in the context of a comparison with another person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &quot;skill as an artist&quot; is much more specific than &quot;this man's art&quot;, choice C is strictly speaking a correct choice. However, since &quot;contentment&quot; is not mentioned as something the poet envies in other men, choice E is logically also a correct option. (One should identify the aspects that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; being envied.) I think that question author(s) mixed something up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T12:31:30.050" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T12:31:30.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8509" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8510" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British science fiction writer Arthur Charles Clarke (1917 – 2008) and his life as a writer. A. C. Clarke is best known as co-writer of the screenplay for the film '2001: A Space Odyssey'. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:39:08.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8511" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:45:22.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:45:22.060" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:45:22.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8512" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:45:22.060" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet Brian Patten (born 1946) and his life as a writer. Together with Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, he is one of the original &quot;Liverpool Poets&quot;, who co-published the poetry anthology 'The Mersey Sound' in 1967. Questions about his poems should be tagged under [poetry]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:18:26.463" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:18:26.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8513" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8514" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novel 'The Invisible Man' (1897) by H. G. Wells. Use this tag with the [h-g-wells] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:47:16.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Far from the Madding Crowd' (1874), Thomas Hardy's fourth novel. Use this tag with the [thomas-hardy] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" LastActivityDate="2018-09-26T13:50:10.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-27T04:48:05.523" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is about a military agent with an incident in his military record (Something about a hostage situation if I remember correctly) that indicates he's soft and is not fine with mindlessly spending other lives in the name of collateral damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This soldier is sent behind enemy lines to retrieve or kill a captured female spy. The soldier is told that this spy has documents of crucial plans regarding a planned invasion (at arbitrary city &amp;quot;A&amp;quot;) by the spy's and the soldier's country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the country but the story had ample mentions of the tommy gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The soldier goes with a squad and after a time see a column of smoke from a cave where the spy was burning the important documents she had. The spy gets captured, and though the soldier has a chance to kill the spy using sniper from a hill, he doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later he goes to enemy barracks to rescue the spy, and he and his squad gets captured. His squad mates are made to walk on minefield as means of execution. Somehow he survives and rescues the agent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The spy then tells him that the invasion plan documents for city A which the spy has are fake, and are a distraction for the real invasion which is supposed to happen in city B (another arbitrary city)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enemy tortures the soldier in front of the spy. The spy then pretends to break down and tells the enemy that their country is planning a invasion of city A. Later somehow the soldier (squad mates are dead) and the spy escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enemy believes the rumours and fortifies city A, and city B is attacked. In the end, back in his country, the soldier goes to a restaurant in an oversized uniform to meet the spy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5097" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T02:52:07.460" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T02:52:07.460" Title="Story about a military agent sent in to kill or retrieve a female spy from behind enemy lines" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2515" CreationDate="2018-09-27T07:00:14.213" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cloud Atlas&lt;/em&gt; by Mitchell would answer your question, but it is not from the 90s, but from 2004. I think you might be mistaken as to the fact of being an older book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5103" LastActivityDate="2018-09-27T07:00:14.213" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8522" CreationDate="2018-09-27T09:14:07.063" Score="8" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wordsworth edition &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-major-works-9780199536863&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Major Works&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Stephen Gill and published by Oxford University Press in 1984 (and revised later) was the first &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;selection of Wordsworth's work (...) in which the poems are ordered according to the date of their composition, and presented in texts which give as nearly as possible their earliest completed state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edition includes a number of poems that were not printed during Wordsworth's lifetime, &lt;em&gt;The Prelude&lt;/em&gt; being the most notable one. A number of Wordsworth's poems were revised after their first publication. Poems that were not published during Wordsworth's life also underwent revision (e.g. &lt;em&gt;The Prelude&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the longer poems in this edition is &quot;Home at Grasmere&quot;, which was written in 1800 but not published by Wordsworth. On page 178, the edition says (italics by Stephen Gill):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) If we were forced to change, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Our home again was sweet; but still, for Youth,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Strong as it seems and bold, is inly weak &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And diffident, the destiny of life &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Remained unfixed, and therefore we were still &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;[Lines 185-191 are missing]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  We will be free, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does Stephen Gill know that &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; seven lines are missing instead of an uncertain number?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T08:53:17.653" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T08:53:17.653" Title="How does the editor know that seven lines are missing from Wordsworth's Home at Grasmere?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8521" CreationDate="2018-09-27T14:39:17.223" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Line numbers in the margin of manuscript A indicate that the missing page 9r in manuscript B had 24 lines, of which 17 can be restored from manuscript A, meaning that 7 are missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Manuscript history&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen Gill writes (p. 743):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Home at Grasmere&lt;/em&gt; Earliest composition 1800. Not published in W[ordsworth]’s lifetime, other than ll. 959–1048, which appeared in the Preface to &lt;em&gt;The Excursion&lt;/em&gt; (1814). Revised version of whole poem published 1888 as &lt;em&gt;The Recluse&lt;/em&gt;. It is very difficult to date the poem securely. See Beth Darlington (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Home at Grasmere, Part first, Book First of the Recluse&lt;/em&gt; (1977), and Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘On Man, On Nature, and On Human Life’, &lt;em&gt;Review of English Studies&lt;/em&gt; NS 31 (1980), 2–28. On MS and other evidence the composition of &lt;em&gt;Home at Grasmere&lt;/em&gt; has been assigned to 1800–6. &lt;strong&gt;The text printed here is the earliest complete one, MS B.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The manuscript history of the poem is complex. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=HaGOverview1SummaryofMSS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary at wordsworth.org.uk&lt;/a&gt; indicates that the manuscripts containing the first part of the poem (the section with the missing lines) were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An initial draft or drafts (Spring 1800), now lost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=HaGMSA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manuscript A&lt;/a&gt; (1806). One leaf divided into six columns, first line “We will be free, and as we mean to live”. This has lines 192–457 of the poem, so there must have been another leaf with lines 1–191, but this is now lost.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=HaGMSB&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manuscript B&lt;/a&gt; (1806). The earliest complete version of the poem. First line “Once on the brow of yonder Hill I stopped”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=HaGMSD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manuscript D&lt;/a&gt; (1812–4 and 1831–2). Revised complete version of the poem. First line “Once to the verge of yon steep barrier came”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Manuscript B&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of manuscript B &lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/GtoG/home.asp?page=MSB1bChangesofHand&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;is itself complex&lt;/a&gt;. In 1806, Mary Wordsworth made a fair copy of the opening lines of the poem on the &lt;em&gt;recto&lt;/em&gt; (right-hand) pages of the first part of manuscript B. In 1812–4 and 1831–2 revisions were entered on some of the &lt;em&gt;verso&lt;/em&gt; (left-hand) pages; these revisions were then copied to manuscript D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with trying to prepare a complete version of the poem based on manuscript B is that leaf 9 is missing: it has been torn out. Here are photos of pages 8r, 8v and 10r from manuscript B (click through for larger versions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/to71h.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/to71h.jpg&quot; height=&quot;280&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JSh3G.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JSh3G.jpg&quot; height=&quot;280&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zYgUu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zYgUu.jpg&quot; height=&quot;280&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 8r has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tis (but I cannot name it) tis the sense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of majesty and beauty &amp;amp; repose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A blended holiness of earth &amp;amp; sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Something that makes this individual Spot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This small abiding-place of many men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A termination and a last retreat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Centre, come from wheresoeer you will&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Whole without dependence or defect&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made for itself and happy in itself&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Perfect Contentment, Unity entire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Long is it since we met, to part no more,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since I and Emma heard each other’s call&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And were Companions once again, like Birds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which by the intruding Fowler had been scar’d&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two of a scatter’d brood that could not bear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To live in loneliness: ’tis long since we&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remembring much &amp;amp; hoping more found means&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To walk abreast tho’ in a narrow path&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With undivided steps. Our home was sweet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could it be less if we were forc’d to change&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our home again was sweet; but still, for Youth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Strong as it seems &amp;amp; bold is inly weak&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And diffident the destiny of life&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remained unfix’d &amp;amp; therefore we were still&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 8v has later revisions of lines whose 1806 versions appear on pages 11r and 12r.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 9 is missing. In the top right of 8v (and in the top left of 10r) you can see the stub where the page was torn out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 10r has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of outward things but for the prize within&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Highest ambition: in the daily walks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of business ’twill be harmony &amp;amp; grace&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the perpetual pleasure of the sense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And for the Soul I do not say too much&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though much be said an image for the soul&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A habit of Eternity &amp;amp; God.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Nor have we been deceived thus far the effect&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Falls not below the loftiest of our hopes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bleak season was it turbulent and bleak&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When hitherward we journey’d &amp;amp; on foot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through bursts of sunshine &amp;amp; through flying snows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pac’d the long Vales how long they were &amp;amp; yet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How fast that length of way was left behind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wensley’s long Vale &amp;amp; Sedbergh’s naked heights&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The frosty wind as if to make amends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For its keen breath, was aiding to our course&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And drove us onward like two Ships at sea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stern was the face of nature we rejoiced&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In that stern countenance for our souls had there&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A feeling of their strength. The naked trees&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The icy brooks as on we passed appear’d&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To question us whence come ye to what end&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They seemed to say what would ye said the shower&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Manuscript A&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The missing lines on page 9r can be partially restored by using manuscript A, an incomplete fair copy of the poem also made in 1806. Here’s the first column of manuscript A (click for a larger version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LGIJe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LGIJe.jpg&quot; height=&quot;280&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This starts with the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We will be free and as we mean to live&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In culture of divinity and truth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will chuse the noblest Temple that we know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not in mistrust, or ignorance of the mind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And of the power she has within herself&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To enoble all things made we this resolve&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Far less from any momentary fit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of inconsiderate fancy light and vain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But that we deem’d it wise to take the help&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which lay within our reach; &amp;amp; here, we knew,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Help could be found of no mean sort; the spirit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of singleness &amp;amp; unity and peace&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In this majestic self-sufficing world&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This all in all of nature it will suit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We said no other       on earth so well&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Simplicity of purpose love intense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ambition not aspiring to the prize&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of outoward things but for the prize within&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereupon it joins the text on page 10r of manuscript B. So the last 17 lines on the missing page 9r can be restored from manuscript A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There must have been more than 17 lines altogther: if you count the lines on nearby pages, then 7r and 11r have 26 lines, and 8r and 10r have 24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How many lines are missing?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manuscript A has some line numbers in the right margin. After the passage quoted above manuscript A continues and the line number 215 appears in the right margin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uYnQE.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Manuscript A lines 209–215&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of outoward things but for the prize within&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Highest ambition: in the daily walks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of business t’will be harmony and grace&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the perpetual pleasure of the sense&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And for the Soul I do not say too much&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though much be said an image for the soul&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A habit of eternity and god.             215&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counting backwards in manuscript A, it must be the case that “We will be free and as we mean to live” is line 192. Counting forwards from the beginning of manuscript B, “Remained unfix’d &amp;amp; therefore we were still” is line 184. So under the assumption that pages 1r to 9r had the same text as the missing part of manuscript A, the lines on page 9r must have been lines 185–208.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T15:25:40.997" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T15:25:40.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8526" CreationDate="2018-09-28T01:59:33.270" Score="5" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading as a child a fictional short story about the difficulties that an English girl had fitting in after moving to America. The children at her school make fun of her using words like &quot;sums&quot;.  When she tells her teacher about her family's tradition of riding a train to the countryside on her birthday and gathering wild primroses, she is informed that primroses do not grow in America.  She had been hoping that her guardian (adoptive aunt?) would be able to take her to celebrate her birthday like her mother used to.  I think the the character's name was Merry (not Mary) because I remember the other children circling around her and teasing &quot;Merry Sums!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would expect that this short story would have been written between 1930 and 1980.  I read it in about 1988, and any inaccuracies in the description above are due to my fallible memory.  Can anyone identify this story and its author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T11:14:23.340" Title="What is this children's short story about an expat English girl who wants to pick primroses on her birthday?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8544" CreationDate="2018-09-28T06:52:56.073" Score="10" ViewCount="2466" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The situation of your mother's family, though objectionable, was nothing in comparison of that total want of propriety so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by herself, by your three younger sisters, and occasionally even by your father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of the mother and the three younger sister acting gauche are not hard to find, but I can't recall an example of Mr Bennet acting improperly in front of Mr Darcy. What was he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the 1995 BBC adaptation, there is a flashback at this time to Mr Bennet interrupting Mary playing. The scene was a bit awkward but that was hardly his fault.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5106" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T07:10:15.247" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T16:56:23.490" Title="What does Mr Darcy refer to when objecting to Mr Bennet's &quot;want of propriety&quot;?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-28T08:10:01.257" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt; contains two stories told in parallel: firstly, the story of Ella and Aziz in the 21st century; secondly, the story of Rumi and Shams in the 13th century as told by Aziz in his novel &lt;em&gt;Sweet Blasphemy&lt;/em&gt; which Ella is reading and reviewing. I would say that the main point of Şafak's book, what sets it apart from many other modern romance novels, is the story of Rumi and Shams: it teaches the average modern reader a lot about life in the 13th-century Middle East, and it also adds context to the Ella-Aziz relationship by comparison. Why, then, didn't Şafak simply write the book Aziz did - a story about Rumi and Shams, without giving it any 21st-century context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is the frame story included in &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, rather than just making it a gripping and entertaining historical tale about Rumi and Shams?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T08:10:01.257" Title="Why include the frame story in The Forty Rules of Love?" Tags="&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8523" CreationDate="2018-09-28T08:58:02.107" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googling for the exact phrase &quot;merry sums&quot; leads to the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=2QCU-Ce2hX4C&amp;amp;pg=PA69&amp;amp;lpg=PA69&amp;amp;dq=%22merry%20sums%22&amp;amp;q=%22merry%20sums%22#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=%22merry%20sums%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Primrose Day&lt;/em&gt; by Carolyn Haywood&lt;/a&gt;. The search results page in the book show the girl's teacher explaining to her that they say &quot;examples&quot; instead of &quot;sums&quot; and is quickly followed by a scene in which other kids tease her &quot;Oh, Merry Sums! How are your sums today?&quot; The title itself is also a strong hint that the other major identification point is covered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copyright page says it was first published in 1942.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-09-28T11:14:23.340" LastActivityDate="2018-09-28T11:14:23.340" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="588" CreationDate="2018-09-29T12:01:02.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sartor Resartus&lt;/em&gt; was written in 1836. There are examples of earlier &lt;em&gt;imaginaries&lt;/em&gt; dating back to John Donne and Rabelais. Donne's &lt;em&gt;The Courtier's Library&lt;/em&gt; (1650), is a catalogue of 34 apocryphal works modeled after Rabelais' &lt;em&gt;Library of St Victor, Pantagruel, II, vii&lt;/em&gt; (~1532).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, these two references move the origin of the OPs query back three centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;http://donneprose.blogspot.com/p/courtiers-library.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Courtier's Library&lt;/a&gt; on the blog &lt;em&gt;John Donne Society Digital Prose Project&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:23:06.077" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:23:06.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8406" CreationDate="2018-09-30T02:26:36.400" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Lewis meant readers to assume the Scrubb family were adherents of scientism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's only a small amount of evidence for this in &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; itself, but it makes sense in light of his expressed views on scientism in his other work. This interpretation also lends itself to a straightforward reading of &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; as the journey of an atheist to belief, a journey that Lewis himself made during his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;WTF is Scientism?&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lewissociety.org/scientism/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;C. S. Lewis: Science and Scientism&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Henry F. Schaefer III quotes Webster's dictionary's definition of scientism as &amp;quot;a thesis that the methods of the natural sciences should be used in all areas of investigation including philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences: a belief that only such methods can fruitfully be used in the pursuit of knowledge&amp;quot;. Schaefer explains further in the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well to note that at least two other terms carry meanings related to the one Lewis intended by the word scientism. The first is “logical positivism,” a system of thought that became popular in the 1920s. The second is “reductionism,” a more recently accepted word that is becoming rather common, particularly among philosophers of science. Taken to the limit, reductionism claims that human behavior is simply a matter of neurons firing in the brain, and the latter can be further reduced to atomic physics. In such a purely reductionist worldview, human responsibility does not exist. Although popular in three different eras, the three terms scientism, logical positivism, and reductionism are sufficiently closely related that distinctions may be subtle. They represent a belief system toward which C. S. Lewis was not receptive. As a more specific example of scientism, consider my relationship with my wife, to whom I have been happily married for more than 30 years. Scientism tells us that if one could make enough accurate scientific measurements on myself and on my wife, the resulting analysis would fully explain my strong attraction to her in preference to all others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later cites Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett as intellectuals who represent these modern-day versions of scientism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis was a follower of scientism himself in his younger days, before he had a religious awakening and converted to Christianity. Schaefer includes a quote from &lt;em&gt;Surprised By Joy&lt;/em&gt; in Lewis's own words: &amp;quot;You will understand that my (atheism) was inevitably based on what I believed to be the findings of the sciences; and those findings, not being a scientist, I had to take on trust—in fact, on authority.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gather scientism was fairly popular in English academic circles from the late 19th Century up until about the 1950's, but all my direct knowledge of it comes from reading critiques of its ideas by its opponents, of which it seems to have had many. The picture these works paint of it is not flattering. Followers of scientism in these works are invariably atheists; are usually obsessed with eugenics, genetic fitness, and IQ tests; wish to impose government-sponsored programs to sterilize or kill the &amp;quot;unfit&amp;quot; to preserve the quality of the gene pool; and believe it is their right or duty to subjugate or exterminate &amp;quot;inferior&amp;quot; races. They often support the worst excesses of British imperialism, and after the Second World War, fictional scientism adherents started to take on traits of the Nazis or the Stalinist Soviets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G.K. Chesterton criticizes ideas that sound rather like scientism in &lt;em&gt;What's Wrong with the World&lt;/em&gt;. You can see the profile of scientism in the World State of &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;; the Ingsoc party of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;; Weston, Devine, and the N.I.C.E. from Lewis's own Space Trilogy; and even a tiny bit in Sauron and Saruman of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. Objections to scientism in these works are often made on religious grounds. Orwell objects from many of the same ethical beliefs as the others, but his views on religion were complicated. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spectator.co.uk/2011/06/orwell-vs-god/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/resources/gordon-bowker-george-orwell-and-the-church-of-england/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Evidence from the text of &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Lewis couldn't write in a children's book that the Scrubbs were atheists who believe in eugenics, imperialism, Marxism, and a Nietzchean rejection of traditional morality. So he settles for a few practices that seem in line with the more harmless things scientism believers might do in their daily lives, but will mark them as odd to most children of the time: they're vegetarians, non-smokers, and non-drinkers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even today, vegetarianism, along with atheism and strong faith in science, is associated with left wing politics. &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1952; according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/the-study-that-helped-spur-the-us-stop-smoking-movement.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the American Cancer Society&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;[t]here were a few small-scale studies conducted from the late 1920s to late 1940s that suggested a possible link between smoking and lung cancer&amp;quot;, but strong evidence didn't start to emerge until the 1950's, and the harmfulness of smoking didn't start to become common knowledge until the 1964 Surgeon General's Report on Smoking and Health. So being a non-smoker would have probably seemed very outré to readers in 1952; you'd have to be paying very close attention to the bleeding edge of research to know there was any evidence at all that smoking was harmful. And in my experience, being a non-drinker can mark you as odd in certain social circles even today. The following information about their underclothes, their bedclothes, and their windows being open is probably just meant to further mark the Scrubbs as odd; if I were writing today and trying to achieve the same effect, I might mention that they do all their cooking and make all their own soap with virgin coconut oil, or that they insist every room have a crystal at its northernmost point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage is followed in the book by a short description of Eustace himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eustace Clarence liked animals, especially beetles, if they were dead and pinned on a card. He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter One: &amp;quot;The Picture in The Bedroom&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's none too concerned about hurting or killing other living creatures; he likes dead beetles, after all, and he likes them pinned to cards, like an entomologist cataloguing specimens. He doesn't read anything that involves abstraction, whimsy, metaphor, or imagination of any kind; he only likes books of information. He enjoys looking at grain elevators (for some reason) and fat foreign children doing exercises (probably because he's a bully and a weakling, and enjoys watching other people suffer---a bit further on we're told that &amp;quot;deep down inside him he liked bossing and bullying&amp;quot; but that &amp;quot;he was a puny little person who couldn’t have stood up even to Lucy, let alone Edmund, in a fight&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Predictably, Eustace neither believes in nor approves of Narnia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ibid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages paint a picture of someone who fancies himself some sort of scientist, carrying around dead beetles on cards as if they were scientific specimens and thumbing through books full of pictures of grain elevators. Eustace doesn't know at this point that Narnia is real, so he thinks it's an imaginative game the Pevensies have made up, and his reaction is cruelty and condescension; not only does he reject imagination and play and belief himself, he also mocks others for accepting them. We're never told straight on that Eustace is an atheist, but this sounds quite a bit like how Christians would perceive someone like Richard Dawkins, who spends a great deal of his time publicly proselytizing atheism and &amp;quot;debunking&amp;quot; religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are little signs in other parts of the book as well that Eustace's family are adherents of scientism. In Chapter 2 we're told Eustace puts down the titular ship the Dawn Treader and keeps on &amp;quot;boasting about liners and motorboats and aeroplanes and submarines&amp;quot;; an obsession with Western society's technological superiority is definitely a trait of the scientism-believing villains in other books, including Weston and Devine in &lt;em&gt;Out of the Silent Planet&lt;/em&gt;, who believe the Malacandrian societies are inferior partially because of their limited use of technology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the same chapter, Eustace writes in his diary that he told Caspian he's a Republican. As an American, I'm assuming he means &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republicanism_in_the_United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a British Republican&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. someone who supports dissolving the monarchy and forming a republic like the one that existed under Oliver Cromwell, which to me sounds rather like something a Marxist would support, given Marxism's antipathy towards hereditary rulers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Five, Eustace writes about an argument he had with Caspian over whether it was feasible to row back to land on short water rations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caspian says the men couldn’t row on half a pint of water a day. I’m pretty sure this is wrong. I tried to explain that perspiration really cools people down, so the men would need less water if they were working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ibid., Chapter Five: &amp;quot;The Storm and What Came of It&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; pretty sure Eustace is wrong, and that you need to have adequate water during strenuous exercise (such as rowing a large ship); &lt;a href=&quot;http://ultrasportsscience.us/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/The-Basics-of-Proper-Hydration.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;these guidelines for prolonged exercise&lt;/a&gt; suggest drinking when you're thirsty and enough to quench your thirst, which the men on the ship wouldn't be able to do. Schaefer quotes Lewis himself from an essay collected in &lt;em&gt;The Discarded Image&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;In our age [...] the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual’s scientific education&amp;quot;. This is exactly what Eustace is doing. He's a child, with no scientific education that we've seen so far, asserting something he thinks is a fact of science when people's lives are at stake, and he's completely self-assured about doing so, never once considering that he might have remembered wrongly or that there might be other complicating factors. His doing this also fits with Faye-Ann Crowell's assertion, which Schaefer also quotes, that &amp;quot;it was not science which Lewis was attacking [in the Space Trilogy] but certain ideas held by people usually not scientists.&amp;quot; Lewis has already shown us some of the odious scientifically flavored ideas that Eustace holds, but now he's also showing us that Eustace is not a scientist or even particularly conversant with science despite the airs he puts on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;A Way of Interpreting the Book&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Narnia books treat religion through metaphor and symbolism, so as I said, they never come out and tell us that Eustace is an atheist. But there are enough hints that I think it's a reasonable reading. And if we adopt this reading, then Eustace's character arc in the story is the journey of an atheist to faith, like the one Lewis himself had as a young man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eustace starts the story as a non-believer who mocks and bullies others for their belief in Narnia and Aslan. He holds dogmatically to his version of &amp;quot;the real world&amp;quot; even when the evidence of his senses plainly tells him that he's not in that world anymore, that he's in a place where there's no British Consulate he can complain to and no one knows what a Republican is. He treats the people around him with contempt, insulting their intelligence, calling them names, and failing to understand good intentions. He notes in his diary that when he complains about getting too little food or too little water, Lucy is usually quick to share with him, but he doesn't understand why, because charity and kindness are apparently foreign concepts to him: in Chapter Five he writes &amp;quot;Very short rations for dinner and I got less than anyone. Caspian is very clever at helping and thinks I don’t see! Lucy for some reason tried to make up to me by offering me some of hers but that interfering prig Edmund wouldn’t let her.&amp;quot; Later in the same chapter, he writes that &amp;quot;Lucy gives me a little of her water ration. She says girls don’t get as thirsty as boys. I had often thought this but it ought to be more generally known at sea.&amp;quot; It sounds to me like Lucy tricked him with some made up scientific-sounding flimflam---again demonstrating how little knowledge of science Eustace actually has---to explain her act of kindness in a way that would make sense to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partway through the book, Eustace turns into a dragon, and is surprised when everyone treats him with kindness and sympathy. He starts to understand morality and ethics, and concepts like charity, kindness, generosity, and altruism, as well as developing a sense of camaraderie with the others that was missing before. It's Aslan who finally turns Eustace from a dragon back into a human. We know from the other books that Aslan represents Jesus Christ in Narnia, or rather is Jesus Christ as He chooses to appear in Narnia, so Aslan transforming Eustace back into a human represents the moment that Eustace chose to embrace faith, and through that act was able to end his moment of crisis. The narrator tells us near the end of Chapter Seven that &amp;quot;[i]t would be nice, and fairly true, to say that 'from that time forth Eustace was a different boy.'&amp;quot; After coming to faith, Eustace changed drastically, and became a much more pleasant person, renouncing his previous attitudes and embracing a morality and ethics along with his faith in Aslan / Jesus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book ends with Reepicheep, a zealous believer, take a leap of faith to get into Aslan's Country, the Narnian representation of Heaven. Eustace, alongside Edmund and Lucy, come to the edge of Aslan's Country and meet Aslan, who tells Edmund and Lucy that they must find the door to Aslan's Country from their own world. The children return to their own world, where we're told that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;everyone soon started saying how Eustace had improved, and how “You’d never know him for the same boy”: everyone except Aunt Alberta, who said he had become very commonplace and tiresome and it must have been the influence of those Pevensie children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ibid., Chapter Sixteen: The Very End of the World&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Eustace returns, he's given up the belief system of his parents. He's no longer an atheist; he no longer believes in scientism; he's acquired a sense of morality. Everyone calls it an improvement, except for his mother, Aunt Alberta, who had taught him her own beliefs and isn't happy that he's abandoned them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T05:41:56.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-09-30T12:35:17.223" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Elif Safak's novel &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt;, Shams has a list of rules which he calls the Forty Rules of Love and encourages everyone to live by. What kind of &quot;love&quot; are these rules trying to govern? There are many different types of love (4, 7, or 8, according to who you ask): romantic love, family love, love between friends, love of God, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do Shams's rules cover all of these equally, or are they focused on some more than others? (For example, he seems &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8458/17&quot;&gt;quite bad at romantic love&lt;/a&gt;, but there's a lot more to him than just love of God.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-09-30T12:35:17.223" Title="The Forty Rules of Love - what kind of &quot;love&quot;?" Tags="&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-01T19:12:51.197" Score="8" ViewCount="232" Body="&lt;p&gt;At least the early &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix#List_of_titles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;albums in the Asterix series&lt;/a&gt; don't directly tell if the potion gives invincibility in addition to superhuman strength and speed. My impression has been that only Obelix is immortal due to falling to a potion cauldron as a child (the potion's effect on him is permanent). I think that invincibility would take away a lot of the tension from the stories and I doubt this has been René Goscinny's and Albert Uderzo's original intention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="48" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T07:43:27.927" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T21:47:32.293" Title="Does the magic potion provide invincibility or only superhuman strength?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rene-goscinny&gt;&lt;albert-uderzo&gt;&lt;asterix&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T12:42:49.767" Score="2" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;During his times the United States and Great Britain were seen as one of the few  the greatest &quot;true&quot; democracies that have ever existed. Why did he decide to merge them into one totalitarian superstate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's safe to assume that Eurasia is an expanded version of the Soviet Union and the story would have worked just as well with Winston working under Stalin's (or BB's) regime fighting against the US/Oceania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was there anything Orwell wanted to insinuate? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5115" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T06:46:32.123" Title="Why did George Orwell make &quot;Oceania&quot; totalitarian in his novel &quot;1984&quot;?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1053" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:28:02.837" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having now read the series, I would recommend reading the books in the order that they were published because many of the events in the books published later allude to the events of books published earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T15:28:02.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:40:13.767" Score="2" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;O Daedalus, Fly Away Home&amp;quot;, Robert Hayden makes reference to flying back to Africa. In the second to last stanza, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My gran. he flew back to Africa,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just spread his arms and flew away home...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly his grandparent couldn't actually fly, so flying must be used as a metaphor. What does flying represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:50:58.450" Title="What does flying represent in &quot;O Daedalus, Fly Away Home&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;robert-hayden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:42:02.260" Score="2" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavittu_Nadakam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chavittu nadakam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a Christian-origin dance form from Kerala, India. It's quite similar to the European opera, though &lt;em&gt;chavittu nadakam&lt;/em&gt; involves a lot of dancing.&#xA;The dance is accompanied by archaic Malayalam/Tamil songs, called &lt;em&gt;nadakam&lt;/em&gt;s, written down in poem form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such &lt;em&gt;nadakam&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;Brijeena Charitham&lt;/em&gt;, literally &lt;em&gt;The Legend of Brijeena&lt;/em&gt;. According to the Wikipedia page on &lt;em&gt;chavittu nadakam&lt;/em&gt;, the title is translated to &lt;em&gt;Life of Queen Brijeena&lt;/em&gt;. This is apparently the costume used by the character of Queen Brijeena.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dHAKS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dHAKS.png&quot; alt=&quot;Queen Brijeena&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By PrinceMathewVillarvattam [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which queen is this? I cannot find any reference to a &quot;Queen Brijeena&quot; online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2169" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T15:42:02.260" Title="Who is Queen Brijeena, the subject of a famous chavittu nadakam?" Tags="&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;opera&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:48:36.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-10-02T15:48:36.417" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T15:48:36.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-02T15:48:36.417" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet and essayist Robert Hayden (1913 – 1980) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T15:10:51.247" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:10:51.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8524" CreationDate="2018-10-02T19:15:14.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's have a look at what Mr Bennet actually says to Mary in the passage alluded to in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Elizabeth] looked at her father to entreat his interference, lest Mary&#xA;  should be singing all night. He took the hint, and when Mary had&#xA;  finished her second song, said aloud,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;``That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long&#xA;  enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Chapter 18)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this leaves some room for interpretation of exactly how harsh he is, we do already know that he has quite a satirical tongue. Furthermore, the part &quot;extremely well&quot; marks that he thought that she has gone to some excess, and to &quot;exhibit&quot; is certainly not a good thing! Consider, for example, this passage a bit later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To Elizabeth it appeared, that had her family made an agreement&#xA;  to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening,&#xA;  it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with&#xA;  more spirit, or finer success; and happy did she think it for&#xA;  Bingley and her sister that some of &lt;strong&gt;the exhibition&lt;/strong&gt; had escaped&#xA;  his notice, and that his feelings were not of a sort to be much&#xA;  distressed by the folly which he must have witnessed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Bennet's speech is not very civil, and not only insulting to Mary, but also to the &quot;other young ladies&quot;. Not a thing that a well bred man should say. Any further doubt should be dispelled by Elizabeths reaction to what he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary, though pretending not to hear, was somewhat disconcerted; and&#xA;  Elizabeth sorry for her, and sorry for her father's speech, was afraid&#xA;  her anxiety had done no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there is also the following part, a paragraph later, when Mr. Collins has had his turn at making a fool of himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many smiled; but no one looked more amused than Mr. Bennet himself [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking amused when someone is embarrassing himself is not a sign of good breeding, especially if the person in question is a relation. This point is also reinforced by what Elizabeth herself thinks after reading the letter referred to in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her father, contented with laughing at them, would never exert himself to restrain the wild giddiness of his youngest daughters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Chapter 37)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laughing at others is bad enough, but not to attempt to regulate the behaviour of your offspring is a serious dereliction of duty. Mr Bennet might be the most likeable father figure in Austen's finished works (hardly a tough competition), but he is like all others (Mr Morland in &lt;em&gt;Northanger Abbey&lt;/em&gt;, whom we do not see much of, possibly excepted) still seriously lacking, having failed to prepare his daughters properly for adult life. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T19:15:14.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5578" CreationDate="2018-10-02T20:49:27.570" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Children were more powerful than us, but not superior. They were pretty amoral and imposed their will on humans, even using humans as hosts for reproduction. As with Wyndham's other books, I think he was saying something about people. People can be pretty amoral and impose their will on others just because they have the power to do so. Sometimes a principled person makes the ultimate sacrifice in order to stop them. I think the moral of the story is to be on guard against becoming amoral and taking advantage of others who have less power than we do, as well as to fight oppression. There's much more to the book than that, but the question was about the morality of the ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5118" LastActivityDate="2018-10-02T20:49:27.570" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2710" CreationDate="2018-10-03T07:20:42.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bernard also means “Hardy” which is ironic because s he is weak and feeble. Since his first name is ironic then it’s rational to believe that his last name is as well. Therefore, Marx could be a use of irony by Huxley that underlines Bernard’s core conservative values opposite to Karl Marx’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5120" LastActivityDate="2018-10-03T07:20:42.310" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8547" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8551" CreationDate="2018-10-03T11:14:46.863" Score="4" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Hayden's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43075/the-ballad-of-nat-turner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Ballad of Nat Turner&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the word &quot;harshener&quot; appears twice in reference to God/Jehovah:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In scary night I wandered, praying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         Lord God my harshener,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  speak to me now or let me die;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         speak, Lord, to this mourner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;they were like mine and in joy and terror&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         wept, praising praising Jehovah.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh praised my honer, harshener&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         till a sleep came over me,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it signify to call God a &quot;harshener&quot;? Why is this word used?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T10:49:08.033" Title="Why is God a &quot;harshener&quot;? What does this mean?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-hayden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8550" CreationDate="2018-10-04T00:46:48.723" Score="4" ViewCount="2557" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book starts with Winston entering his apartment in noon, leaving work at noon by choice since we are given the information that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By leaving the Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food in the kitchen except the bread that must be saved for morning. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston takes a sip of VICTORY GIN after entering his apartment and simply watches outside turning his back to the telescreen, which resides in an unusual position due to an alcove and the reader is led to..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was about to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But it had also been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a beautiful book, smooth creamy paper.. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where what he is about to do is to start a diary.. So it is almost immediately after he enters his apartment, he gets inspired by his surroundings, not after a while. And we also know that it is a 20 minute walk from Ministry of Truth to his apartment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after writing for a while in his diary he stops and we learn that..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we already warned that Winston has a terrible memory and conscious? Or is the narrator altering the past so quickly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who decides to start a diary and sacrifices his lunch in such a world where access to food is limited, forgets what he came home for, decides to start a diary due to a reason completely different than his original intent as he was leaving his work ~20 minutes ago?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe there is a very simple explanation I am missing or I am not understanding the passage, or is there a different message here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some further hints I was able to find on Winstons memory from Chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. But it was no use, he could not remember: Nothing remained of his childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;.. the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk shop un a slummy quarter of the town (just what quarter he did not now remember)..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The thing he was about to do was to open a diary. It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems like Winston has problems remembering things that are: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very old (from his childhood) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;somewhat old (buying a diary from a shop) &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;very recent(coming home with an intention that he forgot)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;active information (monologue he constantly has in his mind).. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5123" LastEditorUserId="5123" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T15:30:43.933" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T15:30:43.933" Title="How bad is Winston Smith 's memory in the novel `1984`?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8548" CreationDate="2018-10-04T10:12:13.363" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a description of Winston's subconscious motivation, not forgetfulness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, I think, starts here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was partly the unusual geography of the room that had suggested to him the thing that he was about to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tense of this statement is timeless: there is no way of knowing when this &quot;suggestion&quot; occurred to Winston. It could have been a moment before, or the moment he moved into his apartment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the implication is that this &quot;suggestion&quot; is not a new one. Since he was at work that morning he must have bought the book - at the very earliest - the previous day. He also went to some pains to obtain an ink pen to write in it, which suggest it's been in his possession for a while. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston also describes how the lift rarely works in his block of flats, so it's likely he's been living there for some time. Given that he is clearly of a rebellious frame of mind, the observation that the alcove in his apartment affords him a rare degree of privacy is likely to have occurred to him quite quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: the desire to write a diary is not new. It's been growing in his mind for some time, inspired by the alcove and his possession of the book. So when the book tells us that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was, he now realized, because of this other incident that he had suddenly decided to come home and begin the diary today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not suggesting he has suddenly remembered that we was planning to start a diary. Rather, it is describing that Winston has not really understood, himself, what his motivation was for suddenly deciding to start his diary that particular day rather than any other. After writing for a while, he has suddenly realised why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incident in question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But there was a fraction of a second when their eyes met, and for as long as it took to happen Winston knew--yes, he KNEW!--that O'Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable&#xA;  message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the&#xA;  thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. 'I am&#xA;  with you,' O'Brien seemed to be saying to him. 'I know precisely what you&#xA;  are feeling. I know all about your contempt, your hatred, your disgust.&#xA;  But don't worry, I am on your side!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston is a citizen an extremely powerful, dangerous and controlling totalitarian state. It monitors its citizens almost the entire time and hands out extreme punishments at a whim, ensuring there is near-total compliance with its desires. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to have a sudden flash suggesting another citizen is as miserable and insecure as Winston feels is a huge revelation. It gives Winston a once in a lifetime surge of hope and inspiration. Easily enough to motivate him to skip a meal and want to go home to begin is little act of rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T10:12:13.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8547" CreationDate="2018-10-04T10:49:08.033" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nat Turner, the subject of the poem, was an American slave who led a violent rebellion that lead to the deaths of sixty white people. Hayden wrote other poems about the brutal injustices of slavery and how some blacks reacted with violence - &lt;em&gt;Middle Passage&lt;/em&gt;, for example, is about the slave uprising on the ship &lt;em&gt;Amistad&lt;/em&gt;, portrayed in the film of the same name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that poem, the violence of the slaves and their leader, Cinquez, is not condemned but praised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The deep immortal human wish,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the timeless will: I Cinquez&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  its deathless primaveral image,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  life that transfigures many lives     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although later in his life Hayden would come to believe that violence was futile, in his earlier poems he defends it as necessary in defence of freedom. Although not related to slavery, see also &lt;em&gt;A Ballad of Remembrance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has this to do with Nat Turner? Because the &quot;harshening&quot; he is asking of God is a steeling of his nerve to commit the acts of violence the poet sees as a necessary reaction to his condition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In poem, Turner is wandering in the woods and experiences a vision heaven which he understands as a representation of a battle between slaves and masters. He is, therefore, to be understood as a civilized man, a Christian who has Christian values: including the instruction to &quot;love thy neighor&quot; and &quot;thou shalt not kill&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet he knows these values were also used to justify slavery, and to encourage its victims to quietly accept their condition. Faced with the hyprocritical, un-Christian institution of slavery, he understands his condition is one of simple duality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In scary night I wandered, praying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         Lord God my harshener,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  speak to me now or let me die;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;         speak, Lord, to this mourner.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He must either steel himself to commit acts of brutality or &quot;die&quot; from his lack of freedom. He is a &quot;mourner&quot; not only because he mourns his enslaved condition, but because only through violence, through the breaking of Christian values, can he relieve it. He is asking God for the ability - and perhaps the forgiveness - to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when he addresses Jehovah as &quot;my honer, harshener&quot;, he is asking to be honed into an instrument of just retribution. He is understanding, asking his God that the non-violent aspects of his faith, stressed by white preachers can instead be interprested as one of radical liberation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Robert Hayden, Collected Poems, Edited by Frederick Glaysher 1985&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T10:49:08.033" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4182" CreationDate="2018-10-04T12:15:26.493" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Lowly is a friend who SOMETIMES sleeps at Huckle's house, according to official Richard Scarry Canon.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iSSXk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iSSXk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their friend Lowly often comes to spend the night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2481" LastEditorUserId="2481" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T19:56:01.617" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T19:56:01.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-04T13:16:43.523" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The North Water by Ian McGuire is a modern novel in the tradition of historical realism, set in the high arctic. It is a violent, masculine novel with a clear debt to the work of Cormac McCarthy which deals in themes of physical and mental isolation and the unforgiving cruelty of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(minor spoilers follow)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the plot revolves around interactions between the crew of a whaling ship. Polar bears, however, appear at various pivotal moments of the story. The crew kill one and capture its cub, hoping to sell it to a zoo. Paragraphs are expended describing the bear's captivity aboard the ship, how the novel's protagonist, Sumner, takes pity on it and how it eventually escapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, another bear becomes crucial to the survival of the crew. And the final chapter ends on an encounter with a bear captive in a zoo - it is implied, although not confirmed, that this may be the bear that was captured earlier in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the bears appear at such important points, including the otherwise uneventful final chapter, it seems clear they are there to serve some symbolic purpose. What is it, especially as regards the captured cub aboard the ship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T14:08:05.133" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T14:08:05.133" Title="What role or symbolic purpose do polar bears serve in The North Water?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;ian-mcguire&gt;&lt;the-north-water&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8556" CreationDate="2018-10-03T17:33:35.123" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago I had a book in my fingers that was somewhat similar to the &lt;em&gt;Art of War&lt;/em&gt; by Sun Tsu, but it was from Japan, and focussed in part on specific combat situations and what to do then. So maybe it is better to be described as focussing on tactics than strategy. I think there were some odd bits about ranged combat in it just as much as there was hand to hand, mixed in between the combat advice. Yet I am pretty sure there were some things about combat terrain in it, which is why I remember it to be somewhat akin to Sun Tsu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I read it after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Five_Rings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Go-Rin-No-Sho&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Musashi and before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagakure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hagakure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, so it is neither. It was most certainly a translation into German, possibly illustrated. The original it was written most likely before the Meji-restauration due to the content. I am not sure, but it &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have had advice for firearms in as well, giving it a timeframe from ca. 1543 to 1868.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" OwnerDisplayName="Trish" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T16:55:11.380" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T21:19:05.537" Title="pre-Meji Japanese book/essay about Strategy" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8555" CreationDate="2018-10-04T16:54:49.433" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Heiho Kadensho&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible candidate is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hereditary_Book_on_the_Art_of_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A Hereditary Book on the Art of War&lt;/strong&gt; / Heihō kadensho&lt;/a&gt; (兵法家伝書) by the samurai &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagy%C5%AB_Munenori&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yagyū Munenori&lt;/a&gt;. It was written in 1632, so it fits the time frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a German translation by Guido Keller entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.piper.de/buecher/der-weg-des-samurai-isbn-978-3-492-23631-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Weg des Samurai. Anleitung zum strategischen Handeln&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Piper, 2004). This translation is not based on a Japanese edition but on the American translation &lt;em&gt;The Sword and the Mind&lt;/em&gt; (Overlook Press, 1986). I couldn't find any illustrations in the limited preview on Amazon but I noticed that it has many endnotes in the Cleary edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two main English translations are the William Scott Wilson edition and the Thomas Cleary edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Heihō Okugisho&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another one that exists in German is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Okugisho. Die Kunst der hohen Strategie&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by the sixteenth-century general &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamamoto_Kansuke_(general)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yamamoto Kansuke&lt;/a&gt;. The German translation by Taro Yamada was published by Piper in 2005 but has apparently gone out of print. (It is no longer listed in Piper's website and there is no preview on Amazon.de.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A review of an english edition on &lt;a href=&quot;https://koryu.com/books/okugisho.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koryu.com&lt;/a&gt; indicates that at least some editions are illustrated. Also, it does feature tactics for matchlocks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter two deals with various techniques and tactics for close-quarter combat (unarmed, with swords, staffs, spears and glaives, and use of the bow and &lt;strong&gt;matchlock gun&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://koryu.com/books/okugisho.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koryo.com review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heih%C5%8D_Okugisho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wiki&lt;/a&gt; also has a short entry on the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Bushidō Shoshinshū (by Daidōji Yūzan)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible candidate is &lt;a href=&quot;https://portal.dnb.de/opac.htm?method=simpleSearch&amp;amp;cqlMode=true&amp;amp;query=nid%3D122694473&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bushidô-shoshinshû&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the samurai and strategist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daid%C5%8Dji_Y%C5%ABzan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daidōji Yūzan&lt;/a&gt; (1639 – 1730). In Scott Wilson's translation, the book is known as &lt;em&gt;Budoshoshinshu: The Warrior's Primer&lt;/em&gt;. The link in this paragraph takes you to the entry in the catalogue of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, which says that the German translation was published by the Angkor Verlag in Frankfurt am Main in 2007. It also says, &amp;quot;Überarb. und ill. Neuausg.&amp;quot;, meaning &amp;quot;revised and illustrated reissue&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Bushidō Shoshinshū (by Taira Shigesuke)&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A different book by the same title was translated into English  by Thomas Cleary and A.L. Sadler on two different occasions. A short comparison on these can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://koryu.com/books/samuraicode.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koryo.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-04T21:19:05.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8557" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8564" CreationDate="2018-10-04T19:25:25.497" Score="3" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was taking a few notes about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashigaru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ashigaru&lt;/a&gt;, japanese foot soldiers of the jigoku-era, I found that most contemporary illustrations on this page stem from one and the same book by Utagawa Kuniyoshi. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main source for the Wikipedia article,  Stephen Turnbull, references in his Osprey works to a book called &lt;em&gt;Zhôyô Monogatari&lt;/em&gt; and uses it as the source for quite some of his contemporary illustrations, that seems to have a very similar style to the works of Kuniyoshi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turnbull cites in the further reading in the Osprey Warrior #29 - Ashigaru, that his reearch is based on Yoshihiko Sasama's research that uses this &lt;em&gt;Zhôyô Monogatari&lt;/em&gt; as one of the main sources. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pinterest.de/search/pins/?q=Zohyo%20Monogatari&amp;amp;rs=typo_auto_original&amp;amp;auto_correction_disabled=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search on Pinterest&lt;/a&gt; reveals quite a lot of pictures are contained in this elusive essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using Google Translate to get monogatari in Kanji(物語) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%B6%B3%E8%BB%BD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese Wikipedia on Ashigaru&lt;/a&gt;, I was able to discern the original title to be &quot;雑兵物語&quot;, but that is a redlink. Google helps though, that it is to be read as &lt;em&gt;Zōhyō monogatari&lt;/em&gt;. Note that the Zōh/Zhô seem to make no difference for the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the search for Zōhyō Monogatari did show further results though: there seem to be 3 editions (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/title/zohyo-monogatari/oclc/22163514&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1776&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/title/zukan-zohyo-monogatari/oclc/68325670&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1967&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/title/zohyo-monogatari/oclc/23328213&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1977&lt;/a&gt;) listed in the WorldCat.org, but all of them were listed only as &quot;Japanese&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I was wondering if this manual, the 雑兵物語, was ever translated as itself since my Japanese is pretty much not suitable to read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="5128" LastEditDate="2018-10-04T19:44:41.373" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:05:53.697" Title="Is there a translation of the 雑兵物語 (zohyo monogatari)?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8504" CreationDate="2018-10-05T07:54:08.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's probably impossible to know for certain now what Dickens's thought process was when he came up with the name Magwitch - we can't exactly ask him, and &amp;quot;interviews with authors&amp;quot; were much less common in his time than today - but there has been some speculation about this by critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The site JohnDClare.net, which describes itself as a GCSE revision site, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.johndclare.net/English/Dickens_3_names.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has this to say&lt;/a&gt; about the significance of the names &amp;quot;Magwitch&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Provis&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Abel&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Mag’ is a slang name for a magpie (a bird associated with theft), but a ‘Mage’ is a wise man (after the Magi who visited Jesus in the Bible story).   Magwitch carries a bible he has stolen ‘as a sort of legal spell or charm’ to keep him from capture.   The idea of ‘magic’ in both ‘mag’ and ‘witch’ also perhaps hints at his amazing powers (to escape, to make money), but the idea of a ‘witch’ also suggests a person unfairly condemned by society and the laws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming to London at the end of the novel, Magwitch takes the name ‘Provis’ – ‘providence’ means ‘God’s plan for your life’/ ‘your fate’.   It reminds us that Magwitch’s interactions with Pip direct the whole of Pip’s life – first in the churchyard, then as his anonymous benefactor, and finally as the cause of his downfall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magwitch’s first name is Abel.   In the Bible, Abel is a sheep-herder who is killed by his brother Cain.   Magwitch makes all his money in Australia as a sheep-herder, and he is tricked and betrayed by Compeyson, whom he wants to kill in revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The academic article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2872039?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph A. Hynes, &amp;quot;Image and Symbol in Great Expectations&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;ELH&lt;/em&gt; 30(3) (1963), pp. 258-92&lt;/a&gt; talks a great deal about the various uses of symbolism in the novel, including a brief analysis of the names of Magwitch and Miss Havisham:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, we might note that both of these puppeteer-characters are associated with labels which help symbolize the ambiguity of their roles. &amp;quot;Satis House&amp;quot; is in plain enough ironic opposition to &amp;quot;Miss Have-a-sham (e)&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Half-a-sham[e]&amp;quot;?), while the innocent &amp;quot;Abel&amp;quot; of Magwitch's name, and his pseudonym of &amp;quot;Provis&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Provider,&amp;quot; probably), must be qualified by the suggestions present in &amp;quot;Magwitch&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;magus&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;magician&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;witch&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's also an article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/44371571?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanley Friedman, &amp;quot;The Complex Origins of Pip and Magwitch&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Dickens Studies Annual&lt;/em&gt; 15 (1986), pp. 221-31&lt;/a&gt; which may be relevant. I was unable to access the full text of this one, but perhaps you or someone else here will have the right subscription or membership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the association of &lt;strong&gt;Mag&lt;/strong&gt;witch with &lt;strong&gt;mag&lt;/strong&gt;pies, it's worth noting (as Hynes does in the article cited above) firstly that the convict's clothes are black and white like a magpie, and secondly that this wouldn't be the only bird metaphor associated with him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch, sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies together, only as the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: &amp;quot;Magwitch&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;mage/magus&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;witch&amp;quot;, suggesting someone with surprising powers who is pursued by the law, with also a hint of &amp;quot;magpie&amp;quot;, a bird which is disliked and clad in black and white.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T07:54:08.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American writer and poet Max Ehrmann (1872 – 1945) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T10:36:41.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="356" CreationDate="2018-10-05T12:12:35.050" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will try, here, to provide a brief introduction to Mathew Franklin Whittier--who I believe was the original author of &quot;The Raven&quot;--if I have room. He was the younger brother, by five years, of poet John Greenleaf Whittier. Historically he is known to have written poems, but only a very early one he wrote in jest, for his mother, has ever been recorded. He is known only as the author of the satirical series, in Yankee dialect, about &quot;Ethan Spike.&quot; In the process of delving into the question of whether I was his reincarnation, over a period of about nine years, I unearthed a great deal of information about him. Some of this I have 100% proof for--most of it I have a preponderance of evidence for, to a standard of &quot;beyond a reasonable doubt,&quot; i.e., in my opinion. I don't have room to sort that out, here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His personal and professional history, as I have ferreted it out, is as follows. He began publishing in the Boston-based &quot;New-England Galaxy&quot; at age 14, in 1827. In late 1829, he moved to New York City and began writing regularly for the &quot;Constellation,&quot; which was edited by Asa Greene. He soon became the associate or junior editor, writing or collecting the entire editorial page. He was the author of the &quot;Enoch Timbertoes&quot; series of letters. Actually, it was Mathew who launched this genre in the United States, with his &quot;Joe Strickland&quot; letters for the &quot;Galaxy&quot;--not Seba Smith, who launched his &quot;Major Jack Downing&quot; in Jan. 1830.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did, ultimately, find a great deal of Mathew's poetry. Even going back to 1843, his preferred style is consistent with what you see in &quot;The Raven.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathew ghost-wrote at least one book, about &quot;Dr. Dodimus Duckworth,&quot; for Greene in 1833; then he went back to work for him in New York, when Greene launched a new paper, the New York &quot;Transcript.&quot; The bulk of the &quot;Police Office&quot; reports (attributed to another reporter by historians) were written by Mathew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here I need to clarify, that Mathew wrote almost all of his work anonymously. He had a few long-time pseudonyms, like a single asterisk, but most-often he would create pseudonyms at the drop of a hat, and drop them just as quickly. He would often create one-off pseudonyms, or use them for brief series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1832, Mathew also wrote for the Boston-based young men's magazine, &quot;The Essayist,&quot; primarily under his single asterisk (book reviews), or the name &quot;Franklin, Jr.&quot; Under that latter signature, he wrote two lengthy reviews on the poetry of Francis Quarles, having obtained an original, antiquarian copy. He provided long quotes from Quarles' poetry. Mathew, himself, was of a similar temperament--a deeply devotional Christian, with tendencies toward austerity, just as Quarles seems to have been. It would have been a far more likely pseudonym for Mathew--who regularly adopted one-off signatures, which had personal meaning for him--than for Poe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1845, Mathew wrote book reviews--several per week on average--for the New York &quot;Tribune,&quot; edited by Horace Greeley. Mathew was an abolitionist, and didn't secret work for this cause. He had to keep his identity secret. Thus, he was a critic for the Tribune at the same time that Poe was a critic for the &quot;Evening Mirror.&quot; You can see his work online via the Hathi Trust. All the asterisk-signed pieces on the front page are his, plus a few signed with his middle initial, &quot;F.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd better stop and see if this will post, before I write more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5129" LastEditorUserId="5129" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T12:18:15.997" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T12:18:15.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8557" CreationDate="2018-10-05T13:52:19.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Possibly&lt;/strong&gt;, there is a book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/0752490001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Samurai War Stories: Teachings and Tales of Samurai Warfare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that appears to have a section by the same name. Based off of the online discussion of it in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.samurai-archives.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5834&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samurai Archive&lt;/a&gt;, it seems as if it could be the same book, but that if it is, it is at best a partial translation due to the length of the &lt;em&gt;Zōhyō&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/865025912&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review&lt;/a&gt; suggests that at the very least the work in the book, is similar in content to the Zōhyō Monogatari that you and others are seeking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion in the Archive seems to say that no (public) translations existed as of 2013, which is backed up by the searching that I did in Google, Amazon, and WorldCat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, a &lt;em&gt;partial&lt;/em&gt; translation may exist, but one should read it at their own risk as it may be incorrect. The author of it has a bad reputation for his analyses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="143" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T15:05:53.697" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:05:53.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:31:17.733" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3569&quot;&gt;This question&lt;/a&gt; asks about the choice of a word and seems to be in the context of assessing the quality of translations. However, to make assessments of the form suggested by the question. One must have a grasp of the original language. However, often one reads a translation, due to the lack of a grasp of the original language. What can a reader do to attempt to assess the quality of a translation, if they do not speak the original language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:31:17.733" Title="How can a reader know the quality of a translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:38:54.137" Score="-2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beauty and Sadness (美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to kanashimi to) clearly isn't an easy read. I had started it some 5 years ago, read till the middle and abandonned it. Now, I picked it up again and found a reading mark at the start of chapter 7 - &lt;em&gt;Summer Thinness&lt;/em&gt; (Or, as I read it in German: Sommermagerkeit).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I remembered the story somewhat well enough to resume where I left it off, but just at the middle of the page I realized: Who were all these people again?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T16:21:14.780" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T16:51:25.043" Title="Dramatis Personae of Beauty and Sadness" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;yasunari-kawabata&gt;&lt;beauty-and-sadness&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8566" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:38:54.137" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The back of the book in conjunction with the contents of chapter 7 allow at least a partial set of Dramatis Personae:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Otoko Ueno&lt;/strong&gt; is the female that was once the lover of Oki, and seemingly protagonist of chapter 7. When she was 15, she was pregnant by him, but the baby it was born early and dead. As the affair ended, she tried to take her life with poison. She started to only wear Kimono in her mid-twenties and by the time when the &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt; of the book is set she's closing in on 40. She's an unmarried famous painter and lover/friend of a girl named Keiko.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Toshi Oki&lt;/strong&gt; is a male that once was the lover of Otoko, and he left her when she was about 16. Back then he had been 31. He wrote a novel about the affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keiko Sakami&lt;/strong&gt; I can place as the girlfriend of Otoko, and she is (according to the back text), planning to exact revenge on Oki for his treason on Otoko. She lives with Otoko and studies painting under her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="5128" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T16:51:25.043" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T16:51:25.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8568" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:39:16.963" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;As established in the question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3741#3911&quot;&gt;Do authors who translate their own works tend to do accurate translations?&lt;/a&gt;, authors who translate their work often emphasize different elements and they do not always give the most 'accurate' translation, from a purely objective perspective. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/776&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, it is observed that other translations of the works are made, in addition to the authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this it is clear, that there could in some cases be significant variance between the original and the translated languages' editions. When analyzing the work, which version should be taken as the definitive edition, given that they were both produced by the author? What about when neither is published explicitly as a translation of the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T15:39:16.963" Title="When authors write a single work in multiple languages or translate their own work, how can we determine which version is definitive?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:45:31.047" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was fighting through the first page of Chapter 7 of &lt;em&gt;Beauty and Sadness&lt;/em&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/8566/dramatis-personae-of-beauty-and-sadness&quot;&gt;Dramatis Personae of Beauty and Sadness&lt;/a&gt;), I stumbled upon a sentence that is hard to understand. Since I read it in German, I do a self-translation to English here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One day, Otoko wanted to write a letter, she opened the &quot;lexicon of the Japanese language&quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, and her eyes fell upon the Kanji for &quot;thinking&quot;. As she read the other meanings of this Kanji like &quot;to long for&quot;, &quot;not being able to forget&quot;, &quot;being sad&quot;, she felt, that her heart cramped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, my Japanese is poor, but I would really like to know which Kanji it was that made her feel so bad and remember her of her affair with Oki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1 - a Kanji-dictionary I believe&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T09:35:48.673" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T10:00:35.057" Title="What Kanji startles Otoko so much?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;beauty-and-sadness&gt;&lt;yasunari-kawabata&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-05T15:49:54.077" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatis_person%C3%A6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about Dramatis Personae&lt;/a&gt;, Dramatis Personae began in plays and later moved into the other forms of literature. This led me to ask: When did Dramatis Personae first appear in a work of literature that was not a play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="143" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T13:06:45.530" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T20:02:46.530" Title="When did the first Dramatis Personae appear outside of theatre?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-05T16:39:46.570" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasunari_Kawabata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yasunari Kawabata&lt;/a&gt; (川端 康成, 11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972) was a Japanese novelist and was the first Japanese to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on 16 October 1968 &quot;for his narrative mastery, which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among his works are &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/snow-country&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;snow-country&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;snow-country&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-master-of-go&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-master-of-go&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-master-of-go&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/thousand-cranes&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;thousand-cranes&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;thousand-cranes&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/beauty-and-sadness&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;beauty-and-sadness&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;beauty-and-sadness&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="5128" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T17:51:00.153" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:51:00.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-05T16:39:46.570" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the works of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata (川端 康成, 11 June 1899 – 16 April 1972)." OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="5128" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T17:50:35.827" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:50:35.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8573" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-05T16:56:34.263" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_Sadness_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beauty and Sadness&lt;/a&gt; (Japanese: 美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to kanashimi to) is a 1964 novel by Japanese author &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/yasunari-kawabata&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;yasunari-kawabata&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;yasunari-kawabata&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="5128" LastEditDate="2018-10-05T17:50:51.690" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T17:50:51.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8574" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-05T16:56:34.263" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the 1964 novel &quot;Beauty and Sadness&quot; (美しさと哀しみと Utsukushisa to kanashimi to) by Yasunari Kawabata. Questions regarding this work should always be tagged with [japanese-literature] and [yasunari-kawabata]." OwnerUserId="5128" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:10:26.953" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:10:26.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8578" CreationDate="2018-10-05T21:52:06.793" Score="2" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do the following lines from Oscar Wilde's &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt; say about Victorian investments and taxes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lady  Bracknell : &#xA;  What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure.It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-06T09:33:22.127" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T10:08:33.237" Title="What do these lines say about Victorian investments and taxes?" Tags="&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2018-10-05T21:57:25.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect anybody who can get their hands on the original Japanese book can trivially and definitively answer this, but I don't have it and can only guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A very promising candidate is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jisho.org/search/%E6%87%90%20%23kanji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;懐&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. It's one of the rarer kanji used for &lt;em&gt;to think&lt;/em&gt;, (おもう, &lt;em&gt;omou&lt;/em&gt;, usual kanji would be 思う). A common use of 懐 is the word 懐かしい (&lt;em&gt;natsukashii&lt;/em&gt;, loosely, nostalgic). As the jisho.org link shows, though, some of the many readings of 懐 include 懐かしむ (&lt;em&gt;natsukashimu&lt;/em&gt;, to miss, to yearn for), 懐く (&lt;em&gt;natsuku&lt;/em&gt;, to grow emotionally attached to), etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-10-05T21:57:25.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8569" CreationDate="2018-10-06T00:55:55.360" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I lack the japanese edition, I found this one promising:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tangorin.com/kanji/think&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tangorin&lt;/a&gt; suggests 思 with the compound 思慕 - yearning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jisho.org/search/%E6%80%9D%20%23kanji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jisho&lt;/a&gt; suggest also 思 with the compound 相思 - mutual affection and 哀思 - sad feeling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5128" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T00:55:55.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8575" CreationDate="2018-10-06T10:08:33.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of this line is Lady Bracknell's interrogation of Jack, as she tries to discover whether he would be a good match for her daughter. She asks him a number of questions, and most of his answers are satisfactory, up until he mentions being found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyuoUwxCLMs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A HANDBAG?!&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, she asks him whether his income is &amp;quot;in land&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;in investments&amp;quot;. He replies that it's mostly in investments, and this is one of his satisfactory answers: she responds with the quote from your question. She is &lt;strong&gt;complaining about taxes on land&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;property tax&lt;/a&gt;, paid by landowners during their lifetimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the duties exacted from one after one’s death&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_Tax_in_the_United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inheritance tax&lt;/a&gt;, paid by a landowner's estate after their death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position and prevents one from keeping it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the society in which this play is set, ownership of land is required for social status (it &amp;quot;gives one position&amp;quot;). But Lady Bracknell is complaining that the taxation on landowners is so heavy that it &amp;quot;prevents one from keeping up&amp;quot; that social status, by bleeding one dry of money. Hence her conclusion that it is better to have one's income from investments than from land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also useful to set this in historical context. During the second half of the 19th century (in which &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt; was written), there was a lot of debate between leading British politicians, notably Disraeli and Gladstone, about taxation. It's probably very realistic that a woman like Lady Bracknell (a Conservative, who would have supported Disraeli) would be complaining about taxation. You can read a good summary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#Gladstone_and_Disraeli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disraeli and Gladstone agreed about little, although both promised to repeal income tax at the 1874 General Election. Disraeli won – the tax stayed (and probably would have done under Gladstone too). Gladstone spoke for nearly five hours introducing his 1853 Budget. He outlined plans for phasing out income tax over seven years (which the Crimean War was to upset), of extending the tax to Ireland, and introduced tax deductions for expenses 'wholly, exclusively and necessarily' incurred in the performance of an office – including keeping and maintaining a horse for work purposes. The 1853 Budget speech included a review of the history of the tax and its place in society, it is regarded as one of the most memorable ever made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the Whigs defeated in 1858, Disraeli returned as Chancellor and in his Budget speech described income tax as 'unjust, unequal and inquisitorial' and 'to continue for a limited time on the distinct understanding that it should ultimately be repealed'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-06T10:08:33.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8582" CreationDate="2018-10-06T15:07:18.363" Score="4" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman rents the same weird film tens or hundreds of times from the video store. For me, the funniest line in the book is where Bateman describes the look of horror on the video clerk's face when he realizes it's Bateman again renting this same film.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember the name of the film or where in the book this occurs, could anyone remind me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5141" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T17:56:15.960" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T17:56:15.960" Title="What was the name of the film Patrick Bateman obsessively rents in American Psycho?" Tags="&lt;american-psycho&gt;&lt;bret-easton-ellis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8590" CreationDate="2018-10-07T01:04:59.147" Score="2" ViewCount="3703" Body="&lt;p&gt;(From Chapter 3..) Winston Smith is doing his morning gymnastics in front of the telescreen and thinking about the Party and their actions. Quoting from the book itself (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, indeed, you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the Party had invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his earliest childhood. But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence. &lt;strong&gt;Just once in his whole life he had held in his hands unmistakable documentary proof of the falsification of an historical fact.&lt;/strong&gt; And on that occasion --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then he gets interrupted by the woman in the telescreen and his train of thought is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is already Winston Smith's daily job to falsify historical facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From Chapter 4..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The messages he had received referred to articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. ... It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Borther's speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details of the falsification that is mentioned in Chapter 3 is given in Chapter 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just once in his life he had possessed - &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the event: that was what counted - concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it between his fingers for as long as thirty seconds...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of &lt;em&gt;The Times&lt;/em&gt; of about ten years earlier - the top half of the page, so that it included the date...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is explained how what Winston sees in that page is obviously not true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand, his daily work is to actually alter news, articles, passages.. Yet, the narrator in Chapter 3 claims he had proof only once in his life..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5123" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T12:43:07.750" Title="What is meant by Winston only had once a proof of falsification by the Party?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8580" CreationDate="2018-10-07T03:07:54.583" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newsweek.com/confessions-serial-killer-201412&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a review of this book&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deep down, in fact, Bateman is a rube: he rents the tape of &quot;Body Double&quot; about 40 times instead of just buying the damned thing, and he's happy with his video club because it lets him check out as many tapes as he wants as long as he spends two grand a year on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T03:07:54.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2018-10-07T06:58:03.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I read through Fables, but while Vol 1 is set in Fabletown proper, which as Snow says may have to operate on a tight budget, while Vol 2 takes place on the Farm, a separate administrative area for non-human Fables, such as talking animals. SPOILER for Vol 2 if you haven't read it, but the Farm Fables have held Weyland Smith, a blacksmith Fable based on the Germanic Wayland the Smith, and either threatened or bewitched him to craft weapons for them, ostensibly for the rebellion against Fabletown depicted in Vol 2. If you're asking where they got the materials for such an arsenal to be created, I guess that's never really acknowledged, but I'm sure there's some reference made to the Farm subsiding off the sellable products such as milk, wool, eggs etc of the animal residents, not 100% sue on that, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T06:58:03.570" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-07T14:09:06.480" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book we learn that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Lorna Doone isn't actually a Doone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering, couldn't they have come up with a better name for the book? Or was the whole theme of the title supposed to be a mystery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T11:01:55.477" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T13:11:16.097" Title="Why is the book called Lorna Doone?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;r-d-blackmore&gt;&lt;lorna-doone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8585" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist Richard Doddridge Blackmore (1825 – 1900) and his life as a writer. Blackmore is mainly known as the author of 'Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor' (1869)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T19:31:40.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8591" CreationDate="2018-10-07T21:47:47.163" Score="4" ViewCount="1278" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem &quot;Spring&quot; by Gerard Manley Hopkins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing is so beautiful as Spring–&lt;br&gt;&#xA;             When weeds, in wheels,&#xA;  shoot long and lovely and lush;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Thrush’s eggs look little&#xA;  low heavens, and thrush&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Through the echoing timber does so&#xA;  rinse and wring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear&#xA;  him sing;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     With&#xA;  richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is all this juice and all this joy?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      A strain of the&#xA;  earth’s sweet being in the beginning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   In Eden's garden. -– Have, get,&#xA;  before it cloy.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour&#xA;  with sinning,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book I use for the SAT preparation asks about the tone of the poem. There are two answer choices I have a problem with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A) meditative and reverent.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B) respectful yet admonishing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, the tone is not admonishing which made me eliminate choice B. A is actually a correct answer choice, but I am a bit confused by the explanation to this question. In regard to the incorrect answer choice B, the explanation says that &quot;there is nothing respectful about [the poem].&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, as far as I understand, &quot;respectful&quot; and &quot;reverent&quot; are actually synonyms with &quot;reverent&quot; having a deeper, more intense, feeling of respect towards something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;My question is: How can there be then &quot;nothing respectful about&quot; the poem if the tone is meditative and reverent?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thank you for any help and suggestions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-08T11:02:44.653" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T11:02:44.653" Title="What is the tone of &quot;Spring&quot; by Gerard Manley Hopkins?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;sat-ii-success-literature&gt;&lt;gerard-manley-hopkins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8581" CreationDate="2018-10-07T23:14:48.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question says &quot;it is explained how what Winston sees in that page is obviously not true.&quot; No, this is a misunderstanding. Winston has good reason to believe that what he sees in that page is &lt;em&gt;unquestionably&lt;/em&gt; true, because it came from a time before records were being altered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three men in the photograph in the &lt;em&gt;Times&lt;/em&gt; fragment had confessed at both of their public trials (they were each tried twice) that they had been in Eurasia - the enemy at that time - on a specific date, a date that had stuck in Winston's memory because it happened to be midsummer day. But the &lt;em&gt;Times&lt;/em&gt; fragment locates them in &lt;em&gt;New York&lt;/em&gt; on that date.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time&#xA;  Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the&#xA;  purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of.&#xA;  But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished&#xA;  past, like a fossil bone that turns up in the wrong stratum and&#xA;  destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to&#xA;  atoms, if in some way it could have been published and its&#xA;  significance made known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston conceals the fragment, but instead of keeping it, he destroys it. Nonetheless, he retains the memory of its significance: &lt;em&gt;the Party is built on lies&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2018-10-07T23:14:48.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-08T00:15:54.273" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a book I read when I was young on the recommendation of my father. While I read the book in the mid 90's I believe that it was published in the 60's or 70's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is about a teen who finds a time machine in his (I think..) grandfathers basement and accidentally time travels back to the stone age. He wonders off from the machine and gets lost. He finds a group of cavemen who he eventually joins and survives with. He slowly grows up and they become a substitute family. At the end of the book he finds the time machine again and returns to the date he left but now a man very different from when he left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written in English and I have a strong feeling that the title was short, one or two words, perhaps relating to either time travel or cavemen. I was around 13 or so at the time and the book was available in the middle school library. I have not found any books that come close to this description as I know the main character was a solitary boy. Most books I have encountered are about multiple travelers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing that it was not a very popular book as I have been searching for the title on and off for a number of years now. As this book was recommended to me, I've often thought of sharing it with my own kids. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5144" LastEditorUserId="682" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T13:47:46.687" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T22:45:08.863" Title="Time traveling teen gets lost in the stone age" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8581" CreationDate="2018-10-08T08:30:38.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Winston's work involves falsifying history, yes, but there's no physical proof that's what he's doing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On paper&lt;/em&gt;, his job is not to change the record of historical facts or to falsify evidence of the past: instead, it's to &lt;strong&gt;correct 'mistakes'&lt;/strong&gt; in past news reports etc. Officially, he's employed by the Ministry of Truth (truth, not falsification) to amend the many unaccountable errors in past documents which don't match the present ones. In reality, he knows that he is concealing facts and creating lies to match the current Party line, but there's no solid incontrovertible evidence that this is what he's doing. He &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; simply believe that he really is correcting mistakes and verifying truths, and no physical evidence in his day-to-day life would contradict this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider, for example, the examples we see of some of his daily orders (Part 1, Chapter 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;times 17.3.84 bb speech malreported africa rectify&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;times 19.12.83 forecasts 3 yp 4th quarter 83 misprints verify current issue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;times 14.2.84 miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;times 3.12.83 reporting bb dayorder doubleplusungood refs unpersons rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the explanation of these weird Newspeak instructions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it appeared from ‘The Times’ of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The Times’ of the nineteenth of December had published the official forecasts of the output of various classes of consumption goods in the fourth quarter of 1983, which was also the sixth quarter of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. Today’s issue contained a statement of the actual output, from which it appeared that the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston’s job was to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a ‘categorical pledge’ were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reporting of Big Brother’s Order for the Day in ‘The Times’ of December 3rd 1983 is extremely unsatisfactory and makes references to non-existent persons. Rewrite it in full and submit your draft to higher authority before filing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the phrasing of the instructions Winston receives. Big Brother's speech wasn't &lt;em&gt;mistaken in view of later events&lt;/em&gt;; it was &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;malreported&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Since BB is always right, he must have predicted what actually happened, so the previous report must be wrong. Perhaps agents of Goldstein had been at work falsifying the reports to make it seem as though BB had been mistaken! Ditto with the other instructions: there were &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;misprints&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; and things &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;malquoted&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, so of course it's the duty of a good citizen to set these mistakes right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also see a massive Ministry of Truth operation when Oceania's ally and enemy switch positions (Part 2, Chapter 9):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the sixth day of Hate Week, after [...] the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces — at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. [...] On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. [...] The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. [...] The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia. A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete. Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound-tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed. Although no directive was ever issued, it was known that the chiefs of the Department intended that within one week no reference to the war with Eurasia, or the alliance with Eastasia, should remain in existence anywhere. The work was overwhelming, all the more so because the processes that it involved could not be called by their true names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that last sentence: the processes could not be called by their true names. Nobody ever admits that what they're doing is falsifying historical records. No, no, no: they're &lt;em&gt;correcting&lt;/em&gt; historical records to match the 'facts' they know to be true today. There is no single incontrovertible piece of evidence that Winston can point to in order to &lt;em&gt;prove&lt;/em&gt; that his job involves falsification. His only ally in knowing what really happened and what didn't is his own memory, which could always be discredited if he chose to speak out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That scrap of newspaper is the sole exception. He had held in his hands physical, documentary proof that the Party official record was a lie. But now that he's thrown it away, that too exists only in his memory. For just one moment, he might have had the power to expose the Party. (In practice, he would probably have been killed before he could do anything about it. But even so.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T08:30:38.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8587" CreationDate="2018-10-08T08:47:51.580" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of the two words is correct. In fact, the dictionary defines reverent as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Feeling or showing deep and solemn respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the difference is entirely one of strength of feeling. Yet that difference is enough to separate the two options given for your answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is broken into two verses - I took the liberty of editing your question to show this. The first is, inarguably, a lyrical evocation of the beauty of springtime. The second, however, is more opaque. It uses negative words like &quot;cloud&quot;, &quot;sour&quot; and &quot;sinning&quot;. The subject of the final line is unclear. It is possible to read these sentiments as &quot;admonishing&quot; - the question is designed to test whether you have understood what the verse means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the &quot;maid&quot; referred to in the final line is the Virgin Mary, Christ's mother. Her mention is prefigured by the &quot;descending blue&quot;, the &quot;blooms&quot; and &quot;low heavens&quot; (i.e. the sky) of the first verse, blue being a colour associated with Mary. This second verse is &quot;meditative&quot;, pondering whether the lush pleasures of springtime can be related, directly, to Eden and later the virginal nature of Christ's birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to the given answers, then, &quot;reverence&quot; may be a solemn respect, but it also has religious overtones. In some denominations, a priest is known as &quot;reverend&quot; and one may &quot;revere&quot; a religious book or symbol. So to be &quot;meditative and reverent&quot; correctly implies that the purpose of the poem is one of religious philosophy, whereas &quot;respectful yet admonishing&quot; plays down the religious element.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, though, if &quot;reverent&quot; implies a deeper level of &quot;respect&quot;, it is conceivable that one could &quot;respect&quot; an idea but still criticise (or &quot;admonish&quot;) it. If you &quot;revere&quot; that idea, however, it implies you have bought into it entirely, to a level where you are unlikely to offer any degree of criticism - indeed you are more likely to want to spend time &quot;meditating&quot; upon it. So even without the religious element there is enough difference between the two words for the answer options to make sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-10-08T08:47:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8594" CreationDate="2018-10-08T19:33:07.487" Score="8" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a &quot;reliability of the text&quot; study and want to review the reliability of the texts that have been used to substantiate the Miyamoto Musashi texts &lt;em&gt;The Book of the Five Rings&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Path of Aloneness&lt;/em&gt;. I've already been through all of the websites on the internet (alright, not all of them), and whilst I've found lots of &quot;facts&quot; about the books and the like, I can't find a single scholarly article or reference to archaeology supporting his existence or that justifies that he actually wrote what we have in our hands today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, things I'm looking for are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Datings for the manuscripts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Number of concordant manuscripts&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Considerations of differences between the published popular works and the originals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been unable to find anything and would appreciate some help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5147" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-09T09:29:40.963" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T10:04:46.393" Title="Where can I find details on the original manuscripts for the Miyamoto Musashi texts?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8593" CreationDate="2018-10-09T08:53:29.477" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Scott Wilson writes in the introduction to his translation (Shambhala Publications, 2002; p. xii),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Musashi's original manuscript of five scrolls no longer exists, but the various copies made differ only slightly in some of the words and phrases. Remarkably, the copy presented by Musashi's disciple Terao Nobumasa to Yamamoto Gensuke, in 1667 (only twenty years after Musashi's death), is still in the possession of the Hosokawa family, whose ancestor, the daimyo Hosokawa Tadatoshi, was Musashi's primary benefactor. It is considered the most accurate of those extant, and it is the copy upon which this translation is based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For his master thesis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Paul De Benson wrote a new translation because &quot;no extant [English] translation is suitable for scholarly reference&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The source text for these problematic English translations is invariably the Hosokawa family manuscript, a wholly unsuitable manuscript for translation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  In recent years, the Harima Musashi Kenkyūkai, a Japan-based research group, has done much worthwhile scholarship on the Gorinsho and has compiled a new annotated edition of the text based on a thorough examination of all extant manuscripts. My translation is based on their authoritative edition and it benefits greatly from their research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from the abstract to Benson's master thesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarworks.umass.edu/theses/523/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gorinsho: Miyamoto Musashi's Five Elements of War&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you need to access the Harima Musashi Kenkyūkai edition (in Japanese) or Benson' thesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T10:04:46.393" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T10:04:46.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8818" CreationDate="2018-10-09T16:15:06.200" Score="3" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prior to his job on &lt;em&gt;The Banner&lt;/em&gt;, Ellsworth Toohey spent awhile as a career advisor at a college. One of his distinctive traits as a career advisor was that he usually advised people against doing what they really wanted to do, which directly lead to at least one person's eventual suicide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People noticed that Ellsworth Toohey seldom let a boy pursue the career he had chosen. &amp;quot;No, I wouldn't go for law if I were you. You're much too tense and passionate about it. A hysterical devotion to one's career does not make for happiness or success. It is wiser to select a profession about which you can be calm, sane and matter-of-fact. Yes, even if you hate it. It makes for down-to-earthness.&amp;quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After leaving college some of his proteges did quite well, others failed. Only one committed suicide. It was said that Ellsworth Toohey had exercised a beneficent influence upon them - for they never forgot him: they came to consult him on many things, years later, they wrote him, they clung to him. They were like machines without a self-starter, that had to be cranked up by an outside hand. He was never too busy to give him his full attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We already know from elsewhere in the book that Elsworth Toohey is actually power-hungry, narcissistic, and sociopathic (hence, for example, his attempted takeover of &lt;em&gt;The Banner&lt;/em&gt;'s editorial policy). But why this? Is it just for the pleasure of having power over them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T20:48:00.317" Title="Why did Ellsworth Toohey advise people against doing what they really wanted when he was a career advisor?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8597" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8598" CreationDate="2018-10-09T18:22:33.263" Score="10" ViewCount="1597" Body="&lt;p&gt;About two years ago I read a short story about a Jack-in-the-box that is unused. I believe that he was at the bottom of the toy box and where he came from was unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the house were a bunch of kids. If I can remember the oldest died in World War One. It took place in a nursery in the attic of an 19th century house. The kids in the story were about three or four and were scared of Jack. Also the youngest tried to burn the house so he went to a mental hospital thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nursery is infested with rats years later as the Jack waits for the kids.Also I believe that it said that he could wait forever. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written in English and I remember reading it in a British Year 7 test from a couple of years earlier, as test prep. I believe it was written by whoever wrote &lt;em&gt;Coraline&lt;/em&gt; but I am unsure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5152" OwnerDisplayName="Hermione Granger" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T20:44:46.667" Title="Short horror story I read two years ago about a Jack-in-the-box" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8597" CreationDate="2018-10-09T19:18:17.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1083060476?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Don't Ask Jack&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, indeed by Neil Gaiman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is an extremely eerie short story about a jack in the box who lives in an old attic in a creaky old house. The children who live in the house have been deeply effected by Jack their experience with Jack who are told things by jack that they &quot;can't quite remember and can't quite forget&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found by searching for &lt;em&gt;Gaiman &quot;Jack in a box&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;A reading of the story on Youtube&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;div class=&quot;youtube-embed&quot;&gt;&lt;div&gt;&#xD;&#xA;                &lt;iframe width=&quot;640px&quot; height=&quot;395px&quot; src=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/embed/7l_4tN38BNM?start=0&quot;&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;&#xD;&#xA;            &lt;/div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After listening to the video, it fits all of your details including the child who died in the war, the one declared insane after he was found in the basement with fire-starting materials, the nursery full of rats and the statement that Jack &quot;could wait forever&quot; for the children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" OwnerDisplayName="Sean Duggan" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T19:20:56.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8600" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-09T22:56:02.003" Score="1" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm listening to &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucifer's Hammer&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and more than once book mentions hand signals based on Kipling's books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something along the line of this: one person is manning a barricade, another man in a hide-out with a scoped rifle. And man on barricade meets people and depending on obscure hand signals rifle-man knows what is happening down there. In one case both hands were up - a signal to shoot the incoming party. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is - what are the signals? Anywhere I can read about them? And what is the book by Kipling that explains these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm new here, not sure about the appropriate tags yet. Please add as you see fit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5153" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T23:24:33.083" Title="What are the hand signals based on Kipling's books?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8600" CreationDate="2018-10-09T23:24:33.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While googling this, I stumbled on what seems to be a copy of &lt;em&gt;Lucifer's Hammer&lt;/em&gt;, and the part immediately around one hand signal seems to be this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Okay.” Al raised his hands. And the shot went through the city councilman’s head, neat and clean, because of course the signal was Al raising his right hand. Pity the councilman had never read his Kipling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twas only by favour of mine, quoth he, ye rode so long alive,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There was not a rock for twenty mile, there was not a clump of tree,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But covered a man of my own men with his rifle cocked on his knee.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If I had raised my bridle-hand, as I have held it low,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The little jackals that flee so fast were feasting all in a row.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If I had bowed my head on my breast, as I have held it high,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Kite that whistles above us now were gorged till she could not fly…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This bit of poetry is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Departmental_Ditties_and_Ballads_and_Barrack-Room_Ballads/The_Ballad_of_East_and_West&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Ballad of the East and West&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Other mentions of Kipling on that copy seems to be of the dog, who's also named Kipling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-09T23:24:33.083" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2347" CreationDate="2018-10-10T02:14:53.357" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gur is afraid of Reba. He understands that possession of such a book is a death sentence for him. In the text he is not implying that Rumata can be easily killed too: Rumata is a famous metropolitan noble, the killing of him by a vassal official (Reba) would have far reaching consequences for Arkanar. As explained later, Reba himself fears the one who claims to be Rumata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5154" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-10T06:10:54.877" LastActivityDate="2018-10-10T06:10:54.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6493" CreationDate="2018-10-11T13:42:01.817" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe because the prole in the bar was a drunk, so he could be bribed with alcohol and intoxicated enough to talk about stuff he should not talk about.&#xA;Drunkenness frees your tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The guy in the store seemed to not be a drunk and not despondent enough to talk about stuff he should not.&#xA;I think it would be like talking to a Chinese man about the massacre on Tiananmen square, if you'd ask a shopkeeper in daylight hours it would not be very wise for that shopkeeper to talk about stuff like that.&#xA;If you were to find an old hobo, especially an addicted hobo, you'd be more likely to get an answer from them about what happened, especially if you had a substance to bribe them with. &#xA;Just conjecture but maybe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5161" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T11:13:24.427" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T11:13:24.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T16:27:21.917" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Jane Roe&quot; a common name for an anonymous or unknown individual (similar to &quot;John Doe&quot; for men) - notably, for example, in the case &lt;em&gt;Roe v. Wade&lt;/em&gt;. That being said, why was Sally Beth Roe's last name &quot;Roe&quot;? What is the significance of this in terms of the storyline?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T16:27:21.917" Title="Why did Sally Beth Roe have that particular last name?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;piercing-the-darkness&gt;&lt;frank-peretti&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-11T16:31:02.577" Score="1" ViewCount="839" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Bright Lights, Big City&lt;/em&gt; by  Jay McInerney, &lt;strong&gt;in which way does the story of the Coma Baby symbolises the life of the main character?&lt;/strong&gt; Why has the author included it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; No doubt that it has much to do with the death of the main characters mother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5162" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-10-12T01:20:03.180" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T01:00:50.153" Title="Bright Lights, Big City: Why is the story Coma Baby included in the novel?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;jay-mcinerney&gt;&lt;bright-lights-big-city&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8607" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8608" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor' (1869) by R. D. Blackmore. Use this tag with the [r-d-blackmore] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:07:36.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8609" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8610" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1889) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:10:20.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8611" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8612" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist Jay McInerney (born in 1955) and his life as a writer. McInerney is best known for the novel 'Bright Lights, Big City' (1984), which was adapted into a film in 1988." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:14:02.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8613" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8614" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Bright Lights, Big City' (1984) by Jay McInerney. Use this tag with the [jay-mcinerney] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" LastActivityDate="2018-10-11T17:14:49.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-12T15:06:02.027" Score="4" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1606, the English Parliament passed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_to_Restrain_Abuses_of_Players&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Act to Restrain Abuses of Players&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and plays written after that date avoided using the names of God or Jesus &quot;jestingly or profanely&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;minced oaths&lt;/a&gt; claims that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Swearing on stage was officially banned by the Act to Restraine Abuses of Players in 1606, and a general ban on swearing followed in 1623.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the 1623 ban is tagged &quot;citation needed&quot;, so the exact nature of that ban is unclear. Was it simply a ban on swearing &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt; or did it also mention the theatre or literature generally. The wording &quot;general ban&quot; suggest that it does not focus on the theatre or literature, but a citation is needed to verify that claim.&#xA;I couldn't find any other information about such a ban on &lt;a href=&quot;https://historyofparliamentonline.org/search/site/1623%20swearing?f[0]=im_field_publish_volume%3A66788&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The History of Parliament Online&lt;/a&gt; or on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.british-history.ac.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British History Online&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a twofold question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did the English Parliament pass a ban on swearing or profane language in 1623?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did this ban or act specifically mention the theatre or literature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T17:58:18.510" Title="Relevance to literature of 1623 ban on swearing in England" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8615" CreationDate="2018-10-12T17:58:18.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English Parliament did pass a ban on swearing in 1623, that much at least is agreed upon by several records: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GZZVAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;q=Profane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Statutes Relating to the Ecclesiastical and Eleemosynary Institutions of England, Wales, Ireland, India, and the Colonies: With the Decisions Thereon&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 1&lt;/a&gt;, Archibald John Stephens, 1845, which names the law as part of &lt;em&gt;Statuta Jacobi&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;XXVI. Stat. 21 Jacobi 1, c. 20(1), A.D. 1623&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;An act to prevent and reform profane Swearing and Cursing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-15816761&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A BBC news article&lt;/a&gt; mentions it in passing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1601 a bill &quot;against usual and common swering&quot; was introduced to the House of Commons, but failed to attract enough support from MPs. However, in 1623 an act was passed against swearing, which was rigorously enforced by the Puritans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.duhaime.org/LawFun/LawArticle-1339/Even-More-Crazy-English-Laws--Part-III.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A site listing &quot;crazy English laws&quot;&lt;/a&gt; contains partial text of &lt;em&gt;An Act to Prevent and Reform Profane Swearing and Cursing&lt;/em&gt;, passed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobean_era&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King James I&lt;/a&gt; in 1623:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Forasmuch as all profane swearing and cursing is forbidden by the Word of God, be it therefore enacted by the authority of this present Parliament, but no person or persons shall from henceforth profanely swear or curse. And that if any person or persons shall at any time or times hereafter offend herein.... or shall therefore be convicted by the oaths of two witnesses or by confession of the party, ... every such offender shall for every time so offending forfeit and pay to the use of the poor of that parish where the same offense is or shall be committed, the sum of 12 pence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The offender, if he or she be above the age of 12 years, shall by warrant from such justice of the peace or head officer be set in the stocks by three whole hours; but if the offender be under the age of 12 years, and shall not forthwith pay the said some of 12 pence, then he or she ... shall be whipped by the Constable, or by the parents or master in his presence.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sIGsBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;q=1623#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=1623&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-speaking World&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Geoffrey Hughes, 2015 also contains partial text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For as much as all profane swearing and cursing is forbidden by the Word of God, be it therefore enacted, by the authority of the then Parliament, but no person or persons should from henceforth profanely swear and curse, upon the Penalty of of forfeiting one Shilling to the use of the Poor for every Oath or Curse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book goes on to say that the 1623 Act was &quot;continued and ratified by the succeeding Parliament of Charles I  in 1627 (3 Chas. I. c. 4) and again, near the end of his reign in 1640.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The provisions of the 1623 Act are also apparently mentioned in the preamble of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profane_Swearing_Act_1694&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Profane Swearing Act of 1694&lt;/a&gt;, so the discrepancies between the quoted text from the last two sources might because either of them used a later Act as the source instead of the 1623 Act itself. At any rate, both versions agree on the offence itself: it wasn't specifically about the theatre or literature. Hughes (2015) also lists a few other laws from that time, with quotes, so it seems to be a good resource for shoring up that Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2018-10-12T17:58:18.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8606" CreationDate="2018-10-13T22:11:40.220" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The coma baby is a representation of the main character himself ( let's call him Coach). Coach's mom is dead and he needs to deal with it and move on with his live. Instead he's living in denial, not accepting the fact that he is miserable. At the same time he is not letting the world around him know that he is miserable. What does he do instead? He drinks and takes drugs. It is easier for coach to just stay put in that lifestyle and he doesn't have strength to say to change his way of living. He wants to though; through the book it is clear that he actually wants to reject Tad and stay home instead of going out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the baby: His mom is dead and he doesn't want to come out the womb and face life (at least in coach’s dream). This situation is very similar to the Coach’s situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the book coach realizes that he needs to start over again while he is on his knees crawling like a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;baby&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. All in all;  The coma baby is a representation of coach himself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5174" LastActivityDate="2018-10-13T22:11:40.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8626" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8641" CreationDate="2018-10-14T05:50:18.567" Score="5" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Fellowship of the Ring, after Gandalf tells Frodo the story of the One Ring and challenges him to destroy it, Frodo looks at the ring and we read this description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds a lot like Hamlet's famous soliloquy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this just a coincidence or was Tolkien intentionally echoing Shakespeare here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5176" LastEditorUserId="5176" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T18:17:33.210" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T13:09:01.473" Title="&quot;What a piece of work is man&quot; - echo in The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8629" CreationDate="2018-10-14T07:10:01.073" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 13 in Coleridge's &lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt; (italics added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, and&#xA;  particularly from the probable effects on the sale of your present&#xA;  publication; but they would weigh little with you compared with the&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;preceding&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;preceding&quot; at the end of the sentence mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T19:29:48.780" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T19:43:24.333" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;preceding&quot; as in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;biographia-literaria&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8628" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T15:06:01.247" Score="7" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the author mean with &quot;The dog gives but the cat is&quot;?  The part I don't understand is the cat part. It's from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/cd.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Cats and Dogs&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by H. P. Lovecraft. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those primitive emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative and imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried, and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog gives, but the cat is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T18:15:54.410" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:16:29.960" Title="&quot;The dog gives but the cat is.&quot; What does it mean?" Tags="&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8627" CreationDate="2018-10-14T19:43:24.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence is part of a letter addressed to Coleridge that the poet cites in its entirety near the end of Chapter XIII of &lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;. In that chapter, Coleridge discusses his theory of the imagination; these thoughts were part of a longer essay that Coleridge planned to publish as the introduction to a volume of his poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author of the letter has read the essay and describes the effect it had on his understandings and his feelings, and how readers of Coleridge's poems would receive the essay. For the anonymous author of the letter, the essay turned a number of ideas he held on their head. Then he goes on to provide arguments against publishing the essay as an introduction to a volume of poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First, in spite of its length, some things had been left out, which made the content harder to understand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second, readers would complain about it. Due to its length, the essay would significantly increase the price of the book into which Coleridge planned to include it. The content is also very abstruse and would better fit into a volume that is more theoretical by design.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the author adds, &quot;I could add to these arguments one derived from pecuniary motives, ...&quot;. The phrase &lt;strong&gt;&quot;the preceding&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; at the end of the sentence is short for &lt;strong&gt;&quot;the preceding arguments&quot;, i.e. the arguments I summarised above&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T19:43:24.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Biographia Literaria; or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions' by the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The work was first published in two volumes in 1817. Use this tag with the [samuel-taylor-coleridge] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T19:45:47.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1984 novel 'Bright Lights, Big City' by Jay McInerney. Use this tag with the [jay-mcinerney] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T20:02:05.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8634" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-14T21:22:25.123" Score="6" ViewCount="694" Body="&lt;p&gt;The religious symbolism in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books is well known and, in many cases, very clear: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/117792/31394&quot;&gt;Aslan &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; Jesus&lt;/a&gt;, the Calormenes are a very stereotypical portrayal of Muslims, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/801/17&quot;&gt;the Dwarfs &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; represent Jews&lt;/a&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the Telmarines, as seen in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;? They rule over Narnia and banish the talking creatures and dwarfs, hags, etc. to the mere legends that they are in our own world. &lt;strong&gt;Do they represent anything in the symbolic Lewisian theology?&lt;/strong&gt; Atheists, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-10-14T21:22:25.123" Title="Religious symbolism of the Telmarines?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8628" CreationDate="2018-10-15T01:30:21.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think about how we normally think about cats and dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dogs, we think of as loyal, always &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt; - man's best friend. We throw the ball, they run to fetch. We call, they come. We ask, they do. The dog gives - does what we ask, gives their service. Think of the people we describe as a dog - people who prostrate themselves before another, begging to continue in their service. (For the record, I'm a dog person, though cats are also nice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cats, on the other hand, we think of as kind of - sassy? independently minded, certainly. Where we we would throw a dog a ball to fetch, we'd never do such a thing with a cat lest we get a disdaining look. Cats are stereotypically free-willed and in pursuit of their &quot;own thing&quot;. They don't give, like a dog. They just kind of are. Think of the people we describe as &quot;catty&quot; - cunning, and you never are quite sure what they are thinking - and certainly not someone who &lt;em&gt;serves&lt;/em&gt; you. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dogs give, but the cat is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T01:30:21.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8636" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T03:32:02.663" Score="4" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem &quot;Holy Thursday&quot; from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; by William Blake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is this a holy thing to see,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a rich and fruitful land?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Babes reduced to misery,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fed with cold and usurious hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is that trembling cry a song?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Can it be a song of joy?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And so&#xA;  many children poor?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is a land of poverty!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And their sun does never shine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And their fields are bleak and&#xA;  bare,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And their ways are filled with thorns;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is eternal&#xA;  winter there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For where-e’er the sun does shine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And where-e’er the rain does&#xA;  fall,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Babe can never hunger there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor poverty the mind appall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a practice test on the SAT Literature Subject exam, I found a question about the last stanza specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the final stanza, what does Blake appeal to in his readers?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I.&#xA;  Their emotions&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  II. Their faith&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  III. Their reason&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (A) I only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (B) II only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (C) III only&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (D) I and III&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (E) I, II, and III&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only choice I am completely sure about here is III because it seems logical to have enough food in the place where &quot;the sun does shine&quot; and &quot;the rain does fall&quot; which is not the case in the reality. Also, I can agree with the choice I since the reader can feel pity for those in the poem who lived in poverty and hunger.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;However, I can't find a reason why the choice II may be correct. It is understandable that the poem itself does touch the subject of faith, but does Blake appeal to it in the last stanza specifically?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Here is the test explanation for this question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First, decide which of the Roman numeral item(s) is or are correct.&#xA;  Blake appeals to his readers’ emotions, so item I is correct. Although&#xA;  there is no mention in the stanza of religion, God, or faith, item II,&#xA;  the title “Holy Thursday” implies a religious context, making item II&#xA;  also correct. Blake does call on his readers’ reason, so item III&#xA;  should be included in the answer. Choice (E), which includes items I,&#xA;  II, and III, is the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, I couldn't find how Blake appeals to faith in the &lt;strong&gt;last&lt;/strong&gt; stanza. Please explain whether the subject of faith is maybe implied in the final stanza or influences it indirectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T04:43:10.187" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:30:24.427" Title="Does Blake appeal to his readers' faith in the last stanza of &quot;Holy Thursday&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;&lt;sat-ii-success-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8636" CreationDate="2018-10-15T04:42:15.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the title “Holy Thursday” implies a religious context, making [&quot;Blake appeals to his readers' faith&quot;] also correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That sentence from the textbook betrays a remarkable lack of understanding of poetry and of Blake's poetry in particular. Just because the title refers to a religious date, doesn't at all mean the author is appealing to his readers' faith. I could write an anti-religious poem and title it &quot;Ascension Day&quot; without ever appealing to my readers' faith. So &lt;strong&gt;the deduction as written is definitely wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important to be aware that Blake's poetry contains a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of religious imagery, symbolism, and commentary, which may sometimes seem contradictory: he may viciously attack the church and priesthood (see for example the last two lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45950/the-garden-of-love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Garden of Love&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or the entirety of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-little-boy-lost/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Little Boy Lost&quot;&lt;/a&gt;) while typically portraying God and Heaven as the wonderful things that religion holds them to be (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Girl_Found&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Little Girl Found&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43654/the-chimney-sweeper-when-my-mother-died-i-was-very-young&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Chimney Sweeper&quot;&lt;/a&gt;). In fact, there is no contradiction, as long as you're able to perceive God as entirely separate from mainstream religion. Blake is able to distinguish between the two in his poetry, mercilessly criticising one without lessening his love for the other. But the existence of a religious context, specifically with reference to Blake, doesn't necessarily imply that he's appealing to his readers' faith. Some of his poetry is brutally cynical about religious things, nearly the opposite of appealing to readers' faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With all that said, &lt;strong&gt;is he, in fact, appealing to his readers' faith in the final stanza of this poem?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For where-e’er the sun does shine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And where-e’er the rain does fall,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Babe can never hunger there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor poverty the mind appall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deduction of no hunger or poverty from the fact of sunshine and rainfall is one that's based more in reason and faith than reality. It seems &lt;em&gt;reasonable&lt;/em&gt; that if there are plenty of natural resources, then children don't need to starve. One might &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; that this should be the case, that poverty wouldn't be allowed to happen in a world of plenty. But in reality, as we know, the sun does shine and the rain does fall but children are still poor and hungry. Thus, the point of the poem is to &lt;strong&gt;argue&lt;/strong&gt; (appealing to our reason) that poverty &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; exist in a &quot;rich and fruitful land&quot;, and to make us &lt;strong&gt;feel&lt;/strong&gt; (appealing to our emotions) pity for hungry children and anger that such conditions exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about faith?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that the first stanza (&quot;Is this a holy thing to see ...&quot;) implies that if the people in our world were more holy, then favourable natural conditions and poor hungry children could never coexist. Expecting us to &lt;strong&gt;believe&lt;/strong&gt; this might be an appeal to our faith: more holiness is what's needed to improve conditions in the world. It could also be interpreted in a less direct way: in an &lt;em&gt;afterlife&lt;/em&gt; which is more holy, there would be no poverty. This again appeals to faith. On the other hand, the poem could also be interpreted as a straightforward description of the horrendousness of our society: saying it's not &quot;holy&quot; to have hungry children in a land of plenty, without necessarily implying that a more holy place exists. (Given that it's Blake - and yes, given the title of the poem - I suspect that implication &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; intended here. But it's possible to understand and interpret the poem without it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: I and III are true, II could be argued either way but the book's argument is wrong.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; all poems referenced in this answer are from Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Innocence and of Experience&lt;/em&gt;. It's important to know that many titles are duplicated between these songs, including in fact the one in your question: there's a &quot;Holy Thursday&quot; of Innocence and another one of Experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T11:30:24.427" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:30:24.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8628" CreationDate="2018-10-15T11:06:52.023" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be clearer if you reorganise the passage a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dog &lt;strong&gt;gives&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;meaningless affection, aimless companionship, and flattering attention and subservience&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cat &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;[an] objective sight of poignant, ethereal beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature's bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried, and impersonal order and sufficiency&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5182" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-15T11:16:29.960" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T11:16:29.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3054" CreationDate="2018-10-15T15:50:48.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It very much depends on the production.&#xA;In many modern productions soliloquies and some humour are performed to the audience or a even a wink or aside to the audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't mean they're unambiguously fourth wall breaking in the text.&#xA;Hamlet probably wouldn't in real life enunciate his famous speech and it's surely a theatrical device. But just because something is present that wouldn't be present if the audience were not doesn't mean the fourth wall is broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be eye contact or a hand to the side of the mouth against the other players directly lines to the audience that indicates the actor is directly interacting with the audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Julius Caeser musing how many future generations will watch the scene is slightly humourous and deliberate irony. Whether the wall is broken is how he delivers the line.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's bawdy humour in Shakespeare so without any historical record I'd guess some it went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a line in Hamlet that is often interpreted as a pop at Will Kempe (one of the players who had maybe left or was certainly starting to fall out with everyone):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for&#xA;  them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh to set on some&#xA;  quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime&#xA;  some necessary question of the play be then to be considered.—That’s&#xA;  villainous and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses&#xA;  it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With no evidence I can only imagine some gesture being made to indicate who was meant - big laughs! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5186" LastActivityDate="2018-10-15T15:50:48.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-15T19:34:01.207" Score="6" ViewCount="342" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opening of Chapter 12 of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; describes a meeting between Villefort and his father Noirtier, on which a servant apparently attempted to eavesdrop. The passage (translation from Chapman &amp;amp; Hall 1846 with my emphasis) reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;M. Noirtier – for it was, indeed, he who entered – looked after the&#xA;  servant until the door was closed, and then, fearing, no doubt, that&#xA;  he might be overheard in the antechamber, he opened the door again,&#xA;  nor was the precaution useless, as appeared from the rapid retreat of&#xA;  Germain, &lt;strong&gt;who proved that he was not exempt from the sin which ruined&#xA;  our first parents&lt;/strong&gt;. M. Noirtier then took the trouble to close and bolt&#xA;  the ante-chamber door, then that of the bed-chamber, and then extended&#xA;  his hand to Villefort, who had followed all his motions with surprise&#xA;  which he could not conceal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the reference to &quot;the sin which ruined our first parents&quot;? I thought it might be a reference to the biblical sin of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adam and Eve&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garden of Eden&lt;/a&gt;, but if that's the case I'm wondering what the exact parallel is between eating &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbidden_fruit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forbidden fruit&lt;/a&gt; and eavesdropping on a private conversation. Or is this a reference to a Christian doctrine in which all sin is some sort of extension of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Original Sin&lt;/a&gt;? Or is this a reference to something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2018-10-16T05:58:47.020" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T11:02:05.527" Title="What is &quot;the sin which ruined our first parents&quot; in The Count of Monte Cristo?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-count-of-monte-cristo&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8626" CreationDate="2018-10-16T03:42:45.973" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;So...I'm going to say probably coincidence, though there is some evidence in your favor. Thus I'll present the evidence first and then my own conclusion; do with it what you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tolkien on Shakespeare&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence here is mixed, but I'll give a brief summary. Tolkien referred to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in his Letters. He felt that Shakespeare wrote elves very poorly (quote again from his Letters)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the word [elves] to be understood in its ancient meanings, which continued as late as Spenser—a murrain on Will Shakespeare and his damned cobwebs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In On Fairy Stories he said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that last a positive reference to Shakespeare, or merely pointing to Shakespeare's lofty status in drama? Who knows. Nevertheless, he clearly thought that fantasy and drama did not mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his Letters, Tolkien comments that in his schooldays he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;disliked [Shakespeare] cordially&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though also in his Letters there is a passage which admires a stage performance of Hamlet (so he would at minimum have been aware of the passage you quote, especially as it is one of the more striking passages in Hamlet):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plain news is on the airgraph; but the only event worth of talk was the performance of Hamlet which I had been to just before I wrote last. I was full of it then, but the cares of the world have soon wiped away the impression. But it emphasized more strongly than anything I have ever seen the &lt;strong&gt;folly of reading Shakespeare (and annotating him in the study)&lt;/strong&gt;, except as a concomitant of seeing his plays acted. It was a very good performance, with a young rather fierce Hamlet; it was played fast without cuts; and came out as a &lt;strong&gt;very exciting play&lt;/strong&gt;. Could one only have seen it without ever having read it or knowing the plot, it would have been terrific. It was well produced except for a bit of bungling over the killing of Polonius. But to my surprise the part that came out as the most moving, almost intolerably so, was the one that in reading I always found a bore: the scene of mad Ophelia singing her snatches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bolding of most relevant bits my own.) &lt;a href=&quot;http://bloggingshakespeare.com/tolkien-and-shakespeare-an-unexpected-discovery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;One writer&lt;/a&gt; notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a professor at Oxford, he often felt that too much attention was given in the English classroom to Shakespeare and felt that a balanced language and literature course should be “based on ancient and medieval texts” and should pay little attention to anything more modern than Geoffrey Chaucer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is of course an interesting point. According to the Carpenter biography, as a teenager he delivered a speech in which he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;poured a sudden flood of unqualified abuse upon Shakespeare, upon his filthy birthplace, his squalid surroundings, and his sordid character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thorough lambasting if there ever was one, though of course this was as a teenager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Ring and Man&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two passages refer to quite different objects - the One Ring, and man. At first glance, the passages seem almost in deep contrast in this sense - we see man being quoted as &amp;quot;noble&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;admirable&amp;quot; - but we know that the Ring is in apparent contradiction a evil thing, even though it appears so beautiful - Frodo is thinking this &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; Gandalf explains the Ring's history to him, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, we know - Hamlet knows - that Man is just as depraved as the Ring. The Ring, after all, only accentuates the base desires of the one who wears it - Sam is notably least affected by the ring, because his desires are not for power, but for a nice garden, and for Frodo to be happy. Not much for the ring to work with. And indeed, while Man can appear powerful and wise, we see Hamlet's uncle murdering Hamlet's father, and Polonius, Rosencratz, Gildenstern, Ophelia going mad, Hamlet himself killing and scorning and hurting - who do we really look upon positively, when it gets down to it, in Hamlet? Horatio, maybe. The skull of Yorick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage is from when Hamlet is &amp;quot;expressing his melancholy&amp;quot; (to quote the ever-faithful Wikipedia) and it shows in the later part of the passage you quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So much for being the paragon of virtue. Similarly, think of who else in the Ring refers to it as beautiful - Isildur, in his writing says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was hot when I first took it, hot as a glede, and my hand was scorched, so that I doubt if ever again I shall be free of the pain of it [...] it loseth neither its beauty nor its shape [...] of all the works of Sauron the only fair. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we know that in the end the Ring betrayed Isildur and let him die. So much for its apparent beauty. (We also see here the echo again of the word &amp;quot;precious&amp;quot; - like with Bilbo, Frodo, and Gollum, such that this is clearly to make a point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Phrasing&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your comparison of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems mostly focused on how they both praise the objects in question, and the sort of pattern of &amp;quot;how [phrase of praise]&amp;quot; (in other words, the use of parallelism here). However, I'll note that that structure is used only &lt;em&gt;twice&lt;/em&gt; in Hamlet's whole soliloquy. Hamlet's soliloquy is also much longer than Frodo's aside here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also, for the record, seen this sort of structure pop up before in other works, and while it may be indirectly from Hamlet through some sort of long descending &amp;quot;ooh, I like this writing! I'll use it!&amp;quot; chain that passed through both conscious and subconscious, it's small enough that it almost certainly &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I'll point to Rand al'Thor's great comment: &amp;quot;if it was an intentional Shakespeare reference, then surely Tolkien's passage would have been more similar: e.g. &amp;quot;how rich and beautiful in its colour, how perfect in its roundness&amp;quot;. The fact that it's only half-similar suggests that Tolkien didn't have Hamlet in mind when writing it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Intertextual comparison in the Lord of the Rings&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien once said in his Letters (in one of the better quotes I've ever read) of intertextual comparison like this that it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;not very useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, Tolkien for the most part based his story on, e.g., Beowulf, or Norse mythology, not more modern literature. To quote his Letters (for what it's worth, if you are at all interested in Tolkien scholarship, please promptly get a copy of the letters and Humphrey Carpenter's biography)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the rest of the tale it is [...] derived from (previously digested) epic, mythology, and fairy-story – not, however, Victorian in authorship, as a rule to which George Macdonald is the chief exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having spent way too much time reading Tolkien, I can to some extent attest to this. The similarities that have been called to my mind reading his work has always been of things like King Arthur or the dwarves of Nordic myth or what have you. I can say with all honesty that even having read Macbeth I only compared Dunsinane wood to the Ents because I'd read his letters - not because they struck me as particularly similar. Prospero in the Tempest is to me a very different wizard from Gandalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is much a personal impression as anything but I feel one does the Lord of the Rings a disservice (or really, almost any literature but that by those like T.S. Eliot, who invite this sort of thing) by trying to see if such and such passage came from such and such other passage - sometimes, an author is just telling a story. (Then again, I shouldn't throw stones in a glass house, as I'm writing a paper comparing Durin and King Arthur.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I've presented in this answer as much evidence as I could dig up in your favor, it really doesn't seem very convincing. Yeah, the Ring is good on the outside but bad in reality, and so is man in Shakespeare's (and probably Tolkien's, seeing as he was Catholic) view, but even if the Ring is a commentary on man, that's really not a very clear pointer towards Shakespeare. Tolkien wasn't even a very big fan of Shakespeare, at minimum, and he probably even harbored an active dislike of Shakespeare. Intertextual comparison in the Lord of the Rings - especially with more &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; (after Chaucer) works, instead of the myths from which Tolkien primarily drew upon - is an attitude Tolkien didn't really like, and not one that is very fruitful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, of course, the phrasing is something that I've seen elsewhere in books and is small enough that it's very easily the sort of thing that could be unconsciously inserted, without any actual thought going to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T14:31:19.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-16T13:26:55.160" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that all of Solzhenitsyn's work is to be in English by the centennial of his birth, which is this year. I'm trying to understand just what new English translations we can expect this year, especially in the Red Wheel series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the bibliography of Solzhenitsyn's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Wheel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Red Wheel&lt;/a&gt; at Wikipedia full and complete? The reason I ask is that the paragraph following the fourth book says that Solzhenitsyn originally intended to carry the cycle through until 1922 when Lenin had his first stroke and went on medical leave. Did any of the books that followed April 1917 ever get written or is April 1917 the absolute end of the cycle? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has an English translation of April 1917 appeared yet? If not, when can we expect it? Have Russian editions of any further books in the Red Wheel cycle appeared? If so, when can we expect those to appear in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5188" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T07:55:40.103" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:55:40.103" Title="Solzhenitsyn's Red Wheel" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;aleksandr-solzhenitsyn&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6773" CreationDate="2018-10-16T18:21:24.883" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Betty Foy's son, the &quot;idiot boy&quot;, is not a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;boy&lt;/a&gt; in the conventional sense (&quot;a young male&quot;). Betty Foy uses the term probably in the second sense provided by Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(diminutive)&lt;/em&gt; A male child: a son of any age&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Wiktionary also provides a third sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(affectionate, diminutive)&lt;/em&gt; A male of any age, particularly one rather younger than the speaker. [from 17th c.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike C.J.Sheu's comment, I don't think the term is used in a derogatory sense. Betty Foy herself uses phrases such as &quot;my poor dear Boy&quot; and &quot;my Johnny&quot;, which make a derogatory intention unlikely. Due to the fact that many of Wordsworth's poems express social concerns related to the lives of ordinary people, a derogatory intention on the poet's part also seems unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows from the above that we can't assume that the &quot;boy&quot; is a child. For this reason, when Betty Foy says, &quot;I'm almost three-score&quot;, we should assume that this literally means she is almost sixty. This mean that her son's age may be anything between late teens and early forties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it seems unlikely that Johnny may be in his late teens, one should look at one of Wordsworth's other poems, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/41/372.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael&lt;/a&gt;. Michael, the shepherd from the title's poem, is at least eighty years old (line 61):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So lived he till his eightieth year was past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His wife is 20 years younger than him (lines 79-80):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His Helpmate was a comely matron, old— &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Though younger than himself full twenty years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And their son is eighteen years old (line 124):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And now, when Luke had reached his eighteenth year,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Luke's mother must have been 42 when she gave birth to him. It is possible that Wordsworth runs up the age of some of the characters in his poems, but this would not explain why Luke is eighteen years old and not, e.g., twenty. For this reason, the conclusion that Betty Foy is almost sixty and Johnny between 18 and his early forties should be acceptable in the fictional world of Wordsworth's poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T11:48:30.093" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T11:48:30.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8645" CreationDate="2018-10-16T21:59:19.877" Score="10" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often hear the term &quot;Lovecraftian&quot; used in reference to describe certain elements of horror literature or film. I do understand this to be a reference to H.P. Lovecraft and his style of horror, but where I'm a little unclear is on what degree of similarity to style would classify a work as &quot;Lovecraftian&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if a horror story had to do with a monster with strange tentacles, this would commonly be referred to as Lovecraftian, but is that just because of the tentacles monster? Are there any examples of tentacled monsters that are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; considered &quot;Lovecraftian&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a clear definition of what would qualify something as being &quot;Lovecraftian&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T07:53:23.213" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T07:53:23.213" Title="What qualifies something as &quot;Lovecraftian&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8644" CreationDate="2018-10-16T22:12:58.567" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraftian_horror&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lovecraftian horror is a subgenre of horror fiction that emphasizes the cosmic horror of the unknown (and in some cases, unknowable) more than gore or other elements of shock, though these may still be present&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism: the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put this more succinctly - Lovecraft's horror is not in the &quot;jump out and scare&quot; or just another &quot;monster&quot; (like Grendel in Beowulf versus It in Stephen King's story) or gorish scenes, which are all horrifying in their own right. Lovecraft's horror resides in the idea that what the universe truly is is so unlike the lives we lead that comprehending it is its own true horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft was also a part of the Modernist movement in literature, meaning that his characters are often outcasts or somehow socially isolated (for example, in Kafka's The Trial, no one really explains what is going on to Joseph K.), that the situations they are in are often not fully explained (for example, in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, no one explains how Gregor is turned into a &quot;monstrous verminous bug&quot; - it just happens, in the first sentence in the text), and the monsters are often very surreal (instead of blood, bones, corpses, instead we see slime or tentacles mishmashed in odd ways).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To address the part where you ask &quot;if a horror story had to do with a monster with strange tentacles, this would commonly be referred to as Lovecraftian, but is that just because of the tentacles monster?&quot; I would say there are two different ways a story can be Lovecraftian. Firstly, the story can deal with a similar mythos - that is, tentacle monsters that smack strongly of Chthulu, like in your example - or the story can have a similar air to the writing (as I describe above, that is, Modernist tendencies and the horror being in the uncomprehensibility of the true universe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you ask for a monster with tentacles that is not Lovecraftian. I nominate &lt;a href=&quot;https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-giant-sea-squid-in-20-000-leagues-under-the-sea.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the giant squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/a&gt; (by Jules Verne) as definitively not Lovecraftian though it possesses an overabundance of tentacles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-10-16T22:12:58.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-17T09:09:31.470" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember one book from my childhood, which I would be glad to have around. I do not recall much, but I think that it was written by (possibly) Slovenian author, or Slovak. Perhaps even Czech or Polish but that is less likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part of the book is about small house toys (or animals), where all toys were of the same &quot;species&quot; (e.g. bears), but there is one exception, a small dog called Floki. I think that there is a kid (boy) involved in those stories, and one particular story that I remember is that all the toys gathered and had a race around the apartment. And I also remember that in one story they made cake from carrots (if I haven't mistaken it with some other book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written in the format of several shorter stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of the book is about the boy himself, and I think that there is some war involved, and it is more realistic. I remember some duke on a horse marching in (possibly after the war was ended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also it was translated into Serbian language. I do not know what is the original language, but i would assume that it is same as authors native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5193" LastEditorUserId="5193" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T13:52:02.353" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T13:52:02.353" Title="Book by eastern European author about small house toys including a dog called Floki" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2846" CreationDate="2018-10-17T15:03:09.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elliot S! Maggin was, in fact, one of the regular writers of Superman stories for DC in the mid-1970s (including &lt;em&gt;Superman&lt;/em&gt; # 293, &quot;The Miracle of Thirsty Thursday,&quot; whose title almost certainly inspired the title for his second Superman novel, &quot;Miracle Monday&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DC had done a little revamping of Superman in the early 1970s. As most people were getting their news from television rather than newspapers, they had Galaxy Communications buy the Daily Planet, and move Clark from newspaper reporter to TV news anchor of their Metropolis TV station, WGBS. In fact, they eventually brought his girlfriend from Smallville, Lana Lang, in to be his co-anchor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While not necessarily connected, I'll note that Clark had a &quot;costume&quot; of his own; we always saw him in a dark blue suit, with a white shirt and a red tie. It was consistent enough that some writer (could have been Maggin, I suppose) wrote a scene where he explained that he specially treated his clothes to deal with the rigors of Superman' activities (he did occasional have to leap into action with them on; and, even when he took them off, he compressed them and stored them in a pocket in his cape). The treatment process determined the color palette he had to work with, so his clothes were always those colors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clark&lt;/em&gt; and Lois were rarely considered an item Pre-Crisis; Lois' romantic focus at the time was Superman, and she didn't know Clark was his alter-ego. During the 1960s, Lois' interest in Superman lead to innumerable &quot;imaginary stories&quot; where their relationship would take various twists. Lois, in fact, starred in her own title: &lt;em&gt;Superman's Girlfriend, Lois Lane&lt;/em&gt;, which usually focused on that relationship in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, by the 1970s, the &quot;Lois Lane&quot; aspect of the title was starting to be focused on over the &quot;Girlfriend&quot; aspect. She was still Superman's girlfriend, but she had her own life, and her own adventures, that didn't always directly involved Superman himself. Their relationship was still there, but she was no longer pushing to marry Superman; presumably, their relationship has moved past that initial point where your entire focus is your significant other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides Lois, Lana, and &quot;Superman's Best Friend, Jimmy Olsen&quot;, his cast included Steve Lombard (WGBS sports guy, and obnoxious prankster/borderline bully - who , for some reason, sometimes had his pranks on Clark backfire), Morgan Edge (owner of Galaxy Communications; a clone of Edge had worked with Intergang, but Edge himself wasn't a criminal), and Perry White (Clark still occasionally did newspaper articles, and I think Lois still wrote for the Planet regularly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Superman did have a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic; however, in the comics, that was excavated out of a mountain, rather than grown from a Kryptonian crystal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the idea that Einstein helped place Clark with the Kents was unique to this novel. That element of his backstory has remained fairly consistent; the Kents found him in his spaceship, and became his adoptive parents (formally or informally; in at least one recounting, the Kents were isolated enough by a bad winter that they got away with claiming Clark was theirs). I'm not aware of any in-continuity telling that involves any sort of government involvement, or the involvement of Einstein. As Clark has historically been considered to be in his late twenties or early thirties (I believe in the 1970s, he was perpetually 29), having Einstein play a role eventually becomes an impossibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4735" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T15:03:09.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-17T18:04:22.577" Score="8" ViewCount="390" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the name of or the author of the poem below? My grandfather used to say it all of the time and I would like to read it at his funeral. It's very silly and goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The night was dark and stormy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sun was shining bright,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The victims lips were tightly sealed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She screamed with all her might,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh kill me friend but spare my life,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The villain shot her dead,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A gay young girl skipped down the aisle,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Grey hairs on her bald head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She recognized the dying girl,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Oh who is this?&quot;, cried she,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The headless corpse raised up its head and said, &quot;It's only me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5195" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-10-17T18:24:15.927" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T18:24:15.927" Title="Who is the author of this contradictory poem starting &quot;The night was dark and stormy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="994" CreationDate="2018-10-17T21:15:16.663" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would argue that it's one final self-referencing theory about the house. Perhaps the house is part of Yggdrasil. One single root network connected by unknown means to a vast body of incomprehensible size. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5196" LastActivityDate="2018-10-17T21:15:16.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8652" CreationDate="2018-10-18T06:55:16.967" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0004&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At present it will be sufficient for my purpose, if I have proved, that Mr. Southey’s writings no more than my own furnished the original occasion to this fiction of a new school of poetry, and to the clamours against its supposed founders and proselytes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As little do I believe that Mr. Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads were in themselves &lt;strong&gt;the cause&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does “the cause” refer to “this fiction” or to “the clamours,” or anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:43:01.240" Title="What does “the cause” refer to in Coleridge's “Biographia Literaria”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;biographia-literaria&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8651" CreationDate="2018-10-18T10:43:01.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Coleridge means the cause of the criticism of the poetry of Southey, Wordsworth, and himself, which he believes was Wordsworth’s preface to &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The background to this passage is the critical reaction to the work of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Southey&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Wordsworth&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coleridge&lt;/a&gt; himself.&#xA;He says that the critics wrongly identified these poets as “a new school of poetry” and clamoured against them and their supporters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Coleridge derides the idea that they constitute “a new school of&#xA;poetry” as “this fiction”, but posterity has sided with the critics on&#xA;this: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lake Poets&lt;/a&gt; are now generally seen as founders of the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_literature_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic movement in English literature&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kind of criticism that Coleridge had in mind can be exemplified by a review of Southey’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39804/39804-h/39804-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thalaba, the Destroyer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jmQJAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA63&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Edinburgh Review&lt;/em&gt; for October 1802&lt;/a&gt; (unsigned, but known to be by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Jeffrey,_Lord_Jeffrey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Jeffrey&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author who is now before us, belongs to a sect of poets, that has established itself in this country within these ten or twelve years, and is looked upon, we believe, as one of its chief champions and apostles. The peculiar doctrines of this sect, it would not, perhaps, be very easy to explain; but, that they are dissenters from the established systems in poetry and criticism, is admitted, and proved indeed, by the whole tenor of their compositions. Though they lay claim, we believe, to a creed and a revelation of their own, there can be little doubt, that their doctrines are of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German origin&lt;/a&gt;, and have been derived from some of the great modern reformers of that country. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The authors of whom we are now speaking, have, among them, unquestionably, a very considerable portion of poetical talent, and have, consequently, been enabled to seduce many into an admiration of the false taste (as it appears to us) in which most of these productions are composed. They constitute, at present, the most formidable conspiracy that has lately been formed against sound judgement in matters poetical; and are entitled to a larger thare of our censorial notice, than could be spared for an individual delinquent. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passage from &lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;, Coleridge goes on to consider the cause of this critical outcry, and rejects three possible explanations: he says that he believes that Southey’s writings were not the cause, nor his own, nor the poems of Wordsworth in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyrical_Ballads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. A couple of paragraphs later, he identifies what he thinks is the real cause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the critical remarks, therefore, prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads, I believe, we may safely rest, as the true origin of the unexampled opposition which Mr. Wordsworth’s writings have been since doomed to encounter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordsworth’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_ballads/Volume_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is indeed exactly the kind of manifesto likely to provoke critics to intemperate response:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in a Poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single line, in which the language, though naturally arranged and according to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there is a numerous class of critics who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T10:43:01.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8640" CreationDate="2018-10-18T19:58:11.173" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sin of Adam and Eve could be stated as a desire for knowledge that did not belong to them - the tree that they ate from was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the tree of the knowledge of good and evil&lt;/a&gt;, and the snake tempted Eve into eating the fruit by telling her that this knowledge would give her power akin to God's. So if this is indeed intended to be a specific reference, it is probably referring to the servant trying to gain knowledge (and potentially power) by eavesdropping on a conversation that didn't concern him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5189" LastActivityDate="2018-10-18T19:58:11.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-19T04:50:37.153" Score="3" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I need an explanation for what Grace Nichols is trying to say in the following stanzas from her poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://poemylovely.blogspot.com/2012/03/we-women-by-grace-nichols.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;We the Women&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We the women &lt;strong&gt;who cut&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  clear fetch dig sing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We the women making&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  something from this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;ache-and-pain-a-me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  back-o-hardness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two phrases in bold are what I have trouble with and need explaining. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5201" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T00:18:22.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T00:18:22.983" Title="What is &quot;ache-and-pain-a-me back-o-hardness&quot; in &quot;We the Women&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;grace-nichols&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-19T06:01:24.307" Score="3" ViewCount="439" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act II of &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;, Cecily has this conversation with Algernon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon: Ahem! Cecily! [Picking up hat.] Your Rector here is, I suppose, thoroughly experienced in the practice of all the rites and ceremonials of the Church?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cecily: &lt;strong&gt;Oh, yes. Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Cecily being sarcastic in her comment about Dr Chasuble being learned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T13:55:28.063" Title="Is Cecily being sarcastic about the fact that Dr Chasuble is not learned?" Tags="&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-19T06:44:31.847" Score="4" ViewCount="435" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act II of &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;, Gwendolen says this in a conversation with Cecily:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gwendolen: [...] And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don't like that. It makes man so very attractive. Cecily, &lt;strong&gt;mamma, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted; it is part of her system&lt;/strong&gt; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this line's meaning and is Gwendolen insulting her mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="5138" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T17:18:26.780" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T17:18:26.780" Title="In the given line, what is the relation between ‘short-sighted’ and ‘education’? What does it mean by strict views on education?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8658" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8659" CreationDate="2018-10-19T08:26:31.630" Score="3" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm#link2HCH0004&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6081/6081-h/6081-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am indeed convinced in my own mind, that could the same experiment have been tried with these volumes, as was made in &lt;strong&gt;the well known story of the picture&lt;/strong&gt;, the result would have been the same; the parts which had been covered by black spots on the one day, would be found equally albo lapide notatae on the succeeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Coleridge mean by “the well known story of the picture”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-19T09:14:06.673" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T12:45:06.387" Title="What is “the well known story of the picture” in Coleridge's “Biographia Literaria”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;biographia-literaria&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8658" CreationDate="2018-10-19T09:55:51.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The publication date of the Biographia (1817) made me wonder if this was anything to do with early photography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out that Thomas Wedgwood was carrying out early experiments with sensitised leather and paper, creating what were then known as 'shadow pictures'. His friend Humphry Davy wrote and published in 1802, in the Journal of the Royal Institution, a paper  entitled  “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of Making Profiles, by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver, with observations by Humphrey Davy. Invented by T. Wedgwood, Esq.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seemed possible that Coleridge's reference was to photographic process, but the likelihood of this is increased by the fact that Wedgwood was Coleridge's friend and Patron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedgwood_(photographer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Wedgwood (Photographer)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T09:55:51.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8658" CreationDate="2018-10-19T12:45:06.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;We can reconstruct, I think, what the story must have been, from Coleridge’s brief précis of it. Perhaps it was something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A painter was present at an exhibition of his works and overheard a spectator say, “This picture has too many black spots.” The painter was mortified and worked all night to correct the picture, but on the next day the same spectator returned and said, “This picture has too many white spots.”*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* &lt;em&gt;albo lapidae notatae&lt;/em&gt; = marked by a white stone&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the spectator was motivated by a desire to criticize, not by any particular flaw in the work. This corresponds to Coleridge’s analysis of the motives behind the criticism of the Lake Poets, which he sees as deriving from&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an unquiet state of mind, which seeks alleviation by quarrelling with the occasion of it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;provoked by Wordsworth’s argumentative &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Lyrical_ballads/Volume_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and not by any particular detail of the poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the same general censure has been grounded by almost every different person on some different poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the origin of the story, I have been unable to trace it. But it is similar in outline to an anecdote in Pliny about the painter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apelles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apelles of Kos&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another habit of his was when he had finished his works to place them in a gallery in the view of passers by, and he himself stood out of sight behind the picture and listened to hear what faults were noticed, rating the public as a more observant critic than himself. And it is said that he was found fault with by a shoemaker because in drawing a subject’s sandals he had represented the loops in them as one too few, and the next day the same critic was so proud of the artist’s correcting the fault indicated by his previous objection that he found fault with the leg, but Apelles indignantly looked out from behind the picture and rebuked him, saying that a shoemaker in his criticism must not go beyond the sandal—a remark that has also passed into a proverb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pliny the Elder&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Natural_History_(Rackham,_Jones,_%26_Eichholz)/Book_35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt;, book XXXV&lt;/a&gt;, translated by David Edward Eichholz.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another mention of the story in Newman’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracts_for_the_Times&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tracts for the Times&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, though this postdates &lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once begin altering, and there will be no reason or justice in stopping, till the criticisms of all parties are satisfied. Thus, will not the Liturgy be in the evil case described in the well-known story, of the picture subjected by the artist to the observations of passers-by?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Henry Newman&lt;/a&gt;, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gPo8AQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thoughts respectfully addressed to the clergy on alterations in the liturgy&lt;/a&gt;’, 9th September 1833.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-19T12:45:06.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-19T14:42:07.520" Score="3" ViewCount="480" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Four:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This fact of itself would have made me diffident in &lt;em&gt;my censures&lt;/em&gt;, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;my censures&quot; to be against Wordsworth's &quot;critical remarks ... prefixed and annexed to the Lyrical Ballads,&quot; or the critic's &quot;unexampled opposition?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5121" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T06:39:10.583" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T19:28:02.513" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;my censures&quot; as in Coleridge's “Biographia Literaria”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;&lt;biographia-literaria&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8679" CreationDate="2018-10-20T07:12:06.227" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot; by William Carlos Williams, for the reader to infer the context of the poem - why so much depends on the red wheelbarrow, the reader has to know that William Carlos was a physician - which is pretty uncommon prior knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language/poetry technique is this (if any)? What is the proper term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5203" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-20T14:56:12.023" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T16:10:26.810" Title="Writing/Poetry technique - Requiring reader to have prior knowledge" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8663" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T13:49:49.010" Score="6" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;If an editor is editing a translated work, does he need to know the language of the original source document?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor is in contact with the client and can therefore ask him questions if something isn’t clear. So does the editor really need any knowledge of the source language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about for proofreading? I figure it is even less likely that the proofreader needs to know the language of the source document.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5205" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T07:39:33.680" Title="Does a translation editor need to know the language of the source document?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-20T17:59:09.130" Score="5" ViewCount="674" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act II of Oscar Wilde's &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;, Algernon and Cecily have this exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cecily: I can't understand how you are here at all. Uncle Jack won't be back till Monday afternoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon: That is a great disappointment. I am obliged to go up by the first train on Monday morning. I have a business appointment that I am anxious . . . to miss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cecily: Couldn't you miss it anywhere but in London?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon: No: the appointment is in London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the humorous meaning behind these lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T18:53:22.947" Title="What is the humour behind these lines in 'The Importance Of Being Earnest'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8663" CreationDate="2018-10-20T19:46:22.113" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Some context: I recently did a job as a proofreader for a translated document.  This quickly turned into editing, which in turn turned into mostly re-translating. That's what most of this based on.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It is &lt;em&gt;very useful&lt;/em&gt; for an editor - and even a proofreader - to know the source language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a proofreader who is literally just looking for typos and the like - obvious mistakes in the target language - this is less important. Someone who is doing that only needs to make sure that what they have in front of them is well-written in the target language, and that doesn't require knowledge of what the original author intended.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;But it can still be useful, especially in cases where a single letter can change the meaning (in the target language). Take this as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The painting was a flame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be a typo / autocorrect error for something entirely different, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The painting was aflame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mean entirely different things - one is describing what the painting is &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, the other is informing you that it's on fire - but there's only a single letter difference. This is a situation where it would be useful for a proofreader to have the original text and to understand it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an editor, it's almost &lt;em&gt;essential&lt;/em&gt; for them to be able to understand the original text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An editor needs to rewrite things. To make sure that they're staying true to what the original author intended, they need to know &lt;em&gt;what they wrote&lt;/em&gt;. What they have right now is the translator's interpretation. This is certainly useful, but sometimes, you need to be able to look at the original text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example would be idioms. I've seen translators translate idioms literally. An editor's job would then be to replace this idiom with an idiom in the target language. For the editor to be able to do that, they need to know the language and to know that this is an idiom and what it means. While it's technically &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; to do this without speaking the language - the Internet is your friend - it's much, much, easier when you speak the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, translators aren't infallible. Especially if the author isn't that familiar with the target language, they can't always read through it to make sure that it's accurate. In a job I did recently - ostensibly editing, but eventually ended up almost re-translating it - the translator didn't do a great job. They relied heavily on Google Translate, and the translation wasn't always correct. In this case, they had translated it to be the &lt;em&gt;exact opposite&lt;/em&gt; of what it was in the original text. The original text said something about it being the first time they drew something &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; from real life or remembered; the translator wrote down that it was the first time they had drawn something &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; real life / memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your editor has to be able to recognize when the translator has made a mistake (in those hopefully rare cases). Getting a second pair of eyes on things is definitely better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, something to keep in mind: The editor and the author, if the editor doesn't speak the source language, may have some trouble &lt;em&gt;communicating&lt;/em&gt;. If the author doesn't speak the target language (which, presumably, they don't well, or they wouldn't have had to use a translator), and the editor doesn't speak the source language, how are they supposed to communicate, to make sure that the editor is sticking with the author's intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's much better, easier, and more likely to lead to accurate results when the editor speaks the language that the work was originally written in.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T07:39:33.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T07:39:33.680" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8666" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-21T01:37:48.890" Score="10" ViewCount="4738" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Excellent, i' faith, of the chameleon's dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, act 3, scene 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this sentence mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the chameleon, air and capons representing? How does this relate to Hamlet's feelings toward Claudius?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5209" OwnerDisplayName="Eric Zhang" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-10-21T13:57:30.120" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T17:30:29.673" Title="What does the line “Excellent, i' faith, of the chameleon's dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.” mean, from Hamlet?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8664" CreationDate="2018-10-21T18:53:22.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Algernon is looking for an excuse to leave before Jack gets back. Rather than saying he has to be present at a business appointment, Algernon says that he has to miss the appointment. The humor is that there is no reason to take a train to another place in order to miss an appointment: he would also be missing the appointment if he stayed with Cecily, and yet he pretends he has to go on a train to London in order to miss the appointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack describes Ernest as wicked and lazy elsewhere in the play, and so Algernon seems to be trying to play the part. The fact that Cecily accepts the excuse highlights her tendency to take things extremely literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4442" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T18:53:22.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-21T20:03:52.293" Score="7" ViewCount="322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite a few novels and films have titles which, if they appeared as phrases in everyday speech or writing, would normally have to be preceded by an article or other determiner. Some examples: &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Animal Farm, Little House on the Prairie,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tropic of Cancer&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; among novels, and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Easy Rider, Taxi Driver,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rear Window&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; among films.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;My question&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: what artistic or literary effect does the omission of the leading determiner have in my six examples? Or, equivalently: why might an author prefer the above-cited versions of the titles over, say, &lt;em&gt;An/The Animal Farm, A/The Little House on the Prairie, The Tropic of Cancer, The Easy Rider, The Taxi Driver,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The/A Rear Window&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt it's the same reason (or group of reasons) in all cases. For example, in the answer which I posted below, I argue that the reasons for dropping the article from &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt; are unlikely to apply to &lt;em&gt;Little House on the Prairie.&lt;/em&gt; This is why I think one needs to consider a number of examples before any patterns start to emerge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A bit of grammar&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's temporarily treat each of my six titles not as the name of a novel or film but as just a bit of regular text, a ‘word group’, and let's see how it behaves when we try to form complete sentences with it. We will soon notice two things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, we are normally forced to add another word in front of our word group, e.g. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;my&lt;/strong&gt; little house on the prairie was a good place to grow up&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;next they saw &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt; animal farm.&lt;/em&gt; Words that will work (which we'll called &lt;strong&gt;determiners&lt;/strong&gt;) include (1) the possessives such as &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Alice's&lt;/em&gt;, and (2) the &lt;strong&gt;determinatives,&lt;/strong&gt; which include the articles &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; as well as words such as &lt;em&gt;some, this, that, each,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;every.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the grammatical behavior of our word group is inherited from one of its nouns (&lt;em&gt;farm, house, tropic, rider, driver,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;window&lt;/em&gt;), which is therefore called its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. By ‘grammatical behavior’ I mean facts like these: once we add a determiner, the word group can function as the subject of the sentence, the object of a transitive verb, etc.; when it is the subject, we must have subject-verb agreement; and so on. We say that adding the determiner to our word group turns it into a &lt;strong&gt;noun phrase&lt;/strong&gt; (NP).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word group whose head is a noun but which has no determiner is often called a &lt;strong&gt;nominal&lt;/strong&gt; or sometimes a &lt;a href=&quot;http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-399&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bare nominal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Some nominals can be acceptable even without adding a determiner, in which case they are called &lt;strong&gt;bare NPs&lt;/strong&gt; and are often described as carrying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Zero_article&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;zero article&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or sometimes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://escholarship.org/content/qt2kb4p9r0/qt2kb4p9r0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;null article&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason our titles (when viewed as just text) normally require a determiner is that their head nouns are all &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;count&lt;/strong&gt; nouns&lt;/a&gt; in the singular. (Count nouns are also called &lt;strong&gt;countable&lt;/strong&gt; nouns.) Normally, a nominal can escape the requirement of having a determiner only if its head noun is one of the following: (1) a proper name, (2) a count noun in the plural (&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;houses&lt;/strong&gt; on the hill&lt;/em&gt;), or (3) an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;uncount noun&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (also called &lt;strong&gt;a mass noun, uncountable noun,&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;non-count noun&lt;/strong&gt;—e.g. &lt;em&gt;deep blue &lt;strong&gt;water&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English wouldn't be English if there weren't any exceptions, and indeed there are some rare exceptions to what I just said, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280998/he-was-neither-seer-nor-prophet-how-would-you-explain-the-absence-of-an-articl/281105#281105&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. None of them apply to our titles, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ambiguities: those I excluded, and those that could help&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem, to repeat, is to explain what is the literary effect of having a normally unacceptable nominal be the title—or, equivalently, what reason an author might have for choosing such a title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have picked my particular examples in part because they cannot be explained by pointing out that the lack of an article makes for an interesting ambiguity as far as whether the word is really a noun, or rather an adjective (as in &lt;em&gt;Alien&lt;/em&gt;) or a verb (as in &lt;em&gt;Network&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;True, &lt;em&gt;farm&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; are also verbs, and &lt;em&gt;tropic&lt;/em&gt; is also an adjective. But in my examples, other words make it clear that they are used as nouns there.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose there could be cases where the ambiguity that's being played on is that between the countable and uncountable readings of the head noun. I don't think that's the case in my examples; I don't think any of the head nouns in my examples have any uncount meanings at all (at least not any relevant meanings; &lt;em&gt;house&lt;/em&gt; does have one uncount meaning, that of a style of dance music).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, I think my six examples also can't be explained by postulating a non-standard usage for the head noun, in which a normally count noun is to be interpreted as an uncount one. That explanation &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be viable with some other titles,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; but I don't think it's a believable one with my six examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;I am purposefully not going to give possible examples that come to my mind, so as to not encourage straying off topic.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One kind of ambiguity that does seem possible is that between the indefinite and definite readings of the noun group. This could be relevant to some of my examples (though I don't think it could apply to all of them); in my answer below, I explore this kind of ambiguity in the case of &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there could be an ambiguity in the grammatical number, i.e. in whether the noun group has a singular or a plural meaning. This is a bit of a stretch in my examples, in which all the head nouns have plurals that are not base plurals (i.e. whose form is not identical with the singular). Nevertheless, I will briefly explore this possibility on the example of &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure that titles of some dramas and even of some operas also fall within the scope of my question. However, for definiteness, unless there is a particularly compelling reason, let us please stick to titles of novels and movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;What I am &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asking&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me stress from the outset that this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a grammar question. Coming up with the title of a work of art is itself a creative process, for the title can influence the reading of the rest of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, this is &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; a question about &lt;strong&gt;headlines&lt;/strong&gt; and the writing style used in them, which is sometimes called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Headlinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'headlinese'&lt;/a&gt;. Although the topic of headlinese &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; be somewhat related to my question, it is still true that newspaper/magazine/blog post/etc. articles are not normally taken to be pieces of artistic literature (unless they explicitly are, as when a magazine publishes a short story; that case, of course, is fair game). In headlines, the main consideration is that of saving space. In contrast, while titles of novels and films are usually relatively short (although see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/movies/22titles.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), it seems to me that this is primarily for aesthetic reasons, not pragmatic ones. Moreover, headlinese has many other features, besides the dropping of articles, which are not shared by titles of novels and films. Some examples of these are (1) the preference for the simple present tense (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Governor signs bill&lt;/em&gt;), (2) the extensive use of abbreviations and metonymy (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Wall Street&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;the financial industry&lt;/em&gt;), (3) the absence of honorifics before names of individuals, and (4) the preference for short words which are only much more rarely used in normal speech and writing in that meaning (e.g. &lt;em&gt;bid&lt;/em&gt; for 'attempt', &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; for 'forecast', and &lt;em&gt;tap&lt;/em&gt; for 'select an appointee'). In short, it cannot be said that titles of novels and films—even those where articles are dropped— are written in headlinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar comments apply to any connection to the language of signs and notices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about titles of &lt;strong&gt;poems.&lt;/strong&gt; Poetic language presents a whole other level of complication which I don't want to get into. I admit that some titles of movies and novels could be taken as being poetic, but I also think that this is not a fair thing to say about e.g. &lt;em&gt;Rear Window&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Taxi Driver.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take song lyrics to be a species of poem, and so I don't want to consider titles of songs, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Titles of &lt;strong&gt;visual works of art,&lt;/strong&gt; especially the more abstract and conceptual art, are also often too far removed from ordinary speech and writing to be useful for the purposes of my question. However, visual art of earlier epochs is probably fair game, as is art that is more in line with the traditions of earlier epochs, and which is often more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figurative_art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;figurative&lt;/a&gt;. Indeed, I've found &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/usage-of-articles-in-the-titles-of-paintings.2445231/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a relevant discussion in that context&lt;/a&gt;. In the summary of the research I've done so far, I will present what seems to me the most interesting part of that discussion (&lt;em&gt;Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;A Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;The Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about &lt;strong&gt;band names&lt;/strong&gt; (i.e. the names of rock/pop/rap/etc. music groups)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I am also &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about &lt;strong&gt;brand names.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grammar Girl has an interesting discussion of article use in both band and brand names &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/why-some-band-names-take-the-and-others-dont&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;, but in the end, her conclusions are not relevant to my question. I will explain why in the summary of the research I've done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about the names of ships, trains, and the like (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/169970/why-does-english-use-definite-articles-before-certain-proper-nouns-such-as-the&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/136954/when-to-use-a-definite-article-in-the-name-of-a-ship&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). That context is simply too different from my question. Similarly, I am &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; asking about the names of lakes, mountains, and the like. And I'm not asking about &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/171462/why-is-the-added-before-wasp-but-not-before-antman/171472#171472&quot;&gt;the names of superheroes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary of the research conducted so far&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the suggestion of Gallifreyan, I've migrated the research I've done so far to an answer (see below). It's quite long, and it includes works by others as well as a little original analysis of mine that I've done for the case of &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5206" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T16:44:36.993" Title="What is the literary effect of dropping articles from titles?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8668" CreationDate="2018-10-21T20:46:17.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Originally, what follows was a section of the question. However, at the suggestion of Gallifreyan, I've migrated it to this answer. It's quite long, and it includes works by others as well as a little original analysis of mine that I've done for the case of &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary of the research conducted so far&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'Book titles and their articles' by Leszek Berezowski&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ifa.uni.wroc.pl/site_media/uploads/documents/berezowski/Book%20titles%20and%20their%20articles.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This author is a linguist who actually wrote a whole book on how to understand article-free noun phrases (&lt;em&gt;The Myth of the Zero Article&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1441185135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). The paper under discussion deals with non-fiction, and particularly with titles that feature &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;-phrases (&lt;em&gt;Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;The Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt; vs. &lt;em&gt;A Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt;), and so is not that relevant to most of my examples. Nevertheless, since one of my examples features an &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;-phrase, I should briefly explain what the paper says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Berezowski says that the contrast between &lt;em&gt;The Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt; is this. In the former, we have a narrowing down of the field of study from everything that can be asked about reading to specifically its psychological aspects. In contrast, in the latter, there is no such narrowing down. Just as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;soup of the day&lt;/em&gt; is not an aspect of the day but a dish named after its French model, &lt;em&gt;Journal of Linguistics&lt;/em&gt; is not a subfield of the study of language but a periodical devoted to language research,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so the authors of &lt;em&gt;Psychology of Reading&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do not view psychology as merely one of the angles at which the process of reading can be researched but treat psychology of reading as a fully fledged discipline in its own right. In other words the title proclaims that the book will survey an entire existing branch of knowledge or create a new paradigm of research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, does not explain &lt;em&gt;Tropic of Cancer&lt;/em&gt;. Of course, this title is a play-on-words that needs a bit of explaining. In the first place, in its 'standard' meaning (which by the way always includes the definite article), &lt;em&gt;the Tropic of Cancer,&lt;/em&gt; also called &lt;em&gt;the Northern Tropic,&lt;/em&gt; is 'the most northerly circle of latitude on Earth at which the Sun can be directly overhead. This occurs on the June solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the Sun to its maximum extent' &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_of_Cancer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(source)&lt;/a&gt;. Its southern counterpart is called &lt;em&gt;the Tropic of Capricorn.&lt;/em&gt; From the same source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When this line of latitude was named in the last centuries BC, the Sun was in the constellation Cancer (Latin for &lt;em&gt;crab&lt;/em&gt;) at the June solstice, the time each year that the Sun reaches its zenith at this latitude. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, this is no longer the case; today the Sun is in Taurus at the June solstice. The word &amp;quot;tropic&amp;quot; itself comes from the Greek &amp;quot;trope (τροπή)&amp;quot;, meaning &lt;em&gt;turn&lt;/em&gt; (change of direction, or circumstances), inclination, referring to the fact that the Sun appears to &amp;quot;turn back&amp;quot; at the solstices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as the book, its author Henry Miller said the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7n9ASjH5FicC&amp;amp;lpg=PT42&amp;amp;dq=%22It%20was%20because%20to%20me%20cancer%20symbolizes%20the%20disease%22&amp;amp;pg=PT43#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22It%20was%20because%20to%20me%20cancer%20symbolizes%20the%20disease%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you know why I called my first book &lt;em&gt;Tropic of Cancer&lt;/em&gt;? It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch … Yes, from scratch, no question about it, for better or for worse … What I want is to halt evolution, to go backward down the path we have taken, to back to the world before childhood, to regress, regress, regress, further and further, until we get to the place we have only lately left behind, where culture and civilization do not figure … It is time we start to think, to feel, to see the universe in a way that is uncultivated, primitive—but this is also without but this is also without doubt the most difficult thing in the world to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even more that can be said: &lt;em&gt;cancer&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;crab,&lt;/em&gt; which is 'the only living creature which can walk backwards and forwards and sideways with equal facility.' A nice discussion can be found in the blog post 'Naming &lt;em&gt;Tropic Of Cancer&lt;/em&gt;', &lt;a href=&quot;http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/2008/08/naming-tropic-of-cancer.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for our purposes, note that neither the 'regular' meaning nor Henry Miller's wordplay fit Berezowski's paradigm. In the regular usage, the narrowing down goes the opposite way than in Berezowski's examples: there are two &lt;em&gt;tropics&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; phrase specifies which one. To fit Berezowski's paradigm, we would need to interpret &lt;em&gt;[the] Tropic of Cancer&lt;/em&gt; as referring, in the first place, to the general topic of 'cancer', and then to a narrowed-down topic of &lt;em&gt;tropic&lt;/em&gt; as it concerns cancer. And that, of course, makes no sense in either the regular or Henry Miller's sense of the phrase. In this respect Henry Miller's meaning is similar to the regular meaning: the turning or regression he is talking about is not a narrowing down of the topic of the disease of cancer, but rather something like a regression caused by that disease. Alternatively, this turning is like the walk of a crab.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could argue that Miller is dropping the article as a hint that he's not talking about the Northern Tropic but about something else. I don't find this persuasive. Even if the definite article were retained, I don't think readers would need a hint to consider the possibility that the title is somehow symbolic or a play-on-words. Conversely, I don't think there's much symbolism in the title of the movie &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Moon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and yet the usually required definite article is dropped. All said, I very much doubt that Miller's primary consideration in dropping the article was to make sure people consider what else his title might mean other than the Northern Tropic. Maybe that was part of it, but I can't believe that's the full explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;'Riding a Straight Line between&lt;/em&gt; The Wild One &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Wild Hogs' by Thomas Goodmann&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following passage makes a comparison between the titles of the movies &lt;em&gt;The Wild One&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Wild Hogs,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; specifically as far as what effect the inclusion or exclusion of the article has on them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;True, &lt;em&gt;Wild Hogs&lt;/em&gt; doesn't belong to my paradigm, since &lt;em&gt;hogs&lt;/em&gt; is a count noun in the plural and so it &lt;strong&gt;could&lt;/strong&gt; appear without a determiner even in everyday speech and writing. However, perhaps any insight gained in this case could be helpful with my examples as well.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of the film likewise performs work of cultural containment when read against its precursory text. Like many narratives of heroism and anti-heroism, &lt;em&gt;The Wild One&lt;/em&gt; instantiates the exceptional—indeed, marginal—masculinity of a single member, Johnny Strabler, among a group of men, a trope in narrative evident since &lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey,&lt;/em&gt; and extant in American culture from James Fennimore Cooper’s novel &lt;em&gt;The Deerslayer&lt;/em&gt; (1841), to Michael Cimino’s film &lt;em&gt;The Deerhunter&lt;/em&gt; (1978), and beyond. In the case of Benedek’s film, the plural title, &lt;strong&gt;lacking a definite article,&lt;/strong&gt; emphasizes the corporate community of identity in the non-gang relations of the four Wild Hogs, each supporting one another, yet not within a hypermasculinated group, such as a motorcycle gang, so that each is not code-bound to prioritize the group over the self, and is therefore free to pursue his own pursuits, while maintaining membership. It is significant then that when Damien Blade asks the Hogs, “What do you call yourselves?” they answer initially by giving their first names, so that Blade reformulates the question to elicit their group identity as “Wild Hogs.” The non-gang’s interrelations emphasize somewhat fluid and empathic masculine identities, as opposed to the comically flattened characters and more strictly stratified relations of the “real” motorcycle gang, whose stereotyped identities signal their outmoded masculinity, replete with clubhouse/bar, ape-hangers and loud pipes, coercion, and threat of violence. And as we will see, a latent impulse of homosexual violence erupts from gang member Red, only to be slugged into silence by Blade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://ijms.nova.edu/Spring2014/IJMS_Artcl.Goodmann.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;, boldfaced emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, even supposing this explanation completely explains the reason why the filmmakers chose to go with &lt;em&gt;Wild Hogs&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;The Wild Hogs,&lt;/em&gt; this explanation does not easily carry over to my examples. The suggestion is that the lack of the definite article emphasizes that 'each [member of Wild Hogs] is not code-bound to prioritize the group over the self'. But in my examples, the relevant nouns do not denote a group, except possibly in &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;; but even that title is not the &lt;strong&gt;name&lt;/strong&gt; of a group.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Three blog posts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'David V. Appleyard's Guide to Article Usage in English'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://davidappleyard.com/english/articles.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one mention of book/movie titles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give added punch, articles are often dropped in the titles of books, movies, music and other works of art. (Example: &lt;em&gt;Journey into Hell&lt;/em&gt; sounds even more thrilling than &lt;em&gt;The Journey into Hell&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For our purposes, this is almost an empty statement. &lt;em&gt;Added punch&lt;/em&gt; simply means that the author thought it sounded better, which of course the author did, or else he or she would not have dropped the article. The question is &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; does dropping the article have that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'The Huge Impact of ‘The’ in Movie Titles'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://dejareviewer.com/2016/02/10/the-huge-impact-of-the-in-movie-titles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contains an opinion regarding my question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Unsettling Absence&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, sometimes the absence of “The” gives a movie title an unsettling aura. It doesn’t sound wrong, but it feels like there’s something missing or just a little off-kilter about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Psycho, Alien, Aliens, Predator, Blade Runner, Gladiator&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without “The,” none of these titles point to a definitive subject. They become rather subjective and even more fascinating as we explore their full implications as the story unfolds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main comment here is that these titles would also not point to a definite subject if they were preceded by the &lt;strong&gt;indefinite&lt;/strong&gt; article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'The &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; is THE best thing to happen to the titles of the movies in the theaters'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://ew.com/article/2011/01/28/the-movie-titles/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I didn't find anything useful in this blog post, and I'm only mentioning it because 1. it &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; as if it should be relevant, and, more importantly, because 2. it disputes the claim that the title is 'punchier' without the definite article. (Provided, of course, the whole post isn't tongue-in-cheek, which it may well be.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An explanation from wordreference.com&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an attempt at an explanation (in the context of titles of paintings), which however I don't think succeeds ('Usage of articles in the titles of paintings', &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/usage-of-articles-in-the-titles-of-paintings.2445231/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; - a Japanese vase chosen at random from many examples probably because (i) it was convenient and/or (ii) it appealed to the artist.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt; Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; - An example, probably typical, taken from many Japanese vases.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt; Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; - (i) the definitive example of vase of Japanese origin or (ii) the Japanese vase that is associated with some commonly known event/person/history/style/etc. (iia) used where the painting is really famous: “The Mona Lisa,” “The Sunflowers,” “The portrait of Whistler's Mother.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between the &lt;em&gt;A&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt; versions is clear enough, but I'm not sure I understand the explanation of the contrast between &lt;em&gt;Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;A Japanese Vase.&lt;/em&gt; According to the explanation, both &lt;em&gt;Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;A Japanese Vase&lt;/em&gt; refer to Japanese vases chosen from many other vases. Could not the former be 'a typical example' of a Japanese vase? Could not the latter be a vase that was either convenient or that appealed to the artist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Questions on StackExchange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over on the English Language and Usage StackExchange (EL&amp;amp;U SE), there was the following recent question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/469114/zero-articles-in-movie-and-book-titles/469200#469200&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Zero articles in movie and book titles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which, frankly, was what motivated me to pose this question on the Literature SE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/469117/155553&quot;&gt;The accepted answer&lt;/a&gt; there said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the case when someone shouts out your name: you turn to look, without concerning yourself whether they have defined fully who you are. The essential quality of the communication is that both sides understand what is meant, in the minimum of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is along the lines of the 'saving space' explanation of headlinese, and as such I find it unconvincing. The title of a film or a novel is part of the artistic expression of the work, and can color the entire reading of it; I simply do not believe that &lt;em&gt;efficiency&lt;/em&gt; is the primary consideration of literary authors when choosing the title of their work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/469144/155553&quot;&gt;Another answer&lt;/a&gt; said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the time a title, especially that of a book or movie, is meant to entice, describe, but also leave a question in the air, so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is close to the explanation given in the 'unsettling absence' passage, above. But is it really true that &lt;em&gt;Taxi Driver&lt;/em&gt; sounds more mysterious than &lt;em&gt;The Taxi Driver&lt;/em&gt;? And if it sounds more 'enticing' without the article, is there anything one could say as to &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; that is so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a missed opportunity to address this issue in another question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/105199/usage-of-a-and-the-in-titles&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Usage of “a” and “the” in titles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) on EL&amp;amp;U SE, as it was not discussed why &lt;em&gt;Apple&lt;/em&gt; should be without an article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/444254/articles-in-movie-or-book-titles-noun-vs-adjective&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Articles in movie or book titles: noun vs. adjective&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, turned on playing up ambiguity in the titles, which, as I said, I don't believe is what's happening in my examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Band names&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difficulty in applying the discussion of band names to my question is the same as it was with the discussion of the movie &lt;em&gt;Wild Hogs&lt;/em&gt;: both band names and motorcycle gang names are names of groups of people. This is just not the case in my six examples, and thus much of the discussion surrounding band names is irrelevant to my question. This is the case with the discussion on Grammar Girl &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/why-some-band-names-take-the-and-others-dont&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(here)&lt;/a&gt; as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bottom line is that fans are likely to think a band name should have &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; in the name if they view the name as describing the members rather than being collective. In other words, we probably don’t call it The Led Zeppelin because we simply think of Led Zeppelin as the name of the band, and don't think of it as describing the band, but we probably do call them The Eagles because we’d say “Don Henley is an Eagle.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is interesting, but not relevant to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Brand names&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the difficulty is that brand names have a very particular purpose which is not shared by titles of novel and movies. The Grammar Girl says &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/why-some-band-names-take-the-and-others-dont?page=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following&lt;/a&gt; :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason for [dropping the articles from brand names] is to save space and characters in Web addresses and tweets, but another reason, according to two marketing experts quoted in the article, amounts to the idea that a singular count noun without an article sounds like something more personal than a mere object or corporation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is again interesting, but not at all relevant to my questions. There is no issue of presenting something as personal vs an object or a corporation in my six examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some posts on the web one might hope would provide some insight, but that don't. An example is 'When should articles be avoided in titles?' on Quora &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/When-should-articles-be-avoided-in-titles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;An attempt at answering my question in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easy_Rider&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345169/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;documentary&lt;/a&gt;, the film's director and co-star &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Hopper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dennis Hopper&lt;/a&gt; explained the meaning of the term &lt;em&gt;an easy rider&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZnMvRGVSYs#t=1h00m48s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as follows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An easy rider is a person that is not a pimp, but he lives off a woman; he lives off a whore. He's her easy rider. He's the one that she loves and she gives money to. He doesn't pimp her, but he's her easy rider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;It was the screenwriter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Southern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terry Southern&lt;/a&gt; who came up with the title. Dennis Hopper claimed this was actually Southern's only contribution to the film, despite being listed as a co-screenwiter together with the film's co-stars Hopper and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fonda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Fonda&lt;/a&gt;; see &lt;a href=&quot;http://mentalfloss.com/article/77348/13-fast-facts-about-easy-rider&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Ebert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roger Ebert's&lt;/a&gt; original &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/easy-rider-1969&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1969 review of the film&lt;/a&gt; quite useful. The suggestion there seems to be that while the middle class is prostituting itself to the establishment, the so-called non-conformists like the Fonda and Hopper characters (Wyatt and Billy) are just as bad. They have also sold out; they also are prostitutes, or, more precisely, they are those who freeload off prostitutes: the 'easy riders'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I also have other associations with the term &lt;em&gt;an easy rider&lt;/em&gt;: it could refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/2014/10/11/354875096/behind-the-motorcycles-in-easy-rider-a-long-obscured-story&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the type of motocycle that the movie made famous&lt;/a&gt;, as being easy to ride (though they absolutely &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZnMvRGVSYs#t=15m21s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;were not in reality&lt;/a&gt;); or perhaps it could refer to the kind of poeple who ride them, because they ride them effortlessly (though actually they were &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZnMvRGVSYs#t=18m30s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not that easy to ride, &lt;/a&gt; especially at long distances). Both interpretations would serve to identify Wyatt and Billy as those who are the ‘easy riders’ here in the other meaning of that term (“freeloading lovers of prostitutes”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, about the articles. Because there are two 'easy riders' in the movie, neither &lt;em&gt;The Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt; nor &lt;em&gt;An Easy Rider&lt;/em&gt; seem suitable (there are probably other reasons as well, but this one is arguably sufficient on its own). This leaves us with the following choices: (1) &lt;em&gt;The Easy Riders,&lt;/em&gt; (2) &lt;em&gt;Easy Riders,&lt;/em&gt; and (3) &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option (1) sounds like the name of a motorcycle gang. If that association were made, it would be a very relevant one in this particular movie. As Roger Ebert wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Easy Rider” takes the gang leader (Fonda) and condenses his gang into one uptight archetype (played by director Hopper.) It takes the aimless rebellion of the bike gangs and channels it into specific rejection of the establishment (by which is meant everything from rednecks to the Pentagon to hippies on communes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the context of the movie, &lt;em&gt;the Easy Riders&lt;/em&gt; would not make sense as a name for this skeleton band. For most of the movie, Wyatt and Billy think they are being very clever and free and so on; it is only at the very end that one of them realizes it's not so (the 'We blew it' line of Fonda). Therefore, for most of the movie, if they were to name themselves at all, it would be something more positive. I would think calling themselves “the Easy Riders” would be too cynical and out of character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option (2) could also be a gang name (like &lt;em&gt;Wild Hogs&lt;/em&gt;), in which case what I just said about option (1) applies. Alternatively, option (2) may suggest there are other 'easy riders.' And on the one hand, there are: there are no doubt countless others who are trying to avoid the various negative aspects of conventional life, but end up selling themselves out in one way or another. But on the other hand, the movie clearly emphasizes individuality and individualism. There are many kinds of sellouts, but in this particular movie we probably don't want to suggest it's some sort of homogeneous mass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves us with option (3). It may seem we have now arrived at it by a process of elimination, once we realized that the other four possibilities are all unsuitable for various reasons. However, we are actually not done yet. After all, this option carries its own set of connotations and associations, which could concievably make it even more unatractive than the other options. So we have to now analyze this option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the most basic of all the options, in the sense that it involves the base form of the noun. Without any marks of definiteness or indefiniteness, this option comes the closest to denoting 'the pure concept of easy-riderness'. It does so without having to use words such as &lt;em&gt;riderness&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;ridership&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;riding,&lt;/em&gt; which, I will consent to admit, obviously sound plain ugly, at least if one tries to use them in this particular title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way to get at 'the pure concept of easy-riderness' is to consider what kinds of ambiguity are present. Here we might have an ambiguity of definiteness: it's simultaneously 'an easy rider' and also 'the easy rider'. (Perhaps it's even also 'easy riders' as well as 'the easy riders'—indicating an ambiguity of the grammatical number—if the base form is looked at abstractly enough. I admit this sort of ambiguity seems like a stretch in this case, however.) At any rate, the article-free base form perhaps manages to convey at least some of these multiple meanings simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Summary&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've presented several attempts to understand the omission of determiners in titles such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Animal Farm, Little House on the Prairie, Tropic of Cancer, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rear Window.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; In the case of &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider,&lt;/em&gt; I eliminated all other possibilities on various grounds, and suggested that the article-free base form expresses the pure concept behind all of the variations of that form whose definiteness is fixed (&lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; + singular, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; + singular, &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; + plural, no article + plural).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if that last suggestion of mine works for &lt;em&gt;Easy Rider,&lt;/em&gt; I don't think it works always. In particular, I can't see how it would work for &lt;em&gt;Little House on the Prairie.&lt;/em&gt; Incidentally, that title is the one whose explanation is perhaps needed most urgently, because the adjective &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; carries a special connotation when used without an article. For example, &lt;em&gt;She has &lt;strong&gt;little&lt;/strong&gt; time for that&lt;/em&gt; means she has basically no time, whereas &lt;em&gt;She has &lt;strong&gt;a little&lt;/strong&gt; time for that&lt;/em&gt; means she can indeed spare some time. True, &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; can't be used literally like that in the construction that appears in the title, but here we are talking about language whose rules have been relaxed and where associations are much more free-flowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5206" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T16:42:15.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-21T21:18:39.540" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Ivanhoe right now and very much enjoying it. Each chapter in Ivanhoe has an epigraph, often very closely related to the plot of the chapter, meaning that it is often very easy to surmise exactly what will occur purely by reading the epigraphs. While a lot of Ivanhoe is fairly obvious - I pretty much saw who the Black Sluggard and the Disinherited Knight were immediately - this strikes me as very odd, to give away the plot in such a significant way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the epigraphs are more commentary on what is occurring, which makes me wonder - why did Scott not include more of these &quot;commentary epigraphs&quot; and less of the &quot;plot epigraphs&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T21:18:39.540" Title="Why did Scott choose to include so many epigraphs in Ivanhoe that give away the plot?" Tags="&lt;plot-element&gt;&lt;ivanhoe&gt;&lt;sir-walter-scott&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8666" CreationDate="2018-10-21T21:22:20.267" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;To start: what is the most basic sense here? What is the &quot;chameleon's dish&quot;? And what is a capon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, among the folklore of Shakespeare's time, there was a belief that chameleons lived on nothing but air, so the &quot;chameleon's dish&quot; is simply &quot;air&quot;. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;capon&lt;/a&gt; is a castrated rooster, sometimes force-fed, which was viewed as superior eating to ordinary roosters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the most basic meaning here is pretty straightforward: &quot;like a chameleon, I live on air, and very good air it is, filled with promises. You can not force-feed a capon like that&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interpretation I've found by others (best summarized &lt;a href=&quot;http://princehamlet.com/QA.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;): Hamlet is a chameleon, living mostly on promises from Claudius of what is due to him (including a pun &quot;air&quot;/&quot;heir&quot;), while Claudius thinks of Hamlet as a gelded, harmless, capon to be fed, possibly for later slaughter, while Hamlet in fact is only masquerading (again, chameleon-like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, part of the fun with Shakespeare is that there is room for other interpretations. When I first read the line, I took it to mean that Hamlet is filled with excitement about things that are about to happen: most obviously the play, but we in the audience also know he's interested in the reactions to the play.  The capon would then be Claudius, content and stupid like a capon, who can not &quot;taste the air&quot; and is unaware of things to come; instead stuffing himself with more traditional food. This does not quite fit quite as well with the lines that follows, alas, so the traditional interpretation is probably right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2018-10-21T21:22:20.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8656" CreationDate="2018-10-22T13:55:28.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;She's not mocking Chasuble: it's clear that he has the skills required of a clergyman. Rather it is a joke based on the idea that people who write books know nothing. From that, it follows that not having written a book is a sign of intelligence. It's a typically Wildean reversal of common sense. If she was being sarcastic, she would be implying that Chasuble is actually an idiot, but that doesn't match either her character or how Chasuble is otherwise presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main characters are seeking a clergyman who is sufficiently skilled his day job to perform a christening, which Chasuble is apparently able to do (he boasts of his skill at this elsewhere and discusses the adequacy of sprinkling vs immersion). Cecily is praising him as up to the job. They don't require someone of particular book-learning or literary ability, just someone who perform the rite. Elsewhere we learn that Chasuble has a number of unpublished sermons and some classical knowledge, so he's not stupid but equally he's no genius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cecily is described as a character with common-sense and a good nature, not someone who would be cruel about Chasuble or mock him as insufficiently educated. For instance we're told she &quot;has got a capital appetite, goes long walks, and pays no attention at all to her lessons.&quot; She also complains that studying German makes her look ugly. Her humorous remarks usually arise from a whimsical or superficial understanding of the world, rather than cruelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite her good nature, she does offer a less than flattering comment about novel-writing: &quot;I believe that Memory is responsible for nearly all the three-volume novels that Mudie sends us.&quot; Even here the joke may be Wilde's rather than hers (for me, her remarks of Memory don't strike me as very in-character, sounding more like Wilde than an 18 year old girl). Throughout the play Miss Prism's literary endeavour (&quot;a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality&quot;) is mocked, so this fits with Wilde's disdain for the practice of writing books. Certainly we should not think less of someone who has not written a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The audience will probably regard Cecily's method of argument as both ridiculous and also perhaps with a kernel of truth, hence the joke. But it's not intended to be cruel or cutting by her. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/844/844-h/844-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quotes from Project Gutenberg text&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2018-10-22T13:55:28.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-22T21:11:19.363" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.blackcatpoems.com/h/the_jewel_of_the_secret_treasury.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Jewel of the Secret Treasury&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by the famous Persian poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafez&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hafez&lt;/a&gt; reads very much like a love poem, but I'm failing to pick up on the precise details of the metaphor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The jewel of the secret treasury&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is still the same as once it was; the seal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon Love's treasure casket, and the key,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are still what thieves can neither break nor steal;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Still among lovers loyalty is found,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And therefore faithful eyes still strew the ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the same pearls that mine once strewed for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the &quot;jewel of the secret treasury&quot;, the &quot;seal&quot;, &quot;key&quot;, and &quot;pearls&quot;? I get that it's a love poem, but I'm trying to understand the exact meaning in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T03:15:13.740" Title="Symbolism in &quot;The Jewel of the Secret Treasury&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8673" CreationDate="2018-10-23T03:15:13.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;jewel of the secret treasury&quot; strikes me as the heart, and the &quot;seal&quot; and &quot;key&quot; refer to the heart being preserved for the lover and loved, while the &quot;pearls&quot; refer to the loving glances between. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hearts are often referred to as jewels in poetry, and we also read of the &quot;seal&quot; being &lt;em&gt;upon&lt;/em&gt; the &quot;treasure casket&quot;; as the heart is a &quot;jewel&quot;, this implies it being a treasure, and thus implies the seal being upon the heart; the key, mentioned in the same line, therefore unlocks the seal. This sort of preservation of the heart for each other, and pure romantic love, is indeed something thieves &quot;can neither break nor steal&quot;, and the seal and key further imply the &quot;loyalty&quot; that &quot;still among lovers is found&quot;. Later in the poem, too, we see the reference to the blood of the heart and rubies, further implying the jewel of the secret treasury is the heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally we come to the pearls; this I find a little more difficult to interpret. However, when I first looked at the poem my thoughts went to the glances you see lovers give each other. You can spot people in love by the way they look at each other, and I think that this poem is also implying that by looking at the ground you are not looking at anyone else in that way (&quot;&lt;em&gt;faithful&lt;/em&gt; eyes&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;loyalty&lt;/em&gt; [among lovers]&quot;; italics my own). We also see in a later line the reference to &quot;a dart from thy bent brows has wounded me&quot; implying the angry glance wounding, which is in contrast to the pearls, or faithful glances, rewarding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is thus setting up the love of the two, and how the speaker's heart is still saved for the other, while the second stanza sets up the argument the loved has with lover, and the lover's wait even still for her to come back, and then the third stanza talks again of his heart and lips (both remind one of blood-red rubies) and how they are still saved, and how he will not hide or forget his love (&quot;Would'st hide the stain / Of my heart's blood?&quot;), and then finally the fourth and final stanza talks of the loved's rule, almost cruel now, over his heart, as he still has not gotten over his love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T03:15:13.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T08:22:44.023" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m trying to id a Native American coming of age short novel that I read in 3rd grade (published prior to 1981) similar to Call It Courage that features a young boy who wanders off into the wilderness for I think a coming of age ceremony . . . I remember that moccasins or learning how to make them was an important element, as well as either making or finding a stone knife . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5219" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T08:22:44.023" Title="Native American coming of age young adult novel published prior to 1981" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8678" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T12:54:58.577" Score="2" ViewCount="257" Body="&lt;p&gt;Any specific reasons for Jung and his colleagues to write this book in English? The majority of his writings seem to be in German and most of his colleagues seem German speaking as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure this is the correct place to ask this but didn't find a better one. The questions seems out of topic for the &quot;psychology and neurology&quot; stackexchange as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5220" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T12:54:58.577" Title="Why did Carl Jung write &quot;Man and his symbols&quot; in English?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8662" CreationDate="2018-10-23T16:10:26.810" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/allusion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allusion&lt;/a&gt;, a reference to something outside the text.  It is common, not just in poetry, but in literature of all types. It can be an extremely effective technique for an audience that understands the references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as you have &quot;alluded&quot; to, the problem with allusion is that its effect depends on your familiarity with the the source.  Work that refers to transitory pop-culture phenomena, or to personal inside knowledge, or to a not-widely-known sub-culture, tends to not travel as well, or age as gracefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best bet is to make sure your work stands up without the allusions, and then they serve as a kind of &quot;bonus&quot; for the people who do understand them. In the case of the Williams poem, plenty of people have enjoyed it or been struck by it without necessarily knowing what it means (or perhaps, because they don't know what it means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T16:10:26.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-23T19:51:27.670" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot remember where I read a quote about holocaust (partial quote further down) and although I'm almost certain that it was from some jewish author who himself survived holocaust I cannot remember the author either. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote itself was along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...because it was not the devil that made holocaust, but you and I.&#xA;  Where there is humanity, there is holocaust/Auschwitz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think the context was that labelling the holocaust and people who did it as simply evil was a disservice to the cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone recognize the quote or maybe the style and sentiment of writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5225" LastEditorUserId="5225" LastEditDate="2018-10-23T20:22:53.737" LastActivityDate="2018-10-23T20:22:53.737" Title="Finding author and source of quote about holocaust" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8682" CreationDate="2018-10-24T14:42:10.367" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read a fiction book about a British person who woke up in a hotel room looking like a completely different person. He was drugged and given plastic surgery so that he would resemble a scientist that was working on a super weapon. It's a very good book but for the life of me I can't figure out what this book is or find a copy. I thought it was called &quot;Tightrope walkers&quot; or some variation but googling the name gives me a completely different book. Does anyone know what this book is called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5228" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T20:08:34.707" Title="Looking for book about a person who was given plastic surgery to look like a super weapon creator" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8681" CreationDate="2018-10-24T20:08:34.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1218914.The_Tightrope_Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tightrope Men&lt;/a&gt; by Desmond Bagley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Giles Denison's life is turned upside down when he awakes to find&#xA;  himself in a luxurious hotel in Oslo and, peering into the bathroom&#xA;  mirror, discovers the face of another man! He has been kidnapped from&#xA;  his flat in London and transformed into famous Finnish scientist, Dr&#xA;  Harold Feltham Meyrick. Compelled to adjust to his new persona&#xA;  (including meeting his daughter) and to play out the role assigned to&#xA;  him by his captors, he embarks on a dangerous escapade from Norway to&#xA;  Finland and across the border into Soviet Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2018-10-24T20:08:34.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8683" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8261" CreationDate="2018-10-25T00:50:49.633" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Slothrop is not a pedophile, Bianca is not a child&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bianca (on the first look) is 11-12 but in fact she is around 16-17, which would make the sexual relation far less squicky without pedophilic undertones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How old IS Bianca?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slothrop thinks, &amp;quot;Bianca's a knockout, alright: 11 or 12, dark and lovely [...]&amp;quot; (p.463), but how old is Bianca, really? Well ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bianca is conceived during the filming of Alpdrücken (&amp;quot;I think Bianca is [Schlepzig's] child. She was conceived while we were filming this.&amp;quot; - p.395) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ilse was conceived after Franz Pökler saw Alpdrücken (&amp;quot;he knew that had to be the night, Alpdrücken night, that Ilse was conceived.&amp;quot; - p.397) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Leni had already given birth to Ilse when she was seeing Peter Sachsa, e.g. &amp;quot;Ilse is awake, and crying. [...] They ought to try Peter after all. He'll have milk.&amp;quot; (p.163); and Sachsa is killed during a street action in 1930 (&amp;quot;Taken forcibly over in 1930 by a blow from a police truncheon [...]&amp;quot; - p.152) &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Placing Bianca's conception, say, 6 months to a year before Ilse's (depending on how long it took for Alpdrücken to reach the theatres and how long it took Franz Pökler to go see it), Bianca's birth would have been in 1928 or 1929. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Slothrop meets Bianca aboard the Anubis in 1945. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Thus Bianca must be 16 or 17&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Bianca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Slothrop first sees her during the orgy, Bianca has been &amp;quot;fetishized&amp;quot; to look like a &amp;quot;Lolita&amp;quot; - a pre-teen girl, something that pedophile would want, while at the same time she is much older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T03:04:13.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-25T14:36:49.647" Score="3" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But summun ’ull come ater meä mayhap wi’ ’is kittle o’ steam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huzzin’ an’ maäzin’ the blessed feälds wi’ the Divil’s oaän teäm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;mean in modern English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5235" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T19:48:34.733" Title="What do these lines mean in Tennyson's poem &quot;Northern Farmer - Old Style&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8686" CreationDate="2018-10-25T16:15:23.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alfred-lord-tennysons-the-northern-farmer-with-manuscript-revisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Context&lt;/a&gt;: this poem is part of a pair, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45371/northern-farmer-old-style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Northern Farmer - Old Style&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45372/northern-farmer-new-style&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Northern Farmer - New Style&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, both written in strong dialect from Tennyson's home county of Lincolnshire, in which Tennyson portrays the differing attitudes of the 'traditional' and 'modern' farmers of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the specific lines you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;summun&amp;quot; is a common and fairly natural contraction of the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;someone&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;'ull&amp;quot; seems like the same morpheme that we'd more commonly represent by &amp;quot;'ll&amp;quot;, as seen in phrases like &amp;quot;we'll&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;they'll&amp;quot; and sometimes also phrases like &amp;quot;someone'll&amp;quot;: in other words, a contraction of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;will&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;ater meä&amp;quot;: the letters &amp;quot;eä&amp;quot; are used a lot in this poem for words which in standard English are pronounced &lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt; (for example, &amp;quot;beän&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;peä&amp;quot;, etc.) So the second word here is &amp;quot;me&amp;quot;, which suggests the first one must be &amp;quot;after&amp;quot;: we have &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;after me&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mayhap&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mayhap&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is an old-fashioned word for &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;perhaps&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;wi' 'is&amp;quot; - these are standard contractions for &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;with his&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;kittle o' steam&amp;quot; - given the context of steam, and the again standard contraction &amp;quot;o'&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;of&amp;quot;, it seems clear that this means &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;kettle of steam&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Huzzin’&amp;quot; - according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/good_glossary/pages/words.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this guide to Lincolnshire dialect&lt;/a&gt;, this means a whirring noise; perhaps here we could 'translate' it as &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;buzzing&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;an’&amp;quot; - standard contraction for &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;and&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;maäzin’&amp;quot; - this is the only part I'm not sure about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;feälds&amp;quot; - as before, interpreting &amp;quot;eä&amp;quot; as the phoneme &lt;code&gt;/iː/&lt;/code&gt;, this should be &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;fields&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Divil’s oaän teäm&amp;quot; - here &amp;quot;Divil&amp;quot; (with a capitalised D) is almost &amp;quot;Devil&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;teäm&amp;quot; must be &amp;quot;team&amp;quot;, so the word in the middle is probably &amp;quot;own&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the lines are, in more standard English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But someone will come after me, perhaps with his kettle of steam,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buzzing and &lt;em&gt;[maäzin’?]&lt;/em&gt; the blessed fields with the Devil’s own team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Actually these are among the lines I find the &lt;em&gt;least&lt;/em&gt; difficult to understand in this poem! It's all the rest that are more troublesome.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T16:15:23.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8686" CreationDate="2018-10-25T16:20:26.753" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this poem, Tennyson uses nonstandard spelling to convey the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Midlands_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dialect of Lincolnshire&lt;/a&gt; where he grew up. His son Hallam wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lincolnshire dialect poems are so true in dialect and feeling, that when they were first read in that county a farmer’s daughter exclaimed, “That’s Lincoln labourer’s talk, and I thought Mr Tennyson was a gentleman.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hallam Tennyson (1897), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8iZJiWCTMOIC&amp;amp;pg=PA10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Memoir&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 2, p. 10&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In standard spelling, the couplet would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But someone will come after me mayhap with his kettle of steam&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Huzzing and mazing the blessed fields with the Devil’s own team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the vocabulary is archaic (a common feature of rural dialects): ‘mayhap’ = ‘perhaps’, ‘huzz’ = ‘buzz’, and ‘maze’ = ‘wander’. By “kettle of steam” the farmer means the kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_engine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;portable steam engine&lt;/a&gt; that was coming into use for ploughing in the 1860s when Tennyson wrote the poem. The farmer would have employed a team of horses, hence the metaphor of the “Devil’s own team”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-25T19:48:34.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-26T21:55:09.647" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his &lt;em&gt;Many Thousands Gone&lt;/em&gt;, James Baldwin wrote   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We cannot, to begin with, divorce this book from the specific social&#xA;  climate of that time; it was one of the last of all through the&#xA;  thirties, dealing with the inequities of the social structure of&#xA;  America.  It was published one year before our entry into the last&#xA;  world war–which is to say, very few years after the dissolution of the&#xA;  WPA and the end of the New Deal and at time when bread lines and soup&#xA;  kitchens and bloody industrial battles were bright in everyone’s&#xA;  memory.  The rigors of that unexpected time filled us not only with a&#xA;  genuinely bewildered and despairing idealism–so that, because there at&#xA;  least was something to fight for, young men went off to die in&#xA;  Spain–but also with a genuinely bewildered self-consciousness.  &lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Negro, who had been during the magnificent twenties a passionate and&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;delightful primitive, now became, as one of the things we were most&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;self-conscious about, our most oppressed minority.&lt;/strong&gt; In the thirties,&#xA;  swallowing Marx whole, we discovered the Worker and realized–I should&#xA;  think with some relief–that the aims of the Worker and the aims of the&#xA;  Negro were one.  This theorem to which we shall return–seems now to&#xA;  leave rather too much out of account; it became, nevertheless, one of&#xA;  the slogans of the “class struggle” and the gospel of the New Negro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially interested in the part indicated in bold. What is he referring to by the &quot;magnificent twenties&quot;? Apparently, there was a change of attitude towards the black community. Can anybody explain this to me? Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5244" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-10-26T22:58:55.973" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T22:24:10.513" Title="What is Baldwin referring to by the &quot;magnificent twenties&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8689" CreationDate="2018-10-27T00:47:28.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's referring to the 1920s. Note the reference to the book's &lt;em&gt;publication&lt;/em&gt; as &quot;one of the last of all through the thirties&quot;, &quot;one year before our entry into the last world war&quot;. The prevailing view towards the African-American in the '20s was one of patronising comfortable superiority, but Baldwin is arguing that the Great Depression changed all this, and the cause of the &quot;Negro&quot; (a term we prefer not to use now) became linked with the cause of the worker, both being the oppressed victims of a capitalist economy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excellent novel to help make sense of this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Invisible Man&lt;/a&gt; by Ralph Ellison. It's little known outside the USA (and I suspect not adequately recognised even within the USA!), but &lt;em&gt;Time&lt;/em&gt; magazine called it &quot;the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century&quot;, listing it in their top 100 novels of 1923-2005.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T22:24:10.513" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T22:24:10.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8692" CreationDate="2018-10-27T03:45:53.033" Score="5" ViewCount="607" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an interview for the Yorkshire Television program &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/PsgBtOVzHKI?t=98&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Take the World from Another Point of View&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1972), Richard Feynman said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You see, I have had in my life a number of pleasant experiences. One of the earliest ones was when I was a kid I invented a problem for myself, the sum of the powers of the integers, and in trying to get the formula for it I developed a certain set of numbers, the formula for which I couldn’t get, and I discovered later that those were known as the Bernoulli numbers and discovered in 1739. So I was up to 1739 when I was about 14 you see. And then a little later I discovered something that I’d find out I just may have invented a thing which we now call operator calculus. That was invented in 1890-something. Gradually I was inventing things that came later and later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the moment when I began to realize that I was now working on something new was when I read about quantum electrodynamics at the time and I read a book, and I learned about it. For example, I read Dirac’s book, and he had these problems that nobody knew how to solve that were described there. I couldn’t understand the book very well because I really wasn’t up to it. But there in the last paragraph at the end of the book it said, “Some new ideas are here needed.” And so there I was. Some new ideas were needed? OK! So I started to think of new ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What book does Richard Feynman refer to exactly?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5240" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-27T13:03:40.263" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T13:03:40.263" Title="In what book does Paul Dirac say, &quot;Some new ideas are here needed&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8691" CreationDate="2018-10-27T09:50:01.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dirac’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Principles_of_Quantum_Mechanics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Principles of Quantum Mechanics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1930) ends with the paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The present theory is very symmetrical between the electrons and protons. The symmetry is not mathematically perfect, as may easily be verified, when one takes interaction between the electrons into account. This cause, however, hardly appears to be sufficient, according to present ideas, to account for the very considerable observed differences between electrons and protons, in particular their different masses. Possibly the solution of this difficulty will be found in a better understanding of the nature of interaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feynman’s “Some new ideas are here needed” seems like a reasonable paraphrase of the last sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-10-27T09:50:01.850" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8699" CreationDate="2018-10-27T12:13:22.163" Score="6" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;With keywords like this, how could I fail to find the book? But I did...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this was a Penguin/Puffin paperback book in the 1970s, or possibly even in the 1960s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fanch is about 10 years old, lives in the south of Brittany, and spends most of his time sailing his little dinghy around on the Morbihan inland sea, which has very strong tidal currents and takes real seamanship. I think he's an orphan. He gets involved with a gold statuette of Gilgamesh which has been stolen from a museum by art thieves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5248" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T21:15:06.833" Title="Children's book: Fanch, art thieves, Gilgamesh statuette, sailing in the Morbihan, Locmariaquer" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-28T01:41:11.063" Score="8" ViewCount="243" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Illustrated_Classics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on Great Illustrated Classics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Great Illustrated Classics series of books offers easy-to-read&#xA;  adaptations of well known classics, featuring large print and&#xA;  illustrations on every other page. The series is targeted at children,&#xA;  but the writing style is suitable for adult readers as well. Currently&#xA;  there are 66 titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I understand that they have to omit parts of the stories in order to fit them into this type of book. However, I don't see any reason why there would be a need to &lt;em&gt;change&lt;/em&gt; things that are kept in the abridged versions. Yet in fact there are changes made in the abridged versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three examples from &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the regular version it was Abbé Faria who directly showed Edmond that it was Danglars, Fernand, and Villefort that had caused his imprisonment. Yet in the Great Illustrated Classics version it is described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One day as Edmond and Faria rested from the hard work of tunneling,&#xA;  Edmond said, &quot;Father, I have been thinking about my enemies. Your&#xA;  lessons on history have taught me how the minds of some men work in&#xA;  evil ways. I believe I was accused by two men — Danglars and Fernand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next paragraph we have the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Very good thinking,&quot; said Faria with a smile. &quot;When you told me&#xA;  everything about yourself, I, too, suspected Danglars and Fernand. But&#xA;  I wanted you to puzzle it out.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a complete invention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the original version the value of Spada's treasure is specified as 13 or 14 million Francs. In the Great Illustrated Classics version the value is given as 70 million Francs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the original version the cannon signifying an escaped prisoner goes off well after Edmond boards the smugglers' boat. In the Great Illustrated Classics version, however, the cannon is shot &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; he even sees their boat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two examples from &lt;em&gt;A Journey to the Center of the Earth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the book when they get shot out of a volcano and&#xA;wonder where they are, Hans says that they are not in Iceland. In&#xA;the original version, the narrator says that Hans is wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Hans must be mistaken,&quot; I said, raising myself up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Great Illustrated Classics version it is the narrator's uncle&#xA;who asserts that Hans is wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You must be wrong,&quot; my uncle cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The date that they leave Stromboli is off by a month. In the&#xA;original version we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After waiting forty-eight hours, on the 31st of August, a small craft&#xA;  took us to Messina, where a few days' rest completely removed the&#xA;  effect of our fatigues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Great Literary Classics version we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And forty-eight hours later, on the 30th of September, a boat took us&#xA;  to the city of Messina on Sicily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many more examples, but I don't think it is necessary to list them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a purpose to these changes? Do they somehow simplify the story for children? Or did the adapters just read the originals and then entirely rewrite the books as simply stories &lt;em&gt;based on&lt;/em&gt; the original?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am primarily interested in a general principle (or set of principles) that addresses the series as a whole. However, if the answer is that each individual change has its own reason, I am okay with that but would ideally like to see one or two example explanations of some of the individual cases (not necessarily limited to the ones I mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T18:42:29.810" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T18:42:29.810" Title="Why does Great Illustrated Classics change details in its abridged versions?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8700" CreationDate="2018-10-28T17:45:46.683" Score="6" ViewCount="1137" Body="&lt;p&gt;If biography means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an account of someone's life written by someone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;biographies as a branch of literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a human life in its course.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would a biography based on a particular animal be called?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5252" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-19T11:26:24.717" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T09:34:10.803" Title="What would a biography on an animal be called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;biography&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8694" CreationDate="2018-10-28T18:52:22.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6491358-the-secret-of-the-missing-boat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Secret of the Missing Boat&lt;/a&gt; by Paul Berna&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old fishermen in his part of Brittany used to call orphaned Fanch&#xA;'king of the Little Sea'. One day he salvaged a dinghy from the mud,&#xA;and was amazed how many questions the police asked about it - until he&#xA;discovered it wasn't the boat they were interested in, but vanished&#xA;treasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one review on Goodreads mentions stolen golden head of Gilgamesh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-28T18:52:22.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8697" CreationDate="2018-10-28T20:14:52.440" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Biographies of animals are not a very common genre, although it is not difficult to find examples with a bit of digging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flush:_A_Biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flush: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1933) by Virginia Woolf is the &quot;imaginative biography&quot; (Wikipedia's description) of a dog. Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2009464725&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry in the Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt;) simply classifies is as &quot;biographical fiction&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bobbie, a Great Collie&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Alexander (1926) is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbie_the_Wonder_Dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bobbie the Wonder Dog&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/26009759&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; does not identify the book's genre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Comanche: Story of America's Most Heroic Horse&lt;/em&gt; (1951) by David Appel is about of one of General Custer's horses. Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/51005190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry in the Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; does not mention a genre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reckless, Pride of the Marines&lt;/em&gt; (1955) by Andrew Geer is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergeant_Reckless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a war horse that served in the Korean War&lt;/a&gt;. Neither the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/55005642&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; nor Amazon.com provide genre information for this book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Soldier Bear&lt;/em&gt; (1970) by Geoffrey Morgan and Wiesław A. Lasocki is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojtek_(bear)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a bear named Wojtek&lt;/a&gt; that was enlisted in the Polish II Corps. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/70583187&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; does not specify the book's genre but considers it as &lt;strong&gt;&quot;juvenile literature&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (see &quot;LC subjects&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Judy Story: The Dog with Six Lives&lt;/em&gt; (1973) by Edwin Varley is a book about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_(dog)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a ship's dog in the British Royal Navy&lt;/a&gt;. The Library of Congress does not know it; Amazon.com only has it second-hand and does not classify it as any specific genre. &lt;em&gt;Judy: A Dog in a Million&lt;/em&gt; (2014) by Damien Lewis is a more recent book about the same dog. Neither the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2014456926&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; nor Amazon.com provide genre information for this book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey:_The_Small-Town_Library_Cat_Who_Touched_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2008) by Vicky Myron is the &quot;biography&quot; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Readmore_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dewey Readmore Books&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_cat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;library cat&lt;/a&gt; of the Spencer Public Library in Spencer, Iowa. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2008004498&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; does not classify this book as biography (but it has &quot;Library cats--Iowa--Spencer--Biography&quot; listed as a subject). Amazon.com lists it under &quot;Books &gt; &lt;strong&gt;Biographies &amp;amp; Memoirs&lt;/strong&gt; &gt; Regional U.S. &gt; Midwest&quot;. Wikipedia's editors have not bothered tagging the article about the book with anything referring to &quot;biography&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hachiko : the true story of a loyal dog&lt;/em&gt; (2004) by Pamela S. Turner in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/2002155546&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt; does not have a genre identification, but the term &quot;biography&quot; is used in the &quot;LS Subjects&quot; (&quot;Dogs--Japan--Tokyo--Biography.&quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A biography of an animal &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be called in &lt;strong&gt;&quot;animal biography&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. However, books about animals are sometimes classified as &quot;juvenile literature&quot;, sometimes as &quot;biography&quot;, depending on the audience rather than the individual whose live is being described. I have never come across the term &quot;animal biography&quot; in a dictionary of literary terms and don't expect it to become a literary term in the near future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T11:14:57.373" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T11:14:57.373" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8535" CreationDate="2018-10-28T20:37:31.193" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Would it really have worked as well if he was in a fictionalized version of the Soviet Union? I do not believe so. 1984 is not a novel meant only to be entertaining, but to also to say a few things about &lt;em&gt;totalitarianism&lt;/em&gt;. Placing the novel in a setting more reminiscent of the Soviet Union would have been a distraction: it would have made it far too easy to interpret it as about the Soviet Union and its brand of socialism, but Orwell was not so particular. He was a democrat and a socialist, in that order. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, by placing it in a world his readers would know and recognize, he increased the emotional impact. The setting is London, but a London changed almost beyond recognition. Letting Winston live in a place many of his readers would know, perhaps even live in themselves, and see it corrupted through his eyes, is a far stronger experience than if it had been set in Moscow, distant and barely known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, one of the themes of the novel is how Ingsoc has created Newspeak, a language that is intended to be an almost insurmountable barrier to questioning Big Brother, but still recognizably based on English. If the novel had been set in the Soviet union, Orwell would have had to pretend that Newspeak was a translated version of Russian instead, which again could be a distraction from his point that totalitarian regimes will try to control language and thoughts as well as actions (see his essay &quot;The Prevention of Literature&quot; for more on this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while, yes, one could probably transpose the action of 1984 from London to Moscow and still have it work as a novel, doing so would have had implications that ran contrary to Orwell's intentions. By placing it in Great Britain, he could both distance Big Brother from actually existing regimes, and did not risk lessening its impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2018-10-29T06:46:32.123" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T06:46:32.123" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8703" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8707" CreationDate="2018-10-29T03:15:04.773" Score="9" ViewCount="756" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt; when Ged first enters the school at Roke, he meets with the Archmage Nemmerle, and a &quot;raven of Osskil&quot; wanders towards the Archmage (his familiar, maybe?) and when the Archmage vanishes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only the raven stood eyeing him, its beak outstretched as if to peck the vanishing staff. It spoke, in what Ged guessed might be the speech of Osskil. &quot;Terrenon ussbuk!&quot; it said croaking. &quot;Terrenon ussbuk orrek!&quot; And it strutted off as it had come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the raven saying to Ged? The one thing I do note is that when Ged is in Osskil, he encounters the evil stone in the Court of the &lt;em&gt;Terrenon&lt;/em&gt;; I assume this is somehow connected. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T20:56:04.243" Title="What does the raven say to Ged when he first enters the school at Roke?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;&lt;the-earthsea-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T10:32:20.597" Score="5" ViewCount="675" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Edge_of_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Over the Edge of the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; the author Laurence Bergreen has described Ferdinand Magellan's daring circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century was a three-year odyssey filled with sex, violence, and amazing adventure. The book was first published in 2003 and the Harper Collins edition which I read was published in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best and most affecting eyewitness account of Magellan’s circumnavigation was written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Pigafetta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antonio Pigafetta&lt;/a&gt;, the young Venetian scholar and diplomat who was among the handful of survivors. His chronicle remains one of the most significant documents of the Age of Discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pigafetta’s account of the Patagonian giant describes him as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist,” the&#xA;official chronicler observed. “He had a very large face, painted round&#xA;with red, and his eyes also were painted round with yellow, and in the&#xA;middle of his cheeks he had two hearts painted. He had hardly any&#xA;hairs on his head, and was painted white.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The giant was a member of the tribe known as the Tehuelche Indians,&#xA;who were numerous throughout the region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laurence Bergreen continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About ninety years later, Pigafetta’s affecting account of the&#xA;curtailed education and conversion of the Patagonian giant drew the&#xA;attention of William Shakespeare, who read an English translation by&#xA;Richard Eden of Pigafetta’s diary. Distinctive fingerprints  in&#xA;Shakespeare’s  resulting  play, ‘The Tempest’, first performed in&#xA;1611, could only have come from Pigafetta’s account.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare’s imagination, the humble details of Pigafetta’s&#xA;encounter with the Patagonian giant are woven into an immense&#xA;cosmological tapestry. The playwright sets the scene on an enchanted&#xA;magical island ruled by Prospero, the duke of Milan, who, with his&#xA;daughter Miranda, had been set adrift by his brother Antonio, a&#xA;usurper. Shipwrecked, Prospero learns magic and manages to remain on&#xA;good terms with spirits inhabiting the island, especially Ariel, a&#xA;sprite whom Prospero had freed from an evil sorceress known as&#xA;Sycorax. But Sycorax also has a son, Caliban, one of the most&#xA;compelling yet enigmatic characters in the Shakespearean canon, and a&#xA;character inspired in part by the Patagonian giant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clash between Prospero and Caliban offers a vivid image of the&#xA;impact of European discovery and conquest on indigenous peoples&#xA;throughout the world, and Shakespeare dramatizes the encounter with&#xA;wit and a frisson of horror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You taught me language; and my profit on’t   Is, I know how to curse:&#xA;the red plague rid you,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For learning me your language!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Caliban quotes Pigafetta’s account of the Patagonian giant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must obey: his art is of such power,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would control my dam’s god, Setebos,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And make a vassal of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Shakespeare keeps the setting vague, this mystical play&#xA;demonstrates, if nothing else, that the New World, with its splendour&#xA;and barbarism, had taken up residence in the European consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Caliban's description based on the Patagonian Giant described by Antonio Pigafetta? Apart from this reference in the referred adventure book, are there any other sources to support such a conclusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4767" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T21:48:09.660" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T10:28:38.443" Title="Is Caliban of Shakespeare's &quot;The Tempest&quot; based on a real life character?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T11:55:16.003" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found out that there are different editions of &lt;em&gt;Fight Club&lt;/em&gt; that contain different text passages. I cannot find any page that would describe these differences and I don't know which version is the original one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of book differences (one of many):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the following text in chapter 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for their humping, Marla and Tyler are never in the same room. If Tyler’s around, Marla ignores him. This is familiar ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 1 is the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The big sleep, `Valley of the Dogs’ style. “Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you.” Marla looks at me as if I’m the one humping her and says, “I can’t win with you, can I?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version 2 is the following different text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My father always said, “Get married before the sex gets boring or you’ll never get married.” My mother said, “Never buy anything with a nylon zipper.”  My parents never said anything you’d want to embroider on a cushion.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if these differences are between paperback and e-book editions. I have a Czech version of the paperback that contains text from version 2. I have been able to find the online English e-books only with the version 1 text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any information about different editions of &lt;em&gt;Fight Club&lt;/em&gt;. Can you help me? The new rerelease of the book should contain only the new introduction by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5256" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T18:30:01.290" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T18:30:01.290" Title="Fight Club book editions and different text passages" Tags="&lt;chuck-palahniuk&gt;&lt;fight-club&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8706" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T11:56:42.803" Score="2" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the poem &quot;Madman's Song&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Wylie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elinor Wylie&lt;/a&gt; (from &lt;em&gt;The Prose and Poetry of Elinor Wylie&lt;/em&gt; , by William Rose Benét):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better to see your cheek grown hollow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Better to see your temple&#xA;  worn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than to forget to follow, follow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After the sound of a silver&#xA;  horn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better to bind your brow with willow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And follow, follow until you&#xA;  die,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than to sleep with your head on a golden pillow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor lift it up&#xA;  when the hunt goes by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better to see your cheek grow sallow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And your hair grown gray, so&#xA;  soon, so soon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than to forget to hallo, hallo,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  After the milk-white&#xA;  hounds of the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a question about this poem in a book &lt;em&gt;Cracking the SAT Literature Subject Test&lt;/em&gt; (by the way, if you've seen some of my previous SAT questions, these are from another book which is better in quality and which I use until I'm going to use until I finish with it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the effect of using “silver” to describe the “horn” (line 4)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(A) To imply that the horn is not as valuable as a golden horn &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (B) To foreshadow any item that may be used in the “hunt” (line 8) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (C) To be alliterative with the word “sound” &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (D) To indicate that the image would be bright &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (E) To symbolize the beauty of wealth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think A, D, and E can be eliminated but am not sure about the remaining answers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In C, the words &quot;sound&quot; and &quot;silver,&quot; actually, are alliterated although I wouldn't think that could be a reason for using the word &quot;silver&quot; in general.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;As for B, I don't completely understand this answer. I couldn't find an analysis of the poem online although I know it is dedicated to someone who lost their touch with what's important in life. However, I am not 100% sure if the words &quot;horn&quot; and &quot;hunt&quot; are related in the context of the poem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And here is the explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;C&lt;/strong&gt;   “Silver” and “sound” are alliterative (C). There is no comparison&#xA;  between silver and gold (A). “Silver” does not foreshadow the hunt&#xA;  (B). Silver is not necessarily bright (D). The horn is not about&#xA;  wealth, nor are we told it’s beautiful (E).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should it be obvious in the context of the poem that the horn and the hunt aren't related here? Is it just my lack of understanding? And do the &quot;silver horn&quot; and &quot;hunt&quot; symbolize something else?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Also, can alliteration here be the main reason for using a particular word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4699" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-18T21:13:47.840" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T21:45:43.787" Title="What is the effect of using “silver” to describe the “horn” in &quot;Madman's Song&quot; by Elinor Wylie?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;elinor-wylie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8703" CreationDate="2018-10-29T13:25:18.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The raven's words are never explicitly translated, but they are referenced later.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 6, &amp;quot;Hunted&amp;quot;, of the same book &lt;em&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope and mistrust struggled in Ged’s mind as he listened. A wizardly man soon learns that few indeed of his meetings are chance ones, be they for good or for ill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In what land is the Court of the Terrenon?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In Osskill.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the sound of that name Ged saw for a moment, by a trick of memory, a black raven on green grass who looked up at him sidelong with an eye like polished stone, and spoke; but the words were forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hDtjOj5FL8MC&amp;amp;pg=PA118&amp;amp;lpg=PA118&amp;amp;dq=%22In+what+land+is+the+Court+of+the+Terrenon?%E2%80%9D+%22In+Osskil.%22+At+the+sound+of+that+name+Ged+saw+for+a+moment,+by+a+trick+of+memory,+a+black+raven+on+green+grass+who+looked+up+at+him+sidelong+with+an+eye+like+polished+stone,+and+spoke;+but+the+words+were+forgotten.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books ref&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from that, I don't think we ever learn any more about the raven's words. Various fans have speculated, of course, just as you have. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://atuan.livejournal.com/17494.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this forum poster&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;figured it was a reference to the later trial at Terrenon with the spirit trapped in the stone&amp;quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tavia.co.uk/earthsea/dictionary.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this dictionary compiler&lt;/a&gt; listed the raven's phrase as &amp;quot;unknown; perhaps a warning about the Terrenon stone&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T13:25:18.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2018-10-29T14:32:49.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe she would have put it in the tea because Papa would only offer it as 'love sips'. But as the children were out of the house staying with Auntie Ifeoma, and he was angry with the children, so would not have offered the tea to them anyway, the children were not at risk, only him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5257" LastActivityDate="2018-10-29T14:32:49.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T19:18:10.813" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;By suggestion, I was transferred here from english.stackexchange.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have some trouble understanding several unusual constructions D. H. Lawrence used in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Studies in Classic American Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Since Lawrence is rather poetic, I was thinking I could find answers here. So, I will now list all the sentences and emphasize particular places (using italic) that I find the most obscure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The great Northern cycle of which he is the &lt;em&gt;returning unit&lt;/em&gt; has almost completed its round, accomplished itself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 10&lt;/a&gt;, “Herman Melville’s &lt;em&gt;Typee&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Omoo&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then fire &lt;em&gt;flies fluid&lt;/em&gt;, and the waters roll off in purity.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 9&lt;/a&gt;, “Dana’s &lt;em&gt;Two Years Before The Mast&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And meanwhile in Melville his bodily knowledge &lt;em&gt;moves naked&lt;/em&gt;, a living quick among the stark elements.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 11&lt;/a&gt;, “Herman Melville’s Moby Dick”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fame: another disgrace, &lt;em&gt;being patronized by&lt;/em&gt; common snobs who just know how to read.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 10&lt;/a&gt;, “Herman Melville’s &lt;em&gt;Typee&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Omoo&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And again, as a revelation of destiny the book is too &lt;em&gt;deep even for sorrow. Profound beyond feeling&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 11&lt;/a&gt;, “Herman Melville’s &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is where apples of knowledge &lt;em&gt;get you&lt;/em&gt;, Miss Eve. You should leave ’em alone.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;, “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For how can any man be free, without an &lt;em&gt;illimitable background&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;, “Benjamin Franklin”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many gods come and go, some say one thing and some say another, and we have to obey the God of the &lt;em&gt;innermost hour&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;, “Edgar Allan Poe”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The new generation […] is &lt;em&gt;setting up in the photography line&lt;/em&gt;, and is just going to make a sound financial thing out of it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblio.wiki/wiki/Studies_in_Classic_American_Literature/Chapter_8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;, “Hawthorne’s &lt;em&gt;Blithedale Romance&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that I am not a native speaker, and that I am in need of a further explanation for what otherwise, to English-speaking people, might appear obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5258" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T12:33:06.533" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T12:33:06.533" Title="Obscure phrases in &quot;Studies in Classic American Literature&quot; by D. H. Lawrence" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;d-h-lawrence&gt;&lt;studies-classic-american-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-29T20:43:47.483" Score="4" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the final chapter of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, Jane Austen writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by Mrs. Bennet's being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was obliged to mix more with the world, &lt;strong&gt;but she could still moralize over every morning visit;&lt;/strong&gt; and as she was no longer mortified by comparisons between her sisters' beauty and her own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to the change without much reluctance. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the bolded (by me) phrase mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps part of my issue is that I am not well enough acquainted with the custom of &lt;a href=&quot;https://visitjaneaustensengland.blogspot.com/2015/01/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morning visits&lt;/a&gt; but I don't have a concrete understanding of what moralizing over them would mean, and how exactly this constrasts with &quot;mixing with the world.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T17:01:20.133" Title="Meaning of &quot;moralize over every morning visit&quot; in Pride and Prejudice" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8710" CreationDate="2018-10-29T21:48:18.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mary stays home on behalf of watching her mother Mrs.Bennet, who could not sit alone. Mary is and always has been a bit of a recluse, with little social skills - she tends to studying and reading. She was obliged (encouraged) to mix more (interact) with the world, although to her parents surprise she was still able to moralize (pretentious/hypocritical banter - &lt;s&gt;Victorian&lt;/s&gt; Georgian moralism) with the guests even in company of her sisters of whom are significantly more attractive - a quality which used to greatly upset her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we learn in the first chapter Mary is a girl of &quot;deep reflection&quot; and who has read many books and makes extracts, she is smart and clever not beautiful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 8 Mary overhears herself mentioned as the most distinguished girl in the community unlike her sisters whom although always have partners (courtship) that is all they have been taught and rely on because of their beauty. A direct quote from &lt;strong&gt;page 16&lt;/strong&gt; reveals further information on her personality: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments,&#xA;  was always impatient for display. Mary had neither genius nor taste; and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited&#xA;  manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly on page 42 Austen addresses the transparency of &lt;s&gt;Victorian&lt;/s&gt;  Georgian moralism and affirms Marys affection to it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough-bass and&#xA;  human nature; and had some extracts to admire, and some new observations of &lt;strong&gt;threadbare&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;morality&lt;/strong&gt; to listen to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austen is a critic of &lt;s&gt;Victorian&lt;/s&gt; Georgian morality specifically in etiquette, manners, religious conduct and prudishness. Mary is a personification of stereotypical moralists at the time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5259" LastEditorUserId="5259" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T17:40:53.903" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T17:40:53.903" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8720" CreationDate="2018-10-30T13:43:58.140" Score="0" ViewCount="1607" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell: &lt;strong&gt;There are distinct social possibilities in your profile. The two weak points in our age are its want of principle and its want of profile&lt;/strong&gt;. The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn very high, just at present. Algernon!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon: Yes, Aunt Augusta!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell: There are distinct social possibilities in Miss Cardew's profile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon: &lt;strong&gt;Cecily is the sweetest, dearest, prettiest girl in the whole world. And I don't care twopence about social possibilities.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell: &lt;strong&gt;Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bolding my own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the bolded lines mean, and what do they say about the characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T11:47:17.297" Title="Meaning and implication of these lines in The Importance of Being Ernest" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-30T14:26:01.800" Score="2" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell (to Cecily): Pretty child! your dress is sadly simple, your hair seems almost as Nature might have left it. But we can soon alter all that. &lt;strong&gt;A thoroughly experienced French maid produces a really marvellous result in a very brief space of time. I remember recommending one to young Lady Lancing, and after three months her own husband did not know her.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack: And after six months nobody knew her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bolding my own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;nobody knew her&amp;quot; imply and is Lady Bracknell now recommending this maid to Cecily too for a makeover?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T20:14:23.500" Title="Meaning of Lady Bracknell's phrasing in The Importance of Being Ernest" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8714" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8713" CreationDate="2018-10-30T16:32:42.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell is indeed suggesting that Cecily get a makeover, though not necessarily by the same French maid as Lady Lancing, just &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; French maid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;her own husband did not know her&quot;, Lady Bracknell is referring to the makeover and the difference it made in Lady Lancing's appearance, saying that you almost couldn't recognize her as the same person. Jack's retort could mean a few different things - he could be saying that Lady Lancing was &lt;a href=&quot;http://tullysenglishclasses.weebly.com/uploads/8/3/9/4/8394298/etiquette_money_and_high_society_in_tiobe.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cut from society&lt;/a&gt;, or that her &lt;a href=&quot;https://caitlyntuckerman.wordpress.com/2016/03/21/victorian-attitudes-in-the-importance-of-being-earnest/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personality was lost&lt;/a&gt; in the transformation of her appearance, or even that Lancing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/i/the-importance-of-being-earnest/summary-and-analysis/act-iii&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;took up with the French maid&lt;/a&gt; instead of her husband! Whatever the intended meaning, he's undercutting Lady Bracknell's enthusiasm for &quot;bettering&quot; Cecily, which is why she glares at him before the next line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5189" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T16:32:42.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8716" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8717" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" Score="0" Body="For questions about D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) and his works. He is best known for his novels &quot;Sons and Lovers&quot;, &quot;The Rainbow&quot;, &quot;Women in Love&quot; and &quot;Lady Chatterley's Lover&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" LastActivityDate="2018-10-30T18:22:28.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-31T00:12:05.027" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Read at least 30-40 years ago. Was in English read in USA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basics of the story is following the career of a Female Cat Burglar in Europe(?) (I think she was French) She travels from country to country pulling solo high value jobs for hire. She ONLY takes payment in the form of Blue Gems. (Believe it was Sapphires, but might have been Blue Diamonds)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile in interludes, or maybe flashbacks, they are relating the events of her life, and how she became a cat burglar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember anything about any of the jobs. Other than sometimes people trying to get her to take other forms of payment, despite her insistence of Gems as payment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do remember the the last job, the the people who hired her paid her in fake gems. And after she leaves with them, they are laughing it off saying more or less when she finds out, who is she going to complain too? The Police?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I think when she discovers they are fakes, she has a quite explicit graphic flashback, which shows why she only wants Blue Gems as payment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; When she was a teenager the police grabbed her in a church (I don't&#xA; recall if SHE had committed a crime, was the girl friend of someone&#xA; who had committed a crime, or the police just decided to &quot;have fun&quot;&#xA; with a runaway they caught) They decided to &quot;teach her a lesson&quot; and&#xA; violated her with their night-sticks. The night-sticks were described&#xA; as either very heavily scuffed/scrapped/scratched or engraved with&#xA; patterns so when they hit someone with them it would it would cut them&#xA; up. And while she is being violated, and torn up inside, all she can&#xA; see is a blue stain glass window, which through her tears looks like &#xA; lots of little blue gems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the book ends with her in the process of hunting down the men who paid her in fakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4342" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T00:12:05.027" Title="80s-90s Female Cat Burglar accepts only Sapphires as payment" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8719" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8750" CreationDate="2018-10-31T09:57:11.450" Score="9" ViewCount="11776" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the famous play by Arthur Miller, The Crucible, John Proctor and Abigail had an affair that drove the major plot points of the play/movie. In The Crucible, John and Abigail are ~30 and 17 years old respectively, but in real life, they were 60 and 11 years old respectively. Miller admitted to taking some creative liberty, but there seems to be no record of whether or not the affair did actually take place, or whether it was simply added to create tension. I assume that with such an age range, it did not take place, but it is also quite a large plot point to simply fabricate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5265" LastEditorUserId="5265" LastEditDate="2018-11-01T01:09:12.757" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T18:52:16.260" Title="Was the affair between John Proctor and Abigail in The Crucible historically accurate?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;arthur-miller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8712" CreationDate="2018-10-31T11:47:17.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lady Bracknell is pleased with Cecily's appearance, but only in the sense that she thinks it will make an impression on society (&quot;distinct social possibilities&quot;). Her listing of lack of principle and lack of profile as the present day's two &quot;weak points&quot; is ironic to the reader, given that one of these is an essential component of character and the other is completely superficial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Algernon objects to this because he considers Cecily beautiful in her own right, and what society thinks about her appearance is unimportant. Lady Bracknell responds that by disrespecting the opinion of society, he is only demonstrating that he's outside of it - in essence, she's calling him jealous. Only people who aren't fashionable (&quot;can't get into it&quot;) reject the ideals of fashionable people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5189" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T11:47:17.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8722" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8723" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the poet, songwriter and novelist Naomi Shihab Nye (born in 1952) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T20:51:08.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8724" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note: the book title contains a period, but Stack Exchange turns the tag &lt;code&gt;v.&lt;/code&gt; automatically into &lt;code&gt;v&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8725" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about Thomas Pynchon's debut novel 'V.', published in 1963. Use this tag with the [thomas-pynchon] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" LastActivityDate="2018-10-31T21:07:25.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-10-31T22:29:32.917" Score="2" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;One thing that I never figured out after reading Jo Nesbo's The Snowman is how did Gert Rafto get captured by the killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gert Rafto confronted the killer alone, and he knows the identity of the killer. He had his hand on his gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then somehow he was transported to his home on Finnøy where he was tortured and mutilated and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &amp;quot;made into a snowman&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the book it also mentioned that he committed suicide, but did so by sucking the air out of the gun first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused as to how this all happened. I believe that Gert was not on the island at the time of the meeting with the killer but was transported there. But I have no idea how the killer got the upper hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5271" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:10:52.600" Title="In Jo Nesbø's The Snowman, how did Gert Rafto get captured?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;jo-nesbo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8727" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8728" CreationDate="2018-11-01T10:05:34.093" Score="9" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;A passage in this famous ghost story, from his published collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8486&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghost Stories of an Antiquary&lt;/a&gt;, makes reference to a &amp;quot;Door Bible&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well, sir, of course I don’t set up my opinion against yours, but it ain’t the pictur I should ‘ang where my little girl could see it, sir.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wouldn’t you, Robert? Why not?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a &lt;strong&gt;Door Bible&lt;/strong&gt;, with pictures not ‘alf what that is, and we ‘ad to set up with her three or four nights afterwards, if you’ll believe me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that it's capitalised meaning, one would presume, that it's a particular edition of the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling the phrase turns up endless biblical references to, or sermons on, doors, which isn't much help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this edition of the Bible, and why does James believe it contain disturbing images?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T10:45:21.877" Title="In The Mezzotint by M. R. James, what is a &quot;Door Bible&quot;?" Tags="&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8727" CreationDate="2018-11-01T10:45:21.877" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's a mispronunciation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave_Dor%C3%A9&amp;#39;s_illustrations_for_La_Grande_Bible_de_Tours&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doré Bible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mispronunciation is quite natural: to an English speaker's eye, Doré looks like &quot;Dore&quot;, which would be a homophone of &quot;door&quot; in English. It also fits with the context (images), since Doré's contribution was as an illustrator and not a translator for the Bible.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;How I found this answer (because it's interesting)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you mentioned, searching the web for &lt;code&gt;door bible&lt;/code&gt;, or even the exact phrase &lt;code&gt;&quot;door bible&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, turned up a lot of Bible quotes about doors, which are useless for answering this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next I tried searching for the exact phrase &lt;code&gt;&quot;a door bible&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, which eliminated many of these useless results and - curiously - gave me only 43 hits on Google many of which were &lt;strong&gt;the exact book and passage&lt;/strong&gt; that your question is about. This is weird, because if there really was something called a Door Bible, surely it would appear in more than just one single book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But clearly the character is shown speaking in a non-standard dialect (&quot;the pore child&quot;, &quot;not 'alf&quot;, and so on). Is it possible that &quot;Door&quot; could be their pronunciation of a different word? The obvious choice, especially given the &quot;poor&quot;/&quot;pore&quot; mixup in the same sentence, would be &quot;Dore&quot;. So I searched the web for &lt;code&gt;&quot;dore bible&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, and bingo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-01T10:45:21.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8729" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8731" CreationDate="2018-11-02T16:38:15.443" Score="5" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contents of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crawford's translation of the Kalevala&lt;/a&gt; begin, after the frontmatter that's not part of the original text, with something called a &quot;Proem&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune00.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here it is&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obvious question: &lt;strong&gt;what is a proem?&lt;/strong&gt; It almost looks like a typo for &quot;poem&quot;, but surely a typo wouldn't have &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/search?ei=cnncW-K4DYO1sAf8k7tQ&amp;amp;q=kalevala+%22proem%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;been preserved for so long&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, none of the sources I tried really explains what a proem is, just that there is one at the start of the Kalevala. Presumably it means an introductory chapter of some kind, but &lt;strong&gt;why was this word chosen by Crawford&lt;/strong&gt; in his English translation instead of, say, &quot;prologue&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T20:25:51.150" Title="What is a &quot;proem&quot;, and why was this word used in the translation of the Kalevala?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;the-kalevala&gt;&lt;finnish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8729" CreationDate="2018-11-02T17:57:38.777" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Proem is most definitely not a typo for &quot;poem&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proem&lt;/a&gt; comes from Latin &lt;em&gt;prooemium&lt;/em&gt;, which comes from Ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=prooi/mion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;προοίμιον&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, &lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;, 1940):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. &lt;em&gt;opening, introduction&lt;/em&gt;; in Music, &lt;em&gt;prelude, overture&lt;/em&gt;, [...]; in Ep. poems, &lt;em&gt;proëm, preamble&lt;/em&gt;, [...];  in speeches, &lt;em&gt;exordium&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Critias 43&lt;/em&gt; tit., (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I did not learn Ancient Greek at school, so I know the term only from Latin. The German Duden dictionary lists both &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Prooimion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pro­oi­mi­on&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Prooemium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pro­ömi­um&lt;/a&gt;.) The term is not common in English, but the Italian Wikipedia lists several examples in its article &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proemio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proemio&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proemio_dell%27Iliade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proem to the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proemio_dell%27Odissea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proem to the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0218:book=1:card=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Butler's translation&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proemio_dell%27Eneide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proem to Virgil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0052&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dryden's translation&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the proem to Ludovico Ariosto's &lt;em&gt;Orlando Furioso&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the proem to Torquato Tasso's &lt;em&gt;Gerusalemme liberata&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In these examples, the basic characteristics of a proem are (according to the Italian Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the invocation of the muse,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protasi_(letteratura)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;protasi&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. the initial part that presents the epic's topics,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;the first word (generally in accusative) that indicates the object of the proem.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crawford already uses the term &quot;preface&quot; for his own &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvintro.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt;. (I assume he did not choose the term &quot;introduction&quot; because an introduction, unlike a preface, normally does not include acknowledgements.) The term &quot;prologue&quot; normally refers to something that is narrative in nature, which is not the case for the first 102 lines (up to and including &quot;The beginning of the new-day.&quot; in Crawford's translation or &quot;Zum Beginn des neuen Tages.&quot; in Anton Schiefner's German translation, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_Crawford_(scholar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crawford&lt;/a&gt; used.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How well do the three characteristics of a proem apply to the Kalevala's first rune?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no muse at the start of the Kalevala; instead, the proem invokes &quot;desire impulsive&quot; and &quot;a mighty inward urging&quot;, which the poet hopes will drive his &quot;chanting&quot;. One might say they serve the same function as a muse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The topic is initially only introduced in very general terms: &quot;our nation's ancient folk-song&quot;; the first characters are introduced much later, when Wainamoinen and Ether are first mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finnish has a much more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_grammar#Cases&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elaborate case system&lt;/a&gt; than Latin or Greek, but I don't know if the Kalevala's first word, &quot;mieleni&quot; (&quot;my mind&quot;; from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fincd.com/finnish/mieli.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;mieli&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;mind&quot;) is actually in the accusative case. If it is, it would match the third criterion for the Greek and Latin proem. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These similarities between the Greek and Latin proems listed above and the beginning of the Kalevala would help explain why Crawford chose the word &quot;proem&quot;. However, he did not get this from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/19Jh/Schiefner/sch_ka01.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anton Schiefner's German translation&lt;/a&gt;, let alone from the Kalevala itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;According to &lt;em&gt;Nordische Literaturgeschichte. Band I&lt;/em&gt; (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1982), Lönnrot was inspired by classical antiquity and by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeric_Question#Time_frame&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friedrich August Wolf's theory&lt;/a&gt; that the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; as we know them today were not written by Homer but that Homer had come up with the basic structure for a story that connects together a number of songs that had already been circulating. This makes Crawford's use of the term &quot;proem&quot; somewhat understandable, but it is still an intervention that goes beyond mere translation. Schiefner did not use the term, and neither do the two other German translations that I consulted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kalewala. Das finnische Epos&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by Gisbert Jänicke. Salzburg / Vienna: Jung und Jung, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kalevala. Das finnische Epos&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by Lore Fromm and Hans Fromm. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985 (München: Carl Hanser,1967).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T20:25:51.150" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T20:25:51.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-02T19:55:50.757" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the preface to his translation of the Kalevala (1888), John Martin Crawford wrote (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A deeper and more esoteric meaning of the Kalevala, however, points to a &lt;strong&gt;contest between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil&lt;/strong&gt;; the Finns representing the Light and the Good, and the Lapps, the Darkness and the Evil. Like the Niebelungs, the heroes of the Finns woo for brides the beauteous maidens of the North; and the similarity is rendered still more striking by their frequent inroads into the country of the Lapps, in order to possess themselves of the envied treasure of Lapland, the mysterious Sampo, evidently the Golden Fleece of the Argonautic expedition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the hosts on the Northern Myth Podcast on YouTube appear to &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/NOP1cBWZfPE?t=439&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;disagree with the above view&lt;/a&gt; (my emphasis): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A thing about Kalevala: I don't think there is any concept of good or evil. There is &lt;strong&gt;order and chaos&lt;/strong&gt; - very specifically, which I think is probably more the &lt;strong&gt;original type of morality&lt;/strong&gt;, (...) without any sort of christianised influence. And I do think that that is, except for the very final poem, which, I think, some details had to be put in there to appease the Church, (...) but throughout, I think Lönnrot maintained the feel and the morality (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on what little information about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_Crawford_(scholar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crawford&lt;/a&gt; is available on Wikipedia, he doesn't strike me as a &quot;scholar&quot; of Nordic literature. (He based his translation on an existing German translation.) I don't know what the YouTubers studied; maybe they just read a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.northernmyths.com/p/recommended-books-1537495137/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Northern mythology&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: is Crawford right about the contest between Good and Evil, or is the Northern Myth Podcast right, which may imply that Crawford might have been taking a christianised view on the story? Does scholarly literature shed more light on this issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-11-02T19:55:50.757" Title="Does the Kalevala rely on the concepts of good and evil?" Tags="&lt;finnish-literature&gt;&lt;the-kalevala&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8737" CreationDate="2018-11-04T02:09:26.587" Score="3" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where does Tolkien talk about hybridization of humans and other beings, in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.excellence-in-literature.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/fairystoriesbytolkien.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Fairy Stories&lt;/a&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just re-read it, and can't find the spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it just a small mention, related to the Frog Prince or something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got the info from &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/Literature/OnFairyStories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVTropes's info on the essay&lt;/a&gt;, which says, or used to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Heinz Hybrid: He mentions this, and notes that it can lead to unimpressive results if overdone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/Laconic/HeinzHybrid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heinz Hybrid&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hybrid of an implausible number of different species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="566" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T20:52:25.707" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T20:52:25.707" Title="Where does Tolkien talk about hybridization of humans and other beings, in &quot;On Fairy Stories&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-04T20:20:50.203" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember learning that &quot;literary theory,&quot; according to some, is theory through which society and other artificial constructs are analyzed as though works of literature or art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall finding more useful for my own understanding an original interpretation that &quot;literary theory&quot; is theory (of culture, of society, of language, of whatever one likes) that is written as literature, with the same creative and imaginative affordances, the same sensitivities, and a flexible style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that defining the field of theory this way (ironically?) gives it some legitimacy--for example against the Sokal attacks, which arguably misunderstood its goals--and distinguishes it neatly from philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this interpretation of literary theory mine alone, or have any scholars expressed similar views? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, whence did the label &quot;literary theory&quot; arise, and how is one correctly to understand its vocabular meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:54:38.397" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:54:38.397" Title="&quot;Literary theory&quot;: Genre or field?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7985" CreationDate="2018-11-05T09:50:57.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no textual answer to this question. Instead, however, we can perhaps artifice one by looking at the religious beliefs of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dickens.ucsc.edu/resources/faq/religion.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;academic symposium The Dickens Project&lt;/a&gt; has this to say on the subject of Dickens' religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all his writings, Charles Dickens—a Christian of the broadest kind—is outspoken in his dislike of evangelicalism and Roman Catholicism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens's parents were Anglican, but evidently entirely uninterested in the dogmas of the Church of England and probably not very regular in their worship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while Dickens was not evangelical and was actively critical of aspects of religious life, he was certainly a believer. While he was disinterested in dogma, those beliefs were broadly Anglican and Protestant in nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is important because some Catholic doctrines believe in the existence of purgatory, a place between heaven and hell. Those who die outside of a state of grace may go there and hope to redeem themselves and enter heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Dickens rejected Catholicism and so we cannot imagine that he envisaged Marley as residing in purgatory. It's also clear that he cannot be in heaven, due to his sins. He must, therefore, have come from hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if Dickens was not particularly religious, would he have cared about this at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is evident at the time of his first American trip in 1842 ... It was in these years too that Dickens first felt the need to impart some religious instruction to his children and, significantly, undertook to do this himself by writing a simplified version of the gospels designed for reading aloud&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Christmas Carol was written in 1843 which, we may infer, was at the height of Dickens' religious feelings. So it seems likely he at least dwelled on the theological possibilities of Marley's fate. Given that he is in hell, and there is no redemption from hell, it is tempting to conclude that there is no redemption for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Dickens mentions Christ's coming again &amp;quot;to judge the world&amp;quot; (LOL 11), he seems never to have taken seriously the possibility of eternal damnation and is always bitterly critical of the harm done by those who hold out the threat of hellfire, especially over the young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, if Dickens was broadly religious, there is no suggestion that he did not believe in hell. We do, however, know, that he was disinterested in dogma. Therefore this statement has to be interpreted as his believing, contrary to doctrine, that sinners could be redeemed from hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that we can imagine a kinder fate for Marley after all. Having paid his punishment and assisted Scrooge, Dickens might well have believed that Marley could eventually be redeemed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I re-read the story over Christmas, and found the following relevant passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is required of every man,&amp;quot; the Ghost returned, &amp;quot;that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.  It is doomed to wander through the world -- oh, woe is me! -- and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ghost in question here is Marley. So it would seem that instead of hell, Marley's haunting in heavy chains is the punishment given to him for his sins. He implies that this is a fate shared by others too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would fit with Dickens' rejection of eternal hellfire and adds weight to the supposition that Marley might have been freed some time after his encounter with Scrooge. Although Jacob also says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;weary journeys lie before me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So perhaps he has more punishment to pay yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T09:20:41.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8733" CreationDate="2018-11-05T12:13:18.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We cannot of course know the exact passage TV Tropes have in mind without asking the author, but I suspect it might be this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If men&#xA;really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not&#xA;have arisen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T08:42:33.523" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T08:42:33.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-05T13:19:29.653" Score="5" ViewCount="676" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miss Prism: (&lt;em&gt;Recoiling in indignant astonishment&lt;/em&gt;) Mr Worthing! I am unmarried!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack: Unmarried! I do not deny that is a serious blow. &lt;strong&gt;But after all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered&lt;/strong&gt;? Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly? &lt;strong&gt;Why should there be one law for men, and another for women? Mother, I forgive you&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Tries to embrace her again.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T14:27:03.963" Title="What do these lines mean in 'The Importance of Being Earnest'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-importance-of-being-earnest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8738" CreationDate="2018-11-05T18:36:08.863" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key part of this passage is that just prior to attempting to hug Miss Prism, Jack had confirmed that the handbag he was left in as a child belonged to her. Therefore he believes she is his mother. To Jack, this is a joyful reunion; to Miss Prism, however, this is an accusation against her character, since she is unmarried and therefore supposed to be a virgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Miss Prism exclaims that she is unmarried, she means that it's impossible for her to be his mother, as a woman of her stature would never have sex outside of marriage. However Jack hears this as a confession that she &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; had sex outside of marriage, and hastily reassures her that he loves her anyway. The humour comes from the mismatch in how each character is reading the situation - Jack sees himself as being generous and progressive, but all he's doing is offending Miss Prism further by continuing to insist she had a child (him) out of wedlock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for his specific lines, &quot;who has the right to cast a stone&quot; refers to a Biblical passage (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+8%3A7&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 8:7&lt;/a&gt;) where Jesus speaks to a mob about to stone a woman for adultery, saying &quot;Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.&quot; In other words, no one is innocent, so it's unfair to condemn someone else without acknowledging our own faults. Furthermore, the requirement of virginity is a double standard - no one expects men to stay virgins before marriage, as long as they're discreet (&quot;one law for men, and another for women&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5189" LastEditorUserId="5189" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T14:27:03.963" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T14:27:03.963" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-05T23:42:29.273" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some time ago I read about a series of paperback books, published at the time (perhaps victorian period) that were popular amongst the upper classes which contained unusual or dramatic British court cases. Cases included interesting murders, and there was an effort to republish them recently. It was a type of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penny Dreadful&lt;/a&gt; containing court transcripts and commentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone identify the title of this publication?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5294" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-11-09T21:59:55.637" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T20:03:05.450" Title="British Victorian Trials identification" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-06T02:35:52.230" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a book I once read, but I do not know the title. The only thing that I remember is that the main character is a boy in high school whose parents are divorced. He lives with his father and does not get to see his mother who is a model in shampoo commercials. At the end of the book he meet his mom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that this book exists because my friend has also read it, but neither of us remember the name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5295" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T02:35:52.230" Title="Identify book where mother is in shampoo commercials" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8746" CreationDate="2018-11-06T20:55:30.970" Score="7" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf and when the poet talks about Heorot Hall (lines 71 through 73) he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  his God-given goods to young and old -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  but not the common land or people's lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does it mean by saying &quot;not the common land or people's lives&quot;? Does it mean to imply that Hrothgar had control over everything but the land and people's lives - God hadn't given him that control? The line just strikes me as rather confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T21:17:56.023" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T11:07:19.783" Title="Meaning of lines explaining Hrothgar's ruling in Heorot" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;seamus-heaney&gt;&lt;beowulf&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-06T21:17:28.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-11-06T21:17:28.980" LastActivityDate="2018-11-06T21:17:28.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-06T21:17:28.980" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Anglo-Saxon epic poem written in Old English about the warrior Beowulf battling Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a dragon. Use with a tag for the translator, such as [seamus-heaney]." OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T12:43:36.427" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T12:43:36.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8742" CreationDate="2018-11-07T01:13:30.653" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⁊ þær on innan       eall gedælan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;geongum ⁊ ealdum       ſƿylc him god ſealde&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;buton folc ſcare       ⁊ feorum gumena&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there within       all distribute&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to young and old       such as god gave him&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;except &lt;em&gt;folcscare&lt;/em&gt;       and lives of men&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4O2iD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4O2iD.jpg&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowell_Codex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nowell Codex&lt;/a&gt;, folio 133v.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Folcscare&lt;/em&gt; is a crux (a difficult word). &lt;em&gt;Folc-&lt;/em&gt; means ‘of the people; held in common’ and &lt;em&gt;scare&lt;/em&gt; is the accusative of &lt;em&gt;scearu&lt;/em&gt; meaning ‘share; portion; division’. Bosworth &amp;amp; Toller, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Anglo-Saxon_Dictionary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, give the definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;folcscearu&lt;/strong&gt; A division of the people, nation, multitude&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;illustrating it with the quotation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ðæt hie hine onsundne gebrohten of ðære folcsceare [that they should bring him uninjured from that tribe of people]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Heaney translate translate &lt;em&gt;folcscare&lt;/em&gt; as ‘common land’? Well,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Klaeber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Frederick] Klaeber&lt;/a&gt; glosses &lt;em&gt;folcscare&lt;/em&gt; as ‘public land’, in reliance on the view of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mitchell_Kemble&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[John Mitchell] Kemble&lt;/a&gt; that in early Germanic society there was a common fund of land over which the king originally had no control. In this he is followed by many. Such a view, influenced by Kemble’s strong political feelings about the continuing enclosure of commons in his day, is now rejected by most historians and legal scholars […] Yet the usual meaning of this poetic word is ‘nation,’ and not impossibly the poet means that it was not Hrōðgār’s prerogative to confer the rule of the nation upon another by his sole choice, for […] the consent of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witenagemot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;witan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and folk seems to have been required for succession in the ancient Germanic world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, John D. Niles (2008), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8ek3p6ILv8wC&amp;amp;pg=PA119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Klaeber’s Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, University of Toronto Press, p. 119.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that Kemble discusses common land under the name &lt;em&gt;folcland&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;folcscearu&lt;/em&gt;), for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folcland may be considered the original and general name of all estates save the hlot, &lt;em&gt;sors&lt;/em&gt; or alód of the first markmen: the whole country was divided into Folclands, containing one or more hides, subject to folcriht or the public law,—and hence having no privilege or immunity of any sort […] The power of disposal over this land lay in the nation itself, or the state; that is, in the king and his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witenagemot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;witan&lt;/a&gt;; but in what way, or by what ceremonies, it was conferred, we no longer know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Mitchell Kemble (1848), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/saxonsinengland04kembgoog/page/n314&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Saxons in England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, book I, p. 298.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether you take &lt;em&gt;folcscare&lt;/em&gt; to mean ‘common land’ or ‘nation’, either way the line describes a limit on the power of the king: he can distribute his own possessions, but not the property of the people, whether that is the people’s land, or the people’s rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the king cannot distribute &lt;em&gt;feorum gumena&lt;/em&gt;, the lives of men. Perhaps this means that he could not distribute justice arbitrarily, but had to respect the rule of law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T11:07:19.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-07T08:22:39.323" Score="-2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember in high school our class read a horror/suspense story involving a man who finds a painting at a garage sale. I can't remember many other details about it but would like very much to read it again. Would anybody know where the best place to look is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5303" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T16:06:21.190" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T19:54:28.697" Title="Trying to re-find a horror/suspense short story involving a painting" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2018-11-09T21:59:38.753" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8749" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-07T16:09:10.053" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have been recently reading the books and short stories that comprise Eric Flint's 1632/Ring of Fire series, I have noticed a narrative style that I have not seen before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These books are written with omniscient third-person narrator, but unlike a traditional narrator that maintains a consistent style and tone throughout the work, the narrator will change style to be similar to the characters that are in a given scene or chapter.  This style change can be seen in details like word choice, complexity of sentence structure, formality/informality, profanity, and what figurative language is chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an unpleasant technique once one gets used to it, but I do not recall seeing it in other fiction, either classic or contemporary. Is there a descriptive term or phrase for this style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T22:16:19.717" Title="Is there a name for this narrative technique or style?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8719" CreationDate="2018-11-07T17:30:19.057" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;We cannot possibly know for certain what happened between two people several hundred years ago, especially when surviving testimony has been coloured with such fevered speculation as surrounds the witch trials. However, it seems extremely unlikely that Proctor and Williams had an affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accusation stems from the court records, which show the testimony of Abigail Williams against John Proctor. She accused his then wife, Elizabeth, of being a witch, and Proctor stepped up to defend her, whereupon Williams also accused him of witchcraft. As her story expanded, it became more and more lurid, until it included the suggestion the two were lovers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no evidence to support the affair beyond Abigail's testimony, and plenty to suggest that she was lying. Consider the following circumstantial evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The age difference: Proctor was 60 and Williams was 11. Although it is commonly presumed that such an age difference was tolerated in this era, that is largely false. Although noblewomen married young, the relationships were not consummated until mid to late teens. And for common folk, parish records suggest that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_pattern&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;average marriage age for a woman was 25&lt;/a&gt;. This suggests a consensual relationship with such a huge age gap was extremely unlikely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proctor had been married twice before, having many children, including daughters. At his trial 32 neighbours signed a petition attesting to his good character. There is no evidence he had an interested in underage girls.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to this &lt;a href=&quot;http://historyofmassachusetts.org/the-salem-witch-trials/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;site on the history of Massachusetts&lt;/a&gt;, there is no evidence that they two actually knew one another prior to the trials. The estimated population of the area at the time varies between 500-2000 individuals, so this is entirely plausible.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Abigail Williams made a huge variety of accusations against people in Salem - 57 in total according to court records. We cannot, therefore, be sure there was anything special to inspire her accusation against Proctor, such as an affair. In fact, Proctor was a critic of the trials in general and accused several of the witnesses of lying, including Williams, stating they deserved to be whipped. That would seem a more likely motivation for Williams than an affair.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presuming that witches don't, in fact, exist, it seems that almost all of Williams' testimony consisted of lies. There is no reason to suppose the affair was any different.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this seems to have stopped Miller from imagining that the affair was real. He seems to have believed this whole-heartedly and not merely used it as an inspiration for the play. He stated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting that he refers to &quot;two women&quot; even though Abigail was, in fact, a young girl. Perhaps when he said this he was unaware, or simply not thinking of, Abigail's age which of course does make the story more plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA; - Hill, Frances (2009) The Salem Witch Trials Reader. Da Capo Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-11-07T18:49:36.413" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T18:49:36.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8748" CreationDate="2018-11-07T19:54:28.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you don't remember many details it's hard to know for sure, but my instinct is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Virus_Heads_North&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Road Virus Heads North&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen King. In it, a man buys a painting at a garage sale that he finds is changing in ominous ways. It's in his collection &lt;em&gt;Everything's Eventual&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5189" LastActivityDate="2018-11-07T19:54:28.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8749" CreationDate="2018-11-08T22:16:19.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you might be looking for the term &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free indirect speech&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in which the narration directly includes character thoughts and perspectives. Because the narrator is directly reporting the characters' thoughts like this, when the focus is on different characters, the narration tone and style can change as well.  Some good examples of free indirect speech are Mrs. Dalloway, Ulysses, and Pride and Prejudice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Credit where credit it due, I only know this from lurking on the Writing Stack Exchange site as well, and remembering &lt;a href=&quot;https://writing.stackexchange.com/a/39348&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2018-11-08T22:16:19.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-09T16:32:14.917" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;During a recent symposium a speaker stated that &quot;Thomas Kuhn's book &lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt; was not a narrative, it was an essay&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In searching online there are discussions of narrative vs descriptive writing (e.g., on &lt;a href=&quot;https://classroom.synonym.com/narrative-vs-descriptive-writing-1043.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Synonym.com&lt;/a&gt;) or expository vs narrative writing (e.g., on &lt;a href=&quot;https://prezi.com/x-8ne76ebwcy/expository-vs-narrative-writing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prezi&lt;/a&gt;) but nothing in the way of a discussion specific to distinguishing between narrative and essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that this query can be related back to writing genres. It may also be that I should not be dissatisfied with the links that did turn up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions on drilling deeper into the distinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T19:29:36.287" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T06:14:12.560" Title="What's the distinction between a narrative and an essay?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-10T14:20:55.717" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune01.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first rune of the Kalevala&lt;/a&gt; (Crawford's translation). Most of it is about the &quot;maiden&quot;, &quot;daughter of the Ether&quot;, and how her travels in the sea lead to the creation of the world. It is mentioned that she has a baby, but nothing more about that baby:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seven hundred years she labored&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ere her first-born was delivered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thus she swam as water-mother,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Toward the east, and also southward,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Toward the west, and also northward;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Swam the sea in all directions,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Frightened at the strife of storm-winds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Swam in travail, swam unceasing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ere her first-born was delivered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the poem, after the world has been created, the story shifts abruptly to Wainamoinen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus created were the islands,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rocks were fastened in the ocean,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pillars of the sky were planted,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fields and forests were created,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Checkered stones of many colors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gleaming in the silver sunlight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All the rocks stood well established;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the singer, Wainamoinen,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had not yet beheld the sunshine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had not seen the golden moonlight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Still remaining undelivered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wainamoinen, old and trusty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lingering within his dungeon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read enough about the Kalevala to know that he is the baby mentioned earlier. The title of this rune is also &quot;The Birth of Wainamoinen&quot;. But how is this clear from the writing itself, without any external context? The baby is mentioned briefly early in this rune, and at the later stage it seems as though we're shifting locations from the maiden in the sea to a man in prison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it meant to be clear, without context, that Wainamoinen is the son? How?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T14:20:55.717" Title="How are we supposed to know that Wainamoinen is the son?" Tags="&lt;finnish-literature&gt;&lt;the-kalevala&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5176" CreationDate="2018-11-10T19:08:15.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/aurora00leighbrowrich/page/372&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first edition of the poem&lt;/a&gt; (Chapman &amp;amp; Hall, London, 1857) has &lt;em&gt;shot&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;shut&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;–At which I shot my tongue against my fly&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And struck him;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequent editions by Chapman &amp;amp; Hall also have &lt;em&gt;shot&lt;/em&gt;; the Internet Archive has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/auroraleighapoe01browgoog/page/n381&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third (1857)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/auroraleighapoe00browgoog/page/n374&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth (1860)&lt;/a&gt; editions. It was in the early U.S. editions, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/auroraleigh00brow/page/338&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. S. Francis &amp;amp; Co., New York (1857)&lt;/a&gt; that the word was changed to &lt;em&gt;shut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly &lt;em&gt;shut&lt;/em&gt; is a misprint, because the change makes nonsense of the line, while the original version is quite clear: it is a metaphor in which the writer  of the letter (Lady Waldemar) imagines herself a frog shooting out her tongue at a fly and striking it (‘him’). In the metaphor the fly stands for Rowney Leigh, whom she has caught in her trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T19:08:15.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3559" CreationDate="2018-11-10T20:44:30.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;nubbed&quot; mean? Something is &lt;em&gt;nubbed&lt;/em&gt; if it has a &lt;em&gt;nub&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;nubs&lt;/em&gt;. (Just like something is &lt;em&gt;fringed&lt;/em&gt; if it has &lt;em&gt;fringes&lt;/em&gt;, or something is &lt;em&gt;winged&lt;/em&gt; if it has &lt;em&gt;wings.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of &lt;em&gt;nub&lt;/em&gt; is (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/nub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionary Online&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1 The crux or central point of a matter.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2 A small lump or protuberance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally, &lt;em&gt;nubbed&lt;/em&gt; would mean having &lt;em&gt;nubs&lt;/em&gt; with respect to definition 2. But this is poetry, and it's quite possible that Seamus Heaney is playing with words, so you will have to use your own judgment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Gareth Rees has an excellent answer dealing with the rest of your question (although he misses the possible play on words I describe above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Added in an edit:&lt;/strong&gt; Some more thoughts about the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The longship's swimming tongue&quot; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Lie down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in the word-hoard, burrow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the coil and gleam&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of your furrowed brain.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;trust the feel of what nubbed treasure&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  your hands have known.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this sounds like the speaker is a dragon (dragons have coils, hoards they burrow in, and are associated with Viking longships). But metaphorically, Heaney is talking about poetry. So literally (from the dragon point of view) &quot;nubbed treasure&quot; means treasure with small protuberances. But metaphorically, it might mean valued poems with &quot;nubs&quot; in sense 1 of the word above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T13:08:18.097" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T13:08:18.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3559" CreationDate="2018-11-10T20:44:52.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of these lines is a poetic vision in which Heaney invokes the Vikings only to demythologize them. Heaney considers ‘those fabulous raiders’ first as archaeological subjects (‘in the solid / belly of stone ships’ referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_burial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ship burial&lt;/a&gt;) and then as historical subjects (‘geography and trade, / thick-witted couplings and revenges’). This is followed by a section in which Heaney imagines ‘the longship’s swimming tongue’ giving him advice about writing poetry (‘Lie down / in the word-hoard … Compose in darkness’). It is here that the longship says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Expect aurora Borealis&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in the long foray&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but no cascade of light&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://petapixel.com/2016/01/22/the-truth-and-lies-of-those-aurora-photos-you-see/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Contrary to the impression given by photographs&lt;/a&gt;, the northern lights are very faint to the naked eye. The photographs are taken with long exposures and post-processed to increase the colour saturation. So this means: when composing poetry, expect to see a faint glimmer in the distance, not a sudden bright light of inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;trust the feel of what nubbed treasure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;your hands have known.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nubbed&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; Having numerous small protuberances; covered in nubs or lumps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this means: when composing poetry, pay attention to the real things around you, the rough things that you have touched, these are the sources of poetical value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Word-hoard” is the Old Norse &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kenning&lt;/a&gt; for language, wherein the poet must follow the labyrinthine toils of his wit like a winter serpent twining for warmth. For the illumination of his “long foray”, Heaney can expect only distant tints on the far horizon. […] To achieve full identity as an artist, Heaney must ultimately live by the rough braille of his senses, and thus he returns in the last two lines to the “nubbed treasure” of the world at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Floyd Collins (2003), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zfHKH2HlwbYC&amp;amp;pg=PA83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p.83.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-10T20:44:52.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8760" CreationDate="2018-11-10T22:34:06.230" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this one in early 2000. It was a novel length hardback, I think with a white cover. The President-Elect has won the election and is riding a horse in some parade when it gets spooked. He falls off, and suffers a nasty bone fracture, which subsequently gets infected and kills him rather suddenly. The natural replacement is the vice president, who is a Brainless Beauty from a political destiny family like the Kennedy's. I think there was a line introducing him coming in for a run where it was noted that not one hair was out of place, and he sported only an attractive sheen of sweat. At the time I read it, I thought he was being portrayed as a cross between Kennedy and Quayle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether due to his incompetence (meaning he'd be run by his cabinet), or some other reason, the protagonists decide someone else needs to be elected. Some or all of the Electoral College had not voted, so they were scheming to get those College members to vote for someone not supported by their state's popular vote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T04:30:18.940" Title="Book involving the president-elect dying in a horse accident and electoral college shenanigans" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;politics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8759" CreationDate="2018-11-11T04:25:12.500" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I may have found it, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People%27s_Choice_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The People's Choice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jeff Greenfield, published in 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TTxUbm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TTxUbm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Book Cover - *The People&amp;#39;s Choice*&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On Election Day in 1996, The Republican presidential ticket of Foyle-Block wins enough states to receive 305 electoral Votes, compared to 233 electoral votes for the Democratic ticket of Mueller-Vincent. Since 270 electoral votes are needed to win the Presidency, the issue of who should be the next President is thought resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;However, President-elect Foyle dies only days after the election in a freak accident. The Republican party then promotes his running mate, Governor Theodore Block, to the top of the ticket. Governor Block quickly proves that he is a mental lightweight, his nickname being Terry Blockhead, leading some to question his fitness for the presidency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of those questioning Block's fitness to be president is Michigan elector Dorothy Ledger, one of those forgotten people lost in a party's political machine who seems unimportant—until the fate of an election hinges on her actions. Ledger publicly questions whether she is required to vote for Block, and in so doing sets off a political firestorm and a minor rebellion among some Republican electors. A series of missteps by Block further exacerbates the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1594249226?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review&lt;/a&gt; mentions the horse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a contentious presidential election filled with backroom shenanigans, but finally the Republican candidate won. A few days after the election, the president-elect went to Wyoming to appear in a parade with children with disabilities. The unthinkable happens when the president-elect is thrown from the horse, and DIES. Now what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The fate of the nation now is in the hands of the Electoral College. Everyone agrees that the former vice-presidential elect is barely functional and certainly not qualified to actually be president. What will happen when the Electoral College meets? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Google search which got me there was &lt;em&gt;novel president-elect dies before swearing in&lt;/em&gt;. It wasn't until I wrote this question that I realized I'd been searching a president dying, not a president-elect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T04:30:18.940" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T04:30:18.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T07:21:01.600" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book says that Daphne was on board a ship that was heading to Port Mercia to retrieve the crown. That was the cause of Daphne being on Nation throughout the book, but was it possible that this all could have happened without the plague?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5313" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T17:12:26.950" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T17:12:26.950" Title="What was the cause of the plague, and was its mention necessary in the start of the book?" Tags="&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;nation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6411" CreationDate="2018-11-11T16:02:04.763" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe, based on the rest of the book, that Yossarian's love for the Chaplain is, most likely, romantic. Whether intentionally or not, Heller wrote Yossarian exhibiting attraction to men multiple times after the opening line. Many of the characters are described, from Yossarian's perspective, as attractive or handsome, including his tentmate Orr&quot;&#xA;&quot;Orr was one of the homeliest freaks Yossarian had ever encountered,&#xA;and one of the most attractive&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the Chaplain scene itself, it has quite a few interesting points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You’re a chaplain,’ he exclaimed ecstatically. ‘I didn’t know you&#xA;  were a chaplain.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Why, yes,’ the chaplain answered. ‘Didn’t you know I was a chaplain?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Why, no. I didn’t know you were a chaplain.’ Yossarian stared at him&#xA;  with a big, fascinated grin. ‘I’ve never really seen a chaplain&#xA;  before.’ The chaplain flushed again and gazed down at his hands. He&#xA;  was a slight man of about thirty-two with tan hair and brown diffident&#xA;  eyes. His face was narrow and rather pale. An innocent nest of ancient&#xA;  pimple pricks lay in the basin of each cheek. Yossarian wanted to help&#xA;  him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Can I do anything at all to help you?’ the chaplain asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Help' seems to be occassionally used as an euphemism in the novel, used in reference to relations with female characters as well. It might be a bit flimsy, but worth noting regardless, especially with the rest of the exchange: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I’ll come to see you again, probably tomorrow.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Please do that,’ Yossarian said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I’ll come only if you want me to,’ the chaplain said, lowering his&#xA;  head shyly. ‘I’ve noticed that I make many of the men uncomfortable.’&#xA;  Yossarian glowed with affection. ‘I want you to,’ he said. ‘You won’t&#xA;  make me uncomfortable.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the aftermath of the conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘A chaplain,’ Dunbar said when the chaplain had visited him and gone.&#xA;  ‘Did you see that? A chaplain.’ ‘Wasn’t he sweet?’ said Yossarian.&#xA;  ‘Maybe they should give him three votes.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yossarian's clear and enthusiastic interest, and the significance of Chaplain seeing him naked in a tree (a vision that is a very important aspect of his later character arc) are  not even the only elements that bind the characters together, and I could write more if the need  arises, but let me just say that I do believe that the Chaplain is, in fact, one of Yossarian's many love interests throughout the book, and far more significant to his arc than most of the female ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the lack of explicit sexual acts might lead some to believe he lacks actual attraction to men, the text contradicts that, imo, and the interactions with the Chaplain and Orr are particularly telling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5314" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T16:02:04.763" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8761" CreationDate="2018-11-11T16:34:36.150" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The plague sets the scene for Daphne's princesshood.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the story have happened in the same way without the plague? Mostly, yes. The subplot with the Gentlemen of Last Resort would have been removed from the story, and Daphne would have been just a girl from the English gentry rather than an heir to the throne. The events on the island would have played out in pretty much the same way until the very end when the Gentlemen of Last Resort arrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what does this add to the story? Why was it written specifically to make her an unknowing princess?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It adds to the irony and contrast between her life in the Nation and the life she'd have in England.&lt;/strong&gt; Much of the story is about this contrast: the cultural shock of putting a girl from an English noble family into a very different community, forcing her to learn their ways, learn to live among them, and to feel more at home there than she had in her old life. Ironically exacerbating this is the fact that her own society's expectations of her are &lt;em&gt;even more different than she'd realised&lt;/em&gt; from what she's doing in the Nation. From their point of view - from her grandmother's point of view, for example - it's bad enough for an English noble girl to be spending time with Mau and his people, but even worse for a princess. We the readers are aware of this, but she isn't, and thus there's a heightened sense of &lt;strong&gt;irony&lt;/strong&gt; and also of &lt;strong&gt;tension&lt;/strong&gt; - what will happen when her family finds her, will they take her away, what will they think of her?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It makes the story's bittersweet ending more inevitable.&lt;/strong&gt; Leading on from the last point in my previous paragraph, the consequences when her family arrives are indeed worse than she'd expected, from the point of view of her life with Mau in the Nation. If she'd had the same status as before in English society, she &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been able to continue her life there, her grandmother notwithstanding. But as the daughter of the new king, she was &lt;em&gt;forced&lt;/em&gt; to go all the way to the other side of the world and live with her father in England. There was no choice, and that spelled the tragic end of her relationship with Mau.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One correction: you said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book says that Daphne was on board a ship that was heading to Port Mercia to retrieve the crown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here you're getting confused between two ships. It was the Gentlemen of Last Resort who were going to Port Mercia with the crown to find the new king. Daphne was on the &lt;em&gt;Sweet Judy&lt;/em&gt;, and knew nothing about the plague or the issues of royal descent. So the whole plague/royalty issue really is irrelevant to the actual events of the story (although affecting our perceptions of them) until the final chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T16:34:36.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-11T20:15:58.340" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a poem. I thought it was a Mary Oliver poem, but I can't find it when searching the few words I know along with her name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem talks about a red tide coming in. There is a part where the poem mentions &quot;memory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know I haven't given much information but does anyone know of a poem like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5317" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-11T21:02:05.063" LastActivityDate="2018-11-11T21:02:05.063" Title="Help finding poem about a red tide coming in which mentions &quot;memory&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8769" CreationDate="2018-11-12T03:00:40.047" Score="7" ViewCount="564" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poet Federico García Lorca, when he was studying at Colombia University visited Harlem with a friend of his, Nella Larsen, a black novelist. It made a tremendous impression upon him and its influence is visible in some of the poems he wrote about New York. He could not understand the overt prejudice displayed by New Yorkers. One of the poems he wrote there is, ‘The King of Harlem’. In the English translation in &lt;em&gt;The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca&lt;/em&gt;, the first stanza goes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a spoon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He scooped out the eyes of crocodiles&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and spanked the monkeys on their bottoms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a spoon &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a later stanza goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That night the King of Harlem with a very hard spoon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  scooped out the eyes of crocodiles&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And spanked the monkeys on their bottoms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a spoon.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The negroes cried abased&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  among umbrellas and golden suns,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the mulattoes were stretching gum, anxious to reach the white torso,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and the wind blurred mirrors&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and burst open the veins of the dancers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Lorca mean by the image of ‘crocodiles’ here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T13:13:57.453" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T13:13:57.453" Title="What did Lorca mean by ‘crocodiles’ in his poem ‘The King of Harlem’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8768" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-12T03:58:05.620" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've already asked one question on this poem and I did think to include this question along with it but decided against it as the poem is quite long, though of course not as long as some ancient epics like the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sixth and seventh stanzas of ‘The King of Harlem’, Federico García Lorca writes (in the English translation from &lt;em&gt;The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Necessary to murder the blonde seller of brandy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and all the friends of the apple and sand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  necessary to bang with closed fists&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the small Jewesses that tremble full of bubbles,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so that the King of Harlem sings with his multitude,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so that the crocodiles sleep in long rows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  under the asbestos of the moon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  so that nobody doubts the infinite beauty of funnels,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  graters, feather-dusters, and saucepans in kitchens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah Harlem! Ah Harlem! Ah Harlem!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There is no anxiety compared to your oppressed scarlets,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to your blood shaken within your dark eclipse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to your garnet violence deaf and dumb in the penumbra,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to your great King, prisoner with a commissionaire’s uniform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Lorca mean by that thread of red that threads itself through the seventh stanza? ‘Oppressed scarlets’, ‘blood shaken’ and ‘garnet violence’? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sixth stanza is there as an introduction to the seventh. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T13:14:45.700" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T13:14:45.700" Title="What does Lorca mean by ‘the oppressed reds’ and ‘garnet violence’ in his poem ‘The King of Harlem’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8767" CreationDate="2018-11-12T10:19:01.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem as a whole contrasts the experience of people of colour in their ancestral land with their experience of New York. The symbolic protagonist is a true &quot;king&quot; in his own land. But while he may also be &quot;king&quot; in Harlem, it is a far less noble office, one that is forced to play second fiddle to the of the white population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In African myth, the crocodile serves two roles. In some legends, such as those of Nigeria, it is associated with kingship. More commonly though, due to its man-eating tendencies, it is a monster, a symbol of evil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A spoon, meanwhile, is a pretty ineffectual tool for taking on a crocodile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By conquering the crocodile with a mere spoon, the protagonist is thus displaying his strength and prowess. He has mastered the symbol of kingship and of evil, demonstrating his own right to kingship and his ability to protect his subjects. While he retains his prowess in Harlem, it is far less vital since his subjects are &quot;abased&quot; and struggling to be taken seriously compared to whites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth mentioning that the poet was Hispanic, not black. So while he attempts to tackle racism in the poem his vision of the black experience is, itself, racist, playing heavily to the &quot;noble savage&quot; stereotype.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Lynch, P.A. and Roberts, J. (2010). African Mythology, A to Z&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- St John, David (2014). In Reality Meager: Eluding Death Anxiety In Walt Whitman And Federico García Lorca’s Poetics of the Body. The University of Tennessee.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T10:19:01.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8770" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8771" CreationDate="2018-11-12T15:48:31.407" Score="7" ViewCount="404" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this poem in the 5th or 6th grade or so, so that'd be 2012-2014 (somewhere in there). It was out of some packet copied out of a book for this language arts extension thing (I remember the book being very keen on something called &quot;Jacob's ladders&quot; I think, for difficulty of questions or something like it - this was part of a gifted/talented informal class). It was in english but it could very well have been translated. I remember very clearly that it started with lines like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell me a story, said Witch's child &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the beast so fierce and wild&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ended with a line like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Something nice to make me sleepy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember it was reasonably long - it filled up the whole page, which was around 11x13 since it had been copied, in a normal size font with a small illustration at the bottom, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea how I've remembered it this whole time, so I thought I might actually try to find the poem. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T16:53:16.903" Title="Poem about bedtime story for witch's child" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8770" CreationDate="2018-11-12T16:16:56.943" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Bedtime Stories’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lilian-moore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lilian Moore&lt;/a&gt; has appeared in many collections, but I think it was originally published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/seemylovelypoiso00moor/page/n11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;See My Lovely Poison Ivy: And Other Verses About Witches, Ghosts and Things&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1975) with an illustration by Diane Dawson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JvsSU.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you’ve seen this poem attributed to a child, that’s because it was plagiarized:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Language Arts&lt;/em&gt;, a journal of the National Council of Teachers of English, published in its February, 1983 issue a work by a seventh grader:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Witch’s Child&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Tell me a story&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Said the witch’s child&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    […]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    So crawly and creepy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Something nice to make me sleepy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is clearly with several word, article, and punctuation changes the work of Lilian Moore, a noted children’s poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Myra Cohn Livingston (1983), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/childaspoetmytho00livi/page/146&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The child as poet: myth or reality?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Boston: The Horn Book, Inc., p.147&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is from a long list of examples of published poetry attributed to schoolchildren, that were in fact plagiarized.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-12T16:53:16.903" LastActivityDate="2018-11-12T16:53:16.903" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Cien años de soledad' (1967, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude') by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. Use this tag with [gabriel-garcia-marquez] and [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:30:05.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Ivanhoe' (1819) by Walter Scott. Use this tag with [sir-walter-scott]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:31:38.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Scottish author Walter Scott (1771 – 1832) and his life as a writer. Scott is well-known for novels such as 'Ivanhoe', 'Rob Roy', 'The Lady of the Lake', 'Waverley', 'The Heart of Midlothian' and 'The Bride of Lammermoor'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T16:33:19.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8753" CreationDate="2018-11-13T19:29:48.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The resources at &lt;a href=&quot;https://classroom.synonym.com/narrative-vs-descriptive-writing-1043.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Synonym.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://prezi.com/x-8ne76ebwcy/expository-vs-narrative-writing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prezi&lt;/a&gt; explain the differences between narrative and descriptive writing (Synonym.com) or between narrative and descriptive essays (Prezi) but they are not very helpful at understanding the comment about Kuhn's &lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt;. Especially Prezi bases the distinction between the two types of essays by focusing on the genre of the &quot;personal narrative&quot;, which has nothing to do with Kuhn's book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitions of &quot;narrative&quot; can differ considerably from each other, but narrativity is essentially the set of formal and thematic features that distinguish narrative texts from non-narrative texts. For example, some theorists point out that narratives present a sequence of events or actions that unfold over time. Other theorists state that narrativity is primarily determined by &quot;experientiality&quot; (M. Fludernik, 1996), by the &quot;the quasi-mimetic evocation of real-life experience&quot; (see &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/experientiality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;experientiality&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in the living handbook of narratology). The iving handbook of narratology also points out that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrativity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;narrativity&lt;/a&gt; &quot;has become a contested term&quot;. The preceding comments on the term &quot;narrativity&quot; are only marginally helpful in explaining the quote about Kuhn's famous book. The term &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is also hard to define because so many disparate types of texts have been termed &quot;essays&quot;; it is typically a type of writing that presents an argument rather than a narrative. (But, then, Wikipedia claims the term has also been applied to short stories.) Since I don't know the symposium speaker, I don't know why they said that Kuhn's book was not a narrative but an essay; I can only assume that they had in mind a clear distinction between the two types of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is one of the most influential books in philosophy of science. I have not yet come across an introduction to philosophy of science that does not discuss it at some length (it often gets a chapter on its own). Kuhn introduced or revived a number of concepts to describe progress in science, such as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;normal science&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradigm shift&lt;/a&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Revolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scientific revolution&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the type of writing that one associates with &quot;narrative&quot; as defined by Synonym.com or on Prezi; the term &quot;essay&quot; seems more appropriate here. But the quote about Kuhn's book assumes that &lt;em&gt;The Structure of Scientific Revolutions&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; be seen as a narrative, or at least as having aspects of narrativity. Why is that? Kuhn's book is also a book about the &lt;em&gt;history&lt;/em&gt; of science; it replaces the way in which progress in science was usually presented (roughly as a steady accumulation of facts) with a new way of describing progress in science, i.e. by presenting as a type of activity that is dominated by a certain &quot;paradigm&quot; until that paradigm leads to contradictions and dead ends that force its rejection and replacement with a new paradigm. So in a way, Kuhn retells the history of science in a new way, which is why the term &quot;narrative&quot; applies here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-11-13T19:29:48.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4061" CreationDate="2018-11-14T10:44:23.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see it's not a direct quote; I only found examples of indirect speech. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/LosPoetasYSuVoz-3FedericoGarcaLorcaGabrielCelayaGerardoDiego&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LOS POETAS Y SU VOZ - 3 Federico García Lorca, Gabriel Celaya, Gerardo Diego&lt;/a&gt;, the &quot;quote&quot; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En esos momentos políticos alguien le preguntó sobre su preferencia política y él manifestó que se sentía a su vez católico, comunista, anarquista, libertario, tradicionalista y monárquico. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In those political moments, someone asked him about his political preference and he stated that he felt in turn Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist and monarchist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text goes on to say that for this reason, he never joined a political faction and never distanced himself from any of his friends for any political reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;quote&quot; can be found on several other websites, e.g. in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.la-politica.com/federico-garcia-lorca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Federico García Lorca: “En la bandera de la Libertad bordé el amor más grande de mi vida.”&lt;/a&gt; on  La Política, on the website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.granadaporelmundo.com/federico-garcia-lorca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Granada por el Mundo&lt;/a&gt;, in the article &lt;a href=&quot;http://noticias.universia.es/vida-universitaria/noticia/2008/08/18/579086/18-agosto-1936-fallecio-federico-garcia-lorca-es-poeta-influencia-literatura-espanola-siglo-xx.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;El 18 de agosto de 1936 falleció Federico García Lorca, es el poeta de mayor influencia de la literatura española del siglo XX&lt;/a&gt; on Universia and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22vez+cat%C3%B3lico%2C+comunista%2C+anarquista%2C+libertario%2C+tradicionalista+y+mon%C3%A1rquico%22+site%3Ablogspot.com&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many, many blogs&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the statement also on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Garc%C3%ADa_Lorca#%C3%9Altimos_d%C3%ADas_y_fusilamiento&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, which cites &lt;a href=&quot;http://trabalibros.com/escritores/i/17455/56/federico-garcia-lorca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a source that uses a slightly different formulation&lt;/a&gt; (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Antes de ser asesinado, el poeta fue interrogado sobre sus preferencias políticas. Lorca, que nunca estuvo afiliado a ninguna fuerza política, manifestó sentirse &lt;strong&gt;al mismo tiempo&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;católico, comunista, anarquista, libertario, tradicionalista y monárquico&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Before his assassination, the poet was asked about his political preferences. Loca, who never affiliated with any political force, said that he felt &lt;strong&gt;at the same time&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Catholic, communist, anarchist, libertarian, traditionalist and monarchist.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-16T09:36:23.917" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T09:36:23.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8781" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8782" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American author Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875 – 1950) and his works. Burroughs is best known for the creation of the Tarzan character and to a lesser extent for the Mars adventurer John Carter." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T10:56:58.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8783" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8785" CreationDate="2018-11-14T13:39:50.193" Score="3" ViewCount="861" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to learn a new language, and looking for works with interleaved Norwegian-English texts. It can be either alternating sentences, paragraphs, or pages, so that I can juxtapose the corresponding vocabulary, structure, et cetera in the two languages without much difficulty. The genre is not of much importance for now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a particular name for this formatting I can use as a keyword for my searches? Thanks in advance.&lt;/strong&gt; I am asking for the naming for this book format, rather than resources themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt; I came across a term &quot;parallel text&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5149" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T19:51:23.197" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T19:51:23.197" Title="What is the name for the books with side-by-side bilingual text?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8740" CreationDate="2018-11-14T15:24:35.577" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.noumenal.com/marc/nbt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web page&lt;/a&gt; describes the series &lt;em&gt;Notable British Trials&lt;/em&gt; published between 1905 and 1959, which is probably what you mean, in spite of the fact that it is not Victorian &lt;em&gt;sensu stricto&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-11-14T18:18:07.907" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T18:18:07.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8783" CreationDate="2018-11-14T18:33:52.667" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you have already found out, if texts are presented side by side, these are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;parallel text&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; in the case of translations, the usual term is &lt;strong&gt;bilingual parallel text&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilingual parallel texts can be used as a language learning resource; see for example the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fluentu.com/blog/bilingual-parallel-texts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;6 Spots to Pick Up Texts in the Bilingual Parallel Universe&lt;/a&gt; on FluentU. There are entire corpora of parallel texts; see for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://opus.nlpl.eu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OPUS - an open source parallel corpus&lt;/a&gt;. For other examples, see for example this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallel translation of Beowulf&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/19Jh/Schiefner/sch_ka01.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallel German translation of the Kalevala&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the translation is not presented on the facing page but on lines that alternate with the original text, this is called &lt;strong&gt;interlinear translation&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, there are interlinear translations of &lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/tr-index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chaucer's Canterbury Tales&lt;/a&gt;, of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/interlinear/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bible&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-11-14T18:33:52.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8786" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-14T19:59:43.760" Score="2" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give the whole &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57607/the-house-was-quiet-and-the-world-was-calm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poem&lt;/a&gt; for context, but I'm having trouble making complete sense of a line in the poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does Stevens mean by the phrase &lt;em&gt;&quot;wanted much most to be / The scholar to whom his book is true,&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? Does Stevens mean to draw attention to the rationalism/empiricism of math, science, or philosophy, that the reader wanted to be like the scholar of the &quot;truth&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5168" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:26:30.347" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T14:03:55.367" Title="The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm by Wallace Stevens quote interpretation" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wallace-stevens&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8788" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8789" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" Score="0" Body="for the series of novels written by K. A. Applegate. use with the [k-a-applegate] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T08:42:08.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8209" CreationDate="2018-11-15T10:14:39.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Dolphins, a dolphin which has been captured and trained for an aquarium show mourns its loss of freedom. In addition to critiquing humanities' treatment of wild animals, it also presents a wider critique of ecological destruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question poems the lines out of sequence. We'll start with the earliest one from the first stanza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Outside this world you cannot breathe for long.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;This world&quot; is their current world, the aquarium. The dolphin is longing for escape, but it has no means to do so. Even if it could escape the confines of the pool, the only place to go is dry land. Dolphins, as mammals, do breathe oxygen but their bodies are built in such a way that they require the buoyancy and support provided by water to extend their ribs and fill their lungs. Hence, travelling over dry land for an extended period in an attempt to escape will lead to death by suffocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As in much of the poem, the word choice here is very clever. To &quot;breathe&quot; is commonly used as a metaphor for freedom. So in saying it cannot breathe, the dolphin is both making a literal statement and bemoaning its lack of freedom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;for the world will not deepen to dream in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third stanza, the dolphin has realised that it cannot escape its captivity. Here &quot;the world&quot; means its world - the world of the aquarium. It understands that that world will not &quot;deepen&quot;. This is an interesting word choice: at face value, it means the deeps of the ocean, where a dolphin is free to swim. But it could also be read as deep in an intellectual or philosophical sense, further humanising the dolphin's narration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theme continues with the conclusion of the line, &quot;dream in&quot;. To dream is a very human activity: we do not really know if dolphins dream. But one can also day-dream, a common euphemism for stirring creativity and thoughtfulness. The line recalls the slightly trance-like state assumed when we take light exercise. In the tight confines of the aquarium, the dolphin is not free to swim and dream as it does so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary: the dolphin is realising the aquarium will never get any bigger, and that as a result, it will never be free to swim at leisure. The line expresses this in deliberately human language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;out of love reflects me for myself&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is worth quoting in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The other knows and out of love reflects me for myself.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because it harks back to a line earlier in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The other has my shape.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which would seem to indicate that &quot;the other&quot; is another dolphin sharing the pool. That dolphin has a similar understanding of their awful mutual situation but it can do nothing. Instead, it offers sympathy: it &quot;reflects&quot; out of &quot;love&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;me for myself&quot; is interesting as it is a statement of individuality. Many animals lack a sense of self and, when faced with a mirror, react as if it is another animal of the same species. In saying &quot;myself&quot; the author is stating the dolphins have sufficient self-awareness both to act as individuals and to sympathise with one another, yet more humanising characteristics to generate sympathy for their plight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-11-15T10:14:39.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2579" CreationDate="2018-11-15T21:54:33.007" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd argue this instead;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eric: gluttony (due to his over-indulgence with alcohol)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sheila: envy (she was envious of Eva's looks)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mrs Birling: pride (she looks down upon Eva and other working class people)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arthur: greed (he fires Eva because she wanted more money &quot;lower costs higher prices&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gerald: lust (due to his affair)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5342" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-13T15:27:31.783" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T15:27:31.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8795" CreationDate="2018-11-16T08:23:53.653" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this fragment from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/library/prose/1670.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Boy at Mugby&lt;/a&gt; within paragraph 60:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The swelling tumult was arrested in its rise. Sniff, bore away by his servile disposition, had drored up his leg with a higher and a higher relish, and was now discovered to be waving his corkscrew over his head. It was at this moment that Mrs. Sniff, who had kep’ her eye upon him like the fabled obelisk, descended on her victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;the fabled obelisk&quot; alluding to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1707" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T09:52:19.013" Title="What is &quot;the fabled obelisk&quot; alluding to in The Boy at Mugby?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8794" CreationDate="2018-11-16T09:52:19.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of the work &quot;obelisk&quot; is most likely a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malapropism&lt;/a&gt; here. The narrator is confusing the less familiar word &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.occultopedia.com/b/basilisk.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;basilisk&lt;/a&gt; with the more familiar word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obelisk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An obelisk is a type of monument and won't cast any glances at anyone. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilisk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;basilisk&lt;/a&gt;, by contrast,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;is a legendary reptile reputed to be a serpent king who can cause death with a single glance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It only exists in myths and fables, hence the phrase &quot;fabled basilisk&quot;. In English literature, the basilisk somehow got confused with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cockatrice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cockatrice&lt;/a&gt;. You can find several &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cockatrice+site%3Ashakespeare.mit.edu&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;instances of &quot;cockatrice&quot; in Shakespeare's works&lt;/a&gt;, where it is typically associated with a deadly glance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T09:52:19.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="791" CreationDate="2018-11-16T10:20:21.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Jews are represented in Narnia, it's the mice. The band of mice consists of twelve mice, the Jews consists of twelve tribes. The mice are the smallest animals in Narnia, the Jews are the smallest of all the people's on the earth. Jews are in this world often portrayed as mice even though they're the opposite. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is represented also, he's represented by Reepicheep. The most valiant and bravest of all mice and probably of all animals in Narnia. Still he's soft and helpful to others, like you can read how he in his good heart helped the obnoxious boy at the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader while others minded their own business and laughed at him. He's king also, king of the mice. He's the only Narnian that ever got to the land of Aslan's father without death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David is more represented. In Narnia Peter is represented as High King over Narnia, King David is Supreme King over Israel. Peter was taken from &quot;outside&quot;, David was also taken from &quot;outside&quot; as a shepherd boy who minded his own business with his sheep and didn't bother anyone. King David was golden haired, like you can see in the movie &quot;The Witch and the Wardrobe&quot; Peter's hair in England was dark blond but after coming to Narnia started to look golden. For Peter Narnia is everything, the hero in the story that everybody counts on. With Israel that's David, a patriot to Israel at heart, the country belonging to his Father. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5344" LastEditorUserId="5344" LastEditDate="2018-11-25T00:12:21.207" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T00:12:21.207" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8753" CreationDate="2018-11-16T23:02:46.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; is a thing of beauty. Wrt &lt;em&gt;essay&lt;/em&gt; it has ten usages beginning with &quot;the action or process of trying or testing&quot; and ending with &quot;a test-scale.&quot; The eighth entry has the most relevance for my question, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a composition of moderate length on any particular subject, or branch&#xA;  of a subject; originally implying want of finish, 'an irregular,&#xA;  undigested piece', but now said of a composition more or less&#xA;  elaborate in style, though limited in range...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &lt;em&gt;narrative&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; has much less to say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an account or narration; a history, tale, story, recital (of facts,&#xA;  etc.)...a consecutively developed story...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4230" LastActivityDate="2018-11-16T23:02:46.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9061" CreationDate="2018-11-17T06:43:20.683" Score="1" ViewCount="2493" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;hollow crown&quot; speech in &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, there is a line with the words &quot;Cover your heads&quot;. I need a paraphrase for this line. What does Shakespeare imply by this line in the context of this speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T17:54:28.910" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T17:54:28.910" Title="In the Hollow Crown speech, what does the line &quot;Cover your heads&quot; imply?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-ii&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8799" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8798" CreationDate="2018-11-17T12:11:15.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it's a reference to &quot;mourning dress,&quot; meaning that those mourning a death would cover themselves to indicate their grief. There's an interesting article &lt;a href=&quot;https://artofmourning.com/2016/01/13/mourning-fashion-in-white/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, which includes a painting of Richard II's funeral, by coincidence. Emphasis mine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt; Similarities with nuns are clear; the rejection of a sexual lifestyle, dressing in black, grey and white to symbolize the loss of joy, while nuns would wear black, grey, brown and white to symbolise purity, humility and chastity. Sexual anonymity was present in both costumes, as well. Nuns would be be draped in fabric and &lt;b&gt;hiding their faces,&lt;/b&gt; even to the point of shaving one’s head, rejected any interest in vanity. Similarly, &lt;b&gt;widows were hidden under veils and drapery,&lt;/b&gt; wearing clothes that were out of fashion to represent their lack of interest in society.&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-17T12:11:15.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T13:33:32.653" Score="5" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avicenna&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avicenna&lt;/a&gt; (980-1037) was a Persian writer and scientist who is regarded as one of the founders of modern medicine. I found it interesting to discover that his textbook on medicine was written in the form of &lt;strong&gt;poetry&lt;/strong&gt;, in a verse form as well as a prose form. Why was this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it a common practice in Persian literature of the time to write scientific textbooks as poems? Either way, what was the reason - to make the writing more entertaining / likely to hold the reader's attention, or for a sense of aesthetic beauty, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T15:39:37.977" Title="Why did Avicenna write his medical textbook in verse?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;avicenna&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8803" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-17T23:17:49.000" Score="2" ViewCount="557" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/templeoftextsess00gass/page/70/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Temple of Texts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, William Gass writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the preface to his &lt;em&gt;Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, Dr. Johnson whines (another persistent feature of the genre)—“It is the fate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/67713/8712&quot;&gt;those who toil at the lower employments of life&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good: to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward&lt;/strong&gt;”—a whine, yes, but how perfectly composed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how these vices (that I bolded) involve only the lower employments, and not the elite professions?  Isn't it unfair for Johnson to upbraid the former, and not the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.108805/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This first paragraph&lt;/a&gt; is followed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science, the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear obstructions from the paths of Learning and Genius, who press forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T15:50:47.193" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T01:38:28.110" Title="Why did Johnson scoff those &quot;who toil at the lower employments of life&quot; in the preface to his dictionary?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-johnson&gt;&lt;dictionary-of-the-english-language&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8813" CreationDate="2018-11-17T23:44:01.003" Score="0" ViewCount="447" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often look for books by topic. For example, recently I wanted to find books about princesses reclaiming their throne, and I got recommended a few. I googled each title, read the summary, if I could find one, read the reviews on Amazon, even read the books' beginnings in Amazon's preview feature. And still, despite 4 1/2 stars, raving reader reviews, and a great beginning, many of the books were so annoyingly bad that I could barely keep reading them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many had characters that acted in stupid and irritating ways, protagonists were permanent saved by random good luck or &lt;em&gt;deae ex machina&lt;/em&gt;, there were contradictions and holes in the plot, and so on. I never encounter any of these problems in the books I buy in book stores or from bestseller lists or from literary award lists, or at least not to such an extent, only when I buy books I get recommended on the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what can I do to separate the wheat from the chaff, if the books haven't been preselected for me by bookstore owners, award juries, or professional reviewers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the past two years I mostly read books recommended on the internet, and almost all of them were a huge disappointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5350" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T22:16:52.860" Title="How to tell whether a book is worth reading?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2018-11-20T12:23:24.647" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8753" CreationDate="2018-11-18T06:07:23.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert, but I do think there can be an overlap here. A narrative is traditionally defined as a piece of writing chronicling a connected series of events or a story in which a person or various persons interact; narratives are often descriptive and creative. An essay is merely &quot;a short piece of writing on a particular subject,&quot; typically nonfiction, informative, and desiring to convey the author's argument. That is the main dichotomy, I'd assume; &lt;strong&gt;one of these styles is primarily designed to entertain or divert with piquant details and descriptors while the other functions strictly to inform an audience.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Truman Capote's &lt;em&gt;In Cold Blood&lt;/em&gt;, to me, is a fascinating example of how narrative style and journalistic reporting blend. While Capote sets up his book in a literary format (creating dialogue between the Clutters, who essentially feel like characters, employing vibrant imagery to describe Holcomb, building suspense in several ways), his true purpose within the book is to bring up the view he holds on capital punishment. His literary style helps build readers' interest and enables them to connect with the family and, at times, the criminals, while also setting the foundation for his argument. Of course, &lt;em&gt;ICB&lt;/em&gt; isn't an essay, but it shows a possible coexistence of both narrative and honest nonfiction or essay–type writing. (I don't really read essays in my free time, otherwise I could have provided a better example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5351" LastEditorUserId="5351" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T06:14:12.560" LastActivityDate="2018-11-18T06:14:12.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-18T12:56:21.183" Score="3" ViewCount="1682" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought metaphor, but it's the &quot;seemed&quot; that's throwing me off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not quite 'something IS something else' (i.e. his 'entrails turned into ice'), but then it's not as comparative as 'like/as' (i.e. his 'entrails were like ice'/'entrails went as cold as ice').&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a quote straight after where Julia's red cheeks are described as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as though unconnected with the skin beneath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posed with a similar problem with the 'though'. I don't think it's a simile because there's no comparison - simply an extension of the idea that her 'cheekbone stood out sharply'. But it is metaphorically(?) saying she jumped out of her skin - is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5353" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-18T13:11:44.210" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T23:57:50.880" Title="Are these quotes from Orwell's 1984 similes, metaphors, or something else?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-18T17:43:30.713" Score="7" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have came across notes about &amp;quot;The Conference of the Birds&amp;quot;, and I have seen images of the cover of the manuscript, as well as random pages from it, as can be seen from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; entry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this manuscript is about 841 years old I would have assumed that it would be in the public domain, but I could not find the original copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any idea whether it exists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oxLL9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oxLL9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Scene from &amp;quot;The Conference of the Birds&amp;quot; in a Persian miniature. The hoopoe, center right, instructs the other birds on the Sufi path.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5355" LastEditorUserId="12702" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T01:29:25.687" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T01:29:25.687" Title="Is there a full copy of the original manuscript of &quot;Mantiq al-Tayr&quot; (The Conference of the Birds) by Attar of Nishapur?" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;farid-ud-din-attar&gt;&lt;the-conference-of-the-birds&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8809" CreationDate="2018-11-18T20:16:23.940" Score="3" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Jorge Luis Borges short story &lt;em&gt;Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius&lt;/em&gt; the only historical name the narrator and Bioy recognize from the cyclopaedia entry on Uqbar is that of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the impostor magician Smerdis, invoked more as a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked him up and read the story of the Smerdis being assassinated, and then the fake Smerdis being killed by the seven including Darius, and so forth. However, nowhere in the Wikipedia article did I find a mention of magic. What is Borges referring to by calling Smerdis a magician?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-07T14:14:00.253" LastActivityDate="2018-12-07T14:14:00.253" Title="&quot;The impostor magician Smerdis&quot; from Borges" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8808" CreationDate="2018-11-19T07:49:11.780" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Smerdis was a &lt;em&gt;magian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the book &lt;em&gt;Darius the Great&lt;/em&gt; by Jacob Abbott (freely available online e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27802/27802-h/27802-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=abbott&amp;amp;book=darius&amp;amp;story=smerdis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) has a chapter entitled &quot;Smerdis the Magian&quot;, and the journal article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/528928?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arno Poebel, &quot;The Duration of the Reign of Smerdis, the Magian, and the Reigns of Nebuchadnezzar III and Nebuchadnezzar IV&quot;, &lt;em&gt;The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures&lt;/em&gt; 56(2) (1939), pp. 121-145&lt;/a&gt;, also refers to him thusly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a magian, you may ask? There's an entry on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/magian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionry.com&lt;/a&gt; (mixed up with magi), and a much more detailed description &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.livius.org/articles/concept/magians/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. In short, they were important religious figures in ancient Persia, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; magicians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Borges call Smerdis a magician? Well, &lt;em&gt;did he?&lt;/em&gt; Remember this is a translated story, originally written in Spanish. Checking the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tlon.unal.edu.co/files/tlon_texto.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish text&lt;/a&gt;, we find the original version of this passage (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;De los nombres históricos, uno solo: &lt;strong&gt;el impostor Esmerdis el mago&lt;/strong&gt;, invocado&#xA;  más bien como una metáfora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spanish word &quot;mago&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#es/en/mago&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does translate as magician&lt;/a&gt;, but as far as I can tell from browsing Spanish-language pages about Zoroastrianism and ancient Persia, it's also the Spanish word for &quot;magian&quot;. E.g.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En la religión tradicional irania, los sacerdotes eran llamados magos.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nationalgeographic.com.es/historia/grandes-reportajes/zaratustra-profeta-del-fuego_11900/11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Geographic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Según Heródoto (I-101), los magos eran una de las seis tribus de la Media.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrismo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;TL;DR: it's a translation error.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T07:49:11.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2018-11-19T16:05:20.437" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surely the answer depends on &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; you read, and what you &lt;em&gt;value&lt;/em&gt; in what you read.  Maybe you should, after reading a book you enjoyed (or profited from, or whatever), try to read other books by the same author, instead of other books with similar plot elements.&#xA;Or books by friends of that author, or books often compared to the one you enjoyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One recommendation you can generally trust is from a positive character in a book you enjoyed.  If (say) you read and enjoyed a kids book by Edward Eager, and a character you admire mentions the &quot;Bastable books&quot;, you could do worse than reading them. (If you are reading Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; you will find Milton, Plutarch and Goethe recommended this way, but you might not trust the recommender.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T16:05:20.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8803" CreationDate="2018-11-19T16:47:22.823" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage you bolded is not a list of vices! It is a list of &lt;em&gt;unhappy conditions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first clause is the trickiest of the three:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here Johnson is using “evil” in the sense “misfortune, calamity” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.108805/page/n715&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sense 4 in his own dictionary&lt;/a&gt;), so “driven by the fear of evil” means something like “motivated by fear of penury”. Similarly, “good” is being used in the sense “benefit”. The clause thus refers to the economic, not the moral, situation of “those who toil at the lower employments”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the use of “evil” in Johnson’s preface with the following quotation from him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. Sir, all the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil, shew it to be evidently a great evil.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Boswell (1791), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Samuel Johnson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third clause:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“miscarriage” means “unhappy event of our undertaking; failure” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.83700/page/n147&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sense 1 in Johnson’s dictionary&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of all three clauses is that “those who toil at the lower employments” suffer the negative side of their endeavours without any prospect of benefitting from the positive side. This is, of course, unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is thus no scoffing or upbraiding going on, the rhetorical point being for Johnson describe a put-upon category of people and then, in a surprise twist, to reveal that he belongs to the category himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Samuel_Johnson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson’s own early biography&lt;/a&gt; will give some idea of why he started his preface in this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am not sure that I would follow Gass in calling the opening to the preface a “whine” on Johnson’s part. I think there’s a fair bit of irony in this passage, or perhaps “humblebragging” would be an appropriate modern term.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T03:16:17.773" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T03:16:17.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-19T18:48:47.483" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I thought I once heard something like the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No more effective device has yet been invented to prevent one man from helping another as writing a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or maybe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no more effective device to excuse a man from helping others as writing a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also thought I heard that it was by C. S. Lewis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find it anywhere.  Does it ring a bell for anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5360" LastEditorUserId="5360" LastEditDate="2018-11-24T16:46:10.397" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T16:46:10.397" Title="Quote: &quot;No more effective device has yet been invented to prevent one man from helping another as writing a book&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8804" CreationDate="2018-11-19T22:16:52.860" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be honest, if there isn't some sort of gatekeeper - bookstore owner, professional reviewer, etc., then the pool of books you're looking at is always going to contain books of more variable quality than those that have passed through some sort of gate.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing you can do is look for other types of hurdles that generally mean books on the other side are of higher overall quality, for instance, is it an older book that's still being published?, or is it translated from another language?  In each case, the book's been popular enough to be published at least twice, and got through the &quot;publishing&quot; gate twice.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of which - &quot;who published the book?&quot; is often a good question to ask.  Judging books by their covers gets a lot of flak (idiomatically, at least), but the cover tells you the author and the publisher, both of which are very useful tools.  If it's an author you have already read and enjoyed, you're in good hands.  If it's a publisher who is known for publishing high-quality books in the genre you're interested in reading, that's also a good sign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from sticking to publishers and authors you trust, you can also look up books your favorite authors are recommending.  If there's a blurb on the back of the book by an author whose own work you like or who is generally well regarded, that's potentially a good sign.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to reviewers, there are amateur reviewers out there as well as professional ones.  I'm not talking about reviews on Amazon itself.  I'm talking about blogs where someone reviews all their favorite fantasy or sci-fi or mystery or romance books.  There are tons of them out there.  Maybe look up some books you read recently and actually liked, and see who else out there in the world also liked those books.  You may have just found a reviewer whose tastes match yours.  That's an excellent resource to have.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Realistically the search will probably go the other way: from book to reviewer, rather than from reviewer to book.  When you look up a book's reviews and you find a reviewer who gives a book you're thinking about buying a good review, maybe quickly check what other books that reviewer thought were good.  If your most hated book of 2018 is on their &quot;must read&quot; list, maybe that reviewer's taste doesn't match yours and you should give this book a miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, a lot of these recommendations work better if you're starting with a broader category, like &quot;epic fantasy&quot; or &quot;police procedural&quot; than something uber-specific like &quot;books with specific plot elements x, y, and z&quot; but you can still look up who the publisher is and whether the book has any independent reviews outside of sites specifically trying to sell you the book.  You can still see if the people who wrote the blurbs on the dust jacket are people whose taste you trust.  There are also a lot of online communities out there where &quot;can you recommend a good book where [x] happens?&quot; is a welcome question (just not Stack Exchange).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also just reading the book.  Not all of it, obviously, but even if you're buying it online, you can often read an extract.  This won't tell you if the protagonist does something really annoying on page 200, but it can tell you if you at least like the author's writing style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, you could actually go to a bookstore instead of getting books online.  The problem you're running into is one that you've already solved, as you stated, &quot;I never encounter any of these problems in the books I buy in book stores.&quot;  In fact, there's another place you can go that's even better than a bookstore in my opinion - a library.  If you're lucky enough to have a good library network wherever in the world you're located, then this is an excellent resource (often it's even an excellent resource of ebooks that you can download from home and which return themselves automatically so they won't accrue any fines).  If you haven't paid for a book, it's a lot easier to just stop reading it when it annoys you, and then you won't have wasted your money or as much of your time. (and librarians are also excellent resources for book recommendations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4629" LastActivityDate="2018-11-19T22:16:52.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8814" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8815" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet, essayist and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709–1874) and his works, including &quot;A Dictionary of the English Language&quot; (1755)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T16:19:59.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8816" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8817" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;A Dictionary of the English Language&quot; (1755) by Samuel Johnson. Use with the [samuel-johnson] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T16:21:49.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8596" CreationDate="2018-11-20T20:18:31.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key part of the quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was said that Ellsworth Toohey had exercised a beneficent influence upon them - for they never forgot him: they came to consult him on many things, years later, they wrote him, they clung to him. They were like machines without a self-starter, that had to be cranked up by an outside hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ellsworth Toohey is driven by a need to exercise power over others. Effectively, he made these young men dependent on him (and therefore gave him power over them). As he told Peter Keating later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What do you... want.. Ellsworth?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Power, Petey.&quot;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You... always said...&quot; Keating began thickly, and stopped.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I've always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It's not my fault if you couldn't hear. you could, of course. You didn't want to. Which was safer than deafness - for me. I said I intended to rule... I shall rule.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Whom?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You. The world. It's only a matter of discovering the lever. &lt;strong&gt;If you learn how to rule one single man's soul, you can get the rest of mankind.&lt;/strong&gt; It's the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That's why the Caesars the Atillas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can't be ruled. &lt;strong&gt;It must be broken. Drive a wedge in, get your fingers on it - and the man is yours. You won't need a whip - he'll bring it to you and ask to be whipped.&lt;/strong&gt; Set him in reverse - and his own mechanism will do your work for you. Use him against himself... Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. &lt;strong&gt;Kill his aspirations and his integrity&lt;/strong&gt;...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last phrase quoted about killing their aspirations and integrity is particularly telling - that's exactly what he was doing as a career advisor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His statement that &quot;It's only a matter of discovering the lever&quot; to control people is also particularly telling. This seems strangely like a serial killer perfecting his M.O. in a way. I don't have direct textual proof for this, but it seems at least textually plausible that Toohey was essentially perfecting his method in his job as a career advisor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T20:48:00.317" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T20:48:00.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5119" CreationDate="2018-11-20T20:33:41.023" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a pause, the next thing he said was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Dagny, have you heard about that discussion at the structural steel workers' union meeting in Detroit?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;No. What discussion?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;It was in all the newspapers. They debated about whether their members should or should not be permitted to work with Rearden metal... What if... what if everybody decides against it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout their discussion, he brings up several other similar cases. Later, he gets to the main point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Dagny, are we... are we going to have that line built... on time?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was strange to hear a note of plain emotion in his voice, the uncomplicated sound of animal fear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;God help this city, if we don't!&quot; she answered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The car turned a corner. &lt;strong&gt;Above the black roofs of the city, she saw the page of the calendar, hit by the white glare of a spotlight.&lt;/strong&gt; It said: January 29.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Dan Conway is a bastard!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The words broke out suddenly, as if he could not hold them any longer.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She looked at him, bewildered. &quot;Why?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;He refused to sell us the Colorado track of the Phoenix-Durango.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recall, of course, what the calendar represented from the beginning of the book: &quot;Your days are numbered.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why did he not finish his sentence? Perhaps he got distracted by remembering the Steelworkers' Union discussion. More likely, that was never really the point: the point was Dan Conway refusing to sell them the rails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T20:33:41.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5919" CreationDate="2018-11-20T21:02:12.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;He later tells Peter Keating that his essential &lt;em&gt;message&lt;/em&gt; has always been the same, for those that can hear it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What do you... want.. Ellsworth?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Power, Petey.&quot;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You... always said...&quot; Keating began thickly, and stopped.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I've always said just that. Clearly, precisely and openly. It's not my fault if you couldn't hear. you could, of course. You didn't want to. Which was safer than deafness - for me. I said I intended to rule... I shall rule.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could extend the argument that, in one sense, he is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another explanation is that it was a different audience, and it's really not all that uncommon for speakers to re-use material from their other speeches (rather than writing a new, original speech for each audience).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, at a minimum, he is giving the same (or at least similar speeches) at a lot of different places. It's not clear from the book whether &lt;em&gt;every&lt;/em&gt; speech is like this, but it seems that a fair number of them are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T21:02:12.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8806" CreationDate="2018-11-20T23:34:34.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some preliminary definitions might be in order before identifying whether they're &quot;similes, metaphors, or something else&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/simile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;simile&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another&#xA;  thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or&#xA;  vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;versus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;metaphor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object&#xA;  or action to which it is not literally applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it simply, a simile describes one thing as a likeness to another, while a metaphor describes one thing as &lt;em&gt;being&lt;/em&gt; another. Someone might liken me to a mouse (simile), but if I say I'm a lion (when in fact I'm a human), that's a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to the two examples from &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston's entrails seemed to have turned into ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;strong&gt;simile&lt;/strong&gt;, not a metaphor. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/seem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;Give the impression of being something or having a particular quality&quot; – hence in the given context, the sensation relating to Winston's entrails is being &lt;em&gt;compared&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;likened&lt;/em&gt; to them turning to ice. In no sense does the passage suggest his entrails were &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; turning to ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The smear of rouge that was still on each cheekbone stood out sharply,&#xA;  almost as though unconnected with the skin beneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sentence said the rouge was &lt;em&gt;actually&lt;/em&gt; unconnected to the skin, it would be metaphorical, since such a thing is not normally possible. But the use of &quot;almost as though&quot; indicates that the rouge being unconnected with the skin is not a literal statement but rather an impression. The rouge is on the skin, but the way it stands out makes it look like it's &lt;em&gt;above&lt;/em&gt; the skin. It's probably pushing the boundaries to describe this as a simile; I think it's simply descriptive prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the question asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But it is metaphorically(?) saying she jumped out of her skin - is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression &quot;jumped out of her skin&quot; is certainly a metaphor, but you're using this expression yourself - it's not within the text. I think it's quite a stretch to suggest Orwell was intending any connection with the metaphor; instead, he's merely &lt;em&gt;accurately describing her appearance&lt;/em&gt;. The sudden shock has drained the blood from Julia's face - &quot;Her face had turned a milky yellow&quot; - leaving the rouge highlighted against her pale skin. The effect is so stark that it's &lt;em&gt;as if&lt;/em&gt; the rouge is no longer connected to the skin. No metaphor here, just vivid description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-11-20T23:57:50.880" LastActivityDate="2018-11-20T23:57:50.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8838" CreationDate="2018-11-21T01:48:03.390" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the source of a quote which William F. Buckley Jr. referenced once during a debate.   I believe he said it was from &quot;Admiral Fulbright,&quot; but I have been completely unable to find it online.   The quote goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The United States government (as opposed to the United States people) should have no quarrel with the policies of any other nation, no matter how odious, so long as it does not seek to export them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can help me with this, I would be immensely grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1565" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T02:23:48.553" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T16:24:17.640" Title="Source of quote &quot;Our government should have no quarrel...&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8823" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8825" CreationDate="2018-11-21T02:39:03.203" Score="-4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in the Ancient Greek plays/poetry right now. Are there any extant works from Greek poets/playwrights that aren't well known currently? This is, of course, excluding Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Sappho, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By well known, I mean the playwrights and poets that haven't been in mainstream literary publication or generally spoken about in the realm of literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit #1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I don't know why this has 2 downvotes right now because all I'm trying to do is gain more knowledge here; if my question isn't good in any way, then you should leave a comment telling me where I can improve. I'm new in town and I don't feel welcomed by this community right now. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit #2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've decided to delete this question because a) it's on hold as off-topic b) I really don't enjoy this community right now. I could have just looked on my own to find them, but I thought that it would add value to have people looking for extant Greek playwrights/poets that aren't well-known to come here. So I will probably just search on my own now. Thanks a lot for everyone who answered!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5168" LastEditorUserId="5168" LastEditDate="2018-11-21T21:57:08.720" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T21:57:08.720" Title="Are there any surviving works of Ancient Greek playwrights/poets excluding the more well known ones?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-11-21T18:43:13.093" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8823" CreationDate="2018-11-21T03:10:00.993" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B0006AO66I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Complete Greek Drama&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has, in addition to the works of Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, three works from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menander&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Menander&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samia_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (translated as &quot;The Girl From Samos&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitrepontes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epitrepontes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (translated as &quot;The Arbitration&quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyskolos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dyscolus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menander#20th-century_discoveries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;These works were apparently only discovered in the last century.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T03:10:00.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8823" CreationDate="2018-11-21T11:13:52.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Exagoge&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezekiel_the_Tragedian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezekiel the Tragedian&lt;/a&gt;, which survives in fragments, is the only extant Hellenistic-era tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sappho is just one of many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_Lyric_Poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyric poets&lt;/a&gt;, which also include Alcman, Alcaeus, Anacreon, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, Bacchylides and Pindar. The (Loeb) three-volume book &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupid?key=olbp71332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyra Graeca&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; collects all the Ancient Greek lyric poets and also includes anonymous ancient poets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatine_Anthology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Palatine Anthology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, or more broadly the &lt;em&gt;Greek Anthology&lt;/em&gt; contains poems written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Anthology#List_of_poets_to_whom_epigrams_are_attributed_in_the_Greek_Anthology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dozens of poets&lt;/a&gt;. It includes poets from the ancient and Hellenistic periods, but also goes into the Christian era, so you have to check to determine their time. The anthology is also a source for some of the lyric poets, which were already given, but it also includes later poets who aren't included with the lyric poets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4442" LastActivityDate="2018-11-21T11:13:52.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4154" CreationDate="2018-11-21T23:11:25.543" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is an original writing from Oda himself, but it definitely echoes the message from Joseph Campbell's works. It's no surprise that some of the greatest writers and storytellers are influenced by Campbell, but each uses their own words to relay the same message, for &quot;Truth is One; Its Names are Many&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5368" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-22T09:13:45.443" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T09:13:45.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8829" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8830" CreationDate="2018-11-22T15:01:21.517" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune01.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first rune&lt;/a&gt; of the Kalevala (Crawford's translation), Wainamoinen has just been born. These are the last four lines of this rune:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus our hero, Wainamoinen,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thus the wonderful enchanter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was delivered from his mother,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ilmatar, the Ether's daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the start of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune02.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second rune&lt;/a&gt;, he is already being described as old. He's described throughout this rune, starting from the very first line, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then arose old Wainamoinen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wainamoinen, ancient hero&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wainamoinen, old and trusty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did he suddenly become &quot;old&quot; just after being born?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T13:14:44.210" Title="How is Wainamoinen &quot;old&quot; at the start of the second Rune?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;finnish-literature&gt;&lt;the-kalevala&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8829" CreationDate="2018-11-22T17:41:59.700" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_Crawford_(scholar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crawford&lt;/a&gt; translates the opening of the second rune as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then arose old Wainamoinen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With his feet upon the island&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fi.wikisource.org/wiki/Kalevala_-_Toinen_runo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnish original this is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nousi siitä Väinämöinen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  jalan kahen kankahalle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in a dictionary I find &lt;em&gt;nousi&lt;/em&gt; = ‘arose’; &lt;em&gt;siitä&lt;/em&gt; = ‘of it’; &lt;em&gt;jalan&lt;/em&gt; = ‘on foot’; &lt;em&gt;kahen&lt;/em&gt; = ‘two’; &lt;em&gt;kankahalle&lt;/em&gt; = ‘materials, surfaces’. So there is no word meaning ‘old’ in these lines: evidently Crawford inserted it for the sake of the metre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Forsell_Kirby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kirby&lt;/a&gt; translates &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25953/25953-h/25953-h.htm#Runo_II_Birth_of_Vainamoinen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these lines as follows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then did Väinämöinen, rising,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Set his feet upon the surface&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Crawford pick the word ‘old’ for the sake of the metre, rather than some other single-syllable word? Well, the vast majority of occurrences of the name Väinämöinen in the Finnish text are prefixed with &lt;em&gt;vanha&lt;/em&gt; = ‘old’. In the second rune alone, the phrase &lt;em&gt;vanha Väinämöinen&lt;/em&gt; appears twelve times. (This kind of repetition is a common feature of orally transmitted epic poetry because the reciter needs a set of stock phases that fit the metre. In classical verse these phrases are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homeric epithets&lt;/a&gt;.) So it is understandable for Crawford to use the epithet ‘old’ without paying too much attention to whether it would be literally correct in this line. However, since Lönnrot chose to not to use &lt;em&gt;vanha&lt;/em&gt; in this line, perhaps because of the difficulty raised in the question, I think Kirby’s version is an improvement, even though it uses ‘did’ as a filler word. (I’d prefer a combination of the two versions: “Then arising, Väinämöinen”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other lines quoted in the question seem to be explained by line 5. In Kirby’s translation this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There he dwelt, while years passed over,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess enough years passed in this line for him to be ‘old’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T13:03:15.587" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T13:03:15.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-22T20:56:41.323" Score="3" ViewCount="11728" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the internet I found this beautiful quotation by C .S. Lewis: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'd like to find the exact book where he wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5370" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T08:02:15.110" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T08:02:15.110" Title="Where does this quotation by C. S. Lewis come from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8831" CreationDate="2018-11-22T21:27:04.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It comes from a letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, a lady who was (thought to be) dying.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.essentialcslewis.com/2016/02/13/ccslq-21-far-better-things/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; about the Misquotable C. S. Lewis (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you read the above words what do you think about? More than likely you think they are meant to be encouraging words for someone facing a unfamiliar situation, like finishing school, or beginning a new job. Or maybe these words are meant to encourage someone who has had a terrible past and is hoping for a better future? While those would be nice sentiments, the context shows a very different meaning. &lt;strong&gt;They are found in a letter Lewis wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne on June 17, 1963. It’s available in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ironically, Lewis would die less than five months later. This is ironic because his words are part of comments expressed to Shelburne to comfort her as she was in the hospital and it was thought that her days were numbered. She actually went on to live twelve more years!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you read the actual letter Lewis penned to Shelburne you find that early on he is challenging her about being fearful of dying by saying, “Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer?” At the close of the same paragraph he states &lt;strong&gt;“Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from &lt;a href=&quot;http://thewardrobedoor.com/2014/03/7-things-c-s-lewis-didnt-say.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;7 Things C. S. Lewis Didn't Say&lt;/a&gt; (although in this case he did say it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis actually did say this, but not in the context it is so often used. It is not some trite expression of optimism about the future. He was not giving some syrupy graduation speech to tell you all your dreams will come true. It was written to a woman facing a looming death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Letters to an American Lady, Lewis wrote these words to Mary Willis Shelburne who, being old and frail, was discussing the end of her life. Unbeknownst to him, Lewis was only five months away from his own death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question immediately before this line gives a better understanding of what Lewis means with this statement. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret?” He wrote those words to remind her of the glory that would be hers after she walked through the valley of death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-22T21:27:04.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8829" CreationDate="2018-11-23T02:19:11.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, there is not word 'old' in that verse but;&#xA;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kvfin/01.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first rune&lt;/a&gt; it is also said that Wainamoinen is at his mother's uterus for 30 summer and 1 winter (well literally 30 + 1 winter) before born. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vaka vanha Väinämöinen kulki äitinsä kohussa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  kolmekymmentä keseä, yhen verran talviaki,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   noilla vienoilla vesillä, utuisilla lainehilla. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is kinda ok to say he is old. Thus Vaka vanha Väinämöinen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5371" LastEditorUserId="5371" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T03:14:15.707" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T03:14:15.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6754" CreationDate="2018-11-23T03:05:13.307" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Väinämöinen is the immortal wizard of magic and poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/kveng/kvrune03.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WAINAMOINEN&lt;/a&gt;, ancient minstrel,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Passed his years in full contentment,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On the meadows of Wainola,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On the plains of Kalevala,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Singing ever wondrous legends,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Songs of ancient wit and wisdom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chanting one day, then a second,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Singing in the dusk of evening,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Singing till the dawn of morning,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5371" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T03:05:13.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2018-11-23T04:38:09.790" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After listening to Jordan B. Peterson’s critique of later Disney movies I wonder if the answer is allegory is necessary but mustn’t be intensed or propaganda.   For example he lives and breathes Catholicism so it comes out of his writing but maybe he wasn’t writing it with the purpose of convincing people to believe or do certain things.    He didn’t write it to manipulate but to inspire.   Maybe it is kind of a paradox.    For in theology of the Body the purpose is freedom and redemption of the body but it’s not to manipulate or control or even tell people what to do with their bodies but to free them so that they may choose to love with the love that God intends.   Maybe his stories too are not to tell us what to do but inspire reveal the deeper meaning of life... meaning that we will only discover by living the adventure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5372" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T08:28:23.607" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T08:28:23.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-23T07:10:51.073" Score="5" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have started reading Proust's &lt;em&gt;Swann's way&lt;/em&gt;. On page 66 the narrator, after providing a very vivid description of aunt Leonie's house and its atmosphere, describes her state. She has gradually left the outside world for her own house. Then he writes about her attitude towards her sensations: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in the life of complete inertia which she led, she attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, endowed them with a &lt;strong&gt;Protean ubiquity&lt;/strong&gt; which made it difficult for her to keep them to herself,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I understand, 'Protean' refers to something that changes very much and 'ubiquitous' refers to ever-presentness. These two words seem to have meaning which feel opposite to each other. I cannot make sense of &quot;Protean ubiquity&quot;, and what meaning is there in this sentence. I wonder, if somebody can help me in this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5373" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T15:47:05.147" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T15:47:05.147" Title="What is &quot;Protean Ubiquity&quot; in Proust's &quot;Swann's Way&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;marcel-proust&gt;&lt;in-search-of-lost-time&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8829" CreationDate="2018-11-23T10:32:42.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As other answers have already made clear, the original has no mention of Väinämöinen being very old at the very beginning of the rune, and that later, Crawford's translation seem to be more accurate, and that Wäinämöinen by this point has been said to have spent &quot;many years&quot; on his island, so that &quot;old&quot; is perhaps not unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why is he called old in the first lines of this particular translation? That something was needed for the metre explains why a word was inserted, but not why that word was &quot;old&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, to start with, given that &lt;em&gt;Kalevala&lt;/em&gt; is at its root a collection of orally transmitted songs, even if they were heavily edited by Elias Lönnroth, typical elements of oral tradition still shows through. One such element is the use of stock phrases and standing epithets, which makes it easier for the teller to created well-formed lines without much effort and instead focus on the story (see e.g. Encyclopaedia Britannica's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/oral-tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oral tradition&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;em&gt;Kalevala&lt;/em&gt; is a bit more varied than e.g. &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, so that a hero can have a few different stock phrases, but the tendency is still there. The stock phrases that are attached to Väinämöinen tend to describe him as &quot;old&quot;, &quot;wise&quot;, &quot;trusty&quot; or similar. Thus, Crawford, did exactly what earlier transmitters would have done when faced with a problem like this: he used the stock phrase, even if it perhaps was not totally logical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-04T13:14:44.210" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T13:14:44.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8822" CreationDate="2018-11-23T16:24:17.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I found it.   WFB had mangled the quote in his recitation, so I wound up doing very limited searches for only one or two words or phrases.   Here's the actual quote and source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Insofar as a nation is content to practice its doctrines within its own frontiers, that nation, however repugnant its ideology, is one with which we have no proper quarrel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Senator J. W. Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, in the Senate, March 25, 1964)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buckley translated this in his conversation as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The United States government (as opposed to the United States people) should have no quarrel with the policies of any other nation, no matter how odious, so long as it does not seek to export them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source was here:   &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/26/archives/excerpts-from-fulbrights-address-urging-united-states-foreign.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Excerpts From Fulbright's Address Urging United States Foreign Policy Changes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1565" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T16:24:17.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2018-11-23T17:57:10.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;puis, dans l'inertie absolu où elle vivait, elle prêtait à ses moindres sensations une importance extraordinaire; elle les douait d'une &lt;em&gt;motilité&lt;/em&gt; qui lui rendait difficile de les garder pour elle, [italics added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and I see nothing corresponding to &quot;Protean ubiquity&quot; in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My poor translation, which I have tried to keep fairly literal (suggestions for improvement welcomed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;then, in the absolute inertia in which she lived, she lent to her least sensations an extraordinary importance; she endowed them with a &lt;em&gt;motility&lt;/em&gt; which made it difficult for her to keep them to herself, [italics added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word used in French is &lt;em&gt;motilité&lt;/em&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/motilit%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt; say means essentially the same thing as &lt;em&gt;motility&lt;/em&gt; in English—the capability of moving by itself (and is a word usually used to describe living things or parts of living things).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does &lt;em&gt;Protean ubiquity&lt;/em&gt; mean &lt;em&gt;motility&lt;/em&gt;? Or at least, what the translator thought Proust intended &lt;em&gt;motility&lt;/em&gt; to mean? I don't know. They don't seem very similar to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-11-23T23:35:00.967" LastActivityDate="2018-11-23T23:35:00.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8841" CreationDate="2018-11-23T19:02:50.040" Score="2" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm looking too hard for meanings that aren't there, but can someone explain to me what's going on in Charlotte Riddell's Old House in Vauxhall Walk?&#xA;How was the second burglar caught?&#xA;What was up with the rattle?&#xA;How did the mirror get broken?&#xA;What story did William tell Graham that he never knew before?&#xA;I feel these questions mean I just didn't get the whole thing, so I'd appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5375" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:03:00.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T12:15:00.347" Title="What's going on in Charlotte Riddell's Old House in Vauxhall Walk?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;charlotte-riddell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8840" CreationDate="2018-11-24T00:56:29.920" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rattle is probably a police rattle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of the rattle is not clear, but what has come to be known as the &amp;quot;Victorian Police Rattle&amp;quot; came into use sometime in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century when night watchmen and/or village constables began using them to &amp;quot;raise the alarm&amp;quot;. They proved to be an ideal method to summon aid, sound the fire alarm, or, just generally get folks attention. A traditional rattle was constructed of wood, usually oak, where one or two blades are held in a frame and a ratchet turned – generally by swinging – to make the blades 'snap' thus creating a very loud noise. - &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.spphs.com/history/whistles/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saint Paul Police Historical Society&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rattle alerted the police who were able to catch the burglars/murderers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear exactly how the mirror was broken, but it happens after the two men with the knife were apprehended. If we make some assumptions, it might be that they were the ones who murdered the old lady. Justice is served and her ghost is laid to rest. The mirror is broken to reveal the treasure, either by the ghost herself, as an act of gratitude, or by some other kind of supernatural karmic force, to reward the young man who solved the mystery of her murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the story William told Graham, I think this part of the story is deliberately left vague. I'm guessing it was to do with the history of his parents' relationship. William says that although Graham thinks he hated her, Graham's father was &lt;em&gt;'was over fond of your [Graham's] mother'&lt;/em&gt; and we also know that his father thought Graham resembled his mother &lt;em&gt;'in mind as well as body'&lt;/em&gt;. My interpretation is that the father was hurt by something the mother did (e.g. maybe she had an affair, or ran off with someone) and sometimes takes it out on the son that resembles her. Hearing the details of the story gives Graham a better understanding of his father and inspires him to improve their relationship. Graham is also buoyed by his recent success, which helps him to confidently approach his father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.searchengine.org.uk/ebooks/102/77.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Link to the story&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5377" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T12:15:00.347" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T12:15:00.347" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5224" CreationDate="2018-11-24T01:53:24.267" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;General Review of &lt;em&gt;The Tales of Goldstone Wood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a wonderful book series. It's Christian fantasy allegory, so if you liked Narnia, you'll probably like this. However, two caveats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most of the book covers aren't accurate to the content of the books. Just ignore them completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The books are published out of chronological order, to the detriment of the reader's understanding and enjoyment. The author herself has stated that she believes &lt;em&gt;Heartless&lt;/em&gt; is the best introduction to the series, but I completely disagree (for many reasons outlined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2255388838&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my Goodreads review&lt;/a&gt; of that book). Here is the order in which these beautiful novels sit upon my bookshelf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tales of Goldstone Wood&lt;/em&gt; Chronological Order&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draven's Light (novella, publishing order #9)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Starflower (publishing order #4)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dragonwitch (publishing order #5)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Golden Daughter (publishing order #8)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fallen Star (short story, publishing order #10)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veiled Rose(publishing order #2)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goddess Tithe (novella, publishing order #7)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heartless (publishing order #1)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moonblood(publishing order #3)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow Hand (publishing order #6)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poison Crown (not yet released)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tales of Goldstone Wood&lt;/em&gt; Reading Guide&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend everyone to begin with &lt;em&gt;Starflower&lt;/em&gt;. It is chronologically the first (and quite possibly the best) full-fledged novel of the series. This book is a fantastic, memorable introduction to the world and some of its key characters, and reading it first will cement a strong foundation in the reader's mind for the rest of the series to be built on. Finally, it can actually stand alone very well if the reader does not have the time or interest to continue with the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading &lt;em&gt;Starflower&lt;/em&gt;, gauge your interest. Are you 100% invested, with all the time in the world and all the dedication you need to get through the whole series? Then I recommend the following reading order, which is the chronological order except for the swap of &lt;em&gt;Starflower&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Draven's Light&lt;/em&gt; (for reasons previously stated), AND moving the short story &amp;quot;Fallen Star&amp;quot; after &lt;em&gt;Moonblood&lt;/em&gt;(imperative because there are major spoilers in the short story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Starflower&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Draven's Light (novella)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dragonwitch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Golden Daughter&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veiled Rose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goddess Tithe (novella)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heartless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moonblood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fallen Star (short story)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shadow Hand&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poison Crown (not yet released)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOWEVER, if you enjoyed &lt;em&gt;Starflower&lt;/em&gt; but aren't ready to commit to a huge series, I recommend following up &lt;em&gt;Starflower&lt;/em&gt; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Veiled Rose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heartless&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Moonblood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three are the first books the author wrote and they stand as a kind of trilogy. Reading these alone would be akin to just reading the Pevensie books in the Narnia series, or only watching the original Star Wars trilogy. The important work of the series is in these books. If you finish these three books and feel that you would like to read more, I recommend &lt;em&gt;Shadow Hand&lt;/em&gt; next, as it continues on with the same characters, before going back into the earlier books of the series (which you may consider supplementary material, like the &amp;quot;prequel&amp;quot; Star Wars movies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5378" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T04:14:48.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8843" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2554" CreationDate="2018-11-24T14:44:42.143" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to disagree with the other answer.&#xA;I believe Mr. Norrell used magic to create his wealth. Norrell was a real magician, and a good one, at a time when there were at most a handful of other real magicians in England, none of whom publicly admitted to being able  to do magic. Surely he could have figured out some way of creating or obtaining wealth. It's possible that Susannah Clarke hid some clues about exactly how he did it somewhere in the book (it's possible that she didn't), but if she did I missed them when I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answer merely says that Drawlight claims that Mr. Norrell's wealth comes from a rich uncle, without making any judgment on whether Drawlight is correct or not. I think a closer reading of that section shows that it is quite likely that Drawlight has no idea what he is talking about, and is making things up to make himself seem knowledgeable. Later in the book, Drawlight turns out to be somewhat of a scoundrel, so this isn't at all incongruous with his personality. Here I analyze the scene in a little more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawlight (the &amp;quot;small man&amp;quot;) and Lascelles (the &amp;quot;tall man&amp;quot;) are discussing the fact that Norrell has not turned up. Drawlight says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I have said that I am disappointed,&amp;quot; continued the small man, &amp;quot;but I am not at all surprized. You do not know him as I do.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drawlight then remarks that Norrell has a rich uncle named Haythornthwaite from which he inherited the money. The author immediately casts doubt on the plausibility of this happening:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ha!&amp;quot; said the tall man drily. &amp;quot;He was in high luck. Rich old uncles who die are in shockingly short supply.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norrell then comes over and introduces himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I beg your pardon,&amp;quot; he [Norrell] said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes?&amp;quot; said the small man sharply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I am Mr. Norrell.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tall man and the small man gave Mr. Norrell two very broad stares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Drawlight, despite claiming to know Norrell, could not recognize him. It is later revealed that the reason that Drawlight thought he could recognize him is that he had been surreptitiously observing his house, and that he mistook Norrell's servant, Childermass, for Norrell. So Drawlight certainly greatly exaggerated his knowledge of Norrell, and it seems very likely that he does not know where Norrell got his money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-11-24T17:10:37.343" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8836" CreationDate="2018-11-25T16:35:39.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96s/chapter2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swann's Way&lt;/a&gt;. Below is a longer quote from the paragraph in the original French (as available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Du_c%C3%B4t%C3%A9_de_chez_Swann/Partie_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;), in which I have highlighted a few phrases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elle ne parlait jamais qu’assez bas parce qu’elle croyait avoir dans la tête quelque chose de cassé et de &lt;strong&gt;flottant&lt;/strong&gt; qu’elle eût déplacé en parlant trop fort, mais elle ne restait jamais longtemps, même seule, sans dire quelque chose, parce qu’elle croyait que c’était salutaire pour sa gorge et qu’en &lt;strong&gt;empêchant le sang de s’y arrêter&lt;/strong&gt;, cela rendrait moins fréquents les étouffements et les angoisses dont elle souffrait ; puis, dans &lt;strong&gt;l’inertie absolue&lt;/strong&gt; où elle vivait, elle prêtait à ses moindres sensations une importance extraordinaire ; elle les douait d’une &lt;strong&gt;motilité&lt;/strong&gt; qui lui rendait difficile de les garder pour elle, et à défaut de confident à qui les communiquer, elle se les annonçait à elle-même, en un perpétuel monologue qui était sa seule forme d’&lt;strong&gt;activité&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation of the same excerpt, with the corresponding phrases highlighted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She never spoke save in low tones, because she believed that there was something broken in her head and &lt;strong&gt;floating loose&lt;/strong&gt; there, which she might displace by talking too loud; but she never remained for long, even when alone, without saying something, because she believed that it was good for her throat, and that by &lt;strong&gt;keeping the blood there in circulation&lt;/strong&gt; it would make less frequent the chokings and other pains to which she was liable; besides, in the life of &lt;strong&gt;complete inertia&lt;/strong&gt; which she led she attached to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, endowed them with a &lt;strong&gt;Protean ubiquity&lt;/strong&gt; which made it difficult for her to keep them secret, and, failing a confidant to whom she might communicate them, she used to promulgate them to herself in an unceasing monologue which was her sole form of &lt;strong&gt;activity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this excerpt, Proust uses several phrases and images that refer to either movement and activity and their opposites, inertia and passivity. Where C. K. Scott Moncrieff wrote &quot;Protean ubiquity&quot;, Proust had written &quot;motilité&quot;, which, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motilit%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikpedia&lt;/a&gt; explains, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;un terme de la biologie qui réfère à la capacité de se déplacer spontanément ou par réaction à des stimuli et activement, en consommant de l'énergie lors du processus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: a term from biology that refers to the ability to move around spontaneously or as a reaction to stimuli and actively, while consuming energy during that process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective &quot;Protean&quot; derives from the name of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek god Proteus&lt;/a&gt;, who was capable of changing shape. Something endowed with &quot;Protean ubiquity&quot; would presumably be able to be &quot;everywhere&quot; as easily as Proteus changes shape. However, &quot;motilité&quot; implies neither &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapeshifting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shapeshifting&lt;/a&gt;, nor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnipresence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;omnipresence&lt;/a&gt;, so by translating &quot;motilité&quot; as &quot;Protean ubiquity&quot;, C. K. Scott Moncrieff breaks the chain of phrases and images that refer to movement or inertia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-11-25T16:35:39.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-25T23:52:33.517" Score="7" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in combination, &lt;strong&gt;had read that article of war which forbade a purpose&lt;/strong&gt; otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to their duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? (Bolding my own.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2018-11-25T23:55:04.283" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T14:18:24.013" Title="Meaning of sentence from &quot;A Tale of Two Cities&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-tale-of-two-cities&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8845" CreationDate="2018-11-26T14:18:24.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Articles of War&lt;/a&gt; are (and were, since before Dickens's time) the official regulations defining the scope of military  and naval  discipline in the UK.  They were  read on ceremonial occasions and on occasions when a commander felt that discipline was lax.  To &quot;read the Articles of War&quot; was the martial equivalent of &quot;reading the riot act&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, Dickens says that the coachman and guard brought the   rebellious horses back into a state of obedience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2018-11-26T14:18:24.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8850" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8851" CreationDate="2018-11-27T06:38:17.800" Score="1" ViewCount="446" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Christina Aguilera - &quot;Hurt&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for blaming you for everything I couldn't do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for blaming you and I'm also sorry for everything I couldn't do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm sorry that I blamed you each time I couldn't do something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or are both possible? (I'm not a native English speaker)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5390" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-11-27T06:56:18.850" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T11:14:19.507" Title="Meaning of “I'm sorry for blaming you for everything I couldn't do”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8850" CreationDate="2018-11-27T11:14:19.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the latter. &quot;I'm sorry that when I tried to do something and failed, I blamed you for it.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-11-27T11:14:19.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T15:28:49.707" Score="6" ViewCount="2856" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many variations on this phrase, but is there an original source which inspired the others, or is it just a piece of popular wisdom that's emerged naturally from humanity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a page &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_stupid_question&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;No such thing as a stupid question&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Goodreads attributes &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/687533-the-only-stupid-question-is-the-question-that-is-never&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The only stupid question is the question that is never asked&quot;&lt;/a&gt; to Ramon Bautista, and a Quora user attributes &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Was-it-Albert-Einstein-that-quoted-there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-stupid-question-If-so-then-why-do-some-Quora-experts-reply-in-a-negative-way-and-make-my-questions-seem-stupid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;there is no such thing as a stupid question&quot;&lt;/a&gt; to Albert Einstein, but none of them has any good citation for an original source. Is there one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T11:07:40.713" Title="Source of the quote &quot;The only bad question is an unasked one&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-28T17:30:01.223" Score="2" ViewCount="317" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I am analyzing a poem and I realize that it has rising meter, what does that say about the poem. Like do happy tone poems have rising meters whereas sad poems have falling meter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5398" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-02T17:17:53.303" LastActivityDate="2018-12-02T17:17:53.303" Title="Significance of rising/falling meter" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8854" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T02:14:26.580" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;The basis of the interactions between the Watches seems to be to keep the balance in their powers: whatever one side does, it must allow the other to counteract. Thus the Night Watch/Inquisition/Day Watch system - to prevent any side from getting too strong and taking over the world. I.e. this is a sort of a zero sum game, where an advantage gained by one faction is compensated by providing the other side with an equal advantage (e.g. every Other has a certain allowance of applications of magic they can use every year). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings the question: why even bother trying to get the upper hand over the other faction? A striking example is Nadya, whom the Light ones designed to be the messiah of light, the most powerful sorceress in the history of ever. As Gesar later tells Anton, she came at a price - a &quot;credit&quot; or a &quot;loan&quot; taken from the Dark ones, meaning the latter had to be allowed to do something equally powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do the Others keep playing this game? It always plays out in such a way that the two major factions remain at the same level, even if they gain a temporary advantage, except the stakes keep getting bigger (think Nadya, she saw said to be able to destroy the Twilight and the Earth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T18:09:23.473" Title="Why do the Watches bother with anything if the whole system is designed to be balanced?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;sergei-lukyanenko&gt;&lt;night-watch-cycle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-29T21:34:07.823" Score="1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out exactly what arguments Dostoevsky tries to make in &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; against atheism. I'm talking about the kind of conclusion he wants you to make for yourself when reading his story. How does he show his thoughts in the actions of his characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is an impossible question to properly answer. But I really just want to know what some of the possible interpretations that are out there are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2018-11-30T07:02:55.787" LastActivityDate="2018-11-30T07:02:55.787" Title="What are the arguments against atheism in Crime and Punishment?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-11-30T05:13:38.990" Score="6" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Dharma Bums,&lt;/em&gt; Ray buys &quot;a polybdenum bottle, with screw top&quot; at the Berkeley Ski Shop (chapter 14), saying he plans to use it &quot;to carry honey up to the moutains&quot; but that he mostly &quot;used it as a canteen for wine... [and] whisky.&quot; It's not a typo because on his way back West when he stops in El Paso he says he &quot;put fresh bus-station water in my polybdenum bottle&quot; (chapter 22).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the top Google results for &quot;polybdenum&quot; are quotes from Kerouac, or probably derivatives from that; when I search for &quot;polybdenum bottle&quot; Google tries to auto-correct me to &quot;molybdenum.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would a reader in the late '50s understand &quot;polybdenum&quot; to mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5404" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-03T17:46:53.980" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T17:46:53.980" Title="What's polybdenum?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-kerouac&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-01T03:26:56.660" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the book in 8th grade (1974) but it was set definitively in the late 40's though no dates were ever given.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was about a selfish, calculating basketball player entering a junior college to set a reputation and be picked up by a four year college. In the setting a guard (no shooting guards apparent in the book) was the absolute desire of any real program as he set the table for the whole team. Shooting skills would lower his value and his defensive skills were not of too much interest. He planned to do precisely that, be the perfect point guard (today's name) and force his teammates to be killer with his perfection. Then ditch them for a four year college. His past was that he played for an Army team under the absolute best Army coach (who was perhaps the best coach in America). But gosh, he made no mention of that in getting on the team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the season progressed his humanity developed drip by drip and eventually he did a little shooting and a bit more defensive work. Finally, in the championship game, he had to pour in the points like Jordan AND take over guarding the other team's center (him 6', the center 6'9&quot; or so) and utterly shut him off with powerful skills never before shown. This sacrificed his future (he was sure) but by then he was man enough it was worth it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards, the coach revealed he had contacted the Army coach and knew his whole story (which was never explained much, but even at 14 I could see he'd been an utter psychopath in his selfishness and almost certainly asked to leave with no offer of recommendation to anyone, hence the JuCo and his plan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was in perfect shape and I dimly knew then (1974) that tall men had once been considered wubbly, not dominant, but Mican proved that foolish since the early 50's so I think it was set before then. The Army did have full leagues for all sports back then too, kind of like the AAU does today. I know it COULD have been written in 1973 even, but since the setting would have been more commonly known back more like 1950 or 1960, I have always thought it was written more like 1955 to 1960 at the latest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember no portion of th etitle, no names from the book, no author, just nothing to do a successful Google searh (experience) or maybe not the right ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reallllly want to read it again so if anyone can tell me the title and maybe the author, I'd be a happy man... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5412" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T03:26:56.660" Title="Title of young adult basketball book from before 1974" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8861" CreationDate="2018-12-01T03:58:23.493" Score="3" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gary Gibbon, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gibbon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First-class BA History (Balliol College, Oxford)&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Breaking-Point-Referendum-Aftermath-Curiosities/dp/1910376620&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Breaking Point: The UK Referendum on the EU and its Aftermath (Haus Curiosities)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. p. 63.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  And then there is English nationalism. Defining yourself as &#xA;  English rather than British was one of the most accurate indicators of &#xA;  a Brexit vote.But what is English identity? It is not like other &#xA;  nationalisms. A Scottish Nationalist might resent Edinburgh a bit but &#xA;  nothing like an English nationalist will loath London and, to his or &#xA;  her mind, what it stands for. The common identifiers of someone &#xA;  describing themselves as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 64&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;English more than British will be a sense &#xA;  that they are not doing very well, struggling perhaps. They will &#xA;  usually look at the pace of change and migration and feel it is &quot;time &#xA;  to put people like me first&quot;. &#xA;  It is often linked to a sense that life &#xA;  would be better if the clock could be turned back. Five years ago, &#xA;  Peter Kellner delved into the issues and found that &quot;English&quot; voters &#xA;  overwhelmingly wanted their country to withdraw from the world &#xA;  and that international agreements were more trouble than they were &#xA;  worth compared with &quot;British&quot; voters who were much more evenly &#xA;  divided between internationalists and isolationists.&lt;sup&gt;14&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  The Labour MP Tristram Hunt has been at the forefront of &#xA;  Labour attempts to get in touch with English sentiment. &lt;strong&gt;He's &#xA;  recalled George Orwell's admonishment back in 1941 that [1.] England &#xA;  was &quot;the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their &#xA;  own nationality. [2.] In Left wing circles it is always felt there is &#xA;  something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman.&quot; [mine]&lt;/strong&gt; But those &#xA;  Labour souls that struggled to find an English nationalism they could &#xA;  identify with are struggling even more after June's referendum. &#xA;  Fintan O'Toole in &lt;em&gt;The Irish Times&lt;/em&gt; wrote straight after the &#xA;  referendum: &quot;England has not had the time, nor made the effort, to &#xA;  develop an inclusive, civic, progressive nationalism. It is left with a &#xA;  nationalism that is scarcely articulated in positive terms at all and &#xA;  that thus plugs into the darker energies of resentment and &#xA;  xenophobia. &lt;sup&gt;15&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please expound 1? What are the reasons of the shame?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please expound 2?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't glean any reasons for this English anti-intellectualism from &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/6oy9dr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;/r/quotesporn&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-when-Orwell-said-England-is-perhaps-the-only-great-country-whose-intellectuals-are-ashamed-of-their-own-nationality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;http://kingsreview.co.uk/orwell-on-patriotism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The King's Review&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T15:24:18.167" Title="What caused English intellectuals to be &quot;ashamed of their own nationality&quot;, according to George Orwell?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8860" CreationDate="2018-12-01T12:10:18.790" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quotation is from Orwell's long essay &lt;em&gt;The Lion and the Unicorn&lt;/em&gt;. The first section of that essay is a lengthy description of what Orwell perceived to be the state of English society at the time of writing (that is, 1941). This included a lot of reflection on the position of intellectuals in English society and their prevailing attitudes to the ruling classes and to English culture in general. Unfortunately the argument is too long to quote in its entirety, but to summarise: Orwell believed the growth of inequality in England (and the British Empire) had forced the ruling classes to adopt a kind of deliberate ignorance. Their self-image would not allow them to admit that their wealth and power were unjustly held while still holding onto them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? ...But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their usefulness was at an end. ... They had to &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; themselves true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one escape for them – into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by being &lt;em&gt;unable&lt;/em&gt; to grasp that any improvement was possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell also argues in this essay that the use of the telegraph resulted in the administration of the British Empire being centralised in Whitehall, which made colonial administration less attractive to young intelligent people who might have become pro-Empire intellectuals in a previous era. (Orwell had worked as a colonial police officer in Burma, so he had some first-hand experience of the matter.) This, combined with the deliberate cultivating of stupidity mentioned above, resulted in English society simply not having any use for intellectuals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since about 1930 everyone describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. ...in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be suspect. ... England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as purely &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion to one's country implies ‘for better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(NB: &amp;quot;Blimp&amp;quot; in this essay is used to refer to the patriotic pro-Empire middle class, especially those with military connections; it was a nickname derived from the cartoon character &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Blimp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colonel Blimp&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to summarise: Orwell believed that the ruling classes of the British Empire had increasingly disdained intellectual skills and intelligence generally in recent times (recent as of 1941, that is). As a result of this, there was almost no scope for intellectually-inclined people to find good positions within the establishment. Because English society had no use for them, English intellectuals turned against that society. This manifested both in political action and in a general cultural disdain for Englishness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite a complex argument, and fairly specific to the period Orwell was writing in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3026" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T12:10:18.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8853" CreationDate="2018-12-01T19:24:30.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe there is much you can conclude about a poem from whether the meter is rising and falling.  There are happy poems and sad poems in iambic meters, and there are happy poems and sad poems in trochaic meters. It's not like minor and major keys in music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, several of A.E Housman's poems are in trochaic tetrameter, and there doesn't seem to be any consistency in themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To illustrate this point, the following two Housman poems have exactly the same meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44412/a-shropshire-lad-35-on-the-idle-hill-of-summer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the idle hill of summer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a depressing anti-war poem. An excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Far and near and low and louder&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  On the roads of earth go by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dear to friends and food for powder,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Soldiers marching, all to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/reveille-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reveille&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a fairly cheerful seize-the-day poem. An excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up, lad, up, 'tis late for lying:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;    Hear the drums of morning play;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hark, the empty highways crying&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;    &quot;Who'll beyond the hills away?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2018-12-01T19:32:43.763" LastActivityDate="2018-12-01T19:32:43.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6194" CreationDate="2018-12-03T02:53:38.940" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm of the opinion that the Wood is a homage to Narnia, a nod to the classic fantasy allegory that I'm sure in part inspired the author to write her series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5378" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T02:53:38.940" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6167" CreationDate="2018-12-03T03:01:16.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think anyone is allowed to take the Gruung. They just don't expect anyone to they don't approve of to actually pass it. Members of low-caste usually don't have the opportunity to study and become good scholars, as Sunan did under his high-caste uncle. Both Sunan and his uncle were unaware that the Overseer would still reject Sunan even if he passed the exam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sunan is not truly offered a position as a Crouching Shadow. He doesn't undertake any training or guidance, he's never told exactly who and what the Crouching Shadows are and their true purpose. He's just threatened that if he doesn't finish his uncle's work, they'll kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I don't think they ever expected to use Sunan in this way--it was just happenstance. He was a convenient tool when they needed one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5378" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T03:01:16.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11278" CreationDate="2018-12-03T06:32:48.043" Score="2" ViewCount="1847" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjCQOr35mQk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gloria the Gift of Life&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is a song by Andrea Bocelli. It's beautiful, but I can't quite figure out what it's about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems like it could be God. &quot;Gloria&quot; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.catholic.org/prayers/prayer.php?p=139&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;traditional Catholic exaltation&lt;/a&gt; to God (&quot;I raise my voice to sing&quot;) and the first few lyrics express gratitude for a variety of phenomena:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the air we breathe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the tears we cry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For every melody&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the times we break&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Even when we bleed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the morning sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the other lyrics seem very inapt in this context, though: &quot;You were just a child/ only yesterday/ and now here you are/ here on your wedding day.&quot; That's not something a believer would say about God. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could be about a child (named Gloria, even). But why would you thank your child for &quot;the air we breathe,&quot; and things like that? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It could be a romantic love song, certainly, since that is Andrea Bocelli's best-known genre. But somehow that doesn't seem quite right for a song about a child grown up, and, similar to the previous point thanking one's partner for things like the &quot;the air we breathe&quot; or &quot;the morning sun&quot; seems a little off. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the subject of the song? Is there a clue in the lyrics? Has Andrea Bocelli mentioned anything about this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:22:54.460" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:22:54.460" Title="Who or what is the subject of Andrea Bocelli's &quot;Gloria the Gift of Life&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;andrea-bocelli&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8856" CreationDate="2018-12-03T12:12:46.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a rarely-used word for a metal alloy containing molybdenum. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the references I found to the term were not public access and did not describe what &quot;polybdenum&quot; meant in the abstract. However, I also found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/CN2572327Y/en&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese patent notice&lt;/a&gt;, the English translation of which includes this (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The carbon steel, aluminum and molybdenum diffused heat exchanger is characterized in that the inner and the outer walls of the carbon steel heat exchanging tube are compounded with &lt;strong&gt;carbon steel, aluminum and molybdenum diffused alloy layers&lt;/strong&gt;; base material surface layers at the parts of the tube plates, the end covers, etc. &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the title of the patent includes the term &quot;polybdenum&quot; but does not mention it again in the abstract, it is reasonable to conclude that the word refers to these alloy layers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly a number of the papers that come up appear to be Chinese in origin, which suggests that's where the term is usually used. A Google Ngrams search returns no results, so it's clearly an extremely rare term (Google Books does not contain an ecopy of The Dharma Bums, so that's why it doesn't appear as a result).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As suggested by user Gareth Rees, many grades of stainless steel contain molybdenum, including a lot of cookware. So it seems reasonable to infer Ray's bottle is made of a stainless steel containing molybdenum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-12-03T12:12:46.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8854" CreationDate="2018-12-04T03:40:57.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;If either side would win, humanity would lose.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please notice, that this is not a &amp;quot;good vs evil&amp;quot; fight - the Night Watch was taking part in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cheka&lt;/a&gt; repressions that tortured and killed thousands of innocent people (for &amp;quot;the Common Good&amp;quot; of course), while the Day Watch was responsible for the Renaissance which managed to pull Europe from the Dark Ages. If they wouldn't fight (with &amp;quot;blunted dueling rapiers&amp;quot;  - as called by Anton), the world would fall to one or the other side destroying itself, creating either brutal anarchy with &amp;quot;everyone for himself&amp;quot; or the tyranny of Greater Good, where even selfish thoughts would be banned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nadia is a good example here - she is a powerful Light magician, but it is not guaranteed that she will remain as such: powerful Greater Ones changed sides (Merlin switched sides to the Darkness while Arina became a Greater Light One). In the end, both sides try to balance so that they (and by extension, humanity) can survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lengthy discussion on this topic in &lt;em&gt;Twilight Watch&lt;/em&gt; which confirms that they are trying to preserve the status quo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'What are you doing in the Night Watch, boss?' I asked. 'Aren't you sick of it yet . . . after thousands of years?' [...] &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Then let's assume that I'd really like to finish off Zabulon,' Gesar said calmly. I thought for a second. 'That's not it either. In hundreds of years one of you would have finished off the other already. Zabulon said that fighting with magic is like swordplay. Well, you're not fighting with swords, you're fencing with blunt rapiers. You claim a hit, but you don't really wound your opponent.' [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I'm waiting for a miracle, Anton.' I looked at Gesar quizzically. 'I don't know exactly what kind of miracle. For all people to acquire the abilities of Others. For all Others to become human again. For a day when the dividing line won't run between Other and human being, but between good and evil.' Gesar smiled gently. 'I have absolutely no idea how anything of the sort could ever happen, or if it ever will. But if it ever does . . . I prefer to be on the side of the Night Watch. And not the Inquisition – the mighty, ingenious, righteous, all-powerful Inquisition.' &lt;br/&gt;'Maybe Zabulon's waiting for the same thing?' &lt;br/&gt;Gesar nodded. &lt;br/&gt; 'Perhaps. I don't know. But better an old enemy you know than a young, unpredictable freak. You can call me a conservative, but I prefer rapiers with Zabulon to baseball bats with a progressive Dark Magician.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T18:09:23.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="935" CreationDate="2018-12-04T08:48:04.323" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/289/verbose&quot;&gt;@verbose&lt;/a&gt;, there is no reason to assume Blake didn't mean mills or factories when he said Mills. If drawing a parallel to churches does exist it is fairly subtle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another way to look at this. Good poetry is evocative. Imagine you are Blake writing contemporaneously. You are probably smart enough to draw parallels between churches and mills - not least as physical structures and places where humans congregate. And he would also know that some of his readers were also capable of drawing such connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously poetry in general contains suggestive references and metaphors, Blake's work is no different. Blake writes of mills and churches in his other works - especially The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake was also critical of the Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be a convenient veil to talk of 'Mills', which could be criticised for invading the countryside, when you actually wanted to criticise the Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think based on this we have a scenario where Blake was aware that talking about mills juxtaposed with religious and spiritual references would be suggestive enough to lead some people to think also of churches. At the very least describing Mills as Satanic conjures up thoughts of worship. How far Blake wanted to take that is open for debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5421" LastEditorUserId="5421" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T05:51:52.220" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T05:51:52.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8875" CreationDate="2018-12-04T09:57:57.373" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time ago I remember reading a book about a kid who fights some enemy (aliens I believe) but not much else. The only key fact I remember is that one of these enemies picked up a coin and bent it in half with their eyelid to demonstrate their strength. The enemies had tiers to them as well. I have a vague memory of there being an elephant on the cover, but I cannot say for certain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5422" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T18:59:27.163" Title="Trying to remember a book about a kid with powers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8874" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8884" CreationDate="2018-12-04T10:23:50.287" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just finished reading &lt;em&gt;The Gunslinger&lt;/em&gt; and I'm really sad about Jake and how Roland left him behind. I want to know at least if in the other books of the series there will be some mention that Jake is okay and nothing happened to him, that he has forgiven Roland or anything like that. Or maybe Roland will get redemption, later on? I want to know if he will feel guilty and try to redeem himself somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Please try to not spoil anything from the next books as much as possible. I'm fine with something not major or critical.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5423" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T12:51:08.030" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T12:51:08.030" Title="About Jake's fate in The Gunslinger" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;the-dark-tower-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8873" CreationDate="2018-12-04T10:27:53.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found it! It was &lt;em&gt;The Dangerous Days of Daniel X&lt;/em&gt; by James Patterson. The specific excerpt can be found from &lt;a href=&quot;https://issuu.com/jamespatterson/docs/daniel_x_dangerous_days_excerpt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this pdf (hit download)&lt;/a&gt; on page 21&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Oh, I hope not. Say, I’ve read you have Level 4 strength.&#xA;  True or false?”&#xA;  Orkng took out a quarter and bent it in half — with its&#xA;  eyelid!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5422" LastEditorUserId="5422" LastEditDate="2018-12-04T18:59:27.163" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T18:59:27.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8876" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T13:37:30.190" Score="6" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a book I read around 10 years ago (in French).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was about a family going on vacation (I remember a sort of camping, near the sea).&#xA;The protagonist was a young boy (8-12 years old) and his parents wanted him to learn a new language. He encounters a foreign girl who speaks Norwegian or Swedish (or a related language) and they become friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But instead of teaching French to the girl, he invents new words and begins to write a dictionary of this new language (so he won't forget the words he invents).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the book, the protagonist's sibling got lost and the girl saw him. So she tries to explain to the protagonist's parents in &quot;French&quot;, but they obviously don't understand. But the protagonist understands and the sibling is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember that there was a note from the author, saying that it was a true story inspired by his childhood. And that, growing up, he learned many languages, but still had to learn Swedish/Norwegian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5424" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T18:10:42.003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T18:10:42.003" Title="Book about a kid that encounters a foreign girl during holidays and invents a new language" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8878" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-04T17:51:43.873" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &amp;quot;The Famine King&amp;quot;, we are given the impression that Irene is delusional and that everything that relates to the windigo is actually just imagined:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Where did that bruise come from?” Az pointed to my throat. A purplish streak marked the curve below my chin. I understood why she was concerned. It resembled a self-inflicted injury, the impression of a makeshift noose. But much like the face print Mr. Botello left on my childhood window, the bruise was evidence of monsters. Real monsters. During my psychotic thrall, while I imagined wendigo conspiracies, ancient ghosts wrapped a sheet around my neck. I must have faith in my little specks of proof, because the alternative is too terrible. Above all, I fear that my life is one endless hypnopompic nightmare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, she seems to believe that it's all real. And there's one thing that makes me suspect that she's not delusional - the opening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story opens with Irene having a sleep paralysis vision of her neighbor at her window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Face pressed against the glass, it said, “Hey, Irene. I have a secret for you. People rarely starve like they used to.” It sounded like a shrill parody of the neighbor, Mr. Botello.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Go away,” I thought. “Stop.” Though young, I was accustomed to hypnopompic nightmares projected on reality, hallucinated monsters and voices without mouths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The silhouette withdrew, leaving marks where its skin had touched, where its hot breath had fogged, and where its nails had pawed the cold glass. As it dissolved into the 2 a.m. shadows outside, it called, “The hunger is still here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, I heard my tattooed window repeating “the hunger, the hunger, the hunger” behind its curtain shroud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that same neighbor &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; at that time did commit murder suicide, killing his wife and children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, these &amp;quot;hunger&amp;quot; delusions seem eerily similar to what she would later encounter after seeing the trailer for &lt;em&gt;The Famine King&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that she wasn't delusional after all, or is she too much of an unreliable narrator for us to tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T17:51:43.873" Title="Is Irene actually delusional in &quot;The Famine King&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;darcie-little-badger&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2018-12-04T22:41:25.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jack keeps going back to bad decisions. Even though they are each different, they all build upon each other. In the end, Jack is going to have to be accountable for his deeds by putting them on the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase 'the land of milk and honey&quot; is a reference to the Promised Land of the bible (called a &quot;land flowing with milk and honey&quot;) and it could also mean Heaven. This means that when your life is over, all your hidden deeds will be revealed. &#xA;Jack is a generic name that can be applied to anyone, so it could be all of us. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stealing water is a big deal, if you live in the western US (such as near Vegas), where rain is scarce. Some farmers are very protective of their irrigation water, and fighting over it is common whether in court or otherwise. Stealing water happens when someone opens up the irrigation canals at a time that they are not supposed to, and then somebody downstream doesn't get their share. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5428" LastActivityDate="2018-12-04T22:41:25.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8881" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8883" CreationDate="2018-12-05T00:56:28.543" Score="9" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why do peasant characters in 19th century Russian literature so often have Greek names? (e.g. &quot;Agafon&quot; and &quot;Platon&quot; in Anna Karenina).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5429" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T08:33:21.117" Title="Why do peasants in 19th century Russian literature often have Greek names?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8885" CreationDate="2018-12-05T01:43:45.640" Score="1" ViewCount="293" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a short story written by the Christian author C.S. Lewis concerning the vanity and solipsism of women, but, for the life of me, I cannot remember the name, and a Google search proved fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember a part where she was walking around some stores, and doing some shopping or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the name of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5430" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T17:50:26.033" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T08:16:28.497" Title="What's the name of that short story written by C.S. Lewis about female vanity?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8881" CreationDate="2018-12-05T08:33:21.117" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Firstly, why there are Greek names in Russia. Russia, being a Christian Orthodox country, had strong historical and cultural connections with Greece. So, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%BF%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA_%D0%B8%D0%BC%D1%91%D0%BD_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%85%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;many Russian names&lt;/a&gt; are of Greek origin. Most of them are archaic nowadays, but some are very common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, in the XIX century, there was a somewhat strong distinction between &quot;noble&quot; names and &quot;plebs'&quot; names. For example, when introducing Tatiana in &quot;Eugene Onegin&quot; Pushkin adds a note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sweetest-sounding Greek names, such as Agathon, Philat, Theodora, Thekla, are used among us only by the common people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yuri Lotman (referencing Nikonov, M. 1974) states that that time the name Tatiana was given to 18-30 peasants girls, and only to 10 nobles out of 1000.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, why were common people more likely to have Greek names. For me, the most probable explanation is that than peasants were very religious and usually named their children according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menologium&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Menologium&lt;/a&gt;, after Orthodox saints. And saints usually had Greek names. On the other hand, the aristocracy often had different ways to choose a name, fashion trends, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fourthly, Tolstoy references Platon (the philosopher) in Anna Karenina, so he could choose that name for a character for some symbolic or creative reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T08:33:21.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8874" CreationDate="2018-12-05T10:27:11.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The actual situation that Jake ends up in after Roland left him behind is...a little odd, primarily because of other events later in book 2, &lt;em&gt;The Drawing of the Three&lt;/em&gt;. It's not exactly like &quot;nothing happened to him&quot;. But without spoiling too much, rest assured that &lt;strong&gt;Jake will make a comeback to the &lt;em&gt;Dark Tower&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/strong&gt;, specifically in book 3 &lt;em&gt;The Waste Lands&lt;/em&gt;, and from then on stays a major character throughout the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The events of &lt;em&gt;The Gunslinger&lt;/em&gt;, specifically Roland leaving him behind, will however still remain to &lt;strong&gt;stand between Jake and Roland for quite some time&lt;/strong&gt;, though, even if more on a deeper emotional level and less as a direct conflict. It's not like he just forgives him right away. But you will notice that Roland doesn't always show himself from his best side in his quest for the Tower, yet his companions largely manage to deal with it and stay with him nevertheless. He is to a large degree a bit of an anti-hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Roland's actions don't go without effect on &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; either and he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; feel guilty about what he did to Jake. But &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;remorse&lt;/em&gt; on the other hand is a different question, since Roland is also a very stubborn character&lt;/strong&gt; and he is convinced that the things he does to reach the Tower, how bad they might be, are &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt;, since the quest for the Tower is everything for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regards to Roland's redemption, that's...a bit of an overarching theme throughout the entire series, so I'd hesitate to delve too much into details. But Roland will to some degree make a development in his character and realize the errors in some of his ways, specifically also in his relationship to Jake. &lt;strong&gt;The two will also ultimately make peace about what Roland did.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all a little vague, but if you &lt;strong&gt;keep reading, all your concerns will be adressed significantly&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2018-12-05T10:52:52.160" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T10:52:52.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8885" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8882" CreationDate="2018-12-05T12:27:35.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?56949&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Shoddy Lands&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. S. Lewis&lt;/a&gt;, first published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?61079+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, February 1956&lt;/a&gt;, available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v010n02_1956-02_PDF#page/n68/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;; the text is also available at Professor Frederick J. Vetter's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Shoddy-Lands.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;web page&lt;/a&gt;. The narrator, a young man, by some unexplained miracle gets trapped in the mind of a young woman named Peggy, and sees the world as Peggy does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/11/celebrating-c-s-lewis-the-shoddy-lands/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a review by Seth T. Hahne&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the course of his story, Lewis deposits his narrator (and probably avatar) within a world representing the things a particular young woman cares about. Trees and grass are spongy and ill-defined because she doesn’t care about them or their natural splendor. People as well are indistinct smudges, save for men of a particular type whose faces are radiant and women who remain blurs of perception save for their clothing and accoutrements, which are crisp. Likewise jewelry and fashionable gowns are beautifully wrought in this world of hers. Centrally, the narrator finds an enormous, perfected version of the woman, lounging in swimwear (and then nude), a monument to her bloated, self-serving ego. The narrator then, having returned to the real world, is both struck by how terrible and shallow the world of her affections is and how fearful he would be of some stranger being able to witness his own trifling affections through such an unguarded mechanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Excerpts from &quot;The Shoddy Lands&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here I had a new surprise. It was a jeweller's, and after the vagueness and general rottenness of most things in that queer place, the sight fairly took my breath away. Everything in that window was perfect; every facet on every diamond distinct, every brooch and tiara finished down to the last perfection of intricate detail. It was good stuff too, as even I could see; there must have &#xA;  been hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of it. &quot;Thank Heaven!&quot; I gasped. &quot;But will it keep on?&quot; Hastily I looked at the next shop. It &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; keeping on. This &#xA;  window contained women's frocks. I'm no judge, so I can't say how good they were. The great thing was that they were real, clear, palpable. The shop beyond this one sold women's shoes. And it was still keeping on. They were real shoes; the &#xA;  toe-pinching and very high-heeled sort which, to my mind, ruins even the prettiest foot, but at any rate real.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;[. . . .]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The gigantic Peggy now removed her beach equipment and stood up naked in front of a full-length mirror. Apparently she enjoyed what she saw there; I can hardly express how much I didn't. Partly the size (it's only fair to remember that) but, still more, something that came as a terrible shock to me, though I suppose modern lovers and husbands must be hardened to it. Her body was (of course) brown, like the bodies in the sun-bathing advertisements. But round her hips, and again round her breasts, where the coverings had been, there were two bands of dead white which looked, by contrast, like leprosy. It made me for the moment almost physically sick. What staggered me was that she could stand and admire it. Had she no idea how it would affect ordinary male eyes? A very disagreeable conviction grew in me that this was a subject of no interest to her; that all her clothes and bath salts and two-piece swim-suits, and indeed the voluptuousness of her every look and gesture, had not, and never had had, the meaning which every man would read, and was intended to read, into them. They were a huge overture to an opera in which she had no interest at all; a coronation procession with no Queen at the centre of it; gestures, gestures about &#xA;  nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-09-01T08:16:28.497" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T08:16:28.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8886" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8891" CreationDate="2018-12-05T18:02:42.047" Score="1" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across the term 'marines' in the book 'The Arrangement by Elia Kazan' twice; however I couldn't get what it may refer. I know it is like 'nautical' or something but it seemed different to me in the context. Need your help. Here are the two paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You're the son of 612, aren't you?&quot; he asked. &quot;I'm Dr. Levine. I've been looking after your father.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;How is he really?&quot; I said.&#xA;  &quot;He's finished. Otherwise he's fine.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;What the hell does that mean?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;I t means some doctors will BS you, put him on a drug calendar,&#xA;  and slip you a hefty bill. But there's no way back with this thing.&quot;&#xA;  &quot;So what do I do?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;Make him as happy as you can, for as long as you can. But don't&#xA;  look for the &lt;strong&gt;marines&lt;/strong&gt;. They ain't coming.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need to mention here that the old man here suffers from arteriosclerosis. The other paragraph is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My father winked at me, and laughed and coughed and laughed.&#xA;  Miss Smythe came back. With her were Butch and the &lt;strong&gt;marines&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;  Dr. Levine and Father Draddy, the young priest who had tried to&#xA;  talk to my father earlier and hadn't been able to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought that the term 'marines' may be something used in daily language like white-collars or something like that. I know it isn't but what is it then?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T00:32:48.523" Title="Is there any other definition or sub-meaning of the term 'marines'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-arrangement&gt;&lt;elia-kazan&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8886" CreationDate="2018-12-05T19:04:32.880" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know it is like 'nautical' or something but it seemed different to me in the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's more specific than that. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;marines&lt;/a&gt; are a special branch of the armed forces in many countries: naval infantry or 'soldiers at sea', sometimes operating as an autonomous part of the navy and sometimes as a separate fourth branch of the armed forces. In the context of this novel set in the United States, it would be the &lt;strong&gt;United States Marine Corps&lt;/strong&gt;. You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Marine_Corps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read about them on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/USMC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;follow them on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-05T19:04:32.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="888" CreationDate="2018-12-06T01:57:58.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Whether Agatha Christie intentionally copied Watson in Hastings or not, he is an example of a necessity for a successful mystery writer:  To fully engage a reader, generally one has to not just present the mystery and let the reader think about it to whatever extent he feels like doing and with whatever skill level he has. That route leads to dissatisfaction on the readers' parts as not only would many not have any particular skill to be thrilled about when the end arrives, but a reader cannot direct actions or ask question of their own and many get a wee frustrated in that their theories cannot be investigated. And out of the milieu, most people read a book over time and will not be fully up to speed each time they pick up the book to continue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having a Hastings allows the author to pull and push the reader into active engagement. Even piking up the book after 2-3 days, the theories and... what-not... that the foils rattle on about let the reader feel his own theories are in play (they would often be precisely the foil's theories...) but the device is an active one generally engaging the reader's thinking vs. him just chunking along to get the book done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to mention the ability to misdirect the reader which also keeps him engaged rather than feeling the last 50 pages were pretty thin as nothing was left but a fairly obvious idea. (That is also why so many books and shows have 40 different crimes and personal quandries solved before finally presenting a (usually) pretty obvious killer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a device was needed and Watson had been a solution in the Holmes stories. Christie went that way. Watson was all those things, but Hastings being them as well wasn't necessarily in any way copying him. War service for instance:  not only was WWI JUST over when Christie was hitting her stride with almost everyone not in industry having been a soldier and so any given man alive would also likely have been one, but for the person presented as her detective's foil to be above any suspicion and filled with plenty of referential authority, he had to be an ex-soldier. &quot;Well, Poirot, I was a malingerer whilst your nation was swarmed with the Bosch, and I hid from the draft, but let's be friends, best buddies...&quot; was implausible. The foil is meant to be US and so must be acceptable to us. Speaking of acceptable, both had to be officers for the elite detectives and society of the time to accept their company and then presence in the investigation (non-police must always have a reason for others to accept them poking into things and Christie liked her stories to develop out of her characters' lives somehow. No one just walked into an office, for instance, and hired Poirot. First you fell into his shoes whilst he was being mortal, and usually fussy, and that was a setting then for a stranger to arrive and a story to be told. So even a random appearance at his office was still something you were already engaged in. Hastings just served that purpose on a broader scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two other quick points about the similarities the OP mentions. 1) Would a simple and straightforward &quot;the husband is covered in blood and kneeling over his wife's body hammering blow after blow into it with a dagger&quot; type stories bring Poirot to the table? No. Only difficult and far less obvious cases required him. The kind of criminal that sets the mystery book stage is actively misguiding the average person. That's what the professional (police usually) brings to the table along with expertise in the mechanics of investigation:  he doesn't drop into the table-setting. He doesn't have implausibilities in the story already explained away in his head. He doesn't think someone was always present, even though no one saw him leave, just because him leaving wasn't part of the table-set story. The professional outsider isn't fooled. So yes, the stories Hastings told were obscure to the reader because the reader IS folled by the carefully set scene, and the Holmes stories along with any really siccessful detective story, are too... or again, the reader won't care much for the story and the author would go back to Home Depot's lumber department. And 2) Poirot had many other friends. They just did not clutter things. They were in Belgium and across Europe, they were in England and the reason someone invited him somewhere (the recommendation of the friend, mutual to them and Poirot). But it was clear he wasn't isolated in any way and that his company was as much desired as his presence. Hastings was simply much closer than any in England, perhaps than any at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice, by the way, that in Holmes' time, the police were not very professionally skilled at all (in fact, a couple generations before, Poe's archetype for detectives went rogue himself). Holmes himself was a nutter and while Watson was there for the very same reason Hastings was, there would have been absolutely nothing for the reader to latch onto with just Holmes. Christie's generation though, had professional police, skilled in detective work, though clearly at the start of it, emphasizing routine and such in a way organizations do when resistance to something is finally beaten down, but many would still slip in their own slapdash habits and techniques if &quot;the Army way&quot; (whatever, right?) weren't hammered at them again and again. Innovation being available, sort of, but not too rewarded, thinking even near the flaps of the box discouraged. She had a husband? They do most murders of women? Get him in and sweat him. But none of them buffoons like Lestrade often was. So Hastings had to provide the comic relief as it would have felt as anarchical for someone then to sneer at the police as it would have for an upstanding citizen to sneer at the police in Dragnet in their own time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hastings and Watson both kept the stories from being presented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Basic facts requiring the police.&#xA;2) Clearly only these three things matter.&#xA;3) Two of those thing really can't be someone other than this fellow.&#xA;4) Take him away; maybe we'll see his connection to the third thing, but who cares? We aren't really wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2-3 pages and all done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an author from New Zealand who wrote stories in which the detective and his sergeant would be sure of the murderer an hour or two after arriving, though that would just be said (&quot;Of course, it must be him.&quot; &quot;Oh, no doubt sir, but proving it needs doing.&quot; No name, just &quot;him&quot;...). I guess enjoyable enough but a bit hard on one's sympathies for the policemen when they knew the killer but further murders occur while they let him roam about during their investigation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other main approach in mystery writing is to tell the storiy from the detective's mind and walk a tightrope of him going off on (um, stupid) tangents and acting on (um, kinda stupid) theories... so he is his own unskilled foil AND the elite detective. It can work:  &quot;They Call Me MR. Tibbs&quot; is a fine example, but then often the mystery is what Hitchcock called &quot;the MacGuffin&quot; so... And really, in the case of Poirot, can we picture an intimate single person relationship with Poirot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think she never allowed that she had copied Watson because she didn't copy him. She chose him much the way he himself was chosen for the Holmes stories. He was different in that his setting was different and so he had to be, but that was in details, not in purpose. Something to engage: to hold, to push, to pull, and to prod the reader here and there was needed in each case, and both authors went the foil route, then made the foil fit their societies. So she hadn't really copied him, just chose to use that device (to which no one held patent!) and so why would she admit she had? Also, do bear in mind, much of what one &quot;knows&quot; of Poirot and Hastings comes from movies and TV, not from reading the books oneself. And THOSE not only had to fit them into their own societies and times, but into their own sterotypes about the characters themselves. Shaky ground for reasoning about Christie's reasons and motives. (if I were a good writer that would be &quot;motives and reasons&quot; as the one follows FROM the other, not the other way around).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She did do the omniscient detective quite well though, no need for a constant foil, in Miss Marple. I prefer her to even Poirot who is #2 in my listing of incredible detective characters. Those stories are magically done. Movie and TV adaptations, kind of not. Enjoyable enough, but not magic. So she could do without a foil when a foil was not the clear choice for proceeding. But Jane Marple was a much more everyday and approachable character so the &quot;Everyman&quot; connection was made with her and usually Christie surrounded her with people to bobble about keeping your mind percolating on wrong ideas. But Poirot's character could not have easily engaged the Everyman. Oh, he'd make any friendship available, unlike, say, Holmes who wasn't even an &quot;acquired taste&quot; but slowly and not in the book's time. Jane Marple? Instant. So Poirot needed an Everyman foil. And was given one. That's not the same as copying him though it did constrain his available characteristics and behaviors. Like eveolution often produces greatly similar traits in utterly unrelated beasties. Same problems to solve? Same traits, by and large, even wiht no direct relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5437" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T01:57:58.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8893" CreationDate="2018-12-06T04:07:45.100" Score="2" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;From which book is the maxim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;大道無門&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wf9re.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wf9re.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Go player Fan&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zen kōan だいどうむもん &quot;Daidō mumon&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&quot;to achieve great understanding there is no single but thousands of ways&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5371" LastEditorUserId="5371" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T19:19:22.540" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T19:19:22.540" Title="Which book is the maxim 大道無門 from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2018-12-06T04:35:58.863" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is one of Boshō poem from 1686, probably his most famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;furuike ya kawazu tobikomu mizuno oto&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;old pond |  a frog dive | sound of water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other poem by Sōgorō from 1689.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;剃捨て黒髪山に衣更&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Sorisutete Kurokamiyamani koromogae&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Shaving my head | at Black Hair mountain | time for summer clothes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Translated from the book 'Boshō – Kapea tie pohjoiseen' ISBN 951-30-5008-4&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5371" LastEditorUserId="5371" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T08:06:15.520" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T08:06:15.520" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8886" CreationDate="2018-12-06T09:07:03.500" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While @Randal’Thor has given a literal definition of marines, the quotations show a more metaphorical usage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within American culture the Marines are the best fighters, the unstoppable yet noble force who will carry the day. To invoke the marines is to say that victory is assured. This is &lt;a href=&quot;http://oldcorps.org/USMC/quotes.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;illustrated in this quote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Attributed to Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to say ‘don’t look for the marines’ is to say that no-one is coming to make everything okay. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume from the second quote that Dr Levine and Father Draddy &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; in some sense make everything okay and so are, metaphorically, the Marines. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T09:07:03.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8889" CreationDate="2018-12-06T13:18:20.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“大道無門” is the first line of a verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;大道無門&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  千差有路&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  透得此關&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  乾坤獨步&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from the introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Barrier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;無門關&lt;/a&gt;, usually translated as &lt;em&gt;The Gateless Barrier&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Gateless Gate&lt;/em&gt;, a collection of kōans by Zen master &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wumen_Huikai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wúmén Huìkāi&lt;/a&gt; (無門慧開), published in 1228. (He is perhaps better known in the West under the Japanese version of his name, Mumon Ekai.) In Robert Aitken’s translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Great Way has no gate;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  there are a thousand different paths;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  once you pass through this barrier,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  you walk the universe alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“大道無門” contains a pun: the author’s name Wúmén is written with the same characters (無門) as “no gate” so the line can be understood as “Wúmén’s Great Way” as well as “the great way has no gate”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“だいどうむもん” (daidō mumon) is the Japanese pronunication of “大道無門” (dàdào wú mén).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hideyuki_Fujisawa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hideyuki Fujisawa&lt;/a&gt; (藤沢秀行) was a professional Go player also known for his calligraphy: presumably the writing on the fan is his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-06T14:25:33.477" LastActivityDate="2018-12-06T14:25:33.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8896" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-07T19:14:08.230" Score="3" ViewCount="1605" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please explain the following opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks's poem &amp;quot;Riot&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;all whitebluerose below his golden hair,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full poem is available on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51835/riot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5448" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:21:11.860" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:21:11.860" Title="Opening lines of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem &quot;Riot&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T17:07:23.307" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;İs there any short version of the &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; to play?&#xA;We are going to play it in our class but the problem is that the story is too long and we don't have enough time for all of it. I need a good short version of it. Thanks for helping!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5449" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T13:04:34.583" LastActivityDate="2019-11-10T18:01:40.223" Title="Shorter version of The Merchant of Venice for school play" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9032" CreationDate="2018-12-08T20:13:22.443" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot; by Darcie Little Badger is a short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://thedarkmagazine.com/the-whalebone-parrot/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available online&lt;/a&gt; about a family living on a small island with a cat and a parrot. An important theme is that both sisters are &quot;Indian&quot; (Native American) and can speak at least some phrases of a Native language, although they rarely do so as their culture has seemingly been suppressed at least since their childhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What language is this?&lt;/strong&gt; It's never stated openly in the story: they are referred to as &quot;Indians&quot; but no specific tribe is mentioned. Searching the internet for some of the phrases used just led me back to this story as the only search result. But perhaps someone more versed than I in Native American history and culture would be able to recognise the language from the words or contextual clues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-08T20:27:25.790" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T14:51:37.770" Title="What is the language which appears in &quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;darcie-little-badger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-08T23:13:29.183" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Afua Hirsch in her book, &lt;em&gt;Brit(ish)&lt;/em&gt; writes that Toni Morrison gave a speech in 1975 saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'It's important to know ... the very serious distraction of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped right, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, and so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is neccessary. There will always be one more thing.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Q.  Where did she gave this speech on the pervasive aspects of racism and to which audience?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T18:18:26.310" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T15:04:58.027" Title="Where and to whom did Toni Morrison give this speech?" Tags="&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2018-12-08T23:30:09.643" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional Haiku has Buddhism as a background and in the philosophy of Buddhism impermanence is a key notion; and what is more impermanent than the present notion which is always slipping away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since poetry is concrete compared to the abstractions of philosophy and we cannot see, feel, smell or hear time the poet relies upon objective correlatives to the notion of time: the falling cherry blossom, the frog jumping into a pond, the moon reflected in a lake at night. These correlatives will always take place in a place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer to your question is a definite no. Time and place tie together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2018-12-08T23:30:09.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T00:29:23.067" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rap group &quot;Public Enemy&quot;, in their first album &lt;em&gt;It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back&lt;/em&gt; (released in 1988), had a track titled &lt;em&gt;Don't Believe the Hype&lt;/em&gt;. Its first stanza is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Back&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Caught you lookin' for the same thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's a new thing - check out this I bring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Uh oh, the roll below the level&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Cause I'm livin' low next to the bass&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  C'mon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Turn up the radio&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They claim that I'm a criminal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By now I wonder how&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some people never know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The enemy could be their friend, guardian&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm not a hooligan&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I rock the party and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Clear all the madness, I'm not a racist&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Preach to teach to all&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Cause some they never had this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Number one, not born to run&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  About the gun...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I wasn't licensed to have one&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The minute they see me, fear me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm the epitome - the public enemy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Used, abused, without clues&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I refused to blow a fuse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They even had it on the news   &gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Don't believe the hype &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by the first line &quot;caught you lookin' for the same thing&quot;? More specifically, what 'thing' was being looked for and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what is this 'new thing' that he's going to 'bring'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he mean by 'don't believe the hype'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T08:04:50.023" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T08:04:50.023" Title="What do the first two lines of this rap by Public Enemy mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8896" CreationDate="2018-12-09T00:35:54.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These lines are a mocking introduction to the protagonist of the poem, describing his race, social class, pedigree, wealth, and snobbery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John Cabot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His surname brings to mind the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabot_family&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cabot family&lt;/a&gt;, part of the aristocracy of Boston. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabot_family#Boston_Toast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-known piece of doggerel&lt;/a&gt; suggests that “the Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God”, meaning that the Cabots are the snootiest of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole name suggests &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cabot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Cabot&lt;/a&gt; the explorer, who traded slaves in the Mediterranean and visited Newfoundland in 1497. The name thus evokes the colonial history of North America and the slave trade that brought the ancestors of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Chicago_riots&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rioters&lt;/a&gt; to Chicago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;out of Wilma&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilma is his mother. The phrase “out of” is the way that the descent of race horses is described, for example Triple Crown winner &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justify_(horse)#Pedigree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Justify&lt;/a&gt; is said to be “out of Stage Magic”. This is mocking the character’s preoccupation with pedigree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;once a Wycliffe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilma’s maiden name. The name suggests &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wycliffe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Wycliffe&lt;/a&gt;, an important early Protestant theologian, so perhaps this is a nod at the ‘P’ in the character’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WASPishness&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;all whitebluerose&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poetic concatenation perhaps refers to the colour of his shirt (white), suit (blue) and skin (pink).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;below his golden hair,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blond hair is associated with whiteness, and gold with wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This alliterative line emphasizes the character’s wealth and snobbery. Linen shirts and wool suits are expensive, and the repetition of “right” suggests that Cabot looks down on ordinary people for wearing cheap cotton shirts and polyester suits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brooks continues to emphasize the character’s wealth and social background. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_Cars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jaguar&lt;/a&gt; is a brand of expensive motor vehicles, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Bluff,_Illinois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lake Bluff&lt;/a&gt; is a wealthy white suburb of Chicago. Today Lake Bluff is 90% white and less than 1% black or African American, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/lakebluffvillageillinois/PST045217&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to the U.S. Census&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word “almost” is an extra little jab: the implication is that Cabot is so attached to his possessions and status that even the imminent threat of injury or death can’t make him forget them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T11:49:06.103" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T11:49:06.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2018-12-09T00:51:48.987" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's often taken that Meursault is the outsider, the stranger amongst men and that he has chosen this destiny for himself and this ties in with the notion of existentialism where one chooses who one is to be - day by day - and maybe hour by hour. Yet none of this is apparent in the text. Moreover, if I recall rightly Camus insisted that he was not an existentialist - at least in Sartre's mould. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And nor is this how marginalisation often works: Man is a gregarious and social creature - he does not exclude himself from the social. What more often occurs is that the outsider finds himself on the outside. It is society itself that excludes to protect its coherence. We are given very little information why Meursault is on the outside of society - Camus does not care to give us a back-story. Though, of course, Meursault must have one:  he may be impoverished, he may not have found the right station in life or he may simply be grieving over some unmentioned passion that Camus omits to mention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why Meursault kills the Arab, again Camus gives us very few clues. For all we know, it could be simply a moment of temporary insanity: the sun is in his eyes, he's tired, weary and looking for solace in the silence of the shade, the Arab appears to be a threat...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2018-12-09T15:15:42.983" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T15:15:42.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T07:07:42.283" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lyrics to the rap &lt;em&gt;Mind Terrorist&lt;/em&gt; by Public Enemy is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take that, ha ha, yeah boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best for your face&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take that, ha ha, yeah boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best for your face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take that, best, best for your face&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best for your face, best for your face&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take that, ha ha, yeah boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best for your face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take that, ha ha, yeah boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best for your face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take that, ha ha, take that&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take that, ha ha, take that&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take that, ha ha, take that&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Best, best, best, best for your face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What on earth do these lyrics mean and what is the connection with the title - Mind Terrorist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T15:07:18.027" Title="What do Public Enemy mean by the rap lyrics of Mind Terrorist?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T14:14:13.607" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Darcie Little Badger's short story &quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot; tells the story of young Emily in the 19th century struggling with her sister Loretta's possession by what turns out to be the eponymous parrot that was supposedly killed by Emily's cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now both sisters are of Native American descent (and aren't actually biological sisters rather than growing up together in an orphanage). It's noticeable that Loretta tries to hide or even supress that identity as best as possible, by e.g. wearing a veil in public, refusing to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8898/50&quot;&gt;her native language&lt;/a&gt; or refusing to let Emily give her cat a &quot;non-English&quot; name. (This is likely due to their past in the orphanage, where it was forbidden by punishment to do so.) Emily, however, seems more confident (or maybe just more naive) to show her identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that may all just be for an interesting character background, but in a short story that screams for more significance. There are also aspects of the story, like the parrot saying &quot;Chee Ba-ti&quot; (&quot;my sister&quot;) to Emily even before the possession or the fact that Emily calls her sister back into conciousness by screaming:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You aren’t Missus Forrester. You aren’t Loretta. Nde tenéna! Shé báti! Shé báti! Shé báti!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that make me wonder &lt;strong&gt;in which way the possession by the parrot is connected to Loretta's supression of her Native American identity&lt;/strong&gt;. Maybe the other things the parrot says (&lt;em&gt;&quot;No doubt part of a longer ballad, one I do not know&quot;&lt;/em&gt;) might also be of help in unraveling that. It would also be interesting how that relates back to the very ending of the story where Emily encounters one of Albert's sisters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2018-12-09T14:14:13.607" Title="How is the possession by &quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot; related to Loretta's Native American identity?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;darcie-little-badger&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8908" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T16:07:14.823" Score="1" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;On what basis is &lt;em&gt;an expression with an opposite meaning&lt;/em&gt; classified under the three types namely &lt;strong&gt;sarcasm, satire and irony&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do sarcasm, satire and irony different from one another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need examples too, please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T02:07:19.817" Title="Sarcasm, satire &amp; irony" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-09T22:19:34.273" Score="4" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where did the idea that Frankenstein is the name of the monster come from? I know that the monster is addressed as Frankenstein in several spin-off movies, but after doing some primary research, I can't find where this idea came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T21:56:50.083" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T21:56:50.083" Title="Where did the idea that Frankenstein is the name of the monster come from?" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3213" CreationDate="2018-12-09T23:00:15.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While it is never really stated straight, we can speculate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Fables are in constant threat - weapons are important to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fables are very afraid - they are refugees from the Adversary's war machine, that has conquered countless kingdoms. Earth is their stand (not necessarily final - there were places that Adversary haven't conquered, like the Cloud kingdom of giants or the SF worlds), but they don't want to run anymore - hence they try to arm themselves with modern weapons. Also, those are Fabletown owned weapons - they have been bought with &amp;quot;state&amp;quot; money - and while indeed Fabletown is not particulars rich &lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, it still can afford to buy few guns here and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They've been here for a while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fables moved to our Earth &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/104264/when-did-the-fables-move-to-our-world&quot;&gt;quite a while ago&lt;/a&gt; (they've been here at very least since 1664) - that would give them time to start working on their armaments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They have a genius blacksmith(s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have quite a lots of skilled people who can make weapons -  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayland_the_Smith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Weyland Smith&lt;/a&gt; comes to mind here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Other methods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have fables that can fly, go invisible, teleport - it really wouldn't be that difficult to steal some stuff, if not from military bases, then from private owners, criminals etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Weeeeellll... kind of... Bluebeard had full rooms full of gold and Frau Totenkinder at one stage created a purse that was pouring gold out of it, so saying &amp;quot;poor&amp;quot; is relative &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T00:44:23.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T13:17:12.010" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Context: I live in Germany.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm fond of shopping for old books at fleamarkets, second-hand-shops, and online. Mostly interested in English 19th century or early 20th century printed books (date of print, not date of first publication). Think Dickens, Doyle, Shakespeare, Burns, Shaw, etc.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;German books from that period are usually typeset in Fraktur. Difficult to read for my untrained eye. So although I do like some Schiller I would usually not buy his books when set in Fraktur because reading it is too much of a hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I was quite astonished to find an English book typeset in Fraktur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Borrow - &lt;em&gt;Wild Wales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beautiful book, leather bound, and I will read it despite the type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is it actually quite an exception for an English book printed in the 19th or early 20th century to be printed in Fraktur?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edition is &amp;quot;The World's Classics&amp;quot; Oxford University Press, Humphrey Milford, 1928&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Printed in England at the University Press Oxford by John Johnson printer to the university.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Addendum:&lt;/strong&gt; I have to apologize. The book is in fact &lt;strong&gt;not printed in Fraktur&lt;/strong&gt;. I can't fathom how I got my memory so completely wrong. Yesterday, as I wrote the question I was completely convinced that it is set in Fraktur. It is awhile now that I last read in it and I was sure it is in Fraktur. But it is not. It is set in good old Roman type.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That means I haven't seen an English book yet that is set in Fraktur. And I can answer my own question: yes, it would indeed be quite an exception if ever one is found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4295" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T10:41:47.043" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T23:28:30.610" Title="Use of Fraktur in 19th Century English Print" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8912" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8911" CreationDate="2018-12-10T14:17:35.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which edition?  The  1862 and 1868 John Murray editions are  not set in Fraktur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general Blackletter (the English word for Fraktur) was not used for setting&#xA;connected prose, but occasionally for decorative purposes, such as on title pages&#xA;and in chapter headings, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-12-10T14:26:23.587" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T14:26:23.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8899" CreationDate="2018-12-10T15:04:58.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In another part of that same book (I cannot find the page number in Google books), the author says this speech was at &lt;strong&gt;Portland University&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Toni Morrison, one of the foremost storytellers of my lifetime, captured the futility of 'celebrating' black history, with a powerful speech in 1975. 'It's important to know ... the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,' Morrison told students at Portland State University.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T15:04:58.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8914" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T18:58:42.493" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot; is a short horror story by Darcie Little Badger. In it, a parrot is killed, and then possesses Loretta to try to kill the cat that killed the parrot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Darcie Little Badger often draws from Apache traditions and beliefs to form her stories - e.g., Owl in&quot; Owl vs. the Neighborhood Watch&quot;, or the theme of the windigo in &quot;The Famine King&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this story draw from any similar sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-12-10T18:58:42.493" Title="Does &quot;The Whalebone Parrot&quot; draw inspiration from any specific Apache sources?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;darcie-little-badger&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8916" CreationDate="2018-12-11T02:47:45.637" Score="6" ViewCount="382" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quote is often attributed to Goethe. Did he actually write this? If yes, then where can we find it? It would be wonderful if there is a reliable source or a book so that I can quote it in my future writings. I'm always suspicious of quotes that circulate on social media, but when I look them up, I can't find an actual source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I will say nothing against the course of my existence. But at bottom&#xA;  it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during&#xA;  the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four weeks of genuine&#xA;  well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be&#xA;  raised up again forever.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5454" LastEditorUserId="5454" LastEditDate="2018-12-21T04:48:03.150" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T14:36:00.997" Title="Does this quote belong to Goethe?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8915" CreationDate="2018-12-11T07:10:00.510" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: The quote comes from a 1917 work by William James. James says Goethe wrote it in 1824, but in fact it was first published in 1836 (in German) by Johann Eckermann, as part of Eckermann's autobiographical recollections of Goethe's conversations with him, this particular conversation taking place in 1824. However, the version given by James may not be the most faithful translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almost all references point to the book &lt;em&gt;The Varieties of Religious Experience&lt;/em&gt; by William James (full text available online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/621/621-h/621-h.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), published in 1917. It's subtitled &quot;A Study in Human Nature / Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At page 174, James writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When such a conquering optimist as Goethe can express himself in this&#xA;  wise, how must it be with less successful men?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;“I will say nothing,” writes Goethe in 1824, “against the course of my&#xA;    existence. But at bottom it has been nothing but pain and burden, and&#xA;    I can affirm that during the whole of my 75 years, I have not had four&#xA;    weeks of genuine well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock&#xA;    that must be raised up again forever.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the quote also appears in &lt;em&gt;Darwin&lt;/em&gt; by Gamaliel Bradford, published in 1926 (text available online &lt;a href=&quot;http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=A875&amp;amp;viewtype=text&amp;amp;pageseq=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), at page 275. Bradford writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we turn to Goethe, we find perhaps little more regard for sexual&#xA;  morals than with Sainte-Beuve, but at any rate a temperament far&#xA;  better poised, and to all appearances charged and glorified with&#xA;  luminous serenity. Yet with Goethe also the scientific spirit, even&#xA;  though enriched with the artist's delight and the artist's creative&#xA;  power, could not bring happiness in its train. The sorrows and&#xA;  sufferings of Werther might perhaps be accredited to the extravagance&#xA;  of youth. But in extreme old age we hear Goethe proclaiming the&#xA;  emptiness and misery of life in terms almost as bitter and complete as&#xA;  those of Sainte-Beuve or of Anatole France. 'I will say nothing,' he&#xA;  said to Eckermann, 'against the course of my existence. But at bottom&#xA;  it has been nothing but pain and burden, and I can affirm that during&#xA;  the whole of my 75 years I have not had four weeks of genuine&#xA;  well-being. It is but the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be&#xA;  raised up again forever.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A footnote for the quote states &quot;&lt;em&gt;Conversations with Eckermann&lt;/em&gt;, quoted in William James, &lt;em&gt;Varieties of Religious Experience&lt;/em&gt;, p. 137.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, nowhere in &lt;em&gt;Varieties&lt;/em&gt; does James mention Eckerman, so it's unclear how Bradford came to this conclusion. However, to be doubly sure, I tracked down the alleged source, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gespr%C3%A4che_mit_Goethe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gespräche mit Goethe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;Conversations with Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann&quot;) by Johann Peter Eckermann, published 1836 (Vols I &amp;amp; II) and 1848 (Vol III). Goethe's conversation with Eckerman on Tuesday 27th January 1824 includes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_n2JKAAAAYAAJ/page/n123&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;following statement by Goethe&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Man hat mich immer als einen vom Glück besonders Begünstigten gepriesen; auch will ich mich nicht beklagen und den Gang meines Lebens nicht schelten. Allein im Grunde ist es nichts als Mühe und Arbeit gewesen, und ich kann wohl sagen, daß ich in meinen fünf und siebzig Jahren keine vier Wochen eigentliches Behagen gehabt. Es war das ewige Wälzen eines Steines, der immer von neuem gehoben seyn wollte.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original English translation was by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;S. M. Fuller&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/conversationswi01fullgoog#page/n106/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 76 of the revised 1852 edition&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have ever been esteemed one of Fortune's chiefest favorites; nor&#xA;  can I complain of the course my life has taken. Yet, truly, there has&#xA;  been nothing but toil and care; and, in my seventy-fifth year, I may&#xA;  say, that I have never had four weeks of genuine pleasure. The stone&#xA;  was ever to be rolled up anew.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia notes that John Oxenford regarded her translation as &quot;almost an abridgement&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/conversationsofg01goetuoft/page/n5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxenford's own translation (1850)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/conversationsofg01goetuoft/page/124&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;at page 125&lt;/a&gt;, gives Goethe as saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have ever been esteemed one of Fortune's chiefest favourites; nor&#xA;  will I complain or find fault with the course my life has taken. Yet,&#xA;  truly, there has been nothing but toil and care, and I may say that,&#xA;  in all my seventy-five years, I have never had a month of genuine&#xA;  comfort. It has been the perpetual rolling of a stone, which I have&#xA;  always had to raise anew.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pertinent to note that Wikipedia adds the following (without citation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Subsequent translators, however, have taken great liberty with&#xA;  Eckermann's work, greatly reducing the autobiographical material and&#xA;  substantially altering his prose, rather than offering faithful&#xA;  renderings in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems reasonable, on the basis of all the above, to conclude that James relied on another (and possibly less accurate) translation of this passage; and he incorrectly attributed the writing of it to Goethe, whereas the author was actually &lt;em&gt;Eckermann&lt;/em&gt; in his autobiographical recollection of what Goethe said to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-12T11:38:07.400" LastActivityDate="2018-12-12T11:38:07.400" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T10:28:01.550" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that symbolism and imagery are two powerful devices of modern literature, especially of poetry, but a problem arises when I try to have a clear understanding of these devices. When a word or a phrase is used figuratively, I have no idea whether it is a symbol or an image. This is because both happen to appear the same to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the sentence &amp;quot;I am trying to plunge into the whirlpool of challenges&amp;quot; is there an image or a symbol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5455" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T17:41:02.797" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T17:41:02.797" Title="How to distinguish between imagery and symbolism?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-11T15:19:30.140" Score="2" ViewCount="1178" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know why Daisy met Tom and that was because of her impatience and her affection with Tom's money but I would like to know Tom's side of the story!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5458" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-11T16:35:14.910" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T08:47:41.733" Title="In the renowned book The Great Gatsby, how, where and why did Tom meet Daisy?" Tags="&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9241" CreationDate="2018-12-11T19:42:42.290" Score="1" ViewCount="172" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The story takes place on a ship and involves the priest spying on the newlyweds couple in their cabin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can't remember the title though.  (It was re-published in one of his short story collections in English.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T17:00:41.780" Title="Chekhov story involving a &quot;peeping tom&quot; priest and a newly married couple?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2685" CreationDate="2018-12-11T22:29:57.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The extreme shortness of haiku, and the traditional requirements of the form, mean that they are most suited to describing moments. But it’s not a rule and there are some exceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally a haiku has three requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seventeen phonetic units (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(Japanese_prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;音, &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) divided into groups of five, seven, and five.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A juxtaposition of two ideas or descriptions via a ‘cutting word’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kireji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;切れ字, &lt;em&gt;kireji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A word relating to a season (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;季語, &lt;em&gt;kigo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most natural kind of juxtaposition is one in which the two descriptions take place simultaneously or in quick succession at a particular time and place. The majority of haiku have this form, which has led to the idea that the description of a ‘moment’ is another requirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] haiku has largely been conceived [in the English-speaking world] as the poetry of the object (particularly small things), of “sensation” and of the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Haruo Shirane (1998). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=jqysp3NaP-wC&amp;amp;pg=PA47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Bashō&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Stanford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, describing a moment is an accident, not a requirement, of the form:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are often told, particularly by the pioneers of English language haiku […] that haiku should be about the “here and now”. This is an extension of the notion that haiku must derive from direct observation and personal experience. Haiku is extremely short, and therefore it can concentrate on only a few details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Haruo Shirane (2000). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haikupoet.com/definitions/beyond_the_haiku_moment.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beyond the Haiku Moment&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Modern Haiku&lt;/em&gt; 31:1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not too hard to find early haiku that aren’t ‘moments’. Here are two that describe longer spans of time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;櫻狩きとくや日々に五里六里&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[hunting cherry blossom—every day, twenty or twenty-five kilometres]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;年々や猿に着せたる猿の面&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[year after year—the monkey’s face wears the monkey]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here’s one which links the present with an imagined past:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;夏草や兵どもが夢の跡&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[summer grass—the traces of soldiers’ dreams]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks whether there are haiku that describe a place “rather than a moment”. The requirement for juxtaposition and a seasonal word mean that it’s most common for haiku to describe a place by describing it at a time within a season, but the time need not be a moment, for example these two could be interpreted as describing a whole day and night respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;暑き日を海へ入れたり最上川&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[entering the sea on a hot day—Mogami River]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;松島や水を衣裳に夏の月&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Matsushima—the summer moon in a costume of water]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example you have the choice of reading it as the poet noticing the gate at a particular moment, or as a description of the place without specific reference to a time, since vines put out leaves throughout the summer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;芋植ゑて門は葎の若葉哉&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[taro planting gate—vine’s new leaves]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All quoted haiku are from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E8%8A%AD%E8%95%89%E4%BF%B3%E5%8F%A5%E5%85%A8%E9%9B%86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;芭蕉俳句全集&lt;/a&gt;, the complete haiku of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matsuo Bashō&lt;/a&gt;. Translations mine, so please point out errors in the comments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T22:29:57.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T07:53:17.983" Score="7" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Miriam Roth's classic Hebrew children's book &lt;em&gt;A Tale of Five Balloons&lt;/em&gt; (Hebrew: מעשה בחמישה בלונים), five children each get a balloon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Dw8m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6Dw8m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;What fun! What joy! A balloon for every girl and boy!&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In sequence, each child sees their balloon pop. And each is told not to cry, with the refrain, &quot;That's the end of every balloon&quot; -- &quot;זה סופו של כל בלון&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SpEAK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SpEAK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is a very simple children's story, it deals very directly and explicitly with loss and impermanence; possibly even grief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is why I'm always a little unsettled by the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; iteration, which is a little different -- a small difference, but I feel a significant one. When Uri's green balloon pops, he isn't told to cheer up because &quot;that's the end of every balloon.&quot; Instead, he's exhorted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;אל תבכה, אורי&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  אל תצטער&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  נקנה לך בלון אחר&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don't cry, Uri,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Don't be sad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;We'll buy you a new balloon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a perfectly reasonable thing to say to a crying young child -- but it feels to me at odds with all the following repetitions. None of the other children are promised another balloon; all of them are told to accept the popping of balloons as inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is Uri different from all the others?&lt;/strong&gt; Isn't it odd to break the story structure in this one, initial instance? Is there thematic significance here; does this somehow tie into the theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I welcome both analysis, and any commentary from the author that addresses the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="225" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T13:53:45.610" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T13:53:45.610" Title="Why does Uri get a special answer when his balloon pops?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;miriam-roth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-12T22:37:44.053" Score="6" ViewCount="487" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; the humans are referred to as &quot;Son of Adam&quot; for a male, and &quot;Daughter of Eve&quot; for a female. I'm assuming that the characters in Narnia don't think that females only descend from a female but not a male, and males only descend from a male but not a female. I.e. technically, a male would be a son of Adam &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a son of Eve; likewise, a female would be a daughter of Eve &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a daughter of Adam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is indeed correct, is there a reason why they always refer to males as &quot;Son of Adam&quot; and not &quot;Son of Eve&quot; or &quot;Son of Adam and Eve&quot;? And, similarly, is there a reason why they always refer to females as &quot;Daughter of Eve&quot; and not &quot;Daughter of Adam&quot; or &quot;Daughter of Adam and Eve&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="29" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T11:16:49.133" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T20:05:32.750" Title="Son of Adam but not Eve? Daughter of Eve but not Adam?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-13T02:55:37.550" Score="7" ViewCount="3759" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From this link,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;DECIUS BRUTUS: Great Caesar,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CAESAR: Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CASCAL: Speak, hands for me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CASCA first, then the other Conspirators and BRUTUS stab CAESAR&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CAESAR: &lt;strong&gt;Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, the last part of the phrase is always left out when discussing Caesar's death. It is very widely believed that &lt;em&gt;Et tu, Brute?&lt;/em&gt; were the last words of Caesar*, and is often used as a joke in common speech. Even Wikipedia ignores the last part, and has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Et_tu,_Brute%3F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;entire page on Et tu, Brute?&lt;/a&gt; with no mention of the subsequent phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason I bring it up is that I think it brings up a different interpretation of the sentiment Shakespeare was trying to convey. &quot;Et tu, Brute?&quot; sounds like an accusatory statement of betrayal, similar to &quot;how dare you!&quot; Even Wikipedia mentions this interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has been argued that the phrase can be interpreted as a curse or&#xA;  warning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the addition of &quot;Then fall Caesar&quot;, at least in my opinion, makes it sound more like a disappointment - similar to &quot;how could you?&quot; In a sense, Caesar believes that the fact that Brutus has taken the side against him is reason enough for Caesar to not fight back against his impending death. This is, of course, my interpretation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, I don't understand why the second part of the phrase is never mentioned, even in literary discussions. Is it just because Latin sounds cooler?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(To be clear, I'm talking about the Shakespeare version of the story, and not the actual series of events. There's some evidence to suggest that Caesar's actual last words may have been &quot;And you, son?&quot; (translated), but that doesn't change the point of the question.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*From my personal experience. Depending on where you live and who your friends are, this might not be the case. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3007" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T20:03:16.513" Title="Why is &quot;...Then fall, Caesar&quot; always left out when talking about Caesar's last words?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8927" CreationDate="2018-12-13T09:58:03.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a definitive answer, but Google Ngrams is helpful here. The first book in the Narnia series was published in 1950, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22son%20of%20adam%22&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2C%22%20son%20of%20adam%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3B%22%20son%20of%20Adam%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B%3B%22%20Son%20of%20Adam%20%22%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a search&lt;/a&gt; reveals the phrase in fairly common use from the 1820's onward. The earliest match is in a poem, The Trial of Cain, the First Son of Adam by W. Sutcliff. There is a big an increase in the 1900's, still many years before Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Daughter of Eve&quot; is rarer, as you might expect (Adam and Eve's children would traditionally have been described as &quot;belonging&quot; to Adam, not Eve). But it's still not unheard of and was first used in the mid-1800's as the title of a novel and a Balzac short story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are zero results for &quot;son of Eve&quot; or &quot;daughter of Adam&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: neither phrase originated with Lewis, and as a well-read man, it is reasonable to assume he would have seen them before, elsewhere. His particular usage as a way to refer to male and female humans might be unique, but there are good reasons for his choice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a great way to signal the &quot;otherness&quot; of the folk of Narnia compared with their human visitors which doesn't demand the reader learn an invented fantasy vocabulary. And its religious overtones suits the pro-Christian message he wanted to convey. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why he didn't go with &quot;son of Eve&quot; or &quot;daughter of Adam&quot;: those phrases are not in familiar usage. And the gender confusion is slightly jarring for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2018-12-13T10:13:57.897" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T10:13:57.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8930" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8931" CreationDate="2018-12-13T15:11:56.827" Score="27" ViewCount="6741" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this English short story during my school days; it was part of our English curriculum 18-19 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plot&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with a wife killing her husband with turkey or chicken or some other food item : not a planned murder but one in anger during a fight. Then the murder investigation starts and a police constable tries to figure out who killed him, but he fails and didn't even get his hands on the murder weapon. In the end, the wife offers him a dish made out of the murder weapon and he starts eating it while either he or the wife says something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes evidence is just under your nose and you fail to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While evidence was literally under his nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Genre&lt;/strong&gt;: Murder Mystery/Drama&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T12:33:04.400" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T12:55:42.917" Title="English short story where a wife makes an investigation officer eat the murder weapon" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8930" CreationDate="2018-12-13T15:17:03.050" Score="36" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Lamb To The Slaughter.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a short story by Roald Dahl that was initially rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She owes it to the child to escape discovery if she can. She prepares the &lt;strong&gt;leg of lamb that she used as a weapon&lt;/strong&gt; and places it in the oven to somewhat destroy the evidence. Then she considers an alibi. After practising a cheerful mask and some innocuous remarks to make in conversation, she visits the grocer and chats blandly with him about what to make for Patrick's dinner. Upon her return to the house and to the room where her husband lies dead on the floor, she acts surprised and meaningfully cries. She then calls the police.&#xA;When the police (who are all friends of her husband) arrive, they ask Mary questions and look at the scene. Considering Mary above suspicion, the police conclude that Patrick was killed by an intruder with a large blunt object likely made of metal. After they make a fruitless search around the house and surrounding area, Mary is reminded that the leg is just about done and offers it to the policemen. She points out that they have already been working through and past the dinner hour, and that the meat will otherwise go to waste; they hesitate, but accept. During the meal, as Mary sits nearby but does not join them, the policemen discuss the murder weapon's possible location. &lt;strong&gt;One officer, his mouth full of meat, says it is &amp;quot;probably right under our very noses&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Mary, overhearing them, begins to giggle.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lamb To The Slaughter - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-13T15:17:03.050" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8927" CreationDate="2018-12-13T16:48:14.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As well as its more literal meaning of a (direct or indirect) male descendant, the word &quot;son&quot; can also be used to mean &quot;&lt;em&gt;A man considered in relation to his native country or area&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;A man regarded as the product of a particular person, influence, or environment&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/son&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definitions 1.4 and 1.5 in the online Oxford Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;). Metaphorically, the word can be used in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymous&lt;/a&gt; way, suggesting a thematic connection. Calling someone a &quot;son of Norfolk&quot; makes it sound as if they somehow &lt;em&gt;personify&lt;/em&gt; Norfolk. Calling someone a &quot;son of &amp;lt; famous figure &gt;&quot; makes it sound as if they're made in the image of that figure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this interpretation, a &quot;son of Adam&quot; could mean, not just a literal descendant of Adam, but someone who's &lt;strong&gt;made in the image of Adam&lt;/strong&gt; - in other words, a male human, as opposed to the other citizens of Narnia. Similarly, a &quot;daughter of Eve&quot; would be interpreted as someone made in the image of Eve - the closest thing to the real Eve that one would be likely to find in Narnia. Talking about a &quot;son of Eve&quot; or a &quot;daughter of Adam&quot; doesn't make so much sense then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, you have to choose one pairing or the other. Poetically, it makes more sense to say &quot;son of Adam&quot; and &quot;daughter of Eve&quot; than &quot;daughter of Adam&quot; and &quot;son of Eve&quot;. Why mix the genders up together when you don't have to? It just sounds aesthetically better to match them in the 'right' gender order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44090738.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Son of Man as Son of Adam&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, an academic article about the use, religious context, and linguistic history of the phrases &quot;son of man&quot; and &quot;son of Adam&quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z8rjuba_HdwC&amp;amp;pg=PA14&amp;amp;lpg=PA14&amp;amp;dq=narnia+son+of+%22adam+and+eve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve: Humanity as an Organism&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a chapter in &#xA;Markus Mühling's &lt;em&gt;A Theological Journey Into Narnia&lt;/em&gt; which explores the significance and context of the use of these phrases in the Narnia books specifically.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T20:05:32.750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T20:05:32.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T02:18:22.570" Score="5" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vague recollection: There is the usual war and conflict on earth and some unknown agent or technology misshap causes a mass event where everyone on earth gains a clear empathy for and understanding of what everyone else is thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there may be a period of technological breakthrough following the event and a bunch of aliens turning up looking for a fight but Earth prevails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure, I read it 30 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone remember the book? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5483" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T21:50:27.727" Title="A Science Fiction story in which everyone on earth has a moment of empathy" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T05:59:36.490" Score="1" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second stanza of Anathema's &quot;One Last Goodbye&quot; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know you didn't want to leave&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your heart yearned to stay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the strength I always loved in you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Finally gave way  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; See full lyrics e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Anathema-one-last-goodbye-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;strength&quot; mean here? Does it mean some sort of inner strength, e.g. will or resolve? The way this line sounds to me is a bit accusing, or let down and disappointed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song is also apparently dedicated to the writers' late mother (or so some websites claim), but it doesn't feel it like it's talking about motherly love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T23:02:19.417" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T23:02:19.417" Title="What is meant by &quot;strength&quot; in Anathema's &quot;One Last Goodbye&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;anathema&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2018-12-14T16:18:00.220" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're searching for &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20070911022207/http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/8/19/21304/8493&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 2005 web-original short story &lt;strong&gt;Roger Williams, “The Fifth Gift”&lt;/strong&gt;.  This link points to a full text copy of the short story on the web.&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The outline of this story is aliens giving a series of five amazing technological gifts to humanity, with enough pauses between them for humans to confirm that the gift is helpful.  The first gift is a replicator that lets people make any number of copies of each alien device.  The second and third gifts are unremarkable.  The fourth gift protects a human from all kinds of harm, so by wearing it as an amulet, a human can take a spacewalk without a spacesuit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the first four gifts don't get to their intended recepients.  A secret agency collects the gifts all to itself, and kills every other witness, so instead of helping humanity prosper, they'll all rot in some government storeroom like the artifacts in Indiana Jones.  The story is written from the point of a reluctant researcher who the secret service forces to examine the gifts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the fifth gift that you seem to remember.  When that one was activated, all humans suddenly became emphatic and started to care about other humans.  (The alien gadget has turned humanity into Gaia from Asimov's &lt;em&gt;Foundation's Edge&lt;/em&gt;, in five seconds after its activation.)  Since the secret agency was led by humans, this led them into releasing the gifts for the benefit of mankind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the field established itself it overshot, and for one bright moment it seemed that I was sharing the thoughts of every single human being on the planet. I could sense Jones and Smith outside the door, reeling from the same sense I was. Further afield was a dim murmer, except for people I had some connection with. I could feel the friends I'd abandoned, who were suddenly aware of me as I was of them. In that moment we knew everything about one another, and I knew that if Smith and Jones [secret agents] recovered their wits they'd all be killed, and my friends knew that too, and they forgave me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Somewhere in the Middle East a man was riding the subway with twelve pounds of explosive strapped to his body and a trigger in his pocket. He had been clutching the trigger, playing with it, steeling himself for his final act in the war between his people and their oppressors. But now he left the trigger alone, and when the doors opened he left the train and returned to the world. Out in the open air of a nearby park he would unwire and take off the explosives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deep in a London slum a room was filled with torpid bodies which suddenly, quietly awakened. The heroin was no longer at work in them, but neither were they now addicted. They looked around with dawning expressions of horror and hope as if to ask, &quot;What the hell am I doing here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must thank Zefram who &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2010/12/msg167271.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pointed me to this remarkable short story in a mailing list post in 2010&lt;/a&gt;, following the tradition that the announcement for any new release of perl (a software package) comes with a literary extract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2018-12-14T22:27:46.363" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T22:27:46.363" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8938" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-14T20:07:51.260" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is an interesting oral tradition that goes something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a dark and story night, and the brigands were waiting in the&#xA;  dell. And the men said &quot;Antonio, tell us a story!&quot;. And Antonio said,&#xA;  &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a dark and story night, and the brigands were waiting in the&#xA;  dell. And the men said &quot;Antonio, tell us a story!&quot;. And Antonio&#xA;  said...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which goes on and on forever. Though I believe the origin is still a mystery, it is well documented in many forms. (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://bohemiancoast.livejournal.com/164722.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://bohemiancoast.livejournal.com/164722.html&lt;/a&gt; for one discussion on the topic)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was casually researching this a couple of years ago, I came across a short-story written based on the &lt;em&gt;Antonio&lt;/em&gt; variant, which extended it to a full story with around 16 layers of story telling -- each slightly different -- each telling a different possible outcome of the brigands' ransack (or not) of a passing caravan. In the topmost story, Antonio saves his lover by telling his long enough that the caravan passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I keep trying to find it, but have had no luck. I believe it was titled just &quot;The Brigands&quot;, and it was hosted on the author's personal webpage. I think it was a professor at a university (so at a .edu site). It was simple static html, so it should be in the Wayback machine if it's no longer hosted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5499" LastActivityDate="2018-12-14T20:07:51.260" Title="Where can I find this short-story extended from the traditional recursive &quot;Antonio, tell us a story!&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8920" CreationDate="2018-12-14T22:08:14.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The book doesn’t say, so you’re going to have to imagine it for yourself. I looked on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fanfiction.net/book/Great-Gatsby/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fanfiction.net&lt;/a&gt;, but no-one there has written a version of this scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few clues on which you might build your version of events. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately—and the decision must be made by some force—of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality—that was close at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position, and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, Tom met Daisy when he visited Louisville in spring 1919. What took him there? Well, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; Nick describes the newlyweds as having:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So perhaps Tom went to Louisville to play polo (the polo season starts in April or May). How were they introduced? Well, it’s possible that there was a family connection. Nick says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s unlikely, however, that it was Nick himself who introduced them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” [Daisy] said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I wasn’t back from the war.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s more likely that they met at a social event like a ball, race meeting, or polo match. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/fitzgerald/f_scott/gatsby/chapter4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; Jordan Baker describes Daisy’s life in Louisville in 1917–1919:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. […] That was nineteen-seventeen. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armistice_of_11_November_1918&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Armistice&lt;/a&gt;, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago, with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debutante&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;debut&lt;/a&gt;’ was a social event where rich young women were put on display with a view to marriage. I interpret ‘presumably engaged’ as meaning that the couple were not engaged, but behaved as if they were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Tom’s side of the story: he’s described by Nick as ‘arrogant’, ‘aggressive’ and possessed of ‘paternal contempt’, so I doubt that any tender feelings were involved. He was the kind of man to have taken ‘the most popular’ young woman in Louisville as a challenge, or as a prize to be competed for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T08:47:41.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8940" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8942" CreationDate="2018-12-15T04:14:47.997" Score="8" ViewCount="1758" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was studying in my high school, there was a lesson in my Telugu textbook about the travels of Pravarakhya and the places he saw in the Himalayas. It was a part of &lt;em&gt;Manu Charitra&lt;/em&gt;, written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allasani_Peddana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allasani Peddana&lt;/a&gt;, a great writer who lived around the 15-16th centuries. The  name of the book means &quot;The story of Manu&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Manu Charitra&lt;/em&gt; is classified as a Prabandha, which is a semi-historical anecdote about a person. The poet takes a small story and enlarges it into a large work using poetic expressions, metaphors, and by adding fictional characters and dialogues, all to describe natural beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Manu Charitra&lt;/em&gt; is the story of Swarochisha Manu, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manu_(Hinduism)#Manus_of_the_current_kalpa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second of the fourteen manus&lt;/a&gt;. In Hinduism, we have many texts describing the lives of different Manus, especially Swarochisha Manu. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the inspiration for Pravarakhya and Varudhini? Are they from a pre-existing book or were they created by Peddana?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5502" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T11:23:30.080" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T18:49:12.163" Title="Did Peddana create Pravarakhya and Varudhini?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;telugu-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8941" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-15T05:18:08.563" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this story in my Indian primary school curriculum and it had some impact on my thinking. It's about an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-resident_Indian_and_person_of_Indian_origin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NRI&lt;/a&gt; aunt coming to India to visit her niece and nephews while they are curiously waiting for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plot:&lt;/strong&gt; The kids start criticizing India on a random basis and become more biased, bickering, praising Canada, and showing signs of enviousness. The aunt calmly listens to them and tries to discuss it from every angle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She shares how vibrant and unique Indian weather and culture is and how Canada is always cold. She talks about diversifying culture, languages, food, and a variety of things to do in India, and the kids start changing their minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then one of the kids curiously asks, &amp;quot;then why are you even living in Canada and not India&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I forgot her answer and want to know that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be from the early 90s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language:&lt;/strong&gt; I guess English but can be Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="95" LastEditorUserId="95" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T17:48:25.937" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T17:48:50.900" Title="Canadian NRI aunty shares her living experience with her niece and nephews" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8940" CreationDate="2018-12-15T05:42:00.917" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The characters Pravarakhya and Varudhini are from a Hindu Purana named &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markandeya_Purana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Markandeya Purana&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. This story occurs when the sage Markandeya, the narrator of the text, gives out the incidents that lead to the birth of the Swarochisha Manu, the one whom the text &lt;em&gt;Manu Charitra&lt;/em&gt; is based upon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allasani used that incident and enlarged the work by adding descriptions of Himalayas, the background of Pravarakhya, conversation between characters, how Pravarakhya and Varudhini felt after they met and parted, and other modifications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Markandeya Purana Chapter 58&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; contains the details and the story of Pravarakhya and Varudhini. One can read the complete story as narrated by Markandeya.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Here is a summary:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a learned youth named Pravarakhya living in a town called Arunaspada on the banks of the River Yamuna. He observed regular rituals and served guests who visited him. This gave him extreme happiness. A Siddha (learned man with magic powers and knowledge of medicinal herbs) visited Arunaspada and he was served by Pravarakhya. Pravarakhya was enthusiastic about the Siddha and asked how he was able to travel to a lot of places at such a young age. The siddha revealed that had a magical medicinal herb which helps him to travel to any place at his will. He just applied it to his feet and then closed eyes. In the next moment, the destination would be reached. Pravara had been keen to visit places for a long time and he requested that herb. Siddha was pleased with the devotion and service offered by Pravarkhya and gifted him that tree root and went on his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pravarakhya desired to visit the Himalayas and closed his eyes. In the next moment, he was there. While he was engaged in admiring the natural beauty of the Himalayas, the exotic root which was applied to his feet melted away due to the water present in the Himalayan mountains. That left him stuck at that place. He laments his decision to visit a place so far away from his home. He feels sad for his wife waiting for him. In search of his way home, Pravarakhya finds a damsel named Varudhini and asks her why she was wandering in such a place alone. She replies that she is the daughter of Menaka, an apsara (a celestial nymph). She asks if it was his habit to talk to women in that way. But Pravarakhya gets defensive and then answers that he was genuinely interested in finding his way home. But she doesn't believe him and she admits that she has fallen in love with him and she wants him to marry and embrace her. If rejected, she will give up her life. He denies her, saying he is already married and is engaged in regular rituals. It is mandatory to marry a single woman to indulge in his daily rituals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He prays to Fire God (whom he worshipped regularly through rituals) that it is getting time for evening ritual and he should perform it as a duty. Fire God answers the prayers and takes him back to his home by carrying him on his shoulders. However, Varudhini still loved him. Meanwhile a Gandharva youth, whose offers to Varudhini have been rejected by her over several years now, assumes the form of Maya Pravarakhya and shows up while Varudhini is saying in desperation that if Pravara would not change his mind, she may as well end her life! Maya Pravarakhya (disguised Pravarakhya) replies that the srutis (Vedas, the sacred texts of Hinduism) declare one must not skip rituals and at the same time, it also says that one should not be the reason for a woman's suicide. So, he accepts her offer on the one condition that she should not open her eyes while they were united.  She readily agreed to that condition. The condition was set because Gandharvas (&lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/q/3052/5212&quot;&gt;a race of celestial beings&lt;/a&gt;) restore their original form while they are performing union with women. The couple had a happy time for some time but she realized that he was a Gandharva. She cursed him to be born as a miserable human being. As a result of this union, Varudhini bore a child named Swarochi with radiant features and strong mental faculties. This Swarochi is the father of Swarochisha Manu, the second Manu who is the main character in &lt;em&gt;Manu Charitra&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5502" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T09:06:07.360" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3029" CreationDate="2018-12-15T09:29:56.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Listerdale_Mystery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Listerdale Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1934) the story has the title ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’, but it was originally published in &lt;em&gt;The Novel Magazine&lt;/em&gt; (August 1924) under the title ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Novel Magazine&lt;/em&gt; was a monthly periodical of pulp fiction, so under the original story title, Eastwood’s position corresponds exactly to Christie’s, hence his remarks can be interpreted as a sardonic reflection on the author’s situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Murder Most Foul’ is a quotation from &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; act I scene V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ghost.&lt;/em&gt; Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Hamlet.&lt;/em&gt; Murder?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Ghost.&lt;/em&gt; Murder most foul, as in the best it is;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a long tradition of using famous quotations as story titles, a tradition that Christie would later adopt (&lt;em&gt;Sad Cypress&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Evil Under the Sun&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Moving Finger&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Taken at the Flood&lt;/em&gt;, etc.), so this is why Eastwood imagines the editor might choose this title. Christie’s own quotation-titles were usually apposite to the story: one would expect a story called ‘Murder Most Foul’ to have at least some symbolic relationship to &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Presumably the lack of any such relationship is why Eastwood thinks the title ‘rotten’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There can’t be a reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Most_Foul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;film starring Margaret Rutherford&lt;/a&gt;, because that was released in 1964, forty years after the story was written. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contra Peter Shor in the comments, I think that ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber’ is a fine title, because by the conventions of detective stories the second cucumber would be expected to be an important plot element, and this raises two intriguing questions: how can a cucumber, that most watery and anodyne of vegetables, be an important clue? and how can the crucial point possibly be the &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; cucumber?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of commonplace objects in the title to create suspense about their relevance to the mystery plot goes back at least to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Conan Doyle&lt;/a&gt;, whose Sherlock Holmes stories included such quotidian titles as ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Cardboard_Box&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Adventure of the Cardboard Box&lt;/a&gt;’ and ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Second_Stain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Adventure of the Second Stain&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T12:14:03.903" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T12:14:03.903" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8944" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8945" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" Score="0" Body="Questions about literature originally written in the Telugu language, regardless where it was published. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T16:02:38.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="719" CreationDate="2018-12-15T21:37:58.770" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Mrs Croft was really an invalid, and was not pretending. Chapter 19:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Hello-ello-ello,’ [Japp] said. ‘What’s this? An old friend! Milly Merton, I declare! And at your old tricks again, my dear.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He turned round in an explanatory way to the company, disregarding Mrs Croft’s shrill protests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Cleverest forger we’ve ever had, Milly Merton. We knew there had been an accident to the car they made their last getaway in. But there! Even an injury to the spine wouldn’t keep Milly from her tricks. She’s an artist, she is!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Blink and you’ll miss it!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-15T21:53:40.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2018-12-16T17:45:47.200" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first instance of 'pearls for eyes', Eliot probably relates to the blind enthusiasm for the war at it's beginning in 1914. With the glory of victory seemingly at hand, young men willingly joined and become soldiers, as if they had pearls for eyes, oblivious of their fate to become 'shadow under this red rock'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tarot card given by Madame Sosostris is a description of things to come. The drowned Phoenician Sailor is to the image of the Imperial Army and Navy at the time, ship-shape and ready to go to war. But though ready and fit, the sailor drowns, and the following card &amp;lt; Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of the situation &gt; is the reality of the carnage setting in, suggesting even the land itself is poisonous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the dirty grey, cinder-like landscape, the eyes of the dead probably seemed like pearls indeed, especially at night when lit by floodlights from the trenches... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5509" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T17:45:47.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="330" CreationDate="2018-12-16T21:49:29.437" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My sense is it relates to the theme of &quot;profit &amp;amp; loss&quot;, and commerce/banking, that is developed later in &lt;em&gt;The Burial of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I had not thought death had undone so many.  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,   &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.     &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Flowed up the hill and down &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_William_Street,_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King William Street&lt;/a&gt;,    &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Mary_Woolnoth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saint Mary Woolnoth&lt;/a&gt; kept the hours     &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T&lt;em&gt;he Wasteland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have a church (religious symbol) associated with the financial center of London which is a juxtaposition of commerce and the spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Death here can be a living death of of the office worker's life &lt;em&gt;(think Shawn of the Dead, where it takes people a while to realize the dead are walking because everyone is so &quot;zombified&quot;;)&lt;/em&gt; For Eliot, who had to work in a bank for a time to support his literary pursuits, this would have been a kind of living death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pearls for eyes can be a signifier of visions (dreams) of wealth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An aquatic theme, which runs through this poem and the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Quartets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, connects this idea to ruin and the death of the spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Fire Sermon&lt;/em&gt; you have river barges &amp;amp; fishermen (commerce). In the Quartets Eliot has a passage about fishermen not always returning to shore, an indicator of the peril, not only of pursuing wealth, but of the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s_Prayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;daily bread&lt;/a&gt;&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pray for all those who are in ships, those &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose business has to do with fish, and &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Those concerned with every lawful traffic&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And those who conduct them.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Repeat a prayer also on behalf of &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Women who have seen their sons or husbands &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Setting forth, and not returning:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/dante/par-33-1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Figlia del tuo figlio&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Queen of Heaven. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dry Salvages IV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the entire text of The Dry Salvages will shed more light, but this passage is particularly salient:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No end to the withering of withered flowers,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Prayer of the one Annunciation. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dry Salvages IV&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot indicates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/vanity-of-vanities-all-is-vanity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vanity&lt;/a&gt; of pursuit of wealth in East Coker III:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;East Coker III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This brings us back to the Wasteland with the fate of a sailor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Phlebas&lt;/strong&gt; the Phoenician, &lt;strong&gt;a fortnight dead&lt;/strong&gt;,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Forgot&lt;/strong&gt; the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell &lt;br&gt; And &lt;strong&gt;the profit and loss&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A current under sea    &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell   &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  He passed the stages of his age and youth    &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Entering the whirlpool.  &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gentile or Jew &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,  &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.&lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wasteland IV &quot;Death By Water&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lead up to this passage is all tied up with dreams of lost wealth, the &lt;em&gt;&quot;inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;  The final line is surely a reference to Ozymandias:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Shelley)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/em&gt; (Shelley)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idea is established early in the Wasteland:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I will show you fear in a handful of dust.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's title, &quot;The Waste Land&quot;, is specifically meant a critique of the emptiness of modern life, which is related to the ultimate vanity (impermanence) of the material world.  The languishing/death of the human spirit brought on by the pursuit/emphasis of worldly things is a theme that runs throughout Eliot's poems (see the &lt;a href=&quot;http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Poem.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hollow Men&lt;/a&gt;, et al.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2018-12-16T22:19:05.347" LastActivityDate="2018-12-16T22:19:05.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8950" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T10:55:35.107" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the original &lt;em&gt;CHERUB&lt;/em&gt; series the children work for a secret espionage group called CHERUB. It is stated a few times throughout the books that whilst they believe the name is initials no one actually knows what they stand for now. However, in the &lt;em&gt;Henderson's Boys&lt;/em&gt; spin off series we find out that the organisation is called (correct me if I'm wrong as it's been years since I read any of these):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Charles Henderson's Espionage and Research Unit B&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always struck me as this was just a convenient way to name the group as an afterthought for not having thought of it in the first place. However, the name also makes some sort of sense so it could have been thought of initially. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It always struck me as a bit odd that no one could have worked out at least part of the name mind you. I mean surely they know who the founder was, there's the first two and they are still an espionage and research group so surely they could have worked those out. It's only the Unit B part that would have been difficult to work out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2987" LastEditorUserId="2987" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T10:58:11.030" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T10:58:11.030" Title="Was the naming of CHERUB an afterthought by Robert Muchamore?" Tags="&lt;robert-muchamore&gt;&lt;cherub&gt;&lt;hendersons-boys&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8951" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-17T10:59:13.463" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T10:59:13.463" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T10:59:13.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8952" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-17T10:59:13.463" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English author Robert Muchamore (1972 – ) and his literary works, such as the CHERUB series which has its own tag [cherub]." OwnerUserId="2987" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:28:05.537" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:28:05.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8953" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:00:49.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:00:49.500" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:00:49.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8954" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:00:49.500" Score="0" Body="For questions about the CHERUB series by Robert Muchamore. Use for both the original series focusing on James Adams and the second series. Use with the [robert-muchamore] tag." OwnerUserId="2987" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:27:25.097" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:27:25.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8955" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:02:20.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:02:20.227" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:02:20.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8956" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-17T11:02:20.227" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Henderson's Boys series by Robert Muchamore. For the original CHERUB series see [cherub]. Use this tag together with the [robert-muchamore] tag." OwnerUserId="2987" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-17T11:28:45.320" LastActivityDate="2018-12-17T11:28:45.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-17T15:05:04.360" Score="1" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the main protagonists in the outer frame story of Elif Shafak's &lt;em&gt;The Forty Rules of Love&lt;/em&gt; is a man named &lt;strong&gt;Aziz Z. Zahara&lt;/strong&gt;. This name immediately struck me because of its interesting relationship with the alphabet: his first name (like the alphabet) starts with A and ends with Z, while his last name starts with Z and ends with A. Given that it's not his real name but one he chose for himself, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8452/17&quot;&gt;he discusses the significance of letters in his life&lt;/a&gt;, I wondered if there's some hidden meaning or symbolism behind this name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any significance to the fact that his name goes &quot;A...z Z Z...a&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T15:55:17.883" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T15:55:17.883" Title="Is there any significance to the format of Aziz's name?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;elif-shafak&gt;&lt;the-forty-rules-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8961" CreationDate="2018-12-17T22:48:21.403" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Sir Walter Scott's &quot;Chronicles of the Canongate&quot; we have the following&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;indigestion, from having swallowed victuals like a Lei'stershire clown bolting bacon&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not traced any other reference to &quot;Leicestershire clowns&quot; and in particular whether excessive eating formed part of their act.  Were such performances well known in the early 19th century?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-18T16:15:46.243" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T22:44:37.980" Title="What were the &quot;Leicestershire clowns&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;sir-walter-scott&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-18T05:41:56.407" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I've read an adaptation of this book along with a couple more from the same series in a different language, but the writer there didn't reveal the original title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Four kids are the main protagonists of the series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They live in a city where strange things happen all the time, and everyone is kind of used to it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this story they face shape shifting jelly monsters, and later rock monsters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They find out about an ancient civilization underneath their city, where a war had been going on between androids and rock monsters (the androids are the good guys)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The leader of the androids is an immortal human.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This leader blows the whole place up to stop the rock monsters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The final twist is that one of the kids were replaced by a jelly monster.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They kill the said jelly monster with the help of an android, who they didn't know was an android.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story in brief:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two kids go to a forest, one of them is kidnapped by this jelly monster. The other one comes back to the city and asks his the friends to come and save him. They find him standing in the forest. He acts strange, and denies the story of the jelly monster. Later they find out that it was actually a jelly monster in their friend's form, and they burn it to death. They go back to the forest to see if there are more of the monsters. They go in a cave and end up in front of a big city. Here another one of them is taken by a jelly monster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They go towards the city, and face a rock monster on the way. A strange girl saves them from the monster. She explains to them that their race is at way with the rock monsters. She wants to take them in the city. Then they see their friend who was taken last. They're suspicious of him, but the strange girl tells them that she'd be able to tell if he's human or not once they're in the city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She takes them to the main building in the city where a mysterious doctor lives (who's the top guy in their society). Here they find their friend who went missing first. The doctor tells them that he created the jelly monsters to clone humans and fight in the war. He's immortal, and the only human in the city. They're losing the war, so he wants to blow up the whole place and destroy both races do that the rock monsters can't escape to the surface. He tells them to return to the surface through a secret tunnel. They take the strange girl with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After they return to the surface, one of them turns out to be a jelly monster. The first jelly monster cloned him before dying. The strange girl kills this jelly monster, but dies in the process. It is revealed that she, along with the whole race in the city were androids created by the Doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This book is probably a part of a series. In this series the kids live in a city where supernatural, paranormal and weird events happen in a regular basis. The mayor of the city is a witch. Topics of the series include aliens, time travel, alternate reality etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It's most probably in English. Written in the last century if that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5516" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T05:41:56.407" Title="Young Adult sci-fi fantasy featuring shape-shifting jelly monsters that clone humans" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8959" CreationDate="2018-12-18T10:30:57.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Clown’ does not always mean a jester-type character, it can also and more prevalent in historical texts, mean (per the&#xA;OED):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A countryman, rustic, or peasant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eg&#xA;&lt;em&gt;1849   Macaulay Hist. Eng. I. 610&lt;/em&gt;   ‘The Somersetshire clowns, with their scythes..faced the royal horse like old soldiers.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Leicestershire is the home of the pork pie, I would assume that the county was a byword for pork production and consumption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/the-northerner/2015/jul/28/coronation-george-iv-food-england-scotland-dialect-1821&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guardian newspaper in 1821 published a letter&lt;/a&gt;, from which an extract follows, originally from the Durham Chronicle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Extract of a letter from a Scotsman, just arrived in Manchester, to a friend in Auchtermuchty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, man, but thae English loons are keen o’ eatin’! In our mither&#xA;kintra, a chiel wad think muckle shame to hae’t kent he made a god o’&#xA;his wame; but here awa folk crack aboot their flesh an’ blades, an’&#xA;their joints, an’ their puddins, an’ their pastry, as if it were nae&#xA;disgrace to a man to be sae muckle ta’en up aboot what he’s to eat and&#xA;what he’s to drink. Wi’ us, in Scotland, it’s aye left to the feckless&#xA;woman bodies to mak provision o’ necessars; but here, believe me ’gin&#xA;ye like, but I gie my word for’t, ye’ll see a muckle fat fallow gaun&#xA;to the merkat to buy meat; na, the vera men milk the kye! Heard ye&#xA;ever sicklike occupations for men?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They hae a kin o’ a provost here, wi twa kin o’ baillies; an’ what&#xA;think ye they’ve done. Kennin’ weel how weel John Bull likes guid&#xA;eatin, they hae coft a score o’ stots and threescore wathers, to kill&#xA;on the day Geordie has the gowden thing wi’ chuckystanes on’t putten&#xA;on his pow; an’ they hae sent them a’ roun the town wi’ ribbans at&#xA;their lugs. A stot wi’ a ribban at his lugs! An’ the pock puddins hae&#xA;been rinnin in hunners, every loon amang them settlin’ i’ his ain mind&#xA;the very collop he is to hae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've translated it for you ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Oh man, but those English blokes are keen on their eating! In our mother country, a fellow would think great shame to have it known he made a god of his guts; but hereabouts folk talk about their meat and veg, their joints and their puddings and their pastry as if it were no disgrace to a man to be so much occupied about what he’s to eat and what he’s to drink. With us, in Scotland, it’s always left to the feeble female types to make provision of necessities; but here, believe me if you like, but I give you my word for it, you’ll see a big fat fellow going to the market to buy meat; indeed, the very men milk the cows! Did you ever hear of such work for men?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They have a kind of Mayor here, with two aldermen of sorts; and what&#xA;do you think they’ve done? Knowing how well John Bull likes good grub,&#xA;they’ve bought twenty bullocks and sixty lamb, to kill on the day&#xA;George IV has the golden thing with pebbles on it put on his head, and&#xA;they have sent them round the town with ribbons at their ears. A&#xA;bullock with a ribbon on his ears! And the Englishmen* have been&#xA;running in their hundreds, every man among them settling in his own&#xA;mind the very slab of meat he is to have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** &lt;em&gt;'&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/pock_n2_v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pock-puddin&lt;/a&gt;' literally means a steamed pudding of the sort that is wrapped in a cloth. It was also used by Scots to describe Englishmen, in the same way the French might say Rosbifs.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pock-pud(ding), (i) a dumpling or steamed pudding cooked in a bag of muslin or similar thin material (Rxb. 1802 J. Sibbald Chron. Sc. Poetry Gl.; Sc. 1825 Jam.; wm.Sc. 1966). Also used attrib., = paunchy, gluttonous, as in 1705, 1827 and 1880 quots. Hence (ii) a jocular or pejorative nickname for an Englishman from the supposed fondness of the English for steamed puddings, with an additional implication of omnivorousness and stolidity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This letter is written just six years before Scott published 'Chronicles of the Canongate'and with its several references to Englishmen being inordinately fond of eating, meat especially, compared to Scotsmen, I think it supports an interpretation that this is about national stereotypes rather than wandering entertainers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would understand ‘Lei’cestershire clowns bolting bacon’ to be stereotypical meat-greedy Englishmen of a status not expected to be encumbered by social niceties of helping children and old men and able to just get on with the business of eating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-18T22:44:37.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8968" CreationDate="2018-12-19T17:13:17.230" Score="8" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/merchant.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;act 2, scene 2 of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Launcelot Gobbo is conflicted regarding whether to run from Shylock, or continue working for him. Shakespeare expresses this internal conflict by describing the conscience on one side and a fiend on the other (at his elbow). This is an image which has found its place in popular culture over the years (an angel on one shoulder and a devil on another).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But did Shakespeare get it from somewhere? Are there earlier (literary, biblical, cultural etc) sources for this device?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5524" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T13:47:22.733" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T13:47:22.733" Title="Are there earlier incidences than Merchant of Venice of an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8966" CreationDate="2018-12-19T18:49:15.873" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the device of the good and the bad angel had definitely been used before, for example by Christopher Marlowe in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Marlowe's plays are generally hard to date and &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9557/2191&quot;&gt;probably written between 1587 and 1589&lt;/a&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; was presumably written between 1596 and 1599, i.e. several years after Marlowe's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;, the good and the evil angel already appear in the very first scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good Angel&lt;/em&gt;: O Faustus, lay that damned book aside&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And gaze not on it, lest it tempt thy soul,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And heap God's heavy wrath upon thy head!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Read, read the Scriptures—that is blasphemy.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Evil Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Go forward, Faustus, in that famous art&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wherein all nature's treasure is contained;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lord and commander of these elements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They come back in scene 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Faustus, repent! Yet God will pity thee.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Evil Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Thou art a spirit; God cannot pity thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again in scene 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Evil Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Too late.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Good Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Never too late, if Faustus can repent.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Evil Angel&lt;/em&gt;: If thou repent, devils shall tear thee in pieces.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Good Angel&lt;/em&gt;: Repent, and they shall never raze thy skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am quoting from an edition that has only scene divisions, no acts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the origin of the device is older and was already used in the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morality plays&lt;/a&gt;, e.g. the fifteenth-century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Perseverance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Castle of Perseverance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In the text available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/klausner-castle-of-perseverance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robbins Libary, University of Rochester&lt;/a&gt;, they are listed as &amp;quot;bonus angelus&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;good angel&amp;quot;) and &amp;quot;malus angelus&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;bad angel&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of two sources for this motif:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The parable of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heracles#Youth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choice of Heracles/Hercules&lt;/a&gt; by the Greek philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodicus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prodicus&lt;/a&gt;. In this parable, two women appear to Hercules: one who is voluptuous and who promises him the shortest road to the enjoyment of pleasure, and one of more dignified beauty who urges him to follow the longer and more arduous path of noble deeds. Hercules chooses virtue over vice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Christian concept of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardian_angel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guardian angel&lt;/a&gt;, which may have some sort of demon as its counterpart. The concept of guardian angel was never formulated by the Church but can be found in the writings of one of the church fahers, St. Jerome: &amp;quot;how great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it&amp;quot; (Commentary on Matthew, xviii, lib. II)). (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/guardian-angel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catholic.com&lt;/a&gt;.) The &amp;quot;bad angel&amp;quot; presumably derives from the angels that were cast out of heaven together with Satan (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Revelation-12-7_12-9/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation 12:7-9&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit, 22.12.2020: I have added a link to the follow-up question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9557/2191&quot;&gt;dating of &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T09:57:18.987" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T09:57:18.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9557" CreationDate="2018-12-19T19:15:18.720" Score="3" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8968/17&quot;&gt;recent answer&lt;/a&gt; that &quot;&lt;em&gt;Marlowe's plays are generally hard to date and Doctor Faustus was probably written between 1589 and 1592&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and this intriguing situation struck me as something that would make an excellent question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Faustus_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; agrees that the play was written &quot;&lt;em&gt;sometime between 1589 and 1592&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but I'd like to know what the information is here. How do we know it was after 1589 and before 1592, and why don't we know any more than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, &lt;strong&gt;what is the information regarding the publication time of &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T01:21:06.927" Title="When was Marlowe's Doctor Faustus written?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;christopher-marlowe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8969" CreationDate="2018-12-19T19:33:58.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not everybody agrees on the probable dates being exactly 1589–1592. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1188141&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This source&lt;/a&gt; says that &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;strike&gt;published&lt;/strike&gt; written between 1588 and 1593. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1593 is the year Marlowe died, so it seems fairly certain it was written before this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the earlier date, Marlowe's play appears &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust#Marlowe&amp;#39;s_Doctor_Faustus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to be based&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust#Marlowe&amp;#39;s_Doctor_Faustus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;P.F.'s &lt;em&gt;The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/a&gt; the first surviving editions of which were published in 1592, but which some people think was first published in English as early as 1588. (There is a possible reference to it in 1590.) This book is a translation of one that was first published in German in 1587. If you allow time for P.F. to translate it and Marlowe to write the play, you could end up with an estimate of 1588 or 1589 as the earliest reasonable date for Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T01:21:06.927" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T01:21:06.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8455" CreationDate="2018-12-20T02:15:11.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think Cohen has ever made this clear, so we can only speculate. While I agree that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arch_of_Titus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arch of Titus&lt;/a&gt; makes the most sense, three other candidates jump out at me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Washington Square Arch&lt;/a&gt; in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, NYC, the city Cohen was in when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallelujah_(Leonard_Cohen_song)#Musical_composition_and_lyrical_interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he wrote Hallelujah&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/20180208_usmilitaryparades_09.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soldiers marched under this arch&lt;/a&gt; at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Victory_Parade_of_1946&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New York City Victory Parade of 1946&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/actually-the-us-has-a-rich-tradition-of-military-parades-but-normally-theyre-after-military-victories-and-stuff/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;), but I can't find any reference to a flag on this arch.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brandenburg Gate&lt;/a&gt; has a complicated political history, being used as a symbol of Nazi Germany and then of Communist East Berlin. The flag on this gate was of particular significance: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_Gate#Political_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;according to Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;A Soviet flag flew from a flagpole atop the gate from 1945 until 1957, when it was replaced by an East German flag. Since the reunification of Germany, the flag and the pole have been removed. During the 1953 riots in East Berlin the Soviet flag was torn off by West Germans.&quot; It is also associated with a victory march: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Victory_Parade_of_1945&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berlin Victory Parade of 1945&lt;/a&gt; passed by this gate. Unfortunately, the gate is made of stone, not marble -- but maybe Cohen was using poetic license?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a Canadian who lived in the United States, Cohen might have been thinking of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Arch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peace Arch&lt;/a&gt;, which has both the American and Canadian flags flying above it. However, Cohen was born in Montreal and lived in New York City, and so he might not be familiar with an arch built on the US-Canada border between Vancouver and Seattle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T02:15:11.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T05:05:24.287" Score="4" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, the scholarship has so far not compellingly answered a significant question of the text of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;; namely, why the Capulets and the Montagues are at war. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am convinced based on my understanding of Shakespeare's poetics that an unmistakably correct answer is supplied in the text, however cleverly and discreetly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please provide the closest hypotheses of which you are aware - your own or scholars' - to that &quot;unmistakably correct answer.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="918" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T05:05:24.287" Title="What caused the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-10T22:34:59.610" Score="11" ViewCount="560" Body="&lt;p&gt;In almost every fantasy world Dwarfs are almost always shown to have superior technology compared to other races. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="LuisLord of the canadian realm" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T10:24:23.213" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T10:24:23.213" Title="Why are Dwarfs almost always technologically advanced compared to other races?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8973" CreationDate="2018-12-11T16:09:32.867" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;While every fantasy series tends to deal slightly differently with their fantasy races, there tend to be some common denominators.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dwarves are generally written as living underground.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dwarves are usually associated with mining, and with forging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In many fantasy stories, dwarves tend not be be traditional magic-users; in some stories, dwarves are naturally &lt;em&gt;resistant&lt;/em&gt; to magic. Any magic they &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; use tends to be tied to their forging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Dwarves are also usually short. Not sure that ties in, but it's hard &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; to note that.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living underground is difficult. Above ground, if you want to expand your house, you have to put up some new walls and extend the ceiling. Underground, you have to remove enough dirt/stone to form the rooms you want. You've got to leave enough rock to support the wieght of the earth above your home; or, provide additional support; otherwise, your new room could lead to your entire home/neighborhood/city being buried in a collapse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, mining also involves the removal of large amounts of stone. However, it also entails the ability to determine what materials you may need are present (iron, gold, aluminum, precious stones, etc.), and how to extract them - again, without collapsing your underground structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your magical talents don't lend themselves to this, you've got to develop things that do; tools (picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, mine carts, etc.; also anvils, tongs, and other forging tools), and science (physics, at a minimum to figure out how to safely remove all that stone, and to remove the materials you need intact; one imagines chemistry, in figuring out how to use some things that you may not use in forging (&quot;Hey, look what happens when I take bat guano, sulfur, and some other stuff, mix it together, and set it on f...&quot; &lt;em&gt;BOOM&lt;/em&gt;)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4735" OwnerDisplayName="RDFozz" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T16:09:32.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8973" CreationDate="2018-12-11T09:31:03.257" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In mythology, dwarves have been portrayed as master smiths, making the most amazing items in their forges.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In Norse mythology, the dwarves Sindre and Brokk forged Thor's hammer Mjölnir, Odin's ring Draupnir, which drips eight new gold rings every ninth night, and the boar Gyllinbursti, whose golden bristles glowed in the dark. Their rivals, the Sons of Ivaldi, forged  Sif's magical golden, growing hair (after Loki in mischief cut off her original hair), Odin's spear Gungnir, and Frey's ship Skíðblaðnir, which can be folded up and put in a pocket.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In &lt;em&gt;Der Ring des Nibelungen&lt;/em&gt;, which is based on the Germanic &lt;em&gt;Nibelungenlied&lt;/em&gt; and the Nordic &lt;em&gt;Völsunga Saga&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Eddas&lt;/em&gt;, Alberich the Dwarf forges the Ring, while his brother Mime forges the Tarnhelm (which can turn the bearer invisible). The Ring is based on the &lt;em&gt;Andvaranaut&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Völsunga Saga&lt;/em&gt; and is forged by the dwarf Andvari.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Since smithcraft, with its forges and production of all sorts of fantastic items, can be seen as the ancestor of industrialism, later fantasy authors have often updated dwarves to be more technologically advanced than the other people of their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Klaus Æ. Mogensen" LastActivityDate="2018-12-11T09:31:03.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8976" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T14:56:48.083" Score="1" ViewCount="764" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read all of the first series, &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;. Years later I’m picking it back up. I didn’t know they all tied into each other, but anyhow I picked up the Trials of Apollo. Did I miss events that led to the Trials of Apollo? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5532" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-20T15:46:46.027" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:46:46.027" Title="Could I read Trials of Apollo directly after PJ and Olympians?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;rick-riordan&gt;&lt;the-trials-of-apollo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2018-12-20T19:06:29.873" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8976" CreationDate="2018-12-20T15:09:42.337" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not really, no, you can't read it directly after &lt;em&gt;Percy Jackson and the Olympians&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The events of &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt; start right after the events of &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt;. It focuses on characters that you won't be familiar with, and you'll lack some essential knowledge about what's going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a concrete example, the whole storyline of Leo will make no sense if you haven't read HoO.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;no, you must read &lt;em&gt;The Heroes of Olympus&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;The Trials of Apollo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2018-12-20T15:09:42.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-20T19:49:14.987" Score="5" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following book on Google Books: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Book_of_Georgian_Verse.html?id=8TM_AAAAYAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of Georgian Verse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; edited by William Braithwaite, published in 1909. What is the meaning of Georgian? Search engine results provided nothing of use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, how would you describe this book? Is it a compilation of poetry from a certain period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5535" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T00:03:01.860" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T00:03:01.860" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Georgian Verse&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;william-stanley-braithwaite&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2018-12-20T20:54:59.483" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is clearly an anthology of English poems written during the &amp;quot;Georgian&amp;quot; era, that is, during the reigns of kings George I through IV, spanning the years 1714 to 1830.  The title page gives a hint: it refers to a similar compilation of &amp;quot;Elizabethan&amp;quot; verse, referring to the reign of Elizabeth I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofgeorgianve00braiuoft/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This anthology, according to the editor's intention, includes those poets born under the four Georges, who seem to represent the rise and development of a distinct poetical epoch...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T20:59:25.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T20:59:25.283" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8994" CreationDate="2018-12-21T11:49:30.360" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to rediscover a book about copyright I once read.&#xA;The book's cover was the iconic copyright C and a vertical strip motive.&#xA;It is/was freely distributed as a digital edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book discusses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;the flaws with the current copyright system by drawing a graph where 4 different pressures on the law have forced it to become untenable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It elaborates on this by showing similarly untenable cases in the past where farmers where suing airplane companies because they caused their livestock to die and they owned the airspace above their land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The law of land ownership assumed the right stretched down to the core forever and towards the sky forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;even though they are holding dead chickens in their hands and it's clearly the planes, there was nothing they could do. The public good was more important than a few farmers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;  paraphrased quote from the book &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It also elaborates on modern practices like piracy and software.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5541" LastEditorUserId="5541" LastEditDate="2018-12-24T15:17:57.703" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T15:17:57.703" Title="What is the name of this book about copyright?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8992" CreationDate="2018-12-22T00:37:56.660" Score="5" ViewCount="777" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a sentence from her introduction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists - I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the &quot;siblings&quot; in this really long sentence? Here is the part of the sentence which I suppose should give the context. I replace &quot;those beings&quot; with women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that [women] who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that the pair is &quot;weakness&quot; and &quot;pity.&quot; Grammatically, how is &quot;pity&quot; associated with &quot;weakness&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5544" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T05:47:06.550" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T17:39:52.743" Title="A quote from the introduction of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mary-wollstonecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2546" CreationDate="2018-12-22T13:02:25.717" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Referring to &quot;You don't care for music do ya&quot;? Is this not asking the listener if &quot;you&quot; want to please the Lord...Maybe through music&quot;? Or maybe does not want to hear about the &quot;chord&quot; &gt;&gt;&gt;Praises that please the Lord...? Seems the baffled writer believes the listener does not want to hear about the Lord, maybe a non-believer...or someone who condemns David for his method of worshiping.....singing the Chord that pleased the Lord. Most often people who do not care for music does not join in praising God through music. So their understanding of those of us who do is very limited in this area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5547" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T13:02:25.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8966" CreationDate="2018-12-22T14:17:11.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Islamic tradition there are two angels, the &lt;em&gt;kiraman katibin&lt;/em&gt;, that figuratively sit to the left and right of person to record their actions, both good and bad. They are named in the &lt;em&gt;Qu'ran&lt;/em&gt; as the noble recorders:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And indeed [appointed] over you are recorders. Noble and recording. They know whatever you do (82:10-12)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might be a possible influence - the parallel in imagery is quite striking after all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T14:17:11.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2018-12-22T14:32:37.740" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fraction 22/7 was often used as an approximation to &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt;, and is often used when first teaching children the basics of geometry and arithmetic, so it seems pretty certain that Yann Martel put in this bit of numerology on that basis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yann's rationale for choosing Pi as the name of his protagonist, whilst interesting in describing his creative thought process, and symbolic of his way of seeing the world, seems at odds with the mathematical understanding of pi. Whilst &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt; is often called 'irrational' and has no discernible pattern in its digital expansion, this isn't the best way to understand &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt;; it's better and more simply understood from its definition as the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, which on the basis of geometric reasoning is easily seen to be an invariant of any circle - this is the sensible and rational way of looking at it. It's probably safe to say that &lt;em&gt;pi&lt;/em&gt; was described as 'irrational' because it was not a fraction, that is as a &lt;em&gt;ratio&lt;/em&gt; of two finite numbers; in fact it is - it's a ratio of two infinite integers (to make this actually precise one has to use the theory of limits, nevertheless the idea is easily understood).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T06:21:02.460" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T06:21:02.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8990" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-22T15:06:03.650" Score="2" ViewCount="1458" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just googled through World's Longest Novel, and the one that seems to come up as an actual story novel (as opposed to things like The Blah Story by Nigel Tomm, which is apparently not an actual story) is Marienbad My Love. But there seem to be hints that its 17 million plus word count wasn't entirely written, but that big sections were lifted as long quotes from other works. Since it's about a science fiction film creator, it seems plausible, but I cannot find definite answers if this was the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Marienbad My Love partially written by lifting sections from other texts as quotes or the like?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5548" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-22T15:11:05.003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T15:18:12.690" Title="How was Marienbad My Love written?" Tags="&lt;writing-process&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8990" CreationDate="2018-12-22T15:18:12.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marienbad My Love&lt;/em&gt; is made of cuts from other books, but some of them were by the same author.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Straight from the horse's mouth at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marienbadmylove.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the website of the book and author&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This multi-million-word, multi-volume work has been meticulously assembled through calculation and chance from fragments of pre-existing texts both written and appropriated by Mark Leach over the course of 30 years - &quot;the movie,&quot; as Leach calls it, &quot;of all my labors and all my inspirations.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the author &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marienbadmylove.com/diy-novel-kit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Writing is &#xA;  hard, but it’s not always easy to be a scissors-and-paste man, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also willing to give as well as take: he's lifted copyright protections on &lt;em&gt;Marienbad My Love&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marienbadmylove.com/diy-novel-kit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invited any other budding writers to plagiarise from it&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure what this says about him, but he's also gleefully &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marienbadmylove.com/comments.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copied on his website&lt;/a&gt; the speculations from internet forumgoers that he's mentally ill. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.marienbadmylove.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Furthermore&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By no means does Leach believe his record will stand unchallenged. He is &#xA;  hedging his bet by also challenging the records for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;longest word. Also &#xA;  called &quot;the holy Jah,&quot; the 4.4-million-letter noun is a coinage of words from &#xA;  the world's faiths and means &quot;god within.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;longest sentence (3 million &#xA;  words).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;longest book title (6,700 words)..&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T15:18:12.690" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8983" CreationDate="2018-12-22T16:29:14.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's see if we can break this down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;• Dignity and happiness come from certain qualities of character.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;• Women should try to obtain and show those qualities.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;• Some of those qualities are a strong mind and a strong body.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are qualities which are the OPPOSITE of a strong mind and body?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;Susceptibility of heart:&lt;/em&gt; I'm not sure if she means literal susceptibility, as in disease, or falling in love with every Thomas, Richard, and Harold who waltzes by. Could go either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;Delicacy of sentiment:&lt;/em&gt; Feeling or speaking delicately, diplomatically, instead of saying plainly and honestly what's on your mind. A modern analogue would be girls who don't speak up in class because they think boys don't like &quot;smart girls.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• &lt;em&gt;Refinement of taste:&lt;/em&gt; Not sure why this is an issue unless it means &quot;super picky&quot; or &quot;snobby&quot; or the like. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next part is what you were asking about. Let's take it in reverse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Women who are loved for the qualities which Wollstonecraft defines as &quot;weak&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (this is &quot;the objects of that kind of love&quot;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;AND&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Women who are pitied&lt;/strong&gt; (possibly for the same reason)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;will soon be held in contempt (considered pathetic) by men, or people in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;pity&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&quot;being loved for being weak&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; are the &quot;sisters&quot; or &quot;siblings&quot; or &quot;two qualities which Wollstonecraft is pairing.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2018-12-22T16:29:14.370" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8800" CreationDate="2018-12-22T19:03:42.930" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;his textbook on medicine&quot; in this question about Avicenna is a bit misleading, since Avicenna wrote more than one treatise on medicine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canon_of_Medicine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Canon of Medicine / al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb&lt;/a&gt;, which is in prose;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Healing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of Healing / Kitāb al-Šifāʾ&lt;/a&gt;, which is in verse;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;an adaptation (in the same metre as The Book of Healing) of a set of Aphorisms attributed to Hippocrates;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;other didactic poems on topics such as anatomy, maintaining good health, the four seasons, and an apocryphal testament of Hippocrates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gotthard Strohmaier notes in his book &lt;em&gt;Avicenna&lt;/em&gt; (München: C. H. Beck, 1999, p. 117) that the authenticity of some of these works (except for the Canon and The Book of Healing) has sometimes been questioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avicenna had an exceptional memory. By the age of ten he had already memorised the Quran and much Arabic poetry (&lt;em&gt;Encyclopaedia Brittanica&lt;/em&gt;, 2007, Micropedia Volume 1, p. 739).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Strohmaier (p. 116) didactic poems already existed before Avicenna, especially to make memorization easier, but they usually employed complex types of metre. The Book of Healing, however, uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajaz_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rajaz&lt;/a&gt;, which is the simplest Arabic metre. Strohmaier compares it to the German &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knittelvers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Knittelvers&lt;/a&gt;, which tended to be used more for humouristic purposes. (Or, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajaz_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says, the rajaz orginally &quot;tended to be used for low-status, everyday genres such as lullabies, or for improvisation&quot;.) This seems to imply that from a poetic point of view, Avicenna choice of metre broke with the existing conventions for didactic poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the use of didactic poems in medical education appears to have been something new. Rabie El-Said Abdel-Halim writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another influence of Ibn Sina's medical poem was the spreading popularity of composing didactic poems and utilizing it in medical education. In the Islamic world, several of those medical poems written after Ibn Sina are still extant but only in the form of unedited manuscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Rabie El-Said Abdel-Halim: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3963335/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The role of Ibn Sina (Avicenna)'s medical poem in the transmission of medical knowledge to medieval Europe&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Urology Annals, 6.1 (January-March 2014).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T15:39:37.977" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T15:39:37.977" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8981" CreationDate="2018-12-22T21:42:36.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it Lawrence Lessig's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Free Culture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; ? &#xA; This &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/portrait.letter.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online version&lt;/a&gt; has the farmer and chicken story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1945, these questions became a federal case. When North Carolina farmers Thomas 21&#xA;  Lee and Tinie Causby started losing chickens because of low-flying military aircraft (the&#xA;  terrified chickens apparently flew into the barn walls and died), the Causbys filed a lawsuit&#xA;  saying that the government was trespassing on their land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or at least, this is how things happen when there's no one powerful on the other side of the &#xA;  change. The Causbys were just farmers. And though there were no doubt many like them&#xA;  who were upset by the growing traffic in the air (though one hopes not many chickens flew&#xA;  themselves into walls), the Causbys of the world would find it very hard to unite and stop&#xA;  the idea, and the technology, that the Wright brothers had birthed. The Wright brothers&#xA;  spat airplanes into the technological meme pool; the idea then spread like a virus in a&#xA;  chicken coop; farmers like the Causbys found themselves surrounded by “what seemed&#xA;  reasonable” given the technology that the Wrights had produced. They could stand on&#xA;  their farms, dead chickens in hand, and shake their fists at these newfangled technologies&#xA;  all they wanted. They could call their representatives or even file a lawsuit. But in the&#xA;  end, the force of what seems “obvious” to everyone else - the power of “common sense”&#xA;  - would prevail. Their “private interest” would not be allowed to defeat an obvious public&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book has this &lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/vSJ2I.png&quot; alt=&quot;diagram showing the flaws of the current copyright system&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps a better site is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/free_culture.lawrence_lessig/sisu_manifest.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cover art has a horizontal motif, however!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2018-12-23T20:49:14.777" LastActivityDate="2018-12-23T20:49:14.777" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8995" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8983" CreationDate="2018-12-23T06:59:59.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that [women] who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary Wollstonecraft was writing a polemic to argue for the participation of women in the public sphere, a realm at the time that was almost wholly dominated by men and which required a particular kind of education which was not available to women. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why she is down-playing 'delicacy of sentiment' and 'refinement of taste' and asking them to 'acquire strength of mind'. She isn't down-playing sentiment and taste per se, but only in relation to broadening the rather narrow educational horizons of women at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T17:39:52.743" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T17:39:52.743" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="8997" CreationDate="2018-12-23T19:47:03.597" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;So there was a novel I read, I think for school years ago, and I've forgotten the name of it. I remember a fair number of details, but searching google with any combination of them doesn't seem to give me what I'm looking for. The main thing that separated it from other series was the fact it was a 4 part series, at the time I read it, with a website.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The details I remember are as follows:&#xA;There was a group of adolescent humans who just arrived at this new &amp;quot;planet&amp;quot;, although it's actually 4 rings with one smaller and more in the center than the last. On the outermost ring is a lot of mining or lower level jobs, which is where they began in the first book. The humans were basically youth workers, being managed by some alien guy who'd give them some pay for their work. One of the memorable things he'd say would be, if someone said something along the lines of &amp;quot;I didn't do it, I swear&amp;quot;, he'd respond with &amp;quot;No swearing&amp;quot; and take away some of their earnings before the situation gets dealt with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now since there were lots of aliens, the humans needed to be able to understand them. Everyone else would need a chip installed somewhere in their head to be able to hear all the other languages as English, but the main character could mentally look inside a computer and download all the files and such into his head. The mental access of computers ability matters to the story, because that's how we meet a character who's in the computer system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that's all the details I remember, I hope that'll help someone recognize the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5550" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T19:37:34.143" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T19:37:34.143" Title="Please identify this sci-fi series where the main character has mental access to the aliens' computers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8996" CreationDate="2018-12-24T17:50:11.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;The Softwire.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a quick look at some of the summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Softwire is a series of four young adult science fiction novels by PJ Haarsma. It is set in space, in an original fictional universe of Haarsma's creation. A group of around two hundred children are orphaned in outer space on their journey to the Rings of Orbis: giant, planet-like rings which surround a wormhole. The children's parents are killed during an incident in the &amp;quot;seed-ship&amp;quot; in which they are traveling and the computer controlling the ship has raised the children—the eldest of whom are thirteen-years-old as the ship reaches Orbis.&#xA;By Orbisian law, the children are required to enter into four years (or &amp;quot;rotations&amp;quot;, as the aliens called it) of indentured servitude to pay for their trip. Each novel takes place during one year of indentured servitude. One of the children, thirteen-year-old Johnny Turnbull (JT), becomes the first ever human softwire—someone who can &amp;quot;speak to&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;enter into&amp;quot; computers with his mind. The Softwire focuses on JT, his sister Ketheria, and their friends, Max and Theodore.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Softwire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Softwire - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-24T17:50:11.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-24T20:37:51.390" Score="3" ViewCount="1156" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lathe of Heaven&lt;/a&gt; (1971) Ursula Le Guin uses an epigraph before the start of each chapter. The author most frequently quoted in these epigraphs is the Chinese philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zhuangzi or Chuang Tzu&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the first epigraph uses the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Confucius and you are both dreams, and I who say you are dreams am a dream myself. This is a paradox. Tomorrow a wise man may explain it; that tomorrow will not be for ten thousand generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epigraph to the third chapter gave the novel its title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those whom heaven helps we call the sons of heaven. They do not learn this by learning. They do not work it by working. They do not reason it by using reason. To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment. Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Zhuangzi quotes are used for the epigraphs for chapters 2, 9 and 11.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shmoop.com/the-lathe-of-heaven/title.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anonymous author on Shmoop&lt;/a&gt; claims that Le Guin used a terrible Zhuangzi translation, since China didn't even have lathes when Zhuangzi supposedly wrote the work attributed to him. I'm curious to know who wrote the translation Le Guin used in the epigraphs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T10:06:53.530" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T17:27:16.433" Title="Zhuangzi translation in The Lathe of Heaven" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;ursula-le-guin&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lathe-of-heaven&gt;&lt;zhuangzi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="8999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8735" CreationDate="2018-12-24T22:03:43.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too have asked myself similar questions...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary Theory&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;a strict sense is the systematic study of&#xA;the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing&#xA;literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century&#xA;often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in&#xA;the strict sense—considerations of intellectual history, moral&#xA;philosophy, social prophecy, and other interdisciplinary themes which&#xA;are of relevance to the way humans interpret meaning.&lt;/strong&gt; In the&#xA;humanities in modern academia, &lt;strong&gt;the latter style of scholarship is an&#xA;outgrowth of critical theory and is often called[by whom?] simply&#xA;&amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;. As a consequence, the word &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot; has become an umbrella&#xA;term for a variety of scholarly approaches to reading texts. Many of&#xA;these approaches are informed by various strands of Continental&#xA;philosophy and of sociology.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I started with one work within a series of 'a very short introduction to' books that I like, which usually tends to help simplify philosophy, but these books have also started to go into other areas, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0199691347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/a&gt; by Jonathan Culler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is literary theory? Is there a relationship between literature&#xA;and culture? These are some of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler&#xA;in this new edition of his highly popular Very Short Introduction.&#xA;Culler, an extremely lucid commentator and much admired in the field&#xA;of literary theory, uses easy-to-grasp examples as he outlines the&#xA;ideas behind schools of criticism that can otherwise be quite&#xA;daunting, &lt;strong&gt;such as deconstruction, semiotics, and postcolonial theory.&#xA;He explains &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot; not by describing warring &amp;quot;schools&amp;quot; but by&#xA;sketching key &amp;quot;moves&amp;quot; that theory has encouraged, and by speaking&#xA;directly about the implications of theory for thinking about&#xA;literature, human identity, and the power of language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this Second Edition, Culler includes much new material, including a&#xA;discussion of the &amp;quot;death of theory,&amp;quot; a look at topics such as trauma&#xA;theory, ecocriticism, and the link between the theory of narrative and&#xA;cognitive science, plus a new chapter on &amp;quot;Ethics and Aesthetics.&amp;quot; The&#xA;book also includes updated bibliographies. Shedding light on&#xA;everything from literature and social identity, to poetry, poetics,&#xA;and rhetoric, Literary Theory is a welcome guide for all lovers of&#xA;literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from there I also began to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roland Barthes&lt;/a&gt;, who was quite the literary theorist and philosopher...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Barthes' earliest ideas reacted to the trend of existentialist&#xA;philosophy that was prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically&#xA;to the figurehead of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's What&#xA;Is Literature? (1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established&#xA;forms of writing and more experimental, avant-garde forms, which he&#xA;feels alienate readers. Barthes’ response was to try to discover that&#xA;which may be considered unique and original in writing. In Writing&#xA;Degree Zero (1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both&#xA;language and style, rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form,&#xA;or what Barthes calls &amp;quot;writing&amp;quot; (the specific way an individual&#xA;chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect), is&#xA;the unique and creative act. A writer's form is vulnerable to becoming&#xA;a convention, however, once it has been made available to the public.&#xA;This means that creativity is an ongoing process of continual change&#xA;and reaction.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;History (also from Wikipedia Literary Theory Link)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The practice of literary theory became a profession in the 20th century, but it&#xA;has historical roots that run as far back as ancient Greece&#xA;(Aristotle's Poetics is an often cited early example)&lt;/strong&gt;, ancient India&#xA;(Bharata Muni's Natya Shastra), ancient Rome (Longinus's On the&#xA;Sublime) and medieval Iraq (Al-Jahiz's al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and&#xA;al-Hayawan, and ibn al-Mu'tazz's Kitab al-Badi). The aesthetic&#xA;theories of philosophers from ancient philosophy through the 18th and&#xA;19th centuries are important influences on current literary study. The&#xA;theory and criticism of literature are, of course, also closely tied&#xA;to the history of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding of Literary Theory is to apply cultural and social philosophy to literature by examining the times at which it was written, which inherently means one has to apply it to other works from that time and otherwise, in order to try and make distinctions about &amp;quot;what kind of work&amp;quot; it is and to whom or what was it serving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I'm not sure if there is a wrong method to examine Literature to make &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;, as much as there continues to be a lot of ways to systematically look at literary works from ethics, aesthetic, style, execution, and contemporary science (cognitive ability &amp;amp; relationships) to what it's trying to say and how that lines up with the times it is written in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5553" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-25T18:25:39.580" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8998" CreationDate="2018-12-25T23:47:09.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more searching I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote's Zhuangzi page&lt;/a&gt;, which points out that the epigraph to chapter three is based upon James Legge's 1891 translation, where the passage (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://oaks.nvg.org/zhuangzi22-.html#23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chuang Zu XXIII.7&lt;/a&gt;) reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those whom Heaven helps we call the Sons of Heaven. Those who would by learning attain to this seek for what they cannot learn. Those who would by effort attain to this, attempt what effort can never effect. Those who aim by reasoning to reach it reason where reasoning has no place. To know to stop where they cannot arrive by means of knowledge is the highest attainment. Those who cannot do this will be destroyed on the lathe of Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu2.html#23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burton Watson's translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those whom men come to lodge with may be called the people of Heaven; those whom Heaven aids may be called the sons of Heaven. Learning means learning what cannot be learned; practicing means practicing what cannot be practiced; discriminating means discriminating what cannot be discriminated. Understanding that rests in what it cannot understand is the finest.9 If you do not attain this goal, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the epigraph to chapter 1 reads differently in Legge's translation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://oaks.nvg.org/zhuangzi1-.html#2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chuang Zu II.11&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bigoted was that Khiu ! He and you are both dreaming. I who say that you are dreaming am dreaming myself. These words seem very strange; but if after ten thousand ages we once meet with a great sage who knows how to explain them, it will be as if we met him (unexpectedly) some morning or evening. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le Guin's quote is closer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html#2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burton Watson's translation&lt;/a&gt; but still different (e.g. &quot;paradox&quot; versus &quot;Supreme Swindle&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle. Yet, after ten thousand generations, a great sage may appear who will know their meaning, and it will still be as though he appeared with astonishing speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epigraph to chapter 9 in &lt;em&gt;The Lathe of Heaven&lt;/em&gt; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those who dream of feasting wake to lamendation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am quoting the edition published Gollancz/Orion in the SF Masterworks series. I don't know whether the typo &quot;lamendation&quot; was also in the original version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Legge's translation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://oaks.nvg.org/zhuangzi1-.html#2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chuang Zu II.11&lt;/a&gt;), something similar can be found in the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those who dream of (the pleasures of) drinking may in the morning wail and weep; those who dream of wailing and weeping may in the morning be going out to hunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burton Watson translates the same passage as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The epigraph to chapter 11 in &lt;em&gt;The Lathe of Heaven&lt;/em&gt; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Starlight asked Non-Entity, 'Master, do you exist? or do you not exist?' He got no answer to his question, however ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://oaks.nvg.org/zhuangzi22-.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Legge's translation&lt;/a&gt;, this passage reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Starlight [the points of light all over the sky] asked Non-entity, saying, 'Master, do you exist? Or Don't you exist?' He got no answer to his question, however,  (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu2.html#22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burton Watson's version&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bright Dazzlement asked Non-Existence, &quot;Sir, do you exist or do you not exist?&quot; Unable to obtain any answer,  (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it is possible that Le Guin consulted several other translations, but I haven't been able to identify them yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T17:27:16.433" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T17:27:16.433" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9001" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9002" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1971 science-fiction novel 'The Lathe of Heaven' by Ursula Le Guin. Use this tag with the [ursula-le-guin] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T00:42:51.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Zhuangzi', a name that may refer both to an an ancient Chinese philosophical text and to its author. The author was probably born around 369 BC, during the Warring States period (476–221 BC). The oldest manuscript fragments date from round 300 BC. The text is best known for the &quot;Butterfly dream&quot;. &#xD;&#xA;Use this tag with the [chinese-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T00:51:34.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9005" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-26T09:56:35.340" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;A wonderful story about a man who owns a bottle of luxury wine and waiting for an important occasion to open the bottle, at the end the bottle is lost and drank by a homeless man does who not know its value.&#xA;can you please help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5555" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2018-12-26T10:14:20.750" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T10:14:20.750" Title="Story about a precious bottle of wine; owner waiting for the perfect occasion" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2018-12-26T10:35:40.667" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that, in addition of what You All said, It could Also refer to the Image of sterility that goes trough the entire poem: each One of us Is trapped in a mental prison: You can't see your prison, but You feel It and, once You felt that there's something prisoning You, You aren't able to leave this consciousness behind and thinking about and feeling your prison, You confirm your prison and this prison becomes deeper and deeper. I think that It could Be similar to a sort of woolfian moment of being  or an epiphany: You Gear the Key once and onc only, so you discover that You are prisoned, and even if You Won't have this consciousness never again so clear, You will not Be able to forget that sense of prison in you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then... &quot;We' Ve lived&quot;: idk how to uderstand it! We had the illusion of Living? We tried to live? We forced the Key? Or we had this illusion before hearing the Key and now we are bound to the consciousness of the prison and that our attempt to live failed? It's the mr prufrock that when asking ti himself &quot;do I dare&quot; decided to dare?  And failed? And remembering of when he was thinking of being Alive, he hear the Key? And thinking on the Key he Is prisoned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Is prufrock prototype a Man Who Heard the Key, tries not to confirm his prison and would like ti attempt Life but asks himself do i dare? I know that i amico bound to fail, but i want to leave the Cage? And obviously Is bound to fail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5556" LastActivityDate="2018-12-26T10:35:40.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13579" CreationDate="2018-12-27T12:27:40.037" Score="8" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; about the Epic of Gilgamesh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From the diverse sources found, two main versions of the epic have been partially reconstructed: the standard Akkadian version, or &lt;em&gt;He who saw the deep&lt;/em&gt;, and the Old Babylonian version, or &lt;em&gt;Surpassing all other kings&lt;/em&gt;. Five earlier Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh have been partially recovered, some with primitive versions of specific episodes in the Akkadian version, others with unrelated stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that the standard Akkadian version was discovered all in one place, at the ancient &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Ashurbanipal&lt;/a&gt;, and it was clear that all of these tablets were part of a single unified story. About the Old Babylonian version, by contrast, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh#Old_Babylonian_versions&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This version of the epic, called in some fragments &lt;em&gt;Surpassing all other kings&lt;/em&gt;, is composed of tablets and fragments from diverse origins and states of conservation. It remains incomplete in its majority, with several tablets missing and big lacunae in those found. They are named after their current location or the place where they were found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and then goes on to list various tablets found in ones and twos at diverse locations (the Pennsylvania tablet, the Nippur school tablet, the Tell Harmal tablets, the Ishchali tablet, the Sippar tablet, etc.), many of which roughly overlap with parts of the story told in the standard Akkadian version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the evidence that all of these scattered tablets are parts of a unified whole?&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, why do they talk about an &quot;Old Babylonian version&quot; rather than fragments of what might be various different versions in contrast with the single long Akkadian version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T20:11:20.737" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T20:11:20.737" Title="Is there really a single &quot;Old Babylonian version&quot; of the Epic of Gilgamesh?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-27T17:58:59.730" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing it on television some time ago, but my IMDB searches are failing me. The basic plot was that we are watching what is essentially a dissertation defense of a higher being who created the universe. He carefully groomed an exemplar person in this universe to be judged, but through some accident a random midwestern telephone lineman winds up being the representative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: While I saw it on television, I do distinctly remember that it was a production of a stage play. It was in English, and was an American production. It was at least 20, perhaps 30 years ago. It was effectively a one-room / set production with, I believe a total of either 4 or 5 characters: The telephone lineman, his wife, the &quot;student&quot; and either one or two faculty inquisitors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5562" LastEditorUserId="5562" LastEditDate="2018-12-27T20:01:30.033" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T20:01:30.033" Title="identify this play / teleplay: all of creation was a higher being's homework assignment" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8455" CreationDate="2018-12-27T18:45:42.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly the reference to seeing her flag on the marble arch refers to seeing her conquered, or taken, by another? Since the following line is &quot;Our love is not a victory march&quot; - A victory march for one, implies a defeat for another. I can't speak to which arch may have been intended, but I think this interpretation fits with the other themes in the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5563" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T18:45:42.887" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9007" CreationDate="2018-12-27T20:39:14.587" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There isn't any single Old Babylonian version. The same is true even of the different witnesses to the so-called standard version, but to a lesser extent, hence &quot;standard&quot; – the Old Babylonian versions being non-standard in that they differed from each other and from the later recensions more than did the later recensions from each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What unites them is that they have some things in common opposed to the late standard version, being from the same time period and sharing the same language. (I am not a Babylonian scholar, but I can give one example: The Old Babylonian texts spell Gilgamesh &lt;em&gt;Gish&lt;/em&gt;, whereas the standard texts spell his name &lt;em&gt;GISH-gim-mash&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/7497/2/Editing_Gilgamesh.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; by A. R. George (pp. 12-15) compares a short parallel passage between four Babylonian versions (including the standard version). The two tablets share some of the same text, but in a different order. It's impossible to guess what other tablets might have had unless more ever become uncovered, but to put it as broadly as possible, we would probably find, as in this case, some parallels and some totally different texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4442" LastActivityDate="2018-12-27T20:39:14.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2703" CreationDate="2018-12-27T21:43:25.103" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literature, at least in one important sense, is holding up a mirror to human nature. And Stanislaw Lem in &lt;em&gt;Solaris&lt;/em&gt; is holding up literally a mirror to European society, just as another Polish writer, Joseph Conrad - a writer Lem both admired and was influenced by - did in &lt;em&gt;Heart of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; . But whereas Conrad was tackling European imperialism, Lem was tackling technological rationality. The passage in question is similar in intent to one Conrad wrote in his book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out here that Solaris is a planet where dream worlds manifest themselves physically. Another passage that is important and follows the same theme is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled, and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to your self that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This picture of men and women as 'they howled, leapt, spun and made horrid faces' is pretty common in rock concerts and raves - and one might think, where did they get that idea from? But given the settings of the novel, at the time, this so called 'primitive vigour' appeared to be alien, different, other and shocking to the narrator, Charles Marlow as a representative of European civilisation but Conrad's understanding that there was a 'meaning' has been borne out in the way that it invigorated both the music and visual arts of the West - Picasso's work would have been unthinkable without it as well as surrealism and in music, the delta blues and everything that sprung from there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as Conrad was skewering the prejudices of the West, so was Lem. This is confirmed in the &lt;em&gt;Liverpool Companion to Science Fiction film&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a little known fact that Polish-Jewish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem first protagonist was an African-American Soviet pilot named Robert Smith. After all, Lems scientifically, anti-racist novel &lt;em&gt;The Astronauts&lt;/em&gt; brings humanity together not only as a multi-cultural crew ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also ask:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How would the language have been understood by Polish readers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that I don't read Polish it's difficult for me to say how Lem's specific use of language would have been received. Nevertheless his thematics of anti-racism most likely developed because of the broader issues at stake, both in the West in general, Europe in particular and Poland specifically - especially when we note the recent scares of racism in Poland together with the rise of authoritarianism, post-truth and 'alternative' facts and interpretations - another theme that Lem felt very strongly about and heavily critiqued in his work. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T12:19:18.133" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T12:19:18.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-27T22:43:31.073" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/Z&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;S/Z&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1970) the French literary theorist Roland Barthes analysed Balzac's story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarrasine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sarassine&lt;/a&gt;. Is his method of analysis structuralist or post-structuralist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5564" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T22:21:52.237" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T22:21:52.237" Title="Is Roland Barthes' s/z structuralist or post-structuralist?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;roland-barthes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-27T23:45:52.567" Score="5" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this short story more than 20 years ago. The premise is: a group of men (who are white) hire a boat (or raft?) with a guide (who is black) to take them on a trip across a sea. The men are obviously racist and do not treat the guide like a person. The entire trip they completely ignore the guide; they never offer him water and they rarely talk to him. The guide doesn't speak to the men unless spoken to, and he spends most of his time crouched in the corner of the boat. Somehow they get stuck at sea and they have a limited supply of water. The white men begin fighting over how to ration the little water they have left and end up killing each other due to this. At the end of the story it is revealed that the guide has an abundant supply of sugar water stored in tanks under the boat, and all that time he was crouched in the corner he was sipping the water through a straw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5565" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T18:31:48.133" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T18:31:48.133" Title="Identify a story about a group of white men stuck at sea without water and a black guide that they ignore" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T06:00:20.287" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;U Iowa Prof. Brooks Landon &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 229 Bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;        Now that I’ve made several strong claims about sentence length, let me offer a few examples to support those claims. Ask anyone who has read much Hemingway whether his sentences are characteristically long or characteristically short, and the odds are they’ll choose short. Indeed, Hemingway has become something of the poster child for short sentences, but consider this sentence from &lt;em&gt;Death in the Afternoon&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration&lt;/strong&gt; for Joselito and showed me some pictures of him in the ring and of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; I had just come from the Near East, where the Greeks broke the legs of their baggage and transport animals and drove and shoved them off the quay into the shallow water when they abandoned the city of Smyrna, &lt;code&gt;and&lt;/code&gt; I remember saying that I did not like the bullfights because of the poor horses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For any of you who were counting, that’s 108 words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first glossed the bolded phrase as one where Hemingway &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/343179/can-that-sometimes-be-superflous?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1#comment792646_343179&quot;&gt;omitted the complementizer &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Once I remember [that] Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this gloss feels wrong, because then the bolded phrase is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverbial_clause#Types&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an Adverbial Clause of Time&lt;/a&gt;, but it can't depend on the following two independent clauses as they both start with &amp;quot;and&amp;quot; (that I colored in grey).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T12:57:52.453" Title="How's this sentence by Hemingway grammatical: 'Once I remember Gertrude Stein talking of bullfights spoke of her admiration for Joselito'?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9015" CreationDate="2018-12-28T12:57:52.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To my mind, the sentence misses at a few punctuation marks to make it grammatical, or at least easier to parse. When you interpret &quot;once&quot; as referring to &quot;spoke&quot; (i.e. &quot;I remember how Gertrude Stein, ..., once spoke her admiration ...&quot;), the syntax starts to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conjunctions &quot;and&quot; in &quot;and I had just come ...&quot; and &quot;and I remember saying ...&quot; are then used for &quot;normal&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parataxis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;parataxis&lt;/a&gt;. The structure of the first half of the sentence can then be parsed as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once, I remember, Gertrude Stein, talking of bullfights,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;spoke of her admiration for Joselito and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;showed me some pictures&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;of him in the ring and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;of herself and Alice Toklas sitting in the first row of the wooden barreras at the bull ring at Valencia with Joselito and his brother Gallo below, &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The result is a run-on sentence that may have been intended as a imitation of real speech, where people don't consistently keep track of the syntax of the sentences they speak and just string clauses together with &quot;and&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T12:57:52.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T13:55:31.567" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &quot;The Smile on the Face&quot; by Nalo Hopkinson (published in the collection &lt;em&gt;Falling in Love with Hominids&lt;/em&gt;, 2015), the author intersperses the story with fragments and lines from the following limerick:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was a young lady from Niger,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Who went for a ride on a tiger.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  They came back from the ride,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  With the lady inside,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And a smile on the face of the tiger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The version I was familiar with has a &quot;lady from Riga&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story's main character, Gilla, manages to turn the tables on a boy, Roger, who had calumniated her, so the smile is on her face, not the boy's. So how is the limerick relevant to the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T20:56:05.830" Title="Relevance of tiger limerick to Gilla's story" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3384" CreationDate="2018-12-28T20:37:04.100" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's main sources for &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arthur Brooke's narrative poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet&lt;/a&gt; (1562) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Painter_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Painter's&lt;/a&gt; prose version of the story in the second volume of &lt;em&gt;The Palace of Pleasure&lt;/em&gt; (1567).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that Shakespeare read any of the French or Italian sources for this story, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boaistuau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre Boaistuau&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandello&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matteo Bandello&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Brooke's narrative poem, Juliet is sixteen years old (&quot;At sixteen years I first did choose my loving fere,&quot; she says), while in Shakespeare's play, her mother says, &quot;[s]he's not fourteen&quot; (Act I, scene 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brooke does not mention Romeus' age. Near the beginning of the poem, he introduces him as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One Romeus, who was of race a Montague,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Upon whose tender chin, as yet, no manlike beard there grew,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so he's probably not much older than Juliet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Painter, who follows Boaistuau, he is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;of the age of .20 or .21 years&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Brooke's and Shakespeare's Romeo seem younger than this. Based on Romeo's and Juliet's relative maturity, I would argue that Shakespeare's Romeo is not much older than Juliet. In the introduction to the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; (second edition, 2003), G. Blakemore Evans writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Critics have often pointed out that Juliet is a stronger personality than Romeo and that she wins through an almost frightening maturity more quickly. We sense this in her poised and playfully serious exchange with Romeo at their first meeting (1.5) and it is underscored in the famous window scene (2.2), where she shows herself more thoughtful, prudent and realistic than Romeo, though no less deeply engaged, in sensing the tragic threat involved in such 'sudden haste': (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(He then goes on to quote Act II, scene 2, 116-220: &quot;Although I joy in thee, ...&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-12-28T20:37:04.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-28T21:57:08.600" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;Returning to the tale of &lt;em&gt;Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell&lt;/em&gt;, it occurred to me to wonder where Childermass (probably my favourite character) got his name from. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childermass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; informed me that &quot;Childermass&quot; is the name of the feast day of the Holy Innocents - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents#Feast_day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;today!&lt;/a&gt; - but the connection, if any, with the character is unclear to me. There are also other characters and titles in literature named Childermass, who could equally have inspired the name of John Childermass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any connection between John Childermass and today's feast day of Childermass? Or, &lt;strong&gt;is there any evidence for what inspired the name of the character Childermass?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T21:55:29.203" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T21:55:29.203" Title="Where does the name Childermass come from?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;susanna-clarke&gt;&lt;jonathan-strange-and-mr-norrell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9022" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4918" CreationDate="2018-12-29T18:13:24.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;But the accent &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; matter, the quote goes: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Piggy was an outsider, not &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by accent, which did not matter, but by fat...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while the boys probably aren't as judgmental as the &quot;grown-ups&quot; (when it comes to accents at least), hence the &quot;which did not matter&quot;, the accent still makes him different from the others in a way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5571" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2018-12-29T20:57:54.773" LastActivityDate="2018-12-29T20:57:54.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9023" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-30T02:43:15.120" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a set of lines from the book &lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt; by Albert Camus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the past, whenever Mersault had spent any time with one woman, he made the first gestures of commitment, he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way, and he would think about the end of the affair before even taking her in his arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know what Camus meant by the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way?And what did mean by desire here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:23:45.067" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T14:58:45.867" Title="What does Camus mean by &quot;the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;a-happy-death&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9024" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16439" CreationDate="2018-12-30T06:26:33.060" Score="13" ViewCount="869" Body="&lt;p&gt;Iambic pentameter is probably the most prevailing and widely used meter in classical English poetry, and it's the 'standard' form of verse in many forms of poetry such as sonnets. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_(poetry)#Frequently_used_metres&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (admittedly not the best of sources):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most frequently encountered metre of English verse is the iambic pentameter, in which the metrical norm is five iambic feet per line, though metrical substitution is common and rhythmic variations practically inexhaustible. John Milton's Paradise Lost, most sonnets, and much else besides in English are written in iambic pentameter. Lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter are commonly known as blank verse. Blank verse in the English language is most famously represented in the plays of William Shakespeare and the great works of Milton, though Tennyson (Ulysses, The Princess) and Wordsworth (The Prelude) also make notable use of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How and why did iambic pentameter become so prevalent?&lt;/strong&gt; Why this particular choice of meter, and how did it happen - e.g. was there one particularly prominent writer who favoured it and influenced others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related, but not duplicates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2572/17&quot;&gt;Why did Shakespeare write in iambic pentameter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5373/17&quot;&gt;Why did the alexandrine become the &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; metre for French verse drama, whereas English renaissance drama adopted the iambic pentameter?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T15:47:38.277" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T07:39:48.440" Title="Why did iambic pentameter become so 'standard' in classical English poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9025" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-30T19:53:00.250" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;Ours is the Prettiest&quot; (published in the collection Falling in Love with Hominids, 2015) mentions Trubies several times, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 190:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I swung aside the skeletal bustle that was the skirt of my gown just in time to get it out from underfoot of a staggerline of Trubies, everyone of them dressed to pussfoot in gleaming white canvas bell-bottoms, sailor shirts and beanies. (page 190)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 190 (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shook my head at the silver flask one of them slid out of a back pocket to offer me. She was only being friendly, but they had a way of forgetting that some of the things they drank for pleasure &lt;strong&gt;could cause humans serious pain&lt;/strong&gt;. (page 190, emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 206 (about a Trubie that is later referred to as a snake charmer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Trubie was ancient as the hills and thrice as wrinkled. He had a boa constrictor draped over his arms. Age had blanched the two braids hanging down his back from silver to pure white. They were each nearly as thick around as the snake, and their tips tickled his dusty ankles. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 209:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Through the windows of the bus, we saw Beti stand and take the hand of a pretty Trubie girl, tall and slim with big cat eyes and a complicated fall of silvery hair.&lt;/em&gt; (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Betti told me that Lizzie [the &quot;Trubie girl&quot; from the bus] wasn't even a Trubie. Just one of the rare humans who kinda looked like one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2011 the story was also published in &lt;em&gt;Welcome to Bordertown&lt;/em&gt;, an anthology with stories by more than twenty authors. The anthology is part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borderland_Series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bordertown (or Borderland) series&lt;/a&gt;, which is an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shared-world&lt;/a&gt; series: multiple authors can use each other's characters (as long as they don't kill them). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is whether the Trubies are Nalo Hopkinson's invention or were invented by one of the other authors who have contributed to the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T19:53:00.250" Title="What are Trubies?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nalo-hopkinson&gt;&lt;bordertown-series&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2018-12-30T22:08:25.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2018-12-30T22:08:25.130" LastActivityDate="2018-12-30T22:08:25.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2018-12-30T22:08:25.130" Score="0" Body="Questions about any parts or all of the Borderland or Bordertown series, a series of urban fantasy novels and stories created by Terri Windling. Always use with the tag [terry-windling]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:18:14.987" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:18:14.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2018-12-31T06:20:31.073" Score="7" ViewCount="273" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to gather a list of some controversial characters in English Literature. As a result, I came up with a small list. A few characters were suggested by my friends, but one I found a bit confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is Daisy Buchanan from &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt; a controversial character? Can anyone help me by identifying some controversial aspects of the character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5577" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2018-12-31T08:49:51.200" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T22:01:25.143" Title="How is Daisy Buchanan from &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot; a controversial character?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6464" CreationDate="2018-12-31T10:07:09.377" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the difficulties can be resolved with a comprehensive dictionary. In this answer I’ll be quoting from the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘Let’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To grant the temporary possession and use of (land, buildings, rooms, movable property) to another in consideration of rent or hire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So originally there were two shops next door to each other. They were both let to the Gesslers, who joined them into single shop, by creating an opening between the two. Perhaps one shop was used for receiving customers and the other as a workshop.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Reach something down” means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to take down from a certain place or position&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for example, from a shelf. If the Gesslers had stocked ready-made boots on their shelves, then they would have been able to reach them down for their customers. But they did not do this: all their products were made to order.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the narrator’s imagination, the Gesslers’ riding boots have, when new, the colour and shine that an ordinary boot might develop after a hundred years of riding, cleaning and polishing. (I think this is quite fanciful, though: a real boot, even of the highest quality, would surely not survive a hundred years of use.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“These thoughts” refers to the ideas in the preceding paragraph (the “Soul of Boot” and so on). They came to the narrator at a later date than “the days of my extreme youth”. ‘Promote’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To publicize or advertise … to publish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to say that the narrator “was promoted to him” means that the narrator was advertized to him, which is a way of saying that he was introduced to him, but with the added nuance that a commercial transaction is in prospect: namely, that the narrator will be purchasing boots in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Inkling’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A hint, a slight intimation, or suggestion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and ‘haunt’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To visit frequently or habitually&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting this together, we might paraphrase the sentence like this: “After I was introduced to him, at the age of perhaps fourteen, I often felt a hint of the quality of him and his brother, and later I elaborated this into the idea that they might see the very Soul of Boot.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the use of “himself and brother” where we would normally write “him and his brother”. This is a feature of some English dialects, whereby kinship terms are used as if names. Or possibly the narrator is reflecting a peculiarity of the Gesslers’ speech.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The narrator never incurred a large debt to the Gesslers, but not because the boots were affordable, rather because “it would not have seemed becoming” to do so. ‘Becoming’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Befitting, suitable … proper&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if he had incurred a large debt with the Gesslers, the narrator would have felt it improper to request another pair, perhaps intimidated or embarrassed by the sense of dignity and quality that he identified in the brothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me how the clause “just the comfortable reassurance that one was still his client” works grammatically with the rest of this sentence. Possibly some words have been omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T10:07:09.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2018-12-31T13:02:45.600" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it has something to do with him not believing he had a future to offer to Kimya. Like how Aziz refused to do the same with Ella and the two characters have some parallels, but then again you could argue that why didn’t Shams believe in the present moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5578" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T13:02:45.600" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8898" CreationDate="2018-12-31T14:51:37.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipan_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lipan.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer lies in the author's activity on Twitter. After &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914572236366995457&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;releasing this story&lt;/a&gt;, she went on to talk about the history of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipan_Apache_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lipan Apache&lt;/a&gt; people, against whom the military of the United States and Mexico waged a genocidal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lipanapache.org/Museum/museum_war.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;war of extermination&lt;/a&gt; in the late 19th century. In the words of Darcie Little Badger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the late 1800s to early 1900s, cultural assimilation became a tool of survival. Blend in or die. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914599774292254722&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parents were afraid to pass on Lipan spirituality, language, and daily culture. Generation by generation, knowledge slipped away. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914600153759277056&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My great-great-grandmother Lorenza spoke Lipan fluently. My great-grandmother Agapita is the last in my line to know our language. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914601520523603969&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[3]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agapita loved her culture. She taught her kids sacred knowledge. But language vanishes when it's not practiced. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914602751887372289&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[4]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to learn Lipan, but so little remains. Haunted by the ghosts of my dying language, I channeled my anger and sorrow into a story. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914603268646608896&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[5]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist is an orphan of the Lipan extermination. As she lives among colonists, she struggles to remember her past. Her people. &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914604254685474816&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[6]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Whalebone Parrot is a Victorian ghost story that's rooted in Lipan history. History that so few remember ... &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/ShiningComic/status/914605120993849349&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[7]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: the author, herself a Lipan Apache by descent, wanted to teach her readers something about the culture that was lost in the Americas after colonisation, and channelled her despair at being unable to find her own ancestors' culture into the story of the Whalebone Parrot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2018-12-31T14:51:37.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-01T01:36:31.227" Score="3" ViewCount="311" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second stanza of Margaret Atwood's &quot;My mother dwindles&quot;, in which there is a boat metaphor, has gotten me a bit confused as I analyze this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If she were a boat, you’d say&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the moon shines through her ribs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and no one’s steering,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  yet she can’t be said to be drifting;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  somebody’s in there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her blind eyes light her way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The complete text of the poem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/my-mother-dwindles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My viewpoint on this stanza was that the boat is a metaphor to the mother's consciousness which is still present to an extent: &quot;Yet she can't be said to be drifting&quot;. But I'd like some thoughts on what you guys think because I'm kind of unsure still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well, the last line of the stanza: &quot;Her blind eyes light her way&quot; is a line that is totally lost on me. I tried to look at in context to the entire poem, which I overall think, is an explanation of the mother's decline of mental function. I would love some help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5580" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T12:51:27.110" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T12:51:27.110" Title="Meaning in Margaret Atwood's &quot;My mother dwindles&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;margaret-atwood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9037" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9038" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of fantasy novels 'Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard' by Rick Riordan. Use this tag with the [rick-riordan] tag.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" LastActivityDate="2019-01-02T23:16:51.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9039" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-03T10:18:06.200" Score="0" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Astrid Lindgren's &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Lionheart&lt;/em&gt; (originally &lt;em&gt;Bröderna Lejonhjärta&lt;/em&gt; in Swedish), Jonathan and Karl/Rusky (originally Jonatan and Karl/Skorpan) are two brothers. Jonathan tells his younger, terminally ill, brother, about the fairy-tale land of Nangiyala (originally Nangijala) where people go when they die. It might seem to us like just a story told to comfort a sick child, but it turns out to be true, and the boys go on to have adventures together in Nangiyala.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;how did Jonathan know about what happens to people when they die?&lt;/strong&gt; Obviously he hadn't died himself before. Is this just a suspend-your-disbelief thing and it doesn't really make sense in an overly pedantic reading of the story, or is there some in-universe explanation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T15:31:36.487" Title="How did Jonathan know about Nangiyala?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;astrid-lindgren&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17443" CreationDate="2019-01-03T12:39:57.250" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was learning about the Geneva School critics, my tutor said that Georges Poulet and other Geneva School critics wanted to remove the biographical author although he still survives as an indeterminate thought (pensée indétérminée). I don't really know what that means and I can't find much information about it, so can someone please explain that term to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="487" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T13:13:49.037" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:23:05.510" Title="What is meant by &quot;pensée indétérminée&quot; in the Geneva School?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2162" CreationDate="2019-01-03T15:30:36.813" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;ALT+227 on the keypad = π&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I do not doubt that there may be some link between 22/7 being an approximation of pi and the title of the story, another simpler explanation is that in order to get the π as text (other than searching through font settings and symbols) is to use the ALT+227 combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No doubt the author would have needed to discover this considering his book uses that very same symbol on the cover. Coincidence? I personally feel it's more likely that 227 was chosen for that exact reason and not the &quot;almost pi&quot; equation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why the ALT+Keypad combinations happen to have pi at 227, no doubt the original creators intentionally placed it there, and then set the rest of the Greek alphabet around it. Again, seems a bit too on the money for it to have been otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5588" LastEditorUserId="5588" LastEditDate="2019-01-03T16:31:06.527" LastActivityDate="2019-01-03T16:31:06.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9043" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-03T23:46:44.947" Score="1" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Ender ever directly pilot ships and the Molecular Disruption Device in the book? Or does he just come up with tactics, maneuvers, and issue commands?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5590" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T00:17:53.287" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T11:47:19.567" Title="Does Ender directly pilot ships or does he just issue commands?" Tags="&lt;enders-game&gt;&lt;orson-scott-card&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9101" CreationDate="2019-01-04T00:32:34.273" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many moons ago, I used the Calvert curriculum for something like 3rd-8th grade. I remember reading a poem about two brothers who had very different philosophies about how to accomplish their goals; each ended up ruining the other's work. I &lt;em&gt;believe&lt;/em&gt; the last stanza went like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Across the sea, the wide, wide sea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two brothers are breaking their hearts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel like there was another line where one brother laments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My blood, my sweat, my tears.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody remember the poem? I have not been able to find it online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5591" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T07:56:14.797" Title="Calvert curricular poem" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9045" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T06:24:32.493" Score="2" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read  'A happy death' by 'Albert Camus' . In this book , Mersault once said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory . . . Everything is&#xA;  forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only &#xA;  a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have &#xA;  had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion—it gives you an alibi for the vague &#xA;  despairs we all suffer from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't understand what Camus want to say. Please explain it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:23:56.520" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T19:23:56.520" Title="What does Camus mean by this sentence?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;a-happy-death&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9045" CreationDate="2019-01-04T15:19:49.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read this book and I may be wrong as I don't know the whole context but reading out the sentence, I can interpret it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everthing is temporary. There is a simple yet powerful statement &quot;Time&#xA;  heals all wounds&quot; which means pain doesnot last forever and in the&#xA;  future we will forget and move on. Same can be said for happiness as&#xA;  it doesn't last. We face moments of joy and pain in life but those are&#xA;  all shortlived, as the wheel of time rotates we forget about the&#xA;  things we felt in past or only vague sense of those emotions can be&#xA;  recalled. It is hauntingly beautiful to know this. Although, the great things that we label that we will never&#xA;  forget, we will eventually forget about its real essence. Its confusing yet&#xA;  its the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above implications can be mapped line by line as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Believe me, there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret,&#xA;  great memory . . . Everything is forgotten, even a great love.&#xA;  =&gt; Everthing is temporary, our memories, our emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it.&#xA;  There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you&#xA;  every once in a while.&#xA;  =&gt; We face moments of joy and pain in life but those are all shortlived, as the wheel of time rotates we forget about the things we&#xA;  felt in past or only vague sense of those emotions can be recalled. It&#xA;  is hauntingly beautiful to know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have&#xA;  had an unhappy passion—it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we&#xA;  all suffer from.&#xA;  =&gt; Although, the great things that we label that we will never forget, will eventually forget about its real essence. Its confusing yet&#xA;  its the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5594" LastEditorUserId="5594" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T07:33:05.133" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T07:33:05.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T17:11:24.237" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lear/lear.5.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 5 Scene 3 of &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A plague upon you, murderers, traitors all! &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I might have saved her. Now she’s gone for ever.—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cordelia, Cordelia, stay a little. Ha?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is ’t thou say’st?—Her voice was ever soft,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman.—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I killed the slave that was a-hanging thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think this would develop the theme of compassion or truth?&#xA;(I would also like to know whether the structure is prose, blank verse or rhyming iambic pentameter, since I have trouble identifying these. However, that may require a separate question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5231" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-17T20:32:27.267" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T22:24:26.990" Title="Does this passage in King Lear develop the theme of compassion or truth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;king-lear&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8666" CreationDate="2019-01-04T17:30:29.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, &quot;chameleon's dish&quot; refers to the belief that the chameleon was able to live on air alone. (See e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2bKnSDQQKgvMPChch0C3T4g/nine-colourful-facts-about-chameleons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nine colourful facts about chameleons&lt;/a&gt;.) In fact, there was a proverb that,  &quot;A man cannot live on air like a chameleon.&quot; According to the Oxford English Dictionary, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From their inanimate appearance, and power of existing for long periods without food, [chameleons] were formerly supposed to live on air. These attributes made the name famous and familiar to many who knew nothing else of the animal. (Quoted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/537836/summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hedda Haugen Askland&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet pretends that Claudius's question, &quot;How fares our cousin Hamlet?&quot; is about Hamlet's food (fare).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the word &quot;air&quot; in &quot;I eat the air&quot; continues the chameleon theme but is also a pun on &quot;heir&quot;. According to G. R. Hibbard's edition of Hamlet (in the Oxford Shakespeare series), Hamlet's lines are &quot;a rapid series of pointed quibbles designed to give Claudius the impression that thwarted ambition is the cause of Hamlet's strange behaviour.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, &quot;promise-crammed&quot; probably refers back to what Claudius said to Hamlet in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You are the most immediate to our throne;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And with no less nobility of love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Than that which dearest father bears his son,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Do I impart toward you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet may feel this has brought him no advantage. (And in the lines following those quoted above, Claudius had not allowed him to return to Wittenberg.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a capon, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; points out, &quot;is a cockerel (rooster) that has been castrated to improve the quality of its flesh for food and, in some countries like Spain, fattened by forced feeding.&quot; Hamlet says he is not as stupid as a capon: he cannot be satisfied with empty promises in the same way that farmers fatten their capons. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this exchange takes place just before the &quot;mousetrap&quot; play that Hamlet wants to use to confirm the ghost's story about Claudius being the murderer of Hamlet's father. The snarky comments about Claudius's empty promises are therefore meant to deceive the king about Hamlet's true intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T17:30:29.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9043" CreationDate="2019-01-04T18:25:49.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both. During the simulation phase on Eros, he controlled a single ship at a time at first. Then as he progressed, he moved on to voice commands. He tried to control a single fighter when he was commanding multiple, but this failed at first.  Although he did end up mastering switching control of a single fighter and commanding multiple, he mostly only commanded the actions, and the pilots (simulated or not) did whatever he ordered, including the other squadron commanders (the other kids) at the final battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Gradually, as he became more adept at controlling the fighter's speed,&#xA;  direction of movement, orientation, and weapons, the game was made&#xA;  more complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he had mastered the one-fighter game, they allowed him to step&#xA;  back into the four-fighter squadron. He spoke commands to simulated&#xA;  pilots of four fighters, and instead of merely carrying out the&#xA;  computer's instructions, he was allowed to determine tactics himself,&#xA;  deciding which of several objectives was the most valuable and&#xA;  directing his squadron accordingly. &lt;strong&gt;At any time he could take personal&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;command of one of the fighters for a short time, and at first he did&#xA;  this often; when he did, however, the other three fighters in his&#xA;  squadron were soon destroyed&lt;/strong&gt;, and as the games became harder and&#xA;  harder he had to spend more and more of his time commanding the&#xA;  squadron. When he did, he won more and more often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the final battle, although the language doesn't specifically say it, it appears that he is only issuing orders (which makes sense given that real pilots were in the ships).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He whispered quickly into the microphone. His commanders took their&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;parts of the fleet and grouped themselves&lt;/strong&gt; into a thick projectile, a&#xA;  cylinder aimed at the nearest of the enemy formations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ender dodged downward,&#xA;  north, east, and down again, not seeming to follow any plan, but&#xA;  always ending up a little closer to the enemy planet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is directly followed from the previous paragraph, so even though it says &quot;Ender dodged&quot;, it implies (at least to me) that he is issuing more orders to accomplish his maneuvers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the finale of the battle was more commands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then he whispered a command and the ships dropped like rocks toward&#xA;  the planet's surface. They were starships and fighters, completely&#xA;  unequipped to handle the heat of passage through an atmosphere. But&#xA;  Ender never intended them to reach the atmosphere. Almost from the&#xA;  moment they began to drop, they were focusing their Little Doctors on&#xA;  one thing only. The planet itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4901" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T18:25:49.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9050" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9051" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's history play 'Richard II' or 'King Richard the Second', which was probably written around 1595 and first printed in a Quarto edition in 1597. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T19:34:12.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9052" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9053" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's tragedy 'King Lear', which was probably written between 1603 and 1606. The texts of the early editions (the first quarto of 1608, the second quarto of 1609 and the First Folio of 1623) differ considerable, but this tag applies to any edition of the play. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T19:38:40.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9054" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:40:45.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-04T19:40:45.733" LastActivityDate="2019-01-04T19:40:45.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9055" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:40:45.733" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature originally written in Sumerian, an extinct language from ancient Mesopotamia." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:49:35.703" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:49:35.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9057" CreationDate="2019-01-04T19:53:14.570" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the definition of &quot;divagate,&quot; several dictionaries, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/divagate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, give the following example sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeats divagated into Virgil's territory only once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What instance of Yeats' writing does this refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5597" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T13:23:00.290" Title="When did Yeats enter into &quot;Virgil's territory&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;&lt;virgil&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9056" CreationDate="2019-01-05T01:25:12.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original source of the quote seems to be &lt;em&gt;Virgil in a Cultural Tradition: Essays to Celebrate the Bimillenium,&lt;/em&gt; edited by &#xA;Richard Andrew Cardwell and Janet Hamilton. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=XpJfAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=yeats+%22Virgil%27s+territory%22&amp;amp;dq=yeats+%22Virgil%27s+territory%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiUjvS8u9XfAhVtT98KHRbRDMQQ6AEILjAB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google books&lt;/a&gt; shows that this book contains the quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yeats divagated into Virgil's territory only when, in 1915, he wrote &lt;em&gt;Per Amica Silentia Lunae&lt;/em&gt;, going for that title to &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; 2, 255, &lt;em&gt;A Tenedo tacitae per amica silentia lunae.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, referring to the 1918 poem &lt;em&gt;Shepherd and Goatherd&lt;/em&gt; that he wrote in memory of Major Robert Gregory, Yeats says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... my poem about Robert, a pastoral, modelled on what Virgil wrote for some friend of his ...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems the dictionary quote is wrong, and Yeats divagated into Virgil's territory at least twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-01-05T13:23:00.290" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T13:23:00.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-05T10:36:23.977" Score="2" ViewCount="611" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just noticed that a character in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; has the same name as a character in Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;strong&gt;Paris.&lt;/strong&gt; In both stories, Paris is one of two men who wish to be with the same woman; Paris of Troy elopes with an already married woman, while Paris of Verona is engaged to marry a woman already in love with someone else. In both stories, Paris ends up dead at the hands of an enemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that this is more than a coincidence?&lt;/strong&gt; I've provided some circumstantial evidence, but I don't know much about Shakespeare's sources for the story of Romeo and Juliet, whether earlier versions also featured Paris and whether he always had that name, or indeed whether &lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; stories in turn could potentially be traced back to Homer. It's clear at least that Shakespeare knew the story of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, as can be seen from his play &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T19:22:52.923" Title="Is there any connection between Paris of Troy and Paris of Verona?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9043" CreationDate="2019-01-05T11:47:19.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Ender does not pilot any ships, nor control the Molecular Disruption Device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ender arrives at Command School, he starts by piloting ships, but only in the simulator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, not knowing the awesome power of the game, he has played only at the tactical level, controlling a single fighter in continuous maneuvers to find and destroy an enemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But soon he is moved on to higher levels of command (still in the simulator):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he had mastered the one-fighter game, they allowed him to step back into the four-fighter squadron. He spoke commands to simulated pilots of four fighters […] At any time he could take personal command of one of the fighters for a short time, and at first he did this often; when he did, however, the other three fighters in his squadron were soon destroyed, and as the games became harder and harder he had to spend more and more of his time commanding the squadron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once he has squadron leaders to delegate to, he no longer has the option to directly pilot any of the ships:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But how do I control the ships?” asked Ender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mazer explained. He wasn’t going to control ships anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ender never directly controls the Molecular Disruption Device, in the simulator or otherwise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why haven’t I been trained with this?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You always have. We just let the computer tend to it for you. Your job is to get into a superior tactical position and choose a target. The shipboard computers are much better at aiming the Doctor than you are.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in this process the simulated battles are replaced with real battles, but because the Command School staff are lying to Ender and the other children, it is not completely clear when this switch takes place. Mazer later gives a clue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ender, you never played &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt;. You never played a &lt;em&gt;game&lt;/em&gt; since I became your enemy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so the most likely point for the switch is where Mazer says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“So Ender, we will now begin your education. We have programmed the computer to simulate the kinds of situations we might expect in encounters with the enemy. We are using the movement patterns we saw in the Second Invasion, but instead of mindlessly following these same patterns, I will be controlling the enemy simulation.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this theory is right, Ender never directly piloted any ships: by the time the simulator was replaced with reality, he had been moved to higher command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T11:47:19.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8798" CreationDate="2019-01-05T17:52:56.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words occur in a monologue by Richard II (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardii/richardii.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act III, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;) which contains the following lines (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;for within the hollow crown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That rounds the mortal temples of a king&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Allowing him a breath, a little scene,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Infusing him with self and vain conceit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  As if this flesh which walls about our life,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Comes at the last and with a little pin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  With solemn reverence&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main idea in these lines is that kings may be allowed for a while to &quot;monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks&quot; (i.e. order somebody's execution with a glance), their bodies are not as impregnable as castle walls, so they die just as easily as other human beings. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last two lines, &quot;solemn reverence&quot; is what a king usually expects; while the king remains covered, the courtiers around him take off their hats. Wearing a hat in somebody else's presence implies equality, whereas the king is God's representative on earth, so he has not equal in his kingdom. Earlier in the same scene, Richard had said (my emphasis),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not all the water in the rough rude sea&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Can wash the balm off from an &lt;strong&gt;anointed king&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The breath of worldly men cannot depose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The &lt;strong&gt;deputy elected by the Lord&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highlighted lines from the hollow-crown speech (first quote above) mark quite a change when compared with the earlier quote. Richard here says that kings are just human beings, i.e. &quot;flesh and blood&quot;, and that treating ordinary human beings with &quot;solemn reverence&quot; constitutes a form of mockery. This is why the people around him should &quot;cover [their] heads&quot;, i.e. put on their hats again as a mark of equality with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T17:52:56.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9058" CreationDate="2019-01-05T19:22:52.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9018/2191&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, Shakespeare's main sources for &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arthur Brooke's narrative poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet&lt;/a&gt; (1562) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Painter_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Painter's&lt;/a&gt; prose version of the story in the second volume of &lt;em&gt;The Palace of Pleasure&lt;/em&gt; (1567).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that Shakespeare read any of the French or Italian sources for this story, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Boaistuau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre Boaistuau&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandello&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matteo Bandello&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An older version of the story that Bandello used was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Da_Porto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luigi Da Porto's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Historia novellamente ritrovata di due nobili amanti&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Newly found story of two noble lovers&quot;), published in 1531. In this version, Giulietta's father wants her to marry the &lt;strong&gt;Count of Lodrone&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another version of the story was published in Venice in 1553; this was a poem entitled &lt;em&gt;L'Infelice Amore dei due Fedelissimi Amanti Giulia e Romeo, scritto in Ottava Rima da Clitia, nobile Veronese, ad Ardeo suo&lt;/em&gt;. Who Clitia (the author) and her Ardeo were is unknown. In this version of the story, the Count of Lodrone is known as &lt;strong&gt;Francesco&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Bandello's version of the story, published in 1554, the Count of Lodrone / Conte di Lodrone is now for the first time named &lt;strong&gt;Paris&lt;/strong&gt;. (Bandello was also the first author to add Juliet's nurse to the story.) I have not been able to find out why Bandello chose Paris as a name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pierre Boaistuau or Boisteau seems to have kept the name of Paris in his French version of Bandello's stories, &lt;em&gt;Histoires Tragiques extraictes des Œuvres de Bandel&lt;/em&gt; (1559). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name Lodrone is no longer present in Arthur Brooke's narrative poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragical_History_of_Romeus_and_Juliet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet&lt;/a&gt; (1562), but it is interesting that the first mention of Paris does not refer to the Count but to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;character from Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At length he [Romeus] saw a maid, right fair, of perfect shape,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Which Theseus or Paris would have chosen to their rape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;Rape&quot; here has the older meaning of &quot;to carry off&quot;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rape of the Lock&lt;/a&gt;. Theseus was also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus#The_abduction_of_Persephone_and_encounter_with_Hades&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;a great abductor of women&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Count Paris is introduced much later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among the rest was one inflamed with her desire,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Who County Paris clepéd was; an earl he had to sire.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Of all the suitors him the father liketh best,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Brooke's poem, Romeus does not encounter Paris at the Capulet tomb; Paris survives until the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connection between Paris of Troy and Count Paris is not a simply a parallel, since a number of things are reversed in Shakespeare's play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paris of Troy has no right to abduct Helen, who is married to Menelaus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;From a &quot;public&quot; point of view (i.e. what the Capulet household knows), Count Paris is a perfectly suitable match for Juliet.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, Juliet has secretly married Romeo, so the private or secret here clashes with the public point of view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whereas Brooke mentions both Paris of Troy and Count Paris, Shakespeare does not mention Paris of Troy. (Helen is mentioned by Mercutio in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.2.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act II, scene 4&lt;/a&gt; and a certain &quot;lively Helena&quot; is on the guest list for the Capulet party in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;. However, Helen is a not an unusual name in Shakespeare's plays: there is also a Helen in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;All's Well That Ends Well&lt;/em&gt; and obviously in &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;. Helen of Troy is also mentioned in other plays, such as &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part 3&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 2&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is indeed a parallel between Paris of Troy and Shakespeare's Count Paris in that both die. I am not aware of evidence that Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; gave Shakespeare this idea. Rivalry between men who love the same woman is a common theme in Shakespeare's plays, from the early &lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt; to the late &lt;em&gt;The Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-01-05T19:22:52.923" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9099" CreationDate="2019-01-05T19:29:52.820" Score="6" ViewCount="287" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate some help over here. Even though it sounds immature, I loved it when I was a sophomore. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's everything I can give you to help me:  I read this book in 2016. It was medium sized. I read this at a public library in the English language in the USA. The cover was blue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Title: The protagonist has an alternate name which he uses to refer to himself. I am fairly certain it has Tom in it but don't take it to be 100% accurate. It's written in autobiography type format so the title may reflect that. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Genre: young adult fiction. Romance? Written in John Green style. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book is set in the United Kingdom. It's about a 16 or 15 year old boy struggling with puberty. The book opens with his struggle with hiding his erection on the bus (it gets talked about a lot ). It's written in the form of a school English project to write an autobiography. Protagonist is a white male, generic looking. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The boy is a middle guy between the preps and the emos. He likes to hang out with the emos because they chill af. There is an almost war but the protagonist averts it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He is hopelessly infatuated with a girl whose name starts with E(maybe). She has long wavy brown hair and only moved here recently. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The boy is into English. His English teacher is young and attractive. POSSIBLY NAMED DAVID . He teaches Romeo and Juliet in class and begins with an anecdote about how the first few lines describe the rest of the play perfectly. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Their drama teacher is an old lesbian. They do mime in class but he blurts out an sentence anyways. The mime is about disabled people. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He used to be friends with 2 other boys but they are &quot;skaters&quot; now and they are not friends anymore. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His new best friend may be named &quot;Martin&quot;. They use the sunglass trick (using sunglass to stare at someone's breasts without them noticing) on their math teacher who is tired and depressed. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He has a female friend named EMILY WHO HAS RED HAIR. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In geography class his inhaler makes him look like he has a massive nob while he is reading. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He has TWO chapters dedicated to names for penises and vaginas. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His hot English teacher likes to masturbate before class and he is told this by Emily but due to a miscommunication he thinks it's another boy called Zack/Zach who does it. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He falls into a bush after sneaking into his English teacher's room and gets his ass pierced with a branch. Martin and him remove it in the boys room but they are caught by a 12-13 year old &quot;skater&quot; who they threaten. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;For the finale, he finds out that the English teacher is having an affair (pedophilic) with his love interest. The teacher knees him in the stomach and the balls but Emily manages to take some pictures of it. He is also confronted by Zach with a football here who reveals that he is gay. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story ends with him revealing that he is sending his manuscript to the police with Emily massaging his balls(sorry if it seems pornographic but that's the literal ending line and I thought it might help) &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other details: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Protagonist insecure about sexuality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parents probably divorced. Never mentioned. Loves his mum very very much. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Takes long for him to reach school. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lots of British slang such as Nob etc. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;English teacher once acts as a substitute. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me! The book was very funny and I would like to discover it again. I got it from a library but it's closed now. I don't know how to find it again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5604" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T19:52:09.670" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T19:52:09.670" Title="Young adult fiction book: written from a teen boy's perspective about school, sex and Shakespeare" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T02:35:38.053" Score="1" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the book ever specify the date of when the story takes place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5590" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T06:55:00.550" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T06:55:00.550" Title="What date does 'Ender's Game' take place?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;enders-game&gt;&lt;orson-scott-card&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T02:41:04.833" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a  pastiche of Sherlock Holmes some time ago that ended up with Watson actually being Moriarty, fooling Holmes all those years, working his machinations under his nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, I can't remember the name of the book, and can't find it by googling...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5606" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T06:44:27.727" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T06:44:27.727" Title="In which pastiche of Sherlock Holmes does Watson end up being Moriarty?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9079" CreationDate="2019-01-06T02:48:37.477" Score="2" ViewCount="816" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Beatty mean in the following quote from &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang; boff, and wow!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this quote imply that Beatty himself realizes that life could go wrong any minute? Or does it mean that Beatty's life or life in general still had its fair share of hardships? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5605" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T06:47:34.737" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T21:53:47.987" Title="What does Beatty mean by “Life becomes one big pratfall, Montag; everything bang; boff, and wow!” in Fahrenheit 451" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6493" CreationDate="2019-01-06T04:11:00.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winston's thoughts immediately after talking to the old man show us fairly clearly that he is less than optimistic about the odds of &lt;em&gt;anyone&lt;/em&gt; being able to tell him anything substantial about the days before the Revolution. From just after, still in Chapter VIII (Part 1), his inner monologue says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in effect it was unanswerable even now, since the few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago; but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His experience with the old man appears to have made Winston judge the proles as a whole - or, rather, the ones hailing from that &quot;ancient world&quot;. He (perhaps melodramatically) makes a sweeping judgment based essentially on one data point, and the fact that his mind continues on this line of thought for a fairly hefty paragraph indicates to me that he is truly doubtful that a prole's &lt;em&gt;memory&lt;/em&gt; will be sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I emphasize the word &quot;memory&quot; here, because memory may be independent of intellect. From Winston's point of view, Mr. Charrington could be a quick thinker, but that says nothing about his powers of recollection. Now, we do actually see Winston test the water a bit, as it were, in his initial interaction with Charrington. Perhaps it isn't intentional, but he does carry on a conversation about the past - centered on the churches of the rhyme (St. Clement's Dane, St. Martin's, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that conversation doesn't necessarily inspire faith in Charrington's memory, as we do hear him say things like &quot;There was a rhyme we had when I was a little boy. How I goes on I don't remember&quot; (although he does soon remember a bit more). Does Winston agree with my interpretation? In Part 2, Chapter IV, he thinks (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was like the two halves of a countersign. But there must be another line after &quot;the bells of Old Bailey&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Perhaps&lt;/strong&gt; it could be &lt;strong&gt;dug out&lt;/strong&gt; of Mr. Charrington's memory, &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt; he was suitably prompted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't sound to me like a positive assessment of someone's capacity for memories! If he was more optimistic, that last sentence might have been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Charrington might be able to remember it, given that he had been able to remember some of the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, Winston's encounter with the old man put him in a fairly pessimistic mindset about the chances of him coaxing out knowledge of the old world from anyone, let alone a strange proprietor of an antiques shop who is also old (recall that we find out he is 63). Charrington's inability to remember the poem well serves to reinforce this notion, no matter what his intellect may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="71" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T04:11:00.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T05:28:32.923" Score="2" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to ask this on Science Fiction but it was off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember, in kindergarten to first grade (late 2000s or early 2010s), reading a kids' manga comic book from the public library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it featured some sort of mad scientist who somehow taught scientific things. He looked like Einstein with spiky white hair and wore a lab coat. I am sure there was some sort of other main, less weird character who was smaller in stature (maybe a kid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it took place in the scientist's laboratory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might have not been educational, but I think it was. It was lighthearted and I believe the plot was secondary to the educational parts or jokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite certain it was a translated manga; it read right to left and had one of those notes that says you're reading the wrong way behind the back cover. I don't remember much else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the cover featured the aforementioned mad scientist and his sidekick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quite certain it was targeted towards kids (&lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; relatively dark but technically for kids like &lt;em&gt;Naruto&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the volumes were about the size of single Viz volumes (i.e. of Shōnen Jump series). It was in black and white. I don't think it was &lt;em&gt;Dr. Slump&lt;/em&gt; based on what I know of the series from appearances of the characters in &lt;em&gt;Dragon Ball&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It definitely read right-to-left, and had one of those things explaining it (just like in Viz books).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The library was in the United States, so the series was very likely released there. It was translated to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5609" LastEditorUserId="5609" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T14:23:59.287" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T14:23:59.287" Title="Educational manga about a mad scientist" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;manga&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T08:25:08.780" Score="-2" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was Harry Potter the first magic series to use wands? I can't really think of any other series that used them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5610" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T04:09:35.733" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T01:14:24.640" Title="Was Harry Potter the first magic series to use wands?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9069" CreationDate="2019-01-06T13:06:16.060" Score="23" Body="&lt;h2&gt;NO!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wands have been associated with magic for &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;millennia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, both in fiction and in the real-world practice of both stage magic (conjuring tricks for an audience) and occultism (purported real magic). You can learn more about wands and their history in association with magic at sources such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wand&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://esotericarchives.com/wands/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esoteric Archives&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In reality&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest recorded use of wands by supposed magicians appears to have been by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;magi&lt;/a&gt; of ancient Persia, priests of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;religion&lt;/a&gt; which is at least two or three thousand years old. You can read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.avesta.org/ritual/barsom.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; about the use of a &quot;barsom&quot; or &quot;baresman&quot; - a stick or bundle of sticks, essentially a wand - in prehistoric Zoroastrian religious rituals. Here's a quote from that page and a &lt;strong&gt;2500-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; image of a magus with a wand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Kotwal and Boyd, the baresman is an &quot;ancient Indo-Iranian emblem of seeking the Holy&quot;, and it &quot;establishes a connecting link between this getig [material] world and the menog [spiritual] realm. The barsom is, as it were, the conduit through which the archetypal principles and powers manifest their presence and receive the offerings.&quot; (A Persian offering, 1991, p. 6, 10; words in square brackets are mine). It is also an instrument through which one acquires the sacred power (op.cit. p. 23). Perhaps then it is also a conduit for channeling the power outwards, and thus is a prototypical 'magic wand'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zNe2E.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zNe2E.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Magus with magic wand, 2500 years old&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of using wands to practise magic extends through ancient Greek and Roman times to medieval Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's mentioned in the &lt;strong&gt;800-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sworn_Book_of_Honorius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sworn Book of Honorius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of the oldest and most influential texts of medieval European magic. The full text of this book is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt; in both the original Latin and an English translation. You can search for &quot;wand&quot; on that page to see how it appears; the original Latin word is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virgula#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;virgula&lt;/a&gt; meaning &quot;&lt;em&gt;a small rod, stick, wand, or staff&lt;/em&gt;&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There's also more detail about wands in the &lt;strong&gt;500-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_of_Solomon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Key of Solomon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, another textbook on magic. Again the full text is &lt;a href=&quot;http://esotericarchives.com/solomon/ksol2.htm#chap8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt;, and there's an entire chapter entitled &quot;&lt;em&gt;Of the knifes, sword, quill knife, iron pen, short lance, wand, [staff,] and other instruments of magical art&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. You can see the wand (&quot;&lt;em&gt;virga&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) at the bottom of this illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sl7hv.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Sl7hv.gif&quot; alt=&quot;magical tools illustrated in The Key of Solomon&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In fiction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest known use of wands in written fictional literature is in the &lt;strong&gt;2800-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; Homerian &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. In book 10, Odysseus and his crew encounter the sorceress Circe who uses a magic wand to turn the men into pigs. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D10%3Acard%3D208&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more recent and rather well-known example from fantasy literature is the &lt;strong&gt;70-year-old&lt;/strong&gt; series &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;. In the (first published, second chronologically) book &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, the White Witch Jadis uses a golden wand to perform magic such as turning creatures into stone. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edmund saw the Witch bite her lips so that a drop of blood&#xA;  appeared on her white cheek. Then she raised her wand. “Oh, don’t,&#xA;  don’t, please don’t,” shouted Edmund, but even while he was shouting&#xA;  she had waved her wand and instantly where the merry party had&#xA;  been there were only statues of creatures (one with its stone fork fixed &#xA;  forever half-way to its stone mouth) seated round a stone table on&#xA;  which there were stone plates and a stone plum pudding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL:DR: there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of books featuring magic wands which predate the popular &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series: both textbooks of 'real' magic and entertaining fictional stories, dating from thousands of years ago up to the present day.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T13:06:16.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9039" CreationDate="2019-01-06T15:31:36.487" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are never explicitly told how he knows this. Karl says that when Jonatan first tells him about Nangiyala, it is in a manner as if &quot;everyone knows about it&quot;. Then the subject is dropped. We are also not told how he knows about the existence of Nangilima, where those that die in Nangiyala goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another interpretation available, which is that Nangiyala is not real, and that everything starting from chapter 3 and until the last sentence is happening inside Karl's head, a dream or a fantasy. This interpretation draws support from such things as Nagilima, which seems like a simple variation on the already existing theme, and parallels with others of Lindgren's stories, most notably &lt;em&gt;Mio, My Son&lt;/em&gt; but also in &quot;Junker Nils av Eka&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Sunnanäng&lt;/em&gt;, both of which also follows a lonely boy who is transported into another world, but which both ends with a more clear callback to the &quot;real&quot; world. We can also note when Jonatan reassures Karl with the idea of the white doves that carries messages from the dead, he is rather obviously inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Paloma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Paloma&lt;/a&gt;, which is quoted in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, depending on how you prefer to read the book, Jonatan's knowledge is either due to him being the generally older, wiser brother that mentors Karl, or it is a comforting lie that the grieving Karl later fills out to become an adventure he had with his older, admired brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T15:31:36.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9072" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T17:15:32.837" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the beginning of Moby Dick there is a chapter which is dedicated to a character called Bulkington, in this chapter the Author addresses this as a &quot;six-inch chapter&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wonderfullest things are unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt; - Moby Dick, Chapter 23 (The Lee Shore)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering: in which versions of the book was this actually a six inch chapter? Did any publishers take the time to make this a six inch chapter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="5036" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T15:12:21.553" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T15:12:21.553" Title="In which editions of Moby Dick is this a six inch chapter?" Tags="&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-06T17:46:52.327" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The American journalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Snow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Snow&lt;/a&gt;, who is best known for his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_Over_China&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Red Star Over China&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1937), apparently managed to interview &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lu Xun&lt;/a&gt; (1881 - 1936). According to Helmut Martin, who wrote an afterword to a German translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Story_of_Ah_Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The True Story of Ah Q&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1921 - 1922), Edgar Snow asked Lu Xun whether there were still as many Ah Qs in China as at the time when Lu Xun wrote the story a decade earlier. Lu Xun responded (German translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Es ist schlimmer geworden. Jetzt regieren sie schon dieses Land!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&quot;It has gotten worse. Now they are even ruling this country!&quot; Translated from &lt;em&gt;Die wahre Geschichte des Ah Q&lt;/em&gt;. Nachwort von Helmut Marting. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982; page 113.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun#cite_ref-DMTTL_20-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; gives the following translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's worse now. Now it's Ah Q's who are running the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The translation reads &quot;Ah Q's&quot;, not &quot;the Ah Q's&quot;; this may be related to the fact that Chinese has no definite articles.) Wikipedia claims that the source is &lt;code&gt;Denton &quot;MOVE TO THE LEFT: 1927–1936&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, which is not in the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun#Sources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt;, and which I have not been able to track down online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is where and when Edgar Snow published the interview from which this quote is taken. It is definitely not in &lt;em&gt;Red Star Over China&lt;/em&gt; (I couldn't find it in my own copy of the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T18:16:28.660" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T12:15:18.327" Title="Source of comment that Ah Qs are now running China (Lu Xun, 1930s)" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;lu-xun&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9074" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9075" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chinese author Lu Xun or Lu Hsün (pen name of Zhou Shuren, 1881 – 1936) and his works. Lu Xun published both stories and essays. One of his best known story is 'The True Story of Ah Q' (1921 – 1922). Use this tag with the [chinese-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" LastActivityDate="2019-01-06T17:54:32.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9087" CreationDate="2019-01-06T20:59:52.020" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; I was looking for more dystopias that are similar to it. But the trouble is, most of them are becoming more sci-fi based rather than politically based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't misunderstand: I recognise the sci-fi elements from &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; such as the tele-screens, but the main story was based around Big Brother rather than these elements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5613" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T12:25:30.917" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T12:25:30.917" Title="Are political dystopias becoming less popular?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;politics&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9076" CreationDate="2019-01-06T23:36:04.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were a number of non-scifi dystopian novels pre-Orwell; Jack London's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Heel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iron Heel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1908) and Arthur Koestler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Darkness at Noon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1940) stand out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1949, dystopian novels with a political or social rather than sci-fi focus actually seem to have flourished, perhaps influenced by the horror of recent and contemporary totalitarian regimes (especially '50s to '80s), the social impact of drugs ('60s) and fears about technology or fundamentalism ('80s onwards). The following brief list is just a sample: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_His_Horn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sound of His Horn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Sarban (1952);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Ray Bradbury (1953)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Among_the_Ruins._A_Romance_of_the_Near_Future&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love Among the Ruins&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Evelyn Waugh (1953);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Ayn Rand (1957); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_Justice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Facial Justice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by L. P. Hartley (1960); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clockwork Orange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Anthony Burgess (1962);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Private_Life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Very Private Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Frayn (1968);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS-GB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;SS-GB&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Len Deighton (1978);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanark:_A_Life_in_Four_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lanark&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Alasdair Gray (1981);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Running Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Bachman (pen name of Stephen King) (1982);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Handmaid%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Handmaid's Tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Margaret Atwood (1985);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_Jest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Infinite Jest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by David Foster Wallace (1996);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_Atlas_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cloud Atlas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by David Mitchell (2004);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plot_Against_America&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plot Against America&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Phillip Roth (2004);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Never_Let_Me_Go_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Never Let Me Go&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Made_By_Hand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;World Made by Hand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by James Howard Kunstler (2008);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Submission&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Michel Houellebecq (2015).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a swag of post-apocalyptic novels that are dystopian by definition (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Earth Abides&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Day of the Triffids&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt;, etc) but with a focus on &lt;em&gt;survival&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-01-09T01:48:11.743" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T01:48:11.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9078" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-07T16:10:48.993" Score="2" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun#Early_life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lu Xun&lt;/a&gt; was the pen name of Zhou Zhangshou (birth name) or Zhou Yushan (courtesy name) or Zhou Yucai (courtesy name 2.0) or Zhou Shuren (the name he chose in 1898). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Lu&quot; (魯 /   鲁) in his pen name comes from his mother's family name. Where did the second part, 迅, come from? This isn't mentioned in Wikipedia, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lu-Xun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopædia Britannica&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;http://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/lu-xun/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lu Xun Biography&lt;/a&gt; at the MCLC Resource Center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T04:52:50.800" Title="How did Lu Xun choose his pen name?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;lu-xun&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9066" CreationDate="2019-01-07T21:53:47.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context to this quote is very useful. It's from the section when Beatty is telling Montag about the dumbing-down of life over the ages: shorten the books, add pictures, add games constantly, organize sports, cram things full of fluff, nursery to college to nursery:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;School is shortened [...] Life is immediate&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the part&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;everything bang; boff, and wow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;promptly becomes clear from context. Life is flashy, in your face, full of empty comics and movies: bangs and flashes of smoke, 'wow's from whatever is currently in line of site. 'Boff' I'm not familiar with; could be slang from somewhere, but in context the meaning is clear: something flashy and in your face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Life becomes one big pratfall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is also, therefore, clear from context: the general impression is that life is something of indulgence and emptiness, without any clear meaning. And this is what the people want! This is why Beatty's speech to Montag is so powerful: this isn't the fault of the firefighters. It's the fault of the people themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-01-07T21:53:47.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="110" CreationDate="2019-01-08T02:24:37.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that Ralph participated but Piggy didn't since it said that he didn't really see what they did to Simon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You were outside. Outside the circle. You never really came in. Didn't you see what we––what they did?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was loathing, and at the same time a kind of feverish excitement in his voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Didn't you see, Piggy?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not all that well. I only got one eye now. You ought to know that, Ralph.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5620" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T12:19:41.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9083" CreationDate="2019-01-08T08:25:21.807" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;So this is from early childhood and I don't remember a lot.&#xA;Here goes a blurred image of the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man is travelling in a train with his two sons. The train meets an accident with a lot of people dying. The elder son (s0) goes missing and the younger son (s1) is very depressed about the whole situation. Eventually s0 is able to find s1 but he has a very different personality now. Later it is discovered that s0 's spirit has been exchanged with someone else from the train accident earlier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keyword - Aloha&#xA;Language - English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was about 10 years ago.&#xA;I remember something that sounds like the keyword being used often in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5621" LastEditorUserId="5621" LastEditDate="2019-01-08T12:23:39.043" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T23:02:28.723" Title="Book about a man and two sons travelling in a train which meets a fatal accident" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="110" CreationDate="2019-01-08T11:26:24.837" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Piggy and Ralph participate? The current answers range from &amp;quot;Yes&amp;quot; (but maybe no) to &amp;quot;Probably&amp;quot; (maybe, maybe not) to &amp;quot;Ralph did but not Piggy&amp;quot;. I'd like to explain why the correct answer is an &lt;strong&gt;unequivocal yes&lt;/strong&gt; - that they were &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; involved, both were complicit in the murder, and they both sought to lie about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's quickly set the scene. Simon has gone off on his own into the forest, has a delusional episode with a pig's head on a stick (the &amp;quot;Lord of the Flies&amp;quot;), has a fit and passes out. When he comes to, he climbs the mountain and discovers that the &amp;quot;beast&amp;quot; is merely the decomposing body of a parachutist. Meanwhile, Jack and Ralph have fallen out, and Jack has staged a mutiny, forming his own gang of hunters. The hunters kill a pig, raid Ralph's camp and steal fire, and hold a party. Ralph finally gives in, and he and Piggy join the party. Ralph challenges Jack, but a thunderstorm hits, and Jack's response is to summon his hunters to &amp;quot;Do our dance!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between the flashes of lightning the air was dark and terrible; and the boys followed him, clamorously. Roger became the pig, grunting and charging at Jack, who side-stepped. The hunters took their spears, the cooks took spits, and the rest clubs of fire-wood. A circling movement developed and a chant. While Roger mimed the terror of the pig, the littluns ran and jumped on the outside of the circle. Piggy and Ralph, under the threat of the sky, found themselves eager to take a place in this demented but partly secure society. They were glad to touch the brown backs of the fence that hemmed in the terror and made it governable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger rejoins the circle, the thunder and lightning are constant, the chanting goes up a notch, and now &amp;quot;out of the terror rose another desire, thick, urgent, blind&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Kill the beast! Cut his throat! Spill his blood!”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's in this terrifying and deranged setting that Simon crawls like a beast out of the bushes and into the circle. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/114/4758&quot;&gt;Beastly Gerbil's answer&lt;/a&gt; provides the grisly details of Simon's brutal death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next chapter gives us the answer. Piggy and Ralph are alone on the beach the next morning, and Ralph is clearly troubled about what had happened. Finally he says it: &amp;quot;That was murder.&amp;quot; Piggy immediately (and &amp;quot;shrilly&amp;quot;) tells him to stop talking like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was dark. There was that––bloody dance.There was the lightning and thunder and rain. We was scared!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Ralph says he wasn't scared, he was ... &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;I don't know what I was&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Nicely ambiguous: does he mean he doesn't know what emotion he had felt, or he doesn't know what &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; he had become - an animal, a beast, a madman? At this point the reader might also recall an earlier chapter where Ralph and the hunters had first performed their kill-the-pig dance, with Robert as the pretend pig within the circle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They got his arms and legs. Ralph, carried away by a sudden thick excitement, grabbed Eric's spear and jabbed at Robert with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Kill him! Kill him!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Ralph too was fighting to get near, to get a handful of that brown, vulnerable flesh. The desire to squeeze and hurt was over-mastering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph has got form; he knows what he did - what he &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; - and is in turmoil. &amp;quot;Oh Piggy!&amp;quot; he says, his voice &amp;quot;low and stricken&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;cradling the conch, he rocked himself to and fro.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't you understand, Piggy? The things we did–––&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9080/4758&quot;&gt;Another answer&lt;/a&gt; cites Ralph's description that Piggy was &amp;quot;outside the circle&amp;quot;, but Piggy's &amp;quot;shrill&amp;quot; reaction has all the hallmarks of a guilty boy desperately searching for a defence or an excuse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;... he had no business crawling like that out of the dark. He was batty. He asked for it.&amp;quot; He gesticulated widely again. &amp;quot;It was an accident.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the clincher is Piggy's final conspiratorial don't-tell-anyone appeal, and Ralph's willing complicity in the lie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And look, Ralph,&amp;quot; Piggy glanced round quickly, then leaned close––&amp;quot;don't let on we was in that dance. Not to Samneric.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But we were! All of us!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy shook his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not us till last. They never noticed in the dark. Anyway you said I was only on the outside–––&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So was I,&amp;quot; muttered Ralph, &amp;quot;I was on the outside too.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy nodded eagerly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That's right. We was on the outside. We never done nothing, we never seen nothing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scene ends with the Samneric twins returning with firewood, everyone acting guilty and assuring each other that they hadn't been involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The air was heavy with unspoken knowledge. Sam twisted and the obscene word shot out of him. &amp;quot;––dance?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Memory of the dance that none of them had attended shook all four boys convulsively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We left early.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T11:26:24.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9081" CreationDate="2019-01-08T23:02:28.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;City of the Dead by Tony Abbot.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a quick look at the summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could the road to the afterlife be a two-way street?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derek Stone just turned fourteen. He's lived in the heart of New Orleans with his dad and older brother, Ronny, his whole life. He's a little overweight. He can't hear well out of his left ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, and he's on the run from the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derek never imagined that the dead could be anything but dead. But there's no denying it. They're back -- and they're after him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He just doesn't know why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he doesn't have long to figure it out.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4495481-city-of-the-dead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;City Of the Dead by Tony Abbot - Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-08T23:02:28.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-09T00:40:33.013" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;A central character in Matt Haig's &lt;em&gt;The Humans&lt;/em&gt;, is a Cambridge mathematician Andrew Martin, whose speciality is prime numbers.  This character is supposed to be exceedingly brilliant and to have solved the Riemann hypothesis (one of the most famous outstanding problems in mathematics). Did the author ever indicate why he chose that name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a real-life mathematician who studies prime numbers, and here are a couple of possible real-life mathematicians that could have inspired the name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;named in part after Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician who solved Fermat's Last Theorem 30+ years ago, and one of the most famous modern British mathematicians&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a blending of the names Andrew Granville (British mathematcian) and Greg Martin, who wrote a reasonably accessible paper on &quot;prime number races&quot; that the author could have conceivably come across in research for the book &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this could very well be coincidence, as Andrew and Martin are rather common first and last names, and the author chose the name for other reasons (or just because they were common).  Still, as the significance of Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem seems comparable to a would-be proof of the Riemann hypothesis, it seems not unreasonable to guess that Andrew Martin might be named after Andrew Wiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="68" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T01:00:45.933" Title="Was the Cambridge mathematician &quot;Andrew Martin&quot; named after any actual mathematicians?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9076" CreationDate="2019-01-09T12:24:10.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Based on recent studies on dystopian fiction, I don't have the impression that dystopian fiction has become less popular, but it is a bit harder to find out whether &lt;em&gt;political&lt;/em&gt; dystopias have become less popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One recent collection of essay is &lt;strong&gt;Han, John J.; Triplett, C. Clark; Anthony, Ashley G. (editors): &lt;em&gt;Worlds Gone Awry: Essays on Dystopian Fiction&lt;/em&gt;. Jefferson, NC: &lt;a href=&quot;https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/worlds-gone-awry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McFarland, 2018&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction to this book starts with a section on &quot;The Development and Popularity of Dystopian Fiction&quot;. It starts by pointing out that sales of dystopian literature rose dramatically after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president of the USA, especially sales of Atwood's &lt;em&gt;The Handmaid's Tale&lt;/em&gt; and of Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; and &quot;1984*. So it appears that some classic (political) dystopias have become &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; popular. The book's introduction also cites Alexandra Alter's &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/30/books/boom-times-for-the-new-dystopians.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boom Times for the New Dystopians&lt;/a&gt; (30.03.2017), which reviews a number of post-apocalyptic novels. The &quot;apocalypse&quot; in these novels may be war, climate change, some other biological or ecological disaster or a combination of these. The editors of &lt;em&gt;Worlds Gone Awry&lt;/em&gt; go on to say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is certain is that people who live in today's society are increasingly concerned about the future of the world. Literature reflects the concerns and anxieties of readers, and dystopian literature focuses particularly on the potential problems humans face, such as totalitarianism, political anarchy, technological oppression, environmental disasters, global war, resource shortage, and widespread disease, among others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the recent popularity of dystopian fiction for &quot;young adult readers&quot;, the editors also ask what it is about dystopian fiction that appeals to this age group:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not surprisingly, common elements found in most dystopian novels include the pressure to conform and a lack of individual freedom (Scholes and Ostenson). Young people tend to relate to the ongoing stress of fitting in with their peers; they harbor a constant anxiety and fear of being the one who stands out. On the other hand, young adults often feel that their individual freedom is being stifled by authority, most often by their parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editors also point out that young adults also connect with the technological aspect in dystopian fiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today's young adults were born into a digital age; specifically, young adults may identify with feelings of social isolation in these novels due to their largely disconnected social lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editors then briefly (i.e. in three paragraphs) sketch the history of dystopian fiction, ending with the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finally, two recent events, the post-9/11 War on terror and the rise of right-wing politics, have played a role in the dramatic increase of readers who turn to dystopian fiction-both classical and new-to better understand the possibly disastrous consequences of &quot;utopian&quot; societies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that &lt;strong&gt;readers&lt;/strong&gt; are definitely interested in political dystopias, apparently more so than, say, 20 years ago, but does not say whether &lt;strong&gt;authors&lt;/strong&gt; are focusing more on it than before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the editors then discuss the themes of dystopian fiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a diversity of trends in dystopian fiction as is made evident in this collection. Regardless of whether the discussion is on recent young adult renditions, such as &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Maze Runner&lt;/em&gt; (2009), or more classical novels such as &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;  and &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;. It is difficult to find a single thread that pulls together the broad range of concerns and interests addressed within the corpus of dystopian fiction. Many literary scholars would agree, however, that some aspect of critique is at least implicit within all types of dystopian works, whether aimed at political manipulation, cultural power, governmental control, or technological sufficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in this paragraph suggests that political dystopian fiction has become less popular. However, some scholars see a difference between &quot;classical&quot; dystopian fiction and the more recent form aimed at young adult readers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Critics argue that classical dystopian literature, however, provides underlying questions about specific social and political concerns that elicit critical discourse on these issues in contemporary culture. Young adults dystopian literature, on the other hand, tends to appeal to popular adolescent issues such as self-identity, thrill-seeking, and romantic angst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the main difference, according to some critics, is not so much the sci-fi aspect, but the issues raised by these novels: political and social issues are not the main focus in much of the utopian fiction for young adults. However, the essays in &lt;em&gt;Worlds Gone Awry&lt;/em&gt; appear to question this distinction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The series of essays in this volume, however, demonstrates that such distinctions are arbitrary and that the intent of both classical and popular young adult dystopian works have similar trajectories and elicit critical inquiry that is more complex that is evident &lt;em&gt;prima facie&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the introduction, the editors mention an older important analysis of modern dystopian fiction: M. Keith Booker's &lt;em&gt;The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (Praeger, 1994):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Published more than two decades ago, Booker's work analyzes several twentieth-century dystopian novels as political critiques of totalitarianism, Stalinism, capitalism and fascism. The primary texts the author covers are Zamyatin's &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; (completed in 1921), Huxley's &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;, Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;, the bourgeois dystopian after World War II, the contemporary Communist dystopia, and Western postmodernist dystopias.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the description of Booker's book suggests that political dystopias have become less popular since Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other studies and collections include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Claeys, Gregory: &lt;em&gt;Dystopia: A Natural History&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dystopia-9780198820475&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback 2018; 576 pages&lt;/a&gt;. The main concern of this book is totalitarian political dystopia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Voigts, Eckart; Boller, Alessandra (editors): &lt;em&gt;Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalypse: Classics - New Tendencies - Model Interpretations&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wvttrier.de/top/Beschreibungen/ID1439.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WVT - Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2015&lt;/a&gt;. According to the publisher's description, &quot;Dystopian and post-apocalyptic narratives, often within the generic framework of science fiction, are currently enjoying a remarkable popularity. Two world wars that brought the nemesis of technology and rationality, large-scale industrialism, collectivism and mass culture – these are historical stepping stones towards the rise of the classic dystopian and apocalyptic imagination in the 20th century. Since then, narratives of a future societal collapse have responded to a set of urgent challenges that, if anything, have increased at the beginning of the 21st century, from climate change and other eco-disasters to the economic crises of globalisation, fundamentalist counter-reactions to modernity, the rise of Big Data, the scientific dynamics in biotechnology, wild urbanisation, migration and displacement, and more.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Basu, Balaka; Broad, Katherine R.; Hintz, Carrie (editors): &lt;em&gt;Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Dystopian-Fiction-for-Young-Adults-Brave-New-Teenagers/Basu-Broad-Hintz/p/book/9781138921924&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Routledge, 2015&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Palardy, Diana Q.: &lt;em&gt;The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783319928845&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palgrave Macmillan, 2018&lt;/a&gt;. According to the publisher, &quot;This study examines contemporary Spanish dystopian literature and films (in)directly related to the 2008 financial crisis from an urban cultural studies perspective. It explores culturally-charged landscapes that effectively convey the zeitgeist and reveal deep-rooted anxieties about issues such as globalization, consumerism, immigration, speculation, precarity, and political resistance (particularly by Indignados [Indignant Ones] from the 15-M Movement). (...)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hart, Heidi: &lt;em&gt;Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.palgrave.com/de/book/9783030018146&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palgrave Macmillan, 2018&lt;/a&gt;. According to the publisher, this book &quot;investigates the active role of music in film and fiction portraying climate crisis.&quot; This does not sound primarily political. It discusses books such as Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel &lt;em&gt;The Book of Joan&lt;/em&gt; but does not focus exclusively on literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gottlieb, Erika: &lt;em&gt;Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mqup.ca/dystopian-fiction-east-and-west-products-9780773521797.php?page_id=73&amp;amp;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001&lt;/a&gt;. According to the publisher, Gottlieb &quot;iscusses Western classics such as Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bradbury's Farenheit 451, Vonnegut's Player Piano, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and Zamiatin's We, all fictions that project expanded versions of the flaws of current society onto a hypothetical monster state in the future.&quot; She also &quot;introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others (...)&quot;. The focus of this study is definitely on political dystopias, many of which were written after &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hintz, Carrie; Ostry, Elaine (editors): &lt;em&gt;Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/Utopian-and-Dystopian-Writing-for-Children-and-Young-Adults-1st-Edition/Hintz-Ostry/p/book/9780415803649&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Routledge, 2009&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-01-09T12:24:10.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9089" CreationDate="2019-01-09T16:04:23.663" Score="6" ViewCount="2496" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the George Orwell poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/poetry/a-dressed-man-and-a-naked-man/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;A Dressed Man and a Naked Man&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, two men are haggling for the clothes of one of them (the other is naked). After a little research into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C2%A3sd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pounds/shillings/pence system&lt;/a&gt; for the terms I'd forgotten, I figured out the amounts they were proposing: &quot;Ten bob&quot; is 10 shillings, &quot;One dollar&quot; is 5 shillings, &quot;Eight and a tanner&quot; is 8.5 shillings, &quot;Take seven&quot; means 7 shillings, and &quot;One tanner more&quot; makes 7.5 shillings. The only thing left to understand is the verb &quot;&lt;em&gt;toby&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which appears twice in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[‘]Turnips, apples, hops and peas,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the spike when times are slack,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fifty years I’ve tobied it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For these clothes upon my back.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[‘]Now pull my shirt over my head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I’m naked sole to crown,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that’s the end of fifty years&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tobying up and down.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does the slang verb &quot;toby&quot; mean?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it refer to some kind of low-paid work, perhaps? I tried searching online for this, but couldn't find any answer that fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T18:03:10.787" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T16:35:45.977" Title="What does &quot;toby&quot; mean, in London slang of Orwell's time?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9088" CreationDate="2019-01-09T17:26:03.370" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;User Gareth Rees appears to be right in his assertion that the word relates to being &quot;on the road&quot;. A quick research suggests this is the only commonly-understood meaning of &quot;toby&quot; in slang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to user Spagirl who found a possible derivation in the OED. It seems to be rooted in 'tober' which originated in the Irish Traveller cant known as 'Shelta'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tobur, toba (showmen, &amp;amp;c.), the ground or field at fairs, hired to put the waggons on for show or circuses, or other al fresco entertainments, which does not amount to much, so that a man or manager is considered very hard up if he has not enough to pay the tobur. Gypsy tober, the road, hence ground. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can, however, confirm that this was Orwell's intended meaning because he used it elsewhere: in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://hoppicking.wordpress.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hop Picking Diary&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is no wonder that itinerant agricultural labourers, most of whom are in work ten months of the year, travel ‘&lt;strong&gt;on the toby&lt;/strong&gt;’ and sleep in the casual ward between jobs.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, later&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We could never persuade him to wash more of himself than his nose and a small circle around it, and he mentioned quite casually that he had several different kinds of louse on him. He too was an orphan, and had been ‘&lt;strong&gt;on the toby&lt;/strong&gt;’ almost from infancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the accompanying notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Toby&lt;/strong&gt;, on the… on the tramp. (Also to toby, and a toby, meaning a tramp. Slang Dictionary gives toby as the highroad.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read in context, these paragraphs clearly refer to a life of vagrancy. So given that Orwell used it this way in his essay, it seems reasonable to assume he intended it in the same way in the poem, especially given the vagabond nature of its characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-01-10T17:22:59.917" LastActivityDate="2019-01-10T17:22:59.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9094" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9098" CreationDate="2019-01-11T04:38:35.783" Score="12" ViewCount="1002" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Lord of the Rings, Gollum/Smeagol’s plan is to lead Frodo and Sam into the pass of Cirith Ungol, where he was gonna leave them to be consumed by Shelob and take the ring from the remains. However, is it possible that Shelob might’ve kept the ring for herself? She is the last child of Ungoliant, the Primordial Spider, and is capable of intelligent thought since she allowed Gollum/Sméagol to leave the tunnels the first time around after he made a pact with her to bring tastier meals than him to her, so is there any reason to believe she wouldn’t keep the ring for herself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5631" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T23:30:11.603" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T23:30:11.603" Title="Could Shelob have kept the ring for herself?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T07:32:49.087" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; I am trying to prove that Winston influenced Julia to be more proactive in rebelling against the Party. So I am wondering if Julia's views on actively trying to take down the Party changed after being with Winston? In my essay I am trying to prove she would never have met with O'Brien or been actively searching for ways to destroy the Party if not for Winston's influence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5632" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T08:31:07.663" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T12:50:56.153" Title="Would Julia have wanted to meet with O'Brien if not for Winston?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9069" CreationDate="2019-01-11T08:59:38.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard it argued that the staves of Moses and his brother Aaron were magic staves as a religious miracle, such as Moses parting of the red sea, and magic are one and the same; the only difference is the view of the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4704" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T08:59:38.093" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9141" CreationDate="2019-01-11T09:06:38.567" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Call_to_Arms_(Lu_Xun)/A_Madman%27s_Diary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource version&lt;/a&gt; (in both Chinese and English) of Lu Xun's short story &quot;A Madman's Diary&quot; from his collection &lt;em&gt;Call to Arms&lt;/em&gt;, the following footnotes are made about character names:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Zhao Guiweng's name is a play on words. Guiweng means aristocratic old man. Zhao is meant to serve as a not-so-subtle metaphor for the corrupt aristocracy of China at that time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Gu Jiu's name is a play on words. Gu Jiu means old. Gu Jiu is meant to serve as a not-so-subtle metaphor for China's feudal past.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are these names called &quot;a play on words&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; If Guiweng means aristocratic old man, what does Zhao mean? I understand that the names correspond to what the characters symbolically represent, but to my mind that's not enough to qualify as &quot;wordplay&quot;. Is there more to it than that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T12:41:30.707" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T12:41:30.707" Title="Where is the wordplay in the names Zhao Guiweng and Gu Jiu?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;lu-xun&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9094" CreationDate="2019-01-11T10:35:45.077" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She might, but she would not have used it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spiders and spider-things we read about in Tolkien's work are all motivated primarily by the same thing: hunger. The spiders of Mirkwood capture Bilbo and the dwarves for food: the fact they're also foiling Gandalf's plan is merely a coincidence. So it is with Shelob. We read in the conversation between the Orcs that all she's interested in is capturing them to eat, and nothing in Frodo and Sam's encounter with her suggests otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in accordance with the description in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; of the primal &quot;spider&quot;, Ungoliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But she had disowned her Master, desiring to be mistress of her own lust, taking all things to herself to feed her emptiness; and she fled to the south, escaping the assaults of the Valar and the hunters of Oromë, for their vigilance had ever been to the north, and the south was long unheeded. Thence she had crept towards the light of the Blessed Realm; for she hungered for light and hated it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that this hatred of the light extends to Shelob and her hatred of Sam's phial. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that Shelob and Ungoliant are similar creatures in many respects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything we read about Ungoliant centers around her insatiable hunger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But when Ungoliant understood the purpose of Melkor, she was torn between lust and great fear; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then perforce Morgoth surrendered to her the gems that he bore with him, one by one and grudgingly; and she devoured them, and their beauty perished from the world. Huger and darker yet grew Ungoliant, but her lust was unsated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting in the above passage that Ungoliant is eating the gems of Valinor. While magic is a complex and amorphous concept in Tolkien's work we might, at a stretch, imagine many of these gems as sources of &quot;magic&quot; and &quot;power&quot; just as the Silmarils - and later the Ring - are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most extreme of all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of the fate of Ungoliant no tale tells. Yet some have said that she ended long ago, when in her uttermost famine she devoured herself at last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A being so ruled by hunger, then, that she would eat herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Shelob is a child of Ungoliant, clearly a closely related creature, and everything we read about her revolves around eating, it would seem that she, also is motivated entirely by hunger and not by power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, this is confirmed in &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Little she knew of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up and the darkness could not contain her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if she did gain possession of the ring, it is likely that she would simply either ignore it or attempt to eat it, with uncertain results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T10:42:14.730" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T10:42:14.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9063" CreationDate="2019-01-11T11:36:05.737" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9720767-one-seriously-messed-up-week-in-the-otherwise-mundane-and-uneventful-lif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;One Seriously Messed-Up Week in the Otherwise Mundane and Uneventful Life of Jack Samsonite&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Tom Clempson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our hero? Jack Samsonite His mission? 1) pass his GCSEs 2) get the&#xA;  girl (to notice he exists) 3) survive the week without a serious face&#xA;  punching Good thing he’s got a plan. Well, half a plan…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the last seven days, Sam, aka Jack Samsonite, has fallen for a&#xA;  girl, is plagued by raging teenage lusts and very nearly gets killed&#xA;  by an extremely unlikely cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Very funny, and pretty rude, Jack tells it like it is. Whether it's&#xA;  skipping from school to hang with the mental freaks or stealing&#xA;  confiscated goods from his teacher, you'll be rooting for him all the&#xA;  way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English teacher is Dave Kross: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once again I am sat in my English classroom waiting for Dave Kross to&#xA;  arrive. Although this is the English classroom, and Dave is our&#xA;  English teacher, I'm not actually in my English lesson – this time&#xA;  it's English Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=z7WQuOea1XEC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://books.google.com/books?id=z7WQuOea1XEC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/415362538?book_show_action=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;review&lt;/a&gt; on goodreads mentions red headed Em, Jack seeing Eleanor and Dave Kross at McDonalds, the latter giving Jack a beating and Em &lt;em&gt;cupping his balls&lt;/em&gt; at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T12:16:43.670" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T12:16:43.670" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9094" CreationDate="2019-01-11T11:41:08.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;She didn't care about it.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little she knew of or cared for towers, or rings, or anything devised by mind  or hand, who only desired death for all others, mind and body, and for herself  a glut of life, alone, swollen till the mountains could no longer hold her up  and the darkness could not contain her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;, chapter &amp;quot;Shelob's Lair&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is consistent with what we know about her character. She shows intelligence only in a brutish, beastly sort of way. Her existence revolves around luring creatures into her traps and devouring them; a Ring of Power would have little interest to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't, of course, account for the effect the Ring has on &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt; (except Tom Bombadil) who comes into contact with it. Perhaps even a creature usually unmotivated by powerlust would be affected by the addiction of the Ring. But given that Gollum would come to take it almost immediately after she first came into contact with it, the Ring wouldn't have much time to take hold of her. Her lack of care for such things would probably take time to wear down, especially given her immense age, and the Ring wouldn't be able to do that in the short time that she would 'possess' it before Gollum seized it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/108804/31394&quot;&gt;What exactly was the understanding between Gollum and Shelob?&lt;/a&gt; at Sci-Fi &amp;amp; Fantasy SE (with an excellent detailed answer which touches upon the aspect of Shelob's potential desire for the Ring)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Would-Shelob-have-been-interested-in-using-the-One-Ring-and-its-power-for-herself&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Would Shelob have been interested in using the One Ring and its power for herself?&lt;/a&gt; at Quora (essentially identical to your question here)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T11:41:08.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9044" CreationDate="2019-01-11T12:11:00.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Two Brothers&lt;/em&gt; by Isaac Leib Peretz, originally written in Yiddish. Mentioned as &lt;em&gt;“Di tsvey brider (fun fremdn khupe-kleyd)” (The two brothers, from “Strange Wedding Gown”)&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://yleksikon.blogspot.com/2018/08/yitskhok-leybush-perets-isaac-leib.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yiddish Leksikon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?biw=1252&amp;amp;bih=600&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=zIA4XODHKpCHwPAPrLaF2AY&amp;amp;q=%22My%20blood%2C%20my%20sweat%2C%20my%20tears%21%20%22%20%22Over%20the%20sea%22&amp;amp;oq=%22My%20blood%2C%20my%20sweat%2C%20my%20tears%21%20%22%20%22Over%20the%20sea%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;My blood, my sweat, my tears! &quot; &quot;Over the sea&quot;&lt;/a&gt; on Google books shows some fragments of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other side of the wide blue sea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stood a house that was simple and pretty and wee.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It hid in the valley, a humble cot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of logs and clay in a hidden spot.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Each day the sun would flush with gold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A little window quaint and old.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the moon would rise,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And its clear, pure eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Would paint the panes with silver.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And love was the blessing that Heaven sent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the brothers who lived there in&#xA;  content. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And joy is dead, and sleep is done,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And love is away and forever gone.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One cries—“My wealth, my dream of years!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The other—“My blood, my sweat, my tears!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Over the sea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wide blue sea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two brothers are breaking their hearts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details added based on the investigative work mentioned in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T07:56:14.797" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T07:56:14.797" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9116" CreationDate="2019-01-11T12:53:51.760" Score="1" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is going to be a bit of a longshot, I suspect. I started reading a book in the 2010 timeframe (probably around 2015ish) that was, I think, at least the second book in the series. It started with an Islamic man (an &lt;em&gt;Imam&lt;/em&gt;, maybe?) being assaulted somewhere in the Middle East, and being saved by a man in ragged clothes who turns out to be an American ex-soldier who went AWOL after having a change of heart about fighting. Said soldier becomes a loyal disciple to the &lt;em&gt;Imam&lt;/em&gt;, who apparently has terrorist leaning. The next scene I remember was one at a terrorist training camp with the main character being a well-educated Arabic young man who'd previously studied in the United States, and is now studying things like explosives, I think under the tutelage of the ex-soldier, who is quite the fanatic now. A few chapters later (or maybe the camp was a flashback), the young man is working concessions at a major sports stadium in the United States, where he has befriended a young woman (of European descent, I want to say Irish), and he's expressing internal regret that he won't be able to warn her about the upcoming attack, which I think involves smuggling explosives being smuggled into the stadium to be detonated during the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say that none of these were the main characters of the story, but rather the antagonists to the protagonist, who might have been a detective rather than, say, a military operative. Unfortunately, my brain gets fuzzy there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember if this was a paperback, a hardback, or an audiobook. I checked it out from a library in Bridgeville, PA, I think, but I check out a lot of books, so my attempts at scanning my history haven't borne much fruit. I think I was getting into David Baldacci at the time, having read &lt;em&gt;Memory Man&lt;/em&gt;, but the book summaries on Baldacci's site are not sparking memories. The other book I remember reading at the time was &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9103/female-detective-former-police-dark-and-troubled-past-involving-violently-kill/9110#9110&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Executive Privilege&lt;/em&gt; by Philip Margolin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T18:19:39.800" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T16:28:35.470" Title="Story involving Islamic terrorists planning an attack on a stadium" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9110" CreationDate="2019-01-11T13:34:56.443" Score="3" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;In relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9102/story-involving-islamic-terrorists-planning-an-attack-on-a-stadium&quot;&gt;Story involving Islamic terrorists planning an attack on a stadium&lt;/a&gt;, I mentioned a contemporaneous series to the book I am seeking there, but couldn't recall the title. From my experiences on the SF&amp;amp;F SE, I'm a bit hesitant to leave that hanging because there's inevitably an &amp;quot;answer&amp;quot; that's identifying the reference rather than the book I'm actually looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a series with at least two books, because I read the second one. The main character is a female detective, I'm pretty sure very formerly with the police. Prior to the events of the book (I think, prior to the first book), she was a police officer who got captured by a gang of criminals, who hold her in a house and abuse her (sexual assault, cigarettes put out on her, and something involving a beer bottle are what I recall). At some point, she is able to make her escape, I think due to an abuser getting drunk and passing out, allowing her to get ahold of a broken beer bottle, which I think she shoved into her captor's eye in the course of her escape. In-universe, it was noted to be an extremely bloody and brutal scene as she killed everyone in the house, but she was acquitted for it basically being self-defense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said abuse is far enough back in the series that it only showed up in occasional traumatic flashbacks, and people referencing it, painting her with the image of a violent woman. Other than that, the details are sparse. I remember she had a boyfriend, who I don't think she'd married by the end of the second book, and that she lived in an apartmnent. She's a good detective, carefully gathering evidence is a systematic fashion. I don't remember what case she was solving, although I have a plot that might relate. Since I don't know for certain that it's the same book (and yes, I recognize the irony of bringing this up in the midst of trying to clarify another memory), I'll put it in the next paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is the plot I'm remembering, she's watching the U.S. President for infidelity, and accidentally becomes the last person to see the President's mistress before said mistress is found dead, apparently the victim of a serial killer. In the course of unwinding the plot, she finds there's a string of suspicious deaths among the President's lovers, but also eventually learns that he's not behind them. One of those murders was blamed on a jailed serial killer who collects the body parts of his victims, and is rather put out that someone pinned a copycat offense on him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; It eventually turns out that it was the President's wife who's been killing the girls with the help of the President's political aide, who's desperate to bury any scandal. I believe it was left ambiguous as to whether the President fully knew what his wife had done, but that he should have known &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T23:03:19.243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T09:52:49.987" Title="Female detective, former police. Dark and troubled past involving violently killing a house of criminals who were holding her hostage and abusing her" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-11T14:32:47.873" Score="5" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any significance in Shakespeare's use of &quot;Laertes&quot; (name of the father of Odysseus) in Hamlet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we associate the name with The Odyssey more strongly than Shakespeare, to whom it was just an available name with a nice ring to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is a connection, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T19:00:22.987" Title="Is there any significance in Shakespeare's use of the name &quot;Laertes&quot; (name of the father of Odysseus) in Hamlet?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9105" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9106" CreationDate="2019-01-11T15:46:32.553" Score="2" ViewCount="212" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everyone knows that Bloom was not circumcised (just ask Google).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But how do we know this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hugh Kenner claims it is (371/373). I have read these pages over and over, but don't see it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the ready repetition of the claim, I have not been able to find the actual quote from Ulysses that proves that Bloom was not circumcised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T16:13:48.460" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T16:13:48.460" Title="How do we know that Bloom was never circumcised?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9106" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9105" CreationDate="2019-01-11T15:55:47.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I put &lt;code&gt;ulysses bloom circumcised&lt;/code&gt; into Google, the top result was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831274?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Jstor page&lt;/a&gt; for the academic article &lt;strong&gt;Erwin R. Steinberg, &amp;quot;James Joyce and the Critics Notwithstanding, Leopold Bloom Is Not Jewish&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of Modern Literature&lt;/em&gt; 9(1) (1981), pp. 27-49&lt;/strong&gt;. This article says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At birth, Bloom was not circumcised, for, in the Nausicaa episode, after he masturbates, Joyce has him think, &amp;quot;Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better detach&amp;quot; (373). In this connection we might note that Joyce was not unaware that male Jews are circumcised. He has Stephen discourse leamedly on Jesus' circumcision (703), and in Circe, he brings onstage a group of Jews who appear &amp;quot;in sackcloth and ashes, . . . by the wailing wall&amp;quot; and to whom he twice refers as &amp;quot;the Circumcised&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-h/4300-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the full text of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and confirmed that the quote from Chapter 13 &amp;quot;Nausicaa&amp;quot; is indeed as Steinberg has it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As God made them he matched them. Sometimes children turn out well enough. Twice nought makes one. Or old rich chap of seventy and blushing bride. Marry in May and repent in December. This wet is very unpleasant. Stuck. Well the foreskin is not back. Better detach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other hand a sixfooter with a wifey up to his watchpocket. Long and the short of it. Big he and little she. Very strange about my watch. Wristwatches are always going wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foreskin, therefore no circumcision. No need to go into any more detail than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T15:55:47.327" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9107" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-04T09:55:54.287" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a line of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/plttrc.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories&lt;/a&gt;, and it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We gave him a hearty welcome; &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;for there was nearly half as much of the&#xA;  entertaining as of the contemptible about the man&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the boldfaced part of the sentence. Does it mean the man was entertaining and despicable at the same time? If that is the case, what makes it confusing for me is that supposing that he was despicable, why did they give him a hearty welcome?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Amethyst" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-11T16:29:59.387" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T17:01:25.263" Title="What is the meaning of this sentence: ...for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9107" CreationDate="2019-01-11T16:25:39.967" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A larger excerpt would give us more context (I don't recognize the story in question), but I think you're reading it correctly: The man was entertaining and despicable at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They give him a hearty welcome because he's entertaining.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;How entertaining?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Almost half as entertaining as he is contemptible.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, he's &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; contemptible that even half that measure of entertainingness is enough entertainingness to earn an enthusiastic welcome (from his friends, I assume). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But it's deliberately phrased to also tells us something about the speaker:&lt;/strong&gt; He and his friends are prepared to overlook the many faults of a contemptible man for no other reason than because they find his company entertaining. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5636" LastActivityDate="2019-01-11T16:25:39.967" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T05:42:31.867" Score="2" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40142205?seq=2#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading about&lt;/a&gt; Hungarian poetry, I &lt;a href=&quot;http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/PikliNatalia/PoetryHANDOUTandEliot1.doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;came across&lt;/a&gt; the claim that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;pure syllabic/quantitative metre is very rare = Hungarian, Greco-Roman ‘időmértékes’ metre&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know what &quot;pure syllabic/quantitative metre&quot; means - I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/219/papers/ExtractFromKRyanWeightBook.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a good source&lt;/a&gt; about it, but far too technical for me to understand - but it sounds like Hungarian poetry has something in common with ancient Greco-Roman poetry and not many other languages/styles, which is interesting. I also tried looking up &quot;időmértékes&quot;, but only found &lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id%C5%91m%C3%A9rt%C3%A9kes_versel%C3%A9s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some pages in Hungarian&lt;/a&gt;, which don't tell me much since machine translation seems very bad at Hungarian-to-English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the standard meter (if any) of Hungarian poetry? Is there a special metrical style in this language?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T05:42:31.867" Title="What is the metrical style of Hungarian poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9103" CreationDate="2019-01-12T11:35:45.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2396743.Executive_Privilege&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Executive Privilege&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Phillip Margolin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private detective Dana Cutler receives a seemingly routine assignment&#xA;to follow a young girl working on a challenger’s campaign against the&#xA;incumbent U.S. president. To Cutler’s shock, she witnesses a&#xA;rendezvous between the young woman and the president. The next morning&#xA;the woman’s mutilated body is discovered, and Cutler is suddenly a&#xA;suspect. How can she prove her innocence against someone who has the&#xA;power of the presidency at his disposal? Meanwhile, an associate in a&#xA;law firm in Portland, Oregon, gets assigned the appeal of a serial&#xA;killer on death row. The convicted felon claims he didn’t kill one of&#xA;the victims—a young woman who was working for the state governor at&#xA;the time—the same man who is now president. Could the president be a&#xA;serial killer? Both story lines collide in this pulse-pounding&#xA;thriller from genre veteran Margolin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviews on Goodreads mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Dana being an ex-cop: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/237500084?book_show_action=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kevin Allmaras's review of &lt;em&gt;Executive Privilege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;her having back story demonstrating why she's so tough and damaged: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/589352372?book_show_action=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&#xA;Lori's review of &lt;em&gt;Executive Privilege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; the wife being the killer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/576556435?book_show_action=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John's reviews of &lt;em&gt;Executive Privilege&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T09:52:49.987" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T09:52:49.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9102" CreationDate="2019-01-12T15:46:50.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This sounds similar to Black Sunday by Thomas Harris.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Lander is a pilot who flies the Aldrich Blimp over NFL football games to film them for network television. He is also, secretly, deranged by years of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, a bitter court martial on his return and a failed marriage. He longs to commit suicide and to take with him as many as possible of the cheerful, carefree American civilians he sees from his blimp each weekend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lander conspires with Dahlia Iyad, an operative from the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, to &lt;strong&gt;launch a suicide attack using a bomb composed of plastique and a quarter million steel darts, housed on the underside of the gondola of the Aldrich Blimp, which they will detonate over Tulane Stadium during a Super Bowl between the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Redskins.&lt;/strong&gt; Dahlia and Black September, in turn, intend the attack as a wake-up call for the American people, to turn their attention and the world's to the plight of the Palestinians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;American and Israeli intelligence, led by Mossad agent David Kabakov and FBI agent Sam Corley, race to prevent the catastrophe. They piece together the path of the explosives into the country, and Dahlia's own movements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a spectacular conclusion, the bomb-carrying blimp is chased by helicopters as it approaches the packed stadium.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sunday_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Sunday - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T15:46:50.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2542" CreationDate="2019-01-12T15:55:37.570" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because the statement&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;A key theme of the novel is Bloom's relative social isolation&quot; &lt;strong&gt;is false.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering this in the negative, when &lt;em&gt;no evidence&lt;/em&gt; to the positive has been presented whatsoever, is bound to be difficult. Rationally, I should not proceed until such evidence has been provided. But here goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Short Argument - &quot;Reductio ad Absurdum via Occam's Razor&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider Stephen. We know from the &lt;em&gt;Artist&lt;/em&gt; that Stephen certainly feels socially isolated. Now, when we meet him again in his tower, we notice, this time with the tool of internal monologue, that, not surprisingly, Stephen thinks mostly about &lt;em&gt;Stephen&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;his relationships to others&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stephen bent forward and peered at the mirror held out to him, cleft by a crooked crack. Hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stephen's social isolation swamps his internal monologues for the rest of the novel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloom is certainly &lt;em&gt;personally&lt;/em&gt; lonely, generally since he has no son, and today, because Molly is having sex with Blazes Boylan, and this is certainly reflected in his internal monologues. For example, from Sirens,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Last rose Castile of summer left bloom I feel so sad alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; loneliness, and today, given Molly and Blazes, &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; isolation.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, as the OP noted, Bloom's internal monologues exhibit little, if any, sign of &lt;em&gt;social&lt;/em&gt; isolation, the anti-Semitism he encounters notwithstanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would contradict the assumption that Bloom feels socially isolated, unless there exists &lt;strong&gt;some extra special reason&lt;/strong&gt; for Bloom to block it out, this &lt;em&gt;despite being unable to block out his personal loneliness and personal isolation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP, of course, is looking for such a special reason, but is only doing so because the OP believes a false assumption. There is no such special reason evidenced in the novel, and dropping the false assumption, we need not seek one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Longer Arguments&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How I see it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bloom&lt;/em&gt;,  unlike Stephen, is &lt;em&gt;not socially isolated&lt;/em&gt;, at least not beyond the kinds of isolation most of us encounter to varying degrees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that statements like the above, asserting the normalcy of Bloom are essentially tautologies, because Bloom is &quot;Everyman&quot; (see for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/ulysses/character/leopold-bloom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SparkNotes&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;strong&gt;Expect no extremes from Bloom.&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the whole, Bloom chats with those he meets along the way, travels with old friends to a funeral, seeks out social settings, participates in conversations, &#xA;stands up for what he believes in (getting a biscuit tin thrown at him once well out of range), etc., and does so in a relatively normal manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I add relatively, because we must not forget what is really going on: Bloom is wandering the streets to avoid going home while Molly has sex with Blazes Boylan! He is in shock, numb, a controlled state of crisis. Trying not to think about it, but its always sneaking in. &lt;em&gt;This&lt;/em&gt; is the primary force distorting Bloom's normal internal monologues, which, in contrast to Stephen's, are normally outward focussed. Bloom is numb, personally lonely, personally isolated (from Molly), but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; social isolated. That is not Bloom.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sure he is Jewish (whatever &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; means), but you wouldn’t notice in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9105/how-do-we-know-that-bloom-was-never-circumcised&quot;&gt;public Irish urinal&lt;/a&gt;, synagogue, nor butchery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Counting misogyny, &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; people are socially isolated at Bloom's level: Bloom is every (wo)man. This level of daily racism/misogyny/homophobia/fundamentalism/xenophobia/small-mindedness/ugly-gossip, is par for the course for most, both then and now. &lt;em&gt;It has not come to define him.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloom deals with many of these horrible/awkward moments just as we tend to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tram, he &quot;avoids&quot; the anti-Semitism by colluding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr Bloom began to speak with sudden eagerness to his companions’ faces.&#xA;  —That’s an awfully good one that’s going the rounds about Reuben J and the son. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Cyclops Bloom is pitted against the Citizen, and takes a stand for what he believes in. While this does eventually descend into anti-Semitism and a thrown tin, the episode is rather like pitting Mr Bean against a Brixiteer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on&#xA;  account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the&#xA;  old stuttering fool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Bloom is in fact initially welcomed by the Citizen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come in, come on, he won’t eat you, says the citizen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joe even buys Bloom a cigar. Not particularly socially isolating. Further, it is Bloom/Mr Bean who starts arguing with the citizen in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That can be explained by science, says Bloom. It’s only a natural&#xA;  phenomenon, don’t you see, because on account of the...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And then he starts with his jawbreakers about phenomenon and science&#xA;  and this phenomenon and the other phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The encounter is won by the ever civic minded Bloom/Odysseus, who blinds the Citizen/Cyclops and escapes, the hurled biscuit tin not even coming close. &#xA;But, going back to Homer, the key point of the episode is that Bloom/Odysseus loses his self-control for a moment and yells. And why does he lose his composure? Not because of some feeling of social isolation, but, of course, Molly and Blazes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—Well, that’s a point, says Bloom, for the wife’s admirers. —Whose&#xA;  admirers? says Joe. —The wife’s advisers, I mean, says Bloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—Who? Blazes? says Joe. And says Bloom: —What I meant about tennis,&#xA;  for example, is the agility and training the eye. —Ay, Blazes, says&#xA;  Alf. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Bloom cuts in again about lawn tennis and the circulation of the&#xA;  blood,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How Hugh Kenner see it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have noted, no evidence has been presented that anyone of authority believes that a key theme of the novel is Bloom's relative social isolation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought to well-read Hugh Kenner's chapter &quot;The Hidden Hero&quot;, which is an overview of Bloom and his day. Nowhere do I encounter any discussion on Bloom's social isolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following quotes (from that chapter) give a feel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is quietly witty, too, and when not preoccupied as on Bloomsday by&#xA;  intolerable worry he can be what Dublin much prizes, a man of tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stature, relative wealth, an exalted dwelling-place, handsome&#xA;  features, polysemous wit, a famously beautiful wife: Bloom may be&#xA;  said, albeit misleadingly, to possess these salient attributes of his&#xA;  prototype the Homeric chieftain.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mulligan, we have noticed, is all&#xA;  outside; the book does not grant him a hint of inner life. Stephen by&#xA;  the end of 'Proteus' has become virtually all inside, the great bright&#xA;  world subsumed into his phrasemaking. Bloom at first is a balance; we&#xA;  move in and out, in and out, the 'out', however, closely in touch with&#xA;  the 'in', prompting and controlling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, until 4 p.m., benumbment. For eight hours Bloom goes through engrossing &#xA;  motions, busily curious, blocking off from his thoughts what ought to be the &#xA;  novel's principal topic, the Boylan-Molly liaison&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man is virtually in shock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T17:53:25.477" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T17:53:25.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T16:15:19.313" Score="6" ViewCount="1122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what literature does Rumi say, &quot;You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe. And your name is Love?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any slight modification of the verse, e.g. &quot;The soul of the soul of the universe is love&quot; can also be equivalently considered for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, what is the name of the poem/story/essay/etc. that Rumi wrote that the verse first appears in? If there is no definite answer, where does the verse above appear first (i.e. where is it first mentioned or referenced)? Any other relevant information would be appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5638" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T17:48:42.963" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T08:07:46.803" Title="In what literature does Rumi say &quot;You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe. And your name is Love?&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-12T16:20:49.103" Score="3" ViewCount="826" Body="&lt;p&gt;In literature, if foreshadowing is reference to future events, what would it be called if it is referencing a past event which the reader does not know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5639" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-12T16:39:46.023" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T00:30:07.133" Title="What would be the name for foreshadowing if it is referencing the past?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9114" CreationDate="2019-01-12T17:07:46.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Foreshadowing is not necessarily reference to future events.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A foreshadowing is a reference to events which &lt;em&gt;will be revealed later in the story&lt;/em&gt;. They're in the future from the point of view of the reader, but not necessarily events which are in the future &quot;in-universe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Foreshadowing is a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreshadowing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/foreshadowing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literary Devices&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It should be noted that neither of the sources linked above are very good. I'm not sure what's a better dictionary of literary devices, but would be very happy to be directed to one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, &quot;later in the story&quot; means later in the physical book or otherwise in the &lt;em&gt;telling&lt;/em&gt; of the narrative - not necessarily events which actually occurred later within the world of the story. For some examples of foreshadowing of &lt;em&gt;earlier&lt;/em&gt; events, in a somewhat famous work of modern literature, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/133206/31394&quot;&gt;this Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I wouldn’t mind knowing how Riddle got an award for special services to Hogwarts either.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Could’ve been anything,&quot; said Ron. &quot;Maybe he got thirty O.W.L.s or saved a teacher from the giant squid. Maybe he murdered Myrtle; that would’ve done everyone a favour...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Harry Potter, book 2, chapter 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's revealed later in this book that Riddle did in fact murder Myrtle, several decades earlier. The event being foreshadowed is well in the past, and only the &lt;em&gt;revelation&lt;/em&gt; of it is in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Dumbledore believed Snape was sorry James was dead? Snape &lt;em&gt;hated&lt;/em&gt; James...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;And he didn't think my mother was worth a damn either,&quot; said Harry, &quot;because she was Muggle-born...'&lt;em&gt;Mudblood&lt;/em&gt;,' he called her...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Harry Potter, book 6, chapter 29&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's revealed in the next book that Snape's &quot;Mudblood&quot; outburst was out of character, and in fact he not only didn't hate Lily (Harry's mother) but had in fact been in love with her since childhood. Here Snape's love for Lily is a continuing state through the past, present, and future (&lt;em&gt;&quot;After all this time?&quot; &quot;Always.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;), but there's foreshadowing because the &lt;em&gt;revelation&lt;/em&gt; of it is in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what would it be called if it is referencing a past event which the reader does not know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is still foreshadowing.&lt;/strong&gt; If the reader doesn't know but will find out later, then the revelation is in the future and it's foreshadowing, regardless of whether the event being referenced is in the future or the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T17:07:46.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9102" CreationDate="2019-01-12T17:15:17.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Philip Margolin's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11746175-capitol-murder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Capitol Murder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, third book of the Dana Cutler series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Private investigator Dana Cutler and attorney Brad Miller have overcome more than a few daunting challenges and powerful enemies to see justice done. Against tremendous odds, they successfully unmasked an American president's involvement in a chain of murders. They also saved the life of a Supreme Court justice while foiling a conspiracy by rogue members of the CIA to fix a case headed for the court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now wicked threats old and new are about to bring them together once again. Convicted serial killer Clarence Little has escaped from death row in Oregon, and Brad receives threatening messages in D.C., where he is working for Senator Jack Carson, a high-ranking member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. A dead body, murdered according to Little's M.O., is found in the senator's Georgetown home, and Carson has disappeared. While Dana is in Oregon digging into Carson's shady background, a terrorist cell is poised to destroy a packed professional football stadium in one of the biggest attacks on American soil. As the senator's personal life begins to dovetail with the cell's evil plan, Brad and Dana will risk it all again to uncover the truth and save their country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T16:28:35.470" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T16:28:35.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9113" CreationDate="2019-01-12T17:48:31.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, please be aware that &lt;strong&gt;Rumi's poetry is very often very poorly translated&lt;/strong&gt; from the original Persian; the original meaning is often totally changed or lost in the English version. I found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blissbat.net/rambles/rumi_compare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;couple&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detailed&lt;/a&gt; articles about this online; it's very much worth the time to at least skim through these, check out their examples of Rumi poems with literal translations and published English 'translations'. To quote from the second link:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet this popularization has had a price, and the price is a frequent distortion of Rumi's words and teachings which permeate such well-selling books. The English &quot;creative versions&quot; rarely sound like Rumi to someone who can read the poems in the original Persian, and they are often shockingly altered-- but few know this, and the vast majority of readers cannot but believe that such versions are faithful renderings into English of Rumi's thoughts and teachings when they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know where, or in what language, you read the quote that you're looking for. But I'm pretty sure you didn't read it in Persian, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/posts/9113/revisions&quot;&gt;in the original version of your question&lt;/a&gt; you seemed unaware that Rumi's poems were even written in Persian! However, I did find that this quote has been attributed to Rumi on the English-speaking internet, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pinterest.com/pin/382102349621092498/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. If indeed you found it in English, then it's quite possible that &lt;strong&gt;in fact Rumi never said anything like this.&lt;/strong&gt; Or at least that the quote has been heavily distorted, so we should be looking for near misses as well as these exact words.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;All of that being said ... I found a couple of websites which may be more reliable when it comes to Rumi poems. One of them is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the site I quoted above&lt;/a&gt; - they at least take pride in publishing proper translations of Rumi poems, rather than popular mistranslations/retellings. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rumi-poem.blogspot.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another site&lt;/a&gt; I'm less sure about (would have to get a Persian speaker to verify the accuracy of the translations), but at least they seem to take Rumi and his works pretty seriously. Searching &lt;em&gt;those sites specifically&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;code&gt;&quot;soul of the universe&quot;&lt;/code&gt; turned up nothing, but searching for &lt;code&gt;&quot;soul of the soul&quot;&lt;/code&gt; was at least a little more fruitful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh soul,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  you worry too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are in truth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the soul, of the soul, of the soul.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You are the security,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the shelter of the spirit of Lovers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://rumi-poem.blogspot.com/2013/02/you-worry-too-much.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;You Worry Too Much&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Not an exact match, but it's about &quot;the soul of the soul&quot; and mentions love. (Translated by Shahram Shiva, whom &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dar-Al-Masnavi&lt;/a&gt; cites as a semi-reliable translator.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The drunkenness of love makes me unaware whether I have&#xA;  profit [or] loss therefrom.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thanks be to Him who gives soul to the body; if the soul&#xA;  should depart, yet I have the soul of the soul.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seek from me that which Shams-e Tabrizi has bestowed, for&#xA;  I have the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://rumi-poem.blogspot.com/2013/02/i-have-fire-for-you.html?m=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;I Have Fire For You&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Again not an exact match, but it's about &quot;the soul of the soul&quot; and seems to imply that this equates to love. (Translated by A. J. Arberry, whom &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/corrections_popular.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dar-Al-Masnavi&lt;/a&gt; says is reliable.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mystical concert is tranquillity for the souls of the &#xA;  (spiritually) alive ones; a person knows (this) who is the Soul of &#xA;  the soul.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Especially (if) they continue to make a circle in the mystical &#xA;  concert and the Ka`ba is in the center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/suzidilara.html#6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jalâluddîn Rûmî, &lt;em&gt;Dîwân-é Kabîr&lt;/em&gt;, Ghazal 339&lt;/a&gt;. Accurate/literal translation mentioning the &quot;soul of the soul&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?ei=VSM6XOPKFIm00gXD8pCwBw&amp;amp;q=%22soul+of+the+soul%22+love+site%3Adar-al-masnavi.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other hits&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;&quot;soul of the soul&quot; love&lt;/code&gt; in Rumi poems. It looks like there's no exact match for your quote, but maybe one of the above was mistranslated/retold in that way?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T17:48:31.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3599" CreationDate="2019-01-12T18:51:30.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Sounds like Project Genius by William D. Hayes.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm Pete. Some people call me a genius.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some people call me other things.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Every year our school gives a prize for the most original science project. This year it's a trip to the State Science Fair. And as I said to my pal, Chet, &amp;quot;I'm going to win that trip or bust!&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Oh, oh. Gotta run.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Something's about to explode!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;See you inside.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an element where he gets his &lt;strong&gt;baby brother&lt;/strong&gt; onto a local TV program, this might be your babysitting scene, so this seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-12T18:51:30.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T00:26:37.250" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can read about the so called l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poet's rejection of closure &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (it's short). Is she saying that an open reading, which is what the text is about, theorizes on, &lt;strong&gt;does not privilege different goals in reading&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. working out whodunit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hejinian is explicitly saying that there are many readings of an open text, so I just wondered if each different method, way, of reading a text is equally viable, if they are at all viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the&#xA;process of the original composition or of subsequent compo­sitions by&#xA;readers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5641" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:08:41.350" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T16:08:41.350" Title="Is Hejinian saying that there is no one privileged way of reading any text?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2019-01-13T00:59:30.877" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm still reading through the short stories, so I may update this in the future, but I decided to do a full family tree with the names as far as I could sort them out. I need to collect all of the reference info, but let me know if I got anything wrong or missed anything important! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hSAVz.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hSAVz.png&quot; alt=&quot;A Healy-Price family tree with god/priestess names&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5642" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T00:59:30.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-13T02:30:47.330" Score="0" ViewCount="1162" Body="&lt;p&gt;While experiencing pain during the first sexual encounter is a common concern among women, I have read that a woman's first sexual encounter is actually not painful at all, if she is experiencing intense sexual pleasure during love-making, because the hymen will just stretch to accommodate a penis. So, my understanding is that the painful deflowering in romance novels is actually an inaccurate depiction of sex, serving as titillation for the reader. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do romance novelists insist on realizing this myth of sex? If actual sex is meant to be pleasurable without any pain, then why can't sex be depicted accurately in fiction? Or is the typical reader's own sexual excitement based on seeing the realization of these sex myths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="5643" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T04:17:01.163" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T15:38:36.283" Title="Why is the painful deflowering of a virgin motif in romance novels so common?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;historical-romance&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9122" CreationDate="2019-01-13T15:11:07.430" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hymen&lt;/a&gt; is a thin membrane which covers the entrance to the vagina. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be broken during the first time a woman has penetrative intercourse, but that is not the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; way. The hymen is not physically shaped the same way in every female body — it can be larger, smaller, or have several holes instead of one. It can be broken by vigorous physical activity, a doctor's normal examination, masturbation, a sexual toy, a tampon, or fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the hymen doesn't have nerve endings in it, it's connected to the vaginal wall, which does. Pressure on the membrane may tug at the walls of the vagina, causing pain, and tearing the membrane (which is tissue) can cause it to bleed. Also, forceful penetrative intercourse (no matter the condition of the hymen) can be painful. &lt;em&gt;Also&lt;/em&gt; also, even gentle penetrative intercourse without sufficient lubrication (no matter the condition of the hymen) can be painful. Either can cause bleeding completely apart from the condition of the hymen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's physically possible that a woman may be so aroused that she doesn't feel slight pains during intercourse, so if her hymen has a large opening or has already been torn, the pain simply wouldn't register. It's also possible that the first time she has intercourse, she is nervous, overwhelmed, unprepared, uneducated, etc. etc. so that she's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; greatly aroused, and therefore doesn't have a high level of endorphins blocking out small pains. She could have a hymen which almost entirely covers the vaginal opening, and a partner who doesn't care to be gentle, so the tearing is going to be more painful. She could have a hymen which has already been broken, and a careful partner, so she feels no pain at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The medical and interpersonal reality is that the first time a woman has penetrative intercourse, it can be anything from amazing to terrible, and additionally anything from painless to very painful, in any combination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pain during the first instance of penetrative intercourse is not a myth. It's a reality for some percentage of women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the important part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A novel is telling a story.&lt;/strong&gt; The writer wants to evoke certain reactions in the reader. So the amount of pain or pleasure the female character is experiencing is going to be related to the plot and the characters, and their relationships. It's honestly not much about biology. You don't read romance novels for medical accuracy; you read them for emotional satisfaction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the female protagonist is experiencing a &quot;painful deflowering,&quot; it has nothing to do with the actual composition of her hymen. It's about the male character not being a gentle, caring partner. It's setting up the male character in a bad light. Whether he is redeemed later or the heroine ends up with someone else is up to the particular narrative. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the female protagonist has a great first experience, it &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; has nothing to do with the actual composition of her hymen. It's about the emotional connection between the two characters, and is generally meant to show that the male character is a kind and loving partner, so that they end up together at the end of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Read more romance novels. Read some NC-17 fanfic (het, slash, femslash). You will find a wider range of scenarios than in the three you have read, and you may come to a better understanding of why romance writers choose painful or non-painful first times. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T15:11:07.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9122" CreationDate="2019-01-13T15:26:58.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a biological perspective, it isn't uncommon for those with vaginas to feel pain at first penetration, whether or not the hymen is responsible. All bodies are unique, and at minimum, a level of mild discomfort to actual pain is often difficult to avoid. Sometimes it's purely biological, and sometimes they maybe haven't learned how to avoid it yet - even if the mitigations are straightforward. Learning how your body works is difficult. Sex is a skill. And that's all that needs to be said about this, because the real answer to this question is cultural. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The romance novel&quot; exists, generally speaking, by the hand of cis, straight women, and for the consumption of other cis, straight women, often but not always white. They're often ghost-written, but when they are, they're often ghost-written by this group. That's not to say non-women &lt;em&gt;shouldn't&lt;/em&gt; pick up a romance novel, but rather that the experiences portrayed in those novels are typically geared towards a specific set of women. This can be a difficult statement to understand, because of how they often distill the experiences of relationships down to a few tropes and kernels. This extends to female sexuality, portrayed in a kind of idealized and &lt;em&gt;practical&lt;/em&gt; way, which, yes, can be a little reductionist sometimes. On the whole, though, they perform a valuable educational and discourse function, which makes them far closer to how sex is in practice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(When you see this trope outside of romance, however, it adopts different meaning. In a novel more laced with metaphor, pain is likely to reflect either a general fetishization of women's pain, or a specific symbol within the context of the novel, or both. Disregard for women's pain, or viewing it as a blunt tool, isn't limited to men, and isn't all done by men, but it is often men who do it.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there's a very basic answer to this question. Romance novels portray first penetration as sometimes painful, because it often is. Not because it &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; to be, but because the experience is common, and romance novels make an effort to be as inclusive as they can... within reason. A romance novel that talked about how you're &quot;just not doing it right&quot; would be shaming over pain that can be very opaque and is not often avoidable. At best, the last thing an author wants is for your reader to feel disconnected from a novel by omitting a pain they felt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted to get a better sense of the depth of the full answer here, I would recommend reading &lt;em&gt;Dangerous Books for Girls,&lt;/em&gt; which talks extensively about this exact point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user80" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2019-01-13T15:38:36.283" LastActivityDate="2019-01-13T15:38:36.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9078" CreationDate="2019-01-13T20:40:38.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On this website (in Chinese):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;鲁迅”这个笔名，历来有两种解释：&lt;strong&gt;一种说法是指“鲁”字乃鲁迅先生母亲的姓，他的小说中常提到的“鲁镇”，就是他母亲的老家；“迅”是他的小名&lt;/strong&gt;，所以在他的小说里也出现过“迅哥儿”一词。另一种解释是先生挚友许寿裳所说，他亲自问过鲁迅先生，先生笑道：“&lt;strong&gt;取愚鲁而迅行的意思&lt;/strong&gt;。”此乃先生自谦之辞。这两种说法，都是从字面上解释，也切合鲁迅的生平，都说得通。可最近又有人发现了第三种解释。&lt;strong&gt;认为“迅”字，古义为狼&lt;/strong&gt;。出处见《尔雅·释兽》：“狼子绝有力者曰迅。”照这样注解引申出来，“鲁迅”是指狼的一个勇敢有力的儿子。持此一说的是历史学家侯外庐。他说，鲁迅是封建社会的叛逆者，他的小说代表作《狂人日记》就是抨击封建社会“吃人”制度的，他取用这两个字为名，正是鲜明表示他甘以“狼子”自居，与封建社会制度彻底决裂之心声。据说侯外庐的这种解释，曾向鲁迅夫人许广平提起过，许广平连连称谢，表示首肯。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/157476489.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;鲁迅为什么叫“鲁迅”？这个笔名有何寓意？&lt;/a&gt; on Baidu Zhidao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First Explanation:&lt;/strong&gt; is the author's mother's family name and old home; 迅 is the author's &amp;quot;little name&amp;quot;. Sorry, but the original text uses 小名. This is not translatable into English. This name is given to little children, and it may stick as a term used by family and close friends. Sometimes, this &amp;quot;little name&amp;quot; is replaced by the &amp;quot;big name&amp;quot; （大名）or personal name (姓名); sometimes, this &amp;quot;little name&amp;quot; remains as that individual's name for eternity instead of calling that individual by his/her actual personal name 姓名. 大名 and 姓名 are the same thing. It is easy to explain in Chinese: &amp;quot;大名就是大人名字，小名就是小孩名字。&amp;quot; In English, that would be: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Big&lt;/em&gt; name&amp;quot; is the name of &lt;em&gt;big&lt;/em&gt; people (adults), &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; name&amp;quot; is the name of &lt;em&gt;little&lt;/em&gt; children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Second Explanation:&lt;/strong&gt; 鲁迅 is a joke made by the author: &amp;quot;取愚鲁而迅行的意思&amp;quot;. Translation: &amp;quot;pick something that means unclever and fast-moving.&amp;quot; This &amp;quot;unclever&amp;quot; word means unclever, dim-witted, or slow mind. The &amp;quot;fast-moving&amp;quot; word means fast-moving. The contradictory meanings between 鲁 and 迅 make up the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third Explanation:&lt;/strong&gt; In ancient times, 迅 means 狼 (translation: &amp;quot;wolf&amp;quot;). Wolves are brave and strong. By taking that character as one's given name, it means that he is the son of a wolf, characterizing himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T04:52:50.800" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T04:52:50.800" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9130" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9137" CreationDate="2019-01-13T22:43:12.067" Score="5" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;When touring Limbo with Virgil, Virgil tells Dante that he and the rest of the virtuous pagans are condemned in Limbo to live eternally without hope. Dante asks his guide,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] &quot;Dear sir, my master,&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       I began, wanting to be reassured&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the faith that conquers every error, &quot;Did ever&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Anyone go forth from here—by his own good&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Or perhaps another's—to join the blessed, after?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; 4.35–39, translated by Robert Pinsky, &lt;em&gt;New England Review&lt;/em&gt; 15:4, p. 58.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Dante saying that that he wants his (religious) faith to be reassured, or does he want to be reassured with faith? Is this faith in God/Christianity or in Virgil? Does &quot;error&quot; refer to mistakes in general, or is Dante saying that he perceives the punishment of the virtuous pagans as a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just in general: What exactly does &quot;wanting to be reassured / In the faith that conquers every error&quot; mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5647" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T11:09:55.670" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:42:22.573" Title="What does Dante mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9133" CreationDate="2019-01-14T06:20:22.010" Score="26" ViewCount="15560" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, Mr. Collins comments that Lady Catherine de Bourgh's daughter will one day inherit the de Bourgh fortune. From previous chapters, we know that the five daughters of Bennet will not inherit their estate (which is now to be given to Mr. Collins). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this the case? Is it because women were not allowed to inherit the family fortune upon their parents' death? If that is the case, how does Lady Catherine's daughter get to inherit the de Bourgh fortune?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5648" LastEditorUserId="5648" LastEditDate="2019-01-14T18:33:00.623" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T09:51:03.517" Title="Why don't Mr. Bennet's daughters get to inherit the Longbourn estate?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9132" CreationDate="2019-01-14T10:47:36.487" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The Longbourn estate is ‘entailed’ to male heirs only, whereas Rosings is not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austen sets out the financial situation of the Bennets in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation; and their mother’s fortune, though ample for her situation in life, could but ill supply the deficiency of his.  Her father had been an attorney in Meryton, and had left her four thousand pounds. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet’s main asset was thus an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estate_in_land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;estate of land&lt;/a&gt; at Longbourn, which generated an income of £2,000 a year by renting it out to tenant farmers. The estate was ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee_tail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entailed&lt;/a&gt;’, meaning that in law Mr. Bennet was a ‘tenant in tail’: he could make use of the estate while he was alive, but he was not allowed to sell the land, and he could not dispose of the estate in his will. Instead the estate would pass at his death to the next male heir in line of the landowner who originally created the entail. Since Mr. Bennet had no male heirs, the estate would pass to his cousin Mr. Collins (except in remote circumstances, such as Mrs. Bennet dying, Mr. Bennet marrying again and having a son).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entail only covers the Longbourn estate, and does not include Mr. Bennet’s other property, and so if he had been more prudent, he could have saved money out of his income from the estate in order to support his family after his death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet had very often wished before this period of his life that, instead of spending his whole income, he had laid by an annual sum for the better provision of his children, and of his wife, if she survived him. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0050&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 50&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he did not do this, because his plan for providing for his family was to ‘cut off’ (or ‘bar’) the entail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son.  The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lacking a son, he was apparently unable to carry out this plan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia’s birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austen does not give explicit details of the legal and financial situation of the de Bourgh family, but there are some clues. First, we learn that Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a widow and her daughter Anne is the “heiress of Rosings”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Mrs. Bennet] “I think you said she was a widow, sir? Has she any family?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Mr. Collins] “She has only one daughter, the heiress of Rosings, and of very extensive property.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ah!” said Mrs. Bennet, shaking her head, “then she is better off than many girls.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0014&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 14&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Rosings is not entailed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Lady Catherine] “Your father’s estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think.  For your sake,” turning to Charlotte, “I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s family.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0029&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 29&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can therefore guess that Sir Lewis de Bourgh disposed of Rosings in his will, either by leaving the whole estate to his widow, or else by giving his widow a life interest, with the estate reverting to their daughter on Lady Catherine’s death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Entails were widely considered unjust (especially by owners of entailed estates who wished to raise money by selling off parts of the land), and were effectively abolished by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/15-16/20/section/176/enacted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;§176&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Property_Act_1925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Law of Property Act 1925&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How realistic is Austen’s portrayal of the legal situation?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rKpXDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA145&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Black’s Law Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; explains how the entail could have been barred:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;barring of entail.&lt;/strong&gt; The freeing of an estate from the limitations imposed by an entail and permitting its free disposition. This was anciently [that is, prior to the Fines and Recoveries Act 1833] done by means of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_of_lands&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fine&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_recovery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common recovery&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Mr. Bennet believe that, lacking a son, he was unable to bar the entail, given that the procedure of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_recovery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common recovery&lt;/a&gt; was available to him? Some legal scholars think that Austen’s account of the legal situation of the Bennets was not realistic on this point. According to Peter Appel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time that Austen wrote, it would have been extremely unlikely that a landed family like the Bennets would have used the entailment standing alone as the legal means of keeping Longbourn within the family. More likely, they would have used a device known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settled_Land_Acts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;strict settlement&lt;/a&gt;. It was also extremely rare (although not impossible) that a strict settlement would have been arranged to cut off close relations like the Bennet daughters. If the restriction on Longbourn was an entailment standing alone—which would have in all likelihood cut off any provision for the Bennet daughters—then the current life tenant (i.e., Mr. Bennet) could have ‘barred the entail’. This term means that Mr. Bennet could have stopped the property from going to Mr. Collins through a fairly simple legal proceeding. After that, he could have left it to whomever he wished: Jane, the eldest daughter; Elizabeth, his clear favorite; or all five of his daughters in whatever shares he chose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Peter A. Appel (2013), ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/fac_artchop/959/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Funhouse Mirror of Law: The Entailment in Jane Austen’s &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law&lt;/em&gt; 41, p. 609.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we to make of this discrepancy? There are various possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Austen was using dramatic license to exaggerate the legal predicament of the Bennet family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The characters’ descriptions of the entail were somewhat loose or inaccurate (as might be expected, since they are not lawyers) and in fact Mr. Bennet was not the tenant in tail of Longbourn, but only had a life interest in the estate, and so common recovery was not available to him. This situation could have arisen if Mr. Bennet’s grandfather had owned the estate in fee simple, and if Mr. Bennet had been living at his grandfather’s death. Then his grandfather, in his will, could have given life interests to both Mr. Bennet’s father and Mr. Bennet, with the remainder left in fee tail male. (This would be a form of ‘strict settlement’ as discussed above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Austen was using the discrepancy to comment on the character of Mr. Bennet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, the more intriguing scenario for contemplating the relationship between law and society is if both Austen and her readers knew that an entail in England could be barred. If this were the case, two interrelated implications immediately leap forth. First, the character of Mr. Bennet must be reread. This point is probably of more interest to Austen scholars and fans. Most readers generally sympathize with Mr. Bennet because he is largely surrounded by folly, because he is witty, and because he favors Elizabeth, the heroine, and recognizes her intelligence. These features—especially that he can find intelligence in a woman, and particularly in the early nineteenth century—are attractive to a modem audience. They make him seem urbane and progressive. A Mr. Bennet who could, but did not, provide for his daughters, however, becomes a much less appealing character. Why would Mr. Bennet not disentail the property if he could? Perhaps it was simply not done, or not an option to a family of the social class or status ofthe Bennets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Appel (2013)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Answers to questions raised in comments&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why were entails created? The purpose was to maintain the concentration of power and wealth (as embodied in an estate of land) by preventing it from being sold off or divided up among many heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why were entails so often restricted to male heirs? No doubt there was a substantial degree of sexism involved, but additionally, prior to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Married_Women%27s_Property_Act_1870&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Married Women’s Property Act 1870&lt;/a&gt;, a woman in England lost control over her property after marriage: she could not sell, lease, or mortgage her estate without her husband’s consent. For the landowner creating the entail, this risk of loss of control could be avoided by specifying that only male heirs could inherit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What about the family name? A landowner who was concerned about the preservation of his surname could require, when creating an entail, that a male heir succeeding via a female line must adopt his surname. For example, Jane Austen’s own brother &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Austen_Knight&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward&lt;/a&gt; changed his surname to Knight as a condition of inheriting the estate of his relative Catherine Knight. Perhaps the ancestor of Mr. Bennet who created the Longbourn entail was not so concerned; alternatively, Mr. Collins may be required to change his name, but this is not mentioned in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T22:17:03.200" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T22:17:03.200" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5497" CreationDate="2019-01-14T17:55:09.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is at least one part of the question that is wrong - that Maria was of &quot;proper education&quot;. This is, in fact, one of the main morals of the story - the education of Maria and Julia was actually seriously mishandled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Sir Thomas Bertram has (according to the novel) a sound moral understanding and a willingness to pass this on to his offspring, he is ineffectual in doing so, while having his efforts undermined by Mrs Norris (Mrs Bertrand is so indolent as to not be a significant factor - we are told in Chapter II that she &quot;paid not the smallest attention&quot; to the education of her daughters). Had Sir Thomas taken a evn closer interest in his children, and been a slightly less dreadful character to them, he might have detected that Maria (and, to a lesser degree, Julia) were in fact morally defective: both sisters were perfectly able to show good manners and a presentable front as long as the stakes were low, but when they were put in a situation that required good moral fibre, they failed. This is pretty much all put explicitly forward in Chapter XLVIII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maria's actions are actually easy to understand: she is married to a dull but rich man, whom she has nothing very much in common with and whom she does not care for. She is morally very shallow and her reputation is at best a secondary concern. Recall the whole play episode, where being close to Henry Crawford is so important for both her and Julia that they are willing to go to great lengths, even at the risk of making a scandal. Maria might have either not given the consequences of an affair with Henry much thought, or she might have believed that she could easily keep it secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Henry, well, I do not think the explanation we are given in Chapter XLVIII at all unlikely: essentially they met, Maria was cold and indifferent, and he decided that he wanted to see her foolishly in love with him again. His love for Fanny, we are told, only spurred him on: he wanted to see Maria humiliated in order to elevate Fanny. He might have rationally understood that this was an unwise action, but as he never was trained to restraint, such understanding did him no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, a lot of energy in the book is spent on presenting the Crawfords as morally corrupt, and Maria as without strong moral backbone. Neither of them are used to considering anything but their own pleasure or the direct risk of getting punished. Without more strict moral training than that, neither can resist the chance for quick gratification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastEditorUserId="315" LastEditDate="2019-01-15T19:39:17.543" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T19:39:17.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9136" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9440" CreationDate="2019-01-14T20:43:55.523" Score="0" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was a Junior in High School (2007-2008) my English teacher used an English textbook that had a story about someone who thought they were living in the wrong time period. I cannot remember exactly but I believe s/he thought they belonged in the 1700s, about 200 years before their time (This could be completely incorrect but I remember 200 years for some reason). The class was called 'American Literature'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is helpful, but the textbook seemed older, possibly from the late 90s but I cannot say for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After thinking about this a bit more, I am leaning towards thinking the character is male. I also believe knights are mentioned as one of the things he 'missed out on'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5658" LastEditorUserId="5658" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T15:39:08.300" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T20:33:07.110" Title="Short Story Identification - From English Textbook, about Person Living in Wrong Time Period" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9130" CreationDate="2019-01-15T11:42:22.573" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working with John Ciardi's translation, New American Library, 1954.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are seven stanzas before this one which give some context to the lines you're asking about. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No tortured wailing rose to greet us here &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  but sounds of sighing rose from every side, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  sending a tremor through the timeless air, &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a grief breathed out of untormented sadness,&lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  the passive state of those who dwelled apart,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  men, women, children — a dim and endless congress. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the Master said to me: &quot;You do not question&lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  what souls these are that suffer here before you? &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  I wish you to know before you travel on &lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that these were sinless. And still their merits fail, &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  for they lacked Baptism's grace, which is the door &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  of the true faith you were born to. Their birth fell &lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;before the age of the Christian mysteries, &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  and so they did not worship God's Trinity &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  in fullest duty. I am one of these. &lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For such defects are we lost, though spared the fire&lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  and suffering Hell in one affliction only: &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  that without hope we live on in desire.&quot;&lt;br /&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought how many worthy souls there were &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  suspended in that Limbo, and a weight &lt;br /&gt; &#xA;  closed on my heart for what the noblest suffer.&lt;br /&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first group of people in Hell whom the poets see are these poor sad souls. They're not being tortured; they're just unhappy because they cannot ever achieve Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virgil is pointing out to Dante &quot;Hey, do you see these folks? Don't you care who they are? This is &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; spot in Hell, by the way. These people are sinless&quot; &lt;em&gt;[which is a very big deal in this text; sin is what people are being punished for]&lt;/em&gt; &quot;but they still aren't good enough to get into Heaven. They were born before Christ, so they weren't baptized in the name of Jesus. That alone is enough to keep them out of Heaven. We &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to go, but we aren't allowed, and that hopeless wanting is our torture.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key stanzas in your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Instruct me, Master and most noble Sir,&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I prayed him then, &quot;better to understand &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  the perfect &lt;strong&gt;creed&lt;/strong&gt; that conquers every error: &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;has any, by his own or another's merit, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  gone ever from this place to blessedness?&quot;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(emphasis mine) &lt;em&gt;Creed&lt;/em&gt; is an entire belief system, not one person's individual faith. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My sense of that phrasing is that Dante is asking Virgil this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I've followed the Christian religion all these years, and I'm finally now seeing the end results of people who &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; follow it. Christianity is presented to us as perfect — it's supposed to be stronger than any sin, any mistake, any evil. But you and these other people are 'virtuous.' You would have gone on to Heaven if you had been born after the birth of Christ and had the chance to accept him as the son of God, the truth the way the life etc. It's not your fault that you weren't. &lt;strong&gt;That seems unfair — imperfect.&lt;/strong&gt; So tell me,&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this is where we reach the next lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;have any virtuous pagans gotten out of Hell and gone on to Heaven, either because they were just so virtuous or because God Said So?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if there &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; some pre-Christ believers who went on to Heaven, that would mean the creed/religion/system is ultimately still fair and therefore perfect. (He's asking for a rationalization of something he already believes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virgil answers by listing a group of virtuous pre-Christians (since they weren't really &quot;pagans&quot;) who were hand-picked by Christ to enter Heaven: Adam, Abel, Abel's son, Noah, Moses, Abraham, David, Israel, Rachel, &quot;and many more He chose for elevation/among the elect.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ciardi continues in the footnotes to this section to clarify:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;53. &lt;em&gt;descended here:&lt;/em&gt; The legend of the Harrowing of Hell is Apocryphal. It is based on I Peter, iii, 19: &quot;He went and preached unto the spirits in prison.&quot; The legend is that Christ in the glory of His resurrection descended into Limbo and took with Him to Heaven the first human souls to be saved. The event would, accordingly, have occurred in a.d. 33 or 34. Virgil died in 19 B.C. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T11:42:22.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4176" CreationDate="2019-01-15T23:24:29.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's explained in the first chapter. Some women are left fertile so the state can take their ovaries and use the eggs to create the next generation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Still leaning against the incubators he gave them, while the pencils&#xA;  scurried illegibly across the pages, a brief description of the modern&#xA;  fertilizing process; spoke first, of course, of its surgical&#xA;  introduction–&quot;the operation undergone voluntarily for the good of&#xA;  Society, not to mention the fact that it carries a bonus amounting to&#xA;  six months' salary&quot;; continued with some account of the technique for&#xA;  preserving the excised ovary alive and actively developing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also mentions that a fairly high percentage of women are left fertile as insurance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;For of course,&quot; said Mr. Foster, &quot;in the vast majority of cases,&#xA;  fertility is merely a nuisance. One fertile ovary in twelve&#xA;  hundred–that would really be quite sufficient for our purposes. But we&#xA;  want to have a good choice. And of course one must always have an&#xA;  enormous margin of safety. So we allow as many as thirty per cent of&#xA;  the female embryos to develop normally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the same reason, some men would also need to be fertile, but in fact men don't seem be sterilised at all, and the contraception described is entirely up to the woman. Possibly a reflection of the times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5669" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T23:24:29.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9136" CreationDate="2019-01-15T23:33:52.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;h1&gt;This Sounds like Running out of Time by Margaret Peterson Haddix.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jessie Keyser is a 13-year-old girl from the village of Clifton, Indiana, in the 1840s. During a village-wide outbreak of diphtheria, Jessie's mother reveals it is really 1996, and Clifton Village is a tourist attraction, a replica of a historical village with the tourists hidden, watching the village's activity under the ground. Originally it was much more lenient with its villagers when a man named Miles Clifton founded it, but is now very strict and prevents anyone from leaving. Her mother asks her to retrieve a cure for now that her own sister Katie has taken ill; the owners of the attraction ceased to provide modern medical care to the villagers in order to preserve its authenticity. She tells Jessie to get the cure from a man named Isaac Neeley, who protested the opening of Clifton. Jessie's escape will be difficult because Clifton is guarded to ensure that none of the villagers leave or finds out it is 1996. Jessie's mother shows her a hidden escape route that has not been sealed.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_Out_of_Time_(Haddix_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&#xA;Running Out of Time (Haddix novel) - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I think what you read might have been an excerpt from this novel because the dates you gave are (roughly) similar to the dates here, and other than that this seems to match your description pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-15T23:33:52.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9140" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9143" CreationDate="2019-01-16T01:50:41.243" Score="1" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Compare Tom and George (Wilson). What attributes does each possess?&#xA;  Would George have been able to transcend his class circumstances to&#xA;  rise above the ashes? What is class structure like in America today?&#xA;  Can the poorest of the working poor leave their circumstances&#xA;  surrounding their situation? Why or why not? Give specific data as it&#xA;  relates to class structures today - you must research this question&#xA;  and provide statistics to support your analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a question from my little sisters homework on The Great Gatsby. To be honest I have no idea how to tie all the parts of this question together and neither does my sister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She asked her friends who are also a bit confused. Any help would be nice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5670" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T02:26:26.913" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T15:57:05.650" Title="How do I tie the different parts of this question together?" Tags="&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-01-18T01:48:46.317" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9097" CreationDate="2019-01-16T01:57:10.620" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;INTRODUCTION TO THE CHINESE NAME&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The American-Based StackExchange Network ranks below Quora in Alexa. Quora receives a lot of traffic, including traffic from native Chinese speakers with professional competency in at least written English and fluently bilingual heritage speakers. StackExchange, on the other hand, is kind of a niche website, so the population base will definitely reflect this, as of now (January 15, 2019). Therefore, I am going to assume that any person who is reading this will not be familiar with the Chinese language, let alone Chinese culture and society. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chinese name is a complex topic by itself&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia article gives a primer to the Chinese name, and like American names, there are naming trends, regional preferences, and a spectrum of names ranging from very masculine to very feminine. The Chinese people of the People's Republic of China are made up of the Han people and 55 ethnic minorities. The ethnic minorities may or may not have a typical 中华民族 (pinyin: Zhong Hua Min Zu) name pattern. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;ZHAO GUIWENG&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chinese Name:&lt;/strong&gt; 趙貴翁 (Traditional) / 赵贵翁 (Simplified)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 赵 surname is one of the most common surnames among Chinese people. As a surname, it is meaningless. Because the surname is supposed to be meaningless, taking account of the logogram's meaning is a part of making the pun. My monolingual Chinese dictionary (新华字典) says: 战国国名, which means the Warring States. (Sorry, but my knowledge of Chinese history is lacking, so I can't comment on the corrupt aristocracy at that time.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;贵 is part of the given name. &lt;em&gt;aristocratic&lt;/em&gt; is one of the meanings of this character. 翁 is the other part of the given name. &lt;em&gt;old man&lt;/em&gt; is one of the meanings of this character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This name is a pun, if you look at the name at multiple levels. On one level, 赵贵翁 looks like a believable Chinese name. On another level, it looks like a descriptor for a character. 赵 may be taken as an adjective, referring to the Warring States time. 贵 may be taken as an adjective, referring to the high status. 翁 is a noun, referring to an old man. I must note that, in Chinese literature, both descriptors and personal names (姓名) can be used as character names. And I think some works in English literature are also this way. Sometimes, a character may be labelled &quot;The Big Bad Wolf&quot; or &quot;The Old Man&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;GU JIU&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chinese Name:&lt;/strong&gt; 古久 (Traditional and Simplified)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;古 is a surname. It is not a common one, but it is a documented surname. As a surname, it means nothing. As a logogram, it means &quot;ancient&quot;. 久 can be selected as a person's given name. It means &quot;a long time&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This name is a pun, if you look at the name at multiple levels. On one level, 古久 is a plausible personal name (姓名). On another level, 古久 refers to China's long ancient history. When 古时候 is used in Standard Written Chinese, it refers to &quot;ancient times&quot; -- 古 means &quot;ancient&quot; or may refer to &quot;ancient times&quot;; 时候 means &quot;time&quot;. In a Chinese context, &quot;ancient times&quot; is anything up to the Republic of China era of Chinese history, because the Republic of China era is when China becomes modern. As previously mentioned, 久 means &quot;a long time&quot;. On a grammatical level, 古 is symbolic of ancient times and may be taken as the topic in a topic-comment structure. 久 is the adjective. In the Chinese language, adjectives are also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_adjectives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;static verbs&lt;/a&gt;. So, 久 is the verb. The Chinese language is a SVO language. So, 古久 means &quot;[ancient times] [stretches a long time]&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also worth mentioning is that &lt;em&gt;A Madman's Diary&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1918, as part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Culture Movement&lt;/a&gt;, which sought to criticize the old way of life and thinking and modernize China in order to keep up with the rest of the world. China was a great power, but then &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it got humiliated by foreigners/barbarians&lt;/a&gt; - Japanese people and Europeans. So, of course, some measures needed to be done in order to make China great again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work is to make fun of the old Classical Chinese literature and the associated Confucian values. A slightly off-topic but interesting note: my cousins grew up in China. One cousin sent his elementary school literature books to me for study of the Chinese language. The books are structured like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hwjyw.com/textbooks/downloads/zhongwen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these textbooks for Overseas Chinese children&lt;/a&gt;, but they are more tailored to Mainlanders, because (1) Mainland children can identify with specific Chinese holidays more, (2) Mainland children don't need to have English translations mainly because they can't read English, and (3) you don't have to describe the restaurant next door is a &lt;em&gt;Chinese&lt;/em&gt; restaurant if you are already in China. But anyway, in one story I read, it is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;孙中山&lt;/a&gt; (Sun Yat-sen). As a child, he went to school. The point of school was to recite literature. But Sun Yat-sen thought the literature was meaningless to him (duh, it's written in Classical Chinese) and asked the teacher for an explanation. The teacher replied that he was supposed to recite the literature, and he would later come to understand in the future. Then, one classmate asked him why he asked the teacher. Sun Yat-sen said, even if he was beaten, it was important to understand than to memorize blindly. As you can see in this story, Sun Yat-sen is challenging the old way of life and thinking, by becoming more of a critical thinker. This completely ties in with the New Culture Movement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="5643" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T16:11:26.907" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T16:11:26.907" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-16T12:30:12.580" Score="3" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;I only vaguely remember this but I know it wasn't a dream because my mom helped me read out loud with it. I only remember some details but I know it had some art in it, it had an Addams family vibe to it, the little girl was raised by spiders? or ghosts? or something similar? And one of the books was about her first day at a real school with normal kids?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And all I remember is that since she was raised like &quot;goth&quot; and creepy she didn't interact with anyone very well because everyone thought she was scary but I think she also thought they were scary? and I know there were lots of &quot;scary&quot; puns like &quot;scream cheese&quot;. I'm so sorry I know this isn't a lot of detail but that was a long time ago when I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I vaguely remember most of the color used only being grey and purple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5671" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T13:19:03.993" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T21:02:45.363" Title="Oldish (at least 15 years) children's book about a little creepy girl going to normal school for the first time?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9140" CreationDate="2019-01-16T15:25:33.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Compare Tom and George (Wilson).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be done with a Venn Diagram. Draw two big circles on the page. One side will be marked &quot;Tom&quot;. The other side will be marked &quot;George&quot;. The two circles must overlap. On Tom's side, you write Tom's characteristics. What does he look like? How does he behave? What is his personality like? On George's side, you write George's characteristics. In the overlapping middle, you write the shared characteristics. The main purpose of this Venn Diagram is to help you brainstorm and organize ideas for your essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What attributes does each possess?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This should be included in the Venn Diagram.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Would George have been able to transcend his class circumstances to rise above the ashes?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you make your Venn Diagram, you take a look at George's characteristics and imagine him as a real person. If you were George, then would you fulfill the &quot;American Dream&quot;? The American Dream is tied with the Protestant work ethic, in which a person is believed to work hard and succeed based on merit. That success can be stereotypically characterized as a wife, 2.5 kids, a house with a white picket fence, and a dog. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44QysfhXzig&amp;amp;index=32&amp;amp;list=LLs2YCsnmKI82txNzkUx59kQ&amp;amp;t=0s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The American Dream is captured in this song&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What is class structure like in America today?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this part, you probably want to look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American social class&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia may not be the best resource for this, but it does collect a wealth of credible references for your research. If you need help on finding information on social class in America and how people classify social class in America, then you may consult a librarian at your local library (assuming that you are in the United States of America, which has a very robust public library system). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can the poorest of the working poor leave their circumstances surrounding their situation? Why or why not?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After you read information about social class in America, you have to imagine yourself as a member of the working poor. You should also consider the book's portrayal of social class in America. If you were poor, then could you achieve the American Dream regardless of condition? If you believe yes, then explain why. If you believe no, then explain why not. &quot;Why or why not&quot; is another way to say &quot;explain your choice&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Give specific data as it relates to class structures today - you must research this question and provide statistics to support your analysis.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will probably have to do a lot of research on various concepts - American Dream, social class in America, social class classification in America, working poor in America. Race in terms of skin color also plays a big role in social class in America (slavery, racial segregation, race riots, race discrimination, race tensions, race-based gangs and terrorist groups, etc). However, in the story, I think the two characters are white men (or at least, in the movie version, they are portrayed by white men), so that's not going to matter much. Social class can be classified by percentage in America. You may have heard &quot;the top 1%&quot; in the America mass media. The author is likely referring to the top 1% of the American social class system, which controls whatever percentage of the American wealth. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully, my explanations will help you get started on your research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="5643" LastEditDate="2019-01-16T15:57:05.650" LastActivityDate="2019-01-16T15:57:05.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2774" CreationDate="2019-01-16T21:58:57.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ac.qq.com/Comic/comicInfo/id/630166&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original webcomic in Chinese on QQ.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Meaning Of &amp;quot;What if...&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have taken a look at the webcomic in Chinese. From my perspective, this webcomic seems to be filled with sexual innuendos. And it is no surprise that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://yaoi-blcd.tumblr.com/archive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tumblr website&lt;/a&gt; has &amp;quot;yaoi&amp;quot; in the URL. Wikipedia writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yaoi, also known as boys' love or BL, is a genre of fictional media&#xA;originating in Japan that features homoerotic relationships between&#xA;male characters. It is typically created by women for women and is&#xA;distinct from homoerotic media marketed to gay male audiences, such as&#xA;bara, but it also attracts male readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That explains the sexual innuendos. Of course, not every comic appears overtly sexual; it may just focus on the homoerotic relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;What If&amp;quot; is a concern, because Zhan Xixi may be wondering what the other guy is doing in the bathtub after so long. What if he is doing this? What if he's doing that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why is Jian Yi an idiot?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The webcomic mentions &amp;quot;2 hours later&amp;quot; in the beginning. Zhan Xixi wonders what in the world the guy is doing in the bathroom. What if he is doing this? What if he's doing that? Heck, what if he's actually masturbating? When he goes in, he notices that he is still &lt;em&gt;taking a shower&lt;/em&gt;. Imagine that. A person takes a shower for 2 hours and does not appear to be finished. Then, Zhan Xixi says: &amp;quot;你是白痴吗？!!!&amp;quot; In the Chinese language, 白痴 is one word that can be translated to &amp;quot;idiot&amp;quot; in English, but this word has the connotation that the person does not know how to live, does not know how to take care of himself, does not have interest in life. When the person does anything, he fails to do it properly. When the person speaks, he lacks social graces and is not a good conversationalist. In context, 白痴 is a curse word at Jian Yi, because Jian Yi should be finished with his shower by now. He is an &amp;quot;idiot&amp;quot; for not knowing how to take a shower, which is a basic life skill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:21:13.167" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:21:13.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2341" CreationDate="2019-01-17T16:10:36.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote -- whether correctly attributed or not -- counts as a wisecrack. The speaker implies that &quot;victors write the history&quot; works in both directions: by keeping the log, he could keep the log favorable. Indeed, after the blood has been let the only lasting significance of a battle is what the history books say about it, which is why (for instance) nobody can agree on the Liancourt rocks. (D'ok-do, a part of S. Korea, or Takeshima, a part of Japan, according to whose history books you read.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5675" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T16:10:36.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2341" CreationDate="2019-01-17T16:22:47.403" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is just a species of wit and one that ought not be taken too seriously. Churchill is riffing on the claim that history is written by the victors. However, history far outlasts the victories of the victors - where the Pharoahs, the Caesars and the conquistadors now? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is he referring to the fact that he will be writing a history of the time he lived in (as he was a prolific writer of history)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nobel Prize award committee was kind to Churchill, they awarded him the 1953 prize for literature for his history of the World War II in six volumes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, more that his actions will dictate the historical record?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History herself and historians has been unkind, in that these volumes have remained largely unread and ignored, particularly by historians. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T15:12:26.200" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T15:12:26.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9150" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-17T18:31:25.263" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just remembered this book series that I read as a teen. I can’t remember the name of them and it’s killing me! I know this a long shot but here it goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s about a girl going to college (or it could also have been some sort of private high school that has dorms). Weird events start happening while she is there. It’s a series with maybe 3-4 books. She tries to solve the events with a friend I think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t get the impression these books were best sellers at the time but I could be wrong. Like I said I know it’s a long shot but I just had to try. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5677" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:53:31.890" Title="Trying to find a book from the 2000s geared towards young adult/teens" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9150" CreationDate="2019-01-17T18:53:31.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it! It was the Blue is for Nightmares series. Thought it might help someone else!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5677" LastActivityDate="2019-01-17T18:53:31.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-18T08:20:30.997" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago, I seem to recall, I read a quote that discouraged the use of superlative words for mundane events, arguing that then, when we found something truly superlative before us, we'd find ourselves short of words to adequately describe what is remarkable in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the author was English and the example talked of prettiness and beauty, but I'm missing the wording and the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sorry for the vague description, but my memory refuses to help any further! I would very much like to pinpoint the exact quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5674" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T08:20:30.997" Title="Quote about using accurate words (e.g. not to exaggerate beauty) to not wear down their meaning" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9240" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:06:23.137" Score="7" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a short story about two painters. They realize that nobody ever becomes famous or earns any money from their work until after they die. So they decide to fake one of them being terminally ill, while really he is busy painting a bunch of paintings. Meanwhile, the other one is on the road selling the paintings for a decent value because eventually the guy is going to die. Eventually, they fake the death of the sick one, and sell the paintings for even more, since he's now dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recall, that at the end of the story, it's heavily hinted that the storyteller is the &quot;dead&quot; guy. I think he was telling it to another traveler, and I want to say they were in a hotel lobby, but it may have been a restaurant, or some other public place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this was a short story, not a play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5684" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T07:09:13.193" Title="Looking for a short story about painters who fake a death" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9142" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:32:22.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be a book based on the Discovery Kids show &quot;Growing Up Creepie,&quot; 2006-2008?  Though I can't find a book, the story details match your description. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growing_Up_Creepie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As told in the opening introduction and in the episode &quot;Creepie Crawling&quot;, Creepie was an infant left on the doorstep of the Dweezwold Mansion, which is home to a family of various insects. The family took her in and raised her as one of their own. She must now adjust to a life surrounded by a society of insectophobic humans as she attends Middlington Middle School and keeps her home life secret in order to protect both herself and her family.&quot;  Images show a predominately black and purple color scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6IYAD.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6IYAD.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5683" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T18:09:01.080" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T18:09:01.080" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9157" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9166" CreationDate="2019-01-18T15:44:48.933" Score="2" ViewCount="1783" Body="&lt;p&gt;So a lot of stories happen after a great big disaster. The cold war heated up, environmental change finally hit an abrupt point of no return, plants or the dead walk and hunt, that kind of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hallmark of such stories is that society has collapsed: survival is unsure, life is harder, morality is a luxury by some, and the works of science and culture of the recent past are unattainable. So far, so clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet some stories talk about a time much later than the above: the world has come to an end, and then started anew. Maybe humanity has gone from nations to tribes, far, far from its peak, but is just as far from its lowest point. Conditions are improving, and the world is 'stable' once more. The apocalypse isn't your cause for discomfort, but the reason for the gulf between you and all that awe you by their discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the question is this: what's the name of the genre of such a story? 'Post-apocalyptic' is still a fit, technically, but seems so far from the tone in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5685" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T15:48:25.443" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T14:14:09.493" Title="What is the genre after post-apocalypse?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9159" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9165" CreationDate="2019-01-18T18:14:17.740" Score="3" ViewCount="517" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the latter half of The Republic, book 5, Socrates and Glaucon are discussing the difference between knowledge of things things that exist and ignorance about things that don't exist. They suppose that opinions, being different from both ignorance and knowledge, must pertain to things neither existing nor nonexistent. The following excerpt from the conversation ensues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Socrates: Then what remains to be discovered is the object which partakes&#xA;  equally of the nature of being and not-being, and cannot rightly be&#xA;  termed either, pure and simple; this unknown term, when discovered, we&#xA;  may truly call the subject of opinion, and assign each to their proper&#xA;  faculty,—the extremes to the faculties of the extremes and the mean to&#xA;  the faculty of the mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glaucon: True.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This being premised, I would ask the gentleman who is of opinion that&#xA;  there is no absolute or unchangeable idea of beauty—in whose opinion&#xA;  the beautiful is the manifold—he, I say, your lover of beautiful&#xA;  sights, who cannot bear to be told that the beautiful is one, and the&#xA;  just is one, or that anything is one—to him I would appeal, saying,&#xA;  Will you be so very kind, sir, as to tell us whether, of all these&#xA;  beautiful things, there is one which will not be found ugly; or of the&#xA;  just, which will not be found unjust; or of the holy, which will not&#xA;  also be unholy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, he replied; the beautiful will in some point of view be found&#xA;  ugly; and the same is true of the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And may not the many which are doubles be also halves?—doubles, that&#xA;  is, of one thing, and halves of another?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quite true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And things great and small, heavy and light, as they are termed, will&#xA;  not be denoted by these any more than by the opposite names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;True; both these and the opposite names will always attach to all of&#xA;  them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And can any one of those many things which are called by particular&#xA;  names be said to be this rather than not to be this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He replied: They are like the punning riddles which are asked at&#xA;  feasts or the children's puzzle about the eunuch aiming at the bat,&#xA;  with what he hit him, as they say in the puzzle, and upon what the bat&#xA;  was sitting. The individual objects of which I am speaking are also a&#xA;  riddle, and have a double sense: nor can you fix them in your mind,&#xA;  either as being or not-being, or both, or neither.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could someone please explain the riddle at the end of that excerpt to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5687" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T00:11:00.343" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T13:59:49.467" Title="What does the riddle at the end of Plato's Republic book 5 mean?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;plato&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2775" CreationDate="2019-01-18T19:13:53.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following Latinized transcriptions - Zhan Zhengxi, Zhan Zheng Xi, and Zhan Xixi - are all Latin-based, specifically Pinyin-based, transcriptions of the original Chinese characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Zhan surname may refer to: 展, 湛, 詹, 占, or 战/戰. They are all converted into Zhan in Pinyin. Without reading the original Chinese, it is impossible to know which logogram is the character's real surname. Same goes for the given name. Chinese is a tonal language, and the tone can help with logogram identification. But even then, it is a wild guess . . . unless someone reads the original Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character's real name may be 展正喜. 正 is a fitting name for a boy. It is used in Kim Jong-un's Hanja name. 喜 makes sense for a boy; a boy gives pleasure to his family. In Pinyin transliteration, the name may be written as ZHAN ZHENG XI, treating each character as a separate word. The name may also be transliterated as ZHAN ZHENGXI, treating the family name as one word and the whole given name as another word, similar to English format. In English name order, 展正喜 may be written as ZHENGXI ZHAN, because ZHENGXI is the given name, and ZHAN is the family name. However, ZHENGXI ZHAN may be too obnoxious, because no one writes the name in all capital letters. So, Zhengxi Zhan would be preferred. If the guy chooses an English name, such as Brian, he would be known as Brian Zhan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first picture, the name is written as Zhan Zhengxi, because that is currently the set Western preference for writing Chinese names. In the second picture, note the exclamation points. That should tell you that the character utters each syllable separately and emphatically. That's &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it is separated. In the third picture, Zhan Xixi may be a &quot;little name&quot;（小名）or a nickname（外号）. The &quot;little name&quot; is a special kind of nickname given at birth, making it different from a regular nickname. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5643" LastEditorUserId="5643" LastEditDate="2019-01-18T19:24:56.253" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T19:24:56.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9157" CreationDate="2019-01-18T19:44:26.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;SF Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; describes this sub-genre under the heading ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ruined_earth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ruined Earth&lt;/a&gt;’, by which it means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the longer-range sf aftermath of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/disaster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Disaster&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/holocaust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holocaust&lt;/a&gt; scenarios&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;typified by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rusting symbols of a technological past protruding into a more primitive, natural, future landscape&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The settings of both works mentioned by the OP, the role-playing game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numenera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Numenera&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the video game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Zero_Dawn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Horizon Zero Dawn&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, feature a primitive society living amid the ruins left by a past technologically advanced society, so ‘Ruined Earth’ seems like a reasonable term under which to categorise them. (&lt;em&gt;Numenera&lt;/em&gt; also has elements of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/far_future&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Far Future&lt;/a&gt; sub-genre.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notable novels in the Ruined Earth sub-genre include Walter Miller’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Canticle for Leibowitz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Russell Hoban’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riddley_Walker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Riddley Walker&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, John Wyndham’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chrysalids&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chrysalids&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, and Ursula Le Guin’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Always_Coming_Home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Always Coming Home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the &lt;em&gt;SF Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; entry starts with the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Term used in this encyclopedia for […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I interpret as meaning that the term had to be invented since there was no term in widespread use. This is a common feature of &lt;em&gt;SF Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; thematic entries: the editors had to develop much of the terminology they needed as they wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-01-18T19:44:26.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9159" CreationDate="2019-01-19T13:07:18.597" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The riddle is given, together with its answer, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deipnosophistae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Deipnosophistae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenaeus_of_Naucratis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Athenaeus of Naucratis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And a similar [riddle] is that of Panarces, mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearchus_of_Soli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clearchus&lt;/a&gt;, in his Essay on Griphi [riddles], that “A man who is not a man, with a stone which was not a stone, struck a bird which was not a bird, sitting on a tree which was not a tree.” For the things alluded to here are a eunuch, a piece of pumice-stone, a bat, and a narthex¹. And Plato, in the fifth book of his Laws², alludes to this riddle, where he says, that those philosophers who occupy themselves about minute arts, are like those who, at banquets, doubt what to eat, and resemble too the boys’ riddle about the stone thrown by the eunuch, and about the bat, and about the place from which they say that the eunuch struck down the bat, and the engine with which he did it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;¹ “Νἀρθηξ, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferula_communis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a tall umbelliferous plant&lt;/a&gt;, (Lat. &lt;em&gt;ferula&lt;/em&gt;) with a slight knotted pithy stalk, in which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0020,001:567&amp;amp;lang=original&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prometheus conveyed the spark of fire&lt;/a&gt; from heaven to earth.” — &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aalphabetic+letter%3D*n%3Aentry+group%3D3%3Aentry%3Dna%2Frqhc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L. &amp;amp; S. Gr. Eng. Lex. in voc. νἀρθηξ&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;² This is a mistake of Athenaeus. The passage referred to occurs in &#xA;  the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Rep.+5.479&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fifth book of the De Republica&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Athenaeus of Naucratis, &lt;em&gt;Deipnosophistae&lt;/em&gt; X.76. Prose translation and notes by C. D. Yonge (1854), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/b24871825_0002/page/714&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Deipnosophists: or, Banquet of the learned, of Athenaeus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, London: Bohn, p. 714.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenaeus_of_Naucratis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Athenaeus&lt;/a&gt; was writing in the 3rd century CE; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearchus_of_Soli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clearchus of Soli&lt;/a&gt; was a pupil of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle&lt;/a&gt; who wrote a treatise Περὶ γρίφων (On Riddles), now lost, in the 3rd century BCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bat riddle has philosophical content. The first two elements expose a problem with definition by properties: if you define ‘man’ by a list of properties including ‘possesses testicles’ then this goes wrong for eunuchs; if you define ‘stone’ by a list of properties including ‘sinks in water’ then this goes wrong for pumice. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato’s&lt;/a&gt; attempt at a solution to this problem was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory of forms&lt;/a&gt;. The last two elements of the riddle expose a problem in classification of living things by their shared characteristics: the class of ‘winged vertebrates’ is unsatisfactory because it includes bats as well as birds; the class of ‘tall plants’ is unsatisfactory because it includes giant fennel as well as trees. This problem is solved by the theory of evolution, which distinguishes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;homologies&lt;/a&gt; (shared characteristics resulting from common descent) from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_evolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;analogies&lt;/a&gt; (shared characteristics resulting from independent adaptation to similar environments).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T13:59:49.467" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T13:59:49.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9157" CreationDate="2019-01-19T14:14:09.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees has &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9162/17&quot;&gt;provided&lt;/a&gt; a term which may be used (albeit perhaps not in &lt;em&gt;widepread&lt;/em&gt; use) for the specific subgenre you're asking about. But in general, stories of this type &lt;strong&gt;are still called post-apocalyptic fiction&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the Wikipedia page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalyptic_and_post-apocalyptic_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story may involve attempts to prevent an apocalypse event, deal with the impact and consequences of the event itself, or it may be post-apocalyptic, set after the event. The time frame may be immediately after the catastrophe, focusing on the travails or psychology of survivors, the way to maintain the human race alive and together as one, or considerably later, often including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization has been forgotten (or mythologized). Post-apocalyptic stories often take place in a non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements of society and technology remain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it seems clear that &amp;quot;apocalyptic&amp;quot; would be for stories that take place during, or perhaps in the &lt;em&gt;immediate&lt;/em&gt; aftermath of, an apocalypse, while &amp;quot;post-apocalyptic&amp;quot; is still used for stories set generations or eons after the apocalypse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sources agree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Post-apocalyptic fiction can be set in the current day or the far off future. Additionally, the story can take place right after the cataclysmic event or years after the event. In post-apocalyptic novels, technology can be that which we have never seen before, or there can be no technology at all. Also,  characters can remember what the world was like, or they can’t remember at all what the world was like and will fantasize about the way it used to be or even go so far as to create myths about the world before the destruction (often our current day).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2014/10/21/genre-guide-post-apocalyptic-fiction-for-teens/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Young Adult Library Services Association&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mythbuilders.com/brief-history-post-apocalyptic-fiction/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Myth Builders' article&lt;/a&gt; abdout post-apocalyptic fiction mentions several stories, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Canticle for Leibowitz&lt;/a&gt;, which, despite being set centuries after the apocalypse, are still widely accepted as works of post-apocalyptic literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &lt;strong&gt;regardless of whether or not this subgenre can be given its own name, it does count as part of post-apocalyptic fiction, not a separate thing.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T14:14:09.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9167" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-19T14:53:44.880" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T14:53:44.880" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T14:53:44.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9168" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-19T14:53:44.880" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Iranian physician and philosopher Avicenna or Ibn Sīnā (980 - 1037) and his works. His most notable works include 'Kitāb al-Šifāʾ' (The Book of Healing or 'Sufficientia') and 'al-Qānūn fī al-Ṭibb' (The Canon of Medicine). His works originally in Persian should use the [persian-literature] tag, while his works originally in Arabic should use the [arabic-literature] tag instead. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:56:52.893" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:56:52.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:39:31.163" Score="5" ViewCount="8721" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; by Harper Lee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jem’s nose wrinkled. ‘Are we as poor as the Cunninghams?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Not exactly. The Cunninghams are country folks, farmers, and the crash hit them hardest.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus said the professional people were poor because the the farmers were poor. As Maycomb County was farm country, nickels and dimes were hard to come by for doctors and dentists and lawyers. &lt;strong&gt;Entailment was only part of Mr Cunningham’s vexations. The acres not entailed were mortgaged to the hilt, and the little cash he made went to interest.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the passage in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T19:01:11.043" Title="What does &quot;entailment&quot; mean in &quot;To Kill a Mockingbird&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9170" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9176" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:50:02.477" Score="9" ViewCount="1045" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2008/how-much-weight-should-we-give-authors-declarations-of-their-intent-after-the-f&quot;&gt;How much weight should we give authors&amp;#39; declarations of their intent after the fact?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to give a concrete example of what I'm asking about, I'm thinking in particular about &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; books and movies. Since the book was written entirely from the perspective of Katniss, the movie has a significant amount of detail that the books didn't. For example, in the movies President Snowe explains why they have the Hunger Games in the first place instead of, for example, just rounding up kids at random and executing them on the spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suzanne Collins is, at a minimum, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed as one of the first movie's screenwriters&lt;/a&gt;. She's not listed as a screenwriter for all of them, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games:_Mockingjay_%E2%80%93_Part_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; part 1&lt;/a&gt;), but she was presumably still involved in the creation of all of the movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, &lt;em&gt;assuming that authorial intent has some bearing on how we interpret the text&lt;/em&gt;, is it &amp;quot;valid&amp;quot; for us to use the additional information introduced in the movies to interpret the books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T07:07:14.087" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T07:07:14.087" Title="Is it reasonable to use the movie version of a book to interpret the book when the same author wrote both?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;&lt;authorial-intent&gt;&lt;canon&gt;&lt;adaptations&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9171" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9172" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" Score="0" Body="For questions related to the relationship between a book and its movie version. If the question is purely about movies or television, consider asking on the Movies and TV Stack Exchange site instead." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T18:51:11.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9173" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:52:23.450" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A canon is a collection or selection of works regarded as genuine or important in some way. There are several related uses of the term:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of works that are accepted by a religion as genuine and inspired, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblical canon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of works that are known or believed to be genuine works of an author, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_attribution_studies#The_Shakespeare_canon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare canon&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of works that are important within a culture and considered worthy of study, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_canon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Western canon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A collection of works that are agreed as portraying a fictional universe, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherlock Holmes canon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except in sense 3, non-canonical works are known as &lt;em&gt;apocrypha&lt;/em&gt; (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_apocrypha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblical apocrypha&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_apocrypha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare apocrypha&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sherlockholmespu00doyl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherlock Holmes apocrypha&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T14:32:27.097" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T14:32:27.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9174" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:52:23.450" Score="0" Body="Questions about the collection or selection of genuine or important works of literature. This includes questions about accepted religious works (for example, the Biblical canon), the genuine works of an author (for example, the Shakespeare canon), important works in a culture (for example, the Western canon) and works agreed as portraying a fictional universe (for example, the Sherlock Holmes canon)." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T14:32:27.097" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T14:32:27.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9169" CreationDate="2019-01-19T18:55:34.820" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/entailment&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, the word &quot;entail&quot; means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To abridge, settle, or limit succession to real property. An estate whose succession is limited to certain people rather than being passed to all heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In real property, a fee tail is the conveyance of land subject to certain limitations or restrictions, namely, that it may only descend to certain specified heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, this was a way of preventing the land from being sold or inherited outside of the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the land was entailed evidently caused him some financial difficulty because he couldn't sell the land to raise cash. It would also mean that he wouldn't be able to borrow money against it, because the fact that he wasn't allowed to sell it would mean that he also couldn't use it as collateral. (That's why the book that says that the land that &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; entailed was mortgaged to the hilt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book implies that he had consulted Atticus Finch on the entailment, which seems to suggest that he was actively trying to find a way to sell the land because he needed the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of a similar legal arrangement is in &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, where the land was entailed in such a way that only male family members could inherit it, so all of the Bennet daughters were being deprived of their sole source of income.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-01-19T19:01:11.043" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T19:01:11.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9170" CreationDate="2019-01-19T19:40:48.187" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding authorial intent after the fact, a number of complaints from readers boil down to &quot;If the author wanted to include that bit, it should have been included in the books to begin with.&quot; These are stricter textualists, who proclaim that canon is only what's on the pages of the novels, period. So they object to the idea that JK Rowling can say that 20 years ago she intended for Dumbledore to be gay, and Nagini to be a woman under a curse, when that was not spelled out in the original seven books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a third party makes a movie or series of movies about a text or texts (Peter Jackson with Tolkien, the Marvel Cinematic Universe vs. the comics), readers can argue that they are from different authors, and therefore &quot;movie canon&quot; is not &quot;textual canon.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what you're posing is that the writer/creator of the &lt;em&gt;text&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;additionally&lt;/em&gt; a writer/creator of the &lt;em&gt;film.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think in that instance, it's valid to consider that the writer is &quot;including that bit&quot; which didn't make it onto the pages. In the specific case of &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games,&lt;/em&gt; Collins chose to stay in first person and did not allow Katniss to overhear anything Snow might have said about the origins of the Games. The films &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; allow that perspective, so she now has the opportunity to canonize those ideas. Similarly, since Rowling wrote the screenplays of &lt;em&gt;Fantastic Beasts,&lt;/em&gt; whatever she is writing and creating can be considered part of the same universe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But: &quot;valid&quot; does not equal &quot;obligatory.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; As a reader/audience member, you are free to declare that for yourself, film canon and textual canon are not congruent. &#xA;Many Potter fans consider &lt;em&gt;The Cursed Child&lt;/em&gt; to be Rowling's fanfic of her own universe because certain aspects of it seem so out of character and contradictory of book canon. You can ignore the prequel trilogy of &lt;em&gt;Star Wars&lt;/em&gt; because of quality problems, but accept &lt;em&gt;Rebels&lt;/em&gt; as canon. Certain Trekkies cheerfully ignore &lt;em&gt;Star Trek V,&lt;/em&gt; VOY's episode &quot;Threshold,&quot; or the entire Abramsverse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; to use the films to contribute to your interpretation of the books, I think you have a solid argument because they are written by the same person. But they are not on the same unequivocable footing as Book 4 of 7.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-20T04:22:08.267" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T04:22:08.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9170" CreationDate="2019-01-19T23:33:43.233" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is generally a bad idea to assume that the movie is the same as the book. Even when the author is a stickler for control, and manages to get his or her own way, things must be adapted for the screen. Frequently characters are omitted or sidestepped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite example is Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead,' where she was both author and screenwriter. She tried for tight control, but still had to omit some of her lengthy novel's scenes and characters. Here's a good article that contrasts her experiences (including the issues of censorship and ad-hoc rewriting) against the usual situation for screenwriters.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/AR/AR4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://productioncode.dhwritings.com/AR/AR4.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Occasionally the movie appears first, and a novelization, perhaps ghost-written, appears later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5692" LastActivityDate="2019-01-19T23:33:43.233" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T04:06:41.927" Score="4" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;E. M. Forster's short story '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Machine Stops&lt;/a&gt;' was published in the 1909 edition of the &lt;em&gt;Oxford &amp;amp; Cambridge Review&lt;/em&gt; and was prescient in terms of thinking about the downsides of the Internet - well before the Internet was invented - the circulation of gossip and of third-hand hearsay masquerading as informed opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that E. M. Forster was writing around eighty years before the Internet was invented, has anyone theorised what inspired him to come up with technology in this story as well as the world explored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T21:50:26.203" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T22:51:22.270" Title="What inspired E. M. Forster's short story 'The Machine Stops'?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;e-m-forster&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9185" CreationDate="2019-01-20T04:29:39.810" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian writer famous for writing &lt;em&gt;Hunger&lt;/em&gt; and awarded the Nobel literature prize in the 1920s, sent Goebbels, Hitler's minister for Propaganda, his Nobel medal in 1943 as a gift, wrote a week after Hitler died:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a warrior, a warrior for mankind, and a prophet for the gospel of justice for all nations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Knut Hamsun by this and was he aware of the holocaust when he wrote it? And did he write this because of it, or despite it, or from ignorance of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T19:45:37.467" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:18:13.997" Title="What prompted Knut Hamsun to write his eulogy for Hitler?" Tags="&lt;knut-hamsun&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9170" CreationDate="2019-01-20T08:57:05.967" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;When trying to determine authorial intent, it is reasonable to use any source from that author, as long as it is not contradicted by a more direct source. The only problem with using movies in which the author had input is that you don't know how much is from the author and not others, and how much of it was changed for the sake of the adaptation, e.g., to look good on screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, simply showing information from the movie can be used to argue authorial intent, but cannot prove it by itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the case given in the Question, you have a rather significant detail that fills in important information about the plot in the book and movie. There isn't much reason that the explanation would be different in the book than in the movie. You state the author was rather involved in the making of the movie in question. And the author has not made any contradictory statements. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can thus make a reasonable assertion that this scene most likely represents the author's intent. Not simply because it is in the movie, but because of those other factors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if you wanted to assert the exact physical form a spell from Harry Potter took, you would be on far shakier ground. Such a detail is rather insignificant. And it would be very possible that something was made to look different on screen. It is reasonable that the author did not concern themselves with this. (Plus spells looked different in different movies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the author's heavy involvement in these adaptations, it would not be reasonable to infer authorial intent from the way a spell was depicted. You would need further evidence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5697" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T08:57:05.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9182" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-20T19:42:36.073" Score="5" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Paradise Lost, Milton depicts the Greek and Egyptian &quot;gods&quot; as among the fallen angels. It does not seem to matter whether the individual god had an evil or good character in its original myths. As these gods are depicted as so humanlike in their theologies, I struggle to imagine them as monstrous devils of evil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the author depict the gods in such a sympathetic manner? And why doesn't their portrayal in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; differ based on whether they were good or evil in their original myths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5698" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T10:42:13.817" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T18:24:25.097" Title="Paradise Lost pagan gods" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9182" CreationDate="2019-01-20T20:07:28.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6174/is-john-miltons-lucifer-a-tragic-hero&quot;&gt;Is John Milton&amp;#39;s Lucifer a tragic hero?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One interesting feature of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; is that the demons are presented as multi-dimensional, complicated characters - likely even more so than the &quot;good&quot; characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could even make a good case that Lucifer is a tragic hero. He certainly displays many heroic qualities - fortitude, charisma, loyalty to his friends. (His downfall, of course, is his arrogance, which causes him to make a terrible mistake and set the events of the story in motion). Certainly, many of the demons also have human-like, or even heroic, character traits too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I completely agree - I think that that's exactly the effect that Milton was going for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-20T20:07:28.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9184" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16332" CreationDate="2019-01-20T21:25:53.643" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall that somewhere Flannery O'Connor complained about the condescending letter she received from her publisher, and I would like the exact reference / quote.&#xA;The complaint was something along the lines of 'it used terms that one uses in addressing a child'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-01-21T02:54:29.313" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T05:46:53.963" Title="Flannery O'Connor's complaint about a certain letter" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;flannery-oconnor&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9180" CreationDate="2019-01-21T04:08:30.137" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends who do you ask, but it seems simply that he was a Nazi sympathiser&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the official &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://hamsun.dk/en/was-knut-hamsun-a-nazi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamsun Online&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; site states that he wasn't a Nazi because his works don't express Nazi ideology (at the same time, I've found a neo-nazi site, that was saying something exactly opposite, but I don't feel comfortable providing links to it) and because &amp;quot;he had an argument with Hitler&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;*&lt;/sup&gt;, you can't ignore the fact, that he gave his Nobel prize to Goebbels, he supported Germany in invasion of Soviet Union and war with Great Britain (he was a serious anglophobe) and (arguably) the occupation of Norway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet indeed, he was acquitted after the war: he was found too old and too senile to be convicted and he pleaded ignorance regarding the Nazi war crimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/28/books/28hams.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned, Is Now Celebrated&lt;/a&gt; by Walter Gibbs, &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, 27 February 2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/sep/10/knut.hamsun.nazi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nazi novelist you should read&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian Books Blog&lt;/em&gt;, 10 September 2008.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newsinenglish.no/2014/10/13/hamsuns-meeting-with-adolph-hitler/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamsun’s meeting with Adolf Hitler&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;News in English&lt;/em&gt;, 13 October 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;* In this meeting, Hamsun was trying to convince Hitler to strengthen the power of head of the puppet government &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vidkun Quisling&lt;/a&gt;, while Hitler was trying to use Hamsun to raise the morale of German elites. Indeed the meeting ended with furious Hitler and Hamsun in tears. &lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T05:18:13.997" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T05:18:13.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9186" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-21T12:54:42.567" Score="3" ViewCount="1260" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 3 of &lt;em&gt;To Kill A Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; by Harper Lee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Walter Cunningham] ‘Reason I can’t pass the first grade, Mr Finch, is I’ve had to stay over ever’ spring an’ help Papa with the choppin’, &lt;strong&gt;but there’s another’n at the house now that’s field size’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘Did you pay a bushel of potatoes for him?’ I asked, but Atticus shook his head at me.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the sentences in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T13:40:00.783" Title="Explain &quot;field size&quot; and &quot;bushel of potatoes&quot; in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9186" CreationDate="2019-01-21T13:40:00.783" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Another'n at the the house that's field size&quot; means &quot;another child/sibling [another one] at the house who is now old enough/big enough to go into the field and help.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier in the text, Atticus explains that Walter Cunningham is so poor that he can only pay Atticus in barter: nuts, firewood, turnip greens. Other professionals in the area accept the same kind of payment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the Cunninghams had no money to pay a lawyer, they simply paid us with &#xA;  what they had. “Did you know,” said Atticus, “that Dr. Reynolds works the same &#xA;  way? He charges some folks a bushel of potatoes for delivery of a baby.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scout, too young to understand the humiliation of this kind of poverty, thinks this is normal. So when Walter says there's another sibling at home, Scout asks if the family paid the doctor for the baby's delivery with potatoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atticus (and later the cook Calpurnia in the same scene) are chastising Scout for her bad manners. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T13:40:00.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9179" CreationDate="2019-01-21T22:51:22.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the introduction to his &lt;em&gt;Collected Short Stories&lt;/em&gt;, Forster said &quot;The Machine Stops&quot; was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Machine Stops&quot; was published in 1909, which gives a later limit as to which of Wells' stories or novels he could have been responding to. Someone more familiar with H. G. Wells' work may have a more definite answer, but my suspicion is that it might have been &lt;em&gt;When the Sleeper Wakes&lt;/em&gt;, a story originally published in 1898-99 and republished in a revised form as &lt;em&gt;The Sleeper Awakes&lt;/em&gt; in 1910. &lt;em&gt;When the Sleeper Wakes&lt;/em&gt; features devices called Babble Machines, which are used to spread propaganda and subdue the population:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so far as the more prosperous classes were concerned, in all the more comfortable private apartments of the city were fixed Babble Machines that would speak directly a lever was pulled. The tenant of the apartment could connect this with the cables of any of the great News Syndicates that he preferred. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm right, Forster was probably being ironic or semi-ironic by describing this as one of Wells' &quot;heavens&quot;, since the future society in &lt;em&gt;When the Sleeper Wakes&lt;/em&gt; is not exactly a utopia. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3026" LastActivityDate="2019-01-21T22:51:22.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T00:07:07.947" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/56361/56361-h/56361-h.htm#Page_26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ruined Cottage&lt;/a&gt;” by William Wordsworth, the narrator listens to an old man sitting outside of an abandoned cottage tell of the family that used to live therein. The man describes how he was once friendly with the family living there, and how he embarked on various travels and visited the cottage each time he happened to be in the area, sometimes going years before seeing the cottage again. Because of this, the old man is able to observe the gradual changes that overtook the cottage as if they were sudden, and he is shaken by the tragedy that afflicts the once-happy family living there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem makes use of a trope that I have noticed in other poems, short stories, books, and even movies: a narrator that goes away and returns to observe a place/person that he/she once knew after a long period of time, emphasizing the changes having taken place in the narrator’s absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this trope have a name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5272" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T11:52:22.453" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T11:52:22.453" Title="“Returning Traveller” Trope" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9196" CreationDate="2019-01-22T09:06:51.390" Score="13" ViewCount="2211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0043&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 43&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Austen, when Elizabeth visits Pemberley with her aunt Mrs. Gardiner, she looks at the splendour of Pemberley, and thinks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And of this place, I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. But no,”—recollecting herself—“that could never be; my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me; I should not have been allowed to invite them.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did she think that? Why wouldn't she be able to invite her aunt and uncle over if she married Darcy and became the mistress of Pemberley? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5648" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T11:39:21.910" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T12:54:56.150" Title="Pride and Prejudice: Why did Elizabeth think &quot;my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me&quot;?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T12:38:37.030" Score="1" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/edgar_allan_poe/poems/18852&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Annabel Lee&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is one of many pieces of writing by Edgar Allan Poe which explore the theme of a beloved woman who died young. As with other such works, most famously &quot;The Raven&quot;, critics have speculated about who this young woman might have been based on, e.g. Poe's own wife or his mother. But I'm curious if there's any significance to be extracted from the &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; &quot;Annabel Lee&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;Do we have any clues about how or why Poe chose this name&lt;/strong&gt; (which might be separate from the inspiration behind the &lt;em&gt;character&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T12:38:37.030" Title="Significance of the name Annabel Lee?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6767" CreationDate="2019-01-22T15:30:32.307" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The match can’t be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match#Friction_matches&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;friction match&lt;/a&gt; as these were not invented until 1826, long after the publication of ‘The Female Vagrant’ in the first edition of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm#poem5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1798. Instead, the blue flame indicates that it is a &lt;strong&gt;sulphur match&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before sulphur matches, the way to light an oil lamp (if you didn’t have a fire already burning) was to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_striker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flint and steel&lt;/a&gt; to make sparks to ignite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinder&lt;/a&gt;, blow on the tinder until it burst into flame, use the burning tinder to light a wax taper or paper spill, and use the taper to light the lamp. Persuading the tinder to burn hot enough to light the taper was a delicate and time-consuming process, and sulphur matches (which caught fire at a lower temperature) sped up this step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even with sulphur matches, the process was tiresome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was young [in the 1790s], the process of obtaining fire, in every house in England, with few exceptions, was as rude, as laborious, and as uncertain, as the effort of the Indian to produce a flame by the friction of two dry sticks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The night-lamp and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rushlight&lt;/a&gt; were for the comparatively luxurious. In the bedrooms of the cottager, the artisan, and the small tradesman, the infant at its mother’s side too often awoke, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1674)/Book_III#3:35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like Milton’s Nightingale&lt;/a&gt;, ‘darkling,’ but that nocturnal note was something different from ‘harmonious numbers.’ The mother was soon on her feet; the friendly tinder-box was duly sought. Click, click, click; not a spark tells upon the sullen blackness. More rapidly does the flint ply the sympathetic steel. The room is bright with the radiant shower. But the child, familar enough with the operation, is impatient at its tediousness, and shouts till the mother is frantic. At length one lucky spark does its office—the tinder is alight. Now for the match. It will not burn. A gentle breath is wafted into the murky box; the face that leans over the tinder is in a glow. Another match, and another, and another. They are all damp. The toil-worn father ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet_(The_Illustrated_Shakespeare,_1847)#pagenumber_19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;swears a prayer or two&lt;/a&gt;;’ the baby is inexorable; and the misery is only ended when the good man has gone to the street door, and after long shivering, has obtained a light from the watchman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Knight (1859). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HeR4AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA500&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Once Upon a Time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, London: John Murray, p. 501.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process was improved by the discovery of chemical ignition in the 18th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Sulphur matches] continued in use throughout the 18th century, but after about 1780 phosphorus devices in various forms began to replace them. For instance, the ‘philosophical bottles’ were small vessels containing a partially oxidised yellow phosphorus and kept tightly corked; when a light was wanted a sulphur match was pushed in, turned round and quickly drawn out, igniting on contact with the air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Needham (1962). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/ScienceAndCivilisationInChina/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China_Vol_4-1_Physics_and_Physical_Technology_Physics#page/n100/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science and Civilisation in China&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 4 Part 1: Physics&lt;/a&gt;, Cambridge University Press, p. 71.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These bottles probably arrived too late, or too expensively, for the characters in Wordsworth’s poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chemical light-producer was a complex and ornamental casket, sold at a guinea. In a year or so there were pretty portable cases of a phial and matches, which enthusiastic young housekeepers regarded as the cheapest of all treasures at five shillings. By-and-by the light-box was sold as low as a shilling. The fire revolution was slowly approaching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Knight, p. 502&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T15:30:32.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9191" CreationDate="2019-01-22T16:20:10.683" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, we should note that Elizabeth is very specific here: she is only talking about her uncle and aunt, not of any other relatives. While it is perhaps natural that her thoughts should first go to those she was in company with, it is not so natural that they should not continue to her closer family. If it was a matter of shutting out all her family, then surely her father and Jane would be missed as much or more than the Gardiners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why the Gardiners? They certainly seem like the most respectably behaved of all her relations we meet. The answer lies in the class system of the time, and what was considered a genteel occupation. In another passage, Elizabeth describes hers and Darcy's position in life as equal: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Chapter 56&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is at least formally correct. While the staggering difference in income would likely have precluded such a match in practice, there were no formal difference in rank, partly because the incomes were still derived from the same sources: land, and interest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One formal requirement of being genteel was how money was generated. Land and interest were the most unobjectionable sources of income, and what the country gentry that is the focus of most of Austen's novels lived on. There were also a few occupations that were also considered acceptable, suitable for younger sons without any hope of a grand inheritance: the army, the navy, the church, and law. These are the occupations of all the romantic interests we meet in Austen that has to earn their living. Anything else, and you were not strictly genteel. Medicine was on the rise in respectability, but not there yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the Gardiners: We are told that Mr Gardiner is a merchant. This is not acceptable society to someone who is strict about this kind of thing, and Mr. Darcy even says that such relatives&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] must very materially lessen [the Bennet sisters'] chance of marrying men of any consideration in the world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way out of this situation for someone who has made a large sum in trade is to buy a suitable country estate; this was the aspiration of the late Mr. Bingley, and the novel is kicked into action by his son attempting to do this very thing: it might take a generation or two, but eventually the stigma of having been in trade would disappear. By the standards set forth already by Mr Darcy and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the Gardiners are of far too low a class to be acceptable company.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, given that Mr Darcy has indeed show great pride before, Elizabeth really has no hope that he would entertain such relatives, when he had already shown how deeply he had objected to most of her immediate family, who at least formally belonged to the same class as him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should probably also say much of Austen's writing actaully is an examination of this class system: in &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, the character that is perhaps the best behaved is Mr Bingley, who does not care very much for such matters and instead is generally kind and attentive. A large part of the redemption of Mr Darcy in the eyes of both Elizabeth and the reader is when he adopts such an attitude to the Gardiners and treats them as being of similar social standing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sources&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've used the essay &quot;Class&quot; by Juliet McMaster in &lt;em&gt;The Cambridge companion to Jane Austen&lt;/em&gt;; apart form pointing out useful passages in the novel it also discusses the class system as it was during Austen's time and how she depicted it in her novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="315" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T16:20:10.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9197" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T16:24:26.570" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;This short passage is quoted from chapter II of J. Steinbeck's &lt;em&gt;The Pastures of Heave&lt;/em&gt;n:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;George cared for his house and kept a flower garden in front of it.&#xA;  The upper story of the house had never been lived in. This farm was a&#xA;  poem by the inarticulate man. Patiently he built his scene and waited&#xA;  for a Sylvia. No Sylvia ever came, but he kept the garden waiting for&#xA;  her just the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Sylvia referring to here? I'm thinking it could refer to the Italian poem &quot;A Silvia&quot; by G. Leopardi, but it seems far-fetched. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5706" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T23:38:33.613" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T19:01:10.117" Title="Who is &quot;Sylvia&quot; in Steinbeck's &quot;The Pastures of Heaven&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;the-pastures-of-heaven&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9198" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9199" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" Score="0" Body="For the short story cycle by John Steinbeck. Use with the [john-steinbeck] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T21:05:28.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9200" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9201" CreationDate="2019-01-23T13:39:45.027" Score="3" ViewCount="1213" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43728/mother-and-poet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Mother and Poet&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is an emotional and moving poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning about a woman poet who loses both her sons in battles in Italy. The emotions seem so raw that one might assume it describes EBB herself ... but she had only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Barrett_Browning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one son&lt;/a&gt;, who died at 63 of a heart attack, not as a young man in war. So was there someone else, a particular person whose tragic story inspired EBB's poem? Or was it just a general reflection on the tragedy of war and soldiers' families?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T15:25:13.687" Title="Who inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem &quot;Mother and Poet&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9200" CreationDate="2019-01-23T14:46:31.447" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Mother and Poet’ was first published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemslast00browrich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Last Poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1862), where a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemslast00browrich/page/96&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note is appended&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[This was Laura Savio, of Turin, a poetess and patriot, whose sons were killed at Ancona and Gaeta.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a reference to Baroness &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olimpia_Rossi_Savio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olimpia Savio&lt;/a&gt; (1815–1889), a poet and writer from Turin, whose sons Alfredo (1838–1860) and Emilio (1837–1861) died in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_unification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Risorgimento&lt;/a&gt;. Between Emilio’s death at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Gaeta_(1860)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siege of Gaeta&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/memoriedellabar00riccgoog/page/n507&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;22 January 1861&lt;/a&gt; and Elizabeth Browning’s death on 29 June, there was time for her to have learned of the event (she was living in Florence at the time) and composed the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Savio’s diaries and letters were later edited by Raffaello Ricci and published in 1911 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/memoriedellabar00riccgoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memorie della Baronessa Olimpia Savio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name ‘Laura’ in the note appears to be a mistake by the editor of &lt;em&gt;Last Poems&lt;/em&gt;, Elizabeth’s husband &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Browning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Browning&lt;/a&gt;. I suppose that it could be a deliberate indication that the character is fictional but based on Olimpia Savio, but a sentence in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_JtBCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter from Robert Browning to Isabella Blagden&lt;/a&gt;, dated 15 February 1862, suggests otherwise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If “Laura Savio of Turin” is really the name of the “Mother &amp;amp; Poetess,” my information is sufficient on &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emotions seem so raw that one might assume it describes EBB herself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is a common trap for readers familiar with the 20th-century genre of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessional_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;confessional poetry&lt;/a&gt; and unfamiliar with the 19th-century genre of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_monologue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dramatic monologue&lt;/a&gt;, which was a favourite of both the Brownings (Robert’s collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_and_Women_(poetry_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Men and Women&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1865) consists largely of works in this genre).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is always a danger, of course, that students might believe that the author is the speaker of any first-person poem. We all know how often we repeat the mantra “the author is not the speaker.” Generally, students have more trouble keeping this in mind with lyrics than they do with narrative poems. Every semester that I teach ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poetical00brow/page/286&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point&lt;/a&gt;,’ however, I receive at least one paper (and sometimes more than one) that refers to the speaker of the poem as if she were the poet, not merely in the careless confusion of pronouns and referents that can happen with lyric poems, but in an explicit and biographical way. […] Why do students make this error more frequently and persistently with this poem than with any other that I teach? I have come to the conclusion that it is a revelation of the nature of the dramatic monologue itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Melissa Schaub (2011). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/23079672&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Margins of the Dramatic Monologue: Teaching Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point”&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; 49:4, p. 557.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-23T15:25:13.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9202" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-24T01:16:26.707" Score="3" ViewCount="7609" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Yeats' greatest of poems, he writes that &quot;the falcon cannot hear the falconer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is the falcon and who is the falconer?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why might Yeats have chosen this metaphor?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;The Second Coming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Turning and turning in the widening gyre&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;The falcon cannot hear the falconer;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The best lack all conviction, while the worst&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are full of passionate intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Surely some revelation is at hand;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Surely the Second Coming is at hand.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The darkness drops again; but now I know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That twenty centuries of stony sleep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Butler Yeats, 1919&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T12:21:25.023" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T18:51:54.620" Title="Who is the falcon, and who the falconer?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9203" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-24T02:14:52.097" Score="1" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; by George Orwell a silent protest against the Russian Revolution? I am correcting an essay about &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, and someone called it a silent protest. I am not sure whether I should correct it. Just a brief overview of &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; for those of you who have read it years ago and for those who never read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is a parallel to the Russian Revolution. Basically everything that happens is based on the USSR. Orwell wrote the book as a satire and mocking of the Russian Revolution. It was his way to protest what was going on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5713" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T19:36:41.957" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T19:54:42.527" Title="Animal Farm — silent protest?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9202" CreationDate="2019-01-24T12:10:59.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The symbolism of the Falcon seems relatively easy to unpick. Slightly further down, Yeats explains the result of the disconnect between Falcon and Falconer is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which implies that the Falcon here is humanity. Without guidance - trained Falcons are supposed to narrow their &quot;gyre&quot; toward a target and then back to the Falconer - we are headed back toward a state of anarchy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This begs the rather more interesting question of who the Falconer, who should be providing us with guidance, represents. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious answer is a deity figure, presumably - given that Yeats was raised in a Protestant culture - Christ. There is symbolic value in this comparison since Christ was described as a &quot;shepherd&quot; of men, just as a Falconer takes charge of a falcon. Also, the symbolism of the Gyre itself may, in fact, have come from Dante's Divine Comedy where the devil Geryon moves in &quot;gyres&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, however, is problematic. Yeats' family was not actively religious. And Yeats himself seems to have been agnostic at best. As I have described in this answer - &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2055/what-rough-beast-slouches-towards-bethlehem-to-be-born&quot;&gt;What rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?&lt;/a&gt; - Yeats developed his own system of faith, in which Christianity was merely a fragment of a wider whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats set out his ideas in a book entitled &lt;em&gt;A Vision&lt;/em&gt;. Unfortunately, this seems to have a been a rather fruitless attempt to reconcile religious yearnings with enlightenment values, which he clearly felt were important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, then, that his own thoughts on the subject were an attempt to impose some rational structure onto a jumble of religious ideas, it is perhaps better to see the Falconer as something more vague and metaphysical such as a sense of ethics or moral philosophy. Even, perhaps, the symbolism of an ideal: a school of thought in which humanity strives for moral perfection, attained through an impossible union of the rational and irrational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Falcon and Falconer: &quot;The Second Coming&quot; and Marvell's &quot;Horatian Ode&quot;, Murray Pittock, Irish University Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 175-181        &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeats, Religion, and History, Peter Allt, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1952), pp. 624-658     &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T08:59:26.317" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T08:59:26.317" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9206" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9209" CreationDate="2019-01-24T16:55:06.547" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Way back in high school, many many years ago, our teacher described to us what made something literature or not.  This lesson always stuck with me for two reasons: 1) I didn't really think it was right; 2) I really enjoyed the short story associated with it.  We read some story that was considered literature, I don't remember what it was anymore.  Then we read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Most Dangerous Game&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  This apparently, according to her, was not literature because of the &quot;too&quot; coincidental incident of how the MC fell overboard.  If I recall correctly, his cigar was knocked out of his hand by the sail when it was blown in the wind and then he was knocked overboard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if this is still considered true?  If coincidental incidents discount a piece from becoming literature, and thus &quot;The Most Dangerous Game&quot; is not literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5047" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T21:42:56.330" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T12:37:52.607" Title="Is &quot;The Most Dangerous Game&quot; Literature?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-24T17:08:15.210" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;White rose in the garden&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Raven puppy in the night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stars reflecting all Heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Looking for it, not found&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Moving through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Moving through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nothing left for me to do&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5717" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-24T18:59:59.030" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T03:14:21.633" Title="Who wrote this?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9202" CreationDate="2019-01-24T17:14:05.350" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't believe this was intended allegorically. The falcon and the falconer aren't anybody but who they are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is, instead, an image, drawn from the sport of falconry. The bird flies overhead in a circle: it can't stay still because then it would fall, but it also has to stay close so that it can &lt;a href=&quot;https://animals.mom.me/importance-falconers-voice-training-falcons-11720.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hear spoken (or whistled) commands&lt;/a&gt;. The falconer is at the center of the circle, but if the bird's gyre &quot;widens&quot;, it won't be able to hear, and the system breaks down: &quot;Things fall apart&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which raises the question of why Yeats would choose an image from the somewhat obscure sport of falconry. The visual image is certainly arresting: a stable situation that slowly but inevitably drifts into chaos. It is both noble and violent, animal and human. The bird itself is controlled chaos, and perhaps its &quot;widening gyre&quot; is inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=458hLESUpzIC&amp;amp;pg=PA61&amp;amp;dq=yeats%20falcon&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj_xpSH8obgAhVGvFkKHWTxDIwQ6AEIMzAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=yeats%20falcon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as Stan Smith puts it&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;this bird of prey is a symbol too fraught with historical meanings to be so pinned down&quot;. I don't know how much Yeats expected his audience to know about falcons and falconry; I doubt we're much more distant from it today than when he wrote it. The image confuses readers, and in that sense is perhaps a failure as poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="20" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T17:14:05.350" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9206" CreationDate="2019-01-24T20:51:27.220" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His cigar was knocked out of his hand by the sail when it was blown in the wind and then he was knocked overboard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well recalled! It was a pipe knocked out of his mouth by a rope, not a cigar knocked out of his hand by a sail, but that’s close enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rainsford sprang up and moved quickly to the rail, mystified. He strained his eyes in the direction from which the reports had come, but it was like trying to see through a blanket. He leaped upon the rail and balanced himself there, to get greater elevation; his pipe, striking a rope, was knocked from his mouth. He lunged for it; a short, hoarse cry came from his lips as he realized he had reached too far and had lost his balance. The cry was pinched off short as the blood-warm waters of the Caribbean Sea closed over his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the meat of the question, well, different people use the word ‘literature’ in different ways. There’s a spectrum of opinions on the meaning of the word, which I’ll caricature like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;extreme inclusionist: “literature is anything consisting of words”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moderate inclusionist: “literature is language deliberately put into permanent form”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;most people: “literature is poetry, plays, stories, essays, stuff like that”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;moderate exclusionist: “literature is written works of high quality, as judged by me”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;extreme exclusionist: “literature is the Bible and Shakespeare and Milton; all else is dross”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when someone’s asked, “Is ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ literature?”, the answer depends on where they stand on the meaning of ‘literature’. People in groups 1–3 will answer ‘yes’ and maybe even some people in group 4, depending on what criteria they use to judge quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can guess from your account that your teacher was a moderate exclusionist, and that an important criterion which she used to judge quality was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_realism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary realism&lt;/a&gt;, that is, the depiction of the subject in a realistic and naturalistic way. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5842/3003&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for more about literary realism and how it rejected the use of coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary realism had its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I think that you’d have to search fairly hard these days to find someone taking a position as exclusionary as your teacher’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-01-24T20:51:27.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9207" CreationDate="2019-01-25T03:14:21.633" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only source I can find is on a fan fiction website, within a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ficbook.net/readfic/7772982/19771657&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian language sub-site&lt;/a&gt; devoted to the TV series &quot;Anna Detective&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem appears within a 2019 fanfic short story called &lt;em&gt;Fiery Notebook&lt;/em&gt; by Andrey Mizin. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com.au/translate?hl=en&amp;amp;sl=ru&amp;amp;u=https://ficbook.net/readfic/7772982/19771657&amp;amp;prev=search&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate version of the page&lt;/a&gt;, a note to the text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work &quot;Fiery Notebook&quot; was written for the literary contest of&#xA;  Christmas stories in 2019 of the group &quot;Anna Detective&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem itself is given in English within the Russian text, but it's not clear whether it's an original poem by Mizin, or has been borrowed (perhaps from a translation, given the slight changes to wording) from some other source. Mizin's wording is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;White flask rose in the garden&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Raven puppy in the night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Stars reflecting all the heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Looking forward no fight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stars reflecting all the heaven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They expect me to fall through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moving through&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Moving through…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T03:14:21.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-25T09:17:40.227" Score="4" ViewCount="561" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The remainder of my school days were no more auspicious than the first. &lt;strong&gt;Indeed,they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State &#xA;  of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(chapter 4)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the sentence in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-25T10:24:13.793" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T10:56:59.933" Title="What does the metaphor used here mean?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9212" CreationDate="2019-01-25T10:56:59.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In elementary school, children are given &lt;em&gt;projects&lt;/em&gt; to do: color this picture, fill out this worksheet, draw a poster of a flower and label all the parts. These projects are part of teaching the curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The projects can be grouped together into a &lt;em&gt;unit,&lt;/em&gt; which focuses on a specific idea or subject: Subject vs. Object, the Biology of a Flower, Long Division, State Capitals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;a Project evolved into a Unit&quot; is describing lots of smaller activities which reinforced each other to build into an overarching unit teaching a concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Construction paper and wax crayons are commonly used by young kids to color and draw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extended metaphor here is saying that the speaker went to school in Alabama and spent lots of time drawing and coloring on construction paper, doing projects, in an effort to learn the subject &quot;Group Dynamics,&quot; which was the larger concept being taught.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of context I don't know if that's meant to be an ironic eyebrow arched at &quot;learning how to get along with other kids&quot; or if it's something more specific. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-25T10:56:59.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9202" CreationDate="2019-01-25T18:56:45.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a take on the obvious answer. (I highly recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9205/391&quot;&gt;Matt Throwers answer&lt;/a&gt; providing a supportable interpretation in an alternate framework. Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9216/391&quot;&gt;Mozibur Ullah's answer&lt;/a&gt;, which shows that the symbols can have a range of meanings, without undermining the poem's intent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Falconer is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redeemer_(Christianity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Redeemer&lt;/a&gt;, the falcon the human spirit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/abstract/journals/soan/22/5/article-p481_3.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Birds have long been used as a symbol of the spirit&lt;/a&gt;, but this is an &lt;em&gt;astonishing&lt;/em&gt; choice.  Yeats forces us to regard the paradigm in a fearsome form, not lambs and shepherd, but as hunter and bird of prey.  In Blake's most famous poem, he asks of the Tyger: &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Did he who made the lamb make thee?&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, and, later, C.S. Lewis uses a lion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aslan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aslan&lt;/a&gt;) as the Christ figure.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats' is a deep metaphor because here we have a relationship where the benefactor (the falconer) sends the ward into the world seeking nourishment.  This must be understood in the context of spiritual nourishment, because the falcon brings it home to share with the benefactor. If the falcon goes so far afield that it cannot return, it can't share the nourishment with the benefactor--potentially the nourishment is no longer spiritual, but merely material.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Eliot will later refer to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the spirit unappeased and peregrine&quot;&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://ww3.haverford.edu/psychology/ddavis/p109g/gidding1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Gidding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of the falcon may also refer to the spirit of inquiry that begins with humanism and the Ancient Greeks (&quot;5th Century&quot; Athens in particular) and leads to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.  Second Coming was largely a response to the horrors of World War I, but the 20th Century, even in the first decades, was also a century of wonders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that spirit of inquiry, which soars to unimagined heights,  also can be said to have lead humanity astray. Nietzsche stated that god was dead.  One of Yeats' responses is that god is continually slain and reborn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw a staring virgin stand &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where holy Dionysus died, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And tear the heart out of his side,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And lay the heart upon her hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And bear that beating heart away;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then did all the Muses sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/ltp/1947-v3-n2-ltp0931/1019794ar.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Magnus Annus&lt;/a&gt; at the spring,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As though God’s death were but a play.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another Troy must rise and set, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Another lineage feed the crow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Another Argo’s painted prow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Drive to a flashier bauble yet.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Roman Empire stood appalled:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It dropped the reins of peace and war&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When that fierce virgin and her Star&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of the fabulous darkness called.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kalliope.org/en/text/yeats2001062015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two Songs from a Play&lt;/a&gt; Full text of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scribd.com/doc/75962581/The-Resurrection-W-B-Yeats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Resurrection&lt;/em&gt; (1931)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here Yeats is at once referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_(constellation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virgo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgo_(constellation)#Mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spica&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persephone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kore&lt;/a&gt; as the female analogue of Dionysus) &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_mother_of_Jesus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;virgin Mary&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_of_Bethlehem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;star of Bethlehem&lt;/a&gt;. He reveals, under the Greek conception, the origin of poetry in religion.  (The Festival of Dionysus was a &lt;em&gt;religious&lt;/em&gt; festival.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fabulous darkness&quot; is likewise the most brilliant possible choice--fabulous derives from the Latin word for story (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dfabula1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fabula&lt;/a&gt;), which conjures an image of a cornucopia of light generated from the darkness.  In some sense, stories are all we have—not only do we put our faith in them, it is from the miraculous they emerge.  Here is it the death of God specifically that inspires the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muses&lt;/a&gt; to sing.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second song also comments on Second Coming:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In pity for man’s darkening thought &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He walked that room and issued thence &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In Galilean turbulence; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Babylonian starlight brought &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fabulous, formless darkness in; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Odour of blood when Christ was slain &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made all Platonic tolerance vain &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And vain all Doric discipline. &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Everything that man esteems &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Endures a moment or a day. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Love’s pleasure drives his love away, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The painter’s brush consumes his dreams; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The herald’s cry, the soldier’s tread &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Exhaust his glory and his might: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whatever flames upon the night &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Man’s own resinous heart has fed. &lt;br&gt; &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kalliope.org/en/text/yeats2001062015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ibid.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vocabulary is incredibly precise, with words such as &quot;pity&quot; (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piet%C3%A0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pietà&lt;/a&gt;). These verses are have high information density, and layers of meaning, but &quot;man's own resinous heart&quot; seems a good place to leave things.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats clearly regards the Bethlehem story in the greater context of Greek mythology, but this is in no way a repudiation.  On the contrary, Yeats' connects it to something even older, and affirms the eternal nature of the cycle, here in the partly context of that which inspires mankind--poetry and stories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the meanings that can be drawn from the play &lt;em&gt;The Resurrection&lt;/em&gt; is the &lt;em&gt;response&lt;/em&gt; to the miracle. The promise of eternal salvation quickly devolves into a death cult which venerates suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare and Birds of Prey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a fun site I found &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespearestudyguide.com/Shake2/birdsofprey.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Swooping Imagery&lt;/a&gt;&quot; with a few salient excerpts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hist! Romeo, hist! O, for a falconer's voice,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To lure this tassel-gentle back again!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Else would I tear the cave where Echo lies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And make her airy tongue more hoarse than mine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With repetition of my Romeo's name. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Rom&amp;amp;loc=line-2.2.169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this derives from that most famous of scenes which begins with &quot;But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?&quot; and the subject is love. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My falcon now is sharp and passing empty. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And till she stoop she must not be full-gorg'd, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For then she never looks upon her lure.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Shr&amp;amp;loc=line-4.1.190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, Petruchio is referring to Kate, the object of his love.  The Dauphin in Henry V also uses the metaphor, describing the feeling of riding his steed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk. &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=H5&amp;amp;loc=line-3.7.15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry V, Act III, Scene 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also the dark side: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look, as the full-fed hound or gorg'd hawk,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unapt for tender smell or speedy flight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Make slow pursuit, or altogether balk&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The prey wherein by nature they delight;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So surfeit-taking Tarquin fares this night:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His taste delicious, in digestion souring,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Devours his will, that lived by foul devouring.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Luc&amp;amp;loc=Luc-0694&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rape of Lucrece&lt;/a&gt;, 694-697&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This said, he shakes aloft his Roman blade, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which, like a falcon towering in the skies, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Coucheth the fowl below with his wings' shade, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose crooked beak threats if he mount he dies: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So under his insulting falchion lies &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Harmless Lucretia, marking what he tells &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With trembling fear, as fowl hear falcon's bells. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Luc&amp;amp;loc=Luc-0505&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ibid.&lt;/a&gt;, 505-511&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spiritual decay Yeats writes of is embodied in Tarquin.  Measure for Measure comments more directly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This outward-sainted deputy—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose settled visage and deliberate word&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nips youth i' th' head and follies doth enmew &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As falcon doth the fowl—is yet a devil. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His filth within being cast, he would appear &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A pond as deep as hell. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=MM&amp;amp;loc=line-3.1.99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T22:45:24.823" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T22:45:24.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5971" CreationDate="2019-01-26T08:54:12.843" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my recently published book &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://enskia.com/en/homepage/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Shadow&lt;/a&gt;&quot; I provide adequate (I believe) evidence that Homeric Ithaca is today's island of Faial in the Azores. The surrounding islands are identified as shown on the map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8KIMu.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8KIMu.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the website for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An animated video of the whole trip of Odysseus is provided here &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHUG0PpR5M&amp;amp;t=16s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCHUG0PpR5M&amp;amp;t=16s&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5724" LastEditorUserId="5724" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T09:43:19.757" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T09:43:19.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9202" CreationDate="2019-01-26T09:16:39.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yeats wrote this in 1919, one year after the First World War ended. It’s not surprising that looking at the horrific devastation, the killing fields of Europe (‘the blood-dimmed tide’) and what was then their colonial possession, the rest of the world, that he felt that the world had lost its centre and could no longer hold, and that mankind (the falcon) could no longer hear what guided it (the falconer) for the  ‘worst are full of passionate intensity.’ It’s not surprising he yearned for a ‘second coming’ and it’s likely he was lamenting his Nietzchian infatuation (he wrote a poem on Nietzsche) as the picture he draws of blind, remorseless will is not a pretty one and this might be why he invokes Christian imagery, setting his face against power for powers sake and this suggests that the falconer is Christ. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thought and feeling is signalled elsewhere, for example, in the thought of Hannah Arendt who wrote of an ‘epistemic break’ in Europe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2019-02-04T18:51:54.620" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T18:51:54.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-26T09:38:56.503" Score="8" ViewCount="1743" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Mac&amp;amp;loc=line-5.3.50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, Scene III&lt;/a&gt; of Macbeth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Macbeth:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Canst not thou not minister to a mind diseased &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raze out the written troubles of the brain&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with some sweet oblivious antidote&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That weighs upon the heart?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doctor:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Therein the patient must minister to himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Macbeth:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throw physic to the dogs. I’ll none of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physic obviously refers to medicine (as the physic in physician) , or so I thought. But when I thought more visually, I mean how I would stage it, I thought perhaps it was a command to his soldiers to throw the quack doctor out. It would certainly make for a more arresting dramatic mise on stage! And then again later, I thought it might as well just be a philosophical judgement, throw the whole of medicine to the dogs after all medicine and doctoring did not have, on the whole, a very good reputation then and perhaps Macbeth was simply impatient at the doctors equivocation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should one decide between these options?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T19:28:54.940" Title="Why does Macbeth say ‘throw physic to the dogs’?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-26T11:46:48.573" Score="1" ViewCount="250" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could only look around me: Atticus and my Uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything - at least, what one didn’t the other did. Furthermore, I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, &lt;strong&gt;elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem educated on the half-Decimal half-Dunce-cap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the lines in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T12:13:21.627" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T16:00:26.673" Title="What is meant by ‘innocent of the adjustments’ here?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-26T12:28:41.517" Score="5" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five an allegory of what would now be called PTSD? Would ‘allegory’ be the correct terminology here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5725" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-26T13:14:56.830" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T13:14:56.830" Title="Is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five an allegory of what would now be called PTSD?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;kurt-vonnegut&gt;&lt;slaughterhouse-five&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9218" CreationDate="2019-01-26T16:00:26.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;innocent&lt;/strong&gt; in this context means &quot;without having encountered.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adjustments&lt;/strong&gt; are &quot;the corrections which teachers made&quot; or &quot;the lessons which the teachers thought were very important,&quot; even though clearly Atticus has achieved Good Citizenship without ever learning the specific curriculum or ideas which those teachers seemed to feel were critical. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Together, the entire sentence reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I couldn’t help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, without ever having learned the specific ideas which my teachers insisted that I had to learn to be a Good Citizen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scout is slyly saying that the teachers' ideas of Good Citizenship were things she found boring and unnecessary — and is also probably referring to punishments or discipline she received because she wasn't conforming to their ideals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the bolded section refers to her brother, and has nothing to do with Atticus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T16:00:26.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9217" CreationDate="2019-01-26T16:09:19.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since MacBeth continues to talk to the doctor afterwards, and specifically asks him to heal his country, it doesn't sound like he's objecting to the doctor or the practice of healing overall. &quot;For the dogs&quot; in this line sounds more like &quot;What, you can't cure my wife? Oh, then the hell with it&quot; or &quot;fine, screw medicines.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/macbeth/page_194/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sparknotes No Fear Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt; translation is helpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Throw physic to the dogs; I’ll none of it. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Come, put mine armor on. Give me my staff.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Seyton, send out. — Doctor, the thanes fly from me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Come, sir, dispatch. — If thou couldst, doctor, cast&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The water of my land, find her disease,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And purge it to a sound and pristine health,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I would applaud thee to the very echo,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That should applaud again. — Pull ’t off, I say. — &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  What rhubarb, senna, or what purgative drug,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Would scour these English hence? Hear’st thou of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(modern English)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Medicine is for the dogs. I won’t have anything to do with it. (to SEYTON) Come, put my armor on me. Give me my lance. Seyton, send out the soldiers. (to the DOCTOR) Doctor, the thanes are running away from me. (to SEYTON) Come on, sir, hurry. (to the DOCTOR) Can you figure out what’s wrong with my country? If you can diagnose its disease by examining its urine, and bring it back to health, I will praise you to the ends of the Earth, where the sound will echo back so you can hear the applause again. — (to SEYTON) Pull it off, I tell you. (to the DOCTOR) What drug would purge the English from this country? Have you heard of any?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-01-26T16:09:19.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14333" CreationDate="2019-01-26T20:21:47.680" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m trying to remember the title of a book I’ve read about a short giant in a mountain raised by normal sized giants. The basic plot is that he’s trying to learn to read or something like that. He leaves the mountain for a short while and meets a human girl and then comes back and saves his people (I don’t remember how exactly). I know that he’s picked on by the rest of the giants though. There’s the giants chiefs daughter in it as well, she’s a minor character though. One of the lines is “he’s upside downing me” if it helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="2455" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T16:57:43.683" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T11:19:52.797" Title="Story about a human sized giant" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9217" CreationDate="2019-01-27T03:36:28.770" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Part of the strength of good dialogue is there are so many ways it can be played.  (Actors will surprise you.)  The preceding lines are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Give me mine armor &lt;br&gt; &#xA;  How does your patient doctor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not so sick, my lord, as she is with troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cure [her] of that &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Canst though not minister to a mind diseased &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actors need to be able to connect to the material, and the Doctor could be describing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainline.org/article/dsm-5-criteria-ptsd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PTSD&lt;/a&gt;. Macbeth's response could be desperation, or it could be sarcastic.  (Important to keep in mind that Macbeth is busy preparing for battle—having an activity not related to the dialogue is a huge boon performance-wise— so don't overlook a certain frenetic energy to the scene, as the play drives toward conclusion.)  The physicians' art at the time was highly unreliable, so there may be skepticism similar to that often directed toward certain branches of psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macbeth asks the doctor if he has a cure.  The Doctor says in these cases only the patient themself has the cure.  Macbeth says &quot;To hell with you then.  I'll have none of it.&quot; &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a kind of &quot;throw away&quot;, though, so I wouldn't over-emphasize. Note that the action of preparing for battle bookends the exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Throw physick to the dogs—I'll have none of it &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Come, put my armor on.  Give me my staff.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes it work so well is that Macbeth is otherwise occupied.  But it can get deeper.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good technique for playwrights and actors both is &quot;what does a character want?  what do they really want?  what do they really, really want?&quot;  So Macbeth may be keeping himself distracted to avoid dealing with his emotions.  (His wife is descending into madness and that has got to bring up some &lt;em&gt;heavy&lt;/em&gt; feelings.  Note how many times the word &quot;fear&quot; is used in the scene. Dread would be a good word for what Macbeth is avoiding.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise there are many ways the second exchange between Macbeth and the Doctor could be played.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If thou couldst Doctor, cast the water of my land— find her disease &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and purge it to a sound an pristine health, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would applaud thee to the very echo that should applaud again &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pull it off, I say— what rhubarb, senna or what purgative drug &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Would scour these English hence?  Hearest thou of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aye my good lord &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your royal preparations makes us hear something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doctor's response is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/wry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wry&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, is Macbeth merely showing a stiff upper lip, good cheer in the face of imminent mortal danger, or is he losing his mind?  (i.e. is he seriously asking the Doctor if he can scour the English from the land?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final line of the scene implies that the Doctor, at least, thinks Macbeth is a bit &quot;off his rocker&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Were I from Dunsinane away and clear &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Profit again should hardly draw me near.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the Doctor is saying, &quot;get me out of this madhouse.&quot; &quot;If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't. I don't care how much you pay me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Mac&amp;amp;loc=line-5.3.42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth, Act V, Scene 2, line 42 ff. (Folger Library)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does occur to me that if you did want to integrate some action to support the lines, you could have the Doctor trying to tend to Macbeth.  (Perhaps he has &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/322195.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the shakes&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, or is experiencing some phantom ailment.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are talking about Lady Macbeth, and when the Doctor reveals he has no treatment that can heal her, Macbeth waves the Doctor off from ministering to him, having concluded that &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/physicker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physicking&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is fruitless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, both Macbeth and Lady M are suffering from PTSD. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the line is literal—Macbeth saying he have none of it in regard to himself. (There is the added dimension that he might realize his own ailment is mental, and therefore immune to treatment.)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would also increase the kinetics of the scene because now you have Macbeth preparing for battle, being ministered to, and engaging in a diagnostic discussion all at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-01-27T04:56:12.347" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T04:56:12.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9104" CreationDate="2019-01-27T04:31:11.973" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess is that it had a nice ring to it, though maybe Shakespeare was making a subconscious or conscious connection.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The salient connection I find is that Polonius, like Odysseus, is a bit of a trickster. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Odysseus was renowned for his cleverness specifically.  He would do things that were dishonorable (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhesus_of_Thrace#Mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;murdering enemies in their sleep&lt;/a&gt;) and still receive the favor of the gods.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polonius spies on people&lt;/a&gt; and uses his daughter to manipulate Hamlet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laertes is the son of Polonius, not the father, so maybe that has something to do with the inverted fate of Polonius compared to Odysseus.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Laertes are sympathetic characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T19:00:22.987" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T19:00:22.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-27T06:52:31.830" Score="12" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who wrote the well-known &lt;em&gt;Outline of Chapter Contents&lt;/em&gt; in the Penguin edition of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia describes the structure of Finnegans Wake as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Finnegans Wake comprises seventeen chapters, divided into four Parts&#xA;  or Books. Part I contains eight chapters, Parts II and III each&#xA;  contain four, and Part IV consists of only one short chapter. The&#xA;  chapters appear &lt;em&gt;without titles&lt;/em&gt;, and while Joyce &lt;em&gt;never provided&#xA;  possible chapter titles&lt;/em&gt; as he had done for Ulysses, he did title&#xA;  various sections published separately (see Publication history below).&#xA;  The standard critical practice is to indicate part number in Roman&#xA;  numerals, and chapter title in Arabic, so that III.2, for example,&#xA;  indicates the second chapter of the third part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Penguin edition of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; includes an &lt;em&gt;Outline of Chapter Contents&lt;/em&gt;, which is reproduced at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Outline_of_Chapter_Contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;finnegansweb&lt;/a&gt;. It begins &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PART I&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapter I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Introduction - The Willingdone Museum - The finding of the&#xA;  letter - Pre-history of Ireland - Mutt and Jute - Jarl van Hoother and&#xA;  the Prankquean - The Fall - Finnegan’s Wake - Introduction to HCE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapter II&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The naming of HCE - The encounter with the cad - The&#xA;  spreading of the cad’s story - The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapter III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Earwicker’s version of the story filmed, televised, and&#xA;  broadcast - HCE’s wake - Reports of HCE’s crime and flight - Court&#xA;  inquiries - HCE reviled - HCE remains silent and sleeps - Finn’s&#xA;  resurrection foreshadowed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who wrote this outline?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it appear in the first edition?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did it originate with Joyce?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an authoritative answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T19:19:21.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T12:06:32.583" Title="Who wrote the well-known Outline of Chapter Contents in the Penguin edition of Finnegans Wake?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9223" CreationDate="2019-01-27T13:26:58.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this be &lt;strong&gt;Roald Dahl's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The BFG&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main characters are a human girl, Sophie, and a giant, the Big Friendly Giant or B.F.G, who lives with a bunch of other giants who are much bigger and fiercer than him and pick on him a lot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Here comes the runty one!' boomed the Fleshlumpeater. 'Ho-ho there, runty one! Where is you splatchwinkling away to in such a hefty hurry?' He shot out an enormous arm and grabbed the BFG by the hair. The BFG didn't struggle. He simply stopped and stood quite still and said, 'Be so kind as to be letting go of my hair, Fleshlumpeater.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, the Fleshlumpeater shot out two enormous hands and grabbled the BFG around the waist. He tossed him high in the air and shouted, 'Catch him, Manhugger!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Manhugger caught him. The other giants spread out quickly in a large circle, each giant about twenty yards from his neighbour, preparing for the game they were going to play. Now the Manhugger threw the BFG high and far, shouting 'Catch him, Bonecruncher!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bonecruncher ran forward and caught the tumbling BFG and immediately swung him up again. 'Catch him, Childchewer!' he shouted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The B.F.G goes out into the world to catch the dream of humans, which he can somehow 'read', although his literacy isn't very good:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You is less or more right,' the BFG said. 'Every dream in the world is making a different sort of buzzy-hum music. And these grand swashboggling ears of mine is able to read that music.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sophie moved over to read what he had written so far. The letters were printed big and bold, but were not very well formed. Here is what it said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THIS DREAM IS ABOUT HOW I IS SAVING MY TEECHER FROM DROWNING. I IS DIVING INTO THE RIVER FROM A HIGH BRIDGE AND I IS DRAGGING MY TEECHER TO THE BANK AND THEN I IS GIVING HIM THE KISS OF DEATH ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, he doesn't exactly save the other giants, but he saves the humans of the world from being eaten by them (while not doing them any real harm):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fleet of helicopters then follows Sophie and the BFG to the giants' homeland, where the giants are tied up as they sleep, and the helicopters carry them back to London where they imprisoned in a deep pit. After BFG has Fleshlumpeater untied and is hoisted out of the pit, the man-eating giants find themselves being only fed snozzcumbers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_BFG&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-27T13:26:58.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-27T20:34:14.787" Score="4" ViewCount="643" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an explanation of the first two lines of the third verse (see below) of the poem &amp;quot;Passing by&amp;quot; by Robert Herrick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that &amp;quot;Cupid is winged&amp;quot; means that Cupid has wings, but what does &amp;quot;and doth range her country&amp;quot; mean (&amp;quot;her&amp;quot; referring to the lady?) and why does that result in &amp;quot;my heart doth change&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lady sweet and kind&lt;br&gt; Was never face so pleased my mind,&lt;br&gt; I did but see her passing by&lt;br&gt; And yet I love her till I die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her gestures, motions and her smile&lt;br&gt; Her wit, her voice, my heart beguile;&lt;br&gt; Beguile my heart, I know not why&lt;br&gt; And yet I love her till I die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged, and doth range&lt;br&gt; Her country; so my heart doth change.&lt;br&gt; But change the earth, or change the sky&lt;br&gt; Yet will I love her till I die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="John B" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T02:56:05.613" Title="In &quot;Passing by&quot; by Robert Herrick, how does Cupid &quot;range her country&quot; and change the narrator's heart?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-herrick&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6655" CreationDate="2019-01-28T05:03:42.117" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I think it will be difficult to find it. John Colapinto writes in his article for &quot;The New Yorker&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The obvious solution would be to buy or borrow a copy of Roy's translation and compare it to Nabokov's, but that’s almost impossible to do. “Camera Obscura” sold only a handful of copies upon its release, and the London warehouse containing the unsold stock was destroyed by German bombs during the Second World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read the full article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/nabokov-retranslated-laughter-dark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5733" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-28T11:44:12.423" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T11:44:12.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2019-01-28T12:39:39.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have been misled about this poem! It’s not known to be by Herrick; the text you quoted is missing three verses; there are a number of textual errors; and it has been mis-punctuated, making nonsense of the lines you asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem first appeared, without attribution, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Ford_(composer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Ford’s&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Musicke of Sundrie Kindes&lt;/em&gt; (1607). So the text may be original to Ford, or if he got it from another poet there is no record as to whom. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Herrick_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Herrick&lt;/a&gt; was born in 1591, and although it is possible that his poems were circulating in 1607, when he was sixteen, there is no evidence of this: the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.celm-ms.org.uk/authors/herrickrobert.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;earliest extant manuscripts&lt;/a&gt; are from the 1620s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original text had six verses, given below (the reduction to three verses may be due to Arthur Quiller-Couch, who &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.201237/page/n109&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;included it&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oxford_Book_of_English_Verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250–1900&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). I’ve bolded the words that have been changed in the version quoted in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is a Ladie sweet &amp;amp; kind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was never face so pleasde my mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I did but see her passing by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her &lt;strong&gt;iesture&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;motion&lt;/strong&gt; and her &lt;strong&gt;smiles&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her wit, her voyce, my hart &lt;strong&gt;beguiles&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Beguiles&lt;/strong&gt; my hart, I know not why,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her free behaviour winning lookes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will make a Lawyer burne his bookes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I toucht her not, alas not I,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And yet I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Had I her fast betwixt mine armes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Iudge you that thinke such sports were harmes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wert any harm? no, no, fie, fie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For I will love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Should I remaine confined there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So long as Phebus in his spher,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I to request shee to denie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet would I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged and doth range,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her countrie so my &lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt; doth change,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But change &lt;strong&gt;she&lt;/strong&gt; earth, or change &lt;strong&gt;she&lt;/strong&gt; skie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet will I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edward Doughtie, ed. (1970). &lt;em&gt;Lyrics from English Airs 1596–1622&lt;/em&gt;. Harvard University Press, p. 277.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that in this version there is a comma after ‘range’, and no punctuation after ‘countrie’, which allows us to make sense of these lines. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cupid&lt;/a&gt; is the Roman god of sexual love, depicted with wings since antiquity; ‘range’ means “rove, roam, wander” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;); ‘change countrie’ is a metaphor for going far away; ‘so’ means “to that extent; in that degree” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;); and ‘my love’ is the lady. So the lines mean that however far the lady travels, Cupid flies after her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mis-punctuated version was popularised by a musical arrangement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another example of the way in which words are misunderstood by composers and editors is the anonymous Elizabethan poem, ‘There is a lady sweet and kind’, in which the last verse has been subject to unconscionable twisting. […] Paraphrased, then, the verse means that Cupid flies about looking for the coy lady who runs away from him—fancifully to another place or ‘countrie’. But wherever she may go in earth or sky, ‘Yet will I love her till I die’. One composer whose setting of this used to be popular removed the comma after ‘range’ and set the words as ‘doth range her country’, following this with a break and the declaration that either the singer’s affection or that of his lady-love had changed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Laurence Ager (1973). ‘Gilding the Poetic Lily’. &lt;em&gt;Musical Opinion&lt;/em&gt; 97, p. 240&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ager is too polite to name the composer, but I am not. It was Edward Cockram Purcell (1853–1932), who published a setting in 1910:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CZ9fB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CZ9fB.png&quot; alt=&quot;‘Passing by’ set to music by Edward Cockram Purcell&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction to this setting in &lt;em&gt;Pathways of Song&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Observe the irregular phrasing in the third verse where the literary transcends the musical sense, and we sing “and doth range her country” without breaking the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Frank LaForge &amp;amp; Will Earhart, eds. (1934). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7D_aqj3AG3MC&amp;amp;pg=PA15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pathways of Song&lt;/em&gt; Volume 1, p. 15&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purcell was also responsible for popularising the attribution to Herrick, as can be seen on the cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0dUi1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0dUi1.jpg&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as Peter Shor points out in comments, although Purcell popularised it, he was not responsible for the mangled version, as it previously appeared in this form in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rarepoemssixtee00unkngoog/page/n230&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rare poems of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1883), edited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Linton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William James Linton&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged, and doth range&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her country,—so my Love doth change;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But change the earth or change the sky,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet will I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UdNZAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odds and Ends about Covent Garden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1866), edited by ‘John Green’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Henry_Townsend&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Henry Townsend&lt;/a&gt;), where ‘still’ replaces ‘will’ in the last line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged, and doth range&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her country, so my love doth change&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But change the earth, or change the sky:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet still I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there is a yet earlier version from which Townsend and Linton derive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure where ‘my heart’ originated. It may be due to mandolinist Jim Hancock, who performed the song on his album &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jimhancock.com/htmfiles/music-albums-recswe.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing We Enchanted&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jimhancock.com/htmfiles/music-lyrics-singwe-passingby.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these lyrics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T13:00:31.507" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T13:00:31.507" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9237" CreationDate="2019-01-28T19:54:47.313" Score="6" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am working through a book of poetry by Tadeusz Miciński, a Polish writer who was active toward the end of the 19th century. The book is called &quot;W mroku gwiazd&quot; or &quot;In the Twilight of the Stars&quot; and was published in 1902. I found a PDF copy of the book in an online archive, and it included a quote toward the beginning which was ascribed to &quot;Eschylos&quot; (which I understand to be Aeschylus). I am not at all versed in the Polish language, so I don't really have the ability to translate the passage very accurately, but I would like to present both the Polish and a &quot;Google Translate&quot; version in English to see if anyone recognizes the source of the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Za karę będę na okropnej skale&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  stróżował stojąc - bez snu i bez ruchu -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jęk niczyjego mój nie dojdzie słuchu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Translate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;As a punishment, I will be on a terrible rock&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  standing guard - without sleep and without movement -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I will not hear anyone's ears&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize the last line is probably a horrible mistranslation, but the first two seem to be like something an old Greek tragedian would write. Also, I'm new to this forum, but not the site, and if anyone feels a need to correct my format, or if this would be better answered somewhere else, please let me know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T13:50:55.360" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T23:12:07.750" Title="Looking for an Aeschylus quote mistranslated from Polish" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;aeschylus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9235" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-28T20:20:49.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OED defines dramaturgy as &quot;The theory and practice of dramatic composition.&quot;  Dramaturgy typically involves the analysis, and even editing, of dramatic texts in service of effective performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; defines it as &quot;the study of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on the stage.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dramaturgy is a comprehensive exploration of the context in which the play resides. The dramaturge is the resident expert on the physical, social, political, and economic milieus in which the action takes place, the psychological underpinnings of the characters, the various metaphorical expressions in the play of thematic concerns; as well as on the technical consideration of the play as a piece of writing: structure, rhythm, flow, even individual word choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the wiki:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Institutional dramaturges may participate in many phases of play production including casting of the play, offering in-house criticism of productions-in-progress, and informing the director, the cast, and the audience about a play’s history and its current importance. In America, this type of dramaturgy is sometimes known as Production Dramaturgy.[12] Institutional or production dramaturges may make files of materials about a play's history or social context, prepare program notes, lead post-production discussions, or write study guides for schools and groups. These actions can assist a director in integrating textual and acting criticism, performance theory, and historical research into a production before it opens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T07:45:18.940" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T07:45:18.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9236" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-28T20:20:49.887" Score="0" Body="For questions on dramatic texts related to the performance of the texts specifically.  " OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T07:46:05.790" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T07:46:05.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9234" CreationDate="2019-01-28T20:25:22.540" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds very like &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0009%3Acard%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lines 31–34&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Bound&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prometheus Bound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ἀνθ᾽ ὧν ἀτερπῆ τήνδε φρουρήσεις πέτραν&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ὀρθοστάδην, ἄυπνος, οὐ κάμπτων γόνυ:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  πολλοὺς δ᾽ ὀδυρμοὺς καὶ γόους ἀνωφελεῖς&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  φθέγξῃ […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0010&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;prose translation&lt;/a&gt; of Herbert Weir Smyth, that’s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore on this joyless rock you must stand sentinel, erect, sleepless, your knee unbent. And many a groan and unavailing lament you shall utter […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miciński seems to have changed the persons so that it is Prometheus speaking, rather than Hephaestus speaking to Prometheus as in the original. (This doesn’t seem to be a Google translation error since ‘będę’ is “I will” whereas “you will” would be ‘będziemy’.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-01-28T20:25:22.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9238" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9244" CreationDate="2019-01-28T21:19:53.263" Score="3" ViewCount="1056" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been told there is an allusion to Plato in &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;. The name &amp;quot;Plato&amp;quot; is mentioned once, but I don't think it counts as an allusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He dialled the call on a secondary phone. The phone on the far end of the line called Faber's name a dozen times before the professor answered in a faint voice. Montag identified himself and was met with a lengthy silence. &amp;quot;Yes, Mr. Montag?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't know what you're talking about!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I want to know if there are any copies left at all.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is some sort of a trap! I can't talk to just anyone on the phone!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How many copies of Shakespeare and Plato?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;None! You know as well as I do. None!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Faber hung up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is an example of an allusion to Plato in &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; by Ray Bradbury?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.secret-satire-society.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Ray-Bradbury-Fahrenheit-451.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF of the book &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5713" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T11:17:40.960" Title="Allusion to Plato in Fahrenheit 451?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;&lt;plato&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9239" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15642" CreationDate="2019-01-29T00:12:55.937" Score="7" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a detective story when I was a kid but can't find I now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist confessed to a murder he didn't commit to protect a client of his detective agency (who did). However, he carefully planned his arrest and confession ahead and used a legal loophole which let him avoid standing trial, so he had to be released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The loophole had something to do with the extradition laws between two different US states (I think they were Nevada and Utah).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist was arrested for something else than the murder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist had the sheriff drag him into the police car kicking and screaming and then used this fact when making his case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the details I remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was (I think) an English-language story, I read it in Russian translation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was set in the US, first part of the XX century.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was (again, I think) the first part of a series.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist was employed in a private detective agency run by a fat woman. At one point the protagonist was talking about his employer on the phone (as she listened to the conversation) and was hesitant to describe her physical appearance. She encouraged him to go ahead and just tell that she was fat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="5740" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T07:16:01.313" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T21:11:52.903" Title="Detective story where a loophole in the US extradition law is used to avoid trial" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9155" CreationDate="2019-01-29T02:03:19.180" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like &amp;quot;Is He Living or Is He Dead?&amp;quot;, a short story by Mark Twain (which he had later developed into a play called &amp;quot;Is He Dead?&amp;quot;, a separate piece of work)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's set in a hotel in the French Riviera&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A stranger tells the narrator the story of the French painter Francois Millet faking his illness and death in order to capitalize on it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There were four painters involved in the conspiracy, the stranger being one of them (not Millet)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Millet is staying in the same hotel as Theofile Magnan, a retired old businessman. The stranger reveals his real identity to the narrator, asking him to keep the secret.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story ends this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Do you remember the man I called your attention to in the dining room to-day? That was Francois Millet.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Great—'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Scott! Yes. For once they didn't starve a genius to death and then put into other pockets the rewards he should have had himself. This song-bird was not allowed to pipe out its heart unheard and then be paid with the cold pomp of a big funeral. We looked out for that.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T07:09:13.193" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8922" CreationDate="2019-01-29T02:26:33.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like &lt;em&gt;В море&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;On the sea&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a newlyweds' cabin on the ship in the sea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sailors have made two holes in the cabin walls to spy on the newlyweds for their own amusement&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cabin is occupied by a newlywed Protestant priest and his wife, the sailors (a father and his son) are spying on them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They witness the pastor (who is apparently in need of money) convincing his young wife to prostitute herself to a rich English banker, to which she finally agrees. The pastor and his wife speak a language the sailors don't understand, so it's not clear what is the pastor convincing his wife of till the end of the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When the sailors realize what's happening, the father stops watching in disgust and orders his son to do the same&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="5740" LastEditDate="2019-01-29T17:00:41.780" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T17:00:41.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5627" CreationDate="2019-01-29T02:52:54.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Jack London's short story, &quot;Love of Life&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's about a man who's abandoned by his companion in an Alaska snow desert&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man, suffering from starvation, is slowly making his way towards the coast, chased by a similarly ill and starving wolf&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man, on the verge of death, eventually manages to kill the wolf and drink its blood which gives him some nutrition&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man is noticed and rescued by a ship crew and makes full recovery on the ship's way back to San Francisco&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T02:52:54.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9243" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2737" CreationDate="2019-01-29T07:37:43.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like &quot;The Mind Parasites&quot; by Colin Wilson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist is a scientist&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He learns that the human minds are controlled by bodiless parasites which can in theory be seen but distract the host's attention when he tries to focus on them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He used mescaline to focus his attention on the parasites and eventually get rid of them&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T07:37:43.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9238" CreationDate="2019-01-29T11:17:40.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it has to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darknesses but moving also toward a new sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What?&amp;quot; asked Montag of that other self, the subconscious idiot that ran babbling at times, quite independent of will, habit, and conscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you? People were more often - he searched for a simile, found one in his work-torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What incredible power of identification the girl had; she was like the eager watcher of a marionette show, anticipating each flicker of an eyelid, each gesture of his hand, each flick of a finger, the moment before it began. How long had they walked together? Three minutes? Five? Yet how large that time seemed now. How immense a figure she was on the stage before him; what a shadow she threw on the wall with her slender body! He felt that if his eye itched, she might blink. And if the muscles of his jaws stretched imperceptibly, she would yawn long before he would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;resembles Plato's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allegory of the Cave&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life. The prisoners manage to break their bonds one day, and discover that their reality was not what they thought it was. They discovered the sun, which Plato uses as an analogy for the fire that man cannot see behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other reference to the same allegory could be Mildred's wall-TV show. She is basically living her life looking at and communicating with TV characters which are projected on the wall, which replaces the reality for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T11:17:40.960" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-29T19:22:43.490" Score="4" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;George R. R. Martin's &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; doesn't need an introduction. It is also widely known among fans that Martin drew a lot of inspiration from history, for example the War of the Roses in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, recently, I have been watching the Chinese TV series &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms_(TV_series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;三国 / Three Kingdoms&lt;/a&gt; (2010), which is based on the fourteenth-century Chinese novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;三国演义 / Romance of the Three Kingdoms&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Guanzhong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luo Guanzhong&lt;/a&gt;. This novel is based on historical facts (obviously, with some poetic licence), namely the events at the end of the Han dynasty and the subsequent period of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Kingdoms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three Kingdoms&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parallels between ASOIAF and &lt;em&gt;Romance of the Three Kingdoms&lt;/em&gt; are impossible to ignore. In the Chinese novel, Cao Cao is a warlord who combines the ruthlessness of Tywin Lannister with the cunning of Littlefinger. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Cao#Cultural_legacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese equivalent of &quot;speaking of the devil&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is, &quot;speak of Cao Cao, and there he is&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Bei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liu Bei&lt;/a&gt; is an honourable man, just like Ned Stark, but he manages to survive longer than Cao Cao. His adviser &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zhuge Liang&lt;/a&gt; is also known 伏龍 or Crouching Dragon and sometimes makes creative use of fire (so there you have your &quot;dragon&quot;). And people see similarities between the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Red_Cliffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of the Red Cliffs&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_(Game_of_Thrones)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Blackwater Bay&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find discussion of parallels between the two novels in several places, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqCGikNUbX4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cultural Exchange Episode 01: Game of Thrones VS Romance of the Three Kingdoms&lt;/a&gt; (though some of the parallels sound a bit forced, e.g. between Red Cliff and the Red Keep) and the Reddit thread &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/1fmk2s/spoilers_all_a_comparison_of_a_song_of_ice_and/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A comparison of &quot;A Song of Ice and Fire&quot; and &quot;Romance of the Three Kingdoms&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Similarities were also briefly mentioned in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/6482/89356&quot;&gt;answer on SciFi Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, where the person who wrote that answer makes the following claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lastly.. Martin admits to being a big fan of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_of_the_Three_Kingdoms_%28video_game_series%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ROTK&lt;/a&gt; video game and its sort-of predecessor Bandit Kings of Ancient China.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That statement has no source, so I would like to know when and where George R. R. Martin said that he is a fan of that video game and whether he also read &lt;em&gt;Romance of the Three Kingdoms&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T14:09:07.840" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T14:09:07.840" Title="Did George R. R. Martin read Romance of The Three Kingdoms?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;&lt;luo-guanzhong&gt;&lt;romance-of-the-three-kingdoms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9247" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11203" CreationDate="2019-01-29T23:31:36.963" Score="4" ViewCount="579" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does Beatty know who has books and who does not in Fahrenheit 451? I presume word of mouth, but who would openly admit to criminal activity? This scene also seems a bit fishy when out of the blue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One last thing,&quot; said Beatty. &quot;At least once in his career, every fireman gets an itch. What do the&#xA;  books say, he wonders. Oh, to scratch that itch, eh? Well, Montag, take my word for it, I've had&#xA;  to read a few in my time, to know what I was about, and the books say nothing! Nothing you can&#xA;  teach or believe. They're about non?existent people, figments of imagination, if they're fiction.&#xA;  And if they're non?fiction, it's worse, one professor calling another an idiot, one philosopher&#xA;  screaming down another's gullet. All of them running about, putting out the stars and&#xA;  extinguishing the sun. You come away lost.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty seems to know Montag has some books. How exactly is this so if Montag has not told anyone about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5713" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T08:59:44.433" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T06:02:44.540" Title="How does Beatty know who has books and who does not in Fahrenheit 451?" Tags="&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-29T09:48:25.603" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;Sadie&lt;/em&gt; by Courtney Summers. There is this sentence that I do not understand. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want to live my life on the internet. Everything is perfect there. I found Kendall Baker on a computer in a library in some forgettable town along the way. She's beautiful. A girl with a glow. Eighteen years old, but the kind of eighteen they write about in books. The kind of eighteen that lives faster than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.in/books?id=OntJDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT66&amp;amp;lpg=PT66&amp;amp;dq=lives%20faster%20than%20the%20speed%20of%20hurt%20sadie&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=h7GPXuz_nr&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1NJnRsgwx_am066y0goUagrTZbMg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiAqO6ovpLgAhUFWysKHRf9CqcQ6AEwBnoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=lives%20faster%20than%20the%20speed%20of%20hurt%20sadie&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;speed of hurt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the author mean by &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;speed of hurt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; here?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5744" OwnerDisplayName="Arjun Ahuja" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T08:57:44.623" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T17:43:05.173" Title="What does &quot;speed of hurt” mean in Courtney Summers's &quot;Sadie&quot;?" Tags="&lt;courtney-summers&gt;&lt;sadie&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9248" CreationDate="2019-01-29T14:29:59.560" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the whole phrase is &quot;living faster than the speed of hurt&quot; and it is a beautiful string of words.  It conjures images of a young person, living life with enthusiasm, ferocity and courage; racing past life's challenges, over emotional hurtles and through dark moments without letting them steal her momentum, her joy of living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;speed of hurt&quot; is the threshold below which pain is real.  Summer's young character believes she can outrun the anguish which living brings.  I haven't read this particular book, but I would not be surprised if later in its pages, she learns that pain is a lot faster runner than she currently believes it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Henry Taylor" LastActivityDate="2019-01-29T14:29:59.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9251" CreationDate="2019-01-30T01:24:06.393" Score="12" ViewCount="2061" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Norse Mythology&lt;/em&gt; by Neil Gaiman (2017) both the names &lt;em&gt;Fenrir&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Fenris Wolf&lt;/em&gt; are used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example, from chapter &quot;Ragnarok: The Final Destiny of the Gods&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fenrir&lt;/em&gt;, the great wolf, will free himself from his shackles... Where &lt;em&gt;Fenris Wolf&lt;/em&gt; walks, flaming destruction follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This distinction in name usage does not appear to be random or unintentional. As in the above quote, both forms of the name are used sometimes in close proximity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first thought was that the term &quot;Fenris&quot; in &quot;Fenris Wolf&quot; was being used as a sort of modifier / adjective. But since &quot;Wolf&quot; is capitalized that does not seem correct. More that &quot;Fenris Wolf&quot; is the full name but &quot;Fenrir&quot; is a type of abbreviation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't count carefully but &quot;Fenrir&quot; appears to be the more common usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in anything related to this specific book, its sources, related authentic materials, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5745" OwnerDisplayName="DaveInCaz" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T08:55:35.347" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T04:18:47.900" Title="What are the different names of Fenrir / Fenris Wolf?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;norse-mythology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2019-01-30T02:06:33.037" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norse mythology, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenrir&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;he&lt;/a&gt; is called both &lt;strong&gt;Fenrir&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Fenrisúlfr&lt;/strong&gt;. Fenrisúlfr means Fenrir's Wolf, but it seems to be common to translate it as Fenris Wolf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.voluspa.org/vafthrudnismal46-50.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's&lt;/a&gt; a poem (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaf%C3%BEr%C3%BA%C3%B0nism%C3%A1l&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vafþrúðnismál&lt;/a&gt;, I believe) that calls him &quot;Fenrir&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Óðinn kvað:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Fjölð ek fór, fjölð ek freistaðak,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  fjölð ek of reynda regin:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hvaðan kemr sól á inn slétta himin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  er þessa hefr fenrir farit?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Othin spake:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Much have I fared, | much have I found,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Much have I got of the gods:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whence comes the sun | to the smooth sky back,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When Fenrir has snatched it forth?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.voluspa.org/skaldskaparmal21-30.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's&lt;/a&gt; an example of it written as &quot;Fenrisúlfr&quot; (from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sk%C3%A1ldskaparm%C3%A1l&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Skáldskaparmál&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hvernig skal kenna Loka? Svá, at kalla hann son Fárbauta ok Laufeyjar, Nálar, bróður Býleists ok Helblinda, föður Vánargands, þat er Fenrisúlfr...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How should one periphrase Loki? Thus: call him Son of Fárbauti and Laufey, or of Nil, Brother of Býleistr and of Helblindi, Father of the Monster of Ván (that is, Fenris-Wolf)...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" OwnerDisplayName="Laurel" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T02:06:33.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:36:25.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:36:25.330" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:36:25.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:36:25.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Canadian young adult fiction author Courtney Summers (born 1986) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:37:48.017" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:37:48.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9254" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9255" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" Score="0" Body="For the novel &quot;Sadie&quot; by Courtney Summers. Use with the [courtney-summers] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:40:11.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9256" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9257" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Stephen Chbosky, and American writer" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:45:17.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9258" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9259" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel by Stephen Chbosky. Use with the [stephen-chbosky] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:45:49.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9260" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9261" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of the Irish author Robert Wilson Lynd" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T09:56:24.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16626" CreationDate="2019-01-30T16:08:54.863" Score="2" ViewCount="347" Body="&lt;p&gt;Certainly the narrative of &lt;em&gt;A Portrait&lt;/em&gt; reflects a &lt;em&gt;developing&lt;/em&gt; narrator (in turn reflecting Stephen's development), and so the child-like first paragraph,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming&#xA;  down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the&#xA;  road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;merely reflects a child narrator since Stephen is a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reader who had &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; met Joyce via &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, might mistake this for interior monologue of some kind, but closer reading reveals that is not, or at least that is how it seems to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there any examples of interior monologue in a &lt;em&gt;A Portrait&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the example quoted above in fact a stream of consciousness / interior monologue of some sort, as argued (non authoritatively) &lt;a href=&quot;https://iasj.net/iasj?func=fulltext&amp;amp;aId=17436&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T14:15:23.870" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T13:10:38.713" Title="Does Joyce use interior monologue in &quot;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&quot;?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;portrait-of-artist-as-a-young-man&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9263" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9266" CreationDate="2019-01-30T17:23:52.367" Score="5" ViewCount="331" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question says it all. As I recall, part of the plot concerns replacing semi-intelligent military aircraft with human-piloted military aircraft, with much greater performance realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-01-31T12:12:54.150" LastActivityDate="2019-12-25T04:20:01.457" Title="What is the title of the story by Isaac Asimov in which technology advances, with increasing advantage, backwards?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9248" CreationDate="2019-01-30T17:43:05.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is by analogy to &quot;the speed of sound&quot; and &quot;the speed of light.&quot;  On Earth, sound travels at a roughly constant speed through the atmosphere.  If you are traveling faster than the speed of sound, it means a sound traveling the same direction from the same origin as you can never catch up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an eighteen-year-old traveling faster than the &quot;speed of hurt&quot; is moving so quickly through life (identities, relationships, settings, moods) that no pain or hurt can possibly catch up with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2019-01-30T17:43:05.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9263" CreationDate="2019-01-30T23:55:15.680" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?41408&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Feeling of Power&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Asimov&lt;/a&gt;, first published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?58728+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt;, February 1958&lt;/a&gt;, available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/1958-02_IF#page/n5/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;. It's about a man in the future who rediscovers the art of calculating without a computer, using pencil and paper, and the military applications of his discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Feeling_of_Power&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; plot summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the distant future, humans live in a computer-aided society and have forgotten the fundamentals of mathematics, including even the rudimentary skill of counting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb, and the war is conducted by long-range weapons controlled by computers which are expensive and hard to replace. Myron Aub, a low grade Technician, discovers how to reverse-engineer the principles of pencil-and-paper arithmetic from computers—a development which is later dubbed &quot;Graphitics&quot;. The discovery is appropriated by the military establishment, who use it to re-invent their understanding of mathematics. They also plan to replace their computer-operated ships with lower cost, more expendable (in their opinion) manned ships to continue the war.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Aub is so upset by the appropriation of his discovery for military purposes that he commits suicide. As Aub's funeral proceeds, his supervisor realizes that even with Aub dead, the advancement of Graphitics is unstoppable. He executes simple multiplications in his mind without help from any machine, which gives him a great feeling of power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The general was saying, &quot;Our goal is a simple one, gentlemen; the replacement of the computer. A ship that can navigate space without a computer on board can be &#xA;  constructed in one-fifth the time and at one-tenth the expense of a computer-laden ship. We could build fleets five times, ten times as great as Deneb could if we could but eliminate the computer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;And I see something even beyond this. It may be fantastic now; a mere dream; but in the future I see the manned missile!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-25T04:20:01.457" LastActivityDate="2019-12-25T04:20:01.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-31T01:02:09.430" Score="2" ViewCount="590" Body="&lt;p&gt;This poem caught my eye a few days ago. I was strangely unable to find a single analysis piece, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/praxis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Praxis by Wendy Xu&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5748" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-10T14:19:15.177" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T15:02:00.377" Title="What is the meaning of the poem &quot;Praxis&quot; by Wendy Xu?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-31T06:13:49.330" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many mystery writers have a prequel as the final book in their series, usually dealing with the detective's first case, how they became a detective. Sometimes these are written many years after the other novels about that detective. Why do the authors choose to do this? Is this a way for the publishers to get the authors to write one more book--appealing to an author's desire to do something different with a character they might feel they've done everything with they could?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples: H.R.F. Keating (Inspector Ghote series), Gillian Linscott (Nell Bray), Leonard Tourney (the Elizabethan amateur sleuths Matthew and Joan Stock).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5082" LastEditorUserId="5082" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T08:40:55.257" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T08:40:55.257" Title="Why do so many mystery series have prequels at the end of the series?" Tags="&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5170" CreationDate="2019-01-31T09:46:54.283" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…] now He has left off calling firmaments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And strata, flowers and creatures, very good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;do not mean, as suggested in the question, that God has ceased to &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt; things, but rather, that he has ceased to &lt;em&gt;call them very good&lt;/em&gt;. This is an allusion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis&lt;/a&gt; chapter 1 verse 31, in the Authorized Version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘firmament of Heaven’ appears in Genesis 1:6–8; flowers in 11–12; creatures in 20–25. I am not entirely sure what Browning means by ‘strata’, but its position in the list suggests that it refers to the division of the waters from the dry land in verses 9–10. After each of these passages the phrase “and God saw that it was good” is repeated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So “He says it still of truth” means that God still says that truth is very good. The association of God with truth comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/John&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John&lt;/a&gt; chapter 14 verse 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-01-31T09:46:54.283" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5144" CreationDate="2019-01-31T13:31:57.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two speakers in the passage are Lady Waldemar and Aurora Leigh. They are rivals for the affection of Aurora’s cousin Romney Leigh. Lady Waldemar is older than Aurora, and an insincere and manipulative character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three points to Lady Waldemar’s speech. First, she belittles Aurora by likening her to ‘a youthful prophetess’ who has to put up a severe façade but underneath it is distracted by pretty sights. Second, she deprecates herself in comparison with Aurora and Romney, but we can tell that this humility is false, not just because it follows immediately on the belittlement, but because it is only a few lines since she was boasting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;              My first husband left me young,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And pretty enough, so please you, and rich enough,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To keep my booth in May-fair with the rest&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To happy issues. There are marquises&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Would serve seven years to call me wife, I know:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, after seven, I might consider it,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For there’s some comfort in a marquisate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When all’s said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Lady Waldemar entreats Aurora to be her friend. We can guess that this appeal is motivated by strategy and not by affection, for if she can enlist Aurora as confidante and ally in her pursuit of Romney, then this effectively cuts Aurora out of the running, for she can tell that Aurora is too virtuous to compete with a friend for the love of a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this undertone is clear to the reader, it is hardly likely to be unclear to Aurora, so when she replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                        ‘I own myself&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Incredulous of confidence like this&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Availing him or you.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what she means is, “I doubt that telling me all this helps either Romney or you,” indicating that she sees through Lady Waldemar’s attempts at manipulating her. Here ‘own’ means ‘acknowledge’; ‘incredulous’ means ‘unbelieving, skeptical’; ‘confidence’ means ‘a confidential communication’; and ‘avail’ means ‘benefit, profit, help, assist’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T11:19:45.873" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:19:45.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5143" CreationDate="2019-01-31T18:19:41.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aurora Leigh is a poor poet living and working in a tiny ‘garret-room’. Lady Waldemar is a rich widow who has fallen in love with Aurora’s cousin Romney Leigh, and who has climbed the stairs to enlist Aurora’s aid in separating Romney from his protégée Marian Erle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Waldemar’s dialogue in this scene is a mixture of insincere flattery and barbed compliments. The gist of her speech here is that she finds Aurora to be prettier than she had expected on account of her fame as a writer. Let’s look at the text in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Is this,’ she said, ‘the Muse?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muses&lt;/a&gt; were the ancient Greek goddesses of poetry, music, and the other arts, and also “by metonymy: a person inspired by a Muse; a poet” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). So Lady Waldemar is asking Aurora if she is the poet she has come to visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                        ‘No sibyl even,’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I answered, ‘since she fails to guess the cause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which taxed you with this visit, madam.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aurora, in her reply, plays on the double meaning of ‘Muse’ by referencing another group of characters from Greek myth: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sibyl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sibyls&lt;/a&gt; were oracles who prophesied at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphic_Sibyl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Delphi&lt;/a&gt; and other temples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                        ‘Good,’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She said, ‘I like to be sincere at once;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We find out fairly soon that this is a lie: Lady Waldemar is insincere and manipulative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Perhaps, if I had found a literal Muse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The visit might have taxed me.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a back-handed compliment: while saying that she does not find a visit to Aurora taxing, Lady Waldemar implies that she has no interest in poetry, music, or the other arts, that the literal Muses might have tried to inspire in her, and thus no interest in Aurora’s work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                        ‘As it is,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You wear your blue so chiefly in your eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My fair Aurora’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is another back-handed compliment. For the barb behind it, we must look a little later in the scene, where she asks rhetorically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                        ‘Is the blue in eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As awful as in stockings, after all’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestocking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bluestocking&lt;/a&gt;” is “a woman devoted to literary, scholarly, or intellectual activities” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) but the word carries derogatory connotations, especially of ugliness or unfashionableness. So Lady Waldemar is apparently complimenting Aurora by saying that she wears her blue in her eyes rather than her stockings, but in doing so she manages to convey her lack of respect for Aurora’s work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                        ‘in a frank good way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It comforts me entirely for your fame’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that Lady Waldemar had feared, on the basis of Aurora’s fame as a poet, that she would be ugly, but on meeting her she is comforted by her good looks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘As well as for the trouble of my ascent&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To this Olympus.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building on the mention of Muses and sibyls, Lady Waldemar fancifully likens Aurora’s garret to Mount Olympus, the home of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Olympians&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient Greek gods&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                        There, a silver laugh&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ran rippling through her quickened little breaths&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The steep stair somewhat justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of ‘somewhat’ is a little barb at Lady Waldemar’s age and lack of fitness, but it is in the narration as Aurora is too polite to say it out loud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T11:19:17.087" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:19:17.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2290" CreationDate="2019-01-31T21:55:09.717" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about the coracle? It is an ancient round boat which is woven and has skin on the outside, looking much like a willow sieve. It is still made today. The reference to the blue hands and green faces might refer to the Celts and the woo blue dye they used and to their painted and tattooed faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D6bcI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/D6bcI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/technology/coracle/media/137033/148939&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image source&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5754" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T08:52:59.963" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T08:52:59.963" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9274" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T06:18:35.267" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. pp 16-17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;I like Faulkner as well as I like Hemingway, and I’d like to believe that even William Strunk and certainly E. B. White would not have tried to edit Faulkner out of existence. When Hemingway writes “He disliked bars and bodegas,” speaking of an old waiter in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” few of us would argue that his sentence is not simple and direct or that it is cluttered with needless words. But when Faulkner writes about the boy who’s the protagonist in “Barn Burning” it’s hard to see how Strunk and White’s admonition might apply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more:&lt;strong&gt;[.]&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;[From]&lt;/strong&gt; where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish— &lt;strong&gt;[.]&lt;/strong&gt; this &lt;strong&gt;[This]&lt;/strong&gt;, the cheese which he knew he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief between the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of the blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; Simple and direct it most certainly is not. Both writers, Faulkner and Hemingway, introduce us to the thinking of their characters, but just as the thinking of Hemingway’s old waiter is infinitely more tired and less active than the thinking of Faulkner’s boy, the sentence each writer constructs is intended to hit us in very different ways for very different reasons. Start cutting out words and simplifying the syntax in Faulkner’s sentence and we’ll miss the complex thinking that haunts the boy throughout the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn’t Faulkner split the sentence overhead into three, by substituting a period for the:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;colon (in the second line)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dash (in the fifth last line)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I emboldened these edits. Shorter sentences still feel more readable to me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T11:16:11.957" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:16:11.957" Title="Why didn't Faulkner split a 118-word sentence into three, In &quot;Barn Burning&quot; when he writes about the boy protagonist?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;brooks-landon&gt;&lt;building-great-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T06:59:11.640" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. pp 16-17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    When I say that Christensen thought that writing really mattered, I mean that he saw sentences as means to a crucial end, much more important than clarity or effectiveness. As he put it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end is to enhance life—to give the self (the soul) body by wedding it to the world, to give the world life by wedding it to the self. Or, more simply, &lt;strong&gt;to teach to see, for that, as Conrad maintained, is everything&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    His second, and more instrumental, belief was that traditional writing instruction had missed the point by advocating the subordinate clause and the complex sentence, and that “we should concentrate instead on the sentence modifiers, or free modifiers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What's the source of this Conrad paraphase? Is it &lt;em&gt;Lord Jim&lt;/em&gt;? Google yielded &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/3345.Joseph_Conrad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did Conrad mean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:16:59.983" Title="What did Conrad mean by teaching to see is everything?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9277" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T08:28:05.673" Score="0" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. pp 55-56.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don’t writers tier long sentences as Landon does beneath? His formatting is far more readable, and clarity's more important than the additional required space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X5MEC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X5MEC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T11:18:26.723" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:26:42.610" Title="Why don’t writers layer and number lengthy sentences?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;brooks-landon&gt;&lt;building-great-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T09:10:12.283" Score="-1" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 121.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  First, prompts of comparison—figurative language. Remember the basic distinction between a simile and a metaphor is that a simile explicitly compares two things of different kinds or quality, usually introducing the comparison with &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;, while a metaphor offers a comparison of two things of different kinds or quality, but does not introduce it explicitly with words such as &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt;. Thus, “She ran like a gazelle” is a simile, comparing a girl to a famously fast and graceful animal, and introducing the comparison with &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt;. But “She gazelled her way across the field” would be a metaphor, the comparison implicit in a verb that suggests her movement had qualities that might be associated with a gazelle.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  Not every simile is a metaphor, since &lt;strong&gt;some similes simply make comparisons and do not ask us to think of one situation or thing as being something else&lt;/strong&gt;, but every metaphor inherently implies the comparison we find in a simile. Both similes and metaphors make our writing more interesting and more effective. Both quickly and powerfully suggest comparisons that might be impossible to explain in any literal way. Years ago, S. I. Hayakawa noted in his classic textbook &lt;em&gt;Language in Thought and Action&lt;/em&gt; that similes don’t actually compare two apparently dissimilar things or situations as much as they compare our feelings toward those two things or situations, thus offering a window into the way we feel, as well as the way we think.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; As Hayakawa puts it: “The simile . . . is something of a compromise stage between the direct, unreflective expression of feeling and the report, but of course closer to the former than the latter.” He goes on to suggest that “[t]he imaginative process by which phrases such as these [similes] are coined is the same as that by which poets arrive at poetry. In poetry, there is the same love of seeing things in scientifically outrageous but emotionally expressive language.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can 'some similes simply make comparisons', if they 'do not ask us to think of one situation or thing as being something else'? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Doesn't the former (comparisons) imply the latter (“think[ing] of one situation or thing as being something else”)?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Please help me distinguish 'some similes simply make comparisons' vs. 'think[ing] of one situation or thing as being something else'?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T11:17:33.313" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T13:03:28.230" Title="How can some similes 'make comparisons' without thinking 'of one situation or thing as being something else'?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;brooks-landon&gt;&lt;building-great-sentences&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9275" CreationDate="2019-02-01T09:35:56.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. What's the source of this Conrad paraphase?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christensen is almost certainly referring to the quote you've found. The source of that quote is the Preface of Conrad's &lt;em&gt;The Nigger Of The &quot;Narcissus&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which you can access online (as html) at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17731/17731-h/17731-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenburg&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. What does he mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conrad uses his Preface – &quot;which is simply an avowal of endeavour&quot; – to explore the nature of creative writing. He opens it boldly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should&#xA;  carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined&#xA;  as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to&#xA;  the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and&#xA;  one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its&#xA;  forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of&#xA;  matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is&#xA;  enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing&#xA;  quality—the very truth of their existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The artist, he says, speaks to &quot;the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that ... binds together all humanity&quot;. More explicitly, he says &quot;Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament&quot; and goes on to say that if this appeal is to be effective, it must be conveyed &lt;em&gt;through the senses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth paragraph he cuts to the chase (I've put in bold the key words Christensen is referring to):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task ... is the only valid justification for&#xA;  the worker in prose. And if his conscience is clear, his answer to&#xA;  those who in the fulness of a wisdom which looks for immediate profit,&#xA;  demand specifically to be edified, consoled, amused; who demand to be&#xA;  promptly improved, or encouraged, or frightened, or shocked, or&#xA;  charmed, must run thus:—&lt;strong&gt;My task which I am trying to achieve is, by&#xA;  the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it&#xA;  is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is&#xA;  everything.&lt;/strong&gt; If I succeed, you shall find there according to your&#xA;  deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and,&#xA;  perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to&#xA;  ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To put it in modern parlance: his response to those who want immediate gratification is that his task is, especially, to make them &lt;em&gt;see&lt;/em&gt; [i.e. see the commonality of human experience that he has previously described], and in so doing, he will not only give them the gratification they want, but maybe also a deeper experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-02-01T10:07:55.523" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T10:07:55.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5150" CreationDate="2019-02-01T10:42:16.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The child is playing a game of chance, with one hand competing against the other, for want of a companion to play against.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of examples from other works, to show how the phrase is used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One summer afternoon at Capua I was sitting on a stone bench behind the stables of my villa, thinking out some problem of Etruscan history and idly shooting dice, &lt;strong&gt;left hand against right&lt;/strong&gt;, on the rough plank table in front of me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Graves (1934). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.226782/page/n221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I, Claudius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sat near her on the floor, playing knucklebones, &lt;strong&gt;right hand against left&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mary Stewart (1970). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LvaqcjjVp2YC&amp;amp;pg=PT16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Crystal Cave&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of game of chance might be played with a brass button? Perhaps the button is spun to see how it lands; or perhaps the game is played with some other equipment (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knucklebones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;knucklebones&lt;/a&gt; can be played with small bones or pebbles) and the brass button is the stake or prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T10:42:16.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9274" CreationDate="2019-02-01T11:02:29.523" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brooks Landon has already provided the explanation in the final paragraph that you've quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;just as the thinking of Hemingway’s old waiter is infinitely more&#xA;  tired and less active than the thinking of Faulkner’s boy, the&#xA;  sentence each writer constructs is intended to hit us in very&#xA;  different ways for very different reasons. Start cutting out words and&#xA;  simplifying the syntax in Faulkner’s sentence and we’ll miss the&#xA;  complex thinking that haunts the boy throughout the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could say that while Hemingway gives the reader a crystal-sharp impression, Faulkner &lt;em&gt;takes us on a journey&lt;/em&gt;. His marvellous sentence - best experienced by reading it aloud, slowly, dramatically (oh, to hear Richard Burton orate this!) - deliberately meanders, as if following the boy's shifting attention on the smells, the tins, the emotion in the courtroom. It's not quite a stream of consciousness, yet we get a strong sense of the experiential flow, as exemplified by the remaining words in that paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He could not see the table where the Justice sat and before which his&#xA;  father and his father’s enemy (our enemy he thought in that despair;&#xA;  ourn! mine and hisn both! He’s my father!) stood, but he could hear&#xA;  them, the two of them that is, because his father had said no word&#xA;  yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've read any Faulkner at all, you'd understand that he is writing &lt;em&gt;for art's sake&lt;/em&gt;, not for the reader's simple comforts. He didn't split this long sentence into bite-sized chunks because doing so would deprive him (and us) of the effect he wanted to achieve. Which is exactly the point Brooks Landon makes in the paragraph you've quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T11:02:29.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5165" CreationDate="2019-02-01T12:07:51.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to this passage is the emotional situation of the characters. The speaker is Marian Erle, a poor young woman who loves philanthropist Romney Leigh. She has been visited by Lady Waldemar, a rich widow who also loves Romney, and who has taken up charity work in order to get closer to Romney, and to try to separate Marian from him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Waldemar’s strategy is to dissimulate kindness and gain Marian’s trust, in order to persuade her that marrying Romney would be bad for him, since she knows that Marian wants only what’s best for Romney, and so can be persuaded to virtuously give him up. So in the quoted passage Lady Waldemar tries to assume a motherly role, something for which she knows that Marian longs, since her own mother was abusive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                  At which she turned,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (The worm), and beat her baby in revenge&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For her own broken heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the situation is false, because Lady Waldemar is not in fact a mother-figure to Marian, but rather a jealous rival, and Marian painfully realises this when she looks at Lady Waldemar’s face and sees its youth and beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think the intended meaning of ‘bright’ is not ‘intelligent’, but rather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of persons: ‘Resplendent with charms’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.109513/page/n605&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johnson&lt;/a&gt;); beautiful, fair. [&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and “beauty keeps itself still uppermost” means that for Lady Waldemar, keeping herself beautiful is still the most important thing, since she hopes by means of her beauty to gain her object. This is an instance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypallage&lt;/a&gt;: it’s not beauty itself, but rather Lady Waldemar who does the keeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T12:07:51.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9279" CreationDate="2019-02-01T13:03:28.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Compare the two sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dolphins are humans of the sea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dolphins are like humans, but they live in the sea&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The former is a metaphor, the latter is a simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at the former sentence closely and think of its actual meaning, you can see it's technically a lie. Dolphins do live in the sea, but they are not humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence is true: dolphins do share some qualities of humans, however they are not humans. This is what &quot;being like&quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By convention, we are trained not to notice small lies like this, we subconsciously parse the metaphors as if they were similes. However, this requires some brain power. We have to spend a tiny moment actually thinking whether to take a statement at its face value, or treat it as a literary device. We come to the conclusion that dolphins are not real people really fast, but we still have to do that thinking, and that's what the author is referring to in your excerpt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tiny moment of thinking is exactly what gives the metaphors (and some other literary devices too) their expressive power. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T13:03:28.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9285" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T16:49:48.780" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Machiavelli mean when he says the following in &lt;em&gt;The Prince&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he must be a very true friend, or a thoroughly determined enemy of the prince, to keep faith with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's on page 29 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/Prince-Adapted2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this PDF version of the text&lt;/a&gt; (in chapter 19).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly I am still unsettled about “to keep faith with you” at the end. What is this adverbial phrase referring to? Because if it is regarding “he must be a very rare friend” then it makes sense. But if it is regarding “a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince” (which is more likely here because that is the phrase comes right before “to keep faith you”) then it just sounds awkward…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5749" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T13:02:18.830" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T13:02:18.830" Title="What does Machiavelli mean on page 29 of The Prince?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;niccolo-machiavelli&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1640" CreationDate="2019-02-01T17:06:08.447" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't believe Moore wasn't aware of the fact that 5 = 101 in binary; and obviously 1984 would have been an influence on his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is an example of synchronicity; once you make a connection between things, other surprising connections follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5760" LastActivityDate="2019-02-01T17:06:08.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2019-02-01T20:47:42.807" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is a paragraph discussing conspiracy against a prince (i.e. ruler). When a conspirator looks for support from other people, anyone who gets involved in the conspiracy is constantly at risk of being betrayed to the ruler in return for a reward. This is what Machiavelli in the words preceding the quote in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As soon as you have opened your mind to a dissatisfied person, you have given him the material with which to satisfy himself, because by informing on you he can look for every advantage. So, because of the certain gains from informing and the uncertain gains and certain dangers from conspiring, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to be loyal to you or to support you (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/keep-faith-with&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synonyms for keep faith with in Collins&lt;/a&gt;), a co-conspirator &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;must be a very true friend [i.e. of you], or a thoroughly determined enemy of the prince to keep faith with you [i.e., you as a conspirator, after you have revealed your intentions].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For comparison, here is the relevant passage in Peter Bondanella's translation (Oxford University Press, 2005, 2008):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone who conspires cannot act alone, (...). As soon as you have revealed your intention to one malcontent, you give him the means to make himself content, since he can have everything he desires by revealing the plot. This is so much the case that, seeing a sure gain on the one hand, and one that is doubtful and full of danger on the other, if he is to remain loyal to you he must either be a rare kind of friend or a wholly obstinate enemy of the prince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Response to a comment saying that Machiavelli is here giving advice to the prince:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to be aware of the fact that the pronoun &quot;you&quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Prince&lt;/em&gt; does not always refer to the ruler (the &quot;prince&quot;). This becomes obvious when you substitute &quot;the prince&quot; for &quot;you&quot; in this whole passage (and adapt &quot;your&quot; etc accordingly):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A conspirator cannot act alone, nor can he take a companion except from those whom he believes to be dissatisfied. As soon as &lt;strong&gt;the prince&lt;/strong&gt; [has] opened &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; mind to a dissatisfied person, &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; [has] given him the material with which to satisfy himself, because by informing on &lt;strong&gt;the prince&lt;/strong&gt; he can look for every advantage. So, because of the certain gains from informing and the uncertain gains and certain dangers from conspiring, he must be a very true friend, or a thoroughly determined enemy of the prince, to keep faith with &lt;strong&gt;the prince&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously does not make sense, since &quot;informing&quot; here refers to revealing the conspiracy to the prince. &quot;You&quot; here refers to someone who is thinking of starting a conspiracy against the prince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T13:01:41.167" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T13:01:41.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9288" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-01T21:52:42.433" Score="-2" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 124.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    Listen to the striking opening sentence of Joseph Conrad’s story “The Secret Sharer”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes[,] resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect[,] as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen[,] now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn’t Conrad and other writers comma as Landon did in square brackets?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T15:50:55.933" Title="Why did Conrad not add commas to lengthy sentences to make them more readable?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9291" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T00:15:31.527" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 124 Bottom – p. 125 Top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;          Listen to the striking opening sentence of Joseph Conrad’s story “The Secret Sharer”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes[,] resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect[,] as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen[,] now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I’ve slightly repunctuated this sentence to emphasize its cumulative rhythms [I emboldened]&lt;/strong&gt;, but I cite it here to note how it is only when we get to the simile “as if abandoned forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen” that we fully understand the extent to which Conrad’s narrator has a very active imagination and loves to use it to make stories out of what he sees. In other words, while mastery of coordinate, subordinate, and mixed cumulative forms is an important goal and may tell us a lot about a writer’s syntactic skill and versatility, it doesn’t do much to distinguish the skill and versatility of one writer who writes great cumulative sentences from the skill and versatility of another writer who also can write great cumulative sentences. However, the similes these two writers will think of, the comparisons they will make, will almost certainly be different, each writer drawing from different knowledge, different experiences, and revealing different interests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are the 'cumulative rhythms' here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did Landon decide where to re-punctuate the sentence? To wit, how did he decide the beginnings and ends of each of the “cumulative rhythms”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I phoned Landon, but he replied that he doesn't have time to answer my questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T00:15:31.527" Title="How do Brooks Landon's commas stress cumulative rhythms in Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer”?" Tags="&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T02:26:53.437" Score="1" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. p. 142&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  And here are two very different-sounding sentences from two of Thomas Berger’s novels. The first is from his classic &lt;em&gt;Little Big Man&lt;/em&gt; and is in the inimitable voice of Jack Crabb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;As I say, none of us understood the situation, but me and Caroline was considerably better off than the chief, because we only looked to him for our upkeep in the foreseeable future, whereas he at last decided we was demons and only waiting for dark to steal the wits from his head; and while riding along he muttered prayers and incantations to bring us bad medicine, but so ran his luck that he never saw any of the animal brothers that assisted his magic—such as Rattlesnake or Prairie Dog—but rather only Jackrabbit, who had a grudge against him of long standing because he once had kept a prairie fire off his camp by exhorting it to burn the hares’ home instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  The second example is from Berger’s retelling of the “matter of Britain” in his &lt;em&gt;Arthur Rex&lt;/em&gt; and sounds more than a bit like Sir Thomas Malory—but like a Malory who has just mastered the cumulative sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Now the abominable Sir Meliagrant took Guinevere to a kingdom that was not very distant from Britain but was cunningly concealed, tucked into a valley amongst mountains, entrance to which could be gained only by one pass not easily found, and before this pass was a rushing river over which was but one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;p. 143&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bridge, the narrowest in the world, for it was made of one long sword, the weapon of a giant, the which was mounted horizontally, keen edge upwards.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;  I’ve chosen these particular passages to share with you to suggest the range of prose rhythms we can hear in Woolf’s finely architected prose, Berger’s mastery of American vernacular prose rhythms, and Berger’s ability to invoke the sound of Sir Thomas Malory’s prose, but in a book whose prose is also thoroughgoingly modern. &lt;strong&gt;Notice that these passages are rhythmical, but not musical or even metrical&lt;/strong&gt;—the result of the way each proceeds forward in steps rather than the result of syllable count or meter. As Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us in her delightful writing text, Steering the Craft, “The sound of language is where it all begins and what it all comes back to. The basic elements of language are physical; the noise words make and the rhythm of their relationships. This is just as true of written prose as it is of poetry.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Landon mean by ‘musical’? How can prose be 'musical'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T02:26:53.437" Title="How can prose be musical?" Tags="&lt;meter&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T04:34:12.263" Score="1" ViewCount="1102" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Johnson wrote the following comparison between Dryden and Pope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pope had perhaps the judgment of Dryden; but Dryden certainly wanted the diligence of Pope. In acquired knowledge the superiority must be allowed to Dryden, whose education was more scholastick, and who before he became an author had been allowed more time for study, with better means of information. His mind has a larger range, and he collects his images and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of science. Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local manners. . . . There is more dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in that of Pope.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind; Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and rapid; Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden’s page is a natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope’s is a velvet lawn, shaven by the scythe, and levelled by the roller.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet; that quality without which judgement is cold and knowledge is inert; that energy which collects, combines, amplifies, and animates—the superiority must, with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. . . . Dryden’s performances were always hasty, either excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestick necessity; he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and to accumulate all that study might produce, or chance might supply. If the flights of Dryden therefore are higher, Pope continues longer on the wing. If of Dryden’s fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope’s the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please explain or paraphrase Johnson’s writing? I don’t understand his distinctions between Dryden and Pope? They feel like elegant, but platitudinous, hokum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T11:50:00.123" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T17:43:52.293" Title="What's Samuel Johnson truly saying about Dryden and Pope?" Tags="&lt;alexander-pope&gt;&lt;samuel-johnson&gt;&lt;john-dryden&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9296" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T05:17:07.243" Score="-4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. pp 199-200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;        Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, it should be remembered, was himself known for his use of balanced form, accused Johnson of writing in “Johnsonese,” a style that he called “systematically vicious,” and famously opined in a sentence that is itself &lt;strong&gt;a masterpiece of balance&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that this sentence can be greatly improved if Macaulay didn't overwhelm his subject with lengthy noun phrases. Point form feels incomparably more readable to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;his constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;his big words wasted on little things;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T22:15:09.660" Title="How's Thomas Babington Macaulay's sentence chiding Samuel Johnson 'a masterpiece of balance'?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T06:58:05.937" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prof. Brooks Landon, U. Iowa, &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.uiowa.edu/people/brooks-landon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ph.D. U. Texas at Austin&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read&lt;/em&gt; (Great Courses) &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0452298601&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2013)&lt;/a&gt;. pp. 245-246. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; And what Connors reports has a bit of the feel of a good news/bad news joke. The good news is that he cites a number of empirical studies that seem to validate the assumption that sentence-based writing pedagogies do indeed improve writing—and do so rather dramatically. The bad news is that they have fallen out of fashion, precisely in part because of a larger suspicion in English studies of empirical studies as &lt;strong&gt;antihumanist&lt;/strong&gt; and a suspicion that these teaching techniques stifle creativity, are not themselves located in larger theories of discourse, and might actually be demeaning to students, with exercises, far removed from actual writing situations, that boil down to “mere servile copying.” More bad news is that by the mid-1980s “[t]he result of all these lines of criticism of syntactic methods was that they were stopped almost dead in their tracks as a research program and ceased being a popular teaching project just a little later.” The good news, however, is that Connors concludes, “It really does seem that the current perception that somehow sentence rhetorics ‘don’t work’ exists as a massive piece of wish fulfillment.” As Connors explains (more good news!) in a sentence that is as carefully suspensive as his earlier sentence was balanced: “In other words, if people believe that research has shown that sentence rhetorics don’t work, their belief exists not because the record bears it out but because it is what people want to believe.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/72aa9v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Humanism vs. Anti-humanism?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/30nrtj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anti-humanism??&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://culturalanalysis.net/2018/03/01/the-rise-of-antihumanism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rise of Antihumanism&lt;/a&gt;, but they're too complicated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T15:45:51.187" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:51:10.847" Title="What's the meaning of 'English studies of empirical studies' to be antihumanist?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9300" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9781" CreationDate="2019-02-02T11:14:10.997" Score="4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1868), the narrator buys an ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/oldyellowbooksou00hodeuoft#page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old yellow book&lt;/a&gt;’ at a street market in Florence, containing documents from a seventeenth-century murder trial at Rome. He considers writing a poem based on the book, and tries to discover more about the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I took my book to Rome first, tried truth’s power&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On likely people. &quot;Have you met such names?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Is a tradition extant of such facts?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The response he receives is discouraging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Content you with your treasure of a book,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “And waive what’s wanting! Take a friend’s advice!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “It’s not the custom of the country. Mend&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Go get you manned by Manning and new-manned&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “By Wiseman, and we’ll see or else we won’t!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are the ‘likely people’ saying here? The named individuals are English and Irish Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church, that is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Edward_Manning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Edward Manning&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Henry Newman&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wiseman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicholas Wiseman&lt;/a&gt;. Is the suggestion that the narrator needs to convert to Catholicism before he can expect anyone to help him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T19:03:19.423" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T12:41:47.430" Title="Why does Browning need to be ‘manned by Manning’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;the-ring-and-the-book&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9285" CreationDate="2019-02-02T11:46:47.797" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You seem to be assuming that “to keep faith with you” must refer &lt;strong&gt;either&lt;/strong&gt; to “he must be a very rare friend” &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; to “a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince”. Actually, it refers to both. Let me simplify the sentence structure for a moment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He must be X, to do Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence means that someone who does Y is necessarily X. If someone does Y, then they &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; be X. Now let's replace the single particle X by an either-or possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He must be A or B, to do Y.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has exactly the same meaning as above, except that X is replaced by &quot;A &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; B&quot;. It means that if someone does Y, then they must be &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; A &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; B - either they must be A, or they must be B.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Y is &quot;keeping faith with you&quot;, A is &quot;a very rare friend [to you]&quot;, and B is &quot; a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince&quot;. So the statement is: if someone keeps faith with you, then &lt;em&gt;either&lt;/em&gt; they must be a very rare friend, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; they must be a thoroughly obstinate enemy of the prince. Both of these possibilities are connected with keeping faith, by the grammatical structure of the sentence.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In context, the person referred to as &quot;you&quot; here is not the prince but a conspirator against the prince:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A conspirator cannot act alone, nor can &#xA;  he take a companion except from those whom he believes to be dissatisfied. As&#xA;   soon as you have opened &#xA;  your mind to a dissatisfied person, you have given him the material with which to satisfy himself, because &#xA;  by informing on you he can look for every advantage. So, because of the certain gains from informing and &#xA;  the uncertain gains&#xA;   and certain dangers from conspiring, he must be a very true friend, or a thoroughly &#xA;  determined enemy of the prince, to keep faith with you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this passage is to justify the claim that conspiracies are rarely successful. To do this, Machiavelli puts himself in the shoes of a would-me conspirator (&quot;you&quot;), and imagines how such a person would find others to conspire with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T18:17:35.820" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T18:17:35.820" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9302" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9303" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" Score="0" Body="For questions about English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889), known for dramatic monologues including ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Porphyria’s Lover’; and for long narrative poems including ‘Sordello’ and ‘The Ring and the Book’." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:45:07.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9304" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9305" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" Score="0" Body="For questions about ‘The Ring and the Book’ (1868–9), a long narrative poem by Robert Browning, recounting a 1698 murder trial in Rome from multiple viewpoints. Use with the [robert-browning] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T13:48:18.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9299" CreationDate="2019-02-02T15:36:33.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 5 word phrase you ask about, &quot;English studies of empirical studies&quot;, is hard to parse when taken out of context, as you took it in the title of your question. The context &quot;a larger suspicion in English studies of empirical studies as antihumanist&quot; in which it occurs is clearer. It means, roughly, &quot;a larger suspicion within English departments that empirical studies are nerdy&quot;.  Here &quot;antihumanist&quot; means the opposite of whatever English departments most prize. &#xA;More particularly, English (as an academic discipline) is conventionally grouped with the &quot;humanities&quot; as opposed to the &quot;sciences&quot;, (and maybe the &quot;arts&quot;)  and &quot;empirical studies&quot; here are considered (by this English professor) to be distastefully scientific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A larger question for you: do you really think this book will teach you how to write better?  Judging by the number of questions you post, it seems to be giving you a lot of trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T16:51:10.847" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:51:10.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9296" CreationDate="2019-02-02T15:42:42.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer the question implied by your &quot;I feel&quot;: The sentence in question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His constant practice of padding out a sentence with useless epithets, till it became as stiff as the bust of an exquisite; his antithetical forms of expression, constantly employed even where there is no opposition in the ideas expressed; his big words wasted on little things; his harsh inversions, so widely different from those graceful and easy inversions which give variety, spirit, and sweetness to the expression of our great old writers—all these peculiarities have been imitated by his admirers, and parodied by his assailants, till the public has become sick of the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is itself written in Johnsonese, and is itself an example of J's being parodied by his assailants.  To cut it into short choppy  pieces would spoil the parody.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In stylistic contrast to this parodic sentence, Peter Shor points out, Macaulay wrote this way about Johnson, in the next paragraph (in a review of Boswell's &lt;em&gt;Life of Johnson&lt;/em&gt; published in 1831, reprinted in volume 2 of  his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2333/2333-h/2333-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Critical and Historical Essays&lt;/em&gt;, vol 2&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No man surely ever had so little talent for personation as Johnson. Whether he wrote in the character of a disappointed legacy-hunter or an empty town fop, of a crazy virtuoso or a flippant coquette, he wrote in the same pompous and unbending style. His speech, like Sir Piercy Shafton’s Euphuistic eloquence, betrayed him under every disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which has comparatively short choppy sentences, lacking the elaborate structure of the parodic sentence the OP asked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to the question in your title is more subjective.  I, for one, think it is a masterpiece of balance, but I'd be hard pressed to say whether it outdoes (say) Gibbon's best along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T22:15:09.660" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T22:15:09.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9288" CreationDate="2019-02-02T16:12:29.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two theories about the proper use of commas in written English.  Theory 1: commas mark pauses in the spoken sentence.  Theory 2: commas mark syntatic divisions of the sentence.  The one is a matter of prosody, the other of grammar.  Editors, schoolteachers, printers, and book writers tend to obey theory 2.  As Conrad (or his editors or printers) did. But Landon is making a prosodic point: the sentence, when properly spoken, has a rhythmic structure.  Clauses are separated with pauses, and his stuck-in commas reflect his understanding of where those pauses are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T16:12:29.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9317" CreationDate="2019-02-02T18:55:06.463" Score="3" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it important to read 'A Study in Scarlet' before 'A Scandal in Bohemia'? I have heard that the former is the first book by Sir Arthur Connal Doyle. And it gives initial insights into the character of the protagonists. However, I found the prose of 'A Scandal in Bohemia' more appealing as per my tastes after flipping through the first few pages of a reading app. Hence, I want to pick up this book first. So, would it be a problem if I study 'A Scandal in Bohemia' before I read 'A Study in Scarlet'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T19:04:45.300" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T17:14:45.653" Title="Should I read 'A Scandal in Bohemia' before I read 'A Study in Scarlet'?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2019-02-02T20:01:06.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a paraphrase of the Johnson's text quoted in the question.  It is clear that Johnson sees differences between the two poets, thinking the one is capable of better work, but not consistently so, whereas the other more-or-less always produces equally good work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 1: Dryden was better educated, smarter, had deeper thoughts than Pope did. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraphs 2 and 3: Dryden is wild, Pope is tame.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paragraph 3: Dryden was the better poet, Pope the easier to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take one example.  In paragraph 2, J says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and uniform; Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind; Pope constrains his mind to his own rules of composition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, Dryden's style jumps like a goat, and is not always the same.  Pope always writes the same way.  Dryden writes down what occurs to him at the moment, but Pope always does it according to his carefully thought out method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T18:03:04.367" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T18:03:04.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-02T21:46:38.387" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long ago, I was told to study a part of a short story.  It was about a group of radical Canadians, and radio broadcasts.  I want to ID that story, so I can find and study it again.  It had a particularly odd fact, as a conundrum for cryptography: similar to this post, it did not contain (until now), any “E”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5767" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T15:23:08.360" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T00:09:23.463" Title="Radical Canadians and Radio Broadcasts" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9277" CreationDate="2019-02-02T21:57:33.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Restating the claim in the question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;writers like Joseph Conrad should have structured their books like&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;decks of PowerPoint slides,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which would have made them&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;more readable,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and clearer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first point to make,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;though it may seem a little cheap,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is that&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you haven’t tried it:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;your questions here have all been&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;written in standardly presented prose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which suggests that&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;you don’t have confidence that&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;this is really all that good an idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious problems with this idea are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would have been wasteful of space,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thus making books more costly,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;since only very recently were authors freed from these constraints by&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the availability of electronic publication;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would have made composition much more laborious,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;as you would have discovered if you had tried it for yourself,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;since small changes to wording of one part of a sentence affect&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the nesting depth of every consequent part,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;requiring continual adjustments to indentation,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;which again only became convenient with the development of&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;outline editing software.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are subtler and deeper problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the tree structure only conveys its &lt;em&gt;syntax&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but syntax is only a fraction of the content of a sentence,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thus giving precedence to something that&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is of comparatively little importance in comparison to&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;semantic&lt;/em&gt; structure;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it lacks the facility for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ambiguity of attachment&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for example in Landon’s extract from Conrad,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the clause “motionless in the moonlight”&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;must be attached either to&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the “entangled mass of trunks, branches,” etc.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(as Landon has it),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or “the great wall of vegetation”,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;but either choice narrows the meaning compared to the original;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it’s redundant,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;duplicating information that a competent reader can reconstruct,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;thus performing the function of a reading crutch,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;like&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the illustrations in a picture-book,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furigana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;furigana&lt;/a&gt; in Japanese beginner texts;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it could easily be incorrect,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;landing the reader with&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the additional tasks of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;determining whether an error has occured,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and if so, correcting it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s naïve to think that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;presenting one’s sentences in this form will not have an effect on&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;em&gt;content&lt;/em&gt; of those sentences too:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Tufte&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;says,&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;among many other cogent criticisms of this approach,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Impoverished space leads to&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;over-generalizations,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;imprecise statements,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;slogans,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;lightweight evidence,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;abrupt and thinly-argued claims.”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-02T22:26:42.610" LastActivityDate="2019-02-02T22:26:42.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3756" CreationDate="2019-02-03T10:46:35.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Have just been reading the autobiography of Agatha Christie's husband, Max Mallowan, in which he mentions this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Glanville&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Glanville&lt;/a&gt;] was the only man ever to have persuaded Agatha to alter the end of a book, against—as she maintains—her better judgement. Her own ending would have been more dramatic. It was the one that was concerned with Ancient Egypt, &lt;em&gt;Death Comes as the End&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be surprised if she had changed the murderer though as she re-cycles the idea in &lt;em&gt;Sleeping Murder&lt;/em&gt;. I think, because of circumstances, this may have actually been written earlier than &lt;em&gt;Death Comes as the End&lt;/em&gt; though published later, which would also suggest that it was Christie's own idea. Perhaps it's just the romantic ending that was changed, or possibly, and chillingly, the murderer triumphed? The latter would be in the spirit of darker Christies such as &lt;em&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5770" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-03T12:16:36.007" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T12:16:36.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8640" CreationDate="2019-02-03T13:32:21.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“The sin which ruined our first parents” is a reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first sin of Adam and Eve&lt;/a&gt; (which in Christian theology is a distinct idea from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_sin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original sin&lt;/a&gt;, though the two are closely related).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what exactly was the first sin? There is disagreement on this point among theologians. If you look at Aquinas, you’ll see that he considers and rejects arguments for &lt;em&gt;disobedience&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;gluttony&lt;/em&gt; (!), &lt;em&gt;curiosity&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;unbelief&lt;/em&gt;, before settling on &lt;em&gt;pride&lt;/em&gt;. Here’s his presentation of the argument in favour of curiosity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Further, man sinned at the devil’s suggestion. Now the devil in tempting man promised him knowledge (Genesis 3:5). Therefore inordinateness in man was through the desire of knowledge, which pertains to curiosity. Therefore curiosity, and not pride, was the first sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Aquinas (1274), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3163.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Summa Theologiae&lt;/em&gt;, 2-2.163&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiosity is clearly the indicated sin of Germain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T13:32:21.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9309" CreationDate="2019-02-03T17:14:45.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two stories in question are connected to the broader Sherlock Holmes reading or story continuity as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; devotes the first two of its fourteen chapters to describing the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson and their backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt; mostly assumes that the reader is already familiar with the characters of Holmes and Watson.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt; makes a few allusions to &lt;em&gt;The Sign of the Four,&lt;/em&gt; which takes place and was published in between, but they are not considerably relevant to understanding the story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if you are generally familiar with the characters of Holmes and Watson as well as the general setup of Sherlock Holmes stories (which is almost impossible to avoid nowadays), having read &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; does not add much to &lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia.&lt;/em&gt; As you apparently already read a bit of it without being confused, this should not be a problem at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; is not your typical Sherlock Holmes story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is rather long (four times as long as &lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Five of its fourteen chapters are a complete digression in most respects, including genre. They do not feature Holmes, Watson, or Britain at all.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not completely consistent with the characterisations of Holmes in later stories. While Doyle is notorious for continuity errors, this one sticks out most.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I found it unnecessarily convoluted and therefore difficult to remember all relevant events and characters. I would consider it the weakest Holmes stories I read so far – despite it being one of the few mysteries to an adaption of which I have not been exposed before (which applies to almost all other stories). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Altogether, I would say that it’s perfectly fine to skip &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt; before reading other Sherlock Holmes stories.&#xA;However, consider reading only the first chapters to get a more thorough backstory of Holmes and Watson, though being aware that Doyle does not stick to some of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastActivityDate="2019-02-03T17:14:45.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9312" CreationDate="2019-02-04T00:50:08.750" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may have found the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Void&lt;/a&gt;, by &lt;s&gt;Georges Perec&lt;/s&gt; Gilbert Adair&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph, found online &lt;a href=&quot;http://static1.squarespace.com/static/50e08e65e4b0c2f4976972df/t/54ca76a3e4b092fde90db359/1422554787554/A+Void.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today, by radio, and also on giant hoardings, a rabbi, an admiral notorious for his links to Masonry, a trio of cardinals, a trio, too, of insignificant politicians (bought and paid for by a rich and corrupt Anglo-Canadian banking corporation), inform us all of how our country now risks dying of starvation. A rumour, that's my initial thought as I switch off my radio, a rumour or possibly a hoax. Propaganda, I murmur anxiously—as though, just by saying so, I might allay my doubts—typical politicians' propaganda. But public opinion gradually absorbs it as a fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... mentions Canadian and radio.  I’ll have to find a full copy to read to be sure, but it seems to have the voice I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I was wrong about it being a short story.  300 pages isn’t exactly short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5767" LastEditorUserId="5767" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T00:09:23.463" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T00:09:23.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9250" CreationDate="2019-02-04T04:18:47.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Snorri Sturluson's &lt;em&gt;Edda&lt;/em&gt; says, in the Skaldskaparmal (pg 164 of my Faulkes translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;warg, &lt;strong&gt;wolf&lt;/strong&gt;, Geri, watcher and grey beast, Hati, Hrodvitnir and heath-dweller, Freki and forest dweller, Fenrir, leopard, Goti, worthy, noisy, howler, fighter, dusky, dreadful and dark-cheeked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further terms can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenrir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fenrir (Old Norse/Icelandic: &quot;fen-dweller&quot;), Fenrisúlfr (Old Norse/Icelandic: &quot;Fenris wolf&quot;), Hróðvitnir (Old Norse/Icelandic: &quot;fame-wolf&quot;), or Vánagandr (Old Norse/Icelandic: &quot;the monster of the river Ván&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hati and Skoll from the first list are both distinguishable from Fenrir in some stories as the wolves who chase sun and moon, though in other stories they seem to be directly wrapped up with Fenrir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are just the direct names - the Norse tradition of kennings adds many other less commonly used names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T04:18:47.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9344" CreationDate="2019-02-04T12:17:14.223" Score="5" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to find a short short story, probably only one page long.  I've read it on the internet in English less than two years ago, probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/1037/2018/8/4&quot;&gt;around 2018-08-04 when I was binging short short stories&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story tells that there's a very expensive restaurant where you have to put reservations months in advance.  The specialty of the restaurant is that they serve &lt;em&gt;everything&lt;/em&gt;.  They have a money-back guarantee for this: if a patron orders something that they can't serve, then the entire three course meal is free for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story tells about the protagonist dining in this restaurant.  The protagonist goes alone, and they may be a businessman, but I'm not sure in this latter.  Their orders for the first two courses are difficult, but the restaurant does serve them.  One of the courses is made of a rare animal, perhaps some kind of turtle or shark or whale.  The other course is made from an extinct animal.  The restaurant appears to be used to these extravagant orders, and the waiter serves them smiling and with compliments on the excellent choices.  I believe they have a group of recreated living animals very close to the extinct animal by selective breading, which is how they can serve the meat; there's no time travel involved.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the third course, the protagonist orders a Twinkie, or some similar commercially branded dessert item.  The waiter returns, distraugh, and apologizes saying something like “our chef insists that we cannot, in good conscience, serve non-food items”, with the effect that they consider the branded dessert to have such bad quality that it doesn't even count as food.  The protagonist does not have to pay for the dinner, and, I believe, the waiter offers them to choose a different dessert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the story is written in the third person, and there isn't more story than what I told, so no other characters have a role, but the descriptions and dialogs are more detailed than what I give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T10:49:27.633" Title="Restaurant serves everything with money back guarantee, patron defeats them by ordering a Twinkie" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9787" CreationDate="2019-02-04T13:29:47.223" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Book I of Robert Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1868) ends with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/336/206.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apostrophe of 26 lines&lt;/a&gt;, addressed to “lyric Love”. The passage was admired by many, including Arthur Quiller-Couch, who anthologized it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013295757/page/n295&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. It begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O lyric Love, half angel and half bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And all a wonder and a wild desire,—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Took sanctuary within the holier blue,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sang a kindred soul out to his face,—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics universally accept that “lyric Love” represents the poet’s wife &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning&lt;/a&gt;, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conceived and planned before the tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate years of bereavement, [&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;] is, more than any other of his greater poems, pervaded by his wife’s spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Harold Herford (1905). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14618/14618-h/14618-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robert Browning&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the identification does not seem to be forced on the reader, or at least not by the text of book I, where the passage could be interpreted as an address to an imaginary spirit or muse of poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there internal evidence in &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt; that makes it clear that “lyric Love” is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or is it something that we must deduce from extra-textual considerations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T11:48:37.770" Title="Evidence for the identity of Browning’s “lyric Love”?" Tags="&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;the-ring-and-the-book&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-04T13:39:40.017" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a short book as a child about an evil wizard and a giant. I don't remember all the details, but I do remember that the story ends with the wizard attempting to turn either the giant or the local town to stone, and his spell his reflected back at him (I think by a mirror owned by the giant?), which turns the wizard to stone instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what this story might be? It had a really distinctive art style, if I remember correctly. I think the latest it could've possibly been published would be the late 90's, but I suspect it might be a bit older than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="249" LastActivityDate="2019-02-04T13:39:40.017" Title="Children's book about an evil wizard and a giant" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9324" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9377" CreationDate="2019-02-05T02:09:44.150" Score="3" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember having heard that many Christian ideas don't come from the Bible like the idea of Hell and Satan. I was wondering if golden halos were also an invention of the Christian Church and isn't mentioned in the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5702" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T18:15:28.547" Title="Are angels ever depicted as having golden halos floating above their heads in the Bible?" Tags="&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9325" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T04:01:31.843" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And in the midnight train&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A cold wind blows through the rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A child laughs an adults cry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Leads to pain and sacrifice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Toward the tracks of the unknown&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The icy river icy cold flows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Trapped by dispair and running on empty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The urge to main, to kill, is tempting&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Onward and onward til the moon rises high&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Onward and onward he swiftly rides&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then the pain is no more&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And comes face to face with scorn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Here we, the fallen five hundred, bled&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and they are the ones who fled&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  throughout the midnight train&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  those who tremble in fear are our bane&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s all that I apparently copied at the time, no title or author. I’ve tried Google, but no matches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5780" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-05T08:57:16.723" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T08:57:16.723" Title="Poem Identification from a stanza(?) containing “the midnight train” repeatedly" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3995" CreationDate="2019-02-05T10:16:49.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A possible common source for the idea of it being pleasant to look at things through emeralds is a passage in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pliny the Elder&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third rank [of precious stones], for many reasons, has been given to the smaragdus. Indeed there is no stone, the colour of which is more delightful to the eye; for whereas the sight fixes itself with avidity upon the green grass and the foliage of the trees, we have all the more pleasure in looking upon the smaragdus, there being no green in existence of a more intense colour than this. And then, besides, of all the precious stones, this is the only one that feeds the sight without satiating it. Even when the vision has been fatigued with intently viewing other objects, it is refreshed by being turned upon this stone; and lapidaries know of nothing that is more gratefully soothing to the eyes, its soft green tints being wonderfully adapted for assuaging lassitude, when felt in those organs. […] In form they are mostly concave, so as to re-unite the rays of light and the powers of vision: and hence it is, that it is so universally agreed upon among mankind to respect these stones, and to forbid their surface to be engraved. In the case, however, of the stones of Scythia and Egypt, their hardness is such, that it would be quite impossible to penetrate them. When the surface of the smaragdus is flat, it reflects the image of objects in the same manner as a mirror. &lt;strong&gt;The Emperor Nero used to view the combats of the gladiators upon a smaragdus&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pliny (79), &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D37%3Achapter%3D16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt; 37.16&lt;/a&gt;, translated by John Bostock (1855).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of this passage is not completely clear. &lt;em&gt;Smaragdus&lt;/em&gt; seems to be a class of green precious stones that included emeralds, but likely also other kinds of stone, for most emeralds are too small to be used as mirrors. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fluorite&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celadonite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;celadonite&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioptase&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dioptase&lt;/a&gt;, green &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obsidian&lt;/a&gt;, and other minerals have been suggested as possibilities. As for the sentence in bold (&lt;em&gt;Nero princeps gladiatorum pugnas spectabat in smaragdo&lt;/em&gt;), in context a plausible reading is that he used the smaragdus as a concave mirror to increase the size of the image, since he was short-sighted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nero could see nothing distinctly without winking, and having it brought close to his eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pliny, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D11%3Achapter%3D54&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt; 11.54&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An alternative reading of the text (&lt;em&gt;smaragdo&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;in smaragdo&lt;/em&gt;) would suggest that Nero was using some kind of lens, but this possibility is not supported by the context of the evidence available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dimitris Plantzos (2013). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/507106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crystals and Lenses in the Graeco-Roman World&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;American Journal of Archaeology&lt;/em&gt;, 101:3, p. 462.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This alternative reading led to the popular idea that Nero had looked at the games through an emerald, as a kind of precursor of sunglasses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-05T10:16:49.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11968" CreationDate="2019-02-05T11:44:37.023" Score="4" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if I'm asking in the right place, but hopefully someone can help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember having this book as a child and it basically fell apart from so much use. It was a collection of stories, each story filled a page (maybe two), the pages were decorated with a border and the characters were almost always rabbits. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried everywhere to find it but I can't remember the title or the cover (it fell off at some point and my memories are exclusively of it with no cover)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: it's not Peter Rabbit. That much I'm certain of (as I still have that collection of books as well) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5333" LastEditorUserId="5333" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T12:11:00.317" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T14:53:45.287" Title="Trying to find a book from my childhood in UK, a collection of stories, one story a page, characters were all Rabbits" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9773" CreationDate="2019-02-05T14:45:10.617" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Hank Reardon met with the Looters to discuss the Steel Unification Plan, he noted with some consternation that they were meeting in the same suite at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel that Francisco d'Anconia used to lease before he disappeared completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did they meet there? Was this due to its personal effect on Hank Reardon, or was Ayn Rand going for symbolism here (i.e. the Looters were, in some sense, trying to replace talented people like Francisco)? Or did Ayn Rand do this mostly for the irony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T22:45:38.493" Title="Why did the Looters meet with Hank Reardon in the same suite that Francisco D'Anconia used to lease?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9332" CreationDate="2019-02-05T19:52:03.867" Score="5" ViewCount="363" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what ways do the winners of these three awards differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm surprised there is not more overlap when surveying the results. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that there are some variations in criteria between the three. I'm wondering more whether one award tends more toward popular fiction, or toward experimental cutting edge novels, or if they occasionally are handed out as &quot;lifetime achievement&quot; awards even if they are not labelled as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5784" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T04:01:57.147" Title="Comparing the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the National Book Award, and the Booker Prize" Tags="&lt;awards&gt;&lt;nobel-prize&gt;&lt;booker-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-05T21:18:52.843" Score="8" ViewCount="394" Body="&lt;p&gt;When an intellectual work (philosophy book, literary book, painting etc) is studied there are (at least) two principal questions to be addressed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is this work about?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is this work important?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions are very intimately interrelated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, if you know more precisely what is this work about then you can answer more convincingly why this may be important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you know why this work is important then this may shed light on some cardinal aspects of the work and it may make you understand it better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these two questions are (probably) not identical because to start with the latter question needs significantly more the historical context of the intellectual work to be addressed and also perhaps some comparative analysis in general so that the question is more precisely answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a quite interesting way, although many people can answer the former question about an intellectual work they usually are not so confident or convincing when answering the latter question.&#xA;(See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/55227/why-the-tractatus-logico-philosophicus-was-is-so-groundbreaking&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; when I asked the same question about the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus - nobody really gave an inclusive answer)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In any case, I want to ask the latter question about 'Hamlet': Why is 'Hamlet' considered one of the very best plays ever?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be that the existential monologue of Hamlet is a quite strong advocate of why this play should be considered so important as it addresses the topic about what is the meaning of life and when life loses to such extent its meaning that death is almost mandatory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, in my opinion, this is only a part of the play and it is not exactly its overarching theme and in this regard the play should not be evaluated only on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor which may make the play (considered as) great is the unique alternation of extreme emotions and behaviors which certainly makes the play rich as a kaleidoscope of human psychology. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just to make clear that I am not saying that Hamlet is not or should not be considered as a great theatrical play but I just want to see some compelling arguments/evidence from people who has seriously read it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would strongly prefer a comprehensive answer and not a too brief one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5251" LastEditorUserId="5251" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T13:16:54.157" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T13:16:54.157" Title="Why is 'Hamlet' considered one of the very best plays ever?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9337" CreationDate="2019-02-06T00:32:39.430" Score="1" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was young, I had a few books with compiled horror, mystery or macabre short stories. I want to go back and read some of these short stories, and was able to find a few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find many of the authors of these stories: Algernon Blackwood, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, M.R. James and Guy de Maupassant. The question is: Is there a genre that encompasses all of these authors and/or stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would help me find similar short stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5786" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T11:08:53.877" Title="How are old horror short stories classified?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9329" CreationDate="2019-02-06T00:43:06.527" Score="8" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what ways do the winners of these three awards differ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These three awards are very different, and it's rare that an author collects more than one of the three. The most obvious difference is the Nobel Laureate is a &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;, whereas the winners of the National Book Awards (NBA) and the Booker Prize are &lt;em&gt;literary works&lt;/em&gt; (although the NBA introduced a lifetime achievement award in 1988). The other obvious difference is geography: the Nobel is a Swedish award but granted globally, the NBA is a U.S. award and the Booker is a British award. All three awards are longstanding but the Booker is the relative newcomer. The Booker Prize is only awarded for &lt;em&gt;novels&lt;/em&gt; whereas the other two awards cover a range of literary forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nobel Prize in Literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This prize is awarded by the Swedish Academy, and has been awarded annually since 1901. It is effectively a &quot;lifetime achievement&quot; award as it's based on the author's entire body of work, although in a small number of cases a specific work is singled out in the award statement. It covers the full gamut of literary formats and genres, including novels and short stories, poetry, drama, screenplays, non-fiction (essays, history, literary criticism, philology, philosophy, biography, memoirs, translations) and – with Bob Dylan's 2016 award – songwriting; and all nationalities are eligible. In fact, one Nobel Laureate is even classed as stateless (Ivan Bunin, 1933).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the world's most prestigious literature prize, but has often been criticised as inherently political and heavily Eurocentric. It has an excessively Scandinavian focus (16 of the 114 awarded up to 2018), with more Swedish writers (8) than from all of Asia (China 2, Japan 2, India 1) or Latin America (6); and it has overlooked many of the world's greatest writers, such as Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, James Joyce, Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Henry James, André Malraux, W.H. Auden, Philip Roth and Jorge Luis Borges. Wikipedia gives the following as an example of the dubious quality of the award decision-making:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In 1974, Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow were&#xA;  considered but rejected in favor of a joint award for Swedish authors&#xA;  Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, both members of the Swedish&#xA;  Academy at the time, and unknown outside their home country. Bellow&#xA;  received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976; neither Greene nor&#xA;  Nabokov was awarded it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more detail on the (many) criticisms, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature#Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Book_Award&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Book Award&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The NBA is a set of U.S.A. literary awards established by the book industry in 1936 (and, after a WW2 hiatus, reestablished in 1950) and administered since 1988 by the National Book Foundation whose mission is &quot;to celebrate the best literature in America, expand its audience, and ensure that books have a prominent place in American culture.&quot; There are five categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people's literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From 1988 a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters has been awarded annually to someone who &quot;has enriched [U.S.] literary heritage over a life of service, or a corpus of work.&quot; This lifetime achievement award is therefore an equivalent to the Nobel Prize for Literature except that it's restricted to one nation only, the U.S.A.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booker_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Man Booker Prize for Fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A relative newcomer - first awarded in 1969 - the Booker Prize was established by a major U.K. food company called Booker, McConnell Ltd. Administration of the prize was transferred to the Booker Prize Foundation in 2002 and it became the Man Booker Prize (Man Group being the new sponsor). It's awarded to English-language novels only, and was restricted to books written by Commonwealth (plus Irish, South African and Zimbabwean) citizens, but controversially has been expanded since 2014 to include all nationalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;lifetime&quot; award – the Man Booker International Prize – existed fleetingly between 2004 and 2015 and was awarded to 6 authors: Ismail Kadare, Chinua Achebe, Alice Munro, Philip Roth, Lydia Davis and László Krasznahorkai. Unfortunately, just when it looked like it might become a worthy alternative to the controversy-riddled Nobel Prize, it was reconfigured to be an award for a single book in English translation, with the prize shared between author and translator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Crossover between awards&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Nobel Laureates have won the Booker Prize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Golding (U.K.): Nobel 1983, Booker 1980 for &lt;em&gt;Rites of Passage&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nadine Gordimer (South Africa): Nobel 1991, Booker 1974 for &lt;em&gt;The Conservationist&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad &amp;amp; Tobago; U.K.): Nobel 2001, Booker 1971 for &lt;em&gt;In a Free State&lt;/em&gt;, finalist 1979);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;J. M. Coetzee (South Africa; Australia): Nobel 2003, Booker 1983 for &lt;em&gt;Life &amp;amp; Times of Michael K&lt;/em&gt; and 1999 for &lt;em&gt;Disgrace&lt;/em&gt;, finalist 2009;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kazuo Ishiguro (Japan; U.K.): Nobel 2017, Booker 1989 with &lt;em&gt;The Remains of the Day&lt;/em&gt;, finalist 1986, 2000 &amp;amp; 2005.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Nobel Laureates have been Booker finalists only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick White (Australia): Nobel 1973, Booker finalist 1970;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Doris Lessing (Zimbabwe; U.K.): Nobel 2007, Booker finalist 1971, 1981 &amp;amp; 1985;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alice Munro (Canada): Nobel 2013, Booker finalist 1980.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only two U.S. authors have ever won a Booker Prize: Paul Beatty for &lt;em&gt;The Sellout&lt;/em&gt; (2016) and George Saunders for &lt;em&gt;Lincoln in the Bardo&lt;/em&gt; (2017). Neither has won an NBA or Nobel; Saunders was an NBA Fiction finalist in 2013 for &lt;em&gt;Tenth of December: Stories&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip Roth won the Man Booker International Prize in 2011 and the NBA's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2002, but hasn't won the Nobel. He has won the NBA Fiction Award twice, in 1960 for &lt;em&gt;Goodbye, Columbus&lt;/em&gt; and in 1995 for &lt;em&gt;Sabbath's Theater&lt;/em&gt;. He was a finalist in 1975 (&lt;em&gt;My Life As a Man&lt;/em&gt;), 1980 (&lt;em&gt;The Ghost Writer&lt;/em&gt;), 1984 (&lt;em&gt;The Anatomy Lesson&lt;/em&gt;) and 1987 (&lt;em&gt;The Counterlife&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lydia Davis won the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 and was a NBA Fiction Award finalist in 2007 with &lt;em&gt;Varieties of Disturbance&lt;/em&gt;, but hasn't won any of the other awards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two Nobel Laureates have won the NBA's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters: Saul Bellow (Nobel 1976, NBA Medal 1990) and Toni Morrison (Nobel 1993, NBA Medal 1996).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following Nobel Laureates have won the NBA's Fiction Award: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Faulkner (Nobel 1949, NBA 1951 for &lt;em&gt;Collected Stories of&#xA;William Faulkner&lt;/em&gt; and 1955 for &lt;em&gt;A Fable&lt;/em&gt;; NBA finalist 1952 &amp;amp; 1960);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Steinbeck (Nobel 1962, NBA 1939 for &lt;em&gt;The Grapes of Wrath&lt;/em&gt;; NBA&#xA;finalist 1953 &amp;amp; 1955); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saul Bellow (Nobel 1976, NBA 1954 for &lt;em&gt;The&#xA;Adventures of Augie March&lt;/em&gt;, 1965 for &lt;em&gt;Herzog&lt;/em&gt; and 1971 for &lt;em&gt;Mr.&#xA;Sammler's Planet&lt;/em&gt;; finalist 1957, 1960 &amp;amp; 1976); &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Isaac Bashevis Singer&#xA;(Nobel 1978, NBA 1974 for &lt;em&gt;A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;;&#xA;NBA finalist 1962, 1965, 1973).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel in 1954 and was an NBA Fiction Award finalist in 1953 for &lt;em&gt;The Old Man and the Sea&lt;/em&gt;. Toni Morrison won the Nobel 1993 and was an NBA finalist in 1975 &amp;amp; 1987.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Other notable awards&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be remiss of me not to mention the main competitors to each of the three literary awards you've singled out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives to the Booker Prize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Tait_Black_Memorial_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Tait Black Memorial Prize&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Britain's oldest literary awards (founded in 1919), there are three prize categories: fiction, drama and biography. It's administered by the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, U.K.), and the annual winners are chosen by the Professor of English Literature at the University, assisted in the shortlisting process by postgraduate students, which is seen to give the decision both impartiality and a degree of gravitas. The work must have been written in English (or Gaelic or Welsh for drama) and published/performed in Britain, but there's no &lt;em&gt;author nationality&lt;/em&gt; restriction: recent American winners in the Fiction category have included Padgett Powell (&lt;em&gt;You and I&lt;/em&gt;, 2011), Tatjana Soli (&lt;em&gt;The Lotus Eaters&lt;/em&gt;, 2010), Cormac McCarthy (&lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt;, 2006) and Jonathan Franzen (&lt;em&gt;The Corrections&lt;/em&gt;, 2002).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Dublin_Literary_Award&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;International DUBLIN Literary Award&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is one of the richest literary prizes in the world, and was first awarded in 1996. It's administered by Dublin City Public Libraries (Ireland), the nominations are submitted each year by public libraries from around the world, and the shortlist and winner are selected by an international panel which changes each year. There's no nationality restriction, but it's restricted to &lt;em&gt;novels&lt;/em&gt; published in English or in an English translation. The shortlist is an annual &quot;must-read&quot; guide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives to the National Book Awards:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulitzer_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pulitzer Prize&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Established in 1917 and administered by Columbia University (New York City, NY, USA), there are annual prizes in 21 categories, of which 14 relate to journalism, the remainder being for Fiction, Drama, History, (Auto)Biography, Poetry, General Non-Fiction, and Music. Eligibility is restricted to American authors. Nobel Laureates who've won a Pulitzer include Sinclair Lewis, Pearl S. Buck, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison (all for Fiction) and Eugene O'Neill (Drama Prize); and Bob Dylan received a Pulitzer Citation for Music in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatives to the Nobel Prize:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_Award_in_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;America Award in Literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This is a lifetime achievement literary award for international writers, and was first presented in 1994; there is no nationality requirement nor any prize money. The rotating jury is drawn from a judging panel of &quot;American poets, prose writers, playwrights and literary critics&quot;. Of the 24 winners, only 3 are from the USA and 2 from the U.K., so it would appear there's no anglophone bias, and there's a broad mix of novelists, poets and dramatists within the winners' list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T04:01:57.147" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T04:01:57.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9333" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9338" CreationDate="2019-02-06T10:03:12.167" Score="5" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please refer to this extract from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 14&lt;/a&gt; of Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elizabeth’s last letter had communicated a piece of news of some&#xA;  interest. Mr Elliot was in Bath. He had called in Camden Place; had&#xA;  called a second time, a third; had been pointedly attentive: if&#xA;  Elizabeth and her father did not deceive themselves, had been taking&#xA;  as much pains to seek the acquaintance, and proclaim the value of the&#xA;  connexion, as he had formerly taken pains to shew neglect. This was&#xA;  very wonderful if it were true; and Lady Russell was in a state of&#xA;  very agreeable curiosity and perplexity about Mr Elliot, already&#xA;  recanting the sentiment she had so lately expressed to Mary, of his&#xA;  being ‘a man whom she had no wish to see.’ She had a great wish to see&#xA;  him. If he really sought to reconcile himself like a dutiful branch,&#xA;  he must be forgiven for having dismembered himself from the paternal&#xA;  tree. Anne was not animated to an equal pitch by the circumstance; but&#xA;  she felt that she would rather see Mr Elliot again than not, which was&#xA;  more than she could say for many other persons in Bath. She was put&#xA;  down in Camden Place; and Lady Russell then drove to her own lodgings,&#xA;  in Rivers Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The above extract says that Mr. Elliot, Anne's cousin, was in Bath. Then I can't understand the following line: &quot;He had called in Camden Place; had called a second time, a third; had been pointedly attentive&quot;. What does the phrase &quot;called in&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;if Elizabeth and her father did not deceive themselves&quot;. Why would Elizabeth and her father deceive themselves? &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does Lady Russell hold negative opinions about Mr. Elliot?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who thinks: &quot;If he really sought to reconcile himself like a dutiful branch, he must be forgiven for having dismembered himself from the paternal tree.&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T10:25:19.583" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T11:09:14.517" Title="Meaning of a passage in &quot;Persuasion&quot; by Jane Austen" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" Score="0" Body="Questions related to Jane Austen's 1817 novel &quot;Persuasion&quot;. Use this tag with the [jane-austen] tag.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T10:26:51.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9800" CreationDate="2019-02-06T10:44:03.467" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book III of Robert Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Violante adopts an unwanted new-born child and passes her off to her husband Pietro as their daughter Pompilia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, having gained Pompilia, the girl grew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’ the midst of Pietro here, Violante there,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each, like a semicircle with stretched arms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Joining the other round her preciousness—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Two walls that go about a garden-plot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where a chance sliver, branchlet slipt from bole&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Of some tongue-leaved eye-figured Eden tree,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Filched by two exiles and borne far away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the line in bold? ‘Eden tree’ would seem to be one of the trees in the Garden of Eden, either the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_life_(biblical)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree of life&lt;/a&gt;, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree of the knowledge of good and evil&lt;/a&gt;. ‘Tongue-leaved’ might mean ‘with leaves like tongues’ or ‘with leaves that speak’, but I can’t make any sense of ‘eye-figured’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cook says of this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference in this passage must be to a legend or allegory which I cannot trace. A friend suggests that the use of the epithets ‘tongue-leaved’ and ‘eye-figured’ was ‘due to some allegorical woodcut of the early sixteenth century, representing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Arthur Kemble Cook (1920). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/commentaryuponbr00cookuoft/page/56&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Commentary Upon Browning’s The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 57. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have scholars been able to trace the reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T09:45:35.810" Title="What is a ‘tongue-leaved eye-figured Eden tree’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;the-ring-and-the-book&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9331" CreationDate="2019-02-06T11:08:53.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the authors you list belong to a genre known as &lt;strong&gt;Weird Fiction&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wikipedia article on the genre&lt;/a&gt; has four out of the five authors you name under its list of notable contributors and names Poe as the founder of the genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The missing author is Guy de Maupassant. But given that he has a two-volume collection available entitled &quot;Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction&quot; it seems safe to say that some people, at least, view his work as part of the movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poe and M. R. James are also often classified under the better-known label of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic Fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. As is often the case with literary genres, there's a fairly wide overlap between this and Weird Fiction, including writers such as Ambrose Bierce and Robert W. Chambers. But Gothic fiction also includes more &quot;classic&quot; horror like &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; so may be less what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that neither genre label includes the word &quot;horror&quot; because unsettling the reader was not the primary goal in either case. It was more about showcasing the imagination and creating an atmosphere. So if you particularly want horror stories, you may have to be more careful in your selection than relying on genre alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T11:08:53.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9333" CreationDate="2019-02-06T11:09:14.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had called in Camden Place; had called a second time, a third; had been pointedly attentive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Called&quot; here means &quot;visited.&quot; &lt;em&gt;Camden Place&lt;/em&gt; is the name of the building or location. The sentence means &quot;He visited the house several times.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if Elizabeth and her father did not deceive themselves,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a rhetorical device: &quot;Unless I'm wrong, here's what's happening.&quot; The entire sentence reads &quot;Unless Elizabeth and her father misunderstood why he was there, he was putting in just as much effort to spend time with them now as he had previously worked at ignoring them.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If he really sought to reconcile himself like a dutiful branch, he must be forgiven for having dismembered himself from the paternal tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narration is speaking; I believe the sentiment is being attributed to Lady Russell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the book, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persuasion_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiki summary&lt;/a&gt; tries to explain why various characters object to Mr. Elliot (which, honestly, I couldn't follow, but the upshot seems to be that he's a money-chasing jerk). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-02-06T11:09:14.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-07T06:04:18.127" Score="5" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Yeti, experts will attest, is physically unkempt at best.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And due to this may go for weeks, alone amidst the snowy steeps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Goes on to tell how he is looking for his &quot;yet unmet counterpart&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5791" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-02-07T16:51:18.253" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T16:51:18.253" Title="Who wrote the poem that begins, &quot;The Yeti, experts will attest . . .&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2019-02-07T12:03:43.270" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first &quot;Greatest Hits of Queen&quot; album that is featured in the book is the most sold album in british pop history. Everyone in UK has the cd lying around somewhere, so chances are high that when you look for a cd in the car you get the impression that you always find the &quot;Greatest Hits of Queen&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5793" LastActivityDate="2019-02-07T12:03:43.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9321" CreationDate="2019-02-08T10:49:27.633" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.stupefyingstoriesshowcase.com/0131115/0131115-10.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;An Indelible Feast&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Alex Shvartsman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“My sincere apologies, but the chef is unable to fill your order. The man was indignant. He insists,” Alfred sighed, “that he cannot, in good consciousness, serve items that aren’t food in this establishment. We have a reputation to uphold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Please make another selection. Your meal will, of course, be complimentary.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T10:49:27.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9226" CreationDate="2019-02-08T12:06:32.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect that the ‘Outline of Chapter Contents’ was written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamus_Deane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seamus Deane&lt;/a&gt;, who edited the Joyce editions for Penguin in the early 1990s. The evidence I have for this is that the following editions all lack the ‘Outline’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463592/page/n1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This 1949 Faber &amp;amp; Faber edition&lt;/a&gt;. Note that it says “First published in mcmxx […] Reprinted in mcmxlvi, mcmxlviii and mcmxlix”. The date ‘mcmxx’ (‘1920’) must be a mistake since the book was not published until 1939. It is possible that this is a reprint of the first edition and that ‘mcmxxxix’ was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/finneganswake00joycuoft/page/n9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This 1966 Viking edition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/finneganswake00jame_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This 1976 Penguin edition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Finnegans-Wake-Penguin-Modern-Classics/dp/014118311X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1992 Penguin Modern Classics edition&lt;/a&gt;, reprinted 2000, contains an introduction ‘© Seamus Deane, 1992’ and also the ‘Outline’. The ‘Outline’ is uncredited but given that the ‘Outline’ did not appear in the previous (1976) Penguin edition, it seems likely that Deane wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T12:06:32.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-08T13:36:16.603" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a quote about getting to the top of your field by moving to the edge and declaring it the new center. It wasn't exactly in those words but if I remember correctly is came from someone in an arts or creative field possibly Andy Warhol. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was concise, nonchalant and pithy in the manner that Andy often answered any question he was asked. I encountered it about 10-15 years ago if that helps. Can anyone identify the source or confirm it was Andy Warhol?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5802" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T21:32:17.053" Title="Looking for the source of a quote about moving to the edge and declaring it the new center" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9347" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9327" CreationDate="2019-02-08T14:13:46.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible you're looking for a Richard Scarry book such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0375832246&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bunny Book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A favorite Richard Scarry Little Golden Book is now in print in a gorgeous Big Golden Book edition! Long a popular Little Golden Book, the tale of a large bunny family wondering what their baby will grow up to be is one of Richard Scarry's best-and is now available in a deluxe hardcover edition. Perfect for springtime gift-giving!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, there are a lot of books in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busytown&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Busytown&lt;/a&gt; setting although I don't know any that figures on a bunny family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T14:13:46.917" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5468" CreationDate="2019-02-08T14:22:17.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4043/4043-h/4043-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is written in the form of a play, but it is immensely long (“three parts, nineteen acts, and one hundred and thirty scenes”) and is written without any consideration for the practicalities involved in staging: Hardy’s own Preface says that it is “intended simply for mental performance, and not for the stage”. For example, part one, act first, scene IV would present a considerable challenge to a set designer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE HARBOUR OF BOULOGNE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The morning breaks, radiant with early sunlight.  The French Army of Invasion is disclosed.  On the hills on either side of the town and behind appear large military camps formed of timber huts.  Lower down are other camps of more or less permanent kind, the whole affording accommodation for one hundred and fifty thousand men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;South of the town is an extensive basin surrounded by quays, the heaps of fresh soil around showing it to be a recent excavation from the banks of the Liane.  The basin is crowded with the flotilla, consisting of hundreds of vessels of sundry kinds: flat-bottomed brigs with guns and two masts; boats of one mast, carrying each an artillery waggon, two guns, and a two-stalled horse-box; transports with three low masts; and long narrow pinnaces arranged for many oars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Timber, saw-mills, and new-cut planks spread in profusion around, and many of the town residences are seen to be adapted for warehouses and infirmaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This impracticality by itself doesn’t make &lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt; distinctively cinematic, as in this respect the work falls into the genre of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_drama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;closet drama&lt;/a&gt;’: that is, poetic works written in dramatic form but intended for reading rather than staging, such as Shelley’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Prometheus_Unbound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prometheus Unbound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pippa_Passes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pippa Passes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Poets were forced to adopt the ‘closet drama’ approach as theatres ceased to stage new plays in verse in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The features of &lt;em&gt;The Dynasts&lt;/em&gt; that anticipate the cinematic form are the frequent use of the phrases “point of view” and “point of observation” in the stage directions; and the emphasis on what can be &lt;em&gt;seen&lt;/em&gt; by an observer rather than what &lt;em&gt;exists&lt;/em&gt;. With the application of hindsight we can interpret Hardy’s stage directions as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_shot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tracking shots&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reception-chamber is shut over by the night without, and the &lt;strong&gt;point of view&lt;/strong&gt; rapidly recedes south, London and its streets and lights diminishing till they are lost in the distance, and its noises being succeeded by the babble of the Channel and Biscay waves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crane_shot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crane shots&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;point of observation&lt;/strong&gt; now descends close to the scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as fade-outs and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolve_(filmmaking)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissolves&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The silent insect-creep of the Austrian columns towards the banks of the Inn continues to be &lt;strong&gt;seen&lt;/strong&gt; till the &lt;strong&gt;view&lt;/strong&gt; fades to nebulousness and dissolves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as aerial shots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;view&lt;/strong&gt; of the country from mid-air, at a point south of the River Inn, which is &lt;strong&gt;seen&lt;/strong&gt; as a silver thread, winding northward between its junction with the Salza and the Danube, and forming the boundaries of the two countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and as other camera movements and effects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar descriptive features have been identified in Hardy’s novels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy uses verbal description as a film director uses the lens of his camera, to select, highlight, distort, and enhance, creating a visualized world that is both recognizable and yet more vivid, intense, and dramatically charged than actuality. The methods he uses can be readily analyzed in cinematic terms: long shot, close-up, wide-angle, telephoto, zoom, etc. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The invocation of a hypothetical or unspecified observer in description is one of the signatures of Hardy’s narrative style. His novels are full of phrases like, “An observer would have remarked,” “a loiterer in this place might have speculated,” or verbs of perception, often in the passive voice (“it was seen,” “it was felt,” etc.) that are not attached to any specified subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Lodge (1974). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Hardy and Cinematographic Form&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction&lt;/em&gt; 7:3, p. 249–250.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T14:22:17.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9350" CreationDate="2019-02-08T14:29:30.697" Score="8" ViewCount="747" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this around 15 years ago in English as a Second Language class in a summer class I was attending in Poughkeepsie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were reading short stories from a book (a collection of short stories by different authors) and I unfortunately can recall only this particular one as it had struck me with its surprise ending, and I very much want to read it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was about 2 brothers getting separated (I do not remember by what means) and in the end they face each other one of them being as the police catching the other one being the criminal, and he (the policeman) had to make the decision whether to let him go or arrest him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it is not much but this is all I can remember. I think it was a story from late 1800s or early 1900s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5123" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T21:07:17.400" Title="A short story on two brothers meeting one a criminal one policeman" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9349" CreationDate="2019-02-08T14:32:41.217" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is likely O. Henry's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/o-henry/short-story/after-twenty-years&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;After Twenty Years&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. What may be throwing you off is that it's two old friends, not brothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The policeman on the beat moved up the avenue impressively. The impressiveness was habitual and not for show, for spectators were few. The time was barely 10 o'clock at night, but chilly gusts of wind with a taste of rain in them had well nigh depeopled the streets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying doors as he went, twirling his club with many intricate and artful movements, turning now and then to cast his watchful eye adown the pacific thoroughfare, the officer, with his stalwart form and slight swagger, made a fine picture of a guardian of the peace. The vicinity was one that kept early hours. Now and then you might see the lights of a cigar store or of an all-night lunch counter; but the majority of the doors belonged to business places that had long since been closed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When about midway of a certain block the policeman suddenly slowed his walk. In the doorway of a darkened hardware store a man leaned, with an unlighted cigar in his mouth. As the policeman walked up to him the man spoke up quickly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's all right, officer,&amp;quot; he said, reassuringly. &amp;quot;I'm just waiting for a friend. It's an appointment made twenty years ago. Sounds a little funny to you, doesn't it? Well, I'll explain if you'd like to make certain it's all straight. About that long ago there used to be a restaurant where this store stands--'Big Joe' Brady's restaurant.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It sometimes changes a good man into a bad one, said the tall man. &amp;quot;You've been under arrest for ten minutes, 'Silky' Bob. Chicago thinks you may have dropped over our way and wires us she wants to have a chat with you. Going quietly, are you? That's sensible. Now, before we go on to the station here's a note I was asked to hand you. You may read it here at the window. It's from Patrolman Wells.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man from the West unfolded the little piece of paper handed him. His hand was steady when he began to read, but it trembled a little by the time he had finished. The note was rather short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bob: I was at the appointed place on time. When you struck the match to light your cigar I saw it was the face of the man wanted in Chicago. Somehow I couldn't do it myself, so I went around and got a plain clothes man to do the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;JIMMY.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-08T21:07:17.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2019-02-08T19:53:37.813" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you are remembering &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32954/32954-h/32954-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;i&gt;The Black_Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses,&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/a&gt; a children's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Arrow:_A_Tale_of_the_Two_Roses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by Robert Louis Stevenson published serially in 1883.&lt;/a&gt; The story is set in England during the War of the Roses. The main character is a young man in his late teens named Dick Shelton, the ward of Sir Daniel Brackley. Dick is heir to the Tunstall Moat House after the death of his father under suspicious circumstances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your recollection of &quot;Cecilia&quot; doesn't match up well, however&amp;mdash;the heroine is named Joanna. There is another young woman named Alicia, which is nearly an anagram of Cilia, but I don't remember a female antagonist, associated with Alicia or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An edition was published in the early 20th century with stunning illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, who illustrated other works by Stevenson, and well as other many other stories of adventure. But the book is still in print today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5805" LastEditorUserId="5805" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T20:15:10.547" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T20:15:10.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-09T09:54:17.110" Score="3" ViewCount="233" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Bernard Shaw's play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pygmalion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has been adapted many times for different media, but most notably as a musical entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;My Fair Lady&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This musical was so popular that some screen adaptations have used the title &amp;quot;My Fair Lady&amp;quot; instead of the original &amp;quot;Pygmalion&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the title changed to &amp;quot;My Fair Lady&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any connection with the nursery rhyme &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_Is_Falling_Down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;London Bridge is Falling Down&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which is often also called &amp;quot;My Fair Lady&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T07:10:00.300" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T07:10:00.300" Title="Why was Pygmalion retitled to My Fair Lady?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;pygmalion-shaw&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9354" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9355" CreationDate="2019-02-09T12:14:03.727" Score="5" ViewCount="1035" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ulysses is written in iambic pentameter. There are a few spondees and trochees thrown in for good measure, but I'm confused in some places, like here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot rest from travel: I will drink&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vext the dim sea: I am become a name  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second line, there's a trochee (&lt;code&gt;Life to&lt;/code&gt;), but then it continues on normally. Ok. Fine. The line after that does the exact same thing (&lt;code&gt;Greatly&lt;/code&gt;). What goes on in the fourth and sixth (last) lines, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first pair (&lt;code&gt;that loved&lt;/code&gt;) is an iambic foot, the second (&lt;code&gt;me, and&lt;/code&gt;) is what? A trochee? The third (&lt;code&gt;alone&lt;/code&gt;) is, finally, an iamb. The rest are iambs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What goes on in Tennyson's head when he creates such a weird structure? How does he decide to break the rules, and where? Also, is it correct to think in pairs when breaking down a poem like this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the last line is also funky:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vext the dim sea: I am become a name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Vext the&lt;/code&gt;: trochee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Dim sea&lt;/code&gt;: spondee?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a line at the end of the poem that has 11 syllables, but I guess he just thought &quot;shit, this sounds so good I just &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to leave it in&quot; because it's the best line in the entire thing. But I'm guessing that's not the usual thought process going on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5811" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-09T12:33:09.903" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T11:05:15.047" Title="Confused about the meter and rhythm of Ulysses by Tennyson" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9354" CreationDate="2019-02-09T15:22:14.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tennyson was indeed writing iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain substitutions are traditionally allowed in iambic pentameter, namely, a foot can be replaced by a trochee or a spondee, and two adjacent feet can be replaced by a double iamb. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trochaic substitutions: &lt;em&gt;much have&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;cities&lt;/em&gt; are trochee in the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Much have I seen and known; cities of men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And manners, climates, councils, governments,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trochaic substitutions are especially common in the first foot of a line, but are allowed in all the feet except the last one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spondaic substitutions: &lt;em&gt;day wanes, moon climbs, moans round&lt;/em&gt; are all spondees in the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Moans round with many voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A double iambic substitution, where two adjacent feet have been replaced by a pyrrhus and a spondee (two unstressed syllables followed by two stressed one); for example, &lt;em&gt;which in óld dáys&lt;/em&gt; in the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are not now that strength which in old days &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I assume your 11-syllable line is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably wasn't originally supposed to be an 11-syllable line.&#xA;When Tennyson was writing, it seems to have permissible to treat the word &lt;em&gt;heaven&lt;/em&gt; as one syllable (but not similar words like &lt;em&gt;leaven&lt;/em&gt;). This reflected a peculiarity of pronunciation that has disappeared since. See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/451684/how-do-you-pronounce-heavn/451694#451694&quot;&gt;English stackexchange question.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although most iambic pentameter uses the above substitutions, some poems adhere to a particularly strict version of iambic pentameter. Although most iambic pentameter uses the above substitutions, some poems adhere to a particularly strict version of iambic pentameter. For example, in Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-will-put-chaos-into-fourteen-lines-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I will put chaos into fourteen lines,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; the only deviation from perfect iambic pentameter occur in the first two feet of a line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T11:05:15.047" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T11:05:15.047" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9267" CreationDate="2019-02-10T14:15:13.723" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Praxis’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the practice or exercise of a technical subject or art [&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and there are several references to writing and poetry: “put down in writing”; “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoral#Pastoral_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pastoral description&lt;/a&gt;”; “do what your poems want”. So it looks as though the poem is about the practice or experience of writing poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator seems to be describing an internal conflict over the wish or need to write two types of poetry. She has been writing politically engaged poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had put down in writing my fear of the war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this kind of poetry is not fulfilling for her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Newness does not, for me, equal satisfaction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and she wished she could have been writing a different kind of poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I too pined for pastoral description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator knows that she has only time to publish a limited number of poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A finite number of concentric rings I push out into space&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is further intimation of mortality in this image, which might represent a grave being filled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sound of the earth closing its one good eye over me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator imagines putting aside the “thorns” and “arms” of her political poetry and being satisfied with writing her preferred pastoral poetry. The imagery used for this kind of poetry is pure and clean: “blue of the water”; “margin’s white hand”, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You do what your poems want and are clean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhetorical figure in this line is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypallage&lt;/a&gt;: it’s the the narrator who wants to write these poems, not the poems themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is just my personal interpretation, and the poem is written very elliptically, so other readers might come to different conclusions. Someone familiar with Xu’s oeuvre might be able to find more detailed interpretations, for example “put down in writing my fear of the war” might refer to a particular poem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-10T14:15:13.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3096" CreationDate="2019-02-11T09:24:46.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Since Spagirl didn't want to post an answer, I'm going ahead and writing one.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Anarchists are generally non-religious and frequently anti-religious.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read more about anarchism and religion &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_religion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Wikipedia (with many references)&lt;/a&gt;, but this is the essential point: that anarchists are typically opposed to religion. This would explain why they don't know the details of how religion works, which is what the Reverend Morell is complaining about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PROSERPINE. Another lecture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MORELL. Yes. The Hoxton Freedom Group want me to address them on Sunday morning (great emphasis on &amp;quot;Sunday,&amp;quot; this being the unreasonable part of the business). What are they?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PROSERPINE. Communist Anarchists, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MORELL. Just like Anarchists not to know that they can't have a parson on Sunday! Tell them to come to church if they want to hear me: it will do them good. Say I can only come on Mondays and Thursdays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Reverend Morell engages himself to give lectures to a great many groups and organisations, but only on Mondays and Thursdays. On Sundays he is in church, not on call for giving lectures elsewhere. He seems quite put out that people might not know this, but from anarchists it's less surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T09:24:46.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-11T14:53:53.530" Score="9" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Over on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;, some participants apply the following theoretical approach to the interpretation of fiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The role of fiction is to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1541/2502&quot;&gt;describe a fictional ‘universe’&lt;/a&gt;, and an important &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/5152/2502&quot;&gt;task of readers&lt;/a&gt; is to determine facts about that universe by analysis of the sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sources can be divided into ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4783/2502&quot;&gt;canon&lt;/a&gt;’ (works accurately describing the universe) and apocrypha (works that purport to describe the universe but which can be rejected as false, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/6730/2502&quot;&gt;fan fiction&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/2027/2502&quot;&gt;Canon determination&lt;/a&gt; is based on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/4783/2502&quot;&gt;hierarchy&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/117948/2502&quot;&gt;of closeness&lt;/a&gt; to the ‘main’ source or sources, or to the author, whose pronouncements are described as ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.meta.stackexchange.com/q/9276/2502&quot;&gt;Word of God&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this approach to literature have a name? Has it been studied? What is its history? Is it purely a ‘folk theory’ or does it have an academic counterpart? Terry Eagleton’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory_and_After_Theory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; purports to give a “reasonably comprehensive account of modern literary theory” but does not mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest work I know that takes a similar approach is ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.diogenes-club.com/studies.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/a&gt;’ (1911) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Knox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ronald Knox&lt;/a&gt;, but Knox and the other early participants in the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlockian_game&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sherlockian game&lt;/a&gt;’ were clear that it was to be played with tongue in cheek:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule of the game is that it must be played as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s: the slightest touch of extravagance or burlesque ruins the atmosphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dorothy L. Sayers (1946). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.209970/page/n9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unpopular Opinions&lt;/em&gt;, p. 7&lt;/a&gt;. London: Gollancz.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T07:22:43.013" Title="What is the history of the universe/canon/word-of-god approach to literature?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9359" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9367" CreationDate="2019-02-11T21:04:45.930" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’, a lecture delivered on 5 March 1935, Dorothy L. Sayers described a book of which the ancient philosopher would not have approved:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet he [Aristotle] was no thriller fan. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poetics_(Bywater)/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Of simple plots and actions,&lt;/a&gt;” he rightly observes, “the episodic are the worst. I call a plot episodic when there is neither probability nor necessity in the sequence of the episodes.” He would not have approved of a certain recent book which includes among its incidents a machine-gun attack in Park Lane, an aeroplane dropping bombs on Barnes Common, a gas attack by the C.I.D. on a West-End flat and a pitched battle with assorted artillery on a yacht in the Solent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dorothy L. Sayers (1935). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.209970/page/n181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle on Detective Fiction&lt;/a&gt;’, in &lt;em&gt;Unpopular Opinions&lt;/em&gt; (1946). London: Gollancz.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T14:54:43.440" Title="Which thriller featured &quot;a machine-gun attack in Park Lane&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;dorothy-l-sayers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9360" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9361" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" Score="0" Body="For questions about English writer Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) and her works, which include a series of detective stories featuring the aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, and a translation of Dante's &quot;Divine Comedy&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" LastActivityDate="2019-02-11T21:07:12.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9385" CreationDate="2019-02-12T03:58:08.137" Score="7" ViewCount="1081" Body="&lt;p&gt;In both &lt;em&gt;The Clock&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Bread&lt;/em&gt; by Wolfgang Borchert there is a mention of the events happening at &quot;half past two&quot; in the morning. I have been unable to find a historical event of World War Two that specifically coincided with this time, and was wondering what the significance might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpts from &lt;em&gt;The Clock&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The most wonderful thing is still to come: Just think, it stopped at half past two. Of all times at half past two, just think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. At half past two there was something quite different, only you don't know what. That's the joke, of course, that it stopped just at half past two. And not at a quarter past four or at seven. For at half past two I always used to come home. At night, I mean. Nearly always at half past two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpts from &lt;em&gt;The Bread&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suddenly she woke up. It was half past two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They stood facing one another in their night-shirts. At night. At half past two. In the kitchen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it were just in one story, I wouldn't have thought it significant. The presence in both stories has sparked my curiosity though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5816" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T08:37:09.960" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T16:04:41.640" Title="What is the significance of &quot;half past two&quot; in Wolfgang Borchert's The Clock and The Bread?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;wolfgang-borchert&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9371" CreationDate="2019-02-12T10:44:03.167" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble understanding a passage in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/a&gt; of Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt;. This chapter describes Mr. Elliot's renewal of acquaintance with his family, from whom he was previously somewhat estranged, while they are all staying in Bath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular phrases and sentences in this passage that I am having trouble with are as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but he had now been a fortnight in Bath&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that Mr. Elliot was presently staying at Bath? Why this confusion arose is because, at the end of the chapter, Mr. Elliot is being shown as visiting Camden Place. So, how could be Mr. Elliot be staying at Camden Place and visiting it at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Colonel Wallis had known Mr Elliot long, had been well acquainted also with his wife, had perfectly understood the whole story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colonel Wallis had been well acquainted with Mr. Elliot's wife. So, this means that Mr. Elliot had a wife and seemed to live perfectly happliy with her. Yet it has been shown that Mr. Elliot fancied Elizabeth to a certain extent. Why is that so?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Allowances, large allowances, she knew, must be made for the ideas of those who spoke. She heard it all under embellishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean for Anne to hear it all &quot;under embellishment&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most earnestly did she wish that he might not be too nice, or too observant, if Elizabeth were his object; and that Elizabeth was disposed to believe herself so, and that her friend Mrs Clay was encouraging the idea, seemed apparent by a glance or two between them, while Mr Elliot’s frequent visits were talked of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't follow this at all: why did Anne &quot;wish that he might not be too nice&quot;? What was &quot;the idea&quot; that Mrs Clay was encouraging?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anne mentioned the glimpses she had had of him at Lyme, but without being much attended to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He, who had ever boasted of being an Elliot, and whose feelings, as to connexion, were only too strict to suit the unfeudal tone of the present day! He was astonished, indeed! But his character and general conduct must refute it. He could refer Sir Walter to all who knew him; and certainly, the pains he had been taking on this, the first opportunity of reconciliation, to be restored to the footing of a relation and heir-presumptive, was a strong proof of his opinions on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here Mr. Elliot has been shown as someone possessing somewhat negative qualities. For, he apparently tried to project himself as someone who never boasted of being an Elliot nor did he appear to conform with the feudal standards of the society back then. Yet he would mention of his connection with Sir Walter Elliot to anyone who he would meet and attempted to reconcile with the Elliot Family as he was the heir to the Elliot estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then why would Lady Russell bear positive notions about Mr. Elliot?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If possible, please answer without spoiling anything in the novel after chapter 15.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T18:29:28.350" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T22:17:34.867" Title="Doubts concerning Chapter 15 of &quot;Persuasion&quot; by Jane Austen" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T10:47:28.337" Score="3" ViewCount="595" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetry.org/cummings.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[may i feel said he]&lt;/a&gt; by e.e. cummings, it is suggested to be a dialogue between a male and a female. My interpretation (an obvious one) is the dialogue spans for a period of time, and marks their happiness, troubles, and arguments, etc., as their relationship unfolds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some phrases are parenthesized irregularly, and it is not clear what they mean.&#xA;What may the parenthesis signify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="196" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T09:55:54.587" Title="E E Cummings: [may i feel said he] What may parentheses signify?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;e-e-cummings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9359" CreationDate="2019-02-12T20:42:46.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not certain, but there's a strong possibility that it's &lt;em&gt;When the Gangs Came to London&lt;/em&gt; by Edgar Wallace (&lt;strong&gt;1932&lt;/strong&gt;), whose full text is available on &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800781h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Machine-guns in Park Lane:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He waited on the opposite corner of Park Lane. At three minutes before the hour Salaman arrived in his chauffeur-driven car and stepped down on to the sidewalk. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A middle-aged man, wearing a flaming flower in his buttonhole, was walking from the direction of Piccadilly. Terry saw him stop and look at his watch and then go on. He walked a short way past the spot where he had to meet Salaman, then he turned back and came to a halt within a foot of the position which had been described over the telephone. Salaman had seen him and strolled down to meet him. They saw the man touch his hat and ask Salaman a question, and the young man took an envelope from his pocket and handed it to the messenger. As he did so, the detectives closed. They were within a foot of their terrified prisoner, when the staccato crash of a machine-gun came from somewhere overhead. The little man with the flower in his coat and Salaman went down together. A detective drooped and sank by the railings, and a second a doubled up and fell with his head in the roadway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'In that block of flats!' yelled Jiggs. [...] 'One empty flat? That's the place. Have you a pass-key?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the greatest good fortune he had. But there was no need for a key: the door of the flat was wide open, and even as the men ran into the room they could smell the acrid scent of exploded cordite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jiggs ran into the front room. The window was wide open. The room was empty, except for a chair drawn up near the window-sill and the small machine-gun that lay on the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An aeroplane attempting to drop bombs on Cavendish Square (not Barnes Common, although the latter is mentioned elsewhere in the story):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Yes, an aeroplane.' [...] The roar of the engine was plainer now. The machine was coming straight for Cavendish Square. They looked up, but could see nothing. Then suddenly it swept into view: a small, black plane, flying so low that its wheels almost skimmed the roof of a high store building. It dipped a little, came straight towards the northern side of the square. It swept up, turned, land came back. 'Looking for the lights,' said Jiggs. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The plane was nearing the centre of Cavendish Square, when it suddenly heeled over. Its tail went down and it fell with a crash in the centre of the garden which occupied the middle of the square. [...] 'What have I done?' said Jiggs. 'I've shot down the man whose job it was to bomb Mr. Cuthbert Drood, and who would have bombed him if he could have found the red lights that had been put there to mark the house. These guys have got other ways of killing besides automatics!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The police who jumped the railings of the square found a groaning man amidst the wreckage. They found also a hundred-pound bomb, which was subsequently discovered to be packed with alanite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything about a gas attack, but several scenes of the story are set in Leslie Ranger's West-End flat.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only mention of a yacht is that Cuthbert Drood &quot;hunted all the winter and yachted most of the summer&quot;, but there's an artillery battle with boats in the Thames (not the Solent):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A policeman leaned over the parapet, saw a long launch heading for the centre of the river and challenged it. There was no answer. He pulled a revolver from its holster and fired twice. Almost instantly there came from the dark waters flickering lines of intermittent light and the stammer of a machine-gun. Bullets sprayed the parapet, smashed a few windows, but did no other damage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By this time the boat was in mid-stream. The watchers saw again the flicker of machine-gun fire and heard the rattle of it. In mid-stream was a police launch, and the battle was one-sided. By the' time reinforcements came the launch had disappeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not a perfect match, but it seems a little too close to be coincidence. I did find some other books of Edgar Wallace which also have some of the elements Sayers described - e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1306021h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Terror&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has a gas attack, although not by the CID and not on a West-End flat, and mentions Park Lane, Barnes Common, bombs dropping, and machine guns - but this one seems by far the closest. It also fits the context of Sayers's discussion since it's a work of detective fiction. Perhaps she was conflating more than one different story in her head (this sometimes happens even with people asking &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;story-identification&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; questions on Stack Exchange: they remember bits of more than one story and answerers have to tease them apart).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, I found this story by the following web search: &lt;code&gt;&quot;park lane&quot; bombs &quot;barnes common&quot; guns yacht solent&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T14:54:43.440" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T14:54:43.440" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9368" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9369" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of Vance Palmer, the Australian author, poet, essayist, and critic" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" LastActivityDate="2019-02-12T20:52:48.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9364" CreationDate="2019-02-13T09:55:54.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Instead of interpreting ‘may i feel said he’ as describing the gradual unfolding of a relationship, I think it works better to read it as the dialogue of two lovers engaged in sexual intercourse, moving from caress in the first stanza to orgasm in the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the parentheses, Tartakovsky divides the uses of parentheses in Cummings’ poems into seven categories: 1. iconicity; 2. protection and intimacy; 3. direct address; 4. layers and frames; 5. interpolation; 6. subversion; and 7. simultaneity. In the first category,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cummings explored iconicity in many aspects of language, and when dealing with his use of parentheses the most rudimentary examples are those that draw on its graphic shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Roi Tartakovsky (2009). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.43.2.215&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. E. Cummings’s Parentheses: Punctuation as Poetic Device&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Style&lt;/em&gt; 43:2, p. 219.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in the second,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;parentheses through their delineation of a separate space also create intimacy. Their protective capabilities and their understated status allow for something more intimate, secretive, or delicate to be put in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Tartakovsky, p. 225&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in ‘may i feel said he’ the parentheses could represent the lovers’ embraces (protection and intimacy) with the shape of the punctuation suggesting the lovers’ arms encircling each other (iconicity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T09:55:54.587" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9363" CreationDate="2019-02-13T10:50:11.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Elliot was not staying at Camden Place, but at another address in Bath.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Elliot’s wife died in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;: that’s why Elizabeth was wearing “black ribbons” for her, and why he was “in mourning” when seen at Lyme in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12&lt;/a&gt;. His motive in renewing his acquaintance with his uncle and cousins is currently (as of chapter 15) a mystery. Anne considers the possibility that he is doing so “for Elizabeth’s sake”, that is, he hopes to marry her.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anne was not there in person when Mr. Elliot visited, so she is hearing about it from Sir Walter and Elizabeth, and, knowing their characters, she has to allow for the likelihood that they are giving her an embellished or inaccurate version of events.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anne thinks that if Mr. Elliot wishes to marry Elizabeth, he must not be too “nice” (meaning ‘fussy; choosy; particular’). This reflects Anne’s unfavorable opinion of her sister’s marriageability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Elliot was the gentleman “of exceedingly good manners” who had admired Anne at Lyme in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12&lt;/a&gt;. But when Anne mentions this to her family no-one pays much attention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘Ever’ here means ‘always’. So Mr. Elliot was saying that he had always been proud of being an Elliot, and that he felt very strongly about “connexion” (that is, family descent), more strongly than most people in these “unfeudal” times. Is he sincere in these claims? Lady Russell’s positive opinion of him suggests that she believes so.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T10:50:11.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T11:20:43.623" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the earliest mention of Shakespeare's &quot;Twelfth Night&quot;; John Manningham's Diary: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good practice in it [was] to make the Steward believe his Lady . . . in love with him, by counterfeiting a letter as from his Lady in general terms, telling him what she liked best in him, and prescribing his gesture in smiling, his apparel, &amp;amp;c., and then when he came to practice making him belive they took him to be mad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;came to practice&quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5472" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T15:29:27.587" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T15:33:01.527" Title="What is meant by &quot;came to practice&quot; in John Manningham's description of Twelfth Night?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;twelfth-night&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9372" CreationDate="2019-02-13T13:09:33.763" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the secondary cluster of meanings of &quot;practise&quot; (or &quot;practice&quot;) listed in, say, the Oxford English Dictionary, is &quot;to deceive&quot;, &quot;to plot&quot;, &quot;to trick&quot;, and so on; a &quot;practic&quot; was used as an associated noun: &quot;a lie&quot;, &quot;a plot&quot;, &quot;a deception&quot;.  A &quot;practical joke&quot; is a joke based on a deception.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;came to practice&quot; can mean &quot;started lying&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T13:09:33.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T15:31:56.730" Score="5" ViewCount="554" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Fahrenheit 451&lt;/em&gt; by Ray Bradbury, television shows are broadcast with parts missing so that viewers can act the scenes out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She didn't look up from her script again. “Well, this is a play comes on the wall-to-wall circuit in ten minutes. They mailed me my part this morning. I sent in some box-tops. They write the script with one part missing. It's a new idea. The home-maker, that's me, is the missing part. When it comes time for the missing lines, they all look at me out of the three walls and I say the lines: Here, for instance, the man says, 'What do you think of this whole idea, Helen?' And he looks at me sitting here centre stage, see? And I say, I say —” She paused and ran her finger under a line in the script. “ 'I think that's fine!' And then they go on with the play until he says, 'Do you agree to that, Helen!' and I say, 'I sure do!' Isn't that fun, Guy?” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this interactive television show within the novel? What does it show about the society portrayed there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5713" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T10:07:04.323" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T10:07:04.323" Title="Why are television shows in Fahrenheit 451 interactive?" Tags="&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;&lt;fahrenheit-451&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9372" CreationDate="2019-02-13T15:33:01.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The construction of English was slightly different in Shakespeare's day and we must also account for the needs of his meter, but essentially it means &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when he came to [put those things into]&#xA;  practice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where the 'things' are the gestures and modes of dress that he had been led to believe 'she liked best in him'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T15:33:01.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9324" CreationDate="2019-02-13T17:53:07.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only direct description of an angel in the Bible is in Revelation 10:1 (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a&#xA;  cloud, &lt;strong&gt;and a rainbow was upon his head&lt;/strong&gt;, and his face was as it were&#xA;  the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angels are also sometimes described in other Bible verses as having &quot;glory&quot; (e.g., Luke 2:9) and being surrounded by heavenly flame (e.g., Exodus 3:2, Judges 13:20). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angels are mentioned around 300 times in the King James Version of the Bible (at least according to the concordance that I'm using), but very little is said about their physical appearance. They speak &amp;amp; sing, their faces and hands are mentioned, and they are sometimes implied to be passing as human.  They do occasionally use various implements - swords, trumpets, vials, etc. - and have various powers, including flight (Revelation 8:13).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So are angels depicted with halos in the Bible? No. But with such vague descriptions being given, you could argue that people were taking a valid level of artistic license when drawing pictures of these scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There are two other types of heavenly beings mentioned in the Bible that are often equated/associated with angels: seraphim and cherubim. Seraphim are mentioned just once, in Isiah 6:2, and are described as having &quot;six wings.&quot; Cherubim are described a bit differently than angels and most of the references appear to be about statues of them rather than actual cherubs. Cherubs can fly (2 Samuel 22:11) and have wings (1 Kings 6:24) and hands (Ezekiel 10:7).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2245" LastEditorUserId="2245" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T18:15:28.547" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T18:15:28.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-13T19:48:20.137" Score="3" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rachel Carson begins her book &lt;em&gt;Silent Spring&lt;/em&gt; with an allegory, explaining how a small American town with beautiful nature, one day is destroyed and all the birds stop singing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously she tries to convey the message how pesticides harm nature and she uses an allegory to make non-scientist readers understand what she means. But is there another reason for such use of allegory, and if yes, then what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5826" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T10:30:56.347" LastActivityDate="2019-08-08T11:02:45.347" Title="Why did Rachel Carson begin “Silent Spring” with an allegory?" Tags="&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;rachel-carson&gt;&lt;silent-spring&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9379" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9380" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" Score="0" Body="For questions about the book on environmental science by Rachel Carson. Use with the [rachel-carson] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T20:02:07.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of the American biologist and author Rachel Carson" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T20:02:37.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2019-02-13T20:08:08.357" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pratchett also has a running joke throughout his books about items of entertainment morphing into more stereotypical/low brow forms when the owners aren't looking. Compare this quote from The Last Continent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is a simple universal law.  People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they’ve always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Caper).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a Queen CD is a relatively inoffensive and popular choice of road-trip music, the same phenomena could result in Crowley and Aziraphile's respective music of choice changing into nostalgic rock. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5667" LastActivityDate="2019-02-13T20:08:08.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9362" CreationDate="2019-02-14T13:44:57.027" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Borchert wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Brot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Das Brot (The Bread)&lt;/a&gt; in 1946 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_K%C3%BCchenuhr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Küchenuhr (The Clock)&lt;/a&gt; in early 1947. Both stories involve a man eating bread at half past two. In English, the translation &quot;half past two in the morning&quot; is a bit misleading, since the German phrase &quot;halb drei&quot; says neither &quot;Morgen/morgens&quot; (morning/in the morning) nor &quot;Nacht/nachts&quot; (night/at night). However, the word &quot;Nacht&quot; (night) or &quot;nachts&quot; is repeated several times, not just in these two stories, but also in other ones, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachts_schlafen_die_Ratten_doch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nachts schlafen die Ratten doch&quot; (Rats sleep at night)&lt;/a&gt; and &quot;Das ist unser Manifest&quot; (This is our manifesto).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not aware of half past two having a special meaning in the context of World War II or the first post-war years. &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Brot#Motive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and several other online sources say it refers to the darkest and coldest part of the night. Note that the men in both stories try to deceive someone about what happened at that time during the night. In &quot;The Bread&quot;, the husband claims that he came to the kitchen because he thought he had heard something, while in reality he had surreptitiously cut off a slice of bread. In &quot;The Clock&quot;, the anonymous man lost his parents and everything he had in a bombing. He seems to try to deceive himself about the fact that the bombing took place at half past two, causing the clock to stop, because that was also the time when he always came back home and ate the bread that his mother prepared for him. Strictly speaking, we don't know when the bombing took place, but the man tells the people sitting on the bench that they shouldn't talk about the bombs and the &quot;clock&quot; (&quot;Küchenuhr&quot; literally translates to &quot;kitchen clock&quot;), the only thing he could save, is described as a &quot;Telleruhr&quot; (literally &quot;plate clock&quot;) because it is white and has the same glazing as the plate from which he used to eat his bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;half past two in the morning&quot; is a figuratively dark hour in both stories. In &quot;The Bread&quot;, the contrast between darkness and light is also used at the end of the story, when, the next evening, the wife tells her husband he should eat four slices of bread instead of the usual three: it is only a little while later that she sits down at the table under the lamplight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-02-14T16:04:41.640" LastActivityDate="2019-02-14T16:04:41.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6806" CreationDate="2019-02-15T10:10:22.537" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Running down a short list of poetic and rhetorical techniques, I find in this poem instances of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliteration&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;fade&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;figures&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;file&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;foul&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;flood&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enjambment&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;coming / in file&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypallage&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;quaking&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;steel wings&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhyme&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;pass&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;morass&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grass&lt;/em&gt;), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhythm&lt;/a&gt;. With a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uff2N62Jx9wC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;longer list&lt;/a&gt; I am sure that you could find more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me take the last of these, &lt;strong&gt;rhythm&lt;/strong&gt;, in a bit more detail. The first step in analyzing rhythm is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scansion&lt;/a&gt;, the usual approach in English being to mark the stressed (/) and unstressed (x) syllables. Then the lines can be divided into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feet&lt;/a&gt;. Not everyone agrees that feet are meaningful in English prosody, but it makes it easier to write about the rhythmic variation, since there’s standard terminology for writing about feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; x     x   /     x   /     x   /&#xA;Will they nev- | er fade | or pass!&#xA;  x  /     x     x  /      x  /     x    /       x   x  /     x&#xA;The mud, | and the mis- | ty fig- | ures end- | lessly com- | ing&#xA;x   /        x      x  /      x /&#xA;In file | through the foul | morass,&#xA;x     x   /      /    x     x   /      x     x  /      x     /&#xA;And the grey | flood-wat- | er rip- | ping the reeds | and grass,&#xA;x     x   /      /      /      x&#xA;And the steel | wings drum- | ming.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general rhythm is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamb_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic&lt;/a&gt;, but there are frequent substitutions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anapests&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;through the foul&lt;/em&gt;), and occasional substitutions with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochees&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;flood-wat-&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spondees&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;wings drum-&lt;/em&gt;). The frequent rhythmic substitutions could suggest the soldiers stumbling in the difficult terrain, or limping with injuries. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a spondee in the last line of each stanza, resulting in three consecutive stressed syllables. In the first stanza, these slow beats could suggest the explosions of the artillery barrage (the ‘steel wings drumming’). In the second, perhaps they indicate the farmer’s difficulty in articulating his experiences to the ‘old folks’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second and fifth lines of each stanza have ‘hypercataletic’ or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘feminine’ endings&lt;/a&gt; (that is, with an extra syllable following the last complete foot). These trailing endings could suggest the figures disappearing into mist in the first stanza, the farmer’s aporia in the second, and the river flowing away in the third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-15T10:10:22.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T08:33:19.000" Score="7" ViewCount="4387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something that always struck me about &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; is how the four Pevensie children not only spend years in Narnia but &lt;strong&gt;grow up and become adults&lt;/strong&gt; there, before having to return to being children in their own world. The issue of their re-adjustment to life on Earth is raised in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3575/17&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm specifically interested in their change from &lt;em&gt;adults&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;children&lt;/em&gt;. Their ability to re-adjust is presumably explained by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3688/17&quot;&gt;the magical resetting of their minds&lt;/a&gt; from &quot;Narnia mode&quot; to &quot;England mode&quot;, but they do retain their memories of being in Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many people, an important difference between childhood and adulthood is the understanding and experiencing of &lt;strong&gt;romantic relationships&lt;/strong&gt;, with or without related concepts such as sex and marriage. It would be very strange to be a child with memories of such knowledge, and stranger still to live as a child with memories of actual romantic experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence my question: &lt;strong&gt;did Peter, Susan, Edmund, or Lucy ever marry or form any romantic or sexual relationship while in Narnia?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The closest thing I can think of is Prince Rabadash attempting to woo Susan, but she turned him down. Maybe &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; is the most likely book to be able to answer my question, since although the Pevensies aren't the main characters they do appear as adults throughout.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I realise that these are books written &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; children, and obviously there aren't any romantic scenes or sexual stuff. However, at least some main characters do get married (Shasta and Aravis), so the books aren't entirely devoid of such ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would accept evidence from the books themselves, any extratextual material by the author, or good arguments based on the story of Narnia or on Lewis's beliefs. No fanfiction, unless solid arguments can be made that it's consistent with &quot;canon&quot; and not just titillation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T01:38:32.307" Title="Did any of the Pevensie kings and queens find romance while in Narnia?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5162" CreationDate="2019-02-16T08:55:51.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It seems so.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most compelling evidence I've found (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/9fn3af/found_this_in_cs_lewis_till_we_have_faces/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thanks to the Stoicism community on Reddit&lt;/a&gt;) is the following passage, quoting one of the Fox's lessons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Orual,&quot; she said, &quot;you make me think I have learned the Fox's lessons better than you. Have you forgotten what we are to say to ourselves every morning? 'Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not - '.&quot; She was speaking with a loving mimicry of the Fox's voice; she could do this as well as Batta did it badly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with &lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.2.two.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following quote&lt;/a&gt; from Marcus Aurelius's &lt;em&gt;Meditations&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; &quot;a significant source of the modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busy-body, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fox has also been counted as representing Stoicism by a multitude of sources, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www3.dbu.edu/mitchell/documents/TheMirrorandtheVeil.doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;academics&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780269?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;journals&lt;/a&gt;, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://alongthebeam.com/2016/05/25/reason-vs-mystery-in-the-fox-and-priest-of-till-we-have-faces-by-byron-barlowe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blogs&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2012/10/c-s-lewis-till-we-have-faces.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critics&lt;/a&gt;, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TillWeHaveFaces&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;popular sites&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/lit/till-we-have-faces/characters/the-fox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;help pages&lt;/a&gt;. I'll quote &lt;a href=&quot;http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2012/10/c-s-lewis-till-we-have-faces.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; in more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Fox, who becomes the tutor of Orual and Psyche, is a Stoic philosopher who has been captured in war and sold into slavery and by that means come to Glome. He is very definitely Stoic, because almost everything he says is standard Stoicism -- this book would be a fairly easy way to introduce the topic of Stoic philosophy. And at one point, Psyche, in the course of describing the Fox's teaching, gives what is in fact a close paraphrase of the opening of Book II of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Marcus Aurelius is a nearly exact contemporary of Apuleius, since he also died in AD 180 and we know that the Meditations were more or less composed in the last decade of his life. It is not, of course, plausible that Lewis is suggesting Marcus Aurelius as the source of the Fox's teaching, but it is entirely plausible to suggest a common influence. The Emperor was only writing a sort of philosophical notebook for himself, and often quotes and borrows from other authors in various ways. If one assumed that Marcus Aurelius was quoting or alluding to someone, then, one would take the Fox and the Emperor as having a common link somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T08:55:51.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-16T20:37:27.453" Score="5" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Heinlein's &lt;em&gt;Orphans of the Sky&lt;/em&gt;, the people on the Ship treat women as if they're not people. There are references to &quot;naming&quot; their women like dogs, they make deals with father and husband, and are, I believe , referred to as &quot;wenches&quot; at several points. There are no women in high positions. There's also this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He washed himself, and went thence to the compartments of his uncle, for whom he worked for his meals. His aunt glanced up as he came in, but said nothing, as became a woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These seem to reflect negatively on the society. However, the story was originally published in 1941. Women's rights in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theclassroom.com/feminism-during-1940s-14003.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 1940s&lt;/a&gt; weren't the way they were today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, two closely related questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Was this intended to reflect badly on the society, or was it simply in line with the thoughts of his time?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regardless of what the author thought, how &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; this change our perception of the society in the Ship?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-02-16T20:37:27.453" Title="In &quot;Orphans of the Sky&quot;, what does the society's treatment of women indicate about the society?" Tags="&lt;robert-a-heinlein&gt;&lt;orphans-of-the-sky&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9396" CreationDate="2019-02-17T10:20:04.260" Score="2" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from chapter 18 of Persuasion by Jane Austen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is when Admiral Croft tries to mention Anne about the possible alliance of Louisa Musgrove and Captain Benwick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anne had been ashamed to appear to comprehend so soon as she really&#xA;  did; but now she could safely suggest the name of ‘Louisa’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that Anne was ashamed to comprehend the name of Louisa too soon for it (might have) seemed unladylike? If such is the case, then how a few moments later could she '&lt;strong&gt;safely&lt;/strong&gt; suggest the name of Louisa'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T17:39:35.673" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T17:39:35.673" Title="In Persuasion, why does Anne feel &quot;ashamed&quot; before being able to &quot;safely suggest&quot; Louisa?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9393" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1153" CreationDate="2019-02-17T10:58:51.990" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a larger context to the unresolved cliffhanger, and yes, it is an unresolved cliffhanger.&#xA;At the end of First Among Sequels, Thursday is fleeing an exploding airship (at the denouement, in an edition of The Eyre Affair [just go with it]), when her usual escape method (bookjumping) has been textually seived out of commission.&#xA;The context being that there is a serial killer (a killer of serialised characters), who has made attempts at Tempe Brennan and Harry Potter, succeeded at taking out Sherlock Holmes, and the airship blowing up is the third attempt at Thursday's life (Norman Johnson, the pagerunner Minotaur, and the written Felix8 having tried earlier).&#xA;Obviously, whoever the killer is, they have pull, as only a Jurisfiction Agent or a member of the Council of Genres, has the power to order the aforementioned textual seive, as well as hide Felix8's transfictional travel. But the Minotaur does not trust Jurisfiction owing to his 5 year imprisonment (see The Well of Lost Plots for further info).&#xA;Additionally, during the Minotaur's original escape, had 'Who killed Godot?' as a cliffhanger (Godot being the Jurisfiction Agent killed before the UltraWord™ conspiracy started to unravel, and who's head is in a sack for most of the Thursday3).&#xA;A long-running conspiracy, or dangling plot-threads?&#xA;Finally, it was the Taxi driver that had the steering column rammed through him, not Thursday herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5840" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T10:58:51.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T16:23:50.993" Score="6" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Wind in The Willows&lt;/em&gt;, at the end of the chapter 'VI: Mr. Toad', Toad is convicted and sentenced to twenty years in &quot;the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this castle named later in the book, and is it a real location, or based on a real location?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;across the hollow-sounding drawbridge, below the spiky portcullis, under the frowning archway of the grim old castle, whose ancient towers soared high overhead; past guardrooms full of grinning soldiery off duty, past sentries who coughed in a horrid, sarcastic way, because that is as much as a sentry on his post dare do to show his contempt and abhorrence of crime; up time-worn winding stairs, past men-at-arms in casquet and corselet of steel, darting threatening looks through their vizards; across courtyards, where mastiffs strained at their leash and pawed the air to get at him; past ancient warders, their halberds leant against the wall, dozing over a pasty and a flagon of brown ale; on and on, past the rack-chamber and the thumbscrew-room, past the turning that led to the private scaffold, till they reached the door of the grimmest dungeon that lay in the heart of the innermost keep. [...] The rusty key creaked in the lock, the great door clanged behind them; and Toad was a helpless prisoner in the remotest dungeon of the best-guarded keep of the stoutest castle in all the length and breadth of Merry England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5841" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2020-02-29T17:25:08.197" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T17:25:08.197" Title="Is the castle where Mr. Toad is imprisoned a real place, or based on a real place?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;&lt;kenneth-grahame&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9395" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9786" CreationDate="2019-02-17T17:00:08.077" Score="2" ViewCount="349" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s the last stanza of Robert Browning’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Soliloquy_of_the_Spanish_Cloister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister&lt;/a&gt;’, first published in &lt;em&gt;Dramatic Lyrics&lt;/em&gt; (1842):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or, there’s Satan!—one might venture&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such a flaw in the indenture&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      As he’d miss till, past retrieve,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Blasted lay that rose-acacia&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      We’re so proud of! &lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ’St, there’s Vespers! &lt;em&gt;Plena gratiâ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;em&gt;Ave, Virgo!&lt;/em&gt; Gr-r-r—you swine!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the mysterious phrase ‘Hy, Zy, Hine’ in the sixth line? Is it onomatopoeia for the ringing of the bells for vespers? (But if so, in what language do bells go ‘hy zy’?) Is it the  interrupted beginning of a pledge to Satan? (But if so, did Browning have a particular source for the incantation?) Or is it something else entirely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T09:46:34.887" Title="What does Browning's cloistered soliloquist mean by ‘Hy, Zy, Hine’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-browning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9392" CreationDate="2019-02-17T18:41:58.880" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The conversation with Admiral Croft follows soon (a couple of weeks) after Anne’s learning of the engagement in a letter from Mary. Since then, we imagine, she has hardly thought of anything else, because if Louisa is engaged to Captain Benwick, then Captain Wentworth is free to bestow his affections elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, it was not regret which made Anne’s heart beat in spite of herself, and brought the colour into her cheeks when she thought of Captain Wentworth unshackled and free. She had some feelings which she was ashamed to investigate. They were too much like joy, senseless joy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the occurrence of “ashamed” in this passage: Anne does not want anyone to guess her feelings. In this context, when Admiral Croft says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, now you shall hear something that will surprise you. But first of all, you must tell me the name of the young lady I am going to talk about.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anne immediately comprehends that he is talking about Louisa Musgrave, because  the engagement has been uppermost in her mind for a fortnight. But she is afraid to suggest the name at this point, because she fears that Admiral Croft might guess the reason why she is so quick to understand, and she would be ashamed if Admiral Croft were to suspect her of being in love with Captain Wentworth. But once he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That young lady, you know, that we have all been so concerned for. The Miss Musgrove, that all this has been happening to. Her Christian name: I always forget her Christian name.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is safe for Anne to name Louisa, because there is only one Miss Musgrove whom everyone is concerned for, and so coming out with her name at this point does not give anything away about Anne’s private thoughts and feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-17T18:41:58.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9398" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T20:56:03.737" Score="10" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Orlando is about an immortal man who changes into a woman. Originally Woolf wanted to write about a bisexual character but the laws of the time wouldn't allow it, so this was her way of compromising apparently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did readers originally react to this work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5843" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T13:24:43.063" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T20:52:00.983" Title="What was the public's initial reaction to Virginia Woolf's Orlando?" Tags="&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;&lt;orlando&gt;&lt;reception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-17T22:07:33.883" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Independent People&lt;/em&gt; by Halldór Laxness (translated from Icelandic by J. A. Thompson):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Others believe that she lives much in the lake in the form of some kind of serpent or water-monster; and indeed it is on all men’s lips that a monster has now for many generations inhabited the lake and appeared to countless witnesses, who have testified to it upon oath, &lt;strong&gt;even those without second sight&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the highlighted phrase mean in this context? It seems to imply that witnesses were divided into those with second sight and those without. Was this ever common practice in Iceland? To what extent is Laxness alluding to historical or legendary events here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text added from author's comments which seem important in understanding the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;there is no mention of people having up-normal powers within the people &quot;in the context&quot; so it's not logic to assume that people without &quot;specific powers&quot; are testifying&lt;/em&gt;.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'...&lt;em&gt;the only witch in here is the women who turned to be the lake monster after death...other people are normal that is why they killed her&lt;/em&gt;' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5844" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T10:33:27.273" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T10:41:07.520" Title="Why does Laxness mention &quot;second sight&quot; in &quot;Independent People&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;halldor-laxness&gt;&lt;independent-people&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9401" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9402" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" Score="0" Body="For questions about works of literature which were originally written in the Icelandic language." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:19:13.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9403" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:20:21.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:20:21.900" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:20:21.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9404" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:20:21.900" Score="0" Body="Halldór Laxness (1902–1998), Icelandic poet, essayist &amp; novelist, and winner of the 1955 Nobel prize for literature." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:25:42.097" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:25:42.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9405" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9406" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" Score="0" Body="&quot;Independent People&quot; is a novel by Halldór Laxness, published in 1934–5. Use with the [halldor-laxness] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T10:22:41.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-18T11:51:13.420" Score="5" ViewCount="736" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 5 of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; by Harper Lee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Maudie had known Uncle Jack Finch, Atticus’s brother, since they were children. Nearly the same age, they had grown up together at Finch’s Landing. Miss Maudie was the daughter of a neighbouring landowner, Dr Frank Buford. &lt;strong&gt;Dr Buford’s profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor. Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging to his window-boxes in Nashville and stayed rich.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did one stay poor and one rich? Please explain the lines in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:06:58.227" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T12:56:44.810" Title="Why did Dr Buford stay poor (and Jack rich) in &quot;To Kill A Mockingbird&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9399" CreationDate="2019-02-18T13:57:00.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll caveat this with the fact that I have not read the work in question and I'm going to some extent off the OP, Mami's comments now edited into the question. Specifically the comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;there is no mention of people having up-normal powers within the people&amp;quot;in the context&amp;quot; so it's not logic to assume that people without &amp;quot;specific powers&amp;quot; are testifying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that 'up-normal' indicates 'super-natural', this makes exactly the wrong assumption.&#xA;In Icelandic Folk Culture the existence in the general population of people with 'specific powers' is the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Introduction of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HY-DCKd6UgUC&amp;amp;pg=PA10&amp;amp;lpg=PA10&amp;amp;dq=%22second%20sight%22%20icelandic%20folklore&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=sO1B7sqpB0&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1Gg02-DtS01f8uLsjyr_kO_lsMTg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiKw7v9tMXgAhX5VBUIHQBPCVcQ6AEwC3oECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=second%20sight&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icelandic Folktales and Legends&#xA;By Jacqueline Simpson and Jón Árnason&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the earliest times, Icelandic sagas take for granted the existence of 'natural' psychic gifts in certain individuals, in particular second sight (both precognition and the power to 'see' invisible beings and distant events), and the ability to read omens and to 'dream true'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further on in 'Independent People', (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Virrt_8tsGQC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Independent%20People%20by%20Halld%C3%B3r%20Laxness&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj2xoPgssXgAhW-SRUIHXTeDeIQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=second%20sight&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;at page 42 in this Google Books result&lt;/a&gt;) Laxness writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Everybody with second sight says this place is haunted&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't care a damn for people with second sight,&amp;quot; he snorted. &amp;quot;Give me a man who has some control over his own senses. They go about seeing things and hearing the devil only knows what...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, reinforcing the fact that people with 'specific powers' are accepted to be a part of the general population and with that power not being something they control, these people are likely to be seen as distinct from 'witches' who actively use and control their powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no indication that people are in any way 'divided' by possession of second site, only that it is generally understood that the population is a mixture of those who have it and those who don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the passage from &amp;quot;Independent People&amp;quot; is merely indicating that the phenomena at the lake were so generally accepted and undisputed because one didn't require 'specific powers' to experience them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T10:41:07.520" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12362" CreationDate="2019-02-18T16:51:35.840" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's from &lt;a href=&quot;http://hplovecraft.hu/index.php?page=library_etexts&amp;amp;id=506&amp;amp;lang=angol&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Case for Classicism&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Lovecraft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first thing one remarks on reading his frigid “Engineering English” is its &lt;strong&gt;laconic atmosphere&lt;/strong&gt; of aloofness from vivid feeling and from love of pure harmonic beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T09:36:30.910" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T12:02:35.323" Title="What does &quot;laconic atmosphere&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9427" CreationDate="2019-02-18T17:30:04.520" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;The king of Archenland during the time of &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;, father of the Archenland princes who play a more major role in the story, is called &lt;strong&gt;Lune&lt;/strong&gt;. Is there any significance to this name? Perhaps either a connection with the moon or possibly with insanity? (For what it's worth, Lewis has &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/the-space-trilogy&quot;&gt;a history&lt;/a&gt; of making symbolic connections to heavenly bodies in his novels, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/77334/31394&quot;&gt;including Narnia&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T01:48:18.797" Title="Is there any significance in King Lune's name?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3212" CreationDate="2019-02-18T17:49:26.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the book and this is pure speculation on my part. But when I'm having what TVtropes calls a &quot;BSOD&quot; or blue screen of death, my facial expressions just aren't there. It's like I'm lifeless and made of stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen it in others who just seem to be drained of emotions. No tears, no smile or frown, just a complete shutdown while the brain works overtime to process the big upsetting thing that has just happened. In others words, our eyes have gone hard. Not soft and lifelike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be Virginia's way of describing such a feeling. As it is a line of dialogue, Susan might just be trying to say, &quot;I don't want to advertise my distress. I hope Jinny's a good distraction.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5843" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T17:49:26.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9389" CreationDate="2019-02-18T18:55:53.683" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To quote &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; (pg 183-184 in my edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Susan grew into a tall and gracious woman with black hair that fell almost to her feet and the kings of the countries beyond the sea began to send ambassadors asking for her hand in marriage [...] But as for Lucy, she was always gay and golden-haired, and all the princes in those parts desired her to be their Queen [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Nothing similar is mentioned for Kings Edmund and Peter in the same passage.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; it is noteworthy that not only does Queen Susan go to visit Calormen for Prince Rabadash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when the Prince was a guest at Cair Paravel [... she] show[ed] him so much favor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;indicating that she wasn't just wooed, she fell for it, a bit. (Perhaps this is one of those different experiences you theorized about in the comments.) Lasaraleen mentions off hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;some of the Narnian &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt; are lovely. I was taken out on a river party the day before yesterday, and I was wearing my...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so clearly the men were going to parties (at minimum, then, we know Edmund has been to a party where he has probably been wooed, though I suppose not necessarily, as he's described in &lt;em&gt;Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; as a &quot;graver and quieter man&quot;; however, I think he probably has) as well as the women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Interestingly I'll note, with respect to Susan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She's not like Lucy, you know, who's as good as a man, or at any rate as good as a boy. Queen Susan is more like an ordinary grown-up lady. She doesn't ride to the wars, though she is an excellent archer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, out of the mouth of Prince Corin in &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;. And, an even more speculative sidebar here (especially considering Lewis' faith) - does 'as good as a man' perhaps indicate Lucy acts like one, in terms of dress, those she loves, etc?) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to summarize: yes, Susan in particular seems to have experienced romance. Lucy has definitely been wooed, and it is rather likely Edmund has as well (Peter seems to have been a bit too busy in battle to be wooed - during all of &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; he's off at battle with the giants). But neither Lucy nor Edmund seems to have reciprocated - that seems to be left to the Problem of Susan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all that can be found on the subject in the books with all four Pevensies: &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; (though as an aside on the problem of Susan, &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; presents her in a rather poor light). Moving on to &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, though: when Lucy is on the island of the Thumpers reading the magician's spellbook, she reads the spell about beauty beyond all mortals. She sees visions of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;kings and dukes and great lords who fought for her favor [...] Susan was jealous of the dazzling beauty of Lucy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Lucy at this stage seems to be at minimum jealous of the attention Susan gets, and wishing for romance. So perhaps to some extent she does move towards the reciprocation that it seems clear Susan has done in the past (as with Rabadash). Aslan roars out of the page, though, and the spell passes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T01:38:32.307" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T01:38:32.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9414" CreationDate="2019-02-18T20:02:10.247" Score="13" ViewCount="1800" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was rereading &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; and noticed that in the start of the story they're in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an empty, sleepy country station, and there was hardly anyone on the platform but themselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then they're magically pulled away to Narnia from there (and at the end, they end up back on the platform).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible Rowling was inspired by this to have wizards and witches head to Hogwarts from a railway platform?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-02-18T20:19:32.330" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T20:47:55.713" Title="Was Rowling inspired by the railway station scene in Prince Caspian?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9413" CreationDate="2019-02-18T20:47:55.713" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oddly enough, Rowling &lt;strong&gt;has&lt;/strong&gt; cited &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; as an inspiration for her King's Cross entryway to the world of magic, but &lt;strong&gt;not the part you're thinking of&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found myself thinking about the wardrobe route to Narnia when Harry is told he has to hurl himself at a barrier in Kings Cross Station - it dissolves and he's on platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and there's the train for Hogwarts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2001/1001-sydney-renton.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview she did for the &lt;em&gt;Sydney Morning Herald&lt;/em&gt; in 2001&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's also claimed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/kings-cross-station&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in a piece of &amp;quot;writing by J. K. Rowling&amp;quot; on Pottermore&lt;/a&gt;, that she chose King's Cross as the point of entry for getting to Hogwarts because of its personal significance to her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;King’s Cross, which is one of London’s main railway stations, has a very personal significance for me, because my parents met on a train to Scotland which departed from King’s Cross station. For this reason, and because it has such an evocative and symbolic name, and because it is actually the right station to leave from if you were heading to Caledonia, I never knew the slightest indecision about the location of the portal that would take Harry to Hogwarts, or the means of transport that would take him there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It's possible that both of these are true - she could have been inspired by her personal/family history to use King's Cross, and inspired by Narnia to have Harry hurl himself at a wall - but if we're to take them as conflicting pieces of evidence, I'd much rather rely on the earlier statement from an interview than the later one from Pottermore. I'm frankly doubtful that all of those pieces of &amp;quot;writing by J. K. Rowling&amp;quot; on Pottermore were really written by her, and even if so, she seems to be putting less care into her new additions to the Potterverse lore these days than she did back when she was writing the books. It's worth noting that she &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/24/did-j-k-rowling-base-platform-9-3-4-on-the-gump#comment1387_29&quot;&gt;misremembered King's Cross when writing the platform scene&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-18T20:47:55.713" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T03:58:03.843" Score="1" ViewCount="365" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 1 of Jack London's &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt;, the dog Buck gets a beating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken. He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it. That club was a revelation. &lt;strong&gt;It was his introduction to the reign of primitive law, and he met the introduction halfway.&lt;/strong&gt; The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain the sentence in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5848" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T08:09:03.610" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T11:58:01.577" Title="What does it mean to &quot;meet the introduction halfway&quot; in &quot;The Call of the Wild&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;the-call-of-the-wild&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-19T05:36:46.540" Score="7" ViewCount="1135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently began reading Hemingway’s memoir, &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt;. In it, Hemingway and his contemporary Americans are described as a ‘lost generation’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was when we had come back from Canada and were living in the rue Notre-Dame-des-Chanps and Miss Stein and I were still good friends that Miss Stein made the remark about the lost generation. She had some ignition trouble with the old Model T Ford she then drove and the young man who worked in the garage and had served in the war had not been adept, or perhaps had not been &lt;em&gt;serieux&lt;/em&gt; and had been corrected severely by the &lt;em&gt;patron&lt;/em&gt; of the garage after Miss Stein’s protest. The &lt;em&gt;patron&lt;/em&gt; had said to him, ‘You are all a &lt;em&gt;generation perdue&lt;/em&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’That’s what you are. That’s what you all are,’ Miss Stein said, ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are all a lost generation.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Really?’ I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’You are,’ she insisted. ‘You have no respect for anything. You drink yourself to death ...’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Was the young mechanic drunk?’ I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Of course not.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Have you ever seen me drunk?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’No. But your friends are drunk.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’I’ve been drunk,’ I said, ‘but I don’t come here drunk.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Of course not. I didn’t say that.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’The boys &lt;em&gt;patron&lt;/em&gt; was probably drunk at eleven o’clock in the morning,’ I said. ‘That’s why he makes such lovely phrases.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Don’t argue with me, Hemingway,’ Miss Stein said. ‘It does you no good at all. You’re all a lost generation, exactly as the garage-keeper said.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? How does one lose oneself, or even a whole generation? What is it that they have lost? And where did they lose it? In other words, what did Gertrude Stein mean by saying this and what did Hemingway mean by including this exchange and what does it mean in the later context of American history? More broadly, are there any other references to this in Hemingway’s work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to learn that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost Generation&lt;/a&gt; is a literary term that refers to a number of writers from the post war era, including Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. It doesn’t really answer my question in the depth that I would like but it does say that Hemingway used the term in the epigraph to his novel, &lt;em&gt;The Sun Also Rises&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T02:51:02.320" Title="Why is Hemingway's generation a ‘lost generation’?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;a-moveable-feast&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9417" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-12T14:02:16.660" Score="1" ViewCount="824" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 2 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=v-IoDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Green Mile&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen King:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was still &lt;strong&gt;as hot as the hinges of hell&lt;/strong&gt;, October or not. The door to the exercise yard opened, letting in a flood of brilliant light and the biggest man I've ever seen, except for some of the basketball fellows they have on the TV down in the “Resource Room” of this home for wayward droolers I've finished up in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;as hot as the hinges of hell&quot; mean? I heard it's a Bible reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Sai Kiran" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T10:50:05.333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:27:17.183" Title="What does &quot;as hot as the hinges of hell&quot; mean in &quot;The Green Mile&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9415" CreationDate="2019-02-19T09:40:21.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it’s about the dog Buck, it’s actually about Jack London’s philosophy of life, or at least that small part of it we see here. I mean, who’s ever heard of a man reading a dog’s mind? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s also important to disentangle the notion of primitive law because it can easily be confused with the notion of &quot;primitive&quot; as in primitive societies. I mean, after all the immense anthropological work done over the course of the 20th century, it turns out that primitive societies are not much different from the societies of the advanced industrial nations. Not a surprising conclusion as they are all sprung from the same root (the difference lies in the technology but not in the society). So again primitive law is something we should understand in terms of Jack London’s philosophy of life and not in terms of law that actually existed in so-called primitive societies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jack London here is eliding the notion of primitive law with violence and cunning. Put simply and crudely: &lt;strong&gt;it was Buck’s ‘introduction’ to the violence and the cunning of the white man and he met that violence ‘half-way’ by fighting back with violence and cunning.&lt;/strong&gt; It’s also worth noting that it’s a short fragment that partly &lt;em&gt;misrepresents&lt;/em&gt; the fuller significance of Jack London’s philosophy - after all he was a socialist and according to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.sonomanews.com/lifestyle/5552019-181/jack-londons-mark-on-literature%3fview=AMP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonama News&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt; is about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;finding yourself and finding your tribe, and your mates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more, to fully understand the meaning of even a part of a novel means that one ought to understand it in the context of both a writer’s oeuvre and times. For example, &lt;em&gt;Sonama News&lt;/em&gt; go on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Jack London is] usually listed as an author intent upon exposing the deterministic world of uncaring Darwinian struggle for survival ... But London’s &lt;em&gt;Naturalism&lt;/em&gt; does not only offer bleak despair in the face of what he called Nature on the Yukon: the ‘white silence’; instead as a socialist he offers a hope that humanity - if united in comradeship and brotherhood - and rise above or at least survive the cold dictates of giant Pacific storms, horrors such as the Chilkoot trail ... In the end, although he was passionately naturalistic in outlook, he was passionately idealistic in his hopes for his fellow man and woman. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T11:58:01.577" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T11:58:01.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9417" CreationDate="2019-02-19T13:57:40.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It means that it was very hot. The addition of ‘hinges’ to the common English idiom ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hot_as_hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hot as hell&lt;/a&gt;’ provides emphasis via alliteration. (Alliteration for emphasis is the reason we go to hell in a handbasket rather than some more practical mode of conveyance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hell is traditionally depicted with doors or gates, which would naturally have hinges. In the Bible, Jesus says to Peter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gospel of Matthew 16:18. Authorized Version.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                          On a sudden open fly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With impetuous recoil and jarring sound,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Th’ infernal doors, and on their hinges grate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Harsh thunder&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1674). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Book II, lines 879–882&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most famously, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Inferno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Dante and Virgil pass through the gate of hell, above which is an inscription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I AM THE WAY TO A FORSAKEN PEOPLE.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL SORROW.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SACRED JUSTICE MOVED MY ARCHITECT.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I WAS RAISED HERE BY DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  PRIMORDIAL LOVE AND ULTIMATE INTELLECT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ONLY THOSE ELEMENTS TIME CANNOT WEAR&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  WERE MADE BEFORE ME, AND BEYOND TIME I STAND.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These mysteries I read cut into stone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      above a gate. And turning I said: “Master,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      what is the meaning of this harsh inscription?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dante Alighieri (1320). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/inferno00dant_2/page/18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Inferno&lt;/em&gt;, Canto III, lines 1–12&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by John Ciardi (1954).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The allusion to the gate of hell, with its inscription ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’, reminds the reader of &lt;em&gt;The Green Mile&lt;/em&gt; of the hopeless situation of the inmates on death row in Cold Mountain State Penitentiary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the locations for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Mile_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1999 film&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Green Mile&lt;/em&gt; was the (then recently closed) Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville, where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Behind the silent walls, however, was a world unto itself, as inmates learned when they walked into the cellblocks in the penitentiary’s early years. They passed under a large sign that loomed overhead, stating “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” a jarring reminder that they were the property of the state for the foreseeable future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Yoshie Lewis and Brian Allison (2014). &lt;em&gt;Tennessee State Penitentiary&lt;/em&gt;, p. 7. Charleston: Arcadia.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T16:27:17.183" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:27:17.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8538" CreationDate="2019-02-19T15:32:25.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem opens with this extract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Lots uh slaves wut wuz brung ovuh from Africa could fly...Dey dohn like it heah... an go back to Africa...&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Legend of the Flying African&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching online for more information about such a legend turns up ready information on the myth, such as this from &lt;a href=&quot;https://blackforteana.wordpress.com/2018/03/23/the-legend-of-the-flying-africans/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Forteana&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it has a number of variations, the basic story says that there was once a time when Africans could fly. When they were captured by slavers and put into the holds of slave ships, they were overcome with despair. In their misery and sadness, they couldn’t use their powers to fly away.  After the ships docked, the people were sold into slavery where they toiled and suffered. Many had their spirits crushed. Overwhelmed by the horror of their new lives, they forgot how to fly. Others did not. They kept to the old ways, and bided their time. When the time was right, they said the magic words they had carried from their homeland, lifted into the air, and flew across the sea, back home to Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its seems that the Flying African legend can be traced back to an incident that occured in 1803 when a group of Igbo slaves revolted aboard a ship off the Georgia coast. They drowned the members of the crew, came ashore, walked to a creek and then drowned themselves in a mass suicide (Snyder 39). For this particular group of Igbo, death was preferable to a life in chains. As the story evolved, the heroes were said to have taken wing and flown away to African rather than died. Based on the historical context, it would seem that “flying to Africa” was actually a metaphor for suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this source does not seem to be particularly scholarly in its own right, it well reflects what I picked up reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iiste.org/Journals/index.php/RHSS/article/viewFile/35027/36026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; and neatly summarises the elements, though the author adds a conclusion that I've not seen explicitly elsewhere, though my reading into the subject has been limited. Whether that conclusion is absolutely correct I can't say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect to consider is the title of this poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;O Daedalus, Fly Away Home&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus#Daedalus_and_Icarus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daedalus in Greek legend&lt;/a&gt; being the master craftsman who, imprisoned by Minos, crafted two pairs of wings so that he and his son, Icarus, could fly to freedom. Icarus flew too close to the sun, melting the wax that secured his feathers and falling to his death. Daedalus survived and made his way to Sicily. This myth captures the duality of outcome possible in taking flight in escape. One may make good one's escape or one may escape life altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allusion in the title would seem to be a direct linking of the idea of literal flight through the air as escape from imprisonment and bondage. The poem can therefore be seen as demonstrating that the mythology of enslaved Africans is in every way the equal of the more conventionally lauded and elevated tales of classical mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:50:58.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9421" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9422" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" Score="0" Body="&quot;Studies in Classic American Literature&quot; (1923) is a work of literary criticism by D. H. Lawrence. Use with the [d-h-lawrence] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T16:39:17.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9416" CreationDate="2019-02-19T17:07:29.267" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This referred to a lack of purpose and drive which was a consequence of having witnessed pointless death on such a huge scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the aftermath of the war there arose a group of young persons known as the &quot;Lost Generation.&quot; The term was coined from something Gertrude Stein witnessed the owner of a garage saying to his young employee, which Hemingway later used as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926): &quot;You are all a lost generation.&quot; This accusation referred to the lack of purpose or drive resulting from the horrific disillusionment felt by those who grew up and lived through the war, and were then in their twenties and thirties. Having seen pointless death on such a huge scale, many lost faith in traditional values like courage, patriotism, and masculinity. Some in turn became aimless, reckless, and focused on material wealth, unable to believe in abstract ideals.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://writersinspire.org/content/lost-generation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost Generation - Writers Inspire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the OP mentions in the question this term also exists in literature and refers to some writers and poets and authors who lived during this era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In literature, the &quot;Lost Generation&quot; refers to a group of writers and poets who were men and women of this period. All were American, but several members emigrated to Europe. The most famous members were Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot.&lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://writersinspire.org/content/lost-generation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost Generation - Writers Inspire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5036" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T17:07:29.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5922" CreationDate="2019-02-19T19:01:25.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The soil in the poet’s garden is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permeability_(earth_sciences)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;permeable&lt;/a&gt;, so that water quickly disappears into the spaces between the grains. Moreover, the poet has heard that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;karst&lt;/a&gt; landscapes where soluble rock like limestone lies on top of insoluble rock like sandstone, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_river&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subterranean rivers&lt;/a&gt; may flow. The poem takes these geological commonplaces and defamiliarizes them using a childlike sense of wonder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-19T19:01:25.727" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3442" CreationDate="2019-02-19T20:24:37.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Rattle’ means “To have an undesirable or unnecessary amount of space in which to move or function” [&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;], like the moon in the sky, or the fragment of candy in the box. (Normally this sense of the word requires ‘about’ or ‘around’, but poetry need not be so finicky.) The moon rattles in the sky ‘sometimes’ because at other times it is hidden by the Earth or by clouds. The epithet ‘angry’ has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transferred&lt;/a&gt;: it’s not the candy or the moon but the speaker who is angry that the Cambridge ladies don’t care about the things the speaker thinks are important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for locating the anger in the speaker is that the poem seems to be expressing a more severe animus than would be justified by a difference in taste or enthusiasms: in particular, the attack on the ladies’ appearance (“unbeautiful … unscented shapeless”) is far too personal for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not clear to me, by the way, whether the satirical target of the poem is the Cambridge ladies (who don’t care about the moon), or the speaker (who seems unreasonably angry that the ladies have their own interests). I think you could read it either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T09:46:45.280" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T09:46:45.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9426" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9431" CreationDate="2019-02-19T22:24:56.733" Score="3" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ted Hughes' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allaboutheaven.org/observations/ted-hughes-on-crows-000100/221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Crow and the Birds&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the lines before the ending read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the wryneck crooked in the moon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the dipper peered from the &lt;strong&gt;dewball&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I need help understanding two things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I Googled the word &amp;quot;dewball&amp;quot;, but couldn't find too much (I did find these: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-school-of-the-heart-lesson-the-second/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tinyurl.com/y5zggjf8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;). My guess is that it's simply a description of a &amp;quot;single unit&amp;quot; of a dew. But is it? Another guess is that it's some play on the (valid) word &amp;quot;dewfall&amp;quot;. But if that so, what's that &amp;quot;ball&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does it mean to peer &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; a dewball? I'd understand alternatives such as &amp;quot;through&amp;quot;, or something close, but can't figure out the imagery meaning of &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I may be &lt;strike&gt;peering&lt;/strike&gt; reading too much into this single line, but I'm not a native speaker and hence I afraid I'm missing something simple. What do you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T00:20:36.130" Title="What does it mean to peer from a dewball?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9410" CreationDate="2019-02-20T01:48:18.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Interesting meanings&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some interesting bits come up on wiktionary: lune is apparently one alternate spelling for lyon, which is one way the leash for a hawk was spelt, as in Sir Thomas Malory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thenne was he ware of a Faucon came fleynge ouer his hede toward an hyghe elme / and longe &lt;strong&gt;lunys&lt;/strong&gt; aboute her feet / and she flewe vnto the elme to take her perche / the &lt;strong&gt;lunys&lt;/strong&gt; ouer cast aboute a bough / And whanne she wold haue taken her flyghte / she henge by the legges fast / and syre launcelot sawe how he henge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[or, if you don't want to deal with the middle english:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then was he aware of a Falcon which came flying over his head toward a high elm / with long [traces/leashes] about her feet / and she flew onto the elm to take her perch / the [traces/leashes] cast over and about a bough / And when she would have taken her flight / She hung by the legs fast / and Sir Launcelot saw how [s?]he hung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another meaning, derived from the fact that lune is related to luna, lunar, and therefore the moon: it can refer to the phases of the moon and mean whim, caprice, humor. Another meaning, derived from the Old Norse &lt;em&gt;lugna&lt;/em&gt;, means warmth, and to calm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Possible reasoning&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What struck me immediately was how King Lune is, as King of Archenland, a barrier between Narnia and Calormen. This made me think of him being a sort of leash on both their armies (referring to the hawking definition now), as a protective barrier - and something certainly needed for the diplomatic relations involved in this would be the ability to be warm/charming, and the ability to calm people down (referring to the Old Norse derivative now).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Keys to the Chronicles: Unlocking the Symbols of C. S. Lewis's Narnia&lt;/em&gt; by Marvin Hinten suggests that the names Archenland and King Lune form a linguistic pair - another derivative meaning of the word lune is arch, or crescent - &lt;em&gt;arch&lt;/em&gt;enland, and a name that means arch. This seems to me a bit of a stretch, but that's one theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There actually aren't that many other analyses (at least not that my dig could turn up). I find your bit about the planets interesting, but I'm not sure if the Moon relation quite makes sense - you could argue that Archenland is a bit of a &amp;quot;satellite&amp;quot; of Narnia.  I suppose you could also argue that Rabadash goes a bit bonkers and consequently gets turned into a donkey - but that's even more of a stretch in my mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another thought that struck me was that it could be like Cor and Corin - Cor doesn't make a ton of sense on its own, but it's part of his brother's name. Similarly, Lune (or more likely, 'Lun') could be the first part of Lune's brother's name (we do not know, of course, whether Lune had a brother). The only problem with this is that boy's names starting with 'Lun' aren't very common - the main ones I found were Lundie and Lundon (and derivations of each) - the former is Scottish in origin, and the latter an early version of London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honestly, it could very well be a combination of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T01:48:18.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3518" CreationDate="2019-02-20T05:27:46.633" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to me, here 'atomies' means the tiny particles.This is because in the line 'I descend(moving down or to a lower level;as the rain drops itself on Earth) to lave(wash) the droughts, atomies, dust-layers of the globe..' the rain says tht it descends, it falls down on to the Earth so as to lave or wash/bathe the droughts, tiny particles or atomies and also the dust-layers which are formed on the globe(Earth).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5851" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T05:27:46.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9426" CreationDate="2019-02-20T13:11:22.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Caveat that this is speculative rather than authoritative...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this poem Hughes clearly relates some of the birds to his own memories in the earlier lines and it is usually clear what kind of occurrence he is recalling, a swallow in a cave, a bluetit dodging past a washing line…, the action of the bird is clearly described. But in this set of four lines the descriptions seem more obscure, how &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; a bullfinch plump in an apple bud? How does a goldfinch ‘bulb’, be it in the sun or anywhere else? What does it mean for a wryneck to ‘crook in the moon’?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the difference is that the swallow and the bluetit are fitting themselves around human activity and the Finches, Wryneck and Dipper are interacting only with the natural world even if those interactions seem more the work of imagination or myth than natural science. Apple bud, sun and moon in which the finches and Wryneck are all very rounded forms, albeit ones that the birds cannot literally be &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt;. I think this frees us from the need to see the Dipper as literally being situated within a ball of dew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I explored the idea of mythology, the Wryneck is apparently associated with the moon in Egyptian mythology and Native American Myths tell of Goldfinches being painted with sunlight. I couldn’t sift anything relevant from search results for mythology of Bullfinches (for predictable reasons) or for Dippers. But the trouble with birds and mythology is that ever culture and subculture has its tales about birds and it would be impossible to light with any certainty on one myth and declare it to be Hughes’ source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, since the poem is effectively ‘scenes from a life’ it leaves me wondering if the references are part of such a personal mythology that an outsider to that life could never hope to recognise them. The descriptions sound almost like the coded memories of families. I recall in some novel a family’s habit of specifying the amount of drink they wanted by numbers of birds rather than ‘fingers’ as the shared recollection of a childhood glass with chickens up the side became their family metric, ‘Whiskey? Just to the second bird!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could imagine these lines being references to artworks, misremembering the tree from Hokusai’s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=785552&amp;amp;partId=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulfinch and Weeping Cherry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; or some series of artworks where the round shapes of the bud, sun, moon and dewball provide a connected structural theme. It could be anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a Dipper peering out from a ball of dew is only an impossibility because of its scale.  Dippers feed underwater, but not being long legged wading birds, when they stand on the bed of s stream their whole body is under the surface and they use their wings as aerofoils (aquafoils?) to create downward pressure from the current to counteract their feathery buoyancy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to watch one feeding in the stream under the window in my parents’ house and can attest that a dipper can appear to be peering from under the water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Bulfinch can perhaps plump &lt;em&gt;near&lt;/em&gt; an apple bud, rather than in one, a Goldfinch could no doubt ‘bulb’ in the light of the sun not in the fiery ball and a Wryneck might twist to gaze at the moon rather than reside in it then perhaps a Dipper can peer through the waters of a stream and sprinkle dewballs as it emerges and shakes water from its feathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, more prosaically, my final piece of research may undermine all of the above... It seems that Dippers make small, enclosed, &lt;em&gt;round&lt;/em&gt; nests close to the water and cover them with moss. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ggDrX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ggDrX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dipper nest between rocks, covered in moss&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Water spray will bead up on moss, so it may be that a Dipper's nest can look like a ball of dew. Which makes me wonder if the Apple-bud, sun and moon have all been called the nests of their respective birds in Folklore...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T13:11:22.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9426" CreationDate="2019-02-20T13:17:52.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘Dewball’ is rare, but means ‘dewdrop’ as you guessed. Your first linked example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I looked upon you when the April moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sprinkled your forms with light, and the dewball lay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All night upon the branch&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Alford (1835). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8q0wAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The School of the Heart&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and here’s another example, found on Google Books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They can learn for themselves that dewball-decorated grass at sunrise is merely wet grass an hour later; and still later this grass is dry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Bertha Stevens (1941). &lt;em&gt;How Miracles Abound&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed odd that the dipper peers ‘from’ the dewball. But all the lines in the poem, except for the last, have some kind of odd or obscure aspect, whether it’s vocabulary (‘bulb’ meaning ‘swell’) or reference (‘Bessemer upglare’ meaning the light from a steel mill, though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessemer_process&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bessemer converters&lt;/a&gt; had been superseded by other processes by the mid-20th century when Hughes was writing).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dipper line is one of the easier ones to interpret: perhaps the dipper peers into the dewball and its reflection peers out. It is harder to come up with an explanation for how the bullfinch ‘plumped in the apple bud’. Bullfinches do eat buds but normally one would use ‘on’ rather than ‘in’ if that was what was meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obscurities associated with the other birds contrast with the straightforward sense of Crow’s line, but this is just one of several contrasts that Hughes sets up. Lines 1-4 have lyrical flights of poetic fancy, contrasting with Crow’s plain words; the birds in lines 7–10 flee human civilization (as represented by steel mills, washing lines, farms and shops) whereas Crow is found ‘head-down’ in its detritus; and the nouns in lines 11–14 (‘bud’, ‘sun’, ‘moon’ and ‘dewball’) are clean, while Crow sprawls in garbage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Building an allegorical interpretation from these structural contrasts, we could take the lyricism of lines 1–4 to represent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic&lt;/a&gt; poets; the abstract elements of lines 5–6 and the concern with civilization and machinery in lines 7–10 to represent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_modernism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modernists&lt;/a&gt;; and the concision and obscurity of lines 11–14 to represent the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imagists&lt;/a&gt;. Thus Hughes, represented by Crow, places himself in opposition to all of these poetic schools, trying to create something new.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-20T15:21:33.513" LastActivityDate="2019-02-20T15:21:33.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9433" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9434" CreationDate="2019-02-20T15:18:58.247" Score="3" ViewCount="346" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/grimmshouseholdt2grim/page/222/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Shepherd Boy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a very short story by the Brothers Grimm which recently found fame in the world of popular sci-fi by being referenced prominently in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaven_Sent_(Doctor_Who)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an episode of &lt;em&gt;Doctor Who&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In general it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;known&lt;/a&gt; that the Brothers Grimm didn't &lt;em&gt;write&lt;/em&gt; the stories themselves but collected them from various traditional sources. But I'm curious if anything is known about the origins of this particular story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is anything known about the history and origins of the story &amp;quot;The Shepherd Boy&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T09:56:22.077" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T09:56:22.077" Title="Where did the Grimm brothers' story &quot;The Shepherd Boy&quot; originate?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;brothers-grimm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9433" CreationDate="2019-02-20T15:46:36.420" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the listed attributions in '&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dec1b-q_of8C&amp;amp;pg=PT1269&amp;amp;lpg=PT1269&amp;amp;dq=%22ludwig%20aurbacher%22%20grimm%20shepherd%20boy&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=yTrNQxfkZ3&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0wd7zdJT9IM1i8bw_biFE66b3HmA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiIpqDI0srgAhVxSRUIHQFVCH0Q6AEwB3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ludwig%20aurbacher%22%20grimm%20shepherd%20boy&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm All-New Third Edition&lt;/a&gt;' the source was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Aurbacher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ludwig Aurbacher&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;152&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;The Little Shepherd Boy “Das Hirtenbüblein” (1819). Source: Ludwig Aurbacher&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he seems to have been something of a polymath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The work of Aurbacher covers a wide range. From pedagogy, psychology, philology and religion to poetry. He became famous for his Ein Volksbüchlein, a treasure chest of Swabian folk poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T11:57:49.873" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T11:57:49.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-20T19:58:16.980" Score="5" ViewCount="533" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have noticed that online listings for books primarily marketed toward children sometimes include the text &amp;quot;This title has Common Core connections.&amp;quot;, usually toward the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't seem to be something that is unique to any specific author, publisher, or bookseller, so it seems likely that this is some sort of standard term of art in the publication or education field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626720879&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626720879&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thebookies.com/?q=h.reports.iv&amp;amp;eisbn=FQO0d1ZFIarR4wVaN8xzLg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.thebookies.com/?q=h.reports.iv&amp;amp;eisbn=FQO0d1ZFIarR4wVaN8xzLg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://spartabooks.indielite.org/book/9780805079968&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://spartabooks.indielite.org/book/9780805079968&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;description&amp;quot; section of the third book above is as follows (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Rabbit's new neighbors are Otters. OTTERS! But he doesn't know anything about Otters. Will they get along? Will they be friends? Just treat otters the same way you'd like them to treat you, advises wise Mr. Owl. And so begins Mr. Rabbit's reflection on good manners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her smart, quirky style Laurie Keller highlights how to be a good friend and neighbor—just follow the Golden Rule! &lt;strong&gt;This title has Common Core connections.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would assume that this has something to do with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_Initiative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Core State Standards Initiative&lt;/a&gt; in US education, but it is not clear exactly what sort of connection is being indicated or implied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these books officially certified, approved, or recognized by some agency as compliant with or allowable for use within a &amp;quot;Common Core&amp;quot; classroom?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these books officially recognized as part of an official Common Core &amp;quot;curriculum&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;reading list&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is content from these books considered &amp;quot;fair game&amp;quot; for appearance on Common Core exams?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is a student who reads these books, or completes assignments based on them, entitled to official course credit in schools adhering to Common Core standards?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are these books self-certified by the author or publisher as having taken inclusion of Common Core learning goals or the exclusion of content deemed unacceptable according to Common Core standards into account during their production, but not &amp;quot;officially&amp;quot; recognized in any way?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If none of the above, what exactly &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the connection?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternately, one could rephrase the question by asking to whom the message is &lt;em&gt;addressed&lt;/em&gt; and for what reason it is included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the message intended to alert schoolteachers that purchasing the book for their classroom and/or assigning it to their students fulfills some sort of curriculum-related requirement?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the message intended for parents to help them purchase personal books for their children that do not contradict the Common Core curriculum (&amp;quot;Sorry, son, I'm only supposed to buy you books that are Common Core-connected. &lt;em&gt;Suzie Rides the Train&lt;/em&gt; may contain content that contradicts what your teacher expects you to learn and you could end up giving the wrong answers on tests.&amp;quot;)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the message intended for students in Common Core classrooms looking for additional study materials?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T14:59:47.300" Title="What does &quot;This title has Common Core connections&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9437" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9532" CreationDate="2019-02-21T00:46:42.090" Score="5" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mark Twain's &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well, Aunt Polly she said that when Aunt Sally wrote to her that Tom and SID had come all right and safe, she says to herself: &quot;Look at that, now! I might have expected it, letting him go off that way without anybody to watch him. So now I got to go and trapse all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile, and find out what that creetur's up to THIS time, as long as I couldn't seem to get any answer out of you about it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the Phelps' farm is supposed to be in Arkansas, but even at the southern edge of that State, 1100 miles would mean Aunt Polly  (supposedly located in Hannibal (called St. Petersburg in the book) was way up in northern Canada, as it is less than 500 miles from Hannibal/St. Pete to Pine Bluff, Arkansas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Twain write &quot;1100 miles&quot; - does it have any special meaning/hidden significance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T16:09:33.010" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T10:06:42.043" Title="How is it 1100 miles from Hannibal to southern Arkansas in Huck Finn?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;adventures-of-huckleberry-finn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9439" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T09:26:03.527" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently writing a paper with 'games' as a subject. One of the axes I am working on deals with games contributing to pleasure in pedagogy, and I intend to use Rabelais' concept mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt; as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, due to the burlesque nature of this work, I cannot clearly explain why Rabelais chose games, except for the fact that it is entertaining. Hence my question: how did 16th-century humanists see the concepts of games and pleasure in the context of pedagogy? I am particularly interested in answers based on 16th-century humanist literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5852" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T14:21:41.357" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T10:25:41.300" Title="Concept of pleasure in pedagogy in the time of Rabelais" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;francois-rabelais&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9136" CreationDate="2019-02-21T19:05:15.880" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer is '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44978/miniver-cheevy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miniver Cheevy&lt;/a&gt;' by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edwin-arlington-robinson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwin Arlington Robinson&lt;/a&gt; and it's actually a poem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miniver loved the days of old&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The vision of a warrior bold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Would set him dancing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to get in contact with my old teacher, thankfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5658" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-21T20:33:07.110" LastActivityDate="2019-02-21T20:33:07.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-21T21:16:59.713" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have always been charmed by George Orwell's and E. B. White's essays. They're insidiously plain, but extremely pleasant to read. The way that they talk is so different from authors today (for obvious reasons).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a &quot;school&quot; of writing style that they belonged to? Or a time period in which it is most common?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5869" OwnerDisplayName="Sermo" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:08:37.533" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T18:52:22.527" Title="Do Orwell's and E. B. White's essays belong to a school?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;e-b-white&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9442" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-22T09:45:32.507" Score="4" ViewCount="973" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 5 of &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; by Harper Lee:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Maudie would yell back, ’Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they’ll hear you at the post office, I haven’t heard you yet!’ &lt;strong&gt;Jem and I thought this is a strange way to ask for a lady’s hand in marriage, but then Uncle Jack was rather strange. He said he trying to get Miss Maudie’s goat, that he had been trying unsuccessfully for forty years,&lt;/strong&gt; that he was the last person in the world Miss Maudie would think about marrying but the first person she thought about teasing, &lt;strong&gt;and the best defence to her was spirited offence,&lt;/strong&gt; all of which we understood clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain the lines in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, why did Miss Maudie compare Uncle Jack’s playful nature with Jem’s ideas about Boo Radley (&quot;He gets more like Jack Finch every day&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:04:32.810" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T09:28:17.107" Title="What is &quot;Miss Maudie's goat&quot; in &quot;To Kill a Mockingbird&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9443" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9444" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" Score="0" Body="Elwyn Brooks White (1899–1985) was an American writer, notable for &quot;The Elements of Style&quot; and for children's books including &quot;Stuart Little&quot; and &quot;Charlotte's Web&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:11:18.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9445" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:15:44.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-22T11:15:44.497" LastActivityDate="2019-02-22T11:15:44.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9446" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-02-22T11:15:44.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about essays, which are (mostly short) works of prose non-fiction, including argument, reflection, autobiography, and criticism. Use with the appropriate author tag. Do not use for questions about works or authors that you want to write an essay about, except if those works are actually essays." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T23:08:08.117" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T23:08:08.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-22T15:48:51.683" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the fictional accounts of July's birth in &lt;em&gt;The Long Song&lt;/em&gt; (historical novel, set in 1830s Jamaica, when slavery was coming to an end), describes a 'tiger', without the usual appearance belonging to that of a tiger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While a further version had a tiger, with its &lt;strong&gt;long, spiky snout and six legs,&lt;/strong&gt; sniffing at the baby July, thinking her as food. &lt;em&gt;- Ch. 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel uses some Jamaican patois; however, I cannot find any alternative meanings of 'tiger'. What (mythical?) animal is this describing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T22:50:50.387" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T22:50:50.387" Title="What is the 'tiger' in 'The Long Song'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-long-song&gt;&lt;andrea-levy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T13:45:29.493" Score="8" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robin Hood is a famous figure of English folklore, whose existence or fictionality is still a subject of debate. The stories about him started off as folk tales transmitted orally (ballads), but by now of course there are many written stories about him. I'm curious about the history of the transition of Robin Hood tales from oral to written form, and I've phrased my title a little vaguely because I think there are several interconnected subquestions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roughly when were Robin Hood stories first written down?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the oldest &lt;em&gt;surviving&lt;/em&gt; written Robin Hood story?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there one particularly important early written text which influenced many of the later/modern versions of the story? (Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d%27Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malory's &lt;em&gt;Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for Arthurian legend.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T07:40:23.660" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T07:40:23.660" Title="How did the story of Robin Hood pass from oral literature to written?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;robin-hood&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3175" CreationDate="2019-02-23T14:03:25.607" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Synopsis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crucial events that form end game of &lt;em&gt;The Scar&lt;/em&gt; are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The real Hedrigall and the Arrogance go missing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A considerable time later, a Hedrigall is found drifting on the wreck of the Arrogance in Armada’s way.&#xA;He appears to be confused and surprised that not everybody is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless mentioned otherwise, &lt;em&gt;Hedrigall&lt;/em&gt; refers to this Hedrigall in this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hedrigall is taken in by the Lovers where he tells them that he is the last survivor of an Armada that was destroyed when riding into the Scar.&#xA;The female Lover decides to withhold this information to the Armadan public, keep Hedrigall under lock, and continue the journey to the scar.&#xA;Bellis Coldwine and Tanner Sack eavesdrop on all of this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tanner Sack uses his reputation and trustworthiness to directly spread this information on Armada, which brings the Armadans on the verge of rebellion and demanding Hedrigall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lovers fail at a last attempt to convince the public (and divorce over this). Tanner Sack and others take control and turn Armada around.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The female Lover leaves Armada on a small ship heading for the Scar.&#xA;After a while, the male Lover regains control of Garwater, because nobody else wants it.&#xA;He is, however, clearly weakened and appears to be a puppet of Uther Doul.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why does Armada turn?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The impetus behind the Armadans’ mutiny is based on three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The danger of the Scar as foretold by Hedrigall.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that the Lovers choose to lie about this to the Armadan public and keep Hedrigall locked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The belief (and subsequent reveal) that the Lovers know less about the Scar than they claimed to do.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are two quotes corroborating this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Two days ago,’ Bellis heard one women say with dreadful awe. ‘All of us, we’ve been dead for two days.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a warning.&#xA;  No one could possibly miss that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You were going to keep it [Hedrigall’s story] from us,’ [Tanner] said. ‘You were going to lie. We’ve come so far with you, and you were going to lie to us about this. Because you’re so blinded by some greed you couldn’t risk us facing you down. You know nothing about the Scar,’ he shouted ‘&lt;em&gt;Nothing.&lt;/em&gt; Don’t tell me cincidence, don’t tell me unbelievable – maybe this is how it &lt;em&gt;works.&lt;/em&gt; You don’t even know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The avanc’s sickness and other previous events like the attack by New Crobuzon, the grindylow–vampir attack, and the Lovers’ general secrecy are not direct reasons for this, but are relevant as they make the suspicions that fuel the Armadans’ mutiny plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What to be uncertain about&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I see no indication that this book is a case of an unreliable narrator.&#xA;It is mostly written from Bellis’ and Tanner’s perspective and what we get to learn are their real experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather it is a case of unreliable reality.&#xA;The main alleged power of the Scar as well as Uther Doul’s Possible Sword and other artifacts is to tap into parallel universes.&#xA;For example, the Possible Sword draws sword blows from parallel universes into this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that being said, there are three relevant interpretations of the ending, as offered by Bellis in her final letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hedrigall is the real Hedrigall (from this universe), whose story is an elaborated lie to make Armada turn around.&#xA;If this is true, it is further unclear whether Hedrigall was acting on his own or is in allegiance with Uther Doul and others.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hedrigall is really from an alternate universe and his story is true.&#xA;That this Hedrigall was picked up by Armada in the story’s universe is a coincidence or a whim of the Scar.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hedrigall is really from an alternate universe and his story is true.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;But:&lt;/strong&gt; Uther Doul used his perhapsadian or other possibility devices to draw this specific Hedrigall into the story’s universe as part of an elaborated plan.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T17:26:48.513" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T17:26:48.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T14:27:53.070" Score="1" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only way whereby anyone divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bond of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a great security of any, that are not of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;it&quot; mean at the very end of this quote from John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5749" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-24T16:02:54.920" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T16:02:54.920" Title="What does John Locke mean by “it” at the very end of this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-locke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T14:54:33.000" Score="2" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Scar,&lt;/em&gt; China Miéville uses “the Lover” to refer to either Lover and only through his choice of pronoun it becomes (most often) clear whether he is referring to the male or female lover. Now, Armadans seem to refer to either of the Lovers in the same indiscriminate way, for example in this quote from near the end of the novel (potential spoiler):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; ‘Turn!’ shouted Tanner Sack. ‘We &lt;em&gt;turn&lt;/em&gt; the city! &lt;strong&gt;Get the Lover!&lt;/strong&gt; Get someone who knows how.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this way of communication can lead to confusion, so it seems likely that the Armadans have devised some way of discerning which Lover they are talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I am asking: Is there some clarification or hint in the book (that I missed) how the Armadans tell the Lovers apart when talking about them? For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of them /ðəˈlʌvə/ (regular &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;) and one of them /ˈðiːˌlʌvə/ (emphasised &lt;em&gt;the,&lt;/em&gt; like &lt;em&gt;thee&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Salt has gender-specific words for &lt;em&gt;lover&lt;/em&gt; that allow for a distinction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armadans have developed a magic sense which Lover is meant (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_(Discworld)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discworld igors&lt;/a&gt; who always know to which Igor you are referring).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2019-02-23T17:22:00.273" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T17:22:00.273" Title="How do the Armadans distinguish the Lovers in spoken language?" Tags="&lt;china-mieville&gt;&lt;the-scar&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-23T15:30:39.230" Score="2" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a speech by Lexy in the beginning of Act I when he is talking to Proserpine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LEXY. Ah, if you women only had the same clue to Man's strength that you have to his weakness, Miss Prossy, there would be no Woman Question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand the meaning of this speech. What do &quot;Man's strength&quot; and &quot;Woman Question&quot; mean exactly and what does the whole line mean altogether? Are man and woman personified here because they begin with capital letter in the speech? Also question begins with a capital letter. What is the significance of this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Text: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4023/4023-h/4023-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4023/4023-h/4023-h.htm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="192" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T14:29:01.117" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T14:29:01.117" Title="Meaning of this line in Candida by Shaw" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;candida&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9441" CreationDate="2019-02-23T16:42:21.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note that the two authors you cite are both English writers, and so the issue you bring up deals with how the English language acquired its extensive vocabulary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While many of the words used in writing English are words inherited from Middle English (I will refer to this as stock English), a large part of English vocabulary comes from borrowings from other languages, in which Latin, Greek, and French predominate. (As an aside, other languages have striven to derive new technical terms from existing native vocabulary; for instance, the Icelandic words for &lt;em&gt;osteoporosis&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;transmit&lt;/em&gt; are formed from Icelandic words that mean &lt;em&gt;bone-thinning&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;throw out&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of overlap in meaning between these two groups of words. However, the stock English words have a more earthy feel, whereas the words derived from borrowed vocabulary tend to have a more clinical air to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, it is often the case that the borrowing from Latin has a more generalized meaning than the stock English equivalent that would have been used in its place, and these more generalized terms are more abstract. This makes it hard for the reader to form a clear picture in his mind. For instance, if a man is trying to get somewhere and doesn't have a car, we can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack required transportation to his residence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack needed a ride home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first phrasing sounds like something a bureaucrat would say in a report, and might be more appropriate there, but the second phrasing would make a much better opening line for a novel. Or how often has someone dropped something, and expressed his or her frustration by shouting, &quot;Oh, feces!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If in our writing we make heavy use of the borrowed terms, we may have the benefit of getting the exact meaning we are after, but it comes at the expense of being sterile in its impact, and it is very easy to get carried away with idea that the guy who knows the most words must be the smart one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have had the same impression from reading Orwell's essays as you have, and it does seem to arise from his preference for the stock English words over the borrowings from other sources. I'm guessing that this is a deliberate choice Orwell has made. (I can't speak for White, because I am not familiar with his work.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5872" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T16:42:21.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3071" CreationDate="2019-02-23T18:16:26.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Feet are arbitrary conventions in English verse, so you can scan the poem however you like, but Frost’s description of the metre is simpler than Gillespie’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Thesis&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/frost-henddecasyllabics-for-once-then-something/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;linked blog post&lt;/a&gt; (by poet Patrick Gillespie) describes two theories regarding scansion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most people divide lines into feet when they read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this division, most people prefer feet with rising stress (iambs and anapests) to feet with falling stress (trochees and dactyls).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that these theories are idiosyncratic to Gillespie, and that although we might find them useful to bear in mind when reading Gillespie’s own verse, the facts about English scansion are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Most people don’t divide lines into feet as they read: if they can do it at all, they have to do it as a separate, conscious, analytical step.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Division into feet is arbitrary and need not be based on rising stress: it can be based on falling stress, on the poet’s intention if known, or on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parsimony&lt;/a&gt; of description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;How do most people scan poetry?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gillespie writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how most of us will read the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;O&lt;/strong&gt;thers | &lt;strong&gt;taunt&lt;/strong&gt; me | with &lt;strong&gt;ha&lt;/strong&gt;|ving &lt;strong&gt;knelt&lt;/strong&gt; | at &lt;strong&gt;well&lt;/strong&gt;-curbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implicit claim here is that “most of us” will insert these foot divisions into our reading. Now, Gillespie is himself a poet, and has written many detailed articles about scansion of poems (see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemshape.wordpress.com/category/donne-poems-discussed/divine-poems-sonnet-ix/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this analysis of Donne’s Holy Sonnet IX&lt;/a&gt;), so I have no trouble believing that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; divides lines into feet when he reads them. But I am quite sure that for &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; people, who are neither poets nor critics of poetry, this is not the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons that I am confident about this are (i) I personally don’t divide lines into feet when reading poetry, I have to work out the scansion separately if I need it; (ii) “verse can be understood and appreciated by one who knows nothing of foot-structure or scansion” (C. M. Lewis; see below); (iii) scansion does not come naturally but has to be taught, with some difficulty, to children in school; (iv) a lot of English verse does not seem to have feet as such: in particular, children have no trouble with accentual verse like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or&lt;/strong&gt;anges and &lt;strong&gt;lem&lt;/strong&gt;ons&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Say the &lt;strong&gt;bells&lt;/strong&gt; of St &lt;strong&gt;Clem&lt;/strong&gt;ent’s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is English an iambic language?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gillespie writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English language is a naturally Iambic and Anapestic language (meaning that the language prefers a rising stress). In nominal phrases, we don’t  normally say &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; car&lt;/em&gt;, we say &lt;em&gt;the &lt;strong&gt;car&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. […] Also, all of our prepositional phrases prefer a rising stress (iambic or anapestic). […] This feature of the language has nothing to do with regional or dialectal inflections. It is simply the way our language works. It’s the reason Iambic meters, rather than Trochaic meters, are the dominant meters of English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a missing step in the argument: just because we say ‘the &lt;strong&gt;car&lt;/strong&gt;’, it does not follow that ‘car’ goes at the end of the foot rather than the beginning of the next foot. Gillespie must be applying some unstated principle. But what can he have in mind? The discussion of prepositional phrases suggests that it is something like “short grammatical units like ‘to the light’ should not be split by foot boundaries (if possible)”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The easiest way to see that this argument is unlikely to be universally convincing is to quote a poet who applied a different principle and got opposite results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every foot has one principal stress or accent, and this or the syllable it falls on may be called the Stress of the foot and the other part, the one or two unaccented syllables, the Slack. […] for purposes of scanning it is a great convenience to follow the example of music and take the stress always first, as the accent or the chief account always comes first in a musical bar. If this is done there will be in common English verse only two possible feet—the so-called accentual Trochee and Dactyl, and correspondingly only two possible uniform rhythms, the so-called Trochaic and Dactylic. […] These are the facts and according to these the scanning of ordinary regularly-written English verse is very simple indeed and to bring in other principles is here unnecessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gerard Manley Hopkins (1919). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemsofgerardman030114mbp/page/n11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1&lt;/a&gt;. London: Humphrey Milford.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lacking any kind of universal principle that might decide between Gillespie’s “stress at the end of the foot, like grammar”, and Hopkins’ “stress at the beginning of the foot, like music”, we’re forced to conclude that the choice is arbitrary. Here’s the prosodist C. M. Lewis putting this conclusion plainly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feet are arbitrary and phantom concepts, and this description of the line does not touch the really vital fact about its rhythm,—the underlying regularity of its time-scheme. […] there is much dispute about the scansion of the line quoted. It seems to me, however, that all such disputes are teapot tempests. Since feet are merely matters of convenience, and rival systems of scansion merely different devices for attaining convenience at the expense of scientific accuracy, it seems useless to spin theories about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;C. M. Lewis (1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/principlesengli00lewigoog/page/n55&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Principles of English Verse&lt;/em&gt;, p. 43&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Henry Holt.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;If feet are arbitrary, why use them at all?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A description of rhythm in terms of feet can be very concise. Compare “iambic pentameter” with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a decasyllabic line on a disyllabic basis and in rising rhythm (i.e. with accents or stresses on the alternate even syllables)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Bridges (1921). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924014156859/page/n15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton’s Prosody&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford: Clarendon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a widely understood set of terminology about feet, which is convenient for writing about the metre of poems. Compare “the first foot is a spondee” with “the first and second syllables of the line are stressed.” C. M. Lewis again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the foregoing paragraphs I have avoided all mention of the word foot. It would often have been more convenient to use it, and I have been put to some circumlocution to escape from it; but I wished, even at the risk of awkwardness, to make it clear that verse can be understood and appreciated by one who knows nothing of foot-structure or scansion. Feet are not organic elements of rhythm. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The convenience, however, of description by feet is so great that it is idle to object to it on theoretical grounds. Even the fact that our names of feet are borrowed from the ancients, and that the rhythm of their verse was measured by the length of syllables instead of the intervals between accents, does not forbid us to use those names in description of our own verse; for they have become so fixed by long misuse in our vocabulary that the misuse has acquired a prescriptive right to recognition; and nobody has devised a better system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/principlesengli00lewigoog/page/n51&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis (1907), p. 39&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many poets composed their poems within a metric tradition that used feet, and so to understand their rhythmic construction it helps to determine how they intended their poems to be scanned within that tradition. When confronted with a line like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets/Holy_Sonnet_7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donne’s Holy Sonnets VII&lt;/a&gt;) it’s helpful to know that Donne intended this to be iambic pentameter within a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/3200/3003&quot;&gt;tradition that had rules about allowable substitutions&lt;/a&gt;, and that what he was likely to have had in mind was therefore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All whom | &lt;strong&gt;war&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;dearth&lt;/strong&gt;, | &lt;strong&gt;age&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;ag&lt;/strong&gt;|ues, &lt;strong&gt;tyr&lt;/strong&gt;|an&lt;strong&gt;nies&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The parsimony principle&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept that the benefit of describing metre in terms of feet is primarily one of convenience, then we can compare candidate scansions to see which describes the rhythm most simply (in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;information-theoretic&lt;/a&gt; sense).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of ‘For Once, Then, Something’, Frost’s intended description of the metre would seem to be “trochaic tetrameter with dactylic second foot”, whereas Gillespie’s description is “tetrameter with cretic, anapestic, iambic, and amphibrachic feet respectively”. To remember Frost’s description, we need only remember two types of foot and the location of the exceptional foot, but to remember Gillespie’s requires four types, two of which are rare in English verse. Which is not to say that Gillespie’s description is &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;, since after all it accurately gives the positions of the stressed and unstressed syllables; it’s just that Frost’s description is &lt;em&gt;simpler&lt;/em&gt;. Indeed, Gillespie acknowledges this when he points out that he needs an ultra-rare &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molossus_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;molossus&lt;/a&gt; in the variant line 12, whereas Frost only needs a common spondee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Is trochaic verse clunky?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of it is, notably Longfellow’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Song of Hiawatha&lt;/a&gt;’, but then is Longfellow’s iambic verse really any better? Here are four trochaic poems that seem to me to flow smoothly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Cunningham, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksenglishpoe38johngoog/page/n484&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fortune to Harlequin&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my favour, sense rejected,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fools by Fortune are protected:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fortune, Harlequin, hath found you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Happiness will hence surround you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Shenstone, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofw00shen2/page/156&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Princess Elizabeth&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malice never taught to treasure,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Censure never taught to bear;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Love is all the shepherd’s pleasure;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Love is all the damsel’s care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edgar Allen Poe, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Raven&lt;/a&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;            Nameless here for evermore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. E. Housman, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/103/29.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reveillé&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Breath’s a ware that will not keep.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up, lad: when the journey’s over&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    There’ll be time enough to sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-23T19:03:36.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9451" CreationDate="2019-02-24T16:02:44.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;it&quot; refers to the community which those people have formed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full quote of paragraph 95 from Chapter 8, &quot;Of the Beginning of Political Societies&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/politics/locke/ch08.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available here&lt;/a&gt;, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Men being, as has been said, by nature, all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate, and subjected to the political power of another, without his own consent. The only way whereby any one divests himself of his natural liberty, and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a greater security against any, that are not of it. This any number of men may do, because it injures not the freedom of the rest; they are left as they were in the liberty of the state of nature. When any number of men have so consented to make one community or government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one body politic, wherein the majority have a right to act and conclude the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Locke isn't talking about a united community that contains &lt;em&gt;everyone&lt;/em&gt;, but only some subset of people, while the rest remain &quot;in the liberty of the state of nature&quot;. Therefore, there are still people not included in this &quot;unite[d] community&quot;, and it is they against whom the community members may need security. Looking at the relevant part of your sentence again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;agreeing with other men to join and unite into &lt;strong&gt;a community&lt;/strong&gt; for their comfortable, safe, peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure enjoyment of their properties, and a great security of any, that are not of &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Emphasis mine, to show clearly what the &quot;it&quot; refers to.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-02-24T16:02:44.673" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2962" CreationDate="2019-02-24T20:04:35.637" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the Sherlock Holmes canon is, in fact, loaded with puns. Two of my favorites are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Engineer's Thumb&amp;quot;, the word &amp;quot;sponge&amp;quot; is used first to describe the engineer's castrated hand and then for Watson's action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots. [...] I sponged the wound, cleaned it, dressed it, and finally covered it over with cotton wadding and carbolized bandages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;A Case of Identity&amp;quot; we are told that the daughter would go to the Gasfitters' Ball, but her stepfather argued against it, using the word &amp;quot;fit&amp;quot; in two different contexts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all father’s friends were to be there. And he said that I had nothing fit to wear, when I had my purple plush that I had never so much as taken out of the drawer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hits really do just keep on coming. This would indicate that the pun in the question is indeed intended, because the sheer number of puns in the Holmes canon indicates that Doyle put them in intentionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5877" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T18:25:06.113" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3199" CreationDate="2019-02-25T03:23:26.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because she was secretly meeting with the police,  when she learned that the was a reward for the capture of Vautrin,  who was well liked by everyone in the house... she was looked upon as a common snitch. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5882" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T03:23:26.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9463" CreationDate="2019-02-25T10:04:38.150" Score="5" ViewCount="1223" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap19&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 19&lt;/a&gt; of Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rain was a mere trifle, and Anne was most sincere in preferring a walk with Mr Elliot. But the rain was also a mere trifle to Mrs Clay; she would hardly allow it even to drop at all, and her boots were so thick! much thicker than Miss Anne’s; and, &lt;strong&gt;in short, her civility rendered her quite as anxious to be left to walk with Mr Elliot as Anne could be&lt;/strong&gt;, and it was discussed between them with a generosity so polite and so determined, that the others were obliged to settle it for them; Miss Elliot maintaining that Mrs Clay had a little cold already, and &lt;strong&gt;Mr Elliot deciding on appeal, that his cousin Anne’s boots were rather the thickest.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase &quot;as Anne could be&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is it that even though Mrs. Clay's boots were the thickest, Mr. Elliot was compelled to decide that Anne should be the one who should walk because her boots were the thickest as decided by the others?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T10:42:38.783" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T13:42:56.883" Title="Why did Mr. Elliot have to decide whose boots were thickest in &quot;Persuasion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9462" CreationDate="2019-02-25T11:14:27.550" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phrase needs to be understood as “as X as Anne could be” where X is “anxious to be left to walk with Mr. Elliot”. That is, Mrs. Clay wanted, just as much as Anne did, to walk alone with Mr. Elliot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The context is that Mr. Elliot, Miss Elliot, Anne, and Mrs. Clay are out walking in Bath when it starts raining. Mrs. Dalrymple offers to take them home in her carriage. However, the carriage is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barouche&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;barouche&lt;/a&gt; and only has covered seating for four. Mrs. Dalrymple and Miss Carteret are two, and Miss Elliot immediately claims the third place (“Whoever suffered inconvenience, she must suffer none”). This leaves one place for either Mrs. Clay or Anne; the other must therefore walk back in the rain with Mr. Elliot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It becomes apparent that Mrs. Clay and Anne both want to be left alone with Mr. Elliot. Mrs. Clay’s reason for this is still a mystery as of chapter 19, but Anne’s, we understand, is that she is still puzzled as to Mr. Elliot’s motives in renewing acquiantance with his family. Does he intend to propose marriage to Miss Elliot? She hopes that if she can converse with him privately he may reveal something. (In the event she squanders this opportunity, all other concerns being driven out by the appearance of Captain Wentworth.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of them wishes to admit her motive for seeking a private conversation with Mr. Elliot, so instead each pretends that she is concerned that the other will get wet feet. (This is the “generosity so polite and so determined”.) Since neither is willing to give up in favour of the other, eventually “the others were obliged to settle it for them” and Mr. Elliot settles the matter in favour of Anne. It seems likely that his judgement about the relative thickness of the boots is just a pretext, and really he prefers the company of Anne.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “deciding on appeal” humorously likens the situation to a court case. In English law, a party that is dissatisfied with a decision in a lower court can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;appeal&lt;/a&gt; to a higher court for a review of the decision. In this metaphor, Mr. Elliot represents the appellate court, with his decision the final one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-25T13:42:56.883" LastActivityDate="2019-02-25T13:42:56.883" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-25T23:03:05.713" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a country which has neither foreign commerce nor any of the &lt;strong&gt;finer manufactures&lt;/strong&gt;, a great proprietor, having nothing of which he can exchange the greater part of the produce of this lands which is over and above the maintenance of the cultivators, &lt;strong&gt;consumes the whole in rustic hospitality&lt;/strong&gt; at home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean by &quot;finer manufactures&quot; and &quot;consumes the whole in rustic hospitality&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5749" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T02:22:07.163" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T21:56:48.030" Title="What does Adam Smith mean here in The Wealth of Nations?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;adam-smith&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9464" CreationDate="2019-02-26T02:21:53.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's basically saying: if you have a nation that's, say, purely rural, and doesn't have trade with foreign countries or have manufacturers that make, e.g., toys, books, games, whirligigs, silk clothes, and all that sort of finery [finer manufactures], a farmer who  did really well one year and has excess crops has nothing to trade for - it's all crops! So instead, they might throw a large party with the extra - consuming the rest of their goods in whatever hospitality or 'rustic' things that might be done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T02:21:53.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9467" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9468" CreationDate="2019-02-26T08:46:41.740" Score="0" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm French and am looking for a book I read as a child. I think it's an American book (I read it translated in French). It's about a boy, probably in the early XXth century (or late XIXth), who is poor and starts by selling newspapers in the street. I think he then becomes a succesful journalist. The cover of the book, in France at least, was colorful and showed a boy holding newspapers in the street. Unfortunately, I don't remember much more than that. I'd say that the overall philosophy of the book was to promote a certain way of life to children, something like: &quot;with a lot of courage and dedication, you can succeed, whatever your social origin is&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5892" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-02-26T15:25:16.620" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T15:25:16.620" Title="American book translated to French: poor boy starts out selling newspapers in the street" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9467" CreationDate="2019-02-26T13:28:57.733" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Alger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horatio Alger book&lt;/a&gt; (although this type of rags-to-riches plot was fairly popular in the U.S. in the 19th century; Horatio Alger is the most famous of the authors who wrote these, so his books are probably more likely to have been translated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dan, the Newsboy&lt;/em&gt;, also known as &lt;em&gt;Dan, the Detective&lt;/em&gt;, is one of Alger's books where the hero starts out selling newspapers. If this isn't the book you remember, you will need to give us more information. It is out of copyright, and you can read it online &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.horatioalgersociety.net/01_fullbooks/dandetective.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (in English, not French, unfortunately).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2019-02-26T13:28:57.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9481" CreationDate="2019-02-27T04:58:17.037" Score="3" ViewCount="2855" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;, Holden describes a movie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was about this English guy, Alec something, that was in the war and loses his memory in the hospital and all. He comes out of the hospital carrying a cane and limping all over the place, all over London, not knowing who the hell he is. He's really a duke, but he doesn't know it. Then he meets this nice, homey, sincere girl getting on a bus. Her goddam hat blows off and he catches it, and then they go upstairs and sit down and start talking about Charles Dickens. He's both their favorite author and all. He's carrying this copy of Oliver Twist and so's she. I could've puked. Anyway, they fell in love right away, on account of they're both so nuts about Charles Dickens and all, and he helps her run her publishing business. She's a publisher, the girl. Only, she's not doing so hot, because her brother's a drunkard and he spends all their dough. He's a very bitter guy, the brother, because he was a doctor in the war and now he can't operate any more because his nerves are shot, so he boozes all the time, but he's pretty witty and all. Anyway, old Alec writes a book, and this girl publishes it, and they both make a hatful of dough on it. They're all set to get married when this other girl, old Marcia, shows up. Marcia was Alec's fiancée before he lost his memory, and she recognizes him when he's in this store autographing books. She tells old Alec he's really a duke and all, but he doesn't believe her and doesn't want to go with her to visit his mother and all. His mother's blind as a bat. But the other girl, the homey one, makes him go. She's very noble and all. So he goes. But he still doesn't get his memory back, even when his great Dane jumps all over him and his mother sticks her fingers all over his face and brings him this teddy bear he used to slobber around with when he was a kid. But then, one day, some kids are playing cricket on the lawn and he gets smacked in the head with a cricket ball. Then right away he gets his goddam memory back and he goes in and &#xA;  kisses his mother on the forehead and all. Then he starts being a regular duke again, and he forgets all about the homey babe that has the publishing business. I'd tell you the rest of the story, but I might puke if I did. It isn't that I'd spoil it for you or anything. There isn't anything to spoil for Chrissake. Anyway, it ends up with Alec and the homey babe getting married, and the brother that's a drunkard gets his nerves back and operates on Alec's mother so she can see again, and then the drunken brother and old Marcia go for each other. It ends up with everybody at this long dinner table laughing their asses off because the great Dane comes in with a bunch of puppies. Everybody thought it was a male, I suppose, or some goddam thing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 18&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a reference to a specific movie? If so, what movie?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T10:17:19.527" Title="What movie is Holden describing?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;&lt;catcher-in-the-rye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-27T18:07:45.857" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a line in my book which says something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Foucault's main job is to historicize discourse and textualize history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this quote is the following (from a course book by K.P Subedi and Subhas Giri):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After discovering the rules of a particular discourse, Foucault relates them to the study of knowledge and power. &lt;strong&gt;His job is to historicize discourse and textualize history.&lt;/strong&gt; Foucault refuses to see history in terms of linearity and development. He sees history in terms of a kind of power struggle of particular time. According to Foucault, power is not repressive and tyrannical rather it is generative and productive force. Power binds together the disparate forces of a society. every event is the product of a vast network of signification and power rather than originating from a single, coherent cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't quite get this concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he want to say that discourse created history and history is created through text? I couldn't understand the concept, please make it clear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5879" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T08:58:27.547" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T08:58:27.547" Title="What does this line about Foucault's job being to &quot;historicize discourse and textualize history&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;michel-foucault&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9464" CreationDate="2019-02-27T19:10:17.523" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two ways you can get goods: you can produce it domestically, or you can import it. If a country doesn't do either, it doesn't get the goods (meaning that no one who lives there will get them, either).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, trading only occurs if the following are the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You have something to sell that other people want*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other people have something to sell that you want*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most cases, money is used to facilitate this process, but you could also use other goods. Here's the problem, though: if there's nothing available for me to buy that I don't already produce myself, why would I care about getting more money? There's nothing I can spend it on, so it's basically just unicorn points. In this case, I'd have no reason to trade - I'd just use any goods I produce myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, if I have nothing to sell that other people are willing and able to buy, I'll have no way of getting money, so I won't be able to trade even if I want to - I'll be limited to consuming whatever I produce myself. Furthermore, if I can't sell it anyway, I might as well use it all; granted, I may still want to save some of it until later rather than consuming it immediately - e.g. to have enough food to last the winter, or in order to have seeds for next year - but the point is I'll &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt; use all of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, you might ask: what if I have a really good year and can't finish all of it myself before the food spoils? Well, in that case, throw a party for all your friends. (Or, for that matter, feed someone who has less than you). Why not? There's no reason not to consume all of the output before it goes bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This analysis, of course, ignores services.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;*&lt;/code&gt; Technically, we should say &quot;are willing and able to sell&quot; and &quot;are willing and able to buy,&quot; but we're simplifying a bit here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T19:10:17.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9477" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9464" CreationDate="2019-02-27T21:56:48.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It simply means that having nothing worth investing in (the ‘foreign commerce’) or purchasing (the ‘finer manufactures’), the ‘great proprietor’ consumes the ‘whole’ of his surplus in ‘hospitality’. In modern terms - parties. And they’re ‘rustic’ parties because he lives in the countryside. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2019-02-27T21:56:48.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T03:19:38.000" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_Corvinus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthias Corvinus&lt;/a&gt;, also known as the Raven King, was King of Hungary and Croatia for a while in the 1400s. He was a noted general, and extensively made use of Hussite mercenaries in his battles. He was also (reportedly) popular with commoners and married into his title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://library.tarvalon.net/index.php?title=Matrim_Cauthon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matrim Cauthon&lt;/a&gt;, also known as the Prince of the Ravens and Knotai in his later life, was the Rodholder of the Seanchan army and consort of the current empress. In addition, he was the leader of the Band of the Red Hand, a group of soldiers that refuse the title of mercenaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These names seem pretty similar to me, especially considering the use of ravens in both of them. Is there any evidence that Jordan based Mat's character (in part) off of Matthias Corvinus? This occurred to me while playing Civilization 6 earlier today. So far I've only found &lt;a href=&quot;http://13depository.blogspot.com/2002/03/character-parallels-mat.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this (incredibly comprehensive) blog post&lt;/a&gt; on the subject. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a definite parallel here, is there any evidence that Mat was based off Matt?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user72" LastEditorDisplayName="user72" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T15:37:39.547" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T15:37:39.547" Title="Is there any evidence Mat Cauthon was inspired by Matthias Corvinus?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T08:15:29.913" Score="4" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having a hard time finding examples of this, but I found one by a man named Darryl Davis, called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/almanac_of_a_man_423600&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Almanac of a man&lt;/a&gt;, that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I was five,&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  I was supreme ruler&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  of a boundless realm.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Hopes were high,&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  supervision constant.&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  Animals could speak,&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  kisses could heal.&lt;br/&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I was fifteen,&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I was twenty-five,&lt;br/&gt; &#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember seeing this style on many occasions, in poetry and in pop songs, but I can't find a general discussion of this style or genre. Is there a term for this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...I just realized that &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Lukas-graham-7-years-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;7 years&lt;/a&gt; is a pretty recent pop example of this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5904" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T08:15:29.913" Title="Is there a name for poems where each verse is a time period?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T08:18:21.287" Score="1" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story Going Places by A.R. Barton, the plot revolves around the story of a schoolgirl Sophie, who fantasizes over many things, but no one ever believes her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone please confirm whether she had ever met Danny Casey for real, or whether it was a mere figment of her imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched this online, and most of the answers (on other websites) don't bother to provide evidence against their claim that Sophie had never met Danny Casey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5905" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:02:23.730" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:02:23.730" Title="In Going Places by A.R. Barton, does Sophie really meet Danny Casey?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9471" CreationDate="2019-02-28T10:17:19.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_Harvest_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Random Harvest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1942) has many of the elements mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hero is an English officer who was wounded in the First World War and lost his memories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He meets and falls in love with a woman.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He becomes a writer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He recovers his original (pre-war) memories when his head is struck accidentally.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When he recovers his pre-war memories he loses his post-war memories, including his lover.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He turns out to be from a wealthy family.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the end he recovers his post-war memories too and reunites with his lover.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are lots of differences too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hero is called ‘John’ before he regains his memory, and ‘Charles’ afterwards (not ‘Alec’).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His lover is a showgirl (not a publisher).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;His accident is a collision with a taxi (not a cricket ball).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is the son of an industrialist (not a duke).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He recovers his memory before finding his family (not vice versa).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He has a cousin called Kitty who is infatuated with him (not a fiancée called Marcia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is no alcoholic brother, no meet-cute with identical copies of &lt;em&gt;Oliver Twist&lt;/em&gt;, and no great Dane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should therefore understand Holden’s description as an exaggerated pastiche of elements that he sees as particularly ‘phony’ in &lt;em&gt;Random Harvest&lt;/em&gt; and other films he has watched (for example, the great Dane might have come from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033404/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blondie in Society&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1941).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;em&gt;Random Harvest&lt;/em&gt; using IMDb’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/search/title&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;advanced title search&lt;/a&gt;: I requested a ‘Feature Film’ in the ‘Drama’ genre with a release date of 1945 or earlier and ‘lost his memory’ in the plot summary. This turned up &lt;em&gt;Random Harvest&lt;/em&gt; as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/search/title?title_type=feature&amp;amp;release_date=,1945-12-31&amp;amp;genres=drama&amp;amp;plot=lost+his+memory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first result&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T10:17:19.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9482" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9483" CreationDate="2019-02-28T10:48:23.967" Score="4" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book VI of Robert Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Giuseppe Caponsacchi tries seducing two women of Arezzo with love-poetry, but he is disappointed with the results:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                            Sirs, ere the week was out,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I saw and said to myself “Light-skirts hides teeth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Would make a dog sick,—the great dame shows spite&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Should drive a cat mad: ’t is but poor work this—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;“Counting one’s fingers till the sonnet’s crowned.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“I doubt much if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Marino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marino&lt;/a&gt; really be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“A better bard than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dante&lt;/a&gt; after all.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the line in bold? Does ‘counting one’s fingers’ mean ‘counting &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; one’s fingers’? But if so, what is he counting? Lines of verse? Or does it mean something like ‘twiddling one’s thumbs’, that is, being idle and bored? Neither meaning appears in the entry for ‘count’ in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; I think Peter Shor is right that Caponsacchi is counting syllables, but here are three citations for the ‘idle and bored’ meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1825   Thomas Dick Lauder &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GdZCAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA118&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lochandhu&lt;/em&gt; 118&lt;/a&gt;   with nothing to do but count one’s fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1850   Esther Copley &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EkxgAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA206&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cottage Comforts&lt;/em&gt; 206&lt;/a&gt;   &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt; shall do it, while I sit still and count my fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1855   Harriet Parr &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MLoBAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA75&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gilbert Massenger&lt;/em&gt; 75&lt;/a&gt;   with nothing to do but count my fingers and remember Bible stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T09:21:22.393" Title="Why does Caponsacchi count his fingers in &quot;The Ring and the Book&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;the-ring-and-the-book&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9482" CreationDate="2019-02-28T12:56:04.887" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;He was probably counting on his fingers, trying to ensure that there were exactly 11 syllables in each line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 19th century, &lt;em&gt;counting one's fingers&lt;/em&gt; seems to have often meant &lt;em&gt;counting on one's fingers&lt;/em&gt;. There are a number of instances in Google books where one can see this. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ERQtAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA393&amp;amp;dq=%22counting+his+fingers%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjE89WHuN7gAhXlRt8KHba1BXsQ6AEIPDAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22counting%20his%20fingers%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from 1885&lt;/a&gt;, less than 20 years after Browning wrote &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he forgets the combination, 9 and 8, he does a very natural and proper thing by counting his fingers. But he is not adding when he does it. He must learn to name the result without the use of objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Caponsacchi was probably counting syllables in each line, rather than lines in a sonnet. The most common poetic meter in Italian is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendecasyllable#In_Italian_poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hendacasyllable&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;endecasillabo&lt;/em&gt;), where each line has 11 syllables, coincidentally just one more than the number of fingers. Counting to 11 fourteen times is much more tedious than counting to 14 just once. Further, the rhyme scheme ensures you have 14 lines, while the only thing that will ensure you have 11 syllables in a line (besides an innate sense of meter) is counting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also shows that Caponsacchi isn't a good poet. I expect that good Italian poets (like good English poets) have a good sense of poetic meter, and only very rarely actually need to count the number of syllables in a line to make sure they've got it correct.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T15:41:19.863" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T15:41:19.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T16:55:00.160" Score="3" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare actually failed as an artist in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Those who have read the relevant critical essay by Eliot, could you kindly let me in on the title of that essay and explain what Eliot really meant by that statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5908" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-10T21:46:16.117" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:13:39.193" Title="Why did T.S. Eliot make a statement that 'Coriolanus' was Shakespeare's masterpiece and that 'Hamlet' was an artistic failure?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9489" CreationDate="2019-02-28T17:21:43.783" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a quote in Russian language which is attributed to G. B. Shaw, but I haven't found its mentions on original language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Russian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Англичане — нация любителей, а не профессионалов; их генералы, равно как и их писатели, — любители. Именно поэтому мы всегда выигрывали войны и создали величайшую на свете литературу.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%B6%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B4%D0%B6_%D0%91%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B4_%D0%A8%D0%BE%D1%83&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ru.wikiquote.org/wiki/Джордж_Бернард_Шоу&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation to English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The British are the nation of amateurs, not professionals. Their generals, as well as their writers are amateurs. For that exactly reason they win the wars and created the most greatest literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it attributed correctly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2881" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T19:36:17.763" Title="&quot;The British are the nation of amateurs&quot; -- is it really G. B. Shaw's quote?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T19:35:21.347" Score="5" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying the poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/be-different-trees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Be Different to Trees&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (1924) by Mary Carolyn Davies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The talking oak&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the ancients spoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But any tree&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will talk to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What truths I know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I garnered so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But those who want to talk and tell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And those who will not listeners be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will never hear a syllable&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From out the lips of any tree. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know who is 'me' and 'I' in the poem. Is it the tree or the human? And could you please tell me if I understand the meaning of the poem correctly as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Be different to trees&quot; means try and listen carefully to the trees. The talking oak says every tree talks to him. He garner the truths he learn from other trees. But any human who loves to talk and never listen, will never hear any word from a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5912" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T12:41:23.337" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T19:02:05.207" Title="The meaning of the poem &quot;Be Different to Trees&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;mary-carolyn-davies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9487" CreationDate="2019-02-28T19:36:17.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first half of the quotation is from George Bernard Shaw, as reported by his biographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesketh_Pearson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesketh Pearson&lt;/a&gt;. The second half is from Pearson himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the evening of October 10th [1946] my wife and I called to see him [Shaw]. Whitehall Court had been buzzing with reporters, two of whom had taken a flashlight photo of him, but the excitement Was now subsiding, and we enjoyed a tranquil talk. He was lying in bed, looking better than I had seen him for years; his complexion was rosy, like that of a child; he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying the effects of his accident; and he talked with vigour, though the lower set of his dentures was on the table beside him. The crutches with which he had hobbled about during his breakdown in 1898 had been discovered, and were propped against the wall by his bed. The object of my visit was to find out all he could tell me about Keir Hardie, a film of whose life I had been asked to write; but before we left we had heard his views, not only on Hardie, but on Sir Edward Grey, Ramsay MacDonald, Napoleon, Wellington, Field-Marshal Montgomery, T. E. Lawrence and Tom Paine. &lt;strong&gt;The English, he said, were a nation of amateurs, not professionals: their generals, like their authors, were amateurs. “Which explains why we have always won our wars and have produced the greatest literature in the world,”&lt;/strong&gt; I remarked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hesketh Pearson (1951). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.186538/page/n129&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;G.B.S.: A Postscript&lt;/em&gt;, p. 130&lt;/a&gt;. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Nation of amateurs” is not original to Shaw—it was first said by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Archibald_Primrose,_5th_Earl_of_Rosebery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archibald Primrose&lt;/a&gt; in 1900, and by 1946 was a familiar expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-02-28T19:36:17.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9495" CreationDate="2019-02-28T20:24:07.097" Score="1" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having a really hard time understanding the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;http://mcllibrary.org/Tasso/2book.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book 2&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem Delivered&lt;/em&gt; (1581) by Torquato Tasso (in the English translation by Edward Fairfax, 1600).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there methods I need to follow to understand this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE ARGUMENT&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ismeno conjures, but his charms are vain:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Aladine will kill the Christians in his ire:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sophronia and Olindo would be slain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To save the rest, the King grants their desire;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Clorinda hears their fact and fortunes plain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their pardon gets and keeps them from the fire:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Argantes, when Aletes' speeches are&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Despised, defies the Duke to mortal war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While thus the tyrant bends his thoughts to arms,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ismeno gan tofore his sight appear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ismen dead bones laid in cold graves that warms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And makes them speak, smell, taste, touch, see, and hear;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ismen with terror of his mighty charms.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That makes great Dis in deepest Hell to fear.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That binds and looses souls condemned to woe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sends the devils on errands to and fro.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;II&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Christian once, Macon he now adores.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor could he quite his wonted faith forsake.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But in his wicked arts both oft implores&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Help from the Lord, and aid from Pluto black;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He, from deep caves by Acheron's dark shores,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where circles vain and spells he used to make.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To advise his king in these extremes is come,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Achitophel so counselled Absalom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5913" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-02-28T20:42:10.383" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T08:49:37.807" Title="How can I understand the second book of &quot;Jerusalem Delivered&quot;?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;jerusalem-delivered&gt;&lt;torquato-tasso&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-02-28T22:26:04.103" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Benjamin Franklin mean here in his essay, &amp;quot;On True Happiness&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no happiness, then, &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; in a virtuous and self-approving conduct. Unless our actions will bear the test of our sober judgments and reflections upon them, they are not the actions, and, consequently, not the happiness, of a rational being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above excerpt, what does Franklin mean by &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;? I think &amp;quot;but&amp;quot; here means &amp;quot;except&amp;quot;, but &amp;quot;There is no happiness except in a self-approving conduct&amp;quot; doesn't really make sense; though &amp;quot;There is no happiness except in a virtuous conduct&amp;quot; makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5749" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:29:30.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:39:51.040" Title="What does Benjamin Franklin mean here in his essay, &quot;On True Happiness&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;benjamin-franklin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9491" CreationDate="2019-03-01T01:36:38.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does mean &amp;quot;except&amp;quot;, as in &amp;quot;There is no happiness except when one's conduct is both virtuous and self-approving&amp;quot; (to restructure the sentence slightly). What Franklin means here by self-approving is explained in the next sentence: not only must one's conduct be virtuous, but it must &amp;quot;bear the test of our [...] reflections upon [it]&amp;quot;. In other words, we must consider our own actions rational, and the actions must be virtuous, for a person to be happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:39:51.040" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:39:51.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-01T02:46:49.190" Score="1" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;How was Kambili affected by her father's death? I understand that she was the only one in the household who was able to love and see pass the image of a violent father but she was also physically and mentally abused. Also she was left to take care of her mother, who was overcome with guilt and with a her brother in jail. Was she at peace with his death? Was she not at peace with his death? What evidence would suggest either of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5914" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-01T07:48:13.447" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T15:41:12.880" Title="Purple Hibiscus: The death of Eugene" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;chimamanda-ngozi-adichie&gt;&lt;purple-hibiscus&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9490" CreationDate="2019-03-01T08:49:37.807" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To read a poem like this you'll need:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A comprehensive dictionary, so that you can look up words like ‘argument’, ‘will’, ‘would’, ‘fact’, ‘gan’, ‘tofore’, etc, and find out what they meant in 1600. I use the online &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; since my local library has a subscription, but a large one-volume dictionary like &lt;a href=&quot;https://chambers.co.uk/book/the-chambers-dictionary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chambers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; would also work. A ‘learner’ or ‘collegiate’ dictionary probably won’t be big enough for a work as old as &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem Delivered&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia, so you can look up allusions like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%ABs_Pater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahitophel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Achitophel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Patience! As you learn the language and become familiar with the classical allusions, you’ll get faster.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my notes for these three stanzas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The argument&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Argument’ means ‘summary or abstract of the subject matter of a book’ so the first stanza is a summary of what’s going to happen in the rest of the book, like a table of contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Characters&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ismeno is a sorceror. His name sometimes appears as ‘Ismen’ for the sake of the rhythm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aladine is the king of Jerusalem. The name ‘Aladine’ comes from the historical figure &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saladin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saladin&lt;/a&gt;, though there is otherwise little resemblence. He is often referred to as a ‘tyrant’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sophronia and Olindo are two Christians of Jerusalem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clorinda is a Saracen warrior. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Argantes and Alestes are ambassadors from the king of Egypt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ‘Duke’ is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_of_Bouillon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godfrey of Bouillon&lt;/a&gt;, leader of the crusaders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Allusions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%ABs_Pater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pluto&lt;/a&gt; are names for the god of the underworld in Roman mythology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macon is a variant of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahoun&lt;/a&gt;, a name used in medieval Europe for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muhammad&lt;/a&gt;, the founder of Islam.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acheron&lt;/a&gt; is one of the rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absalom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Absalom&lt;/a&gt; was the son, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahitophel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ahitophel&lt;/a&gt; the counsellor, of King David in the Bible. Absalom rebelled against his father, but ignored Ahitophel’s advice and was killed in battle. (In the allusion, Ahitophel represents Ismeno and Absalom represents Aladine. This is not very flattering to Aladine.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Glosses&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;will = intends to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;would = wants to&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fact = deed, action (especially a noble one)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their pardon gets = a poetic inversion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastrophe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anastrophe&lt;/a&gt;) for ‘gets their pardon’, making the line a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chiasmus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;mortal = implacable, unrelenting, deadly&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gan = began (but in poetry it’s mostly used as a filler word when there’s a gap in the rhythm, like ‘did’)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tofore = before&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dead bones laid = a poetic inversion of ‘laid dead bones’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;wonted = accustomed, usual&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pluto black = a poetic inversion of ‘black Pluto’&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;circles = figures of magic or necromancy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-01T08:49:37.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-01T16:07:33.630" Score="6" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Reine Margot&lt;/em&gt; by Alexandre Dumas can be read as the story of two guys, and their two girlfriends: the alpha couple is Marguerite de Valois (Margot), who's having a passionate affair with the protestant La Môle (sort of historically attested). The beta couple is Marguerite's friend Henriette, having an affair with La Môle's friend Coconnas. That is certainly how film adaptations (both the French and the Russian) treated the subject-matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there are numerous curious statements made by Coconnas. First, he tells Henriette that his relationship with her is like a candle, whereas his relationship with La Môle is like a star. Then, in the very end,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; choosing between life with Henriette and death with La Môle, he chooses the latter, without a moment of hesitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gets more explicit towards the end: right after La Môle kisses Margot on the forehead, Coconnas kisses La Môle on the forehead. And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; When the two are executed, first La Môle kisses a pendant given by Margot, then Coconnas kisses La Môle's severed head on the lips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had all this been written today, the homoeroticism would have been deliberate. Homosexual characters appear in other works by Alexandre Dumas. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Le Comte de Monte-Cristo&lt;/em&gt;, Danglar's daughter refuses all the men who court her, explicitly says she's not interested in men, and finally runs off with a woman. Also, curiously enough, according to French Wikipedia, La Môle was the lover both of Marggueritte, and of her brother François (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Boniface_de_La_M%C3%B4le&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, in this particular case, &lt;strong&gt;I'm curious whether the homoerotic subtext is intentional, or whether I am reading into the novel something that is not there, and inspired rather by my modern views&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5919" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T08:01:19.330" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T08:01:19.330" Title="Are the homoerotic hints in &quot;La Reine Margot&quot; intentional?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;la-reine-margot&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12352" CreationDate="2019-03-02T10:04:33.107" Score="8" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a passage where Westfield talks about possibly having to allow Natives into the European club:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Got to put up with it, I suppose&quot;, he said. &quot;B--s of natives are getting into all the Clubs nowadays. Even the Pegu Club, I'm told. Way this country's going, you know. We're about the last Club in Burma to hold out against 'em&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out what the &quot;B--s&quot; is supposed to be. Could it be bollocks? I haven't heard that word being used in this way yet, and it seems weird to me to censor bollocks but not the n-word, although I guess those were different times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5923" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T11:12:30.980" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T22:57:24.753" Title="In George Orwell's Burmese Days, what word is the censored &quot;b--s&quot; supposed to be?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;burmese-days&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-02T15:09:46.440" Score="-3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;From David Hume's &lt;em&gt;A Treatise of Human Nature&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hume/david/treatise-of-human-nature/B3.2.7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 3, Part 2, Section 7&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has been observed, in treating of the passions, that men are mightily governed by the imagination, and proportion their affections more to the light, under which any object appears to them, than to its real and intrinsic value. What strikes upon them with a strong and lively idea commonly prevails above what lies in a more obscure light; and it must be a great superiority of value, that is able to compensate this advantage. Now as every thing, that is contiguous to us, either in space or time, strikes upon us with such an idea, &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; has a proportional effect on the will and passions, and commonly operates with more force than any object, that lies in a more distant and obscure light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is “&lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;” implying? This dude really makes everything so obscure...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5749" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-02T15:30:22.633" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T18:09:11.783" Title="What does &quot;it&quot; mean in this passage of David Hume's “A Treatise of Human Nature”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;david-hume&gt;&lt;a-treatise-of-human-nature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9564" CreationDate="2019-03-02T23:02:12.333" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading &lt;em&gt;Ethan Frome&lt;/em&gt; by Edith Wharton for a school assignment and upon a second review of the introduction, I noticed something odd. First, I shall give some background. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel opens with the unnamed narrator's interactions with Ethan Frome. Page 4 contains the following quotation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that's twenty-four years ago come next February,&quot; Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chapter, which is unnumbered in my edition, comes to a close with: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was that night that I found the clue to Ethan Frome, and began to put together this vision of his story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of the novel is an account of Ethan's life prior to the aforementioned &quot;smash-up&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction of my edition, written by Edith Wharton herself, contains the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem before me, as I saw in the first flash, was this: I had to deal with a subject of which the dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax, occurs a generation later than the first acts of the tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This to me seems incorrect as the first acts of the piece precede the flashback to the climax, which occurred 24 years earlier and constitutes the majority of the piece. Am I correct in thinking that Mrs. Wharton intended to write &quot;earlier&quot; than &quot;later&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5924" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T14:42:40.537" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T14:42:40.537" Title="Did Edith Wharton make a mistake in her introduction to &quot;Ethan Frome&quot;?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;edith-wharton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-02T23:57:50.140" Score="4" ViewCount="8356" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the last stanza of Thomas Gray's 1742 poem, '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44301/ode-on-a-distant-prospect-of-eton-college&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College&lt;/a&gt;':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To each his suff'rings: all are men,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        Condemn'd alike to groan,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The tender for another's pain;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        Th' unfeeling for his own.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet ah! why should they know their fate?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since sorrow never comes too late,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        And happiness too swiftly flies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thought would destroy their paradise.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;No more; where ignorance is bliss,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        'Tis folly to be wise.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Gray mean by the lines in bold? To what religious or philosophical idea is he alluding? Or is the thought (as well as the expression) original to Gray?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T13:59:00.500" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T13:59:00.500" Title="What did Gray mean by &quot;where ignorance is bliss, / 'tis folly to be wise&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;thomas-gray&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9503" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9504" CreationDate="2019-03-03T04:56:20.960" Score="20" ViewCount="2471" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0052&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter Fifty-Two&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; there is a discussion between the titular count and Madame de Villefort about exposing oneself to poisons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well,” replied Monte Cristo “suppose, then, that this poison was brucine, and you were to take a milligramme the first day, two milligrammes the second day, and so on. Well, at the end of ten days you would have taken a centigramme, at the end of twenty days, increasing another milligramme, you would have taken three hundred centigrammes; that is to say, a dose which you would support without inconvenience, and which would be very dangerous for any other person who had not taken the same precautions as yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am somewhat confused about the calculations here, and I am wondering if this may be a mistake or if I am simply missing something. The count talks about starting with one milligramme on the first day and adding a milligramme each day. He then says that in this manner you will be up to a centigramme (i.e. 10 milligrammes) by the tenth day. But then he says that after twenty days you will be at 300 centigrammes. This does not appear to make sense. If you continue increasing by 1 milligramme per day then you would be at 20 milligrammes (i.e. 2 centigrammes) by the twentieth day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I thought that perhaps he meant that the total of all the poison from all the days would be 300 centigrams. But, first of all, this would be odd because the number mentioned for the tenth day was only the amount of poison taken on that day and not the total of all days up to that point. And, anyway, the calculation still wouldn't work out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20=210&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the total amount of poison after twenty days would only be 210 milligrammes (i.e. 21 centigrammes). This is still nowhere near the figure of 300 centigrammes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an explanation for this calculation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-03T06:37:07.857" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T06:37:07.857" Title="Can the Count of Monte Cristo's calculation of poison dosage be explained?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-count-of-monte-cristo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9503" CreationDate="2019-03-03T06:36:34.897" Score="31" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It's a mistranslation.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17990/17990-h/17990-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original French text&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—Eh bien, reprit Monte-Cristo, supposez que ce poison soit de la brucine, par exemple, et que vous en preniez un milligramme le premier jour, deux milligrammes le second, eh bien, au bout de dix jours vous aurez un centigramme; au bout de vingt jours, en augmentant d'un autre milligramme, vous aurez &lt;strong&gt;trois centigrammes&lt;/strong&gt;, c'est-à-dire une dose que vous supporterez sans inconvénient, et qui serait déjà fort dangereuse pour une autre personne qui n'aurait pas pris les mêmes précautions que vous [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well then,&quot; Monte-Cristo continued, &quot;suppose the poison would be brucine, for example, and that you take one milligram of it the first day, two milligrams the second - well then, at the end of ten days you would have one centigram; at the end of twenty days, adding one more milligram, you would have &lt;strong&gt;three centigrams&lt;/strong&gt;: namely, a dose which you can take without inconvenience, but which would already be very dangerous for someone else who had not taken the same precautions as you [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Three hundred centigrams&quot; would be &quot;trois cent centigrammes&quot; in French, not &quot;trois centigrammes&quot;. Someone made a mistake translating. Three centigrammes makes sense, because of the phrase &quot;en augmentant d'un autre milligramme&quot;: in the second week of this hypothetical experiment, the dose is increasing by one &lt;em&gt;extra&lt;/em&gt; milligram each day, i.e. by two milligrams, which brings us to three centigrams at the end of twenty days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T06:36:34.897" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2019-03-03T16:37:52.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.history.com/topics/british-history/robin-hood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Real Robin Hood&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on History.com, the first literary references to Robin Hood appear in a series of 14th- and 15th-century ballads about a violent yeoman who lived in Sherwood Forest with his men and frequently clashed with the Sheriff of Nottingham. Rather than a peasant, knight or fallen noble, as in later versions, the protagonist of these medieval stories is a commoner. Besides this, I found no answers to your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5914" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:36:01.980" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:36:01.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9512" CreationDate="2019-03-03T18:03:30.767" Score="8" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9503/17&quot;&gt;There's a translation error in Project Gutenberg's English-language version of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/a&gt; I'd like to know whose translation was being used which contained this mistake. But in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Project Gutenberg text&lt;/a&gt; I can't find the name of the translator anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do Project Gutenberg translated texts mention the translator's name anywhere by default?&lt;/strong&gt; Maybe on some meta/info page which I didn't find? If not, how can I find this piece of information given what details the Project Gutenberg text does provide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T18:59:58.923" Title="How can I find out who translated a book on Project Gutenberg?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9499" CreationDate="2019-03-03T18:09:11.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this is hard to read, primarily because he is sprinkling commas in places they clearly do not belong under modern rules of grammar. Let's just take this sentence by sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It has been observed, in treating of the passions, that men are mightily governed by the imagination, and proportion their affections more to the light, under which any object appears to them, than to its real and intrinsic value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My rough translation: &lt;em&gt;I noticed that people care more about how things look than about what they are.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What strikes upon them with a strong and lively idea commonly prevails above what lies in a more obscure light; and it must be a great superiority of value, that is able to compensate this advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;People are too superficial, and will only notice subtle properties of objects if those properties are valuable or useful in some way.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now as every thing, that is contiguous to us, either in space or time, strikes upon us with such an idea, it has a proportional effect on the will and passions, and commonly operates with more force than any object, that lies in a more distant and obscure light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Superficial properties have a tendency to inflame emotions in a way that subtle properties do not.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question, &quot;it&quot; is here referring to the superficial features of an object that people will readily notice and comprehend. More precisely, the antecedent of the pronoun &quot;it&quot; is the phrase &quot;such an idea,&quot; which refers back to the earlier phrase &quot;What strikes upon them with a strong and lively idea...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Alternatively, the antecedent is &quot;every thing,&quot; which is then &lt;em&gt;restricted&lt;/em&gt; by the subsequent clauses so that it's clear we're talking about a &quot;thing&quot; with superficial properties that have an emotional effect etcetera. The grammar is so unclear that I'm uncertain which exact parse Hume intended. But either way, it has the same overall meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="997" LastActivityDate="2019-03-03T18:09:11.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9507" CreationDate="2019-03-03T22:32:44.123" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the title page and the illustrations on Project Gutenberg match the 1888 Routledge edition, the text does not. Searching on Google books, one can find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=dWlKAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP13&amp;amp;dq=%22its+fascination+is+exerted+equally+upon%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi9ppCVgufgAhWJnOAKHYafAmQQ6AEILDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22its%20fascination%20is%20exerted%20equally%20upon%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned version&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;the Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; that has the same text as the Project Gutenberg edition. This edition has copyright 1894, by Thomas Y. Crowell &amp;amp; Co. (the publishers). It includes a &quot;Publisher's Note&quot; (not included on PG) that gives some detail of the translation process.  Unfortunately, it doesn't give the name of the translator. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpted from the &quot;Publisher's Note&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the present revised edition, upwards of fifteen thousand such faults have been corrected. Great pains have been taken to represent the original faithfully in correct English. Technical terms have been expressed in accurate correspondents. The nautical phrases, so ludicrous in all other English translations, have been revised by a French Man-of-War's man, an Ex-Lieutenant of the United States Navy, and an experienced commander in the Merchant Service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an unnamed committee translated it, presumably based heavily on some earlier translation or translations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo#English_translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that this translation was first published in 1889, and is based on an anonymous 1846 translation published by Chapman and Hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T18:59:58.923" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T18:59:58.923" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9510" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9540" CreationDate="2019-03-03T23:37:09.497" Score="7" ViewCount="1109" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Note: all emphases in quoted passages below are mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing the theme of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9503/can-the-count-of-monte-cristos-calculation-of-poison-dosage-be-explained&quot;&gt;confusing mathematics in &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, here is another example that stymies me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Edmond Dantès is first described in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter One&lt;/a&gt;, right when the story begins, his age is given as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a fine, tall, slim young &lt;strong&gt;fellow of eighteen or twenty&lt;/strong&gt;, with black eyes, and hair as dark as a raven’s wing; and his whole appearance bespoke that calmness and resolution peculiar to men accustomed from their cradle to contend with danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he is estimated to be 18-20 years old. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter Two&lt;/a&gt; (which is the same day) he himself confirms that he is 20 years old:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“God forgive me,” said the young man, “for rejoicing at happiness derived from the misery of others, but, Heaven knows, I did not seek this good fortune; it has happened, and I really cannot pretend to lament it. The good Captain Leclere is dead, father, and it is probable that, with the aid of M. Morrel, I shall have his place. Do you understand, father? Only imagine &lt;strong&gt;me a captain at twenty&lt;/strong&gt;, with a hundred louis pay, and a share in the profits! Is this not more than a poor sailor like me could have hoped for?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of Chapter Two, Mercédès (Edmond's bride) is described as being 17 years old, and her cousin (Fernand) as being 21 years old:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, every time I have seen Mercédès come into the city she has been accompanied by a tall, strapping, black-eyed Catalan, with a red complexion, brown skin, and fierce air, whom she calls cousin.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Really; and you think this cousin pays her attentions?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I only suppose so. What else can a strapping &lt;strong&gt;chap of twenty-one&lt;/strong&gt; mean with a fine &lt;strong&gt;wench of seventeen&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, at this point we have established that Fernand is about a year older than Edmond, who in turn is about three years older than Mercédès.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fast-forward about forty chapters, and Mercédès is now married to Fernand (Count de Morcerf) and is the mother of Albert, while Edmond has become the Count of Monte Cristo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0041&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter Forty-One&lt;/a&gt; Edmond visits the de Morcerf house and sees a portrait of Mercédès:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was the portrait of &lt;strong&gt;a young woman of five or six-and-twenty&lt;/strong&gt;, with a dark complexion, and light and lustrous eyes, veiled beneath long lashes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albert then explains that the portrait is his mother, taken 6-8 years ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, monsieur,” returned Albert, “I would never forgive you this mistake if you had seen another picture beside this. You do not know my mother; she it is whom you see here. &lt;strong&gt;She had her portrait painted thus six or eight years ago.&lt;/strong&gt; This costume is a fancy one, it appears, and the resemblance is so great that I think I still see my mother the same as she was in 1830. The countess had this portrait painted during the count’s absence. She doubtless intended giving him an agreeable surprise; but, strange to say, this portrait seemed to displease my father, and the value of the picture, which is, as you see, one of the best works of Léopold Robert, could not overcome his dislike to it. It is true, between ourselves, that M. de Morcerf is one of the most assiduous peers at the Luxembourg, a general renowned for theory, but a most mediocre amateur of art. It is different with my mother, who paints exceedingly well, and who, unwilling to part with so valuable a picture, gave it to me to put here, where it would be less likely to displease M. de Morcerf, whose portrait, by Gros, I will also show you. Excuse my talking of family matters, but as I shall have the honor of introducing you to the count, I tell you this to prevent you making any allusions to this picture. The picture seems to have a malign influence, for my mother rarely comes here without looking at it, and still more rarely does she look at it without weeping. This disagreement is the only one that has ever taken place between the count and countess, who are still as much united, &lt;strong&gt;although married more than twenty years&lt;/strong&gt;, as on the first day of their wedding.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, at this point Mercédès would have to be 31-34 years old (25 + 6 = 31; 26 + 8 = 34), which would mean (as per the above evidence) that Edmond would be about 34-37 years old and Fernand would be about 35-38 years old. However, at the end of the paragraph just cited, Albert clearly states that his parents have been married for more than 20 years. That would mean that they got married when Mercédès was (at most) younger than 14 years old, Edmond (at most) younger than 17 years old, and Fernand (at most) younger than 18 years old. Yet that would mean that they were married even before the book began! This, of course, cannot be, as when the book began Mercédès was still betrothed to Edmond, and she only married Fernand well after Edmond had been imprisoned. According to Caderousse in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0027&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter Twenty-Seven&lt;/a&gt; it was a full eighteen months later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Mercédès begged for six months more in which to await and mourn for Edmond.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“So that,” said the abbé, with a bitter smile, “&lt;strong&gt;that makes eighteen months in all&lt;/strong&gt;. What more could the most devoted lover desire?” Then he murmured the words of the English poet, “‘Frailty, thy name is woman.’”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Six months afterwards,” continued Caderousse, “the marriage took place in the church of Accoules.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To compound matters further, returning to Chapter Forty-One, Edmond meets Fernand who is described as being 40-45 years old: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Monte Cristo was engaged in examining this portrait with no less care than he had bestowed upon the other, when another door opened, and he found himself opposite to the Count of Morcerf in person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was &lt;strong&gt;a man of forty to forty-five years&lt;/strong&gt;, but he seemed at least fifty, and his black moustache and eyebrows contrasted strangely with his almost white hair, which was cut short, in the military fashion. He was dressed in plain clothes, and wore at his button-hole the ribbons of the different orders to which he belonged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is problematic because it makes Fernand 6-14 years older than Mercédès (instead of four years older as indicated from the beginning of the book). It also doesn't fit with how Edmond's own age is described by Albert immediately thereafter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And what do you suppose is the count’s age?” inquired Mercédès, evidently attaching great importance to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“Thirty-five or thirty-six, mother.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“So young, — it is impossible,” said Mercédès, replying at the same time to what Albert said as well as to her own private reflection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It is the truth, however. Three or four times he has said to me, and certainly without the slightest premeditation, ‘at such a period I was five years old, at another ten years old, at another twelve,’ and I, induced by curiosity, which kept me alive to these details, have compared the dates, and never found him inaccurate. &lt;strong&gt;The age of this singular man, who is of no age, is then, I am certain, thirty-five.&lt;/strong&gt; Besides, mother, remark how vivid his eye, how raven-black his hair, and his brow, though so pale, is free from wrinkles,—he is not only vigorous, but also young.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edmond being 35-36 would be consistent with Mercédès being 31-34 as was indicated by the portrait, but it is not definitely not consistent with Fernand being 40-45 years old. Furthermore, when Mercédès says “So young, — it is impossible,” she seems to be trying to refute a potential suspicion that the Count of Monte Cristo is actually Edmond, by saying that Edmond couldn't possibly be that young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on here? How can we make sense of the age discrepancies described above? Have I miscalculated, or misinterpreted any important details? Is this just a mistake?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T11:40:27.133" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T10:39:24.190" Title="Can the apparent age discrepancies in The Count of Monte Cristo be reconciled?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-count-of-monte-cristo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T00:45:26.543" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;All Quiet in the Western Front&lt;/em&gt;, the protagonist and narrator, Paul Bäumer, hides in a shell hole between the trenches and is forced to kill a French soldier that stumbles in beside him during an attack. One full chapter is devoted to how this is his first hand-to-hand kill and the psychological ramifications of the act. However, in a previous chapter, Paul narrates an attack the Germans carry out on the French and how they &quot;bayonet&quot; some French machine gun operators. This contradiction puzzles me. Had he or had he not killed someone before in hand to hand combat? Is this perhaps a mistranslation from the original German to English or am I misinterpreting what the author is writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5926" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T09:47:26.910" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T09:47:26.910" Title="Why is Paul so torn when he stabs the French soldier?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;all-quiet-on-the-western-front&gt;&lt;erich-maria-remarque&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9507" CreationDate="2019-03-04T09:46:16.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do Project Gutenberg translated texts mention the translator's name anywhere by default?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, they do.&lt;/strong&gt; At least for books that have a single known translator. It's in the frontmatter section at the very top of the HTML file, before the text itself or even the front cover image. I checked a few other examples of translated texts on Project Gutenberg:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3804/3804-h/3804-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pierre et Jean&lt;/em&gt; by Guy de Maupassant&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/POBh6.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/POBh6.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of preamble info&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2638/2638-h/2638-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt; by Fyodor Dostoevsky&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EN4y5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EN4y5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of preamble info&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in general, Project Gutenberg appears to be good at including the translator as well as the author when they publish translated texts. The reason why they didn't do so in the particular case of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; is that (as discussed in other comments and answers on this page) &lt;strong&gt;the translator is unknown&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T09:46:16.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-01-22T14:38:16.067" Score="3" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Hippolyta mean in this speech from Act V Scene I of &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But all the story of the night told over,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all their minds transfigured so together,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More witnesseth than fancy’s images&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And grows to something of great constancy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But, howsoever, strange and admirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="mBabaee" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T11:21:27.333" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T20:43:13.087" Title="What does Hippolyta mean by &quot;More witnesseth than fancy’s images&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;a-midsummer-nights-dream&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9513" CreationDate="2019-01-22T15:09:34.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Hippolyta commenting on the activity in the play itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because this site prefers citations and not freelance interpretations, here is one such interpreration (or condensation) from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/msnd/page_146/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;No Fear Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hippolyta&lt;/strong&gt;: But the story that these lovers are telling, and the fact that they all saw and heard exactly the same things, make me think there’s more going on here than imaginary fantasies. Their story is bizarre and astounding, but it’s solid and consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I think there is more to the notion of &quot;fancy's images&quot; than that they are merely &quot;imaginary fantasies.&quot; The whole play is brilliantly predicated on the dichotomy (somewhat blurred) between what is real and what is imagination, and it ultimately seems to suggest that if a bizarre figment of the imagination appears to be real, what's the difference? The imagination is the true magic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2074" OwnerDisplayName="Robusto" LastActivityDate="2019-01-22T15:09:34.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T19:21:40.400" Score="1" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Taking a class on existentialism and literature and I'm curious how far back the idea has been referenced in literature. What is the first work of literature to express the ideas of existentialism? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T05:54:10.600" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T19:09:13.000" Title="What is the first work of literature to reference existentialism?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2292" CreationDate="2019-03-04T20:37:24.050" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know this question is old, but...&#xA;Yes, the businessmen who hired Chigurh also hired other hitmen to track Moss down. Chigurh finds this insulting and infuriating and it's  one of the reasons he goes back and kills the businessman in the high rise (the other reason was because that guy had hired Wells to kill Chigurh). But to answer your question directly: Yes, the Mexicans who were in the hotel in Del Rio also had a receiver. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why Moss didn't get rid of the tracker when he found it, no answer is given. After he found it, the book says Moss realized he would probably never be safe again in his life, so Moss was probably thinking he would just wait for Chigurh and kill him. (Remember that Moss had asked the clerk to call him if anyone checked in, so that's why he felt safe enough to lie down). Later on in the book there's a passage in which Chigurh says, &quot;The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not.&quot; So it's safe to say Moss didn't realize what / who he was up against. Yes, he was a badass in his own right, but he wasn't badass enough. He exaggerated his own capabilities and he underestimated his enemies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end, the Mexicans found Moss by tapping the phone of either  Sheriff Bell or Carla Jean Moss. Carla Jean told sheriff Bell where Llewellyn was. All the hitmen knew Moss was traveling along the border and that he was trying to get back to his wife. The towns are small and populations sparse along the border (even more so back in 1980) so there weren't many places he could have stayed along the way without being found. (Remember that the Mexican hitman actually killed Llewellyn. Chigurh arrived at the motel afterwards and retrieved the money - which no one else had found) Sometime after Moss was killed and Carla Jean's mother died, Chigurh went to Carla Jean's mother's house (which would've been easy for him to find) and killed her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5935" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T20:37:24.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9517" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9518" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" Score="0" Body="Thomas Gray (1716–1771), English poet, known for &quot;Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T21:34:58.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-04T23:50:44.847" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just started reading &quot;The Bourne Supremacy&quot; and I see that in some places Robert Ludlum spells things the British way, and in others the American way. For example, on one page you'd see &quot;favorite&quot; and on another one you'd see &quot;favourite&quot;. Or, he spells &quot;color&quot; like &quot;colour&quot;, even though he's American. There are also much more things that I won't include here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a common thing in books written by American authors? Or does this style of writing seem weird?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5939" LastActivityDate="2019-03-04T23:50:44.847" Title="Why is there no spelling consistency in Robert Ludlum's books?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;robert-ludlum&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9521" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-05T12:39:54.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-05T12:39:54.140" LastActivityDate="2019-03-05T12:39:54.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9522" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-05T12:39:54.140" Score="0" Body="Questions about the crime novel 'No Country for Old Men' (2005) by Cormac McCarthy. Use with the [cormac-mccarthy] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:37:49.130" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:37:49.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-05T13:06:56.650" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a common trope that high schoolers, and perhaps many more people, view Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as overdone and somewhat cheesy and shallow, for lack of better words. Would it have been viewed this way in Shakespeare's own day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5942" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T23:27:37.363" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T23:27:37.363" Title="Perception of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet by contemporaries" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9524" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9378" CreationDate="2019-03-06T15:32:08.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a misapprehension in the question. An &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;allegory&lt;/a&gt; is a fiction in which characters, places and events stand for real people and concepts. For example, in Spenser’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the characters represent virtues and vices, and in Orwell’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the animals represent people from the Russian Revolution. Chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;Silent Spring&lt;/em&gt; is not an allegory in this sense: there is no scheme of representation. Carson calls it a ‘fable’, that is “a short story devised to convey some useful lesson” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Carson include this chapter in &lt;em&gt;Silent Spring&lt;/em&gt;? Because she wanted the book to be persuasive, to motivate the readers to action. A well-known passage from Aristotle describes three &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modes of persuasion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the proofs furnished by the speech are of three kinds. The first depends upon the moral character of the speaker, the second upon putting the hearer into a certain frame of mind, the third upon the speech itself, in so far as it proves or seems to prove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Aristot.+Rh.+1.2.3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt; 1.2.3&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by J. H. Freese.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three modes are often referred to as &lt;em&gt;ethos&lt;/em&gt; (authority of the speaker), &lt;em&gt;pathos&lt;/em&gt; (emotional appeal) and &lt;em&gt;logos&lt;/em&gt; (facts and reasoning). Carson’s chapter 1 presents an emotional appeal to the readers, which the remainder of the book then backs up with facts and reasoning. Both are necessary for the work to be persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T10:36:21.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-06T18:00:16.143" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading this book for the first time, I was surprised by the structure of the story. After Robinson is shipwrecked, we learn about his survival methods from his retrospective point-of-view. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then after Robinson builds a table and begins writing his Journal, Defoe reproduces it within the text and gives the reader another description of the method of Robinson's survival once again, covering scenes that were already explained with lots of detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that the Journal was written while Robinson was shipwrecked and the book itself is written after he was rescued (within the context of the story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Defoe think it was a good idea to recap these events?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5949" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T18:00:16.143" Title="In Robinson Crusoe, why does Defoe include the Journal which recaps the events that are already narrated?" Tags="&lt;daniel-defoe&gt;&lt;robinson-crusoe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9515" CreationDate="2019-03-06T18:05:34.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that it is very hard to nail down the precise first work or thinker to reference Existentialist ideas. The Encyclopedia Britannica makes references to 16th and 17th century thinkers including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/existentialism#ref68494&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pascal and De Montaigne&lt;/a&gt; as precursors to Existentialism, making references to their application of the Socratic method.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem of what humans are in themselves can be discerned in the Socratic imperative “know thyself,” as well as in the work of the 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French religious philosopher and mathematician. Montaigne had said: “If my mind could gain a foothold, I would not write essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” And Pascal had insisted on the precarious position of humans situated between Being and Nothingness: “We burn with the desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.” &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/existentialism#ref68494&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, both the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia agree that the most direct antecedents to Existentialism were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Kierkegaard_and_Nietzsche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nietzsche and Kierkegaard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche were two of the first philosophers considered fundamental to the existentialist movement, though neither used the term &quot;existentialism&quot; and it is unclear whether they would have supported the existentialism of the 20th century. They focused on subjective human experience rather than the objective truths of mathematics and science, which they believed were too detached or observational to truly get at the human experience. Like Pascal, they were interested in people's quiet struggle with the apparent meaninglessness of life and the use of diversion to escape from boredom.&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Kierkegaard_and_Nietzsche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a literary perspective, the first and most significant proponents of an Existentialist philosophy were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Dostoyevsky_and_Sartre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dostoevsky and Sartre&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes Ivan Karamazov's claim, &quot;If God did not exist, everything would be permitted&quot; to Dostoyevsky himself, though this quote does not appear in the novel. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism#Dostoyevsky_and_Sartre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the father of Existentialism is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/existentialism#ref68494&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dane Søren Kierkegaard&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The theme of the irreducibility of existence to reason, common to many existentialists, was also defended by the German idealist F.W.J. von Schelling as he argued against G.W.F. Hegel in the last phase of his philosophy; Schelling’s polemic, in turn, inspired the thinker usually cited as the father of existentialism, the religious Dane Søren Kierkegaard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5686" LastEditorUserId="5686" LastEditDate="2019-03-06T19:09:13.000" LastActivityDate="2019-03-06T19:09:13.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9527" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="248" CreationDate="2019-03-06T22:25:08.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;More than likely the tool the man was using was a post hole digger. I'm speculating but I've used one and I can't think of what else it could be. He was probably digging post holes for a fence. When you strike rock with the blades of the digger it creates a spark. Barbed wire fencing fundamentally changed and tamed the &quot;wild west&quot; and the North American prairie. Once fences were erected it was no longer open range. It was the end of the huge cattle drives from Texas to the northern prairies, the end of free roaming buffalo, the end of the cowboy and the end of the frontier itself. A great book on the subject is &lt;em&gt;Cattle Kingdom: The Hidden History of the Cowboy West&lt;/em&gt; by Christopher Knowlton. I've also read books about mountain men and pioneers which discuss the subject. Many of Larry McMurtry's books also attempt to demythologize our idea of the cowboy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;All the Pretty Horses&lt;/em&gt;, Mccarthy wrote, &quot;What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and the love of blood.&quot; Evil and &quot;prophets of destruction&quot; are common in McCarthy's novels - e.g. Judge Holden, Anton Chigurh, cannibal gangs in &lt;em&gt;The Road&lt;/em&gt;. One of the morals I've gleaned from McCarthy's books is to never underestimate evil. There are &quot;true and living prophets of destruction&quot; in the world and they are not to be trifled with. Usually the characters in his novels meet a violent end when they allow greed or vengeance take them down a path of no return - and there is only one path in our lives and we can never return on it or start over. In &lt;em&gt;No Country for Old Men&lt;/em&gt;, Llewellyn Moss says, &quot;Your notions about startin over. You don't start over... Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it.&quot; Later in that same book Anton Chigurh says, &quot;The prospect of outsized profits leads people to exaggerate their own capabilities. In their minds. They pretend to themselves that they are in control of events where perhaps they are not. And it is always one's stance upon uncertain ground that invites the attentions of one's enemies. Or discourages it.&quot;&#xA;Be careful what you wish for and how you seek it. Do not assume you can dip your toe in evil and not be consumed by it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mccarthy is so dark... and so good!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5935" LastEditorUserId="5935" LastEditDate="2019-03-07T12:45:12.420" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T12:45:12.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9530" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9531" CreationDate="2019-03-07T10:15:58.060" Score="2" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 19 of Persuasion by Jane Austen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At last, Lady Russell drew back her head. ‘Now, how would she speak of him?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You will wonder,’ said she, ‘what has been fixing my eye so long; but&#xA;  I was looking after some window-curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs&#xA;  Frankland were telling me of last night. They described the&#xA;  drawing-room window-curtains of one of the houses on this side of the&#xA;  way, and this part of the street, as being the handsomest and best&#xA;  hung of any in Bath, but could not recollect the exact number, and I&#xA;  have been trying to find out which it could be; but I confess I can&#xA;  see no curtains hereabouts that answer their description.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anne sighed and blushed and smiled, in pity and disdain, either at her&#xA;  friend or herself. The part which provoked her most, was that in all&#xA;  this waste of foresight and caution, she should have lost the right&#xA;  moment for seeing whether he saw them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were Anne and Lady Russell talking about curtains when they saw Captain Wentworth passing by?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T10:42:44.513" Title="Persuasion by Jane Austen: Why were Anne and Lady Russell talking about curtains when they saw Captain Wentworth passing by?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9530" CreationDate="2019-03-07T10:42:44.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of this passage is that Anne is worried about Lady Russell’s reaction to seeing Captain Wentworth in Bath. You will recall from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap04&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 4&lt;/a&gt; that when Captain Wentworth proposed to Anne in 1806, eight years before the opening of the novel,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Russell saw it very differently. His sanguine temper, and fearlessness of mind, operated very differently on her. She saw in it but an aggravation of the evil. It only added a dangerous character to himself. He was brilliant, he was headstrong. Lady Russell had little taste for wit, and of anything approaching to imprudence a horror. She deprecated the connexion in every light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such opposition, as these feelings produced, was more than Anne could combat. Young and gentle as she was, it might yet have been possible to withstand her father’s ill-will, though unsoftened by one kind word or look on the part of her sister; but Lady Russell, whom she had always loved and relied on, could not, with such steadiness of opinion, and such tenderness of manner, be continually advising her in vain. She was &lt;strong&gt;persuaded&lt;/strong&gt; to believe the engagement a wrong thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis.) The novel’s title alludes to this episode, alerting us to its importance, and Anne of course remembers it as a critical turning point in her own life. So when Captain Wentworth comes to Bath in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 19&lt;/a&gt;, Anne is in agony to know how her friend will react: will Lady Russell take up her opposition to him again and threaten the possibility of a reattachment, or has she softened in the intervening period? When Anne sees Captain Wentworth in the street, she watches Lady Russell carefully in order to determine her reaction when she eventually recognises him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She looked instinctively at Lady Russell; but not from any mad idea of her recognising him so soon as she did herself. No, it was not to be supposed that Lady Russell would perceive him till they were nearly opposite. She looked at her however, from time to time, anxiously; and when the moment approached which must point him out, though not daring to look again (for her own countenance she knew was unfit to be seen), she was yet perfectly conscious of Lady Russell’s eyes being turned exactly in the direction for him--of her being, in short, intently observing him. She could thoroughly comprehend the sort of fascination he must possess over Lady Russell’s mind, the difficulty it must be for her to withdraw her eyes, the astonishment she must be feeling that eight or nine years should have passed over him, and in foreign climes and in active service too, without robbing him of one personal grace!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Lady Russell speaks of curtains, we (and Anne) realise that she has not recognized Captain Wentworth at all; indeed, perhaps she hardly remembers the advice she gave to her friend those eight years previously. The episode is a comic deflation of Anne’s preoccupations and worries: Captain Wentworth looms so largely in her own mind that she has forgotten how unimportant he is to others. Lady Russell choosing, at this moment of emotional drama for Anne, to discourse upon such a prosaic subject as curtains, heightens the comic irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T10:42:44.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9437" CreationDate="2019-03-07T16:07:22.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As mentioned by the OP &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9437/how-is-it-1100-miles-from-hannibal-to-southern-arkansas-in-huck-finn#comment16119_9437&quot;&gt;in a comment&lt;/a&gt;, the answer may be found in the article &lt;strong&gt;Sherwood Cummings, &quot;Mark Twain's Moveable Farm and the Evasion&quot;, &lt;em&gt;American Literature&lt;/em&gt; 63(3) (1991), pp. 440-458&lt;/strong&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2927242?seq=7#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;may be found on Jstor&lt;/a&gt;. There's actually much more to this issue than that one line from Aunt Polly. Allow me to answer by challenging one assumption made in the OP which is actually incorrect, and by subverting the question to a different but related one, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Where is the Phelps farm?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know the Phelps' farm is supposed to be in Arkansas ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nope!&lt;/strong&gt; In fact, there has been a lot of disagreement among Twain critics about exactly where it is. Quoting from Cummings's article (p. 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Located where Huck and Jim's long raft voyage down the Mississippi ended, the Phelps place must be considerably south of its Missouri counterpart, but just how far south is a matter of disagreement. There are scholars who put it in Arkansas and others who put it in Mississippi or Louisiana. It is the purpose of this study to sketch the history of that disagreement, to offer a precise location for the farm based on fresh analysis and evidence, and, more importantly, to suggest how the disagreement is a consequence of Mark Twain's own ambivalence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following paragraph (pp. 1-2) details the writings of many Twain scholars who variously determined the Phelps farm to be in assorted parts of the states of Arkansas, Louisiana, or Mississippi. Strong evidence for Arkansas is &lt;strong&gt;Twain's own assertion&lt;/strong&gt;, in his autobiography, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Huck Finn&lt;/em&gt; and in &lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer, Detective&lt;/em&gt;, I moved it [the farm where Twain himself spent his childhood] down to Arkansas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer, Detective&lt;/em&gt;, the farm is clearly stated to be in Arkansas. But this was written over a decade after &lt;em&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt;, and several Twain scholars have determined from textual evidence in &lt;em&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt; (including the &quot;eleven hundred mile&quot; which you're asking about) that the farm wasn't written to be in Arkansas at all. After summarising the existing body of literature on this topic, Cummings summarises his own research as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was my curiosity about such questions that led me to search out old maps and records and to learn something about lumber rafting. My inquiry has satisfied me that Mark Twain located Pikesville on the site of the now vanished village of Point Coupee, Louisiana, on the west bank of the Mississippi, thirty-seven river miles north of Baton Rouge, across and somewhat upstream from St. Francisville.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointe_Coupee_Parish,_Louisiana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Point Coupee Parish&lt;/a&gt; still exists and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/maps/place/Pointe+Coupee+Parish,+LA,+USA/@30.751,-91.8464639,10z/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;you can find it on Google Maps&lt;/a&gt;. It's in Louisiana.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cummings spends several pages justifying in considerable detail, using evidence from the novel and knowledge of contemporary geography, his claim that Pikesville equates to Point Coupee. In this answer I'll mention only what I found the most clinching piece of evidence (p. 7):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Point Coupee, then, seemed a likely Pikesville, but was there corroborative evidence? Speculating that Mark Twain might have used the government map that he had previously acquired for his Mississippi River trip as a present aid in developing the locale of Pikesville and the Phelps farm, I sent for a copy. Drawn to a scale of one inch to one mile and consisting of thirty-two panels, each twelve by twenty-two inches, Major Charles R. Suter's 1878 &lt;em&gt;Map of the Reconnaissance of the Misssissippi River&lt;/em&gt; shows considerable detail. From evidence in &lt;em&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt; we know that the Phelps farm is four miles below Pikesville on the river road, that on the side away from the river there are cotton fields and beyond them woods, that in the opposite direction there is a narrow strip of &quot;bush,&quot; then the river, and out in the river a &quot;woody island.&quot; Four miles below Point Coupee on the Suter map is the cleared land of the riverside Preston plantation, woods a mile to the southwest, and to the northeast, in midriver, a wooded island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How's that for confirmatory evidence?! Cummings also speculates on where the name &quot;Pikesville&quot; came from, providing even more confirmation for his theorised equivalence (pp. 7-8):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The particular copy of the Suter map I studied provided an unexpected bonus: the original, which is part of the Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio, was once owned by Samuel Fulton Covington (1837-1889), an incorporator and later president of the Globe Insurance Company of Cincinnati. Covington's special interest in river-traffic safety prompred him to pinpoint on his map the locations of steamboat accidents. At Point Coupee he wrote, &quot;GEN. PIKE, BURNED.&quot; Further search on my part identified the &lt;em&gt;General Pike&lt;/em&gt; as a 308-ton sidewheeler destroyed by fire at Point Coupee on 18 April 1849 with the loss of one life, facts that Mark Twain may well have been aware of and which may have given him the name for Pikesville or &quot;Pikeville&quot; as its first appearance in the holograph would have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;So how about that 1100 miles?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coming back to the original question ... Cummings &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; confirms that his proposed location is consistent with the &quot;eleven hundred mile&quot; from the text (p. 7):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the river-mileage figures plentifully printed midstream on the Suter map there is further corroboration. Suter's river mileage from Greenville to Point Coupee, in comparison to our estimate of 350 miles of raft travel from Wilks-town to Pikesville, is 349 miles. From the confluence of the Ohio River to Point Coupee, Suter's mileage is 850. Add to that the slightly more than 300 miles from Hannibal to the mouth of the Ohio, and Aunt Polly's traipsing &quot;all the way down the river, eleven hundred mile&quot; (p. 358) makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question of &quot;how is it 1100 miles from Hannibal to southern Arkansas&quot; - &lt;strong&gt;it isn't&lt;/strong&gt;. If you reach a contradiction, alter the initial assumptions :-) No geometries were harmed in the making of this novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T10:06:42.043" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T10:06:42.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9533" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9534" CreationDate="2019-03-07T18:25:29.123" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from a part in the article that Lovecraft lists most common mistakes beginners make when writing. The parts I didn't get is in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Want of &lt;strong&gt;correspondence in number&lt;/strong&gt; between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the &lt;strong&gt;construction involved&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T13:56:31.433" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T13:56:31.433" Title="What does sentence mean from &quot;Literary Composition&quot; by Lovecraft?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9533" CreationDate="2019-03-07T21:01:15.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarbook.com/grammar/subjectVerbAgree.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;subject-verb agreement&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: when the subject is singular, so should the main verb be; when the subject is plural, then the verb should be in plural form. (Of course, this only applies to languages where verbs are conjugated and not, for example, Standard Chinese.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule is easy to follow when subject and verb aren't separated by many words, but authors may &quot;forget&quot; the subject's grammatical number if one of the many words between the subject and the verb has a different number. This can also occur if the subject is very complex (&quot;the construction [of the sentence is] involved]&quot;, in Lovecraft's words). This type of separation of subject and verb is also known as a &lt;strong&gt;subject-verb split&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a simple example from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kgbanswers.com/what-is-a-subject-verb-split/10853761&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;kgbanswers.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The teacher along with his students are going on a field trip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The subject (&quot;The teacher&quot;) is singular, so the main verb (&quot;are going&quot;) should also be singular. However, due to the phrase &quot;his students&quot; (plural), the author got confused and put the verb in plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Lovecraft is saying is that the risk for the above type of mistakes is higher, when sentences are longer (more specifically, when there are more words between the subject and the verb) or more complex (&quot;involved&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-07T21:01:15.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8786" CreationDate="2019-03-08T15:49:54.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm no expert on this particular poem. However, we know that Stevens is obsessed with (what he views as) the abstract, highly subjective distinctions between concepts such as reality/language, truth/imagination, idea/thing-itself, order/chaos, poem/mind, black/white [or'the first idea'/nothingness], and the scope of human potential versus the limited time which we are allotted to comprehend and articulate the world in order to truly and comprehensively understand anything. This is why we observe Stevens regress to terms like 'seem', ' or 'part', evidently reluctant to address reality as an objective fact, perhaps out of respect for Cartesian metaphysical Skepticism from which he draws the version of phenomenology which provides the foundation for everything he writes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at his many other poems, and understand how his poetry progresses from Harmonium to the less optimistic The Rock, this one becomes clearer. A Postcard From The Volcano, for example: 'what we said of it became / A part of what it is'. Similarly, some other examples sprinkled throughout his canon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of Modern Poetry: &quot;poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will &lt;strong&gt;suffice&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-statement of Romance: &quot;The night knows nothing of the chants of night. / It is what it is as I am what I am: / And in perceiving this I best perceive myself&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself: &quot;a scrawny cry from outside / Seemed like a sound in his mind&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man on the Dump and Of Mere Being are also good reference points for this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this basis, I am going to say that the line which you question refers to &#xA;Stevens talks about the book and reality throughout the poem, and it's all about solitude, solipsism, the sublime, the transcendental experience, and the process by which the reader becomes the creator, not the poet, through the act of reading itself (a concept I learn from Sartre's &lt;em&gt;Being &amp;amp; Nothingness&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;What is Literature&lt;/em&gt;, which I'm sure originates elsewhere). I settle on this interpretation in particular because: &#xA;a) it recurs throughout American writing, in many of my favourite authors and poets, and &#xA;b) it's not only philosophically poignant, but also akin to Stevens's own preestablished philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevens digresses further on these philosophies in his meta-theoretical poetry. Comedian as the Letter C, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven -- as well as his essays from The Necessary Angel -- all give a more direct version of his methodology and theoretical framework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, you can actually track the poignant, highly Existentialist thoughts which he notes in his early poetry (Harmonium, Ideas of Order) and see how they break down, remain, or develop later. And this is no exception; it's very clear that Stevens is indebted to many philosophers focussing on temporality and being (Heidegger, Sartre, some Camus, Collingwood) as he usurps their lexicon and recreates the form, giving these European ideas an American Modernist platform&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sidenote: I believe also that Stevens is indebted to William Faulkner in this respect (the 'is was' concept from As I Lay Dying; the entirety self-reflexive historiographical form of Absalom, Absalom), but have not as of yet found any biographical evidence of this. Must be a symptom of the shared American experience? Very interesting regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this answers your question!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5959" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T15:49:54.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9484" CreationDate="2019-03-08T18:58:48.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Hamlet_and_His_Problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet and His Problems&lt;/a&gt;’, collected in &lt;em&gt;The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (1920), Eliot describes &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; as an artistic failure because Hamlet’s emotions and actions cannot be fully explained as responses to the events of the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but […] his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot contrasts these inadequacies with cases in Shakespeare’s other plays where emotions &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be fully explained as responses to stimuli:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic ‘inevitability’ lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He builds this into an artistic theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective_correlative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;objective correlative&lt;/a&gt;”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We deduce that Eliot thinks &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; is “Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success” because it has ‘objective correlatives’ for the characters’ behaviour in every case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously we’re not obliged to accept this theory. We might reply that the gap between the stimulus of events and the character’s response requires the actor and the audience to construct hypotheses about the character’s mental state that would be capable of filling the gap; and that this need for psychological theorizing is one of the features that makes &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; more interesting than &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-08T18:58:48.667" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8786" CreationDate="2019-03-08T20:13:34.483" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem describes a reader who gets so caught up in their book that they start to forget the distinction between themselves and the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reader became the book; […]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The words were spoken as if there was no book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an experience that many fluent readers will recognize. In this context, the reader&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                wanted much most to be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The scholar to whom his book is true&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be “true to” something means to be “accurately representing” it (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), so if the book is true to the scholar, then it is accurately representing him, and by metonymy, his scholarship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the meaning of these lines is that the reader is thinking, “I wish I were the kind of person who could write a book like this.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-09T10:15:04.827" LastActivityDate="2019-03-09T10:15:04.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9510" CreationDate="2019-03-10T00:29:34.797" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The discrepancies can be reconciled if we allow the painter to flatter Mercédès, and Monte Cristo to lie about his age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chronology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;24 February 1815&lt;/strong&gt; — Edmond arrives at Marseilles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the 24th of February, 1815, the look-out at Notre-Dame de la Garde signalled the three-master, the Pharaon from Smyrna, Trieste, and Naples. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;28 February 1815&lt;/strong&gt; — Edmond is arrested:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“So long?—when were you arrested, then?” asked the inspector.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “The 28th of February, 1815, at half-past two in the afternoon.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0014&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 14&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are given the ages of Edmond:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was nineteen when he entered the Château d’If [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0021&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 21&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and also of Fernand and Mercédès, according to Caderousse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What else can a strapping chap of twenty-one mean with a fine wench of seventeen?” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;February 1816&lt;/strong&gt; — Edmond’s father dies, according to Caderousse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, yes, about a year after the disappearance of his son the poor old man died.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0026&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 26&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;August 1816&lt;/strong&gt; — Mercédès and Fernard are married, according to Caderousse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Fernand saw this, and when he learned of the old man’s death he returned. He was now a lieutenant. At his first coming he had not said a word of love to Mercedes; at the second he reminded her that he loved her. Mercedes begged for six months more in which to await and mourn for Edmond. […] Six months afterwards, the marriage took place in the church of Accoules.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0026&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 26&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;28 February 1829&lt;/strong&gt; — Edmond escapes the Château d’If:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I ask you what year is it?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “The year 1829,” returned Jacopo.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It was fourteen years, day for day, since Dantès’ arrest. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0021&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 21&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;January 1838&lt;/strong&gt; — Monte Cristo meets Albert and Franz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Towards the beginning of the year 1838, two young men belonging to the first society of Paris, the Viscount Albert de Morcerf and the Baron Franz d’Épinay, were at Florence. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0031&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 31&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;21 February 1838&lt;/strong&gt; — Monte Cristo arranges to visit Albert in Paris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he said, “to-day is the 21st of February;” and drawing out his watch, added, “it is exactly half-past ten o’clock. Now promise me to remember this, and expect me the 21st of May at the same hour in the forenoon.” [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0034&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 34&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;21 May 1838&lt;/strong&gt; — Monte Cristo visits Albert in Paris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the house in the Rue du Helder, where Albert had invited the Count of Monte Cristo, everything was being prepared on the morning of the 21st of May to do honor to the occasion. [&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0039&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 39&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Checking&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s go through the text quoted in the post and check against the chronology. Difficulties are in italics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 1&lt;/a&gt; (February 1815), Edmond is described as “eighteen or twenty”. According to the chronology he is nineteen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0002&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 2&lt;/a&gt; (February 1815), Edmond says, “imagine me a captain at twenty”. This is compatible with his being nineteen, if he is imagining being made captain later that year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0041&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 41&lt;/a&gt; (May 1838), Albert says the portrait was painted “six or eight years ago” which would be 1830 to 1832, when according to the chronology Mercédès was thirty-two to thirty-five years old. &lt;em&gt;But the portrait is “of a young woman of five or six-and-twenty”.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albert says his parents have been “married more than twenty years”. According to the chronology they have been married 21 years and 9 months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fernand is described as “a man of forty to forty-five years, but he seemed at least fifty”. According to the chronology he is forty-four or forty-five.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albert says that he is certain that Monte Cristo is “thirty-five”. &lt;em&gt;But according to the chronology he is forty-two or forty-three.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Resolution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two difficulties to resolve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The age of Mercédès in the portrait. This is easily resolved, since it is a painting, not a photograph. Presumably the painter (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_L%C3%A9opold_Robert&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis Léopold Robert&lt;/a&gt;) flattered the sitter.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The age of Monte Cristo. Again, this is easily resolved, since this is only Albert’s deduction from Monte Cristo’s mentions of his age at particular dates. We can guess that the Count has lied to Albert in order to make it harder for Mercédès to penetrate his disguise.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T10:39:24.190" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T10:39:24.190" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-10T20:21:11.837" Score="4" ViewCount="558" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble interpreting the significance of a specific stanza in T.S. Eliot's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                          Nothing again nothing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                                                       “Do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Nothing?”&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I remember&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Those are pearls that were his eyes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the &amp;quot;pearls that were his eyes&amp;quot; references &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, but I'm unsure of how that connects to the central message of the poem. In addition, I'm confused about the significance of the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5965" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T05:50:01.123" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T05:50:01.123" Title="In T.S. Eliot's &quot;The Waste Land&quot;, how do the wind and the &quot;pearls that were his eyes&quot; connect to the central message of the poem?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9513" CreationDate="2019-03-10T20:43:13.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Act V, scene 1 begins when Theseus and Hyppolita have heard the story of Demetrius, Helena, Lysander and Hermia. Hyppolita's words are a response to Theseus, who doesn't believe the story and compares the stories told by the lovers to the imaginings of madmen and poets (&quot;The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact&quot;, i.e. they all have the same imagination).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hyppolita's words can be paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But when the story of last night is told in full,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  and [we see that] the minds/imaginings of the four of them are all &quot;transformed&quot; in the same way,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  this testifies to more than just the creation of the imagination, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  and [what they say] grows to something more true or permanent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  albeit something strange and to be wondered at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few additional notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; [of great constancy]&quot; contrasts with &quot;airy &lt;em&gt;nothing&lt;/em&gt;&quot; in Theseus' words. (Chaudhuri)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;constancy&quot; does not only suggest &quot;something permanent and therefore true&quot; but also &quot;that the lovers' relationships have progressed beyond 'fancy' or casual attraction to firm love&quot;. (Chaudhuri)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;[T]he word 'constancy' also means 'fidelity' and refers to the newfound steadfastness of loved confirmed in marriage.&quot; (R. A. Foakes)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri. The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. Bloomsbury, 2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by R. A. Foakes. The Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1984.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Stanley Wells. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin, 1995.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-10T20:43:13.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9484" CreationDate="2019-03-10T21:47:46.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant essay is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Hamlet_and_His_Problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Hamlet and His Problems&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, written in 1919 and first published in the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood_(T._S._Eliot)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sacred Wood: : Essays on Poetry and Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1920. It has been reprinted in other collections, for example, &lt;em&gt;Selected Prose&lt;/em&gt;, edited by John Hayward (Penguin Books, 1953). In this collection the essay was simply entitled &amp;quot;Hamlet&amp;quot; and followed by a &amp;quot;Postscript&amp;quot; excerpted from &lt;em&gt;The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (1933).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot makes several points in this essay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the late eighteenth century, critics, especially if they were authors in their own right (e.g. Goethe and Coleridge), have often been fascinated by the play's leading character at the expence of looking at the play as a whole.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is superposed on older material, probably including a lost play by Thomas Kyd. Thomas Kyd is best remembered as the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which, like Shakespeare's Hamlet, includes elements such as revenge, a play-within-the-play and feigned madness. (Kyd's version of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is often referred to as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but Eliot does not use that phrase.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eliot maintains that in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; there is another motive that is more important than the revenge motive and that delays the revenge. Since we don't know what that other motive is, &amp;quot;the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency&amp;quot;. (Eliot does not comment on any specific scenes that are relevant to this delay, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.3.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act III, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;, where Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius, but refrains from doing so since killing him during prayer would send him to heaven instead of hell.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; contains a few &amp;quot;unexplained scenes&amp;quot;, such as the Polonius-Laertes scene (in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;) and the Polonius-Reynaldo scene (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act II, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;). (Eliot borrowed the last three points from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/problemofhamlet00robeuoft/page/n6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Problem of &amp;quot;Hamlet&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Mackinnon Robertson, published in 1919.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eliot concludes from this (emphasis mine)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that **Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the 'intractable' material of the old play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why he says that &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;the play is most certainly an artistic failure&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot goes on to say that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; belongs &amp;quot;to a period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; may not be as 'interesting' as &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, but it is, with &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &amp;quot;Postscript&amp;quot;, which John Hayward extracted from &lt;em&gt;The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (1933), Eliot says that his essay on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; had, by some, been interpreted as saying &amp;quot;that &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; is a greater play than &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. However, he points out that he is not interested in determining which Shakespeare play is greater than which other; instead, he is interested &amp;quot;in Shakespeare's work as a whole&amp;quot;. He also adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not think it any derogation to suggest that Shakespeare did not always succeed; such a suggestion would imply a very narrow view of success. His success must always be reckoned of what he attempted; and I believe that to admit his partial failures is to &lt;em&gt;approach&lt;/em&gt; the recognition of his real greatness more closely than to hold that he was always granted plenary inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:13:39.193" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:13:39.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9555" CreationDate="2019-03-10T22:15:19.767" Score="4" ViewCount="583" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9484/why-did-t-s-eliot-make-a-statement-that-coriolanus-was-shakespeares-masterpi#comment16308_9536&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9484/2191&quot;&gt;recent question about T. S. Eliot's essay on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Peter Shor wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Aristotle, in great tragedy the hero must have a fatal flaw that leads to his downfall. What Eliot failed to recognize was that Hamlet's fatal flaws were intellectualism and indecisiveness (maybe because he saw these as positive character traits). The delay in revenge has no simple, rational explanation, because it's Hamlet's fatal flaw. If there had been a good reason for him to delay his revenge, the ending wouldn't be Aristotelean tragedy but just bad luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assumes that the theories exposed in Aristotle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were &lt;em&gt;somehow&lt;/em&gt; relevant to Shakespeare's tragedies during the period in which they were written. However, as far as I know, Shakespeare did not consistently use a five-act division (the act and scene divisions we are used to seeing in modern editions are typically the work of later editors) and he disregarded the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three unities&lt;/a&gt; in all of his plays except (more or less) &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads me to the question whether Shakespeare would have known Aristotle's &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;. The first &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)#English_translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt; listed on Wikipedia is Thomas Twining's translation from 1789, i.e. long after Shakespeare. Did any other versions (perhaps a Latin translation?) circulate in England during Shakespeare's lifetime?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T04:49:29.710" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T04:49:29.710" Title="When did Aristotle's Poetics first become available in England?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;aristotle&gt;&lt;poetics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-11T10:50:36.910" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the following in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://charles-darwin.classic-literature.co.uk/the-life-and-letters-of-charles-darwin-volume-i/ebook-page-12.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A portrait from Mr. Carlyle's portfolio not regretted by any who loved the original, surely confers sufficient distinction to warrant a few words of notice, when the character it depicts is withdrawn from mortal gaze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many words are confusing (to me, at least); &quot;confer&quot;, &quot;distinction&quot;, &quot;warrant&quot; and &quot;mortal gaze&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does &quot;confer&quot; here mean &quot;grant&quot; or &quot;bestow&quot;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does &quot;distinction&quot; mean &quot;Excellence or eminence&quot;?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &quot;warrant&quot; and &quot;mortal gaze&quot; mean?  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the speaker mean that Carlyle praised Erasmus Darwin? or the opposite?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5472" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T12:53:54.560" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T12:53:54.560" Title="What exactly do these words from &quot;The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;julia-wedgwood&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9549" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9570" CreationDate="2019-03-11T12:25:23.870" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Avowals and Denials&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of articles by Chesterton first published in 1934. Is it possible to know when each individual article was first published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5967" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T12:52:40.853" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T17:08:10.913" Title="When was each article of Avowals and Denials written?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;essays&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9761" CreationDate="2019-03-11T16:38:03.513" Score="6" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't remember exactly when I read this, probably over 10 years ago, somewhere in the late 2000s. The protagonist is some sort of hired killer, who winds up being the target of a contract, leading to a variety of killers going after him. I don't remember the circumstances, whether he got targeted because he was retiring, because he'd come upon some sort of secret, or because he was just unlucky, but he gets wind that there's a price on his head, and tries to escape his house or apartment through a back window, maybe down a fire escape. That's when he encounters the first killer, who I think was Mafia, primarily known for his work with an ice-pick, putting it through the ear of the victim. They have a brief discussion (I think basically along the lines of the Mafia guy offering a relatively painless death if he just gave up) before he killed the guy and continued on the run. From there, it's all very hazy until the final killer he confronts. I believe he's in a church, and notices an older Latino woman with her cart of cleaning supplies, and he tries to protect her in the ensuing gun battle, only to find out that she is the final assassin, and this is part of how she gets close to her targets. He kills her and I think makes his way to his new life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting was fairly modern in the United States, maybe in the late 1980s to late 1990s, no futuristic weaponry, but at least at the level where concealable automatic weapons were available. I remember the cover as being dark, but I don't remember anything in the title. I'm pretty sure the protagonist was a Caucasian male, although I can't point to anything clear that indicates his ethnicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T14:47:04.493" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T14:47:04.493" Title="Novel about a contract killer being pursued by other killers - Started with an icepick guy and ended with a Latino woman disguised as a cleaning lady" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9545" CreationDate="2019-03-11T20:17:34.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; was available in translation, but there is no evidence that Shakespeare read it. However, it is likely that he was familiar with some of Aristotle’s ideas via secondary sources like Philip Sidney’s &lt;em&gt;The Defence of Poesie&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Possible misconceptions in the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question can be read as implying that observing (or not) the ‘five-act division’ of plays, and the ‘three unities’, would be evidence for having read Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; (or not). But this isn’t the case, because these dramatic rules do not come from Aristotle!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rule that a play should have five acts comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horace&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Neue minor neu sit quinto productior actu&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  fabula, quae posci uolt et spectanda reponi; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Let a play which would be inquired after, and though seen, represented anew, be neither shorter nor longer than the fifth act.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Horace, &lt;a href=&quot;https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Ars_poetica&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/em&gt; ll. 189–90&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by C. Smart &amp;amp; Theodore Alois Buckley (1863).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the ‘three unities’ (action, time and place) only the unity of action is expressed in the form of a rule in Aristotle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After these definitions we must next discuss the proper arrangement of the incidents since this is the first and most important thing in tragedy. We have laid it down that tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude, since a thing may be a whole and yet have no magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end. A beginning is that which is not a necessary consequent of anything else but after which something else exists or happens as a natural result. An end on the contrary is that which is inevitably or, as a rule, the natural result of something else but from which nothing else follows; a middle follows something else and something follows from it. Well constructed plots must not therefore begin and end at random, but must embody the formulae we have stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1450b&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; 1450b&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by W. H. Fyfe (1932).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other unities were developed by the dramatists of Italian Renaissance and written up as elucidations of Aristotle. They were put into the form of rules by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodovico_Castelvetro&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lodovico Castelvetro&lt;/a&gt; in his commentary on the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;la tragedia, la quale conviene avere per soggetto un’azzione avenuta in picciolo spazio di luogo e in picciolo spazio di tempo, cioè in quel luogo e in quel tempo dove e quando i rappresentatori dimorano occupati in operazione, e non altrove né in altro tempo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[tragedy ought to have for subject an action which happened in a very limited extent of place and in a very limited extent of time, that is, in that place and in that time, in which and for which the actors respresenting the action remain occupied in acting; and in no other place and in no other time.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lodovico Castelvetro (1570), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/264CastelvetroPoeticaDAristotele1Si071/page/n155&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by H. B. Chalton (1913). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924027093362/page/n103&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, p. 85&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Could&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare have read Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;French&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;English&lt;/strong&gt; translation? No. The first French translation was &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6246935z.texteImage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La poétique d'Aristote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1671) by ‘le sieur de Norville’, and the first English translation was the anonymous &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=lu9eAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aristotle’s Art of Poetry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1705), “Translated from the Original Greek, according to Mr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Goulston&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodore Goulston&lt;/a&gt;’s Edition, Together With Mr. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Dacier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;D’Acier&lt;/a&gt;’s Notes Translated from the French.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Latin&lt;/strong&gt;? Yes. There is strong evidence that Shakespeare was able to read Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we cannot question the competence of Shakespeare’s Latin, small as it may have been by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ben Jonson&lt;/a&gt;’s prodigious standards. Latin was the substance of the grammar-school curriculum; and within that curriculum, Ovid occupied a very special place […]. Shakespeare got a good enough education for him to be able to base his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Lucrece&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lucrece&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on a story in Ovid’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasti_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fasti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was not published in an English translation until well after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jonathan Bate (1993). &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare and Ovid&lt;/em&gt;, p. 13. Oxford: Clarendon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were Latin translations of the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_fYZUF0vUs3UC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aristotelis Poetica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Alessandro de’ Pazzi, published 1536. That these translations were of interest to Shakespeare’s contemporaries is demonstated by the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ben Jonson&lt;/a&gt; owned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Latin translation of the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; by the English scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Goulston&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodore Goulston&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David McPherson (1974). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173858&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ben Jonson’s Library and Marginalia: An Annotated Catalogue&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Studies in Philology&lt;/em&gt; 71:5, p. 26.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a parallel Latin–Greek edition, the one used as a basis for the anonymous 1705 English translation, but as it was published in 1623 it arrived too late for Jonson to have lent his copy to Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original &lt;strong&gt;Greek&lt;/strong&gt;? Probably not. In his epitaph ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44466/to-the-memory-of-my-beloved-the-author-mr-william-shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;’, Ben Jonson described Shakespeare as having “small Latin and less Greek”, and the scholarly consensus is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the possibility that Shakespeare read a Greek text of the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; is extremely remote. His formal studies extended only as far as grammar school in Stratford, and since he did not attend university, we have no clear evidence that he knew Greek. In what remains the most authoritative and comprehensive study of Shakespeare and the classics to date, T. W. Baldwin argues that Shakespeare probably studied some Greek at school. However, Baldwin acknowledges that this is likely to have been New Testament rather than classical Greek, and this would not have equipped Shakespeare to read Aristotle, or indeed, the texts of Greek drama, in the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sarah Dewar-Watson (2004). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.87.x&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare and Aristotle&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Literature Compass&lt;/em&gt; 1, p. 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;strong&gt;Italian&lt;/strong&gt; translation? Perhaps. There is some evidence that he could read Italian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best evidence that Shakespeare could read Italian, however, comes from the close adherence of his plays to his Italian sources. For some plays, those Italian sources had not been translated into any other language, and the only logical conclusion is that Shakespeare must have read the source in Italian. In other instances, although the Italian source had been translated into French or English, Shakespeare’s play is often closer to the Italian original than to the translations or adaptations of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Naseeb Shaheen (1994). ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of Italian’. &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Survey 47&lt;/em&gt;, p. 163–4. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is right, then he could have read the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; in the 1570 Italian translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodovico_Castelvetro&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lodovico Castelvetro&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;em&gt;Did&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare read Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to prove a negative. All we can say is that no-one has identified any passages in Shakespeare that are clearly derivative of Aristotle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is also widely agreed that Shakespeare never read the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;: there is no linguistic evidence to suggest that he did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dewar-Watson, p. 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What about secondary sources?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Shakespeare never read the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, that does not mean that he was unaware of Aristotelian and neo-Aristotelian ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it was long a favourite idea that Shakespeare was totally ignorant of the ‘rules.’ Yet this is quite incredible. The rules referred to, such as they were, were not buried in Aristotle’s Greek nor even hidden away in Italian treatises. He could find pretty well all of them in a book so current and famous as Sidney’s &lt;em&gt;Defence of Poetry&lt;/em&gt; [sic]. Even if we suppose that he refused to open this book (which is most unlikely), how could he possibly remain ignorant of the rules in a society of actors and dramatists and amateurs who must have been incessantly talking about plays and play-writing, and some of whom were ardent champions of the rules and full of contempt for the lawlessness of the popular drama?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;A. C. Bradley (1904). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16966/16966-h/16966-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakesperian Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sidney elucidates concepts from Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, and mentions the unities too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our tragedies and comedies not without cause cried out against, observing rules neither of honest civility nor of skilful poetry, excepting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorboduc_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gorboduc&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,—again I say of those that I have seen. Which notwithstanding as it is full of stately speeches and well-sounding phrases, climbing to the height of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seneca&lt;/a&gt;’s style, and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach, and so obtain the very end of poesy; yet in truth it is very defectious in the circumstances, which grieveth me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies. For it is &lt;strong&gt;faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions&lt;/strong&gt;. For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day; there is both many days and many places inartificially imagined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Philip Sidney (c. 1579). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Defense_of_Poesy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Defence of Poesie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are passages in Shakespeare that can be interpreted as apologies for rule-breaking, which implies that he was aware of the rules:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, the Chorus explicitly acknowledges the play’s breach of the Unity of Place: ‘Linger your patience on and well digest/Th’abuse of distance, and we’ll force our play’ (2.0.31–32). This reference suggests that Shakespeare’s failure to observe the Unities is part of a deliberate strategy, rather than a sign of his theoretical ignorance. This is echoed in &lt;em&gt;The Winter’s Tale&lt;/em&gt;, in which the figure of Time makes explicit reference to the play’s breach of the Unities (4.1.4–8):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Impute it not a crime&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To me or my swift passage that I slide&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Of that wide gap, since it is in my power&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To o’erthrow law &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dewar-Watson, p. 6.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T20:17:34.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9556" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9558" CreationDate="2019-03-11T20:29:39.587" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read the book &lt;em&gt;The Girl on the Train&lt;/em&gt; by Paula Hawkins. To be honest I did not like the storyline of the book. However, I found the way the story is told based on the different viewpoints of the main characters very interesting. Is there a name for this kind of style? Is it a common style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5968" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-03-11T20:33:45.377" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T20:55:24.247" Title="Books that are narrated using various points of view of the main characters" Tags="&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8969" CreationDate="2019-03-11T20:31:43.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first editions of Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; were published in 1604 (the &quot;A-Text&quot;) and 1616 (the &quot;B-text&quot;) and not between 1588 and 1593, as Peter Shor claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Harvey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gabriel Harvey's&lt;/a&gt; marginal notes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_Gasser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A. P. Gasser's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Historiarum&lt;/em&gt;, it is possible that &quot;Johannes Faustius&quot; (yes, Faustius, not Faustus)  was talked about in the halls of Cambridge University, where Marlowe also studied. The oldest &lt;em&gt;surviving&lt;/em&gt; book about Faust was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_von_D._Johann_Fausten_(chapbook)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historia von D. Johann Fausten, dem weitbescheyten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;History of Dr. Johann Faust, the Famous Magician and Necromancer&quot;), published in Frankfurt in 1587. Park Honan thinks that an older Latin tract about Faust may have circulated at Cambridge University, but that document is now lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German book was translated into English as &lt;em&gt;The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus&lt;/em&gt; by a certain P. F. The earliest &lt;em&gt;surviving&lt;/em&gt; edition is dated 1592, but its title page says it is &quot;newly printed&quot; and &quot;amended&quot;, so it may have been a reprint of an older edition published as early as 1587. Marlowe may have read that earlier edition, which is now lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; appears to have been &lt;strong&gt;completed by 1589&lt;/strong&gt;, since it was staged at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shalt.dmu.ac.uk/locations/bel-savage-inn-1575-94.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bel Savage&lt;/a&gt; around that time. There is also a popular sheet entitled &quot;A ballad of the life and deathe of Doctor Faustus the great Cunngerer&quot;, registered on 28 February 1589.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How much of that original play text survived into the editions of 1604 and 1616 is still a matter of debate. Both versions include lines that cannot be Marlowe's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; was probably &lt;strong&gt;written between 1587 and early 1589&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;first published in 1604&lt;/strong&gt;, just over a decade after the author's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Park Honan: &lt;em&gt;Christopher Marlowe: Poet &amp;amp; Spy&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 2005, pages 198-200.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T20:31:43.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9556" CreationDate="2019-03-11T20:55:24.247" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called many things, but the most common terms seem to be multiperspectivity (what Wikipedia uses), alternate point of view, multiple narrative, and switching point of view. Multiperspectivity, however, seems to be a bit of a broader term - it refers to more than just literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem to be a fairly common style (at least now) - I know Rick Riordan uses it in his books rather obviously (first person POV for different people in each chapter), but it also appears in, e.g., &lt;em&gt;The Color Purple&lt;/em&gt; with the inclusion of letters from another character to the main character that are repeated verbatim in the text of the book. &lt;em&gt;Wonder&lt;/em&gt; by R.J. Palaccio uses it, where there are four parts, and each part is narrated by a different character. (I'm thinking about this more and more, and a lot of new YA books seem to use multiple narrative, actually.) &lt;em&gt;As I Lay Dying&lt;/em&gt; by Faulkner famously uses it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea has actually been around for awhile, with some of the oldest novels in the english language epistolary novels - i.e., novels made up of letters between different characters showing their different viewpoints. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-03-11T20:55:24.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9559" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-11T21:27:27.703" Score="4" ViewCount="818" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his most famous essay, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Traditional and the Individual Talent&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, T. S. Eliot appears to make a distinction between emotions and feelings. Read especially the following passage (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of &lt;strong&gt;two kinds: emotions and feelings&lt;/strong&gt;. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one &lt;strong&gt;emotion&lt;/strong&gt;, or may be a combination of several; and various &lt;strong&gt;feelings&lt;/strong&gt;, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made &lt;strong&gt;without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &quot;emotion&quot; and &quot;feeling&quot; are often used as synonyms. See for example the following definitions from Collins (online):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/emotion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;emotion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An emotion is a feeling such as happiness, love, fear, anger, or hatred, which can be caused by the situation that you are in or the people you are with.&lt;br /&gt;Synonyms: feeling, spirit, soul, passion  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/feeling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feeling&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A feeling is an emotion, such as anger or happiness. &lt;br /&gt;Synonyms: emotion, sentiment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not help one better understand what Eliot exactly means. What is the specific distinction between emotion and feeling that T. S. Eliot is talking about? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB: I have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8426/2191&quot;&gt;similar question about the Preface to &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; where Gareth Rees suggested that in Wordsworth's case, this may be just &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elegant variation&lt;/a&gt;. In Eliot's essay, this does not seem to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T09:00:27.993" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T09:00:27.993" Title="What is the difference between emotions and feelings in Eliot's essay Tradition and the Individual Talent?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;essays&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-11T22:24:30.727" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember that the edition of &lt;em&gt;The Magic Mountain&lt;/em&gt; I read around 7 or 8 years ago contained an introduction that was written by Mann and inspired by a lecture he gave about his book. I remember it saying something along the lines that &amp;quot;writing the introduction in English makes it easier, just like how in the book Castorp's love was easier to confess in French, a language which is not his native one&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find that introduction again, but I cannot find it online and I'm not sure which edition(s) of the book have it, to make things worse I might be misremembering the details. So to make this into an explicit question: which edition(s) of the magic mountain have an introduction written by Mann? Is that introduction also available online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5972" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:26:27.700" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T11:08:10.500" Title="Mann's introduction to The Magic Mountain?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-mann&gt;&lt;the-magic-mountain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9501" CreationDate="2019-03-12T11:18:41.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wharton is correct if you locate the “first acts” and the “dramatic climax” in the same places as she does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question interprets “first acts of the tragedy” as “first in the text”, that is, those at the beginning of chapter I, in the ‘present’ of the novel. But Wharton means “first in historical sequence”, that is, the earliest actions in the flashback, the actions that are the cause of the tragedy. Similarly, the question says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The remainder of the novel is an account of Ethan’s life prior to the aforementioned “smash-up”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this isn’t quite right. There is another section set in the ‘present’ of the novel, forming the last few pages of chapter IX (it starts, “The querulous drone ceased as I entered Frome’s kitchen”). It’s this section, and not the sled crash, that Wharton is describing as the “dramatic climax, or rather the anti-climax” of &lt;em&gt;Ethan Frome&lt;/em&gt;, and indeed it occurs “a generation later” than the “first acts” in the flashback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T11:26:38.867" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T11:26:38.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9542" CreationDate="2019-03-12T16:01:15.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second part (“A Game of Chess”) of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is a sequence of episodes in different styles, all concerned with seduction. (The title alludes to Thomas Middleton’s play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Game_at_Chess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Game at Chess&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in which the game of chess is used as an extended metaphor for seduction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The extract in the question belongs to the second of these episodes, which begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      “What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “I never know what you are thinking. Think.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    I think we are in rats’ alley&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where the dead men lost their bones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “What is that noise?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                                  The wind under the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This episode is in the form of a conversation between two people, whom I will call ‘A’ and ‘B’. A’s dialogue is in quotation marks, while B’s is unmarked, and it seems that some of the latter consists of private thoughts rather than spoken words, for A repeatedly interrogates B without seeming to get a response: “Why do you never speak … What are you thinking of?” (This kind of interrogation is also suggestive of a row between lovers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaker A complains of “nerves”, meaning “disordered or heightened sensitivity; anxiety, fearfulness, tension, nervousness” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) and implores B to “stay with me”. Initially we might think that the “nerves” are merely a pretext for A to seduce B, but then A seems really to be fearful about the noise of “the wind under the door”. Perhaps A and B are engaged in an adulterous liaison, and A is alarmed by the least noise, in case it is their spouse returning unexpectedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “rat’s alley” and “pearls” lines are B’s unspoken thoughts about death. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charnel_house&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;charnel-house&lt;/a&gt; rats re-appear in part III of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;White bodies naked on the low damp ground&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And bones cast in a little low dry garret,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while the “pearls” allude to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel%27s_Song&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ariel’s song from &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in which he tells Ferdinand that his father is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why should B be thinking about death instead of sex? Well, this is the theme of the poem: in the aftermath of the Great War, society is the ‘Waste Land’ of the title, a land rendered sterile like the realm of the legendary &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fisher King&lt;/a&gt;, in which death, dust, dry bones, and meaninglessness intrude everywhere, even between lovers. (Eliot may also be employing the Freudian idea of the “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_drive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;death drive&lt;/a&gt;”, the idea that a psychological drive towards death and destruction complements the drive towards sex and procreation. We know that Eliot was familiar with Freudian theory from his critical works, for example his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Wood/Hamlet_and_His_Problems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; discusses the interpretation of the play in terms of Freud’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oedipus complex&lt;/a&gt;’.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the dialogue, the lines have two interpretations, a literal one with respect to the A–B conversation, and a metaphorical one with respect to the theme of the poem. For example, in the conversation, the “wind under the door” is the literal wind, the noise of which A worries might be their returning spouse, and which B tries to soothe away with the reply “Nothing again nothing”. But looking at Eliot’s own notes to the poem (&lt;a href=&quot;https://wasteland.windingway.org/poem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; has an excellent presentation of them), we find that “the wind under the door” is an allusion to John Webster’s play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil%27s_Law_Case&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Devil’s Law Case&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in which two surgeons wonder whether Contarino, who has been stabbed, is dead or alive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Con. Oh!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First Sur. Did he not groan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second Sur. Is the wind in that door still?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Webster (1623). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksjohnwebste02dycegoog/page/n74&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Devil’s Law Case&lt;/em&gt;, Act III Scene II&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here “the wind” is Contarino’s breath and “that door” is his mouth, so in the thematic interpretation, the “wind under the door” is the breath of life, which has become “Nothing again nothing” in the ‘Waste Land’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the lines “Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?” are, in the literal interpretation, a sordid row resulting from the failure of the speaker’s attempts at seeking intimacy in the thoughts of their lover; but in the thematic interpretation they are a set of rhetorical questions implying that modern people (like the reader of the poem) are “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hollow men&lt;/a&gt;”, that is, spiritually empty and ignorant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-12T22:00:54.283" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T22:00:54.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-12T19:45:42.663" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Through serendipity (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3929/2191&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about Ian Watt&lt;/a&gt;) I found that that the Russian literary theorist Mikhael Bakhtin is supposed to have written that certain genres with flat plots and characters &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;can literally be read front to back, or back to front, with no significant difference in effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the wording is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Watt#Literary_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (or from Ian Watt?): it is not in quotation marks and no source is given. The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mikhail Bakhtin&lt;/a&gt; does not mention this statement. So which of Bakhtin's publications is the source of this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-12T19:45:42.663" Title="Bakhtin quote about flat plots and characters" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;mikhail-bakhtin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-13T04:15:07.330" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main character is a young woman (late teens? early 20s?) She's in Paris with an (aunt?) and they're discussing what to do since her father has suddenly died. If they return to England, her brother will claim the family estate and sell it for gambling debts.  The only way she can see to prevent this is for her to marry someone, anyone, as soon as possible.  Before her brother learns of their father's death.  Does this sound familiar to anyone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was written in English, maybe in the 1990s or 2000s. As best I can remember, if she married, her husband would then have the rights to the property. This was an era when women could not own property themselves, after all. Evidently she felt she could influence a husband to retain control. Where if she did nothing and let the inheritance pass to her brother, who cared nothing for the estate, he would sell it to pay gambling debts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5980" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T15:05:38.780" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T16:00:11.047" Title="Identifying book set in 18th or 19th century France and England" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6821" CreationDate="2019-03-13T08:21:25.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think, just as you said, the book's very title is a reference to Caliban, suggesting that he should be central to the story. I agree. Caliban in the context of colonialism represents the undesired member of that society - much the same as prisoners in today's society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Tempest, Caliban is taught English and his feedback to it, in the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When thou didst not, savage, know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like a thing most brutish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this quote, Miranda uses the metaphor of gabble to describe Caliban's own language, which represents colonial ignorance to the native way of life. The similarity between Hagseed and the Tempest in this regard is that in both texts, these members of society are taught English literature -- offered part of the English way of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hagseed, the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The performances were a little rough, maybe, but they were heartfelt. Felix wished he could have squeezed half that much emotion out of his professionals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atwood utilises juxtaposition, between &quot;rough&quot; - what the initial reaction is, from his perspective of a theatre director trained in Shakespeare, and &quot;heartfelt&quot; - what the prisoners brought to the table. Felix is able to understand both the frame from which his initial reaction is coming from and understand the merit that comes from the frame different to his (the prisoners). The freedom from the imprisonment that these undesired members of society are in, is through the understanding of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hagseed, the text is centered around the evolving dynamic between felix and the inmates, while in the Tempest, Caliban and Prospero, each has their own story, that neither understands of the other and neither story comes together harmoniously. So, in conclusion, Caliban is represented in Hagseed by all of the inmates - both of these character/groups being treated differently in each text and consequently experiencing different levels of freedom as a reflection of cultural values and contexts of each time period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5981" LastEditorUserId="225" LastEditDate="2019-03-13T11:30:09.780" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T11:30:09.780" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9570" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9549" CreationDate="2019-03-13T15:40:44.270" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, this is straightforward (if somewhat tedious). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/vowalsanddenials012186mbp/page/n7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Avowals and Denials&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; begins with a note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The essays of which this book is composed are reprinted, often with slight alterations, from the &lt;em&gt;Illustrated London News&lt;/em&gt;, by kind permission of the proprietors of that paper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original dates can thus be found using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/titles/illustrated-london-news&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Newspaper Archive&lt;/a&gt;. This would normally require a subscription, but since you don’t actually need to see the contents of the articles (only their dates, which are shown to non-subscribers) you should be able to find them by searching for distinctive phrases found in the articles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, ‘On Monsters and Logic’ ends with the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But a man might as well say that millers and cats and princesses are fabulous animals, because they appear side by side with goblins and mermaids in the stories of the nursery. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you search the BNA for the phrase ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/search/results?basicsearch=goblins%20and%20mermaids&amp;amp;exactsearch=true&amp;amp;retrievecountrycounts=false&amp;amp;newspapertitle=illustrated%20london%20news&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;goblins and mermaids&lt;/a&gt;’ (remembering to tick the ‘Exact search’ box), then there is just one result, for Saturday 6th January 1934.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T15:40:44.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9549" CreationDate="2019-03-13T17:08:10.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;For completeness, I leave here the straightforward and tedious search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monsters and logic  6 january 1934&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Christmas that is coming  23 December 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the man on the spot  26 August 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Shaw and his back girl  31 December 1932&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the atheist museum  19 November 1932&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the new prudery  11 March 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the return of the barbarian  5 August 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On women who vote  13 May 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the fallacy of eugenics  9 December 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the classicism of the terror  6 May 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the return to the land  12 August 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On dialect and decency  16 December 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On man: heir of all the ages  7 January 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the real animal 1 July 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On dogs with bad names  26 November 1932&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the prison of Jazz 19 April 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the deceptibility of youth  20 January 1934&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Duke of Marlborough 28 October 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Crank and the Cad 14 January 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Dreams 4 February 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Fossil of a Fanatic 10 February 1934&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Blake and his Critics 21 October 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Instability of the State 17 June 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On a Melodrama 11 February 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the One-Party System 27 January 1934&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On books for pessimists 18 February 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the science of sociology 15 April 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Letter-Bag Novel 8 April 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Touchy Realist 4 March 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Wordsworth 30 December 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Facing Facts 29 April 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Free Verse 18 March 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Eric Gill 10 June 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On Prussian Paganism 23 September 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Great Relapse 25 March 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On the Next Hundred Years 22 July 1933&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5967" LastActivityDate="2019-03-13T17:08:10.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-13T17:58:37.990" Score="3" ViewCount="338" Body="&lt;p&gt;Am I correct to assume there is a feud between academics considering Shakespeare's social origins? I understand that he was probably born as a member of the working classes (or even the Elizabethan underclass), but his skill might suggest something equivalent to what is portrayed in the film Anonymous, where Shakespeare was a noble who wrote under the name of a commoner. What is the state of this debate? What sources could I read that summarize it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5984" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T18:16:41.103" Title="Was Shakespeare a member of the lower classes?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3147" CreationDate="2019-03-14T08:27:25.413" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of this passage is that the narrator Xeones is a soldier in the army of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sparta&lt;/a&gt; who was severely wounded at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of Thermopylae&lt;/a&gt; in 480 BCE and who believes that he died and was brought back to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that I read the passage is that Xeones is describing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-death_experience&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;near-death experience&lt;/a&gt; through the lens of his religious beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had reached the river now. We could hear with ears that were no longer ears and see with eyes that were no longer eyes the stream of Lethe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The river &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lethe&lt;/a&gt; is one of the rivers of the underworld in Greek and Roman mythology. Xeones believes that he, and the other soldiers killed in the battle, became spirits or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shade_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shades&lt;/a&gt;, and therefore, if they were seeing and hearing, it was no longer with their bodily eyes and ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and hosts of long-suffering dead whose round beneath the earth was at last drawing to a close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some ancient Greeks believed that souls are immortal and, after spending a period of time in the underworld, are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metempsychosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reincarnated&lt;/a&gt; into new bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were returning to life, drinking of those waters which would efface all memory of their existence here as shades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Lethe’ means ‘oblivion; forgetfulness’, and in some accounts, the shades of the dead are obliged to drink from this river before being reincarnated, to erase their memory of their time in the underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reincarnation of souls and the river of forgetfulness do not appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesiod&lt;/a&gt;, and must have been introduced to Greek religion some time after the 7th century BCE. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herodotus&lt;/a&gt;, writing in the mid-5th century, says that the doctrine of reincarnation was imported from Egypt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Egyptians say that Demeter and Dionysos are rulers of the world below; and the Egyptians are also the first who reported the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body dies, the soul enters into another creature which chances then to be coming to the birth, and when it has gone the round of all the creatures of land and sea and of the air, it enters again into a human body as it comes to the birth; and that it makes this round in a period of three thousand years. This doctrine certain Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were of their own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain from recording them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Herodotus (440 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_History_of_Herodotus_(Macaulay)/Book_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Histories&lt;/em&gt; 2.123&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by G. C. Macaulay (1890).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest mention of a river of forgetfulness, and the most complete account of the doctrine of reincarnation, is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato&lt;/a&gt;’s telling of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_Er&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;myth of Er, son of Armenius&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the souls […] marched on in a scorching heat to the plain of Forgetfulness [Lethe], which was a barren waste destitute of trees and verdure; and then towards evening they encamped by the river of Unmindfulness [Ameleta], whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting. He himself [Er] was hindered from drinking the water. But in what manner or by what means he returned to the body he could not say; only, in the morning, awaking suddenly, he found himself lying on the pyre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness [Lethe] and our soul will not be defiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Plato (c. 380 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Republic/Book_X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Republic&lt;/em&gt; X&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Benjamin Jowett (1888).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A group of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totenpass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;golden funerary tablets&lt;/a&gt; from the 4th century BCE, thought to be associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphism_(religion)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orphic religion&lt;/a&gt;, contain instructions for the deceased, describing two pools or springs in the underworld, one for forgetfulness, and one for memory. Richard Janko reconstructed the archetype as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will find on the right in Hades’ halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives. Do not even draw nigh this spring. Further on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Memory&lt;/a&gt;: over this stand guardians. They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of (?)deadly Hades. They will ask you for what reason you have come. Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves. I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.” Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory. After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Janko (1984). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838800029323&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forgetfulness in the Golden Tablets of Memory&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Classical Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 34:1, p. 99.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Anachronism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Xeones’ description of the underworld is anachronistic for 480 BCE. At that time, the doctrine of reincarnation was a preserve of the mystery cults, and not a feature of general Greek religion. If Xeones had been initiated into the Orphic or Pythagorean mysteries, then this would have had to show up somewhere in the novel, and there’s nothing like that there. However, it’s the prerogative of a historical novelist to extrapolate beyond the evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T08:27:25.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9572" CreationDate="2019-03-14T18:16:41.103" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of official and legal documents concerning William Shakespeare's parents, especially his father John. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The oldest document dates from 29 April 1552. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeares-midden-heap-stratford-court-leet-view-frankpledge-taken&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare's Midden Heap: Stratford Court Leet, view of frankpledge taken at Stratford-upon-Avon&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented. John Shakespeare was one of three people in Stratford who were fined for allowing a midden heap to accumulate in Henley Street. Alan H. Nelson writes that, &quot;Virtually all residents of Stratford incurred occasional fines for similar offenses.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeare-identified-glover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare identified as a glover&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a court document dated 17 June 1556 that identifies John Shakespeare as a glover in &quot;Stretforde&quot;. There are various other documents that identify him as a glover (in 1575, 1579, 1580 and 1597). So there is no reason to doubt that he actually &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; a glover. The article points out that &quot;evidence from at least 1572 establishes that he was clearly involved in wide-scale wool-dealing, an ancillary but highly profitable activity pursued by many glovers.&quot; Whatever &quot;lower classes&quot; means, John Shakespeare wasn't poor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/presentment-stratford-upon-avon-s-court-leet-john-shakespeare-had-bought-house&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Presentment at Stratford-upon-Avon’s court leet that John Shakespeare had bought a house in Greenhill Street from George Turner and a house in Henley Street that became part of the Birthplace from Edward West&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a court document dated 2 October 1556 that registers two purchases by John Shakespeare. The first is the purchase of a tenement (with a garden and a small enclosed piece of land) in Greenhill Street; the second is the purchase of a house and garden in Henley Street. More evidence that John Shakespeare wasn't poor in those days.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeare-fined-stratford-s-court-record-his-failure-attend-last-three&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare is fined in Stratford’s court of record for his failure to attend the last three sittings of the court in his capacity as taster&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a document dated 2 June 1557. The fine mentioned in the document implies that John Shakespeare had been chosen as one of the tasters, a type of officials, &quot;whose principal duty was to ensure that bread and ale were sold at the official weights, volumes and prices as defined by statute – the assize of bread and ale – and to present at the local court those who had infringed the regulations.&quot; This is a type of local government position.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeare-elected-constable-recorded-stratford-upon-avon-s-manorial-court&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare elected as constable, as recorded at Stratford-upon-Avon’s manorial court&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a document dated 30 September 1558 - proceedings of the manorial court. Robert Bearman writes, &quot;John Shakespeare’s service as constable indicates that he had become part of a body of well-to-do business men  involved in the town’s governance.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeare-one-four-affeerors-attests-level-fines-imposed-manorial-court&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare, as one of four affeerors, attests to the level of fines imposed at the manorial court&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a document dated 4 May 1561. Robert Bearman explains that an affeeror was &quot;an official appointed to monitor the level of fines imposed at Stratford’s manorial court&quot;. John Shakespeare had previously acted in this capacity in 1559.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/account-john-taylor-and-john-shakespeare-chamberlains-stratford-upon-avon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The account of John Taylor and John Shakespeare, chamberlains of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation for the year Michaelmas 1561 to Michaelmas 1562&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a document dated 24 January 1563. John Shakespeare had been elected as one of the two chamberlains of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation; their job was to keep the Corporation accounts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/parish-register-entry-recording-william-shakespeares-baptism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parish register entry recording William Shakespeare's baptism&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a page from the parish registry of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The parish registry entry recording &lt;strong&gt;William Shakespeare's baptism on 26 April 1564&lt;/strong&gt; is the earliest reference to his existence. The entry reads, &quot;Guilielmus filius Johannes Shakspere&quot;, i.e. &quot;William, son of John Shakespeare&quot;. Note that this date, as all dates mentioned here, is based on the Julian Calendar, since England did not switch over to the Gregorian Calendar until the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.adsb.co.uk/date_and_time/calendar_reform_1752/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calendar Reform of 1752&lt;/a&gt;. (Late April in 1564 seems to correspond to early May on the Gregorian Calendar, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Book_Day#Date_selection&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Book Day&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/record-meeting-stratford-upon-avon-corporation-when-john-shakespeare-was-elected&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Record of a meeting of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation when John Shakespeare was elected an alderman&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a page dated 4 July 1565 in the minute books of the council. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/john-shakespeare-threat-distraint-his-goods-ordered-appear-next-session&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare, on threat of distraint of his goods, is ordered to appear at the next session of Stratford’s court of record, as surety for Richard Hathaway&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a &quot;charge of detinue&quot; dated 11 September 1566.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/precept-issued-john-shakespeare-justice-peace-arrest-richard-walker-and-bring&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Precept issued by John Shakespeare, justice of the peace, to arrest Richard Walker and bring him before the next sitting of the court of record to answer to a plea brought against him&lt;/a&gt;, dated 9 December 1568, on the website Shakespeare Documented.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/meeting-stratford-upon-avon-corporation-which-john-shakespeare-was-elected&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meeting of the Stratford-upon-Avon Corporation at which John Shakespeare was elected bailiff&lt;/a&gt; on the website Shakespeare Documented shows a page dated 4 September 1568 in the minute books of the Stratford Corporation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are many other documents mentioning John Shakespeare, e.g. an &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/exchequer-informations-and-proceedings-against-john-shakespeare-usury-accused&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;accusation for usury&lt;/a&gt; (1570), his &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/meeting-stratford-upon-avon-corporation-which-officers-following-year-were&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;election as chief alderman&lt;/a&gt; on 5 September 1571, &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/exchequer-informations-against-john-shakespeare-illegal-purchases-wool-1572-14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;exchequer information about illegal purchases of wool&lt;/a&gt; in 1572, a document showing that &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/meeting-stratford-upon-avon-corporation-which-john-shakespeare-excused-weekly&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare was &quot;exempted from the obligation to pay a weekly sum for the relief of the poor&quot;&lt;/a&gt; dated 19 November 1578 (which, combined with other documents, suggests that he may have had financial difficulties), etcetera. In September 1586, &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/meeting-stratford-upon-avon-corporation-which-john-shakespeare-and-john-wheeler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare was removed from the office of alderman&lt;/a&gt;. Expulsions were rare, but John Shakespeare seems to have missed many meetings. A document dated 1 March 1587 shows that &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/proceedings-local-court-record-action-brought-nicholas-lane-against-john-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare had incurred a large debt of £22 after standing surety for his brother&lt;/a&gt;. In 1590, &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/exchequer-survey-manor-stratford-showing-john-shakespeare-holding-two-properties&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare still held two properties in Henley Street&lt;/a&gt;, so the financial difficulties mentioned above don't imply he was poor. Then again, in 1592 it appeared that &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/second-certificate-commissioners-warwickshire-showing-john-shakespeare-failing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Shakespeare had failed to attend church &quot;for feare of processe for debtte&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you define &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class#Lower_class&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lower class&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as &quot;employed in low-paying wage jobs with very little economic security&quot; and include poor farmers, then William Shakespeare's father didn't belong to the lower classes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a relatively large number of official documents that mentions &lt;strong&gt;William Shakespeare&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. his &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/entry-bishops-register-concerning-marriage-william-shakespeare-and-anne-hathaway&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;marriage licence&lt;/a&gt; from 27 November 1582, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/shakespeare-marriage-bond&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;marriage bond&lt;/a&gt; from the following day, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/langley-writ-court-kings-bench-writ-attachment-against-william-shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Langley Writ from November 1596&lt;/a&gt;, showing that he had changed his residence in London, and a number of documents about purchases of real estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also two drafts of an application for a grant of arms to John Shakespeare (both dated 20 October 1596: &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/grant-arms-john-shakespeare-draft-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first draft&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/grant-arms-john-shakespeare-draft-2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second draft&lt;/a&gt;). According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/grant-arms-john-shakespeare-draft-1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article about the first draft&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The granting of a coat of arms to John Shakespeare would have bestowed an outward show of “gentility” on all of his descendents. In the complicated social hierarchies of early modern England, a coat of arms did not establish gentility, but merely confirmed it. This was a great social step upwards, and one to which, it has been shown, many actors aspired. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(William's name isn't mentioned in these drafts, but it is assumed that he commissioned these drafts on behalf of his father.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of Robert Arden, who owned a farm in Wilmcote. The blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://theshakespeareblog.com/2015/02/michael-wood-and-mary-arden-a-tudor-life/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Wood and “Mary Arden: a Tudor Life”&lt;/a&gt; (2 February 2015) quotes Professor Christopher Dyer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We know that Robert Arden, Mary Arden’s father, was already a person of some substance when he paid 6s 8d to join the Stratford Guild in 1517.&quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  [In 1538] &quot;Robert was playing a prominent role in the religious fraternity at Aston Cantlow, which would suggest an important person in village society.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blog post also mentions Robert Arden's will:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We know quite a lot about Robert Arden’s finances because he made a will, and the inventory of his goods survives. Mary was named as his executrix. It shows him to be relatively affluent, as well as showing how his house was furnished. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this also shows that Mary Arden wasn't lower class in the sense cited above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that William Shakespeare belonged to the nobility. The theory that the works attributed to William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford, was written by someone else is known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Shakespeare authorship question&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_authorship_candidates&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of Shakespeare authorship candidates&lt;/a&gt; currently lists &lt;strong&gt;87 candidates&lt;/strong&gt;, one more far-fetched than the other. Mainstream Shakespeare scholarship doesn't accept these theories. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(2011_film)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anonymous&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2011) proposes a version of the theory that Shakespeare plays were written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_de_Vere,_17th_Earl_of_Oxford&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford&lt;/a&gt; (1550 - 1604). Some inconvenient facts related to his candidacy include his death in 1604 (some eight to ten years before Shakespeare's last plays were written) and the fact that his surviving poems don't come close to the level of Shakespeare's poetry. One of the arguments for this &quot;Oxfordian theory&quot; is that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he didn't have sufficient knowledge of court life, unlike Edward de Vere. The film contains many factual errors and prompted a reaction from a number of Shakespeare scholars. See for example the YuoTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfJ45tT6pV0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Anonymous' - Prof Carol Rutter &amp;amp; Prof Stanley Wells discuss the Shakespeare authorship question&lt;/a&gt; (posted by the University of Warwick in November 2011; 25 minutes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word of warning to those who want to read about Edward de Vere: most biographies currently on the market were written by supporters of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxfordian_theory_of_Shakespeare_authorship&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship&lt;/a&gt;. For a biography that wasn't written by an &quot;Oxfordian&quot;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/isbn/9780853236887/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Alan H. Nelson, Liverpool University Press, 2003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T18:16:41.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2019-03-14T18:54:03.253" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the reference to Vegas is not literal. Vegas is known as Sin City,  so he is saying he is not a sinful (gambling) man, but returns to his sinful ways with a handle in his hand.  Possibly a &quot;broom handle&quot; which is a nickname for a type of hand gun, or just the handle of a gun period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5989" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-14T19:23:55.437" LastActivityDate="2019-03-14T19:23:55.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9577" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16575" CreationDate="2019-03-15T16:38:37.403" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Years ago I came across a marvelous book that was just published in Russian. The book was full of humor as well as deep observations about human nature and politics. The book quickly became quite famous among Russian speakers; people would often quote the sharpest quips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since 2016-ish American politics transformed in such a way that one can clearly see that the book's political innuendos apply very strongly to today's United States. So I decided to get an English translation of the book for my friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I purchased the English translation and decided to read it before handing it to friends. Alas, the translation completely butchers the original! For example, one of the words that was key to the book's story could have been translated into English in two different ways, with only one translation carrying the intended meaning; the translator chose the wrong one. If I would give the translation to an English speaker he wouldn't be able to appreciate the story solely because of the poor translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we have here a marvelous book in a foreign language that is relevant to today's Americans and an existing poor English translation. Is it possible to improve the situation, to have the book translated again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5988" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:29:23.493" Title="How does one go about translating into English a foreign language book that has been poorly translated before?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9586" CreationDate="2019-03-15T17:21:45.387" Score="1" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Resistance's goal is not to wound or disable. Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique and priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Steven Pressfield, from &lt;em&gt;The War of Art&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, what it meant when the author said &quot;priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us&quot;, what is it that he meant by &quot;give&quot;, give what exactly? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5992" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T17:37:24.470" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T21:34:20.253" Title="What did Steven Pressfield mean by &quot;give&quot; in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;steven-pressfield&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9579" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9581" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:35:22.630" Score="6" ViewCount="774" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alexander Pope's '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Essay on Criticism&lt;/a&gt;', lines 337–349:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But most by Numbers judge a Poet's Song,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the bright Muse tho' thousand Charms conspire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  These Equal Syllables alone require,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels tire,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;While Expletives their feeble Aid do join&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the line in bold. Can you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-15T20:48:16.837" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T01:26:52.640" Title="What did Alexander Pope mean by &quot;Expletives their feeble Aid do join&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alexander-pope&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2019-03-15T20:59:26.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pope is talking about how most people just care about how a poem sounds (&quot;Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear&quot;) and not what it actually says (&quot;Not mend their minds&quot;). In particular he notes how &quot;ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line, / While they ring round the same unvary'd Chimes&quot; - that is, how the sound of the poem (&quot;Chimes&quot;) is &quot;unvary'd&quot; from other works of literature, and uses the &quot;expected Rhymes&quot;. One particular example he gives are the &quot;Expletives&quot; (which are exclamations, especially 'cuss' words) who give their &quot;feeble Aid&quot; to both the tiring &quot;oft the Ear&quot; and the sound of the poem that Pope is so focused on here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I stand corrected on the point that the term 'expletives' actually used to mean a sort of 'place-filler', as noted in the excellent answer by Gareth Rees; however the general point still stands, that these extra words are tiring &quot;oft the Ear&quot; and don't actually add substance (&quot;Not mend their minds&quot;) - the poem is a general decrying of the state of poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T01:26:52.640" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T01:26:52.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9579" CreationDate="2019-03-15T21:03:38.407" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pope is using the word ‘expletive’ in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A word or phrase that fills out a sentence or metrical line without adding anything to the sense; a word or phrase serving as a grammatical place-filler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. ‘Expletive’, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; sense B.1.a.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This sense later evolved into the modern sense of the word, “an emphatic exclamation with which a person fills his or her speech; (hence) an oath, curse, or swear word, a profanity.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example of such an expletive is the word ‘do’ in this very line, which has no function other than filling a gap in the rhythm. Pope of course put this here deliberately in order to illustrate the problem (just as in the next line, which complains about the monotony of ‘ten low words’ in a line, there are ten single-syllable words).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage Pope is accusing ‘most’ critics of judging poetry by counting the number of syllables in each line, without regard to other qualities of verse. These critics don’t care &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; the poet filled the line, so long as he was able to count to ten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-15T21:03:38.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9584" CreationDate="2019-03-15T22:22:37.467" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I remember watching this television play probably adopted from a more famous original opus about a Nazi-occupied village somewhere in Europe (I don't recall where exactly, but perhaps the story took place somewhere in Norway.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, the Nazis dismissed the idea that the &quot;simple-minded&quot; villagers might pose any viable threat to their forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as one can guess, in the next acts, the villagers gradually came to know their ways around and began sabotaging the Nazis' supply lines, and even killing them in an organized fashion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, as far as I can remember, was that when it comes to survival, the usually dormant killing instincts can turn every human being to the predator he or she is meant to be...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone recognize what play this may be? Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5993" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:55:49.050" Title="Name of Play about a Nazi-occupied (Nordic?) Village Population of Which Underestimated by Occupiers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16672" CreationDate="2019-03-16T04:57:58.000" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Shyam Saran's &lt;em&gt;How India sees the world&lt;/em&gt;. I came across this paragraph which talks about the &quot;sense of being Indian&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There is an immemorial and abiding sense of affinity drawn from a geography cosmic in origin but reflected in the physical attributes of the subcontinent. This is intrinsic to the sense of being Indian and is anchored in the geography of the subcontinent. This sense of affinity is overlaid by a modern nationalism but has echoes of the mental map inherited from the past. Overcoming the fragmentation of this historical and cultural space is the challenge. The idea of making subcontinent whole again is powerful driver of India's foreign policy behaviour&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what the author means by &quot;&lt;em&gt;. . . drawn from a geography cosmic in origin but reflected in the physical attributes of the subcontinent&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. I am really curious to know what is actually encompassed by the &quot;sense of being Indian&quot;. Has anyone read the book and understood what that paragraph means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5994" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T16:34:08.653" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T16:34:08.653" Title="Understanding Shyam Saran's &quot;How India sees the world&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;shyam-saran&gt;&lt;how-india-sees-the-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9582" CreationDate="2019-03-16T17:55:49.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moon_Is_Down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Moon is Down&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 1942 novel by John Steinbeck which was also adapted for the stage. The novel never explicitly states the nationality of either the invading force or the occupied country, but from context it's clearly Nazi Germany and probably Norway. (The Norwegian king-in-exile attended the London premiere of the play.) It's interesting to realise that this was written &lt;em&gt;during WW2 itself&lt;/em&gt;: it was more than just a moving story; it was actually intended to encourage revolt against Nazi occupiers in real time!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Wikipedia's plot summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Taken by surprise, a small coastal town is overrun by an invading army with little resistance. [...] As the reality of occupation sinks in and the weather turns bleak, with the snows beginning earlier than usual, the &quot;simple, peaceful people&quot; of the town are angry and confused. Colonel Lanser, a veteran of many wars, tries to operate under a veil of civility and law, but in his heart he knows that &quot;there are no peaceful people&quot; amongst those whose freedom has been taken away by force. [...] Sections of the railroad linking the port with the mine get damaged regularly, the machinery breaks down often, and the dynamo of the electricity generators gets short circuited. Whenever a soldier relaxes his guard, drinks or goes out with a woman, he is killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T17:55:49.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9585" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-16T19:01:27.900" Score="4" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a short manga or a one-shot (not really sure) about the main guy who bumps into a girl on his way to school and the girl drops her hair pin which she got from her crush (childhood friend, I think). The main guy is cold at first but likes the girl later and he plays a football game against the girl's crush where he gets injured. The age of the MCs are around 16-17 (high school). It's a shoujo\romance manga.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember the MC being popular but odd, he takes the female MC on a date by force even though she has a boyfriend at that time and they meet the boyfriend by chance. Also I remember there was a scene with the female MC and the guy she likes at the beginning at the bus stop, that where they become a couple and if I am not mistaken he asks about the hair pin she lost because of the male MC (she finds it later ).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also if I am not mistaken at the end she still has that pin and the male MC sees that she still has it and was upset but she said that she is keeping it because he found it for her and also that's how they met and not because of the guy who gave it to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5997" LastEditorUserId="2751" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T06:36:51.000" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T19:11:42.140" Title="Looking for a shoujo/romance one-shot manga" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;manga&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9578" CreationDate="2019-03-16T21:34:20.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The object of ‘give’ is ‘our genius, our soul’ but this doesn’t make sense literally: how can we give our genius? One of the themes of the book is human creativity (and the forces which oppose it, which Pressfield personifies as ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_(creativity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Resistance&lt;/a&gt;’) so the object of ‘give’ must be understood to be the products or works of genius, not genius itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no mention of whom these works of genius are to be given, so we have to deduce the recipient: something like ‘to the world’ or ‘to the public’ must be understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would paraphrase this sentence as, “Resistance’s target is the epicentre of our being, our genius or soul: this is a unique and priceless gift; we were put on earth to give its products to the world; and no-one else has it except us.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considered charitably, we might describe Pressfield’s version of the sentence as a combination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt; (whereby ‘genius’ is used with the meaning ‘product of genius’) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pun&lt;/a&gt; (whereby ‘genius’ appears once but is used with two different meanings). Considered uncharitably, we might say that the author allowed his figures of speech to run away with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-16T21:34:20.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9587" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12389" CreationDate="2019-03-17T11:36:28.387" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/translation.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website of translated Turkish poetry&lt;/a&gt;, a traditional hymn of sacrifice from a Turkish Alevi village is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~sibel/poetry/poems/anonim/sarilar_alevi_poems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;included in its English translation&lt;/a&gt;, with a note at the top signed &quot;Ali Haydar&quot;, although the research and translation was done by Thomas McElwain. The website's front page (first link in this question) links directly to that hymn with the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a part of the oral tradition, recorded by Thomas McElwain (alias Ali Haydar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://journal.fi/scripta/article/view/67210/27508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an original article&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas McElwain detailing his research into this hymn of sacrifice at the village of Sarilar (near Gaziantep) in 1989. The title is &quot;Ritual Change in a Turkish Alevi Village&quot;, whereas the website linked above cites &quot;Rites of Sacrifice in a Turkish Alevi Village&quot;, so I'm not sure if it's exactly the same article. Anyway there's no mention of a pseudonym Ali Haydar. I found a few other references to this pseudonym online, e.g. at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AHaydar#Other_Haydars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, but nothing reliable or sourced. It feels like chasing whispers and shadows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Thomas McElwain take the pseudonym Ali Haydar? When, how, and why?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming yes, was it to be accepted as if he was Turkish during his research in Turkish villages? How long did he keep up that false persona? Is there anything more to this story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T21:50:42.003" Title="Thomas McElwain as Ali Haydar?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;turkish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11900" CreationDate="2019-03-17T15:37:27.593" Score="8" ViewCount="392" Body="&lt;p&gt;While trying to ascertain the accentuation of certain names in Shakespeare, by analyzing lines of verse where they occur, I encountered a couple of lines that I was tempted to scan with a substitute foot consisting of three consecutive unstressed syllables. I would not even know how to call such a foot, if foot it be, but it falls out thus in what seems to me the best way to read either line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first instance is from the first act of &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt; (so we are more likely talking George Peele than Shakespeare, according to what seems a prevailing view among experts):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behold I choose thee Tamora for my bride, (1.1.322)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analysis of this and other verse lines where the name occurs satisfies me that &lt;em&gt;Tamora&lt;/em&gt; is always accented on the first syllable, and can scan variously as / ˘ ˘ (end of iamb with pyrrhic or anapestic substitution following), or with secondary accent as / ˘ / (end of iamb plus whole iamb), or with &lt;a href=&quot;http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/S/syncope.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;syncope&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;em&gt;TAM’ra,&lt;/em&gt; / ˘.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I scan this particular line with iambic first and fifth feet, spondaic second and third, and the mystery foot fourth, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;   ˘   /     &#xA;/      /           &#xA;/      /      &#xA;˘  ˘   ˘      ˘      /&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Behold | I choose | thee Tam | ora for | my bride,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker is new emperor Saturninus, in a mode of public pronouncement, which the five consecutive stresses suit well. Given that mode, the syncope option that would reduce the fourth foot to a regular pyrrhus seems all too sloppy and unemphatic, and it is easy to fit the extra unstressed syllable in while keeping the basic five-beat pentameter rhythm intact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could also assign the word &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; to the fifth foot, making that an anapest and the fourth either a pyrrhus or (with secondary stress) an iamb; but a natural reading seems to place the fourth beat on that &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; rather than on the &lt;em&gt;-a.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second instance is &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; 1.6.10:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citizens of Corioles have issued,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the city-name &lt;em&gt;Corioles,&lt;/em&gt; as it is spelled in F1 here and in most instances, seems elsewhere required by the meter to be pronounced sometimes &lt;em&gt;kor-EYE-oh-LES&lt;/em&gt; ( ˘ / ˘ / ) and sometimes &lt;em&gt;kor-YOHL-es&lt;/em&gt; ( ˘ / ˘ ). For the present line, &lt;em&gt;KOR-ee-YOHLS&lt;/em&gt; ( / ˘ / ) is tempting but unlikely, since the two pronunciations are already a recipe for audience confusion. My scansion suggestion here is as follows, with the foot in question second:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    ˘    /    ˘  ˘      ˘      ˘  /    ˘ /        ˘     /    ˘&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The cit | izens of | Cori | oles | have issued,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again syncope &lt;em&gt;(cit’zens)&lt;/em&gt; offers an obvious way out of the difficulty, but seems unnecessary in the natural rhythmic reading of the line, and likely to impair audience comprehension somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should such a foot ( ˘ ˘ ˘ ) be admitted to the list of possible substitutions in Shakespearean iambic pentameter? And if so, what should we call it? Tri-pyrrhic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: I see already a better scansion solution for the &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; line, with secondary accent on &lt;em&gt;-zens&lt;/em&gt; and an anapestic substitution at the third foot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    ˘    /    ˘  /        ˘    ˘  /    ˘ /        ˘     /    ˘&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The cit | izens | of Cori | oles | have issued,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Titus&lt;/em&gt; line still stands as an example, though as noted maybe of Peele rather than of Shakespeare. I have added an English Renaissance Theater tag accordingly, though without deleting Shakespeare. I’ll be on the lookout for further bona fide Shakespeare examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1971" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T02:44:05.247" Title="Can three unstressed syllables constitute a substitute foot in Shakespeare?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9590" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14767" CreationDate="2019-03-17T20:18:07.680" Score="8" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;T. S. Eliot&lt;/a&gt; has a reputation as a difficult and serious poet. He also wrote very serious essays about other serious authors. However, according to Johannes Kleinstück (&lt;em&gt;T. S. Eliot - mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten&lt;/em&gt;. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1966) he was also a practical joker who bought exploding cigars and cushions that made funny noises when you sat down on them. (After reading that, it becomes easier to understand how Eliot could later come up with something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Possum%27s_Book_of_Practical_Cats&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kleinstück even claims that he wrote crime novels (&quot;Kriminalromane&quot;) that were published under a pseudonym (page 22):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Angeblich hat er auch unter einem Pseudonym Kriminalromane geschrieben und in seiner Tätigkeit als Verlagsdirektor bei Faber &amp;amp; Faber eine große Zahl von &quot;Waschzetteln&quot; (&quot;blurbs&quot;), deren Autorschaft wohl nie geklärt werden kann.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Apparently he also wrote crime novels under a pseudonym, and, as director at Faber &amp;amp; Faber, a large number of blurbs whose authorship will probably never be resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Kleinstück doesn't provide a source for this claim; on the internet, I found that Eliot wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://thepassingtramp.blogspot.com/2015/06/eliot-elucidates-t-s-eliots-detective.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;five rules for &quot;detective conduct&quot;&lt;/a&gt; but nothing about novels he is supposed to have written. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the source for the claim that T. S. Eliot wrote crime novels? Since Kleinstück's book was published in the year following Eliot's death, the source should be someone who had known him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-17T20:37:00.537" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T14:36:48.577" Title="Did T. S. Eliot write crime novels under a pseudonym?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9591" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9592" CreationDate="2019-03-18T16:00:52.003" Score="5" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;The letter is called &quot;Letter to August Derleth&quot;. He describes a frightful dream he had to Derleth. In this dream, he and his friend Loveman go to a old cemetery to investigate a sepulchre and Loveman carries, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;slung over his shoulder, a portable telephone outfit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sepulchre has a passage in it with steps that go down, and they later use this telephone to communicate when Loveman climbs down inside the sepulchre and Lovecraft stays behind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loveman says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But I'll keep you informed of every move I make by the telephone - you see I've enough wire to reach to the centre of the earth and back!&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-18T17:12:25.277" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:12:25.277" Title="What kind of &quot;portable telephone&quot; does H. P. Lovecraft write about in his letter to August Derleth?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9591" CreationDate="2019-03-18T17:10:15.753" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Two phones connected by wires - it's hard to say much more than that.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lovecraft turned this nightmare into one of his short stories, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/src.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Statement of Randolph Carter&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. If you read this story (the full text is available at the link I provided), you can see that it's &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; the same as the story he told in his letter to Derleth, but with some changes to the phrasing. For example, the following paragraph from the Derleth letter (dated 11 December 1919):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm really sorry&quot;, he said in a mellow, pleasant voice; cultivated, and not very deep, &quot;to have to ask you to stay above ground, but I couldn't answer for the consequences if you were to go down with me. Honestly, I doubt if anyone with a nervous system like yours could see it through. You can't imagine what I shall have to see and do - not even from what the book said and from what I have told you - and I don't think anyone without iron-clad nerves could ever go down and come out of that place alive and sane. At any rate, this is no place for anybody who can't pass an army physical examination. I discovered this thing, and I am responsible in a way for anyone who goes with me - so I would not for a thousand dollars let you take the risk. But I'll keep you informed of every move I make by the telephone - you see I've enough wire to reach to the centre of the earth and back!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;becomes the following, similar but slightly altered, passage in the short story (dated December 1919):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I’m sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,” he said, “but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can’t imagine, even from what you have read and from what I’ve told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It’s fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don’t wish to offend you, and heaven knows I’d be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn’t drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can’t imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move—you see I’ve enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technology described in this short story has been analysed &lt;a href=&quot;https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/tag/telephones/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in a blog post from Lovecraftian Science&lt;/a&gt;. Unfortunately, it seems that very little can be said about the &quot;portable telephone&quot; except that it connects two telephones directly by wire, just a very long wire. Certainly it's a far cry from modern-day &quot;mobile phones&quot;. Quoting from that blog post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As Leslie S. Klinger has noted in The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (2014) on “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” information on a phone system as described by Lovecraft – where two telephones are directly connected to each other by wire – is not widely available.  Apparently, Frederick F. Strong filed a patent application in 1905 for a portable telephone unit where two phones were connected with wire (Klinger, 2014).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft's dream and story from 1919 come from an era when telephone technology was rather new and developing very rapidly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Additionally, the first coast to coast long-distance telephone call was in 1915 between Alexander Graham Bell in New York City and his formal assistant Thomas Augustus Watson in San Francisco.  By 1904 more than three million phones in the United States were connected to manual switchboard exchanges. Given the quick-based, technological evolution of the telephone, it was not surprising that Warren and Carter had a portable telephone outfit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's hard to say exactly how far telephone technology had progressed in exactly Lovecraft's circles in exactly December 1919. However, I did find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/US898699A/en?inventor=Frederick+F+Strong&amp;amp;page=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;patent application by Frederick F. Strong&lt;/a&gt; for a &quot;&lt;strong&gt;portable telephone apparatus&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (note the exact same phrase &quot;portable telephone&quot; as in Lovecraft's letter and story). You can &lt;a href=&quot;https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/b4/ac/e5/2c982f3bdca00c/US898699.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;read the patent application in full&lt;/a&gt; (4-page PDF link) (filed in 1905, granted in 1908) or just look at the pretty pictures:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CfSmc.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/CfSmc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Strong patent diagrams&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's probably impossible to know if Lovecraft was aware of this or similar inventions, but that seems to be what people would be thinking of in those days if they talked about &quot;portable telephones&quot;: two boxes connected by long wires. Wireless technology wasn't much of a thing back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-18T17:10:15.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9598" CreationDate="2019-03-19T01:08:24.707" Score="4" ViewCount="848" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plot of the first part of &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt; revolves around 12 diamond studs that Queen Anne d'Autriche gives to the Duke of Buckingham.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly were those studs? I mean, what was this object of jewellery? How were they to be worn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5919" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T09:54:38.553" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T22:38:37.110" Title="Three Musketeers - the diamond studs" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-three-musketeers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9585" CreationDate="2019-03-19T08:05:27.840" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just here to say I finally found what I am looking for. It's a short manga called &lt;em&gt;Getsuyoubi Kara Kataomoi&lt;/em&gt;. &#xA;Well this manga is about the male MC having everything in life and desiring nothing until he meets the female MC and falls in love with her and we will see him trying his best to get her to look his way even though he knows she already loves someone else .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5997" LastEditorUserId="5997" LastEditDate="2019-03-19T19:11:42.140" LastActivityDate="2019-03-19T19:11:42.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9615" CreationDate="2019-03-19T20:16:57.527" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;After having read a few different works by Tolstoy, I have come to the conclusion that his main goal is to accurately depict what goes through a person's mind in various situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most vivid memories I have from reading Anna Karenina is the fact that when Anna throws herself under the train, she has an immediate change of heart (i.e. she doesn't want to die), but there's no time for her to change her decision and the train kills her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That always struck me as both 1) non-obvious and 2) making a lot of sense.  And my reaction seemed to be confirmed when I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/10/13/jumpers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a 2003 New Yorker article on people who attempt suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge&lt;/a&gt; that says &lt;em&gt;&quot;Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;&quot;“I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Tolstoy know or predict that Anna would immediately regret her decision?  Had he spoken with people who had attempted suicide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the relevant paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys. But she did not take her eyes from the wheels of the second carriage. And exactly at the moment when the space between the wheels came opposite her, she dropped the red bag, and drawing her head back into her shoulders, fell on her hands under the carriage, and lightly, as though she would rise again at once, dropped on to her knees. And at the same instant she was terror-stricken at what she was doing. “Where am I? What am I doing? What for?” She tried to get up, to drop backwards; but something huge and merciless struck her on the head and rolled her on her back. “Lord, forgive me all!” she said, feeling it impossible to struggle. A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her. And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been in darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5728" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T19:21:41.320" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T10:11:50.117" Title="What led Tolstoy to depict that a person would have a change of heart after throwing themselves under a train?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9593" CreationDate="2019-03-20T02:12:30.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French word that was translated to &lt;em&gt;stud&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;em&gt;ferret&lt;/em&gt;. I don't actually see any justification for translating &lt;em&gt;ferret&lt;/em&gt; here as &lt;em&gt;stud&lt;/em&gt;, as I will explain later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain how the diamonds were worn first, these twelve diamond &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; were part of a decoration meant to be worn on a shoulder. It was made of six blue ribbons woven or knotted together. The twelve &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; were ornamental tips attached to the ends of the ribbons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the answer contains the justification for this statement. To see what &lt;em&gt;ferret&lt;/em&gt; means, let us look at the relevant definition from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://larousse.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Larousse dictionnaire de français.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; This is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petit bout (en métal, en pierre précieuse, etc.) d'une aiguillette.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Small tip (of metal, gemstone, etc.) of an aiguillette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is an &lt;em&gt;aiguillette&lt;/em&gt;? The English translation is aiguillette, but this won't help modern readers because the word has largely fallen out of use in both English and French (because aiguillettes aren't used much anymore). &lt;em&gt;Larousse&lt;/em&gt; says that an &lt;em&gt;aiguillette&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cordon, ganse ou tresse, ferré aux deux bouts, ayant, jusqu'au règne de Louis XIV, servi à fermer ou à garnir les vêtements.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cord or braid, tipped with metal at both ends, that until the reign of Louis XIV served to fasten or decorate clothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an &lt;em&gt;aguillette&lt;/em&gt; was a short length of cord or braid, tipped at both ends, often with precious metal or gemstones, that was used to fasten clothing closed, or which was worn purely for decoration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can see pictures of them in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiguillette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. This says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portraits of the 16th and 17th centuries show that aiglets or metal tips could be functional or purely decorative, though many were used to &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; seams and slashes that are not always apparent on dark garments in portraits. They were made in matched sets, might be of silver, silver-gilt, or gold, and were worn in masses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a 1562 picture of Lord High Admiral Clinton wearing a doublet fastened by aiguillettes, from Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5bqtFm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5bqtFm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Lord High Admiral Clinton in an arming doublet of 1562&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So were the diamonds on aiguillettes? If they were, &lt;em&gt;stud&lt;/em&gt; might be a reasonable translation of &lt;em&gt;ferret&lt;/em&gt;, because a stud is a piece of jewelry that you use to fasten two buttonholes together, and similarly an aiguillette is a piece of jewelry you use to fasten your clothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in this case, the &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; were not on aiguillettes, although they were indeed on the ends of ribbons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time we see the &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; being worn is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;elle [la reine] avait un chapeau de feutre avec des plumes bleues, un surtout en velours gris perle rattaché avec des agrafes de diamants, et une jupe de satin bleu toute brodée d'argent. Sur son épaule gauche étincelaient les ferrets soutenus par un noeud de même couleur que les plumes et la jupe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She [The Queen] wore a felt hat with blue feathers, a surcoat of gray-pearl velvet, fastened with diamond clasps, and a skirt of blue satin, embroidered with silver. On her left shoulder sparkled the diamond &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt;, on a knot of the same color as the plumes and the skirt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A later description of&#xA;the diamonds in &lt;em&gt;Les Trois Mousquetaires&lt;/em&gt; follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tenez, lui dit-il en tirant du coffre un gros noeud de ruban bleu tout étincelant de diamants; tenez, voici ces précieux ferrets ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Here,” said he, drawing from the casket a large knot of blue ribbon all glittering with diamonds, “here are the precious &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the French word &lt;em&gt;noeud&lt;/em&gt; is broader than the English word &lt;em&gt;knot&lt;/em&gt;; a bow would also be called a &lt;em&gt;noeud&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; are in a large decoration made of blue ribbon. We also find that this was meant to be worn on a shoulder. This decoration must then be made of six blue ribbons knotted or woven together somehow, and the diamonds are on pieces of jewelry which are affixed to the twelve ends of these six ribbons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: the English translations above are my modifications of the translations of &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1257/1257-h/1257-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE: the first passage I quote above from &lt;em&gt;Les Trois Mousquetaires&lt;/em&gt; seems to have been changed between the serialization where it first appears, and the 1850 novel edition of &lt;em&gt;Les Trois Mousquetaires&lt;/em&gt; published in Paris. The language in the novel seems compatible with the idea that the &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; are on &lt;em&gt;aguillettes&lt;/em&gt;. See the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T17:36:45.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9652" CreationDate="2019-03-20T02:27:36.083" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is probable that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humans remember unfinished/incomplete tasks better than completed tasks.&lt;/a&gt; I am wondering if there is a genre/style of literature which takes advantage of this to boost the memorability of stories by leaving none of the threads tied up. I know that there is no proper way to define &quot;unfinished&quot;, especially if an author has decided that their work is 'finished', so to clarify a little further, I've drawn some diagrams (because everybody loves diagrams).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Generally I imagine that over the course of a novel various threads (goals, threats, characters) can make up the ark of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w2mZQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/w2mZQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Often the threads are resolved by the climax and then there is some kind of denoument. Sometimes not every thread is resolved, for example in Norwegian Wood where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it is left ambiguous whether Toru and Midori get back together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LOJM8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LOJM8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes threads are created and then lost/drift away/are never tied up, for example almost every plotline in A Series of Unfortunate Events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OStG0.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OStG0.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then of course sometimes extra threads get resolved after the climax of a story, like the &quot;there's just one thing I still don't understand...&quot; type endings of a detective story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/neHm8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/neHm8.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be a 'Zeigarnik book' I would say that all of the plot-lines would be left unresolved, and the result is the appearance (or reality) of a book where the author got half way and then gave up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OaHLW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OaHLW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case there is no resolution of anything, rather than a cliff-hanger as such. I suppose another analogy could be watching a single episode of a soap opera, where there is no sense of the character stories terminating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a real genre or style of book that anybody is familiar with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6021" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T08:58:21.343" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:46:49.693" Title="Do genre(s) of literature exist which take advantage of the Zeigarnik Effect?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9601" CreationDate="2019-03-20T08:51:30.740" Score="4" ViewCount="1463" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of Stave 2, after Marley's ghost has disappeared, Scrooge wakes up believing he has overslept and that the time at which the first ghost was to appear has passed. To confirm this, he looks out the window only to find out that it isn't morning yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This was a great relief, because “Three days after sight of this&#xA;  First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,” and so&#xA;  forth, would have become a mere United States security, if there were&#xA;  no days to count by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this sentence mean? More specifically, I can't interpret these 2 parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order&quot;, and&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;would have become a mere United States security, if there were no days to count by&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T10:51:49.323" Title="What exactly does Dickens mean to say here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-christmas-carol&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9600" CreationDate="2019-03-20T10:51:49.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Bill of Exchange is a financial instrument which promised to pay money after a fixed period, was signed by the person drawing the instrument up  and the 'acceptor', who was the person responsible for paying the money signed it to prove they agreed to it. There would usually be a three day grace period, to allow the acceptor time to get the cash together when the bill is presented for payment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In '&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LjQslEX7rH4C&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=Wall%20Street%2C%20A%20History%2C%20Charles%20R.%20Geisst&amp;amp;pg=PA42#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Second%20Bank%20of%20the%20United%20States%20went&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wall Street, A History, Charles R. Geisst&lt;/a&gt;, Oxford University Press 1997, ISBN 0-19-511512-0.' Geisst writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the Second Bank of the United States went out of business in 1836, many states quickly began to feel the economic pinch...Many states had used regularly used the Bank of the United States to support their bond issues. When it failed, they were no longer able to borrow from the bank to pay their interest, and eight states went into default (Arkansas, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi and Pennsylvania, in addition to the Florida territory)...On the other side, the states' refusal to pay interest brought opprobrium down on the entire country. Unfortunately, the United States as a whole was achieving the same sort of reputation abroad. Its image became so tarnished that the British dubbed their former subjects 'a nation of swindlers'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens was writing A Christmas Carol in the early 1840s, so this view would be topical and current.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So essentially Ebeneezer is saying, 'If there were no more days to be counted then a Bill of Exchange which should pay me in 3 days is worthless.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T10:51:49.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2019-03-20T16:15:28.383" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In short: Suicide is bad, kids, don't do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's basically all there is to it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer: You need to get into the morality of the time and place when the novel was written and ask yourself what the position of Anna in that world and the world of the book would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For love (somebody would say lust) Anna had broken all the rules of morality in society, she and Vronsky sacrificed everything for it. In a way, she had ruined her own life and the life of her husband by that infidelity. Vronsky had ruined his own life and Anna's too. In a way, they are like Adam and Eve tasting forbidden fruit. Tolstoy couldn't publish a book with that romance ending happily in that time period. He would have been attacked by the Orthodox church and other authorities for promoting obscenity and corrupting the innocent.&#xA;So, what's the way to end the story of a lifetime of bad decisions? Another, the last bad decision somebody could ever make. Suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare the love and lives of Levin and Anna. Levin was very wild in his youth but he asked his Kitty for forgiveness, he laid his cards and past deeds and thoughts bare in front of her and is reborn in her love as a good husband and home owner, a good man. Anna never asked for forgiveness. She kept running from her mistakes, never daring to look back and ran into her grave that way. Only moments before dying, she got clarity to see them, but it was too late. So, kids, don't let that happen to you. Be like Levin, be like Kitty, don't be like Anna and Vronsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T16:15:28.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9604" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9605" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French playwright and poet Molière (stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin,  1622 – 1673) and his works. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:15:49.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9606" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9607" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н, 1895 – 1975) and his works. Use this tag with the [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:17:44.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9608" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9609" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Orlando: A Biography', a novel by Virginia Woolf first published in 1928. Use this tag with the [virginia-woolf] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:19:47.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9610" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9611" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the German author and playwright Wolfgang Borchert ( 1921 – 1947) and his works. Use this tag with the [german-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:21:15.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9612" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9613" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist, short story writer and playwright Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) and her works. Her best known works include the novels 'The House of Mirth' (1905) and 'The Age of Innocence' (1920)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" LastActivityDate="2019-03-20T20:25:02.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="99" CreationDate="2019-03-21T07:57:46.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cat represents both intelligence and unsavory part of society, in a way. In short, the cat represents secret intelligence services, specifically civilian ones (KGB, CIA etc). It's spy and spy community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cat always lurks in the shadows, listens to other animals, watches over them. It is also the only animal which leaves the farm and visits other farms and nobody knows what it is doing there. In fact, nobody knows what it is doing anywhere, what is the work that cat does. The cat is one of the animals inherited from old system, is used then warped or discarded as the new system takes form. Cats allegiance is uncertain but it does its job well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you see it in the light, it is usually sleeping, it always looks lazy and harmless, a good person to confide in. It is insidious, friendly and purrs nicely. But it also has quite sharp claws and it's job is to find and remove vermin. It is a subtle form of control in the system. Cat is spying and doing subversive actions. It is a cloak and dagger compared to sword and shield of dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also indicative when the cat leaves the farm forever (or maybe is killed). When dogs take over as open police/military force and other farm animals are so brainwashed that they report each other so cat's usefulness is diminished in the eyes of pigs. Also, the need to spy on other farms is diminished by pigs becoming friendly with them. Intelligence services greatly diminished (for a while at least) after the end of Cold War. It is indicative of dictatorship. Open and brutal forms of control are now thinking they have subdued the society so much that they don't need intelligence services any more, because they think they know everything about everyone and that there is absolutely no chance of rebellion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T09:53:24.163" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T09:53:24.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9596" CreationDate="2019-03-21T10:11:50.117" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that there is no reliable answer to your question. He could make this up, or he could hear it from someone or read about it somewhere, we will never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy's wife Sofia Andreevna writes this in her &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolstoy-lit.ru/tolstoy/bio/tolstaya-dnevniki/moi-zapisi-raznye-dlya-spravok.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memoirs&lt;/a&gt; (my translation from Russian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have a neighbor, about 50, not rich and poorly educated - N. A. Bibikov. His dead wife's remote relative, a young woman about 35, lived in his house, did housework and was his lover. Bibikov employed a governess for his son and niece - beautiful Geman woman, he fell in love and proposed to her. And his former lover, whose name was Anna Stepanovna, went from the house to Tula, supposedly to visit her mother, and from there having just a fardel (with extra clothes) she returned to the nearby train station - Yasenki, and jumped on the rails, under a freight train. Her body was dissected then. Lev Nikolaevich saw her, with bare skull, naked and ripped up in the barracks of Yasenki. It made a horrible impression on him which sunk deep into his soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all we know about the real world's inspiration for Anna's suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But suicide is the more vast theme in the novel. Vronsky attempts to kill himself by shooting. Levin hides the rope from himself so as not to hang himself. There are different attitudes to this act in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T10:11:50.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-21T12:28:06.957" Score="5" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to remember the name of a book with short stories inside. I remember 2 stories from it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was an astronaut on a foreign planet with flowers all around called floofs or phoofs, I forgot. His helmet broke and he fell upon those flowers and found out that he can actually breathe there. Only his face was swollen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A wife ordered a murder kit to kill her husband but failed each time until she was caught by her husband's murder kit for her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help. I am already having restless nights because of this. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add on: it was an old book in English and I read it in 1999 or 2000. It was a compilation of short stories by different authors. The book cover as I can vaguely recall was a silhouette or outline of a man in a hat and glasses. I forget the color background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6029" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T18:54:07.097" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T03:08:36.250" Title="Anthology: one story about an astronaut falling on flowers, another about a wife trying to kill her husband" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9618" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9632" CreationDate="2019-03-21T13:36:43.447" Score="5" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read &lt;em&gt;The Moon is Down&lt;/em&gt; by John Steinbeck and I noticed that the conquerors and the conquered are not defined. Throughout the novel are several allusions that the conquerors are German. They talk about &quot;the Leader&quot;; Colonel Lanser says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I've helped to occupy countries before. I was in Belgium twenty years ago and in France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the novel was written during World War II (1942 to be exact) but there is no indication who the conquered are. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a European country since there is talk about America but my edition (Pan Books) says that the novel is set in Norway. I couldn't find the exact quote (book is at home, if necessary I can upload a photo later) but did find this summary from another &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblio.com/book/moon-down-steinbeck-john/d/99907698&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pan Books edition&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this masterful tale set in &lt;strong&gt;Norway&lt;/strong&gt; during World War II, Steinbeck&#xA;  explores the effects of invasion on both the conquered and the&#xA;  conquerors. As he delves into the emotions of the German commander and&#xA;  the &lt;strong&gt;Norwegian traitor&lt;/strong&gt;, and depicts the spirited patriotism of the&#xA;  Norwegian underground, Steinbeck uncovers profound, often unsettling&#xA;  truths about war—and about human nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for this comment on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12722.The_Moon_Is_Down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While not directly naming either Norway or Germany, the reader understands that the setting is Norway during the Nazi German occupation, which began in 1940.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any source/evidence that it is indeed set in Norway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6030" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T14:26:02.090" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T12:00:05.333" Title="Is Steinbeck's &quot;The Moon is Down&quot; set in Norway?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;the-moon-is-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9619" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9620" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Moon is Down&quot; is a 1942 novel by John Steinbeck about a town's resistance to military occupation. Use this tag with the [john-steinbeck] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" LastActivityDate="2019-03-21T14:36:32.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9621" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9628" CreationDate="2019-03-21T21:58:07.993" Score="4" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an English poem, in fact I think it was at least two poems, that consisted of capital A's, representing the Ford Model A, moving as if in traffic, and another that had both A's and T's. The first, with only A's, was two vertical columns with only a few A's, representing the beginning of the automobile age when only a few model A's could be found on very simple roads. The second was a more complicated &quot;road&quot; (not just a vertical column) filled congestedly with both A's and T's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though, if I'm recalling correctly, this has no words &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;, it was in a collection of poetry I once encountered. I had thought it was by cummings or Sandberg, but I've been unable to confirm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6032" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T02:16:14.450" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T08:46:41.400" Title="Poem with A's and T's representing Ford model A's and T's in traffic" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9622" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9631" CreationDate="2019-03-22T01:07:50.307" Score="6" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;This middle-grade novel was from sometime between 2000 and 2016, I believe. It was by an American or British author, who died before 2016, as mentioned on the back cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The protagonist was a 10/11 year old boy who described his mind as being wired differently, like a computer with a different operating system; later he said he had a mental disorder such as autism or Asperger's.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was from the US.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He made a friend with a boy of a similar age from England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The British boy had a sister, I believe, and maybe was related to the main character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This friend frequently used the British slang word &quot;mosher&quot;, saying something like it meant &quot;a right cool dude&quot;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it maybe took place in England.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it did, there was some sort of a scene where the characters went on the London Eye, but that is likely confused with another book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T13:34:49.610" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T16:02:26.413" Title="Book about a 10/11 year old boy with autism or something similar" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9624" CreationDate="2019-03-22T02:55:31.327" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago I read a short story that I think was titled &quot;Blood and Lust&quot;. It featured two entities named Blood and Lust who would travel through history making very small adjustments to see how events played out after. I recall one instance where one of them slightly altered the trajectory of a bullet, resulting in a failed assassination attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling turns up a bunch of hits, but I'm not finding that specific story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6033" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T03:40:07.313" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T22:45:23.417" Title="Short sci-fi story called &quot;Blood and Lust&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9623" CreationDate="2019-03-22T03:35:34.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &quot;The Game of Blood and Dust&quot; (1975)&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; by Roger Zelazny, originally published in Galaxy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is about two characters, Blood and Dust, altering history through time travel. They have the power to go to any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, they fail to prevent Lincoln's death (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blood entered Chewy's Theater on the evening in 1865 when the disgruntled actor had taken a shot at the President of the United States.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Delicately altering the course of the bullet in midair&lt;/strong&gt;, he made it reach its target.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, they stop Nikita Khrushchev's death (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blood entered the century at a farther point and &lt;strong&gt;assured the failure of Leon Nozdrev, the man who had assassinated Nikita Khrushchev.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?51715&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?51715&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Credit to Adamant for &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/49597661#49597661&quot;&gt;finding this&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/202704/102999&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, answered by Mark Olson.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;Quotes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://lingualeo.com/pt/jungle/roger-zelazny-the-game-of-blood-and-dust-259829&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;; other content from ISFdb. The link to that text is dead; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.e-reading.club/chapter.php/73093/12/Zelazny_-_The_Last_Defender_Of_Camelot.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; it is live.&#xA;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-06-29T22:45:23.417" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T22:45:23.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T04:03:57.397" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;This middle grade/children's book was from 2015 or earlier, probably after 2009. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was about four to six or so boys camping in the wilderness. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They were scared of bears attacking them, but none were ever hurt. &#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, I don't remember if these hypothetical bears ever appeared in the flesh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the boys was some sort of exchange student from Denmark.&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He could understand what everyone else was saying, but never talked.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cover had some sort of cartoony drawing on it. I believe one of the more prominent colors was green.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5581" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T04:03:57.397" Title="Book about boys camping in the wilderness; a Danish one can't speak English, but understands it" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="994" CreationDate="2019-03-22T05:28:37.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The World Ash Tree of Norse mythology translates to &amp;quot;Odin's Steed&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Ygg&amp;quot; in turn translates to &amp;quot;terrible one&amp;quot;. Odin hung himself for nine days on the tree in order to acquire knowledge of the runic alphabet. You can read more about it &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.wikia.com/wiki/Yggdrasil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This echoes Navidson descending into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;House&lt;/a&gt; to tackle his personal demons, which echos Truant descending into Zampano's work to tackle &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; personal demons. And of course, once you realize what Yggdrasil is, it becomes apparent that it can literally be described as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Leaves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;House&lt;/a&gt; of Leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I find it odd that people assume the &amp;quot;Ygg&amp;quot; is the canopy and the poem its base. It feels like such a stretch. Next time you get the chance, go to this page and flip the book upside down. What do you immediately see? What the poem tells you that you should see: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Its roots must hold the sky.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can a tree's roots hold the sky? Why would it be upside down? Well, if you've ever been by a lake, you've seen plenty of trees whose roots hold the sky: the reflections. Reflections are just the visual form of an echo, and echoes are a running theme in HoL.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Its roots must hold the sky.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It stands ten thousand feet high&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What miracle is this? This giant tree.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yggdrasil&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6034" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T12:28:31.963" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T12:28:31.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9621" CreationDate="2019-03-22T08:46:41.400" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kostelanetz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Kostelanetz&lt;/a&gt;, ‘Tribute to Henry Ford’ (1968).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the composition depicts the letters T and A, badges of the early model cars created by Ford, travelling various four-lane highways. In frame 1, the model Ts, introduced in 1908, carelessly ride the yet unmarked roads of turn-of-the-century America, roaring through the twenties. In frame 2, a far fewer number of model As, originated in 1928, come to a halt, forced to obey, one can infer, the newly instituted system of traffic lights. The funereal  orderliness with which they ride points to the reduced production and sobering economic reality of the times. In the third frame, a profusion of smaller, necessarily more maneuverable Ts and As, as automobile offspring, cruise superhighways and execute cloverleaf turns, manifesting the automania that came on the prosperity and technological prowess of post-war America. Thus the geometric artistry of the poem includes an intricate correspondence between images and American eras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hildy Coleman (1995). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1995.9937248&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kostelanetz’s Tribute to Henry Ford&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;The Explicator&lt;/em&gt; 53:2, pp. 123–125.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem appears on page 804 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/isbn_9781568653679&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Treasury of American Poetry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1978), edited by Nancy Sullivan. Here’s the first of its three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3JdAe.png&quot; alt=&quot;Tribute to Henry Ford 1, with letter Ts representing model Ts&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T08:46:41.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9023" CreationDate="2019-03-22T14:48:19.093" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original French text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jusqu’ici chaque fois que Mersault avait lié avec une femme les premiers gestes qui engagent, conscient du malheur qui veut que l’amour et le désir s’expriment de la même façon, il songeait à la rupture avant d’avoir serré cet être dans ses bras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My literal translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So far each time that Mersault had associated with a woman the first acts that commit, aware of the misfortune that love and desire express themselves in the same way, he had thought of the break-up before having clasped that being in his arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Comparing this with the published English translation (by Richard Howard), I think the latter has mangled the first clause (‘lié avec’ means ‘tied/linked/associated with’ and not ‘spent time with’) and introduced the word ‘must’ into the second clause. But neither of these defects affects the answer to the question in the post.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast here is between romantic love (‘amour’) and sexual love (‘désir’), both of which can be expressed by the same ‘gestures of commitment’, for example taking someone in one’s arms. Mersault describes this as a ‘disastrous fact’ because the ambiguity leads to miscommunication: when Mersault expresses his sexual desire in this way, the woman misinterprets it as a gesture of romantic love and commitment, and this later causes her unhappiness when Mersault ends the affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is disingenuous: it is not the case that love and sex must be confused. Mersault could, if he wished, use his words to disambiguate his feelings. We deduce that he does not, because it is convenient for him to allow the woman to be deceived into believing that he is in love with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-22T14:58:45.867" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T14:58:45.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-22T15:54:46.677" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo  refuses to speak the language of the colonizer (the white man) , rather he uses his own language (Ibo) to deconstruct the language of the colonizer. So, how has Okonkwo succeed in resisting the colonizer through word-play in &quot;Things Fall Apart&quot; ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6037" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T20:03:52.703" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T20:03:52.703" Title="How has Okonkwo succeed in resisting the colonizer through word-play in &quot;Things Fall Apart&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;chinua-achebe&gt;&lt;things-fall-apart&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9622" CreationDate="2019-03-22T16:02:26.413" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably &lt;em&gt;The London Eye Mystery&lt;/em&gt; (2007) by Siobhan Dowd, who passed away the same year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1184305.The_London_Eye_Mystery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monday, 24 May, 11.32 a.m. &lt;strong&gt;Ted and Kat watch their cousin Salim get on board the London Eye.&lt;/strong&gt; He turns and waves and the pod rises from the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monday, 24 May, 12.02 p.m. The pod lands and the doors open. People exit in all shapes and sizes – but where is Salim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ted and his older sister Kat become sleuthing partners since the police are having no luck. Despite their prickly relationship, they overcome their differences to follow a trail of clues across London in a desperate bid to find their cousin. And ultimately &lt;strong&gt;it comes down to Ted, whose brain runs on its own unique operating system,&lt;/strong&gt; to find the key to the mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=jiHLr3_KQyQC&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;pg=PA54&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; offers the following quote about mosher and being cool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Salim's a mosher, I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'A mosher?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It's northern for &amp;quot;casual, cool dude&amp;quot;, I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;book mind &amp;quot;wired differently&amp;quot; &amp;quot;mosher&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; which returned&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.unc.edu/world/2010PartnersWS/ABCsofDiversity6-12.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;, which is taken down, but the Google preview read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The ABC's of Diversity”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Selective Bibliography of Multicultural Books for Students in Grades 6-12 ... the two siblings must work together-Ted with his brain that is &amp;quot;wired differently&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-22T16:02:26.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9618" CreationDate="2019-03-22T21:32:41.490" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://sits.sjsu.edu/curriculum-resources/the-moon-is-down/setting/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt; discusses the setting of the novel. Apparently Steinbeck never actually explicitly identified the country, although he said it was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are enough clues in it to narrow the possible countries down to Norway (unless you argue that Steinbeck just took the physical characteristics of the country from Norway, and that it is really an amalgam of several countries). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website lists the clues: It gets dark around 3pm in the winter, narrowing it to down a country in the far north. It's occupied by the Nazis, with a resistance movement, narrowing it down further to Norway and Denmark. And there are avalanches in the nearby mountains, which probably leaves Norway as the only possibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Steinbeck originally intended to set it in a Nazi-occupied American town, but the government agency he was working for disapproved. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;John Steinbeck Goes to War: The Moon is Down as Propaganda&lt;/em&gt; contains the whole Steinbeck quote, and gives the source in a footnote (&lt;em&gt;&quot;[Arne] Skouen, letter to the author&quot;&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I placed the story in an unnamed country, cold and stern like Norway, cunning and implacable like Denmark, reasonable like France. The names of the people in the book I made as international as I could. I did not even call the Germans Germans but simply invaders. I named the book ‘The Moon is Down’ from a line in ‘Macbeth’ and sent it to press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while Steinbeck avoided identifying the invaded country, he did not hesitate to identify the invaders as Nazis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T12:00:05.333" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T12:00:05.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9617" CreationDate="2019-03-23T06:11:27.183" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first story is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?56400&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Nothing for My Noon Meal&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_Ellison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harlan Ellison&lt;/a&gt;, originally published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?59599+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nebula Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt; #30, May 1958&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?392959+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;U.S. edition&lt;/a&gt; dated September 1958), available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Nebula_30_1958-05#page/n34/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There was an astronaut on a foreign planet with flowers all around called floofs or phoofs, I forgot.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I first saw them, I was certain they were trumpet-flowers, for they had the characteristic bell-shaped perianth with delicate stamen projecting slightly from the cup. But as I drew nearer I realized nothing so Earth-like—even in outward appearance—could occur here. These were not flowers, and on the spot, in the muffled-breathing of my helmet, I called them Fluhs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;His helmet broke and he fell upon those flowers&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I leaned over to stare deeper into the trumpet-blossoms, resting on one of the slanting pillars of pseudo-rock for support. That was one of my first mistakes, nearly fatal, and intended to color my entire life on Hell.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The pillar crashed—it was a semi-porous volcanic formation, almost scoria-like in composition—and loosened other rocks that rested on it. I fell forward, directly atop the Fluhs, and the last thing I felt was my oxygen helmet shattering about my head.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Then the blackness that was not as deep as space slid down over me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;and found out that he can actually breathe there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I should have been dead. There was no reason why I should not have been dead. But I was living; I was . . . breathing! Can you understand that? I should have been with my wife, but I was alive.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;My face was pressed into the Fluhs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;I was drawing oxygen from them.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;I had stumbled and fallen and cracked open my helmet, and should have died, but because of strange plants that sucked the nitrogen from the thin atmosphere, circulated it and cast it back out as oxygen, I was still alive. I cursed the Fluhs for depriving me of quick, unknowing surcease. I had come so close to joining her, and had lost the chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Only his face was swollen.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I lay there thinking, gathering strength for the run back to the ship, I felt my face draining. It was as though I had a great boil or pus-bag on my left cheek, and it was sucking blood down into it. I felt my cheek, and yes, even through the glove I could feel a swelling. I grew terrified then, and plucking a handful of Fluhs—close to the bottom of their stem—I thrust my face into them, and ran frantically back to the ship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;The second story is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?64725&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Do-It-Yourself&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by Harlan Ellison and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_L._Hensley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joe L. Hensley&lt;/a&gt;, originally published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B005FLZBUI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the February 1961 issue&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(magazine)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rogue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (This story was also the answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/76281/sci-fi-short-story-1950-1969&quot;&gt;an old question&lt;/a&gt; over at the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A wife ordered a murder kit to kill her husband&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;This Kit contains three sure, clean and undetectable, I repeat, undetectable, ways to commit murder. No two kits are the same, though repetition occasionally occurs when the subjects to be murdered have common character traits. Again, though, no two kits are the same. Each of the three &lt;em&gt;modus operandi&lt;/em&gt; is designed for you according to the application blank you sent us when you contracted for this Kit. Now. To prepare yourself for your murder—&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;She snapped the pamphlet shut with quick, suddenly-sweating hands.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do I hate him that much?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Where had their marriage gone wrong . . . somewhere in the eleven years? Where? An infinite sadness stole over her as she remembered Carl the way he had been when they first met.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;but failed each time&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This time there was no mistaking the annoyance in the pamphlet's voice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;You failed again. I can tell from your emanations. Very seldom does anyone need two of the methods provided by our Kits . . . you are the first one in nearly eight thousand Kits that has needed all three. We hope you are proud of yourself.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;until she was caught by her husband's murder kit for her.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;So that's what's been goin' on, huh Madge? I shoulda guessed you'd get up the gut one day soon. I'll haveta think back an' see if I can figger out what this Kit included. It'll be fun. My three was real wowzers, y'know.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;She stared at him, uncomprehending. Had he found her Kit, and had she not noticed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;I rekcanize the pamphlet,&quot; he explained with a wave of his meaty hand. &quot;I sent for one of them things over three months ago.&quot; His voice altered with incredible swiftness. Now casual and defacing, now harsh and bitter as sump water. &quot;But how'n a hell could I of used it around someone like you . . . you'd of noticed the first lousy little trap that I'd'a set . . . you'd a vacuumed an' swept an' pried an' found it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&quot;I know you've hated me—but Gawd A'mighty, how I've hated &lt;em&gt;you!&lt;/em&gt; You straighten an' pick an' fuss till . . .&quot; he summed it all up, and ended it all, eleven years of it, &quot;. . . till a guy can't even come home an' enjoy a belch!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;He smiled again . . . this time with dirty mirth. &quot;Your goddam floor's gonna get filthy today, Madge.&quot; He drew out the long, shiny knife. &quot;Had one of the guys in Steel Molding make this for me . . . a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; do-it-yourself.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Speculative Fiction Database&lt;/a&gt; lists only one book containing both stories, the 1962 Harlan Ellison collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?37439&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ellison Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which has also been issued under the titles &lt;em&gt;Earthman, Go Home!&lt;/em&gt; and (in German) &lt;em&gt;Der silberne Korridor&lt;/em&gt;. You can see all the different covers for this collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?37439&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Based on your description of the cover (man, hat, glasses) I believe you read &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?12097&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 1974 Signet / New American Library edition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvvEr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VvvEr.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T03:08:36.250" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T03:08:36.250" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-23T11:45:26.000" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In John Buchan's famous short novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Nine_Steps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Thirty-Nine Steps&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, much of the plot (ha) revolves around a German plot to assassinate the Greek Premier, which is thwarted by the story's hero. All this happens just before Britain joins the First World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was this based on, or inspired by, any real-life plot?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T14:25:48.380" Title="Was the assassination plot in The Thirty-Nine Steps based on any real plot?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;john-buchan&gt;&lt;the-thirty-nine-steps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9636" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9637" CreationDate="2019-03-23T13:56:10.483" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;The series I remember is about a young female lead.  She is in a world where human trafficking is common.  The rich and powerful are able to take another person's attributes through the use of a Blood Ore or Blood Metal.  The female protagonist doesn't join the practice, but rather eats the brains of large insectoid creatures to gain supernatural abilities.  The human inhabitants are fighting each other, ignoring the looming threat of giant deep earth dwelling insectoids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6042" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-23T14:32:32.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T14:32:32.680" Title="Fantasy book from my childhood: female protagonist, Blood Ore or Blood Metal for taking attributes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9636" CreationDate="2019-03-23T14:31:53.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Runelords&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Runelords&lt;/a&gt; series by David Farland.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The rich and powerful are able to take another person's attributes through the use of a Blood Ore or Blood Metal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The main magical system of the series relies on a system of attributes which are inherent to every living creature. These attributes are transferable to and from both man and animal, so brawn from a dog can be transferred to a man. Once an individual gives an attribute to another, the giver loses that particular attribute until the death of the recipient. Each person can only give one endowment in their lifetime. Endowments include brawn (physical strength), grace (physical dexterity), wit (memory and clearness of thought), metabolism (speed at which the body's processes operate), glamor, voice, stamina, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, talent, will, bloodlust, and pain. [...] Endowments are transferred with special tools called forcibles. A forcible is cast of a rare material called blood metal into the rune corresponding to the endowment to be transferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The human inhabitants are fighting each other, ignoring the looming threat of giant deep earth dwelling insectoids.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Reavers are a massive species of subterranean creatures which bear no resemblance to any surface dwelling creature. Reavers are somewhat like insects, communicating through scents and having various &quot;castes&quot; which perform different functions within their &quot;hives&quot;, though they do not have a collective intelligence. They are unchallenged masters of the Underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only part which I can't find a fit for is the female protagonist. From Wikipedia it seems that both the Earth King series (first four books) and the Scions of the Earth series (fifth to eighth books) have main protagonists who are male: Gaborn and Fallion respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T14:31:53.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6849" CreationDate="2019-03-23T15:15:06.350" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Whodunit?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shaksperecritica00dowd/page/n5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Dowden (1875)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Equating Prospero with Shakespeare, and vice-versa&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific equation of Prospero's breaking his staff with Shakespeare's renouncing his art is part of a much larger pattern of identification of Prospero with Shakespeare. In an &lt;a href=&quot;http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/tempest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford University podcast&lt;/a&gt;, Emma Smith shows that this pattern goes as far back as the late 17th century. In 1667, when John Dryden and William D'Avenant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest_(Dryden_and_D%27Avenant_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rewrote &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for the Restoration stage, their preface praised “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/tempestorenchant00shad_0/page/n9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's magic&lt;/a&gt;”, thereby linking him to the magician Prospero. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This identification was well-established by 1740, when the statue of Shakespeare was installed in the Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. Here's the statue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L5Rjz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/L5Rjz.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Shakespeare&amp;#39;s memorial in Poet&amp;#39;s Corner&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scroll that Shakespeare is pointing to quotes part of Prospero's famous speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our revels now are ended. These our actors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are melted into air, into thin air:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Leave not a wrack behind. We are such stuff&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As dreams are made on; and our little life&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is rounded with a sleep.   &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/Tmp.html#line-4.1.165&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(4.1.148–158)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines highlight the metatheatricality of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Smith points out that throughout the play, Prospero's actions are those of a playwright: he conjures up situations and manipulates characters within them. For example, the eponymous tempest with which the play opens turns out to be only an illusion of his making. Through Prospero's magic, the other characters experience it as real; through the magic of theater, the audience shares that experience. When the next scene reveals that the storm is just a trick of Prospero's, it's easy to extend the parallel. Prospero creates the tempest; Shakespeare creates &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;; Prospero is Shakespeare. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the Romantic era, Samuel Taylor Coleridge explicitly makes this parallel. He delivered a series of lectures on Shakespeare between 1811 and 1818. His &lt;a href=&quot;http://absoluteshakespeare.com/guides/tempest/essay/tempest_essay.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lecture on &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has a parenthetical remark where he calls Prospero &quot;the very Shakspeare [sic] himself, as it were, of the tempest&quot;. Coleridge leaves it nicely ambiguous as to whether by &quot;the tempest&quot; he means the storm or the play. Prospero is the Shakespeare of the storm, in that he is its maker. He is the Shakespeare of the play, in that he's the playwright's representative in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, the Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays, and the Biographical Approach&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These early identifications of Prospero with Shakespeare did not, however, make the specific connection between Prospero's breaking his staff and Shakespeare's renouncing his art. Since &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is the first play printed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, it was often assumed to be an early play. Scholars such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-17896&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmond Malone&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Capell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Capell&lt;/a&gt; began tackling the chronology of Shakespeare's plays in the late 1700s. Malone's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; &quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written&quot; was first published in 1788. He &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n353&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; could not have been written before 1609, as the play draws upon descriptions of the Bermudas that began to circulate after Sir George Somers's shipwreck on one of those islands in that year. He also says that the play &quot;exhibits ... strong internal marks of having been a late production&quot;, without elaborating on what those marks are. Malone does not, however, say that this was Shakespeare's last play, seeing &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; as later. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone claims that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was probably written in Summer 1612 and first performed in 1613. He argues that Shakespeare must have chosen this title in order to capitalize on a particularly destructive tempest that had occurred in England late in 1612. Were it not for this historical tempest, the argument goes, Shakespeare would not have named his play &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, and the play must have been performed in 1613, when the storm would still be fresh in the minds of the audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coleridge himself indulged in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/coleridgesessays00cole/page/58&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some rather idiosyncratic speculation&lt;/a&gt; about the plays' order from time to time. He came up with three different orderings at three different times, without providing reasoned arguments for any of those arrangements. Initially, he attributed &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; to Shakespeare's late period; around the time of his lecture on &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, he considered that it belonged to the middle of Shakespeare's career; eventually, he placed it among Shakespeare's later, but not final, plays. At no time, however, does he claim that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is Shakespeare's last play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Malone and Coleridge do not position &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; at the very end of Shakespeare's career, neither of them makes the equation of Prospero's staff-breaking with the playwright's retirement. This view arose only in the Victorian period. Over the course of the 19th century, stylistic approaches to Shakespeare's language (the proportion of poetry to prose, the prevalence of feminine endings, etc.) began to be used as a way to order the plays chronologically. This approach was what positioned &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as one of Shakespeare's last plays. A footnote to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Dowden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Dowden&lt;/a&gt;'s first book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shaksperecritica00dowd/page/6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakspere: His Mind and Art&lt;/a&gt; (1875), describes the development of this approach: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Spedding, in his article &quot;Who Wrote Henry VIII?&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Gentleman's Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, August, 1850), first applied quantitative criticism of verse peculiarities to the study of Shakspere's writings. Mr. Charles Bathurst, in &quot;Remarks on the Differences of Shakspere's Versification in Different Periods of his Life&quot; (London, 1867), called attention to the change &quot;from broken to interrupted verse&quot; which took place as Shakspere advanced in his dramatic career; and observed, also, the increase in the use of double-endings in his later plays. Professor Craik,in his &quot;English of Shakspere,&quot; and Professor J. K. Ingram, in a lecture upon Shakspere published in &quot;Afternoon Lectures&quot; (Bell and Daldy, 1863), again called attention to these peculiarities of versification as affording evidence for the ascertainment of the chronology of the plays. Finally, about the same time in England and in Germany, two investigators—Rev. F. G. Fleay and Professor Hertzberg—began to apply &quot;quantitative criticism&quot; of the characteristics of verse to the determination of the dates of plays. The test on which Hertzberg chiefly relies is the feminine (double) ending ; he gives the percentage of such endings in seventeen plays, and believes that the percentage indicates their chronological order. See the preface to &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt; in the German Shakespeare Society's edition of Tieck and Schlegel's translation. Mr. Fleay's results, independently ascertained, were published subsequently to Hertzberg's. See Trans. New Sh. Soc, and &lt;em&gt;Macmillan's Magazine&lt;/em&gt; Sept., 1874. In 1873 Mr. Furnivall, in founding the New Shakspere Society—before he was aware that Mr. Fleay's work was in progress—insisted on the importance of metrical tests for determining the chronology, and gave the proportion of stopped to unstopped lines in three early and three late plays. The latest contribution to the subject is Professor Ingram's valuable paper read before the New Sh. Soc, on the &quot;Weak-ending&quot; Test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the Victorian period, these methods had led to a widely accepted chronology of Shakespeare's plays that placed &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; firmly as one of the last. It was recognized that the chronology was not exact, but approximate. Nevertheless, the approximate order was well-suited to biographical approaches that sought to show how Shakespeare's art and personality matured hand-in-hand. Dowden &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shaksperecritica00dowd/page/336&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In these chapters we have been chiefly concerned with observing the growth of Shakspere's mind and art. The essential prerequisite of such a study was a scheme of the chronological succession of Shakspere's plays which could be accepted as trustworthy in the main. But for such a study it is fortunately not necessary that we should in every case determine how play followed play. It would for many reasons be important and interesting to ascertain the date at which each work of Shakspere came into existence; but as a fact this has not been accomplished, and we may safely say that it never will be accomplished. To understand in all essentials the history of Shakspere's character and Shakspere's art, we have obtained what is absolutely necessary when we have made out the succession, not of Shakspere's plays, but of Shakspere's chief visions of truth, his most intense moments of inspiration, his greater discoveries about human life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Retiring from the Stage, having Conquered All&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was (as it happens, accurately) placed as one of Shakespeare's last plays, given the long-standing identification of Shakespeare and Prospero, and given Dowden's frankly biographical approach to criticism, the temptation to see this as the culmination of the bard's career was perhaps too hard for Dowden to resist. He uses various rhetorical and argumentative strategies to position &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as the last of Shakespeare's plays. In another &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shaksperecritica00dowd/page/338&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;footnote&lt;/a&gt;, he returns to the previously mentioned &quot;latest contribution to the subject&quot; of Shakespeare's chronology, &quot;Professor Ingram's valuable paper&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Professor Ingram, in his paper &quot;On the 'Weak-endings' of Shakspere,&quot; arranges the plays of the weak-ending period in the following order: &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VIII&lt;/em&gt;. From an aesthetic point of view, &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; seem to me connected with the plays that immediately precede, not with those that follow them. Professor Ingram is disposed to place &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; immediately before &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;. I had independently arrived at the same opinion. ... Observe that &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Henry VIII&lt;/em&gt; are Shaksperian fragments. Thus &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt; remain as the three complete plays which represent the final period of Shakspere's authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first step toward positioning &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as Shakespeare's last play, Dowden accepts Ingram's ordering, but brackets &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; with immediately preceding plays such as &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. He then dismisses &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Henry VIII&lt;/em&gt;, collaborative plays, as mere &quot;fragments&quot; not worth much consideration. That leaves &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt; as Shakespeare's final plays. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, in the main body of his text, he claims that of these three plays, it is &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; which epitomizes &quot;the pathetic yet august serenity of Shakspere's final period&quot;. In an argument of breathtaking circularity, he says that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; must be considered Shakespeare's last play because it best provides the sense of a resolution:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the purposes of such a study as this we may look upon &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as Shakspere's latest play. Perhaps it actually was such; perhaps &lt;em&gt;A Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt; or both, may have followed it in point of time. It does not matter greatly, for the purposes of the present study, which preceded and which succeeded. These three plays, as we shall see, form a little group by themselves, but it is &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; which gives its most perfect expression to the spirit that breathes through these three plays which bring to an end the dramatic career of Shakspere; and therefore for us it is Shakspere's latest play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dowden's use of the royal we is rhetorically effective. He's making a bold and quite unsupported argument; there's no objective reason he can give that would establish &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as later than the other two plays. But the reader is made complicit in his strategy via that &quot;we&quot;. In the space of a few sentences, the reader progresses hand-in-hand with Dowden from merely &quot;look[ing] upon &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as Shakspere's latest play&quot; to the flat assertion that &quot;for us it &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; Shakspere's latest play.&quot;  Now &quot;we&quot; can milk the identification of Prospero and Shakespeare for all it's worth. And voilà, Prospero's breaking his staff becomes Shakespeare's preparation for retirement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is not chiefly because Prospero is a great enchanter, now about to break his magic staff, to drown his book deeper than ever plummet sounded, to dismiss his airy spirits, and to return to the practical service of his Dukedom, that we identify Prospero in some measure with Shakspere himself. It is rather because the temper of Prospero, the grave harmony of his character, his self-mastery, his calm validity of will, his sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice, and, with these, a certain abandonment, a remoteness from the common joys and sorrows of the world, are characteristic of Shakspere as discovered to us in all his latest plays. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shaksperecritica00dowd/page/370&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 371&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through these rhetorical and argumentative strategies, Dowden makes &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare's farewell to the stage. They are so effective that few pages on, Dowden can state without qualification that while writing &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Shakespeare &quot;was passing from his service as artist to his service as English country gentleman&quot; (p. 376). The possibility that he might have written four plays, independently or collaboratively, subsequent to this one no longer matters.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In justice to Dowden, it's worth mentioning that despite the dubiety of his argumentative strategy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Shakespeare&amp;#39;s_plays&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern approaches to Shakespeare's chronology&lt;/a&gt; have proven him correct. &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is in fact the last independent play that Shakespeare is known to have written. (The long history of seeing this as a late play, however, goes back to Malone, and now I'm wondering whether this is just &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anchoring bias&lt;/a&gt;. Okay, I'm kidding.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Dowden did get the fact of the relative chronology of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; right. His interpretation of the play is another matter. Some 140 years after Dowden, critics are no longer so sure about Prospero's &quot;sensitiveness to wrong, his unfaltering justice&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nas.org/articles/acknowledging_things_of_darkness_postcolonial_criticism_of_the_tempest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Postcolonial approaches to &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; cast Prospero as colonizer, exercising imperial control over the original inhabitants of the island: Caliban and Ariel. In the Oxford podcast, Smith also draws attention to his pompousness and his obsession with preserving Miranda's virginity until she is married. But Prospero's rule over the natives and his hangups about sexual purity would all be transparent to Dowden, writing as he was during the Victorian era, renowned for both its empire and its prudishness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dowden was a professor in the newly established academic field of English Literature. Gauri Viswanathan has &lt;a href=&quot;http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/english/masks.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pointed out&lt;/a&gt; that the academic study of English literature first arose in the context of British rule in India as part of the imperial mission of “educating and civilizing colonial subjects in the literature and thought of England”. This civilizing mission, this white man’s burden, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;serviceable to the dynamic of power relations between the educator and those who are to be educated. A vital if subtle connection exists between a discourse in which those who are to be educated are represented as morally and intellectually deficient and the attribution of moral and intellectual values to the literary works they are assigned to read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in this context the greatest, the most moral, of English literary works are, of course, Shakespeare’s plays. Against this imperial background, it is no surprise that Dowden should see Prospero/Shakespeare as someone who &quot;has reached not only the higher levels of moral attainment; he has also reached an altitude of thought from which he can survey the whole of human life, and see how small and yet how great it is&quot; (p. 372). Well, then! When one has reached such rarefied heights, what's left to do but break one's staff and drown one's books? We've already encompassed &quot;the whole of human life&quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/?chapter=5&amp;amp;play=Ham&amp;amp;loc=p283&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the rest is silence&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T00:06:41.523" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T00:06:41.523" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9639" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9662" CreationDate="2019-03-23T17:49:14.637" Score="6" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;Think sci-fi but only about ~20-30 years out. It takes place in NYC and has a huge emphasis on the media, entertainment, and cultural conflict in America. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the protagonists hosts a radio show and has significant influence. Another protagonist is a performer with some superhuman ability to connect with people emotionally. The final protag is a soldier of some kind that turns out to be an AI housed in a man's body&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, South Africa is a huge political influence on what happens in the states. Other major players are the mental health institution and an overarching defense contractor that sells arms like hot cakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really have no idea how popular this book was/is and when it was published. There was a common pattern of Dr. Seuss naming where common things became &quot;widgets&quot; and &quot;gidgets&quot; that made it a more difficult read than it had to be. Overall it was quite enjoyable and I'd recommend it if you guys happen to find out the title. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6044" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T16:55:09.170" Title="Dystopian novel that may or may not have been ahead of its time" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-23T18:12:59.663" Score="6" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All you need to free yourself from slavery is a couple of pints of beer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read Ivanhoe for the first time translated into Spanish, and am having a heck of time finding the material in any English editions for reference.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6045" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T06:36:15.873" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T06:36:15.873" Title="What was the exact wording from Ivanhoe of this advice on how to free yourself from slavery?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;sir-walter-scott&gt;&lt;ivanhoe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9640" CreationDate="2019-03-23T18:35:23.933" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scott made his Saxons drink ‘ale’, not ‘beer’. In doing so he was following the Saxons’ own usage: the word ‘beer’ was “rare, except in poetry, and it seems to have become common only in the 16th century” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). So you are looking for this piece of dialogue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Thou art an ass,” replied one of the thieves; “three quarts of double ale had rendered thee as free as thy master, ay, and freer too, if he be a Saxon like thyself.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Walter Scott (1819). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/82/82-h/82-h.htm#link2HCH0011&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-23T21:24:50.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-23T18:42:44.630" Score="6" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9638/2191&quot;&gt;excellent answer&lt;/a&gt; to one of my previous questions, verbose writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is the first play printed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, it was often assumed to be an early play. Scholars such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-17896&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmond Malone&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Capell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Capell&lt;/a&gt; began tackling the chronology of Shakespeare's plays in the late 1700s. I have been unable to track down exactly where Malone and Capell placed &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; chronologically, as I don't have easy access to a university library and could not find the information online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some scholars now assume that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was printed as the first play in the First Folio because of the quality of the text that the printer could work from. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Malone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmond Malone&lt;/a&gt; was the first scholar who tried to establish a chronology of Shakespeare's plays, namely in &quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in Which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare Were Written&quot;, which was included in the first volume of &lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakspeare&lt;/em&gt; (1778), a revised edition of Samuel Johnson's Shakespeare edition, created on co-operation with George Steevens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is now where Malone put &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; in this first chronology. (He seems to have revised his chronology later; this question is specifically about the version published in 1778.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T20:16:32.250" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:54:32.373" Title="Where did Edmond Malone place the Tempest in the chronology of Shakespeare's plays?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9642" CreationDate="2019-03-23T19:18:58.390" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakespeare Were Written&amp;quot; can be found on pages 269 - 346 of the first volume of &lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes&lt;/em&gt;. The chronology itself can be found on pages 274-275. It starts with &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt; (1589) and ends with the following plays and years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Yorkshire Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; (1608; title italicized since attribution to Shakespeare is doubtful)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; (1608)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; (1609)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt; (1610)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; (1611)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; (1612)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; (1614)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone's arguments for dating &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; to 1612 can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n353&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pages 341-342&lt;/a&gt;. These arguments include a &amp;quot;dreadful tempest&amp;quot; in England in late 1612 and the account of the sailor Edmond Pet, who narrowly survived a tempest at sea, but he eventually describes the dating of this play as &amp;quot;[not] a very improbable conjecture&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T09:54:32.373" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:54:32.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3593" CreationDate="2019-03-23T20:56:20.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The post says, “The original account … uses it to illustrate Cnut’s humility.” But note that Henry of Huntingdon only wrote that Cnut was humble &lt;em&gt;afterwards&lt;/em&gt;, not that he intended this beforehand. His version did not explain the king’s motive at all, leaving a gap that later historians filled.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cnut’s motive seems to have been introduced into the story accidentally and in stages: (i) Henry of Huntingdon’s introduction “when at the summit of his power”, which fixed the episode chronologically, was reinterpreted as its &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;. (ii) The king’s pride in his power was reworded to emphasize the moral. (iii) The king’s pride was explicitly given as the reason for his attempt to command the tide. (iv) Flattering courtiers were introduced to explain the king’s overweening pride. (v) The flattering courtiers remained but the king’s motive was changed to rebuking them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;While the evolution of the story is interesting, I doubt that the proverbial use of the story of Cnut trying to stop the tide has spread via this kind of written tradition. Instead, what I suspect has happened many times is that someone has alluded to the story as a vivid instance of the fact that events exceed our power to control them, without assigning any particular motive to the king; and someone else has heard the allusion and found that the easiest way to interpret it was if it was &lt;em&gt;Cnut&lt;/em&gt; who believed he could stop the tide. Thus the popular version has undergone a process of continual reinvention, no matter how often historians explain that it has no historical basis.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found it hard to find written versions of story (as opposed to proverbial uses) in which Cnut really believed that he could command the tide. This must be because this version is not remotely credible as history. No man who had made as many sea-voyages as Cnut could have believed he had any power over the tide, and no historian who cared about the plausibility of their account could have accepted it uncritically.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In nearly all modern versions of the story, Cnut’s motive in staging the scene was to rebuke his courtiers for their flattery. But this motive does not appear in any of the early sources, and although it is an improvement on the idea that Cnut believed he could command the tide, it is not particularly credible either, as Charles Dickens pointed out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We may learn from this, I think, that a little sense will go a long way in a king; and that courtiers are not easily cured of flattery, nor kings of a liking for it. If the courtiers of Canute had not known long before, that the King was fond of flattery, they would have known better than to offer it in such large doses. And if they had not known that he was vain of this speech […], they would not have been at such great pains to repeat it. I fancy I see them all on the sea-shore together; the King’s chair sinking in the sand; the King in a mighty good humor with his own wisdom; and the courtiers pretending to be quite stunned by it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Dickens (1852). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofe00childsdickrich/page/n39&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Child’s History of England&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter V&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Gaimar&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry of Huntington is not the only source for the story! In the 1130s, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Gaimar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoffrey Gaimar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; wrote a chronicle of the English people in Anglo-Norman rhyming couplets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Donc fu Cnuth de treis regnés sire;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Poi trovot ki l’osout desdire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  E nepurquant si fut desdit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  E son comandement despit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Londres ert desur Tamise;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Li floz veneit près de l’eglise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ki Westmuster ert apelé.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Li reis à pié s’est aresté […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His version of the story is different in detail from Henry’s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then Cnut was lord of three kingdoms; he found few who dared to disobey him. &#xA;  And nevertheless he was disobeyed, and his command despised. He was in London on the Thames; the tide was flowing near the church which is called Westminster. The king stood afoot at the strand; on the sand the tide came struggling onward; it advanced much, and came near the king. Cnut held his sceptre in his hand, and he said to the tide, “Return back; flee from me, lest I strike thee.” The sea did not retire for him,—more and more the tide rose; the king remained, he waited, and struck the water with his sceptre. The river retired not for that, so it reached the king and wetted him. When the king saw he had waited too long, and that the tide did not regard him, he withdrew himself back from the strand; then standing upon a stone, he stretched out his hands towards the east. Hear what he said while his people were listening:—“Him who made the sea to rise, men ought indeed to believe and adore. He is a good King, I am a poor creature; I am a mortal man, but He lives for ever; His command annihilates everything; I pray Him that He may be my Protector. To &#xA;  Rome I will go to petition Him; of Him I will hold all my lands.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Geoffrey Gaimar (1130s). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anglonormanmetri00gaim/page/n181&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Estoire des Engleis&lt;/em&gt;, lines 4695–4728&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ckhFAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA31&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation from &lt;em&gt;The Gentleman’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt; (1857)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaimar wrote no more about the king’s motives than Henry, but by setting the story &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; Cnut’s visit to Rome (rather than afterwards, as later writers did) he made it possible to imagine a different and more plausible motive. Perhaps someone had objected to Cnut’s pilgrimage to Rome on the grounds that he would be subjecting himself to the Pope, and Cnut replied that he would only be subjecting himself to God, to whom he was already subject, as demonstrated by his inability to command the tide. The Old Palace of Westminster (which Cnut had ordered constructed) was at that time on an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorney_Island_(London)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;island in the Thames&lt;/a&gt; and it would only have been a few steps from the church to the river bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gaimar’s version does not seem to have been much read: I could not find any version of the story that derived from it. This is no doubt because there are only four surviving manuscripts and the poem was not printed until the mid-19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Early Latin sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later versions derived instead from five sources in Latin. &lt;strong&gt;Henry of Huntingdon&lt;/strong&gt;’s &lt;em&gt;Historia Anglorum&lt;/em&gt;, written 1129–1154, is quoted in the question. The other four are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Matthew Paris&lt;/strong&gt; (c. 1300), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flores_Historiarum#Paris&amp;#39;s_Flores_Historiarum,_and_its_continuation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flores Historiarum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Until the mid-19th century this work was erroneously attributed to ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_of_Westminster&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew of Westminster&lt;/a&gt;’ and that’s how later sources refer to it. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rogerofwendovers01rogemiss/page/300&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. A. Giles’ translation&lt;/a&gt; (1849).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranulph_Higden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ranulph Higden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (c. 1344), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/polychroniconran07higd/page/134&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Polychronicon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brompton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Brompton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (c. 1436), &lt;a href=&quot;https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/vd272wq5988&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicon Johannis Brompton&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Printed in Roger Twysden’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historiaeanglica00twys/page/n531&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores X&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1652).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Thomas Rudburn&lt;/strong&gt; (c. 1454), &lt;em&gt;Historia Maior Wintoniensis&lt;/em&gt;. Printed in Henry Wharton’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AngliaSacra/page/n297&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anglia Sacra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1691).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these was closely derived from the text in Henry of Huntingdon. Paris, Higden and Brompton made minor changes to the Latin wording, but added nothing to Henry’s version. Rudburn, however, had another source, which gave the story’s location:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when he gracefully prospered in the kingdom he had conquered, he ordered a seat to be placed for him on the sea-shore; &lt;strong&gt;as some say, at Southampton, according to the author of &lt;em&gt;Concordantiis Historiarum&lt;/em&gt; under the letter K&lt;/strong&gt;, the tide was coming in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Rudburn (c. 1454). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AngliaSacra/page/n297&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Historia Maior Wintoniensis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(‘K’ stands for ‘Kanutus’.) The work referred to, a concordance of English history, written by a monk of Winchester, is now lost. Where did this monk get “Southampton” from? Perhaps he was reporting a local tradition, Southampton being the nearest point on the coast to Winchester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, nothing is known about &lt;em&gt;De Concordantiis Historiarum Angliae&lt;/em&gt; other than the handful of facts preserved by Rudburn. We only know that it was written by someone from Winchester because &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AngliaSacra/page/n335&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rudburn says so&lt;/a&gt;: “For this same author wrote a great deal about the Church of Winchester, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Cathedral_Priory&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in which&lt;/a&gt; he was formerly brought up” (&lt;em&gt;Ipse enim Auctor multa scribit de Ecclesia Wyntoniensi, in qua quondam nutritus erat&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Evolution of the story&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry of Huntingdon introduced the story with the phrase “when at the summit of his power” (&lt;em&gt;cum maximo vigore&lt;/em&gt;), which fixed the story chronologically. But it would have been easy to read this introduction causatively, understanding ‘when’ as ‘because’ (&lt;em&gt;cum&lt;/em&gt; has both meanings in Latin); and if you understood it this way then you would have been tempted to modify “at the summit of his power” in order to clarify the moral. The first chronicler to do so was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fabyan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Fabyan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then let us return to Canute, of whom it is read, that after his coming from Rome, &lt;strong&gt;he began somedeal to presume in pride, and let more of himself than good wisdom would&lt;/strong&gt;. In time of which exaltation of his mind, he went unto the Thames side, and beheld how the water swelled or flowed: and so standing near the water, the water touched his feet. Then he charged the water that he should flow no higher, and that, in no wise, he should touch his lord’s clothes; but the water kept his course, and wet, at length, the king’s thighs: wherewith the king abashed, started back and said, “All earthly kings may know that their powers be vain, and that none is worthy to have the name of a king but he that hath all things subject to his hests, as here is shown, by working of his creature by this water. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Fabyan (1516). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/newchroniclesofe00fabyuoft/page/218&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Chronicles of England and France&lt;/em&gt; part VI&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Fabyan linked the introduction to the story using “in time of which”, not “therefore”, and so his version remained ambiguous as to the king’s motive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fabyan gave his source as Henry of Huntingdon, so where did he get “Thames” from? It seems unlikely that he had read Gaimar, otherwise he would surely have mentioned the detail of the church at Westminster. Perhaps instead, since he lived in London, he was reporting a local tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Holinshed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael Holinshed&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; went one step further than Fabyan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[W]hen he came home (as some write) he did grow greatly into pride, &lt;strong&gt;insomuch that&lt;/strong&gt; being he caused his chair to be set there, as near to the Thames, or rather (as other write) upon the sea strand, near to Southampton, and perceiving the water to rise by reason of the tide, he cast off his gown, and wrapping it round together, threw it on the sands very near the increasing water, and sat him down upon it, speaking these or the like words to the sea: “Thou art (saith he) within the compass of my dominion, and the ground whereon I sit is mine, and thou knowest that no wight dare disobey my commandments; I therefore do now command thee not to rise upon my ground, nor to presume to wet any part of thy sovereign lord and governor.” But the sea keeping her course, rose still higher and higher, and overflowed not only the kings feet, but also flashed up unto his legs and knees. Wherewith the king started suddenly up, and withdrew from it, saying withall to his nobles that were about him: “Behold you noble men, you call me king, which can not so much as stay by my commandment this small portion of water. But know ye for certain, that there is no king but the father only of our Lord Jesus Christ, with whom he reigneth, and at whose beck all things are governed. Let us therefore honour him, let us confess and profess him to be the ruler of heaven, earth, and sea, and besides him none other.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Raphael Holinshed (1577). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/holinshedschroni01holi/page/730&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2 chapter 13&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holinshed wrote that his sources are Henry of Huntingdon and ‘Matthew of Westminster’, but this can’t have been the whole story, because neither of those sources mentioned the location. Holinshed must surely have consulted Fabyan (who located the event on the Thames) and Rudburn (who located it at Southampton). It seems likely that he followed Fabyan’s introduction, but replaced “In time of which” with “insomuch that” in order to better link the introduction and the story, perhaps not even realising that he was making a connection that was not previously there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Norden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Norden&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; introduced flattering courtiers as an explanation for why Cnut believed he could command the tide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[A]fter his return from Rome into England, who in regard of his quadruplicity of kingdoms, &lt;strong&gt;esteemed himself, more than a man mortal: for his Sycophants had so bewitched him with their enchanted flatteries, that he deemed himself no less then a God&lt;/strong&gt;. And in this proud conceit on a day he passed by the Thames, which ran by that palace, at the flowing of the tide, &amp;amp; making stay near the water, the waves cast forth some part of the water towards him, this Canute conjured the waves by his regal command to proceed no farther: the Thames unacquainted with this new God, held on it course, flowing as of custom it used to do, and refrained not to assail him near to the knees: whereat this high conceited man as one amazed, began to tremble, starting back protesting that he was but a man, though a mighty king. And that he that governed those waters, was only worthy to be called a king, and all mortal men, most mighty kings, ought to subject them unto him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Norden (1593). &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?cc=eebo2;c=eebo2;idno=a08306.0001.001;node=A08306.0001.001:10.6;seq=65;vid=13561;page=root;view=text&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Speculum Britanniae&lt;/em&gt;, part first&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Baker_(chronicler)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Baker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; retained the courtiers, but removed the idea that the king believed their flatteries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One strange act is recorded, which he did for convincing his fawning flatterers, who used to tell him that his powers were more than humane; For being one time at &lt;em&gt;Southampton&lt;/em&gt;, he commanded that his Chair of State should be set on the shore when the Sea began to flow, and then sitting down there in the presence of his many attendants, he spake thus to that Element: I charge thee that thou presume not to enter my Land, nor wet these Robes of thy Lord that are about me. But the Sea giving no heed to his command, but keeping on his usual course of Tide, first wet his skirts, and after his thighs, whereupon suddenly arising, he thus spake in the hearing of them all: Let all the worlds Inhabitants know, that vain and weak is the power of their Kings; and that none is worthy of the name of King, but be that keeps both Heaven and Earth and Sea in obedience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Baker (1643). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/b30329644/page/16&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Chronicle of the Kings of England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baker included a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/b30329644/page/n15&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;general bibliography&lt;/a&gt; but did not give line or chapter sources, so I don’t know which sources he consulted, but ‘Southampton’ and ‘Chair’ suggest Holinshed, and ‘thighs’ suggest Fabyan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Hume&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; included the courtiers and made it explicit that the king knew he could not command the tide:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Canute, who was the greatest and most powerful prince of his time, sovereign of Denmark and Norway, as well as of England, could not fail to meet with adulation from his courtiers; a tribute which is liberally paid even to the meanest and weakest princes. Some of his flatterers breaking out, one day, in admiration of his grandeur, exclaimed that every thing was possible for him: Upon which the monarch, it is said, ordered his chair to be set on the sea-shore, while the tide was making; and as the waters approached, he commanded them to retire, and to obey the voice of him who was lord of the ocean. He &lt;strong&gt;feigned&lt;/strong&gt; to sit some time in expectation of their submission; but when the sea still advanced towards him, and began to wash him with its billows, he turned to his courtiers, and remarked to them, that every creature in the universe was feeble and impotent, and that power resided with one Being alone, in whose hands were all the elements of nature, who could say to the ocean, &lt;em&gt;Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther&lt;/em&gt;, and who could level with his nod the most towering piles of human pride and ambition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Hume (1762). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=x0s8AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA164&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of England&lt;/em&gt;, volume I chapter III&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hume gave as his sources Ranulph Higden, John Brompton, ‘Matthew of Westminster’ and Henry of Huntingdon, but none of these mentioned the courtiers, so it is hard to avoid suspecting that he was also influenced by Baker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many versions of the story derived from Hume’s, for example that of &lt;strong&gt;Charles Dickens&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The old writers of history relate how that Canute was one day disgusted with his courtiers for their flattery, and how he caused his chair to be set on the sea-shore, and feigned to command the tide as it came up not to wet the edge of his robe, for the land was his; how the tide came up, of course, without regarding him; and how he then turned to his flatterers, and rebuked them, saying, what was the might of any earthly king, to the might of the Creator, who could say unto the sea, “Thus far shalt thou go, and no further!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Dickens (1852). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofe00childsdickrich/page/n39&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Child’s History of England&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter V&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the Ladybird book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JBSCO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JBSCO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Canute’s courtiers had said that the sea would obey him. So Canute ordered back the sea and got very wet proving how stupid were their flatteries&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Brenda Ralph Lewis (1954). &lt;em&gt;Kings and Queens of England Book 1&lt;/em&gt;. Illustrated by John Leigh-Pemberton and Peter Robinson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Envoi&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t want to give the impression that everyone in the early modern period was incapable of basic scholarship. The historians I selected above were those that contributed to the game of whispers, but contrast them with &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Milton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I must not omit one remarkable action done by him, as Huntingdon reports it, with great scene of circumstance and emphatical expression, to show the small power of kings in respect of God; which, unless to court-parasites, needed no such laborious demonstration. He caused his royal seat to be set on the shore, while the tide was coming in; and with all the state that royalty could put into his countenance, said thus to the sea; “Thou, sea, belongest to me, and the land whereon I sit, is mine; nor hath any one, unpunished, resisted my commands; I charge thee come no farther upon my land, neither presume to wet the feet of thy sovereign lord.” But the sea, as before, came rolling-on, and, without reverence, both wetted and dashed him. Whereat the king quickly rising “wished all about him to behold and consider the weak and frivolous power of a king, and that none indeed deserved the name of a king, but he whose eternal laws both Heaven, earth, and sea obey.” A truth so evident of itself, as I said before, that, unless to shame his court-flatterers, who would not else be convinced, Canute needed not to have gone wet-shod home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1670). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofbritain00miltuoft/page/234&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Britain&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll see that Milton managed to correctly reference his source, accurately quote it, and separate his own commentary from it. Would that all historians had done so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T09:26:51.200" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T09:26:51.200" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11407" CreationDate="2019-03-23T22:04:31.047" Score="8" ViewCount="4627" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Princess Bride&lt;/em&gt; by William Goldman, there is an extended section where the author says that he wanted to include a reunion scene when Buttercup first discovers that the &quot;man in black&quot; is in fact her beloved Westley, but his editor didn't want it in. So as a compromise, Goldman tells you to write to his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and they will send you the &quot;missing scene&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the company no longer exists at the address given. My eBook copy also includes an asterisk after the address that, when followed to the last page, says this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*I've been writing since Eisenhower's been president and I think this is my first asterisk. I feel giddy. The purpose of this is to announce that time has marched on. If you don't want to wait to read the reunion scene, you no longer have to. Just go to the Internet and log on to www.hmhco.com/princessbride. You'll see it right on your very own computer screen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, that URL goes to a dead link, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.hmhco.com/princessbride&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org's only history&lt;/a&gt; is an error page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what was the &quot;reunion scene&quot; that you would get if you wrote to the publisher or visited the website? Was it actually an additional narrative, or was it just an additional joke, such as claiming that the manuscript was lost as the book went to print?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="993" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T06:37:03.583" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T20:49:41.787" Title="What is The Princess Bride's &quot;reunion scene&quot; that you had to write to the publisher for?" Tags="&lt;the-princess-bride&gt;&lt;william-goldman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-24T02:07:00.303" Score="3" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Jew's dress, which appeared to have suffered considerably from the storm, was a plain russet cloak of many folds, covering a dark purple tunic. He had large boots lined with fur, and a belt around his waist, which sustained a small knife, together with a case for &lt;strong&gt;writing materials,&lt;/strong&gt; but no weapon. He wore a high square yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned to his nation to distinguish them from Christians, and which he doffed with great humility at the door of the hall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strange but true: this snippet, apparently about a scribe's tools, has been haunting me rather obsessively lately.  I didn't recall that the bearer was the Jew.  I suppose a lender/usurer would want to keep records of his debtors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something else?  Was it particularly rare to be able to write, even among certain strata of the upper class?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does he say &quot;a small knife, but no weapon&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Sir Walter Scott's mention of writing tools here used primarily to distinguish his social class/ his occupation, or perhaps something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I mistaken in thinking it might have been a little bit odd for a traveler to be carrying a sack full of pens?  (which lacking further descriptive language is what most readers will assume...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6046" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T11:57:51.730" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T14:07:09.387" Title="What is the significance of the traveler carrying writing materials in Ivanhoe?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;sir-walter-scott&gt;&lt;ivanhoe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9647" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9593" CreationDate="2019-03-24T11:37:07.467" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the original French version of the novel, what d'Artagnan has to recover from London are &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret_(v%C3%AAtement)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ferrets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (engl. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aglet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aglets&lt;/a&gt;). An aglet is a small sheath that allows to easily slide a lace or ribbon through an eyelet hole. During the seventeenth century, these had became purely decorative and could be made from fragile minerals such as rock crystal or be adorned with diamonds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exhibition about &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.musee-armee.fr/au-programme/expositions/detail/mousquetaires.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Mousquetaires&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.musee-armee.fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Musée de l'Armée&lt;/a&gt; in 2014 displayed some historic objects related to the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Among them were &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; owned by the Marquise Arconati-Visconti from circa 1895-1897. They are no. 48 in the lower half of this image from the exhibition catalogue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hBxYh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hBxYh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How these &lt;em&gt;ferrets&lt;/em&gt; were worn can be seen in the following portrait of Anne of Austria, where they are attached to red ribbons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybHjj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ybHjj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user6049" LastEditorDisplayName="user6049" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T18:56:46.907" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T18:56:46.907" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9635" CreationDate="2019-03-24T14:25:48.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surely the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Archduke_Franz_Ferdinand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serbian plot&lt;/a&gt; to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (the event which set off World War I) would not have been far from Buchan's mind, since he wrote it shortly after the start of the war. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in some sense the reverse ... a German plot to assassinate a Balkan head of state, rather than a Balkan plot to assassinate the Austrian heir to the throne. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this would have been sufficient inspiration for Buchan. I don't see why we need to postulate any real-life plot closer to the novel's plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T14:25:48.380" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-24T21:14:37.483" Score="3" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;T. S. Eliot's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Waste Land&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is usually printed with the poet's notes. However, these notes were not present in the original edition and were added in a later edition dating from the same year (i.e. 1922).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the notes identify quotes and allusions in the poem, of which there are many. However, they are not always helpful, e.g. when the poet writes in a note on line 199,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her introduction to &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land and Other Writings&lt;/em&gt; (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), Mary Karr writes in a comment on notes like this,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today, I interpret Eliot's pose here not as pompous but as a self-mocking signal, a bold admission that the notes &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; trivial. I also wonder whether plagiarism laws of his age required such notations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of teaching about this poem year after year at Syracuse University, Mary Karr has not done the research required to answer her own question. Can anybody find out whether &quot;plagiarism laws&quot; in the 1920s in England might have required such notes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-25T16:32:55.187" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T17:19:39.627" Title="Were T. S. Eliot's notes to The Waste Land partly inspired by plagiarism laws?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9650" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9651" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" Score="0" Body="Questions about James Joyce's first novel, &quot;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&quot;, first published in 1916. Use this tag with the [james-joyce] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" LastActivityDate="2019-03-24T21:31:04.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9599" CreationDate="2019-03-25T01:11:22.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding the Zeigarnik Effect itself, it's a bit of a leap from an &lt;em&gt;unfinished task&lt;/em&gt; being more memorable, to thinking that &lt;em&gt;unresolved threads in a novel&lt;/em&gt; make the novel more memorable. In any case, there are criticisms of the effect itself. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeigarnik_effect#Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reliability of the effect has been a matter of some controversy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several later studies, performed later in other countries, attempting&#xA;  to replicate Zeigarnik's experiment, failed to find any significant&#xA;  differences in recall between &quot;finished&quot; and &quot;unfinished&quot;&#xA;  (interrupted) tasks (e.g. Van Bergen, 1968).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring the question of the effect itself, are there many memorable works of fiction with unresolved threads? &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9599/do-genres-of-literature-exist-which-take-advantage-of-the-zeigarnik-effect#comment16465_9599&quot;&gt;Gareth Rees&lt;/a&gt; suggests &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1079&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&lt;/a&gt;, by Laurence Sterne, might fit the bill. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9599/do-genres-of-literature-exist-which-take-advantage-of-the-zeigarnik-effect#comment16462_9599&quot;&gt;Peter Shor&lt;/a&gt; suggests &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisadero_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Divisadero&lt;/a&gt;, by Michael Ondaatje. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think any work that sets out to examine the human condition without offering a clear conclusion would qualify – &quot;here's life, it doesn't make sense, no tidy endings&quot; kind of stuff. Hugh Selby Jr's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Last Exit to Brooklyn&lt;/a&gt; comes to mind. Maybe some existentialist or absurdist novels – e.g. Kafka's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7849&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Trial&lt;/a&gt;. Some of the more experimental or boundary-pushing modernist works: certainly Samuel Beckett's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unnamable_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Unnameable&lt;/a&gt;, and perhaps William Faulkner's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_and_the_Fury&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sound and the Fury&lt;/a&gt; and James Joyce's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ulysses&lt;/a&gt;, amongst others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But compared to the wealth of great literary works to choose from, the above is a pretty slim list. I think the difficulty in finding examples suggests one of three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not many such works get written. They're challenging to write successfully, and not very enticing: fiction&#xA;writers are generally &lt;strong&gt;storytellers&lt;/strong&gt; who certainly want to take you on a&#xA;journey but also derive pleasure from delivering you to the &lt;em&gt;destination&lt;/em&gt;, rather than leaving&#xA;you stranded at sea (or in space, or in the desert, or in a dungeon,&#xA;or just meaninglessly dead).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Editors and publishers are conscious that good stories, with a&#xA;&lt;em&gt;dénouement&lt;/em&gt; where everything gets resolved (ideally with at least a satisfying if not happy ending) tend to be safe and popular, so&#xA;there's an automatic filter to be overcome just to get the work&#xA;published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The supposed Zeigarnik Effect is about whether something is more &lt;em&gt;memorable&lt;/em&gt;, not whether it's more &lt;em&gt;satisfying, likeable or worth recommending&lt;/em&gt;. How many have read &lt;em&gt;The Da Vinci Code&lt;/em&gt; compared to &lt;em&gt;The Unnameable&lt;/em&gt;? The latter is utterly memorable, but I wouldn't recommend it to most readers. If the Zeigarnik Effect exists in literature, it's probably also self-limiting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-03-26T10:46:49.693" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:46:49.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8661" CreationDate="2019-03-25T06:30:29.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither. Coleridge is referring to his own reservations about some of Wordsworth's poems. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.185927/page/n79&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;context&lt;/a&gt; makes this clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend whose &lt;em&gt;talents&lt;/em&gt; I hold in the highest respect, but whose &lt;em&gt;judgment&lt;/em&gt; and strong sound sense I have had almost continued occasion to &lt;em&gt;revere&lt;/em&gt;, making the usual complaints to me concerning both the style and subjects of Mr. Wordsworth's minor poems; I admitted that there were some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre. I mentioned Alice Fell as an instance; &amp;quot;Nay,&amp;quot; replied my friend with more than usual quickness of manner, &amp;quot;I cannot agree with you &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;!—that, I own, &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; seem to me a remarkably pleasing poem.&amp;quot; In the Lyrical Ballads, (for my experience does not enable me to extend the remark equally unqualified to the two subsequent volumes,) I have heard at different times, and from different individuals, every single poem &lt;em&gt;extolled&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reprobated&lt;/em&gt;, with the exception of those of loftier kind, which as was before observed, seem to have won universal praise. This fact of itself would have made me diffident in my censures, had not a still stronger ground been furnished by the strange contrast of the heat and long continuance of the opposition, with the nature of the faults stated as justifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt; marked a break with prevailing trends in 18th C. poetry by including several poems that forgo elevated subjects and lofty diction, focusing instead on humbler subjects and ordinary language. Coleridge is defending Wordsworth's attempt to &amp;quot;ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Advertisement&amp;quot; to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1798 edition&lt;/a&gt;). He says that in some cases, he thinks Wordsworth might have gone too far, picking a topic so unremarkable that it is not worth writing poetry about: &amp;quot;there were some few of the tales and incidents, in which I could not myself find a sufficient cause for their having been recorded in metre.&amp;quot; However, he finds that even those poems which he and others criticize for this reason have their fierce defenders. He says that the fact that the same poem can be both &amp;quot;extolled&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;reprobated&amp;quot; would be enough to make him &amp;quot;diffident in [his] censures&amp;quot;. I.e., since others whose judgment he esteems like poems that he himself doesn't like, he thinks that he might perhaps be wrong to criticize those poems. He goes on to say that the sheer and continued vitriol directed toward Wordsworth's experiments also reinforces his sense that the poems do not deserve such hostility, and that the problem is therefore with those who excoriate Wordsworth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T19:28:02.513" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T19:28:02.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-25T12:23:13.033" Score="3" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1886, Mark Twain wrote an essay entitled &quot;The New Dynasty&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its theme, and much of its language, are quite similar to Carl Sandburg's poem &quot;I Am the People, the Mob&quot; of half a century later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is plain to me that Sandburg read Twain's essay, and was inspired by its thought process and even some of its wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did he ever acknowledge the role that Twain's essay played in his writing that poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T12:23:13.033" Title="Did Sandburg acknowledge Twain's influence?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;carl-sandburg&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6351" CreationDate="2019-03-25T14:52:22.653" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one part in particular in &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt; where Frodo and Sam are discussing the story as a narrative that strikes me as metafictional in a way different than other comments have mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “Step or stone, breath or bone.  Earth, air and water all seem accursed.  But so our path is laid.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam.  “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started.  But I suppose it’s often that way.  The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventure, as I used to call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of sport as you might say.  But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Folk just seem to have landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it.  But I expect they had lots of chances like us, of turning back, only they didn’t.  And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end.  You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like Mr. Bilbo.  But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in.  I wonder what sort of tale we fallen into?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6053" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T15:35:58.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9649" CreationDate="2019-03-25T17:19:39.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Gareth Rees pointed out, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/46/contents/enacted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Act of 1911&lt;/a&gt; was the copyright law that was in force when T. S. Eliot published &quot;The Waste Land&quot;. Below is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/46/section/1/enacted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how this act defines &quot;copyright&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the purposes of this Act, &quot;copyright&quot; means the sole right to produce or reproduce the work or any &lt;strong&gt;substantial part&lt;/strong&gt; thereof in any material form whatsoever, to perform, or in the case of a lecture to deliver, the work or any &lt;strong&gt;substantial part&lt;/strong&gt; thereof in public; if the work is unpublished, to publish the work or any &lt;strong&gt;substantial part&lt;/strong&gt; thereof ; and shall include the sole right,— &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (a) to produce, reproduce, perform, or publish any translation of the work;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (b) in the case of a dramatic work, to convert it into a novel or other non-dramatic work ;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (c) in the case of a novel or other non-dramatic work, or of an artistic work, to convert it into a dramatic work, by way of performance in public or otherwise;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (d) in the case of a literary, dramatic, or musical work, to make any record, perforated roll, cinematograph film, or other contrivance by means of which the work may be mechanically performed or delivered, and to authorise any such acts as aforesaid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/1-2/46/section/3/enacted&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Section 3&lt;/a&gt; also states (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The term for which copyright shall subsist shall, except as otherwise expressly provided by this Act, be &lt;strong&gt;the life of the author and a period Of fifty years after his death&lt;/strong&gt;: (...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot's quotes in &quot;The Waste Land&quot; reproduce at most a few lines from other works, i.e. no &quot;substantial parts&quot;. In addition, copyright had already expired for many of the works he quotes, e.g. Bible books, Elizabethan and Jacobean authors such as Shakespeare, Kyd and Webster, and the works of Dante.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was not copyright &lt;em&gt;legislation&lt;/em&gt; that required such notes, but the perception of plagiarism by readers may have played a role. Peter Ackroyd's biography of T. S. Eliot notes (on pages 177-178 of the German translation, published by Suhrkamp in 1988):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Die Ausgaben in Buchform unterschieden sich von den Zeitschriftenfassungen durch die Beifügung von Eliots Anmerkungen. Diese waren ursprünglich dazu gedacht, Pagiatsvorwürfe, wie sei seinen früheren Gedichten gemacht wurden, zu unterlaufen. Da aber das Gedicht noch immer nicht lang genug schien, um ein Buch zu ergeben, weitete er sei aus. Was daraus hervorging, nannte er dann eine &quot;beachtliche Zurschaustellung gelehrter Hochstapelei&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The book editions [of &quot;The Waste Land&quot;] differed from the magazine editions by the addition of Eliot's notes. These were originally intended to avoid the accusations of plagiarism that had been levelled at his earlier poems. Since the poem still seemed too short to fill a book, Eliot expanded the notes. He later called the result a &quot;remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment about &quot;bogus scholarship&quot; comes from his lecture &quot;The Frontiers in Criticism&quot;, which was later published in &lt;em&gt;On Poetry and Poets&lt;/em&gt;. Below is a longer quote from that lecture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had at first intended only to put down all the references for my quotations, with a view to spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism. Then, when it came time to print &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; as a little book—for the poem on its first appearance in &lt;em&gt;The Dial&lt;/em&gt; and in &lt;em&gt;The Criterion&lt;/em&gt; had no notes whatever—it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter, with the result that they became the remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view to-day. I have sometimes thought of getting rid of these notes; but now they can never be unstuck. They have had almost greater popularity than the poem itself—anyone who bought my book of poems, and found that the notes to The Waste Land were not in it, would demand his money back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So avoiding accusations of plagiarism played a role, but not in a legal sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-25T17:19:39.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9659" CreationDate="2019-03-25T22:30:58.453" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In A Ted Hughes poem called &quot;Criminal Ballad&quot; (of the Crow collection), there's a usage of the word &quot;heave&quot; which I can't figure: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;A woman fell between the ship and the jetty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At a heave from the moon and the sun&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her pleading cries were humbled out&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;at a heave&quot; means here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that &quot;heave&quot; have a meaning in a nautical context, and I also know that a sea can be described as &quot;heaving&quot;, but what does it have to do with the moon and the sun? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:58:43.823" Title="A woman falling at a heave from the moon and the sun" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;crow&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9657" CreationDate="2019-03-26T10:58:43.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;heave of the sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;: the force exerted by the swell of the sea in quickening, retarding, or altering a vessel’s course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the ship was heaved by the sea and this caused the woman to fall, perhaps when she was walking along the gangplank to or from the jetty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What have the moon and the sun to do with it? These celestial bodies are responsible for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tide&lt;/a&gt;, not for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swell_(ocean)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;swell&lt;/a&gt;, which is caused by wind. The tide does not move fast enough to noticeably heave a ship (except in a few places where there are tidal &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_bore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bores&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_race&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;races&lt;/a&gt;). Perhaps Hughes is making a metaphor whereby the sun and the moon cause the tide, and the tide is like the swell, and the swell moves the ship. However, the chain of connections there seems rather long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next line, “humbled out” is also hard to interpret. Turning again to the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; I find that ‘humble’ has a second meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;humble&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;v.2 Obsolete. intransitive.&lt;/em&gt; To rumble; to mumble; to hum or buzz as a bee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so perhaps Hughes means that her cries were drowned out by the noise of the ship’s engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T10:58:43.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9661" CreationDate="2019-03-26T13:15:48.760" Score="10" ViewCount="1692" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the creature is first created we get a strong impression that it is built up from body parts, quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap04&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. [...] The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creature then demands a female companion, and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm#chap19&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 19&lt;/a&gt;, Victor sets out to create one on a tiny, remote island (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of my labours. It was a place fitted for such a work, being &lt;strong&gt;hardly more than a rock&lt;/strong&gt; whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for &lt;strong&gt;its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons&lt;/strong&gt;, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare. Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured &lt;strong&gt;from the mainland, which was about five miles distant&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, such a barren rock would not have an abundance of dead bodies that Victor could use as a source for the new creature, and bringing them in by boat to such a small community would like raise too many questions. It is however clear that he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; build something, since he destroys it after being reminded of his first creation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I thought with a sensation of madness on my promise of creating another like to him, and trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged. The wretch saw me destroy the creature on whose future existence he depended for happiness...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this ever explained in some other version of the book, or in external sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="627" LastEditorUserId="5694" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T06:26:08.293" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T06:26:08.293" Title="How could Frankenstein get the parts for his second creature?" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9660" CreationDate="2019-03-26T13:32:44.997" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The beginning of chapter 19 says that Frankenstein spent six months in London assembling the ‘materials’ for the new creature, before setting out for the Scottish island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;London was our present point of rest; we determined to remain several months in this wonderful and celebrated city. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now also began to &lt;strong&gt;collect the materials&lt;/strong&gt; necessary for my new creation […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had arrived in England at the beginning of October, and it was now February. We accordingly determined to commence our journey towards the north at the expiration of another month. In this expedition we did not intend to follow the great road to Edinburgh, but to visit Windsor, Oxford, Matlock, and the Cumberland lakes, resolving to arrive at the completion of this tour about the end of July. I packed up &lt;strong&gt;my chemical instruments and the materials I had collected&lt;/strong&gt;, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear if he took these ‘materials’ with him on his tour of Britain, or whether he left them in London and later sent for them to be delivered once he had found a suitable island. Presumably they were packed into cases or crates and the boatmen would not have been aware of their contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T13:37:46.107" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9639" CreationDate="2019-03-26T16:55:09.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found it: the book is The Jagged Orbit by John Brunner. Surprising that it was written in the 60's &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6044" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T16:55:09.170" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2072" CreationDate="2019-03-26T23:00:34.427" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The keywords in your question reminded me of &quot;Cloud, Castle, Lake&quot; from &quot;Nabokov's Dozen&quot; in which a Vasiliy Ivanovich is traveling on a train with a group of Germans, all called Schramm or Schultz. He is made to sing (in German), has to hand over his provisions (&quot;The cucumber amused everybody, was pronouced inedible, and was thrown out of the window&quot;). They spend the night at an inn. The next day, again on a train, &quot;There was much laughter&quot;. Beer is also mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could this be what you were looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the book with me at this moment, so I need to quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.nl/books?id=eAQhuAZzfYIC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2019-03-26T23:00:34.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T09:01:16.230" Score="5" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9638/17&quot;&gt;recent answer from verbose&lt;/a&gt; mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Postcolonial approaches to &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; cast Prospero as colonizer, exercising imperial control over the original inhabitants of the island: Caliban and Ariel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Previously, I'd only been aware of a connection between &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; and colonialism via &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/search?q=nalo+hopkinson+shift&quot;&gt;Nalo Hopkinson's short story &quot;Shift&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which is set in a post-colonial Caribbean but uses characters named Caliban, Ariel, and Sycorax after those in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Even after reading and learning about this story, I had not realised that there are post-colonial interpretations of the original Shakespeare play too. I haven't actually studied this play, only read a retelling years ago, but to me this was never an obvious interpretation. So I'm curious about the history of this approach to study of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When was the first &quot;post-colonial&quot; analysis of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, casting Prospero as a coloniser exercising imperial control? What is the history of this interpretation?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T17:41:20.170" Title="When was Shakespeare's The Tempest first analysed from a &quot;post-colonial&quot; perspective?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9665" CreationDate="2019-03-27T12:02:35.500" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest postcolonial reading of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; that I am aware of was published by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Mannoni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Octave Mannoni&lt;/a&gt; (1899-1989; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Mannoni&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article about Mannoni&lt;/a&gt; is a bit longer). Mannoni was a Frenchman who is a bit hard to classify, since he studied philosophy, worked as a teacher in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martinique&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martinique&lt;/a&gt; (which is still part of France's overseas territories), La Réunion and Madagascar, and later became psychoanalyst. He left Madagascar in 1947 because he disagreed with the French colonial policy there, which had led to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malagasy_Uprising&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malagasy Uprising&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the years 1947-1948, he had already published a few articles in the magazines &lt;em&gt;Psyché&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Revue de psychologie des peuples&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Esprit&lt;/em&gt;, which he reworked into a book entitled &lt;em&gt;La psychologie de la colonisation&lt;/em&gt; (literally, &quot;The psychology of coloniation&quot;), published in 1950. The book heavily criticised colonialism; in spite of this, Mannoni was criticised by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aim%C3%A9_C%C3%A9saire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aimé Césaire&lt;/a&gt;, another notable theorist of postcolonialism, in his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Colonialism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discours sur le colonialisme&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was also published in 1950. (In 1969, Césaire published the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Une_Temp%C3%AAte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Une tempête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was an adaptation of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; from a postcolonial perspective.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in 1964, the book is translated into English as &lt;em&gt;Prospero and Caliban. The Psychology of Colonization&lt;/em&gt; and published by Methuen in London. In the United States, the book was published by Praeger in New York in 1964, since 1990, it has been available from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press.umich.edu/9316/prospero_and_caliban&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Michigan Press&lt;/a&gt;. While the English version of the book became something like a classic of postcolonial literature in the English-speaking world, this does not appear to be the case in the French-speaking world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mannoni republished the French edition of his book in 1984, but now under the title &lt;em&gt;Prospero et Caliban. Psychologie de la colonisation&lt;/em&gt;. This edition contains a foreword by Charles Baladier, a French translation of the preface that Philip Mason wrote for the 1956 English edition and Mannoni's own notes from 1956 and 1964 for the English edition. This edition was republished posthumously in 1997 under the supervision of Mannoni's wife Maud, but with a new title: &lt;em&gt;Le racisme revisité. Madagascar, 1947&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;Racism revisited, Madagascar, 1947&quot;. This last edtion also contained two other texts by Mannoni: &quot;The decolonisation of myself&quot; (originally published in English in 1966) and &quot;Terrains de mission&quot; (originally published in 1971).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is not primarily an interpretation of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;; it is more a study of the colonial situation in Madagascar and a psychological theory of colonialism. Mannoni claimed that the Malagasy personality type was characterised by a &lt;strong&gt;dependency complex&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas the European personality type was characterised by a &lt;strong&gt;inferiority complex&lt;/strong&gt;. Both complexes are initially present in children, but the community in which they are raised leads to a predominance of one of these complexes. The inferiority complex leads to a search for situations where the European can prove his superiority, and colonialism provides such &quot;opportunities&quot;. In other words, Europeans were psychologically prepared to behave like Shakespeare's Prospero or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and to treat the colonised as Calibans. This psychological interpration was one of the reasons for the criticism by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;François Vatin: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cairn.info/revue-du-mauss-2011-1-page-137.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Octave Mannoni (1899-1989) et sa Psychologie de la colonisation. Contextualisation et décontextualisation&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Revue due MAUSS&lt;/em&gt;, volume 37 (2011/1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kenneth E. Bock: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/prospero-and-caliban-the-psychology-of-colonization-by-o-mannoni/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, by O. Mannoni&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Commentary&lt;/em&gt;, July 1957. (Review of the English translation.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Anne M. Lynch: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/19/mannoni-octave/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Mannoni, Octave&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Postcolonial Studies blog at Emory University, 1998.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: In 1900, the Uruguayan author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Enrique_Rod%C3%B3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;José Enrique Rodó&lt;/a&gt; published his essay &lt;em&gt;Ariel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in which Ariel represents the positive, and Caliban represents the negative tendencies in human nature, and they debate the future course of history, in what Rodó intended to be a secular sermon to Latin American youth, championing the cause of the classical western tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more a discussion of the situation in Latin America around 1900 than an analysis of the play. Even though the essay was very influential in Latin America, it doesn't appear to have had a significant impact in the English-speaking or French-speaking world—there is a gap of fifty years between &lt;em&gt;Ariel&lt;/em&gt; and Mannoni's &lt;em&gt;La psychologie de la colonisation&lt;/em&gt;, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monreal, Susana: &lt;a href=&quot;https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/rodo_jose_enrique&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rodó, José Enrique&lt;/a&gt;, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.10104. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20060612204131/http://analitica.com/bitblioteca/rodo/ariel.asp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ariel&lt;/a&gt; in Spanish in the Internet Archive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikisource.org/wiki/Ariel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ariel&lt;/a&gt; in Spanish on Wikisource.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ariel00rodj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ariel, English translation by F. J. Stimson (1922)&lt;/a&gt; in the Internet Archive.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T17:41:20.170" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T17:41:20.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T10:56:12.273" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a fragment of a short story by Louce Baker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sladen Morris is the boy next door.&#xA;  The girls all think he’s fascinating and tend to deify him now that he’s touched six feet on the wall where his mother has been marking his height since he was two. But I keep remembering when he had braces on his teeth and refused to apply a comb to his hair and wouldn’t even wash his face unless forcefully led to the bathroom. You wouldn’t expect me to go weak-kneed over Sladen, and I certainly never expected to, even if he showed up on a white charger with a new moon for me tucked under a red cape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I don't understand this phrase &quot;white charger with a new moon for me tucked under a red cape&quot;. What is meant here as &quot;a new moon&quot;? Why &quot;moon&quot; and why is it &quot;a new&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6066" OwnerDisplayName="Бертран Рассел" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T12:16:00.827" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T13:01:26.143" Title="Meaning of a phrase &quot;showed up on a white charger with a new moon&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9667" CreationDate="2019-03-27T11:51:42.003" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Showed up on a white charger&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White charger means an elegant/strong white horse.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;New moon for me tucked under a red cape&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;New moon is used here to symbolize something new, expensive and fancy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the whole phrase would means that even if the guy comes to her in a big white horse (&lt;em&gt;like a knight or prince, symbolizing high rank of a person&lt;/em&gt;) and would bring the moon for her (&lt;em&gt;a metaphor for riches and unique, expensive gifts&lt;/em&gt;), she would still not be attracted to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6067" OwnerDisplayName="Bella Swan" LastEditorUserId="6067" LastEditDate="2019-03-27T13:01:26.143" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T13:01:26.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9646" CreationDate="2019-03-27T14:07:09.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It was rare for laity to be able to read and write; everyone carried a knife but generally only nobility and soldiers carried weapons; Scott mentions the writing materials in chapter V because they will be used in chapter VI; the writing materials included parchment, quills and ink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Was it rare to be able to write?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depended on which section of society you belonged to. &lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt; is set in 1194, during the reign of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard I&lt;/a&gt;. At that time, it was a stereotype that clergy were literate and laity illiterate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ancient notion of three estates with distinctive functions was well known in medieval England. The clergy prayed, the knights fought, and the peasants laboured. In this tripartite scheme, literacy was seen as the distinctive skill of ecclesiastics; indeed, in the French and English languages, the word ‘clergy’ meant not only clerks but written learning. Those who practiced it were clerks, and ‘lay’ was a synonym for ‘illiterate’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Nicholas Orme (1996). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-7bEwILv-qkC&amp;amp;pg=PA35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lay Literacy in England 1100–1300&lt;/a&gt;’. In Alfred Haverkamp &amp;amp; Hanna Vollrath (eds.), &lt;em&gt;England and Germany in the High Middle Ages&lt;/em&gt;, Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scott included an episode in &lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt; illustrating this stereotype:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Let us see the cause of this cursed clamour,” said Front-de-Boeuf—“here is a letter, and, if I mistake not, it is in Saxon.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He looked at it, turning it round and round as if he had had really some hopes of coming at the meaning by inverting the position of the paper, and then handed it to De Bracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It may be magic spells for aught I know,” said De Bracy, who possessed his full proportion of the ignorance which characterised the chivalry of the period. “Our chaplain attempted to teach me to write,” he said, “but all my letters were formed like spear-heads and sword-blades, and so the old shaveling gave up the task.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Give it me,” said the Templar. “We have that of the priestly character, that we have some knowledge to enlighten our valour.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Walter Scott (1819). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/82/82-h/82-h.htm#link2HCH0025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XXV&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The use of ‘Saxon’ here and elsewhere in the book seems wrong to me—the English had called themselves ‘English’ since before the Conquest, and the Anglo-Norman word was ‘Engleis’. Possibly Scott used ‘Saxon’ deliberately as a defamilization device.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the rule that only clergy could read and write was far from universal, and the 12th century was a time of increasing literacy among the laity. In the case of the royal family:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the twelfth century at last it was becoming common to put the prince to letters in his youth. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry I&lt;/a&gt; accurately dates the change, for though all the children of William the Conqueror seem to have received some formal education in youth, he alone impressed his contemporaries as an educated man. [… By the 13th century,] all our kings were taught letters in their youth, and their literacy, as distinct from their culture, has no particular importance. The change is reflected in the silence of the chroniclers, which seems to assume an education in letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Vivian Hunter Galbraith (1935). ‘The Literacy Of The Medieval English Kings’. &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the British Academy&lt;/em&gt; vol 21, pp. 202–5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the situation as of 1194 was that a lay member of the nobility would not be expected to be literate, but it would not be very surprising if he were; whereas it would be rare to meet a yeoman or peasant who could read and write. The situation was very different among the Jews, who needed to be literate in order to study the Torah:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At least up to 1200, they were culturally superior to virtually all their Christian contemporaries. Whereas cathedral schools might educate a small minority of (male) clerics, European Jews, in England as elsewhere, inherited and continued a much more universal instruction in literacy, numeracy, and the handling of legal texts, which often involved women as well as men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Edwards (2003). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GKXbD-RiQ2oC&amp;amp;pg=PA89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Church and the Jews in Medieval England&lt;/a&gt;’. In Patricia Skinner (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Jews in Medieval Britain&lt;/em&gt;, Boydell Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt;, Isaac of York was certainly literate in Hebrew (this is mentioned in chapter VI), probably in Arabic (his daughter Rebecca reads a message “in the Arabian character” in chapter XXXVII), and possibly in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why “a small knife, but no weapon”?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make sense of this phrase, you have to understand “weapon” as meaning “weapon of war”, that is, a sword, spear, mace, or something similar. Of course a knife can be used as a dagger, but many objects can be used as improvised weapons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In medieval England, most men, and many women, carried a knife for daily tasks like food preparation. When a host gave a meal, his guests were expected to bring their own knives. In &lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt;, Isaac of York would have used his knife to cut the nibs of his quill pens, sharpen them regularly as they wore down, trim his parchment, score lines, and scratch out mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why mention the writing materials?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that when Isaac uses them in the next chapter, we don’t need to wonder where he got them from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No more of that,” said the Jew, changing colour; and drawing forth his &lt;strong&gt;writing materials&lt;/strong&gt; in haste, as if to stop the conversation, he began to write upon a piece of paper which he supported on the top of his yellow cap, without dismounting from his mule. When he had finished, he delivered the scroll, which was in the Hebrew character, to the Pilgrim […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Scott, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/82/82-h/82-h.htm#link2HCH0006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter VI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty of acquiring writing materials furnishes a plot point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And who shall bear such a message?” said Front-de-Boeuf; “they will beset every path, and rip the errand out of his bosom.—I have it,” he added, after pausing for a moment—“Sir Templar, thou canst write as well as read, and if we can but find the writing materials of my chaplain, who died a twelvemonth since in the midst of his Christmas carousals—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“So please ye,” said the squire, who was still in attendance, “I think old Urfried has them somewhere in keeping, for love of the confessor.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Scott, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/82/82-h/82-h.htm#link2HCH0025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter XXV&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What were these materials?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isaac must have carried:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Parchment. Scott writes ‘paper’ in &lt;em&gt;Ivanhoe&lt;/em&gt; but that’s anachronistic: paper manufacture didn’t come to England until a couple of centuries later. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parchment&lt;/a&gt; is the depilated, scraped and dried skin of animals, usually sheep and goats; the finer quality skin of calves is known as ‘vellum’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quills. Scribes made their own pens from feathers, most commonly from geese. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8LTei_AIs0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This video by Bernadette Banner&lt;/a&gt; shows how a nib is cut. Quill nibs wear down quickly and have to be sharpened regularly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;John of Tillbury, one of the scholars in the household of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Becket&lt;/a&gt; in the twelfth century, describes how a clerk taking dictation would need to sharpen his pen so often that he had to have sixty or a hundred quills ready cut and sharpened in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher De Hamel (1992). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9X1Vc393iPAC&amp;amp;pg=PA29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scribes and Illuminators&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. British Library.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ink. Scribes made their own ink from oak galls and ferrous sulphate, or from lamp black and gum arabic. The processes were time-consuming, so a traveller like Isaac would have carried a supply in an inkhorn, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inkwell&lt;/a&gt; made out of animal horn with a lid.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He might also have carried:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An awl, for extracting the internal membrane from the feather; for pricking holes in sheets of parchment; and for pinning the parchment to a desk to hold it in place while writing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A ruler, for making straight margins and lines.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealing_wax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sealing wax&lt;/a&gt;, for closing letters.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T14:07:09.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T21:55:13.527" Score="5" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just attended a performance of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; that ended on a much more ambivalent note than Shakespeare's original text. Instead of Malcolm and his posse picking up the shambles and Malcolm motivating his men to look into a brighter future, it actually ended with Macduff crowning Malcolm, surrounded and cheered on by the witches who start to recitate, together with Malcolm even, the &quot;fair is foul&quot; rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paints a lot darker prospect of the future, if we understand it as Malcolm ultimately becoming (if not already being) a playball for the witches' schemes as well. It then reminded me of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2884018/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Justin Kurzel adaptation from 2015&lt;/a&gt;, which also had a more &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/q/55556/49&quot;&gt;ambiguous ending that left me wondering&lt;/a&gt; a little. But even more so, I rechecked the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067372/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1971 Polanski adaptation&lt;/a&gt; and it &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; ended with Donalbain visiting the witches, possibly implying he'll end up falling for their schemes as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my experience with &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; largely comes from cinematic adaptations, but in retrospect on these and reinforced by the performance I just attended, I can't help but notice a &lt;strong&gt;trend of having the play end on a much more ambiguous or even pessimistic note than the original text &lt;em&gt;seems&lt;/em&gt; to suggest&lt;/strong&gt;. But maybe it is also just me failing to read the subtext in the play's ending and it already contains more ambivalent undertones that I just missed in the dialogue. These endings &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; fit not too badly to the rest of the play's overall tone, especially if we take it as a general parable for the corrupting nature of power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to condense these ramblings into a hopefully not &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; broad question, I'd like to know more about the &lt;strong&gt;evolution of these interpretations. Are these pessimistic tendencies already present in the original play? If not, when did these more ambiguous intepretations of the ending emerge?&lt;/strong&gt; Is this a generally exhibited approach to the play nowadays, maybe as a natural extension of its themes and is this trend maybe pointing to a larger difference in how the characters' motivations are seen? Basically, &lt;strong&gt;has the understanding of the larger-scale themes of the play maybe changed throughout history?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2019-03-27T21:55:13.527" Title="(How) have the interpretations of Macbeth's ending evolved over time?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-27T23:58:41.213" Score="5" ViewCount="468" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've had a Spanish friend tell me of a poem that is claimed to be by Rudyard Kipling.&#xA;However I was tipped off to it probably not being a Kipling poem by several facts: one, the English translation was on a little visited blog&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sloyu.com/blog/english/2014/02/21/chose-life/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sloyu.com/blog/english/2014/02/21/chose-life/&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Two, it had an English translation!&#xA;Lastly, it doesn't sound like Kipling, in theme or meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be a Spanish poem called &amp;quot;elegi&amp;quot; (meaning &amp;quot;I chose&amp;quot;).&#xA;My question therefore, can anyone definitively say it isn't by Kipling, possibly by identifying the true writer of the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling it just gives me a small number of Spanish-language sites attributing the poem (in Spanish) to Kipling, plus some ominous &amp;quot;results removed for data protection warnings&amp;quot; but here is a link to the same blog with the Spanish version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sloyu.com/2017/02/28/elegi-la-vida-poema-de-rudyard-kipling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sloyu.com/2017/02/28/elegi-la-vida-poema-de-rudyard-kipling/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6072" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T03:02:21.870" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T03:02:21.870" Title="&quot;Rudyard Kiplings&quot; elegi / I chose life" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9673" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9674" CreationDate="2019-03-28T09:39:43.917" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I started reading &quot;A Clockwork Orange&quot; in English. A feature of the book that jumped out at me was that a lot of words used by the main character are adapted from Russian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I am a native Russian speaker, I have no trouble understanding the words and so the reading goes smoothly for me. However, it got me thinking: the author probably had a specific purpose in mind, since the words replacements occur frequently and it must have been too much work for this feature to be just a gimmick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, my questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does reading the book feel for non-Russian speakers?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did Burgess want to tell the reader with this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting point to note is that in the version of the book translated to Russian, the replaced words are written using the Latin script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6076" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-03-28T09:53:57.410" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T12:35:51.240" Title="Do word replacements in &quot;A Clockwork Orange&quot; affect the interpretation of the book as a whole?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;anthony-burgess&gt;&lt;a-clockwork-orange&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9673" CreationDate="2019-03-28T12:35:51.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For myself, as an English speaker with only a smattering of Russian from a foreign exchange trip, I did a lot of checking the glossary in the back at first (obviously, I got an edition which included said glossary), but eventually started just trying to figure it out from context, which worked well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards Burgess's motivation, it was a combination of his fascination with language, a desire to avoid the novel being dated by picking a particular era's slang, and use of language to show a counter-culture, as seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.anthonyburgess.org/a-clockwork-orange/a-clockwork-orange-and-nadsat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much like George Orwell with his ‘Newspeak’ in Nineteen-Eighty Four (1949), Burgess aimed to create a timeless language to depict his dystopian future, perhaps the reason why the novel has had such longevity. The language also removes the action of the novel from geographical location, and the city it is set in could stand for anywhere from Manchester to Leningrad, London to Los Angeles, or other even more distant locales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burgess viewed his use of Nadsat as a ‘brainwashing device’, something he writes about in &lt;em&gt;You’ve Had Your Time&lt;/em&gt; (1990): ‘The novel was to be an exercise in linguistic programming, with the exoticisms gradually clarified by context: I would resist to the limit any publisher’s demand that a glossary be provided. A glossary would disrupt the programme and nullify the brainwashing’. The book’s editor, James Michie, had some hesitations about the density of Nadsat in the novel and stated a desire for Burgess to ‘make it gently accelerando. You can’t throw too much of it at them too quickly’. This editorial suggestion led to revisions in the first part of the novel, and is shown when Alex helps the reader through some of the tougher language. For example: ‘rooker (a hand, that is)’, ‘litso (face, that is) and ‘my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-03-28T12:35:51.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9678" CreationDate="2019-03-29T08:08:42.277" Score="1" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is a sentence from Lovecraft's &quot;Polaris&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I said to myself, &quot;This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps into my north window each night?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this sentence as roughly meaning &quot;this is not a dream, because I cannot prove its reality&quot;, which kind of doesn't make any  sense. So what does the author really want to convey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks advance for any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2497" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T14:18:10.157" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T14:18:10.157" Title="What is the meaning of this sentence from &quot;Polaris&quot; by Lovecraft?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9677" CreationDate="2019-03-29T08:29:42.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist here is saying that he cannot prove that the reality that he has used to - his normal life - is &lt;em&gt;more real&lt;/em&gt; than this other reality of the marble city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says &lt;em&gt;&quot;...for by what means can I prove the &lt;strong&gt;greater reality&lt;/strong&gt; of that other life in the house of stone and brick...&quot;&lt;/em&gt;,meaning that he cannot prove that this marble city is less real than &lt;em&gt;&quot;...that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peeps into my north window each night..&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see in the beginning of the story that he's used to the Pole Star shining in his window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Into the north window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And right before he says this quote that you're confused about, the story says that our protagonist now desires to actually walk through that marble city that he sees. So since the reality that he's concerned with at the moment is that of the marble city, that makes the &lt;em&gt;other reality&lt;/em&gt; normal life - and gives a description of that normal life, describing his house and the star that always shines through his window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, he cannot prove that normal life is &quot;more real&quot; than this marble city.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T08:29:42.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T08:51:08.840" Score="3" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an essay prompt from my literature class:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The women in Jane Austen's novels are more life-like than men&quot;. How far is this comment applicable to Elizabeth in &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes Elizabeth Bennet &quot;life-like&quot;? Is she considered more life-like just because she has a definite arc? Because Mr. Darcy also has his moments where he apparently misjudged Jane Bennet as unfit for Mr. Bingley. Is the essay prompt trying to suggest that that usually men in Austen's works are cardboard figures? Or simply that Austen employs better nuances in forming female characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6081" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T09:49:02.843" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T23:01:25.140" Title="What makes Elizabeth Bennet &quot;life-like&quot; in &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9681" CreationDate="2019-03-29T10:13:56.130" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 21&lt;/a&gt; from Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She felt a great deal of good-will towards him. In spite of the&#xA;  mischief of his attentions, she owed him gratitude and regard, perhaps&#xA;  compassion. &lt;strong&gt;She could not help thinking much of the extraordinary&#xA;  circumstances attending their acquaintance, of the right which he&#xA;  seemed to have to interest her, by everything in situation, by his own&#xA;  sentiments, by his early prepossession.&lt;/strong&gt; It was altogether very&#xA;  extraordinary; flattering, but painful. There was much to regret.&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth inquiry; for there was a Captain Wentworth; and be&#xA;  the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection&#xA;  would be his for ever. Their union, she believed, could not divide her&#xA;  more from other men, than their final separation.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the sentences written in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T10:53:58.753" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T11:50:52.100" Title="What is Mr Elliot's &quot;early prepossession&quot; in Jane Austen's &quot;Persuasion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9680" CreationDate="2019-03-29T10:57:24.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;extraordinary circumstances attending their acquaintance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means “the unusual way in which they met”, that is, their chance encounter at Lyme in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the right which he seemed to have to interest her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means “the expectation that she should be interested in marrying him”, the reasons for which are given in the successive clauses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;by everything in situation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Situation” means “a person’s position or circumstances in life” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). You will recall that Mr Elliot is the heir presumptive to the Kellynch estate and the baronetcy, meaning that unless Sir Walter remarries and has a son, Mr Elliot will inherit them. Marrying Mr Elliot is thus an opportunity for Anne to become Lady Elliot of Kellynch Hall, the summit of ambition for a woman in her position in society.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;by his own sentiments&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sentiments” means “expressions of emotion”, referring to Mr Elliot’s conversation at the concert in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 20&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The name of Anne Elliot,” said he, “has long had an interesting sound to me. Very long has it possessed a charm over my fancy; and, if I dared, I would breathe my wishes that the name might never change.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to interpret “that the name might never change” is that Mr Elliot wants Anne to marry him, so that her married name should be the same as her maiden name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;by his early prepossession&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Prepossession” means “the condition of being favourably predisposed towards a person or thing” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). This again refers back to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12&lt;/a&gt;, when upon their first (earliest) encounter at Lyme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was evident that the gentleman, (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How she might have felt had there been no Captain Wentworth in the case, was not worth inquiry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Anne loves Captain Wentworth, there is no point in her considering the advantages and disadvantages of marrying Mr Elliot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;be the conclusion of the present suspense good or bad, her affection would be his for ever&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “present suspense” is her uncertainty about whether Captain Wentworth will propose marriage (“good”) or not (“bad”), but either way, she will always love him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their union could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This just restates the foregoing in stronger language. Her marriage (“union”) with Captain Wentworth would forbid her from loving other men, but even if they parted forever, her unrequited love would have the same effect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-03-29T11:50:52.100" LastActivityDate="2019-03-29T11:50:52.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-29T17:32:33.727" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miep_Gies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miep Gies&lt;/a&gt; was one of the persons who helped Anne Frank's family and several other people hide in the &quot;secret annex&quot;. She also managed to retrieve Anne Frank's diary after the inhabitants of the secret annex had been arrested. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miep Gies later wrote &lt;em&gt;Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family&lt;/em&gt; in collaboration with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Leslie_Gold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alison Leslie Gold&lt;/a&gt; and published it in 1987, 40 years after the first publication of Anne Frank's diary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miep Gies originated from Austria, not the Netherlands, but had lived in the Netherlands since the age of nine. She was fluent in Dutch by the time the Frank family moved to Amsterdam. When I read the Dutch translation of &lt;em&gt;Anne Frank Remembered&lt;/em&gt;, I could not find any reason or argument in it for writing the book in English instead of Dutch. I could not find anything about this on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alisonlesliegold.com/?page_id=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alison Leslie Gold's webpage about the book&lt;/a&gt;, nor on the website MiepGies.nl (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.miepgies.nl/en/149.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New edition of book by Miep Gies&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.miepgies.nl/en/faq/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ&lt;/a&gt;). So why was the book written in English? I know that Alison Leslie Gold is American (and probably didn't know Dutch), which then leads to the question why Miep Gies collaborated with her instead of a native speaker of Dutch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:41:46.337" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:41:46.337" Title="Why did Miep Gies write Anne Frank Remembered in English instead of Dutch?" Tags="&lt;anne-frank&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6825" CreationDate="2019-03-30T00:46:21.573" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably &quot;The Hampdenshire Wonder&quot; by J. D. Beresford (also called just &quot;The Wonder&quot;) from 1911. I can't find a relevant passage from the novel. And the book may not be completely apropos because it's the opposite of &quot;To Whom This May Come&quot; noted earlier: Only one person (The titular &quot;Wonder,&quot; Stott) can tell what others are thinking, but no one else has that ability. However, it's always the case that Stott accurately knows what others are thinking and they are unable to mislead him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6087" LastEditorUserId="6090" LastEditDate="2019-03-30T16:31:31.093" LastActivityDate="2019-03-30T16:31:31.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6825" CreationDate="2019-03-30T05:23:23.207" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1889:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?89625&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;To Whom This May Come&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bellamy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Bellamy&lt;/a&gt;, originally published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper%27s_Magazine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harper's New Monthly Magazine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, February 1889. An 1898 reprint is available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22704&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;Plot summary from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Science_fiction_the_Early_Years.html?id=KEZxhkG5eikC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Science-Fiction: The Early Years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._F._Bleiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Everett F. Bleiler&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An island in the Indian Ocean. The protagonist is shipwrecked on an unknown island peopled by descendants of ancient Magi who were expelled from Asia. The unusual point about them is that they communicate by telepathy and that their vocal organs have almost completely atrophied. A few interpreters of mixed ancestry alone have partial power of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;I believe the following excerpts (copied from the 1898 reprint at Project Gutenberg) show that telepaths (called mind-readers) are incapable of lying to one another (or being lied to by anyone):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It must not be supposed, however, that courtesy among the mind-readers prevents them from thinking pointedly and freely concerning one another upon serious occasions, any more than the finest courtesy among the talking races restrains them from speaking to one another with entire plainness when it it desirable to do so. &lt;strong&gt;Indeed, among the mind-readers, politeness never can extend to the point of insincerity, as among talking nations, seeing that it is always one another's real and inmost thought that they read.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;[. . . .]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;I have already told how my first qualms of morbid self-consciousness at knowing that my mind was an open book to all around me disappeared as I learned that the very completeness of the disclosure of my thoughts and motives was a guarantee that I would be judged with a fairness and a sympathy such as even self-judgment cannot pretend to, affected as that is by so many subtle reactions. The assurance of being so judged by every one might well seem an inestimable privilege to one accustomed to a world in which not even the tenderest love is any pledge of comprehension, and yet I soon discovered that open-mindedness had a still greater profit than this. How shall I describe the delightful exhilaration of moral health and cleanness, the breezy oxygenated mental condition, which resulted from the consciousness that I had absolutely nothing concealed! Truly I may say that I enjoyed myself. I think surely that no one needs to have had my marvelous experience to sympathize with this portion of it. Are we not all ready to agree that this having a curtained chamber where we may go to grovel, out of the sight of our fellows, troubled only by a vague apprehension that God may look over the top, is the most demoralizing incident in the human condition? &lt;strong&gt;It is the existence within the soul of this secure refuge of lies which has always been the despair of the saint and the exultation of the knave.&lt;/strong&gt; It is the foul cellar which taints the whole house above, be it never so fine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;What stronger testimony could there be to the instinctive consciousness that concealment is debauching, and openness our only cure, than the world-old conviction of the virtue of confession for the soul, and that the uttermost exposing of one's worst and foulest is the first step toward moral health? The wickedest man, if he could but somehow attain to writhe himself inside out as to his soul, so that its full sickness could be seen, would feel ready for a new life. Nevertheless, owing to the utter impotence of the words to convey mental conditions in their totality, or to give other than mere distortions of them, confession is, we must needs admit, but a mockery of that longing for self-revelation to which it testifies. &lt;strong&gt;But think what health and soundness there must be for souls among a people who see in every face a conscience which, unlike their own, they cannot sophisticate, who confess one another with a glance, and shrive with a smile!&lt;/strong&gt; Ah, friends, let me now predict, though ages may elapse before the slow event shall justify me, that in no way will the mutual vision of minds, when at last it shall be perfected, so enhance the blessedness of mankind as by rending the veil of self, and leaving no spot of darkness in the mind for lies to hide in. Then shall the soul no longer be a coal smoking among ashes, but a star in a crystal sphere. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T00:00:04.270" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T00:00:04.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15" CreationDate="2019-03-31T11:11:46.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The mad dog has rabies which is a disease and that is why it's mad, Atticus quotes that &quot;Maycomb's usual disease is racism.&quot; Therefore, the dog is symbolised as racism and Atticus is the only shot they have at killing this dog and he is the only shot at the Tom Robinson case and showing the town what real courage is. So if Atticus has an ability that can help the town and stop the 'disease' from spreading then he will and he tries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6093" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-07T14:13:33.663" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T14:13:33.663" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-03-31T18:31:21.210" Score="7" ViewCount="598" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas More uses Greek puns such as Hythloday that means speaker of nonsense, etc. What is he trying to do? What difference would it make for Greek readers and non-Greek readers? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6096" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T04:42:11.530" LastActivityDate="2019-09-12T12:58:31.623" Title="What does Thomas More try to do with Greek puns in Utopia?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;thomas-more&gt;&lt;utopia-more&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" Score="0" Body="Questions about Thomas More's &quot;Utopia&quot;, a work of fiction written in Latin and published in 1516. Use this tag with [thomas-more] and [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T18:47:24.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9692" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9693" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Thomas More (1478–1535) and his life as a writer. More is best known as author of &quot;Utopia&quot; (1516) and &quot;The History of King Richard III&quot; (c. 1513–1518). Use this tag with the [latin-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T18:49:40.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9017" CreationDate="2019-03-31T20:56:05.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The limerick used in the story can be seen as a text about two types of domination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;domination of a man be a woman (assuming the tiger is male) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;domination of nature by humans.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theme of domination can also be found in the short story, in which it gets reversed. But this reversal relies on another reversal. The beginning of the story mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_the_Virgin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margaret of Antioch&lt;/a&gt;, who gets eaten by a laidly worm (a kind of wingless dragon). Because she is so virtuous, the wooden cross she wears around her neck turns back into a living tree, the tree's branches burst open the dragon's body and Margaret emerges alive. The story also mentions &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamadryad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hamadryads&lt;/a&gt;, a type of female beings from Greek mythology that live in trees. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the short story, Gilla swallows a cherry (including its stone) from a half-dead cherry tree that scares her because it seems to be talking to her. It's as if a hamadryad was living in that tree. After swallowing the cherry's stone, Gilla gets the impression that she has thoughts that can't be hers (because of the unfamiliar vocabulary), almost as if the cherry tree or its hamadryad were talking to her or inside her. The &quot;reversal&quot; here is the following: whereas Margaret of Antioch was wearing something from a tree on her body, Gilla has something from a tree inside her body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gilla goes to a party where she joins the other teenagers there in playing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_(game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Postman&lt;/a&gt;. Roger, the boy who had calumniated her, gets someone to fetch Gilla so he can harass her. She tries to fight him off, then something changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The back of Gilla's neck tingled. The sensation unfurled down her spine. She gathered power from the core of her, from that muscled, padded belly, and elbowed Roger high in the stomach. &quot;No!&quot; she roared, a fiery breath. (...) Gilla fell onto her hands and knees, solidly centred on all fours. Her toes, her fingers flexed. She wasn't surprised to feel her limbs flesh themselves into four knotted appendages, backwards-crooked and strong as wood. She'd sprouted claws, too. She tapped them impatiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roger gets scared, and when he and Gilla emerge from the closet, Gilla looks perfectly normal to everyone else except Roger, who says that, &quot;She's some kind of dragon, or something!&quot; (It is perhaps no coincidence that her name sounds similar to that of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gila_monster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gila monster&lt;/a&gt;.) This is another reversal: Roger though he could get his way with her but ends up on the loosing end. When this ending is compared with the limerick, the &quot;rider&quot; is not a &quot;lady&quot; but a (very ungentleman-like) boy. And whereas his &quot;mount&quot; seemed harmless, she turns out to be a dragon. (The eating of the rider has the following counterpart in the story: &quot;Gilla considered, licking her lips. Roger smelled like meat.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, there is no tiger with a lady inside, but a lady with a dragon inside, at least figuratively: whereas Gilla had been uncertain about her physical appearance, she now appears confident. She asks another boy, Foster, to deliver her a &quot;real Postman message&quot;. &quot;Gilla led the way, grinning.&quot; This last sentence mirrors the limerick's &quot;smile on the face of the tiger&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-03-31T20:56:05.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T02:14:06.030" Score="6" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm creating a children's book for a school project. I've been tasked to identify some literary devices used throughout the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a section of the book which I want to highlight because it represents a major event. There's rhyming throughout the book. However, when the major event happens, the rhyming suddenly stops to produce a dramatic and eerie effect. I'm having trouble identifying what exactly this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you call that break in rhyming? Would it be considered a literary device?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;They built houses and cities, what a marvellous sight.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Oh how amazing it was, it just felt so right.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;*Rhyming stops*&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But it all came down suddenly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They had nothing left.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It all fell, like the trees they cut.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;*Rhyming starts again*&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Story continues and rhyming persists till end of book*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6098" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T05:09:14.687" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T06:04:55.633" Title="What do you call a break in rhyming in the middle of a book / poem for dramatic effect?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9548" CreationDate="2019-04-01T12:28:13.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence you quoted is from a letter by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Julia_Wedgwood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julia Wedgwood&lt;/a&gt; to the magazine &lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt;, printed on 3rd September 1881, a week after the death of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Alvey_Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erasmus Darwin&lt;/a&gt; on 26th August. (Julia Wedgwood was the first cousin, once removed, of Erasmus Darwin, who was the grandson of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus_Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more famous namesake&lt;/a&gt; and the brother of the naturalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Darwin&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence explains why Wedgwood thought that Erasmus deserved an obituary notice in &lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt;. Her points were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carlyle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Carlyle&lt;/a&gt; included a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/reminiscences01frougoog/page/n302&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;description of Erasmus&lt;/a&gt; in his &lt;em&gt;Reminiscences&lt;/em&gt;. Wedgwood describes this metaphorically as a “portrait from Mr. Carlyle’s portfolio”, likening Carlyle’s memoirs to an artist’s portfolio, and his character descriptions to portraits. &lt;em&gt;Reminiscences&lt;/em&gt; had been published earlier the same year, so Wedgwood could assume that her readers would know which work of Carlyle’s she was referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Carlyle’s description of Erasmus was “not regretted by any who loved the original”, that is, it was favourable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;That the famous man of letters, Thomas Carlyle, wrote a favourable description of Erasmus, “confers distinction” on him. “Confer” means “give, grant, bestow” and “distinction” means “excellence or eminence that distinguishes from others”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This distinction is sufficient to “warrant” (meaning “justify”) “a few words of notice” (meaning an obituary).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Eramus was “withdrawn from mortal gaze”, meaning that he died. Here “mortal” means “living”, in opposition to “immortal” meaning “dead” (since according to Christian belief, souls are immortal).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T12:28:13.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9698" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9699" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" Score="0" Body="Frances Julia Wedgwood (1833–1913), English novelist, feminist, historian and essayist, author of &quot;Framleigh Hall&quot; and a biography of John Wesley." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T13:21:30.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9701" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T16:30:27.673" Score="2" ViewCount="633" Body="&lt;p&gt;In John Updike's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A&amp;amp;P&lt;/a&gt;, the narrator Sammy has been ogling a group of customers at the A&amp;amp;P store:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I'm in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don't see them until they're over by the bread. The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs. I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when McMahon does the same, Sammy feels sorry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The girls had reached the meat counter and were asking McMahon something. He pointed, they pointed, and they shuffled out of sight behind a pyramid of Diet Delight peaches. All that was left for us to see was old McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints. &lt;strong&gt;Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Sammy feel sorry after seeing McMahon is making eyes at the girls, while Sammy himself was enjoying making eyes at them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6101" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T09:15:11.130" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T15:38:50.760" Title="Why does Sammy feel sorry in Updike's &quot;A&amp;P&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;john-updike&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-01T17:22:51.717" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Stack Overflow thought it would be fun to use a &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/326036/340816&quot;&gt;1990s style featuring a unicorn&lt;/a&gt; to celebrate this First of April, let me post a question that fits the theme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the oldest mention of a unicorn in English literature?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I am looking for are texts that aren't &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestiary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bestiaries&lt;/a&gt; (such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashmole_Bestiary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ashmole Bestiary&lt;/a&gt;) in which the unicorn is a &amp;quot;character&amp;quot; instead of just being shown in an image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xavgx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xavgx.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the present question with the 1990s unicorn theme&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T14:34:55.487" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T14:34:55.487" Title="What is the oldest mention of a unicorn in English literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5335" CreationDate="2019-04-01T19:18:55.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only way that I can make sense of this line is if Byron messed it up for the sake of the rhythm and the rhyme. If you imagine starting out with the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the first never knows the cause of the second&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then turning it around so that ‘cause’ is at the end of the line where it can rhyme with ‘applause’, then ‘the second’ gets replaced by ‘which’ and the result is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;of which the first ne’er knows the cause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this lacks two syllables of a pentameter, and ‘first’ is hard to make sense of without ‘second’ to go with it. So you’d like to put ‘second’ back in somewhere, but there is nowhere good to put it. If you put it in the only place where it (just about) fits syntactically, you get:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;of which second the first ne’er knows the cause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is hard to understand and doesn’t scan. So I imagine that Byron said, “to hell with syntax!” and put ‘second’ before ‘cause’ where it makes sense semantically but not syntactically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that the ‘second’ is the applause, but what is the ‘first’? This is ambiguous: it could be the poet (meaning that he doesn’t know that the audience are applauding out of drunkenness and good humour and not because they appreciate his speech), or it could be the audience, the ‘mess of men’ (meaning that they don’t know why they are applauding). The satire seems more biting if we take it to be the poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-01T19:18:55.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9702" CreationDate="2019-04-01T22:20:21.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ælfric, in his Old English glossary, defines the Latin word &lt;em&gt;unicornis&lt;/em&gt; (although, being a glossary, I'm not sure this counts for the purpose of the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;unicornis&lt;/em&gt; anhyrne deor; þæt deor hæfð ænne horn bufan ðam twam eagum swa strangne and swa scearpne, þæt he fyht wið ðone mycclan ylp and hine oft gewundað on ðære wambe oð deað. He hatte eac &lt;em&gt;rinoceron&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;monoceron&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unicornis&lt;/em&gt;, one-horned deer; that deer has one horn above the two eyes so strong and so sharp, that he fights with the great elephant and [the elelphant is] oft wounded on the belly until dead. He is also called &lt;em&gt;rinoceron&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;monoceron&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first work to use &amp;quot;unicorn&amp;quot; in English, according to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancrene_Wisse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ancrene Riwle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, probably written before 1200, although the earliest manuscripts are circa 1225. The original says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wummon wrað is wuluene; Mon wulf oðer liun oðer unicorne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bsswebsite.me.uk/History/AncreneRiwle/AncreneRiwle2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of this online which gives the context more fully:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An angry woman is a she-wolf, and an angry man is a wolf, or a lion, or a unicorn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Go, however, very cautiously: for in this wilderness there are many evil beasts – the lion of pride, the serpent of venomous envy, the unicorn of wrath, the bear of dead sloth, the fox of covetousness, the swine of greediness, the scorpion with the tail of stinking lechery, that is, lustfulness. These, now, are the seven chief sins detailed in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] The Unicorn of Wrath, which bears on his nose the horn with which he butts at all whom he reaches, has six whelps. The first is Contention or Strife. The second is Rage. The third is contumelous Reproach. The fourth is Cursing. The fifth is Striking. The sixth is Wishing that Evil may happen to a man himself, or to his friend, or to his possessions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Of those seven beasts, and of their offspring in the wilderness, and of a solitary life, we have spoken thus far – which beasts are endeavouring to destroy all mortals. The Lion of Pride slays all the proud, and all those who are elated and lofty in heart The venomous serpent [slays] all the envious, and all who have base malicious thoughts. The Unicorn, all the wrathful; and so of the others in succession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although it's an educational metaphor, I think it still counts as a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T10:24:16.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:11:07.897" Score="4" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was recently rereading William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as it follows the lives of two distinct female characters, Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also have read that Thackeray himself had set out to describe his work (and was once subtitled) as &amp;quot;a novel without a hero&amp;quot; and wanted to defy convention of the Victorian novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rebecca Sharp, called Becky, is Amelia's opposite, an intelligent&#xA;young woman with a gift for satire. She is described as a short sandy&#xA;haired girl who has green eyes and a great deal of wit. Becky is born&#xA;to a French opera dancer mother and an art teacher and artist father&#xA;Francis. Fluent in both French and English, Becky has a beautiful&#xA;singing voice, plays the piano, and shows great talent as an actress.&#xA;Without a mother to guide her into marriage, &lt;strong&gt;Becky resolves that &amp;quot;I&#xA;must be my own Mamma&amp;quot;. She thereafter appears to be completely&#xA;amoral and without conscience and has been called the work's&#xA;&amp;quot;anti-heroine&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; She does not seem to have the ability to get&#xA;attached to other people, and lies easily and intelligently to get her&#xA;way. She is extremely manipulative and, after the first few chapters&#xA;and her failure to attract Jos Sedley, is not shown as being&#xA;particularly sincere&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Wikipedia, '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/a&gt;'&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I tend to think of works that allegedly don't have heroes or heroines, I tend to think that many of the characters are anti-heroes and that perhaps some of them are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Byronic heroes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of&#xA;character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both&#xA;Byron's own persona as well as characters from his writings are&#xA;considered to provide defining features to the character type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Byronic hero first reached a very wide public in Byron's&#xA;semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage&#xA;(1812–1818). Historian and critic Lord Macaulay described the&#xA;character as &amp;quot;a man proud, &lt;strong&gt;moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow,&#xA;and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge,&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;yet capable of deep and strong affection&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Wikipedia, '&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byronic_hero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Byronic hero&lt;/a&gt;'&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Becky Sharp is a character that seems to almost be miserable through constent discontent, and is often seen as unlikable, because her obsession with wealth and schemes only affords her to show little to no kindness to others, unless it suits her self interest. However she does get hurt, even if she washes it off; and she does tend to defy convention, especially for a women depicted in this era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I was wondering if Becky Sharp meets the criteria of a Byronic heroine or if her disposition to not really like others keeps her from being labeled as such?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5553" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T18:16:38.893" Title="Could Becky Sharp in &quot;Vanity Fair&quot; be considered a Byronic heroine?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-makepeace-thackeray&gt;&lt;vanity-fair&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9708" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9709" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" Score="0" Body="William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863), British novelist, best known for the satire &quot;Vanity Fair&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T18:18:22.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9710" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:20:24.997" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T18:20:24.997" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T18:20:24.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9711" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-02T18:20:24.997" Score="0" Body="&quot;Vanity Fair&quot;, published 1847–8, is a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray that satirises British society in the early 19th century. Use with the [william-makepeace-thackeray] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-02T19:07:07.457" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T19:07:07.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="500" CreationDate="2019-04-02T22:23:42.357" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standback's answer already tells you how &lt;strong&gt;the ending of &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt; is deliberately ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;.  In this answer I'd just like to add some some quotes where Lois Lowry directly confirms that she has indeed intended to write an ambiguous ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20061105143923/http://www.loislowry.com:80/faq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The FAQ page of Lois Lowry's homepage used to address this the most clearly&lt;/a&gt;, before she revised it between 2006 and 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What happened at the end of THE GIVER?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I made the ending ambiguous on purpose. &quot;Ambiguous&quot; means that it can have different explanations. I like to leave it that way so that each reader can use his or her imagination and decide what is happening. But I do think it is a happy ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yes, I understand all that, but please would you tell me what really happened?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No. Cut it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An earlier reference is &lt;a href=&quot;http://loislowry.com/documents/speeches/pdf_server.php?file=Newbery_Award#7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the acceptance speech for the Newberry Medal, an award that Lois Lowry received for &lt;em&gt;The Giver&lt;/em&gt; in 1994&lt;/a&gt;, part of which also talks about the meaning of the ending.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://loislowry.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=81&amp;amp;Itemid=200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can get the text of this speech from Lowry's homepage&lt;/a&gt;.  Quoting page 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those of you who hoped that I would stand here tonight and reveal the “true” ending, the “right” interpretation of the ending, will be disappointed. There isn’t one. There’s a right one for each of us, and it depends on our own beliefs, our own hopes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lowry also lists some possible interpretations of the ending after this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lowry &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also confirms this briefly in an interview from 2014-05&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/eKxy3IMzkEs?t=2630&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see also the video recording of this interview&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because the book I could end ambiguously, and did, and the publisher allowed me to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She also mentions in that interview that she got a lot of letters asking about the ending of the Giver, so your question is a FAQ.  However, this interview advertises the Giver movie that would be in the movies shortly after, thus it is deliberately avoiding spoilers, so no more details are given here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastActivityDate="2019-04-02T22:23:42.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5337" CreationDate="2019-04-03T18:19:49.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Nice’ has three senses in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; that could work in this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.b.&lt;/strong&gt; Fastidious, fussy, difficult to please&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.a.&lt;/strong&gt; Faint-hearted, timorous, cowardly, unmanly. &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;10.b.&lt;/strong&gt; Of the eye, ear, etc.: able to distinguish or discriminate to a high degree; sensitive, acute&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last of these corresponds well with the “strange quick jar upon the ear” from the first line of the stanza: the idea being that in your first duel you are acutely sensitive to the click of the hammer as the pistol is cocked, but the more duels you survive, the more accustomed you get to the sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of ‘Irish’ must be the opposite of whichever sense of ‘nice’ is chosen, that is, ‘coarse’ if ‘nice’ means ‘fastidious’, ‘brave’ if ‘cowardly’, and ‘stoical’ if ‘sensitive’. There are no senses of ‘Irish’ in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; with these specific meanings, but there is a general sense which could cover any or all of them, depending on how we think Byron might have stereotyped the Irish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irish, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 5.a.&lt;/strong&gt; Characteristic or typical of Irish people, life, or culture. In earlier use frequently with derogatory connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-03T18:19:49.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-03T19:37:05.030" Score="4" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a book I read a while ago, and I forgot what its title was. In the book, there's this really smart science kid who goes on a trip to the Amazon to help in some sort of study tour. I don't remember the ending but he uses curare darts to take people out. I think it was evil industrialists and they were cutting down the forest and he was going to stop them 'cause it was displacing a group native to the land and so he starts using guerrila warfare type stuff to attack them. He’s a kid from middle school who is crazy smart but gets bullied and would purposely fail tests&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6111" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-04-03T21:03:46.783" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T03:50:05.037" Title="Book: smart science kid goes to Amazon, shoots bad guys with curare darts" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9715" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9718" CreationDate="2019-04-04T08:44:49.093" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate some help in finding this book I have but vague memories of. &#xA;Here's everything I remember, some things more vivid than others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story starts with the protagonist outside of this prison/facility.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Within the story the prison/facility is seen as normal from the outside but &#xA;on the inside it is evil.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Protagonist is sent there for some reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That's the basic stuff so far. Hopefully the next descriptions are more defining and reminiscent.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a sadistic scientist/guard who tries to break the prisoners and does experiments on them (the whole facility may be based on human experimentation).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are abnormally strong guards in black suits that keep the prisoners in check and work for the sadistic scientist/guard.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist is forced to watch gruesome scenes on a screen with his eyes peeled open as some form of torture&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember vividly the protagonist is then strapped down and injected or forced to take some medication which causes him immense agony. When he wakes up he feels different, including greatly enhanced vision. The author describes how he can see things in great definition and clarity like the pores on skin or all the cracks in the walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I really remember. I will try to add more details if I remember or answer any questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: More details&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the book approximately 5 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6113" LastEditorUserId="6113" LastEditDate="2019-04-04T12:00:59.147" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T12:24:00.040" Title="Help me find a Childhood fictional book about a prisoner" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5406" CreationDate="2019-04-04T09:18:23.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sense of ‘still’ that works in this line is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;still, &lt;em&gt;adv.&lt;/em&gt; 3.a.&lt;/strong&gt; With reference to action or condition: Without change, interruption, or cessation; continually, constantly; on every occasion, invariably; always. &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt; exc. &lt;em&gt;poetic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Byron means that the monsoon wind quietly blows “her steady breath” without interruption for some months. But in context, the choice of phrasing is unfortunate, because you can’t use ‘still’ when describing the weather without calling to mind a more common sense of the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;still, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 1.&lt;/strong&gt; Motionless; not moving from one place, stationary; also, remaining in the same position or attitude, quiescent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is quite the opposite of what is meant. The impression I get is that the difficulty of writing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottava_rima&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ottava rima&lt;/a&gt; in English, where there are not nearly so many rhymes as in Italian where the verse form originated, causes Byron to get himself into syntactic and semantic tangles, and sometimes he solves them by throwing down his pen and leaving the mess for the reader to figure out. In this stanza, however, the rhymes are so inventive that maybe we don’t mind that the sense has gone astray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘still’ is italicized to tell the reader where to put the stress so that ‘still is’ rhymes with ‘Achilles’ and ‘kill his’. (As pointed out in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5406/meaning-of-which-some-months-the-same-still-is-in-byrons-don-juan#comment10744_5406&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; by Peter Shor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T09:18:23.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9689" CreationDate="2019-04-04T09:52:39.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; More's wordplay both creates a world and undercuts it. It allows More to tell an entirely plausible story with a straight face while simultaneously signaling that the story is false. It forms part of an intricate strategy of &amp;quot;self-fashioning and self-cancellation&amp;quot; (Greenblatt, p. 12) whereby More raises specific and dangerous questions about society, politics, economics, religion, etc. while safely keeping his own views under wraps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The truthiness of Utopia&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the surface, &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; is a credible enough tale, particularly in the context of the Renaissance. More carefully situates his text in a factual context. He really was part of an embassy sent by Henry VIII to Flanders, and the ambassadors his team was negotiating with did indeed have to suspend talks in order to consult with their prince. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_Tunstall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cuthbert Tunstall&lt;/a&gt;, Georges de Themsecke, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Gillis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Giles&lt;/a&gt;, etc. are all historical figures. So the story More tells, of meeting a friend of Giles's named Raphael Hythloday who has returned from a faraway land called Utopia, could very well be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giles tells More that Hythloday has been to the New World with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amerigo Vespucci&lt;/a&gt;. Vespucci's accounts of his voyages to America (the continent named after him) were published in 1507, to great acclaim. &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; was published a mere nine years later, in 1516. The tale of a sailor who went on a further journey after leaving Vespucci's service and thereby knew of another strange land would not seem far-fetched to contemporary readers. As Peter Giles wrote in a letter to another humanist, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_van_Busleyden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jerome Busleiden&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Nowadays we find all sorts of lands turning up which the old geographers never mentioned&amp;quot; (More, p. 113).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More creates a careful scaffolding of truthiness around his narrative. The unsuspecting reader would have no way of realizing that he is constructing an elaborate fiction. But More deploys Greek words within his Latin text so as to let knowing readers in on the joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Latin and Greek in the Renaissance&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand how Latin and Greek work in More's text, it is necessary to know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/latin-language-and-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;status of each of the two languages in Renaissance Europe&lt;/a&gt;. Latin was the lingua franca of the era; to be educated implied the ability to read, write, and speak Latin. Discussing the central place of Latin in the curriculum, Walter Ong writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Renaissance educator was ... compelled to teach Latin because the books in use, contemporary as well as ancient, were books written in Latin or translated into Latin. These included the books on language and literature ... and on every other more or less learned subject. This unacknowledged reason for teaching the language—the fact that pupils had to be able to read it, write it, and think in it—in actuality outweighed all other reasons throughout the Renaissance period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ong, pp. 103–104.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was true of the medieval period as well, but what defines the Renaissance as a distinct era is the renewed interest in the humanities, i.e., the language, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome. More was part of a circle of humanists, the most influential of whom was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erasmus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desiderius Erasmus&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More, Erasmus, and their counterparts across Europe valued Greek as highly as they did Latin. This marked them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/greek-manuscripts/articles/knowledge-of-greek-in-the-medieval-latin-west&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different from their medieval forebears&lt;/a&gt;. But their fluency in Greek also set them apart from other educated men of their era. Ong points out that although theoretically held in as high esteem, &amp;quot;Renaissance Greek and Hebrew are sorry failures compared to Renaissance Latin&amp;quot;. Works such as &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; and Erasmus's &lt;em&gt;Encomium Moriae&lt;/em&gt; are examples of a flourishing neo-Latin literature during this period; by contrast, Greek and Hebrew &amp;quot;produce no perceptible literature at all&amp;quot; (Ong, p. 104).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Greek words, then, function as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shibboleth&lt;/a&gt; for the humanist readers of &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;. Those who understand them would get a layer of meaning that the ordinary reader would miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Greek names and titles in Utopia&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More peppers his Latin text with proper names and titles that sound believable enough, but would put anybody acquainted with Greek on alert. The names function in the manner of a wink: their Greek meanings, inaccessible to most readers, signal to the more sophisticated that the narrative should not be taken at face value. Some examples are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The capital of Utopia, Amaurot (&amp;quot;dark city&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The principal river, Anyder (&amp;quot;waterless&amp;quot;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title for the prince, Ademos (&amp;quot;no people&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these are puns per se. They're fairly straightforward Greek. But insofar as they suggest a meaning beyond what's on the surface, they work in the same way as puns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the humanists were big on puns. Erasmus's best-known work, for example, is &lt;em&gt;Encomium Moriae&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;In Praise of Folly&lt;/em&gt;. But Erasmus's praises of &lt;em&gt;moriae&lt;/em&gt;, stupidity (whence the word &lt;em&gt;moron&lt;/em&gt;), are also his praises of his friend and dedicatee of that work, Thomas &lt;em&gt;More&lt;/em&gt;. More himself pulls off two puns of staggering complexity in &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;. The first is the name Raphael Hythloday. Robert Adams explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first root of &amp;quot;Hythloday&amp;quot; is surely Greek &lt;em&gt;huthlos&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &amp;quot;nonsense&amp;quot;; the second part of the name may suggest &lt;em&gt;daien&lt;/em&gt;, to distribute, i.e., a nonsense-peddler. A fantastic trilingual pun could make the whole name mean &amp;quot;God Heals [Heb., &lt;em&gt;Raphael&lt;/em&gt;] through the nonsense [Gr., &lt;em&gt;huthlos&lt;/em&gt;] of God [Lat., &lt;em&gt;dei&lt;/em&gt;].&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;More, p. 5, n. 9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is worth unpacking. On the one hand, the fact that Raphael Hythloday's name requires three languages to understand itself works to shield More's fiction from being open to view as a fiction. Anybody reading the text would know Latin, of course, or they wouldn't be reading it. But Hebrew and Greek would be known only to the highly cultured humanists of More's circle. So the fact that Hythloday is a distributor of nonsense would be clear to none but those in the know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_(archangel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;? The name signifies a healer, and not just any healer; God's own healer, God the healer. Alternatively, it's an appeal: God, please heal. And heal how? Through the nonsense of God. Hythloday's story may be nonsense, a mere folly, a &lt;em&gt;moria&lt;/em&gt;. Yet there's something in there that's both divine and healing in its very nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same sort of double pun prevails in the second pun, the title of the work itself. The unsuspecting will take Utopia simply as a name. The more sophisticated will realize that this ideal republic is &lt;em&gt;outopia&lt;/em&gt;, no place at all. But there's a twist. Just as Hythloday is not just a dispenser of folly but also a healer, perhaps this no-place is a &lt;em&gt;eutopia&lt;/em&gt;, a good place after all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Liar's Paradox&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More cheerfully underlines the simultaneous building and dismantling of his Utopian world. Speculation that &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; was fiction began to circulate as soon as the work was published. The second edition of &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;  is prefaced by a letter to Peter Giles wherein More insists that the story is fact and Utopia is a real place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perfectly possible that if I'd decided to write about a republic, and a fable of this sort had occurred to me, I might have spread a little fiction, like so much honey, over the truth to make it more acceptable. But I would certainly have tempered the fiction so that, while it deceived the common folk, it also tipped the wink to the learned, who were capable of seeing through it. So, if I'd done nothing but give special names to the prince, the river, the city, and the island, which hinted to the learned that the island was nowhere, the city was a phantom, the river was waterless, and the prince had no people, that would not have been hard to do, and would have been a good deal more clever than what I actually did. Unless I had a historian's devotion to fact, I am not so stupid as to have used those barbarous and senseless names of Utopia, Anyder, Amaurot, and Ademus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;More, pp. 124–125.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In its doubling down on the truth of a fiction, this is nothing so much as an mirror image of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubulides#Paradoxes_of_Eubulides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;liar's paradox&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;Eubulides says, 'This statement is a lie'&amp;quot;. I am not so stupid that I'd make up those names, More maintains. I'm telling the truth. It would have been more clever to lie. The moron says he's no moron, because if he were, he'd not have made up the names he's made up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of this dazzling display of indirection? Is &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; a rhetorical game, a performance highlighting its own virtuosity, a conjuring trick where illusion and reality become indistinguishable? It is indisputably those things. But there's more to it than that, and the paradox of &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; is part and parcel of the paradox of More and his era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questioning of received wisdom that's foundational to &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; was also foundational to the Renaissance. Cosmology, geography, and theology were all overturned as Copernicus, Columbus, and Luther radically challenged existing conceptions of the world. This opened up possibilities, but also dangers. When there are no foundations for truth any more, all that's left is extremely slippery ground. And More was part of an uncommonly volatile world, the court of Henry VIII.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen Greenblatt, in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3680145.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;influential reading&lt;/a&gt; of More and his times, relates the rhetorical strategies of &lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt; to the role-playing necessary for survival in the court. As both a deeply devout man and an ambitious one, More was fully engaged in the philosophical, political, and religious debates and affairs of his day. Greenblatt argues that More adopts masks as a way to navigate the treacherous politics of the court and the religious upheavals of the times. In such times, being definitive about one's stance is perilous; far better to adopt masks that allow one to further one's ambition while keeping private beliefs unknowable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By creating a plausible eutopia that's also an outopia, More puts forward radical ideas of how society and government might be organized and simultaneously undercuts those ideas. Utopia—the imagined country, and the linguistic hall of mirrors he uses to imagine it—gives More a way to question received wisdom about the familial, religious, political, and economic organization of society, and a way to withhold any answers. The debates engendered by this wondrous book are far from settled, and we can't point to More's own stance as definitive: it's impossible to pin down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;References&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stephen Greenblatt (2005). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo3680145.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. University of Chicago Press.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thomas More (1516). &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0393961451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Utopia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Robert M. Adams (1991). Norton Critical Editions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Walter J. Ong (1959). '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4173267&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin Language Study as a Renaissance Puberty Rite&lt;/a&gt;'. &lt;em&gt;Studies in Philology&lt;/em&gt; 56:2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T09:37:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9718" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9715" CreationDate="2019-04-04T12:24:00.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be the &lt;em&gt;Lockdown&lt;/em&gt; series by Alexander Gordon Smith?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It follows the story of a teenager who is falsely convicted of murder and sent into a prison where they do experiments of the teenagers who live there. I have only read the first book, so I do not remember a specific antagonist, or the torture scene that you described, but they could have appeared later on in the series. Likewise I do not remember the main character being experimented on; the first book ends with him attempting to escape the prison. The guards in black suits that you were talking about could be the &quot;blacksuit&quot; characters from the book, who acted as enforcers and bodyguards.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pn90O.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Pn90O.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="37" LastActivityDate="2019-04-04T12:24:00.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9744" CreationDate="2019-04-05T09:20:24.687" Score="2" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not able to comprehend this paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Mr. Elliot was not done with. Mrs. Smith had been carried away from her first direction, and Anne had forgotten, in the interest of her own family concerns, how much had been originally implied against him; but her attention was now called to the explanation of those first hints, and she listened to a recital which, if it did not perfectly justify the unqualified bitterness of Mrs Smith, proved him to have been very unfeeling in his conduct towards her; very deficient both in justice and compassion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/105/105-h/105-h.htm#chap21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 21&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Austen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T17:26:03.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T17:26:03.047" Title="A confusing conversation between Anne and Mrs. Smith" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5212" CreationDate="2019-04-05T09:40:05.503" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph of the question understands the line correctly: according to the rumour, more of Julia’s uncles and aunts were illegitimate (‘heirs at love’) than legitimate (‘heirs at law’). The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;heir-at-law&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; the person who succeeds another by right of blood in the enjoyment of his property&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This phrase was popularized by the comedy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Heir_at_Law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Heir at Law&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Colman_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Colman&lt;/a&gt; which opened in London in 1797 and would have been familiar to Byron and his readers in 1819 when the first part of &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt; was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase ‘heir at love’ is parallel to ‘heir at law’, but this is ironic because if a child were known to be illegitimate, they would be no heir at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-05T09:40:05.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9724" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9725" CreationDate="2019-04-05T14:59:20.240" Score="5" ViewCount="1257" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9649/17&quot;&gt;This Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; mention accusations of plagiarism levelled at T. S. Eliot in the context of his famous poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Waste Land&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. There seems to be a lot of information about this on the internet, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/03/31/famous-plagiarists-could-it-happen-today/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plagiarism Today&lt;/a&gt; and the linked Cracked article, but I couldn't easily distil the important points to understand what's going on here. What was the origin of these accusations? How prevalent have they been, and how much credit should we give them? What's the evidence for and against &quot;The Waste Land&quot; being plagiarised, and from whom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-05T15:22:29.440" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T11:41:41.947" Title="Was T. S. Eliot's &quot;The Waste Land&quot; plagiarised?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9724" CreationDate="2019-04-05T18:17:28.633" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot said that the source of the title, theme and imagery of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://wasteland.windingway.org/poem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;’ was the medieval legend of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fisher King&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessie_Weston&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jessie L. Weston&lt;/a&gt;’s book on the Grail legend: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Ritual_to_Romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;From Ritual to Romance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T. S. Eliot (1922), Notes on ‘The Waste Land’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem also quotes many phrases and lines from other works, amounting to about 40 lines of the poem’s 433. Eliot uses these quotations transformatively, altering some of them, and placing them in new and ironic contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this use of sources and quotations amount to plagiarism? Plagiarism is copying without attribution, and Eliot’s notes to the poem give the attributions. But in any case plagiarism is a violation of academic norms, not of poetic norms. ‘The Waste Land’ was not a term paper, and poets have always alluded to each other and drawn on a common stock of images and themes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to the direct quotations and the influences acknowledged by Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’ (like any poem) contains echoes of unacknowledged influences, the most well-known of which I discuss below. A clever muck-raker with a facility for rhetoric can muddle these two aspects of the poem, pointing out that some lines are copied (but not that Eliot attributed them), and that some lines have unacknowledged influences (but omitting to mention that no copying is involved), creating the false impression that Eliot copied substantial amounts of text from other works without attribution. Since all the works involved are widely available, it is a simple matter of comparing the originals to expose the falsehood. But who bothers to check original sources?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without the operation of dishonesty, so long as everyone relies on secondary and tertiary sources instead of checking against the originals, a game of whispers can take place whereby a coincidental similarity gets described by A as a “parallel”, by B as a “borrowing”, by C as “copying”, and by D as “plagiarism”. In this kind of ‘innocent’ accusation, even a casual reader ought to be able to tell that D has gone wrong somewhere, because if they really had evidence for plagiarism they would present their best examples. The fact that they don’t do so is evidence that they have nothing to present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cawein&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Madison Cawein’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/300/36.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;’ has some striking similarities to Eliot’s poem in title, theme, and imagery. It begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Briar and fennel and chincapin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          And rue and ragweed everywhere;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The field seemed sick as a soul with sin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Or dead of an old despair,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Born of an ancient care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          And the note of a bird’s distress,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the rasping sound of the grasshopper,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Clung to the loneliness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Like burrs to a trailing dress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Madison Cawein (1913). ‘Waste Land’. &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, January 1913.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion that Eliot was inspired by Cawein was first made by Richard Patteson in a note that I’ll quote in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Following T. S. Eliot’s own suggestion, critics have generally assumed that Jessie L. Weston’s &lt;em&gt;From Ritual to Romance&lt;/em&gt; is the sole source for the title of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. But seven years before the publication of Miss Weston’s book, there appeared in Harriet Monroe’s &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt; magazine a poem which bears striking similarities to &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. Madison Cawein’s “Waste Land”, like Eliot’s poem, presents a desolate landscape as a metaphor for spiritual desolation: “The field seemed sick despair.” Much of the poem’s imagery also suggests Eliot’s. Cawein’s setting is dry and dead. Trees are “Skeletons gaunt that gnarled the place”, and the single human being on the scene is “Like a dead weed, gray and wan,/Or a breath of dust”. Eliot’s “cicada/And dry grass singing” is forecast by Cawein’s “crickets’ cry and the locusts’ whirr”. More revealing than the imagery, however, is Cawein’s explicit equation of “the grim death there” with “forms of the mind, an old despair,/That there into semblance grew/Out of the grief I knew”. We now know, thanks to Valerie Eliot’s facsimile edition of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, something of the grief that lay behind T. S. Eliot’s own work. Of course, the use of nature to express an emotional or spiritual condition does not originate either with Eliot or with Madison Cawein. But Eliot must surely have read Cawein’s poem in &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt;; and Cawein’s title, combined with his imagery and theme, seems rather too close to Eliot’s to be purely coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard F. Patteson (1976). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/23-7-300&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An additional source for “The Waste Land”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; 23:7, pp. 300–1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Patteson has to fill the gap in his argument with speculation (“must surely have read”, “seems rather too close”) since there is no evidence of textual copying that he can point to, just similarities of imagery and theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some significant words (‘cricket’, ‘bones’, ‘dust’, ‘dog’, ‘trees’) do appear in both poems, but a detailed look at the text shows no evidence of copying, for example Cawein has “The cricket’s cry and the locust’s whirr” whereas Eliot has “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief”. The imagery of crickets or locusts laying waste to the land is, in any case, an ancient one, appearing for example several times in the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though the similarities are suggestive, it remains, I think, more likely that both poets drew their theme and imagery from other sources, for example the medieval legend of the Fisher King or the plagues of locusts in Exodus and Ezekiel. Once you have picked the idea of a wasteland as a metaphor for the human condition, images of crickets, dust and dry bones may not be all that difficult to come by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Joyce&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suggestion that Eliot was inspired by James Joyce’s &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; was first made by Giorgio Melchiori:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; was published in its final form in the same year as &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; was written; besides, the &lt;em&gt;Lestrygonians&lt;/em&gt; episode, from which this passage is taken, is among those published two or three years before in &lt;em&gt;The Little Review&lt;/em&gt;, a periodical to which Eliot himself contributed. There can be little doubt that the poet had read it before writing &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, and, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/review-of-ulysses-by-t-s-eliot-from-the-dial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reviewing it in 1923&lt;/a&gt;, he acknowledges that it had made a deep impression on him: ‘It is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape.’ It would not be surprising that the scene from the &lt;em&gt;Lestrygonians&lt;/em&gt;, where the suggestion of sumptuousness in the window-display rouses voluptuous thoughts (together with a hint of sexual disgust), leading to the merely physical and sordid stimulus of food, should have wandered into the poet’s imagination while he was dealing with a not very different subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Giorgio Melchiori (1951). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/00138385108596855&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Echoes in “The Waste Land”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;English Studies&lt;/em&gt; 32:1-6, p. 3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melchiori’s claim in the first sentence is false: ‘The Waste Land’ was &lt;em&gt;published&lt;/em&gt; in 1922, but the earliest manuscripts are thought to date from 1914. Note also Melchiori’s use of speculation: “There can be little doubt” and “It would not be surprising”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trouble with Melchiori’s argument in this paper is that it relies on picking a little atmosphere and a few words out of a very large amount of text. This is as good as it gets in the 1951 paper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But what seems most striking is the echo of Joyce’s line ‘He turned Combridge’s corner, still pursued’, in Eliot’s “And still she cried, and still the world pursues.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Melchiori (1951), p. 4&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 1954 paper (‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/00138385408596922&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;English Studies&lt;/em&gt;, 35:1-6, pp. 56–68), Melchiori explored some similarities in imagery between ‘The Waste Land’ and the &lt;em&gt;Proteus&lt;/em&gt; episode of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. Melchiori’s argument is too vague to summarize, but the key similarities are as follows. First, both works have a digging dog and a corpse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. […] Unheeded he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcase lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. […] His hindpaws then scattered sand: then his forepaws dabbled and delved. Something he buried there, his grandmother. He rooted in the sand, dabbling, delving and stopped to listen to the air, scraped up the sand again with a fury of his claws, soon ceasing, a pard, a panther, got in spousebreach, vulturing the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, both works have a drowned man and allusions to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel%27s_Song&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ariel’s song&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—There’s five fathoms out there, he said. It’ll be swept up that way when the tide comes in about one. It’s nine days today. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man that was drowned. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Five fathoms out there. Full fathom five thy father lies. At one he said. Found drowned. High water at Dublin bar. Driving before it a loose drift of rubble, fanshoals of fishes, silly shells. A corpse rising saltwhite from the undertow, bobbing landward, a pace a pace a porpose. There he is. Hook it quick. Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor… A seachange this, brown eyes saltblue. Seadeath, mildest of all deaths known to man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the profit and loss.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A current under sea&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He passed the stages of his age and youth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Entering the whirlpool. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And on the king my father’s death before him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  White bodies naked on the low damp ground&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melchiori is not attempting to demonstrate plagiarism: his theory is that these passages are evidence of “unconscious reminiscence” at most, and in that light the similarities are interesting, but far from dispositive, as the most striking ones arise from the use of a common source, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Lorch also combed the two texts for thematic parallels, finding in both works rivers, nymphs, nerves, adultery, rats, thunder, and barren lands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These parallels even extend as far as verbal echoes. “The Burial of the Dead” actually takes place, in the form of Patrick Dignam’s funeral. The concept of planting the corpse comes up at the funeral when Bloom pleads, “Plant him and have done with him” and Bloom’s thought in the graveyard, “How many! All these here once walked round Dublin” resembles Eliot’s lines, “so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Lorch (1964). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753806&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Relationship between &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Texas Studies in Literature and Language&lt;/em&gt;, 6:2, p. 125.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the last of these verbal echos may be another case of a shared source. Eliot is alluding to Dante, and Joyce may be too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And there, behind it, marched so long a file&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of people, I would never have believed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That death could have undone so many souls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dante Alighieri. &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; III.55-57. Translated by James Finn Cotter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with Melchiori, in evaluating the saliency of these echoes we face the problem of a missing base rate. &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; is so vast and multifarious that we should expect to be able to find echoes of it in a great many works. The question is not whether ‘The Waste Land’ has &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; echoes of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, but whether it has &lt;em&gt;significantly more and stronger&lt;/em&gt; echoes than a typical work of its length, and neither Melchiori nor Lorch addresses this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tindall&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Tindall claimed that Joyce had accused Eliot of stealing ‘The Waste Land’ from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, and that he had encoded this claim in the text of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;. He states this with great confidence (but without citation) early in his &lt;em&gt;Reader’s Guide&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Joyce, as we have also noticed, always insisted that Eliot stole ‘The Waste Land’ from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William York Tindall (1969). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dO2IrqURy8cC&amp;amp;pg=PA45&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Reader’s Guide to Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, p. 60&lt;/a&gt;. Syracuse University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you look in detail at Tindall’s method, any confidence you might have in his boldly stated claims evaporates. The trouble is that &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; is written using stream-of-consciousness, dream-logic, fluid symbolism, shifting allusion and convoluted puns. This encourages a mode of reading in which you grasp at associations in an effort to find any kind of meaning in the text. But this is hopeless if you are trying to make biographical claims about Joyce: to make these associations you have to read as much into the text as you read out of it. I’ll give two examples where I am confident that Tindall is confabulating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;] Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers or Helviticus committed deuteronomy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My interpretation.] This sentence gives us Finnegan’s profession, and sets the scene in space and time. ‘Bygmester’ is Danish for ‘master builder’ and sounds like ‘big mister’. ‘Maurer’ is German for ‘mason’. Freeman’s Stone is an ancient boundary marker formerly on the ‘margin’ of Dublin. In &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; a ‘two-pair-back and passages’ is a kind of Dublin tenement. The time is antiquity, before the books of the Bible—Joshua, Judges, etc.—had been written. ‘Helviticus’ looks like a portmanteau of ‘Helveticus’ (Latin for ‘Swiss’) and ‘Leviticus’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Tindall’s interpretation.] Helviticus comitting “deuteronomy” is T. S. Eliot imitating &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; in Switzerland—“by the waters of Leman”, as he says in ‘The Waste Land’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My commentary.] Tindall’s theory here is that ‘deuteronomy’ means ‘imitation’ (because it repeats material from Exodus) and that ‘Helveticus’ means ‘Eliot’ (because Eliot visited Switzerland in 1921 during the composition of ‘The Waste Land’). But these connections are very thin: there would be no reason to suspect the equation of ‘Helviticus’ with Eliot unless you were already convinced that Joyce thought Eliot had plagiarised from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; while he was in Switzerland, so you can’t adduce it as evidence of Joyce accusing him of doing so without engaging in circular reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;] What child of a strandlooper but keepy little Kevin in the despondful surrounding of such sneezing cold would ever have trouved up on a strate that was called strete a motive for future saintity by euchring the finding of the Ardagh chalice by another heily innocent and beachwalker whilst trying with pious clamour to wheedle Tipperaw raw raw reeraw puteters out of Now Sealand in spignt of the patchpurple of the massacre, a dual a duel to die to day, goddam and biggod, sticks and stanks, of most of the Jacobiters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My interpretation.] This sentence alludes, first to the dispute between the finders of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardagh_Hoard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ardagh Chalice&lt;/a&gt; in 1868. A ‘strandlooper’ is a beach-comber, hence by association a treasure-hunter. ‘Trouved’ suggests French ‘trouver’, to find, and English ‘trove’ meaning buried treasure. ‘Euchring’ means ‘outwitting’ but also puns on ‘eucharist’ which the chalice was used for. Paddy Flanagan found the chalice in a potato (‘puteter’) field near Ardagh Fort, but his friend Jimmy Quin tried to ‘euchre’ him out of the credit. Then the allusion switches to the Jacobite &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Irelander_Rebellion_of_1848&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848&lt;/a&gt; in Tipperary. ‘Patchpurple’ puns on ‘purple patch’ and the ‘battle of Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch’ in which the ‘Jacobiters’ (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Young Irelanders&lt;/a&gt;) fought the Irish Constabulary in a ‘duel’ of gunfire, the ‘dual’ ‘massacre’ being the killing of rebels Cahir McGoldrick and Gareth Ney. Jacobites traditionally wore a sprig of purple heather in their caps, or perhaps the patch is purple with the blood of the slain men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Tindall’s interpretation.] At this point Kevin–Shaun is T. S. Eliot stealing ‘The Waste Land’ from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, Joyce’s purple-patched “massacre”. April, “future saintity”, the chalice (Joyce’s golden cup and Eliot’s grail), “strandlooper” (Prufrock), “beachwalker” (Stephen) and “euchring” (Mme. Sosostris’ wicked pack of cards) establishes identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My commentary.] I can follow some of Tindall’s associations: in Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ Prufrock says that he will “walk upon the beach”; in the ‘Proteus’ episode of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach; &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; can be described as a ‘purple patch’ in both senses (a success; an excessively ornate passage of text); Eliot drew on the Grail legend, and the Grail is a cup, and so is the Ardagh chalice; Madame Sosostris has a deck of Tarot cards and euchre is also played with cards. But these seem very weak, and I don’t understand Tindall’s claims about “massacre” and “future saintity”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Evans&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 2009 article by Robert Evans at cracked.com ekes out a teaspoon of truth with a bucket of lies, innuendo, and snide rhetoric, in order, I can only guess, to create a controversy that might drive clicks to the site. (For this reason I have not linked to it.) Almost every sentence in Evans’ piece includes either an outright falsehood or an innuendo amounting to one, something that would be hard to achieve merely through ignorance and incompetence. Let’s have a look at it in detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem with this is that Eliot didn’t write ‘The Waste Land.’ Not all of it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Evans (2009). ‘5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism’. cracked.com&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the rhetoric: an initial sweeping claim that is immediately admitted to be false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As it turns out, the idea behind ‘The Waste Land,’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the use of ‘as it turns out’ to give a misleading impression of certainty. Some scholars speculate that Eliot got his title and some of his imagery from Cawein (as discussed above), but the evidence is too thin for ‘as it turns out’ to be a fair summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and a fair amount of its content, was plagiarized from an almost unknown American poet named Madison Cawein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the use of ‘fair amount’ to avoid having to quantify exactly how many lines Eliot took from Cawein. That’s because Eliot took &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; lines from Cawein (see above) but it would not suit Evans’ purpose to say so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cawein’s poem was even named ‘Waste Land.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the use of ‘even’ here: this seems to imply that not only did Eliot plagiarise the poem, he &lt;em&gt;even&lt;/em&gt; plagiarised the title. But the title is the main reason anyone thinks Eliot was influenced by Cawein at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was first published in the same issue of &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt; as Eliot’s ‘Love Song,’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is false. Cawein’s ‘Waste Land’ was published in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/70321/january-1913&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;January 1913 issue&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Poetry&lt;/em&gt; but Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was published in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/70350/june-1915&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;June 1915 issue&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and contains several metaphors that were later used word for word by Eliot in his ‘The Waste Land.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note again the use of ‘several’ to avoid quantification. Cawein’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/300/36.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Waste Land&lt;/a&gt;’ is only 40 lines long so it is easy to check every phrase. There are &lt;em&gt;no&lt;/em&gt; metaphors “that were later used word for word”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Eliot’s lucky he died before trying to publish his ‘The Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘The Tyler Perry’s Diary of a Mad Black Woman.’)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is false, but phrased as a joke so that it is deniable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the poor, unappreciated Madison Cawein wasn’t the only person Eliot stole from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the attempt to solicit sympathy for Cawein, as if Eliot were responsible for his lack of prominence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This passage from ‘The Waste Land:’ “The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne / Glowed on the marble,” was slightly altered but still stolen from Shakespeare, who wrote, “The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne / Burn’d on the water”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans is correct that Eliot adapted these two lines from &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; (maybe he read &lt;a href=&quot;https://wasteland.windingway.org/77/the-chair-she-sat-in-like-a-burnished-throne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eliot’s note&lt;/a&gt;?), but ironically Shakespeare’s description of Cleopatra’s barge that follows these lines is not original to him either: he adapted it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/shakespearesplu00nortgoog#page/n224/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marcus Antonius’&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans also neglects the transformative way Eliot has used these lines: the woman in her suburban dressing-room likened ironically to Cleopatra in her barge on the Nile, her banal modern furnishings described with the grandeur of Shakespeare’s pentameter and classical reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eliot’s line, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song,” was stolen entirely from Edmund Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans is correct about the source of this line, but again omits to explain the transformative way it is used. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/106/53.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser&lt;/a&gt; the Thames is decked out with “variable flowers” and “dainty gems” for a wedding day, but in Eliot “the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank” of a river flowing through a wasteland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most of ‘The Waste Land’ was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the rhetorical use of ‘just’ to suggest that Eliot contributed nothing more than stringing the quotes together. Note also the use of ‘most’ to avoid quantification. It’s not too difficult to look through ‘The Waste Land’ and count the lines with quoted material, which amount to about 40 out of 433.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Until very recently, most scholars have been happy to simply chalk these up as ‘allusions’ to the work of other authors. For a long time, it was regarded as something poets just did, as a way of honoring their influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the use of scare quotes around ‘allusions’ to imply that the term is illegitate in some way, and the use of “Until very recently” and “For a long time” to suggest (without saying so) that allusion is no longer considered to be something that poets do (which would be false).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T17:22:15.547" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T17:22:15.547" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-06T00:31:39.043" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems like at the end of Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust II&lt;/em&gt;, he has realized what he should do. Shortly before that, he kills humans on his quest to help humanity. So what exactly is his new purpose, except that he has given up his power?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was his whole journey just about experiencing different forms of things he would think he enjoys, to realize they aren't what he wants, and is happy just existing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in other words, if he knew what he knows now at the beginning of the book, what would he have done? Continued his research? Nothing at all? Something completely different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6123" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:23:56.953" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T19:21:07.187" Title="What was Faust's purpose?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;&lt;faust&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9728" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9767" CreationDate="2019-04-06T04:03:11.020" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve already asked about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/7963/oldest-library-in-america&quot;&gt;oldest free public library&lt;/a&gt;: now what’s the oldest children’s library in America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T09:34:16.403" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T09:35:22.357" Title="Oldest children’s library in America?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;library-and-information-science&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9729" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9730" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" Score="0" Body="For question about the works within the Uplift Universe by David Brin. Use with the [david-brin] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T12:17:31.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9731" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9732" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" Score="0" Body="For question about the life and works of David Brin, the American author of science fiction" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" LastActivityDate="2019-04-06T12:18:02.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11030" CreationDate="2019-04-07T00:13:50.297" Score="5" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ShcIjIYxAMoC&amp;amp;pg=PT35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Criminal Ballad&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Ted Hughes describes a chain of tragedies happening in parallel with a man's simple moments of life. One of these is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when he ran and got his toy squealing with delight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An old man pulled from under the crush of metal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gazed towards the nearby polished shoes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And slowly forgot the deaths in Homer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The sparrowfall natural economy&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the dark simple curtain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand how the images in the last two lines are related to each other. So, the &quot;sparrowfall&quot; image is easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'Sparrowfall' refers us to Matthew 10:29, where Christ is comforting&#xA;  the disciples by telling them that God's providence [...] covers&#xA;  everything, even the smallest details such as man himself would&#xA;  forget. For Hughes, this is no comfort to the old man at his death.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — Craig Robinson (1989). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OXmuCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA61&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ted Hughes As Shepherd Of Being&lt;/em&gt;, p. 61&lt;/a&gt;. Palgrave Macmillan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it might be helpful to note that Hamlet makes the same biblical reference, saying that &quot;there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, when reading Matthew 10:29, we can also see that the &quot;sparrowfall&quot; is given in the context of commerce, and thus we can understand the meaning of &quot;natural economy&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  — &lt;em&gt;Matthew 10:29, King James Bible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does a &quot;dark simple curtain&quot; have to do with it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T08:33:28.873" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T08:33:28.873" Title="What is &quot;the dark simple curtain&quot; in Ted Hughes' &quot;Criminal Ballad&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;crow&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9747" CreationDate="2019-04-09T02:03:48.847" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Hank Reardon was finally ready to join the Strike, he found that Francisco had already been working for him as a furnace superintendent - and, characteristically, as a very good one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the main reason Francisco was there was so that he could be sure to be at hand when Reardon was ready. With that said, how could he do even that without violating his oath to the Strike?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other strikers either went to the Valley full-time right away (e.g. the &quot;later&quot; strikers like Roger Marsh and Ellis Wyatt), retired if they had the savings to do so (e.g. William Hastings), or worked unskilled jobs (e.g. Owen Kellogg, John Galt). At one point, Francisco was even forced to (reluctantly) decline Hank Reardon's job offer on the grounds that it would violate his oath. So, why does he do so now?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T04:38:00.850" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T16:26:32.770" Title="How could Francisco d’Anconia work for Reardon without breaking his oath?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9751" CreationDate="2019-04-09T04:23:00.377" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300/lecture-3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lecture 3&lt;/a&gt; of his Introduction to the Theory of Literature Yale Open Course, Prof. Paul Fry makes the following claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... the notion of hermeneutics arises primarily in religion first, specifically in the Christian tradition, but that isn’t to say that there hasn’t been, that there wasn’t long before the moment at which hermeneutics became important in Christianity, that there wasn’t centuries’ worth of Talmudic scholarship which is essentially also hermeneutic in nature–that is, to say concerned with the art and basis of interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What gave rise in the Western world to what is called “hermeneutics” was in fact the Protestant Reformation. And there’s a lot of significance in that, I think, and I’ll try to explain why. You don’t really puzzle your head about questions of interpretation, how we determine the validity of interpretation and so on, until A) meaning becomes terribly important to you, and B) the ascertainment of meaning becomes difficult. You may say to yourself, “Well, isn’t it always the case that meaning is important and that meaning is hard to construe?” Well, not necessarily. If you are a person whose sacred scripture is adjudicated by the Pope and the occasional tribunal of church elders, you yourself don’t really need to worry very much about what scripture means. You are told what it means. It goes without saying therefore what it means. But in the wake of the Protestant Reformation when the question of one’s relationship with the Bible became personal and everyone was understood, if only through the local minister, to be engaged with coming to an understanding of what is after all pretty difficult–who on earth knows what the Parables mean and so on, and the whole of the Bible poses interpretative difficulties–then of course you are going to have to start worrying about how to interpret it. Needless to say, since it’s a sacred scripture, the meaning of it is important to you. You do want to know what it means. It can’t mean just anything. It’s crucial to you to know exactly what it means and why what it means is important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an accurate description of where hemeneutics came from? For example, is his implication that the Roman Catholic Church played little to no role in the development of Western hermeneutic methods correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T12:35:04.770" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T18:01:55.123" Title="Is Paul Fry correct in saying that modern hermeneutic approaches largely developed due to the Protestant Reformation?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;yale-english-300-open-course&gt;&lt;paul-fry&gt;&lt;lectures&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9738" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The course link is available here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-300&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9739" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" Score="0" Body="Introduction to the Theory of Literature (English 300) is a Yale Open Course taught by Professor Paul Fry. Use with the [paul-fry] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T04:24:22.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9740" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-09T04:25:28.653" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T04:25:28.653" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T04:25:28.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9741" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-09T04:25:28.653" Score="0" Body="Paul Fry is an author and literature professor at Yale University." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T04:33:37.150" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T04:33:37.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9764" CreationDate="2019-04-09T05:02:27.780" Score="3" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5737/why-was-francisco-danconia-amused-by-ellis-wyatts-imminent-demise&quot;&gt;Why was Francisco d&amp;#39;Anconia amused by Ellis Wyatt&amp;#39;s imminent demise?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When describing what a playboy Francisco d'Anconia had supposedly become (including throwing wild and ridiculously expensive parties, his supposed womanizing, etc.), we find the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... [Dagny Taggart] read the accounts of the business ventures he undertook at length intervals; the ventures were spectacularly successful &lt;strong&gt;and ruined his competitors&lt;/strong&gt;, but he indulged in them as in an occasional sport, staging a sudden raid, then vanishing from the industrial scene for a year or two, leaving d'Anconia Copper to the management of his employees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It turns out, of course, that he was actively destroying his company the entire time, as well as several of his competitors, Taggart Transcontinental, the Phoenix-Durango, Ellis Wyatt, and a host of other businesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One particularly notable example was the San Sebastian Mines incident, which both Dagny and Jim Taggart later described as a &quot;rotten swindle.&quot; When Dagny went to see d'Anconia to confront him about the incident, she accused him of knowing full well that the mines would eventually be nationalized (and were of little value anyway):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You knew, before you bought that property, that Mexico was in the hands of a looters' government... you knew that they'd seize those mines sooner or later. What you were after is your American stockholders.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&quot;That's true.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; He was looking straight at her, he was not smiling, his face was earnest. He added, &quot;That's part of the truth.&quot;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You had exhausted every other form of depravity and sought a new thrill by swindling people like Jim and his friends, in order to watch them squirm. I don't know what sort of corruption could make anyone enjoy that, but that's what you came to New York to see, at the right time.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;They certainly provided a spectacle of squirming on the grand scale. Your brother James in particular.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;They're rotten fools, but in this case their only crime was that they trusted you. They trusted your name and your honor.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Again, she saw the look of earnestness and knew with certainty that it was genuine, when he said, &quot;Yes. They did. I know it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;And do you find it amusing?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;No. I don't find it amusing at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;, however (as pointed out in the linked Q&amp;amp;A), vastly amused by the destruction of the Mexican Planners, and even more amused by the fact that Ellis Wyatt was going to be wiped out. He was also fully aware that the Phoenix-Durango railroad was wiped out as a direct result of his actions, and that Dan Conway had been forced into retirement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that part of the point of the Strike in the first place was to prove that looter governments would eventually collapse when they were deprived of people to enable them, was the fact that Francisco d'Anconia (and, for that fact, Ragnar Danneskjöld) was deliberately destroying the economy contrary to that goal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T17:59:49.853" Title="Was Francisco d'Anconia's deliberate destruction of his competitors counterproductive to the purpose of the Strike?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2019-04-09T09:15:32.313" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your good ideas. I have another one, spontaneously adding some of your hints:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imagined that the ghost was still inside of Coleridge while Gently came by. During his stay in Coleridge's house he hypnotised the ghost. The ghost didn't know Gently yet, so he would not get suspicious.&#xA;He gave him some confusing thing or corrupting action to think of or to do at the time it would be at him to destroy humanity (he told Coleridge, AND the ghost it's not a meteor but an albatross to think of. I'd say here symbolically meteor means doom and the albatross means hope).&#xA;About Gently saying they would not have much time to react, I think by leaving that place within these few minutes via the time machine, again they had time &quot;forever&quot;, since they then took action to prevent the ghost from being successful.&#xA;The ghost had already been hypnotised in the past so they could let him go within Martin's body.&#xA;I didn't notice about the book dropping out Martin's discarded jacket. It helps with my theory: the book itself would contain the trigger words for the ghost for the hypnotic order to be executed. But there is a problem: the book MUST NOT have been instantly, &quot;miraculously&quot; changed by this activity (like the way things would change in the move back to the future) but already contain the trigger within their reality, otherwise the hypnosis would NOT affect the ghost walking towards the ship.) This way of manipulating time is contradicting to the fact, that in the end surprisingly, &quot;miraculously&quot; Bach's music exists. Probably the time machine is intelligent enough to change reality either the one or the other way. One could even figure further on, by this kind of manipulation the machine got damaged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I enjoyed the thought they would put the fate of humanity into this high risk activity. Also, this is one really great detective story where you have to find the ultimate clue by yourself :) to me it is a lovely even caring and genius trick by the author towards the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6132" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T09:15:32.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9722" CreationDate="2019-04-09T09:30:33.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs. Smith had been carried away from her first direction,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her “first direction” was a severe attack on the character of Mr. Elliot (“a man without heart or conscience; a designing, wary, cold-blooded being, who thinks only of himself; whom for his own interest or ease, would be guilty of any cruelty, or any treachery, that could be perpetrated without risk”) but she has been diverted into a discussion of Mrs. Clay’s design of marrying Sir Walter and Mr. Elliot’s efforts to prevent it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and Anne had forgotten, in the interest of her own family concerns, how much had been originally implied against him;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally Anne is interested in these revelations about Mr. Elliot’s relations with her family, but Mrs. Smith’s original attack on him was so strong that it implied more faults than she has revealed thus far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but her attention was now called to the explanation of those first hints, and she listened to a recital&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Smith’s ‘recital’ is the next five paragraphs of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;which, if it did not perfectly justify the unqualified bitterness of Mrs. Smith,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator says that there is a difference between the level of bitterness that would be justified by the infamy of Mr. Elliot’s behaviour as described in this recital, and the level of bitterness displayed by Mrs. Smith. This points to either a flaw in Mrs. Smith’s character, or to the existence of something that Mrs. Smith knows but has not told Anne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This level of discrimination is quite unrealistic—no-one can say to a hair exactly how much bitterness is justified by what level of infamy—but it reminds us that the narrator of &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt; is paying close attention to the virtues and vices of even the sympathetic characters, and hence that so should we.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T09:30:33.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9197" CreationDate="2019-04-09T14:30:43.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Sylvia’ represents a nymph or shepherdess of Arcadia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pastoral or Arcadian literature was a late-medieval and early-modern genre that romanticized the simplicity of rural life. Named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arcadia&lt;/a&gt;, the home of the god Pan in Greek mythology, the genre depicts an uncorrupted wilderness peopled with satyrs and nymphs or shepherds and shepherdesses. Important works were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcadia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1480) by Jacopo Sannarazo, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013123280/page/n20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1580s) by Philip Sidney, and the best known today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_You_Like_It&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1599) by William Shakespeare. Steinbeck’s title &lt;em&gt;The Pastures of Heaven&lt;/em&gt; alludes to this pastoral genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stock characters in Arcadian romances had classical names: Lysander, Damon, Strephon, etc. for the shepherds, and Sylvia, Phyllis, Cloris, etc. for the shepherdesses and nymphs. The name ‘Sylvia’ derives from Latin ‘silva’ meaning ‘wood’ (contrasting in Steinbeck with ‘George’ which derives from Greek ‘γεωργός’ meaning ‘farmer’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-known Silvia appears in the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/image220TeatroOpal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aminta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1573) by Torquato Tasso, which portrays her romance with the shepherd boy of the title. This was adapted into the ballet &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_(ballet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sylvia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1876) with music by Delibes. But I doubt that Steinbeck had any particular Sylvia in mind: by writing ‘a Sylvia’ he makes it clear that ‘Sylvia’ is to be understood as a type, not an individual. So the image is generic, casting George as a shepherd in an Arcadian drama, waiting in vain for a nymph to appear from the woods and fall in love with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-09T17:50:11.607" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T17:50:11.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9746" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-09T15:36:08.920" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus_Sequence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bartimaeus trilogy&lt;/a&gt;, the main character is the eponymous djinni &lt;strong&gt;Bartimaeus&lt;/strong&gt;, a demon/spirit from &quot;the Other Place&quot; who is cheeky, witty, boastful, and at times surprisingly deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartimaeus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bartimaeus&lt;/a&gt;, however, is also the name of a man in the New Testament of the Bible. What's the connection there? Does the name in Jonathan Stroud's novels come from this Biblical Bartimaeus, or from somewhere else? Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T15:18:52.033" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T15:18:52.033" Title="What is the significance of naming the djinni Bartimaeus?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;jonathan-stroud&gt;&lt;bartimaeus-sequence&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9736" CreationDate="2019-04-09T16:26:32.770" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that what Francisco did would not violate the oath. The actual oath that had to be sworn to join the strikers is described in Part III Chapter One as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR &#xA;  THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to forbid all work; rather it forbids a certain mindset. At the end of that chapter, John Galt elaborates on what the oath actually meant in practical terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We had no rules of any kind,&quot; said Galt, &quot;except one. When a man took our &#xA;  oath, it meant a single commitment: not to work in his own profession, not to &#xA;  give to the world the benefit of his mind. Each of us carried it out in any &#xA;  manner he chose. Those who had money, retired to live on their savings. Those &#xA;  who had to work, took the lowest jobs they could find. Some of us had been &#xA;  famous; others — like that young brakeman of yours, whom Halley discovered— were &#xA;  stopped by us before they had set out to get tortured. But we did not give up &#xA;  our minds or the work we loved. Each of us continued in his real profession, &#xA;  in whatever manner and spare time he could manage — but he did it secretly, for &#xA;  his own sole benefit, giving nothing to men, sharing nothing. We were &#xA;  scattered all over the country, as the outcasts we had always been, only now &#xA;  we accepted our parts with conscious intention. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this seems to indicate that it was not work &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; that was forbidden, but specifically work that was done to help the world. Similarly, when Galt intends to go back to work in the world for the last time in Chapter Two he explains that it is not a violation of the oath because his particular reasons for working were valid:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If I go back,&quot; said Galt, &quot;it won't be for our work. It will be to win &#xA;  the only thing I want from the world for myself, now that the work is done. &#xA;  I've taken nothing from the world and I've wanted nothing. But there's one &#xA;  thing which it's still holding and which is mine and which I won't let it &#xA;  have. No, I don't intend to break my oath, I won't deal with the looters, I &#xA;  won't be of any value or help to anyone out there, neither to looters nor &#xA;  neutrals — nor scabs. If I go, it won't be for anyone's sake but mine — and I &#xA;  don't think I'm risking my life, but if I am — well, I'm now free to risk it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, we can perhaps say that Francisco was able to do the same thing. He didn't take the job as the furnace foreman in order to be productive for the world; He took it to advance his own agenda by enabling Rearden to join the strike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2019-04-09T16:26:32.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9724" CreationDate="2019-04-09T18:36:18.583" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. What plagiarism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sources of the accusation of plagiarism are the two following articles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evans, Robert: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cracked.com/article_17198_5-great-men-who-built-their-careers-on-plagiarism.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;”, Cracked.com, 29.03.2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bailey, Jonathan: “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2009/03/31/famous-plagiarists-could-it-happen-today/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Famous Plagiarists: Could it Happen Today?&lt;/a&gt;”, PlagiarismToday, 31.05.2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not find any accusation of plagiarism in the 17 reviews, contemporary reactions and interpretations from the years 1922 - 1945 included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.wwnorton.com/books/webad.aspx?id=10806&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norton Critical Edition of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Michael North (Norton, 2001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Bailey appears to agree with Evans's accusation against T. S. Eliot, let us first look at what he considers the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/06/07/why-stealing-from-many-isnt-research/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;generally accepted definition of plagiarism&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (i.e.from  &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/plagiarism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.reference.com&lt;/a&gt;) and then see whether the accusations by Evans and Bailey hold water:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own original work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of this essay discusses whether and to what extent this definition applies to the quotes and allusions in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Cawein as unacknowledged source of inspriation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans first claims that &amp;quot;the idea behind &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; (...) was plagiarized from an almost unknown American poet named Madison Cawein&amp;quot;. Eliot's source was supposedly Cawein's poem &amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://d.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/text/cawein-waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; can be read online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans also claims that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a fair amount of its content [i.e. of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;], was plagiarized from (...) Madison Cawein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cawein's poem is exactly 40 lines long, whereas &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is 433 lines long, so it is not clear how most of the content of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; could have been plagiarised from &amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans then goes on to say that Cawein's &amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;contains several metaphors that were later used word for word by Eliot in his &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans doesn't bother to tell us what those images or words are, but we can consult Richard F. Patteson's short article &lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/nq/article/23/7/300/4611401&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;An Additional Source for “The Waste Land”&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; (July 1976), which is Evans's unnamed source. (Since Evans doesn't acknowledge Patteson but presents the &amp;quot;plagiarism&amp;quot; as his own discovery, his article can be seen as an example of plagiarism according to the definition cited by Bailey, because that definition does not only cover &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;thoughts&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patteson says about &amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot; that &amp;quot;[m]uch of the poem's imagery also suggest's Eliot's&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Cawein's setting is dry and dead.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot's &amp;quot;cicada / And dry grass singing&amp;quot; is forecast by Cawein's &amp;quot;cricket's cry and the locusts' whirr&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More revealing (...) is Cawein's explicit equation of &amp;quot;the grim death there&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;forms of the mind, an old despair, / That there into semblance grew / Out of the grief I knew&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patteson then mentions &amp;quot;the grief that lay behind T. S. Eliot's own work&amp;quot;. However, he also admits that &amp;quot;the use of nature to express an emotional or spiritual condition does not originate either with Eliot or with Madison Cawein.&amp;quot; Patteson concludes that Eliot must have read Cawein's poem but does not accuse him of plagiarism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patteson's findings definitely don't constitute &amp;quot;a fair amount&amp;quot; (see Evans's claim above). The theme of drought and the &amp;quot;waste land&amp;quot; (or devastated land) goes at least as far back as the Grail legend (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceval,_the_Story_of_the_Grail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perceval ou le Conte du Graal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Chrétien de Troyes, 12th century), which is also cited in one of Eliot's other sources, Jessie L. Weston's book &lt;em&gt;From Ritual to Romance&lt;/em&gt; (Cambridge University Press, 1920).  On &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies/comments/28vba2/was_ts_eliot_guilty_of_plagiarism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit&lt;/a&gt;, someone pointed out that there is similar imagery to Cawein's in Robert Browning's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/childe-roland-to-the-dark-tower-came/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Childe Roland To The Dark Tower Came - Poem by Robert Browning&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I never saw&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Such starved ignoble nature; nothing throve:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For flowers---as well expect a cedar grove!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But cockle, spurge, according to their law&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Might propagate their kind, with none to awe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You'd think; a burr had been a treasure-trove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commenter (using the pseudonym FerdinandoFalkland) adds: &amp;quot;Amazingly enough, again, descriptions of wastelands all sound... curiously like descriptions of wastelands.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, using nature or weather phenomena to express an emotional state is known by the literary term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pathetic fallacy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Patteson's last point: whereas Cawein uses the cited imagery to express the narrator's (and not necessarily the author's) grief, one cannot say that Eliot uses this imagery to express his personal grief, even if that provided (part of?) the initial impetus for the composition of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. First, &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; does not have a sole narrator but changes perspectives many times; unlike Cawein's poem, it works as a collage of viewpoints and fragments. Second, what inspires a poet to compose a poem and the poem's meaning are not the same thing, even if they are related. Moreover, T. S. Eliot wrote in his essay &amp;quot;Tradition and the Individual Talent&amp;quot; that poetry is not the expression of personality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) the poet has, not a &amp;quot;personality&amp;quot; to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Quoted from &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land and Other Writings&lt;/em&gt;. Introduction by Mary Karr. New York: The Modern Library, 2001, pages 103 and 105-106, respectively.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot's view of poetry is relevant here in the sense that he uses images, whether borrowed or original, in a different way than Cawein or many of his other predecessors; it explains in part why Eliot would never write a line like &amp;quot;Out of the grief I knew&amp;quot;, or at least not in a way that allows identification between himself and the poem's narrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cawein's &amp;quot;Waste Land&amp;quot; was an unacknowledged source of inspiration for &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, but Evans's accusation of plagiarism is an exaggeration. Evans conveniently ignores the note in which Eliot explained that Weston's book was a source of inspiration and that the drought theme goes back to Medieval Grail stories, presumably to avoid weakening his accusation of theft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Other sources for &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the other authors that Eliot supposedly &amp;quot;plagiarised&amp;quot;? Evans's second example is the beginning of Part II, which uses a modified quote from Shakespeare's play &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/cleopatra/cleopatra.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; (Act II, scene 2)&lt;/a&gt;. Evans conveniently ignores that Eliot's note explicitly mentions this source and that the type of reader Eliot had in mind was expected to recognise the lines. His third and final example is the line &amp;quot;Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song&amp;quot; (the fourth line in Part III), which comes from Edmund Spenser's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/prothalamion-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Prothalamion&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Here, again, Evans ignores that Eliot's own notes identify this source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evans concludes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[m]ost of &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot; was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that T. S. Eliot was &amp;quot;a plagiarizing cockbag&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Evans is claiming that Eliot was trying to pass off other people's work as his own. This claim ignores several aspects of Eliot's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whenever Eliot inserts a quote (whether modified or not) into &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, there is a change in metre, register, line length, language or a combination of these. Even a relatively unexperienced reader of poetry should be able to notice these changes. In other words, readers were expected to notice changes in poetic style.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eliot had a type of educated reader in mind who would be able to recognise a large proportion of the quotes and allusions. To take two obvious examples, readers should recognise the Shakespeare quotes in &amp;quot;Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies&amp;quot; (Ophelia in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;) and &amp;quot;Those are pearls that were his eyes&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;). And the Marvell allusion in &amp;quot;But at my back from time to time I hear&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To His Coy Mistress&lt;/a&gt;). Readers were also expected to recognise the Dante allusion in &amp;quot;so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many&amp;quot;, as Eliot explained &amp;quot;What Dante Means to Me&amp;quot; (published in his book &lt;em&gt;To Criticize the Critic&lt;/em&gt;, 1965). Admittedly, Eliot's notes are not always helpful, for example, because they don't always mantion line numbers or because they cite sources in Latin or Dante's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuscan_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tuscan dialect&lt;/a&gt; without translation. Even in spite of the notes, the poem is not very accessible. In &lt;em&gt;New Bearings on English Poetry&lt;/em&gt; (1932), F. R. Leavis wrote about this, &amp;quot;But that the public for it is limited is one of the symptoms of the state of culture that produced the poem.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;According to Helen Gardner (in an essay in &lt;em&gt;Eliot in His Time&lt;/em&gt;, 1973) Eliot even &amp;quot;wished to go through English poetic styles as Joyce had gone through English prose styles the section called &amp;quot;Oxen of the Sun&amp;quot; [in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;]. However, according to Gardner, Eliot was not a good enough parodist to disguise his own style, so Pound advised against that idea. This is relevant to the accusation of plagiarism because this plan &lt;em&gt;required&lt;/em&gt; quoting and allusions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As Gorham Munson pointed out in his review in &lt;em&gt;The Manchester Guardian&lt;/em&gt; of 31 October 1923, &amp;quot;the central process of the poem (...) is to take ancient beauty by the neck and twist it into modern ugliness.&amp;quot; John Crowe Ransom wrote in &lt;em&gt;The New York Evening Post Literary Review&lt;/em&gt; (14 July 1923) that Eliot used a device &amp;quot;not fundamentally different from parody. To parody is to borrow a phrase whose meaning lies on a plane of intelligence and to insert it into the context of a lower plane; an attempt to compound two incommensurable imaginative creations.&amp;quot; If parody is &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;'s central process, large-scale quoting and alluding is simply unavoidable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion from the above points is that Eliot's use of quotes and allusions is part of a plan, and that this plan is made obvious both through literary means (points 1 and 2 above) and by means of the notes. Bailey, who claims to be a poet, does not mention any of the artistic considerations of using quotes and allusions in his accusation of plagiarism. Evans's claim that &amp;quot;[m]ost of &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot; was just cobbled together out of quotes from other writers&amp;quot; simply betrays ignorance of literary techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. The meaning of &amp;quot;immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the infamous quote &amp;quot;immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&amp;quot;, which Bailey interprets as Eliot &amp;quot;bragging about his rampant copying&amp;quot;. Both Evans and Bailey take this quote out of context and present it as Eliot describing his own method. The quote actually comes from Eliot's essay &amp;quot;Philip Massinger&amp;quot;, published in &lt;em&gt;The Sacred Wood&lt;/em&gt; (1920, i.e. before the composition of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;). Philip Massinger (1583 - 1640) was a younger contemporary of Shakespeare (1564 - 1616). Eliot's essay reviews a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013133339/page/n4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book by a certain Mr. A. H. Cruickshank&lt;/a&gt; that (among other things) presents &amp;quot;parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare to make manifes Massinger's indebtedness.&amp;quot; It is in this context that Eliot writes the following (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the surest of tests [of indebtedness] is the way in which a poet borrows. &lt;strong&gt;Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&lt;/strong&gt;; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. &lt;strong&gt;The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling that is unique&lt;/strong&gt;, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which as no cohesion. (...) Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poets always inherit from a tradition, as Eliot wrote earlier in &amp;quot;Tradition and the Individual Talent&amp;quot; (1919). When Elizabethan dramatists &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot; from their contemporaries (or from Antiquity), they did not simply rip unacknowledged quotes from another poet's work; what Eliot says is that they borrowed images or ideas and tried to turn them into something that was in their own voice. Hence, the words &amp;quot;Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&amp;quot; is not about plagiarism perpetrated by Elizabethan dramatists, but about a normal process of artistic influence. (Ironically, since the first impression of &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; is often a lack of cohesion, the above quote could be misread as saying that Eliot calls himself a bad poet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is one of the parallel quotations that illustrate the idea &amp;quot;immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.3.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not poppy, nor mandragora&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which thou owedst yesterday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Massinger (&lt;em&gt;The Emperor of the East&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That bow unto my sceptre? or restore&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My mind to that tranquility and peace&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is then enjoyed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we follow Evans's and Bailey's interpretation of &amp;quot;immature poets imitate; mature poets steal&amp;quot; is a defence of plagiarism, then the above Massinger quote either imitated or plagiarised the preceding Shakespeare quote. Eliot writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is, on Massinger's part, an echo rather than an imitation or a plagiarism - the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot knew very well the difference between a literary echo, imitation and plagiarism. What he did in &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; relied on an artistic process that was new and that challenged the boundary between quotes and allusions on the one hand and plagiarism on the other. When Bailey writes in his essay that it is &amp;quot;very unlikely&amp;quot; that Eliot would be able to do the same thing today, he is ignoring this artistic process and putting it on the same level as one non-fiction author copying language from another author without proper citations or acknowledgement. Coming from someone who claims to be a poet, this is simply baffling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T18:21:14.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9714" CreationDate="2019-04-09T19:53:46.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assuming aherocalledFrog is correct in the added detail of hair remover spitballs, you're thinking of Rob Thomas's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B007JKS506&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green Thumb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g9CSV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g9CSV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Book cover - Green Thumb&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winner of two National Science Fairs for his work on plant life, thirteen-year-old Grady Jacobs isn't exactly Mr. Popularity. But he doesn't care. He's spending the summer with the famous botanist Dr. Phillip Carter in the Amazon jungle trying to save the rain forest with a new species of super trees. Although his duties are mostly relegated to kitchen patrol, Grady stumbles on a startling discovery: a binary system of sounds that enables him to control the movement of trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even as Grady discovers the tree language, he realizes that Carter's super trees aren't replenishing the Amazon's ecosystem -- they're killing it. When his unauthorized experiments are discovered, Grady flees from Carter's camp and finds refuge with the Urah-wau Indian tribe. but even with the tribe's help and the secret tree language, can Grady stop Carter's super trees?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With his keen eye for popular culture now trained on the environment, award-winning author Rob Thomas tells a coming-of-age story bursting with action and adventure. Hanh on to that vine: It's going to be a wild ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2GWH8E51M6VSI/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;ASIN=B007JKS506&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review&lt;/a&gt; mentions the spitballs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a big fan of Rob Thomas and this book did not disappoint. I'm also really glad it's directed at the younger reader since junior high kids have probably missed his other titles. (Rats Saw God, Slave Day, Satellite Down) The main character, Grady, is instantly likable while we witness him outwitting his football-star bullies by covertly pelting them with spitballs covered in hair remover. These bullies have beat him up for the last time, however, when he travels to the Amazon rain forest as part of a tree-growing research team. He loses his extra weight &amp;amp; puts on muscle. Not to mention saving the jungle from a mad scientist. It's a fun story that teens will love, with a main character that some may identify with. Keep 'em coming, Rob!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at Google Books, curare is mentioned a handful of times, primarily in that the protagonist is semi-immune due to previous exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with a search for &lt;em&gt;novel amazon spitballs &amp;quot;hair remover&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, also the accepted answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/167230/book-about-a-boy-that-controls-plants-by-whistling&quot;&gt;Book about a boy that controls plants by whistling?&lt;/a&gt; on the SF&amp;amp;F SE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T03:50:05.037" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T03:50:05.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9750" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2019-04-10T03:01:54.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The significance of the rhyme is revealed when O'Brien completes the stanza while Winston is visiting him at his flat. It shows that he has been electronically shadowing Winston for a long period before ordering his arrest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6136" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T03:01:54.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9737" CreationDate="2019-04-10T11:21:31.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;He may be making the case that hermeneutics is qualitatively different from medieval scholasticism.  Scholasticism is mostly deductive, chasing out implications or inconsistencies in received texts, but with a known result in mind, to validate existing dogma, whether that of canon law or of Greek philosophy.  Even Abelard at his most radical, in &lt;em&gt;Sic et Non&lt;/em&gt;, was only collecting inconsistencies, not interpreting new ideas from existing texts. Augustine may have done some interpreting of meanings, but those who came after him tended to follow the existing Patristic path that he had made rather than creating a new one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you define hermeneutics as a critical methodology for analyzing texts, then some skepticism and distance may be necessary for it to be effective.  It was necessary for Lorenzo Valla to admit the possibility that the Donation of Constantine could be a forgery before he could muster all of the internal evidence that he used to prove that it was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The new importance given to the biblical text starting with Wycliffe and continuing though Luther and Calvin probably fed the new methods.  Most of the earlier &quot;heresies&quot; like the Albigensians or the Arians were not especially text based.  The Protestant Reformation's ideology caused a new emphasis on the Bible, and due to humanist education, they had some new techniques to analyze it and launch a new type of study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastEditorUserId="1296" LastEditDate="2019-04-10T18:01:55.123" LastActivityDate="2019-04-10T18:01:55.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9753" CreationDate="2019-04-10T13:36:55.380" Score="7" ViewCount="445" Body="&lt;p&gt;Earlier this year, someone asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9484/2191&quot;&gt;Why did T.S. Eliot make a statement that 'Coriolanus' was Shakespeare's masterpiece and that 'Hamlet' was an artistic failure?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the Wikipedia article about William H. Quillian's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_the_New_Poetic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet and the New Poetic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1983) is to be believed, both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;T. S. Eliot and James Joyce condemned the play [i.e. Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;] as a &quot;failure.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &quot;source&quot; for this claim is the following statement in the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dukeupress.edu/sixteen-modern-american-authors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sixteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism since 1972&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Duke University Press, 1989) (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Hg8BAR4lX-kC&amp;amp;pg=PA202&amp;amp;lpg=PA202&amp;amp;dq=%22Hamlet+and+the+New+Poetic%22&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;ots=Jm6uB1gCTr&amp;amp;sig=SPPhqckNN7u_1cyYxGIimOcYvLc&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Hamlet%20and%20the%20New%20Poetic%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&quot;Hamlet&quot; and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot&lt;/em&gt; (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), William H. Quillian analyzes the literary response to &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in the decade from 1911 to 1922. Quillian demonstrates the enormous and positive hold that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; exerted on the literary imagination of the nineteenth century before examining the &quot;fundamental shift in orientation of critical inquiry&quot; represented by the &quot;condemnation of the play as an artistic failure by Eliot and Joyce.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce held a number of lectures on Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in Triest in 1912, but according to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.museojoycetrieste.it/english/works/lectures/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joyce Museum in Triest&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;these lectures are no longer extant&lt;/strong&gt;, but based upon the surviving notes we can see that Joyce read extensively and that his treatment also included a discussion of Elizabethan England and Shakespeare’s life and other works. Much of this material undoubtedly found its way into the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ episode in Ulysses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesjoyce.ie/on-this-day-11-november/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Joyce Centre in Dublin&lt;/a&gt; quotes a few contemporary articles about the first lectures, that they were mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Giacomo Joyce&lt;/em&gt; and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the lectures are likely to have provided some of the material about Shakespeare and particularly about &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; that pervades Joyce’s &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have pointed out that Stephen Daedalus is presented as a Hamlet figure (e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.classicsnetwork.com/essays/stephen-daedalus-as-hamlet-in-ulysses/1856&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Daedalus as Hamlet in Ulysses&lt;/a&gt;) but I have not been able to find evidence that James Joyce considered &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; a failure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T12:10:26.390" Title="Where and how did James Joyce condemn Hamlet as a failure?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9752" CreationDate="2019-04-11T08:45:14.143" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Joyce criticized dramatic flaws in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, but never condemned the play as a “failure”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ellmann&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Ellman&lt;/a&gt;’s biography of Joyce makes it clear that Joyce thought &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Ibsen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henrik Ibsen&lt;/a&gt; a better dramatist than Shakespeare, and in 1908 he criticized the dramatic aspects of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in a conversation with his brother Stanislaus. However this has to be balanced against the fact that Joyce gave a long series of lectures on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in 1912–13, and included many allusions to the play in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce’s comparison with Ibsen also needs to be understood in context. It is a commonplace that Shakespeare was a better poet than dramatist: his plays are admired not because the plots are watertight, or the morals uplifting, but because his “skill in placing one syllable beside another has given acute pleasure to generation after generation of English-speaking people” (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Orwell&lt;/a&gt;). So when Joyce said that Ibsen “towers head and shoulders above him [Shakespeare] &lt;em&gt;when it comes to drama&lt;/em&gt;” he did not mean that Shakespeare’s plays lacked other kinds of merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key participant in the game of whispers was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Quillian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William H. Quillian&lt;/a&gt;, who summarized Ellmann like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the whole, however, I accept the evidence put forward by Richard Ellmann […] that Joyce considered Shakespeare a “second-rate” playwright (after Ibsen) and &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; a “rude and barbarous” play (à la Voltaire).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quillian’s use of quotation marks suggests that these phrases come from Ellmann or maybe even from Joyce as quoted by Ellmann. But in fact neither phrase appears in Ellmann, and both are misleading summarizations. Joyce considered Ibsen a better dramatist than Shakespeare, but that makes Shakespeare ‘second only to’, not ‘second-rate’. And although Ellmann presents evidence that Joyce once &lt;em&gt;read out&lt;/em&gt; Voltaire’s criticism of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; at a lecture, this does not mean that Joyce &lt;em&gt;agreed&lt;/em&gt; with Voltaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Citation chasing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia cites McDougal.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;McDougal cites Quillian:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;“Hamlet” and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot&lt;/em&gt; (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983), William H. Quillian analyzes the literary response to Hamlet in the decade from 1911 to 1922. Quillian demonstrates the enormous and positive hold that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; exerted on the literary imagination of the nineteenth century before examining the “fundamental shift in orientation of critical inquiry” represented by the “condemnation of the play as an artistic failure by Eliot and Joyce.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stuart Y. McDougal (1989). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Hg8BAR4lX-kC&amp;amp;pg=PA202&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;T. S. Eliot&lt;/a&gt;’. In Jackson R. Bryer (ed.), &lt;em&gt;Sixteen American Authors&lt;/em&gt;, Duke University Press, p. 202.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Quillian cites Ellmann:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By Eliot’s “condemnation” I mean the famous condemnation of the 1919 essay (the subject of my 3rd chapter). The situation with Joyce is somewhat more complex. In my second chapter I try to show that when Joyce lectured on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in Trieste in 1912/1913, he adopted a unique method of “unravelling the mystery” of the play. On the whole, however, I accept the evidence put forward by Richard Ellmann, &lt;em&gt;James Joyce&lt;/em&gt; (New York, 1959; rev. 1982), p. 398; that Joyce considered Shakespeare a “second-rate” playwright (after Ibsen) and &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; a “rude and barbarous” play (à la Voltaire).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William H. Quillian (1983). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kHVlAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=unique+method&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T.S. Eliot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 147. University of Michigan Research Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ellmann describes three occasions on which Joyce said that Ibsen was a better dramatist than Shakespeare. First, based on Joyce’s brother Stanislaus’s Trieste diary for 1908:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To Stanislaus he [James] continued to disparage Shakespeare at Ibsen’s expense. As he had objected to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; at University College for its improbabilities, now he took &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; to task. He had just seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandro_Salvini&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salvini&lt;/a&gt; play the part in Trieste when, on February 6, 1908, he complained of the play’s gross dramatic blunders. ‘He said,’ wrote Stanislaus, ‘that Ophelia’s madness took all the force out of Hamlet’s simulation, and that her love for her father, whom the audience have seen to be a paltry old imbecile, is a caricature of Hamlet’s passion; and the evil in the King’s character that accounts for Hamlet’s hatred must be supposed for it is not dramatically explained.’ Ibsen was much better, although perhaps lacking in variety; Joyce remarked on March 2, 1908, ‘Ibsen has persisted in writing what was essentially the same drama over and over again. I suspect that Ibsen met the four of five characters whom he uses throughout his plays before he was twenty-five.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Ellmann (1982). &lt;em&gt;James Joyce&lt;/em&gt;, p. 266. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, based on an “interview with [Felix] Béran’s widow, Frau Lisa Béran, by Dr. Alfred Dutli, 1956”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the end of 1915, he [Joyce] obtained some work from a bearded messianic professor from Vienna, Siegmund Feilbogen. […] But they began to talk of Ibsen, and Joyce proved Ibsen’s superiority to Shakespeare so eloquently that he won Feilbogen over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ellmann, p. 398.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, based on “Ole Vinding, ‘James Joyce in Copenhagen,’ in Willard Potts, ed., &lt;em&gt;Portraits of the Artist in Exile&lt;/em&gt; (Seattle, 1979), 139–52”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Do you then place Ibsen higher than Shakespeare?’ asked Vinding. ‘He towers head and shoulders above him when it comes to drama [said Joyce]. No one approaches him there. It’s very difficult to believe that Ibsen will grow stale; he will renew himself for every generation.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ellmann, p. 694&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only relevant occurrence of ‘Voltaire’ in Ellmann is in a description of Joyce’s lecture series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following notices of Joyce’s lectures on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (translated here into English) appeared in the &lt;em&gt;Piccolo della Sera&lt;/em&gt;, Trieste. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;11 February 1913&lt;/em&gt; (p. 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dr James Joyce’s Lectures.&lt;/em&gt; Yesterday evening Dr. James Joyce concluded his series of lectures in English on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;As Joyce indicated yesterday, he had purposely refrained from critical or philsophical disquisitions about the play he was reading and interpreting. His first task was to explain the words. His original and slightly bizarre talent changed the nature of his commentary, which might otherwise have been dry, into attractive ‘causeries’. The words, the manners, and the dress of the Elizabethans stirred the lecturer to literary and historical recollections which proved of keen interest to an audience which had been his for so many hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Yesterday evening, accepting the duty of closing such a work with a critical synthesis, he read (in English translation) the attack of Voltaire on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, and then, suddenly, the eulogy of the same work by Georg Brandes. We think that many in an audience that was capable of following these lectures will find themselves encouraged, as Joyce intended, to read other works of the great Englishman in the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ellmann pp. 775–6.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the mere reading of Voltaire’s attack does not mean that Joyce agreed with it, any more than his reading of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/50724/50724-h/50724-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brandes’ eulogy&lt;/a&gt; means he agreed with that. This is the passage from Voltaire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I certainly cannot justify everything in the Tragedy of Hamlet; it is a rude and barbarous piece, which would not be approved even by the most wretched people of France or Italy. Hamlet goes mad in the second act, and his mistress goes mad in the third; the prince kills his mistress’s father in the belief that he is killing a rat, and the heroine throws herself in a river. A grave is dug on stage; the gravediggers make jokes while holding the skulls of the dead in their hands; prince Hamlet replies to their abominable vulgarities with lunacies no less repugnant; meanwhile, one of the actors conquers Poland: Hamlet, his mother, and his step-father drink together on stage; they sing at table; they quarrel; they kill each other; we would believe this outrage were the fruit of the imagination of a drunken savage. But amid these vulgar absurdities, which are performed to this day to the absurd and barbarous English, we find in Hamlet sublime features, worthy of the greatest geniuses. It seems that nature pleased itself to mix in the head of Shakespeare, the greatest strength and grandeur imaginable, with whatever witless vulgarity can make basest and most detestable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Quillian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voltaire&lt;/a&gt; (1748). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5783896g/f26.item.zoom&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dissertation sur la Tragédie&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;La Tragédie de Sémiramis&lt;/em&gt;. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA; &#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T12:10:26.390" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T12:10:26.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9766" CreationDate="2019-04-11T13:55:55.630" Score="5" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;Berg&lt;/em&gt; by Ann Quin, a famous British experimental writer, and having a hard time understanding some of her prose. Although I realise that it is written in a vague, stream-of-consciousness style, using poetic/abstract language, I’m unclear about certain bits as to whether they are supposed to be taken literally, or are metaphors that I’m simply missing. Either way, their meaning evades me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some examples (I’ll try to provide as much context as possible):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Time meaningless for you exploring the mysterious regions of mountains, lakes, jungles within a blanket territory. &lt;strong&gt;I pull my eye through a keyhole, on a string the days are declared&lt;/strong&gt;; thoughts are switchbacks uncontrolled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m sure the surreal image of pulling one’s eye through a keyhole is conjured up for some poetic/semantic effect (unless it’s a phraseologism I’m not aware of), but I’m missing what it is, same for the days on a string.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s another example from the beginning of the book, describing the main character and setting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Alistair Berg, hair-restorer, curled webbed toes, &lt;strong&gt;strung between heart and clock&lt;/strong&gt;, nibbles in the half light, and laughter from the dance hall opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not my first language, but generally I don’t have any trouble comprehending literary texts, even the more nuanced bits. It is my first encounter with experimental literature however, so any advice would help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T14:43:44.600" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T07:51:50.740" Title="Ann Quin’s ambiguous prose" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ann-quin&gt;&lt;berg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9755" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9756" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" Score="0" Body="Ann Quin (1936–73), English experimental novelist, most well-known for her first novel &quot;Berg&quot; (1964)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T15:06:19.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9757" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9758" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" Score="0" Body="&quot;Berg&quot; (1964), an experimental novel by Ann Quin. Use this tag with the [ann-quin] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" LastActivityDate="2019-04-11T15:06:48.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9553" CreationDate="2019-04-11T21:02:57.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, this resolved from an unexpected vector. Jay Bonansinga's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/651605.The_Killer_s_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Killer's Game&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is the book. I recognize the cover on sight and the plot matches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A new novel from the much-praised author of &quot;Black Mariah&quot;. Joe Flood is a hit man who has made it a point of pride to kill only those who deserve to be killed. When his doctor tells him he has only a few months to live, Joe puts an open contract out on himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I encountered the book in an announcement that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/amp/collider.com/dave-bautista-killers-game/amp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dave Bautista is scheduled to star in an upcoming movie adaptation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T09:58:54.463" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T09:58:54.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9762" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9763" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" Score="0" Body="For questions on lectures on literature-related topics" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T05:45:10.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9742" CreationDate="2019-04-12T06:37:47.857" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given that part of the point of the Strike in the first place was to&#xA;  prove that looter governments would eventually collapse when they were&#xA;  deprived of people to enable them, was the fact that Francisco&#xA;  d'Anconia (and, for that fact, Ragnar Danneskjöld) was deliberately&#xA;  destroying the economy contrary to that goal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two answers to that question: yes and no. Which answer you accept depends whether you accept either of two connected premises Ayn Rand 'pushed' in the book. If you don't accept them, then the answer is &quot;Yes, and they are very hypocritical about it&quot;. If you accept one of them, the answer is &quot;No, it makes perfect sense, they were just trying to save the thousands of innocent people by hastening the collapse.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first idea can be summed as &quot;If there is not the best person for the job doing it (or at least the person in top ten), the job wouldn't get done at all and the whole system will grind to a halt. And everybody knows who the best person for the job is.&quot; and that's the whole idea behind The Strike. The thing to know entertaining the idea here is that Rand never worked in a business or a corporation. She never did any scientific research either. As a rule (with certain exceptions) writing is a solitary profession. Business and scientific research are not. Businesses and scientific research are built on the work and knowledge of many individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll get back to this idea later. The idea leads to her second idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second idea is so called &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/evil.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impotence of evil&lt;/a&gt;&quot; . Basically, the idea that evil people can create anything useful and prosper in the long term without the good guys helping them was absolutely unbelievable to Rand. It is shown in the book itself with Galt fixing the machine used to torture him. The idea is basically &quot;the only thing evil needs to win is for the good men to do nothing to prevent it&quot;  with addition of &quot;or to keep doing their jobs for the wrong reasons&quot;. Because evil can't create, it cannot even maintain what greater (&quot;good&quot;) people created, not even to further its goals. It can only destroy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Short answer: the heroes believe and the narrative that is pushed is: the world is doomed anyway, everything is going downhill quickly and the heroes want to hasten that doom so they can start the rebuilding process sooner. Basically, let the system burn down completely before rebuilding it from the ashes. Make it from 0 instead of fixing the existing one. Which is example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;broken window fallacy&lt;/a&gt;, because it is easier to peel a few spuds off the current system than destroy and rebuild.  If that is the case, then the answer is &quot;No, destroying shipments wasn't contrary to their goals&quot;. And why didn't they use them and repurposed them for something else? Because that would have made them moochers and looters. The more interesting example is Ellis Wyat burning his oil fields, which demonstrates lack of understanding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Negative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;negative externalities&lt;/a&gt; and would be an example of ecological terrorism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In real world, sometimes people are doing jobs they are not perfect for. In fact, they sometimes are assigned tasks they are ill suited for. And they do them anyway, to the standard lower than what an expert for the job would have done, sometimes much lower, but (and this is crucial) it still somehow works. There are three possibilities: either &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;option 1) the task is done perfectly or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;option 2)it is done badly but it still works or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;option 3)it is not done at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) done perfectly, everything is good with the world. That is what Randian hero would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) done badly (and badly here means anything less than perfect, from barely  works to slightly worse than what the best of the best would have done. Basically everything which can be improved later if you tomorrow call an expert in), it is done in such a way that after the task is finished, it still works. Not as efficiently as it would work if it was expert doing it in the first place (in fact, if expert saw it they would say it was done by rank amateur and suggest improvements immediately), but it still works. It does its designed purpose. If it doesn't, you get straight to option 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Option 3: The task wasn't done. Our current workers and expertise tried their best, they really did, after trying for a month they decided the task and change behind it as designed and decided is impossible to implement. That means back to the drawing board, we will have to figure something else, some workaround to the original problem which is not the current solution/task which we found that it is impossible for us to implement. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, that's one of the reasons immigration of the best educated and most efficient workers from the economy is bad. Your expertise is going away and your growth slows down considerably. It slows down, but it never stops completely. Why not? Because expertise and knowledge can be gained and given time and resources even the lowest worker on the assembly line can become expert in something! Which was almost anathema for Rand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was in love with idea of natural born geniuses without understanding technological and societal basis for innovation. Or basis and origination of societal welfare and wealth. Thus the idea that somebody could do the job badly but not badly enough that it doesn't work out in the end is impossible in that book. And that's why The Strike works. Because in the book the job is either done by the best or is not done at all. Without a few thousand supermen in power things are not getting done and are collapsing. In real world, you would replace a single superman with 3, 4 or 10 regular people and keep on going. In time, one of them will become 50% superman, or 75% superman. They might never become a genius like the original, but they would be good enough for the system to keep functioning. And growing and innovating too.&#xA;In fact, there is a metric which measures whether the project will fail if one member of the organization or project team is taken out. It is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the bus factor&lt;/a&gt; and organizations take care to ensure continued existence if something happens to a key team member or leader (eg they get hit by a bus or join The Strike).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because Rand didn't really understand economics and basis for wealth of society, she thought that it is better idea to burn everything to the ground and then rebuild than to just innovate and fix the problems with the existing world. The truth is, if there is big enough societal collapse, there is no quick rebuilding possible. And as Mike Rowe's &quot;Dirtiest Jobs&quot; show &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/IRVdiHu1VCc?t=19m20s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;demonstrates&lt;/a&gt;, you need some really dirty jobs for our shiny civilization and technology to be possible. Like the picture below hints at with tongue firmly in cheek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j8ssu.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j8ssu.gif&quot; alt=&quot;Like this tongue in cheek picture shows&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit to clarify after comments, because I focused on Dagnar and background more than on Francisco:&#xA;What Francisco did fits definition of industrial sabotage. And fraud. And wide definition of terrorism, e.g using fear and violence to make people change their habits and convert them to his way of thinking. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He used the weakness of quality control mechanisms (which were set up by Francisco himself) to intentionally do a subpar job which caused people to die. And he basically used the excuse every fraudster ever used to justify himself. &quot;If they were smarter, if there was one good and smart guy among my victims, I wouldn't have been able to pull it off. They got exactly what they deserve.&quot; . &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, keep in mind that Ayn never worked in business. And that she believed in those two things above. And that she decided to make the world and characters intentionally archetypal, sharper than they would be realistically, all to prove the point.&#xA;I'll again compare real world and the world of the book and this is going to be a long edit, so...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In real world, contractors are not just chosen according to their price and their needs. When the project is made and contractors chosen, minimal standards of quality are decided on before choosing the contractors to do the jobs. Even after choosing the contractor, there are minimal standards of quality that their work has to fulfill to be accepted and contractors paid. There are multiple control mechanisms which check for defects, workarounds and shoddy work. The contractor is forced to fix defects found before the work is accepted as good and the next phase of the project begins. Once the final phase of the project is complete, there is final sets of checks which says &quot;Yes, this work is done and it can now be open to the public. &quot; or &quot;No,  you need to fix these major problems before it can be allowed. These minor problems can stand.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is penalty for every major defect found and for every day the project is late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, we get back to her &quot;impotence of evil&quot; theory. In the book Francisco intentionally hired the worst contractor he could find. He intentionally crippled every quality control mechanism, by firing any competent person from the Quality control commission and by bullying any competent worker of contractor he hired to do subpar work. In his mind, Francisco is doing exactly what the looters are doing. In his mind, he is following the principles of the looters to the letter. &quot;If there was one truly good and competent among them, that person would stand up to Francisco&quot; Ayn says. The only way the evil can win is if the good people do nothing and let themselves be bullied - she says. Except, Francisco is one of Ayn's supermen. If there existed superman to oppose him, he would have instead joined him on moral principles else he wouldn't be superman!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francisco is wrong. Ayn wants to have her cake and eat it too.&#xA;There is a difference between doing something bad unintentionally, from incompetence and doing something from pure malice. Ayn wanted to prove that planners are incompetent, even when they think they are acting rationally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She chose to prove it by planting the saboteur at the highest level of the enterprise who doesn't act rationally. Unless you know he is saboteur and fraud, then his behavior makes perfect sense. Keep in mind, the victim of a fraud often finds out it was tricked only after the fact. Then all that weird behavior you dismissed earlier starts to make sense. Those were the warning signs you chose to ignore and have suffered for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, genealogy of the fraud which potentially left thousands of people dead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2013/08/atlas-shrugged-marge-vs-the-monorail/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hundreds of people ruined&lt;/a&gt; from the point of view of defrauded businessman: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Francisco, a man who up to that point always turned profit in all his business endeavors, starts gathering money to buy some mountains and build a settlement. He is in copper mining business, so you logically assume that he found some rich vein of copper there.&#xA;He always acted rationally before, he always worked with a profit motive and his self interest at heart, he is a trusted member of the community. Investing in him was always a sure bet (Rand emphasizes that point multiple times). Asked for a few investments, some people you trust invested in him. You ask for details. He provides them to you. You invest in him too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He starts working on his project. A few months later, the project is a failure and it turns out Francisco sabotaged it. He ruined himself and the other people intentionally. A year before starting the project, he joined some &quot;End of the world&quot; cult and has decided to get rid of all his worldly possessions so he can join Heaven. Nobody knew about that before investing else they wouldn't have invested in him. When asked why did he do that, he replies &quot;If you weren't so rotten and fallen, you would have been able to stop me. This proves that I am right and just, that I am one of the chosen ones. Heaven's gates are now wide open for me. And all of you got exactly what you deserved, sinners as you are, this is just punishment for your sins!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;But thousands of innocent people have died! Miners and their families! Children died.&quot; You reply weakly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;If they were smart people and true believers, they would have noticed all the shortcuts I have used, all the defects, all the shoddy workmanship. They were sinners, all of them, enablers! Each and every one! They got what they deserve!&quot; Francisco replies, his eyes burning with the fire of fanaticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When put like that, it makes just as much sense as his explanation. And that's what the scam was, if you look away from the text a bit and assume that the two principles Ayn Rand pushed in the book do not quite hold up to scrutiny. And that heroes are not quite  reliable. But that would be breaking the suspension of disbelief. You can read the quotes in the answer below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T09:17:08.293" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T09:17:08.293" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9754" CreationDate="2019-04-12T07:51:50.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is difficult writing, even for native English speakers, and not all of it is meant to be decoded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quin […] attempts ‘to convey the artificiality and estrangement of the conditions of modern life’. That impression of estrangement is achieved via a narrative that blurs the distinctions between fantasy and reality, irrationality and rationality, past and present, moving in and out of Berg’s twisted consciousness and oscillating between third and second person and a kind of free indirect narration, in a jumble of images and thoughts that sometimes fails to cohere into sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Kaye Mitchell (2017). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=y9o1DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Post-War Fiction: Realism and Experimentation&lt;/a&gt;’. In Clare Hanson and Susan Watkins, eds. &lt;em&gt;The History of British Women’s Writing, 1945–1975&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 9, p. 31.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think that in the examples in the post we can get some poetic sense out. The phrase ‘strung between heart and clock’ suggests that Berg is torn between the internal demands of his heart (his wish to daydream about the dancers in the hall opposite) and the external demands of the clock (his need to kill his father before he has to leave the boarding house).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other example starts by alluding to the phrase ‘looking at life though a keyhole’, that is, having the feeling of being an observer but not a participant in one’s own life. Then ‘on a string the days are declared; thoughts are switchbacks uncontrolled’ contrasts the way that days follow each other one by one, like beads on a string, but recollection jumps from one event to another without sequence. This introduces a page of reminiscence in which Berg’s memories skip about in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T07:51:50.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9728" CreationDate="2019-04-12T09:35:22.357" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest children's library was probably a school library. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ala.org/tools/first-school-library&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Library Assocation (ALA)&lt;/a&gt;, it is not entirely clear when the first school library was established:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The birth of America’s school libraries cannot be assigned a definite date.  Rather, these first school libraries were born unheralded in the earliest colonial times when the teacher in the one-room placed the Bible, a chapbook, and the Bay Psalm Book on the corner of his desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is quoted from the article on &quot;School Libraries&quot; in the &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia on Library and Information Science&lt;/em&gt;. ALA goes on to say (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The same article also reports that in 1740 Benjamin Franklin recommended school libraries as a key element in the ideal academy, and the &lt;strong&gt;Penn Charter School in Philadelphia&lt;/strong&gt; designating a specially designed room as the library in &lt;strong&gt;1744&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have been the oldest proper school library in America, but the article is not explicit about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) is a much more recent organisation. It's oldest precursor, the Section for Library Work with Children, had its first meeting in 1901. According to the &lt;em&gt;ALA Handbook 1948 (with 1949 copyright)&lt;/em&gt;, cited on the webpages &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ala.org/alsc/aboutalsc/historyofalsc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of the ALSC&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Division of Libraries for Children and Young People&lt;/strong&gt; was organized and adopted its constitution and by-laws in June 1941. On June 24, 1941, the division was approved by A.L.A. Council. The division is made up of the American Association of School Librarians (formerly the School Libraries Section which had its first meeting in 1915), the &lt;strong&gt;Children's Library Association&lt;/strong&gt; (formerly the &lt;strong&gt;Section for Library Work with Children&lt;/strong&gt;, which had its first meeting in 1901) and the Young People's Reading Round Table which first met in 1930.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ALA's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ala.org/yalsa/aboutyalsa/history/briefhistory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Young Adult Services Division&lt;/a&gt; was established in 1957, but the article does not say anything about the history of libraries for teens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even an &lt;a href=&quot;https://iasl-online.org/about/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Association of School Librarianship&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slj.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;School Library Journal&lt;/a&gt;. For more historical background, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sldirectory.com/libsf/resf/libraryhistory.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;History of School and Other Libraries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T09:35:22.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9769" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-12T14:51:00.083" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did Pale Fire's interpretation and analysis develop through time? Had there been continuous critical attention towards it and what did Nabokov himself say about the work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite a substantial and curio-like piece of literature. Did anyone manage to decipher it in different ways from its publication towards now? What was it compared to? (Italo Calvino springs to mind)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4943" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T14:53:09.540" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T14:53:09.540" Title="History of Pale Fire's Criticism" Tags="&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;&lt;pale-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9770" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9771" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" Score="0" Body="Questions about Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel 'Pale Fire'. Use this tag with the [vladimir-nabokov] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T16:05:30.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9742" CreationDate="2019-04-12T22:35:28.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the good points that @jo1storm made, I'll add a few thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the largest point is that Francisco d'Anconia was following the morality of the day to the hilt. He had the following discussion with James Taggart about the mines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm entitled to an explanation! You owe your stockholders an account of the whole disgraceful affair! Why did you pick a worthless mine? Why did you waste all those millions? What sort of rotten swindle was it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Francisco stood looking at him in polite astonishment. &quot;Why, James,&quot; he said, &quot;I thought you would approve of it.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Approve?!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I thought you would consider the San Sebastian Mines as the practical realization of an ideal of the highest moral order. Remembering that you and I have disagreed so often in the past, &lt;strong&gt;I thought you would be gratified to see me acting in accordance with your principles.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What are you talking about?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Francisco shook his head regretfully. &quot;I don't know why you should call my behavior rotten. &lt;strong&gt;I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching.&lt;/strong&gt; Doesn't everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn't it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn't it evil to work for a profit? I did not work for a profit - I took a loss. Doesn't everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of its employees? The San Sebastian Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they provided a livelihood for thousands of men who could not have achieved in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day's work, which they could not do. Isn't it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed a job very badly. Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? &lt;strong&gt;I have carried out every moral precept of our age.&lt;/strong&gt; I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you have it: the San Sebastian Mines was one more example of the outcome of following the Looter morality literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, when he discussed the situation with Dagny, he told her that&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... your brother James and his friends knew nothing about the copper-mining industry. They knew nothing about making money. They did not consider it necessary to learn. They considered knowledge superfluous and judgment inessential... They thought it was safe to ride on my brain, because they assumed that the goal of my journey was wealth. All their calculations rested on the premise that I wanted to make money. What if I didn't?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;If you didn't, what did you want?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;They never asked me that. Not to inquire about my aims, motives or desires is an essential part of their theory.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also compared it to &quot;tearing the lid off hell and letting men see it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also pointed out that it really didn't make a difference whether he did the whole thing on purpose or through neglect or stupidity - the same thing was missing no matter what (his mind).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also important to recall what prompted the investments in the first place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Francisco d'Anconia suddenly bought miles of bare mountains in Mexico, news leaked out that he had discovered vast deposits of copper. &lt;strong&gt;He made no effort to sell stock in his venture; the stock was begged out of his hand&lt;/strong&gt;, and he merely chose those whom he wished to favor from among the applicants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the Taggart Transcontinental board meetings to discuss their proposed line to Mexico,&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They spoke about the future importance of the trade with Mexico, about the rich stream of freight, about the large revenues assured to the exclusive carrier of an inexhaustible supply of copper. They proved it by citing Francisco d'Anconia's past achievements. &lt;strong&gt;They didn't mention any mineralogical facts about the San Sebastian Mines.&lt;/strong&gt; Few were available; the information which d'Anconia had released were not very specific; &lt;strong&gt;but they did not seem to need facts.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There you have it: while he was (by his own admission) deliberately trying to wipe out his American stockholders and the Mexican planners, he did so by following their morality to the letter. As for the Taggart Transcontinental line and the investments from people like James Taggart, they did that of their own accord without bothering to find out anything concrete about the mines themselves or why Francisco was investing in them in the first place. The secondary consequences (e.g. the destruction of the Phoenix-Durango Railroad) were instigated by James Taggart. (Granted, it was the direct result of their losses in the San Sebastian Mines, but it was still James Taggart who did it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there was no contradictions. Everything was done in accord with the Looters' code, and the consequences were the direct result of that fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T17:59:49.853" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T17:59:49.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9328" CreationDate="2019-04-12T22:45:38.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it was all three. The scene was reinforcing the point that, once talented people like Francisco d'Anconia are out of the picture, they end up getting replaced with people like Tinky Holloway and Wesley Mouch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also points out its effect on Hank Reardon, who agreed to quit and disappear shortly after this meeting (and largely as a &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of this meeting, once he realized that he was enabling the Looters to continue in their behavior).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-04-12T22:45:38.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9774" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9775" CreationDate="2019-04-12T13:33:48.490" Score="3" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;I really like the following poem by E. Bronte:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts bending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Earth rising to heaven and heaven descending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Man's spirit away from its drear dungeon sending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All down the mountain sides wild forests lending&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One mighty voice to the life-giving wind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rivers their banks in their jubilee rending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fast through the valleys a reckless course wending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wider and deeper their waters extending,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Leaving a desolate desert behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shining and lowering and swelling and dying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Changing forever from midnight to noon;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Roaring like thunder, like soft music sighing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shadows on shadows advancing and flying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lighning-bright flashes the deep gloom defying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Coming as swiftly and fading as soon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I like the rhythm of it, the rhyme, but I am a bit rusty since last time I &quot;studied&quot; poetry was in high school.&#xA;Is it iambic? What is the metre? What else is some interesting characteristic to notice about it? &#xA;I have been looking for an answer online to no avail. A link with more info would also be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6157" OwnerDisplayName="xyz" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-04-13T19:38:45.463" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T19:38:45.463" Title="What is the metre of this poem by Emily Bronte?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;emily-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9774" CreationDate="2019-04-13T15:05:07.303" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's dactylic tetrameter. That means that there are four feet per line, and each foot is DUM dah dah. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HIGH waving HEATHer 'neath STORmy blasts BENDing,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feet at the ends of the lines are shorter, a few lines have extra syllables at the beginning, and a few feet are irregular, but this doesn't change the basic meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Shor" LastActivityDate="2019-04-13T15:05:07.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9776" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-13T18:30:54.457" Score="4" ViewCount="195" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a poem on the 2015 AP English Literature and Composition exam multiple choice section that I only barely remember. The topic was along the lines of &quot;sleep is as great an equalizer as death&quot; and featured a line like &quot;even the great emperor ... laid his head down to rest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the title of the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Blake Lucas" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T18:12:36.590" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T01:05:44.500" Title="Looking for poem in which sleep is as great an equalizer as death" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9777" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9776" CreationDate="2019-04-13T20:53:04.770" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-shadow-of-the-cross/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shadow Of The Cross&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John McCrae?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the drowsy dusk when the shadows creep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the golden west, where the sunbeams sleep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the attic poor to the palace grand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The King and the beggar went hand in hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6152" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T18:18:25.657" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T18:18:25.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9778" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="135" CreationDate="2019-04-14T00:40:57.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comparison of the albatross to the cross alludes to the cross not as a symbol of faith, but as a symbol of penance.  Remember, Christ was executed on the cross. When the captain killed the bird, the wind calmed and no rain fell, condemning the entire crew to death. The crew hung the dead bird around the captain's neck as a reminder of what he'd done: basically, here's your penance for your crime – a stinking, rotting bird carcass hung around your neck – to remind you every second of every day that you got us into this mess with your arrogance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6153" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-04-14T01:02:14.753" LastActivityDate="2019-04-14T01:02:14.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9779" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-14T03:28:48.770" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question on &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt; and the Victorian era. I was just wondering to what extent the cultural anxieties of the Victorian age are represented in &lt;em&gt;Dracula&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6154" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-15T18:19:25.313" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T23:44:45.867" Title="Dracula Cultural Anxieties" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;bram-stoker&gt;&lt;dracula&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9300" CreationDate="2019-04-15T11:13:17.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cook summarizes these lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Roman authorities, before allowing Browning to ‘rove and rummage’ among their records, required, he says, that he should ‘mend his ways’, that he should be ‘manned’, ‘new-manned’, or ‘wise-manned’, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; that he should become a convert. It was not enough that one of the eminent Catholic priests upon whose names he puns should certify that he was a genuine student, or even that he should promise to refrain from attacks upon the Church.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Arthur Kemble Cook (1920). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/commentaryuponbr00cookuoft/page/14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Commentary Upon Browning’s The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 15. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fictionalization&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did something like this actually happen to Browning when he tried to research the Franceschini murder trial in Rome, or are these lines a fictional account of what he thought might have happened had he done so? The editors of the Oxford edition of Browning’s poems think that there might be some truth in it, quoting the following letter of Browning’s in support:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should be glad of any scrap of information respecting the principals above mentioned […] It may be useful to mention while making enquiry, that the action of the Church in the whole matter was wholly laudable, and that it opposed the prejudices and passions of the time, for once, with success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Browning (no date, but c. June 1865). Letter to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cornwallis_Cartwright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Cornwallis Cartwright&lt;/a&gt;. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Quoted in Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett, eds. (1998), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yZ5QzEXCsDoC&amp;amp;pg=PR20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poetical Works of Robert Browning&lt;/em&gt; volume VII, pp. xx–xxii&lt;/a&gt;, Oxford: Clarendon Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their argument is based on the resemblence between the letter to Cartwright and the corresponding section of &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph of the letter is closely echoed in the poem at I.433–8, which suggests that Browning’s report there of his enquiries in Rome is likely to be substantively true, and that, as a Protestant and supporter of Italian nationalism, he had met with some suspicion in the winter of 1860–1 in asking about such a long-forgotten legal case. The Romans he consulted had assumed he was digging around for some anti-Catholic or anti-Papal propaganda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hawlin &amp;amp; Burnett, p. xxii.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since both letter and poem are by Browning, this resemblence does not seem to me to require or justify this explanation. I prefer the skeptical position of Browning’s biographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Orr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexandra Orr&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had Browning really gone to Rome and “tried truth’s power” in the manner supposed—if he had even done it while spending his last winter there—we should have had letters, fragments of conversation, a whole chapter of biography. Every friend of his in London who was interested in his work would have heard of it; I could not have failed to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexandra Orr (25 March 1897). Letter to W. H. Griffin. Griffin Collections, vi. 62. Quoted in Hawlin &amp;amp; Burnett, p. 28.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orr points out in her biography that the autobiographical details in &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt; are highly fictionalized:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has often been told, though with curious confusion as regards the date, how Mr. Browning picked up the original parchment-bound record of the Franceschini trial, on a stall of the Piazza San Lorenzo [in Florence, in 1860]. We read in the first section of his own work that he plunged instantly into the study of this record; that he had mastered it by the end of the day; and that he then stepped out on to the terrace of his house […] and saw the tragedy as a living picture unfold itself before him. These were his last days at Casa Guidi. It was four years before he definitely began the work. The idea of converting the story into a poem cannot even have occurred to him for some little time, since he offered it for prose treatment to Miss [Anne Charlotte] Ogle, the author of ‘A Lost Love’; and for poetic use, I am almost certain, to one of his leading contemporaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexandra Orr (1891). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54853/page/n153&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Life and Letters of Robert Browning&lt;/em&gt;, p. 138&lt;/a&gt;. London: Smith, Elder &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Browning fictionalized the timetable of conception of &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt; in this way, he likely also fictionalized his account of its research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Anti-Catholicism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did Browning think the Catholic Church might have objected to his researching the Franceschini case in their archives? The reason must be that Browning was well aware that he had a reputation as a critic of Catholicism, due to the fact that many of his poems feature hypocritical or corrupt clerics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general impression left on the mind by his Catholic allusions is, that he regards the Church and her ministers as in the main an organisation of ambitious and self-seeking imposters. Rarely, and perhaps even with the exception of Pope Innocent in &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;, never, is an avowed Papist introduced into a poem in a creditable rôle; while not infrequently the subject-matter is some sordid tale of moral delinquency on the part of a priest or monk. The uniform unfavourableness of the poet’s handling of Catholic themes and the occasional asperity of his tone gives evidence, which cannot be mistaken, of his contempt for the creed of Rome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘J. B.’ (1913). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/20503356&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Browning and the Catholic Church&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The Irish Monthly&lt;/em&gt; 41:477, p. 119.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of these ‘sordid tales’ include ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Bishop_Orders_his_Tomb_at_Saint_Praxed%27s_Church&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church&lt;/a&gt;’ (a dying bishop’s main concerns are decorative art, classical learning, and rivalry over a woman); ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Confessional&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Confessional&lt;/a&gt;’ (a corrupt priest violates the seal of confession); ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Soliloquy_of_the_Spanish_Cloister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister&lt;/a&gt;’ (one monk expresses his hatred for another); ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Holy-Cross_Day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holy-Cross Day&lt;/a&gt;’ (the reaction of Jews on being forced to attend a Christian sermon); ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Heretic%27s_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Heretic’s Tragedy&lt;/a&gt;’ (the burning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_de_Molay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques de Molay&lt;/a&gt;); and ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/asolando00browgoog/page/n46&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Pope and the Net&lt;/a&gt;’ (a cleric dissimulates piety until he been elected Pope).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longest of Browning’s works in this tendency is ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bishop_Blougram%27s_Apology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bishop Blougram’s Apology&lt;/a&gt;’ (1855), in which the bishop of the title (a light disguise for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Wiseman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cardinal Wiseman&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is at heart indistinguishable from the sceptic or the infidel, but has thrown in his lot with the Church for the material advantages which a high position in it can confer on him. […] The whole of this diatribe is, we fear, intended to be taken not as applicable merely to an individual, to wit, the Cardinal, but as equally serviceable to portrary the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘J. B.’, pp. 124–5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether these poems are in fact motivated by anti-Catholicism as ‘J. B.’ claims, or whether Browning’s fascination with Renaissance Italy and the potential for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_monologue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dramatic irony&lt;/a&gt; in the character of a hypocritical churchman was too tempting for him not to return to the subject again and again, is hard to say. Browning defended his approach to the Catholic Church in a conversation with the Irish nationalist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Gavan_Duffy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Gavan Duffy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found throughout his poems the Catholic Church so habitually disparaged that I should have expected him […] of condemning it to perpetual subjection. Browning replied that the allusions to the Catholic Church, which I complained of, were mainly attributable to local circumstances. He had lived in Italy, and he took his illustrations of life from the facts which fell under his notice there; had he lived in England he would probably have taken them from the [Church of England]. I said I had always assumed that one of his illustrations from the Catholic Church which was English and certainly unfriendly, Bishop Blougram was intended to suggest Cardinal Wiseman. Yes, he said, Bishop Blougram was certainly intended for the English Cardinal, but he was not treated ungenerously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Gavan Duffy (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mylifeintwohemis02duffuoft/page/260&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;My Life in Two Hemispheres&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 2, p. 261&lt;/a&gt;. London: Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if you accept Browning’s defence, the accounts of ‘J. B.’ and Duffy show how he was perceived by Catholics, and hence what kind of reception he might have had if he had approached the Church in Rome during his research for &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-15T12:41:47.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8265" CreationDate="2019-04-16T02:25:01.627" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not entirely certain that Syme was vaporised. We know only that he is no longer around for Winston to talk with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Syme were still useful in his work, or in something related, the Party simply could have reassigned him to another bureau and then made it look like he had been removed from all records to which Winston had access. With Syme gone Winston was more dependent on O'Brien for his inquiries about Ingsoc, Newspeak, etc., and it is likely that the thinkpols assigned to monitoring Winston knew this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5872" LastActivityDate="2019-04-16T02:25:01.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9395" CreationDate="2019-04-16T18:59:48.927" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: No convincing explanation has yet been put forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Perhaps nowhere else in Browning scholarship has more critical ink been expended on fewer words than the three of “&lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine&lt;/em&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James F. Loucks (1974). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40001814&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Hy, Zy, Hine” and Peter of Abano&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; 12:2, p. 165.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Criteria&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good explanation would meet the following criteria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this stanza the speaker describes a plan to pretend to sell his soul to Satan in return for the latter destroying Brother Lawrence’s rose-acacia. (A rose-acacia is a delicate ornamental shrub imported from the American southwest, so Lawrence is understandably proud of succeeding in growing one.) After “&lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine…&lt;/em&gt;” the speaker seems to be interrupted by the evening prayer service. It would be a point in favour of an explanation if it fit into this context.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If the explanation depends on an obscure source, it would be a point in its favour if Browning could be shown to have had some knowledge of the source prior to 1842.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Browning’s immersion in medieval sources means that his references are often obscure, but this does not make it likely that he would deliberately obfuscate his sources, for example by misspelling words. It would be a point in favour of an explanation if it didn’t rely on Browning doing this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The words “&lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine…&lt;/em&gt;” are printed in italics in all editions of the poem. In the rest of the poem, phrases in italics are consistently used for the words of Brother Lawrence which the speaker mocks. In the second stanza the speaker mocks Lawrence’s poor Latin (‘salve’ is an imperative, so ‘tibi’ is otiose) and dull conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the meal we sit together:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;em&gt;Salve tibi!&lt;/em&gt; I must hear&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wise talk of the kind of weather,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Sort of season, time of year:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of the fourth stanza, “&lt;em&gt;Saint&lt;/em&gt;, forsooth” mocks Lawrence’s mild oath after he snaps a lily. And “&lt;em&gt;Plena gratiâ / Ave, Virgo!&lt;/em&gt;” at the end of the last stanza mocks Lawrence’s poor knowledge of the vesper service (in which the word ‘virgo’ does not appear: the hymn begins “Ave &lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;/em&gt; gratia plena”). It would be a point in favour of an explanation if it were consistent with this typographical convention.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Vesper bells&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nineteenth-century commentators, if they tried to interpret the words at all, took them for the sound of the vesper bells. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutchison_Stirling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Stirling&lt;/a&gt; had a detailed theory about the meaning of each syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Hy-Zy-Hine&lt;/em&gt; represents the sound of the bell—&lt;em&gt;Hy&lt;/em&gt;, as it opens its mouth left, &lt;em&gt;Zy&lt;/em&gt;, as it pours itself out right, and &lt;em&gt;Hine&lt;/em&gt;, as it drops its own extinguisher on its own sound in the midst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Hutchison Stirling (1868). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/northbritishrev05unkngoog/page/n424&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Poetical Works of Robert Browning&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The North British Review&lt;/em&gt; 98, p. 402. Published anonymously, but authorship confirmed by Amelia Hutchison Stirling (1912), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029047870/page/n199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;James Hutchison Stirling: His Life and Work&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, London: Unwin, p. 188.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These details seem to me unconvincing and even self-contradictory: ‘extinguisher’ must mean ‘damper’ which implies that the bell was fixed in place and rung with a hammer; but “opens its mouth left” implies that it was swung and rung with a clapper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later commentators followed Stirling in outline if not in detail, though Peterson’s “apparently” suggests some skepticism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hiram Corson (1888). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anintroductiont07corsgoog/page/n326&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning’s Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, p. 313&lt;/a&gt;. Boston: D. C. Heath.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is apparently meant to represent the sound of the Vesper’s bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hans Christian Peterson (1903), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/inductivestudies00brow/page/14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inductive Studies in Browning&lt;/em&gt;, p. 14&lt;/a&gt;. Chicago: Ainsworth.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twentieth-century scholars tended to favour other possibilities and criticized the ‘vesper bells’ interpretation, first, because Browning’s choice of syllables is unnecessarily obscure if bell-ringing is intended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As an echo of bell-notes the syllables seem curiously inept. English &lt;em&gt;ding-dong&lt;/em&gt;, French &lt;em&gt;din-dan&lt;/em&gt;, Spanish &lt;em&gt;tin-tan&lt;/em&gt; might have served. Our speaker’s mood is hardly such that he can be supposed to shift instantly into fanciful imitative mouthings; and had Browning meant to throw in original bell-syllables of his own, could he not have done better than &lt;em&gt;hy, zy, hine&lt;/em&gt;? When he employed onomatopoeia it was not usually subtle or obscure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Fred A. Dudley (1957). ‘Hy, Zy, Hine’. &lt;em&gt;Research Studies of the State College of Washington&lt;/em&gt; XXV, p. 65.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cannot believe monastery bells to be very different from other bells, which do not put forth such strange sounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Loucks (1974), p. 165.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, if the sound of the bells is to fit into the soliloquy we have to imagine the speaker (or Brother Lawrence) singing along with them, but then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[They] have not satisfactorily explained why the speaker appears to be interrupting himself (“’St, there’s Vespers”) when the actual bells begin to ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Loucks (1974), p. 165.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Wear tried to rescue this interpretation by suggesting that it is Brother Lawrence who is singing along with the bells:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is precisely his simple, loving nature that would cause Lawrence to burst into joyous, if somewhat foolish, song at the sound of the Vesper bells. Because the speaker is so riveted in his rage on Lawrence’s every act, he mocks the absurd syllables, &lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine&lt;/em&gt;, only to realize with a start what they indicate: “’St, there’s Vespers!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Wear (1974). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40001717&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Further Thoughts on Browning’s Spanish Cloister&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; 12:1, p. 69.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Satanic conjuration&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlotte Porter and Helen Clarke were the first to suggest that the words might be the interrupted beginning of a conjuration. They did so, without any indication that they were introducing a novel interpretation, in the middle of a list of self-study questions on the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Does the conjuration he begins (line 70) suggest Arabic words? How do they contrast with the interruption of the call to vesper service, and the Latin “Hail Mary” following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke (1900). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013444975/page/n563&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Browning Study Programmes&lt;/em&gt;, p. 527&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fred Dudley drew attention to Porter and Clarke, and suggested that the words might have been inspired by &lt;em&gt;De occulta philosophia&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Cornelius_Agrippa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cornelius Agrippa&lt;/a&gt;, which Browning had quoted from in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paracelsus00brow/page/148&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note to ‘Paracelsus’&lt;/a&gt; (1835):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A glance almost anywhere in [&lt;em&gt;De occulta philosophia&lt;/em&gt;] would have turned up elaborate discussions of sorcery, charms, astrology, necromancy, numerology, or the powers of names. There are complicated instructions for “deriving” the secret names of angels and devils from the names of God. The procedure requires tracing the letters of known names through tables marked up one side and down the other with the the characters of the Hebrew alphabet, across the top and backward across the bottom with the signs of the zodiac or of the planets. One direction of tracing yields names of good spirits; the reverse, those of evil spirits. Browning’s &lt;em&gt;Zy&lt;/em&gt; might just conceivably echo “the name of the evill spirit &lt;em&gt;Schii&lt;/em&gt; … which signifies a spirit that is a work of engines.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dudley (1957), p. 67.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but Dudley recognized that this was a poor effort and immediately retreated to the idea that the phrase is a nonsensical invention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But surely the outright invention of three bizarre syllables was not beyond the powers of Robert Browning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dudley (1957), p. 68.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gordon Pitts suggested that Browning might have come across the Beauvais manuscript of the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Ass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feast of the Ass&lt;/a&gt;’ in the British Museum during his research for &lt;em&gt;Sordello&lt;/em&gt; (1840).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The refrain of the mass throughout is “&lt;em&gt;Hez hez sire asnes hez&lt;/em&gt;,” Old French for “Heigh, heigh, Sir Ass, heigh”. Elsewhere in the mass too occurs the phrase &lt;em&gt;Hinham, Hinham, Hinham&lt;/em&gt; (he-haw). These refrains could easily become slurred in the mind of speaker (or of Browning) into “&lt;em&gt;Hy, zy, hine&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gordon Pitts (1966). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/13-9-339b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”: “Hy, Zy, Hine”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; 13:9, pp. 339–340.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Loucks suggested that the words are altered forms of names appearing in the &lt;em&gt;Elementa Magica&lt;/em&gt; attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_d%27Abano&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pietro d’Abano&lt;/a&gt;, which Browning might have encountered during his research on &lt;em&gt;Paracelsus&lt;/em&gt;, since it is printed as an appendix to &lt;em&gt;De occulta philosophia&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following words serve to open the [“&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FFMKQlYkPUgC&amp;amp;pg=PT30&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coniuratio diei Martis&lt;/a&gt;”]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Coniuro &amp;amp; confirmo super vos, angeli fortes &amp;amp; sancti, per nomen Ya, Ya, Ya, He, He, He, Va, Hy, Hy, Ha, Ha, Va, Va, Va, Aie, Air, Air, El, Ay, Elibra, Eloim, Eloim [etc.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What follows is the concluding sentence of Abano’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FFMKQlYkPUgC&amp;amp;pg=PT7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exorcismus Spirituum Aereorum&lt;/a&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Venite ergo in nomine Adonay, Zebaoth, Adonay, Amioram: venite, venite, quid tardatis? festinate, imperat vobus Adonay Saday, Rex Regum, El, Aty, Titeip, Azia, Hyn, En, Minosel, Achadan, Vay, Vaa, Ey, Haa, Eye, Exe, a El, El, a, Hy, Hau, Hau, Hau, Va, Va, Va, Va.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It will be noted that the words “&lt;em&gt;Hy&lt;/em&gt;” and “&lt;em&gt;Hyn&lt;/em&gt;” appear in these passages; I am guessing that Browning borrowed the word just &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; “&lt;em&gt;Hyn&lt;/em&gt;” in the second passage (“&lt;em&gt;Azia&lt;/em&gt;”), altering it to “&lt;em&gt;Zy&lt;/em&gt;” to echo “&lt;em&gt;Hy&lt;/em&gt;.” As for “&lt;em&gt;Hyn&lt;/em&gt;,” presumably Browning altered its spelling to make its rhyme with “swine” more exact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Loucks (1974), pp. 168–9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Susan Hardy Aiken suggested that Browning, rather than finding the ‘Feast of the Ass’ in the Beauvais manuscript in the British Museum, might have found it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ancientmysterie02honegoog/page/n172&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ancient Mysteries Described&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1823) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Hone&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hone bases his account of the Feast of the Ass on the Beauvais manuscript and a thirteenth-century missal composed by the archbishop of Sens, both printed in Latin and Old French by Du Cange. Noting that the service begins immediately “before vespers,” he describes “the clergy [going] in procession to the door of the cathedral,” where they chant, “in a minor key, or rather squeaking voices,&quot; mock vesper anthems in adoration of the Ass. He then translates the first and last stanzas of the Mass, rendering its refrain as “Huzza, Seignor Ass, Huzza!” and &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;other parts of the service were terminated by the burden of &lt;em&gt;Hin-Han, Hin-Han&lt;/em&gt;, in imitation of the braying of an ass […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hone’s &lt;em&gt;Huzza&lt;/em&gt; (which unlike the French &lt;em&gt;hez&lt;/em&gt; requires pronunciation of the &lt;em&gt;z&lt;/em&gt;) becomes &lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy&lt;/em&gt;; and the &lt;em&gt;Hin-Han&lt;/em&gt; ending the mock Vespers becomes “&lt;em&gt;Hine…&lt;/em&gt;”—its second syllable interrupted, as Browning’s ellipsis suggests, by true Vespers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Susan Hardy Aiken (1979). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40002367&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Hy, Zy, Hine” and Browning’s Medieval Sources for “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; 17:4, pp. 377–383&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These explanations are in my opinion all quite implausible: they depend on Browning picking indiviual words from an obscure text and altering them so as to make the allusion unrecognizable, without having any understandable motivation for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other explanations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alexandra Orr managed to give the impression of glossing the phrase, but without committing to any particular meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is turning over some pithy expedients, when the vesper bell cuts short his meditations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexandra Orr (1885). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.93974/page/n269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning&lt;/em&gt;, p. 252&lt;/a&gt;. London: Bell &amp;amp; Sons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joseph Baker’s suggestion has at least the merit of simplicity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These meaningless words represent a growl of hatred&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph E. Baker, ed. (1947). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.503498/page/n133&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pippa Passes and Shorter Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 71&lt;/a&gt;. New York: The Odyssey Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Roberts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adam Roberts&lt;/a&gt; noted the similarity between ‘Hy’ and Greek ‘hys’ meaning ‘swine’, and wondered whether&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the words are there to evoke a speaker with poor Greek, vaguely remembering a Greek-language magic charm for transforming an enemy into the shape of a pig?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Adam Roberts (2014). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://amechanicalart.blogspot.com/2014/10/hy-zy-hine.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prize for ridiculous contrivance goes to James Anderson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blended, perhaps, with the tones of the vespers bells of the next line, but ascribable neither to them nor to Brother Lawrence nor to the soliloquist himself, these words are best read in literal Miltonic terms as a truly satanic utterance, the intrusion of the Devil’s alien voice, summoned into the cloister garden by the soliloquist’s human evil. Satan himself, father of many a curse, must logically be speaking the words “&lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine…&lt;/em&gt;” […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Strange imprecation though they may be, these satanic words nevertheless cannot be dismissed as a mere nonsense-formula. In fact they belong to English, albeit English of a dialectal variety. […] Thus Browning’s italicized words “&lt;em&gt;Hy, Zy, Hine…&lt;/em&gt;,” however mysterious or incantatory they may seem, also make perfectly good lexical sense as a satanic imperative: “Hurry up, sink down, you (slavish) lout!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James E. Anderson (1997). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40003055&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Browning’s “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”: Themes, Voices, and the Words, “Hy, Zy, Hine”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Victorian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; 35:3, pp. 322–3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No-one has yet built a theory on the coincidence that ‘hy zy’ means ‘he is’ in West Frisian and ‘hine’ meant ‘theirs’ in Old Frisian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-21T09:46:34.887" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T09:46:34.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9322" CreationDate="2019-04-17T11:44:33.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words ‘Lyric Love’ reappear in the third-to-last line of the poem, at the end of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book/XII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book XII&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the rough ore be rounded to a ring,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Render all duty which good ring should do,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, failing grace, succeed in guardianship,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Might mine but lie outside thine, Lyric Love,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Linking our England to his Italy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two lines refer to an epitaph written by the Italian poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Tommaseo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Niccolò Tommaseo&lt;/a&gt; and inscribed on a tablet on the wall of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Guidi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casa Guidi&lt;/a&gt; in Florence, where the Brownings lived from 1847 until Elizabeth’s death in 1861. The epitaph reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here wrote and died&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Elizabeth Barrett Browning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who in a woman’s heart reconciled&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A scholar’s knowledge and a poet’s spirit&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And made of her verse a gold ring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Between Italy and England&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This memorial placed by&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A grateful Florence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1861&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference identifies the ‘Lyric Love’ of &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt; with Elizabeth Browning via Tommaseo’s metaphor of her ‘gold ring of verse’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elizabeth_Barrett_Browning_plaque_zoomed_view.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4Pdsv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Photo of Casa Guidi tablet by Robert Greenham, licensed under CC-BY-SA.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-04-17T11:44:33.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9788" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9795" CreationDate="2019-04-18T11:15:37.927" Score="3" ViewCount="432" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fourth clue read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Picture me: I’m a girl who is very bad&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I need to be punished, and by punished, I mean had&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It’s where you store goodies for anniversary five&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pardon me if this is getting contrived!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A good time was had right here at sunny midday&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then out for a cocktail, all so terribly gay.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So run there right now, full of sweet sighs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And open the door for your big surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Nick figure out that &quot;&lt;em&gt;Goodies would be something made of wood. To punish is to take someone to the woodshed. It was the woodshed behind my sister’s house – a place to stow lawn-mower parts and rusty tools&lt;/em&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6170" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:37:09.360" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:37:09.360" Title="How did Nick figure out the fourth clue in &quot;Gone Girl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;gillian-flynn&gt;&lt;gone-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9095" CreationDate="2019-04-18T12:50:56.153" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. She generally seemed very uninterested in anything political. She was not interested in reading &quot;The Book&quot; and didn't even understand why Winston was so excited about that photo which was proof of the Party lying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe she was more of a passive rebel. She had a sort of instinct to rebel against the social norms of the party but never actually planned to destroy the party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that O'Brien would never have asked her to meet with him alone. It is very probable that he knew about her way before he knew about Winston since she had been having sexual affairs way before Winston even bought his book. So O'Brien probably knew about her but chose not to ask Her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope my thoughs will help you with your essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4610" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T12:50:56.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9776" CreationDate="2019-04-18T18:03:29.243" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a poem per se, but this is a blank verse passage from Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry4p2&amp;amp;Act=3&amp;amp;Scene=1&amp;amp;Scope=scene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part II&lt;/em&gt;, act 3, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;, that is often quoted, a testing board favorite, and covers the themes you've mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O sleep, O gentle sleep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And steep my senses in forgetfulness?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hush'd with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than in the perfum'd chambers of the great,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under the canopies of costly state,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And lull'd with sound of sweetest melody?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O thou dull god, why liest thou with the vile&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In loathsome beds, and leav'st the kingly couch&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A watch-case or a common 'larum-bell?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In cradle of the rude imperious surge,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in the visitation of the winds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who take the ruffian billows by the top,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With deafing clamour in the slippery clouds,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That with the hurly death itself awakes?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in the calmest and most stillest night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With all appliances and means to boot,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6159" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-18T18:12:19.883" LastActivityDate="2019-04-18T18:12:19.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9776" CreationDate="2019-04-19T01:05:44.500" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps John Donne's &lt;em&gt;Holy Sonnets&lt;/em&gt; 10? Donne explicitly argues that sleep is better than death. He doesn't call sleep an equalizer, but he does say that death is a &quot;slave to ... kings and desperate men&quot;, which sleep isn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Death, be not proud, though some have called thee&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And soonest our best men with thee do go,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One short sleep past, we wake eternally&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly this is a long shot, as I'd not expect American teenagers (even those taking AP English) to be able to tackle Donne in an exam setting. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T01:05:44.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9792" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-19T02:38:33.750" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jean Rhys's affair with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Madox_Ford&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ford Madox Ford&lt;/a&gt;, and its effects on her marriage to Jean Lenglet as well as on Ford's relationship with Stella Bowen, have been variously cataloged by each of this foursome:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Quartet&lt;/em&gt; aka &lt;em&gt;Postures&lt;/em&gt; (1928), Rhys depicted Ford and Bowen as Hugh and Lois Heidler; Stephan Zelli is Lenglet, and Rhys herself is the protagonist, Marya Zelli.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ford followed soon after with &lt;em&gt;When the Wicked Man&lt;/em&gt; (1931), portraying Rhys as Lola Porter, a drunken journalist who takes advantage of the generosity of Joseph Notterdam (Ford) and his wife Elspeth (Bowen).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lenglet wrote an autobiographical novel, called variously &lt;em&gt;In de Strik&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Barred&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Sous les Verrous&lt;/em&gt;, published 1932 in Dutch and English, and 1933 in French. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, Bowen's 1941 autobiography, &lt;em&gt;Drawn from Life&lt;/em&gt;, provides her take on the affair. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhys herself translated the manuscript of &lt;em&gt;Sous les Verrous&lt;/em&gt; into English. In his article &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831159?read-now=1&amp;amp;seq=9#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Rhys and the Dutch Connection&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Journal of Modern Literature&lt;/em&gt; vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, pp. 159–173), Martien Kappers-Den Hollander has pointed out that Rhys made several changes: for example, cutting out all references to the character representing Bowen and softening the portrayal of her own counterpart. Lenglet in turn used the English translation as the basis for his Dutch translation. The French version, however, used his original manuscript. So by comparing the French original to the English translation, and by considering the changes Rhys made, we can gauge Rhys's reaction to Lenglet's portrayal of the affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhys refused to read Bowen's &lt;em&gt;Drawn from Life&lt;/em&gt;, on the very sensible grounds that &quot;I was quite certain that Stella's opinion of me wouldn't be pleasant to read&quot;. This is mentioned in another &lt;a href=&quot;https://jeanrhysreviewdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/measure-for-measure-quartet-and-when-the-wicked-man.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; by Hollander, &quot;Measure for Measure: &lt;em&gt;Quartet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;When the Wicked Man&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Jean Rhys Review&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 2–16). In the footnotes to this second article, Hollander says that Rhys eventually did read Arthur Mizener's biography of Ford, &lt;em&gt;The Saddest Story&lt;/em&gt; (London: The Bodley Head, 1971), which draws upon Stella's account of the affair. Rhys was predictably upset at how Bowen depicted her. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been unable, however, to find any evidence either way whether Rhys ever read &lt;em&gt;When the Wicked Man&lt;/em&gt;.  Do we know whether Rhys ever read Ford's novel and recognized herself in it? If so, what was her reaction to this fictionalized representation?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T04:30:58.460" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T04:30:58.460" Title="Did Jean Rhys recognize her fictional portrait in Ford Madox Ford's *When the Wicked Man*?" Tags="&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;ford-madox-ford&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3749" CreationDate="2019-04-19T03:44:20.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An Outer Party member has been told to believe that the Party is advancing the common good, and believes that this is what the Party should be doing. If he comes to believe that the Party, far from advancing the common good, is actually the chief obstacle to that desideratum, he becomes a threat to the Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a Thought Police apparatchik already knows that it's really all about power, and is perfectly happy with that, because in some way he's cashing in on that situation and could not care less about the common good. His disillusionment is not a threat to the Party because his loyalty does not depend on the illusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5872" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T03:44:20.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9794" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-19T09:43:58.653" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background.&lt;/strong&gt; I have made an observation, documented in detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/LGcommaI/status/1116010801784152064&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://twitter.com/LGcommaI/status/1116010801784152064&lt;/a&gt;. [ I am the person who is writing the content of the twitter-channel @LGcommaI; this is not plagiarism of the observation. ] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Preliminary epistemological remark.&lt;/strong&gt; Obviously, strictly speaking, such an almost-identical agreement in conjunction with Pike's book being two decades younger than Mackays merely strongly &lt;em&gt;suggests&lt;/em&gt; that Pike plagiarized from Mackay, but does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; prove it. (For vavious reasons; e.g., there remains the &lt;em&gt;remote&lt;/em&gt; theoretical possibility that there existed a &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; (unnamed) source which &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; Pike and Mackay plagiarized from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description of the observation.&lt;/strong&gt; For your convenience, I will repeat my observation here: in Albert Pike's 1871 book &lt;em&gt;Morals and Dogma&lt;/em&gt; there is a passage of about twenty lines which occurs almost-identically on page 6 Robert William Mackay's 1850 book &lt;em&gt;Progress Of The Intellect&lt;/em&gt;. (Documented at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.docdroid.net/4kKUlnt/did-albert-pike-plagiarize-from-robert-william-mackay.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.docdroid.net/4kKUlnt/did-albert-pike-plagiarize-from-robert-william-mackay.pdf&lt;/a&gt;). No mention of Mackay is made by Pike anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pike made exactly three changes to Mackay's paragraph: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pike replaced &quot;under different&quot; by &quot;with only a change of&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pike freshly inserted the subclause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;when his ancestors communed face to face with the Gods;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;into Mackay's paragraph (which does not contain any such statement), after the main clause &quot;man still looked back with longing to the lost golden age&quot; (which is identical in both sources).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pike changed the somewhat nonstandard spelling &quot;Cronus&quot; into &quot;Kronos&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that these minor differences are all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be surprised if this hasn't been published before in one-and-a-half centuries already, but (so far) I haven't found it in the secondary literature, whence my: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; Has this particular case of almost-identical plagiarism  been described in the published literature?  (I.e., not only the generality that Pike may have plagiarized occasionally here and there, but this particular instance.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendix.&lt;/strong&gt; For the sake of self-containedness, I add my side-by-side comparison of the two passages as image-files.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in one picture:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8rcGW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8rcGW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the &lt;em&gt;same&lt;/em&gt; image split into several images:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOgVq.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OOgVq.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BXEeO.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BXEeO.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TFLl5.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TFLl5.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pnnIx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pnnIx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/201t4.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/201t4.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Adding more images appears to be forbidden with the reputation-score I currently have.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6176" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T09:40:12.727" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T09:40:12.727" Title="Has Albert Pike's plagiarism from Robert William Mackay been described?" Tags="&lt;plagiarism&gt;&lt;albert-pike&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9788" CreationDate="2019-04-19T09:52:33.997" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a tradition in the U.S. and U.K. of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_anniversary#Traditional_and_modern_anniversary_gifts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;what kind of gifts to give couples on each anniversary.&lt;/a&gt; Fifth anniversary is wood. (this is also the source of calling a 25th anniversary &quot;silver&quot; and a 50th &quot;gold.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Taking someone out to the woodshed&quot; is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trip_to_the_woodshed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;old American idiom&lt;/a&gt; for giving a child a spanking or beating as punishment, done privately (out behind the woodshed, where the parent could beat the child and the child's cries wouldn't be heard by the rest of the family).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T09:52:33.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-19T15:31:51.383" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this in the early 2000s, I think. It was a paperback, with the main characters being a set of kids, at least three of them, with both boys and girls in the group. I don't remember the main part of the narrative, but I remember it involved them having an adventure or solving a mystery. There is an older lady who had a cool house with a number of button-invoked amenities. At the end of the book, as the kids are waiting for their parents to pick them up, or drive them home, they push the button marked &amp;quot;Pool&amp;quot;, expecting to play billiards, only to have the floor open up into a swimming pool, to which one of them comments that they don't have swimsuits with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T18:57:49.737" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T18:57:49.737" Title="Adventure / Mystery book with a cool old lady and her house with automated amusements" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9797" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9798" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" Score="0" Body="Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939), English novelist, critic and editor, best known for &quot;The Good Soldier&quot; (1915) and &quot;The English Novel: From the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad&quot; (1929)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" LastActivityDate="2019-04-19T17:03:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T03:07:23.133" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;How did the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geronimo_Stilton#Hero_mice_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hero mice&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geronimo_Stilton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geronimo Stilton&lt;/a&gt; series of children's books originally gain their powers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:40:42.237" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:40:42.237" Title="How did the &quot;hero mice&quot; gain their powers in the &quot;Geronimo Stilton&quot; series?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;geronimo-stilton&gt;&lt;elisabetta-dami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9336" CreationDate="2019-04-20T08:49:53.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Tree of vices&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of the kind of ‘allegorical woodcut’ that Cook’s friend may have had in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GdjJW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/GdjJW.jpg&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;From Boccaccio, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Mulieribus_Claris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De Claris Mulieribus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published by Aegidius van der Heerstraten, Louvain, 1487.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tree depicted here is simultaneously a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_virtues_and_tree_of_vices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree of vices&lt;/a&gt; bearing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seven deadly sins&lt;/a&gt; (clockwise from left: wrath, envy, greed, vanity, lust, gluttony, sloth) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree of the knowledge of good and evil&lt;/a&gt; in the garden of Eden. It has figures with eyes and tongues among its leaves, so it could be described as ‘tongue-leaved, eye-figured’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trees of vices (‘arbores vitiorum’) and trees of virtues (‘arbores virtutum’) were common types of medieval allegorical illustration, so there is no reason to suspect that Browning was referring to this woodcut in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tree of Life&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. Stephen Finley says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Eden tree of this passage is from the legend of the Tree of Life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;C. Stephen Finley (1983). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/25057743&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Browning’s “The Other Half-Rome”: A “Fancy-Fit” or Not?&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Browning Institute Studies&lt;/em&gt; 11, p. 140.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This legend is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot-Grail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 13th century prose romance in Old French. Late in their quest, Bors, Perceval and Galahad encounter the Ship of Solomon, aboard which there is a bed equipped with three spindles coloured white, red and green, and on which lies the Sword with the Strange Hangers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_14_e_iii_f125v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PN8yP.jpg&quot; height=&quot;400&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_14_e_iii_f125v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library: Royal MS 14 E III; folio 125v&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grail maiden tells the history of the ship and its spindles to the knights. The portions of this story that correspond to the image in &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt; are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eue la pecheresse ki la premiere feme fu […] cuellir del fruit mortel, et del arbre meisme vn rainsiel auœc le fruit. […] et quant il furent fors, si tint eue toutes voies le rainssiel en sa main, que onques n’el regarda a chele fois. mais quant ele se regarda, et ele vit le raim, si s’aperchut pour che qu’ele le vit verdoiant comme chelui qui tantost auoit estei quellis. […] li rainsiaus qui en la terre estoit fichies, par la volentei al creatour a qui toutes choses sont obeissans, […] enrachina&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eve the sinnner, who was the first woman, picked the fatal fruit, and from the same tree a little branch along with the fruit. And when they were outside [of paradise], Eve still held the branch in her hand, without noticing it. But when she looked at herself, and saw the branch, she realised that it was still as verdant as if it had only just been picked. When it had been fixed in the earth, the branch, by the will of the creator whom all things obey, took root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=royal_ms_14_e_iii_f127v&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library: Royal MS 14 E III; folios 127v–128r&lt;/a&gt;. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This transplanted branch grows into a new ‘Tree of Life’ that later supplies the red spindle of the bed on the Ship of Solomon, and its descendants the white and green spindles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This legend corresponds closely to the lines in &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;: Eve accidentally acquires a little branch (‘chance sliver’) from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (‘Eden tree’); Adam and Eve are driven from Eden (‘two exiles’), she having taken (‘filched’) the branch with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Quest del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt; was translated and adapted by Thomas Malory in the later part of his &lt;em&gt;Morte d’Arthur&lt;/em&gt;, where the legend of the tree of life is briefly summarized as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when sinful Eve came to gather fruit, for which Adam and she were put out of paradise, she took with her the bough on which the apple hung on. Then perceived she that the branch was fair and green, and she remembered her the loss which came from the tree. Then she thought to keep the branch as long as she might. And for she had no coffer to keep it in, she put it in the earth. So by the will of Our Lord the branch grew to a great tree within a little while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Malory (1485). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1252/1252-h/1252-h.htm#link2HCH0174&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Morte d’Arthur&lt;/em&gt;, book XVII, chapter V&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malory bungled his retelling of the story by omitting to mention the descendants of the new tree of life, so that in his version the green and white spindles are made ‘of the green tree and of the white tree’, these trees having not previously been mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt; was printed in 1864, so that Browning also had the opportunity to read it in full in the original Old French, or in Furnivall’s summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Eve had yielded to the Devil’s advice, and plucked a branch of the tree of life [sic], she gave it to Adam, who picked off the fruit; and when they had eaten the fruit, they saw that they were carnal and naked, were ashamed, and covered themselves with their hands,—Eve still keeping the branch of the Tree of Life [sic]. Then God called Adam, and said he should eat his bread in sweat, and that Eve should bring forth in pain; and God drove them from the Paradise of Delight. Eve says she will always keep her branch; but, having nothing to keep it in (for things then were nothing like they are now), she stuck it in the ground, and it took root there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Frederick J. Furnivall (1864). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=yX6DAmSU5kQC&amp;amp;pg=PR34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt;, p. xxxiv&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. B. Nichols &amp;amp; sons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furnivall seems to have conflated the two trees of Genesis 2:9, or perhaps he got distracted by the new ‘Tree of Life’ that grew from the cutting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tree imagery&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image of Pompilia as a transplanted cutting recurs in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book/VII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book VII&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;. Here Pompilia describes herself similarly to the way ‘Other Half-Rome’ had described her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Designate just the time for planting me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(The wild-briar slip she plucked to love and wear)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In soil where I could strike real root, and grow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just one of a number of comparisons between Pompilia and a plant in the early part of book VII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why is it you are turned a sort of tree?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, God, you see! God plants us where we grow.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is not that, because a bud is born&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At a wild briar’s end, full i’ the wild beast’s way,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We ought to pluck and put it out of reach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the oak-tree top,—say, “There the bud belongs!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wilding flower-tree-branch that, all those years,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a soul i’ the bud, so starved by ignorance,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stinted of warmth, it will not blow this year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These botanical images represent Pompilia’s passivity and stoicism under her husband Guido’s cruelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-21T09:45:35.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9811" CreationDate="2019-04-20T18:53:44.413" Score="3" ViewCount="1615" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many quote Michelangelo as saying that &amp;quot;trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.&amp;quot; For example, the following passage is from the book &lt;em&gt;Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct&lt;/em&gt; by Samuel Smiles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Angelo was one day explaining to a visitor at his studio, what he had been doing at a statue since his previous visit. &amp;quot;I have retouched this part—polished that—softened this feature—brought out that muscle—given some expression to this lip, and more energy to that limb.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But these are trifles,&amp;quot; remarked the visitor. &amp;quot;It may be so,&amp;quot; replied the sculptor, &amp;quot;but recollect that trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did Smiles get this anecdote from? Did Michelangelo really say this? If so, wouldn't he've said it in Italian? I'd like to know the exact words he used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2251" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T13:59:38.877" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T13:59:38.877" Title="What's the source of Michelangelo's quote: &quot;Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;michelangelo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-20T21:01:38.863" Score="6" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this story there's a girl who is mentally fragile in some way -- I don't remember exactly how, and I don't think it's spelled out explicitly, but there's something about her that isn't entirely neurotypical. There's also a much older man who is close friends with her and, I think, a bit of a mentor -- he's in a parental role and doesn't think of her romantically. I believe most of the story is from his POV (it's third person). Near the end of the story, the girl gets pregnant somehow (not from the older man -- I think from someone more her own age, and it was probably not entirely consensual).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She goes to the older man, very worried, and he thinks, when her family finds out, &quot;They would take it away from her, and they must not do that, not to [girl's name].&quot; (That's not a direct quote, but it's close to that. I tried doing google searches on variations of that and found nothing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it cuts directly to the last scene, which takes place a number of years later, and might (?) be from the POV of the man who got her pregnant. I'm not sure about that, but definitely the POV is a third character, not the girl or the older man. That person sees kids (I think multiple kids) running around -- one of them talks about &quot;Dad&quot; or &quot;Daddy&quot; -- and it becomes clear, without anything being said directly, that the older man has married the girl and adopted her kid (the oldest kid the POV character sees being the one in question). The story ends on that realization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this story in the late 80's (possibly early 90's), though it feels like the story may be a little older than that. The vast majority of the short stories I read at that point were SF, so that's why I think this might be too. Possibly all of this took place in a post-apocalyptic landscape (I feel like there were forests and such, but not any technology to speak of), or might be by an author known for SF like Zenna Henderson or Clifford Simak, although I don't think stylistically it was either of those two authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also posted asking about this on the Straight Dope, but got no answers there.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6145" LastActivityDate="2019-04-20T21:01:38.863" Title="Short story, maybe SF: non-neurotypical girl gets pregnant and older mentor (not the father) marries her" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9804" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-21T01:16:57.003" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a letter to his friend William Dean Howells recounting the heroic exploits of John T. Lewis, Mark Twain wrote the following in 1877:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lewis, the prodigious … saw the frantic horse plunging down the hill toward him on a full gallop, throwing his heels as high as a man’s head at every jump. So Lewis turned his team diagonally across the road just at the “turn,” thus making a V with the fence. The running horse could not escape that, but must enter it. Then Lewis sprang to the ground and stood in this V. He gathered his vast strength, and with a perfect Creedmoor aim he seized the gray horse’s bit has he plunged by and fetched him up standing!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this &quot;Creedmoor aim&quot; he refers to? Is it a reference to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creedmoor_Rifle_Range&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creedmoor rifle range&lt;/a&gt; in Queens, New York? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T09:31:05.263" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T12:21:21.387" Title="What did Twain mean by the &quot;Creedmoor aim&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9804" CreationDate="2019-04-21T11:12:55.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I got these answers from a different source (Twain email forum):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Barbara Schmidt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;According to the annotations in _Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2_, p. 543 it is a reference to an 1874 long range rifle match that occurred on the Creed farm in upstate New York.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Robert H. Hirst:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Today the term Creedmoor is synonymous with precision long-range performance from classic single shot black-powder rifles. The magnificent Winchester 1885 High Wall Creedmoor LTD, exclusively from Davidson’s, is just such a rifle.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T12:21:21.387" LastActivityDate="2019-04-24T12:21:21.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9817" CreationDate="2019-04-21T23:02:58.777" Score="7" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book for a university course between 1993-97.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narration is hectic &amp;amp; fragmented: inner thoughts mixed with straight narration mixed with flashbacks, run-on and choppy sentences, funky grammar, etc. I think it would be classified as postmodern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PLOT:&lt;/strong&gt; In the U.S., a wealthy, young woman goes to college and meets leftist/radical students who tell her about atrocities taking place in a Latin American country run by a military dictatorship. The young woman's father has business dealings with this country and her family’s wealth is linked to its oppressive regime (she grew up with an idyllic view of this country and knew nothing of the regime's violence toward its people). The final act: her father is hosting a party where a big-shot from this country (I think it’s a high-ranking military official) is the honoured guest (I think she met him before, as a kid or teen). She goes to the party wearing a loose, flowy dress (white with folkloric embroidery) that conceals the fact that she has strapped explosives to her body. She reaches out to embrace the General, hugs him tightly, and then detonates the bomb belt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One other thing: the narrator describes the young woman as desperate for her father's attention and validation; he views her as a shiny trinket at best. The narrator likens the young woman to a begging puppy, writing something like &quot;wuf, wuf, daddy&quot; -- and this refrain sometimes recurs in the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume it was published before 1993. And I suspect it was published after 1970: the female protagonist has similarities to Weather Underground radical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Oughton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diana Oughton&lt;/a&gt;, who died in 1970 when a bomb she was building blew up in a Greenwich Village townhouse. There are so many parallels that I can't help but think that the author used this real-life person as partial inspiration for her character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6184" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:06:42.057" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T16:06:42.057" Title="Novel: young woman blows herself up at her rich dad's party for Latin American dictators" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9812" CreationDate="2019-04-22T01:24:34.513" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a footnote on page 29 of &lt;em&gt;The Lay of Aotrou &amp;amp; Itroun&lt;/em&gt; Verlyn Flieger notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the word &lt;em&gt;korigans&lt;/em&gt; appears in the 1891 compendium of folklore known as &lt;em&gt;The Denham Tracts&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. II, p. 79) where it is in the same word-list as the first recorded use of the word &lt;em&gt;hobbits&lt;/em&gt;, another term which Tolkien put to good use in his own work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the &lt;em&gt;Letters&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the etymology [of &lt;em&gt;hobbit&lt;/em&gt;]: 'Invented by J.R.R. Tolkien'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this in letter 316, to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in letter 25 says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have no waking recollection [...] of any Hobbit bogey in print by 1904&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;hobbit-names [are] from Obvious Sources proper to their kind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an issue of the origin of the term versus the origin of the creature, or is something else at play here? How did the term 'hobbit' originate, and how did the idea of the 'halfling' originate, especially with respect to Tolkien?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T14:06:41.750" Title="The origin of Tolkien's use of the term &quot;hobbit&quot;" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9801" CreationDate="2019-04-22T08:38:51.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Smiles copied his anecdote about Michelangelo from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Caleb_Colton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Colton&lt;/a&gt;, who wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That writer who aspires to immortality, should imitate the sculptor, if he would make the labours of the pen as durable as those of the chisel. Like the sculptor, he should arrive at ultimate perfection, not by what he &lt;em&gt;adds&lt;/em&gt;, but by what he &lt;em&gt;takes away&lt;/em&gt;; otherwise all his energy may be hidden in the superabundant mass of his matter, as the finished form of an Apollo, in the unworked solidity of the block. A friend called on Michael Angelo, who was finishing a statue; some time afterwards he called again; the sculptor was still at his work; his friend looking at the figure, exclaimed, you have been idle since I saw you last; by no means, replied the sculptor, I have retouched this part, and polished that; I have softened this feature, and brought out this muscle; I have given more expression to this lip, and more energy to this limb: Well, well, said his friend, but all these are trifles; it may be so, replied Angelo, but recollect that trifles make perfection, and that perfection is no trifle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Caleb Colton (1822). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hypocrisysatire00colt/page/n101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lacon: or Many Things in Few Words&lt;/em&gt;, p. 94&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll see that the text starting “I have retouched this part” is repeated almost word for word in Smiles. Colton’s book of anecdates and aphorisms was immensely popular in the early 19th century, so Smiles may have expected his readers to recognize the origin of the story without needing to be told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colton, like Smiles, gives no source for this anecdote, and my opinion is that Colton invented it. I have two reasons for thinking this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the moral of the story (“trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle”) is in the form of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chiasmus&lt;/a&gt;, a rhetorical device in which two words or phrases are repeated, but in the opposite order. This device was a particular favourite of Colton’s, and other examples from &lt;em&gt;Lacon&lt;/em&gt; include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We should have a glorious conflagration, if all who cannot put fire into their works would only consent to put their works into the fire. [p. viii]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Friendship often ends in love; but love in friendship—never. [p. 58]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you have nothing to say, say nothing [p. 99]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liberty will not descend to a people, a people must raise themselves to liberty [p. 123]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they were the very reverse of their own mirrors; for the one reflected, without talking, but the other talked without reflecting. [p. 144]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he that has a sword, will either use it without threatening, or threaten without using it. [p. 151]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, nothing like this anecdote appears in either of the biographies of Michelangelo that were published in his lifetime, neither in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lives_of_the_Most_Excellent_Painters,_Sculptors,_and_Architects&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1550) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgio_Vasari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Giorgio Vasari&lt;/a&gt;, nor in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19332/19332-h/19332-h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1553) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascanio_Condivi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ascanio Condivi&lt;/a&gt;. The closest approach to Colton is this anecdote in Vasari:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It happened at this time that Piero Soderini, having seen it [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_(Michelangelo)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the statue of David&lt;/a&gt;] in place, was well pleased with it, but said to Michelagnolo, at a moment when he was retouching it in certain parts, that it seemed to him that the nose of the figure was too thick. Michelagnolo noticed that the Gonfalonier [i.e. Soderini] was beneath the Giant, and that his point of view prevented him from seeing it properly; but in order to satisfy him he climbed upon the staging, which was against the shoulders, and quickly took up a chisel in his left hand, with a little of the marble-dust that lay upon the planks of the staging, and then, beginning to strike lightly with the chisel, let fall the dust little by little, nor changed the nose a whit from what it was before. Then, looking down at the Gonfalonier, who stood watching him, he said, “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” said the Gonfalonier, “you have given it life.” And so Michelagnolo came down, laughing to himself at having satisfied that lord, for he had compassion on those who, in order to appear full of knowledge, talk about things of which they know nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Giorgio Vasari (1550), ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/v/vasari/giorgio/lives/part3.71.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Life of Michelagnolo Buonarroti: Painter, Sculptor, and Architect of Florence&lt;/a&gt;’ from &lt;em&gt;Lives of the Most Execellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (1912).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Vasari’s story is quite different in tone and moral from Colton’s. Perhaps Colton had read this story and adjusted it to fit his own moral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Vasari’s story is also likely to be a rumour or invention. In his account of Michelangelo’s sculpting of David, Vasari gets various details wrong, for example he says that it was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Ferrucci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simone da Fiesole&lt;/a&gt; who had abandoned the roughed-out block of marble which Michelangelo used, whereas the modern consensus is that was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agostino_di_Duccio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agostino di Duccio&lt;/a&gt;. This suggests that he was not using a reliable source for this part of his biography.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T08:14:27.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9810" CreationDate="2019-04-22T12:40:02.810" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two questions here: the origin of the idea of the ‘halfling’, and the origin of the word ‘hobbit’. The former seems to be adequately explained by European folklore, which describes dwarfs, elves, fairies, goblins, brownies, kobolds, leprechauns, and other kinds of small magical people. So I will concentrate on the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien described the origin of the word in a letter to W. H. Auden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I remember about the start of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map. But it became &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; in the early 1930s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkienestate.com/en/writing/letters/letter-163-to-wh-auden.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to W. H. Auden&lt;/a&gt;. Number 163 in Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (1981). &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His biographer Humphrey Carpenter quoted another version of the story but (following his usual slipshod practice) without reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road [in Oxford], laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “&lt;em&gt;In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit&lt;/em&gt;”. Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Humphrey Carpenter (1977). &lt;em&gt;Tolkien: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 172. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This must have been fairly soon after Tolkien took up his post as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, in 1925.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are we to reconcile Tolkien’s version of events with the appearance of the word in the list of supernatural beings in the tracts of folklorist Michael Denham?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] pigmies, chittifaces, nixies, Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers, boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, &lt;strong&gt;hobbits&lt;/strong&gt;, hobgoblins, brown-men, cowies, dunnies, wirrikows, alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricauns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sylvans, succubuses, black-men, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabriel-hounds, mawkins, doubles, corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sybils, nick-nevins, whitewomen, fairies, thrummy-caps […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Hardy, ed. (1895). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/denhamtractscoll02denhuoft/page/78&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Denham Tracts: A Collection of Folklore by Michael Aislabie Denham&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 79&lt;/a&gt;. London: David Nutt.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seem to be two possibilities: either Tolkien had in fact read the word in Denham (or some other source yet undiscovered) but had forgotten that he had done so; or the two occurrences of the word are independent inventions. The problem with the first of these possibilities is that Denham’s tracts are obscure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denham was an amateur folklorist who published many books and pamphlets, including twenty &lt;em&gt;Minor Tracts on Folklore&lt;/em&gt; (1849–c. 1854). The majority of these Tracts were collected in an edition prepared for the Folklore Society in the 1890s, and the word &lt;em&gt;hobbit&lt;/em&gt; appears in the second volume (1895) of this edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall &amp;amp; Edmund Weiner (2006). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bszM-uwEQOkC&amp;amp;pg=PA146&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, p. 146&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any evidence that Tolkien read Denham’s work, Gilliver et al. have to resort to speculation about how he might have done so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1895 version would have been readily available in university libraries accessible to Tolkien (there is a copy in Oxford), and he was interested in folklore. Alternatively, he could have seen a list copied out by one of his friends or colleagues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gilliver et al., p. 148.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the tantalizing possibility of another source for the word. A letter to the &lt;em&gt;Observer&lt;/em&gt; soon after the publication of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; in 1937, asked about the origins of the name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sir,—Dr. Julian Huxley, in one of his recent lectures, referred to the “little furry men” seen in Africa by natives and, although dimly in moonlight, by at least one scientist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I should like to know is whether these creatures provided the inspiration for Professor Tolkien’s attractive hobbit, the newest visitor to so many of our nurseries this Christmas. Naturally, I always read my children’s book before giving them to them, and I noticed that all the characters in the hobbit were nearly all drawn from real animal life or from real mythology. Few of them appeared to be invented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On mentioning the hairy-footed hobbit, rather like a rabbit, to one of my contemporaries, I was amazed to see her shudder. &lt;strong&gt;She said she remembered an old fairy tale called “The Hobbit” in a collection read about 1904.&lt;/strong&gt; This creature, she said, was definitely frightening, unlike Professor Tolkien’s. Would the Professor be persuaded to tell us some more about the name and inception of the intriguing hero of his book? It would save so many research students so very much trouble in the generations to come. And, by the way, is the hobbit's stealing of the dragon's cup based on the cup-stealing episode in Beowulf? I hope so, since one of the book's charms appears to be its Spenserian harmonising of the brilliant threads of so many branches of epic, mythology, and Victorian fairy literature. Yours, etc. ‘Habit’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘Habit’ (16 January 1938). Letter to &lt;em&gt;The Observer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien replied, denying any knowledge of the “old fairy tale”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born in Africa, and have read several books on African exploration. I have, since about 1896, read even more books of fairy-tales of the genuine kind. Both the facts produced by the Habit would appear, therefore, to be significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But are they? I have no waking recollection of furry pigmies (in book or moonlight); nor of any Hobbit bogey in print by 1904. I suspect that the two hobbits are accidental homophones, and am content* that they are not (it would seem) synonyms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Not quite. I should like, if possible, to learn more about the fairy-tale collection, c. 1904.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1938). Letter to &lt;em&gt;The Observer&lt;/em&gt;. Number 25 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “old fairy tale” has not turned up in 80 years of searching, and so it seems that ‘Habit’s friend was mistaken in her recollection, perhaps at the distance of 34 years having confused ‘The Hobbit’ with a similar-sounding title. An example of a tale that could fit the bill is ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PQVLAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA295&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bar-gaist, or Boggart&lt;/a&gt;’ which was printed in John Roby’s &lt;em&gt;Traditions of Lancashire&lt;/em&gt; (1829).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it is more likely that Denham’s and Tolkien’s ‘hobbit’ are independent inventions. There is a word ‘hob’ (an abbreviation of ‘Robin’) from which they could both derive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hob, &lt;em&gt;n.1&lt;/em&gt; 2.a.&lt;/strong&gt; = Robin Goodfellow or Puck; a hobgoblin, sprite, elf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gave rise to the compounds ‘hobgoblin’ (an imp or sprite; a terrifying apparition), ‘hobhouchin’ (an owl), and ‘hob-thrush’ (a goblin), so it could also have assisted with the coining of ‘hobbit’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T14:06:41.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-22T18:14:16.567" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Book Thief&lt;/em&gt; by Markus Zusak, Liesel Meminger and Max Vandenburg have an interesting relationship: at first, Liesel ignores Max and is hesitant to to talk to him. Then, for some reason, the two begin to get closer and closer and form a tight bond. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Liesel ignore Max at first? Was it because she felt that Max replaced her brother? Was it because of how unexpected it was to hide a Jew in the house? Or was it something else? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5713" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-22T18:19:53.557" LastActivityDate="2019-04-22T18:19:53.557" Title="Why does Liesel ignore Max at first in &quot;The Book Thief&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;markus-zusak&gt;&lt;the-book-thief&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="9819" CreationDate="2019-04-22T22:33:03.233" Score="4" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ewan MacColl's song &quot;My Old Man&quot; contains the lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My old man was a good old man&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Skilled in the moulding trade&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the stinking heat of the iron foundry&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My old man was made&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Down on his knees in the moulding sand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He wore his trade like a company brand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He was one of the &lt;strong&gt;cyclops’ smoky band&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, that was my old man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was this cyclops, and what was his smoky band?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="664" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-23T08:33:27.030" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T09:41:15.667" Title="What was the &quot;cyclops' smoky band&quot; to which Ewan MacColl's father belonged?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6" CreationDate="2019-04-23T00:51:40.350" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think most fairy tales have a moral, when it really comes down to it, but it is not a requirement. Mostly, fables (such as those of Aesop) are the ones that require morals at the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6190" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T00:51:40.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9809" CreationDate="2019-04-23T11:22:52.583" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Measure of Miranda&lt;/em&gt; by Sarah Murphy&lt;/strong&gt; (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1987). Here are a couple of descriptions of the novel that confirm the points you remembered. First, from a book review:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one level the book is about Miranda, a young Canadian woman, the perfect 21 year old—beautiful, intelligent and graceful. […] Miranda’s father is head of a subsidiary of a large corporation, based in a Central American country, probably El Salvador. Her mother writes to her, telling her that, of course, life is wonderful in this beautiful country. They have a large and luxurious house, many “happy” servants and peasants, “Who are really different than us, Miranda.” But Miranda, living in Canada and attending university, meets a group of people who help her to see the realities that are around her, the world so different from what her parents wish her to see […] Miranda meets Amparo, a miraculous woman, a Chilean political refugee […] It is through her relationship with Amparo that Miranda is truly awakened, not only to the truths of the oppression, torture and fear that run rampant in Latin America. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel is written in a “stream of consciousness,” ignoring many rules of grammar and composition. Although this sometimes makes the story difficult to follow it also adds to its great emotional impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Isabel Waldman (1989). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/article/view/11334&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Measure of Miranda&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Canadian Woman Studies / les cahiers de la femme&lt;/em&gt; 10:1, p. 123.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, from a critical analysis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miranda’s relationship with her “Daddy” comes through quite clearly in a scene where her parents take her to the restaurant. The “Fairy Princess” reassures her rather tha, despite the fact that she is living in a commune with Jim and has taken up the Central American cause, she is still his “little girl” and that her heart definitely belongs to Daddy. She describes herself as a puupy responding to her master’s voice “already salivating, already getting ready to whine”. The Pavolvian reactions to her facther are rendered parenthetically through onomatopeic barking: “(—wuf, wuf, my own, wuf, my own, wufmyown, … myownperson–)”. Miranda will “strive to stop puppydog[ging]” to her Dad in quite a spectacular way, by using her bride-like, virgin look and her “cheshire cat smile” to approach the Central American Major and detonate the bomb she had been hiding under her purposely white dress. She will blow herself up and, accidentally, her father and everything else within fifty feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chantal Zabus (2002). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=FLQYDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA122&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tempests after Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, p.122&lt;/a&gt;. Palgrave.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-23T11:22:52.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9815" CreationDate="2019-04-23T17:34:59.170" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the work of the Greek poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cyclops-Greek-mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesiod&lt;/a&gt;, the three cyclops, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Arges, Brontes, and Steropes (Bright, Thunderer, Lightener)—[...] forged&#xA;  the thunderbolts of Zeus. Later authors made them the workmen of&#xA;  Hephaestus and said that Apollo killed them for making the thunderbolt&#xA;  that slew his son Asclepius.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be the connection which led to the naming of the Sheffield ‘Cyclops Works’, that @GarethRees cited in comments, but which equally applies to all foundry men. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Working molten metal is a dangerous trade, sparks fly and no doubt the classical link of one eyed creatures with foundry work reflects a tendency of those in that trade to lose eyes, particularly before glass eye protection became possible and common. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song also contains the line &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They'll rob you blind if you don't fight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes me wonder if his father had his eyesight damaged by the work. But even if not, cyclops were iron shapers to the Gods, Pa MacColl was one of their trade, and foundries are smokey places. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T09:41:15.667" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T09:41:15.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="9827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-23T23:21:03.727" Score="2" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the theme of human children raised out of human society (e.g. Mowgli or Romulus and Remus), whether by animals, gods, flowers, aliens, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the oldest story where such a theme appears?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6195" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-04-27T03:55:23.423" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T03:55:23.423" Title="Children raised out of human society - ancient stories" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10827" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10828" CreationDate="2019-04-24T03:32:38.577" Score="7" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist in &lt;em&gt;A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court&lt;/em&gt; uses this phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But that should be nothing to his discredit; the man that can do THIS kind of miracle knows enough to keep hotel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to find another passage, this time in Twain's &lt;em&gt;Notebooks&lt;/em&gt;, containing the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is an art apart. Saint Francis of Assisi said, &quot;All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep hotel.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't know what to make of it, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7195" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-04-24T07:17:56.127" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T01:15:07.767" Title="What does Mark Twain mean by &quot;keep hotel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10827" CreationDate="2019-04-25T01:15:07.767" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary has this definition for &lt;strong&gt;to keep&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To carry on and manage, to conduct as one's own (an establishment or business, a school, shop, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sense of the verb well predates Twain, dating back to &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED24173/track?counter=1&amp;amp;search_id=912222&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle English&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two common expressions of this form are &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/keep+house&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to keep house&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LAKQCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA203&amp;amp;lpg=PA203&amp;amp;dq=&amp;quot;keep+a+shop&amp;quot;.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to keep (a) shop&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore &quot;keep hotel&quot; simply means &lt;strong&gt;run a hotel&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T01:15:07.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-25T10:55:29.637" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have picked up &quot;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas&quot; after reading glowing reviews of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as I read the book further, I felt that I have completely misunderstood the points it was trying to make - rather, I did not understand them at all. After some research, I have found the most common explanation: the book is a kind of commentary on the society in the US at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This argument does not seem to be particularly fulfilling. After all, if all it was is a commentary on the 1970s, why the appraisal that the book still receives? The fact that it was adapted to a movie almost 30 years later tells me the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps I am missing a crucial point of the book, which didn't seem to contain any plot. That alone is not a big problem, as there are many books without a clear narrative, but combined with the style of writing it made reading this book a challenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is it that makes this book so appealing even now? Can the commentary in it be applied to today's society and if yes, in what way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6076" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-04-25T20:07:30.467" LastActivityDate="2019-04-25T20:07:30.467" Title="Can the social commentary in &quot;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas&quot; be applied to the present?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas&gt;&lt;hunter-s-thompson&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10830" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9827" CreationDate="2019-04-26T00:46:18.193" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This comes under the heading of history or social sciences, rather than literature.  But:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Herodotus  (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC) relates, in his &lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt; (Book II), the story of Psammeticus (Psamtik I), who ruled Egypt from 664–610 BC causing two children to be brought up with minimal contact with humans: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Taking two newborn children belonging to persons of the common sort he gave them to a shepherd to bring up at the place where his flocks were, with a manner of bringing up such as I shall say, charging him namely that no man should utter any word in their presence, and that they should be placed by themselves in a room where none might come, and at the proper time he should bring them she-goats, and when he had satisfied them with milk he should do for them whatever else was needed. These things Psammetichos did and gave him this charge wishing to hear what word the children would let break forth first after they had ceased from wailings without sense. And accordingly it came to pass; for after a space of two years had gone by, during which the shepherd went on acting so, at length, when he opened the door and entered, both children fell before him in entreaty and uttered the word bekos, stretching forth their hands. At first when he heard this the shepherd kept silence; but since this word was often repeated, as he visited them constantly and attended to them, at last he declared the matter to his master, and at his command he brought the children before his face. Then Psammetichos having himself also heard it, began to inquire what nation of men named anything bekos, and inquiring he found that the Phrygians had this name for bread. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T00:46:18.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10831" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-26T01:52:14.510" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T01:52:14.510" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T01:52:14.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10832" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-26T01:52:14.510" Score="0" Body="For questions about the bestselling 2005 novel &quot;The Book Thief&quot; by Markus Zusak. Use with tag [markus-zusak]. Questions about the film adaptation, unless they relate to the book, should be asked on Movies &amp; TV Stack Exchange instead." OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T06:54:12.213" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T06:54:12.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10833" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-04-26T01:55:22.920" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Markus Zusak (born 1975) is an Australian author most famous for his novels &lt;em&gt;The Book Thief&lt;/em&gt; (2005) and &lt;em&gt;The Messenger&lt;/em&gt; (2002; published as &lt;em&gt;I am the Messenger&lt;/em&gt; in the U.S.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T06:55:01.827" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T06:55:01.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10834" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-04-26T01:55:22.920" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Australian author Markus Zusak or any of his literary works. If this question is about one of his novels, the book in question should also be tagged." OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-26T06:55:18.803" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T06:55:18.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9827" CreationDate="2019-04-26T11:20:43.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;How about &lt;strong&gt;the oldest known work of literature, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (c. 2100 BC)&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legendary character of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enkidu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Enkidu&lt;/a&gt; is a &amp;quot;wild man&amp;quot;, living with the beasts until he is seduced and tamed by a prostitute to the ways of civilisation. He's not exactly a normal human even physically, since he was created out of clay by the gods to defeat Gilgamesh, but I think it's close enough to match what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aruru washed her hands, she broke off a piece of clay; she cast it on the ground. Thus she created Enkidu the hero. The whole of his body was covered with hair. He was clothed with long hair like a woman. The quality of his hair was luxuriant, like that of the Corn-goddess Nisaba. He knew not the land and the inhabitants thereof; he was clothed with garments as the god of the field. &lt;strong&gt;With gazelles he ate herbs, with the beasts he slaked his thirst, with the creatures of the water his heart rejoiced.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the beasts Enkidu slaked his thirst; with the creatures of the waters his heart rejoiced. Then Enkidu, offspring of the mountains who with the gazelles eats herbs, with the beasts he slaked his thirst, with the creatures of the water his heart rejoiced. [...] For six days and six nights Enkidu succumbed to her charms and had intercourse with Shamhat. After he had satisfied himself with her abundance, he turned his countenance toward his cattle. His gazelles lay, and looked at Enkidu, and the beasts of the field turned away from him. This startled Enkidu and his body grew faint; his knees became stiff, as his cattle departed, and he became less agile than ever before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modernised version of William Muss-Arnolt's 1901 translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-26T11:20:43.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10837" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-27T10:53:50.530" Score="4" ViewCount="1247" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Oscar Wilde's &lt;em&gt;The Picture of Dorian Gray&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are &lt;strong&gt;corrupt without being charming&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;corrupt without being charming&amp;quot; mean in this passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7205" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T00:27:53.820" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T01:25:01.000" Title="Can someone explain what &quot;corrupt without being charming&quot; means?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-picture-of-dorian-gray&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10838" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10858" CreationDate="2019-04-28T00:58:06.857" Score="4" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Brideshead Revisited features a side character, a certain Captain Foulenough. In Russian translation his last name is rendered as Буремглой, obviously referring to a Pushkin's line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Буря мглою небо кроет&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The storm covers sky with darkness)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a famous poem, known by every Russian fourth-grader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search for &lt;em&gt;foul enough&lt;/em&gt; in a similar context yields &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/BAD9522.0001.001/1:6?rgn=div1;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Island&lt;/a&gt;, by Edwin Arlington Robinson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a storm foul enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I trust the translator; I am sure she came up with such rendering for a reason. On the other hand, I doubt that Robinson was known in 1945 England as much as Pushkin in Russia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question is, did Waugh intentionally attach a hidden meaning, and did he expect this hidden meaning to be understood by an average reader?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T21:25:55.427" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T21:25:55.427" Title="Is there a hidden meaning in the name of Captain Foulenough?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;evelyn-waugh&gt;&lt;brideshead-revisited&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2019-04-28T04:34:55.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say it refers to the idea of a slick, snake oil-y salesman: corrupt, but corrupt by charming you out of your money. They sort of find the beauty in the ugly things; smooth it all over until it is palatable. Someone who finds ugly meanings in beautiful things isn't charming at all, but they are still corrupt. Thus, the contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T04:34:55.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-28T21:31:49.913" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the text of Vladimir Nabokov: The Beginning of Consciousness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the author convey the tone of the panic that can be aroused by contemplating the &quot;prenatal abyss&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our&#xA;  existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of&#xA;  darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views&#xA;  the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at&#xA;  some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a&#xA;  young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking&#xA;  for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks&#xA;  before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the&#xA;  same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist&#xA;  there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse&#xA;  of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar&#xA;  gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But&#xA;  what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby&#xA;  carriage standing there on the porch; even that was empty, as if, in&#xA;  the reverse order of events, his very bones had disintegrated. Such&#xA;  fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first&#xA;  and last things often tend to have an adolescent note — unless,&#xA;  possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion.&#xA;  Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore&#xA;  and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in&#xA;  between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and&#xA;  immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not&#xA;  enjoy it too much. I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the&#xA;  urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over&#xA;  again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest&#xA;  of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my&#xA;  life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time&#xA;  separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness&#xA;  is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I&#xA;  have journeyed back in thought — with thought hopelessly tapering off&#xA;  as I went — to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet&#xA;  only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without&#xA;  exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my&#xA;  identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into&#xA;  realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured&#xA;  the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels&#xA;  who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a&#xA;  Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my&#xA;  oldest dreams for keys and clues — and let me say at once that I&#xA;  reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of&#xA;  Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like&#xA;  searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its&#xA;  bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love&#xA;  life of their parents. Initially, I was unaware that time, so&#xA;  boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which&#xA;  is the next best to probing one’s eternity) I see the awakening of&#xA;  consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals&#xA;  between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception&#xA;  are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers&#xA;  and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the&#xA;  inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems&#xA;  to have been established only later, when it was directly associated&#xA;  with my discovering their age in relation to mine. Judging by the&#xA;  strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately&#xA;  invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns&#xA;  of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother’s birthday, in late&#xA;  summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the&#xA;  answers I received. All this is as it should be according to the&#xA;  theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in&#xA;  the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the&#xA;  dawning of the sense of time. Thus, when the newly disclosed, fresh&#xA;  and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental&#xA;  formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me. I&#xA;  was given a tremendously invigorating shock. As if subjected to a&#xA;  second baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking&#xA;  undergone fifty months earlier by a howling, half-drowned half-Victor&#xA;  (my mother, through the half-closed door, behind which an old custom&#xA;  bade parents retreat, managed to correct the bungling archpresbyter,&#xA;  Father Konstantin Vetvenitski), I felt myself plunged abruptly into a&#xA;  radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of&#xA;  time. One shared it — just as excited bathers share shining seawater —&#xA;  with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by&#xA;  time’s common flow, an environment quite different from the spacial&#xA;  world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. At&#xA;  that instant, I became acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old&#xA;  being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother,&#xA;  and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold,&#xA;  holding my right hand, was my father. Between them, as they evenly&#xA;  progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun&#xA;  fleck to sun fleck, along the middle of the path, which I easily&#xA;  identify today with an alley of ornamental oaklings in the park of our&#xA;  country estate, Vyra, in the former Province of St. Petersburg,&#xA;  Russia. Indeed, from my present ridge of remote, isolated, almost&#xA;  uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that&#xA;  August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. If my left-hand-holder&#xA;  and my right-hand-holder had both been present before in my vague&#xA;  infant world, they had been so under the mask of a tender incognito;&#xA;  but now my father’s attire, the resplendent uniform of the House&#xA;  Guards, with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his&#xA;  chest and back, came out like the sun, and for several years afterward&#xA;  I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself&#xA;  informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order&#xA;  to check a new watch. My father, let it be noted, had served his term&#xA;  of military training long before I was born, so I suppose he had that&#xA;  day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a&#xA;  joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness — which&#xA;  again has recapitulatory implications, since the first creatures on&#xA;  earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2543" LastActivityDate="2019-04-28T21:31:49.913" Title="How does the author convey the tone of the panic that can be aroused by contemplating the &quot;prenatal abyss&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10841" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-26T14:13:30.347" Score="3" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm new in English and I want to understand this sentence from Isaiah Berlin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hedgehog and the Fox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Rousseau must have strengthened, if he did not actually originate, his growing tendency to idealize the soil and its cultivators — the simple peasant, who for Tolstoy is a repository of almost as rich a stock of 'natural' virtues as Rousseau's noble savage.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &quot;the simple peasant&quot; refer to in this sentence?   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;a repository of almost as rich a stock of 'natural' virtues as Rousseau's noble savage&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7226" OwnerDisplayName="Nastaran Heydari" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-04-29T13:32:36.163" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T13:32:36.163" Title="What is the meaning of a complex sentence from &quot;The Hedgehog and the Fox&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;jean-jacques-rousseau&gt;&lt;isaiah-berlin&gt;&lt;the-hedgehog-and-the-fox&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10841" CreationDate="2019-04-27T01:30:10.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The simple peasant&quot; refers to the cultivators of the soil mentioned just before.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Rousseau claimed that, before humanity was corrupted by civilization, people were noble savages with a lot of natural virtues. Tolstoy claimed that simple peasants had almost as many virtues as the noble savages. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Andreas Blass" LastActivityDate="2019-04-27T01:30:10.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-29T12:57:48.053" Score="2" ViewCount="455" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does the term &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;myopia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; have a special meaning in the context of literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myopia is in its most direct meaning a healthcare condition: relating to, or exhibiting myopia : NEARSIGHTED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myopia or myopic should refer to:&#xA;lacking in foresight or discernment : narrow in perspective and without concern for broader implications.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/myopic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quotes from merriam-webster&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like most who mutilate Chopin, he was musically myopic, fawning over each note instead of seeking the longer shape of a phrase, its arc and context, where the real beauty lay.&#xA;  — Andrew Corsello&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present.&#xA;  — Drew Gilpin Faust&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he ran again in 2013, this time without a primary opponent, his campaign had an almost myopic focus on a subject dear to Republicans: job creation.&#xA;  — Andy Kroll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1938" LastEditorUserId="1938" LastEditDate="2019-04-30T15:37:22.770" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T21:02:00.733" Title="What is the meaning of 'myopia' in literature studies?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10845" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-29T13:07:22.183" Score="0" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure about the precise wording of the sentence, neither in english or german.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the quote is often used when referring to a mans life or career that has gone from the lowest low (e.g. prison or homeless) to the highest high of society (e.g. successful businessman, minister).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: It might also be a paraphrase of a story in one of Goethe's fictional stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1938" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T05:58:12.177" Title="Where does Goethe refer to &quot;from the deepest mountain valley to the highest mountain top&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-04-29T16:19:08.530" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 19th century, why did literary realism start? I mean it in contrast to romanticism. Why did writers stop to express their ideals and conflicts in their works? I think it might be because none of them came true. But what did the new way of depicting the reality bring to them? This almost scientifically objective or very satirical way of writing. What was the purpose of such literature?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apologize if my question is not clear, I had a hard time formulating it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7211" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T16:19:08.530" Title="Purpose of realistic literature" Tags="&lt;realism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10845" CreationDate="2019-04-29T22:54:21.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are asking for the precise wording of an unidentified passage?  Step one would be to find the sentence  you allude to.  Could it be this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Project Gutenberg English version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36483/36483-h/36483-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wilhelm Meister&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Book II, Chapter I ends with this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To awaken these again within him, he would recall to memory the scenes of his by-gone happiness. He would paint them to his fancy in the liveliest colors, transport himself again into the days when they were real; and when standing on the highest elevation he could reach, when the sunshine of past times again seemed to animate his limbs and heave his bosom, he would look back into the fearful chasm, would feast his eye on its dismembering depth, then plunge down into its horrors, and thus force from nature the bitterest pains. With such repeated cruelty did he tear himself in pieces; for youth, which is so rich in undeveloped force, knows not what it squanders when, to the anguish which a loss occasions, it adds so many sorrows of its own production, as if it meant then first to give the right value to what is gone forever. He likewise felt so convinced that his present loss was the sole, the first, the last, he ever could experience in life, that he turned away from every consolation which aimed at showing that his sorrows might be less than endless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-04-29T22:54:21.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10845" CreationDate="2019-04-30T05:58:12.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at Wikiquote’s page on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe&lt;/a&gt;, I find the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Der echte gesetzgebende Künstler strebt nach Kunstwahrheit, der gesetzlose, der einem blinden Trieb solgt, nach Naturwirklichkeit; durch jenen wird die Kunst zum höchsten Gipfel, durch diesen aus ihre niedrigste Stufe gebracht.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The true, prescriptive artist strives after artistic truth; the lawless artist, following blind instinct, after an appearance of naturalness. The one leads to the highest peak of art, the other to its lowest depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1798). ‘Einleitung in die Propyläen’. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pt01werkegoeth47goet/page/22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Goethes Werke&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 47, p. 23&lt;/a&gt;. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the ‘highest peak’ and ‘lowest depth’ that you are looking for, though the context (the search for artistic truth) is quite different from what you are looking for (the span of someone’s career).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-04-30T05:58:12.177" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10844" CreationDate="2019-05-01T06:56:58.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;All of the examples you give seem to be using the term &quot;myopic&quot; to mean focusing on something small, or very specific, while ignoring the larger view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like most who mutilate Chopin, he was musically myopic, fawning over each note instead of seeking the longer shape of a phrase, its arc and context, where the real beauty lay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, we're talking about someone, presumably a musician. The paragraph is saying that he, this musician, &quot;mutilates&quot; Chopin (a famous composer). The musician focuses - myopically - on each individual note, where the real beauty is in how they all work together. He's nearsightedly peering at the notes instead of seeing the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this example, we're again using myopic in a sense of not seeing the bigger picture. The &quot;inevitably myopic present&quot; is that we focus on the here and now. The present is inherently not the past or future. We inevitably focus on the present, not the past or future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he ran again in 2013, this time without a primary opponent, his campaign had an almost myopic focus on a subject dear to Republicans: job creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one's is talking about the focus of the candidate's campaign - job creation. This person running for office is basing his campaign around one thing. He's focused on this one thing, so much so that it is basically the only thing that he's working with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to answer the initial question: &lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;, it doesn't have a &quot;special meaning&quot; in literary context. It's a word; treat it as one. If you come across a word in a work of literature, the interpretation and nuances of that will change drastically based on the context and surrounding text. It has to be analyzed along with all the other words.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Don't be myopically focused on analyzing this one word at the expense of the others. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T06:56:58.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2019-05-01T11:02:16.620" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with another answer here. Mama knew that Eugene wouldn't share his tea with his children, as a sign that they are not worthy anymore. He thinks they have sinned multiple times and do not deserve the tea. Yet he is unwittingly protecting his children. The reason Kambili gets so mad is because she understands that Mama put it in his tea because he wouldn't give her love sips anymore. Therefore to her it means that her father was disappointed in her and though she didn't deserve it. This affects Kambili greatly, causing her to lash out, because all she ever wanted, and all she still wants, is her father's approval and love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7214" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T00:44:35.887" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:44:35.887" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10852" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-01T12:51:45.290" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the fourth and fifth stanzas of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Lord_Byron_(ed._Coleridge,_Prothero)/Poetry/Volume_1/To_Mary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Mary, On Receiving Her Picture&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Lord Byron:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here, I behold its beauteous hue;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      But where's the beam so sweetly straying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which gave a lustre to its blue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;Like Luna o'er the ocean playing?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sweet copy! far more dear to me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &lt;strong&gt;Lifeless, unfeeling as thou art,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than all the living forms could be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Save her who plac'd thee next my heart.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth stanza, Byron mentions the blue eyes of his beloved. He asks where is the beam of her eyes sweetly wandering? Then he says, &quot;Like Luna o'er the ocean playing&quot;. What does &quot;Luna&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth stanza, he says that the copy of her picture is even more dearer to him. Then he says, &quot;Lifeless, unfeeling as thou art&quot;. Does it mean that the painting is lifeless and dull, for Mary might have been lively and vivacious as a person or does it mean that Mary is lifeless and unfeeling just an inanimate object such as a painting is? Then he says, &quot;Than all the living forms could be, Save her who plac'd thee next my heart.&quot; What could it possibly mean?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-01T13:06:45.733" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T21:24:28.953" Title="Who is &quot;Luna&quot; in Byron's &quot;To Mary, On Receiving Her Picture&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10852" CreationDate="2019-05-01T13:47:35.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Luna is another name for the Moon. Most celestial bodies have a fixed name, but &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; moon is an oddity in that regard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As it turns out, the Moon did have other names, notable among them, and in keeping with the naming schema of other local celestial bodies, was one taken from the name of an ancient and powerful deity- Luna, the Roman Goddess of the Moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Latin in origin, the word “Luna” is still very much associated with the Moon (as is “Selene”, to a lesser extent, the Greek Moon goddess). For instance, “Luna” is noted as being the root of words like “lunar”. However, “Luna” as a name for the Moon is still pre-dated by early derivatives of the word moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://gizmodo.com/how-the-moon-got-its-name-1696701328&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How the Moon Got Its Name&lt;/a&gt;. Also verified by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verse in the fifth stanza reads oddly because Byron has subverted the natural-language order to make things rhyme. To break it down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;sweet copy&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;lifeless and unfeeling&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yet it is &amp;quot;far more dear&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;all living forms&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Except for the one living form (&amp;quot;Save her&amp;quot;, here shorthand for &amp;quot;save for her&amp;quot; an archaic phrasing of 'except for her') that put the picture next to his heart.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, using Byron's language in a clearer sequence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sweet copy!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lifeless, unfeeling as thou art,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[you are] far more dear to me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than all the living forms could be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Except for] her who plac'd thee next my heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, then, Byron values the portrait above any other human being, except for the person, Mary, who gave it to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T21:24:28.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10855" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11299" CreationDate="2019-05-01T17:27:23.947" Score="11" ViewCount="1879" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's well known among &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; nerds that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is located in Scotland. But the only sources I've found for this are extratextual, e.g. from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/1997/0697-herald-johnstone.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;interviews with the author&lt;/a&gt; or from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/writing-by-jk-rowling/the-hogwarts-express&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pottermore website&lt;/a&gt;. These are commonly considered to be &quot;canon&quot; among the Potter-fan community, but (as someone rather sceptical both about this particular author's extratextual assertions about her universe and about the true authors of writing on Pottermore) I'm interested in evidence from the 7 main books alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there enough evidence in the books to conclude that Hogwarts is in Scotland?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm pretty sure it's never explicitly stated, but maybe there's some other evidence pointing to this conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T14:24:26.033" Title="Do the *books* show that Hogwarts is in Scotland?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10856" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10855" CreationDate="2019-05-01T19:26:58.510" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Scotland&quot; is only mentioned once in the series, and that is as a Quidditch team in Chapter Five of &lt;em&gt;Goblet of Fire&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Wales lost to Uganda, and Scotland was slaughtered by Luxembourg.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Sixteen of &lt;em&gt;Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt; there is a mention of Harry and Hermione camping in a Scottish loch, but not in any relation to Hogwarts's location:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They did not dare remain in any area too long, so rather than staying in the south of England, where a hard ground frost was the worst of their worries, they continued to meander up and down the country, braving a mountainside, where sleet pounded the tent; a wide, flat marsh, where the tent was flooded with chill water; and a tiny island in the middle of a Scottish loch, where snow half buried the tent in the night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is certainly reasonable that Hogwarts is in Scotland. We know that the Hogwarts Express leaves from London at 11:00, and when they arrive at Hogwarts they have a feast and go to sleep. Indeed, when they arrive it is already described as night. For instance, in Chapter Six of &lt;em&gt;Philosopher's Stone&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harry shivered in the cold night air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the train ride is probably something like nine or ten hours long, as night begins quite late on the first day of September.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direction of the journey is also described in several places as being northward. For instance, in Chapter Five of &lt;em&gt;Chamber of Secrets&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Hogwarts Express was streaking along below them like a scarlet snake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Due north,&quot; said Ron, checking the compass on the dashboard. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They made regular checks on the train as they flew farther and farther north, each dip beneath the clouds showing them a different view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on where in Scotland, the distance could be something like 400-600 miles (in a relatively straight line). This could be consistent with the train journey described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, Hogwarts is consistently described as being among mountains. For instance, in Chapter Nineteen of &lt;em&gt;Order of the Phoenix&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the mountains around Hogwarts became&#xA;  snowcapped, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be perfectly consistent with a location in Scotland, which is, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountains_and_hills_of_Scotland&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the most mountainous part of the United Kingdom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Scotland is the most mountainous country in the United Kingdom. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from the way Hermione describes Durmstrang in Chapter Eleven of &lt;em&gt;Goblet of Fire&lt;/em&gt;, we can perhaps infer that Hogwarts is not quite so far north:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But I think Durmstrang must be somewhere in the far north,&quot; said Hermione thoughtfully. &quot;Somewhere very cold, because they've got fur capes as part of their uniforms.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Durmstrang is probably significantly more north than Hogwarts is. If so, then in order for Hogwarts to be in Scotland, the potential countries where Durmstrang could be would have to be pretty limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in conclusion, while we are never directly told that Hogwarts is in Scotland there doesn't seem to be much information that would contradict such a possibility, and, indeed, judging by the Hogwarts Express's journey Scotland would seem to be the most likely location. As you can see on the map below, when you travel far enough north from London there is nowhere else to go besides Scotland:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jPf4T.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jPf4T.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of Google Maps showing United Kingdom&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also abundantly clear from &lt;em&gt;Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them&lt;/em&gt; which was published in 2001 while there were still three books remaining in the series (so I don't know how &quot;extratextual&quot; you consider it). In the first entry in the book (Acromantula) there is the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rumours that a colony of Acromantula has been established in Scotland are unconfirmed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would seem to be a reference to the Acromantula colony on the Hogwarts grounds. Indeed, in the first edition of the book which contains notes from Harry and friends, the word &quot;unconfirmed&quot; is crossed out and replaced with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;confirmed by Harry Potter and Ron Weasley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, it is clear from there that Hogwarts is in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2019-05-01T19:26:58.510" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10838" CreationDate="2019-05-03T00:55:44.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Waugh seems to have borrowed the character &lt;em&gt;Captain Foulenough&lt;/em&gt; from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beachcomber_(pen_name)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long-running newspaper column&lt;/a&gt; published under the pen name Beachcomber. So if &lt;em&gt;Captain Foulenough&lt;/em&gt; is a reference to Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem &lt;em&gt;The Island&lt;/em&gt;, it would not have been Evelyn Waugh's reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it seems very unlikely that it is a reference to &lt;em&gt;The Island&lt;/em&gt;. Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote a handful of poems that are quite well-known (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44982/richard-cory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Cory&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44979/mr-floods-party&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mr. Flood's Party&lt;/a&gt; being among the most famous), but as far as I know, &lt;em&gt;The Island&lt;/em&gt; was never one of his better known poems. And naming an &quot;archetypical cad and gatecrasher&quot; after a line in a poem about Napoleon seems rather bizarre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T00:55:44.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T12:04:13.933" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first paragraph of &quot;The Parable of the King and the Maiden&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden and whose heart was unaffected by the wisdom that is so often loudly preached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;&lt;em&gt;wisdom that is so often loudly preached&lt;/em&gt;&quot; mean here? Does it mean the king didn't listen to other people who thought he's wrong about the girl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7226" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-03T16:02:24.537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-03T16:02:24.537" Title="What does &quot;wisdom that is so often loudly preached&quot; mean in the Parable of the King and the Maiden?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;soren-kierkegaard&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16522" CreationDate="2019-05-03T17:21:03.250" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finwake.com/1024chapter3/1024finn3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnwake.com&lt;/a&gt; claims that &quot;egourge&quot;, in the following line from &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; (p.g. 49-50), derives from &quot;egoourgos (gr) - worker for the self&quot;, but Google Translate does not seem to know of any word &quot;egoourgos&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now let the centuple celves of my &lt;strong&gt;egourge&lt;/strong&gt; as Micholas de Cusack calls&#xA;  them, — of all of whose I in my hereinafter of course by recourse&#xA;  demission me — by the coincidance of their contraries reamalgamerge in&#xA;  that indentity of undiscernibles where the Baxters and the Fleshmans&#xA;  may they cease to bidivil uns and (but at this poingt though the iron&#xA;  thrust of his cockspurt start might have prepared us we are well- nigh&#xA;  stinkpotthered by the mustardpunge in the tailend) this outandin brown&#xA;  candlestock melt Nolan's into peese!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone justify this derivation, or source a reference in the literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked  &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/504755/how-can-james-joyces-word-egourge-be-seen-via-greek-as-worker-for-the-se&quot;&gt;essentially the same question&lt;/a&gt; on our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language and Usage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2019-07-11T19:08:19.450" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T16:29:26.760" Title="Does &quot;egourge&quot; in Finnegans Wake derive from the Greek &quot;egoourgos&quot; meaning &quot;worker for the self&quot;?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T21:35:10.397" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed Vargas Llosa credits Sartre with his characters being amoral. I'm wondering when does Sartre write about amorality? About characters not facing repercusions for their amoral acts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm very curious since in most western movies, even if there's not clear divide between good and evil. The characters do face repercussions for being amoral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7227" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T20:02:57.320" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T20:02:57.320" Title="Sartre on amorality and his influence on Vargas Llosa?" Tags="&lt;jean-paul-sartre&gt;&lt;mario-vargas-llosa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-03T21:36:56.750" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was written by one of the four (or five) &quot;Lions&quot; of post-war Dutch literature. The story concerns an old retired actor who lives alone. He has had some mysterious dealings with his older (or younger) family members. One day he receives an anonymous letter in the post offering him one last role in a Shakespeare revival (King Lear, Hamlet, The Tempest?). He decides against it then changes his mind...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7228" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T12:22:21.830" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T12:39:12.023" Title="Dutch Novel: old retired actor who receives an anonymous letter offering him one last role" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10867" CreationDate="2019-05-04T07:54:38.727" Score="1" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that Frankenstein's family were rich enough for him to take frequent vacations, but were they titled nobility? And if they were what title or titles did they hold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7229" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-05-04T17:09:24.380" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T17:09:24.380" Title="Was Victor Frankenstein an aristocrat?" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10865" CreationDate="2019-05-04T15:42:44.213" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the closest you come to an answer is in the first paragraph of chapter I (of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; edition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_nobility#Geneva&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swiss nobility&lt;/a&gt; makes it clear that at the time of writing, the concept of titled nobility did not play a big role in the Republic of Geneva, at least not when compared with England, France, or Italy.  I do not know know if &quot;ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation&quot; counts as qualifying for the aristocracy.  If your question is really &quot;was his name &lt;em&gt;von&lt;/em&gt; Frankenstein?&quot;, I think the answer is &quot;probably not; there is no direct evidence in the book&quot;.  Otherwise, I think the answer depends on your precise understanding of the word &quot;aristocracy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-05-04T15:42:44.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2019-05-04T17:58:47.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am sure Shams was just answering the verse that Kimya asked him to interpret from Quran. If we closely examine the book, we come to a point that Kimya was never told the final of the four stages of interpreting the translation. The idea that a &amp;quot;Sufi is a celibate&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;they are free from worldly desires&amp;quot; is so weak in this case. It was a duty for Shams to answer Kimya. If we closely observe the situation after this we can know Kimya turned into a Sufi. The proofs are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shams never did anything without any reason.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rumi didn't even feel/smell that something unnecessary or bad&#xA;was on. (He knew the intention behind Shams Tabriz's act)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Refraining from sexual desire (She got the answer and the point that&#xA;this act of Shams was an answer/clue to God and a lesson for her). This also destroyed the desires of Kimya's Nafs/Self-an important part of Sufism nouned as &amp;quot;unlearning&amp;quot; in the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silence (It's the beauty of a Sufi, and the path to God)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hunger (It's the beauty of a Sufi, and its reward is God)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stare (That's the only thing a Sufi keeps. God dwells in the eyes of&#xA;Sufi)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the points that support the hidden truth behind the tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7231" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-17T16:11:44.700" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T16:11:44.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10871" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10901" CreationDate="2019-05-04T23:07:08.767" Score="17" ViewCount="635" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I noticed that in &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; Sauron acts as a very interesting villain. He never makes a corporeal appearance, nor does he have any acting dialogue. He's mentioned plenty of times through other characters, history, and lore, but never makes an appearance himself. I know the canon mythology is that Sauron doesn't have a physical body from his rebirth, but what is significant about that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T08:31:23.883" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T00:47:59.253" Title="What is the significance of Sauron never having a physical presence in the Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10881" CreationDate="2019-05-05T17:26:40.767" Score="5" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist in Charlotte Brontë's 'The Professor', who is employed as a teacher of English in a Belgian school, is surprised upon reading an unusually well-written creative essay by one of his students; and yet he still makes a few critical remarks about it. Here is the portion of it that he quotes, which is a fictional monologue by one of the characters in the essay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is Christmas Eve, I mark the date; here I sit alone on a rude couch of rushes, sheltered by the thatch of a herdsman’s hut; I, whose inheritance was a kingdom, owe my night’s harbourage to a poor serf; my throne is usurped, my crown presses the brow of an invader; I have no friends; my troops wander broken in the hills of Wales; reckless robbers spoil my country; my subjects lie prostrate, their breasts crushed by the heel of the brutal Dane. Fate! thou hast done thy worst, and now thou standest before me resting thy hand on thy blunted blade. Ay; I see thine eye confront mine and demand why I still live, why I still hope. Pagan demon, I credit not thine omnipotence, and so cannot succumb to thy power. My God, whose Son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise—in Him is my trust; and though stripped and crushed by thee—though naked, desolate, void of resource—I do not despair, I cannot despair: were the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray; Jehovah, in his own time, will aid.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist comments that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there were errors of orthography, there were foreign idioms, there were some faults of construction, there were verbs irregular transformed into verbs regular; it was mostly made up, as the above example shows, of short and somewhat rude sentences, and the style stood in great need of polish and sustained dignity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His comments seem a little odd to me. The sentences in the extract are certainly not short, at least not universally; as to whether they are rude, I can allow for disagreements on the matters of style, but even so I fail to see what in particular is 'rude' about the student's prose. Apart from a certain turgidity I don't see any serious issues, but then again this was written in the immediate wake of the Romantic era, so pompous prose would have been perceived as quite normal at the time. Are the protagonist's comments then motivated by some prejudice on his part, or is the essay genuinely flawed? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T19:49:16.420" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T14:01:46.893" Title="Protagonist's comments on his student's essay in 'The Professor' by Charlotte Brontë" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;the-professor&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10873" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10905" CreationDate="2019-05-05T19:03:03.060" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading several lines from what I think was a Shakespearean type play. It was between a villain and one of his henchman, and I think they were discussing the murder of someone referred to as “He”. The villain was trying to keep the conversation vague, and I think he was annoyed by the henchman, who referred to him as “My lord”. It seemed like it was by Shakespeare, but I did some searches and couldn’t find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is kind of a long shot due to the lack of information I have, because I only read a little excerpt of it, a while ago, but I would appreciate any help I can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7239" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T12:30:56.180" Title="Play: With A Memorable Conversation between a villain and his henchman" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10874" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10875" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Professor&quot; (1857), a novel by Charlotte Brontë. Use this tag with the [charlotte-bronte] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T19:51:04.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10876" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-05T20:09:45.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-05T20:09:45.153" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T20:09:45.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10877" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-05T20:09:45.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa (born 1936) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T15:54:01.933" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T15:54:01.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2659" CreationDate="2019-05-05T21:17:37.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might find this of interest: &lt;a href=&quot;https://thenovelsmithy.com/character-arcs-flat-arcs/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://thenovelsmithy.com/character-arcs-flat-arcs/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nausicaa's story is essentially that of a Messiah figure. It's less about her learning and growing as a character, and more about her struggling to save the people she meets and demonstrating the correct path to them. It's a very tricky plot to pull off well --- can easily come off as preachy or cloying -- but Miyazaki manages it. There's two key factors that I think keep Nausicaa from being a Sue -- first, her genuine humility and lack of pretentiousness; and second, that achieving her goals requires a massive amount of effort and struggle on her part. Part of what makes a Sue a Sue is that the fictional world and the writer bend over backwards to give the character what they want and make things easy for them. Nausicaa actually has to work and struggle to achieve her peace; and that makes all the difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7240" LastActivityDate="2019-05-05T21:17:37.800" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-06T10:34:25.017" Score="5" ViewCount="1125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this a real quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Few people have the imagination for reality&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen it attributed to Goethe in 1815, but I cannot find the source..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7243" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T10:35:43.537" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T09:23:21.567" Title="Is this quote by Goethe, and what is the source?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10872" CreationDate="2019-05-06T14:01:46.893" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two ways to read this passage: we can take Crimsworth’s claims about Frances’ devoir at face value, and deduce his preferred model of prose style; or we can treat his claims with skepticism, and uncover what he ironically reveals about his attitude towards Frances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Face value&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crimsworth’s criticism that “the style stood in great need of polish and sustained dignity” suggests that his model was the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustan_prose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Augustan prose&lt;/a&gt;’ of the 18th century, which reached its pinnacle in the essays of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Johnson&lt;/a&gt;. Here, for example, is the first sentence of Johnson’s preface to the plays of Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That praises are without reason lavished on the dead, and that the honours due only to excellence are paid to antiquity, is a complaint likely to be always continued by those, who, being able to add nothing to truth, hope for eminence from the heresies of paradox; or those, who, being forced by disappointment upon consolatory expedients, are willing to hope from posterity what the present age refuses, and flatter themselves that the regard which is yet denied by envy, will be at last bestowed by time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Johnson (1765). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playsofwilliamsh01shak_1/page/n13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, vol. I, p. v.&lt;/a&gt;. London: printed for J. and R. Tonson, etc.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johnson’s long sentences use parallel clauses for balance and antithesis; he repeats ideas in different words for emphasis or to make fine distinctions of meanings; and he employs Latinisms and abstractions. His style was enormously influential, both for and against: his fans admired his elegance and sublimity; while his detractors scorned his pomposity, obscurity, and monotony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we look at Frances’ devoir in this context, we can see that it lacks the balanced parallelisms and rational consideration of thesis and antithesis in complex grammatical structures, of Crimsworth’s prose models, substituting instead an outpouring of feeling in short clauses juxaposed without conjunctions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, even if we take Crimsworth’s observations at face value, we are not obliged to agree with him: we might well prefer the emotional force of Frances’ style. Virginia Woolf, for example, criticized Charlotte Brontë’s attempts to emulate the Johnsonian prose style:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence that was current at the beginning of the nineteenth century ran something like this perhaps: “The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art and endless generations of truth and beauty. Success prompts to exertion; and habit facilitates success.” That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon and the rest. It was a sentence that was unsuited for a woman’s use. Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Virginia Woolf (1929). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/woolf_aroom/page/n113&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Room of One’s Own&lt;/em&gt;, p. 115&lt;/a&gt;. London: Hogarth Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Irony&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other approach to this passage is to take seriously the fact that Crimsworth is mistaken: the quoted passage from Frances’ devoir is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; “mostly made up” of “short and somewhat rude sentences”. Such a mistake seems quite telling: it suggests in Crimsworth such a need to criticize his pupil’s work that he is driven to find faults that are not there. It is not hard to see that this arises from his patriarchal view that the relationship between man and woman corresponds to that between master and pupil. Here’s Helen Davis making this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frances’s devoirs (which he places in quotes) and her quick mastery of English also serve to undermine Crimsworth’s narrative claims of awakening her through his own skills as teacher because they clearly demonstrate her intelligence, eloquence, and creativity. After quoting a devoir that is both eloquent and creative, he says that “It was mostly made up, as the above example shows, of short and somewhat rude sentences, and the style stood in great need of polish and sustained dignity”. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the devoir is so obviously not composed of short, unpolished sentences, coupled with Frances’s first oral recitation, indicates that she has a natural aptitude for writing and speaking well in English. Crimsworth presents her as coming into beauty and intelligence after he meets her so that he can claim credit for her transformation and demonstrate control over her, but instead the implied reader sees his unreliability when discussing Frances. The contrast between her reality, and his description of that reality, also foregrounds her intelligence and determination to the implied reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Helen H. Davis (2015). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2015.0009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“I seemed to possess two wives”: Implied Narrative in Charlotte Brontë’s &lt;em&gt;The Professor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Journal of Narrative Theory&lt;/em&gt; 45:2, p. 202.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crimsworth needs to find fault with Frances’ work in order to maintain the Victorian view of the husband as the teacher and superior of his wife, a view that Frances has to challenge in order to achieve a relationship of equals. While she considers his proposal of marriage, Crimsworth mediates on the role of husband:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something flattering to man’s strength, something consonant to his honourable pride, in the idea of becoming the providence of what he loves—feeding and clothing it, as God does the lilies of the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charlotte Brontë (1857). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/professorbycurr00brongoog/page/n176&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Professor&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 2, pp. 169–170&lt;/a&gt;. London: Smith, Elder &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Frances rejects the idea of giving up her work, and even though we can only see her through Crimsworth’s narrative, we can see that she is already considering how best to manage him so as to meet her needs without wounding his &lt;em&gt;amour-propre&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How rich you are, monsieur!” and then she stirred uneasy in my arms. “Three thousand francs!” she murmured, “While I get only twelve hundred!” She went on faster. “However, it must be so for the present; and, monsieur, were you not saying something about my giving up my place? Oh no! I shall hold it fast;” and her little fingers emphatically tightened on mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Brontë, pp. 170–171.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T14:01:46.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10882" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10880" CreationDate="2019-05-06T15:17:44.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest appearance of this quote that I can find is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a short while she [Diane Arbus] studied with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berenice_Abbott&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berenice Abbott&lt;/a&gt;, who photographed New York and James Joyce and collected [Eugène] Atget. Abbott thought photography was the ultimate art form of the twentieth century because it demands speed and science, and she was fond of quoting Goethe: “&lt;strong&gt;Few people have the imagination for reality.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Patricia Bosworth (1984). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.213834/page/n79&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diana Arbus: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 67&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote does not seem to come from any translation of Goethe, nor does it resemble Goethe’s style, but possibly it is Abbott’s own paraphrase or summary of a passage by Goethe. It has something of the flavour of maxim number 592:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Es gehört eine eigene Geisteswendung dazu, um das gestaltlose Wirkliche in seiner eigensten Art zu fassen und es von Hirngespinnsten zu unterscheiden, die sich denn auch mit einer gewissen Wirklichkeit lebhaft aufdringen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes a special turn of mind to grasp formless reality in its essential nature and to distinguish it from the figments of the imagination which, all the same, thrust themselves urgently on our attention with a certain semblance of reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/goethemaximenun00goetgoog/page/n179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maximen und Reflexionen&lt;/em&gt;, p. 128&lt;/a&gt;. Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft. Translated by Elisabeth Stopp (1998). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/GoethemaximsAndReflectionspenguin.num/page/n83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maxims and Reflections&lt;/em&gt;, p. 84&lt;/a&gt;. Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T09:23:21.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10884" CreationDate="2019-05-06T16:09:21.983" Score="3" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what ahn in &quot;Maggie: A Girl of the Streets&quot; by Stephen Crane means. It can be read from this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.hku.hk/courses/engl1039/Crane.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://english.hku.hk/courses/engl1039/Crane.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some lines with it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah, go ahn,&quot; replied the other argumentatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little girl cried out: &quot;Ah, Tommie, come ahn. Dere's Jimmie and fader. Don't be apullin' me back.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Come out in deh hall, Mary Murphy, damn yeh, if yehs want a row. Come ahn, yeh overgrown terrier, come ahn.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7245" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-18T19:45:30.220" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T19:45:30.220" Title="What does ahn in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;stephen-crane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10883" CreationDate="2019-05-06T16:29:23.277" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems clear from context that &quot;ahn&quot; is the author's way of showing &lt;strong&gt;a dialect pronunciation of &quot;on&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. Rewriting your quotes in standard English spelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah, go on,&quot; replied the other argumentatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little girl cried out: &quot;Ah, Tommie, come on. There's Jimmie and father. Don't be pulling me back.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Come out in the hall, Mary Murphy, damn you, if you want a row. Come on, you overgrown terrier, come on.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ahn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; lists &quot;ahn&quot; as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eye dialect&lt;/a&gt; spelling of &quot;on&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, &quot;on&quot; is pronounced more like &quot;ahn&quot; in &lt;strong&gt;American English&lt;/strong&gt; accents. You can learn more about the American &quot;o&quot; vowel in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr_KAu-_Hmo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Youtube video&lt;/a&gt;, and there's a Q&amp;amp;A about it on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/146641/87724&quot;&gt;English Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;. Pronuncian has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://pronuncian.com/pronounce-short-o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;short page&lt;/a&gt; on the American &quot;short O&quot;, and you can verify that it sounds like &quot;ah&quot;. (Specifically, in the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maggie:_A_Girl_of_the_Streets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maggie: a Girl of the Streets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the characters would mostly be speaking in a &lt;strong&gt;New York&lt;/strong&gt; accent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-06T16:44:44.103" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T16:44:44.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10886" CreationDate="2019-05-06T17:04:53.670" Score="9" ViewCount="535" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for Stevenson's &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;, one of the mentioned interpretations of the story is as a symbolic representation of Scottish nationalism vs union with England. This seems to stand out among other more natural interpretations involving human nature and Victorian social commentary. Checking the sources of that section, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/13/dr-jekyll-mr-hyde-stevenson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Guardian article&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this view, the moral focus of the story is the Scottish character, burdened by dual nationality (Scottish and British), caught between two tongues (Scots and English), its instinctive spontaneity repressed by a Calvinistic church - the very church that once came between Stevenson and his father, and caused a split in the family. Edinburgh is a city starkly divided into two: the foggy old town up on the hill, once the site of colourful crimes such as bodysnatching and of public hangings in the Grassmarket; and the splendid New Town to the north, on the other side of the then newly laid railway tracks. In Glasgow, where I grew up, the common perception of Edinburgh was of a cloudy inner life (old town) shielded by a genteel exterior (New Town). It was - how could you avoid saying so? - a Jekyll-and-Hyde sort of place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems fairly weak evidence in itself. Many cities have a dual nature such as &quot;old city&quot; vs &quot;new city&quot;, not only Edinburgh. But of course a news article isn't the place to look for detailed literary analysis. So I pose the question here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can &lt;em&gt;Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt; be read as a representation of Scottishness? Can this reading of the story be well supported from the text, and does it have a strong history in the world of Stevenson criticism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T21:43:18.703" Title="How can &quot;Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&quot; be read as a commentary on Scotland?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;strange-case-of-jekyll-and-hyde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10885" CreationDate="2019-05-06T21:43:18.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The “double being” of Jekyll and Hyde is a floating signifier, so a Scottish interpretation of the novella could be made. But no-one has done so yet! Wikipedia and James Campbell are mistaken on this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Floating signifier&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stevenson wrote that the theme of &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson (1888). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/with00stevacrossplainsrich#page/228&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Chapter on Dreams&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Scribner’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, January 1888. Collected in &lt;em&gt;Across the Plains&lt;/em&gt;, 1892.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry Jekyll describes, in his “full statement of the case”, that he was always disposed to “pleasures” that required “profound duplicity” to conceal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And indeed the worst of my faults was a certain impatient gaiety of disposition, such as has made the happiness of many, but such as I found it hard to reconcile with my imperious desire to carry my head high, and wear a more than commonly grave countenance before the public. Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson (1886), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/strangecaseofdrj00stevrich#page/106&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;, p. 106&lt;/a&gt;, London: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through his scientific experiments, Jekyll is able to make this “duplicity” from a metaphor into a fact, splitting his self into two so that one part can indulge and the other repress. But the novella never explains what Jekyll’s “pleasures” were, and so the meaning of this split cannot be nailed down: it is a reference without an object, that is, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;floating signifier&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we interpret the dualism of Jekyll and Hyde? Do they represent good and evil? civilization and savagery? public and private? sobriety and drunkenness? chastity and licentiousness? health and disease? law and criminality? Scotland and England? It’s in the nature of a floating signifier that the reader has to bring some idea from outside the text in order to make sense of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A gallimaufry of interpretations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, if you bring Stevenson’s own alcoholism and the Victorian alcohol debate, then you can read the text as an allegory of alcoholism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cloud of alcohol shadows &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt; as thoroughly as it did its author […] To state the case most simply—and in the novella’s own terms—Stevenson’s best-known tale documents the fate of a man who regularly escapes from an over-burdening respectability into an addictive world of recreational excess by drinking a “blood-red &lt;em&gt;liquor&lt;/em&gt;” whose effects “braced and delighted [him] like &lt;em&gt;wine&lt;/em&gt;”—but which ultimately reduce him to the same crushing self-recrimination that is suffered when “a &lt;em&gt;drunkard&lt;/em&gt; reasons with himself upon his vice” (emphases added). If &lt;em&gt;J&amp;amp;H&lt;/em&gt; is not actually an allegory of alcoholism, of the disruptive “Hyde” that strong drink can release in any human being, then it is everything but that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas L. Reed, Jr. (2006). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dpEoo8HvP5cC&amp;amp;pg=PA1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 1–2&lt;/a&gt;. London: McFarland &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you bring knowledge of the psychology of addiction, then you can read the text as an allegory of drug addiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denial of the addiction is illustrative of the addict who cannot confront his illness. Such inability frequently is attributable to the addict’s belief that his disability is not physiological but moral. To acknowledge addiction is to acknowledge that one is dependent rather than self-reliant, and addicts “fiercely resist admitting dependency.” To the extent that the addict cannot comprehend his behavior in termsdivorced from the rhetoric of personal and moral failure, the addict likely will refuse to admit that he cannot govern his condition. Jekyll’s reaction to Hyde, the emblem of his addiction, is typical; as he proclaims to Utterson, “to put your good heart at rest, I will tell you one thing: the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde”. The addict untutored in the pathology of addiction will always so mistakenly suppose that he can regulate the use and effects of his intoxicant. Of course, he cannot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Daniel L. Wright (1994). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/20831878&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“The prisonhouse of my disposition”: a study of the psychology of addiction in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Studies in the Novel&lt;/em&gt; 26:3, p. 255.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you bring the pseudo-scientific theories of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Lombroso&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cesare Lombroso&lt;/a&gt; then you can read the text as an allegory of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_school_of_criminology&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;criminal atavism&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equating the criminal with atavism, and both with the lower classes, was a familiar gesture by the 1880s, as was the claim that deviance expressed itself most markedly through physical deformity. Stevenson’s middle-class readers would have had as little trouble deciphering the features of the “abnormal and misbegotten” Hyde, his “body an imprint of deformity and decay,” as Stevenson’s middle-class characters do. “God bless me,” exclaims Utterson, “the man seems hardly human. Something troglodytic, shall we say?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stephen D. Arata (1995), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/93666/mod_resource/content/1/Sedulous%20Ape.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson’s &lt;em&gt;Jekyll and Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;”, &lt;em&gt;Criticism&lt;/em&gt; 37:2, pp. 233–259.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you bring Freud’s theories, then you can read the text as an allegory of male sexual repression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first incident that is reported to us in Stevenson’s &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt; (1886) as an indication of Hyde’s ‘furious propensity to ill’ concerns ‘a girl of maybe eight or ten’ who collides with him in the street one night: ‘the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child‘s body and left her screaming on the ground’. A number of contemporary readers were dissatisfied with this: ‘the first incident which is meant to show the diabolical character of Mr Hyde is inadequate’, commented the anonymous reviewer in &lt;em&gt;The Athenaeum&lt;/em&gt;. […] [Gerald Manley] Hopkins wrote to [Robert] Bridges: ‘the trampling scene is perhaps a convention: he [Stevenson] was thinking of something unsuitable for fiction’. Random violence, in other words, has replaced a sexual drive which it thus serves to express; the nocturnal settings, the not-quite-rightness, the feeling of some inadequacy are so many signs of this (the little girl and the gentleman really should not be where they are in the text). Stevenson would no doubt have protested to Hopkins as he protested elsewhere: ‘people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, that they can think of nothing but sexuality’; for him, ‘the beast Hyde’ who is let out ‘is no more sensual than another, but … is the essence of cruelty and malice, and selfishness and cowardice: and these are the diabolic in man’. The protest has a kind of self-defeating truth: if people are so filled full of folly and inverted lust, this must be central for what Hyde represents, all those ’lower elements’; and when Jekyll first tries his experiment, he is indeed conscious before all else of ‘a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in [his] fancy’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stephen Heath (1986). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1986.tb00248.x&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psychopathia sexualis: Stevenson’s &lt;em&gt;Strange Case&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Critical Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 28, p. 93–94.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you bring knowledge of Victorian treatment of gay men, then you can read the text as an allegory of male homosexuality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a certain way, Jekyll is ashamed of such pleasures and desires, thus partly agreeing with the society that abhors them. He apparently suffers a sense of guilt for his double life. Could we not argue that his duplicit life is a representation of the double life many homosexual men were obliged to conduct in the last decades of the nineteenth century? Could we not also argue that what Jekyll refers to as morbid pleasures are actually the secret encounters many homosexual men indulged in, in the very same foggy streets of London described in Stevenson’s novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Antonio Sanna (2013). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silent Homosexuality in Oscar Wilde’s &lt;em&gt;Teleny&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Picture of Dorian Gray&lt;/em&gt; and Robert Louis Stevenson’s &lt;em&gt;Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Law &amp;amp; Literature&lt;/em&gt; 24:1, p. 27.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A Scottish interpretation?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, if you bring some knowledge of Stevenson’s upbringing in Edinburgh, and a concern with Scottish nationalism, then you could read the text as an allegory for the dual nationality and dual language of the Scottish people. But has anyone actually done so? Wikipedia gives no detail of how this reading is supposed to work, saying only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another common interpretation sees the novella’s duality as representative of Scotland and the Scottish character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Wikipedia. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. As of 2019-04-16T19:33:57.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia sources this claim to David Daiches and Jared Campbell. But there is no trace of it in Daiches, who writes instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is of course a story about good and evil subsisting within the same person and shows Louis’ lifelong fascination with the ambiguities of the individual moral character. […] The fact that Hyde, the doctor’s stunted evil self, manifests his evil in acts of physical brutality rather than in, say, sexual license, although the moral defectiveness to which he owed his release relates to the kind of hedonistic adventurism that Stevenson himself practised in his bohemian days, is perhaps evidence of Stevenson’s instinctive awareness of the relationship between sensuality and sadism, but it is more likely to result from the impossibility in the 1880s of describing acts of violent sensuality with the frankness they require if they are to administer to the reader the kind of shock which the story demands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Daiches (1973). &lt;em&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson and his World&lt;/em&gt;, p. 68. London: Thames and Hudson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/dec/13/dr-jekyll-mr-hyde-stevenson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Campbell’s 2008 article&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt; (quoted in the question) only gives us an outline of this interpretation, not even indicating whether we are to interpret Jekyll as Scotland and Hyde as England, or the other way round. Campbell refers us to Clayton Hamilton and G. K. Chesterton for the details. But on inspection, neither of those writers makes this interpretation! Hamilton just notes that the setting has a Scottish flavour, and does not attempt to interpret the text at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered why the &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde&lt;/em&gt; was set in London instead of Edinburgh. Utterson is a very Scottish sort of lawyer; Lanyon is a very Scottish sort of doctor; and the metaphysical speculation that allures Dr. Jekyll to his doom is decidedly more Scottish than English. Furthermore, the tale might most appropriately be conceived as happening among the gloomy doorways and mysterious &lt;em&gt;wynds&lt;/em&gt; that undermine the tall, decaying &lt;em&gt;lands&lt;/em&gt; which darkly overhang the High Street of Edinburgh. Possibly Louis may have felt that Mr. Hyde could lose himself more easily among the shifting crowds of a vaster and less centred city. It is more difficult to hunt a villain down in London than in Edinburgh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Clayton Hamilton (1915). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ontrailofstevens00hamirich/page/n97&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Trail of Stevenson&lt;/em&gt;, p. 61&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Doubleday, Page &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chesterton also notes the Scottish aspects of the setting, before moving on to discuss the text as an allegory of good and evil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is indeed one peculiarity about that grim grotesque which I have never seen noted anywhere; though I dare say it may have been noted more than once. It will be realised that I am not, alas, so close a student of Stevensoniana as many who seem to think much less of Stevenson. But it seems to me that the story of Jekyll and Hyde, which is presumably presented as happening in London, is all the time very unmistakably happening in Edinburgh. More than one of the characters seem to be pure Scots. Mr. Utterson, the lawyer, is a most unmistakably Scottish lawyer, strictly occupied with Scots Law. No modern English lawyer ever read a book of dry divinity in the evening merely because it was Sunday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;G. K. Chesterton (1927). &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/chesterton/gk/robert-louis-stevenson/chapter3.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Robert Louis Stevenson&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the chasing of citations reaches a dead end. Far from being “The most popular allegorical reading in our own day”, as Campbell has it, or even a “common interpretation”, as Wikipedia more cautiously puts it, the Scottish interpretation of Jekyll and Hyde remains to be made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-06T21:43:18.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10887" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-06T22:25:39.207" Score="7" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read the novel &lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt; by Albert Camus. In this novel Mersault (the absurd hero) at one point says to his girlfriend, &quot;Hello, image!&quot;. I am wondering why he calls his girlfriend &quot;image&quot;. I am quoting here the relevant part from the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;After making love, at  that moment when the heart drowses in the&#xA;  released body, filled only with the tender affection he might  have&#xA;  felt for a winsome puppy, Mersault would smile at her and say, &quot;Hello,&#xA;  image.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5573" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T08:00:04.137" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T08:00:04.137" Title="Why does Mersault say &quot;Hello image!&quot; to his girlfriend?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;a-happy-death&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10888" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5539" CreationDate="2019-05-07T17:38:23.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: This is a bad translation of a line from &lt;a href=&quot;http://shamsrumi.com/molana/poem/ghazal/ghazal-332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ghazal 332&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwan-e_Shams-e_Tabrizi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. A more accurate translation would be, “the house of love has no limits”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was hard to track down, because the original poem has neither “garden of the world” nor “except in your mind”, leaving us with only “has no limits” to go on! I hope to convince you that this is enough to identify the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you search for the text in the post, then you’ll find that it is commonly given as the first part of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7368119-the-garden-of-the-world-has-no-limits-except-in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;longer quotation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The garden of the world has no limits except in your mind. Its presence is more beautiful than the stars, with more clarity than the polished mirror of your heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just about recognizable as a bad translation of these lines from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ghazal&lt;/a&gt; (ode) &lt;a href=&quot;http://shamsrumi.com/molana/poem/ghazal/ghazal-332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;number 332&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwan-e_Shams-e_Tabrizi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;این خواجه چَرخ است که چون زُهره و ماه است&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  وین خانه عشق است که بی‌حَدّ و کرانه‌ست&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  چون آیِنِه جانْ نَقْشِ تو در دل بِگِرفته‌ست&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a selection of English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the Lord of heaven, who resembles Venus and the moon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is the house of Love, which has no bound or end.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Like a mirror, the soul has received thy image in its heart;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Reynold A. Nicholson (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/SelectedPoemsFromTheDivaniShamsiTabriz-ReynoldA.Nicholson/page/n57&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Selected Poems from the Dīvanī Shamsi Tabrīz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the Master of heaven, who is like unto Venus and the moon, and this is the house of Love, which is without bound and end. The soul, like a mirror, has received your image in its heart;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;A. J. Arberry (1968). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/MysticalPoemsOfRumiArberry/page/n71&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mystical Poems of Rumi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the lord of the sphere:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      an orb like the Moon or Venus&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and this is the house of love:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      boundless, uncontained&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Like a mirror to the soul&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  your visage fills the heart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Franklin D. Lewis (2000). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/RumiPastAndPresent/page/n435&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rumi Past And Present, East And West&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Oneworld Publications.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T17:38:23.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14591" CreationDate="2019-05-07T23:24:39.203" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, Andrew MacPhee was an old friend of Dr. Ransom's that appeared as the &quot;resident skeptic&quot; at St. Anne's. Beyond that, he's never shown actually &lt;em&gt;doing&lt;/em&gt; anything. A lot of the other characters bring specific expertise (e.g. Ransom's contact with the Oyarsa and role as the Pendragon, Jane's clairvoyant dreams, the Dimbles' expertise in the history of Arthur, etc.) and/or are &quot;outcasts&quot; somehow from the N.I.C.E. (e.g. Ivy Maggs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these appear to be the case for MacPhee. I'm not aware of any textual indication of him being an outcast, nor does he appear to have any particular expertise beyond his skepticism. It's not even clear exactly why they keep him around as a gadfly, given that none of the characters ever appear to take his advice or change their opinions in response to his arguments. Whenever he asks for something concrete to actually &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; Ransom refuses. Ransom also adamantly refused to let MacPhee try to find Merlin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but when MacPhee asks Dr. Ransom exactly what use he was, Ransom gave a rather vague answer that seemed to be more or less to the effect that him just being there was helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have clarification as to exactly why MacPhee was there, and how he was actually helpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-08T12:44:22.973" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T23:35:05.757" Title="Why was Andrew MacPhee at St. Anne's?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2055" CreationDate="2019-05-07T23:32:46.243" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may have been more likely that this was written in response to the publication in 1919 of the Balfour Declaration, which was signed originally two years before it was made known. In Revelations we are told that political and military upheaval will take place in Jerusalem which will initiate the return of Christ. The Balfour Declaration promised just that. Yeats was likely referring to the sands of the Judean desert. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7247" LastActivityDate="2019-05-07T23:32:46.243" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10887" CreationDate="2019-05-08T05:13:48.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;So from the context, here's my understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common trend that's observed from a lot of &lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt; is the treatment of women as mere objects, rather than as human beings. This is portrayed quite well in the beginning of that paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The natural stupidity which glowed in her eyes emphasized her remote, impassive expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remark, &quot;hello, image&quot; is slightly misleading. The meaning of image used here doesn't mean image as in a photograph, but rather an image i.e. a guise, appearance. You need to remember that this was actually written in French before translation. The phrase used is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Bonjour, apparence&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparence in this context, to quote the Collins French-English dictionary, is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...guise to refer to the outward appearance or form of someone or something.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mersault is quite literally greeting Marthe's physical appearance rather than her as a person. If you were to put it more into modern term, it might be something like, &quot;Hello, body&quot;. This plays into the character of Mersault who only values his girlfriend for making other guys around him jealous and for being his personal eye-candy (along with other kinds of candy). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helped!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T05:13:48.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10864" CreationDate="2019-05-08T12:39:12.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, this is the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoogste_tijd_(roman)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hoogste tijd&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1985) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Mulisch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harry Mulisch&lt;/a&gt;, who was considered as one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Grote_Drie#Literatuur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;big three&quot;&lt;/a&gt; of post-war literature in the Netherlands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel's main character is Willem (Uli) Bouwmeester, a retired actor who used to work mainly in night clubs and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revue&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;revues&lt;/a&gt;. He receives an offer for the lead role in &quot;Noodweer&quot; (literally &quot;Tempest&quot;), a play about the stage actor Pierre de Vries. Uli accepts the offer but the strain of the preparations and rehearsals causes a stroke. He dies and is &quot;reborn&quot; as Pierre de Vries; as Pierre de Vries he plays the lead role in the première of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadsschouwburg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stadsschouwburg of Amsterdam&lt;/a&gt; at the end of the nineteenth century. (In other words, Uli travels back in time / becomes Pierre de Vries.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sources I found on the web, i.e. this &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoogste_tijd_(roman)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; and this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholieren.com/verslag/boekverslag-nederlands-hoogste-tijd-door-harry-mulisch-50422&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;review by a secondary-school pupil&lt;/a&gt;, there is no mention of an anonymous letter or of mysterious dealings with other family members. (Uli comes from a family of actors but had only a second-rate career in comparison with the others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T12:39:12.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-08T14:49:16.837" Score="8" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stevenson's famous novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is set in London, but some critics have claimed that it would seem to fit better in Stevenson's native Edinburgh, almost as if he wrote a story set in Edinburgh and then just changed the names to London ones. For example, as quoted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/10886/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have often wondered why the &lt;em&gt;Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde&lt;/em&gt; was set in London instead of Edinburgh. Utterson is a very Scottish sort of lawyer; Lanyon is a very Scottish sort of doctor; and the metaphysical speculation that allures Dr. Jekyll to his doom is decidedly more Scottish than English. Furthermore, the tale might most appropriately be conceived as happening among the gloomy doorways and mysterious &lt;em&gt;wynds&lt;/em&gt; that undermine the tall, decaying &lt;em&gt;lands&lt;/em&gt; which darkly overhang the High Street of Edinburgh. Possibly Louis may have felt that Mr. Hyde could lose himself more easily among the shifting crowds of a vaster and less centred city. It is more difficult to hunt a villain down in London than in Edinburgh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ontrailofstevens00hamirich/page/n97&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clayton Hamilton, &lt;em&gt;On the Trail of Stevenson&lt;/em&gt; (1915), New York: Doubleday, Page &amp;amp; Co.; p. 61&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote, for example, says that the story seems like one set in Scotland, but doesn't really provide any edivence for its claims. (&lt;em&gt;How&lt;/em&gt; are Utterson and Lanyon &amp;quot;very Scottish&amp;quot;, or the metaphysical speculation? &lt;em&gt;Why&lt;/em&gt; is it more &amp;quot;appropriate&amp;quot; to imagine it in Edinburgh than London?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What evidence in the story supports an Edinburgh setting as more apt than a London one?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-08T14:49:16.837" Title="What's the evidence for &quot;Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde&quot; being secretly set in Edinburgh?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;strange-case-of-jekyll-and-hyde&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10895" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-09T04:10:03.233" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read part of a book a number of years (8?) back.  It was a romance novel about the CEO of a paint company who marries a Russian (?) Chemist because of passport stuff.  Kinda like a reverse of The Proposal.  It may have been set in Seattle.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was a paperback in Novella length, written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was probably relatively new at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7253" LastEditorUserId="7253" LastEditDate="2019-05-09T15:37:42.810" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T15:54:55.690" Title="Romance Novel about Paint Company CEO" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10898" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10902" CreationDate="2019-05-10T06:52:31.503" Score="3" ViewCount="655" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt;, the most prominent character who never appears on-stage is surely Captain Flint, the notorious pirate captain whose treasure drives the plot. Almost as important as the treasure are several former members of his pirate crew, including:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Billy Bones, his first mate;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Long John Silver, his quartermaster;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Israel Hands, his gunner;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite a number of characters throughout the book are mentioned as having served with Flint. &lt;strong&gt;What is the full list of all known members of Captain Flint's crew?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;This question is restricted to &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; only. Flint crewmembers mentioned in other fiction (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Peter Pan&lt;/em&gt;) don't count.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T03:20:19.200" Title="How many members of Captain Flint's crew are known?" Tags="&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-10T07:16:46.627" Score="5" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nepalichhaya.wixsite.com/nepalichhaya/single-post/2017/09/17/The-Recurring-Dream-A-story-from-England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Recurring Dream&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (from &lt;em&gt;Unusual Stories from Many Lands&lt;/em&gt; by Arlo T. Janssen), a character called Kimberly Clark is accused of being a ghost by an old man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The man opens the door a little and looks at her. &quot;What do you want here?&quot; he asks. &quot;Why don't you go away?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kim doesn't know what to say. But she does want to talk to him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I—I see—I see that this house is for sale,&quot; she stammers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes it is. But I'm sure you don't want to buy it!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why do you say that?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Because—uh—because a ghost hunts this house.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;A ghost haunts this pretty little house?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes, it comes almost every night now.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Kim tries hard to think of something to say. &quot;Do—uh—do you know who the ghost is?&quot; she stammers.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Yes, I do now.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Who is it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In a loud whisper he exclaims, &quot;It's you!&quot; Then he closes the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't understand why he calls her a ghost or why his house is on sale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7260" LastEditorUserId="7260" LastEditDate="2019-05-10T13:10:38.810" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T13:10:38.810" Title="How is Kimberly Clark a ghost in Janssen's &quot;A Recurring Dream&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10899" CreationDate="2019-05-10T10:18:12.333" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read this particular short story before, but I've certainly read a longer more developed version of it by an established author. (I've tried to find that story but can't quite pin it down, I'll amend the answer if I do). &#xA;EDIT: Looking again at your link, I'm not at all sure if the story as presented there is supposed to be a whole story or a precis of a story. Could you clarify? It might be that it is a precis of the story I recall. I did think that the 'Kimberly Clark' name rang a bell until I realised it was the name of a personal care products brand... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the main character's dreams are haunted by her perfect house and she regularly visits it in her dreams. When she happens upon it in real life the owner is selling up because they have had enough of being haunted by a woman who appears ever night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seller recognises the main character as the ghost whose presence is driving him from the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader is left to assume that the main character has somehow not &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; been dreaming about this perfect house, but actually visiting it in some form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man calls her a ghost because when she thinks she is dreaming about his house, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; sees her as an apparition &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the house. he is selling the house because he doesn't like to be haunted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-05-10T12:31:01.347" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T12:31:01.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10871" CreationDate="2019-05-10T10:32:45.133" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien never explained the choice to leave Sauron off-stage, or at least he did not do so in the published letters. But I can see three ways in which the decision makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is written largely from the down-to-earth point of view of the hobbit characters, a narrative strategy that Tolkien recognized was necessary to reach a large audience. Discussing the possible publication of the &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am afraid that all the matter of the First and Second Ages is very ‘high-mythical’ or Elvish and heroic, and there is no ‘hobbitry’ at all: an ingredient that seems to have made the present mixture [that is, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;] more generally palatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). Letter to Lord Halsbury. Number 174 in Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (1981). &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would have been difficult for Tolkien to reconcile the rural-comical tone of ‘hobbitry’ with the representation of a mythic figure like Sauron. For an example of how this could have gone wrong, consider the one scene of Sauron’s dialogue that made it into the novel. For although the question says that he does not “have any acting dialogue”, this is not quite true. Pippin speaks with him using the Palantir of Orthanc, and reports the conversation thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘“So you have come back? Why have you neglected to report for so long?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I did not answer. He said: “Who are you?” I still did not answer, but it hurt me horribly; and he pressed me, so I said: “A hobbit.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Then suddenly he seemed to see me, and he laughed at me. It was cruel. It was like being stabbed with knives. I struggled. But he said: “Wait a moment! We shall meet again soon. Tell Saruman that this dainty is not for him. I will send for it at once. Do you understand? Say just that!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt; III.11. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, Sauron is at risk of coming across as a pantomime villain rather than a mythic figure of evil, and it was surely a wise decision to include no more of his dialogue than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the distance of Sauron from the events of the narrative conforms to the pattern of military leadership in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. The captains whom Tolkien approves (Aragorn, Theoden) have a heroic style of leadership, fighting in the first rank of battle and inspiring their armies with their personal bravery; while the captains whom Tolkien disapproves (Sauron, Saruman, Denethor) have a modern style of leadership, directing strategy from a safe distance in their fortresses. Denethor draws our attention to this in a conversation with Pippin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Not—the Dark Lord?’ cried Pippin, forgetting his place in his terror.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Denethor laughed bitterly. ‘Nay, not yet, Master Peregrin! He will not come save only to triumph over me when all is won. He uses others as his weapons. So do all great lords, if they are wise, Master Halfling. Or why should I sit here in my tower and think, and watch, and wait, spending even my sons? For I can still wield a brand.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; V.4. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of several passages in which Tolkien uses the word ‘wise’ ironically to describe conduct so prudent as to become self-defeating. Saruman says that “it would be wise” (II.2) for Gandalf to join him in an alliance with Sauron; Gandalf describes Sauron as a “wise fool” (III.5) for thinking that his enemies are “seeking to cast him down and take his place”; and Saruman’s enchanted voice “seemed wise and reasonable” (III.10).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image of Denethor sitting in his tower and “spending even his sons” ought to remind us of the situation on the Western Front of World War I. Tolkien had fought at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thiepval_Ridge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thiepval Ridge&lt;/a&gt; on the Somme in September 1916, while General Haig directed the battle from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beaurepaire_(60),_ch%C3%A2teau,_fa%C3%A7ade_sud.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Château de Beaurepaire&lt;/a&gt; near Montreuil-sur-Mer, a hundred kilometres away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, the physical absence of Sauron corresponds to the way that evil is conceptualized in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. In Tolkien’s world, goodness corresponds to light, and evil flourishes in darkness. Evil beings are hidden from the world in underground lairs: barrow-wights in the barrow-downs; the Balrog in Moria, Shelob in Torech Ungol. Sauron’s army advances under the darkness of “a great cloud [that] streamed slowly westward from the Black Land, devouring light” (V.4), and the turning point of the siege of Gondor is when a wind blows the cloud away “and the darkness was removed” (V.5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien described the power of the Nazgûl as presiding in the fear of their victims, which is magnified in darkness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their peril is almost entirely due to the unreasoning &lt;em&gt;fear&lt;/em&gt; which they inspire (like ghosts). They have no great physical power against the fearless; but what they have, and the fear that they inspire, is enormously increased in &lt;em&gt;darkness&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1958). Letter to Forrest J. Ackerman. Number 210 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well known that the most frightening monsters in movies are those that are not shown in detail: nothing that the special-effects department can contrive is as fearsome as the viewer’s own imagination. Thus, Sauron’s threat would be diminished if he were brought into the light of the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:11:27.600" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2019-05-10T15:34:30.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Billy Bones (first mate)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirmed from his own mouth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I was first mate, I was, old Flint's first mate, and I'm the on'y one as knows the place. He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I was to now, you see.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3, &quot;The Black Spot&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Long John Silver (quartermaster)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirmed from his own mouth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No, not I,” said Silver. “Flint was cap'n; I was quartermaster, along of my timber leg.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 11, &quot;What I Heard in the Apple Barrel&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Israel Hands (gunner)&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirmed explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Israel was Flint's gunner,” said Gray hoarsely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 17, &quot;Narrative Continued by the Doctor: The Jolly-boat's Last Trip&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Blind Pew&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strongly suggested by association (although it's &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; the said &quot;broadside&quot; took place on England's ship, by context in the conversation it seems clearly Flint's):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No, not I,” said Silver. “Flint was cap'n; I was quartermaster, along of my timber leg. The same broadside I lost my leg, old Pew lost his deadlights.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 11, &quot;What I Heard in the Apple Barrel&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ben Gunn&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confirmed from his own mouth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Now, I'll tell you what,” he went on. “So much I'll tell you, and no more. I were in Flint's ship when he buried the treasure; he and six along—six strong seamen. They was ashore nigh on a week, and us standing off and on in the old Walrus.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 15, &quot;The Man of the Island&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tom Morgan&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knew one of Flint's dead crew as an old shipmate up until the time he went ashore with Flint to his death; and he even saw Flint's body immediatedly after his death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I thought so,” cried the cook; “this here is a p'inter. Right up there is our line for the Pole Star and the jolly dollars. But, by thunder! If it don't make me cold inside to think of Flint. This is one of his jokes, and no mistake. Him and these six was alone here; he killed 'em, every man; and this one he hauled here and laid down by compass, shiver my timbers! They're long bones, and the hair's been yellow. Aye, that would be Allardyce. You mind Allardyce, Tom Morgan?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Aye, aye,” returned Morgan; “I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“No, by gum, it don't,” agreed Silver; “not nat'ral, nor not nice, says you. Great guns! Messmates, but if Flint was living, this would be a hot spot for you and me. Six they were, and six are we; and bones is what they are now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I saw him dead with these here deadlights,” said Morgan. “Billy took me in. There he laid, with penny-pieces on his eyes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 31, &quot;The Treasure-hunt—Flint's Pointer&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;George Merry&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knew Flint's voice and Ben Gunn's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, that's so,” he said. “You've a head upon your shoulders, John, and no mistake. 'Bout ship, mates! This here crew is on a wrong tack, I do believe. And come to think on it, it was like Flint's voice, I grant you, but not just so clear-away like it, after all. It was liker somebody else's voice now—it was liker—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 32, &quot;The Treasure-hunt—The Voice Among the Trees&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Black Dog?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is never confirmed for sure, but suggested by association. He greets Billy Bones as an old shipmate, he knows Pew and frequents Silver's tavern, and Bones refers to him in the same breath as Flint's crew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Black Dog!” said he.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And who else?” returned the other, getting more at his ease. “Black Dog as ever was, come for to see his old shipmate Billy, at the Admiral Benbow inn. Ah, Bill, Bill, we have seen a sight of times, us two, since I lost them two talons,” holding up his mutilated hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 2, &quot;Black Dog Appears and Disappears&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah! Black Dog,” says he. “He's a bad un; but there's worse that put him on. Now, if I can't get away nohow, and they tip me the black spot, mind you, it's my old sea-chest they're after; you get on a horse—you can, can't you? Well, then, you get on a horse, and go to—well, yes, I will!—to that eternal doctor swab, and tell him to pipe all hands—magistrates and sich—and he'll lay 'em aboard at the Admiral Benbow—all old Flint's crew, man and boy, all on 'em that's left. I was first mate, I was, old Flint's first mate, and I'm the on'y one as knows the place. He gave it me at Savannah, when he lay a-dying, like as if I was to now, you see. But you won't peach unless they get the black spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again or a seafaring man with one leg, Jim—him above all.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 3, &quot;The Black Spot&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Probably many of the mutineers&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Silver says explicitly that many of Flint's old crew are aboard the &lt;em&gt;Hispaniola&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Where's all England's men now? I dunno. Where's Flint's? Why, most on 'em aboard here, and glad to get the duff—been begging before that, some on 'em.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 11, &quot;What I Heard in the Apple Barrel&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitely at least two of the unnamed men along with Merry, Morgan, and the others at the end also knew Flint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Yes,” said one, “that's Flint, sure enough. J. F., and a score below, with a clove hitch to it; so he done ever.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 29, &quot;The Black Spot Again&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Aye, aye,” returned Morgan; “I mind him; he owed me money, he did, and took my knife ashore with him.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Speaking of knives,” said another, “why don't we find his'n lying round? Flint warn't the man to pick a seaman's pocket; and the birds, I guess, would leave it be.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Dead—aye, sure enough he's dead and gone below,” said the fellow with the bandage; “but if ever sperrit walked, it would be Flint's. Dear heart, but he died bad, did Flint!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Aye, that he did,” observed another; “now he raged, and now he hollered for the rum, and now he sang. 'Fifteen Men' were his only song, mates; and I tell you true, I never rightly liked to hear it since. It was main hot, and the windy was open, and I hear that old song comin' out as clear as clear—and the death-haul on the man already.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 31, &quot;The Treasure-hunt—Flint's Pointer&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don't feel sharp,” growled Morgan. “Thinkin' o' Flint—I think it were—as done me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Ah, well, my son, you praise your stars he's dead,” said Silver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“He were an ugly devil,” cried a third pirate with a shudder; “that blue in the face too!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Chapter 32, &quot;The Treasure-hunt—The Voice Among the Trees&quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These aren't Morgan or Merry, who are referred to by name at this point. They must be at least two of the other three, and probably not Dick who's also usually referred to by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One interesting omission is Job Anderson, the boatswain. He's referred to many times, and he seems to be quite senior among the mutineers (on par with Hands and Merry, one step below Silver), but it's never confirmed whether he was a Flint crewman or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-05-10T15:34:30.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10903" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10925" CreationDate="2019-05-10T20:10:02.760" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Joyce, in &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, link the sound form &quot;hoe&quot; to &quot;whore&quot;, as in the current day &quot;ho&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, is it probable that Joyce intended the (additional) modern day pun in the following line [&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; p.g. 5.9]?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; standalone &quot;ho&quot; appears 29 times, of which 24 occur in Circes, but all appear to be standard usages. &quot;hoe&quot; appears but once. This &lt;em&gt;excludes&lt;/em&gt; portmanteau usages such as &quot;hother’s&quot;.  The prevalence of &quot;ho&quot; in Circes (a chapter of whores) suggests Joyce may have been onto this association. Perhaps for censorship reason? Does any &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; buff know more about this? Here are a few example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MARION: Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll&#xA;  write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to&#xA;  raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a&#xA;  signed and stamped receipt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BOYLAN: (Clasps himself.) Here, I can’t hold this little lot much&#xA;  longer. (He strides off on stiff cavalry legs.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BELLA: (Laughing.) Ho ho ho ho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;THE CROPPY BOY: Horhot ho hray hor hother’s hest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and my favourite, &lt;em&gt;if the pun holds&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Private Carr and Private Compton turn and counterretort, their tunics&#xA;  bloodbright in a lampglow, black sockets of caps on their blond&#xA;  cropped polls. Stephen Dedalus and Lynch pass through the crowd close&#xA;  to the redcoats.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PRIVATE COMPTON: (Jerks his finger.) Way for the parson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;PRIVATE CARR: (Turns and calls.) What ho, parson!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this sound form is so prevalent in &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; it would be important to know if Joyce is using this association or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched Google Books and can find no contemporaneous usage (the 1930s or before), so suspect perhaps not. I have also search some of James's love letters to Nora, and while &quot;whore&quot; indeed appears, &quot;ho/hoe&quot; does not. I could not find it in Shakespeare either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Has anyone commented on this before in the literature?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does such a usage appear in any of Joyce's earlier works?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do any such usages appear anywhere before the 1930s? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this the sound form for whore in any other language?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the the sound form &quot;hoer&quot; from the Dutch is different to &quot;hoe&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; is riddled with foreign words, especially (but not inclusively) from the Germanic, Scandinavian, Greek and Latin languages, so all such variants of &quot;whore&quot; appear in the text. All those close to &quot;whore&quot; end in an &quot;r&quot; of some sort, while &quot;ho/hoe&quot; does not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found an example [p.g. 20.35] in &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; that suggests he was very close to making the leap, where ann is the &quot;whore&quot; river-wife [think Molly] of the aforementioned husband manhandling his hoe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Flou inn, flow ann. Hohore!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Research reveals to &quot;ho&quot; gained popularity in the 60s, which is 30 years too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demonstrating that Joyce was onto &quot;ho&quot;-&quot;whore&quot; in the Circe chapter of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, would, of course, completely answer this question, and I would absolutely accept such an answer without it have any discussion of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have accepted Laurel's answer, thereby ensuring full bounty award, since (1) that answer is as correct as we know at this date, and (2) I required a line drawn in the sand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have opened &lt;em&gt;(and cross-referenced)&lt;/em&gt; a related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/504177/where-in-ireland-if-anywhere-at-the-time-of-james-joyce-would-hoe-and-whor&quot;&gt;Where in Ireland, if anywhere, at the time of James Joyce, would “hoe” and “whore” sound similar enough to pun?&lt;/a&gt; on our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2019-07-11T17:35:29.677" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T19:26:24.600" Title="Does Joyce, in Finnegans Wake or Ulysses, link the sound form &quot;hoe&quot; to &quot;whore&quot;?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ulysses&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10873" CreationDate="2019-05-11T12:25:29.697" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be a scene from the Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;King John&lt;/em&gt;, in which the eponymous king commands his henchman Hubert to kill his nephew Arthur. There are two passages which might be what you're thinking of, although neither &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; fits since the king isn't completely vague about the topic. (I found these by searching &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/john/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the full text&lt;/a&gt; for &quot;my lord&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    So well, that what you bid me undertake,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though that my death were adjunct to my act,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By heaven, I would do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Do not I know thou wouldst?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Good Hubert, Hubert, Hubert, throw thine eye&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On yon young boy: I'll tell thee what, my friend,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He is a very serpent in my way;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And whereso'er this foot of mine doth tread,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He lies before me: dost thou understand me?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou art his keeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    And I'll keep him so,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That he shall not offend your majesty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    My lord?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    A grave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    He shall not live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Enough.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I could be merry now. Hubert, I love thee;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Well, I'll not say what I intend for thee:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Remember. Madam, fare you well:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'll send those powers o'er to your majesty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    My lord, they say five moons were seen to-night;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Four fixed, and the fifth did whirl about&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The other four in wondrous motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Five moons!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    Old men and beldams in the streets&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Do prophesy upon it dangerously:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Young Arthur's death is common in their mouths:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And when they talk of him, they shake their heads&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And whisper one another in the ear;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he that speaks doth gripe the hearer's wrist,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whilst he that hears makes fearful action,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With wrinkled brows, with nods, with rolling eyes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who, with his shears and measure in his hand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Standing on slippers, which his nimble haste&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had falsely thrust upon contrary feet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Told of a many thousand warlike French&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That were embattailed and rank'd in Kent:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Another lean unwash'd artificer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cuts off his tale and talks of Arthur's death.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Why seek'st thou to possess me with these fears?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why urgest thou so oft young Arthur's death?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thy hand hath murder'd him: I had a mighty cause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To wish him dead, but thou hadst none to kill him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    No had, my lord! why, did you not provoke me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    It is the curse of kings to be attended&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By slaves that take their humours for a warrant&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To break within the bloody house of life,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And on the winking of authority&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To understand a law, to know the meaning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of dangerous majesty, when perchance it frowns&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More upon humour than advised respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    Here is your hand and seal for what I did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    O, when the last account 'twixt heaven and earth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is to be made, then shall this hand and seal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Witness against us to damnation!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Make deeds ill done! Hadst not thou been by,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fellow by the hand of nature mark'd,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Quoted and sign'd to do a deed of shame,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This murder had not come into my mind:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But taking note of thy abhorr'd aspect,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Finding thee fit for bloody villany,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Apt, liable to be employ'd in danger,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I faintly broke with thee of Arthur's death;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And thou, to be endeared to a king,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made it no conscience to destroy a prince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HUBERT:    My lord--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KING JOHN:    Hadst thou but shook thy head or made a pause&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When I spake darkly what I purposed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or turn'd an eye of doubt upon my face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As bid me tell my tale in express words,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Deep shame had struck me dumb, made me break off,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And those thy fears might have wrought fears in me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But thou didst understand me by my signs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And didst in signs again parley with sin;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yea, without stop, didst let thy heart consent,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And consequently thy rude hand to act&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The deed, which both our tongues held vile to name.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Out of my sight, and never see me more!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My nobles leave me; and my state is braved,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Even at my gates, with ranks of foreign powers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nay, in the body of this fleshly land,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This kingdom, this confine of blood and breath,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hostility and civil tumult reigns&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Between my conscience and my cousin's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it could be the very last scene from the Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, in which the new king Henry IV (Bolingbroke) rebukes his follower Exton for murdering the old king Richard II in prison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;EXTON:    Great king, within this coffin I present&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thy buried fear: herein all breathless lies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The mightiest of thy greatest enemies,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Richard of Bordeaux, by me hither brought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HENRY BOLINGBROKE:    Exton, I thank thee not; for thou hast wrought&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A deed of slander with thy fatal hand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon my head and all this famous land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;EXTON:    From your own mouth, my lord, did I this deed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HENRY BOLINGBROKE:    They love not poison that do poison need,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor do I thee: though I did wish him dead,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I hate the murderer, love him murdered.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The guilt of conscience take thou for thy labour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But neither my good word nor princely favour:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With Cain go wander through shades of night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And never show thy head by day nor light.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lords, I protest, my soul is full of woe,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Come, mourn with me for that I do lament,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And put on sullen black incontinent:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'll make a voyage to the Holy Land,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To wash this blood off from my guilty hand:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  March sadly after; grace my mournings here;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In weeping after this untimely bier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If none of these are right, then a useful tool to search for a better match is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-advanced.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Source Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;, where you can perform an advanced search on the full texts of all Shakespeare's plays. (I tried searching for the exact phrases &lt;code&gt;my lord&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;he&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;his&lt;/code&gt;, in History and Tragedy plays only, and got 97 results none of which matched your description. If you can remember &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; more exact phrases from the passage you're looking for, it would be really helpful.) &lt;em&gt;King John&lt;/em&gt; just came to mind because one of the major plot points in it is a villain commanding a henchman to kill another character, and similarly &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-11T12:30:56.180" LastActivityDate="2019-05-11T12:30:56.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-11T22:22:13.287" Score="4" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Penelope Fitzgerald’s short story &lt;em&gt;The Prescription&lt;/em&gt; (1982), Dr. Mehmet Bey almost kills his 14-year-old apprentice, Alecco, by forcing him to drink a poisoned prescription after discovering the boy reading his books without permission. Many years later,  Alecco - now an experienced young doctor who has studied with the greatest specialist in Vienna - is asked to provide a second opinion on one of Mehmet Bey’s cases. At the end of the story, Mehmet Bey rejects his opinion, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cast your memory back and answer me this question: Knowledge is good, but what is the use of knowledge without honesty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In response, Alecco withdraws his diagnosis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does he do that, and what is the significance?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT 16/7/19: In her 2013 biography of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee briefly summarises the plot and says that the story is about &quot;cruelty, power, and surviving against the odds&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7265" LastEditorUserId="7265" LastEditDate="2019-05-16T16:51:01.550" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T16:51:01.550" Title="In Penelope Fitzgerald’s short story The Prescription, significance of &quot;Knowledge is good, but what is the use of knowledge without honesty?&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;penelope-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10907" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10908" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Prescription&quot; is a 1982 short story by Penelope Fitzgerald. Use along with the [Penelope-Fitzgerald] tag." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T02:18:04.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10909" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-12T02:19:15.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-05-12T02:19:15.467" LastActivityDate="2019-05-12T02:19:15.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10910" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-12T02:19:15.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Penelope Fitzgerald (17 December 1916 - 28 April 2000) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T15:54:13.443" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T15:54:13.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-13T03:28:48.667" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that in the novel &lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt; by Henry James, there is a theme of innocence. It's really shown through how the governess perceives Miles and Flora at first, but then as she realizes that they're being possessed by ghosts, but even after the governess notices that, she still somewhat perceives them as innocent. I'm not sure how else innocence is shown in &lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt; and what other moments to draw from in the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7270" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-13T08:47:57.673" LastActivityDate="2019-05-13T08:47:57.673" Title="How is the theme of innocence featured in the Turn of the Screw?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;henry-james&gt;&lt;the-turn-of-the-screw&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-13T15:11:38.370" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to identify an English children's book that I read many years ago at my grandmother's house. It was a book that she herself had been given as a child, and was probably published in England in the 1920s (she was born in 1909). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember anything about the cover, but it was a small-format book for young children about the same size as those by Beatrix Potter, with text on one side and illustration opposite. The illustrations were black and white ink drawings, in silhouette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book followed the adventures of a small toy teddy bear. These are the adventures I can remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The bear was given to a young girl as a present. She named it “Huff” because of the tiny sound it made when she poked its tummy with her finger: “huff!”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The bear came with the girl and her family when they drove out for a picnic. The accompanying illustration included an old–style charabanc in silhouette.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The family went punting, and the bear fell into the river. Picture of punt in silhouette.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As the girl got older, the bear accompanied her to her first ball/dance.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On the girl's wedding day, the bear came too, I think hidden in her dress. The illustration showed the newlyweds driving away in an open car, with something tied to the rear bumper - perhaps an old boot, or perhaps the bear?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was until recently sure that the book was called “A Bear Called Huff”, or something similar, but I’ve been unable to find anything by that title in the British Library main catalogue. I've searched fairly extensively, and have excluded all books in the catalogue published between 1910 and 1933 with either “Huff&quot; or “Bear” anywhere in the title. Perhaps I've conflated the title with the bear's first adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7265" LastEditorUserId="7265" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T07:40:17.517" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T07:40:17.517" Title="Book identification: &quot;A Bear Called Huff&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10915" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-13T19:37:11.950" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is Pound's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Selwyn_Mauberley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugh Selwyn Mauberley&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that he's a failure, but not if the modernist Pound thought that Mauberley was &quot;wrong from the start&quot;. Should he, Mauberley or people like him, not have been bent &quot;resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5641" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T10:03:51.403" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T11:05:15.673" Title="Who is Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ezra-pound&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10906" CreationDate="2019-05-14T00:46:51.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's no real explanation online (not surprisingly) so here's my attempt at it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall theme of &quot;The Prescription&quot; seems to deal with social status and pride of an individual. This is illustrated by Dr. Mehmet's comment where he states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;‘I decline to accept you as a colleague, Alexander Zarifi.’&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as well as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;‘Your [Alecco's] word is not good enough.’&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, Mehmet still feels superior to Alecco due to the fact that Alecco was his apprentice, thus lower in social status. But despite the fact that Alecco has reached the same amount of prestige (or perhaps more) disgusts him, so Mehmet gives Alecco a rather curt explanation and attempts to dismiss him off, sort of a &quot;you're wasting my time&quot; attitude. This is portrayed by the following sentence,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'There is no need for us to waste time in each other’s company.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He can't stand to be in the same room (or I guess, outdoor living space?) as Alecco, so quickly dismisses him. It doesn't really work though, as Alecco gives quite a lengthy explanation of why he believes this woman can be cured differently. He starts mentioning his success and studies under different doctors. To this, Mehmet replies,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'Knowledge is good, but what is the use of knowledge without honesty?'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote in itself doesn't really make sense, so it must be viewed from the overall theme of the story. Now after reading this for a while, I finally understand the implications of this comment. This is a backhanded insult to apprentice's achievements as a doctor. The &quot;knowledge without honesty&quot; is a reference to when Alecco read Mehmet's books without permission. Suddenly, Alecco is filled with guilt (since the reason that Alecco became so successful was due to sneaking and reading the books) so Mehmet is accusing Alecco of obtaining success through lying. This is kind of a jerk move by Mehmet, and we can end the discussion here, saying Alecco's just guilty. But nope! I think there's more, to it than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books has a heavy discussion relating to mania and hypnosis: here, they're referring to traumatic experiences disrupting someone's daily life, perhaps a form of PTSD. I think this is some sort of metaphor/implied meaning. Why else would Alecco go to Vienna to study hypnosis and psychiatrical help if it were not for his own issues? Remember that Alecco nearly did die, and any near-death experience (especially if some poison is shoved down your throat) has got to be traumatic. Also, moving on to the concoction that was supposed to kill him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;... a dose of aphrodisiac go into the glass, and then the dried flowers of agnus castus, which inhibits sex, opium, lavender, ecballium elaterium, the most violent of all purgatives, datura, either 14 grams, inducing insanity, or 22½ grams (death) and finally mustard and cinnamon.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funnily enough, most of the poisons that are given a description are pretty accurate &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecballium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ecballium elaterium&lt;/a&gt; is indeed a very, very strong purgative, and also poisonous. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Datura&lt;/a&gt;, too is known for inducing insanity. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitex_agnus-castus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agnus castus&lt;/a&gt; has historically been &lt;em&gt;believed&lt;/em&gt; to be an anaphrodisiac, though the reliability of this is questionable. The other listed are otherwise not harmful, in their natural forms. He might have survived this by excreting all the poison from his system, and would explain his nausea on the ship (loss of water).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR, the significance of the action is indicative of perhaps PTSD, and the effect of social status and pride of humans.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T14:04:33.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T14:04:33.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10917" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-14T10:06:07.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-05-14T10:06:07.670" LastActivityDate="2019-05-14T10:06:07.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10918" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-14T10:06:07.670" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of expatriate American poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T22:07:30.977" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T22:07:30.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10919" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10955" CreationDate="2019-05-15T04:18:11.123" Score="2" ViewCount="1468" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 3 Witches prophecied to Macbeth that he would be king, thus setting the play into motion. Why did they do that? Did they realize that they were basically giving a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what the result of their prediction would be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:30:04.007" Title="Why did the Witches give the prophecy in the first place?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11387" CreationDate="2019-05-15T04:26:05.407" Score="3" ViewCount="286" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of the book, following Merlin bringing about the destruction of much of the N.I.C.E., Dr. Filostrato, John Withers, and Reverend Straik go to see the Head. The Macrobes promptly demand another head; Withers and Straik promptly kill Filostrato in order to supply it with one. Eventually, they realize that the Head will just demand another Head, and they promptly turn on each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, why did the Macrobes make this demand? Why the gratuitous killing of people that were working for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T20:37:09.953" Title="Why did the Macrobes demand another head at the end of That Hideous Strength?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-15T12:40:38.227" Score="6" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have to translate German playwright Ernst Toller's drama &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=g4UuAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Wandlung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In this drama, Toller uses slashes in the dialogues of some characters to separate the sentences, like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KRIEGSTOD: Zuviel des Lobs, Herr Kamerad. / Ihr Misstraun schien mir unerklärlich, / Ich bin's in Bürgerkreisen zwar gewohnt. / Drum möchte ich von Herzen gern Sie überzeugen. / Wenn Sie gestatten, lass ich aufmarschieren.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/luk46.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/luk46.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the above text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I know, the slash is used in literature to separate verses of a poem when written in body text. I have also asked my teacher, a professional translator specialised in literature, and she told me that she has only seen the slash in this context. But in this case there is no poem, there is not even a rhyme, so I don't understand the purpose of this punctuation mark here and I can't translate the text properly. Has anyone ever encountered the slash in a similar context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe it is something only play-related. Could it have something to do with the way the actors have to act this scene or these characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7275" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T12:18:06.313" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T12:18:06.313" Title="Meaning of the slash (&quot;/&quot;) in dialog in Ernst Toller's &quot;Die Wandlung&quot;" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;&lt;ernst-toller&gt;&lt;die-wandlung&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10923" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10924" CreationDate="2019-05-15T19:56:39.617" Score="1" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book in elementary school but pretty sure it was a novel on the longer side targeting at middle schoolers. The main plot was a major airliner, possibly a 747, crashing. I believe it was in the backyard of the house where the main character (a child) lived, and I think the house was a mansion with a big estate. I distinctly remember learning about triage from this book, as the rescuers tag the victims with red, yellow, and green tags. I read this book sometime in the window of 2006-2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7277" LastEditorUserId="7277" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T03:51:56.540" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T03:51:56.540" Title="Book Identification: YA book about airplane crash in child's backyard" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10923" CreationDate="2019-05-15T21:22:43.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93773.Flight_116_Is_Down_&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flight 116 is Down!&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Caroline B. Cooney?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;paragraph breaks inserted&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1640866312?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book started out with a young boy named Patrick who was a seventeen year old who was a part of the junior first responder team. Patrick always dreamed about the time he will be able to show everyone that he would be a suitable EMT. Patrick would always sit at the coffee shop downtown. He forced himself to drink the coffee while he listed in on all of the EMT’s stories that they had. His mother and his father were also apart of the Nearing River Emergency squad. There was also a girl named Heidi who lived at the Dove House outside of town about seven miles. Her parents traveled all over the world doing all types of cool things. Heidi went to a boarding school where she did not fit in at all and wished that she could just move home. The Dove house was watched by an elderly woman who took care of the gardens and the home itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Heidi came home from break was when the action started to happen. There was a plane a boeing seven-thirty-seven airplane that was traveling through Connecticut loaded with passengers on it. Off those passengers included two young boys Tuck and Daniel, they were on their way to their dad's wedding. Daniel was the older of the two at the age of fifteen and Tuck was ten. Then there is Darienne a spoiled and smart girl who is very pretty, but because of this, she was very stuck up and snobby. The plane ride was going very smoothly when all of a sudden the plane started losing altitude and shaking out of control. The plane was going down. Panic soon broke out on the plane and people were crying and hugging loved ones. The announcement came over the speaker to take the crash position. The plane crash landed in Heidi’s back yard of the dove house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chaos was just beginning for Heidi. She heard a loud crash and took off to the back yard and that is when she saw the plane that had crashed. At first Heidi panicked, she soon got her wit back and called for help, meanwhile help was on the way Heidi helped multiple people to the dove house for warmth and to wait for help. Patrick was the first one on the scene and between himself and Heidi they moved more and more people to the Dove house for safety. They also found people with no serious injuries. Those people also came to help out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soon there were multiple ambulances and fire trucks that took up the one lane road to the Dove House. There were so many cars from Nearing River and all surrounding towns of Connecticut that lined the road to the Dove House. All the cars created a little problem when the ambulance crews and fire rescue vehicles were trying to get through to the crash scene, Heidi made a bold move and told them to cut down the ancient rose bushes that were in the front of the Dove House. The crews could then get to the crash scene with ease. The house itself was a command post for all the wounded people and for people to wait for ambulances. The house was a disaster, but Heidi did not care. Heidi was glad that she did the right thing and helped out the people that needed the help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the night Heidi knew she could not stay at home, so Patrick and his parents offered a spot for Heidi to sleep while the house got cleaned. Patrick enjoyed having Heidi over and liked spending time with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ablightedone.wordpress.com/2013/05/01/to-keep-or-not-flight-116-is-down-flash-fire-and-emergency-room-by-caroline-b-cooney-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This blog&lt;/a&gt; explicitly notes that they learned about triage from the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it by searching for &lt;em&gt;book 747 crashes in backyard&lt;/em&gt;. I was not initially certain it was the right book, but a little more research into the reviews settled it for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T11:38:28.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10903" CreationDate="2019-05-16T00:22:03.753" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of these aren't saying &quot;whore&quot;. The one that does is &quot;Hohore&quot;, which according to &lt;a href=&quot;http://finwake.com/1024chapter1/1024finn1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; is actually &quot;ho whore&quot;; &quot;ho&quot; here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ho#h47125217506960&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the exclamation&lt;/a&gt;. Also, note the &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt; in &quot;hore&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest attestation for &quot;hoe&quot; (for any spelling without &lt;em&gt;r&lt;/em&gt;) meaning &quot;whore&quot; is from the &lt;strong&gt;1964&lt;/strong&gt; book &lt;em&gt;Deep down in Jungle&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Main who'&lt;/em&gt;, best girlfriend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is much too late for it to be something that was used in Joyce's books. It also comes from the wrong accent; the OED says that this shortening represents an African American pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling is definitely not censorship; Ulysses (for example, as Peter Shor says) has 47 instances of &quot;whore&quot; or words containing &quot;whore&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Hoe&quot; meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/minecraft/images/a/a8/IMG_1510.JPG/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/185?cb=20170531184625&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the tool&lt;/a&gt; and the exclamations &quot;ho&quot; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/what-ho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;what ho&quot;&lt;/a&gt; have been around for centuries. Specifically, all of these came into use somewhere between the late 1300s and early 1400s.  Both &quot;what ho&quot; and &quot;ho&quot; were used by Shakespeare: &lt;a href=&quot;https://william-shakespeare.classic-literature.co.uk/the-tempest/ebook-page-08.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;What hoa: slaue: Caliban&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sacred-texts.com/sks/ff/man.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ho now you strike like the blindman&quot;&lt;/a&gt; for example. Neither exclamation is used much now, although &quot;ho&quot; still shows up in expressions like &quot;land ho!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line &quot;Horhot ho hray hor hother’s hest&quot; is just the croppy boy saying &quot;Forgot to pray for mother's rest&quot; with a tongue that is protruding violently. (It says a while back that &quot;for his mother’s rest he had not prayed&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T00:22:03.753" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1102" CreationDate="2019-05-16T21:49:54.740" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting question, I wondered myself. All I could find was a small hint in &quot;Julian's book&quot;, the last chapter in &quot;The Labyrinth of the light&quot; (1:1 translation from my German copy, the original was published in 2016 as &quot;El laberinto de los espíritus&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a name mentioned as ghostwriter of Julian Carax: Boris Laurent. This could be some inside joke or a hint, as such a person(s) actually exist(ed). One of which has written 3 books (found at Amazon), but since I don't understand Spain nor French I have no idea if this reference could actually point to a real person. Very vague, very conspirative, I'm still sitting in the dark. Could be just a common and garden name...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Julian Carax is most certainly a fictive name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7281" LastActivityDate="2019-05-16T21:49:54.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10895" CreationDate="2019-05-16T21:55:02.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9149094.Hired_Husband&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hired Husband&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Rebecca Brandewyne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With eyes as dark as night and a gaze that laid all secrets bare, Nick&#xA;  Valkov was the kind of man any smart woman would avoid. But dire&#xA;  circumstances forced level-headed Caroline Fortune to proposition this&#xA;  compelling stranger…with marriage. Her family's fate rested in Nick's&#xA;  capable hands—and brilliant mind. Yet her proper upbringing hadn't&#xA;  prepared this reluctant bride for her husband's soul-stirring embrace.&#xA;  And neither expected that their practical union would lead them to&#xA;  dark hours of danger…and the ultimate surrender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2439891933&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Caroline fortune is the oldest grand-daughter to Kate, who is the&#xA;  matriarch of Fortune companies, including Fortune Cosmetics. When&#xA;  their chief chemist, the Russian Nicholas is threatened by the INS for&#xA;  deportation, Kate and her brothers come up with a pretend marriage&#xA;  plan between Caroline and Nicholas to keep him in the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T15:54:55.690" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T15:54:55.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10928" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10935" CreationDate="2019-05-18T02:27:47.937" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a story in the nineties, probably published in the eighties or a bit earlier. It involved a sinister villain trapping some kids in a cave full of hibernating rattlesnakes. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was either a river in the cave or a flashflood at the end that enabled the kids to escape, and the villain ended up getting killed by dozens of newly-awakened rattlesnakes and getting flushed out of the cave in the river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recall it being pretty intense for my late grade school age self, maybe targeted at Jr high age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7283" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T15:27:52.517" Title="Story about a cave full of hibernating rattlesnakes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10938" CreationDate="2019-05-18T02:43:48.473" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;I heard a description of a book in 2015 or 2016 in school. The target audience was probably 8-12 years old, but the teacher did say that it was more difficult than the other choices to read for 6th graders (which included &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/203795/106244&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dark Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was about a really smart teenager (I believe 17) who I think was a thief/criminal. They (I think he) were committing a heist or stealing something, maybe a diamond. The teenager had a quite unique name. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The drawing on the cover was completely solid colors, no shading. The cover had a fancily cut diamond, I believe some glasses, and a red, white, and black color scheme. The background was either red or black and the diamond was definitely white. The glasses were either red or black, whatever the background wasn't. It looked sort of like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OL7NOm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OL7NOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A mockup of the described cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5609" LastEditorUserId="5609" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T14:02:25.840" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T16:39:19.977" Title="Middle-grade or YA book with a very smart teenager" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10929" CreationDate="2019-05-18T06:34:03.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this be &quot;Artemis Fowl: The Seventh Dwarf&quot;, a novella/short story by Eoin Colfer for World Book Day 2004? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_Fowl:_The_Seventh_Dwarf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8fBts.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8fBts.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7265" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-18T18:03:05.037" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T18:03:05.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10928" CreationDate="2019-05-18T07:30:05.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this be &lt;strong&gt;Escape from the Island of Aquarius&lt;/strong&gt; (1986) by Frank E. Peretti?  The plot isn’t quite the same, but it does feature a villain, kids, a cavern, a serpent and a whirlpool. Perhaps you found it intense because of its overtly Christian theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_the_Island_of_Aquarius&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia’s page on it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7265" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-10-13T15:27:52.517" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T15:27:52.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10932" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T09:06:19.763" Score="3" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Questions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know if I understood correctly that &amp;quot;metatextuality / metareference / metareferentiality&amp;quot; are synonyms and can be used interchangeably. Finally I summarize what I think the their main functions are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Short Definition&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is &amp;quot;metatextuality / metareference / metareferentiality&amp;quot; when the own medium is emphasized to reflect about language, narration structure and plot →  “writing about the writing” →  this is a typical feature of post-modernism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Longer definition and functions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a quality of certain types of literature [certain book or movie is very “meta-fictional”] that seem to have two levels of dialogue going on at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text has a layer in which it generally proceeds as normal – it is a typical text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a second level of commentary in which the text knowingly comments on what it is doing. It calls your attention to the process of its own creation, or the text will knowingly get in its own way, constantly interrupting what it is doing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the functions of metatextuality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to be funny&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to try to break free from old forms&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4668" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-08T20:47:03.470" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T20:47:03.470" Title="Are the terms &quot;metatextuality / metareference / metareferentiality&quot; synonyms? Is the following definition correct?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;metafiction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-18T11:56:43.527" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to grasp the difference between the literary devices of recurrence and equivalence. I'm preparing for an exam where we are asked to define these terms. In German, they are referred to as &quot;Rekurrenz / Äquivalenz&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my understanding so far, both are a form of &lt;em&gt;foregrounded regularity&lt;/em&gt; (Giving unusual prominence to a &quot;regular element&quot; of a text). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone give me some examples of Recurrence and Equivalence in literary texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4668" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T11:56:43.527" Title="Forms of foregrounding: are recurrence / equivalence the same?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10928" CreationDate="2019-05-18T23:13:41.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was reading @MichaelMaggs answer, I recalled that there was also a treasure involved somehow. That led me back to google and I found the book, the unsubtly titled: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205733.Trapped_in_Death_Cave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trapped in Death Cave&lt;/a&gt; by Bill Wallace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two boys get trapped by the bad guy in a pit in a cave full of hibernating rattlesnakes to dig up some stolen gold. A rainstorm outside causes the cave to fill with water, and the boys use the crate that the gold was in to float out of the pit and out to safety. As I recall, on their way out, they see the bad guy also floating along, dead with lots of visible rattlesnake bites. It was a fun read for a late-elementary boy. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7283" LastActivityDate="2019-05-18T23:13:41.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10936" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10937" CreationDate="2019-05-19T02:15:04.153" Score="6" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1184/1184-h/1184-h.htm#linkC2HCH0078&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter Seventy-Eight&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; Albert shows Monte Cristo the following article from the newspaper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A correspondent at Yanina informs us of a fact of which until now we had remained in ignorance. The castle which formed the protection of the town was given up to the Turks by a French officer named Fernand, in whom the grand vizier, Ali Tepelini, had reposed the greatest confidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albert is offended by this because he thinks it is a reference to his father. As he tells Monte Cristo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It signifies to my father, the Count of Morcerf, whose Christian name is Fernand!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monte Cristo tries to convince Albert that no one will make the connection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now, just tell me who the devil should know in France that the officer Fernand and the Count of Morcerf are one and the same person? and who cares now about Yanina, which was taken as long ago as the year 1822 or 1823?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet Albert is unconvinced, and he goes to demand that Beauchamp issue a retraction of the article. At one point in the conversation Beauchamp says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you insist on this retractation so far as to kill me if I do not make it, although I have repeated more than once, and affirmed on my honor, that I was ignorant of the thing with which you charge me, and although I still declare that it is impossible for anyone but you to recognize the Count of Morcerf under the name of Fernand?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this seems to be essentially the same argument given by Monte Cristo – while Albert's father the Count of Morcerf is indeed named Fernand, that is not enough to make people think that the Fernand spoken of in the newspaper is in fact Albert's father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the edition containing notes by Keith Wren of Kent University, the following note appears on the last sentence above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fernand&lt;/em&gt; clearly incorrect: Dumas means Albert&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble understanding this. The sentence seems to make perfect sense using the name Fernand, as Beauchamp is saying that no one will recognize the Count of Morcerf under the name of Fernand (despite Fernand being his actual given name). To replace Fernand with Albert would seem to make no sense – Beauchamp would be saying that no one would recognize the Count of Morcerf under the name Albert, which has nothing to do with what was written in the newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something here, or is this note just wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T13:27:49.637" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T13:27:49.637" Title="Is this sentence in The Count of Monte Cristo supposed to refer to Fernand or to Albert?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-count-of-monte-cristo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10936" CreationDate="2019-05-19T08:24:27.537" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don’t say which edition of the novel you were reading (you’ll see below why it’s vital to be clear about this), but I guess it is the 2002 paperback published by Wordsworth Editions Limited, where the text appears on page 631 and the note (number 209) appears on page 890. In this edition, the note has been attached to the wrong paragraph. It belongs here, a few paragraphs earlier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Wait a moment—no threats, if you please, M. &lt;strong&gt;Fernand&lt;/strong&gt; Mondego, Vicomte de Morcerf; I never allow them from my enemies, and therefore shall not put up with them from my friends. You insist on my contradicting the article relating to General Fernand, an article with which, I assure you on my word of honor, I had nothing whatever to do?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexandre Dumas (1844). &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;. Project Gutenberg. Based on an anonymous English translation, first published by Crowell &amp;amp; Co (1889).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the text of the 2002 Wordsworth edition, this error has been corrected, and on page 630 it says, “no threats, if you please, M. &lt;strong&gt;Albert&lt;/strong&gt; Mondego”. The editor should therefore have deleted the note, but instead they have moved it to a nearby occurrence of the word ‘Fernand’, presumably under the mistaken belief that the note was misplaced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-19T08:24:27.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10929" CreationDate="2019-05-19T13:03:13.443" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That cover with diamonds and glasses reminds me about the books by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_Watson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jude Watson&lt;/a&gt;. She wrote a Scholastic book in 2015 called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27865403-loot-how-to-steal-a-fortune-paperback-by-jude-watson?rating=5&amp;amp;utm_medium=api&amp;amp;utm_source=book_widget&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; with this cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kIZTl.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kIZTl.png&quot; alt=&quot;Cover of Loot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a foggy night in Amsterdam, a man falls from a rooftop to the wet pavement below. It's Alfie McQuinn, the notorious cat burglar, and he's dying. As sirens wail in the distance, Alfie manages to get out two last words to his young son, March: &amp;quot;Find jewels.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But March learns that his father is not talking about a stash of loot. He's talking about Jules, the twin sister March never knew he had. No sooner than the two find each other, they're picked up by the police and sent to the world's worst orphanage. It's not prison, but it feels like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;March and Jules have no intention of staying put. They know their father's business inside and out, and they're tired of being pushed around. Just one good heist, and they'll live the life of riches and freedom most kids only dream about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a few differences though&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The cover depicts a diamond and glasses, but glasses are on the&#xA;diamond, not beside it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The color scheme of the cover is black-white-yellow without any red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author's name is at the top of the cover, and not the bottom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hero of the story has an unusual name, March McQuinn, but he is&#xA;only 12, and so is his sister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for that it seems to be rather close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jude Watson also wrote a sequel called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/books/sting-by-jude-watson/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sting&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; about the same boy, and with a cover depicting a diamond wearing glasses. It has a blue color scheme, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7285" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-27T16:39:19.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-19T20:59:59.097" Score="3" ViewCount="241" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2019, George R. R. Martin has published 5 out of a planned 7 novels in the series &lt;em&gt;A Song of Fire and Ice&lt;/em&gt; (commonly referred to as &lt;em&gt;Game of Thrones&lt;/em&gt; based on the TV adaptation and the title of the first book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/George-Martins-Thrones-5-Book-Boxed/dp/0345540565/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching on Amazon.de for English language series of books, I observe that it is possible to purchase the first 5 books as a set of new paperbacks for less than 30 Euro.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when I search for German language translations, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Game-Thrones-1-Winter-naht/dp/3764531525/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it seems that the most prevalent German translation is published by &lt;em&gt;Penhaligon&lt;/em&gt; and that the price for a new book is 30 Euro per book and the price for the set is 150 Euro&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's understandable that book translations would incur additional costs to cover the translator fees, however  I'm wondering why there is an approximate 5 fold increase for the German editions especially considering that this book series is one of the most successful book series in the modern era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7288" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2019-05-20T06:50:06.463" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T15:59:21.950" Title="Why are German language editions of Game of Thrones much more expensive than their original version counterparts?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10942" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10945" CreationDate="2019-05-21T02:33:49.673" Score="6" ViewCount="3710" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Herman Melville's &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For as in this world, head winds are far more prevalent than winds from astern (that is, if you never violate the Pythagorean maxim), so for the most part the Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the Pythagorean theorem (a^2 + b^2 = c^2) but I'm not sure what he means in applying it to head winds and winds from astern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4729" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T17:09:26.330" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T06:30:23.247" Title="What did Melville mean by the &quot;Pythagorean Maxim&quot; in &quot;Moby Dick&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10944" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10954" CreationDate="2019-05-21T03:17:26.640" Score="1" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;What literary devices and rhetorical techniques does Shakespeare use in the following passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Benvolio.&lt;/em&gt; I, measuring his affections by my own,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which then most sought where most might not be found,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;being one too many by my weary self,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pursued my humor not pursuing his,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and gladly shunned who gladly fled from me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (c. 1595). &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1 Scene 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T23:30:17.407" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T23:30:17.407" Title="Romeo and Juliet “Which then most sought where most might not be found”" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10942" CreationDate="2019-05-21T07:09:41.000" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;By “the Pythagorean maxim” Melville means the forbidding of eating beans, which was believed in antiquity to have been one of the rules of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pythagorean cult&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plato then asserts that we should bring our bodies into such a disposition before we go to sleep as to leave nothing which may occasion error or perturbation in our dreams. For this reason, perhaps, &lt;strong&gt;Pythagoras laid it down as a rule, that his disciples should not eat beans&lt;/strong&gt;, because this food is very flatulent, and contrary to that tranquillity of mind which a truth-seeking spirit should possess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Marcus Tullius Cicero (44 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Divination/Book_1#30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Divination&lt;/em&gt; 1.30&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by C. D. Yonge (1853).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage from &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; is thus a fart joke: if you “violate the Pythagorean maxim” (eat beans) then you will find that “winds from astern” (farts) become prevalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T07:09:41.000" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10946" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10947" CreationDate="2019-05-21T07:45:03.493" Score="6" ViewCount="837" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's tragedy &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, prince Hamlet repeatedly calls Claudius a &amp;quot;villain&amp;quot;. Here is a quote from Act 2 Scene 2 :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless&#xA;villain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the word &amp;quot;villain&amp;quot; used in the modern sense to refer to a person with malevolent motives or was it meant to carry connotations of lowly birth as well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T21:37:35.943" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T00:23:55.140" Title="What does Hamlet mean when he calls Claudius a &quot;villain&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10947" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10946" CreationDate="2019-05-21T10:52:29.733" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;villain&quot; is derived from the 14th-century word &quot;villein&quot; which means: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a free common villager or village peasant of any of the feudal classes lower in rank than the thane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/villein&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So originally, it would certainly have carried the connotation of low birth. I found this &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/244956/how-did-the-archaic-villein-transform-into-villain&quot;&gt;question on English Language &amp;amp; Usage&lt;/a&gt; about the process of how the word changed meaning which you may find interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question thus becomes when did the meaning change. As it so happens the Oxford English Dictionary provides &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/223417&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;various examples of its usage down the ages&lt;/a&gt;. And from this, we can  see that the transformation of meaning into &quot;scoundrel&quot; happened before Shakespeare's time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By far the most pertinent example is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The greateste vyllany in a villayne is to be gyuen in largesse of lyes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Ld. Berners tr. A. de Guevara Golden Bk. M. Aurelius (1546)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various interpretations of this sentence which cannot be unpicked without context for the passage, which I cannot find. In all of them, however &quot;vyllany&quot; (i.e. villainy) has to be understood as a synonym for wicked behaviour. That, in turn, strongly suggests that &quot;villayne&quot; (i.e. villain) was, by 1546, understood as a synonym for one who was wicked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its actual meaning in the passage is unclear, and it could possibly still mean &quot;serf&quot;. So while not definitive as regards Shakespeare's meaning, we can conclude that by his time, the modern meaning of &quot;villain&quot; was widely understood. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards this specific usage, then, it is worth noting that Claudius is not a serf but the opposite. He is a noble: the King's brother and, later, the King himself. There is nothing in the play to suggest we are to think this claim to nobility is invalid. Indeed, if it was, you might imagine Hamlet might have pursued it as a means to oust Claudius from the throne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we can look at some other quotes in which Shakespeare uses the word villain, including another from Hamlet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One may smile, and smile, and be a villain!    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hamlet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Merchant of Venice &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeits of our own behaviour) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars: as if we were villains on necessity;    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;King Lear&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And every tongue brings in a several tale, and every tale condemns me for a villain  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Richard III&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each of these cases, the context indicates we should read &quot;villain&quot; in the modern sense rather than to mean someone of low birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T12:59:09.023" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T12:59:09.023" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11321" CreationDate="2019-05-21T12:51:50.157" Score="5" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a short story of a person whose conversations all ran alphabetically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a rather known short story (I read it initially in German, but don't know, in which language it was originally written).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part is of the man reminiscing about a visit at a bar, where he talked to a girl. There he explains his situation, that all his conversations start from A and run letter by letter to Z, at which point they finish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;He vexes that, if only he (not sure if it was exactly like that) would have held each letter a little longer, he'd have had a chance with the girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the story, he visits a specialist in the hopes of curing his curse. This specialist then tells him that breaking the curse is a difficult endeavor, and eventually he achieves breaking it, leaving the main character relieved, but only as neither of the two notices that the curse had been replaced by another one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the name of the short story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7296" LastEditorUserId="7296" LastEditDate="2019-05-21T20:14:58.487" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T18:23:21.037" Title="Looking for a short story about a person whose conversations run from A to Z" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10951" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-22T13:54:58.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-22T13:54:58.057" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T13:54:58.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10952" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-22T13:54:58.057" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the ancient Greek tragedian Aeschylus (c. 525–c. 455 BCE). His surviving works include 'The Persians', 'Seven Against Thebes' and 'The Oresteia'. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:43:05.037" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:43:05.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-22T14:20:24.820" Score="3" ViewCount="410" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the following sentence from &lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the light by which she had read the book filled with troubles, falsehoods, sorrow, and evil, flared up more brightly than ever before, lighted up for her all that had been darkness, flickered, began to grow dim, and was quenched forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Leo Tolstoy (1878). &lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt;, part 7, chapter 31. Translated by Constance Garnett (1901).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the line which describes the final moments of Anna’s death, when she flings herself under an oncoming train. Which light and which book are being talked about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7301" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T11:47:03.543" Title="What is &quot;the light by which she had read the book&quot; in &quot;Anna Karenina&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10944" CreationDate="2019-05-22T14:53:31.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(rhetoric)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parallelism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the “correspondence, in sense or construction, of successive clauses or passages” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Benvolio compares his own mood and behaviour with Romeo’s in a pair of parallel phrases: “pursued my humor not pursuing his” and “gladly shunned who gladly fled”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antithesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, “the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced or parallel words”. Here we find “his affections” contrasting with “my own”; “most sought” contrasting with “most might not be found”; “pursued my humour” contrasting with “pursuing his”, and “gladly shunned” contrasting with “gladly fled”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isocolon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isocolon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, “a rhetorical scheme in which parallel elements possess the same number of words”. In this passage we find “his affections”—“my own” and “gladly shunned”—“gladly fled”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schesis_onomaton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schesis onomaton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the “emphasis of an idea by repeating it rapidly using slightly different words”. Here the lines “pursued my humor not pursuing his” and “gladly shunned who gladly fled from me” repeat the same idea (that Benvolio and Romeo have been avoiding each other) in different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paradox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, “an apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Here there is an apparent self-contradiction in Benvolio’s claim that he is “one too many” even though he is “by my weary self”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amphiboly&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, “a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure”. Here the participial phrase “being one too many by my weary self” modifies either the line above, or to the line below, there being no way to determine which. (Shakespeare often employs this device; see the discussion of it in William Empson’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/page/n69&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 50–53&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanaclasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antanaclasis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, “the repeated use of the same word, each time with a different meaning”. Here, in “most sought, where most might not be found”, the first occurrence of “most” is an adverb meaning “to the greatest extent”, while the second is a noun meaning “the greatest amount or quantity”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-05-22T14:53:31.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10919" CreationDate="2019-05-22T16:00:31.120" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Witches are supernatural in character and Satanic. They delivered a self-fulfilling prophecy to tempt Macbeth into willingly committing evil deeds to secure his soul.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common motif in mythology is that of the three Fates. Greek and Roman, Irish and Norse legend all have versions of these figures with each of the women representing past, present and future respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Witches in Macbeth are often compared to the Fates, particularly their Norse incarnation, known as the Norns. They are described in the play as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The weird sisters, hand in hand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the word &quot;weird&quot; is derived from the old Norse &quot;wyrd&quot;, meaning &quot;fate&quot;. The Norns, unlike their classical counterparts, were outcasts who lived far from human habitation. It is clear from the events of the play that, like the Fates, are in the habit of predicting the future. But look at the way they greet Macbeth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First Witch&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Second Witch&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Third Witch&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   - All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has been Thane of Glamis for some time. He is - although he does not know it - Thane of Cawdor. And he will be King in the fullness of time. Each statement is made by a different Witch, suggesting that, again like the Fates, they represent past, present and future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this matter? Because the purpose of the Fates was to control destiny. Indeed the Norns were so powerful that they held the destiny of not only men but gods, as well. So if we are to equate the Witches with the Fates, it strongly suggests that they knew full well what the result of their prophecy would be, and were fully able to ensure it would come about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This begs the question of why they bothered to get involved at all. A possible answer is that Shakespeare's time is not so long after the days of witch trials. Audiences were still willing and able to believe in the supernatural, and in Satanic forces. And the Witche's modus operandi, which is essentially to tempt Macbeth into murder with their prophecy, echoes the classic behaviour of devils. Fates they may be, but by leading Macbeth willingly to his fate, they are ensuring his rejection by God and that his soul will go to hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their Satanic allegiance is made clear at the very opening of the play. The first two witches call out &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;First Witch.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - I come, Graymalkin!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Second Witch.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  - Paddock calls.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Graymalkin&quot; (literally &quot;grey cat&quot;) and &quot;Paddock&quot; are their familiars, helper devils in the form of animals. The belief in familiars dates back to the witch trials of earlier centuries and was central in many prosecutions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which brings us on to why they'd bother in the first place. To which the answer is that, as allies of the devil, they are simply and clearly agents of evil. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at the conversation they have among themselves prior to Macbeth's entrance, in which they are boasting of the wicked deeds they have done. The first witch has been killing pigs, offering no reason and thus leaving the audience to presume it was for the sheer hell of it. The second has bought down the most awful, ruinous curses upon a sailor for no better reason than his wife refused to share her chestnuts. If they are the Fates and servants of Satan, they need no further motivation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- Frye, Roland Mushat. &quot;Launching the Tragedy of Macbeth: Temptation, Deliberation, and Consent in Act I.&quot; The Huntington Library Quarterly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T10:45:17.953" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T10:45:17.953" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10953" CreationDate="2019-05-23T02:23:15.350" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's metaphorical, and examining the context before the passage you cite can illuminate the meaning. I believe the light refers to Anna's outlook on the world, or her interpretation of external events. The book, then, is what she sees outside her--what's happening with &amp;amp; to the average people around her. (I'm working from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, on page 766 in my version, Anna, in a miserable mental state and seeing only the worst in those around her, overhears a man and his wife talking on the train. The woman says, &quot;Man has been given reason in order to rid himself of that which troubles.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'To rid himself of that which troubles,' Anna repeated. And, glancing at the red-cheeked husband and the thin wife, she realized that the sickly wife considered herself a misunderstood woman and that her husband deceived her and supported her in this opinion of herself. &lt;strong&gt;It was as if Anna could see their story and all the hidden corners of their souls, turning her light on them.&lt;/strong&gt; ....&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Yes, troubles me very much, and reason was given us in order to rid ourselves of it. So I must rid myself of it. &lt;strong&gt;Why not put out the candle, if there's nothing more to look at it, if it's vile to look at it all?&lt;/strong&gt;'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the story of the man and wife constitutes a part of the &quot;book&quot; around Anna, and her &quot;light&quot; or &quot;candle&quot; represents how Anna views the stories of the people around her. Crucially, however, what this &quot;light&quot; reveals is vile, upsetting, dark, and ultimately more a reflection of Anna's depression than the truth about the people around her. She doesn't know the woman views herself as misunderstood; it's more a projection of Anna's own internal state, itself bleak, grim, despairing. (She is suicidal, after all.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, moments before Anna's death--the excerpt you cite-she crosses herself. Tolstoy writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The habitual gesture of making the sign of the cross called up in her soul a whole series of memories from childhood and girlhood, and suddenly the darkness that covered everything for her [projected from within herself outward, in my interpretation, like some kind of an anti-candle or bizarro lantern] broke and life rose up before her momentarily with all its bright past joys. ... And that candle by the light of which she had been reading that book filled with anxieties, deceptions, grief and evil, flared up brighter than ever, lit up for her all that had once been in darkness, sputtered, grew dim, and went out for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's a matter of debate and interpretation if the flaring up of the candle's light here, in Anna's final moment, actually reveals truth and beauty, a la her childhood recollections, or merely reveals in a harsher glare all the deceptions Anna had previously been fixated on immediately before her death. I'm inclined toward the former, that she attains a powerful spiritual realization in her last instant, brought upon by crossing herself. This could fruitfully be compared to Levin's spiritual realization and awakening that comes later, but that's beyond the scope of this answer, which is already far too sprawling and imprecise. I hope it helps and others can improve it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7303" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-23T08:33:46.090" LastActivityDate="2019-05-23T08:33:46.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10961" CreationDate="2019-05-23T12:32:54.287" Score="4" ViewCount="214" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Shakespearean tragedy &lt;strong&gt;Hamlet&lt;/strong&gt;, Horatio is a friend and &quot;fellow student&quot; of the eponymous prince. A  meticulous reading of the text will reveal certain apparent inconsistencies in the depiction of the character of Horatio. For instance, Horatio - who is the primary source of information about King Hamlet - seems to have observed the old king well enough to describe his attire and his physical features such as his hands and beard. He has witnessed the battle between the old king Hamlet and the king of Norway, Fortinbras. In a separate incident, he remembers the frown on the kings face when he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;smote the sledded Polacks on the ice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;during an argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very next scene, he tells Hamlet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw him once ;he was a godly king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we reconcile these two statements?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T08:47:48.627" Title="Inconsistencies in the character of Horatio in Hamlet" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10960" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-24T04:32:50.893" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;How is fate/fatalism portrayed in Njal's Saga? And how does it play into the development of the plot? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some comparisons that can be drawn between fate in Njal's Saga and the Aeneid of Virgil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7305" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-24T06:13:09.260" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T06:13:09.260" Title="How does the theme of fate manifest in 'Njal's Saga', and how does it differ from the theme of fate in the Aeneid by Virgil?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;norse-mythology&gt;&lt;virgil&gt;&lt;aeneid&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10958" CreationDate="2019-05-24T08:47:48.627" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found two possible explanations for this. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to ever know which - if either - is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1: It's a Punctuation Error&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to W. Edward Farrison in his essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3043363&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horatio's Report to Hamlet&lt;/a&gt; (Modern Language Notes, June 1957) it is a printing mistake. He notes that in early editions of the play, the mark after &quot;once&quot; varied between a comma and a semicolon and suggests this is evidence of confusion among early scribes or proofreaders about how the line should be punctuated. Remember, early editions would have been copied from Shakespeare's messy scripts or even verbally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to point out that the line makes a whole lot more sense if punctuated differently, with a mark after &quot;him&quot; and before &quot;once&quot;. As in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw him; once he was a godly king&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember, they are talking about Hamlet's father. So in this reading Horatio begins &quot;I saw him&quot; then realises that speaking impulsively to a disturbed friend about his father's ghost could be quite upsetting. So he pauses (the semicolon) and begins again by praising the dead king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this reading, there is no contradiction with Horatio's earlier statement of having seen the king in battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2: Shakespeare Didn't Care&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the notes to the 1984 Oxford Scholarly Edition of the play, George Richard Hibbard suggests that Shakespeare was not interested in minor discrepancies in Horatio's statements. He posits that audiences at the time would have been most unlikely to notice the exact contradiction the OP has noticed. Again, remember that few would have the advantage a modern-day reader has of being able to pore over a printed text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also points out that it is not the only contradiction Horatio makes. In the speech beginning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That can I.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At least, the whisper goes so. Our last king,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose image even but now appear'd to us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio demonstrates a rich knowledge of Danish history. Yet later we see this exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hamlet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The King doth wake to-night and takes his rouse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keeps wassail, and the swagg'ring upspring reels,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The kettledrum and trumpet thus bray out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The triumph of his pledge.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Horatio.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is it a custom?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which seems an unlikey ignorance of custom for one so well-versed in knowledge about Denmark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for Shakespeare's disinterest is simply that Horatio is not a well-rounded character. His function in the play is, rather, &lt;a href=&quot;http://triggs.djvu.org/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/ABOUT/Horatio-12-20-08.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a dramatic foil&lt;/a&gt; who can be called upon to advance the plot as and when required. Indeed this is sometimes obvious, such as when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hamlet.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  What, ho, Horatio!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Enter Horatio.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Horatio.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  Here, sweet lord, at your service.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio simply appears out of nowhere when required.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T08:47:48.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="71" CreationDate="2019-05-24T13:53:50.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his 1943 article, “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace,” English geographer Halford Mackinder described Britain as a 'moated aerodrome' in the 'Midland Ocean' (ie the North Atlantic and surrounding countries, ie the US, Canada, France, and the UK). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been suggested already that the Ingsoc slogan in &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; ('Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past') was inspired by Mackinder's summary of his Heartland theory: 'Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world' (in &lt;em&gt;Democratic Ideals and Realit&lt;/em&gt;y, 1919). Perhaps Mackinder's 'moated aerodrome' also served as an inspiration for 'Airstrip One'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7306" LastActivityDate="2019-05-24T13:53:50.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10964" CreationDate="2019-05-24T20:23:24.017" Score="3" ViewCount="725" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Taylor Coleridge's incomplete poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kubla Khan&lt;/a&gt;&quot; ends with a vision of a poet in an ecstatic state with &quot;flashing eyes&quot; and &quot;floating hair&quot;. He is beyond the realm of mere mortals for he has drunk the &quot;milk of paradise&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And all should cry, Beware! Beware!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His flashing eyes, his floating hair!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Weave a circle round him thrice,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And close your eyes with holy dread,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For he on honey dew hath fed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And drunk the milk of paradise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What perplexes me are the phrases &quot;Beware! Beware!&quot; and &quot;holy dread&quot;. It seems as though the poet is being treated as an outcast. Can anyone explain why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T07:02:59.120" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T07:03:56.440" Title="Why &quot;all should cry, Beware! Beware!&quot; in Coleridge's &quot;Kubla Khan&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10963" CreationDate="2019-05-25T03:51:19.427" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the final stanza, the poet writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could I revive within me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her symphony and song,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To such a deep delight 'twould win me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That with music loud and long,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would build that dome in air,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That sunny dome! those caves of ice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears the speaker longs for (or is even envious of) Khan's somewhat mythic abilities described in the poem, namely the power to create something beautiful. When he would complete the great creation he longs for, the speaker believes people would revere him as a supernatural being, one which you would have to &amp;quot;weave a circle round him thrice&amp;quot; as protection from his power. There is a certain fear of those who have passed beyond mortality into the supernatural, and that fear of the supernatural could be what Coleridge is trying to assert in this final stanza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should also be noted that he (apparently) wrote this poem after waking up from an opium dream, was interrupted, and forgot most of the lines. The last stanza was written after he came back from this interruption, and in his preface to his poetry collection, &amp;quot;Christabel, Kubla Khan, and the Pains of Sleep&amp;quot;, he wrote about it, saying,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet from the still surviving recollections in his mind, the Author has frequently purposed to finish for himself what had been originally, as it were, given to him. but the to-morrow is yet to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a contrast to this vision, I have annexed a fragment of a very different character, describing with equal fidelity the dream of pain and disease.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T07:03:56.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5128" CreationDate="2019-05-25T04:07:27.310" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you continue the meter to the next line, you find it is unstressed (From), completing the trochee from the previous line's stressed syllable (short). Now, if you continue, you might find another problem with the ending of the second line, mainly that it is stressed. However, notice the next line, which starts discussing the spondee, two long stressed syllables. If you consider &quot;sort&quot; to be part of the first spondee, then you must consider &quot;yet&quot; to be the end of the last one, which allows &quot;ill able&quot; to be the first dactyl. The rest of the meters work out by line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trochee: &lt;strong&gt;Tro&lt;/strong&gt;chee &lt;strong&gt;trips&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;short&lt;/strong&gt;; From &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;long&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;so&lt;/strong&gt;lemn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spondee: &lt;strong&gt;sort&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Slow&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Spondee&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;stalks&lt;/strong&gt;; &lt;strong&gt;strong&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;foot&lt;/strong&gt;! &lt;strong&gt;yet&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dactyl: &lt;strong&gt;ill&lt;/strong&gt; able&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either that or it sounded better to Coleridge, and he wanted to confuse future generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5739" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T04:07:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-25T06:52:41.613" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Wavell's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/modernpilgriminm00wave/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca&lt;/a&gt; (1913), p. 138:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sir Richard Burton got into hot water with many people for translating&#xA;  literally and without expurgation the “Arabian Nights.” A perusal of&#xA;  his work will give the reader an idea of how strange a medley of grave&#xA;  and gay, religion and superstition, high moral precepts and cynically&#xA;  immoral episodes is Arabic literature. The “Arabian Nights,” however,&#xA;  even in its most unrestrained passages, is &lt;em&gt;petite bière&lt;/em&gt; compared&#xA;  with some other well-known books. One in my possession, entitled very&#xA;  inappropriately “Flowers of the Spring,” was written by a learned&#xA;  doctor of sacred law for the purpose, so he says in his introduction,&#xA;  of affording entertainment and distraction to his pupils when wearied&#xA;  by their arduous theological studies. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this book &quot;Flowers of the Spring&quot; available in a modern edition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Casual googling did not turn up anything likely-looking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4714" LastEditorUserId="4714" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T17:50:26.287" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T00:04:08.950" Title="Identify Arabic book, Flowers of the Spring" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-25T11:26:42.493" Score="1" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;The introduction to Barack Obama's memoir &lt;em&gt;Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance&lt;/em&gt; (1995) contains the passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And yet what strikes me most when I think about the story of my family is a &lt;strong&gt;running strain of innocence&lt;/strong&gt;, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood. My wife's cousin, only six years old, has already lost such innocence: A few weeks ago he reported to his parents that some of his first grade classmates had refused to play with him because of his dark, unblemished skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to  understand the meaning of the words &quot;running strain of innocence&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7309" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T11:35:27.353" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T12:01:25.160" Title="What does Obama mean by &quot;running strain of innocence&quot; in &quot;Dreams from My Father&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;barack-obama&gt;&lt;dreams-from-my-father&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10970" CreationDate="2019-05-25T14:44:35.500" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just finished reading Lovecraft's fragment &quot;Azathoth&quot; (in Italian translation) and I am astonished by the beauty of the story. Nevertheless I am a little bit confused about the end of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my case I read the tale in Italian and then when I wanted to read it in English a doubt came to mind. The original text says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without  touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which gives me the idea that the guy felt asleep while watching the stars.&#xA;Instead the Italian version is much more dramatic since it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il corpo che penzolava irrigidito dalla solitaria finestra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which makes me think that the guy actually committed suicide by hanging himself out from the window. Some ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7310" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-25T17:23:49.667" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T17:23:49.667" Title="How to interpret &quot;body that leaned stiffly&quot; in H. P. Lovecraft's &quot;Azathoth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10969" CreationDate="2019-05-25T17:20:44.147" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Azathoth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English text&lt;/a&gt; says that the protagonist lives in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a room whose one window opened […] on to a dim court […]. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one &lt;strong&gt;leaned&lt;/strong&gt; so far out and peered at the small stars that passed. [… He] used night after night to &lt;strong&gt;lean&lt;/strong&gt; out and peer aloft&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, because his only window looked out onto a small enclosed courtyard, he had to lean out and look up if he wanted to see the stars. The word “leaned” in this paragraph has the same meaning as in “the body that &lt;strong&gt;leaned&lt;/strong&gt; stiffly from the lonely window” in the next paragraph, and there is no implication of hanging or suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason the Italian translator has chosen to translate “leaned” as “penzolava” (dangling, hanging), whereas “pendente” (leaning) would better convey the meaning of the English text. Perhaps the translator wanted to make the story more dramatic, or perhaps it was a mistake. How did the translator handle the other occurrences of “leaned” and “lean”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-05-25T17:20:44.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10967" CreationDate="2019-05-26T00:57:22.173" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A search of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OCLC WorldCat&lt;/a&gt; catalogue for an Arabic language book with the title &lt;em&gt;Flowers of the Spring&lt;/em&gt; returns &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3Aflowers+of+the+spring&amp;amp;fq=ln%3Aara+%3E+-mt%3Ajuv&amp;amp;qt=advanced&amp;amp;dblist=638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six results&lt;/a&gt;, of which &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Zahr al-rabi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Niʻmat Allāh ibn ʻAbd Allāh Jazāʼirī seems promising (although clicking on that title reveals there are multiple variations on the author's name). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A further WorldCat search just for that title offers &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=zahr-al-rabi&amp;amp;&amp;amp;dblist=638&amp;amp;fq=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;74 items&lt;/a&gt;, including 56 printed books, four articles and a thesis/dissertation. Some of these items are dated in the 19th century, which corresponds to the timeframe for Wavell's library. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A broader internet search for &lt;em&gt;Zahr al-rabi&lt;/em&gt; leads to a WikiShia entry for the author &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikishia.net/view/Al-Sayyid_Ni%27mat_Allah_al-Jaza%27iri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Al-Sayyid Ni'mat Allah al-Jaza'iri&lt;/a&gt;, which starts with the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Al-Sayyid Niʿmat Allāh al-Jazāʾirī&lt;/strong&gt; (Arabic:السيد نعمة الله الجزائري) (b. 1050/1640-41 d.1112/1701), known as **al-Muḥaddith al-Jazāʾirī* (المحدث الجزائري), was a Shiite scholar and the head of the well-known scholarly and religious household of Jaza'iri whose lineage goes back to Imam al-Kazim (a). Al-Sayyid Ni'mat Allah was a student of scholars such as al-'Allama al-Majlisi, Jamal al-Din Khwansari, Mulla Muhsin al-Fayd al-Kashani, and al-Shaykh al-Hurr al-'Amili. He wrote many works; in fact, he is known as a prolific author. His works include &lt;em&gt;al-Anwar al-nu'maniyya, Qisas al-anbiya'&lt;/em&gt;, and the anthology, &lt;em&gt;Zahr al-rabi'&lt;/em&gt;. He counts as a prominent high-ranking Akhbari scholar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that in the WikiShia entry the author is referred to variously as &lt;strong&gt;al-Sayyid Ni'mat Allah&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;al-Jaza'iri&lt;/strong&gt;, although the latter simply means someone from the al-Jaza'ir (where he was born: it's a district of Basra in what is now known as Iraq).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hopefully this provides a springboard for further investigation...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-05-27T00:04:08.950" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T00:04:08.950" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8271" CreationDate="2019-05-26T17:11:08.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Most likely an error of composition or copying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433372b/f11.double&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KVorim.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Galland manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 3609–11&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The 15th century Syrian ‘Galland manuscript’, the oldest extant manuscript of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8433372b/f11.double&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arabe 3609–11&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a lot of variation among the manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt;, and not all versions have the porter retell the list of shops. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/arabiannightsen01lanegoog/page/n67&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward William Lane’s 1853 translation&lt;/a&gt;, the porter in retelling his story says only, “this cateress loaded me and brought me hither”. But in all the translations I looked at where the porter &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; list the shops, there is a discrepancy between the original narration of the shopping trip, and the porter’s retelling of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Mille_et_Une_Nuits/Histoire_de_trois_Calenders,_fils_de_roi,_et_de_cinq_dames_de_Bagdad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antoine Galland’s 1704 translation&lt;/a&gt;, the original order is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chrétien; vendeur de fruits et de fleurs; boucher; une autre boutique [greengrocer]; une autre [dry grocer]; une autre encore [confectioner]; droguiste&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(the bracketed descriptions are mine, based on what the lady bought at the shop), and the order in the porter’s retelling is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;marchand de vin; vendeur d’herbes; vendeur d’oranges, de limons et de citrons; vendeur d’amandes, de noix, de noisettes et d’autres fruits; confiseur; droguiste&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are only six shops in the retelling, the butcher having been omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_Thousand_Nights_and_One_Night/The_Porter_and_the_Three_Ladies_of_Baghdad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Payne’s 1882 translation&lt;/a&gt;, the original order is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nazarene; fruiterer; butcher; grocer; pastry-cook; druggist; greengrocer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the order in the retelling is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vintner; butcher; fruiterer; grocer; greengrocer; confectioner; druggist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Porter_and_the_Three_Ladies_of_Baghdad_(Burton)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Burton’s 1885 translation&lt;/a&gt;, the original order is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nazarene; fruiterer; butcher; grocer; confectioner; perfumer; greengrocer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and the order in the retelling is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;vintner; butcher; fruiterer; grocer; confectioner; perfumer-cum-druggist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are only six shops in the retelling, the greengrocer having been omitted.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Irwin suggests that the variation between manuscripts is due in part to carelessness in copying, and in part to the use to which the manuscripts were to be put:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt; cannot have been seen as a canonical text which deserved special care or demanded accurate transmission; nor was it written to be read by scholars. It is unlikely that medieval copyists of manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt; had any great reverence for the text they were transcribing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhsin_Mahdi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahdi&lt;/a&gt; himself has noted the evidence, provided in the marginalia of a manuscript of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt; now in the British Library, of a book dealer, Ahmad al-Rabbat, who traded in Aleppo in the late eighteenth century, who used to hire out copies of collections of stories and poetry—and when these collections began to suffer from wear, al-Rabbat would insert new pages, sometimes with new stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There was no reason for a scribal copyist of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt; to take special pains to get the Arabic right, for it was never written in immaculate classical Arabic in the first place. Nor was there any reason to hesitate in adding or deleting stories, incidents or glosses. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In fact, it is likely that many copies of the &lt;em&gt;Nights&lt;/em&gt; were written to be read aloud, whether by professional or amateur storytellers, and it may be that the storyteller had no need of the full text (never mind an accurate one!); he needed only an outline of a story on which he could embroider. Moreover, if storytellers themselves made copies of the text, they would very likely have added favourite elaborations of their own devising to stories in their repertoire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Irwin (1994). &lt;em&gt;The Arabian Nights: A Companion&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 58–59. Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Irwin’s description of the context of manuscript production is clearly also capable of explaining the internal inconsistency between the two lists of shops. The order of shops does not matter for the story, so why take pains to make it consistent? Given all the events that take place between the two lists, it is unlikely that a copyist will notice the discrepancy, let alone be troubled enough to correct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see Irwin’s proposed process of elaboration in operation by looking at the items on the shopping list. For example, at the fruiterer, the lady buys, in Galland’s translation (based on the earliest extant manuscript):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;plusieurs sortes de pommes, des abricots, des pêches, des coins, des limons, des citrons, des oranges, du myrte, du basilic, des lis, du jasmin, et de quelques autres sortes de fleurs et de plantes de bonne odeur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[many kinds of apples, apricots, peaches, quinces, lemons, limes, oranges, myrtle, basil, lilies, jasmine, and other kinds of sweet-smelling flowers and plants]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Haddawy’s translation (based on Mahdi’s critical edition), the list is much more elaborate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;yellow and red apples, Hebron peaches and Turkish quinces, and seacoast lemons and royal oranges, as well as baby cucumbers. She also bought Aleppo jasmine and Damascus lilies, myrtle berries and mignonettes, daisies and gillyflowers, lilies of the valley and irises, narcissus and daffodils, violets and anemones, as well as pomegranate blossoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-05-26T17:11:08.017" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8442" CreationDate="2019-05-27T11:08:02.240" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally I think there is more to it than the obvious 'don't use love to manipulate'. I think it means don't pretend to be what you are not in all areas of life not just in romantic relations...talking the talk but not walking the walk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7320" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T11:08:02.240" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10968" CreationDate="2019-05-27T11:22:25.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Running&quot; in this context means &quot;happening repeatedly.&quot; A &lt;em&gt;running joke&lt;/em&gt; is one which the people involved reference over several meetings, maybe for years, possibly generations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;strain&quot; here means a tendency towards a kind of behavior: a trait or a facet of someone's personality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Obama is saying that in his family, many people, generations of them, have been innocent in facing the world. They aren't cynical. They aren't hurt. They face the world thinking only good things, and haven't been disillusioned. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-05-27T11:22:25.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10977" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-27T23:36:59.433" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first stumbled on this quote at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/a-passage-to-india-quotes-741015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ThoughtCo&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he did not realize that 'white' has no more to do with a colour than '&lt;em&gt;God save the King&lt;/em&gt;' with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; does connote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— E. M. Forster (1924), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445/page/n77&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Passage to India&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How doesn't &amp;quot;white&amp;quot; relate to skin colour? Most European Caucasians do have lighter skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How doesn't  'God save the King' relate to a god? Doesn't it refer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Save_the_Queen#Lyrics_in_the_UK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Church of England's God&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; connote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is &amp;quot;the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T10:41:17.223" Title="Why isn't &quot;white&quot; related to colour and ''God save the King&quot; with a god?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;e-m-forster&gt;&lt;a-passage-to-india&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T00:23:28.897" Score="3" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm Asian and read &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=FBBQDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA114&amp;amp;dq=%22Suspicion%20in%20the%20Oriental%20is%20a%20sort%20of%20malignant%20tumor%22&amp;amp;pg=PA114#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Suspicion%20in%20the%20Oriental%20is%20a%20sort%20of%20malignant%20tumor%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 114&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms&lt;/em&gt; by Lisa Lowe, but I'm still baffled by this quote at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/a-passage-to-india-quotes-741015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ThoughtCo&lt;/a&gt;. It feels too broadly generalized (and a shade politically incorrect?!?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspicion in the Oriental is a sort of malignant tumour, a mental malady, that makes him self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly; he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way the Westerner can not comprehend. It is his demon, as the Westerner's is hypocrisy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— E. M. Forster (1924), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445/page/n269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Passage to India&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 32&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What's meant by &amp;quot;suspicion&amp;quot;? Like how Eurosceptics are &amp;quot;suspicious&amp;quot; of the EU?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How does &amp;quot;suspicion&amp;quot; make Orientals &amp;quot;self-conscious and unfriendly suddenly&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;he trusts and mistrusts at the same time in a way&amp;quot; - huh? This looks like a contradiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why can't the &amp;quot;Westerner&amp;quot; &amp;quot;comprehend&amp;quot; this synchronous trust and mistrust?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is the Westerner's &amp;quot;demon&amp;quot; &amp;quot;hypocrisy&amp;quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Are-many-Japanese-people-hypocritical-and-if-so-why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orientals can be hypocritical too&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:30:46.553" Title="What does Forster mean by &quot;Suspicion in the Oriental&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;e-m-forster&gt;&lt;a-passage-to-india&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T01:36:48.737" Score="3" ViewCount="3766" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lighted on this quote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://bookriot.com/2016/04/21/35-best-lines-jane-eyre/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BookRiot&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Helen Burns] went on— “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Charlotte Brontë (1847), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog01bron/page/124&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.thefreedictionary.com/postst7713_If-all-the-world-hated-you-and-believed-you-wicked--while-your-own-conscience-approved-of-you-and-absolved-you-from-guilt----.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This forum thread&lt;/a&gt; has diverse interpretations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just listen to the applauses of your own conscience and forget about the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it means that even if the whole world hated you because you were evil, but you in your conscience feel you are not, then probably you would have friends who would feel the same way about you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it means that some people are their only best friends. It reminds me of Rudyard Kipling's 'If'. It may be a sign of strength in times of hardship if you are a leader making awkward decisions but it may also mean you are stubborn and just plain wrong like Lord Cardigan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;friends, with the &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; on the end makes it more than one. Being a friend to yourself is not correct by itself. But it is true. The truth is that yes, you would have friends. Even if they are animals. but not only to the animals but to all that you show yourself friendly to, most of them will be friendly back to you. Make sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an old story referred to Nasreddin Hodja - maybe one of the most well-known ones. In the original, Nasreddin Hodja, son and donkey (his famous donkey!) are the main figures of story. It implies that, whatever you do, there will always be somebody there not to approve of how you act. After all, in connection with the quote, one should know he/she is the one who can choose the rightest step for him/herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if you are righteous, you still can be left alone, without single friend. Although not entirely true, this quote does give some consolation :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these are right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:44:04.457" Title="What did Charlotte Brontë mean by &quot;you would not be without friends”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10980" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T05:55:50.143" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Long ago, I read a children's story by an English author who probably pre-dated Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton, and could be pre-World War I. It concerned some children trying to frighten an alcoholic off the bottle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Story line: They show him a bunch of Pomeranian dogs dyed pink, blue and green, to persuade him that he has delirium. When he wakes from a stupor, they cluster around him in lab coats and lay icicles on his stomach (where he can't see them), pretending they're scalpels for operating on him. And so on. Rough humour, but very well written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would like to read this writer's work again as an adult, but I simply can't remember his/her name. Any pointers appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7324" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T16:00:54.423" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T16:00:54.423" Title="Early 20th century children's story: children trying to frighten an alcoholic off the bottle using dyed dogs and icicles" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10981" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T08:25:03.897" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure this comes from an English poem, referring a woman's beauty. The author suggests that roses fade and wither, and that by describing her in written word keeps her alive forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That might be a misdirect, it was a long time ago I read it. The actual poem didn't really stick with me, but the last line did and I've been trying to find the origin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immortalised in prose, a god among the pages&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas? Google has not been fruitful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7325" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T02:19:16.513" Title="Source of &quot;Immortalised in Prose, A God Among the Pages&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10982" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10977" CreationDate="2019-05-28T10:41:17.223" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you read the rest of the paragraph, it's clear that Mr Fielding thinks &quot;white&quot; is an inaccurate description of a Caucasian's skin (it should be &quot;pinko-grey&quot;). The narrator is saying that being &quot;white&quot; is not about skin colour; the implication is that &quot;white&quot; represents &lt;em&gt;racial superiority&lt;/em&gt; rather than skin tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator sees a corollary with &lt;em&gt;God Save the King&lt;/em&gt;, which ostensibly is a prayer for divine protection of the monarch, but in practice can be seen as a purely self-serving utterance, whether as a pledge of loyalty to the monarchy, or as a fervent wish that everything that the monarchy represents (imperial power, social stability, British hegemony) should continue. It doesn't require a belief in a god, just as being &quot;white&quot; doesn't require a particular skin colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it would be improper to say these things: one shouldn't draw attention to one's (assumed) superiority, firstly because a cultured person should have better manners than that, and secondly because expressing a belief in the right to rule over the &quot;lesser&quot; races may not exactly be welcomed out there in the colonies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T10:41:17.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10983" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11000" CreationDate="2019-05-28T12:56:56.210" Score="4" ViewCount="5596" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Samuel Beckett's play '&lt;strong&gt;Waiting for Godot&lt;/strong&gt;', Lucky is the slave of a character called Pozzo. Unlike the other characters in the play who talk compulsively,Lucky utters just two sentences in the play, one of which is extremely long. Lucky's speech is a monologue of non-sequitur which jars coherence at every level. What does the speech signify? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T07:08:24.030" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T07:08:24.030" Title="The significance of Lucky's speech in 'Waiting for Godot'" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;samuel-beckett&gt;&lt;waiting-for-godot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10979" CreationDate="2019-05-28T13:25:12.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;None of the quoted interpretations has quite got the meaning of this passage. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this quote is that Jane has just been humiliated by Mr Brocklehurst in front of the whole school for accidentally dropping and breaking her slate. She believes that everyone despises her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Helen, why do you stay with a girl whom everybody believes to be a liar?” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog01bron/page/122&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter VIII&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Helen points out that this is not the case: in fact, the majority of the school sympathizes with Jane, but they dare not express this sympathy because Mr Brocklehurst would punish them for it, if he found out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Mr. Brocklehurst is not a god; nor is he even a great and admired man: he is little liked here; he never took steps to make himself liked. Had he treated you as an especial favourite, you would have found enemies, declared or covert, all around you; as it is, the greater number would offer you sympathy if they dared. Teachers and pupils may look coldly on you for a day or two, but friendly feelings are concealed in their hearts; and if you persevere in doing well, these feelings will ere long appear so much the more evidently for their temporary suppression.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog01bron/page/124&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter VIII&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this context Helen means the word “friend” in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A person who wishes another, a cause, etc., well; a sympathizer, helper, patron, or supporter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Friend, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; sense A.4.a. &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Helen means is that &lt;strong&gt;so long as Jane does what is right (that is, what her conscience approves) she will not lack for people who sympathize and support her, even if it appears that “all the world” hates her.&lt;/strong&gt; (We need to insert “appears” here for it to make sense, but this is clear from the context.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the plain meaning of Helen’s speech, but she also means “friend” in its more usual sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A person with whom one has developed a close and informal relationship of mutual trust and intimacy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Friend, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; sense A.1.a. &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her gesture of affection (“she chafed my fingers gently to warm them”) and kind words show that Helen also means that &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; believes that Jane has done right, and will always be Jane’s friend.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Helen’s use here of “conscience” is a foreshadowing of events later in the novel. Jane will face two difficult decisions, and in each case it is her conscience of what is right that guides her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First, when she discovers that Edward Rochester is already married, and she has to decide whether to live with him as his mistress, or leave him for ever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I asked, “What am I to do?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the answer my mind gave—“Leave Thornfield at once”—was so prompt, so dread, that I stopped my ears: I said, I could not bear such words now. “That I am not Edward Rochester’s bride, is the least part of my woe,” I alleged: “that I have wakened out of most glorious dreams, and found them all void and vain, is a horror I could bear and master; but that I must leave him decidedly, instantly, entirely, is intolerable. I cannot do it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But, then, a voice within me averred that I could do it; and foretold that I should do it. I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and &lt;strong&gt;conscience&lt;/strong&gt;, turned tyrant, held passion by the throat, told her, tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron, he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog03bron/page/n9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXV&lt;/a&gt;, my emphasis]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second, when St John Rivers asks her to marry him, and she has to decide whether to accompany him to India as his wife, or be parted from him under the shadow of his disapproval:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Consent, then, to his demand is possible: but for one item—one dreadful item. It is—that he asks me to be his wife, and has no more of a husband’s heart for me than that frowning giant of a rock, down which the stream is foaming in yonder gorge. He prizes me as a soldier would a good weapon; and that is all. Unmarried to him, this would never grieve me; but can I let him complete his calculations—coolly put into practice his plans—go through the wedding ceremony? Can I receive from him the bridal ring, endure all the forms of love (which I doubt not he would scrupulously observe) and know that the spirit was quite absent? Can I bear the consciousness that every endearment he bestows is a sacrifice made on principle? No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous. I will never undergo it: As his sister, I might accompany him—not as his wife: I will tell him so.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog03bron/page/212&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXIV&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases Jane suffers initially (her homeless flight across the moors from Thornfield in the first case; the coldness and scorn of St John in the second) but finds that she does not lack for friends (her Rivers cousins in the first case; the widowed Rochester in the second), just as Helen had prophesied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-28T16:06:22.153" LastActivityDate="2019-05-28T16:06:22.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10985" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-28T15:46:40.713" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this is against the canons of literary construction but, is there a name for the style of tales, novels, and books which do not contain names for any of the characters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only think of Monterroso's microstory &lt;em&gt;The dinosaur&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder if there are longer literary works with such construction. I would also be interested if this way of constructing characters has a known school or if it's an isolated way of writing and appears only from time to time. (For school I mean e.g. the stream of consciousness which was used by Faulkner, Joyce, among others.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7326" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T09:02:29.237" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T09:02:29.237" Title="Name for stories which do not contain names of the characters" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10986" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10994" CreationDate="2019-05-28T21:39:28.537" Score="6" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the mid-1970s I read a feminist book with a premise that was something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All men are guilty of raping all women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to re-read this to see if I am remembering it correctly.  I tried searching for the premise, but it did not help me find the book.  Maybe I am remembering it wrong.  I do not think so, because I remember being almost offended.  The author strove not to make it sound like an attack.  As I remember it, the large majority of the book was an explanation of its premise. It was well-written, but I disagreed (and still do).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone please help me identify the title and author of this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7328" LastEditorUserId="7328" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T14:27:58.510" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T06:11:40.977" Title="1970s feminist book with premise something like: All men are guilty of raping all women?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T00:00:19.613" Score="3" ViewCount="337" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lighted upon this quote from Faulkner's novel &lt;em&gt;As I Lay Dying&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Faulkner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WikiQuote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did not know that he was dead, then. Sometimes I would lie by him in the dark, hearing the land that was now of my blood and flesh, and I would think: Anse. Why Anse. Why are you Anse. I would think about his name until after a while I could see the word as a shape, a vessel, and I would watch him liquefy and flow into it like cold molasses flowing out of the darkness into the vessel, until the jar stood full and motionless: a significant shape profoundly without Me like an empty door frame; and then I would find that I had forgotten the name of the jar. I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse. It was not that I could think of myself as no longer unvirgin, because I was three now. And when I would think Cash and Darl that way until their names would die and solidify into a shape and then fade away, I would say, All right. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what they call them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin, line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other and that &lt;strong&gt;sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words&lt;/strong&gt;. Like Cora, who could never even cook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She would tell me what I owed to my children and to Anse and to God. I gave Anse the children. I did not ask for them. I did not even ask him for what he could have given me: not-Anse. That was my duty to him, to not ask that, and that duty I fulfilled. I would be I; I would let him be the shape and echo of his word. That was more than he asked, because he could not have asked for that and been Anse, using himself so with a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— William Faulker (1930). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.150131/page/n169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As I Lay Dying&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how the emboldened phrase is true? I'm not a romantic and won't debate love, but let's focus on sin and fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't need to sin (like adultery or a criminal offense) or be directly unnerved by my &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phobia&lt;/a&gt; (like seeing my skin age to know &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerascophobia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerascophobia&lt;/a&gt;) to know what sin and fear are? And I haven't forgotten these nouns!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:15:44.490" Title="How are &quot;sin and love and fear&quot; &quot;just sounds&quot; in Faulkner's &quot;As I Lay Dying&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;as-i-lay-dying&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T05:34:25.270" Score="8" ViewCount="1023" Body="&lt;p&gt;The film &quot;Groundhog Day&quot; has a plot centered around a character whose day repeats &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; the same way each day, and upon waking retains memory of the previous day. This is what I call a &quot;time-loop,&quot; which has a full explanation on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GroundhogDayLoop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVTropes&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the earliest known instance of this idea being used in a story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit for clarification: one or a few main characters remember the previous iterations of their day, and their actions can alter the events of the day. However, after the end of the day, the character wakes up with memories in tact. The day then repeats in the same way, possibly with different events depending on what the main character tries to do in reacting to their situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7330" LastEditorUserId="7330" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T18:25:31.197" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T09:40:24.650" Title="What is the earliest work with the time-loop trope?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="10991" CreationDate="2019-05-29T08:18:58.310" Score="6" ViewCount="824" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following passage is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Call of the Wild&lt;/em&gt;. What do the boldfaced parts mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of &lt;strong&gt;the first man&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him.&lt;/strong&gt; From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike&#xA;  any known grade of gold in the Northland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T08:27:11.533" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:14:26.540" Title="The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;the-call-of-the-wild&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10989" CreationDate="2019-05-29T09:25:09.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far back as the tradition goes, it still doesn't go back far enough to know who the first man was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's adding to the first sentence that you quoted - about how it's shrouded in mystery. The passage is giving this as sort of an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;oldest tradition&quot; means the farthest back that anyone knows. It stops, which means it reaches up to a certain point. That certain point, however, is before the first man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T09:25:09.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10991" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10989" CreationDate="2019-05-29T09:39:27.580" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add a little more context to that quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Buck earned sixteen hundred dollars in five minutes for John Thornton, he made it possible for his master to pay off certain debts and to journey with his partners into the East after a fabled lost mine, the history of which was as old as the history of the country. Many men had sought it; few had found it; and more than a few there were who had never returned from the quest. This lost mine was steeped in tragedy and shrouded in mystery. No one knew of the first man. The oldest tradition stopped before it got back to him. From the beginning there had been an ancient and ramshackle cabin. Dying men had sworn to it, and to the mine the site of which it marked, clinching their testimony with nuggets that were unlike any known grade of gold in the Northland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph is talking about the long-running hunt for a lost mine. Given the preceding sentence about &quot;&lt;em&gt;Many men had sought it ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, probably the part about &quot;&lt;em&gt;the first man&lt;/em&gt;&quot; refers to &lt;strong&gt;the first man who went looking for this mine&lt;/strong&gt; among the many who have tried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are stories and traditions surrounding this mine and the frequent searches for it. A sort of folk history has sprung up around it, &quot;&lt;em&gt;as old as the history of the country&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. But among all those stories, not one goes back as far as to tell about the man who first started the quest: &quot;&lt;em&gt;the oldest tradition&lt;/em&gt;&quot; concerning the hunt for the mine &lt;strong&gt;is still not old enough to tell us about the origins of that hunt&lt;/strong&gt;. The passage doesn't tell us what the traditions are, but we may imagine that some stories relate to specific quests and some traditions might have originated with specific questors, but even the oldest one doesn't &quot;go back&quot; as far as the very first questor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin story is so old that it's been lost in the mists of time, and only newer stories and traditions still remain now. To quote a related theme from a completely unrelated work of literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T12:14:26.540" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:14:26.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10987" CreationDate="2019-05-29T11:53:03.280" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would think how words go straight up in a thin, line, quick and&#xA;  harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it,&#xA;  so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same&#xA;  person to straddle from one to the other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is huge difference between saying something and doing something. Theory and practice. Words are quick and easy, anybody can say them, they are said and they fly away straight up. Doing is much harder, when you start doing something, it clings to the ground, so, in a way, it is not easy for the same person to talk about something and do it at the same time. In a way, it is much easier to talk about something you have never done yourself, because you don't know all the nuances of it and you don't know what you don't know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never&#xA;  sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot&#xA;  have until they forget the words.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the above... You can talk about love at length, but if you never felt love, your words will be empty. You may have read all the books about love in the world, you don't know the truth about it until you feel it. And you will not be able to feel it, until you forget about the words and just do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Analogy: I can read a dozen books about drawing. I can watch a dozen tutorials. Until I actually take a pencil and start to draw, I would not truly know how to draw or learn the truth about drawing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole meaning is this: it is easier to judge somebody else's choices when you didn't have to make them. Cora Tull is not considered a valid source of judgment to narrator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I don't need to sin (like adultery or a criminal offense) or be&#xA;  directly unnerved by my phobia (like seeing my skin age to know&#xA;  gerascophobia) to know what sin and fear are? And I haven't forgotten&#xA;  these nouns!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between knowing something without practical experience with it and feeling something.&#xA;This is the knowledge argument about &lt;a href=&quot;https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Qualia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;qualia&lt;/a&gt; and Mary the Colour Scientist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Knowledge Argument is a rational challenge to&#xA;  physicalism. The argument seeks to prove that qualia&#xA;  are real through a purely rational (i.e., not empirical) thought&#xA;  experiment. The fictitious story of Mary the Colour Scientist, who&#xA;  lives in a black-and-white world, is invoked to demonstrate the point.&#xA;  Supposedly Mary learns all physical facts about colour including how&#xA;  colour is processed by the cornea, optic nerve, and brain. Once Mary&#xA;  has all physical facts about colour, she is permitted to experience a&#xA;  red tomato for the first time. The question is whether Mary learns&#xA;  something new upon experiencing colour for the first time. If yes,&#xA;  then rationalists conclude that the physical description that Mary had&#xA;  of colour was inadequate and thus physicalism is&#xA;  false. Although the argument has traction among rationalists,&#xA;  empiricists generally do not find the argument persuasive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, you might not agree with the character, but that is her opinion. Basically, to truly know something, you need to leave your previous misconceptions of it at the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T12:15:44.490" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:15:44.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10993" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10978" CreationDate="2019-05-29T12:16:37.977" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the ‘quotation’ approach to literature is that novels work as complete texts, where each passage is read in the context of all the passages that precede it. When taken out of context, an individual passage often becomes hard to appreciate because the details of character and event that it alludes to are missing. If you find yourself struggling to understand a passage, there is no substitute for reading the whole book from which it was taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case the passage taken out of context is an overbroad and racist generalization. But in the context of &lt;em&gt;A Passage to India&lt;/em&gt;, it is a generalization from a particular character and circumstance, that of Dr Aziz, a Muslim doctor in Chandrapore in British-controlled India in the early 20th century. Aziz is the friend of Cyril Fielding, an Englishman, and presumes on the basis of that friendship to organize an expedition to the Marabar Caves for a group of English visitors, but this goes disastrously wrong, and Aziz is falsely accused of the sexual assault of Adela Quested. The case goes to trial, but Adela recants and Aziz is acquitted. Fielding persuades Aziz not to sue Adela for the false accusation, but then Fielding goes back to England with Adela. This is the point at which Aziz becomes suspicious of Fielding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aziz sighed. Each for himself. One man needs a coat, another a rich wife; each approaches his goal by a clever detour, Fielding had saved the girl a fine of twenty thousand rupees, and now followed her to England. If he desired to marry her, all was explained; she would bring him a larger dowry. [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445/page/n269&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXI&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Aziz suspects that Fielding has taken advantage of their friendship in order to persuade him not to sue Adela, from purely selfish reasons, since he intends to marry her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is at this point in the narrative that Forster generalizes Aziz’s particular suspicion into a wider claim about “suspicion in the Oriental”. The point is that in the context of the racist power relations between the colonizing English and the subject Indians, it is impossible for the latter to trust the former. Aziz’s experience has shown him that however much they may appear to be his friends, in a crisis the English will support each other, and that their prior protestations of goodwill are hypocritical and worthless. In this situation, it is impossible for Aziz not to be suspicious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the passage about “suspicion in the Oriental” can be understood as a commentary on the destructive effects of colonialism: there cannot be trust between the colonized and the colonizers, only suspicion on the part of one and hypocrisy on the part of the other. (The racist and brutal way in which the passage is phrased reminds the reader that Forster is English and so that his insights into the character of someone like Aziz cannot be trusted either.) This message is reinforced at the end of the novel, when Aziz tells Fielding that they cannot properly be friends until India is free:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Down with the English, anyhow. That’s certain. Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don’t make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it’s fifty five-hundred year; we shall get ride of you; yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then”—he rode against him furiously—“and then,” he concluded, half kissing him, “you and I shall be friends.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463445/page/n307&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXVII&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quickly answer the numbered questions in the post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Suspicion of the motives of Westerners.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because it is hard to be friendly with someone if you suspect their motives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is possible to have contradictory feelings. Rationally someone may tell themselves that trust is justified, but experience makes them feel that this trust will be betrayed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because the Westerner lacks the experience of being racially discriminated against.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The colonial situation creates this hypocrisy: on an individual level, social politeness requires Westerners to behave in a friendly way to Indians, but the colonial enterprise as a whole exploits Indians and rewards Westerners.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-29T12:30:46.553" LastActivityDate="2019-05-29T12:30:46.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10986" CreationDate="2019-05-29T18:17:31.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it Susan Brownmiller's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jaWqAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Against Our Will&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which &lt;em&gt;all men&lt;/em&gt; keep &lt;em&gt;all women&lt;/em&gt; in a state of fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Susan Brownmiller (1975). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/0449908208AgainstOurWillB1/page/n13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 14–15&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Fawcett Columbine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is certainly a controversial book, as anyone would expect, but well written enough that &amp;quot;[i]n 1995, the New York Public Library selected &lt;em&gt;Against Our Will&lt;/em&gt; as one of 100 most important books of the 20th century&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Brownmiller#Against_Our_Will&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T14:31:32.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-29T23:04:19.890" Score="5" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a children's book that I read some time between 1997 and 1999, but it wasn't a new book so I guess it might have been written before 1990. I must have been about 8-10 years old when I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book I read was in German, I don't know if it has been released in any other language, I can't remember the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was about a fox family and a badger family possibly sharing a burrow or living close together and a farmer that wants to get rid of them because he's worried about the fox stealing from him. Some time during the story the farmer then starts guarding their burrow's exit and plans to shoot them as soon as they try to leave, so they're stuck underground. Trying not to starve, the fox and the badger team up (if I remember correctly) and start digging a new tunnel/exit. At this point my memory gets a bit sketchier - if I'm not completely mistaken, they dig this tunnel straight to the farmer's home in order to get revenge? Or they don't and stealing from the farmer comes up some time else during the storyline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't remember if they manage to escape in the end or if there are any casualties, but as it is a children's book, it's probably on the lighter side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7333" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T10:19:18.177" Title="Children's book (maybe German) I read in about 1995, fox and badger need to dig a tunnel to escape from farmer guarding their burrow's exit" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2019-05-30T03:23:29.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;People are subject to making the same mistakes over and over again... they just don’t learn from them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Cops and robbers thinking it's only wrong if you are caught, and OK if you get away with it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mistakes in relationships ... I could write a book on this one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, addictions: from which gambling is one of the worst.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still play this song a lot, to remind me of the right road to take.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7335" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T08:40:37.580" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T08:40:37.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10995" CreationDate="2019-05-30T08:04:40.917" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is almost certainly the English book &lt;em&gt;Fantastic Mr Fox&lt;/em&gt; by famed children's author Roald Dahl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have the text to hand, so I'm going to quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Mr_Fox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia plot summary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story was about a fox family and a badger family possibly sharing a burrow or living close together&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story revolves around an anthropomorphic, tricky, and clever fox named Mr. Fox who lives underground beside a tree with his wife and four children&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Fox runs into his friend Badger and asks him to accompany him on his mission&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A farmer that wants to get rid of them because he's worried about the fox stealing from him. Some time during the story the farmer then starts guarding their burrow's exit and plans to shoot them as soon as they try to leave, so they're stuck underground.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tired of being outsmarted by Mr. Fox, the farmers devise a plan to ambush him as he leaves his burrow, but they succeed only in shooting off his tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The trio of farmers are ridiculed for their persistence, so they decide to surround Mr. Fox's hole and wait until he is hungry enough to come out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Trying not to starve, the fox and the badger team up (if I remember correctly) and start digging a new tunnel/exit.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Fox devises a plot to acquire food. Working from Mr. Fox's memory of the routes he has taken above ground, he and his children tunnel through the ground and wind up burrowing to one of Boggis' four chicken houses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They dig this tunnel straight to the farmer's home in order to get revenge? Or they don't and stealing from the farmer comes up some time else during the storyline.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aided by Badger, the animals tunnel to Bunce's mighty storehouse for ducks, geese, hams, bacon and carrots - as noted by one of the Small Foxes, the Rabbits will require vegetables - and then to Bean's secret cider cellar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference from your memory is that there is no &amp;quot;revenge&amp;quot; beyond the stealing and the farmers are left watching the hole, night after night, to no avail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was an animated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Mr._Fox_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;film adaptation&lt;/a&gt; released in 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T10:19:18.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="10999" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T09:33:04.047" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In George Bernard Shaw's &lt;strong&gt;Major Barbara&lt;/strong&gt;, I came across the following conversation which culminates with Barbara and her father Colonel Undershaft shaking hands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BARBARA. No. Will you let me try?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UNDERSHAFT. Well, I will make a bargain with you. If I go to see you&#xA;  to-morrow in your Salvation Shelter, will you come the day after to&#xA;  see me in my cannon works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BARBARA. Take care. It may end in your giving up the cannons for the&#xA;  sake of the Salvation Army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UNDERSHAFT. Are you sure it will not end in your giving up the&#xA;  Salvation Army for the sake of the cannons?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BARBARA. I will take my chance of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;UNDERSHAFT. And I will take my chance of the other. [They shake hands&#xA;  on it]. Where is your shelter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Barbara make a bet with Undershaft? If yes, does she ultimately win or lose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="4312" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T15:26:59.477" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T23:00:45.100" Title="Why do Major Barbara and Undershaft shake hands?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;major-barbara&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10983" CreationDate="2019-05-30T09:43:09.213" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beckett himself, while directing the play, offered an explanation. He said of Lucky's speech that:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The threads and themes of the play are being gathered together&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that it's theme was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;to shrink on an impossible earth under an indifferent heaven&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his own notebooks, he divided the long, rambling monologue into three different sections, which are followed by critics when discussing the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first, &lt;em&gt;Indifferent Heaven&lt;/em&gt;, Lucky discusses the nature of God, positing the divine force as one that is uncaring and disinterested. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;God … loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication being that while priests tell us of God's love, there is precious little evidence of it in the squalid, cruel world of humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second section Beckett called &lt;em&gt;Dwindling man&lt;/em&gt;. The theme of this section is the failure of all humanities efforts to improve itself. In particular, Beckett attacks enlightenment values as a failure, with the resulting scientific advances being used to fuel awful wars and industrialisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third section &lt;em&gt;Earth abode of stones&lt;/em&gt; Lucky uses to describe an apocalyptic earth of death and darkness. Without a caring God and with the failure of enlightenment thinking, this is the only certain fate. In the end, the speech degenerates into complete incoherence, symbolic of the destruction of logical thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speech as a whole, then, can be seen as a nihilistic dismissal of human effort, both rational and spiritual. This is, in some respects, reflective of the post-modern philosophy at the heart of the play. Post-modernism posits that absolute truth is unknowable which, in its most extreme form, would clearly result in chaos. It is also opposed to the enlightenment thinking of the modernists, who held up the scientific method as a gold standard for approaching universal truths.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucky's &quot;thinking&quot; then stands in contrast with that of the main protagonists of the play, Vladimir and Estragon, who, like scientists, try to give their life meaning through structure but end up wasting it, waiting for Godot. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lawrence Graver - Beckett Waiting for Godot - A Student Guide - 2004       &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Vol. I: Waiting for Godot - Edited by Dougald McMillan and James Knowlson - 1993    &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot - Mark Taylor-Batty, Juliette Taylor-Batty - 2008&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T12:39:26.250" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T12:39:26.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-21T21:03:14.657" Score="3" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'm one of the Sole Sanhedrims and Ostensible Hooplas of the Inner Pulpit,&quot; says I. &quot;&lt;strong&gt;The lame talk and the blind rubber&lt;/strong&gt; whenever I make a pass at 'em. I am a medium, a coloratura hypnotist and a spirituous control.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/o-henry/short-story/jeff-peters-as-a-personal-magnet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;O. Henry, &quot;Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the word &lt;em&gt;rubber&lt;/em&gt; is used as a verb in this sentence. And as far as I know in this context it is intended to mean &quot;to [regain the ability to] move/walk/limp/etc.&quot; and so on. But searching through the online dictionaries I have not been able to find a fitting definition for the verb &lt;em&gt;to rubber&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this some kind of beginning-of-the-century American slang that never made it into &quot;official&quot; dictionaries? Or am I misinterpreting its usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="AnT" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T13:24:16.697" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T11:24:34.117" Title="Meaning of &quot;rubber&quot; as a verb in O. Henry" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="17" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-05-21T21:09:50.320" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rubber as a verb can hold two meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The act of eavesdropping&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1999, Los Angeles Times, &quot;Party's Over for Rural Phone Customers in Green Mountain State,&quot; (Jan. 31, 1999):&#xA;&quot;There's a lot of nostalgia about the phone and how it was the way to get the local news,&quot; said Jane Beck of the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury. One way was &quot;rubbering,&quot; or listening in on a neighbor's conversations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or the more slang:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rubbernecking (Snapping ones neck to look at something so quickly it appears to be made of rubber)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1951, J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 17:&#xA;Old Sally didn't talk much, except to rave about the Lunts, because she was busy rubbering and being charming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="frathoss" LastActivityDate="2019-05-21T23:09:07.653" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11003" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-05-22T01:54:50.003" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The entire phrase is a nonsensical piece of wordplay&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The lame walk and the blind see&quot; is a well known biblical phrase, said by Jesus to indicate his holiness. The phrase is corrupted here into nonsense, in keeping with the nonsense religious position he claims immediately before it, and the nonsense powers he claims after it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The lame talk&quot; makes no sense as a sign of holiness, and &quot;lame talk&quot; is a well known (noun) phrase meaning idle chatter (probably more so at the time of writing) Likewise &quot;blind rubber&quot; doesn't make sense as a subject-verb pair, but would have been well known as meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grommets.co.uk/products/grommets/blind-rubber-grommets/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a rubber seal that closes off a hole&lt;/a&gt;. This is the sort of joke O. Henry was known for. As AnT says, the protagonist of the story frequently makes good-sounding nonsense statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" OwnerDisplayName="DJClayworth" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T13:12:55.260" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T13:12:55.260" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T13:22:24.177" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmuel_Yosef_Agnon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S. Y. Agnon&lt;/a&gt;'s first influential story is &quot;Agunot&quot; - in fact, his chosen name &quot;Agnon&quot; comes from the same word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;Agunot&quot; is the plural form of the word &quot;Agunah&quot;, which is the term for a woman whose husband has vanished or left without either dying or giving her a get (official divorce document), leaving her, essentially, stranded - she is still technically bound to her husband, unable to re-marry, but she either can't know if he's alive or has no way of obtaining a get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, then, does this have to do with the story &quot;Agunot&quot;? There is no case of an Agunah in the story itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the importance of the title &quot;Agunot&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T17:29:45.637" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T17:29:45.637" Title="Why the title &quot;Agunot&quot; for S. Y. Agnon's short story?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;s-y-agnon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8261" CreationDate="2019-05-30T17:08:36.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a long time since I read it, but ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think you should expect a proper &quot;handling&quot;, nor do I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8683/17&quot;&gt;scholasticism&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8433/17&quot;&gt;moral apologetics&lt;/a&gt;, as suggested in other answers, can save it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for myself, it's 1960s literature. It is not affirmative of childhood sexual abuse, as @Daniel would have it; rather, it tries to put you to that place of truth where you realize &lt;strong&gt;childhood abuse is everywhere&lt;/strong&gt; (especially with the powerful) like SM is everywhere (especially with war, politics etc.). It puts you where you were abused, or are abused, in whatever low-key or metaphorical sense that may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the truth ... yes, Slothrop is also a paedophile ... that's how far the early 1970s bring us. That is really far for that time, just to state that it is everywhere. It is not before Karen Finley, Lydia Lunch, and Vivenne Dick in the late 1970s that arts and culture have started to thematize sexual violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7342" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T19:05:44.540" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T19:05:44.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11006" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T17:48:26.470" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does the boy-next-door raise objections about the racist remarks that his yippie friends make in the introductory chapters? Bateman does it twice in quick succession as if to show the reader that he stands out, is separated from his social circle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You spin a dreidel, Preston,” I say calmly, “not a menorah. You spin a dreidel.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh my god, Bateman, do you want me to go over to the bar and ask Freddy to fry you up some fucking potato pancakes?” Preston asks, truly alarmed.  “Some… latkes?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “No,” I say. “Just cool it with the anti-Semitic remarks.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again, see his reaction to the racist anecdote about Pearl Bailey:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Van Patten gives him high-five. Even Price laughs.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh Christ,” I say. “That’s awful.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why?&quot; Preston says. “It’s funny. It’s &lt;em&gt;humor&lt;/em&gt;.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Yeah, Bateman,” McDermott says. “Cheer up.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh I forgot. Bateman’s dating someone from the ACLU,” Price says. “What bothers you about that?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “It’s not funny,” I say. “It’s racist.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Bateman, you are some kind of morose bastard,” Preston says. “You should stop reading all those Ted Bundy biographies.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of this description, considering how utterly despicable and cynical he appears to be later in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7343" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T18:03:29.427" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T08:18:40.683" Title="Why does the boy-next-door raise objections about the racist remarks that the others are making?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;american-psycho&gt;&lt;bret-easton-ellis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11007" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11008" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" Score="0" Body="Bret Easton Ellis (born 1964), American novelist, author of &quot;American Psycho&quot; (1991)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" LastActivityDate="2019-05-30T18:13:24.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-30T22:53:37.307" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several editions of &lt;em&gt;Joseph and his brothers&lt;/em&gt; (original German &lt;em&gt;Joseph und seine Brüder&lt;/em&gt;). Do all of them contain the same text? Or did Thomas Mann make some &quot;adjustments&quot; for some publishers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2954" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T06:05:54.920" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T06:05:54.920" Title="Are all editions of &quot;Joseph und seine Brüder&quot; (by Thomas Mann) the same?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;thomas-mann&gt;&lt;joseph-and-his-brothers&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11006" CreationDate="2019-05-31T08:18:40.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What's the purpose of this description, considering how utterly despicable and cynical he appears to be later in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two purposes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Bateman didn't start utterly despicable and cynical. There might have been goodness in his heart that got twisted and lost later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Even evil has standards &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStandards&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trope&lt;/a&gt; (warning, tvtropes link!). He might be cynical, he might be despicable, but he is not racist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T08:18:40.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11011" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-05-31T14:22:02.327" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like the title of the short story by Flannery O'Connor in which a man thinks he is engaging in friendly conversation only to find that his responses are used as data in an article published in a psychology periodical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T14:44:58.800" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T02:23:35.620" Title="Short story by Flannery O'Connor: conversation used in psychology periodical" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;flannery-oconnor&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11012" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11014" CreationDate="2019-05-31T14:34:11.173" Score="4" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=ShcIjIYxAMoC&amp;amp;pg=PT38&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Contender&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (a poem in Ted Hughes' &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; collection), there's a group of lines with peculiar syntax. Here are the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He abandoned his grin to them his grimace&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In his face upwards body he lay face downwards&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a dead man adamant&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to make a sense out of this syntax, let's try to change the structure and punctuate it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He abandoned his grin to them, his grimace in his face.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upwards body he lay, face downwards&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a dead man adamant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But except for the fact that humans can't lay with their body (i.e, torso) turned upwards while their face turned downwards, this punctuation is not how Hughes reads it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how it's read by Hughes (I would've uploaded the audio, but it's copyrighted):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He abandoned his grin to them, his grimace,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In his face upwards, body, he lay, face downwards,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a dead man adamant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now it seems unintelligible: The word &quot;body&quot; seems to have no function, and in addition, it seems that the man in the poem lay with his face turned both upwards and downwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you suggest an interpretation of these lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-05-31T20:47:55.470" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T20:47:55.470" Title="Meaning of &quot;abandoned his grin to them&quot; in Ted Hughes' &quot;The Contender&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;crow&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11012" CreationDate="2019-05-31T20:45:28.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s how I understand these lines. I’ve added punctuation and put some plausible elisions in brackets to clarify the sense and syntax. I’ve resolved the paradox in the second line by taking “face upwards” to be literal and “face downwards” to be metaphorical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He abandoned his grin to them, his grimace [too].&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In his face-upwards body, he lay [as if] face downwards,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As a dead man, adamant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I read these lines as a description of a man whose outward appearance reveals nothing of himself. He has “abandoned his grin”, leaving his expression like an empty shell, with nothing behind it. The odd expression “in his face upwards body” conveys his inward separation from his outward appearance: normally one would not distinguish “him” from “his body” in this way. He lies face-up but might as well be face-down for all one can read from his face, which reveals no more than a corpse or a stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-05-31T20:45:28.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11017" CreationDate="2019-06-01T00:17:03.097" Score="5" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always been a huge fan of Arthurian legend, and have read many books and comics etc inspired by it. But I've always wanted to read a telling of the stories that was much closer to the source so to speak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some cursory googling the best lead I have is Le Morte d'Arthur. I was hoping some more learned folks might have recommendations for good annotated editions of this text that would be appropriate for, let's say an enthusiastic amateur of Old European Lit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7346" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-01T08:17:20.600" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T16:35:28.667" Title="Is there a useful &quot;entry-level&quot; annotated edition of Le Morte d'Arthur" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;&lt;le-morte-darthur&gt;&lt;thomas-malory&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11015" CreationDate="2019-06-01T08:35:12.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edition I own of &lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt; is the Penguin Classics version in two volumes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ouc3O.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ouc3O.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of covers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abebooks.com/Morte-DArthur-Volumes-Penguin-English-Library/16458966501/bd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image source: AbeBooks&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd highly recommend it for someone who's accustomed to reading English literature with old-fashioned turns of phrase (from Shakespeare to the various 19th-century authors or even Tolkien) but not necessarily with archaic, obsolete, or inconsistent spellings of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This edition has &lt;strong&gt;modernised spelling&lt;/strong&gt; (familiar words are spelled in familiar ways for today's readers) but retains many &lt;strong&gt;archaic words&lt;/strong&gt; (lots and lots of words never used nowadays, like &quot;hight&quot; for instance), which are all marked with endnotes and listed carefully in an appendix with their translations into modern English. It also has lots of very &lt;strong&gt;old-fashioned turns of phrase&lt;/strong&gt; (phrases in an unexpected order, long run-on sentences, etc), but remains &lt;strong&gt;readable&lt;/strong&gt; for any well-read English literature enthusiast. As well as the endnotes on unfamiliar words, there are also endnotes on some other aspects, such as differences between the Caxton and Winchester versions of the manuscript, or commentary on some apparent contradictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I found reading this a very fascinating experience. To see how sentences were constructed back then and how a story was told, and to learn lots of new archaic words. It may enhance your appreciation of the English language, even if you're already a voracious reader of works from the last few centuries. It may take you a while to get accustomed to the style of writing (battles are described as &quot;So-and-so unhorsed So-and-so, then So-and-so unhorsed So-and-so, then ...&quot; - lots of repetitive prose, lists, etc.) but when you do get used to it, you may really enjoy it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good luck!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T08:35:12.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11015" CreationDate="2019-06-01T16:35:28.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two versions of Malory's  &lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;: the text as printed by Caxton in 1485, from which I believe the Penguin edition is derived, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.maloryproject.com/winchester_viewer.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Winchester Manuscript&quot; text&lt;/a&gt;, not printed until  1947.  Apparently this was the text as it left Malory's hand; Caxton used it in preparing his version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My copy of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/works-9780192812179?lang=en&amp;amp;cc=us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;latter&lt;/a&gt;, in the Oxford Standard Authors series, edited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Vinaver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eugène Vinaver&lt;/a&gt;,   is  surprisingly easy to read.  There is a glossary at the back of the book, and I have never regretted &#xA;the lack of footnotes.  Although there has been a lot of&#xA;vocabulary and orthography change in the English language between 1450 and now, the language itself is basically  the same language we speak nowadays, and reading this edition is like visiting a place where they speak a different dialect from yours: you pick it up.  I read the first 40 pages  to my 5 year old kid, who had no trouble understanding it; we stopped because the next bit (&quot;Balin&quot;)  bored  us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The jacket flap says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Winchester text is not merely much closer than Caxton's to what Malory actually wrote, it also establishes that Caxton freely edited and recast Malory's work. For the general reader this is a much livelier book, and its fifteenth-century English presents few difficulties. The reader's eye quickly becomes accustomed to the old spellings...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with the second and third sentences. (As I copied this, I saw that I paid six dollars for this book when I bought it in an earlier millennium.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-06-01T16:35:28.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-02T06:35:37.010" Score="8" ViewCount="228" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is well known that Thomas Kyd's &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; established the genre of revenge tragedy in Elizabethan drama. The play contains many elements such as the appearance of a ghost, a play within the play and madness that were frequently used in subsequent revenge tragedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; undoubtedly has the outer structure of a revenge tragedy but its extreme popularity makes me wonder whether it has certain features that are unusual in a conventional revenge tragedy? Is Hamlet's  tendency to procrastinate one of them? Are there any others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4312" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T14:43:36.887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T16:45:37.117" Title="How is Hamlet different from a conventional Elizabethan revenge play?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11021" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-02T06:40:11.293" Score="2" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m searching for a fairy tale I’m almost sure I once read as a child about a Prince who was searching for his Princess. Because all the established Princesses he knew from surrounding kingdoms were snobs and he didn’t like them, he disguised himself as a poor traveler/peasant/normal person and began to travel around his kingdom searching for the right girl to make his Princess. Eventually he found one who was kind and showed all the qualities needed to be truly noble, and he revealed his true identity to her, took her back to his palace, and married her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve searched around but can’t seem to locate this particular story. I know it’s not Cinderella or the Princess and the Pea, even though there are some similarities to both of those stories in the one I described. It may have just been an original children’s book that was read to me, and I’m mistaking it for an actual classic fairy tale. Either way, I’d love to locate it, as it’s nagging me that I can’t hunt it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Edit: I have no idea when the version of the story I read/was told would have been written, but it was definitely in English. However, if it was a retelling (in a children’s fairytale collection, for example), then I would have no idea of the language or time period the story originated in. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7349" LastEditorUserId="7349" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T16:36:25.697" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T16:36:25.697" Title="Fairy tale about disguised Prince searching for Princess" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2019-06-13T14:52:52.693" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11031" CreationDate="2019-06-02T15:09:12.353" Score="6" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt; as part of my A Level. In the story Candide is chased from his home and finds &quot;Two men dressed in blue&quot;.  We later learn that they are trying to recruit him in the Bulgarian army. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q-hkmgm1kSkC&amp;amp;pg=PA9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;footnote&lt;/a&gt; that says &quot;These two men are wearing the uniforms of Prussian recruiting officers&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does this mean that Prussian soldiers are helping the Bulgarians?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do know that Voltaire is representing the Prussians as Bulgarians in his book, so maybe this means that they are Bulgarian officers wearing uniforms like the Prussians to make his representation clear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7351" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T15:54:22.650" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:22:53.803" Title="In &quot;Candide&quot;, are Prussian officers recruiting for the Bulgarian army?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;voltaire&gt;&lt;candide&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11025" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-02T19:23:29.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T19:23:29.200" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:23:29.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11026" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-02T19:23:29.200" Score="0" Body="François-Marie Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen-name &quot;Voltaire&quot;, French philosopher and novelist, author of &quot;Candide, ou l'Optimisme&quot; (1759). Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T16:58:42.840" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T16:58:42.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-02T19:24:39.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-02T19:24:39.093" LastActivityDate="2019-06-02T19:24:39.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-02T19:24:39.093" Score="0" Body="&quot;Candide, ou l'Optimisme&quot;, a 1759 satirical novel by Voltaire. Use this tag with [voltaire]  and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T16:58:00.503" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T16:58:00.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11029" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-03T01:48:15.827" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished re-reading the &lt;em&gt;Artemis Fowl&lt;/em&gt; series, books 1-8. There were a couple of things that I seem to remember happening from the first time I read the series, a while ago, but that I didn't read this time through. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to figure out if I am remembering wrong or if there was an extra section that I missed. I know there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://artemisfowl.fangathering.com/books/codes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extra content&lt;/a&gt; for the codes printed on the bottom of every page of the books, but I didn't find it there either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I seem to remember is that Artemis provides Holly with an opportunity to have a hologram-call back in time to speak to her mother, Coral Short, just before she dies in the submarine. They had done it that way so that time as they know it would not change, since her mother would not be able to prevent her death. I know she got to say goodbye to Commander Root, but I seem to remember this, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember Artemis coming back from some time changes, seeing his parents, and finding that his brothers no longer exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do either of these happen in any of the books or somewhere else? Or am I remembering incorrectly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7353" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2019-06-03T09:08:34.857" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T09:08:34.857" Title="Does Holly Short get to say goodbye to her mom?" Tags="&lt;artemis-fowl&gt;&lt;eoin-colfer&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9733" CreationDate="2019-06-03T08:28:27.747" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Dark simple curtain’ is a metaphor for death: a curtain shuts out the light, and comes down at the end of a performance. ‘Simple’ means ‘uncomplicated’ but also has an archaic sense of ‘medicine’, which could allude to the idea of death as a cure for all ills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficult bit is ‘natural economy’. The post suggests that it alludes to the price of sparrows, but I don’t think this can be right, since ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_economy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural economy&lt;/a&gt;’ is a type of economy in which there is no money or medium of exchange, and so goods must be bartered or shared. In a natural economy, you can’t sell two sparrows for a farthing, because there are no farthings; instead you must exchange them—but for what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to make sense of this is to suppose that Hughes is gesturing towards the Christian doctrine of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Salvation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;economy of salvation&lt;/a&gt;’, the exchange of faith and works for eternal life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T08:28:27.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11022" CreationDate="2019-06-03T15:19:37.603" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Candide, ou l’Optimisme&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;satire&lt;/a&gt;, a work of literature in which people, ideas, countries, religions and so on are ridiculed. The targets of satire are usually presented in disguise or under a transformation, so the reader has to be on the lookout for clues as to their intended identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since you’re studying &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt;, I’m sure you’ve already covered the way that Voltaire in chapter 1 uses Pangloss to satirize &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz&lt;/a&gt;, using clues like “il n’y a point d’effect sans cause” (representing Leibniz’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#PriSufRea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;principle of sufficient reason&lt;/a&gt;”) and “dans ce meilleur des Mondes possibles” (representing Leibniz’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#PriBes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;principle of the best&lt;/a&gt;”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what are the clues as to the satirical identity of the “Bulgarians”? Why do people think they might stand for Prussians?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was no Bulgarian army in the mid-18th century when &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt; is set (as pointed out by Peter Shor in comments). Bulgaria had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire in 1396, and did not gain independence until 1878.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the 18th century, the Prussian infantry uniform included a blue jacket:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lW6zO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lW6zOm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Füsilliere, Offizier. Kompagnie-Feldscheer.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Knötel. ‘Infanterie-Regiment “Prinz Heinrich von Preussen” 1757’. &lt;em&gt;Uniformenkunde&lt;/em&gt; volume 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voltaire had gone to Prussia in 1750, at the invitation of king &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frederick II&lt;/a&gt;. The two men fell out after Voltaire wrote a satire on the Prussian philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Louis_Maupertuis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre Maupertuis&lt;/a&gt;, and Voltaire had to leave Prussia in disgrace in 1752. He took his literary revenge by writing a scurrilous description of Frederick and his court, which was published after his death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ce Gouvernement singulier, ces mœurs encore plus étranges, ce contraste de Stoïcisme &amp;amp; d’Epicuréïsme, de sévérité dans la discipline militaire &amp;amp; de mollesse dans l’intérieur du Palais, des Pages avec lesquels on s’amusait dans son Cabinet &amp;amp; des soldats qu’on faisait passer trente six fois par les baguettes sous les fenêtres du Monarque qui les regardait, des discours de Morale &amp;amp; une licence effrénée, tout cela composait un tableau bizarre que peu de personnes connaissaient, &amp;amp; qui a depuis percé dans l’Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[This singular government, these manners still more strange, this contrast of Stoicism and Epicureanism, of severity in military discipline and softness in the interior of the palace, of pages with whom he [Frederick] amused himself in his study and of soldiers who were made to undergo the batons thirty-six times under the windows of the monarch who watched them, of discourse on morality and unrestrained licence, all this made up a peculiar picture, which few people were aware of, and which has since spread through Europe.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Voltaire (1784). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mmoiresdemdevol00voltgoog/page/n93&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mémoires&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 84-85&lt;/a&gt;. London: Robinson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This account of Prussian military discipline, with the soldier being made to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_the_gauntlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;run the gauntlet&lt;/a&gt; thirty-six times, corresponds to the account of Candide’s punishment in the Bulgarian army:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;on lui demanda juridiquement ce qu’il aimait le mieux, d’être fustigé trente-six fois par tout le Régiment, ou de recevoir à la fois douze bales de plomb dans la cervelle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[they asked him judicially which he liked better, to be beaten thirty-six times by the whole regiment, or to receive twelve lead bullets simultaneously in his brain.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Voltaire (1759). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/candideouloptim01voltgoog/page/n18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Candide, ou l’Optimise&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 13–14&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that “trente-six” is probably not meant literally: in French this number can be used with the meaning “a lot, countless, umpteen”. For example “faire trente-six choses à la fois” means “to do umpteen things at once”, and “au trente-sixième dessous” means “utterly miserable”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second account of Prussian military punishment in Voltaire’s &lt;em&gt;Memoirs&lt;/em&gt; is even closer to the events in &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il y avait dans les prisons de Spandau un vieux Gentil-homme de Franche-Comté, haut de six pieds, que le feu Roi avait fait enlever pour sa belle taille. On lui avait promis une place de Chambellan, &amp;amp; on lui en donna une de soldat. Ce pauvre homme défecta bientôt avec un de ses camarades. Il fut saisi &amp;amp; ramené devant le feu Roi auquel il eut la naïveté de dire qu’il ne se repentait que de n’avoir pas tué un Tiran comme lui. On lui coupa, pour réponse, le nez &amp;amp; les oreilles; il passa par les baguettes trente six fois; aprés quoi il alla trainer la brouette à Spandau.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[In the prisons of Spandau there was an old gentleman from Franche-Comté, six feet tall, whom the late king [Frederick William I] had recruited for his good size. He had been promised a place as a chamberlain, but he was given that of a soldier. This poor man soon deserted with one of his comrades. He was captured and brought before the late king whereupon he had the naivety to say that he was sorry that he had not killed a tyrant like him. In reply, his nose and ears were cut off; he suffered under the batons thirty-six times; after which he was hauled by wheelbarrow to Spandau.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Voltaire (1784), pp. 90–91.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage and in &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt; there is recruitment based on height; desertion and recapture; naivety; and thirty-six beatings.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the account of Frederick’s court quoted above, Voltaire mentions “des Pages avec lesquels on s’amusait dans son Cabinet”, alluding to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great#Sexual_orientation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;king’s homosexuality&lt;/a&gt;. The French word “bougre”, an abusive term corresponding to English “bugger”, derives etymologically from Latin “Bulgarus” meaning “Bulgarian”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Voltaire wrote &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt; in 1757–1759, during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years%27_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Years’ War&lt;/a&gt;, in which Prussia was one of the main combatants. Thus the horrors of war between the “Bulgarians” and the “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avars_(Caucasus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abares&lt;/a&gt;” described in chapter 3, correspond to the horrors of war between Prussia and its enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:22:53.803" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:22:53.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6816" CreationDate="2019-06-03T17:32:15.190" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quoted sentence is a piece of rhetoric in which Michael Herr belittles &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khe_Sanh#Operation_Pegasus_(1%E2%80%9314_April_1968)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Operation Pegasus&lt;/a&gt; by proxy, distancing himself from the criticism by placing it in the mouth of Stendhal, who is a convenient spokesman because he’s dead and can’t complain about being misrepresented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An “outpost” is “a detachment of soldiers situated at a distance from the main body of an army” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) and an “affair of outposts” is a skirmish between outposts, a minor event that does not involve the main armies and on which the outcome of the battle does not depend. The phrase in English is most likely a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;calque&lt;/a&gt; of the French “affaire des avant-postes”. Here’s an early example of its use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On ne sait jusqu’à quel point l’affaire des avant-postes auprès de Taroutina influa, le 18 octobre, sur les déterminations de Napoléon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[We don’t know how much the affair of outposts near Tarutino influenced Napoléon’s decisions on 18th October]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pierre Blanchard, ed. (1818). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=idKpIZg_6PYC&amp;amp;pg=PA69&amp;amp;lpg=PA69&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histoire des batailles, siéges et combats des Français, depuis 1792 jusqu’en 1815&lt;/em&gt;, volume IV, p. 69&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “affaire des avant-postes” does not appear in Stendhal’s published work, so it is hard to say exactly how he would have used it, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Khe_Sanh#Operation_Pegasus_(1%E2%80%9314_April_1968)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Operation Pegasus&lt;/a&gt; involved tens of thousands on each side, making it comparable in scale to battles like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tarutino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tarutino&lt;/a&gt; itself, and not to skirmishes like the “affair of outposts” that preceded it, so it is unlikely that Stendhal would have said what Herr makes him say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know why Herr picked Stendhal to be his mouthpiece. Perhaps he had been reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZGUIAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vie de Napoléon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which does have an “attaque d’avant-postes”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-03T17:32:15.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11033" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14298" CreationDate="2019-06-03T19:49:37.027" Score="6" ViewCount="441" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently been tasked with analysing &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/john-galsworthy/five-tales/3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Apple Tree&quot; by John Galsworthy&lt;/a&gt;. I've had no major issues with understanding the text, but I really can't grasp the ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up on the top of the hill, beyond where he had spread the lunch, over, out of sight, he lay down on his face. So had his virtue been rewarded, and &quot;the Cyprian,&quot; goddess of love, taken her revenge! And before his eyes, dim with tears, came Megan's face with the sprig of apple blossom in her dark, wet hair. 'What did I do that was wrong?' he thought. 'What did I do?' But he could not answer. Spring, with its rush of passion, its flowers and song-the spring in his heart and Megan's! Was it just Love seeking a victim! The Greek was right, then--the words of the &quot;Hippolytus&quot; as true to-day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is going on here? Is he confused about what he did wrong and blaming the goddess of love? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7355" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T17:55:33.330" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T17:55:33.330" Title="&quot;The Apple Tree&quot; ending and the meaning behind it" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11035" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2019-06-04T02:50:26.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Time loops are an ancient idea, and many instances of history/lifetimes/cycles/eons repeating are found in various world religions and myths. But if you are looking specifically for an early story where a single day repeats, there's &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/william-dean-howells/short-story/christmas-every-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Christmas Every Day&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by William Dean Howells, written in 1892.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7357" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:34:35.200" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:34:35.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6873" CreationDate="2019-06-04T06:38:05.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no real need to assume an Alternative History. I saw no evidence that Ayn Rand was familiar with this genre or wrote in it. I think that the book represents her perception of the situation of the late 1940s and early 1950s and where she thought it was going. In 1945 the British Labor Party won power and launched the Welfare State, nationalised the Health Service, nationlised coal mines and public transportation - and was heavily supported economically by the United States. Similar things were happening in several other European countries which got American aid under the Marshall Plan.I think that is quite enough to understand where she got the idea of a world of &quot;People's States&quot; getting economic support from the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7358" LastActivityDate="2019-06-04T06:38:05.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-05T08:08:36.657" Score="1" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Scene 6, page 50 line 27, there's the following stage direction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Low drums sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when the doorbell rings and Laura is required to open the door to let Jim and Tom in. What is the effect of this sound? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it able to relate to the theme of fear for Laura? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7365" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T08:37:28.300" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T08:37:28.300" Title="What is the effect of the stage directions in scene 6 of The Glass Menagerie?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;tennessee-williams&gt;&lt;the-glass-menagerie&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11039" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11040" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" Score="0" Body="&quot;Gravity's Rainbow&quot;, a 1973 novel by Thomas Pynchon. Use with the [thomas-pynchon] tag.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:14:40.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11041" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11042" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Glass Menagerie&quot;, a 1944 play by Tennessee Williams. Use with the [tennessee-williams] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:15:22.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11043" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11044" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" Score="0" Body="&quot;Joseph and His Brothers&quot; (&quot;Joseph und seine Brüder&quot;), a novel by Thomas Mann, published in four parts, 1933–1943. Use with the [thomas-mann] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:17:15.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11045" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11046" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" Score="0" Body="Barack Obama (born 1961), American politician and writer of the memoir &quot;Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance&quot; (1995)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:19:00.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11047" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11048" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" Score="0" Body="&quot;Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance&quot;, a 1995 memoir by Barack Obama. Use with the [barack-obama] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:19:30.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11049" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:21:54.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:21:54.567" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:21:54.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11050" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:21:54.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author Henry James (1843–1916) or his life as a writer. His novels include &quot;The Portrait of a Lady&quot; (1881), &quot;The Wings of the Dove&quot; (1902), and &quot;The Ambassadors&quot; (1903)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T15:53:44.010" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T15:53:44.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11051" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11052" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Turn of the Screw&quot;, an 1898 novella by Henry James. Use with the [henry-james] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:22:31.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11053" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:24:26.027" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:24:26.027" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:24:26.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11054" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:24:26.027" Score="0" Body="For questions about Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), Russian–British philosopher and his literary works. Questions about his works should be tagged likewise." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:26:58.770" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T05:26:58.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11055" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11056" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Hedgehog and the Fox&quot;, a 1953 essay on Tolstoy's view of history, by Isaiah Berlin. Use with the [isaiah-berlin] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:25:32.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11057" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11058" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" Score="0" Body="&quot;Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred &amp; Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder&quot;, a 1945 novel by Evelyn Waugh. Use with the [evelyn-waugh] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:26:26.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11059" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11060" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Picture of Dorian Gray&quot;, an 1890 novel by Oscar Wilde. Use with the [oscar-wilde] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:26:59.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11061" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11062" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" Score="0" Body="&quot;Main Street&quot;, a 1920 novel by Sinclair Lewis. Use with the [sinclair-lewis] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:32:20.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11063" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:34:22.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:34:22.597" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:34:22.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11064" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:34:22.597" Score="0" Body="Questions about Darcie Little Badger (born 1980), Apache writer of supernatural horror and her various works. Questions about her works should be tagged appropriately." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:23:38.383" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:23:38.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11065" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:35:54.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marcel Proust wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; between 1906 and his death in 1922. The novel's last three volumes were published after his death, based on corrected galley proofs and manuscripts. These seven volumes are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Du côté de chez Swann&lt;/em&gt; (1913; English: &lt;em&gt;Swann's Way&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Way by Swann's&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs&lt;/em&gt; (1919; &lt;em&gt;In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Côté de Guermantes&lt;/em&gt; (1920/1921; &lt;em&gt;The Guermantes Way&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sodome et Gomorrhe&lt;/em&gt; (1921/1922; &lt;em&gt;Sodom and Gomorrah&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Prisonnière&lt;/em&gt; (1923; &lt;em&gt;The Prisoner&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Albertine disparue&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;La Fugitive&lt;/em&gt; (1925; &lt;em&gt;The Fugitive&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Temps retrouvé&lt;/em&gt; (1927; &lt;em&gt;Finding Time Again&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Time Regained&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Scott_Moncrieff&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. K. Scott Moncrieff&lt;/a&gt; translated the six first volumes, published between 1922 and his death in 1930. The translation was completed by Terence Kilmartin and was revised by D. J. Enright in 1992.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T19:28:35.090" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T19:28:35.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11066" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:35:54.890" Score="0" Body="'In Search of Lost Time' ('À la recherche du temps perdu'), a novel by Marcel Proust, published in seven volumes, 1913–1927. Use with the tags [marcel-proust] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:54:49.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:54:49.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11067" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:36:45.423" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:36:45.423" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:36:45.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11068" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:36:45.423" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), Spanish poet and playwright, or his life as a writer. He is best known as a member of the Generation of '27, who introduced European movements to Spanish literature. Use with [poetry] (for poems) or a work tag (for plays), along with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T00:00:00.063" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:00:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11069" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11070" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" Score="0" Body="Questions asking for an explanation of an element of the plot of a work of fiction." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:38:11.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11071" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:43:25.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T10:43:25.307" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T10:43:25.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11072" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T10:43:25.307" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American writer Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) or her life as a writer. She is known for her Southern Gothic fiction." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:00:55.777" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:00:55.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11074" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11075" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" Score="0" Body="&quot;Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow&quot;, a 1970 collection of poems by Ted Hughes. Use with the [ted-hughes] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:46:21.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11076" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:47:15.763" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:47:15.763" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:47:15.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11077" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:47:15.763" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'A Happy Death' ('La mort heureuse'), a novel by Albert Camus written in the years 1936-1938 and published posthumously in 1971. Use with the tags [albert-camus] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:47:00.993" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:47:00.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:48:44.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:48:44.913" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:48:44.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:48:44.913" Score="0" Body="&quot;Mistborn&quot;, a series of fantasy novels by Brandon Sanderson, beginning with &quot;The Final Empire&quot; (2006). Use with the [brandon-sanderson] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T13:41:08.723" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T13:41:08.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11080" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11081" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" Score="0" Body="Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), Columbian writer. His novels include &quot;One Hundred Years of Solitude&quot;, &quot;Chronicle of a Death Foretold&quot; and &quot;Love in the Time of Cholera&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:51:10.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11082" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:54:41.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:54:41.083" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:54:41.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11083" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:54:41.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English poet Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), or his life as a writer. He is best known for his book of poems &quot;Hesperides&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:27:26.320" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:27:26.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11084" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11085" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about the practice and skill of reading." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:55:15.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11086" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:57:00.267" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:57:00.267" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:57:00.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11087" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:57:00.267" Score="0" Body="For questions about any works concerning Robin Hood, a character in English folklore. The body of Robin Hood literature started off as ballads and orally transmitted stories, but many books have also been written and published by various authors retelling his adventures." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T19:00:02.087" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T19:00:02.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11088" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11089" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" Score="0" Body="John Locke (1632–1704), English philosopher and author of &quot;An Essay Concerning Human Understanding&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T19:58:28.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11090" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11091" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" Score="0" Body="&quot;Jerusalem Delivered&quot; (&quot;La Gerusalemme liberata&quot;), 1581, an epic poem by Torquato Tasso about the First Crusade. Translated into English by Edward Fairfax (1600). Use with the [torquato-tasso] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:00:36.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11092" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11093" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" Score="0" Body="Torquato Tasso (1544–1595), Italian poet, author of the epic &quot;Jerusalem Delivered&quot; (&quot;Gerusalemme liberata&quot;, 1581)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:01:27.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11094" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11095" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" Score="0" Body="&quot;La Reine Margot&quot;, an 1845 historical novel by Alexandre Dumas, père, about the life of Marguerite de Valois. Use with the [alexandre-dumas-pere] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:03:19.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11096" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11097" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" Score="0" Body="&quot;Burmese Days&quot;, a 1934 novel by George Orwell. Use with the [george-orwell] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:04:04.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11098" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11099" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Three Musketeers&quot; (&quot;Les trois mousquetaires&quot;), an 1844 historical novel by Alexandre Dumas, père. Use with the [alexandre-dumas-pere] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" LastActivityDate="2019-06-05T20:05:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11100" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-06T06:45:37.800" Score="4" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Punjabi poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/chhanna-metal-bowl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Chhanna, the Metal Bowl&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is about a &quot;flat-bottom metal bowl&quot; which is apparently some kind of family heirloom, &quot;filled with memories&quot;. What's so special about a metal bowl? Is it only because it's been in the family for a long time, or is there some special cultural significance attached to it, perhaps some Punjabi tradition? What is &quot;the &lt;em&gt;chhayapatra&lt;/em&gt; hovering in a nook&quot;, and why is this word untranslated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T07:30:18.950" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T07:30:18.950" Title="Is there some cultural significance in the &quot;chhanna&quot; or metal bowl?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;punjabi-literature&gt;&lt;amarjit-chandan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11101" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11102" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" Score="0" Body="For questions about literature which was originally written in the Punjabi language of India and Pakistan, regardless of the author or place of publication." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T06:48:09.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11103" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11104" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" Score="0" Body="Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), English philosopher. Author of &quot;A Vindication of the Rights of Woman&quot; (1792)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T09:21:08.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" Score="0" Body="Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), English playwright and poet. Author of &quot;Tamburlaine&quot; and &quot;Doctor Faustus&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T09:22:25.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11107" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:23:47.703" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-06T09:23:47.703" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T09:23:47.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11108" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-06T09:23:47.703" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'A Clockwork Orange', a 1962 satirical novel by Anthony Burgess. Use with the [anthony-burgess] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:40:42.253" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:40:42.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3718" CreationDate="2019-06-06T12:42:26.533" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have long been suggestions that Queen have satanic links. Freddie joked in his live performances in the mid 70s that his jewel encrusted single glove was given to him by Satan himself. It is Freddie's very dry delivery of the joke that set some people on edge and started the rumour-mill. Just Google or Youtube 'Freddie Mercury Devil Worship' to find more on the ridiculous theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7370" LastActivityDate="2019-06-06T12:42:26.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11110" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11111" CreationDate="2019-06-06T17:14:44.577" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_a_Tub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has the following to say about Jonathan Swift's &lt;em&gt;A Tale of a Tub&lt;/em&gt; (formatting added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of a Tub&lt;/em&gt; is divided between various forms of digression and&#xA;  sections of a &quot;tale&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &quot;tale&quot;, or narrative, is an allegory of three brothers, &lt;em&gt;Peter&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Martin&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Jack&lt;/em&gt;, as they attempt to make their way in the world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each brother represents one of the primary branches of Christianity in&#xA;  the West. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Peter&lt;/strong&gt; (named for Saint Peter) stands in for the &lt;em&gt;Roman Catholic&lt;/em&gt; Church.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jack&lt;/strong&gt; (named for John Calvin, but whom Swift also connects to John of&#xA;  Leyden) represents the various dissenting &lt;em&gt;Protestant&lt;/em&gt; churches such as&#xA;  Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, Congregationalists and Anabaptists. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The third brother, middle born and middle standing, is &lt;strong&gt;Martin&lt;/strong&gt; (named&#xA;  for Martin Luther), whom Swift uses to represent the &lt;em&gt;'via media' of&#xA;  the Church of England.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is meant by &lt;em&gt;'via media' of the Church of England&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is the Church of England treated differently to the other Protestant branches? I.e., why three characters and not two?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In what sense does Martin stand between Peter and Jack?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question arises from my reading of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, where the &quot;patterjackmartins&quot; play a key role.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T08:14:07.867" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T08:14:07.867" Title="In A Tale of a Tub, in what sense does Martin stand between Peter and Jack?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;a-tale-of-a-tub&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11110" CreationDate="2019-06-07T08:12:49.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Anglicanism &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; somehow 'between' Catholicism and Protestantism.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer your first question, the phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_media&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;via media&quot;&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;the middle road&quot;, and &lt;em&gt;one of the commonest contexts where this phrase is used&lt;/em&gt; is to describe the Church of England as a &quot;via media&quot; between the Catholic Church and the various Protestant churches. The above-linked Wikipedia page for the phrase is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_media#Anglicanism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;almost entirely&lt;/a&gt; (barring the first paragraph) about Anglicanism, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/via_media&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;'s example sentence using the phrase is &quot;&lt;em&gt;the settlement has sometimes been described as a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, which clearly refers to Anglicanism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second question assumes that the Church of England is just another Protestant branch, but it's not really seen in that way. This is a complex issue, going back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabethan_Religious_Settlement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabethan Religious Settlement&lt;/a&gt; in the 16th century and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-nine_Articles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thirty-Nine Articles&lt;/a&gt; drawn up to describe the religious direction that the new Church of England intended to steer between Catholicism and Protestantism. I'm not a religious scholar, but there's a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt; of information about this if you'd like to read further on it. Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_England#Separation_from_Rome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The settlement under Queen Elizabeth I (from 1558), known as the Elizabethan Settlement, tried to find a middle way between radical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, the via media (a term that actually only became current in the 1620s), as the character of the Church of England, a church moderately Reformed in doctrine, as expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, but also emphasising continuity with the Catholic and Apostolic traditions of the Church Fathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-nine_Articles#Content&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; interesting, as it goes directly against your interpretation of the Church of England as a branch of Protestantism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wishing to pursue Elizabeth's agenda of establishing a national church that would maintain the indigenous apostolic faith and incorporate some of the insights of Protestantism, the Articles were intended to incorporate a balance of theology and doctrine. This allowed them to appeal to the broadest domestic opinion, Catholic and otherwise.[49] In this sense, the Articles are a revealing window into the ethos and character of Anglicanism, in particular in the way the document works to navigate a via media (&quot;middle path&quot;) between the beliefs and practices of the Lutheran and of the Reformed churches, thus lending the Church of England a mainstream Reformed air. The &quot;via media&quot; was expressed so adroitly in the Articles that some Anglican scholars have labelled their content as an early example of the idea that the doctrine of Anglicanism is one of &quot;Reformed Catholicism&quot;. &lt;sup&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3XUtAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important difference between Anglicanism and most branches of Protestantism is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_succession&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apostolic succession&lt;/a&gt;: just like in the Catholic Church, Anglican bishops claim direct descent from the Apostles of Jesus, while most Protestant churches either don't have bishops at all or don't care about apostolic succession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important similarity between Anglicanism and Catholicism is in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_Christian_leaders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leader of the church&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Governor_of_the_Church_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supreme Governor of the Church of England&lt;/a&gt; is the UK monarch, just like the leader of the Catholic Church is the Pope. Both of these are internationally recognised and important figures, with a clear line of descent which stretches back for centuries. Compare them with the various Protestant religious leaders, who are not politically important or well-known outside of their own respective faiths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The divisions and subdivisions within Christianity are a vast and extremely complicated topic. But on a general, simplistic level, &lt;strong&gt;it does make sense to consider three main branches of Christianity in England, with Anglicanism standing between Catholicism and Protestantism&lt;/strong&gt;. This explains the allegory in &lt;em&gt;A Tale of a Tub&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T08:12:49.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11112" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11113" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" Score="0" Body="&quot;A Tale of a Tub&quot; (1704), a satire by Jonathan Swift. Use with the [jonathan-swift] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T09:39:23.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6922" CreationDate="2019-06-07T10:18:49.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gail through his newspaper always criticized the great work of talented artists. And the people with no understanding of arts used to follow his newspaper's views and never gave talented artists what they deserved. Howard Roark was a talented young artist with a rich taste of architecture. This means if he want to be recognized for his work, he will have to fight with Gail. And if you remember earlier in the Book Gail did tell Howard to not to build houses as he wants but latter he did allowed him to build as he wants to build and never said anything against him in his newspaper. Also Toohey was a cunning man who never showed his real face to anyone so it was very difficult to blame him. And Gail with his newspaper had a greater effect on the people than Toohey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7331" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T10:18:49.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6839" CreationDate="2019-06-07T10:24:29.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do you think he should've done with Peter's confession? Why would he jail Peter? He had destroyed Peter completely. Now he wanted Howard Roark destroyed. And Toohey wanted Peter to confess about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7331" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T13:17:44.040" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T13:17:44.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" Score="0" Body="Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Danish philosopher, author of &quot;Fear and Trembling&quot; (1843) and &quot;The Sickness Unto Death&quot; (1849)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:12:25.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:13:35.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:13:35.210" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:13:35.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:13:35.210" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) or his life as a writer. He is an American journalist and author of &quot;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas&quot; (1971)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:03:56.160" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:03:56.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11120" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11121" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" Score="0" Body="&quot;Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream&quot;, a 1971 novel by Hunter S. Thompson. Use with the [hunter-s-thompson] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" LastActivityDate="2019-06-07T11:13:59.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11123" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11373" CreationDate="2019-06-07T20:43:16.873" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dr. Filostrato believed (incorrectly, as it turns out) that he had preserved the head of François Alcasan. Towards the end of the book, it's revealed that the Macrobes didn't really need Filostrato's setup in order to be able to use Alcasan's head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, why did the N.I.C.E. bother with Filostrato in the first place? Did they believe that they needed Filostrato's setup too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T22:36:57.880" Title="Why did the N.I.C.E. bother with Dr. Filostrato?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6174" CreationDate="2019-06-08T10:19:34.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a useful observation in Simone Weils &lt;em&gt;Gravity and Grace&lt;/em&gt;, edited Gustave Thibon from her notebooks, which might help your confusion on this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literature and morality&lt;/em&gt;: Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren and boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. Therefore 'imaginative literature' is either boring or immoral (or a mixture of both). It only escapes from this alternative if in some way it passes over to the side of reality through the power of art - and only genius can do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Gustave Thibon classified this observation under the category of &lt;strong&gt;evil&lt;/strong&gt;, in his thematic division of her book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that she thought Shakespeare generally a second-rate author of plays (apart from King Lear), her standards were very high (but of course ought to argue that standards ought to be high - otherwise why have them?) So, I don't think she would count Milton as the kind of true genius who had the power of transmuting imaginative literature into the kind of transcendently real art, the kind of art that points at the real, even on the unreal plane that imaginative literature plays on, that she was looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2019-06-08T10:19:34.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11126" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11132" CreationDate="2019-06-09T04:11:14.223" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was a hard-headed man he was brutally handsome&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And she was terminally pretty&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;She held him up and he held her for ransom&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the heart of the cold, cold city&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He had a nasty reputation as a cruel dude&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They said he was ruthless said he was crude&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the line &quot;She held him up and he held her for ransom&quot; refer to? Is this an enabler/enablee relationship (based on the &quot;She held him up&quot; phrase)? Or is this a coercive relationship of some kind (based on the &quot;he held her for ransom&quot; phrase)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the double meaning here (&quot;held him up&quot; like a robbery, and &quot;held her for ransom&quot; like kidnapping) deliberate? If so, is he basically presenting them as &quot;partners in crime&quot; here in one sense, or is there some other significance that I'm missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T09:58:41.513" Title="Is the central relationship in &quot;Life in the Fast Lane&quot; coercive?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-eagles&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11130" CreationDate="2019-06-10T15:33:08.007" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;This should be easy to remember, but I'm having a senior moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1980s, potentially early 1990s, I read a very funny book about a man who's wife goes off with the new neighbours on a houseboat and the husband is soon on the hook for killing her. She learns they are swingers, at which point she escapes on a floaty. Meanwhile he's accused of disposing of the body in his college class' meat grinder. Noticing one of the officers having a meat pie, he agrees with them and says he put it in the filling. Eventually everything unwinds and they live happily ever after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was a pretty well-known book, at least in the UK. So much so that they turned it into a moderately OK movie, but like so many, the timing just wasn't &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any event, does anyone recall the title? I'm looking for some summer reading for a friend and thought they'd like it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7377" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T23:42:37.913" Title="UK comedy book about a man falsely accused of murder while his wife is off with the new neighbours" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2339" CreationDate="2019-06-10T20:07:31.617" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martin has just read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Spencer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herbert Spencer&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029047558/page/n8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;First Principles of a New System of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1862), which describes a universal and teleological process of evolution spanning every scale from microscopic to galactic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus from the persistence of force follow, not only the various direct and indirect equilibrations going on around, together with that cosmical equilibration which brings Evolution under all its forms to a close; but also those less manifest equilibrations shown in the re-adjustments of moving equilibria that have been disturbed. By this ultimate principle is proveable the tendency of every organism, disordered by some unusual influence, to return to a balanced state. To it also may be traced the capacity, possessed in a slight degree by individuals, and in a greater degree by species, of becoming adapted to new circumstances. And not less does it afford a basis for the inference, that there is a gradual advance towards harmony between man's mental nature and the conditions of his existence. After finding that from it are deducible the various characteristics of Evolution, we finally draw from it a warrant for the belief, that Evolution can end only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and the most complete happiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Herbert Spencer (1862). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029047558/page/n503&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;First Principles of a New System of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;, p. 486&lt;/a&gt;. London: Williams and Norgate.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Martin has experienced an intellectual epiphany—his mind has been blown, as we might say nowadays—and he finds it simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, like standing on the edge of a precipice. His sense of the solidity of his knowledge of the world has been cut out from under him, and he does not know to what conclusion Spencer’s philosophy will lead him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphor of “living with the gods in colossal nightmare” attempts to convey this combination of exhilaration and terror. The pagan gods are wise and powerful but also fickle and dangerous: to live on Olympus is to risk the thunderbolts of Zeus and the arrows of Artemis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T20:07:31.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11128" CreationDate="2019-06-10T23:36:58.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/wilt-tom-sharpe/amp/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilt&lt;/a&gt;, by Tom Sharpe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The police are called and several witnesses come forward to wildly misinterpret what they saw as Wilt throwing a body down the hole and – because his wife has taken an unscheduled break with the Californian couple on a boat in the Broads and is nowhere to be found – the police arrest Wilt on suspicion of murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-06-10T23:42:37.913" LastActivityDate="2019-06-10T23:42:37.913" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-11T00:39:07.277" Score="4" ViewCount="162" Body="&lt;p&gt;What was Virginia Woolf's take on literary canon? How does her book &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Room of One's Own&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; argue or imply that literary canon should be changed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7379" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T14:35:21.997" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T14:35:21.997" Title="Virginia Woolf's stance on literary canon" Tags="&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;&lt;a-room-of-ones-own&gt;&lt;canon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11126" CreationDate="2019-06-11T09:58:41.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;my interpretation, given that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Eagles-life-in-the-fast-lane-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rest of the lyrics&lt;/a&gt; describe a hard-partying but consensual relationship, is that the two of them were using each other. They are both cruel, selfish people who are accustomed to taking advantage of more innocent partners, and happened to catch one another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="29" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T09:58:41.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11133" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-11T15:01:37.077" Score="6" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although many novels are still written in the past tense, it seems that many other novels nowadays are written in the present tense. When did this begin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the first novel written primarily in the present tense?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some clarifications: I am referring to novels written mostly in the present tense, so a novel written in the past tense with a few present tense verbs sprinkled in does not count. I realize that &quot;novel&quot; does not necessarily have a clear definition; thus, there may be multiple answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I refer specifically to the English language. In this context, I would define the English language as beginning with &quot;Le Morte d'Arthur,&quot; which is also often considered the first English novel (which is why I begin here). Thus, I am talking specifically about English novels beginning with and following Le Morte d'Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7380" LastEditorUserId="7380" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T15:27:28.800" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T13:33:48.310" Title="What was the first novel written in the present tense?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11134" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11135" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" Score="0" Body="John Dryden (1631–1700), English poet and dramatist, author of &quot;An Essay of Dramatick Poesie&quot; (1668) and &quot;All for Love&quot; (1678)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:51:11.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11136" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:58:13.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T18:58:13.840" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:58:13.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11137" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:58:13.840" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Luo Guanzhong (羅貫中) or his life as a writer. He was a 14th century Chinese writer, author of &quot;Romance of the Three Kingdoms&quot; and editor of &quot;Water Margin&quot;." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T08:57:45.627" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T08:57:45.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11138" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11139" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" Score="0" Body="&quot;Romance of the Three Kingdoms&quot; (三国演义), a 14th century novel by Luo Guanzhong (羅貫中), one of the Classic Chinese Novels. Use with the [luo-guanzhong] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T18:59:33.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11140" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11141" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" Score="0" Body="&quot;Orphans of the Sky&quot;, a 1941 science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein. Use with the [robert-heinlein] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T19:01:45.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:05:13.460" Score="4" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Deloney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Deloney's&lt;/a&gt; Elizabethan novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newberie&lt;/em&gt; is based on the life of the English clothier John Winchcombe or Jack of Newbury. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofjohnwin00delorich/page/40&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second chapter&lt;/a&gt;, he marries for the second time. Deloney writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This wedding endured ten days, to the great reliefe of the poore that dwelt all about (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If ten days seems long, remember Theseus words in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/midsummer.5.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 1 of &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;A fortnight hold we this solemnity, / In nightly revels and new jollity.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Deloney alluding to? What sort of relief is he thinking of? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:53:59.333" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T15:33:31.670" Title="What sort of &quot;relief of the poor&quot; is Thomas Deloney alluding to?" Tags="&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11143" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11144" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" Score="0" Body="The Elizabethan &quot;novel&quot; was a precursor of the modern novel and characterised by several of the following characteristics: a lack of progressive story-telling, insufficiently developed characters and a lack of credible human situations. The &quot;story&quot; often consists of a string of anecdotes or is used as a pretext for long digressions." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:20:30.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11145" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11146" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of Thomas Deloney (c. 1543 – April 1600)  and his life as a writer. Deloney published ballads and &quot;novels&quot;. He is best known for &quot;Jack of Newbury &quot;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:47:03.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11147" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:49:36.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:49:36.257" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:49:36.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11148" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:49:36.257" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Elizabethan novel &quot;Jack of Newbury&quot; (1597) by Thomas Deloney. Use this tag with the tag [thomas-deloney]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:21:25.177" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:21:25.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11149" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:52:23.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:52:23.657" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:52:23.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11150" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:52:23.657" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the play 'Die Wandlung' (1917/18) by the German dramatist and politician Ernst Toller (1893 - 1939). Use this tag with the tags [ernst-toller] and [german-literature]. This play should not be confused with Kafka's short story 'Die Verwandlung' ('The Metamorphosis')." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T15:23:10.093" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T15:23:10.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11151" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11152" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of Ernst Toller (1893 - 1939) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T10:53:28.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11133" CreationDate="2019-06-12T10:56:05.907" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many of the novels of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoda_Broughton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rhoda Broughton&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are narrated in the present tense, and the earliest of these is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45178&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Red as a Rose is She&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1870):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Half-an-hour passes, and Mr. Brandon is still in the “parlour.” It is seven o’clock, and dinner-time. Would you like to know what it is that Mr. Brandon takes so long in saying, and whether it is anything likely to reconcile Miss Craven to the loss of her dinner? A little room that looks towards the sun-setting; a little room full of evening sunshine and the smell of tea-roses; a light paper, with small, bright flower-bunches on the walls; white muslin curtains; a general air of crisp freshness, as of a room that there are no climbing, crawling, sticky-fingered children to crumple and rumple. A young woman, rather red in the face, standing in one corner. She has been driven thither apparently by a young man, who is standing before her, and who is still redder. At a rough calculation, you would say that the young man was seven feet high; but put him with his back against the wall, with his heels together, and his chin in, and you will find that he is exactly six feet four; that is, four inches taller than any man who wishes to do work in the world, and find horses to carry him, ought to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll give some precursors to show that this didn’t come out of nowhere. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1023&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1853) by Charles Dickens, the narration switches back and forth between first-person past tense (the Esther Summerson chapters), and third-person present tense, so that about half of the book is in the present tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1260&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, the last few pages switch to the present tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest—blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband’s life as fully is he is mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a novel, but &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The French Revolution: a History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1837) by Thomas Carlyle uses novelistic technique, and is narrated mainly in the present tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The drums are beating: “Silence!” he cries ‘in a terrible voice.’ He mounts the scaffold, not without delay; he is in puce coat, breeches of grey, white stockings. He strips off the coat; stands disclosed in a sleeve-waistcoat of white flannel. The Executioners approach to bind him: he spurns, resists; Abbé Edgeworth has to remind him how the Saviour, in whom men trust, submitted to be bound. His hands are tied, his head bare; the fatal moment is come. He advances to the edge of the Scaffold, ‘his face very red,’ and says: “Frenchmen, I die innocent: it is from the Scaffold and near appearing before God that I tell you so. I pardon my enemies; I desire that France—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carlyle’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sartor_Resartus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sartor Resartus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1833) also has substantial parts in the present tense, namely the musings of the fictional editor. In this respect it is similar to Jonathan Swift’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_a_Tub&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Tale of a Tub&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1704) and to John Lyly’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1578). But these works are in the form of philosophical discursions, or parodies thereof, and do not much resemble the modern novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T13:33:48.310" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T13:33:48.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8897" CreationDate="2019-06-12T12:48:59.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a shorter version of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; by K.J. O'Hara, who has been Artistic Director of the Antic Mind Theatre Company and an English and drama teacher. &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice: Abridged for Schools and Performance&lt;/em&gt; was published by CreateSpace (Amazon's publishing platform) in 2015. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The goal of the abridgement was to create a version that would be more accessible to a younger audience while still retaining the play's essential elements. In the resulting version,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the plot is coherent, characters are developed and all the text is original. (...) The abridgement required only one shorter scene to be removed in its entirety; the main revisions have been to cut extraneous dialogue from scenes. This was done partially to allow the play to be performed by a small cast and partially to make it more streamlined and, therefore, easier for a young audience to understand and follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The scene that was cut is not specified, but it is one of the scenes in Act III, which normally has five scenes instead of four.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The play is also available in the volume &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abridged-Shakespeare-Collection-Schools-Performance/dp/1530513235/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abridged Shakespeare Collection: For Schools and Performance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which also contains &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T16:47:57.763" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T16:47:57.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4361" CreationDate="2019-06-12T17:49:32.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of &quot;what is the literary canon,&quot; to paraphrase noted science-fiction author Samuel Delany (from his &lt;em&gt;About Writing&lt;/em&gt;) the most practical marker of inclusion in the &quot;canon&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;when a work remains part of the living discourse,&lt;/strong&gt; because of ongoing creation of an active body of derivative (adapted, parodied, modernized, retold) and secondary (critical, biographical, analytical) literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; is part of the canon, because a new movie version comes out every twenty years or so.  The works of Toni Morrison are part of the canon, because new books &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; them and about her continue to be published. This definition is useful because &lt;strong&gt;it avoids value judgements&lt;/strong&gt; on the relative worth of various works of literature, and focuses in on the objective, empirical traces of the quality of having been canonized.  It also allows for work to go in and out of the canon, and traces how works might have originally entered the canon in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other common literary meaning of &quot;canon&quot; is confirmed information about the characters or settings in work of fiction.  The primary source of canon is the actual work itself (assuming there are no contradictions). The secondary source is what the author says (assuming that doesn't contradict what is in print).  In the case of a large franchise, what is canon may be controlled by official sources produced by the franchise owner. Speculation by fans is not canon, unless confirmed by one of the routes above. What is canon is thus usually clear, except in the case of contradictions. The common factor between the terms is that &lt;strong&gt;both are based by analogy on the religious canon&lt;/strong&gt;, the term for the officially endorsed sacred writings of a religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2019-06-12T17:55:02.333" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T17:55:02.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11142" CreationDate="2019-06-12T18:01:15.627" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient and almost forgotten (wedding) custom is to not deny a traveler from your doorstep. In the times before hotels and such, a traveler would depend on the kindness of strangers who would let them sleep in their home, share meager food in exchange for tales of their travels or small gifts. One of the most ancient rights are so called guest rights, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hospitium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hospitium or xenia&lt;/a&gt;, divine right of guest and divine duty of host. To break those was to invite punishment from the gods. Even Odyssey has Odysseus disguising himself as a beggar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the later times, the custom wasn't so carefully observed. Yet, there was still a remnant of that belief and it went as follows: When people celebrated wedding or christening, it was considered a bad luck to refuse anyone wanting to join in the celebration. There are multiple stories and legends of kings, gods or fairies wandering around disguised as beggars and asking for alms. If the host received them gracefully, they would get a blessing from the god. If they mistreated the powerful person disguised as beggar, a quick, usually magical punishment such as curse would follow. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fEbW568CZo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beauty and The Beast&lt;/a&gt; or Sleeping Beauty. The more important the event (Birth of a child, wedding, even funeral), the more likely that supernatural being would try to join as an uninvited guest, disguised as vulnerable beggar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, beggars and generally poor people would be very happy when somebody celebrated a wedding, because they could join in the celebration and eat and drink for free. The longer the wedding celebrations, the more relieved they were of their poverty and hunger, if only temporarily. And if the host was rich, the food would be great too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason for that belief was this quote from the Bible, Luke 14:13-14&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;13 But when you host a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the&#xA;  lame, and the blind,  14 and you will be blessed. Since they cannot&#xA;  repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a modern look at that trope, lookup &quot;The Mystery Knight&quot; by George RR Martin in which a hedge knight joins wedding celebrations and tournament of lord of the lands they are passing through, along with a few more hedge knights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;Couldn't quite find confirmation of Tudor customs, except that Henri VIII organized multiple feasts all over the city of London and tournament when he married. It might be another status symbol: I am so rich and generous. I can show it by feeding the poor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found another custom though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another custom is when the couple left the church. Then the groom (or groom's brother or a godfather) would throw small coins to the mass gathered in front of the church to spread joy. And couples in southern France still throw coins when they leave the church as a throwback to a more ancient tradition, where child beggars were allowed to harass newlyweds. They'd often prevent them from leaving the church grounds until the groom paid them to go away.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kiro7.com/living/shopping/wedding-coin-traditions-around-world/81895137&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Customs with coins&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2031" LastEditorUserId="2031" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T15:33:31.670" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T15:33:31.670" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8570" CreationDate="2019-06-12T20:02:46.530" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarissa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1748) by Samuel Richardson begins with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A brief Account of the principal Characters throughout the Whole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Clarissa Harlowe, &lt;em&gt;a young Lady of great Delicacy; Mistress of all the Accomplements, natural and acquired, that adorn the Sex; having the strictest Notions of filial Duty.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robert Lovelace, &lt;em&gt;Esq; a Man of Birth and Fortune: Haughty, vindictive, humourously vain; equally intrepid and indefatigable in the Pursuit of his Pleasures—Making his Addresses to Miss&lt;/em&gt; Clarissa Harlowe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;James Harlowe, &lt;em&gt;Esq; the Father of Miss&lt;/em&gt; Clarissa, &lt;em&gt;Miss&lt;/em&gt; Arabella, &lt;em&gt;and Mr.&lt;/em&gt; James Harlowe: &lt;em&gt;Despotic, absolute; and, when offended, not easily forgiving.&lt;/em&gt; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Richardson (1748). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/SamuelRichardson/page/n13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. ix&lt;/a&gt;. London: S. Richardson&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has longer character descriptions than a typical &lt;em&gt;dramatis personae&lt;/em&gt;, but it is close, and Richardson’s next novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Sir_Charles_Grandison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Sir Charles Grandison&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1754) is even closer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Names of the Principal Persons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;        MEN.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  George Selby, &lt;em&gt;Esq&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  John Greville, &lt;em&gt;Esq&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Richard Fenwick, &lt;em&gt;Esq&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;        WOMEN.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Miss&lt;/em&gt; Harriet Byron.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Mrs.&lt;/em&gt; Shirley, &lt;em&gt;her Grandmother by the Mother’s Side&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Mrs.&lt;/em&gt; Selby, &lt;em&gt;Sister to Miss&lt;/em&gt; Byron’s &lt;em&gt;Father, and Wife of Mr.&lt;/em&gt; Selby.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Richardson (1754). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=sw0UAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Sir Charles Grandison&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. viii&lt;/a&gt;. London: S. Richardson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later editions of &lt;em&gt;Clarissa&lt;/em&gt; were revised to contain a list similar to that in &lt;em&gt;Charles Grandison&lt;/em&gt;, for example the sixth edition (1768) has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Names of the Principal Persons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss &lt;em&gt;Clarissa Harlowe&lt;/em&gt;, A young Lady of great Beauty and Merit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Robert Lovelace&lt;/em&gt;, Esq; Her Admirer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;James Harlowe&lt;/em&gt;, Esq; Father of Clarissa.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mrs. &lt;em&gt;Harlowe&lt;/em&gt;, His Lady.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Richardson (1768). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/clarissaorhisto00clargoog/page/n16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady&lt;/em&gt; (sixth edition), volume 1, p. xii&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. and F. Rivington.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T20:02:46.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1855" CreationDate="2019-06-12T20:33:06.850" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be remembering a chapter (commonly excerpted as a short story and often translated into English) called &quot;The Prisoner,&quot; from Alexander Dumas's /The Man in the Iron Mask/ (itself a section of a longer work written in the 1840s, /The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later/). &quot;The Prisoner&quot; is available in an English translation via Gutenberg (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2759/2759-h/2759-h.htm#link2HCH0001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2759/2759-h/2759-h.htm#link2HCH0001&lt;/a&gt;). The &quot;interviewer&quot; is a priest, not a journalist, but the prisoner's situation sounds very similar (memory problems, doesn't know why he is imprisoned, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6159" LastActivityDate="2019-06-12T20:33:06.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11164" CreationDate="2019-06-13T14:39:46.327" Score="3" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the anthology &lt;em&gt;Shorter Novels: Elizabethan&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1929, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Saintsbury&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Saintsbury&lt;/a&gt; writes in the introduction that the English novel had something like a false start in the Elizabethan era and that eras of great theatre did not coincide with eras of great novel writing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to write (links and emphasis added by me),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Even later than the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Restoration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Restoration&lt;/a&gt;, things in themselves first-rate, the performances of &lt;strong&gt;Bunyan&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Defoe&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Swift&lt;/strong&gt;, were in the first  and last cases especially, ‘side-shows’—as it were in fiction—allegories—a great word, which one might almost translate ‘side-show’ in one of its senses. (...) The ‘strong contagion’ of world-exploring which showed itself mainly in &lt;strong&gt;Defoe&lt;/strong&gt;, had minor symptoms such as that curious &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Isle_of_Pines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Isle of Pines&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;Nevile&lt;/strong&gt;'s which the Continent, if not England, also took for history. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Head&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Head's&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and other people's disreputable &lt;em&gt;English Rogue&lt;/em&gt;, putting its disreputableness aside, is an attempt at a novel, and though a long one is made of short things put together: and when we come to the &lt;strong&gt;great quartet of the mid-eighteenth century&lt;/strong&gt; we seem to have stumbled into competence never quite to stumble out of it again, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is who Saintsbury has in mind when he refers to &quot;the great quartet of the mid-eighteenth century&quot;. Daniel Defoe had died in 1731 and Jonathan Swift in 1745. Other names worth mentioning are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Richardson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Richardson&lt;/a&gt; (1689 – 1761), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fielding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Fielding&lt;/a&gt; (1707 – 1754), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laurence Sterne&lt;/a&gt; (1713 – 1768), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Smollett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tobias Smollet&lt;/a&gt; (1721 – 1771) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Goldsmith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oliver Goldsmith&lt;/a&gt; (1728 – 1774). I doubt that Saintsbury was thinking of Samuel Johnson; Johnson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rasselas,_Prince_of_Abissinia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rasselas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is usually described as a novella. I also doubt he was thinking of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Brooke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frances Brooke&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cleland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Cleland&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with making a choice is that literary tastes and critical appreciation have changed since the interwar period, so any attempt to answer this question needs to look at sources from the interwar period instead of simply looking at present-day appraisals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T14:50:20.380" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T08:59:15.670" Title="For Saintsbury, which English novelists constituted the &quot;great quartet of the mid-eighteenth century&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11161" CreationDate="2019-06-13T15:27:41.973" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As it happens, George Saintsbury wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofen00sain/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Short History of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1910. In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shorthistoryofen00sain/page/n23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;table of contents&lt;/a&gt;, the chapter on the eighteenth-century novel is described as follows: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Richardson—Fielding—Smollett—Sterne—Minor novelists—Walpole—Beckford—Mrs. Radcliffe—Lewis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Walpole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horace Walpole&lt;/a&gt; (1717 – 1797) is best known for the Gothic novel &lt;em&gt;The Castle of Otranto&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beckford_(novelist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Beckford&lt;/a&gt; (1760 – 1844), best known for the Gothic novel &lt;em&gt;Vathek&lt;/em&gt;, was born too late to be included in &quot;great quartet of the mid-eighteenth century&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Radcliffe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anne Radcliffe&lt;/a&gt; (1764 – 1823) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lewis_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Lewis&lt;/a&gt; (1775 – 1818), two other authors of Gothic novels, were also born too late to be included. The minor novelists include authors such as Francis Coventry, Charles Johnstone, William Dodd (Dr. Dodd, also nicknamed the &quot;Macaroni Parson&quot;), Thomas Amory, Henry Brooke and a few authors that I have never heard of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless George Saintsbury changed his opinion between 1910 and 1929, the &quot;great quartet&quot; consists of  &lt;strong&gt;Samuel Richardson&lt;/strong&gt; (1689 – 1761), &lt;strong&gt;Henry Fielding&lt;/strong&gt; (1707 – 1754), &lt;strong&gt;Tobias Smollet&lt;/strong&gt; (1721 – 1771) and &lt;strong&gt;Laurence Sterne&lt;/strong&gt; (1713 – 1768). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oliver Goldsmith's work is treated in the next chapter on &quot;Johnson, Goldsmith, and the later essayists&quot;. Saintsbury was more impressed by Goldsmith's essays than by his novels; he does not say so explicitly, but it seems to be implied by the very brief discussion of the author's prose style compared to the longer discussion of the essays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:27:41.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11161" CreationDate="2019-06-13T15:29:33.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, according to his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14469/14469-h/14469-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Novel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of 1913.  His chapter 2 ends with the line &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That this was due to the work of the four great novelists who fill its central third and will fill our next chapter cannot perhaps be said: that their work was the first great desertion of it may be said safely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and chapter 3 begins&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It does not enter into the plan, because it would be entirely inconsistent with the scale, of the present book to give details of the lives of the novelists, except when they have something special to do with the subject, or when (as in the case of a few minorities who happen to be of some importance) even well-informed readers are likely to be quite ignorant about them. Accounts, in all degrees of scale and competence, of the lives of Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne abound. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and goes on for the rest of the chapter about these authors.  Towards the end of chapter 2 he writes &quot;One cannot conveniently rank Swift with the great quartette of the next chapter&quot; and uses the phrase &quot;great quartette&quot; similarly elsewhere: six times in all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T15:51:38.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T15:51:38.680" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11161" CreationDate="2019-06-13T16:00:16.793" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of a quartet of pre-eminent mid-18th century English novelists was popularized by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Moir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Moir&lt;/a&gt;, whose essay on ‘Modern Romance and Novel’ appeared in the seventh edition of the &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia Britannica&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne,&lt;/strong&gt; are the &lt;strong&gt;four great novelists&lt;/strong&gt; of this period (the reign of George II.) which was pre-eminently the age of novel-writing in England. For though we should indeed be sorry to undervalue the merits of Goldsmith, or the charm of his &lt;em&gt;Vicar of Wakefield&lt;/em&gt;, we cannot quite rank the powers displayed in that delightful little tale, which appeared in 1763, so highly as the varied invention displayed by the writers we have named, upon the broader canvas which they selected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Moir (1839). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/treatisesonpoet00unkngoog/page/n194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Romance and Novel&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Treatises on Poetry, Modern Romance, and Rhetoric: being the articles under those heads, contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, seventh edition&lt;/em&gt;, p. 186. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar wording appeared in subsequent editions of the &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia&lt;/em&gt;, for example, the eleventh edition has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These &lt;strong&gt;four great writers&lt;/strong&gt; then, &lt;strong&gt;Richardson, Fielding, Smollett and Sterne&lt;/strong&gt;—all of them great pessimists in comparison with the benignant philosophers of a later fiction—first thoroughly fertilized this important field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Seccombe (1911). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/English_Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Literature&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia Britannica&lt;/em&gt; (eleventh edition), volume 9, p. 633.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics soon took up the quartet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne,&lt;/strong&gt; worked on at the mine which Defoe had opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Arnold (1862). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0N1LAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Manual of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;, p. 190&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne&lt;/strong&gt;, not only laid the vast foundations, but raised thereon the noble structures, of an art new to the literature of our country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1863). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kjVPAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA268&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caxtoniana&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 268&lt;/a&gt;. Edinburgh: Blackwood&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the 20th century, the quartet was sufficiently orthodox, that Saintsbury could title a chapter of &lt;em&gt;The English Novel&lt;/em&gt; (1913) ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013275254/page/n87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Four Wheels of the Novel Wain&lt;/a&gt;’ and feel no need to explain his metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T08:59:15.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11165" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11166" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1884/1885) by Mark Twain. Use this tag with the [mark-twain] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:01:27.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11167" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11168" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723 – 1790) and his life as a writer. Smith is best known for his studies ' The Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759) and 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' (1776)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:03:59.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11169" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11170" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" Score="0" Body="Questions related to 'A Treatise of Human Nature' (1738–40), which is possibly David Hume's most important work. Use this tag with the [david-hume] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:06:16.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11171" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11172" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711 – 1776) and his life as a writer. His major works include 'A Treatise of Human Nature' (1738), 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding' (1748) and 'Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion' (published posthumously in 1779)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T17:09:42.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-08T07:16:36.950" Score="7" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is part of a quote by Ferdinand in the beginning of scene 1 of act 3 of &quot;The Tempest&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Most busy, least when I do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literaturepage.com/read/shakespeare-tempest-35.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literaturepage.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Play.aspx?Content=Text&amp;amp;WorkId=12&amp;amp;Act=3&amp;amp;Scene=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shakespeareswords.com&lt;/a&gt; offers this from the First Folio:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts, doe euen refresh my labours,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Most busie lest, when I doe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/the-tempest/act-3-scene-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;litcharts.com&lt;/a&gt; offers yet another version (without saying what the &quot;original&quot; is taken from):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labors,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Most busiest when I do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is right and how should I interpret the sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="kelvin" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-06-14T10:21:31.173" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T05:44:15.987" Title="Which of these sources is right about &quot;The Tempest&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11173" CreationDate="2019-06-13T18:28:27.580" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare wrote his works in a variety of English known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Early Modern English&lt;/a&gt;. At that time, English spelling had not yet been standardised and plays were not highly regarded as a form of literature. As a consequence, the early printed versions of Shakespeare's plays contain a lot of deviations from present-day English, for a number of reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare probably did not spell the same words consistently in the same way (but none of his plays have survived in manuscript form). In fact, he did not even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_of_Shakespeare%27s_name&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;spell his own name&lt;/a&gt; consistently.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some of Shakespeare's manuscripts were probably copied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;scribes&quot;&lt;/a&gt; before they were sent to a printer; scribes could make the spelling more regular, but they could also introduce their own mistakes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Printers employed typesetters and large printing projects may have required several typesetters. &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was first published in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;First Folio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. Scholars have detected the hand of different typesetters in the First Folio, for example, by looking at the distribution of different types of mistakes or spelling preferences.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence of this, a modern editor of Shakespeare's plays needs to make a number of decisions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How do I solve the obvious errors (e.g. missing words, words that don't make sense, etc.) that I find? Do I try to correct them at all?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do I do with the spelling? Do I keep the original spelling or do I modernise it? If I modernise it, should I do this for an American audience, for a British audience, etc? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What do I do with the punctuation? Should I modernise it and, if yes, to what degree?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different editors make different decisions and their response to the above questions are some of the reasons why editions of Shakespeare's plays present different texts. Aside from obvious mistakes made by the editors, there is no real right or wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the First Folio, Ferdinand's first speech in Act 3, scene 1 ends as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But theſe ſweet thoughts, doe euen refreſh my labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Moſt buſie leſt, when I doe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;code&gt;ſ&lt;/code&gt; is an archaic form of &lt;code&gt;s&lt;/code&gt;, so a minimal modernisation would result in the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts, doe euen refresh my labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Most busie lest, when I doe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further modernisations would replace &quot;doe&quot; with &quot;do&quot;, &quot;euen&quot; with &quot;even&quot; and &quot;busie&quot; with &quot;busy&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts, do even refresh my labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Most busy lest, when I do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modernisation normally also adapts the punctuation to modern conventions, so the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/tempest.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;version hosted by MIT&lt;/a&gt; looks as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Most busy lest, when I do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is not a matter of right or wrong but how far you go with modernisation. This in turn depends on the intended audience. An edition aimed at a scholarly audience is typically more conservative in this regards than editions for the general reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editors also clarify the meaning of passages that are unclear. The first line of the quote roughly means, &quot;These sweet thoughts (about Miranda) give me new energy for my work&quot;, but the second line is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux_(literary)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;crux&quot;&lt;/a&gt; and has left editors guessing as to what Shakespeare actually meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;buſie leſt&quot; is the most notorious crux in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, and editors have emended it in various ways, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;busiliest (Bulloch, Cambridge Shakespeare, 1863),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;busy least (John Payne Collier),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;busiest (James Spedding),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;busy-less (Lewis Theobald).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Arden Shakespeare edition (second series) Frank Kermode wrote a two-page footnote arguing for &quot;busilest&quot;, which is similar to Bulloch's conjecture &quot;busiliest&quot;. This turns the phrase into an adverbial superlative, similar to two word formations elsewhere in Shakespeare's plays: &quot;easilest/easiliest&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/cymbeline/cymbeline.4.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, Act 4 Scene 2&lt;/a&gt; and &quot;maidenlest/maidenliest&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fulltextarchive.com/page/The-Tragedie-of-King-Lear1/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1, Scene 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/arden-edition-of-the-works-22-the-tempest/oclc/634043974&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kermode's edition of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, first published in 1954, many editors went along with Spedding's conjecture, based on an interpretation in the sense of &quot;I am least engaged with my work when I am most engaged with these thoughts&quot;. Kermode argues that this reading is almost the opposite of what the context requires, since Ferdinand seems to say that these thoughts (of Miranda) are busiest when he is busiest (piling logs). Hence his emendation &quot;Most busilest when I do it.&quot; He sees no convincing reason to mend &quot;I do(e) it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, my reading of these two lines is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These sweet thoughts (about Miranda) give me new energy for my work,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  It is when I think these thoughts that I am most active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" OwnerDisplayName="Christophe Strobbe" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T09:48:40.310" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11173" CreationDate="2019-06-13T20:39:05.157" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no consensus on who is right. The punctuation placement, the spelling - editors disagree on all of these points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I should give a note on why the punctuation would change. At the time Shakespeare's plays were published in the First Folio, punctuation had not been standardized as a system for marking syntax. An introductory guide to punctuation in the period would explain that it was flexible; as Walter Ong explained in  “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/459334&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Historical Backgrounds of Elizabethan and Jacobean Punctuation Theory&lt;/a&gt;.” (PMLA, vol. 59, no. 2, 1944, pp. 349–360), punctuation was partly performative, corresponding to when someone reading aloud might need to take a breath; it was only inconsistently about syntax or elocution: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The present study shows that ... behind the punctuation theory of the time, which was based on a mixed set of principles, there was a factor which is not included under either a syntactical or an elocutionary system as these systems have been understood. This factor was the original theory of the late classical and the medieval grammarians, for whom &lt;strong&gt;punctuation was first of all a system demanded by the exigencies of breathing in oral delivery&lt;/strong&gt; and only secondly (at first rather negatively) a means of interpreting the sense. Lying at the background of Elizabethan and Jacobean theory, &lt;strong&gt;this view of punctuation accounts for a practice which is loose by either syntactical or elocutionary standards&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who set this punctuation? In the case of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, it could have been the printers of the First Folio in 1623, which was produced after Shakespeare had died in 1616. It could also have been Ralph Crane, a performer in the King's Men, who wrote a manuscript for The Tempest from a possible rough draft. Because punctuation and spelling were not standardized, copiers and printers would often change these elements, and scholars still write about Crane's influence on the text (see Amy Bowles, &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/res/article/67/280/405/2451630&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dressing the Text: Ralph Crane’s Scribal Publication of Drama&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Review of English Studies&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 67, no. 280, June 2016, pp. 405–427). So editors would have little qualm about changing punctuation to help readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scholarly editions, recognizing the need to update spelling and punctuation to fit modern reading expectations, and also recognizing that these elements may have multiple valid interpretations, make note of their method of textual editing and, often, choose a primary early text to follow. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/html/Tmp.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folger digital edition&lt;/a&gt;, for example, includes this note after explaining the multiple nature of Shakespearean texts: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The reader of the Folger Shakespeare knows where the text has been altered because editorial interventions are signaled by square brackets ..., half-square brackets ..., or angle brackets .... At any point in the text, you can hover your cursor over a bracket for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 3.1.15-16, they leave the following note: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labors,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most &lt;code&gt;[&lt;/code&gt;busiest&lt;code&gt;]&lt;/code&gt; when I do it. &lt;code&gt;editorial emendation&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they note that they have made an interpretation that goes beyond updates to spelling. Indeed, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Tmp_F1/scene/3.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio reads&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But these sweet thoughts, doe euen refresh my labours,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most &lt;strong&gt;busie lest&lt;/strong&gt;, when I doe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Folger editors, working from the First Folio, have combined what appears to be two words and gotten rid of the punctuation. Here's how they explain the choice in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ou8FAwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR51&amp;amp;lpg=PR51&amp;amp;dq=The%20Tempest%20Crane%20Manuscript&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=TtcAEG0bu4&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0WsyTM212u6pVcVloGZcG2M-yzpg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwijvJWWpufiAhXnYt8KHZXjBgwQ6AEwDXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=most%20busiest&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;print edition&lt;/a&gt; by the same editors: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This difficult line is printed in the Folio as &quot;Most busie lest, when I doe it, and sometimes appears in editions as &quot;Most busil'est when I do it.&quot; There is no agreement about what &quot;busiest&quot; (or &quot;busil'est&quot;) modifies, nor about what &quot;it&quot; refers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No agreement indeed. Other editors resolve the issue in other ways; this 2002 edition of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=QxvcXItXYtoC&amp;amp;pg=PA157&amp;amp;lpg=PA157&amp;amp;dq=%22Most%20busy,%20least%20when%20I%20do%20it.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=h1orV-LfK4&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3Pd95RvahPpb4d_NskQNebL3iXSA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjFkMSto-fiAhWwmeAKHd42DJUQ6AEwB3oECAUQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Most%20busy%2C%20least%20when%20I%20do%20it.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tempest&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; construes the line as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Most busy, least when I do it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a long paragraph explaining their choice of emphasizing the &lt;strong&gt;busy&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;least&lt;/strong&gt; rather than trying to make sense of the passage by construing the line as &lt;strong&gt;busiest&lt;/strong&gt;. The comma provides an additional emphasis of their editor's reading, even though it wasn't present in the First Folio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is right? Is inventing one word from two or moving the comma a bigger deal? Those questions approach &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; as if an authoritative answer is possible. In this case, we have a manuscript, a First Folio, and subsequent folios, and a line that is difficult to interpret as written. These editors are all trying to make sense of the line, which doesn't quite make sense even to experts. Each edition reflects an effort to balance preserving the text(s) and making sense of the text(s), and in this specific case changes are made based on how the editor reads Ferdinand's previous actions against this specific line. There is no consensus. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7386" OwnerDisplayName="TaliesinMerlin" LastActivityDate="2019-06-13T20:39:05.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T10:59:02.307" Score="4" ViewCount="281" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of the first chapter of Thomas Deloney's &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, Jack's unnamed wife makes him a &quot;Cawdle&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the morning his wife rose betime, and merrily made him a Cawdle, and bringing it up to his bed side, asked him how he did?&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;(...)&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  And therefore forgiving each other all injuries past, having also tride one anothers patience, let us quench these burning coales of contention, with the sweete juyce of a faithfull kiss, and shaking hands, bequeath all our anger to the eating up of this Cawdle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context, I assume a &quot;cawdle&quot; is some sort of dish. But what type of dish exactly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking up &quot;cawdle&quot; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?search=cawdle&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;go=Go&amp;amp;ns0=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, I get the question, &quot;Did you mean castle?&quot; When looking up the term on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=cawdle&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;go=Go&amp;amp;ns0=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;, it gives me search results for &quot;candle&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:53:51.973" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T15:53:51.973" Title="What is a Cawdle?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11176" CreationDate="2019-06-14T11:37:55.130" Score="7" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A caudle (or caudel) was a hot drink that recurred in various guises throughout British cuisine from the Middle Ages into Victorian times. It was thick and sweet, and seen as particularly suitable and sustaining for invalids and new mothers. At some periods of history, caudle recipes were based on milk and eggs, like eggnog. Later variants were more similar to a gruel, a sort of drinkable oatmeal porridge. Like the original forms of posset (a drink of wine and milk, rather than a set dessert), a caudle was usually alcoholic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caudle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A general term for thickened drinks. Typically wine, milk or ale thickened with flour, oatmeal or egg, sweetened and spiced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.foodsofengland.co.uk/caudelorcaudle.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;From foods of England&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2019-06-14T11:37:55.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8640" CreationDate="2019-06-14T15:07:48.473" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the French version, the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ia902308.us.archive.org/12/items/lecomtedemontecr17989gut/17989-h/17989-h.htm#XII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter XII in volume I&lt;/a&gt; goes as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M. Noirtier, car c'était en effet lui-même qui venait d'entrer, suivit des yeux le domestique jusqu'à ce qu'il eût refermé la porte; puis, craignant sans doute qu'il n'écoutât dans l'antichambre, il alla rouvrir derrière lui: la précaution n'était pas inutile, et la rapidité avec laquelle maître Germain se retira &lt;strong&gt;prouva qu'il n'était point exempt du péché qui perdit nos premiers pères&lt;/strong&gt;. M. Noirtier prit alors la peine d'aller fermer lui-même la porte de l'antichambre, revint fermer celle de la chambre à coucher, poussa les verrous, et revint tendre la main à Villefort, qui avait suivi tous ces mouvements avec une surprise dont il n'était pas encore revenu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was just to verify whether the 1846 English translation was faithful to the original or not. The reference is obviously to the &amp;quot;first sin&amp;quot; but we don't need to go as far back as Thomas Aquinas (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9316/2191&quot;&gt;Gareth Rees's  now deleted answer&lt;/a&gt;) to find its more specific meaning. Alexandre Dumas was more likely to be familiar with the 17th-century French theologian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques-B%C3%A9nigne_Bossuet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet&lt;/a&gt; than with Aquinas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.fr/books?id=1U5HAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA658&amp;amp;lpg=PA658&amp;amp;dq=curiosit%C3%A9+%C3%A8ve&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=a_GI1N-wGY&amp;amp;sig=K3EPrdFqoNNjFS8NWk4of18VGuk&amp;amp;hl=fr&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj1u-fx_43LAhWIWBoKHdHYDqwQ6AEINDAF#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=curiosit%C3%A9%20%C3%A8ve&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Élévations sur les Mystères&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Elevations on the Mysteries) Bossuet discussed, among other things, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Gen%C3%A8se+3&amp;amp;version=LSG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third chapter of Genesis&lt;/a&gt;. This discussion often mentions Eve's curiosity. For example (italics for Bible quotes by Bossuet):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comme il vit qu'Ève était éblouie de la nouveauté, et que déjà elle entrait dans la doute qu'il voulait suggérer, il en garde plus de mesures et lui dit sans ménagement: (...)&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Et alors&lt;/em&gt;, dit-il, par une si belle connaissance, vous deviendrez si parfaits, que &lt;em&gt;vous serez comme des dieux&lt;/em&gt;. De cette sorte, il flatte l'orgeuil, il pique et excite la curiosité. Ève commence à regarder ce fruit défendu, et c'est un commencement de désobéissance : (...). &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...) Le tentateur ne manqua pas de joindre la suggestion, et pour ainsi dire, le sifflement intérieur à l'extérieur; et il tâcha d'allumer la concupiscence, qu'Ève jusqu'alors ne connaissait pas. (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;L'orgeuil entra avec ses paroles : &lt;em&gt;Vous serez comme des dieux&lt;/em&gt;. Celles-ci : &lt;em&gt;Vous saurez le bien et le mal&lt;/em&gt;, excitèrent la curiosité. (...) Voilà les trois maladies générales de notre nature, dont la complication fait tous les maux particuliers dont nous sommes affligés; et sain Jean les a ramassés dans ses paroles : &lt;em&gt;N'aimez pas les monde, ni tout ce qui est dans le monde, parce que tout ce qui est dans le monde est, ou la concupiscence de la chair&lt;/em&gt;, c'est-à-dire manifestement la sensualité, &lt;em&gt;ou la concupiscence des yeux&lt;/em&gt;, qui est la curiosité, &lt;em&gt;ou&lt;/em&gt; enfin l'ambition et &lt;em&gt;l'orgeuil! répandu dans toute la vie&lt;/em&gt;, qui est le nom propre du troisième vice dont la nature et la vie humaine est infectée.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...) Adam crut donc qu'il saurait le bien et le mal, et que sa curiosité serait satisfaite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My (somewhat free) translation (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As he [the serpent] saw that Eve was dazzled by the new [information] and that she was already sinking into the doubt that he wanted to suggest, he no longer held back and told her outright: (...)&#xA;And he [the serpent] said, by this great knowledge you will become so perfect that &lt;em&gt;you will be like gods&lt;/em&gt;. In this way, he flatters her pride and arouses her &lt;strong&gt;curiosity&lt;/strong&gt;. Eve begins looking at that forbidden fruit and it's the beginning of &lt;strong&gt;disobedience&lt;/strong&gt;: (...). &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...) The tempter managed to combine the [power of] suggestion with, in a manner of saying, the internal whistling/hissing with the external [whistling/hissing] [a]; and he tried to stimulate her concupiscence / sexual desire, which Eve did not know yet. (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He added pride to his words: &lt;em&gt;You will be like gods&lt;/em&gt;. These words: &lt;em&gt;You will know good and evil&lt;/em&gt; aroused her curiosity. (...) These are the three general maladies of our nature, which together cause all the particular evils that afflict us; and Saint John brought them together in his words: &lt;em&gt;Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, for all that is in the world, or the lust of the flesh&lt;/em&gt;, in other words obviously sensuality, &lt;em&gt;or the lust of the eyes&lt;/em&gt;, which is &lt;strong&gt;curiosity&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; at last ambition and &lt;em&gt;the pride of life&lt;/em&gt;, which is the proper/suitable name of the third vice by which human nature and human life are infected.[b]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...) Adam therefore believed that he would know good and evil, and that his &lt;strong&gt;curiosity&lt;/strong&gt; would be satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a] Sifflement literally means &amp;quot;whistling&amp;quot; but in the case of a serpent it can also mean &amp;quot;hissing&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-anglais/sifflement/71855&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Larousse&lt;/a&gt;). In the French Bible &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lueur.org/bible/chercher/sifflement%2A/at/NEG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sifflement only occurs twice&lt;/a&gt;, with meanings that don't match well with what Bossuet probably intended. &amp;quot;Sifflement&amp;quot; probably refers to feeling of temptation that initially only exists in the mind and that is subsequently turned into action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[b] These words are quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_John#Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I John, 2 (i.e. the First Epistle of John, Chapter 2)&lt;/a&gt; but Bossuet added &amp;quot;or&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;ou&amp;quot;) and left out some other words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of Dumas' novel, where Germain is caught eavesdropping, &lt;strong&gt;curiosity&lt;/strong&gt; is obviously the &amp;quot;sin&amp;quot; that the author had in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: It has been pointed out (in a now deleted answer) that the &amp;quot;first sin of Adam and Eve&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;original sin&amp;quot; are two related but distinct concepts. I do not consider this distinction relevant to this answer because it is a theological subtlety that goes right over the head of most believers. The &amp;quot;first sin&amp;quot; is the mythical event described in Genesis 3. &amp;quot;Original sin&amp;quot; is the presumed state of sin into which every human is born as a consequence of Adam and Eve's first sin. If you didn't grow up learning the catechism, you would probably not be aware of this distinction. For an explanation, see the article on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P1C.HTM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fall&lt;/a&gt; in the catechism, which points out that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called &amp;quot;original sin&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T11:02:05.527" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T11:02:05.527" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-14T19:58:59.603" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cure_at_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cure at Troy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is Seamus Heaney's translation and adaptation of Sophocles's &lt;em&gt;Philoctetes&lt;/em&gt; set during the Trojan War. It seems to be very often quoted by politicians: most recently &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/RoryStewartUK/status/1139104279891980288&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by British prime minister candidate Rory Stewart&lt;/a&gt;, but also according to Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage was quoted by Bill Clinton in his remarks to the community in Derry in 1995 during the Northern Ireland Peace Process, and by Joe Biden at the memorial service for Sean Collier, a campus police officer who was killed in the line of duty during the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage in question is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History says, Don't hope&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On this side of the grave.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But then, once in a lifetime&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The longed-for tidal wave&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of justice can rise up,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And hope and history rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is it about this work, or passage, that makes it so eminently quotable by politicians?&lt;/strong&gt; Was Sophocles's play, or Heaney's translation of it, overtly political or clearly lending itself to such? Was it just that Bill Clinton knew the poem and others copied the idea from him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I'm trying to approach this question from the point of view of &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt;, considering the play to see why it's used in this way, rather than considering the politicians to see why they used it. Hence posting here and not on Politics SE.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T08:34:13.817" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T08:34:13.817" Title="Why is Seamus Heaney's &quot;The Cure at Troy&quot; so often quoted in political contexts?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;politics&gt;&lt;seamus-heaney&gt;&lt;sophocles&gt;&lt;the-cure-at-troy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1899" CreationDate="2019-06-14T20:20:08.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means an underling or non-Japanese. As it says on page 7 of my copy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he could not fathom his ex-employer's power to sway the real authorities, the Japanese. The LJC was pinoc run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7387" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-15T09:00:19.183" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T09:00:19.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-15T02:31:30.473" Score="12" ViewCount="399" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;, often considered the first English novel, is an early version of the story of Camelot. The book is according, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Morte_d%27Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, written in Middle English. Why, then, is the title of the book in French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7380" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T03:11:52.387" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T03:11:52.387" Title="Why is the title of &quot;Le Morte d'Arthur&quot; in French if the book is in English?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;le-morte-darthur&gt;&lt;thomas-malory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11181" CreationDate="2019-06-15T18:32:02.170" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;We don't know very much about the life of Thomas Malory, but it is clear that &lt;em&gt;Le Morte Darthur&lt;/em&gt; draws on French sources. For example, in &quot;Capitulum tercium&quot; (in the version printed by Caxton, which is available at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://name.umdl.umich.edu/MaloryWks2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Michigan&lt;/a&gt;), Malory writes (emphasis mine), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soo in the grettest chirch of london whether it were Powlis or not the &lt;strong&gt;Frensshe booke&lt;/strong&gt; maketh no mencyon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Morte Darthur&lt;/em&gt; makes frequent references to &quot;the Frensshe book&quot;. According to scholars, the sources used by Mallory include the following, not all of which are actually in French:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &quot;Alliterative &lt;em&gt;Morthe Arthure&lt;/em&gt;, a 14th-century poem in English, which probably used the 12th-century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_de_Brut&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Roman de Brut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as a source. In spite of the French titles, both &lt;em&gt;Morthe Arthure&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Roman de Brut&lt;/em&gt; are in English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Suite du Merlin&lt;/em&gt; (also known as the &lt;em&gt;Huth Merlin&lt;/em&gt; because it is contained in a manuscript at the British Library that is also known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/record.asp?MSID=6730&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Huth MS&quot;&lt;/a&gt;), which is also in English. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/conlee-prose-merlin-introduction&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prose Merlin: Introduction&lt;/a&gt; by John Conlee.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The prose Vulgate &lt;em&gt;Queste del Saint Graal&lt;/em&gt; (see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot-Grail&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lancelot-Grail, also known as Vulgate Cycle&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The French Vulgate &lt;em&gt;Morte Artu&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The 15th-century stanzaic &lt;em&gt;Le Morte Arthur&lt;/em&gt; (in English).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most (or all) of the Arthurian materials in French and English literature were influenced by the 12th-century French poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chr%C3%A9tien_de_Troyes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chrétien de Troyes&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; also notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Private and commercial correspondence was carried out in Anglo-Norman or Anglo-French from the 13th to the 15th century though its spelling forms were often displaced by continental spellings. Social classes other than the nobility became keen to learn French: manuscripts containing materials for instructing non-native speakers still exist, dating mostly from the late 14th century onwards. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Malory probably chose a French title for two reasons: French sources and familiarity with either French or Anglo-French in part of the English population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources not linked or listed above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stephen Coote: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Short History of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;. London: Penguin, 1993. (Page 50)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Margaret Drabble (editor): &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Companion to English Literature&lt;/em&gt;. Revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-15T18:32:02.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-15T18:48:04.777" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;novel&quot; &lt;em&gt;Thomas of Reading&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Deloney, there is some sort of weaving or cloth making competition between the London weavers and a few clothiers from other towns (including one named Weasell). The relevant passage in Chapter VI goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alas poore fellows (quoth they [the London weavers]) your hearts are good, but your hands are ill.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Tush, the fault was in their legges (quoth another) pray you friend, were you not borne at home?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Why doe you aske (quote Weasell)?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Because (said he) the biggest place of your legge is next to your shoe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relevance of &quot;were you not borne at home?&quot;? It appears to have some figurative meaning that I am not familiar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:53:44.617" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T15:53:44.617" Title="What is the figurative meaning of &quot;were you not borne at home&quot;?" Tags="&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;thomas-of-reading&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-15T19:16:40.833" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know Goethe has that title with Faust (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc20.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; tells that it spanned 57 years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is it the record; or are there any other works took longer? &lt;em&gt;Unfinished&lt;/em&gt; works are also considered to be &lt;strong&gt;included&lt;/strong&gt; in the scope of question. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7393" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T21:02:43.417" Title="Which literature work took the longest time in its author's life (finished or not)" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11183" CreationDate="2019-06-16T10:29:29.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the ‘borne at home’ line is the set-up for a joke about puny legs. (The previous paragraph says the town weavers made ‘frumps’ at the country weavers. ‘Frumps’ being jibes or sneers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, one of the London Weavers says the country weaver has bad hands. Another says it is his &lt;em&gt;legs&lt;/em&gt; that are the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legs are important for weavers as they use them to operate the treadles that move the shaft and heddles that lift the warp threads to allow the shuttle carrying the weft thread to pass between them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=1190464001&amp;amp;objectId=3436082&amp;amp;partId=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This drawing&lt;/a&gt; seems to show a loom of approximately the right period. You can’t really follow how the thread separation works, but the treadles are clear. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AgtXT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AgtXT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;1695 engraving of weaver and loom&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My suggested reading is that when the London weaver says that the biggest part of the country weaver’s leg is by his shoe, it is a roundabout way of saying that he has no calf muscles (and possibly fat ankles). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this ‘borne at home’ would mean ‘carried at home’ rather than ‘given birth to at home’, emphasising the utter uselessness of the country weaver’s legs. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Postscript: I also found this book '&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GgM8AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=borne&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Exposition of the Morall Law: Or Ten Commandments of Almightie God&lt;/a&gt;' from 1639 which uses the phrases 'borne at home' and 'borne abroad' to differentiate between those who are 'borne of one father' and those 'borne of one mother, but not begotten of one father'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I struggle to apprehend the full meaning of this, but it does open the possibility that the question 'were you not borne at home?' &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a pun, as has been suggested, but one that requires that contemporary understanding. The putative pun being that 'were you not borne at home?' can be interpreted as , 'Didn't your mother put it about a bit such that all your siblings have different fathers?' OR 'Do they carry you everywhere at your house?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T13:17:47.743" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T13:17:47.743" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11184" CreationDate="2019-06-16T13:06:12.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; is probably a contender. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolkiensociety.org/author/timeline/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tolkien Society's timeline&lt;/a&gt;, his first identifiable Middle-Earth fragment (which would likely have been part of his 'Lost Tales', which are a proto-Silmarillion) was written in 1914. Tolkien died in 1973, with the Silmarillion still unfinished; it was edited and published posthumously by Christopher Tolkien. This gives us a total of &lt;strong&gt;59 years&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the record, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bustle.com/articles/117911-7-novels-that-took-their-authors-years-to-write-to-make-you-feel-better-about-not&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another source&lt;/a&gt; cites Ezra Pound's &lt;em&gt;The Cantos&lt;/em&gt; as taking 57 years to write.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, depending on how you define 'book', the Bible as a whole took several thousand years [out of God's life? now you see the difficulty with the question]. Similar is probably true for some other religious texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting statistic could be words/day - for example, the Silmarillion (as posthumously published) has ~130k words; this comes out to 6.03 words per day. However, books like &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt; were written at a rate of ~10 words per day (10 years to write, but it's a very short book) - so it's another interesting statistic. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another interesting statistic could be &lt;em&gt;percentage&lt;/em&gt; of the author's life - e.g., Tolkien was 81 when he died, meaning he spent ~73% of his life working on the Silmarillion (though Christophe Strobbe's answer is excellent in pointing out that it is unlikely that this time is continuously spent working on it). Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;, for comparison, took ~70% of the author's life - he died at 82.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For the record, I think it's probably going to be very difficult to get a definitive answer on this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T21:02:43.417" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T21:02:43.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11187" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-16T17:18:50.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-16T17:18:50.977" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T17:18:50.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11188" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-16T17:18:50.977" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Elizabethan &quot;novel&quot; &quot;Thomas of Reading&quot; by Thomas Deloney, first published in 1600. Use this tag with the tag [thomas-deloney]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:21:01.810" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:21:01.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11189" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11191" CreationDate="2019-06-16T19:28:12.163" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter IV of Thomas Deloney's &quot;novel&quot; &lt;em&gt;Thomas of Reading&lt;/em&gt;, king &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_I_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry I of England&lt;/a&gt; is willing to grant the clothiers a few requests as a reward for their support during a military campaign in France. Hodgekins, a clothier from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax,_West_Yorkshire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Halifax&lt;/a&gt; (Yorkshire), requests that the town of Halifax be allowed to hang thieves who steal &quot;Clothes&quot;. While the king is saying he is willing to grant the request, Hodgekins interrupts him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With that Hodgekins unmannerly interrupted the King, saying in broad Northerne speech, Yea gude faith, mai Liedge, the faule eule of mai saule, giff any thing will keepe them whiat, till the karles be hanged by the cragge. What the dule care they for boaring their eyne, sea lang as they mae gae groping up and down the Country like fause lizar lownes, begging and craking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of this understandable, but not all of it (in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) Yes, good faith, my &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liege#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;liege&lt;/a&gt;, the foul &lt;strong&gt;eule&lt;/strong&gt; of my soul, give anything [that] will keep them &lt;strong&gt;whiatt&lt;/strong&gt;, till the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/karl#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;karls&lt;/a&gt;/guys are hanged by the &lt;strong&gt;cragge&lt;/strong&gt; (neck?). What the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dule#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dule&lt;/a&gt; (or devil?) care they for &lt;strong&gt;boaring&lt;/strong&gt; their eyes, so/as long as they may go groping up and down the country like false &lt;strong&gt;lizar&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lowne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lownes (i.e. loons)&lt;/a&gt;, begging and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crake#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;craking (crying out loudly?)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Boaring their eyne&quot; posssibly means blinding them (the English verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bore#Etymology_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bore&lt;/a&gt; is a cognate of German &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bohren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bohren&lt;/a&gt;), though I am not aware of this being a punishment for theft in medieval England. Who can fill in the gaps and confirm that my other guesses are correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T15:53:25.903" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T17:28:01.533" Title="What does Hodgekins' &quot;Northerne speech&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;thomas-of-reading&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3203" CreationDate="2019-06-16T21:42:05.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several things you can do to protect paperback books while carrying them around in a backpack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you want to prevent books from getting &lt;strong&gt;bent or warped&lt;/strong&gt;, you can carry them in the type of rigid cardboard envelope that some online booksellers use when they mail books.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q3kNf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q3kNf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;book sticking out of a cardboard envelope&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;&lt;br /&gt;Or you can buy a cardboard envelope that has the appropriate size for the book you want to take with you.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have also reused envelopes with bubble wrap padding, but these don't protect you books from bending, unless you put the envelope between other objects that don't bend to easily, e.g. some types of file folders. A backpack's laptop compartment can also work, especially if your laptop is thin and/or if you have the type of backpack that can actually stand (instead of falling over).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you just want to protect the book against &lt;strong&gt;friction&lt;/strong&gt; instead of preventing bending, you can wrap it in an extra cover. For pocket books, I normally reuse discarded printouts; it's better for the environment and you can discard the cover afterwards:&lt;br /&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLDZg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pLDZg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For larger books, I have even reused gift wrapping paper, though usually &quot;inside out&quot;. I try to avoid plastic covers, even though they have the advantage that you can see the book's original cover through them:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phyvX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/phyvX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;book with plastic cover&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You can put the book into a neoprene laptop sleeve. However, this is only really useful if you don't need to take your laptop with you or if you have a spare laptop sleeve.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have never bought premade book covers or wraps (regardless their material). I have many books and I usually carry at least one book in my backpack, so the keyword is &lt;strong&gt;reuse&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-16T21:42:05.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11189" CreationDate="2019-06-16T23:14:27.593" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eule:&lt;/strong&gt; evil; it seems to have been spelled &lt;em&gt;Evle&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=WbkvAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA45&amp;amp;lpg=PA45&amp;amp;dq=%22Hodgekins+unmannerly+interrupted+the+King%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=3VrBj2NJ7W&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1_MK6rhLH6zc5V6FAPdP09TE4cHA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjsosayke_iAhXHq1kKHT9kAZgQ6AEwAHoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some editions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;whiatt:&lt;/strong&gt; probably &lt;em&gt;quiet&lt;/em&gt;, as pronounced in a Northern dialect. In Scottish speech, &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;wh&lt;/em&gt; were the same sound, /xw/. It was usually spelled &lt;em&gt;qu&lt;/em&gt; in Scotland, though, but that spelling wouldn't have conveyed the Northern pronunciation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/80312/5754&quot;&gt;See this ELU.stackexchange answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;karl:&lt;/strong&gt; The OED has a bunch of definitions for &lt;em&gt;carl&lt;/em&gt;, which range from &lt;em&gt;fellow&lt;/em&gt; to something like &lt;em&gt;penny-pincher&lt;/em&gt;. The most likely meaning, based on the date and the context, is &quot;A fellow of low birth or rude manners; a base fellow; a churl. In later times, passing into a vague term of disparagement or contempt, and chiefly with appropriate epithets.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;cragge:&lt;/strong&gt; indeed, neck. (What else would you be hanged by?) The OED has &quot;crag: The neck. (Chiefly Scottish, but also English regional (northern).)&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dule&lt;/strong&gt; devil: the OED says that this spelling was used in the 1500s, particularly &quot;in representations of Scottish speech&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;boaring their eyes&lt;/strong&gt;: indeed, putting out their eyes. From the OED &quot;bore: To pierce, stab, run through with a weapon; to wound. &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lizar:&lt;/strong&gt; From the OED: &lt;em&gt;lazar (adj.)&lt;/em&gt;: Affected with a loathsome disease, esp. leprosy; leprous. Or maybe it's the noun &lt;em&gt;lazar&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;somebody afflicted with a loathsome disease ...,&lt;/em&gt; since &lt;em&gt;false leper louts&lt;/em&gt; (louts who pretend to be lepers) makes a little more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;craking:&lt;/strong&gt; After some discussion—see the comments—it seems that &lt;em&gt;craking&lt;/em&gt; means to make noise using a clapper (also called a &lt;em&gt;crake&lt;/em&gt;) that lepers carried to warn people to keep away from them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So translated into modern English, the passage reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, good faith, my liege, the foul evil of my soul, give anything [that] will keep them quiet, till the karles (oafs) be hanged by the cragge (neck). What the devil do they care for boaring (putting out) their eyes, so long as they may go groping up and down the Country like fause lizar lownes (false leper louts), begging and craking (rattling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T17:28:01.533" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T17:28:01.533" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-17T07:10:14.407" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for what is probably a young adult book, pre-80's, possibly fantasy, that I read long ago which ends with these 2 lines, the 2nd line being its own paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Fall in love, it makes you brave.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah, yes, very brave.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This harks back to advice a that the main character was given earlier in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Lynn IPW" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T20:43:18.327" Title="Book that ends with the lines &quot;Fall in love, it makes you brave. Ah, yes, very brave.&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11193" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11192" CreationDate="2019-06-17T07:26:16.460" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Courtship of Eddie's Father&lt;/em&gt;, by Mark Toby&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I found this snippet from a story in the magazine &quot;Good Housekeeping&quot;, volume 153, page 187, from 1961. The whole thing is not available online, but searching through Google Books gave me this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You bet! ! !” We sat there for a minute, grinning at each other. Then I picked up the telephone. I dialed Elizabeth's number. Ed. die watched me with shining eyes. Rule eight, remember? Fall in love; it makes you brave. Ah, yes. Very brave. e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming the &quot;e.&quot; means end in that snippet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iVaPx.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iVaPx.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of Google Books result&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can search through random snippets of the magazine on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=sjlbP25PnYQC&amp;amp;dq=%22love%22+%22makes+you+brave%22&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=shining+eyes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, but I couldn't get the exact text to show up - the closest I got was right above it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aFFxs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aFFxs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also see that there are results for the words &quot;very brave&quot; on page 187 at &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt/search?q1=very+brave&amp;amp;id=uc1.31158013368864&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hathitrust&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it by doing a Google Books search for &lt;code&gt;&quot;love&quot; &quot;makes you brave&quot;&lt;/code&gt;, and it was about the tenth result. Then I just had to go searching for confirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I see on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B007I1RC9G&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;, the issue contains an entire novel (as seen on the cover).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v3QnY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/v3QnY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover of the issue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched through the book for &quot;novel&quot; on Google Books, which led to me finding the title, &lt;em&gt;The Courtship of Eddie's Father&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fPW4s.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fPW4s.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;snippet that says the title&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reviews on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7743169#other_reviews&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; indicate that this is not a fantasy novel, however. It also had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Courtship_of_Eddie%27s_Father&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sitcom based off of the novel&lt;/a&gt;, which was not fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?redir_esc=y&amp;amp;id=WTxHAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=very+brave&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books page&lt;/a&gt; for the book directly, we can see that it ends on the &quot;fall in love&quot; lines, on their own paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oXYwh.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oXYwh.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of ending, transcript below&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Ed]die watched me with shining eyes.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rule eight, remember? Fall in love; it makes you brave.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah, yes. Very brave.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  THE END&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" OwnerDisplayName="Mithrandir" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T08:13:35.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:15:47.737" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Greene_(dramatist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Greene's&lt;/a&gt; novel &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius; The Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt; (published in 1584) Clerophontes gives his son Gwydonius the following advice (italics from the original; bold by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who so meanes to be a sutor to &lt;em&gt;Circes&lt;/em&gt;, must take a Preservative, unlesse he will be inchaunted. &lt;strong&gt;He / that will fish for the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torpedo_(genus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Torpedo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, must anoint his hand with the oyle of &lt;em&gt;Nemiphar&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; least he be charmed, and who so meaneth to enter combat with vanitie, must first surely defence himselfe with the target of vertue, unless he meane to be a captive to care, or calamitie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea what &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=nemiphar&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;go=Go&amp;amp;ns0=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nemiphar&lt;/a&gt; means. It sounds like the French word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nenuphar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nénuphar&lt;/a&gt; (water lily), but I don't see how oil from a water lily would provide protection against electric rays (who don't live in fresh water). Or am I misunderstanding &quot;torpedo&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T17:09:43.533" Title="What sort of nemiphar's oil provided protection against torpedoes?" Tags="&lt;robert-greene&gt;&lt;gwydonius-the-carde-of-fancie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11195" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11196" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the English author Robert Greene (1558–1592) and his life as a writer. Greene wrote prose works, plays and verse. His prose work 'Pandosto' was a source for Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:24:28.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" Score="0" Body="Questions about Robert Greene's novel 'Gwydonius; The Card of Fancie', which was first published in 1584. Use this tag with [robert-greene]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T16:25:21.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11194" CreationDate="2019-06-17T17:09:43.533" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer seems to be that &lt;strong&gt;Greene played so fast and loose with biology that there's no point trying to make sense of it&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;Nemiphar&quot; is indeed (probably) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuphar_lutea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;water lily&lt;/a&gt;, but the connection with protection from electric rays appears to be something Greene made up out of whole cloth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Carmine G. di Blase's chapter &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphuism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euphuism&lt;/a&gt; and the Uses of Falseness&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=7pbJHd6i9nwC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trompe(-)l'oeil: imitation and falsification&lt;/em&gt; by Philippe Romanski and Aïssatou Sy-Wonyu&lt;/a&gt; is an analysis of Greene and other writers of the period by someone who seems to know what they're talking about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Greene took the greatest liberties, however, with natural philosophy. The vast majority of these references - and this is a telling fact - would suggest Pliny as a source, but nearly all of them have been falsified to one degree or another. It will suffice here to characterize, rather than to list, the numerous falsifications that were revealed in annotating &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt; alone. It must be said, first of all, that Greene seems never to have studied Pliny at all. As Don Cameron Allen has shown, &quot;the index to Pliny supplies many names, but Pliny does not supply the matter&quot; [Allen 1007]. For example, when Greene says, &quot;He that will fish for the torpedo must anoint his hand with the oil of nemiphar, lest he be charmed&quot; [&lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt; 88], he very likely is appropriating the names from Pliny but happily inventing the properties. Pliny mentions the torpedo, or electric-ray, quite often [Pliny IX. 24, 40, 67, 74; XXXII. 2, 31, 32, 33, 46, 47, 49, 53], but never any herbs that might prevent a fisherman from being &quot;charmed&quot; by it. And by &quot;nemiphar&quot; Greene might mean Pliny's &lt;em&gt;nymphaea&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;nuphar luteum&lt;/em&gt; (the white lily), which is mentioned in the &lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt; over a dozen times but never with the property Greene attributes to it [Pliny XXV. 37, 83; XXVI. 18, 28, 36, 48, 49, 61, 83, 87, 90, 92].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T17:09:43.533" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11184" CreationDate="2019-06-17T18:20:34.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with the question is: how do you determine how long it took an author to finish a work of literature? Do you just look at the years between the first draft and the final publication or at the years during which the author effectively &lt;em&gt;worked&lt;/em&gt; on the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the earliest drafts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goethe's &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, also known as &lt;em&gt;Urfaust&lt;/em&gt;, probably date from the years 1772 - 1775. &lt;em&gt;Faust, a Fragment&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1790. &lt;em&gt;Faust, Part One&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1808; &lt;em&gt;Faust, Part Two&lt;/em&gt; followed in 1831. There are 59 years between 1772 and 1831, but almost all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Wolfgang_von_Goethe_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goethe's other works&lt;/a&gt; were written between those years. It is clear that Goethe did not &lt;em&gt;continuously&lt;/em&gt; work on &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;. Also, in addition to his work as an author, he was a member of the privy council of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar. Goethe definitely did not dedicate 57 or 59 years of his life to &lt;em&gt;Faust&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better example would be James Joyce's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnegans_Wake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which took the author seventeen years to write. Joyce did not publish any other fiction during this period. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;non-fiction&lt;/strong&gt; can be accepted, another example would be Montaigne's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_(Montaigne)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Essays&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Though first published in 1580, Montaigne worked on them during a period of twenty years (&quot;from approximately 1570 to 1592&quot; according to Wikipedia) and did not publish anything else during that period. Some editions mark the changes Montaigne made to earlier essays, for example as follows (according to [Wikipedia](from approximately 1570 to 1592)):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A: passages written 1571–1580, published 1580&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B: passages written 1580–1588, published 1588&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C: passages written 1588–1592, published 1595 (posthumously)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;strong&gt;diaries&lt;/strong&gt; can count as works of literature, it is easy to find works that span a much longer period of time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-sarashina-diary/9780231167185&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sarashina Diary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written in eleventh-century Japan, spans a period of forty years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More recently, the diary of Adam Francis Plummer, now in the collections of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://anacostia.si.edu/exhibits/Plummer/Plummer_Home.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anacostia Museum&lt;/a&gt;, covers the years 1841 to 1905 (the year of Plummer's death), i.e. 64 years.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-17T18:20:34.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11205" CreationDate="2019-06-18T05:22:38.380" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning about the literary critic Albert Thibaudet. I read on Wikipedia that he was the co-founder of the Geneva School of literary criticism, but I don't remember my tutor mentioning that about him, nor can I find any confirmation for that elsewhere. Can someone point me to resources that could confirm this? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="487" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T15:42:46.213" Title="Albert Thibaudet and the Geneva School?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9247" CreationDate="2019-06-18T06:02:44.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wondered about this, but I don't think Beatty has to know. Remember, people can be punished just for seeming different, or being the sort of person who evoke suspicion, in Bradbury's future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On rereading I figured either Beatty was bluffing (sort of like hazing a new fraternity recruit, or just showing his power over Montag,) or it might be a test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatty has likely had training in knowing who is likely to have read books, and he picks on those people. For instance, Montag hanging out with Clarice McClellan is a strong indication Montag is at risk of being a reader. Whether Clarice has exposed Montag to books, or books made Montag open to Clarice, is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, it might be like parents seeing a kid hang out with other kids who smoke marijuana, then saying &quot;Oh, I bet you teens all have tried marijuana, etc.,&quot; trying to force a confession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd think also that Beatty has read books himself. They are probably just books about how to be controlling, and just enough to keep his place in the power structure. Nothing imaginative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7399" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T06:02:44.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11204" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T06:05:05.480" Score="7" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've enjoyed books like &lt;em&gt;Molesworth&lt;/em&gt; by Geoffrey Willans and &lt;em&gt;The BFG&lt;/em&gt; by Roald Dahl, where bad spelling and grammar (the BFG's extensive writing on the dream jars) are an integral part of the joke, and it establishes the narrator as wise if not book-smart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are before the Internet age, which featured an explosion of leetspeak, etc., and it's quickly lost its novelty value. But I am wondering what the earliest book is in English that uses bad spelling for humor value. I don't mean spelling that was right then but looks odd now, or spelling that was wrong then but is acceptable now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I'd need a separate question to for earliest American effort as opposed to the earliest English effort, but I'd be interested in either. I hope that doesn't make the question too wide in scope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7399" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T11:15:54.347" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T11:13:13.293" Title="What is the earliest book where bad spelling is primarily for humor value?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11202" CreationDate="2019-06-18T15:42:46.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simple answer is that he wasn't. Wikipedia's own article on the Geneva School makes no mention of him, and neither did most sources I consulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this error is present seems to be that while Thibaudet did not help &lt;em&gt;found&lt;/em&gt; the Geneva School, he helped &lt;em&gt;inspire&lt;/em&gt; said school. The source that clarified this was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/380037?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theoretical Schools and Circles in the Twentieth Century Humanities&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (see pgs 154 - 156):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the 1920s, Poulet had devoured the notes on &quot;Bergsonism&quot; by Albert Thibaudet (1847 - 1936), who then taught at Geneva from 1925 to 1936. For Starobinski, Thibaudet's Physiologie de la critique (1930) revealed &quot;the power of fiction&quot; and a skill for critical &quot;sympathy&quot; that merged with &quot;the &lt;em&gt;elan profond&lt;/em&gt; of romanticism&quot; (1970, 28-31). [Thibaudet was] part of the prehistory of the &quot;criticism of identification&quot;: they thought that the critic should &quot;unite with a creator to recreate&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly Thibaudet was in the right location at the right time, and his writings helped influence some of the major critics in the Geneva School - note that Poulet and Starobinski are Georges Poulet and Jean Starobinski, two of the major founders of the Geneva School - and Thibaudet, according to this, inspired them both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another source, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=loJ1DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA79&amp;amp;lpg=PA79&amp;amp;dq=albert+thibaudet+geneva+school&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mTK80Nm6cO&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2zLB_OoSblTiVeYyJvJqNlOTy0HQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiJhZaWq_PiAhVBmuAKHaC6BhQQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=albert%20thibaudet%20geneva%20school&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Literature&lt;/a&gt; (see page 79) notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a student at the University of Geneva, Jean Rousset took courses with Albert Thibaudet and Marcel Raymond [Thibaudet's successor to his position, who was himself part of the Geneva School], who introduced him to phenomenological literary criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jean Rousset was yet another of the major founders of the Geneva School. Again, we see Thibaudet in the background as an inspiration. Effectively, Thibaudet was just a little early to be a part of the Geneva School.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-06-18T15:42:46.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2019-06-18T16:22:19.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Whitcomb_Riley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Whitcomb Riley&lt;/a&gt; was perhaps the most well-known American humorist who &lt;em&gt;wrote primarily&lt;/em&gt; in dialect. Mark Twain's &lt;em&gt;Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt; is probably the best-known American book written in dialect, but it's only semi-humorous.  Zora Neale Hurston's transcendent &lt;em&gt;Their Eyes Were Watching God&lt;/em&gt; has all the dialog in dialect, but it's neither for humor nor for cruelty.  &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; is written all in an idiolect, and is arguably intended to be humorous, but it's such a difficult work that it's hard to say anything definitive about it.  Heinlein's &lt;em&gt;The Moon is a Harsh Mistress&lt;/em&gt; is in an invented composite dialect, but again, not primarily for humor. &lt;em&gt;Trainspotting&lt;/em&gt; is arguably bleakly humorous, and some of the humor comes from the language.  Terry Pratchett often uses humorous idiolects in his books, and outlandish alien slang is a reoccuring joke in Douglas Adams &lt;em&gt;Hitchhiker&lt;/em&gt; series.  Bruno's babyish language is milked shamelessly for (putative) humor in Lewis Carroll's &lt;em&gt;Sylvie &amp;amp; Bruno&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="101" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T11:13:13.293" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T11:13:13.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-18T17:14:16.663" Score="7" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of chapter VIII of Thomas Deloney's &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, Jack has a discussion with his wife about a certain &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gossip#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;gossip&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (an archaic term for &quot;familiar acquaintance&quot;), that he does not want to see in his house again. His wife says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leave her company? why husband, so long as she is an honest woman, why should I leaue her company? She never gave me hurtfull counsell in all her life, but hath alwaies been ready to tell mee things for my profit, though you take it not so. Leave her company? I am no gyrle I would you should well know, to bee taught what company I should keepe: I keepe none but honest company, I warrant you. &lt;strong&gt;Leave her company ketha?&lt;/strong&gt; Alas poore soule, this reward shee hath for her good will. I wis, I wis, she is more your friend, than you are your owne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;ketha&quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth knowing that the word or phrase &quot;ke-tha&quot; occurred in Act II, Scene 1 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Per_Q1/scene/2.1/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles, Prince of Tyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, namely in the First Quarto of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles,_Prince_of_Tyre#Date_and_text&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that play&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt; was not included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt; of Shakespeare's plays but was one of the plays in the 1619 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;False Folio&lt;/a&gt;.) The relevant lines go as follows (&lt;em&gt;Per.&lt;/em&gt; = Pericles; &lt;em&gt;1.&lt;/em&gt; = First fisherman):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Per.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; What I haue been, I haue forgot to know;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  But what I am, want teaches me to thinke on:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  A man throng'd vp with cold, my Veines are chill,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And haue no more of life then may suffize,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  To giue my tongue that heat to aske your helpe:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Which if you shall refuse, when I am dead,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  For that I am a man, pray you see me buried.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Die, &lt;strong&gt;ke-tha&lt;/strong&gt;; now Gods forbid't, and I haue a Gowne&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  heere, come put it on, keepe thee warme: now afore mee a&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  handsome fellow : Come, thou shalt goe home, and wee'le&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  haue Flesh for all day, Fish for fasting-dayes and more; or&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Puddinges and Flap-iackes, and thou shalt be welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editors emend &quot;ke-tha&quot; to &quot;quoth-a&quot; (i.e. quoth he), which is plausible, since the words &quot;Die, &lt;strong&gt;ke-tha&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; may be spoken to the second fisherman. However, in the dialogue from &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, there is no third person, and the wife consistently uses &quot;you&quot; and &quot;your&quot; to refer to her husband, so &quot;ketha&quot; cannot plausibly be emended to &quot;quoth-a&quot; here. This leaves us with the question what it actually means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T00:11:32.573" Title="What does ketha mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11208" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11209" CreationDate="2019-06-19T00:05:44.930" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the full original set of Great Books. I know there was an updated version published in the 70s(?). Is there a way to attain the rest without re-buying the whole set? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7401" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-28T22:01:14.110" LastActivityDate="2019-06-28T22:01:14.110" Title="Difference between the two editions of &quot;Great Books of the Western World&quot;" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11208" CreationDate="2019-06-19T00:38:04.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The updated set was published in 1990. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; details the exact differences between the two editions. To summarize: the primary changes are the addition of six volumes of 20th century material - volumes 55 through 60. There are also smaller changes (addition or deletion of one or two works - the works deleted are Apollonious' &lt;em&gt;On Conic Sections&lt;/em&gt;, Sterne's &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt;, Fielding's &lt;em&gt;Tom Jones&lt;/em&gt;, and Fourier's &lt;em&gt;Analytical Theory of Heat&lt;/em&gt;) in volumes 20, 23, 31, 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, and 52. For more exact details, again, see the Wikipedia article. It seems to perfectly have the new set, you'd have to buy 17 volumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T00:38:04.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T02:20:08.093" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early on in the book, Francisco d'Antonia comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“In his lifetime, every one of my ancestors raised the production of d’Anconia Copper by about ten per cent. I intend to raise it by one hundred.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later comments after the Strike that, unlike his ancestors, all of the fortune was his - without the interference of the Looters who tried to claim it. Is this quote a veiled reference to that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T02:20:08.093" Title="Is this quote by Francisco d'Anconia a veiled reference to the Strike?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T04:11:19.237" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;...how can one be sure the translation is correct unless one speaks that language? Prime example: The Bible. &#xA;This book (for the purpose of keeping religious arguments nonexistent here, its a piece of literature), and other writings convey the same general idea...but is the authors specific message being brought across once it is translated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7401" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T04:11:19.237" Title="Since so many books are translated into so many languages" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-06-19T04:49:40.270" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-19T17:52:26.540" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Greene's novel &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius; The Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;, one of the characters, Castania, uses the following words in her rejection of Gwydonius (italics from the origin; bold by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Better it is &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt;, to live in griefe, then to die desperately without grace: better to choose a lingering life in miserie, then a speedie death without mercie, better to be tormented with haplesse fancie, the with hellish fiends, for in life it is possible to redresse miserie. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tully&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt;, in his &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tusculans&lt;/em&gt; questions&lt;/strong&gt;, discoursing of the happinesse of life and heavinesse of death, saith, that &lt;strong&gt;to live we obtaine it of the loving Gods, but to dye, of the unluckie destinies&lt;/strong&gt;: meaning heereby, that life though never so loathsome, is better than death, though never so welcome: whereby I conclude &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt;, that to live carefully, is better than to die desperately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The combination of &quot;Tully&quot; and &quot;Tusculans&quot; makes clear that Castania is referring to Cicero's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tusculanae_Disputationes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tusculanae Disputationes&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Tusculan Disputations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but it is not clear whether she is quoting (more or less accurately) a specific passage or summarizing a larger section (or even a more general idea expressed in &lt;em&gt;Tusculanae Disputationes&lt;/em&gt;. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Tusculan+Disputations%22+live+gods+die+destinies&amp;amp;t=canonical&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Tusculanae+Disputationes%22+live+gods+die+destinies&amp;amp;t=canonical&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searches&lt;/a&gt; did not make me any wiser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T17:52:26.540" Title="Which part or quote in Cicero is Greene referring to?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;robert-greene&gt;&lt;gwydonius-the-carde-of-fancie&gt;&lt;cicero&gt;&lt;tusculan-disputations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11213" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11214" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Tusculanae Disputationes' or 'Tusculan Disputations' by Marcus Tullius Cicero, which were written around 45 BC. Use this tag with the tags [cicero] and [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:04:52.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11215" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11216" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Roman politician, orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) and his life as a writer. He is best known for his orations, such as 'In Verrem' and 'In Catilinam' (I–IV) and for philosophical works such as 'De Oratore', 'De re publica' and 'De Natura Deorum'. Use this tag with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" LastActivityDate="2019-06-19T18:08:09.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11217" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="232" CreationDate="2019-06-20T03:03:19.753" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always thought that last line meant that one constructs the prison by believing in the key and granting it power &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7403" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T03:03:19.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2019-06-20T07:34:05.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This song is an old school Picasso of words about a man out of control. Drugs and inebriated decision making is involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The man who stole your water” means a man that stole your money or your woman. You sought revenge and you hurt the man, maybe catastrophically. The man did his time in prison, but didn’t learn his lesson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second Verse: = When you know she’s no high climber, then found your only friend. ( Means you found refuge in a woman that is loose and not to be trusted, but you felt refuge in her worldliness because she gave you comfort, and you fell for her head over heals, even though you know she will be promiscuous and betray you). You’ll be on your knees tomorrow due to the fact the woman is poison, and you’re gonna suffer in the long run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You swear kick and beg us that you’re not a gambling man: You tried to convince people you’re not on the wild side anymore, yet there you are back at your old ways, loose woman, drugs, and out of control lifestyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, you’re repeating the same reckless behavior over and over again. DRUG ADDICTION, WILD WOMEN, BAD DECISIONS!!!! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7404" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-20T08:38:09.273" LastActivityDate="2019-06-20T08:38:09.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11224" CreationDate="2019-06-20T20:49:18.803" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Greene's novel &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius; The Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;, Castania says to her suitor Valericus (italics from the original, bold by me),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah &lt;em&gt;Valericus&lt;/em&gt;, hast thou forgot the saying of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Propertius&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, that &lt;strong&gt;to love howsoever it bee, is to loose, and to fancie, how charie so ever thy choice be, is to have an ill chance&lt;/strong&gt;, for Love though never so fickle, is but a &lt;em&gt;Chaos&lt;/em&gt; of care, and fancie, though never so fortunate , is but a mass of miserie: (...) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure where the part attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propertius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sextus Propertius&lt;/a&gt; is meant to end: at &quot;ill chance&quot; or at &quot;miserie&quot;. I have not been able to find anything similar on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Propertius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt; or in this &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.yorku.ca/pswarney/3110/Propertius.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;partial translation of Propertius' &lt;em&gt;Elegies&lt;/em&gt; by A. S. Kline&lt;/a&gt;. Assuming that Castania (or Robert Greene) did not make up the words attributed to Propertius, where exactly do they come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T20:07:51.507" Title="Which part of Propertius' Elegies is Castania referring to?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;robert-greene&gt;&lt;gwydonius-the-carde-of-fancie&gt;&lt;propertius&gt;&lt;elegies-propertius&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:22:52.823" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Robert Greene's novel &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius; The Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;, the character Melytta  has guessed that Castania has fallen in love. At the end of a long speech, she says to Castania (italics from the original),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if in all these supposes I have mist the marke, and have not toucht the case of thy calamitie, unfolde unto me &lt;em&gt;Castania&lt;/em&gt;, what the paine is that thus doth pinch thee, and assure thy selfe I will be so secret in they affaires, as ever &lt;em&gt;Lampana&lt;/em&gt; was to her Ladie &lt;em&gt;Cleophila&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What story is Melytta (or Robert Greene) referring to? I have tried several &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=lampana+cleophila&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;searches&lt;/a&gt; varying the spelling of both names but came out empty-handed. Or did Lampana guard Cleophila's secret so well that no one could write a story about it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a Cleophila in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Countess_of_Pembroke%27s_Arcadia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Philip Sidney may have started writing in the late 1570s. However, I have not been able to find the name &quot;Lampana&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/cu31924013123330/cu31924013123330_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;that text&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T18:30:08.063" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:30:08.063" Title="What work or story about Lampana and Cleophila is Robert Greene referring to?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;gwydonius-the-carde-of-fancie&gt;&lt;robert-greene&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11222" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11223" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the Roman poet Sextus Propertius (first century BC) and his life as a writer. His only surviving work is the four books of 'Elegiae' or 'Elegies'. Use this tag with the [latin-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T18:40:51.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11219" CreationDate="2019-06-21T20:07:51.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Assuming that Castania (or Robert Greene) did not make up the words attributed to Propertius&lt;/em&gt;&quot; ... that assumption is probably not warranted :-) Just as Greene &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11199/17&quot;&gt;invented biological phenomena&lt;/a&gt; out of whole cloth, he did much the same thing with classical quotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Carmine G. di Blase's chapter &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphuism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euphuism&lt;/a&gt; and the Uses of Falseness&quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=7pbJHd6i9nwC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trompe(-)l'oeil: imitation and falsification&lt;/em&gt; by Philippe Romanski and Aïssatou Sy-Wonyu&lt;/a&gt; is an analysis of Greene and other writers of the period by someone who seems to know what they're talking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sidney's fear, according to John Hunter, was that Euphuism, with its endless accumulations of examples, had become &quot;a threat to the value of an educated memory&quot; [J. Hunter 51]. [...] Sidney's &lt;em&gt;Defense&lt;/em&gt; was written in 1583, when Greene was making his first appearances in print. Greene, I believe, was at that time already struggling with the very same problem. For Greene, this struggle manifested itself in quiet, but deliberate and persistent, falsifications of the knowledge that Euphuism was expected to impart. His falsifications may be found not only in his dedicatory letters but throughout his Euphuistic works. He was careful enough with the more common classical allusions. What he says about Medusa, for example, or Sisyphus, or Pyramus and Thisbe, is generally correct. But when he needs an authoritative judgement on any given subject, he is liable to invent one. It is unlikely, for example, that Propertius ever said &quot;that to love, howsoever it be, is to lose, and to fancy, how chary so ever thy choice be, is to have an ill chance&quot; [99], and how can one know if Plato ever really said &quot;things lightly granted (though never so costly) are smally accounted of&quot; [153]? According to James Applegate, who has attempted to annotate the classical allusions in all of Greene's works, every opinion on love that Greene attributes to Propertius is &quot;unremarkable&quot; [Applegate 281]; and the same is true of Greene's allusions to Plato, &quot;many of them being so inane as to make it almost certain that Greene is merely attaching Plato's authority to a remark which he finds it convenient to make&quot; [Applegate 272]. And such is the case with greene's treatment of nearly every classical authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't waste your time looking for this quote in Propertius: Greene was most likely making it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T20:07:51.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="7982" CreationDate="2019-06-21T23:29:08.087" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This book was written soon after WWII and at the time there was a patriotic atmosphere where everybody wanted to enlist in the army. So maybe his thought was that everyone would feel compelled to go back to earth to defend their country. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7410" LastActivityDate="2019-06-21T23:29:08.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11226" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11228" CreationDate="2019-06-11T14:08:40.233" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lottery_in_Babylon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lottery in Babylon&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, Jorge Luis Borges describes an imaginary society where a Lottery decides the fate of the people, with omnipotence and foresight. At the beginning of the original text we read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[ES] Miren: por este desgarrón de la capa se ve en mi estómago un tatuaje bermejo: es el segundo símbolo, &lt;strong&gt;Beth&lt;/strong&gt;. Esta letra, en las noches de luna llena, me confiere poder sobre los hombres cuya marca es Ghimel, pero me subordina a los de Aleph, que en las noches sin luna deben obediencia a los Ghimel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[EN] Look: through this rent cape can be seen on my stomach a ruddy tattoo — it is the second symbol, &lt;strong&gt;Beth&lt;/strong&gt;. On nights when the moon is full, this symbol confers unto me power over the men whose mark is Ghimel while rendering me subject to the men of Aleph, who on moonless nights must obey the men of Ghimel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I first read this novel, I have been convinced that the sequence &quot;aleph, beth, gimel&quot; is the beginning of the Hebrew alphabet. Now I'm not sure any more, as the second letter is called &quot;Bet&quot;, not &quot;Beth&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if not Hebrew, what is the alphabet that the proconsul in Babylon is referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Fosco Loregian" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-06-22T09:19:23.350" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T09:19:23.350" Title="What is the language spoken in Babylon?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11226" CreationDate="2019-06-11T14:25:01.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Hebrew. Hebrew letters have Hebrew names, written in Hebrew. Our transliteration into Latin alphabet is a convention and those can change, different authors may use different conventions for different reasons. The same word can be spelt differently in academic paper, high school textbook or online forum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7414" OwnerDisplayName="Milo Bem" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T14:25:01.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11228" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11226" CreationDate="2019-06-11T14:57:21.743" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bet&quot; and &quot;beth&quot; are both valid spellings in Latin alphabet for the name of the letter &quot;ב&quot;; others include &quot;beyt&quot;, &quot;beh&quot;, &quot;beis&quot;. The choice of the end sound comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;type of Hebrew pronunciation&lt;/a&gt; used: &quot;-t&quot; is modern Israeli, &quot;-th&quot; is (academic) Tiberian pronunciation, and &quot;-s&quot; is an Ashkenazi pronunciation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In modern Hebrew, it is also often pronounced with &quot;v-&quot; (as the letters ב and בּ without and with dagesh are distinguished, the one without &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; being /v/ whereas the one with &lt;em&gt;dagesh&lt;/em&gt; being /b/).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it was Imperial Aramaic that was the dominant language and script across the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Achamenid empires that ruled over Babylon after 900 BCE. It employed and adapted the Phoenician script, so the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imperial Aramaic&lt;/a&gt; alphabet followed the same pattern, ordering and naming, as its relative the Hebrew script.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Michaelyus" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T14:57:21.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11226" CreationDate="2019-06-11T21:31:46.090" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said, it's Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In academic/formal/archaic/Tiberian pronunciation, six of the Hebrew phonemes &lt;code&gt;/b g d k p t/&lt;/code&gt; can be realized in two different ways. When between vowels and not doubled, or at the end of the word, they're pronounced as &lt;em&gt;fricatives&lt;/em&gt; and conventionally transcribed as &lt;code&gt;bh gh dh kh ph th&lt;/code&gt;. When anywhere else, they're pronounced as &lt;em&gt;stops&lt;/em&gt; and conventionally transcribed as &lt;code&gt;b g d k p t&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, in actual living/spoken Hebrew, some of these distinctions have vanished. The fricative versions of &lt;code&gt;g d t&lt;/code&gt; are gone, and the fricative versions of &lt;code&gt;b p&lt;/code&gt; are conventionally written as &lt;code&gt;v f&lt;/code&gt; instead of &lt;code&gt;bh ph&lt;/code&gt;. So the names of the first few Hebrew letters alphabet are now transcribed &lt;em&gt;alef bet gimel dalet&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;aleph beth gimel daleth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Borges here is using the archaic spelling…&lt;em&gt;mostly&lt;/em&gt;. You've probably also noticed &lt;em&gt;ghimel&lt;/em&gt;, which is nowadays written as &lt;em&gt;gimel&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;code&gt;/g/&lt;/code&gt; comes at the beginning of a word, so it should be a stop, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, it is (and always has been) in Hebrew—but in Romance languages, people are used to &lt;em&gt;gi&lt;/em&gt; being pronounced as in &quot;genie&quot; or &quot;gin&quot;, not as in &quot;gill&quot; or &quot;get&quot;. So Borges is using an &lt;em&gt;Italian&lt;/em&gt; convention there, to spell the stop &lt;code&gt;[g]&lt;/code&gt; as &lt;code&gt;gh&lt;/code&gt; before the letters &lt;em&gt;i&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Fricative &lt;code&gt;gh&lt;/code&gt; and &lt;code&gt;dh&lt;/code&gt; are pretty much gone for good, but &lt;code&gt;th&lt;/code&gt; has left some traces: Israelis pronounce it &lt;code&gt;[t]&lt;/code&gt;, but Ashkenazim pronounce it &lt;code&gt;[s]&lt;/code&gt;. So the word for &quot;house&quot; is now &lt;em&gt;beit&lt;/em&gt; to Israelis but &lt;em&gt;beis&lt;/em&gt; to Ashkenazim: that shows that it used to be &lt;em&gt;beith&lt;/em&gt;. Some Sephardim also keep the fricatives, along with other archaic features like &lt;em&gt;ŋayin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. Academics (generally those who aren't specifically studying Hebrew) also tend to use the old spellings that Borges uses here. That's why mathematicians talking about infinities will write &lt;em&gt;aleph&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;beth&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Draconis" LastActivityDate="2019-06-11T21:31:46.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11231" CreationDate="2019-06-22T18:24:11.243" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter II of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unfortunate_Traveller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Unfortunate Traveller&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Thomas Nashe describes an outbreak of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweating_sickness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sweating sickness&lt;/a&gt;. The cause of this disease is apparently still unknown. Below is a relevant paragraph from that chapter (italics from the original, bold by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sweating sickness, was a disease that a man might catch and never goe to a hot-house. Manie Masters desire to have such servants as would worke till they sweate againe, but in those dayes hee that sweate never wrought againe. That Scripture then was not thought so necessarie, which sayes, Earne thy living with the sweat of their browes, for then they earnd their dying with the sweat of their browes. It was inough if a fat man did but trusse his points, to turne him over the pearch: &lt;strong&gt;Mother &lt;em&gt;Cornelius&lt;/em&gt; tub&lt;/strong&gt; why it was like hell, he that came into it, ever came out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Mother Cornelius tub&quot; might be just an interjection, but the question remains what it actually means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T13:30:20.817" Title="What does Mother Cornelius tub refer to?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-nashe&gt;&lt;the-unfortunate-traveller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11230" CreationDate="2019-06-22T18:39:10.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A sweating tub used for patients with venereal diseases.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ze3nmfa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green's Dictionary of Slang&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mother Cornelius’ tub&lt;/strong&gt; n.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;also Cornelian tub, Cornelius’ tub&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[a presumed actual Mother Cornelius, whether a nurse or a procuress; but note the masc. ‘Cornelius’ in Taylor, ‘Travels to Bohemia’ (1620): ‘Or had Cornelius but this tub, to drench / His clients that had practis’d too much French’ (i.e. venereal disease); poss. ref. to physician Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1496–1535) a leading advocate of hot baths for medicinal purposes; Henke, in Gutter Life and Language (1988), also notes the possible use of a hard dense wood, necessary to withstand the heavy salt brine used in ‘pickling’ patients, known as cornel-wood, ‘the wood of Cornus mascula, celebrated for its hardness and toughness, whence it was anciently in request for javelins, arrows, etc.’ (OED); also poss. puns on cornel and the ‘cornuted’ cuckold or Lat. cornu, a horn; one’s current incapacity is the result of one’s horn n.2 (1b)]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the sweating tub used in the cure of venereal disease; many ad hoc vars. and extrapolations exist in cits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this via some sources which mentioned &amp;quot;Cornelius tub&amp;quot; in the context of that specific Nashe passage. For example, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1081450/pdf/medhist00123-0090.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this historical paper entitled &amp;quot;Venereal Diseases in Sixteenth-Century England&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1561 venereal diseases were treated at St. Thomas's Hospital in the four sweat wards: Job, Lazarus, Judith and Susanna, at the back of the hospital. Berengario Da Carpi (d. 1530), better known as the leading anatomist before Vesalius, was treating the disease by mercurial inunction in 1500 and by fumigation in 1506. That this remained the standard treatment in Britain is proved by the very large number of allusions to it in the literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One example is Shakespeare's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be a whore still; they love thee not that use thee. Give them diseases, leaving them with their lust. Make use of thy salt hours. Season the slaves For tubs and baths; bring down rose-cheek'd youth To the tub-fast and the diet (&lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt;, IV, iii, 83-87).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another allusion is to 'Cornelius's tub'. How the name came about is unknown. One of the earliest references to it is in Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594. 'Mother Cornelius's tub why it was like hell, he that came in to it never came out of it.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1Fvkrhzd950C&amp;amp;pg=PA274&amp;amp;lpg=PA274&amp;amp;dq=Mother+Cornelius+tub+why+it+was+like+hell&amp;amp;source=bl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introductions, Notes and Commentaries to Texts in 'The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker'&lt;/em&gt; by Cyrus Hoy and Fredson Bowers&lt;/a&gt; also contains some other literary references to &amp;quot;Cornelius tubs&amp;quot; and variants thereupon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T13:30:20.817" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T13:30:20.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-22T20:01:51.843" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;This short story was told by a narrator and was something about an unsavory man. I don't remember how he was unsavory exactly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only part I remember is the ending: the narrator is outside the UM's house, and is surprised to see the UM's son come outside with a pot of water -- he'd finished washing the dishes -- and he flings the hot water out into the yard, and it's steaming in the cold (snow?). The narrator was surprised that the son would even do the dishes. IIRC the house was in a rural area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it was written in English. I read it around 2008. It seemed to be written in fairly modern times, perhaps in the last 50 years or so. It was part of an anthology. I'm thinking it may have been part of a college literature class, but I can't swear to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about all I remember. Anyone know what this story is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7412" LastEditorUserId="7412" LastEditDate="2019-06-22T20:27:01.483" LastActivityDate="2019-06-22T20:27:01.483" Title="Story ends with son washing dishes, flinging dishwater outside in the cold" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-22T23:00:30.170" Score="7" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere Isaac Asimov remarks that the citadel of truth can only be breached by a brute-force assault. I would like the exact source of this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T21:33:37.997" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T21:33:37.997" Title="Source of an Asimov quotation about the citadel of truth" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;isaac-asimov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11401" CreationDate="2019-06-24T17:28:29.893" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Greene's novel &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius; The Card of Fancie&lt;/em&gt; was first published in 1584. The novel's main character, Gwydonius, is the only son of the the duke of Mettelyne (presumably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mytilene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mytilene&lt;/a&gt;). He travels to Alexandria (it is not clear whether this refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexandria in Egypt&lt;/a&gt; or to one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_(disambiguation)#West_and_Central_Asia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many other cities with the same name&lt;/a&gt;), where he falls in love with Castania, the only daughter of the duke of Alexandria. Castania has another suitor named Valericus, who is of low birth. In addition, in the second half of the story, the duke of Alexandria's son falls in love with the duke of Mettelyne's daughter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fancy#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fancy&lt;/a&gt; has several meanings, including the following (quoted from Wiktionary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The imagination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An image or representation of anything formed in the mind; conception; thought; idea.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An opinion or notion formed without much reflection; an impression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Love or amorous attachment. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/card#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Card&lt;/a&gt; also has many meanings, but I don't see which one is meant by the novels title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T15:56:00.350" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T15:56:00.350" Title="What does &quot;card&quot; in the title &quot;Gwydonius; The Card of Fancie&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;gwydonius-the-carde-of-fancie&gt;&lt;robert-greene&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11237" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11242" CreationDate="2019-06-24T20:43:00.077" Score="6" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ted Hughes' &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=ShcIjIYxAMoC&amp;amp;pg=PT38#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Contender&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (which I already &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/11012/meaning-of-abandoned-his-grin-to-them-in-ted-hughes-the-contender&quot;&gt;asked about&lt;/a&gt; once), there's a phrase which I can't figure. Here are the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All the women in the world could not move him&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They came their mouths deformed against stone&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They came and their tears salted his nail-holes […]&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker so I maybe missing something simple here, but I can't figure out the phrase: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;mouths deformed against stone&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could this mean? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:31:49.413" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:31:49.413" Title="What could &quot;mouths deformed against stone&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;crow&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11236" CreationDate="2019-06-25T13:36:30.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is almost certainly the sixth of the definitions of &lt;em&gt;card&lt;/em&gt; in your link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(informal) An amusing or entertaining person, often slightly&#xA;  eccentrically so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or as the definition at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=word+card&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolfram Alpha&lt;/a&gt; has it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A witty amusing person who makes jokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usage of the word in this sense isn't so common nowadays as it was then but it is still understood.  It fits your synopsis of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2019-06-25T13:36:30.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11241" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11237" CreationDate="2019-06-26T16:39:44.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They came their mouths deformed against stone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is obviously metaphor(man is compared to a rock)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rock essentially is a spiritless, non-alive thing which obviously can't think and generally can't do what human can do. So&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mouth deformed against stone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Means that this man didn't gave any attention to them(womans) and stood like a rock and their effort to talk to him was ineffective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7420" LastActivityDate="2019-06-26T16:39:44.333" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11237" CreationDate="2019-06-27T19:32:31.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;After thinking of it for a while, I'd like to shed some poetic light on it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Similiar usage&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got reminded of another similiar usage of the &quot;&lt;em&gt;de-&lt;/em&gt;&quot; prefix in another Ted Hughes' Crow poem, called &lt;em&gt;&quot;Crow's Account of St. George&quot;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] He refrigerates an emptiness,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Decreates&lt;/em&gt; all to outer space [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&quot;Decreates&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is Hughes' neologism, using the &lt;em&gt;&quot;de-&quot;&lt;/em&gt; prefix in a unique, poetic sense. One can suggest many interpretations of this usage, but surely enough, since this is a neologism, those interpretations would concentrate on the two parts of the word: The prefix (&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;), and the verb (&lt;em&gt;create&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, I think we can refer to the phrase in question in a similiar way: We need to concentrate separately of the two parts of the word &lt;em&gt;&quot;deformed&quot;&lt;/em&gt;: The prefix (&lt;em&gt;de&lt;/em&gt;), and the verb (&lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Suggestion: A Biblical Allusion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we search for &lt;em&gt;&quot;formed against&quot;&lt;/em&gt; in Google, the first result is the last verse of Isaiah 54 (all of the following citations are taken from King James version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No weapon that is &lt;strong&gt;formed&lt;/strong&gt; against thee shall prosper; and every &lt;strong&gt;tongue&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  that shall rise against thee in judgment thou shalt condemn. This is&#xA;  the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is&#xA;  of me, saith the Lord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can see that tongue and a formed-weapon coincide, and so we can understand the phrase in question as a poetic arrangement of this metaphor. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does Isaiah 54 has to do with &lt;em&gt;&quot;The Contender&quot;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. The Servant Songs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, though it's not considered as one of the four &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Servant_songs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Servant Songs&lt;/a&gt;, Isaiah 54 is the chapter that follows the last Servant Song - which is a part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Isaiah_53&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaiah 53&lt;/a&gt;, arguably the most known Old Testament chapter that - according to Christian discourse - is a prophecy of Jesus. Isaiah 54 itself is also referred to in Christianity as speaking of Jesus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four Servant Songs, especially the last one, depicts lengthily the suffering of &quot;the servant&quot;, and suffering is also the main subject of &lt;em&gt;&quot;The Contender&quot;&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ok, so all is good and well, but what's &lt;em&gt;&quot;mouths deformed &lt;strong&gt;against stone&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. Wrapping It All Together&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third Servant Song, the Servant's face is depicted as a flint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded:&#xA;  therefore have I set my face like a &lt;strong&gt;flint&lt;/strong&gt;, and I know that I shall not&#xA;  be ashamed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Relatedly, in Isaiah 54:11-12 we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted, behold, I&#xA;  will lay thy &lt;strong&gt;stones&lt;/strong&gt; with fair colours, and lay thy foundations with&#xA;  sapphires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I will make thy windows of agates, and thy gates of carbuncles,&#xA;  and all thy borders of pleasant &lt;strong&gt;stones&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to expand on what @giorgi rcheulishvili have correctly simply put, we may suggest that the women in the poem approach the man with good intentions, maybe trying to convince him to leave the suffering behind it, but their words are hitting a stone-faced man who considers their words as weapons trying to deflect him of its passion (pun intended).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5. A Side Note&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isaiah 54:5 talks about &quot;The Redeemer&quot;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that, it's pretty clear that the poem's title is quite ironic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2019-06-27T19:32:31.730" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-28T21:52:38.960" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;The Unfortunate Traveller&lt;/em&gt;, Thomas Nashe attributes a Latin quote to a certain Epicharmus (italics from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The onely precept that a traveller hath most use of, and shall finde most ease in, is that of &lt;em&gt;Epicharmus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Vigila, et memor sis ne quid credas&lt;/em&gt;: Beleeve nothing, trust no man, yet seeme thou swallowedst al, suspectedst none, but wert easie to be gulled by everie one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Epicharmus I could find online is the Greek dramatist and philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicharmus_of_Kos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epicharmus of Kos&lt;/a&gt; (c. 550 - c. 460 BC), so if the quote really comes from him, it must be a later translation into Latin. I have not been able to &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vigila+et+memor+sis+ne+quid+credas&amp;amp;t=canonical&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;find the Latin version online&lt;/a&gt;, but I also can't exclude the possibility that Nashe is pulling the reader's leg here. If Epicharmus is the real source, I assume Nashe got the quote from a Latin translation that was available in England in the sixteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T18:33:02.353" Title="Where did Thomas Nashe get the Latin quote he attributes to Epicharmus?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;the-unfortunate-traveller&gt;&lt;thomas-nashe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11255" CreationDate="2019-06-28T23:49:48.070" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before declaming the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov, Ivan refers to a poem with the virgin Marie visiting Hell and begging God for mercy for its inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a real poem? If so, what is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5845" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T13:25:36.000" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T13:25:36.000" Title="What is the text Ivan refers to in the preface to the Grand Inquisitor" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-29T16:50:42.963" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Describing the history of the Marsten House in the novel &lt;em&gt;Salem’s Lot&lt;/em&gt;, Stephen King writes of the Marsten family:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He and his wife had retired wealthy to ‘salem’s Lot in 1929, and had lost a good part of that wealth in the stock market crash of 1929. &lt;strong&gt;In the ten years between the fall of the market and the rise of Hitler&lt;/strong&gt;, Marsten and his wife lived in their house like hermits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Hitler came to power in 1933, finally consolidating it with the passing of the Enabling Act, that makes it &lt;strong&gt;4&lt;/strong&gt; years, not &lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt;. I’m assuming King means the beginning of WW2 and not Hitler’s ascent to power, but it’s a little strange that such an error hasn’t been weeded out by the editor, considering the book’s been in print for over 40 years now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: is this just an odd and persistent mistake, or is there some subtlety in the English language that I’m not aware of that renders the phrase a different meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T16:50:42.963" Title="Weird Timeline in ‘Salem’s Lot’" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-28T16:20:55.280" Score="9" ViewCount="155" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1987 I began high school. There was one YA novel that the school librarian put on a special part of the shelf because it was &amp;quot;too frightening&amp;quot;. If this was reverse psychology it worked because I borrowed it. I cannot recall the title. I didn't finish it. I got about 1/3rd of the way through/skimmed some of it/jumped to the ending. Anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was set in England. It had a British author.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The front cover showed a boy crawling out of a pit with a terrified expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The plot was that two young British guys - teenagers - went around Britain tandem on one motorbike. They stopped at a beach and stumbled on a terrorist camp. One of the terrorists knocks them both out with rocks. They wake up in a cave tied to a bomb. They are told that a terrorist plot is going to happen in a week where bombs will be put on British boats and subs at UK ports to blow them up and hurt the British government. They are allowed to live until the plot is done.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Then I skimmed/skipped [maybe the due date got close] and the final pages had one of the teenage captives escaping and climbing out of a pit like the front cover. He passes quasi supernatural beings real and/or imagined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried various book forums. No suggestion has been it. It was very well written. For instance when the guys get captured there is a two page description of the pain of being hit. It's a bit synesthesia like with pain being a colour. I wouldn't mind reading it again or seeing what else the author did. I feel that it was a male author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a tough one. I don't really expect an answer; I've given as much detail as I honestly can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7431" OwnerDisplayName="athornton" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T20:20:36.953" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T20:20:36.953" Title="YA novel that I read in 1987 at school - two young British guys captured by terrorists and escape from a pit" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-29T18:55:42.143" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the end of Thomas Nashe's novel &lt;em&gt;The Unfortunate Traveller&lt;/em&gt; a compatriot tells the main character that travelling abroad is a bad idea for Englishmen (italics from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alas, our Englishmen are the plainest dealing soules that ever God put life in: they are greedie of newes, and love to bee fed in their humors, and heare themselves flattred the best that may be. (...) He is not fit to travell, that cannot with the &lt;em&gt;Candians&lt;/em&gt; live on serpents, make nourishing food even of poison.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Candians&quot; sounds a bit like &quot;inhabitants of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Candiana&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, a village (probably not a town) in Northern Italy. (The last part of the novel is set in Italy.) Candiana already existed during Thomas Nashe's lifetime, since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candiana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Italian Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; makes mention of a legend mentioning Diana, from whose name the community got its name. However, since I couldn't find anything relevant to snake eating about Candiana, I think &quot;Candians&quot; refers to a different location. Or is the snake-eating business not to be taken literally?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T19:33:47.713" Title="Who were the snake-eating Candians that Nashe is referring to?" Tags="&lt;the-unfortunate-traveller&gt;&lt;thomas-nashe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11248" CreationDate="2019-06-29T19:33:47.713" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chandia is a latinisation of Χάνδακας, which used to be the name of present-day &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraklion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heraklion, Crete&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the snake eating, it is hard to say. Although snakes have occasionally been consumed all throughout the Mediterranean region, this, I would assume, would be too rare and/or inconspicuous to merit any serious attention (in England of all places). The association with snakes strikes me as particularly odd, however, since Heraklion, famously, is the location of the Knossos archaeological site, where the notorious ‘Snake Goddess’ figurines were found. While the details are unclear, it is safe to say that snakes had an extremely significant role in the mythology of the Minoan civilization. As for the population of Crete at the time of Nashe’s life — I simply do not know. There is no way that Nashe could have known of the snake goddess, but — and this is just a wild guess — perhaps the people in Crete had retained some of the elements of Minoan mythology, or developed similar symbolism independently, given the conspicuous presence of snakes on the island, especially poisonous ones. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastActivityDate="2019-06-29T19:33:47.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-29T20:46:09.497" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any technical term for a type of reading that focuses on minor characters in a literary work? For example, a type of reading that focuses on the character of Polonius in William Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; or on the character of Jordan Baker from &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7430" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T19:09:18.870" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T08:04:10.333" Title="Is there any technical term for a type of reading that focuses on minor characters in a literary work?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11250" CreationDate="2019-06-30T01:04:26.960" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would probably be what is called a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallel novel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Common examples include &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Grendel&lt;/em&gt;. To quote wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These stories further the works of already well-known novels by focusing on a minor character and making them the major character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so it seems to be exactly what you're looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T01:04:26.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11252" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-30T17:21:46.877" Score="3" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a list of points unique to Layamon's retelling of the Arthurian legends? For example, as far as I can tell, the story of Arthur being raised in Avalon (as opposed to with Sir Ector) is unique to Layamon. Is there a list of these, or a paper that discusses these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T17:21:46.877" Title="Is there a list of points unique to Layamon's telling of the King Arthur story?" Tags="&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;&lt;layamon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11253" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-06-30T17:22:30.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-06-30T17:22:30.497" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T17:22:30.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11254" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-06-30T17:22:30.497" Score="0" Body="Author of the Brut, a Middle English epic poem that, among other things, is a major source of Arthurian legend." OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T13:09:08.743" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T13:09:08.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11244" CreationDate="2019-06-30T17:52:50.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a XIIth century Slavic apocrypha &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A5%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5_%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%8B_%D0%BF%D0%BE_%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;«Хождение Богородицы по мукам»&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English: “The journey of the Mother of God through hell”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aleksey Tolstoy’s novel &lt;em&gt;Хождение по мукам&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Calvary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Road to Calvary&lt;/a&gt; refers to it too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T21:02:55.807" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T21:02:55.807" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="502" CreationDate="2019-06-30T18:08:47.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure to understand your question. Do you mean reviews from critics or author ? If so, the answer is yes. Gogol was a good friend of Pushkin, who promoted his short stories and encouraged him to write  &lt;em&gt;The Dead Souls&lt;/em&gt;. Also, Gogol was the protégé of the most influential Russian critic of the 1840’s, Vissarion Belinsky, at least until the publication of &lt;em&gt;The Dead Souls&lt;/em&gt;. Gogol was also a major influence for Dostoyevsky, Sologub, Belyi, and more generally for the Silver Age of Russian Literature (1890’s-1920’s).&#xA;I don’t if I answered your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7433" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T18:08:47.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-06-30T19:27:37.950" Score="5" ViewCount="1261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in finding out whose fingerprint is on the cover of &lt;em&gt;Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind&lt;/em&gt; by Yuval Noah Harari. Could it belong to Mr Harari, or his father (whom the book was dedicated to), or Suzanne Dean (the cover designer), or someone else? I've tried looking through the book and Google but have had no luck so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TRUB1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover is all text except for one grey inky fingerprint at centre&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks as if the same fingerprint is on the back twice but I can't know for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7434" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T13:18:14.823" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T02:19:34.280" Title="Whose fingerprint is on the cover of &quot;Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind&quot;?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;yuval-noah-harari&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11264" CreationDate="2019-06-30T20:23:27.553" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter X of Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, a few characters want to take revenge on a &quot;Mistresse Franke&quot; (italics from the original, bold by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now certaine of the maidens of the house, and some of the yongue men, who had long before determined to bee revenged of this pratling huswife: came into the Cellar one after another, one of them bringing a great peece of a gammon of Bacon in his hand: and every one bad mistriss &lt;em&gt;Franke&lt;/em&gt; welcome: and first one drunke to her, and then another, and so the third, the fourth, and the fift: so that &lt;strong&gt;mistresse &lt;em&gt;Frankes&lt;/em&gt; braines waxt as mellow as a Pippin at Michaelmas&lt;/strong&gt;, and so light, that sitting in the Cellar, she thought the world ran round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pippin&lt;/a&gt; or pippin is intended here? And what is Pippin's condition at Michaelmas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T20:22:47.133" Title="What is a Pippin at Michaelmas?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11258" CreationDate="2019-06-30T21:07:05.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pippin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pippin&lt;/a&gt; here refers to a several varieties of eating apples. Wikipedia lists several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippin_apple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;varieties of pippin apples&lt;/a&gt;, but all of them date from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. The variety in Thomas Deloney's novel must be older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Michaelmas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michaelmas&lt;/a&gt; is celebrated on 29 September. The ideal harvest time for apples varies a lot and depends both on the specific variety and the temperature, especially summer temperatures. Deloney is presumably referring to a variety that needs to be harvested early; if apples are harvest too late, they will be soft (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/fruits/apples/harvesting-and-storing-apples.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tips For Harvesting Apples And Post Harvest Apple Storing&lt;/a&gt; by Amy Grant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-06-30T21:07:05.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11260" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11261" CreationDate="2019-07-01T12:38:09.513" Score="10" ViewCount="1200" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I am trying to work out how long Bertha Mason had been locked up by the time we reach Thornfield in the story.&lt;/strong&gt; This is part of an argument I am working for work and I haven't been able to find a definite amount of time. Adding to this variations in timeline if we add &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; I have had some trouble working it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be assumed it's at the least around ten years since we know Adèle is just under ten years old. Mr. Rochester's travels that led to him meeting Celine were likely started after he had returned to England, with Bertha having already exhibited signs of her maladies back in Jamaica. From what I could gather it seems he locked her up as soon as he returned after the deaths of his father and brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this about right as accurate time for how long she had been in the attic? Anything else that I can look at to work out the timelines?&lt;/strong&gt; I would prefer the answers mainly from the &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; text but will also accept anything that can help from &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7435" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T15:54:38.430" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:14:02.887" Title="How long had Bertha Mason been in the attic at the point of the events in Jane Eyre" Tags="&lt;jane-eyre&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;timeline&gt;&lt;wide-sargasso-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2019-07-01T18:21:43.877" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Nine years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Timeline&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timeline of events relating to Bertha’s imprisonment is (approximately) as follows, relative to the year &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; in which Jane arrives at Thornfield Hall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−14 — Mr. Rochester marries Bertha Mason&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−13 to &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−11 — Mr. Rochester’s brother dies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−10 — Mr. Rochester’s father dies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−9 — Mr. Rochester moves to Thornfield Hall, imprisons Bertha, departs for Europe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−8 or &lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;−7 — Adèle born&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt; — Jane arrives at Thornfield Hall&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Y&lt;/em&gt;+1 — Mr. Rochester attempts to marry Jane; Jane flees; Thornfield Hall burns.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Evidence&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Rochester had been in possession of Thornfield Hall for nine years when Jane arrived:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The present Mr. Rochester has not been very long in possession of the property: only about &lt;strong&gt;nine years&lt;/strong&gt;.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog11bron/page/246&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume I, chapter XIII&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Rochesters had been married for four years when he inherited Thornfield Hall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I lived with that woman up-stairs &lt;strong&gt;four years&lt;/strong&gt; […] My brother in the interval was dead; and at the end of the four years my father died too.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog31bron/page/18&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume III, chapter I&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Rochester imprisoned his wife when he arrived in England, so that no-one should know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“My father and brother had not made my marriage known to their acquaintance […] To England, then, I conveyed her: a fearful voyage I had with such a monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third story room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for &lt;strong&gt;ten years&lt;/strong&gt; made a wild beast’s den—a goblin’s cell.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog31bron/page/24&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume III, chapter I&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By comparing Mr. Rochester’s ‘ten years’ with Mrs. Fairfax’s ‘nine years’, we deduce that a year passed between Jane’s arrival at Thornfield Hall and the attempted marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bertha’s imprisonment must have been immediately on arrival, since no-one locally was aware of her identity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“At Thornfield Hall!” ejaculated the clergyman. “Impossible! I am an old resident in this neighbourhood, sir, and I never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at Thornfield Hall.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw a grim smile contort Mr. Rochester’s lip, and he muttered:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No—by God! I took care that none should hear of it—or of her under that name.” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog21bron/page/290&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume II, chapter XI&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after installing Bertha in the attic, Mr. Rochester left for the continent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Ten years since&lt;/strong&gt;, I flew through Europe half mad; with disgust, hate, and rage, as my companions” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog21bron/page/222&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume II, chapter IX&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adèle was seven or eight when Jane meets her for the first time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at my pupil, who did not at first appear to notice me: she was quite a child, perhaps &lt;strong&gt;seven or eight years old&lt;/strong&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog11bron/page/186&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume I, chapter XI&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Rochester had been married to Bertha for fifteen years when he attempted to bigamously marry Jane:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“‘I affirm and can prove that on the 20th of October A.D. —, (a date of &lt;strong&gt;fifteen years back&lt;/strong&gt;), Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield Hall, in the county of —, and of Ferndean Manor, in —shire, England, was married to my sister, Bertha Antoinetta Mason” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog21bron/page/288&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume II, chapter XI&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You say you never heard of a Mrs. Rochester at the house up yonder, Wood: but I daresay you have many a time inclined your ear to gossip about the mysterious lunatic kept there under watch and ward. Some have whispered to you that she is my bastard half-sister; some, my cast-off mistress;—I now inform you that she is my wife, whom I married &lt;strong&gt;fifteen years ago&lt;/strong&gt;,—Bertha Mason by name” [&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/janeeyreautobiog21bron/page/292&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume II, chapter XI&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By comparing the ‘fifteen years’ that the Rochesters have been married with the ‘four years’ they lived together before Mr. Rochester’s father died, and the ‘ten years’ that Bertha was imprisoned at Thornfield Hall, we deduce that it was a year after his father’s death that Mr. Rochester brought his wife from Jamaica to England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T18:21:43.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-01T19:05:41.407" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, a woman wants to marry Iohn/John (&quot;Jack&quot; in the novel's title) and tricks him into going to church with her where she will be married. After the widow and Jack, the priest tells her that the bridegroom (whom the widow simply invented) has not arrived yet. The widow answers (italics from the original),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is it true (quoth the Widow)? I promise you I will stay no longer for him, if hee were as good as &lt;em&gt;George a Green&lt;/em&gt;: and therefore dispatch (quoth she) and marry mee to my man &lt;em&gt;Iohn&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to be &quot;as good as George a Green&quot;? Where does this expression come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T19:05:41.407" Title="What does it mean to be as good as George a Green?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11262" CreationDate="2019-07-01T19:05:41.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;George a Green is also known as the &quot;Pindar of Wakefield&quot; (pindar could also be spelled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pinder#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pinder or pinner&lt;/a&gt;). The book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofgeorgeg00geor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of George a Green; Pindar of the Town of Wakefield&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1827 (and available on Archive.org) reprinted a ballad that contains a precursor of &quot;None shall pass&quot; from &lt;em&gt;Monty Python and the Holy Grail&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Wakefield there lives a jolly pinder,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;In Wakefield, all on a green&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;In Wakefield, all on a green;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  There is neither knight nor squire, said the pinder,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Nor baron so bold,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Nor baron so bold,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Dare make a trespas to the town of Wakefield,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;But his pledge goes to the pinfold, &amp;amp;c.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  All this be heard three witty young men,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Twas Robin Hood, Scarlet, and John;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  With that they espy'd the jolly pinder&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;As he sat under a thorn.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Now turn again, turn again, said the pinder,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;For a wrong way you have gone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  For you have forsaken the kings highway,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;And made a path over the corn.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  [The pinder] leaned his back fast unto a thorn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;And his foot against a stone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And there he fought a long summers day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;A summers day so long,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Till that their swords on their broad bucklers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Were broke fast into their hands.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Hold thy hand, hold thy hand said bold Robin Hood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;And my merry men every one;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  For this is one of the best pinders,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;That ever I tryed with sword&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For a full version with some annotations, see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/jolly-pinder-of-wakefield&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robbins Library Digital Projects at the University of Rochester&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;The anonymous editor of the above-mentioned volume adds (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This it will be perceived is the incident described in the tenth chapter of the present work, and for the valour displayed by the Pinder, upon this and all similar occasions, &lt;strong&gt;his name has passed into a proverb, and &quot;as good as George A Green,&quot; is a saying in use even at the present time&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A play entitled &lt;em&gt;George a Greene&lt;/em&gt; was performed in December 1593 and January 1594 (according to Henslowe's &quot;diary&quot;); one of the three companies that performed it was the Lord Chamberlain's Men, of which Shakespeare was a member. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://emed.folger.edu/gag&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folger Shakespeare Library&lt;/a&gt;, the play was first performed in 1590.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/exhibition/document/george-greene-george-buc-interviews-william-shakespeare-and-edward-juby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Pleasant Conceyted Comedie of George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was printed in 1599. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T19:05:41.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11258" CreationDate="2019-07-01T19:50:55.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is one of those punning comparisons, that still exist in English today, but were more common in earlier centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He lies like a rug.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the man is lying (telling untruths) in a different way than the rug is lying (being in a horizontal position on the floor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking in the OED for two possible definitions that would fit this punning comparison, we find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1a.  Of fruit: ripe; soft, sweet, and juicy with ripeness.  (first citation, 1440)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   6a. Drunk. (first citation, 1611)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Pippin is an apple.  A Michaelmas Pippin was presumably harvested at the peak of ripeness &#xA;So if mistresse Frankes braine was as mellow (drunk) as a Michaelmas Pippin is mellow (ripe and juicy), she must have been very drunk indeed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For apples, it seems that &lt;em&gt;mellow&lt;/em&gt; did not imply &lt;em&gt;soft&lt;/em&gt;, since apples only get soft when they are overripe. The OED has &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thynke howe god may make of that grene apple, a swete frute full melowe. (1526   W. Bonde &lt;em&gt;Pylgrimage of Perfection&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This greene fruite, beeing gathered before it be ripe, is rotten before it be mellow. (1589   T. Nashe &lt;em&gt;Anat. Absurditie&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, &lt;em&gt;mellow&lt;/em&gt; means mildly drunk, and good-naturedly so, but the citations in the OED seem to imply that it just mean &lt;em&gt;drunk&lt;/em&gt; in the 18th century and earlier. The most convincing example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hateful fellow, That's crabbed when he's mellow. (1775   R. B. Sheridan &lt;em&gt;Songs Duenna&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T20:22:47.133" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T20:22:47.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2019-07-01T19:54:47.780" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a few details to add to the existing answer. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bertha had been in the attic for around 10 years&lt;/strong&gt;. This can start to be worked out from the date given at Rochester and Jane's attempted marriage by Briggs who announces the impediment of a previous marriage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I affirm and can prove that on the &lt;strong&gt;20th of October&lt;/strong&gt; A.D. (a date &lt;strong&gt;fifteen years back&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ch. 26&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Rochester then relates the narrative of his previous marriage to Jane, he states that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I lived with that woman upstairs &lt;strong&gt;four years&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ch. 27&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that at the time of Jane and Rochester's marriage attempt, Bertha had been locked away for 11 years (15 years total since Bertha and Rochester's marriage date that Briggs gave, subtracting the four years lived together).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, since you asked how long from when Jane arrived at Thornfield Hall, it has to be noted how much time elapsed between arrival and attempted marriage. Jane began her post as a governess in &lt;strong&gt;October&lt;/strong&gt; of the year before her attempted marriage which she reveals during her momentary stay at the George Inn just before being taken to Thornfield:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am warming away the numbness and chill contracted by sixteen hours' exposure to the rawness of an &lt;strong&gt;October day&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ch. 11&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then relates to the &lt;strong&gt;October&lt;/strong&gt; date of Bertha and Rochester's marriage, meaning that &lt;strong&gt;exactly 14 years&lt;/strong&gt; had passed from then to Jane's arrival at Thornfield. The real problem with working out &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; how long is because it is not revealed how exact Rochester's four years with Bertha were until she was locked away and so 10 years is still an approximation, but matches Rochester's comment of &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third story room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has now for &lt;strong&gt;ten years&lt;/strong&gt; made a wild beast’s den&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ch. 27&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;made 8 months after Jane's arrival at Thornfield (October to July as the failed ceremony took place in July since in Chapter 25, shortly before the wedding, Jane describes the day as &lt;em&gt;&quot;no glimpse of blue sky had been visible that July day&quot;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Fairfax's claim of Rochester only having had possession of the property for &quot;about nine years&quot; is somewhat dubious in its obvious approximation and ties in with her significant lack of awareness about Rochester's marriage to Bertha, as evidenced by his comment in the same paragraph, with Rochester affirming that the doctor Carter and Grace Poole were the only two people he ever told of Bertha (excepting her brother):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs Fairfax may indeed have suspected something, but she could have gained no precise knowledge as to facts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ch. 27&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could suggest that Mrs Fairfax is less informed in general about the family's affairs and so I deem Rochester as a more accurate albeit very personally involved source on the duration of Bertha's imprisonment. Even so, Mrs Fairfax and Rochester's comments coincide in stating around 9-10 years as the duration of imprisonment and this is perhaps as accurate as one can gather from the details given by Charlotte Bronte in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;, since taking any material from &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; is equally as speculative as the opinion of any reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="2511" LastEditDate="2019-07-01T20:03:52.237" LastActivityDate="2019-07-01T20:03:52.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-02T03:21:03.367" Score="2" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the gospels of Matthew and Mark in the Bible, Jesus says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a sign that Jesus is upset with God?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7436" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T08:27:50.830" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T01:50:16.657" Title="Why is Jesus upset with God?" Tags="&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-07-03T09:42:24.500" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-02T12:20:00.433" Score="11" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;On 28 Sep. 1952, V.S. Naipaul wrote the following to his father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The very fact that I can write about future plans ought to hearten you. You see, I have really been suffering from an abnormal mental condition. I was depressive. I have seen the psychologist twice and there is now no further need to see him. The first talk was inconclusive. At the end of the second, he discovered what was wrong with me. Put simply, it was this. Disappointed in Oxford, and myself, I had looked upon myself as a failure; yet was never willing to admit this fear. Accordingly this fear of failure became fear of something so absurd and horrifying that I shall not tell what it was for a number of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last night, while reading the 2019 essay &lt;em&gt;Editing Vidia&lt;/em&gt; by Naipaul's editor, Diana Athill, I was stopped cold by the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Naipaul and I] began to meet fairly often, and I enjoyed his company because he talked well about writing and people, and was often funny. At quite an early meeting he said gravely that when he was up at Oxford—which he had not liked—he once did a thing so terrible that he would never be able to tell anyone what it was. I said it was unforgivable to reveal that much without revealing more, especially to someone like me who didn’t consider even murder literally unspeakable, but I couldn’t shift him and never learned what the horror was—though someone told me later that when he was at Oxford Vidia did have some kind of nervous breakdown. It distressed me that he had been unhappy at a place which I loved. Having such a feeling for scholarship, high standards and tradition he ought to have liked it . . . but no, he would not budge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what was the unspeakable act that V.S. Naipaul committed while at Oxford University?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7366" LastEditorUserId="7366" LastEditDate="2019-07-02T15:07:57.510" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:56:28.023" Title="What was the unspeakable act that V.S. Naipaul committed while at Oxford University?" Tags="&lt;v-s-naipaul&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11268" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-02T16:26:09.590" Score="4" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rudyard Kipling's  poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46786/the-secret-of-the-machines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Secret of the Machines&lt;/a&gt; the last stanza goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  It will vanish and the stars will shine again,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Because, for all our power and weight and size,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  We are nothing more than children of your brain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is first letter of the word 'Heavens' capitalised? What does the word stand for? Is it personified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T11:16:46.993" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T11:16:46.993" Title="Why the capitalization of &quot;Heavens&quot; in Rudyard Kipling's &quot;The Secret of the Machines&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11266" CreationDate="2019-07-03T05:45:38.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone in the comments gave this interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not much confusion if you look at the quotes in context. This quote comes after he has been nailed to the cross and has spent several hours being tortured. Passersby are insulting him and saying &amp;quot;If you're really the son of God, get down off the cross yourself! Perform a miracle!&amp;quot; He can't. So he's shouting &amp;quot;God, why can't I perform a miracle and save myself? Why did you abandon me?&amp;quot; Seems pretty straightforward why he's &amp;quot;upset.&amp;quot; &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2027&amp;amp;version=NIV%20and%20biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2015&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew 27 (NIV)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not a big fan of this interpretation. I think it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of understanding the text. In particular, I wouldn't agree that Jesus is trying to say &amp;quot;God, why can't I perform a miracle and save myself? Why did you abandon me?&amp;quot;, and I certainly would disagree that any of this is &amp;quot;straightforward&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any analysis of this line needs to begin with the understanding that &amp;quot;My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?&amp;quot; is a direct quotation of (and thus a reference to) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2022&amp;amp;version=KJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalms 22&lt;/a&gt;. Psalm 22 begins by expressing doubt in god, but it ends with a renewed faith in God (e.g. &amp;quot;For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help.&amp;quot;). So it's at the very least possible to read &amp;quot;My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?&amp;quot; as an expression of faith in God even during tough times, as opposed to expressing doubt or anger in God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Some Christians would point to similarities between Psalm 22 and Jesus' crucifixion as evidence that the old testament contains prophecies of the new testament; needless to say other religions would have a different view on this. However, the question of the prophetic relationship between Psalm 22 and Jesus' crucifixion &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an example of a question where literary analysis probably doesn't have a lot to offer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what emotion Jesus was feeling at this time: my limited understanding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-of-emotions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the history of emotion&lt;/a&gt; makes me wary of assigning specific emotions in this way. But I think it's worth doing a comparative analysis between Mark and Matthew (where Jesus says &amp;quot;My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?&amp;quot;) and Luke and John where Jesus says other things. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus is described as being silent until referencing Psalm 22, after which Jesus dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chief priests accused him of many things. So again Pilate asked him, “Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast that with Luke, where Jesus responds to many of the people talking to him during his crucifixion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the other criminal rebuked him. “Don’t you fear God,” he said, “since you are under the same sentence? We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fair to say that Mark's narrative, compared to Luke's narrative, allow a much more robust argument that Jesus felt abandoned. I don't think any text supports an interpretation that Jesus was angry during his crucifixion. For example,  Jesus isn't lashing out at anyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be interested in the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2016/02/03/my-god-my-god-when-jesus-felt-abandoned&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘My God, My God’: When Jesus felt abandoned&lt;/a&gt;. At the very least there are Christians who do feel that Jesus expressed abandonment in Mark, although not everyone would agree with this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth mentioning that I doubt this short answer has done justice to this complicated moment in a complicated work, but I doubt any answer could do this line justice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comments it seems people are debating whether or not this question constitutes a &amp;quot;literary&amp;quot; question. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not literary analysis, and I feel it should be closed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really comment on whether the question should be &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot;, but this question can be answered through an analysis of the text, which is without a doubt something within the bailiwick of literary analysis. There undoubtedly are elements of the text that are outside the realm of literary analysis, and I think most of the interesting commentary on the bible would be from a theologian rather than a literature professor, but that doesn't mean that scholars of literature can't engage in questions about the bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the question of what constitutes &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;literary analysis&amp;quot; seems to be what people find interesting about this question, I'll try to address it in more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Definitions of literature run the gamut from &amp;quot;literature is artistic works of superior artistic quality&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;literature is written text.&amp;quot; I think most scholars of literature would consider the bible to be literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Questions about what constitutes &amp;quot;literary analysis&amp;quot; are really questions about the appropriateness of various methodological approaches. There are schools of thought, such as the new critics, who hold that an analysis of a &amp;quot;text&amp;quot; should be limited to the text itself. But while I think New Criticism is useful as a pedagogical teaching tool, I would also caution that there's a lot of innovative scholarship that goes beyond merely looking at a single text, and that New Criticism is by no means accepted dogmatically by the literary community (although there certainly are individuals who are dogmatic about new criticism).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Personally, while I think it's useful to be able to identify methods of analysis and definitions of literature, I don't think debating definitions is conducive to teaching or conducting research. There are certainly limits in terms of questions that can be answered by literature as a field: if someone asked me &amp;quot;how can I live as a good Christian&amp;quot; I would tell them they needed to speak to a priest. But this is more an issue of being humble about what we don't know rather than defending the borders of a discipline that, quite frankly, is dying in large part because of attempts to define and defend its borders.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7446" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T01:50:16.657" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T01:50:16.657" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11268" CreationDate="2019-07-03T09:42:51.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This poem seems to have two meanings here, a literal one and a metaphorical one. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the last eight lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!-&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Our touch can alter all created things,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;   We are everything on earth—except The Gods!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp; Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  It will vanish and the stars will shine again,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;   Because, for all our power and weight and size,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  We are nothing more than children of your brain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Gods&quot; is mentioned in the line before &quot;the Heavens&quot;. I think that this and the capitalization should be taken as a hint that &quot;the Heavens&quot; should be read as a metonym for God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, read literally, it means that the smoke hides the sky. Metaphorically, it means that machines make people forget about God. (I don't want to go into detail about exactly how they would do that, because there are lots of possibilities, for instance people starting to &quot;worship&quot; machines instead of God, and it's not clear to me which one Kipling was thinking about, if indeed he had one in particular in mind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T09:42:51.490" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11273" CreationDate="2019-07-03T08:26:25.657" Score="13" ViewCount="5388" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading Shakespeare's third sonnet, and I noticed something funny. I am going to put in bold all the capital letters in the sonnet itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sonnet III&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;hen fortie &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;inters shall beseige thy brow, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;nd digge deep trenches in thy beauties field, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;hy youthes proud liuery so gaz’d on now, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;il be a totter’d weed of smal worth held: &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;hen being askt, where all thy beautie lies, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;here all the treasure of thy lusty daies; &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;o say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;ere an all-eating shame, and thriftlesse praise. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;H&lt;/strong&gt;ow much more praise deseru’d thy beauties vse, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt;f thou couldst answere this faire child of mine &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;S&lt;/strong&gt;hall sum my count, and make my old excuse &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;roouing his beautie by succession thine. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;T&lt;/strong&gt;his were to be new made when thou art ould, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A&lt;/strong&gt;nd see thy blood warme when thou feel’st it could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is an odd letter out, namely, the second &lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt; from &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;W&lt;/strong&gt;inters&amp;quot;. Since this is not the beginning of a line, then the capitalised letter can only be a reference to a &lt;em&gt;name&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I look at &amp;quot;Winters shall&amp;quot; I can see &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Wi&lt;/strong&gt;nters &lt;strong&gt;sha&lt;/strong&gt;ll&amp;quot; to make &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Wi&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sha&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Wi&lt;/strong&gt;lliam &lt;strong&gt;Sha&lt;/strong&gt;kespeare&amp;quot; which is the name of the author who wrote this sonnet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a coincidence? Did William Shakespeare hide things in his writings? (I hope he did, because that would be cool.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4908" OwnerDisplayName="Mr Pie" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-19T07:07:38.633" Title="Did William Shakespeare hide things in his writings?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2019-07-03T08:58:26.837" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're reading too much into this - Shakespeare was known to capitalize significant nouns fairly commonly in his writings (several examples can be seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/detail/FOLGER~1~1~3864~231443:Mr--William-Shakespeares-comedies&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that when Shakespeare was writing he was using very early Modern English and the style rules then were far looser as the language shifted from Middle English towards the more modern forms of the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't generally capitalize season names &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; but he was writing some ~400 years ago!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7457" OwnerDisplayName="motosubatsu" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T08:58:26.837" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11538" CreationDate="2019-07-03T17:14:23.030" Score="6" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia claims&lt;/a&gt; that the character of Horace Jules in C. S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt; - ostensibly the Director and boss of the N.I.C.E. organisation, in reality a figurehead manipulated by those truly in the know - was &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in part a caricature of H. G. Wells&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the reference for this claim is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://echoesacrosstime.blogspot.com/2007/12/horace-jules-h-g-wells.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt; which supposedly gives a &quot;very detailed analysis&quot; but which leads me only to a login page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the evidence for this claim?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm interested to know if Lewis was really lampooning a fellow writer, and if so why. Does the character of Jules bear any resemblance to Wells or Lewis's idea of him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T13:37:16.463" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T06:00:03.457" Title="Was the N.I.C.E. director modelled on H. G. Wells?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11275" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-03T17:26:47.563" Score="8" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;, Edmund, resentful of his inferior status to his older brother, betrays his family and frames his brother as a traitor. This strikes me as not being at all unlike what Edmund does in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. Is there any evidence of an inspiration, or is the resemblance purely coincidental?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T10:03:42.947" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:03:42.947" Title="Was Edmund in the Narnia series loosely inspired by Edmund in King Lear?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;king-lear&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2019-07-03T18:05:12.460" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was common in Shakespeare's time for writers to capitalize nouns other than proper nouns. There is nothing particularly unusual about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, it would be cool to find a hidden message in Shakespeare. But people have been looking for such hidden messages for centuries, and to the best of my knowledge no one's ever found one. At least, not one that isn't based on very strained theories of the mechanism for hiding the message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7447" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T18:05:12.460" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2019-07-03T20:20:48.403" Score="4" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gray was referencing Ecclesiastes and playfully inverting the conclusion of an important verse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-18.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecclesiastes 1:18&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grey's poem is quite famous, as is the phrase &quot;ignorance is bliss&quot; and much has been written on it, but the the core meaning is quite simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The more knowledge one has, the greater one's grief, because this knowledge includes the inevitability of death, and that all we are and do and achieve eventually turns to dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shelley referenced this in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/a&gt;, although TS Eliot's allusion in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/a&gt; may be the most compact: &quot;I will show you fear in a handful of dust.&quot;  The reference to dust goes back to the beginning, &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/genesis/3-19.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 3:19&lt;/a&gt;, and provides a basis for Ecclesiastes: &quot;For dust you are and to dust you will return.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that Ecclesiastes begins with &quot;Vanity, vanity, vanity--all is vanity&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Ecclesiastes 1:2)&lt;/a&gt; and goes on to explicate this in exhaustive detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/2-11.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecclesiastes 2:11&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gray's Inversion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes Gray's turn of phrase so clever is the reversal of King David's conclusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom, and also madness and folly. What more can the king's successor do than what has already been done?  &lt;strong&gt;I saw that wisdom is better than folly, just as light is better than darkness.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/2-13.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecclesiastes 2:12 ff.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it gets more complicated because King David goes on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness; but I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both. &#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/2-14.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecclesiastes 2:14&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gray is saying it is better to &quot;walk in darkness&quot;, and be happy, even if that happiness is temporary, than to go through life with full knowledge of mortality and the ultimate vanity of all endeavors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where David concludes that &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/2-15.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;even wisdom is ultimately meaningless&lt;/a&gt;, Gray calls it folly, and concludes that ignorance is the optimal strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T21:01:18.357" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T21:01:18.357" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8867" CreationDate="2019-07-03T20:54:36.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is indeed about a wedding. I guess the first verse is just general thankfulness for the (wedding) day (with God implied) before the second verse is more specific.&#xA;Andrea Bocelli speaks about it in this video:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WECD1l0r0EQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrea Bocelli - Gloria the Gift of Life (Commentary)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7449" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-07-03T21:15:44.347" LastActivityDate="2019-07-03T21:15:44.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11279" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11284" CreationDate="2019-07-03T23:13:32.047" Score="7" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;So in December 22nd, 1985, Charles Schulz made this following Christmas themed Sunday panel featuring Linus and Sally. Linus is reading Sally the second chapter of the Book of Luke (from the Bible), and makes a remark about how King Augustus is near-forgotten while Jesus has an entire holiday dedicated to his birth. Then Sally remarks a rather egotistical statement about how everyone loves her, with Snoopy looking shocked. Linus starts walking away and when Sally asks why he isn't finishing the story he says, &quot;I think you already finished it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This panel always confused me. I know there's some sort of message here, but I never understood it. It's not true that no one paid any attention to Sally when she was born, because Charlie Brown literally ran out of the house screaming &quot;I'm a father - I mean my Dad's a father - I'm a brother! I have a baby sister&quot; With Linus comically telling Lucy &quot;You didn't act that way when I was born.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later Charlie Brown pretty much throws a party with everyone getting chocolate cigars (including Snoopy) and talking about how proud he is to be a big brother. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain this strip?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ft14q.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ft14q.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T10:56:04.743" Title="Why does Linus say &quot;I think you finished it&quot; to Sally in this Sunday strip?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-m-schulz&gt;&lt;peanuts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2019-07-04T01:57:19.387" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Stan kills himself because unlike every other member of the losers club, Stan remembers what happened to them in the summer of 1958. As adults, each of them are scared when they get the call from Mike, but none of them can remember why. I think Stan immediately kills himself after Mike calls because he never truly forgot what happened to them under Dairy, and would rather die than face IT again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7451" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T01:57:19.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-04T08:21:01.970" Score="5" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And every dewdrop paints a bow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A line by Alfred Lord Tennyson, from section CXXII of his poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/tennyson/718/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. What is the poet actually trying to convey with this line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verse in context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And all the breeze of Fancy blows,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every dew-drop paints a bow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The wizard lightnings deeply glow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And every thought breaks out a rose.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7454" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T19:14:22.110" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T19:14:22.110" Title="Meaning of &quot;every dewdrop paints a bow&quot; from In Memoriam, Section CXXII by Alfred lord Tennyson" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11281" CreationDate="2019-07-04T09:11:20.450" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reference is to the properties of water refracting the light spectrum, effectively producing a &lt;em&gt;rainbow&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED bears this out with the following definition of 'Bow'.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;II. Specific uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A rainbow. (Mostly contextual or poetical for the compound.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact the OED specifically cites this line as an example of this usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1850   Tennyson &lt;em&gt;In Memoriam&lt;/em&gt; cxx. 189    Every dew-drop paints a bow .  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the speaker is essentially saying that if his love were still with him he would never think of death but instead of flights of fancy, all rainbows, magic and roses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T09:11:20.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11279" CreationDate="2019-07-04T10:27:57.797" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this is a play on the word &amp;quot;finished&amp;quot;. Relevant definitions of &amp;quot;finish&amp;quot; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1GCEU_enGB847GB847&amp;amp;q=Dictionary#dobs=finish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bring (a task or activity) to an end; complete.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;they were straining to finish the job&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;kill, destroy, or comprehensively defeat.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the English men-at-arms finished them off in hand-to-hand combat&amp;quot;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards the latter definition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/finish&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; tells us that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning &amp;quot;to kill&amp;quot; is from 1755&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story Linus is telling has two points to it. In the first, it is a reminder that the original meaning of Christmas is literally Christian. It celebrates the birth of a figure who encouraged charity and humility. In the second, he reflects on the reasons why certain historical figures are remembered and others are forgotten, and how impossible it is to predict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sally's reply indicates she has understood neither point. Her focus is entirely selfish and greedy, showing she has no interest in the wider Christian message of the festival. Her narrow statement that &amp;quot;now everyone loves me&amp;quot; shows her ignorance of the point Linus is making about the vast unlikeliness of being remembered or the reasons why a few people are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She then asks for the story to be &amp;quot;finished&amp;quot; in the sense of the first definition: to be completed. Linus' reply is that she has &amp;quot;finished&amp;quot; it in the sense of the second: she has essentially &amp;quot;killed&amp;quot; it with her total failure to understand its message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-04T14:19:42.387" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6804" CreationDate="2019-07-05T03:46:41.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'd say this is a part of the Experiment. No, I can't say it's directly related to the real situation in the USSR*; &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; there was a general attitude then (not only in the USSR) that things will/should be more rationalised in the future. What can be more rational than a machine assigning you jobs, taking into account all your traits and 'actual' needs? In &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; people are &lt;em&gt;bred&lt;/em&gt; predestined to certain classes according to the 'needs' of the society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just a generic idea taken to one of its extremes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curiously, &lt;em&gt;The Doomed City&lt;/em&gt; was planned to be published as an 'inside story' of another novel &lt;em&gt;Limping Fate&lt;/em&gt;**. In that 'frame novel', a computer makes a prediction of the 'actual merit' of the story. Just another take on the same idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(*) That said, any totalitarian/authoritarian/command system tends to have some of it: the Party can 'determine' that currently you are needed here or there, and 'appoint' you, often without your consent. That wasn't uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(**) I'm not sure about the official title translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T03:46:41.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11204" CreationDate="2019-07-05T08:00:29.973" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I am wondering what the earliest book is in English that uses bad spelling for humor value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise I'm somewhat stretching the scope of your question, but if you include &lt;em&gt;plays&lt;/em&gt; as &amp;quot;books&amp;quot;, and in the context of spoken dialogue you interpret &amp;quot;bad spelling&amp;quot;  to include the author putting the wrong &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; in a character's mouth for the audience's amusement, then &lt;strong&gt;malapropisms&lt;/strong&gt; offer some early options.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;malapropism&amp;quot; itself is derived from the surname of Mrs Malaprop, a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's comedy of manners &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rivals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rivals&lt;/a&gt;, which was first performed in 1775. Mrs Malaprop is a moralistic widow, and guardian of the main character Lydia; as the primary comic figure in the play, she frequently chooses a word that &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; like the one she means, but is completely (indeed, &lt;em&gt;ludicrously&lt;/em&gt;) wrong in the context. It might therefore be thought of as a verbal spelling error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of her misspoken words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; [Likely substitutions: &amp;quot;reprehend&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;apprehend&lt;/em&gt;; &amp;quot;oracular&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;vernacular&lt;/em&gt;; &amp;quot;derangement&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;arrangement&lt;/em&gt;; &amp;quot;epitaphs&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;epithets&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;illiterate him quite from your memory&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; [&amp;quot;illiterate&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;obliterate&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; [&amp;quot;allegory&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;alligator&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Sheridan's play gave the modern name to this technique, its use for comic effect goes back much earlier. In Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1623, the attempts of his comic character Constable Dogberry – an officious, incompetent, amateur police chief – to appear sophisticated result in tortured descriptions and ridiculous malapropisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps Constable Dogberry's best-known line is when he reports the arrest of two villains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Our watch, sir, have indeed comprehended two auspicious persons.&amp;quot; [&amp;quot;comprehended&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;apprehended&lt;/em&gt; and &amp;quot;auspicious&amp;quot; for &lt;em&gt;suspicious&lt;/em&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, as a result of this popular play such vocabulary errors became known as &lt;em&gt;dogberryisms&lt;/em&gt;, a term that endured until the arrival of Mrs Malaprop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4758" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T02:32:42.250" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T02:32:42.250" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2019-07-05T10:00:19.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answers have pointed out, noun capitalization was fairly common in Shakespeare's time but as &quot;Winter&quot; is the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; capitalized noun it may simply be that &quot;Winter&quot; is a personification of the season and therefore a proper noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7465" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T10:00:19.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11001" CreationDate="2019-07-05T10:52:34.553" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While both of the existing answers touch on relevant matters I believe they both miss the mark in terms of the intended meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@frathoss cites a range of definitions including one which supports the OED definition of 'rubber' as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;North American colloquial. To listen (in) on a party telephone line, or on any telephone conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but declares the relevant meaning not to be that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@DJClayworth reminds us of the biblical phrase 'the blind see, the lame walk, those with skin diseases are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news' to which the phrases in the short story allude. However, I think reference to 'lame talk' and 'blind rubbers' as noun-phrases is a red herring. Search results for 'blind rubber' mostly lead to 'blind rubber grommets' where rubber is an adjective rather than a noun. Google Books hits for 'lame talk' between 1914 and 1973 primarily brings up either false positives where 'lame' and 'talk' are separated by punctuation, or the O Henry story. Other uses do occur, but they are in the minority and generally post date the 1908 publication of &lt;em&gt;Jeff Peters as a Personal Magnet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, Jeff Peters is engaging in bombastic tall-talk as part of his spiel to con the Judge, he is aware as he does this that the Judge believes &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; to be engaged in a 'con' to bring Jeff Peters to justice. So we can understand the whole bedside performance to be entirely theatrical. Jeff Peters isn't truly trying to sell anything because he knows that the Judge isn't really ill and that the Judge believes himself to be setting Peters up for arrest, and already knows full well that the 'healing through personal magnetism' is fake, just as Peters' bottled medicine is a mere  nostrum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the spiel is pure performance, only intended to convince the judge that Peters is unsuspecting, and to leave him something to chew on down the line when the con has become apparent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'Mr. Mayor,' says I, 'the time will come soon when you'll believe that personal magnetism is a success. And you'll be sure that it succeeded in this case, too.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Peters is having fun with the words, using phrases that echo the New Testament but don't convey its meaning, the lame can already &lt;em&gt;talk&lt;/em&gt;, the blind can already &lt;em&gt;rubber&lt;/em&gt; on their neighbour's telephone conversations. As part of a sales pitch these might be claimed to create plausible deniability that the vendor can't be held responsible for the misunderstandings of his customers. But in this instance he is running a different con and what he has to &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; is the idea of himself as an over-confident conman who doesn't realise he is in a trap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So literally 'rubber' means 'listen in on other's conversations on a party line', but its &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; is to contribute to bolstering the Judge's belief that Peters is unaware he is being set up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-07-05T11:24:34.117" LastActivityDate="2019-07-05T11:24:34.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11290" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-05T12:55:20.463" Score="2" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book in middle school in 2000/2001. I don’t recall that it was a popular or extremely current book, as nobody else had chosen to read it in our class, but I don’t think it could have been written much earlier than the 70s; it seemed current enough, and the actual storyline was also somewhat contemporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t remember much of the plot, but I believe the girl protagonist was an expat from the US living on the border of two or three  European countries: I believe Switzerland (possibly Belgium, but I think she was located near the Swiss alps for some reason). She was going to this foreign school and I believe she didn’t quite fit in (not 100% sure on this detail). Pretty sure regardless that she was homesick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The biggest recollection I have of this story is the feeling and/or theme: she’s quite lonely, and lives in a very in-between sort of place (because she’s literally living on the border of these two/three countries: I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; Switzerland and Italy; if not, possiblly her location was between Belgium, Switzerland and France). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scene I can remember most vividly is a thematic description of the mountainous country surrounding her; she describes the differing terrains/ecosystems of the landscapes on each side of her: there’s a snowy, rough and high terrain (Swiss Alps?) and a (comparatively) more tropical, warm terrain (Italy?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I’ve given enough information for this to qualify as a full, descriptive question. It’s all I can remember. Thank you for reading! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7442" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T18:59:41.853" Title="Middle Grade book read in 2001" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-05T19:46:50.610" Score="5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;Shame&lt;/em&gt; (1983) by Salman Rushdie, and came to this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lost in the forest of new relatives, wandering in the bloodjungle of the matriarchal home, Bilquis consulted the &lt;strong&gt;family Quran&lt;/strong&gt; in search of these family trees, and found them there, &lt;strong&gt;in their traditional place&lt;/strong&gt;, monkey-puzzle groves of genealogy inscribed in the back of the holy book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a widespread tradition to inscribe family trees in the back of the Quran? The author refers to the back as a &amp;quot;traditional place&amp;quot; where they would expect to find a family tree. I couldn't find any other resources proving this fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is off-topic, please direct me which Stack Exchange site to use. I couldn't find anything more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7257" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-11T22:44:33.967" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T19:43:52.330" Title="Is it a widespread tradition to inscribe family trees in the back of holy books?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;koran&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6902" CreationDate="2019-07-05T20:06:54.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the other answer highly unknowledgeable and completely wrong. I am in my 30's and have high functioning autism. Charlie is just like me. He is definitely on the spectrum. High functioning means he is very intelligent and therefore we are able to learn behaviours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of high functioning autistic people have a gift that many cannot understand. For example, he said to the psychiatrist it's everyone else's pain he feels and sees and he wants it to stop. It feels so extreme, so intense, like fire rolling all over your soul, and all you want to do is make that other person happy and take their pain away because it physically hurts us so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I hug some friends I say they feel like marshmallows, when I hug a certain person it feels like barbed wire I hate it. I can feel another person's pain and fears across the room and it's suffocating, like superman experiences. It's exhausting. It has a lot to do with the emotions from the other person that we are feeling. Yes, sometimes we cannot differentiate what it means, but most of the time we can, and it is real, so real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watching this film was like watching my own life in another person. Please don't tell people it's unlikely he's on the spectrum, just look at the modern day movies of Sherlock Holmes. He is 100% high functioning autistic and look at all of the accurate and emotional observations he makes, yet goes home and breaks down. That is because we use all our energy to appear 'normal' during the day, but when we go home it's our safe place and we can let down our guards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because low functioning autistic people cannot differentiate between emotions, doesn't mean that high functioning Aspies can't. Autism is a variation of social and sensory issues, the key word being variation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7472" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T14:19:32.363" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T14:19:32.363" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-06T00:56:23.647" Score="4" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the battle of Borodino, in which the Russians apparently did well, why did the French simply advance to Moscow and why was it considered inevitable that Moscow would be abandoned and the army would have to retreat past Moscow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7475" LastEditorUserId="7475" LastEditDate="2019-07-07T20:59:16.923" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T23:49:03.397" Title="In War and Peace, why do all the generals and Kutuzov consider it &quot;impossible&quot; to defend Moscow?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2019-07-06T10:31:44.853" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, capitalisation was the norm.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until Charlemagne, basically everything was written in all-caps. He oversaw a system of small, standardised letters - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_minuscule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carolingian Minuscule&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was only after that, that capitalisation rules could even begin to be formed. The terms upper &amp;amp; lower case, of course, did not appear until we had the printing press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nouns tended to be capitalised - to this day &lt;a href=&quot;https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/172/what-is-the-origin-of-the-rules-about-the-capitalization-of-the-first-letter-of&quot;&gt;German still does&lt;/a&gt; - though in Britain the practise slowly dropped to only Proper Nouns, of which the seasons were considered a part. A later resurgence of the practise led to such as the US Constitution using those older rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia - Capitalization in English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History of English capitalization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old English did not have a distinction between uppercase and&#xA;  lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating&#xA;  sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained&#xA;  haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar;&#xA;  in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often&#xA;  capitalized. With the development of the printing press in Europe and&#xA;  England capitalization of initial letters and proper nouns became more&#xA;  regularized, perhaps partly to distinguish new sentences in a time&#xA;  where punctuation remained sparse and irregularly used. The plays of&#xA;  Shakespeare show capitalization both of new lines and sentences,&#xA;  proper nouns, and some significant common nouns and verbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With the influence of continental printing practices after the English&#xA;  Restoration in 1688 printing began to favor more and more&#xA;  capitalization of nouns following German typography. The first lines&#xA;  of the U.S. Constitution of 1787 show major capitalization of most&#xA;  nouns: &quot;We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more&#xA;  perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide&#xA;  for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the&#xA;  Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and&#xA;  establish this Constitution for the United States of America.&quot; But by&#xA;  the end of the 18th century with the growth of prescriptive&#xA;  dictionaries and style manuals for English usage, the practice faded&#xA;  in Britain so that by the beginning of the 19th century common nouns&#xA;  were only occasionally capitalized, such as in advertisements. Yet the&#xA;  style lasted as late as the Civil War era in the United States, as&#xA;  some of Emily Dickinson's poems still capitalize many common nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7476" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T10:31:44.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11290" CreationDate="2019-07-06T11:59:20.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EGl0Pm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I figured out what this book is: “Bloomability” by Sharon Creech! Thank you to everyone who tried to answer my question! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7442" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-06T18:59:41.853" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T18:59:41.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10855" CreationDate="2019-07-06T18:00:24.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alex has presented a lot of quantitative evidence in his answer, but perhaps the most conclusive piece of evidence is a throwaway line in the second book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You were seen,’ [Snape] hissed, showing them the headline: FLYING FORD ANGLIA MYSTIFIES MUGGLES. He began to read aloud. ‘“Two Muggles in London, convinced they saw an old car flying over the Post Office tower … at noon in Norfolk, Mrs Hetty Bayliss, while hanging out her washing … Mr Angus Fleet, of Peebles, reported to police” … six or seven Muggles in all. I believe your father works in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office?’ he said, looking up at Ron and smiling still more nastily. ‘Dear, dear … his own son …’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;HP and the Chamber of Secrets&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pottermore.com/book-extract-long/after-the-crash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;extract available on Pottermore&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important word here is &lt;strong&gt;Peebles&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peebles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a town in Scotland&lt;/a&gt;. If any route from London to Hogwarts passes near Peebles, then Hogwarts is almost certainly in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Spagirl points out, there is a small logical possibility that Hogwarts is in the far north of England and the car just circled over the far south of Scotland before finding the right area to land in ... but in practice, the authorial choice of mentioning a town in Scotland seems likely to indicate that the final destination is also in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T14:24:26.033" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11272" CreationDate="2019-07-06T18:43:07.950" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to &quot;hide things&quot; in one's writings? Several centuries of  criticism have unearthed &quot;things&quot; from Shakespeare's plays and poems that were not obvious to older generations. Those &quot;things&quot; are usually called &quot;interpretations&quot; and are often based on new approaches to literature (new literary theories etcetera). Another categories of &quot;things&quot; are allusions and citations from sources that had not been noticed before. I assume that is not what the question describes as &quot;hiding things&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another category of &quot;things&quot; in Shakespeare's writing that has usually not been the subject of serious or academic literary criticism. The type of people who is most active in this area are the proponents of conspiracy theories that not William Shakespeare from Stratford but someone else actually wrote the plays attributed to him. There are roughly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_authorship_candidates&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eighty such alternative candidates&lt;/a&gt;, very often from noble families, because, as we all know, only people from noble families can write great literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me give one example of the type of arguments that these conspiracy theorists use to support their claims. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/lll/lll.5.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 1 of &lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; Costard uses the Latin word &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/-AgQb_k-8Rk?t=31&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Honorificabilitudinitatibus&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the longest word in Early Modern English. John Kerrigan (who edited the play for the Penguin Shakespeare) explains,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Considered the longest word in existence (a renaissance equivalent of 'disestablishmentarianism'); it is the dative-ablative plural of a medieval Latin word meaning, in the nominative, 'the state of being honoured'. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do conspiracy theorists see in this word? They claim it is an anagram of &quot;Hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi&quot;, roughly meaning, &quot;These plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world&quot;, thereby proving beyond all reasonable doubt that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Bacon&lt;/a&gt; is the author of &quot;Shakespeare's plays&quot;. (The anagram argument was put forward by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Durning-Lawrence#Writings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwin Durning-Lawrence&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia adds that the Shakespeare scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Schoenbaum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Schoenbaum&lt;/a&gt; pointed out that &quot;the anagram overlooks the fact that Bacon would have written the genitive of his name as Baconi (from Baconus), never Baconis (which assumes his name was Baco)&quot;.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to the issue of capitalisation mentioned in the original question: Early Modern English spelling was not fixed. (See for example the quotes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11194/2191&quot;&gt;Robert Greene&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/11189/what-does-hodgekins-northerne-speech-mean&quot;&gt;Thomas Deloney&lt;/a&gt; in some of my recent questions.) Even in the original 1609 edition of the Sonnets, scholars have been able to detect the hand of two typesetters based on variations in preferences in spelling. (See MacDonald P. Jackson: &lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/library/article/s5-XXX/1/1/957001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Punctuation and the Compositors of Shakespeare's Sonnets, 1609&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Library&lt;/em&gt;, 1975.) This means that &lt;strong&gt;any attempt by Shakespeare to &quot;hide&quot; secret messages through variations in capitalisation would come to nothing due to personal preferences of typesetters&lt;/strong&gt;. (And Shakespeare's poems were typeset more carefully than his plays.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, the additional irony that seeing &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Wi&lt;/strong&gt;nters shall**&quot; as a hidden allusion to &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Wi&lt;/strong&gt;lliam &lt;strong&gt;Sha&lt;/strong&gt;kespeare&quot; fails as soon as one notices that &quot;shall&quot; is not capitalised and that the choice of words to read as &quot;hidden message&quot; is therefore arbitrary. Never mind that an allusion on Shakespeare's own name would add nothing to the poem's meaning. In the two annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets that I have consulted (one by John Kerrigan for the New Penguin Shakespeare, 1986, one by Colin Burrow for the Oxford Shakespeare, 2002), no mention is made of this type of hidden message.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colin Burrow also writes in this introduction to &lt;em&gt;The Complete Sonnets and Poems&lt;/em&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;there is no reason to assume that the Sonnets are 'about' one relationship, that they are systematically organized on a numerological or biographical principle, or that [sonnets] 1-126 are addressed to one man (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S.: The sonnet quoted in the question is not sonnet 3 but sonnet 2. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-06T18:43:07.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-06T19:45:05.197" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter VII of Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt; an Italian merchant named Benedicke tries to woo Jone. After some time, Jone gets tired of this and tries to trick him into sleeping with a sow, making him believe he will actually be in bed with her. After putting a sow with a nightcap into a bed in a perfectly dark room, Benedicke is sent into that room (italics from the original, bold by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;By this time master &lt;em&gt;Benedicke&lt;/em&gt; was unready, and slipt into bed, where the Sowe lay swathed in a sheete, and her head bound in a great linnen cloth: As soone as he was laid, he began to embrace his new bedfellow, and laying his lips to her snout, hee felt her draw her breath very short.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Why how now love (quoth he) be you sick, be Got mistris &lt;em&gt;Jone&lt;/em&gt; your breat be very strong: &lt;strong&gt;have you no cacke a bed&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;The Sow feeling her selfe disturbed, began to grunt and keep a great stirre: whereat master &lt;em&gt;Benedick&lt;/em&gt; (like a mad man) ran out of the bed, crying de devil de devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what the intended meaning is here, especially in the context of having &quot;strong breath&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T08:12:51.940" Title="What does &quot;have you no cacke a bed&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11301" CreationDate="2019-07-06T20:04:14.890" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because of the smell, he wonders if she has soiled the bed.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even today, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/cack&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;cack&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is still used as a word for faeces. By searching the web for &amp;quot;cack a bed&amp;quot; (with the superfluous &amp;quot;e&amp;quot; removed), I found several results from 18th-century dictionaries between English and other languages such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=dp7hSAZlQ3UC&amp;amp;pg=PA85&amp;amp;lpg=PA85&amp;amp;dq=%22cack+a+bed%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French (1768)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4eZJv3RRcNQC&amp;amp;pg=PA378&amp;amp;lpg=PA378&amp;amp;dq=%22cack+a+bed%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German (1788)&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=k48NAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA113&amp;amp;lpg=PA113&amp;amp;dq=%22cack+a+bed%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch (1789)&lt;/a&gt;. I didn't find any reference in an English-to-English dictionary (could it be due to some censorship of vulgar words in England at that time?), but since I speak some French, I then searched for the French translation &amp;quot;chic en lit&amp;quot; and found &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=Eub5HiLlj7EC&amp;amp;pg=PA64&amp;amp;lpg=PA64&amp;amp;dq=%22chic+en+lit%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this French dictionary (1839)&lt;/a&gt; which gives the meaning of the related term &amp;quot;cago oou lièch&amp;quot; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petit enfant qui fait ses nécessités au lit sans demander le pot. Il est bas et fam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Small child who does their business in bed without asking for a potty. [The phrase] is low [vulgar?] and informal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits with the context of your quote. Benedicke gets into bed with (as he thinks) Jone, and when he notices a smell like a farmyard, he wonders if there is manure in the bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The grammar seems a bit off, but this might be accounted for by the imperfect English of the Italian merchant Benedicke. The meaning, however, seems clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T08:12:51.940" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11305" CreationDate="2019-07-07T19:41:41.643" Score="4" ViewCount="443" Body="&lt;p&gt;The end Thomas Nashe's novel &lt;em&gt;The Unfortunate Traveller&lt;/em&gt; takes a very antisemitic turn when both the novel's main character (Jack Wilton) and his concubine fall into the hands of a Jew named Zadoch. Zadoch wants to sell his prisoner to another Jew, Doctor Zacharie; while Jack Wilton is being transported through the streets of Rome, he is seen by the Marques of Mantua's wive, who is one of the Pope's concubines. Chapter IX ends with the following words (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the first sight [the Marques of Mantua's wive] was enamoured with my age and beardles face, that had in it no ill signe of phisiognomie fatall to fetters: after me she sent to know what I was, wherein I had offended, and whether I was going? My conducts resolved them all. Shee having received this answer, with a lustfull &lt;strong&gt;collachrimation&lt;/strong&gt; lamenting my Jewish &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/praemunire#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Premunire&lt;/a&gt;, that bodie and goods I should light into the hands of such a cursed generation, invented the means of my release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?search=collachrimation&amp;amp;title=Special%3ASearch&amp;amp;go=Go&amp;amp;ns0=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;collachrimation&quot; in Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; but I found an instance of the verb &lt;strong&gt;collachrimate&lt;/strong&gt; in Thomas Nashe's &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A08002.0001.001/1:4?rgn=div1;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Christs teares ouer Ierusalem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Tormentor (that abiureth commiseration) when he first enters into the infancy of his occupation, would &lt;strong&gt;collachrimate&lt;/strong&gt; my case, and rather chuse to haue beene tortured himselfe, them torment me with ingratitude as thou doost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on these usage examples, collachrimation sounds like a synonym or near-synonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/commiseration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commiseration&lt;/a&gt;, but I would like to find confirmation from a source that actually defines the word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T19:52:08.630" Title="What does collachrimation mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-unfortunate-traveller&gt;&lt;thomas-nashe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11304" CreationDate="2019-07-07T19:52:08.630" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The more common spelling was &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;collachrymate&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and you're right that it means essentially to commiserate, specifically in the form of weeping in sympathy. It can also be used as an adjective. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordsandphrasesfromthepast.com/bull-blog/collachrymate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ADJ.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  mingled with tears, accompanied with weeping (obsolete rare)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;VERB&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1) to weep or lament with, or in sympathy with others; to commiserate (obsolete rare)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  2) to exude in the form of tears (obsolete rare)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its etymology is from the Latin &lt;a href=&quot;https://latinlexicon.org/definition.php?p1=1003427&amp;amp;p2=c&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;collacrimātus&lt;/a&gt;, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/col-#Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;col-&lt;/a&gt; &quot;with&quot; + &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lacrimare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lacrimāre&lt;/a&gt; &quot;to weep&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(When I searched the web for &quot;collachrimate&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vM53CgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA183&amp;amp;lpg=PA183&amp;amp;dq=collachrimate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one result&lt;/a&gt;, relating to Nashe, gave the meaning as &quot;to weep together&quot; and cited the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; entry for &quot;collachrymate&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-07-07T19:52:08.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-08T01:19:16.340" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the book &lt;em&gt;Adversity Quotient&lt;/em&gt; by Dr. Paul G. Stoltz and I would like to make a gift with that book to someone, but that person is not fluent in English (it's a Spanish citizen). Is there any translation of this book into Spanish? I've searched, but I didn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4625" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-08T07:09:11.753" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T07:09:11.753" Title="Spanish translation of Adversity Quotient?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-08T15:13:07.387" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book forever ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a Native American inspired story about a girl whose village needs food. Her grandmother had a vision and sends her to travel across the country with a man (no real romance there, he was more family friend/guide). I think his name was Coyote something I can’t remember. She encounters many different tribes along the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had a necklace of animal beads that she keeps through all her travels and trades it in the end for children who know how to plant corn, to bring the blessing of corn back across the country to her people to survive a famine. The children lived separate because they were orphans or had some abnormality that set them apart, I remember one had blue eyes. But they still belonged to their people and she had to trade to take the knowledge of corn with them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Darcy Scott" LastActivityDate="2019-07-08T17:06:51.293" Title="Pre Colonial Native American coming of age story about a girl who travels across the country for food" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-09T00:30:23.190" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;Surrounding the death of Ernest Hemingway, there are declarations that he suffered vigilance from the FBI. It is also said that he believed badly that he was being checked at every turn by goverment security offices. He also received electroconvulsive therapy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I cannot find information on is if he suffered from a mental illness (which it appeared the case to be). Does anyone know which one was? Perhaps some kind of schizophrenia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7326" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T10:36:00.710" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T10:36:00.710" Title="Was Hemingway schizophrenic?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11311" CreationDate="2019-07-09T03:32:36.333" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book 'War and peace ' , the characters seem to mention the name of a person ' countess Apraksina ' with a tone of respect and concern in chapter 10. This character 'countess Apraksina' is not described in any of the previous chapters.I couldn't understand how she is relevent to the story, please explain (I am reading the translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7487" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-09T09:10:59.893" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T10:03:49.303" Title="Description of a character in 'War and peace'" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13688" CreationDate="2019-07-09T09:54:17.597" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;At some point in the indeterminate future, George RR Martin will release the next book in the &lt;em&gt;Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that the last book was released so long ago, is there (or will there be) a synopsis of books 1-5 so readers won't have to re-read the previous books before reading the new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T19:33:55.393" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T19:33:55.393" Title="Is there a synopsis available for A Song of Ice and Fire?" Tags="&lt;george-r-r-martin&gt;&lt;a-song-of-ice-and-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11309" CreationDate="2019-07-09T10:03:49.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apraskin is an old &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian noble family&lt;/a&gt;. They are not the only real nobles portrayed in the novel, but I couldn't find exactly whom of the Apraskins Tolstoy had in mind. My guess would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekaterina_Vladimirovna_Apraksina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ekaterina Vladimirovna&lt;/a&gt; but I don't have anything reliable to back it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2019-07-09T10:03:49.303" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-09T21:14:29.817" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why does Euripides put the following speech into the mouth of Andromache, in his play of the same name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Andromache&lt;/strong&gt;: (Breaking into a rage) Inhabitants of Sparta, most hated men on earth, devious plotters, masters of lies, hatcher’s of wicked schemes, whose thoughts are twisted and rotten, never direct, your successes in Greece are built on crimes! Every vice belongs to you, you commit murder without end and know no shame in seeking your profit. Constantly you are discovered saying one thing but thinking another. I curse you! I am not appalled by the prospect of death as you suppose ... there will be no words of flattery on my tongue when I take leave of you ... do not take any pleasure from my present misery - it may come to you also. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I'm interested in is answer that reflects the historical circumstances within which the play was written, that is the Peloponnesian Wars where Attica tore itself apart in civil warfare leading to the deaths of roughly 250,000 men, women and children and with the death of democracy and the rise of Macedonia, led by Alexander and which appeared to model itself upon the Persian empire. Also any other substantiating evidence in connection with any other plays that Euripides wrote on the same subject would be useful. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T23:03:23.667" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T23:03:23.667" Title="Why did Andromache call the men of Sparta ‘devious plotters and the master of lies’?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;euripides&gt;&lt;andromache&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11314" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11315" CreationDate="2019-07-10T04:07:15.257" Score="3" ViewCount="1810" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a story a long time ago about a Civil War soldier who was being hanged from a bridge but the rope broke and he escaped. It goes through all the things he went through after escaping but then it turns out his neck was snapped and he died in the noose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7401" LastEditorUserId="1032" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T23:12:39.393" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T23:13:46.807" Title="US Civil War story: man hanged from a bridge" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11314" CreationDate="2019-07-10T04:53:31.577" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?69758&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambrose_Bierce&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ambrose Bierce&lt;/a&gt;. The full text is available at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/375&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Occurrence_at_Owl_Creek_Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; plot summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Peyton Farquhar, a civilian and plantation owner, is being prepared for execution by hanging from an Alabama railroad bridge during the American Civil War. Six military men and a company of infantrymen are present, guarding the bridge and carrying out the sentence. Farquhar thinks of his wife and children and is then distracted by a noise that, to him, sounds like an unbearably loud clanging; it is actually the ticking of his watch. He considers the possibility of jumping off the bridge and swimming to safety if he can free his tied hands, but the soldiers drop him from the bridge before he can act on the idea.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;In a flashback, Farquhar and his wife are relaxing at home one evening when a soldier rides up to the gate. Farquhar, a supporter of the Confederacy, learns from him that Union troops have seized the Owl Creek railroad bridge and repaired it. The soldier suggests that Farquhar might be able to burn the bridge down if he can slip past its guards. He then leaves, but doubles back after nightfall to return north the way he came. The soldier is actually a disguised Union scout who has lured Farquhar into a trap as any civilian caught interfering with the railroads will be hanged.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;The story returns to the present, and the rope around Farquhar's neck breaks when he falls from the bridge into the creek. He frees his hands, pulls the noose away, and rises to the surface to begin his escape. His senses now greatly sharpened, he dives and swims downstream to avoid rifle and cannon fire. Once he is out of range, he leaves the creek to begin the journey to his home, 30 miles away. Farquhar walks all day long through a seemingly endless forest, and that night he begins to hallucinate, seeing strange constellations and hearing whispered voices in an unknown language. He travels on, urged by the thought of his wife and children despite the pains caused by his ordeal. The next morning, after having apparently fallen asleep while walking, he finds himself at the gate to his plantation. He rushes to embrace his wife, but before he can do so, he feels a heavy blow upon the back of his neck; there is a loud noise and a flash of white, and &quot;then all is darkness and silence&quot;. It is revealed that Farquhar never escaped at all; he imagined the entire third part of the story during the time between falling through the bridge and the noose breaking his neck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T23:13:46.807" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T23:13:46.807" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-10T08:35:45.200" Score="4" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Gérard Genette, the paratext is what is beyond a text, e.g.: the cover, the title, the interviews about a novel...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paratext can be devided into two categories: spatial and temporal. The spatial paratexts are peritext and epitext, while the temporal ones are divided into three categories: original, later and prior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not understand the two categories &quot;spatial&quot; and &quot;temporal&quot;. Can someone help me understand them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In those examples can you help me find out which paratext is temporal and which one is spatial? I still have a hard time making a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The novel’s title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author’s foreword written for the second edition of the novel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Film adaptation of the novel&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The film’s trailer &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7491" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T15:12:26.920" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T15:14:15.487" Title="What is the difference between spatial and temporal paratext?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;gerard-genette&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11317" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11318" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" Score="0" Body="Questions about Euripides's play 'Andromache', which was written in the late fifth century BCE. Use this tag with [euripides] and [greek-literature]. Do not use this tag for Racine's play 'Andromaque'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:01:53.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11319" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11320" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Athenian tragedian Euripides (fifth century BCE) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the [greek-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T10:03:08.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10948" CreationDate="2019-07-10T18:23:21.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the story has some earlier origin, but this is exactly the story in the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Withershins_(Book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Withershins&lt;/a&gt; from Morrowind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All right,&quot; said Kazagha. &quot;Why don't you want to talk?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Zaki put down his mug of mead and just stared at his wife for a few seconds. Finally, grudgingly: &quot;Because every time I have a conversation, darling, it flows in alphabetical order. Just like I told you. I think the only way to stop it is not to talk at all.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Couldn't you just be imagining this?&quot; said Kazagha patiently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the end he has a new problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the counter, when Zaki pulled out his satchel of gold pieces, Octoplasm merely shook his head: &quot;Are treatment radical such of effects term long the what sure be can't we, naturally. Charge no.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Feeling the first real relief he had felt in days, Zaki walked backwards out of the shop and down the road to his shop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7494" LastActivityDate="2019-07-10T18:23:21.037" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-10T19:27:26.600" Score="0" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read it many years ago, but infuriatingly cannot find it. It appeared in &lt;em&gt;The New Republic&lt;/em&gt; roughly between 2003 and 2012 by a woman (I think a mentee of his) with a remarkably simple, crystalline style. All that I remember of the obituary, besides these few meager details, is that the writer describes the man as being friendly and patient toward new writers but vitriolic toward any writer who showed the least arrogance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7366" LastEditorUserId="7366" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T18:42:31.963" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T18:42:31.963" Title="From which obituary of a male &quot;New Republic&quot; editor do these details sound familiar?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4069" CreationDate="2019-07-11T03:36:20.127" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song is about heroin addiction.  The handle in your hand is the syringe. The land of milk and honey is when the drug hits you.  Do it again, the need for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7496" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T22:45:19.223" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T22:45:19.223" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-11T00:01:27.513" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can anyone find the original quote from Baltasar Gracián in the Spanish he wrote this in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some never arrive at being complete, somewhat is always awanting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The art of worldy wisdom&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Graham" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-07-11T07:27:12.763" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T07:27:12.763" Title="What is Baltasar Gracián's original quote to &quot;Some never arrive at being complete, somewhat is always awanting&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;baltasar-gracian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11324" CreationDate="2019-07-11T04:02:55.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some call it Aphorism #6 but in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://freeditorial.com/en/books/el-arte-de-la-prudencia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;text I found&lt;/a&gt;, it is #5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Nadie es perfecto: No nacemos perfectos, cada día nos desarrollamos en nuestra personalidad y en nuestra profesión. Esto se conoce por la pureza de nuestros gustos, por la claridad de nuestras ideas, por la madurez de nuestros juicios y por la firmeza de nuestra voluntad. &lt;strong&gt;La persona completa –sabia en el hablar, prudente en sus actos- es admirada.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Full quote in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are not born perfect: every day we develop in our personality and in our calling till we reach the highest point of our completed being, to the full round of our accomplishment, of our excellences. This is known by the purity of our taste, the clearness of our thought, the maturity of our judgment, and the firmness of our will. Some never arrive at being complete; somewhat is always awanting: other ripen late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="aparente001" LastActivityDate="2019-07-11T06:49:41.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11326" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-11T09:04:34.433" Score="2" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;I guess isolation and social exclusion of different groups is something of relevance. e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crooks: racism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Curley's wife: misogyny &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Candy: ageism &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lennie: ableism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still can't think of any other points that is of relevance to contemporary society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not looking for anything over the top. Just looking for a few words or sentences to help me along. I can do all the quote finding and analysis myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7499" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-19T22:10:06.317" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T22:13:21.913" Title="How is “Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck still relevant to readers of today?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;of-mice-and-men&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11328" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11329" CreationDate="2019-07-12T15:32:58.477" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the first page of Chapter VII in Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, the narrator tells us (italics from the original),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Halfe the day sometime would hee sit by her, as shee was waighing wooll, often sighing and sobbing to himselfe, yet saying nothing, as if he had been tonguelesse, like the men of &lt;em&gt;Coromandae&lt;/em&gt;; and the loather to speake, for that hee could speak but bad English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which part of the world is Deloney referring to? Which people were supposed to be &quot;tongueless&quot;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coromandae&amp;amp;t=canonical&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching for Coromandae&lt;/a&gt;, I find the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Peninsula&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coromandel peninsula in New Zealand&lt;/a&gt;, which did not receive its current name until 1820, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coromandel_Coast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coromandel Coast in southeast India&lt;/a&gt;, whose name is probably  more recent than Deloney's novel (the Dutch didn't reach &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Coromandel#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coromandel governorate&lt;/a&gt; until 1606). At this point, I doubt that I'm on the right track with &quot;Coromandel&quot;, so where did Deloney get the name &quot;Coromandae&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T16:16:59.173" Title="Who were the tongueless men of Coromandae?" Tags="&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11328" CreationDate="2019-07-12T16:16:59.173" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reference is to Pliny’s &lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt;, where the Choromandae seem to be a species of monkey or ape found in the forests of India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sunt et satyri subsolanis indorum montibus (catarcludorum dicitur regio), pernicissimum animal, iam quadripedes, iam recte currentes humana effigie; propter velocitatem nisi senes aut aegri non capiuntur. &lt;strong&gt;choromandarum&lt;/strong&gt; gentem vocat tauron silvestrem, sine voce, stridoris horrendi, hirtis corporibus, oculis glaucis, dentibus caninis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the mountainous districts of the eastern parts of India, in what is called the country of the Catharcludi, we find the Satyr, an animal of extraordinary swiftness. These go sometimes on four feet, and sometimes walk erect; they have also the features of a human being. On account of their swiftness, these creatures are never to be caught, except when they are either aged or sickly. Tauron gives the name of &lt;strong&gt;Choromandæ&lt;/strong&gt; to a nation which dwell in the woods and have no proper voice. These people screech in a frightful manner; their bodies are covered with hair, their eyes are of a sea-green colour, and their teeth like those of the dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pliny the Elder (79). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137:book=7:chapter=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt;, 7.2&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by John Bostock (1855).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Deloney’s ‘tonguelesse’ corresponds to Pliny’s ‘sine voce’ and so means ‘without speech or language’, not ‘without tongues’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T16:16:59.173" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11330" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11331" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Spanish prose writer Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601 – 1658) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the [spanish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:34:05.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11332" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11333" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English playwright, poet, satirist and pamphleteer Thomas Nashe (1567 – c. 1601) and his life as a writer. His works include the novel 'The Unfortunate Traveller'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:36:07.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" Score="0" Body="Questions about the picaresque novel 'The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton' (1594) by Thomas Nashe. Use this tag with [thomas-nashe]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:37:43.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11336" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11337" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Norwegian writer, musician and former reporter Jo Nesbø (born in 1960) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:39:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11338" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11339" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Elegies' ('Elegiae'), the only surviving work by the first-century poet Sextus Propertius. Use this tag with [propertius] and [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:42:58.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11340" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11341" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author, poet, orator and jurist Albert Pike (1809 – 1891) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:44:42.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11342" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11343" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author Andrea Levy (1956 – 2019) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:46:49.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11344" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11345" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren (1907 – 2002) and her life as a writer. She is best known for her Pippi Longstocking books. Use this tag with the [scandinavian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" LastActivityDate="2019-07-12T20:49:45.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11346" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11350" CreationDate="2019-07-13T03:47:36.220" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is &quot;temporary absolution&quot; in the quoted passage from &quot;The Confession&quot; by René Maizeroy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She grew excited, sobbed, seemed enervated and worn out, as if she were still burning from her lover’s kisses, hardly seemed to know what she was saying, and begged for &lt;strong&gt;temporary absolution&lt;/strong&gt; from her sins; but then Champdelin, in his exasperation, and unable to restrain himself any longer, interrupted her in a furious voice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This story &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lifeworkofhenrir03maupiala/page/178/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first appeared in English&lt;/a&gt; in a collection of works attributed to Guy de Maupassant, but which included stories by other writers. You can find the French text and the attribution to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Maizeroy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Maizeroy&lt;/a&gt; in the newspaper &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k7526163w/f1.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Supplément&lt;/em&gt; for 4th December 1906&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7505" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T09:42:05.107" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T09:42:05.107" Title="Meaning of &quot;temporary absolution&quot; in Maizeroy's &quot;The Confession&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;rene-maizeroy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-13T04:45:57.150" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;My wife is looking for a book that she read circa 2004.  The novel was a “coming of age story” with a teenage protagonist.  Embedded within the prose of the book were Middle Eastern (possibly Lebanese), and American recipes.  Among others, she remembers getting recipes for mjeddrah, meatloaf, tabbouli, and baclava.  The story had details like what kind of bulgur the character’s father used in the recipes, and she says while the plot wasn’t necessarily food-centric, everything tied back to food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She believes the story is set in New England and that that the protagonist was transplanted there.  She says the time was more or less contemporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Added to state:  We have searched quite a bit. In particular, we saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://bookriot.com/2017/01/23/100-must-read-books-food-in-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list of 100 books featuring food&lt;/a&gt; and did not think it was any of them. &lt;em&gt;Crescent&lt;/em&gt; is among them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7506" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T06:28:41.267" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T06:28:41.267" Title="A novel with a female teenage protagonist with Middle Eastern recipes interspersed with the prose" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11402" CreationDate="2019-07-13T05:31:47.140" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Dagny Taggart found John Galt's motor, she tried to find a scientist who could reconstruct it. None of the people she interviewed worked out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had tried to find a scientist able to attempt the reconstruction of the motor. She had interviewed the men recommended to her as the best in their field... The decision to speak to Dr. Robert Stadler had been her last recourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had forced herself to call him, against the resistance of some immovable point within her that felt like brakes slammed tight. She had argued against herself. She had thought: I deal with men like Jim and Orren Boyle - &lt;strong&gt;his guilt is less than theirs&lt;/strong&gt; - why can't I speak to him? She had found no answer, only a stubborn sense of reluctance, only the feeling that of all the men on earth, Dr. Robert Stadler was the one she must not call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hank Rearden later commented that Dr. Stadler wanted Dagney to help him pretend that he was still the great Dr. Robert Stadler, and that she shouldn't have seen him. (John Galt later identifies this as &quot;the sanction of the victim&quot;). Also, while Jim Taggart is the primary villain in the book, Robert Stadler represents a wholly different kind of evil - the man who knew better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why was she so reluctant to see Stadler? Did she realize that this was giving him the sanction of the victim, or did she realize at some conscious level that his guilt was arguably greater than Jim's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T03:37:01.377" Title="Why was Dagny Taggart so reluctant to call Dr. Robert Stadler about John Galt's motor?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11347" CreationDate="2019-07-13T07:48:50.497" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/773454.Crescent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crescent&lt;/a&gt;, by Diana Abu-Jaber?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Written in a lush, lyrical style, infused with the flavors and scents of Middle Eastern food, and spiced with history and fable, &lt;em&gt;Crescent&lt;/em&gt; is a sensuous love story and a gripping tale of risk and commitment. The reading guide includes a number of recipes to share with friends and family!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirty-nine-year-old Sirine, never married, lives with a devoted Iraqi-immigrant uncle and an adoring dog named King Babar. She works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant, her passions aroused only by the preparation of food—until an unbearably handsome Arabic literature professor starts dropping by for a little home cooking. Falling in love brings Sirene's whole heart to a boil—stirring up memories of her parents and questions about her identity as an Arab American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heroine is quite a bit older than a teenager, although it still appears to be something of a coming-of-age story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T07:48:50.497" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11346" CreationDate="2019-07-13T18:59:05.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;absolution&quot; is presumably clear; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/absolution#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; defines it as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;An absolving of sins from ecclesiastical penalties by an authority.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Forgiveness of sins, in a general sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An absolution is what you normally receive from a catholic priest after your confession, assuming that you show sufficient contrition. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c2a4.htm#1461&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paragraph 1461 of the Catechism&lt;/a&gt; says, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Since Christ entrusted to his apostles the ministry of reconciliation, bishops who are their successors, and priests, the bishops' collaborators, continue to exercise this ministry. Indeed bishops and priests, by virtue of the sacrament of Holy Orders, have the power to forgive all sins &quot;in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last part gives the impression that once a priest has forgiven your sins, there is nothing to worry about. Moreover, in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c2a4.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entire chapter on &quot;the sacraments of healing&quot; in the Cathecism&lt;/a&gt;, there is no mention of &quot;&lt;em&gt;temporary&lt;/em&gt; absolution&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s2c2a4.htm#1441&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paragraph 1441&lt;/a&gt; also points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only God forgives sins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as a catholic, Mrs. de Champdelin would also be familiar with the concept of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Judgment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Last Judgement&lt;/a&gt;. In the light of this concept, any absolution that a priest may give for your sins is only temporary, i.e. only the Last Judgment can tell you whether God had really forgiven your sins. Mrs. Champdelin's hope for &quot;temporary absolution&quot; implies that she considers her own sins so grave that even if a priest absolved her, she would not be forgiven by God on Judgment Day. (One may add that Mrs. de Champdelin shows true contrition here, so it is ironic that Mr. de Champdelin, who committed the same sins without contrition, does not want to forgive her.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-13T18:59:05.810" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11352" CreationDate="2019-07-13T19:42:10.387" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter VIII of Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, a woman schools Mrs. Winchcombe (Jack of Newbury's wife) on how to save money by being more economical with the food for her servants and workers (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And in like manner for their meate: it is well knowne, that neckes and points of beefe is their ordinarie fare: which because it is commonly leane, they seeth therewith now and then a peece of bacon or porke, whereby they make their pottage fat, and therewith drives out the rest with more content. And thus must you learne to doe. And beside that, the midriffes of the Oxen, and the cheekes, the sheepes heads, and &lt;strong&gt;the gathers&lt;/strong&gt;, which you give away at your gate, might serve them wel enough: which would be a great sparing to your other meate, and by this meanes you might the better maintaine your hoode and silke gowne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;meat&quot;&lt;/a&gt; was often used in the more general meaning of food or dish. Mrs. Winchcombe also admits that her servants&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;make such parings of their cheese, and keepe such chipping of their bread, that their very ortes would serve two or three honest folkes to their dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ort#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ort (usually plural)&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A fragment; a scrap of leftover food; any remainder; a piece of refuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is whether &quot;gathers&quot; refers to some edible part of an animal (edible for Elizabethans, not necessarily for modern dainty eating habits) or whether it is a synonym or near-synonym for &quot;orts&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T07:41:58.520" Title="What does &quot;the gathers&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11351" CreationDate="2019-07-14T07:41:58.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gather, &lt;em&gt;n.2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;   &lt;em&gt;Obsolete.&lt;/em&gt; The pluck (heart, liver and lights) of an animal, &lt;em&gt;esp.&lt;/em&gt; of a sheep or calf. Also &lt;em&gt;plural&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a1600   T. Deloney &lt;em&gt;Pleasant Hist. Iohn Winchcomb&lt;/em&gt; (1619) viii. sig. Kij   The sheepes heads, and the gathers, which you giue away at your gate, might serue them well enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(‘Lights’ are lungs, so called because they are the least dense of the internal organs.) Sheep’s gathers are the main ingredient in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haggis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;haggis&lt;/a&gt;, although in Newbury they might be used for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humble_pie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humble pie&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T07:41:58.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11353" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11360" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:07:37.280" Score="8" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;The eponymous hero (or heroine) of George Herriman's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krazy_Kat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Krazy Kat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; cartoons uses a very peculiar language. Most of the time, it's simply phonetical and is easy to understand, but in the strip that appeared on 25 July 1936, I have difficulty understanding some of what he or she or it is saying. In that cartoon, Offisa Pupp takes a nap; he dreams that he meets Krazy and then catches Ignatz Mouse. Offisa Pupp and Ignatz start wrestling each other, with Krazy looking on and commenting on the action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Krazy: Regular, the romin - insulting the kottage injins - &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp [to Ignatz, who's getting reading to hurl a brick]: Avaunt - wastrel &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Hoikillitz tossin the big bed bull - &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Have at you - Quince.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Etlitz jugglin' a lot of woils - &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Kavvy Kannem - [i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beware_of_the_dog&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cave canem&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Horachel diffendin' his bridges - [Horachel defending his bridges?]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Shis kibab - &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Cyklops destroyin' the tutty-nine dumb dimmins [i.e. Cyclops destroying the 39 ...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Skol&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Jupita darin' the tunda bolds - [i.e. Jupiter daring the thunder bolts]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Sayonara -&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Ajex knoggin' the lightnin' around - [i.e. Ajax knocking the lightning around]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Weeny weedy weeky [i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veni,_vidi,_vici&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;veni, vidi, vici&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Krazy: Nobil - movillis - killosis - &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pupp: Hark - - I seem to hear the plaudits of my people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who or what is Horachel? What are dimmins? Why would Jupiter by &quot;daring&quot; thunderbolts? (Or was that supposed to be a genitive, i.e. &quot;Jupiter's&quot;?) And what does &quot;Nobil - movillis - killosis&quot; if it has any meaning at all? Please hurl a brick with explanations at my noodle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T07:06:16.857" Title="Krazy language in Krazy Kat, 25 July 1936" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;george-herriman&gt;&lt;krazy-kat&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11260" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:29:13.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two answers that have been posted so far are exclusively based on &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre. An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt; and assume that that story's narrator is reliable. Of course, one may well ask to what extent her account of her husband's past can be relied upon, since she does not condemn the cruelty of his imprisonment of his first wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter XXVI, Richard Mason's solicitor Briggs mentions a marriage date fifteen years before Jane and Rochester's planned marriage: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I affirm and can prove that on the 20th of October, A.D. — (&lt;strong&gt;a date of fifteen years back&lt;/strong&gt;), Edward Fairfax Rochester, (...), was married to my sister, Bertha Antoinette Mason, daughter of Jonas Mason, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some resistance, Edward Rochester finally admits,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I now inform you that she is my wife, whom &lt;strong&gt;I married fifteen years ago&lt;/strong&gt;, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter XXVII, Rochester tells Jane,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I lived with that woman upstairs four years&lt;/strong&gt;, and before that time she had tried me indeed: (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may lead to the conclusion that Bertha's confinement started &lt;strong&gt;eleven years&lt;/strong&gt; before the events in Chapters XXVI-XXVII, assuming that the years have not been rounded up or down. However, one should not overlook that &lt;strong&gt;Bertha Mason's or Antoinette Cosway's confinement did not start at her arrival in England&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter XXVII, Rochester also tells Jane how he got married and what happened after that (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'One night I had been awakened by her yells—(&lt;strong&gt;since the medical men had pronounced her mad she had of course been shut up&lt;/strong&gt;)—it was a fiery West Indian Night; one of the description that frequently precede the hurricanes of those climates; (...). (...) I was physically influenced by the atmosphere and scene, and my ears were filled with the curses the maniac still shrieked out; wherein she momentarily mingled my name with such a tone of demon-hate, with such language!—no professed harlot ever had a fouler vocabulary than she: though two rooms off, I heard every word—the thin partitions of the West Indian house opposing but slight obstruction to her wolfish cries.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  '&quot;Go,&quot; said Hope, &quot;and live again in Europe: there it is not known what a sullied name you bear, nor what a filthy burden is bound to you. You may take the maniac with you to England; confine her with due attendance and precautions at Thornfield: (...).&#xA;  'To England, then, I conveyed here; a fearful voyage I had with such a monster in the vessel. Glad was I when I at last got her to Thornfield, and saw her safely lodged in that third-storey room, of whose secret inner cabinet she has &lt;strong&gt;now for ten years&lt;/strong&gt; made a wild beast's den—a goblin's cell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the years have been rounded up (if eleven is correct) or down (if ten is correct), but we don't know for &lt;strong&gt;how many years Bertha or Antoinette lived in confinement while in the West Indies&lt;/strong&gt;. Rochester says that &quot;here vices sprang up fast and rank&quot;, which suggests that this started not long after they were married. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of Part Two of &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;, Antoinette Cosway/Mason and her unnamed husband (Edward Rochester's name is never mentioned in the entire novel) travel to their &quot;honeymoon house&quot;. The man starts to dislike the environment very soon; even before they have arrived at the house, he tells himself that &quot;the woman is a stranger&quot;. Near the end of Part Two, he writes a letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then I wrote a letter to the firm of lawyers I had dealt with in Spanish Town. I told them that I wished to rent a furnished house not too near the town, commodious enough to allow for two separate suites of rooms. I also told them to engage a staff of servants whom I was prepared to pay very liberally—so long they keep their mouths shut, I thought—provided that they are discreet, I wrote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This ties in with &quot;of course been shut up&quot; from Chapter XXVII in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. However, it is not clear how much time passes in Part Two of &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;; it is easy to get the impression it covers just a few weeks or, perhaps, months. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part Three, which is again told from Bertha's or Antoinette's point of view, does not provide clear information on the duration of her confinement. During the dream at the very end, she says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I passed the room where they brought me &lt;strong&gt;yesterday or the day before yesterday&lt;/strong&gt;, I don't remember. Perhaps it was &lt;strong&gt;long ago&lt;/strong&gt; for I seemed to know the house well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Part Three contains several mentions of Bertha or Antoinette getting Grace Poole's keys and wandering around Thornfield Hall, so she must have been brought there long before &quot;yesterday or the day before yesterday&quot;. Overall, the events in &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; are hard to date, except for its beginning after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_of_the_British_West_Indies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slavery Abolition Act of 1833&lt;/a&gt;, which abolished slavery in Britain and its colonies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T14:14:02.887" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:14:02.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="103" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:30:44.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no consensus among critics about whether &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; stands on its own or not. For example, Francis Wyndham wrote in his introduction to the first edition (1966):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For many years, Jean Rhys has been haunted by the figure of the first Mrs Rochester—the mad wife in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. The present novel—completed at last after much revision and agonized rejection of earlier versions—is her story. Not, of course, literally so: it is in no sense a pastiche of Charlotte Brontë and &lt;strong&gt;exists on its own right, quite independent of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;All That Foolishness / That All Foolishness: Race and Carribean Culture as Thematics of Liberation in Jean Rhys' &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Critica&lt;/em&gt; 2.2, 1990), Sandra Drake wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The novel stands on its own. It could have been written without the relationship of intertextual referentiality of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Jean Rhys wrote in a letter to Francis Wyndham dated 14 April 1964:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I think there were several Antoinettes and Mr Rochesters. Indeed I am sure. Mine is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; Miss Brontë's, though much suggested by &quot;Jane Eyre&quot;. She is, to start with, young not old. She is still a girl when she fires the house and jumps to her death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, neither this statement nor Sandra Drake's deny the deliberate intertextuality between &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;New York Times Book Review&lt;/em&gt; of 18 June 1967, Walter Allen wrote that &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; is only,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a triumph of atmosphere [which] does not exist in its own right, as Mr. Rochester is almost as shadowy as Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is not clear why Allen claims that &quot;Mr. Rochester is almost as shadowy as Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Mason&quot;, since Part Two, which represents more than 60% of the novel, is told from Rochester's point of view.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Thorpe wrote in 1977:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though I have seen people ignorant of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; respond to this novel as a self-sufficient work, it would be foolish to deny that many average readers come to it with some recollection of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; and that Rhys relied in a general way on their doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Burning Down the House: The Revisionary Paradigm of Jean Rhys's &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (1993), Caroline Rody wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thorpe disagrees with Allen, as does another critic, Arnold A. Davidson, who argues vehemently for the text's wholeness, citing as precedents the famous literary borrowings of Shakespeare, Joyce, and others. (...) In striking contrast to these three male critics, &lt;strong&gt;none of the dozen or more female critics I have read finds it necessary to consider the &quot;crucial&quot; question of the autonomy of Rhys's text&lt;/strong&gt;; most are interested, rather, in the nature of its attachment to &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;The suggestively grim and awesome imperative that a text &quot;stand and be judged alone&quot; is alien to the model of inheritance implicit in &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/strong&gt; which privileges relationships — to a mother first and, I shall argue, to daughters to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, all the critics cited above were familiar with &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;; I doubt that they know what it is like to read &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; without being familiar with Charlotte Brontë's novel. On a superficial level, the first two parts of Rhys' novel can easily be read without any knowledge of &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;; it's only at the beginning of Part Three (the shortest part) that &quot;Grace Poole&quot;, &quot;Leah&quot; and &quot;Mrs Eff&quot; may confuse readers who are unfamiliar with &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;. However, readers should be aware that the intertextuality between the two texts goes deeper than the level of the plot and the characters' names. Readers who are not familiar with &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; will not understand in what way &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; &quot;rewrites&quot; the story of Bertha Mason/Antoinette Cosway and Edward Rochester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:46:16.753" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:46:16.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11356" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11357" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American comic strip 'Krazy Kat' by George Herriman, which ran in American newspapers from 1913 to 1944. Use this tag with [george-herriman] and [comics]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:40:58.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11358" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11359" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944) and his life as an artist. His best known work is the newspaper comic strip 'Krazy Kat' (1913 – 1944)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" LastActivityDate="2019-07-14T19:42:45.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11353" CreationDate="2019-07-14T20:27:47.600" Score="15" Body="&lt;h2&gt;As it has been suggested that it would be useful to identify all of the Allusions in the quoted piece, I've edited this answer to include further information. And made some discoveries along the way.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular, the romin - insulting the kottage injins&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The start of this extract begins with a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Atilius_Regulus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Atilius Regulus&lt;/a&gt;, the roman who defeated the Carthaginians in a naval battle at Cape Ecnomus during the first Punic War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP has already, in comments, identified&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoikillitz tossin the big bed bull&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/bull.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;seventh labour of Hercules&lt;/a&gt;, wrestling the Cretan Bull&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etlitz jugglin' a lot of woils&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would be Atlas juggling a lot of worlds. Atlas was a Titan condemned to hold up the heavens, but is also credited by some sources with the creation of the first celestial sphere. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_sphere#Star_globe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A celestial sphere in this context maps the constellations on the outside of a sphere&lt;/a&gt;, resulting in a mirror image of the constellations as seen from Earth. This is the object that Atlas is typically depicted holding, not a globe of the earth. Hence he is juggling the many worlds of the celestial bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ajex knoggin' the lightnin' around&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to refer to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ajax of Oileus (after his father, Oileus), or Ajax the Lesser, because he was not the equal of the Telamonian Ajax In the sack of Troy, [Ajax] violated Cassandra at the altar of Athena, and Athena caused him to be shipwrecked on the way home. Poseidon saved him, but Ajax, boasting of his own power, defied the lightning to strike him down and was instantly struck by it. Other versions of the story say that he stole the Palladium and that later Poseidon destroyed him for blasphemy.&#xA;&amp;quot;Ajax.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.encyclopedia.com/reference/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ajax&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed.. . Encyclopedia.com. (July 19, 2019)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It actually seems that most versions of the tale I can find don’t talk about him being killed by lightning. The phrase ‘Ajax defied the lightning’ seems to have has great currency at one time, but I’ve not identified a source, though it was used by PG Wodehouse in Summer Lightning. The earliest use of the phrase I can find is in a book from 1845  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=931BAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA64&amp;amp;dq=%22ajax%20defied%20the%20lightning%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiJxIj45cDjAhWFYMAKHWqzCRk4ChC7BQgrMAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ajax%20defied%20the%20lightning%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘Will Watch: The Bold Smuggler: A Tale of the Coast : the Narrative Founded on Fact, and Characters Drawn from Life&lt;/a&gt;. Where it is linked to Ajax, son of Telamon rather than Ajax, son of Oileus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ajax, the son of Telamon, whom Homer sometimes likeneth unto a ass, and you, good reader, have, without a doubt, seen worthily represented by the merry Andrew Ducrow, in his Hippodramatic exhibition at the foot of Westminster bridge, on the Surrey shore of the River Thames – we say, when Ajax defied the lightning, he would never have been such a fool had he known anything about he principles of electricity; for he would have then known  that the lightning, properly treated, was a harmless well-&lt;em&gt;conducted&lt;/em&gt; body enough.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onto the allusions that the OP specifically inquired about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Horachel&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may be a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatius_Cocles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horatius Cocles&lt;/a&gt; who&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;defended the Pons Sublicius from the invading army of Etruscan King Lars Porsena of Clusium in the late 6th century BC, during the war between Rome and Clusium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as immortalised in the narrative poem '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/360/7/158.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horatius at the Bridge&lt;/a&gt;' (link kindly provided by @user14111, I had remembered enough of the poem to add 'Tiber' to my search terms but hadn't though to link the poem itself)&#xA;Some sources also note that the nickname 'Cocles' indicates a one-eyed man, or cyclops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Cyklops destroyin' the tutty-nine dumb dimmins&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d guess that ‘dimmins’ are demons, this is supported by a paper by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/1474053/George_Herrimans_Krazy_Kat_&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr Taimi Olsen in 2008&lt;/a&gt; where they state&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy, acting like Jack Dempsey, falls into the role of a street-smart guy and uses boxing slang (“K.O.” for knock-out) and casual Northern speech (‘regla” for “regular” and “golla” for “golly”)—and an immigrant reference (“knock it for a goulash”). He (she is not very feminine in this cartoon!) brags that he is a battling demon or “bettling dimmin.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remain in the dark as to the significance of there being 39 of them, or any particular tale of Roman Mythology that relates demons to cyclopes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that it may be related to Polyphemus; Odysseus fools him with the aid of strong wine, hence Pupp's response 'Skol', a toast. However that still doesn't get us to 39 demons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Roman mythology the cyclopes forge Jupiter's thunderbolts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Jupita darin' the tunda bolds&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jupiter was obviously the God of Thunder, so the association seems clear. ‘Daring the thunderbolts’ I would read as his having (per the OED) the ‘boldness or courage’ [to hurl] his thunderbolts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking at the letter substitutions employed in Krazy Kat's speech, it may be that we aren't looking at 'daring' at all. Looking within the same sentence, we have the word 'bolds' for 'bolts'. Substituting 't' for 'd' in 'darin' gives us 'tarin' which could, in Krazy Kat's ideolect represent 'tearing', which is a recognised description of one of the sounds that thunder makes.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/lightning/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Energy from a lightning channel heats the air to around 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes the air to rapidly expand, creating a sound wave known as thunder. The stepped leader causes the initial &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tearing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; sound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/oct/05/weatherwatch-thunder-noise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.theguardian.com/news/2011/oct/05/weatherwatch-thunder-noise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A snapping or &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tearing&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; sound before the main thunder is caused by a failed leader, a streamer of positive charge going up from the ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we could be expected to understand 'Jupiter tearing the thunderbolts', but I'm not 100% convinced by this argument myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nobil - movillis - killosis&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;taking some hints from this book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zQwbBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT39&amp;amp;lpg=PT39&amp;amp;dq=%22movillis%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mTljbLCR71&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1x9l3K9EwyHJ7oZfMRA_io-wvTlw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjp8oWbnLXjAhXSQkEAHbmDALsQ6AEwB3oECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Movillis&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which invites us into a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mental recitation of these often mystifying spellings in order to hear what actual words stand behind the wretched phonics of “movillis -stipenditz-killotzil”...’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which I eventually decoded as ‘marvellous -stupendous -colossal”, suggesting that the phrase you asked about would be ‘noble - marvellous-colossus’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So. That quote back in the Ajax section, which rumbled on with a dozen of more commas and didn't seem to add a great deal? It turns out that that was the key to unlocking this whole list of allusions and why Krazy Kat is calling them out as they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merry old Andrew Ducrow performed an act called ‘The Living Statue or Model of Antiques’ during which he assumed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘various poses including several that imitated Hercules battling the Nemean Lion’(Wyke 1997b:53-54)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This knowledge leads us to a body-builder named  &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=l08nDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA435&amp;amp;lpg=PA435&amp;amp;dq=%22andrew%20ducrow%22%20%22living%20Statue%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=0zB74VqCqQ&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U038VzBSLZ045BQAYa-OVYA1-nwVQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwimjL7f68DjAhVLQkEAHfjLCycQ6AEwDXoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22andrew%20ducrow%22%20%22living%20Statue%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eugene Sandow&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sandow’s act did not consist of any marvels of strength. Instead, covered in plaster dust, he struck a number of poses in imitation of classical statuary. A number of famous works such as the “Dying gaul” were evoked, but the most famous imitation, and the one that became his trademark, was his imitation of the Farnese Hercules. His identification with the hero became so strong that in May 1894 he even reprised Hercules’ first labour and wrestled a lion in San Francisco, admittedly a lion muzzled and wearing leather mittens (Blanshard 2005:151-156).’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sandow became a huge sensation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Photographs of him striking his various poses circulated widely. He even appeared in primitive film. In 1894, he visited Thomas Edison in his studio in New jersey and a short kinetoscope film of Sandow flexing was produced for distribution in ‘Kinetoscopic Parlors’ throughout the country. This was the first time that Hercules became a mass media phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sandow inspired numerous imitators and it was not long before there were dozens of young Hercules snapping at the heels of Sandow and wanting to steal his lion-skin mantle. This was a world wide phenomenon. Originally from Germany, Sandow had devoted followers in Great Britain, France, Canada, Australia and the United States. The fashion for displays of muscular poses in imitation of statuary proved to be so popular that in September 1901 in the Royal Albert Hall the world’s first body-building competition was staged.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uah8nkFBZ04C&amp;amp;pg=PA357&amp;amp;lpg=PA357&amp;amp;dq=%22ajax%20defying%20the%20lightning%22%20statue&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=tZWQbx1-pL&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U13EzNZNJmhk3_U_CYc0H9VGmc5QA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj9upD46cDjAhUHfMAKHb5eDU4Q6AEwEXoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ajax%20defying%20the%20lightning%22%20statue&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shows of such 'living statuary' became hugely popular:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popularity of “antiquity” in the theatrical, literary and educational worlds of the nineteenth century extended even to exhibitions of strength and horsemanship. The strongmen who performed in the nineteenth century were referred to as “Kings of Force” and were often provided with stage names such as Hercules, Romulus, Remus or Cyclops. They carried the classicizing attributes of animal skins and a club or were set in some form of classical scenario such as a “Roman” spectacle, replete with lions, elephants and gladiators. Equestrian programs incorporated circus artists with well developed physiques who rode around the ring in skintight fleshings and posed on horseback in attitudes drawn from classical or pseudoclassical statuary. Criers gave each pose a title, such as “Ajax Defying the Lightining” or “The Fighting and Dying Gladiator”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I propose the theory that Krazy Kat is not just making educated classical allusions as he identifies these figures from antiquity, he is playing the role of ‘Crier’ as though the ongoing fight is a series of strongman poses as put on by performers such as Ducrow and Sandow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this takes place in Officer Pupp's dream, and if I've understood what I've read about the strip correctly, it presumably indicates Pupp's desire to be seen as a perfect masculine specimen by Krazy Kat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final thought, Officer Pupp's responses to Krazy Kats identification of poses do seem to be related to the classical allusions, though I can't quite pin them all down. Quince have been identified as being the Golden Apples that Hercules had to steal in his eleventh Labour, Skol is a toast which may tie to a drunken Polyphemus and cave cannam, beware of the dog may be a reference to Atlas' daughter,  Maera, was the nymph of the Dog Star, Shis Kebbab highlights the skewering of the challengers from the Etruscan army by Horatius and his two sidekicks...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T13:49:18.673" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5507" CreationDate="2019-07-16T09:43:27.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also, it means that God is always with us and once he realizes that, it doesn’t matter if he loses his hands, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7513" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T09:43:27.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11364" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T12:14:50.840" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;First I would like to clarify that I do not know if someone can answer the question because I think that the book is from Galicia and, although it was translated into Spanish, I do not know if it was taken to any English-speaking country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl looks like a normal person, that is, removing the fact that she has an obsessive mania with writing and does not speak (because of the trauma) she knows how to behave like a civilized person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument is simple, it turns out that in the town where that girl was on vacation there is a legend about a cave in the vicinity. In this cave the devil lives and he likes to kidnapp red-haired girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not remember much why but this ends up in the trauma that the girl has now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the passage of time the psychologist / psychiatrist manages to improve the condition of his patient to the point where, from time to time, they make trips to the town to visit stores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day they decide to make speleology to a cave, which is that of the legend, having as a fatal result that, several days later, after listening to night noises coming from the cells of the patients, the protagonist verifies how a kind of being has torn the door and he has taken the woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7516" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T12:14:50.840" Title="A book about a recently graduated psychologist / psychiatrist who meets a redhead girl who is his first patient" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6297" CreationDate="2019-07-16T16:54:52.497" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's easy to see this as a conflict between literacy (represented by the Old Man) and illiteracy (represented by the Childlike Empress), but I don't think that was what was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just before this passage (still within chapter 12), we read in the message of The Old Man of Wandering Mountain (from the 1983 English translation by Ralph Manheim, formatted and converted by me from ALL CAPS):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What you achieve and what you are,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is recorded by me, the chronicler,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Letters unchangeable and dead,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freeze what the living did and said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the end of what you once began,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You never will be old, and I old man,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was never young. What you awaken,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lay to rest...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conflict is not related to reading as a skill or hobby per se, but the nature of the written word as representing &lt;em&gt;finality&lt;/em&gt;. In Chapter 13, the Empress tells Bastian that &amp;quot;there won't be any more Fantastica&amp;quot; if he is unable to make any wishes. The Empress represents dreams and &lt;em&gt;possibility&lt;/em&gt;. The Old Man simply writes down what happens (as he himself tells the Empress in Ch. 12). Simply writing down a history in the way that the Old Man does is &lt;em&gt;not imaginative&lt;/em&gt;, rather, it produces the &amp;quot;death&amp;quot; that the Empress speaks about which is the result of a lack of wishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;It's a dualistic system&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look just after the passage you quoted, where we see (another) description of AURYN (in this case, as it appears in the Old Man's copy of The Neverending Story) (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was tilted in such a way that she could see the binding, which was of copper-colored silk, and on the binding, as on the Gem, which the Childlike Empress wore around her neck, she saw an oval &lt;em&gt;formed by two snakes biting each other's tail&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The AURYN symbolizes a dualistic system of two snakes in constant conflict, similar to other dualistic systems such as the Chinese concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient.eu/Yin_and_Yang/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yin and Yang&lt;/a&gt;. The Old Man is not &lt;em&gt;evil&lt;/em&gt; (he never commits any evil act or appears inclined to do so), but is &lt;em&gt;distinct&lt;/em&gt; from the Empress in fundamental essence. Written language, as a concept, is assigned to the Old Man's half of the universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="88" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T16:54:52.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-16T18:14:50.400" Score="5" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read quite a few stories by old Indian authors who wrote in Hindi and Urdu in the early twentieth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed a trend of them not completing their stories or providing an ending and leaving their audience in a mystery which often is quite a let down especially after reading a 10 page story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance the author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithileshwar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mithileshwar&lt;/a&gt; wrote a story by the title of &lt;em&gt;Harihar Kaka&lt;/em&gt; depicting the plight of an old man, however didn't provide an ending as to what happened to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premchand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Premchand&lt;/a&gt;'s famous &lt;em&gt;Bade Bhai Sahab&lt;/em&gt; which also didn't provide what happened in the future of the two brothers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a reason for this trend among Indian authors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7519" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-16T22:38:02.233" LastActivityDate="2019-07-16T22:38:02.233" Title="Lack of Proper Ending in Stories by Old Indian Authors" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;hindi-literature&gt;&lt;urdu-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11368" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-17T06:57:05.717" Score="2" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the end of his book, &lt;em&gt;The Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt;, about his times as an expatriate American in Paris, he quotes a conversation he overhears in an Inn, somewhere in the Swiss Alps which he is visiting along with his wife. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A woman exclaimed angrily that it was these lecturers that led Germany to its doom. And then she is shushed by her companion who is disturbed by this. He’s worried that even the walls have ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hemingway doesn’t contextualise this. Given his oeuvre, and his own story in fighting against Fascism and Franco in the Spanish Civil War, how are we to contextualise this quote? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T10:27:40.893" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T12:03:00.387" Title="Why did Hemingway include the following in his book, the Moveable Feast?" Tags="&lt;politics&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;a-moveable-feast&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11561" CreationDate="2019-07-17T07:57:10.440" Score="6" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just spent the last 5 hours browsing through google, pinterest, and eBay in an attempt to find a beautifully illustrated book I loved as a child. I remember what it is generally about, but I have not the slightest recollection of any names (title, author, illustrator, publisher, characters). I do remember that the edition we owned was hardcover and roughly 12 by 9.5 by 0.5 inches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story begins with a mouse in a speedster (possibly red) driving through the country one morning by a lake town. The mouse's automobile is rather loud and disturbs the locals who are trying to sleep. One of the mouse's tires is punctured by a nail/nails and he is stranded in that town(?) for the remainder of the book until the end where if I remember correctly he finally gets a new tire and leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that a white cat lets him stay with her (she wears victorian dresses and expensive necklaces of pearls and perhaps jewels). And there is a white goat who owned some sort of grocery store (I remember him on a ladder either putting things away or trying to reach something, and my sister remembers a scene where he is trying not to sneeze—probably the same scene). There is a dog whom my mother remembers being the handyman (possibly for the boat) and thinks was named Billy. I also have distinct scenes in my mind: one of the mouse somehow falling into the lake(?) and having to dry off with a towel, one of the goat laughing, one of the goat and cat having a glass of wine at night (I think they are discussing the mouse leaving and they are sad because they've grown fond of him), one of the white cat being swung around in a waltz at some celebration (possibly by the captain).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The illustrations were very distinct. The style is similar to the images I have attached, however, I remember them being much more anthropomorphic and facially expressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My deepest thank to anyone who manages to find out what book this is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZE5wl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZE5wl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;from &amp;quot;The City Mouse and the Country Mouse&amp;quot; illustrated by Don Daly?&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dxQoF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dxQoF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;from &amp;quot;The Wind in the Willows&amp;quot; illustrated by Chris Dunn&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7521" LastEditorUserId="7521" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T16:29:04.163" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T13:59:55.640" Title="Searching for an Illustrated Children's Book with Animal Characters" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11279" CreationDate="2019-07-17T10:56:04.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's saying she finished it because she essentially just told the rest of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My Christian theology is a bit sketchy, but I think I know enough to explain my thought process here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Linus is telling, literally, the story of Jesus. He's going over his birth when Sally cuts in, saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nobody paid any attention when I was born either, but now everyone loves me, and I'm gonna get so many presents for Christmas, it'll make your head swim!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Sally is saying here could easily be a description of Jesus. Linus has just shown that &quot;nobody paid any attention&quot; when he was born. Now, though, &quot;everybody loves me&quot; - Jesus is a pretty major part of one of the largest religions in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christmas is supposedly a celebration of Jesus's birth. If I understand correctly, when Jesus was born, three men showed up bearing gifts for him. So, at Christmas, he received a lot of gifts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what Sally is saying here could easily be understood as &quot;finishing&quot; the story that Linus was telling, as what she's saying can be interpreted as the rest of the story of Jesus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T10:56:04.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-17T14:27:44.447" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book around 14 years ago. All I can remember about the story is that it was about a boy named Milo, who ends up losing his eyebrows and running away from home — the overall plot, from memory, was that he somehow ends up visiting a place where monsters come down from space. I can't remember whether he's tasked with saving the world or similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7522" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-07-17T15:38:45.390" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T15:38:45.390" Title="Book about a boy named Milo who loses his eyebrows and runs away" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-17T21:11:32.190" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the middle of &lt;strong&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/strong&gt;, Wither says to the Fairy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a mere arrest could have secured the — er — good will and&#xA;  collaboration of Mrs. Studdock, we should hardly have embarrassed&#xA;  ourselves with the presence of her husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement seems to imply that the only reason the N.I.C.E. brought Mark Studdock to Belbury was in order to get a hold of his wife, Jane. Now it turns out that Jane is a seer and an invaluable asset to either side, so the Institute wanting to get their paws on her makes perfect sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What doesn't make sense is that at the time Wither made that statement, the N.I.C.E. hadn't yet discovered Jane's powers. Frost had seen her in vision and was studying her in the vision—but we have no evidence that he knew it was Mark's wife that he was studying. Furthermore, Frost didn't see Jane in vision until &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; Mark was dragged to the Institute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why did the N.I.C.E. want Mark Studdock at Belbury &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; they understood the significance of his wife and her gifts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are led to believe at various points before Wither's statement to the Fairy, that the Institute people wanted Mark so he could write good propaganda in the newspapers for them. But if that was the reason they brought him, why would Wither make that statement? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a plot defect? Did the author's timing get tangled? Or am I missing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T15:51:29.523" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T15:51:29.523" Title="Why did the N.I.C.E. want Mark Studdock at Belbury?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11123" CreationDate="2019-07-17T22:36:57.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may have been that the macrobes needed the N.I.C.E. people to believe it was all about &quot;science&quot;, and not that an evil spirit was haunting the place. The illusion of science (and the required/attending scientist) was a useful one, and the macrobes were happy to play along with that charade so as to get better cooperation and not scare off their pawns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2019-07-17T22:36:57.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11384" CreationDate="2019-07-18T13:32:58.790" Score="3" ViewCount="574" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and I loved it (of course).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to bring into analysis the role of Lizaveta, the pawnbroker's half sister who is accidentally killed by Raskolnikov. More specifically I'd like to understand in a better way how this episode (the killing of an innocent person) really influenced the rest of the book. In fact, it seems to me (but I may be  wrong) that what started as a potentially huge plot twist, later became less central or crucial to the book message. Let's put it like this: what would have happened if Raskolnikov only killed the evil pawnbroker and got away with it? One may say that all his immediate, post-murder, anxieties and second thoughts would have been much less severe and debilitating! He also felt empathetic towards the poor Lizaveta, almost enslaved by her sister. So my (wrong?) guess is that his hypothetical perfect crime would change the story quite a bit. Raskolnikov is indeed convinced (up to his typical overthinking) until the very end of the book (Siberia chapters) that killing the pawnbroker was not a bad thing at all. But here's the thing I don't get. In the book, especially the second part, it's more about the crime in itself, not much about the poor dead innocent. It feels to me that Lizaveta's death could have been used much more than it actually was, to work towards and to explain Raskolnikov's redemption.. for instance. But again it's not perceived to me as a very important fact in the end: Raskolnikov turns himself in because of his murder, it seems that with or without Lizaveta's death he would have done so anyway. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you think? Am I misinterpreting something? Or is this really the point of the book, that killing is wrong anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7527" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T09:15:34.403" Title="About the role of Lizaveta in Crime and Punishment" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11383" CreationDate="2019-07-18T18:20:34.603" Score="4" ViewCount="688" Body="&lt;p&gt;After several reads I am still struggling to understand the events around Judas' death in the Pilate story. On the face of it, the following things occur:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pilate has dinner with Aphranius (head of secret service), and mentions some of Yeshua's friends are plotting to kill Judas, discover how much money he was paid for betraying Yeshua, and return the money to the high priest with a note. Pilate insists all this will happen that same evening. Aphranius expresses surprise and concern at his own failing as he did not have this information.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aphranius leaves the palace, orders some of his men out of town with carts 'loaded with entrenching tools and a barrel of water' (side question, is this to do with Judas or is it just for burying the executed men?). He talks with Niza, Judas' love interest. She then tempts Judas to Gethsemane outside the city. Once Judas arrives there, he is killed by Aphranius and his men, who also obtain the bribe money. Aphranius then attaches the note and returns to the palace.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aphranius tells Pilate that Judas was killed exactly as Pilate had anticipated, and shows as evidence the money bag with note. He admits failure at having been unable to stop the death, and asks to be tried. Pilate questions him about the death, and Aphranius gives an invented story, carefully avoiding Niza and insisting that it could not have been a woman to tempt Judas to his death.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pilate later tells Matthew Levi triumphantly that he killed Judas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly Pilate did not directly order Aphranius to kill Judas. So was it a veiled order, or a manipulation of Aphranius (in that Aphranius had some reason of his own to kill Judas and this gave Aphranius the chance to blame the murder on Yeshua's followers)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it was a veiled order, what hinted to Aphranius that Pilate wanted Judas dead?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Aphranius had his own motive for killing Judas why? Was he a secret disciple of Yeshua? If so, then why did Pilate have to give the order, couldn't he just rely on the chief spy to get it done at some point? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7529" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T23:12:50.407" Title="How did Pilate order Judas' death in Master and Margarita?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;master-and-margarita&gt;&lt;mikhail-bulgakov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11378" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-18T18:21:41.883" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall reading a short story a number of years ago where two brothers were each given extremely detailed (and sometimes rather tedious) instructions that they had to follow very precisely in order to get their inheritance. One of the brothers ended up having to spend a lot of the night in this tower, periodically going to the top at very exact times in order to get his next set of instructions and then returning to the bottom of the tower. I don't recall the exact details of the other brother's instructions, but he had to go all over town in order to accomplish all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One brother (I think the one in the tower) just barely finished his entire set of instructions on time, having only a few minutes to spare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story may have been written by O. Henry, but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help me identify what story this is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T00:01:02.963" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T00:01:02.963" Title="Story in which two brothers had to follow extremely detailed instructions to get their inheritance" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11379" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11381" CreationDate="2019-07-18T20:51:01.373" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter IX of Thomas Deloney's novel &lt;em&gt;Jack of Newbury&lt;/em&gt;, I found the following sentence (emphasis and links added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thus lay the poore Draper a long time in prison, in which space, his Wife which before for daintinesse would not foule her fingers, nor turne her head aside, for feare of hurting the set of her &lt;strong&gt;neckenger&lt;/strong&gt;, was glad to goe about and wash &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buck#Noun_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;buckes&lt;/a&gt; at the Thames side, and to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/charwoman#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chare-woman&lt;/a&gt; in rich mens houses, her soft hand was now hardened with scouring, and in steade of gold rings upon her lilly fingers, they were now fild witch chaps, provoked by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sharp#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sharpe&lt;/a&gt;, lee, and other drudgeries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/quipsuponquesti00ouvrgoog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quips upon Questions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a book originally published in 1600 and at one point attributed to the actor John Singer but currently to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199569311.001.0001/acprof-9780199569311-chapter-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Armin&lt;/a&gt;, I found another example: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A gallant Neckenger her necke to grace, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  No matter for her Gowne, or other place : &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Good foote, good legge : theſe two are chiefly fine, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And ſhe that giues her wages muſt decline. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a neckenger appears to be something that can be worn around the neck, as the name suggests. But what exactly is it? A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choker&lt;/a&gt;, perhaps? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T12:45:16.743" Title="What is a neckenger?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-deloney&gt;&lt;jack-of-newbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8706" CreationDate="2019-07-18T21:45:43.787" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first stanza, there is no mention of a hunt, but a hunt is arguably the most likely situation in which one would &lt;em&gt;follow&lt;/em&gt; the sound of a horn, rather than just figuring out its potential meaning (as, e.g., in signals during a battle). For this reason, the foreshadowing of the hunt mentioned in the second stanza cannot be excluded. Even so, it is mainly the end of the second stanza that clarifies the meaning of the horn retrospectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the question is not about the effect of the word &quot;horn&quot;; it is about the effect of the word &quot;silver&quot;, which does not at all foreshadow a hunt, or 'any item that may be used in the “hunt”' (the second stanza does not mention &lt;em&gt;items&lt;/em&gt; &quot;that may be used in a hunt&quot;, anyway). For this reason, I would exclude option B.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alliteration in &quot;the sound of a silver horn&quot; (option C) cannot be denied, especially because the alliterating syllables are also stressed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to option A, one can argue that there is no implication that horns might be made from gold; the silver from the first stanza contrasts with the gold from the second stanza by means of the contrast between following a horn on the one hand and sleeping on a pillow on the other. The poem's narrator rejects the latter, in spite of the higher value of gold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to option D, one can argue that the horn is perceived aurally (&quot;the sound of&quot;), not visually, so brightness does not seem relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to option E, one can argue that the golden pillow represents wealth better than the horn, because it represents the comfort that wealth can provide, whereas the horn spurns to action, even so much so that the poem's addressee may end up with hollow cheeks and worn temples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves C as the best option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T21:45:43.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11379" CreationDate="2019-07-18T21:48:41.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Es-kCQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PT126&amp;amp;ots=IRo7woPE1m&amp;amp;dq=neckenger%20clothing%20-neckinger&amp;amp;pg=PT126#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=neckenger%20clothing%20-neckinger&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Broadview Press edition of Jack of Newbury&lt;/a&gt; gives the meaning as ‘neckerchief’. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is all the information the glossary of that publication provides, the OED gives the following information under 'Neckinger':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Origin&lt;/strong&gt;: A variant or alteration of another lexical item. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Etymon&lt;/strong&gt;: neckercher n.&#xA;  Etymology: Variant of neckercher n. Perhaps compare nouns in -&lt;em&gt;enger&lt;/em&gt; , -&lt;em&gt;inger&lt;/em&gt; , such as &lt;em&gt;messenger&lt;/em&gt; n., &lt;em&gt;harbinger&lt;/em&gt; n... Perhaps compare also &lt;em&gt;muckinger&lt;/em&gt; , &lt;em&gt;muckenger&lt;/em&gt; , variants of &lt;em&gt;muckender&lt;/em&gt; n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chiefly &lt;em&gt;English regional&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;eastern&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;northern&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A neckerchief&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entry goes on to cite the passage from the question as an example of the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T12:45:16.743" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T12:45:16.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11377" CreationDate="2019-07-18T22:57:54.520" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was indeed a very thinly veiled order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I am very glad to hear it. Now for the second question. It concerns&#xA;  that man . . . what's his name? . . . Judas of Karioth.' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   At this the visitor again gave the Procurator his open-eyed glance,&#xA;  then, as was fitting, hooded his eyes again.  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'They say,' the Procurator went on, lowering his voice, ' that he is&#xA;  supposed to have been paid for the way he took that idiot home and made him&#xA;  so welcome.'  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'Will be paid,' corrected the visitor gently.   &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  'Ah, he must be greedy, that old man from Karioth! ' said the &#xA;  Procurator with a smile. ' I suppose he is an old man, isn't he?'  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'The Procurator is never mistaken, but on this occasion he has been&#xA;  misinformed,' replied the man kindly. ' This man from Karioth is a young&#xA;  man.' [...] &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  'I see, I see.' The Procurator was silent, looked round to make sure&#xA;  that there was no one on the balcony and then said in a low voice :  &lt;br /&gt;' The&#xA;  fact is--&lt;strong&gt;I have received information that he is to be murdered tonight.'&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   At this the visitor not only turned his glance on the Procurator but&#xA;  held it for a while and then replied :  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'You have nattered me. Procurator, but I fear I have not earned your&#xA;  commendation. I have no such information.' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'You deserve the highest possible praise,' replied the Procurator, '&#xA;  but there is no doubting this information.'  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'May I ask its source? ' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'You must allow me not to divulge that for the present, particularly&#xA;  as it is casual, vague and unreliable. But it is my duty to allow for every&#xA;  eventuality. &lt;strong&gt;I place great reliance on my instinct in these matters, because&#xA;  it has never failed me yet. The information is that one of Ha-Notsri's&#xA;  secret followers, revolted by this money-changer's monstrous treachery, has&#xA;  plotted with his confederates to kill the man tonight and to return his&#xA;  blood-money to the High Priest with a note reading :&#xA;   &quot; Take back your accursed money! &quot; '&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite obvious, that Pilate has not much information about Judas - he doesn't know what he does, how does he look etc... yet he has VERY specific information that Judas will be killed and a specific note will be left at his body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there are no secret followers that have revolted - the Pilate is telling his spy to kill Judas and make it look like he has been killed in revenge for his betrayal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spy later keeps asking for confirmation, warning against this task and even pointing that it would be extremely difficult for the assassin to find and kill the target:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;' The chief of the secret service&#xA;  gave the hegemon no more of his startling glances and listened, frowning, as&#xA;  Pilate continued : &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'Do you think the High Priest will be pleased at such a gift on&#xA;  Passover night? '&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'Not only will he not be pleased,' replied the visitor with a smile, '&#xA;  but I think. Procurator, that it will create a major scandal.' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'I think so too. That is why I am asking you to look after the affair&#xA;  and take all possible steps to protect Judas of Karioth.' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'The hegemon's orders will be carried out,' said Arthanius, ' but I&#xA;  can assure the hegemon that these villains have set themselves a very&#xA;  difficult task. After all, only think '--the visitor glanced round as he&#xA;  spoke--' they have to trace the man, kill him, then find out how much money&#xA;  he received and return it to Caiaphas by stealth. All that in one night?&#xA;  Today? ' &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   &lt;strong&gt;'Nevertheless he will be murdered tonight,'&lt;/strong&gt; Pilate repeated firmly. '&#xA;  I have a presentiment, I tell you! And it has never yet played me false.' A&#xA;  spasm crossed the Procurator's face and he rubbed his hands. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   'Very well,' said the visitor obediently. He rose, straightened up and&#xA;  suddenly said coldly : &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   &lt;strong&gt;'You say he will be murdered, hegemon? '&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   &lt;strong&gt;'Yes,' answered Pilate, '&lt;/strong&gt; and our only hope is your extreme&#xA;  efficiency.' &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while he officially asks to protect Judas, in fact, his order is to murder him. He could later say &quot;It was a &lt;em&gt;such shame&lt;/em&gt; if something would happen to that person, I've sent my best men to protect him&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2019-07-18T23:12:50.407" LastActivityDate="2019-07-18T23:12:50.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11376" CreationDate="2019-07-19T09:15:34.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've searched for some material in Russian on the topic and haven't found much. The only book by a serious critic, I found, is by &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2,_%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC_%D0%92%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vadim Kozhinov&lt;/a&gt;. He writes that in early editions of the novel Lizaveta was pregnant, but later Dostoevsky removed this information. Kozhinov supposes that may be Lizaveta's murder could have been initial Dostoevsky's idea, that he changed later. Speaking about the role of Lizaveta in the final edition, Kozhinov writes the murder of Lizaveta is manifestation of the novel's fate theme, and more importantly, the fact that Rodion (and the reader) doesn't pay much attention to Lizaveta's death underlines the importance of the pawnbroker's death and Raskolnikov's theory. If it doesn't make much sense to you, you are not alone here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course there are plenty of other interpretations: the murder of Lizaveta is the murder of Sonya, the murder of Lizaveta is the murder of his sister (Sonya accepted Lizaveta's cross, becoming sisters with her, and Raskolnikov accepted the cross before going to Siberia), the murder of Lizaveta is the murder of Jesus Christ, event that it is metaphorical turning the other cheek. All of these are speculations, of course, that can not be confirmed reliably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T09:15:34.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11243" CreationDate="2019-07-19T15:57:54.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original Greek quote can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/fragmentaphilo01mull/page/144&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 144 (line 255) of Friedrich W. A. Mullach's &lt;em&gt;Fragmenta philosophorum greacorum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a collection of fragments of ancient Greek philosophers published by Didot in Paris in 1860: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Νᾶφε καὶ μέμνασ’ ἁπιστεῖν&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Latin translation can also be found in Book Four of &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.532361028x&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=241&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iusti Lipsi Politicorum siue Ciuilis doctrinae libri sex&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justus_Lipsius#Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Justus Lipsius&lt;/a&gt;, 1589)) and goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vigila, &amp;amp; memor es nequid credas: (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Unfortunate Traveller&lt;/em&gt; (published in 1594, i.e. a few years after Lipsius' work) has &quot;sis&quot; instead of &quot;es&quot;. I don't know whether Thomas Nashe would have read Lipsius. @kimchi lover posted a comment with a link to &lt;a href=&quot;http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/display.do?tabs=moreTab&amp;amp;ct=display&amp;amp;fn=search&amp;amp;doc=BLL01001153446&amp;amp;indx=10&amp;amp;recIds=BLL01001153446&amp;amp;recIdxs=9&amp;amp;elementId=9&amp;amp;renderMode=poppedOut&amp;amp;displayMode=full&amp;amp;frbrVersion=3&amp;amp;frbg=&amp;amp;&amp;amp;dscnt=0&amp;amp;scp.scps=scope%3A%28BLCONTENT%29&amp;amp;vl(2084770704UI0)=any&amp;amp;tb=t&amp;amp;vid=BLVU1&amp;amp;mode=Basic&amp;amp;srt=rank&amp;amp;tab=local_tab&amp;amp;dum=true&amp;amp;vl(freeText0)=epicharmus&amp;amp;dstmp=1561830902581&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Τα ἐκ των Ἐπιχαρμου ... γνωμικα. Ex Comoediis Epicharmi ... Sententiæ. Gr. &amp;amp; Lat.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1560, in the catalogue of the British Library. This looks like an older collection of fragments that Nashe may have consulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note (21.07.2019): Some of Nashe's contemporaries, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/11219/which-part-of-propertius-elegies-is-castania-referring-to/11224#11224&quot;&gt;especially Robert Greene&lt;/a&gt;, invented quotes, but at least the Epicharmus quote is real. One thing to add is that the first edition (1594) spelled the name of the Greek playwright as &quot;Epicharcus&quot; and the second edition, published in the same year, corrected this to Epicharmus. It is not clear whether the incorrect spelling in the first edition originated from Nashe's manuscript or from a typesetter's mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T18:33:02.353" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T18:33:02.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10920" CreationDate="2019-07-19T16:29:48.933" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The macrobes used a human head as an instrument of physical communication with their human pawns. We know that they can communicate with humans &lt;em&gt;without&lt;/em&gt; the head, but that tends to scare the daylights out of their pawns, so the head is a useful charade. With the original head destroyed or out of commission, the macros needed another--mostly for their own convenience in communicating, and centering their pawns' loyalty around something vaguely human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think Lewis may also have been making a larger, more metaphorical point here. Evil spirits have always used humans as pawns. In fact they can't accomplish much without them. The macrobes need the cooperation of humans to maximize their nefarious results. They also care nothing for &quot;the head&quot; or anyone else, as soon as that person has served his purpose and is no longer of value. The macrobes truly &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; people in the worst sense of the word. This is in sharp contrast with the good guys. Ransom and his &quot;spirits&quot; also, in a sense, use people. But those people are not discarded and abandoned to destruction as soon they have served their purpose. The opposite occurs: those who have been &quot;used&quot; are elevated, empowered, preserved, and blessed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make an even larger point, there are numerous remarkable similarities and contrasts between Belbury and St. Anne's. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider first the similarities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They both have people and those people do work.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They both have headquarters at a physical location. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They both have a &quot;head&quot; that is clearly in charge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are both at odds with the &quot;other side&quot;. They are enemies, literally and figuratively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are both secretive, but the reasons for the secrecy are quite different for each side.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both societies have a head that is governed by spirits from another realm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now consider their differences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;St. Anne's consists of flawed but nice people; Belbury consists of very nasty NICE people!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belbury obtains and controls its followers using greed, threats, fear, seduction, and promises of power. Ransom obtains and influences his followers using love, respect, and protection.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belbury desires power and dominion. St. Anne's desires life and righteousness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My point regarding the similarities and contrasts is that Belbury turns on itself and cannibalizes itself -- symbolized by the demand for another head and the murders that follow. While St. Anne's comes out better, stronger, and &lt;em&gt;safe&lt;/em&gt; at the end!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastEditorUserId="3075" LastEditDate="2019-07-19T20:37:09.953" LastActivityDate="2019-07-19T20:37:09.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-19T19:43:34.090" Score="6" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is about the same &lt;em&gt;Krazy Kat&lt;/em&gt; strip (25 July 1936) as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11353/17&quot;&gt;Krazy language in Krazy Kat, 25 July 1936&lt;/a&gt;, in which Krazy is making a lot of classical references and Pupp is responding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Regular, the romin - insulting the kottage injins -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp [to Ignatz, who's getting reading to hurl a brick]: Avaunt - wastrel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Hoikillitz tossin the big bed bull -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Have at you - Quince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Etlitz jugglin' a lot of woils -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Kavvy Kannem -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Horachel diffendin' his bridges -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Shis kibab -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Cyklops destroyin' the tutty-nine dumb dimmins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Skol&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Jupita darin' the tunda bolds -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Sayonara -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Ajex knoggin' the lightnin' around -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Weeny weedy weeky&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krazy: Nobil - movillis - killosis -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pupp: Hark - - I seem to hear the plaudits of my people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As laid out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11360/17&quot;&gt;Spagirl's excellent answer&lt;/a&gt;, Krazy's remarks refer to, respectively: Regulus defeating the Carthaginians; the seventh labour of Heracles; Atlas holding the world; Horatio defending the bridge; a Cyclops fighting demons (?); Jupiter throwing thunderbolts; Ajax defying lightning; &amp;quot;noble - marvellous - colossus&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;how do Pupp's remarks connect respectively with these?&lt;/strong&gt; From Heracles to Quince, Atlas to cave canem, Horatio to shish kebab, etc. - what are the links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Spagirl's answer speculates a little about this in the final paragraph, but I'd like to see more detail, and I'd feel bad about asking her to go into full detail about this in her answer when it isn't &lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt; part of that question. Hence, this new follow-up question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T10:51:04.660" Title="How do Pupp's remarks connect with Krazy's in Krazy Kat, 25 July 1936?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;george-herriman&gt;&lt;krazy-kat&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11389" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-20T09:00:27.583" Score="4" ViewCount="284" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Rosemary's Baby&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She asked him questions   that    had been    unspeakable in  Catholic    High;   he sent her  to  a  night    course  in philosophy   at NYU.     “I’ll  make     a  duchess out of   this cockney    flower  girl    yet,”   he  said,   and     Rosemary    had     had     wit     enough  to  say “Garn!”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the word &quot;garn&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7534" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-20T09:17:32.557" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T09:40:04.147" Title="What does &quot;garn&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;rosemarys-baby&gt;&lt;ira-levin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11390" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11389" CreationDate="2019-07-20T09:33:59.700" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&amp;quot;Garn&amp;quot; is Cockney slang, in this context a reference to &lt;em&gt;Pygmalion&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;My Fair Lady&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the direct meaning of the word, you can check for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/garn#Etymology_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;go on&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interjection&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;garn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Cockney slang)&lt;/em&gt; A response that expresses disbelief or mockery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The example quote provided in that Wiktionary page is from George Bernard Shaw's play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pygmalion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was adapted into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous musical&lt;/a&gt; and later an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady_(film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;award-winning film&lt;/a&gt; both titled &lt;em&gt;My Fair Lady&lt;/em&gt;. The story is about a linguistic professor who teaches a Cockney flower girl to speak &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; English in order to pass her off as a duchess - the passage you quote from &lt;em&gt;Rosemary's Baby&lt;/em&gt; is a direct and clear reference to this. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3825/3825-h/3825-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play &lt;em&gt;Pygmalion&lt;/em&gt; itself&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE FLOWER GIRL [tickled by the performance, and laughing in spite of herself] &lt;strong&gt;Garn!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with &lt;strong&gt;her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess&lt;/strong&gt; at an ambassador's garden party. I could even get her a place as lady's maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That's the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRTcpsoM00Q&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listen to the line &amp;quot;Garn&amp;quot; from the film adaptation&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/167920/87724&quot;&gt;read more about its meaning from our friends at the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passage you quote from &lt;em&gt;Rosemary's Baby&lt;/em&gt;, it seems that Hutch is trying to raise Rosemary's intellectual and social level - responding to &amp;quot;improper&amp;quot; question by sending her to philosophy classes. He likens himself to Henry Higgins, the linguist who trains flower seller Eliza Doolittle to speak like a duchess. Rosemary has wit enough to reply in kind, saying &amp;quot;Garn!&amp;quot; in Eliza Doolittle style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T09:40:04.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5209" CreationDate="2019-07-20T13:34:11.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is too long for a comment, but I'd like to add to @Rand al'Thor's excellent answer a bit more about the use of &quot;govern&quot; in talking about grammar. Quoting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online OED&lt;/a&gt;'s (paywalled) definition of &quot;govern&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;13.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;transitive. Grammar.&lt;/em&gt; Of a word, esp. a verb or a preposition: to have (a word or a case) depending on it; to require (a certain case or mood) in a dependent word. Also: (of a subject) to determine the number and person of (the verb). Also occasionally &lt;em&gt;intransitive.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages with cases, a verb or preposition may be said to &quot;govern&quot; a certain case, such as the dative or the accusative. It may be less usual to speak, as Byron does here, of a subject &quot;governing&quot; a verb, but the OED cites these examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1835&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;C. Follen &lt;em&gt;Pract. Gram. German Lang.&lt;/em&gt; ii. 186 &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;Here, &lt;em&gt;der Va'ter&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;the subject,&lt;/em&gt; which&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;governs the verb, that is to say, the verb must agree with it, in number and person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;1924&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;S. Perry &lt;em&gt;Making Lett. talk Business&lt;/em&gt; 153 &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;If we are to use verbs correctly, we must&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;remember that the subject &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; governs the verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2019-07-20T13:34:11.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-21T08:14:10.363" Score="-4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the earliest example for a story with an animal or object that gains the ability to talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Animal/object needs to have a name of their own, and the gaining of the ability to speak is part of the story (so not lion king or animal farm where all the animals are anthropomorphized).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good example would be Billina from the wizard of Oz, but I'm looking for earlier fables or stories, the earliest if you'd like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7539" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-23T11:38:05.483" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T12:28:38.973" Title="Earliest example of a story where an animal or object gains the ability to talk" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11395" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-21T21:06:59.537" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;What number should &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.uchronia.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uchronia&lt;/a&gt;, ie fiction concerning a 'hypothetical or fictional time period of our world, in contrast to altogether-fictional lands or worlds' (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchronia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), have in the Universal Decimal Classification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Decimal_Classification#8_Language._Linguistics._Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literature section&lt;/a&gt; I find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;82-94 History as literary genre. Historical writing. Historiography. Chronicles. Annals. Memoirs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But “History as literary genre” is not exactly an uchronia with an alternate universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is there a deeper branch of UDC dedicated to uchronia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7548" OwnerDisplayName="fauve" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T21:53:21.083" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T21:53:21.083" Title="What is the UDC number for uchronia?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;library-and-information-science&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11398" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11399" CreationDate="2019-07-22T08:35:08.750" Score="4" ViewCount="566" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sarah Waters' award-winning Victorian crime novel Fingersmith makes liberal use of period underworld slang. Indeed the title is such slang for a petty thief. Most of it is unfamiliar to the modern reader but easy to understand from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My curiosity was piqued by the unfamiliar language and I started looking some of it up to find the derivation. One phrase, however, I can't source at all: &quot;poke&quot; to mean stolen goods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For out from their coats and sleeves would come pocket-books, silk handkerchiefs, petticoats - whole suits of clothes, sometimes. 'This is quality stuff, this is' they would say, as they set it all out; and Mr Ibbs would rub his hands and look expectant. But then he would study their &lt;strong&gt;poke&lt;/strong&gt;, and his face would fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only relationship for this meaning I could find is that &quot;poke&quot; is an old-fashioned word for pocket, and most of the thievery in Fingersmith is pickpocketry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;poke&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  n. Chiefly Southern US&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A sack; a bag.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In-context use in the book, however, suggests the word means goods stolen by any means, not just picking pockets. And the US derivation makes it a stretch for Victorian London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone confirm whether this meaning is genuine Victorian slang and where the author found this unfamiliar usage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-07-22T09:30:18.627" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T13:41:40.230" Title="Use of &quot;Poke&quot; as Victorian slang in Fingersmith" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;sarah-waters&gt;&lt;fingersmith&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11398" CreationDate="2019-07-22T10:45:53.233" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sense of the word is not in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, but Eric Partridge has it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poke&lt;/strong&gt;. 1. Stolen property: from ca. 1850; ob. &lt;em&gt;The Times&lt;/em&gt;, Nov 29, 1860; Baumann. Ex &lt;em&gt;poke&lt;/em&gt;, a bag, pocket, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Eric Partridge (1923). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460523/page/n651&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English&lt;/em&gt;, fifth edition. p. 644&lt;/a&gt;. London: Routledge &amp;amp; Kegan Paul.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t have access to the &lt;em&gt;Times&lt;/em&gt; archive, but evidently the report was syndicated for it can be found in other newspapers via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Newspaper Archive&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Langley deposed that he apprehended Rees at his lodgings. He was in bed with a young woman who lives with him as his wife. (He is about 16 or 17 years of age.) While dressing himself, he asked, “Did you find the &lt;strong&gt;‘poke’ (booty)&lt;/strong&gt; at the old man’s?” Witness made no answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;London Evening Standard&lt;/em&gt;. Thursday, November 29, 1860.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baumann’s dictionary of London slang is available via the Internet Archive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;poke 1. c)&lt;/strong&gt; Gestohlenes, Beute: &lt;strong&gt;the ~ had been got away&lt;/strong&gt; der Raub war beiseite geschafft worden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Heinrich Baumann (1887). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/londinismenslan00baumgoog/page/n252&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Londinismen, Slang und Cant&lt;/em&gt;, p. 141&lt;/a&gt;. Berlin: Langenscheidtsche.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Gestohlenes’ = stolen property; ‘Beute’ = booty, loot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T12:01:27.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-22T15:22:00.903" Score="4" ViewCount="126" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a children's book(s) that I read as a kid. I read it around 1991-2000 so it could only be sooner than that, no later. I am saying books because they might be 2, although I think it was just 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the characters in the books were animals that could talk and there were different stories about each one of them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the cover, when you open both sides would be the whole jungle with a pond(or lake) in the middle where some would fish, other would just climb the trees and other animals would just sit nearby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also recall that one of the stories was about an aligator that was a dentist. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one of the stories, maybe the last, was a christmas(?) story about mice that were living to a snowy village with a bridge and lanterns and at some point one mouse was carrying something with a sledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case there are 2 books, then the story about the mice would be the 2nd one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone seen/read any of these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Edit to add more info:&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my recollection,&#xA; 1. They are picture books with 1 page of an image and the other page with a story relevant to the image.&#xA; 2. I would say they are anthropomorphic since I remember the dentist wearing a uniform and using tools.&#xA; 3. The age would be 4-8 I guess, I don't remember when kids start to read xd&#xA; 4. During my search I couldn't get samples of books that I found so I didn't dismiss any (that seemed relevant).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7544" OwnerDisplayName="Lev" LastEditorUserId="7544" LastEditDate="2019-07-28T11:24:06.980" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T11:24:06.980" Title="Children's book(s) with animal stories" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11236" CreationDate="2019-07-22T17:25:51.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Helmut Bonheim argues that ‘card’ means &lt;strong&gt;compass&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title—&lt;em&gt;The Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;—followed a pattern which remained popular until the later years of the sixteenth century: it consisted in combining the name of a concrete object with the name of some abstract quality. Greene knew the pattern from such works as Painter’s &lt;em&gt;Palace of Pleasure&lt;/em&gt; (entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1562 as &lt;em&gt;The Cytie of Cyvelitie&lt;/em&gt;) or from Whetstone’s &lt;em&gt;Rocke of Regarde&lt;/em&gt; (1576). Greene’s friend, Henry Chettle, wrote a &lt;em&gt;Forrest of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;, which contained “pleasaunt histories … in prose”. In both book titles the word &lt;em&gt;fancie&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;infatuation&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;carde&lt;/em&gt; is the mariner’s card or compass, which swings and swivels to and fro like man’s affection. The subtitle speaks of those who guide their course “by the compass of Cupid”, as do both Gwydonius and Castania; she eventually resolves: “he shall be the starre shall guide my compasse”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Helmut Bonheim (1978). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1515/angl.1978.1978.96.45&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Greene’s &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius, the Carde of Fancie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Anglia-Zeitschrift für englische Philologie&lt;/em&gt; 96, p. 45.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 4a in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4.a.&lt;/strong&gt; The circular piece of stiff paper on which the 32 points are marked in the mariner's compass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Entry for card, &lt;em&gt;n.2&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Maslen suggests that ‘card’ is polysemous, but that the primary meaning is &lt;strong&gt;chart&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The instability of &lt;em&gt;Gwydonius&lt;/em&gt; can be summed up in the changing connotations of the term ‘fancy’ in the romance. The subtitle—&lt;em&gt;The Card of Fancy&lt;/em&gt;—suggests it is a verbal chart or map of the affections, although a ‘card’ could also be a compass or a component in a card-game. Fancy in Greene’s work can only be mapped, its course traced like that of a storm-tossed vessel; it can be won with luck, like a game of cards, but it cannot be shaped, directed, or expunged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. W. Maslen (2013). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qY4eAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Greene&lt;/a&gt;’. In Andrew Hadfield, ed., &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640&lt;/em&gt;, Oxford University Press, p. 199.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is sense 3a in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A map or plan; = chart &lt;em&gt;n.1&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Entry for card, &lt;em&gt;n.2&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this sense, the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; includes the following citation, in which ‘card’ is used metaphorically, perhaps in a similar fashion to Greene’s ‘card of fancy’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1604   Shakespeare &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; v. ii. 107 + 4   Hee is the card or kalender of gentry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-22T17:25:51.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11402" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11348" CreationDate="2019-07-23T03:37:01.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Early on, Stadler's great crime was endorsing the creation of the State Science Institute. That alone made him a looter. And that is why Dagny was reluctant to go see him about the motor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T03:37:01.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-23T10:43:41.790" Score="1" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The viewpoint is from a small girl who is living near to a gas station maybe in the midwest. It's a hot summer and she hears on the radio that there is a another dead child found. She goes to the gas station where a fat man tries to lure her near, but she runs off into some hills, and knows he must not catch her, but he gets closer and closer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7546" LastActivityDate="2019-07-23T10:43:41.790" Title="Short story about a girl pursued by a fat man in the hills" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11404" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11405" CreationDate="2019-07-23T07:15:36.683" Score="5" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this novel like a couple years ago (probably 4-5 years already). It's kinda old I guess and my detail maybe is not very specific but I try my best. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is talk about a young boy (Maybe the age around 14-16 like this.) trying to survive in a jungle and it end up living in the jungle for a couple years in there. The novel I recall it has 5 volume, it has different ending too. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story start like this, the young boy ride his uncle small airplane across a jungle but end up his uncle suddenly have heart attack and crash on the lake. (Actually not sure is the uncle have heart attack or the plane have engine problem.) The young boy manage to escape but unfortunately his uncle passed away from the heart attack. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has 2 different storyline I remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first one is after surviving in the jungle for like almost a year. The young boy finally got rescue and return back to his normal life but after living a couple month in the city, he feel that he doesn't like that life, he want to go back to the jungle to relax. So he when back again to the jungle and the story continue. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The another ending is the young boy did not rescue by the people but his second challenge is coming near, he need to survive the winter period. I remember before he face the winter, he went back to the crash site (the airplane crash into the lake that part) and search for some equipment. I remember he found a gun in that plane and some more better equipment to help him hunting.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7553" OwnerDisplayName="kit" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T16:32:22.470" Title="00s (or latterly) novel which talk about a boy trying to survive in the jungle after a plane crash into a lake" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11404" CreationDate="2019-07-23T07:32:09.590" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the book you are looking for is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatchet_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hatchet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Some of your explanation matches a lot, but then again some of it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Brian Robeson is a thirteen-year-old son of divorced parents. As he travels from Hampton, New York on a Cessna 406 bush plane to visit his father in the oil fields in Northern Canada for the summer, the pilot suffers a massive heart attack and dies. Brian tries to land the plane, but ends up crash-landing into a lake in the forest. He must learn to survive on his own with nothing but his hatchet—a gift his mother gave him shortly before his plane departed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="T Jasinski" LastEditorUserId="169" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T16:32:22.470" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T16:32:22.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9645" CreationDate="2019-07-23T22:05:10.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;As of July 2019&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look up the book (hardcover edition) on the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books website, you will see a link to the &quot;Reunion Scene&quot; on the side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Currently, the relevant URLs are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hmhbooks.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hmhbooks.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Princess-Bride-Deluxe-Edition-HC/9781328948854&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hmhbooks.com/shop/books/The-Princess-Bride-Deluxe-Edition-HC/9781328948854&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hmhco.com/~/media/sites/princessbride/goldman-princess-bride-response-letter.pdf?la=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.hmhco.com/~/media/sites/princessbride/goldman-princess-bride-response-letter.pdf?la=en&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Description&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reunion scene&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the novel's commentary, Goldman writes that he added nothing to the&#xA;  &quot;original&quot; Morgenstern text. He did write one original scene, a loving&#xA;  reunion between Buttercup and Westley, but, he said, his publisher&#xA;  objected to this addition.[9] He invites any reader who wants to read&#xA;  the &quot;Reunion Scene&quot; to write to the publisher (formerly Harcourt Brace&#xA;  Jovanovich; now Random House) and request a copy. Many readers wrote&#xA;  in to the publisher and did receive a letter, but instead of an extra&#xA;  scene, the letter detailed the (obviously fictitious) legal problems&#xA;  that Goldman and his publishers encountered with the Morgenstern&#xA;  estate and its lawyer, Kermit Shog. This letter was revised and&#xA;  updated periodically; the 1987 revision mentioned the movie, while the&#xA;  25th Anniversary Edition published the letter with an addendum about&#xA;  Kermit's lawyer granddaughter Carly. The 30th Anniversary Edition has&#xA;  a footnote that the three pages of the reunion scene were now&#xA;  available online.[10] However, the website itself contained nothing&#xA;  but the text of the original three letters. This website has since&#xA;  been taken down and superseded by the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt&#xA;  product page for the book, which provides the 2003 version of the&#xA;  Reunion Scene letter as a digital download.[11]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;[9] &quot;The Princess Bride, Chapter Five Summary&quot;. Spark Notes. Retrieved October 27, 2007.&#xA;&#xA;[10] Princess bride, Harcourt, archived from the original on 2007-10-23.&#xA;&#xA;[11] &quot;The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern's Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure | HMH Books&quot;. www.hmhbooks.com. Retrieved 2019-07-23.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: Wikipedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Excerpt&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j6Nxs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/j6Nxsm.png&quot; alt=&quot;page 1&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hyRgg.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hyRggm.png&quot; alt=&quot;page 2&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CdoN.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7CdoNm.png&quot; alt=&quot;page 3&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7552" LastEditorUserId="7552" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T20:49:41.787" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T20:49:41.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11398" CreationDate="2019-07-24T13:41:40.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What about 'a pig in a poke' If pokes were only small like wallets you couldn't get a pig in one. So I assume that the term should also apply to a larger item a sort of 'swag bag'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7554" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T13:41:40.230" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11426" CreationDate="2019-07-24T14:12:54.850" Score="6" ViewCount="218" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a 16th-century Chinese novel whose original title 西遊記 means (according to Wikipedia) &quot;West-Wandering Chronicles&quot;. In Arthur Waley's well-known 1942 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt;, he changed the title to &lt;em&gt;Monkey: A Folk-Tale of China&lt;/em&gt;. It's been published under a few variant titles, but always the title's focus is on the monkey rather than the journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the title changed in this translation?&lt;/strong&gt; Not all English translations have changed the title: &lt;em&gt;Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt; seems more common for English versions. Does it relate to the chapters Waley chose to excise or keep during his abridgement - does the change in title reflect a change in focus of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T03:08:26.810" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T03:08:26.810" Title="Why did Arthur Waley change the title in his translation of Journey to the West?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;journey-to-the-west&gt;&lt;arthur-waley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11411" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11413" CreationDate="2019-07-24T15:39:09.270" Score="4" ViewCount="368" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.onedepart.com/i-fall-asleep&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this poem&lt;/a&gt; as a part of some frequently quoted poems in the eulogy. I am not sure what exactly it tries to convey and how people use it, because it sounds like the person that delivers the eulogy died, not the other way around. Can someone explain to me what subtle meaning it is expressing? How exactly do people use it in the eulogy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fall asleep in the full and certain hope&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That my slumber shall not be broken;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And that though I be all-forgetting,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet shall I not be all-forgotten,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of those I loved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7555" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:08:41.600" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:08:41.600" Title="What is the meaning of Samuel Butler's eulogy beginning &quot;I fall asleep&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;samuel-butler-novelist&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11394" CreationDate="2019-07-24T18:41:17.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The serpent in Genesis 3 has the ability to talk, but it isn't clear where that ability comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Numbers 22, Balaam the diviner is summoned by the King of Moab to give advice about what to do about the Israelites traveling through Moab. God sends an angel to oppose Balaam and his donkey from riding away. Each time the donkey goes astray from the path and Balaam beats it to get the donkey back to the path. After the third movement, this happens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth, and it said to Balaam, “What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2022&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Numbers 22:28&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They go on to have a conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;29 Balaam answered the donkey, “You have made a fool of me! If only I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;30 The donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your own donkey, which you have always ridden, to this day? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?” “No,” he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;31 Then the Lord opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;32 The angel of the Lord asked him, “Why have you beaten your donkey these three times? I have come here to oppose you because your path is a reckless one before me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;33 The donkey saw me and turned away from me these three times. If it had not turned away, I would certainly have killed you by now, but I would have spared it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;34 Balaam said to the angel of the Lord, “I have sinned. I did not realize you were standing in the road to oppose me. Now if you are displeased, I will go back.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;35 The angel of the Lord said to Balaam, “Go with the men, but speak only what I tell you.” So Balaam went with Balak’s officials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is likely that there were mythical references to animals or things who talked before the Book of Numbers was composed, but this is the earliest instance I can find showing the moment of &lt;em&gt;gaining the ability to talk&lt;/em&gt; in an otherwise human-populated narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7386" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T18:41:17.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11411" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:28:26.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These lines have been taken from Samuel Butler’s novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon_Revisited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erewhon Revisited&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1901). Here’s the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My father has said that the Erewhonians never put up monuments or write epitaphs for their dead, and this he believed to be still true; but it was not so always, and on waking his eye was caught by a monument of great beauty, which bore a date of about 1550 of our era. It was to an old lady, who must have been very loveable if the sweet smiling face of her recumbent figure was as faithful to the original as its strongly marked individuality suggested. I need not give the earlier part of her epitaph, which was conventional enough, but my father was so struck with the concluding lines, that he copied them into the note-book which he always carried in his pocket. They ran:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;I fall asleep in the full and certain hope&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That my slumber shall not be broken;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And that though I be all-forgetting,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Yet shall I not be all-forgotten,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Of those I loved,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Into which, while the power to strive was yet vouchsafed me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    I fondly strove to enter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My father deplored his inability to do justice to the subtle tenderness of the original, but the above was the nearest he could get to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Butler (1901). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon_Revisited&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erewhon Revisted Twenty Years Later, Both by the Original Discoverer of the Country and by His Son&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 119–120&lt;/a&gt;. London: Grant Richards.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Butler’s two &lt;em&gt;Erewhon&lt;/em&gt; novels are satires of Victorian society, in which English conventions and mores are interrogated through the imaginary country of Erewhon, where everything is backwards. For example, in Erewhon the social roles of disease and criminality are transposed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;if a man falls into ill health, or catches any disorder, or fails bodily in any way before he is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to public scorn and sentenced more or less severely as the case may be. […] But if a man forges a cheque, or sets his house on fire, or robs with violence from the person, or does any other such things as are criminal in our own country, he is either taken to a hospital and most carefully tended at the public expense, or if he is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to all his friends that he is suffering from a severe fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill, and they come and visit him with great solicitude&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Butler (1872). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/erewhonoroverran00butlrich/page/84&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Erewhon or Over the Range&lt;/em&gt;, p. 84&lt;/a&gt;. London: Trübner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines from the question are another example of this kind of satirical reversal. Many English epitaphs alluded to the deceased’s hope of eternal life according to their Christian faith. Here are a couple of examples employing Butler’s phrase “full and certain hope”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And, when the grim monarch levelled his dart at him, he met the stroke with fortitude, and left this world in full and certain hope of a better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Nichols (1812). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=NDwUAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PP439&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 421&lt;/a&gt;. London: Nichols, Son &amp;amp; Bentley.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The event accelerated at least his own death, which occurred soon after; and the mortal remains of thes &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; honoured vestiges of departed worth, now have blended their dust, and repose in the full and certain hope of a joyful resurrection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Cottle (1829). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9ZgXAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA371&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malvern Hills: With Minor Poems and Essays&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 371&lt;/a&gt;. London: T. Cadell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the people of Erewhon do not believe in life after death, and so instead of heaven or resurrection, they have a “full and certain hope” that they will remain dead for ever (“slumber shall not be broken”) and all that will survive of them are the memories of the people who knew them. The collapse of religious belief since Butler wrote his novels means that for most modern readers, this sentiment no longer strikes us as a satirical reversal, but as the plain truth of the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T20:28:26.413" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11414" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11415" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" Score="0" Body="Samuel Butler (1835–1902), English novelist, known for the satire &quot;Erewhon&quot; (1872) and the semi-autobiographical &quot;The Way of All Flesh&quot; (1903)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" LastActivityDate="2019-07-24T20:34:11.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11422" CreationDate="2019-07-25T01:05:42.230" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;From 'The Screaming Skull' by F. Marion Crawford:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ought not to be nervous. I've sailed in a haunted ship. There was &lt;strong&gt;a&#xA;  Man in the Top&lt;/strong&gt;, and two-thirds of the crew died of the West Coast fever&#xA;  inside of ten days after we anchored; but I was all right, then and&#xA;  afterward. I have seen some ugly sights, too, just as you have, and all&#xA;  the rest of us. But nothing ever stuck in my head in the way this does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Francis Marion Crawford (1911). '&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wanderingghosts00crawgoog/page/n69&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Screaming Skull&lt;/a&gt;'. In &lt;em&gt;Wandering Ghosts&lt;/em&gt;, New York: Macmillan, p. 57.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;a Man in the Top&quot; mean? Why did the author use capital letters in that phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7505" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T10:33:10.183" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T10:33:10.183" Title="What is &quot;a Man in the Top&quot; in Crawford's 'The Screaming Skull'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;francis-marion-crawford&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11418" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11419" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" Score="0" Body="Samuel Butler (1835–1902), English novelist, known for the satire &quot;Erewhon&quot; (1872) and the semi-autobiographical &quot;The Way of All Flesh&quot; (1903). Not to be confused with the poet Samuel Butler (1613–1680)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T06:26:28.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11420" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11421" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" Score="0" Body="Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909), American writer, noted for Italian-set novels and ghost stories." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T07:52:40.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11417" CreationDate="2019-07-25T08:00:54.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator of ‘The Screaming Skull’ describes himself as ‘an old sailor’, and this paragraph is set aboard a ship, so ‘Top’ has this meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;top, &lt;em&gt;n.1&lt;/em&gt;. 9.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A platform near the head of each of the lower masts of a ship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This platform provides attachment points for the shrouds supporting the topmast, and in military ships provides a vantage point for the marines to fire from. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_(sailing_ship)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for more details.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ship is described as ‘haunted’, so the ‘Man in the Top’ must be a man who shouldn’t be there: that is, an apparition or ghost. The capital letters make the phrase into a kind of title, indicating that we are to understand ‘Man in the Top’ as being a genre of nautical tale. The way that the narrator casually refers to the episode without further explanation suggests that it is the kind of story which we ought to recognise and be able to fill in the rest of the details for ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure that the ‘Man in the Top’ genre of story is quite as common as implied by the narrator of ‘The Screaming Skull’, but I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; able to find one example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was just laying the halyards up off deck, when all at once the boy comes down the topmast back stay on deck, and there he stood hanging on, and his eyes staring, with his hands pointed to the top. Well, the second mate came up, and wanted to know what was the matter; but he couldn’t get him to speak for some time—at last he made out to say that there was &lt;strong&gt;a man in the top&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexander Hamilton Heysham (1831). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7tQRAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA295&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Messenger; Or, a Yarn Upon the Lee Booms—A Sea Story&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Lady’s Book&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 295.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T08:00:54.667" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11394" CreationDate="2019-07-25T12:28:38.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garuda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Garuda&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a mythical bird or bird-like creature also known as the king of birds in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythology. Garuda is mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an Indian epic that may have reached its final form in the 4th century BC, even thoug its origins appear to be older (&quot;between the 8th and 9th centuries BCE&quot; according to Wikipedia). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient.eu/Garuda/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient History Encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt; summarizes the following episode involving Garuda (italics from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In perhaps the most famous episode from Hindu mythology involving Garuda, the giant bird attempted to steal from the gods the sacred &lt;em&gt;amrta&lt;/em&gt; or 'water of life'. Indra soon found out and, unconvinced by Garuda's motive that he needed the &lt;em&gt;amrta&lt;/em&gt; as a ransom to free his mother from the clutches of Kadru, fought the giant bird in an epic battle. Mighty Indra lost his famous thunderbolt in the clash but eventually managed to retrieve the &lt;em&gt;amrta&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage implies that Garuda can speak (&quot;Garuda's motive ...&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Norse mythology, Odin has two ravens called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huginn_and_Muninn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Huginn and Muninn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; who fly over the world and bring information to Odin. However, the earliest texts that mention these ravens date from the 13th century, so they are much more recent than the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;. Wikipedia also points out,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Heimskringla&lt;/em&gt; book &lt;em&gt;Ynglinga&lt;/em&gt; saga, a euhemerized account of the life of Odin is provided. Chapter 7 describes that Odin had two ravens, and upon these ravens he bestowed the gift of speech. These ravens flew all over the land and brought him information, causing Odin to become &quot;very wise in his lore.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T12:28:38.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11424" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11425" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Chinese novel 'Journey to the West', which was published in the 16th century and is attributed to Wu Cheng'en. Use this tag with [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T13:05:54.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11410" CreationDate="2019-07-25T15:15:54.830" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt; is divided into three sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 1–7: the rebellion of Monkey (Sun Wukong) against the gods and his punishment by Buddha.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 8–12: the early life of Tripitaka (Tang Xuanzang) and his recruitment by Kuan-Yin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 13–100: the recruitment of Tripitaka’s companions, their journey to India, and their return to China with the sutras.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, 88% of the original novel is about the journey to the West, amply justifying its title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waley’s translation, however, substantially abridges the original. He included the whole of part 1 (Monkey’s rebellion) and part 2 (Triptaka’s recruitment), but from part 3 he selected eighteen of the eighty-eight chapters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 13–15: recruitment of Monkey and the Dragon Horse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 18–19: recruitment of Pigsy (Zhu Bajie).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 22: recruitment of Sandy (Sha Wujing).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 37–39: ‘The Lion Demon in the Kingdom of Crow-Cock’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 44–46: ‘The Cart-Slow Kingdom’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 47–49: ‘The River that Leads to Heaven’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 98: ‘The Goal Achieved’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapters 99–100: ‘The Eighty-first Calamity’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Monkey’s rebellion thus constitutes nearly a quarter of Waley’s translation, and the particular episodes selected from the third section of the book further foreground the character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The episodes selected by Waley all highlight the Monkey as a hero who plays a vital role in using his own power or strategies to subdue demons and help the pilgrims successfully complete their mission. Waley’s reduction of &lt;em&gt;The Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt; from one hundred chapters to thirty chapters makes an important change to the original story: to a large extent, the journey becomes the Monkey’s journey of self-development, whose growth and heroic behavior overshadow Tripitaka, the original protagonist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hao Ji (2016). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1163/23521341-12340027&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Comparative Study of Two Major English Translations of &lt;em&gt;The Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Monkey&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Monkey and the Monk&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Journal of Chinese Humanities&lt;/em&gt; 2:1, p.80.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waley thus refashioned the book from the story of Tripitaka’s journey (in which Monkey plays a secondary role) into the story of Monkey’s rebellion and penance (in which Tripitaka plays a secondary role).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-07-25T16:09:43.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11427" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-26T09:47:14.593" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quite some time ago (I can't really say for sure, but I think it was in the 90s) I've read a story about a car chasing in a traffic jam, and I can't figure out now what this story was, or in which book I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might have been a story by Stanislav Lem (an author I was reading a lot at that time), but I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was, as far as I remember, a short story (contained in a paperback book with several stories). I read it in German, but it might have been a translation. The protagonist was the one chased, and as far as I remember, the story was written in first-person present tense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was basically the thoughts of the protagonist, on how to escape. He's on the middle lane, and considers that to get off the road, he would first need to get to the left or right lane, but for some reason that I don't remember, it would give him a disadvantage to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, he considers why he is chased after all, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; comes to the conclusion that he is chased to prevent him from killing the driver of the car in front of him. So he shoots the driver of that car, and thus ends the chase by it becoming pointless. Indeed, if I remember correctly, he contemplates a full sequence of killers in that traffic jam, each of them intending to kill the one in front to prevent that one from killing the one in front of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3220" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T09:47:14.593" Title="A story about a car chase in a traffic jam" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11428" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-26T18:48:07.903" Score="5" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm (re-)reading &quot;An Equal Music&quot; by Vikram Seth and encountered the following paragraph which I do not understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, the book is written in first person perspective (although that isn't apparent in the quoted portion), the main character (Michael) is a violinist and at this point in the book the love of his life (Julia) has just left Venice to go home to her husband. Michael stays in Venice (since he is on tour with his string quartet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the passage I'm having trouble with, I marked the specific words and phrases I do not understand in cursive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A walk&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the world, the earthquake plate, alone; the&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;mudflats of subsidence and flood&lt;/em&gt;, and the hermitage of the one who&#xA;  found the true cross. Then in the city on the day of the earthquake&#xA;  was born the weak priest whose writings were dispersed, coming through&#xA;  hands and hands to the library of the curved wall. There they lay &lt;em&gt;till&#xA;  ecstasy rose unheard to the crowning angels and the dove&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;If we were&#xA;  dolphins, what would we play?&lt;/em&gt; If we had four hands would Bach's mind&#xA;  have further branched? Let our thumbs be opposable at the opposite&#xA;  edge. Let our teeth be pulled, let us have baleen like whales, that&#xA;  our plankton love might grow, that we might ungnashing plash and play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three points I have trouble with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saint Helena (of Constatinople) is the one who (allegedly) found the true cross, and there is a chapel dedicated to her in the outskirts of Venice (a city plagued by earthquakes), which Michael and Julia have visited. However, who goes on this walk alone? Initially I thought it would be Michael revisiting places they went to together alone but since the next sentence starts with &quot;then&quot;, it seems the walk has to precede the birth of the weak priest (1678) while the story is set in the present. Also, I don't understand what the mudflats of subsidence and flood are supposed to be.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context to the next phrase I'm having trouble with, an explanation of the weak priest: the composer Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741) was born in Venice, (allegedly) during an earthquake, became a priest and had terrible health. He wrote a piece Michael and Julia played together which is part of  a set (now called the Manchester Sonatas) discovered only relatively recently (very recently when the book was written) in the Manchester city library (where Michael has spent time earlier in the book) which, according to Google Images, is a round building (so there is only one outside wall, in the obviously curved shape of a circle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Apparently the discovery of the Manchester Sonatas coincided with the rising of ecstasy – I don't have a clue. Neither do I know whether they lay unheard (which is obviously true, since, having been forgotten, they weren't played until their discovery) or whether ecstasy rose unheard (which makes no sense to me but the word order seems to indicate this). Who are the crowning angels? And does the dove symbolise the Holy Spirit? The idea of music being written and played &lt;em&gt;soli deo gloria&lt;/em&gt; was common in Vivaldi's time, but in the present music isn't regarded in this way anymore.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What comes next might seem bizarre but Michael wouldn't be the first to wonder what composers would have composed if circumstances had been different. Though usually the question is what a composer had written if they had been born in a different time (usually later), what would change if humans had had a different physiology is not so farfetched. But what does this have to do with the rest of the paragraph? My best guess is that this wishing for different music for a different human condition somehow relates to him wishing for different circumstances in which he could be with Julia (an important motif in the book is them playing together) but I'm not exactly convinced of this interpretation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7560" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T19:22:25.660" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T11:01:02.617" Title="What does this paragraph of &quot;An Equal Music&quot; by Vikram Seth mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;vikram-seth&gt;&lt;an-equal-music&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2019-07-26T19:19:07.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never met Sherri Poterfield so obviously I can only speculate on why she made this choice. But that I will do!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Poterfield's melody begins with a musical structure that is called a &quot;Satz&quot; (or sentence). A Satz consists of two halves: the presentation and the continuation. The presentation has two halves: first comes an &quot;idea&quot;, or a motif (musical rather than literary), then a (mostly varied) repetition, both parts are of equal length. The continuation is slightly hairier but in the textbook case the continuation is the same length as the presentation, yet doesn't break apart in two halves and, while based on it, does not literally repeat the full motif from the presentation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Satz is a very old, very reliable and very common thematic structure, especially for a beginning, and Poterfield decided to open the piece with one. This means, however, that she needs a melodic idea she can repeat. The idea of a Satz is generally very short, in this case 4 notes (which is not at all unusual, compare Beethoven's fifth symphony), since &quot;tiger tiger&quot; is 4 syllables. However, to repeat the idea she needs another four, while &quot;burning bright&quot; is only three. A (small scale) Satz is a very rhythmical structure, usually the variation of the repetition is a transposition or a melodic variation (and the Poterfield setting of The Tiger starts with an, apart from the text, unvaried repetition), not a rhythmical variation (especially not such a big one – omitting a quarter of the material). In addition, a common technique for the continuation is shortening the initial motif, so doing that in the presentation creates problems in this area too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, adding the extra syllable is very convenient (but by no means necessary) for the melody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7560" LastEditorUserId="7560" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T22:34:24.160" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T22:34:24.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11430" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11431" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" Score="0" Body="For question about the 1999 novel by Vikram Seth. Use with the [vikram-seth] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T19:23:17.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11432" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-26T19:24:29.207" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-07-26T19:24:29.207" LastActivityDate="2019-07-26T19:24:29.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11433" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-26T19:24:29.207" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Indian author Vikram Seth and his works. Questions about his works should be tagged either with the appropriate novel tag, or with [poetry] if they are questions about his short poems." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T17:03:39.647" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T17:03:39.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11434" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11537" CreationDate="2019-07-26T20:12:19.593" Score="2" ViewCount="301" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently heard this, and was trying to figure out what it means. It's by Isaac Watts and, I believe, from his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/024343913X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/Arrangement-Psalms-Hymns-Spiritual-Songs/dp/024343913X&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our life contains a thousand springs,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dies if one be gone:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Strange that a harp of thousand strings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should keep in tune so long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7562" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-07-27T03:37:19.110" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T16:36:29.720" Title="Help understanding this quote/hymn by Isaac Watts" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;isaac-watts&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-27T10:09:40.267" Score="7" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/506147/87724&quot;&gt;literature-related thread&lt;/a&gt; on another SE site, I found the claim that the pirates in Robert louis Stevenson's &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; speak in a Cornish dialect. This makes sense only thematically (given that the story begins in Cornwall and several of the &lt;em&gt;non-pirate&lt;/em&gt; main characters are Cornish), not in terms of in-story logic (many of the pirates are from Flint's old crew, or presumably whatever riffraff Silver picked up in Bristol, and there's no particular reason they'd be likely to hail from Cornwall rather than anywhere else).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the &quot;pirate dialect&quot; portrayed in &lt;em&gt;Treasure Island&lt;/em&gt; consistent with Cornish dialect?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm expecting an answer which analyses the speech patterns shown in the text compared with those of Cornish dialect. But if someone can show compelling evidence that many of the pirates are actually from Cornwall - which I strongly doubt, but feel free to surprise me - that would also make a good answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:21:10.280" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:21:10.280" Title="Do Stevenson's pirates speak in Cornish dialect?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;robert-louis-stevenson&gt;&lt;treasure-island&gt;&lt;dialect&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11436" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-27T15:21:53.887" Score="3" ViewCount="513" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have heard that the quote “The Devil is not as black as he is painted.” is due to Dante. Can someone please provide me a with a reference for this? I am guessing that it is somewhere in the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7564" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T21:23:53.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:23:53.983" Title="Reference for Dante Quote" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-28T02:03:40.257" Score="4" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was preparing for my exam , in exam solution book I found written like &lt;strong&gt;&quot;There is cross cultural relation between Stella and Leo.Because Leo was Jewish and Stella was Christain.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I wander is this a good analysis to write in the exam paper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story &quot;The Magic Barrel&quot;, how is it possible that the father (Pinny) and daughter (Stella) are from different religions? Is it one of the reason why Pinny was chatting for her death or sinful acts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5879" LastEditorUserId="5879" LastEditDate="2019-07-28T20:34:44.487" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T20:34:44.487" Title="How can Stella Salzman be Christian while her father Pinny Salzman is Jewish?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;bernard-malamud&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11437" CreationDate="2019-07-28T18:14:49.480" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no indication in the story that they are from different religions. Stella is only introduced at the very end of the story, and nothing is said about her religion. Additionally, nothing is mentioned about her sinning. The only thing we have is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This is why to me she is dead now.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why, he asks,&quot; Salzman said, bursting into tear. &quot;This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is nothing here that indicates that she had actually done anything wrong. In fact, Leo later suspects that Pinye was deliberately talking like that in a sort of reverse psychology to get him to want to date Stella:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leaving the cafeteria, he was, however, afflicted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, when Pinye was praying for the dead, there is no mention that this is a reference to Stella (though, of course, that may have been the intent):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2019-07-28T18:14:49.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-29T16:14:41.787" Score="7" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Stephen King's &lt;em&gt;IT&lt;/em&gt;, we are introduced to some particularly evil characters such as Beverley's husband Tom Rogan, Henry Bowers, and most notably Patrick Hockstetter. King delves into this maniacal, heartless, and excessively cruel character toward the end of the book. Despite torturing animals, molesting people, and otherwise horrifying everyone he is around, Hockstetter is captured and murdered by Pennywise the clown. Being that Patrick is a character who is generally unimpressed with terror, I am curious why Pennywise decides to kill him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know Pennywise will &quot;use&quot; people to further his agenda, for example, he recruits Henry Bowers to help kill the &lt;em&gt;Losers&lt;/em&gt;. Why not use Hockstetter? Hockstetter has killed before, his little brother who he smothered, why not use this individual who clearly enjoys violence and isn't driven by rage like Bowers? There could be a long discussion about the differences between Bowers and Hockstetter, but I believe that can be determined by examining their goals. Bowers &lt;em&gt;hates&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;Losers&lt;/em&gt;, Hockstetter is indifferent to them. I'm curious as to what other people think about these two individuals and why Pennywise might select Bowers over Hockstetter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7570" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T09:33:09.420" LastActivityDate="2019-07-30T09:33:09.420" Title="Why does Pennywise Kill Patrick Hockstetter?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;it&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-29T17:24:21.143" Score="2" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Austen (volume 1, chapter 4):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Bingley inherited property to the amount of nearly a&#xA;  hundred thousand pounds from his father, who had intended to&#xA;  purchase an estate, but did not live to do it.  Mr. Bingley&#xA;  intended it likewise, and sometimes made choice of his county;&#xA;  but as he was now provided with a good house and the liberty of&#xA;  a manor, it was doubtful to many of those who best knew the&#xA;  easiness of his temper, whether he might not spend the&#xA;  remainder of his days at Netherfield, and leave the next&#xA;  generation to purchase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this paragraph mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T08:26:09.263" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T14:47:25.007" Title="Why might Mr. Bingley &quot;leave the next generation to purchase&quot; in &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11456" CreationDate="2019-07-30T09:18:08.213" Score="3" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Joseph Conrad's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/conrad/181/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Idiots&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Millot was stumbling, laughing, swearing meaninglessly out of pure satisfaction, pleased with himself for having run down that fly-by-night. “As if there were such things as ghosts! Bah! &lt;strong&gt;It took an old African soldier to show those clodhoppers&lt;/strong&gt;. . . . But it was curious. Who the devil was she?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Conrad mean? Which African soldier? I get it that African soldier is somehow connected to the ghosts and &quot;inferior&quot; civilizations that still believe in such things, but is there some story behind the expression?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1944" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T12:35:12.780" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T12:35:12.780" Title="Who's this African soldier? What does Conrad mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-30T18:07:09.583" Score="1" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Promised_Land_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Promised Land&lt;/em&gt; by Władysław Reymont&lt;/a&gt; have an English translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find it on Amazon. I am very naive about book shopping beyond Amazon and I could not find anything by Googling. Does anyone know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7576" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-07-30T23:55:34.360" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T17:11:24.660" Title="English translation of The Promised Land by Władysław Reymont" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;wladyslaw-reymont&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11454" CreationDate="2019-07-30T18:32:51.070" Score="4" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 5 Scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HAMLET:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So much for this, sir. Now shall you see the other.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You do remember all the circumstance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;HORATIO: Remember it, my lord!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio replies to Hamlet calling him his &quot;lord.&quot; Is it common for higher ranking nobility to refer to lower ranking nobility as sir?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7577" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T20:12:25.750" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T01:58:17.853" Title="If Hamlet, being a prince, outranked Horatio, why did he address him as &quot;sir&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-30T21:17:50.877" Score="5" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the 2nd chapter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Fire_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Baptism Of Fire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Geralt and Dandelion come across a group of traders trying to sell Cahir to the Nilfgaardian army, who are introduced as &quot;havekars&quot;, basically war profiteers selling weapons to the Scoia'tael.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while the term &quot;havekar&quot; is explained to be, within the story, a sloppy transliteration of a (supposedly fictional) elven word, the text seems to suggest that it has, or at least points to, a real meaning in human language, too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Money ruled the world, and demand created supply. The Scoia'tael roaming the woods piled up huge loot, for which they had no use, though. But they lacked in gear and weapons. This way a flying trade arose in the woods. And a kind of humans who catered to that trade. On the forest paths, glades and aisles quietly and secretly the carts of the speculators appeared, who did business with the squirrels. The elves called them &lt;em&gt;hav'caaren&lt;/em&gt;, an untranslatable word, but in which ringed predatory greed. Among the humans the term &quot;havekar&quot; vernacularized, and that reminded of an even more detestable word. For it were detestable people. Cruel and ruthless they didn't shy away from anything, not even murder. A havekar caught by the army couldn't count on mercy. The same as he himself didn't use to be merciful. If he encountered someone who could reveal him to the soldiers, he reached for crossbow or knife without hesitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it's unclear to me &lt;strong&gt;what &quot;even more detestable word&quot; Sapkowski is alluding to here&lt;/strong&gt; (which might extratextually have in turn inspired the elven word). This is made especially difficult since I didn't read the Polish original but its German translation (and thus the above excerpt has actually been translated into English by me from Erik Simon's official German translation). So it might very well be that the allusion got itself lost in translation and refers to a Polish word that doesn't actually fit to &quot;havekar&quot; in German. Alternatively, &quot;havekar&quot; might itself have been translated from Polish in order to make sense in the translation, a sense I'm nevertheless still missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;what real word is he hinting at here that the ostensible transliteration &quot;havekar&quot; is supposed to remind us of?&lt;/strong&gt; Does this only make sense in Polish? Or does it maybe not even make sense in the original and is itself an empty allusion for the sheer sake of worldbuilding through incomplete knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T21:37:02.273" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T21:37:02.273" Title="What real word is &quot;havekar&quot; alluding to?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11446" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11559" CreationDate="2019-07-30T22:40:04.640" Score="4" ViewCount="246" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ted Hughes' &quot;In Laughter&quot; (A &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; poem. See it fully &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?redir_esc=y&amp;amp;id=hz5O0laGLOgC&amp;amp;pg=pt372&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), the first paragraph depicts &quot;colliding&quot; and &quot;crashing&quot; as the kind of events that happen &quot;In laughter&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The steamer upends and goes under saluting like a stuntman&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The nosediving aircraft concludes with a boom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  People's arms and legs fly off and fly on again&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The haggard mask on the bed rediscovers its pang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In laughter, in laughter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The meteorite crashes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With extraordinary ill-luck on the pram&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;[Note that the repeating line &quot;In laughter&quot; is the beginning, not the ending, of each couplet, as evident by &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt;'s audio version].&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this paragraph, there's one image that I'm not sure how to interpret:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The steamer upends and goes under &lt;strong&gt;saluting like a stuntman&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;saluting&quot; may simply mean a nautical etiquette flag dipping (and see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/506498/salute-usage-as-firecracker?noredirect=1#comment1225633_506498&quot;&gt;this comment&lt;/a&gt;), but how do a &quot;saluting&quot; and a &quot;stuntman&quot; are connected to each other as an image of a sinking steamer ship? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:30:41.067" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T14:40:03.153" Title="Meaning of &quot;a ship saluting like a stuntman&quot; in Ted Hughes' &quot;In Laughter&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;crow&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11445" CreationDate="2019-07-30T23:10:07.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Warning: a speculative answer!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&quot;Havekar&quot; doesn't relate to any Polish word&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For start, there is no letter &quot;v&quot; in the Polish alphabet and &quot;h&quot; is relatively rarely used as a first letter. However, this does look slightly similar to the Czech language, where (after digging a bit in the dictionary) I've found a few similarly sounding words: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;havran&lt;/strong&gt; : rook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;havranovitý&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;havraní&lt;/strong&gt; - corvine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;havěť&lt;/strong&gt; - vermin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: &quot;Vrány a jiní havranovití, krkavci, havrani a podobní jsou neuvěřitelně chytří ptáci&quot; means &quot;crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept that chain of thought, it could mean that &quot;Havekars&quot; are like birds from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corvidae&lt;/a&gt; family - smart, but quite happy to feed on carrion. This suggests that Havekars are willing to use unsavoury ways to earn their living - live from other's death and misery, so they feed on carrion. Or we can go with the &quot;havěť&quot; word, which means something small and disgusting (vermin or bug), which brings similar meaning as described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T01:02:37.407" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T01:02:37.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11443" CreationDate="2019-07-31T17:11:24.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;An English translation was published in hardback format by A.A. Knopf in 1927, but there appears to be no English translation currently in print. You may have to use the services of a second-hand bookseller in order to obtain a copy. However, your first port of call should be a public library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18340844-the-promised-land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads: The Promised Land (2 Volumes)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T17:11:24.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:31:05.007" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Supplement_to_the_Journey_to_the_West&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Supplement to the Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a Chinese novel from around 1640 that was written as a type of addendum to the great classic novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_West&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt; is set during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_dynasty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tang dynasty&lt;/a&gt; (618 - 907), since it involves a character, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xuanzang&lt;/a&gt; that lived during that period. In &lt;em&gt;A Supplement to the Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;, one of the characters, Sun Wukong aka Monkey&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;leaps through and travels hundreds of years forward in time to the Song Dynasty,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which officially lasted from 960 until 1279.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the West (i.e. Europe, not the &amp;quot;West&amp;quot; from the novel's title), the concept of time travel was popularised by H. G. Wells' story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1895, i.e. three and a half centuries after &lt;em&gt;A Supplement to the Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt;. The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel#History_of_the_time_travel_concept&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;time travel&lt;/a&gt; mentions older examples from other literatures, e.g. from the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; (India) and from 8th-century Japanese literature. Is &lt;em&gt;A Supplement to the Journey to the West&lt;/em&gt; the oldest Chinese example? If not, what is the oldest one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T18:34:22.267" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T18:34:22.267" Title="Is A Supplement to the Journey to the West from the 17th century the oldest Chinese work of literature involving time travel?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;xi-you-bu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11450" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11451" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'A Supplement to the Journey to the West' (西游补 / Xī Yóu Bǔ), a Chinese novel written around 1640 as an addendum to the classic novel 'Journey to the West' (西遊記 / Xīyóu Jì)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:44:05.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11452" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11453" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859 – 1952) and his life as a writer. He is best known for his 1890 novel 'Hunger'. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1920. Use this tag with the [scandinavian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T19:48:13.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2019-07-31T20:26:37.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ShakespearesWords.com&lt;/a&gt; provides two definitions for &quot;sir&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;man, person, individual &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  gentleman, lord, gallant, master&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first definition can be ignored, since it is not a form of address.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/LanguageCompanion/ThemesAndTopics.aspx?TopicId=2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Address forms&lt;/a&gt; on ShakespearesWords.com also adds the following explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;respectful title for a priest, clerk, or other professional; often mock use&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;the address &quot;sir&quot; is not reserved for nobility&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; contains other examples of this form of address. For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 2, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LORD POLONIUS&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Honest, my lord!&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  HAMLET&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  one man picked out of ten thousand.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;(...)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Enter ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  LORD POLONIUS&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  You go to seek the Lord Hamlet; there he is.&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  ROSENCRANTZ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;  [To POLONIUS] God save you, sir!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hamlet's usage of &quot;sir&quot; in this scene is consistent with Act 5, scene 2. Rosencrantz, who is a courtier, just like Polonius, also uses it to address the king's adviser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, Leontes even use the term &quot;sir&quot; when talking to his son, who is only a boy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come, sir page,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Most dear'st! my collop!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-07-31T20:26:37.840" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-07-31T21:36:35.910" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a poem about a little girl who is with her mum and is trying to change the sleeping arrangements or something so that she can stay in her dad's bed.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember something about the father sleeping in the barn or something.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The girl ends up falling asleep in her mum's arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about all I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7582" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T04:06:51.173" Title="Poem about moving beds" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11442" CreationDate="2019-08-01T01:25:53.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It appears that Millot is speaking about himself&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that scene, Susan runs madly through the night - when peasants see her, they take her for a ghost and hide in fear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She ran lightly, unaware of any effort of her body [...] She heard a voice calling, &quot;Hey! There!&quot; and answered with a wild scream. So, he could call yet! He was calling after her to stop. Never! . . . She tore through the night, past the startled group of seaweed-gatherers who stood round their lantern paralysed with fear at the unearthly screech coming from that fleeing shadow. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only Millot is ready to face her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suddenly a man swore loudly. He would go and see what was the matter. It had been a woman's voice. He would go [...] &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  A woman moaned. An old man said gravely: &quot;Such things ought to be left alone.&quot; They went on slower, shuffling in the yielding sand and &lt;strong&gt;whispering to one another that Millot feared nothing, having no religion,&lt;/strong&gt; but that it would end badly some day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Susan thinks that Millot is her dead husband and runs further away, but the notion that he scared this &quot;ghost&quot; entertains him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Where the devil did you pass?&quot; said an invisible man, hoarsely. &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  She held her breath. She recognized the voice. She had not seen him fall. Was he pursuing her there dead, or perhaps . . . alive? &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  She lost her head. She cried from the crevice where she lay huddled, &quot;Never, never!&quot; &lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Ah! You are still there. You led me a fine dance. Wait, my beauty, I must see how you look after all this. You wait. . . .&quot;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;  Millot was stumbling, laughing, swearing meaninglessly out of pure satisfaction, pleased with himself for having run down that fly-by-night. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;As if there were such things as ghosts! Bah! It took an old African soldier to show those clodhoppers*&lt;/strong&gt;. . . . But it was curious. Who the devil was she?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he means that all those superstitious peasants are afraid of ghosts, so it needs someone like him - an old African soldier - to show them there is no such thing, to show no fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why he is an African soldier - please remember that this story takes place in the XIX century France, which is a colonial empire. This means if he was a soldier, Millot would have most likely fought in Africa (i.e. during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Algeria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conquest of Algier 1830-1847&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_conquest_of_Senegal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Senegal 1854-1865&lt;/a&gt;... or during one of many more interventions) or that he was born somewhere in French Africa. It has nothing to do with Africa being inferior - quite contrary, Millot thinks that he is better than the rest because he is the &quot;African soldier&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2019-08-01T01:48:29.563" LastActivityDate="2019-08-01T01:48:29.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-01T14:24:48.503" Score="2" ViewCount="644" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having some trouble comprehending a portion of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://thomaspaine.org/essays/poetry/liberty-tree.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liberty Tree&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Thomas Paine, and was unable to find a decent analysis of it. It is my understanding that this poem is about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liberty Tree&lt;/a&gt; that was located in Boston where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Liberty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sons of Liberty&lt;/a&gt; met in order to plan (it died in 1923, and is now memorialized by a statue).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically this stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In a chariot of light, from the regions of the day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Goddess of Liberty came,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ten thousand celestials directed her way,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hither conducted the dame.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fair budding branch from the gardens above,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where millions with millions agree,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the plant she named Liberty Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, is this reference to timber about the pine which was supplied by the colonies to make masts for their ships? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beneath this fair tree, like the patriarchs of old,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their bread in contentment they ate,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Unvexed with the troubles of silver or gold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The cares of the grand and the great.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With timber and tar they Old England supplied,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And supported her power on the sea;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her battles they fought, without getting a groat,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For the honor of Liberty Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update 2: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question was poorly worded, and I did not accurately communicate my points of confusion. I suppose what is really confusing me is specific lines within each stanza. Allow me to provide one example. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And hither conducted the dame.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fair budding branch from the gardens above,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where millions with millions agree,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does this mean? I can understand the overall meaning of the individual stanzas, but certain points confuse me. Even with my researching the definitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7585" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T14:46:54.263" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T14:46:54.263" Title="Analysis of &quot;Liberty Tree&quot; by Thomas Paine" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-paine&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10986" CreationDate="2019-08-02T16:49:39.533" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrea Dworkin was a feminist activist in the 1970s and later. In her book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercourse_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Intercourse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1987), she wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solideness a lie. The discourse of male truth—literature, science, philosophy, pornography—calls that penetration &lt;em&gt;violation&lt;/em&gt;. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Violation&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym for intercourse.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Andrea Dworkin (1987). &lt;em&gt;Intercourse&lt;/em&gt;, p. 122. New York: The Free Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage has been interpreted as saying that &amp;quot;all heterosexual sex is rape,&amp;quot; although she has said this a mischaracterization of her work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Penetrative intercourse is, by its nature, violent. But I'm not saying that sex must be rape. What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That's my point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Andrea Dworkin (2000). Quoted in Michael Sheldon, 'I was taught to be too nice to boys', &lt;em&gt;Daily Telegraph&lt;/em&gt;, 27 May 2000.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her work, along with Catharine MacKinnon's work, was often brought up in the anti-pornography movement of the 1980s. I took a women's studies course in college in the late '80s, and they were part of the required reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T06:11:40.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10986" CreationDate="2019-08-02T21:43:13.090" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Also important is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marilyn French&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;All men are rapists... They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes.”&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Women%27s_Room&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Women’s Room&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastActivityDate="2019-08-02T21:43:13.090" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11491" CreationDate="2019-08-03T07:40:21.350" Score="6" ViewCount="3584" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story &quot;Should Wizard hit Mommy&quot; by John Updike (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;url=http://www.ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/levt105.pdf&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiA94TQl-bjAhXDXSsKHT1CC5QQFjAAegQIAxAB&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw2csWqEb9AQBu-zWFm7NHcA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a short five-to-ten-minute read&lt;/a&gt;) is on my curriculum; it involves a father who tells a nap-time story to his daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be a story, that the father is telling her to teach her values, but I couldn't understand what really the author wanted to tell us. What was the real morale of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because in the middle he says that he has to finish the story quickly to help his 6-month pregnant wife, but in the last paragraph he says that he feels like being in a cage, and doesn't want to speak or touch her!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“The poor kid,”&lt;/strong&gt; he answered, and with utter weariness watched his wife labour. The woodwork, a cage of moldings and rails and baseboards all around them, was half old tan and half new ivory and he &lt;strong&gt;felt caught in an ugly middle position, and though he as well felt his wife’s presence in the cage with him, he did not want to speak with her, work with her, touch her , anything.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also why does he call his daughter a &quot;poor kid&quot;? What exactly is the author conveying here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7578" LastEditorUserId="7578" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T19:12:07.693" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T07:14:11.493" Title="In the short story &quot;Should Wizard hit Mommy&quot; by John Updike,what is the author conveying through his narrated story and contradicting actions" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;john-updike&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11463" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11484" CreationDate="2019-08-03T16:06:58.577" Score="4" ViewCount="418" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now was the moment for her resolution to be executed, and, while her courage was high, she immediately said, 'Mr Darcy, I am a very selfish creature; and, for the sake of giving relief to my own feelings, care not how much I may be wounding yours. I can no longer help thanking you for your unexampled kindness to my poor sister. Ever since I have known it, I have been most anxious to acknowledge to you how gratefully I feel it. Were it known  to the rest of my family, I should not have merely my own gratitude to express.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'I am sorry, exceedingly sorry,' replied Darcy,  in the tone of surprise and emotion, 'that you have ever been informed of what may, in a mistaken light, have given you uneasiness. &lt;strong&gt;I did not think Mrs Gardiner was so little to be trusted&lt;/strong&gt;.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'You must not blame my aunt. Lydia's thoughtlessness first betrayed to me that you had been concerned with the matter; and, of course, I could not rest till I knew the particulars.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Volume 3, Chapter 16&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can make out, a few people knew Mr Darcy was involved with Mr Wickham/Lydia affair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr Gardiner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mrs Gardiner&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Gardiner children&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lydia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr Wickham&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that Mr Darcy knew what a thoughtless person Lydia was, why did he not suspect her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume he would have known the embargo Mr Wickham placed on his new wife,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'...But gracious me! I quite forgot! I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised &lt;strong&gt;them&lt;/strong&gt; so faithfully! What will Wickham say? It was to be such a secret!'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Volume 3, Chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But did Darcy think such a promise would stand with Lydia, and it was merely a gentleman's agreement for discretion between himself and the Gardiners that he thinks Mrs Gardiner broke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of sexism/the titular prejudice on Mr Darcy's part, or does he consider the closeness between Elizabeth and Mrs Gardiner as the reason for her suspected divulgence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1896" LastEditorUserId="1896" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T17:56:07.840" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T08:22:07.387" Title="Why does Mr Darcy immediately suspect Mrs Gardiner of telling Elizabeth of his hand in marrying Lydia?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11464" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11465" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the  American novelist, poet, short-story writer and literary critic John Updike (1932 – 2009) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" LastActivityDate="2019-08-03T17:45:23.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11466" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:45:47.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:45:47.967" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:45:47.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11467" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:45:47.967" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Andrea Bocelli (born 1958), Italian singer and songwriter. Questions regarding his song lyrics should be tagged with [song-lyrics] as well as [italian-literature] or [spanish-literature] depending on the songs themselves." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:57:38.910" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:57:38.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11468" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11469" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" Score="0" Body="Thomas Paine (1737–1809), American philosopher and revolutionary. His notable works include &quot;Common Sense&quot; (1776) and &quot;Rights of Man&quot; (1791)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:48:04.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11470" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11471" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" Score="0" Body="Arthur Waley (1889–1966), English orientalist. His translations include &quot;The Tale of Genji&quot; (1926) and &quot;Monkey&quot; (1942)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:50:30.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11472" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11473" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" Score="0" Body="Sarah Waters (born 1966), Welsh novelist. Her works include &quot;Tipping the Velvet&quot; (1998) and &quot;Fingersmith&quot; (2002)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:51:39.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11474" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11475" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" Score="0" Body="&quot;Fingersmith&quot; (2002), an historical novel by Sarah Waters. Use this tag with the [sarah-waters] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:52:24.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11476" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11477" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" Score="0" Body="Ira Levin (1929–2007), American writer. His novels include &quot;A Kiss Before Dying&quot; (1953), &quot;Rosemary's Baby&quot; (1967), &quot;The Stepford Wives&quot; (1972), and &quot;The Boys from Brazil&quot; (1976).&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:54:10.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11478" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11479" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" Score="0" Body="&quot;Rosemary's Baby&quot; (1967), a horror novel by Ira Levin (adapted into the film of the same name by Roman Polanski). Use this tag with the [ira-levin] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:55:14.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11480" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11481" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" Score="0" Body="Elinor Wylie (1885–1928), American poet." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:56:19.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11482" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:57:25.483" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T05:57:25.483" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T05:57:25.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11483" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-04T05:57:25.483" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) or his life as a writer. His novels include 'The Natural' (1952) and 'The Fixer' (1966)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:46:21.330" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:46:21.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11463" CreationDate="2019-08-04T08:22:07.387" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Elizabeth expressed her gratitude for “your unexampled kindness to my poor sister”, Mr. Darcy correctly understood her as referring, not just to his &lt;em&gt;attendance&lt;/em&gt; at the wedding of Lydia and Mr. Wickham, but to his &lt;em&gt;financial contributions&lt;/em&gt; that persuaded the groom to go through with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Mr. Darcy did not suspect Lydia of betraying his financial arrangements because &lt;em&gt;she was not aware of them&lt;/em&gt;. The novel is not explicit on this point, but my reasoning is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lydia casually mentioned Mr. Darcy as an afterthought in a description of how Mr. Gardiner was nearly late for the wedding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, and so just as the carriage came to the door, my uncle was called away upon business to that horrid man Mr. Stone. And then, you know, when once they get together, there is no end of it. Well, I was so frightened I did not know what to do, for my uncle was to give me away; and if we were beyond the hour, we could not be married all day. But, luckily, he came back again in ten minutes’ time, and then we all set out. However, I recollected afterwards that if he had been prevented going, the wedding need not be put off, for Mr. Darcy might have done as well.” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.21684/page/n171&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.9&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that even Lydia would have been so casual about Mr. Darcy’s involvement had she known its full extent.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In making the arrangements, Mr. Darcy met Mr. Wickham several times but Lydia just once:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He came to tell Mr. Gardiner that he had found out where your sister and Mr. Wickham were, and that he had seen and talked with them both; Wickham repeatedly, Lydia once. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.21684/page/n177&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.10&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that some of the arrangements between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham were concealed from Lydia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lydia’s frivolity and love of gossip made her untrustworthy as a keeper of confidences, and Mr. Darcy was surely aware of her character, for example based on her behaviour at the Netherfield ball.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would be a poor start to the marriage for Lydia to know that, but for Mr. Darcy’s money, her husband had “cherished the hope of more effectually making his fortune by marriage in some other country” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.21684/page/n181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.10&lt;/a&gt;). Both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham would have been motivated to conceal the financial arrangements from her for this reason.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Lydia was unaware of the financial arrangements, she could not have betrayed them to Elizabeth. Neither could the Gardiner’s children, for the same reason. Mr. Wickham was an unlikely source since the secret was to his discredit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This left Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner as suspects. It is not clear to me why Mr. Darcy presumed so definitely that the latter was guilty. It may have been prejudice; it may have been his judgement of their respective characters; or he may have observed the closeness between Mrs. Gardiner and Elizabeth during their visit to Pemberley. We were told in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/prideandprejudi00sensgoog/page/n24&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.2&lt;/a&gt; that “between [Jane and Elizabeth] and [Mrs. Gardiner] especially, there subsisted a particular regard.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T08:22:07.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11485" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11488" CreationDate="2019-08-04T09:42:32.840" Score="0" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember listening to a &quot;Just William&quot; audiobook when I was younger about a Christmas Day when he received a mouth organ, and started playing it really early in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7522" LastEditorUserId="5581" LastEditDate="2019-08-04T20:22:38.210" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T13:01:48.457" Title="&quot;Just William&quot; story where he gets a mouth organ on Christmas Day" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;audiobook&gt;&lt;just-william&gt;&lt;richmal-crompton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11368" CreationDate="2019-08-04T10:27:23.673" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks why Hemingway included this story in &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt;. But it is not clear that he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; include it! Hemingway died in 1961 before the book was finished; his widow Mary edited his notes into the first edition, published 1964, and in this edition the story does not appear. Whether this was due to Ernest’s intention or Mary’s judgement is now impossible to say. The story appeared in the 2009 ‘restored’ edition, edited by Hemingway’s grandson Seán.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some other minor errors in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title is &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;The&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hotel is in Austria (not Switzerland).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was a man who said that the lecturer ruined Germany (not a woman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the major error is the claim that Hemingway did not contextualize the episode. This is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another year a former German naval officer with a shaven head and scars came to give a lecture with lantern slides on the great and unappreciated German Victory of the Battle of Jutland. The lantern slides showed the movements of the two battle fleets and the naval officer used a billiard cue for a pointer when he pointed out the cowardice of Jellicoe and sometimes he became so angry that his voice broke. The school master was afraid that he would stab the billiard cue through the screen. Afterwards the former naval officer could not quiet himself down and everyone was ill at ease in the &lt;em&gt;Weinstube&lt;/em&gt;. Only the public prosecutor and the banker drank with him, and they were at a separate table. Herr Lent, who was a Rhinelander, would not attend the lecture. There was a couple from Vienna who had come for the skiing but who did not want to go to the high mountains and so were leaving for Zurs where, I heard, they were killed in an avalanche. The man said the lecturer was the type of swine who had ruined Germany and in twenty years they would do it again. The woman with him told him to shut up in French and said this is a small place and you never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ernest Hemingway (2009). &lt;em&gt;A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Scribner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The story, if it is true, took place in the mid-1920s, when Hemingway spent his winters skiing in the Austrian Alps near &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schruns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schruns&lt;/a&gt; and working on the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sun_Also_Rises&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sun Also Rises&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1926). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jellicoe,_1st_Earl_Jellicoe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Jellicoe&lt;/a&gt; had been the British commander at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Jutland&lt;/a&gt; in May 1916. ‘Weinstube’ means ‘wine bar’. Walther Lent was a ski instructor. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhineland had been occupied&lt;/a&gt; by the Allies in 1918.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key point of the story is that Jutland was in no sense a “great German Victory” as claimed by the lecturer. The strategic objective for the British Grand Fleet throughout the war was to keep the German High Seas Fleet confined to the Baltic; the corresponding objective for the Germans was to damage the Grand Fleet so much as to be able to operate freely in the North Sea, break the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blockade of Germany&lt;/a&gt;, and escape into the Atlantic. Although the Germans inflicted more casualties on the British than they sustained, the outcome of the battle was that the High Seas Fleet turned tail and returned to its ports, ceding control of the North Sea to the British for the remainder of the war. Only the most blinkered and partisan nationalist could describe this result as a “great victory”. The story thus illustrates the belief, among many members of Germany’s armed forces in the years after 1918, in the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dolchstoßlegende&lt;/a&gt;’, the idea that the German military had in fact been on the verge of winning the war, but had been prevented from doing so (“stabbed in the back”) by socialists, republicans, communists, and Jews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reaction of the Viennese couple seems, with hindsight, eerily prophetic. But the idea was widespread that if things continued as they were, then in a generation or so there would inevitably be another war. For example, following the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Maynard_Keynes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Maynard Keynes&lt;/a&gt; had written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Economic privation proceeds by easy stages, and so long as men suffer it patiently the outside world cares very little. Physical efficiency and resistance to disease slowly diminish, but life proceeds somehow, until the limit of human endurance is reached at last and counsels of despair and madness stir the sufferers from the lethargy which precedes the crisis. The man shakes himself, and the bonds of custom are loosed. The power of ideas is sovereign, and he listens to whatever instruction of hope, illusion, or revenge is carried to them in the air. […] But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Maynard Keynes (1920). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/economicconseque00keynuoft/page/232&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Economic Consequences of the Peace&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 233–5&lt;/a&gt;. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Gesell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silvio Gesell&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trotz des heiligen Versprechens der Völker, den Krieg für alle Zeiten zu ächten, trotz der Rufe der Millionen: »Nie wieder Krieg!«, entgegen all den Hoffnungen auf eine schöne Zukunft, muss ich sagen: wenn das heutige Geldsystem, die Zinswirtschaft, beibehalten wird, so wage ich es, heute zu behaupten, dass es keine 25 Jahre dauern wird, bis wir vor einem neuen, noch furchtbareren Krieg stehen!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the solemn promises of the people that war should be banned for all time; despite the cry of the millions: “No more war!”; against all hope of a brighter future, I must say: if the current monetary system, the economy based on interest, be continued, I dare to assert today that it will be less than twenty-five years until we are faced with a new and more terrible war!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Silvio Gesell (1918). Letter to the editor, &lt;em&gt;Berliner Zeitung am Mittag&lt;/em&gt;. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T11:17:18.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8908" CreationDate="2019-08-04T13:50:56.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sarcasm&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;satire&lt;/strong&gt; are related to each other and share some similarities with &lt;strong&gt;irony&lt;/strong&gt;(quite specifically,verbal irony).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sarcasm&lt;/strong&gt; is using wit and/or irony to be mocking or to be humorous.The effect of sarcasm is felt because of three things: timing, tone and context. If an expression is totally counter-intuitive and has great wordplay and is basically cutting if you think through it, that is basically sarcasm.&#xA;An example could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It may have escaped your notice, but life isn't fair&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sounds familiar? It should. It's Severus Snape from Harry Potter, with his cutting wit defaming Harry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Satire&lt;/strong&gt;, on the other hand is mocking of politicians, countries or society using a lot of wordplay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Americans will always do the right thing, after exhausting every other possible alternative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an easy one too-Churchill. One can notice the subtle satire in his statements, and he was known for both his sarcasm and satirical wit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irony&lt;/strong&gt; is easy: using words to convey the opposite of what you mean. While it shares similarities with Sarcasm and Satire, the only difference is the intent. Irony is not as mocking and depends more on context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You could win an award for keeping your room clean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what a mother could say to her child with respect to a disorganized room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7589" LastActivityDate="2019-08-04T13:50:56.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11485" CreationDate="2019-08-04T15:19:29.980" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;The Christmas Truce&lt;/strong&gt;’ by Richmal Crompton, first published in &lt;em&gt;William’s Happy Days&lt;/em&gt; (1930). It takes place at Christmas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;em&gt;Him?&lt;/em&gt;’ he exploded fiercely when at last the power of speech returned to him. ‘Ask &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; to my Christmas party? I’d sooner not have a Christmas party at all than ask &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; to it. &lt;em&gt;Him!&lt;/em&gt; Why I wun’t go to the &lt;em&gt;King’s&lt;/em&gt; Christmas party, if &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; was going to be there. Not if I had to be beheaded for it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William receives a mouth organ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bates took the parcels out one by one, announcing the name on each label. The first was William. The Hubert Laneites watched him go up to receive it in paroxysms of silent mirth. William took it and opened it, wearing a sphinx-like expression. It was the most magnificent mouth organ that he had ever seen. The mouths of the Hubert Laneites dropped open in horror and amazement. It was evidently the present that Hubert had destined for himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William plays the mouth organ, though the story does not say at what time of day this takes place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Outlaws marched triumphantly down the road, brandishing their spoils. William was playing on his mouth organ, Ginger was flashing his electric light, Henry waving his fountain pen, and Douglas slashing at the hedge with his penknife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was easily found using a Google Books search for “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=just+william+mouth+organ+christmas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just william mouth organ christmas&lt;/a&gt;”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Update&lt;/em&gt;: The incident whereby William is “the first person up on Christmas Day … and wakes everybody up” comes from the story ‘&lt;strong&gt;A Busy Day&lt;/strong&gt;’, first published in &lt;em&gt;More William&lt;/em&gt; (1922):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William awoke and rubbed his eyes. It was Christmas Day — the day to which he had looked forward with mingled feelings for twelve months. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Singing ‘Christians Awake!’ at the top of his lusty young voice, he went along the landing, putting his gifts outside the doors of his family, and pausing to yell ‘Happy Christmas’ as he did so. From within he was greeted in each case by muffled groans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He went downstairs into the hall, still singing. It was earlier than he thought — just five o’clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I submit that you have mingled these two stories in your memory! This would be easy to do as both stories appear on the &lt;em&gt;Just William at Christmas&lt;/em&gt; audiobook, read by Martin Jarvis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T13:01:48.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11489" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11492" CreationDate="2019-08-04T21:55:58.280" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I used to have a set of &quot;Just William&quot; audiobooks. One of these was about when William went out for the evening with his school choir or similar, and ended up going into somebody's house, the owner of which, who was almost deaf, thought the noise made by the choir was that of wolves and as a result, produced a gun and aimed it out of the window! What is this story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7522" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T07:21:13.667" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T08:01:30.620" Title="&quot;Just William&quot; story in which school choir is mistaken for wolves" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;just-william&gt;&lt;richmal-crompton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11490" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11493" CreationDate="2019-08-05T01:50:57.253" Score="8" ViewCount="364" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Hardy's &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; (1894-95) some of the characters meet in Christminster (Oxford) on &quot;Remembrance Day&quot;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The place seems gay,&quot; said Sue. &quot;Why—it is Remembrance Day!—Jude—how&#xA;  sly of you—you came to-day on purpose!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, that's the Doctors in the theatre, conferring Honorary degrees on&#xA;  the Duke of Hamptonshire and a lot more illustrious gents of that&#xA;  sort. It's Remembrance Week, you know. The cheers come from the young&#xA;  men.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be an Oxford University-specific commemoration. However, I can find no reference to this celebration on-line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone point me to a source that explains what &quot;Remembrance Day&quot; in &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; is in celebration of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, did Hardy simply make this up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2280" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T08:45:50.280" Title="&quot;Remembrance Day&quot; in &quot;Jude the Obscure&quot;" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11462" CreationDate="2019-08-05T06:25:13.020" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jo’s suggestion that the story’s hero should be a skunk results in Jack, without initially intending to do so, basing the story on his own childhood. The choice of a skunk suggests to Jack that Roger might be bullied by the other animals because of his smell, and this causes Jack to remember “certain humiliations of his own childhood”. We deduce that Jack too had been bullied as a child, perhaps due to a noticeable difference between him and the other children in his school or neighbourhood, a difference that he might have wished could have been removed by a wizard’s magic spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this difference? Updike does not say, but maybe we can guess it from the reaction of Roger’s mother in Jack’s story. We are all but told that Roger’s mother corresponds to Jack’s mother, for when Joanne says that Mommy Skunk was stupid,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;,” he said with rare emphasis, and believed, from her expression, that she realised he was defending his own mother to her&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if Mommy Skunk objects to Roger wishing away his smell, what did Jack’s mother object to Jack wishing away? Perhaps Jack belonged to a visible racial minority in a predominately white neighbourhood. It would then be likely for Jack to be racially bullied, to wish that he could be white, and for his mother to object to her son wishing away his own identity. (It is perhaps significant that the wizard lives in a “little white house”.) This would explain Jack’s feeling of being ‘caught in an ugly middle’ in the story’s final paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The woodwork, a cage of moldings and rails and baseboards all around them, was &lt;strong&gt;half old tan and half new ivory&lt;/strong&gt; and he felt caught in an ugly middle position&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis.) There are a couple of other clues to Jack’s origins. His stories always involve a lack of pennies, perhaps indicating that he grew up poor. He pronounces “creek” like “crick”, a U.S. dialect variation indicating a rural Southern upbringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under this interpretation, when Jack says, “poor kid”, he is simultaneously referring to himself as a child suffering racial bullying, and to his fears that his daughter Jo (who is coming up to school age) will have to go through something similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the question of why Jack “did not want to speak with her [Clare], work with her, touch her, anything” in the final paragraph, telling the story of Roger Skunk has brought up powerful emotions for Jack, and the narrative has repeatedly suggested that Jack has trouble managing his emotions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack answered curtly. She had made him miss a beat in the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jo made the crying face again, but this time without a trace of sincerity. This annoyed Jack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jack didn’t like women when they took anything for granted; he liked them apprehensive, hanging on his words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Joanne! Shall I come up there and spank you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Clare were white, as suggested by the way he links her with cocktail parties (a stereotypically WASP-ish activity) then that would be another reason why Jack feels that he can’t share his emotions with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T07:14:11.493" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T07:14:11.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11489" CreationDate="2019-08-05T08:01:30.620" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;William Joins the Waits&lt;/strong&gt;’ by Richmal Crompton, first published in &lt;em&gt;William in Trouble&lt;/em&gt; (1927). In this story, William goes carol singing with the Sunday School choir:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Solomon was the superindendant of the Sunday School, on which the Outlaws reluctantly shed the light of their presence every Sunday afternoon. […] ‘He’s going to take the elder boys out carol singing on Christmas Eve.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They visit the house of Douglas’s Aunt Jane, who is hard of hearing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had been singing for nearly ten minutes, when Douglas stopped them with an imperious gesture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I say,’ he said to William, ‘I forgot — she’s deaf.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane mistakes the sound of the choir for the baying of wolves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That sound,’ she went on. ‘It roused me from sleep; the roaring of wild animals, or — is it an air raid? Has some enemy attackd us?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No,’ William hastened to assure her through the trumpet, ‘it’s not that.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Animals, then,’ she want on, still excited; ‘it sounded to me like the baying of wolves. Did you see them?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She produces a gun and points it out of the window at the choir:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly Aunt Jane left the room to reappear triumphantly a few minutes later carrying a large and old-fashioned gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It’s a long time since I used it,’ she said, ‘but I believe it might get one or two of them.’ […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She clambered on to the table before the window and opened the window very slightly. Through the small aperture thus made she projected the muzzle of her gun. William watched her, paralysed with horror. Outside the medley of song rose higher and higher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This was easily found with a Google Books search for “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=just+william+wolves+gun+window&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just william wolves gun window&lt;/a&gt;”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T08:01:30.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11490" CreationDate="2019-08-05T08:45:50.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Remembrance Day’ is Hardy’s fictional version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encaenia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Encaenia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the ceremony at which the University of Oxford awards honorary degrees to distinguished men and women and commemorates its benefactors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;University of Oxford. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/The-University-Year/Encaenia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encaenia&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correspondences are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘Remembrance’ is synonymous with ‘commemoration’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christminster confers honorary degrees on Remembrance Day; Oxford does the same at Encaenia.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Christminster’s Remembrance Day has a procession of academics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A peal of six bells struck out, human faces began to crowd the windows around, and the procession of heads of houses and new Doctors emerged, their red and black gowned forms passing across the field of Jude’s vision like inaccessible planets across an object-glass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Hardy (1895). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.214000/page/n395&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;, p. 389&lt;/a&gt;. London: Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The University of Oxford has the same at Encaenia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the morning of the ceremony, the heads of colleges, university dignitaries, holders of the Oxford degrees of Doctor of Divinity, Civil Law, Medicine, Letters, Science, and Music, and the honorands assemble, in full academic dress, in one of the colleges, where they enjoy Lord Crewe's Benefaction of peaches, strawberries and champagne. They then walk in procession to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.214000/page/n141&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sheldonian Theatre&lt;/a&gt; on Broad Street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;University of Oxford. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/The-University-Year/Encaenia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encaenia&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both processions end at a theatre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Phillotson had seen both her and Jude as they stood in the rain at Christminster watching the procession to the Theatre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hardy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.214000/page/n427&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 423&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The theatre has an octagonal cupola:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not quite knowing what to do with himself, he went up to an octagonal chamber in the lantern of a singularly built theatre that was set amidst this quaint and singular city. It had windows all round, from which an outlook over the whole town and its edifices could be gained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Hardy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.214000/page/n141&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 135&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Lantern’ is an architectural term for a structure “on the top either of a dome or of an apartment, having the sides pierced, and the apertures glazed, to admit light” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T08:45:50.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11441" CreationDate="2019-08-05T14:47:25.007" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that that Mr. Bingley was content with renting Netherfield and probably never would get around to buying a house of his own. In other words, he would leave the purchase of a house to the next generation, just like his father. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7595" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T14:47:25.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-05T16:57:37.737" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know the play caused drama over feminist ideas and all, but what about the social structure, such as in the end when Nora ignores Torvald's statement &quot;You don’t understand the society you live in&quot; and continues to leave him anyway?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7596" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T00:58:33.607" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T00:58:33.607" Title="Did 'A Doll's House' spark controversy over its dismissal of social classes?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;a-dolls-house&gt;&lt;henrik-ibsen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11498" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-05T18:10:30.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T18:10:30.050" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T18:10:30.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11499" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-05T18:10:30.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Norwegian playwright, director, and poet, or his life as a writer. Questions about his works (originally written in Scandinavian languages) should be tagged with [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T05:08:01.027" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T05:08:01.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11500" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-05T18:12:11.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-08-05T18:12:11.600" LastActivityDate="2019-08-05T18:12:11.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11501" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-05T18:12:11.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1879 play 'A Doll's House' ('Et dukkehjem', 1879) by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Use with the [henrik-ibsen] tag and the [scandinavian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:41:52.717" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:41:52.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8908" CreationDate="2019-08-05T21:35:58.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are related, but have different scope, qualities, and nuance.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sarcasm:&lt;/strong&gt; Can simply be a statement that is insincere. One can be sarcastic without being ironic, although it often overlaps in modern English usage. (Contemporary teen sarcasm is typically ironic, saying the opposite of what they mean.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irony:&lt;/strong&gt; When the literal meaning is counter to the intended meaning.  Also dramatic irony, when the audience is aware that a character's words and actions are ironic, but the character is not.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex#Plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oedipus Rex&lt;/a&gt; is dramatic irony, where the murderer he investigating is himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Satire:&lt;/strong&gt; Satire require imitation.  Taking an actual passage, story, image and skewing the meaning to mock the subject. Satire can also involve purely invented material about a subject or person, typically where the lampooning is meant to be obvious.*  Often used for social critique, which is a basis for its protected status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Sarcasm&lt;/strong&gt;: A sharp, bitter, or cutting expression or remark; a bitter gibe or taunt. Now usually in generalized sense: Sarcastic language; sarcastic meaning or purpose. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/170938?redirectedFrom=sarcasm#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Irony&lt;/strong&gt;: The expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect. (dramatic) An outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/99565?rskey=o5X5uL&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Satire&lt;/strong&gt;: satirical utterance; a speech or saying which ridicules and criticizes a person, thing, or quality. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/171207?rskey=ebQ1No&amp;amp;result=1&amp;amp;isAdvanced=false#eid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OED&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Satire is specifically protected by the first amendment in the United States in regard to public figures.  There was a famous lawsuit: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hustler_Magazine_v._Falwell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hustler Magazine v. Falwell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T02:07:19.817" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T02:07:19.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11504" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11505" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" Score="0" Body="Wallace Stevens (1879–1955), American modernist poet." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:27:29.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" Score="0" Body="Michael Herr (1940–2016), American war correspondent, known as the author of &quot;Dispatches&quot; (1977), a memoir of the Vietnam War." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T12:52:15.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11446" CreationDate="2019-08-06T15:34:50.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The image in this line is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt;: it is not the &lt;em&gt;ship&lt;/em&gt; itself that is saluting as it goes down, but its &lt;em&gt;captain&lt;/em&gt; (or officers, or crew). The comparison to a “stuntman” indicates that we are to imagine the event taking place in a movie: as the model of the ship’s upper works disappears under the surface of the water tank in the studio’s back lot, it is the stuntman standing on the bridge, so that the star does not have to get wet. The sinking being part of a movie explains why people might be laughing at it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two critics who agree with this interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crow, in short, is the beast of a very modern apocalypse, one in which images of global disaster and individual violence take absurd and grotesque and debased forms that derive quite as much from contemporary mass culture as from literary tradition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cars collide and erupt luggage and babies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In laughter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The steamer upends and goes under saluting like a stuntman&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In laughter&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Crow himself, it seems to me, is conceived and handled in ways which invite comparison with a popular art form peculiar to the twentieth century: the animated cartoon, and its printed relative, the strip cartoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Lodge (1971). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.1971.tb00643.x#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Crow” and the Cartoons&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Critical Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 13:1, p. 39.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere, in the poem “In Laughter,” Hughes engages more fundamentally with the performative strategies of the popular visual arts. As David Lodge first noted in his influential 1971 article “&lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; and the Cartoons,” this lyric sets highly staged images of violence and pain against a refrain-like soundtrack of canned laughter […] The reference to “a stuntman” highlights the text’s indebtedness to the realms of televisual and movie culture. The poem deliberately aims to shock and unsettle the reader with its robust, surreal humor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James A. Knapton (2004). ‘Ted Hughes’s &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt;’. In Jay Parini, ed. (2004). &lt;em&gt;British Writers Classics&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, p. 44. New York: Scriber’s.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T15:34:50.147" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5132" CreationDate="2019-08-06T16:54:29.820" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the book, Solomon loses things.  They start small and grow larger.  He learns that he can “fly,” but it’s going to cost him.  Everything.  It symbolizes his losing all the things of this world that weigh him down so that he is light as a feather and can truly be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7601" LastActivityDate="2019-08-06T16:54:29.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11436" CreationDate="2019-08-07T11:01:24.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; the quote comes from Dante, its most likely origin would be the first part, &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;, from the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. The Italian text of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mappingdante.com/text/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Divina Commedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is available online (also in several editions on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=dante%20divina%20commedia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for &quot;nero&quot; (black) inside the text of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mappingdante.com/inferno/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; results in only one instance of the word near &quot;diavol&quot; (or &quot;diavolo&quot;), namely in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mappingdante.com/inferno/#inf21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto 21&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;che, per veder, non indugia 'l partire:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  e vidi dietro a noi un diavol nero&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  correndo su per lo scoglio venire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.182933/page/n85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry F. Cary's translation&lt;/a&gt;, the last two lines of this stanza are translated as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Behind me I discern'd a devil black,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That running up advanced along the rock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is just &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; devil, not &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; devil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone pointed out in a comment that a translation of &quot;the Devil is not as black as he is painted&quot; can be found in Franco Sacchetti's 14th-century work &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.belpaese2000.narod.ru/Teca/Tre/Sacchetti/sacco2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Il Trecentonovelle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;il diavolo non è nero come si dipigne&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/dipingere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dipingere&lt;/a&gt; in the Italian Wiktionary.)&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Sacchetti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franco Sacchetti&lt;/a&gt; lived from c. 1335 – c. 1400 and lived in Florence in Tuscany (although it is not clear whether he was actually born there). This makes him a bit younger than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dante&lt;/a&gt;, who lived from c. 1265 – 1321.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Sacchetti's words may have been a variation on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikiquote.org/wiki/Diavolo#Toscani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tuscan proverb&lt;/a&gt;, if that proverb already existed at the time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Non bisogna fare il diavolo più nero di quanto non sia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning: there is no need to make (or &quot;paint&quot;) the devil more black than he is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T15:26:53.257" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T15:26:53.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11511" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:10:24.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T13:10:24.950" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:10:24.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11512" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:10:24.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Isaac Watts (1674 – 1748), English nonconformist minister and hymnist, or his life as a writer. He has been called &quot;Godfather of English Hymnody&quot; and many of his hymns are in use today." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:26:59.800" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:26:59.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11513" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:12:19.770" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T13:12:19.770" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:12:19.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11514" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:12:19.770" Score="0" Body="Władysław Reymont (1867–1925), Polish novelist and Nobel Prize-winner. His best-known novel is &quot;Chłopi&quot; (the Peasants, four-volumes, 1904–9). Use with [polish-literature] for questions about any of his works originally written in Polish." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T14:40:48.087" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T14:40:48.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11515" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11516" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" Score="0" Body="Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976), Israeli historian, best known for popular works including &quot;A Brief History of Humankind&quot; (2014)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T13:24:06.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11517" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T18:44:14.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T18:44:14.607" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T18:44:14.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11518" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T18:44:14.607" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Scottish novelist John Buchan (1875–1940) and his works. He is most notably known for his novel, &quot;The Thirty-Nine Steps&quot; (1915). Questions regarding his novels should be tagged with the name of that work." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:26:17.210" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T05:26:17.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11519" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11520" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Thirty-Nine Steps&quot; (1915), an adventure novel by John Buchan. Use with the [john-buchan] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" LastActivityDate="2019-08-07T18:44:35.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1731" CreationDate="2019-08-08T13:36:42.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the only &quot;mandatory&quot; novella is 'The Churn'. It contains information that is relevant, especially in 'Nemesis Games'. Read the books in order, and make sure to read 'The Churn' somewhere before 'Nemesis Games'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'The Vital Abyss' is semi-important to the overall plot, so reading it before 'Babylon' or 'Percepolis' will certainly add to the experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other novellas are more world building, which contributes to the depth of The Expanse universe, but I don't consider them vital to the plot in the books. (Also, I didn't like the earliest novellas too much. They were OK, but nowhere near as good as the books.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE&#xA;I higly recommend reading Strange Dogs before Tiamat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7606" LastEditorUserId="7606" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T22:30:30.633" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T22:30:30.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T17:20:36.353" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;Note:&lt;/strong&gt; Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question, but this link: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300800/where-can-i-ask-questions-about-a-broadway-show&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/300800/where-can-i-ask-questions-about-a-broadway-show&lt;/a&gt; brought me here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend and I were chatting about Miami fullback Larry Csonka the other day (it was a &lt;em&gt;Mystery Science Theater 3000&lt;/em&gt; discussion) and perusing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Csonka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page I came along this intriguing paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the 1971 off season Csonka starred in the critically well received off Broadway play of &amp;quot;Larry Csonka and the Chocolate Factory&amp;quot;. Due to financial backing and Larry's contract with the Dolphins barring him from any off season &amp;quot;strenuous activity&amp;quot; the play never gained commercial success, but for his efforts Csonka was nominated in the 1972 Obie Award for best Actor, where he eventually lost to Douglas Rain for his role in Vivat! Vivat Regina!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References to back this section up included Larry's IMDB page (there's no reference to the show on there) and the Obie Awards archives (if you search for 1972 you only get a list of winners).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: Besides this mention on Wikipedia, is there any evidence out there to confirm this was actually a show?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7607" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T09:43:42.727" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T09:43:42.727" Title="Larry Csonka and the Chocolate Factory: confirmation of existence" Tags="&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-08T21:02:40.360" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Lorca's &lt;em&gt;Ode to Walt Whitman&lt;/em&gt;, his homage to the great American poet, he has the following few verses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... against the men with that green look in their eyes&#xA;who love other men and burn their lips in silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be odd, since Lorca himself was gay. But of course then it wasn't safe to be openly gay and presumably this is why he needed to say this. But, remarkably, considering his sexual orientation he goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yes against you, urban faggots,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;of the love that bestows crowns of joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always against you, who give boys&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;drops of foul death with bitter poison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always against you,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fairies of North America,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pájaros of Havana,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jotos of Mexico,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sarasas of Cádiz,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apios of Seville,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cancos of Madrid,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Floras of Alicante,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adelaidas of Portugal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Opening in public squares like feverish fans&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact he closes the poem by writing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No quarter given! Death&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;spills from your eyes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to emphasise the vehemence of his passion here. Why this remarkable out-pouring of anger against the 'fairies, the pajaro's, the faggots' and why suddenly the phrase 'the slaves of women' (this being odd given the gay orientation he is attributing the men) and how does this link to his final two lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that the kingdom of grain has arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T03:33:37.480" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T03:53:22.170" Title="Why is Lorca so angry at 'the urban faggots?'" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-09T02:12:05.197" Score="1" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Edith Wharton’s 'Roman Fever'. I have a couple of question which are beyond my understanding, being not a native English speaker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I'd rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.&quot; &lt;strong&gt;The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman's lunch.&lt;/strong&gt; It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Grace Anslay is an ordinary housewife, without a chance to get involved in a speakeasy business, so there is no reason for her to be raided by the police. What is the logic in this sentence? Something is missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7505" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T16:03:17.463" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T15:01:50.283" Title="In 'Roman Fever' by Edith Wharton, why would Grace be raided?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edith-wharton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-09T07:07:19.497" Score="3" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &quot;Africa&quot; by Toto is at least nominally about the narrator's relationship with a woman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hear the drums echoing tonight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;She's coming in 12:30 flight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, much of the rest of the song is talking about Africa itself (e.g. the title, the references to wild dogs, etc.). Even its &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/FTQbiNvZqaY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;music video&lt;/a&gt; is full of references to Africa (clothing style, globe centered on Africa, etc.), and doesn't feature a woman anywhere in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song includes the following chorus, sung multiple times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever&#xA;  do&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;I bless the rains down in Africa&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who, exactly, is &quot;you&quot; here? Is the narrator referring to the woman introduced in the beginning of the song, or to Africa itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T19:36:48.793" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T19:36:48.793" Title="Is &quot;Africa&quot; by Toto focused on the woman referred to in the beginning of the song, or on Africa itself?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;toto&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11523" CreationDate="2019-08-09T10:42:06.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The genesis of this poem is in the fiercely Catholic and masculine culture of 1900's Spain, where Lorca grew up. This was not simply unfriendly to homosexuality, but actively hostile to it. As a young gay man, Lorca would have found it impossible not to absorb some of the cultures around him, and yet it was irreconcilable with his sexuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In New York, he found a much more open culture, but one that was also heavily mechanised, in contrast to rural Spain. This was, in turn, problematic for Lorca, who romanticised the countryside. This poem is an attempt by him, then to weave together these two problematic strands of this thinking with his love and admiration for the American bisexual poet Walt Whitman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To actually answer the question, let's return to the opening stanzas. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the East River and the Bronx&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  boys were singing, exposing their waists&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and children drawing stairs and perspectives.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the mechanised world, which Lorca dislikes. In using sexual imagery here - &quot;exposing&quot;, &quot;oil&quot;, &quot;leather&quot;, the phallic &quot;hammer&quot; - he is conflating it with heterosexuality. This continues over the following stanzas. This is then contrasted with their lack of wonder at the beauty of the natural world or the act of imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But none of them paused,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  none of them wanted to be a cloud,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  none of them looked for ferns&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the end result?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;New York, mire and death.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet then spends several stanzas idolising Whitman, both for his imagination and his physical beauty, imagining that he alone has the power to save New York from &quot;mire and death&quot;. Crucially, Whitman is praised in terms that evoke imagination and nature, in contrast to the industrialised city around him. This, again, is deliberately sexual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Not for a moment, virile beauty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after, the long section of the poem highlighted in the question begins, which terminates in the call for &quot;no quarter&quot;. But although both Whitman and the &quot;faggots&quot; are gay, it starts by contrasting the two, again in terms of nature against industry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  point to the shore of your dream&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  when a friend eats your apple&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  with a slight taste of gasoline   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: when the poet ends up fulminating against the &quot;faggots&quot;, what he's actually angry with is not gay men, but gay men who choose to live in the confines of heterosexual, industrialised society instead of the more sensitive, imaginative natural society Lorca himself wants. This is why they are &quot;slaves of women&quot;. By choosing to exist within a masculine, patriarchal, society that does not want them, they occupy the lowest social order, below that of women. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Lorca is attempting to do here is separate the hostile anti-gay society in which he was bought up from the society he wants without explicitly condemning his boyhood values. He sees and wants gay society and traditional, masculine society to be separate because they venerate and cherish different values. To him, then, gay men who don't share this vision but instead choose the confines of patriarchy, are almost pestilential. The imagery he associates with these &quot;urban faggots&quot; is animalistic and lustful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, then, is the purpose of that final stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want the powerful air from the deepest night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that the kingdom of grain has arrived.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;black child&quot; and the &quot;whites&quot; is, of course, another juxtaposition of bigotry, racism this time, with the implicit assumption that, again, the natural &quot;flower&quot; society, the &quot;kingdom of grain&quot; is the one the oppressed should crave. Lorca &quot;wants&quot; a clean, natural breeze to blow away industrialised society, making space for the oppressed to enjoy a more open, imaginative and playful culture away from the &quot;gold-craving&quot; that drives so much of Western culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5dv8f3hg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beauty and The Beast: Homosexuality in Federico García Lorca's &quot;Oda a Walt Whitman&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Ruth, Tobias. UCLA Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Mester, Volume 21, Issue 1. 19&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T10:42:06.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11527" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-09T14:43:21.797" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-09T14:43:21.797" LastActivityDate="2019-08-09T14:43:21.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11528" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-09T14:43:21.797" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American writer Edith Wharton (1862–1937) or her life as an author. Her works include the novels &quot;The House of Mirth&quot; (1905) and &quot;The Age of Innocence&quot; (1920)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T15:45:42.450" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T15:45:42.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-09T21:38:33.177" Score="4" ViewCount="681" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first part of Jean Rhys' novel &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; is set in Jamaica, but the main character's mother is from Martinique, where French and the French-based Martiniquan Creole are spoken. The family's parrot can speak a few words that are based either on French or Martiniquan Creole. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, on page 25 of the Norton Critical Edition of the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our parrot was called Coco, a green parrot. He didn't talk very well, he could say &lt;em&gt;Qui est là? Qui est là?&lt;/em&gt; and answer himself &lt;em&gt;Ché Coco, Ché Coco&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judith L. Raiskin, who edited the Norton Critical Edition, explains Coco's words as &quot;Who's there?&quot; and &quot;Dear Coco.&quot; The first translation is fine, but the second does not appear to make sense. It assumes that &quot;ché&quot; is a mispronunciation of &quot;cher/chère&quot;, turning the French è into é and dropping the guttural R. However, the normal answer to, &quot;Who's there?&quot; would be, &quot;It's Coco&quot; (since the parrot answers himself) or, in French, &quot;C'est Coco&quot;. &quot;Ché Coco&quot; can be interpreted as a mispronunciation (or perhaps an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eggcorn&lt;/a&gt;) of &quot;C'est Coco&quot;, which sounds more plausible than Judith Raiskin's explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In part two, Prof. Raiskin annotates another phrase in (presumably) Martiniquan Creole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Doudou, ché cocotte&lt;/em&gt;,&quot; the elderly woman said to Antoinette.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The elderly woman is Christophine, who used to be Antoinette's nurse. The word &quot;doudou&quot; is also used in Nalo Hopkinson's novel &lt;em&gt;Midnight Robber&lt;/em&gt;, which uses many elements from Caribbean culture.) According to Prof. Raiskin, the phrase is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An endearment, &quot;darling little ducky&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionary tells us that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doudou#French&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;doudou&lt;/a&gt; comes from a duplication of the French word &quot;doux&quot; (literally &quot;soft&quot;), so the first part of the translation is fine. However, since the phrase is a greeting, it would make more sense to translate the second part as &quot;it's cocotte&quot; instead of &quot;little ducky&quot; (assuming that &quot;cocotte&quot; refers to the elderly woman and isn't used in its current meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, much later (page 90 in the Norton Critical Edition), Christophine uses the phrase &quot;doudou ché&quot;, which Judith Raiskin translates as &quot;darling dear&quot;. Based on word order, the translation &quot;it's doudou&quot; does not appear to make sense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question therefore is what &quot;ché&quot; in the above examples means. Does it always mean the same thing? If it comes from &quot;c'est&quot;, how it is possible to make sense of the last example? (Does Martiniquan Creole use a different word order than French?) If it comes from &quot;cher/chère&quot;, how does that make sense in the first two examples? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T17:49:56.363" Title="Meaning of ché in several French or Martiniquan Creole phrases in Wide Sargasso Sea" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;wide-sargasso-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11531" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-10T00:57:12.357" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The below paragraph is from &quot;Roman Fever'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Alida Slade's awfully brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,&quot; would have summed it up; though she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had been an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughter, who was pretty, of course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother's—well, &quot;vividness,&quot; someone had once called it. &#xA;  Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this, and cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not like her mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the ‘current words’ mean? Why ‘in quotation marks, as unheard of audacities’? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7505" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T03:28:31.777" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T18:29:13.723" Title="What do &quot;current words&quot; mean in 'Roman Fever' by Edith Wharton?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edith-wharton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11531" CreationDate="2019-08-10T15:29:11.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mrs Ansley would use currently trendy words in her conversation, with an intonation that would now-a-days be accompanied with &quot;air-quotes&quot;, as a way of showing off her trendiness.  As a way of ensuring the listener actually notices the use of the word in question, and so realizes that Ansley (1) knows the word and is hence herself aware of current trends, and  (2) that Ansley disapproves of the word in some sense, and is hence not merely a blind follower of current trends.  As I do just here, with the term &quot;air-quotes&quot;, for the same reasons.  It's something all us bright but not &quot;that&quot; brilliant people do.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-08-10T18:29:13.723" LastActivityDate="2019-08-10T18:29:13.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11529" CreationDate="2019-08-11T17:49:56.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Confiant has the following entries under ‘chè’ (and nothing under ‘che’ or ‘ché’):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chè&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; cher, coûteux&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chè&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; cher(e), chéri(e), mon (ma) cher(e)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Raphaël Confiant (2007). &lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire du créole martiniquais&lt;/em&gt;. Ibis Rouge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confiant gives ‘sé’ as the Martiniquian for ‘c’est’, which casts doubt on the theory in the post that ‘ché’ might mean ‘c’est’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Peter Shor in comments, there does not seem to be any difficulty in the parrot saying ‘Ché Coco’. Parrot repeat sounds made by humans in their vicinity, and ‘who’s there? dear Coco’ is plausibly something an owner might say to their parrot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for ‘Doudou ché cocotte’, Confiant gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;doudou&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; chéri(e); amoureux(se)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kòkot&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; cocotte, chérie&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so this phrase is a triplicate endearment as glossed by Judith Raiskin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creole spoken in Martinique belongs to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antillean_Creole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antillean Creole&lt;/a&gt; family.&#xA;Accordingly, I also looked at dictionaries of other members of the family:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chè 1&lt;/strong&gt; cher, coûteux; mon cher, ma chère&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chè 2&lt;/strong&gt; viande ou poisson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Tourneux and Maurice Barbotin (2008). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4D79mKJtKHIC&amp;amp;pg=PA80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire pratique du créole de Guadeloupe&lt;/em&gt;, p. 80&lt;/a&gt;. Karthala.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;che&lt;/strong&gt;, 1. n., pulpit, tribune&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;che&lt;/strong&gt;, 2. n., choir&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;che&lt;/strong&gt;, 3. a., dear, beloved; precious; costly, expensive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jones E. Mondesir (1992). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=tsF_cJWANT8C&amp;amp;pg=PA40&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of St. Lucian Creole&lt;/em&gt;, p. 40&lt;/a&gt;. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The French origins must be ‘chair’, flesh; ‘chaire’, pulpit; ‘chœur’, choir.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T17:49:56.363" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11434" CreationDate="2019-08-11T18:40:50.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watts published this hymn under the subject:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our frail Bodies, and God our Preserver&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Isaac Watts (1719). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/psalmsofdavidimi00watt_0/page/158&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Psalms of David&lt;/em&gt;, book II, hymn XIX&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stanza in the question consists of two metaphors. First, the human body is compared to a &lt;em&gt;clockwork mechanism&lt;/em&gt;, containing many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainspring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;springs&lt;/a&gt;, all of which are vital for its operation. Second, the human body is compared to a &lt;em&gt;harp&lt;/em&gt; of many strings, all of which must be tuned correctly for the instrument to play in harmony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both metaphors portray the human body as a delicate mechanism that requires constant attention, the implication being that God is our maintenance operator:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But ’tis our God supports our frame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    The God that built us first:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Salvation to th’ Almighty name&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    That reared us from the dust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-11T18:40:50.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11274" CreationDate="2019-08-11T20:01:02.943" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In answering this question, I cannot do better than to quote the analysis of David Lake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will now prove that ‘Jules’ must be taken as Wells, and no-one else. There are at least nine points of contact, including a genuine semi-quotation from a book by Wells placed in Jules’s mouth. I will first demonstrate the similarities, and only later point out how unfair many of these points are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The name ‘Horace Jules’. ‘Horace’ echoes Wells’s first name ‘Herbert’; and it was a stock journalistic comparison (complained of by Wells, more than once), to call Wells ‘the English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jules Verne&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Education. Jules had been to the ‘University of London over fifty years ago’, and ‘any science he knew was that taught him’ there (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419&lt;/a&gt;). Wells’s first degree (B.Sc.) was from the Normal School of Science, Kensington, which later became part of London University, in 1890 — 53 years before &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt; was written, 55 before it was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Philosophy. ‘Any philosophy he knew had been acquired from writers like Haeckel, Joseph McCabe and Winwood Reade’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419&lt;/a&gt;). All these writers were agnostics or atheists, and none rates as a formal philosopher. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCabe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;McCabe&lt;/a&gt; (1867–1955) was a contemporary ex-Catholic priest and militant rationalist. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haeckel&lt;/a&gt; (1834–1919) was a brash Darwinian biologist, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Winwood_Reade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reade&lt;/a&gt; (1838–75) mainly a historian: both might in 1945 be considered ‘out of date’. Wells certainly knew the works of all three, and was strongly influenced by Reade’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029764739/page/n4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Martyrdom of Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1872), as is clear from traces in Wells’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/outlinehistoryb09wellgoog/page/n6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Outline of History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (First Edition, 1919–20) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924028328908/page/n6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Short History of the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (First Edition 1923). Indeed, Wells acknowledges this in the Introduction to the &lt;em&gt;Outline&lt;/em&gt;: ‘One book that has influenced the writer very strongly is Winwood Reade’s &lt;em&gt;Martrydom of Man&lt;/em&gt;. This dates … but it is still an extraordinarily inspiring presentation of human history as one consistent process’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/outlinehistoryb09wellgoog/page/n12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Outline&lt;/em&gt; vii&lt;/a&gt;). Haeckel, Reade and McCabe were all clearly important men of Wells’s ‘party’ in biology and (ir)religion. What Lewis found most objectionable about them is that they substitute for the worship of God a worship of future, perfectible Man. Reade even expected that out of man’s present and past ‘martyrdom’ — his necessary suffering — he would achieve physical immortality. Wells never goes quite that far, but after about 1900 his general vision and hope for the human future is usually similar to Reade’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Residence and class status. ‘Jules was a cockney’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419&lt;/a&gt;). Wells was born and brought up in Bromley, on the southern edge of London, and in his early writing career lived at various London addresses. His family background was lower-middle class (another connotation of ‘cockney’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personal appearance. ‘He was a very little man, whose legs were so short that he had unkindly been compared with a duck’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419&lt;/a&gt;). Wells was indeed below average height, and was sensitive about that. His biographer David Smith, from the evidence of a home movie, calls him a ‘small, round, tiny-footed man’ (Smith 481).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘His novels had first raised him to fame and affluence’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419&lt;/a&gt;). Certainly true of Wells in 1895–1901; after which, beginning with &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/jstor-25105170/page/n1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anticipations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in late 1901, he became even more famous as a futurologist and social reformer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘… Later, as editor of the weekly &lt;em&gt;We Want to Know&lt;/em&gt;, he had become … a power in the country’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;419–20&lt;/a&gt;). Wells did not edit a weekly, but he produced two famous non-fiction works, both of which appeared in fortnightly parts, and filled important gaps in the average person’s education. These were &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/outlinehistoryb09wellgoog/page/n6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Outline of History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919–20), the first really adequate non-nationalistic and Darwinian world history ever published; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.218637/page/n7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Science of Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1930), written under his direction mainly by his son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._P._Wells&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G. P. Wells&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Huxley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julian Huxley&lt;/a&gt;. These were clear and popular in style, world-wide best sellers which told people what they wanted to know about humanity’s place in time and in nature. A child who bought Part Three of &lt;em&gt;The Science of Life&lt;/em&gt; for 1/3d (about 12¢) could learn the basic facts about human sex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jules, like Wells, has been battling all his life for sexual openness and permissiveness (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n423&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;421&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jules quotes his own previous remark to an Archbishop, ‘you may not know, my lord … that modern research shows the temple at Jerusalem to have been about the size of an English village church’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207839/page/n421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;420&lt;/a&gt;). In the first edition of &lt;em&gt;The Outline&lt;/em&gt;, a photograph of a modern reconstruction of Solomon’s Temple is criticised as ‘exaggerated’, and later, Wells compares the temple to ‘a small villa residence’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/outlinehistoryb09wellgoog/page/n314&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;290&lt;/a&gt;). In the &lt;em&gt;Short History&lt;/em&gt;, we read: ‘Solomon’s temple, if one works out the measurements, would go inside a small suburban church’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924028328908/page/n135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;116&lt;/a&gt;). I think this final coincidence clinches the identification: Jules is meant to be recognised as Wells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Lake (1992). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-22126-4_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wells, &lt;em&gt;The First Men in the Moon&lt;/em&gt;, and Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy&lt;/a&gt;’. In Kath Filmer, ed. &lt;em&gt;Twentieth-Century Fantasists&lt;/em&gt;. St Martin’s Press. I revised the linked page numbers to correspond to those in the linked editions.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T06:00:03.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11545" CreationDate="2019-08-11T20:08:18.857" Score="5" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;When only Lombard and Vera are left alive, they have this dialogue that makes it seem like Lombard was the murderer. And while you could claim that it was a mutual misunderstanding (both of them thinking the other one was the murderer), there is this line that perplexes me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vera said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There's no one on the island - no one at all - except us two...&quot; Her voice was a whisper - nothing more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lombard said: &quot;Precisely. So we know where we are, don't we?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vera said: &quot;How was it worked - that trick with the marble bear?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He shrugged his shoulders. &quot;A conjuring trick, my dear - a very good one...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it's as if Lombard admits he did all the murders, along with the last one. Which is obviously then proved to be a lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before reading the epilogue, I was thinking that Morris had hired him as a murderer, so the line made sense. Which is again proven to not be the case. So, which one is it? How much did Lombard know about the plan, and why did he answer like that about the marble bear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7616" LastEditorUserId="7616" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T02:58:04.573" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T19:01:48.427" Title="How much did Lombard know about the murders in &quot;And Then There Where None&quot;?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;and-then-there-were-none&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11540" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11551" CreationDate="2019-08-12T04:16:29.477" Score="0" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the summary of the poem &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Death Be Not Proud&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Jon Donne&lt;/strong&gt; (Source - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud)-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44107/holy-sonnets-death-be-not-proud)-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;“Death Be Not Proud” presents an argument against the power of death.&#xA;  Addressing Death as a person, the speaker warns Death against pride in&#xA;  his power. Such power is merely an illusion, and the end Death thinks&#xA;  it brings to men and women is in fact a rest from world-weariness for&#xA;  its alleged “victims.” The poet criticizes Death as a slave to other&#xA;  forces: fate, chance, kings, and desperate men. Death is not in&#xA;  control, for a variety of other powers exercise their volition in&#xA;  taking lives. Even in the rest it brings, Death is inferior to drugs.&#xA;  Finally, the speaker predicts the end of Death itself, stating “Death,&#xA;  thou shalt die.”&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the two areas of exploration (Source - &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sevanoland.com/areas-of-exploration.html)-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.sevanoland.com/areas-of-exploration.html)-&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Readers, writers, and texts -&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This area introduces students to the nature of language and literature&#xA;  and its study. The investigation undertaken involves close attention&#xA;  to the details of texts in a variety of types and literary forms so&#xA;  that students learn about the choices made by creators and the ways in&#xA;  which meaning is communicated through words, image, and sound.  Study&#xA;  in this area should be structured to allow students to become more&#xA;  confident in their ability to recognize key textual and rhetorical&#xA;  features and how they create or affect meaning. Non-literary texts and&#xA;  literary works can be chosen that lend themselves to close reading and&#xA;  give students a sense of stylistic, rhetorical and literary elements&#xA;  across a variety of text types and literary forms.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Time and Space&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This area of exploration focuses on the idea that language is a social&#xA;  capacity and as such is intertwined with community, culture and&#xA;  history. It explores the variety of cultural contexts in which texts&#xA;  are produced and read across time and space as well as the ways texts&#xA;  themselves reflect or refract the world at large. Students will&#xA;  examine how cultural conditions can affect language and how these&#xA;  conditions are a product of language. Students will also consider the&#xA;  ways culture and identity influence reception.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is - &quot;How can I relate the two areas of exploration to the poem &quot;Death Be Not Proud&quot;?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7594" LastEditorUserId="7594" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T12:19:52.977" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T18:19:53.287" Title="How can &quot;Death be not proud&quot; be related to the areas of exploration?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;john-donne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-12T07:14:57.550" Score="5" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;In act 1, scene 7, Lady Macbeth encourages Macbeth to keep his promise and kill king Duncan, but is there any textual evidence from the play regarding his earlier oath to kill the king?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, for example, Lady Macbeth says that if she had promised to kill her own child, like Macbeth did in the case of killing the king, she certainly would have done so!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have given suck, and know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I would, while it was smiling in my face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have done to this. (1.7.54–59)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7618" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T07:51:01.903" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T17:10:32.210" Title="Any textual evidence from Shakespeare's Macbeth regarding Macbeth's oath to kill the king?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11541" CreationDate="2019-08-12T10:01:15.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we are to understand that he made his oath to Lady Macbeth between the end of Act I Scene V and the start of Act I Scene VI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MACBETH: We will speak further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LADY MACBETH: Only look up clear; To alter favour ever is to fear: Leave all the rest to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Exeunt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fresh from seeing Measure for Measure at the RSC in Stratford on Saturday and was struck by how often there is some phrase which cues up the fact that further discussion is going to take place out of the audience's hearing. 'Let us withdraw together' or 'would by and&#xA;by have some speech with you' or similar is used as characters leave the stage or centre of focus when the detail of what people might agree doesn't really matter because their actions will be played out for us in due course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare sets things up such that we know people have made plans, without telling us the detail of what those plans are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T17:10:32.210" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T17:10:32.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11543" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11544" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet and cleric John Donne (1572 – 1631) and his life as a writer. Donne is remembered both for his poems and his sermons." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T15:54:25.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11539" CreationDate="2019-08-12T19:01:48.427" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lombard’s phrase “conjuring trick” refers back to chapter 14:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lombard said: “Armstrong’s disappeared…”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Vera cried: “What?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lombard said: “Vanished clean off the island.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Blore concurred: “Vanished—that’s the word! &lt;strong&gt;Like some damned conjuring trick.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Armstrong’s disappearance and Blore’s death were conjuring tricks, then who was the conjuror? Lombard now believes that it must have been Vera, since she is the only remaining suspect. However, he cannot work out how she did it, so when he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A conjuring trick, my dear—a very good one…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he &lt;strong&gt;means to compliment her&lt;/strong&gt; on how completely she fooled everyone. But due to the ambiguous way he phrased the compliment, Vera interprets it as Lombard admitting his guilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ambiguous phrasing like this is one of Christie’s favourite tricks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T19:01:48.427" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-12T22:01:15.323" Score="0" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember during my English class reading an extract of a well-known novel. It was about a lady spraining her ankle and a gentleman helping her, I recollect. I have always thought it to be from &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt; but as I am finishing it I understand it is not. And I don’t believe it’s from &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; either. Could someone please give me a hint? I can only suppose the writer was either Austen or a Brontë.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7619" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T05:20:23.657" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T07:37:36.153" Title="Lady sprains her ankle" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11546" CreationDate="2019-08-12T23:34:15.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you supposed, it is Austen, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sense and Sensibility. &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While out for a walk, Marianne gets caught in the rain, slips, and sprains her ankle. The dashing John Willoughby sees the accident and assists her, picking her up and carrying her back to her home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-08-12T23:34:15.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11540" CreationDate="2019-08-13T18:19:53.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “areas of exploration” quoted in the question come from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internationalschooloftalentsmulticampus.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/lang-and-lit-a-first-exam-2021.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;syllabus&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibo.org/programmes/diploma-programme/curriculum/language-and-literature/language-a-language-and-literature-slhl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Language A: Language and Literature&lt;/a&gt; diploma from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibo.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Baccalaureate Organization&lt;/a&gt;. A syllabus is not primarily addressed to the &lt;em&gt;student&lt;/em&gt;, but rather to the &lt;em&gt;instructor&lt;/em&gt;. You can see this from the phrasing: when the syllabus says, “study should be structured”, it is the instructor who is expected to structure the study; when it says, “works can be chosen” it is the instructor who is expected to choose the works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intermediate step between the syllabus and the student is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesson_plan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lesson planning&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. An instructor is expected to read the syllabus and develop a program of lessons, exercises and assessments for their students that will meet the learning goals described in the syllabus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in order to relate ‘Death be not proud’ to the syllabus, you first have to put yourself in the role of the instructor and plan some lessons and exercises on the poem. For example, you might set yourself some essay questions, like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What rhetorical and poetic devices does Donne use in the poem? How do they contribute to its meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This contributes to the learning goal of recognizing “key textual and rhetorical features and how they create or affect meaning”.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Donne belonged to the school of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Metaphysical” poets&lt;/a&gt;. To what extent is this poem typical of that school?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This contributes to the learning goal of knowing that language is “intertwined with community, culture and history”.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Compare the view of death in this poem with that of Holy Sonnets VI. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/357/96.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This is my play’s last scene&lt;/a&gt;” and VII. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/357/97.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;At the round earth’s imagined corners&lt;/a&gt;”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(This contributes to the goal of learning about “choices made by creators”.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what if you are not yet familiar with Donne and his poetry? Before you can plan your lessons, you need to know enough about the subject to be able to teach it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you might instead have to begin by reading around the subject. You might try reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rest of Donne’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Sonnets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holy Sonnets&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A biography of Donne (Robert Cecil Bald’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/johndonnelife00bald&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Donne: A Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is available for loan at the Internet Archive);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other Metaphysical poems, for example Andrew Marvell’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48332/on-a-drop-of-dew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On a drop of dew&lt;/a&gt;’ or Henry Vaughan’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45432/they-are-all-gone-into-the-world-of-light&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;They are all gone into the world of light&lt;/a&gt;’;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A general book on the study of poetry, for example Terry Eagleton’s &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Poem&lt;/em&gt;, or Thomas Foster’s &lt;em&gt;How to Read Poetry Like a Professor&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in this kind of reading programme you’ll realise you know enough to be able to plan some lessons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T18:19:53.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11585" CreationDate="2019-08-13T19:38:45.373" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unit &quot;Memories of Childhood&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/levt108.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a short five minute read&lt;/a&gt;) is on my curriculum; I think it consists of excerpts from two different books, one by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zitkala-Sa&lt;/a&gt; and one by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bama_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bama&lt;/a&gt;, presented together. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I fail to understand is why has this been done. These two are seemingly unrelated. While the first one talks about an issue where a girl complaints about getting her hair cut short forcefully, the other goes about the social issue of caste-system and prejudice against the untouchables. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are seemingly unrelated, but as they are presented together, I believe they do have some purpose. Can some explain me what exactly it is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7578" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T20:23:03.837" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T11:48:48.287" Title="In &quot;Memories of Childhood&quot;, why are two seemingly unrelated excerpts being presented together?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;zitkala-sa&gt;&lt;bama&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11554" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11555" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" Score="0" Body="Zitkála-Šá (1876–1938), Sioux writer, author of &quot;The Sun Dance Opera&quot; (1913)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T20:25:09.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11556" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-13T20:25:55.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-13T20:25:55.057" LastActivityDate="2019-08-13T20:25:55.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11557" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-13T20:25:55.057" Score="0" Body="Bama (born 1958), Tamil novelist, known for her autobiographical novel &quot;Karukku&quot; (1992). Questions about her works should be tagged [tamil-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:27:40.527" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:27:40.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11446" CreationDate="2019-08-14T19:29:01.867" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simone Biles &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/simone-biles-dismount-beam-history_n_5d500148e4b0fd2733f199c1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just made history&lt;/a&gt; this week, and pictures of her performance made me think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look at her saluting:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TmCrW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TmCrW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now look at an upended ship (that's a painting of the Titanic, made by Filson Young):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9vmmx.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9vmmx.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These postures look pretty similar, aren't they? The body is all stretched up, impressively lengthened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, Hughes maybe didn't have a gymnast salute in mind, but maybe he was thinking of something similar - a circus stuntman salute (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/amateurcircuslif00balcrich/page/n33&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), picturing a sinking ship as a saluting circus man in an ironic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the song title - and its repeating chorus - is &quot;In Laughter&quot;, it's reasonable to also interpret other lines in the first verse in this circus-que light (aside from their apparent macabre meaning). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T14:40:03.153" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T14:40:03.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11560" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9327" CreationDate="2019-08-15T11:44:18.837" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been bugging me as I vaguely recall this story from my own childhood and I'd have read it early to mid 1980s.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some googling I found it.  Its The Jeremy Mouse Book by Patricia Scarry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find a synopsis online but found this review on Amazon which fits with the beginning of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I received this book as a Christmas present in 1970. It is my absolute&#xA;  favorite book. I can't get through too much of reading a bedtime story&#xA;  to myself without falling asleep and dreaming of Deep Pond. It is a&#xA;  perfect little children's story. I highly recommend it for small&#xA;  Grandchildren. It teaches the lessons of empathy, compassion and sense&#xA;  of community, especially for the little unexpected Mouse and his&#xA;  little red convertible sports car. He was not the most popular animal&#xA;  when he came speeding into town and blew his tire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the cover of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QENSC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QENSC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a copy Etsy (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/658913242/the-jeremy-mouse-book-1969-first-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/658913242/the-jeremy-mouse-book-1969-first-edition&lt;/a&gt;) which has pictures of the inside, the goat in the shop I remember: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYuEO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYuEO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7626" LastEditorUserId="7626" LastEditDate="2019-08-15T11:53:20.147" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T11:53:20.147" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11369" CreationDate="2019-08-15T13:59:55.640" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has been bugging me as I vaguely recall this story from my own childhood and I'd have read it early to mid 1980s.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some googling I found it.  Its The Jeremy Mouse Book by Patricia Scarry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find a synopsis online but found this review on Amazon which fits with the beginning of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I received this book as a Christmas present in 1970. It is my absolute&#xA;  favorite book. I can't get through too much of reading a bedtime story&#xA;  to myself without falling asleep and dreaming of Deep Pond. It is a&#xA;  perfect little children's story. I highly recommend it for small&#xA;  Grandchildren. It teaches the lessons of empathy, compassion and sense&#xA;  of community, especially for the little unexpected Mouse and his&#xA;  little red convertible sports car. He was not the most popular animal&#xA;  when he came speeding into town and blew his tire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the cover of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QENSC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QENSC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a copy Etsy (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/658913242/the-jeremy-mouse-book-1969-first-edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/658913242/the-jeremy-mouse-book-1969-first-edition&lt;/a&gt;) which has pictures of the inside, the goat in the shop I remember: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYuEO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gYuEO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7626" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T13:59:55.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11562" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-15T17:40:31.337" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can only remember the rough plot of a novel that I read many (15, 20?) years ago. (I am not talking about the film &quot;Allied&quot;.) It went something like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wife in a US American married couple is actually a Russian spy. The husband works as a rocket scientist or journalist. In any case, the spy tries to steal and/or manipulate a rocket program.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end the man falls in love (and sleeps with) another woman who is his colleague and/or helps him in his adventure, which consists of unmasking the spy and/or clearing his name. When unmasked his wife claims that even though she's a spy, she does actually love him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7627" LastEditorUserId="5473" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T07:18:06.260" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T07:18:06.260" Title="Cold war spy novel: wife of a US rocket scientist (or journalist) is a Russian spy in disguise, but claims to actually love him" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-15T18:56:48.603" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Minor spoilers for &lt;em&gt;Fingersmith&lt;/em&gt; follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pornography is an omnipresent but tangential feature in the plot of Sarah Waters' novel &lt;em&gt;Fingersmith&lt;/em&gt;. Several important characters are related to the trade as collectors, dealers or creators of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet despite its ubiquity, it is in no way directly essential to the unfolding story. This suggests that the author has included it in order to elaborate on themes connected to pornography. One could argue that it has influenced the sexuality of one of the characters, but that's not explicit in the novel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, what is explicit in the novel are a number of prominent feminist themes. This sits oddly with the prominence of pornography since feminist thought is often critical of the way in which it demeans and objectifies women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, despite this disparity, there is little that is judgemental concerning pornography. It is treated mostly as an academic curiosity, its impact on the lives of those involved is rarely examined.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, then, that the novel seems to have been purposefully built to examine themes of pornography and its relation to feminism, yet steers clear of moral pronouncements on that relationship, what does it tell us about the interplay between the two?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T13:04:38.733" Title="What does Fingersmith say about the relationship between feminism and pornography" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;fingersmith&gt;&lt;sarah-waters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1016" CreationDate="2019-08-15T19:51:32.933" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're confusing allegory with applicability. Allegory implies authorial intent while applicability is up to the reader. Tolkien understood that applicability was out of his control. Readers can see things in writings that the author maybe never considered. But he was annoyed when people tried to read into his work and make out what kind of person he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7629" LastActivityDate="2019-08-15T19:51:32.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11565" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1921" CreationDate="2019-08-16T01:30:04.560" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author intended it to get you to 'fill out' O'Brien's character on your own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one can say exactly what it means, even after very thoughtful dissection, but, reading the conjecture - heck, even the existence of this thread - shows that its ambiguity was effective in getting the phrase stuck in each reader's mind, contributing to the character that is O'Brien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason why this author makes it on every 'Top' list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7630" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T06:23:07.783" LastActivityDate="2019-08-16T06:23:07.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11566" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-16T06:34:38.257" Score="5" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This famous Persian poet and mystic&lt;/a&gt; was named Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī (جلال‌الدین محمد بلخى‎) or Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (جلال‌الدین محمد رومی), where Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad was his actual personal name while Balkhī and Rūmī were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisba_(onomastics)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;nisbas&lt;/a&gt; referring respectively to his birthplace and the place where he spent much of his later life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English-speaking world, he is usually referred to as &lt;strong&gt;Rumi&lt;/strong&gt; after one of these nisbas. In various Middle Eastern countries (e.g. Turkey), he is commonly referred to as &lt;strong&gt;Mevlana&lt;/strong&gt; or some other variant of Mawlānā (مولانا‎) meaning &quot;our master&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why have these sobriquets in particular become popular for him?&lt;/strong&gt; Nobody refers to him by his personal name; instead we have, in the west, the name &quot;Rumi&quot; meaning &quot;from the western part [of the Persian Empire] which was formerly in the Roman Empire&quot;, and, in the Middle East, some variant of the name &quot;Mawlana&quot; meaning &quot;my/our master&quot;. How did these names become the standard way of referring to him? And why different names in different countries?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T09:02:05.203" Title="Why are the names Rumi and Mevlana respectively used for the famous poet?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11567" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-16T10:59:59.627" Score="3" ViewCount="718" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do the phrases in bold mean in this passage from Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Darcy had at first scarcely allowed her to be pretty; he had looked at her without admiration at the ball; and when they next met, he looked at her only to criticise. &lt;strong&gt;But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face&lt;/strong&gt;, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. &lt;strong&gt;To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world&lt;/strong&gt;, he was caught by their easy playfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5138" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T11:11:14.317" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T09:51:37.367" Title="Why were Mr Darcy's discoveries &quot;mortifying&quot; in &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11563" CreationDate="2019-08-16T15:50:13.643" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to understanding this is to see that the character of Maud herself is a metaphor for the male presumption of entitlement over women. She is taken by her Uncle from an environment where she is happy into his house, in order that he might use her eyes and hands to substitute for his own failing faculties in secretarial work on his pornography collection. He is thus objectifying her through his power over her in a similar manner to the way the male gaze objectifies women through pornography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her Uncle cares nothing for her happiness in this new role and is oblivious to her own independent inner life. Likewise, he treats the erotic stories in his collection in a similarly detached manner, seeing them only as academic curios. This typifies the male response to both pornography and women as something functional, with no independent or emotional value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As she comes to understand what is in his collection, she begins to learn about the world of sex through the books purely to facilitate her Uncle's desires. Thus her own sexuality is subjugated to the needs of a man, as women's sexualities often are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the plot progresses, however, Maud begins to rebel both against her Uncle and against male power over women generally. Her final act in escaping her Uncle is to destroy part of his collection, again a metaphor for the sexual liberation away from men that she has found with Sue. Indeed as the plot unfolds further, both protagonists begin to assert themselves against the dominance of men in their society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is significant that at the close of the novel, it is implied that the protagonists are going to earn their livelihood making pornography of their own. It will be a different kind of pornography to that in Maud's Uncle's collection, however, one created by and for women. One with subtlety and emotional resonance. It is noteworthy that in the passage of her work that Maud reads out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quickly my daring hand seized her most secret treasure, regardless of her soft complaints, which my burning kisses reduced to mere murmurs, while my fingers penetrated into the covered way of love&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She uses the word &quot;love&quot; to indicate the tone is not one of sex but of erotic love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is thus subtly railing against the typical male-dominated, objectifying form of pornography, which rules the lives of both protagonists and which they jointly reject. However, it opens up the possibility that a more female-oriented pornography can be a disruptive power for positive change in a male-dominated world, helping women to discover their own sexual individuality as opposed to being mere tools for the pleasure of men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue41/miller.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith: Leaving Women’s Fingerprints on Victorian Pornography&lt;/a&gt;, K.A. Miller, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Issue 4.1 (Spring 2008).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T13:04:38.733" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T13:04:38.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11572" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11575" CreationDate="2019-08-16T17:55:55.293" Score="1" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary, who having, in consequence of being the only plain one in the family, worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments, and was always impatient for display... had neither genius nor taste, and though vanity had given her application, it had given her likewise a pedantic air and conceited manner, &lt;strong&gt;which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached. Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well; and Mary,at the end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish airs, at the resquest of her younger sisters&lt;/strong&gt;, who with some of the Lucases and two or three officers joined eagerly in dancing at one end of the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the lines in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5169" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-16T18:04:04.430" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T17:46:23.870" Title="In 'Pride and Prejudice',why was Mary's performance bad compared to Elizabeth's?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9113" CreationDate="2019-08-17T11:33:28.557" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a translation of the tenth couplet of &lt;a href=&quot;https://ganjoor.net/moulavi/shams/ghazalsh/sh908/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this poem&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwan-e_Shams-e_Tabrizi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Diwan-e Shams-e Tabrizi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;تو جان جان جهانی و نام تو عشق است&#xA;    هر آنک از تو پری یافت بر علو گردد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it translates something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are the Soul of the Soul of the Universe. And your name is Love&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever found a feather of you has come to a high position&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this couplet hints to the tale of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simurgh&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C4%81l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zāl&lt;/a&gt; and therefore is really hard (if not impossible) to translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7634" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T08:07:46.803" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-17T14:52:57.360" Score="4" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading through some fables of Aesop's. I notice that some of them draw an explicit moral, but I don't know whether these were edited in later. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this version&lt;/a&gt; of &amp;quot;boy and snails&amp;quot; stops short of the moral while &lt;a href=&quot;https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2019/08/14/singing-while-the-house-burns-down/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; delivers it. The collection I've been reading mostly omits them, although characters do often get a line such as &amp;quot;This is what I deserve for leaving my life in the pasture, hard as it was!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;But the sheep was no fool and retorted...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, some are without editorialization and seem open to interpretation. Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-222&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ape and travellers.&lt;/a&gt; Is this an indictment of those who tell the truth heedless of the danger; of those who tell the truth only opportunistically; or of those who can't bear the hear the truth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three tradesmen.&lt;/a&gt; Do we laugh at the tanner for having no better argument than his partiality, or does he lampoon the others for appearing to have good reasons when really they're partial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-151&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swan.&lt;/a&gt; Are we supposed to agree with the expedient solution or is it as crude as it sounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wolf, mother, child.&lt;/a&gt; Do we laugh at the wolf's naïveté about figurative language or do we share his disgust at people never meaning what they say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I find it easier to piece together an intended reading when there are thematic links:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pomegranate, apple tree, bramble.&lt;/a&gt; Two fruit trees argue over whose fruit is better and a bramble invites them to quit quarrelling. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-207&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dolphins, whales, sprat.&lt;/a&gt; Same story but this time the dolphins and whales rebuke the would-be mediator: &amp;quot;We would rather go on killing each other than be reconciled by a sprat.&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.infoplease.com/aesops-fables-259&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lion &amp;amp; boar.&lt;/a&gt; Two enemies realize that killing each other for others' gain benefits neither of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heart of my question: &lt;strong&gt;Do some of the fables have intentionally ambiguous meanings?&lt;/strong&gt; I consider this important because that's quite a different species of literature than black-and-white moralizing. (Of course, I see that at least some fables are of the latter kind.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some subquestions of possible relevance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this the fault of my edition? That is, do we have some manuscripts with more of the morals spelled out and others with less? I know that the Victorians liked to gloss the fables...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does something about the form tell me how to read it? For example, in the bramble story, does its having the last word mean anything?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there clues from the customs or mores of the time that make some readings more or less likely for the time? For example, if one used to wring swans' necks as a matter of course...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1672" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T13:24:57.787" Title="Aesop's ambiguous fables" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;moral&gt;&lt;aesop&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11572" CreationDate="2019-08-17T17:46:23.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a pedantic air and conceited manner, which would have injured a higher degree of excellence than she had reached.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary's &quot;pedantic air and conceited manner&quot; made her playing less appreciated, and it would have done so even if she had played better than she actually did. (It's unclear to me whether the &quot;pedantic air and conceited manner&quot; was in her playing or her general attitude, or both.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elizabeth, easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth was not technically as good a player as Mary, but she was &quot;easy and unaffected&quot; (not at all serious or pretentious), and people enjoyed listening to her more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mary,at the end of a long concerto, was glad to purchase praise and gratitude by Scotch and Irish airs, at the request of her younger sisters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Mary had played her concertos (complicated and difficult pieces), her younger sisters would ask her to play airs (simple dance tunes). People praised Mary for those tunes, and Mary was glad to have the praise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2019-08-17T17:46:23.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11567" CreationDate="2019-08-18T03:39:43.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the many senses of &quot;mortify&quot; is (according to Wiktionary) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(transitive, usually used passively) To embarrass, to humiliate. To injure one's dignity. [from 17th c.] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is easy to find examples of forms of this word being used this way in 18th-20th century writing.  James Boswell, in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1564/1564-h/1564-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Life of Johnson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, for instance, has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon after this time Dr. Johnson had the mortification of being informed by Mrs. Thrale, that, 'what she supposed he never believed,' was true; namely, that she was actually going to marry Signor Piozzi, an Italian musick-master. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People often do not like to be contradicted, and often do not like to discover for themselves that they were wrong about something; &lt;em&gt;mortification&lt;/em&gt; is one term for this feeling of dislike. Darcy realizes that his initial assessment of Elizabeth was incorrect, or at least incomplete.  It is perhaps hyperbole on Austen's part to use a word that can also mean to feel like dying, but there it is: Darcy realizes that there is more to Elizabeth  than he saw at first, and is, to some extent, embarrassed about this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T03:39:43.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11566" CreationDate="2019-08-18T04:44:32.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Muslims generally called Byzantine, Turkey, &amp;amp; Anatolia Rum. The name &lt;strong&gt;Rumi&lt;/strong&gt; was popular untill very recently in the east as well. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/Karim-Zamani/e/B00MY4SB1K%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Karim Zamani&lt;/a&gt; who is a famous exegete of Mevlana's work in a lecture says it was very common until somewhat 50 years ago to call him Rumi. But then came a bit strange atmosphere around that name and people saw it as a kind of &lt;strong&gt;Westernization&lt;/strong&gt; and therefore avoid that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7634" LastActivityDate="2019-08-18T04:44:32.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14440" CreationDate="2019-08-18T18:23:25.917" Score="4" ViewCount="2640" Body="&lt;p&gt;From chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator says he lost interest in 'abortive sorrows' and 'shortwinded elations of men'. What do these phrases mean and does he mean it in a general sense or in relation to Gatsby only?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7642" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T08:09:32.117" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T01:40:54.493" Title="What are &quot;abortive sorrows&quot; and &quot;short-winded elations&quot; in &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11581" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11583" CreationDate="2019-08-18T20:12:05.063" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm visiting my girl this week (long-distance relationship, different country) and at some point she told me about being a big fan of Anna Karenina. However, the copy she had read was old and falling apart, so it lacked one specific scene of her favourite character which was very disappointing to her. I'd love to surprise her with the passage she is missing. But since the paperback is about 1000 pages long, I have no chance to read it entirely until Tuesday. If someone has read the novel and could assist me with her/his knowledge, I would be very grateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what I know about the mysterious scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a crucial part of the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is a beautiful moment for Ljewin in a positive sense.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The reader knows that it is bound to happen before the scene occurs.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, I would never enter this forum without having done my own research before despairing. What I found out already is that Ljewin marries Kitty; I surmise that there might have been an important scene that marks the starting point of their relationship, however, I didn't manage to find the exact Part and Chapter of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My second guess is one of the conversations between Ljewin and his brother Sergej, which many sources describe as very impactful for him. To my mind this option is less likely to be the one she is missing because these scenes don't seem to be positively connotated.&#xA;Maybe I also missed other possible scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thankful for any help I can get!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7643" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T08:20:25.680" Title="Does someone know the &quot;Moment of Ljewin&quot; in Anna Karenina?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11581" CreationDate="2019-08-19T08:20:25.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be the scene, where Kitty and Levin open their hearts to each other. It fits the description (tr. Constance Garnett).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!” she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What! shall I be left alone—without her?” he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. “Wait a minute,” he said, sitting down to the table. “I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Please, ask it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Here,” he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, “When you told me it could never be, did that mean never, or then?” There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, “Is it what I think?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I understand,” she said, flushing a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What is this word?” he said, pointing to the n that stood for never.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It means never,” she said; “but that’s not true!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dolly was completely comforted in the depression caused by her conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch when she caught sight of the two figures: Kitty with the chalk in her hand, with a shy and happy smile looking upwards at Levin, and his handsome figure bending over the table with glowing eyes fastened one minute on the table and the next on her. He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, “Then I could not answer differently.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Only then?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes,” her smile answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And n... and now?” he asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!” she wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, “If you could forget and forgive what happened.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I understand,” she said in a whisper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood it all, and without asking him, “Is it this?” took the chalk and at once answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a long while he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was stupefied with happiness. He could not supply the word she had meant; but in her charming eyes, beaming with happiness, he saw all he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had hardly finished writing when she read them over her arm, and herself finished and wrote the answer, “Yes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You’re playing secrétaire?” said the old prince. “But we must really be getting along if you want to be in time at the theater.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T08:20:25.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11567" CreationDate="2019-08-19T09:42:12.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Darcy’s discoveries are ‘mortifying’ (humbling, humiliating) because they are wounding to his pride. The appearance of ‘pride’ in the title of the novel alerts us to the significance of this aspect of his character. Darcy is a man who is especially proud of his social position, family connection, and self-sufficiency. At the Meryton assembly in chapter 3,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he was discovered to be proud; to be above his company, and above being pleased&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s look at the passage from the question in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Darcy and his friends—that is, Mr. Bingley, Caroline Bingley and Louisa Hurst—had been disparaging the attractiveness of the young women they had met at the assembly, and that Darcy’s contribution to the game was to criticize the appearance of Elizabeth Bennet. But no sooner had he done so,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is his first ‘discovery’ and he finds it ‘mortifying’ because it makes him a liar and hypocrite, and because according to his self-conception, Elizabeth’s social position ought to place her beneath him. Later on he will describe “his sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing, and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the important words are ‘forced’ and ‘caught’. Darcy believes that his self-control and self-sufficiency ought to make him invulnerable to Elzabeth’s charms, and that he should be able to impose his principles on his heart, but he finds that it is otherwise. The narrative later says that Darcy “had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her”, and in his botched proposal of marriage, he will tell Elizabeth that he “liked her against his will, against his reason, and even against his character.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T09:51:37.367" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T09:51:37.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11552" CreationDate="2019-08-19T11:48:48.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first extract (‘The Cutting of My Long Hair’) comes from the autobiographical essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079893750&amp;amp;view=2up&amp;amp;seq=190&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Schooldays of an Indian Girl&lt;/a&gt;’ (&lt;em&gt;The Atlantic Monthly&lt;/em&gt;, February 1900). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zitkala-Sa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zitkála-Šá&lt;/a&gt; was a member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dakota Sioux&lt;/a&gt; nation. The year of her birth, 1876, was the year of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sioux_War_of_1876&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defeat of the Sioux&lt;/a&gt; by the army of the United States. The military campaign was followed up by a campaign of cultural assimilation, and in 1884 Zitkála-Šá was taken from her family and tribe to be educated at a missionary school in Indiana. The story of the cutting of her long hair exemplifies the cruelty of the institution and symbolises the way the pupils were cut off from their heritage and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second extract (‘We Too Are Human Beings’) comes from the autobiography &lt;em&gt;Karukku&lt;/em&gt; (1992; translated into English by Lakshmi Holmström, 2000). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bama_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bama&lt;/a&gt; was born into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dalit caste&lt;/a&gt; in Tamil Nadu. The extract describes an experience in her childhood when she first became aware of the prejudice against her caste, through the imposition of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untouchability&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;untouchability&lt;/a&gt;’ by members of ‘higher’ castes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the extracts have multiple points in common, as explained in the introduction to the unit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This unit presents autobiographical episodes from the lives of two women from marginalised communities [that is, Dakota Sioux and Tamil Dalits] who look back on their childhood, and reflect on their relationship with the mainstream culture [that is, white Americans and higher-caste Indians, respectively].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, both extracts describe the point in the author’s childhood when they first became aware of the cruelty and prejudice of the mainstream and how it would be deployed against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T11:48:48.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11524" CreationDate="2019-08-19T13:20:55.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It’s a joke, a deliberate absurdity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It helps to have a bit more context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs. [Alida] Slade and Mrs. [Grace] Ansley had lived opposite each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room curtains in No. 20 East Seventy-third Street were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries, illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs. Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper Park Avenue had already begun to think: “I’d rather live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Slades were planning to move house from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_73rd_Street_Historic_District&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;East Seventy-third Street&lt;/a&gt; (a neighbourhood of small rowhouses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Avenue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Park Avenue&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most fashionable and expensive addresses in New York. At the old house the Slades were across the road from the Ansleys; at the new house, they might well be across the street from a ‘speakeasy’ such as the Park Avenue Club. A ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakeasy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speakeasy&lt;/a&gt;’ was a nightclub illegally selling alcohol during the period of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prohibition&lt;/a&gt; (1920–1933); these institutions were subject to police raids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Slade has grown bored with watching the Ansleys in their house opposite, and so she tells herself that she would rather live opposite a speakeasy, however disreputable it might be, because of the potential excitement of watching it get raided. The converse idea, that Mrs. Ansley should get raided instead, is absurd, since the Ansleys are so ‘tame’ and ‘irreproachable’. The absurdity is so amusing that Mrs. Slade decides to make the idea into a joke, and to ‘launch it’ (tell it for the first time) at a lunch she hosts for her friends. The joke is a ‘hit’ (success) and ‘goes the rounds’ (gets repeated by her circle of friends).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T13:20:55.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11587" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T13:59:59.670" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Grove&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In a Grove&lt;/a&gt; is one of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%ABnosuke_Akutagawa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ryūnosuke Akutagawa&lt;/a&gt;'s best-known short stories, partly due to Kurosawa's film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rashomon&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the short stories, we get several accounts of the death of samurai Kanazawa no Takehiro. The three people who could have witnessed his death, i.e. his wife Masago, the robber Tajōmaru and the samurai himself, give contradictory accounts of the events. Kanazawa no Takehiro's version is presented as that of a dead man's spirit as told through a medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is not clear to me is whether Akutagawa or contemporary culture (early 20th century) assumed that a dead man's spirit wouldn't lie. If yes, the samurai's version would seem to be authoritative, unless the medium is unreliable. If no, it seems that the truth cannot be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T05:18:33.847" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T05:18:33.847" Title="Does 'In a Grove' assume that dead people don't lie?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;ryunosuke-akutagawa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-19T14:37:24.170" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hoping you can help with this half-remembered poem that from what I can recall was written by someone who worked for the New Statesman or the Spectator in the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening part is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'They say consider the ant O thou sluggard,go to its ways and be wise&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well,I've considered the ant and I'm buggered why it thinks it's as good as us guys&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather consider the lily...'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far I've had no joy in finding the rest of it-any help muchly appreciated (from humans or ants..)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7645" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T15:09:05.713" Title="Can anyone identify this parody of 'Consider the ant'?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11588" CreationDate="2019-08-19T14:59:53.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Go to the ant’ by &lt;strong&gt;Stanley J. Sharpless&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Consider her ways, and be wise,’&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Well, I’ve been to the ant, and I’m buggered&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If I think it’s one up on us guys;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All that rushing about is damn silly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (And uneconomic, I bet),&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'd rather consider the lily,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It's got Solomon beat—and no sweat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stanley J. Sharpless. ‘Go to the ant’. In Kingsley Amis, ed. (1978), &lt;em&gt;The New Oxford Book of English Light Verse&lt;/em&gt;, Oxford University Press, p. 278.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The first two lines quote Proverbs 6:6 in the Authorized Version; according to Proverbs 1:1 this is one of the “proverbs of Solomon”. The last two lines are an allusion to Matthew 6:28: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-19T15:09:05.713" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T15:09:05.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9701" CreationDate="2019-08-19T15:04:25.613" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be that he didn't realize it was inappropriate until he saw someone else do it.  It is a known behavior of humans to judge oneself less harshly than judging others.  Sometimes seeing someone else doing a behavior casts it into a new light and it could seem different than when you did the same thing earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1296" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T15:04:25.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3953" CreationDate="2019-08-19T21:12:57.667" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;History has been a nightmare since Cain killed Abel, I suppose. Consider how so many of us share this nightmare. I live in the north of Ireland which has long had a bloody history right up until the present day. What do I do? Not take sides? Shrug my shoulders? Rise above sectarianism? Do you imagine that to be an easy strategy? Indeed not. I am caught up in this history. It breathes through the pores of my skin. However noble my sentiments I have been made to fit a Procrustean bed. This is what Stephen Daedalus means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7647" LastActivityDate="2019-08-19T21:12:57.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11602" CreationDate="2019-08-20T01:13:46.067" Score="4" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;On page 334 of Cormac McCarthy’s &lt;em&gt;Blood Meridian&lt;/em&gt;, Elrod responds to the man’s assertion that the ears on his scapular were taken from Apaches by saying that the “Apaches would give a watermelon a pure fit”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man sat holding the necklace in his hands. They wasnt cannibals, he said. They was Apaches. I knowed the man that docked em. Knowed him and rode with him and seen him hung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elrod looked at the others and grinned. Apaches, he said. I bet them old Apaches &lt;strong&gt;would give a watermelon a pure fit&lt;/strong&gt;, what about you all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man looked up wearily. You aint callin me a liar are ye son?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bolding my own.) What is the origin of this joke/insult? Was it a common saying in the book's time period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7650" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T12:26:04.073" Title="Origin of &quot;give a watermelon a pure fit&quot; in &quot;Blood Meridian&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;blood-meridian&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11610" CreationDate="2019-08-20T05:31:31.240" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The boots were approaching again. The door opened. O'Brien came in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Winston started to his feet. The shock of the sight had driven all&#xA;  caution out of him. For the first time in many years he forgot the&#xA;  presence of the telescreen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'They've got you too!' he cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;They got me a long time ago&lt;/strong&gt;,' said O'Brien with a mild, almost regretful&#xA;  irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1921/what-did-obrien-mean-when-he-said-this-at-the-end-of-1984/1929?noredirect=1#comment18750_1929&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1921/what-did-obrien-mean-when-he-said-this-at-the-end-of-1984&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about why O'Brien seemed regretful, we discussed whether there was any chance that O'Brien was referring to a time before the Party was in power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question, then: does the book offer any clue as to when and/or how the Party took power originally? Is it possible that O'Brien remembered it, and was perhaps even part of putting them in power in the first place? Did Orwell ever comment on either point outside the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T17:02:25.300" Title="When was the Party founded?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-20T08:57:02.463" Score="6" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antinatalism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antinatalism on Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt; and saw&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antinatalism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antinatalism - Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Above all, we must make the reproductive question ethically relevant. &lt;strong&gt;A coin is turned around before it is handed to the beggar&lt;/strong&gt;, yet a child is unflinchingly tossed into cosmic bruteness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ul&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Peter_Wessel_Zapffe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Peter Wessel Zapffe&quot;&gt;Peter Wessel Zapffe&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Essays og epistler&lt;/em&gt;, 1967&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't speak Norwegian and don't know if this was translated well. Don't people just toss coins to beggars? I never seen someone in New York turning around a coin.  Am I missing figuration? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T10:57:50.710" Title="Are coins usually turned around before handed to beggars?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2019-08-20T08:59:52.137" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had always taken this to be questioning whether the ears had, in fact, come from live Apache warriors. As in: the &quot;Apaches&quot; in question were so feeble they would only frighten (&quot;give .. a pure fit&quot;) a fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some support for this in a &lt;a href=&quot;http://othes.univie.ac.at/28721/1/2013-06-17_0104149.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD thesis&lt;/a&gt; I uncovered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elrod calls into question the provenance of the kid’s scapula of human ears, effectively calling the man a liar and, furthermore, professing himself to be unimpressed with the notion of their having been harvested from the bodies of Apaches, presumably killed in combat –– &quot;I bet&#xA;  them old Apaches would give a watermelon a pure fit,&quot; Elrod says, making fun of the man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it would not be a &quot;common saying&quot; at the time. But it's worth remembering that watermelons were cultivated in the time and area in which the book is set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T08:59:52.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11595" CreationDate="2019-08-20T09:26:58.803" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several languages have a similar expression involving &quot;turning over&quot; coins. For example, the German expression &quot;jedes Geldstück zweimal umdrehen&quot; (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/jeden_Pfennig_zweimal_umdrehen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jeden Pfennig zweimal umdrehen&lt;/a&gt;) literally means &quot;turning over each piece of money twice&quot; and the Dutch expression &quot;ieder dubbeltje drie keer omdraaien&quot; literally means &quot;turning over each coin three times&quot;. (In the Netherlands, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubbeltje&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dubbeltje&lt;/a&gt; was a coin with a low value.) These expressions mean thinking (at least) twice before spending any money. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Wessel Zapffe is saying that people (in the 1960s) worried more about spending even small amounts of money than about than about bringing children into the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-22T10:57:50.710" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T10:57:50.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11598" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-20T10:55:22.900" Score="5" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to identify a book, or series of books I read as a child. The setting was pre-columbian Central America, the protagonists belonged to a river based tribe (lots of big canoes etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If memory serves, the premise of one of the books was that the beautiful wife-to-be of one of the protagonists was kidnapped by members of a rival tribe. A rescue party is formed by the protagonists and some of the kidnapped girls kin (from the rival tribe?). They track the kidnappers, and soon discover that the kidnappers have sold her to slavers or have been themselves taken by slavers (my recollection of this bit is a bit hazy). The rescue party learn the destination of the slavers by talking to salt traders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slavers are heading for the far away mountains to sell their catch to a (relatively) advanced city-dwelling nation ruled by a god-king.&#xA;To look at the god-kings face means certain death (unclear if this death is instant, or if it means that the offender is shunned as lawless/banished to a wasteland).&#xA;The girl is sold to the temple of the god-king and are to be wed and/or sacrificed to the king.&#xA;The rescue party find a local ally to help them, and end up saving the god-king from a plot by the evil vizier/main priest or whatever during a jaguar hunt.&#xA;As a reward the girl is freed and reunited with her betrothed, the protagonists get fancy gifts and travel back home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some details (that might be from other books in the series):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a tapir hunt, involving using a big bow which have to be drawn using the feet while lying on the back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At one point the protagonists have to climb trees to escape/hide from aggressive peccaries&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some people worship a giant (evil?) snapping turtle living in the bottom of a cave and feed it human sacrifices.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a sacred gathering of the tribes where conflicts are resolved, trade agreements are made, weddings are decided. All feuds and violence are banned during this gathering, but traveling to the gathering can be dangerous as the restriction on violence only applies to the gathering proper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Salt, well crafted items and hides are the main trade goods, the protagonists doesn't understand the mountain nation's fascination for precious metals.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a character called something like Stonefist because his tolerance of pain (he receives the nickname after holding a burning coal in his hand for a dare?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how old these books might be, I read them in the early 90s, but I'm guessing they were from the 60-70s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;edit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original might not be English! The version I read was in Norwegian, and I've always assumed they were originally in English, but that might not be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7652" LastEditorUserId="7652" LastEditDate="2019-08-27T07:46:48.860" LastActivityDate="2019-08-27T07:46:48.860" Title="Which book(s): Fictional account of pre-columbian indians" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11595" CreationDate="2019-08-20T13:09:21.993" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fremfor alt må vi gjøre forplantningsspørsmålet etisk relevant. &lt;strong&gt;Man endevender en mynt under valgets kvide, før man gir den til tiggeren.&lt;/strong&gt; Men et barn slænger man ut i den kosmiske råskap uten å blunke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;P W Zapffe, Essays og epistler, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nb.no/items/7e7ed5a776c7544c2b032ff26a9458a2?page=161&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 161&lt;/a&gt;, last paragraph&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal translation would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They turn the coin in the anguish of indecision, before giving it to the beggar.&lt;/strong&gt; But a child they throw into the cosmic brutality without blinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A better translation of the bold text is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Via &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1161737-a-coin-is-examined-and-only-after-careful-deliberation-given&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7652" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-20T13:09:21.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11601" CreationDate="2019-08-21T02:40:16.030" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably a Soviet-era children's book. It is about a boy's journey by train. As I remember it, not much happens plot-wise, but the boy's sense of wonder makes everything he encounters (The washbasin! This is how the door works! This is how they serve tea on the train!) seem marvelous. I think the book is meant to introduce young children to these phenomena. My mother read this book (in Chinese translation) to me when I was a child. I would love to know the name of the book.         &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7653" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-21T06:34:34.063" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T08:54:42.897" Title="Russian children's book about a boy's first train journey" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11600" CreationDate="2019-08-21T08:54:42.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My guess would be &quot;What I Saw&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Zhitkov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boris Zhitkov&lt;/a&gt;. But I don't know if it was translated in other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T08:54:42.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2019-08-21T09:56:16.183" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I interpret the sentence as meaning, “the Apaches are so frightening that they would give even a watermelon a feeling of intense fear.” Elrod’s grin and the man’s reaction suggest that the sentence is meant sarcastically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The watermelon has long been a stereotypical crop of the Southern United States, and the phrase “pure fit” (meaning “intense feeling or outburst of emotion”) came in the 1970s and 1980s to be used as a stereotypical Southern dialect expression in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_(genre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Western novels&lt;/a&gt; and Western-set historical romances. By combining these elements into one sentence of dialogue, Cormac McCarthy gave his character a double dose, as it were, of Southernness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “pure fit” is a straightforward composition of these senses of the words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pure, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 3.b.&lt;/strong&gt; Used emphatically or as an intensifier: nothing but (the thing specified); sheer, utter, complete, total, unmitigated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;fit, &lt;em&gt;n.2&lt;/em&gt; 4.f.&lt;/strong&gt; A violent access or outburst of laughter, tears, rage, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With an appended description of the type of emotion, the phrase appeared in the late 19th and early 20th century in England: one could have “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mindchildobserv03preygoog/page/n332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pure fit of tenderness&lt;/a&gt;” (1895), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/broadwalk00aminuoft/page/262&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pure fit of freakish obstinacy&lt;/a&gt;” (1912), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924028549925/page/n375&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pure fit of nerves&lt;/a&gt;” (1914), “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/broadwalk00aminuoft/page/262&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a pure fit of experimentalism&lt;/a&gt;” (1920) and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without an appended description, the phrase appears in the 1960s in the United States. Here’s the earliest instance I could find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a glorious defensive job […] all 11 were in a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt; to get at Simpson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dan Jenkins (1968). ‘The Day They Tied Up O. J.’. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Sports-Illustrated-1968-12-09/page/n23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sports Illustrated&lt;/em&gt;, 9 December 1968, p. 21&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other early instances of the phrase appear in dialogue by characters from the Southern United States, in historical settings from the mid 19th to early 20th century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ain’t it strange them dogs o’ yourn never tuk no notice atall of a common man sich as that fust preacher we had, an’ then they went an’ pitched sich a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt; over this here high-minded feller?” […] “Then the fust airplane that come—they pitched a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt; over hit.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Louise Howe Bailey (1974). &lt;em&gt;Go Home Wi’ Me&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 79–80. Groves. Setting: North Carolina, early 20th century.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He ain’t gonna like it. Not one bit. He’s gonna have a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt;. Ain’t no stableboy ever set his boots under his table before.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Patricia Hagan (1981). &lt;em&gt;Passion’s Fury&lt;/em&gt;, p. 47. New York: Avon. Setting: Alabama, mid 19th century.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It’s just that I’ve never danced with a gunfighter before. My father, bless him, would have a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt;, if he saw me dancing with you.” She wrinkled her nose. “To be truthful papa has a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt; if he sees me dancing with most anybody.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Linda Benjamin (1982). &lt;em&gt;Ecstasy’s Fury&lt;/em&gt;, p. 336. New York: Kensington. Setting: New Mexico, mid 19th century.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, I heard little Loma threw a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt; down at the store today,” said somebody else. “You want my opinion, Rucker’s been hopin’ to git shet a-Mattie Lou ever since he laid eyes on the milliner.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Olive Ann Burns (1984). &lt;em&gt;Cold Sassy Tree&lt;/em&gt;, p. 88. New York: Dell. Setting: Georgia, early 20th century.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Big tells ’em, way I hear it. Whipped three at the creek crossin’ and tied ’em across saddles to trot home. Ol’ Clifton like to throwed a &lt;strong&gt;pure fit&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lee Raintree (1985). &lt;em&gt;This Promised Earth&lt;/em&gt;, p. 175. New York: Bantam. Setting: Alabama, mid 19th century.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by the time Cormac McCarthy was writing &lt;em&gt;Blood Meridian&lt;/em&gt; (1985), set in Texas and Mexico in the mid 19th century, “a pure fit” was a stereotypical expression for his setting, despite there being no contemporary written evidence that the phrase was used in that place and period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-21T09:56:16.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11604" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-21T20:39:06.410" Score="6" ViewCount="1116" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas De Quincey's 1823 essay &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Knocking_at_the_Gate_in_Macbeth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Knocking at the Gate in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, he describes the effect of the knocking at the gate (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, Scene 3) on him when he was a boy: &amp;quot;it [the knocking] reflected back upon the murderer a peculiar awfulness...&amp;quot;. What does he mean by this? Does he admit feeling sympathy for Macbeth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the paragraph in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point&#xA;in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to&#xA;the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I&#xA;never could account. &lt;strong&gt;The effect was, that it reflected back upon the&#xA;murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity&lt;/strong&gt;; yet, however&#xA;obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this,&#xA;for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7658" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T11:09:45.683" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T11:57:39.860" Title="What effect did the knocking at the gate in &quot;Macbeth&quot; have on Thomas De Quincey?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;thomas-de-quincey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-22T17:15:09.903" Score="3" ViewCount="132" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mispronunciation can be a comedic device.  (Zach Galifianakis has regularly used the device in situational comedy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was trying to discuss the device formally, but couldn't recall a formal term for this device, and could only relate it to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malapropism&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But malapropism involves using a similar sounding but incorrect word, not mispronunciation, per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a formal term for &amp;quot;mispronunciation as a comedic device&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T13:26:21.177" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T13:26:21.177" Title="Is there a formal term for &quot;mispronunciation as a comedic device&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11606" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-22T17:47:54.673" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't remember much but here's what I do remember:&#xA;There were two novels featuring a group of elite Union soldiers, both would have been published around 2010, but not later than 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first novel was set during the civil war and had a steamboat featured heavily. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second was about one of the soldiers return to his hometown, which was being controlled by a group of outlaws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the group dies in the first book, and they use the rally &quot;Remember____&quot; in the second book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of the group, twins maybe, were very good with explosives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The slip cover was brown and the title was in the typical western font.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7661" LastActivityDate="2019-08-22T17:47:54.673" Title="Western novel series set around the civil war" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11313" CreationDate="2019-08-23T01:37:33.003" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leaving aside the matter of the translation, the background of Andromache's speech is as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time of the speech, Menelaus King of Sparta has been the leader of the Greeks war against Try, Andromache's home city. It is his thirst for revenge for the abduction/escape of Helen that has been the driving force of the war. The war ended with the sack of Troy, and the destruction of pretty much the entirety of Andromache's family, including her husband, her Father-in-law, and very many of her children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andromache is not, for example, making a factual statement that Spartans are, objectively, the most hated people on Earth - just that they deserve to be so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T01:37:33.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11608" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11667" CreationDate="2019-08-23T03:17:42.103" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;So recently I felt a slight pang of regret for not reading enough of this really interesting book I got from the library at age 9. The plot goes something like this:&#xA;1: There is this evil crocodile kisser&#xA;2: There are two raccoons living in a DeSoto car&#xA;3: Blueberry Pie!&#xA;4: Also I know this takes place in a rural area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7662" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:22:26.590" Title="What is the book that has an abandoned DeSoto in it along with two raccoons?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11609" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11605" CreationDate="2019-08-23T13:27:10.767" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are literary terms for certain types of mispronunciation, but, as far as I know, no literary term that covers all of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;spoonerism&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is probably the best-known example. For example, &quot;The Lord is a shoving leopard&quot; instead of &quot;The Lord is a loving shepherd.&quot; From a linguistic point of view, a spoonerims is a type of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metathesis_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metathesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;eggcorn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &quot;is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect&quot;. Examples: &quot;ex-patriot&quot; instead of &quot;expatriate&quot;; &quot;on the spurt of the moment&quot; instead of &quot;on the spur of the moment&quot;. Strictly speaking, eggcorn is a linguistic term rather than a literarary term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of course, you can use &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;homophones&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for comic purposes. A famous example of this occurs in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Candles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Candles sketch&lt;/a&gt; by The Two Ronnies. In this sketch, a customer in a hardware shop pronounces &quot;fork handles&quot; as &quot;fork 'andles&quot;, so the shopkeeper misunderstands it as &quot;four candles&quot;. When the customer asks &quot;O's / ose (?)&quot;, the shopkeeper successively interprets this as &quot;hoe(s)&quot;, &quot;(garden) hose&quot; and &quot;(panty)hose&quot;, after which the customer finally explains he wants &quot;letter O's&quot;. The omission of the letter 'h' (combined with a lack of clarification) increases the potential of misinterpretation because it leads to more homophones.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a psychological or psycholinguistic point of view, the most relevant term may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraphasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;paraphasia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;a type of language output error commonly associated with aphasia, and characterized by the production of unintended syllables, words, or phrases during the effort to speak&quot; (Wikipedia). Obviously, this is outside of the realm of literature or comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside of the pathological domain, there are several types of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_error#Psycholinguistic_classification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech errors&lt;/a&gt; that are relevant, e.g. those classified as anticipation (&quot;leading list&quot; instead of &quot;reading list&quot;), blends, deletion, morpheme exchange errors and perseveration (e.g. &quot;black bloxes&quot; instead of &quot;black boxes&quot;). These, too, are outside of the realm of literature or comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-08-23T13:27:10.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11610" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11594" CreationDate="2019-08-23T19:42:19.473" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It does not give a specific date, although it is said sometime after the unification of the United States and British commonwealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event&#xA;  which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth&#xA;  century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire&#xA;  by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and&#xA;  Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only&#xA;  emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 2, Chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the book gives some clues, saying there was an atomic war in the 1950s and shortly after the Revolution followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although the Party, according to its&#xA;  habit, claims the invention for itself, atomic bombs first appeared as&#xA;  early as the nineteen-forties, and were first used on a large scale about&#xA;  ten years later. At that time some hundreds of bombs were dropped on&#xA;  industrial centres, chiefly in European Russia, Western Europe, and&#xA;  North America. The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all&#xA;  countries that a few more atomic bombs would mean the end of organized&#xA;  society, and hence of their own power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Part 2, Chapter 9&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc#Fictional_origins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oceania, the fictional superstate in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, appears to have emerged from a formal political union of the United States and the countries of the British Commonwealth, which later annexed the remainder of the Americas. Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein, fictional characters from the book, led the Party to power in Oceania after a revolution of some kind. After the Party achieved control of Oceania, Ingsoc became the official governing ideology and other political beliefs were increasingly marginalized. Goldstein and Big Brother later became enemies and differed in their interpretation of Ingsoc. Goldstein was eventually branded a criminal and was used as a symbol of treachery and sedition by the party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7662" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T15:11:23.837" LastActivityDate="2019-09-24T15:11:23.837" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11611" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11612" CreationDate="2019-08-24T13:12:49.500" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is Thomas o'Becket in chapter 2, vol.7 of &lt;em&gt;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So without arguing the matter further with &lt;strong&gt;Thomas o’Becket&lt;/strong&gt;, or any one else—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;St. Becket is of course dead at the time when Tristram wrote this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the whole passage for reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;——and I never gave a peep into Rochester church, or took notice of the dock of Chatham, or visited St. Thomas at Canterbury, though they all three laid in my way—— —But mine, indeed, is a particular case——&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So without arguing the matter further with Thomas o’Becket, or any one else—I skip’d into the boat, and in five minutes we got under sail and scudded away like the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7666" LastEditorUserId="7666" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T01:19:45.173" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T01:19:45.173" Title="Who is Thomas o' Becket&quot; in Tristram Shandy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;tristram-shandy&gt;&lt;laurence-sterne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11611" CreationDate="2019-08-24T13:29:35.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I checked the full context, in which Tristram is at Dover, on his way for a trip to France, and momentarily wonders if he should first have checked out some of the sights of England:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now hang it! quoth I, as I look'd towards the French coast—a man should know something of his own country too, before he goes abroad—and I never gave a peep into Rochester church, or took notice of the dock of Chatham, or visited St. Thomas at Canterbury, though they all three laid in my way—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—But mine, indeed, is a particular case—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So without arguing the matter further with Thomas o'Becket, or any one else—I skip'd into the boat, and in five minutes we got under sail, and scudded away like the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What, then, does he mean by &amp;quot;should&amp;quot;? He feels that he is expected to know a little of his own country before travelling to another, but from whence does this expectation come? My reading of the next paragraph is that he is using Thomas o'Becket as a sort of synecdoche to represent all the sights of England that came into his mind, as well as perhaps representing established thinking which would expect him to see those sights first. In reality, of course, the only person he needs to argue with is himself - but it may be convenient for him to &lt;strong&gt;use another figure to personify the expectation that came to his mind&lt;/strong&gt;. Who should he &amp;quot;argue&amp;quot; with about whether or not he should have visited those sites in Kent? Symbolically, why not Thomas o'Becket, who is himself worth visiting as a tourist, and who might be imagined to be &amp;quot;offended&amp;quot; at not being visited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt;, but this interpretation seems to fit with the whimsical humour of the character, much better than the idea of the author breaking the fourth wall by referring to his publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T13:29:35.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11613" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13770" CreationDate="2019-08-24T14:20:26.130" Score="4" ViewCount="2817" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a major turning point is the death of Enkidu as a punishment from the gods after he and Gilgamesh slew both Humbaba and the Heaven-Bull. From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modernised Muss-Arnolt translation&lt;/a&gt;, Tablet VII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The great gods Anu, Enlil, Ea, and Shamash held an assembly, and Anu spoke unto Ea thus: ‘Because these two slew the Heaven-Bull, and slew Humbaba, the guardian of the mountains and the Forest of Cedar, one of the two must die.’ Enlil said unto Anu, ‘Let Enkidu die, for Gilgamesh must die not!’ Shamash, however, spoke unto Enlil thus: ‘Was it not by thy order that these men slew the Heaven-Bull and the guardian Humbaba? Why should the innocent Enkidu die for this?’ But Enlil, burning with anger at Shamash, said unto him: ‘Each day thou traveled with them like unto a companion.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm missing the cause of the political undercurrents between these gods. Why is it that killing Humbaba and the Heaven-Bull (at the behest of the gods?) is considered cause for killing one of the two men? Why only one? Why Enkidu and not Gilgamesh? (Could it be that Humbaba and the Heaven-Bull are only an excuse, the real reason being Enkidu's failure to defeat Gilgamesh?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any more information about this decision, perhaps in a different version of the text, or some context from other passages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T21:09:48.577" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T19:13:51.573" Title="Why did the gods decide that Enkidu must die?" Tags="&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11614" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-24T16:47:37.167" Score="7" ViewCount="593" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is regarding a dialogue of Hermia in Scene 1 of Act 1 of 'The Midsummer Night's Dream' by William Shakespeare where she mentions, &quot;From lovers' food till morrow deep midnight.&quot; Please explain what the playwright refers to by &quot;lovers' food.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess that this refers to some sort of poison that lovers choose to have when they are forced to break their relation or to some meal that lovers have with a great night ahead of them. I wish to have a confirmation on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7667" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-24T17:56:40.610" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T17:36:21.310" Title="The meaning of &quot;Lovers' Food&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;a-midsummer-nights-dream&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11614" CreationDate="2019-08-24T17:03:29.890" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given the context, I propose an alternative meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;LYSANDER:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To-morrow night, when Phoebe doth behold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her silver visage in the watery glass,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal,)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through Athens' gates have we devised to steal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  HERMIA:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in the wood, where often you and I&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There my Lysander and myself shall meet;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And thence, from Athens, turn away our eyes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To seek new friends and stranger companies.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Farewell, sweet playfellow; pray thou for us,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And good luck grant thee thy Demetrius!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Keep word, Lysander. We must starve our sight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From lovers' food, till morrow deep midnight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moa/ABA6614.0002.001?rgn=main;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Summarising in modern English: the lovers Hermia and Lysander plan to elope from Athens tomorrow night, letting the morning dew on the grass conceal their tracks, and travel to pastures new.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Punctuation in Shakespeare plays is inconsistent and not to be relied upon, but I noticed the lack of comma at the end of the penultimate line: &lt;em&gt;&quot;We must &lt;strong&gt;starve our sight / From lovers' food&lt;/strong&gt;, till morrow deep midnight.&quot;&lt;/em&gt; It's not themselves they're starving, but their sight. Perhaps &quot;lovers' food&quot; doesn't refer to a time of day, but instead it's a poetical way of referring to the way lovers' eyes may feast upon each other. &lt;strong&gt;The &quot;food&quot; of lovers' sight is to see each other, and they're starving them of this until tomorrow night.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-08-24T17:03:29.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-25T02:19:31.587" Score="6" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book around 2010 and I need help identifying it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first scene was of a woman who had just given birth (?, she had her newborn) and it was raining. A wizard (who have been called something else) knocked on her door and she let him in. He was there to give a gift to the child. He was already in a bad mood because of the rain and the mud. The mother was trying to get her son something good and she annoyed the wizard who ‘gifted’ the kid with truthfulness before leaving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next scene (?) the boy is older and having difficulty with his inability to lie. There might be some sort of fair at his town. He talks with his mother and somehow it’s decided he’s going to magic school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the magic school (which I think was underground) he is working with another boy, who he is on vaguely antagonistic terms with. They either have to extinguish a flame or make it cold. The kid who can’t lie casts a spell (?) and when he picks up the candle it is cold. The other boy sits on the table and starts screaming because the heat was left behind. He accuses the first boy of doing it on purpose, getting him in trouble (?) from their teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point both boys and the original wizard end up in tunnels on a flying carpet being chased by giant worms. (The worms might be purple, but I’m not sure.) I think the original wizard wasn’t very powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the cover was yellow and it may have been part of a series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7669" LastActivityDate="2019-08-25T02:19:31.587" Title="Fantasy children’s novel about a boy who can’t lie" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11614" CreationDate="2019-08-25T18:18:01.790" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;lovers' food&quot; is definitely not poison. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanley Wells' edition of the play (New Penguin Shakespeare) glosses the phrase as &quot;the sight of each other&quot;. This makes sense in the context of this speech, since Hermia says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Keep word, Lysander: we must starve our sight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  From lovers' food till morrow deep midnight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gloss also makes sense when looking at &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/asyoulikeit/asyoulikeit.3.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, Scene 4&lt;/a&gt;, where Rosalind says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the food metaphor is also present indirectly in an earlier line in Hermia's speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And in the wood, where often you and I &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Upon faint primrose-beds were wont to lie, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  There my Lysander and myself shall meet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's works, &quot;sweet&quot; can be interpreted as &quot;tasting sweet&quot; or as &quot;sounding sweet&quot;. See for example the following lines in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/midsummer.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;, where these two meaning appear to meld due to use of the word &quot;tongue&quot; (both the organ and &quot;speech&quot;): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet melody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that &quot;lovers' food&quot; can be something auditory is also present in one of the best-known opening lines from Shakespeare's plays, namely from &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/twelfth_night.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If music be the food of love&lt;/strong&gt;, play on;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The appetite may sicken, and so die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, when lovers are in each other's presence, they can enjoy both the visual and the auditory &quot;food&quot;, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;the visual and/or auditory enjoyment of each other's presence&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T17:36:21.310" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T17:36:21.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11619" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11645" CreationDate="2019-08-26T08:26:24.103" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &quot;ought to make a good thing out of this&quot; means in the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His utterance of the name ‘Mr Fadge’ sufficiently intimated that he had some cause of personal discontent with the editor of &lt;em&gt;The Study&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘The author,’ remarked Milvain, ‘&lt;strong&gt;ought to make a good thing out of this.&lt;/strong&gt;’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Will, no doubt. Ought to write at once to the papers, calling&#xA;  attention to this sample of critical impartiality. Ha! ha!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1709/1709-h/1709-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Gissing (1891), &lt;em&gt;New Grub Street&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jasper Milvain, the protagonist of this novel, was invited to Yule's house and met the literary critic Alfred Yule. Then Jasper asked him whether he had seen that the literary magazine &lt;em&gt;The Study&lt;/em&gt; of this week contained a very pleasant review about a novel named &lt;em&gt;On the Boards&lt;/em&gt; which was seriously abused some weeks ago at the very same magazine. At this, Alfred Yule expressed undisguised pleasure at &lt;em&gt;The Study&lt;/em&gt;'s mistake, and the corresponding misfortune on Mr. Fadge, the editor of &lt;em&gt;The Study&lt;/em&gt;. And Jasper commented that the author of &lt;em&gt;On the Boards&lt;/em&gt; &quot;ought to make a good thing out of this.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I would like to know what &quot;ought to&quot; and &quot;make a good thing out of&quot; mean.&#xA;Does it mean that the author would surely raise an opposition against the two reviews diametrically opposed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:21:42.473" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T08:10:42.477" Title="What does &quot;ought to make a good thing out of this&quot; mean in &quot;New Grub Street&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-gissing&gt;&lt;new-grub-street&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11620" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11621" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" Score="0" Body="George Gissing (1857–1903), British novelist and critic. His novels include &quot;The Nether World&quot; (1889), &quot;New Grub Street&quot; (1891), and &quot;The Odd Women&quot; (1893)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:24:08.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11622" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11623" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" Score="0" Body=" &quot;New Grub Street&quot; (1891), a novel by George Gissing. Use with the [george-gissing] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:26:10.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" Score="0" Body="Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), Irish novelist and clergyman, author of &quot;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&quot; (1759–1767)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:35:36.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11626" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11627" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&quot;, comic novel by Laurence Sterne (nine volumes, 1759–1767). Use with the [laurence-sterne] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:36:54.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11628" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:38:29.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:38:29.863" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:38:29.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11629" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:38:29.863" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Greek storyteller Aesop (c. 620–564 BCE), credited with the authorship of 'Aesop's Fables'. Use this tag with  [greek-literature] or [latin-literature], depending on whether the question is about a Greek or a Latin version of his work." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:43:40.523" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:43:40.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" Score="0" Body="&quot;Poetics&quot; (c. 335 BCE) by Aristotle, the earliest surviving work of literary and dramatic theory. Use with the [aristotle] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" LastActivityDate="2019-08-26T09:46:49.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11636" CreationDate="2019-08-27T08:29:44.383" Score="6" ViewCount="1047" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I go, I go; look how I go,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Puck, Act III Scene II, &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a well-known line from a Shakespeare play, but did Shakespeare invent this simile? Was it already a known phrase in Elizabethan England - or at least, was there a saying about Tartar bows shooting fast? &lt;em&gt;Did&lt;/em&gt; Tartar bows shoot faster than others? How much were the English even aware of the Tartars at that point in history - had they had much contact with them, or seen them in war?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any historical context behind Shakespeare's use of this phrase?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T05:44:29.757" Title="Context of &quot;swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;a-midsummer-nights-dream&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11632" CreationDate="2019-08-27T10:22:29.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A partial answer - a few commentators on Shakespeare's works point out that by the &lt;em&gt;Tartar's bow&lt;/em&gt; he meant the Cupid's bow as depicted on a number of popular paintings, sculptures. The same commentators claim that a bow of that particular shape, now called a recurve bow, was known (at Shakespeare's times) as &lt;em&gt;Tartar's&lt;/em&gt; (as opposed to an &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; bow that was &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt;, less curved).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594-1596, 1596), I.iv.4-6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Benvolio (to Romeo): We’ll have no Cupid hoodwinked with a scarf,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bearing a Tartar’s painted bow of lath,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Scaring the ladies like a crowkeeper…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare-navigators.com/romeo/Note_Romeo_and_Juliet_1_4_4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See comments and the picture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some historical facts on Tatar's bow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ottoman &quot;Istanbul style&quot; bow and the Tatar bow have a common&#xA;  ancestor somewhere in the 14th century, but we don't know anything&#xA;  about it or where it comes from geographically, but imo both are an&#xA;  ecclectic turkic development that carried over a number of&#xA;  idiosyncracies of construction back from turkic finds from 8th century&#xA;  Mongolia (e.g. the Zargalant bow).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Tatar bow was popular in eastern europe (Russia, Ukraine, Poland,&#xA;  etc.) and ofc the Ottoman Empire, most of the surviving bows are from&#xA;  the 17th century, so there's quite a gap there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There aren't surviving turkish bows from the 14th century, the&#xA;  earliest surviving ones (currently in the Topkapi Museum) are from the&#xA;  late 15th, and they're bows personally made by Sultan Bayezid II.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both turkish and tatar differ from earlier static ear bows in terms of&#xA;  their similar biconvex cross-section of the core, where they're&#xA;  spliced, the extend of the horn strips into the ear and thus where the&#xA;  bow flexes (they're both bows with flexible kasan eyes). That's a&#xA;  feature that somebody came up between the 14th and 15th cent and can&#xA;  also be found in other branches of persian bows from that timeframe,&#xA;  but not in bows from the period of the Mongol Conquest. In any case,&#xA;  that's the most important feature in more &quot;modern&quot; bows, and possibly&#xA;  an invention from the area of modern day Iran or central asia. Persian&#xA;  archery, language and culture casts a very long shadow, but that's&#xA;  another story.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Archery/comments/8v39kd/tatar_bow_history_please/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update #1:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r4XwCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PT542&amp;amp;ots=IocjqUaPP-&amp;amp;dq=%22tartar&amp;#39;s%20bow%22%20etymology&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;pg=PT542#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22tartar&amp;#39;s%20bow%22%20etymology&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Insults: A Pragmatic Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; by Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Editors note that that Tartar's bow is known for its power and that&#xA;  there is probably a reference to Golding's translation of Ovid's&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Metamorphosis&lt;/em&gt; (10.687), where Atalanta runs 'as swift as arrow from a Turkey bow'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="8525" LastEditDate="2020-02-11T05:44:29.757" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T05:44:29.757" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-28T08:10:11.133" Score="15" ViewCount="1312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many works of fantasy involve an evil leader or &quot;dark lord&quot; whose real name is known but usually not permitted to be spoken, either by his own followers (out of respect?) or by others (out of fear?) or both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the Wheel of Time series, the Dark One's true name is Shai'tan, but nobody uses the name, either Darkfriends or good people, for fear of attracting unwanted attention from him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the Harry Potter series, Voldemort is referred to by such names as You-Know-Who, He Who Must Not Be Named, or (by his followers) the Dark Lord.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the Lord of the Rings, Sauron does not permit his name to be used by his followers. (I'm not exactly sure why and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/218155/31394&quot;&gt;have asked a related question about that&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the origin of this trope?&lt;/strong&gt; Many fantasy tropes spring originally from Tolkien, but this one feels older. It feels similar to the Jewish belief that one must not speak the name of God, although different because this is specifically about evil characters. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;I couldn't find any analogous belief about Satan in any major religion&lt;/a&gt;, but my gut feeling says this idea might well come from real-world religion or mythology rather than being a thing purely of fantasy literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T11:43:27.153" Title="What is the origin of the trope of an evil character whose name is not permitted to be spoken?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11632" CreationDate="2019-08-28T12:49:17.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stanley Wells' edition of &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; (The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1967, 1995) has the following gloss for &quot;Tartar&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Oriental bow was of special power. The image may have come to Shakespeare by way of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Golding&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golding's&lt;/a&gt; translation of Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, X.686-7, 'she / Did fly as swift as arrow from a Turkey bow'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R. A. Foakes' edition of &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; (The New Cambridge Shakespeare) has the following gloss for &quot;Tartar's bow&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Noted for its power; the image was probably derived from Golding's Ovid, &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; X, 687, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atalanta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atalanta&lt;/a&gt; runs 'as swift as arrow from a Turkye bowe.' The word 'Tartar' was used vaguely to signify anyone from central Asia, including Turkey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sukanta Chaudhuri's edition of the play (The Arden Shakespeare, third series, 2017), essentially agrees with the above and adds a few more pieces of information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shakespeare was probably echoing Golding 10.687, 'as swift as arrow from a Turkye bowe', where Oved (&lt;em&gt;Met.&lt;/em&gt; 10.588) has '&lt;em&gt;Scythica ... sagitta&lt;/em&gt;', 'Scythian bow'. Ancient Scythia overlapped with later 'Tartary', and Turk and Tartar were popularly associated: see 263, and &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; Tartar n.² 1. The Turks had a venerable tradition of archery, reaching its highest point during the Ottoman Empire, and known to Europeans from the time of the Crusades. 'As swift as an arrow' is proverbial by itself (Dent, A322).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;('Dent' refers to &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index&lt;/em&gt; by R. W. Dent (1981).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it is not the bow that is fast, but arrows shot from that type of bow (which sounds more plausible at any rate). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid's Roman contemporaries knew archers on foot (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarii&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sagittarii&lt;/a&gt;) but armies that relied a lot on mounted archers were able to inflict major defeats on Roman armies, for example at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Carrhae&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Carrhae&lt;/a&gt; in 53 BC, where the Parthians defeated a numerically superior Roman army led by Crassus. This type of defeat led to the introduction of mounted archers in the Roman armies during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Principate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythians#Warfare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scythians&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthian_Empire#Military&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parthians&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_archery&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turks&lt;/a&gt; all used composite bows, whereas Europeans, including the English, used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_bow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;self bows&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. made from a single piece of wood). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also worth knowing that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_archery#Technique&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish archers&lt;/a&gt; developed several unique techniques to aid in combat. One was the practice of holding several arrows in between the fingers of the draw hand, allowing fast repeat shots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could mean that Turkish archers may have been able to fire more arrows per minute than their English counterparts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mounted archers seem to have relied more on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bow_draw#Thumb_draw_and_release&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;thumb draw&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. using the thumb instead of the index and/or middle fingers to draw the string. For a description and explanation of bow types, arrow types and techniques used by eastern mounted archers, see the video &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/6lf9q6OQse0?t=85&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Firing Arrows Like a Mongolian Warrior&lt;/a&gt; on The Modern Rogue (YouTube). (This video also does away with the misconception that a longer bow is necessarily more powerful than a shorter composite bow.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the question what Elizabethans could know about the Turks, it is also worth noting that Elizabethan England did have some sort of diplomatic relationship with the Ottoman Empire. When Elizabeth I ascended the throne, she became the head of a non-Catholic nation that was surrounded by Catholic adversaries (Ireland, France and above all Spain). Using the dubious logic of &quot;the enemy of my enemy is my friend&quot;, Elizabeth sent emissaries to the Shah of Iran, the king of Morocco and the Ottoman Sultan Murad III. In 1599, she even sent a self-playing organ as a present to Sultan Mehmet III of Turkey. One of the craftsmen that went to Turkey with the organ was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dallam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Dallam&lt;/a&gt;, whose diary forms the basis of the book &lt;em&gt;The Sultan's Organ&lt;/em&gt; (translated by John Mole and published in 2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-08-28T12:49:17.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11639" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-28T14:19:44.343" Score="7" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Betjeman’s poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s2phRLbALuIC&amp;amp;pg=PT49&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suicide on Junction Road Station after Abstention from Evening Communion in North London&lt;/a&gt;’ was first published in the collection &lt;em&gt;Continual Dew&lt;/em&gt; (1937). It’s short enough to quote in its entirety:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With the roar of the gas my heart gives a shout—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      To Jehovah Tsidkenu the praise!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bracket and bracket go blazon it out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      In this Evangelical haze!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jehovah Jireh! the arches ring,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      The Mintons glisten, and grand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are the surpliced boys as they sweetly sing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      On the threshold of glory land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jehovah Nisi! from Tufnell Park,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Five minutes to Junction Road,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through grey brick Gothic and London dark,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And my sins, a fearful load.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Six on the upside! six on the down side!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      One gaslight in the Booking Hall&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a thousand sins on this lonely station—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      What shall I do with them all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this poem about? What is the significance of the three Hebrew phrases starting “Jehovah”? What are “Mintons”? Why does the speaker abstain from communion and commit suicide? Why Junction Road? Is the poem sincere or satirical? If satirical, what is its target?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T09:02:23.753" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T16:29:31.537" Title="John Betjeman’s &quot;Suicide on Junction Road Station after Abstention from Evening Communion in North London&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-betjeman&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11641" CreationDate="2019-08-29T00:34:40.740" Score="5" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;It has been years since I read &lt;em&gt;Mrs. Dalloway&lt;/em&gt;, and I don't remember if Septimus Warren Smith's rank was ever indicated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm vaguely left with the impression he was an officer.  Was his rank ever identified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7314" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-08-29T08:21:36.493" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T09:30:21.083" Title="What was Septimus Warren Smith's rank?" Tags="&lt;virginia-woolf&gt;&lt;mrs-dalloway&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11640" CreationDate="2019-08-29T12:41:20.850" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.93420/page/n137&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;description of Septimus’ military career&lt;/a&gt; does not say what rank he reached, only that “he was promoted”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Septimus was one of the first to volunteer. He went to France to save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare’s plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square. There in the trenches the change which Mr. Brewer desired when he advised football was produced instantly; he developed manliness; he was promoted; he drew the attention, indeed the affection of his officer, Evans by name. It was a case of two dogs playing on a hearth-rug; one worrying a paper screw, snarling, snapping, giving a pinch, now and then, at the old dog’s ear; the other lying somnolent, blinking at the fire, raising a paw, turning and growling good-temperedly. They had to be together, share with each other, fight with each other, quarrel with each other. But when Evans (Rezia who had only seen him once called him “a quiet man,” a sturdy red-haired man, undemonstrative in the company of women), when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably. The War had taught him. It was sublime. He had gone through the whole show, friendship, European War, death, had won promotion, was still under thirty and was bound to survive. He was right there. The last shells missed him. He watched them explode with indifference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a volunteer in August 1914, he would have begun as a private in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchener%27s_Army&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kitchener’s Army&lt;/a&gt;. (That the Armistice found him in Italy means that he must have been in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23rd_Division_(United_Kingdom)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;23rd Division&lt;/a&gt; and fought at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Somme&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Messines_(1917)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Messines Ridge&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Passchendaele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Passchendaele&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vittorio_Veneto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vittoria Veneto&lt;/a&gt;.) Promotion would have taken him up through the non-comissioned ranks: corporal, sergeant, warrant officer (after 1915), sergeant major. The 23rd Division suffered about 200% casualties in the course of the war (23,574 killed, wounded and missing on an establishment of about 12,000), so there were plenty of opportunities for promotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regular army officers were killed in large numbers, many volunteers were given commissions. If Septimus had reached the rank of captain, social convention would have allowed him to continue to use the rank in civilian life, but in the novel he is always “Mr.”, so we can be confident that if he was commissioned he was not promoted beyond lieutenant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However there is no hint in the novel of Septimus being commissioned. If he had been commissioned he then would have been transferred to the command of another unit, whereas he seems to have been subordinate to Evans until the latter was killed just before the Armistice. His close working relationship with Evans suggests that Septimus was the senior non-commissioned officer of Evans’ unit, so I think a good guess is that he reached the rank of &lt;strong&gt;company&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;battalion&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;regimental sergeant major&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T09:30:21.083" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T09:30:21.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11639" CreationDate="2019-08-29T21:19:15.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the poem describes the suicide of a religious gay man who kills himself because he cannot stop &quot;sinning”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One reason to abstain from communion, at least in the Catholic church, and probably in the Anglican as well, is because you are an unrepentant sinner (as you might be if you were gay). And &lt;em&gt;grand are the surpliced boys&lt;/em&gt; may be a subtle hint that the speaker is gay. There is more evidence for this in that &lt;em&gt;on the threshold of glory land&lt;/em&gt; appears to have a double meaning: while &lt;em&gt;glory land&lt;/em&gt; is a traditional Christian phrase meaning &lt;em&gt;heaven&lt;/em&gt;, this meaning doesn't seem to fit perfectly in that line, and &lt;em&gt;boys on the threshold of glory land&lt;/em&gt; could also be taken as an allusion to their attaining sexual maturity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time this poem was written, novelists generally did not discuss homosexuality openly; often it was alluded to so subtly that modern readers don't even notice. Poetry may have had a little more latitude, but poets also sometimes like to be subtle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Betjeman was apparently bisexual, and so would have been sympathetic to gay issues.  It’s not at all clear to me whether he intended the speaker in the poem to be himself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two verses are set in a church. There’s a choir, arches and an &lt;em&gt;Evangelical haze&lt;/em&gt;. The phrases &lt;em&gt;with the roar of the gas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;bracket to bracket go blazon it out&lt;/em&gt; describe gas lighting. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Minton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mintons&lt;/a&gt; are &quot;fine-quality porcelain wares produced in Stoke-on-Trent since 1793”; these could be sacred vessels and/or decorations in a church. (EDIT: Another answer shows these are very likely to be floor tiles.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza is set in a nearby train station (now demolished, but when the poem was written, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junction_Road_railway_station&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Junction Road Station&lt;/a&gt; was part of the London Overground, and a short walk from Tufnell Park). &lt;em&gt;Six on the upside! six on the down side! One gaslight in the Booking Hall&lt;/em&gt; presumably refer to the gaslights at the station. The booking hall was where you bought train tickets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;em&gt;Jehovah&lt;/em&gt; phrases can also be loosely seen as associated with somebody committing suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Jehovah Tsidkenu means &lt;em&gt;God is righteous&lt;/em&gt;. The speaker might not believe a righteous God would tolerate his sinning.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-jireh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah Jireh&lt;/a&gt; means &lt;em&gt;God will provide&lt;/em&gt;, but it is also the name of the location where Abraham bound his son Isaac in order to sacrifice him. On that occasion, God provided a ram as a substitute sacrifice. Not this time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-nissi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah Nisi&lt;/a&gt; was the name of the altar built to celebrate the defeat of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/amalek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amelekites;&lt;/a&gt;  in the Bible, the Amelekites are traditionally seen as an evil people who need to be exterminated. The Junction Road train platform, lit by gaslights, might metaphorically be this altar, and the speaker might be viewing himself to an evil Amelekite.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T16:29:31.537" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T16:29:31.537" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11635" CreationDate="2019-08-30T07:57:14.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpeakOfTheDevil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TvTropes's Speak of the Devil&lt;/a&gt; is the closest match - Speak the name of [Evil Person] and he/she/it will appear and/or have some sort of power over you. Note that of your three examples, the first two (Shai'tan, Voldemort) are directly stated to be of fear of retribution, while it's certainly implied in the third (Sauron). I consider that supported by the fact that the missing of the last one is only for his own subjects, which implies he lacks the awareness of those outside of his own realm, or lacks the power to intervene there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TvTropes considers this one &quot;Older than Feudalism&quot;, defined as between 800 BC and 476. It does not give a reference of a story from this period using it, aside from a reference to a chinese general, Cao Cao, who would appear at the gates of your town/city/fortress/whatever if someone spoke of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7692" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T07:57:14.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11619" CreationDate="2019-08-30T08:10:42.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;ought to&quot; is used literally, meaning to say that it is used to indicate something that is probable, which in this case is to &quot;make a good thing out of&quot; the pleasant review published in the magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;make a good thing out of&quot; simply refers to the act of using something to one's own benefit. The something here is the aforementioned positive review. Given that there was a negative opinion article earlier, Jasper is expressing the probability that the author of the novel should use the now positive article as an opportunity and make it work for his benefit, to which Yule then adds his own expectation that the author must write to the papers and call attention to the (positive) impartial critic review now published, which is a way of taking a jab on the magazine which had previously published a negative take on the same thing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T08:10:42.477" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11639" CreationDate="2019-08-30T09:15:01.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't explain the terms any better than &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11642/17&quot;&gt;Peter Shor has already done&lt;/a&gt;, nor expand on the direct meaning of the poem, but I'd like to add some &lt;strong&gt;thematic&lt;/strong&gt; commentary, in the hope that this might be considered enough for an answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Betjeman's poetry includes a lot about religion, especially churches, and also a lot about travel, especially by train. Sometimes, as in this poem and others such as &lt;a href=&quot;http://itallstartedwithaghost.blogspot.com/2008/05/monody.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the two are juxtaposed together. In the poem you're asking about, there's a clear &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt; between the religious ectasy of the church and the gloomy grimness of the station. The narrator feels too weighed down by sins to partake in the former, instead confining himself to the latter, which is depressing enough that he turns to suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(No comment on what those sins might be. Peter Shor's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11642/17&quot;&gt;suggestion&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;homosexuality&lt;/strong&gt; is one possibility; another &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/6051049/Literary-giant-or-a-nasty-piece-of-work.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proposed interpretation&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;adultery&lt;/strong&gt;, as Betjeman himself was apparently a serial adulterer. Certainly he remained formally married to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Chetwode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penelope Chetwode&lt;/a&gt; throughout his decades-long relationship with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Elizabeth_Cavendish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Cavendish&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Betjeman also apparently had a particular fondness for &lt;strong&gt;gas lighting&lt;/strong&gt;, which is mentioned many times in his writings, especially in connection with railway stations and churches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://itallstartedwithaghost.blogspot.com/2008/05/monody.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station&quot;&lt;/a&gt; he refers to &lt;em&gt;&quot;us of the steam and the gas-light, the lost generation&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, which ties in more generally with his love of old-fashioned things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetrycat.com/john-betjeman/pershore-station-or-a-liverish-journey-first-class&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Pershore Station, or A Liverish Journey First Class&quot;&lt;/a&gt; he contrasts &lt;em&gt;&quot;Gas light on the platform, in my carriage electric light, / Gas light on frosty evergreens, electric on Empire wood&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and finishes the poem with a clear indication of which he prefers: &lt;em&gt;&quot;The carriage is new and smart. / I am cushioned and soft and heated with a deadweight in my heart.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nunoncastors.co.uk/wordpress/2009/04/30/john-betjeman-the-cockney-amorist/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Cockney Amorist&quot;&lt;/a&gt; he speaks of &lt;em&gt;&quot;The vast suburban churches / Together we have found: / The ones which smelt of gaslight / The ones in incense drown’d&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, again contrasted positively with the &lt;em&gt;&quot;soft electric lamplight&lt;/em&gt;&quot; mentioned later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In real life he &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/26194739?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;had an interest in minor nonconformist branches of Christianity&lt;/a&gt;, and:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt; he wrote of his interest in the Muggletonians, a seventeenth-century sect that lingered on into the nineteenth. Visiting their old meeting house in London, recently converted into a carpet business, he came away with a prized acquisition: a gas bracket which had illuminated the &quot;strange deliberations&quot; of this moribund affiliation (&quot;City and Suburban&quot; [1957] 684).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Interestingly, in 1937 (the year of publication of this poem) Betjeman, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Betjeman#After_university&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;working as a churchwarden&lt;/a&gt;, arranged the conversion of oil lamps to electricity in his church. Not in North London, though, but in a country church.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the poem you're asking about, gas lighting is mentioned in connection with both the church and the station. Indeed, this introduces potential &lt;strong&gt;ambiguity&lt;/strong&gt; in lines 1, 3, and 5. Although the first two verses seem primarily set in the church, the &quot;roar of the gas&quot; upon &quot;bracket and bracket&quot; could easily be in the station too, and &quot;the arches ring&quot; sounds a lot like railway arches. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1_in_London#Hornsey_Lane_Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archway Bridge&lt;/a&gt; is a well-known suicide spot just up the road from Junction Road station.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How about those Jehovahs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-jireh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah-jireh&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;the Lord will provide&quot;, but it has also been translated as &quot;the Lord has seen&quot; or &quot;the Lord sees&quot;. Again I think there's some ambiguity here: it might refer to the religious ceremony which God sees and approves, or it might refer to the sins in the narrator's mind, which God also sees. &lt;em&gt;&quot;Jehovah Jireh! the arches ring&lt;/em&gt;&quot; could mean church arches ringing with praise of God, or railway arches ringing with the sound of an approaching train.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-nissi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah-nissi&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;the Lord my refuge&quot;. Since now the poem is turning towards the gloomier second half, the &quot;dark&quot; and &quot;Gothic&quot; suburbs, maybe this suggests the narrator is thinking to seek God and find refuge in death.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, is it too much of a stretch to see religious symbolism in the description of the station? &lt;em&gt;&quot;Six on the upside! six on the down side! / One gaslight in the Booking Hall&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - that makes thirteen, the number at the Last Supper. Identifying gaslights with Jesus and his disciples - a step too far? (For a while I wondered if Betjeman might be drawing a parallel between the physical structure of the station and the church, with six on each side equating to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stations_of_the_Cross&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stations of the Cross&lt;/a&gt;, but apparently there are 14 of those not 12.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T09:15:01.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-08-30T10:06:53.563" Score="4" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout &lt;em&gt;The Double&lt;/em&gt; by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, there had been hints that maybe Mr. Golyadkin Jr., the double, was a product of Mr. Golyadkin Sr.'s imagination — and that it was either a way to signify him struggling to reconcile two facets of himself, or that he was simply suffering from some sort of mental disorder. Right at the end, it's made clear that it's most likely the latter, given that the last chapter pretty much describes Mr. Golyadkin having a psychotic/mental breakdown. Furthermore, a few chapters before that Mr. Golyadkin pulls a vial of medicine out of his pocket (even though he seems confused by it, and maybe thinks it's poison...?), which means he'd been presumably diagnosed with something beforehand too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right at the end of &lt;em&gt;The Double&lt;/em&gt;, Mr. Golyadkin is taken by his friend, Dr. Krestyan Ivanovitch Rutenspitz, in a carriage, presumably to an asylum. As I mentioned before, the last chapter describes what seems like a psychotic or mental breakdown. However, the very last words spoken by Krestyan Ivanovitch seem to confirm something for Mr. Golyadkin (my highlight):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;“You get free quarters, wood, with light, and service, the which you deserve not,”&lt;/strong&gt; Krestyan Ivanovitch’s answer rang out, stern and terrible as a judge’s sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our hero shrieked and clutched his head in his hands. Alas! For a long while he had been haunted by a presentiment of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1846). &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/dostoyevsky/d72d/chapter13.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Double&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Constance Garnett (1945). &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any special significance to this sentence?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it make Mr. Golyadkin aware of his mental condition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it just confirm his paranoia that people are out to get him, given that he sees the doctor as &amp;quot;a terrible Krestyan Ivanovitch&amp;quot; once inside the carriage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; I read &lt;em&gt;The Double&lt;/em&gt; in another language, so I quoted it in Garnett's English translation. If there's a better/more accurate translation, please edit the question to replace this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T17:05:23.300" Title="Is there any special significance in Dr. Rutenspitz's last words to Mr. Golyadkin?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-double&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11648" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-30T10:51:09.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T10:51:09.523" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T10:51:09.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11649" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-30T10:51:09.523" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Double&quot; (1846), a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Use with the [fyodor-dostoyevsky] and [russian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:26:51.233" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T05:26:51.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11635" CreationDate="2019-08-30T13:12:06.860" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Obie pointed out in a comment, the expression &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_of_the_devil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;speak of the devil and he shall appear&lt;/a&gt; is a remnant of a naming taboo that was taken very seriously in days long gone. Religions have known many more naming taboos. The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Names of God in Judaism&lt;/a&gt; points out that most English editions of the Bible use the phrase &quot;the Lord&quot;, &quot;owing to the Jewish tradition increasingly viewing the divine name as too sacred to be uttered.&quot; (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1443443/jewish/Why-Dont-Jews-Say-Gds-Name.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why Don’t Jews Say G‑d’s Name?&lt;/a&gt;.) In imperial China, there &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_taboo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;was a taboo on using the emperor's name&lt;/a&gt;. Somewhat similar is the prohibition against creating images of a god (or of living beings in general), notably in Islam. See for example the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.davidmus.dk/en/collections/islamic/cultural-history-themes/image-prohibition&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Religious Prohibition Against Images&lt;/a&gt;, which quotes the Sahih Muslim hadith:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He who creates pictures in this world will be ordered to breathe life into them on the Day of Judgment, but he will be unable to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding the origin of such prohibitions, requires a theory about the origin of religion generally, and I don't believe there is a consensus about this topic in anthropology. One theory that is capable of explaining the above is the one proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Girard&lt;/a&gt; (1923 – 2015), especially in his works &lt;em&gt;La Violence et le sacré&lt;/em&gt; (1972; English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/violence-and-sacred&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Violence and the Sacred&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde&lt;/em&gt; (1978; English: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=2670&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). I can only give an extremely condensed summary of his theory here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his earliest works, René Girard had explained that the human capacity to imitate (&quot;mimesis&quot;) does not only help us learn things (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-8/aristotle-on-mimesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle's view on mimesis&lt;/a&gt;) but that it can also lead to conflict when one individual imitates another's desire for something. His next step was to ask what this insuppressible tendency to imitate would have meant for early human culture. The increase in brain size during the evolution from primates to hominids did not only imply a greater capacity to learn but also a potential increase in mimetic conflicts. Looking at a wide range of myths and religions, Girard used a process that may be described as abductive inference to arrive at the following hypothesis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mimetic conflicts could escalate until they involved the entire group. This conflict of all against all could only end if one individual died as the result of this &lt;strong&gt;collective violence&lt;/strong&gt;. Since the death of this individual brought back peace, this individual became associated with both the power to bring this peace and with the power to bring the preceding collective violence. This individual possessed nothing less than a &lt;strong&gt;godlike power&lt;/strong&gt;. This process must have repeated itself many times until early hominids developed way of dealing with this, as described below.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ancient religious practices originate from an effort to deal with the collective violence. For example, instead of waiting for the next collective conflict, the community choses an individual and collectively kills it. The victim is strictly speaking innocent, but the &lt;strong&gt;collective murder&lt;/strong&gt; turns him into the godlike individual that can cause violence and bring back peace. It is essential that the entire community believes in the victim's guilt, otherwise his death cannot bring peace because it would trigger revenge killings and more violence. Myths describing the death of individuals who brought certain things or benefits into the world leave no doubt about the victim's guilt.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the sacrificed individual has dangerous powers, it makes sense to delegate this sacrifice to one or more individuals, who thus become &lt;strong&gt;&quot;priests&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the collective violence mentioned above is associated with all sorts of transgessions, it makes sense to delay the sacrifice of the chosen victim in order to allow or force him to violate all sorts of social rules (rules that would lead to collective violence if everyone violated them). This individual violates what some cultures call &lt;strong&gt;&quot;taboo&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; and thereby establishes his guilt and justifies his sacrifice at the hands of the community or the priests.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The chosen individual is associated with the power to bring violence, and hence is very dangerous. If he manages to exploit the fear he causes, he may be able to delay the sacrifice, stay alive and become a &lt;strong&gt;&quot;god-king&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. This would be the origin of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_king&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sacred kingship&lt;/a&gt;. Based on Girard's theory, it is no coincidence that kings were often considered as gods or their intermediaries (e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaoh&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Egyptian pharaohs&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The meaning of the godlike victim was always &lt;strong&gt;ambiguous&lt;/strong&gt;, i.e. having power over both peace and violence. This would explain why some languages have words that can mean both &quot;sacred&quot; and &quot;cursed&quot;, e.g. the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sacer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin word &lt;em&gt;sacer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (The same ambiguity is still present in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sacr%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French adjective &lt;em&gt;sacré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.) However, this ambiguity is difficult to tolerate in the long run, so cultures must either find excuses why &quot;good gods&quot; sometimes do bad things or make a distinction between &quot;good gods&quot; and &quot;devils&quot; (in Christian culture, Satan is a fallen angel). &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early hominids seem not to have distinguished clearly (or not always) between &lt;strong&gt;a thing and its name&lt;/strong&gt;. This would also apply to the godlike individual or victim mentioned above and hence also to kings. This would have given rise to &lt;strong&gt;naming taboos&lt;/strong&gt;, which can apply both to &quot;good gods&quot; and &quot;devils&quot;. It would expain why &quot;the divine name [was] too sacred to be uttered&quot; (to quote the Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Names of God in Judaism&lt;/a&gt; again).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above theory does not explain the origin of all religions. It is a theory about describes the emergence of religious practices as psycho-social mechanisms to keep internal violence in check, not about religions that have a historical &quot;founding father&quot; (e.g. Christianity, Islam and Buddhism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note about the history of this answer&lt;/strong&gt;: Within less than an hour of its submission, the original version of this answer was shortened to 36 percent of its original length on the grounds that it contained &quot;unnecessary proselytising&quot;. The discussion in the chat led to questions and comments such as &quot;Did I misunderstand something, or is the non-existence of any actual deity an unstated assumption in that entire theory?&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/51535413#51535413&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;) and &quot;Preaching (or worse, treating as a natural assumption) the non-existence of any deity is equally much proselytising as preaching a deity-based religion&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/51535462#51535462&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;). The speed of the edit (within an hour), its size (74 percent) and its &quot;justification&quot; have led me to believe that the deletion was an attempt at &lt;strong&gt;censorship for faith-based reasons&lt;/strong&gt;, with the argument about the answer's length serving only as a fig leaf. To the best of my knowledge, Stack Exchange does not approve of censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory described above does not make assumptions about the existence (or non-existence) of deities; it is perfectly agnostic in this regard. (Even a theory that assumed the existence of a deity would still need to explain how &lt;em&gt;belief&lt;/em&gt; in a deity (either the same one or a different one) came into the world.) The length of the answer is due to an effort to explain why an anthropological theory would claim that early humans would develop naming taboos, instead of simply stating that there is such a theory and be done with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-09-07T11:43:27.153" LastActivityDate="2019-09-07T11:43:27.153" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11654" CreationDate="2019-08-30T18:59:43.643" Score="3" ViewCount="2408" Body="&lt;p&gt;T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/song-jellicles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Song of the Jellicles&lt;/a&gt;’ was first published in &lt;em&gt;Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats&lt;/em&gt; (1939) and was popularized by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical &lt;em&gt;Cats&lt;/em&gt;. It begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jellicle Cats come out to-night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jellicle Cats come one come all:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Jellicle Moon is shining bright—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T. S. Eliot (1939). ‘The Song of the Jellicles’. &lt;em&gt;Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats&lt;/em&gt;. London: Faber and Faber.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another group of curiously named animals in the book are the “Pollicle Dogs”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But a terrible din is what Pollicles like,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For your Pollicle Dog is a dour Yorkshire tyke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T. S. Eliot (1939). ‘The Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles’. &lt;em&gt;Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats&lt;/em&gt;. London: Faber and Faber.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are “Jellicle Cats” and “Pollicle Dogs”? Where do these names come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T08:56:39.817" Title="What are T. S. Eliot’s “Jellicle Cats” and “Pollicle Dogs”?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;&lt;old-possums-book-of-practical-cats&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11652" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11653" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" Score="0" Body="&quot;Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats&quot; (1939), a collection of children's poems by T. S. Eliot. Use with the [t-s-eliot] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T19:00:21.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11651" CreationDate="2019-08-30T19:06:02.930" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1382102/Now-Lloyd-Webber-puts-Eliots-dogs-to-music.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catherine Milner, Arts Correspondent of the Telegraph, wrote in 200&lt;/a&gt;2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Dr Faber, a retired physicist who is now 74 and lives in Cambridge, Eliot was &quot;a very generous godfather and the subject of great envy by my siblings&quot;.&#xA;  &quot;He was quite a chameleon in many ways; he would be grave or funny as he so desired and could write anything - adopt any mood.&quot; Pollicle Dogs was a corruption of &quot;poor little dogs&quot;, just as Jellicle Cats are &quot;dear little cats&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-08-30T19:06:02.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11651" CreationDate="2019-08-31T08:56:39.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some extra material building on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11654/3003&quot;&gt;Spagirl’s answer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot’s godson &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Faber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Faber&lt;/a&gt; was the son of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Faber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoffrey Faber&lt;/a&gt;, the co-founder of the publishers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faber_and_Faber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Faber and Faber&lt;/a&gt; for whom Eliot worked as an editor. Tom’s widow Elizabeth put up &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/11945/lot/626/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eliot’s letters to her husband for auction&lt;/a&gt; in 2005. This collection of typed letters includes the first known appearance of “Jellicle” and “Pollicle”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/XeoV6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Letter on Faber &amp;amp; Faber headed paper, with hand-drawn picture of dancing cat carrying top hat and umbrella. Transcript follows.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Easter 1931.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Tom,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I Believe that your are to have a Birthday soon, and I think that you will then be Four Years Old (I am not Clever at Arithmetic) but that is a Great Age, so I thought we might send out this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;INVITATION TO ALL POLLICLE DOGS &amp;amp; JELLICLE CATS TO COME TO THE BIRTHDAY OF THOMAS FABER.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Come from your Kennels &amp;amp; Houses &amp;amp; Flats;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Pollicle Dogs &amp;amp; Cats, draw near;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Jellicle Cats &amp;amp; Dogs, Appear;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Come with your Ears &amp;amp; your Whiskers &amp;amp; Tails&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Over the Mountains &amp;amp; Valleys of Wales.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    This is your ONLY CHANCE THIS YEAR,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Your ONLY CHANCE to—what do you spose?—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Brush Up your Coats and Turn out your Toes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And come with Hop &amp;amp; a Skip &amp;amp; a Dance—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Because, for this year, it’s your ONLY CHANCE&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To come with your Whiskers &amp;amp; Tails &amp;amp; Hair on&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To&lt;br&gt;&#xA;        Ty Glyn Aeron&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                            Ciliau Aeron—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Because your are INVITED to Come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    With a a Flute &amp;amp; a Fife &amp;amp; a Fiddle &amp;amp; Drum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;            With a Fiddle, a Fife, &amp;amp; a Drum &amp;amp; a Taber*&lt;br&gt;&#xA;            To the Birthday Party of&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                    THOMAS ERLE FABER!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;* (A Musicle Instrument that makes a Joyful Noise)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh But P.S. we mustn’t send out this Invitation after All, Because, if ALL the Pollicle Dogs &amp;amp; Jellicle Cats came (and of course they all &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; come) then all the roads would be blocked up, and what’s more, they would track Muddy Feet into the House, and your Mother wouldn’t Like that at All, and what’s More Still, you would have to give them All a Piece of your Birthday Cake, and there would be so Many that there wouldn’t be any Cake left for &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;, and that would be Dreadful, so we won’t send out this Invitation,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                  so no more for the present from your&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                                  Silly Uncle Tom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tŷ Glyn Aeron, now the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tyglyn.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TyGlyn Hotel&lt;/a&gt;, was the Fabers’ holiday home in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciliau_Aeron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ciliau Aeron&lt;/a&gt; in Ceredigion. The ungrammatical “your are” appears twice; if deliberate then perhaps it represents another idiosyncracy of young Tom’s speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Other theories&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the other versions of the origin story are remotely as plausible, relying as they do on unsupported hearsay rather than documentary evidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eliot heard this word from &lt;strong&gt;his young niece&lt;/strong&gt;, who sounded as if she were saying “Jellicle cat” whenever she called for her “dear little cat” and “Pollicle dog” whenever she called for her “poor little puppy”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;L. Goodman (1991). Letter in &lt;em&gt;Playbill: The National Theatre Magazine&lt;/em&gt; 9:7 (30 April 1991).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Goodman’s letter is rather poorly phrased: as written it says that Eliot’s niece mis-pronounced “puppy” so badly that it sounded like “dog”, which I doubt was the intended meaning.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Andrew Lloyd Webber, when T. S. Eliot was a little boy, &lt;strong&gt;his grandma&lt;/strong&gt; would talk about “dear little cats” and “poor little dogs”—but to his young ears it sounded as if she was saying “jellicle cats” and &quot;pollicle dogs.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Marty Bell (1993). &lt;em&gt;Broadway Stories: A Backstage Journey Through Musical Theatre&lt;/em&gt;. Limelight Editions&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of other theories account for only one of the names. Felix Clowder suggested that “Jellicle” is short for “evangelical”, though I am not sure that he was being entirely serious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jellicle Cats, it is clear, come out at night to jump about and shout. Does this fact suggest anything? To the casual first glance, perhaps not. But consider: The means adjective means nothing, it is a set of apparently meaningless syllables suggestive only of Edward Lear—&lt;em&gt;until&lt;/em&gt; one realizes, consciously or from his own half-conscious memories of small-town tent-revivals, that the author is playing with another and longer word, frequently shortened, at certain social or intellectual levels: &lt;em&gt;E’van&lt;/em&gt;-gelical.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Jellicle&lt;/em&gt; may thus be either a deliberately sly shortening of &lt;em&gt;Evangelical&lt;/em&gt; or&#xA;  an accurate rendition of middle-class speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Felix Clowder (1960). ‘The Bestiary of T. S. Eliot’. &lt;em&gt;Prairie Schooner&lt;/em&gt; 34:1, p. 31.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue suggested that “Pollicle” originated as a nickname Eliot used to address his friend “Polly” (Doris) Tandy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TSE addressed letters to Polly Tandy as “Dear Pollicle ma’am” or simply “Dear Pollicle”. At Christmas 1937, he suggested to her a labrador puppy as a possible Christmas present for the children. The epithet came to mean “dog”, as when TSE wrote to Alison Tandy, 20 Dec 1940 about the household where he was lodging for Christmas: “There are also two dogs … There is also a small pollicle which is Australian, and another pollicle is expected by post from Devon.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, eds. (2015). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=m4IOCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA43&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume II: Practical Cats and Further Verses&lt;/em&gt;, p. 43&lt;/a&gt;. Faber and Faber.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the dates, the causation surely went the other way, from “Pollicle Dogs” to the nickname. &lt;em&gt;Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 8&lt;/em&gt; prints letters addressed to “Pollicle Ma’am” dated &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kYd1DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT766&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1 December 1937&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=kYd1DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT790&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;30 December 1937&lt;/a&gt;. I cannot find any letter addressed to “Pollicle”, though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/an-introduction-to-old-possums-book-of-practical-cats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library&lt;/a&gt; has one addressed to “Polligal”, &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dEvrH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;20 November 1936&lt;/a&gt;. This is some years after the appearance of “Pollicle Dogs” in the 1931 letter to Tom Faber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T08:56:39.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11639" CreationDate="2019-08-31T09:14:14.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Betjeman’s target seems to be the inadequacy of the Evangelical approach to absolution of sins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The church service is described as “Evangelical” in line 4; the named songs of praise are by prominent Evangelical hymnodists (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Murray_M%27Cheyne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert M’Cheyne&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Cowper&lt;/a&gt;) rather than conventional selections from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymns_Ancient_and_Modern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hymns Ancient and Modern&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;; and “threshold of glory land” is a characteristically Evangelical form of words. The “surpliced boys” in the choir and the “haze” of incense would probably not be found in a nonconformist chapel, so the poem seems to be commenting in some way on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_Anglicanism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evangelical movement&lt;/a&gt; within the Church of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of the poem tells us that the speaker abstained from communion. Why was that? Well, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/1_Corinthians#11:27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1 Corinthians 11:27&lt;/a&gt; says, “whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, &lt;em&gt;unworthily&lt;/em&gt;, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.” Clearly the speaker feels unworthy. But Anglicanism has a supposed remedy for unworthiness: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/order-evening-prayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Order for Evening Prayer&lt;/a&gt; includes “a general Confession to be said of the whole Congregation” followed by the “Absolution or Remission of sins to be pronounced by the Priest”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there should be no reason for the speaker to abstain from communion. And yet the heart’s shout in line 1, the singing of hymns, and the &lt;em&gt;corporate&lt;/em&gt; confession and absolution are not enough to relieve the speaker of the guilt of their sins. After the service, at the little-used Junction Road station, the emptiness of the station mirrors the speaker’s conviction that their “fearful load” of sin has cut them off forever from the communion of believers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is missing? How does the Evangelical church fail the speaker? The poem does not say, but knowing Betjeman’s sympathy for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglo-Catholicism&lt;/a&gt;, maybe the point is that no amount of lusty singing of praises to Jehovah can make up for Evangelicalism’s lack of &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; confession and absolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Line notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The roar of the gas” is the noise made by the burning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coal gas&lt;/a&gt; for lighting the church.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Tsidkenu” means “righteousness”. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Jeremiah#23:6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeremiah 23:6&lt;/a&gt; “Jehovah Tsidkenu” is the name of a hypothetical king of Israel. There is a hymn with this title by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Murray_M%27Cheyne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Murray M’Cheyne&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When free grace awoke me, by light from on high,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then legal fears shook me, I trembled to die;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No refuge, no safety in self could I see,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Jehovah Tsidkenu&lt;/strong&gt; my Saviour must be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Murray M’Cheyne (1834). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JIY6AAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA582&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah Tsidkenu&lt;/a&gt;’. In Andrew A. Bonar, ed. (1845). &lt;em&gt;Memoir and Remains of the Rev. R. M. M’Cheyne, Minister of St Peter’s Church, Dundee&lt;/em&gt;. Dundee: William Middleton.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;M’Cheyne was a minister in the Church of Scotland, whose ideas became influential in Evangelicalism through Bonar’s biography of him.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A bracket is a “metal pipe, usually of ornamental shape, projecting from the wall […], at once to support and supply the gas lamps” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Blazon” means “proclaim, make public” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), here the praise from line 2; but it also puns on the “blaze” of the gaslights.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelical_Anglicanism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Evangelical movement&lt;/a&gt; within the Church of England favoured ‘low church’ ideas and practices, in particular experiential religion and universal priesthood; and rejected ritual, the authority of the ordained priesthood, and the sacrament of personal confession and absolution. In the 1930s when Betjeman was writing, the movement had been eclipsed by ‘high church’ groups including the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Catholicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglo-Catholics&lt;/a&gt;, to which Betjeman was sympathetic, as suggested by his poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rNe_9gCJS2QC&amp;amp;pg=PA197&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglo-Catholic Congresses&lt;/a&gt;’ (1966).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Haze” is due to smoke from the burning of incense.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Jireh” means “see”. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#22:14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 22:14&lt;/a&gt; “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-jireh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah Jireh&lt;/a&gt;” (god will see to it) is the name given by Abraham to the place of sacrifice. There is a hymn with this title by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Cowper&lt;/a&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZslVAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Olney Hymns&lt;/em&gt;, book I, p. 6&lt;/a&gt;). Cowper was an Evangelical poet.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mintons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mintons&lt;/a&gt; was a manufacturer of ceramic tiles for the floors of public buildings, especially churches.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;surplice&lt;/a&gt; is a long white tunic worn by Anglican ministers and members of the choir.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Threshold of glory” is a characteristically Evangelical phrase meaning “the gates of heaven” and thus figuratively “close to salvation”. It often appears in the context of the possibility of damnation even as one is about to enter heaven. An early appearance is in a discussion of the sin of despair in the explanatory notes to the 1775 edition of John Bunyan’s &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim’s Progress&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of all the different states and conditions, to which a sinner may be reduced in time, there is none so exceedingly tremendous as that of despair. […] To have tasted of the good word of God—bid fair for the kingdom, and perish with the hand on the very &lt;strong&gt;threshold of glory&lt;/strong&gt;, is beyond all conception dreadful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1775). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EOMGAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA42&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pilgrim’s Progress&lt;/em&gt;, note pp. 42–43&lt;/a&gt;. London: P. Oriel.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This allusion anticipates the speaker’s despair in the last verse.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Glory land” is a phrase characteristic of gospel music, for example in ‘Will you meet me at the fountain’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_D._Sankey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ira D. Sankey&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Will you meet me at the fountain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      When I reach the &lt;strong&gt;glory land&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will you meet me at the fountain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Shall I clasp your friendly hand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Nissi” means “banner”. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Exodus#17:15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exodus 17:15&lt;/a&gt; “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehovah-nissi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jehovah Nissi&lt;/a&gt;” is the name given by Moses to the altar celebrating the massacre of the Amalekites. There are hymns with this title by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Cowper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Cowper&lt;/a&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZslVAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Olney Hymns&lt;/em&gt;, book I, p. 18&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wordsworth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Wordsworth&lt;/a&gt; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/churchhht00soci/page/474&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Church Hymns With Tunes&lt;/em&gt;, p. 474&lt;/a&gt;). For thematic reasons, I think Betjeman had in mind Cowper’s hymn and not Wordsworth’s.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tufnell_Park&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tufnell Park&lt;/a&gt; is an area of north London, now part of the boroughs of Islington and Camden, consisting largely of late 19th century terraces.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junction_Road_railway_station&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Junction Road&lt;/a&gt; was a station on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottenham_and_Hampstead_Junction_Railway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tottenham and Hampstead Junction Railway&lt;/a&gt; (now the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_Oak_to_Barking_line&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gospel Oak to Barking line&lt;/a&gt;) in Tufnell Park. It closed in 1943 and was demolished in the 1950s.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Grey brick is a construction material characteristic of London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As London expanded again after 1810, so brickfields sprang up all over the capital and the south-east. The local clays in these areas often produced a characteristically yellow or yellow-grey brick known as a ‘London stock’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Steven Parissien (1992). &lt;em&gt;Regency Style&lt;/em&gt;, p. 40. Phaidon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_stock_brick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;London stock bricks&lt;/a&gt; started out brownish or yellowish grey but turned dark grey due to the city’s atmospheric pollution.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_Revival_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic revival&lt;/a&gt; was a 19th century architectural movement that attempted to emulate the design and spirit of the great medieval cathedrals. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gothic_Revival_architecture_in_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Many London churches&lt;/a&gt; are built in the style. An example of “grey brick Gothic” in Tufnell Park is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stmarybrookfield.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;St Mary Brookfield&lt;/a&gt;, designed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Butterfield&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Butterfield&lt;/a&gt; and built 1869–1875. It uses a mixture of red and grey brick:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:St_Mary_Brookfield_2005.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/keBe2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;St Mary Brookfield, Dartmouth Park, Camden, London. Photo by Justinc. Licensed under CC-BY-SA.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s no hint in the poem that Betjeman had a particular church in mind, but St Mary Brookfield happens to be about five minutes’ walk from the former location of Junction Road station. The church appears in Betjeman’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/americansguideto00betj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An American’s Guide to English Parish Churches&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1959) where the brief description is “By W. Butterfield, 1876. A noble nave in polychrome brick leading to an anti-climax of a chancel by G. E. Street, 1881.” (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Edmund_Street&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G[eorge] E[dmund] Street&lt;/a&gt;” seems to be a mistake as most other sources give “W. C. Street”.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;11&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“London dark” may refer to the darkening effect of soot on buildings in London, or to the smoggy darkness of the evening on which the poem is set.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;13&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Six on the upside” is the number of gaslights on the “up” platform, that is, the platform for trains toward the main terminus. At Junction Road this was on the south side of the station, for trains to Gospel Oak or St Pancras. The “down side” ran the other way, to Tottenham. But to the speaker in the poem, the gaslights on the platforms recall the gaslights down the sides of the nave in the church, and the “upside” and “down side” suggest, perhaps, the paths to heaven and hell respectively.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Junction Road became a “lonely station” after the opening in 1907 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tufnell_Park_tube_station&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tufnell Park tube station&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charing_Cross,_Euston_and_Hampstead_Railway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway&lt;/a&gt; (now the Northern line) just a couple of minutes’ walk away. Passenger numbers at Junction Road collapsed and the station was closed in 1943.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T09:29:57.593" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T09:29:57.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11658" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-08-31T09:14:55.870" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Questions tagged &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; are asking for general, open-ended, interpretation of a text. Answers may cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the meaning of the text as a whole;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the text’s atmosphere and style;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;glosses of difficult passages;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;figurative language and rhetorical devices;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;formal structures like metre, lines, and stanzas;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;references, allusions and other forms of intertextuality;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;historical, social, or intellectual context;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;existing scholarly critiques of the text;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;application of a theory to the text;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anything else about the text that can be backed up by evidence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interpretations are not required or expected to be comprehensive: the hope is that multiple answers will approach the text from different perspectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tag is best used on short texts only: ideally, texts that are short enough to quote in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T17:25:27.107" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T17:25:27.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11659" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-08-31T09:14:55.870" Score="0" Body="Questions asking for general, open-ended, interpretation of a text. Use this tag if you want answers that address all and any aspects of the text: its meaning, atmosphere, style, images, structure, references, context, and so on. Best used on short texts only." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-08-31T17:25:27.107" LastActivityDate="2019-08-31T17:25:27.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-01T19:51:29.243" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &quot;Cliffs&quot; (&quot;Irdumijiet&quot;) is part of a &lt;a href=&quot;http://john-peter-portelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Cirasa-Text-Copy.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collection available online&lt;/a&gt; by the Maltese-Canadian writer, poet, and academic professor &lt;a href=&quot;http://john-peter-portelli.com/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John P. Portelli&lt;/a&gt;. Written in 1973, and found on pages 40-41 (page 21 of the PDF) in the book linked above, it goes as follows (English translation from the original Maltese):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Take off oh friend the century of greed!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Distance yourself from the ennui and the noise of the 20th century!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You seem accustomed to the petty noise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and the unbridled haste of the cities!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You were struck by the mythological twilight of Dingli Cliffs!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Everyday, stuck right there to the mythology, there is me, oh friend,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  there I present audaciously my face&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to the scimitar moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to the mischievous steeple&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to the bell half sleeping&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  which little by little&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  lulls me asleep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in my weird, reserved bed!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All this oh friend struck you and inspired you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I feel my whole life drown in the mythological silence, friend,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in this mysterious emptiness which ends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  only God knows where.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yes, oh friend, I am drowning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a particular mythological significance to Dingli Cliffs?&lt;/strong&gt; I know zero about Maltese mythology, but the word &quot;mythological&quot; (&quot;mitologiku&quot;) appears three times in this poem, and it seems like some of the phrases in the middle (scimitar moon, mischievous steeple, bell half sleeping, weird reserved bed) &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be references to some local story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-09-01T19:51:29.243" Title="Is there specific mythological significance to the Dingli Cliffs?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;myths&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-02T07:25:32.560" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simone Kern's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://magazine.metaphorosis.com/story/2019/the-propagator-simone-kern/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Propagator&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is set in a future where abortion is illegal, and anyone who tries it is persecuted for &quot;reproductive crimes&quot;. During the story, we learn about the &quot;friends of Lilith&quot;, who are a group of underground folks who help people with abortion, and the phrase &quot;visiting Lilith&quot;, which refers to attempting to get an abortion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suddenly it clicks. Friend of Lilith. “She’s gone to see a friend of Lilith.” That’s what kids would say when someone met a doctor at a sunken home, late at night, maybe never to emerge. “She tried to visit Lilith.” That meant one of our classmates was in the hospital for eating a box of laxatives. Or digging inside themselves with an unbent coat hanger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any significance in invoking the name &quot;Lilith&quot;? Was it simply an arbitrary choice, or is there something deeper here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T22:44:20.177" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T22:44:20.177" Title="Is there any significance to the name &quot;friends of Lilith&quot; in Simone Kern's &quot;The Propagator&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;sim-kern&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11661" CreationDate="2019-09-02T07:54:54.660" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Lilith Fund is a real thing helping people to get abortions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lilithfund.org/portfolio/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;about page&lt;/a&gt; at LilithFund.org:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Does Lilith Fund Do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lilith Fund assists Texans in exercising their fundamental right to abortion by removing barriers to access. Lilith provides direct financial assistance to empower people seeking to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and education and outreach within the community about reproductive rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a page about it at &lt;a href=&quot;https://abortionfunds.org/fund/lilith-fund/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AbortionFunds.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This organisation isn't universally known - it operates specifically in the US state of Texas. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://simonekernwrites.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simone Kern lives in Texas&lt;/a&gt;, so they likely would have heard about it (they also follow it on Twitter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why the connection between Lilith and abortion, though?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lilith.org/articles/the-lilith-question/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Lilith Question&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, an article in another organisation (this time a magazine) named after Lilith, provides some clues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most ancient Biblical account of the Creation relates that God created the first man and the first woman at the same time. Jewish legends tell us that this woman was Lilith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lilith, we learn, felt herself to be Adam’s equal (“We are both from the earth”) but Adam refused to accept her equality. Lilith, determined to retain her independence and dignity, and choosing loneliness over subservience, flew away from Adam and the Garden of Eden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, Lilith is sometimes used by feminists (&lt;a href=&quot;https://forward.com/sisterhood/330448/lilith-remains-a-powerful-inspiration-for-jewish-feminists/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;especially Jewish feminists&lt;/a&gt;) as a symbol of a strong independent woman who wants to do her own thing. More information on that connection may be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41206133?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ann R. Shapiro, &amp;quot;The Flight of Lilith: Modern Jewish American Feminist Literature&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Studies in American Jewish Literature&lt;/em&gt; 29 (2010), pp. 68-79&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any direct currently visible evidence that Simone Kern is Jewish, but their &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/simone__kern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter bio&lt;/a&gt; says &amp;quot;feminist&amp;quot; and &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; to put Jewish there too (or so Google search previews are telling me), and apparently Kern &lt;a href=&quot;https://threadreaderapp.com/user/simone__kern&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grew up in a Jewish family&lt;/a&gt;. A Jewish feminist writer would likely be aware of the cultural connotations surrounding Lilith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditorDisplayName="user80" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T11:00:18.850" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11663" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11675" CreationDate="2019-09-02T08:37:23.027" Score="1" ViewCount="279" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In your eyes&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Gabriel contains the following verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in your eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the light the heat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in your eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am complete&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in your eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I see the doorway (in your eyes) to a thousand churches&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in your eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the resolution (in your eyes) of all the fruitless searches&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &quot;doorway to a thousand churches&quot; referring to? Also, is the author trying to connect churches with the fruitless searches (i.e. he found something in the subject of the song that he couldn't find in church)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T12:15:15.517" Title="What are the thousand churches in &quot;In your eyes&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11894" CreationDate="2019-09-02T11:48:11.277" Score="0" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;An English professor commented that &quot;the future of the English language is grand but as far as its literature is concerned it seems bleak&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this sentence be interpreted? What exactly is the difference between language and literature? I know that language is primarily spoken and literature is primarily written. There is no literature without language and language is being enriched by literature. For example, Shakespeare has enriched the English language immensely. I think Shakespeare's works belong to both literature and language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7701" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-02T12:25:41.477" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T14:42:33.703" Title="What does it mean to say &quot;the future of the English language is grand but as far as its literature is concerned it seems bleak&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11666" CreationDate="2019-09-02T13:23:57.780" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;My friend described a possible fable to me that they read as  a child. They recall it being a picture book that was a fable/folk tale that had a weasel/mongoose type chacter. The main character gets engaged and sets out to collect his friends and dowry for the wedding. Among the friends he finds on the way are a tortoise and a boa/python. He waits for each of his friends to complete their own tasks (boa eats an antelope, tortoise waits for log to break down so he can get over it). Because of this, he returns to his village a very long time later. His bride has married someone else as he took so long. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone know of this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7702" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:06:28.073" Title="What is the Title of this fable where a Mongoose is getting married" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11665" CreationDate="2019-09-02T14:06:28.073" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5493308.Traveling_to_Tondo_A_Tale_of_the_Nkundo_of_Zaire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Traveling to Tondo: A Tale of the Nkundo of Zaire&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On his way to his wedding, with his friends as attendants, a civet cat&#xA;  meets with extraordinary and unexpected delays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reviews on Goodreads mention Bowane (the civet cat), Embenga (the pigeon), Nguma (the python) and Ulu (the tortoise) and that the journey took several years, when they arrived the bride-to-be has married someone else. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:06:28.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11608" CreationDate="2019-09-02T14:22:26.590" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16074339-the-true-blue-scouts-of-sugar-man-swamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp&lt;/a&gt; by Kathi Appelt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meet Bingo and J’miah, raccoon brothers on a mission to save Sugar Man&#xA;  Swamp in this rollicking tale and National Book Award Finalist from&#xA;  Newbery Honoree Kathi Appelt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Raccoon brothers Bingo and J’miah are the newest recruits of the&#xA;  Official Sugar Man Swamp Scouts. The opportunity to serve the Sugar&#xA;  Man—the massive creature who delights in delicious sugar cane and&#xA;  magnanimously rules over the swamp—is an honor, and also a big&#xA;  responsibility, since the rest of the swamp critters rely heavily on&#xA;  the intel of these hardworking Scouts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Twelve-year-old Chap Brayburn is not a member of any such&#xA;  organization. But he loves the swamp something fierce, and he’ll do&#xA;  anything to help protect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And help is surely needed, because world-class alligator wrestler&#xA;  Jaeger Stitch wants to turn Sugar Man swamp into an Alligator World&#xA;  Wrestling Arena and Theme Park, and the troubles don’t end there.&#xA;  There is also a gang of wild feral hogs on the march, headed straight&#xA;  toward them all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Scouts are ready. All they have to do is wake up the Sugar Man.&#xA;  Problem is, no one’s been able to wake that fellow up in a decade or&#xA;  four…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the first result in Google Books for &lt;em&gt;raccoons DeSoto car&lt;/em&gt;, cane sugar pie business is mentioned on the Goodreads reviews. And according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/books/review/kathi-appelts-true-blue-scouts-of-sugar-man-swamp.amp.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New York Times review&lt;/a&gt; the wrestler's signature move is kissing the defeated reptile on the lips. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T14:22:26.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11647" CreationDate="2019-09-02T17:05:23.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is one very important thing in these words, which is completely lost in translation. Throughout the story, Rutenspitz speaks normal Russian, but these last words he pronounces with a heavy German accent (more even in Germanized Russian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ви получаит казённый квартир, с дровами, с лихт и с прислугой, чего ви недостоин...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why has his speech changed? Or maybe it isn't his friend and doctor Krestyan Ivanovitch, but Rutenspitz's evil double?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s not Krestyan Ivanovitch! Who is it? Or is it he? It is. It is Krestyan Ivanovitch, but not the old Krestyan Ivanovitch, it’s another Krestyan Ivanovitch! It’s a terrible Krestyan Ivanovitch!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Same translation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a special significance in these words, but more in the way, they were said, rather in the words themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-02T17:05:23.300" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4266" CreationDate="2019-09-02T17:28:23.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I propose &lt;strong&gt;Jerome K. Jerome's &quot;The New Utopia&quot; (1891)&lt;/strong&gt;, which can be &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/cultn/cultn014.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read online&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Story similarities&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story, the narrator is a man who falls asleep and misses &quot;the great social revolution of 1899&quot;, remaining asleep (and preserved in a glass case at the Museum of Curiosities) for one thousand years until he awakes in the 29th century. This far-distant future is a socialist one with all people being equal and all things decided by &quot;THE MAJORITY&quot;, which is spoken of as a sort of god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Everyone looks very similar, dressed in grey uniform and with short black hair:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All  the  people  that  we  met  wore  a  quiet grave  expression,  and  were  so  much  like  each  other  as  to  give  one the  idea  that  they  were  all  members  of  the  same  family.    Everyone was dressed, as was also my guide, in a pair of grey trousers, and a grey  tunic,  buttoning  tight  round  the  neck  and  fastened  round  the waist  by  a  belt.    Each  man  was  clean  shaven,  and  each  man  had black hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even men and women look the same, and instead of names, people have only numbers to identify them, which are displayed on a metal plate attached to their clothes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“How do you know they are women?” I asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Why,  you  see  the  metal  numbers  that everybody  wears  on  their collar? [...] Well, the even numbers are women; the odd numbers are men.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “How very simple,” I remarked.  “I suppose after a little practice you can tell one sex from the other almost at a glance?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh yes,” he replied, “if you want to.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Don’t people have names, then?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “No.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Why?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Oh! there was so much inequality in names.  Some people were called Montmorency, and they looked down on the Smiths; and the Smythes  did  not  like  mixing  with  the  Joneses:  so,  to  save  further bother,  it  was  decided  to  abolish  names  altogether,  and  to  give everybody a number.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Did the Montmorencys and the Smythes object.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Yes: but the Smiths and Joneses were in THE MAJORITY.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “And did no the Ones and Twos look down upon the Threes and Fours, and so on?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “At  first,  yes.    But,  with  the  abolition  of  wealth,  numbers  lost their  value,  except  for  industrial  purposes  and  for  double  acrostics, and now No. 100 does not consider himself in any way superior to No. 1,000,000.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;People are washed by the state instead of washing themselves (so they would all smell similarly):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He  said  that  they  had  found  they  could  not  maintain  their equality  when  people  were  allowed  to  wash  themselves.    Some people  washed  three  or  four  times  a  day,  while  others  never touched  soap  and  water  from  one  year’s  end  to  the  other,  and  in consquence  there  got  to  be  two  distinct  classes,  the  Clean  and  the Dirty.    All  the  old  class  prejudices  began  to  be  revived.    The  clean despised the dirty, and the dirty hated the clean.  So, to end dissension,  the  State  decided  to  do  the  washing  itself,  and  each  citizen was  now  washed  twice  a  day  by  government-appointed  officials; and private washing was prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story similarities are clear: physical uniformity, grey clothing, wearing metal numbers (whether it be on their sleeves or collars), washing, and hair are mentioned both in the future seen by Enoch Soames and that described in &quot;The New Utopia&quot;. Furthermore, in both cases the character who finds himself in the future goes to a museum, and it is either one hundred or one thousand years ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Historical context&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your description reminded me somewhat of the much more famous &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; by George Orwell, which I knew was influenced by the moderately well-known &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; by Yevgeny Zamyatin. Perusing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page for the latter&lt;/a&gt;, I learned that &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; was in turn influenced by &quot;The New Utopia&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; are of course too late to have influenced Beerbohm's 1916 story, but &quot;The New Utopia&quot; seems just right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Socialist utopias in fiction have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism#In_literature_and_in_practice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long history&lt;/a&gt;, with some prominent examples being &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;listed here&lt;/a&gt;. Several notable such books were written around the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/624/624-h/624-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Bellamy's &lt;em&gt;Looking Backward&lt;/em&gt; (1888)&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6424/6424-h/6424-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. G. Wells's &lt;em&gt;A Modern Utopia&lt;/em&gt; (1905)&lt;/a&gt;. But neither of these has anywhere near as many common elements with Beerbohm's vision as those listed above for &quot;The New Utopia&quot;. The latter is by far the most convincing match I've been able to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, we know for a fact that &lt;strong&gt;Beerbohm was aware of Jerome and his work&lt;/strong&gt; - indeed, he was known as a critic of Jerome. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_K._Jerome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; mentions that Beerbohm called Jerome a &quot;tenth-rate writer&quot;, and an &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/135634075X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon review&lt;/a&gt; mentions that &quot;Max Beerbohm has the reputation of being a pacific personality (with the exception of the poor Jerome K. Jerome)&quot;. So it's plausible that he would have written &quot;Enoch Soames&quot; with Jerome's utopia specifically in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a possibility that both Beerbohm and Jerome were basing their &quot;utopias&quot; on some previous work. &lt;a href=&quot;https://is.cuni.cz/webapps/zzp/download/130164009&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A bachelor's thesis about Jerome's writings and social/political views&lt;/a&gt; (PDF link) describes &quot;The New Utopia&quot; as connected purely to Jerome's own political views, without reference to any previous work, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=x2ivDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA198&amp;amp;lpg=PA198&amp;amp;dq=jerome+%22the+new+utopia%22+inspired&amp;amp;source=bl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brian Stableford's &lt;em&gt;Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jerome's &quot;The New Utopia&quot; (1891) was, like [&quot;June 1993&quot; by Julian Hawthorne], a response to Edward Bellamy, but is more farcically parodic, in keeping with his usual manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the other story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;June 1993&quot;, which appeared in the February 1893 issue of &lt;em&gt;Cosmopolitan&lt;/em&gt;, is part of a flood of utopia speculations that followed the unexpected but enormous success of Edward Bellamy's &lt;em&gt;Looking Backward, 2000-1887&lt;/em&gt; (1888). Most of the responses focused on the novel's prospectus for socialist economic reform - far more controversial in rampantly capitalist America than in Europe, where France had a thriving subgenre of anarchist utopian fiction - but Hawthorne focuses on the side-effects of technological advancement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was indeed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward#Reaction_and_sequels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a massive response&lt;/a&gt; to Bellamy's &lt;em&gt;Looking Backward&lt;/em&gt; in other stories, both positive and negative takes on his vision of the future. Bellamy's novel also concerns a man who falls asleep at the end of the nineteenth century and wakes up at the end of the twentieth, and it seems clear enough that &lt;strong&gt;Jerome's story is a direct (satirical) response to Bellamy's&lt;/strong&gt;. However, I still contend that the similarities between Beerbohm's future and Jerome's are far greater than with Bellamy's, and that Beerbohm was specifically making use of Jerome's reimagining of Bellamy's socialist utopia, rather than being directly inspired by Bellamy himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, I quote some passages of Bellamy's story which are startlingly different from Jerome's and Beerbohm's more negative visions of socialism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It did not appear that any very startling revolution in men's attire had been among the great changes my host had spoken of, for, barring a few details, my new habiliments did not puzzle me at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Because,&quot; Edith explained, &quot;although the income is the same, personal taste determines how the individual shall spend it. Some like fine horses; others, like myself, prefer pretty clothes; and still others want an elaborate table. The rents which the nation receives for these houses vary, according to size, elegance, and location, so that everybody can find something to suit. The larger houses are usually occupied by large families, in which there are several to contribute to the rent; while small families, like ours, find smaller houses more convenient and economical. It is a matter of taste and convenience wholly. I have read that in old times people often kept up establishments and did other things which they could not afford for ostentation, to make people think them richer than they were. Was it really so, Mr. West?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Bellamy's future, people have individual names (not numbers) and freedom of individual expression in things like clothing and hairstyle. In Jerome's future, society is much more rigidly restricted. Recall that Jerome's story is believed to have inspired &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; and indirectly &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;; it's not implausible that it was being directly referenced closer to its own time too. Indeed, the publication date of &quot;Enoch Soames&quot; is only a few years before &lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T13:12:02.270" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T13:12:02.270" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11670" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11743" CreationDate="2019-09-02T19:28:34.370" Score="1" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;And Rearden said the following at his trial for the illegal sale of metal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You pose as a champion of freedom, but it’s only the freedom to make money that you’re after.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Yes, of course. All I want is the freedom to make money. Do you know what that freedom implies?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;“Surely, Mr. Rearden, you wouldn’t want your attitude to be misunderstood. You wouldn’t want to give support to the widespread impression that you are a man devoid of social conscience, who feels no concern for the welfare of his fellows and works for nothing but his own profit.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“I work for nothing but my own profit. I earn it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also said the following to Paul Larken:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What do they write about me?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Well, you know the stuff. That you’re intractable. That you’re ruthless. That you won’t allow anyone any voice in the running of your mills. That your only goal is to make steel and to make money.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“But that is my only goal.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“But you shouldn’t say it.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Why not? What is it I’m supposed to say?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, compare that to when Howard Roark and Peter Keating were discussing the Cortlandt project:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well? Go on. I want you to give me a reason why I should wish to design Cortlandt. I want you to make me an offer.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“You can have all the money they pay me. I don’t need it. You can have twice the money. I’ll double their fee.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“You know better than that, Peter. Is that what you wish to tempt me with?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“You would save my life.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Can you think of any reason why I should want to save your life?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“No.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Well?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“It’s a great public project, Howard. A humanitarian undertaking. Think of the poor people who live in slums. If you can give them decent comfort within their means, you’ll have the satisfaction of performing a noble deed.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Peter, you were more honest than that yesterday.” His eyes dropped, his voice low, Keating said: “You will love designing it.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Yes, Peter. Now you’re speaking my language.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reardon seems to imply that his main motive is money, whereas Roark seems to imply that his love for the work (not the money) is his main motive. What is the reason for the difference here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T20:21:04.310" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T20:21:04.310" Title="Did Howard Roark contradict Henry Rearden on the purpose of work?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6580" CreationDate="2019-09-03T01:21:40.067" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Le Guin collaborated with James P. Seaton, professor emeritus of Chinese at UNC-Chapel Hill, who has translated other classical Chinese works (e.g. The Wine of Endless Life: Taoist Drinking Songs from the Yuan Dynasty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She worked on her version for forty years, starting with Paul Carus' 1898 edition which listed Chinese characters side by side with English words. She used that as a sort of Rosetta Stone to correlate with other editions and translations, working slowly over the years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Le Guin was adamant about not calling this book a translation. She is very familiar with that art, holding an undergraduate degree in Renaissance French and Italian Literature (from Harvard/Radcliffe) and a masters in French (from Columbia). She translated numerous works, particularly from Spanish to English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le Guin &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=XJHVjH2hz50C&amp;amp;pg=PA134&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;told interviewer Hélène Escudié in 2002&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don't really call it a translation because I don't know Chinese. It is a version built up from all the other English versions, and a couple of French ones, and the Chinese word for word translation, and a lot of help from my collaborator who does know Chinese, ancient Chinese.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7705" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T08:21:48.303" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T08:21:48.303" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11672" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12349" CreationDate="2019-09-03T06:45:37.847" Score="9" ViewCount="1415" Body="&lt;p&gt;In George Orwell's 1984, there is a mention of a secretive organization named Brotherhood whose main aim is to rebel against the Big Brother, and the Party in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the later part of the prose, we find out that O' Brien was actually working for the Party the whole time in order to find and capture rebels like the protagonist. Does that mean Goldstein's Book, and the Brotherhood itself, were just made up by the Party to achieve the task of separating out the rebels? Or did the Brotherhood really exist at some point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T20:51:28.570" Title="Did the Brotherhood really exist?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11663" CreationDate="2019-09-03T12:15:15.517" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, this song is all about the singer &lt;em&gt;finally&lt;/em&gt; finding love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, 'In your eyes, I am complete'and 'The resolution of a thousand fruitless searches' refer to that the singer has tried (and failed) to find love before (a thousand fruitless searches) but, in this case, has suceeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the end of a &lt;em&gt;successful&lt;/em&gt; search for love can be represented by a door to a church and the hints that a wedding is going to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T12:15:15.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11676" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:37:39.547" Score="2" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Jane_Pfeiffer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emily Jane Pfeiffer&lt;/a&gt;’s poem ‘Evolution’ was first published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poems00pfeigoog/page/n150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1876):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hunger that strivest in the restless arms&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Of the sea-flower, that drivest rooted things&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      To break their moorings, that unfoldest wings&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In creatures to be rapt above thy harms;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hunger, of whom the hungry-seeming waves&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Were the first ministers, till, free to range,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Thou madest the Universe thy park and grange,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is it thine insatiate heart still craves?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sacred disquietude, divine unrest!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Maker of all that breathes the breath of life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No unthrift greed spurs thine unflagging zest,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      No lust self-slaying, hounds thee to the strife;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou art the Unknown God on whom we wait:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thy path the course of our unfolded fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this poem about? What is the significance of “hunger”? How can creatures “be rapt above thy harms”? In what way are waves “hungry-seeming” and “first ministers”? What is “sacred disquietude”? How can greed be “unthrift” and lust “self-slaying”? What is the speaker’s attitude to evolution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T11:35:06.633" Title="Emily Jane Pfeiffer's &quot;Evolution&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;emily-jane-pfeiffer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11677" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:38:50.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-03T15:38:50.710" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T15:38:50.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11678" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-03T15:38:50.710" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Welsh poet Emily Jane Pfeiffer (1827 – 1890), or her life as a writer. She was a supporter of women's higher education and rights, and produced many feminist poems." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:26:31.707" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:26:31.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-03T20:38:03.583" Score="1" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Simone Kern's short story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://magazine.metaphorosis.com/story/2019/the-propagator-simone-kern/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Propagator&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, there's a line where a prison guard for those convicted of &quot;reproductive crimes&quot; refers to the inmates as &quot;girls&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The guard leaned towards me, and for a moment I thought he was going to arrest me. Like he also knew what was in my rotten heart. But slowly, I processed what he was shouting over the din. “They thought their little ‘protest’ would get them something better than that,” he pointed back at my drones and their rolls of sod.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We stepped through another set of doors into a blessedly quiet corridor, and his voice dropped to a normal volume. “We meet all the legal requirements. Every inmate gets an hour a day of green time, &lt;strong&gt;and we have 1 square foot of lawn for every girl&lt;/strong&gt;. But that wasn’t good enough for them.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this line refer to &quot;girls&quot;? As we can see directly above, it's not only women who are jailed here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The inmates were cursing and wailing, kicking the bars and their beds. Many of them were pregnant—women and trans men. I saw one guy, scraggly beard and swollen belly, must’ve been nine months along. He was chained to his bed, sobbing into his hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in any case, these are on the whole grown women, not under 18 girls. So why does this guard refer to them as girls? Is he being anti-trans, or misogynistic, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2019-09-03T20:38:03.583" Title="Why does the guard call the inmates &quot;girls&quot; in &quot;The Propagator&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;sim-kern&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11680" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-04T06:35:38.820" Score="12" ViewCount="1053" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I have noticed there are multiple interpretations of the following lines from William Shakespeare 's Macbeth. For example, &quot;drink gave thee the lie&quot; has been interpreted as diversely as &quot;deceived you,&quot; &quot;told you that you're a liar,&quot; and &quot;knocked you down.&quot; I wonder if all these interpretations are correct, and if so, how the Porter's answer &quot;i' the very throat on me&quot; makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Macduff:     I believe drink gave thee the lie last night.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Porter:         That it did, sir, i' the very throat on me:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;                    but I requited him for his lie;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (2.3.37-39)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7711" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T06:54:37.000" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T11:59:13.253" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;give someone the lie&quot; in Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11680" CreationDate="2019-09-04T08:14:18.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &quot;give the lie&quot; is an English expression meaning to expose a lie, or show a thing is not true. It is still in use today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to show that something is not at all true&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;These figures give the lie to the notion that people are spending less.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/give-the-lie-to-something&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macmillan Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to prove that something is not true:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;The fact that the number of deaths from cancer in the area has doubled surely gives the lie to official assurances of the safety of nuclear power.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/give-the-lie-to-sth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the literal interpretation of Macduff's words is that drink made the Porter tell lies. This being Shakespeare though, there are deeper meanings at play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most obvious one is a pun: drink made the porter &quot;lie&quot; as in &quot;lie down drunk&quot;. Drink also makes people into &quot;liars&quot; because they talk nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more interesting interpretation, however, is that the Porter in this scene can be read as a stand-in for his master, Macbeth. His speech about hell is a metaphor for the hell which Macbeth's castle has become and each of the three sinners for an aspect of Macbeth's character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this interpretation, Macbeth has been &quot;given the lie&quot; by the Witches through their manipulative prophecies. The result is his confusion, as though drunk with power and aggression, and eventually the literal &quot;lie down&quot; of his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &quot;give the lie&quot; remains a current phrase, the Porter's reply is another figure of speech which has become less common:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;lie in one's throat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;to tell a foul or outrageous lie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/lie-in-ones-throat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he is simply confirming that Macduff is correct via a comic overstatement. This then adds dramatic weight to his &quot;requitation&quot; of the drink, managing to stand and converse despite his hangover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that again there is a literal pun here. When drinking the drink does of course &quot;lie&quot; in the throat of the drinker both in drinking and in the aftermath of alcohol-provoked vomit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&#xA;Macbeth and His Porter, Frederic B. Tromly, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Spring, 1975), pp. 151-156&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T08:08:57.630" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T08:08:57.630" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3072" CreationDate="2019-09-04T12:18:08.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As somebody who lives in Britain, we tend to just take the piss out of other people's towns, as a sort of joke. Manchester doesn't really have much there apart from architecture and it's football teams, but it was well known as being the first industrial city for a while, which would tie in with the quote of Hell being 14th century mind's, which was when the industrial revolution came about in Britain. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note though that Crowley isn't just a 'typical' demon. He makes things to annoy and inconvenience humans, such as taking down the phone lines in London for the evening, or creating the M25 for the sole purpose of it creating traffic. Therefore, Manchester can be taken with the same mindset - Crowley created it for the sole purpose of annoying humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7712" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T12:18:08.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11684" CreationDate="2019-09-04T21:02:51.340" Score="2" ViewCount="1030" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the quote from 1984 where Winston tells O'Brien that O'Brien is mortal, and O'Brien responds that what matters is the party's immortality and not his own?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was during a sort of &quot;ask me anything&quot; session in the Ministry of Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching for it but don't know enough of the quote to find it.  Since the book is on Youtube, a reference to the time of the quote would also be helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7713" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-04T21:33:57.833" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T21:33:57.833" Title="Looking for a quote from 1984 about the party's immortality vs personal mortality" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11683" CreationDate="2019-09-04T21:32:49.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably you're thinking of this passage from Part 3, Chapter 3 (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston was struck, as he had been struck before, by the tiredness of O’Brien’s face. It was strong and fleshy and brutal, it was full of intelligence and a sort of controlled passion before which he felt himself helpless; but it was tired. There were pouches under the eyes, the skin sagged from the cheekbones. O’Brien leaned over him, deliberately bringing the worn face nearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You are thinking,’ he said, ‘that my face is old and tired. &lt;strong&gt;You are thinking that I talk of power, and yet I am not even able to prevent the decay of my own body. Can you not understand, Winston, that the individual is only a cell?&lt;/strong&gt; The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. Do you die when you cut your fingernails?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He turned away from the bed and began strolling up and down again, one hand in his pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘We are the priests of power,’ he said. ‘God is power. But at present power is only a word so far as you are concerned. It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual. You know the Party slogan: “Freedom is Slavery”. Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom. Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because &lt;strong&gt;every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures&lt;/strong&gt;. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, &lt;strong&gt;if he can merge himself in the Party so that he IS the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal&lt;/strong&gt;. The second thing for you to realize is that power is power over human beings. Over the body — but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter — external reality, as you would call it — is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't go to check Youtube to find a video with a timestamp, but the entire text of &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/contents.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt; from the University of Adelaide, so I just needed to Ctrl+F for &amp;quot;mortal&amp;quot; in each chapter of Part 3 in turn. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/chapter3.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the relevant chapter&lt;/a&gt; so you can read it in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-04T21:32:49.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11689" CreationDate="2019-09-05T02:30:39.453" Score="3" ViewCount="809" Body="&lt;p&gt;We sometimes see &lt;strong&gt;Ode to&lt;/strong&gt; and sometimes &lt;strong&gt;Ode on&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do these both mean &lt;strong&gt;a poem written about something?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a new literature student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T09:45:02.460" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T09:51:20.930" Title="Difference between &quot;Ode to&quot; and &quot;Ode on&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11686" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T05:29:12.077" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&lt;/em&gt;, at the beginning of the book, Rachael and Eldon Rosen attempt to make a deal with Rick Deckard when Rick thinks the empathy test he was going to use (the Voigt-Kampff scale) to hunt the 8 escaped androids does not work. They will give him a “live” (but actually robot) owl in exchange for his secrecy as to the fallibility of the Voigt-Kampff scale. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do they do this? I thought they didn’t want him to kill the androids? Why do they want to send him on his mission using this scale? Do they want him to accidentally kill a human so that bounty hunters lose credibility? Or do they want him to doubt himself so that he ultimately gives up on his hunt, or goes mad? That seems roundabout, I don’t understand why they don’t just blackmail him into &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; completing his mission or force him to tell his boss that their scale is erroneous. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously it turns out the scale worked fine, but I’m still confused by their actions here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7718" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T13:31:38.377" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T13:33:50.067" Title="Why do Rachael and Eldon attempt to blackmail Rick in &quot;Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&quot;?" Tags="&lt;philip-k-dick&gt;&lt;do-androids-dream-of-electric-sheep&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11687" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11688" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" Score="0" Body="&quot;Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&quot;, sometimes entitled &quot;Blade Runner: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&quot;, is a 1968 science fiction novel by the US author Philip K. Dick. Always use this tag together with the [philip-k-dick] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T08:19:21.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11685" CreationDate="2019-09-05T09:44:36.597" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An ode is not just any poem, but specifically a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lyric poem, serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in its stanzaic structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;M. H. Abrams (1957). &lt;em&gt;A Glossary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;, p. 116. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where a lyric poem is a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nonnarrative poem presenting a single speaker who expresses a state of mind or a process of thought and feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Abrams, p. 89&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ode originated with the ancient Greeks, notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pindar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pindar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sappho&lt;/a&gt;. Lyric poems are so-called because they were originally sung and accompanied on a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyre&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English poetry, if an ode is written as if speaking &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the subject (addressing it in the second person), then it would be an “ode to”. If an ode is written &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the subject (referring to it in the third person) then it would be an “ode on”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking examples from the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Keats&lt;/a&gt;, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode to a Nightingale&lt;/a&gt;’ is addressed to a nightingale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        No hungry generations tread thee down;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44478/ode-on-melancholy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on Melancholy&lt;/a&gt;’ is addressed to someone suffering from melancholy, not to melancholy itself, which is referred to in the third person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ay, in the very temple of Delight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is not a hard-and-fast rule! ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn&lt;/a&gt;’ is addressed to the urn but titled with “on”. Perhaps Keats chose this form of title because the urn is not the only addressee: parts of the poem are addressed instead to the figures depicted on the urn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T09:51:20.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2019-09-05T14:59:06.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can solve this question once and for all. The poem &quot;Elegí la vida&quot; was written by me in 1998, and not by Rudyard Kipling. My name is Elena Pérez Hoyos and the poem was written in Spanish.&#xA;I have just learned that this poem has been reposted by many web sites stating that the author was Kipling. This has come as a shock to me. I am doing everything I can to clear up this issue and find out the origin of such misunderstanding. &#xA;As it has been mentioned in previous comments, it is more than evident that the style is not Kipling's. And there is no mention of this text in relation with Kipling before 2010. The original poem has rhythm in the language in which it was written, Spanish. Some words have been strangely modified. And the gender has been changed, the voice of the original poem was a woman's voice. Mine.&#xA;It is regrettable to see how some people, even in blogs about poetry or literature, spread mistakes like this without checking previously the authority of the work.&#xA;I am very grateful for the opportunity this web offers me to claim my ownership of this text and I ask from you any help you can provide me to solve this problem.&#xA;Thank you very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7722" LastActivityDate="2019-09-05T14:59:06.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1961" CreationDate="2019-09-05T18:15:43.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These same words appear in &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602051h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Worm Ouroboros&lt;/a&gt; (1922) by E. R. Eddison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7726" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:11:26.993" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:11:26.993" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12446" CreationDate="2019-09-06T12:41:22.183" Score="6" ViewCount="642" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 10 of &lt;em&gt;All Quiet on the Western Front&lt;/em&gt;, Paul and his comrades are goofing around by pretending to give orders to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Tjaden!&quot; - &quot;What?&quot; - &quot;Stand at ease, Tjaden; and what's more, don't&#xA;  say 'What,' say 'Yes, Sir,' - now: Tjaden!&quot; Tjaden retorts in the&#xA;  well-known phrase from Goethe's &quot;Götz von Berlichingen,&quot; with which he&#xA;  is always very free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the well known phrase from Götz von Berlichingen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6056" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T14:42:41.543" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T20:46:14.330" Title="What well known phrase from &quot;Götz von Berlichingen&quot; is alluded to in All Quiet in the Western Front?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;&lt;all-quiet-on-the-western-front&gt;&lt;erich-maria-remarque&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2019-09-06T12:41:22.183" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The well known phrase is &quot;Leck mich am Arsch&quot; (&quot;kiss my arse&quot;, but literally &quot;lick me on the arse&quot;).  It is also known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_salute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swabian salute&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6056" LastActivityDate="2019-09-06T12:41:22.183" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-05T10:15:34.410" Score="2" ViewCount="438" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a song: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fare Three Well (Dink's Song) performed by Marcus Mumford &amp;amp; Oscar&#xA;  Isaac for the movie ''Inside Llewyn Davis''&#xA;  (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If I had wings like Noah's dove&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'd fly the river to the one that I love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Fare three well, my honey fare three well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had a man, who was long and tall&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He moved his body like a cannon ball&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I remember one evening in the pouring rain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And in my heart there was an aching pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Muddy river runs muddy and wild&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;You can't give a bloody for my unborn child&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Just as sure as the birds flying high above&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Life ain't worth living without the one you love&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fare thee well, my honey, fare thee well&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;You can't give a bloody for my unborn child&quot; - what does that mean? I couldn't find anything about such an expression in internet dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="AgO" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-06T14:54:34.240" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:43:43.633" Title="&quot;to give a bloody for someone&quot;? what does that mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11717" CreationDate="2019-09-06T15:40:08.167" Score="4" ViewCount="451" Body="&lt;p&gt;Spoilers for John Le Carré’s &lt;em&gt;Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel, Percy Alleline has become the director of “the Circus”, a fictional British intelligence service. Alleline and the department heads of the Circus (Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase, and Roy Bland) are running a group of Russian agents, codenamed “Source Merlin”, who communicate by passing their secrets to Aleksey Polyakov, supposedly a cultural attaché at the Soviet Union’s embassy in London. Polyakov passes the secrets to Esterhase at meetings in a house in Camden owned by Alleline:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Treasury had sanctioned sixty thousand pounds for the freehold and another ten for furniture and fittings. To cut costs, it wanted its own lawyers to handle the conveyance. Alleline refused to reveal the address. For the same reason there was an argument about who should keep the deeds. This time the Treasury put its foot down and its lawyers drew up instruments to get the house back from Alleline should he die or go bankrupt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polyakov is actually a spy, and his cover story for the meetings is that Esterhase is &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; agent in the Circus, and accordingly the Circus carefully selects harmless low-level information (“chickenfeed”) for Esterhase to pass to Polyakov for the latter to put in his reports to “Moscow Centre”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What I’m asking you is very simple,’ Smiley insisted. ‘Notionally, who is Polyakov’s agent inside the Circus? Good heavens, Toby, don’t be obtuse. If Polyakov’s cover for meeting you people is that he is spying on the Circus, then he must have a Circus spy, mustn’t he? So who is he? He can’t come back to the Embassy after a meeting with you people, loaded with reels of Circus chickenfeed, and say, “I got this from the boys.” There has to be a story, and a good one at that: a whole history of courtship, recruitment, clandestine meetings, money and motive. Doesn’t there? Heavens, this isn’t just Polyakov’s cover story: it’s his lifeline. It’s got to be thorough. It’s got to be convincing; I’d say it was a very big issue in the game. So who is he?’ Smiley enquired pleasantly. ‘You? Toby Esterhase masquerades as a Circus traitor in order to keep Polyakov in business? My hat, Toby, that’s worth a whole handful of medals.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this. &lt;em&gt;In the Circus’ view&lt;/em&gt;, what is Polyakov’s cover story, in his reports to Moscow Centre, for the meetings with Esterhase taking place at a house owned by the director of the Circus? I can see five possibilities, none completely satisfactory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Circus has not considered this problem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Circus believes that Polyakov says in his reports that he meets Esterhase somewhere else. (The problem with this is that Moscow Centre might tail him one day and discover that he has been lying.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Circus believes that Polyakov tells the truth about the location of the meetings but lies about the nature of the house. (The problem with this is that Moscow Centre might discover that Alleline owned the freehold. The novel is set in the 1970s, well before the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2002/9/contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Land Registration Act 2002&lt;/a&gt; made it compulsory to register ownership upon purchase, but the seller and both sets of conveyancing solicitors would have known, and it seems risky to depend on their silence for such a delicate operation.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Circus believes that Polyakov tells the truth about the house but says that Esterhase, as a senior member of the Circus, is able to suppress evidence that the meetings took place there. (The problem with this is that the safe house has a housekeeper, Millie McCraig, and there would need to be a convincing story explaining why her silence could be relied on.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Circus believes that Polyakov tells the truth about the house but says that Esterhase has a cover story for the meetings, namely that Polyakov is &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; agent. (There are several problems with this. One, Polyakov would need to be passing “chickenfeed” to Esterhase, in addition to the “Source Merlin” material, to explain how Esterhase is able to make his cover story stick, and there is no hint of this in the novel. Two, Esterhase’s cover story wouldn’t be convincing to the Circus as it wouldn’t explain how Polyakov was able to secretly visit the house, as he points out himself: “But [Polyakov]’s got to pretend to his own people that he’s spying on us. How else does he get away with it? How does he walk in and out of that house all day, no gorillas, no babysitters, everything so easy?” Three, this scenario is too close to the truth.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T07:03:42.587" Title="What is the supposed cover story in &quot;Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;john-le-carre&gt;&lt;tinker-tailor-soldier-spy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1168" CreationDate="2019-09-08T19:11:28.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of all the kids, he was the least childlike. He never really had the resiliency or faith in good magic of a child. When called back, he didn't have the well of childlike innocence to dip into, so he didn't have the strength to do it again. I believe he also had his bar mitzvah before the final child battle (been a long time since I read the book, could be wrong). With bar mitzvah he's no longer a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7737" LastEditorUserId="7737" LastEditDate="2019-09-08T19:29:49.600" LastActivityDate="2019-09-08T19:29:49.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11661" CreationDate="2019-09-09T04:44:30.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have no idea if this is what the author was referencing, but Lilith appears in Jewish folklore in a number of instances that might relate to this. In particular, there are two ancient sources in which Lilith seems to be associated with abortion in some way. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talmud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talmud&lt;/a&gt; (Niddah 24b) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;אמר רב יהודה אמר שמואל המפלת דמות לילית אמו טמאה לידה ולד הוא אלא שיש לו כנפים תנ&amp;quot;ה א&amp;quot;ר יוסי מעשה בסימוני באחת שהפילה דמות לילית ובא מעשה לפני חכמים ואמרו ולד הוא אלא שיש לו כנפים&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rab Judah citing Samuel ruled: If an abortion had the likeness of Lilith its mother is unclean by reason of the birth, for it is a child, but it has wings. So it was also taught: R. Jose stated, It once happened at Simoni  that a woman aborted the likeness of Lilith, and when the case came up for a decision before the Sages they ruled that it was a child but that it also had wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://halakhah.com/niddah/niddah_24.html#24b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soncino translation&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midrash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Midrash&lt;/a&gt; which records a critique Moses offered to God about what people would say if God destroyed the Israelites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ואף לאלו שקרא אותן בני בכורי ישראל הרי הוא מכלה אותן כלילית הזו שאינה מוצאה כלום והיא הופכת על בניה כך מבלתי יכולת ה' להביא את העם הזה אל הארץ אשר נשבע להם וישחטם במדבר&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even to these whom He called &amp;quot;my firstborn son Israel&amp;quot; behold he destroys them, as this Lilith who does not find anything and turns on her children, so too it is beyond the ability of God to bring this nation to the land that He swore to them and he [instead] slaughtered them in the wilderness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage it seems that Lilith is known for killing her own children, something which some people consider abortion to be similar or equivalent to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being the case, the name Lilith would be apropos to the situation described in the book. Again, I have no idea if this is what the author intended; I offer it merely as a possible association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T04:44:30.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11704" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-09T06:53:00.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T06:53:00.327" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T06:53:00.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11705" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-09T06:53:00.327" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Da Vinci Code&quot; (2003), a thriller by Dan Brown. Use with the [dan-brown] tag." OwnerUserId="5526" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T06:57:28.967" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T06:57:28.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11706" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11707" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" Score="0" Body="Questions about misprints and typographical errors (real or suspected) in books." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:13:30.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11708" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11709" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" Score="0" Body="Questions about the representation of non-standard and regional dialects in literature." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:15:54.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11710" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11711" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" Score="0" Body="Siri Hustvedt (born 1955), American novelist, author of &quot;What I Loved&quot; (2003)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:18:13.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11712" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11713" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Enchantment of Lily Dahl&quot; (1996), a novel by Siri Hustvedt. Use with the [siri-hustvedt] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T07:18:46.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-09T08:18:13.333" Score="4" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading As I Lay Dying, I noticed that the characters repeat certain phrases a great deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's an example from one of Tull's chapters which shows the same two phrases recurring three times in a short space of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That boy comes up the hill. He is carrying a fish &lt;strong&gt;nigh long as he is&lt;/strong&gt;. He slings it to the ground and grunts &amp;quot;Hah&amp;quot; and spits over his shoulder like a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Durn &lt;strong&gt;nigh long as he is&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What's that?&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;A hog? Where'd you get it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;You clean that fish&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; Anse says. Vardaman stops. &amp;quot;Why cant Dewey Dell clean it?&amp;quot; he says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;You clean that fish,&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; Anse says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Aw, pa,&amp;quot; Vardaman says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;You clean it&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; Anse says. He dont look around. Vardaman comes back and picks up the fish. .... He goes on around the house, toting it in both arms like a armful of wood, it overlapping him on both ends, head and tail. &lt;strong&gt;Durn nigh big as he is&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These repetitions are not unique to Tull but occur in other chapters narrated by other characters (see the previous chapter where Dewey Dell repeats &amp;quot;without the words&amp;quot; for example).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because they are phrases in thought and speech, they seem to be fundamentally different to, although mirroring, the descriptive repetition that occurs elsewhere in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will give her confidence and comfort. I go on to the house, followed by the &lt;strong&gt;Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.&lt;/strong&gt; of the adze.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Faulkner have his characters repeat themselves so often? Is it a common speech pattern in the Southern US dialect he's seeking to mimic, or are there deeper meanings here, perhaps related to the descriptive repetition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T10:59:51.713" Title="Repetition in Faulkner's &quot;As I Lay Dying&quot;" Tags="&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;as-i-lay-dying&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11716" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11686" CreationDate="2019-09-09T13:26:13.177" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question says that Eldon offers Rick the owl “in exchange for his secrecy as to the fallibility of the Voigt-Kampff scale”. But this is not what the novel says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rachael, leaning towards Rick, said, ‘How would you like to own an owl?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I doubt if I’ll ever own an owl.’ But he knew what she meant; he understood the business the Rosen Association wanted to transact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This “business” is not specified, so we have to deduce what Rick thinks it might be. My interpretation is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eldon’s plan is to save the Nexus-6 androids by convincing Rick that the Voigt–Kampff test is not reliable. If Rick doubts the reliability of the test, he will not be willing to “retire” the androids, for fear of killing people by mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of the blackmail and the owl is &lt;em&gt;misdirection&lt;/em&gt; as to the nature of Eldon’s plan, in order to “sell” the unreliability of the test. The idea is that Rick should believe that Eldon’s plan was to save the Nexus-6 androids by blackmailing and bribing him into abandoning the mission. (This is how I interpret “business” in the extract I quoted.) If Rick can be convinced that this was the plan, then he won’t be suspicious about the demonstration of the test’s unreliability, as that will seem to be just an incidental element of the blackmail step of the plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The episode dovetails with the book’s theme of reality versus appearance: here we are misled on questions including the reliability of the Voigt–Kampff test; the humanity of Rachael; the nature of the owl; and the details of Eldon’s plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-09T13:33:50.067" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11699" CreationDate="2019-09-10T07:03:42.587" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Because of the tight secrecy surrounding Operation Witchcraft, there was no such thing as the “Circus view”, only the individual views of the four Circus heads, the “magic circle” as George Smiley calls them. And in each case there could plausibly have been a reason why the flaw in Polyakov’s cover story did not concern them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Cover story&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Circus provides the safe house with a cover story for inquisitive members of the general public:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lock Gardens, which presumably drew its name from the Camden and Hampstead Road Locks nearby, was a terrace of four flat-fronted nineteenth-century houses […] Some of the houses had been turned into one-roomed flats, and had ten door bells laid out like a typewriter. Some were got up grandly and had only one. Number five had two: one for Millie McCraig and one for her lodger Mr Jefferson.&#xA;Mrs McCraig was churchy and collected for everything, which was incidentally an excellent way of keeping an eye on the locals, though that was scarcely how they viewed her zeal. Jefferson, her lodger, was known vaguely to be foreign and in oil and away a lot. Lock Gardens was his pied-à-terre. The neighbours, when they bothered to notice him, found him shy and respectable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(McCraig is a Circus employee and ‘Jefferson’ is Polyakov.) It seems likely that the same cover story is intended for use by Polyakov. (This corresponds to option 3 in the question.) This story would be suitable, if not for the fact that Alleline owns the freehold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Missing the flaw&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why did the members of the “magic circle” miss the flaw in Polyakov’s cover story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bill Haydon of course was not concerned by the flaw because he was the mole ‘Gerald’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Percy Alleline was carefully chosen by Haydon as the figurehead for Operation Witchcraft precisely because he is a committee man, someone who is not concerned with operational details. Smiley imagined the scene like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So this, in my thesis, is what Gerald says to Percy next. “We—that is, myself and those like-minded souls who are associated with this project—would like you to act as our father-figure, Percy. We’re not political men, we’re operators. We don’t understand the Whitehall jungle. But you do. You handle the committees, we’ll handle Merlin. If you act as our cut-out, and protect us from the rot that’s set in, which means in effect limiting knowledge of the operation to the absolute minimum, we’ll supply the goods.”’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All we learn about Alleline’s operational abilities is that he had a “Middle East adventure, which went so wrong and nearly cost Percy his career.” So Haydon could be confident that Alleline would leave the details of the operation to him. Haydon was the Circus’ Russian expert and supposedly recruited Source Merlin in the first place, so he was the natural person for the job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roy Bland and Toby Esterhase may well not have known who owned the freehold of the safe house, and so were not in a position to spot the flaw. The principle of need-to-know may have meant that the ownership was a secret shared between Haydon, Alleline and the Treasury. We never learn much about Bland, but we do get given the impression that Esterhase was not admitted to all the details of the operation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And who’s Merlin?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esterhase shook his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But at least you’ve heard he’s based in Moscow,’ Smiley said. ‘And a member of the Soviet Intelligence establishment, whatever else he isn’t?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That much they tell me,’ Esterhase agreed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T07:03:42.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11721" CreationDate="2019-09-10T18:05:10.890" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across an interesting poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt in a forgotten old tome, &lt;em&gt;The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse&lt;/em&gt;. Blunt's own note states it is 'From the Arabic'. Is this just a device, or is there a real Arabic poem from which these lines are drawn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-camel-rider/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the version on PoemHunter.com&lt;/a&gt; seems to be the same as my printed version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T18:57:00.363" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T17:38:31.763" Title="Is Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's poem 'The Camel Rider' really a translation?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;wilfrid-scawen-blunt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" Score="0" Body="For question about the life and works of the English poet and essayist Wilfrid Scawen Blunt." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" LastActivityDate="2019-09-10T18:58:31.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11718" CreationDate="2019-09-11T07:48:06.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's difficult to be sure.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Scawen_Blunt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilfrid Scawen Blunt&lt;/a&gt; was an Englishman who travelled extensively in the Middle East, spending many years in Egypt but also seeing other Arabic speaking countries such as Algeria and Syria. He was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13555502.2011.630267&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;known as a poet and a translator of Arabic poetry&lt;/a&gt;. In particular, he worked together with his wife Anne Blunt on translations from Arabic of works such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27allaqat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muʻallaqāt&lt;/a&gt; which they translated as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=ETtbAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In this project, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maggs.com/the-celebrated-romance-of-the-stealing-of-the-mare-translated-from-the-arabic-by-lady-anne-blunt-and-done-into-verse-by-wilfrid-scawen-blunt_115460.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; it was Lady Anne who did the language translation and Wilfrid who turned it into English verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evidence in favour&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/182746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Morgan Libary&lt;/a&gt; in the USA has a manuscript of &quot;The Camel Rider&quot;, which is listed as &quot;translated from the Arabic by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt&quot;. However, this could be a cataloguing error - the manuscript is not written by Blunt, and dates to several years after the poem's publication, so the scribe (Ethel M. Offer) might have just copied &quot;From the Arabic&quot; from the original.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/poeticalworksofw01blunuoft/poeticalworksofw01blunuoft_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his collected works&lt;/a&gt;, the poem &quot;The Camel Rider&quot; is included in the section &quot;From the Arabic&quot;, suggesting that the poems are translated rather than written himself from scratch. However, the next point below provides a counterpoint to this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evidence against&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://library.umac.mo/ebooks/b32368070.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred H. Miles, &lt;em&gt;The Poets and the Poetry of the Century&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, he draws the conclusion that Blunt's poems &quot;From the Arabic&quot; were in fact his own work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regarding Mr. Blunt's work apart from its great interest as &lt;em&gt;marginalia&lt;/em&gt;, his best things, since certain of the &quot;Love-Sonnets,&quot; are perhaps the poems &quot;From the Arabic,&quot; - presumably as Mrs. Browning's sonnets were &quot;From the Portuguese,&quot; and &quot;Sed Nos Qui Vivimus,&quot; both contained in the &quot;New Pilgrimage&quot; volume. Mr. Blunt presents these as experiments in assonance, and as such he is well-justified of them, for though hardly an entire success, they come very near being so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Browning's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnets_from_the_Portuguese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonnets from the Portuguese&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were indeed written by herself.) However, Miles doesn't justify this claim, making it only with the weasel word &quot;presumably&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the PhD thesis &lt;a href=&quot;http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/14731/1/255084.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Literary Achievement of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Mohammed Tawfiq Muhieddin el Bujairami, a Syrian who studied at Sheffield University, he analyses Blunt's success in capturing the &lt;em&gt;style&lt;/em&gt; of Arabic poetry even without exact translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Blunt succeeded in capturing the spirit of these desert songs &lt;em&gt;[actual Arabic songs translated by his wife]&lt;/em&gt; and reproducing their melodious effect through assonance. In a series of rich, evocative images, he recreates the desert atmosphere, of which he had first-hand knowledge, and many lines hark back to his travels in Arabia. The images in stanzas IX, X and XI of &quot;The Camel Rider&quot;, for example, are recollections of the features of the Euphrates Valley. The references to the valley of Thyme, to Saba, and to hearth stones are contrived to convey suggestive associations; such references are recurrent in ancient Arabic love poetry.  [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These lines, it must be noted, &lt;em&gt;[lines quoted from &quot;The Camel Rider&quot;]&lt;/em&gt; are imitations and not translations of any Arabic text. Blunt penetrates and captures the spirit of the Arabic tradition; in contrast, Sir William Jones's &quot;Solaima&quot; depends for its &quot;Arabian&quot; qualities on various Arabic names that occur in it, and it appears stilted in comparison. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another element which Blunt captures in his Arabic imitations is the undercurrent of warm emotion, felt even by the natural objects, which do not act as a merely passive, inanimate background, but also sympathize with the singer in his suffering. The wind, the sand, the stars and the camel become active participants in the human drama, as can be seen in stanzas III, IV, V and VI of &quot;The Camel Rider&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;el Bujairami says directly that &quot;The Camel Rider&quot; is an imitation and not a translation of any Arabic text - suggesting that not only is it not a &lt;em&gt;direct&lt;/em&gt; translation, it's also not even based on any one particular text. This is probably the most compelling piece of evidence - as well as being a scholar writing his PhD specifically on Blunt, el Bujairami was also (presumably) a native speaker of Arabic himself, and thus in a good position to conduct a proper search for an original Arabic poem which Blunt might have translated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In all the sources I've checked, nobody has identified an original song in Arabic which Blunt was reproducing. However, given that Blunt spent years living and travelling in Arabic countries, there remains the possibility that he heard it somewhere and remembered it, even that it's never been recorded in writing and thus wouldn't show up even in el Bujairami's searches.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Discussion on translation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating stories in general requires more than just &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2686/17&quot;&gt;literally translating the words&lt;/a&gt;. This is especially true for poetry, and even more especially for translations between languages such as Arabic and English which have such different structures and literary stylistic forms. Translating poetry can be almost like writing new poetry: you need to decide which writing technique in the target language can most accurately capture the effect of an untranslatable technique in the source language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, the use of the term &quot;imitation&quot; is not, in itself, definitive proof that Blunt's poems &quot;From the Arabic&quot; were not translations of any pre-existing Arabic work. Let's compare the above with descriptions of &lt;em&gt;The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia&lt;/em&gt; which was definitely a translation of an existing work: it's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hellenicaworld.com/Arabia/Literature/ReynoldNicholson/en/ALiteraryHistoryOfTheArabs.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;described&lt;/a&gt; as a &quot;&lt;em&gt;fine and original, though somewhat free, rendering into English verse&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and el Bujairami mentions in the same thesis that in this translation Blunt &quot;&lt;em&gt;succeeded in producing, in English rhythm, the sound effects and the real atmosphere of the originals&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. It seems that his translations in general were more concerned with effect and atmosphere than literal meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;el Bujairami makes mention in general of Blunt's &quot;&lt;em&gt;imitations and translations&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, suggesting that these are two different things. But, as Peter Shor notes in a comment, there is a continuum between the two, with &quot;a very free translation&quot; somewhere in the middle. el Bujairami also says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the Arabic song, which is usually meant to be heard over long distances when chanted, the long vowels (which Blunt tries to reproduce in his English imitation) impart a plaintive echo to the song, reflecting the yearnings of the soul of the Bedouin lover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not clear from the context whether &quot;the Arabic song&quot; here refers to a specific Arabic song which was translated/imitated in &quot;The Camel Rider&quot; (this passage comes only a few paragraphs after several verses of &quot;The Camel Rider&quot; are quoted) or whether it means Arabic songs in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another difficulty in the process of imitation is the technical difference between English and Arabic measures. The latter are quantitative, rather like the classical Greek and Latin measures. To the four principal meters of English verse, Arabic poetry can be moulded in sixteen different prosodic measures. In his effort to reproduce its forceful rhythms, Blunt resorted to recurrent spondees in a number of lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again this paragraph is illustrated with a verse from &quot;The Camel Rider&quot;. Does this mean Blunt was reproducing the rhythms of a particular Arabic poem, or simply reproducing the style of Arabic poetry in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Summary: I think there are two possibilities for the answer to your question.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blunt started from a particular Arabic song and made a very &quot;free&quot; translation, prioritising the preservation of Arabic style and rhythm over that of literal meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Blunt wrote &quot;The Camel Rider&quot; himself, but with knowledge of many Arabic songs he'd heard, trying to capture their general style and atmosphere.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; is probably the more likely option, but I don't think we have quite enough evidence to rule out &lt;strong&gt;1&lt;/strong&gt;, especially given we know that's what he did with other Arabic-to-English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T17:38:31.763" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T17:38:31.763" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11698" CreationDate="2019-09-11T16:37:14.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bloody&quot; is a curse word in Britain. It's normally an adjective ('He is a bloody idiot') but seems to be being used as a noun here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some possible ways it could be interpreted. As Hellion suggests, they may have left out a word, with the full version being &quot;bloody damn&quot; or something else. Or alternatively (since &quot;bloody&quot; is a fairly mild curseword) it may be replacing a stronger word such as &quot;You can't give a s***...&quot; or &quot;You can't give a f***...&quot;. Alternatively, or as well, scansion may have dictated a substitution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know who actually wrote the lyrics above (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dink%27s_Song&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original lyrics of the song don't contain that line&lt;/a&gt;). If it was written for the movie then audience sensibilities may have dictated the line. The song was recorded by different artists, many long enough ago that putting in a stronger curseword would have been out of the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original lyrics certainly are such that &quot;You can't give a **** for my unborn child&quot; would have fitted well in. They are less direct but the intention is clearly the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2019-09-11T16:43:43.633" LastActivityDate="2019-09-11T16:43:43.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11742" CreationDate="2019-09-14T10:14:45.417" Score="3" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/sayersdl-treasury/sayersdl-treasury-00-h-dir/sayersdl-treasury-00-h.html#Page_191&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker&lt;/a&gt;’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was collected in &lt;em&gt;Lord Peter Views the Body&lt;/em&gt; (Gollancz, 1928). In this extract the characters are playing a game of bridge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Whatever has induced you, my dear boy,’ said Colonel Marchbanks, ‘to take up with that very objectionable fellow Melville?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;Diamonds&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Lord Peter. ‘Do you find him so, really?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Perfectly dreadful man,’ said the Hon. Frederick Arbuthnot. ‘&lt;strong&gt;Hearts&lt;/strong&gt;. What did you want to go and get him a room here for? This used to be a quite decent club.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Two clubs?’ said Sir Impey Biggs, who had been ordering a whisky, and had only caught the last word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘No, no, one heart.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘I beg your pardon. Well, partner, how about &lt;strong&gt;spades&lt;/strong&gt;? Perfectly good suit.’ &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;Pass&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said the Colonel. ‘I don’t know what the Army’s coming to nowadays.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;No trumps&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Wimsey. ‘It’s all right, children. Trust your Uncle Pete. Come on, Freddy, how many of those hearts are you going to shout for?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘None, the Colonel havin’ let me down so ’orrid,’ said the Hon. Freddy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Cautious blighter. All content? Righty-ho! Bring out your dead, partner. Oh, very pretty indeed. We’ll make it a slam this time.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The puzzle here is to explain the bidding, which I’ve highlighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If Lord Peter and Sir Impey have the cards for a slam, how come they stopped bidding at one no trump?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cdn.acbl.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Laws-of-Rubber-Bridge.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern laws of rubber bridge&lt;/a&gt;, a bid “names both a level, from one to seven, and a denomination”. So Lord Peter’s opening bid of “diamonds” would today be given as “one diamond” and Freddy’s “hearts” as “one heart”. Was it the norm in the 1920s to omit the “one”, as in the dialogue above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By comparison, in Agatha Christie’s &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt; (1936), the bidding is in the modern form, in this respect at least:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There they were well down to it, their faces serious, the bids coming quickly. ‘&lt;strong&gt;One heart&lt;/strong&gt;.’ ‘Pass.’ ‘Three clubs.’ ‘Three spades.’ ‘Four diamonds.’ ‘Double.’ ‘Four hearts.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;One no trump&lt;/strong&gt;’—clear and decisive—Mrs. Lorrimer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T18:03:20.627" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T08:55:12.917" Title="Explain the bidding in ‘The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker’" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;dorothy-l-sayers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11724" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-14T10:59:33.730" Score="3" ViewCount="844" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem 'My Mother at Sixty-six' by Kamala Surayya, the poet ends the &quot;prose&quot; saying &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;all I did was smile and smile and smile....&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various critical interpretations as to what does the over-usage of the word &quot;smile&quot; mean, some say it is because she wanted to hide her feelings of sadness, while some say she was out of words. Reading the poem, I think she is trying to exaggerate in a sense, by over-using the word smile. Can you interpret for me in that way? Also, are all critical interpretations valid?&#xA;Here's the complete poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Driving from my parent’s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  home to Cochin last Friday&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  morning, I saw my mother,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  beside me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  doze, open mouthed, her face&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ashen like that&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of a corpse and realised with pain&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that she &lt;strong&gt;thought away&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  looked but soon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  put that &lt;strong&gt;thought away&lt;/strong&gt;, and&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  looked out at young&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  trees sprinting, the merry children &#xA;  spilling&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  out of their homes, but after the &#xA;  airport’s&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  security check, standing a few yards&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  away, I looked again at her, wan, pale&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  as a late winter’s moon and felt that old&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  familiar ache, my childhood’s fear,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  but all I said was, see you soon, Amma,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  all I did was smile and smile and smile......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wanted to ask about the usage of putting the thought away twice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7760" OwnerDisplayName="Rew" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T11:37:28.493" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T15:01:50.290" Title="Repetition of &quot;smile&quot; in Kamala Surayya's 'My Mother at Sixty-six'" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;kamala-surayya&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11725" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11726" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" Score="0" Body="Kamala Surayya (1934–2009), Indian poet, novelist, and short story writer; also known by her pen name Madhavikutty and married name Kamala Das." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T11:41:33.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11727" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11728" CreationDate="2019-09-14T13:27:44.240" Score="13" ViewCount="1847" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have seen a postcard with a quote &quot;You can achieve a lot with hate, but even more with love&quot;, signed &quot;Shakespeare&quot;, in a French bookshop. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is not exact, because I have translated it back from French. The original is “On peut faire beaucoup avec la haine, mais encore plus avec l'amour” (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://evene.lefigaro.fr/citation/peut-faire-beaucoup-haine-encore-amour-6575.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would you know where it comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7759" LastEditorUserId="7759" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T18:42:33.887" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T14:25:42.870" Title="What is the source of &quot;You can achieve a lot with hate, but even more with love&quot; (Shakespeare?)" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11727" CreationDate="2019-09-14T13:46:03.357" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you say the quote isn't exact, the best I can remember is the following from &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;strong&gt;emphasis mine&lt;/strong&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Here's much to do with hate, but more with love&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O any thing, of nothing first create!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  O heavy lightness! serious vanity!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This love feel I, that feel no love in this.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dost thou not laugh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above text is from Act 1 Scene 1. Romeo says this after he comes to the place where the Montagues and Capulets' servants had been fighting. The fight, he says, is more about love than it is about hatred. Even though they are representing hatred by fighting with each other, they are doing so out of the love and loyalty they have for their respective masters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-14T14:22:51.100" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T14:22:51.100" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11724" CreationDate="2019-09-14T14:52:40.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Thought away&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The duplication of “thought away” is a mistake in your edition of the poem. The line should read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That she was as old as she looked, but soon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example, Mary Ann Dasgupta, ed. (1978), &lt;em&gt;Hers: Indian Perspectives&lt;/em&gt;, page 29, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4kqjuarqYiIC&amp;amp;q=%22That+she+was+as+old+as+she+looked,+but+soon%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available in Google Books “snippet view”&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know where the mistaken edition comes from, but it seems quite widespread. The mistaken version of the line makes no sense, which ought to be a clue that something went wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Are all interpretations valid?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not keen on this way of putting it, because something is either “valid” or not. This is fine when you’re talking about mathematical proofs, but interpretations of poetry aren’t binary, black-and-white, in that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it’s better to ask about an interpretation &lt;em&gt;how convincing it is&lt;/em&gt; (that is, how much sense it makes and to what extent is it backed up with evidence from the text), and &lt;em&gt;how useful it is&lt;/em&gt; (that is, how much it helps you understand and appreciate the text).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this light, one interpretation can certainly be more convincing, or more useful, than another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretations&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is trying to exaggerate in a sense, by over-using the word smile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the speaker is trying to exaggerate, this means that she didn’t smile very much, but is trying to give someone the false impression that she smiled a lot. But who is she trying to deceive? In the “smile and smile and smile” line, the speaker does not seem to be talking to anyone other than the reader of the poem. But if she is trying to deceive the reader about how much she smiled, what else might she be trying to deceive the reader about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a general problem of interpretations that suppose narration to be unreliable: once you start to consider the possibility that the narrator is not always telling the reader the truth, then it is hard to know where to stop. For this reason most readers prefer not to entertain the possibility unless the text is very clear about it. (I wrote about this problem in more detail in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5670/3003&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She wanted to hide her feelings of sadness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She wanted to hide her feeling of sadness &lt;em&gt;from her mother&lt;/em&gt;, not from the reader of the poem. But the “smile and smile and smile” line is addressed to the reader, not to her mother. So this interpretation does not explain the repetition of “smile”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was out of words. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can imagine the speaker not knowing what to say to her mother, because her thoughts are sad and she does not want to say anything in case she gives herself away, so all she can do is smile, and the repetition of “smile” suggests how long this went on.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;(My own interpretation.) The repetition conveys how difficult the speaker found it to smile. She feels “that old familiar ache, my childhood’s fear” (that is, the fear that her mother will die), but she does not want to reveal this fear to her mother, so she smiles instead. But smiling is hard when it does not come naturally from one’s emotion, and so she has to consciously tell herself over and over to smile, in case her concentration should lapse and her feelings reveal themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-09-14T14:52:40.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11727" CreationDate="2019-09-14T19:48:30.560" Score="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;strong&gt;Émile Montégut&lt;/strong&gt;’s translation of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Roméo. — Hélas! pourquoi faut-il que l’amour, dont la vue est toujours couverte d’un bandeau, puisse sans yeux trouver le chemin qui mène à ses caprices? Où allons-nous dîner? — Hélas de moi! — Quelle querelle aviez-vous ici tout à l’heure? mais non, ne me la racontez pas; car j’ai tout appris. &lt;strong&gt;On peut faire beaucoup avec la haine, mais encore plus avec l’amour.&lt;/strong&gt; O amour &#xA;  querelleur! O haine aimante! O toute chose d’abord créée de rien! O lourde légèreté! sérieuse vanité! chaos informe de formes harmonieuses au regard! plume de plomb! fumée brillante! feu de glace! santé malade! sommeil toujours &#xA;  éveillé qui est ce qu’il n’est pas! voilà l’amour que je ressens, et pourtant je n’y sens pas d’amour. Est-ce que tu ne ris pas? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Émile Montégut (1866). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/uvrescompltesd03shak/page/304&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oeuvres complètes de Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, p. 304&lt;/a&gt;. Paris: Hachette.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is the speech from Act I Scene I that is quoted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11728/3003&quot;&gt;CinCout’s answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“On peut faire beaucoup avec la haine” is a poor translation of the original “Here’s much to do with hate”. In this line, Romeo means “this situation [that is, the brawl between the Montagues and Capulets] is caused to a great extent by hate” but the line also puns on “to-do” meaning “an (unwarranted) uproar, dispute, or fracas” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Romeo is speaking in the riddling mood now upon him. He means that the fray has much to do with the hate between the rival houses, yet affects him more, inasmuch as his Rosaline is of the Capulet family; that what has just passed has had reference to the animosity which divides the two factions, and has also shown him the anxious affection felt on his account by his father and Benvolio. To the latter he refers where he says, “This love that thou hast shown,” etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke (1868). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playseditedannot03shakuoft/page/146&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plays of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume III, p. 147&lt;/a&gt;. London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are three better translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il y a ici largement place pour la haine, mais plus encore pour l’amour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Benjamin Laroche (1856).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il y a bien à faire avec la haine, mais plus encore avec l’amour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;François Guizot (1864).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ici on a beaucoup à faire avec la haine, mais plus encore avec l’amour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;François-Victor Hugo (1868).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guizot and Hugo managed to preserve the pun: “à faire” sounds like “affaire” meaning “incident”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T14:25:42.870" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T14:25:42.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11731" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-15T03:36:29.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T03:36:29.437" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T03:36:29.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11732" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-15T03:36:29.437" Score="0" Body="For questions about &quot;The Wind-up Bird Chronicle&quot;, a novel by Haruki Murakami which was first published in three parts in Japanese in 1994-1995.. Use with the [haruki-murakami] and [japanese-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="5526" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T08:23:05.660" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T08:23:05.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11733" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-15T03:38:25.360" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T03:38:25.360" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T03:38:25.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11734" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-15T03:38:25.360" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Haruki Murakami (e.g. Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), or his life as a writer. If asking about a specific Murakami work, use this author tag as well as the individual work tag (or [short-stories] or [poetry] if it's too short to have its own tag) and [japanese-literature] if the story was first written in Japanese." OwnerUserId="5526" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T08:24:18.590" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T08:24:18.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11735" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11739" CreationDate="2019-09-15T10:17:24.503" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been reading &lt;em&gt;Kipps&lt;/em&gt; by H. G. Wells, and I came across this sentence, which I am having trouble understanding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They &lt;em&gt;(the protagonist Kipps and his friend Sid)&lt;/em&gt; proceeded to the question of how two accomplished Hurons might most satisfactorily spend the morning. &lt;strong&gt;Manifestly their line lay straight along the lane to the sea.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite get what Wells means by &quot;their line lay straight along the lane to the sea&quot;. What does &quot;line&quot; mean in this context? And to whom is the pronoun &quot;their&quot; referring? The Hurons or Kipps and Sid? I am not a native speaker of English so if anyone can help shed some light on this, I'd really appreciate it. Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T10:18:47.793" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T16:44:35.597" Title="What did H. G. Wells mean by &quot;Manifestly their line lay straight along the lane to the sea&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;kipps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-15T13:50:50.610" Score="2" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve been a fan of Neruda for a while now. In his &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Sonnet-LXVI:-I-Do-Not-Love-You-Except-Because-I-Love-You&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet LXVI: I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You&lt;/a&gt;, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maybe January light will consume&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart with its cruel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ray, stealing my key to true calm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand these verses. Especially why does he mention January specifically? And what does he mean by January light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7768" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T14:07:01.803" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T23:33:49.593" Title="What does Neruda mean when he says ‘Maybe January light will consume My heart with its cruel Ray.’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;pablo-neruda&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11737" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11738" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" Score="0" Body="&quot;Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul&quot; (1905), a novel by H. G. Wells. Use with the [h-g-wells] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T15:01:38.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11735" CreationDate="2019-09-15T16:44:35.597" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyandot_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hurons&lt;/a&gt; are a native American nation. In context, it seems that Kipps and his friends have been accustomed to play at being Hurons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He set himself to whistle a peculiarly penetrating arrangement of three notes supposed by the boys of the Hastings Academy and himself and Sid Pornick, for no earthly reason whatever, to be the original &lt;strong&gt;Huron&lt;/strong&gt; war-cry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can guess that the boys have been reading historical fiction set in America, for example the hugely popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_of_the_Mohicans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last of the Mohicans&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by James Fenimore Cooper, and they have been playing at aspects of Huron life described therein. So the “two accomplished Hurons” are Kipps and Sid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Manifestly” means “clearly”; “their” refers to Kipps and Sid; and “line” means “track, course, direction” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). So the meaning of the passage is that if Kipps and Sid are to play at being Hurons, their best course would be to go down the lane to the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-09-15T16:44:35.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-15T22:31:06.877" Score="8" ViewCount="1078" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prince Hamlet describes his fear of death in poetic phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be or not to be, that is the question: ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;              To die, to sleep;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To sleep, perchance to dream—aye, there's the rub:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Must give us pause.     (III.i.64, 72–76)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He even claims that nobody has knowledge of what may come after death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that the dread of something after death,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The undiscovered country, from whose bourn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No traveller returns&lt;/strong&gt;, puzzles the will,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And makes us rather bear those ills we have,&#xA;Than fly to others that &lt;strong&gt;we know not of&lt;/strong&gt;.     (III.i.86–90)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-3-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young prince has good reason to believe that the soul lives after death. He does know somewhat what dreams may comes for a traveler has returned from that undiscovered country, his father, King Hamlet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ghost says he will soon be tormented until the crimes of his life are purged away. The ghost is also forbidden from telling the conditions of his torment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ghost of King Hamlet:&lt;/em&gt; I am thy father's spirit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And for the day confined to fast in fires,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are burnt and purged away. &lt;strong&gt;But that I am forbid&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To tell the secrets of my prison-house,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I could a tale unfold whose lightest word&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood   (I.v.14–21)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-1-scene-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1, Scene 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If young Hamlet believes himself to be pure of heart and who has never committed a crime against anyone, then he should not fear the torments his father's spirit endures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So why would Prince Hamlet fear death?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="679" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T05:58:22.587" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T05:58:22.587" Title="Why would Hamlet fear suicide if he knew of life after death?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11740" CreationDate="2019-09-16T02:26:00.197" Score="12" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Because suicide is a mortal sin&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Church, suicide is a sin against God, because only God has the right to bring life and decide death. Suiciders didn't receive a Christian burial: they were not allowed to be buried in hallowed ground and there was no mass sung for anyone who committed suicide. They have been excommunicated from the Church and condemned to Hell and since they've &quot;stolen their life&quot; from the Lord, their goods were often confiscated. &lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://justhistoryposts.com/2017/07/06/reactions-to-suicide-in-medieval-europe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while Hamlet knows that there is life after death (as any Christian at this time would), he is afraid that his fate would be much worse than his father's one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note, that Hamlet does believe in what the Church says regarding salvation and damnation: in the act 3 scene 3, the prince has a chance to kill Claudius, but Hamlet holds his hand: Claudius is praying, so if he was killed at this moment, he would go straight to heaven (even while being a murderer), while his father has to suffer for his sins, because he had no chance to redeem them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T01:22:18.773" LastActivityDate="2019-09-18T01:22:18.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11742" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11723" CreationDate="2019-09-16T07:42:38.927" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The characters are playing &lt;strong&gt;auction bridge&lt;/strong&gt;, not contract bridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Auction bridge was the main form of the game before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Stirling_Vanderbilt#Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harold Stirling Vanderbilt&lt;/a&gt; invented contract bridge in 1925. Vanderbilt’s rules quickly swept the bridge-playing world, but this was a little too late for ‘The Unprincipled Affair of the Practical Joker’, which was first published under the title ‘Beyond the Reach of the Law’ in &lt;em&gt;Pearson’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt; vol. 61 (February 1926).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In auction bridge, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#overtrick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;overtricks&lt;/a&gt; are scored &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#belowtheline&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;below the line&lt;/a&gt; and count towards &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;game&lt;/a&gt;, and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#slam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slam&lt;/a&gt; scores a bonus whether it was bid or not. This means that there is no incentive for a partnership to carry on bidding after they have won the auction: their score will not be improved by bidding and making a higher contract, and of course a higher contract has a higher risk of going &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_contract_bridge_terms#down&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;down&lt;/a&gt;. This explains why Lord Peter and Sir Impey stopped the bidding at one no trump even though they had the cards for a slam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The omission of “one” from the characters’ bids is not so easy to explain. My theory is that this form of bid is a survival from the game of &lt;strong&gt;ordinary bridge&lt;/strong&gt;, which was the only form of the game before the invention of auction bridge in 1905. In ordinary bridge, there is no bidding: trumps are chosen by the dealer, or, at the dealer’s option, by the dealer’s partner. There is thus no need to specify a level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s an anecdote illustrating the process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rubber is made up of two ladies—a mother and her daughter—and two visitors, who happen to be gentlemen. […] The mother has dealt and examined her hand very carefully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, dear! Let me see! We are eighteen, aren’t we, and the rubber game? Well, if I should happen to leave it to you, dear, and you should just happen to make it no trumps, and we could make the odd trick, we should win the rubber, shouldn’t we? Well, I leave it to you, dear.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;No trumps&lt;/strong&gt;,” said the daughter with alarming alacrity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, how lucky that you could make it!” said mama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Arthur Loring Bruce (1909). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bridgefiendcheer00crow/page/252&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bridge-fiend: A Cheerful Book for Bridge-Whisters&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 252–253&lt;/a&gt;. New York, Moffat, Yard and Company.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The mother’s behaviour here in prompting her partner’s choice is of course an egregious bit of cheating.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you had got used to playing ordinary bridge then when auction bridge came along it might be natural to omit the “one” from opening bids. Here’s an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, Peter, one moment!” [Nellie] whispered. “Look quickly at mamma’s face. When that holy expression comes on it, it always means that she is intending to declare no trumps. So when I’m playing against her, if it’s my turn first I always declare one no trumps, and then she has to declare two. Wait one second, Peter.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;No trumps&lt;/strong&gt;,” said Mrs. Heaton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;E. F. Benson (1922). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/peter___00bensuoft/page/6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Peter&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 7–8&lt;/a&gt;. London: Cassell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage the discussion of “two no trumps” shows that the game must be auction bridge. Mrs. Heaton most likely began her bridge career playing ordinary bridge, so that a plain “no trumps” is her habitual form of bid; whereas the younger Nellie has only played auction bridge, so that “one no trumps” is hers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-16T08:55:12.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11670" CreationDate="2019-09-16T21:23:50.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, to begin with you must not think merely of money as the motivator in human existence. Ayn Rand wrote both of these books to promote her own philosophy called objectivism, which is the premise that there is only this world, what you and I see and create it to be.  Her ideas extend throughout the text to the conclusion that man defines his objective reality with his own individualistic expression of his ego. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both men were heroic archetypes in a more modern setting; they both were leaders who were handsome, charming, and went after the most exclusive women.  In a way the characters juxtapose one another in that one desires money and perhaps status, whereas the other desires expression of his inner genius regardless of money, prestige, or achievement. Yet, on the other hand, they are moreso individualistic parallels of the same character type with the same philosophical outlook on life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They both express the value of their ego in the material world, one with money and business brilliance, and the other with architectural genius.  They both gain fulfillment of their passions and purpose with expression of themselves in the material realm, albeit with different modes of expression, yet still with the same resultant effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7777" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2019-09-17T04:11:05.540" LastActivityDate="2019-09-17T04:11:05.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11744" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12079" CreationDate="2019-09-17T09:27:11.503" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;Federico Garcia Lorca's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gypsy_Ballads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romancero Gitano&lt;/em&gt;, usually translated as &lt;em&gt;Gypsy Ballads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, is a collection of poems, about which Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the poems deal with the Romani people (gypsies) and their culture, but only as a theme used to carry the larger message that the poet was trying to convey. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a highly stylised imitation of the ballads and poems that were still being told throughout the Spanish countryside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Are the poems just &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the Romani people, or are they imitations (or even translations?) of actual Romani ballads?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2018/06/06/sleepwalking-ballad/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of them&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Sleepwalking Ballad&amp;quot; as translated by Kirkland and Maurer, and it mentions a &amp;quot;gypsy girl&amp;quot; but I can't tell if the poem could have come from Romani culture itself or if it just happens to feature one of the Romani people as a character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the backstory behind these poems? Were they inspired by Romani literature in any form?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T09:20:07.263" Title="Are Lorca's &quot;Gypsy Ballads&quot; adapted from, or inspired by, traditional Romani songs?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-17T10:59:15.923" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Man He Killed’ (1902) was published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/firsttimeslaughin00harduoft/page/186&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time’s Laughingstocks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1909):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “Had he and I but met&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      By some old ancient inn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We should have sat us down to wet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Right many a nipperkin!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “But ranged as infantry,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And staring face to face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I shot at him as he at me.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And killed him in his place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “I shot him dead because—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Because he was my foe.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Just so: my foe of course he was;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      That’s clear enough; although&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “He thought he’d ’list, perhaps,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Off-hand like—just as I—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was out of work—had sold his traps—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      No other reason why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;    “Yes; quaint and curious war is!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      You shoot a fellow down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You’d treat if met where any bar is.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Or help to half-a-crown.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this poem about? What poetic and rhetorical techniques does Hardy use? What do we learn about the character and origins of the speaker? Is “old ancient” a pleonasm? What is the significance of “nipperkin”? Does “war is” rhyme with “bar is”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T12:38:14.590" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T12:38:14.590" Title="Thomas Hardy’s “The Man He Killed”" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8935" CreationDate="2019-09-18T07:32:28.557" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was dedicated to his mother. And as a motherless daughter, I can relate to every word in this song.  My mom passed away in 30-3-2017 and I used to listen to &amp;quot;One Last Goodbye&amp;quot; on repeat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe his relationship with his mother was strong like mine, many people will think &amp;quot;it doesn't feel like it's talking about motherly love&amp;quot; but take it from someone who lost her mother, it does talk about motherly love. I can feel every word and relate to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7782" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T22:47:51.447" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T22:47:51.447" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-18T10:47:15.420" Score="5" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the many memorable pieces of wordplay in &lt;a href=&quot;http://mrkingrocks.com/files/phantom.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is when the heroes meet Dr Dischord and his assistant, the awful DYNNE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You mean you've never met the awful DYNNE before?&quot; said Dr. Dischord in a surprised tone. &quot;Why, I thought everyone had. When you're playing in your room and making a great amount of noise, what do they tell you to stop?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;That awful din,&quot; admitted Milo.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;When the neighbors are playing their radio too loud, late at night, what do you wish they'd turn down?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The awful din,&quot; answered Tock.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;When the street on your block is being repaired and the pneumatic drills are working all day, what does everyone complain of?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The dreadful row,&quot; volunteered the Humbug brightly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;The dreadful RAUW,&quot; cried the anguished DYNNE, &quot;was my grandfather. He perished in the great silence epidemic of 1712.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, does &quot;the great silence epidemic of 1712&quot; refer to?&lt;/strong&gt; Did something significant happen in that year which led to a reduction of noise in the world? (Trying to recall this line from memory, I misremembered it as 1918, which would have made sense as the end of a world war would surely have reduced noise levels.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-18T10:52:23.253" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T11:01:55.347" Title="What was the Great Silence Epidemic of 1712?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11749" CreationDate="2019-09-19T22:13:10.767" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;For decades this short story has been stuck in my head. We read it in highschool English class once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I remember it, it was about a boy leaving his home to encounter a man who was about to hang himself. I think the man is standing on a chair and preparing the ordeal, when the boy meets him. The boy doesn't understand the situation, so he starts a conversation.&#xA;Not sure how the story ends...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it as a very beautiful short story, but haven't managed to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the word 'penny' was involved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7787" LastEditorUserId="5526" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T10:48:19.673" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T19:39:21.493" Title="Trying to find: Short story: Boy meets a man who is about to hang himself" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11748" CreationDate="2019-09-19T22:18:55.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it. Strangely enough I never googled it like I did today, using completely different words. Alan Sillitoe, 'On Saturday Afternoon'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A prevalent theme was also 'feeling black'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is narrated by a teen remembering when he was younger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a kid, he followed a guy from the neighborhood who told everyone he was going to hang himself when asked about the rope he was carrying.&#xA;Being curious, he snuck into the guy's apartment, even going as far as trying to help the guy get it done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the passage mentioning a penny:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Shut  the  door,”  he  asked  me,  and  I  did  as  I  was  told.  “Ye’re  a  good  lad  for  your  age,”  he said  to  me  while  I  sucked  my  thumb,  and  he  felt  in  his  pockets  and  pulled  out  all  that  was inside,  throwing  the  handful  of  bits  and  bobs  on  the  table:  fag-packet  and  peppermints,  a  pawnticket,  an  old  comb,  and  a  few  coppers.  He  picked  out  a  penny  and  gave  it  to  me,  saying:  “Now listen  ter  me,  young  ‘un.  I’m  going  to  ‘ang  messen,  and  when  I’m  swinging  I  want  you  to  gi’  this chair  a  bloody  good  kick  and  push  it  away.  All  right?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7787" LastEditorUserId="7787" LastEditDate="2019-09-20T19:39:21.493" LastActivityDate="2019-09-20T19:39:21.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-20T23:42:34.487" Score="4" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to &lt;strong&gt;Cardinal Vitori&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Queen Margherita&lt;/strong&gt; and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was able to find Queen Margherita - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margherita_of_Savoy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margherita of Savoy&lt;/a&gt;. The same time period as described in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for Cardinal Vitori I was only able to google &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loreto_Vittori&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loreto Vittori&lt;/a&gt;, who was an Italian castrato and composer and not a Cardinal and lived far before 1920s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it a fictional character thought up by F. Scott Fitzgerald?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7792" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T06:24:51.087" Title="Was there a real person for Cardinal Vitori mentioned in This Side of Paradise of F. Scott Fitzgerald?" Tags="&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11751" CreationDate="2019-09-21T06:24:51.087" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=WZslGpJEmE0C&amp;amp;pg=PA316&amp;amp;lpg=PA316&amp;amp;dq=Cardinal%20Vitori&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=rMsNyQ5Q0O&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2Nl0vTjDXNIRxjfsxZ08eRxWsqEQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi5muX3nuHkAhXRQ0EAHRhSAIYQ6AEwAnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Cardinal%20Vitori&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Cambridge edition&lt;/a&gt;, with explanatory notes by James L W West III and Lynn Setzer specifically notes that although Margherita di Savoia was a real person, Queen of Italy from 1878 to 1900 and Queen Dowager thereafter, Cardinal Vitori was a fictitious character. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not completely rule out his character being in some way based on a real person.  However &lt;a href=&quot;http://english.la.psu.edu/faculty-staff/jlw14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James LW West III &lt;/a&gt;is &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Professor of English, Emeritus, at Pennsylvania State University. He is a biographer, book historian, and scholarly editor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Lynn Setzer is a former student he credited with much of the historical research, so the notes seem to be a work of some scholarship. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-09-21T06:24:51.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13625" CreationDate="2019-09-22T00:12:00.950" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;How would the author of &lt;em&gt;The Rise of Silas Lapham&lt;/em&gt; have pronounced the last name of his title character? Please provide supporting evidence for your answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2280" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T10:43:36.693" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T12:39:54.927" Title="How to pronounce Silas Lapham's last name" Tags="&lt;william-dean-howells&gt;&lt;the-rise-of-silas-lapham&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3756" CreationDate="2019-09-22T09:31:55.047" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it’s quite possible that the story, as presented, is close to what Christie intended. However, she may have been influenced into omitting an epilogue that unmasked the actual killer. Let’s suppose that hundreds of years have passed and a present day expedition unearths a written confession in which the real killer explains what really happened. Logically, the only written confession could come from Hori, the scribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being ambitious, clever and more resourceful than any of Imhotep’s family, Hori could have manipulated the weak Yahmose into committing the murders for him. Hori killed Yahmose in order to cover his own tracks and to save the unsuspecting Renisenb. What better a way to influence the now broken Imhotep than by marrying his only surviving daughter and inheriting the holdings of the Ka priest. They all probably did live happily ever after!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is pure conjecture, but it would be in keeping with other Christie “surprise endings”: for example, the confessions at the end of &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Roger Ackroyd&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/em&gt;. Again, can’t prove it, but it would seem to be in Christie’s style to employ a similar ending...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7797" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-22T16:13:30.813" LastActivityDate="2019-09-22T16:13:30.813" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11758" CreationDate="2019-09-23T09:58:03.860" Score="5" ViewCount="623" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this story was by Kipling -- it's set in India, during the British Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe a few dozen pages in length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An Indian man had had a successful career, as a ruler or a high adviser/administrator, maybe had a medal, was semi-famous&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Retired, left home, set out to become a holy man or hermit (which the author says is traditional in Indian society in the 3rd phase of life)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leaves the city unnoticed/unrecognised (contrasted with his previous fame)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eventually finds an abandoned spot -- with a room, a little temple or something -- at the top of a hill in the country-side&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The local villagers bring him alms food and he stays there, becomes their local holy man&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The local animals become unafraid of him and visit&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One night he's awoken by a lot of animals arriving&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He somehow knows there's an earthquake and they all (i.e. he and the animals) race off down the hill-side&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They pass through the village, which is lower down the hill, wake everyone up, all the villagers leave the village too, gather on the other side of the valley&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hillside falls down, obliterating the village (but the villagers are safe)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man then dies (of old age, basically) and the villagers resume their life&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7801" LastEditorUserId="5526" LastEditDate="2019-09-23T14:19:54.660" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T14:19:54.660" Title="An Indian man retires to become a hermit" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11757" CreationDate="2019-09-23T10:29:24.173" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you are looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hermitary.com/literature/kipling.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Miracle of Purun Bhagat&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An Indian man had had a successful career, as a ruler or a high adviser/administrator, maybe had a medal, was semi-famous&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His name was Purun Dass, and he was the &quot;Prime Minister of one of the semi-independent native States in the north-western part of the country.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Retired, left home, set out to become a holy man or hermit (which the author says is traditional in Indian society in the 3rd phase of life)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Leaves the city unnoticed/unrecognised (contrasted with his previous fame)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;he walked through the city gates, an antelope skin and brass-handled crutch under his arm, and a begging-bowl of polished brown coco-de-mer in his hand, barefoot, alone, with eyes cast on the ground&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Eventually finds an abandoned spot -- with a room, a little temple or something -- at the top of a hill in the country-side&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;One evening he crossed the highest pass he had met till then -- it had been a two-day's climb -- and came out on a line of snow-peaks that banded all the horizon -- mountains from fifteen to twenty thousand feet high, looking almost near enough to hit with a stone, though they were fifty or sixty miles away. The pass was crowned with dense, dark forest -- deodar, walnut, wild cherry, wild olive, and wild pear, but mostly deodar, which is the Himalayan cedar; and under the shadow of the deodars stood a deserted shrine to Kali-- who is Durga, who is Sitala, who is sometimes worshipped against the smallpox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purun Dass swept the stone floor clean, smiled at the grinning statue, made himself a little mud fireplace at the back of the shrine, spread his antelope skin on a bed of fresh pine-needles, tucked his bairagi -- his brass-handled crutch -- under his armpit, and sat down to rest.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The local villagers bring him alms food and he stays there, becomes their local holy man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Then all the housewives of the village said, &quot;Think you he will stay with us?&quot; and each did her best to cook the most savoury meal for the Bhagat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The local animals become unafraid of him and visit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Even in populated India a man cannot a day sit still before the wild things run over him as though he were a rock; and in that wilderness very soon the wild things, who knew Kali's Shrine well, came back to look at the intruder. The langurs, the big gray-whiskered monkeys of the Himalayas, were, naturally, the first, for they are alive with curiosity; and when they had upset the begging-bowl, and rolled it round the floor, and tried their teeth on the brass-handled crutch, and made faces at the antelope skin, they decided that the human being who sat so still was harmless. At evening, they would leap down from the pines, and beg with their hands for things to eat, and then swing off in graceful curves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the monkeys came the barasingh, that big deer which is like our red deer, but stronger. He wished to rub off the velvet of his horns against the cold stones of Kali's statue, and stamped his feet when he saw the man at the shrine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterward, the barasingh brought his doe and fawn -- gentle things that mumbled on the holy man's blanket -- or would come alone at night, his eyes green in the fire-flicker, to take his share of fresh walnuts. At last, the musk-deer, the shyest and almost the smallest of the deerlets, came, too, her big rabbity ears erect; even brindled, silent mushick-nabha must needs find out what the light in the shrine meant, and drop out her moose-like nose into Purun Bhagat's lap, coming and going with the shadows of the fire.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One night he's awoken by a lot of animals arriving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It was in the black heart of the night, the rain drumming like a thousand drums, that he was roused by a plucking at his blanket, and, stretching out, felt the little hand of a langur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deer's antlers clashed as he strode into the shrine, clashed against the grinning statue of Kali. He lowered them in Purun Bhagat's direction and stamped uneasily, hissing through his half-shut nostrils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The barasingh backed unwillingly as Purun Bhagat drove a pine torch deep into the flame, twirling it till it was well lit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He heard, though he could not see, the langurs pressing about him, and behind them the uhh! uhh! of Sona. The rain matted his long white hair into ropes; the water splashed beneath his bare feet, and his yellow robe clung to his frail old body, but he stepped down steadily, leaning against the barasingh.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He somehow knows there's an earthquake and they all (i.e. he and the animals) race off down the hill-side&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&quot;Up and out!&quot; cried Purun Bhagat; and he did not know his own voice, for it was years since he had spoken aloud to a man. &quot;The hill falls! The hill is falling! Up and out, oh, you within!&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They pass through the village, which is lower down the hill, wake everyone up, all the villagers leave the village too, gather on the other side of the valley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&quot;Across the valley and up the next hill!&quot; shouted Purun Bhagat. &quot;Leave none behind! We follow!&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The hillside falls down, obliterating the village (but the villagers are safe)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;There was a sigh in the air that grew to a mutter, and a mutter that grew to a roar, and a roar that passed all sense of hearing, and the hillside on which the villagers stood was hit in the darkness, and rocked to the blow.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2019-09-23T10:29:24.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11760" CreationDate="2019-09-24T15:09:15.340" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Patrick O'Brian's &lt;em&gt;Master and Commander&lt;/em&gt;, during the encounter with the &lt;em&gt;Cacafuego&lt;/em&gt;, Aubrey says the following to Ellis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Cut along to the galley. Tell the cook to put all his dirty pans and coppers upside down.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a literal command, or some kind of nautical jargon? In either case, what is the purpose of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7806" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-24T15:14:34.390" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T09:38:21.327" Title="In Master and Commander, why is the cook told to put his pans upside down?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;master-and-commander&gt;&lt;patrick-obrian&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11759" CreationDate="2019-09-24T21:56:56.410" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full passage is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Cut along to the galley. Tell the cook to put all his dirty pans and coppers upside-down. Pullings, Babbington, stop the firing. Boom off, boom off. Back topsails. Mr Dillon, let the starboard watch black their faces in the galley as soon as I have spoken to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a literal instruction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The men of the starboard watch are to go to the place where the pans are, the galley, and once there they will use the soot from the bottom of the pans to blacken their faces. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T09:38:21.327" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T09:38:21.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11761" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11762" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" Score="0" Body="&quot;Master and Commander&quot; (1969), a novel by Patrick O'Brian, the first in the &quot;Aubrey–Maturin&quot; series. Use with the [patrick-obrian] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:13:58.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11763" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11764" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" Score="0" Body="Patrick O'Brian (1914–2000), English novelist, best known for the &quot;Aubrey–Maturin&quot; series of historical novels." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T08:15:48.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T14:45:11.000" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is, on the whole, a realistic novel which seeks to portray the misery of poverty in the deep south. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the ending very much took me by surprise. Anse, the father of the Bundren family, borrows some shovels from a mysterious house. Later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; He announces to his family that the woman from whom he borrowed the shovels is his new wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: further spoilers follow which I have not hidden in tags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several unanswered questions with this ending. Most pressing: who is this woman? Have she and Anse been corresponding and if so, for how long? If not, why has she suddenly agreed to marry Anse? For that matter, since Anse is relatively old and portrayed as lazy and selfish, why would anyone agree to marry him at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems a rather unsatisfactory close to proceedings: why did Faulkner choose to end this way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T14:45:11.000" Title="Who is the mysterious stranger at the end of Faulkner's &quot;As I Lay Dying&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;&lt;as-i-lay-dying&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-09-25T15:32:14.270" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;There was a a humorous piece by Stephen Leacock (I remember reading it as a child from a late seventies Reader’s Digest) inanely titled either “How to kill a spider” or “How to make a board” or some such. It described how the author made a wooden board to squash small crawly creatures. Have been unsuccessfully trying to locate it for several years ... internet searches and searches in project Gutenberg and like have revealed nothing so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7807" LastActivityDate="2019-09-25T15:32:14.270" Title="Looking for a story/essay by Stephen Leacock" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11768" CreationDate="2019-09-26T12:56:51.347" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered this following sentence while reading the second chapter of H. G. Wells' novel &lt;em&gt;Kipps&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was an irascible, energetic little man, with hairy hands, for the most part under his coat tails, a long, shiny, bald head, a pointed, aquiline nose a little askew, and a neatly trimmed beard. He walked lightly and with a confident jerk, and he was given to humming. &lt;strong&gt;He had added to exceptional business &quot;push,&quot; bankruptcy under the old dispensation, and judicious matrimony&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not so clear what this sentence means. What exactly does &quot;the old dispensation&quot; refer to, and what role does the notion of &quot;judicious matrimony&quot; play in the context of this sentence? I'm not a native speaker of English so it's possible I'm not understanding some subtle language play, or perhaps some allusion to certain social context is lost on me. Could anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T13:27:07.897" Title="What does H. G. Wells mean by &quot;He had added to exceptional business 'push', bankruptcy under the old dispensation, and judicious matrimony.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;kipps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11767" CreationDate="2019-09-26T13:27:07.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You should parse this as &lt;em&gt;bankruptcy under the old dispensation&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;judicious matrimony&lt;/em&gt; were added to &lt;em&gt;business &quot;push&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Judicious matrimony&lt;/em&gt; probably means he married somebody with lots of money — i.e., somebody he chose &quot;judiciously&quot; (even though by the dictionary definition, choosing her &quot;judiciously&quot; doesn't mean that he chose her because of her money; there's some irony here),  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bankruptcy under the old dispensation&lt;/em&gt; probably means that there had been a recent change in bankruptcy laws to make things harder for people going bankrupt, and the older rules applied to his bankruptcy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2019-09-26T13:27:07.897" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2019-09-28T07:56:29.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There be fools alive I wis;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Silvered over and so was this;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that there are many fools who are reputed wise because the are silvered over (have grey hair, representing wisdom with age). &quot;The fire seven times tried&quot; - this means that silver was tested by fire 7 times to get its color and lustre. When making judgement,we should also think something through 7 times to make an accurate decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some there be that shadows kiss;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such have but a Shadows bliss;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that some people only run after things that are imaginary and unreal so the happiness that they get is also imaginary and unreal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7826" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-09-28T08:25:11.647" LastActivityDate="2019-09-28T08:25:11.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8401" CreationDate="2019-09-28T09:53:14.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find it extremely difficult to accept most of these types of interpretations. A brief background on myself: I have read the book twice—once as a high school student, and again as an adult in my mid 40s. As a student, I saw things completely different, and in a way much aligned with this form of interpretation. As an adult...not so much. I am a different person, undoubtedly, after serving well over 20 years in the military, and through 3 different wars. In many ways I feel I can relate to Salinger. But it seems to me the more “credentials” someone has, the further into it they seem to read. This may seem like a stereotypical comment to most, I know, but this is not at all what it says to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, this entire book, from start to finish, absolutely screams “death”. Not only death, but that Holden may even be institutionalized for having killed these people himself. I could also see how it may suggest Holden himself is dead, or imagining his own death and how people may react to that. Additionally the “visits” he has with many others somehow in his life could easily be interpreted as them visiting him at his own grave. The way things are written, things like Mr. and Mrs. Spencer “having separate rooms” and while with Mr. Spencer and sitting on his bed which was at one point “hard as a rock” and later sitting back down on his “cement bed”. He references “getting the ax(e)”, “madman stuff” (several times), “supposed to commit suicide if Pencey didn’t win”, and being in a place “not too far from Hollywood”, but getting out when “D.B. was going to drive (him) home next month, maybe”. The phrase “molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young men” can easily be interpreted as his way of comparing that to the mummification process used by the Egyptians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibilities are endless, but I believe the meaning is right there in plain sight. The emotions he most often exhibits are not the sort that come from someone rationalizing the child to adult transformation. As I said, I can easily relate to Salinger, and given the fact it was written over a ten year span and in close proximity to combat, I can see much of the same transition in the book as I experienced in my own life. I believe he is somehow fixated on death, being dead, or how to reach it. That part only he could could say with certainty. Facing death on a daily basis cannot truly be explained by anyone who has not been there, and I do not care how many pieces of paper hang on the wall behind your desk. Without a shadow of doubt, though it was not understood at the time the book was written and largely dismissed until recent years, this man was suffering from PTSD. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7827" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-09-29T11:50:59.640" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T11:50:59.640" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11775" CreationDate="2019-09-29T05:48:38.503" Score="34" ViewCount="5821" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Fantastic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Light Fantastic&lt;/em&gt; by Terry Pratchett&lt;/a&gt; in English and always interpreted the title as &amp;quot;The Fantastic (adjective) light (noun)&amp;quot;. Mostly because I do not see &amp;quot;Fantastic&amp;quot; as noun. To my surprise the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.martinus.sk/?uItem=652269&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slovak translation&lt;/a&gt; is titled &amp;quot;Ľahká fantastika&amp;quot;, translatable as &amp;quot;The Light (adjective) Fantastic (noun)&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Easy fiction&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The Lightweight Fiction&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is &amp;quot;The Light (adjective) Fantastic (noun)&amp;quot; a correct meaning/translation of the title? If so, does &amp;quot;Fantastic (noun)&amp;quot; here mean fiction?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Investigating this only made me more confused:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_Fantastic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, the title of the book is a quote from &amp;quot;L'Allegro&amp;quot; by John Milton, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/L%27Allegro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there&lt;/a&gt; it is used like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come, and trip it, as you go,&#xA;On the &lt;strong&gt;light fantastic toe&lt;/strong&gt;; And in thy&#xA;right hand lead with thee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is it used there as &amp;quot;The Light (adjective) Fantastic (adjective)&amp;quot;?.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A definition for &amp;quot;Fantastic(noun)&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fantastic#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yields&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;A fanciful or whimsical person.&amp;quot; so could this refer to one of MCs of the book (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rincewind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rincewind&lt;/a&gt;?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3084" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T20:07:01.950" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T20:07:01.950" Title="Meaning/translation of title &quot;The Light Fantastic&quot; by Terry Pratchett" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;discworld&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11771" CreationDate="2019-09-29T09:31:10.623" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a punning reference to the phrase ‘trip the light fantastic’, which means (per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/trip-the-light-fantastic.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Phrase Finder&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dance, especially in an imaginative or 'fantastic' manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase seems to arise from the works of Milton, in &lt;em&gt;Comus&lt;/em&gt; he wrote, as you have already seen,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come, knit hands, and beat the ground,&#xA;In a light fantastic round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;em&gt;L’Allegro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come, and trip it as you go&#xA;On the light fantastic toe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, in 1894, as cited in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trip_the_light_fantastic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Clarke’s B Lawlor and James W Blake included the lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boys and girls together, me and Mamie O'Rourke&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tripped the light fantastic&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the sidewalks of New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as summarised by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/trip_the_light_fantastic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;WordOrigins.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not light that is fantastic, but rather the toe or dance step. Both trip and light refer to the movement of the feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is where the pun comes in, Pratchett uses the phrase to refer to actual ‘light’ that is ‘fantastic’. In this sense it is both the light cast by the red star and the star itself which can be referred to as the ‘fantastic light.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translated title's doubled meaning is therefore a fortuitous co-incidence which preserves the spirit of the original punning reference and is an example of how good translation goes beyond the mere literal substitution of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: It is only fair to add that I am incorrect in my recollection of what the 'light fantastic' actually was in the book, which serves me right for not having read it for several years. As Valorum correctly identifies in their accepted answer,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a rather disappointing purple colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm leaving the references to the red star in, as it still qualifies as a fantastic light, adding to the layers of reference in the title, but it is &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; 'light fantastic'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T14:59:43.810" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11771" CreationDate="2019-09-29T10:50:40.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The light that Pratchett refers to is &lt;em&gt;Octarine&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is defined in the Discworld books as the eighth colour of the spectrum and the colour of magic.  &quot;&lt;em&gt;The Colour Of Magic&lt;/em&gt;&quot; itself being a title of another book in the series.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is fantastic because its existence is part of the Discworld fantasy universe.  Pratchett is very fond of such puns and allusions in his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &lt;em&gt;Light Fantastic&lt;/em&gt; is indeed &lt;em&gt;noun - adjective&lt;/em&gt;, a poetic syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T10:50:40.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11771" CreationDate="2019-09-29T15:52:04.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;And to add yet another facet: &quot;light&quot; as a distinctive qualifier is used in military, such as in the famous &quot;The Charge of the Light Brigade&quot; poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson or &quot;Leichte Kavallerie&quot; (light cavalry), an obscure operette by Franz von Suppé about a dance troup that is these days only known because of its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_j1Spl5RicM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;world famous ouverture&lt;/a&gt;.  So &quot;The Light Fantastic&quot; can also allude to an agile form of fantasy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user7835" LastActivityDate="2019-09-29T15:52:04.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11771" CreationDate="2019-09-29T16:10:44.417" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In-universe the &amp;quot;light fantastic&amp;quot; is an actual, factual thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was no real need for the torches. The Octavo filled the room with a dull, sullen light, which wasn’t strictly light at all but the opposite of light; darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and &lt;strong&gt;what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a rather disappointing purple colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Light Fantastic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pratchett, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18090153-turtle-recall&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discworld Companion&lt;/a&gt; notes that this is &lt;strong&gt;not to be confused with Octarine&lt;/strong&gt; (which is the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Colour of Magic&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) and splits from ordinary light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Light, nature of.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as can be determined, there are now four distinct types of&#xA;light on the Disc. For the sake of discussion they could be called&#xA;common light, meta-light, dark light and ‘the light fantastic’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meta-light is almost an idea rather than a phenomenon. It is the light by which darkness can be seen, and therefore is always available, everywhere. If it didn’t exist, darkness could not be visible. It is widely used in the film industry for shots in caves and mines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The light fantastic is perhaps best evidenced by the dull, sullen light which fills the room where the &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;OCTAVO&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; is kept. &lt;strong&gt;Not strictly light at all but the opposite of light. Darkness is not the opposite of light, it is simply its absence. The light fantastic is the light that lies on the far side of darkness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ordinary light passing through a strong magical field is split into not seven but eight colours, and the eighth – &lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;OCTARINE&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/sub&gt; – is generally associated with things magical.&lt;/strong&gt; It can be described in terms of other colours about as readily as red can be described in terms of green, yellow and blue, but if some description is really insisted on then octarine is a rather disappointing greeny-purple-yellow colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-09-30T12:34:31.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2019-09-30T19:50:40.720" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mama put the poison in Papa's tea because, at that moment, Papa was disappointed at Jaja and Kambili for sinning so he would not offer them &amp;quot;love sips&amp;quot;. The main reason Mama put poison in his tea was to set them free from his hold, as Papa never let them make their own opinions, and made Kambili in a way dependent on him. At this point of the book Jaja and Kambili have grown as people and Mama can see this. That could be another reason for Mama poisoning Papa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7857" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T00:45:40.307" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:45:40.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11777" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11779" CreationDate="2019-10-01T16:30:19.023" Score="4" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having trouble deciphering what appears to be a string of colloquialisms in H. G. Wells' novel &lt;em&gt;Kipps&lt;/em&gt;. The passage in question describes a business owner Mr. Shalford, and it goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was the sort of man who is not only ignorant, but absolutely incapable of English. When he wanted to say he had a sixpenny- &lt;strong&gt;ha'penny longcloth to sell&lt;/strong&gt;, he put it thus to startled customers: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Can DO you one, six half if y' like&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;He always omitted pronouns and articles and so forth; it seemed to him the very essence of the efficiently businesslike. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recognize that these expressions are idiosyncratic to Shalford, and are supposed to give him character. But being a non-native speaker of English I'm having a hard time understanding their meanings. What does Shalford mean by &quot;Can DO you one, six half if y'like&quot;, and is the &quot;ha' penny&quot; supposed to be an abbreviation of &quot;had a sixpenny&quot;? There have been quite a few such colloquial shortenings of sounds in this book up until this point but this is the first one that's giving me any real trouble. Can anyone help? Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:39:04.953" Title="What does H. G. Wells mean by &quot;ha'penny longcloth to sell, he put it thus to startled customers: 'Can DO you one, six half if y' like.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;kipps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11783" CreationDate="2019-10-01T20:13:41.963" Score="8" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading Book III of William Cowper's &lt;em&gt;The Task&lt;/em&gt; today. Lines 252-260:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such was thy wisdom, Newton, childlike sage,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Sagacious reader of the works of God,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And in his word sagacious. Such too thine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Milton, whose genius had angelic wings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And fed on manna. And such thine, in whom&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Our British Themis gloried with just cause,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Immortal Hale, for deep discernment praised,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And sound integrity not more, than famed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      For sanctity of manners undefiled.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newton and Milton are easy of course. But who on earth is Hale? I've searched through Wikipedia for everyone with the surname Hale that Cowper would have known about, and the best match I can find is Sir Matthew Hale - a seventeenth century judge best known today for declaring the impossiblity of marital rape - which is still quite a jump from the first two!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-02T05:06:21.013" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T09:52:18.437" Title="Who is the 'Immortal Hale' in William Cowper's The Task?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;william-cowper&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11777" CreationDate="2019-10-01T20:39:04.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not a native either but I'll hazard a guess.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he wanted to say he had a sixpenny- ha'penny longcloth to sell, he put&#xA;  it thus to startled customers: &quot;Can DO you one, six half if y' like.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, he had some item that cost 6.5 pence (sixpenny-halfpenny). He used &quot;DO&quot; (capitals probably imply some specific intonation, stress) instead of &quot;sell&quot; and &quot;six half&quot; = six and a half. &quot;If y'like&quot; is just &quot;if you like&quot; with reduced &quot;you&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastActivityDate="2019-10-01T20:39:04.953" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11771" CreationDate="2019-10-02T01:07:33.413" Score="3" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's 'The Light(noun) Fantastic(adjective)'&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's how it is used both in Milton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the light (noun) fantastic (adjective) toe (verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and how this construction is generally rendered in English.  Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Brothers (noun) Grimm (adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Brothers (noun) Karamazov (adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean (noun) blue (adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Tale (noun) Dark (adjective) and Grim (adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Murder (noun) most (adverb) foul (adjective)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word order in English isn't actually as strict as people make it out to be, particularly when one is referencing a phrase from older sources-- it used to be somewhat more flexible in that regard.  You will see this (noun) (adjective) construction most commonly in older works and references to them (e.g. Pratchett here is referencing Milton who wrote in 1645), but also occasionally in poetry where it may be used to preserve meter or rhyme.  In both cases it emphasizes the adjective more than the noun-- what's most important is not that this is merely a &lt;em&gt;murder&lt;/em&gt; but rather the &lt;em&gt;foulness&lt;/em&gt; of it, what's important is not mere light but fantasy, etc-- and it is typically only used where the correct attribution is clear through context/lack of other nouns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1415" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T01:07:33.413" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11778" CreationDate="2019-10-02T09:52:18.437" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;James Sambrook appears to agree that you have the correct Hale, in the annotations to his &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=vEcGDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA120&amp;amp;lpg=PA120&amp;amp;dq=%22WILLIAM%20COWPER%22%20%22HALE%22%20-white&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=qW7Od0ztLx&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3K8O8ZiMTkINmKnLR5uLV2eTH-hw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwizp8HUnv3kAhWMRBUIHYsRAHoQ6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22WILLIAM%20COWPER%22%20%22HALE%22%20-white&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Cowper: The Task and Selected Other Poems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;258. Hale: Sir Matthew Hale (1609-76), Chief Justice of the King's Bench, devout Puritan, and able philosophical defender of the Mosaic Account of the creation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mosaic Account of the Creation&lt;/em&gt; is the order of creation as laid out in Genesis, 'Mosaic' denoting the tradition that the first five books of the Bible were written by Moses.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Hale's view of the non-retractability of a wife's consent, we can only hope that Cowper's unmarried state left him in ignorance of the consequences of Hale's doctrine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-10-02T09:52:18.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11736" CreationDate="2019-10-04T11:25:38.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well Neruda was Chilean and Chile is in the southern hemisphere. Therefore January is the hottest month by far and when the sun shines more cruelly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not Chilean but I am from the same latitude in Argentina. As January is the hottest month it is usually the month with the brightest light also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7891" LastActivityDate="2019-10-04T11:25:38.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11791" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-05T17:58:47.370" Score="6" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;A long time I read a story where a young boy accidentally hits a bird (with a stone I think). He runs over to find it and nurses it back to health. It flies away and eventually brings him back some sort of gift (a bag of gold maybe?). A man sees this happen and decides to try the same thing. He hits the bird on purpose and nurses it back to health. However, the bird knew his intentions and did not bring him a gift but instead punished him in some way. I’m not sure where I read this story but I want to know how it ends and I would very much like to find it. Is anybody familiar with it or may have some resource that could help me find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7898" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T18:44:03.350" Title="Children’s story: boy accidentally hits bird with stone and nurses back to health. man hurts it on purpose nurses it back to get gift" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3394" CreationDate="2019-10-06T12:37:46.213" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What would the novel's ending have been like if there was no Liza-Lu? I think she is unnecessarily thrust upon the readers' sympathy. Without Liza-Lu marrying Angel the story would be more elevating and intense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I can read under the surface is that Tess never got rid of the idea that she is impure, and, therefore, unfit for Angel. Hence, before she disappears forever, a pure Liza is tied up with pure Angel. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But from artistic point of view I regard this final part as a serious flaw in the novel. Perhaps, like Charles Dickens, Hardy had the readers' response in mind, for the novel was serialized for a magazine in 1891.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7899" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-06T13:42:53.337" LastActivityDate="2019-10-06T13:42:53.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12206" CreationDate="2019-10-07T20:21:00.937" Score="4" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;, it says that the gods made Gilgamesh to be two-thirds god and one-third man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two thirds god they made him; one third man they made him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modernised Muss-Arnolt translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two-thirds of him are divine, and [one-third of him human,]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20140515201628/http://king-of-heroes.co.uk/the-epic-of-gilgamesh/reginald-campbell-thompson-translation/of-the-tyranny-of-gilgamish-and-the-creation-of-enkidu/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thompson translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is this possible?&lt;/strong&gt; Considering the ancestors of a person, one's genetic proportion of &quot;god&quot; or &quot;human&quot; can only be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyadic_rational&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dyadic rational&lt;/a&gt;, not 1/3 or 2/3. Does it mean he had two-thirds of the attributes of gods and one-third of the attributes of humanity? Does it simply reflect a poor understanding of genetics? Am I overthinking this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T21:08:47.797" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T09:38:35.013" Title="How can Gilgamesh be one-third man and two-thirds god?" Tags="&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="14" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11444" CreationDate="2019-10-08T01:58:17.853" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP assumes that people only address their direct superiors and bosses, or at least people of superior rank, as &quot;sir&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question at Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange assumes the same thing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/87040/star-trek-tos-officer-status/87534#87534&quot;&gt;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/87040/star-trek-tos-officer-status/87534#87534&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP finds an example of Spock calling Dr. McCoy sir in one episode perplexing as Dr. McCoy is not his direct boss nor of higher rank.  Dr. McCoy is the ship's surgeon and head of the life sciences department.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both are called to testify in Kirk's court martial in the first season episode &quot;Court Martial&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SHAW: I now call Doctor McCoy to the stand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;COMPUTER: Service rank, Lieutenant Commander. Position, Ship's Surgeon. Current assignment, USS Enterprise. Commendations, Legion of Honour. Awards of valour. Decorated by Starfleet surgeons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SHAW: I call Mister Spock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Spock hands over his data chip, sits down and puts his hand on the lie detector.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;COMPUTER: Spock, serial number S179-276SP. Service rank, Lieutenant Commander. Position, First officer, science officer. Current assignment, USS Enterprise. Commendations, Vulcanian Scientific Legion of Honour. Awards of valour. Twice decorated by Starfleet command.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Doctor McCoy and Mr. Spock have the rank of lieutenant commander.  Spock is not a member of the medical staff or the life sciences department aboard the Enterprise.  Instead, as the First Officer or executive officer of the ship he might possibly be Dr. McCoy's boss, and as the science officer he might possibly be the Boss of Dr. McCoy as head of the life sciences department. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second season episode &quot;The Immunity Syndrome&quot; Spock makes what he expects to be his last message ever:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPOCK: Personal log, Commander Spock, USS Enterprise. I have noted the passage of the Enterprise on its way to whatever awaits it. If this record should survive me, I wish it known that I bequeath my highest commendation and testimonial to the captain, officers, and crew of the Enterprise. The finest starship in the fleet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kirk on the Enterprise also makes a recorded statement which he thinks might be his last:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KIRK: (also making a log entry) We have arrived at the chromosome body in the nucleus of the organism. If we should fail in our attempt to destroy it, or be unable to free ourselves, I wish to record my recommendations for the following personnel, that they receive special citation. Lieutenant Commander Leonard McCoy, Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, officers Chekov, Kyle, Uhura, and my highest commendation for Commander Spock, Science Officer, who gave his life in the performance of his duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Kirk names two officers as lieutenant commanders in rank but names Spock as commander in rank.  The always precise Spock also gives his rank as commander.  It thus seems very likely that Spock has been promoted from lieutenant commander to commander between those two episodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second season episode &quot;The Trouble With Tribbles&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MCCOY: I like them better than I like you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPOCK: Doctor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MCCOY: Yes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPOCK: They do have one redeeming characteristic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;MCCOY: What's that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SPOCK: They do not talk too much. If you'll excuse me, sir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spock is clearly a little annoyed at Dr. McCoy, and is also McCoy's equal or superior in this setting, but he politely asks to be excused and calls McCoy &quot;sir&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first season episode &quot;What Are Little Girls Made of?&quot;  Dr. Korby captures Captain Kirk and makes an android double of Kirk, planning to use the double to take command of the Enterprise.  Kirk and the android double of Kirk talk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KIRK: Well, there's one difference between us. I'm hungry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KIRK2: The difference is your weakness, Captain, not mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KORBY: One at a time, gentlemen. Captain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KIRK: Eating is a pleasure, sir. Unfortunately, one you will never know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;KIRK2: Perhaps, but I will never starve, sir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kirk and his android double are on opposite sides of a conflict, and so neither is subordinate to the other, but bothp politely call the other &quot;sir&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is an example of a phrase where someone calls someone else &quot;sir &quot; while insulting them: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cad%20and%20bounder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cad%20and%20bounder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cad%20and%20bounder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is a link to an article containing other examples of calling someone &quot;sir&quot; while insulting them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.salon.com/1996/02/10/sanders_2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.salon.com/1996/02/10/sanders_2/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.salon.com/1996/02/10/sanders_2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, in 19th and 20th century English it was proper to call someone &quot;sir&quot; who wasn't your direct superior and wasn't of higher rank than oneself, and so to call someone sir when angry with them, when on opposite sides in a conflict, and even when insulting them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in Christophe Stobbe's answer a quotation from &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; has Leontes address his young son as &quot;sir page&quot; in one line and &quot;sweet villain&quot; in the next line, which may seem like rather contradictory expressions to modern readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thus I find it easy to believe that in the English of Shakespeare's era about 1600 it might have been the rule to always address someone entitled to be called &quot;sir&quot;, such as a knight, as &quot;sir&quot; as a matter of course, even by their worst enemies or by someone much higher ranking than them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7906" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T01:58:17.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-08T11:00:14.237" Score="7" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've been a big fan of Lovecraft's works of literature and used them as inspiration for a lot of my own writing, but I've been unable to find a proper consensus on how his stories all fit together or if there even is a true canon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of my confusion comes from how collections of his work are referred to, like the Cthulhu Mythos, which I understand consists of works from various authors but I believe it lacks a canonical timeline of sorts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a canonical order to HP Lovecraft's work, and if there is, how would it be formatted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7909" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-08T14:50:15.403" LastActivityDate="2019-10-08T14:50:15.403" Title="Is there a canonical order to HP Lovecraft's work?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11796" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T00:59:26.213" Score="3" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm struggling to find the meter in which the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91395/snow-582b58513ffae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Snow&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is written. I know that Shakespeare's poetry was written in iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, I've read that the poem &quot;Snow&quot; has a rough meter, and since that wasn't enough, I tried finding it myself, but I'm really struggling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7913" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-10T08:50:16.497" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T01:16:03.857" Title="What is the meter of the poem &quot;Snow&quot; by Louis MacNeice?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;louis-macneice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11797" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T09:30:09.320" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this a fussy question, but in teaching &quot;Araby&quot; I have found that there is an inconsistency between editions that must be a typo, but I can't figure out which version is correct. Just after the narrator reminds his uncle about giving him money for the bazaar, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I felt the house in bad humour and walked slowly toward the school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or he says: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I left the house...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've looked at about 8 different editions now, and they seem evenly split between &quot;left&quot; and &quot;felt&quot;. Both work logically, but &quot;left&quot; flows more easily grammatically. &quot;Felt&quot; is more interesting though. Which one is correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7915" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-10T11:44:46.557" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T11:44:46.557" Title="Typographical inconsistency in James Joyce's &quot;Araby&quot;" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11798" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T11:28:41.903" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this following sentence in H. G. Wells' &lt;em&gt;Kipps&lt;/em&gt;  and I don't understand what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he put into Kipps was chiefly bread and margarine, infusions of chicory and tea-dust, &lt;strong&gt;colonial meat by contract at threepence a pound&lt;/strong&gt;, potatoes by the sack, and watered beer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get the other parts of the sentence, but what is &amp;quot;colonial meat&amp;quot;? Is it a particular type of meat? Or is it in reference to a method of farming/processing in the British Empire? Or, is it &amp;quot;colonial&amp;quot; as in an animal colony (This one may be too far off the mark as it doesn't seem to make much sense but just in case)？Also, &amp;quot;by contract&amp;quot; is alluding to the existence of some business arrangement between retailers and farms, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T16:08:57.947" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T16:08:57.947" Title="In Kipps, what does H. G. Wells mean by &quot;colonial meat by contract at threepence a pound&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;kipps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11799" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T12:19:29.900" Score="4" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;When someone is awarded the Nobel prize, the Nobel committee always gives a short description of their achievement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This year, two prizes were awarded (for 2019 and 2018):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Handke&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Olga Tokarczuk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can make some sense of the description of Handke's achievement, but not of Tokarczuk's. Can someone explain it in layman's terms?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't make sense of terms like &amp;quot;encyclopedic passion&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Encyclopedic knowlegde&amp;quot; is a common phrase that I understand. Encyclopedias are the books where one finds the most knowledge. So this term makes sense to describe someone who has vast knowledge. But I do not understand the relationship between encylopedias and passion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't understand &amp;quot;crossing of boundaries as a form of life&amp;quot;.  Does she write about other forms of life than humans? Or is this a metaphor that only makes sense with some background knowledge? &amp;quot;Crossing of boundaries&amp;quot; makes some sense as a metaphor to me, but it is awfully nonspecific. Perhaps I'd understand it if I had read her books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain for a layman who is not well versed in abstract literature, but is excited about the Nobel prize and is interested in the getting to know the work of the prize recipients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/lists/all-nobel-prizes-in-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;You can see all awards here.&lt;/a&gt; The vast majority have a clear and understandable description. I feel that this years' descriptions suddenly become much harder to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7916" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T08:11:17.230" Title="Understanding the 2018 and 2019 Nobel prizes" Tags="&lt;nobel-prize&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11800" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-10T13:23:00.117" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of magical brilliance and personal traits, it was Hermione who was the closest to the main hero Harry Potter, and therefore was the most suited to have him as her spouse. A timid Ronald was a world behind the brilliant Hermione and the two hardly had anything in common. So what made Rowling choose Ron over Harry as Hermione's life partner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7794" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T21:13:06.543" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T11:57:49.050" Title="Why didn't Harry and Hermione Granger get married?" Tags="&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4359" CreationDate="2019-10-10T14:05:12.210" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On a structural and autobiographical level JKR saw the reunion of the three friends as the perfect ending to an overall painful and exhausting series and there couldn't have been a better platform than the Weasley family for that. Hermione married Ron and Harry was married to Ginny Weasley as a part of that plan. Besides, Harry got the much awaited love of his parents in the form of Arthur and Molly Weasley. Hermione was accused for her non magical background, but the Weasley family is, from the start, shown to have a particular sentiment of love for the Muggle-borns despite themselves being pure-bloods. So marrying Ron to Hermione was not just by accident but by a proper design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7794" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-11T07:42:13.537" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T07:42:13.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5465" CreationDate="2019-10-10T17:41:28.653" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All the boards did shrink - the fresh water barrels were all empty, and the barrel staves were shrinking as they dried.  Though humid at sea, the barrels were losing their moisture.  Being empty, there was no potable water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7920" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T17:41:28.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11791" CreationDate="2019-10-10T18:44:03.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Just Rewards: Or Who Is That Man in the Moon &amp;amp; Whats He Doing Up There Anyway?&lt;/em&gt; by Steve Sanfield &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the  School Library Journal review found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0531095355&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amazon&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Based on versions found in Wolfram Eberhard's Folktales of China&#xA;  (Univ. of Chicago, 1965; o.p.) and Louise and Yuan Hsi Kuo's Chinese&#xA;  Folk Tales (Celestial Arts, 1976), Sanfield's retelling is one that he&#xA;  developed through years of storytelling. The tale is yet another&#xA;  interpretation of good deeds receiving just rewards while wrongdoings&#xA;  are punished. Here, the good neighbor nurses an injured bird back to&#xA;  health. The bird, in return, provides the man with a seed that grows&#xA;  into a vine yielding watermelons filled with silver, gold, and&#xA;  precious jewels. The evil neighbor, who injures a bird in order to&#xA;  heal it, is rewarded with a seed whose vine grows straight up to the moon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ending:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The man, thinking that the riches of the moon are to be his, climbs to the top only to see the vine wither and die. And there he is to this day, if you look very hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T18:44:03.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11799" CreationDate="2019-10-10T19:09:57.757" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to add a subtly here, &quot;encyclopedic knowledge&quot; doesn't just refer to vast knowledge, it refers to &lt;em&gt;comprehensive&lt;/em&gt; knowledge. (You could have lots of knowledge about a very narrow topic, but that would not usually be referred to as &quot;encyclopedic&quot; knowledge). In other words, it's not just just the quantity of knowledge, it's also breadth of knowledge - i.e. lots of knowledge about lots of topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Encyclopedic passion&quot; is a quite uncommon phrase, but by analogy to the above, it would imply that she's very passionate about a lot of different topics - not only does she know a lot about a lot of different topics, she's passionate about them too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2019-10-10T21:13:46.187" LastActivityDate="2019-10-10T21:13:46.187" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11798" CreationDate="2019-10-10T19:35:47.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On February 15, 1882, the Dunedin finally set sail for Britain. She was loaded with 4,331 mutton, 598 lamb and 22 pig carcasses, 250 kegs of butter, hare, pheasant, turkey, chicken and 2,226 sheep tongues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/local-news/how-new-zealand-lamb-conquered-10665690&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How New Zealand lamb conquered Britain in the 19th century&lt;/a&gt;, by Andrew Forgrave, &lt;em&gt;North Wales Live&lt;/em&gt;, 30 December 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within five years, 172 shipments of frozen meat were sent from New Zealand to Britain, mostly without mishap: it was a trade that grew to such an extent that, by 1957, New Zealand was exporting 14m lamb carcasses to Britain each year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-road-makers-eat-meat-three-times-a-day/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘The road-makers eat meat three times a day’&lt;/a&gt; by Grace Moore, &lt;em&gt;Meanjin Quarterly&lt;/em&gt;, Autumn 2108.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first successful shipment of antipodean frozen meat did not take place until 1879, when it sailed from Sydney, aboard the steamship the Strathleven, which docked in London 59 days later, with a perfectly preserved cargo. Mort, who also owned an abattoir, was keen to ship internationally, partly to offset his concerns relating to the falling price of wool (an anxiety for which Trollope would have had great sympathy) and partly because of a belief in making affordable, nutritious food available to as many people as possible, hoping to be able to sell it in England for six pence a pound (meat then cost between eight pence and a shilling per pound, depending upon the animal and the cut).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The UK imported meat from its colonies, hence ‘colonial meat’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZqIjb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZqIjb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;sepia image of old butcher shop in Lambeth, shop sign ‘English and Colonial meat’&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.josephineavenue.org.uk/old-brixton-hill-photos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Photo source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not able to shine any light on the reference to ‘contract’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T15:26:26.910" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T15:26:26.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11799" CreationDate="2019-10-11T08:11:17.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Narratives come in many shapes/forms/sizes. It’s fairly common for a book to be written (mostly) linearly. It’s also common for an author to stick with a specific set of related characters. (See books such as the Harry Potter series.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tokarczuk’s &lt;em&gt;Flights&lt;/em&gt; is written more as a constellation: smaller segments that make up the whole like individual stars make up one image. The content of the single novel ranges from short stories to pieces of historical or scientific information. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some might argue &lt;em&gt;Flights&lt;/em&gt; doesn’t categorize as a novel due to this structure. I agree that it challenges what a reader might expect from ‘a novel’ (though if you are familiar with works from smaller press publications such as OmniDawn, it is a comfortable form). The book traverses across fields that are often treated as separate, given firm boundary lines (such as ‘science’ vs ‘literature’). It further traverses across geographies and from character to character. One might say Tokarczuk gives the novel a migratory form, echoing what it is to be a migrant, immigrant, traveler — a body in motion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From etymonline.com, “encylopedia” means “general course of instruction.” Literally, it means “training in a circle”. In terms of education/instruction, the circle is the arts and sciences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Passion” means both “suffering, enduring” and “strong emotion, desire.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not too strange to say that your passions are informed by x, y, z. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that by stating Tokarczuk has “a narrative imagination…with encyclopedic passion…,” the committee intends to convey her constellation style of storytelling. How the suffering/desire moves in a circle to speak on or include many (seemingly disparate) things. How the suffering/desire is broad in its education. Then, how the narrative form utilizes these encyclopedic passions to tell the story that is &lt;em&gt;Flights&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7923" LastActivityDate="2019-10-11T08:11:17.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-12T05:31:21.060" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Heart of Darkness&lt;/em&gt; by Joseph Conrad, why did native Africans love Kurtz despite his violent nature?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7926" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-12T08:08:18.223" LastActivityDate="2019-10-12T08:08:18.223" Title="In Heart of Darkness, why did native Africans love Kurtz?" Tags="&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;heart-of-darkness&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8127" CreationDate="2019-10-13T02:09:36.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I too was wondering what this passage meant and I can't seem to find any kind of interpretation online. My only guess is that he is either experiencing some type of dissociation due to electric shock (this would explain the man staring at the dials and Winston feeling like he floated out of the seat he is strapped to) or the effects of some drug that was given to him. I'm assuming that the ticking instrument is possibly a heart monitor. As for the dreadful thing that had been skipped over...I still haven't figured this one out. Maybe he just felt an overwhelming relief at having confessed everything he had held back his entire life. Maybe he was finally able to forgive himself for the guilt he felt regarding his mother and sister. Of course, this is just my own interpretation. I do not know if this is what the author actually meant. It would be nice if someone else could chime in with an explanation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7927" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T02:09:36.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11593" CreationDate="2019-10-13T12:26:04.073" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;McCarthy has shown himself willing to include anachronisms (or perhaps unintentionally they creep in) in Blood Meridian. I suspect that fondness for watermelon being a stereotypical characteristic of Blacks in that time may have already existed but even if not, I think that he is simply implying that the ears came from Blacks, not Indians -- I had not thought of &quot;give pure fit&quot; meaning &quot;would frighten&quot; a watermelon but if that is how to interpret that phrase, the nasty young person Elrod is making a lame and racist joke. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T12:26:04.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2579" CreationDate="2019-10-13T14:06:18.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Inspector - Pride - for his large ego and he thinks he can and should change peoples idea  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr B - Gluttony - large size and is the embodiment of the rich and stingy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sheila - Envy - Of the girl in the shops looks and being able to wear the dress so well  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gerald - Lust - for his affair with Eva   &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mrs B - Sloth - Didn't do anything to help Eva even though she was capable of it  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eric - Greed - Stealing from his father  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eva - Wrath - Her anger with them and life in general is now affecting them&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Or as an embodiment of the people and how they will rise and destroy the rich &quot;in fire and blood and anguish&quot; not referencing WW2 but revolution  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7930" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-13T15:27:20.197" LastActivityDate="2019-10-13T15:27:20.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11812" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-13T22:36:50.803" Score="3" ViewCount="1523" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was told to analyze this passage in book 1 of The Odyssey, having read only books 1-4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And sparkling-eyed Athena drove the matter home: “Father, son of Cronus, our high and mighty king, surely he goes down to a death he earned in full!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Let them all die so, all who do such things.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But my heart breaks for Odysseus,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  that seasoned veteran cursed by fate so long—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  far from his loved ones still, he suffers torments&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  off on a wave-washed island rising at the center of the seas. A dark wooded island, and there a goddess makes her home, daughter of Atlas, wicked Titan who sounds the deep&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  in all its depths, whose shoulders lift on high&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  the colossal pillars thrusting earth and sky apart.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Atlas’ daughter it is who holds Odysseus captive,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  luckless man—despite his tears, forever trying&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to spellbind his heart with suave, seductive words&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and wipe all thought of Ithaca from his mind.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But he, straining for no more than a glimpse&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  of hearth-smoke drifting up from his own land,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Odysseus longs to die ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Olympian Zeus, have you no care for him in your lofty heart?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Did he never win your favor with sacrifices&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  burned beside the ships on the broad plain of Troy? Why, Zeus, why so dead set against Odysseus?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are my takeaways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Athena is obviously very affectionate for Odysseus. Regardless of whether they have any history, I’m suspecting that Athena cares for him as he is essentially her male/mortal counterpart-he is known as a very wise/cunning man, and known for his valor in war, while Athena is the goddess of wisdom and battle. I suspect that she is affectionate for him in the same way that a master is affectionate for their skilled apprentice, although I don’t know how to explicitly support this claim with this passage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Gods seem to favor punishment/use violence as a means for resolving issues. Zeus looks at most humans as corrupt, using Aegisthus as an example. Athena, on the other hand, seems to believe that not all humans are bad, and seeks a way to help them, in this passage she advocates for helping Odysseus, and later on she assists Telemachus in finding his father, as well as helping comfort Penelope, reassuring her that her son was in good hands. The gods seem to have traits typically assigned to their respective gender, the male gods being violent, and the goddesses being kind and compassionate. This, along with other evidence like Zeus deciding to help free Odysseus behind Poseidon’s back, justifying it with essentially “we can overpower him” shows that the gods aren’t necessarily these enlighten beings, they seem to have many of the traits/flaws characteristic to humans&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also noticed how Athena, despite having traits commonly possessed by women, acts as a fatherly figure to Telemachus. She guides him on this journey, trying to help him achieve manhood by telling him he has to kill the suitors, be confident, and brave. This isn’t entirely related to the passage but ties into my first observation, although I’m not really certain what the significance of this is.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I noticed how Zeus seems to be a fairly poor leader. Almost immediately after Athena makes her point Zeus says that the gods have not freed Odysseus because of Poseidon, but then decides that they should go against him with his only reasoning being that if Poseidon acts out against it, the other gods could overpower him. It seems as if not much has to be said to convince him, however this is the only example I have so far.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are my takeaways accurate? I feel like there’s not many more observations I can make, though I feel like there’s so much more this passage says about Athena and the gods as a whole. I feel as if some parts of my takeaways are already reaches and don’t know what else is so significant about it. Did I hit on any good points?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7932" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-14T12:05:04.737" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T12:05:04.737" Title="What does Athena’s statement to Zeus at the beginning of The Odyssey reveal?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-14T20:20:58.567" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back when I was in school, I remember one of my English teachers telling us about a book she was about to read written from the perspective of both the killer and the killer's victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each chapter flipped between the 2, and I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the victim was female and homeless, but this may be wrong. It was probably released around 1998-2000, although I'm not sure if it was newly released or an old book that she'd discovered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a bit vague, but I've recently got back into reading a lot more, and remembered this story, thinking it could be interesting. I've Googled it, but found nothing, and was wondering if anyone here could help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7938" LastActivityDate="2019-10-14T20:20:58.567" Title="Story from the perspective of a killer and the victim" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-15T17:51:58.200" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading chapter 11 of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. There is a conversation going on between Fanny, Edmund, and Mrs. Crawford. In the book the conversation is going on without explicitly mentioning who is the speaker. Since there are three speakers, I am unable to follow who is speaking the following sentences. If anyone could help me regarding who is speaking which sentence, it would be of great help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Edmund looked round at Mr. Rushworth too, but had nothing to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Your father's return will be a very interesting event.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It will, indeed, after such an absence; an absence not only long, but&#xA;  including so many dangers.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It will be the forerunner also of other interesting events: your&#xA;  sister's marriage, and your taking orders.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Don't be affronted,&quot; said she, laughing, &quot;but it does put me in mind&#xA;  of some of the old heathen heroes, who, after performing great&#xA;  exploits in a foreign land, offered sacrifices to the gods on their&#xA;  safe return.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There is no sacrifice in the case,&quot; replied Edmund, with a serious&#xA;  smile, and glancing at the pianoforte again; &quot;it is entirely her own&#xA;  doing.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh yes I know it is. I was merely joking. She has done no more than&#xA;  what every young woman would do; and I have no doubt of her being&#xA;  extremely happy. My other sacrifice, of course, you do not&#xA;  understand.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;My taking orders, I assure you, is quite as voluntary as Maria's&#xA;  marrying.&quot; &quot;It is fortunate that your inclination and your father's&#xA;  convenience should accord so well. There is a very good living kept&#xA;  for you, I understand, hereabouts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Which you suppose has biassed me?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But that I am sure it has not,&quot; cried Fanny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Thank you for your good word, Fanny, but it is more than I would&#xA;  affirm myself. On the contrary, the knowing that there was such a&#xA;  provision for me probably did bias me. Nor can I think it wrong that&#xA;  it should. There was no natural disinclination to be overcome, and I&#xA;  see no reason why a man should make a worse clergyman for knowing that&#xA;  he will have a competence early in life. I was in safe hands. I hope I&#xA;  should not have been influenced myself in a wrong way, and I am sure&#xA;  my father was too conscientious to have allowed it. I have no doubt&#xA;  that I was biased, but I think it was blamelessly.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is the same sort of thing,&quot; said Fanny, after a short pause, &quot;as&#xA;  for the son of an admiral to go into the navy, or the son of a general&#xA;  to be in the army, and nobody sees anything wrong in that. Nobody&#xA;  wonders that they should prefer the line where their friends can serve&#xA;  them best, or suspects them to be less in earnest in it than they&#xA;  appear.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No, my dear Miss Price, and for reasons good. The profession, either&#xA;  navy or army, is its own justification. It has everything in its&#xA;  favour: heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are&#xA;  always acceptable in society. Nobody can wonder that men are soldiers&#xA;  and sailors.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But the motives of a man who takes orders with the certainty of&#xA;  preferment may be fairly suspected, you think?&quot; said Edmund. &quot;To be&#xA;  justified in your eyes, he must do it in the most complete uncertainty&#xA;  of any provision.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What! take orders without a living! No; that is madness indeed;&#xA;  absolute madness.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Shall I ask you how the church is to be filled, if a man is neither&#xA;  to take orders with a living nor without? No; for you certainly would&#xA;  not know what to say. But I must beg some advantage to the clergyman&#xA;  from your own argument. As he cannot be influenced by those feelings&#xA;  which you rank highly as temptation and reward to the soldier and&#xA;  sailor in their choice of a profession, as heroism, and noise, and&#xA;  fashion, are all against him, he ought to be less liable to the&#xA;  suspicion of wanting sincerity or good intentions in the choice of&#xA;  his.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh! no doubt he is very sincere in preferring an income ready made,&#xA;  to the trouble of working for one; and has the best intentions of&#xA;  doing nothing all the rest of his days but eat, drink, and grow fat.&#xA;  It is indolence, Mr. Bertram, indeed. Indolence and love of ease; a&#xA;  want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of&#xA;  inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men&#xA;  clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and&#xA;  selfish—read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his&#xA;  wife. His curate does all the work, and the business of his own life&#xA;  is to dine.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so&#xA;  common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general&#xA;  character. I suspect that in this comprehensive and (may I say)&#xA;  commonplace censure, you are not judging from yourself, but from&#xA;  prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the habit of&#xA;  hearing. It is impossible that your own observation can have given you&#xA;  much knowledge of the clergy. You can have been personally acquainted&#xA;  with very few of a set of men you condemn so conclusively. You are&#xA;  speaking what you have been told at your uncle's table.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion&#xA;  is general, it is usually correct. Though I have not seen much of the&#xA;  domestic lives of clergymen, it is seen by too many to leave any&#xA;  deficiency of information.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are&#xA;  condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information,&#xA;  or (smiling) of something else. Your uncle, and his brother admirals,&#xA;  perhaps knew little of clergymen beyond the chaplains whom, good or&#xA;  bad, they were always wishing away.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poor William! He has met with great kindness from the chaplain of the&#xA;  Antwerp,&quot; was a tender apostrophe of Fanny's, very much to the purpose&#xA;  of her own feelings if not of the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have been so little addicted to take my opinions from my uncle,&quot;&#xA;  said Miss Crawford, &quot;that I can hardly suppose—and since you push me&#xA;  so hard, I must observe, that I am not entirely without the means of&#xA;  seeing what clergymen are, being at this present time the guest of my&#xA;  own brother, Dr. Grant. And though Dr. Grant is most kind and obliging&#xA;  to me, and though he is really a gentleman, and, I dare say, a good&#xA;  scholar and clever, and often preaches good sermons, and is very&#xA;  respectable, I see him to be an indolent, selfish bon vivant, who must&#xA;  have his palate consulted in everything; who will not stir a finger&#xA;  for the convenience of any one; and who, moreover, if the cook makes a&#xA;  blunder, is out of humour with his excellent wife. To own the truth,&#xA;  Henry and I were partly driven out this very evening by a&#xA;  disappointment about a green goose, which he could not get the better&#xA;  of. My poor sister was forced to stay and bear it.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I do not wonder at your disapprobation, upon my word. It is a great&#xA;  defect of temper, made worse by a very faulty habit of&#xA;  self-indulgence; and to see your sister suffering from it must be&#xA;  exceedingly painful to such feelings as yours. Fanny, it goes against&#xA;  us. We cannot attempt to defend Dr. Grant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; replied Fanny, &quot;but we need not give up his profession for all&#xA;  that; because, whatever profession Dr. Grant had chosen, he would have&#xA;  taken a—not a good temper into it; and as he must, either in the navy&#xA;  or army, have had a great many more people under his command than he&#xA;  has now, I think more would have been made unhappy by him as a sailor&#xA;  or soldier than as a clergyman. Besides, I cannot but suppose that&#xA;  whatever there may be to wish otherwise in Dr. Grant would have been&#xA;  in a greater danger of becoming worse in a more active and worldly&#xA;  profession, where he would have had less time and obligation—where he&#xA;  might have escaped that knowledge of himself, the frequency, at least,&#xA;  of that knowledge which it is impossible he should escape as he is&#xA;  now. A man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of&#xA;  teaching others their duty every week, cannot go to church twice every&#xA;  Sunday, and preach such very good sermons in so good a manner as he&#xA;  does, without being the better for it himself. It must make him think;&#xA;  and I have no doubt that he oftener endeavours to restrain himself&#xA;  than he would if he had been anything but a clergyman.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;We cannot prove to the contrary, to be sure; but I wish you a better&#xA;  fate, Miss Price, than to be the wife of a man whose amiableness&#xA;  depends upon his own sermons; for though he may preach himself into a&#xA;  good-humour every Sunday, it will be bad enough to have him&#xA;  quarrelling about green geese from Monday morning till Saturday&#xA;  night.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny,&quot; said Edmund&#xA;  affectionately, &quot;must be beyond the reach of any sermons.&quot; Fanny&#xA;  turned farther into the window; and Miss Crawford had only time to&#xA;  say, in a pleasant manner, &quot;I fancy Miss Price has been more used to&#xA;  deserve praise than to hear it&quot;; when, being earnestly invited by the&#xA;  Miss Bertrams to join in a glee, she tripped off to the instrument,&#xA;  leaving Edmund looking after her in an ecstasy of admiration of all&#xA;  her many virtues, from her obliging manners down to her light and&#xA;  graceful tread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-15T18:31:58.913" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T10:34:03.827" Title="Regarding a conversation between Miss. Price, Miss. Crawford and Edmund in Mansfield Park by Jane Austen" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;mansfield-park&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11818" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-16T04:58:38.260" Score="1" ViewCount="1376" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am just curious but in which year does The Giver take place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7942" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-16T07:15:34.247" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T08:17:25.643" Title="In what year do the events of The Giver take place?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-giver&gt;&lt;lois-lowry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11818" CreationDate="2019-10-16T08:17:25.643" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An unknown year in the future.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lois Lowry, the author, was asked this question in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.buzzfeed.com/ariellecalderon/things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-giver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview with Buzzfeed&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do you ever say what time period The Giver takes place in?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LL:&lt;/strong&gt; No, it's just some time in the indefinite future. It's kind of interesting, I have a grandson who's 13 and he asked me recently how far in the future it was. He speculated it was 50 years in the future, and the reason that came up is because the filmmakers had asked me how the boy's bedroom should be decorated, and I said it should be very stark, nothing decorative on the walls, but maybe something educational like the periodic table of elements. And I mentioned that to my grandson and he said, 'Fifty years in the future, there won't be any helium anymore.' Well, who knew, only a 13-year-old [laughs]. So you know, things of that sort would be very different, but who knows, the future seems to be speeding up and I read an article recently implying that very soon we will in fact be able to manipulate human memory. Whether that's a good thing or a bad, we can only guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we know for sure she wasn't aiming for any very specific time period, which means there are almost certainly no clues in the novel fixing it to a particular year. The thing about &amp;quot;50 years in the future&amp;quot; is hardly canonical in any sense of the word, but it's just an interesting factoid, and the author mentioning it suggests that near future (21st century) is at least plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T08:17:25.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11817" CreationDate="2019-10-16T10:11:37.950" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every contribution from Fanny is attributed directly in the text. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It is the same sort of thing,&quot; said Fanny&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Poor William! He has met with great kindness from the chaplain of the&#xA;  Antwerp,&quot; was a tender apostrophe of Fanny's,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main body of the conversation alternates between Edmund and Miss Crawford. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one point at which it gets a little confusing when Edmund is speaking in response to Miss crawford but referring to her in the third person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are such clergymen, no doubt, but I think they are not so common as to justify Miss Crawford in esteeming it their general character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I think what we are to understand here is that he is keeping Fanny involved in the conversation, as a gentleman he would be mindful of the social graces, before returning to addressing Miss Crawford directly in the second person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suspect that in this comprehensive and (may I say) commonplace censure, you are not judging from yourself, but from prejudiced persons, whose opinions you have been in the habit of hearing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his next reply Edmund makes reference to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your uncle, and his brother admirals&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which squarely puts Mary, niece of 'the Admiral', as the originator of the arguments he is responding to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other textual clue is that Edmund always addresses Fanny by her first name, while Miss Crawford addresses her as 'Miss Price'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-10-16T10:34:03.827" LastActivityDate="2019-10-16T10:34:03.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11822" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11823" CreationDate="2019-10-18T00:06:39.230" Score="5" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 99 (&quot;The Doubloon&quot;) of Moby Dick, Flask comments that the doubloon is worth 16 dollars, and, at two cents a cigar, that will get him 960 cigars.  But if each cigar is two cents, then you can buy 50 for a dollar.  50 x 16 = 800, which isn't 960.  Is this a math mistake on the part of the author, or a deliberate inclusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7961" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-10-18T07:18:35.140" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T07:18:35.140" Title="Is there a math mistake in Moby Dick Chapter 99?" Tags="&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11822" CreationDate="2019-10-18T00:41:39.493" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The analysis in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/mobydick/summary-and-analysis/chapters-99100&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cliffsnotes&lt;/a&gt; assumes that this is intended to portray the character's lack of mathematical proficiency:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Others see things they value as they peruse the coin, but they don't see themselves. The devout first mate, Starbuck, sees the Trinity. Stubb sees temporary wealth and mystery. &lt;strong&gt;Flask reveals his inability with simple math as he miscalculates how many of his beloved cigars he could buy with the doubloon.&lt;/strong&gt; The coin reminds Queequeg of his tattoos and homeland. The &amp;quot;ghost-devil&amp;quot; Fedallah bows to the sun that he worships. Little Pip speaks in metaphors but seems to notice a universal human longing in the coin's images. For this moment, the doubloon is the center of the ship, its &amp;quot;navel.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-18T00:41:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11824" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-18T02:47:12.627" Score="5" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a fan of the Ridley Scott film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duellists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Duellists (1977)&lt;/a&gt; which is based on the story &quot;The Duel&quot; by Joseph Conrad. I would like to read the original story, but whenever I search for paperback collections of Conrad's stories in used book stores they never include &quot;The Duel&quot;. Sure, I could read the the story on Project Gutenberg, but what I'm looking for is something like a Penguin books edition that includes a scholarly introduction. Does this exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4860" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-03T09:51:58.823" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T18:04:56.977" Title="Has &quot;The Duel&quot; by Joseph Conrad been published in any recent story collections?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11796" CreationDate="2019-10-18T18:13:41.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even free verse can include an occasional rhyme. The key is its metrical irregularity and avoidance of being defined as a fixed form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what makes this poem interesting is that is &lt;em&gt;appears&lt;/em&gt; to have regularity, because of the repeated 4-line verse paragraphs, which look like a regular stanzaic form. But the unpredictable meter contradicts this appearance, giving us two opposites at the same time: regularity and irregularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's form is mirroring its content: the world is &quot;collateral and incompatible&quot; and &quot;Incorrigibly plural.&quot; It doesn't fit a single category: winter and summer, &quot;spiteful and gay,&quot; all at the same time. Opposites, just like the poetic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know MacNiece's work, but this is a lovely and intriguing piece, and this is how I make sense of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastEditorUserId="7964" LastEditDate="2019-10-19T01:16:03.857" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T01:16:03.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11326" CreationDate="2019-10-19T20:54:19.570" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For me, the relevance lies, at the core, in the pathos in Robert Burn's poem &quot;To A Mouse&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gang aft agley,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For promis'd joy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence the title of Steinbeck's work: &lt;em&gt;Of Mice and Men&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5963" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-19T22:13:21.913" LastActivityDate="2019-10-19T22:13:21.913" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11828" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11831" CreationDate="2019-10-21T03:19:01.897" Score="6" ViewCount="1010" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He yearned for a bed and sheets- but the only whiteness here was the slow spilt milk, luminous round the rock forty feet below, where Piggy had fallen. Piggy was everywhere, was on this neck, was become terrible in darkness and death.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the &quot;spilt milk&quot; is referring to a problem, but what does it mean by whiteness? I guess it is related to the bed and sheet, does it refer to the cleanliness that civilization has?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That last sentence is what is mainly confusing me. &quot;Piggy was everywhere&quot; probably means that Ralph's mind is filled with Piggy, &quot;was on this neck&quot; probably refers to Piggy being on that neck of land, but what does Golding mean by &quot;was become terrible in darkness and death&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7971" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T20:49:08.337" Title="What does it mean when Ralph is thinking about Piggy's death in Lord of the Flies by Golding" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11831" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11828" CreationDate="2019-10-21T17:09:01.143" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of literal description, the whiteness refers to the foaming of the sea water as it washes over the rock.&#xA;The rock is first described when Ralph crosses the neck to the Castle Rock:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now he saw the landsman's view of the swell and it seemed like the breathing of some stupendous creature. Slowly the waters sank among the rocks, revealing pink tables of granite, strange growths of coral, polyp and weed. Down, down, the waters went, whispering like the wind among the heads of the forest. There was one flat rock there, spread like a table, where the waters sucking down on the four weedy sides made them seem like cliffs. Then the sleeping leviathan breathed out - the waters rose, the weed streamed, and the water boiled over the table rock with a roar. There was no sense of the passage of waves, only this minute-long fall and rise and fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is described again, being the rock Piggy lands on when he is knocked to his death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy fell forty feet and landed on his back across that square, red rock in the sea. His head opened and stuff came out and turned red. Piggy's arms and legs twitched a bit, like a pig's after it has been killed. Then the sea breathed again in a long, slow sigh, the water boiled white and pink over the rock; and when it went, sucking back again, the body of Piggy was gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;immediately before the section you are asking about it is described again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every minute the water breathed around the rock and flowered into a&#xA;field of whiteness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ralph yearns for a bed and sheets, he is yearning for the clean, safe harbour of home. The imagery of 'sheets' relates to whiteness as both the default colour of sheets and the remembered, idealised, clean, simplicity of 'civilisation' in contrast to the dark, chaotic complexities of life on the island, but the only whiteness where Ralph is now is the whiteness of the leviathan’s breathing. Remember also that when Piggy is hit by the rock the conch, which represented civilisation and civil discourse explodes into 'a thousand white fragments'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Ralph likens that whiteness where Piggy died not just to milk, but to spilt milk, evoking the proverb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no point in crying over spilt milk&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cry-over-spilled-milk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to express regret about something that has already happened or cannot be changed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy's brains can no more be put back in his head than spilled milk can be put back in a jug, its done, crying won't change it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piggy was everywhere, was on this neck, was become terrible in darkness and death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is to be read in terms of the previous descriptions of the rock; the rock and the sea around it have been described in terms of a living creature, a leviathan. Leviathan is defined in the OED as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of some aquatic animal (real or imaginary) of enormous size, frequently mentioned in Hebrew poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but also an obsolete definition is given&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The great enemy of God, Satan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my reading, in Ralph's mind, in Piggy's death on the altar table of the rock, his friend was not only consumed by the breath of the leviathan but has in essence &lt;em&gt;become&lt;/em&gt; the leviathan.&#xA;In the same way that Simon understood that the Beast was in each of them; and that for the tribe, even as they collectively became the Beast, Ralph became the external representation of it, to be hunted, Piggy has himself become a part of the greater Beast, beyond the puny beast that the imagination of schoolboys brought forth.&#xA;Just after the section you quote we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here - and his hands touched grass - was a place to be in for the night, not far from the tribe, so that if the horrors of the supernatural emerged one could at least mix with humans for the time being, even if it meant...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret this to mean that the 'darkness and death' in which Piggy has become terrible is part of the supernatural world and as such to be feared even more than the beast within mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A late edit: I have just come across my school’s magazine from 1981. I had no recollection of this but apparently we had  a question when reading ‘Lord of the Flies’ and wrote to Wm Golding seeking enlightenment. History does not relate what our question was, but his reply is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you for your letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve moved from the position I once held: which was that an author knows all about his own books. So I’ll have to say now that your/their guess is as good as mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in fact, as I wrote the book over a quarter of a century ago I’ve simply forgotten what I meant anyway!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yours Sincerely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Golding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T20:49:08.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11834" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-22T18:55:08.243" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know the specific differences and similarities and some examples for me to better understand the differences and similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7978" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-23T14:59:30.027" LastActivityDate="2019-10-23T14:59:30.027" Title="What are the differences and similarities between the role of female “sovereignty” in Lanval and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”?" Tags="&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;lais-of-marie-de-france&gt;&lt;marie-de-france&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-23T11:42:27.560" Score="7" ViewCount="2553" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; The Second Coming&lt;/a&gt; by W.B. Yeats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning and turning in the widening gyre&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The falcon cannot hear the falconer;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The ceremony of innocence&lt;/strong&gt; is drowned;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The best lack all conviction, while the worst&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are full of passionate intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely some revelation is at hand;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A shape with lion body and the head of a man,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The darkness drops again; but now I know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That twenty centuries of stony sleep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase &amp;quot;The ceremony of innocence&amp;quot; mean here? From a quick look online, one interpretation I found is that the ceremony of innocence refers to christian baptism, but that doesn't sound quite right to me (how do you drown an actual ceremony?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One idea I had is that maybe &amp;quot;ceremony of innocence&amp;quot; refers to people pretending to be innocent, so the lines &amp;quot;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The ceremony of innocence is drowned;&amp;quot;&#xA;mean that humanities evil deeds (the blood-dimmed tide) are so numerous that there is no point for anyone to pretend to be innocent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone suggest other interpretations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7982" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T01:01:11.417" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T01:01:11.417" Title="What does &quot;ceremony of innocence&quot; mean In &quot;The Second Coming&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-24T05:58:20.333" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading a book titled &amp;quot;Hillbilly Elegy,&amp;quot; and I have its Korean translation too. But at some part, especially which I am curious about in meaning, the translation seems so uncertain, so I want someone who is a native English speaker to let me know what this &amp;quot;get to&amp;quot; means here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you already read the book, it might be much better. But no problem. Here is part of the book, which will help you understand the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Most of this tradition was far from child appropriate. Almost all of it involved the kind of violence that should land someone in jail. Much of it centered on how the county in which Jackson was situated--Breathitt--earned its alliterative nickname, &amp;quot;Bloody Breathitt.&amp;quot; There were many expectations, but they all had one theme: The people of Breathitt hated certain things, and they didn't need the law to snuff them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most common tales of Breathitt's gore revolved around an older man in town who was accused of raping a young girl. Mamaw told me that, days before his trial, the man was found facedown in a local lake with sixteen bullet wounds in his back. The authorities never investigated the murder, and the only mention of the incident appeared in the local newspaper on the morning his body was discovered. In an admirable display of journalistic pith, the paper reported: &amp;quot;Man found dead. Foul play expected.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Foul play expected?&amp;quot; &lt;strong&gt;my grandmother would roar&lt;/strong&gt;. &amp;quot;You're goddamned right. Bloody Breathitt &lt;strong&gt;got to&lt;/strong&gt; that son of a bitch.&amp;quot; ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact meaning of this &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;got to&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? Please let me know really specifically. Plus could you also explain the meaning of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;my grandmother would roar&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; here? The tense of &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; is always confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T12:17:56.617" Title="What does &quot;get to&quot; mean in &quot;Hillbilly Elegy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;hillbilly-elegy&gt;&lt;j-d-vance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-24T06:28:17.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T06:28:17.563" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T06:28:17.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-24T06:28:17.563" Score="0" Body="For the 2016 memoir by the American author James David Vance. Use with [j-d-vance]" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T03:27:19.393" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T03:27:19.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-24T08:52:40.547" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me share some part of the book, and I would appreciate if you give me the answer to my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were undoubtedly many of these children and grandchildren, as hillbillies tended to have much higher birthrates than the native population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In short, my grandparents' experience was extremely common. Significant parts of an entire region &lt;strong&gt;picked up shop&lt;/strong&gt; and moved north. Need more proof? Hop on an northbound highway in Kentucky or Tenessee the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas, and virtually every license plate you see comes from Ohio, Indiana, or Michigan--cars full of hillbilly transplants returning home for the holidays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Korean version, it is translated into like &quot;Significant parts of an entire region moved north along plants(or factories)&quot; or &quot;Significant parts of an entire region moved north, looking for plants(or factories).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what &quot;pick up&quot; means here, what's more I don't get the hang of &quot;shop&quot; here. Does it any mean factories or plants? It is even used without an article, really confusing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7985" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T15:18:40.477" Title="What does &quot;pick up shop&quot; mean in &quot;Hillbilly Elegy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;hillbilly-elegy&gt;&lt;j-d-vance&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11844" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11851" CreationDate="2019-10-24T10:06:08.633" Score="2" ViewCount="993" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just stumbled across the expression in Molière's &lt;em&gt;Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme&lt;/em&gt; of Monsieur Jourdain having been speaking prose for all of his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I understand this is used today as a metaphor (correct rhetoric figure?) for if someone is doing something of high achievement without noticing himself. The point which I do not understand is the bit that it's &quot;prose&quot; what he is speaking. According to my knowledge prose is anything except the bound language of lyrics. So it includes the normal everyday spoken language, doesn't it? In this understanding I would think that the figure of Monsieur Jourdain discovering that he spoke prose is a mere joke without noticing is that he actually just discovered an euphemism for a plain common thing, but his fascination for the sound of the euphemic expression is larger than his understanding of the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently my understanding is in mismatch with the common usage, so I wonder what am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7986" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T16:25:49.533" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T17:11:05.887" Title="Meaning of the prose of Monsieur Jourdain" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;moliere&gt;&lt;le-bourgeois-gentilhomme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11845" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11847" CreationDate="2019-10-24T11:05:03.783" Score="3" ViewCount="2322" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here, Malcolm is talking to Macduff as they are now determined to overthrow Macbeth. Generally speaking, I know what is going on but I'm not sure what Malcolm means by &amp;quot;cheer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;night&amp;quot; that never finds the day. Isn't it that all nights, no matter how long, are finally followed by days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come, go we to the king; our power is ready;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our lack is nothing but our leave; Macbeth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is ripe for shaking, and the powers above&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Put on their instruments. &lt;strong&gt;Receive what cheer you may,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The night is long that never finds the day.&lt;/strong&gt; (IV.III.236-240)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7987" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T20:27:59.183" Title="What's the meaning of the last two sentences in Macbeth, Act 4, Scene 3?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11845" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:07:12.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand 'cheer' here in the sense given in the OED at 5.b&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That which brings joy, gladness, or comfort; solace; encouragement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically relevant would be the idea of 'comfort' and 'solace'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macduff has just learned that his wife and children have been slaughtered and Malcolm has had to brace him up from his despair and tell him to use it to fuel his action against Macbeth &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief Convert to anger; blunt&#xA;  not the heart, enrage it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malcolm is telling Macduff that he should take comfort and solace in the avenging of those deaths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right, every night sees a dawn, and that is what Malcolm is telling Macduff, that the night of his grief and sorrow may be long, but not so long that there is no end to it, and that that dawn begins with bringing Macbeth down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would interpret the line about the night in much the same way as the proverb ‘it’s a long road that knows no turning’.  Such an interpretation is in keeping with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DQIlAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA316&amp;amp;lpg=RA1-PA316&amp;amp;dq=%22the%20night%20is%20long%22%20proverb&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=ISOjS6IHLc&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0qI97jZwWIJX8qEz6USgkZ5TiEMw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjKwsjgvLXlAhUNTBUIHZl5BMs4ChDoATAIegQIBxAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22the%20night%20is%20long%22%20proverb&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aphorisms from Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812&lt;/em&gt; entry 2913 ‘Patience and Hope’: which quotes the lines about cheer and night, adding as a footnote &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Equivalent in sense to this sublime Allegorical Aphorism, but how different in Expression is the common Proverb - “‘Tis a long Lane which has no turning.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proverb also seems to puzzle people and you will find many discussions and variations for its interpretation. However, the explanation which best satisfies the ‘long night that never finds the day’ situation in Macbeth is that offered in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LMGPCgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA191&amp;amp;lpg=PA191&amp;amp;dq=%22it%27s%20a%20long%20run%20that%20never%20turns%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lGY9kmEk53&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3jZDK7n5v3XUzVV9LmQAQwI63gSw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjd_O_W2rXlAhXnUxUIHTv1AvUQ6AEwAnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22it&amp;#39;s%20a%20long%20run%20that%20never%20turns%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Commonly used as an assertion that an unfavourable situation will eventually change for the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m afraid I can go no further with citations on exactly &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; it means that, but would speculate that if the road is a metaphor for life, it will seem long and dreary if nothing ever changes. For Shakespeare’s version, night seems endless if there is no glimmer of dawn, and Macduff and Malcom are the ones who must clear the darkness away. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T20:27:59.183" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T20:27:59.183" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11843" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:20:38.463" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a figurative usage related to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;to shut up (one's) shop&lt;/strong&gt;: to close one's business premises, esp. (in&#xA;  later use) permanently or for an extended period; to withdraw from or&#xA;  bring to a close any business; (figurative) to cease functioning. Also&#xA;  †to shut in one's shop.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary Online&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phrase you quote, 'shop' can probably be extended to the figurative meaning of people's whole 'establishment', their lives, their work, their goods and chattels. But instead of 'shutting it up' they are picking it up, lock stock and barrel and transplanting it elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-10-24T15:18:40.477" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T15:18:40.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11840" CreationDate="2019-10-24T14:34:21.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my grandmother would roar&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my grandmother was in the habit of bellowing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Would' is used in sense 27 from the OED entry for the veb 'Will':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Was (were) accustomed to; used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;example: &lt;strong&gt;W. Holt&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Beacon for Blind&lt;/em&gt; xxx. 307   &lt;em&gt;He would often return home exhausted from his work, and when Mrs. Fawcett read to him he would frequently fall fast asleep.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that this story was commonly told and this was her habitual reaction to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the phrase &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bloody Breathitt got to him&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tells us the effect that that the community of Breathitt have had on the rapist.There are some closely related options here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;strong&gt;To get to - -:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;2 &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt;. Chiefly North American. To reach the attention or feelings of (an audience, etc.) with a message&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;4 &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt;. colloquial (originally U.S.). To have an overpowering negative effect upon the spirits or outlook of (a person); to worry, depress, or obsess. &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For either of these there is an underlying common aspect of the rapists outlook having been in some way adjusted by the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My view is that taking this as a tongue-in-cheek or ironic understatement of his murder adequately explains the usage; the Breathitt community have achieved the ultimate negative effect on the rapist’s outlook, his killing is understated for a blackly comic effect. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is also a possibility that the use is intended to have something of a double meaning, that she is literally saying they 'adjusted his outlook', but with a slightly hidden acknowledgement that that was achieved by physically attacking him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I can't find a neat citation for the meaning or 'attack/kill', the OED does give us &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to get at —— &#xA;   1. intransitive. colloquial.&#xA;  a. To attack, assail; to make destructive inroads on.&#xA;  In some uses overlapping with sense 2a.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(sense 2a) To get hold of, come at; to reach, arrive at&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this is given as 'get at' rather than 'get to', the phrase 'got to' is well attested for describing the attack of disease or other agents on the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.charlotteobserver.com/sports/spt-columns-blogs/tom-sorensen-blog/article146827249.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;He looked at nothing but the end zone. But the cramps got to him and, at the Michigan 18, so did the Wolverines.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nfScDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT140&amp;amp;lpg=PT140&amp;amp;dq=%22cancer%20got%20to%20him%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=I5yb5Gi2Um&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2K6N4phI8INqBEGQ4XpAOtSfCgBA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiwlaexq7flAhWDtXEKHdwBAjQQ6AEwBHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22cancer%20got%20to%20him%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his father had been here on many occasions before the cancer got to him.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opentohope.com/more-than-the-way-he-died/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;but the drugs got to him before we could find the proper help.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3890785/8/Bun-Bun-WHAT-Inside-Hunny-s-silly-sick-mind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;But before he can kill himself, the AIDS got to him first.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H-eaDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT230&amp;amp;lpg=PT230&amp;amp;dq=%22disease%20got%20to%20him%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Xn_eaWMLvC&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U35dMzpwK3dYvo-f1wlCPz-objJ0g&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj-soXPrLflAhW1ThUIHTbrDZwQ6AEwBnoECAcQAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The disease got to him first. He died at age thirtyfour from typhoid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore in this interpretation 'Bloody Breathitt' is almost likened to a disease that 'got to him'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T12:17:56.617" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T12:17:56.617" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11844" CreationDate="2019-10-24T17:11:05.887" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;prose&quot; is now generally understood in the same way as described by the &lt;em&gt;Maître de philosophie&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Le Bourgeois gentilhomme&lt;/em&gt;, i.e. language that &quot;sounds natural and uses grammatical structure&quot; and &quot;the opposite of verse&quot; (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literarydevices.com/prose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.com&lt;/a&gt;). Hence, on the surface level, any normal language that is not verse is prose. According to the &lt;em&gt;Maître de philosophie&lt;/em&gt; in the play, this includes oral language (since he appears to agree with Mr Jourdain's discovery that he is speaking in prose). However, some definitions of prose exclude spoken language, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literaryterms.net/prose/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryTerms.net&lt;/a&gt;, which says, &quot;Prose is just non-verse writing&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on which definition of prose you accept, the joke in &lt;em&gt;Le Bourgeois gentilhomme&lt;/em&gt; has three levels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr Jourdain discovers that he uses normal language that is not verse. This is hardly something to be proud of, but he is impressed that this deserves to be called &quot;prose&quot;. (See for example, the emphasis on &quot;prose&quot;, when Jourdain says, 'Quoi ? quand je dis : « Nicole, apportez-moi mes pantoufles, et me donnez mon bonnet de nuit », c’est de la &lt;em&gt;prose&lt;/em&gt; ?': &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/jJMuzRxE5sA?t=419&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/jJMuzRxE5sA?t=419&lt;/a&gt;.) This is the joke that people allude to when they say they are like Mr Jourdain, i.e. they have been doing something that is perfectly ordinary and then discover that there is an impressive term for it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mr Jourdain discovers that his ordinary language is called &quot;prose&quot;, which is a term that is usually reserved for &lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt; language that is not verse. (As mentioned above, there is no consensus about this.) According to this interpretation, both Mr Jourdain and the &quot;Maître de philosophie&quot; look ridiculous, because they don't understand the difference between ordinary spoken language and literary prose. (The &quot;Maître de philosophie&quot; is also a comical figure, after all.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, &quot;prose&quot; can also mean language that is banal or commonplace (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; does not mention this, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the French one&lt;/a&gt; does). Thus, Mr Jourdain's pride at discovering that he has been speaking prose for forty years without realising it makes him look doubly ridiculous: from his own point of view he is proud of doing something that is worthy of the literary terms &quot;prose&quot;, while all his life he has been saying utterly banal things. In fact, he even provides examples (see the quote in the first list item). Most readers and viewers of the play never get this double (or triple) entendre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-10-24T17:11:05.887" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11852" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11853" CreationDate="2019-10-24T18:13:08.040" Score="3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Far from the Madding Crowd&lt;/em&gt;, from the scene in which Bathsheba is paying her workers their wages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What do you do on the farm?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I do do carting things all the year, and in seed time I shoots the rooks and sparrows, and helps at pig-killing, sir.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;How much to you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Please nine and ninepence &lt;strong&gt;and a good halfpenny where 'twas a bad one&lt;/strong&gt;, sir--ma'am I mane.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Quite correct. Now here are ten shillings in addition as a small present, as I am a new comer.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this? Is it derived from some proverb or byword? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. &quot;mane&quot; is eye dialect for &quot;mean&quot; (here's one &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literaturepage.com/read/far-from-the-madding-crowd-82.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T01:20:18.150" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T13:24:08.407" Title="Meaning of &quot;and a good halfpenny where 'twas a bad one&quot; in Thomas Hardy's &quot;Far from the Madding Crowd&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;far-from-the-madding-crowd&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11853" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11852" CreationDate="2019-10-24T21:19:46.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that Poorgrass gets a ha’penny bonus if the pig-killing is a ‘bad one’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy is known to have been opposed to the prevalence of inhumane pig slaughter and in particular the practice of slow-bleeding. We can see this represented in Jude’s revulsion at the cruelty of Arabella’s preferred methods in &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AXMzDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA114&amp;amp;lpg=PA114&amp;amp;dq=pig%20killing%20in%20thomas%20hardy&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=zDP9vH09AE&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1tmhXDmtNnTyl01kqfA5TQQ_d3Fw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjdmqao47XlAhUaiFwKHZVtDv84ChDoATAFegQIBBAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=pig%20killing%20in%20thomas%20hardy&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Food in the Novels of Thomas Hardy: Production and Consumption&lt;/a&gt;’&#xA;By Kim Salmons, the author states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Harry’s personal notebooks, he records a letter of August 1919 that he sent to Mr. W. J. Malden, Chair of the Wessex Saddleback Pig Society, in which he remarks that he is ‘more bent on human methods of slaughter that [sic] on anything else in relation to it.’ Hardy continues the letter with a suggestion: ‘I am not aware if the stupid custom still prevails of having pork “well bled”. This impoverishment of the meat for the sake of a temporary appearance should, I feel, be discouraged by the Society’. At the bottom of the letter in Hardy’s notebook, he remarks in the third person, ‘It is satisfactory to know that Hardy’s suggestions were acted upon by the society’. (Taylor 1979, p. 270).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Salmons goes on to note that Hardy had hoped the slaughter scene in &lt;em&gt;Jude&lt;/em&gt; would &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;serve a humane end in showing people the cruelty that goes on unheeded under the barbarous regime we call civilisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I would read it that Poorgrass gets a little extra compensation if the pig kicks up extra fuss about being killed slowly. The 9/9 was his regular wage covering all of his duties, including pig-killing, but as pig-killings happen only infrequently any bonus related to a difficult one seemed worthy of special mention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-10-25T13:24:08.407" LastActivityDate="2019-10-25T13:24:08.407" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11854" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11890" CreationDate="2019-10-26T22:25:33.217" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philip Pullman's &lt;em&gt;The Ruby in the Smoke&lt;/em&gt; is set in 19th century London. Four of the main characters, Sally, Fred, Rosa, and Trembler, are running a small photographic studio. They are not particularly well-off, and they do a lot of household chores on their own. However, at some point they host a small celebration, and Pullman uses the following phrasing (end of chapter eight):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once that was settled, Sally felt a glow of happiness; and to celebrate their agreement, Frederick sent out for a hot meat-pie from the chop-house around the corner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, since Pullman says &quot;sent out&quot;, none of the main characters went to the chop-house on their own, as I would expect. &lt;strong&gt;Who did they send to get a meat-pie for them?&lt;/strong&gt; Were there street urchins running small errands for the homeowners? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T23:38:48.073" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T01:14:33.560" Title="Who ran the small errands in 19th century London?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;philip-pullman&gt;&lt;the-ruby-in-the-smoke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11855" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11856" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" Score="0" Body="For question about the 1985 novel by the English author Philip Pullman; use with the [philip-pullman] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" LastActivityDate="2019-10-26T23:39:39.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11857" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5507" CreationDate="2019-10-27T02:22:20.903" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I always thought that a moonshadow as it is cast at night will leave a bit of a glow or &lt;strong&gt;silver edge&lt;/strong&gt; around the object. Whenever something is lost in the lyrics like the eyes or teeth it counters with a lyric regarding what they no longer need to worry about. He won't have to cry anymore if he loses his eyes, the outlook is always finding the &lt;strong&gt;silver lining&lt;/strong&gt; in each situation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8000" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T02:22:20.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="120" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:24:45.110" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marmee is actually an old English word. At that time it wasn't pronounced 'Mar-mee' but rather 'Mah-mee' as at that time 'r' would be pronounced as 'ah'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8002" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:24:45.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" Score="0" Body="For question about the life and works of the American author Gillian Flynn. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:37:42.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11861" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11862" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" Score="0" Body="The 2012 mystery/thriller novel by Gillian Flynn; use with the [gillian-flynn] tag." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:38:45.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11863" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:43:20.323" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:43:20.323" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:43:20.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11864" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:43:20.323" Score="0" Body="Questions about the children's book series &quot;Berenstain Bears&quot; by Stan and Jan Berenstain. " OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T23:22:49.560" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:22:49.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11865" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11866" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" Score="0" Body="the Italian children's book series by Elisabetta Dami; use with the [italian-literature] and [elisabetta-dami] tags" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:44:21.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11867" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11868" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" Score="0" Body="the Italian author known for the children's book series &quot;Geronimo Stilton&quot;; use with the [italian-literature] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T14:44:54.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6311" CreationDate="2019-10-27T22:10:48.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to an episode of &lt;a href=&quot;https://berenstainbearcast.wordpress.com/2019/10/12/episode-216-patreon-question-ernie-and-melissa/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deep In Bear Country&lt;/a&gt; (timestamp 12:25), a fan podcast, Mama and Papa used to go by &quot;Missy&quot; and &quot;Junior&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7q6k4.png&quot; alt=&quot;&amp;quot;Of course, they weren&amp;#39;t &amp;#39;Mama&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;Papa&amp;#39; then—just &amp;#39;Missy&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;Junior&amp;#39;&amp;quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's from a book that was written by Mike Berenstain, probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Berenstain_Bears_Big_Family_Album.html?id=8vVVugEACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Berenstain Bears' Big Family Album&lt;/a&gt; because the plot matches. The podcast also says that Papa's father, Grizzly Gramps, is named Earnest (so Papa's real name is probably also Earnest) but I don't know what book that is from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2019-10-27T22:10:48.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-28T00:03:06.423" Score="4" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not exactly a book, but a short story, young-adult maybe. From what I can remember, the story was relatively short, something around 20-30 pages, maybe ? I remember reading the story about 8 years ago or so but the story could've been much older. I remember it being a Roald Dahl piece (short story compilation-ish) &lt;strong&gt;but&lt;/strong&gt; I could be mistaken on that one. A good portion of it was the first person perspective of a middle/high school boy that has a tall, awkward girl as a normal friend but somehow manages to catch the eye of a really popular and pretty girl and goes over to the pretty girl's house to ask her about prom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He can't believe his luck but it turns out the popular, pretty girl is rude, entitled, spoilt and is a very attention-seeking, compliment-fishing person. Before prom, he meets her dad who's a muscled brute who shakes his hand squeezing hard to show some sort of dominance but the meeting goes haywire from there with him running away from the house and the pretty girl's father chasing him in the darkness while mentioning something about serving in Vietnam (very quick escalation, I know, lol).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then asks out the tall, awkward girl to prom and in turn goes over to her house to meet her dad. The dad is a gentle giant, is kind, soft-spoken and shakes his hand very gently. The awkward girl turns out to absolutely beautiful in her prom dress and he realises he's had deep feelings for her all this time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3197" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T00:03:06.423" Title="Story/children's story about a middle/high school boy asking out two girls to prom" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11871" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-28T08:58:53.483" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading a book titled &amp;quot;the Female Persuasion.&amp;quot;&#xA;There is a phrase with a infinitive be-verb, which I am curious about why &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;be&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; should be instead of am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I wasn't supposed to be here at Ryland, actually. It was all a big mistake, but it happened, and it isn't fixable.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Is that right?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;You were supposed to be at another college?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes. Somewhere much better.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh yeah? Where is that?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yale.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He laughed. &amp;quot;That's a good one.&amp;quot;&#xA;&amp;quot;I &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; she said. Then, more indignantly, &amp;quot;I got in.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sure you did&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;. But it didn't work out, and it's too complicated to go into. So &lt;strong&gt;here I be&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Here you be&lt;/strong&gt;,&amp;quot; Darren Tinzler said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why in the bold text is &amp;quot;here I be&amp;quot; used instead of &amp;quot;here I am&amp;quot;? Just to emphasize it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7985" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T12:42:02.580" Title="Why is the be-verb here infinitive in &quot;the Female Persuasion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-female-persuasion&gt;&lt;meg-wolitzer&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11889" CreationDate="2019-10-28T10:32:08.927" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am rather enamoured by the late Norman Mailer. He wrote a letter to the late Ernest Hemingway in 1955.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;TO ERNEST HEMINGWAY&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—because finally after all these years I am deeply curious to know&#xA;  what you think of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you&#xA;  use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc.,&#xA;  then fuck you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;—and since I suspect that you're even more vain than I am, I might as&#xA;  well warn you that there is a reference to you on page 353 which you&#xA;  may or may not like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;NORMAN MAILER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than being an entertaining read (it certainly made me laugh) I am concerned with finding the alleged reference (I cannot see why it wouldn't be there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a 1957 copy of &lt;em&gt;The Deer Park&lt;/em&gt;. I could not find the reference on page 353.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either it is more subtle than I supposed, or on another page, or does not exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody have any more information about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8008" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:13:42.867" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T21:25:14.590" Title="Does anybody know where the Hemingway reference is located in The Deer Park?" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;norman-mailer&gt;&lt;the-deer-park&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11873" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11874" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" Score="0" Body="the American author of novels, known for &quot;The Wife&quot;, &quot;The Ten-Year Nap&quot;, &quot;The Uncoupling&quot;, &quot;The Interestings&quot;, and &quot;The Female Persuasion&quot;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:05:50.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11875" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11876" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" Score="0" Body="the 2018 novel by the American author Meg Wolitzer; use with the [meg-wolitzer] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:06:34.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11877" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11878" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" Score="0" Body="the 1955 novel by the American author Norman Mailer; use with the [norman-mailer] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:14:12.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11879" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11880" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" Score="0" Body="Norman Mailer (1923-2007), the American author, essayist, journalist, actor, and playwright." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T11:15:32.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11871" CreationDate="2019-10-28T12:42:02.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;I be&quot; is not correct grammar in standard English, but it's a form used in certain dialects. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/93231/87724&quot;&gt;What dialect is “I be doing this”?&lt;/a&gt; on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage SE - the answers don't have much in the way of supporting evidence, but at least that question makes clear that &quot;I be&quot; is known as a dialect form of &quot;I am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character speaking in this passage, Greer Kadetsky, is from the USA (specifically Connecticut?) I don't know enough about different US accents to know if her use of this phrase is meant to tell us something about her background, or if it's just an affectation, a funny way of saying &quot;here I am&quot; which doesn't sound as mundane as just &quot;here I am&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-10-28T12:42:02.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11895" CreationDate="2019-10-29T00:37:16.570" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a series of young adult or children book, but cannot find the name about a group of boys who solved a detective club of sorts. They solved mysteries or other problems in their community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In one book, they helped solve a case involving a missing treasure that was placed in the barrel of a cannon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In another book, they bought a submarine, by bidding down instead of up, and used it to explore a local lake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In another book, they helped locate a lost parachute jumper.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the name of this series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8013" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T09:30:18.943" Title="What young adult series involved a club of boys who bought a submarine?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-29T01:52:24.977" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wasn't sure whether to ask on history SE or here, but am trying this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the German language book &lt;em&gt;Hubert Lanz: General der Gebirgstruppe&lt;/em&gt; by the American professor &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Burdick&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles B. Burdick&lt;/a&gt;, who does not seem to have any English language wiki page, it says it was translated from &quot;American&quot;, but no English language book by him on Lanz seems to exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know how this happened? Did Burdick write a manuscript in English that was never published, but then translated into German?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have tried contacting the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sjsu.edu/burdick/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burdick Archive&lt;/a&gt; but with no results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4714" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T13:00:27.163" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T13:00:27.163" Title="Does an English version of Burdick's book on Hubert Lanz exist?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;charles-b-burdick&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-29T06:00:42.810" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just began reading the book &lt;em&gt;Pachinko,&lt;/em&gt; and it starts thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  History failed us, but no matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  At the turn of the century, an&#xA;aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra&#xA;money. Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo--a&#xA;five-mile-wide islet beside the port city of Busan. In there long&#xA;marriage, the wife gave birth to three sons, but only Hoonie, the&#xA;eldest and the weakest one, survived. ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For more information, let me share part from the recommendation remark for this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Pachinko represents a breakthrough portrayal of an invisible society&#xA;within a society--Koreans in Japan. The book begins with the sentence,&#xA;&amp;quot;History has failed us, but no matter.&amp;quot; That is one of the most&#xA;succinct summaries of the twentieth century's legacy of colonialism&#xA;and war that still fuels tensions in North East Asia, including the&#xA;current crisis with North Korea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fail&amp;quot; is always a difficult word to me when it is used in the forms like&#xA;&amp;quot;failed me&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;failed us&amp;quot;. Please explain what the whole sentence &amp;quot;History failed us, but no matter&amp;quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plus, there is another &amp;quot;fail&amp;quot; phrase which I want to know correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poor men mocked their powerful colonizer within the shabby walls&#xA;of the boardinghouse, feeling secure from the colonial police, who&#xA;wouldn't bother with fishermen with grandiose ideas. The brothers&#xA;boasted of China's strengths—their hearts yearning for another nation&#xA;to be strong since &lt;strong&gt;their own rulers had failed them&lt;/strong&gt;. Korea had been&#xA;colonized for twenty-two years already. The younger two had never&#xA;lived in a Korea that wasn't ruled by Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context, I understand that the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;fail&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;their own rulers had failed them&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; implies their own rulers (Japanese rulers) had colonized them (Koreans) or that Japanese imperialists had kind of defeated Koreans. I want to know the exact meaning though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7985" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T17:45:03.163" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T18:20:58.280" Title="What does &quot;fail us&quot; mean in the book &quot;Pachinko&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;min-jin-lee&gt;&lt;pachinko&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11886" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11887" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" Score="0" Body="Charles Burton Burdick (1927-1998), the American military historian" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T12:33:34.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11888" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11908" CreationDate="2019-10-29T17:55:59.240" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;em&gt;Building the Perfect Beast&lt;/em&gt; by Don Henley repeats the following phrases several times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon he will be released&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Glory hallelujah!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We're building the perfect beast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this include the phrase &quot;Glory hallelujah!&quot;? Is there a religious meaning intended here? And what is the &quot;perfect beast&quot; in this instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T20:21:36.923" Title="What, exactly, is the &quot;Perfect Beast&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;don-henley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11872" CreationDate="2019-10-29T21:17:45.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ti3ZCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=deer+park+norman+mailer&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiZnpSjscLlAhXnhOAKHfTnDfUQuwUwAHoECAAQBg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=353&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google books,&lt;/a&gt; one can preview page 353 of &lt;em&gt;The Deer Park&lt;/em&gt;, where one finds the following text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and I tried to write my novel about bullfighting, but it was not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the trade paperback Random House edition (1997), but it presumably has the same page numbering as the original 1955 hardcover or advanced reading copy that Mailer sent Hemingway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your edition presumably has different page numbering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-10-29T21:25:14.590" LastActivityDate="2019-10-29T21:25:14.590" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11890" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11854" CreationDate="2019-10-30T01:14:33.560" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frederick sent out for a hot meat-pie from the chop-house around the corner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could well mean that he went around the corner to place an order to be delivered. Or, as you suggest, it could mean that he offered a kid on the street some money to walk the order to the chop shop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even poor households in the nineteenth century would typically have had a &quot;maid of all work,&quot; someone who worked part time to do chores, including running errands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are multiple possibilities, then. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T01:14:33.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11891" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-30T07:03:21.890" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both pieces of work are reactions to post-war trauma, but unlike The Wasteland, which aims to put back together the fragments of Western Literature, fractured by The Great War, and sees the grand narrative ultimately as redeemable/salvageable, Catch-22 seems to almost be mocking Eliot by shrouding his name in a cultural amnesia, paralleling themes of disillusionment and rejection of modernism present in postmodernism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'T. S. Eliot,' ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh&#xA;  Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the telephone without&#xA;   identifying himself.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Colonel Cargill, in Rome, was perplexed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Who was it?' asked General Peckem.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'I don't know,' Colonel Cargill replied.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'What did he want?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'I don't know.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Well, what did he say?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  '&quot;T. S. Eliot&quot;,' Colonel Cargill informed him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'What's that?'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  '&quot;T. S. Eliot&quot;,' Colonel Cargill repeated.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Just &quot;T. S. -&quot;'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Yes, sir. That's all he said. Just &quot;T. S. Eliot.&quot;'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'I wonder what it means,' General Peckem reflected. Colonel Cargill wondered,    too.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'T. S. Eliot,' General Peckem mused.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'T. S. Eliot,' Colonel Cargill echoed with the same funereal puzzlement.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further context, this question has answers that seem to fit my question as well:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3632/whats-the-significance-of-the-t-s-eliot-reference-in-catch-22&quot;&gt;What&amp;#39;s the significance of the T. S. Eliot reference in Catch-22?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7962" LastEditorUserId="7962" LastEditDate="2019-10-30T18:16:05.023" LastActivityDate="2019-10-30T18:16:05.023" Title="Could T.S. Eliot's namedrop early on in Catch-22 be a play on The Wasteland" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="928" CreationDate="2019-10-31T00:34:50.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The publisher, Albert Whitman &amp;amp; Company, &lt;a href=&quot;https://albertwhitman.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/awc-podcast-series-ghostwriting-the-boxcar-children/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interviewed&lt;/a&gt; two of the ghostwriters for the series,  Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohon. They are credited as &quot;the ghostwriters behind many of The Boxcar Children books, including the recent &lt;em&gt;Cupcake Caper&lt;/em&gt;&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0807513741&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;#125&lt;/a&gt;, published 2010).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site gives this longer biography:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Stacia Deutsch and Rhody Cohon are the #1 New York Times best-selling co-authors of more than thirty children’s books. In addition to their award winning creative chapter book series entitled, BLAST TO THE PAST (Simon and Schuster), Stacia and Rhody have also published non-fiction texts, a young adult romantic comedy called IN THE STARS (Simon and Schuster), and HOT PURSUIT, a civil rights story (Kar-Ben/Lerner). Their works have won them the Teacher’s Choice Award, the Arizona Glyph, and a SCRIBE award. Stacia and Rhody have also written several licensed properties, including NANCY DREW AND THE CLUE CREW (Simon and Schuster) and THE BOXCAR CHILDREN (Albert Whitman).  They have also written junior movie tie in novels for summer blockbuster films, including BATMAN, THE DARK KNIGHT(HarperCollins) and CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS (Simon and Schuster).  Stacia Deutsch, an ordained rabbi, lives in Irvine, California with her three children. Rhody Cohon, a college math teacher, lives with her three children in Tucson, Arizona. They talk on the phone a hundred times a day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T00:34:50.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11893" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-10-31T02:07:43.243" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently finished it and although I found it fascinating and very articulate at times, I fail to see any profound themes or literary significance that could be drawn from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7962" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T01:13:46.183" Title="Why is Naked Lunch by Burroughs so groundbreaking and recognized as a literary milestone by prominent authors that succeeded its publication?" Tags="&lt;william-s-burroughs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11664" CreationDate="2019-10-31T02:21:23.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment differentiates language and literature and suggests they have opposite futures. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the future of the English language is grand&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language is a broad category that includes verbal and written communication of many forms. If the language is connected to the dominant world power, as English is, then the comment suggests that the society promises to maintain that position. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;as its literature is concerned it seems bleak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a comment less about social dominance than about the conditions for art within a society. We can have no way of knowing what this specific professor meant, of course, but writers have long argued about the ideal social conditions for the production of great art. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most famous, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=peter-logan-on-culture-matthew-arnolds-culture-and-anarchy-1869&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Arnold&lt;/a&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;Culture and Anarchy&lt;/em&gt; (1869), held that the world was divided between societies that primarily valued (1) artistry, beauty, and freedom; and (2) military might, productivity, and obedience. The former produced great innovations in art, while the latter could produce only imitations of older artists. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is only one example, of course, but the comment about the &quot;bleak&quot; future of literature is specifically speaking about literature-as-art, and so seems to reflect a pessimistic view about the current state of culture within a society that nonetheless dominates the world's business and political order. That is similar to what Arnold thought in 1869, when Britain was the dominant world power, and it is certainly possible that your professor had something in mind like that of the Victorian poet and critic. We don't know, but the distinction between language and literature has a long and fascinating history to it, so you are in very good company in asking this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T02:21:23.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11882" CreationDate="2019-10-31T09:30:18.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mad Scientists' Club&lt;/em&gt; series by Bertrand R. Brinley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mad Scientists' Club&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A strange sea monster suddenly appears on Strawberry Lake, a fortune&#xA;  is unearthed from an old cannon and a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen.&#xA;  Who's responsible? Those seven junior geniuses -- and their wild&#xA;  ideas. Watch out as the Mad Scientists' Club turns the town of Mammoth&#xA;  Falls upside down!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=63oyOh6jgbEC&amp;amp;pg=PT58&amp;amp;dq=Hidden%20%22in%20the%20cannon%22%20concrete&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiByoG8kcblAhWpk4sKHaUHAw0Q6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Hidden%20%22in%20the%20cannon%22%20concrete&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You mean you think the bank robber hid the money in the cannon, and&#xA;  then before he could get it out again the Town Council sent a crew out&#xA;  there to plug up the barrel with cement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists' Club&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A secret cavern becomes the perfect spot to restore a midget&#xA;  submarine, bank robbers must be apprehended, a flying sorcerer looms&#xA;  over Mammoth Falls and that's just the beginning of five more mad, mad&#xA;  MAD adventures!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2019-10-31T09:30:18.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11896" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11898" CreationDate="2019-10-31T20:49:33.720" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m just paraphrasing what I remember. I believe this is from a science fiction novel. But essentially it says “A king commissioned a map of his kingdom to be made. It wasn’t inclusive enough, so it was added to repeatedly until it became a useless collection of space where wild animals roamed”. Can someone remind me where this idea comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8026" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T03:30:47.227" Title="A king commissioned an ever growing map of his kingdom" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11896" CreationDate="2019-11-01T03:30:47.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &quot;Del Rigor en la Ciencia&quot;, by Jorge Luis Borges. It is frequently associated with the phrase &quot;the map is not the territory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot is what you say, and the last line of the story says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En los desiertos del Oeste perduran despedazadas Ruinas del Mapa, habitadas por Animales y por Mendigos. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This says that only broken ruins of the map remain, inhabited by wild animals and beggars, which matches your recollection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T03:30:47.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11899" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11901" CreationDate="2019-10-30T05:58:19.760" Score="11" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the 1887 Sherlock Holmes story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_in_Scarlet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... He has just &lt;strong&gt;come from the tropics&lt;/strong&gt;, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin ... Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as far as I know, Afghanistan is not in tropics - not even particularly close. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is confused here? Holmes, Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or me? I was astonished not find a discussion of this question anywhere (though I did just find &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.garenewing.co.uk/angloafghanwar/articles/watson.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only explanation I can think of besides the obvious one (that Sir Arthur was completely confused) is that perhaps the term tropical meant something somewhat different back when 1870?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8032" OwnerDisplayName="stacksia" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T12:37:16.030" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:10:48.870" Title="Was Afghanistan considered tropical or was Holmes wrong?" Tags="&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9589" CreationDate="2019-11-01T12:39:33.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A foot of three unstressed syllables is called a &lt;em&gt;tribrach&lt;/em&gt;. Do tribrachs exist in Shakespeare? I don't know. It is going to be very hard, if not impossible, to find tribrachs in Shakespeare (or any other English pentameter, for that matter) that can't be reanalyzed in terms of other feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling &quot;tribrach&quot; gives a number of websites that include the sentence &quot;the existence of the tribrach has been contested by some writers.&quot; However, none of these websites seem to say who these writers are, or why they think tribrachs don't exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling, I have found one &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=8nUZAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA234&amp;amp;lpg=PA234&amp;amp;dq=%22tribrach+stress+poetry&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=MWv2qNu_Hm&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0KQBvQCLprYKNzXwC55uvtUxqc0w&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjh1b-z5cflAhVGuVkKHeEPBZQ4ChDoATAJegQICRAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22tribrach%20stress%20poetry&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;An Introduction to Poetry: for Students of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;, by Raymond McDonald Alden) that casts doubt on the existence of tribrachs. It says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some writers, again, recognize a foot of three &#xA;  unstressed syllables called the tribrach, in such verses &#xA;  as these: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From their | pure in | &lt;em&gt;fluence to&lt;/em&gt; | pervade | the room,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mista | ken men | and pat | &lt;em&gt;riots&lt;/em&gt; in | their hearts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unquestionably the term is sometimes convenient ; yet &#xA;  the succession of four unstressed syllables is usually &#xA;  avoided either by slurring the first two or by putting &#xA;  a slight secondary stress on the third,—in other words, &#xA;  treating the foot as a pyrrhic or an anapest. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the argument is that in English iambic poetry, tribrachs can always be reanalyzed as other feet. When you have a long string of unstressed syllables in English, we naturally tend to put some amount of stress on one of them, and this usually lets us reanalyze the tribrach as an anapest, possibly after switching it with an adjacent iambic foot. You have already done this with your second example, which you reanalyzed from tribrach | iamb (izens of | Cori) to iamb | anapest (izens | of Cori). Similarly, you could reanalyze your first example as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  ˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  /&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  ˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Behold | I choose | thee Tam | ora for | my bride,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since there is no real semantic obstacle to putting a light stress on &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; in this line.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So where might you find an example of an uncontested tribrach? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An uncontested tribrach in iambic pentameter would have to be followed by a foot with two syllables, since otherwise there is a strong tendency to scan the two adjacent three-syllable feet as three two-syllable feet. I believe it also will have to be followed by an iamb, because if it's followed by a stressed syllable, there is a strong tendency to scan it as two iambs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can you arrange English so as to have four incontestably unstressed syllables together? I have looked at a number of English words that start with two unstressed syllables, and as far as I can tell, you can always put secondary stress on the first. Similarly, looking at English words that end with three unstressed syllables, I haven't found any where you can't stress one of the last two. Thus, the only way to get four incontestably unstressed syllables seems to be with a word ending with two unstressed syllables, followed by a single unstressable word, and a word starting with an unstressed syllable. The best examples I can think of are on the lines of: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  ˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The queen | gave Chris | topher an | embroid | ered shirt. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see putting any stress on &lt;em&gt;pher&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;an&lt;/em&gt; in this line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even here, you could scan it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  ˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The queen | gave Chris | topher | an embroid | ered shirt,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which sounds nearly the same to me when read.&#xA;I don't like this scansion anywhere near as much as the earlier one, because the feet are more uneven in length. However, I believe this indicates you never &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to use tribrachs to scan poetry in English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does seem that some poets use three unstressed syllables as a foot in iambic pentameter. If you listen to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxlYy-9Ya6c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yeats reading&lt;/a&gt; his poem &lt;em&gt;The Second Coming,&lt;/em&gt; the first ten lines of this poem are in reasonably strict iambic pentameter, and he reads the sixth line with a foot of three unstressed syllables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;˘&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;/&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The cer | emony | of in | nocence | is drowned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-01-20T02:44:05.247" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T02:44:05.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11901" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11899" CreationDate="2019-11-01T15:11:44.363" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Don't interpret &quot;the tropics&quot; with such scientific precision.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You originally posted this question on the Earth Sciences site, and you seem to have been thinking of this quote with a literal (I'd even say pedantic, noting that I consider this a compliment) interpretation of the word &quot;tropics&quot;. But in everyday English, the word isn't always used so precisely - I'd wager most English people aren't aware even today that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the tropics&lt;/a&gt; refers specifically to the region between 23°N and 23°S, and that was probably even more true in the days of the British Empire when people travelled less and knew less about the world beyond their own country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_climate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tropical climate&lt;/a&gt; is characterised as one that's both hot and humid. This is another potential meaning of &quot;tropics&quot; (short for &quot;tropical climates&quot;), which may include regions above the Tropic of Cancer or below the Tropic of Capricorn. However, the climate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Afghanistan#Climate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Afghanistan&lt;/a&gt; is hot and dry, so this definition doesn't strictly work either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, checking the quote again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... the important point about the region is not its latitude, nor its humidity, but its temperature and the intensity of the sun, which cause people to become tanned. While &quot;tropics&quot; doesn't actually cover Afghanistan, it probably does cover &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; places in the world with the most intense tan-inducing heat and sunlight. &quot;Tropics&quot; will do as a catch-all term. Even a precise intellect like Holmes's (or Doyle's) doesn't need to split hairs when it's not necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any specific information on how the word &quot;tropics&quot; was generally used in the late 19th century, but it seems plausible that it was used more loosely than today, in an era when many &quot;foreign parts&quot; could be bunched together as &quot;the colonies&quot; and mostly ignored by Englishmen. It may be worth noting that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Köppen climate classification&lt;/a&gt; was first published in 1884, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8124/17&quot;&gt;after the time of &quot;A Study in Scarlet&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, so &quot;tropical climate&quot; may not have been defined at all at this time except vaguely as something like &quot;hot parts of the world&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-01T15:16:51.677" LastActivityDate="2019-11-01T15:16:51.677" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11902" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-02T02:29:07.253" Score="5" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Listen,&quot; Sunset complained. &quot;I don't know you &lt;strong&gt;from last Sunday's sports section. You may be all to the silk.&lt;/strong&gt; I just don't know.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Why'd you brace me?&quot; I asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You had the word, didn't you?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This was where I took the dive. I grinned at him. &quot;Yeah. Goldfish was the password. The Smoke Shop was the place.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is from &lt;em&gt;Goldfish&lt;/em&gt; by Raymond Chandler.&#xA;I can't figure out the bold letter part, so I am asking about its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8033" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T21:48:42.807" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T15:06:15.663" Title="An undecipherable part of 'Goldfish' by Raymond Chandler" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;raymond-chandler&gt;&lt;goldfish&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11903" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-02T03:03:56.600" Score="1" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a comparison paper, and I think there is something in common between Joyce's and Hemingway's short story writing: concise but powerful. Is there any evidence that Hemingway's writing style was influenced by Joyce's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8034" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-17T20:23:57.133" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:39:11.920" Title="Did James Joyce's writing style influence Ernest Hemingway?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11899" CreationDate="2019-11-03T07:23:13.547" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sir Arthur was mistaken. Afghanistan is certainly not officially 'tropical', neither does the inter-tropical convergence zone extend that far north. However, Afghanistan, especially in the northern lowlands adjacent to the Amu Darya near the Tajikistan border has an eminently continental climate, and can get ferociously hot in high summer - I speak from experience. Occasional daytime temperatures of &gt;40 degrees C are becoming more common. Similarly the flat plains to the south and west can be hugely debilitating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt if Sir A.C-D ever visited Afghanistan, and certainly not in the mountains in mid-winter when temperatures can plummet to less than -20. Much as I enjoy the Sherlock Holmes stories, his correlation of sunburn with 'the tropics' is at fault. For example, I have been sunburned north of the Arctic Circle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8039" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T07:23:13.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11909" CreationDate="2019-11-03T13:35:08.473" Score="3" ViewCount="2483" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a poem &quot;The Hollow Men&quot; by T. S. Eliot. The poet ended the verse like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is the way the world ends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is the way the world ends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This is the way the world ends&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not with a bang but a whimper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean? What is he trying to tell the reader?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Eliot express his own personal life or emotions with these lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T15:43:51.270" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T09:52:38.193" Title="What does T. S. Eliot mean by &quot;This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11888" CreationDate="2019-11-03T20:21:36.923" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The perfect beast is humanity's self-made doom.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beast that we keep building is a (modern/future) human, that has lifted itself &quot;All the way to Malibu out of the land of talking drum&quot;; someone who has &quot;The power of reason&quot; and is &quot;the top of the heap&quot;, someone who &quot;kills things he doesn't eat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole song is a description of a self-created doom based on our self-destruction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We've found the lock and turned the key &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  We're shakin' up those building blocks  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Going deeper into that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora%27s_box&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;box&lt;/a&gt;- (Pandora wouldn't like it)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the power to get our life better and longer, we are trying to become gods (&#xA;&quot;Olympus or bust!&quot;)  yet there is a price to pay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Relieve all pain and suffering &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And lift us out of the dark &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Turn us all into methuselah- &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  But where are we gonna park?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The semi-religious &quot;Glory hallelujah!&quot; is used sarcastically here - we are creating our own doom and we are happy to do so, because&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For we have met the enemy -and he is us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastActivityDate="2019-11-03T20:21:36.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11907" CreationDate="2019-11-04T11:29:02.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While what a poet is trying to tell the reader will usually be a matter of dispute, B. C. Southam shines some light on these lines in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.nl/books/about/A_Student_s_Guide_to_the_Selected_Poems.html?id=v3fHQgAACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 217-8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ll. 95-8:&lt;/em&gt; a parody, combining a line from the children's song 'Here we go round the mulberry bush' - 'This is the way we clap our hands' -&#xA;with a distortion of the phrase 'world without end' from the prayer&#xA;'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it&#xA;was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.&#xA;Amen.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;l. 98: Not with a bang:&lt;/em&gt; cf. 'it all ends, not with a bang, not with some casual incident, but in sustained reflection...', in George&#xA;Santayana's account of the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, in &lt;em&gt;Three Philosophical&#xA;Poets&lt;/em&gt; (1910). Santayana (1863-1952) was lecturing on Dante at Harvard&#xA;during Eliot's student days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;whimper&lt;/em&gt;: Eliot may have had in mind two lines from &lt;em&gt;Danny Deever&lt;/em&gt; (1892) by Rudyard Kipling, a poem he knew by heart at the age of ten. Deever, a British soldier, is executed in front of his regiment for killing another comrade:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;What's that that whimpers over'ead?, said Files-on-Parade,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It's Danny's soul that's passin' now,' the Colour-Sargeant said.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot referred to this 'remarkable' poem in his Introduction to &lt;em&gt;A Choice of Kipling's Verse&lt;/em&gt; (1941) quoting these lines and commenting that Kipling's choice of the word 'whimpers' is 'exactly right'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'whimper' may also combine an allusive reference to Dante, suggesting the cry of a baby, the new-born leaving one world to enter another, just as at the end of the &lt;em&gt;Purgatorio&lt;/em&gt; Dante is leaving the sinful, fallen world in the presence of Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise. In xxx, 43ff. and xxi, 64ff, he stands before her, shamed and conscience-stricken, repentant and silent, like a child before a stern mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-04T11:29:02.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11910" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17296" CreationDate="2019-11-04T20:41:07.733" Score="3" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://webhome.phy.duke.edu/~hsg/134/poems/harold-furth-perils-of-modern-living.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Perils of Modern Living&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a poem written by the physicist Harold P. Furth inspired by a speech on antimatter by Edward Teller. (Hat-tip to our comrades at &lt;a href=&quot;https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/159913/2235&quot;&gt;Worldbuilding SE&lt;/a&gt; for making me aware of this poem, although I'm pretty sure I'd heard of it, or at least the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimacassar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;macassar&lt;/a&gt; part, before.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Well up above the tropostrata&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     There is a region stark and stellar&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Where, on a streak of anti-matter&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Lived Dr. Edward Anti-Teller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Remote from Fusion's origin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     He lived unguessed and unawares&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     With all his antikith and kin,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     And kept macassars on his chairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One morning, idling by the sea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     He spied a tin of monstrous girth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     That bore three letters: A. E. C.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Out stepped a visitor from Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then, shouting gladly o'er the sands,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Met two who in their alien ways&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Were like as lentils. Their right hands&lt;br&gt;&#xA;     Clasped, and the rest was gamma rays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does A. E. C. represent?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm guessing it's not just a made-up sci-fi acronym like Antimatter Energy Company, but probably refers to something real, perhaps associated with space exploration (as it was conceived of back in the 50s) or with Teller specifically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T10:52:29.747" Title="What does A. E. C. denote in the poem about Edward Anti-Teller?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;harold-p-furth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11911" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-05T08:42:48.357" Score="0" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my native subcontinental literature, there is a notion that one of the identifying features of short stories is, it &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; end without a conclusion. The reader is left guessing. That is, the reader can assume anything to be the conclusion. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it same in English literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8041" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T14:00:49.290" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T16:24:52.743" Title="Is it true that short stories &quot;must&quot; end without definite conclusions?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11913" CreationDate="2019-11-05T10:50:25.197" Score="6" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book maybe fifteen years ago, but it felt much older. I think the prices used suggested it taking place in the 50's or 60's. (I was a european kid who never used dollars, I might be mistaken on this point.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a group of siblings, with the oldest sister being somewhere in her teens. For some reason they had to go find an older cousin of them to live with, and couldn't rely on anyone, so they walked across the states, maybe following an interstate. I think they worked a bit along the way to get food money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They eventually reached the cousin's house. She proved to be quite nice to the children. I can't remember if they did actually live with her, but I'm pretty sure they didn't see their parents again if they were still alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sequel the oldest sister was learning to build boats. A stranger came in the hangar she was working in, made fun of her for her lack of experience, then helped her I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember a scene of her at the school, the teacher asking to plan a meal with as little money as possible. She did so using her previous experience on the road, but the teacher mocked her, claiming that no one could survive on so little. That made her angry as she obviously had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8043" OwnerDisplayName="user123065" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2019-11-05T12:38:37.000" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T12:38:37.000" Title="Story about siblings crossing the United States on foot" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11913" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11912" CreationDate="2019-11-05T12:22:01.647" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I suspect this is Cynthia Voight's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homecoming_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homecoming&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homecoming&lt;/em&gt;, set in the very early 1980s, tells the story of four siblings aged between six and thirteen, whose mother abandons them one summer afternoon in their car next to a Connecticut shopping mall during an aborted road trip to a family member in Bridgeport. Realizing that their mother is not coming back, and that they cannot go home (as their father walked out before the youngest child was born), the children travel together, mostly on foot, trying to reach Bridgeport. There, they hope to find their missing mother at the home of a relative they have never met. The children find themselves on a journey that is emotional as well as literal; during their weeks on the road, their adventures and the people they meet along the way help them to find out more about who they are and what is important to them, as well as to cope with the loss of their mother and to understand society's reaction to her poverty, isolation, mental illness, and the fact that she was an unmarried mother of four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's followed by &lt;em&gt;Dicey's Song&lt;/em&gt;, which does indeed involve boats and budgets, and several other books by Voight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found by searching for &lt;em&gt;novel children hiking across United States to meet cousin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T12:22:01.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11664" CreationDate="2019-11-05T14:42:33.703" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As literary people we shall not shy away from trying to decipher the meaning of a speech, statement or literary work simply for lack of context. That we don’t know the professor or why he said so does not stop us interpreting his communication and its ramifications. We do that all the time, it is called Literary Appreciation. We look at the literal and connotative meanings, and consider context and intent etc. Context is important yes. But context itself is not homogenous; it is granular and involves immediate setting, situation and motivation and the wider millieu, setting, situation and motivation. In the absence of the former, the latter can shed light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Professor’s remark was loud and clear: “Literature appears to me to be dying”. That’s it. Why does he think like that? Why this pessimistic view? The wider millieu of academics explains this. I have related with academics and industry people and work with both as a consultant and teacher. This professor is symptomatic of an attitude among many academics (the gown) and other town’s people that innovation is debasing “good old culture” or theory.&#xA; Academics especially in literary fields, arrogate to themselves the custodianship of culture. They want to believe the established, and carefully abstracted rules of engagement which they have packaged in handouts, notes, books and other media are gospel and should be obeyed and not broken. They want you to write to the standards of Shakespeare, Tennyson and literary giants of old. Any deviation is a seen by them as a debasement or dilution of the “real” thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why when you write fine, “delicious” prose as essay for academics, they derisively dismiss your writing as “journalistic”. They would rather you write terse, boring cryptic prose as essay, and even then will pick nits in your work. It is the same conservatism that made them dismiss e.e. cummins’ poetry in his life time, only now to come to see his towering greatness posthumously. The same is going on with Rupi Kaur who, despite her popularity and commercial success in her niche, is dismissed by the academics. It is the same phenomenon we see in the initial rejection of Wikipedia as a veritable citation in academic work (fortunately, many are coming to accept it). In Poetry we have had this raging argument with the pessimists who think Poetry is dead too. As a protest to spite them we launched the #poetryisnotdead movement. You will find it on Instagram and Twitter particularly. May be in response to this professor of yours, we shall start the #literatureisNOTDEAD movement too. But I digress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The academics (the gown) and some towns people who see innovations and emerging literature as not literature but a descent to the demise of literature, miss a very important point. Literature is a product of popular culture. I use popular culture not in the “glitz and glamour” sense of it but as activities and artefacts of a people in a given social millieu or the society in general. People had folklores, developed chants and incantations and unique techniques of rendering these long before it was carefully distilled and put on paper as literature. Since literature comes out of the culture of the people and is intended for consumption by the people, it naturally panders to the overall whims and caprices, and adjusts to changes in these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 21Century for example, social media is a cultural fact and having literary works especially poetry and stories done by many, non-academic writers all over the world is a fact. That these things are not of the academia, makes them see it as bohemian (pardon my rhyme, am a poet). So they dismiss these as not good since, for example many poems are not crafted sonnets or allegories or some form in the way they are used to. There is a lot of free versing, free-wheeling innovation and flux. Rather than study emerging phenomena and literary expressions of the times (which is what they are paid for), they condemn and deride them ab initio. This is crux of the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my take on the professor’s remark: Literature is flourishing. Just try counting how many good hard copy publications or blogs, social media posts and other online content are, say, stories, drama, poetry, screenwriting or discourse on the craft and practice of writing these &amp;amp; you will see that many academics are so far up “there” in their rarefied ivory tower, they miss the point: it’s all about communication and self-expression, its art!&#xA;No, Prof.. #literatureisNOTDEAD!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8031" LastActivityDate="2019-11-05T14:42:33.703" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11920" CreationDate="2019-11-05T18:54:13.310" Score="1" ViewCount="177" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember this anecdote from shortly after I graduated college, so it was on the internet at least in 2014. The point of the anecdote was that two equally valid solutions to a problem can take drastically different approaches with different cost and difficulty and each have value as measured by different metrics. I can't recall, however, if I heard this spoken in a YouTube presentation (possibly at Strange Loop or Google IO) or if I read it on an online post, but I know I heard the story online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story went &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;roughly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A company needed to accomplish some task (perhaps finding the sum of&#xA;  all accounts who were overdue)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They hired a famous software architect with 40 years of experience&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The architect gathered specs, built a definition of the problem, and&#xA;  worked for 6 months. When he was done he had written tens of thousands&#xA;  of lines of code including very elegant solutions to problems the&#xA;  likes of which the industry had never seen. And his code worked&#xA;  perfectly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then another developer came along and solved the same problem in an&#xA;  hour with 6 lines of bash script&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the postscript of the story (perhaps discussing it afterwards) they mentioned that &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;technically&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; the bash script utilized other tools like &lt;code&gt;awk&lt;/code&gt;, &lt;code&gt;sed&lt;/code&gt;, and &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt; so you need to factor in the lines of code for those programs as well to find that this one-hour solution was technically less efficient and had more total code involved - yet it was solved faster and it worked just as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm hoping someone can help me find the source of this story&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8046" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T18:38:31.513" Title="Trying to find a particular anecdote about programming" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="9" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2019-11-07T15:05:28.487" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11835" CreationDate="2019-11-05T23:02:42.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I put &amp;quot;Yeats ceremony of innocence&amp;quot; on Google and saw lots of speculation/interpretation just in the first page of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats uses the term &amp;quot;ceremony of innocence&amp;quot; to harken back to the ordered, structured, ceremonial world of pre-war Europe. Yeats mourns what he sees as the loss of an aristocratic order. Instead of order, the world is now awash in bloody chaos or anarchy.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; D. Reynolds in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-drowns-the-ceremony-of-innocence-in-the-272404&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What drowns the &amp;quot;ceremony of innocence&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;, eNotes.com.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it's poetry, so any interpretation that makes the poem more robust for you (hooking your emotional response to your understanding of his argument) is the goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8050" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:30:40.767" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:30:40.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11918" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-06T16:34:34.253" Score="3" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his story &amp;quot;Genesis and Catastrophe&amp;quot; [1959] , also called &amp;quot;A fine son&amp;quot;, Roald Dahl uses a plot twist that has been done so often that it is an eye-roller: revealing near the end that the protagonist is Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was he the first writer to use this plot device? Or did anyone beat him to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7431" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T10:47:12.897" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T10:47:12.897" Title="Was Roald Dahl the first to use the &quot;Hitler twist?&quot;" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;roald-dahl&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-06T16:47:57.390" Score="0" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following quote from Richard Siken comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://richardsikendaily.tumblr.com/post/21456264006/kathleenjoy-james-hall-i-love-that-you-risk/amp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview with James Hall&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the literal meaning, is there a deeper meaning to this? I mean, can I infer that the floor and the wall do not actually meet because I didn't paint it very well? And is it directly connected to my losing something I love?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8054" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T09:04:52.737" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T17:13:10.847" Title="Deeper meaning of Richard Siken's quote" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;richard-siken&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11915" CreationDate="2019-11-06T18:31:41.673" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: This story is recognisable as a mangled version of Donald Knuth’s solution to the ‘&lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; most common words’ problem and Doug McIlroy’s review of it, in the June 1986 &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Literate programming&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1980s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bentley_(computer_scientist)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jon Bentley&lt;/a&gt; wrote a column called ‘Programming Pearls’ that appeared in the &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt;. He devoted the columns for May and June 1986 to a description of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald Knuth&lt;/a&gt;’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literate programming&lt;/a&gt;’ paradigm which he had used to develop the computer typesetting systems &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;METAFONT&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TeX&lt;/a&gt;. The May column described the principles of literate programming and Knuth’s ‘WEB’ software, and introduced the following challenge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I first read Knuth’s “Literate Programming” paper referenced under Further Reading, I was quite impressed by his approach. When I read the large programs referenced there, I was overwhelmed: for the first time, somebody was proud enough of a substantial piece of code to publish it for public viewing, in a way that is inviting to read. I was so fascinated that I wrote Knuth a letter, asking whether he had any spare programs handy that I might publish as a “Programming Pearl.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But that was too easy for Knuth. He responded, “Why should you let me choose the program? My claim is that programming is an artistic endeavor and that the WEB system gives me the best way to write beautiful programs. Therefore I should be able to meet a stiffer test: I should be able to write a superliterate program that will be noticeably better than an ordinary one, whatever the topic. So how about this: You tell me what sort of program you want me to write, and I’ll try to prove the merits of literate programming by finding the best possible solution to whatever problem you pose—at least the best by current standards.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He laid some ground rules for the task. The program had to be short enough to fit comfortably in a column, say, an afternoon’s worth of programming. It had to be a complete program (not just a fragment), and could not stress input and output (Knuth has boilerplate to handle that problem, but that isn’t of interest to most readers). Because his “Literate Programming” article is built around a program to print prime numbers, this assignment should avoid number-theoretic problems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I chose a problem that I had assigned to several classes on data structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Given a text file and an integer &lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt;, you are to print the &lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; most common words in the file (and the number of their occurrences) in decreasing frequency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jon Bentley (1986). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://onrf.pw/1571415234.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Literate Programming&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt; 29:5, pp. 365–368.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Knuth’s solution&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon Bentley gave over his June 1986 column to Knuth’s literate solution to the ‘&lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; most common words’ problem. Knuth solved the problem by deploying a recently invented data structure, Frank Liang’s ‘hash trie’, a form of prefix tree with the representations of the nodes interleaved in an array in order to make the most efficent use of the available space:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Given a word in the buffer, we will want to look for it in a dynamic dictionary of all words that have appeared so far. We expect many words to occur often, so we want a search technique that will find existing words quickly. Furthermore, the dictionary should accommodate words of variable length, and (ideally) it should also facilitate the task of alphabetic ordering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These constraints, suggest a variant of the data structure introduced by Frank M. Liang in his Ph.D. thesis [“Word Hy-phen-a-tion by Com-pu-ter,” Stanford University, 1983]. Liang’s structure, which we may call a &lt;em&gt;hash trie&lt;/em&gt;, requires comparatively few operations to find a word that is already present, although it may take somewhat longer to insert a new entry. Some space is sacrificed—we will need two pointers, a count, and another 5-bit field for each character in the dictionary, plus extra space to keep the hash table from becoming congested—but relatively large memories are commonplace nowadays, so the method seems ideal for the present application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Donald Knuth (1986). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/don-knuth/pearls-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Words&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt; 29:6, pp. 473–474.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;McIlroy’s review&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon Bentley commissioned a review of Knuth’s solution from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_McIlroy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doug McIlroy&lt;/a&gt;. McIlroy was impressed by Knuth’s virtuousity but critical of his engineering approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I found Don Knuth’s program convincing as a demonstration of WEB and fascinating for its data structure, but I disagree with it on engineering grounds. The problem is to print the &lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; most common words in an input file (and the number of their occurrences) in decreasing frequency. Knuth’s solution is to tally in an associative data structure each word as it is read from the file. The data structure is a trie, with 26-way (for technical reasons actually 27-way) fan-out at each letter. To avoid wasting space all the (sparse) 26-element arrays are cleverly interleaved in one common arena, with hashing used to assign homes. Homes may move underfoot as new words cause old arrays to collide. The final sorting is done by distributing counts less than 200 into buckets and insertion-sorting larger counts into a list. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Knuth’s purpose was to illustrate WEB. Nevertheless, it is instructive to consider the program at face value as a solution to a problem. A first engineering question to ask is: how often is one likely to have to do this exact task? Not at all often, I contend. It is plausible, though, that similar, but not identical, problems might arise. A wise engineering solution would produce—or better, exploit—reusable parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Doug McIlroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/don-knuth/pearls-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Review&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Communications of the ACM&lt;/em&gt; 29:6, pp. 478–479.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McIlroy pointed out that the ‘&lt;em&gt;K&lt;/em&gt; most common words’ problem could be solved using standard Unix tools via a short shell script:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The following shell script was written on the spot and worked on the first try. It took 30 seconds to handle a 10,000-word file on a VAX-11/750™.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;(1)  tr -cs A-Za-z '&#xA;     ' |&#xA;(2)  tr A-Z a-z |&#xA;(3)  sort |&#xA;(4)  uniq -c |&#xA;(5)  sort -rn |&#xA;(6)  sed ${1}q&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you are not a Unix adept, you may need a little explanation, but not much, to understand this pipeline of processes. The plan is easy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make one-word lines by transliterating the complement (&lt;code&gt;-c&lt;/code&gt;) of the alphabet into newlines (note the quoted newline), and squeezing out (&lt;code&gt;-s&lt;/code&gt;) multiple newlines.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transliterate upper case to lower case.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sort to bring identical words together.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Replace each run of duplicate words with a single representative and include a count (&lt;code&gt;-c&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sort in reverse (&lt;code&gt;-r&lt;/code&gt;) numeric (&lt;code&gt;-n&lt;/code&gt;) order.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pass through a stream editor; quit (&lt;code&gt;q&lt;/code&gt;) after printing the number of lines designated by the script’s first parameter (&lt;code&gt;${1}&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;McIlroy, p. 479.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend reading both the &lt;a href=&quot;https://onrf.pw/1571415234.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;May&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/don-knuth/pearls-2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;June 1986&lt;/a&gt; ‘Programming Pearls’ columns—they are classics of the computer programming literature, and Knuth’s solution remains a jewel of elegance and readability despite its impracticality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T18:38:31.513" LastActivityDate="2019-11-06T18:38:31.513" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11921" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11925" CreationDate="2019-11-06T19:41:31.640" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his best known book, &lt;em&gt;History of Shit&lt;/em&gt;, Dominique Laporte mentions &quot;Swift's &lt;em&gt;Great Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&quot; when listing pertinent literature (pp. 100-101):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Biblioteca Scatalogica&lt;/em&gt; furnishes an impressive list of works, for the most part in Latin, published between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. In the sixteenth century, we find the &lt;em&gt;De excrementis&lt;/em&gt;, [...] followed, in order of publication, by &lt;em&gt;Dissertatio de utilitate inspiciendorum ut signorum&lt;/em&gt; (1693), [...], Swift’s magestrial [&lt;em&gt;sic&lt;/em&gt;] two-volume &lt;em&gt;Great Mystery&lt;/em&gt; published in 1726,...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The year of publication seems to correspond with Swift's lifetime (indeed, &lt;em&gt;Gulliver's Travels&lt;/em&gt; was published that same year), but I'm having a hard time finding which of his works (if anything) this is referencing. I'm not especially enthusiastic about reading it, but mostly wondering about Laporte's integrity -- does the &lt;em&gt;Great Mystery&lt;/em&gt; actually exist? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="6142" LastEditorUserId="6142" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T19:46:46.093" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T17:26:43.190" Title="Swift's Great Mystery" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11952" CreationDate="2019-11-06T20:05:19.157" Score="1" ViewCount="1628" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the passage from Ginsberg's Howl:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the hyphen in Blake-light get interpreted? Is the speaker hallucinating about Blake-light tragedy? If yes, what does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is the speaker hallucinating about Blake, and using the hyphen to pause before commenting that his hallucination is a light tragedy when compared to what the scholars of war are doing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8056" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-06T20:13:20.697" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T17:45:56.803" Title="In &quot;Howl&quot;, what does &quot;Blake-light tragedy&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allen-ginsberg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="409" CreationDate="2019-11-07T06:14:47.183" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Like Tolkien, Herbert paid very close attention to the language of the people he described and tied those back to actual real world languages an their structures. As described above, the term &quot;Kwisatz Haderach&quot;makes a real life reference to Semitic language, both Hebrew and Arabic.  None of the language used by the Freman is simple.  Their language is more of an amalgamation of proto-Hindi, Arabic, Hebrew, and even Aramaic.  The language, with some alterations exist within every planet in the Dune Universe.  I imagine Imperial Standard language includes Chakosba as an influence as most people in the frame of reference are both familiar with the Orange Catholic Bible as well as the oral traditions of the Zensuni wanders and the teachings of the Bene Gesserit.  &quot;Bene&quot;, by the way is derived from the Arabic &quot;Banū.&quot; meaning tribe or clan.  Mahdi! Mahdi! As-salāmuʿalaykum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8059" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T06:14:47.183" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11921" CreationDate="2019-11-07T17:26:43.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Laporte must refer to &lt;em&gt;The Grand Mystery: Or, Art of Meditating Over an House of Office, Restor'd and Unveil'd&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1726; whether this is to be attributed to Swift or to Edward Ward is apparently unclear. A modern reproduction is for sale &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookdepository.com/Grand-Mystery-Jonathan-Swift/9781245694889&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online&lt;/a&gt; but I couldn't find any more information on this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T17:26:43.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3935" CreationDate="2019-11-07T19:12:50.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was reading I discovered a constant repetition of certain phrases that allowed me to deduce who it was through the random thought sequences we were shown. I also remarked that he was the only one sent to the island by someone other than U.N. Owen and he was the one who noticed that it sounded like unknown, which reminded me of the way I hint at my siblings where the Easter Bunny hid their chocolates because I can't stand the waiting, and I want my brilliant hiding spots to be shown. It is evident that Lawrence also enjoyed being thought of as brilliant, and that is the reason for his confession. I read a story once about a dentist who murdered his associate and he planned it out very carefully and intelligently. The detective got him to confess by saying he stumbled across things by 'accident' and he got 'lucky'. The accused flung himself into a rage and detailed his entire plan, giving a full confession. That's why Lawrence revealed the name and sent the confession in a bottle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8062" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T19:12:50.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13641" CreationDate="2019-11-07T19:53:46.440" Score="4" ViewCount="493" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modernised Muss-Arnolt translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;None with weapon might challenge him as rival. His men stand at attention, longing for his orders; but the old men of Uruk grouse that Gilgamesh has left no son to his father, for his arrogance has grown boundless. He has taken all their children, for is Gilgamesh not the shepherd of his people? Gilgamesh does not leave a daughter to her mother, nor the maiden to the warrior, nor the wife to her husband. Yet Gilgamesh is the magnificent and glorious shepherd of his people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does it mean that Gilgamesh has &quot;taken all their children&quot; and &quot;does not leave&quot; a son to his father, a wife to her husband, and so on? Does he literally &lt;em&gt;take&lt;/em&gt; people for his own purposes, to serve him personally? Does he take them on as servants/slaves, or just take whatever he wants for a day and then let them go? Or is the meaning less literal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems pretty important to the plot, as it's what motivated the gods to create Enkidu to challenge Gilgamesh, starting off the whole story. I don't know if there's any answer beyond what I've quoted above, but given the various versions of this story, maybe another version (or another translation) is more clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T21:07:32.243" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T21:07:32.243" Title="What does it mean that Gilgamesh &quot;took&quot; the people of Uruk?" Tags="&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8934" CreationDate="2019-11-07T21:50:27.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like it might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/337133.Factoring_Humanity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Factoring Humanity&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1998) by Robert J. Sawyer.  (Admittedly it's more like 20 years old than 30.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aliens (from Alpha Centauri) first send a message, then a ship.  (The decoded message contains instructions for building a device that allows people to visit and explore what is essentially the collective unconscious of humanity.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the aliens arrive near Earth, their presence brings their own collective unconscious into contact with humanity's collective unconscious.  It is this contact, and the fact that it finally forces humanity's collective unconscious to confront an &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; that precipitates the &quot;moment of empathy.&quot;  Somehow this fundamental level of recognition that others are also empathic beings instantly propagates through humanity as a whole, and narrative skips over many scenes of people turning away from violence or selfishness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8063" LastActivityDate="2019-11-07T21:50:27.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11929" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2019-11-08T02:17:03.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am amazed of what I read here as I first heard the poem somewhere around 1980 ans seemed to be a well known poem in poetry circles by then, so it must be way older. So it is not possible to have been written in 1998. By the way I always heard it in Spanish and not in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8065" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T02:17:03.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-08T06:57:29.397" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following passage from Les Miserables, with characters Mr. Thenardier and Jean Valjean, who does the bold &quot;&lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Be that as it may, on entering into conversation with the man, sure that there was some secret in the case, that the latter had some interest in remaining in the shadow, he felt himself strong; when he perceived from the stranger’s clear and firm retort, that this mysterious personage was mysterious in so simple a way, he became conscious that &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; was weak. He had expected nothing of the sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-08T07:54:41.493" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T12:57:18.233" Title="Who does “he” refer to in this passage from Les Miserables?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11930" CreationDate="2019-11-08T12:57:18.233" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17493/17493-h/17493-h.htm#Chapitre_IXc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original French&lt;/a&gt; (Tome 2 &quot;Cosette&quot;, Livre 3, Chapitre IX), it reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quoi qu'il en fût, en entamant la conversation avec l'homme, sûr qu'il&#xA;  y avait un secret dans tout cela, sûr que l'homme était intéressé à&#xA;  rester dans l'ombre, il se sentait fort; à la réponse nette et ferme&#xA;  de l'étranger, quand il vit que ce personnage mystérieux était&#xA;  mystérieux si simplement, il se sentit faible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;il se sentit faible&quot; simply means &quot;he felt weak&quot;, thus referring to himself; in contrast to the earlier &quot;il se sentait fort&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2019-11-08T12:57:18.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11934" CreationDate="2019-11-09T16:35:25.517" Score="6" ViewCount="855" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a comic strip about the statement that your clothes make, but don't seem to be able to find it. It goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cartoon of a Guy with great hair, smile, and a suit.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Caption: &amp;quot;I'm going places so I won't be here long enough to learn your name&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cartoon of a Guy in a dirty t-shirt (note mustard stain) and flip flops.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Caption: &amp;quot;I'm the only one who understands the unix system. Worship me&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were more panels in between but I don't remember them. I think it's a Dilbert strip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8071" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-10T16:17:34.403" Title="Trying to find a comic strip about &quot;What your clothes say about you&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11933" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-09T18:34:12.647" Score="0" ViewCount="2619" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see the obvious use of repetition but I felt like there might be some more specific type of repetition/technique to comment about here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8072" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T21:01:05.243" Title="What's the technique in 'To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus.' from Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11934" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11932" CreationDate="2019-11-09T19:10:50.717" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qxIp1.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qxIp1.gif&quot; alt=&quot;comic strip&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://blog.abhinavagarwal.net/2010/08/dilbert-build-better-life-by-stealing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apparently&lt;/a&gt; this is from the book &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0836217578&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies: Dogbert's Big Book of Business&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; - many thanks to @Carmeister for knowing this!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How I found it:&lt;/strong&gt; a Google image search for &lt;code&gt;comic strip unix &quot;clothes say&quot; about you&lt;/code&gt; (note the quotes) led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://users.cs.fiu.edu/~esj/work.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. Having found the image, I tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&amp;amp;q=%22understands+the+computer+system+worship+me%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching for an exact quote&lt;/a&gt; but found almost no results, probably because Google doesn't index text found in images like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-10T16:17:34.403" LastActivityDate="2019-11-10T16:17:34.403" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-10T13:04:06.497" Score="2" ViewCount="407" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a high school student, and my assignment was to find intertextuality of the crucifixion of Christ and write a reflection about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was surfing on the web, and found a poem called &quot;Crucified&quot; written by Kahlil Gibran. My interpretation of the poem is that the author is trying to convey that Jesus chose to get crucified &quot;just for the sake of it&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I cried to men, “I would be crucified!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And they said, “Why should your blood be upon our heads?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I answered, “How else shall you be exalted except by crucifying madmen?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And they heeded and I was crucified.  And the crucifixion appeased me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when I was hanged between earth and heaven they lifted up their heads to see me.  And they were exalted, for their heads had never before been lifted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But as they stood looking up at me one called out, “For what art thou seeking to atone?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And another cried, “In what cause dost thou sacrifice thyself?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And a third said, “Thinkest thou with this price to buy world glory?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then said a fourth, “Behold, how he smiles!  Can such pain be forgiven?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I answered them all, and said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Remember only that I smiled.  I do not atone—nor sacrifice—nor wish for glory; and I have nothing to forgive.  I thirsted—and I besought you to give me my blood to drink.  For what is there can quench a madman’s thirst but his own blood?  I was dumb—and I asked wounds of you for mouths.  I was imprisoned in your days and nights—and I sought a door into larger days and nights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And now I go—as others already crucified have gone.  And think not we are weary of crucifixion.  For we must be crucified by larger and yet larger men, between greater earths and greater heavens.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8075" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-10T15:58:51.450" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:01:40.537" Title="The meaning of the poem &quot;Crucified&quot; by Kahlil Gibran" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11936" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-10T13:40:19.620" Score="4" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the course of the Sherlock Holmes stories, many streets are named. Let's focus here on London streets. Many of them are real, e.g. Baker St., Oxford St., Regent St. and many more. Which of them, though, are fictional?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A street name might be entirely fictional. On the other hand, it might contain real elements, e.g. if it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the name of a London street, with its final word replaced&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the real name of a street in some part of London different from where Doyle specifies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the name of a street in the correct part of London, slightly altered (is the fictional Pope's Court really Poppins Court, fictionalized?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1584" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T08:45:39.250" Title="Which London streets mentioned in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories are fictional?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11936" CreationDate="2019-11-10T13:41:08.790" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/2198&quot;&gt;Chenmunka's answer&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2120/why-did-doyle-choose-221b-baker-street&quot;&gt;this question about why Doyle chose Baker St.&lt;/a&gt; claims&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the streets and districts of London mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes stories existed at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the London street names mentioned in the Holmes stories are indeed real. But some are not. Below, I list some that seem to be fictional. Admittedly, some references to streets might be to streets that have disappeared or been renamed. I based my searches on a London A-Z, Google Maps (rejecting any names where the only match is a street which, to judge from the buildings either side, obviously didn't exist when the story was published), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maps.thehunthouse.com/Streets/New_to_Old_Abolished_London_Street_Names.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.maps.thehunthouse.com/Streets/New_to_Old_London_Street_Name_Changes.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists&lt;/a&gt; of changes to names of London streets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Street, Brixton (Black Peter)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Ratcliff Highway (Black Peter)&lt;/s&gt; [Ratcliff Highway is a former name of The Highway, in the borough of Tower Hamlets.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caulfield Gardens, Kensington (Bruce-Partington Plans)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lower Burke Street (Dying Detective)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turpey Street, the Borough (Hound of the Baskervilles, ch. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lyon Place, Camberwell (Case of Identity)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ivy Lane, Brixton (Naval Treaty)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great Orme Street (Red Circle). This seems from the context to be a fictional name for Montague St:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great Orme Street, a narrow thoroughfare at the northeast side of the British Museum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Howe Street near this Great Orme Street (Red Circle)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Saxe-)Coburg Square and Pope's Court (Red-headed League). Pope's Court is possibly a fictionalized alteration of Poppins Court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Serpentine Avenue and Serpentine Mews (Scandal in Bohemia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Godolphin Street (Second Stain). However, Godolphin Rd exists and seems to be old enough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following extract from chapter 3 of The Sign of the Four, the street names are a mix of real and fictionalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Rochester Row,&amp;quot; said he.  &amp;quot;Now Vincent Square.  Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road.  We are making for the Surrey side, apparently. [...]&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Wordsworth Road,&amp;quot; said my companion.  &amp;quot;Priory Road.  Lark Hall Lane.  Stockwell Place.  Robert Street.  Cold Harbour Lane.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rochester Row, Vincent Square and Vauxhall Bridge Road are real. Then Wordsworth Road could be Wandworth Road, fictionalized. Moreover, as Spagirl points out, some of the other street names mentioned later were real or could be fictionalized forms of real names of streets along the cab's journey if we suppose that Holmes didn't mention every street along the way. In further detail: the cab might have gone along Parry Street (not Priory Road), South Lambeth Road, then some other street (possibly Priory Grove) to Larkhall Lane, then other streets to Stockwell Road, then via Sidney Rd to Robsart Street (formerly Robert Street), then via some other street to Coldharbour Lane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinchin Lane, &amp;quot;down near the water's edge at Lambeth&amp;quot; (Sign of the Four, ch. 6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bond Street, Knight's Place and possibly Miles Street (Sign of the Four, ch. 7, 8).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had traversed Streatham, Brixton, Camberwell, and now found ourselves in Kennington Lane, having borne away through the side-streets to the east of the Oval.  The men whom we pursued seemed to have taken a curiously zigzag road [...].  At the foot of Kennington Lane they had edged away to the left through Bond Street and Miles Street.  Where the latter street turns into Knight's Place, Toby ceased to advance [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;London has streets of these names, but none anywhere Kennington. There is a Miles Street a short distance &lt;em&gt;west&lt;/em&gt; of the Oval, and a Bondway near it (thanks to Spagirl for finding Bondway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laburnum Vale, Chiswick (Six Napoleons)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lauriston Gardens, &amp;quot;off the Brixton Road&amp;quot; (Study in Scarlet, ch. 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henrietta Street (Study in Scarlet, ch. 4). London has one, north of the Strand, and had more, one in Deptford and some north of the Thames, but these seem not to fit the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I met Harry Murcher -- him who has the Holland Grove beat -- and we stood together at the corner of Henrietta Street a-talkin'. Presently -- maybe about two or a little after -- I thought I would take a look round and see that all was right down the Brixton Road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mayfield Place, Peckham (Study in Scarlet, ch. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Torquay Terrace, Camberwell (Study in Scarlet, ch. 6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little Ryder Street, W. (Three Garridebs)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upper Swandam Lane, and Fresno Street, &amp;quot;which branches out of Upper Swandam Lane&amp;quot; (Twisted Lip)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1584" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T08:45:39.250" CommentCount="12" CommunityOwnedDate="2019-11-21T07:58:50.930" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11933" CreationDate="2019-11-10T17:48:39.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I take it that you are looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Poetic_devices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poetic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_device&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rhetorical devices&lt;/a&gt; in this sentence. I can see a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Euphemism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. By ‘thus’ Macbeth means ‘king’, and ‘king’ would fit the rhythm as well as ‘thus’, so it is significant that he avoids the word here.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hyperbole&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. To be king insecurely is not ‘nothing’ as Macbeth claims; merely less desirable than to be king securely.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feminine ending&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. ‘Nothing’ ends the line on an unstressed syllable, perhaps indicating Macbeth’s dissatisfaction with the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metrical inversion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. ‘But’ begins the line with a stressed syllable (a trochee substituting for an iamb), emphasising this clause, in which ‘but’ is used with the meaning ‘unless’ or ‘without’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-11-10T17:48:39.837" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11939" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-10T21:46:12.350" Score="6" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the TV Tropes entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheBluebeard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bluebeard&lt;/a&gt; and it made me recall a short story (probably less than 20 pages) I read probably in the early 2000s, I think part of a mystery anthology. The protagonist is an older woman, well-off, possibly a widow herself. She meets an extremely charming older gentleman and, for some reason, gets suspicious of him, so she starts investigating his past, and comes to find that he's hiding several previous marriages, the women of which each died, leaving him a widower who inherits their estate. And in the end... she decides to stay, figuring that now that she knows what he plans to do, she can avoid it, leaving him more and more nervous about her. And, ultimately, she figures she's already led a long and interesting life, so if she dies, it's not a great loss. I think she's also set things up so that, if she dies, people get notified of what she's learned so that he can't pull this off after her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might have read it in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology, although it also seems like the sort of black humor that might fit Harry Harrison (who wrote several novels about crime mysteries) and there's a faint part of me that wants to tie it to Agatha Christie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T14:57:22.437" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T14:57:22.437" Title="Short story where an older lady realizes that her new beau has been murdering his wives, but decides to go with it" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11942" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-11T20:01:49.313" Score="4" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_(character)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; states that it is the head and spine of a defeated enemy: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In battle he wears a helm made from the skull and backbone of a defeated enemy. This helm, which resembles a World War II-era gas mask, is also his sigil in the galleries of the other Endless ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there anything more known?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T9u14.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/T9u14.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dream&amp;#39;s Helm&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8079" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-12T00:13:37.423" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T00:13:37.423" Title="What is the origin of Dream's helm in Neil Gaiman's &quot;The Sandman&quot;?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;the-sandman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11942" CreationDate="2019-11-12T00:07:33.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dream explains the story of the helmet and the Gates of Horn and Ivory on &lt;em&gt;The Sandman: Overture&lt;/em&gt; #3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is now the Helm of Dream was once the skull of a god. Said god, along with another one, once came to the Dreaming and proclaimed themselves its masters. They took Dream by surprise and imprisoned him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long story short, with the help of Desire and Alianora, the gods were defeated, and Dream fashioned the gates from their horns and the helmet from one of the gods' skull, to remind himself to be vigilant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mM6lO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mM6lO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T00:07:33.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11935" CreationDate="2019-11-12T20:18:19.443" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's certainly an odd poem. It looks to me like he's trying to suggest that by crucifying Jesus, man gains independence and strength (perhaps by hardening their consciences or coming to a new realization about his nature). It also seems linked to that religion (someone comment please!) that believes men are destined to become gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8086" LastActivityDate="2019-11-12T20:18:19.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11948" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11958" CreationDate="2019-11-13T10:00:04.253" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was written around the mid 20th century by an author who (I think) was also known for sci-fi, but this was about a real person and (more or less) based on real events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist was a Confederate leader in the US civil war.  He was not a secessionist, but lived in a state that had voted to secede from the Union and felt that the Union's position in the war was anti-democratic, so he was willing to fight for his state.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After hearing that one of the main Union leaders had decided to focus all his energy on the front lines, he said something like &quot;if he won't look after his back, then I will&quot; and spent the war harassing the Union army's supply lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a kind of freelancer, making money by looting the enemy instead of being employed/commissioned, which allowed him greater freedom.  I'm pretty sure it said his talent for strategy led to him being offered a commission later in the war, but he turned it down because his men would earn less as regular soldiers so he'd have more trouble finding recruits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a summary saying he'd caused the Union army to divert a significant amount of effort away from the front, and a brief epilogue about what he did after the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it on Project Gutenberg, but having forgotten the names of the author, book and main character I haven't managed to find it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8090" LastEditorUserId="8090" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T16:24:54.273" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T05:08:20.760" Title="Looking for a story about a Confederate leader in the US civil war" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;biography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11949" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-14T10:30:51.157" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the German book &lt;em&gt;Usability und UX kompakt&lt;/em&gt; by Michael Richter and Markus Flückiger (Springer, 2016, page 159), I found the following quote, which the authors attribute to Denis Diderot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Die einen, so scheint mir, haben viele Werkzeuge und wenig Ideen; die anderen haben viele Ideen und gar keine Werkzeuge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some, it seems to me, have many tools and few ideas; (the) others have many ideas and no tools at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact source of this quote and what was the wording of the original version in French? The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikiquote page&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikiquote.org/wiki/Denis_Diderot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikiquote page&lt;/a&gt; don't seem to list the quote. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=diderot+outils+id%C3%A9es+%22les+uns%22+%22les+autres%22&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search for &lt;code&gt;diderot outils idées &quot;les uns&quot; &quot;les autres&quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but Diderot may have used a different word than &quot;outils&quot; for &quot;tools&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T12:16:10.813" Title="Source of Diderot quote about tools and ideas" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;denis-diderot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11949" CreationDate="2019-11-14T12:16:10.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;After some more research, I found out that &quot;outils&quot; was a red herring; Diderot used the word &quot;instruments&quot; in the original quote. Its source is &lt;a href=&quot;http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/diderot_nature.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pensées sur l'interprétation de la Nature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Diderot first published anonymously in 1753 and edited for republication in 1754 (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es_sur_l%27interpr%C3%A9tation_de_la_nature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the original version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ce seront ou des vues générales sur l'art expérimental, ou des vues particulières sur un phénomène qui paraît occuper tous nos philosophes, et les diviser en deux classes. &lt;strong&gt;Les uns ont, ce me semble, beaucoup d'instruments et peu d'idées; les autres ont beaucoup d'idées et n'ont point d'instruments.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These will be either general views on (the art of) experimentation, or specific views about a phenomenon that appears to keep all of our philosophers occupied and divide them into two categories. &lt;strong&gt;Some, it seems to me, have many instruments/tools and few ideas; the others have many ideas and no instruments/tools at all.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T12:16:10.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11922" CreationDate="2019-11-14T17:45:56.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a hyphen, not a dash, so its function is not to mark a pause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first glance the word &quot;light&quot; might be taken to mean &quot;intellectually or spiritually less than profound&quot;, in the sense that one might write of &quot;Shakespeare-light&quot; or &quot;light entertainment&quot;. That is the usual meaning of appending &quot;-light&quot; to a word. But here I think the poet is calling up an image of hallucinated tragedy &lt;i&gt;illuminated by the experience of reading and taking in works by William Blake&lt;/i&gt;, or in a material world that one sees illuminated in a way that is comparable to how Blake saw it. So to summarise, the idea is of seeing in the light that is given by Blake's work and of viewing the world lit the way Blake saw it lit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way there is a &lt;a href=&quot;http://blakelight.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary magazine called &quot;Blakelight&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5798" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T17:45:56.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5910" CreationDate="2019-11-14T18:02:10.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt Blake meant to refer to the name. If you want to look for other meanings of &quot;mark&quot; than the two literal ones apparent in the antanaclasis, though, it's worth considering &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason%27s_mark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;masons' marks&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Mark_Master_Masons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark Masonry&lt;/a&gt;, recalling that freemasonic lodges are established by &lt;em&gt;charter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8097" LastActivityDate="2019-11-14T18:02:10.523" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11956" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11747" CreationDate="2019-11-16T09:28:24.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is the beginning of the peace negotiations to end the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Spanish_Succession&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;War of the Spanish Succession&lt;/a&gt;, which involved much of western Europe (Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, etc.) and continued for more than a decade until it was ended by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Utrecht&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peace of Utrecht&lt;/a&gt;, negotiations for which began in 1712 although the final peace was not agreed until 1715.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After war for ten years, 1712 would have been a year of unusual silence in Europe. (I also found a website claiming the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Riot Act&lt;/a&gt; came into effect in 1712, but this seems to be incorrect.)&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Or, as commenters suggest, it might be entirely random. The story is set in a fantasy world, whose connection with the real world is unclear, but there are a few references to real-world history, including in connection with sounds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Every sound that's ever been made in history is kept here,&quot; said the Soundkeeper, skipping down one of the corridors with Milo in hand. &quot;For instance, look here.&quot; She opened one of the drawers and pulled out a small brown envelope. &quot;This is the exact tune George Washington whistled when he crossed the Delaware on that icy night in 1777.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T09:28:24.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11957" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-16T16:11:32.810" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dance, when you're broken open.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dance, if you've torn the bandage off.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dance in the middle of the fighting.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dance in your blood.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dance when you're perfectly free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8107" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T20:19:38.970" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T14:41:28.193" Title="What is original Persian text of Rumi for the following English translation?" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11948" CreationDate="2019-11-16T21:00:57.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rebel Raider&lt;/a&gt; by H. Beam Piper looks like a possibility. It ends with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jeb Stuart left John Singleton Mosby behind Northern lines &quot;to look&#xA;  after loyal Confederate people.&quot; But before the war was over, Mosby&#xA;  did a lot more than that....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A True Book-Length Feature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T17:40:41.373" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T17:40:41.373" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3982" CreationDate="2019-11-16T21:40:14.037" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, Ozma makes Dorothy the princess of Oz and a &quot;constant companion&quot;, they spend time walking in the garden kissing, Ozma was a boy when she first appears in the series, there's an army of pissed off women, they mention that only Dorothy is allowed in Ozma's bedroom without needing to ask permission, when she the wizard and her cousin appeared Ozma and Dorothy spent a lot of time in said bedroom making them wait, oh and in the first book Dorothy had a crush on the China Princess. There's lots more lesbian overtones in the series if you read the books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep in mind, the Oz books did take place over 14 years and Baum really didn't say how old Dorothy was in each one. And Ozma's basically an immortal fairy. Also she's the queen so they don't need a ceremony, only her word. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And they aren't even the only potentially lesbian characters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8109" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-16T21:58:20.653" LastActivityDate="2019-11-16T21:58:20.653" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11961" CreationDate="2019-11-17T10:11:42.190" Score="1" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following sentence is an excerpt from &quot;Wifey Redux&quot; by Kevin Barry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And we made a picture – I was a gorgeous kid myself. A Matt Dillon-type, people used to say, which dates me. But your dates can work out, and we were historically lucky in the property market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to understand &quot;made a picture&quot; and &quot;dates can work out&quot; in this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-17T10:21:03.383" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T10:48:03.973" Title="How to understand &quot;made a picture&quot; and &quot;dates can work out&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kevin-barry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11960" CreationDate="2019-11-17T10:48:03.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of the story - &lt;a href=&quot;https://electricliterature.com/wifey-redux/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which can be read in full online&lt;/a&gt; - the narrator, Jonathan, is describing the history of his relationship with his wife Saoirse. He describes her attractiveness (in some lascivious detail) and then mentions that he too was good-looking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We got married when Saoirse was twenty-one and I was twenty-three. That seems impossibly young now but this was the late eighties. And we made a picture — I was a gorgeous kid myself. A Matt Dillon type, people used to say, which dates me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He reminds the reader that they are now an older couple: born in the 1960s, married in the 1980s. The phrase &quot;made a picture&quot; means that they looked good together, good enough to be in a painting - a claim supported by her previously described beauty and his claim &quot;I was a gorgeous kid myself&quot;. He compares himself at that age to the actor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matt Dillon&lt;/a&gt;, who, according to Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;established himself as a teen idol by starring in the films My Bodyguard (1980), Little Darlings (1980), Tex (1982), Rumble Fish (1983), The Outsiders (1983) and The Flamingo Kid (1984).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that time, Dillon was under twenty years old, and presumably very good-looking. But these films are from the early 1980s, which again reminds the reader that our narrator is no longer young and handsome. The phrase &quot;which dates me&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.idiomsandslang.com/im-dating-myself/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;means&lt;/a&gt; that he's revealing his age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But your dates can work out, and we were historically lucky in the property market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He takes the &quot;dates&quot; idiom and runs with it, as this word has multiple meanings. In the previous sentence he was using it in the sense of &quot;putting a date to&quot;, and given the context it might also put readers in mind of the sense of &quot;romantic appointments&quot;, but now he's making it sound more like the sense of &quot;points in history&quot;, which leads him on to the next part of his story: their &quot;historic&quot; luck in finding a home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: &quot;made a picture&quot; means they were pretty enough for a picture; &quot;dates can work out&quot; is a little piece of wordplay to link one part of his story to the next.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T10:48:03.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11935" CreationDate="2019-11-17T15:46:05.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem had more than one message. &amp;quot;Crucified&amp;quot; is part of a collection of poems by Gibran &amp;quot;The Madman&amp;quot;. Khalil Gibran was a great fan of Jesus Christ and celebrated him in many works including The Prophet. This poem, like many works of Gibran, is a celebration of the strength and eternal goodness of Christ, and a lampoon of our human hypocrisy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Substantially, it was Gibran's way of lampooning us&#xA;humans for hypocrisy. We celebrate the death of Christ on Good Friday and put up showy ceremonies only to go home and forget about him.&#xA;Listen to this from Gibran about the good Friday:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today, the Christian souls ride on the wing of memories&#xA;and fly to Jerusalem. There they will stand in throngs,&#xA;beating upon their bosoms, and staring at Him, crowned&#xA;with a wreath of thorns, stretching His arms before&#xA;heaven, and looking from behind the veil of Death into the&#xA;depths of Life....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when the curtain of night drops over the stage of the&#xA;day and the brief drama is concluded, the Christians will&#xA;go back in groups and lie down in the shadow of oblivion&#xA;between the quilts of ignorance and slothfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This comment also confirms Gibran's disdain for our hypocrisy and showiness with no genuine substance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesus came not from the heart of the circle of Light to&#xA;destroy the homes and build upon their ruins the&#xA;convents and monasteries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dialog with the crowd was a mockery of their hypocrisy of showing concern but not stopping the evil about to happen as they saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gibrain was also celebrating Jesus strength but not in the way conventional Christian thinking sees it. He sees the death of Jesus as not a weakness or victimhood of a good one by the wicked, but a triumphant damning of the wicked by one who had completed a mission and was leaving anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This excerpt from Gibrain tells it all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humanity looks upon Jesus the Nazarene as a poor-born&#xA;who suffered misery and humiliation with all of the weak.&#xA;And He is pitied, for Humanity believes He was crucified&#xA;painfully.... And all that Humanity offers to Him is crying&#xA;and wailing and lamentation. For centuries Humanity has&#xA;been worshipping weakness in the person of the Saviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is&#xA;strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of&#xA;strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Nazarene was not weak! He was strong and is&#xA;strong! But the people refuse to heed the true meaning of&#xA;strength. . . He lived as a leader: He was crucified as a&#xA;crusader; He died with a heroism that frightened His&#xA;killers and tormentors. He was not a bird with broken&#xA;wings; He was a raging tempest who broke all crooked&#xA;wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He feared not His persecutors nor His enemies. He&#xA;suffered not before His killers. Free and brave and daring&#xA;He was. He defied all despots and oppressors. He saw&#xA;the contagious pustules and amputated them.... He&#xA;muted Evil and He crushed Falsehood and He choked&#xA;Treachery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To him,  Jesus was one of a continuous stream in time, of good spirits  God sent as messengers to clean up a corrupt world and when done return back home to the better, eternal realm. This is a common belief in the Jew/Arab cultures from which Gibran comes. Gibran is from Lebanon, migrated to America with family in the 1800s. To him Jesus was not a victim of a wicked system but one of many messengers of God who came to deliver the good news for betterment of mankind but always get victimized by foolish mankind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesus had done his job and it was time to go back home and that's it. So his death by whatever means was not to be judged by human standards of victimisation. It is not an atonement, sacrifice or our banal need to be praised! Listen to the last two lines of the poem you quoted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And now I go as others already crucified have gone. And&#xA;think not we are weary of crucifixion. For we must be&#xA;crucified by larger and yet larger men, between greater&#xA;earths and greater heavens.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The import of all this is: the crucifixion is not to be taken in the carnal, ordinary, banal sense we humans have  ascribed to it. It was a much more deeply fundamental phenomenon with a meaning far deeper than we mere canal, banal humans can comprehend. The ultimate message here is: the son of man is better, greater than we think!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can get the full text of Gibran's comment on &amp;quot;The crucified (written on Good Friday)&amp;quot; in the blogpost &lt;a href=&quot;http://spindulys.blogspot.com/2008/03/crucified-written-on-good-friday-kahlil.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the crucified (written on good friday) - kahlil gibran&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8031" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:01:40.537" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:01:40.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11911" CreationDate="2019-11-17T16:24:52.743" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A short story can, and often does, have a simple point to make.  Sometimes, though, it leaves things open on purpose because it is intended to make you think and consider - and in so doing reconsider your own assumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples from my own favorites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The point is to make a (horrible) pun, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.e-reading.life/chapter.php/81709/3/Azimov_-_Buy_Jupiter_and_Other_Stories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Shah Guido G.&quot;&lt;/a&gt;   (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shah_Guido_G.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Asimov&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The point is to express an opinion of the (collective) behaviour of people as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.e-reading.life/chapter.php/81709/21/Azimov_-_Buy_Jupiter_and_Other_Stories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Silly Asses&quot;&lt;/a&gt;  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_Asses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Asimov&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Make you look at things from a new perspective as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.e-reading.life/chapter.php/81709/31/Azimov_-_Buy_Jupiter_and_Other_Stories.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Exile to Hell&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_to_Hell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaac Asimov&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reconsider right and wrong as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/ScannersLiveInVain/SmithCordwainer-ScannersLiveInVain.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Scanners Live in Vain&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanners_Live_in_Vain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cordwainer Smith&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, a short story can end unresolved and leave it to your imagination - but it can also have a definite point and end that it wants to bring you to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8114" LastActivityDate="2019-11-17T16:24:52.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-17T16:34:16.937" Score="1" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was wondering how enjambment can be used to improve the rhythm in poetry.  I have seen some innovative uses of it by e.e. cummings, such as by breaking a word and writing the ending on the next line. Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. me ri&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ka, my mother la&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  nd, land of the bra&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ve.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for other ways enjambment is used to make the beat come through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8031" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T15:57:04.390" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T15:57:04.390" Title="How can enjambment be used to enhance rhythm in a poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11965" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12068" CreationDate="2019-11-17T17:03:39.937" Score="5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;In grade school in the 1970s, I read a short story I would like to find again.  I think it was assigned reading, a school book (reader) that one of the schools used.  It may also have been in an old reader that I borrowed from a school library.  It was in any case not a new story even then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll tell the story as I remember it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A geography class in an American grade school is studying India.  The Taj Mahal is the current subject.  A new student in school mentions that the school book picture (black and white) doesn't do it justice, and that the described color is wrong - the Taj Mahal is a sort of wonderful pink color when seen near sunset (or sunrise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The teacher is slightly peeved at being interrupted, and asks the student which book gave him that description of the Taj Mahal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The student tells the teacher that he didn't read it, he'd actually been there and seen it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The teacher assumes the student is a liar and sends him to the principal who sends the student home with a note that he's in trouble for disrupting class and telling lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother shows up in school the next day, and asks the teacher what supposed lie her son had told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The teacher tells her that the son had claimed to have been to the Taj Mahal.  The mother responds that yes, they had both been to the Taj Mahal.  The teacher asks what color it is, and the mother describes it much like the student had and leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrarator then notes that he didn't think the teacher believed it but the teacher didn't give him any more trouble about it.  The narrarator is the student, and goes on to say that thereafter he never mentioned the year he traveled with his mother to anyone so as to not cause more trouble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story then goes on to tell why the two traveled through the Orient and on to India - and at least one incident from their travels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy's father died.  His mother and father had had dreams of traveling the world and visiting the Taj Mahal, but the father died while the son was a young boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother fell into depression when the father died, and at some point decided to carry out the dream and travel the Orient.  Possibly she saw it as a way to commit suicide without actually killing herself - travel a dangerous and chaotic part of the world with just herself and her son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point while traveling through a desert, they are taken prisoner by a bunch of bandits who threaten to kill the mother and her son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the translator, she tells the chief of the bandits that he should go right ahead and kill them but that he would regret it. Part of what she said was &quot;death rides a fast horse behind me.&quot;  In the end, the bandit chief is so impressed with her fearlessness and concerned about what he perceives as a curse on the mother that he lets them go and even gives them a guide out of his territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was less about the travel and the Taj Mahal as it was about a young boy growing up to understand what drove his mother into making that trip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story stuck with me for a couple of reasons.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One was that I could identify with the boy in the story.  As a child, I was nearly always the new kid in the class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing was the quote from the mother when facing down the bandits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to find and read this story again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure it was old even when I read it - I have a vague memory of it referring to events that I recognized even then as being old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's about all that I can recall about it, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8114" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T05:29:08.083" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T16:39:20.260" Title="Short story identification: Color of the Taj Mahal, mother says &quot;Death rides a fast horse behind me&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-17T18:48:20.143" Score="7" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the Holy Grail was always depicted as an important or powerful relic, in medieval literature I have never seen a quest to own the Grail, only to seek it in a spiritual sense. &lt;strong&gt;In early stories, the seeking of the Grail was subordinate to a quest to fix a mistake.&lt;/strong&gt; This can be seen in &lt;em&gt;Perceval&lt;/em&gt;, by Chretien de Troyes (c. 1190), and in its adaptation &lt;em&gt;Parzival&lt;/em&gt;, by Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1210).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, the Grail became the actual object of the quest. This is seen in the Vulgate and Post-Vulgate versions of the Matter of Britain, most noticeably in Malory's &lt;em&gt;Le Mort D'Arthur&lt;/em&gt; (1485). &lt;strong&gt;In these later works, the objective of the quest was to be worthy of the Grail and to serve it&lt;/strong&gt; (for instance, taking it from Corbenic to Sarras), and &lt;strong&gt;never to own it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In most recent works, a search for the Grail often has its possession as objective&lt;/strong&gt;, due to its powers or significance. The earliest modern examples I know of are &lt;em&gt;War in Heaven&lt;/em&gt;, by Charles Williams (1930), and Wagner's opera &lt;em&gt;Parsifal&lt;/em&gt; (1882), in which Klingsor, having the Spear, also wants the Grail in order to destroy Amfortas. Even in &lt;em&gt;The Once and Future King&lt;/em&gt; (1958), an Arthurian romance by T. H. White, it is initially implied that the objective of the quest is to bring the Grail to Arthur. As far as I know, this does not happen in the medieval romances. Examples in cinema are &lt;em&gt;Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade&lt;/em&gt; (1989) and the loose adaptation of Arthurian romances &lt;em&gt;Excalibur&lt;/em&gt; (1981).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: when did literature start to depict the Holy Grail as an object to be owned? I do not restrict the question to works that present the Grail as the Holy Chalice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8117" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T16:45:34.820" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T16:45:34.820" Title="When was the Holy Grail first depicted as an object to be owned by its seeker?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;arthurian-legend&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11899" CreationDate="2019-11-18T08:49:49.167" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading ‘A Study in Scarlet’ and had the same question because I lived in Kabul this past year. The summers can be hot, but the winters are freezing cold and there is a good deal of snow. He mentions Kandahar which is much hotter than Kabul. Considering how overcast and rainy London is, this would be tropical by comparison and Watson would have a tan. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not consider Afghanistan to be in the tropics or tropical , but it would ‘Tropical’ in comparison to London during the summer. From pure language and definition, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would be incorrect, but conceptually and comparing he would be correct. The answer above about the tropical range was also a good one to keep in mind about what was considered ‘The Tropics’ during the that time. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8121" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T08:49:49.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9327" CreationDate="2019-11-18T14:25:46.547" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems this was resolved on Goodreads' group &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/19997627-solved-childrens-book-from-the-mid-90s-read-in-the-uk-anthology-of-s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What's the name of that book???&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;More Five Minute Bunny Tales for Bedtime&lt;/em&gt; by Geoffrey Cowan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm posting the answer here for the sake of potential future searches. If someone wants to add more detailed answer I'll gladly delete mine (if I'm allowed to). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="2746" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T14:53:45.287" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T14:53:45.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-18T16:47:16.833" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across several fantasy books and stories where the characters recognize a divine/supernatural force in their world which often referred to as &quot;the narrative&quot; or &quot;the story&quot;. In such stories, narrative-aware characters are often clever enough to figure out if they're &quot;on the side of the narrative&quot; or &quot;against the narrative&quot;. For example (and for more you can read some &lt;a href=&quot;https://abridged-guide-to-evil.fandom.com/wiki/Two_Hundred_Heroic_Axioms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;examples here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A villain knows better than to kill a hero &quot;offscreen&quot; or by being thrown off a cliff as heroes typically survive something like that so they can have their revenge later&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A character needs to approach a witches hut or something and through their knowledge of &quot;narrative&quot;, they know they will need to face three trials (or some other magic number)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A heroic character knows that if they say something like &quot;go on without me, I'll hold them back&quot; they'll suddenly have a much easier time holding back some threat while their friends escape&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The evil empire funds orphanages and makes sure orphans are well cared for in order to prevent them from having tragic backstories and turning into heroes&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specific stories I've encountered this narrative-awareness in include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Second Hand Curses&lt;/em&gt; by Drew Hayes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Practical Guide to Evil&lt;/em&gt; by ErraticErrata&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question: &lt;strong&gt;Does this genre/technique have a specific name?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8122" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-18T17:22:06.833" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T17:22:06.833" Title="Name for genre of stories where the characters are narrative-aware" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11970" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11971" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" Score="0" Body="For the 1950 novel/short story fixup by the American author Ray Bradbury. Use with the [ray-bradbury] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T00:53:17.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-19T14:15:02.820" Score="3" ViewCount="276" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;The Bird with a Broken Wing,&quot; part of Agatha Christie's story collection, &lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Mr Quin&lt;/em&gt;, Inspector Winkfield tells Mr Satterthwaite: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Must find out what terms they were on. That’s where you can be useful to us, Mr Satterthwaite. You’ve the &lt;em&gt;ongtray&lt;/em&gt; here, and you can get the hang of things in a way we can’t. Find out what relations there were between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;ongtray&quot; mean? Searches on Google mostly yield the same quoted text, with people complaining that searching didn't yield anything useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T14:15:02.820" Title="What does &quot;ongtray&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;mysterious-mr-quin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11973" CreationDate="2019-11-19T14:15:02.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe it means &quot;entrée&quot; but I am not entirely sure why Agatha Christie wrote &lt;em&gt;ongtray&lt;/em&gt; instead. Checking the meaning of &quot;entrée&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main course of a meal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  1.1 &lt;em&gt;British&lt;/em&gt; A dish served between the first and main courses at a formal dinner.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The right to enter or join a particular sphere or group.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/entree&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) fits the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, Google gives some other results for &quot;ongtray&quot; which match  &quot;entrée&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wordincontext.com/en/ongtray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Brass Bottle&lt;/em&gt;, F. Anstey&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I was going to ask you, sir, before them parcels came,&quot; she began, with a dry cough of disapproval, &quot;what you would like in the way of ongtray to-morrow night. I thought if I could find a sweetbread at all reasonable &quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seems to fit (1).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Bring_Larks_and_Heroes.html?id=eyTLDAAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bring Larks and Heroes&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;Thomas Keneally, 2016&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Ongtray!' called Mrs Blythe. 'She means go in,' Ann hissed at him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe fits (2), but I suppose it's a bit of a stretch. Perhaps the same word but in French?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Complete_Servant.html?id=xRIJAQAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Servant&lt;/em&gt; by Samuel and Sarah Adams, 1825&lt;/a&gt; has this entry in a glossary including French words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Entrée&lt;/em&gt; (ong-tray) Entrance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose the use of &quot;ongtray&quot; here perhaps indicates some over-enunciation from the good Inspector.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T14:15:02.820" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11975" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11978" CreationDate="2019-11-19T16:03:45.267" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Italy it is often attributed to Ezra Pound the following quote without source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;la parola comunica il pensiero, il tono le emozioni&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It translate more or less to &quot;The word communicates the thought, the tone the emotions&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a correct quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8126" LastEditorUserId="8126" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T12:25:16.957" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T12:25:16.957" Title="Did Ezra Pound write something like &quot;The word communicates the thought, the tone the emotions&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;ezra-pound&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="11977" CreationDate="2019-11-18T16:10:03.047" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;This story was a part of a collection that I read quite some time ago. Here are the details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Language&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Year&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Unknown; but I read it sometime in the early 2000s (likely  2002-03)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What I remember&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A king has a bizarre way of judging crimes in his kingdom. The accused is given the choice to open either of the two doors in front of him. One door has a Tiger inside and the other has beautiful lady. If the accused opens the door and the lady walks out, his innocence is proven and he gets to marry her. If the tiger walks out, he is immediately devoured by the beast.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One day the king finds out that his daughter is on love with one of her slaves. So the king decides to punish him.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The story ends with a cliffhanger: the king puts the slave in front of the doors and he slowly walks up and opens the left door.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is quite old, as far as I can remember and is set probably during the ancient Greek/Roman times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8127" OwnerDisplayName="Shreedhar" LastActivityDate="2019-11-19T18:06:49.930" Title="Short story where a king uses a tiger to punish the accused" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11976" CreationDate="2019-11-18T16:18:05.643" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;This famous story is called &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english-literature.uni-bayreuth.de/en/teaching/documents/courses/Stockton1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lady Or The Tiger&lt;/a&gt; (1882), by Frank R. Stockton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cliffhanger ending is complicated by the fact that the princess &lt;em&gt;knows&lt;/em&gt; which door is which, and directs her lover to open the (actually right, not left) door.  The man opens it without hesitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is famous because it asks the reader to decide the ending for themselves.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Now, the point of the story is this: Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady ? &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The more we reflect upon this question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a study of the human heart which leads us through devious mazes of passion, out of which it is difficult to find our way. Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at a white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealousy. She had lost him, but who should have him?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8128" OwnerDisplayName="PlutoThePlanet" LastActivityDate="2019-11-18T16:18:05.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11975" CreationDate="2019-11-19T20:52:57.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Pound said  seems to have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the Italian a good translation? It's hard to say without knowing more about how this phrase is used in Italian. This is a sentence from Pound's introduction to his translation of a book of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=jd8Z_9r0k4UC&amp;amp;pg=PR21&amp;amp;lpg=PR21&amp;amp;dq=%22As+for+the+verse+itself:+I+believe+in+an+ultimate+and+absolute%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=On_P16a8sE&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1raWE2ygq8Pe_T1GDyVm8o4aX2ug&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwisw9zVk_flAhVKdt8KHUndB60Q6AEwBnoECAYQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22As%20for%20the%20verse%20itself%3A%20I%20believe%20in%20an%20ultimate%20and%20absolute%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guido Calvacanti's poetry&lt;/a&gt;, and the full paragraph it appears in is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As for the verse itself: I believe in an ultimate and absolute &#xA;  rhythm as I believe in an absolute symbol or metaphor. The &#xA;  perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions &#xA;  in the cadence. It is only, then, in perfect rhythm joined to the &#xA;  perfect word that the two-fold vision can be recorded. I would &#xA;  liken Guido's cadence to nothing less powerful than line in &#xA;  Blake's drawing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T12:24:31.960" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T12:24:31.960" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9132" CreationDate="2019-11-20T00:37:16.290" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;JANE WAS RIGHT!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that Mr. Bennet could have barred the entail in Pride and Prejudice — thereby leaving Longbourn to his daughters — is surprisingly common. It is, however, wrong. Jane Austen understood the law of entail, and she described the Longbourn entail with great clarity. In my opinion as an attorney trained in trusts and estates law and corporate tax law, it's extremely unlikely that Mr. Bennet could have broken this entail and left Longbourn to his daughters instead of Mr. Collins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What follows is my best effort to explain the law of entail in plain English. Property law is one of the most challenging course in first year law school, so what follows is obviously a gross simplification. However my goal is to get you to 'think like a lawyer' about entail. This ability to ‘think like a lawyer’ is the key to mastering the complex and arcane world of English common law. And entails are complex and arcane even by English common law standards. So let's just say we have our work cut out for us!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE LONGBOURN ENTAIL:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before we do our deep dive, let’s quickly summarize what Jane Austen actually tells us about the Longbourn entail. I’m going to quickly do this using the legal jargon — the ‘magic words’ — that I would use to explain the Longbourn entail to a fellow lawyer. Then I will circle back to explain what those magic words mean in laymen’s terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So don’t freak out! By the time you read the rest of this answer, you should (a) know what all these magic words mean; (b) understand why Jane is correct when she says that Mr. Bennet can't cut off the entail; and (c) be able to read between the lines of Jane's explanation just like a judge or lawyer would.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First Jane explains the line of succession under the entail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mr. Bennet’s property consisted almost entirely in an estate of two thousand a year, which, unfortunately for his daughters, was entailed, in default of heirs male, on a distant relation&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tells us that Mr. Bennet's estate is entailed in the male line: somewhere there is a document that includes the magic words 'fee tail male' or 'heirs of his body.' It also tells that the remainder man — the person who gets the estate if the male line fails — is Mr. Collins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next passage explains why Mr. Bennet cannot simply &amp;quot;cut off the entail&amp;quot; and leave Longbourn to his daughters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this passage it is almost certain that the magic words that entail Longbourn in the male line are actually contained in a larger, more complicated document called a strict settlement. Strict settlement was the dominant estate planning tool for the landowning class throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. So it would be fairly safe to assume that Longbourn w. But Jane has given us a critical piece of additional information: she tells us that Mr. Bennet can only cut off the entail by joining forces with his adult son. To a lawyer this detail practically screams &amp;quot;strict settlement!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strict settlement (also called English entail) is basically a drafting trick that makes entailments more enforceable. In a true entail (“to A and the heirs of his body”) every heir is a tenant in tail, so they all have the same level of property rights. The big innovation in a strict settlement is that the first heir is only given use of the estate for life (“to A for life, and then to the heirs of his body”). This means that A is only a life tenant. A’s oldest son will be the first tenant in tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this matter so much? Because only the tenant in tail can use common recovery loophole. If the life tenant wants to use it, he has to join forces with his adult son — and that is exactly what Jane has told us Mr. Bennet needs to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some scholars have argued that Longbourn was held in a true entail. This would mean that Mr. Bennet could have broken the Longbourn entail any time he wanted to. And these scholars conclude that Jane Austen was either ignorant of the law or making an ironic comment about just how lazy a father Mr. Bennet was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think this theory holds water, though. ‘Strict settlement’ never replaced ‘entail’ in common speech. Throughout the 19th century writers like Anthony Trollope and George Elliot use 'entail' as a synonym for strict settlement. It seems reasonable to conclude that Jane was merely following common usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The historical record also shows most entailed estates were managed through strict settlement by 1680. Economic historians have shown that strict settlement was expressly designed to disinherit daughters who stood to inherit estates at common law — and that it was highly effective. One study found that 25% of country houses should have been inherited by daughters based on demographics, but only 9% actually were. This suggests that Jane was accurate about the on-the-ground effects of entailing estates in the male line. No surprise when we're dealing with one of the most perceptive social commentators in all of English literature!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, again, here's a lawyer's restatement of what Jane wrote about the Longbourn entail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Longbourn is entailed on the male line through a type of legal instrument called a strict settlement. Mr. Bennet is a mere life tenant. His unborn son would have been a tenant in tail. And Mr. Collins is the remainderman who inherits if the male line fails.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let’s unpack these magic words so you understand the bigger picture…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WHAT IS AN ENTAIL?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An entail is really just any document that includes a specific set of magical words. These magical words have been enshrined in English law since the middle ages. Every time you transfer a piece of land — real property — you need to use these magic words. So lawyers have learned them for a thousand years. And if you learn a few of them, then wills, trusts, and deeds will all suddenly make sense to you. And you only need to learn three of them to understand the Longbourn entail: fee simple, tenant for life, and fee tail (or entail)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic words that create a fee simple are “to A and his heirs.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic words that create a tenant for life are ‘to A for his life.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The magic words that create a fee tail are &amp;quot;to A and the heirs of his body.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will notice that I didn't write MALE heirs of his body. In casual speech the word &amp;quot;entail&amp;quot; has come to mean a specific type of entail: entail in the male line. But you can entail on all children (&amp;quot;heirs of his body) or even on a woman's female children (“female heirs of her body&amp;quot;). In fact, as you'll see later, the oldest known entails were on the female line. So if you want to think like a lawyer about entails, forget about primogeniture and just remember that an entail is created any time you use the magic words &amp;quot;heirs of his body.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do all these magic words do in the real world? Each of them creates a specific type of ‘fee’ or property interest. Fee is a medieval word that described how a feudal lord owns his land. And feudalism is the easiest way to understand something law students struggle with throughout first year property law classes: the Bundle of Rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lawyers treat property as a &amp;quot;bundle of rights&amp;quot; where the more &amp;quot;sticks&amp;quot; you own, the higher your level of ownership. In medieval times the feudal lord would get ‘fee simple’ straight from the king. Then the lord would grant lesser fees and tenancies to his vassals and tenants. These fees and tenancies live on in the magic words real estate lawyers still use today. If you live in the UK and you own your home in leasehold, then you have the same partial ‘bundle of rights’ that feudal lords granted to their tenant farmers. But if you own a home in the US without a mortgage on it, then you hold the whole bundle of ‘fee simple’ rights just like a feudal lord …. because, as Americans like to say, a man's home is his castle!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what sticks in the bundle of rights does Fee Tail include? Fee tail is a Norman legal concept that literally means that you own the land &amp;quot;with a tail on it.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;en tail&amp;quot; in French) The tail is the future interest of the person who is going to inherit it after you. So if you hold land &amp;quot;in fee tail&amp;quot; you hold the current rights in the land — but &amp;quot;the heirs of your body&amp;quot; hold the tail, or the future rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how this works, imagine a fee simple owner holding a huge bundle of sticks that represent total control over a piece of land for all time. Then pull out several sticks and give one each to the owner's oldest son, grandson, great-grandson, etc. You have now turned the fee simple owner into a fee tail owner — or, to use the correct legal term, a &amp;quot;tenant in tail.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time during day to day life, there is no difference between a fee simple owner and a tenant in tail. The tenant in tail can live on the land, farm it, and so forth. But what happens when he wants to sell it? In English common law, before a tenant in tail can sell his land he needs to get back the sticks that belong to all the future heirs and reunite them with his sticks. Otherwise he does not have the &amp;quot;full bundle of rights&amp;quot; and can't alienate the land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This single issue is what 90 percent of the law of entail is about: can you alienate the property without getting sued by future heirs? And since Jane knew her stuff, this is also the main issue in Pride and Prejudice: can Mr. Bennet give Longbourn to his daughters instead of Mr. Collins?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BARRING THE ENTAIL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short answer is that Mr. Bennet can only give Longbourn to his daughters if he can &amp;quot;bar the entail.&amp;quot; So what does &amp;quot;barring the entail&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the phrase Jane used was &amp;quot;cutting off the entail.&amp;quot; And that should give you a big hint. When you &amp;quot;cut off the tail&amp;quot; you get rid of the future interest that those medieval lawyers envisioned as the &amp;quot;tail&amp;quot; on the end of the &amp;quot;fee.&amp;quot; This bars the entail — or in plain English it stops your heirs from suing your ass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for Mr. Bennet, not everyone can bar an entail. In order to understand who can bar an entail — and why — we need to look at why entails were originally invented. And the reason is the exact same reason that modern trusts exist: Bossy grandparents!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Entails evolved from medieval Norman marriage gifts called &amp;quot;maritagia.&amp;quot; Traditionally the bride gift remained conditional until the couple had children. Once the bride had children, the gift was settled on the children and became irrevocable. But if the bride died without children, the gift went back to her family. This makes sense, right? If your daughter marries some jerk and then dies without children, do you really want him to spend her dowry on his new floozy? This was accomplished by settling the gift on &amp;quot;A and the heirs of her body.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over time aristocratic families started using these marriage settlements to lock family land up for longer and longer periods. They did it by using the same language in the bride gifts — but using the phrase &amp;quot;to A and the MALE heirs of his body.&amp;quot; And voila! The entail as Jane Austen fans know and love it was born!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1285 a statute called De Donis (of gifts) was passed that many judges interpreted as allowing entails to go literally forever. Under De Donis no heir could ever bar an entail. Some courts even went so far as to say that the King could not seize entailed land when a vassal committed treason. (The King didn't like this idea and soon passed a statute that put the kibosh on it!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perpetual entails are great when you want to protect land from creditors. But they stink when you need to sell or mortgage land. They also offend judges' basic notions of fairness because it seems unnatural for a dead donor to keep controlling his family forever. So between 1400 and 1700 judges argued back and forth about how long you could lock an estate up in fee tail. Eventually they agreed that donors have a right to lock up their estates for a &amp;quot;reasonable&amp;quot; time. By about 1720 this “reasonable” time was defined by something called the rule against perpetuities (RAP) which — this is a gross generalization! — automatically terminates all trusts and entails within three generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While RAP was evolving, however, lawyers were busy inventing a multitude of creative loopholes that would allow the current owner of an entailed estate to alienate property and “cut off” future claims from later heirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COMMON RECOVERY&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most successful loophole was called Common Recovery. The basic concept behind Common Recovery was that you could &amp;quot;break&amp;quot; an entail by having the current heir in tail contract an illegal sale — and then having the buyer file a legal action to enforce the sale. Under very particular circumstances (involving a third party warrantor) the court would issue a default judgment that gave the disputed property to the buyer and left the heir in tail with the &amp;quot;warrantee.&amp;quot; The heir then passed the warrantee on to the future heirs instead of the actual land. This was called &amp;quot;suffering common recovery&amp;quot; because on the surface it looked like the tenant in tail actually lost the land. But really it was a kind of 'Oh, gee, twist my rubber arm and I'll have to give you my wallet!&amp;quot; deal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound crazy? Just wait! On top of all the other bizarre details the &amp;quot;demandant&amp;quot; in a common recovery traditionally claimed he had been wrongfully dispossessed of his land by &amp;quot;Hugh Hunt.&amp;quot; I have no idea who &amp;quot;Hugh Hunt&amp;quot; was or how he got involved in all these lawsuits. Honestly, I don't know what to tell you. English common law is very Lewis Carroll sometimes…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite all this magical language, common recovery was not a magic wand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, only the tenant in tail can do a common recovery. A common recovery turns a fee tail into a fee simple. It can’t turn a life estate or a future interest into a fee simple. So when there is no current tenant in tail, you are basically stuck in limbo with no option to sell, mortgage, or resettle entailed property.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, common recoveries are real estate transfers. Every common recovery case I've been able to read about involved selling or mortgaging a specific piece of real estate that was a piece of a much larger inheritance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best way to think of barring entail through common recovery is to see it not as a silver bullet but as an estate management tool. In practice a typical bar of entail through common recovery would go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The tenant in tail is the head of the family, and his son is getting married. The overall family estate is legally made up of many smaller estates — let's call them farms to avoid confusion. Each farm has its own separate deed. The two fathers agree that the income from one of these farms will be set aside to provide an annuity for the bride if she is widowed. The marriage settlement gives the bride's family a mortgage against this farm to guarantee she gets her annuity. Legally, however, this farm is still locked up in a strict settlement that entails it through the male line.&#xA;Going back to our property law magic words, this means the groom’s father has a fee tail. But before he can mortgage the farm he needs to have a fee simple deed for it. Therefore the week before the marriage settlement is about to be signed, the groom's father &amp;quot;suffers common recovery&amp;quot; on this farm.&#xA;When the common recovery is complete, the family lawyers will have two pieces of paper in hand: a fee simple deed for the farm; and a warrantee against a third party who has promised to pay the value of the farm in the event of a default judgment. That empty, fictional warrantee will be passed down to the heirs so that they retain a theoretical right to redeem if for the value of the mortgaged farm.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Courts accepted the legal fiction of common recovery almost universally in cases like this, where a competent adult tenant in tail used it to responsibly manage family assets. But a common recovery that was obviously intended to steal assets from a named heir and give them to someone else would be very problematic. In Mr. Bennet's case, Mr. Collins would have the right to take him to court and challenge a common recovery on the Longbourn property. If Mr. Collins won, Mr. Bennet could keep Longbourn but he would need to pay out on the warrantee. This warrantee would have equaled the cash value of the real estate transferred — in this case the cash value of Longbourn. Since Mr. Bennet doesn't have that kind of money, Mr. Collins would likely end up getting Longbourn. And Mr. Bennet would probably be bankrupted by legal fees!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that to non-attorneys this whole setup may sound strange. On the one hand, you have this clear-cut procedural loophole that seems to work based on arbitrary magic words. On the other hand, you have a nebulous body of common law that may or may not invalidate certain common recoveries based on mushy ideas about ‘fairness’ and ‘public policy.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you happen to be a corporate tax lawyer, you will immediately see a parallel with the modern concept of &amp;quot;piercing the corporate veil.&amp;quot; And you will already have noticed that barring an entail by common recovery is fascinatingly similar to tax-driven transactions like reverse triangular mergers. On the surface it looks like the &amp;quot;tenant in tail&amp;quot; has suffered a default judgment and lost the property to a third party. But the real world result of this &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot; is that the tenant in tail has managed to break the entailed property into two separate pieces: a fee simple deed that he can freely sell or mortgage; and a third party warrantee equal in value to the land, which he can pass on to the future heirs in place of the entailed property. The &amp;quot;tail&amp;quot; goes to the heirs — and the fee simple deed goes wherever the tenant in tail wants to send it. If you’re a tax lawyer, you already know where I’m going with this. If you're not a tax lawyer then you have to take it on faith: as with today's tax-driven corporate reorganizations, any loophole or fictitious legal procedure is vulnerable to challenge in court. And a judge who believes you have used it to cheat someone can almost always reverse the fictional procedure. A judge can ‘pierce the corporate veil’ when it’s used to cheat creditors. A tax court can invalidate any tax deal that doesn’t ‘pass the sniff test.’ And a judge could definitely invalidate a common recovery that he thought was fraudulent or immoral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;STRICT SETTLEMENT/ENGLISH ENTAIL&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the early 18th century, the rule against perpetuities had outlawed perpetual entails. This meant two things. On the one hand, no entail could last for more than about three generations. But on the other hand, judges were increasingly inclined to let you lock things up very tight indeed as long as you didn’t violate the rule against perpetuities. In this context, lawyers developed a very innovative estate planning tool called strict settlement — or the name I prefer because this is such a uniquely English institution — English entail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English entail as an estate management system essentially amounts to placing a great landed estate in the hands of a father-son management team. It locks up property almost completely for one generation, but after the first generation the ‘management team’ can break the entail whenever they decide they want to rewrite the settlements. This system of continually breaking and recreating entails gets around the rule against perpetuities to create something almost as immortal as old medieval perpetual entails. As long as each successive father-son management team renewed the settlements, the entail could remain in force indefinitely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is a new, sleek, flexible, adaptable version of entail! Because the entail is broken and reformed every generation, the male head of family got to tweak it every generation. If his estate was large enough, he could run a sort of shell game in which assets were constantly being moved in and out of entailment to keep the bulk of the estates locked up — but with a healthy liquid capital reserve that remained easily accessible. Think of it like buying a CD ladder or investing in an index fund. You’re never gambling the whole estate on one throw of the dice — or one generation’s ability to produce a male heir. You’ve always got your eggs divided up into many baskets. This link to the Duke of Portland’s estate documents shows just how complex these transactions could be, with multiple parcels of real estate being shifted between settlements to meet changing obligations. One of the Duke of Portland’s marriage settlements actually required 43 separate common recovery actions!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/manuscriptsandspecialcollections/researchguidance/deedsindepth/settlements/complex.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;More complex settlements&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the resettling the entail at the time of marriage served a much more important purpose: it prevented fathers like Mr. Bennet from breaking ranks and leaving their estate to their daughters. Entail through strict settlement forced a man to disinherit his daughters &lt;strong&gt;before they were even born.&lt;/strong&gt; . Eileen Spring and other economic and legal historians have  presented extremely compelling evidence that this cruel practice was a feature, not a bug. And the result was precisely what Jane shows us at Longbourn: an impotent and demoralized father whose estate is so tightly locked up in entail that he cannot provide for his own daughters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take a closer look at the way an entail worked in a strict settlement, let's turn to the Knight family estate that Jane Austen's older brother inherited. The Knight family had a practice of adopting a distant cousin whenever the male line failed, which made their entail potentially immortal. This is how Jane Austen's brother became a wealthy landowner — and why he changed his name to Knight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol34no1/grover.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Knight’s Inheritance: The Chawton, Godmersham, and Winchester Estates&lt;/a&gt;, C. Grover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following passage from one of the Knight family archives shows the typical language that lawyers used to entail property in a strict settlement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manors of Lordships, messuages, farms, land, tenements, hereditaments and premises were given to the use of Thomas May of Godmersham (who hath since in pursuance of a will, taken upon himself to be called Thomas Knight) for his life without impeachment of waste, remainder to the use of William Guidott, John Baker and Edward Munford and their heirs during the life of Thomas (May) Knight in trust to preserve the contingent remainder and after the death of Thomas Knight to use of the first and every other son of the body of Thomas Knight lawfully to be begotten successively in tail-male remainder to the use of William Lloyd of Newberry, gent for his life with the provision for supporting the contingent remainder and after his decease to use of the first and every other son of his body lawfully to be begotten successively in tail-male. Remainder to John Hinton of Chawton, clerk for his life without impeachment of waste with like limitation to preserve the contingent remainder and after his decease to use of the first and every other son of his body lawfully to be begotten successively in tail-male. Remainder to the right heirs of the testatrix Elizabeth forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you spot the magic words? Like most real strict settlements this a very complicated document with reservations of income, multiple remaindermen, and distant cousins adopting the family name to inherit (as Jane Austen’s brother eventually did). It’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Still, when you boil it down to basics you can end up with the classic inheritance pattern of a strict settlement. Here are the new and slightly more wordy magic words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“To A for his life with limitation to preserve the contingent remainder and after his decease to use of the first and every other son of his body lawfully to be begotten successively in tail-male.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the essence of a strict settlement: a hybrid between a life estate and an entail. In a true entail (“to A and the heirs of his body”) every heir is a tenant in tail who can bar the entail through common recovery. But in a strict settlement (“to A for life and then to the heirs of his body”) the first owner is only a tenant for life. And even the subsequent heirs aren't truly full tenants in tail because they are subject to the requirement to &amp;quot;preserve the contingent remainder.&amp;quot; Using these particular magic words creates an entail that can’t be broken unless the current owner and his heir 'join together' to do it … exactly what Jane Austen tells us in Pride and Prejudice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand why a tenant for life can’t do a common recovery, let’s go back to the bundle of rights exercise. Remember how you turned a fee simple into a fee tail by having the grandfather hand a stick to the oldest son in each generation to give them a future interest? Well, with a life tenant it works in reverse: the future heirs hold all the sticks; the life tenant only has the stick that represents the right to use the estate for life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what does a common recovery do? If you’re still not thinking like a lawyer, you might be tempted to say it ‘bars the entail.’ But if you’re thinking like a lawyer, you know that all common recovery really does is turn a fee tail deed into a fee simple deed. The warrantee that actually bars the entail is just a byproduct of this transaction. So just as you need the right catalyst to start a chemical reaction, you need the right deed to start a common recovery. Under the type of strict settlement that was in common use in Jane's era, the father and son (and sometimes a trustee as well) had to &amp;quot;join together&amp;quot; to act as the tenant in tail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BACK TO THE LONGBOURN ENTAIL…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combining what Jane Austen tells us with what I just explained about entails, we can now see that four people are involved in the Bennet family entail, and they each have a different bundle of sticks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet's father held Longbourn in fee simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet holds only a life estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bennet's son will be the ‘heir in tail’ until his father dies,and then he will be the ‘tenant in tail’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Collins is the remainderman in case the male line fails.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we know that Mr. Bennet's father was the original donor? Because Jane tells us that Mr. Bennet can't cut off the entail without a son who is of age. Remember those medieval marriage gifts that were traditionally irrevocable until the bride died without children? Well, by 1800 this tradition had evolved into a specific sequence of magic words that made it impossible for the donee in a strict settlement to break the entail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Jane writes that “the son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age,” she is telling us that Longbourn estate was a strict settlement and that Mr. Bennet was the first heir — the one who only holds a life estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some scholars have argued that Longbourn wasn’t held in strict settlement because Jane uses the word “entail” But by 1800 pure entails were long dead, and no competent lawyer would have drafted anything but a strict settlement. When someone in 1800 told you that their estate was “entailed in the male line” they were talking about a strict settlement almost by definition. In calling the Longbourn strict settlement and entail, Jane is merely following common usage of her day. In contrast, however, her statement that Mr. Bennet has to “join” with an adult son in order to bar the entail is an extremely specific legal clue. In property law terms, Jane is telling us that Mr. Bennet needs to “join” his sticks to his son’s sticks before he can bar the entail through common recovery. And there is only one person who needs to do this: the life tenant in a strict settlement. The textual and historical evidence is overwhelming: Longbourn is held in a strict settlement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is bad news for Lizzie and her sisters! When a life tenant in a strict settlement doesn’t produce an heir, there is no way to reform the entail. This means that the entail ends and the property goes to the remainderman. And Jane has already told us that the remainder man is Mr. Collins. So unless Mr. Bennet miraculously produces a son, there is never going to be a tenant in tail who can break the trust in favor of the Bennet girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The risk of not having a male heir in the first generation is the biggest problem with entailment by strict settlement. It means that if the original donor’s grandchildren are all female, they can be completely disinherited. This is one reason why entails to the male line become so rare in the 20th century. (Obviously, the passage of better laws protecting married women's property also played role.) Today &amp;quot;fee tail male&amp;quot; settlements are only found in a very few aristocratic or royal families who want to tie their land and money to the family title. Everyone else just passes their stuff to their kids &amp;quot;per stirpes&amp;quot; — in equal shares — because we feel it's more fair. (And also because most of us would probably agree that it's good for our kids to work for a living…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But poor Mr. Bennet is stuck with a measly life interest and no son to inherit. There were potential ways around this, including getting a private bill through Parliament or paying off Mr. Collins to go away. But these solutions are out of reach for the same reason that the entail is such a disaster for the Bennet girls: Mr. Bennet is broke. Then, as now, the uber-rich played by different rules than the cash-strapped middle class….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that's it.  The entailment in P&amp;amp;P was indeed unbreakable. Mr. Bennet did not legally have the authority to bar the entail. Nor did he have the wealth or influence to squeeze through the other major loopholes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane was right!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T01:46:49.860" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T01:46:49.860" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11980" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11981" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" Score="0" Body="The Mysterious Mr Quin is a set of short stories by Agatha Christie featuring Mr Satterthwaite and the eponymous Mr Harley Quin" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" LastActivityDate="2019-11-20T03:17:42.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11983" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-21T08:57:54.323" Score="0" ViewCount="1352" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, Rowling had planned out A LOT of details for the main plot of all 7 Harry Potter books even before publishing the first. Such questions have been asked here before (such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1917/how-far-ahead-did-j-k-rowling-plan-harry-potter&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But still, I can't help feeling that the plot of horcruxes weren't really thought about until book 4/5. To elaborate; in book 2, she wrote that Voldemort had put a part of himself/his soul into the diary, but I'm not convinced she had already planned that he had also put parts of himself into other items &lt;strong&gt;AND that they all needed to be destroyed in order to defeat him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thoughts are that if the horcruxes were planned from the start; it's a good plot, but I feel that we should've been given a bit more insight other than &quot;it was a memory&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if the horcruxes &lt;strong&gt;weren't&lt;/strong&gt; planned from the start, but rather added as a main plot in later books (4/5), that's so much more impressive. The horcrux-plot she made to perfectly incorporate that the diary was a horcrux, it's so well done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we know if Rowling knew that the diary &lt;strong&gt;had to be destroyed&lt;/strong&gt; in order to defeat Voldemort, when she wrote the Chamber of Secrets?&#xA;Did she also know that the reason Voldemort didn't die in the end of the first book (philosopher's stone) was partly because of the part of his soul in the diary specifically? Or were these plot arches connected later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8138" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T08:57:54.323" Title="Did J.K. Rowling know the diary was a horcrux when she wrote about it?" Tags="&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1353" CreationDate="2019-11-21T16:09:26.370" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wards of the court of Chancery were children who were heirs or heiresses and who were placed under the protection of the Lord Chancellor. He appointed a guardian and a solicitor to oversee the affairs of such children. Lord Byron was one. Then lady Byron made her daughter a ward of the court.  Chancery court was the court of Guardians and wards. That aspect didn't change though courts and court functions changed over the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8140" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-21T16:51:31.780" LastActivityDate="2019-11-21T16:51:31.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8909" CreationDate="2019-11-22T02:04:18.390" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems really unlikely that there's any single path, and the monster is &quot;a Frankenstein&quot; in at least some of the same ways that a Model T. is &quot;a Ford&quot; or Guernica is &quot;a Picasso.&quot; But James Whale is also obviously a key tributary of the drifting reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;James Whale's 1931 movie with Boris Karloff (&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; seminal visual depiction of the monster) totally centers the monster in a movie called &quot;Frankenstein.&quot; Moreover, many (if not all) of the posters for the film have the text &quot;Frankenstein&quot; superimposed on Karloff's giant forehead.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;James Whale made a 1935 movie that not only compounds, but trades on the ambiguious reference, being called &quot;The Bride of Frankenstein.&quot; The bride is of course a bride &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; the Monster, conceived by the mad scientist Frankenstein (though not the same Frankenstein as made the first monster!)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8144" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T02:04:18.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11988" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-22T05:53:06.257" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;My class is having a discussion finding out whether Piggy has done anything wrong or immoral during the time that he was on the island, perhaps him being involved in Simon's death. Is there any piece of evidence that can support it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would really appreciate some input on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8145" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T05:53:06.257" Title="Has Piggy done anything evil or immoral in Lord of the Flies?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2019-11-22T18:36:34.833" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11989" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8909" CreationDate="2019-11-22T06:23:04.713" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, it started very early on and probably wasn't inspired by anything in particular. Probably it was created of either laziness (&quot;Frankenstein's monster&quot; is so long) or ignorance (&quot;Dracula&quot; is both the name of the book and the monster).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/516344/191178&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt;, using &quot;Frankenstein&quot; to refer to Frankenstein’s monster dates back to at least 1838, only 20 years after the book was published according to the OED:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They [sc. mules] really seem like Frankensteins of the animal creation.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=H4QOAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR46&amp;amp;lpg=PR46&amp;amp;dq=%22really+seem+like+Frankensteins+of+the+animal+creation%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Murray's Handbook Sicily&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's another example I found from only a year later, in 1839:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two gigantic empires—the Frankensteins of our own creation, which will soon turn upon the author of their being—are shooting...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=3YEfAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=RA2-PA83&amp;amp;dq=%22Frankensteins+of%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The London Quarterly Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2019-11-22T06:23:04.713" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11991" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12006" CreationDate="2019-11-23T04:10:26.590" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is an excerpt from Wifey Redux by Kevin Barry: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He wasn’t her usual type, so immediately I was worried. The usual type – so far as it had been established – was black-clad, pale-skinned, basically depressed-looking, given to eyeliner and guitar cases, &lt;strong&gt;Columbine types&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;sniper material&lt;/strong&gt;, little runts in duster coats, addicted to their antihistamine inhalers, self-harmers, yadda-yadda, but basically innocent.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What type can be regarded as &quot;Columbine type?&quot; and does &quot;sniper material&quot; really mean someone meant to become a sniper(shooter)? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T08:17:05.773" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T05:41:14.563" Title="How to understand the meaning of &quot; Columbine types&quot; and &quot;sniper material&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kevin-barry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-23T20:46:53.993" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently reading &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; for school and I'm struggling to find a common reoccurring theme for the tales. More specifically the Wife of Bath and Prioress tales. I thought about writing about oppression since women (Wife of Bath) and Jews (Prioress) were both victimized by society. I'm not sure if this is the best argument I can use in my essay as I have to use 3 tales to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help come up with suggestions and better ideas for reoccurring themes? This is a very complex piece of literature for me and is a huge assignment so I'm trying to get to understand the tales as best as I can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5605" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-23T21:07:03.420" LastActivityDate="2019-11-23T21:07:03.420" Title="Common reoccurring themes in The Canterbury Tales?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-23T21:48:04.173" Score="5" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like Roald Dahl or Edgar Allan Poe, but I could be wrong. It's NOT Lamb to the Slaughter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woman in the story is in danger somehow by a man in her house, and she manages to call for help using the phone in a certain way; so that when she is ordering meat, the help at the other end of the receiver does not hear it, but only hears her words that call him to rush to her house.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reminded of this story by the recent (?) one in the news that a woman in a domestic violence situation called 911 and &quot;ordered a pizza&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8153" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T07:38:16.027" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T20:26:00.160" Title="Looking for story where a woman calls for help by pretending to be ordering meat over the phone or something" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-23T23:40:01.970" Score="5" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6DoBAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR7#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;footnote&lt;/a&gt; to his translation of Aeschylus's &lt;em&gt;Prometheus Bound&lt;/em&gt; (1832), Thomas Medwin says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I make no apology for taking this argument from Black’s translation of Schlegel’s admirable treatise on dramatic literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Schlegel is Friedrich von Schlegel, but I don't know which of his works is being cited, nor who the translator, Black, is. Who is Black and how do I cite his translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest citation I can find is in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schlegel-aw/#EnglTran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of translations of August Wilhelm von Schlegel's works&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1944 (1833), &lt;em&gt;A.W. Schlegel’s Lectures on German literature from Gottsched to Goethe,&lt;/em&gt; Oxford: B. Blackwell (notes taken by George Toynbee).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this was published the year after the Medwin source and is by Blackwell, not Black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll owe bonus gratitude if you can point me to an archive of Black's translation online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8154" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T21:08:55.660" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T21:12:30.010" Title="What source did Thomas Medwin use for the argument of his translation of Prometheus Bound?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;august-wilhelm-schlegel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11995" CreationDate="2019-11-23T23:40:01.970" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I found it in the process of researching for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Black&amp;quot; is John Black and his translation is &lt;em&gt;A Course on Dramatic Art and Literature by August Wilhelm Schlegel&lt;/em&gt;, in two volumes, published by Baldwin, Cradock and Joy (in London), Blackwood (in Edinburgh) and John Cumming (in Dublin) in 1815, and available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6CMwAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8154" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T21:12:30.010" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T21:12:30.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T02:32:46.737" Score="3" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The insolence of office and the spurns&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When he himself might his quietus make&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a bare bodkin?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a veracious etymological basis for the interpretation offered &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bardweb.net/content/readings/hamlet/lines.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Bardweb.net&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;defining patient as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;bearing evils with calmness and fortitude,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while remaining constant with its status as a noun, or in the case of rendering it as an adjective, that doesn't personify the noun 'merit', or being that 'merit' here is used as a verb, that doesn't render our minds awry at such nonsense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our modern ears would be more accustomed to hearing 'patience', up to a certain point, but still one would have to ask ourselves what is he talking about? (In the context as a whole.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The insolence of office here can have several meanings.&#xA;Is he talking about the monarch? as would be in the case if one were to say something about &quot;the wickedness of the incumbent in office&quot; or is he talking about the 'task at hand'.  And even that (task at hand) can be ambiguous.  Is he talking about &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Committing suicide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Regicide&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The King's own suicide &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last of course relies on the interpretation that 'office' is referring to the king, or the one who holds his title.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some may ask why would he be contemplating whether or not the King might commit suicide.  In the beginning of the soliloquy he is contemplating being nothing, a worthless SOB, and contrasting it with making a name for himself.  One theory is that the second half of the soliloquy, he is not necessarily contemplating his own thoughts and actions, but generally those that all people would face when contemplating suicide.  This is evidenced by his use of the second person in &quot;When he himself&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many have argued that &quot;To be or not to be&quot; is best thus rendered &quot;to exist or not to exist&quot;, and by continuation to live or to die, but I argue that it is not the only interpretation.  When Hamlet ponders the king committing suicide, it is not merely a hope or a prayer, or any other form of diversion, but chiefly a call to action, that, in the unlikely event that the king does make amends for his sins, (as all men do in fact have a conscience) and kill himself (which he won't because he's a coward like us all) who else but Hamlet himself would amend the wrongs done?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these possibilities to me seem plausible, but paradoxically not really possible because all seem to me to lead to a grammatical inconsistency. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8156" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T10:20:44.463" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T10:20:44.463" Title="What is meant by 'patient' in Hamlet's famous soliloquy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11998" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T04:51:30.817" Score="3" ViewCount="412" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has anyone read and analyzed Poe's &quot;The Assignation&quot;? I read it and have a preliminary understanding of it but failed to perceive greater nuances by far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8157" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T07:36:31.813" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T07:36:31.813" Title="What is the meaning behind Poe's &quot;The Assignation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="11999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8909" CreationDate="2019-11-24T04:54:18.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The popular recognition of Victor Frankenstein's Creature as simply &amp;quot;Frankenstein&amp;quot; started with the films; since more people were familiar with the films, popular culture began to acknowledge the movie portrayal of the Creature more than the literary portrayal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.futurity.org/frankensteins-monster-comics-movies-1589812/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How Frankenstein’s monster has shuffled through movies and comics&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Rosalind Early-Wustl on Futurity.org (30 October 2017).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the above link you can see how the Creature has progressed through film; this progression seems to suggest my conjecture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8157" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:41:04.710" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:41:04.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8127" CreationDate="2019-11-24T05:03:51.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is (I think) the torture scene near where they fit the rat cage onto Winston's head. Its meaning is probably that it is the moment where Winston ceases to be Winston; he is back to being a conformist unit in a dystopian society. &quot;He loved Big Brother&quot;, the last line, is biting because &quot;he&quot; is used instead of &quot;Winston&quot;. Furthermore, the idea of &quot;loved&quot; here is love by the definition of Oceania. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a post-humanity society, remember. The last shreds to which Winston clung that made him human (passion, caring for Julia, wanting to be an individual, even in secret, which led to his hoarding of beautiful items not issued to him nor possessed by any standards by anyone else) are removed from him. In part he is relieved - he no longer has to live a lie, and no longer fears having his humanity taken away from him - there is simply nothing left to take except his memories - and even those he hands over to the authorities. He now has a sense of animal contentment of belonging in a herd and having his basic needs fulfilled. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8157" LastEditorUserId="8157" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T19:44:33.313" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T19:44:33.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T11:37:17.273" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do I understand explicitly the meaning of this last sentence from the fourth letter of Frankenstein? Why would the ship be &amp;quot;wrecked&amp;quot; when it was not? Also, how do I account for the usage of em dash followed by &amp;quot;thus&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even now, as I commence my task, his full-toned voice swells in my ears; his lustrous eyes dwell on me with all their melancholy sweetness; I see his thin hand raised in animation, while the lineaments of his face are irradiated by the soul within. Strange and harrowing must be his story, frightful the storm which embraced the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it—thus!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; -- &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, Mary Shelley&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8158" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-24T11:53:26.033" Title="&quot;...the gallant vessel on its course and wrecked it—thus!&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-24T19:38:06.393" Score="2" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;C.P. Snow's &quot;The Masters&quot; revolves around the election of a new Master. There are a total of 13 voters of which the two candidates make up two. Because the split of the two candidates' &quot;parties&quot; is so close an important plot point midway through the book is how the candidates themselves will vote. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that the each candidate is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; allowed to vote for themselves, but &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; allowed to vote for the other candidate. Here is one of the characters talking to one of the candidates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There are thirteen of us, not counting the present Master. If we leave&#xA;  you out, and assume that another member of the&#xA;  society will be the other candidate, that gives eleven people with a&#xA;  free vote.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is quote from Chapter  21; one of the candidates is speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...a clear majority has not yet found itself to express the will of&#xA;  the college. In the circumstances, the votes which the Senior Tutor and I&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;(the two candidates)&lt;/em&gt; dispose, by virtue of being fellows, may be&#xA;  relevant. [...] We do not consider ourselves justified in voting for&#xA;  one another. As matters stand at present, we shall abstain from voting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of a candidate not voting for themselves seems crazy. Does this come from real life: did (or does) this restriction hold in real Oxbridge college elections? If so, why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2280" LastEditorUserId="2280" LastEditDate="2019-11-24T21:28:52.387" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T12:28:59.607" Title="Why can't the candidates in &quot;The Masters&quot; vote for themselves?" Tags="&lt;c-p-snow&gt;&lt;strangers-and-brothers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12003" CreationDate="2019-11-24T20:42:59.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It might have been a college statute at the time, or possibly just a &amp;quot;gentlemen's agreement&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cambridge and Oxford colleges are strange, anachronistic institutions, quite unlike any other organisation of higher education in the UK (or probably anywhere else, with the possible exception of institutions in other countries which are specifically modelled on Oxbridge colleges). They are not subject-based like departments or faculties, and they play little role in the teaching or research aspects of the university, but many of them are among the oldest and most prestigious institutions in the country, as well as being significant landowners worth hundreds of millions of pounds. These assets are usually managed by the board of Fellows (college members, professors and the like) presided over by the Master.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each college has its own Statutes and Ordinances which govern the running and affairs of the college. I haven't checked all of these for all Cambridge colleges, let alone all the revisions to them through the centuries (if such a thing is even publicly recorded anywhere), but I did check the one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ%27s_College,_Cambridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christ's College&lt;/a&gt;, where C. P. Snow was a fellow and on which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Masters_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the college featuring in &lt;em&gt;The Masters&lt;/em&gt; may be based&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever the office of Master falls vacant the Fellows shall as soon as may be elect a person to fill the office.  All Fellows, including those granted or deemed to have been granted leave of absence by the Council, shall be entitled to vote and no person shall be elected unless a majority of those entitled to vote have voted in favour of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Master shall take no part in the pre-election of his successor.   If there is no Master and the last holder of that office is a Fellow, he shall take no part in the election of his successor and he shall not count as a Fellow for the purposes of this Chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Governing Body may by Ordinance make such additional rules as it deems necessary concerning the procedure to be followed at meetings called for the purpose of the election or pre-election of a Master.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.christs.cam.ac.uk/files/inline-files/2019%20-%20Statutes%20and%20Ordinances%20combined%20-%20revised%20October%202019.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christ's College Cambridge Statutes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this particular college, for whatever reason, the outgoing Master is not allowed to cast a vote for the new one. It's also worth noting that additional rules may be added if deemed necessary (including &lt;em&gt;potentially&lt;/em&gt; a rule preventing candidates from voting for themselves).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another interesting case to consider is the Mastership election in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Catharine%27s_College,_Cambridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;St. Catharine's College&lt;/a&gt; in 1861, which created something of a scandal in the college:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter part of the 19th century was dominated by what became known as the 'Robinson Vote'. In 1861, when Philpott was made Bishop, the election for his successor took place, with Charles Robinson and Francis Jameson standing for the position. The actual facts of the case are obscure, but Jameson voted for Robinson, presumably expecting Robinson to vote for him, but Robinson voted for himself, enabling him to win. The episode was well-known throughout the University and caused the reputation of the College to suffer for a good number of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.caths.cam.ac.uk/about-us/history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;St. Catharine's College website&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems unclear whether the natural or expected thing to do was for both candidates to vote for themselves or for them to vote for each other. Wikipedia says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Jameson naturally voted for Robinson, however Robinson voted for himself&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/cambs/vol3/pp415-420&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British History Online&lt;/a&gt; says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Jameson and another voted for Robinson, two for Jameson, but Robinson, following an old tradition of the College, voted for himself, and so secured the election.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; In any case, it seems likely that this was the very incident Snow had in mind when writing &lt;em&gt;The Masters&lt;/em&gt;, given the notoriety of this scandal in the university. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cantab.org/storage/documents/St_Catharines_Society_Magazine_2015_public.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;St. Catharine's College magazine&lt;/a&gt; explicitly compares the Robinson scandal with &lt;em&gt;The Masters&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most infamous controversial election is the one which blighted the College’s reputation for half a century and for which St Catharine’s for a time was unjustifiably notorious. Jones and the Quincentenary Essays discuss the 1861 election at length – worth reading if only to compare with CP Snow’s &lt;em&gt;The Masters&lt;/em&gt;. [...] The two junior Fellows had decided to vote for Robinson, but, the evening before the election, they had a discussion and changed their minds. They therefore voted for Jameson; the other three, including Jameson, voted for Robinson, despite Robinson having previously repeatedly urged Jameson that he should vote for himself as was the custom in such elections. For some time all was sweetness and light until Jameson belatedly discovered Robinson’s marriage, upon which he made a great scandal while Robinson was away on honeymoon, broadcasting around that Robinson won the election only because he voted for himself. Robinson offered to stand down, but even Jameson agreed that the election should stand. Jones (who was elected a Fellow towards the end of Robinson’s Mastership and so had first-hand experience of the effect) writes ‘The scandal caused ... was probably the greatest disaster that ever happened to any college...’. Robinson was Master for nearly fifty years and his presence a constant reminder of the ‘Robinson vote.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion (Wikipedia notwithstanding) appears to be that voting for oneself was usual in such elections, and Jameson perhaps made a mistake. However, this incident may have led to ordinances &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; voting for oneself in other college elections: no other college would want a scandal like St. Catharine's had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another case, this time from Gonville and Caius College:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three scrutinies were held. At the first two. Guest obtained exactly half the votes. At the third he was induced to give his own vote for himself, which secured the requisite majority, and he was duly elected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/biographicalhist03invenn/biographicalhist03invenn_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Biographical history of Gonville and Caius college, 1349-1897; containing a list of all known members of the college from the foundation to the present time, with biographical notes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incoming Master &amp;quot;was induced&amp;quot; to vote for himself, having not done so in the first two rounds of voting. It seems that voting for oneself, while not against the rules, was at least not just the natural and expected thing to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Trinity College, with also a note about non-collegiate university practices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he, this deponent, lastly maketh oath, that as no clause in the statute about Royal Professorships does forbid any elector to vote for himself, if he pleases to be a candidate; for the constant practice in like cases both in Trinity College and the University for near twenty years, that this deponent hath been Master there, and, as he believes, for time immemorial, doth warrant the said voting for one's self. It being notoriously known that the eight Seniors of the said College, who, with the Master, are electors into all the College offices, do yearly some of them vote for themselves for the offices of Vice-master, of Senior Dean, and of Senior Bursar. And in the said University, whenever an University living, or a place of member of Parliament, or yearly the University lectureships of rhetoric, &amp;amp;c. do fall vacant, the candidates for any of the said places are allowed to have a right, and, as occasion requires, are accustomed to vote for themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LqFWAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PR29&amp;amp;lpg=PR29&amp;amp;dq=college+statutes+election+of+%22the+master%22+%22vote+for+himself%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., Master of Trinity College&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, although it &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; permitted to vote for oneself, someone felt the need to write a lengthy paragraph to justify that it was indeed permitted. It seems that some Fellows might have felt it inappropriate (ungentlemanly?) to vote for oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Oxford this time, Balliol College:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Best's side argued that the custom of private and secret voting in the Chapel was not an inflexible constraint. The Visitor himself, they pointed out, had been elected at a meeting convened for the purpose by the Master in his Lodging, because he had 'taken physick and was fearfull of venturing out'. Several other instances were cited to show that the College was free to use its discretion in matters not explicitly covered by the Statutes. Their case was voluminous, but weak, lacking examples of elections which had involved real decisions by voting. A second line of attack was aimed at Quick. By some oversight he had failed to take the Oath of Allegiance, and it was maintained that his Fellowship was therefore void, and his vote worthless. Leigh's team entered fully into the spirit of the thing. Adherence to ancient custom was strongly defended. Was it in order for Best to vote for himself? Was Lux &lt;em&gt;compos mentis&lt;/em&gt;? If not, was his vote valid? And so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=66ILtB9wQX8C&amp;amp;pg=PA158&amp;amp;lpg=PA158&amp;amp;dq=college+statutes+election+of+%22the+master%22+%22vote+for+himself%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Balliol College: A History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among many other nice points of college regulations, the issue was raised of whether or not a candidate was allowed to vote for himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: although I haven't found any Oxbridge college statutes or ordinances, past or present, which specifically disallow voting for oneself in Mastership elections, doing so was often considered controversial. So, it's plausible based on reality either that the fictional college of Snow's &lt;em&gt;The Masters&lt;/em&gt; imposed ordinances disallowing it, or that the candidates in this particular story had a &amp;quot;gentlemen's agreement&amp;quot; not to vote for themselves.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T12:28:59.607" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2019-11-25T09:38:21.010" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;black-clad, pale-skinned, basically depressed-looking, given to eyeliner&amp;quot; definitely describes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goth_subculture#Styling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the goth stereotype&lt;/a&gt;. For example, take this character from the British TV show &lt;em&gt;The IT Crowd&lt;/em&gt;, where most characters are caricatures of stereotypes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://theitcrowd.fandom.com/wiki/Richmond_Avenal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Richmond Avenal&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9FiyY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Richmond Avenal&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Checks all the boxes (though maybe not depressed-looking in this picture).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/11991/how-to-understand-the-meaning-of-columbine-types-and-sniper-material?noredirect=1#comment19323_11991&quot;&gt;the links from Rand al'Thor&lt;/a&gt;, we can also explore the connection between (or lack thereof) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Columbine shootings&lt;/a&gt; and the goth subculture. Soon after the massacre, there were a number of misconceptions floating around about the motivations of the shooters, such as subversion by the goth subculture, reaction to bullying, and so on. The Wikipedia article mentions this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debates were sparked over gun control laws and gun culture, high school cliques, subcultures, and bullying. Also discussed were the moral panic over goths, social outcasts, the use of pharmaceutical antidepressants by teenagers, teenage Internet use and violence in video games and movies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apparent goth connection came largely from a group in the school named the Trenchcoat Mafia. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/apr/22/usgunviolence.usa4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an April 1999 article in The Guardian&lt;/a&gt; (be cautious of the article, it's from right around the time when these misconceptions were strong and I'm using it show how things were then):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, right at the bottom of the food chain, there were the students&#xA;who could not fit into any of the other groups, the quiet, brooding,&#xA;intelligent ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to pupils who spoke to the Guardian last night, these pupils&#xA;were invariably shunned by the other tribes, and frequently bullied,&#xA;verbally and physically. As a reaction, they formed a clique two years&#xA;ago and called themselves the Anachronists. But it was the derogatory&#xA;label given to them by the jocks because of their habit of wearing&#xA;long black trench coats whatever the weather, indoors and out, which&#xA;stuck: the Trenchcoat Mafia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Central to the Trenchcoat Mafia's identity was their association with 'dark metal' Goth music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/19/bullies-black-trench-coats-columbine-shootings-most-dangerous-myths/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Washington Post article&lt;/a&gt; suggested by Rand al'Thor shows what they reported then and corrects it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Washington Post put it this way: “The shooters who turned&#xA;Columbine High School into an unspeakable landscape of carnage&#xA;yesterday were members of a small clique of outcasts who always wore&#xA;black trench coats and spent their entire adolescence deep inside the&#xA;morose subculture of Gothic fantasy, their fellow students said.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harris and Klebold knew a few of these students, but they were not&#xA;considered core to the friend group, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s&#xA;Office later determined, and did not appear in a photo of Trench Coat&#xA;Mafia members in the 1998 yearbook. Most of those students had&#xA;graduated the year before the shooting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Police also later determined that some students confused Klebold with&#xA;another student who was in the group and resembled Klebold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.salon.com/1999/09/23/columbine_4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Salon article&lt;/a&gt; goes into a lot of detail about this and some other misconceptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Investigators also criticized the media for propagating the myth that&#xA;the pair were Goths. Apparently it took nothing more than reports of&#xA;black clothing and eyeliner among the unrelated Trench Coat Mafia for&#xA;much of the national media to label them Goths. &amp;quot;That became a whole&#xA;issue for a week,&amp;quot; one investigator said. &amp;quot;Marilyn Manson canceled his&#xA;concert.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ABC's &amp;quot;20/20&amp;quot; aired a particularly ignorant &amp;quot;report&amp;quot; the night after&#xA;the tragedy, linking the killers to the scene with alarmist messages&#xA;about Satanism and cults. Aside from the fact that the report&#xA;completely misrepresented and maligned the movement, neither Marilyn&#xA;Manson nor the Goths had anything whatsoever to do with the killers,&#xA;who had nothing but contempt for the music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am at a loss as to what &amp;quot;sniper material&amp;quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T09:38:21.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11997" CreationDate="2019-11-25T12:30:29.653" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines have the following meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The overbearing / pride of those who hold an official position, and the insults &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  that the deserving have to patiently endure from the unworthy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  when they themselves could be released from the troubles of life (literally, to be released from debt)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  with merely a dagger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above paraphrase, &quot;those who hold an official position&quot; is much broader than just the king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Patient&quot; is interpreted as an adjective; in Shakespeare's day, the adjective could mean &quot;calm, serene&quot; or &quot;restrained and impassive&quot; (e.g. in &quot;Why art thou patient, man?&quot; in &lt;em&gt;3 Henry IV&lt;/em&gt;, Act I, scene 4). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/GlossaryHeadword.aspx?headwordId=12844&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patience&lt;/a&gt; existed as a noun; according to David Crystal's glossary, it meant &quot;endurance, fortitude, composure&quot;. There is no reason to assume that &quot;patient&quot; is a noun here (merit as a patient?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above, &quot;patient merit&quot; can also be paraphrased as &quot;those who have merit and are calm&quot;, i.e. referring to people by some of their characteristics.&#xA;Bardweb's interpretation of &quot;patient&quot; as &quot;bearing evils with calmness and fortitude&quot; sounds over the top, since &quot;spurns&quot; does not mean &quot;evils&quot; but &quot;scornful rejection&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory that Claudius might be contemplating suicide or that Hamlet thinks the King is contemplating suicide sounds far-fetched and needs much more support from the play's text than is provided in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-11-25T12:30:29.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-25T17:43:19.137" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hardy's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/3171/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Distracted Preacher&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first page has this really long sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But when those of the inhabitants who styled themselves of his connection became acquainted with him, they were rather pleased with the substitute than otherwise, though he had scarcely as yet acquired ballast of character sufficient to steady the consciences of the hundred-and-forty Methodists of pure blood who, at this time, lived in Nether-Moynton, and to give in addition supplementary support to the mixed race which went to church in the morning and chapel in the evening, or when there was a tea--as many as a hundred-and-ten people more, all told, and including the parish-clerk in the winter-time, when it was too dark for the vicar to observe who passed up the street at seven o'clock--which, to be just to him, he was never anxious to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably a really simple answer, but given the length of this sentence I'm having trouble determining what &quot;he was never anxious to do&quot;? Is it go to a tea? Is it steadying the consciences of / giving supplementary support to the people in the town? Is it becoming acquainted with the inhabitants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also curious whether this technically qualifies as a run-on sentence? It's certainly one of the longest ones I've seen, and I'm assuming it is included for comedic effect. I haven't yet read other works of Hardy's, so I don't know if this is a common occurrence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8162" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T17:58:17.320" Title="What is the Distracted Preacher never anxious to do in this long sentence?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8697" CreationDate="2019-11-25T22:19:40.807" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be called an animal biography or juvenile literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8164" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T09:34:10.803" LastActivityDate="2019-11-29T09:34:10.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8928" CreationDate="2019-11-26T02:52:12.020" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I see it as Caesar trusting Brutus's choice. If Brutus thinks Caesar needs to die then it is the right thing to do. You too Brutus? Then I must die. I think it's an affirmation. I agree with you that everyone always says et tu brute was the last words of Caesar because when you add &quot;then fall Caesar&quot;, the meaning changes from &quot;how could you&quot; to &quot;even you Brutus, then it must be done.&quot; Just the way I see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8166" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T02:52:12.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-26T17:55:55.160" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just recently got in touch with such an inspiring book called &lt;em&gt;The Kite Runner&lt;/em&gt; by Khaled Hosseini. I was quite astonished by how the idea of racism and religious discrimination is stressed throughout the book, and the way it presented its metaphor and symbolism was exhilarating. As I'm a Muslim myself, I understand the difficulties on a personal level, brothers fighting against brothers. HORRIFIC!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to understand, from a literary point of view, how Hosseini uses emotion, symbolism and other linguistic/figurative features to highlight the social groups that are silenced and marginalized in this novel. If anyone educated in this book can help me understand how Hosseini uses such tremendous techniques, it would really FULFIL my inner curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8170" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-26T18:36:08.027" LastActivityDate="2019-11-26T18:36:08.027" Title="Social discrimination commentary in the Kite Runner" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;the-kite-runner&gt;&lt;khaled-hosseini&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12014" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-27T18:54:30.447" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo (Wordsworth Classics English translation, complete and unabridged) and have reached page 603/875 = 69%.&#xA;Around p400 the author introduces us to an important plot element in the form of a love story, at a point when the romance between Maximilian Morrel and Valentine is already well under way.&#xA;There are some oblique references made to their first meeting, such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ever since we met, have I made any demands upon you&amp;quot; (says Morrel)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you had been happy then you would never have noticed a poor soldier like me&amp;quot; (Morrel)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He related everything to the old man, from their first meeting to their present firm decision to wed one another (all quotes paraphrase)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...but having searched quite a bit through the text, I still cannot identify where it is made explicit, within these 603 pages: when and where did Maximilian and Valentine actually first meet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2159" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-27T22:26:44.530" Title="When and where did Maximilian first meet Valentine?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-count-of-monte-cristo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12015" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12008" CreationDate="2019-11-28T17:07:24.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the winter, the Parish Clerk goes to tea with the Methodists.  The vicar turns a blind eye to this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in the winter-time, when it was too dark for the vicar to observe [...] which [...] he was never anxious to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-11-28T17:58:17.320" LastActivityDate="2019-11-28T17:58:17.320" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-28T21:19:40.487" Score="3" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;CASSIUS: Have not you love enough to bear with me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      When that rash humor which my mother gave me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      Makes me forgetful?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;W. Shakespeare, &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, ACT 4 SCENE 3&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Cassius referring to? Who was his mother? I couldn't find the answer online. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Modernised text from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/juliuscaesar/page_176/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NoFearShakespeare&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you have enough love for me to be patient when my bad temper, which I inherited from my mother, makes me forget how I should behave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8177" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-11-29T08:44:13.273" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T15:44:26.230" Title="What does Cassius mean when he refers to his mother?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-29T16:21:48.967" Score="5" ViewCount="3588" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/348/17&quot;&gt;A previous question&lt;/a&gt; asks about the comparative timescale of the flood story that appears in the Book of Genesis and the one that appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh. An interesting apparent difference is that Noah was told to save himself by the same God who sent the flood, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utnapishtim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Utnapishtim&lt;/a&gt; was told by Enki (Ea) who was only one of many gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_flood_narrative&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblical flood&lt;/a&gt;, God wishes to destroy both humanity and the earth, because of the corruption and violence that had engulfed both due to the evil of humans (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+6-9&amp;amp;version=NIV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 6:9&lt;/a&gt;). Was there a similar &lt;strong&gt;motivation&lt;/strong&gt; for the Mesopotamian flood myth? Did the gods (presumably plural) wish to destroy both humanity and the earth, or only the former, and was it because of the evil of people? Did they all sanction Utnapishtim's survival as a &quot;good man&quot;, or was he more of a &quot;rebel&quot; against the will of the gods?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:47:31.563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T13:19:00.480" Title="Why did the gods send the flood in The Epic of Gilgamesh?" Tags="&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12016" CreationDate="2019-11-30T16:41:57.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would paraphrase &quot;rash humour&quot; as irascible temper or fickle temper. Based on what Brutus said earlier, Cassius does not so much have a persisting angry mood; his character is better described as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/choleric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;choleric&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O Cassius, you are yoked with a lamb&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That &lt;strong&gt;carries anger as the flint bears fire&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Who, much enforced, shows a &lt;strong&gt;hasty spark&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And &lt;strong&gt;straight is cold again&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's main source for &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is Plutarch's &quot;Life of Brutus&quot; (from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Parallel Lives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as translated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas North&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the relevant description of Cassius in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0078%3Atext%3DBrut.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Life of Marcus Brutus&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And as for Cassius, a hot, choleric, and cruel man, that would oftentimes be carried away from justice for gain, it was certainly thought that he made war and put himself into sundry dangers, more to have absolute power and authority than to defend the liberty of his country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plutarch does not mention Cassius's mother, so it appears that Shakespeare made up the claim that Cassius inherited his irascible temper from her. It is less clear why Shakespeare would add this sort of detail. However, Brutus goes on to say,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) from henceforth,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, the two men use Cassius's mother as a figurative lightning rod, i.e. as a means of diverting blame for Cassius's irascibility to someone else, in order to make their own working relationship less vulnerable to Cassius's temper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Rand al'Thor wrote in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I can't find a good source, but I think it's a standard expression in English (especially older English such as Shakespeare's) to say that an attribute was given you by your mother just meaning you had it from birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My paraphrase as &quot;inherited&quot; is based on two editions of &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;: one by Norman Sanders (New Penguin Shakespeare) and one by T. S. Dorsch (Aden Shakespeare, 1965, reprinted 1983). Both editors use the term &quot;inherited&quot;. Note that in this context, it is difficult to claim that Cassius did not get his irascible temper from his mother (i.e. that it is a trait he was born with without his mother having anything to do with it), due to Brutus's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-02T15:44:26.230" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T15:44:26.230" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-11-30T18:55:15.270" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;My mom (b. 1960) has long searched for this book she read in her childhood. She consulted with librarians and even wrote a letter to the &lt;em&gt;Toronto Star&lt;/em&gt;, but none of the suggestions were it. She gave up in the '90s, so now I'm wondering if the Newfangled Technology of the Internet can help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Details: It was a picture book (for children) about a teenage girl who finds a den of orphaned fox cubs and cares for them in the den, rather than taking them home. The illustrations were in pencil crayon or pastel style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She believes it wasn't an old book back then, so it was probably published in the late '50s or '60s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1672" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T18:55:15.270" Title="Old children's book about teenage girl who helps foxes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11994" CreationDate="2019-11-30T19:53:25.833" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found it! It's &amp;quot;Philomel Cottage&amp;quot; by Agatha Christie!!&#xA;I just dug it up at my parents' house, it was a story in a Longman simplified edition called &amp;quot;Stories of Detection and Mystery&amp;quot;. Had apparently confused it with Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm just going to telephone to the butcher,&amp;quot; she announced nonchalantly. &amp;quot;Don't you bother to move.&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then, as she nervously depressed and released the little key in the receiver she was holding, which permits the voice to be heard or not heard at the other end, another plan flashed into her head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It will be difficult,&amp;quot; she thought. &amp;quot;It means keeping my head, and thinking of the right words, and not faltering for a moment, but I believe I could do it. I &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; do it.&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alix drew a deep breath. Then she depressed the key firmly and spoke. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Mrs. Martin speaking - from Philomel Cottage. Please come&lt;/em&gt; (she released the key) tomorrow morning with six nice veal cutlets (she released the key again) &lt;em&gt;It's very important&lt;/em&gt; (she released the key) Thank you so much, Mr. Hexworthy: you don't mind my ringing you up so late, I hope, but those veal cutlets are really a matter of (she depressed the key again) &lt;em&gt;life or death&lt;/em&gt; (she released it) Very well - tomorrow morning - (she depressed it) &lt;em&gt;as soon as possible.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8153" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-11-30T20:26:00.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3884" CreationDate="2019-11-30T20:48:11.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great question. One of the things I've noticed about Henley's lyrics, having memorized and performed a LOT of them, is that they lack coherency. He's a master of powerful one-liners that sound terribly meaningful and insightful in isolation but when taken in the context of the larger song lose meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case I think he simply drifts off. He starts the first verse addressing someone who obviously is important to him. I don't think it's important whether the relationship is romantic or platonic. I initially took it to mean Don Felder or someone from the band who is as fiercely creative as he is but from whom he is estranged. Then in the all-important hook, when you expect him to tie it all together with gratitude for the person's influence in his life, he wanders off to gratitude for life and breath instead - nothing to do with the previous 16 lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As another example, the second verse shifts gracefully from the personal relationship problems to American cultural problems - lack of appreciation. But again in the chorus he non-sequiturs to things for which he is personally grateful. I think a better poet would have continued with, and put a ribbon on, the theme of social/cultural issues. Coherent lyrics often pose a question or conflict in the verse that they then answer in the chorus and make further observations on in the bridge - a powerful formula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I love Henley's songs but I think crediting him with lyrics that are as crafted as, for instance, Sting's, is a mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A glaring exception to my broad generalization is the lyrics to &quot;Hotel California&quot; which smack of Henley's dark, ironic style; are singularly brilliant and gripping; tell a very coherent story; and blow your mind in the last line &quot;You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8181" LastEditorUserId="8181" LastEditDate="2019-12-07T13:50:52.593" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T13:50:52.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12026" CreationDate="2019-12-01T13:23:45.613" Score="2" ViewCount="1793" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://celine.klinghammer.free.fr/documents%20pdf/nouvelles/Philomel%20cottage.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Philomel Cottage&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a short story by Agatha Christie which was &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12020/17&quot;&gt;recently identified as the answer to a story-ID question on our site&lt;/a&gt;. After seeing it there, I read the story in full - it's only 10 pages, freely available online, and thoroughly worth the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Gerald Martin, or Charles Lemaitre, is found dead in his chair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; seem to fit the dream Alix had before:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She saw her husband lying dead and Dick Windyford standing over him, and she knew clearly and distinctly that his was the hand which had dealt the fatal blow.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what's less clear is how he actually died. Alix has just told him a story in which&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; plays the role of the &quot;female Bluebeard&quot;, making him think that she poisoned his coffee. But it doesn't seem that she actually did such a thing: she was instead waiting for Dick Windyford to come and save her. So, what really happened? Did he simply die of fright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T10:57:07.840" Title="Why did he die in &quot;Philomel Cottage&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12024" CreationDate="2019-12-01T14:10:59.557" Score="3" ViewCount="1039" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the book &lt;em&gt;Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;A Description of the Northern Peoples&lt;/em&gt;), available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=O9lEAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;dq=inauthor%3A%22Olaus%20Magnus%22&amp;amp;pg=PP5#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zHMan.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zHMan.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;What are the two highlighted letters in unicode?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What typeface is this? Maybe &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua_(typeface_class)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antiqua&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8183" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2019-12-03T02:27:01.213" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T04:32:44.140" Title="What are these letters in unicode?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;olaus-magnus&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12023" CreationDate="2019-12-01T15:08:36.667" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first one is a common abbreviation: &lt;code&gt;q;&lt;/code&gt; stands for &lt;em&gt;que&lt;/em&gt; in this case. A screenshot from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ub.uni-koeln.de/cdm/ref/collection/mono20/id/8533&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cappelli&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RnjXY.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RnjXY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other one is a ligature: what you see is simply &lt;code&gt;ct&lt;/code&gt; with a little arc connecting the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether these exist in Unicode, nor do I know about type faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="854" LastEditorUserId="854" LastEditDate="2019-12-01T15:18:20.900" LastActivityDate="2019-12-01T15:18:20.900" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12022" CreationDate="2019-12-02T10:57:07.840" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer was in the locked drawer. Amongst the reports in the newspaper clippings was one  which read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The personality of the man and his extraordinary power over women had been discussed at great length in the English papers at the time, together with an account of his excitability in court, his passionate protestations, and his occasional sudden physical collapses, due to the fact that he had a weak heart, though the ignorant accredited it to his dramatic powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'ignorant' were indeed incorrect to think he was faking the collapses. In times of stress his weak heart made itself known and when in mortal fear of his life, it killed him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2019-12-02T10:57:07.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-02T22:35:54.323" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Swans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wild Swans&lt;/a&gt; by Andersen and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Swans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Six Swans&lt;/a&gt; by Grimm so similar to each other? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which one is more original? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8189" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-05T14:59:25.013" LastActivityDate="2019-12-05T14:59:25.013" Title="Why are The Wild Swans by Andersen and The Six Swans by Grimm so similar to each other?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12030" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-03T02:54:10.163" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm starting to read &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kongens Fald&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Johannes V. Jensen. I find out that at the first chapter, &lt;strong&gt;Mikkel&lt;/strong&gt; chapter, there are some empty pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just want to know if the Spanish version that I bought is complete trash or if this is on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7326" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-03T08:10:12.317" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T08:10:12.317" Title="Empty pages in Kongens Fald" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;johannes-v-jensen&gt;&lt;the-fall-of-the-king&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12023" CreationDate="2019-12-03T04:32:44.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The typeface appears similar to those by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Jenson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicolas Jenson&lt;/a&gt;, a 15th-century typographer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original typeface may not have a name (or the name may be lost to time), but there is a 21st-century typographer named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/person/Gilles_Le_Corre/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gilles Le Corre&lt;/a&gt; (GLC) who creates fonts that replicate 15th- and 16th-century typefaces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/foundry/GLC/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GLC's typefaces&lt;/a&gt; matches this one exactly, but several of them are quite close.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/glc/1470-jenson-latin?tab=glyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1470 Jenson Latin Bold&lt;/a&gt; has a Q with the same long tail, lowercase e with slanted crossbar, and ct ligature, but its -que ligature is different. Also, you can't get the -que ligature without the in- and -us ligatures, as seen in this sample.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xInLY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xInLY.png&quot; alt=&quot;1470 Jenson Latin Bold&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/glc/1529-champ-fleury-initials?tab=glyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1529 Champ Fleury Pro&lt;/a&gt; has a Q with a shorter tail and is a little more angular than Jenson Latin. The lowercase e has a slanted crossbar, and the ct ligatures is used by default, but the ae and interior s ligatures require typing a special character. It doesn't appear to have a -que ligature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TGbdP.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/TGbdP.png&quot; alt=&quot;1529 Champ Fleury Pro&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/glc/1543-humane-jenson?tab=glyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1543 Humane Jenson Bold&lt;/a&gt; has a slightly shorter Q-tail than Jenson Latin. It also has the slanted-crossbar e, but doesn't use the ligatures by default. The ct and que ligatures are actually occupying the slots of dagger and double-dagger, and the que ligature has a diacritical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F6lwr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/F6lwr.png&quot; alt=&quot;1543 Humane Jenson Bold&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/glc/1543-humane-petreius?tab=glyphs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1543 Humane Petreius&lt;/a&gt; has a short Q-tail, but a slanted e-crossbar, a ct ligature, and a lovely que ligature (in the double-dagger slot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yaVz8.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yaVz8.png&quot; alt=&quot;1543 Humane Petreius&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Yes, this question is off-topic and will probably get closed. I have no vested interest in the MyFonts website.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2019-12-03T04:32:44.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12032" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-03T16:24:40.120" Score="4" ViewCount="267" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;&lt;strong&gt;inlooped&lt;/strong&gt; flags&quot; in a poem of Whitman (When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd)? He is describing the Lincoln funeral:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the pomp of the &lt;strong&gt;inloop'd&lt;/strong&gt; flags with the cities draped in black,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil'd women standing,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he mean flags are looped over the coffin and covered it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-03T17:00:42.470" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T07:56:38.520" Title="&quot;inlooped flags&quot; in Whitman's poem" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12032" CreationDate="2019-12-03T17:21:19.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/lincolns-traveling-funeral-4122958&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pictures from the Funeral&lt;/a&gt; you will see that while the flags that are on vertical flag poles are flying at half mast as a mark of respect, flags that are on angled or horizontal poles, eg hanging out over streets, which cannot be 'half masted' are instead 'looped in' at the end so that they do not fly free. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't universal, you will still find flags in the pictures that don't show this, but the funeral car and images from Pennsylvania Avenue and Broadway have examples. You will also see plenty of the black drapery the poem refers to on buildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QttNc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QttNc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Funeral car&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpUQ1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cpUQ1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Pennysilvania Avenue&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-04T07:56:38.520" LastActivityDate="2019-12-04T07:56:38.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12035" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-06T00:54:39.893" Score="1" ViewCount="4937" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the theme of “The Deserted Road” by Sheila Burnford? This is part of the novel, &lt;em&gt;The Incredible Journey&lt;/em&gt;, but I want to figure out the theme for this short excerpt. It is shown that the animals have human-like intelligence, and as a result chose to leave their home, but I’m not sure if there is enough evidence to prove any theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8203" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T22:39:02.920" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T22:06:36.323" Title="What is the theme of “The Deserted Road” by Sheila Burnford?" Tags="&lt;theme&gt;&lt;the-incredible-journey&gt;&lt;sheila-burnford&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3069" CreationDate="2019-12-06T10:25:56.143" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I see it, the gift that the Magi didn't bring was sacrifice (sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house), which doesn't require money (Eight dollars a week or a million a year - what is the difference?) and which Jesus didn't need, because he had already decided to be born to sacrifice himself for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8204" LastEditorUserId="8204" LastEditDate="2019-12-06T10:32:24.257" LastActivityDate="2019-12-06T10:32:24.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12037" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-07T05:46:19.017" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a short story, quite convinced at the moment that it was by O. Henry, in which a grandfather figure sits down on his porch with a young boy and starts to tell him a story ... about a grandfather figure who sat down on his porch with a young boy to tell him a story ... about a grandfather figure who sat down on his porch with a young boy to tell him a story ... and on and on it went, several layers deep into a story that never went anywhere.  The quotation marks alone ended up being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;Well, let me tell you a story,&quot; said the old man&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... because it was a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now I can't find that story anywhere.  Any help at all is appreciated, especially if I have the entirely wrong author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8208" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T00:01:30.197" Title="Looking For a Specific O. Henry Story" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11676" CreationDate="2019-12-07T11:35:06.633" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Pfeiffer grapples with the impersonal nature of Darwinian evolution by personifying it: this contradictory endeavour yields confusion and paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discovery of “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deep time&lt;/a&gt;” by the geologists of the 17th and 18th centuries had unsettled Christians with the vista of millions of years of unpeopled prehistory. But by the mid-19th century the findings of geology and paleontology had largely been domesticated into the body of mainsteam Christianity through the ideas of “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Theology_or_Evidences_of_the_Existence_and_Attributes_of_the_Deity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural theology&lt;/a&gt;” (living things were designed by the creator); the teleological “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;great chain of being&lt;/a&gt;” (the history of life represents progress towards a goal); and the special status of humans within creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the publication of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Darwin&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1859) shattered the first two of these coping mechanisms, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Descent_of_Man,_and_Selection_in_Relation_to_Sex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Descent of Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1871) the third. Variation and natural selection explain how living things can be complex and well-adapted to their environments without the need for a designer; the process is directionless and purposeless; and humans share so many characteristics with the other great apes that we must be closely related.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These were much harder pills to swallow than deep time, and the struggle to incorporate the discoveries of science into the Victorian worldview is evident in Pfeiffer’s deployment of contradiction and double meaning throughout this sonnet: evolution’s impersonal nature is figurated using personification; its purposelessness is described in purposeful language; and the question posed in the octave is answered by paradox in the sestet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These contradictions are embodied in the sonnet’s addressee, “Hunger”. This is used with multiple meanings: craving for food; dearth or famine, one of the mechanisms of the Darwinian “struggle for existence”; and lust, desire or ambition, that drives a purposeful process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pfeiffer was a serious student of evolution and had exchanged letters with Darwin, suggesting an improvement to his discussion of sexual selection. Darwin had written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colours before the female, whilst other birds, not thus decorated, make no such display, it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Darwin (1871). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.8900/page/n89&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Descent of Man&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, page 63&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-7411.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pfeiffer pointed out&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-7719F.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Darwin agreed&lt;/a&gt;, that it would be simpler if the causation went the other way, namely if the sense of appreciation of beauty were a consequence of sexual admiration, rather than its cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Line notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Both times “Hunger” appears (here and in line 4) it is a metrical inversion (a trochee substituting for an iamb), emphasizing the importance of the word. Other inversions are on “Sacred” (line 9) and “Maker” (line 10).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Of the sea-flower”: a double iamb, emphasizing both “sea” and “flower”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A “sea-flower” is a sea anemone. Anemones were familiar to the Victorians due to the new hobby of building home marine aquaria, popularized by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henry_Gosse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Henry Gosse&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2wIgHm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Coloured plate by Dickes, based on watercolour by Gosse, showing five species of anemone. Bolocera tuediae: large fat brown spotted stalk, short thick striated tentacles. Anthea cereus: brown dome-shaped stalk with thin green red-tipped tentacles. Aiptasia couchii: long thin yellow stalk and long thin brown wormlike tentacles. Sacartia coccinea: cylindrical red-and-white striped stalk and short white tentacles. Sacartia troglodytes: flat, no stalk visible, many rows of black tentacles and white tentacles.&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Philip Henry Gosse (1860). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/actinologiabrita00goss/page/n9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plate V in &lt;em&gt;Actinologia Britannica: A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Van Voorst.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anemones are sessile, but some species are not “rooted” to the spot in the manner of a coral: they can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqg98V2q850&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;move slowly on their muscular pedal disk&lt;/a&gt; “somewhat in the manner of a snail” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/actinologiabrita00goss/page/8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gosse, p. 9&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of anemones as Pfeiffer’s first example was perhaps suggested by their reputation as mindless eaters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A sensual Christian resembles a sea anemone […] It squats on a tenacious base, gulps all acquisitions into a capacious chasm, and harmonises with the weeds it dwells amongst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christina Rossetti (1902). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/timefliesreading00rossrich/page/198&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Time Flies: A Reading Diary&lt;/em&gt;, p. 198&lt;/a&gt;. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Driveth rooted things to break their moorings” has a double meaning, In the struggle for life, even sessile animals like anemones may sometimes have to break free in order to survive, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJREYPZlCyo#t=1m20s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;to escape from a predator&lt;/a&gt;; and on longer timescales, sessile species can evolve into free-swimming species, for example jellyfish are thought to have evolved from sessile ancestors similar to anemones or corals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that “driveth” here is purposeful language for a purposeless process, and that evolution is not directional in the manner suggested: many sessile species (sea lilies, tube worms, barnacles, oysters, mussels, etc.) had mobile ancestors.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Unfoldest wings in creatures” is ambiguous in the same way as “break their moorings”. The struggle for life can drive a winged creature to take flight; and on longer timescales winged species can evolve from wingless.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Rapt” too has a double meaning: “carried up and transported into heaven” as metaphorically an animal is by its wings or a species by the evolution of flight; and also “transported with joy” as an animal might be on escaping a predator.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Above thy harms” can only be a wishful or temporary condition: the struggle for life goes on in the air just as it did in the ocean or on the ground, as Darwin pointed out in his discussion of the beetles of Madeira:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For during thousands of successive generations each individual beetle which&#xA;  flew least, either from its wings having been ever so little less perfectly&#xA;  developed or from indolent habit, will have had the best chance of&#xA;  surviving from not being blown out to sea; and, on the other hand, those&#xA;  beetles which most readily took to flight will oftenest have been blown to&#xA;  sea and thus have been destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Darwin (1859). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/onoriginofspec00darw/page/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt;, p. 136&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Waves are “hungry-seeming” perhaps because of the purposeful way they seem to travel in ranks when there is a prevailing wind (“hungry” in the sense “desirous, eager”). But “hungry” also means “barren”, so perhaps this refers to the appearance of the oceans before the origin of life.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Were the first ministers”: a double iamb, emphasizing both “first” and “ministers”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The waves are Hunger’s “first ministers” because the earliest fossils are of marine creatures. “Minister” means “one who carries out executive duties as the agent or representative of a superior” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;): that is, the waves, and hence, by metonymy, the ocean, are imposing the struggle of life upon their living inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Universe” is probably intended in the sense “the world, the earth”. A “park” is “any large enclosed piece of ground, usually comprising woodland and pasture, attached to or surrounding a manor, castle, country house, etc., and used for recreation” and a “grange” is “a country house with farm buildings attached, usually the residence of a gentleman-farmer” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). The image in this line portrays Hunger as a “huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’” type of landowner, filling the whole world with life only to kill it for amusement and sport.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Sacred disquietude, divine unrest” is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schesis_onomaton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;schesis onomaton&lt;/a&gt;, the repetition of an idea in different words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrases are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradoxical&lt;/a&gt; since “sacred” has the sense “solemn, reverent” which is opposed to “disquiet”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These phrases have a double meaning. “Sacred/divine” characterizes Hunger (compare “Unknown God” in line 13) and “disquietude/unrest” its effects on living things (compare “restless arms” in line 1). But we can also interpret these phrases as meaning “disquietude &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the sacred”, thus referring to the anxiety of Victorians like Pfeiffer grappling with the consequences of evolution for their Christian beliefs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Breathes the breath of life” is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis#2:7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 2:7&lt;/a&gt;, “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and &lt;strong&gt;breathed&lt;/strong&gt; into his nostrils the &lt;strong&gt;breath of life&lt;/strong&gt;; and man became a living soul.” Pfeiffer’s substitution of the impersonal force of Hunger for the “Lord God” here is daring, as it rejects the special creation and status of humans.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is not the case that Hunger (taken as a metaphor for the struggle for life) is by itself the “maker” of all living things. Evolution requires &lt;em&gt;variation&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;selection&lt;/em&gt;. The causes of variation were not understood until the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in the early 20th century, so it is not surprising that Pfeiffer omits it from this poetic account. In &lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt; Darwin can only speculate about the “complex and little known laws of variation”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Unthrift” means “prodigal, spendthrift”, so that “unthrift greed” is a vast outpouring of greed. But “unthrift” is paradoxical when applied to “greed” which would conventionally be characterized as “miserly”.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Lust” is “self-slaying” (self-defeating) because it can achieve its end and thus satiate itself, whereas Hunger in its role as the personification of evolution is “insatiate” (line 8).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Unknown God” is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Acts_of_the_Apostles#17:23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acts 17:23&lt;/a&gt;, in which Paul preaches to the Athenians: “For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.” Paul’s message is that the Athenians have been worshipping the Christian god all along, but did not know they were doing so. So by analogy the poem says that we have been worshipping “Hunger” (that is, evolution) all along, without knowing it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This line accepts that humans have evolved, and that evolution is still ongoing, contrary to the idea of species being perfect and unchanging. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Wilberforce&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Wilberforce&lt;/a&gt;, Bishop of Oxford, had objected to Darwin on this ground:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How can we account for all this? [&lt;em&gt;that is, for the classifiability of living things into nested groups&lt;/em&gt;] By the simplest and yet the most comprehensive answer. By declaring the stupendous fact that all creation is the transcript in matter of ideas eternally existing in the mind of the Most High—that order in the utmost perfectness of its relation pervades His works, because it exists as in its centre and highest fountain-head in Him the Lord of all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Wilberforce (1860). ‘Darwin’s Origin of Species’. In Wilberforce (1874). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essayscontribut02wilbgoog/page/n104&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Essays Contributed to the “Quarterly Review”&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 96&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Murray&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;14&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“Unfolded” refers back to “thou unfoldest wings” in line 2, suggesting that the future of human evolution might metaphorically resemble the flight of birds, “rapt above thy harms”. An optimistic point to end the sonnet on.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2019-12-07T11:35:06.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12039" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13776" CreationDate="2019-12-09T11:53:27.457" Score="15" ViewCount="1585" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/224153/was-the-controversy-around-harry-potter-embellished-for-publicity#comment613361_224153&quot;&gt;comment on another recent question&lt;/a&gt; I learned that &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; have (in certain places and at certain times) been banned for supposedly satanic themes. A quick bit of searching online &lt;a href=&quot;https://world.edu/banned-book-awareness-lord-rings-jrr-tolkien/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;confirmed&lt;/a&gt; that &lt;a href=&quot;https://banninggandalf.weebly.com/satanism.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;indeed&lt;/a&gt; certain groups of people have attacked, or even publicly burned copies of, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; claiming it to be satanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What are the supposed satanic themes in Tolkien's legendarium?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand it a bit better with the more recent &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series, which is actively playing into the theme of the occult. While not at all equivalent to satanism, this does at least connect to witchcraft (Hogwarts School of &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; and Wizardry?) which some might see as connected with satanism. But Tolkien was a devout Christian, and his legendarium was presided over by the single supreme deity Eru - hardly promoting any different religion, let alone satanism! So, where did these accusations come from, and how were they grounded in Tolkien's actual writings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T08:47:14.717" Title="What was supposedly satanic about the Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-09T15:46:29.760" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem describes a situation when three witches (Old Goody Jones, Goody Price, and Madge Gray) and a man (Robin) stole into the vicarage's cellar and indulged in revelry. These thieves laughed so loud that all the members of the vicarage awake and head to the cellar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next part goes...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On, on to the cellar! away! away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On, on, to the cellar without more delay!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The whole posse rush onwards in battle array.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conceive the dismay of the party so gay,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Old Goody Jones, Goody Price, and Madge Gray,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When the door bursting wide, they descried the allied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Troops, prepared for the onslaught, roll in like a tide,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the spits, and the tongs, and the pokers beside! —&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can I change the bolded part into 'while Old Goody Jones, Goody Price, and Madge Gray were conceiving the dismay of the party (the whole posse) so gaily'? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I leave a link to the whole text here. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/i/ingoldsby/thomas/ingoldsby_legends/chapter9.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/i/ingoldsby/thomas/ingoldsby_legends/chapter9.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8217" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T15:54:18.613" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T15:54:18.613" Title="Converting poetry to prose" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-ingoldsby&gt;&lt;the-ingoldsby-legends&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12040" CreationDate="2019-12-09T15:53:08.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Conceive&quot; here is in the imperative form, an instruction to the reader. The &quot;party so gay&quot; refers to the revellers in the cellar (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gay#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gay&lt;/a&gt;&quot; here meaning happy or lively). You might rephrase it as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Imagine the dismay of Old Goody Jones, Goody Price, and Madge Gray, partying so gaily, when ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, I'm not quite sure what you mean by &quot;can I change&quot;. If you're just asking about the meaning, in plainer English, of the quoted text, then you can understand it as above. If you want to quote the poem somewhere, then of course you need to preserve the original text in the quote.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T15:53:08.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12042" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12043" CreationDate="2019-12-09T17:13:23.717" Score="2" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Philosophers' Magazine&lt;/em&gt; has a Twitter account for quotes. Today it posted the following quote: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;--Alfred North Whitehead&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people appear to disagree. For example, according to the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefunstons.com/holy-wit-humor-in-the-bible-from-the-daily-office-february-25-2013/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holy Wit: Humor in the Bible – From the Daily Office – February 25, 2013&lt;/a&gt;, Jeremiah 1:11-12 contains a pun, but you need to be able to read the Hebrew original in order to appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, my question is not about whether Whitehead was right but about the source of the quote. And what was the context of that quote? Even though &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Whitehead's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy#Whitehead&amp;#39;s_Process_and_Reality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;process philosophy&lt;/a&gt; influenced process theology, the man himself is not known as a theologian or Bible scholar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find the quote on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T18:45:24.310" Title="Where did Whitehead say that there is no humour in the Bible?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;alfred-north-whitehead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12043" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12042" CreationDate="2019-12-09T18:16:00.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's recorded in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1ONzgBFvGSAC&amp;amp;pg=PA195&amp;amp;lpg=PA195&amp;amp;dq=quote+whitehead+%22absence+of+humour%22+bible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead&lt;/em&gt; as recorded by Lucien Price&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Do you remember that remark of Thomas Hardy about the 'jealous God'&#xA;  in &lt;em&gt;Tess of the D'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;?&quot; I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No,&quot; said Whitehead. &quot;What is it?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I remember it,&quot; said Mrs. Whitehead. &quot;Quote it him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;'But although to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may&#xA;  be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average&#xA;  human nature.'&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;How amiable the Grecian gods appear by comparison,&quot; said Mrs.&#xA;  Whitehead. &quot;They may have had their crimes and follies, and have been&#xA;  no better than they should have been, but their offences were more&#xA;  urbane.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes,&quot; I said. &quot;Even if they, too, went to the devil in the end, they&#xA;  had a good time going. The point is, the Greeks always reserved the&#xA;  right to laugh at their gods.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;The total absence of humour from the Bible,&quot; remarked Whitehead, &quot;is&#xA;  one of the most singular things in all literature.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by recalling that Whitehead, as a Brit, would have written &quot;humour&quot; instead of &quot;humor&quot;. An initial web search for Whitehead quotes about the Bible gave lots of results with &quot;humor&quot;, but searching the web for &lt;code&gt;quote whitehead &quot;absence of humour&quot; bible&lt;/code&gt; gave the above-linked book as the 3rd result. (By comparison, searching for &lt;code&gt;quote whitehead &quot;absence of humor&quot; bible&lt;/code&gt; gave only unreliable and unsourced &quot;quote collection&quot; websites.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-12-09T18:45:24.310" LastActivityDate="2019-12-09T18:45:24.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2214" CreationDate="2019-12-10T13:38:55.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to understanding the sukebind is not how the Starkadders and their neighbours comment on its effects in the beginning of the novel, but in when it is removed or destroyed in the end of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Elfie returned from Dick's birthday dance, and Aunt Ada finally saw that her family was defying her power over them,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...the heat of the fire had caused the long, pink buds of the sukebind to burst; the wreath which hung round the portrait of Fig Starkadder was covered with large flowers whose petals sprang back, like snarling fangs, to show the shameless heart that sent out full gusts of sweetness. (Chapter XVI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ada Doom then threw a tantrum screeching &quot;from her heart-roots&quot; as the sukebind withered. She called Flora names and &quot;struck at [Flora] with the ‘Milk Producers’ Weekly Bulletin and Cowkeepers’ Guide’&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a withered flower fell from the sukebind wreath into the coals. (Chapter XVI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the conflict was over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next we hear of the sukebind, Reuben tells Flora that his grandmother chose to have &quot;all the pictures wreathed with that smelly sukebind,&quot; but Flora may take it down as he &quot;niver wants to see a sprig of it again.&quot; (Chapter XX) And so Flora gets rid of it, and the wedding is entirely sukebindless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wedding guests are greeted by Aunt Ada Doom rising &quot;from a chair wreathed in peonies&quot; and then literally flies away, finding her own freedom just like the rest of her family did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sukebind is not sex, or animalistic urges. It is the oppression which hung over the Starkadder Farm preventing its inhabitants from finding their own joy. Instead each person sought sullen distractions from their predicament according to their character at the expense of others. As each person became able to seek their own joy, the sukebind burned, withered, and was thrown out. It is most directly associated with Aunt Doom, because her choice of distractions were the most harmful to those around her, and she clung to them the longest of all the Starkadders--seeking cold comfort in her familiar misery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="151" LastActivityDate="2019-12-10T13:38:55.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-10T19:09:52.500" Score="8" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;My teacher recently told us that he has written multiple(?) mystery novels, but he won't tell us what it's called, and they're published under a pseudonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is all I know about the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was most likely written in German. ( A student in his previous class presented it as a book report for German class, but wasn't aware his teacher wrote the book lol)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main character is named Johann Friedrich von Solland (or something similar-sounding, because I don't know if it's actually written that way), but it might just be a name the character takes on temporarily, because I couldn't get any results from google under that name.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Johann is a detective who used to work for the German intelligence agency&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Johann has blond hair, blue eyes and is tall. He's also a stereotypical German (hardworking, nitpicky, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He lives/works in Great Britain and most of his cases are in manors&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The plot takes place in the 1920-1930 (My teacher said the 20s - 30s, so it could also be 1820s to 1830s, but it seems unlikely)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Johann has two assistants, one of which is a lady and the other is a man (I think?). One of them is similar to Dr Watson's role in Sherlock Holmes, as they are the one explaining what Johann does.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The last book that was published came out about six years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have much more information other than that. I'm just really curious to read his book, because I personally enjoy mystery novels, but my teacher won't divulge anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8225" LastEditorUserId="8225" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T15:55:48.133" LastActivityDate="2020-02-01T11:29:11.123" Title="I'm looking for a book that my teacher wrote" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2019-12-11T02:37:43.403" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Benjamin could be represented as a bystander. He doesn't get affected by any of the changes Napoleon makes. He is just there in the middle. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8227" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T02:37:43.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12051" CreationDate="2019-12-11T13:44:44.050" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Wifey Redux&quot; is a short story by Kevin Barry and I am at a loss as to what the author meant by that title. Literally, it means Wifey Brought Back, but there is no indication in the story which suggests that the protagonist has fixed the marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-11T16:30:10.880" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T20:42:56.630" Title="How to understand the title &quot;Wifey Redux&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;kevin-barry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12050" CreationDate="2019-12-11T16:40:44.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the central themes of the story is how &lt;strong&gt;the protagonist's daughter closely resembles his wife&lt;/strong&gt; at a similar age. He begins the story by describing his relationship with his wife, all the way from the beginning to now, particularly dwelling on the sexual parts. This segues naturally into discussing his daughter, whose teenage self he introduces into the story as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The difficult central fact of this thing: Ellie is now seventeen years old and everything about her is a taunt to man. [...] Now understand that this is not about to get weird and fucked up but I need to point out that she is identical to Saoirse at that age. I am just being brutally honest here. And I would plead that the situation is not unusual. It’s just one of those things you’re supposed to keep shtum about. Horribly often, our beautiful, perfect daughters emerge into a perfect facsimile of how our beautiful, desirable wives had been, back then, when they were young. And slim. And sober. There is a horrid poignancy to it. And to even put this stuff down on paper looks wrong. There are certain people (hello, Dr. Murtagh!) who would see this and think: your man is bad again. So I should just get to the story of how the trouble started. And, of course, it concerns my hatred for the boys who flock around my beautiful daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Continuing on to the main plot about his daughter's relationship with Aodhan, and the father's increasing worry about it culminating in the promised conclusion of the story. As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://electricliterature.com/wifey-redux/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;editor remarks&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this story comically exposes the conflict between our fetishization of youthful sexuality and our prudish hypocrisy about it once we become parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, it seems pretty clear that &quot;Wifey Redux&quot; refers to the fact that the protagonist's wife (whom he calls &quot;Wifey&quot;, and dwells on her sexual appeal to him) has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/redux&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brought back&lt;/a&gt; in the form of their daughter and her sexual appeal to young men such as Aodhan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-12-11T16:40:44.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12052" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-12T00:21:38.510" Score="4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read -- a few months ago -- Hemingway's juvenilia poetry &amp;amp; short-story collection stoically entitled &lt;em&gt;Three Stories &amp;amp; Ten Poems&lt;/em&gt;. It was published in the early 1920s -- I think 1923, but I've heard 1921 thrown around. Or, perhaps that was the date he wrote it. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59603&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;If you are interested you can access and download the &lt;em&gt;Three Stories &amp;amp; Ten Poems&lt;/em&gt; collection for free from Project Gutenburg.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really enjoyed the poetry. In my opinion, the best poem in the collection is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The mills of the gods grind slowly;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But this mill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chatters in mechanical staccato.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ugly short infantry of the mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Advancing over difficult terrain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Make this Corona&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their mitrailleuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A &quot;mitrailleuse&quot; is a type of machine-gun: presumably a French one, used during W.W.I.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read online that the poem is entitled &quot;MITRAILLIATRICE&quot;. But, Project Guttenburg -- in their version of the collection -- calls the poem &quot;MITRAIGLIATRICE&quot;. I have found the following information from &lt;a href=&quot;http://nwpressbooks.blogspot.com/2008/09/extremely-rare-1923-hemingway-poetry.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &quot;Mitraigiatrice&quot; (July printing of TSTP) was spelled &quot;Mitrailliatrice&quot; (January printing, Poetry Magazine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I do not know which title is &quot;correct&quot;. Does anyone have any information about this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As far as I can tell, the quote above is incorrect. In the Project Guttenburg version of the poem, it is entitled MITRAIGLIATRICE. Presumably &quot;Miltraigiatrice&quot; is a misquote or misspelling of that. I'm amazed I didn't notice that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what is the meaning(s) of either of the titles? I assumed that it was supposed to be some sort of French play-on-words, but, not knowing French (I had to Google the word &quot;mitrailleuse&quot;) I am ignorant. I feel I am missing an integral part of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8008" LastEditorUserId="8008" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T19:25:49.960" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T19:25:49.960" Title="Is Hemingway's poem entitled MITRAILLIATRICE or MITRAIGLIATRICE?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12047" CreationDate="2019-12-12T13:32:16.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems like the one. Except it doesn’t seem to be a pseudonym, as there is a biography and photo of the author available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘Allmen’ crime series by Swiss author Martin Suter focuses on the adventures of Johann Friedrich von Allmen. Written in German, with a couple available in English translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German titles and author photo can be seen at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00YQJJT5S/ref=dp_st_3257243014&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und die Libellen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und der rosa Diamant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und die Dahlien&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und die verschwundene María&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und die Erotik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Allmen und der Koi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English synopsis of the first in the series can be read at &lt;a href=&quot;http://newvesselpress.com/books/allmen-and-the-dragonflies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Vessel Press&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune by living in Old World grandeur despite present-day financial constraints. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand. Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five Art Nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, pressured to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in. This is the first of a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to a memorable gentleman thief who, with his trusted sidekick Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="374" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-12T16:32:39.967" LastActivityDate="2019-12-12T16:32:39.967" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6285" CreationDate="2019-12-13T09:33:33.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to my professor, lists are common in epic poetry, and in that form they are not truly meant to be comprehended. They are meant to impress, to fill one with the sense that even if they read the entire work, there is still something they haven't quite gotten. The epic remains unconquered, even to its readers, because who has the capacity to keep 70 different boat names straight and appreciate every single one? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously this unconquered-ness can also be applied to Ulysses as a whole, where people are still trying to puzzle it out, even though there are multiple books annotating the entire work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8235" LastActivityDate="2019-12-13T09:33:33.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12059" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-13T23:24:51.883" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I've read a story that the real reason for the Babylonian confusion was not divine at all but a striking translator guild (I am not sure whether they were slaves or just had worse payment).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovely, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who has (originally) written it and under which title? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1693" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T14:06:16.420" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T14:06:16.420" Title="Identify a free interpretation of the Babylonian confusion" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12060" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12061" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" Score="0" Body="The 1960 novel by Sheila Burnford; use with the [sheila-burnford] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T14:02:27.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12062" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2019-12-14T14:03:04.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-14T14:03:04.560" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T14:03:04.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12063" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2019-12-14T14:03:04.560" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British-Canadian author Sheila Burnford (1918 – 1984), best known for the children's book 'The Incredible Journey'." OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:39:59.033" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:39:59.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12037" CreationDate="2019-12-14T23:46:52.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be actually thinking about Faulkner's 'The Reivers', which begins with &quot;Grandfather said:&quot;, and the rest of the book is one long quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5699" LastActivityDate="2019-12-14T23:46:52.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12065" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-15T02:18:11.847" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following sentence is taken from Wifey Redux by Kevin Barry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He was seventeen, six two, with blonde, floppy hair, and about eight&#xA;  million quids’ worth of dental work.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to understand the expression &quot;eight million quids' worth of dental work?&quot; Is the author suggesting that &quot;he&quot; has a mouthful of bad teeth that may take eight million pounds to correct, or &quot;he&quot; has perfect teeth that seems to have been corrected by eight million worth of dental work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8112" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T07:37:35.830" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T15:10:45.523" Title="How to understand &quot; eight million quids’ worth of dental work&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kevin-barry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12066" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12067" CreationDate="2019-12-15T03:31:27.023" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following text is an excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://electricliterature.com/wifey-redux/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Wifey Redux&quot; by Kevin Barry&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I sighed and left the den. The way it worked, Ellie had the use of&#xA;  the sitting room down back of the ground floor; no teenager wants to&#xA;  sit with her parents. She’d had a decorator in – it was got up in like&#xA;  a purple-and-black scheme – and she had a really fabulous Eames couch&#xA;  we’d got at auction for her sixteenth, and I went down there to check&#xA;  on Aodhan and herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to understand the word &quot;decorator&quot; and &quot;got up in&quot;? According to the word &quot;like&quot;, I presume there is some resemblance between the decorator and the scheme, but fail to see the connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8112" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-15T14:37:07.167" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T13:13:38.287" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;decorator&quot; and &quot;got up in&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;kevin-barry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12066" CreationDate="2019-12-15T14:22:31.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are all idiomatic  expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Decorator = a painter, or perhaps an &quot;interior decorator&quot;, an advisor in aesthetics of home decoration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Got up ... in = &quot;the results [of the painting or of acting on the decorators advice] were as follows&quot;.  The &quot;in&quot; here is the same as that of &quot;The lady in red&quot;, perhaps an extension of the original sense of &quot;clothed in&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;like = &quot;as, in my opinion&quot; or just plain &quot;as&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A partial paraphrase: &quot;I'm like, whoah, it was all in black and purple!&quot;&#xA;Or more literally, Rand al'Thor's &quot;it was decorated in, like, a purple and black design&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T13:13:38.287" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T13:13:38.287" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12068" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11965" CreationDate="2019-12-15T19:56:27.853" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the story.  I had mis-remembered one word - with the correct wording, I found the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mrspollifax.com/blog/list-of-books-published/magazine-stories/sorrow-rides-a-fast-horse/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Sorrow Rides a Fast Horse&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Gilman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dorothy Gilman Butters.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is much as I described it in the question, so I won't summarise it again here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had remembered the one sentence from the story as &quot;death rides a fast horse&quot; when it should have been &quot;sorrow.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full story is available as a PDF on the site in the first link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8114" LastActivityDate="2019-12-15T19:56:27.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-16T07:42:52.613" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any interview, essay etc. which mentions Arundhati Roy's literary influences? Or, is it possible to notice some influences just from reading &lt;em&gt;The God of Small Things&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask because I love to read writers whose works influenced the work of my favourite authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8245" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-16T15:56:37.577" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T15:56:37.577" Title="Literary influences on Arundhati Roy, author of God of Small Things?" Tags="&lt;arundhati-roy&gt;&lt;the-god-of-small-things&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6055" CreationDate="2019-12-16T15:38:37.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, you missed one story: &amp;quot;The story of Ghemmal&amp;quot;, in the beginning of chapter 23.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a glittering object was left behind in the juniper bush: the belt Ghemmal. Bastian was unaware of his loss and never thought of the belt again. Ilwan had saved it from the flames for nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few days later Ghemmal was found by a blackbird, who had no suspicion of what this glittering object might be. She carried it to her nest, but that's the beginning of another story that shall be told another time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8248" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T03:45:24.840" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T03:45:24.840" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-16T18:47:06.523" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;George R. R. Martin's first novel, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_the_Light&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dying of the Light&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1977) contains a manhunt. This is not a manhunt in the context of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_(law_enforcement)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;law enforcement&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhunt_(military)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;military operation&lt;/a&gt;, but refers to a “hunting party” in which a group of hunters tracks down and kills other individuals, as a sort of “sport”; their victims aren't criminals. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading this novel, I strongly suspected that this was not the first work of literature using this type of man hunt and I found the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Most Dangerous Game&lt;/a&gt; by Richard Connell, published in 1924. (This story probably inspired the comic strip &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.roderidder.net/nl/46-uitgaven/albums/459-103-de-gezellen-van-nimrod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;De gezellen van Nimrod&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1992. The comic strip has a character named Zofar, which is almost an anagram of Zaroff from Connell's story.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: is Connell's story the earliest work of literature in English that features this type of “human hunting”, or, if not, what is the earliest example? I am not looking for comic strips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-12-16T18:47:06.523" Title="Earliest work of English literature featuring “human hunting”" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12074" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-17T02:03:31.510" Score="2" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Odysseus a hero in the Odyssey? From what I’ve read, the answer seems to be a pretty clear yes. The definition of an Ancient Greek hero seemed to revolve around pure talent and ability to fight. Even though we see that Odysseus is very flawed (he often has violent thoughts about murdering the people who stand in front of him for criticizing him, he is arrogant such as when he reveals his true name to Polyphemus resulting in the death of his crew, he’s disloyal to his wife, etc.), he seems to be considered a hero. Are there any other approaches to answering this question that take his flaws into account? Or is using the Ancient Greek definition of a hero the best way to go?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7932" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T19:32:13.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T19:32:13.643" Title="Is Odysseus a hero in the Odyssey?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12076" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12078" CreationDate="2019-12-17T12:32:43.217" Score="6" ViewCount="585" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Regarding the books featuring these characters) Was PG Wodehouse writing for peers of Wooster who would relate to his escapades? Or to literate lower classes who would enjoy laughing at an upper class imbecile? Or some other group?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8257" OwnerDisplayName="iftheshoefritz" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-12-17T14:05:40.327" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T15:43:43.727" Title="Who was Wodehouse’s intended audience for Jeeves and Wooster?" Tags="&lt;p-g-wodehouse&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="239" CreationDate="2019-12-17T13:27:03.530" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The whole crew dies, except Odysseus. He started off to the Trojan war with a whole fleet of ships. Odysseus won the victory. Then he landed on the Achaeans land, allies of Troy. He lost 72 men there. Then he came to the island of the Lotus eaters. Where three of his men were 'drunk' from eating the flower and wanted to stay, but Odysseus tied them to his ship. Then they went to the Cyclopes where he lost six men to Polyphemus the Cyclops. That's when Polyphemus cursed Odysseus so that Odysseus would be the only one to return home. Then his fleet gets smaller and smaller until only Odysseus and 45 men are left. Then they land on Helios's island where his sacred cattle is. Odysseus's men eat the cattle except him, and they all die. Only Odysseus reaches home. No man was left behind, they were killed off. That's what I had learned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8256" LastActivityDate="2019-12-17T13:27:03.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12076" CreationDate="2019-12-17T13:59:14.040" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that he would be writing specifically &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; peers of Wooster, not least because he himself was not a peer of Wooster. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wodehouse was more closely a peer of Mike Jackson from the Psmith books. Reduction in family circumstances robbed Wodehouse of a career at Oxford, sending him instead to the Hong-Kong and Shanghai Bank closely mirroring the reduced circumstances of Jackson who had to sacrifice a planned course of study at Cambridge for a job in the fictitious New Asiatic Bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Mike Jackson was originally intended to be the hero of a series of books, but found himself eclipsed by Psmith whom he met at his second Public School where both were in some disgrace having been expelled from their original schools. Psmith also worked at the New Asiatic with Mike as the series progressed and in &lt;em&gt;Psmith, Journalist&lt;/em&gt; became the unrivalled lead.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast Bertie Wooster managed not to be expelled from Eton and progressed to Magdalen College at Oxford and thence to a life of apparent leisure, though he does write a magazine column for one of his many aunts, for which he is paid a packet of cigarettes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Blandings novels, which introduce us to the world of the Emsworth family and their estate, if not to Jeeves and Wooster, began with &lt;em&gt;Something New&lt;/em&gt; which was initially published as a serialisation in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Saturday_Evening_Post&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Saturday Evening Post&lt;/a&gt;, an &lt;em&gt;American&lt;/em&gt; magazine. While the novel was published in both the USA and the UK later that year, I think the fact of an initial American publication strongly suggests that &lt;em&gt;peers&lt;/em&gt; of the landed gentry were not his primarily targeted audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after the publication of 'Something New' Wodehouse also published a short story &quot;Extricating Young Gussie&quot; which introduces Bertie and Jeeves, though Bertie's name is not given as Wooster and his Aunt Agatha makes clear that her side of the family at least is called 'Mannering Phipps'. Like 'Something New' this was first published in the United States in the 18 September 1915 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, and then in the United Kingdom in the January 1916 edition of The Strand Magazine. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The current incarnation of the Strand Magazine has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://strandmag.com/the-magazine/history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section on the magazine's history&lt;/a&gt; which states: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Founded by George Newnes in 1890 and edited by H Greenhough Smith from 1891 to 1930, the Strand aimed at a mass market family readership. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This slightly contradicts the account given in an article on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://omeka.library.uvic.ca/exhibits/show/movable-type/readers/the-strand-magazine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Victoria website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Newnes felt there was a gap in the market for a periodical purely dedicated to the aspirational middle-classes of London &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But speaking of the magazine's later development the article goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The magazine became a mirror for the middle-classes of England, through which they saw themselves clearly represented unlike any other title available to them. This led to a large and loyal readership unprecedented by any other national magazine. The Strand would eventually grow to such popularity that it became a symbol of Englishness, representing a sense of shared community among its readers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time the Saturday Evening Post was publishing Wodehouse it was under the editorship of GH Lorimer. The &lt;em&gt;Post's&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/history-saturday-evening-post/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website page on the magazine's history&lt;/a&gt; says that it was his aim that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Post would be the first magazine the entire nation had in common, and he’d achieve national acceptance by producing a wholesome, positive magazine that appealed to intelligent readers living the good American life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the magazines' target audiences are not identical, both were by time of publishing Wodehouse, fairly general but definitely 'respectable'. And certainly it is the case that neither are directed solely at a class of people who do not have to work for a living.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems likely then that, if Wodehouse considered it at all, his intended audience was anyone who might enjoy well written, irreverent farce that pokes gentle fun at the upper classes but remains inoffensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I had in my mind conflated the worlds of Blandings and Jeeves and Wooster. Hopefully I've drawn a bit more distinction between them and given what evidence I can find on the target audiences of his early publishers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2019-12-18T15:43:43.727" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T15:43:43.727" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11744" CreationDate="2019-12-18T09:20:07.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think so. Romanis have been very present for centuries in Andalusia (where Lorca came from) and so he noted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El libro en conjunto, aunque se llama gitano, es el poema de Andalucía, y lo llamo gitano porque el gitano es lo más elemental, lo más profundo de mi país, lo más representativo de su modo y el que guarda la sangre y el alfabeto de la verdad andaluza universal. Los gitanos vivían en un mundo de ensueños, tremendamente vital, de pasiones fuertes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book as a whole, although it is called gypsy, is the poem of Andalusia, and I call it gypsy because the gypsy is the most elementary, the deepest of my country, the most representative of his way and he keeps the blood and the alphabet of The universal Andalusian truth. The gypsies lived in a world of dreams, tremendously vital, of strong passions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote extracted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literaturaurbanicuarto.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/federico-garcia-lorca-romancero-gitano-caracteristicas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Federico García Lorca: Romancero Gitano&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give more background: Federico García Lorca was born in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the autonomous community of Andalusia, Spain. That region is where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamenco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flamenco&lt;/a&gt; art is from. Quoting from the Wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of flamenco is a subject of disagreement. Of the hypotheses regarding its origin, the most widespread states that flamenco was developed through the cross-cultural interchange between native Andalusians, &lt;strong&gt;Romani&lt;/strong&gt;, Castilians, Moors and Sephardi Jews that occurred in Andalusia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To show how they were very present in the rural areas, let's check &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_people&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romani people&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 30 July 1749, Spain conducted The Great Roundup of Romani (Gitanos) in its territory. The Spanish Crown ordered a nationwide raid that led to the break-up of families as all able-bodied men were interned into forced labor camps in an attempt at ethnic cleansing. The measure was eventually reversed and the Romanis were freed as protests began to arise in different communities, &lt;strong&gt;sedentary romanis being highly esteemed and protected in rural Spain&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this to say the Romanis were very present in the culture where García Lorca was raised, so references to this group were everywhere and so it was natural to use them to create a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="194" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T09:20:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12084" CreationDate="2019-12-18T18:32:57.080" Score="5" ViewCount="264" Body="&lt;p&gt;I half-remember this short story I read in a faded SF or fantasy collection: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The child of a respected sorcerer family scandalizes them by choosing a career as an &lt;em&gt;accountant&lt;/em&gt;. The parents summon some sort of demon or scary relative to subdue the rebellious child, but the child is ultimately victorious by casting the &quot;seven words of invalidity(?)&quot;: dissolution, annulment, expiry, forfeiture, termination [...] and death.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Might&lt;/em&gt; be by Robert Sheckley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8265" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T06:48:10.407" Title="Short Story: Duel between a magical creature and a master accountant" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14972" CreationDate="2019-12-18T19:38:20.727" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was there a poem by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aleister Crowley&lt;/a&gt; that involved a mechanical girl?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember finding one with a straight-forward title, like &quot;The Mechanical Girl&quot; or something, when looking up early uses of pre-computer humanoid automatons in literature...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now I can't find it, and I'm not sure if it's actually by some other author around the same time, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Liddell_MacGregor_Mathers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've gone through Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_robots_and_androids#19th_century_and_earlier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of fictional robots and androids in literature before the 20th century&lt;/a&gt;, and nothing rings a bell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="566" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T17:19:34.087" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T15:24:15.593" Title="Was there a poem by Aleister Crowley that involved a mechanical girl?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;aleister-crowley&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12081" CreationDate="2019-12-18T21:38:09.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Complete Works of Aleister Crowley are &lt;a href=&quot;http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Crowley%2C%20Aleister%2C%201875-1947&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available online&lt;/a&gt;, linked from the University of Pennsylvania website. I checked the contents list for each of the Volumes I, II, and III, but didn't see anything that looked like &quot;The Mechanical Girl&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closest possibilities I saw were the poems in Crowley's collection &lt;em&gt;Rodin in Rime&lt;/em&gt;, apparently inspired by the art of the French sculptor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auguste Rodin&lt;/a&gt;. This poetry collection is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/rodin_in_rime_1907/rodin_text.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available as a &lt;em&gt;searchable&lt;/em&gt; PDF&lt;/a&gt;, and the word &quot;mechanical&quot; doesn't appear anywhere, nor various synonyms and related terms which I tried in both French and English (the titles of these poems are in French, the poems themselves in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-12-18T21:38:09.230" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12080" CreationDate="2019-12-19T04:11:02.273" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?58540&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Accountant&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sheckley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Sheckley&lt;/a&gt;, first published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?61162+c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, July 1954&lt;/a&gt;, available at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v007n01_1954-07_Gorgon776#page/n37/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;. Does any of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?58540&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these covers&lt;/a&gt; ring a bell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The child of a respected sorcerer family scandalizes them by choosing a career as an &lt;em&gt;accountant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morton looked uncomfortable and scuffed his feet on the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You know, not many boys have a chance to become wizards in this day and age.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Yes sir, I know.&quot; Morton looked away abruptly. In a high, nervous voice he said, &quot;But Dad, I want to be an accountant. I really do, Dad?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Dee shook his head. &quot;Morton, there's always been a wizard in our family. For eighteen hundred years, the Dees have been famous in supernatural circles.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morton continued to look out the window and scuff his feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You wouldn't want to disappoint me, would you, son?&quot; Dee smiled sadly. &quot;You know, anyone can be an &lt;em&gt;accountant&lt;/em&gt;. But only a chosen few can master the Black Arts.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The parents summon some sort of demon or scary relative to subdue the rebellious child,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scary relative was the boy's dead grandfather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Morton grinned, and turned back to his books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Dee was unable to stand it any longer. &quot;Damn it,&quot; he shouted, &quot;aren't you scared?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Why should I be?&quot; Morton asked. &quot;It's only grandpa.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Grandpa Dee fails to make an impression, Mr. Dee summons a real demon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That does it, Mr. Dee said. &quot;The boy is too cocksure of himself. We must call up Boarbas.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No!&quot; his wife said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What, then?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I just don't know any more,&quot; Mrs. Dee said, on the verge of tears. You &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; what Boarbas does to children. They're never the same afterwards.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Mr. Dee's face was hard as granite. &quot;I know. It can't be helped.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He's so young!&quot; Mrs. Dee wailed. &quot;It—it will be traumatic!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;If so, we will use all the resources of modern psychology to heal him,&quot; Mr. Dee said soothingly. &quot;He will have the best psychoanalysts money can buy. But the boy must be a wizard!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Go ahead then,&quot; Mrs. Dee said, crying openly. &quot;But please don't ask me to assist you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How like a woman, Dee thought. Always turning into jelly at the moment when firmness was indicated. With a heavy heart, he made the preparations for calling up Boarbas, Demon of Children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;but the child is ultimately victorious by casting the &quot;seven words of invalidity(?)&quot;: dissolution, annulment, expiry, forfeiture, termination [...] and death.&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The demons great horned hands reached for Morton; but quickly the boy opened the accounting book. &quot;Save me!&quot; he screamed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In that instant, a tall, terribly thin old man appeared, covered with worn pen points and ledger sheets, his eyes two empty zeroes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Zico Pico Reel!&lt;/em&gt;&quot; chanted Boarbas, turning to grapple with the newcomer. But the thin old man laughed, and said, &quot;A contract of corporation which is &lt;em&gt;ultra vires&lt;/em&gt; is not voidable only, but utterly void.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At these words, Boarbas was flung back, breaking a chair as he fell. He scrambled to his feet, his skin glowing red-hot with rage, and intoned the Demoniac Master-Spell: &quot;VRAY, HAT, HO!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the thin old man shielded Morton with his body, and cried the words of Dissolution: &quot;Expiration, Repeal, Occurrence, Surrender, Abandonment and Death!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Boarbas squeaked in agony. Hastily he backed away, fumbling in the air until he found The Opening. He jumped through this, and was gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The tall, thin old man turned to Mr. and Mrs. Dee, cowering in a corner of the living room, and said, “Know that I am The Accountant. And Know, Moreover, that this Child has signed a Compact with Me, to enter My Apprenticeship and be My Servant. And in return for Services Rendered, I, THE ACCOUNTANT, am teaching him the Damnation of Souls, by means of &#xA;  ensnaring them in a cursed web of Figures, Forms, Torts and Reprisals. And behold, this is My Mark upon him!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Accountant held up Morton's right hand, and showed the ink smudge on the third finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He turned to Morton, and in a softer voice said, &quot;Tomorrow, lad, we will consider some aspects of Income Tax Evasion as a Path to Damnation.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-19T06:48:10.407" LastActivityDate="2019-12-19T06:48:10.407" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12085" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12086" CreationDate="2019-12-19T17:19:03.747" Score="5" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard about the famous &lt;s&gt;nutter&lt;/s&gt; occultist, religion founder, and writer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aleister Crowley&lt;/a&gt; since my childhood, but always pronouncing it to rhyme with &quot;owly&quot;. For this reason, when reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; I also pronounced the demon Crowley's name that way in my head, and I was surprised to find it rhyming with &lt;s&gt;&quot;holy&quot;&lt;/s&gt; &quot;unholy&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Omens_(TV_series)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV adaptation&lt;/a&gt;. Then, doubting myself on the pronunciation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3621/17&quot;&gt;the original&lt;/a&gt; Crowley, I went to check online and found that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says Aleister Crowley's name also rhymes with &quot;unholy&quot;. But this claim on Wikipedia is unsourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did Aleister Crowley pronounce his last name?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any evidence in his writings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T14:48:25.803" Title="Evidence for the correct pronunciation of Crowley?" Tags="&lt;aleister-crowley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12085" CreationDate="2019-12-20T14:35:50.950" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Crowley wrote a poem called &lt;a href=&quot;http://lib.oto-usa.org/crowley/poetry/the-convert.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'The Convert'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There met one eve in a sylvan glade&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A horrible Man and a beautiful maid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Where are you going, so meek and holy?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’m going to temple to worship Crowley.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Crowley is God, then? How did you know?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why, it’s Captain Fuller that told us so.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And how do you know that Fuller was right?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’m afraid you’re a wicked man; Good-night.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this sort of thing is styled success&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shall not count failure bitterness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no knowledge of Crowley's accent, and frankly there are English accents where 'owly' and 'holy' would only be distinguishable by the 'h' anyway. But this suggests that however the man himself pronounced 'holy' he thought it reasonable to rhyme his name with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: I've not listened to it, but there apparently is a recording of Crowley reading several poems, not the Convert however, from which you may be able to get an idea of his own accent. I don't know if the word 'holy' appears in any of his readings, and apparently the quality is poor with many of the words being hard to distinguish. This link discusses it a little and links to the recordings. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2016/10/aleister-crowley-reads-occult-poetry-in-the-only-known-recordings-of-his-voice-1920.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://www.openculture.com/2016/10/aleister-crowley-reads-occult-poetry-in-the-only-known-recordings-of-his-voice-1920.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2019-12-20T14:48:25.803" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-20T21:38:04.293" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Natasha's mother, Countess Natalia Rostova, seems to dislike her daughter's affections for Prince Andrei when they meet again at his (eventual) deathbed. At this point in the story, she's also been consistently insistent that Sonya free her son Nikolai from their &quot;betrothal&quot; so that he's able to marry Andrei's sister, Princess Marya. The Countess's husband, Count Ilya, is himself becoming mentally infirm following their exodus from Moscow to object to her wishes. When Marya does manage to meet Andrei, he's on his last legs and she's a woman more inclined towards prayer than able to help her brother through medical help. This creates a unique situation where the Countess can subtly influence events so that once Andrei has died, Nikolai is able to inherit Marya's property and restore the Rostov family's fortunes. So, is there any indication or proof either directly in the text or other popular commentaries that the Countess causes the Prince's death through her negligence, deliberate or otherwise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8272" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-21T07:22:10.080" LastActivityDate="2019-12-21T07:22:10.080" Title="Does Countess Natalia Rostova let Prince Andrei die so Nikolai could inherit all of Marya's wealth?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-23T10:35:43.253" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a book during my school days. There was a story which was based during some war in medieval England I believe. There was an Inn in the story named Step Inn. Where the owner of the Inn used to welcome the guests with the pun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Step in, Step Inn.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also used to used all over the story where once a knight entered in his Inn and he greeted him with,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Good Morning, Good Knight.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know which story this is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8277" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T19:05:08.300" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T19:05:08.300" Title="Medieval England story - &quot;Step in, Step Inn&quot;, &quot;Good Morning, Good Knight&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2019-12-23T15:37:22.347" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Hallelujah&quot; from Samson refers to his thankfulness that God restored his strength when his hair grew back, enabling him to push in the columns of the temple of the Philistines.  He had been chained to these columns, had his eyes put out and ridiculed continually after having lost his strength due to his hair being cut by Delilah.  She had seduced him into divulging the secret of his remarkable strength.  The columns caved in and the temple fell, killing everyone, including Samson.  He was thankful God restored his strength (as his hair grew back out), forgiving him of his shortcomings, and he was able to carry out God's will and received victory over his enemies before he died.  Redemption, obedience and Faith are the lessons we learn here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8279" LastActivityDate="2019-12-23T15:37:22.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12094" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-26T21:58:19.337" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &quot;Song of Myself&quot; by Walt Whitman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Scattering it freely forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to &lt;em&gt;go in for&lt;/em&gt; something in this contest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just feel that it means &quot;I bet on my chances, so I expect the vast returns for this spending&quot;. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-27T09:24:32.110" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T09:24:32.110" Title="What does Walt Whitman mean by &quot;going in for my chances&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12096" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12097" CreationDate="2019-12-27T12:36:30.530" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Oscar Henry's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/o-henry/short-story/the-trimmed-lamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“The Trimmed Lamp”&lt;/a&gt;, Nancy describes why she declined a potential suitor who appeared to be a rather rich (or “swell”, as they refer to the rich in the story) individual: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And he’s got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google says “dactylis” is a type of plant, and I couldn’t find anything else. Does anyone by any chance know what’s “dactylis” in this context, and why Nancy considered it to be negative? Sources would be greatly appreciated as well :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1543" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2019-12-27T13:55:32.513" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T14:01:21.430" Title="Meaning of “dactylis” in O. Henry’s “The Trimmed Lamp”" Tags="&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12096" CreationDate="2019-12-27T14:01:21.430" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paragraph in which the quote from the question can be found goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Him?&quot; said Nancy, with her coolest, sweetest, most impersonal, Van Alstyne Fisher smile; &quot;not for mine. I saw him drive up outside. A 12 H. P. machine and an Irish chauffeur! And you saw what kind of handkerchiefs he bought--silk! And he's got dactylis on him. Give me the real thing or nothing, if you please.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dactylis in this passage is not &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the plant itself&lt;/a&gt; but a perfume. According to the website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.parfumo.net/Perfumes/Colgate_Company/Dactylis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parfumo.net&lt;/a&gt;, Dactylis was a perfume by Colgate &amp;amp; Company created in 1901:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dactylis is a perfume by Colgate &amp;amp; Company for women and was released in 1901. The production was apparently discontinued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Nancy thinks the man is not the &quot;real thing&quot;, i.e. the sort of millionaire she is looking for, because he wears a perfume for &lt;em&gt;women&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T14:01:21.430" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9203" CreationDate="2019-12-27T19:54:42.527" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, here is the definition of the term &lt;code&gt;silent protest&lt;/code&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Silent protest is an organized effort where the participants stay quiet to demonstrate disapproval. It is used as a form of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_protest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing &lt;em&gt;silent&lt;/em&gt; about his protest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might be able to consider it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;culture jamming&lt;/a&gt; but I'm not too familiar with the details so I'm not sure about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8289" LastActivityDate="2019-12-27T19:54:42.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5373" CreationDate="2019-12-28T03:02:47.350" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The traditional distinction between syllabic (French) and metrical (English) verse is misleading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French has long and short vowels (long and short syllables) just like any other language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English poetry, on the other hand, is &quot;accented&quot; (tricky term here) by long syllables or so-called &quot;stresses&quot; just like French, Italian, Latin and Greek verse. If you don't believe me, try reciting English verse out loud like a well-trained Shakespearean actor using only variations of long and short syllables. The long syllables sound &quot;accented&quot; or &quot;stressed.&quot; Ordinary language stresses a syllable by lengthening the vowel. Variations of pitch or volume sound weird in verse. They are used solely for emphasis and for signaling a question. Stressing a line of poetry by pitch or volume is a beginner's mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see the fundamentally iambic rhythm of the French alexandrine, compare it to Dante's iambic &lt;em&gt;terza rima&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the French language developed, the original Italian-like vowel endings became more and more subdued (&lt;em&gt;e muet&lt;/em&gt;). In a progression of French iambs, the &lt;em&gt;e muet&lt;/em&gt; is often &lt;em&gt;nearly&lt;/em&gt; elided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gave modern French poets the resources to modulate the iambic line in ways that sound somewhat different from an Italian or an English iambic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the rhythm is still fundamentally iambic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason this is hard to see is because the long and short syllables of the words in a line of poetry never correspond exactly to the underlying metrical schema. This is not accidental. A poet's chief effect lies in the teasing convergence and divergence between the actual long and short syllables of the words he uses and the underlying metrical schema. See Vladimir Nabokov's &lt;em&gt;Notes On Prosody&lt;/em&gt; for excellent insight into this effect, which he called &quot;scudding.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looked at in this way, it is easy to see that Baudelaire's &quot;&lt;em&gt;Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres&lt;/em&gt;&quot; corresponds to (and diverges pleasingly from) an underlying iambic rhythm. The rhythm of a French alexandrine sounds uncannily like a twelve-syllable iambic trimeter in Aeschylus or Sophocles. But the strong mid-line break of the French hexameter (wrongly called a caesura) makes it better suited to the epigrammatic short poems of Baudelaire or Verlaine than to great dramatic verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The basic rhythm of human speech is iambic, marked out by syllable length. Prose is iambic as a result. Iambic meter characterizes almost all great dramatic verse (compare Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; or Sophocles &lt;em&gt;Antigone&lt;/em&gt;). All other poetic rhythms (like Homer's great dactylic hexameters) are elaborations of an underlying iambic rhythm. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8291" LastEditorUserId="8291" LastEditDate="2019-12-28T06:15:05.423" LastActivityDate="2019-12-28T06:15:05.423" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12101" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12102" CreationDate="2019-12-29T08:19:38.660" Score="1" ViewCount="609" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the last quote of the short story '&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1289/1289-h/1289-h.htm#page303&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Trial for Murder&lt;/a&gt;' mean? Why did the 'Murderer' says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...] Before I was taken, he somehow got to my bedside in the night, woke me, &#xA;  and put a rope round my neck.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the speaker kinda hypnotized and killed the 'Murderer' even before the hearing? Or is it something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8294" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T20:02:37.707" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T20:02:37.707" Title="Conclusion of 'The Trial for Murder' by Charles Dickens" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12101" CreationDate="2019-12-29T16:27:26.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe what we are to understand is that, just as the narrator has seen the murderer and the murdered man in incorporeal form, and remember that when he saw them from his window:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Both men threaded their way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly consistent even with the action of walking on a pavement; and no single creature, that I could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same way, the murderer has seen a phantasmagorical version of the narrator, at his bedside hanging the noose about his neck. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T20:01:23.647" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T20:01:23.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12107" CreationDate="2019-12-29T18:31:49.657" Score="47" ViewCount="8863" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tom Bombadil is definitely one of the weirdest characters in all of The Lord of the Rings, he just comes out of nowhere, stumbling upon Frodo and Sam while singing. His actions are just incredibly unusual compared to the other characters in LotR. My question is for what reason does Tolkien add Bombadil into his story? How is he important to the development of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8297" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-30T00:17:25.653" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:32:25.707" Title="What is Tom Bombadil's importance in The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="7" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12105" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-29T20:21:53.393" Score="3" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O western orb sailing the heaven,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now I know what you must have meant &lt;strong&gt;as a month since I walk’d&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after&#xA;  night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As you droop’d from the sky &lt;strong&gt;low down&lt;/strong&gt; as if to my side, (while the&#xA;  other stars all look’d on,)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not&#xA;  what kept me from sleep,)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you&#xA;  were of woe,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent&#xA;  night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As I watch’d where you pass’d and &lt;strong&gt;was lost&lt;/strong&gt; in the netherward black of&#xA;  the night,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the section 8 of &quot;When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d&quot; by Walt Whitman. I have some problems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What he means by &lt;strong&gt;as a month since I walk’d&lt;/strong&gt; in second line?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of &quot;low down&quot; is just redundant?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost&quot;, if the subject is you, why he used &quot;was&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T03:52:00.693" Title="Some Problem about Whitman's Language" Tags="&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12106" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12120" CreationDate="2019-12-29T22:25:16.443" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels, specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Fortune_des_Rougon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Fortune des Rougon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, set in December 1851, around the time of Napoleon III's coup d'etat, Pierre Rougon seeks to obtain the post of &quot;receveur particulier&quot; for the town of Plassans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given his ambitions, this is clearly a lucrative appointment, but I cannot find a clear picture of what its duties would have been and what opportunities it would have brought for personal enrichment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T17:11:45.940" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T17:11:45.940" Title="What are the duties of a &quot;receveur particulier&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;emile-zola&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12107" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T01:28:51.630" Score="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bombadil is indeed an anomaly, and does not appear to fit very well into Tolkien's overall narrative. He comes from nowhere (although he has been there all along, unobserved), and disappears equally abruptly from the story. Unless the author has given us some hints about the character's relevance, we are reduced to speculation, so let us just consider the mechanics of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien has to get the four hobbits from Crickhollow to Bree, where they will meet Aragorn, unharmed, and without Gandalf to protect them; and yet they need to have some adventures on the way, otherwise the story becomes uninteresting. Gandalf's absence is Tolkien's biggest problem, and so Bombadil is basically a (slightly unreliable) stand-in for Gandalf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hobbits are in no position to face the nine riders on their own. Neither can they just walk through the Old Forest and have a pleasant hike to Bree. So, we have Old Man Willow, which Bombadil rescues the hobbits from, and then the barrow wights, where he rescues them again, and in between these two escapades, a pleasant interlude in Bombadil's house, with Goldberry and plenty of food and rhyming verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a suspicion that Tolkien had some attachment to Bombadil. Maybe Bombadil represents the author, since he is older than any other living thing in Middle Earth, and is unaffected by the power of the One Ring, and presumably, he is also unaffected by the destruction of the ring at the story's climax. Only an author has this much power to do as he pleases in his own stories. Tolkien is, perhaps, pulling a Hitchcock on us, since the director liked to make cameo appearances in his own films.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Council of Elrond, Gandalf is right when he says that they cannot give the Ring to Bombadil, since he would probably just lose it. With the Ring in his own pocket, Tolkien loses the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2019-12-30T05:15:18.050" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T05:15:18.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12105" CreationDate="2019-12-30T03:35:05.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;since&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;as a month since I walk’d&lt;/strong&gt; means 'ago'. It's a usage I haven't heard since my Northumbrian grandparents died, and I think it may have been more common up there in the North, and in Scotland, than in the rest of England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walter Scott's novel Waverley is properly called:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Waverley;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;   Or, 'Tis Sixty Years Since.&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Supplement to 'Six Months in a Convent',&lt;/em&gt; by Rebecca T. Read, 1835:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am surprised at what the Superior says in her answer, viz., “she did not know till &lt;strong&gt;some months since&lt;/strong&gt; that Miss Reed ever had any pretensions to the name of Mary Agnes.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps &quot;low down&quot; &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; a little redundant. It is certainly emphatic. In everyday speech perhaps we would say, &lt;em&gt;As you droop’d &lt;strong&gt;right down&lt;/strong&gt; from the sky as if to my side.&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost&quot;, the word &quot;was&quot; tells us that it is &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; who was lost, not the 'orb'(1). &quot;where you pass'd&quot; is a subordinate clause, though really the whole poem, from the first &lt;strong&gt;'as'&lt;/strong&gt;, in line two, to the end, consists of a subordinate clause.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) I mistakenly said the orb was the moon. Connoisseur corrected me. It is clearly the planet Venus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T03:52:00.693" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T03:52:00.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="276" CreationDate="2019-12-30T03:51:18.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly, Shelob the sentient spider has a few inner-monologue moments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you're interested about regular animals showing sentience in general, in The Hobbit, a Thrush and a Raven communicate with the Dwarves when on the Lonely Mountain. The Raven, if I recall correctly, tried to communicate and wasn't understood by the dwarves, but understood the dwarves' speaking about needing a Thrush, and the Thrush spoke with one of the dwarves who could interpret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8300" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T03:51:18.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T05:01:59.467" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is opinion: I have no way to back it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Tolkien introduced Tom Bombadil as a symbol of mankind before the fall, a sort of creature of pure, unadulterated nature. (Others have speculated this as well.) Think of him a bit like Adam, of the Adam and Eve in Genesis, before it all went south. He lives in harmony with nature and has some control over it, which makes sense because nature was a thing created for man's use and there was no enmity between man and nature before the fall. He's peaceable and happy because he's not tainted by evil or regret - he knows what evil is but he's not affected by it. He's unlike other characters because, well, no other character is like &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; - unfallen and unaffected by brokenness. Of course the ring has no effect on him, and neither do wights. Tolkien, a Christian, was (I think) making a point about the limits of the power of evil, and introducing a point of hope and optimism (here is something evil will never win against) in a story that then gets bleaker before it gets better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's important not to push the analogy too far: T.B. might be a symbol of the purity of the original creation, or Adam himself, but not a Jesus or God one. Tolkien was clear about that; this link might be of interest: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?FAQ/Who__is__Tom__Bombadil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FAQ / Who is Tom Bombadil&lt;/a&gt; in the Tolkien Wiki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In LotR there are other echoes of the idea that someone who has never done X (X some bad thing) cannot be affected by X. For T.B, X is evil itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien has to handwave a bit during the Council of Elrond because of Bombadil - people propose just giving the ring to Bombadil and calling it a day, but Gandalf says no. I always thought the explanation was weak; why would Bombadil be so carefree and detached as to forget he had it? But I think I see the opposing problem - if people could just pass every awkward, evil bit of magic to Bombadil, he'd end up as the caretaker of a growing mountain of other people's dark efforts and failings. It wouldn't be a peaceful existence - there would constantly be evil characters going to Bombadil's land to grab the bad stuff. Bombadil, the ultimate symbol of freedom from the effects of evil, would get trapped in the role of taking care of everyone else's evil schemes and follies. It's no way to live, so Bombadil simply doesn't. He withdraws instead, only joining the world when he sees value in it to others, such as bumbling into the hobbits when they need help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8302" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:32:25.707" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:32:25.707" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T06:21:50.333" Score="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Tolkien said that Bombadil represented a sort of passive pacifism, which was important to represent in the story but couldn't play much of a role in the actual plot.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Tolkien's Letters, letter #144:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a 'comment'. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford  Magazine&lt;/em&gt; about  1933),  and he  represents  something  that  I  feel  important,  though  I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control. but if you have, as it were taken 'a vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference  to  yourself,  watching,  observing,  and  to  some  extent  knowing,  then  the  question  of  the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war. But the view of Rivendell seems to be that it is an excellent thing to have represented, but that there  are  in  fact  things  with  which  it  cannot  cope;  and  upon  which  its  existence  nonetheless depends. Ultimately  only  the  victory  of  the  West  will  allow  Bombadil  to  continue,  or  even  to survive. Nothing would be left for him in the world of Sauron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Letter #20, Tolkien also reveals the out-of-universe inspiration for Bombadil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you think Tom Bombadil, the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside, could be made into the hero of a story? Or is he, as I suspect, fully enshrined in the enclosed verses?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other answers have some good analysis of Bombadil and his role and purpose, but I thought it would also be useful to have what the author himself said about his intentions in introducing the character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also some existing discussion of this and other related issues on the Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange, which I checked before posting this answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/1586/31394&quot;&gt;Who or what was Tom Bombadil?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/91451/31394&quot;&gt;Why was Tom Bombadil so unconcerned about the fate of Middle-earth?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/140769/31394&quot;&gt;In Tolkien's opinion, does Tom Bombadil (and the concept of pacifism) actually hold any power?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-30T19:05:52.050" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T19:05:52.050" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T13:21:55.813" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Fellowship (again) right now, and I had a similar thought when I reached the Forest/Barrow section, and I thought for a long while why it might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found my answer ('my' rather than 'the' because it's just an opinion) when the Council are discussing what to do about the ring. Bombadil is suggested as a solution - in fact the suggestion veers towards the idea of 'weaponising' Bombadil, then towards him keeping the Ring within his protection/seclusion, but both are dealt with swiftly as impossible. I (chose to?) interpret this as Tolkien's in-line explanation of why greater entities (Bombadil, or the Valar, or a greater collection of Maiar) in general couldn't or wouldn't just resolve the issue themselves. This is probably dealt with extensively elsewhere in the Histories, or Silmarillion, though I don't remember where, but if you take the Lord of the Rings series as a set by themselves without the rest of the legendarium, it seems to me to give the satisfactory 'answer' for why the West doesn't just come back and go to open war with Sauron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of the Ring is, after all, a vehicle for the closing of the Third Age and the beginning of the dominion of Humankind, so it makes sense (to me) that a more powerful being choosing a pacifist stance is included. The Elves are already departing for the West, and the remaining Elves in Middle-Earth are already but a small number of the previous population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bombadil's existence (nor that of Goldberry) is never really 'dealt with' at least not in my recollection (this read-through is after maybe 10 years since I last read the series) so one can only assume they sort of just fade into the background, not being corporeal any more. I have wondered before whether the 'feeling' that Tolkien mentions in the letter #144 (quote above) is due his environment at the time (wartime and after) where simple enjoyment of things is basically non-existent because everyone is so preoccupied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8311" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T13:21:55.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T16:15:50.393" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;One reason that Bombadil does not really &quot;fit&quot; in the narrative may be that The Lord of the Rings was originally a sequel to The Hobbit.  At that time, The Hobbit was only indirectly connected to the world of the Silmarillion and was &quot;only&quot; a children's story with ogres speaking in cockney accents and other silly things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the adventures until the hobbits reach Bree still very much have a feel of that type of children's story and Tom Bombadil actually fits very well into that type of story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Tolkien further developed The Lord of the Rings and rolled both it and The Hobbit into the mythology of the Silmarillion, the story became much more serious and &quot;adult&quot;, but some of the earlier elements were left in place, even though they don't have quite the same feel as the items developed later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2752" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T16:15:50.393" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12114" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12115" CreationDate="2019-12-30T18:36:54.217" Score="3" ViewCount="416" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &quot;Subject Races&quot; is used a few times in H. G. Wells's novel &lt;em&gt;The War in the Air&lt;/em&gt;. I have been looking around but only found a paper called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2375954.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Treatment of Subject Races&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, is this related?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8327" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2019-12-30T18:59:54.003" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T19:52:57.250" Title="What does H. G. Wells means by &quot;Subject Races&quot; in The War in the Air?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-war-in-the-air&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12114" CreationDate="2019-12-30T19:52:57.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a nutshell, &quot;subject races&quot; means people of colour who were subjects of the British Empire.  Wells uses the term ironically. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a passage near the beginning of Chapter 4 that makes this clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of the sturdy establishment in prejudice of Bert's grandfather, to whom the word “Frenchified” was the ultimate term of contempt, there flowed through Bert's brain a squittering succession of thinly violent ideas about German competition, about the Yellow Danger, about the Black Peril, about the White Man's Burthen—that is to say, Bert's preposterous right to muddle further the naturally very muddled politics of the entirely similar little cads to himself (except for a smear of brown) who smoked cigarettes and rode bicycles in Buluwayo, Kingston (Jamaica), or Bombay. These were Bert's “Subject Races,” and he was ready to die—by proxy in the person of any one who cared to enlist—to maintain his hold upon that right. It kept him awake at nights to think that he might lose it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People from what is now Zambabwe, from Jamaica, from India: then all parts of the British Empire, all thought of by the Berts of the Empire as being inferior.  The reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette_card&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cigarette cards&lt;/a&gt; is interesting: it would be nice to find the particular series Wells was referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T19:52:57.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12116" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2019-12-30T20:18:15.390" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bombadil is also part of the world-building. He's part of the world, and his whole purpose in it is something that nobody short of Eru fully understands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien mentions things like this in passing. Gandalf, after his returning from his trip Outside, mentions some creatures at the very nadir of his fall in Moria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maps that Tolkien made include a lot of places the the hobbits never see, and some that are not even named in the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all done to give the reader a picture of a world that is not only larger than the Shire, but is also far older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think it's a coincidence that the very oldest resident of Middle-Earth (aside from Maiar), and by far its biggest enigma, dwells within a day's walk of where the story begins and ends?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5872" LastActivityDate="2019-12-30T20:18:15.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12121" CreationDate="2019-12-31T05:20:21.507" Score="2" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Merchant Of Venice&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare, Act I Scene I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Antonio : Believe me, no: I thank my fortune for it,&lt;br&gt;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;My ventures are not in one bottom trusted.&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;Nor to one place;&lt;strong&gt;nor is my whole estate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;Upon the fortune of this present year:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;   &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;  &amp;nbsp;Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If his estate was not upon the fortune of that year, then why did the losses he had in his trade make him bankrupt? Elaborating on the point, Antonio explicitly mentions that his whole estate is not dependent upon the fortune of the present year. If that's the case, He shouldn't have been bankrupt because his financial situation, as he says, is well enough to sustain him even if all his ships sink and are miscarried. Is it another of Shakespeare's absent-minded errors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8341" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2019-12-31T18:12:56.257" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T11:54:39.140" Title="How is it possible for Antonio to go bankrupt?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12119" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2019-12-31T11:59:27.407" Score="4" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can not remember the author, but this seems was Ray Bradbury. However, I've already read couple of his short stories, which would be matched by titles, and found nothing. It's probably not Ray Bradbury but someone who wrote around the same time: between 1950 and 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story starts with one time-traveler, he starts his travel in something like a U-boat/Time-Travel-Boat. After a while, another version of him appeared right inside this &quot;Time-Travel-Boat&quot;. Thereafter, a third version, and then the next one, next one, next one, etc...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some time, there were 20+ of him (may be 600 - six hundred). Some of them were from his childhood, and were very young. Others, on the opposite, were very old, with beards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything mixed up. And such very-very funny chaos happened on this &quot;Time-Travel-Boat&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think it was short story.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;By &quot;U-boat&quot; I'm meaning environment of action, something like a &quot;U-boat&quot;, a closed/isolated atmosphere, without any chance of escape from it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;funny chaos&quot;: because all of this 20+ persons - was one man, he knew everything about this place, about himself, about each of this 20+ crew members, about all this story, etc... And everyday life is turning in something very different.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story is humorous, and each new &quot;copy of him&quot;, makes the story more-and-more fun. Certainly, it was not a philosophical insight on time-traveling, though, I'm still thinking about this concept of duplication of personality.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There isn't any sex in it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are no other characters. Only copies/duplicates of the main character.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8344" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-01-11T11:01:42.983" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T21:45:37.907" Title="Looking for an old sci-fi tale about time-traveling" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12106" CreationDate="2019-12-31T16:21:07.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/traitdesimptsen00vigngoog/page/n10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Traité des impôts en France: considérés sous le rapport du droit, de l'économie politique et de l'économie politique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Edouard Vignes (3rd edition, 1872) discusses the tax system in France in the second half of the 19th century.&#xA;1872 is admittedly a bit later than the year in which the novel is set, but apparently the tax system did not change much in those years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/traitdesimptsen00vigngoog/page/n101&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pages 83-84&lt;/a&gt; explain that each &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Departments_of_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;department&lt;/a&gt; has an office that is in charge of collecting taxes and that this office consists of the following persons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[une agence composée : ] &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  D'un trésorier-payeur général ; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  D'un receveur particulier par arrondissement, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Et de plusieurs percepteurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The &quot;arrondissement&quot; is a subdivision of the &quot;département&quot; and is overseen by a &quot;sous-préfet&quot; or subprefect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book also specifies their &quot;émoluments&quot; (fees, emoluments):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Pour les trésoriers-payeurs généraux et les receveurs particuliers, en un traitement fixe de 6,000 fr. pour les premiers,&#xA;  et de 2,400 francs pour les seconds, en même temps qu'en taxations et bonifications sur le produit des impôts ; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Pour les percepteurs, en remises qui leur sont allouées sur le montant des contributions qu'ils recouvrent. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Les trésoriers-payeurs généraux, les receveurs particuliers et les percepteurs fournissent au Trésor un cautionnement dont la quotité est déterminée d'après l'importance de leurs recettes.&#xA;  Elle est, pour les trésoriers-payeurs généraux, de six fois le montant de leurs émoluments de toute nature, et pour les receveurs particuliers, de cinq fois leurs émoluments. (Loi du 13 juillet 1867, art. 28.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a &quot;receveur particulier&quot; was essentially a tax collector for a specific arrondissement. They receive an income of 2,400 francs (per year, presumably); in addition, they get a &quot;bonus&quot; (&quot;bonification&quot;) based on the taxes they collect, and they get a &quot;discount&quot; (&quot;remise&quot;) on their own taxes.&#xA;Presumably, the bonus could lead to abuse (extorting more money from tax payers) if the trésorier-payeur général didn't check the tax figures too closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T16:21:07.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12117" CreationDate="2019-12-31T17:59:45.070" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Usually, as he says in the bit you quote, Antonio is cash-poor but ship-rich.  He has many ships, so he can afford to loose one.  But in Act III, scene 1 we learn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, yet it lives there unchecked that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrack’d on the narrow seas; the Goodwins, I think they call the place, a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say, if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and then in  III,2 Antonio sends a letter to Salerio and Bassanio. Salerio reads it first and Bassanio asks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hath all his ventures fail'd? What, not one hit? &#xA;      From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England, &#xA;      From Lisbon, Barbary, and India, &#xA;      And not one vessel scape the dreadful touch &#xA;      Of merchant-marring rocks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Here &quot;not one hit?&quot; means &quot;not one succeeded?&quot;.) The answer: &quot;Not one, my lord&quot;.  That is, all six ships are lost.  Later in the scene Bassanio gives a direct quote from the letter, summarizing &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit, and since in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are clear’d between you and I, if I might but see you at my death. Notwithstanding, use your pleasure. If your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he has lost all his ships, and so his credit rating is downgraded: is now not only cash-poor but also ship-poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; But (spoiler alert) in the last scene it turns out, deus ex machina style, that all this shipping news was mistaken, and Antonio is ship-rich after all.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-01-05T11:54:39.140" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T11:54:39.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2019-12-31T18:58:26.723" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished reading the entire series (except for the first book Kid Lawyer) and have no reason to think there's an underlying biblical reason for choosing Bethlehem as the town for which he models Strattenburg. The protagonist, Theodore Boone's, family were Christians who went to church every Sunday and prayed before meals. However, that appears merely to be a detail to fill in Theo's background and culture, not for any &quot;biblical purposes.&quot; In other words, the author seems not to be promoting a religious message; his goal appears to be to tell a good story. He succeeds very well in doing this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8350" LastActivityDate="2019-12-31T18:58:26.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-01T15:55:40.207" Score="2" ViewCount="1298" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;We Are Seven&quot; is a poem by William Wordsworth and this poem depicts the innocent nature of a child who just does not want to understand that her siblings have passed away of natural causes and continuously reiterating her determined claim that they are still seven children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is it the theme of the poem that tells us that in young age how innocent we all were until we age and complexity burden our shoulder and we start to act in a not so innocent way or the theme is about how close a disabled, broken, innocent, distressed and disoriented sibling feel when his/her other siblings are separated from them? And he/she constantly calls up their names standing outside the home looking at the bay and believes siblings will come to rescue them sometime later or be the assists in the ice hockey game of their life to score big time in life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We Are Seven&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;———A simple Child,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That lightly draws its breath,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And feels its life in every limb,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What should it know of death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I met a little cottage Girl:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She was eight years old, she said;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her hair was thick with many a curl&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That clustered round her head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She had a rustic, woodland air,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And she was wildly clad:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Her eyes were fair, and very fair;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  —Her beauty made me glad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Sisters and brothers, little Maid,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How many may you be?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “How many? Seven in all,” she said,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And wondering looked at me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And where are they? I pray you tell.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She answered, “Seven are we;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And two of us at Conway dwell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And two are gone to sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Two of us in the church-yard lie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My sister and my brother;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, in the church-yard cottage, I&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dwell near them with my mother.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You say that two at Conway dwell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And two are gone to sea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet ye are seven! I pray you tell,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sweet Maid, how this may be.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then did the little Maid reply,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Seven boys and girls are we;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two of us in the church-yard lie,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Beneath the church-yard tree.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You run about, my little Maid,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Your limbs they are alive;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If two are in the church-yard laid,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then ye are only five.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Their graves are green, they may be seen,”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The little Maid replied,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Twelve steps or more from my mother’s door,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And they are side by side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“My stockings there I often knit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My kerchief there I hem;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And there upon the ground I sit,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sing a song to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And often after sun-set, Sir,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When it is light and fair,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I take my little porringer,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And eat my supper there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The first that died was sister Jane;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In bed she moaning lay,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till God released her of her pain;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And then she went away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“So in the church-yard she was laid;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, when the grass was dry,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Together round her grave we played,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My brother John and I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And when the ground was white with snow,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I could run and slide,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My brother John was forced to go,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And he lies by her side.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“How many are you, then,” said I,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “If they two are in heaven?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Quick was the little Maid’s reply,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “O Master! we are seven.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But they are dead; those two are dead!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their spirits are in heaven!”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ’Twas throwing words away; for still&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The little Maid would have her will,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And said, “Nay, we are seven!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-01T17:00:26.510" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T03:25:53.603" Title="Theme of William Wordsworth's poem &quot;We Are Seven&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="16" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12103" CreationDate="2020-01-01T21:00:05.633" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quality literature is rarely about the plot, but instead the plot serves to deliver a message (and perhaps to engage the reader long enough to get the message). Other elements besides the plot also serve to deliver the message (e.g. places, names, auxiliary characters, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lord of the Rings is full of messages - about Truth, war and peace, virtue, character, bravery, honesty, commitment, greed, etc. A key message of the work is the archetypal battle of good versus evil. Evil is hell-bent on destroying all that is good: how will it be defeated? How will the innocent be protected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Rand al'Thor explains in his answer, Bombadil is an important part of the message: good triumphs over evil, not through an escape to innocent pacifism, but by honest individuals standing forth with courage give and risk all they have and are. These message is repeated as the Hobbits leave the Shire, as the Ents rally against Isengard, as Rivendale supports Rohan at Helm's Deep, as Rohan responds to Gondor's call for help, etc. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is something beautiful and refreshing about a complete release of the cares of the world (Bombadil), but the absence of Bombadil from the rest of the story &lt;strong&gt;IS&lt;/strong&gt; a deliberate part of the message: evil is not defeated by innocence - we must proactively fight against evil in order to establish peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8361" LastActivityDate="2020-01-01T21:00:05.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12131" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5225" CreationDate="2020-01-02T18:18:18.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Her new pen name is Silvia Mercedes. She has a few books under that name out now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8368" LastEditorUserId="8368" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T05:39:01.220" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T05:39:01.220" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12132" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12136" CreationDate="2020-01-02T20:26:01.493" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find the name of a fin-de-siècle writer/&lt;em&gt;feuilletoniste&lt;/em&gt;/journalist who wrote very short fiction pieces based on crime stories in the Paris newspapers. A collection of these was published some time within the last ten years and was reviewed, or at least mentioned, in the &lt;em&gt;New York Review of Books&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;London Review of Books&lt;/em&gt;. Is there anyone out there who knows who I'm talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-03T17:57:27.810" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T18:09:32.697" Title="19th-century French &quot;flash fiction&quot; writer/journalist" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12133" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12173" CreationDate="2020-01-03T01:32:44.410" Score="3" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ted Hughes' &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=hz5O0laGLOgC&amp;amp;pg=PT379&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Owl's Song&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt; (in &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; collection), the last line of the first verse seems quite obscure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He sang&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  how the swan blanched forever&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How the wolf threw away its telltale heart&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the stars dropped their pretence&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The air gave up appearances&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Water went deliberately numb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The rock surrendered its last hope&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;And cold died beyond knowledge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be the meaning of a &quot;dying cold&quot;, and its dying being &quot;beyond knowledge&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, note that the verse is filled with desperation: everything lets go of its vitality. In this light, the last line doesn't fit: if a cold is dying, doesn't it mean that vitality is recovered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T09:43:25.790" Title="What does &quot;cold died beyond knowledge&quot; mean in Ted Hughes' &quot;Owl's Song&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5629" CreationDate="2020-01-03T02:38:54.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mrs Alexander heard that Mr. Shears was good friends with Christopher’s mother. She thinks that Christopher’s mother passed away because Christopher’s father lied to his son and Christopher told that lie he heard from his father to Mrs. Alexander&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8371" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T02:38:54.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12135" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-03T11:50:34.913" Score="1" ViewCount="253" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the original Persian version of the following poems of Rumi. These poems are from &quot;The Essential Rumi&quot; by Coleman Barks. The numbers refer to the Furuzanfar's edition of Kulliyat-e Shams, 8 vols. (Teheran: Amir Kabir Press, I957-1966).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am so small I can barely be seen.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How can this great love be inside me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Look at your eyes. They are small,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  but they see enormous things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Diwan-e Shams #798)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Only music day and night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Calm and bright is the melody&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of the flute. When this melody is wiped out&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So are we.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Diwan-e Shams #7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That’s fine with us. Every morning&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We glow and in the evening we glow again.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They say there’s no future for us. They’re right.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Which is fine with us.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Real value comes with madness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Diwan-e Shams #1399)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8107" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T21:12:02.267" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T21:12:02.267" Title="Where can I find the original Persian version of these Rumi poems from &quot;The Essential Rumi&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12132" CreationDate="2020-01-03T18:09:32.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most likely candidate is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_F%C3%A9n%C3%A9on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Félix Fénéon (22 June 1861 – 29 February 1944)&lt;/a&gt;. A collection of his short fiction &lt;em&gt;Novels in Three Lines&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Nouvelles en trois lignes&lt;/em&gt; in French) was translated by Luc Sante and published in 2007. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n19/julian-barnes/behind-the-gas-lamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;review by Julian Barnes&lt;/a&gt; appeared in the &lt;em&gt;London Review of Books&lt;/em&gt; on 4 October 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouvelle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Nouvelle&quot;&lt;/a&gt; does not mean &quot;novel&quot;; it refers to a very short narrative form; &quot;short story&quot; would be a more accurate translation. As far as I know, the term &quot;flash fiction&quot; did not exist during Fénéon's lifetime, even though the genre already existed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-01-03T18:09:32.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12147" CreationDate="2020-01-03T21:29:56.047" Score="1" ViewCount="200" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That is a very dreadful story,&amp;quot; said the Padre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Very,&amp;quot; said I, &amp;quot;and there are some rather odd points about it. Did commercial travellers dash about in motorcars when Popper was a youngster? And why didn't he take that evidence straight to the police?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is almost the last part of &amp;quot;Dilemma&amp;quot;, short story written by Dorothy L. Sayers. The word 'dash about' seems to be a kind of twisting part of this short story, but I can't figure out the real meaning of this phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoping somebody could help me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8033" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T21:28:50.977" Title="meaning of 'dash about'" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;dorothy-l-sayers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12138" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12146" CreationDate="2020-01-04T02:16:20.330" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm reading Gregory Hays's translation of Marcus Aurelius's meditations and there's a section I'm fairly stuck on. The full section (book 6, section 57) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Honey tastes bitter to a man with jaundice. People &#xA;      with rabies are terrified of water. And a child's idea&#xA;      of beauty is a ball. Why does that upset you? Do you&#xA;      think falsehood is less powerful than bile or a rabid dog?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused because the first 3 lines are things that can be true for an individual even if they're not true in general, and shouldn't make anyone mad. Because bile and rabid dogs are so powerful, they can locally distort the truth. These people aren't lying. But the question seems rhetorical, suggesting that falsehood is more powerful that physical factors. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess I'm overall confused how I should be reading this section or what to make of it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8373" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-06T09:24:13.277" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T09:24:13.277" Title="What does &quot;Do you think falsehood is less powerful than bile or a rabid dog?&quot; mean in Marcus Aurelius's Meditations?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;marcus-aurelius&gt;&lt;meditations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2020-01-04T13:03:26.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've never heard &lt;em&gt;all to the silk&lt;/em&gt;, but it must mean &quot;on the level&quot;, don't you think?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A silk, in BrE, is a high status lawyer, or Queen's Council, but I don't think that helps. Perhaps Chandler had in mind the expression 'pure as silk'. Or perhaps he just heard someone say 'all to the silk': I know he kept notebooks full of colloquialisms and things he'd overheard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for an hour or so online last night for a book that &lt;em&gt;ought&lt;/em&gt; to exist. It would be called &quot;Decoding Chandler&quot; or something like that. It doesn't seem to exist yet but someone should write it before his language slips through our fingers along with the clothes, perfumes and gadgets he mentions that are no longer around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I happened to be three-quarters of the way through The Big Sleep but when - looking for an answer to your question - I found Goldfish online, I downloaded it, poured a glass of whisky and read it. So thank you. Good story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastActivityDate="2020-01-04T13:03:26.167" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-04T13:07:00.477" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50364/neutral-tones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neutral Tones&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Thomas Hardy was written in 1867 and published in the 1898 collection &lt;em&gt;Wessex Poems and Other Verses&lt;/em&gt;. It contains the stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Alive enough to have strength to die;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And a grin of bitterness swept thereby&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like an ominous bird a-wing….&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which figure of speech does the phrase &amp;quot;alive enough to have strength to die&amp;quot; contain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8374" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:25:40.610" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:25:40.610" Title="What figure of speech does &quot;alive enough to have strength to die&quot; by Hardy contain?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12140" CreationDate="2020-01-04T15:54:42.443" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antithesis&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not sure if any other can be included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8375" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:22:45.860" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:22:45.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12137" CreationDate="2020-01-04T16:01:18.763" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dash&quot; can mean a lot of things, but I think here connotes mostly &quot;movement&quot;, as if the question was &quot;did commercial travelers go from place to place in motorcars?&quot;, with an added side-connotation of doing so stylishly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I asked Google books for &quot;dash about town&quot; and came up with instances like this recent one (from&#xA;Juliet Clutton-Brock's 1992 &lt;em&gt;Horse&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In English spa towns in the early part of the 19th century, young gentlemen&#xA;  would dash about town driving their latest status symbols, such as this&#xA;  convertible model -- an elegant sporting phaeton driven with ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that are consistent with Dash = Move.  But it carries a whiff  of a different connotation, of Dash = Style, or Dash = Panache, or Dash = Profligacy, as in this snippet from a 1817 play by Maria Edgeworth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he and our Mr. Beauchamp will be cutting a fine dash &#xA;  about town, for this minor's to have a swinging allowance--- may play&#xA;  away as he pleases...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2020-01-04T16:01:18.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2020-01-05T20:34:26.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just a thought on &quot;all to the silk.&quot; Jockeys' outfits are known as &quot;silks.&quot; Baseball and horse-racing would have been the main topics in Sports Sections back then.  Might &quot;You may be all to the silk&quot; mean &quot;you may be all that you say you are,&quot; from an equestian idiom now lost even to the internet, meaning &quot;good enough to be a jockey?&quot; More likely, it's an embedded misprint. But of what? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T20:34:26.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12138" CreationDate="2020-01-05T20:42:16.540" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Marcus Aurelius is saying is this:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Falsehood has the same effect of sickness, or a childish cognition: they all distort the view of the true nature of the world. Thus, the same way one would treat with forgiveness to claims held or behaviors done as a result of sickness or childhood, so one shouldn't lose temper when faced with claims or behaviors that stems from false ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can consult many other translations linked in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditations#External_links&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, and I'll give here two examples to get the idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2680/2680-h/2680-h.htm#link2H_4_0128&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; (credit says: &quot;Produced by J. Boulton, and David Widger&quot;, but doesn't mention the translator. publication date is 2008):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To them that are sick of the jaundice, honey seems bitter; and to them&#xA;  that are bitten by a mad dog, the water terrible; and to children, a&#xA;  little ball seems a fine thing. And why then should I be angry? or do&#xA;  I think that error and false opinion is less powerful to make men&#xA;  transgress, than either choler, being immoderate and excessive, to&#xA;  cause the jaundice; or poison, to cause rage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/marcusaureliusa00auregoog/page/n242&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another publication&lt;/a&gt;, from 1898, translated by Gerald Henry Rendall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the jaundiced honey seems bitter; to the hydrophobe water is&#xA;  horrible; to children a ball is a thing of beauty. Then why lose my&#xA;  temper? Think you false opinion takes less effect, then bile in the&#xA;  jaundiced or the virus in hydrophobia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, if you happen to know a Koine Greek translator, here's the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0562,001:6:57&amp;amp;lang=original&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ἰκτεριῶσι τὸ μέλι πικρὸν φαίνεται καὶ λυσσοδήκτοις τὸ ὕδωρ φοβερὸν καὶ&#xA;  παιδίοις τὸ σφαιρίον καλόν. τί οὖν ὀργίζομαι; ἢ δοκεῖ σοι ἔλασσον&#xA;  ἰσχύειν τὸ διεψευσμένον ἢ τὸ χόλιον τῷ ἰκτεριῶντι καὶ ὁ ἰὸς τῷ&#xA;  λυσσοδήκτῳ;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2020-01-05T21:08:52.727" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T21:08:52.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12137" CreationDate="2020-01-05T21:28:50.977" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The important bit of this sentence is not “dash about”, but “motor-cars”. The point being that &#xA;the character ‘Old Popper’ had introduced his tale with the claim that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The thing actually happened to me—years ago, many years ago. … It happened when I was quite a youngster, and was working as a clerk in a solicitor’s office.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When would this have been? Well, ‘Dilemma’ was written for the ‘Short Story’ programme on BBC radio, and was broadcast on 6 April 1934*. So if Popper is in his sixties, say, then his youth would have been 40 years previously, that is, in the 1890s, when motor-cars were not yet widespread and cheap enough for commercial travellers to go about in them. This means that Popper’s tale must have been a fabrication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* According to Robert B. Harmon and Margaret A. Burger (1977), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/annotatedguideto0000harm/page/238&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Annotated Guide to the Works of Dorothy L. Sayers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, New York: Garland, p. 239.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-01-05T21:28:50.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12125" CreationDate="2020-01-05T22:59:47.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;this poem depicts the innocent nature of a child who just does not want to understand that her siblings have passed away of natural causes and continuously reiterating her determined claim that they are still seven children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a nice description of how the speaker (not Wordsworth) perceives the child. Like the speaker, you describe her response as refusing to acknowledge something patently obvious. Why do you think Wordsworth did that? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He prefaced &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;, which included this ballad, with a description of the wisdom of the rural people. Because they live close to nature, Wordsworth claimed, their perceptions are shaped by nature and its rhythms and processes. He believed human nature is itself molded by the natural world. By contrast, educated urban residents are surrounded by an artificial environment and they have lost touch with the natural world and with human nature itself. By studying rural people and their feelings, he believed, we can find the natural feelings we have lost touch with. His poetry seeks to teach us how to find the human nature we have lost because of our artificial lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that light, the child's insistence on including her dead siblings as continuing members of the family makes more sense. Death in nature is a seasonal affair, with flowers dying in Autumn only to reappear in Spring. Death is less the actual end of something than a phase in a cyclical process. And the child knows this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about the poem as a commentary on the speaker, rather than the child, it is saying something about his limitations. Why is he so resistant to her perspective? Why so determined to teach her about his own, more artificial view of mortality as something final? Why can't he listen to this child of nature and learn from her about mortality in the natural world? And why do we modern readers identify with that speaker and his blind ignorance of human nature? What does it suggest about us? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In reading Wordsworth's ballads, you need to reconsider things you take for granted before you can see that behind a simple story, like this one, lies a much deeper philosophical meaning. His poems often work in that fashion. But that's why they are worth reading over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastEditorUserId="7964" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T03:25:53.603" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T03:25:53.603" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12149" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12105" CreationDate="2020-01-06T01:26:19.633" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Full moons - and every other phase of the moon - appear at intervals of approximately a monnth. So, when Whiteman walked &quot;a month since,&quot; was the last time the moon was full,  as it is at the time of the poem. Since it is a &quot;transparent shadowy night&quot; the moon was full, or close enough to full to cast shadows.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-01-06T01:26:19.633" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12150" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18704" CreationDate="2020-01-06T11:01:17.350" Score="4" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many comic books and graphic novels contain several pages (usually at the end of the book) which may expand on the lore or may contain biographical information about the authors. Others may contain concept art. This is an example from &lt;em&gt;Watchmen&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Iwxq.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2Iwxq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of two pages from Watchmen. The page on the left has a text with the title &amp;#39;After The Masquerade&amp;#39; next to an athletic figure; the page on the right contains only text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there a specific term for referring to these type of pages?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2842" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T00:37:04.367" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T00:37:04.367" Title="What do you call the pages in a comic book/graphic novel that expand on the lore, provide biographical information or have concept art?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12150" CreationDate="2020-01-07T02:42:51.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure it's the technical term, but I'd refer to pages like these as appendices. (Or an appendix, for a single section.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8373" LastActivityDate="2020-01-07T02:42:51.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12152" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-07T11:16:23.663" Score="4" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know some novels or sagas where the title of the work appears to be some variation of the protagonist's name. For example, the Aeneid is named after Aeneas. In high fantasy, the Belgariad is named after Belgarion, and the Silmarillion is named after the Silmarils (although the Silmarils are not protagonists, they are at the centre of the story).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably when authors like David Eddings and Tolkien do this, they are following the trope of some older literary tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what literary tradition did this become a trope? Greek epics?&#xA;What are more examples of this phenomenon?&#xA;And how are these 'variations' generated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8383" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-01-07T15:55:26.407" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T00:49:58.770" Title="In what tradition are sagas named some variation of the protagonist's name?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12153" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12152" CreationDate="2020-01-07T18:33:06.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagas_of_Icelanders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Icelandic sagas&lt;/a&gt;. Two of the most famous such are &lt;em&gt;Egil's Saga&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Njal's Saga&lt;/em&gt;, bearing personal names. Others, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laxd%C3%A6la_saga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laxdæla saga&lt;/a&gt; have place names in their titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; from another cultural tradition show the same mix: place name and personal name, respectively, in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In classical Greek literature there are works with titles like &lt;em&gt;Antigone&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Philoctetes&lt;/em&gt;, and so on, named for people, and (from the same author) &lt;em&gt;Women of Trachis&lt;/em&gt; naming a place, and &lt;em&gt;Oedipus at Colonus&lt;/em&gt; naming both a person and a place.  A different writer gave us &lt;em&gt;Electra&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Andromache&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hecuba&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Trojan Women&lt;/em&gt;, with all but the last naming people; yet another gave us &lt;em&gt;The Persians&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Seven Against Thebes&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Agamemnon&lt;/em&gt;, naming places and a person.  Another used &lt;em&gt;Lysistrata&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Frogs&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Clouds&lt;/em&gt;, naming a person, a kind of animal, and a natural phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zipping forwards a few  millennia we have &lt;em&gt;The Magic Goose of Cairo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Marriage of Figaro&lt;/em&gt;, naming an animal, a place, a ritual, and a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are the classical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansori#Pansori_repertoire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pansori&lt;/a&gt; works with personal name-derived titles: &lt;em&gt;Chunhyangga&lt;/em&gt;, &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Simcheongga&lt;/em&gt;, and &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Heungbuga&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So across the world and across time literary works have borne the names of people and of places.  Is this a trend, a trope? Examples of the sort listed above could be multiplied, but without understanding more precisely what you are really asking, I'll forbear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or maybe you are asking for when the word &quot;saga&quot; was used to mean &quot;the story of&quot;, as in titles like  &lt;em&gt;The Forsyte Saga&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Herries Saga&lt;/em&gt; or the generic AGA Saga.  In the 20th century, I'd guess.  When did the word begin to be used to mean &quot;long story&quot; in English?  Numerous citations in the OED suggest the 19th century. I would further guess that this was under the influence of the 1816-1818 &lt;em&gt;Deutsche Sagen&lt;/em&gt; by the brothers Grimm. Nowadays the term is a staple in the word-store of the writers of jacket-blurbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T00:49:58.770" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T00:49:58.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-07T21:21:56.287" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;An acquaintance is trying to find a short story she read some years ago (I am sorry she could not identify how far). She thinks she read it in Reader's Digest, or in a collection of stories from it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story, a U.S. soldier serving in Japan (I don't know if it's set during the occupation or later) has a name similar to that of a well-known NFL (?) player, and is mistaken for him. Somehow he is unable to explain the error, and is invited to display his prowess in a scrimmage. He tells his plight to his teammates. They tell him that once he gets the ball, just close his eyes and run in the right direction, and they will block everyone out of his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5215" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T01:59:37.877" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T01:59:37.877" Title="Story ID: U.S. soldier mistaken for football star in Japan" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-07T22:20:20.390" Score="2" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hanya Yanagihara’s “Little Life”, the narration toggles between the four protagonists. When it focuses on either of them, his name is usually mentioned once and then consecutively omitted and replaced by the pronouns “he”, “his”, and “him”, thus giving the impression that the person is (right next to) the narrator. It works wonderfully in this novel (even though sometimes these pronouns clash with pronouns referring to other male characters, but then they are sometimes disamibugated e.g. “his” is replaced with “his own”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this convention common in English-language literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Andy had been looking down at his ankle as he spoke, using tweezers to pick out shreds of dead flesh from a wound he’d developed, when he suddenly froze, and even without seeing Andy’s face, he could tell he was chagrined. “I’m sorry, Jude,” he said, looking up, still cupping his foot in his hand. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you differently.” And when he couldn’t answer, he sighed. “You’re upset.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logically I think the only “he” referring to Jude is the one in “when he couldn’t answer”. Technically his name is mentioned right before (though not by the narrator), but that is not always the case in this novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8385" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-01-14T08:45:51.647" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T08:45:51.647" Title="Is replacing names with pronouns common in multiple points of view narration?" Tags="&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12159" CreationDate="2020-01-08T07:47:28.337" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;his grief only became more deep and rankling when he had leisure for reflection, and at length it took so fast hold of his mind that at the end of three months he lay on a bed of sickness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;hold&quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I got it right but I understand that as the capacity of the mind to bear the situation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8386" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-08T07:51:42.837" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T07:58:13.163" Title="What does &quot;hold&quot; mean in this context from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12158" CreationDate="2020-01-08T07:58:13.163" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;hold&quot; is part of the phrasal verb &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/take-hold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;took hold&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which is divided here by an adverb &quot;so fast&quot;. The pronoun &quot;it&quot;, the thing that it taking hold of his mind, refers to &quot;[h]is grief&quot;, the subject of the previous clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage might be rephrased in easier English as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His grief only became more deep and rankling when he was free to think. At length, his grief dominated his mind so much that after three months he lay on a sickbed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-08T07:58:13.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-08T08:34:50.473" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1292149248&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Letters to a Law Student: A Guide to Studying Law at University&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (2017 4 ed). p 50.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In an observation that is now so clichéd, you won’t be able to believe how much&#xA;  I hate myself for repeating it, the ancient Greek poet Archilochus distinguished&#xA;  between the fox, who ‘knows many things’, and the hedgehog, who ‘knows one&#xA;  big thing’. (The philosopher Isaiah Berlin borrowed the distinction to distinguish&#xA;  between writers (‘hedgehogs’) who attempt to explain the world in terms&#xA;  of one big idea, and writers (‘foxes’) who refuse to view the world in such&#xA;  simplistic terms.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm benighted about hedgehogs. Do they truly know just one big thing? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T14:17:43.690" Title="Why did Archilochus affiliate the hedgehog with just knowing one big thing?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-08T14:00:07.900" Score="3" ViewCount="139" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could someone please answer the following questions?&#xA;1-  What is an “editorial novelist”?&#xA;2-  What does “dude” and “literary dude” mean in the following passages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All are mentioned in a New Yorker article by Arthur Krystal, titled “Easy Writers.”&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/easy-writers?verso=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/05/28/easy-writers?verso=true&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chandler wasn’t pleased. “Literature is bunk,” he retorted, propagated by “fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents, and &lt;strong&gt;editorial novelists&lt;/strong&gt;”—in other words, a bunch of &lt;strong&gt;literary dudes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“He [Mathew Arnold] will not be missed,” Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was “rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis.” He was, in short, “&lt;strong&gt;one of the dudes of literature&lt;/strong&gt;.” Whitman probably figured that his own gnarly hirsuteness would &lt;strong&gt;save him&lt;/strong&gt; from becoming a &lt;strong&gt;dude&lt;/strong&gt;. He was wrong, and therein lies a lesson for all hardworking scribblers: stick around long enough, develop a cult following, gain the approval of one or two &lt;strong&gt;literary dudes&lt;/strong&gt; (in Whitman’s case: &lt;strong&gt;Henry James, Ezra Pound, and F. O. Matthiessen&lt;/strong&gt;), and you, too, can become respectable.”&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Chandler and Whitman, as well as the writer of the article, have used “dude” as a disparaging term. If so, what does it (dude and literary dude) mean in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, if (literary) dude is disparaging or derogatory, how can it be applied to literary figures like Whitman and Henry James and Ezra Pound and F. O. Matthiessen (in The New Yorker article)?&#xA;Could someone please clarify the issue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8388" LastEditorUserId="8388" LastEditDate="2020-01-14T11:37:17.663" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T11:37:17.663" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;editorial novelist&quot; and &quot;literary dude&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12163" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-09T06:55:08.987" Score="4" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;In popular culture, Pynchon is best known (quite often by those who haven't read his work) as a zany, mischievous creator of large and very difficult to read books. His use of language and portrayal of character and narrative allow him to be slotted neatly into the draw for &amp;quot;writers; second half of the twentieth century; deconstruction of the traditional form of the novel.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the last point above illustrates, it seems the attention his writing gets focuses far more on form rather than content. For someone whose mastery of language is so fine and broad, it appears to me that it is worth asking &amp;quot;what's he using these words to say and why is he choosing to articulate it in the way he does&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the risk of sounding censorious, I'd like this question to be based on the premise that there is indeed substance to his works. If your view is &amp;quot;he's just another of those postmodern jokers&amp;quot; (I satirize somewhat), perhaps this may not be the optimal discussion for you (but of course no disrespect intended to anyone across the full spectrum of opinions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8390" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-05-21T06:01:57.577" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T06:01:57.577" Title="Is there a consistent set of messages that run throughout the works of Thomas Pynchon?" Tags="&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12161" CreationDate="2020-01-09T09:55:54.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't help you with &quot;editorial novelist,&quot; but I do know where &quot;dude&quot; comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dude&quot; today is just some guy, usually a friend or buddy.  It is also used as friendly greeting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Dude&quot;&lt;/a&gt; used to be &lt;strong&gt;way&lt;/strong&gt; different though.  A dude was like a dandy - a fancy dresser more concerned with appearance than anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;literary dude&quot; is therefore a writer or other person involved with literature who is more concerned with appearing to be literate rather than actually doing anything serious in the field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, a &quot;literary dude&quot; is a poser or wannabe who thinks he's really something - but only has the form and appearance but no substance, and is admired only by other posers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8114" LastEditorUserId="8114" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T10:00:58.340" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T10:00:58.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-09T12:23:00.843" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our teacher has asked us about the subject of &quot;Discursive Hybridity&quot; in Don Quixote, I've read about it but I'm not still so sure what it actually designates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here I am asking for your help. What is &quot;Discursive Hybridity&quot; and how does it appear in &lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8391" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T12:42:23.007" LastActivityDate="2020-01-09T12:42:23.007" Title="Can someone elaborate on the subject of &quot;Discursive Hybridity&quot; in Don Quixote?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;don-quixote&gt;&lt;miguel-de-cervantes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12172" CreationDate="2020-01-09T18:26:20.453" Score="5" ViewCount="5784" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading one of the master-pieces by Stephen Spender, &quot;An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following are the starting lines of the second of four octaves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Belled, flowery Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map ......&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &lt;em&gt;Cloudless at dawn&lt;/em&gt;? And I can't get what sense it makes after Shakespeare's portrait: I could see no relationship between the two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;My thoughts..&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Cloudless dawn' and 'civilized dome' might highlight monotonous and dull life in urban slum. The elementary school is squeezed and suppressed under so called concrete structures of the cities, that the children are unaware of the beauty of sky at the dawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But according to what I think, it's in a way satire to urban civilisation too, but the whole poem is an altruistic act for welfare of slum children (later, the author appeals to the powers to liberate these children from horrendous and gory slums). So my point doesn't seem veracious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8218" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-09T20:33:57.593" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T15:03:21.647" Title="Meaning of &quot;cloudless at dawn&quot; and connection with Shakespeare's head?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;stephen-spender&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12160" CreationDate="2020-01-10T03:43:57.333" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference divides writers and the thinkers. On one side is a balanced central vision; on the other, the pursuit of contradictory ends. Listen for the distortion of strategy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of Berlin's essay is a reference to a proverb attributed to Greek poet Archilochus (c. 680 – c. 645 BC): “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  The metaphor of the hedgehog is lost on many non-European readers. Hedgehogs are simple small mammals that are native to Australia and are found in parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Hedgehogs are vocal and communicate through grunts, snuffles and squeals. Also, the hedgehog looks for beetles, worms and the like using a very straightforward hunting method: 1) waddle forward and 2) if you approach anything alive, eat it. The hedgehog is an exposed thinker, with a simple idea and a simple plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foxes are small-to-medium-size mammals found across the entire Northern Hemisphere. From the Arctic Circle to North Africa, the red fox is known for its ability to adapt quickly to new environments. Foxes are largely silent animals that on rare occasions use contact calls (similar to a bark) and interaction calls (a high pitched whine). The fox is wise to many little things, with lots of ideas and no big plans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hedgehogs are the experts. Foxes are the amateurs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt; Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cio.com/article/3151060/decide-if-youre-a-hedgehog-or-a-fox.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.cio.com/article/3151060/decide-if-youre-a-hedgehog-or-a-fox.html&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8397" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T06:54:51.877" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12169" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12170" CreationDate="2020-01-10T08:24:42.990" Score="1" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not a native English speaker and cannot get the full meaning of this part of Artemus Ward's work named &quot;On Forts&quot;. I have highlighted difficult words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is rarely seldum that I seek consolation in the &lt;strong&gt;Flowin Bole&lt;/strong&gt;. But in a certain town in &lt;strong&gt;Injianny&lt;/strong&gt; in the Faul of 18—, my &lt;strong&gt;orgin grinder&lt;/strong&gt; got sick with the fever &amp;amp; died. I never felt so ashamed in my life, &amp;amp; I thowt I’d hist in a few swallers of suthin strengthnin. Konsequents was I &lt;strong&gt;histid&lt;/strong&gt; in so much I dident zackly know whare bowts I was. I turned my livin wild beasts of Pray loose into the streets and spilt all my &lt;strong&gt;wax wurks&lt;/strong&gt;. I then bet I cood play &lt;strong&gt;hoss&lt;/strong&gt;. So I hitched myself to a Kanawl bote, there bein two other hosses &lt;strong&gt;hicht&lt;/strong&gt; on also, one behind and anuther ahead of me. The driver hollerd for us to git up, and we did. But the hosses bein onused to sich a arrangemunt begun to kick &amp;amp; squeal and rair up. Konsequents was I was kickt vilently in the stummuck &amp;amp; back, and presuntly I fownd myself in the Kanawl with the other hosses, kickin &amp;amp; yellin like a tribe of Cusscaroorus savvijis. I was rescood, &amp;amp; as I was bein carrid to the tavern on a &lt;strong&gt;hemlock Bored&lt;/strong&gt; I sed in a feeble voise, “Boys, playin hoss isn’t my Fort.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will be pleased if someone translates the difficult informal words into formal English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8398" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-10T09:24:09.793" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T22:20:15.593" Title="Meaning of these dialect words and phrases from Artemus Ward, &quot;On Forts&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;artemus-ward&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12169" CreationDate="2020-01-10T11:49:38.727" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'Flowin bole'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Literally 'Flowing bowl', but figuratively 'alcohol', as in the traditional folksong  '&lt;a href=&quot;http://wychwood.wikidot.com/songbook-come-landlord&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Come Landlord Fill the Flowing Bowl&lt;/a&gt;'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come landlord fill the flowing bowl&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Until it doth run over.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Come landlord fill the flowing bowl&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Until it doth run over.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For tonight we'll merry merry be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For tonight we'll merry merry be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For tonight we'll merry merry be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tomorrow we'll be sober.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the phrase 'seek consolation in the Flowin Bole' is therefore 'take comfort in alcohol'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'a certain town in Injianny'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'Injianny' is the State of 'Indiana'. In '&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fUF3DnydmggC&amp;amp;pg=PA198&amp;amp;lpg=PA198&amp;amp;dq=He%20had%20come%20to%20Sac%20Prairie%20from%20Indiana,%20and%20he%20never%20ceased%20to%20sing%20the%20praises%20of%20%22Injianny,%20where%20I%20come%20from&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=eJ8M7a27-M&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0BUgbbO4m4avXam-qwcqXg1QJK4Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi1yvO9-fjmAhUkWhUIHZkiCFYQ6AEwAHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=He%20had%20come%20to%20Sac%20Prairie%20from%20Indiana%2C%20and%20he%20never%20ceased%20to%20sing%20the%20praises%20of%20%22Injianny%2C%20where%20I%20come%20from&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walden West' by August Derlleth&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He had come to Sac Prairie from Indiana, and he never ceased to sing the praises of &quot;Injianny, where I come from.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;'my orgin grinder got sick with the fever &amp;amp; died'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'Orgin grinder' is 'Organ Grinder', an operator of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_organ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'barrel' or 'Street' organ&lt;/a&gt;. Per wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In many towns in Europe the barrel street organ was not just a solo performer, but used by a group of musicians as part of a story-telling street act, together with brightly coloured posters and sing-along sessions. In New York City, the massive influx of Italian immigrants led to a situation where, by 1880, nearly one in 20 Italian men in certain areas were organ grinders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a quote I include further down shows, the narrator's character runs a Traveling Show, so presumably the barrel organ and its grinder had a role in drumming up trade to the show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Histid&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I struggled a little with this one, but believe it to be an 'eye-dialect' spelling of 'hoisted', which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/drunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; confirms as a synonym for 'drunk', which is the meaning suggested by the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Wax wurks&quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Simply &quot;wax works&quot;, ie wax models of famous people which, in his drunkenness he damaged. I think 'spilt' here is eye-dialect for 'spoiled' rather than standard English 'spilt' meaning 'spilled'.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;In the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ijl-W-QoacMC&amp;amp;pg=PT21&amp;amp;lpg=PT21&amp;amp;dq=traveling%20show%20waxworks&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=1RaqvQouOh&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2oEMAizft84YVJ-TWpp3bymcTDfQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOiJad8_jmAhXSYcAKHeMoAIkQ6AEwDXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=traveling%20show%20waxworks&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Traveling Show to Vaudeville:Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Artemus Ward assumed the showman’s persona for his stage “lectures” and his humorous essays on “the show bizness” in Vanity Fair. “I’m travelin with a tent, which is better nor [than] hirin hauls,” Ward announced to his readers in 1857. “ my show konsists of a serious of waxworks, snakes and a paneramy kalled a Grand Movin Diarea of the War in the Crymear, komic songs and the Cangeroo.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hoss&lt;/strong&gt;- Horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hicht&lt;/strong&gt;- Hitched&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hemlock Bored&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;'Hemlock board' ie a plank of wood from the 'Tsuga' family of trees, most likely &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wood-database.com/eastern-hemlock/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tsuga canadensis&lt;/a&gt;, (Eastern Hemlock) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.trada.co.uk/wood-species/hemlock-western/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tsuga heterophylla&lt;/a&gt; (Western Hemlock).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-01-11T22:20:15.593" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T22:20:15.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-10T14:32:08.470" Score="1" ViewCount="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished The Secret Generations, a British spy novel set around 1910 by John Gardner, and one character I am wondering about is Brenner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clearly mentioned that this is a codename for another character but which one?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if it is explicitly mentioned, or made clear in another way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8399" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T14:32:08.470" Title="Who is Brenner in The Secret Generations?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12166" CreationDate="2020-01-10T15:03:21.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's flowery description of Shakespeare's head.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For those unfamiliar with his work, the most famous image of Shakespeare is of a bald man with facial hair. Since most men of his era cultivated moustache and beard, it's the baldness that stands out. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pNyqy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pNyqy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our sour cream walls, donations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pictures and posters on the pale walls of the classroom are donated: the school cannot afford to provide them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's head,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among them is an image of Shakespeare, resplendent in his baldness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Cloudless at dawn, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dawn: this is an image of the sun. Shakespeare's bald head is shining, like a weak sun in the morning. Of course, it's cloudless because it's not really the sun at all, but a head. &quot;Cloudless&quot; simply fits the image better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;civilized dome riding all cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &quot;dome&quot; is a common description of a bald head. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a shape like one-half of a ball:&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Gerald had a long grey beard and a shiny bald dome (= head).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is civilized not only because Shakespeare was a well-mannered gentleman, unlike the poor unfortunates in the school. But also because Shakespeare's work, and the learning required to comprehend it is seen as a civilizing influence across the country. Hence it &quot;rides&quot; all cities. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Belled, flowery Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are additional classroom decorations. A photograph of an alpine valley, such as you might see in a travel brochure and also a map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that by focussing on the &lt;em&gt;image&lt;/em&gt; of Shakespeare, instead of his work, the poet is emphasising how it is likely only the picture the pupils are familiar with. It's all they know of his work and fame. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T15:03:21.647" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12133" CreationDate="2020-01-10T16:51:41.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's an example of emphasis by repetition.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major theme of the Crow cycle is how empirical methods of understanding the cosmos are doomed to failure in a spiritual sense. It doesn't matter how well science untangles the mysteries of nature: it brings humanity no nearer to being able to deal with the big questions of life and death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Owl's song is an example of this. The owl &quot;sings&quot; the world to total destruction but then (in the unquoted climax of the poem) the rocks and stars of his song come alive again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Seeing the clawtrack of star&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hearing the wingbeat of rock   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence his efforts have been in vain: his failure makes him afraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line you're trying to untangle is the climax of a series of escalating negatives. First we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;how the swan blanched forever&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a small thing. Swans are already white, &quot;blanched&quot;. But the choice of word also implies a more extreme process, boiling (we &quot;blanch&quot; vegetables in boiling water).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How the wolf threw away its telltale heart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is more extreme. The wolf, another living animal, has its heart sung away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then come to more inorganic, generalised distant forms, whose destruction is more difficult and, with each passing line is &quot;sung&quot; in a more extreme fashion. Until we come to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rock surrendered its last hope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is made of rock. Hope is foundational to the positive human experience. This is thus an image of extreme desolation, of total unmaking. Then, finally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And cold died beyond knowledge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there's one thing more universal and general than rock, it's cold. The cold of the dark vacuum left when the world is unmade. If cold can &quot;die&quot;, we are at the uttermost end of physical existence. There is nothing left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repetition of these lines highlights the growing extremity of what owl is attempting. The final line is thus a signal of ultimate emptiness, where there is no longer even basic physics to apply. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also the meaning of &quot;beyond knowledge&quot;. If the laws of physics no longer apply, we have no way of understanding, of &quot;knowing&quot; what that state is like, or how it came to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: As user @Randal'Thor very helpfully observers, all these lines are self-negating, fitting with and emphasising the negative picture that's being built up. The swan is already white. The wolf, in mythic tradition,  is a &quot;heartless&quot; predator. Air has no appearance and water creates numbness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41803808&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;THE POETRY OF TED HUGHES&lt;/a&gt;, P. E. Strauss, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 38 (May 1972), pp. 45-63 &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-01-13T09:43:25.790" LastActivityDate="2020-01-13T09:43:25.790" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12174" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-10T17:08:42.587" Score="2" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, do some of you happen to know, did Gustave Flaubert really say &lt;em&gt;Pulchritudo vitae in vico, ea videtur solummodo a poetis, ea non videtur a hominibus in vicis.&lt;/em&gt; or anything like that? If so, where?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he did not say that, do you know where that quote actually originates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastActivityDate="2020-01-10T17:08:42.587" Title="A quote supposedly from Gustave Flaubert" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12176" CreationDate="2020-01-10T20:46:50.893" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elizabeth  had  caught  the  scarlet  fever;  her  illness  was  severe,  and she  was  in  the  greatest  danger.  During  her  illness  many  arguments  had  been  urged  to  persuade  my  mother  to  refrain from  attending  upon  her.  She  had  at  first  yielded  to  our  entreaties,  but  when  she  heard  that  the  life  of  her  favourite was  menaced,  she  could  no  longer  control  her  anxiety.  She attended  her  sickbed;  her  watchful  attentions  triumphed over  the  malignity  of  the  distemper—Elizabeth  was  saved, but  the  consequences  of  this  imprudence  were  fatal  to  her preserver.  On  the  third  day  my  mother  sickened&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why were they keeping the mother from helping the daughter? Is this a contagious disease or I missed something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8386" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-11T09:14:41.277" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:06:29.497" Title="Why were they keeping the mother from helping the daughter in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein?" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12175" CreationDate="2020-01-10T20:53:16.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Check out the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_fever&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry on scarlet fever&lt;/a&gt;, I don't know if this is really related, but it is a bacterial infection. Considering that at the time the story goes there were no antibiotics, I might be mistaken on this one but I think people didn't even used to wash hands when handling sick people, I don't know how people were educated though, but that would improve the chances of someone getting sick. Contracting it could be potentially fatal. As it says in the Wikipedia article, it was a major cause of infant mortality in the early 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8375" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T17:06:29.497" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:06:29.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12163" CreationDate="2020-01-10T22:51:36.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short Answer:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I believe one of the main unifying themes in Pynchon's work is history, and more specifically the question of how history is relevant to the present; how, and in what way, do we and can we make use of historical fact and narrative? In my reading, Pynchon’s “novels of ideas,” as @AdamGold nicely describes them, use the preconceptions underlying great, overarching ideas like technology and paranoia to interrogate precisely the normal ways we interpret history on global, cultural, social, and personal levels, and the ways we perceive these levels as interacting. (I think Pynchon chooses to really upset the traditional novel form as part of this strategy of interrogation, but that is off topic here). What is to be learned from these interrogations, however, is much harder to say, and I think this is where the really productive conversations on Pynchon's work and its relevance can/do occur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A full elaboration, for those interested (~1000 words):&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following @AdamGold, there is a certain bedrock for ideas in history. In his engagement with history and with the grand ideas of humanity, I think Pynchon uses the conceptions behind great, overarching ideas like technology and paranoia to interrogate precisely the normal ways we interpret history on global, cultural, social, and personal levels, and the ways we perceive these levels as interacting. &#xA;To begin with examples, consider what David Cowart says regarding German thought and &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; in his book &lt;em&gt;Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For Pynchon, the West defines itself by a negative capability of ultimately German provenance: a secular dream of total knowledge and power coexists uneasily with a vision of transcendence [i.e. Philosophical Idealism]. ... These paradoxes of Western culture, the thematic substance of much of Pynchon's work, often find their focus in specific meditations on Germany, German culture, and German intellectual and social history. (58-59)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly, it is hard to say that &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; ends by nicely resolving this tension or refuting this Faustian impetus in the West as something left behind with the Nazis. Updating this, &lt;em&gt;Bleeding Edge&lt;/em&gt; confronts a similar tension between transcendence and capitalism in the internet / terrorist era (to entirely gloss a 450 page novel). Technology and paranoia are two other major modern ideologically-driven ideas and sources of propelling tensions that Pynchon really digs into in his works. As an example from &lt;em&gt;Gravity’s Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;, Imoplex G (and with it the Schwartzgarat, Blicero, the Herero, Jamf’s life in Si-N biology, and other intertwined storylines) really dives into the tension created by a conflation of technological progress with social progress;  this same tension is explored too in Pynchon’s essay “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Is It O.K. to be a Luddite?&lt;/a&gt;”. Importantly, where many people like to focus on the sort of mad-cap characters and storylines, I think it is important to pay attention to what happens with these grand ideas and the tensions they build come the end of Pynchon's novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, though, I think a certain level of subjective interpretation becomes inevitable. Pynchon opens up these capacious critiques within the truly incredible breadth of human experience available to him, but what does he do with them? I think the answer depends on how one reads his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at &lt;em&gt;Against the Day&lt;/em&gt;, for example, there are a plethora of narratives that all converge with the beginning of the first world war. One could read this convergence as orchestrated to raise a particular sort of questioning: In what ways do the American characters and their narratives, history, etc., bear on the European situation? What types of technological progress precipitate what outcomes? And as everyone is sent headlong into various catastrophes, personal or world-historical, is there any way to stop these events? Was there a pivotal moment or moments where a certain decisive action could have possibly averted the destruction to come? &lt;em&gt;Gravity's Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; is no different. During the span of the novel (only ~2 years) there is a constant return to past episodes, again both personal and world-historical, in an attempt to understand the current destruction and chaos. If you read closely, the characters do in fact have their questions answered, and hard-won knowledge abounds - and yet, what does it amount to? Certainly it does not have the effects the novel's protagonists desired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pynchon, I believe, elaborately constructs his engagements with history intentionally in order to raise and criticize the idea of a “what if” questioning of history along with the type of understanding of history / ideas it implies. To wit, think how many times someone has said “If we had a time machine, we could go back in time and kill Hitler and prevent WW2!” I think Pynchon precisely rejects such an understanding as one completely failing to grasp the complexities of the human race and the extent to which grand ideas, not so much individual actors, create a certain inevitability. Perhaps Pynchon’s message, if there is an explicit one, might be to teach us that we keep playing into these grand ideas and their underlying ideologies. But then, after refuting that, what is there? How to make sense of history, what to do with it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pynchon uses this incommensurate juxtaposition of individual lives and world history to interrogate the grand ideologies he sees as both driving the people of a particular time and place and part of a larger symptom of the human condition.  Consequently, his characters can be read as embodying engagements with ideas, ways of living ideas, which get swept up in the whirlwind of human complexities; yet through this they also embody, at least in my reading, some very deep human feelings and emotional experiences (that their ability to present to the reader feelings about ideas and life doesn’t necessarily require a fully functioning person as we normally think about characters I see as one of Pynchon’s great insights).  Who could possibly shoulder the weight of ideas? I think the end of &lt;em&gt;Gravity’s Rainbow&lt;/em&gt; nicely addresses this incommensurability of individuals with history and ideas: some characters give up, some go on searching, and (perhaps) nothing really changed. As everything sort of dissolves come the end of the novels, I moreover will admit that I see where some people are able to read him as saying nothing, just a bizarre postmodern send-up of humanity, just for the kicks, or just for the smug laugh - I disagree, but I’ll grant such a reading it’s place. Largely, I feel that Pynchon, intentionally or not, mirrors his protagonists, always striving to understand the grand structure of history, society, and the &quot;powers that be&quot; and their grand plans, getting ever more frustrated and angry, ever more paranoid, and ever more lost - how many thousands of pages (and counting?) must he/they cross to find where humanity is going?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I realize that is both a very long and vague answer including my own personal take on a lot, but hopefully it’s enough for anyone who has read this far to begin to form their own reading of Pynchon’s convoluted grandiosity. Thanks @AdamGold for the discussion that helped develop this answer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8403" LastEditorUserId="8403" LastEditDate="2020-01-15T23:04:28.343" LastActivityDate="2020-01-15T23:04:28.343" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12258" CreationDate="2020-01-11T00:23:00.260" Score="3" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45480/when-lilacs-last-in-the-dooryard-bloomd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Walt Whitman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the &lt;strong&gt;tally&lt;/strong&gt; of my soul,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Loud in the pines and cedars dim,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And I with my comrades there in the night.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;As to long panoramas of visions.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;tally&quot;? Does it mean &quot;correspondence&quot; or &quot;agreement&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does Whitman mean by two last lines? Can anyone explain these two lines?  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T10:27:32.430" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T23:25:01.570" Title="Meaning of &quot;tally&quot; in Whitman's &quot;When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2020-01-11T00:50:27.997" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Do you think it might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_His_Bootstraps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;By His Bootstraps&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Heinlein? It takes place in a single room, rather than a boat, but the rest of it fits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8404" LastEditorUserId="5694" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T21:45:37.907" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T21:45:37.907" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12180" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2020-01-11T00:53:16.697" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Another Possibility - but not as close - might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Folded_Himself&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Man Who Folded Himself&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. He ends up having relationships (and relations) with himself, though, and you said there was no sex in your original post. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8404" LastEditorUserId="5694" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T21:45:31.537" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T21:45:31.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11893" CreationDate="2020-01-11T01:13:46.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Burroughs' &lt;em&gt;Naked Lunch&lt;/em&gt; presents the challenge of having woven some very significant themes and social commentary up in a fragmentary and obscene narrative written in a disorienting style. Some of these profound themes &amp;amp; literary significance include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Power, including state &amp;amp; governmental power, bureaucratic power, the power of biology to determine one's life, the power of addiction and sex, and the power of and over death. All of these get intermingled in a way that at the time was quite fresh.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Style: The book is written in a style that is intentionally colloquial and intentionally that of the outlaw. This really alienated the general middle-class American reading public at the time - not only was the book offensive, but it seemed to be written in some sort of dangerous code. Again, at the time quite sensational. Additionally, the non-linearity was much admired by numerous artists and authors and later appropriated in various ways.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sex, vice, and violence: the novel has  quite radical presentations of this subject matter for the time, including homosexuality. It was actually the last (text-only) book to be banned in America (banned in MA, then overturned in a rather significant court case, adding to the book's influence).  &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Satire: Certainly there is debate about which parts are satirical and which are not, but, for example, the political parties of Interzone satirize both our own political parties and the ways power and influence are conceived politically (mind-control, clones, eradication).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Social commentary &amp;amp; critique: The characters in the vignettes are largely satirical, and the vignettes themselves are often an intentionally hyperbolic gloss on American cultural attitudes towards sex, drugs, legality, and the status quo, written using various bastardized American dialects and discourses.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Philosophy: This book has, rightly or wrongly, provided a fodder for a number of philosophical positions, perhaps most notably the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatteri .&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This list could go on, but these are the most salient ones to mention. If you ever look at the reasons authors, artists, and scholars give for citing Burroughs' &lt;em&gt;Naked Lunch&lt;/em&gt; as an influence, you'll note the disparate range, everything from &quot;I, too, like drugs&quot; to &quot;He changed the way I conceptualized the relation between the human mind and body.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sixty years later, some of the novel's impact has faded, arguably because of the influence it had on other anti-establishment authors and artists, and arguably just because 60 years on, especially post-Vietnam and post-internet, social protest and the proliferation of &quot;obscenities&quot; are more mundane. It's definitely a fascinating book, and very articulate, as you said, but to what end? I'm not convinced Burroughs had an end in mind when he wrote (in spite of what he may claim in interviews), and that ultimately it's the brazen strangeness (for want of a better word) of the book that has acted as an influential and productive source of inspiration for some people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Additional Reading, if you're interested:&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;You also used the word &quot;fascinating&quot; - there is a very good book called &lt;em&gt;William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination&lt;/em&gt; by Oliver Harris that focuses on precisely what you ask about, covering what lead up to Burroughs' writing of &lt;em&gt;Junky&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Naked Lunch&lt;/em&gt; and the books' relation to America that lead to their volatile and influential reception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burroughs also further develops the themes in Naked Lunch to an extreme degree in &lt;em&gt;The Soft Machine&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Nova Express&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Ticket That Exploded&lt;/em&gt; (the cut-up books). Then Burroughs  refines them into a more readable, cohesive form in &lt;em&gt;Cities of the Red Night&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Place of Dead Roads&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Western Lands&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8403" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T01:13:46.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12119" CreationDate="2020-01-11T16:31:17.790" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds very like ‘&lt;strong&gt;The Seventh Voyage of Ijon Tichy&lt;/strong&gt;’ by &lt;strong&gt;Stanisław Lem&lt;/strong&gt;, collected in &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_Diaries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Star Diaries&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The collection was first published in Polish as &lt;em&gt;Dzienniki Gwiazdowe&lt;/em&gt; in 1957; the English translation by Michael Kandel appeared in 1976. This story has all the features you remembered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Ijon Tichy is travelling alone in a spaceship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was on a Monday, April second—I was cruising in thie vicinity of Betelgeuse—when a meteor no larger than a lima bean pierced the hull, shattered the drive regulator and part of the rudder, as a result of which the rocket lost all maneouverability. I put on my spacesuit, went outside and tried to fix the mechanism, but found I couldn’t possibly attach the spare rudder—which I’d had the foresight to bring along—without the help of another man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His spaceship gets caught in a region of time vortices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately this was a complete stellar wilderness, avoided by all vessels as a region unusually dangerous, for in it lay gravitational vortices, as formidable as they were mysterious, one hundred and forty-seven of them in all […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A thick volume of the General Theory of Relativity […] spoke of the manifestation of the ‘time loop,’ that is, the bending of the direction of the flow of time in the presence of gravitational fields of great intensity, which phenomenon might even on occasion lead to the complete reversal of time and the ‘duplication of the present.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Another version of Tichy appears inside the spaceship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I opened my eyes and saw a man standing over the bed; his face was strangely familiar, though I hadn’t the faintest idea who this could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Get up,’ he said, ‘and take the pliers, we’re going out and screwing on the rudder bolts’ […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Don’t you recognize me? Look here!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And saying this, he pointed to the two warts, big as strawberries, on his left cheek. Instinctively I clutched my own face, for yes, I had two warts, exactly the same, and in that very place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;More copies of Tichy appear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘From what day of the week are you?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Wednesday,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s get that rudder fixed while we have the chance!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘But where’s the Monday me?’ I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Gone. Which means, I suppose, that you are he.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘How is that?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Well, the Monday me on Monday night became, Tuesday morning, the Tuesday me, and so on.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The copies are farcically unable to co-operate in fixing the rudder:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And so we quarreled, in opposite roles, during which he did in fact drive me into a positive fury, for he persistently refused to fix the rudder and it did no good calling him pigheaded and a stubborn mule. And when at last I managed to convince him, we plunged into the next gravitational vortex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The more copies turn up, the more chaotic it becomes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The problem was, who had hit whom, and when. The situation was complicated by the fact that there now had appeared morning me's and afternoon me's—I feared that if things went on like this, I would soon be broken into minutes and seconds—and then too, the majority of me's present were lying like mad, so that to this day I'm not altogether sure whom I hit and who hit me when that whole business took place, triangularly, between the Thursday, the Friday and the Wednesday me's all of whom I was in turn. My impression is that because I had lied to the Friday me, pretending to be the Sunday me, I ended up with one blow more than I should have, going by the calendar. But I would prefer not to dwell any longer on these unpleasant memories; a man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The number of copies grows absurdly large:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Upon passage through a particularly strong positive vortex we hardly fit in the cabin and corridor, and opening the hatch was out of the question—there simply wasn’t room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are copies of different ages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the worst of it was, these time displacements were increasing in amplitude, a few grayhaired me’s had already appeared, and here and there I even caught a glimpse of the close-cropped heads of children, that is of myself, of course—or rather—myselves from the halcyon days of boyhood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-01-11T16:31:17.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12163" CreationDate="2020-01-12T04:50:52.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;@spassgodzilla, I'm going to start with a generalisation that's so broad as to be almost meaningless but it's helpful for what I want to say so here we go. There are 'novels of ideas' and then there are 'novels of not ideas'. Of course all fiction needs infusing with some ideas but my contrast is more between the authors. Thomas Mann (quintessential), Herman Broch, Herman Hesse ('The Glass Beed Game' is a perfect example) and Dostoyevsky are a tiny, wholly arbitrary selection of writers who have authored what I'm calling 'novels of ideas'. They use their artform to embrace the grandest facets of existence. While I'm not looking to situate Pynchon within a particular literary tradition, it is important to say that he is also interested in addressing the really big ideas. Thus it is easy for me to wholeheartedly agree with your very first sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there will be space to comment on your response point by point but with respect to your second paragraph: yes/no. Yes, he inserts grand historical perspectives on the one hand and, as one device to examine them, uses characters placed within short spans of history. I think one of the reasons he uses the latter so effectively is based on his exceptional powers of evocation: while I didn't grow up in London during WWII, I am a Londonder and the place he creates in Gravity's Rainbow (&amp;quot;GR&amp;quot;) tallies with so much of the non-verbal experience of London that has been passed on. My 'no' concerns the following: he's certainly creating non-fictional historical arcs which usually emcompass real catastrophe but I don't read this as a vehicle for the 'what/if' type of examination you refer to. The history is there firstly because 'big ideas' are rarely examined in isolation from the historical bedrock upon which they rest - this is crucial. My second reason begins after the next paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;bedrock upon which the history rests, which encapsulates 'big ideas'&amp;quot; (!!) is obviously going to be populated with themes that interest Pynchon some of which span across quite a lot of his work. Technology and paranoia are probably the two concepts most associated with him which is sort of right although easily misportrayed or misunderstood. I won't say more about this now other than they are clearly intertwined and symbiotic, not existing separately. You also allude to some additional concepts which I, too, see as relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the 'no' in my 'yes/no'. His reconstruction of historical narratives - which are usually faithful (unlike the adherence of certain of his characters to the laws of physics) - and which not just in GR, often happen during periods of conflict and catastrophe, are a thin veil for a type of moralising. Not the most obvious leap, I appreciate but I first started thinking about it after I read this article he wrote for The New York Times about Watts, LA a year after the riots: &lt;a href=&quot;http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Journey Into The Mind of Watts&lt;/a&gt;. Unsurprisingly it's full of perceptive commentary but it also does not hold back on a very clear message along the lines of: there are no scenarios in which vile levels of racsim do not exist. It's a fool's game to base interpretation on authorial intent or guesses as to the author's pyschology at the time of writing but still, I'm going to say the essay is the work of an angry man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about in the context of GR? Surely he did not choose to write a novel about WWII which has but the vestiges of a semi-coherent plot, solely to display his writing talent and to show he possessed a polymath's encyclopedic erudition? He wrote GR approximately thirty years after humanity had reached its lowest ebb. Dwell on this lowest ebb, think about it deeply and the angry man might just re-emerge in particularly incandescent form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you heard of a piece of writing by Dostoyevsky called &amp;quot;The Grand Inquisitor&amp;quot;? If you have read the &amp;quot;Brothers Karamzov&amp;quot; you will have as it's a chapter in the novel but it is also recognised as a standalone piece of literature. Christ returns to earth in the 16th century in Seville, is imprisoned and then the Grand Inquistor talks to / excoriates him for earning humanity its freedom as most people cannot shoulder the burden. I say this completely subjectively but for me, no other author can make his characters shriek at the reader as Dostoyevsky does, whether out of anger, despair, frustration etc. The Grand Inquisitor shrieks at Christ for failing humanity. In GR, humanity shrieks at humanity for failing itself, sometimes to the point where the tools to express the magnitude of digust and despair don't exist (I think that is what partly explains the splintering of Slothrop in the final section). If we try, we'll have a custard pie fight with a plane from a hot air baloon, suck on bitumen-flavoured boiled sweets, eat shit and die of E Coli infections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TO BE VERY CLEAR, this comparison between Dostoevsky and Pynchon is merely for the convenience of exposition, I'm not suggesting a deeper connection (actually it is not something I have ever thought about). For whatever reason, Pynchon decided upon a portrayal of WWII (quasi-non-linear in character!) with which he constructed a literary edifice which could perpetuate the appropriate 'shriek'. No excuses, extant or implied, are offered up. GR is screaming &amp;quot;THIS happened. HOW can this have happened?&amp;quot; And all the while the frantic search for &amp;quot;00000&amp;quot; continues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realise, that's a wafer thin description of what I have labelled 'moralising' in the service of rendering history's judgment. Additionally, there is lots of wonderful Pynchon banter which contributes. Imoplex G is one excerpt which I actually think is really important (and he certainly devotes a lot of pages to it). Imho, it's a vision of the world arming itself for war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Random question: I've never really understood how Rilke fits into GR. Anyone have any ideas?]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case I've performed the function of a sleeping pill, I should probably stop here although I do have a lot more to say. Before I forget, I haven't read Cowart's book, I'll be interested to check it out. To list some other areas that interest me: in &amp;quot;V.&amp;quot;, the detailed description of the proto-holocaust perpetrated by the Germans against the Herero people in SW Africa is an integral cross novel thread and self-evidently important. &amp;quot;V.&amp;quot; also presents to us for the first time Blicero and Gottfried. It is not hard to extrapolate what is described in &amp;quot;V.&amp;quot; to GR. I wouldn't attempt a reductive explanation of the Blicero-Gottfried relationship here but I would say it may possibly be making some arresting comments about love that a person could find disturbing. I think &amp;quot;V.&amp;quot; also has some lovely things to say about love when Benny finds it at the end (it really annoys me when people describe Pynchon as 'non-feeling'). And lastly I'm in no doubt: on the final page the rocket hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8390" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T22:42:24.257" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T22:42:24.257" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12188" CreationDate="2020-01-12T13:03:05.310" Score="4" ViewCount="314" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, my Latin textbook, Hereditas Linguae Latinae, tells me (in the lesson about deponent verbs) that Jean de La Fontaine wrote, at the end of his fable The Cock and the Jewel, a Latin saying &lt;em&gt;Stulti semper sic statuuntur, quae non intellegunt, aspernantur et abutuntur.&lt;/em&gt;, and translates it to Croatian as &lt;em&gt;Budale uvijek tako sude, što ne shvaćaju, preziru i kude.&lt;/em&gt; (Fools always reason that way, that which they don't understand, they despise and abuse.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, did Jean de La Fontaine really write that? If not, do you happen to know who did?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: What intrigued me the most is that the Latin quote has a rhyme, as if it were truly taken from some Latin poem. However, it's clear now that it isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="8400" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T15:48:34.227" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T15:48:34.227" Title="A quote supposedly by Jean de La Fontaine" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12187" CreationDate="2020-01-12T13:21:06.970" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have figured out where they got the quote form. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=Budale+uvijek+tako+sude,+%C5%A1to+ne+shva%C4%87aju,+preziru+i+kude+Zvonimir+Balog,&amp;amp;sxsrf=ACYBGNTDM4XmpWnKvEaz5YE5E8MtUOXzrA:1578842913953&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjliquYsP7mAhXsQ98KHa05BSkQ_AUoAXoECAgQCQ&amp;amp;biw=1066&amp;amp;bih=559&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Googling the original quote&lt;/a&gt; in Croatian shows that the line&#xA;appears in the book &lt;em&gt;Zlatna knjiga svjetske poezije za djecu&lt;/em&gt; by Zvonimir Balog, which Google translate says means &lt;em&gt;The Golden Book of World Poetry for Children&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MY ORIGINAL ANSWER, which shows that Jean de la Fontaine never wrote anything like this quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is &lt;em&gt;Le Coq et la perle&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Cock and the Pearl&lt;/em&gt;). This is one of Jean de la Fontaine's poems which he has taken directly from Aesop's Fables (the first verse, at least) and it goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Un jour un Coq détourna&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Une perle qu'il donna&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Au beau premier Lapidaire :&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Je la crois fine, dit-il ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mais le moindre grain de mil&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Serait bien mieux mon affaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Un ignorant hérita&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  D'un manuscrit qu'il porta&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Chez son voisin le Libraire.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Je crois, dit-il, qu'il est bon ;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mais le moindre ducaton&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Serait bien mieux mon affaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A translation (I used Google translate, and fixed the things that were obviously wrong):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One day a Rooster uncovered&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A pearl, which he gave&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To a premier Jeweler:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I think it is fine, he said;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the smallest grain of millet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Would be much more my business.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An unlearned man inherited&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A manuscript, which he took&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To his neighbor the bookseller.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I think, he said, that it is good;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the smallest silver coin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Would be much more my business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was translated here was not part of the poem itself, but what seems to be the moral of the poem, which de la Fontaine did not include in his poem (the moral is part of other fables of de la Fontaine). The moral is often included in other versions of &lt;em&gt;Aesop's Fables&lt;/em&gt;: for example, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/17/1/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A COCK was once strutting up and down the farmyard among the hens when suddenly he espied something shining amid the straw. “Ho! ho!” quoth he, “that’s for me,” and soon rooted it out from beneath the straw. What did it turn out to be but a Pearl that by some chance had been lost in the yard? “You may be a treasure,” quoth Master Cock, “to men that prize you, but for me I would rather have a single barley-corn than a peck of pearls.”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“PRECIOUS THINGS ARE FOR THOSE THAT CAN PRIZE THEM.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moral here is different from that in your Latin book, but other versions of this fable have morals closer to your original quote. A version by Robert Henryson goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This Cock, desiring nothing more than corn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  May to that fool be easily compared&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who at all learning makes a mock and scorn,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Decrying it; of truth he is affeared ... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So certainly, your quote was not written in Latin by Jean de la Fontaine, and is not a translation into Latin of anything he wrote in French. However, it does seem like a translation into Latin of the moral of &lt;em&gt;The Cock and the Jewel&lt;/em&gt;. I have no idea where the authors of your book found it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-01-12T15:29:46.543" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T15:29:46.543" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12189" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-12T14:06:08.910" Score="4" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently annotated this poem and when looking online, I have found that my interpretation of the poem in some aspects is a bit different to most others. I just want to make sure that my interpretation of this poem is also valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, up till line 25, the tone is quite serene (which i agree with) but in addition, I also feel there is a bit of sense of foreboding involved because of a few things. The moon is out, so the events are occurring in the midst of night, which connotes evil. Also, the mountains are described as &quot;hoary&quot; - which means greyish-white - and the colour grey has connotations of a lack of emotion, so therefore this portrays the mountains as ruthless and evil. The &quot;mountain echoes&quot; are also following the poet, therefore hinting at the possibility that something might happen. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do you guys think of this interpretation? Would you say its valid? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate any answers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to access the poem I am talking about, go to this website: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/171147-poetry-anthology-towards-a-world-unknown.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.ocr.org.uk/Images/171147-poetry-anthology-towards-a-world-unknown.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and scroll to page 20. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8412" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T00:12:24.833" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T00:12:24.833" Title="A slightly different interpretation in the poem &quot;Boat Stealing&quot; by Wordsworth" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12190" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-12T18:36:28.703" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Silence is the language of God; all else is poor translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this quote, like many, attributed to Rumi (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/27617-silence-is-the-language-of-god-all-else-is-poor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://paulocoelhoblog.com/2015/10/02/character-of-the-week-rumi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://thequotes.in/silence-is-the-language-of-god-all-else-is-poor-translation-rumi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt; non-verifiable sources). Since Rumi quotes are &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9117/17&quot;&gt;notoriously often mistranslated or misattributed&lt;/a&gt;, this needs a better source to be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Rumi actually write this? If so, where?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-12T18:36:28.703" Title="Did Rumi actually say &quot;Silence is the language of God; all else is poor translation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-13T23:52:53.143" Score="2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;On Wikipedia I came across a quote by Tacitus which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire;&lt;br&gt; &#xA;  and where they make a desert, they call it peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From my school days I remember a very similar quote by Martial, but after more than two decades and some relocations my old textbook is lost. I wanted to find out about it, but on the internet there's no trace of it so I have to rely on my memories. I remember that the textbook said that Martial beside the Epigrams wrote a minor epic poem. In that poem a Barbarian chief before a battle with the Romans addressed his tribe and said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They rape, they kill, they plunder, they burn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  they leave a desert and they call it peace&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I prefer the supposed Martial's version, the translation has a stronger rhythm. Did he really write it? Is there any reference somewhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8416" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T13:27:35.420" Title="Does this quote by Martial really exist?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12194" CreationDate="2020-01-14T13:27:35.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tacitus's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/9090/pg9090-images.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Agricola&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says, at the end of XXX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;XXX. &quot;... Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7524/7524-h/7524-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is to say&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be possible that Martial wrote something along the same lines, and that Tacitus borrowed Martial's simile, but Google has not helped me verify this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2020-01-14T13:27:35.420" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12203" CreationDate="2020-01-16T01:17:46.967" Score="2" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a high school course in English literature, I'm reading Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a  basic multiple choice question about Act IV, scene I, I am given the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Witches threw into the cauldron &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I. eye of bat and tongue of frog&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  II. wool of bat and tongue of dog&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  III. fang of snake and eagle's glare &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A. I and II&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B. I and III&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  C. II and III&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite my best efforts, I've only been able to find references to the second choice &quot;II. wool of bat and tongue of dog.&quot; This doesn't satisfy the question as it requires two choices. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something obvious from the text? I can't find anything and it seems to me that this course was developed as some kind of a practical joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8425" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-01-16T07:02:51.060" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T15:17:56.520" Title="Do the witches in Macbeth ever mention &quot;eye of bat and tongue of frog&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12202" CreationDate="2020-01-16T10:33:28.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the First Folio (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeareswords.com/Public/Play.aspx?Content=Text&amp;amp;WorkId=13&amp;amp;Act=4&amp;amp;Scene=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ShakespearesWords.com&lt;/a&gt;), which contained the first printed version of the play, the relevant lines read as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fillet of a Fenny Snake,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  In the Cauldron boyle and bake:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Eye of Newt, and Toe of Frogge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Wooll of Bat, and Tongue of Dogge&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Adders Forke, and Blinde-wormes Sting,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Lizards legge, and Howlets wing:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  For a Charme of powrefull trouble,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Like a Hell-broth, boyle and bubble.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Scale of Dragon, Tooth of Wolfe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Of the rauin'd salt Sea sharke:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Roote of Hemlocke, digg'd i'th' darke:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Liuer of Blaspheming Iew,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Gall of Goate, and Slippes of Yew,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Sliuer'd in the Moones Ecclipse:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Nose of Turke, and Tartars lips:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Finger of Birth-strangled Babe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ditch-deliuer'd by a Drab,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Make the Grewell thicke, and slab.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Adde thereto a Tigers Chawdron,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  For th' Ingredience of our Cawdron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;fang&quot; does not appear in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;; &quot;snake&quot; appears in the current scene and in Act III, scene 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have scotch’d the snake, not kill’d it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world &quot;glare&quot; occurs only once in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, namely in Act III, Scene 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thou hast no speculation in those eyes &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Which thou dost glare with!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The forms &quot;eagle&quot; and &quot;eagle's&quot; do not appear in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;; the plural form &quot;eagles&quot; does, namely in Act I, Scene 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As sparrows eagles, or the hare the lion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is either an error in the multiple choice question, or the authors used an edition of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; that deviates significantly from the text in the First Folio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: When you search &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/search?q=&amp;quot;eye+of+bat&amp;quot;+&amp;quot;tongue+of+frog&amp;quot;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;eye of bat&quot; &quot;tongue of frog&quot; in Google&lt;/a&gt;, all you get is web pages about the test quoted in the question, sometimes with an answer key claiming that the options I and II are correct. This search did not give any results that actually quote an edition of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; in which the phrase &quot;eye of bat and tongue of frog&quot; occurs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Spagirl pointed out in a comment, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://quizizz.com/admin/quiz/5c9aba433f0973001be68559/macbeth-unit-review&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version of the quiz hosted at Quizziz&lt;/a&gt; has a fourth answer option, &quot;Only II&quot;, which would be the correct answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-16T15:17:56.520" LastActivityDate="2020-01-16T15:17:56.520" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12204" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12216" CreationDate="2020-01-16T21:08:19.400" Score="3" ViewCount="830" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Tolkien&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christopher John Reuel Tolkien&lt;/a&gt;, J. R. R. Tolkien's third son, died very recently. He is best know for editing and publishing materials he inherited from his father, including these three books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Children of Húrin&lt;/em&gt; (2007),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beren and Lúthien&lt;/em&gt; (2017),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fall of Gondolin&lt;/em&gt; (2018).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beren_and_L%C3%BAthien&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;story of Beren and Lúthien&lt;/a&gt; &quot;takes place during the First Age of Middle-earth, about 6,500 years before the events of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. All three stories appear to be set in the First Age, however, I have not been able to figure out what the internal chronological order of these stories is, or whether the clues for their internal order can be inferred from certain clues (either in the stories themselves or in statements made by J. R. R. Tolkien). Is there any such information?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: This question is not about &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/15534/89356&quot;&gt;In what order should Tolkien's writings on Middle-earth be read?&lt;/a&gt;, because that type of advice is not necessarily based on internal chronological order. I also looked at &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/141056/89356&quot;&gt;What is the chronological reading order for the fictional elements of The History of Middle-earth series?&lt;/a&gt;, but the answer there does not list &lt;em&gt;Beren and Lúthien&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Fall of Gondolin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/quentaendor/status/1218128172128129024&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter account Quenta Endor&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Beren and Lúthien&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Children of Húrin&lt;/em&gt;, and finally the &lt;em&gt;Fall of Gondolin&lt;/em&gt; is the chronological order of those three particular stories&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T08:08:13.003" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T08:08:13.003" Title="What is the internal order of Christopher Tolkien's last three books in the Middle-earth legendarium?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;christopher-tolkien&gt;&lt;tolkiens-legendarium&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5373" CreationDate="2020-01-17T04:06:21.710" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Analyse the rhythm of any line of blank verse in Shakespeare. Almost none of his lines—accent them however you please—conform exactly to the underlying iambic metrical schema when spoken naturally. But they still sound melodious and regular. Are you saying that none of these lines of verse is really iambic? That would be ridiculous. Blank verse is iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing the divergence between spoken language and its underlying metrical structure is the first step in understanding poetry. Think how monotonous poetry (or ordinary language) would sound if it had a mechanical rhythm. Go back to Baudelaire and observe the endless inventiveness in the rhythm of his lines. (French &quot;syllabic&quot; verse is beautifully metrical, like Greek or Latin, or Italian, or English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of this essential feature of language (i.e., divergence, which is not quite the same as &quot;scudding&quot;; scudding only applies to iambic verse in English and maybe Russian) ordinary speech can be &quot;parsed&quot; into any underlying metrical schema you please. The boundaries of language are open-ended, and the permutations of meter are endless. Rhythm is not mechanical, but infinite, like an organism. Quantity (unlike bare &quot;accent&quot;) is infinitely divisible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus there is no way to &quot;prove&quot; that iambic meter is the underlying meter of natural language. Go ahead and pick a meter. But I doubt you speak limerick. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8428" LastActivityDate="2020-01-17T04:06:21.710" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11793" CreationDate="2020-01-18T15:50:16.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have consulted several translations and each of them renders the &amp;quot;proportions&amp;quot; the same, i.e. one third man and two thirds god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This claim has been translated in slightly different ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Andrew George's translation (Penguin, 1999), we find the following lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gilgamesh was his name from the day he was born,&#xA;two-thirds of him god and one third human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Andrew George relied on the actual tablets for most of his translation, instead of the pen-and-paper drawings provided by other assyriologists.&#xA;He also published the currently most authorative edition of the Akkadian texts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Stefam M. Maul's German translation (C. H. Beck, 2005):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Gilgamesh&amp;quot; ist er seit dem Tage, da er geboren, mit Namen genannt,&#xA;Zwei Drittel an ihm sind Gott, doch sein (drittes) Drittel, das ist Mensch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&amp;quot;(...), / Two thirds of him are god, but his (third) third part, that is human.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Wolgang Röllig's German translation (Reclam, 2009):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Den Namen Gilgamesh trägt er seit dem Tag seiner Geburt.&#xA;Zwei Drittel von ihm sind Gott, ein Drittel Mensch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&amp;quot;(...), / Two thirds of him are god, one third human.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Benjamin R. Foster's translation (second edition, Norton, 2019):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gilgamesh was singled out from the day of his birth,&#xA;Two-thirds of him was divine, one-third of him was human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most interesting difference here is the different tenses that are used in these lines.&#xA;The context of these verses is the narrator's account of Gilgamesh' achievements, which, from the narrator's point of view, are situated in the past.&#xA;However, the tense in the verse describing the godly and human shares in Gilgamesh is sometimes a past tense (Foster), sometimes a present tense (both German translations), while Andrew George avoids choosing a specific tense.&#xA;(Possibly, Akkadian verbs did not have tenses, like Standard Chinese today.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The present tense can be defended on the ground that Gilgamesh was deified after his death and became one of the judges in the Netherworld (thereby achieving the immortality he had been looking for).&#xA;This would assume that Gilgamesh did not lose his human share after his deification.&#xA;So is the narrator's description of the godly and human shares based on the later deification of Gilgamesh, or are there any arguments that support the thesis that he is describing the shares as they were before the death of Gilgamesh?&#xA;It appears to be the latter, since these shares are also mentioned by the scorpion-man's mate in Tablet IX (in Andrew George's translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two-thirds of him is god, and one third human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translators do not always explain the two-thirds-versus-one-third ratio. Andrew George and Benjamin R. Foster do not comment on it at all.&#xA;Stefan M. Maul (page 155) points out that Lugalbanda, who is considered Gilgamesh' father, was also deified after his death, so Gilgamesh may have inherited a both a human and a godly part from him. (His is not clear on the &amp;quot;biology&amp;quot;: did the union between Lugalbanda and Ninsun take place before or after his death?)&#xA;Wolfgang Röllig (page 156) also mentions Lugalbanda's deification, but without mentioning heredity. However, both translators point out in a comment on line 36 that Gilgamesh had drunk milk from Ninsun's breast.&#xA;The claim that the ruler had drunk the milk from a goddess's breast was a common motif in Babylonian literature and occasionally also in Babylonian art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raoul Schrott's German translation has a footnote for the passage about the divine element in Gilgamesh (footnote 11 on page 178):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Er hat also doppelt soviel Göttliches wie die übrigen Menschen, was den sumerischen Sexagesimalsystem nach der Zahl 60 entspricht - (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has twice as much &amp;quot;divinity&amp;quot; as other humans, which corresponds to the Sumerian sexagesimal system, which is based on the number 60 (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genetics are irrelevant here; Schrott also adds that the goddess Ninsun and the king Lugalbanda are Gilgamesh's parents only in name.&#xA;However, as far as I know, Raoul Schrott, unlike the other translators listed above, is not as Assyriologist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: None of the translators find the two-thirds-divinne-versus-one-third-human ratio strange in the context of a heroic epic.&#xA;However, their explanations don't agree on the cause of this ratio: either humans generally already had a divine part and Gilgamesh just had a bigger share (due to his mother Ninsun),&#xA;or Gilgamesh had a larger divine share because his father had been deified.&#xA;Perhaps it is not remarkable that the son of a divine mother and a human father is two thirds god because (a) he spent (presumably) nine months in a goddess' womb and (b) was breastfed by his mother, so it is logical that &amp;quot;her share&amp;quot; in him is bigger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The introduction to Benjamin R. Foster's translation (2nd edition, Norton, 2019) contains a subchapter on &amp;quot;Use of Fantastical Number&amp;quot;, which provides the following comment on Gilgamesh's divine-to-human ratio (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the epic's most celebrated &lt;strong&gt;riddles&lt;/strong&gt; is Gilgamesh's genealogy as two-thirds divine and one-third human, for which various explanations have been offered. The fraction two-thirds appears again in the name of the boatman, &lt;strong&gt;Ur-Shanabi, &amp;quot;Servant of Two-Thirds&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, and in connection with completing the Ark (XI, 97).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another piece of interesting background information: pages xxxix - xl of Andrew George's introduction also discuss how Ea created man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clay that Ea gave to the Mother Goddess as the raw material from which she bore mankind was animated - given spirit - by mixing it with the blood of a god:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let one god be slaughtered and the gods be thereby cleansed. With his flesh and his blood let the Lady of the Gods mix some clay, so that god and man are mixed together in the clay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, ordinary human beings also had a divine element. The text does not specify to what proportion humans are &amp;quot;divine&amp;quot;.&#xA;(See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/sum/sum07.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter II. Myths of Origins&lt;/a&gt; in Samuel Noah Kramer's Sumerian Mythology, which mentions that the blood was &amp;quot;of one of the more troublesome of the gods&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T10:30:49.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12209" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-19T03:03:33.103" Score="12" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; is partially inspired by Bunyan's &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt;, with chapter titles and themes borrowed from Bunyan's story, and reading the book itself being an early activity the girls share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But almost two centuries separated the books, and in between them was the Enlightenment. Louisa May Alcott's parents were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentalism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transcendentalists&lt;/a&gt;, a philosophical movement associated with Unitarianism but which was distinct. Her &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_May&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mother's father&lt;/a&gt; was a Unitarian layman, but I haven't found any more specific details about the religious affiliations of Louisa May Alcott or her family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When &lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; discusses God, Jesus, or other theological topics, does it express the Trinitarian theology of Bunyan's &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt;, the Unitarian theology of Alcott's family, or does it try to stay ambiguous and acceptable to both camps of theology? (If a clearer answer is found in &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Jo's Boys&lt;/em&gt; feel free to include them as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="392" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T07:07:57.940" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T08:50:06.223" Title="What is the theology of Little Women?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;john-bunyan&gt;&lt;louisa-may-alcott&gt;&lt;pilgrims-progress&gt;&lt;little-women-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12210" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12211" CreationDate="2020-01-19T08:56:38.337" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;About this time legend among the Hobbits first becomes history with a reckoning of years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;reckoning of years&quot; mean in this passage from &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T09:08:10.800" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T09:13:20.660" Title="What does &quot;reckoning of years&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12211" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12210" CreationDate="2020-01-19T09:13:20.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It means they started to record their history and the passing of time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/reckoning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico (powered by Oxford Dictionaries) on &quot;reckoning&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The action or process of calculating or estimating something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits with the rest of the sentence: &quot;legend [...] first becomes history&quot; when the telling of stories about past events and heroes becomes more concrete by fixing them in time, recording the passing of years and when the events took place, i.e. &quot;reckoning [the] years&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To quote from &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; great work of epic fantasy: &quot;&lt;em&gt;Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth ...&lt;/em&gt;&quot; The difference between history and legend is often simply that legend is harder to pin down exactly but historical events have their own place in the calendar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T09:13:20.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12213" CreationDate="2020-01-19T09:42:14.497" Score="6" ViewCount="1493" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While there was still a king they were in name his subjects, but they were, in fact, ruled by their own chieftains and meddled not at all with events in the world outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;they were in name his subjects&quot; mean in this passage from &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T10:07:58.163" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T08:13:57.347" Title="What does &quot;they were in name his subjects&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12212" CreationDate="2020-01-19T10:14:06.687" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;They were &lt;em&gt;de jure&lt;/em&gt; (officially, supposedly, on paper, in theory) ruled over by the king.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many terms to express this meaning. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/in%20name&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster on &quot;in name&quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;used with a following statement to say that something is so by name or title but that is not the way things really are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, the Latin term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_jure&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;de jure&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (as opposed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_facto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; meaning &quot;in fact&quot;) is still commonly used to express such a situation. Terms such as &quot;officially&quot; and &quot;on paper&quot; are also used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, Tolkien is telling us about the history of Hobbits. While the Kingdom of Arnor was still functioning, they were still &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/subject&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;subjects&lt;/em&gt; (noun, meaning 3)&lt;/a&gt; of its king, citizens of the kingdom according to the laws of the kingdom - but in reality, they did their own thing and cared little for the kingdom or the world outside of their own domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T19:25:37.937" LastActivityDate="2020-01-19T19:25:37.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12214" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12231" CreationDate="2020-01-19T14:57:08.817" Score="-1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does the room in hell in the first scene of the French play &lt;em&gt;Huis Clos&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;No Exit&lt;/em&gt; in English) by Jean-Paul Sartre look like and how does Joseph Garcin react to it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8438" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-19T17:23:31.197" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T18:56:45.730" Title="Huis Clos Description of the room" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jean-paul-sartre&gt;&lt;no-exit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12017" CreationDate="2020-01-19T18:29:02.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &quot;standard version&quot; of the Babylonian epic (see the translation by Andrew George, Penguin, 1999), it is not very clear. After the gods discover that Uta-napishti has survived the flood, Ea upbraids Enlil for sending the flood without first talking to the other gods (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instead of your causing the Deluge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     a lion could have risen, and &lt;strong&gt;diminished the people&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Instead of your causing the Deluge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     a wolf could have risen, and &lt;strong&gt;diminished the people&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Instead of your causing the Deluge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     a famine could have happened, and slaughtered the land!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Instead of your causing the Deluge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     the Plague God could have risen, and slaughtered the land!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Enlil send the flood to &quot;diminish the people&quot;. But this raises another question: Why did Enlil want to &quot;diminish&quot; the people in the first place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard version of the epic keeps silent on this matter, so we need to turn to another Babylonian story, namely the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.livius.org/sources/content/anet/104-106-the-epic-of-atrahasis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Epic of Atraḥasis&lt;/a&gt; (sometimes spelled Atram-hasis). This story tells us that the gods created man in order to delegate the hard work to them: &quot;Create a human being, that he bear the yoke&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew George writes in the introduction to his Gilgamesh edition (page xliii - xliv):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the human race had another defect: it bred with great ease and rapidly became too numerous. As the poem of Atram-hasis relates, three times, at intervals of 1,200 years, the god Enlil tired of the relentless hubbub of the new creation, which kept him awake in his chamber. Each time he resolved to reduce the human population, first by plague, then by drought and finally by famine. Each time he was successful at first, so that the number of man were considerably diminished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the Deluge is Enlil's final solution to man's &quot;relentless hubbub&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-01-21T12:10:03.277" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T12:10:03.277" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12204" CreationDate="2020-01-19T21:32:43.420" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: There are events interleaved between the three, but roughly speaking &lt;em&gt;Beren and Lúthien&lt;/em&gt; precedes &lt;em&gt;The Children of Húrin&lt;/em&gt; which precedes &lt;em&gt;The Fall of Gondolin&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout his life, Tolkien worked and reworked parts of his legendarium, including aspects of its internal chronology. The stories of the ‘First Age’ first began to be written down in 1916 (as Tolkien recovered from trench fever contracted in the Battle of the Somme), and he continued to make new versions of these stories until his death in 1973. So there is no single chronology, but rather an evolving series of chronologies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The earliest Annals of Beleriand&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting in the 1930s, Tolkien worked on a set of ‘annals’ of the First Age. The first version of this text, the ‘Earliest Annals of Beleriand’, was published by Christopher Tolkien in &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-Earth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The earliest &lt;em&gt;Annals of Beleriand&lt;/em&gt; (‘AB’) are themselves found in two versions, which I shall call AB I and AB II. AB I is a complete text to the end of the First Age; AB II is quite brief, and though it begins as a fair copy of the much-emended opening of I it soon becomes strongly divergent. In this chapter I give both texts separately and in their entirety, and in what follows I refer only to the earlier, AB I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This is a good, clear manuscript, but the style suggests very rapid composition. For much of its length the entries are in the present tense and often staccato, even with such expressions as ‘the Orcs got between them’ (annal 172), though by subsequent small expansions and alterations here and there my father slightly modified this character. I think that his primary intention at this time was the consolidation of the historical structure in its internal relations and chronology—the Annals began, perhaps, in parallel with the &lt;em&gt;Quenta&lt;/em&gt; as a convenient way of driving abreast, and keeping track of, the different elements in the ever more complex narrative web. Nonetheless major new developments enter here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1986). &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt;, p. 294. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the quote that follows I’ve freely edited the entries from AB I relevant to the three stories you asked about. See &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt; for the full text. Dates are in ‘Years of the Sun’, that is, from the creation of the Moon and the Sun by the Valar. Some of the names from this stage of development of the mythology may be unfamiliar to readers who have only read &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;: ‘Thû’ is Sauron, ‘Flinding’ is Gwindor, ‘Glómund’ is Glaurung, the ‘Nauglafring’ is the Nauglamir, and the ‘Gnomes’ are the Noldor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;132&lt;/strong&gt; Beren, after named the One-handed, son of Barahir, born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;141&lt;/strong&gt; Húrin the Steadfast, son of Gumlin, born, Handir son of Hundor son of Haleth born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;144&lt;/strong&gt; Huor Húrin’s brother born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;145&lt;/strong&gt; Morwen Elfsheen, daughter of Baragund, born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;150&lt;/strong&gt; Rían daughter of Belegund, mother of Tuor, born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;155&lt;/strong&gt; Battle of Sudden Fire. Haleth and Húrin bought into the secret value of Gondolin, whereof of those outside none yet knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;160&lt;/strong&gt; Barahir was betrayed by Gorlim, and all his company is slain by the Orcs save Beren who was hunting alone. Beren pursues the Orcs and slays his father’s slayer and retakes the ring which Felagund gave to Barahir. Beren becomes a solitary outlaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;163–4&lt;/strong&gt; The great geste of Beren and Lúthien. King Felagund of Nargothrond dies in Tolsirion in the dungeons of Thû. Lúthien and Huan overthrow Thû. Beren and Lúthien go to Angband and recover a Silmaril. Carcharoth the great wolf of Angband with the Silmaril in his belly bursts into Doriath. Beren and the hound Huan are slain by Carcharoth, but Huan slays Carcharoth and the Silmaril is regained. Beren was recalled from the dead by Lúthien and dwelt with her in the Land of Seven Rivers, Ossiriand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;164&lt;/strong&gt; Húrin weds Morwen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;165&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin son of Húrin born in winter with sad, omens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;167&lt;/strong&gt; Dior the Beautiful born to Beren and Lúthien in Ossiriand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;172&lt;/strong&gt; Battle of Unnumbered Tears. Huor fell pierced with a venomed arrow. Húrin was taken alive by Morgoth’s command and dragged to Angband where Morgoth cursed him and his kin, and because he would. not reveal where Turgon was gone chained him with enchanted sight on Thangorodrim to see the evil that befell his wife and children. Rían sought for Huor, for no tidings came to Hithlum of the battle, and her child Tuor son of Huor was norn to her in the wild. He was taken to nurture by Dark-elves, but Rían went to the Mound of Slain and laid her down to die there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;173&lt;/strong&gt; Nienor the sorrowful, daughter of Húrin and Morwen, was born in Hithlum. Tuor grew up wild in the woods among fugitive Elves nigh the shores of Mithrim, but Morwen sent Túrin to Doriath begging for Thingol’s fostering and aid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;184&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin slays Orgof, kinsman of the royal house, and flees from Thingol’s court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;187&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin slays Beleg by misadventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;190&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin healed of his madness by Ivrin’s well, and is brought at last by Flinding to Nargothrond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;195&lt;/strong&gt; Sack of Nargothrond. Túrin is deceived and spellbound by Glómund. Tuor was led out of Hithlum by a secret way under Ulmo’s guidance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;196&lt;/strong&gt; Tuor and Bronweg guided by Ulmo find Gondolin. Morwen and Nienor go to Nargothrond where they are spellbound by Glómund. Túrin found Nienor hunted by the Orcs. He names her Níniel, the tearful, since she knew not her name, and himself Turambar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;198&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin weds Nienor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;199&lt;/strong&gt; Glómund seeks out the dwellings of Túrin. Túrin slays him with Gurtholfin his sword, but falls aswoon beside him. Nienor finds him, but Glómund ere death releases her from the spell and declares her kindred. Nienor casts herself away over the waterfall. Túrin bids Gurtholfin slay him, and he dies. Húrin was released from Angband, bowed as with age, and sought for Morwen. Tuor weds Idril Celebrindal daughter of Turgon of Gondolin, and earns the secret hate of Meglin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;200&lt;/strong&gt; Here was born Eärendel the Bright, the star of the Two Kindreds, unto Tuor and Idril in Gondolin. Here was born also Elwing the White, fairest of women save Lúthien, unto Dior in Ossiriand. Húrin gathers men unto him. They find the treasure of Nargothrond and slay Mîm the Dwarf who had taken it to himself. The treasure is cursed. The treasure is brought to Thingol. But Húrin departs from Doriath with bitter words, but of his fate and of Morwen’s after no certain tidings are known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;201&lt;/strong&gt; Thingol employs the Dwarves to make the renowned Nauglafring, the Dwarf-necklace, whereon is hung the Silmaril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;202&lt;/strong&gt; Here the Dwarves invaded Doriath aided by treachery. Thingol was slain and the Thousand Caves sacked. Beren summoned by Melian overthrew the Dwarves at Sarn-Athra; the Nauglafring and the Silmaril he took. Lúthien wore the necklace and the Silmaril on her breast. Here Beren and Lúthien depart out of men’s knowledge and their deathday is not known; save that at night a messenger brought the necklace unto Dior in Doriath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;205&lt;/strong&gt; Here Dior fought the sons of Fëanor on the east marches of Doriath. but he was slain. The maiden Elwing was saved by faithful Elves and taken to Sirion’s mouth, and with them they took the jewel and the necklace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;207&lt;/strong&gt; The Orcs sacked Gondolin and destroyed the king and most of his people. Tuor slew Meglin. Tuor, Idril, and Eärendel escaped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1930). ‘The Earliest Annals of Beleriand’. In Christopher Tolkien (1986), &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 297–308, Boston: Houghton Mifflin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The later Annals of Beleriand&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1937, following the success of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien prepared an incomplete version of the &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; for submission to Allen &amp;amp; Unwin. This was not published, but Allen &amp;amp; Unwin requested another story about hobbits, and this became &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. But in the course of revising the &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien prepared a revised chronology, the ‘Later Annals of Beleriand’. This was published by Christopher Tolkien in &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In content AB 2 remains in general close to AB 1, but it is not only fuller in matter but also more finished in manner; the &lt;em&gt;Annals of Beleriand&lt;/em&gt; was becoming an independent work, and less (as I described AB 1 in IV.294) a ‘consolidation of the historical structure in its internal relations and chronology’ in support of the &lt;em&gt;Quenta&lt;/em&gt;—but it is still annalistic, retaining the introductory &lt;em&gt;Here&lt;/em&gt; of the year-entries (derived from the &lt;em&gt;Anglo-Saxon Chronicle&lt;/em&gt;), and lacking connection of motive between events. And since, most unhappily, my father abandoned the &lt;em&gt;Grey Annals&lt;/em&gt; at the end of the story of Túrin, the conclusion of AB 2 contains the last account in the Annals tradition of the fourth (becoming the sixth*) century of the Sun and of the Great Battle. Both AV 2 and AB 2 only came to light very recently (I was not aware of their existence when &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; was prepared for publication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 137–8. New York: Ballantine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Tolkien twice revised the length of the siege of Angband, adding 100 years in AB 2, and another 200 years in the &lt;em&gt;Grey Annals&lt;/em&gt; (see below).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But apart from the revisions to the dates, the differences from the ‘Earlier Annals’ (AB 1) are very small. Again, I’ve freely edited the annals to include only the events central to the three stories in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;232&lt;/strong&gt; Beren, after surnamed the One-handed, son of Barahir son of Bëor, was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;241&lt;/strong&gt; Húrin the Steadfast, son of Gumlin son of Hador, was born in Hithlum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;244&lt;/strong&gt; Huor, brother of Húrin, was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;245&lt;/strong&gt; Morwen Eledwen (Elfsheen) was born to Baragund. She was the fairest of all mortal maidens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;250&lt;/strong&gt; Rian, daughter of Belegund, mother of Tuor, was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;255&lt;/strong&gt; Battle of Sudden Fire. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;256&lt;/strong&gt; Haleth and Húrin hunting in Sirion’s vale came upon some of Turgon’s folk, and espied their secret entrance into the valley of Gondolin. But they were taken and brought before Turgon, and looked upon the hidden city, whereof of those outside none yet knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;261&lt;/strong&gt; In Taur-na-Fuin Barahir made his lair; but Gorlim betrayed him, and&#xA;  he was surprised and slain with all his company, save Beren only. Beren pursued the Orcs, and slew his father’s murderer, and regained the ring of Felagund. Beren became now a solitary outlaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;263–4&lt;/strong&gt;. Here began the renowned deeds of Beren and Lúthien Tinuviel, Thingol’s daughter, of Doriath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;264&lt;/strong&gt; Here King Felagund and Beren son of Barahir were emprisoned in Tol-na-Gaurhoth by Thu, and King Felagund was slain in combat with Draugluin the Werewolf; but Lúthien and Huan, the hound of Valinor, slew Draugluin and overthrew Thu, who fled to Taur-na-Fuin. Húrin son of Gumlin wedded Morwen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;265&lt;/strong&gt; Beren and Lúthien went unto Angband and took a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth. Carcharoth, the wolfwarden of the gate, bit off Beren’s hand, and with the Silmaril in his belly burst in madness into Doriath. Huan slew&#xA;  Carcharoth and the Silmaril was regained, but Carcharoth slew both Huan and Beren. Beren was recalled from the Dead by Lúthien, and they passed from the knowledge of Men and Gnomes, and dwelt a while by the green waters of Ossiriand. In the winter of this year Túrin son of Húrin was born with sad omens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;267&lt;/strong&gt; Dior the Beautiful was born to Beren and Lúthien in Ossiriand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;272&lt;/strong&gt; Here was fought the Fourth Battle, Nirnaith Dirnoth, Unnumbered Tears. Huor fell pierced with a venomed arrow, but Húrin was taken alive by Morgoth’s command, and dragged to Angband. But Húrin would not reveal whither Turgon was gone, and Morgoth cursed him, and he was chained upon Thangorodrim; and Morgoth gave him sight to see the evil that befell his kindred in the world. No tidings came to Hithlum of the battle, wherefore Rian went forth, and her child Tuor was born to her in the wild. He was taken to nurture by Dark-elves, but Rian went to the Mound of Slain and laid her there and died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;273&lt;/strong&gt; Nienor the Sorrowful was born in Hithlum, daughter of Húrin and Morwen; but Morwen sent Túrin to Doriath, begging for Thingol’s fostering and aid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;284&lt;/strong&gt; Here Túrin slew Orgof, kinsman of Thingol, at the king’s board, and fled from Menegroth. He became an outlaw in the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;287&lt;/strong&gt; Tuor son of Huor came unto Hithlum seeking his kindred, but they were no more, and he lived as an outlaw in the woods about Mithrim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;289&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin slew Beleg by misadventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;290&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin was healed of his madness at Ivrineithel, and was brought at last by Gwindor to Nargothrond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;295&lt;/strong&gt; Sack of Nargothrond. Túrin was deceived and bound in spell by Glómund. Tuor son of Huor departed from Hithlum by a secret way under the leading of Ulmo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;296&lt;/strong&gt; Here Tuor met the Gnome Bronweg at the mouths of Sirion. Ulmo himself appeared to Tuor in Nantathrin, and Tuor went thence up Sirion, and guided by Ulmo found the entrance to Gondolin. Morwen and Nienor go to Nargothrond where they are spellbound by Glómund. Turambar found Nienor hunted by Orcs. He named her Níniel the tearful, since she knew not her own name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;298&lt;/strong&gt; Turambar wedded Níniel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;299&lt;/strong&gt; Glómund sought out the dwelling of Túrin Turambar; but Túrin smote him mightily with Gurtholfin, and fell aswoon beside him. There Níniel found him; but Glomund ere death released her from spells and declared her kindred. Nienor cast herself over the waterfall. Túrin bade Gurtholfin slay him; and he died there. Húrin was released from Angband, and he was bowed as with great age; but he departed and sought for Morwen. Tuor wedded Idril Celebrindal, Turgon’s daughter, of Gondolin; and Meglin hated him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;300&lt;/strong&gt; Here was born Eärendel the Bright, star of the Two Kindreds, unto Tuor and Idril in Gondolin. In this year was born also Elwing the White, fairest of all women save Lúthien, unto Dior son of Beren in Ossiriand.&#xA;  Húrin gathered men unto him, and they came to Nargothrond, and slew the dwarf Mîm, who had taken the treasure unto himself. But Mîm cursed the treasure. Húrin brought the gold to Thingol in Doriath, but he departed thence again with bitter words, and of his fate and the fate of Morwen thereafter no sure tidings were ever heard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;301&lt;/strong&gt; Thingol employed Dwarvish craftsmen; and they made the renowned Nauglamir, the Dwarf-necklace, whereon was hung the Silmaril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;302&lt;/strong&gt; Here the Dwarves invaded Doriath; and they came within by treachery. Thingol was slain and the Thousand Caves were plundered. Beren and the Green-elves overthrew the Dwarves. Beren took the Nauglamir and the Silmaril. Lúthien wore the Silmaril upon her breast. Dior their son ruled over the remnants of the Elves of Doriath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;303&lt;/strong&gt; Here Beren and Lúthien departed out of the knowledge of Elves and Men, and their deathday is not known; but at night a messenger brought the necklace to Dior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;306&lt;/strong&gt; Here Dior Thingol’s heir fought the sons of Fëanor on the east marches of Doriath, but he was slain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;307&lt;/strong&gt; The Orcs sacked Gondolin, and destroyed King Turgon and most of his people. Tuor slew Meglin. Tuor escaped with Idril and Eärendel by a secret way devised before by Idril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). ‘The Later Annals of Beleriand’. In Christopher Tolkien (1987), &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 145–156, New York: Ballantine.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The Grey Annals&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1950s Tolkien revised the chronology again, producing a text called ‘The Grey Annals’, which Christopher Tolkien published in &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When my father turned again, in 1950–1, to the Matter of the Elder Days after the completion of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, he began new work on the Annals by taking up the AV 2 and AB 2 manuscripts from some 15 years earlier and using them as vehicles for revision and new writing. In the case of AV 2, correction of the old text was limited to the opening annals, and the beginnings of a new version written on the blank verso pages of this manuscript likewise petered out very quickly, so that there was no need to take much account of this preliminary work (X.47). In AB 2, on the other hand, the preparatory stages were much more extensive and substantial.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1994). &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 51–102. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Grey Annals&lt;/em&gt; contain much more narrative than the &lt;em&gt;Annals of Beleriand&lt;/em&gt;; accordingly I have been much severer in editing them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;432&lt;/strong&gt; Beren son of Barahir son of Bëor was born in Dorthonion, who was after named the One-handed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;441&lt;/strong&gt; Húrin the Steadfast son of Galion son of Hador was born in Hithlum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;443&lt;/strong&gt; Morwen Eledwen, the Elf-sheen, was born, daughter of Baragund. She was the fairest of all mortal maidens of the Elder Days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;444&lt;/strong&gt; Huor brother of Húrin was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;450&lt;/strong&gt; Rían daughter of Belegund, mother of Tuor the Blessed, was born.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;455&lt;/strong&gt; Battle of Sudden Flame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;456&lt;/strong&gt; It is said that at this time Húrin and Huor went both to battle with the Orcs. And being with a company that was cut off from the rest, they were pursued to the ford of Brithiach; and there they would have been taken or slain, but for the power of Ulmo, which was still strong in Sirion. Therefore a mist arose from the river and hid them from their enemies, and they escaped into Dimbar, and wandered in the hills beneath the sheer walls of the Crisaegrim. There Thorondor espied them, and sent two Eagles that took them and bore them up and brought them beyond the mountains to the secret vale of Tumladen and the hidden city of Gondolin, which no man else had yet seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;460&lt;/strong&gt; Sauron ensnared Gorlim by a phantom of his wife Eilinel, so that he betrayed the hidings of Barahir. Thus at last the outlaws were surrounded and all slain, save Beren son of Barahir. Then Beren pursued the Orcs that had slain his father, and coming upon their camp, at Rivil’s Well above Serech, he entered it and slew the captain even as he boasted that he was the slayer of Barahir; and he snatched from him the hand of Barahir that had been cut off as a token for Sauron. Thus he regained the Ring of Felagund that his father had worn. Thereafter escaping from the Orcs Beren dwelt still in those lands as a solitary outlaw for four years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;464&lt;/strong&gt; In this year in the spring Húrin of the House of Hador wedded Morwen Elfsheen of the people of Bëor. In this year at the midsummer Beren son of Barahir met Lúthien Thingol’s daughter in the forest of Neldoreth. Túrin son of Húrin was born in Dor Lomin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;465&lt;/strong&gt; Felagund and Beren and their companions went forth, and waylaying a company of Orcs beyond the Taiglin they passed towards Tol-in-Gaurhoth, disguised as soldiers of Morgoth. There they were questioned and laid bare by Sauron, and cast into a pit. Lúthien and Húan came to the bridge that led to Sauron’s isle, and Lúthien sang a song of Doriath. Then the towers of Sauron trembled, and he sent forth Draugluin the greatest of his werewolves. But Húan slew Draugluin, and when Sauron himself came forth in wolf-hame he overthrew him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;466&lt;/strong&gt; Beren and Lúthien came into the dreadful realm of Morgoth, and even as he watched her dancing, held as in a spell by her beauty, she set a deep slumber upon all the hall, and at last Morgoth himself was overcome and fell from his seat into a blind sleep, but the Iron Crown rolled from his head. Beren and Lúthien fled, but at the gates they found Carcharoth once more awake, and Beren would daunt the wolf with the hand that held the Silmaril. But Carcharoth seized the hand and bit it off, and straightway the Silmaril burned him, and madness seized him and he fled away, and by the power of the Silmaril burst into Doriath. And Carcharoth hurt Beren to the death, but Húan slew him and then died. From the belly of the Wolf Mablung cut the Jewel and Beren took it and gave it to Thingol, and said ‘Now the Quest is achieved’, and afterwards spoke no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;469&lt;/strong&gt; In this year, it hath been said, Beren and Lúthien returned to the world, for a while.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;470&lt;/strong&gt; In this year was the birth of Dior Aranel the Beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;471&lt;/strong&gt; In this year Huor wedded Rían daughter of Belegund.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;472&lt;/strong&gt; Here at midsummer was fought the Fifth Battle Nirnaeth Arnediad, Unnumbered Tears. Huor fell pierced with a venomed arrow in the eye. Húrin they took alive at last, by the command of Morgoth, and binding him they dragged him to Angband with mockery. Húrin was brought before Morgoth, and defied him; and he was chained and set in torment. Then Morgoth cursed Húrin and Morwen and their offspring and set a doom upon them of sorrow and darkness; and taking Húrin from prison he set him in a chair of stone upon a high place of Thangorodrim. Rían wife of Huor hearing no tidings of her lord went forth into the wild, and there gave birth to Tuor her son; and he was taken to foster by Annael of the Grey-elves of Mithrim. But Rían went to Haud-in-nDengin and laid her there and died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;473&lt;/strong&gt; In the beginning of this year was born to Morwen Elfsheen a maid-child, daughter of Húrin; and she was named Niënor, which is Mourning. And at about this time Túrin came through great perils to Doriath and was there received by Thingol, who took him to his own fostering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;484&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin smote Orgof with a cup and slew him at the king’s board. Then fearing the anger of Thingol he fled, and became an outlaw in the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;488&lt;/strong&gt; Here Tuor son of Huor, being now sixteen years of age, seeking to escape from Dorlomin, was made captive and enslaved by Lorgan chief of the Easterlings; and he endured thraldom for three years, ere he escaped and became an outlaw in the hills of Mithrim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;489&lt;/strong&gt; Túrin was captured by Orcs and carried towards Angband. Beleg laboured to unloose Túrin’s fetters but Túrin, dreaming that he was surrounded by Orcs that would torment him, seized Beleg’s sword and slew him ere he knew him. Gwindor buried Beleg, and led Túrin away, for a dumb madness of grief was on him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;490&lt;/strong&gt; Through great perils Gwindor led Túrin towards Nargothrond, and they came to the pools of Ivrin, and there Túrin wept and was healed of his madness. Gwindor and Túrin came at last to Nargothrond, and were admitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;495&lt;/strong&gt; Sack of Nargothrond. Túrin fell under the dreadful spell of the dragon Glaurung. In this same year Tuor son of Huor was led by the sendings of Ulmo to a secret way that led from Mithrim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;496&lt;/strong&gt; Here Tuor son of Huor met Bronwe of the Noldor at the mouths of Sirion. Now at Ulmo’s command he went up Sirion, and by the power that Ulmo set upon them Tuor and Bronwe found the guarded entrance to Gondolin. Morwen and Niënor came to Nargothrond where they were waylaid by Glaurung. Of Morwen no sure tidings came ever to Doriath after, but Niënor looked into the eyes of Glaurung and he laid on her a spell of utter darkness and forgetfulness, so that she could remember nothing that had ever befallen her. [Túrin] Turambar found her, and said: ‘I will call thee &lt;em&gt;Níniel&lt;/em&gt; (tear-maiden).’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;498&lt;/strong&gt; In the spring of this year Turambar vowed that he would now wed her, or go back to war in the wild. And Níniel took him with joy, and they were wedded at the mid-summer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;499&lt;/strong&gt; Glaurung came to the borders of Brethil, and Turambar thrust Gurthang into the soft belly of the Worm, even up to the hilts. Thereupon Glaurung opened his eyes and looked upon Turambar with such malice, that it smote him as a blow; and he lay as one dead, and his sword was beneath him. Niënor came to Turambar and called his name in vain. Thereat Glaurung stirred for the last time ere he died, and he spoke with his last breath saying: ‘Hail, Niënor daughter of Húrin. This is thy brother! Have joy of your meeting, and know him: Túrin son of Húrin, treacherous to foes, faithless to friends, and a curse unto his kin. And to thee worst of all, as now thou shalt feel!’ Then Glaurung died, and the veil of his malice was taken from her, and she remembered all her life; and she sat as one stunned with horror and anguish. Then she leapt up and ran like a hunted deer, and came to Cabed-en-Aras, and there cast herself over the brink, and was lost in the wild water. And Túrin cursed the place, and he drew forth his sword, that now alone remained to him of all his possessions, and he said: ‘Hail Gurthang! No lord or loyalty dost thou know, save the hand that wieldeth thee. From no blood wilt thou shrink. Wilt thou therefore take Túrin Turambar, wilt thou slay me swiftly?’ And from the blade rang a cold voice in answer: ‘Yea, I will drink thy blood gladly, that so I may forget the blood of Beleg my master, and the blood of Brandir slain unjustly. I will slay thee swiftly.’ Then Túrin set the hilts upon the ground, and cast himself upon the point of Gurthang, and the black blade took his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1952). ‘The Grey Annals’. In Christopher Tolkien (1994), &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 51–102, London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Grey Annals&lt;/em&gt; end here, with the death of Túrin. But the revised chronology continues in a much terser typescript, ‘The Tale of Years’, also published in &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;501&lt;/strong&gt; Húrin is released from captivity. He goes to Nargothrond and seizes the treasure of Glaurung. He takes the treasure to Menegroth and casts it at the feet of Thingol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;502&lt;/strong&gt; The Nauglamir is wrought of the treasure of Glaurung, and the Silmaril is hung thereon. Thingol quarrels with the Dwarves who had wrought for him the Necklace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;503&lt;/strong&gt; The Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod invade Doriath. King Elu Thingol is slain and his realm ended. Melian escapes and carries away the Nauglamir and the Silmaril, and brings them to Beren and Lúthien. In this year, or according to others in the year before, Tuor wedded Idril Celebrindal Turgon’s daughter of Gondolin; and in the spring of the year after was born in Gondolin Eärendil Halfelven. In the autumn of this year a messenger brought by night the Silmaril to Dior in Doriath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;503&lt;/strong&gt; Elwing the White daughter of Dior born in Ossiriand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;504&lt;/strong&gt; Dior returns to Doriath, and with the power of the Silmaril restores it; but Melian departed to Valinor. Dior now publicly wore the Nauglamir and the Jewel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;506–7&lt;/strong&gt; At Yule Dior fought the sons of Fëanor on the east marches of Doriath, and was slain. Elwing escaped to Ossir with the Necklace and the Jewel. Thence she fled to the Havens of Sirion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;510&lt;/strong&gt; Midsummer. Assault and sack of Gondolin, owing to treachery of Maeglin who revealed where it lay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;511&lt;/strong&gt; Exiles of Gondolin (Tuor, Idril and Eärendil &amp;amp;c.) reach Sirion, which now prospers in the power of the Silmaril.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1952). ‘The Tale of Years’. In Christopher Tolkien (1994), &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 350–352, London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was characteristic of Tolkien’s many revisions of the story of the Silmarils, that as he came to the ‘Fall of Gondolin’ he could go no further. Thus the only complete version of this story is the very first version,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a very difficult manuscript contained in two school exercise-books, where the title of the tale is ‘Tuor and the Exiles of Condolin (which bringeth in the great tale of Earendel)’ … This manuscript is (or rather, was) the original text of the tale, dating from 1916–17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1984). &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt;, p. 146. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the memories of 1916–17 were simply too difficult for Tolkien to revisit. A consequence of this is that the only complete version of the story comes from the earliest stratum of the mythology, when Elves were ‘Gnomes’ and Morgoth was ‘Melko’, meaning that Christopher Tolkien and Guy Gavriel Kay faced great difficulties in translating it into the post-&lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; version of the mythology for inclusion in the published &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-20T18:17:44.243" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T18:17:44.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12219" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13779" CreationDate="2020-01-20T07:23:58.150" Score="1" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Prologue (&quot;Concerning Hobbits&quot;) to &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; (1954) by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough.&#xA;  They were, &lt;strong&gt;if it came to it&lt;/strong&gt;, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, &lt;strong&gt;when put to it&lt;/strong&gt;, do without them, and could survive &lt;strong&gt;rough handling by grief&lt;/strong&gt;, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the three phrases in bold mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T20:03:42.607" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T08:57:04.523" Title="What does &quot;rough handling by grief&quot; mean in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12212" CreationDate="2020-01-20T08:13:57.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A comparable situation today:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Canadians are in name the subjects of Queen Elizabeth of England, but are in fact ruled by their own parliament and prime minister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning is the Queen is their ruler only as long as she doesn't try to actually rule them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same is more or less the case in England itself, but is even more clear in Canada)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="569" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T08:13:57.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12221" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-20T17:04:28.630" Score="1" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following quote is from the chapter &quot;Concerning Hobbits&quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though slow to quarrel, and for sport killing nothing that lived, they were doughty at bay, and at need could still handle arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do &quot;nothing that lived&quot; and &quot;doughty at bay&quot; in this quote mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T20:32:41.180" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T20:32:41.180" Title="What do &quot;nothing that lived&quot; and &quot;doughty at bay&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12222" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12221" CreationDate="2020-01-20T17:52:46.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/doughty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doughty&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;&lt;em&gt;brave and persistent&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/at_bay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;At bay&lt;/a&gt; means &quot;&lt;em&gt;Forced to face or confront one's attackers or pursuers; cornered.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;killing nothing&quot; would be clear; but instead of absolutely &quot;nothing&quot;, Tolkien writes &quot;nothing that lived&quot;: in other words, they do not kill anything that is alive. (This is actually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pleonasm&lt;/a&gt;, since if you kill something it must be something that lives, but presumably it's written that way for poetic effect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rephrasing of the sentence in simpler language might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They would rarely argue, and never killed living things for sport, but they were brave when cornered, and could still use weapons if necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-20T17:52:46.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-20T20:33:02.800" Score="6" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent issue of the French magazine &lt;em&gt;Marianne&lt;/em&gt; (3-9 January 2020) contained an article entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.marianne.net/debattons/editos/matzneff-de-l-ecrivain-tendance-au-vieux-degueulasse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matzneff : de l'écrivain tendance au vieux dégueulasse&lt;/a&gt; by Guy Konopnicki.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article contains the following sentences (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Qu'est-ce que Matzneff ? Un Humbert Humbert de bazar, qui ne va pas jusqu'au meurtre, mais imagine qu'un personnage se passe du romancier, de la fiction, et même de l'écriture. &lt;strong&gt;Les petits cardinaux de l'Eglise des lettres qui s'agitaient alors entre le Saint-Siège de la rue Sébastien-Bottin et la chapelle Sixtine de la rue Jacob&lt;/strong&gt; édictaient le droit canon du roman et de la poésie. On ne pouvait critiquer Matzneff sans passer pour un béotien.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author being criticised here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Matzneff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gabriel Matzneff&lt;/a&gt;, who won several literary prizes but who now lives on an allowance from the Centre national du livre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: What is meant by &quot;le Saint-Siège de la rue Sébastien-Bottin et la chapelle Sixtine de la rue Jacob&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T12:59:23.607" Title="What is meant by «le Saint-Siège de la rue Sébastien-Bottin et la chapelle Sixtine de la rue Jacob»?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12224" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12225" CreationDate="2020-01-20T20:58:40.273" Score="0" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is taken from from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; prologue where JRRT lays out some of the characteristics of Hobbits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The genealogical trees at the end of the Red Book of Westmarch are a small book in themselves, and all but Hobbits would find them exceedingly dull.  Hobbits delighted in such things, if they were accurate: they liked to have books filled with things that they already knew, set out fair and square with no contradiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T09:59:47.213" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T20:53:24.437" Title="What does &quot;set out fair and square&quot; mean in the characterization of the Hobbits?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12224" CreationDate="2020-01-20T22:48:36.400" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from the last sentence of the first part of the Prologue in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, subtitled &amp;quot;Concerning Hobbits&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien wrote this section as a bridge between the light storytelling style of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and the more serious style of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. It serves as a bit of character development, characterizing Hobbits in general as stodgy and phlegmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hobbits read books, but they like to read about familiar, uncomplicated things that don't challenge their preconceptions. &amp;quot;Set out fair and square&amp;quot; is just a way of saying that Hobbits like to see uncomplicated, easy to read prose with not too many long words. Moral ambiguities need not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; is a bit like this (Tolkien originally intended it for children), but &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is not. The Good Guys don't always do the right things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's prologue serves to underscore the extraordinary deeds, and transformations, of four particular Hobbits that &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; revolves around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think that this particular passage is a deliberate warning to readers that Things Are Going To Change: You might have to read between the lines, and there is moral ambiguity (or at least nuance) ahead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="179" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T20:53:24.437" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T20:53:24.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12226" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12017" CreationDate="2020-01-21T02:01:05.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is another version of the answer above, also referring to &amp;quot;The Epic of Atraḥasis&amp;quot;, in Gary Beckman's introduction to Stanley Lombardo's verse rendering of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=VMyIDwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Gilgamesh&amp;quot; (Hackett, 2019)&lt;/a&gt;. In a section called &amp;quot;Gilgamesh and Noah,&amp;quot; Beckman writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A major difference between the Biblical and Akkadian accounts is the role the Deluge plays within the respective national traditions. In the Hebrew Bible, as an incident within the development of their relationship to God as set forth in the Torah, men bring their destruction upon themselves as a result of their wicked behavior. While after the trial God promises not to repeat the eliminationist flooding, he insists that human nature remains essentially evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Mesopotamia by contrast—as as seen more clearly in the fuller account provided in “The Story of Atrahasis”—there is no question of human disobedience or perversity involved. Humans in their multitudes and noisy, frenetic activity had simply become a nuisance within the once-serene universe, leading the gods to seek to eliminate them. But following the example of the Mother Goddess, they almost immediately regret their decision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belet-ili cried out in her lovely voice,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our Lady wailing like a woman in childbirth:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“The days of old have turned into clay&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Because I said bad things among the gods.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How could I say bad things among the gods,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Declare a war to destroy my people?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am the one who gave birth to these people,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And now they fill the ocean like fish!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Anunnaki wept along with her;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tears in their eyes, the gods were weeping;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their lips were dry and parched with fever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Tablet XI 109–19)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, it is their relief in learning of the survival of Utanapishtim, who immediately takes up his duties of caring for and feeding the gods, that leads them to bestow upon him and his spouse the eternal life that lies beyond the reach of all mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T13:19:00.480" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T13:19:00.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-21T10:19:22.133" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12226/2191&quot;&gt;answer to an older question about the Flood in &lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Denkof Zwemmen quotes the recent translation (2019) by Stanley Lombardo. The translation's publisher &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hackettpublishing.com/gilgamesh-4248&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;describes this translation&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This stirring new version of the great Babylonian epic includes material from the recently discovered “monkey tablet” as well as an Introduction, timeline, glossary, and correspondences between lines of the translation and those of the original texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not heard of this &quot;monkey tablet&quot; before. What is the content of this tablet and where does it fit into the XI tablets that normally make up the &quot;standard version&quot; of the epic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22monkey+tablet%22+gilgamesh&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=shopping&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;monkey tablet&quot; and gilgamesh using DuckDuckGo&lt;/a&gt; I only find references to Lombardo's translation. In the YouTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tl1zlHJnpKc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Sulaymaniyah Museum&lt;/a&gt;, you can actually see the tablet; unfortunately, the video is in Kurdish and has no subtitles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T20:39:03.527" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T15:47:37.140" Title="What is the content of the “monkey tablet” of the Gilgamesh epic?" Tags="&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12223" CreationDate="2020-01-21T12:59:23.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence with the text in bold means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The little cardinals of the Church of Letters that then bustled about between the Holy See of Sébastien-Bottin street and the Sistine Chapel of Jacob street promulgated the canon law of the novel and poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a bit more research, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1982/01/21/guide-rouge/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emmnuel Le Roy Ladurie's review of Régis Debray's &lt;em&gt;Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;New York Review of Books&lt;/em&gt; in January 1982. The street names refer to two important publishing houses in Paris, France (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Debray is more like an ideological Baedeker or Fodor of the Parisian intellectual world—a deeply disapproving guide, it must be said, for Debray ultimately wants to show that the various “media” of the French intellectual world, and the people who he thinks control them, make up an oppressive network of power in support of “bourgeois” values. He gives us first a geography of publishing. There are two poles: &lt;strong&gt;rue Sébastien Bottin, with the great publishing house of Gallimard; and rue Jacob, supplemented by the adjacent rues Guénégaud and de Seine, where we find the headquarters of the intellectually prominent house of Le Seuil.&lt;/strong&gt; Both poles are on the Left Bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Footer/Ressources/Le-groupe-Madrigall&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gallimard&lt;/a&gt; (rue Sébastien Bottin) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seuil.com/la-maison&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Seuil/Editions du Seuil&lt;/a&gt; (rue Jacob) are two influential publishing houses that dictated &quot;bourgeois&quot; values. (The publishing houses Gallimard and Le Seuil are only a seven-minute walk away from each other, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.mappy.com/itineraire#/pieton/Rue%20S%C3%A9bastien%20Bottin%2075007%20Paris/Rue%20Jacob%2075006%20Paris/walk/1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mappy.fr&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.zeit.de/1989/42/die-dreierbande-galligrasseuil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Dreierbande Galligrasseuil&lt;/a&gt; by J. Fritz-Vannahme (&lt;em&gt;Die Zeit&lt;/em&gt;, October 1989) discusses the &quot;gang of three&quot; Galligrasseuil, i.e. Gallimard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grasset.fr/maison-grasset&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grasset&lt;/a&gt; and Le Seuil, which wins the lion's share of revenue-generating literary prizes in France:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Man, das ist vor allem die Dreierbande Galligrasseuil, ein &quot;Syndikat&quot; der Renommierverlage Gallimard, Grasset und Le Seuil. Das Gros der großen, umsatzträchtigen Literaturpreise entfällt seit zwanzig Jahren auf sie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T12:59:23.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12214" CreationDate="2020-01-21T18:56:45.730" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Room from the french Play &quot;Huis Clos&quot;, &quot;No Exit&quot; in English by Jean-Paul Sartre represents Hell. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything in this room is Second Empire furniture, there is for example a Louis-Phillipe armchair. There is a bronze ornament on the mantelpiece. There are no mirrors, nor windows and nothing breakable. There is also no bathroom for hygiene, nor a bed to sleep.&#xA;There are more rooms, more passages, stairs and floors. The light is always turnes on and there is no light-switch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Garcin questions the design and the available things in the room. He is confused, that he can't close his eyes as he is dead and that the Valet offers no teeth-brushes because in Hell people lose their sense of human dignity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8438" LastActivityDate="2020-01-21T18:56:45.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12232" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12233" CreationDate="2020-01-23T17:02:12.437" Score="0" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Book I Chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mr. Drogo married poor Miss Primula Brandybuck. She was our Mr. Bilbo's first cousin on the mother's side (her mother being the youngest of the Old Took's daughters); and Mr. Drogo was his second cousin. So Mr. Frodo is his first and second cousin, &lt;strong&gt;once removed either way&lt;/strong&gt;, as the saying is, if you follow me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-23T19:08:50.143" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T19:15:18.340" Title="What does &quot;once removed either way&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12232" CreationDate="2020-01-23T18:54:53.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Either way’ modifies ‘first and second cousin’, so that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;first and second cousin, once removed either way&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;first cousin, once removed, and second cousin, once removed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cousin#Removed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; for an explanation of the relationship terminology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are Baggins, Took and Brandybuck family trees in Appendix C of &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, which allow us to confirm this passage as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Frodo and Bilbo are first cousins, once removed, on their mothers’ sides, because Bilbo’s mother Belladonna &lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; Took was sister of Frodo’s grandmother Mirabella &lt;em&gt;née&lt;/em&gt; Took. (Their father Gerontius was known as ‘the Old Took’.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/m4yKb.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Frodo and Bilbo are second cousins, once removed, on their fathers’ sides, because Bilbo’s grandfather Mungo was brother of Frodo’s great-grandfather Largo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YYWz5.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-23T18:54:53.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2341" CreationDate="2020-01-24T12:46:45.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;He means that he will engrave himself on the pages of history, and mind you the good pages of history, because he will be so powerful, that historians, who &quot;write history&quot; will know only his good deeds, and maybe what he doesn't want to show the world will be buried. Hence he WRITES his own history, and he will always be on the good side of it, or rather, the PERFECT side of history&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8455" LastActivityDate="2020-01-24T12:46:45.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12236" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12237" CreationDate="2020-01-24T13:49:50.183" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this paragraph while reading &lt;em&gt;Into the Cool&lt;/em&gt; by Sagan and Schneider and I was intrigued by a reference to Joseph Brodsky’s poetry but I can’t seem to understand what it means exactly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The time since the Big Bang is an estimated 15 billion years. Life as a whole is roughly a third as old. We are closer, as Joseph Brodsky wrote, with poetic license, to the Big Bang than to Rome. If we consider our origins in natural transformations, in the cycling of matter in regions of energy flow, no poetic license is needed to see the truth of this statement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the reference to Brodsky’s poem mean in this context? I.e. what do Sagan and Schneider mean by referring to his saying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8456" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-24T21:56:16.603" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T22:42:08.830" Title="What is the meaning of Brodsky’s saying in the context of Sagan &amp; Schneider’s book “Into the Cool”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;joseph-brodsky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12236" CreationDate="2020-01-24T16:17:13.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;thing&lt;/em&gt; (I'm not sure whether it should be called a poem or a song) is called:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Anti-Shenandoah: Two Skits and a Chorus&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final part reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;III. Chorus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here they are, for all to see,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the fruits of complacency.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beware of love, of A.D., B.C.,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and the travel agency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A train may move fast, but time is slow.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;History's closer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to the Big Bang than to Roman Law,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and you are the loser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, our advice to you is, Stay put&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if you can help it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Always be ready to say Kaput,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but wear a helmet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;1992&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://natsla.livejournal.com/274397.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; (the discussion is in Russian, though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the question has been edited since I've typed my answer, the answer makes little sense now.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I haven't read the book, so I went and read the annotation and a review to get the rough idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quoted paragraph can be found in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u4wb1EQWQD0C&amp;amp;pg=PR11&amp;amp;lpg=PR11&amp;amp;dq=%22The+time+since+the+Big+Bang+is+an+estimated+15+billion+years.%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=X7KjVmJFjF&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2N0JNpOxPmW6awdNHv9LfEhJ2QSQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjwq46HsJ3nAhWaVBUIHXJsD-sQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22The%20time%20since%20the%20Big%20Bang%20is%20an%20estimated%2015%20billion%20years.%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface&lt;/a&gt; of the book but this appears to be of little help. I believe the Physics.SE might actually be a better place for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;However&lt;/strong&gt;, if I were to hazard a guess on what the authors mean I'd be thinking of something along the following lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We (meaning the humankind here and now) are very far from (the Ancient) Rome in terms of our current beliefs, social life, politics, science, technology, you name it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet we, as a part of the material world, are built up from the same &lt;em&gt;matter&lt;/em&gt; that once came into existence as a result of the Big Bang (if the theory is true, that is) and then just kept transforming for billions of years. So, in this sense, we are fairly close to the Big Bang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS.&lt;/strong&gt; I'd be much more interested to know what &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; Brodsky meant by his lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History's closer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to the Big Bang than to Roman Law,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and you are the loser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure Sagan and Schneider understood this but neither can I :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T22:42:08.830" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T22:42:08.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-25T19:51:25.630" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/226541/31394&quot;&gt;a question about Lovecraft&lt;/a&gt;, I was reading the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/CRAS-010-02-11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen A. Black, &quot;Literary Biography and Psychological Criticism: In the Matter of H. P. Lovecraft&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Canadian Review of American Studies&lt;/em&gt; 10(2) (1979), pp. 243-250 (DOI 10.3138/CRAS-010-02-11)&lt;/a&gt; which cites another article (Barton Levi St. Armand, &lt;em&gt;The Roots of Horror in the Fiction of H. P. Lovecraft&lt;/em&gt;) which I have been unable to find myself. Discussing St. Armand's work, Black writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In tracing out the symbolic or associative meanings of the cat, &quot;Nigger-Man,&quot; the following seem to be Lovecraft's thoughts: as a youth, Lovecraft actually owned a black cat called &quot;Nigger-Man&quot; whom he loved very much. It is highly probable that Lovecraft knew thoroughly Poe's grisly tale, &quot;The Black Cat&quot;; however, there seems to be no information about Lovecraft's reactions to parts or all of the Poe tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got curious about this, since Poe and Lovecraft are both well-known authors in the horror genre and I hadn't thought about the connection between them before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that Lovecraft was influenced by Poe's story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cat_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Black Cat&quot;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we do better than the researchers cited above and find any explicit reference by Lovecraft to this Poe story? Or, failing that, what is the evidence to support that &quot;highly probable&quot;, evidence for the influence of this Poe story on Lovecraft's writings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-01-25T19:51:25.630" Title="Was Lovecraft influenced by Poe's &quot;The Black Cat&quot;?" Tags="&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12240" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-26T13:18:01.390" Score="7" ViewCount="1609" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the chocolate ration is reduced from 30 grammes per week to 20, the Ministry of Truth puts out the claim that it has been &lt;em&gt;increased&lt;/em&gt; to 20 grammes (its supposed previous level is not stated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, Winston hears a reporter/newsreader on the telescreen claiming that spontaneous gatherings of people have formed and demonstrated, purely to thank Big Brother for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, at first, this seemed like more fake news of the sort Minitrue routinely puts out. However, it seems odd that this is talking &lt;em&gt;with approval&lt;/em&gt; about spontaneous activity which was &lt;em&gt;ostensibly&lt;/em&gt; not done at the instigation of the Party. The Party doesn't want people thinking for themselves, or making decisions for themselves, even if they decide to enthusiastically express support for its policies. (Note as an example Syme and his eventual fate. And, I suppose, Parsons as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking about it, I seem to remember somewhere reading an article - or a very old interview with Orwell - or the script for some adaptation of the book - in which some more backstory to this was given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Factory workers, angry at the reduced chocolate ration (the loss of one of their few comforts under the Party regime) had downed tools and stormed out into the streets to protest against this.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They certainly weren't fooled, or cowed into doublethink, by the use of the word &quot;increase&quot;. Partly because the Inner Party hadn't put as much effort into controlling and intimidating the so-called &quot;proles&quot; as it had into making the lives of the Outer Party miserable.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;In-universe&quot;, the decision was made by someone working at Minitrue to mention the demonstrations in a telescreen broadcast, but to make a false claim as to their nature, to get the Party version of events out to anybody who'd witnessed the demonstrations. Which would be rather hard to ignore if you'd walked into the middle of one!&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Out-of-universe, this was Orwell's way of showing that however beaten-down, obedient and doublethinking Winston's peers might be, the &quot;proles&quot; would not so readily accept having the Party &quot;p*ss on their leg and tell them it was raining&quot;. So an uprising originating from the working class, as opposed to someone like Winston, might still occur in the future. They'd probably put up with several impositions of hardship like this, but this straw temporarily broke the camel's back.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been googling and I cannot find this article, if indeed it ever existed. Does anyone know if Orwell did indeed say these things, or commit them to print? I might just be misremembering a critic giving their opinion on that section of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8461" LastActivityDate="2020-01-26T13:18:01.390" Title="Nineteen Eighty Four - the chocolate ration demonstrations" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12242" CreationDate="2020-01-26T21:11:59.217" Score="3" ViewCount="1392" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the third stanza of John Donne's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44131/a-valediction-forbidding-mourning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning&lt;/a&gt;&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Men reckon what it did, and meant;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But trepidation of the spheres,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though greater far, is innocent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8465" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-26T22:39:49.513" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T09:41:18.700" Title="Explain the third stanza of Donne's &quot;A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-donne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12241" CreationDate="2020-01-26T22:25:37.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulty here is ‘trepidation of the spheres’, so let’s start with a look in the dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sphere, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 2. a.&lt;/strong&gt; One or other of the concentric, transparent, hollow globes imagined by the older astronomers as revolving round the earth and respectively carrying with them the several heavenly bodies (moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars). The number of these was originally supposed to be eight, subsequently increased to nine and finally to ten by the addition of the ‘primum mobile’ and the ‘crystalline sphere’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;trepidation, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 3. a.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Astronomy.&lt;/em&gt; A libration of the eighth (or ninth) sphere, added to the system of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ptolemy&lt;/a&gt; by the Arab astronomer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C4%81bit_ibn_Qurra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thabet ben Korrah&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;c.&lt;/em&gt; 950, in order to account for certain phenomena, esp. precession, really due to motion of the earth's axis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See also Wikipedia’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepidation_(astronomy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trepidation&lt;/a&gt;’ article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the ‘trepidation of the spheres’ is a supposed libration (oscillation) in the direction or rate of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;precession of the equinoxes&lt;/a&gt;, attributed to the imaginary ‘spheres’ of the heavens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind we can interpret the stanza as follows. Since ‘trepidation of the sphere’ is a kind of vibration or quaking, the parallel phrase ‘Moving of th’earth’ must be an earthquake. An earthquake certainly ‘brings harms and fears’; its victims must count the cost (‘reckon what it did’); and since ancient times people have considered earthquakes to be portents, omens, or visitations of divine displeasure, and tried to work out what they ‘meant’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it has often happened that […] earthquakes have predicted, with terrible truth, many of the evils which have befallen our own republic and other states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Marcus Tullius Cicero (44 BCE). &lt;em&gt;On Divination&lt;/em&gt; 1.18. Translated by C. D. Yonge (1853).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet compares the movement of the earth to the trepidation of the heavenly spheres and points out that the latter is ‘far greater’, but is quite ‘innocent’ of harm: indeed, its effects can only be made out by the most learned of astronomers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s the &lt;em&gt;literal&lt;/em&gt; meaning of the stanza. But why has the poet chosen to write about earthquakes and astronomical events? The context of the whole poem is that the speaker is parting from their beloved, and is trying to persuade them not to cry or mourn: a ‘valediction’ being ‘An utterance, discourse, etc., made at (or by way of) leave-taking or bidding farewell’ (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). The speaker attempts this persuasion through a series of increasingly outlandish metaphors. (The use of extended and ingenious metaphors, so-called ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceit#Metaphysical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphysical conceits&lt;/a&gt;’, was a common feature of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English poetry in the early 17th century&lt;/a&gt; when Donne was writing.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, in the first stanza the parting of the speaker and the addressee is compared to the death of a ‘virtuous man’, who dies so ‘mildly’ that his friends at the bed-side cannot make out which is his last breath. In the second stanza their parting is compared to the melting of ice, which ‘makes no noise’, unlike other partings which are accompanied by ‘floods of tears’ and ‘tempests of sighs’. So by the time we get to the third stanza we are primed to interpret it as another metaphor for how couples handle a separation. So the &lt;em&gt;metaphorical&lt;/em&gt; meaning of this stanza is that the parting of an ordinary pair of lovers is like an earthquake: harmful, fearful, and dramatic; but the parting of the speaker and the addressee is like the trepidation of the spheres: ‘greater far’ because of the magnitude of their love, yet as calm and ‘innocent’ as the motion of the heavens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T09:41:18.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12251" CreationDate="2020-01-27T08:10:45.893" Score="0" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am new to literature and was trying to find material on social change. The names of Mrs Gaskell, William Hale White and Thomas Hardy came up. I am interested in turning points in social history and what literary criticism says about recognizing that we are passing through one and change is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8270" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T14:03:22.767" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T01:14:59.770" Title="Literature of change" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ClosedDate="2020-01-28T18:23:35.540" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12244" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12245" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" Score="0" Body="Christopher Tolkien (1924–2020), English editor of the works of his father, J. R. R. Tolkien, including &quot;The Silmarillion&quot; (1977) and &quot;The History of Middle-earth&quot; (twelve volumes, 1983–1996)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T08:11:23.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T08:47:09.473" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while back I asked on anoher SE &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/43169/which-originally-non-english-novel-or-story-has-had-the-widest-reception-in-engl&quot;&gt;&quot;Which, originally non-English, work has the widest reception in English SF?&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Shortly after the question was closed for being opinion based. Now another user modified the question by adding the qualifier &quot;... widest reach as measured in Google Scholar citations&quot; as this is an objectively measurable item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find it rather puzzling, tbh, as I think wide reception means things like lots of copies sold, read, borrowed from libraries, talked about in zines, referenced in other works etc. - most of which might not show up as Google Scholar cites.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When literature people talk about reception of a work, how do they measure this, how do they compare receptions of different work? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: SF differs from other literary fiction and other genres in a few way that might be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;SF is self referential in a different way (background and plot ideas of other authors are examined and re-examined) so the reach of an SF work might lie in how its tropes are picked up by other authors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is or was the SF ghetto meaning that SF works seldom reach anyone beyond an SF audience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that shouldn't affect the answer much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4386" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-27T13:24:12.453" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T02:33:25.990" Title="How to measure the reception of a literary work" Tags="&lt;reception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-27T12:26:12.247" Score="2" ViewCount="863" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; several of the gods take sides in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. For example, Ares, Apollo and Aphrodite side with the Trojans, while Pallas Athena, Hera and Poseidon favour the Greeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; tells us Pallas Athena had been angered by the Greeks (even though she eventually helps Odysseus reach Ithaca). For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.3.iii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book III&lt;/a&gt; (from Samuel Butler's translation, in which &quot;Pallas Athena&quot; is replaced with the Latin name &quot;Minerva&quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When however, we had sacked the city of Priam, and were setting sail in our ships as heaven had dispersed us, then Jove saw fit to vex the Argives on their homeward voyage; for they had Not all been either wise or understanding, and hence many came to a bad end through the displeasure of Jove's daughter Minerva, who brought about a quarrel between the two sons of Atreus.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The sons of Atreus called a meeting which was not as it should be, for it was sunset and the Achaeans were heavy with wine. When they explained why they had called- the people together, it seemed that Menelaus was for sailing homeward at once, and this displeased Agamemnon, who thought that we should wait till we had offered hecatombs to appease the anger of Minerva. Fool that he was, he might have known that he would not prevail with her, for when the gods have made up their minds they do not change them lightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sack of Troy is described neither in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; nor in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, so it is not clear (or not made explicit) how that event might have Pallas Athena from a &quot;friend&quot; into an enemy. Is this described in other works about the same events?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T20:45:33.310" Title="How did the Greeks anger Pallas Athena?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12247" CreationDate="2020-01-27T15:57:01.153" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Returns_from_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, in a pastiche of plot summaries scraped from here and there,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The city was razed and the temples were destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;News of Troy's fall quickly reached the Achaean kingdoms through a system of fire relays.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But though the message was brought fast and with ease, the heroes were not to return this way. The Gods were very angry over the destruction of their temples and other sacrilegious acts by the Achaeans and decided that most would not return. A storm fell on the returning fleet off Tenos island. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: a top level policy decision to punish the Greeks.  The passage you quote shows how Athena implements it.  She sends Discord to the 2 kings, and level-headed Agamemnon's&#xA;council to give sacrifices to the gods (&amp;quot;hecatombs&amp;quot;) is ignored, and this makes the gods angrier yet. The rest is (pre-)history.  Pope's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Discord, sent by Pallas from above,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stern daughter of the great avenger Jove,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The brother-kings inspired with fell debate;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who call’d to council all the Achaian state,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But call’d untimely (not the sacred rite&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Observed, nor heedful of the setting light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor herald sword the session to proclaim),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sour with debauch, a reeling tribe the came.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To these the cause of meeting they explain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Menelaus moves to cross the main;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not so the king of men: be will’d to stay,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sacred rites and hecatombs to pay,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And calm Minerva’s wrath. Oh blind to fate!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The gods not lightly change their love, or hate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But of course in most of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; Athena helps Odysseus and his family; the Book III stuff is back-story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia seems to get its info from &lt;em&gt;&lt;strike&gt;Cliff's Notes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strike&gt; Apollodorus's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/ApollodorusE.html#4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epitome&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[E.5.22] But Menelaus slew Deiphobus and led away Helen to the ships133; and Aethra, mother of Theseus, was also led away by Demophon and Acamas, the sons of Theseus; for they say that they afterwards went to Troy.134 And the Locrian Ajax, seeing Cassandra clinging to the wooden image of Athena, violated her; therefore they say that the image looks to heaven.135&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[E.5.23] And having slain the Trojans, they set fire to the city and divided the spoil among them. And having sacrificed to all the gods, they threw Astyanax from the battlements136 and slaughtered Polyxena on the grave of Achilles.137 And as special awards Agamemnon got Cassandra, Neoptolemus got Andromache, and Ulysses got Hecuba.138 But some say that Helenus got her, and crossed over with her to the Chersonese139; and that there she turned into a bitch, and he buried her at the place now called the Bitch's Tomb.140 As for Laodice, the fairest of the daughters of Priam, she was swallowed up by a chasm in the earth in the sight of all.141 When they had laid Troy waste and were about to sail away, they were detained by Calchas, who said that Athena was angry with them on account of the impiety of Ajax. And they would have killed Ajax, but he fled to the altar and they let him alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[E.6.1] After these things they met in assembly, and Agamemnon and Menelaus quarrelled, Menelaus advising that they should sail away, and Agamemnon insisting that they should stay and sacrifice to Athena. When they put to sea, Diomedes, Nestor, and Menelaus in company, the two former had a prosperous voyage, but Menelaus was overtaken by a storm, and after losing the rest of his vessels, arrived with five ships in Egypt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T16:30:11.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12247" CreationDate="2020-01-27T17:33:48.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euripides&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Euripides&lt;/a&gt; dramatised Athena’s change of heart near the start of &lt;em&gt;The Trojan Women&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt;  Do you bring fresh tidings from some god, from Zeus, or from some lesser power?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; From none of these; but on behalf of Troy, whose soil we tread, I have come to seek your mighty aid, to make it one with mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; What! have you laid your former hate aside  to take compassion on the town now that it is burnt to ashes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; First go back to the former point; will you make common cause with me in the scheme I purpose?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; Yes, surely; but I want to learn your wishes, whether you have come to help Achaeans or Phrygians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt;  I wish to give my former foes, the Trojans, joy, and on the Achaean army impose a bitter return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; Why do you leap thus from mood to mood? Your love and hate both go too far, on whomever centred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Do you not know the insult done to me and to the shrine I love?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt;  &lt;strong&gt;I do: when Aias dragged away Cassandra by force.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;Yes, and the Achaeans did nothing, said nothing to him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; And yet it was by your mighty aid they sacked Ilium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; For which cause I would join with you to do them harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; My powers are ready at your will. What is your intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt;  I will impose on them a return that is no return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poseidon:&lt;/em&gt; While they stay on shore, or as they cross the salt sea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Athena:&lt;/em&gt; When they have set sail from Ilium for their homes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Euripides (415 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0124%3Acard%3D48&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Trojan Women&lt;/em&gt; 55–77&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Edward P. Coleridge (1891).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Aias’ here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_the_Lesser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ajax the Lesser&lt;/a&gt;. During the sack of Troy, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cassandra&lt;/a&gt; tried to claim sanctuary in the temple of Athena at Troy, but Ajax dragged her away and raped her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There must have been at least two incompatible versions of the story, because in the passage above, Euripides has Poseidon say that Ajax dragged Cassandra out of Athena’s temple in Troy, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_(Pseudo-Apollodorus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pseudo-Apollodorus&lt;/a&gt; has more detail:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helenus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helenus&lt;/a&gt; was forced to tell how Ilium could be taken, to wit, first, if the bones of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelops&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pelops&lt;/a&gt; were brought to them; next, if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoptolemus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neoptolemus&lt;/a&gt; fought for them; and third, if the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palladium_(classical_antiquity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Palladium&lt;/a&gt;, which had fallen from heaven, were stolen from Troy, for while it was within the walls the city could not be taken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On hearing these things the Greeks caused the bones of Pelops to be fetched, and they sent &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ulysses&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(son_of_Amyntor)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phoenix&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycomedes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lycomedes&lt;/a&gt; at Scyros, and these two persuaded him to let Neoptolemus go. […] And Ulysses went with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomedes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diomedes&lt;/a&gt; by night to the city, and there he let Diomedes wait, and after disfiguring himself and putting on mean attire he entered unknown into the city as a beggar. And being recognized by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen&lt;/a&gt;, he with her help &lt;strong&gt;stole away the Palladium&lt;/strong&gt;, and after killing many of the guards, brought it to the ships with the aid of Diomedes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[… the Greeks then built the wooden horse and sacked Troy …]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Locrian Ajax, seeing Cassandra &lt;strong&gt;clinging to the wooden image of Athena&lt;/strong&gt;, violated her; therefore they say that the image looks to heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pseudo-Apollodorus. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0022%3Atext%3DEpitome%3Abook%3DE%3Achapter%3D5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epitome&lt;/em&gt; E.5.11–14 and 23&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by James Frazer (1913).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “wooden image of Athena” is the Palladium, but since it had been stolen by the Greeks, how could Cassandra have later clung to it in the temple? Presumably pseudo-Apollodorus has edited multiple incompatible sources together here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T20:45:33.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12243" CreationDate="2020-01-27T18:07:59.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two interesting questions posed here: 1) Which novelists – with an emphasis on the Victorian novelists – recognized contemporary changes in society and took them into account in their books? 2) Which of them, if any, expressed a need for such changes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A book could be written on these questions. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Off the top of my head, from my own limited reading (William Hale White is a new one on me): Social change seems to be the engine behind most of Wharton’s novels – although she’s interested in how that change effects only two or three narrow and adjacent levels of society. Social change is the subject of “Cranford” (the only Gaskell novel I’ve read); there it is treated as a source of tender comedy. Social change is Gissing’s main concern, although for him it is usually a source of tragedy – of the domestic sort. Thomas Hardy certainly is aware of social changes, but sees them more as social eruptions than changes which are part of a historical progression. Social change is an important element in Arnold Bennett’s novels; his view of it is even-handed – it’s a good thing for some of his characters, a bad thing for others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for novelists who see a need for social change and promote it in their books, the muckrakers immediately come to mind. Off-hand, I’d say that writers who express a need for social change are less likely to recognize that it is happening under their noses. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-01-27T18:07:59.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12243" CreationDate="2020-01-28T02:19:17.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am interested in turning points in social history and what the literature says about recognizing that we are passing through one and change is needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century was a dramatic time of social change and it did indeed lead to a group of novels called the &quot;social problem novels,&quot; including the &quot;industrial novels&quot; of the 1830s to 1860s. The Industrial Novels include (among others):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elizabeth Gaskell, &lt;em&gt;Mary Barton,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;North and South,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Cranford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charles Dickens, &lt;em&gt;Hard Times&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Charles Kingsley, &lt;em&gt;Alton Locke&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George Eliot, &lt;em&gt;Felix Holt: The Radical&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frances Trollope, &lt;em&gt;Michael Armstrong: The Factory Boy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;C.E Tonna, &lt;em&gt;Helen Fleetwood&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Benjamin Disraeli, &lt;em&gt;Sybil&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the &quot;social problem novel,&quot; also called the &quot;condition of England novel,&quot; was a larger category that explored the new social order, often without any references to factories. Charles Dickens' novels are the most well known of the group, beginning with &lt;em&gt;Oliver Twist,&lt;/em&gt; but his &lt;em&gt;Dombey and Son,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Bleak House,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Our Mutual Friend&lt;/em&gt; are the most widely read today, with all of them passionately addressing different social problems and calling for social reform.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other important examples focus on the &quot;Woman Problem,&quot; or the impossible predicaments faced by women at the time. The best examples are Charlotte Brontë's &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; and George Eliot's &lt;em&gt;Middlemarch.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is barely scratching the surface, of course. You might look at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/problem.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Victorian Social Novel as Genre&lt;/a&gt; as a free academic starting point for more information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But novels about social problems are widespread and the Victorian novel is only one particularly prominent example. For others in English, look at the novels of American Naturalism, such as Theodore Dreiser's &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt; or Kate Chopin's &lt;em&gt;The Awakening.&lt;/em&gt; You'll find an bibliography at &lt;a href=&quot;https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naturalism in American Literature&lt;/a&gt;, which includes an brief introduction to the term &quot;naturalism.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very broad question, but one always worth exploring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastEditorUserId="7964" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T01:14:59.770" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T01:14:59.770" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12246" CreationDate="2020-01-28T02:33:25.990" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When literature people talk about reception of a work, how do they measure this, how do they compare receptions of different work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typically literary scholars look at all of the published reviews to get one documented form of &quot;reception.&quot; In the 18th-20th centuries, the number of periodicals specializing in reviews was enormous, giving a good gauge of the range of responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sales figures provide a second metric, and these are found in the archives of publishing houses or sometimes in the correspondence and diaries of authors, who generally tracked sales (and the income they produced) closely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book historians have another technique, of looking at the records of libraries to get a sense of what they were purchasing and how much individual books circulated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, all of this predates Google Scholar, which would be a singularly unhelpful source to track reception of anything except new books -- and even then, I would question its accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T02:33:25.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12253" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-01-28T10:59:56.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T10:59:56.807" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T10:59:56.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12254" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-01-28T10:59:56.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about how audiences responded to specific literary works, including theories about the reception of literary works. This can cover both qualitative and quantitative aspects (e.g. sales figures). This tag should not be used for questions about how one author influenced another or for questions specifically about meaning or interpretation." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T19:31:35.187" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T19:31:35.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-28T12:31:29.290" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to locate the source of a story I remember, for an essay I'm writing. Not sure if the story is fact, fiction, or legend. It concerns an apprentice to a master storyteller in Japan (Rakugo I think). The master makes the apprentice practice the same bit of the same story over and over, never lets him try anything else. Frustrated, the apprentice runs away, and comes across an inn where he's asked to tell a story for his supper. Of course, he tells the only one he knows. Everyone's in awe of his skills, and say they didn't realise he was a master of the art. Realising why his master has been making him do this, he returns to his master and becomes a master in his own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4502" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T22:08:46.780" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T22:08:46.780" Title="Trying to locate source of a story about Japanese storyteller's apprentice who is mistaken for a master" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-28T14:01:19.200" Score="4" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad#Date_and_textual_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says that this work was first printed in Florence in 1488/89.&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey#Textual_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; does not mention when this epic was first printed,&#xA;but it appears to have been part of the same &quot;editio princeps&quot; as the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://onassislibrary.gr/en/collection/items/39018_en/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homerus / Τὰ σωζόμενα&lt;/a&gt; (Onassis Library).&#xA;The description of this edition in the Onassis Library also says that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The edition of the epic poems was prepared by Demetrios Chalkokondyles, funded by his pupil Bernardo Nerli. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/greek-manuscripts/articles/greek-manuscripts-from-the-dawn-of-print&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Printing Greek in the 15th century&lt;/a&gt; by Eugenia Russell on the British Library's website adds that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Florence, Demetrius Chalkokondyles (1423–1511) and Demetrius Damilas produced the first printed edition of the works of Homer (1488–89), using typefaces that the latter had used before in Milan. The production included all that was then believed to be Homeric, i.e. the Homeric Hymns and &lt;em&gt;Batrachomyomachia&lt;/em&gt; (The Battle of Frogs and Mice), a parody previously attributed to Lucian. The Chalkokondyles Homer is probably the most famous &lt;em&gt;editio princeps&lt;/em&gt; (first edition) in the history of philology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;what manuscript of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; was that edition based on?&lt;/strong&gt; Or did the editors consult more than one manuscript? Does that manuscript still exist and, if yes, where is it currently available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.answers.com/Q/How_old_is_the_oldest_known_manuscript_for_Iliad_and_Odyssey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How old is the oldest known manuscript for Iliad and Odyssey?&lt;/a&gt; on Answers.com mentions several manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; but for the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; merely adds, &quot;The story for the Odyssey is similar, but there are fewer medieval manuscripts and fewer papyrus fragments.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.homermultitext.org/manuscripts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer Multitext Project&lt;/a&gt; lists several manuscripts of Homeric works they are editing, but at the time of writing these are all manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;del&gt;One potential candidate as a source is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-florentine-homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Florentine Homer&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a manuscript by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rhosos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ioannes Rhosos&lt;/a&gt; completed in Florence in May 1466, i.e. just two decades before the printed edition by Demetrios Chalkokondyles.&lt;/del&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-28T17:42:08.710" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T15:13:24.400" Title="What manuscript was the first printed edition of the Odyssey based on?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3576" CreationDate="2020-01-28T14:57:59.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm almost certain this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0765355221&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Empire&lt;/em&gt;, by Orson Scott Card.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only excerpts I can find online are from the first chapter, whereas the events you describe happen slightly later in the narrative. However, I clearly remember this occuring in the novel, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Card_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia summary&lt;/a&gt; backs this up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Major Malich works at the Pentagon, where he writes the plans to find holes in American security, having no idea that they will fall into the wrong hands. The plans call for a stealthy underwater entrance into Washington, D.C., followed by a rocket launcher attack on the White House, relying on an inside informant to give the location of the President. Malich and Coleman come upon the attack in progress, and, after acquiring rifles, attempt to prevent the attack....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8470" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T14:57:59.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12178" CreationDate="2020-01-28T23:25:01.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To the tally of my soul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;tally&lt;/em&gt; is indeed a state of correspondence or agreement, but still a question remains: What's the tally of a soul? In other words: What does the soul of the narrator corresponds &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is found earlier in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again at the last strophe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the tallying&#xA;  chant, the echo arous’d in my soul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So now we know: The poet's spirit corresponds to, or: echoes, reflects, the bird's song in acknowledging the meaning of death, which is the main theme of the poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theme is related to the other lines you asked about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As to long panoramas of visions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two lines convey a dream-like, or maybe propehtic-like, experience of the poet: To this point, his eyes were &lt;em&gt;bound&lt;/em&gt;, imprisoned, but suddenly they're &lt;em&gt;unclosed&lt;/em&gt;, opened for distinguished sights:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I saw they were not as was thought,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This vision is a tactile expression of what until these lines was only sung (by the bird, or the soul), but now can actually be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2020-01-28T23:25:01.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12189" CreationDate="2020-01-29T01:48:22.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;After line 25, the poem turns dark and troubled, as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                            the huge cliff&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Rose up between me and the stars, and still,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With measured motion, like a living thing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Strode after me. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before that, you notice the careful way the writer creates a sense of unease within a moment that &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be pure pleasure. But instead, as the poet notes (ll. 10–11), &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                     It was an act of stealth&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And troubled pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So you are right to identify the other elements that create this note of &quot;trouble&quot; within this scene of &quot;pleasure.&quot; Within the larger context of the &lt;em&gt;Prelude&lt;/em&gt; (in all versions), this incident is one in which the young Wordsworth has not wholly learned the lessons from nature, and his sense of guilt at taking the boat manifests itself in his fear of the ominous cliff chasing after him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your analysis is spot on. So, my question is: why did you doubt yourself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-01-29T10:18:52.420" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T10:18:52.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12261" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12256" CreationDate="2020-01-29T15:13:24.400" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Single or Multiple Manuscrips?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The editor, Demetrius Chalkokondyles (Demetrius Damilas was the printer), consulted multiple manuscripts.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how I've found it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chalkokondyles's &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b10722775p/f5.item.r=DEMETRIUS%20Chalcondylas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;editio princeps&lt;/em&gt; of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey&lt;/a&gt; has two prefaces: One, in Latin, which was written by Bernardus Nerlius, and second, in Greek, which was written by the editor Demetrius Chalkokondyles.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;[The Latin part is available &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/prefacestofirste00botfuoft/prefacestofirste00botfuoft_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; - look for the words &lt;em&gt;&quot;Bernardus Nerlius Petro&quot;&lt;/em&gt; - but the Greek is Giberish].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have knowledge in neither Latin nor Greek, but I've found what seems to be a short summary of these prefaces, in a 1810 book called &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=XckUAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA478&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manual of Classical Bibliography&lt;/a&gt;, by Joseph William Moss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chalcondyles, the editor, collected as great a number of MSS. together&#xA;  as he was able to procure ; but, after a careful inspection, not&#xA;  finding any one perfect, or entirely free from interpolations, he, by&#xA;  the assitance of Eustathius's Commentary, laboured to compose from&#xA;  these various MSS, as perfect an edition as, from the corrupt and&#xA;  imperfect state of his materials, he was able. &lt;em&gt;(pg. 478&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which Manuscrips?&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure we can find this out. We know today of dozens of manuscripts (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/manuscripts/greek_classics.htm#Homer%20The%20Odyssey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see e.g. T.W. Allen's list&lt;/a&gt;), and new ones are discovered from time to time. Maybe, if you can find someone to decipher Chalcondyles's Greek preface, it would shed more light over this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2020-01-29T15:13:24.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12262" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12263" CreationDate="2020-01-30T05:02:49.547" Score="1" ViewCount="627" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Oriah Mountain Dreamer's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mindfulnessassociation.net/words-of-wonder/the-invitation-oriah-mountain-dreamer/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Invitation&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the sixth paragraph is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't figure out what she means by the last phrase --being &amp;quot;faithless and therefore trustworthy&amp;quot;.  I've thought it refers to not being dependent on a higher power for &amp;quot;goodness&amp;quot;, but on one's own sense of right and wrong, but I'm not sure that's what she's trying to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really can't find anything about it when I search -- certainly not about that particular phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of that phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7583" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T14:29:20.680" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T14:29:20.680" Title="What's the meaning of this phrase in &quot;The Invitation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;oriah-mountain-dreamer&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12262" CreationDate="2020-01-30T11:35:34.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My take on the passage is that a person who will put aside their own belief in the right thing to do because they cannot bear to be the cause of disappointment in another person, can never be as trusted as one who will not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you think about it, if someone sets aside their own will to not disappoint &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; person, then you cannot know if they will set it aside for &lt;em&gt;another&lt;/em&gt; person. They will always be susceptible to pressure not to 'break faith' with another person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to go back to the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be &lt;strong&gt;faithless and therefore trustworthy&lt;/strong&gt;..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can only fully trust a person who is prepared to break faith with another person to be true to themselves. A person who is not true to themselves is true to whoever holds most sway over them, and their actions cannot be predicted, so one cannot put trust in them because you don't know who can pull their strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-01-30T12:38:17.307" LastActivityDate="2020-01-30T12:38:17.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12264" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-30T15:38:09.923" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can I read &lt;em&gt;Twenty Years After&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Vingt ans après&lt;/em&gt;) by Alexandre Dumas without reading &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Les Trois Mousquetaires&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have come across a site which says that &lt;em&gt;Twenty Years After&lt;/em&gt; is a sequel to &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt;. I was wondering if I could read &lt;em&gt;Twenty Years After&lt;/em&gt; without reading any other Alexandre Dumas book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5766" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-01-30T16:33:44.643" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T20:28:34.000" Title="Can I read &quot;Twenty Years After&quot; by Alexandre Dumas without reading &quot;The Three Musketeers&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;alexandre-dumas-pere&gt;&lt;the-three-musketeers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12265" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-31T06:41:07.837" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Okay, this has nagged me for years. I read a children's book circa 1970, set in the western US in early-mid-20th century.  Horses and trucks both.  A mystery. Protagonists two boys and one girl.  There is a lost treasure (a mine?) in a hidden valley somewhere in a small mountain range.  One character takes a job as a helper to a peddler (a handyman?) who drives a van throughout the region.  Eventually the main characters discover that the hidden valley can only be found by swimming underwater (through a pool or stream?).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably not a classic, but I'd love to re-read, enjoy and exorcise!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8484" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T15:25:31.700" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T15:25:31.700" Title="Children's book with a lost treasure in a hidden valley only accessible by swimming underwater" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-01-31T19:59:21.430" Score="5" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a short story back in the 2001/2002 time frame while I was in middle school. It may have been assigned reading, or part of a text book, or a library book I can't remember. I was reading it during class at the time (7th or 8th grade, USA). I believe it was a literature class. I only remember one specific scene, which may actually be the entirety of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;School bullies pick on a certain kid and begin throwing either snowballs with rocks in them, or just rocks at him. I feel like this was a common occurrence in the story setting. There may have been snow piles and banks because the main character takes cover. He ends up winning the fight (I think) because he has practiced throwing rocks so that they curve (they curve because they are somewhat flattened and thrown at an angle). He is accurate enough to curve the rocks around the cover the bullies are using, and beats them even though there are many bullies. The fact that he could curve the rock so accurately was a big deal in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it feeling somewhat dystopian almost in a &quot;The Giver&quot; kind of way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8487" LastEditorUserId="5473" LastEditDate="2020-01-31T20:26:34.330" LastActivityDate="2020-01-31T20:26:34.330" Title="Short story about a bullied boy winning a rock throwing fight because he can throw rocks so that they curve" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12267" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-01T10:15:21.367" Score="0" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;From book 1|Chapter 2 of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Ring of the Enemy would leave its marks,too, &lt;strong&gt;leave him open to the summons&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T12:46:43.203" Title="What's the meaning of &quot; leave him open to the summons &quot; in The Lord Of The Rings?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12269" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-02T02:52:10.083" Score="5" ViewCount="343" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about this sentence from the Sherlock Holmes story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20160532/html.php#chap10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (1927) by Arthur Conan Doyle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From that day I was in hell, and he the devil who tormented me. There was no one in the show who did not know of his treatment. &lt;strong&gt;He deserted me for others&lt;/strong&gt;. He tied me down and lashed me with his riding-whip when I complained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This “he” and “I” were husband and wife, he’s dead when she is speaking of him though. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to confirm is what “He deserted me for others” means. Does this mean he was having an affair? That doesn’t sound right so me somehow. For one, “he” here is ugly wild-boar type man, even he had power and influence as the ringmaster of this traveling circus, did any women go to him, when there were few women in the troupe in the first place? For another, this woman “I” didn’t love this husband at all. So if he was having affair did (does) she even care?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this part be interpreted other than he having affairs?  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" OwnerDisplayName="giraffe" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-02T09:27:57.353" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T09:27:57.353" Title="Meaning of &quot;He deserted me for others&quot; in &quot;The Veiled Lodger&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12269" CreationDate="2020-02-02T04:53:47.383" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Veiled_Lodger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; summary of the story and I'm sure your interpretation is the only likely one. After describing the violence and cruelty of the man, Mrs. Ronder is clearly not expressing regret at his leaving her alone. At first glance &quot;deserted me for others&quot; doesn't seem quite right, but I think it is a &lt;em&gt;euphemism&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is simply saying 'he slept with other women', but a century ago that would have been found shockingly blunt. Circus troupes were perhaps looser in their morals than most and blunter in their speech, but in the company of &lt;em&gt;gentlemen&lt;/em&gt; (I'm assuming Holmes &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; Watson are there) and confident that they'll know exactly what she means, she chooses her words sensitively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-02-02T05:34:37.180" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T05:34:37.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-02T08:19:03.650" Score="2" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Rattrap&quot; by Selma Lagelöf (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;url=http://ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/lefl104.pdf&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjai9OQt7LnAhVLVH0KHdzdAfsQFjAIegQIBxAF&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw1l22UD-8vud4BKZMQoawZG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;short story&lt;/a&gt;) tells about a story of a rattrap seller, who thinks the world as a rattrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a fun story, but what I fail to understand is why, at the end of the story, the rattrap seller signs the letter as &quot; Captain Von Stahle&quot;, and how exactly being treated like a captain helped him get out of the Rattrap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7578" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-02-02T17:56:34.707" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T17:57:52.390" Title="In &quot;The Rattrap&quot; why does the peddler sign as captain and how does it help to get free of the rattrap?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;selma-lagerlof&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12267" CreationDate="2020-02-02T12:46:43.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of this sentence is Gandalf’s description of the search for Gollum:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘But I am afraid there is no possible doubt: he had made his slow, sneaking way, step by step, mile by mile, south, down at last to the Land of Mordor. […] Alas! Mordor draws all wicked things,&#xA;  and the Dark Power was bending all its will to gather them there. The Ring of the Enemy would leave its mark, too, leave him open to the summons.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book I chapter 2. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the last sentence describes the effects on Gollum of his long possession of the Ring. To ‘leave a mark’ means ‘to make a permanent impression’ (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;): that is, Gollum has been permanently changed by the Ring, so that even though he lost it to Bilbo many years ago, he still suffers from its influence. To be ‘open to’ something means to be ‘attentive’ or ‘receptive’ to it: that is, Gollum is still receptive to the magical ‘summons’ of the ‘Dark Power’ or ‘Enemy’ (that is, Sauron, whose very name Gandalf prefers to avoid).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we have learned in this chapter is that the rings of power weaken and corrupt the possessor until they are under Sauron’s control:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nine [rings] he gave to Mortal Men, proud and great, and so ensnared them. Long ago they fell under the dominion of the One, and they became Ringwraiths, shadows under his great Shadow, his most terrible servants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And we have read the inscription on the Ring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;One Ring to rule them all. One Ring to find them,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by ‘summons’ we understand the magical power that ‘brings them all’ (that is, all the ring-bearers) to Mordor and ‘binds them’ there (that is, subjects them to the control of Sauron).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T12:46:43.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12313" CreationDate="2020-02-02T17:32:10.110" Score="2" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was a short book (maybe less than 20 pages) that I probably read around 1988 or so in elementary school. The protagonist is a young boy, I think in Mexico. His family does pottery, and he's particularly fond of making clay horses, something his family sees as wasteful because what they sell are pots (I don't remember exactly how they make the pots, although my brain is trying to suggest it's the &quot;spiral ropes of clay&quot; kind instead of turning it on a wheel), and his taking time to make the horses is seen as frivolous. Near the end of the book, he's come home, where the tourists are waiting for a class or demonstration, but his mother or sister is not there, so he steps up, and shows them how to make a clay horse, starting out shaky, but getting more confident as he continues. Near the end, he realizes that his family is watching him. After the class/demonstration, they tell him that they now see the value of him making the clay horses, and he feels more accepted by his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T04:54:38.470" Title="Short children's book about a Mexican boy who likes to make clay horses" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12271" CreationDate="2020-02-02T17:57:52.390" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the start of the story, the peddler thinks of the world as a rat trap, where everything that is good, any seeming luxury or kindness, is just bait for a trap. While with the ironmaster's family, he is treated with kindness with no ulterior motive, particularly by Edla, and even after he is found out, she continues to treat him with kindness. At the end of the story, he now sees the his cynicism is what has trapped him. He signs the letter under the name of the Captain, who the family believes to be a noble and upright character, because now he knows that he can be that better person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T17:57:52.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5870" CreationDate="2020-02-02T18:27:48.040" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of the song being sung is that the conscripts have been invited to a Christmas party with the officers, and folk music is brought up with the implication that the Officers, as educated people, are familiar with their country's history and folk music, while the conscripts would only be familiar with popular contemporary music. The conscripts sing with increased aggression because they are angry at being dismissed by the officers as uneducated louts and also, as you note, there's an undercurrent that this song, associated with the Peasant's Revolt, also reminds the officers that the conscripts, common people, outnumber them, and therefore should not be treated so poorly as they might rise up in response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/36418/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Only in the Common People: The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Paul Leslie Long&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wesker explored the value of folk in his most successful play, &lt;em&gt;Chips With Everything&lt;/em&gt; which, along with the festivals, opened in 1962. This play follows a group of RAF conscripts through their national service training. Drawing upon personal experience, Wesker uses the tensions of this milieu to examine the enduring British class system and some contemporary cultural ideas and conflicts. Towards the end of the first act the men attend a Christmas party laid on for them by the officers. The odious Wing Commander reveals his estimation of them when he announces that in return he had expected ‘A dirty recitation, or a pop song. I’m sure there’s a wealth of native talent among you’ (Act 2, Scene 7). Pip Thompson, an upper-class recruit ‘slumming’ among the ranks, realises that the festivities are merely a cynical experiment. The representatives of the establishment seek confirmation of the docility and baseness of their subordinates. A surprise is in store however as Thompson encourages one soldier in a recitation of a dialect poem, and a minor battle of wills ensues. In turn, the officer encourages abandoned revelry and laughter, to the accompaniment of a rock`n’roll band engaged for the evening. In response, Pip whispers into the ear of the guitarist who begins to play an arrangement of ‘The Cutty Wren’. Quite spontaneously, the men join in the singing of this ‘old peasant revolt song’, which is delivered in a rather menacing manner, before the curtain falls. This vignette neatly delineates the politics of taste and class that were at issue. The idea of a shoddy mass culture is there, with disdainful reference made to Elvis and pop music in general. In opposition is the sense of an ‘authentic’ culture, which threatens by its very nature to galvanise the men into action. By fault or design there is an implication that the knowledge and understanding of this folk music is an immanent quality of the men, individual and collective. In this same vein, Jazz was approved of and included in festivals as: 'the last of the authentic folk music’. One contemporary writer considered it to be a bridge between high art and the popular culture of the people, underlining its authenticity&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T18:27:48.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12277" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12299" CreationDate="2020-02-02T19:12:06.170" Score="0" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Book 1, Chapter 2, of &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't tempt me! For I don't wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. &lt;strong&gt;Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.&lt;/strong&gt; Don't tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T12:35:55.567" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T12:35:55.567" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12277" CreationDate="2020-02-02T20:14:55.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Gandalf is saying is that he would be tempted to take up the ring to have the power to help other people, rather than because he desires power for personal gain, or for the sake of having power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T20:14:55.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-02T20:55:11.003" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;Famous Chinese Short Stories&lt;/em&gt; (John Day, 1948) contains a selection of stories, most from the Tang and Song dynasties, translated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yutang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lin Yutang&lt;/a&gt; (1895 – 1976). One of the later stories in the book is from the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Stories_from_a_Chinese_Studio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu_Songling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pu Songling&lt;/a&gt; (1640 – 1715).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lin Yutang translated the story's title as &quot;Jojo&quot;, but the original title (in Wade-Giles) was &quot;Hsiao Hsieh&quot; (presumably &quot;Xiao Xie&quot; in pinyin). The story's main character doesn't believe in ghosts and he wants to rent a residence from his friend Chiang that has been abandoned because it was said to be haunted. Of course, Tao Wang soon meets the two ghosts that haunt the place. (Many of Pu Songling's stories involve ghosts or other supernatural phenomena.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of the story, Tao Wang shows Chiang an essay entitled &quot;An Expansion on Yuan Chan's Theme Disproving the Existence of Ghosts&quot;. &lt;strong&gt;My question now is whether this is a reference or allusion to a real essay on the existence of ghosts.&lt;/strong&gt; I have not found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22yuan+chan%22+classical+chinese&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese author named Yuan Chan&lt;/a&gt;, but since the book contains a few typos, the name may have been Yuan Chen (Wade-Giles) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Zhen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yuan Zhen (pinyin)&lt;/a&gt;. &quot;Famous Chinese Short Stories&quot; actually contains a story by Yuan Zhen, but I am not aware of a text by Yuan Zhen an the existence of ghosts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-02-02T20:55:11.003" Title="Did Yuan Zhen really write a text disproving the existence of ghosts" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;pu-songling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12281" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-03T18:59:33.700" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lin Yutang's collection &lt;em&gt;Famous Chinese Short Stories&lt;/em&gt; contains a story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Zhen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yuan Zhen&lt;/a&gt; that is not simply a translation but a retelling. Lin Yutang follows Yuan Zhen's story until a certain point and then uses some of the author's poems to fill in gaps. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At a certain point in the story, the male protagonist, Yuan, sends a love poem to Inging (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yingying%27s_Biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yingying&lt;/a&gt; in pinyin) and later receives one back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That evening, Rose brought back a poem by Inging, which was entitled, &quot;Full Moon Night&quot;:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Some one waits in the moonlit night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  In the western room, with the door ajar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Across the wall, the flower shadows move —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ah, perhaps my love has come!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;That was February the fourteenth.&lt;/strong&gt; Yuan was overjoyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume Lin Yutang wrote &quot;February the fourteenth&quot; because people in the West know this date as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valentine's Day&lt;/a&gt;. However, Valentine's Day wasn't something the Chinese celebrated during the Tang dynasty (618 to 907 A.D.), when the story was written. So my question is what &quot;date&quot; or festival day (if any) Yuan Zhen used in his short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T18:59:33.700" Title="In Yuan Zhen's story ‘ Passion’, what does 14 February refer to?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;lin-yutang&gt;&lt;yuan-zhen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12282" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12283" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Chinese writer Yuan Zhen (779 – 831) and his life as a writer. Yuan Zhen is known as a poet and as the author of the short story &quot;Biography of Ying-ying&quot;. Use this tag with the tag [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:02:07.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12284" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12285" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Chinese linguist, novelist, philosopher and translator Lin Yutang (1895 – 1976) and his life as a writer. Lin Yutang published both in Chinese and in English. For questions about works Lin Yutang published in Chinese, use this tag with the [chinese-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:04:16.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12286" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:09:22.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:09:22.627" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:09:22.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12287" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:09:22.627" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Chinese writer Pu Songling (1640 – 1715) and his life as a writer. Pu Songling is best known for his short stories, which were collected in 'Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio' (Liáozhāi zhìyì, 聊斋志异), which was probably not published before 1740. Use this tag with the tag [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T14:25:52.950" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T14:25:52.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12288" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12289" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature originally written in Akkadian, an extinct Semitic language from ancient Mesopotamia." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T19:49:19.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12290" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12219" CreationDate="2020-02-03T20:44:18.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are ordinary English words and phrases that you should be able to find in a dictionary, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;when&lt;/strong&gt; (also &lt;strong&gt;if&lt;/strong&gt;) &lt;strong&gt;it comes to it&lt;/strong&gt; and variants: when (or if) the time comes for essential, decisive, or important action; should it become (absolutely) necessary; ultimately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Put&lt;/strong&gt; (a person) &lt;strong&gt;to it.&lt;/strong&gt; To force, challenge, or require (a person) to do something indicated by the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ill-treatment. Bad or unfavourable treatment; &lt;strong&gt;rough handling&lt;/strong&gt;; harsh or unsympathetic dealings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the particular case of &lt;strong&gt;grief&lt;/strong&gt;, the usual meaning of the word in the mid-20th century was ‘Deep or violent sorrow, caused by loss or trouble’, but Tolkien was a scholar of Old English, and particularly fond of archaic vocabulary, so I suspect that what he had in mind here was the (then obsolete) meaning ‘hardship, suffering’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the meaning of the passage is that although a casual acquaintance with Hobbits gives the impression that they cling to their comforts, in fact they have hidden qualities of toughness, endurance, and bravery, that are revealed in case of need: that is, when they are &lt;em&gt;put to it&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage is an important piece of foreshadowing, because in the course of chapter 2 we learn from Gandalf that for sixty years Bilbo Baggins has been possessed of a Ring of Power, which is ‘perilous’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later—later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last—sooner or later the dark power will devour him.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ring is too dangerous for Gandalf to accept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great, for my strength.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point a reader who is paying attention will ask how, if the Ring is so dangerous, can Bilbo have possessed it for sixty years and suffered no more than growing ‘thin and stretched’? The passage from the Prologue provides us with the answer: that Hobbits are ‘curiously tough’ in some ways, and perhaps (we guess) resistance to the power of the Ring is one of those ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-03T20:44:18.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2020-02-06T14:31:28.477" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere here: 1960 - 1973, Carlos Castaneda had written his book &quot;The Wheel of Time: Shamans of Ancient Mexico&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is repeats not a day, but couple of weeks/months... and repeats only once, maybe twice or thrice... In first &quot;loop&quot;, Carlos had not seen group of Ancient Shamans on plato in the middle of Sonora desert, he just jumped from this plato to the ground, and appeared couple of hundredth kilometers away from this place in Los Angeles. But in second loop, he remembered party of Don Juan Matus gathered on this plato 12+ members and students, and how Don Juan declared them, that their Shaman's education is finished, they said good bye each other and Carlos with another one graduated called Pablo jumped to the abysm... Pablo was cried...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, Castaneda declared his books like documentary, not a tabloid literature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as @LitGuest mentioned, seems that the roots of &quot;time loop&quot; hidden deeper in human history and it is not a fiction but practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8512" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T14:31:28.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12294" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-06T17:41:14.450" Score="5" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bashung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alain Bashung's&lt;/a&gt; song “Résidents de la république” (part of the album &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleu_p%C3%A9trole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bleu pétrole&lt;/a&gt;, 2008) contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Résidents, résidents de la république &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Où le rose a des reflets bleus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words literally mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Residents, residents of the republic &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Where the colour pink has a blue reflection (or some shade of blue?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the colours have a hidden meaning, but which one? (The colours of the French flag are red, white and blue, not pink, white and blue, so that doesn't help.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T14:36:08.137" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T14:36:08.137" Title="Meaning of “rose” and “bleu” in Alain Bashung's “Résidents de la république ”" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alain-bashung&gt;&lt;gaetan-roussel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12295" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-06T18:36:09.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-06T18:36:09.503" LastActivityDate="2020-02-06T18:36:09.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12296" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-06T18:36:09.503" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the French singer-songwriter Alain Bashung (1947 – 2009) and his songs. When asking about song lyrics, please use the [song-lyrics] and [french-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:53:57.440" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:53:57.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12264" CreationDate="2020-02-07T20:28:34.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can, as @PeterShor said, but do you really want to skip &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt;? It's been a long time since I read all four or five books in the series, but I think a lot of the pleasure of reading them was seeing how the characters aged and being excited when they returned in completely new circumstances after a long absence. But &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt; is also just so much fun. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8516" LastActivityDate="2020-02-07T20:28:34.000" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12262" CreationDate="2020-02-07T20:47:10.927" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the accepted answer is not quite right, based on having read most of Oriah Mountain Dreamer's books a number of years ago -- so I can't recall which books contained what, but...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she says faithless, she doesn't mean susceptible to pressure, but really faithless --&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit: As per @Spagirl's comment below, I misunderstood her answer and am fixing that now.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;By 'faithless', OMD does indeed mean what the quote says: willingness to disappoint another and be accused of betrayal to be true to one's soul. And it goes beyond that as well. Mountain Dreamer's laudatory take on faithlessness means being&lt;/strong&gt; willing to break vows, willing to go against one's own convictions and values. Both the OP and @Spagirl in the answer above talk about being true to oneself, but Oriah Mountain Dreamer is not a moralist, she's a real spiritual daredevil. So, yes, she is talking about being true to oneself, but not like sticking to your principles. Mountain Dreamer's version of being true to herself is having the guts to follow her spiritual path to genuinely scary places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly recommend her non-bestselling first book, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/Confessions-Spiritual-Thrillseeker-Teachings-Grandmothers/dp/0969536119/ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_g8217842112?_encoding=UTF8&amp;amp;%2AVersion%2A=1&amp;amp;%2Aentries%2A=0&amp;amp;ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confessions of a Spiritual Thrillseeker: Medicine Teachings from the Grandmothers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The faithlessness quote is meant to be challenging, like the Nietzsche quote: “A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions—? Rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions.” Unlike Nietzsche, Mountain Dreamer doesn't have a philology professor job to support her radical independence, so I think her work may be colored by its market niche of new age self help, but what she's offering is not tepid self-actualization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8516" LastEditorUserId="8516" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T22:04:39.553" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T22:04:39.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12277" CreationDate="2020-02-08T21:17:44.803" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think he says that he would take the ring out of pity for the hobbit. &#xA;He talks about the weakness of the hobbit (being a small and fragile creation) which would make him (Gandalf) want to help him out of pity and his personal desire to do good. &#xA;However, he knows taking the ring would also corrupt him, and only the innocence of the hobbits can carry the burden as they themselves are as corruptible as he might be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8518" LastActivityDate="2020-02-08T21:17:44.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12302" CreationDate="2020-02-09T11:43:56.433" Score="3" ViewCount="136" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the sentence “But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the full quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain. But were Oedipa some single melted crystal of urban horse, L.A., really, would be no less turned on for her absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried really hard to parse the sentence, and I googled it, but I can’t glean the slightest meaning from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8520" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T19:22:18.713" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T19:22:18.713" Title="Meaning of a sentence from “The Crying of Lot 49”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-pynchon&gt;&lt;the-crying-of-lot-49&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12301" CreationDate="2020-02-09T17:21:07.190" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As per the comments, and so that we have an answer present, &quot;horse&quot; is a slang term for &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanaddictioncenters.org/heroin-treatment/slang-names&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heroin&lt;/a&gt;, so the simile being used is comparing the road to a hypodermic needle, and Oedipa as a dose of a drug, but one which would not be missed if not present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-02-09T17:21:07.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2020-02-09T17:28:16.170" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is novel titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hero_of_Our_Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A hero of our time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but the word &amp;quot;hero&amp;quot; is used on purpose, with second meaning &amp;quot;typical man&amp;quot;. I think the play of words &amp;quot;The Great Gatsby&amp;quot; is genius, no matter who did it. This is a known and common move in literature. This is the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluous_man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt; superfluous man&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8522" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T23:16:33.437" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T23:16:33.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12304" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-09T15:59:01.190" Score="3" ViewCount="3427" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have two questions regarding this sonnet by William Wordsworth, first published in 1807:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The world is too much with us; late and soon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Little we see in Nature that is ours;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The winds that will be howling at all hours,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It moves us not. – Great God! I'd rather be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, does this mean that the writer wants to be a pagan? What does the line mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A pagan suckled in a creed outworn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in this pair of lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so might I, standing on this pleasant lea,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  have glimpses that would make me less forlorn. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the poet 'standing on this pleasant lea' in his imagination, or in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Faizan Bashir" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-09T19:28:32.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T23:02:35.580" Title="What does Wordsworth mean by &quot;A pagan suckled in a creed outworn&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12304" CreationDate="2020-02-10T11:31:54.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Suckled&lt;/strong&gt; here means 'raised', or 'brought up '. &lt;strong&gt;Outworn&lt;/strong&gt; means old-fashioned or outdated. So it means 'I'd rather be a Pagan brought up in an outdated religion'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So might I&lt;/strong&gt; means &quot;then (or thus) might I&quot;. But 'So' also has a sense of 'if'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I had been happy if the general camp,/Pioneers and all, had tasted&#xA;  her sweet body./So I had nothing known.&quot;[Othello 3, iii]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Othello was written 199 years earlier: a shorter span than from the composition of the sonnet to 2020. Wordsworth may well have known the usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the meaning is either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd rather be a Pagan; then I would be allowed glimpses...&#xA;or&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I'd rather be a Pagan; if that would allow me glimpses...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Does this mean that the writer wants to be a pagan?' Yes! But in the second interpretation, only IF he'd be allowed glimpses of the gods.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Is the poet &lt;em&gt;standing on this pleasant lea&lt;/em&gt; in his imagination, or in the future?' He says he is standing on it now: longing for glimpses of the gods right here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-02-10T14:32:35.953" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T14:32:35.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12050" CreationDate="2020-02-10T19:38:26.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title is obviously also a homage to, or play on, Rabbit Redux by Updike.   The word redux   has been more commonly used since its publication. &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/redux#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; says this: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The word may have re-entered popular usage in the United States with the 1971 publication of the novel Rabbit Redux by John Updike,&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LNElAAAAIBAJ&amp;amp;sjid=IvMFAAAAIBAJ&amp;amp;dq=redux&amp;amp;pg=5986%2C704890&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=redux&amp;amp;year_start=1900&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[2]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; although it had previously been used in medicine, literary titles, and product names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-10T20:42:56.630" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T20:42:56.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2020-02-10T20:25:15.403" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is from a book titled &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BBTaDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA193&amp;amp;lpg=PA193&amp;amp;dq=%22christmas%20every%20day%22%20%22time%20loop%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Mfi3kv5WLZ&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1V5iIo9c-xI9aE2gYl9ax9lbsswg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ppis=_e&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj6pPPl5MfnAhXJV98KHcsJBroQ6AEwEHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22christmas%20every%20day%22%20%22time%20loop%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Now and Then We Time Travel: Visiting Pasts and Futures in Film and Television&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Frasier A. Sherman (2017), p. 193: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some sources have cited William Dean Howell's &quot;Christmas Every Day&quot; (1892) as the earliest time-loop story, but that's incorrect: Time passes normally in the story, with magic forcing everyone to celebrate Christmas no matter what the date is. The time-loop concept goes back at least as far as 1922's &lt;em&gt;Worm Ouroboros&lt;/em&gt;: At the end of a great war, the protagonists opt to have time recycle endlessly rather than settle into postwar lives of peace and comfort. In Malcolm Jameson's 1941 story &quot;Doubled and Redoubled,&quot; a more conventional time loop, a man experiences the best day of his life, and wishes every day could be like that, and a witch overhears ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &quot;Christmas Every Day&quot; (1892) features the repetition of a holiday, though time moves forward nonetheless; &lt;em&gt;Worm Ouroboros&lt;/em&gt; (1922) involves a time loop over a period of years, but it's one the heroes choose at the end to maintain their sense of purpose; &quot;Doubled and Redoubled&quot; (1941) features the first time loop that occurs over the course of a single day, in a way reminiscent of &lt;em&gt;Groundhog Day&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7386" LastActivityDate="2020-02-10T20:25:15.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9398" CreationDate="2020-02-10T21:03:42.440" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In literary reviews, the novel was usually praised, and reviewers accepted the conceit of changing gender. I'll bold the portions of the following excerpts that mention sex. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Journal&lt;/em&gt; volume 18, number 3, March 1929, features in its regular section &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/804026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Brief Review&lt;/a&gt;&quot; the following paragraph-long review of &lt;em&gt;Orlando&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Biography in form and fiction in fact is this impressionistic novel of Orlando, &lt;strong&gt;the serene baffling personage who began as an Elizabethan nobleman and after an intriguing life of three centuries is at the last a dazzling, beautiful woman of thirty- six&lt;/strong&gt;. Those who know the tightly meshed mind of Virginia Woolf do not expect to find in her brilliant writing only such quixotic paradox. They will look through the scintillating episodes of her story for poetry of thought and keen asides on the grand parade of Continental life, and the swift revealing touch of satire that mocks the pompous march of time. For this the work is memorable--she denies time by robbing it of its values as she annihilated it in earlier books by intensive and minute examination of a pin point of eternity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A longer review of both &lt;em&gt;Orlando&lt;/em&gt; and Aldous Huxley's &lt;em&gt;Point Counter Point&lt;/em&gt;, entitled &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/26434304&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fantasy with a Difference&lt;/a&gt;,&quot; written by Walter L. Myers and published in &lt;em&gt;The Virginia Quarterly Review&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 5, no. 2, April 1929, accepts the changes in gender as a part of the heterogeneity of the work: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At any, rate, heterogeneity and simultaneity are constantly evident in Orlando, more and more insisted upon as the book progresses. Orlando begins &quot;strangely compounded of many humors,&quot; to which miscellany is attached an appropriately fantastic assortment of recollections as &quot;memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither.&quot; &quot;What a phantasmagoria the mind is,&quot; exclaims Orlando midway the book, throwing her cheroot out of the window. &lt;strong&gt;Symbolic, that cheroot, of a difficult complexity in its smoker, an ideal hermaphroditism that survives in Orlando even during Victorian femaleness.&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;In every human being,&quot; explains Mrs. Woolf, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.&quot; And within this duality Orlando develops, through the busyness of memory, a multiplicity of selves to dizzy any arithmetic.&lt;/strong&gt; So much for the modern consciousness of heterogeneity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even a more mass market publication like &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt; accepts the sex change as allegory, though suggesting the book's execution could be clearer, in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/docview/104281746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oct. 21, 1928 review (p. 64)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs. Woolf's &lt;strong&gt;hero-heroine&lt;/strong&gt; is hundreds of years old. &lt;strong&gt;Orlando is a boy of 16, melancholy, indolent, loving solitude and given to writing poetry; the age is the Elizabethan; the book ends on the 11th of October, 1928, and Orlando is a thoroughly modern matron of 86, who has published a successful book of poems and has evolved a hard-earned philosophy of life.&lt;/strong&gt; Thus, to express her very modern fourth-dimensional concepts, Mrs. Woolf has fallen back upon one of the most ancient of literary forms, the allegory. In doing so she has left the book perhaps more confused than was strictly necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the reviews I found consider this an interesting work that builds off of Woolf's previous publications. The authors of these reviews approach &lt;em&gt;Orlando&lt;/em&gt; as innovative in literary technique, as a commentary on modernity, and there is not much commentary on gender or sex in itself. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7386" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T20:52:00.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T20:52:00.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11991" CreationDate="2020-02-10T21:32:55.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;sniper material&quot; means somebody who is naturally cut out to be a sniper. You hear it fairly commonly in a complimentary form as in &quot;he's university material&quot;. Here it's being used as an insult, it's saying he's a natural born psycho killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/material&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins online dictionary&lt;/a&gt; gives: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a person who has qualities suitable for a given occupation...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;That boy is not university material&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-11T05:41:14.563" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T05:41:14.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12274" CreationDate="2020-02-11T01:15:34.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Big horse, little horse&lt;/em&gt; by Martha Goldberg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bulletin of Children's Books review is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mateo wanted to buy the beautiful horse that a neighbor was going to&#xA;sell, but his family was too poor. The boy consoled himself by making&#xA;a clay horse, and he found that his work won the approval of his&#xA;mother-an expert potter-and the requests of tourists that he make more&#xA;for sale. Mateo decided that he would become one of the fine potters&#xA;of the village. A slight story that has little direction; Mateo shows&#xA;an appreciation of creativity, a sense of responsibility, and an&#xA;acceptance of loss ... but very little happens. The boy has made&#xA;pottery before, he simply gains confidence. Another weakness of the&#xA;book is in the phrases used by the characters; the family is speaking&#xA;Spanish to each other, so there is no reason to use the sort of&#xA;dialogue which a Mexican might use in speaking English: &amp;quot;Let it not&#xA;repeat itself .. .&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Also have ready the clay.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T04:54:38.470" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T04:54:38.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12160" CreationDate="2020-02-11T14:17:43.690" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the question is asking about what Isaiah Berlin's essay means.  I think he's simply asking what Archilochus meant. &#xA;The fox is commonly regarded as a cunning figure in literature. He is the trickster in many fables (Aesop, Uncle Remus, Pinocchio etc). He is clever and knows many things.&#xA;The hedgehog doesn't have any such reputation.  He has one trick only, namely to roll up into a spiky ball. That's his one big thing.&#xA;The comparison between the different styles is often used as a metaphor to describe different human personalities and behaviours. It's not necessarily a judgement (expert/amateur or smart/dumb) the one big trick can sometimes defeat all the smart moves. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T14:17:43.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12065" CreationDate="2020-02-11T15:10:45.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's hyperbole,  suggesting that a huge sum of money had been spent on cosmetic dentistry.  You can also tell from the reference to his height and the floppy blonde hair that Barry is creating a character from a relatively wealthy background. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastActivityDate="2020-02-11T15:10:45.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11546" CreationDate="2020-02-11T17:24:47.307" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Prince_(Burnett_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Prince&lt;/a&gt;, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's one of her lesser-known books (famous ones include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_Garden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Secret Garden&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Princess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Little Princess&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the story, Marco (the main character) gets lured into his enemy's house when she pretends to sprain her ankle as he passes her in the street, and asks him to help her home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was trying to decide which of the two countries she belonged to, as&#xA;  she drew near to him, but quite suddenly the curved mouth ceased&#xA;  smiling as her foot seemed to catch in a break in the pavement, and&#xA;  she so lost her balance that she would have fallen if he had not&#xA;  leaped forward and caught her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She was light and slender, and he was a strong lad and managed to&#xA;  steady her. An expression of sharp momentary anguish crossed her face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;''I hope you are not hurt,'' Marco said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She bit her lip and clutched his shoulder very hard with her slim&#xA;  hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;''I have twisted my ankle,'' she answered. ''I am afraid I have&#xA;  twisted it badly. Thank you for saving me. I should have had a bad&#xA;  fall.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Excerpt from Chapter 13&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I still love this book after years of rereading; it's full of the beauty many of the classics hold, without being heavy reading. I think it's a wonderful example of the art of writing so many modern authors seem to have lost.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8315" LastEditorUserId="8315" LastEditDate="2020-02-13T07:37:36.153" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T07:37:36.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-12T10:07:32.820" Score="0" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading (the Italian translation of) &lt;em&gt;The Confessions of Frannie Langton&lt;/em&gt;, a novel set in Georgian London, and one of the preeminent characters is the housekeeper of George and Marguerite Benham, &lt;em&gt;Mrs Eustacia Linux&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm curious if Sara Collins, the author of the novel, has given a rationale of this very particular (to my ear at least) name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched online but eventual results are lost in the sea of links to miss Linux, in the understanding of what I'm missing in the Linux operating system with regard to other OS's...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8534" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-02-12T11:02:29.580" LastActivityDate="2020-02-12T11:02:29.580" Title="Georgian London: they had Windows of course but ... Linux?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;sara-collins&gt;&lt;the-confessions-of-frannie-langton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2638" CreationDate="2020-02-13T08:24:34.607" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several renditions of the play that depict Antonio and Bassanio to be lovers (though they cannot show it due to the time they are living in). They insinuate that Bassanio is just marrying Portia for her money. &#xA;As for textual proof, I have nothing concrete, but at the beginning of the play, Antonio is melancholy for a reason that is never explained. In my Shakespeare class, we discussed how this may be the result of his unreturned love for Bassanio. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8536" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T08:24:34.607" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12319" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-13T18:41:54.737" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an astrology student and, in order to better understand the explanation for the meaning of certain phenomena, I'm investigating greek mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right now, I'm trying to understand why void moons. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.astrologyhub.com/void-of-course-moon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;, it's because the Moon was an emissary of the planets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Consequently, one of the Moon’s jobs was to serve as emissary for all the other planets.  Since she produced no light of her own, she helped the other planets carry their light down to the physical plane. In so doing, heavenly will was made manifest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I haven't been able to find any sources for this claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is this true? If so, could you point to any sources so I can continue researching on the topic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks a lot in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8539" LastActivityDate="2020-02-13T18:41:54.737" Title="Was the Moon an emissary for the Gods in greek mythology?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1414" CreationDate="2020-02-14T00:16:05.073" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There should be a lot more Jason2s, and not just because there were more of them and more worlds where they could find perfect Jasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they both pass through the box multiple times, that should have led to multiple versions of each. If getting back to the perfect world makes more Jasons, it should make more Jason2s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Jason2 kidnapped Jason and dragged him into the cube, so did an infinite number of other Jason2s in slightly different ways. They then all brought Jason to Jason2's world, which should have resulted in a swarm of Jasons showing up at Velocity Labs, as well as a gaggle of Jason2s getting back to the ideal Jason world. So the end should have been gangs upon gangs of Jasons and Jason2s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hokum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8541" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T00:16:05.073" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8409" CreationDate="2020-02-14T14:28:59.423" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maggie was making it clear that the chickens were for meat, not for eggs.  But Sarah loved them as pets,  and the author is telling us that he/she knew that this would happen.  It's not a joke, it's more of a fond comment about Sarah's kind nature. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastActivityDate="2020-02-14T14:28:59.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12324" CreationDate="2020-02-14T16:53:15.130" Score="8" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have the following passage from '&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0606901h.html#s15&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Terrible Voyage of the Toad&lt;/a&gt;' (1878) by Edward Page Mitchell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Without intendin' to disperidge,&quot; continued the deacon, &quot;her bottom's more putty'n timber.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Putty or no putty,&quot; rejoined the owner of the Toad, &quot;she sails afore the wind like a thing of life and minds her helium like a lady.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t understand what he means by “she sails afore the wind like a thing of life and minds her helium like a lady”, can someone kindly explain this to me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8544" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-14T17:47:30.363" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T00:07:23.760" Title="What does &quot;minds her helium like a lady&quot; mean in &quot;The Terrible Voyage of the Toad&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edward-page-mitchell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12323" CreationDate="2020-02-14T17:47:10.840" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: ‘Helium’ is a misprint for ‘&lt;strong&gt;hellum&lt;/strong&gt;’ which is a dialect spelling of ‘&lt;strong&gt;helm&lt;/strong&gt;’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s get the easier parts out of the way before we tackle ‘helium’. The &lt;em&gt;Toad&lt;/em&gt; is a “sloop, of 8,825–10,000 registered tonnage”. I don’t really understand this description—a ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sloop&lt;/a&gt;’ is normally a sailing vessel with a single fore-and-aft rigged mast, but a vessel of 10,000 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_register_tonnage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gross register tonnage&lt;/a&gt; would be far too large for a single mast—a five-masted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;clipper&lt;/a&gt; might not be so large. Let’s be generous and assume that this discrepancy is a plain hint that the tale is a tall one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a sailing vessel, to “sail afore [before] the wind” means to travel downwind, that is, in the same, or similar, direction as the wind. To do so “like a thing of life” means that in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Points_of_sail&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;point of sail&lt;/a&gt; it responds quickly to the wind and waves, pitching, rolling and yawing like a living thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘helium’ is a misprint (probably arising from an optical character recognition error) for ‘hellum’, as you can see in the Google Books snippet view for the 1973 Doubleday edition of Mitchell’s collection &lt;em&gt;The Crystal Man&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NgtVE.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spelling ‘hellum’ indicates a dialect pronunciation of ‘helm’, meaning the steering gear of the ship, presumably a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship%27s_wheel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;ship’s wheel&lt;/a&gt; in the case of the &lt;em&gt;Toad&lt;/em&gt;. There are lots of other dialect spellings in this passage, for example ‘thurowly’ for ‘thoroughly’ and ‘disperidge’ for ‘disparage’. For a ship to ‘mind her helm’ means to be obedient to steering, so that when the steersman turns the wheel the ship turns quickly and without resistance: ‘like a lady’ means ‘gracefully’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T00:07:23.760" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T00:07:23.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" Score="0" Body="Edward Page Mitchell (1852–1927), American short story writer and pioneer of science fiction." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T09:50:31.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12328" CreationDate="2020-02-15T12:31:33.237" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne Bronte's poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/bronte/poems/pba-penitent.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Penitent&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, originally published under the name Acton Bell in the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1019/1019-h/1019-h.htm#link2H_4_0042&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell&lt;/em&gt; (1846)&lt;/a&gt; published jointly with her two sisters, reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I mourn with thee, and yet rejoice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       That thou shouldst sorrow so;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       With angel choirs I join my voice&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       To bless the sinner's woe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though friends and kindred turn away,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And laugh thy grief to scorn;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       I hear the great Redeemer say,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       &quot;Blessed are ye that mourn.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hold on thy course, nor deem it strange&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       That earthly cords are riven:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Man may lament the wondrous change,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But &quot;there is joy in heaven!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How should this be interpreted? Reading only the first stanza, I thought at first this reads like a piece of &lt;em&gt;schadenfreude&lt;/em&gt;, the speaker rejoicing at the sorrow of a sinner. The second stanza seems kinder, the speaker not identifying with those who laugh and scorn, but instead suggesting that even sinners who mourn may be blessed. In the third stanza it seems that the sinner is dying and going to heaven. However, I may be missing some religious context here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the second-person character, why do they mourn, what is their &quot;course&quot; and &quot;wondrous change&quot;, and are they dying? Who is the first-person character, and why do they &quot;rejoice&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T14:36:23.757" Title="Anne Bronte's &quot;The Penitent&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;anne-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12327" CreationDate="2020-02-15T13:52:45.940" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to this poem is the title, ‘The Penitent’, that is, someone who ‘repents’ their sins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;repent, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; To review one’s actions and feel contrition or regret for something one has done or omitted to do; (&lt;em&gt;esp.&lt;/em&gt; in religious contexts) to acknowledge the sinfulness of one’s past action or conduct by showing sincere remorse and undertaking to reform in the future&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Christianity, sincere &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repentance_(Christianity)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;repentance&lt;/a&gt; is a precondition for forgiveness of sins and admission or reconciliation to the Church, and forgiveness of sins is a precondition for being saved (admitted to heaven). It should be remembered that Anne Brontë’s father &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Bront%C3%AB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patrick&lt;/a&gt; (1777–1861) was a priest in the Church of England, so that the Anglican religion must have been omnipresent in Anne’s childhood at the parsonage in Haworth. In this Christian context we can interpret the poem as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The penitent regrets their former wrongdoing (‘thou shouldst sorrow so’), and the speaker feels the same way (‘I mourn with thee’). But in a neat &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;, the speaker also ‘rejoices’ because the penitent sincerely repents, and so they can be forgiven and saved. The ‘angel choirs’ are a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/luke/15-10.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luke 15:10&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In line 4, ‘to bless the sinner’s woe’ is another paradox. This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;: it is not the woe itself that is blessed, but the consequences of that woe, namely contrition, repentance, and salvation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza describes the obstacles facing the penitent, namely the mockery of the non-religious (or insincerely religious) friends and family who would rather the penitent continue sinning. The ‘Redeemer’ is Christ, whose words from &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/luke/6-21.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luke 6:21–22&lt;/a&gt; are referenced here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third stanza, ‘thy course’ means the course of repentance and salvation. ‘Earthly cords’ are the ties that bind the penitent to ‘Earthly’ (secular) concerns, and these are ‘riven’ (cut) by religious conversion. ‘Wondrous change’ is a common phrase in evangelical contexts meaning ‘conversion or awakening to Christianity’. In the poem this is lamented by ‘Man’, meaning the penitents’ acquaintances from the second stanza. The last line is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/luke/15-7.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luke 15:7&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say to you that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T14:36:23.757" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12329" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T14:12:19.377" Score="2" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book I of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56621&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the speaker sketches the character of her father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My father was an austere Englishman,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who, after a dry life-time spent at home&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In college-learning, law, and parish talk,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was flooded with a passion unaware,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His whole provisioned and complacent past&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Drowned out from him that moment. As he stood&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In Florence, where he had come to spend a month&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And note &lt;strong&gt;the secret of Da Vinci’s drains&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He musing somewhat absently perhaps&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some English question … &lt;strong&gt;whether men should pay&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The unpopular but necessary tax&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With left or right hand&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is ‘the secret of Da Vinci’s drains’?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is ‘the unpopular but necessary tax’?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It would seem to make no difference which hand one pays tax with. So is this an idiom for a pointless and abstruse question? If so, where does this come from?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T15:02:17.913" Title="What is ‘the secret of Da Vinci’s drains’ in ‘Aurora Leigh’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12329" CreationDate="2020-02-15T14:28:25.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To answer one of your questions, Googling, I found a version of &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; that had a footnote referencing Matthew 2:3. Looking this up, we find that Matthew 2:2-4 reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;unpopular but necessary tax&quot; is charity, and the &quot;English question&quot; would be whether you should give to charity secretly or publicly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T14:28:25.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12331" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12357" CreationDate="2020-02-15T14:35:19.377" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGBamfWasNQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speak like a leader&lt;/a&gt;, Simon Lancaster says that lessons learned in Roman times about effective political speeches still apply, and it is scandalous that a training in rhetoric is such a rarity. He briefly touches six major lessons in effective speaking, but he does not flesh it out beyond what is permitted in a TED talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Briefly, the six lessons or tools are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;breathless x 3&lt;/strong&gt;, three short adjectives, nouns, or phrases: &quot;Lies. Treachery. Embezzlement.&quot; as the opening to a political smear ad.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;repetition x 3&lt;/strong&gt;, three sentences repeating the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;balance x 3,&lt;/strong&gt; three balanced sentences which are taken to represent balanced thought.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Metaphor,&lt;/strong&gt; his point being that we all use metaphor and which political metaphor we use can have profound impact on reception.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exaggeration,&lt;/strong&gt; by far the most potent tool in any communication. (Err...)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rhyme:&lt;/strong&gt; if you've taken the time to make a rhyme, what you're saying must be true, even if you're blue.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the classic sources, ancient or modern, providing a foundational treatment of rhetoric, in which these six highlights were originally proposed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1514" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T18:50:25.273" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:50:25.273" Title="What are the sources for these six ancient Roman rhetorical tools?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12329" CreationDate="2020-02-15T15:02:17.913" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Da Vinci's drains&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As remarked in a page of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Notes_and_Queries_-_Series_10_-_Volume_1.djvu/63&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/a&gt; (I found this at Wikisource, but I'm not sure exactly what document it's a page &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt;!), this simply refers to the fact that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonardo da Vinci&lt;/a&gt; was a famous hydraulic engineer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, he worked on draining the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontine_Marshes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pontine Marshes&lt;/a&gt; and made a &lt;a href=&quot;http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/projects/arno/Leonardosplan.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plan to divert&lt;/a&gt; the River Arno. Although now most famous as an artist and scientist, in his own lifetime he found employment largely as an engineer and architect. From a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/rolling-up-the-river-frank-mcnally-on-an-unlikely-partnership-between-leonardo-da-vinci-and-niccol%C3%B2-machiavelli-1.3877642&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recent article commemorating the 500th anniversary of his death&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;in a CV he once submitted to Ludovico Forza, the Duke of Milan, he first listed his skills in bridge-building, trench drainage, weapons manufacture, and many other disciplines useful to war, before adding a throwaway mention, down at bullet point 10, of his abilities to sculpt and paint “as well as any other”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pontine Marshes are far from Florence, and it seems that da Vinci's plans for the River Arno through Florence were not enacted. However, given that da Vinci spent much of his life in Florence, it seems reasonable that one might go there to study his works. Even though the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museo_Ideale_Leonardo_da_Vinci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;museum at his birthplace&lt;/a&gt; was only opened in the late 20th century, various records relating to him may well have been kept in Florence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The unpopular but necessary tax&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been interpreted to be a reference to &lt;strong&gt;income tax&lt;/strong&gt;, a hot topic of political debate in England during the mid 19th century. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JuwyWaSdFpIC&amp;amp;pg=PA60&amp;amp;lpg=PA60&amp;amp;dq=%22unpopular+but+necessary+tax%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Fictions of Reciprocity in &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Chapter 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JuwyWaSdFpIC&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jill Rappoport's &lt;em&gt;Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aurora's gifts have larger legal and economic significance. Just as &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt; stages a debate about inheritance through Jane's recognition of a common duty, &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; invokes a similar ethos when Aurora uses her own means of subsistence to benefit the larger community she claims as her &quot;own&quot;. It also invokes a similar law. Income, like inheritance, was increasingly taxed throughout the nineteenth century. Whereas inheritance tax was accepted as the lesser of the two evils and even praised for its relative &quot;unburthensomeness&quot;, income tax, lifted after 1816 but reinstated by Peel in 1842 and increased in 1854 during the Crimean War, was extremely unpoular, seen by political theorists and &lt;em&gt;Household Words&lt;/em&gt; editorials alike as an &quot;objectionable&quot; measure. Despite the tax's general unpopularity, it was framed as &quot;necessary for the public interest&quot;. It seems plausible that this is the subject of Aurora's father's speculations, when, wandering through Florence before meeting her mother, &quot;[h]e mus[es] somewhat absently perhaps / Some English question . . whether men should pay / The unpopular but necessary tax / With left or right hand&quot; (I: 73-76). Aurora's decision to share her home and her wealth echoes but also exceeds the income tax's &quot;unpopular but necessary&quot; duty to benefit the &quot;public interest&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Left or right hand&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been interpreted, as Peter Shor already noted, as a reference to Matthew 6:3. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dZRvAAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA36&amp;amp;lpg=PA36&amp;amp;dq=%22unpopular+but+necessary+tax%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michele C Martinez, &lt;em&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Aurora Leigh'&lt;/em&gt; (with commentary)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Line 76. An allusion to Matthew 6:3: 'But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not clear on how this biblical reference connects with the context of the poem, though, so I'll defer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12330/17&quot;&gt;Peter Shor's explanation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T15:02:17.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-15T15:37:29.860" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;Basic plot of this book was, a teenage girl finds out she was adopted. Here are some specifics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Girl had a younger sister, who was their parents' natural born child. Younger sister's name was Martha.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How the teen girl learned of the adoption was this way: Martha had just returned from a visit to the parents' hometown; and was describing to teen girl a conversation she (Martha) had had with an elderly man who had known the parents before parents had moved...The man had made comments that led Martha to put pieces together, and in the scene I do remember, Martha is telling teen girl about this conversation.  Teen girl at first thinks the man was saying Martha was adopted, but Martha replies with the following quote (this I do remember verbatim):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me? Me? Anderson was talking about a child adopted before Mother and Dad moved away from Milford. I was born here. You were born in Milford.  He was talking about you. You're the adopted one!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Teen girl has a hard time dealing with this and leaves parents' home for a while.  She was staying with a friend whose name was Charlotte.  She does eventually find her birth mother, but don't remember how that ended up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does any of this ring bells for anyone?  I am pretty sure I read this anywhere between 5th to.8th grade, which timewise would be from 1973 to 1977.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5980" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T22:36:57.593" Title="Identify a book where a teenage girl finds out from her younger sister Martha that she was adopted" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-15T15:38:47.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T15:38:47.283" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T15:38:47.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-15T15:38:47.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about Anne Brontë (1820–1849), English novelist and poet, or her life as a writer. She wrote the novels &quot;Agnes Grey&quot; (1847) and &quot;The Tenant of Wildfell Hall&quot; (1848)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T17:37:13.190" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T17:37:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12304" CreationDate="2020-02-15T17:45:01.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The speaker does not actually want to be a pagan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sonnet, the octave describes the spiritual inadequacy of modern life, and the sestet describes a more attractive &lt;em&gt;but still untenable&lt;/em&gt; alternative. The question that is implied by the poem is thus: since we have lost our spiritual relationship with Nature, and since we cannot go back to paganism, &lt;em&gt;what must we do instead?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rhetorical structure was clearer to Wordsworth’s contemporary audience (see quote below), who were living in a Europe that had been solidly Christian for centuries, the last pagans having been exterminated or forcibly converted in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Crusades&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Northern Crusades&lt;/a&gt; of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, their religious rites and practices lost and forgotten. Wordsworth’s use of ‘outworn’ meaning ‘wasted, destroyed, or obliterated by the action of time’ (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) makes it clear that however attractive he might find the idea, of standing on a meadow by the sea and watching for Neptune in the waves, it’s not a realistic answer to the question posed by the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The latter part of this sonnet has been misapprehended by some persons, who have supposed that pagan superstitions were commended absolutely, and not merely as being better than a total absence of devotional and natural sentiment. All that Mr. Wordsworth contends for, is a preference for Triton or Proteus to Mammon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Taylor (1849). &lt;em&gt;Notes from Books&lt;/em&gt;, p. 154. Quoted in David M. Main, ed. (1881). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/treasuryofengli00main/page/372/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Treasury of English Sonnets&lt;/em&gt;, p. 372&lt;/a&gt;. New York: R. Worthington.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-13T23:02:35.580" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T23:02:35.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12333" CreationDate="2020-02-15T21:35:44.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=BgckYFdOh98C&amp;amp;q=%22Mother+and+Dad+moved+away+from+Milford%22&amp;amp;dq=%22Mother+and+Dad+moved+away+from+Milford%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiK263bwNTnAhW9knIEHbYWC3sQ6AEwAHoECAAQAg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google books&lt;/a&gt; tells me it is  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=NOTHING+BUT+STRANGER+arlene+hale&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;NOTHING BUT A STRANGER&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Arlene Hale, published in 1966. I think your memory is phenomenal; the passage in question seems to have been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Me?&quot; Martha stepped back, eyes wide, face contorted. &quot;&lt;em&gt;Me!&lt;/em&gt; Anderson was talking about a child adopted before Mother and Dad moved away from Milford. I was born here. &lt;em&gt;You&lt;/em&gt; were born in ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13083905-nothing-but-a-stranger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This link&lt;/a&gt; describes the book &amp;amp; author, somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-02-15T22:36:57.593" LastActivityDate="2020-02-15T22:36:57.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12340" CreationDate="2020-02-16T09:36:23.273" Score="4" ViewCount="340" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a child I enjoyed some of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumdrop_(book_series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gumdrop stories&lt;/a&gt;, without ever realising that the name of the car Gumdrop was the same as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumdrop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a type of sweet&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps the reason for this name is explained somewhere in the books and I've long forgotten it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the car called Gumdrop?&lt;/strong&gt; It doesn't seem to &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; especially like a gumdrop sweet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBFqe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SBFqe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of the car Gumdrop, with owner and dog inside&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T12:02:14.343" Title="Why the name &quot;Gumdrop&quot; for the vintage car?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;val-biro&gt;&lt;gumdrop&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-16T09:40:22.460" Score="1" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/our-casuarina-tree/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Our Casuarina Tree&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Toru Dutt, why has she written 'a creeper climbs...'?&#xA;Instead, she might have written 'a climber climbs'! Does it imply anything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T09:56:04.833" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T16:01:57.760" Title="Why &quot;a creeper climbs&quot; in Our Casuarina Tree by Toru Dutt?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;toru-dutt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12338" CreationDate="2020-02-16T12:02:14.343" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (defunct) Val Biro &lt;a href=&quot;http://cunninghamh.tripod.com/books/valbiro/valbiro-index.htm/#First&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Official Fan web page&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has a brief interview with Val Biro on this subject, adding to the wording found in &lt;em&gt;Gumdrop Makes a Start&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HOW GUMDROP GOT HIS NAME&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He set the levers on the steering wheel and pulled the choke out. Then&#xA;he pressed his foot on the starter button. The car went &amp;quot;Guuuuum&amp;quot;. The&#xA;foreman pushed in the choke and pulled out the ignition button and&#xA;pressed his foot again. This time the car went &amp;quot;Drrrropopopop&amp;quot; and the&#xA;engine started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy was enchanted. What a lovely sound; &amp;quot;Guuuuum-Drrrropopopop&amp;quot;.&#xA;As if the car had called out his own name. &amp;quot;That's it!&amp;quot; he declared to&#xA;one and all. &amp;quot;That's his name. GUMDROP!&amp;quot; and he felt convinced that&#xA;Gumdrop was the only car for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This presumably is also the out-of-universe reason that Balint Stephen &amp;quot;Val&amp;quot; Biro named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Biro#Gumdrop&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;his real-world car&lt;/a&gt; (on which the book series is based).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T12:02:14.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13637" CreationDate="2020-02-16T13:12:07.013" Score="2" ViewCount="578" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.91859/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Endymion: A poetic romance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1818), the first stanza of Book I (beginning, &quot;A thing of beauty is a joy for ever&quot;) contains the following passage:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                      yes, in spite of all,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Some shape of beauty moves away the pall&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For &lt;strong&gt;simple sheep&lt;/strong&gt;; and such are daffodils&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With the green world they live in; and clear rills&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That for themselves a cooling covert make&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Gainst the hot season&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told that &quot;simple sheep&quot; was a biblical reference (I presume it to be related to how we are all sheep following a Shepherd or something). However, I couldn’t find anything in particular related to it nor could I interpret what it could be as Keats was describing beauty till this point. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7969" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T14:50:48.077" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T18:27:42.180" Title="Are &quot;simple sheep&quot; a biblical reference in Keats' &quot;Endymion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;endymion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12342" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-16T13:45:39.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T13:45:39.587" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T13:45:39.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12343" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-16T13:45:39.587" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;Endymion&quot; (1818), a poem by John Keats. Use with [john-keats] and [poetry]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T08:57:31.550" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T08:57:31.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4735" CreationDate="2020-02-16T14:07:13.507" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is Keats saying in the last three lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing beauty, Keats says that beauty is also experienced in the grandeur and magnificence of the deaths of the mighty and powerful knights and kings (perhaps, though unlikely, any person who fights and did for a noble cause) who made supreme sacrifices and died noble deaths. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magnificent tales of their lives are a perennial source of inspiration (like water falling from a fountain or waterfall) to the mortals on earth to emulate their lives and stories of their victories and heroic deeds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is Keats referring to &quot;tales&quot; of an afterlife / immortality in heaven? If so, why are those &quot;tales&quot; an &quot;endless fountain&quot;? Because there are so many different views on life after death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These tales are like water falling from heaven (like a waterfall) onto the Earth bring forth a perennial source of inspiration for generations to come. I don't think there's any interpretation on “views of the afterlife“&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what might be the significance of the aquatic imagery (&quot;fountain&quot;, &quot;drink&quot;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no particular significance or inclination towards that but it might be an element Keats may have wanted to utilize to describe beauty. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side Note: A Thing Of Beauty from Endymion is excessively focussed on in my school curriculum. You can look into a detailed study over &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.successcds.net/cce-cbse/class-xii/english/a-thing-of-beauty-ncert-explanation-summary.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7969" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T14:07:13.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12345" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13648" CreationDate="2020-02-16T15:09:56.007" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem Endymion: A poetic romance (1818), the first stanza of Book I (beginning, &quot;A thing of beauty is a joy for ever&quot;) focuses a great deal on beauty where Keats presents some of his views on poetry with an eternally famous line, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Keats ever criticized for standardizing generic beauty rather than approaching it from a 'beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’ point of view (with the exception of the 'beauty in death')?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I ask this question having read, “if thou must love me” where the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning showed a non-generic view of love which I thoroughly appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7969" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T16:27:25.143" Title="Keats' views on beauty" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;endymion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12339" CreationDate="2020-02-16T16:01:57.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context for this phrase is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a huge Python, winding round and round&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up to its very summit near the stars,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A creeper climbs&lt;/strong&gt;, in whose embraces bound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No other tree could live. But gallantly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In crimson clusters all the boughs among,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ‘creeper’ is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A plant that creeps along the ground, or (more usually) one that ascends a supporting surface, as ivy and the Virginian Creeper (&lt;em&gt;Ampelopsis hederacea&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense it is synonymous with ‘climber’, and Google Books Ngram Viewer suggests that the two terms have had broadly similar popularity in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=climbing+plant%2Ccreeping+plant&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AKdYK.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless I think the choice of ‘creeper’ is significant because the plant is compared to a python, and ‘to creep’ means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To move with the body prone and close to the ground […] Formerly said of snakes, worms, and other creatures without limbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so that ‘creeper’ emphasizes the snake-like behaviour of the plant in a way that ‘climber’ would not. And a third sense of ‘creeper’ is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One who moves stealthily […] or proceeds in a mean and servile way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which suggests the way that a parasitic plant depends on its host for support and yet slowly and inimically strangles it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T16:01:57.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12347" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12348" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" Score="0" Body="Toru Dutt (1856–1877), Bengali poet and novelist, author of &quot;Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan&quot; (1882)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T17:42:06.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11672" CreationDate="2020-02-16T20:51:28.570" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The only evidence of the existence (or non-existence) of the Brotherhood comes directly from the Party itself. As such, its existence (or non-existence) may simply be part of the mystique of Big Brother and the party apparatus.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston is told about the Brotherhood on a daily basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A day never passed when spies and saboteurs acting under his directions were not unmasked by the Thought Police. He was the commander of a vast shadowy army, an underground network of conspirators dedicated to the overthrow of the State. The Brotherhood, its name was supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas Julia is entirely unaware of the Brotherhood's supposed existence, implying that that knowledge of the Brotherhood-mythos is restricted to lower echelon Party members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into&#xA;everyday use. &lt;strong&gt;She had never heard of the Brotherhood,&lt;/strong&gt; and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With that in mind, since the Brotherhood is used as a tool to entrap would-be rebels like Winston (just like the fake bric-a-brac shop) it seems more likely than not that the Brotherhood &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; exist&lt;/strong&gt; or else the risk would be that by promoting it, the Party could inadvertently strengthen resistance to Big Brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That all being said, we shall let O'Brien have the final word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Does the Brotherhood exist?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘That, Winston, you will never know.&lt;/strong&gt; If we choose to set&#xA;you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to&#xA;be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the&#xA;answer to that question is Yes or No. &lt;strong&gt;As long as you live it&#xA;will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that goes for you too, dear reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T20:51:28.570" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2671" CreationDate="2020-02-16T21:24:47.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Intraschool Communications&lt;/em&gt; along with various memos + missives from management seem to be placed into &lt;a href=&quot;https://s3.studentvip.com.au/photos/pigeon-hall-153687-small.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pigeon-holes&lt;/a&gt; (referred to as &quot;&lt;em&gt;boxes&lt;/em&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;em&gt;letter-boxes&lt;/em&gt;&quot;) to be collected between periods. This accounts for the large number of messages since most high schools in the 1960s would operate a 6-10 period-per-day system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  FROM: 304 TO: 508&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Bea—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What am I supposed to do about the number of basketballs I need?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Syl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;hr&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  FROM: 508 TO: 304&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nothing. Notice was put in your box by mistake.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Health Ed teacher is right under you.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Bea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  FROM: 508 TO: 304&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dear Syl—&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Your letter-box is crammed to the gills, as usual; I hope I can squeeze this note in!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm supposed to lure you out of 304 during the homeroom period today: I promised your cherubs I'd think of something! They want to collect money for your Xmas corsage; it's traditional, and every year every teacher pretends great surprise at receiving it. (The one with the biggest corsage wins!) So be sure to drop in to my room — on some pretext or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also the mention of &lt;em&gt;teacher's aides&lt;/em&gt; who could be used to shuttle notes around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Purely for interest, in the play version, the &lt;a href=&quot;http://holmenhighschooltheatre.yolasite.com/resources/One%20Act%20Script%20Cutting.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stage direction&lt;/a&gt; is that slips and notes are brought by hall monitors (student trustees)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(Stops as she sees a girl, FRANCINE GARDNER, who approaches her with a slip of paper. FRANCINE is bored, looking about indifferently)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2020-02-16T21:39:06.860" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T21:39:06.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2020-02-16T22:02:51.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;William S. Sadler (probably).&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was likely authored (or part-authored) by a doctor named William Sadler, a man who garnered some local fame as a debunker of psychics but latterly formed his own religious cult and became immensely wealthy as a result.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He supposedly spent some time with an unconscious psychic who translated readings from various celestial beings to a court-trained stenographer. Sadler was suspiciously vague as to the identity of this remarkable individual (and the stenographer whose identity he had no reason to conceal) and hence it seems more likely that he wrote the pages himself, noting that he ready access to the various religious books and essays from which the papers were cribbed and was a prolific writer of books of medicine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadler confessed there that he'd been introduced to an individual in the summer of 1911 who was an apparent exception to his thesis, and that he had been present at two-hundred-fifty night sessions recorded by a stenographer: &amp;quot;This man is utterly unconscious, wholly oblivious to what takes place, and, unless told about it subsequently, never knows that he has been used as a sort of clearing house for the coming and going of alleged extra-planetary personalities.&amp;quot; The doctor reassured his readers that the message being received was &amp;quot;essentially Christian and is, on the whole, entirely harmonious with the known scientific facts and truths of this age.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/gooch/excerpt.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godtalk: Brad Gooch - Sleuthing the Urantia Book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In later years his story changed, having the psychic produce papers out of thin air which would arrive at his bedside table. Rather than handing over the original papers, Sadler would read them aloud and the members of the cult would take notes which would then be retyped as pages that eventually made up the bulk of the Urantia book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T22:02:51.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9498" CreationDate="2020-02-16T22:57:24.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/bugger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;buggers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;. Several other possible options (&quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;bastards&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;balls&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) are used later in the book without bowdlerisation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Now, you damned swab, will you take that back?' 'No, I will not.'&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'You oily swine! You nigger's Nancy Boy! &lt;strong&gt;You crawling,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  sneaking, f - -  bloody bastard!'&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'Order!' exclaimed Mr Macgregor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Here, Macgregor, we've read this notice, and we all think&#xA;  this idea of electing a native to the Club is absolute...' &lt;strong&gt;Ellis&#xA;  was going to have said 'absolute balls',&lt;/strong&gt; but he remembered Mrs Lackersteen's presence and checked himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context in which it's used later in the book fits 'buggers' well and doesn't fit the final option (&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;bollocks&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;) at all well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;to be governing a set of damn black swine who've been slaves since the beginning of history, and instead of ruling them in the only way they understand, we go and treat them as equals. And &lt;strong&gt;all you silly b - - s take it for granted&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that's against all the Government regulations. Ellis was a little&#xA;  vexed about it. &lt;strong&gt;&quot;Why didn't you plug some of the b - - s when&#xA;  you had the chance?&quot;&lt;/strong&gt; he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T22:57:24.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4528" CreationDate="2020-02-16T23:42:51.977" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest use in literature that I could find of this now &lt;a href=&quot;http://chaimsimons.net/liverpool25a.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fairly common Jewish saying&lt;/a&gt; seems to be from Victor Gollantz's (1953) &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ch/books/about/My_Dear_Timothy.html?id=t0XRAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My Dear Timothy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot; and which offers this explanation; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the crowded lobby people, before they went in, wished one another&#xA;  &quot;well over the Fast&quot;, meaning by it &quot;I hope the fasting won't make you&#xA;  ill&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This being the case, it seems more likely than not that Stanley's birthday is near to a fasting day such as the Fast of Gedaliah or Yom Kippur, in which case the greeting is much the same way that you might wish someone whose birthday was on the 31st of December &quot;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;a happy birthday and a Happy New Year&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2020-02-16T23:42:51.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4531" CreationDate="2020-02-17T01:00:56.190" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The (1976) second reprint on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.149670/page/n163/mode/2up/search/thurible&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org&lt;/a&gt; refers to it as a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;brass&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; thurible. Given that the word brass is notched, it's possible that your version was OCR'd from the archive version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eYtNx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eYtNx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2020-02-17T17:03:16.290" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T17:03:16.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12355" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-17T11:27:38.843" Score="3" ViewCount="1028" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many critics claim that Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; follows all three &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_unities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classical unities&lt;/a&gt;. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The play &lt;strong&gt;observes the three Unities&lt;/strong&gt;: the action is confined to parts of the same location, the events actually occupy the three hours or so which the play takes to perform … and there is a single main plot to which all the subsidiary 'plots' belong organically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Kenneth Pickering (1986). &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, p.11. Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is unique in its &lt;strong&gt;adherence to the three unities&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sheri Metzger (2001). &lt;em&gt;CliffsNotes on Shakespeare's The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, p. 10. IDG.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy that &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt; and Shakespeare's last play, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, are the only two plays that &lt;strong&gt;strictly adhere to the classical unities&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Janyce Marson (2010). &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt;, p. 57. Bloom's Literary Criticism.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; follows all the three classical unities, then it follows the Unity of Action too, which requires all subplots to contribute to the main plot (&amp;quot;belong organically&amp;quot; is Pickering's phrase). But how does the comic subplot of the intrigue of Caliban against Prospero contribute to the main plot of the play? How do critics try to resolve this apparent contradiction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8553" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T10:36:00.957" Title="The Unity of Action in Shakespeare's &quot;The Tempest&quot;" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12331" CreationDate="2020-02-17T16:03:49.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After I contacted Simon Lancaster, he was gracious enough to respond:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look at my own books, particularly &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B07DXDLTBQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Speechwriting: The Expert Guide&lt;/a&gt;, you'll find a ton of sources. Warm wishes, Simon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two resources that most stand out to me so far are Aristotle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://amzn.to/39FpLhm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/a&gt; and Cicero's &lt;a href=&quot;https://amzn.to/2SztQ0V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhetoric ad Herennium&lt;/a&gt;, and I plan on tackling them next.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might mind the qualifications in the review I posted of Lancaster's title as I would situate it somewhat differently from where Lancaster situates himself. My Amazon review presently reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;★★★★★  Gentlemen's duel? Try assassin's duel!&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One part of the filtering in law school filters out some of those who are squeamish about bad argument. The pressure is to pick whatever argument that would best win the case: no argument is too slimy, or would make too disastrous a precedent in the precedent-based field of law, if it will win. That is a lawyer's job, and as best I can tell the idea of holding to solid, honest, argument falls somewhere between being quixotic, and being a category mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a book for what will work best at its center of gravity in political and political-like speeches. While the author claims universal jurisdiction, and says of Wesley's work and an Apple product launch, &amp;quot;The principles are identical.&amp;quot; (Compare the Dorothy Sayers, &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Dogma-is-the-Drama/dp/0849945267/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dogma is the Drama&lt;/a&gt;, where Sayers deliberately embraces an unpopular word and argues that the greatest story ever told is positively driven by religious doctrine.) In 90% of the exemplars of good communication are from politics (narrowly construed), and the author does not once countenance the use of solid argument; he compares the use of rational and emotional appeal as a &amp;quot;pea-shooter&amp;quot; versus a &amp;quot;nuclear bomb.&amp;quot; Where he references argument, he discusses giving &amp;quot;the illusion of argument&amp;quot; in appropriate places. The dissemination of actual argument is never countenanced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book has a genuine place in &amp;quot;philosophy&amp;quot; under an older definition of &amp;quot;philosophy,&amp;quot; as do classics like &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Art-of-War/dp/1505572835/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of War&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Prince/dp/1548070688/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prince&lt;/a&gt;, but I wince when I see someone in the business world who wants to get serious and deep and reaches for the one or two volume canon of &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Art-of-War/dp/1505572835/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of War&lt;/a&gt; and perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Prince/dp/1548070688/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prince&lt;/a&gt;. What is called for is wisdom literature, a broad and deep tradition that is older than the books of wisdom literature in the Bible and newer than &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Seven-Habits-of-Highly-Effective-People/dp/B00824Z9RU/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People&lt;/a&gt;, of which &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Art-of-War/dp/1505572835/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of War&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/The-Prince/dp/1548070688/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prince&lt;/a&gt; represent a dreary sampling for people who want to get ahead in the business world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is a masterful manual of an assassin's duel in the realm of political speeches. For those of us who would like to speak better, it represents all the cards laid on the table for an assassin's duel for how to draw or repel an audience and how to best convince, and there are some cards that a gentleman would draw in argument. This book also represents, more than any other modern text I've read, a meticulous exposition of unclean argument, and it has every relevance to people who want to expose and rebut shady argument (and &amp;quot;illusion of argument&amp;quot;). That is something I searched long for, and failed to find, before going on to write a dissertation on the topic at Cambridge. If I had found this book then, I would have devoured this book and begged the author for more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that SOME of this book is something I would draw on, but I also believe argument and constructive discourse is possible in communication, including speeches, and the speeches that have most shaped me have involved real and often sound arguments. I believe that this book covers a department of &amp;quot;philosophy,&amp;quot; so to speak, and is not the whole, particularly as the author portrays argument as having no place in his jurisdiction. One implication is that his jurisdiction is not universal, particularly not if his jurisdiction does not include any discourse that includes argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work is quite valuable, but it is parochial, and those of us who do not want discourse to always be in the image of political speeches. Speeches can be more varied, and a fortiori lectures can be more varied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On to what motivated me to buy this book: understanding ancient and modern rhetoric while pursuing discourse that is sometimes not political speechmaking. On those grounds, I would consider this work well worth my money for its references alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/C-J-S-Hayward/dp/B007PJY1T0/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C.J.S. Hayward&lt;/a&gt;, author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1514" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T16:03:49.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11295" CreationDate="2020-02-17T19:57:51.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It suited Tolstoy’s theory of history to portray the abandonment of Moscow as inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Tolstoy’s theory of history&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy portrays the decision-making after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Borodino&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borodino&lt;/a&gt; in the first four chapters of book 11 of &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;. This opens with an essay on the difficulty, or maybe even the impossibility, or determining cause and effect in history. He attacks, in particular, the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;great man&lt;/a&gt;’ theory of history, which says that events can be explained by “the actions of some one man—a king or a commander”: that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Kutuzov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kutuzov&lt;/a&gt;, for example, gave the order for the army to abandon Moscow to the French, and therefore they did so. But Tolstoy points out that this confuses correlation and causation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,” says history. And, indeed, human reason replies: every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man. Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Leo Tolstoy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2600&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; 11.1. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alternative theory is that the pressure of events, the accumulation of the millions of “common, infinitesimally small elements by which the masses are moved,” drove Kutuzov one way and another until the orders he gave were the only possible ones in the circumstances:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles are made by generals—as any one of us sitting over a map in his study may imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that battle—the questions present themselves: Why did Kutuzov during the retreat not do this or that? Why did he not take up a position before reaching &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fili_(Moscow)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fili&lt;/a&gt;? Why did he not retire at once by the Kaluga road, abandoning Moscow? and so on. People accustomed to think in that way forget, or do not know, the inevitable conditions which always limit the activities of any commander in chief. The activity of a commander in chief does not all resemble the activity we imagine to ourselves when we sit at ease in our studies examining some campaign on the map, with a certain number of troops on this and that side in a certain known locality, and begin our plans from some given moment. A commander in chief is never dealing with the beginning of any event—the position from which we always contemplate it. The commander in chief is always in the midst of a series of shifting events and so he never can at any moment consider the whole import of an event that is occurring. Moment by moment the event is imperceptibly shaping itself, and at every moment of this continuous, uninterrupted shaping of events the commander in chief is in the midst of a most complex play of intrigues, worries, contingencies, authorities, projects, counsels, threats, and deceptions and is continually obliged to reply to innumerable questions addressed to him, which constantly conflict with one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; 11.2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kutuzov calls a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_at_Fili&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;council of war&lt;/a&gt; among his senior generals to consider the question of whether or not to abandon Moscow, but he realizes that the issue was already decided before he came even to consider it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question for him now was: “Have I really allowed Napoleon to reach Moscow, and when did I do so? When was it decided? Can it have been yesterday when I ordered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matvei_Platov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Platov&lt;/a&gt; to retreat, or was it the evening before, when I had a nap and told &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levin_August_von_Bennigsen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bennigsen&lt;/a&gt; to issue orders? Or was it earlier still? … When, when was this terrible affair decided? Moscow must be abandoned. The army must retreat and the order to do so must be given.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; 11.3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The council of war itself is thus an anticlimax. Bennigsen suggests that patriotic duty requires that the army turn and fight another battle, but this appears to be motivated by political concerns, so that he does not share in the blame for the retreat, and not because of any prospect of success:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bennigsen did not yet consider his game lost. Admitting the view of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Andreas_Barclay_de_Tolly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barclay&lt;/a&gt; and others that a defensive battle at Fili was impossible, but imbued with Russian patriotism and the love of Moscow, he proposed to move troops from the right to the left flank during the night and attack the French right flank the following day. Opinions were divided, and arguments were advanced for and against that project. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Petrovich_Yermolov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yermolov&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Dokhturov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dokhturov&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Raevsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raevsky&lt;/a&gt; agreed with Bennigsen. Whether feeling it necessary to make a sacrifice before abandoning the capital or guided by other, personal considerations, these generals seemed not to understand that this council could not alter the inevitable course of events and that Moscow was in effect already abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; 11.4. In this and other quoted passages, I have normalized the spelling of names, thus ‘Yermolov’ for ‘Ermolov’ and ‘Raevsky’ for ‘Raevski’, ‘Rayevsky’ or ‘Rayevskii’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benningsen’s ‘game’ here is the political game, his attempt “to throw the blame on Kutuzov”, not the military game, of beating the French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Historical sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So was the abandonment of Moscow without another battle really as inevitable as Tolstoy suggests? The question says, “the Russians apparently did well” at Borodino, which is true in the sense that the army stood its ground and did not break, but the cost was terrible: the Russians suffered about 45,000 casualties (killed, wounded and missing) from a force of about 150,000. After such a bloodbath it was a considerable achievement just to be able to withdraw in order. The army was also desperately in need of resupply, having fired off most of its ammunition in the battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our only sources for Kutuzov’s decision-making and the council of war are the letters and memoirs of the participants, as no official minutes were taken at the council, and these sources are sometimes contradictory and often self-serving. Barclay wrote afterwards that he had found the Russian position outside Moscow (selected by Bennigsen) completely untenable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon our arrival in Moscow, I summoned as much strength as possible to inspect the position designated for the army. I was surprised upon seeing it. Many divisions were separated by unpassable ravines. In one of them flowed the river, completely cutting off communications. The right wing was adjacent to the forest, which extended for several versts [kilometres] towards the enemy. Due to his superior firepower one could expect him to capture this forest without difficulty, and then we would be unable to support the right wing. Behind the First Army was a ditch, at the very least 10 to 15 sazhens [20–30 metres] in depth and with such steep banks that hardly a single person could cross it. The reserve to the right was so unfortunately placed that each shell could hit all four lines. The reserve on the left flank, separated from the corps which it was expected to reinforce would remain a silent spectator if these troops were overrun, since it would be unable to provide assistance due to the aforementioned ravine. The infantry of this reserve would at the very least be firing at both our troops and the enemy’s. The cavalry was already without the advantages which it was expected to have, and if it did not decide to immediately turn to flight, would quietly await its annihilation by the enemy artillery. […] In the case of defeat, the whole army would be destroyed to the last man, because a retreat through such a large city in front of a pursuing enemy is an unrealisable task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Michael Barclay de Tolly. &lt;em&gt;An Account of the Military Campaign of the Year 1812&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by Jimmy Chen (2018).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yermolov suggested that the main point of difficulty for Kutuzov was not &lt;em&gt;whether&lt;/em&gt; to abandon Moscow, but rather &lt;em&gt;how to escape the blame&lt;/em&gt; for doing so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The minister of war [that is, Barclay] summoned me and, with marvellous sagacity and insight, he explained the reasons for the necessity of retreat. He then went to Kutuzov, ordering me to follow him. No one knew better than Barclay the varied ways of making war and which of them were most feasible at any moment. In order to win the war, it was imperative for us to gain time, and, to that end, abandon Moscow. Listening attentively, Kutuzov could not conceal his excitement that the idea of retreat would not be attributed to him, and, to further avoid any blame, he summoned the army generals for a council of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexey Yermolov. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3bt9AwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars&lt;/em&gt;, volume III, p. 194&lt;/a&gt;. Tbilisi: Napoleonic Society of Georgia. Translated by Alexander Mikaberidze (2005).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Wilhelm_von_Toll&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toll&lt;/a&gt; wrote that Kutuzov sought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to shift the responsibility from himself and to relegate it to the generals assembled here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Karl Wilhelm von Toll. Quoted in Alexander Mikaberidze (2014), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H2ttBQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Burning of Moscow: Napoleon’s Trial By Fire&lt;/em&gt;, p.35&lt;/a&gt;. Barnsley: Pen &amp;amp; Sword.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even though Yermolov wrote that he agreed with Barclay about the untenability of the position, he went on to admit that political considerations led him to support a hopeless battle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I was still relatively unknown, I did not dare give my consent to the surrender of Moscow, fearing the accusations of my compatriots; so without defending my hasty opinion, I proposed an attack. I argued that, after 900 versts of continual retreat, the French would not be prepared for such an action; that this sudden move would force the French to take up defensive positions, and undoubtedly spread confusion which His Excellency [that is, Kutuzov], as a talented commander, could exploit to our advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly displeased, Kutuzov told me that I had suggested that only because I did not fear the responsibility of taking such an action. He had vented his indignation too hastily as he should have known that there would be some cautious opinions to come. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rusgenerals.oooprog.ru/index.php?id=uvarov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Uvarov&lt;/a&gt; briefly expressed his consent to retreat. &lt;a href=&quot;http://rusgenerals.oooprog.ru/index.php?id=konovnitsin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Konovnitsyn&lt;/a&gt; supported attacking; he was an enterprising and undaunted officer, but inexperienced in taking extensive and complex decisions. Dokhturov said that it would be good to march against the enemy, however, because of the loss of so many commanders at Borodino, who had been replaced by less familiar officers, success in the ensuing battle could not be guaranteed; therefore, he proposed to retreat. Bennigsen, known for his knowledge of the military art and being experienced in the wars against Napoleon, supported attacking. I was encouraged by his views since I was confident that he based them on the most correct calculations of the likelihood of success, or at least on the possibility of not being overwhelmed. However, there were certainly some at the council who were astonished by his proposal. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Ivanovich_Ostermann-Tolstoy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ostermann-Tolstoy&lt;/a&gt; agreed to retreat, and, to criticize the proposed offensive, he asked Bennigsen if he could guarantee success? With his usual calm, Bennigsen responded that if the subject of our discussion were not in doubt, it would have been unnecessary to call a council and his opinion would not have been required. I was ordered to relay Barclay’s observations and the opinions of each council member to Raevsky, who had arrived late. He soon expressed his consent to retreat. Everyone based their decisions on the minister’s observations, without explaining their reasons or considerations, and certainly there could hardly be a more thorough reasoning than that of Barclay. Completely sharing his opinion, Kutuzov ordered plans drawn up for a retreat. He courteously listened to the opinions of his generals and could not hide his pleasure that the surrender of Moscow had been urged upon him whilst he had been committed to giving battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Yermolov, p. 195.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this situation, where the generals are torn between military disaster if they stand and fight, and political disaster if they retreat without fighting, it is quite possible to imagine the decision going the other way—without Barclay insisting on the untenability of the position (which doesn’t discredit him, since he can blame it on Bennigsen) we can imagine all the generals agreeing to a hopeless stand out of fear for their reputations. There have certainly been military parallels where decisions quite as disastrous have been taken, such as the Austrian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulm_campaign&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;failure to retreat from Ulm in 1805&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere in &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; Tolstoy grossly exaggerates the extent of historical determinism. In the epilogue to the novel he portrays the whole of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as if they were no more than a meaningless rushing about of ants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1789 a ferment arises in Paris; it grows, spreads, and is expressed by a movement of peoples from west to east. Several times it moves eastward and collides with a countermovement from the east westward. In 1812 it reaches its extreme limit, Moscow, and then, with remarkable symmetry, a countermovement occurs from east to west, attracting to it, as the first movement had done, the nations of middle Europe. The counter movement reaches the starting point of the first movement in the west—Paris—and subsides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; 2nd Epilogue.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too much, but no doubt Tolstoy saw the exaggeration here and elsewhere in the novel as a necessary corrective to a literature that described the events of 1812 as the intended outcomes of the considered decisions of monarchs and generals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T23:49:03.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10999" CreationDate="2020-02-17T22:33:58.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They shook hands to &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/shake+hands+on+something&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seal the bargain&lt;/a&gt; they'd made a few lines earlier, she to visit his cannon works and he to come to her shelter. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I will make a bargain with you.&lt;/strong&gt; If I go to see you to-morrow in your Salvation Shelter, will you come the day after to see me in my cannon works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shaking hands is a semi-formal way of making the compact a little more real. They've both committed their honour to the agreement and although it's not legally binding in any real sense, &lt;strong&gt;it shows the audience that both have made serious plans to follow through with this.&lt;/strong&gt; It's not just idle chatter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2020-02-17T22:33:58.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11927" CreationDate="2020-02-18T20:33:46.850" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Andrew George, in his updated translation of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/12CPReadingTheEpicOfGilgamesh/page/n63/mode/2up/search/shepherd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, offers a perspective on this stanza. In short, Gilgamesh' monstrous appetites mean that he has '&lt;em&gt;taken&lt;/em&gt;' (in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_the_biblical_sense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biblical sense&lt;/a&gt;) all of the young wives and daughters. His sexual needs are matched only by his militarism, constantly fighting with and besting all of the young men and leading them into pointless battles, keeping them from their farming duties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The change wrought in Gilgamesh occurs only after a long history &#xA;  of heroic misdemeanours. At first he does everything wrong. He is &#xA;  king but he does not behave like a king. In Babylonian ideology, as &#xA;  throughout the ancient Near East, the king should be to his people &#xA;  as a shepherd to his sheep, guiding them, protecting them and ruling &#xA;  them with a just and equitable hand. Far from that, Gilgamesh is a cruel &#xA;  tyrant, whose brutality calls forth the complaint of his people. The &#xA;  contrast between the ideal and the actual is implicit in their lament: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Yet he is the shepherd of Uruk-the-Sheepfold,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Gilgamesh, [the guide of the] teeming [people.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  . . . he is their shepherd and their [protector,]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;powerful, pre-eminent, expert [and mighty.] The nature of Gilgamesh’s tyranny is not explained by the poet, for it is not necessary to know more than that he is a tyrant. All that is certain is that his demands mean that filial and conjugal duties are displaced. Daughters have no time to help their mothers nor sons their fathers, and wives are unable to tend the needs of their husbands. Some commentators have inferred that Gilgamesh’s abuse is sexual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is certainly true that in the Old Babylonian version of the epic the  Babylonian audience, like Enkidu, would have reacted with horror to the ‘the right of first night’ (ius primae noctis) which the wedding-guest reports as customary in Gilgamesh’s Uruk: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh will couple with the wife-to-be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  he first of all, the bridegroom after.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Such things did not happen in Babylonia in the historical period. &#xA;  However, according to the text this activity was divinely sanctioned, &#xA;  and therefore could not have been an abuse in the context. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2020-02-18T20:33:46.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9442" CreationDate="2020-02-19T09:28:17.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jack Finch is teasing Miss Maudie, playfully but unsuccessfully trying to annoy her.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/get-your-goat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;get somebody's goat&lt;/a&gt;, as Matt Thrower said in comments, means to make them annoyed or angry. As it says at the start of the paragraph, Miss Maudie and Jack Finch had known each other since they were children. He feels that she teases him a lot (he is &quot;&lt;em&gt;the first person she [thinks] about teasing&lt;/em&gt;&quot;), and that the best way to respond to it is for him to tease her in return: &quot;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_best_defense_is_a_good_offense&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the best defence to her was spirited offence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, meaning that he takes a proactive stance in teasing her as the best way to cope with her teasing him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To say &quot;&lt;em&gt;he had been trying unsuccessfully for forty years&lt;/em&gt;&quot; means that he's been trying to make her actually annoyed (to get her goat) since they were children together, but she is too unflappable. Even when he shouts inappropriate marriage proposals to her in the streets, she responds by teasing him right back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why she compares Jem to Jack Finch, it seems that Jem's reported remark about Boo Radley displays a similar idea of humour. Because Boo Radley stays in his house and doesn't come out, Jem says he thinks that &quot;&lt;em&gt;he died and they stuffed him up the chimney&lt;/em&gt;&quot;. To come up with such a notion betrays the same sort of &lt;strong&gt;irreverent sense of humour&lt;/strong&gt; that might lead someone to shout non-serious marriage proposals in the street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T09:28:17.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9409" CreationDate="2020-02-19T11:53:35.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laconic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laconic&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;using or involving the use of a minimum of words : concise to the point of seeming rude or mysterious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So basically, it's indicating this piece doesn't require a lot of words to express itself. &quot;Laconic&quot; also tends to imply that this terseness is intentional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T11:53:35.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12517" CreationDate="2020-02-19T14:54:49.917" Score="3" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the following quote from Rumi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill only the best, none of the weak or deformed. Don't run away from this dying. Whoever's not killed for love is dead meat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I get the gist of it but seems like something was lost in translation. Wouldn't anything killed in a slaughterhouse be dead meat, even metaphorically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8558" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-03T10:31:33.400" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T23:48:27.410" Title="Rumi's &quot;In a slaughterhouse of love...&quot; meaning" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12364" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12365" CreationDate="2020-02-19T15:12:06.517" Score="3" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a beautiful quote about the soul being like a bird that flies through a house at night. Its entrance out of darkness through the first window is birth, and its exit through the second window back into the darkness is death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall it was by a Christian missionary in the context of converting the Vikings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what I'm talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1907" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T07:38:14.833" Title="Looking for a source for a (Christian) metaphor about the soul being like a bird that flies through the house" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12364" CreationDate="2020-02-19T16:23:31.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bede&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38326/38326-h/38326-h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ecclesiastical History of the English People&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (written about 731) has a version of this, in Book II, Chapter XIII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another of the king's chief men, approving of his wise words and exhortations, added thereafter: “The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.” The other elders and king's counsellors, by Divine prompting, spoke to the same effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The king in question is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_of_Northumbria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;St. Edwin&lt;/a&gt; of Northumbria; the conversation in the early 600's.&#xA;Note (as did MJ713, in a comment) that the simile itself is uttered by a pagan councilor of the king, and hence is not, strictly speaking, a &quot;Christian metaphor&quot;, even though it occurs in the context of a description of a successful conversion to Christianity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A modern song incorporating this simile is Patrick Regan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://soundcloud.com/snakebird/tracks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;That Passed, This is&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-02-21T19:03:09.040" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T19:03:09.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12366" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12372" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:03:30.473" Score="5" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;With reference to Samuel R Delany's book, Dhalgren:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When The Kid &quot;first&quot; crosses the bridge into the autumnal city, he's met by a group of women who are exiting. They tell him it's dangerous inside and offer him a weapon to stay safe. The weapon is called an &quot;orchid&quot; and is described thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You wear it around your wrist. With the blades sticking out front.&#xA;  Like a bracelet.&quot;  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From an adjustable metal wrist-band, seven blades,&#xA;  from eight to twelve inches, curved sharply forward. There was a&#xA;  chain-and-leather harness inside to hold it steady on the fingers. The&#xA;  blades were sharpened along the outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that a real weapon, or did he just make it up for the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5687" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T21:05:10.683" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T21:14:09.750" Title="Is Dhalgren's &quot;orchid&quot; based on a real weapon?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;samuel-r-delany&gt;&lt;dhalgren&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12367" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12368" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1974 science fiction novel Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. Use this tag together with the [samuel-r-delany] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T21:09:10.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12369" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12370" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Samuel R. Delany (born 1942) or about any of his literary works, which include science fiction and various essays." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T21:11:52.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="433" CreationDate="2020-02-19T23:42:52.170" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidently the authors felt that the original translation lacked nuance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the years following the initial publication, in 1908, of this greatly treasured volume that records the explanations given by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in response to questions posed by Laura Clifford Barney during her visits to the Holy Land in 1904-1906, &lt;strong&gt;it became evident that the English translation was in need of a thorough revision — one which would more adequately reflect the meaning and style of the original, convey clearly the subtleties of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s explanations, and render consistently the philosophical terms used in the text.&lt;/strong&gt; The present volume is the fruit of efforts to realize those aims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bahaicanada.bahai.ca/new-english-translation-of-some-answered-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New English translation of Some Answered Questions: Press Releas&lt;/a&gt;e&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%CA%BC%C3%AD_World_Centre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baha’i World Centre&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is producing a body of works, retranslating a wide range of historically important books. A cynic might argue that they had financial aims as well as a desire to garner fame and publicity for their organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The publication of Some Answered Questions marks the beginning of an acceleration in the pace of the programme for the translation and publication of the Holy Writings at the Baha’i World Centre. Work is already well advanced on a volume of extracts pertaining to Baha’i Holy Days as well as a retranslation of the Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys, and it is anticipated that in the course of the next Plan further volumes will be produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bahaicanada.bahai.ca/new-english-translation-of-some-answered-questions/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New English translation of Some Answered Questions: Press Releas&lt;/a&gt;e&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-19T23:42:52.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12366" CreationDate="2020-02-20T12:06:03.300" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: weapons &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; like this are more of a &quot;cool trope&quot; in fiction than something that actually existed, but they're similar to some real-life ninja weapons which presumably inspired them directly or indirectly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a very informative &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-useful-would-metal-claws-strapped-to-your-hands-be-in-a-fight-What-advantages-or-disadvantages-would-this-have-as-a-weapon-Are-there-any-real-world-examples-of-this-kind-of-weapon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora thread about &quot;long metal claws strapped to your hand&quot; weapons&lt;/a&gt;, their usefulness and historical precedents. Several answers give detailed explanations of why such a weapon would not be useful or practical, which explains why they never passed into frequent usage like &quot;long metal blade&quot; weapons did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;However&lt;/em&gt;, there were a few weapons originating in eastern Asia, mostly Japanese ninjas, which come close to matching your description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ninjaencyclopedia.com/weapon/tekko-kagi.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tekko-Kagi&lt;/a&gt;, originally a farm tool but adapted by ninjas as a weapon, shaped roughly like a set of bear claws which can be attached either over or under the hand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AT3LW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/AT3LW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EmQQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6EmQQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://blackbeltwiki.com/shuko&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shuko&lt;/a&gt;, another ninja weapon in the form of a row of spikes or claws set &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; the palm, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagh_nakh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bagh Nakh&lt;/a&gt;, an Indian weapon shaped like tiger claws and also designed to be held inside the palm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B85KJ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/B85KJ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;shuko&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SQTV.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1SQTV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;bagh nakh&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these, the Tekko-Kagi is most similar to the &quot;orchid&quot; described in &lt;em&gt;Dhalgren&lt;/em&gt;. It has blades which can sit on top of the hand and be used for slashing and fighting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the key thing to notice is that the Tekko-Kagi blades are relatively &lt;em&gt;short&lt;/em&gt;. As you can see in the pictures above, they don't seem to be 8-12 inch long blades. In fact, as one of the Quora answerers explained, such long blades would not be practical to use in combat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nope, not useful. Can't punch with it, the end of the blade would push into the fleshy part between your knuckles, same with slashing down, because it would pivot around the handle. The thin blades would also easily get caught in a shield and break and twisted away from user and useless against armour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems more likely that Delany's &quot;orchid&quot; is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WolverineClaws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trope&lt;/a&gt; common in various fantasy media of having unrealistically long claws attached to one's hands as weapons. This trope has inspired various forum threads, like the Quora one linked above and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/61gr37/wristarmmounted_weapons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Reddit one&lt;/a&gt;, asking about real-world examples or inspiration. Stuff like this looks more similar to the description of the &quot;orchid&quot; than the Tekko-Kagi does:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cd91Hm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cd91Hm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WMXFS.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/WMXFS.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the trope was presumably inspired by the real-life historical ninja weapons mentioned above, the origins in literature of (specifically) the long impractical claws are less clear. I haven't dug deeply into that, since it wasn't exactly part of your question, but it's even possible that &lt;em&gt;Dhalgren&lt;/em&gt; was one of the first appearances of such weapons in speculative-fiction literature. The examples listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WolverineClaws&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes page&lt;/a&gt; go back as far as the 1980s, but &lt;em&gt;Dhalgren&lt;/em&gt; was published in the 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just for fun, that &quot;cool trope&quot; inspired Colin Furze, Youtube's most brilliant mad inventor, to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVBCFGebqTg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;actually build&lt;/a&gt; a set of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdcGek-NoFQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;such claws&lt;/a&gt; himself. Presumably he doesn't use them as weapons though, so this doesn't speak against their impracticality as mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-20T21:14:09.750" LastActivityDate="2020-02-20T21:14:09.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9394" CreationDate="2020-02-21T14:45:46.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;By implication, the Tower of London.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer to &quot;&lt;em&gt;Is this castle named later in the book&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt;, it's never explicitly named in the original text of the book. Some adaptations of the story, such as Disney's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Ichabod_and_Mr._Toad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, have explicitly made the setting to be the Tower of London, but the original story is written quite anonymously with respect to location. In the entire book, the only references I can find to specific real-world places are in the speeches of the Sea Rat, who mentions &quot;London&quot; but only in the same breath as Constantinople, Venice, the Levant, and Marseilles. It seems a deliberate writing choice to keep the setting general, not forcing the river to be the Thames or the castle to be the Tower of London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that said, the location that would spring to mind for any English reader of &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;, upon seeing the description you've quoted, is surely the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_London&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tower of London&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Even though the story is set in the era of motor cars, well after the time when castles would be expected to have torture chambers and men-at-arms wearing armour, the Tower of London &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hrp.org.uk/tower-of-london/whats-on/torture-at-the-tower-exhibition/#gs.wz3u4l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;implements of torture on display&lt;/a&gt; (although not in use) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://greatbritishmag.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/What-is-British-beefeater.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;uniformed guards with halberds&lt;/a&gt; (although only ceremonial).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description is obviously rather hammed up, in order to make Toad's experience as terrifying as possible for the story. I doubt the Tower of London had &quot;guardrooms full of grinning soldiery&quot; around the turn of the 20th century. But it does have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/heritage/tower-of-london-finally-gets-its-working-drawbridge-back-1-3565249&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;drawbridge&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rct.uk/collection/2102209/the-portcullis-of-the-byward-tower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;portcullis&lt;/a&gt;, as well as the torture chambers and halberd-wielding warders mentioned above. And it was used for holding and executing prisoners even in the 20th century, with the last prisoner held there being in 1941. So this isn't &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; much of an exaggeration of the Tower of London, and I'm fairly sure it doesn't come close to matching anything else in England in that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NxaLn.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NxaLn.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/634m7.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/634m7.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-21T14:45:46.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12355" CreationDate="2020-02-22T16:09:57.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; does not respect Aristotle’s unity of action, but to discover this you need to read Aristotle, and even literary critics sometimes neglect primary sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Aristotle&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unity of action comes from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetics_(Aristotle)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After these definitions we must next discuss the proper arrangement of the incidents since this is the first and most important thing in tragedy. We have laid it down that tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude, since a thing may be a whole and yet have no magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end. A beginning is that which is not a necessary consequent of anything else but after which something else exists or happens as a natural result. An end on the contrary is that which is inevitably or, as a rule, the natural result of something else but from which nothing else follows; a middle follows something else and something follows from it. Well constructed plots must not therefore begin and end at random, but must embody the formulae we have stated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle (c. 335 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1450b&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; 1450b&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by W. H. Fyfe (1932).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fyfe’s translation is not very idiomatic (it was probably intended as an aid to construing the original Greek), but we can get some sense out of it. In this passage, Aristotle is in the middle of defining what he means by “tragedy”, and one component of that definition is that a tragedy should consist of a “representation of an action that is whole and complete”. He seems to mean that an action is “whole and complete” if it consists of a chain of causes and effects, starting at the beginning (an event “which is not a necessary consequent”: that is, an accident or coincidence), and going on to the end (an event from which nothing, or at least nothing important to the plot, follows).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This becomes clearer if we look at the kinds of ancient Greek plays that Aristotle is discussing in this passage. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophocles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sophocles’&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oedipus Rex&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the event that causes the plot is Oedipus becoming king of Thebes by unknowingly killing his father Laius and marrying his mother Jocasta. Everything else in the play—Jocasta’s suicide, Oedipus’ self-mutilation, his and his daughters’ exile—follows from this original event in an inexorable chain of consequences. But the original event itself has no explicable cause—it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, or a divine curse, or a monstrous coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aristotle’s subsequent remarks show that cause and probable effect are the keys to his idea of the unity of action:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give a simple definition: the magnitude which admits of a change from bad fortune to good or from good fortune to bad, in a &lt;strong&gt;sequence of events which follow one another either inevitably or according to probability&lt;/strong&gt;, that is the proper limit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer&lt;/a&gt;, supreme also in all other respects, was apparently well aware of this truth either by instinct or from knowledge of his art. For in writing an &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; he did not put in all that ever happened to Odysseus, his being wounded on Parnassus, for instance, or his feigned madness when the host was gathered (these being &lt;strong&gt;events neither of which necessarily or probably led to the other&lt;/strong&gt;), but he constructed his &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; round a single action in our sense of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1451a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; 1451a&lt;/a&gt;. My emphasis.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Aristotle’s idea of “probability” is pretty flexible, as in this example where he allows it to include a “providential” coincidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;since tragedy represents not only a complete action but also incidents that cause fear and pity, and this happens most of all when the incidents are unexpected and yet one is a consequence of the other. For in that way the incidents will cause more amazement than if they happened mechanically and accidentally, since the most amazing accidental occurrences are those which seem to have been providential, for instance when the statue of Mitys at Argos killed the man who caused Mitys’s death by falling on him at a festival. Such events do not seem to be mere accidents. So such plots as these must necessarily be the best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1452a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; 1452a&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; respect Aristotle’s definition of the unity of action? Clearly the answer is going to depend on how far you are willing to stretch the idea of cause and effect being “natural”, “probable” or “inevitable”. Granted that Prospero has been exiled from Milan to an island in the Bermudas, and granted that he is a magician with powerful spirits at his command, and granted that his enemies happen to be on a ship within his magical reach, then the events of the play do follow as consequences. But these events do not seem to be “probable” or “inevitable” in the sense of Aristotle. And this applies not only to the magical events: is it really probable that Ferdinand and Miranda should fall in love at first sight and consent to be wedded within the hour? Is it really inevitable that Alonso, who conspired with Antonio against Prospero, should sincerely repent and beg forgiveness? Perhaps some of these can be filed under the heading of providential coincidences, like the statue of Mitys, but to do this for all of the fantastic events of the play seems to stretch things too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about subplots? Aristotle’s criterion for the unity of action is that all the “component incidents” of a plot must contribute to the chain of cause and effect, and that if an incident can be removed without materially changing the rest of the plot then this spoils the unity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As then in the other arts of representation a single representation means a representation of a single object, so too the plot being a representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0056%3Asection%3D1451a&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; 1451a&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Caliban subplot in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is clearly not “integral” in this sense. It is foiled so easily by Prospero and Ariel that it makes no difference to the events or outcome of the main plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Critics&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; fails to respect Aristotle’s unity of action, both in the improbability of the events in the main plot, and in the failure of the subplots to make a difference to the outcome of the main plot. So what makes so many critics claim otherwise? This is hard to answer without going into unverifiable speculation, but I have three theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is always a temptation to distort the facts in order make a more interesting claim. Aristotle’s unity of action is pretty flexible, so that if you want to claim that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; respects it, you can always justify yourself with something like, “if the statue of Mitys counted as ‘probable’ enough for Aristotle’s purposes, then why not a victimless shipwreck brought about by a magical spirit?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, some critics may not have looked carefully at the text of Aristotle’s &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, but have been working from secondary or tertiary sources that summarize or explicate Aristotle, omitting or generalizing some of the detail in the original. You can see that something like this must have been happening because Pickering’s criterion for subplots is that they must “belong organically” to “a single main plot”, which does not seem to correspond closely to anything in Aristotle. Similarly, the CliffsNotes series is intended for people who don’t want to read original texts, so it would not be so surprising if its contributors didn’t always read original texts either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, some critics may not even have looked at summaries of Aristotle, but have simply copied the claim that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; respects the unity of action from a secondary or tertiary source. Once an interesting factoid like this becomes established, it is almost impossible to correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-22T19:28:04.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12394" CreationDate="2020-02-22T19:52:22.140" Score="3" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Field_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Field&lt;/a&gt;’ was a joint pen-name used by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Their elegy ‘To Christina Rossetti’ (1896) was written after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Rossetti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rossetti&lt;/a&gt;’s death in 1894.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lady, we would behold thee moving bright&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As Beatrice or Matilda mid the trees,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alas! thy moan was as a moan for ease&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And passage through cool shadows to the night:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fleeing from love, hadst thou not poet’s right&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To slip into the universe? The seas&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are fathomless to rivers drowned in these,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sorrow is secure in leafy light.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ah, had this secret touched thee, in a tomb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou hadst not buried thy enchanting self,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As happy Syrinx murmuring with the wind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or Daphne thrilled through all her mystic bloom,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From safe recess as genius or as elf,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou hadst breathed joy in earth and in thy kind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? Why do the speakers want to see Rossetti emulate Dante’s Beatrice and Matilda? What was Rossetti’s “moan”? How does a poet “slip into the universe”? What do seas, rivers and “leafy light” symbolize? In what “tomb” do the speakers regret that Rossetti buried herself? In what way are the nymphs Syrinx and Daphne good role models? What are “safe recess” and “thy kind”? What retrospective advice are the speakers giving Rossetti?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-22T20:01:45.503" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T12:39:59.570" Title="Michael Field’s ‘To Christina Rossetti’" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;michael-field&gt;&lt;christina-rossetti&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12377" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-22T19:54:27.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-22T19:54:27.737" LastActivityDate="2020-02-22T19:54:27.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12378" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-22T19:54:27.737" Score="0" Body="&quot;Michael Field&quot; was a joint pseudonym used by English verse dramatists Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913). Use this tag for questions regarding the author(s) or any of their works, with the appropriate work tag for long works or the [poetry] tag for short poems." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:20:13.223" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:20:13.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12379" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-02-22T19:57:15.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-22T19:57:15.197" LastActivityDate="2020-02-22T19:57:15.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12380" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-02-22T19:57:15.197" Score="0" Body="Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), English romantic poet. Her works include &quot;Goblin Market&quot; and the carol &quot;In the Bleak Midwinter&quot;. Questions about her poems should be tagged under [poetry], questions about her songs should be tagged under [song-lyrics]" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T19:17:54.960" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T19:17:54.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-22T21:24:59.427" Score="3" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Background:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song &amp;quot;Take 5&amp;quot; by Dave Brubeck is one of the more famous jazz standards (famous jazz songs) out there, and one thing any musician would point out immediately is the tune's 5/4 (five beats in a measure) shuffle, which from what I remember was quite a departure from the normal 4/4 (four beats to a measure) swing at the time. The piece was first recorded in the late 1950s, and it's possibly the most famous piece of music ever to be written in 5/4 &lt;em&gt;(next to the Mission: Impossible theme)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently, I have been reading a book (a fictional work unrelated to music) by Aldous Huxley titled &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; (1932), containing a passage that interested me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Four hundred couples were &lt;strong&gt;five-stepping&lt;/strong&gt; round the polished floor. Lenina and Henry were soon the four hundred and first. The saxophones wailed like melodious cats under the moon, moaned in the alto and tenor registers as though the little death were upon them. Rich with a wealth of harmonics, their tremulous chorus mounted towards a climax, louder and ever louder–until at last, with a wave of his hand, the conductor let loose the final shattering note of ether-music and blew the sixteen merely human blowers clean out of existence. Thunder in A flat major. And then, in all but silence, in all but darkness, there followed a gradual deturgescence, a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones, down, down to a faintly whispered dominant chord that lingered on (while the &lt;strong&gt;five-four rhythms&lt;/strong&gt; still pulsed below) charging the darkened seconds with an intense expectancy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Emphasis mine]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phrases like &amp;quot;alto and tenor registers&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;a diminuendo sliding gradually, through quarter tones&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;a faintly whispered dominant chord&amp;quot; prove undoubtably that Huxley has had some non-trivial experience with music and music theory. (If you're not a musician, take it on faith that these are terms that are hard to use correctly without knowing a lot about music.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was originally published in 1932, long before Brubeck's jazz standard; clearly, the concept of moaning jazz saxophones paired with 5/4 time signatures had not been inspired by &amp;quot;Take 5&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;if 5/4 time signatures were so revolutionary in the late '50s, how on Earth would Huxley have put these ideas together?&lt;/strong&gt; I haven't even found any reference to Huxley ever being involved with music at all, let alone able to understand such complicated ideas as irregular meter and quarter tones!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8568" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:14:37.593" Title="How Did Aldous Huxley Know So Much About Music?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12381" CreationDate="2020-02-23T01:50:32.833" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintuple_meter#European_folk_music&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian folk music&lt;/a&gt; (and other Slavik folk music, as well) has lots of strange rhythms in it. Tchaikovsky, probably taking his cue from folk music, wrote  the second movement of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._6_(Tchaikovsky)#II._Allegro_con_grazia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1893 &lt;em&gt;Symphony Pathétique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 5/4 time. He wasn't the only or the first Russian composer to have done this, but it's probably the most famous piece of 5/4 music that Huxley might have listened to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Aldous Huxley seems to have appreciated music quite a lot, judging from the quotes you give in your question. Surely it's possible that he listened to Tchaikovsky's &lt;em&gt;Symphony Pathéthique&lt;/em&gt; and recognized that it was in 5/4 time, and included the unusual time signature as a future innovation for dance music in &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T13:04:21.637" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T13:04:21.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12383" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12384" CreationDate="2020-02-23T09:19:19.660" Score="6" ViewCount="3546" Body="&lt;p&gt;From book 1, Chapter 6,of The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tom Bombadil's Song&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Old Tom Bombadil water-lilies bringing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Comes hopping home again. Can you hear him singing?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! and merry-o,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Goldberry, Goldberry, merry yellow berry-o!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Poor old Willow-man, you tuck your roots away!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tom's in a hurry now. Evening will follow day.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tom's going home home again water-lilies bringing.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Hey! come derry dol! Can you hear me singing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T11:49:58.207" Title="What's the meaning of Tom Bombadil's poem?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12383" CreationDate="2020-02-23T11:49:58.207" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s a bit more context from chapter 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He [Frodo] turned round and listened, and soon there could be no doubt: someone was singing a song; a deep glad voice was singing carelessly and happily, but it was singing nonsense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Half hopeful and half afraid of some new danger, Frodo and Sam now both stood still. Suddenly out of a long string of nonsense-words (or so they seemed) the voice rose up loud and clear and burst into this song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hey! Come merry dol! derry dol! My darling!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narration says that Bombadil is singing “carelessly and happily” and that the song consists of “a long string of nonsense-words”. The impression we get is that Bombadil simply loves to sing as he goes about his activities. His song expresses his joy in the natural world about him (the starlings and willows, the wind and sun and starlight and so on), and declares his love for Goldberry. When Frodo meets Goldberry he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Fair lady Goldberry! Now the joy that was hidden in the songs we heard is made plain to&#xA;  me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can imagine that Bombadill makes up his song as he goes along, using a stock of phrases that he has composed over the years, and that sometimes he runs out of sense and fills up the tune with nonsense-words. However, these words are not completely nonsensical, and in fact most of them can be explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Hey” is “an exclamation expressing exultation, incitement, surprise, etc.” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) In Bombadil’s song it seems to express his joy. The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; goes on to add that it is “sometimes used in the burden of a song with no definite meaning”, for example in Balthazar’s song from Shakespeare’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Converting all your sounds of woe&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into Hey nonny, nonny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Derry” is “a meaningless word in the refrains of popular songs” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), for example the folk ballad ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Ravens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Three Ravens&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There were three ravens sat on a tree,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They were as black as they might be.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With a down, derry, derry, derry, down, down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Dol”, “fal” and “lal” are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;solfège&lt;/a&gt;, that is, conventional syllables that are assigned to notes of the musical scale: the usual spellings are “&lt;strong&gt;do&lt;/strong&gt; re mi &lt;strong&gt;fa&lt;/strong&gt; sol &lt;strong&gt;la&lt;/strong&gt;”. These come from the initial syllables of the phrases of an 8th century Latin hymn &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut_queant_laxis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ut queant laxis&lt;/a&gt; which was set to a rising scale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ut&lt;/strong&gt; queant laxīs &lt;strong&gt;re&lt;/strong&gt;sonāre fībrīs&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Mī&lt;/strong&gt;ra gestōrum &lt;strong&gt;fa&lt;/strong&gt;mulī tuōrum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Sol&lt;/strong&gt;ve pollūtī &lt;strong&gt;la&lt;/strong&gt;biī reātum,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sancte Iōhannēs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The syllable “ut” was found to be hard to pronounce and was substituted by “do” in the 17th century.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syllables “fa” and “la” are popular fill-in words in English songs: indeed, a common form of song has a refrain consisting only of these words. Well-known examples are the madrigal ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_Is_the_Month_of_Maying&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Now is the month of Maying&lt;/a&gt;’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Morley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Morley&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now is the month of maying,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When merry lads are playing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fa la la la la la la la la,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fa la la la la la la la.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the carol “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deck_the_Halls&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deck the halls&lt;/a&gt;”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deck the halls with boughs of holly,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fa la la la la, la la la la.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Ring a dong” is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;onomatopeia&lt;/a&gt; for the sound of bells, and similar words are a common motif in English nursery rhymes (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding_Dong_Bell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ding dong bell / pussy’s in the well&lt;/a&gt;”) and carols (“&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding_Dong_Merrily_on_High&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ding dong! Merrily on high&lt;/a&gt;”).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Dillo” is an abbreviation of “Bombadillo”, which is just “Bombadil, O”, the “O” being “Added after the rhyme word at the end of a line in a ballad, song, etc., for metrical reasons” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), as for example in the folk song ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Grow_the_Rushes%2C_O&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Green grow the rushes, O&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll sing you one, O&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Green grow the rushes, O&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What is your one, O?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the effect of these nonsense words and phrases is to strongly associate Bombadil’s song with the tradition of English folk songs and ballads, fitting Bombadil’s role as a kind of archetype or spirit of the English countryside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T11:49:58.207" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12385" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9407" CreationDate="2020-02-23T12:56:44.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The implication seems to be that Dr Buford preferred to spend time gardening instead of being a social climber. We don't have much more information about him in the story, so this passage is nearly all we have to go on, but:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;his obsession was anything that grew in the ground&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests he was a keen gardener, like his daughter Miss Maudie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Miss Maudie hated her house: time spent indoors was time wasted. She was a widow, a chameleon lady who worked in her flower beds in an old straw hat and men’s coveralls, but after her five o’clock bath she would appear on the porch and reign over the street in magisterial beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She loved everything that grew in God’s earth, even the weeds. With one exception. If she found a blade of nut grass in her yard it was like the Second Battle of the Marne: she swooped down upon it with a tin tub and subjected it to blasts from beneath with a poisonous substance she said was so powerful it’d kill us all if we didn’t stand out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;so he stayed poor&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are getting an impression of a man who spent time on his passions instead of on his work and making money. Instead of becoming rich and famous, he would rather stay at home and do gardening because he enjoyed it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of this passage is to &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt; Dr Buford with Jack Finch. Like Dr Buford, both Jack Finch and his original ancestor Simon had professions in medicine; but Simon Finch &lt;em&gt;&quot;made a pile practicing medicine&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, thus enabling his family to remain reasonably well-off for generations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;my father, Atticus Finch, went to Montgomery to read law, and his younger brother went to Boston to study medicine. [...] During his first five years in Maycomb, Atticus practiced economy more than anything; for several years thereafter he invested his earnings in his brother’s education. John Hale Finch was ten years younger than my father, and chose to study medicine at a time when cotton was not worth growing; but after getting Uncle Jack started, Atticus derived a reasonable income from the law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Jack Finch had spent as much time as possible in his garden, he would not have been able to make a very successful career. Thus the contrast between him and Dr Buford:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Dr Buford’s profession was medicine and his obsession was anything that grew in the ground, so he stayed poor. Uncle Jack Finch confined his passion for digging to his window-boxes in Nashville and stayed rich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words: &lt;strong&gt;Dr Buford practised medicine as a job, but preferred enjoying himself in the garden, so he didn't &quot;make a pile&quot; like Simon Finch; by contrast, Jack Finch did gardening only in small window-boxes and had time to make a more successful career.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T12:56:44.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12381" CreationDate="2020-02-23T13:08:52.580" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;References to Huxley and his views on music are easy to find. E.g. this article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/735358?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Aldous Huxley and Music in the 1920s&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Music &amp;amp; Letters&lt;/em&gt; 64 (1/2), 25-36, 1983&lt;/a&gt;, hosted at Jstor where I can only access the free preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE IMPORTANCE of music in the writings of Aldous Huxley has always been recognized, yet it is not often remembered that the confidence of his musical judgements had its foundations in a period that he spent, in 1922-3, as music critic of the Weekly Westminster Gazette. This remains one of his least-known ventures, and his criticisms have not been reprinted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gervase Huxley, his cousin and Oxford contemporary, remembers that at that time Aldous discovered jazz and the delights of syncopation:'he was always picking up something new-and this was certainly brand new to us'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huxley was later to despise and pillory the vulgarity, cheapness and sensuality of jazz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t speak to the details of 5/4 time, but Huxley knew music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T13:41:28.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5099" CreationDate="2020-02-23T14:30:10.083" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of possibilities, some of which are also touched on in the answers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/4/17&quot;&gt;In Brave New World, what caste is Lenina Crowne?&lt;/a&gt; I'm listing them in what I think is decreasing order of probability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;The author made a mistake.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colour associated with the Beta caste is only stated once in the whole story, in a throwaway line in Chapter IV (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like aphides and ants, the leaf-green Gamma girls, the black Semi-Morons swarmed round the entrances, or stood in queues to take their places in the monorail tram-cars. &lt;strong&gt;Mulberry-coloured Beta-Minuses&lt;/strong&gt; came and went among the crowd. The roof of the main building was alive with the alighting and departure of helicopters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'My word,' said Lenina, 'I'm glad I'm not a Gamma.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps either this use of the word &amp;quot;mulberry&amp;quot; was a mistake, or the author forgot it when describing Lenina's green outfit (although the latter is mentioned more than once).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;Betas have more freedom in what colours to wear.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the higher castes are not so strictly required to wear only the appropriate colour for their caste. As a Beta, perhaps Lenina has a little more latitude in clothing colour - presumably so long as it's not the same colour as one associated with another caste, so a different type of green from the Gammas' &amp;quot;leaf-green&amp;quot; might be acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h2&gt;She's a Beta-Plus with a different associated colour from Beta-Minuses.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's never mentioned explicitly which caste Lenina belongs to, although it &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/4/17&quot;&gt;can be more or less deduced&lt;/a&gt; that she is Beta. But whether that's Beta-Plus or Beta-Minus is another question, and it's just possible that the two may have different associated colours. The &amp;quot;mulberry&amp;quot; quote only refers to Beta-Minuses, after all. Possible but perhaps unlikely, since only one colour is mentioned for each of the other castes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Mulberry&amp;quot; referring to a green colour?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two answerers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Lenina-Crowne-wear-green-in-Brave-New-World-Is-this-simply-an-irritating-inconsistency-or-did-Huxley-mean-something-by-this&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt; seem to think &amp;quot;mulberry&amp;quot; means green, one of them saying &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Lenina wears bottle green shorts, which is close to the mulberry green colour. Thus, the readers know she is Beta.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; and the other asserting that &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;While mulberry today indicates a deep red, there is a colour called “mulberry green&amp;quot; that's very close to old dark green bottles.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; However, I couldn't find any evidence that this is actually true: I could only find &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mulberry.com/gb/about-us/mulberry-green&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mulberry green&lt;/a&gt; as a brand of the company Mulberry, which definitely postdates Huxley. And there are other mistakes made by the answerers on that Quora page, so definitely take this with a pinch of salt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T14:30:10.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12407" CreationDate="2020-02-23T20:58:31.007" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The final chapter of &lt;em&gt;Blood of Elves&lt;/em&gt; covers the beginning of Ciri's training with Yennefer, learning about magic but also many other things. One passage describes her reading, and I noticed the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She read &lt;em&gt;The Adversities of Loving&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Time of the Moon&lt;/em&gt;, collections of poems by the famous troubadour Dandilion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dandilion, of course, is a major character in the whole Witcher series, but he sings and tells stories - I don't recall any mention of him writing them down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who collected Dandilion's poems in written form?&lt;/strong&gt; Was it he himself, or someone who listened to him many times? Is this ever mentioned in the books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T08:01:56.983" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T08:01:56.983" Title="Who collected Dandilion's songs in written books?" Tags="&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9587" CreationDate="2020-02-23T21:43:06.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I appreciate the attention drawn to my academic article and my translations of Alevi hymns, I should like to make some remarks on the question and perhaps provide some answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, the source noted does not contain &quot;a hymn&quot; but an entire liturgy with multiple texts. Let us not diminish the achievement, such as it is, of putting a whole collection of Turkish Alevi hymns into English rhymed verse that fits the original Turkish melodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second issue is in the identification of the articles. The entire academic article is entitled &quot;Ritual Change in a Turkish Alevi Village.&quot; The website linked above refers to the last section of the article, which it quotes, and which bears the section title &quot;Rites of Sacrifice in a Turkish Alevi Village.&quot; The latter is thus a section of the original and far more extensive complete article. Perhaps there is some ambiguity there, but I suspect an examination of both sources would clear that up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both sources clearly identify the author accurately as Thomas McElwain. But the questioner finds reference to &quot;Ali Haydar&quot; somehow  a justification for &quot;chasing whispers and shadows.&quot; There is nothing sinister, strange, occult, or dishonest involved. It was simply that while working in the village of Sarilar, people jokingly complained that Thomas is a word too difficult to pronounce, and so I was given a local nickname that has stuck among Muslim friends and occasionally appears here and there. I felt it at the time to be a gesture of friendship, acceptance, and in some measure even affection. It takes the internet to replace such things with suspicion and possibly even hostility. Let's go back to the original intent and atmosphere. Thomas McElwain remains my birth name and official name. Some people, on converting to Islam, change their names officially. That could have been the case here, but it is not. Such a religious name change ought to have been the first explanation to come to mind, rather than something nefarious, a pseudonym, or an attempt at co-opting a &quot;false persona.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a site that deals primarily with literature. If the explanation of religious conversion does not immediately come to mind among those interested in literature, it does come to mind when the term &quot;nom de plume&quot; was replaced by &quot;false persona.&quot; I should think that might have entered the speculation long before the thought of someone clandestinely trying to come across as native where he was not. But it was not a matter of anything so pretentious as a nom de plume either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me thank, however, the questioner for flattering me with the implication that my spoken Turkish was of such excellence, that I might have been able to maintain the &quot;false persona&quot; of being Turkish in a Turkish village. My written work might have excused such an impression, but experience will show that there is a great difference between being able to work on paper and speak a language with the fluency required to pass oneself off as a native. I have been mistaken in France for being French, in Spain for being a Spaniard, in Finland for being a Finn, but never in Turkey for being Turkish. Wait! I am trying to be so accurate that I can escape the darts of the discourteous, no doubt a futile hope. My daughter and I were in fact mistaken for being Turkish in a shop in Istanbul, when we were amusing ourselves by speaking Turkish together at a moment when it rose to slightly more fluency after being in the country for several weeks. But it was only for a moment. There was no attempt to maintain a &quot;false persona&quot; or &quot;create whispers and shadows.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8570" LastEditorUserId="8570" LastEditDate="2020-02-23T21:50:42.003" LastActivityDate="2020-02-23T21:50:42.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-23T21:53:10.900" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some difficulties in understanding the meaning of this excerpt from &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Things&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;David was aware of a change in the room as soon as he began to fill the empty spaces on the shelves, the newer books looking and sounding uneasy beside these other works from the past. Their appearance was intimidating, and they spoke to David in dusty, rumbling tones. The older books were bound in calfskin and leather, and some of them contained knowledge that had long been forgotten, or that was found to be incorrect as science and the process of discovery uncovered new truths. The books that held this old knowledge had never come to terms with this relegation of their worth. They were now lower than stories, for stories were intended, at some level, to be made up and untrue, but these other books had been born for greater things. Men and women had worked hard on their creation, filling them with the sum total of all that they knew and all that they believed about the world. That they were misguided, and the assumptions they made were now largely worthless, was almost impossible for the books to bear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the author plays with the idea of talking books with personalities. However, I wonder, is there a hierarchy made between fiction and non-fiction here? Is it ironic when it is said &quot;these other books had been born for greater things&quot;? I don't really understand the point of mentioning these old books. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8573" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-24T10:13:38.677" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T10:13:38.677" Title="Can someone explain this excerpt of The Book of Lost Things of John Connolly?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-book-of-lost-things&gt;&lt;john-connolly&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6651" CreationDate="2020-02-24T07:57:38.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Read the opening paragraphs closely. It seems to me that he's blowing a LOT of smoke. He never gives a &lt;em&gt;concrete&lt;/em&gt; explanation for why he wants to go to sea for three &lt;em&gt;years&lt;/em&gt;. Take that in context with him feeling nervous when the sign post for the Try Pots inn reminds him of a gallows.&#xA;He needed to disappear for a while.  ;)  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8576" LastActivityDate="2020-02-24T07:57:38.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12395" CreationDate="2020-02-24T23:24:02.200" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Wall!&quot; he said, &quot;I guess I've not had enjoyment like this since &#xA;  I left Noo York. &lt;strong&gt;Bar a scrap with&lt;/strong&gt; a French sailor at Wapping-an' that &#xA;  warn't much of a picnic neither-I've not had a show fur real pleasure &#xA;  in this dod-rotted Continent, where there ain't no b'ars nor no &#xA;  Injuns, an' wheer nary man goes heeled. Slow there, Judge! Don't &#xA;  you rush this business! I want a show for my money this game-I du!&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraph is from 'Squaw' by Bram Stoker. The phrase 'bar a scrap with' seems to me 'to fight with someone', but I am not so sure, since there is no specific explanation in dictionary as to 'bar' to the extent that  'picking a fight or similar context'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8033" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T06:32:55.137" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T06:32:55.137" Title="Meaning of 'bar a scrap' in &quot;Squaw&quot; by Bram Stoker" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;bram-stoker&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12397" CreationDate="2020-02-24T23:28:29.467" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But the central object in the whole of this chamber of horrors &#xA;  was the engine known as the Iron Virgin, which stood near the centre &#xA;  of the room. It was a rudely-shaped figure of a woman, something of &#xA;  the &lt;strong&gt;bell order&lt;/strong&gt;, or, to make a closer comparison, of the figure of &#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Mrs. Noah in the children's Ark,&lt;/strong&gt; but without that slimness of waist &#xA;  and perfect rondeur of hip which marks the aesthetic type of the &#xA;  Noah family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is from 'Squaw' from by Bran Stoker. Who is Mrs. Noah (seemingly not from 'old testament')? What is the children's Ark? The bell order means 'in the shape of bell'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8033" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T06:33:44.210" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T14:38:18.327" Title="What is the children's Ark?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;bram-stoker&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12376" CreationDate="2020-02-25T00:56:39.477" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't completely understand the poem, but I have some observations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start with the nymphs at the end. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrinx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Syrinx&lt;/a&gt; was a nymph who was being sexually pursued by Pan, and was changed into reeds to escape (from which Pan cut his panpipes). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daphne&lt;/a&gt; was a nymph being sexually pursued by Apollo, and was turned into a laurel tree to escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Fleeing from love, hadst thou not poet’s right&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To slip into the universe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seem to mean: to be changed into a part of nature rather than dying. The next lines: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The seas&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  are fathomless to rivers drowned in these,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;suggest that maybe she could have turned into a river, while &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And sorrow is secure in leafy light,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;maybe suggests that she might have turned into a tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, in the poem she seems not to have realized she had this option:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alas! thy moan was as a moan for ease&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And passage through cool shadows to the night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Rossetti really fleeing from love? She never married, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://qspirit.net/christina-rossetti-writer-christmas-carols-lesbian-poetry/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some people&lt;/a&gt; believe that she was lesbian; although since she was religious, she would probably have been conflicted over her attraction to women, and not acted on it. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the two women whose pen-name was Michael Field, were indeed lesbians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My analysis above gives this poem a rather bizarre meaning — don't die, but change into something in nature; How? — and it seems to me that there is a further reading beneath that one, well-concealed because it was so subversive. This would be: &quot;don't run from your sexuality, but embrace it, while still concealing it from the world.&quot; The last lines point to this meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah, had this secret touched thee, in a tomb&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou hadst not buried thy enchanting self,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&#xA;  From safe recess as genius or as elf,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thou hadst breathed joy in earth and in thy kind.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I still don't quite see how everything fits together (why Beatrice and Matilda, for example?), but I think this is a reasonable start at the interpretation of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T12:39:59.570" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T12:39:59.570" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12392" CreationDate="2020-02-25T00:58:21.037" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bar&quot; means &quot;except for,&quot; &quot;with the exception of.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I guess I've not had enjoyment like this since I left Noo York. [Except for] a scrap with a French sailor at Wapping-an' that warn't much of a picnic neither.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Bar&quot; in this sense is still widely used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T00:58:21.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-25T11:18:31.883" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not uncommon to hear the work of American author Cormac McCarthy described as &quot;sparse&quot;, &quot;terse&quot;, &quot;spartan&quot; or some other similar descriptor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;An extensive body of criticism focuses on the sparse style, on what Donoghue calls the “neuter austerity” (267), characteristic of much of McCarthy's prose     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Contractions in Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD, Lindsey Banco, The Explicator, Volume 68, 2010 - Issue 4     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;McCarthy’s idiosyncratic prose style – characterized by esoteric diction, sparse punctuation and a fascination with the biblical and the grotesque – is unlike anything else in contemporary fiction    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Madness and civilization, George Berridge, The Times Literary Supplement     &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When discussing McCarthy's work the other day, though, the critique came up that in fact, a lot of his prose is very heavy and crosses into what many readers would find &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purple&lt;/a&gt;&quot;. For example this ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When he crashed into the glade among the cottonwoods he fell headlong and lay there with his cheek to the earth. And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird’s first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare. He would have taken it for some boneless cognate of his heart’s dread had the child not cried.     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from &lt;em&gt;Outer Dark&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... is essentially a someone witnessing a bolt of lightning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, then, are adjectives relating to brevity and economy so often related to his work? And further, I'd be interested in any examination of why McCarthy's prose is so celebrated despite its extravagance breaking a commonly held rule of quality writing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T16:33:14.477" Title="Why is Cormac McCarthy's prose so often described as &quot;sparse&quot;" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;outer-dark&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12393" CreationDate="2020-02-25T14:28:00.437" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This link shows a copy of the Nuremberg iron maiden where you can clearly see its campanulate qualities &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.fandom.com/wiki/The_Squaw&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://literature.fandom.com/wiki/The_Squaw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0oox2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/0oox2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Copy of the iron Maiden of Nuremberg on display in the Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noah's Ark sets were a popular item in the 19th and early 20th centuries; the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SoCeCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA22&amp;amp;lpg=PA22&amp;amp;dq=early%2020th%20century%20childrens%20ark%20carved&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=c646GPDxbA&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U19dXNHABsVXm9eLhaebH-Q3yc1_Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiU-Nfa8OznAhXSVsAKHY3LC6UQ6AEwEHoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=ark&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Youth Cultures in America [2 volumes]edited by Simon J. Bronner, Cindy Dell Clark.&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Animal shaped toys carved from wood are among the earliest folk toys for children. These range from hand-sized wood horses, for example, to larger toy horses on a wheeled platform to rocking horses large enough for the young child to ride. Adults would also fashion folk toy animals from other materials, including clay and straw. With the emergence of commercial toy companies in the 19th century some wooden toys shaped like animals were mass produced, even if made by hand. A popular Sunday toy in the United States was a wooden Noah’s ark with carefully carved pairs of animals (and Noah and his wife too). Religious parents would let their children play on Sundays only with toys of moral or religious message, hence the popularity of Noah’s ark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this I would add my own observation that the parents probably enjoyed the fact that the ark doubled as the storage box and children could be encouraged to put the animals away by sending them into the ark two-by-two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of images of such arks are available online, very many of them having been of German origin, which may also speak to their appropriateness for a novel set in Nuremberg. Although there are many styles, the ones with lathe-turned figures for Noah and his wife would seem to be closest to the iron Maiden in shape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7TJu0m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7TJu0m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Early 20th Century Toy Noah&amp;#39;s Ark, German&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MGKT9m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MGKT9m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Noah&amp;#39;s Ark with 37 Animals, German, circa 1890&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-02-25T14:38:18.327" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T14:38:18.327" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-25T15:24:07.233" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://journal.fi/scripta/article/view/67210/27508&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ritual Change in a Turkish Alevi Village&quot; by Thomas McElwain&lt;/a&gt;, I found a description of a sacrifice ritual which includes the following &lt;em&gt;nefes&lt;/em&gt; (hymn?) recited for a ram:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Erler evliyalar kirklar yediler&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oniki imamlarin kurbaniyem ben,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Verildi tekbirim döndüm kibleme&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oniki imamlarin kurbaniyem ben.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(English translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To God's lovers, saints of forties and sevens,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am the sacrifice of the twelve imams.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I turned to the Kible, my tekbir given,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I am the sacrifice of the twelve imams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The same words can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.antoloji.com/erler-evliyalar-kirklar-yediler-siiri/?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but without any of the context or surrounding information.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the meaning of &quot;saints of forties and sevens&quot; here?&lt;/strong&gt; There are a few other references to &quot;forties&quot; throughout the ritual descriptions, and in other recitations, which I didn't understand. Do these numbers 40 and 7 have some special religious significance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T13:24:04.227" Title="What is meant by &quot;saints of forties and sevens&quot; in this traditional Turkish hymn?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;turkish-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12399" CreationDate="2020-02-25T18:45:46.017" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The hymn would appear to have references to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.alevinet.org/RP.aspx?pid=AkedemikCalismalar_en-GB&amp;amp;aid=97847432_92832609&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alevism&lt;/a&gt;; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alevis are the second largest belief community in Turkey. However language, belief and ethnic background is not registered in the national census therefore, it is not possible to have official statistics about the number of Alevis. On the basis of reliable academic research, the population of Alevis is estimated at approximately 20 million out of 70 million population in Turkey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Alevism&lt;/strong&gt;;&#xA;  Alevism is not a stagnate belief but has evolved by interacting with various beliefs, spiritual doctrines and cultures over a wide geographical area from Central Asia to Balkan Mountains throughout the history. A process of gradual convergence between various different mystical schools since the 13th century constitutes what we call Alevism today. The concept of Alevi is actually a broad term covers different language and ethnic communities sharing same belief components. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seven therefore refers to the seven grand poets:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alevis specifically venerate seven poets as their grand poets who are Seyyid Nesimi (14th century), Yemini (15th century), Pir Sultan Abdal, Virani, Kul Himmet, Hatayi and Fuzuli (16th century).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the forty to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ayn-i Cem (the ritual of gathering) is the main ritual in Alevism. This special ritual is modeled on a mystical event, the Assembly of the Forty Being (Kırklar Cemi), includes 17 women and 23 men. They gather with the motto of “all for one, one for all.”  This narrative portrays a sacred and secret gathering which the Prophet Muhammad participated on his way back from Miraç (heavenly journey in which he meets God). Ali, as the leader of this gathering, opens the secrets of belief to Prophet during the ceremony. The notable narrative used by Muhammed was “I am the city of knowledge but Ali is the gate.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The twelve imams, who were the key that made this all findable online, are another common Alevi belief. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Each Imam represents a different aspect of the Universe and are recognized as twelve services or oniki hizmet which are performed by members of the Alevi community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much more detail obviously on the website linked. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-02-25T18:45:46.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-26T13:09:30.620" Score="4" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;The Power&lt;/em&gt; by Naomi Alderman, and I find that the author writes some sentences in Early Modern English such as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She maketh a channel for the thunderbolt and setteth a path for the storm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this reminds me that the &lt;em&gt;Thus Spake Zarathustra&lt;/em&gt; was translated into Early Modern English English by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Common&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Common&lt;/a&gt; in 1909. Does anyone know the reasons why it was translated into Early Modern English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8596" OwnerDisplayName="Leonard Lee" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T13:26:30.860" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T13:26:30.860" Title="Why was Thus Spake Zarathustra translated into Early Modern English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;friedrich-nietzsche&gt;&lt;thus-spake-zarathustra&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12406" CreationDate="2020-02-26T15:13:41.477" Score="1" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;From book 1, Chapter 6, of &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then another clear voice, as young and as ancient as &lt;strong&gt;Spring&lt;/strong&gt;, like the song of glad water flowing down into the night from a bright morning in the hills, came falling like silver to meet them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T15:38:58.057" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T18:52:25.237" Title="What's the meaning of 'Spring' in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12405" CreationDate="2020-02-26T18:52:25.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The capital letter indicates that ‘Spring’ is being used in the sense “the season between winter and summer”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can something be both “as young as Spring” and “as ancient as Spring”? This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;, and to resolve it we have to think of Spring in two different ways. Spring is “young” because it is the first season of the calendar year, and because it the season when many animals have their young. (This is an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;.) But Spring is also “ancient” because Spring has been a season of the year as long as the Earth and Sun have existed, which in the mythology of Middle-earth is about seven thousand years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the voice is both young and ancient, then perhaps (by metonymy) so is the speaker: these &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;similes&lt;/a&gt; are giving us a hint about the nature of Goldberry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘spring’ has another meaning, “a flow of water emerging naturally out of the ground”. This is so close in meaning to the following phrase, “glad water flowing down … from … the hills” that it cannot be a coincidence, and seems to be a clue that Goldberry is (or resembles) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naiad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;naiad&lt;/a&gt;, “a nymph of fresh water, thought to inhabit a river, spring, etc., as its tutelary spirit” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Other clues to this are Tom’s description of her as “River-woman’s daughter” and her own description of herself as “River-daughter”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T18:52:25.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12388" CreationDate="2020-02-26T21:02:25.327" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely it was the poet himself: Dandilion is not just a simple troubadour wandering through the countries following Geralt, he graduated with honours the Oxenfurt University, then he has spent year teaching to other students (and occasionally he returns there as a guest lecturer). This suggests that he is indeed a famous poet, well known in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He [Dandilion] knew the University grounds like the back of his hand – and no wonder, considering he had studied there for four years, then had lectured for a year in the Faculty of Trouvereship and Poetry. The post of lecturer had been offered to him when he had passed his final exams with full marks, to the astonishment of professors with whom he had earned the reputation of lazybones, rake and idiot during his studies. Then, when, after several years of roaming around the country with his lute, his fame as a minstrel had spread far and wide, the Academy had taken great pains to have him visit and give guest lectures. Dandilion yielded to their requests only sporadically, for his love of wandering was constantly at odds with his predilection for comfort, luxury and a regular income. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book series also quotes his written memoirs &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://witcher.fandom.com/wiki/Half_a_Century_of_Poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Half a Century of Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&quot;, which most likely contains a big portion of his poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-02-26T21:25:16.923" LastActivityDate="2020-02-26T21:25:16.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-02-27T10:32:06.877" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think this passage is fairly straight-forward in the context of the novel. Many of the characters are corrup (that is, enjoy pastimes and activities that the society of that time thought morally wrong), but that was tolerated as long as they were charming. Being corrupt without being charming is a fault. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7595" LastActivityDate="2020-02-27T10:32:06.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-28T18:17:18.443" Score="4" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the chapter &quot;Ideals of Life&quot; of &lt;em&gt;My Country and My People&lt;/em&gt;, Lin Yutang writes (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Confucian conception of man's place in nature is that &quot;Heaven, earth and man&quot; are regarded as &quot;the three geniuses of the universe&quot;. This is a distinction somewhat corresponding to the &lt;strong&gt;Babbittian threefold distinction of supernaturalism, humanism and naturalism&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the paragraph goes on discussing the Confucian view on man's place in the universe; Irving Babbitt is not mentioned anywhere else in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not immediately obvious from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Babbitt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's article on Irving Babbitt&lt;/a&gt; whether this distinction was expressed in a specific publication. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://isi.org/modern-age/irving-babbitt-and-lin-yutang/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irving Babbitt and Lin Yutang&lt;/a&gt; (2014), which discusses Irving Babbitt's influence on Lin Yutang, is not helpful either. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/naturalism.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philosophy 312: Oriental Philosophy&#xA;Naturalism, Supernaturalism, and Humanism&lt;/a&gt; on Lander University's Eastern Philosophy website discusses naturalism, supernaturalism and humanism without mentioning Babbitt. So what exactly was Lin Yutang's source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-02-28T18:17:18.443" Title="What is the source of Irving Babbitt's disctinction between supernaturalism, humanism and naturalism" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;lin-yutang&gt;&lt;my-country-and-my-people&gt;&lt;irving-babbitt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12413" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-28T19:09:40.337" Score="2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the chapter &quot;Ideals of Life&quot; of &lt;em&gt;My Country and My People&lt;/em&gt;, Lin Yutang briefly discusses the novel &lt;em&gt;Yehsao Paoyen&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;an out-and-out Confucianist novel, which takes special delight in exposing the libertinism of the monks, and whose hero, a Confucian superman, goes about persuading his bachelor bandits and bandit girls to marry and bear children for the glory of their ancestors. Unlike &lt;em&gt;Chinp'inmei&lt;/em&gt;, which is devoted to libertinism, the men and women in &lt;em&gt;Yehsao Paoyen&lt;/em&gt; are decent people, who make ideal husbands and wives. The only reason why this novel is considered obscene is that the author makes its men and women go through extremely compromising situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chinp'inmei&lt;/em&gt; is obviously &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin_Ping_Mei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jin Ping Mei&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Plum in the Golden Vase&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of the great classic Chinese novels, but I have not been able to figure out what &lt;em&gt;Yehsao Paoyen&lt;/em&gt; is in pinyin or in Chinese characters, when it was written and by whom (if it was not published anonymously). In fact, even Chinese readers don't seem to know, as one can see from this question on Baidu: &lt;a href=&quot;https://zhidao.baidu.com/question/589803169.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yehsao Paoyen 是什么意思? 这是好像是根据托马斯 韦德的拼音来的 但是还是看不懂,求解释?&lt;/a&gt; (&quot;What does &lt;em&gt;Yehsao Paoyen&lt;/em&gt; mean? This looks like it's based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Francis_Wade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Wade&lt;/a&gt; pinyin but I still don't understand ...). The question has no answer there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T20:09:28.307" Title="What novel is Yehsao Paoyen?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12415" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-02-28T22:37:13.257" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to identify and locate a children's short story about a boy who takes over the flying of a plane in a storm when the pilot becomes incapacitated. I am not sure, but I believe the boy was taking lessons and a storm came and the pilot/instructor had a heart attack or something. The boy landed the plane successfully. I had thought the name might be something like &quot;Solo Flight&quot; or &quot;Flying Solo&quot;. I had read them to my young daughter in the early 2000's and I thought it might have been from 1940's era readers, but they might also have been from a library book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other elements of the story are: They didn't think the student was ready for a solo flight... something related to panic. So there was an &quot;I showed them&quot; moment after his accidental solo flight. The plane was going too fast and was broken in some way, so land successfully, he pulled a fishtail to slow the plane. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story inspired my daughter to become a pilot when she got older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8612" LastEditorUserId="8612" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T16:59:24.250" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T16:59:24.250" Title="children's short story about boy flying plane in storm" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12416" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3461" CreationDate="2020-02-29T01:02:15.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's perhaps a literary foreshadowing of the primary storyline of the book, what happens to the twins.  Each has two &quot;halves&quot; of their personal identity, the genetic and the social (often called nature and nurture). The discovery of the switch changes one-half of the identity, genetic/nature.  The townsfolk and all the rest think the other half, the socioeconomic role, would just automatically go along with too, but of course it doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8613" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T01:02:15.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-02-29T13:03:20.593" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Human beings cannot bear much reality. That is the basic point that Plato was making in &lt;em&gt;The Republic&lt;/em&gt;. Thus corruption, which is endemic in human society, is often covered up by charm; this makes the corruption bearable. But nevertheless, as Plato pointed out, it doesn't get at the real root of the problem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fault is really two-fold. Lack of real charm; &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; a surfeit of corruption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilde, by merely focusing on the aspect of charm, was ignoring the corruption endemic to human society; presumably, he thought this unfixable - but I do wonder how he would have considered this after his experience in Reading Gaol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T13:03:20.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12363" CreationDate="2020-02-29T16:11:05.727" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd suggest that it's for the same reason that Yeats wrote in the first stanza of his &lt;em&gt;Second Coming&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Turning and turning in the widening gyre&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The best lack all conviction, while the worst&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Are full of passionate intensity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Yeats, as for Rumi (as it was also true of Plato), it's so often that the best that get murdered, because they are doing what they are good at; whilst the worst, being worse, do what they are good at - being cunning, Machiavellian, full of venal and stupid desires and dressed up in a charade of politesse to make it all look right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-02-29T17:08:14.283" LastActivityDate="2020-02-29T17:08:14.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12381" CreationDate="2020-03-01T16:14:37.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Traditional folk dances in 5/4 time were common in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere. So were 7/8 folk dances, especially in South-Eastern Europe (Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People had been ballroom dancing in 5/4 time since the middle of the 19th century. (I assume we're allowed to use Google.) According to libraryofdance.org, &quot;Five-Step Waltz is a family of couples dances from the mid to late 19th century that is danced to music in 5/4 time.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third movement of Chopin's First Piano Sonata is in 5/4 time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, 5-beats-to-a-measure popular dance music was a peculiar enough concept when Huxley wrote &quot;Brave New World&quot; for his image of 400 couples five-stepping round a polished floor to be science fiction. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brubeck's &quot;Take Five&quot; was a breakthrough for jazz, not - in the age of Stravinsky, Bartok, etc. - for &quot;serious&quot; music. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-03-01T16:14:37.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-02T12:30:14.860" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find out the name of a comic book I read as a kid, probably in the 80s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was about an astronaut who is caught in a jupiter storm and is transported to another time. It meets a very technologically backward population (similar to barbarians) and in this region there is a giant wall.&#xA;On the other side of this wall there is a vast ocean. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember that there was at least a second book with the continuation of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was in Portuguese but I think it must have existed in other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me identify the book?&#xA;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8623" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T17:41:52.120" Title="Comic Book about Jupiter and time travel" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3534" CreationDate="2020-03-02T17:10:53.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is critical of the 'pro-life' belief in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character is an uncaring person who doesn't like his sex partners using contraception. We see this in his past relationship with 'Gwen.' He admits he finds contraception takes away the magic of sex. This is presumably why his wife has an unwanted pregnancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story revolves around the narrator's obsession with not killing the mouse who has infested his house. When he finally catches the mouse non-lethally and sets it free, it is instantly eaten by a cat, and he does nothing to stop it. When his wife wants to tell him about her abortion, he ignores her too, much like he does the mouse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pro-life movement is shown as being obsessed with the 'magic' of life and sex, and prone to fantasy, as evidenced by the conspiracy-theory rantings of the pro-life advocates in news that serves as the the backdrop of the story. Also, the narrator admits that to him, sex takes place 'half in his dreams, half in reality' whereas for Gwen and his wife, sex takes place 100% in the real world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cat eating the mouse at the end, and the protagonists' blasé attitude towards his wife's suffering and women's suffering in general, shows that the pro-life movement is unable to see the harsh realities of life, and would prefer to keep their hands clean, regardless of the consequences. Life, death, sex and suffering are real things, things the narrator, and the pro-life movement, would prefer not to think about and ignore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8624" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T22:22:58.383" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T22:22:58.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12431" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12434" CreationDate="2020-03-02T18:23:26.373" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s an extract from ‘The Temptation; or, Satan in the Country’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Moody&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Moody&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The verdant table Satan spy’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And took his seat by Lydia’s side;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Soon as he hovers o’er her hand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Lydia finds aces at command;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From one &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; shuffle amply pours&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Sans prendre&lt;/em&gt; games and matadores.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then perching next on Cosmo’s sword,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Two fish were pilfer’d from the board.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Elizabeth Moody (1798). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hLVYAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA152&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poetic Trifles&lt;/em&gt;, p. 152–3&lt;/a&gt;. London: Baldwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What game are they playing? What are “&lt;em&gt;sans prendre&lt;/em&gt; games”, “matadores”, and “fish”? Why is the shuffle “&lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt;”? What is the significance, if any, of Cosmo’s sword?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T22:51:28.540" Title="What game are they playing in Elizabeth Moody’s ‘The Temptation’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-moody&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12432" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-02T18:24:05.123" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T18:24:05.123" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T18:24:05.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12433" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-02T18:24:05.123" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English poet Elizabeth Moody (1737–1814) or about any of her literary works. Use this tag together with [poetry] if asking about any of her short poems or about her poetry in general." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T17:23:24.033" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T17:23:24.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12431" CreationDate="2020-03-02T18:43:22.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrille_(card_game)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quadrille&lt;/a&gt;, as named in the last line of the poem, is the game. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.parlettgames.uk/histocs/quadrill.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This web page&lt;/a&gt; has lots of details and further references.)&#xA;I don't know exactly what &quot;known shuffle&quot; means here.  &quot;Sword&quot; seems to mean &quot;spadille&quot;, the ace of spades.  I assume Cosmo is the name of one of the players.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Check out, eg, &lt;em&gt;A Brief and Necessary Supplement to All Former Treatises on Quadrille: Consisting of Hints, Questions, Explanations, References, Suppositions, &amp;amp;c. for the Benefit of the Unlearned&lt;/em&gt; by &quot;No Adept&quot;, of &#xA;1764. (See this &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=TyPpAOzIrRIC&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=GBS.PA3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online copy&lt;/a&gt;.)&#xA;An excerpt (with modernized capitalization) from page 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wherefore, without further introduction, as the difference between a &lt;em&gt;Sans prendre&lt;/em&gt; and a &lt;em&gt;Vole&lt;/em&gt;, seems not sufficiently attended to by young players, I shall begin with the following illustration of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Suppose, for instance, two fish on the board, and eight remaining in the pool, a &lt;em&gt;Sans prendre&lt;/em&gt; without matadores is one fish better than a &lt;em&gt;vole&lt;/em&gt; without matadores : and with matadores, it is two fish better than a vole with matadores.  Without matadores it is a matadore better than a vole with matadores  and with matadores two fish and a half better than a &lt;em&gt;vole&lt;/em&gt; without matadores.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can almost imagine Moody writing with &quot;No Adept's&quot; handbook open in front of her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-03-02T22:51:28.540" LastActivityDate="2020-03-02T22:51:28.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-03T11:58:21.807" Score="7" ViewCount="504" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the penultimate stanza of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48989/caged-bird&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caged Bird&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Maya Angelou:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;his wings are clipped and his feet are tied&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;so he opens his throat to sing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream&amp;quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8626" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-13T21:35:54.490" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T04:03:27.450" Title="In Maya Angelou's &quot;Caged Bird&quot;, what is the meaning of &quot;his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12438" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12471" CreationDate="2020-03-03T14:24:16.117" Score="3" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following part of the dialogue puzzles me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What's the matter, father? You seem very tired.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I am tired but I have no right to be.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It's the heat.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No. This is only the spring. I feel very low.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You have the war disgust.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;No. But I hate the war.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I don't enjoy it,&quot; I said. He shook his head and looked out of the&#xA;  window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You do not mind it. You do not see it. You must forgive me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know you are wounded.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;That is an accident.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Still even wounded you do not see it. I can tell. I do not see it&#xA;  myself but I feel it a little.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all what does the priest mean when he says that Henry can't see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;? The horrors of war in general? If so he must mean that in a metaphorical sense since a few chapters ago Henry saw a soldier under his command die painfully after getting injured by artillery among other horrible things, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Henry respond with &quot;That is an accident.&quot; ?&#xA;Does he mean that it is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a)&lt;/strong&gt; an accident that he can't see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; and that he doesn't try not to see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; on purpose &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b)&lt;/strong&gt; an accident that he got wounded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the priest goes on to tell Henry that &lt;em&gt;even though&lt;/em&gt; he got wounded he can't see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; despite in the sentence before implying that he can't see &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; he got wounded&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't really make sense of it ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore what I'd be interested in (assuming that this dialogue seems strange to others too and not only me) does the weirdness stem from the fact that Hemingway tried to emulate Italian?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For reference the complete text can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.209262/2015.209262.A-_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Posted what I added in the original edit as an answer and removed it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8629" LastEditorUserId="8629" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T12:29:38.843" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T13:01:33.500" Title="A Farewell To Arms - Dialogue between Henry and the priest in chapter XI" Tags="&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;a-farewell-to-arms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12294" CreationDate="2020-03-03T19:46:07.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;On closer inspection, the lines appear fraught with ambiguity. In the French newspaper &lt;a href=&quot;https://next.liberation.fr/musique/2008/03/20/bashung-humblement-politique_67761&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Libération&lt;/em&gt; (20.03.2008)&lt;/a&gt;, Bashung said &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Bleu pétrole] est peut-être un album humblement politique (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. possibly a humbly political album. So, naturally, people looked for a political interpretation of the song &quot;Résidents de la république&quot;.&#xA;For example, pink (&quot;rose&quot; in French) is the colour of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_(France)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parti socialiste / Socialist Party&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;But what does the colour blue stand for? Some have suggested the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_for_a_Popular_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UMP&lt;/a&gt;, whose colours are blue, white and red, i.e. not only blue.&#xA;Another possibility (not found among the comments and interpretations I read) is that the line alludes to the right-wing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MR / the Radical Movement&lt;/a&gt;, whose colour, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mauve&lt;/a&gt;, looks like pink with a shade of blue. In fact, Wikipedia notes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Many pale wildflowers called &quot;blue&quot; are actually mauve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The political significance of &quot;le rose a des reflets bleus&quot; might then that the MR's extreme position rub off on even the French Socialist Party, but I can't find any concrete evidence to support this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that on maps representing presidential election results, pink is used to represent departments where the socialists won, blue for UMP and a darker shade of blue for MR.&#xA;See, for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_French_presidential_election&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2002 presidential elections&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_French_presidential_election&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2007 presidential elections&lt;/a&gt;. So blue is ambiguous from this point of view.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080828121903AAfv56V&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yahoo Questions/Réponses&lt;/a&gt;, someone suggested that &quot;résident&quot; might refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carte_de_r%C3%A9sident_(France)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;carte de résident&lt;/a&gt;, a type of resident card that foreigners can apply for if they want to stay in France for ten years or longer. The implications of this are not explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone even suggested (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90X62itERcY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a YouTube comment&lt;/a&gt;) that pink stands for the monarchy and blue for the republic.&#xA;However, if either of these colours can be associated with the French monarchy, it would be blue rather than pink, since blue was the background colour of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kingdom of France's flag&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;(Heraldry used a limited set of colours or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tincture_(heraldry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tinctures&lt;/a&gt; and pink is not one of the traditional tinctures.)&#xA;In addition, the accusation that Emmanuel Macron, elected President of France in 2017, seems to think of himself as the new Napoleon, is much more recent than Bashung's song and therefore irrelevant at the time when it was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catherine Armand, who runs a website about French chanson, suggested in her article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cousumouche.com/plusbellechanson/?p=371&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Résidents de la République – Alain Bashung&lt;/a&gt; (22.08.2014) that the song can be seen as political or as a sort of testament.&#xA;According to the political interpretation, citizens have been degraded to residents, who have become powerless pawns. The Socialist Party then represents &quot;la gauche caviar&quot; (&quot;the caviar[-eating] left&quot;) who has betrayed the people (with blue representing the UMP).&#xA;However, when reading &quot;Résidents de la république&quot; as a personal song (&quot;chanson testament&quot;, since Bashung already knew he had cancer and would die one year later), she does not provide an explanation for the colours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-03T19:46:07.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12440" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17642" CreationDate="2020-03-04T08:07:12.297" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a short-story titled &amp;quot;A Face in the Dark&amp;quot; by Ruskin Bond. There's this passage in it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It had no eyes, ears, nose or mouth. It was just a round smooth head — with a school cap on top of it! &lt;strong&gt;And that's where the story should end.&lt;/strong&gt; But for Mr. Oliver, it did not end there.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence in bold suggests that the omniscient narrator of the story is somehow aware that he is telling a fictional story; this phenomenon can also be seen in stories wherein the narrator directly addresses the reader as &amp;quot;Dear reader&amp;quot; etc. (this is more common in stories for children).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;what is this literary device called?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Breaking the fourth wall&amp;quot; seemed to be the closest answer — but I guess that's relevant only in plays where characters become aware of their fictional nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8634" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T17:10:29.313" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T17:10:29.313" Title="What is the term used for a story's narrator becoming self-aware?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;ruskin-bond&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="626" CreationDate="2020-03-04T08:40:39.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also thought that perhaps that the ghost's mind is so fractured from loneliness and age that, like Professor Chronotus, he needs written reminders of events; in this case, the exact circumstances that played out to cause the accident. And this reminder is written into the second part of the poem, so with that jotted down reminder gone, the ghost is at a loss to remember why the ship blew up at all. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8636" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T09:38:06.717" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T09:38:06.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12438" CreationDate="2020-03-04T12:28:03.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading the part again I think &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; stands literally for the war itself. Since Henry serves in a medical unit he doesn't fight on the front and being in charge of the mechanics he might not actually see many wounded or dead. Then it would make sense to say that he doesn't see the war, after all we know that Henry stays in the village with other officers, drinking, seeing women and even going on vacation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the priest told Henry that he doesn't see the war he might have realized that Henry is in the hospital for a reason and apologized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently injuring oneself was something soldiers would do to escape the fighting and just to clarify Henry added that him being wounded was an accident, speaking in the present tense because his Italian is not perfect. However I don't think that the priest alluded to that at all since he calls Henry a patriot in the same chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a better explanation I'd love to hear it though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8629" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T12:28:03.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-04T13:36:02.560" Score="5" ViewCount="215" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#List_of_major_cuneiform_tablet_discoveries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;major cuneiform tablet discoveries&lt;/a&gt; date from the 1840s and later. Cuneiform was used to write several languages, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumerian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sumerian&lt;/a&gt; (a language isolate according to the current state of knowledge) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Akkadian&lt;/a&gt; (a Semitic language). There are now a number of anthologies of literature in those languages, e.g. &lt;em&gt;The Harps that Once...: Sumerian Poetry in Translation&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Thorkild Jacobsen, &lt;em&gt;Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, The Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Stephanie Dalley, and &lt;em&gt;Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature&lt;/em&gt; edited by Benjamin R. Foster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous cuneiform text is probably the Epic of Gilgamesh (see &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/epic-of-gilgamesh&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;epic-of-gilgamesh&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;epic-of-gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt; on this site). However, literature was not the only type of text written down in cuneiform, since that was not what the writing system was invented for. This leads me to the following question: &lt;strong&gt;what percentage of the cuneiform texts that have been discovered in the Near East actually contain literature?&lt;/strong&gt; &quot;Literature&quot; can her refer to epics, myths, wisdom compositions, laments, hymns, literary letters, stories, love poetry and even magic spells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T12:14:23.637" Title="What percentage of clay tablets found in Mesopotamia contain literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2020-03-04T13:58:53.080" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reclam.de/data/media/978-3-15-019153-8.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Götz von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand&lt;/em&gt;. Herausgegeben von Martin C. Wald. Reclam, 2018 (PDF)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did a word search for the original German phrase and nothing came up, but this looks like it might not be complete&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2113/Goethe_0841-03_EBk_v6.0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, &lt;em&gt;Goethe’s Works, vol. 3&#xA;(Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia in Tauris, Tarquato&#xA;Tasso, etc)&lt;/em&gt; [1885] (PDF)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also couldn't find anything in this English translation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8638" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T20:46:14.330" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T20:46:14.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12445" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2020-03-04T14:39:52.070" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tz_von_Berlichingen_(Goethe)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; about this play and this notorious passage and&#xA;the various editions which printed it straight or  expurgated.  According to Wikipedia, in Act 3, Scene 16, Goethe wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which W translates as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Me, surrender! At mercy! Whom do you speak with? Am I a robber! Tell your captain that for His Imperial Majesty, I have, as always, due respect. But he, tell him that, he can lick me in the arse!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T16:15:00.063" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T16:15:00.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11696" CreationDate="2020-03-04T14:41:53.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous phrase from Goethe's play &lt;em&gt;Götz von Berlichingen&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;er kann mich im Arsche lecken!&quot; This is taken from the third act, when Götz von Berlichingen's castle is being besieged and a herald comes to tell him it were better to surrender. This leads to a response that made the play famous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsche lecken! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Schmeißt das Fenster zu.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (&lt;a href=&quot;http://files.libertyfund.org/files/2113/Goethe_0841-03_EBk_v6.0.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1885, hosted by The Online Library of Liberty&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Surrender—surrender at discretion. With whom speak you? Am I a robber? Tell your&#xA;  captain, that for the emperor I entertain, as I have ever done, all due respect; but as for him, he may lick my arse! &lt;br /&gt;&lt;em&gt;[Shuts the window with violence.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many editions censored the last few words, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Goethe,+Johann+Wolfgang/Dramen/G%C3%B6tz+von+Berlichingen+mit+der+eisernen+Hand/3.+Akt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zeno.org&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich – –&quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;on &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tz_von_Berlichingen_mit_der_eisernen_Hand&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Er aber, sag’s ihm, er kann mich – – –&quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the above English translation, which actually said, &quot;but as for him, he may—&quot;. (I added the missing words in the quote above.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words are so famous they are known in Germany as &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schw%C3%A4bischer_Gru%C3%9F&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;schwäbischer Gruß&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_salute&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Swabian salute&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Today, you can hear the phrase &quot;leck mich am Arsch&quot; in informal conversation, but it would be ill-advised to say it to someone of authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T14:41:53.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12443" CreationDate="2020-03-04T16:55:19.163" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for an exact number, I can't give that to you. But I can give you a rough idea: the overwhelming majority of clay tablets are financial records.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me put this into perspective: in the 1930s a French archeological team discovered about 30,000 clay tablets at Larsa -- all of these were records of items deposited at the temple or removed from the temple over the years Larsa was inhabited. None of these were literary. A similar number were found at other ancient cities, although often a given collection of tablets might number in the hundreds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the number of tablets in the &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Ashurbanipal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library of Ashurbanipal&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is given as 30,000, this number includes fragments of tablets: if a given tablet had broken into 3 pieces, for example, it was counted as 3 tablets. Moreover, many of these tablets were legal tracts, foreign correspondences and engagements, aristocratic declarations, and financial records. When all is said &amp;amp; done, only ten contained material that could be considered &quot;literary&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an unusual proportion. Papyrus with writing recovered from ancient Egypt is mostly financial records, business correspondence, &amp;amp; other materials of interest only to historians. (And sometimes not even to them.) And the majority of literary papyrus that has been recovered are parts of Homer's Iliad. (Not only was he very popular with the ancient Greeks, he was required reading in every school.) Hundreds of wooden tablets have been recovered from sites in Britain, yet to the best of my knowledge only one could be considered literary -- a schoolboy's copying exercise from Vergil's Aeneid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up until the last few centuries, most literature was oral -- folk tales, songs, recited poems, jokes -- not written. Writing was a skill known only to a few, who used it for business reasons, or to preserve &quot;serious&quot; literature like the Bible, Homer's poems, &amp;amp; so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8480" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T16:55:19.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12473" CreationDate="2020-03-04T18:53:29.443" Score="3" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book 2 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56621&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora’s cousin Romney doubts there is any value in women writing poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                              ‘Who has time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An hour’s time … think! … to sit upon a bank&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And hear the cymbal tinkle in white hands?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When Egypt’s slain, I say, let Miriam sing!—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Before … where’s Moses?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Aurora defends herself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                            ‘Ah—exactly that!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where’s Moses?—is a Moses to be found?—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You’ll seek him vainly in the bulrushes,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such sounding brass has done some actual good,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (The application in a woman’s hand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If that were credible, being scarcely spoilt,)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;In colonising beehives&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of this is straightforward. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miriam&lt;/a&gt; is an Israelite woman in the Book of Exodus. She plays a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbrel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;timbrel&lt;/a&gt; (tambourine) and sings a song in &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/exodus/15-20.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exodus 15:20-21&lt;/a&gt; after the death of Pharoah (“Egypt”) at the crossing of the Red Sea. She is traditionally identifed with Moses’ sister, who watched their mother place the baby Moses in a basket among the reeds (“bulrushes”) of the Nile, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/exodus/2-4.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exodus 2:4&lt;/a&gt;. “Sounding brass”, “cymbal”, and “tinkle” are references to &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/13-1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1 Corinthians 13:1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does Aurora mean by “colonising beehives”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T12:29:45.340" Title="Why is Aurora Leigh proud of “colonising beehives” in the poem by Elizabeth Browning?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12413" CreationDate="2020-03-04T19:27:18.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ruzhen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Li Ju-chen&lt;/a&gt; is comparable to &lt;strong&gt;Hsia Ching-ch’ü&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%8F%E6%95%AC%E6%B8%A0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;夏敬渠&lt;/a&gt;, 1705–1787). Hsia’s mammoth novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yeh-sou p’u-yen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%87%8E%E5%8F%9F%E6%9B%9D%E8%A8%80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;野叟曝言&lt;/a&gt;, An Old Rustic’s Idle Talk), is a grand fantasy of wish fulfillment in which the male protagonist, Wen Su-ch’en, parades his accomplishments and adventures as scholar, knight-errant, moralist, lover, minister, and military commander in interminable discourses on miscellaneous subjects. However, while Li Ju-chen continues the tradition of [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_Xueqin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cao Xueqin&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Story of the&lt;/em&gt;] &lt;em&gt;Stone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in valorizing the feminine, Hsia mythologizes the &lt;em&gt;yang&lt;/em&gt; (masculine) qualities embodied by Wen Su-ch’en. Roughly contemporaneous with &lt;em&gt;Stone&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An Old Rustic’s Idle Talk&lt;/em&gt; in some ways represents its opposite—the naive self-aggrandizement and apotheosis of certain wonted moral precepts (sometimes fulfilled through perverse, puerile means) cannot be more different from the ironic self-reflexivity and profound questioning of the values upheld by Chinese civilization in &lt;em&gt;Stone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Wai-yee Li (2001). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=n2DfEmr2g0YC&amp;amp;pg=PA656&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Full Length Vernacular Fiction&lt;/a&gt;’. In Victor H. Mair (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Columbia History of Chinese Literature&lt;/em&gt;, Columbia University Press, p. 656.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T20:09:28.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12451" CreationDate="2020-03-04T19:47:29.237" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once upon a summer in the hills by the river&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was a deep green forest where the wild things grow.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There were paths as ...?....?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There were ...?...?...?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a thousand little spaces where the sky looked through&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Deep inside the forest where the moss was soft as velvet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the ..?..?..?  dusky risky as could be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where the days were full of shadows&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the nights were full of darkness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was a deep old hollow tree  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone recognise this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8639" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-04T20:46:47.387" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T21:03:43.820" Title="Does anyone recognise this poem - from my mum (90)?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12450" CreationDate="2020-03-04T21:03:43.820" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;em&gt;Honey Bear&lt;/em&gt; (1923) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Willson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dixie Willson&lt;/a&gt;, a narrative poem about “a big black bear” who steals a “cosy, rosy, baby” and takes it away into the forest. The stanzas your mother remembered are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once upon a summer in the hills by the river&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Was a deep green forest where the wild things grew.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There were caves as dark as midnight—there were tangled trees and thickets&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And a thousand little places where the sky looked through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now ’way inside the forest where the path was lost in nothing&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the moss was soft as velvet—dusky, rusky as could be,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Where the day was full of shadows, and the night was full of darkness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And nobody ever found it—was a big old hollow tree!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-03-04T21:03:43.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T03:40:16.950" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching various levels of drunkenness, at the Online Etymology Dictionary site I found a statement that medieval folklore recognized four successive stages of it, in which drinkers resembled sheep, lion, ape, and sow: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/drunk#etymonline_v_15937&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Origin and meaning of drunk by Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone direct me to actual sources where these descriptions appear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8640" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:27:48.477" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:27:48.477" Title="Source for the Stages of Drunkenness resembling sheep, lion, ape, sow?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T05:30:30.987" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is it called when a thought or idea is given physical traits? One example of this is from Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For stony limits cannot hold love out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage, love is given a physical trait of being able to be physically blocked. Would this just be personification?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8552" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T20:00:51.690" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:01:54.567" Title="What is it called when a thought or idea is given physical traits?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12443" CreationDate="2020-03-05T08:51:42.187" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A small percentage. Most likely writing was invented for writing, rather than for recording transactions. But it proved important for recording transactions which is why so much of what has come down to us is in this form. Archaeologists regard them as useful, not as transactions per se, but what they reveal about the society that then existed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8644" LastActivityDate="2020-03-05T08:51:42.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T11:02:39.007" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall reading that the Edda - either the poetic or prose Edda - counselled or complained against drunkenness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did it exactly say? And who said it? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8646" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T15:33:46.707" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T22:53:27.127" Title="Where in the Edda does it counsel or complain against drunkenness?" Tags="&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12443" CreationDate="2020-03-05T11:57:52.623" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his book &lt;em&gt;Die Babylonier. Geschichte, Gesellschaft, Kultur&lt;/em&gt; (2004; 3rd, revised edition 2015), Michael Jursa (Professor of Assyriology at the University of Vienna)&#xA;writes that the following categorisation of cuneiforms texts has established itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Archival texts&lt;/strong&gt; are texts that belong to the sphere of daily life. They include contracts, letters, administrative documents/notes, settlements of accounts, etcetera.&#xA;They constitute the majority of cuneiform texts (tablets and fragments): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grob geschätzt fallen 80% der schriftlichen Überlieferung Mesopotamiens in diese Kategorie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e. roughly 80% of Mesopotamian texts that have come down to use fit into this category.&#xA;These texts constitute a unique source of information about the social and economic history of Mesopotamia, since no other civilisation from the same period (except for Egyptian papyri from late Antiquity) has left us a similar corpus.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monumental texts&lt;/strong&gt; are mainly royal inscriptions on buildings and objects, and other texts intended for public display. These can sometimes include useful historical information, but they tend to glorify the ruler who ordered the construction or creation of the object on which the inscription can be found. Jursa does not give an estimation of the share of these texts in the overall corpus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Canonical texts&lt;/strong&gt; are those texts that were studied in by scribes in &quot;schools&quot; (these were not public institutions like modern schools) and passed on from generation to generation.&#xA;The category of texts can be subdivided into &lt;strong&gt;scientific texts&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;literary texts&lt;/strong&gt;. &quot;Scientific texts&quot; are those that were used by certain professions, such as scribes, evocators, diviners and doctors.&#xA;(In the chapter on &quot;Babylonian science&quot;, Jursa also discusses &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_lists&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lexical lists&lt;/a&gt; used for scribal training.)&#xA;In the chapter on Babylonian literature, Jursa explains that modern readers may be more interested in the literary texts, but this does not change the fact that it is the more practical texts that constitute the core of the &quot;canon&quot;.&#xA;Jursa does not give an estimation of the share of canonical texts in the overall corpus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael Jursa and Juan Carlos Moreno García also discussed this classification in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=YQ3UBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA115&amp;amp;lpg=PA115&amp;amp;dq=cuneiform+archival+monumental+canonical&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=vOIY3r-3n_&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0lsDlLC251MyFdH7EVaRg3gLDyOw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj9m43zlYPoAhXJTcAKHbOoAZQQ6AEwCnoECAwQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=cuneiform%20archival%20monumental%20canonical&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 4 &quot;The ancient Near East and Egypt&quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States&lt;/em&gt; (edited by Andrew Monson and Walter Scheidel, Cambridge University Press, 2015).&#xA;The categorisation appears to have been proposed by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_W._Hallo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William W. Hallo&lt;/a&gt;, who used also used it in a three-volume work he co-edited: &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/view/package/9789004096295?lang=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions, Monumental Inscriptions and Archival Documents from the Biblical World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=c1aFAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=cuneiform+archival+monumental+canonical&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=qpHWzNuh_u&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1bO8jEez5apzGN6BqkLVV75kE8Fw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj9m43zlYPoAhXJTcAKHbOoAZQQ6AEwDHoECA0QAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=cuneiform%20archival%20monumental%20canonical&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cuneiform Texts and the Writing of History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Marc Van de Mieroop points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have no simple criterion to differentiate between literary and non-literary texts, as style is a difficult concept to use in a textual tradition so alien to ours, and as the Mesopotamians themselves did not indicate a generic categorization of their writings which would help us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the percentage of cuneiform texts (clay tablets or fragments) that can be categorised as literature is definitely below 20%, but it is not clear from the above sources how much below 20%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 06.03.2020&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;In the article &quot;Großes Fach Altorientalistik: Der Umfang des keilschriftlichen Textkorpus&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Mitteilungen der deutschen Orientgesellschaft zu Berlin&lt;/em&gt;, 2010),&#xA;Michael P. Streck published estimations of the size of the text corpus of Ancient Near East texts that have come down to us.&#xA;This obviously does not cover all texts that were ever written down in the Ancient Near East until 300 A.D. (since much has been lost), nor texts that have not been discovered yet.&#xA;The estimations are based on word counts, not the number of tablets or tablet fragments. Chapter 3.10 of his article discusses &quot;canonical texts&quot; (see Hallo's categorisation, above).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For literary texts, he offers an estimation of around 100.000 words. (For comparison, he adds in a footnote the word counts for &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, namely 115.477 and 87.765 words, respectively.)&#xA;After the discussing the share of &quot;scientific texts&quot;, which is much greater, and the shares of different genres represented in the libraries at Sippar and Kalhy, he adds the following comment (my translations):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[These numbers] mean that the mythic-epic texts and the hymns and prayers, which are categorised as literary texts, constitute 9 to 18% of the total corpus. When adding the pseudo-historical texts, which we already counted as literary texts, the share of literary genres may increase to 10 to 20%.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that many cuneiform tablets and tablet fragments in museum collections have not yet been published or even categorised. (The British Museum alone owns 130.000 clay tablets and tablet fragments.)&#xA;The available text corpus in the Akkadian language is the second biggest of the available corpora in ancient languages; only the Greek text corpus is bigger. However, the corpora in Akkadian and Sumerian (and other languages that used cuneiform) is much more likely to grow significantly than those in Greek or Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When combining Jursa's information with that provided by Streck, the conclusion seems to be that literary texts may constitute at most 20% of the available canonical texts, which constitute less than 20% of the total corpus (i.e. roughly 20% minus the share of &quot;monumental texts&quot;).&#xA;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;literary texts constitute less than 4% of the total corpus&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-03-06T12:14:23.637" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T12:14:23.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-05T14:12:40.477" Score="2" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 2 of Part 2 of &lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighty-Four&lt;/em&gt;, Orwell writes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sometimes it stopped for a few seconds, spread out and resettled its wings, then swelled its speckled breast and again burst into song. Winston watched it with a sort of vague reverence. For whom, for what, was that bird singing? No mate, no rival was watching it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found his usage of &quot;vague reverence&quot; intriguing. What does this phrase mean? Might he be hinting to Winston's vague memories of the dream? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8647" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-05T15:28:28.617" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:52:48.143" Title="What does George Orwell mean with &quot;vague reverence&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12460" CreationDate="2020-03-05T14:50:07.260" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A1vam%C3%A1l&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hávamál&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;The High One's [=Odin's] Lay&amp;quot;) in this 1908 translation edition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14726/14726-h/14726-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elder Edda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has these bits of advice and reminiscence, which might be what you are after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A better burthen no man bears on the way than much good sense; that is thought better than riches in a strange place; such is the recourse of the indigent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A worse provision on the way he cannot carry than too much beer-bibbing; so good is not, as it is said, beer for the sons of men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A worse provision no man can take from table than too much beer-bibbing: for the more he drinks the less control he has of his own mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Oblivion's heron 'tis called that over potations hovers; he steals the minds of men. With this bird's pinions I was fettered in Gunnlods dwelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Drunk I was, I was over-drunk, at that cunning Fialar's. It's the best drunkenness, when every one after it regains his reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;19&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Let a man hold the cup, yet of the mead drink moderately, speak sensibly or be silent. As of a fault no man will admonish thee, if thou goest betimes to sleep.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T22:53:27.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12452" CreationDate="2020-03-06T00:08:01.760" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original source seems to be ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/nashe1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Divell&lt;/a&gt;’ by Thomas Nashe, published in 1592.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor haue we one or two kinde of drunkards onely, but eight kindes. The first is Ape drunke, and he leapes, and sings, and hollowes, and daunceth for the heauens: the second is Lion drunke, and he flings the pots about the house, calls his Hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windowes with his dagger, and is apt to quarrel with any man that speaks to him: the third is Swine drunke, heauy, lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke, and a fewe more cloathes: the fourth is Sheepe drunke, wise in his owne conceipt, when he cannot bring foorth a right word, the fifth is Mawdlen drunke, when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of his Ale, and kisse you, saying; by God Captaine I loue thee, goe thy waies thou dost not thinke so often of me as I do of thee, I would (if it pleased GOD) I could not loue thee so well as I doo, and then he puts his finger in his eie, and cries: the sixt is Martin drunke, when a man is drunke and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre: the seauenth is Goate drunke, when in his drunkennes he hath no minde but on Lechery: the eighth is Foxe drunke, when he is craftie drunke, as many of the Dutch men bee, will neuer bargaine but when they are drunke. All these Species and more I haue seene practised in one Company at one sitting, when I haue beene permitted to remaine sober amongst them, onely to note their seuerall humors. Hee that plies any one of them harde, it will make him to write admirable verses, to haue a deepe casting head, though hee were neuer so verie a Dunce&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/thomas-nashes-8-kinds-of-drunkards&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster states &lt;/a&gt;that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of later writers were so fond of Nashe’s treatment of drunkards that they decided to flatter the satirist by stealing his idea. In 1652 the acronymic D. N. published The Figure of Six, an ostensibly humorous collection of things arranged in groups of six, in which he included “Six sorts of Drunkards,” most of which were simply lifted from Nashe (“a sowish Drunkard, a sheepish Drunkard, a loving Drunkard, a goat Drunkard an a pish Drunkard, and a Fox Drunkard”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A writer named Martin Parker liked this so much that he wrote a book around the same time, titled The Figure of Seaven, in which similar things were (you guessed it!) placed in groups of seven. Parker’s drunks were also taken almost verbatim from Nashe’s list. Thomas Young, writing in 1617, was perhaps the first one to plagiarize this concept, although he added a 9th kind of drunk (bat drunk, which is the kind of drunk who “delights in secret places and flies by night: so they will drinke priuately, and chiefely in the night”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T03:26:11.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12468" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12462" CreationDate="2020-03-06T18:55:01.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That is an interesting phrase &quot;sort of vague reverence&quot;. Were I to write that passage, I would have not added that phrase. A careful writer picks his words carefully &amp;amp; a careless editor, thinking they were superfluous, would be tempted to delete them. Yet he did, which suggests his words here are intentional, &amp;amp; worth looking more closely at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Reverence&quot; is related to the verb &quot;revere&quot;, an act one performs to things considered sacred. We can understand Smith considering a wild creature sacred, so that part is understandable. However, when one reveres someone or something, one is attentive to it, one gives it close attention. Which seems to contradict the adverb &quot;vague&quot;, which implies that Smith's action was done in an off-handed or inattentive fashion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Orwell could be understood to say here that Smith watched the thrush carefully, yet did not really see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't read the Q&amp;amp;A Spagirl linked to yet, this is the point where you may want to now. Some interesting ideas are presented there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8480" LastActivityDate="2020-03-06T18:55:01.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-06T21:10:06.690" Score="10" ViewCount="1484" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes Shakespeare uses &quot;do&quot; with a verb even though it isn't necessary. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, Act One, Scene 2, line 10, the captain states, &quot;As two spent swimmers that do cling together&quot;. Why doesn't he say &quot;As two spent swimmers that cling together&quot;? What purpose does the word &quot;do&quot; have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8660" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T12:29:15.670" Title="Why does Shakespeare sometimes use &quot;do&quot; with the verbs in his plays?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12470" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12469" CreationDate="2020-03-06T21:37:14.160" Score="18" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Rhythm&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word ‘do’ fills what would otherwise be a gap in the rhythm. With ‘do’ you can scan the line as regular &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic pentameter&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x    /     x     /      x     /     x   /      x /      x&#xA;As two | spent swim- | mers that | do cling | togeth- | er&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The extra syllable at the end of the line is a so-called ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;feminine&lt;/a&gt;’ ending.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without the word ‘do’ there would be a gap in the rhythm and the line would be hard to scan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x    /     x     /      x     /    ?   /      x /      x&#xA;As two | spent swim- | mers that | ? cling | togeth- | er&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other ways you could try to fix the rhythm, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As two spent swimmers that &lt;strong&gt;hold fast&lt;/strong&gt; together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but ‘hold fast’ does not have quite the same meaning as ‘cling’, and it is less satisfactory from a rhythmic point of view because you’d like to stress ‘hold’ as well as ‘fast’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This use of ‘do’ is a kind of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive#&amp;quot;Do&amp;quot;_as_an_expletive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;expletive&lt;/a&gt;’ and is ubiqitous in Early Modern English verse wherever a gap in the rhythm needs filling next to a verb. Just a few lines later in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The multiplying villainies of nature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Do&lt;/strong&gt; swarm upon him—from the Western Isles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, you can imagine rewriting the line to avoid the ‘do’, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The multiplying villainies of nature&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Attend&lt;/strong&gt; upon him—from the Western Isles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but ‘swarm’ makes for a stronger image, the ‘villianies of nature’ being imagined as thousands of stinging or biting insects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;History&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; has the following to say about this sense of ‘do’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This construction appears to arise in the 13th century (no certain examples occur in Old English) and becomes especially frequent after 1500, first as a simple periphrastic form without perceptible difference of sense (in which use in south-western English regional dialect it practically takes the place of the simple form of the verb). In standard English from the early 17th century onwards it becomes restricted to contexts where it is functionally parallel to other auxiliaries (perfect, progressive, and modal). Thus simple affirmative with inversion of word order after certain adverbs: ‘So quietly did he come that…’ (like ‘So quietly has he come’). Emphatic: ‘He &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; drink’, ‘and drink he &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt;’ (like ‘I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; go’, ‘and go I &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt;’). Interrogative: ‘Do you hear?’ (like ‘Will you hear?’). Negative: ‘They do not speak’ (like ‘They will not speak,’ ‘They have not spoken’.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before this use of ‘do’ became widespread, poets had to use other devices. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geoffrey Chaucer&lt;/a&gt;, for example, writing in the 14th century, uses ‘gan’ (meaning ‘began to’) when he has a gap that needs filling, for example, from ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Canterbury_Tales_(ed._Skeat)/Knight&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Knight’s Tale&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And with that word Arcite &lt;strong&gt;gan&lt;/strong&gt; espye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This Palamon &lt;strong&gt;gan&lt;/strong&gt; knitte his browes tweye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And to the temple of Diane &lt;strong&gt;gan&lt;/strong&gt; hye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘espye’ = ‘discover’; ‘tweye’ = ‘two’; ‘hye’ = ‘hasten’&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over-use of expletives like ‘gan’ and ‘do’ eventually led to a reaction against them. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Pope&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I would except against [i.e., object to] all expletives in verse, as &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; before verbs plural, or even the frequent use of &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; to change the termination of the rhyme; all these being against the usual manner of speech, and mere fillers-up of unnecessary syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexander Pope (25 November 1710). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MxRJAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA112&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Henry Cromwell&lt;/a&gt;. In John Croker (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Works of Alexander Pope&lt;/em&gt;, volume VI, p. 112. London: John Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By ‘change the termination of the rhyme’ Pope means that poets often found it convenient to write, for example, ‘did look’, instead of the more natural ‘looked’, at the end of a line, in order to have a wider choice of rhymes. Pope was not above using this device himself, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For loved by Pallas, Pallas &lt;strong&gt;did&lt;/strong&gt; impart&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To him the shipwright’s and the builder’s art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexander Pope (1715–20). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/iliadofhomer011801home/page/130&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad of Homer&lt;/em&gt;, book V, lines 79–80&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T12:29:15.670" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T12:29:15.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12438" CreationDate="2020-03-06T23:56:24.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll start with the simple question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;That is an accident&quot; refers to being wounded. Hemingway wrote of being wounded as &quot;an accident&quot; in some of his other stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &quot;it&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry becomes detached from reality after his injury. You can see it, for example, in the way he fails to respond and care for Catherine. This detachment and indifference is a major theme in the poetics of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry detached from the pain and suffering and horror of his surroundings and circumstances. The priest did not, so he feels it intensely, which brings him &quot;low&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is in fact quite a natural reaction to their situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the reason for the duality of phrasing that you observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, the priest realizes that Henry can no longer experience &quot;it&quot; (as explained above) &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt; he has been wounded. He must detach, defensively, and thus he &quot;does mind it&quot;. In fact, Henry detaches for the express purpose that he &quot;won't mind it&quot;. He got too close to the absolute horror of war, and now he can no longer feel it, or anything. Like someone who touched a scorching hot furnace, which burned his nerve endings, and now can no longer feel anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On his next reply, the priest also acknowledges the paradox of Henry coming into the closest possible contact with the horror of war - physical injury - yet now being unable to feel it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The priest also acknowledges that he himself did not come into such close contact (&quot;I do not see it myself&quot;) but unlike Henry, he is not terminally, defensively detached so he does feel it to an extent (&quot;but I feel it a little&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry's defensive detachment reaction is a central them in A Farewell to Arms and this conversation is one of its many expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8661" LastEditorUserId="8661" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T13:01:33.500" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T13:01:33.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12472" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11957" CreationDate="2020-03-07T13:26:05.957" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope you are doing well.&#xA;This is full text of this poem from the book three of Masnavi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;آن شنیدی تو که در هندوستان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;دید دانایی گروهی دوستان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گرسنه مانده شده بی‌برگ و عور&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;می‌رسیدند از سفر از راه دور&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;مهر داناییش جوشید و بگفت&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;خوش سلامیشان و چون گلبن شکفت&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گفت دانم کز تجوع وز خلا&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;جمع آمد رنجتان زین کربلا&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;لیک الله الله ای قوم جلیل&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تا نباشد خوردتان فرزند پیل&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;پیل هست این سو که اکنون می‌روید&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;پیل‌زاده مشکرید و بشنوید&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;پیل‌بچگانند اندر راهتان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;صید ایشان هست بس دلخواهتان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;بس ضعیف‌اند و لطیف و بس سمین&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;لیک مادر هست طالب در کمین&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;از پی فرزند صد فرسنگ راه&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;او بگردد در حنین و آه آه&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;آتش و دود آید از خرطوم او&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;الحذر زان کودک مرحوم او&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;اولیا اطفال حق‌اند ای پسر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;غایبی و حاضری بس با خبر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;غایبی مندیش از نقصانشان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;کو کشد کین از برای جانشان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گفت اطفال من‌اند این اولیا&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;در غریبی فرد از کار و کیا&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;از برای امتحان خوار و یتیم&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;لیک اندر سر منم یار و ندیم&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;پشت‌دار جمله عصمتهای من&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گوییا هستند خود اجزای من&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;هان و هان این دلق‌پوشان من‌اند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;صد هزار اندر هزار و یک تن‌اند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ورنه کی کردی به یک چوبی هنر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;موسیی فرعون را زیر و زبر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ورنه کی کردی به یک نفرین بد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;نوح شرق و غرب را غرقاب خود&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;بر نکندی یک دعای لوط راد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;جمله شهرستانشان را بی مراد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گشت شهرستان چون فردوسشان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;دجلهٔ آب سیه رو بین نشان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;سوی شامست این نشان و این خبر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;در ره قدسش ببینی در گذر&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;صد هزاران ز انبیای حق‌پرست&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;خود بهر قرنی سیاستها بدست&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گر بگویم وین بیان افزون شود&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;خود جگر چه بود که کهها خون شود&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;خون شود کهها و باز آن بفسرد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تو نبینی خون شدن کوری و رد&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;طرفه کوری دوربین تیزچشم&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;لیک از اشتر نبیند غیر پشم&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;مو بمو بیند ز صرفه حرص انس&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;رقص بی مقصود دارد همچو خرس&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;رقص آنجا کن که خود را بشکنی&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;پنبه را از ریش شهوت بر کنی&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;رقص و جولان بر سر میدان کنند&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;رقص اندر خون خود مردان کنند&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;چون رهند از دست خود دستی زنند&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;چون جهند از نقص خود رقصی کنند&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;مطربانشان از درون دف می‌زنند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;بحرها در شورشان کف می‌زنند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تو نبینی لیک بهر گوششان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;برگها بر شاخها هم کف‌زنان&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تو نبینی برگها را کف زدن&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گوش دل باید نه این گوش بدن&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گوش سر بر بند از هزل و دروغ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تا ببینی شهر جان با فروغ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;سر کشد گوش محمد در سخن&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;کش بگوید در نبی حق هو اذن&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;سر به سر گوشست و چشم است این نبی&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;تازه زو ما مرضعست او ما صبی&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;این سخن پایان ندارد باز ران&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;سوی اهل پیل و بر آغاز ران&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8663" LastEditorUserId="8663" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T14:41:28.193" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T14:41:28.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2020-03-07T13:44:52.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Removing the parenthetical interruption so as to follow the syntax better, we have  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While I in vain touch cymbals. Yet, concede,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Such sounding brass has done some actual good,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In colonising beehives.’  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what do cymbals have to do with beehives? In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.medievalists.net/2015/06/medieval-beekeeping/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this webpage&lt;/a&gt; on medieval bee-keeping, it quotes a 10th-century Byzantine text which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This animal [the bee] is pleased by a good tune: when they are scattered, therefore, beekeepers clash cymbals or clap their hands rhythmically to bring them home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew about this custom. It was probably still being practiced eight centuries later, when she wrote. Even today, people are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.beesource.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-285423.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;still asking&lt;/a&gt; about the accuracy of the &quot;old wives' tale&quot; that clapping your hands will cause a swarm of bees to land so they can be captured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea whether this advice is accurate. However, its metaphorical relevance to the poem is clear. Aurora is saying that even though she's sitting tinkling her cymbals while other people are actively looking for Moses in the bulrushes, it's nevertheless possible that the cymbals will call Moses to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-03-07T14:12:36.740" LastActivityDate="2020-03-07T14:12:36.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12474" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13634" CreationDate="2020-03-07T14:05:55.253" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act III Scene 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HOTSPUR:    Why, so can I, or so can any man;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But will they come when you do call for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;vasty deep&amp;quot; is still somewhat used, and &amp;quot;vasty&amp;quot; appears in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vasty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in reference to this one passage of Shakespeare. I'd guess that &amp;quot;vasty&amp;quot; might have been used instead of &amp;quot;vast&amp;quot; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12470/17&quot;&gt;reasons of rhythm&lt;/a&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;was it a recognised word at the time, or was Shakespeare exercising some poetic license to invent a new variant of &amp;quot;vast&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T16:12:13.203" Title="Shakespeare's vasty deep: was &quot;vasty&quot; a recognised variant of &quot;vast&quot; at the time?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;word-coinage&gt;&lt;henry-iv-part-i&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12448" CreationDate="2020-03-07T14:54:58.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12473/3003&quot;&gt;Peter Shor having identified&lt;/a&gt; the connection between cymbals and bees, I found a couple of classical sources for this allusion. First, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ovid&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasti_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fasti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;liba deo fiunt, sucis quia dulcibus idem&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;gaudet, et a Baccho mella reperta ferunt.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ibat harenoso satyris comitatus ab Hebro&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(non habet ingratos fabula nostra iocos),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;iamque erat ad Rhodopen Pangaeaque florida ventum:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aeriferae comitum concrepuere manus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ecce novae coeunt volucres tinnitibus actae,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;quosque movent sonitus aera, sequuntur apes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;colligit errantes et in arbore claudit inani&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Liber et inventi praemia mellis habet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sweet cakes are made for the god, because he too rejoices in&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sweetness, and they say that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bacchus&lt;/a&gt; discovered honey.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Accompanied by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;satyrs&lt;/a&gt;, he set off from sandy &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritsa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Our story having a not unpleasant joke),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And soon he had come to Thrace and flowering &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea_(mountain)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pangaea&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Bronze cymbals clashing&lt;/strong&gt; in the company’s hands,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Behold! Driven by the ringing, new-found insects swarm,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All disturbed, bees follow the sound of bronze.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liber&lt;/a&gt;† gathered the flying things and shut them in a hollow tree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And had discovered the prize of honey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ovid (8 CE). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0547%3Abook%3D3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fasti&lt;/em&gt;, book III&lt;/a&gt;, lines 735–744. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† A Latin deity who was syncretized with Bacchus/Dionysus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virgil&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Georgics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hinc ubi iam emissum caveis ad sidera caeli&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;nare per aestatem liquidam suspexeris agmen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;obscuramque trahi vento mirabere nubem,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;contemplator: aquas dulces et frondea semper&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;tecta petunt. Huc tu iussos adsperge sapores,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;trita melisphylla et cerinthae ignobile gramen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;tinnitusque cie et Matris quate cymbala circum.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ipsae consident medicatis sedibus, ipsae&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;intima more suo sese in cunabula condent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when the cage-escaped hosts† you see&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Float heavenward through the hot clear air, until&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You marvel at yon dusky cloud that spreads&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lengthens on the wind, then mark them well;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For then ’tis ever the fresh springs they seek&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And bowery shelter: hither must you bring&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The savoury sweets I bid, and sprinkle them,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bruised balsam and the wax-flower’s lowly weed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And wake and shake the &lt;strong&gt;tinkling cymbals&lt;/strong&gt; heard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the great Mother:‡ on the anointed spots&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Themselves will settle, and in wonted wise&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seek of themselves the cradle’s inmost depth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Virgil (c. 29 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0059%3Abook%3D4%3Acard%3D51&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Georgics&lt;/em&gt;, book IV, lines 58–66&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by J. B. Greenough (1900).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† That is, bees. Book IV opens “Of air-born honey, gift of heaven, I now take up the tale”. ‡ The goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cybele&lt;/a&gt;, who was worshipped with cymbals.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly after this question was asked and answered, Jane Wright published an essay on bees in &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; discussing these and other allusions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bees in Barrett Browning’s domestic epic, &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; (1856), appear on seven occasions and never as merely naturalistic detail. They include previously unnoticed instances of Barrett Browning’s allusive sophistication and they help to figure the poet’s (and Aurora’s) claims to literary posterity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jane Wright (2020). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgaa004&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barrett Browning’s Enduring Bees&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Essays In Criticism&lt;/em&gt; 70:2, p. 178.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T12:29:45.340" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T12:29:45.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-07T17:58:59.350" Score="2" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;These two novels came out a year apart. They share &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/30/david-mitchell-interview-bone-clocks-midlife-crisis-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;certain very noticeable similarities&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The setting is nominally the real world, but children are occasionally born with paranormal potential; however, it's implied that they rarely attain the awareness and training needed to properly harness that potential. The plot centres on a covert conflict between two small groups who have attained control over their powers, but continue to spend time in public interacting with &quot;normals&quot;. The antagonists, who are shown early on recruiting a new member in their late teens, have achieved eternal youth using an elixir that they must occasionally replenish by identifying children from the general population with latent powers, using their knowledge of those powers to tempt the children away from safety, and then extracting their life force. The principal point-of-view character has some powers and receives limited mentoring, but one of the main supporting characters is a self-taught child with exceptional power; the two have a family-like bond. The antagonists, despite their eternal youth, are still mortal, and are eventually defeated through mundane means. The climactic confrontation takes place in a location with paranormal properties that the point-of-view character recalls from their youth, and features both a labyrinth and the release of other entities which had been trapped inside the point-of-view character's head. One of the protagonists dies, but is shown to live on; the antagonists have no such afterlife, and are utterly destroyed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell, was acclaimed by Stephen King, who wrote Doctor Sleep. (Both are high-profile authors working in related genres; for what it's worth, an otherwise unrelated &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/96551/did-author-david-mitchell-have-any-influence-on-the-wachowskis-tv-series-sense&quot;&gt;movie.stackexchange question&lt;/a&gt; notes that each author includes connecting elements between his stories.) This is all circumstantial and while it feels suggestive to me, I can also believe that it might be coincidence as Mitchell implies in the interview I linked to above. Is there any stronger evidence either way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think either King or Mitchell would be daft enough to intentionally plagiarize the other. I'm more curious to what extent the very specific common elements could have spread through broader sharing of ideas (in either or both directions) whether through direct conversations, or more likely via some of the common circles that authors move in: conventions, interviews, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is too open-ended. My hope is that by asking specifically for strong evidence as opposed to conjecture, it will fall on the safe side of the line, but perhaps no such evidence exists, and regardless I recognize that these things can be a bit grey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8665" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-12T09:19:53.010" LastActivityDate="2020-03-12T09:19:53.010" Title="Doctor Sleep and The Bone Clocks" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;david-mitchell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-07T19:02:48.977" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently asked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/12443/2191&quot;&gt;What percentage of clay tablets found in Mesopotamia contain literature?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and was only able to define an upper limit of 4% literature in the overall corpus texts from the Ancient Near East. &#xA;However, the corpus of Latin texts from Antiquity that have come down to us has been researched over a much longer period of time and has been passed down under circumstances that are very different than those for clay tablets and other cuneiform texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably means that the percentage of literature in the overall corpus of Latin texts is very different than for clay tablets.&#xA;(Medieval monks made conscious decision when selecting works they would copy by hand, whereas physical and chemical processes (and occasionally worms) make no distinction between the content of clay tablets.)&#xA;This leads me to the question, &lt;strong&gt;What percentage of Latin texts from Antiquity constitute literature?&lt;/strong&gt; For the purpose of this question,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_literature&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;literature (see Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt; may also include non-fiction such as essays and history works.&#xA;When I write &quot;Antiquity&quot;, I mean texts from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Latin&lt;/a&gt; period until the end of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Latin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Classical Latin&lt;/a&gt; period, i.e. until the third century AD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T11:59:06.700" Title="What percentage of Latin texts from Antiquity constitute literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-08T05:35:24.167" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've heard that Shakespeare borrowed ideas from the events and other literary works from the time. He uses cross-dressing as a major plot device in several plays. Where did this come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8668" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T03:05:44.570" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T03:29:29.790" Title="What was Shakespeare's inspiration for the several cross-dressing episodes in his plays?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2020-03-08T10:31:43.643" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hercules Poirot was born in Belgium, between 1875 and 1880 … or before. He entered the Belgian police when 18 years old, between 1893 and 1898. He retired from the Belgian police with 22 years of service, between 1915 and 1918. He arrived in England between 1916 and 1918, because the First World War was ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His first case was The Mystery of Styles in 1920, when he was between 40 and 45 years old. Here there is a small discrepancy, because if he arrived in England at the end of the war, his first case should have been in 1916/1918 and not in 1920, but let's continue. He died in Curtain in May 1975, the New York Times published his death. So when he died he should be between 95 and 100 years old, or more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there is another version: the letter addressed to Hastings, where Poirot explains how he solved the Curtain case, is dated October 1949. With this version, he should be between 69 and 74 years old when he died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: between 69 and 100 . . . or more. There is no exact way to know how old Poirot was at death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8672" LastEditorUserId="411" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T14:38:55.270" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T14:38:55.270" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12480" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12482" CreationDate="2020-03-08T10:34:02.350" Score="3" ViewCount="495" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ezra Pound wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very short poem&lt;/a&gt; entitled &quot;In a Station of the Metro&quot;. It is, in full:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The apparition of these faces in the crowd:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Petals on a wet, black bough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of meaning and symbolism is packed into these fourteen words?&lt;/strong&gt; What is the symbolic connection between faces and petals? Why is the bough black and wet? What is the significance of the word &quot;apparition&quot;, which could be an old word for &quot;appearance&quot; but nowadays is more likely to suggest &quot;ghost&quot;? Do we know in which city is the titular metro station, or even which station Pound might have been thinking of? Why did he write these lines about a metro station?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T13:45:53.963" Title="Ezra Pound's &quot;In a Station of the Metro&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;ezra-pound&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12481" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9033" CreationDate="2020-03-08T12:51:06.667" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;The mother is &amp;quot;dwindling&amp;quot;, receding from life, but still stubbornly living on.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clear from the first stanza of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My mother dwindles and dwindles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and lives and lives.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her strong heart drives her&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as heedless as an engine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;through one night after another.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everyone says, &lt;em&gt;This can’t go on&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but it does.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It’s like watching someone drown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally &amp;quot;dwindling&amp;quot; means becoming smaller, but it's used here to mean that the life in her is becoming smaller. Yet still she lives on, even when everyone thinks she must soon pass away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza is devoted to the boat metaphor. My interpretation of this is that the boat represents her body, or more likely her consciousness as you said. It's in poor condition (like the moon shining through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(nautical)#/media/File:Ship_Frames;_Omi%C5%A1,_2012-02-20_(1).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ribs of a boat&lt;/a&gt;), and nobody is consciously directing it, but it's not empty of life. Like the mother here: she's not acting or doing anything, but &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;somebody's in there&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Even though she's blind, her sheer force of will is keeping her going: even &amp;quot;blind eyes&amp;quot;, with her strength, can still &amp;quot;light her way&amp;quot; towards life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third stanza, leading into the fourth, is about the plants in her garden. Even though this can be taken at face value to show how her place is going to rack and ruin without her care, it's &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; a metaphor. Just as she is deteriorating due to her fading life, so her garden is deteriorating due to her fading influence on it. The metaphorical meaning becomes clear with the line &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;slurring her edges&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, coming directly before the topic of her words. The plants don't directly affect her fading life, but this ambiguity and juxtaposition show that they are acting as a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this poem is important: it was published in 2007, the year after Atwood's own mother died. She is not just channelling a fictional narrator's daughterly grief, but her own. Also in 2007, she published an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/margaret-dorothy-killam-atwood/article684022/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;obituary&lt;/a&gt; which sheds some light on the character of her mother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she was 84, she casually informed me that it was time for her to stop climbing up on the roof to get the leaves out of the eavestroughs. &amp;quot;You've been doing what?&amp;quot; I said. She gave me the same stubborn but pleased look she had when, forbidden to shovel snow, she'd have the driveway cleared before you could get there. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was a believer in doing what you thought was right, seeing things through, buttoning your lip when advisable, and enjoying life as much as possible. She was a permissive mother in many ways - mud pies, frogs in jars, and messy paint held no terrors for her - but she discouraged complaining: Even in her last few years, when she was blind and bedridden, she never did it herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This description has advised my analysis above. The mother being described is someone who stubbornly refuses to give in to old age, who sees things through without complaining. She really was blind towards the end of her life, but the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;blind eyes light[ing] her way&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; surely refers to her strength of will that keeps her going even through the impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T12:51:06.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12480" CreationDate="2020-03-08T12:54:18.443" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Interpretation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Apparition’ means simply ‘appearance’ (the poet is thinking about the way the faces looked), or ‘the action of becoming visible’ (the faces suddenly stood out from the crowd to the poet), or ‘phantom’ (the particular faces are not really there, only suggested to the poet by the crowd).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘These faces in the crowd’ means ‘the faces of &lt;em&gt;all these&lt;/em&gt; people in the crowd’ (which resemble a scattering of petals) or ‘the faces of &lt;em&gt;these particular&lt;/em&gt; people in the crowd’ (which stand out from the rest of the crowd like the petals from the bough), or (if we take ‘apparition’ in the sense of ‘phantom’) ‘these faces suggested to the poet by the crowd’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘petals’ may be real (there is a tree outside the Metro station), or metaphorical, or there is no specific connection. If metaphorical, the comparison may be suggested by the contrast between the faces and something black, whether it is the black floor tiles inside the station, or the black clothing of the crowd, or the black road outside the station. Or the comparison may be to the delicacy and impermanence of the petals, suggesting the fleeting glimpse of a face in a crowd, or perhaps the fleeting nature of human life in general (bolstered by ‘apparition’ meaning ‘ghost’, ‘bough’ meaning ‘gallows’ and ‘black’ meaning ‘foreboding’). If no specific connection, the two images are juxtaposed because they provoked a similar mood in the poet, or a contrasting mood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The petals are ‘on a bough’ because they are flowering from buds on the bough, or because they have wilted and fallen onto the bough from higher on the tree. The bough is ‘wet’ because it is raining outside the Metro, or because it is coated in early morning dew. The bough is ‘black’ because that is the colour of the bark (for example, it is a species of &lt;em&gt;Betula&lt;/em&gt;), or because it is covered in soot from atmospheric pollution (the poem being written in the 1910s when coal burning was the main source of energy), or because wet things appear dark in colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;This approach inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Empson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Empson&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Origin&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1916, Pound published an essay, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/gaudierbrzeskame00poun/page/94&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vorticism&lt;/a&gt;’, which includes a discussion of the origin and composition of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Three years ago in Paris I got out of a “metro” train at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde_(Paris_M%C3%A9tro)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Concorde&lt;/a&gt;, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation … not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. It was just that—a “pattern,” or hardly a pattern, if by “pattern” you mean something with a “repeat” in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ezra Pound (1916). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/gaudierbrzeskame00poun/page/100&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir&lt;/em&gt;, p. 100&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Lane.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form that his poem eventually took was inspired by the Japanese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokku&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hokku&lt;/a&gt; (better known now as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;haiku&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Japanese have evolved the still shorter form of the &lt;em&gt;hokku&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The fallen blossom flies back to its branch:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    A butterfly.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That is the substance of a very well-known &lt;em&gt;hokku&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Plarr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victor Plarr&lt;/a&gt; tells me that once, when he was walking over snow with a Japanese naval officer, they came to a place where a cat had crossed the path, and the officer said, “Stop, I am making a poem.” Which poem was, roughly, as follows:— &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The footsteps of the cat upon the snow:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    (are like) plum-blossoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The words “are like” would not occur in the original, but I add them for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The “one image poem” is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work “of second intensity.” Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following &lt;em&gt;hokku&lt;/em&gt;-like sentence:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The apparition of these faces in the crowd:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Petals, on a wet, black bough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/gaudierbrzeskame00poun/page/102&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pound, pp. 102–3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* ‘落花枝にかへると見れば胡蝶哉’ by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arakida_Moritake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arakida Moritake&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-08T13:45:53.963" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T13:45:53.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12483" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6347" CreationDate="2020-03-08T15:08:03.807" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the section of Tuczay's paper entitled &quot;The Automaton and the Genie in the Bottle&quot;, she covers the history of mechanical moving figures both in literature and in history, from the legendary Daedalus to the real-life Heron of Alexandria. She notes regarding the latter that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several inventions mentioned in his &lt;em&gt;Pneumatica&lt;/em&gt; bear resemblance not only to the figure of the flying horse and other automatic devices featured in &lt;em&gt;The Arabian Nights&lt;/em&gt;, but also to numerous other examples in Middle High German romances and epics. In both the Middle East and Far East, the manufacture of automata of various types was quite common at the royal courts, as demonstrated by the casual mention of such mechanised figures by &#xA;  early travellers such as Friar Odoric and Marco Polo (Odoric of Pordenone 1966, 222).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;flying horse&quot; mentioned in the passage about their destruction indicating demonic origins is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the flying horse from the eponymous story which you're asking about, but instead the one from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Third_Kalandar%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Third Kalandar's Tale&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a different story which also features a flying horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about &quot;The Story of the Magic Horse&quot;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://1000into1night.wordpress.com/16-the-ebony-horse/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Ebony Horse&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a different story altogether? In this tale, the horse does not seem to be driven by any magic or demonic influences: it is not a &lt;em&gt;living&lt;/em&gt; flying horse, but one made out of wood, which gains or loses altitude according to the turning of two screws on its body. It's more akin to a hot-air balloon. Disregarding for a moment the weight of ebony, this is almost a plausible device to actually make in real life. From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3439/3439-h/3439-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Burton's translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then he bade the slaves bring the horse before him and they did so; and, when the Prince saw it, it pleased him. So (being an accomplished cavalier) he mounted it forthright and struck its sides with the shovel-shaped stirrup-irons; but it stirred not and the King said to the Sage, &quot;Go show him its movement, that he also may help thee to win thy wish.&quot; Now the Persian bore the Prince a grudge because he willed not he should have his sister; so he showed him the pin of ascent on the right side of the horse and saying to him, &quot;Trill this,&quot; left him. Thereupon the Prince trilled the pin and lo! the horse forthwith soared with him high in ether, as it were a bird, and gave not overflying till it disappeared from men's espying, whereat the King was troubled and perplexed about his case and said to the Persian, &quot;O sage, look how thou mayest make him descend.&quot; But he replied, &quot;O my lord, I can do nothing, and thou wilt never see him again till Resurrection-day, for he, of his ignorance and pride, asked me not of the pin of descent and I forgot to acquaint him therewith.&quot; [...] the horse gave not over soaring with him till he drew near the sun, whereat he gave himself up for lost and saw death in the skies, and was confounded at his case, repenting him of having mounted the horse and saying to himself, &quot;Verily, this was a device of the Sage to destroy me on account of my youngest sister; but there is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah, the Glorious, the Great! I am lost without recourse; but I wonder, did not he who made the ascent-pin make also a descent-pin?&quot; Now he was a man of wit and knowledge and intelligence; so he fell to feeling all the parts of the horse, but saw nothing save a screw, like a cock's head, on its right shoulder and the like on the left, when quoth he to himself, &quot;I see no sign save these things like buttons.&quot; Presently he turned the right-hand pin, whereupon the horse flew heavenwards with increased speed. So he left it and looking at the sinister shoulder and finding another pin, he wound it up and immediately the steed's upwards motion slowed and ceased and it began to descend, little by little, towards the face of the earth, while the rider became yet more cautious and careful of his life. [...] And when he saw this and knew the uses of the horse, his heart was filled with joy and gladness and he thanked Almighty Allah for that He had deigned deliver him from destruction. Then he began to turn the horse's head whithersoever he would, making it rise and fall at pleasure, till he had gotten complete mastery over its every movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not the behaviour of a living horse, or one whose motion is driven by demons. It's simply a machine that one needs to learn how to operate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there are no instances in this story where speaking the name of Allah causes the horse or any other machine/automaton to stop working. It does get destroyed at the end of the story, but only by the King literally breaking it into pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only connection between this horse and &quot;evil&quot; is that the Persian sage who created it is a deeply unpleasant figure. Because Prince Kamar wanted to protect his sister from marrying him, and their father the King imprisoned him, this sage decides to get revenge by attempting to rape Kamar's bride-to-be Shams. But there is no suggestion that his unpleasantness comes of being ruled by demons, or of any religious differences. He's just a bad person, albeit one who invented a marvellous thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How is this observation relevant in the context of “The Story of the Magic Horse” specifically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would conclude that &lt;strong&gt;it is not especially relevant&lt;/strong&gt;. The ebony horse is not a thing of evil, nor is it destroyed by religious invocations, nor indeed does it bring about any evil events (Kamal almost gets lost with it, until he figures out how to use it, but even that is ultimately a good thing as it leads to him meeting Shams), even though its maker does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-08T15:08:03.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12484" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-09T00:56:55.263" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking to identify a novel which talks about the relationship between an extroverted boy and an introverted girl, who fears that the boy will forget her and writes to him every week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another detail that I could find was that the girl's roommate quotes Goethe, telling about how people who are close at heart yet separated by distance are never actually apart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks for your time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7477" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T00:56:55.263" Title="Novel about an extroverted boy and an introverted girl" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5728" CreationDate="2020-03-09T01:22:20.083" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake was a Christian and so he is therefore using biblical symbolism. The rose symbolizes a Christian, specifically the Rose of Sharon, aka, the Lily of the Valley, in the Song of Solomon.(Somg of Solomon 2:1-3). (Incidentally, all of humanity is symbolically a woman, as those joined to Christ, are represented as chaste virgins, waiting to be wedded to him and for the promised consummation of all things, while those who are not are fornicators and harlots who defile the flesh (the image of God) by living for the pleasures of this world and disdaining the promises of God in Christ.). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The invisible worm is the Satanic principle of lust/indwelling corruption borne in the heart of fallen men, which the Christian can, and must, successfully mortify by by the faithful indwelling Spirit of Christ, or be killed himself. (Roman's 8:13: &quot;For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.&quot;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the wind, the Lord Jesus rebuked a great windstorm, (Mark 4:39), which windstorm was itself symbolic of the Devil, who is also known as known as the prince of the power of the air ((Eph. 2:1-3), and the tempter (Matthew 4:3), and whose mission is to devour the souls of men, but particularly the Christian, whom he cannot eternally destroy, but whom he can make sick and miserable in this life by tempting them to succumb to diverse lusts which harden their hearts, robbing them of their love for Christ and the joy of their salvation.(I.e., destroying their spiritual life by quenching the Spirit).  (See 1 John 2:15-16; Psalm 16:11; 51:12).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy bed of crimson joy is, of course, evidently symbolic of the indwelling sin of passion, and maybe sexual desire, so the incubus/succubus/night demons angle is surely plausible, but I believe the general principle of forbidden lust is more than apt to convey the general sense of the poem's aim, which is to warn faltering Christians of their perennial duty to beware the danger of letting the Devil get a foothold through incipient lusts, which war against the soul. (1 Peter 2:11: &quot;Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;&quot;). God be praised, the gates (counsels) of hell cannot prevail against those who are Christ's! (See Matthew 16:18). For he is faithful that promised, (Hebrews 10:23), and &quot; ...the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.&quot; (Roman's 10:11). Amen and amen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8674" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T01:22:20.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12486" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12489" CreationDate="2020-03-09T12:45:29.273" Score="11" ViewCount="1263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m slowly reading the novels of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, and I finished all the Tiffany Aching saga. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I read &lt;em&gt;The Amazing Maurice and its Educated Rodents&lt;/em&gt; since from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discworld#/media/File:Discworld_Reading_Order_Guide_3.0_(cropped).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Discworld Reading Order image&lt;/a&gt;, there was a minor connection between the novels. &#xA;I didn’t find any clear connection. At first I thought that Malicia and Granny Weatherwax had the same knack for ‘stories’, but it turned out there was no glimpse of link between them. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could anybody point out the missing link?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8679" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T08:57:56.540" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T14:30:40.187" Title="What’s the link between “The Amazing Maurice” and the Tiffany Aching books?" Tags="&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;discworld&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="946" CreationDate="2020-03-09T14:31:13.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It is not possible to put together a consistent biography of Poirot that includes all the stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chronology&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Precise dates are very rare in the Poirot corpus, and there are few references to historical events that can be used to give a &lt;em&gt;terminus post quem&lt;/em&gt;, but here is a selection of significant dates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I had a bad failure in Belgium in &lt;strong&gt;1893&lt;/strong&gt;. You recollect, Hastings? I recounted it to you. The affair of the box of chocolates.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1932). &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 15. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story itself Poirot says, “At that time, &lt;em&gt;mon ami&lt;/em&gt;, I was, as you know, a member of the Belgian detective force” but as to the date he is vague:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It was at the time of the terrible struggle in France between church and state.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1923). ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’. &lt;em&gt;The Sketch&lt;/em&gt;, issue 1582. Reprinted in &lt;em&gt;Poirot’s Early Cases&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This places the story during the conflict over state secularism that occupied the last quarter of the 19th century and culminated in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1905_French_law_on_the_Separation_of_the_Churches_and_the_State&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loi du 9 décembre 1905&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt; Poirot says that his last failure was “twenty-eight years ago”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Don't you ever have a failure, Monsieur Poirot?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The last time was twenty-eight years ago,” said Poirot with dignity. “And even then, there were circumstances—but no matter.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1936). &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 15. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When does &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt; take place? It must post-date &lt;em&gt;The A.B.C. Murders&lt;/em&gt;, since Miss Meredith says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I know all about you, Monsieur Poirot. It was you who really solved the A.B.C. crimes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;The A.B.C. Murders&lt;/em&gt; is set in 1935:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was in &lt;strong&gt;June of 1935&lt;/strong&gt; that I came home from my ranch in South America for a stay of about six months.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1936). &lt;em&gt;The ABC Murders&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Poirot’s “twenty-eight years ago” can be no earlier than 1907. This suggests that he had more than one failure, so that his “last failure” is not the same case as ‘The Clue of the Chocolate Box’.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Inspector Japp] turned to the other man. “You’ve heard me speak of Mr. Poirot? It was in &lt;strong&gt;1904&lt;/strong&gt; he and I worked together—the Abercrombie forgery case—you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then, do you remember ‘Baron’ Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp—thanks to Mr. Poirot here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1920). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Affair_at_Styles/Chapter_7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Affair at Styles&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;. London: Bodley Head.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, Poirot says that he was “due to retire” from the Belgian police on the eve of the First World War:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“See you, as a boy I was poor. There were many of us. We had to get on in the world. I entered the Police Force. I worked hard. Slowly I rose in that Force. I began to make a name for myself. I made a name for myself. I began to acquire an international reputation. At last, I was due to retire. There came the War. I was injured. I came, a sad and weary refugee, to England.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1934). &lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Affair at Styles&lt;/em&gt; is not precisely dated, but it is set during the First World War. Captain Arthur Hastings has been “invalided home from the Front”, Mary Cavendish is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Land_Army_(World_War_I)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Land Girl&lt;/a&gt;, Cynthia Murdoch is a  pharmacist in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Aid_Detachment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voluntary Aid Detachment&lt;/a&gt;, Mrs Inglethorp says, “We are quite a war household; nothing is wasted here”, and there are Belgian refugees in the village. Some time around 1916 seems to be indicated, and this date is confirmed by Hastings in &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ah! If I could go back—live life all over again. If this could have been that day in &lt;strong&gt;1916&lt;/strong&gt; when I first travelled to Styles…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1975). &lt;em&gt;Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; is set during or after the Second World War, according to Hastings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;How long ago was it that I had taken this self-same journey? Had felt (ridiculously) that the best of life was over for me! Wounded in that war that for me would always be &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; war—the war that was wiped out now by a &lt;strong&gt;second and a more desperate war&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A remark from Poirot suggests that the war is ongoing or only recently concluded, otherwise “the last war” would be the Second World War, not the First:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Like your Mr Asquith &lt;strong&gt;in the last war&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hastings meets “an old woman with rheumy eyes and an unpleasantly ghoulish manner” who describes the passage of time since the earlier novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Twenty years ago and over&lt;/strong&gt;. When the old lady died up at the Court. That was the first murder we had to Styles. Won’t be the last, I say. Old Mrs Inglethorp, her husband done her in, so we all said. Sure of it, we was.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 15.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would seem to place &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; in the mid-1940s: indeed, by 1946, it would already be thirty years since Mrs Inglethorp’s murder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt; is set after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_(Abolition_of_Death_Penalty)_Act_1965&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suspension of capital punishment for murder in 1965&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Faint memories flashed across his mind. Rather a celebrated case, more celebrated actually than it had showed any signs of being, a case that had seemed cut and dried. Of course! It came to him that his nephew Robert had been connected with it, had been Junior Counsel. A psychopathic killer, it had seemed, a man who had hardly bothered to try and defend himself, a man whom you might have thought really wanted to be hanged (because it had meant hanging at that time). No fifteen years, or indefinite number of years in prison. No. You paid the full penalty and &lt;strong&gt;more’s the pity they’ve given it up&lt;/strong&gt;, so Mr Fullerton thought in his dry mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1969). &lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This paragraph references the events of &lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, 1952.)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elephants Can Remember&lt;/em&gt; is set in the early 1970s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A speech!” Mrs. Oliver sounded horrified. “No, of course not. You know I never make speeches.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, I thought they always did at these here literary luncheons. That’s what you’re going to, isn’t it? Famous writers of &lt;strong&gt;nineteen seventy-three&lt;/strong&gt;—or wherever year it is we’ve got to now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1972). &lt;em&gt;Elephants Can Remember&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What I want,&quot; said Mrs. Oliver with firmness and the determination of a spoiled child, &quot;is my &lt;strong&gt;nineteen seventy&lt;/strong&gt; address book. And I think &lt;strong&gt;nineteen sixty-nine&lt;/strong&gt; as well. Please look for it as quick as you can, will you?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elephants Can Remember&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Consistency&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;Curtain&lt;/em&gt; is ‘Poirot’s Last Case’ and so would have to follow &lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Elephants Can Remember&lt;/em&gt; in any coherent biography, the only way to make the chronology consistent would be to imagine that the characters are mistaken or lying or joking in some or all of these works. But I think that’s a sign that such an exercise would be &lt;a href=&quot;http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FanWank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;futile&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie was well aware of this. She satirizes the difficulty of having such a long-running series detective in &lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, where crime novelist Ariadne Oliver and playwright Robin Upwood are collaborating on a play in which Oliver’s Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson, is to be the hero:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robin continued blithely: “What I feel is, here’s that wonderful young man, parachuted down—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver interrupted: “He’s sixty.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Oh no!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“He is.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t see him like that. Thirty-five—not a day older.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But I’ve been writing books about him for thirty years, and he was at least thirty-five in the first one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But, darling, if he’s sixty, you can’t have the tension between him and the girl—what’s her name? Ingrid. I mean, it would make him just a nasty old man!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It certainly would.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1952). &lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, nothing in Christie’s oeuvre suggests that she was all that bothered by series consistency. While they may share characters, each novel and story stands on its own. There are occasional references to other stories but these are never important to the plot. It’s not just Poirot’s age that varies: for example, Hastings is about to marry Dulcie Duveen at the conclusion of &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt; (1923) but in &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt; (1932) he calls his wife ‘Bella’, the name of Dulcie’s twin sister in the earlier novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T19:40:15.620" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T19:40:15.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12486" CreationDate="2020-03-09T15:14:19.170" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly sure that the link is what might be described as thematic. That is, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents features a boy whose main companions are a group of small non-human people, many of whom regard thievery and deceit with equanimity, and of whom the adult world is largely unaware, and the Tiffany novels feature a young girl whose main companions are a group of small non-human people, many of whom regard thievery and deceit with equanimity, and of whom the adult world is largely unaware. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keith is the 'stupid looking kid' who people are prone to underestimate, and Tiffany is a girl; hence prone to being underestimated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keith's story takes place entirely away from Ankh-Morpork and the earlier Tiffany books do likewise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to this, I think it may be a case of the author of the reading order striving to include all the discworld novels in their schema and there being no stronger or more explicit links than a general thematic one as I propose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you have mentioned Malicia, I think there is also a thematic link there, in that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Malicia_Grim&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L-Space wiki&lt;/a&gt; describes her as 'a girl who asks &lt;em&gt;questions&lt;/em&gt;' which would also describe one of Tiffany's defining characteristics. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As there is a gmail address for the originator of that reading order included on the image you linked, I will drop them a line with a link to this answer and invite them to let me know if they disagree or have anything further they would wish to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The response from the reading order author reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hi, there is no link other than these are young reader novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, so much for my literary analysis!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-03-09T18:48:23.753" LastActivityDate="2020-03-09T18:48:23.753" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12477" CreationDate="2020-03-09T16:28:51.520" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;To give you a proper answer, we need to define a few more terms than simply &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;. Such as what is meant by &amp;quot;texts&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defining &amp;quot;text&amp;quot;, we need to understand whether or not inscriptions -- anything written or painted on walls, stones, or other objects -- are included. This extends the range from an illiterate person's scribbling what he thinks are letters (and there are examples of exactly this) to the Emperor Augustus' &lt;em&gt;Res Gestae Divi Augusti&lt;/em&gt;, one of the longest inscriptions to have survived down to modern times -- and arguably a work of literature. One authority estimates there are about 400,000 inscriptions known, so whether these are included is not a trivial question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sake of argument, let's exclude inscriptions. Next, since the Wikipedia definition is a bit vague on this, what kinds of non-fiction writing would we exclude from the category &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;? Is the Elder Pliny's &lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt; literature? He was not trying to write in eloquent language -- as his adopted son Pliny did with his letters -- but to inform people. Yet his Natural History helped establish a genre of literature, the encyclopedia. And then there are a number of howto guides or handbooks that have come down to us of questionable practical value, such as Cato's De Agri Cultura. (Recent studies suggest it was not intended as a guide to farmers, but rather was an essay about a partly imaginary or idealized farm life.) The ancients didn't clearly divide their published writing into &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;practical guides for the general audience&amp;quot; as we do today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, again for the sake of argument, let's exclude all texts that were private -- by this, meant to be read by one individual (such as personal letters, financial records, legal records, etc.) -- from the category of literature. What we have left is, by any measure, overwhelmingly literary. What private texts that survive are few: a few hundred pieces from Britain (most of which comprise a few, disjointed words), maybe a hundred more from Pompeii and Herculeneum, and a similar number from Vindonissa (a Roman military camp in what is now Austria), Dacia (a series of miners' contracts), and North Africa (a number of letters on ostraca). These private texts (without critical apparatus and commentary) would fill maybe a couple of printed volumes at most, as compared to the 50+ Latin titles of the Loeb Classical Library which comprise close to 100 volumes. This should not be surprising: transmission of texts before printing was done through copying by hand, and few people will bother to copy theirs or other peoples' private papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, where maybe 4% of the cuneiform texts are literary, with Latin it is the opposite situation: maybe 4% are non-literary, not counting inscriptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to anticipate your next question, the situation with ancient Greek texts is complicated, due to the survival of so much writing on papyrus from Egypt: on the one hand, there are hundreds of volumes of published papyrus texts (which is still only a fraction of the surviving texts); on the other, there are hundreds of volumes of &amp;quot;literary&amp;quot; Greek writings that have survived to today. And there remains the question how do we categorize all of the inscriptions in Greek, which are at least as abundant as those in Latin...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8480" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T11:59:06.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T11:59:06.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12492" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12486" CreationDate="2020-03-10T14:30:40.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the reading order author's comments, Terry Pratchett himself may be the reason for the link in some people's mind (including my own), to some extent.  Note from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lspace.org/books/apf/the-wee-free-men.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Annotated Pratchett on L-Space&lt;/a&gt;, he mentioned them as linked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is possible that there will also be books in the spring -- certainly the Wee Free Men will be one, and it will be on the line of Maurice, ie, set on DW but ostensibly written for children and set outside the pattern of the main novels. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So not a direct link &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt; but similar in that they're Discworld novels intended for children.  They were originally shelved next to each other in the children's section, also (in my bookstore, it was shelved in the &quot;intermediate reader&quot; section, intended for kids in the 10-year old range roughly - think just younger than Harry Potter) which lead to people thinking they were connected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8689" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T14:30:40.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12493" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12496" CreationDate="2020-03-10T15:03:15.643" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading short story when I was young (in the 80s) where the protagonist passed a series of objects though a discovered portal (in their room?) and they were returned powered by - or containing - worm-like creatures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought this story may have been written by Joan Aiken (the story was in English)  but would very much like to know who the actual author was and the name of the anthology!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas....?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8690" LastEditorUserId="8690" LastEditDate="2020-03-10T15:17:47.550" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T13:33:00.877" Title="Young Horror Anthology - Short story with devices passed into a hole in a wall, returned powered by worms...?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-10T21:55:32.157" Score="4" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haruki Murakami's short story &quot;Birthday Girl&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://harpers.org/archive/2003/07/birthday-girl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read online&lt;/a&gt;, is about a girl working part-time as a waiter who gets to make a special wish on her twentieth birthday. The first-person narrator of the frame story asks her a couple of questions, about whether her wish came true and whether she ever regretted it, but he refrains from asking the obvious question of what it was. But even though this question isn't explicitly answered in the story, there must be hints towards it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a few questions about this story, but I'll start by addressing the elephant in the room head-on. &lt;strong&gt;What was her wish?&lt;/strong&gt; Or what evidence do we have to suggest what it was?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-10T21:55:32.157" Title="What was her wish in Haruki Murakami's &quot;Birthday Girl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;haruki-murakami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-11T12:03:04.370" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haruki Murakami's short story &quot;Birthday Girl&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://harpers.org/archive/2003/07/birthday-girl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read online&lt;/a&gt;, is about a girl working part-time as a waiter who gets to make a special wish on her twentieth birthday. Much of it is written from the third-person viewpoint of the girl herself, but (starting from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://harpers.org/archive/2003/07/birthday-girl/2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second page&lt;/a&gt;) there is also a first-person narrator in a many-years-later frame story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Somehow she and I had gotten onto the subject of our twentieth birthdays—what sort of day it had been for each of us. Most people remember the day they turned twenty. Hers had happened more than ten years earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is this character, and what is their relation to the girl?&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't even spot any indication whether it's a man or a woman. At first I thought it might have been a romantic interest, but then at the end she talks about her family life, so apparently it's not even someone who knows her well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T12:03:04.370" Title="Who is the second narrator character in Haruki Murakami's &quot;Birthday Girl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;haruki-murakami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12493" CreationDate="2020-03-11T13:33:00.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;We had this one asked after on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/37416/23243&quot;&gt;Children find hole in their bedroom wall which changes objects&lt;/a&gt;. It is Nicholas Fisk's &quot;Swap Shop&quot; from his collection &lt;em&gt;Sweets from a stranger&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://vector-bsfa.com/2010/02/13/swap-shop/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It begins with the wind whistling through the wall. It’s not the noise itself that’s the problem, says Jo, it’s the feeling behind it. “It’s almost as if someone or something is saying things in the wall…” (103). Her brother Bogey (nee Alec) teases her about her fears, but together they reveal a hole in the wall, a hole that is “all wrong”, that is sometimes a normal hole, and sometimes “seemed to shift — to move, to swell and contract, almost to breathe” (105). Neither sibling is brave enough to venture into the hole, but Bogey throws in a old, cracked, china mug. It disappears. Two minutes later, a glass tumbler appears: thick, whole, beautiful green glass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Further swaps ensue. They put hot chocolate in the glass, and get back a golden liquid that tastes of every fruit and none. They put in salted peanuts, and get back unsalted. A needle and thread, and get back two pieces of fabric joined by a small button containing a golden worm, that glows “like the filament of a torch bulb when the battery’s almost flat” (109), and slowly rotates. Other devices come back with other worm-buttons on. Bogey gets excited: this could be his fortune! These miraculous worm-buttons, which seem to be able to join and clean and power and much else. He tries to establish direct communications with the whatevers on the other side of the hole: his notes and photographs come back unchanged. He does the inevitable. This is what Jo finds in the morning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Motionless, but for the fluttering of the petal-like eyelids. Glimmering white, smooth, flawless, hairless. Him. Not him. His head seemed larger. Too large. His scarred lip was still healing — as she watched, the last of the scar faded and vanished leaving only rose and white perfection.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;He groaned and rolled from side to side; then completely over. She felt the burn of vomit in her throat when her eyes were trapped by the sight of the crystal buttons in which turned little golden worms, in his neck, his brow, his belly, his chest. His eyelids fluttered again. They opened: then she saw the spiralling golden worms in his eyes. (121)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T13:33:00.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-11T15:42:54.827" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a short book about hockey player and his girlfriend. I think it is by Jerome Salinger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've already read 50% of his books, which I can find on public. Only story about this crazy family of wonderkids and other little stories, and it's not that one, which I've read long-long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Story was short. 1-2-3, may be 4 hours, not more, for an average person with average speed of reading.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably, it was set in New York City. It may also be Chicago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two main heroes - it is the hockey player and his girlfriend. He played, and something sad happened in the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Timeframe of story: 1950-1990&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Timeframe of creation: 1950-1990&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, it may not have been Jerome Salinger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8699" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T19:27:13.603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T19:27:13.603" Title="Possible Jerome Salinger short book about hockey player and his girlfriend" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5521" CreationDate="2020-03-11T19:36:17.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;This answer is largely based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/49246/27759&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV post&lt;/a&gt; which user1964 linked in a comment.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Yes, Poirot was a religious Catholic.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story &lt;em&gt;Murder in Mesopotamia&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/agathachristie/Agatha%20Christie/English/Agatha%20Christie%20-%20Murder%20in%20Mesopotamia_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive link&lt;/a&gt;), he mentions twice that he is a &amp;quot;practising Catholic&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he said quite irrelevantly: ‘An interesting man, that Father Lavigny.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A monk being an archaeologist seems odd to me,’ I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Ah, yes, you are a Protestant. Me, I am a good Catholic. I know something of priests and monks.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I had a lengthy conversation with Father Lavigny. I am a practising Catholic and I know many priests and members of religious communities. Father Lavigny struck me as not ringing quite true to his role. But he struck me, on the other hand, as familiar in quite a different capacity. I had met men of his type quite frequently — but they were not members of a religious community. Far from it!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the later story &lt;em&gt;Taken at the Flood&lt;/em&gt;, he even enters a Catholic church to pray:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moved by an impulse Poirot went through the gate and along the path to the door of the Roman Catholic building.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He removed his hat, genuflected in front of the altar and knelt down behind one of the chairs. His prayers were interrupted by the sound of stifled heartbroken sobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His religion is not mentioned in earlier Poirot stories, but it's one of the things that helps to fill out, at least a little, the background of the character. Although he doesn't frequently refer to his religion, he also doesn't (as far as I know) say anything which &lt;em&gt;contradicts&lt;/em&gt; him being religious: it's just not usually mentioned but occasionally comes up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T19:36:17.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12499" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5321" CreationDate="2020-03-11T21:05:46.773" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are strong hints that Mr Antolini expresses sexual interest in Holden in this scene. Consider his verbal reaction when Holden wakes up from his touch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;What the hellya doing?&quot; I said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Nothing! I'm simply sitting here, admiring--&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole scene happens in a dark room, with Antolini drinking heavily, and conveys an aura that some molestation could have happened, and perhaps was already beginning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was dark and all and I couldn't see him so hot, but I knew he was watching me, all right. He was still boozing, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Antolini refuses to acknowledge Holden's reasonable discomfort at being woken up in a dark room by a drunk adult man touching him non-consensually. Instead, Antolini casts the blame for the awkward result on Holden, repeatedly calling him &quot;a very, very strange boy&quot;. This is an abusive deceitful tactic, as Holden is well-aware (&quot;Strange, my ass&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would caution strongly against concluding that &quot;Holden was sexually molested as a child&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;especially&lt;/strong&gt; against seeing that as some sort of fundamental explanation for all the events, themes, and ideas presented in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catcher in the Rye is not a mystery genre work and there's no single answer to be uncovered by unearthing subtle clues and thus resolving all the fundamental questions the novel raises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Holden is clinically depressed&quot; is likewise not an adequate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holden tells us quite elaborately, throughout the novel, about things that depress him, and very often &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to understand Holden is key to gaining value from the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dismissing practically the entire narrative as &quot;Holden was depressed&quot;, &quot;Holden was sexually molested&quot;, or &quot;Holden was crazy&quot; only serves to shut down any fruitful discussion before it even begun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, if the only problem is that Holden was depressed / molested / crazy, then this novel is mostly relevant for people who suffered from these conditions. Instead, a very large portion of readers find meaning and relevance in the novel, including those who never suffered any of these conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than dismissing or otherwise limiting the novel's relevance, it is far more challenging and rewarding to try to understand why a fairly normal person could think, feel, act, and react as Holden did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holden's reaction to Antolini's behavior in that scene is very reasonable when you recall that Holden knew, trusted, and even admired Antolini for quite some time before that evening. A major theme in the novel is how sexual desire affects various characters and their humanity, including Holden himself. For instance, consider his explanation of his relation to Sally Hayes as a function of his attraction to her. The encounter with the prostitute has some of that too, though there are other interesting themes there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To avoid straying too much, and get back to your question, there's no particular reason to suspect that Holden was molested as a child. Holden was an upper-middle-class (possibly even upper-class) child growing up in an upscale part of New York. It is unlikely that he was exposed to molestation by strangers, and there's absolutely no hint that any family member molested him either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By many accounts, Holden was a handsome boy, and that can certainly attract unwanted attention, as Holden himself mentions in the bit you quoted (&quot;they're always being perverty when I'm around&quot;). Arguably, that scene is an example of someone &quot;being perverty&quot; around Holden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he is able to protect himself quite well. He identifies, and promptly exits the compromising situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth pointing out that he is able to do so despite difficult present conditions: he is effectively without shelter and asleep when Antolini tries to molest him. In fact, that's a common circumstance to many of the events in the novel: Holden exits the normal, sheltered life of a boy of his age and class, and enters a series of unusual and sometimes vulnerable alternative circumstances. This is how Antolini is able to touch him, and how Maurice is able to assault him earlier in the novel. In fact, the Maurice incident also carries undertones of sexual assault:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then what he did, he snapped his finger very hard on my pajamas. I won't tell you where he snapped it, but it hurt like hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holden never exhibits any special reaction to the sexual undertone of this part of the assault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To conclude, Holden enters a vulnerable state when he leaves his proper upper-middle-class at the boarding school, and in that vulnerable state he encounters some unsavory happenings, including assaults of a violent nature, sexual nature, or both. However, there's no evidence that these sexual assaults echo some significant earlier trauma. In any case, it is inadvisable to dismiss the huge wealth of ideas and themes present in the novel as simply a mechanical consequence of any particular psychopathology, such as past sexual trauma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8661" LastEditorUserId="8661" LastEditDate="2020-03-11T21:53:48.643" LastActivityDate="2020-03-11T21:53:48.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4082" CreationDate="2020-03-12T01:55:02.690" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a 'knock-knock' joke in the 1960s, when &lt;strong&gt;everyone&lt;/strong&gt; knew the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Person 1: Knock knock.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person 2: Who's there?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person 1: M.A.B. is a big horse.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person 2: M.A.B. is a big horse who?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Person 1: [Sings] A-maybe it's a-because I'm a Londoner. . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T11:35:54.463" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T11:35:54.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12501" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12504" CreationDate="2020-03-12T20:22:00.770" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the passage in the book where Bill gets into Derry and is riding a cab to meet Mike I believe, the phrase &amp;quot;Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my!&amp;quot; stood out to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the cab moved slowly down Main Street (&lt;em&gt;we're over the Canal now,&lt;/em&gt; Bill thought; &lt;em&gt;can't see it, but it's down there, running in the dark&lt;/em&gt;) and then turned up Center, his first thought was predictable enough: how much had changed. But the predictable thought was accompanied by a deep dismay that he never would have expected. He remembered his childhood here as a fearful, nervous time ... not only because of the summer of '58, when the seven of them had faced the terror, but because of George's death, the deep dream his parents seemed to have fallen into following that death, the constant ragging about his stutter, Bowers and Huggins and Criss constantly on the prod for them after the rockfight in the Barrens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my! Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my!&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and just a feeling that Derry was cold, that Derry was hard, that Derry didn't give a shit if any of them lived or died, and certainly not if they triumphed over Pennywise the Clown. Derryfolk had lived with Pennywise in all his guises for a long time ... and maybe, in some mad way, they had even come to understand him. To like him, need him. &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; him? Maybe. Yes, maybe that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am just briefly dipping my toes in literature and was wondering if you guys have encountered phrases similar to that of the title in question? Is there a specific name to this archetype? Have other authors before King used a similar phrase, with different names/nouns perhaps? Wonder if it's coincidence but I've been seeing this more and more lately. Wonder if I notice it more often now having read/listened to 'IT'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8706" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T20:54:39.690" Title="Bowers and Huggins and Criss, oh my!" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;it&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12502" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12503" CreationDate="2020-03-12T23:44:31.937" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am stuck trying to figure out something from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. In the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The young man stepped into the dark entry, which was partitioned off from the tiny kitchen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which is from the first chapter of the 4th page, in the Dover Thrift edition of the novel. It is describing Alyona Ivanovna's apartment. I am troubled by the outline of her apartment. Where is this kitchen? We have the landing, the thin, dark, passageway, and then a door to her parlor, but where is the kitchen? Is the kitchen a shared kitchen in the landing where Raskolnikov is standing? Does it branch off from the passageway into its own tiny subsection, separate from the parlor? Is it part of the parlor? In any case, can anyone provide some sort of interpretation of this to stop my annoyance at not understanding where this damned kitchen is!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3186" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-13T10:51:54.253" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T10:51:54.253" Title="Alyona Ivanovna apartment layout" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12502" CreationDate="2020-03-13T08:24:27.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no mention of a &quot;thin, dark, passageway&quot;, at least in the original. This description refers to the backstairs, before the landing and apartment itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately behind the apartment threshold, there is a [dark] entry. The kitchen is separated from the entry by a partition; that is, there is no 'substantial' stand-alone kitchen per se; it's just a corner in the entrance area. This simply indicates very modest if not scanty conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The door to her room is also just there: she was able to point to it right from the entrance door, inviting Raskolnikov to enter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T08:24:27.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12504" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12501" CreationDate="2020-03-13T20:07:31.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Phrases of the form &quot;&lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;, oh my!&quot; are fairly widespread as a sort of meme (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;snowclone&lt;/a&gt;) originating from the classic 1939 film &lt;em&gt;The Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HrfbV16-FQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!&lt;/a&gt; (Youtube link)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's discussed, with many variants listed, at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://snowclones.org/2007/05/22/x-y-and-z-oh-my/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Snowclones Database&lt;/a&gt;, and lambasted at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://madamgrammar.com/2016/10/21/oh-my-could-we-stop-using-this-cliche/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madam Grammar&lt;/a&gt; blog. In the context of this passage in &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt;, Bowers and Huggins and Criss are bullies constantly after Bill (&quot;on the prod&quot;), so that he was &quot;fearful&quot; and &quot;nervous&quot;, rather like Dorothy at the thought of lions and tigers and bears in &lt;em&gt;The Wizard of Oz&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-13T20:54:39.690" LastActivityDate="2020-03-13T20:54:39.690" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T14:14:52.267" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the song &quot;Tomorrow Wendy&quot; by Concrete Blonde (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/1037224/Concrete+Blonde/Tomorrow%2C+Wendy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to full lyrics&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Underneath the chilly gray November sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We can make believe that Kennedy is still alive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And we're shooting for the moon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And smiling Jack is driving by  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the reference to J. F. Kennedy mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8714" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T14:31:10.357" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:31:10.357" Title="What is the reference to Kennedy in &quot;Tomorrow Wendy&quot; by Concrete Blonde meant for?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;concrete-blonde&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12506" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12507" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" Score="0" Body="the American alternative rock band; use with the [song-lyrics] tag when necessary" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:22:05.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3072" CreationDate="2020-03-14T14:48:33.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Manchester&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the 1980s, with the demise of many traditional industries under the radical economic restructuring often known as Thatcherism, the city and region experienced some decline. The revival started towards the end of the decade, catalysed, not only by wider growing prosperity in the UK but by the creative music industry. New institutions such as Factory Records and Fac 51 Hacienda earned the city the sobriquet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madchester&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madchester&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Good Omens&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1990. Depending on their tastes, therefore, this could be a reference to Manchester’s “decline” in this period, or to the rave scene referred to as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madchester&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madchester&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T14:48:33.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12509" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T15:22:52.850" Score="3" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;From book 1, Chapter 8, of &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; by J. R. R. Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;There you'll find an old inn that is called &lt;em&gt;The Prancing Pony&lt;/em&gt;. Barliman Butterbur is the worthy keeper. There you can stay the night, and afterwards &lt;strong&gt;the morning will speed you upon your way&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the meaning of the phrase in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T15:25:56.047" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T15:41:16.043" Title="Meaning of &quot;the morning will speed you upon your way&quot; in “The Fellowship of the Ring”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12509" CreationDate="2020-03-14T15:41:16.043" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word ‘speed’ is used here in an archaic sense, but one that you should be easily able to find in a dictionary, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;speed, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 6.a.&lt;/strong&gt; To further or assist (a person); to cause to succeed or prosper&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today this sense mostly survives in stock phrases like ‘God speed’, meaning ‘(may) God assist (you)’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Bombadil suggests that ‘the morning will speed you’ what he means is that the hobbits will find it easier to continue on their journey in the morning, when it is light. The attribution of this assistance to the ‘morning’ is a kind of (mild) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personification&lt;/a&gt;. This is in character for Bombadil, who is prone to speaking of natural objects as if persons, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sun won’t show her face much today, I’m thinking.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book I, chapter 7. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T15:41:16.043" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T17:24:22.020" Score="4" ViewCount="333" Body="&lt;p&gt;The protagonist/antihero of Dostoyevsky's &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;odion &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;omanovich &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;askolnikov. As it says on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodion_Raskolnikov&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The name Raskolnikov derives from the Russian raskolnik meaning &quot;schismatic&quot; (traditionally referring to a member of the Old Believer movement). The name &quot;Rodion&quot; comes from Greek and indicates an inhabitant of Rhodes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was going to ask just about the significance of his triple initials, but even this &quot;explanation&quot; of his names leaves much unanswered. So I've broadened the question to cover the significance of his name in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the connection between his character and schismaticism, or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Believer&lt;/a&gt; movement?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the connection between his character and the Greek island of Rhodes?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the significance of his triple initials R.R.R.?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &lt;strong&gt;what meaning or symbolism can be found in the choice of name for this character?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T20:57:11.170" Title="Significance in Raskolnikov's name in Crime and Punishment?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5585" CreationDate="2020-03-14T17:24:24.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poetically, metrically, the line as Blake wrote it is trochaic tetrameter with a catalexis (missing syllable). Brightly makes it trochaic tetrameter, but ruins the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8715" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T17:47:26.170" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T17:47:26.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T17:36:37.353" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Trail of Lightning&lt;/em&gt; by Rebecca Roanhorse, when Grace is embarrassing Maggie by making comments about Kai, Maggie uses &quot;Jesus&quot; as an exclamation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She straightens up, points toward Kai. &quot;Make her listen. She won't listen to me. But I imagine a handsome young man like you could say things to a girl that would her listen right up.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Jesus, Grace,&quot; I say, embarrassed.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trail of Lightning&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 22&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maggie is Diné. She grew up with her nalí, and then with Neizgháni, neither of whom presumably would have used &quot;Jesus&quot; as an exclamation. The only person who we see uses &quot;Jesus&quot; is Grace, who isn't Diné.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why would Maggie use it here? It's not something she'd have been exposed all that much to - from what I could tell, she's only been at the bar once or twice before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T17:36:37.353" Title="Why does Maggie use &quot;Jesus&quot; as an exclamation while talking to Grace?" Tags="&lt;rebecca-roanhorse&gt;&lt;the-sixth-world&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12514" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-14T20:19:40.923" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, what could the phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF47v_9olEs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;enos chalked halltraps&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; refer to? Some, possibly flawed, attempt at pest control?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[30.1] Now  (to forebare for ever solittle of Iris Trees and Lili&#xA;O'Rangans),  concerning the genesis of Harold or Humphrey Chimpden's&#xA;occupational agnomen  (we are back in the presurnames prodromarith&#xA;period, of  course just when enos chalked halltraps) and discarding&#xA;once for all those theories from older  sources which would link him&#xA;back with such pivotal ancestors as the Glues, the Gravys, the&#xA;Northeasts, the Ankers and the Earwickers  of Sidlesham  in the&#xA;Hundred of Manhood or proclaim him offsprout of vikings who had&#xA;founded  wapentake and seddled hem in Herrick or Eric,  the best&#xA;authenticated version, the Dumlat,  read the Reading of&#xA;Hofed-ben-Edar,  has it that it was this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question pertains to before 1939.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a need to analyze the whole passage, the question is focused on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(we are back in the presurnames prodromarith period, of  course just&#xA;when enos chalked halltraps)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of the standard readings, but am not satisfied. None explain all three words simultaneously. It is my experience with &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; that there is usually a clear simple Duh! behind the complex text, and that straying into the esoteric often misses the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what is known at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Chalked_halltraps&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegans Web &amp;amp; Wiki&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chalked halltraps&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;enos chalked halltraps:&lt;/strong&gt; ECH → HCE (backwards)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chalked:&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;slang&lt;/em&gt;) slashed, scratched → Enos the magician chalking circles in the ground to conjure spirits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;chalked:&lt;/strong&gt; drew with chalk → chalk drawings in palaeolithic caves are some of the earliest examples of art → Kevin (=Shaun) &amp;quot;chalked oghres on walls&amp;quot; at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Page_27&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;FW 027.05-06&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;choked&lt;/strong&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;talked:&lt;/strong&gt; in the time of the Biblical Enos men first invoked the name of God (Genesis 4:26)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hall trappings:&lt;/strong&gt; pictures on the wall in the hallway → Vico's First Age, when primitive men made their homes in caves (and chalked images on the walls?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hallow-traps:&lt;/strong&gt; an old meaning of &lt;em&gt;hallows&lt;/em&gt; is the gods of the heathens → Enos's chalk circles trap the spirits of false gods&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hilltops&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hell-traps:&lt;/strong&gt; to trap and compel demons from Hell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hallstatt:&lt;/strong&gt; a Celtic Iron Age culture&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;traps:&lt;/strong&gt; anticipates the traps HCE uses to capture earwigs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps someone attempting but failing to control ants or roaches (chalk trap) is suggested by earlier context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Chapter I.2 is by far the easiest in the novel, I can find no satisfactory interpretation of the phrase &amp;quot;enos chalked halltraps&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I would accept any answer that can give all three words suitable context simultaneously.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &amp;quot;trap&amp;quot; is Dutch/Afrikaans for &amp;quot;stair&amp;quot;, so we may be looking at hall stairs, although of course &amp;quot;trappe&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;stairs&amp;quot;, but for Joyce &amp;quot;traps&amp;quot; could easily mean &amp;quot;stairs&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T20:52:21.750" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T20:52:21.750" Title="In Finnegans Wake, what could &quot;enos chalked halltraps&quot; refer to?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="17" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2020-03-14T21:37:34.203" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Self reference is all over Shakespeare. Many asides are to the audience: &quot;she who's a maid and laughs at my depart...&quot;; &quot;dive, thoughts, down into my soul&quot; (to whom, if not to the audience, were Lear's fool and Richard talking?). It takes something decisive, like Lady Macbeth's bloody hands soliloquy or Hamlet's &quot;to be or not to be&quot;, to actually rate rumination not directed at the audience but instead indicating a thought process. All these are moments that reveal the character more than the plot. Shakespeare, I believe, had his finger on the pulse of the audience like a good doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;The rest is silence&quot; may, in my opinion, project the irony of Hamlet's now-ended struggle to make up his mind. Hamlet could have just killed Claudius in Act 1, were he not a man of refinement and sensibilities, a prince, who didn't just believe in the supernatural. What did that get him? Stuck with a poisoned epee in revenge for stupidly killing his friend's father because he couldn't just let it go or kill the bad guy openly. Schlemozzle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8718" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T22:29:19.353" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T22:29:19.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12363" CreationDate="2020-03-14T23:42:14.610" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;در مسلخ عشق جز نکو را نکشند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In love slaughterhouse, they not kill except the good ones&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;روبه صفتان زشت خو را نکشند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They will not kill the ill-natured vulpines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;گر عاشق صادقی ز کشتن مگریز&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do not run away from death if you are truthful in love&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;مردار بود هر آنکه او را نکشند&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anybody who is not killed in love slaughterhouse is a dead meat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the answer to your question is related to Rumi's mystical look.&#xA;If we look at it in a superficial way when a man is killed, apparently only a dead meat remains of him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everyone will eventually die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one killed in the slaughterhouse of love will be different from the one killed in the usual way.&#xA;The memory of the one who is killed in the way of love remains but The one who is killed in vain will not remain in remembrance and the one who doesn't stay in the memories is as dead meat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can watch a video (Puppet Opera Rumi) of this poem by Iranian singer Homayoun Shajarian &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/FfZoYUlgL9c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watch the full video of this opera &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/f9Xpa-e9DIA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also see something like this in Ghazal/Ode 636 from Rumi's Divan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Go and die, go and die, In this Love, go and die. Once you've died in&#xA;  this Love, You'd receive the spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Go and die, go and die, Don't fear death, go and die. Go and leave&#xA;  this dusty earth,  Go fly up high into the sky.&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8663" LastEditorUserId="8663" LastEditDate="2020-03-14T23:48:27.410" LastActivityDate="2020-03-14T23:48:27.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12526" CreationDate="2020-03-15T17:13:05.067" Score="12" ViewCount="1919" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the self-help manual &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21291/21291-h/21291-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pushing to the Front&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1911) by Orison Swett Marden, at the start of Chapter XV (&quot;What a good appearance will do&quot;), I find this quotation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes.—ANTHONY TROLLOPE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not my native language and I cannot get the exact meaning of this quotation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8398" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:45:49.247" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T22:28:22.597" Title="Meaning of a Trollope quotation about the &quot;best dressed gentleman&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;anthony-trollope&gt;&lt;orison-swett-marden&gt;&lt;pushing-to-the-front&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12519" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-15T17:46:47.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:46:47.083" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T17:46:47.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12520" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-15T17:46:47.083" Score="0" Body="Orison Swett Marden (1848–1924), American self-help writer. Use this tag for questions about the author, or related to their work, with the work appropriately tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:52:59.097" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:52:59.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12521" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12522" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" Score="0" Body="Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), English novelist. His novels include &quot;Barchester Towers&quot; (1857), &quot;Can You Forgive Her?&quot; (1865), and &quot;The Way We Live Now&quot; (1875)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T17:49:42.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12534" CreationDate="2020-03-15T18:37:22.593" Score="3" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &lt;strong&gt;Murder in the Cathedral&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;T.S. Eliot&lt;/strong&gt;, the fourth tempter comes to Thomas Becket and after some conversation between them the fourth tempter says  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You know and do not know, what is it to act or suffer.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You know and do not know, that acting is suffering,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And suffering action. Neither does the actor suffer&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor the patient act. But both are fixed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In an eternal action, an eternal patience&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To which all must consent that it may be willed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And which all must suffer that they may will it,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That the pattern may subsist, that the wheel may turn and still&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Be forever still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found after some research that in 1930s T.S. Eliot was going through some spiritual crisis and dilemmas and this play is one of the manifestation of his inner battle with/for spirituality. So, it seems that the fourth tempter is saying something spiritual by those words (well, of course, his advice was spiritual, he asked Thomas to become a martyr and enjoy the heaven) but I really am unable to make sense of those words, they are self contradictory (“you know and do not know”). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just after this the tempter’s parts ends and Chorus comes once again, this shows that those lines must be important as they are last of tempter.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T20:28:39.657" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T20:58:41.247" Title="What does these words mean from “Murder in the Cathedral”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;murder-in-the-cathedral&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12524" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12525" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" Score="0" Body="&quot;Murder in the Cathedral&quot; (1935), a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, depicting the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in 1170. Use with the [t-s-eliot] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T19:56:48.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12518" CreationDate="2020-03-15T21:12:21.820" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;First off, this appears in an 1879 &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18645/18645-h/18645-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; about the writer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Makepeace_Thackeray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Thackeray&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Trollope&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony Trollope&lt;/a&gt;.  What it means is perhaps clearer in its original context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hold that gentleman to be the best dressed whose dress no one observes. I am not sure but that the same may be said of an author's written language. Only, where shall we find an example of such perfection? Always easy, always lucid, always correct, we may find them; but who is the writer, easy, lucid, and correct, who has not impregnated his writing with something of that personal flavour which we call mannerism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt I say  it better, but Trollope is saying, in effect: if someone notices how you are dressed, you are not well dressed.  If someone notices your prose style, there is something wrong with it.  [In my personal experience this has always been the case: my clothes are over shabby, or (on rare occasion) too new-looking; I love to use extravagant figures of speech and fancy words, and so on.  I have recognizable mannerisms.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Trollope, the best dressers and  the best writers exhibit no mannerisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-03-15T23:11:57.533" LastActivityDate="2020-03-15T23:11:57.533" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-15T21:53:30.993" Score="4" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Haruki Murakami's novel &lt;i&gt;1Q84&lt;/i&gt;, there is a novella, &lt;i&gt;Air Chrysalis&lt;/i&gt;, that plays an important role. It describes some apparently supernatural beings called &quot;the Little People&quot;.   When the &quot;Little People&quot; first appear in the novella, there are six of them. However, the heroine of the novella thinks that there should be seven of them, like in &lt;i&gt;Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs&lt;/i&gt;, and then there are seven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Little People are described as being identical except for their voices. When you try to count how many voices they have, it seems like there are eight. There are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a bass, &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a baritone,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a tenor,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one with a small voice,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one with a soft voice,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one with a screechy voice,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;one with a hoarse voice,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the keeper of the beat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anybody come up with an explanation for this discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:33:15.853" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:33:15.853" Title="How many &quot;Little People&quot; are in the story-in-the-story in 1Q84?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;haruki-murakami&gt;&lt;1q84&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12529" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12518" CreationDate="2020-03-16T02:27:41.447" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a cricket fan and it is popular in that field to say of both wicketkeepers and umpires that they have had a good game if you don't notice them. That is to say that you tend to only notice them if and when they make mistakes. The same is true of umpires and referees in most sports. Their jobs are so integral to the game that if they do them well it comes across as just the normal flow of the game and not anything noteworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This expression is saying essentially the same thing, i.e. that our clothing is so integral to our social existence that those doing it best are those who are not noticed for doing it. If someone notices what you are wearing then it is noteworthy and, thus, not normal or proper and thus not the best it could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It depends on your own demeanour as to whether you agree with the sentiment or not. Personally, I find overly-flamboyant people to be annoying as they come across as craving attention, while others consider being &quot;normal&quot; to be extremely boring. It's quite possible that both are true simultaneously, because there is no one right way to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8725" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T02:27:41.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-15T19:52:26.753" Score="1" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading Nicola Tesla's Autobiography &quot;&lt;em&gt;My Inventions&lt;/em&gt;&quot; for the second time, I noticed that the book is quite different. Indeed, there seem to be in circulation at least two vastly edited versions: One that mentions The Editors of the &lt;em&gt;Electrical Engineer&lt;/em&gt; in the third paragraph of chapter one &quot;&lt;em&gt;My Early Life&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, and one that doesn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the topics covered seem to be quite distinct, I'd like to find out more about whether it was Tesla himself who did the editing, which of the two editions is original, and whether it happened posthumously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any information on the subject be found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="MrMartin" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T10:01:46.127" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T06:59:43.537" Title="Who edited the second edition of Nicola Tesla's autobiography?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;nikola-tesla&gt;&lt;my-inventions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12518" CreationDate="2020-03-16T18:37:06.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I hold &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I believe...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;that gentleman to be the best dressed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;...the gentleman who is best dressed...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;gentleman&quot; has two possible meanings.  The first is a man with good manners and good moral behaviour; and the second is a man born into an upper-class family.  Or it might mean both.  It was usual for upper-class people to think that only upper-class people could have good manners and good moral behaviour.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Best dressed&quot; means &quot;the person with the best clothes&quot;.  What does &quot;best&quot; mean here? We'll find out!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;whose dress no one observes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;... has clothes which do not stand out in a way which people notice.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clothes he is wearing are &quot;normal&quot; or &quot;average&quot;.  If his clothes were unusual in some way, people would remember him as &quot;the man who wore &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; shirt&quot;.  His clothes are similar to everyone else's though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does this matter?  We need to remember that this man is upper-class, so he is rich.  He can probably afford very good clothes.  With his rich friends, he can wear those expensive, high-quality clothes, because all his rich friends are wearing clothes of the same quality.  Wearing smart clothes is also a sign of respect, so if you wear scruffy clothes when you meet your friends, you are being disrespectful to your friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happens when he goes out around town though?  And more than that, what happens if he goes somewhere where everyone is poor?  They can't afford high-quality clothes.  Maybe they're lucky if they even have shoes.  Everyone else there is equally poor, so they don't feel bad compared to each other.  But a rich man walking through the town in his fine clothes will remind them of how poor they really are, and that will make them feel bad - especially parents who can't afford that for their children.  He is noticed because his clothes stand out, and it feels to the poorer people that he is wearing those fine clothes to say to them &quot;I'm better than you are&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... To be respectful to the people who cannot afford the same quality of clothes, he should wear clothes which are not such high quality.  Perhaps not as low-quality as the poorer people are wearing, but still not as high quality as he would wear with his friends.  Then his clothes don't stand out, and it doesn't feel like he's showing off.  And as a result, he is &quot;better dressed&quot; - and a better gentleman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5493" LastEditorUserId="5493" LastEditDate="2020-03-16T22:28:22.597" LastActivityDate="2020-03-16T22:28:22.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-17T18:54:57.633" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read the story in a &lt;strong&gt;Learning To Communicate&lt;/strong&gt;, an English Textbook by &lt;strong&gt;Oxford Printing Press&lt;/strong&gt; about 10 years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Story description&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A boy rides his bus to school and throughout his day he observes different behavior towards him by his classmates and teachers. When he is returning home he expects his mother to be waiting for him but when he reaches home he sees that the drapes of the house are drawn which he finds odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then someone comes to him and tells him that he will be living in a different house since his mother is dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a very sad story and sometimes I find myself remembering it. It'll be nice to read the story again if I can find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8731" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T08:09:56.370" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T08:14:21.423" Title="Story in which a boy's mother dies, he forgets about it when at school but remembers when he arrives home?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6697" CreationDate="2020-03-17T19:27:00.213" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the standards set in the OP, the answer is no, &quot;papishee&quot; is not a term directly linkable to Nora. I have obtained a word searchable version of Richard Ellman's &lt;em&gt;James Joyce&lt;/em&gt;, and Ellman, who is very familiar with Joyce's letters to Nora, makes no mention of the term. The term cannot be found when searching Google Books, etc., outside of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; or Tindall. Joyce made up the term for &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, and there is no evidence he ever used it outside of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, from this term we lean that Anna is catholic, in contrast to HCE, and this is not inconsistent with &lt;em&gt;interpreting&lt;/em&gt; Anna through Nora.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T19:27:00.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12523" CreationDate="2020-03-17T20:58:41.247" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In interpreting these lines, it's important to bear in mind exactly what the Fourth Tempter is trying to do. All the Tempters are showing Thomas a false path -- a path that will lead to damnation. Their temptations grow progressively more subtle, until the Fourth Tempter arrives. Remember that when the Fourth Tempter first appears, Thomas is surprised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who are you? I expected&#xA;  Three visitors, not four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Fourth Tempter thus represents a temptation that comes from very deep inside Thomas's own mind, deep enough that he has never confronted the possibility the Tempter represents. The Tempter points out that Thomas has considered the glory of martyrdom before (&quot;You have thought of that too&quot;). But he hasn't allowed the thought to become conscious. Perhaps for a long time it wasn't relevant, but now that it's becoming a real possibility, he's actively resisting it. Once he has the thought, it becomes possible for him to seek martyrdom for selfish reasons -- for the sake of lasting personal glory. To be martyred because the alternative was to betray God is one thing; to be martyred because you like the idea of being a saint... Well, as Thomas puts it himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last temptation is the greatest treason;&#xA;  To do the right deed for the wrong reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's vital to look at the immediate context, too. Thomas has just said to the Tempter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can I neither act nor suffer &#xA;  Without perdition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous tempters wanted Thomas to do something: to act. The Fourth Tempter wants Thomas to endure something: to suffer. Thomas is dismayed, because he had thought that by not taking action he could avoid damnation. But in this speech, the Fourth Tempter points out that there isn't really a definitive difference between acting and suffering. The actor (the one who acts) must also be a patient (one who suffers). And the same applies in reverse. In effect, the Fourth Tempter is trying to convince Thomas that there is no way to avoid responsibility -- quite literally, that Thomas is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. And if it is, in fact, impossible to avoid damnation, Thomas might as well go down in a blaze of glory, and seek martyrdom for the sake of later sanctification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But finally, it's important to recognise that Eliot isn't trying to present the Fourth Tempter as being fundamentally right. All the Tempters are to some degree reasonable, all of them have something genuinely tempting to offer. But their view of the world is skewed and incomplete, and Thomas ultimately manages to resist all of them. His final speech in Part 1 includes the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I shall no longer act or suffer, to the sword's end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the Tempter may be right to suggest there's no bright line separating suffering from acting, but he's also wrong to imply that that leaves Thomas with no way out. I don't fully understand what Eliot means when he has Thomas say he will &quot;no longer act or suffer&quot; -- it's not as if Thomas dies or goes into a coma at that moment -- and I would tentatively suggest that what Eliot has in mind is something like perfect submission to God's will and complete acceptance of whatever comes next. In his sermon, later in the play, he says &quot;A martyrdom is always the design of God.&quot; This suggests, to me at least, that Thomas can see his martyrdom coming and is accepting of it -- but is also willing to let it pass by, if it's not God's will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3026" LastActivityDate="2020-03-17T20:58:41.247" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-18T09:15:17.573" Score="1" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, by “explicit contents” I really mean the &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; thing.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; when Brutus had planned everything and the night before the assassination he was in his room he had a little &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/charlines.php?CharID=Portia&amp;amp;WorkID=juliuscaesar&amp;amp;cues=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; with his wife Portia. During the conversation Portia says  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Giving myself a voluntary wound &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why we got such an explicit reference in between such a serious and intellectual scene? Why writers put those things in plays which shouldn’t contain it (in my opinion).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got one more example (suggested by @Rand al’Thor) from Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene IV we find  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;the bawdy hand of the [clock] dial is now upon the prick of noon&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please understand that I’m not criticising any playwright all I want is to know why it’s important to make such references when things are better without them (in my opinion).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;DEFENCE&lt;/strong&gt;: Users are asking me to clear out what I think about “thighs”, well (@MattThrower has pointed out) it is “thigh” which is used in that verse not the “thighs”. I think the word “thigh” refer to something explicit or as something &lt;em&gt;pre&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;reproduction&lt;/em&gt; act because a women don’t talk about their body parts which are close to &lt;em&gt;genitals&lt;/em&gt; (as far as I have been around with relatives or acquaintances) and “thigh” is quite close (near) to &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt;. The problem is why would a woman inflict a wound on her “thigh” rather than on any other place, what’s the significance of “thigh” in that verse. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="8723" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T13:06:24.687" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T17:12:33.760" Title="Why do we get some explicit references in Shakespearean plays that are meant for something else?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="26" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-18T21:29:40.187" Score="5" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of epidemics&lt;/a&gt; shows that epidemics have plagued us for almost as long as recorded history.&#xA;Some great works of literature describe events caused or triggered by an epidemic, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_Rex&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oedipus Rex&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the plague is ravaging Thebes,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Giovanni Boccaccio's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Decameron&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a number of young people flee to the countryside while the plague rages in Florence and tell each other stories to while away the time,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Daniel Defoe's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Journal of the Plague Year&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1722) is based on the bubonic plague that struck London in 1665-1666,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jean Giono's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horseman_on_the_Roof_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Hussard sur le toit&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Horseman on the Roof&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1951) describes events set during a cholera epidemic, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;perhaps most famously, Albert Camus' novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Plague&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Peste&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1947) describes the effects of the plague in the French Algerian city of Oran.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest novel in the above list is Daniel Defoe's &lt;em&gt;A Journal of the Plague Year&lt;/em&gt; (1722), since &lt;em&gt;The Decameron&lt;/em&gt; is not a novel but a collection of short stories tied together by a frame story.&#xA;However, what was the oldest European novel that was set during an epidemic? Note that it is not sufficient that a novel merely mentions the epidemic; the epidemic needs to determine the main character's action for at least 50% of the story. It does not matter whether the epidemic is to be taken literally (see Boccaccio and Defoe) or whether it symbolizes something else (Giono).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-18T21:29:40.187" Title="Earliest European novel that was set during an epidemic" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12556" CreationDate="2020-03-19T00:17:13.233" Score="1" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;Our English teacher showed us a &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/magdalene-seven-devils&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poem&lt;/a&gt; about someone trying to organize thoughts/feelings that haunt them into a list, and revising the list as they go.&#xA;She claims that this style of writing is stream of consciousness. But my understanding is that stream of consciousness has to be a &quot;stream&quot;, therefore it cannot have things like full stops and dashes and intentional line breaks, all of which this poem has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in general, can stream of consciousness be structured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8736" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-22T16:31:18.000" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T02:04:22.700" Title="Can stream of consciousness have punctuation/structure?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12429" CreationDate="2020-03-19T17:41:52.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the Storm collection (draw by Don Lawrence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Luckily, I found the first one selling at a flea market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books I read as a child were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Deep World - (De Diepe Wereld) (1978) (written by Philip 'Saul' Dunn) (PT - O Mundo das Profundesas) and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Last Fighter - (De Laatste Vechter) (1979) (written by Martin Lodewijk) (PT - O Último Campeão)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiki:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_(Don_Lawrence)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_(Don_Lawrence)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8623" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T17:41:52.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-19T18:03:26.590" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm thinking of a set of stories that forms a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_cycle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary cycle&lt;/a&gt; in the traditional sense but where they are intended to form a coherent story arc regardless of where in the sequence you start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious first candidate for such a plot would be something in SF/time-travel (from what I can see parts of Dr. Who glance in that direction), but it seems to me that it would also present some interesting opportunities where the described events are not cyclic but still work as (possibly wildly diverging?) strictly linear stories depending on where things are stated.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8738" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T18:03:26.590" Title="Are there any &quot;literary cycles&quot; that are cyclic?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-19T18:12:39.457" Score="0" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &lt;em&gt;Oryx and Crake&lt;/em&gt; by Margaret Atwood, why did Crake choose Jimmy to take care of the Crakers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please answer using evidence from textual quotes to support your claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8739" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T18:53:38.393" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T21:46:31.517" Title="Why did Crake choose Jimmy to take care of the Crakers?" Tags="&lt;margaret-atwood&gt;&lt;oryx-and-crake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12536" CreationDate="2020-03-19T19:20:36.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The discussion of sexual allusions or inferences in Shakespeare has been going on for a century or more. There can be no discussion, though, about the second quotation. (the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon). It's dirty. To answer Knight's question: Shakespeare's trade was theater, not literature. He wrote with his audience in mind, not literary critics and scholars. The word &quot;prick&quot; appears six times in Act II, Scene 4 - and nowhere else in Romeo and Juliet. It is there to entertain his audience, who would have started chuckling at the fourth or fifth &quot;prick.&quot; Maybe it's a stretch, but one might also say he was training his audience, training them to listen, training them for &quot;Hamlet&quot;, &quot;Lear&quot;, &quot;The Tempest&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T19:20:36.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12541" CreationDate="2020-03-19T19:36:46.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Warning: spoilers follow!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first person to ask Jimmy to take care of the Crakers was Oryx, on the last night of her life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Jimmy, I want you to promise me something.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Sure, what?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “If Crake isn’t here, if he goes away somewhere, and if I’m not here either, I want you to take care of the Crakers.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Not here? Why wouldn’t you be here?” Anxiety again, suspicion: were they planning to go off together, leaving him behind? Was that it? Had he only been some sort of toy-boy for Oryx, a court jester for Crake? “You’re going on a honeymoon, or what?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Don’t be silly, Jimmy. They are like children, they need someone. You have to be kind with them.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “You’re looking at the wrong man,” said Jimmy. “If I had to spend more than five minutes with them they’d drive me nuts.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “I know you could do it. I’m serious, Jimmy. Say you’ll do it, don’t let me down. Promise?” She was stroking him, running a row of kisses up his arm.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Okay then. Cross my heart and hope to die. Happy now?” It didn’t cost him anything, it was all purely theoretical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crake's last instruction to Jimmy is rather oblique, but it seems to convey the same idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He looked at Jimmy, a direct look, unsmiling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “I’m counting on you,” he said. Then he slit her throat.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Jimmy shot him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's just possible that Jimmy ended up being the one to take care of the Crakers by &lt;strong&gt;coincidence&lt;/strong&gt; - he was the one who happened to be nearest to them, sealed into the inner compound, while everyone outside either didn't care, couldn't get in, or was turned away by Jimmy's lies. But it seems more likely that nothing in Crake's meticulous plan was coincidence. Jimmy didn't &quot;just happen&quot; to be Crake's best friend and Oryx's lover. He was there, with them, at the centre of events - he would be the natural choice to be left behind. He was probably &lt;strong&gt;the only person who cared enough about Crake and Oryx to continue their work&lt;/strong&gt;, and almost certainly &lt;strong&gt;the only person besides Oryx that Crake cared about&lt;/strong&gt; on any level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the thought of them that keeps Jimmy from ending his life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Once in a while he considered killing himself – it seemed mandatory – but somehow he didn’t have the required energy. Anyway, killing yourself was something you did for an audience, as on nitee-nite.com. Under the circumstances, the here and now, it was a gesture that lacked elegance. He could imagine Crake’s amused contempt, and the disappointment of Oryx: &lt;em&gt;But Jimmy! Why do you give up? You have a job to do! You promised, remember?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, despite his thoughts during his last conversation with Oryx, he doesn't abandon the Crakers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I could leave them behind, he thought. Just leave them. Let them fend for themselves. They aren’t my business.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But he couldn’t do that, because although the Crakers weren’t his business, they were now his responsibility. Who else did they have?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who else did he have, for that matter? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then why Jimmy? Why did he become Crake's friend (assuming that becoming Oryx's lover wasn't part of the grand masterplan, although it may well have been)? That might have been chance - since he was Crake's friend since boyhood, he ended up being there with him until the very end, the only person with sufficient loyalty to Crake. But again, assuming Crake to be completely without emotion and perfect in all his planning, can we find a reason why Jimmy was the best suited person to take care of the Crakers after the apocalypse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, look at his skills. Jimmy was no scientist, like Crake. But science wasn't what was needed at that time. The Crakers had been created and educated so that they could take care of themselves, and new scientific discoveries might in time come from their new civilisation. Jimmy's role, as well as the basics of getting them out of the complex to a place of safety, was in telling them stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of the buildings along the way were still smouldering. There were many questions, and much explaining to do. &lt;em&gt;What is that smoke? It is a thing of Crake’s. Why is that child lying down, with no eyes? It was the will of Crake.&lt;/em&gt; And so forth.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Snowman made it up as he went along. He knew what an improbable shepherd he was.To reassure them, he tried his best to appear dignified and reliable, wise and kindly. A lifetime of deviousness came to his aid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Jimmy/Snowman is perhaps a less improbable shepherd than he gives himself credit for. &lt;strong&gt;His talent is with words, with stories&lt;/strong&gt;, with making things up and convincing people. This is what the Crakers need in the post-apocalyptic world. They've been given enough physical attributes and training to take care of themselves if given a territory; they just need someone to take them there and give them a story to start them off. The story of Oryx and Crake fills the last remaining element that's needed to create their civilisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: on one level, Jimmy was simply in the right place at the right time, being in the inner complex with the Crakers when the apocalypse hit; on another level, he was the only logical choice at that point, being the only person close enough to Crake and Oryx that he would stay in place and do what needed doing; and on a deeper level, he has the right skills for the job, being a storyteller to create a mythology for the Crakers, and being tough and devious enough to survive the post-apocalyptic world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-19T21:46:31.517" LastActivityDate="2020-03-19T21:46:31.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-19T20:04:38.937" Score="6" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a question about &lt;em&gt;Don Quijote de la Mancha&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/ediciones-conmemorativas/el-quijote-edicion-de-2015&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edición conmemorativa de la RAE y la ASALE&lt;/a&gt; / 400th-anniversary commemorative edition by the Spanish language academies).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter XXVI of the second (1615) par,: the puppeteer Maese Pedro says something in the lines of &amp;quot;more impropierties than atoms has the sun&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation is horrendous (sorry). He says that even if he says (with his puppets) as many things as the number of atoms in the sun, he doesn't care as long as he gets the money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This edition includes lots of annotations for words not used in modern Spanish (the edition is almost identical to the original by Cervantes) but this is the first instance of a modern word (atom) present there with its present meaning (small build blocks of the sun). The only meaning of atom before that (that I know of) is &amp;quot;indivisible&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit with the text in Spanish:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lo cual oído por maese Pedro, cesó el tocar y dijo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No mire vuesa merced en niñerías, ni quiera llevar las cosas tan por el cabo, que no se le halle. ¿No se representan por ahí casi de ordinario mil comedias llenas de mil impropiedades y disparates, y con todo eso, corren felicísimamente su carrera y se escuchan no sólo con aplauso, sino con admiración y todo? Prosigue, muchacho, y deja decir, que como yo llene mi talego, siquiera represente más impropiedades que &lt;strong&gt;átomos&lt;/strong&gt; tiene el sol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3211" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T16:52:02.783" Title="What does &quot;atom&quot; mean in Don Quixote?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;miguel-de-cervantes&gt;&lt;don-quixote&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9132" CreationDate="2020-03-20T14:35:19.187" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lady Catherine's daughter would have got her maternal fortune owing to the fact that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;she is a single child making her a lot more eligible to her mother's fortune, and &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lady Catherine wanted her child to be married off to Mr Darcy, another aristocratic rank holder.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She for sure, would not have left her child deprived of anything to rise the status to Mr Darcy. If not by her looks (which played an essential role at that time for matrimony), then by her mother's fortune which she would inherit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving on to the Bennets, their sole aim was to marry off their daughters to distinguished or at least worthy households, which they nearly succeeded at. We already know that Mr Bennet had a tussle with Mr Collins's father over the property which may mean that Mr Collins may have come to dethrone them from their own inhabitance. We cannot intermingle the situation of the then middle class based Bennets with not one, but 5 daughters, with Lady Catherine, whose estate belonged to her, and her alone with no Claimant to her fortune. So in a way, class, number of daughters, politics, intervene to the two different situations. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8741" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T15:25:22.353" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T15:25:22.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-20T14:49:07.587" Score="3" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the rhythm of the following line from the start of Byron's &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want a hero: an uncommon want,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it iambic or trochaic? It's a tetrameter and not a pentameter that I am aware of. If it's iambic then why so? Please justify - the same if it's trochaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8741" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T15:22:35.857" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T17:20:01.850" Title="What is the rhythm of the line 'I want a hero, an uncommon want'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12547" CreationDate="2020-03-20T17:05:29.063" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Feet are arbitrary concepts in English verse (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9455/3003&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for a detailed discussion of the issue), so when you have a line on its own, with no context, it is impossible to say what its scansion ought to be. All you can say in isolation is what the pattern of streses is. In this case I read the line as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; x  /   x  / x  x  x  /  x   /&#xA; I want a hero: an uncommon want,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are various way to turn this into feet. We could apply the rule “each foot ends with a single stress” (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/frost-henddecasyllabics-for-once-then-something/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patrick Gillespie&lt;/a&gt;) and get a tetrameter with three iambs and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paeon_(prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paeon&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; x  /     x  /     x  x  x  /      x   /&#xA; I want | a he- | ro: an uncom- | mon want,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or we could apply the rule “each foot starts with a single stress” (like &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemsofgerardman030114mbp/page/n11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerard Manley Hopkins&lt;/a&gt;) and get a tetrameter in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprung_rhythm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sprung rhythm&lt;/a&gt; with an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacrusis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anacrusis&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; x    /   x    / x  x  x      /  x     /&#xA; I | want a | hero: an un- | common | want,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or we could apply the rule “each foot has two syllables” and get a pentameter with four iambs and one &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pyrrhic foot&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; x  /     x  /     x  x    x  /      x   /&#xA; I want | a he- | ro: an | uncom- | mon want,&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these are equally good ways to scan the line, considered on its own. But consider the line in the context of the opening stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want a hero: an uncommon want,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          When every year and month sends forth a new one,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          The age discovers he is not the true one;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We all have seen him, in the pantomime,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the lines have ten or eleven syllables, and all but two have five stresses, which means that if we adopt the rule “iambic pentameter with usual range of variations”, we can scan every line in a similar and regular way. This is much simpler than the other approaches, which will cause the number of feet to change from line to line in an irregular way. It is also confirmed by the verse form, which is recognizable as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottava_rima&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ottava rima&lt;/a&gt;, and in English this is commonly written in iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual range of variations includes substituion with pyrrhic feet (as in the first line), substitution with trochees, as in the last line of the stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  /    x     x  /     x   /        x  /      x   /&#xA; Sent to | the dev- | il some- | what ere | his time.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘feminine’ endings&lt;/a&gt;, as in the second, fourth and sixth lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;   x  /       x  /     x    /       x     /      x  /    x &#xA; When ev- | ery year | and month | sends forth | a new | one,  &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-20T17:20:01.850" LastActivityDate="2020-03-20T17:20:01.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-20T21:55:37.177" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A Common Confusion&amp;quot; is a very short story by Franz Kafka, only three paragraphs long with an English translation &lt;a href=&quot;https://zork.net/%7Epatty/pattyland/kafka/confusion.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available in full online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common experience, resulting in a common confusion. A. has to transact important business with B. in H. He goes to H. for a preliminary interview, accomplishes the journey there in ten minutes, and the journey back in the same time, and on returning boasts to his family of his expedition. Next day he goes again to H., this time to settle his business finally. As that by all appearances will require several hours, A. leaves very early in the morning. But although all the surrounding circumstances, at least in A.'s estimation, are exactly the same as the day before, this time it takes him ten hours to reach H. When he arrives there quite exhausted in the evening he is informed that B., annoyed at his absence, had left half an hour before to go to A.'s village, and that they must have passed each other on the road. A. is advised to wait. But in his anxiety about his business he sets off at once and hurries home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This time he covers the distance, without paying any particular attention to the fact, practically in an instant. At home he learns that B. had arrived quite early, immediately after A.'s departure, indeed that he had met A. on the threshold and reminded him of his business; but A. had replied that he had no time to spare, he must go at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of this incomprehensible behavior of A., however, B. had stayed on to wait for A.'s return. It is true, he had asked several times whether A. was not back yet, but he was still sitting up in A.'s room. Overjoyed at the opportunity of seeing B. at once and explaining everything to him, A. rushes upstairs. He is almost at the top, when he stumbles, twists a sinew, and almost fainting with the pain, incapable even of uttering a cry, only able to moan faintly in the darkness, he hears B.--impossible to tell whether at a great distance or quite near him--stamping down the stairs in a violent rage and vanishing for good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The German text, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.textlog.de/32094.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Eine alltägliche Verwirrung&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, is also available online.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the story depict? What is the inner meaning of this short story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8744" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T10:10:43.280" Title="What is the inner meaning of &quot;A Common Confusion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12551" CreationDate="2020-03-21T16:21:38.153" Score="2" ViewCount="1157" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar when Brutus had planned everything and the night before the assassination he was in his room he had a little conversation with his wife Portia. During the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/charlines.php?CharID=Portia&amp;amp;WorkID=juliuscaesar&amp;amp;cues=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conversation&lt;/a&gt; Portia says  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Giving myself a voluntary wound &#xA;  Here, in the thigh: can I bear that with patience.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And not my husband’s secrets? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the above verses mean? I find it a little &lt;em&gt;open&lt;/em&gt; when a woman talks about wounding her &lt;em&gt;thigh&lt;/em&gt;, I find it beacuse of cultural influences. So, as the play at that moment was at a serious turn why we got such a reference? What’s the significance of “wounding the thigh” ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T18:25:08.263" Title="What does this verse said by Portia in Julius Caesar mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12550" CreationDate="2020-03-21T17:57:40.373" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s main sources for &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biographies of Julius Caesar and Marcus Brutus&lt;/a&gt;, which he read in the 1579 English translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_North&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas North&lt;/a&gt;. The episode you are asking about appears in the biography of Brutus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His wife Porcia (as we have told you before) was the daughter of Cato, whom Brutus married being his cousin, not a maiden, but a young widow after the death of her first husband Bibulus, by whom she had also a young son called Bibulus, who afterwards wrote a book of the acts and gests¹ of Brutus, extant at this present day. This young lady, being excellently well seen² in philosophy, loving her husband well, and being of a noble courage, as she was also wise: because she would not ask her husband what he ailed before she had made some proof by³ her self: she took a little razor, such as barbers occupy⁴ to pare men’s nails, and, causing her maids and women to go out of her chamber, gave herself a great gash withal in her thigh, that she was straight all of a gore blood⁵: and incontinently⁶ after, a vehement fever took her, by reason of the pain of her wound. Then perceiving her husband was marvellously out of quiet, and that he could take no rest, even in her greatest pain of all she spake in this sort unto him: “I being, O Brutus,” said she “the daughter of Cato, was married unto thee; not to be thy bed-fellow and companion in bed and at board only, like a harlot, but to be partaker also with thee of thy good and evil fortune. Now for thyself, I can find no cause of fault in thee touching our match: but for my part, how may I shew my duty towards thee and how much I would do for thy sake, if I cannot constantly⁷ bear a secret mischance or grief with thee, which requireth secrecy and fidelity? I confess that a woman’s wit commonly is too weak to keep a secret safely: but yet, Brutus, good education and the company of virtuous men have some power to reform the defect of nature. And for myself, I have this benefit moreover, that I am the daughter of Cato, and wife of Brutus. This notwithstanding, I did not trust to any of these things before, until that now I have found by experience that no pain or grief whatsoever can overcome me.” With those words she shewed him her wound on her thigh, and told him what she had done to prove herself. Brutus was amazed to hear what she said unto him, and lifting up his hands to heaven, he besought the gods to give him the grace he might bring his enterprise to so good pass⁸, that he might be found a husband worthy of so noble a wife as Porcia: so he then did comfort her the best he could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;¹deeds; ²well versed; ³of; ⁴use; ⁵covered in blood; ⁶immediately; ⁷with constancy; ⁸success.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Plutarch (c. 100). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearesplu00nortgoog/page/n144/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Life of Marcus Brutus&lt;/a&gt;’. Translated by Thomas North (1579). In Walter Skeat, ed. (1875), &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare’s Plutarch&lt;/em&gt;, p. 115. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quite clear about Portia’s motivations: in order to demonstrate to her husband in the most dramatic fashion that she has the fortitude to endure pain, and the constancy to keep secrets, she has cut herself and hidden the wound from her husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plutarch’s original Greek is ‘μηρός’ meaning ‘thigh’ or ‘thigh-bone’. The word appears in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0133%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D172&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; I.190&lt;/a&gt; where Achilles wonders whether to ‘draw his sharp sword from beside his thigh’ (‘φάσγανον ὀξὺ ἐρυσσάμενος παρὰ μηροῦ’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll see that Shakespeare follows North’s translation of Plutarch very closely at some points in the scene. In this extract I’ve bolded parts of Shakespeare’s text that particularly resemble passages in North:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PORTIA.&lt;/em&gt; I should not need, if you were gentle Brutus.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Within the bond of &lt;strong&gt;marriage&lt;/strong&gt;, tell me, Brutus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is it excepted I should know no secrets&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That appertain to you? Am I yourself&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But, as it were, in sort or limitation,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To &lt;strong&gt;keep with you at meals, comfort your bed&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of your good pleasure? If it be no more,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Portia is Brutus’ &lt;strong&gt;harlot&lt;/strong&gt;, not his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BRUTUS.&lt;/em&gt; You are my true and honorable wife,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As dear to me as are the ruddy drops&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That visit my sad heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;PORTIA.&lt;/em&gt; If this were true, then should I know this secret.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I grant I am a woman, but withal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A woman that Lord &lt;strong&gt;Brutus took to wife&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I grant I am a woman, but withal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A woman well reputed, &lt;strong&gt;Cato’s daughter&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Think you I am no stronger than my sex,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Being so father’d and so husbanded?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tell me your counsels, I will not disclose ’em.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have made strong &lt;strong&gt;proof of my constancy&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Giving myself a voluntary &lt;strong&gt;wound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here in the thigh&lt;/strong&gt;. Can I bear that with patience&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And not my husband’s &lt;strong&gt;secrets&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;BRUTUS.&lt;/em&gt; O ye &lt;strong&gt;gods&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Render me &lt;strong&gt;worthy of this noble wife&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (1599). &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, act II, scene I.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question wonders (if I interpret it correctly) whether ‘thigh’ has a sexual connotation. I think that there is a choice of interpretations here. The plain reading of the passage is that Portia is demonstrating her bravery and constancy, and the cut is in the thigh because this is the best place to keep the wound secret, as it will be hidden by clothing. But we also recognise that deliberate self-injury can be a response to an intolerable situation, when one’s words and concerns are being ignored, as Portia’s are by Brutus. It is in this second interpretation that ‘thigh’ might have a sexual significance: a part of the body that ought, in a healthy marriage, to be a site of sexual pleasure, becomes, in Portia and Brutus’s marriage, a target of secret violence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last interpretation seems to have influenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabetta_Sirani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elisabetta Sirani&lt;/a&gt;’s 1664 painting of the episode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YOrVl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YOrVl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Portia dressed in a red Baroque-era gown, reclines on a couch, lifting a small dagger with which she has just stabbed her thigh, and looks down at the wound. Four figures are visible through a doorway, perhaps Portia’s attendants and her husband Brutus.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elisabetta_Sirani_-_Portia_wounding_her_thigh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Image from Wikimedia Commons&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T09:18:01.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12553" CreationDate="2020-03-22T10:33:55.367" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Agatha Christie’s mystery novel &lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, the actress Angela Sutcliffe is being interviewed about the death of Stephen Babbington, vicar of St. Petroch’s church, Loomouth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Dear old man, did they think I’d had an affair with him? Archdeacons are sometimes very naughty, aren’t they? So why not vicars? There’s &lt;strong&gt;the man in the barrel&lt;/strong&gt;, isn’t there? But I must clear the poor man’s memory. I’d never seen him before in my life.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1934). &lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 20. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is ‘the man in the barrel’ here? The most well-known crime involving a barrel is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gangrule.com/events/the-barrel-murder-1903&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the killing of Benedetto Madonia&lt;/a&gt; by a New York mafia gang in 1903, but this does not seem to have involved any members of the clergy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T10:44:00.563" Title="Who is ‘the man in the barrel’ in ‘Three Act Tragedy’?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;three-act-tragedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12552" CreationDate="2020-03-22T10:44:00.563" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're barking up the wrong tree by looking for murders involving a barrel. In the passage you quote, the context is about the notion of clergymen being immoral, &quot;naughty&quot; as she puts it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference then would be to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Davidson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harold Davidson&lt;/a&gt;, also known as the &quot;Rector of Stiffkey&quot; or the &quot;Prostitutes' Padre&quot;. He was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rector_(ecclesiastical)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rector&lt;/a&gt; who was prosecuted in court for immorality, accused of associating with &quot;women of loose character&quot;, and &quot;accosting, molesting, and importuning young females for immoral purposes&quot;. After his conviction and defrocking, he paraded himself in a barrel on the Blackpool seafront in order to earn money for his defence campaign.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of this happened in 1932, so it would have been in recent memory at the time &lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; was written. (I found it by searching the web for &quot;vicar in a barrel&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T10:44:00.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12554" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12555" CreationDate="2020-03-22T12:17:52.777" Score="10" ViewCount="1873" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dorothy L. Sayers’ novel &lt;em&gt;Unnatural Death&lt;/em&gt;, the barrister Mr Towkington advises Lord Peter Wimsey to be careful to avoid libel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You are too easily surprised,’ said Mr Towkington. ‘Many words have no legal meaning. Others have a legal meaning very unlike their ordinary meaning. For example, the word “daffy-down-dilly”. &lt;strong&gt;It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly&lt;/strong&gt;. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing. No, I certainly advise you &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; to do it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dorothy L. Sayers (1927). &lt;em&gt;Unnatural Death&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 14. London: Ernest Benn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the libellous meaning of ‘daffy-down-dilly’? The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; says only:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;daffydowndilly, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; 1. A daffodil; used at first in the generic sense. Still a widespread popular name of the Yellow Daffodil. 2. A shrub: probably the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_mezereum&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mezereon&lt;/a&gt;, which is still so called in Yorkshire ‘from the slight similarity of the Greek name &lt;em&gt;Daphne&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Daffodil&lt;/em&gt;’ (Britten and Holland).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Eric Partridge adds another meaning, equally unhelpful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;daffy-down-dilly&lt;/strong&gt;. A dandy: ca. 1830-80. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leman_Rede&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leman Rede&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Sixteen-String Jack&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Eric Partridge (1923). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460523/page/n215/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary Of Slang And Unconventional English&lt;/em&gt;, p. 204&lt;/a&gt;. London: Routledge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T12:17:52.777" Title="What is the libellous meaning of ‘daffy-down-dilly’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;dorothy-l-sayers&gt;&lt;unnatural-death&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12554" CreationDate="2020-03-22T12:17:52.777" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: A ‘daffy-down-dilly’ is a lawyer who engages in double dealing, that is, representation of both sides in a case, for his own advantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference is to a case reported in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolle%27s_Abridgment&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rolle’s abridgment&lt;/a&gt; of the Common Law:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Si home dit al un Counceller del ley en le North, Thou art a Daffa-down-dilly. Action giſt ove averrment que les parols ſignifie que il eſt un Ambedexter, Mich. 10 Car. B.R. En Peares Caſe dit d’eſtre adjudge en Scaccario, &amp;amp; agree per curiam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Rolle (1668). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0yla8HV3EIgC&amp;amp;pg=PA55&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Un Abridgment des plusiers Cases et Resolutions del Common Ley&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 55&lt;/a&gt;. London: A. Crooke &lt;em&gt;et al.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was translated into English by Knightley D’Anvers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a Man ſays of a Counſellor of Law in the North, Thou art (g) a Daffa-down-dilly an Action lies, with an Averment that the words ſignifie that he is an (h) Ambodexter. Mich. 10 Car. B. R. in (i) Peare’s Caſe, ſaid to have been adjudged in Scaccario, and agreed per Curiam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(g) So if he calls him Ambodexter. Dal. 97. cited Moor 409. ſaid Godb. 214. adjudged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(h) B is a good Attorney, but that he will play on both Sides, actionable; 1. Brownl. 5. per Curiam, tho’ Judgment was given againſt the Plaintiff for a Fault in the Declaration.—He is a Paltry fellow, for he deals on both Sides, and deceives them which put him in truſt; actionable being ſpoke of an Attorney. Noy 11. adjudged niſi, Yelv. 32 adjudged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(i) Cart. 214. S.C. cited. Noy 98. S.C. cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Knightley D’Anvers (1705). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-jVWAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA113&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A General Abridgment of the Common Law&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 113&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Walthoe.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meaning of ‘ambidexter’ is in the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ambidexter, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 2.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Law.&lt;/em&gt; A corrupt lawyer (or occasionally juror) who takes fees or bribes from both sides in a case. Now &lt;em&gt;historical&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T12:17:52.777" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2020-03-22T16:31:07.227" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In general, a lot of terms in literature are not very strictly defined: the definitions may vary among different schools of study and different people may use the same term in different ways. I say this not only from my viewpoint as a mathematician (coming from a field where every term is very strictly and unambiguously defined) - it's quite clear in discussions about the definition of literature itself (about which this site has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/definition-of-literature&quot;&gt;whole tag&lt;/a&gt;) such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9209/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, as well as attempts to define specific genres, that literature is a topic where most terms do not have a single fixed meaning that everyone agrees on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mention this in order to clarify that this answer is not completely debunking your proposition that a stream of consciousness should not have punctuation or line breaks. The example cited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stream_of_consciousness#Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; from James Joyce's &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; certainly has no punctuation, and Wikipedia says, &quot;&lt;em&gt;Stream-of-consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in thought and lack of some or all punctuation.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what we might call an extreme form of the stream-of-consciousness style of writing. Note the &quot;some or all punctuation&quot; - it's not necessary to dispense with full stops and dashes altogether. Let's check another definition, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/stream-of-consciousness/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiteraryDevices.Net&lt;/a&gt;. Here it says, &quot;&lt;em&gt;The stream of consciousness style of writing is marked by the sudden rise of thoughts and lack of punctuation.&lt;/em&gt;&quot; But look at the examples. Firstly, again from &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He is young Leopold, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precious manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clambrassil to the high school, his book satchel on him bandolier wise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother’s thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, from Virginia Woolf's &lt;em&gt;Mrs Dalloway&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What a lark! What a plunge! For so it always seemed to me when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which I can hear now, I burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as I then was) solemn, feeling as I did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen …&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirdly, from David Lodge's &lt;em&gt;The British Museum is Falling Down&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It partook, he thought, shifting his weight in the saddle, of metempsychosis, the way his humble life fell into moulds prepared by literature. Or was it, he wondered, picking his nose, the result of closely studying the sentence structure of the English novelists? One had resigned oneself to having no private language any more, but one had clung wistfully to the illusion of a personal property of events. A find and fruitless illusion, it seemed, for here, inevitably came the limousine, with its Very Important Personage, or Personages, dimly visible in the interior. The policeman saluted, and the crowd pressed forward, murmuring ‘Philip’, ‘Tony’, ‘Margaret’, ‘Prince Andrew’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;All of these use at least some punctuation.&lt;/strong&gt; As for line breaks, well, they're one of the main things distinguishing poetry from prose. Without line breaks, a poem wouldn't be a poem any more. So if we want the phrase &quot;stream-of-consciousness poem&quot; not to be an oxymoron, then &lt;strong&gt;line breaks must be allowable too&lt;/strong&gt;. And certainly some critics have referred to stream-of-consciousness poems: for example, T. S. Eliot's &quot;The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock&quot; has often been referred to as employing a stream of consciousness technique, skipping from one barely-related thought to another, despite the punctuation and line breaks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I grow old ... I grow old ...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not think that they will sing to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: the definition of what constitutes a &quot;stream of consciousness&quot; isn't set in stone, but at least some definitions certainly allow the existence of punctuation and line breaks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-22T16:31:07.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12228" CreationDate="2020-03-22T22:26:19.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;monkey tablet&quot;, a Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet identified by Farouk Al-Rawi, is important in several ways, as Al-Rawi and Andrew R. George explain in their article&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/18512/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Back to the Cedar Forest: The beginning and end of Tablet V of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgameš&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Journal of Cuneiform Studies&lt;/em&gt;, 66 (2014).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it refutes the hypothesis that MS (manuscript) H from Nineveh and the Late Babylonian MS dd from Uruk (both manuscripts of Tablet V) represented two different textual traditions.&#xA;The tablet identified by Al-Rawi is in Neo-Babylonian and has the same incipit as MS H. (Note: The monkey tablet being Neo-Babylonian makes it a later manuscript than both MS H and MS dd.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Assyriologists have long debated the relative order of MS H and MS AA, both from Nineveh. (Nineveh is where Assurbanipal had his libraries, which were destroyed in 612 B.C.)&#xA;George Smith, who first translated both fragments in the 1870s assumed the order MS H first, MS AA second. However, many Assyriologist in the 20th century claimed that MS AA belonged to Tablet IV instead of Tablet V.&#xA;However, the &quot;monkey tablet&quot; &quot;proves incontestably that the text of MS AA continues that of MS H after a short gap, and that both are witnesses of cols. i and ii of Tablet V as it was known at Nineveh.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, and probably most importantly for lay readers, the &quot;monkey tablet&quot; contains lines that had been missing in all known manuscripts of Tablet V.&#xA;In his book &lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos&lt;/em&gt; (C. H. Beck, 2008, page 19) Walther Sallaberger presents a table describing the level of completeness of the tablets that make up the Gilgamesh Epic.&#xA;In 2007 or 2008, the available manuscripts of Tablet V provided 21% of that tablet's &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; lines; 50% of its lines were missing.&#xA;(As is often the case with clay tablets, lines may be incompletely preserved due to physical damage. Sometimes, part of a line that is missing on one tablet can be found on another tablet; in other cases, line continuations are inferred from lines that are repeated elsewhere in a manuscript. This still leaves many lines incomplete.)&#xA;For comparison, we have only 10% complete lines from Tablet IV (the worst case) and 91% complete lines from Tablet XI (the best case so far).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Andrew R. George's translation of Tablet V (&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian&lt;/em&gt;, Penguin, 1999), the text breaks off after line 10 and resumes at what George assumed to be line 53.&#xA;Based on the new tablet, 20 lines could be added to fill part of that gap.&#xA;Gilgamesh and Enkidu have arrived at the Cedar Forest, which is described as a jungle with cicadas, pigeons etcetera.&#xA;There are even monkeys, which gave the tablet its name on various blogs and online articles; however, Al-Rawi and George don't use the term &quot;monkey tablet&quot; in their article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Benjamin R. Foster's translation (&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition, Norton, 2019), the lines about the monkeys go as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mother monkeys kept up their calls, baby monkeys chirruped.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Like a band of musicians and drummers, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  They resounded all day long in the presence of Humbaba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I used Benjamin R. Foster's translation instead of Stanley Lombardo's because Foster is an Assyriologist while Lombardo is a Classicist.&#xA;For a full translation of the fragment, see Al-Rawi and George 's article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-03-26T15:47:37.140" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T15:47:37.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12560" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12562" CreationDate="2020-03-23T16:28:00.070" Score="2" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne Bronte's short poem &quot;A Reminiscence&quot;, originally published under the name Acton Bell in the book &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1019/1019-h/1019-h.htm#link2H_4_0042&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell&lt;/em&gt; (1846)&lt;/a&gt; published jointly with her two sisters, is addressed to a deceased loved one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yes, thou art gone! and never more&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Thy sunny smile shall gladden me;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       But I may pass the old church door,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And pace the floor that covers thee,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;May stand upon the cold, damp stone,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And think that, frozen, lies below&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       The lightest heart that I have known,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       The kindest I shall ever know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yet, though I cannot see thee more,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       'Tis still a comfort to have seen;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       And though thy transient life is o'er,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       'Tis sweet to think that thou hast been;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To think a soul so near divine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Within a form so angel fair,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       United to a heart like thine,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;       Has gladdened once our humble sphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a personal poem addressed to someone in her own life, and if so who?&lt;/strong&gt; At the time this book of poems was published, her sisters Charlotte and Emily and her brother Branwell were still alive, as well as their father. Her mother and two older sisters had died when she was still a small child, but this poem seems to me as if it's addressed to someone she knew as an adult. Is there any evidence (e.g. by comparing with her other poems addressed to people) that it's personal for her, and who she might have been thinking of when writing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T19:25:44.267" Title="To whom is Anne Bronte's &quot;A Reminiscence&quot; addressed?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;anne-bronte&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12561" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12550" CreationDate="2020-03-23T18:25:08.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main sources for Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; are three of Plutarch's &lt;em&gt;Lives&lt;/em&gt;, namely &lt;em&gt;Marcus Brutus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Marcus Antonius&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;Shakespeare's use of Plutarch's work is documented in detail in &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Plutarch: The Lives of Julius Caesar, Brutus, Marcus Antonius and Coriolanus in the translation of Thomas North&lt;/em&gt;, edited by T. J. B. Spencer (Penguin 1964).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source for the current passage is &lt;em&gt;The Life of Marcus Brutus&lt;/em&gt;, which contains a similar conversation between Brutus and his wife Portia (pages 118-119 in the 1964 printing of Spencer's book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'I being, O Brutus,' said she, 'the daughter of Cato, was married unto thee, not to be thy bedfellow and companion in bed and at board only, like a harlot, but to be a partaker also with thee of the good and evil fortune.&#xA;  (...) But for my part, how may I show my duty towards thee and how muchI would do for thy sake, if I cannot constantly bear a secret mischance or grief with thee, which requireth secrey and fidelity? (...)&#xA;  And for myself I have this benefit moreover: that I am the daughter of Cato and wife of Brutus. This notwithstanding, I did not trust to any of these things before, until that now I have found by experience that no pain nor grief whatsoever can overcome me.'&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;With those words she showed him her wound on her thigh and told him what she had done to prove herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portia's father, Marcus Porcius Cato (who was also Brutus's uncle) was famous for his rigid moral code. Cato had fought against Caesar and after his final resistance in Utica (in Africa) he committed suicide in order to avoid being captured.&#xA;The implication of this is that Portia has no reason to like Caesar, and in this dialogue she convinces her husband Brutus that she can keep a secret and shows that she has put her powers of resolution to the test (&quot;made strong proof of my constancy&quot;; see Norman Sanders's paraphrase).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editors of the play, e.g. Arthur Humphries (Oxford Shakespeare, 1984) and Norman Sanders (New Penguin Shakespeare, 1967) don't mention any &quot;Freudian&quot; subtext that might be read into these lines.&#xA;Those looking for a sexual subtext should compare Portia's words about her wound with from Act 1, scene 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;CAESAR: Calphurnia. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  CALPHURNIA: Here, my lord. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  CAESAR: Stand you directly in Antonius' way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  When he doth run his course. Antonius.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  ANTONY: Caesar, my lord?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  CAESAR: Forget not, in your speed, Antonius,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  To touch Calphurnia; for our elders say,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The barren, touchèd in this holy chase,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Shake off their sterile curse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This probably sounds a bit obscure, but it is based on Plutarch's &lt;em&gt;The Life of Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; (see page 83 in Spencer's book):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At that time the feast &lt;em&gt;Lupercalia&lt;/em&gt; was celebrated, the which in old time men say was the feast of sheperds or herdmen and is much like unto the feast of the Lycaeans in Arcadia.&#xA;  But howsoever it is, that day there are divers noblemen's sons, young men - and some of them magistrates themselves that govern them - which run naked through the city,&#xA;  striking in sport them they meet in their way with leather thongs, hair and all on, to make them give place.&#xA;  And many noblewome and gentlewomen also go of purpose to stand in their way, and do put forth their hands to be stricken, as scholars hold them out to their schoolmasters to be stricken with the ferula;&#xA;  persuading themselves that, being with child, they shall have good delivery, and also, being barren, that it will make them to conceive with child.&#xA;  (...) Antonius, who was Consul at that time, was one of them that ran this holy course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plutarch does not mention Calphurnia's sterility (&quot;sterile curse&quot; in Shakespeare), which Freudian readers might see as contrasting with Portia's ability to bleed.&#xA;Whether Shakespeare had this type of contrast in mind is a different matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T18:25:08.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12560" CreationDate="2020-03-23T19:25:44.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Biographers of the Brontës have generally guessed that the addressee was &lt;strong&gt;William Weightman&lt;/strong&gt;, who was curate at Haworth from 1839 until he died of cholera in 1842.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This identification is purely speculative, but there does not seem to be a better candidate. Weightman is handsome, if not perhaps “angel fair”, in a pencil sketch by Charlotte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tUNL3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Weightman is sketched in profile facing right, in soft pencil. His curly hair is combed forwards and he has mutton-chop whiskers, but his lips and chin are clean-shaven.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had a reputation for flirting with women:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I dare say you have received a valentine this year from our bonny-faced friend the curate of Haworth. I got a precious specimen a few days before I left home, but I knew better how to treat it than I did those we received a year ago. I am up to the dodges and artifices of his lordship's character. He knows I know him, and you cannot conceive how quiet and respectful he has long been. Mind I am not writing against him—I never will do that. I like him very much. I honour and admire his generous, open disposition, and sweet temper—but for all the tricks, wiles, and insincerities of love, the gentleman has not his match for twenty miles round. He would fain persuade every woman under thirty whom he sees that he is desperately in love with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charlotte Brontë (3rd March 1841). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/brontslifeandle00shorgoog/page/n222/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Ellen Nussey&lt;/a&gt;. In Clement Shorter, ed. (1908). &lt;em&gt;The Brontës: Life and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 204–206. New York: Charles Scribner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlotte mentions that she caught him looking at Anne in church:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘His young reverence,’ as you tenderly call him, is looking delicate and pale; poor thing, don’t you pity him? I do from my heart! When he is well, and fat and jovial, I never think of him, but when anything ails him I am always sorry. He sits opposite to Anne at church, sighing softly, and looking out of the comers of his eyes to win her attention, and Anne is so quiet, her look so downcast, they are a picture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charlotte Brontë (30th January 1842). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/brontslifeandle00shorgoog/page/n244/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Ellen Nussey&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Life and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, p. 228.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was known for his kindness to his parishioners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is one little trait respecting him [Weightman] which lately came to my knowledge, which gives a glimpse of the better side of his character. Last Saturday night he had been sitting an hour in the parlour with papa; and, as he went away, I heard papa say to him—‘What is the matter with you? You seem in very low spirits to-night?’ ‘Oh, I don't know. I’ve been to see a poor young girl, who, I’m afraid, is dying.’ ‘Indeed, what is her name?’ ‘Susan Bland, the daughter of John Bland, the Superintendent.’ Now Susan Bland is my oldest and best scholar in the Sunday-school; and, when I heard that, I thought I would go as soon as I could to see her. I did go on Monday afternoon, and found her very ill and weak, and seemingly far on her way to that bourne whence no traveller returns. After sitting with her some time, I happened to ask her mother if she thought a little port wine would do her good. She replied that the doctor had recommended it, and that when Mr. Weightman was last there he had sent them a bottle of wine and a jar of preserves. She added that he was always good to poor folks, and seemed to have a deal of feeling and kind-heartedness about him. This proves that he is not all selfishness and vanity. No doubt there are defects in his character, but there are also good qualities. God bless him!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charlotte Brontë (29th September 1840). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/brontslifeandle00shorgoog/page/n210/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Ellen Nussey&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Life and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 192–193.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he died, a subscription was made to erect a memorial tablet placed in the north aisle of Haworth Old Church, reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was three years curate of Haworth, and by the congregation, and parishioners in general, was greatly respected, for his orthodox principles, active zeal, moral habits, learning, mildness, and affability: his useful labours will long be gratefully remembered, by the members of the congregation; and Sunday school teachers, and scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On these slender foundations biographers have built a superstructure of speculation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Agnes Grey&lt;/em&gt;, the curate whom Agnes marries is a Mr. Weston, and he is said to have been based on William Weightman. A poem written by Anne Brontë is considered to have been an expression of her feelings at the death of the young curate, for during her lifetime, Mr. Weightman was the only curate with whom she was closely associated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ellis H. Chadwick (1914). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/infootstepsofbro00chadrich/page/164/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the Footsteps of the Brontës&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 165–167&lt;/a&gt;. London: Isaac Pitman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-23T19:25:44.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12563" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6365" CreationDate="2020-03-24T16:48:51.767" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you want depends on what you mean by &quot;full version&quot;. Translators have taken different approaches to translating the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is due to the fact that only two thirds of the Standard Babylonian version has survived. This Standard Babylonian version was found in four incomplete manuscripts in the libraries of Ashurbanipal / Asurbanipal at Nineveh.  This version consisted of twelve tablets, but the main narrative clearly ends at the Tablet XI, while Tablet XII was based on a translation of an older Sumerian text and is usually not included in modern translations. Other fragments have shown up since that discovery, but the text as a whole is still very incomplete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there are six older Sumerian Gilgamesh texts that don't form a continuous narrative. There are also fragments that are neither Sumerian nor Standard Babylonian, including a version in Hittite. With this in mind, it is possible to look at some available English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. An English version with an introduction by &lt;strong&gt;N. K. Sandars&lt;/strong&gt;. Revised edition incorporating new material. London: Penguin Books, &lt;strong&gt;1972&lt;/strong&gt;. (125 pages)&lt;br /&gt;This is a prose translation that focuses on providing an easy-to-follow continuous narrative. This version is now more than forty years old and therefore outdated. Translations of Gilgamesh get outdated for two reasons: (1) new fragments are discovered that provide previously unknown content and (2) the discovery of clay tablets generally increases Assyriologists' knowledge of Akkadian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction by &lt;strong&gt;Andrew George&lt;/strong&gt;. London: Penguin, &lt;strong&gt;1999&lt;/strong&gt;. (lv + 228 pages)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/translation-tuesday/translating-gilgamesh-conversation-benjamin-foster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Benjamin Foster&lt;/a&gt;, who published his own translation, &quot;[t]he English translation of Andrew George is by far the most authoritative in any language&quot;. (Andrew George also published an edition of the cuneiform texts at Oxford University Press.) George consulted more than a hundred clay tablets and fragments for his verse translation. Unlike other some other translators, George clearly indicates where words or entire lines are missing. In some places, he inserts translations from other tablets, including the Yale tablet and the Pennsylvania tablet.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The translation covers Tablets I - XI (a chapter each); instead of translating Tablet XII, George provides translations of the older Sumerian texts. The book also includes an appendix in which George explains how a cuneiform text goes from clay tablet through transliteration and eventually translation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hines, Derrek: &lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Chatto and Windus, 2002. (80 pages) &lt;br /&gt;This is not a direct translation from Akkadian but a retelling by the Canadian poet Derrek Hines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. A New Verse Rendering by &lt;strong&gt;Stanley Lombardo&lt;/strong&gt;. Introduction by Gary Beckman. Hackett, &lt;strong&gt;2019&lt;/strong&gt;. (128 pages)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Lombardo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanley Lombardo&lt;/a&gt; is not an Assyriologist but a Classicist whose other translations include the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;. Wikipedia notes that &quot;[t]he style of his translations is a more vernacular one, emphasizing conversational English rather than the formal tone of some older American English translations of classical verse.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Translated and edited by &lt;strong&gt;Benjamin R. Foster&lt;/strong&gt;. Second Edition. Norton, &lt;strong&gt;2019&lt;/strong&gt;. (256 pages)&lt;br /&gt;This translation was first published in 2001 and updated in 2019. In addition to the Standard Babylonian version, this book also includes the older Sumerian poems (however, Gilgamesh and Huwawa A and Gilgamesh and Huwawa B have been merged into a single text) and Gary Beckman's translation of the Hittite Gilgamesh. Like other Norton Critical Editions, this volume also includes a few scholarly articles. If you are looking for an edition that covers the largest number of versions of the Gilgamesh epic, this edition is an excellent choice.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-03-24T18:38:20.917" LastActivityDate="2020-03-24T18:38:20.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12567" CreationDate="2020-03-25T20:40:27.137" Score="7" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this novel in 2014, and it was probably published at least after 2000. It was set in England (I think) during the Black Death of the 14th century. I read it in English, in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book follows a motley band of travellers who group together for safety while travelling. Each of them has some secret he or she is hiding, and one by one they die in mysterious circumstances. As I recall, the Black Death never directly affects the plot - none of them die by catching it - but it forms a backdrop to the whole story. My memories of it are quite vague, but here's as much as I can recall about the characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The viewpoint character is an older man named something like Cypriot(?).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two Italian men, an older one and a younger one, with typically Italian names (I think one of their names beginning with R). Their secret is the younger one (possibly both of them?) being homosexual.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A boy who is apparently deformed, bearing the wings of a swan; he earns them some money by performing while telling a story about seven princes who were turned into swans. (Maybe he's the one named something like Cypriot.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A couple, man and woman, the woman being pregnant. (Her name might be something like Adele?) Their secret is that they are actually brother and sister. Either that, or they originally presented themselves as brother and sister and the secret is that they're actually a couple.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A conjuror(?) whose name begins with Z and who is always grumpy and unfriendly. He's the main suspect who might be killing the others, until he too is killed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A young girl, a child, the youngest of them all.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Probably one more that I don't remember. I think there were nine characters in total.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Towards the very end of the story, it turns out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; the young girl is a sort of witch, with evil magical powers, who brought about (perhaps indirectly) the deaths of most of the others. The viewpoint character is the only person who realises this, but when he tries to kill her, the others think he is a monster and abandon him alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final twist, the viewpoint character's secret, is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; 'he' is actually a woman, disguised as a man in order to have less trouble travelling the roads. She is secretly in love with the older Italian man, one of the remaining survivors, but now he hates her because she disposed of the witch-child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this book? My vague memories of it are taunting me now, and I can't find it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T01:17:24.117" Title="Book set during the Black Death: nine travellers each with a secret" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12566" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12568" CreationDate="2020-03-26T00:43:04.707" Score="7" ViewCount="1021" Body="&lt;p&gt;this is a book I borrowed off my father about 15 years ago, not sure of the actual age of the book. I've tried Googling but I've not been able to turn up anything that fits my memories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book starts with our protagonist being released from jail in (I think) America, he's sent to the city of Bologna in Italy to act as a spy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's married, however he ends up divorcing his wife in favour of a woman he meets in Italy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason he's in Italy is to investigate a terrorist cell I think - a representative of this cell meets him toward the end of the book and believes he is turning traitor on his home country. Our protagonist says something to tip the guy off that he's not turning traitor, so he gets tortured, ending up losing two fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I distinctly remember a chapter titled &quot;Bolognia on a plate&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8766" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T01:35:34.580" Title="Identify a book where the main character is released from prison in order to be sent to conduct espionage in Italy" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12565" CreationDate="2020-03-26T01:17:24.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Company of Liars&lt;/em&gt; (2008) by Karen Maitland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2761171-company-of-liars&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The year is 1348. The Black Plague grips the country. In a world ruled by faith and fear, nine desperate strangers, brought together by chance, attempt to outrun the certain death that is running inexorably toward them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each member of this motley company has a story to tell. From Camelot, the relic-seller who will become the group's leader, to Cygnus, the one-armed storyteller . . . from the strange, silent child called Narigorm to a painter and his pregnant wife, each has a secret. None is what they seem. And one among them conceals the darkest secret of all—propelling these liars to a destiny they never saw coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;fantasy book black death wings swan site:goodreads.com/book&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T01:17:24.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12566" CreationDate="2020-03-26T01:35:34.580" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Partial match: &lt;em&gt;The Broker&lt;/em&gt; (2005) by John Grisham.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1110.The_Broker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his final hours in the Oval Office, the outgoing President grants a controversial last-minute pardon to Joel Backman, a notorious Washington power broker who has spent the last six years hidden away in a federal prison. What no one knows is that the President issues the pardon only after receiving enormous pressure from the CIA. It seems Backman, in his power broker heyday, may have obtained secrets that compromise the world's most sophisticated satellite surveillance system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Backman is quietly smuggled out of the country in a military cargo plane, given a new name, a new identity, and a new home in Italy. Eventually, after he has settled into his new life, the CIA will leak his whereabouts to the Israelis, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Saudis. Then the CIA will do what it does best: sit back and watch. The question is not whether Backman will survive, there is no chance of that. The question the CIA needs answered is, who will kill him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;released in 2005, so fits with you having read it 15 years ago&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;guy taken out of jail and sent to Bologna specifically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he meets a woman he likes a lot, from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-the-broker/#gsc.tab=0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This tutor is a woman close to Backman's age whose husband is dying of cancer. Backman finds this woman fascinating, giving his life a new purpose that was missing before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;he's said to have a son, so I'm guessing he had a wife as well&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What doesn't match:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the chapters don't appear to have specific titles&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I can't find evidence of torture at the end, and it's not like the protagonist seems to actually know he's a &amp;quot;spy&amp;quot; for most of the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;book released prison spy italy bologna site:goodreads.com&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-03-26T01:35:34.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-27T13:31:17.453" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rebecca Roanhorse's &lt;em&gt;Trail of Lightning&lt;/em&gt;, Ma'ii (aka Coyote) is the only person to call Maggie by her full name, Magdalena. This is stated explicitly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The same creature, looking mostly like a man and wearing the same outlandish Western costume, now sits drinking tea in my favorite chair in my living room.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Magdalena, dear, is this really all you have? Tea?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Hello, Ma'ii,&quot; I greet him. He's the only person, or non-person as it were, who calls me by that name. But it would be useless to correct him.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sixth World&lt;/em&gt;, book 1: &lt;em&gt;Trail of Lightning&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Ma'ii refer to her by &quot;Magdalena&quot;? How does this affect our reading of their interactions? Does this change the power dynamics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does Ma'ii calling Maggie &quot;Magdalena&quot; affect the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-03-27T14:00:01.343" LastActivityDate="2020-03-27T14:00:01.343" Title="Why does Ma'ii call Maggie by her full name?" Tags="&lt;rebecca-roanhorse&gt;&lt;the-sixth-world&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12571" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="12572" CreationDate="2020-03-27T16:48:50.520" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I solved this one in the process of asking the question, so I'm self-answering. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember it as being part of an Alfred Hitchcock anthology. The protagonists get pulled into investigating the murder of an old lady who's found dead on her kitchen floor (I remember very vividly the black-and-white drawing of her contorted body lying there) with no apparent motive for murdering her. It is found that the hamburger that she ate that night was poisoned with strychnine. Eventually, the protagonists determine that the actual intended victim was her dog, who she had written into her will. The killer had seen that she had bought steak and hamburger, and poisoned the hamburger, assuming that would be the dog's food, but she'd given her dog the steak and eaten the hamburger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may have appeared in the same anthology as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43724&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Robert Bloch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T04:45:35.360" Title="Mystery short story where the owner of a dog is accidentally murdered via strychnine" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12571" CreationDate="2020-03-27T16:48:50.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Puzzle for Poppy&amp;quot; by Patrick Quentin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking up &amp;quot;Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper&amp;quot; led me to the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?43724&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ISFDB page&lt;/a&gt;, which listed two Hitchcock anthologies that included the story, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?382747&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Hitchcock's Fireside Book of Suspense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?512071&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the latter of which looked very familiar, but none of the listed entries matched up. However, in a search on one of the titles, I came upon &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/965098.Alfred_Hitchcock_s_Spellbinders_in_Suspense?from_search=true&amp;amp;from_srp=true&amp;amp;qid=iSFi3hZ43z&amp;amp;rank=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Goodreads entry for the book&lt;/a&gt;, which listed more stories. Of course, this one would not be science fiction or fantasy, and therefore would not be on ISFDB. A bit more searching, and I found that it was &amp;quot;Puzzle for Poppy&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=41064&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This review&lt;/a&gt; mentions some salient details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do Peter and Iris Duluth, a last will bequest, a nervous guardian, and a pregnant St. Bernard have in common? It will take a realization on Iris’s part (one very reminiscent of a well-known G. K. Chesterton story) and a lucky shot by a precocious little girl with a charming lisp to expose (and we do mean “expose”) a carefully-planned murder plot against an unusual intended victim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The excerpt of her seeming death (it turns out that she survived the experience):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poppy was crouching on the carpet, her huge muzzle dropped on her paws.&#xA;She was howling and staring straight at Miss Crump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poppy’s paid companion was on the floor too. She lay motionless on her&#xA;back, her legs twisted under her, her small, gray face distorted, her lips&#xA;stretched in a dreadful smile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is the illustration I remember, apparently by Harold Isen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J9xAb.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J9xAb.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Miss Crump, apparently dead on the kitchen floor&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I was wrong that Mrs. Crump was dead. She had to stay in the hospital to recover for a time, leading to Iris and Duluth getting to make a bit of money dogsitting for her until her return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T04:45:35.360" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T04:45:35.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T00:07:55.700" Score="4" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among the hospital poems, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53027/the-wound-dresser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Wound-Dresser&quot; by Walt Whitman&lt;/a&gt; is one of the best and finest. I wonder if anybody here can help me to understand two lines of this piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in silence, in dreams’ projections,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With hinged knees returning I enter the doors, (while for you up there,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the subject of &quot;follow&quot; and &quot;be&quot; in the last line? Are these verbs imperative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But a day or two more, for see the frame all wasted and sinking,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the yellow-blue countenance see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that &quot;for&quot; in the middle of second line? What does he mean by &quot;frame&quot;? I have no idea about what he means by the last two lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8171" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-28T08:53:03.940" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T00:01:00.203" Title="Understanding two lines from &quot;The Wound-Dresser&quot; by Walt Whitman" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12575" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T01:34:22.503" Score="4" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;Frank Kermode's &lt;em&gt;The Genesis of Secrecy&lt;/em&gt; has the following quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One motive of... modernism was the desire to break with a tradition of writing supposed to have been based on a mistaken or dishonest desire to eliminate the oracular by simple plausibility in the registration of a real world, and by connivance with vulgar notions of cause and closure - to make false sense by means of a false realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, some definitions.  He defines modernism as Joyce, T.S. Eliot and such, so there's no real issue here. By oracular he means the knowledge that there are latent meanings in the text and that the author knows and creates these meanings, though Kermode suggests that the interpretations may extend beyond the author's intent.&#xA;What this means is that Kermode claims that modernism is a return to expecting latent meanings away from some school or tradition that denied it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what could that school or tradition be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can't be the romantics, because they seem to be filled with the oracular.  Is he commenting on Edwardian literature?  I am not very familiar with it, but I lump Yeats in that era and he seems steeped in the idea of interpretation.  Could he be referring to that era in different countries? Or is he referring to Milton, Pope and that group of authors or whatever was occurring in Europe at that same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8776" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T01:34:22.503" Title="Frank Kermode's prelude to modernism" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12538" CreationDate="2020-03-28T02:04:22.700" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stream of consciousness is a technique to mimic the internal thought process of a character.  As such some form of punctuation would be appropriate.  Think of times when you might think something like, &quot;What a jerk.&quot; In those cases punctuation would make sense.  In general, I've seen punctuation in stream of consciousness to direct the flow of thought and allow the reader to follow that flow.  There are often ellipses and sudden changes in direction, but they need to be shown with punctuation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A famous counter-example is Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; which has no punctuation.  In this case Molly is slowly drifting to sleep and indulging herself.  The lack of punctuation is used to help create the image of someone close to sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8776" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T02:04:22.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="12577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9671" CreationDate="2020-03-28T13:44:45.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there evidence of what was said about the poem existing at 1980? Because if not I can say, as an expert in Language and Literature, PhD in Linguistics, that this poem is not by Ruyard Kipling and it was originally written in Spanish for sure. So I do not have evidences of what Elena Pérez Hoyos says is true, what it is closer to true than the previous version of authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8779" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T13:44:45.473" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T17:16:03.663" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jules Verne's 1888 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years%27_Vacation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two Years' Vacation&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Deux ans de vacances&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt; is about a group of schoolboys who find themselves having to survive on a deserted island. The theme seems similar to the more famous &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; written by William Golding sixty-five years later. Wikipedia remarks on the common elements between the two stories, but not about whether such elements are due to direct influence or simply a common genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; was influenced by &lt;em&gt;Two Years' Vacation&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; Any plot elements that are &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; similar to be coincidence, or Easter-egg homages in the story? Or extratextual evidence such as remarks by Golding, or even any evidence that he read &lt;em&gt;Two Years' Vacation&lt;/em&gt; before writing his own story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T17:16:03.663" Title="Did Verne's &quot;Two Years' Vacation&quot; influence Golding's &quot;Lord of the Flies&quot;?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;two-years-vacation&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-28T17:33:18.743" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I glanced at the Goodreads page for &lt;em&gt;Satan in Goray&lt;/em&gt; by Isaac Bashevis Singer (translated by Jacob Sloan), part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/158469053?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt; caught my eye:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the ending did fall a bit short. It was forced &amp;amp; rushed, needlessly Singer tried changing his style in order to give the story a more parable/myth like atmosphere which simply didn’t work &amp;amp; destroyed most of his previous build-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading the book myself, I'm forced to agree. The end of the book makes an abrupt change in style that feels like Singer didn't feel like actually finishing the book and so simply wrote a summary of the end of the story instead of actually writing it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why this sudden change in style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-03-28T17:33:18.743" Title="Why does &quot;Satan in Goray&quot; abruptly change in style at the end?" Tags="&lt;isaac-bashevis-singer&gt;&lt;yiddish-literature&gt;&lt;satan-in-goray&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9007" CreationDate="2020-03-28T22:47:53.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1977, &lt;strong&gt;Jeffrey H. Tigay&lt;/strong&gt; published the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jtigay/JJFvol.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Was There an Integrated Gilgamesh Epic in the Old Babylonian Period?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Memory of Jacob Joel Finkelstein&lt;/em&gt;, Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, Memoir 19 (1977): 215-18). &#xA;Tigay noted that the assumption that the “canonical” version of the Gilgamesh Epic was based on an Old Babylonian version had never been substantiated. &#xA;The Old Babylonian Gilgamesh texts might have been independent, disconnected stories, just like the older Sumerian Gilgamesh stories. &#xA;Tigay tries to put forward evidence that the Old Babylonian version existed as an integrated epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pennsylvania and Yale tablets (Gilg P and Gilg Y, respectively) appear to come from the same edition, which contained at least four tablets: &#xA;the first tablet has not survived, the second deals with the advent of Enkidu, and the third with the preparations for the journey to the Cedar Mountain. &#xA;This series implies that there was a fourth tablet describing the journey itself. None of the other Old Babylonian clay tablets belong to the same edition. &#xA;However, they contain episodes that can be found in the “canonical” version and not in the Old Babylonian one. &#xA;The Akkadian fragment unearthed in Boghozköi (Anatolia), which dates to the 14th-13th century covers part of the journey to the Cedar Forest and the episode of the Bull of Heaven. &#xA;The Hittite retelling of the epic (fragmentary and in prose), which was also found in Boghozköi, covers events found in tablets I-V and tablets VII-X of the canonical version and presupposes events from tablet VI. &#xA;The tablets clearly suggest the existence of an integrated epic in the Hittite empire but do not prove the existence of an integrated Old Babylonian version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a number of features in the canonical version that can also be found in the Old Babylonian texts but not the in the Sumerian ones. &#xA;The theme that unifies the epic is &quot;Gilgamesh's quest to overcome death in some fashion&quot;. A turning point in Gilgamesh's quest is the death of Enkidu, which has this effect on Gilgamesh because Enkidu is not his servant, as in the Sumerian texts, but his friend. &#xA;The integrating features related to Enkidu's status and the effect of his death on Gilgamesh were already present in the Old Babylonian fragments. &#xA;Gilgamesh's tyranny of Uruk, which motivated the gods to create Enkidu, is also mentioned in the Pennsylvania tablet. &#xA;&lt;strong&gt;These and several other features are missing in the Sumerian Gilgamesh texts, and they only make sense in the context of an integrated epic.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;For Tigay, this confirms the existence of an integrated Old Babylonian Gilgamesh epic.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Walther Sallaberger&lt;/strong&gt;'s book &lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos. Mythos, Werk und Tradition&lt;/em&gt; (C. H. Beck, 2008) discusses the Old Babylonian version on pages 69-72. &#xA;Sallaberger describes the themes and features that distinguish the Old Babylonian version from the Sumerian Gilgamesh texts and which can also be found in the Standard Babylonian version.&#xA;The German Assyriologist does not question the existence of an integrated Old Babylonian Gilgamesh epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper by &lt;strong&gt;Andrew R. George&lt;/strong&gt; cited by b a (“Shattered tablets and tangled threads: Editing Gilgamesh, then and now”) points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[The twelve extant Old Babylonian tablets and fragments] demonstrate that already in the eighteenth century the Babylonian written epic was quite different from the Sumerian poems,&#xA;  that it was from the start a long poetic narrative bound together by common themes and exhibiting a unified plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are differences in wording that suggest that the epic's origin “surely lay in narrative poetry transmitted orally”.&#xA;The epic only became more “standardised” in its Standard Babylonian version; this text remained remarkably stable until the last extant manuscript of the epic, which dates from around 130 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What George describes on pages 8-10 of his article is not a comparison of four “versions” of the Standard Babylonian epic, as b a assumes,&#xA;but the reconstruction of several lines based on three manuscripts, each of which only provides incomplete lines of the passage in question.&#xA;On pages 13-15 he shows how a specific passage evolved over time, and on pages 15-17 he discusses “recensions”, i.e. variations between different manuscripts of the Standard Babylonian epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b a's answers seems to interpret George's paper as evidence that there was not even a single Standard Babylonian version,&#xA;thereby &lt;strong&gt;assuming a concept of sameness of texts that is reasonable for printed text (think Gutenberg, 15th century AD) but which seems anachronistic for literary texts that were copied by hand over the course of many centuries&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;and in the case of Gilgamesh, often by apprentice scribes. (In fact, even early printed texts exhibited variation, even within the same print run of, for example, Shakespeare's First Folio.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: b a's answer appears to misinterpret the phrase &quot;Standard Babylonian version&quot; as &quot;standard version&quot;.&#xA;However, &quot;Standard&quot; is capitalised because it refers to Babylonian (as in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Chinese&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) and not to &quot;version&quot;.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Standard Babylonian&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a specific &lt;strong&gt;literary style&lt;/strong&gt; used during the Mature and Late periods of Akkadian literature.&#xA;This style can be distinguished from the older Hymnic-Epic style. (See Benjamin R. Foster: &lt;em&gt;Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature&lt;/em&gt;, CDL Press, 2005, pages 3-4.)&#xA;The Standard Babylonian version may be called the “standard version” because that is the version that remained (relatively) stable until the last extant manuscript of the epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T12:49:02.593" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T12:49:02.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13580" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13581" CreationDate="2020-03-28T23:19:52.690" Score="4" ViewCount="268" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this book maybe 8-10 years ago. It was set in a school and all the characters were named after chess pieces. There was a teacher called Mr Bishop maybe and someone’s nickname might have been Rook. Probably not exactly those but along those lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We followed different perspectives with one being the elderly headteacher and other teachers at the school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book we follow a student as they navigate the school as maybe they were the child of the grounds-person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also remember the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The student was assumed to be a boy but at the end was revealed to be a girl. She therefore takes over the mantle of Queen when she achieves her goal.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel was in English and was aimed primarily at adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9780" LastEditorUserId="9780" LastEditDate="2020-03-29T11:09:35.077" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T10:22:01.103" Title="Book where all the characters are named after chess pieces" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13581" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13580" CreationDate="2020-03-29T11:42:12.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could the book have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlemen_%26_Players&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gentlemen and Players&lt;/a&gt;, by Joanne Harris? One of the teachers is indeed named &lt;em&gt;Bishop&lt;/em&gt;, and there is an unnamed character whose perspective is indicated by a black pawn.  although most of the characters are not named after chess pieces. And if I remember correctly, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; one of the characters is indeed the child of a groundsperson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been long enough since I read it that I don't remember whether the rest of your descriptions agree with the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T14:46:36.790" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T14:46:36.790" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13602" CreationDate="2020-03-29T14:20:39.953" Score="4" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy's novel &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; begins with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/3789/17&quot;&gt;epigraph&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;... Poor wounded name! My bosom as a bed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Shall lodge thee.—W. Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source of this quote is one of Shakespeare's lesser known plays, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/two_gentlemen/full.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Act I Scene II. The context is Julia speaking of Proteus while looking at the letter she has torn up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the relevance of this quote to &lt;em&gt;Tess&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; I haven't studied that Shakespeare play, but reading the plot it seems not too similar to &lt;em&gt;Tess&lt;/em&gt;, being a comedy rather than a tragedy and featuring romantic troubles between two men and &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; women. Does that particular scene from the play correspond to something in &lt;em&gt;Tess&lt;/em&gt;? Or that particular quote? What can we say about why it was chosen to symbolise, as it were, the whole novel by Hardy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T19:16:39.813" Title="How does the quote from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona connect with Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;tess-of-the-durbervilles&gt;&lt;the-two-gentlemen-of-verona&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-29T14:36:46.323" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;Marianne Moore’s poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://bulletin.brynmawr.edu/articles/treasures-the-poet-and-the-gadget/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Quartz Crystal Clocks&lt;/a&gt;’ (1940) was first published in &lt;em&gt;The Kenyon Review&lt;/em&gt; 2:3, pp. 284–285, and collected in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/whatareyears0000unse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Are Years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1941). Here's the first stanza (of seven):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are four vibrators, the world’s exactest clocks;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      and these quartz time-pieces that tell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  time intervals to other clocks,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      these worksless clocks work well;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and all four, independently the&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      same are there, in the cool Bell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Laboratory time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The version printed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completepoemsofm0000moor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Complete Poems of Marianne Moore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has slightly different wording in a couple of places: “independently the same, kept in / the 41° Bell” for lines 5–6, and “newborn progeny) that punctuality / is not a crime.” for lines 47–48.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this poem about? What form is it written in? What is “the Giraudoux truth-bureau”? Is the third stanza a good explanation of a quartz clock’s sensitivity to temperature? What is the train of thought linking quartz clocks in the first stanza to Giradoux in the second to the lemur-student in the fourth to metathesis in the fifth? Why is the bell-boy carrying a buoy-ball? In what way does the speaking clock resemble the god Jupiter? Why does Jupiter tell Chronos that “punctuality is not now a crime”? What happened to the last line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T14:36:46.323" Title="Marianne Moore’s ‘Four Quartz Crystal Clocks’" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;marianne-moore&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13584" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:00:07.160" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-29T15:00:07.160" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:00:07.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13585" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:00:07.160" Score="0" Body="Marianne Moore (1887–1972), American modernist poet. Use this tag when asking a question related to the author, or any of their works (with the work tagged accordingly). If the question is specifically related to one of her poems, use the [poetry] tag instead." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:52:14.087" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:52:14.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&quot; (c. 1590), a comedy by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the [william-shakespeare] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" LastActivityDate="2020-03-29T15:39:03.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="348" CreationDate="2020-03-29T15:49:33.690" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walther Sallaberger's book &lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos. Mythos, Werk und Tradition&lt;/em&gt; (C. H. Beck, 2008) discusses the flood story &#xA;mainly in the context of the Standard Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh Epic. &#xA;This is the version whose redaction is attributed to Sîn-lēqi-unninni and which Sallaberger dates to the 11th century BC.&#xA;There is no evidence that the flood story was part of earlier Gilgamesh stories,&#xA;such as the five or six Sumerian stories (which do not constitute a continuous narrative),&#xA;the Old Babylonian version (which is very fragmentary but &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13579/2191&quot;&gt;appears to have been an integrated epic&lt;/a&gt;.),&#xA;the Hittite version (which was shorter than the Standard Babylonian version and in prose) or in other older versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the flood story on Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian version of the epic did not come out of the blue.&#xA;The story on Tablet XI is based on the Atrahasis story, which existed in several versions.&#xA;Benjamin R. Foster's anthology &lt;em&gt;Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature&lt;/em&gt; (CDL Press, 2005) provides several versions&#xA;(translations of the fragments that have been discovered so far): an Old Babylonian version,&#xA;a Middle Babylonian version (a dozen incomplete lines from a tablet found in Nippur),&#xA;a Late Babylonian version and a Late Assyrian version.&#xA;The Classical or Old Babylonian period lasted approximately from 1850 to 1500 BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the Standard Babylonian version used the Atrahasis story is obvious from verbal parallels,&#xA;including an occurrence of the name &quot;Atrahasis&quot; instead of Utanapishtim in Ea's speech in Tablet XI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept the Standard Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh Epic as the earliest Gilgamesh story that contains the flood,&#xA;it is clear that this story is older than the story in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book of Genesis&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which probably dates from the 6th and 5th centuries BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: user8's answer appears to misinterpret the phrase &quot;Standard Babylonian version&quot; as &quot;standard version&quot;.&#xA;However, &quot;Standard&quot; is capitalised because it refers to Babylonian (as in &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Standard Chinese&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) and not to &quot;version&quot;.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Standard Babylonian&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a specific &lt;strong&gt;literary style&lt;/strong&gt; used during the Mature and Late periods of Akkadian literature.&#xA;This style can be distinguished from the older Hymnic-Epic style. (See Benjamin R. Foster: &lt;em&gt;Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature&lt;/em&gt;, CDL Press, 2005, pages 3-4.)&#xA;The Standard Babylonian version may be called the “standard version” because that is the version that remained (relatively) stable until the last extant manuscript of the epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T12:48:30.313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T12:48:30.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13589" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13590" CreationDate="2020-03-30T06:06:27.397" Score="2" ViewCount="297" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play, &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, Dogberry consistently uses malapropisms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the creative ideas behind giving him this style of speech? Does he use it on purpose? What's his intention? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please give me your best interpretation of why Dogberry uses malapropisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9783" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T15:16:05.397" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T16:27:33.933" Title="Why does Dogberry use malapropisms in Much Ado About Nothing?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13589" CreationDate="2020-03-30T13:18:34.743" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Dogberry is not as intelligent as he likes to think he is&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;malapropisms&lt;/a&gt; many times in his plays to show an uneducated character who is using vocabulary that they don't entirely understand. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/characters/charlines.php?CharID=quickly&amp;amp;WorkID=merrywives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hostess Quickly&lt;/a&gt;, an associate of Falstaff, was another major offender, as the Nurse in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; as per the paper, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/5323/1/RAEI_14_16.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Use of Malapropisms and their Translation into Spanish&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In this tragedy the nurse is a character that continuously tries to imitate the speech of a lady.&#xA;  But as her origins are rather low, she makes several mistakes each time she decides to use&#xA;  some word of Latin origin. The presence in the play of a friar whose speech is clearly&#xA;  influenced by his study of the classical languages, far from providing the nurse with the&#xA;  perfect source to improve her speech produces on the reader a comic affect by the&#xA;  comparison of both speeches. The friar's Latinisms become blunders in the nurse's mouth:&#xA;  &quot;If you be he, sir, I desire some confidence with you&quot;(II.iii. 118-119). The malapropism is&#xA;  produced because of the similarity in the pronunciation of the term &quot;confidence&quot; and that&#xA;  of the word the nurse really intends to pronounce: &quot;conference&quot;. Both terms have a Latin&#xA;  origin although they do not belong to the same root. The OED highlights the use of&#xA;  &quot; confidence&quot; as a humorous blunder for &quot;conference&quot; in some other works by Shakespeare.&#xA;  As these terms exist in the English language most translators decided to ignore the mistake&#xA;  in the nurse's speech, but in the original text this is made explicit in the way in which other&#xA;  characters make fun of her speech. Thus Benvolio replies intentionally:&quot; She will endite him&#xA;  to some supper&quot;(n.iii.l20). Benvolio is offering &quot;endite&quot; as a delibérate malapropism for&#xA;  &quot;invite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-03-30T16:27:33.933" LastActivityDate="2020-03-30T16:27:33.933" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13592" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T03:19:24.057" Score="8" ViewCount="242" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes I know it sounds like a superslang portmanteau of modern obscenities (and indeed it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cumfart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is&lt;/a&gt;), which is why I was surprised to see it in a 1742 book, and why I'm asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Toward the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/9609/9609-h/9609-h.htm#book4chapter5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 4, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams&lt;/em&gt; is the following passage, with bolding added by me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why, there it is in peaper,&amp;quot; answered the justice, showing him a deposition which, in the absence of his clerk, he had writ himself, of which we have with great difficulty procured an authentic copy; and here it follows verbatim et literatim:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The depusition of James Scout, layer, and Thomas Trotter, yeoman, taken before mee, one of his magesty's justasses of the piece for Zumersetshire.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;These deponants saith, and first Thomas Trotter for himself saith, that on the — of this instant October, being Sabbath-day, betwin the ours of 2 and 4 in the afternoon, he zeed Joseph Andrews and Francis Goodwill walk akross a certane felde belunging to layer Scout, and out of the path which ledes thru the said felde, and there he zede Joseph Andrews with a nife cut one hassel twig, of the value, as he believes, of three half-pence, or thereabouts; and he saith that the said Francis Goodwill was likewise walking on the grass out of the said path in the said felde, and did receive and karry in her hand the said twig, &lt;strong&gt;and so was cumfarting, eading, and abatting&lt;/strong&gt; to the said Joseph therein. And the said James Scout for himself says that he verily believes the said twig to be his own proper twig,&amp;quot; &amp;amp;c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Ngram &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cumfarting&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccumfarting%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccumfarting%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shows&lt;/a&gt; virtually no use of the word other than, presumably, copies of this book itself (huge spike in 1742) and, after 1880, mostly few analyses of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cumfarting&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2008&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=0&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Ccumfarting%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Ccumfarting%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dZMax.png&quot; alt=&quot;Ngram graph of &amp;quot;cumfarting&amp;quot; in English corpus, 1700-2012&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://depotuw.ceon.pl/bitstream/handle/item/1226/ABCD.The_Creative_Role_of_Parody._PU%20%282%29.pdf?sequence=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one dissertation&lt;/a&gt; by Przemysław Uściński which suggests in a footnote the word &lt;em&gt;cumfarting&lt;/em&gt; is part of &amp;quot;a brilliant parody of tedious legal language&amp;quot; (pg. 164).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Helen Thompson &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=c_GcDQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;ppis=_c&amp;amp;lpg=PA215&amp;amp;ots=jh2TkQXf6w&amp;amp;dq=%22cumfarting%22%20fielding&amp;amp;pg=PA215#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt; something similar, though more specific, in &lt;em&gt;Fictional Matter&lt;/em&gt;, her book on chemistry and English novels. In fact she quotes the word specifically and individually (pg. 215):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Typography concretizes—and, in the eyes of the reader whose literacy enlists her in Fielding’s game, rectifies—an abuse of justice also enacted in words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Cumfarting” obviously invalidates the juridical text’s claim to propri- ety. In this capacity, language in Joseph Andrews acts: by turning words into things, Fielding lends them qualities that override the prejudicial enactment of the law they would enable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However everyone seems to be skirting the question: &lt;strong&gt;What did cumfarting mean?&lt;/strong&gt; Or, assuming it's a neologism, what might it have been &lt;em&gt;imagined&lt;/em&gt; to mean by an 18th century reader?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did &amp;quot;cum&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fart&amp;quot; have the same meanings in 1742 as today (to orgasm &amp;amp; to flatulate, respectively)? Did one but not the other, and it pairing just sounded funny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or was it just a &lt;em&gt;completely meaningless&lt;/em&gt; pun on &amp;quot;comforting&amp;quot; that only today sounds sexual/filthy? If so, what’s the evidence of meaninglessness? Thompson and Uściński seem to argue it was a double entendre, but don’t specify the second entendre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9789" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T16:56:40.993" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T16:56:40.993" Title="What is meant by the word &quot;cumfarting&quot; in the 1742 English novel &quot;Joseph Andrews&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;henry-fielding&gt;&lt;joseph-andrews&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-03-31T08:53:28.513" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haruki Murakami's short story &quot;Birthday Girl&quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://harpers.org/archive/2003/07/birthday-girl/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read online&lt;/a&gt;, is about a girl working part-time as a waiter who gets to make a special wish on her twentieth birthday. In the frame story, she is telling an unnamed first-person narrator about the events of her twentieth birthday. She asks him(?) what wish he would make, if he were in the same situation as her on her twentieth birthday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I took some time to think about that, but I couldn’t come  up with a single wish.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I can’t think of anything,&quot; I confessed. &quot;I’m too far away now from my twentieth birthday.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You really can’t think of anything?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I nodded.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Not one thing?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Not one thing.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She  looked  into  my  eyes  again—straight  in—and  said, &quot;That’s because you’ve already made your wish.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? What is the wish he already made, and how does she know? Does it relate to the questions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/12494/17&quot;&gt;what &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; wish was&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/12495/17&quot;&gt;who he is&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T14:36:39.210" Title="&quot;That’s because you’ve already made your wish.&quot; What does it mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;haruki-murakami&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13594" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13604" CreationDate="2020-03-31T11:52:00.620" Score="7" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_the_Chieftain%27s_Shield&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/em&gt; the inhabitants of Gergovia are obsessed with wine and charcoal, all having shops selling both.&#xA;The coal is used for a running gag in the book as the Romans often dirty themselves with coal dust when searching these cellars for something or somebody hiding there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It feels like the entire coal obsession does not only exist to facilitate this running gag, but is a reference to something or similar.&#xA;However, the typical sources, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_and_the_Chieftain%27s_Shield#Notes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes&lt;/em&gt; section on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; do not mention anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus I am asking: Why was coal used as theme and plot device in this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T11:46:10.803" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T11:46:10.803" Title="What’s up with the coal in “Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield”?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rene-goscinny&gt;&lt;albert-uderzo&gt;&lt;asterix&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13593" CreationDate="2020-03-31T14:36:39.210" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;He already has his wish by having a life where he can't think of an improvement&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not have any textual proof that this is the answer, but I think that the simplest answer is fairly evident. She states that he has &quot;already made [his] wish&quot; because he cannot think of anything that he would change in his life. On one hand, one could take the perspective of the mystical, that he may have had his own opportunity for a wish, and that the life he leads now is the result of it. On the other hand, there's the pragmatic interpretation that, because he has everything he wants, he's effectively made a wish for his best life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T14:36:39.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13596" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:25:03.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T16:25:03.707" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T16:25:03.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13597" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:25:03.707" Score="0" Body="René Goscinny (1926–1977), French comic writer, best known for the &quot;Astérix&quot; series in collaboration with Albert Uderzo. Use with [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:47:59.827" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:47:59.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13598" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:26:02.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T16:26:02.180" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T16:26:02.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13599" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:26:02.180" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Albert Uderzo (1927–2020), a French comic writer and illustrator best known for the 'Astérix' series, created in collaboration with René Goscinny. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:54:19.493" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:54:19.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13600" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:42:21.883" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T16:42:21.883" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T16:42:21.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13601" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-03-31T16:42:21.883" Score="0" Body="&quot;Astérix&quot;, a series of comics in French by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. Use with [rene-goscinny], [albert-uderzo], [comics], and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:45:06.703" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:45:06.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13582" CreationDate="2020-03-31T17:34:58.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This epigraph is best dealt with by being broken down into two parts, but there are vague links between Hardy and Shakespeare's works tied together in this particular quote. (Also, it relates to the overarching themes and events in &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d’Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;, so this answer will link it to such rather than specific quotations from the texts to avoid this answer becoming overburdened with perhaps irrelevant degrees of detail).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Firstly&lt;/strong&gt;, “Poor wounded name!” corresponds to Tess’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1883/what-justifies-the-anti-tess-interpretation-of-tess-of-the-durbervilles/5294#5294&quot;&gt;damaged reputation&lt;/a&gt; on account of her extramarital pregnancy as well as her unavoidably being a murderer - her name becomes synonymous with her social outcast. The metonym of focussing on a name and not physical person was highlighted by Rıza Öztürk in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JbMwBwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA66&amp;amp;lpg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Origin of Hardy’s Tragic Vision&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;“might be associated with Shakespeare’s emphasis on the character” (p. 66)&lt;/em&gt;; since characters in novels are no more than words, Tess only has her name and since it is tarnished, her whole being likewise is. This “wounded” status is not from the self but from external forces, as Tess has been used and discarded by both Alec and Angel and is also subjected to the scorn of Victorian society. This mirrors an arc in &lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt;: Julia, whom Proteus loves, receives a letter from Proteus which she tears up over a disagreement, an action she deeply regrets later on in the scene, causing her to utter the monologue containing the lines of the epigraph. Julia’s behaviour following her tearing up the letter suggests that she feels remorse appropriate to having physically injured Proteus through the action (as hinted at with its use in &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d’Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O hateful hands, to tear such loving words!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Injurious wasps, to feed on such sweet honey&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And kill the bees that yield it with your stings!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I’ll kiss each several paper for amends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Act 1, Scene 2, lines 110–113.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The injuries to Tess are on a grander scale than the largely domestic squabbles of Shakespeare’s play. Regardless of whether she conceived by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1907/was-tess-raped?noredirect=1&amp;amp;lq=1&quot;&gt;a consensual act or not&lt;/a&gt;, Tess was still subjected to the social disdain that was directed to her after she gave birth to her and Alec’s child outside of wedlock. Likewise, Tess is executed as a criminal when, in desperation, she murders her second husband Alec, after her first husband Angel returns from what she thought was the dead (actually only Brazil) since it had appeared that he was not returning after effectively abandoning Tess, upon discovery of her earlier affair with Alec. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The next phrase of the epigraph&lt;/strong&gt; leads on from this: “My bosom as a bed”. The “My”, positioned before the novel’s opening cements it as Hardy’s voice, overriding any voices in the narrative, since it is placed before any input from the characters can arrive on the scene. For all of the instances where Tess’ honour comes into question, Hardy seeps his voice into the narrative as the background narrator of the events. This is established from the foremost beginning of the novel in the subtitle: “&lt;em&gt;A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, by Thomas Hardy&lt;/em&gt;”. Hardy places his name seamlessly into the subtitle here and boldly goes against the grain of society’s judgement and emphasises his opinion (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c6TpOyrfrF4C&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reference&lt;/a&gt;) of Tess as a blameless victim, acting according to human error and natural behaviour, not as a perpetrator of unnatural crimes. As a result, Hardy singles himself out as Tess’ sole protector and advocate in what is a preemption of society’s criticism that would flood the novel at the time of publishing, certainly in part regarding the depiction of Tess’ social downfall, but specifically Hardy’s personal and heartfelt sympathy to it. The clarity he uses in making sure that Tess is regarded as a “&lt;em&gt;Pure Woman&lt;/em&gt;”, despite being the mother of an illegitimate child as well as a murderer and adulterer, is what would have been seen as a very adverse viewpoint. Hardy verbally defended Tess’ purity in an 1892 interview, attributing her outwardly-appearing downfalls as whims of fate and buffeted by external circumstances: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I still maintain that her innate purity remained intact to the very last; though I frankly own that a certain outward purity left her on her last fall. I regarded her then as being in the hands of circumstances, not morally responsible, a mere corpse drifting with the current to her end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;As cited and further elaborated on by Merryn Williams in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hL2wCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA91&amp;amp;lpg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy and Rural England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, p. 91.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Hardy unashamedly defends this by further claiming it to be “&lt;em&gt;Faithfully Presented&lt;/em&gt;” aiming to dispel any distortions of biased perspective, by suggesting that the following narrative is an autobiographical representation of the unfortunate life of Tess, based in reality and not a fictional creation, which subsequently labels the judgement of Tess as a “&lt;em&gt;Pure Woman&lt;/em&gt;” by Hardy as definitive, without any shadow of doubt to its truth or authenticity. On a broader level, Tess is Hardy’s creation, which could tenuously link to the imagery of the epigraph as she is consequently inspired from the “bosom” of his imagination, a protective place of authorial defence, to which she can return to “lodge” following critical exposure to readers of the novel. However, this is of course a metaphorical interpretation and Shakespeare employs this part in a very literal sense in &lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt;, where Julia places the torn pieces of the love letter into the fabric of her bodice. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-03-31T19:16:39.813" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T19:16:39.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12511" CreationDate="2020-03-31T20:57:11.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know where the lined Wiki page got the Rhodes idea. The name Rodion really comes from the Greek Ῥοδίων. In the context of Crime and Punishment it bears several meanings, and likely refers to all of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;its literal meaning (heroic, as Raskolnikov tries himself as a hero),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;King Herod (who is a despicable villain in Russian tradition),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodion_of_Patras&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herodion of Patras&lt;/a&gt; (who recover his life by turning to God, just as Raskolnikov does at the end),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;maybe something else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the last name, раскол does not necessarily mean the Old Rites schism; main meaning is violent parting of one into two. This is what happening with his soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet another meaning of раскол relates to a confession of a criminal. This is very common in modern Russian, but I have no idea if it did exist in the Dostoyevsky timeframe. Kind of far-fetched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are certain theories about Romanovich, also pedaling the heroic theme, posing him as a descendants of Roman heroes. I don't really buy them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you read Russian, try &lt;a href=&quot;https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/onomastika-v-romane-f-m-dostoevskogo-prestuplenie-i-nakazanie/viewer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/glavnye-geroi-romana-f-m-dostoevskogo-prestuplenie-i-nakazanie-v-svete-ih-antroponimov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. These articles also provide more trustworthy references (the references themselves are not available online, sorry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't see any explanation of the triple R though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2020-03-31T20:57:11.170" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13604" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13594" CreationDate="2020-04-01T13:50:27.160" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The charcoal connection is found with the ‘Bougnats of Paris’. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.france-ecotours.com/en/blog/sur-les-traces-des-bougnats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;France écotours&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the 18th century, the agricultural crisis forced thousands of French countrymen to leave their homes in search of work. The Auvergne people left the volcanic soil of their homeland for the capital. There, the new Parisians built a community where they became known as “Bougnats”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nickname Bougnat first appeared during the Second Empire (1852-1870).The word is a contraction between charcoal maker, charbonnier, and a person from Auvergne, Auvergnats: charbougnats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the 19th century, the Auvergne residents decided to sell the coal they imported from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassac-les-Mines&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brassac-Les-Mines&lt;/a&gt; via rivers and canals. It was at this time when coalmining activity increased that the nickname Bougnat emerged. Immigrants opened &lt;strong&gt;Wines and Charcoal cafes&lt;/strong&gt; to market their commodity, additionally selling spirits and lemonade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term “bougnat” then ended up referring to both the Auvergnat residents in Paris as well as their cafes adjacent to their sale of coal. In these particular cafes, women were responsible for serving coffee while their husbands delivered coal to the customers. Often, Bougnats supplemented their activity with restaurants and hotels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougnat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry for Bougnat&lt;/a&gt;, we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Chieftain's Shield,&lt;/em&gt; the eleventh collection of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Asterix,&lt;/em&gt; the town of Gergovie is full of &amp;quot;wine and coal&amp;quot; shops, in reference to the bougnats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a historical photograph of an actual shop for wine, wood, and coal (vins, bois et charbons):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NEY8P.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NEY8P.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;historical picture of wine-and-coal shop&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Public domain; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://bibliotheques-specialisees.paris.fr/ark:/73873/pf0001887643/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portail des bibliothèques muncipales spécialisées&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T16:24:23.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13606" CreationDate="2020-04-01T15:44:09.613" Score="3" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;French author Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, the author of &lt;em&gt;Journey to the End of the Night&lt;/em&gt;, used Céline, a French female first name as his pen name.  Any idea where he got it from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7559" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-01T16:26:49.557" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T19:37:03.520" Title="Where did French writer Céline get his pen name from?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;louis-ferdinand-celine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13605" CreationDate="2020-04-01T19:37:03.520" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/louis-ferdinand-celine/1-de-destouches-a-celine/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LOUIS-FERDINAND CÉLINE, De Destouches à Céline&lt;/a&gt; in the online &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia Universalis&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;c'est à sa grand-mère maternelle, Céline Guillou, qu'il empruntera son nom de plume&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literal translation: &quot;it is from his maternal grandmother, Céline Guillou, that he will borrow his pen name&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the French Wikipedia article about the author, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis-Ferdinand_C%C3%A9line#cite_note-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first footnote&lt;/a&gt; points out that &quot;Céline&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) est le prénom de sa grand-mère et l'un des prénoms de sa mère. cf.Pol Vandromme, &lt;em&gt;Céline&lt;/em&gt;, Pardès, 2001, p. 114&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is the first name of his grandmother and one of his mother's names. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T19:37:03.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2149" CreationDate="2020-04-02T13:23:18.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always interpreted the &quot;The Great&quot; as referring to Gatsby from James Gatz's point of view.  Gatz comes from a poor background and he invents Gatsby as his larger than life, wealthy, successful alter ego.  The man that lets Gatz access the life that he should have been born into.  For Gatz, Gatsby is the idealized, perfect version of himself.  &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot; is almost a stage name, and what Gatz would have called the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastActivityDate="2020-04-02T13:23:18.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13608" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-02T14:00:26.227" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;We haven't studied this poem in class due to the COVID-19 outbreak and schools shutting down, but we have made annotations for the poem. However nothing about conflict came up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you got any ideas how inner conflict is shown in Imtiaz Dharker's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Imtiaz-dharker-tissue-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tissue&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9797" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T10:16:35.187" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T10:16:35.187" Title="How is inner conflict presented in the poem &quot;Tissue&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;imtiaz-dharker&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13612" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13643" CreationDate="2020-04-03T23:44:55.030" Score="4" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his 1976 essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amherst.edu/system/files/media/0305/Brodsky%252520Less%252520Than%252520One.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Less than One&lt;/a&gt;, Joseph Brodsky writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the beginning I had better trust my birth certificate, which states that I was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad, Russia, much as I abhor this name for the city which long ago the ordinary people nicknamed simply “Peter”—from Petersburg. There is an old two-liner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The people’s sides&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Are rubbed by Old Peter.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not certain how to interpret the above two-liner, my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question.&lt;/strong&gt; Is the above two-liner referring to the charm that the blessed city bestows upon its residents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9807" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T16:05:56.047" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T04:27:06.180" Title="Brodsky's &quot;two-liner&quot; in his essay &quot;Less than One&quot;" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;joseph-brodsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13612" CreationDate="2020-04-04T00:26:22.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Russian for that two-liner is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Старый Питер,&#xA;  Бока повытер.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13643/532&quot;&gt;DVK's answer&lt;/a&gt; for a much better analysis than mine. I now agree that my assumptions below were incorrect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;I would argue that the correct translation into English has nothing to do with people: it's a saying that describes the city itself: &lt;em&gt;Old Petersburg, with its worn out sides&lt;/em&gt;. It alludes to a certain charm that old buildings have due to their imperfect façades.&lt;/s&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next passages, Brodsky mentions how the buildings remind him of old &lt;em&gt;Petersburg&lt;/em&gt; and not of contemporaneous &lt;em&gt;Leningrad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And yet I’d rather call it “Peter”, for I remember this city at a time when it didn’t look like “Leningrad” – right after the war. &lt;strong&gt;Gray, pale-green façades with bullet and shrapnel cavities&lt;/strong&gt;; endless, empty streets, with few passerby and light traffic; almost a starved look with, as a result, more definite and, if you wish, nobler features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="532" LastEditorUserId="532" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T09:09:25.170" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T09:09:25.170" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1674" CreationDate="2020-04-04T03:20:58.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Romantic love, couples, ethics, fidelity, all this has existed since the earliest records of humankind - and also in nature, among other animal species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greece had romantic novels like Daphnis &amp;amp; Chloe, Anthia &amp;amp; Habrocome, in myths Orpheus &amp;amp; Eurydike, etc. Penelope &amp;amp; Odysseus are obviously a romantic couple as all predecessors in romantic novels, and that's quite clear to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ancient Greece has a reputation of chauvinism because of the highly recorded 5th century of Athens, but that's a reality of one city at one particular time - of war and distress - not of Greece in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among Ancient Greek culture we often see Matriarchy - both in myth and in history -   at such a level that often the status of Women seems way higher than in our modern chauvinist society.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Helen and Penelope are portrayed as very powerful Women, and the leading role of both the Iliad and the Odyssey belongs to Pallas, a Goddess. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what concerns Odysseus, we can ask if he is considered breaking the fidelity of a love romantic relationship or not, and, again, Ancient Greeks delivered tons of literature about romantic couples (homo and heteroaffectuous), so don't believe in modern commentators that without reading ancient literature want to judge Shakespeare invented it...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe Ancient Greeks didn't see him as a traitor because the Gods aren't characters equivalent to humans in the plot. Every event relating to a God becomes part of a myth and needs a symbolic interpretation, once it's with myths that Greeks described the Gods, not with literality. Greek Gods are, just as in many other polytheist theories, elements, principles of the organized world (Kosmos): for the Greeks the world is a systematic sphere ruled by &quot;forces&quot; that they try to apprehend with myths - the Gods.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;So, the passages where Odysseus relates with Gods would be interpreted allegorically, not bearing relation with his fidelity on the novel's plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9809" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T13:15:55.267" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T13:15:55.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13615" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13620" CreationDate="2020-04-04T09:17:13.333" Score="8" ViewCount="697" Body="&lt;p&gt;In T. H. White's novel, &quot;The Sword in the Stone&quot;, he describes a mythical creature, the Aullay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[It was] as much bigger than an elephant as an elephant is larger than a sheep. It was a sort of horse with an elephant's trunk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the rest of the book, White uses creatures and events from many old fables and myths. However I have never heard of an aullay before. Is the aullay a creature from an old myth, or did White invent it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5033" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T12:19:15.710" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T17:42:50.773" Title="What is the origin of the Aullay in &quot;The Sword in the Stone&quot;?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;t-h-white&gt;&lt;the-sword-in-the-stone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13616" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-04T12:20:39.133" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T12:20:39.133" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T12:20:39.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13617" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-04T12:20:39.133" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works or life of T.H. White (Terence Hanbury White, 1906–1964), an English novelist, best known for the Arthurian fantasy &quot;The Sword in the Stone&quot; (1938)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T05:54:27.513" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T05:54:27.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13618" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13619" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" Score="0" Body="&quot;The Sword in the Stone&quot; (1938), an Arthurian novel by T. H. White. Use this tag with the [t-h-white] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T12:21:11.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13620" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13615" CreationDate="2020-04-04T13:34:42.067" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: An ‘aullay’ is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yali&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a hybrid creature in Hindu mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the ‘aullay’ in &lt;em&gt;The Sword in the Stone&lt;/em&gt; is a lightly edited quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._Cobham_Brewer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. Cobham Brewer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aullay&lt;/strong&gt;, a monster horse with an elephant’s trunk. The creature is as much bigger than an elephant as an elephant is larger than a sheep. King Baly of India rode on an aullay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;E. Cobham Brewer (1892). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/charactersketche00inbrew/page/n149/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. 83&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Selmar Hess.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brewer’s description comes in turn from the notes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Southey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Southey&lt;/a&gt;’s poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_Kehama&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Curse of Kehama&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Aullay.&lt;/em&gt; This monster of Hindoo imagination is a horse with the trunk of an elephant, but bearing about the same proportion to the elephant in size, that the elephant itself does to a common sheep. In one of the prints to Mr Kindersley’s “Specimens of Hindoo Literature,” an aullay is represented taking up an elephant with his trunk. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Southey (1810). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/curseofkehama00sout/page/168/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Curse of Kehama&lt;/em&gt;, p. 358&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brewer’s claim that “King Baly of India rode on an aullay” also comes from the poem, which he quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Through these wide portals oft had Baly* rode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Triumphant from his proud abode,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When, in his greatness, he bestrode&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Aullay, hugest of four-footed kind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Aullay-Horse, that in his force,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With elephantine trunk, could bind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And lift the elephant, and on the wind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whirl him away, with sway and swing,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Even like a pebble from the practis’d sling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabali&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bali or Mahabali&lt;/a&gt;, a king of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asura&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asuras&lt;/a&gt; in Hindu mythology.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/curseofkehama00sout/page/168/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Southey, pp. 169–170&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Southey indicates in his notes, he got the creature from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Edward_Kindersley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nathaniel Edward Kindersley&lt;/a&gt;, though the spelling ‘aullay’ seems to be Southey’s own invention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;choultry&lt;/em&gt;*, which bears the name of &lt;em&gt;Trimul-Naig&lt;/em&gt;†, one of the kings of &lt;em&gt;Madura&lt;/em&gt;‡ (to whom &#xA;  all these buildings are ascribed, but of the date of whose reign we have no authentic account) being composed entirely of granite, has suffered but little; it is constructed in a style of peculiar richness and grandeur, and while the whole forms a sculptured system of Hindoo mythology, its pillars, all varying from each other, exhibit specimens of architecture, so curious as to have induced me to present the reader with drawings from three of them. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The next side (&lt;em&gt;fig.&lt;/em&gt; 2) of this pillar, presents to the spectator an elephant surmounted by two fanciful monsters, the highest and largest of which resembles a horse, with the trunk of an elephant. It is called by &lt;em&gt;Hindoo&lt;/em&gt; poets the &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;aulee&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, and is supposed to exceed the last mentioned animal as much in size as it is here represented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* A pillared hall or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandapa&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mandapa&lt;/a&gt;; † &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirumala_Nayaka&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tirumala Nayaka&lt;/a&gt;; ‡ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabali&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madurai&lt;/a&gt; in southern India.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Nathaniel Edward Kindersley (1794). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.195952/page/n359/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Specimens Of Hindoo Literature&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 331–334&lt;/a&gt;. London: W. Bulmer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s Kindersley’s figure 2. The ‘aulee’ is on the right-hand side of the pillar, standing on the back of an elephant and twining trunks with a smaller ‘aulee’, perhaps its child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qf4lbl.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qf4lbl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Line drawing of elaborately decorated square pillar with praying human figures on a pedestal to the left, and an aullay on the right.&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand Kindersley’s description correctly, his ‘choultry’ is the ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thousand-Pillared_Hall,_16th_century,_Meenakshi_Temple_at_Madurai_(3)_(36817476384).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thousand-Pillared Hall&lt;/a&gt;’, part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meenakshi_Temple&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meenakshi Temple&lt;/a&gt; complex, and if you search Google Images for photos of the hall you will soon spot more ‘aulees’, &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carved_pillar_in_the_16th_century_Thousnad-Pillared_Hall,_Meenakshi_Temple,_Madurai_(2)_(37259217170).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;for example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kindersley says of the aulee that it ‘resembles a horse’. But is that quite right? Looking closely at the figure, we can see that it has paws (not hooves) and a long fleshy tail with a small tuft on the end, resembling the tail of a lion (not the short tail with long hairs of a horse). So what we are looking at is a &lt;em&gt;lion&lt;/em&gt;-elephant hybrid, that is, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yali_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;yali&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Kindersley’s spelling ‘aulee’ is surely his attempt to transcribe ‘yali’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T17:42:50.773" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T17:42:50.773" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2020-04-04T20:29:10.480" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ancient Greece the East (Anatolia, the &quot;Orient&quot;) was stereotyped as a place of richness, wealth, immorality, power, luxury - the opposite of a more austere and humble life, but more virtuous, that the non-Anatolian (western) Greeks would live. Anatolia had rich states (Lydia) and its wealth came also to the Greek cities nearby. The oldest reference I know is the verse about the &quot;Gold of Gyges&quot; by Archilochus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The Romans inherited this notion, and Cicerus has writings with the same motif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The notion of the East being &quot;barbaric&quot; seems to appear for the first time in Aristotle, after Alexander's invasion, when he argues that while rich and magnificent, Persian cities weren't free, because they had a king, and considering this political condition - compared to Greek republics and democracies  -  a lack on &quot;human character&quot;, so it's not any more a lack of virtue by excess of wealth, but a lack of humanity that makes them inferior humans - barbaric. It's a very violent ideology that Aristotle assigned, that made the &quot;Orient&quot; stereotype much more aggressive from there on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This notion was very present in European literature in the XVIII century referring to the Turkish Empire. And even in the XX century there were attempts to appropriate this tradition by calling the Soviet Union a part of the &quot;Orient&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9809" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T21:36:08.863" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T21:36:08.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6410" CreationDate="2020-04-04T21:29:22.500" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Western storytelling is an incredibly broad category but there are certainly example of the antagonists being based in the East including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/strong&gt; - You've mentioned Mordor's location in the East but we also have the evil-aligned Easterings (hopefully no explanation needed) and the Corsairs of Umbar (whose base is relatively Eastern). It also doesn't take an especially detailed reading of the books to detect that dragons, orcs and evil humans all seem to become more common the further East you travel from the Shire, Grey Havens and Gondor.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;His Dark Materials&lt;/strong&gt; - The Tartars are portrayed as en evil and bloodthirsty nation and are clearly modeled on the real Russo-Turkic tribes of our world. They frequently act as ruthless mercenaries for the antagonists of Lyra's world. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/strong&gt; - So you've got Hogwarts (the British centre of heroism where all the important events happen), Beauxbatons (home to hot French students) and Durmstrang (whose students are laconic east europeans and have a syllabus focussing on the dark arts and anti-Muggle racism. Spot the evil one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Uberwald&lt;/strong&gt; - Pratchett's eastern european analogue is a brutal, feudal place where Vampires and Werewolves hunt everybody else for fun and nutrition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that is just focusing on relatively recent fantasy. Looking further back you've got the evil, Indian temple of Indiana Jones, Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the Congo, Fu Manchu, yellow peril invasion stories, the anarchic eastern kingdoms of Kipling and various other forms of racist, anti-eastern sentiment.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5667" LastEditorUserId="5667" LastEditDate="2020-04-04T21:41:19.080" LastActivityDate="2020-04-04T21:41:19.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13666" CreationDate="2020-04-04T21:53:17.577" Score="2" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11613/17&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; I originally used the name Gugalanna for the Heaven-Bull slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, following &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh#Tablet_six&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;. After a query in comments, I edited the question since the name Gugalanna is not used in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modernised Muss-Arnolt translation&lt;/a&gt; which I was using as a source. But after that I went searching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gugalanna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apparently&lt;/a&gt;, Gugalanna was a man, husband to Ereshkigal the queen of the underworld, but he's also possibly identified with two other characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;he may be merely an alternative name for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennugi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ennugi&lt;/a&gt;. [...] Some scholars consider Gugalanna to be the same figure as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_of_Heaven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bull of Heaven&lt;/a&gt;, slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the deal with this character? Why, based on what ancient sources, is he so variously identified?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T21:08:06.663" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T19:36:39.677" Title="Who is Gugalanna?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;&lt;sumerian-literature&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13624" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-05T01:27:19.693" Score="4" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Foster Wallace's &quot;This Is Water&quot; Commencement Speech&lt;/a&gt;, there is a story used as a metaphor about a fish asking another fish &quot;what the hell is water&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had the impression this story was something I had heard &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt;, and DFW was there only using or slightly modifying a popular joke to illustrate his point. However when now I tried to find its origin everything seems to point to This Is Water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for any reference to the story or similar stories before 2005 or the confirmation of this not being a common tale in the American/Anglosaxon culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9814" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T11:18:48.817" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T11:18:48.817" Title="&quot;This Is Water&quot; David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech Fish Story Reference" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;david-foster-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13625" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11754" CreationDate="2020-04-05T10:30:03.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we look at British place names ending in 'ham', we see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allingham is pronounced &lt;code&gt;/ˈælɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Altrincham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈɔːltrɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Birmingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbɜːmɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Buckingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbʌkɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cunningham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈkʌnɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chatham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈtʃætəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clapham&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;code&gt;/ˈklæpəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Evesham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈiːvʃəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gillingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈdʒɪlɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heysham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈhiːʃəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Immingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈɪmɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Newham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈnjuːəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nottingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈnɒtɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oldham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈoʊldəm/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sandringham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈsændrɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tottenham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈtɑtənəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wrexham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈrɛksəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at British family names, see see for example the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bentham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbɛnθəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Botham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbəʊθəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gresham : &lt;code&gt;/ˈɡrɛʃəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pelham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈpɛləm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at American place names, we see a different pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bellingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbɛlɪŋˌhæm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Framingham: &lt;code&gt;/ˈfreɪmɪŋˌhæm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bingham:&lt;code&gt;/ˈbɪŋəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waltham is pronounced &lt;code&gt;/ˈwɔlθəm/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ˈwɔlˌθæm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we look at American family names, we find the following examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lewis H. &lt;strong&gt;Lapham&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;code&gt;/ˈlæpəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Lethem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonathan Lethem&lt;/a&gt; (admitted not 'ham'): &lt;code&gt;/ˈliːθəm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gingham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gingham&lt;/a&gt; is pronounced &lt;code&gt;/ˈgiŋ-əm/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source for the phonemic transcriptions: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, except where I have included a link to Wikipedia or Merriam Webster.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that is very consistent is that names consisting of two syllables end on &lt;code&gt;/əm/&lt;/code&gt;; the only exception is Waltham.&#xA;So unless William Dean Howells intentionally wanted to diverge from this pattern, the name of the character Lapham was pronounced &lt;strong&gt;&lt;code&gt;/ˈlæpəm/&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T12:39:54.927" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T12:39:54.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13626" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13627" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist William Dean Howells (1837 – 1920) and his life as a writer. Howells is best known for the novels 'The Rise of Silas Lapham' (1885) and 'A Traveler from Altruria' (1894). " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T10:51:45.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13628" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-05T14:56:41.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T14:56:41.457" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T14:56:41.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13629" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-05T14:56:41.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Henry Fielding (1707–1754), or his life as a writer. He is an English novelist, best known for &quot;Shamela&quot; (1741), &quot;Joseph Andrews&quot; (1742) and &quot;Tom Jones&quot; (1749)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T05:54:17.007" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T05:54:17.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" Score="0" Body="&quot;Joseph Andrews&quot; (1742), a novel by Henry Fielding. Use this tag with the [henry-fielding] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T14:57:27.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham written by William Dean Howells. Always use this tag together with the [william-dean-howells] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T15:33:42.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12474" CreationDate="2020-04-05T16:12:13.203" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are five occurrences of &quot;vasty&quot; in Shakespeare's plays:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;1 Henry IV&lt;/em&gt;, III.1.50: &quot;I can call spirits from the vasty deep&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, Prologue: &quot;Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France?&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, II.2.123: &quot;He might return to vasty Tartar back&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, II.4.105: &quot;the poor souls for whom this hungry war / Opens his vasty jaws&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt;, II.7.41: &quot;the vasty wilds / Of wide Arabia&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions (revised by Robert D. Eagleson, 1986) defines &quot;vasty&quot; as &quot;Vast, immense, boundless&quot;.&#xA;(Shakespeare also used the term &quot;vastidity&quot;, meaning &quot;immensity&quot;, in &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gary Taylor's edition of &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt; (The Oxford Shakespeare, 1982) notes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, Shakespeare invented this word. He never uses it in prose; three of its five appearances are in this play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Shakespeare only used it in verse suggests why he invented (or used) &quot;vasty&quot; instead of &quot;vast&quot;: to fit the iambic metre of his lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T16:12:13.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12536" CreationDate="2020-04-05T17:12:33.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous study of Shakespeare's &quot;explicit references&quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/Shakespeares-Bawdy/Partridge/p/book/9780415254007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary &amp;amp; Psychological Essay and A Comprehensive Glossary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Eric Partridge (first published in 1947).&#xA;The book contains a 48-page introduction, followed by a 175-page glossary. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope it is clear that what is considered taboo or inappropriate varies through time and from culture to culture. On page 33, Partridge writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the other hand, there is much evidence to show that in late-Elizabethan, in Jacobean, and in Caroline times,&#xA;  women spoke very freely of sex in the presence of men and that the men and women of those times conversed together,&#xA;  with considerable freedom, on the theme of fornication and 'wedding and bedding'.&#xA;  The comedies of Ben Jonson, the comedies and tragi-comedies of Beaumont &amp;amp; Fletcher, Heywood, Massinger, Middleton, offer many proofs of this freedom.&#xA;  Shakespeare and Beaumont &amp;amp; Fletcher were quite as 'free' as were Dryden, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth and last part of the introduction, Partridge asks how Shakespeare compared with other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists in the matter of sex and bawdiness, and writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of all the dramatists flourishing in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, Shakespeare is the wittiest, profoundest, most idealistic yet most cynical,&#xA;  and, proportionally to the &lt;em&gt;corpora operum&lt;/em&gt;, the most abundant: Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, Greene—Ben Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, Heywood, Dekker, Massinger,&#xA;  Middleton, Beaumont &amp;amp; Fletcher: all these men are inferior, in all those respects, to Shakespeare, and only Jonson in his comedies&#xA;  and Beaumont &amp;amp; Fletcher, whether in comedy or in tragi-comedy, are as smutty; but unfortunately the smut of Ben Jonson, as of the collaborators, is less witty, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partridge also claims that Shakespeare's interest in women and their sexual features &quot;was part of his character and his temperament&quot; (page 21) and that he did not want to hide this.&#xA;He does not believe that Shakespeare's bawdy jokes were concessions to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;groundlings&lt;/a&gt; (page 3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T17:12:33.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6712" CreationDate="2020-04-05T17:52:12.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;[second] most translated book after the Bible&quot; apparently depends on whom you ask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Professor Alfredo Moro, the 17th-century noel “&lt;strong&gt;Don Quijote de la Mancha&lt;/strong&gt; is the second most translated book after the Bible”. &#xA;In an interview from 2016, Moro said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are currently working on a project where we are assembling all the translations of Don Quijote in many languages all around the world and we have one language per chapter. (...)&#xA;  We find thousands of translations and thousands of authors who were influenced, e.g. British authors like Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, all wrote about Don Quixote and all were interested in Don Quixote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tvm.com.mt/en/news/don-quijote-de-la-mancha-is-the-second-most-translated-book-after-the-bible/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Don Quijote de la Mancha is the second most translated book after the Bible” &lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;TVM News, 23.04.2016.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to the French newspaper &lt;em&gt;Le Figaro&lt;/em&gt;, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Petit Prince&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Little Prince&lt;/em&gt;) is the second most translated book after the Bible:&#xA;Apparently, the book's threehundredth translation was a translation into &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassaniya_Arabic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hassaniya Arabic&lt;/a&gt;, a variety of Arabic spoken in Northwest Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lefigaro.fr/langue-francaise/actu-des-mots/2017/04/07/37002-20170407ARTFIG00005--le-petit-prince-deuxieme-livre-le-plus-traduit-au-monde-apres-la-bible.php#link_time=1491592234&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;&lt;em&gt;Le Petit Prince&lt;/em&gt;, deuxième livre le plus traduit au monde après la Bible&quot;&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Le Figaro&lt;/em&gt;, 07.04.2017; see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.revue-internationale.com/2013/04/le-petit-prince-louvrage-le-plus-traduit-depuis-70-ans/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;«Le Petit Prince»: l’ouvrage le plus traduit depuis 70 ans&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;La Revue Internationale&lt;/em&gt;, 13.04.2013.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other articles put other books at the top, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/most-translated-texts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 5 Most Translated Literary Texts In The World&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ingcointernational.com/the-20-most-translated-texts-in-history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 20 Most Translated Texts in History&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Both these articles are probably based on Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_works_by_number_of_translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of literary works by number of translations&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;which ranks &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (more than 300 translations) above &lt;em&gt;The Little Prince&lt;/em&gt; (300 translations). &#xA;Wikipedia also lists &quot;Rhapsody of Realities Devotional&quot;, a text by a megachurch that is claimed to have more than 2000 translations.&#xA;Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; is not even listed. It may be one of the most translated Italian works of literature, but &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/em&gt; appears to have more translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; isn't in the top 50 of Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of best-selling books&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;where works such as &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/em&gt; and Umberto Eco's &lt;em&gt;The Name of the Rose&lt;/em&gt; are ranked much higher than Dante's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T13:48:17.057" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T13:48:17.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12341" CreationDate="2020-04-05T18:27:42.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is always difficult to prove a negative, but I doubt that ‘simple sheep’ is a biblical reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two reasons for this doubt. First, in the Authorized Version (the translation with which Keats was most familiar) the word ‘simple’ is mainly used with the meaning ‘unsophisticated, ignorant, foolish’, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblehub.com/psalms/119-130.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalm 119:130&lt;/a&gt; The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblehub.com/proverbs/9-13.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proverbs 9:13&lt;/a&gt; A foolish woman is clamorous: she is simple, and knoweth nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblehub.com/romans/16-18.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romans 16:17&lt;/a&gt; by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas in the line from ‘Endymion’, Keats is using ‘simple’ with the meaning ‘humble, modest, unassuming’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the sentiment of the passage is that the beauty of the natural world, such as a flock of sheep resting in the shade of a tree on a hot day, ‘moves away the pall from our dark spirits’, that is, it cheers us up. This is an idea that is not found in the Bible: when the Bible mentions the beauty of the natural world, it does so in order to praise God, as for example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblehub.com/psalms/96.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Psalm 96:11–13&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof. Let the field be joyful, and all that is therein: then shall all the trees of the wood rejoice before the Lord: for he cometh, for he cometh to judge the earth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T18:27:42.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4735" CreationDate="2020-04-05T20:06:12.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lines 1–33 of ‘Endymion’ form an introduction to the story, which starts at line 34:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore, ’tis with full happiness that I&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will trace the story of Endymion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way to understand the word ‘Therefore’ in line 34 is that lines 1–33 consist of an &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt; as to why Keats should be happy to tell the story of Endymion. What is this argument? Well, first, ‘a thing of beauty is a joy for ever’, that is, a beautiful story is always worth re-telling; second, a thing of beauty ‘moves away the pall from our dark spirits’, that is, it cheers us up. Things of beauty include the natural world (‘the sun, the moon, trees old and young’ etc.), and also ‘all lovely tales that we have heard or read’, and by implication these tales must include the myth of Endymion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if we take the ‘lovely tales’ to be the corpus of ancient myths, then ‘the mighty dead’ are the heroes of those myths, and the ‘dooms we have imagined’ for them are their tragic and heroic fates. The ‘endless fountain of immortal drink’ is a metaphor in which the myths are compared to a waterfall, and reading to drinking. The waterfall comes from ‘heaven’s brink’, meaning that the myths have a divine quality, and it is ‘endless’ because the stories can be re-told over and again, as Keats proposes to do in the remainder of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T20:32:43.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T20:32:43.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13640" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-05T20:10:50.423" Score="5" ViewCount="796" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first line of Isaac Bashevis Singer's &lt;em&gt;Satan in Goray&lt;/em&gt; goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the year 1648, the wicked Ukrainian hetman, Bogdan Chmelnicki, and his followers besieged the city of Zamosć but could not take it, because it was strongly fortified; the rebelling &lt;em&gt;haidamak&lt;/em&gt; peasants moved on to spread havoc in Tomaszów, Bilgoraj, Kraśnik, Turbin, Frampol&amp;mdash;and in Goray, too, the town that lay in the midst of the hills at the end of the world.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Satan in Goray&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1: &quot;The Year 1648 in Goray&quot; (no emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the italicized word &quot;&lt;em&gt;haidamak&lt;/em&gt;&quot; is supposed to mean here. What language is it in? Is it Yiddish (the language the book was originally written in)? Is it Polish? What does it mean? And why was it left untranslated here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-05T20:56:46.353" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T07:51:54.623" Title="What does &quot;haidamak&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;isaac-bashevis-singer&gt;&lt;yiddish-literature&gt;&lt;satan-in-goray&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11927" CreationDate="2020-04-05T20:47:14.270" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Assyriologist Andrew R. George (&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;, Penguin, 1999) translates the relevant passages as follows &#xA;(page 3; an almost indentical passage occurs on the following page):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He has no equal when his weapons are brandished, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    his companions are kept on their feet by his &lt;em&gt;contests&lt;/em&gt; &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The young men of Uruk he harries without warrant, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  By day and by night his tyranny grows harsher, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     Gilgamesh, [&lt;em&gt;the guide of the teeming people&lt;/em&gt;!] &lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  It is he who is shepherd of Uruk-the-Sheepfold, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    [but Gilgamesh] lets no [daughter go free to her] mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In BBC 4's podcast &lt;em&gt;In Our Time&lt;/em&gt; podcast &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0kkdXuMeoI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt;, originally broadcast on 03.11.2016, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/c0kkdXuMeoI?t=380&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew George summarises the relevant part of Tablet I&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) when the narrative gets going, we have Gilgamesh as a king in Uruk who's abusing his power.&#xA;  It's a period of tyranny, the city can't function as it should. As a result, there's an outcry.&#xA;  He's preoccupying the people, particularly the young in martial exercises, he's abusing his rights.&#xA;  And in response, the mother goddess actually creates a wild man, Enkidu, from clay, to be a match to Gilgamesh.&#xA;  And the idea is that this will therefore absorb his energies, his aggression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page xlvi of his introduction, Andrew George points out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The nature of Gilgamesh's tyranny is not explained by the poet, for it is not necessary to know more than that he is a tyrant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are reasons to assume that his tyranny involves the &lt;em&gt;ius primae noctis&lt;/em&gt; (&quot;right of the first night&quot;), since on Tablet II,&#xA;a man who has been invited to a wedding says (page 15 in George's translation),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He [Gilgamesh] will couple with the wife-to-be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  he first of all, the bridegroom after.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  By divine consent it is so ordained:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This practice is not documented in historical sources, as George (page xlvii) and other translators (Stefan M. Maul, page 159; Wolfgang Röllig, page 158) point out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;ius primae noctis&lt;/em&gt; is not the whole story; it does not explain in what way Gilgamesh &quot;lets no son go free to his father&quot; and &quot;lets no [daughter go free to her] mother&quot; (unless one assumes that every daughter is a bride).&#xA;Wolfgang Röllig thinks the tyranny refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corv%C3%A9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;statute labour&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the passage also contains something of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux_(literary)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crux&lt;/a&gt;: &#xA;the italicised word &lt;em&gt;contests&lt;/em&gt; in George's translation is left untranslated in Röllig's translation: &lt;strong&gt;pukku&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Stefan M. Maul translates the word as &quot;Spielball&quot; (playing ball), whereas Benjamin R. Foster translates it as &quot;game stick&quot;.&#xA;Both Maul and Röllig point out that the meaning of &quot;pukku&quot; has not been established beyond doubt.&#xA;The word is also used in the Sumerian poem &quot;Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld&quot;, where the word &quot;mekku&quot; is also used.&#xA;Perhaps &quot;pukku&quot; and &quot;mekku&quot; refer to a ball and a stick or mallet used in a ball game with vague similarities to hockey (Maul, page 156; Röllig, page 156).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.1.4#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gilgameš, Enkidu and the nether world&lt;/a&gt;, both the pukku and the mekku are made from the wood of a ḫalub tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As for himself, from its roots, he manufactured his ball (?) and, from its branches, he manufactured his mallet (?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the ball game takes up so much time and energy from the people that they start complaining about it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the widows' accusation and the young girls' complaint caused his ball (?) and his mallet (?) to fall down to the bottom of the nether world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, it is possible that in the Standard Babylonian epic, Gilgamesh is wasting people's time with a ball game or requiring too much statute labour, or both (in addition to the &lt;em&gt;ius primae noctis&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources (in chronological order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction by Andrew George. London: Penguin, 1999.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos&lt;/em&gt;. Neu Übersetzt und kommentiert von Stefan M. Maul. München: C. H. Beck, 2005. Sixth edition, 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos&lt;/em&gt;. Übersetzt, kommentiert und herausgegeben von Wolfgang Röllig. Reclam Bibliothek. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart, 2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Translated and edited by Benjamin R. Foster. Second Edition. Norton, 2019. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T20:47:14.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13640" CreationDate="2020-04-05T20:56:26.267" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Haidamaks are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidamaka&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;haidamaks&lt;/a&gt;: Ukrainian peasants and cossacks who formed paramilitary bands and engaged in guerilla warfare against the Polish Catholics and Jews in the Polish-occupied &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-bank_Ukraine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Right-Bank Ukraine&lt;/a&gt; during the 18th century. Haidamaks is the English word for them too; there is no specific translated version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035751?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Myths Old and New: the Haidamak Movement and the Koliivshchyna (1768) in Recent Historiography&lt;/em&gt; - review article by Zenon E. Kohut&lt;/a&gt; (Jstor link)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com/display.asp?linkpath=pages%5CH%5CA%5CHaidamakauprisings.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haidamaka uprisings&lt;/a&gt;, Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only puzzle then is in the setting of 1648. From what I've read, it seems that the haidamak uprisings were largely an &lt;em&gt;eighteenth&lt;/em&gt;-century thing. It seems that in Singer's novel, he's using the term &quot;haidamak&quot; in the broader sense mentioned in the Wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because of the massacres of Jews, Jesuits, Uniates, and Polish nobility, the Polish language term Hajdamactwo became a pejorative label for Ukrainians as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmelnytsky_Uprising&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khmelnytsky Uprising&lt;/a&gt;, the setting of &lt;em&gt;Satan in Goray&lt;/em&gt;, makes no mention of haidamaks. However, this too involved Ukrainian Cossacks rising up against Polish occupiers and committing atrocities against Catholics and Jews. It makes sense that the word &quot;haidamak&quot; would be used (if somewhat anachronistically) to describe the people and actions in the seventeenth century, which foreshadowed those coming later and in similar vein in the eighteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-05T20:56:26.267" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13612" CreationDate="2020-04-06T07:36:22.027" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: the meaning of the saying varied with time, with original meaning being life in Peter was &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;expensive&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, and some drifting to general &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;difficult&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original meaning was recorded by none other than the famous Vladimir Dal', in his 1862 monumental work &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%8B_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0_(%D0%94%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8C)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Пословицы и поговорки русского народа&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%86%D1%8B_%D1%80%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proverbs and sayings of the Russian people&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Хорош город Питер, да бока повытер &lt;em&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;дорог&lt;/strong&gt;).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter is a fine city, but rubbed out sides &lt;em&gt;(&lt;strong&gt;is expensive&lt;/strong&gt; - Dal's editorial)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please note that the explicit meaning noted fully rejects the descriptive meaning of &amp;quot;old looking&amp;quot; proposed by the other answer - &amp;quot;expensive&amp;quot; implies unambigously that the verb applies to its affect on its populace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, let's dig into details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I was able to find both a literary reference to a more expanded saying from &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%8D%D0%BC%D0%B0_%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B7_%D0%B3%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%8F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anna Akhmatova's 1940-1962 poem &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Poem without a hero&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;; as well as the source of the saying in academic literature. BOTH expanded wordings actually fully match the translation you saw Brodsky use (and contradict the previous answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Academic source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Батюшко Питер нам все бока повытер&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Это поговорка Олонецкой губернии&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://remma-ug.ru/poslovitsy-pogovorki-zagadki-v-rukopisnykh-sbornikakh-18-20-vekov/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Пословицы, поговорки, загадки в рукописных сборниках 18-20 веков&lt;/a&gt;. М.,-Л., 1961, с. 1, Микаэла Яковлевна Мельц)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Father Peter rubbed out all &lt;strong&gt;our&lt;/strong&gt; sides* (emphasis mine)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is a saying in &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%86%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%B3%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Olonetsky Governorate&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(&lt;em&gt;Source: &amp;quot;Proverbs, sayings, riddles in manuscript collections of 18th-20th centuries&amp;quot;, 1961, by Michaela Yakovlevna Meltz, published by USSR Academy of Science&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Literary source: &lt;strong&gt;Анна Ахматова. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ruthenia.ru/60s/ahmatova/poema1_2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Поэма без героя&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Глава вторая&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;А вокруг старый город Питер,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Что народу бока повытер&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Как тогда народ говорил), —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;В гривах, в сбруях, в мучных обозах,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;В размалеванных чайных розах&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;И под тучей вороньих крыл.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter two&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And around the old city Peter,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which &lt;strong&gt;rubbed out people's sides&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(As the people said back then)&lt;/strong&gt;, —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In manes, in harnesses, in flour wagons,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In painted tea roses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And under a cloud of raven wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mine + Google Translate)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether Brodsky's source was Akhmatova or they both just heard the same saying, but either way the meaning is relayed identically in both sources to Brodsky's translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interestingly, I actually was able to find a whole discourse on the topic of that saying, in the 2014 re-published book &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.labirint.ru/books/427698/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Словарь петербуржца. Лексикон Северной столицы. История и современность&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of denizen of petersburg. Lexicon of Northern Capital. History and Modernity&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) by Наум Александрович Синдаловский (Naum Alexandrovich Sindalovsky).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unable to find the full text of the book yet, but the annotation actually quoted extensively from that chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Один пример такого рода – смысловые и формальные перевоплощения старой, можно сказать «классической» пословицы о Петербурге – Питер бока повытер, да и Москва бьет с носка, смысл которой В. И. Даль в своих знаменитых «Пословицах русского народа» лапидарно определил так: «все дорого, убыточно». Н. А. Синдаловский любовно собрал максимально полную коллекцию вариантов этой пословицы, указав на их источники: А кабы занесло вас в Питер, он бы вам бока повытер – надпись на лубочной картинке 1812 г. «Старостиха Василиса», ставшая пословицей и относившаяся первоначально только к армии Наполеона; Батюшка-Питер бока наши повытер, братцы-заводы унесли годы, а матушка-канава и совсем доконала – о тяжелой жизни рабочего люда в Петербурге (Канава – Обводный канал, по берегам которого во второй половине XIX в. появилось множество промышленных предприятий); Красный Питер бока Юденичу вытер — поговорка родилась в 1919 г., после отпора, данного рабочими Петрограда попытке захвата города войсками белогвардейской армии под командованием Юденича; Москва бьет с носка, а Питер бока повытер – и в Петербурге, и в Москве живется несладко; Питер бока повытер, а в Москве толсто звонят, да тонко едят – в Петербурге жизнь тяжела, а в Москве дорога; Питер бока повытер, да и Москва бьет с носка – жизнь в обеих столицах мало чем различается; Попал бы ты в Питер, он бы тебе бока вытер – о хвастунах и бездельниках; Хорош город Питер, да бока вытер – Петербург – город замечательный, но жить в нем трудно.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One example of this kind is the semantic and formal reincarnations of the old, one might say &amp;quot;classical&amp;quot; proverb about St. Petersburg - Peter has gone overboard, and Moscow is beating off his toes, the meaning of which V. I. Dal in his famous &amp;quot;Proverbs of the Russian people&amp;quot; lapidarily defined as follows: &amp;quot;Everything is expensive, unprofitable.&amp;quot; N. A. Sindalovsky lovingly collected the most complete collection of versions of this proverb, pointing out their sources: And if it had brought you to St. Petersburg, he would have washed your sides - the inscription on the popular print of 1812 &amp;quot;Elder Vasilisa&amp;quot;, which became a proverb and originally referred only to to Napoleon's army; Peter the father rubbed off our sides, factories the brothers shaved off years of our lives, and the ditch the mother did us in completely - about the hard life of the working people in St. Petersburg (Kanava - Obvodny Canal, on the banks of which in the second half of the XIX century. A lot of industrial enterprises appeared); Red Peter wiped Yudenich's sides - the saying was born in 1919, after the rebuff given by the workers of Petrograd to an attempt to capture the city by the troops of the White Guard army under the command of Yudenich; Moscow beats off his toes, and Peter has his sides worn out - both in St. Petersburg and in Moscow life is hard; Peter's side was worn out, but in Moscow they ring thickly, but eat thinly - life is hard in Petersburg, but it's expensive in Moscow; Peter's sides have been wobbly, and Moscow is beating off its toes - life in both capitals is not much different; If you got to Peter, he would wipe your sides - about braggarts and idlers; Peter is a fine city, but rubbed out sides - &lt;strong&gt;Petersburg is a wonderful city, but it's difficult to live there&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mostly from Google)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The overall wording of the majority of the versions cited explicitly mentions again effect on people (&amp;quot;вам&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;наши&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;тебе&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, in another book by the same author (Sindalovsky), 2002 &amp;quot;Мифология Петербурга: Очерки&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Mythology of Petersburg: Essays&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), he quotes yet another version of the saying, which even more clearly conveys &amp;quot;Expensive to live&amp;quot; context/meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Далеко не всем провинциалам Питер оказывался по плечу. Вблизи свобода превращалась в иллюзию, богатство – в призрак. Помятые столичной жизнью и отрезвевшие псковичи и ярославцы становились извозчиками и лакеями, чернорабочими и носильщиками. До сегодняшнего дня в петербургском городском фольклоре сохраняется множество пословичных вариантов на одну и ту же болезненную тему: «Хорош город Питер, да бока вытер»; «&lt;strong&gt;Питер – карман вытер&lt;/strong&gt;»; «Батюшко Питер бока наши повытер»; «Матушка Нева испромыла нам бока». Пословицам и поговоркам вторят частушки:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Уж как с Питера начать,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;До Казани окончать.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Уж как в Питере Нева&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Испромыла нам бока.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all provincials were able to handle Peter. Up close, freedom turned into an illusion, wealth into a ghost. Battered by the life of the capital and sobering up, Pskov and Yaroslavl residents became cabbies and lackeys, laborers and porters. To this day, many proverbial variants on the same painful theme are preserved in St. Petersburg city folklore: &amp;quot;The city of Peter is good, but wiped the sides&amp;quot;; “&lt;strong&gt;Peter cleaned out our pockets&lt;/strong&gt;”; &amp;quot;Father Peter rubbed off our sides&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;Mother Neva has washed our sides.&amp;quot; Chastooshkas echo proverbs and sayings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to start with Peter,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Finish before Kazan.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like in St. Petersburg Neva&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She flushed our sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mostly from Google)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The bolded version explicitly says &amp;quot;Peter cleaned out our &lt;em&gt;pockets&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (instead of &amp;quot;sides&amp;quot;)&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T04:27:06.180" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T04:27:06.180" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13640" CreationDate="2020-04-06T07:51:54.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Romanian the word &lt;em&gt;haidamac&lt;/em&gt; means thug, or less pejoratively, burly man. It comes from Turkish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dexonline.ro:8080/definitie/haidamac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanian dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9816" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T07:51:54.623" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13645" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13646" CreationDate="2020-04-06T12:00:23.237" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might have been a short piece rather than a full-length play; I heard about it in a news story. I don't remember any details, but the idea was that instead of actually speaking content words, the actors all just used dialogue which was generic and descriptive, although conveyed plenty of emotion and nuance. E.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alice: General question?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob: Non-committal reply.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice: Subtly modified inquiry?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob: Suspicious Irony? Confident dismissal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice: Hesitant reiteration...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Bob: Emphatic redirection!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Alice: Shrugging acceptance, faux pleasantry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etc. I'm having trouble finding it because any google search for relevant terms like &quot;play using generic words&quot; just gives me lists of theatre jargon and the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9817" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T12:02:45.930" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T12:14:02.463" Title="What was the play 5-10 years ago where all the dialogue consisted of generic words describing what might be said" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13645" CreationDate="2020-04-06T12:07:43.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be thinking of this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/rbhrz1-4hN4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trailer For Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever - With BriTANick&lt;/a&gt; (2010)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a play or a piece for theatre, but a spoof film trailer. But the theme of the dialogue is so &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; what you describe that I'm posting it as an answer anyway. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B: Friendly concern that something may be missing from your life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: Confidence that nothing is missing in my life.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  B: Interrupted statement about -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: Reassurance that my good fortune will not waver.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;[Cut to A in a dark room holding a half-empty bottle. A knock at the door.]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;B: Specific outlining of your major character flaws.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A: Overreaction! &lt;em&gt;[slamming B against the wall]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  C &lt;em&gt;[unseen]&lt;/em&gt;: Friendly black optimistic advice.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  D &lt;em&gt;[sobbing]&lt;/em&gt;: Passionate plea! Whispered repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T12:14:02.463" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T12:14:02.463" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-06T12:16:31.133" Score="4" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was in 6th, 7th and 8th grade in mid-70's, my school used a series of textbooks for the literature classes.  I thought they were excellent collections and I've hunted for them several times over the last decade.  I remember a few of the stories, but don't remember which of the 3 texts each particular story came from, which makes the search harder.  Here's the stories I remember:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Strangers that Came to Town&quot; by Ambrose Flack.  &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The scene from &quot;The Hobbit&quot; where Bilbo is riddling with Gollum.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Boy Who Painted Christ Black&quot; by John Henrik Clarke.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can try to describe the cover art, as I remember it.  The 6th-grade text had an abstract painting done with earth tones on a white background.  The paint was real thick and globby.  The image looked vaguely like a loaf of bread with on slice cut off and lying in front of it.  The 7th grade text again had a white background but the painting was even more abstract.  Black streaks and splotches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm good at Google; really good. But nothing.  E-bay has a huge collection of middle school texts.  Nothing.  I don't remember the publisher, but Houghton-Mifflin seemed to be the publisher for most of our texts back then and their website gives me nothing.  Now that I finally have a grandson, I'd like to add these to my collection of all the books I'm going to read to him.  Any leads or a better place to ask are welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9818" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-04-07T09:18:18.437" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T09:18:18.437" Title="Searching for US Nebraska middle school literature texts from the 70's" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12345" CreationDate="2020-04-06T16:27:25.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question asks, ‘Was Keats ever criticized for standardizing generic beauty?’ and the answer is ‘yes—indeed, he was criticized along these lines by his own fiancée, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanny_Brawne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fanny Brawne&lt;/a&gt;!’ The evidence for this appears in two letters from Keats to Brawne:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why may I not speak of your Beauty, since without that I could never have lov’d you?&lt;/strong&gt;—I cannot conceive any beginning of such love as I have for you but Beauty. There may be a sort of love for which, without the least sneer at it, I have the highest respect and can admire it in others: but it has not the richness, the bloom, the full form, the enchantment of love after my own heart. So let me speak of your Beauty, though to my own endangering; if you could be so cruel to me as to try elsewhere its Power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Keats (10 July 1819). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/letterstofannybr00keatuoft/page/8/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Fanny Brawne&lt;/a&gt;. Letter II in Harry Buxton Forman, ed. (1878). &lt;em&gt;Letters of John Keats to Fanny Brawne&lt;/em&gt;. London: Reeves and Turner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you pass’d my window home yesterday, I was fill’d with as much admiration as if I had then seen you for the first time. &lt;strong&gt;You uttered a half complaint once that I only lov’d your beauty.&lt;/strong&gt; Have I nothing else then to love in you but that? Do not I see a heart naturally furnish’d with wings imprison itself with me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Keats (undated, but c. March 1820). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/letterstofannybr00keatuoft/page/68/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Fanny Brawne&lt;/a&gt;. Letter XXIV in Forman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brawne’s letters to Keats were destroyed by him, but we can read between the lines of Keats’ replies to deduce the nature of her complaint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-06T16:27:25.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13649" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-06T17:49:45.137" Score="2" ViewCount="203" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mr William Collins is an ordained clergyman in the Church of England, and becomes the priest of the Hunsford parish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that neither Miss Elizabeth Bennet nor her father particularly revere Mr Collins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder if there is a reason why &lt;strong&gt;nobody&lt;/strong&gt; refers to Mr William Collins as &lt;strong&gt;the Reverend&lt;/strong&gt; Mr Collins, not even he himself (who otherwise never passes an opportunity to underline his self-importance)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9819" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T19:26:16.690" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T17:23:37.567" Title="Why is Mr William Collins never referred to as the Rev Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-06T21:17:55.563" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am investigating about Gothic Literature, more concretely about Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, and realized there was &lt;strong&gt;a theory on the possibility of Frankenstein's monster being an illusion&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1385522-did-the-creature-even-exist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some info can be found available here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Is there any paper or specific publication mentioning this theory?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9821" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-06T22:00:43.003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T09:50:20.987" Title="Was Frankenstein's Monster really an illusion?" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13651" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13652" CreationDate="2020-04-07T02:36:16.120" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a paragraph from &lt;em&gt;The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland&lt;/em&gt; (2016) by John Lewis-Stempel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quite aside from the de-naturing of contemporary childhood, more about collecting apps for Apple iPhones than scrumping apples, there was always the terrible destructivity of butterfly collecting. Due to the collectors the ineffability of evolution is better understood; minute wing variation in the pretty marsh fritillary, discovered Professor E. B. Ford, was no accident but a real, living adjustment to environment. Neither can the collectors be blamed for the butterflies we have lost, in the Lady Bracknell understanding of the word, such as the English large copper, the chequered skipper, the English large blue . . . Pollution, agribusiness, infrastructural development are the true butterfly-killers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;in the Lady Bracknell understanding of the word&quot; mean here? What does &quot;the word&quot; refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that Lady Bracknell is the character from &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;. I read the play, but still could not get a clue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9822" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-07T06:35:32.247" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T06:36:36.923" Title="Context and meaning of &quot;in the Lady Bracknell understanding of the word&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-running-hare&gt;&lt;john-lewis-stempel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13651" CreationDate="2020-04-07T06:36:36.923" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reference is to the following well-known exchange from &lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lady Bracknell.&lt;/strong&gt; Now to minor matters. Are your parents living? (&lt;em&gt;Turning to Jack.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jack.&lt;/strong&gt; I have lost both my parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lady Bracknell.&lt;/strong&gt; To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Oscar Wilde (1895). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/importanceofbein1895wild/page/22/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Importance of Being Earnest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, act I.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So “the word” is “lost” and the point Lewis-Stempel is making that the butterflies weren’t “lost” by accident or misfortune, they were destroyed by carelessness, negligence, and greed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T06:36:36.923" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13650" CreationDate="2020-04-07T09:50:20.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first relevant document I managed to discover on this is an undergraduate biology thesis titled &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://augusta.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10675.2/620919/Urizar_D_2016.pdf?sequence=5&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Real &quot;Monster&quot; in Frankenstein&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Here is an extract from the abstract:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I argue that that the real “monster” of the story is in fact Victor&#xA;  Frankenstein who is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and that the “monster” is really just&#xA;  a delusions that Victor uses to cope with the idea that he in fact is the killer of the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't sure if an undergraduate level paper was sufficient to answer the question but, fortunately, the author included two supportive references from more mainstream journals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1297&amp;amp;context=engl_facpub&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Probing the Psychological Mystery of Frankenstein&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Approaches to Teaching Shelley's Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;. This goes into detail as to how a teacher can guide a class into considering that the monster may be a manifestation of Frankenstein's schizophrenia. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I call attention to the many times throughout the&#xA;  novel that Victor falls asleep or loses consciousness and how he explicitly acknowledges his own culpability when he first sees the corpse of each of the &quot;monster's&quot; victims.      &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I point out a passage in which the Creature reminds Frankenstein of their physical kinship (&quot;my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance&quot;     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I call attention to the similarity of many of their utterances. For example, each in his own way cries to a mocking universe, &quot;if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory&quot;, just as each describes himself repeatedly as a &quot;miserable wretch.&quot; Each, motivated by blind revenge, destroys himself as he seeks the annihilation of the other. One is the slave of the&#xA;  other and at the same time master and executioner. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pval.org/cms/lib/NY19000481/Centricity/Domain/105/Frankenstein%20Critique.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Myth of the Monster in Mary's Shelley's Murder Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Journal of South Texas English Studies&lt;/em&gt;. This makes a similar argument more from a close reading of the text than a medical examination. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another interesting comment that throws into doubt the existence of this being is when&#xA;  Frankenstein says, “Clerval, my friend and dearest companion, had fallen a victim to me and&#xA;  the monster of my creation”. The monster of his creation can be seen as a metaphor for&#xA;  his delusions rather than an actual creature.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The ambiguity in Shelley’s novel makes a single, definitive reading impossible. It is not clear&#xA;  from the text whether a creature exists who stalks his creator, killing all of the people close&#xA;  to him, or whether Frankenstein is actually a deranged killer with an alter ego who goes on a&#xA;  killing spree. Either reading is just as plausible. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, both these papers include their own references which may also be of help for further reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T09:50:20.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13655" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13649" CreationDate="2020-04-07T12:04:29.053" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a book review written by Dinah Birch, a professor at the University of Liverpool, she examines the role of Mr Collins as a clergyman in Jane Austen's writing. Birch says that &quot;one of the strongest points of Pride and Prejudice is its understanding that Jane Austen's Christianity ... is also an imaginative force in her writing&quot;, because Austen is &quot;deeply interested in the role of the church&quot;, in her society. She writes about the lack of religious dedication she sees in some clergyman through her character Mr Collins who is &quot;by no means an aspirant to sainthood.&#xA;(From Wiki).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that is because of the author's attitude to her character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4590" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T12:04:29.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1907" CreationDate="2020-04-07T12:16:26.707" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the excellent reasoning of the existing answer, I would like to add one detail. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although not much more can be gleaned from the edition that is in circulation today, the 1891 first edition of &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt; contained some details that were later removed. During the episode at the Chase, Alec actually forcibly drugs her in a very unambiguous act, in order to make sure she is asleep before coming back and subsequently taking advantage of her in her senseless state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see.” He went to the horse, took &lt;strong&gt;a druggist’s bottle&lt;/strong&gt; from a parcel on the saddle, and after some trouble in opening it &lt;strong&gt;held it to her mouth unawares. Tess sputtered and coughed, and gasping, “It will go on my pretty frock!” swallowed as he poured, to prevent the catastrophe she feared.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “That’s it - now you’ll feel warmer,” said d’Urberville, as he restored the bottle to its place. “It is only a well-known cordial that my mother ordered me to bring for household purposes, and she won’t mind me using some of it medicinally. Now, my pretty, rest there; I shall soon be back again.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the revised and now definitive 1892 edition this was changed to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see.&quot; He pulled off a light overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly. &quot;That's it--now you'll feel warmer,&quot; he continued. &quot;Now, my pretty, rest there; I shall soon be back again.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which practically transforms all connotations by replacing the object that he uses to 'warm' Tess with his &quot;light overcoat&quot; instead of the &quot;druggist's bottle&quot;. Tess' sleep as a product of simple tiredness in the newer edition is subsequently a drastic change from the drugged sleep and consequently undeniably sinister intent of the action contained in the original edition. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alec drugs her against her will which confirms that the sexual act between Alec and Tess was premeditated rape and definitely not consensual. Most likely this was removed from the final edition to censure the violence of Alec's actions to make it more socially suitable reading, but this reveals Hardy's original intention to cement in Victorian minds Alec as the violator of an actual, blatant crime and Tess, without any doubt, as the victim. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=SQ4gAt480TgC&amp;amp;pg=PA106#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy&lt;/a&gt; Dr Rosemarie Morgan ed., which further details this first edition scene, cites (p. 106) that a contemporary law meant that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If a person by giving a woman liquor makes her intoxicated to such a degree as to be insensible, and then has connection with her, he may be convicted of rape&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;exacting precisely what Alec does. However, scrutiny of Tess' blamelessness and purity (as established in the subtitle of '&lt;em&gt;A Pure Woman&lt;/em&gt;') arose after Hardy, for whatever reason, decided to omit this intrinsic clue and soften the degree of threat of Alec's act, creating new ambiguity around what was unquestionably rape in the original edition.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2511" LastActivityDate="2020-04-07T12:16:26.707" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6057" CreationDate="2020-04-08T17:08:46.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Ambiguity&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line is well known as a crux. But is it difficult, or just ambiguous? Ambiguity is ubiquitous in Dickinson’s poems, as she herself points out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I dwell in Possibility -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A fairer House than Prose -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  More numerous of Windows -&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Superior - for Doors -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emily Dickinson (c. 1862). In R. W. Franklin, ed. (1998). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemsofemilydick0001dick/page/492/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. 485&lt;/a&gt;. Harvard: Belknap Press. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So trying to “pin down the exact meaning”, as suggested in the question, is going to fail from time to time, and this seems to be one of those times. So you have to consider the range of possibilities, the ‘Windows’ and ‘Doors’ of the line, as it were, and see where they lead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several possibilities for the meaning of ‘Ring’, considered literally as a space for children to strive in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;13.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A circle or circular group of people; &lt;em&gt;spec.&lt;/em&gt; a circle of people in a dance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;16.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A circular course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;17.a.&lt;/strong&gt; An enclosed usually circular space within which some sport, performance, exhibition, or competition takes place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;18.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A space, originally defined by a circle of spectators, for a boxing match, wrestling match, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering ‘Ring’ as a symbol or metaphor, we can find many more meanings: the circle of friends, the arena of human competition, the prison-yard of society, the circle of the sun around the sky, the cycle of existence, the carriage-wheels of death, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;danse macabre&lt;/a&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a metaphorical sense of ‘Recess’ too, because as well as a break in a school-day it is also “an act of withdrawing from society, public life” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) as the speaker is doing in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Textual history&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line has an interesting history. Here’s the manuscript of the stanza, courtesy of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edickinson.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emily Dickinson Archive&lt;/a&gt;. (I’ve thresholded the image to improve the contrast. Click for a larger version.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJc1F.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eJc1Fm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is usually transcribed as in the question. But in the poem’s first publication in 1890, under the editorial title ‘The Chariot’, the stanza reads as follows (differences in wording in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We pass the school where children &lt;strong&gt;played&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Their lessons scarcely done;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the &lt;strong&gt;field&lt;/strong&gt; of gazing grain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the setting sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emily Dickinson (c. 1862). In Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, eds. (1890). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemssucc00dickrich/page/138/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems by Emily Dickinson&lt;/em&gt;, p. 138&lt;/a&gt; Boston: Roberts Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Todd and Higginson say in their introduction, that the poems “are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes; although it is fair to say that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors.” The changes here are hardly ‘superficial’, but you can see why they did it: the majority of the stanzas in the poem have a rhyme or assonance in the second and fourth lines, so why not this one? It is the same approach that led them to regularize Dickinson’s manuscript dashes into more conventional stops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickinson’s niece Martha Bianchi modified the line in a different way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We passed the school where children &lt;strong&gt;played&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;At wrestling in a ring&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the fields of gazing grain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  We passed the setting sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emily Dickinson (c. 1862). In Martha Dickinson Bianchi and Alfred Leete Hampson, eds. (1948). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215198/page/n191/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems by Emily Dickinson&lt;/em&gt;, p. 169&lt;/a&gt;. Boston: Little, Brown.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change here seems to be motivated by a desire to resolve the ambiguity of ‘Ring’ one way or another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ring a Ring o’ Roses?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation was first put forth by George Monteiro:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These lines do not seem problematic; yet, there is something worth noting about them. First, there is the matter that the children, at recess, do not play (as anyone would expect them to) but strive. And secondly, there is the matter of what the children are performing—whether it be called play or strife-and where and how they are performing it: “in the ring.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To take up the second matter first, it seems to me that the narrator has noticed that the children out in the schoolyard have so set themselves as to form a ring. They are thus engaged, I would suggest, in some form of organized activity—most likely, a familiar game. My hunch is that their game is the one called “Ring-a-ring-a-roses.” This venerable game, as everyone knows, involves two or more children holding hands and forming a “ring” that then moves in a circle, while its individual members recite a rhyme […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In some form or other, this rhyme dates from the middle ages. It has been suggested that originally it was recited by children who performed the ritual of circling and falling down as an exercise in exorcism or as a charm against the ravages of the plague. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is small wonder, then—to turn to the first matter—that the narrator of the poem sees the children’s activity in the ring, not as “play,” but as “strife.” For indeed, imbedded in their ritualistic game is a reminder of the mortal stakes that the poet talks about elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Monteiro (1988). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.1988.9934718&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The Explicator&lt;/em&gt; 46:3, pp. 20–21.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an ingenious interpretation but it is built on a foundation of nonsense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The legend linking the plague with the game-song seems in fact to be comparatively new. It was not given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Gomme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alice Gomme&lt;/a&gt; in 1898, who would certainly have mentioned it had she known it; and has not been found in the work of any commentator before the Second World War, although—under the protection of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bough&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Golden Bough&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;—the mythologists were not wanting in fancifulness. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The association of the plague with ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’ looks even more improbable when the history of the game itself is exampled. Alice Gomme’s failure to devolve it from Stuart times is commendable, seeing that, when she was writing [that is, in 1898], the game had not been on record in England for more than twenty years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Iona Opie and Peter Opie (1985). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ibald00iona/page/220/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Singing Game&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 221–222&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-08T17:08:46.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13649" CreationDate="2020-04-09T00:10:29.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer would appear to be, because we never see correspondence addressed to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Collins was a Rector, and while I cannot vouch for its currency at time of Austen’s writing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/professions/religion/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Debretts.com&lt;/a&gt;* gives several forms of address, for ranks of clergy including Rector and Vicar, dependent on the usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Salutation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Mr Denman, Dear Father Denman (for beneficed clergy Dear Rector or Dear Vicar)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Envelope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Reverend John Denman (not Reverend Denman or The Reverend Denman )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verbal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Denman or Father Denman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane Austen was well versed in such societal minutiae, so I would be surprised is these forms of address were not also proper at the time she was writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Debrett’s are the publishers of the default reference works on UK peerage and forms of address.  Per their website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Debrett’s has a 250-year publishing heritage, the first edition of John Debrett’s &lt;em&gt;New Peerage&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1769, and it has remained in print ever since, with the 150th edition published in 2019 to coincide with Debrett’s turning a quarter of a millennium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our popular etiquette guides are consistently revised and updated, including &lt;em&gt;Debrett’s Handbook&lt;/em&gt;, an indispensable reference book on all matters of correct form and British etiquette&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-09T13:02:09.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-09T15:53:37.170" Score="1" ViewCount="167" Body="&lt;p&gt;In John Wyndham's classic apocalyptic novel &lt;em&gt;The Day of the Triffids&lt;/em&gt;, events are put into motion by a double catastrophe: the &lt;strong&gt;mass blindness&lt;/strong&gt; of nearly everyone on Earth, apparently caused by a meteor shower, coincides with the appearance of &lt;strong&gt;carnivorous plants&lt;/strong&gt; which can kill people and which proceed, in the near absence of sighted people, to take over much of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The triffids are perhaps the best known aspect of this story in popular culture, and their origins and nature are covered in detail in the novel, the main narrator character being something of an expert on them. They are a massive danger but at least well understood. But the mass blindness, although it's the main catastrophe that puts everything into motion, is more of a mystery. Why would a meteor shower make everyone blind? I recall one conversation between Bill and Jo where they &lt;em&gt;speculate&lt;/em&gt; about what might really have caused it, but that's all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the cause of the blindness catastrophe?&lt;/strong&gt; Or rather, what evidence do we have to support the different options here? Was it caused by extraterrestrial material in the meteors, or by human-manufactured weapons, either a deliberate attack or something accidentally triggered by the meteor shower? What evidence can we draw on either from the novel itself, from other Wyndham novels and his general style, or from other things he wrote about this novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-09T16:55:53.763" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T12:42:54.210" Title="What caused the mass blindness in The Day of the Triffids?" Tags="&lt;john-wyndham&gt;&lt;the-day-of-the-triffids&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13649" CreationDate="2020-04-10T02:26:20.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not clear to me that this usage needs explanation. That is, using  &quot;Mr X&quot; to refer to a rector in early 19th century England was  not unusual, and was not disrespectful.  In Anthony Trollope's 1858 novel &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3166/3166-h/3166-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doctor Thorne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; the character Caleb Oriel is first mentioned in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then there were the Bakers, and the Batesons, and the Jacksons, who all lived near and returned home at night; there was the Reverend Caleb Oriel, the High-Church rector, with his beautiful sister, Patience Oriel; there was Mr Yates Umbleby, the attorney and agent; and there was Dr Thorne, and the doctor's modest, quiet-looking little niece, Miss Mary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only use of the word &quot;Reverend&quot; in the book.&#xA;Thereafter he is &quot;Rev Caleb Oriel&quot;, &quot;Mr Caleb Oriel&quot; and &quot;Caleb Oriel&quot; once each, and plain &quot;Caleb&quot; 8 times. But he is &quot;Mr Oriel&quot; 88 times, in quoted speech addressed to him, as in &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Ah, a bore!&quot; said Miss Gushing, in an enthusiastic tone of depreciation. &quot;How insensate they must be! To me it gives a new charm to life. It quiets one for the day; makes one so much fitter for one's daily trials and daily troubles. Does it not, Mr Oriel?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and speech not addressed to him, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It that so odd?&quot; said Mary. &quot;You love Mr Oriel, though you have been intimate with him hardly more than two years. Is it so odd that I should love your brother, whom I have known almost all my life?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and most often, by the narrator, as in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now Mr Oriel was a modest man, and, when thus addressed as to his future wife, found it difficult to make any reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austen's and Trollope's characters are social equals: the  sons and daughters of gentlemen. They  must have spoken pretty much the same language and followed the same social usages, even though they are separated by almost fifty years.  Austen and Trollope are, in effect, anthropologists describing the same tribe.  Neither reports extensive use of the epithet &quot;Reverend&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So an answer to the question &quot;Why is Mr William Collins never referred to as the Rev Mr Collins in &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;?&quot;&#xA;the answer is &quot;why do you think he should be&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-04-10T17:23:37.567" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T17:23:37.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13664" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13660" CreationDate="2020-04-10T12:42:54.210" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some &quot;shooting stars&quot; have made everyone blind, as mentioned in the first chapters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You'll find it in the records that on Tuesday, May 7, the Earth's&#xA;  orbit passed through a cloud of comet debris.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;D'you know what? I'm blind. Thash what I am- blind's a bat.&#xA;  Everybody's blind's a bat. 'Cept you. Why aren't you blind's a bat?&quot;&#xA;  &quot;I don't know,&quot; I told him. &quot;'S that bloody comet. Thash what done it.&#xA;  Green shootin' shtarsh-an' now everyone's blind's a hat. D'ju shee&#xA;  green shootin' shtarsh?&quot; &quot;No,&quot; I admitted. &quot;There you are. Proves it.&#xA;  You didn't see 'em: you aren't blind. Everyone else saw 'em&quot;-he waved&#xA;  an expressive arm -&quot;all's blind's bats. Bloody comets, I say.&quot; I&#xA;  poured myself a third brandy, wondering whether there might not be&#xA;  something in what he was saying. &quot;Everyone blind?&quot; I repeated. &quot;Thash&#xA;  it. All of 'em. Prob'ly everyone in th'world-'cept you,' he added as&#xA;  an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what's wrong with those comets, or meteors, or shooting stars? There are some hints that they are human-made:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sustained research in rocketry had at last succeeded in attaining one&#xA;  of its objectives. It had sent up a missile which stayed up. It was,&#xA;  in fact, possible to fire a rocket far enough up for it to fall into&#xA;  an orbit. Once there, it would continue to circle like a tiny moon,&#xA;  quite inactive and innocuous until the pressure on a button should&#xA;  give it the impulse to drop back, with devastating effect. Great as&#xA;  was the public concern which followed the triumphant announcement of&#xA;  the first nation to establish a satellite weapon satisfactorily, a&#xA;  still greater concern was felt over the failure of others to make any&#xA;  announcement at all, even when they were known to have had similar&#xA;  successes. It was by no means pleasant to realize that there was an&#xA;  unknown number of menaces up there over your head, quietly circling&#xA;  and circling until someone should arrange for them to drop-and that&#xA;  there was nothing to be done about them. Still, life has to go on-and&#xA;  novelty is a wonderfully short-lived thing. One became used to the&#xA;  idea perforce. From time to time there would be a panicky flare-up of&#xA;  expostulation when reports circulated that as well as satellites with&#xA;  atomic heads there were others with such things as crop diseases,&#xA;  cattle diseases, radioactive dusts, viruses, and infections not only&#xA;  of familiar kinds but brand-new sorts recently thought up in&#xA;  laboratories, all floating around up there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, the satellites are shown to be used for biological warfare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A virulent organism, unstable enough to become harmless in the course&#xA;  of a few days (and who is to say that such could not be bred?), could&#xA;  be considered to have strategic uses if dropped in suitable spots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's all that I could find in this (luckily not too long) book about what happens in space before the flash that blinds everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T12:42:54.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2120" CreationDate="2020-04-10T14:24:04.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is highly likely that Doyle chose a nonexistent, random, but specific name. Nonexistent, to prevent (as suggested by Gallifreyan) some poor coincidence resident from unwanted pestering; random because it was the first thing that popped into his head; and specific because specificity lends reality, and we all like to believe that stories are real. Except for horror stories, but that's a different subject altogether.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9839" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T14:24:04.327" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13623" CreationDate="2020-04-10T19:08:48.363" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia contributors did a fairly decent job of gathering what little information is available about Gugalanna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only text in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) that mentions Gugalanna/Gud-gal-ana is&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section1/tr141.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inana's descent to the nether world&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;a poem in which the goddess Inanna decides to visit the Netherworld.&#xA;When Neti, the chief doorman of the Netherworld asks her why she has come there, she answers&#xA;(quoted from the translation on ETCSL):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Holy Inana answered him:&#xA;  &quot;Because lord Gud-gal-ana, the husband of my elder sister holy Erec-ki-gala, has died; &#xA;  in order to have his funeral rites observed, she offers generous libations at his wake -- that is the reason.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The manuscripts of &quot;Inanna's Descent&quot;, also known as &quot;From the Great Above to the Great Below&quot; (from its first line of an older translation),&#xA;date from ca. 1900 – 1600 BCE (see Joshua J. Mark: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient.eu/article/215/inannas-descent-a-sumerian-tale-of-injustice/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inanna's Descent: A Sumerian Tale of Injustice&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;but the story may be older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text does not mention how Gugalanna died, unlike the Sumerian poem &quot;Bilgames/Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven&quot;, which does not mention the name Gugalanna.&#xA;(None of the other Gilgamesh texts that render the episode about the Bull of Heaven use the name Gugalanna, i.e. the Hittite version and the Standard Babylonian version of the epic.)&#xA;Manuscripts of the Sumerian Bilgames/Gilgamesh poems date from the 18th century BC (Sallaberger: &lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos&lt;/em&gt;, page 60), although the stories may be three centuries older.&#xA;Based on this, it seems hard to argue that the name &quot;Gugalanna&quot; represents an older tradition than the Sumerian Bilgames/Gilgamesh poems&#xA;(i.e. there is insufficient evidence to support the hypothesis that scribes stopped using the name Gugalanna during the period between the composition of &quot;Inanna's descent&quot; and &quot;Bilgames and the Bull of Heaven&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeremy Black and Anthony Green thought that &quot;[Gugal-ana's] name probably originally meant 'canal inspector of An'&quot; and that therefore he &quot;may have been identical with Ennugi&quot;.&#xA;(They write this in the entry for Ereskigal, since Gugal-ana doesn't have his own entry.&#xA;See Black, Jeremy; Green, Anthony: &lt;em&gt;Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;. The British Museum Press, 1992.&#xA;An is the Sumerian word for &quot;heave&quot;; An or Anu is the sky god.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Gwendolyn Leick thinks Gugalanna's name means &quot;wild bull of Anu&quot; and mentions that he &quot;is quoted in some god-lists as the husband of Ereškigal&quot;&#xA;(Gwendolyn Leick: &lt;em&gt;A Dictionary Of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology&lt;/em&gt;. Routledge, 1998).&#xA;Leick also states that &quot;was identified with Nergal by the time of the Old Babylonian period&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since in a later tradition, Nergal became Ereškigal's (second?) husband (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/erekigal/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Ereškigal (goddess)&quot; in Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;the identification of Gugalanna with Nergal may be a result of this later tradition. [Note 1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear where the identification of Gugalanna with Ennugi comes from. &#xA;Ennugi is mentioned in only one text in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL): &lt;a href=&quot;http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.4.29.2&amp;amp;display=Crit&amp;amp;charenc=gcirc&amp;amp;lineid=t4292.p4#t4292.p4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A šir-gida to Nuska (Nuska B)&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You make pleasing the offering table of Nintur. You issue orders for Ennugi. You …… life for the king. You …… over the single path of heaven and earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion:&lt;/strong&gt; Based on the above, information that supports the claim that the Bull of Heaven's name was Gugalanna appears to be very scanty. In the sources listed above, there is no direct explanation of how Gugalanna come to be identified with the Bull of Heaven, except for the translation of his name as &quot;wild bull of Anu&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[Note 1]&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/listofdeities/nergal/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nergal&lt;/a&gt; became co-ruler of the Netherworld in the second millennium; the Neo-Assyrian poem &quot;Nergal and Ereškigal&quot; relates how he became  Ereškigal's husband. Nergal is also mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jasoncolavito.com/epic-of-gilgamesh.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modernized Muss-Arnolt translation&lt;/a&gt;, namely in the flood story in Tablet XI and in another story in Tablet XII. However, in the corresponding passage in Tablet XI in the translations by Andrew George and Benjamin W. Foster, we find the name Errakal instead of Nergal. The events in the flood story predate the events in the rest of the epic, and the events in Tablet XII describe an alternative &quot;death&quot; of Enkidu, so Nergal being mentioned in the Muss-Arnolt translation does not allow us to draw conclusion about the identification of Gugalanna with Nergal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-10T19:36:39.677" LastActivityDate="2020-04-10T19:36:39.677" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13667" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-11T00:50:01.137" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is satire used anywhere in the story &quot;The Story of How Basat Killed Goggle-Eye&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is from The Book of Dede Korkut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9842" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T01:00:36.667" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T01:00:36.667" Title="Is satire used anywhere in &quot;The Story of How Basat Killed Goggle-Eye&quot;?" Tags="&lt;turkish-literature&gt;&lt;the-book-of-dede-korkut&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13668" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-11T10:29:32.367" Score="4" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm currently reading an obscure novel by English occultist, poet, self-appointed religious prophet, and all-round nut job Aleister Crowley called &lt;em&gt;Moonchild&lt;/em&gt;. It's actually surprisingly good so far in my humble opinion, but there's a passage in chapter 6 which has been bugging me for a while now. One character says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Dinner was served; the Poltergeist supplied the conversation. Never before had he been so light, so genial, so anxious to assure us of our future in Summerland; but ever and anon he touched the minor chord, spoke darkly of 'proof,' and of fish! (I beg you all to bear witness that I have not degraded myself by the evident &lt;strong&gt;pun&lt;/strong&gt;). [...]”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand correctly, there's an obvious pun to be made somewhere in what he said, which he &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; make; however, I honestly don't see what this pun could possibly be... If anyone could tell me, it'd be greatly appreciated; like I said, it's been eating me up for quite some time now...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(By the way: I don't think any prior knowledge of anything that happens earlier in the novel is required, but in case anyone's interested, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermetic.com/crowley/moonchild/mc06?fbclid=IwAR2X6vYzbsNqxpGhAvJH30zv9Y6Yxci9Ev83hfuZ-yFS1YA4CacHqxga1kc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here's a link to the entire chapter in question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9845" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T11:27:34.423" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T14:27:40.793" Title="What does this passage from Aleister Crowley's &quot;Moonchild&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aleister-crowley&gt;&lt;moonchild&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13669" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13670" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Book of Dede Korkut', an epic story of the Oghuz Turks. The oldest extant manuscripts date from the sixteenth century." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T10:57:08.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13671" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-11T13:13:52.400" Score="3" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Book_of_Dede_Korkut&amp;amp;oldid=948663348&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt; is written in &quot;Oghuz Turkish&quot;, a language name that does not have its own article on Wikipedia and that is not documented on Ethnologue.&#xA;Wikipedia has an article about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oghuz_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oghuz languages&lt;/a&gt;, a sub-branch of the Turkic languages.&#xA;The Western Oghuz languages include Turkish, Azerbaijani and the now defunct Ottoman Turkish.&#xA;Searching &quot;Oghuz&quot; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ethnologue.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethnologue&lt;/a&gt; only gives two results,&#xA;one for a dialect of Uzbek (on the Karluk branch, not the Oghuz branch of the Turkic languages) and one for a dialect of Udi (a Northeast Caucasian language),&#xA;neither of which seem relevant to the language of the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia categorizes the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_literature#The_epic_tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Azerbaijani literature&lt;/a&gt; and says it was &quot;written in Azerbaijani language&quot; (Source: V. Barthold: &lt;em&gt;The book of my grandfather Korkut&lt;/em&gt;. Moscow and Leningrad: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1962).&#xA;Wikipedia describes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Book_of_Dede_Korkut&amp;amp;oldid=948663348#Manuscript_tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: one found in the Royal Library of Dresden and one discovered in the Vatican Library in 1950.&#xA;According to Geoffrey Lewis, who published a translation in 1974, these manuscripts date from the 16th century (the stories as such are older).&#xA;The Dresden manuscript contains twelve stories, while the Vatican manuscript contains six stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sempozyum.sdu.edu.tr/dedekorkut/en/yeni_el_yazmasi_hakkinda.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;International Symposium of Dede Korkut, June 2020&lt;/a&gt; mentions a recently discovered third manuscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to these writings, the third Dede Korkut manuscript was found in the Turkmen Sahara region of Iran. This third manuscript has been named as the &lt;strong&gt;Turkmen Sahara&lt;/strong&gt; copy regarding its location.&#xA;  In this third manuscript, which is missing an unknown amount from the beginning, there are twenty-seven extollings that weren't mentioned in previous manuscripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A scanned version of this third manuscript can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=6E4E6F9FE6DDD6130D13B4EB5A81D88E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Library Genesis&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confusingly, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.slub-dresden.de/en/collections/manuscripts/kitab-i-dedem-korkut/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB)&lt;/a&gt; describes the Dresden manuscript as &quot;written in Arab language&quot;, which is not even a Turkic language.&#xA;(Possibly, the librarians confused the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arabic script&lt;/a&gt;, used by several Turkic languages, with the Arabic language.)&#xA;When you click through to &lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/10013/1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;view the manuscript&lt;/a&gt;, the metadata identify the language as &quot;Alttürkisch&quot;, which refers to a time period from the 7th to 13th century (see Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altt%C3%BCrkische_Sprache&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alttürkisch&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Turkic&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the only clear statement about the language of the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt; is Barthold's claim that the text was written in Azerbaijani.&#xA;Does this apply to each of the extant manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Book of Dede Korkut&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T19:04:52.807" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T22:05:06.653" Title="What is the language of the manuscripts of the Book of Dede Korkut?" Tags="&lt;the-book-of-dede-korkut&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13671" CreationDate="2020-04-11T13:54:29.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article seems largely based on Lewis's book, which predates the discovery of the third MS. Lewis says (on p.22 of the Penguin edition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As to the language of the text, it is consistent with the book's belonging to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. It exhibits a number of features charactersitic of Azeri, the Turkish dialect of Azerbaijan, side by side with certain western features, the latter being more frequent in the Vatican M.S. The origins of the text lie back in the time before Azeri and Ottoman emerged as separate dialects. But it is unwise to try to draw conclusions from linguistic evidence about the time or place of the compilation of the book, as we cannot know whether any given feature is due to the compiler or to subsequent bards and copyists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot imagine the third MS invalidates the last sentence here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that the Dresden MS &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt; it is written in Oghuz Turkish, which might partly answer the OP's question.  Diez's 1815 article &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101075165686&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DepéGhöz oder der &#xA; oghuzische Cyklop&lt;/a&gt; [=&lt;em&gt;Tepegöz, the Oghuz Cyclops&lt;/em&gt;&quot;] starts out with&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Die Handschrift, woraus ich den gegenwärtigen  Aufsatz nehmen, ist auf der Schmutzseite des ersten Blatts überschriben: [....]&#xA;  Das ist, Buch der Dedé Korkud in der Sprache des Volks  der Oghuzier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[= The manuscript this essay is about bears, on the verso side of the first leaf, the inscription [....] which is to say &quot;'The Book of Dede Korkut' in the language of the Oghuz people&quot;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-04-11T19:44:23.140" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T19:44:23.140" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13671" CreationDate="2020-04-11T22:05:06.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç of the Faculty of Sciences and Arts at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University wrote (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Dresden and Vatican manuscripts are written in &lt;strong&gt;Old Anatolian Turkish&lt;/strong&gt; showing marks of Eastern Anatolian accents; they are most probably from the &lt;strong&gt;mid-16th century&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/h_ihsan_erkoc/status/1249073759526453248&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter, 11.04.2020&lt;/a&gt;)&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;latest discovered manuscript&lt;/strong&gt; is also written in the same language but the calligraphy indicates that it was most probably copies in the &lt;strong&gt;18th century&lt;/strong&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/h_ihsan_erkoc/status/1249073783589257217&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter, 11.04.2020&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contradicts the metadata provided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/10013/1/0/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (SLUB)&lt;/a&gt;, where the Dresden manuscript has been digitised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Wikipedia classifies &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Turkic_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Turkic&lt;/a&gt; as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Turkic_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siberian Turkic language&lt;/a&gt;, while it classifies &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Anatolian_Turkish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Anatolian Turkish&lt;/a&gt; as an Oghuz [Turkic] language. The Wikipedia article on Old Anatolian Turkish contains a few examples of differences of the Arabic script used for Old Anatolian Turkish and the later Ottoman Turkish, including the word &quot;dede&quot;. In Old Anatolian Turkish: دَدَ‎;&#xA;in Ottoman Turkish: دده.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Friedrich_von_Diez&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heinrich Friedrich von Diez&lt;/a&gt; (1751 -1817), who published the first translation of the Dresden manuscript in 1815 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101075165686&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Depé Ghöz oder der oghuzische Cyklop&lt;/a&gt;), described the language as &quot;Tatarisch-Türkisch&quot;, i.e. Tatar-Turkic (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatar_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tatar&lt;/a&gt; being another Turkic language that does not belong on the Oghuz sub-branch). Since linguistics has evolved a lot in the last 200 years, I trust Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç's judgement over Diez's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hayrettin İhsan Erkoç added in a third tweet,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Old Anatolian Turkish is a part of Middle Turkic and it is a dialect of Oghuz Turkic dating to the 13th-15th centuries. Oghuz itself was a dialect of the Old Turkic language that lasted until the 13th century. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/h_ihsan_erkoc/status/1249074400919531520&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter, 11.04.2020&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-11T22:05:06.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4046" CreationDate="2020-04-12T11:32:57.200" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s the “ANGER ILLUSION” from &lt;em&gt;Rhett &amp;amp; Link’s Book of Mythicality&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9DE6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/S9DE6l.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Pages 96-97&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are times when you find yourself in the midst of a confrontation, and if you don’t stop and cool off, you’re destined to get into trouble. We have provided the above image. If you stare at it long enough (crossing your eyes helps), you’ll calm down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next page has a flow-chart, titled “CHOOSE YOUR OWN CONFRONTATION”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cjxpA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cjxpAl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Page 98&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does that minuscule text at the bottom left say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bBnJo.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bBnJo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Detail of page 98&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NOTE ABOUT PREVIOUS PAGE: THE ANGER ILLUSION DID NOT CONTAIN A HIDDEN IMAGE. SORRY IF WE MADE YOU ANGRY AGAIN.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(They were not actually sorry.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-12T11:32:57.200" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3049" CreationDate="2020-04-12T17:49:55.127" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If &quot;atomic  bomb&quot; could mean V-2 Rockets, then it could also mean catapult, or mustard gas, both of which, given even a short notice, might lead to an evacuation of the children. And, of course, children might be evacuated immediately after an atomic attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out, one atomic bomb does not make a nuclear war, but it does make one atomic bomb. Why would Golding even mention an atomic  bomb, especially to an audience whose children were practicing &quot;duck and cover&quot; in their schools (doesn't work, by the way) and spending small fortunes on fallout shelters if he didn't want to evoke a deeply rooted fear? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was also the idea floating around at the time as to how civilization would recover if huge portions of the population were to die, surely a notable theme in the novel. The USA had a stockpile of over 2000 weapons and the USSR had around 200 by 1955, (Norris, Robert; Hans M. Kristensen (July 1, 2010). &quot;Global nuclear weapons inventories, 1945−2010&quot;. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 66 (4): 77–83. Bibcode:2010BuAtS..66d..77N. doi:10.2968/066004008), both countries building their reserves fast from 1949 on. The dread of nuclear war was palpable; it is harldly likely that anyone reading this in 1955 would have envisioned a V-2 attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9848" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T06:38:16.747" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T06:38:16.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14176" CreationDate="2020-04-12T21:58:06.433" Score="5" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago I've read a short story that impressed me very much at the time. I'd like to find the story on the endless Web, but, alas, I recall neither the title nor the author, only the plot. To make the matters worse, this was printed in an anthology of Russian language translations of Chinese fiction. Is there any way to identify the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's basically the story. IIRC Russian translation was &quot;Barcarola&quot;, which doesn't mean anything in Russian, so I have no clue how it was called in Chinese or could have been translated to English. I read it around 1990; it's situated in Mao's China and partially after the regime was relaxed, and is opaquely critical of the Cultural Revolution, so must have been written in 1980s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story consists of several interleaving timelines. In the first one the storyteller recall his childhood, when he and his friends played on an old unseaworthy beached fishing boat; in the second one he visits a family of an old friend who passed away. In the story the friend died in an earthquake, but it's pretty much obvious that the &quot;earthquake&quot; was the Cultural Revolution. The story goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) Young kids, including the protagonist, find an abandoned beached fishing boat. They decide that the boat is their &quot;ship&quot;; they play on it, pretending to be sailors or pirates. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) Years later, during the &quot;earthquake&quot; the protagonist sees his childhood friend carried away, never to be seen again. After a while the protagonist decides to visit his friend's family, the wife and the daughter. They are surprised and excited: after their husband/father disappeared nobody would have any interaction with them, they are being treated pretty much like lepers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The kids take care of their beached &quot;ship&quot;, play on it daily, it becomes the center of their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The protagonist keeps visiting his friend's family that was abandoned by the society, and gradually convinces them that their lives have not ended. He convinces the daughter, whom he gets attached to more than he admits, to resume her piano training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) The kids learn that the villagers are going to scrap their &quot;ship&quot; for firewood. They decide to save it by letting it sail into the ocean. So they dig a trench in the sand between the boat and the water and push the boat into the ocean. The boat disappears with the tide. The kids' jubilation is mixed with tears, for they won't see their &quot;ship&quot; again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) The protagonists is visited by his friend's daughter who now has become a great piano player. She tells him that she was invited to play overseas. It's obvious that if she leaves she'll never come back to China. She says that she's accepting the offer, but lingers as if to let him intervene. The protagonist decides not to stop her and watches her leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5988" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T10:34:34.880" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:17:50.130" Title="Story about a beached fishing boat and the Chinese Cultural Revolution" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-04-13T10:10:47.443" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Corrupt statements made by people who enjoy vices would be charming. A corrupting friend would be charming. A merchant might be charming. However, a person sharing the connotations associated with a beautiful thing fits the author's point of view as an uncultivated person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T10:10:47.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13680" CreationDate="2020-04-13T11:03:56.950" Score="6" ViewCount="1165" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a short story, many years ago, about a notorious safe-cracker in the old west, who managed to accrue a nice fortune by utilizing his skills. I cannot remember the title or author, or the names of any of the characters. I remember it took about two days to get through the entire story, as my class was reading it in school, so I imagine it was on the longer side of &quot;short&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, the man robs a bank and immediately skips town. He goes to a new town to scope out the bank there, under the guise of a traveling shoe salesman. He meets the bank owner's daughter, and decides to try and use her to get information about the bank's safes and vault, but through the course of the story ends up falling in love with the woman and decides to become a legitimate businessman and put away his drills and stethoscope for good. One day, the bank gets a new safe, and, while the adults are talking about it, a young girl, who is playing with some other children, hides in the new safe and accidentally closes the door, which automatically locks. Before they discover the girl, a detective who had been tracking the thief for several months walks into the bank, and spooks the man. He collects his tools in a bag and attempts to escape, but as he's walking through the main hall of the bank, they discover that the girl is in the safe. He decides to sacrifice his own freedom to save the girl, and then the detective, who saw the whole thing, decides to let him go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9854" LastEditorUserId="5700" LastEditDate="2020-04-13T20:35:10.263" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T02:01:15.743" Title="Short story in which notorious safe-cracker retires but has to use old tools to save girl's life" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13679" CreationDate="2020-04-13T11:13:14.113" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is &amp;quot;A Retrieved Reformation&amp;quot;, a short O. Henry story.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Retrieved_Reformation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Safecracker Jimmy Valentine was released from prison after serving less than ten months of a four year sentence, due to his criminal connections. He goes to his old apartment, packs up his tools, and leaves. In the following weeks, a few cash robberies are committed, and the detective who landed Valentine in jail in the first place, Ben Price, is called to work on the new case. He realizes that the robberies are committed in Jimmy's style. [...] [Jimmy] moves into the town, taking up the identity of Ralph D. Spencer, a shoemaker: he had been assigned shoemaking as forced labor in prison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Carrying the tool case, Jimmy watches as Annabel's father shows them the bank's new safe. Annabel's nieces are fascinated by it, and as they are playing, one accidentally shuts the other inside and locks the door, without the time lock's clock having been wound nor any combination set. Everyone panics, and Annabel begs Jimmy to do something. Jimmy, knowing that it will reveal his true identity, uses his case of tools to open the door and save the child. Unbeknownst to Valentine at that time, Price has witnessed the whole incident.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Valentine starts to leave the bank afterwards, and he sees Price standing by the door. Sheepishly, he gives himself up, but much to his surprise, Price pretends not to recognize him and walks away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google search query &lt;code&gt;short story bank robber safe girl shoe&lt;/code&gt;, but I also remembered the story - having seen it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5431/17&quot;&gt;another question on this site&lt;/a&gt;, as it turns out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T11:13:14.113" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2020-04-13T18:36:38.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a letter (published in &quot;Michael Endes Zettelkasten&quot;) the author answered a question.&#xA;Readers had complained about Moonchild beeing a lesser Momo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the whole letter. But parts of it. &quot;Momo&quot; is human. &quot;Moonchild&quot; is a godess. She per definition is neutral. Or better all has the same worth.&#xA;She as the source of creativity and creating is not concerned with the struggles the artist (Bastian) has with her gifts - she only grants them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9856" LastActivityDate="2020-04-13T18:36:38.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-13T19:58:16.323" Score="3" ViewCount="366" Body="&lt;p&gt;From part II, chapter IV of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Constance Garnett:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zossimov looked curiously at Raskolnikov. He did not stir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But I say, Razumihin, I wonder at you. What a busybody you are!” Zossimov observed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Maybe I am, but we will get him off anyway,” shouted Razumihin, bringing his fist down on the table. “What’s the most offensive is not their lying—one can always forgive lying—&lt;strong&gt;lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth&lt;/strong&gt;—what is offensive is that they lie and worship their own lying.... I respect Porfiry, but... What threw them out at first? The door was locked, and when they came back with the porter it was open. So it followed that Koch and Pestryakov were the murderers—that was their logic!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This says that lying leads to truth but I cannot see how.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9858" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T13:33:22.217" Title="What does “lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to truth” mean in &quot;Crime and Punishment&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-14T01:38:08.740" Score="1" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;Penelope's real letter to Julian says &quot;Many times I tried to find you through Miguel, but he told me that you didn't want anything more to do with me.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in the book does it explain why Miguel, who wanted the best for his best friend, would have told Penelope to stop trying. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9859" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T03:39:03.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T01:33:33.907" Title="Penelope's Letter in The Shadow Of The Wind" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;the-cemetery-of-forgotten-books&gt;&lt;carlos-ruiz-zafon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9094" CreationDate="2020-04-14T03:07:01.487" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Idk...but I have some guesses.&#xA;Shelob could be addicted to the ring thinking it is a yellow body part from the insides, thus eating it, or possibly ignore it. We DO know that Shelob loves eating, and has gained plenty of weight from eating the flesh and drinking the blood. (Thus a text saying Shelob is bloated.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9860" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T03:07:01.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13686" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13798" CreationDate="2020-04-14T05:24:40.260" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am interested in reading Alessandro Manzoni's novel &lt;em&gt;The Betrothed&lt;/em&gt; as it has scenes of the plague in Milan which are very relevant to our current times.  I don't have time to read the entire novel so I am interested in reading some excerpts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially interested in reading the scenes where the priests are ministering to the plague victims. Can anyone point me to which chapters/page numbers depict these scenes? I am reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/betrothed00manzuoft/page/n1/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online e-book at archive.org&lt;/a&gt;. I read online summaries of the novel but I can't find these scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9861" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T05:30:58.277" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T19:00:16.873" Title="Where in Alessandro Manzoni's the Betrothed are the scenes with priests ministering to plague victims?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;alessandro-manzoni&gt;&lt;the-betrothed&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13687" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2020-04-14T12:25:04.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hey all you cool cats and kittens... Oh wait, wrong platform... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hello there Literature.SE, my name is Skooba and I would like to nominate myself for the honor and privilege of being one of your moderators. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been with the site since its commitment phase, but I would also be the first to admit I am not an expert in Literature. I like many here (I believe) just have a love for literature in all its forms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also not my most active site on the SE network, but I have been around for about 4 years and have earned access to all user moderator privileges (on other sites). I feel confident in my understanding of the network rules, policy, and guidelines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen great things happen and communities grow and flourish while even making a few friends along the way. I have seen some of the &quot;not so great&quot; things in our recent past. As I moderator I would strive to keep the positive vibes flowing while maintaining an atmosphere of respect and inclusion with a keen eye on promoting high quality content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look forward to the election cycle and will be in chat to answer any questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T13:02:33.147" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T13:02:33.147" CommentCount="5" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-04-14T12:25:04.473" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11310" CreationDate="2020-04-14T12:43:19.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.westeros.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Westeros.org&lt;/a&gt; offers &lt;a href=&quot;http://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Chapters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter by chapter summaries&lt;/a&gt; for all currently published material including the main &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; novels, the released chapters of &lt;em&gt;The Winds of Winter&lt;/em&gt;, and a couple ancillary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site also offers deep dives into characters, history, geography and culture. It documents almost all of the interviews with George in the section &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.westeros.org/Citadel/SSM/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;So Spake Martin&quot;&lt;/a&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been my main go-to when researching answers, to brush up on what has been going on in Westeros, and to remind myself what was show-only canon and what is book-only canon. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T12:43:19.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13683" CreationDate="2020-04-14T13:33:22.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question Razumihin will answer himself (Part III, chapter I, same translation)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What do you think?” shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, “you think I&#xA;  am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk&#xA;  nonsense. That’s man’s one privilege over all creation. Through error&#xA;  you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any&#xA;  truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and&#xA;  fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can’t even make&#xA;  mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own&#xA;  nonsense, and I’ll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one’s own way is&#xA;  better than to go right in someone else’s. In the first case you are a&#xA;  man, in the second you’re no better than a bird. Truth won’t escape&#xA;  you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why, but the translator decided to use &quot;to talk nonsense&quot; and &quot;to err&quot; here for some reason, while in Russian text it is the same verb as in the quote in the question (&lt;em&gt;врать&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation by Pevear and Volokhonskaya is much better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What do you think?” Razumikhin shouted, raising his voice even more.&#xA;  “You think it's because they're lying? Nonsense! I like it when people&#xA;  lie! Lying is man's only privilege over all other organisms. If you&#xA;  lie—you get to the truth! Lying is what makes me a man. Not one truth&#xA;  has ever been reached without first lying fourteen times or so, maybe&#xA;  a hundred and fourteen, and that's honorable in its way; well, but we&#xA;  can't even lie with our own minds! Lie to me, but in your own way, and&#xA;  I'll kiss you for it. Lying in one's own way is almost better than&#xA;  telling the truth in someone else's way; in the first case you're a&#xA;  man, and in the second—no better than a bird! The truth won't go away,&#xA;  but life can be nailed shut; there are examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T13:33:22.217" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2276" CreationDate="2020-04-14T14:31:10.390" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: The text does not say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The feature of the text that most strongly suggests that my true love might have sent twelve partridges is the word ‘On’ at the start of each verse. But this word is an interpolation, and does not appear in the earliest printed version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pCLFr.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pCLFrl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Woodcut of twelve men in tail-coats all in mid-jump over very tiny hurdles. Verse below starts “The twelfth day of Christmas, My true love sent to me Twelve lords a leaping…”&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anonymous (c. 1780). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mirth_without_mischief/page/n13/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mirth Without Mischief&lt;/em&gt;, p. 16&lt;/a&gt;. London: C. Sheppard.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks us to treat the song as if it were &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9358/3003&quot;&gt;documentary evidence for a fictional universe&lt;/a&gt; in which someone’s true love sends them a number of presents during the twelve days of Christmas. But turning the question around, what do we gain by treating the song in this way? The song does not seem to be describing a fictional situation in a documentary way, and to insist on that approach just runs into the limitations of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look at the origin of the song gives us some insight into why the “documentary evidence for a fictional universe” approach doesn’t seem very productive in this case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The Twelve Days” was a Christmas game. It was a customary thing in a friend’s house to play “The Twelve Days,” or “My Lady’s Lap Dog,” every Twelfth Day night. The party was usually a mixed gathering of juveniles and adults, mostly relatives, and before supper—that is, before eating mince pies and twelfth cake—this game and the cushion dance† were played, and the forfeits consequent upon them always cried‡. The company were all seated round the room. The leader of the game commenced by saying the first line. […] The lines for the “first day” of Christmas was said by each of the company in turn; then the first “day” was repeated, with the addition of the “second” by the leader, and then this was said all round the circle in turn. This was continued until the lines for the “twelve days” were said by every player. For every mistake a forfeit—a small article belonging to the person—had to be given up. These forfeits were afterwards “cried” in the usual way, and were not returned to the owner until they had been redeemed by the penalty inflicted being performed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alice Gomme (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/traditionalgame00gommgoog/page/n338/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, p. 319&lt;/a&gt;. London: David Nutt.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† For “cushion dance” see &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924092530579/page/n111/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1, pp. 87–94&lt;/a&gt;. ‡ For “crying forfeits”, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924092530579/page/n161/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume 1, pp. 137–138&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers ought to recognise this game as resembling other cumulative memory games, such as the 20th century “I went to the zoo and I saw …” This origin adequately explains why the presents are repeated on each day of Christmas, without needing to go into the question of whether twelve partridges were sent, or only one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Twelve Days of Christmas” is just one of a group of similar cumulative recitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In Scotland, early in the nineteenth century, the recitation began:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The king sent his lady on the first Yule day,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    A popingo-aye [parrot];&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Wha learns my carol and carries it away?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The succeeding gifts were three partridges, three plovers, a goose that was grey, three starlings, three goldspinks, a bull that was brown, three ducks a-merry laying, three swans a-merry swimming, an Arabian baboon, three hinds a-merry hunting, three maids a-merry dancing, three stalks o’ merry corn. In the Cambrésis, in the north of France, the game is called ‘Les dons de l’an’, and the sequence is one partridge, two turtle doves, three wood-pigeons, four ducks flying, five rabbits trotting, six hares a-field, seven hounds running, eight shorn sheep, nine horned oxen, ten good turkeys, eleven good hams, twelve small cheeses. In the west of France the piece is known as a song, ‘La foi de la loi’, and is sung ‘avec solemnité’, the sequence being: a good stuffing without bones, two breasts of veal, three joints of beef, four pigs’ trotters, five legs of mutton, six partridges with cabbage, seven spitted rabbits, eight plates of salad, nine dishes for a chapter of canons, ten full casks, eleven beautiful full-breasted maidens, and twelve musketeers with their swords. A Langeudoc chant is similar, but the gifts are made on the first fifteen days of May.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Iona Opie and Peter Opie, eds. (1951). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oxforddictionary0000opie/page/122/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 122–123&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford: Clarendon Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T17:40:26.843" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T17:40:26.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2276" CreationDate="2020-04-14T15:16:24.283" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the song is treated as a factual account, the only interpretation is that one partridge is sent on each day of Christmas, for a total of 12 partridges. The true love sends a partridge on the first day, another on the second, another on the third, and so on. If the song lyrics were &quot;by the second day of Christmas&quot;, one could interpret it as a cumulative list over all days, but the lyric is describing what is sent &quot;on&quot; each day individually. If I mail you a package and a letter on Dec 26, there is no reasonable interpretation where I mailed the package on Dec 26 and the letter on Dec 25.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1574" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T15:16:24.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5464" CreationDate="2020-04-14T19:35:07.877" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie uses the character of Ariadne Oliver to gently satirize her own career as a writer of detective stories. A few of Christie’s personal characteristics also show up in Mrs Oliver, but Christie’s war work, marriages, travel, and daughter, have no counterparts—these show up elsewhere in Christie’s writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this answer I’ll undertake a survey of the parallels between Mrs Oliver and Christie, organized alphabetically by topic. I have used spoiler markup in a few places where I discuss plot outcomes, but there might be accidental spoilers elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Adaptation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver goes through agonies when collaborating with Robin Upwood on a play adapted from her novels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Robin continued blithely: “What I feel is, here’s that wonderful young man, parachuted down—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver interrupted: “He’s sixty.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Oh no!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“He is.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I don’t see him like that. Thirty-five—not a day older.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But I’ve been writing books about him for thirty years, and he was at least thirty-five in the first one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But, darling, if he’s sixty, you can’t have the tension between him and the girl—what’s her name? Ingrid. I mean, it would make him just a nasty old man!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“It certainly would.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1952). &lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie had a similar experience:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I had no idea when the idea was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibi_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alibi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first play to be produced from one of my books—&lt;em&gt;The Murder of Roger Ackroyd&lt;/em&gt;—was adapted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Morton_(dramatist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Morton&lt;/a&gt;. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot, and have lots of girls in love with him. I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life, and I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_du_Maurier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerald Du Maurier&lt;/a&gt;, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl. As I have said, I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal; I liked the part she played in village life; and I liked the idea of village life—reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1977). &lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 421–422. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Alcohol&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver does not drink alcohol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I’d like to meet her. Good yarns she writes.” He lowered his voice. “But they say she drinks like a fish.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He hurried off and Mrs Oliver said indignantly: “Really! That’s most unfair when I only like lemonade!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1956) &lt;em&gt;Dead Man’s Folly&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poirot looked at her rather doubtfully. Originally relieved at the mention of a party, he now again felt slightly doubtful. Since he knew that Mrs Oliver did not partake of spirituous liquor, he could not make one of the assumptions that he might have made in any other case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1969). &lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie did not like alcohol either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I married Max [Mallowan] we enjoyed the pleasures of the table in perfect harmony, eating wisely but much too well. He was distressed to find that my appreciation of good drink—or indeed, of any drink, was &lt;em&gt;nil&lt;/em&gt;. He set to work to educate me, trying me perserveringly with clarets, burgundies, sauternes, graves, and, more desperately, with tokay, vodka, and absinthe! In the end he acknowledged defeat. My only reaction was that some tasted worse than others! With a weary sigh, Max contemplated a life in which he should be for ever condemned to the battle of obtaining water for me in a restaurant!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1946). &lt;em&gt;Come Tell Me How You Live&lt;/em&gt;, p. 53. New York: Pocket Books.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Apples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs. Oliver was partial to apples and had indeed been known to eat as many as five pounds straight off while composing the complicated plot of &lt;em&gt;The Death in the Drain Pipe&lt;/em&gt;, coming to herself with a start and an incipient stomach-ache […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1936). &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[At Ashfield in Torquay] There was the kitchen garden, bounded by a high wall which abutted on the road. This garden was uninteresting to me except as a provider of raspberries and green apples, both of which I ate in large quantities. […] Occasionally, after a surfeit of green apples one might have what was termed a bilious attack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 9–81.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Blood&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver keeps gory descriptions out of her books, but some readers don’t appreciate that kind of delicacy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I read one of your books,” said Ann to Mrs Oliver. “&lt;em&gt;The Dying Goldfish&lt;/em&gt;. It was quite good,” she said kindly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I didn’t like that one,” said Joyce. “There wasn’t enough blood in it. I like murders to have lots of blood.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A bit messy,” said Mrs Oliver, “don’t you think?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But exciting,” said Joyce.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Not necessarily,” said Mrs Oliver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie was criticised along similar lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My dear James†,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You have always been one of the most faithful and kindly of my readers, and I was therefore seriously perturbed when I received from you a word of criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You complained that my murders were getting too refined—anaemic, in fact! You yearned for a “good violent murder with lots of blood.” A murder where there was no doubt about its being murder!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So this is your special story—written for you. I hope it may please.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Your affectionate sister-in-law,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Agatha&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1939). &lt;em&gt;A Holiday for Murder&lt;/em&gt;‡, p. vii. New York: Bantam.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† James Watts, who married Christie’s sister Madge. ‡ Better known by its British title &lt;em&gt;Hercule Poirot’s Christmas&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Blowpipes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver makes a mistake over the length of a murder weapon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver cast a glance over the Penguin display. It was slightly overlaid by children’s waders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“&lt;em&gt;The Affair of the Second Goldfish&lt;/em&gt;,” she mused, “that’s quite a good one. &lt;em&gt;The Cat it was Who Died&lt;/em&gt;—that’s where I made a blowpipe a foot long and it’s really six feet. Ridiculous that a blowpipe should be that size, but someone wrote from a museum to tell me so.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie had made the same mistake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Detective Sergeant Wilson deposed to the finding of the blowpipe behind the cushion of one of the seats. There were no fingerprints on it. Experiments had been made with the dart and the blowpipe. What you might call the range of it was fairly accurate up to about ten yards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1935). &lt;em&gt;Death in the Clouds&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Since the blowpipe could be hidden behind an airplane seat cushion, it couldn’t be very much longer than a foot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Detective&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver is weary of her series detective, Sven Hjerson, but his popularity means that she cannot get away from him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don't really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it’s the long winters with no daylight. In Bulgaria and Rumania they don’t seem to read at all. I’d have done better to have made him a Bulgarian.” She broke off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I can’t help it,” said Mrs Oliver obstinately. “He’s always been a vegetarian. He takes round a little machine for grating raw carrots and turnips.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But, Ariadne, precious, why?” [said Robin Upwood]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“How do I know?” said Mrs Oliver crossly. “How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? These things just happen. You try something—and people seem to like it—and then you go on—and before you know where you are, you’ve got someone like that maddening Sven Hjerson tied to you for life. And people even write and say how fond you must be of him. Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 14.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie expressed similar sentiments about her long-running series detective, Hercule Poirot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hercule Poirot, my Belgian invention, was hanging round my neck, firmly attached there like the old man of the sea.† […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It had escaped my notice that not only was I now tied to the detective story, I was also tied to two people: Hercule Poirot and his Watson, Captain Hastings. […] Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt;—I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun again with someone much younger. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hollow&lt;/em&gt; was a book I always thought I had ruined by the introduction of Poirot. I had got used to having Poirot in my books, and naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 263–458.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Coleridge’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rime_of_the_Ancient_Mariner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Mariner&lt;/a&gt;, not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_of_the_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Old Man of the Sea&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Doctors&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver is quick to accuse doctors of being murderers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“In that case, it’s Doctor Roberts,” said Mrs. Oliver firmly. “I felt instinctively that there was something wrong with that man as soon as I saw him. My instincts never lie.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Last night somebody tried to push me on to the railway line at Kilchester station.” [said Poirot]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Good gracious. To kill you, do you mean?” [said Mrs Oliver]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I have no doubt that was the idea.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And Dr Rendell was out on a case, I know he was.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I understand—yes—that Dr Rendell was out on a case.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Then that settles it,” said Mrs Oliver with satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 13.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie also had a dislike of doctors, perhaps due to her experiences during her mother’s illness:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon after I came home from Paris, my mother had a serious illness. In the usual manner of doctors, it was diagnosed as appendicitis, paratyphoid, gallstones and few more things. […] Finally losing patience with her medical attendants, she said, “I don’t think they &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt;—&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; don’t know myself. I think the great thing is to get out of the doctors’ hands.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 155–156.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or to her work at the hospital in Torquay with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Aid_Detachment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voluntary Aid Detachment&lt;/a&gt; in the First World War:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was given more responsibility as time went on, and I liked my work. One settled into a routine of doctors and nurses. One knew the surgeons one respected; one knew the doctors who were secretly despised by the Sisters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 227.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the cause, doctors and other medical practioners are murderers in many of her works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Dr Ames in ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’; Dr Armstrong in &lt;em&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/em&gt;; Norman Gale (a dentist) in &lt;em&gt;Death in the Clouds&lt;/em&gt;; Nurse Hopkins in &lt;em&gt;Sad Cypress&lt;/em&gt;; Dr Kennedy in &lt;em&gt;Sleeping Murder&lt;/em&gt;; Zachariah Osborne (a pharmacist) in &lt;em&gt;The Pale Horse&lt;/em&gt;; Dr Quimper in &lt;em&gt;4.50 From Paddington&lt;/em&gt;; Dr Rendell in &lt;em&gt;Mrs McGinty’s Dead&lt;/em&gt;; Dr Roberts in &lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;; Dr Sheppard in &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Roger Ackroyd&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hair&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver likes to wear her hair “up” despite the difficulty of keeping it in place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The last time [Poirot] had seen Mrs Oliver, her hair style had been plain and severe. It now displayed a richness of coils and twists arranged in intricate patterns all over her head. Its prolific luxury was, he suspected, largely artificial. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Wait!” implored Mrs Oliver, again with the same agony. She relaxed her grip on her head and uttered a deep sigh. Hair detached itself from its bonds and tumbled over her shoulders, a super imperial coil of hair detached itself completely and fell on the floor. Poirot picked it up and put it discreetly on the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1966). &lt;em&gt;Third Girl&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie did the same:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My hair was “up,” which at that period meant done in the Grecian style, with large knots of curls high up on the back of the head and a kind of fillet round it. It was really a becoming style, particularly suited to evening dress. My hair was very long—I could sit on it easily. This for some reason was considered something to be proud of in a woman, though what it actually &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; was that your hair was completely unmanageable and was always coming down. To counteract this, hairdressers created what was called a “postiche”—a large false knot of curls, with your own hair pinned away as tight to your head as possible, and the postiche pinned to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 156.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Harrogate&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver was once abandoned in Harrogate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Naturally,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I don’t know what you think, but I haven’t the least doubt who did it. That doctor. What was his name? Roberts. That’s it! Roberts. A Welsh name! I never trust the Welsh! I had a Welsh nurse and she took me to Harrogate one day and went home, having forgotten all about me. Very unstable. But never mind about her.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 12.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie ran away from her husband Archie (who was having an affair) in December 1926. Her disappearance caused a sensation in the press and there was a nationwide hunt for her. She turned up eleven days later at a spa hotel in Harrogate under an assumed name. It was said at the time that she had suffered amnesia due to grief at her mother’s death, but it seems more likely that she wanted to scare or embarrass her philandering husband. Christie omitted the episode entirely from her autobiography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Imagination&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver has a hyperactive imagination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I can’t help you,” said Mrs Oliver. “I can’t imagine who could have done it. At least, of course, I can, imagine—I can imagine anything! That’s the trouble with me. I can imagine things now—this minute, I could even make them sound all right, but of course none of them would be true. I mean, she could have been murdered by someone who just likes murdering girls (but that’s too easy)—and, anyway, too much of a coincidence that somebody should be at this fête who wanted to murder a girl. And how would he know that Marlene was in the boathouse? Or she might have known some secret about somebody’s love affairs, or she may have seen someone bury a body at night, or she may have recognised somebody who was concealing his identity—or she may have known a secret about where some treasure was buried during the war. Or the man in the launch may have thrown somebody into the river and she saw it from the window of the boathouse—or she may even have got hold of some very important message in secret code and not known what it was herself.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Please!” The inspector held up his hand. His head was whirling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver stopped obediently. It was clear that she could have gone on in this vein for some time, although it seemed to the inspector that she had already envisaged every possibility, likely or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dead Man’s Folly&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Of course it could be all sorts of things.” Mrs Oliver began to brighten as she set her ever prolific imagination to work. “She could have run over someone in her car and not stopped. She could have been assaulted by a man on a cliff and struggled with him and managed to push him over. She could have given someone the wrong medicine by mistake. She could have gone to one of those purple pill parties and had a fight with someone. She could have come to and found she had stabbed someone. She—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Assez, madame, assez!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But Mrs Oliver was well away. “She might have been a nurse in the operating theatre and administered the wrong anaesthetic or—” she broke off, suddenly anxious for clearer details. “What did she look like?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Third Girl&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And there are plenty of other possibilities [said Poirot]. Some of them I will admit suggested by my friend, Mrs Oliver, who can easily come up with about twelve different solutions to everything, most of them not very probable but all of them faintly possible.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hallowe’en Party&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie was the same way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I was, I suppose, always overburdened with imagination. That has served me well in my profession—it must, indeed, be the basis of the novelist’s craft—but it can give you some very bad sessions in other respects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 109.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Poisons&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver is interested in poisons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the opposite side of the table Mrs. Oliver was asking Major Despard if he knew of any unheard-of, out-of-the-way poisons. […] “The people who read my books like untraceable poisons!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie also had an interest in unusual poisons and poisoning methods, arising from her time as a dispensing chemist in the First World War and a pharmacist in the Second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her use of poison was not just a convenient way to dispose of a character. Although her novels are liberally sprinkled with classic poisons such as arsenic and cyanide, Christie used a huge variety of killer compounds in her novels—too many to fit into this book. Many of the poisons she described were the drugs she was familiar with from her dispensing days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Kathryn Harkup (2015). &lt;em&gt;A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie&lt;/em&gt;. Bloomsbury.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie’s stories included many types of poison:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Aconite (&lt;em&gt;4.50 from Paddington&lt;/em&gt;); arsenic (&lt;em&gt;Murder is Easy&lt;/em&gt;), atropine (‘The Cretan Bull’ in &lt;em&gt;The Labours of Hercules&lt;/em&gt;); boomslang venom (&lt;em&gt;Death in the Clouds&lt;/em&gt;); cocaine (&lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;); coniine (&lt;em&gt;Five Little Pigs&lt;/em&gt;); cyanide (&lt;em&gt;Sparkling Cyanide&lt;/em&gt;), digitoxin (&lt;em&gt;Appointment with Death&lt;/em&gt;); eserine (&lt;em&gt;Crooked House&lt;/em&gt;); nicotine (&lt;em&gt;Three Act Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;); morphine (&lt;em&gt;Sad Cypress&lt;/em&gt;); phosphorus (&lt;em&gt;Dumb Witness&lt;/em&gt;); ricin (&lt;em&gt;Partners in Crime&lt;/em&gt;); strychnine (&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Affair at Styles&lt;/em&gt;); taxine (&lt;em&gt;A Pocket Full of Rye&lt;/em&gt;); thallium (&lt;em&gt;The Pale Horse&lt;/em&gt;); veronal (&lt;em&gt;Lord Edgware Dies&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Repetition&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver has been known to repeat her plots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Women,” said Mrs. Oliver, “are capable of infinite variation. I should never commit the same type of murder twice running.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Don’t you ever write the same plot twice running?” asked Battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The Lotus Murder,&quot; murmured Poirot. “The Clue of the Candle Wax.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mrs. Oliver turned on him, her eyes beaming appreciation. “That’s clever of you—that’s really very clever of you. Because of course those two are exactly the same plot, but nobody else has seen it. One is stolen papers at an informal week-end party of the Cabinet, and the other’s a murder in Borneo in a rubber planter’s bungalow.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“But the essential point on which the story turns is the same,&quot; said Poirot. “One of your neatest tricks. The rubber planter arranges his own murder; the cabinet minister arranges the robbery of his own papers. At the last minute the third person steps in and turns deception into reality.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference here is to two of Christie’s works that used this device:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; ‘The Submarine Plans’, in which Lord Alloway, Minister of Defence, arranges for the theft of the plans for a new type of submarine, and &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt;, in which Paul Renauld intends to fake his own murder, but someone steps in and makes the murder real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Unidentified&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Oliver complains about readers catching her out over which flowers bloom together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, you are and you aren’t,” said Mrs. Oliver. “I am working. As you see. But that dreadful Finn of mine has got himself terribly tangled up. He did some awfully clever deduction with a dish of French beans, and now he’s just detected deadly poison in the sage and onion stuffing of the Michaelmas goose and I’ve just remembered that French beans are over by Michaelmas.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thrilled by this peep into the inner world of creative detective fiction Rhoda said breathlessly, “They might be tinned.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“They might, of course,” said Mrs. Oliver, doubtfully. &quot;But it would rather spoil the point. I’m always getting tangled up in horticulture and things like that. People write to me and say I’ve got the wrong flowers all out together. As though it mattered.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cards on the Table&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 17.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems as if it ought to be a reference to a specific mistake of Christie’s, but I have been unable to identify it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T12:39:50.430" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T12:39:50.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13693" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13694" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French novelist and essayist Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894 – 1961) and his life as a writer. Céline is best known for his novels 'Journey to the End of the Night' ('Voyage au bout de la nuit', 1932) and 'Death on Credit' ('Mort à crédit', 1936). Use this tag with [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T19:58:42.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13695" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13696" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" Score="0" Body="Questions about Ernest Hemingway's 1929 novel 'A Farewell to Arms'. Use this tag with the [ernest-hemingway] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:08:23.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13697" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:34:59.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:34:59.063" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:34:59.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13698" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:34:59.063" Score="0" Body="For questions about or related to the philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche. Popularized by the quote &quot;God is dead&quot;, and &quot;prophesy&quot; of the  Übermensch. Always use this tag together with the [friedrich-nietzsche] and [german-literature] tags." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T21:00:22.740" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T21:00:22.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13699" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:37:25.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:37:25.990" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:37:25.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13700" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-14T20:37:25.990" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English writer John Lewis-Stempel or any of his literary works. If this question is about one of his novels or long works, the book in question should also be tagged." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T20:59:31.610" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T20:59:31.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13701" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2020-04-14T21:40:37.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello, I'm heather.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me disclaim that I stopped dropping by this site so frequently, and I'm primarily nominating because I love this site and I want to make sure there's a variety of candidates. (I would certainly start coming by more if I became a mod.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was active I regularly went through review queues and I do have a decent amount of reputation. I'm also somewhat experienced with moderation as I've been pro tem moderator on Quantum Computing SE for around two years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you, and stay safe everybody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: I just noticed Mith's question on the announcement post; my apologies. As someone who was rather...in the thick of things this past fall, I will continue pushing as I have been for the safety of those on this network, especially LGBT+ folks. I do not know how to convey appropriately my sadness over what has happened this past year. Aza and Mith were good mods, and Aza has left the network entirely. The notification I got for the election brought everything home just that little bit more. The best I can do is work hard to continue to persuade SE to do more and to continue speaking out against problems, to continue flagging and deleting and trying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1982" LastEditorUserId="1982" LastEditDate="2020-04-14T21:54:53.933" LastActivityDate="2020-04-14T21:54:53.933" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-04-14T21:40:37.367" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T11:27:28.663" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;The potions used in Asterix comic books resemble the methamphetamine usage of World War II. Has the drug culture within the comics ever been discussed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T11:45:31.323" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T21:49:26.513" Title="Are the Asterix comics about a drug culture?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;rene-goscinny&gt;&lt;albert-uderzo&gt;&lt;asterix&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13717" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:31:36.833" Score="4" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I suggested the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1222/2191&quot;&gt;currently running topic challenge on R. K. Narayan&lt;/a&gt;, I wrote that the author&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature (possibly several times) but never won it. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was based on the following statement in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Narayan#Awards_and_honours&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the author&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times, but never won the honour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source for that statement is the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tribuneindia.com/2000/20001007/windows/main1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Grand Old Man of Malgudi&lt;/a&gt; in the Indian newspaper &lt;em&gt;The Tribune&lt;/em&gt; (7 October 2000), which says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Narayan rated as one of the finest English language writers in the world — and a perennial candidate for the Nobel Prize — was born in Madras in 1906.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His work is available in most of the world’s major languages, he has been nominated more than once for the Nobel Prize, he has won many literary honours, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and finally,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I along with many others feel the Nobel should have come to him several years ago. He was nominated twice – and could still get it. Some 40 years ago Graham Greene expressed, in a letter, confidence that Narayan would one day win the Nobel Prize. But, then, what on earth could be the reason for the Nobel not coming to Greene, a truly great writer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last two statements come from N. Ram, who wrote a biography of R. K. Narayan. However, is Graham Greene the only source for this claim or are their other sources? (Could Graham Greene actually have knowledge about nominations without having won the prize himself?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T12:49:52.267" Title="What is the evidence that R. K. Narayan was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times?" Tags="&lt;nobel-prize&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13706" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13707" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Indian novelist and short story author R. K. Narayan (Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, 1906 – 2001) and his life as a writer. Narayan wrote many novels and stories situated in or around the fictional town of Malgudi, starting with hist first novel 'Swami and Friends' (1935)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T13:38:56.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13708" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T14:27:55.540" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow, follow me into the South,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          And if you are brave and wise&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'll buy you laughter for your mouth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Sorrow for your eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'll buy you laughter, wild and sweet,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          And sorrow, grey and still,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But you must follow with willing feet&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          Over the farthest hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Follow, follow me into the South&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          You may return tomorrow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wearing my kisses on your mouth,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          In your eyes my sorrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone tell me the author and title of this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9867" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T15:07:57.683" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T15:10:57.520" Title="Author and title of poem: &quot;Follow, follow me into the South, ...&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13713" CreationDate="2020-04-15T14:36:40.317" Score="4" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am an adult who struggles with reading. I can fully understand books up to about an eighth grade or high school level (books like &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;, writing of Hemingway, etc...) but I struggle with more complex works. I've recently tried reading Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, Bertrand Russel and other philosophical pieces; I've found that I have to put the book down after a few hours of straining my eyes because I have no clue what is going on in the reading, and I don't know why that's the case. Is it that the language is so much different from modern English? Is my vocabulary too much deficient to comprehend the variety of words used in these texts? Or am I just missing a lot of context surrounding the philosophical tradition? Or a mix of those... &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have advice of how to improve my reading skills so that I can digest more difficult works than The Hobbit?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Side Note, I remember first noticing this problem in college when I read &lt;em&gt;The Last of the Mohicans&lt;/em&gt; and answered every question incorrectly relating to characters emotions, arguments, and etc. My lack of reading skills, shockingly, didn't prevent me from completing a math degree and working as an actuary. This is wholly due invention of video and audio which I've turned to when textbooks were incomprehensible to me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9868" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T08:18:45.257" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T08:18:45.257" Title="How to Improve Reading Abilities" Tags="&lt;reading&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13710" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13708" CreationDate="2020-04-15T15:10:57.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is ‘&lt;strong&gt;Ballad&lt;/strong&gt;’ by &lt;strong&gt;Marjorie Allen Seiffert&lt;/strong&gt; (1885–1970), first published in the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4556&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Woman of Thirty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1919).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T15:10:57.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-15T15:25:51.940" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find some lost poems that were favorites of mine in high school. This one, I only have one line that I remember clearly. Not much to go on, I know, but if anyone recognizes it, I would be grateful. Thanks! The line I remember is as follows, and I believe it is the starting line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today I thought about how much you really mean to me, and I felt it so deep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sitting here thinking about it, I've got a line to add, that I think is accurate, but not 100% sure. It goes as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I try to think, that it might be in the way your eyes smile&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9867" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-15T19:26:08.687" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T19:26:08.687" Title="Trying to remember a poem that I only have a snippet of" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10940" CreationDate="2020-04-15T15:59:21.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking at the links and the pictures used to represent the product, it is likely that the price difference is simply the difference from paperback to hardcover. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even here in the United States a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B00IM89AGW&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hardback set is around $125&lt;/a&gt; while a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0345529057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paperback set can be had for as low as $35.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is not quite extreme as a 500% increase, it is close at 350%. Keep in mind as well you are comparing a set to individual books in your links, and a set is always going to be cheaper. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T15:59:21.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13709" CreationDate="2020-04-15T21:30:28.217" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some of these (Hobbes, Smith, Russel) tend to be fairly technical in nature, so part of the complexity is the reading and part of the complexity is the ideas themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, it's totally normal to have to work hard to understand them. You're definitely not alone in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few recommendations I have: speaking as someone who also has a math degree, in one sense, the approach to reading a philosophy book has a lot of similarities to how you read a math book. You can't necessarily &quot;read it straight through&quot; like you would with a novel - you have to study each part to make sure you follow their thought process and where they got their ideas from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As is the case in math, many people tend to &quot;gloss over&quot; the parts of the book that they don't understand. However, it's important to make sure you understand these parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, make sure that you understand all of the terms used. (In case that sounds obvious, I've seen a lot of people skip that entirely when they read - when they encounter an unfamiliar word, they just gloss over it rather than looking up what the word means).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note: if you're reading on a Kindle or other similar device, you can select the word and it'll give you a popup with the definition and a link to the Wikipedia article (if there is one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you encounter some new concept, try to read it and then explain it to yourself afterwards. If you were teaching someone else, how would you explain it to them? For example, when I read Shakespeare, whenever I finish a scene I try to summarize to myself what happened in that scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're into programming, you can also acquire a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rubber duck&lt;/a&gt; for this purpose. If the duck isn't convinced by your explanation, this is probably where your confusion lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final point: it sounds odd, but it can also be helpful to read a summary in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be helpful to write down some questions before even starting the book or chapter and then try to answer them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this initially somewhat slower way to read, in my experience for really complicated material like mathematics, philosophy, and economics this is actually the most efficient way to learn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, I strongly recommend reading about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://jamesclear.com/fixed-mindset-vs-growth-mindset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;difference between the fixed mindset and the growth mindset&lt;/a&gt;. The idea behind that is that, if you believe that your abilities are basically fixed (either you're a good reader or you aren't and there's not much you can do about it), you end up setting yourself up to fail. On the other hand, if you believe that you can improve, you're much more likely to be able to succeed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-04-15T21:30:28.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-16T05:36:24.543" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/books/fast-loose-beginnings-a-memoir-of-intoxications-20060923-ge36vx.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memoir excerpt&lt;/a&gt; about a drug addict, who was jealous of his peer, I began wondering if the author is intending to be unreliable. The memoir's account was practically as drunk as the author in the original context. That seems fitting considering it was a memoir that included drug addiction. Is it important for the narrator to be more ethical and self aware at the later time? His account of his peer was misrepresentative and unethically vexatious, but the overall personal journey was well described. Should the author recant the views formed in his earlier state?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastEditorUserId="9853" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T05:43:56.123" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T00:39:00.410" Title="Does a memoir need to include a reliable narrator?" Tags="&lt;diary&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13714" CreationDate="2020-04-16T06:31:11.720" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A memoir does not need to have a consistent reliable narrator&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a memoir, and how does it differ from a historical novel and how does it differ from a textbook?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionary.com defines the word thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Usually &lt;strong&gt;memoirs&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  a. an account of one's personal life and experiences; autobiography.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  b. the published record of the proceedings of a group or organization, as of a learned society.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;a biography or biographical sketch.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A memoir is written from &lt;em&gt;personal observations&lt;/em&gt;. A historical novel is fiction set in a historic context; a textbook is a collection of facts. A memoir is neither of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A memoir, in my view, is supposed to give you an accurate &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; of what the experience was like. To give you a glimpse of what it would be like if you had been there. To show what the author was going through, and how they felt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not the author's perception of things was &lt;em&gt;factual&lt;/em&gt; - given that it was influenced by the effects of drugs - is &lt;em&gt;irrelevant&lt;/em&gt;. What matters is that it accurately portrays what the &lt;em&gt;experience&lt;/em&gt; was like for the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, in a memoir, the actual facts and what actually happened is less useful than how the author perceived it at the time. Because how the author perceived it &lt;em&gt;at the time&lt;/em&gt; is the only way that we can, first of all, get an accurate feel of what the situation was like from their perspective; and second, it helps to understand actions taken by understanding what the author was thinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, no: &lt;strong&gt;a memoir does not always need to have a perfectly reliable narrator, because that's not the point of a memoir&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T06:31:11.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13771" CreationDate="2020-04-16T09:26:01.330" Score="8" ViewCount="1547" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opening words of Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; (1816) describe the eponymous heroine as follows: &quot;Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich ....&quot; The novel shows very clearly how much prestige and power Emma and her father have on account of their wealth. For example, whenever Emma has plans for the evening, she can summon less fortunate individuals to babysit her father: Mrs Bates, Miss Bates, and Mrs Goddard are described as &quot;almost always at the service of an invitation from Hartfield&quot; (Chapter 3). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear that the Woodhouses are not only wealthy, but also the crème de la crème of Highbury society. Emma as well as Austen treat that high social position as a given. For example, Emma is positively &quot;insulted&quot; when Mr Elton, the vicar, proposes to her, because he has &quot;the arrogance to raise his eyes to her&quot; (Chapter 16). Similarly, when she is out for a walk with Harriet Smith and they run across Robert Martin, the lovers Harriet and Robert cannot have a long conversation because &quot;Miss Woodhouse must not be kept waiting&quot; (Chapter 4). Examples abound of the deference Emma both expects and receives from nearly all the other residents of Highbury, with the notable exception of George Knightley, her only equal socially, financially, and intellectually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel provides an exquisitely detailed portrait of class distinctions in the pre-Industrial Revolution era. Mr Knightley is a landowner who farms part of his land and rents out the rest; this places him very high in the class structure of the period. Emma's neighbor Mr Weston has made his money in the army and from the upward mobility of his family (Chapter 2). The Coles are wealthy, but they are &quot;of very low origin&quot; and their money comes from trade; so they are definitely second-class citizens compared to Mr Knightley or Emma (Chapter 25). Yet it is never made clear where Emma's and her father's wealth comes from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they landowners? The impression the novel gives is that Donwell Abbey, Mr Knightley's residence, has extensive grounds and farmland; we hear a lot about his estate manager William Larkins (e.g., Chapter 28) and we also learn that Mr Martin is one of his tenant farmers.  We are told also about the apples, strawberries, etc. that Mr Knightley grows, and about the dairy cattle Mr Martin keeps. But we have no comparable data about the Woodhouses. It appears that Hartfield is a residence with no attached farmland. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the source of Emma's and her father's wealth? It does not appear that Emma is wealthy independently of her father (for example, because her mother has left her a legacy); in any case, the opening sentence also tells us she is not yet 21 years old, so she would not have control over any such funds. In fact, as far as I can tell, we are never told exactly what the Woodhouses live on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given how important a theme money generally is in Austen's work, &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; would be rather an outlier if we are simply told the heroine is rich, but not given any ready clues about the money's provenance. In every other novel of hers, we know exactly why the protagonists are where they are in terms of money. So: are there any specific textual clues in &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; that point to the source of Emma's money? I am not looking for general speculation on various ways that the Woodhouses &lt;strong&gt;might&lt;/strong&gt; have made their money (e.g., a pirate ancestor, vast possessions in the colonies, the stock market, etc). I am wondering whether there is any particular evidence in the novel itself about where the money comes from. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T01:22:58.560" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T08:00:43.567" Title="Where does Emma Woodhouse’s family fortune come from?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;emma-austen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13705" CreationDate="2020-04-16T11:47:49.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;TLDR: Contrary to the OP's assumptions, being nominated for a Nobel Prize and being shortlisted for one are two quite different things. We know some of the nominees for Nobel Prizes because their nominators tell people about it; the Nobel Prize Foundation does not require them to stay silent. Information about the shortlist is not released until fifty years after a Nobel Prize is given, and we have no information about who was shortlisted for more recent prizes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question seems to assume that being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and being on the short list are essentially equivalent. They are two quite different things. The number of people who are nominated is much larger than the number on the short list. For example, in 1962, one of the years that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/uncategorized/candidates-for-the-1962-nobel-prize-in-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Nobel Foundation has commented on the short list&lt;/a&gt;, there were 66 people nominated, and three on the short list (there apparently would have been four, but one of them died).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a fairly long list of people who can nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature. These are (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the Nobel Prize website&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Members of the Swedish Academy and of other academies, institutions and societies which are similar to it in construction and purpose;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Professors of literature and of linguistics at universities and university colleges;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Previous Nobel Laureates in Literature;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Presidents of those societies of authors that are representative of the literary production in their respective countries.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If somebody nominated Narayan for the Nobel Prize in Literature, that person would know that he had been nominated and could tell other people that Narayan had been nominated. This happens quite often (especially for the Nobel Peace Prize). I would assume that this is how people know that Narayan had been nominated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this is quite different from being shortlisted. The short list is compiled by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nobel Committee for Literature&lt;/a&gt;, and this information is kept secret for fifty years. The only people who would know the short list are members of this committee and the Swedish Academy, and it is extremely unlikely that any of them would say anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T12:49:52.267" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T12:49:52.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-16T13:18:13.420" Score="3" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember a story that I read in english class during middle school (ca 2008-2010 in Sweden) about a boy being turned into mannequin. From what I remember the boy was dipped in waxed by evil villain and then while still alive placed in the shop windows. The shop might have been Harrods, though I very unsure about this detail. I tried searching on the internet but unfortunately I didn't find anything. The story was quite short and also think it might have appeared in the textbook we using though it might been adapted from elsewhere. The level of english should also been quite easy. One thing that reminded me of the story is the following lines from this QI clip: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Fki5pi_Y5IY?t=274&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/Fki5pi_Y5IY?t=274&lt;/a&gt; (starting at ca 4:30) though it might just be me remebering things incorrectly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much in advanced for any help. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2119" LastEditorUserId="2119" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T14:08:42.337" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T14:08:42.337" Title="Horror story about boy being turned into a mannequin" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14574" CreationDate="2020-04-16T18:39:59.787" Score="3" ViewCount="263" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can understand why Dominique was ultimately attracted to him. He really was the &quot;Superman&quot; she wanted, although it took her almost the whole novel to realize it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Dominique disdained Roark for most of the novel, and dated his rival. So what did he see in her that caused his love to last for the length of the novel. For instance, did he consider her a &quot;Superwoman&quot; also?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing a screenplay in which the hero courts the heroine because of the light that he saw her in, twenty years earlier, when they both had other partners. At that time, he wrote of her, &quot;she is just a supernova, a shooting star, a celestial comet.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twenty years later (and both newly single), they go on a cruise together and have a major fight, but when they debark in Valparaiso, Chile, he offers her the engagement ring that he had &quot;forgotten&quot; to give her on board ship. The play ends with their riding the &quot;funicular&quot; upward, which parallels the (movie) version of the Fountainhead, when &quot;Mrs. Roark&quot; rides the elevator to the top of Roark's latest building to meet him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent does Howard Roark's motivations parallel those of my hero?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T13:13:50.697" Title="What attracted Howard Roark to Dominique in The Fountainhead?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12232" CreationDate="2020-04-16T19:15:18.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's say you and X are first cousins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X has a child, Y. You and Y are still &quot;first cousins,&quot; but Y is one (generation) removed from X (in a downward direction). If you had a child, Z, Y and Z would be second cousins, both of them being children of two first cousins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;X also has a parent, A, who is a sibling of one of your parents, B. At this stage, A would be your uncle or aunt. But A is &quot;once removed&quot; from your first cousin, X, in an upward direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;higher&quot; of two generations controls, so A would be &quot;avuncular&quot; (root word, uncle) to you, not your &quot;first cousin once removed.&quot; And you and Y would be &quot;first cousins&quot; once removed, not &quot;second cousins&quot; once removed, even though Y would be a &quot;second cousin&quot; to your child Z.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T19:15:18.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9029" CreationDate="2020-04-16T19:49:29.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Daisy (Fay) Buchanan was a well-meaning, but ultimately weak and indecisive woman from a wealthy family. Modern critics might characterize as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stepford_Wives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stepford Wife&lt;/a&gt;. Her main problem is that she doesn't seem to &quot;take responsibility&quot; for her actions (even though she appears not to mean any harm). In Nick's opinion, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They were careless people, Tom &lt;strong&gt;and Daisy&lt;/strong&gt; – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…&quot; [Emphasis added.}&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, she falls in love with Gatsby, then is swayed by Tom Buchanan, then (reasonably) thinks better of her upcoming marriage to Buchanan, but without cancelling the wedding. Then Gatsby comes back into her life, and she thinks of leaving Tom for him, but finally opts for the status quo, just because it is the status quo. Finally, she gets into a hit and run accident with her husband's mistress, and doesn't stop to help or leave identification, which is basically illegal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A hundred years ago, such indecisiveness was tolerated in, if not expected of a young woman. Not so today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T20:23:44.067" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T20:23:44.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9679" CreationDate="2020-04-16T19:56:13.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consider the Elizabeth Bennett character &quot;wooden&quot; by modern standards. She is not as expressive as a modern heroine would be. But she speaks and acts in a manner appropriate for a lady of her time and station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within that context, she was &quot;lifelike&quot; by the more restrained standards of her time. She exhibits a full range of feelings and emotions. Ultimately, what makes someone &quot;lifelike&quot; is largely defined by the social mores of the time they live in (not those of the reader). A few people manage to live and act outside &quot;the social mores of their time&quot; but not many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There could be one (or both) of two explanations for Elizabeth being more &quot;lifelike&quot; than men. 1) Upper class 19th century English women were still more expressive than similarly situated 19th century English men. 2) Jane Austen, being a woman, did a better job of depicting Elizabeth than say, Darcy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T20:15:25.587" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T20:15:25.587" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8114" CreationDate="2020-04-16T20:04:22.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One complaint against Tom was that &quot;he's not even Italian, let alone Sicilian.&quot; Worse, he also had blond hair and a pale face, not dark hair and skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vito made him &quot;consigliere&quot; because he performed a key function, as a lawyer. Vito did, in fact, want to move his, and other families, in the direction of greater respectability. Tom would have been the &quot;point man&quot; in such an effort. In that context, his &quot;blond hair and a pale face,&quot; was an advantage. At the end of Vito's life, his family owned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;tremendously valuable real estate in midtown New York, whole office buildings. It owned, through fronts, partnerships in two Wall Street brokerage houses, pieces of banks on Long Island, partnerships in some garment center firms, all this in addition to its illegal operations in gambling.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But existential threats (the rise of other families) forced Michael to move in the opposite direction, of acting in an &quot;extralegal&quot; manner, just to survive. In that kind of a situation, you need the most &quot;Sicilian&quot; person around, both in looks and in manner. Tom finally figured out that he was not that man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 30, such a Sicilian, Alberto Neri, a Michael choice, was described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;He was immensely strong...people were afraid of him because of that strength and his unbending attitude toward what was right and wrong... If he disagreed with a group's attitude or an individual's opinion, he kept his mouth shut or brutally spoke his contradiction. He never gave a polite agreement. He also had a true Sicilian temper and his rages could be awesome.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Michael was also that man, arguably more so than his father. In Chapter 9, it was &lt;strong&gt;Michael&lt;/strong&gt; who &quot;realized that Sonny &lt;strong&gt;and Tom&lt;/strong&gt; were off-center on this guy Sollozzo,[who later killed Sonny] they were still underrating him...&quot;&#xA; [emphasis added].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Chapter 29: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;But he was not to get his necessary year because fate itself took a stand against him, and in the most surprising fashion. For it was the Godfather, the great Don himself, who failed Michael Corleone.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T22:19:41.123" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T22:19:41.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13725" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2020-04-16T20:20:18.590" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hi. I'm Rand. I love literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why to vote for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm the site's top &lt;strong&gt;flagger&lt;/strong&gt;, top &lt;strong&gt;voter&lt;/strong&gt;, top &lt;strong&gt;editor&lt;/strong&gt;, and top &lt;strong&gt;reviewer&lt;/strong&gt; in all six review queues. So I'm already doing a lot of moderation work here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I have four years of &lt;strong&gt;experience&lt;/strong&gt; moderating another Stack Exchange site, Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy. (So I'm well aware of the differences and wouldn't try to import SFF policies here.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I've been &lt;strong&gt;active&lt;/strong&gt; on Literature and its &lt;strong&gt;meta&lt;/strong&gt; since day 1, and helped create important policies including on recommendation questions, homework questions, language tagging, etc. So I know the site policies as well as anyone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why not to vote for me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Electing me would eliminate one of the most active &lt;strong&gt;non-diamond moderators&lt;/strong&gt;. If I had a diamond, I'd try to leave non-obvious close/reopen/delete/undelete votes to the community, so I wouldn't be reviewing as much as I do now. Others would need to fill that gap.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T20:20:18.590" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T20:20:18.590" CommentCount="4" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-04-16T20:20:18.590" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2083" CreationDate="2020-04-16T20:48:59.160" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was about the mixing of the &quot;old money&quot; and &quot;new money&quot; crowds in West Egg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;old money&quot; crowd set the manners, the ways of speech, the ostensible behaviors, etc., or what Daisy called the &quot;old euphemisms,&quot; which she actually approved of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What she &lt;strong&gt;dis&lt;/strong&gt;approved of, was the &quot;raw vigor&quot; exhibited by the &quot;new money people&quot; that adopted &quot;the old euphemisms, and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short-cut from nothing to nothing.&quot; In her mind, such people were imposters, who would go from &quot;nothing to nothing,&quot; where they belonged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T20:48:59.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13727" PostTypeId="6" CreationDate="2020-04-16T22:08:22.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am Tsundoku and I am nominating myself for the Literature SE pro-tem mod election.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to posting questions and answers, I have written literally hundreds of tag wiki excerpts, which shows I don't mind doing the less exciting work that is needed for the site's upkeep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also contributed to the site by editing questions to improve them, by reviewing issues in the review queues, by making many suggestions for the reading challenges and by proposing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1172/2191&quot;&gt;change to the reading challenges&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been moderator on Language Learning SE since October 2017.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope for our site to become more diverse, both in the literatures being discussed and in our userbase. Diversity in our userbase needs to be protected by taking a clear stance against bigotry and aggressive behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the day I work in digital accessibility, which is an area where diversity is also important. It is an area in which I have also witnessed shortsightedness and uncivility, but whereas making things accessible to people with disability can cost time and effort,&#xA;being tolerant online does not. There is no excuse for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-16T22:08:22.770" LastActivityDate="2020-04-16T22:08:22.770" CommentCount="1" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-04-16T22:08:22.770" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-17T03:23:44.427" Score="3" ViewCount="1034" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book a long time ago about a stuffed cat and a stuffed dog who get hungry when their owner leaves and eat each other: they rip each other apart until they are each just a rag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They looked like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U2YjKm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/U2YjKm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9874" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T05:56:03.907" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T08:02:38.680" Title="Children's book about a stuffed dog and stuffed cat who eat each other when their owner leaves" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13592" CreationDate="2020-04-17T05:00:15.833" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not an obscenity about &quot;climaxing&quot; or &quot;passing gas.&quot; It's a phonetic rendering of what was then spoken English. For instance, the sexual meaning of &quot;come&quot; is a modern usage dating back to the 1970s. etymonline.com/word/cum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bolded text, &quot;and so was cumfarting, eading, and abatting,&quot; reads in modern English, &quot;and so was &lt;strong&gt;comforting,&lt;/strong&gt; aiding, and abetting...&quot; That might be a pleading in a court proceeding. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T16:30:59.490" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T16:30:59.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13728" CreationDate="2020-04-17T08:02:38.680" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe you may be thinking of the poem &quot;The Duel&quot;, also known as &quot;The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat&quot;, by Eugene Field.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been published in many formats, with various art; for instance, this edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bqeci.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bqeci.gif&quot; alt=&quot;cover of a version of the poem&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem itself goes like this (and is &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/duel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in the public domain&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gingham dog and the calico cat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Side by side on the table sat;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  'T was half-past twelve, and (what do you think!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor one nor t' other had slept a wink!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Appeared to know as sure as fate&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There was going to be a terrible spat.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;(I wasn't there; I simply state&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The gingham dog went &quot;Bow-wow-wow!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the calico cat replied &quot;Mee-ow!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The air was littered, an hour or so,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With bits of gingham and calico,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  While the old Dutch clock in the chimney-place&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Up with its hands before its face,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For it always dreaded a family row!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;(Now mind: I'm only telling you&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Chinese plate looked very blue,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And wailed, &quot;Oh, dear! what shall we do!&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the gingham dog and the calico cat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wallowed this way and tumbled that,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Employing every tooth and claw&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the awfullest way you ever saw—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, oh! how the gingham and calico flew!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;(Don't fancy I exaggerate—&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;I got my news from the Chinese plate!)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Next morning, where the two had sat&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  They found no trace of dog or cat;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And some folks think unto this day&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That burglars stole that pair away!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But the truth about the cat and pup&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Is this: they ate each other up!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now what do you really think of that!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;(The old Dutch clock it told me so,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;And that is how I came to know.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;Eugene Field&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T08:02:38.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-14T06:12:11.363" Score="7" ViewCount="1147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just watched &quot;The Shawshank Redemption&quot; for the first time. I was surprised that it took place in a U.S. prison because I had assumed for years based on my ignorance that &quot;Shawshank&quot; was derived from an Asian language. I see now that the word &quot;Shawshank&quot; was also part of the original book by Stephen King, &quot;Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What language and/or source was the origin for the word &quot;Shawshank&quot; in Stephen King's book? Did King invent the word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9882" OwnerDisplayName="xdhmoore" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T09:23:13.807" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T10:17:58.843" Title="Where did Stephen King get the word &quot;Shawshank&quot; from?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;rita-hayworth-shawshank-redemption&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14009" CreationDate="2020-04-17T09:25:58.203" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hollowneedleana00leblgoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hollow Needle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1909) by Maurice Leblanc, did M. Brédoux just &amp;quot;drop&amp;quot; the paper with the Hollow Needle cipher?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I missed something in the book, but the way the good guys and Beautrelet just get to stumble upon that very important piece of information feels weird to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It enters the narrative like this (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hollowneedleana00leblgoog/page/n90/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see page 76&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that moment, the sergeant of gendarmes came up to M. Filleul and handed him a crumpled, torn and discolored piece of paper, which he had picked up not far from the place where the scarf was found. M. Filleul looked at it and gave it to Beautrelet, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I don't suppose this will help us much in our investigations.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isidore turned the paper over and over. It was covered with figures, dots and signs [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean, it's a legit, massive secret paper that have been around and hidden for centuries and Brédoux or Lupin (or some of the Lupin-guy) just dropped it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9876" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:15:42.350" Title="How did they happen to find the cipher in &quot;The Hollow Needle&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-hollow-needle&gt;&lt;maurice-leblanc&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13734" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-17T11:49:01.443" Score="7" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13731/17&quot;&gt;from an answer to an ID question&lt;/a&gt; about the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duel_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Duel&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, or &quot;The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat&quot;, in which Eugene Field describes a vicious fight between two stuffed animals as told to him by a &quot;Dutch clock&quot; and a &quot;Chinese plate&quot;. The repeated mention of countries, in this otherwise quite timeless and unfixed poem, made me wonder if there's any special significance to them. Especially since the poet repeatedly draws attention (parenthetically) to their credibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(I wasn't there; I simply state&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What was told to me by the Chinese plate!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Now mind: I'm only telling you&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the old Dutch clock declares is true!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Don't fancy I exaggerate—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I got my news from the Chinese plate!)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  [...]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (The old Dutch clock it told me so,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And that is how I came to know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could there be, even, some political subtext? At the time this poem was written (I couldn't actually find exactly when that was), was there any particular international news involving credibility of the Netherlands or China? Or am I reading too much into a simple children's rhyme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T11:49:01.443" Title="Any significance to the &quot;Dutch clock&quot; and &quot;Chinese plate&quot; in Eugene Field's &quot;The Duel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;eugene-field&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13735" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13736" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American science fiction and fantasy write Rebecca Roanhorse (born 1971) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T13:16:11.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13737" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13738" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French singer, songwriter and composer Gaëtan Roussel (born 1972) and his life as an artist. In addition to songs for his own albums, he has contributed songs to Alain Bashung's album 'Bleu pétrole'. Use this tag with [french-literature] and, if applicable, with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T14:39:06.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13739" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-17T14:41:34.723" Score="4" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alain Bashung's song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sN4vBuQNGw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sur un trapèze&lt;/a&gt;, with lyrics by Gaëtan Roussel &#xA;(see the Wikipedia article about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleu_p%C3%A9trole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;album &lt;em&gt;Bleu pétrole&lt;/em&gt;, released in 2008&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;begins with the following lines (emphasis and links added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On dirait qu'on sait lire sur les lèvres&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Et que l'on tient tous les deux sur un &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%C3%A8ze_(agr%C3%A8s)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trapèze&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  On dirait que sans les poings on est toujours aussi &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bal%C3%A8ze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;balèzes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Et que les fenêtres nous &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/apaiser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apaisent&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (if I understand the words correctly):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One would say that we can lipread&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And that we can stand (?) together on a trapeze&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  One would say that without our wrist we would still be equally strong&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;And that the windows pacify / calm us&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way would windows do this?&#xA;(Living in confined spaces, &lt;em&gt;behind windows&lt;/em&gt;, has not been doing many people a lot of good from a psychological point of view.) Or is Roussel being ironic here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T18:03:02.990" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T18:03:02.990" Title="In what way would windows appease or calm us?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;gaetan-roussel&gt;&lt;alain-bashung&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13740" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13741" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" Score="0" Body="Questions about Jane Austen's 1815 novel 'Emma'. Use this tag with [jane-austen].&#xD;&#xA;This tag should not be used for works entitled 'Emma' by other authors, e.g. F. W. Kenyon's novel with the same title." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" LastActivityDate="2020-04-17T19:42:24.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13766" CreationDate="2020-04-17T21:17:19.363" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was trying to read the following excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1091/1091-h/1091-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in Society&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas Carlyle, and I had a few questions. (The emboldening is mine; bolded phrases or words in a passage are followed by a question referring to it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; &lt;strong&gt;not this wholly, in many cases not this at all&lt;/strong&gt;. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why are these two separate categories? Don't they both mean &amp;quot;entirely&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it &lt;strong&gt;Heathenism&lt;/strong&gt;,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it &lt;strong&gt;Christianism&lt;/strong&gt;; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; &lt;strong&gt;Time&lt;/strong&gt;, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; &lt;strong&gt;Pagan empire of Force&lt;/strong&gt; displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it &lt;strong&gt;Skepticism&lt;/strong&gt;, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps &lt;strong&gt;unbelief and flat denial&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the bold words comprise the set of &amp;quot;religions&amp;quot; Carlyle lists?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does Carlyle mean here: &lt;em&gt;and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does Carlyle mean here: &lt;em&gt;not as real only, but as the only reality&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does Carlyle mean here: &lt;em&gt;displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does Carlyle equate &lt;em&gt;feelings&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the unseen and spiritual&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8161" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T07:21:40.767" Title="&quot;On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in Society&quot; by Thomas Carlyle" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;thomas-carlyle&gt;&lt;on-heroes-hero-worship-and-heroic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T02:23:49.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T02:23:49.773" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T02:23:49.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T02:23:49.773" Score="0" Body="A novella by Stephen King (based on Leo Tolstoy's short story &quot;God Sees the Truth, But Waits), where a man named Andy Dufrene is falsely accused of murdering his wife and her lover. He befriends a man named Red and endures many hardships during his stay, but Andy eventually escapes. Always use this with the tag [Stephen-King]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T04:40:40.540" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T04:40:40.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13745" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T02:31:07.000" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T02:31:07.000" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T02:31:07.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13746" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T02:31:07.000" Score="0" Body="Fredrick Douglas (February 1817–February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. He escaped slavery when he was young and became an abolitionist, impressing many with his oratory skills and intellect. He wrote three autobiographies, 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave', 'My Bondage and My Freedom', and 'Life and Times of Frederick Douglass'. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T04:40:12.593" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T04:40:12.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13747" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-18T06:29:49.147" Score="2" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;A biographer I follow on a social media platform once wrote &quot;we're a hardcover household&quot;. Where does the tradition of preferences between these two options come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:12:27.530" Title="Why is a hardcover book better than a paperback book?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13748" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-18T06:59:05.413" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are lines 205–224 of book II of &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1745/1745-h/1745-h.htm#link2H_4_0070&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paradise Regained&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by John Milton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But he whom we attempt is wiser far&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then Solomon, of more exalted mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made and set wholly on the accomplishment&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of greatest things; what woman will you find,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Though of this Age the wonder and the fame,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On whom his leisure will vouchsafe an eye&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of fond desire? or should she confident,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As sitting Queen ador'd on Beauties Throne,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Descend with all her winning charms begirt&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To enamour, as the Zone of Venus once&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wrought that effect on Jove, so Fables tell;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  How would one look from his Majestick brow&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Seated as on the top of Vertues hill,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Discount'nance her despis'd, and put to rout&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All her array; her female pride deject,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Or turn to reverent awe? &lt;strong&gt;for Beauty stands&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In the admiration only of weak minds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Led captive&lt;/strong&gt;; cease to admire, and all her Plumes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fall flat and shrink into a trivial toy,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  At every sudden slighting quite abasht&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belial suggests to Satan to lure Christ with a woman but Satan rebukes him and utters these lines. What I understood of this is that Satan is aware that he cannot lure Christ with a woman. But what is the exact meaning of the phrase &quot;admiration only of weak minds led captive&quot;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user9884" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T09:47:38.253" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T11:02:25.543" Title="Meaning of &quot;beauty stands in the admiration only of weak minds led captive&quot; in &quot;Paradise Regained&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-regained&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13769" CreationDate="2020-04-18T07:55:30.683" Score="3" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Henry IV Part 1, Act 5, Scene 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Falstaff says &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...God keep the lead out of me, I need no more weight than my own&#xA;  bowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this referring to lead bullets? I was under the impression these were not available at the time of the battle, around the year 1400. Even the rudimentary cannon is only just being introduced in the later War of the Roses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...of basilisks, of cannon, culverin, of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is mentioned in the play (Act 2, Scene 3). The basilisk is a sort of French cannon. Is this in fact the use of gunpowder and lead bullets in the year 1400? For example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Were-guns-firearms-used-during-the-War-of-The-Roses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; says they were not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9885" LastEditorUserId="9885" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:30:58.710" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T20:11:20.390" Title="1 Henry IV Act 5, Scene 3: &quot;God keep the lead out of me&quot;" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;henry-iv-part-i&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13750" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13751" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" Score="0" Body="Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), British historian and essayist, author of &quot;Sartor Resartus&quot; (1831) and &quot;The French Revolution&quot; (1837)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:04:14.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13752" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13753" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" Score="0" Body="&quot;On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History&quot; (1841), a collection of historical lectures by Thomas Carlyle. Use this tag with the [thomas-carlyle] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:05:58.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4820" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:06:36.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He is a hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole play is a &quot;morality&quot; play, with a virtue/vice comparison between Falstaff and Hotspur. But the twist is, from the outset, that Falstaff is really the virtue (wise, biblical, popular), while Hotspur is lost in vanity (harebrained, hot blooded) - but brave and honourable, like a legendary giant, with a devout, idealistic maiden in tow: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Prince Hal: &lt;strong&gt;...I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the north, he that kills me some six or seven dozen of&#xA;  Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife “Fie upon&#xA;  this quiet life! I want work.” “O my sweet Harry,” says she, “how many&#xA;  hast thou killed today?” “Give my roan horse a drench,” says he, and&#xA;  answers “Some fourteen,” an hour after. “A trifle, a trifle.&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Act 2, Scene 4.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hotspur is chivalry, and is considered on the whole to be living up to the expectation of his time. But, ultimately, in vain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Falstaff: ...&lt;strong&gt;There's honour for you! Here's no vanity!&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Act 5, Scene 3.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and slightly earlier&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Falstaff: &lt;strong&gt;What is honour? A word...Honour is a mere scutcheon - and so ends my catechism.&lt;/strong&gt; &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Act 5, Scene 1.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is definitely not a villain. Perhaps there is similarity to Hamlet, who is lost in vain. Also, for his hot-bloodedness, I can see similarities with Sonny in The Godfather: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Clemenza: &lt;strong&gt;I hope you're not a hot head like your brother Sonny, you&#xA;  can't talk business with him&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Godfather&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Sonny a villain in the Godfather? No way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps Hotspur's actions are not on the whole &quot;recommended&quot; by Shakespeare, in some sense, but he is given the role of a hero, not a villain. It is more likely Falstaff is the villain. Consider Henry IV Part 2, where Falstaff is ultimately cast out, and Henry V, where Bardolph is hanged.  But then, he is too likeable. So there is a deep character comparison going on. If there is a villain, what is being driven out is Hal's un-kingly life. He is fulfilling his potential. So personalities are so bright and vivacious in the play, it is the opposite (dullness) which is being driven out &quot;with a dagger of lath&quot;, leaving the fulfilment of Hal as Henry V (again, like in the Godfather).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9885" LastEditorUserId="9885" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:29:13.017" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:29:13.017" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13755" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13756" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" Score="0" Body="&quot;Paradise Regained&quot; (1671), a poem by John Milton. Use this tag with the [john-milton] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T08:15:55.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13732" CreationDate="2020-04-18T09:29:58.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What ‘Shawshank’ suggests to me, is a &lt;strong&gt;surname from the Scottish Borders&lt;/strong&gt;. The name is made up of two elements that are common in English and Scots surnames and placenames: ‘shaw’ meaning ‘covert’ or ‘shelter’; and ‘shank’ meaning literally ‘leg’ but figuratively ‘a projecting point of a hill’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Shaw’ is found in surnames deriving from placenames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A ‘shaw’ or ‘schaw’ was a small woody shade or covert. An old manuscript† says—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;In somer when the shawes be sheyne,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And leves be large and long.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    It is fulle mery in feyre fareste&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To here the foulys song. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As a shelter for game and the wilder animals, it is found in such compounds as ‘Bagshaw,’ the badger being evidently common; ‘Hindshaw,’ ‘Cockshaw,’ ‘Henshaw,’ and ‘Earnshaw.’‡ The occurrence of such names as ‘Shallcross’ and ‘Shawcross,’ ‘Henshall’ and ‘Henshaw,’ and ‘Kersall’ and ‘Kershaw,’ would lead us to imagine that this word too has been somewhat corrupted. Other descriptive compounds are found in ‘Bradshaw,’ or ‘Langshaw,’ or ‘Openshaw.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Wareing Bardsley (1873). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029805813/page/n107/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our English Surnames: Their Sources and Significations&lt;/em&gt;, p. 91&lt;/a&gt;. London: Chatto and Windus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Child%27s_Ballads/119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Child ballad 119&lt;/a&gt;). ‡ An ‘earnshaw’ is a heron, from Anglo-Norman ‘herouncel’; I think Bardsley must be mistaken in deriving the name from ‘shaw’ meaning ‘covert’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Shank’ meaning ‘leg’ is found in surnames deriving from nicknames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Jambe’ was the Norman synonym of ‘Shank,’ and by way of more definite distinction we light upon the somewhat flattering ‘Bellejambe,’ the equally unflattering ‘Foljambe,’ the doubtful ‘Greyshank,’ the historic ‘Longshank,’† the hapless ‘Cruikshank,’ the decidedly uncomplimentary ‘Sheepshank,’ and last and worst ‘Pelkeshank,’ seemingly intended to be ‘Pelican-shanked,’ which, when we recal the peculiar disproportion of that bird’s extremities to the rest of its body, affords ample reason for the absence of that sobriquet in our more modern rolls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924029805813/page/n403/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bardsley, p. 387&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† A nickname given to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_I_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward I of England&lt;/a&gt;, a tall man for his time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Scotland ‘shank’ is used in place names with this meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;SHANK 3. The projecting point of a hill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I heard a queer unearthly greet coming down the &lt;em&gt;shank&lt;/em&gt;, and wixing ay nearer and nearer to the byre door.” &lt;em&gt;Blackwoods Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, November 1820, p. 201.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Jamieson (1882). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yLgrAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA193&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language&lt;/em&gt;, volume 4, p. 193&lt;/a&gt;. Paisley: Alexander Gardner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples include Bowshank (a village) and Gairshank (a hill) in the Scottish Borders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting this together, ‘Shawshank’ suggests a placename in the Scottish Borders, meaning something like ‘wooded point of a hill’. The placename could have been used as a surname for a family that originated there, and when the descendants of that family emigrated to the United States (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Americans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as many Scots did in the late 18th and 19th centuries&lt;/a&gt;) they took the name with them and it became attached to the town where they settled in Maine, and hence eventually to the penitenitiary of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T10:17:58.843" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T10:17:58.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-18T10:03:10.093" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;King Henry IV of England, also known as Henry Bolingbroke, appears in three Shakespeare plays, with two of them being named after him. In &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, he can be seen as the main antagonist of the play, overthrowing the titular king and claiming the throne himself, with the former king Richard being murdered at the end of the play. In &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 1&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 2&lt;/em&gt;, Henry Bolingbroke is well established as king, although still dealing with uprisings against him. The main protagonist of these plays is his son Prince Hal (later King Henry V), who supports his father in fighting the uprisings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least two different views of King Henry IV, both as a real-life figure and by other characters within the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He can be seen as a usurper, who took the throne by force and had his predecessor Richard II murdered. This negative attitude is taken by the various rebels under his rule, such as Northumberland, as well as presumably Richard II himself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At least during his own reign, if not his rebellion against King Richard, he can be seen as the &quot;rightful&quot; king, sitting the throne and holding his own against the rebels from various parts of his country.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does Shakespeare's portrayal clearly lean towards one of these points of view rather than the other? Does it change between plays?&lt;/strong&gt; I haven't studied &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; in detail, but from reading a retelling my impression is that this play portrays Henry Bolingbroke as a usurper. In &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, which I have studied, his portrayal seems much more positive, as we follow his son fighting to protect his throne, and the characters who see him as a usurper are &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/4820/17&quot;&gt;mostly&lt;/a&gt; negatively depicted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm mostly interested in textual analysis and interpretation, but commentary on the real-world context would also be interesting (e.g. would Shakespeare have felt pressure from the contemporary monarch to lean one way or the other in his portrayals of past ones).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T20:31:48.277" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T20:31:48.277" Title="Portrayal of Henry Bolingbroke through different Shakespeare plays" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;henry-iv-part-i&gt;&lt;richard-ii&gt;&lt;henry-iv-part-ii&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13759" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13762" CreationDate="2020-04-18T14:19:39.973" Score="4" ViewCount="223" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why Lope de Vega titled his poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lope_de_Vega#La_dragontea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Dragontea&lt;/a&gt;, what were the prerequisites? I tried to search the etymology of this word but was not successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I know that Chinese &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longjing_tea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragon Tea&lt;/a&gt; exists, but I suppose it has nothing to do with Vega's poem, because Longjing tea was named Dragon Tea by English speakers, and Vega was a Spanish-speaking author, so this is irrelevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also know an old music-hit &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragostea_Din_Tei&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragostea Din Tei&lt;/a&gt; but this is ridiculous as this name has Romanian language origin :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found couple of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270122409_Lope_de_Vega_y_Ercilla_el_caso_de_La_Dragontea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;researches&lt;/a&gt; about this book but they are all paid, so I cannot inspect them up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anybody knows the etymology or story of invention of this word? Some credible historical evidences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4576" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T14:39:02.410" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T16:20:39.237" Title="Origin of the title of &quot;La Dragontea&quot; by Lope de Vega?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;lope-de-vega&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13760" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-18T14:39:55.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T14:39:55.367" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T14:39:55.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13761" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-18T14:39:55.367" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Lope Félix de Vega y Carpio (1562–1635) or his life as a Spanish playwright, poet, and novelist in the Spanish Golden Age of Baroque. He is one of the most prolific writers in history and considered second only to Miguel de Cervantes within Spanish literature. Use with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:45:58.170" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:45:58.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13759" CreationDate="2020-04-18T16:20:39.237" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The subject of Vega’s poem is the disastrous expedition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Drake&lt;/a&gt; against the Spanish colony of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panam%C3%A1_Viejo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Panamá&lt;/a&gt; in Central America, where he met his death of dysentery in 1596. ‘Drake’ of course means ‘dragon’, and Vega combined this with ‘tea’, meaning ‘fire-torch’ in Spanish, to produce an image of the English sailor as a fire-breathing dragon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Como el Alva sus parpados abria&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  estornudando resplandor intenso,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  lamparas de su boca despedia,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  de sus narices humo negro y denso&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His eyelids, raised, released the light of dawn;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His snorting breath lit up the heavens with fire;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His mouth sent tongues of flame into the sky;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His nostrils poured out black and smoking clouds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lope Félix de Vega Carpio. ‘La Dragontea’, Canto X. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/colecciondelaso16vegagoog/page/n390/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coleccion de las Obras Sueltas&lt;/em&gt; (1776), volume 3, p. 371&lt;/a&gt;. Madrid: Antonio de Sancha. The (somewhat fanciful) English translation is from Simon Schama (2015), &lt;em&gt;The Face of Britain&lt;/em&gt;, Viking.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T16:20:39.237" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13747" CreationDate="2020-04-18T17:48:54.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are more ways to bind a book than is suggested by the binary opposition of hardcover versus paperback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paperback are usually made by applying glue to the &amp;quot;spine&amp;quot; of a set of sheets and then glueing the cover to the spine.&#xA;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.instructables.com/id/Bind-Your-Own-Paperback-Books-with-Ease/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bind Your Own Paperback Books With Ease&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;on the Instructable website for a tutorial explaining how to glue a book at home.)&#xA;Sometimes the sheets aren't fully cut but combined into sections, and the glue is then applied to the spine of these sections.&#xA;As the book ages, the glue can become brittle, which can cause the spine to break when you open the book.&#xA;Another downside is that bad glueing or low-quality glue can cause pages to become unstuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardcover books used to be sewn more often, which is a more time-consuming and therefore more expensive process than glueing.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.advantagebookbinding.com/products/hard-cover-binding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Advantage Book Binding&lt;/a&gt; describes three methods:&#xA;Smyth sewn hard cover books, adhesive bound hard cover books and wire-bound hardback books.)&#xA;In addition, the rigid protective covers provide more protection than the flexible paper covers, and they are more expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hardcover&lt;/a&gt; points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If brisk sales are anticipated, a hardcover edition of a book is typically released first, followed by a &amp;quot;trade&amp;quot; paperback edition (same format as hardcover) the next year.&#xA;Some publishers publish paperback originals if slow hardback sales are anticipated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, hardcover books are not always sewn; I have seen cheap hardcover books that were actually glued, with a hardcover glued to the first and last pages of the book.&#xA;And paperbacks can be bound in a way that they lay flat when you open them.&#xA;Two publishers in IT who use such bindings are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1149&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;O'Reilly (RepKover binding)&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nostarch.com/blog/lay-flat-bindings-what-and-how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;No Starch Press&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The massmarket paperback is a more recent phenomenon than hardcover books.&#xA;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperback&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paperback&lt;/a&gt; mentions paperbacks being available in the 19th century,&#xA;but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ioba.org/standard/2001/12/a-short-history-of-paperbacks/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oliver Corlett&lt;/a&gt; writes that they already existed as early as the 17th century.&#xA;However, 19th-century paperbacks were typically &amp;quot;dime novels&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pulp fiction&amp;quot;.&#xA;Apparently, that was also what motivated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Lane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allen Lane&lt;/a&gt; to publish serious works of literature as paperbacks.&#xA;According to the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-the-paperback-novel-changed-popular-literature-11893941/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How the Paperback Novel Changed Popular Literature&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;Lane was on his way back home after spending a weekend in the country with Agatha Christie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While he was in Exeter station waiting for his train back to London, he browsed shops looking for something good to read. He struck out. All he could find were trendy magazines and junky pulp fiction. And then he had a “Eureka!” moment: What if quality books were available at places like train stations and sold for reasonable prices—the price of a pack of cigarettes, say?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what led to the founding of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguin_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penguin Books&lt;/a&gt; in 1935.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, the impression of superiority of paperbacks over hardcover books can come from two sources: the superior material quality and the lingering stigma of pulp fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:12:27.530" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:12:27.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13748" CreationDate="2020-04-18T17:51:58.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here beauty is personified and stands for physical charm. The line suggests only weak minds are made captive by and enamored of outward beautiful appearance. Beauty can not exert any lasting impact on such an August being.The line that follows, goes to explain how it falls flat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2075" LastEditorUserId="2075" LastEditDate="2020-04-18T18:28:04.003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-18T18:28:04.003" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-19T00:35:10.960" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading such a story, maybe in the New Yorker or The Atlantic, in the 1990s or early 2000s. There were hearts and diamonds and clubs and spades throughout the story (printed the same size as the type font, like wingdings or webdings symbols) in place of words. The story was written in first person. IIRC the narrator was dealing with a family medical situation at a hospital, something among adult brothers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9894" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-19T06:22:08.150" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T06:22:08.150" Title="Short fiction in which the suits of playing cards (clubs, diamonds, spades, hearts) are used in place of some words" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13742" CreationDate="2020-04-19T07:21:40.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are the answers to your questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As @user14111 points out in a comment to your question, &quot;not wholly&quot; and &quot;not at all&quot; are nearly opposites in their meanings. The former means &quot;in large measure, but not entirely&quot;; the latter means &quot;in no measure.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, though whether he meant it as an exhaustive list is hard to say from this excerpt. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Carlyle says that heathenism is polytheism where each deity is great because of physical power. Zeus and Hermes, for example, aren't necessarily &lt;em&gt;better&lt;/em&gt; individuals than your average human. They are just more powerful because they can &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; things that average humans can't. They live forever, they're stronger, they control certain physical forces (e.g., Zeus controls the thunder), etc. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The heathens think of their gods as real, but they don't think of them as the only reality; they take human existence as real too. But in Christendom, human life is not ultimately real. Its goal is to become part of the ultimate reality, which is to live in God's world after our human existence comes to an end. So the Invisible is not only real, it is in fact the only reality. The visible world is just transitory. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your emboldening obscures the meaning a bit. It's not a &quot;Pagan empire of force&quot; that's &quot;displaced by a nobler supremacy&quot;; it's a pagan empire where &quot;force&quot; is &quot;displaced by a nobler supremacy.&quot; The contrast is with a heathenism where gods are worshipped for their physical force. In this pagan empire, gods are worshipped not for their power, but for their &quot;Holiness&quot;. The gods aren't just more powerful versions of humans. They are more holy, with none of the pettinesses, lust, etc. that humans have. Take the Hindu god Rama, for example, who is celebrated not for his victory in battle, but because that victory represents a triumph of good over evil. Rama is considered the epitome of &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; conduct, not just of power. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Not quite. Feelings lead to thoughts; and that thinking, in turn, leads to &quot;outward and actual actions.&quot; It's the reflection on one's feelings, specifically determinative of one's actions in the world, that Carlyle equates with &quot;the unseen and the spiritual.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T07:21:40.767" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13767" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13772" CreationDate="2020-04-19T07:59:02.573" Score="6" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; act I scene IV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                                What may this mean,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Revisit'st thus the &lt;strong&gt;glimpses of the moon&lt;/strong&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unable to figure out what the correct interpretation semantically of the bold part would be. Some sources like &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/3978233&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/hamlet/act-1-scene-4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; suggest that it means that the moon glimpses the earth, its light emanating from it to get a view of the earth (which I think shouldn't be considered a glimpse since the moon is there in the sky for at least 4-5 hrs generally, contrary to a typical &quot;glimpse&quot; duration). But other sources like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/hamlet/page_54/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; suggest that the person has come back to look at the moon or glimpse the moon. Which one is correct and why? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9895" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-19T08:42:13.710" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T13:07:50.720" Title="Meaning of &quot;glimpses of the moon&quot; in &quot;Hamlet&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13749" CreationDate="2020-04-19T18:14:44.507" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let us first look at the occurrences of words such as [gun]powder and pistol &lt;strong&gt;in the play&lt;/strong&gt; as a whole. Falstaff says (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.5.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead out of me, I need no more weight than my own bowels.&#xA;  I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scene is set during the Battle of Shrewsbury and Falstaff's ragamuffins are the soldiers he is in charge of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few lines below, Prince Hal enters the scene and says to Falstaff,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I prithee lend me thy sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Falstaff responds (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Nay, before God, Hal, if Percy be alive thou &#xA;  gets not my sword, but take my &lt;strong&gt;pistol&lt;/strong&gt; if thou wilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, what the Prince draws from Falstaff's &quot;case&quot; turns out to be a bottle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_(wine)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sack&lt;/a&gt;, which is more useful before than during a battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act IV, scene 2, Falstaff had described the men he had rounded up for the army &quot;&lt;strong&gt;food for powder&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;,&#xA;showing little concern for the lives of his men, but also providing evidence for the use of firearms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.5.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 4&lt;/a&gt;, Falstaff also use the word &lt;strong&gt;gunpowder&lt;/strong&gt; (in a metaphoric sense):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Zounds, I am afraid of this &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  gunpowder Percy, though he be dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;&lt;strong&gt;pistol&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; is also used elsewhere in the play, namely by Prince Hal in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.2.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act II, scene 4&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He that rides at high speed and with his pistol&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  kills a sparrow flying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this textual evidence, it is perfectly plausible that &quot;lead&quot; in &quot;keep the lead out of me&quot; refers to bullets.&#xA;It is much less plausible that it refers to something like the leaden dagger that Prince Hal mentions in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.2.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act II, scene 4&lt;/a&gt; because lead is too malleable to be used for a dagger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thy state is taken for a joined-stool, thy golden&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  crown for a pitiful bald crown!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about the &lt;strong&gt;historical accuracy&lt;/strong&gt;? The use of gunpowder and pistols during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shrewsbury&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Shrewsbury&lt;/a&gt; (July 1403) sounds anachronistic. The Wikipeda article doesn't mention any firearms. This is not because the technology was unknown in England though. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_artillery_in_the_Middle_Ages#Britain_and_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on gunpowder artillery&lt;/a&gt; mentions that the &quot;pot-de-fer&quot; was used by both the English and the French during the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) and that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;During the 1340s, cannon were still relatively rare, and were only used in small numbers by a few states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So this &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dd-b2ae-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cigarette card&lt;/a&gt; in the collections of the New York Public Library is perhaps not entirely anachronistic. But the depicted shape does not match the image of the reconstructed pot-de-fer in the above Wikipedia article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French started using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culverin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;culverin&lt;/a&gt; in the 15th century; this weapon was &quot;later adapted for naval use by the English in the late 16th century&quot;, i.e. long after the Battle of Shrewsbury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arquebus&lt;/a&gt;, however, did not appear in Europe before 1521, a century after the Battle of Shrewsbury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Falstaff's pistol might have looked like is less clear. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol#History_and_etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; explains that &quot;the English word was introduced in ca. 1570 from the Middle French &lt;em&gt;pistolet&lt;/em&gt; (ca. 1550)&quot;. So Shakespeare has Falstaff use a word that was not introduced into the language until roughly 170 years after the Battle of Shrewsbury. The term &quot;anachronism&quot; is fully justified here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-19T20:11:20.390" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T20:11:20.390" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11613" CreationDate="2020-04-19T19:13:51.573" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are various ways to approach this question, both philological and literary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a &lt;strong&gt;philological or textual point of view&lt;/strong&gt;, we need to look at the source of the statement that Enkidu must die.&#xA;None of the manuscripts of the Standard Babylonian version provide an complete text of the beginning of Tablet VII,&#xA;where Enkidu's dream is supposed to be. Instead, there is a gap of 30-35 lines immediately following the first line.&#xA;The dream is only available in the shorter Hittite version of the epic, which is fragmentary and in prose.&#xA;The Hittite version of the epic, however, does not contain the episode about the Bull of Heaven.&#xA;But the Hittite version of the dream mentions both the killing of Huwawa (Humbaba's name in the Sumerian poems)&#xA;and the killing of the Bull of Heaven.&#xA;So from a philological point of view, we believe that the gods decided that Enkidu must die because&#xA;the only extant manuscript of the dream, the Hittite version, says so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the question from a &lt;strong&gt;literary point of view&lt;/strong&gt;, there are various aspects to consider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, there is the &lt;strong&gt;relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;In the Sumerian Gilgamesh/Bilgames poems (which are older and don't constitute an integrated narrative), Enkidu is described as a servant.&#xA;For example, in &quot;Bilgames and Huwawa A&quot;, Bilgames &quot;called to his servant, Enkidu&quot; (George p. 151).&#xA;From this point of view, Enkidu is more &quot;expendable&quot; than Gilgamesh, who is a king.&#xA;In the Standard Babylonian version, Enkidu is more than a servant;&#xA;Gilgamesh repeatedly calls him a friend and in Tablet III, Gilgamesh's mother Ninsun adopts Enkidu as her son.&#xA;(Enkidu has no parents and in Ancient Mesopotamia, orphans were often adopted by the temples in order to &quot;save them the jaws of the dogs&quot;, as one text puts it.)&#xA;In the Standard Babylonian version, which describes Gilgamesh as two-thirds god and one-third human, Enkidu is still more expendable than his king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Curiously, in the available manuscripts of the Standard Babylonian version, Gilgamesh never addresses Enkidu by his name but calls him &quot;my friend&quot;.&#xA;He starts pronouncing Enkidu's name repeatedly only after his friend's death. The Hittite version is too fragmentary to establish whether the same pattern is present there.&#xA;It is not clear whether this is relevant to the decision of the gods.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, &lt;strong&gt;which gods are present&lt;/strong&gt; in Enkidu's dream? They are Anu, father of the gods and Ishtar's father, Ea, the wisest of the gods,&#xA;Enlil, &quot;Lord Wind&quot; and divine rules of Earth, and the sun god [Shamash]. Notably absent are Ishtar, whom both Gilgamesh and Enkidu had insulted,&#xA;and Gilgamesh's mother Ninsun (who is probably one of the lesser gods, as suggested by Tablet III, where she asks Shamash to protect Gilgamesh during his quest to the Cedar Forest).&#xA;Enlil had appointed Humbaba as guardian of the Cedar Forest, so he has a reason to be displeased,&#xA;even though Gilgamesh and Enkidu had created a gigantic door for his temple in Nippur to placate him.&#xA;It was Enkidu who had come up with this idea (see end of Tablet V). Apparently, the door did not placate Enlil.&#xA;Anu had allowed Ishtar to take the Bull of Heaven to earth to exact her personal revenge.&#xA;After the death of the Bull of Heaven, he too has a good reason to be angry.&#xA;Shamash had always protected Gilgamesh and even helped both friends to kill Humbaba.&#xA;There are even lines in Tablet III that it was he gave Gilgamesh the idea to go to the Cedar Forest.&#xA;It is only consistent for him to continue defending Gilgamesh and Enkidu.&#xA;None of the gods explicitly demands Gilgamesh's death, so letting Enkidu die comes down to a choice for the line of least resistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, neither Enkidu's social inferiority nor the decision of the gods provide an answer to the following two questions:&#xA;(1) &lt;strong&gt;which of the two men most deserve to die&lt;/strong&gt; and (2) &lt;strong&gt;whose death would most placate the gods&lt;/strong&gt;?&#xA;When we look at both killings they stand accused of, we can see an interesting pattern.&#xA;When Gilgamesh and Enkidu have managed to overpower Humbaba the guardian pleads for his life.&#xA;Gilgamesh appears willing to spare him but Enkidu urges Gilgamesh to kill him, which Gilgamesh does.&#xA;In the fight against the Bull of Heaven, it is Enkidu who advises Gilgamesh on how to kill the Bull:&#xA;&quot;Thrust your dagger between nape, horn, and kill-point!&quot; And this is exactly who Gilgamesh does it&#xA;(See page 53 in Foster's translation or page 52 in George's translation, which uses the term &quot;slaughter-spot&quot;).&#xA;By executing the actual killings, Gilgamesh appears to heap more blame upon himself than Enkidu.&#xA;In addition, both victims weren't earthly creatures but were both associated with the realm of the gods.&#xA;One would expect the gods to exact more than an ordinary sacrifice to placate them, and Gilgamesh, being two-thirds god,&#xA;would constitute a much more valuable sacrifice than the orphan Enkidu.&#xA;Instead, it is Enkidu who has to take the fall.&#xA;It is possible to find two reasons for this.&#xA;First, it is possible to see a vague parallel with the custom of appointing a &lt;strong&gt;substitute king to divert danger from the real king&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Eckart Frahm (page 140-141 writes):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When a ruler in Ancient Mesopotamia believed that a negaive omen, for example a lunar eclipse, announced disaster,&#xA;  he could appoint a &quot;substitute king&quot; [Ersatzkönig], who would pro forma temporarily rule in his stead&#xA;  in order to divert the expected disaster to himself, after which he [the substitute king] was killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parallel with the fate of Enkidu is obviously not become a &quot;substitute king&quot; but being sacrificed to save a king or, in other context, another person.&#xA;(The social phenomenon that someone takes the blame for others is well known in other cultures and is still preserved in concepts &#xA;such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scapegoat&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_guy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fall guy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipping_boy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whipping boy&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, and perhaps more convincingly, there is a &lt;strong&gt;psychological argument&lt;/strong&gt; for letting Enkidu die instead of Gilgamesh.&#xA;In the first half of the epic, Gilgamesh wants to make a name for himself, which would confer at least virtual immortality on him.&#xA;(Being remembered was very important for kings but also for ordinary people in Mesopotamia; see for example the Sumerian poem &quot;Bilgames and the Netherworld&quot;.)&#xA;However, it is Enkidu's death that causes his fear of dying and that motivates him to go on a quest to Uta-napishti and the secret of eternal life.&#xA;This quest is essential to his development as a character.&#xA;His desire for immortality is such that he needs to be taught several lessons before he understands its futility:&#xA;first, the tavern-keeper Siduri tells him it is useless, then he fails Uta-napishti's challenge to stay awake for six days and seven nights&#xA;(he falls asleep immediately) and finally, he loses the plant that would give him back his youth.&#xA;Finally, from a &lt;strong&gt;purely narrative point of view&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;Enkidu's death triggers Gilgamesh's quests in Tablets IX-XI, which allows the narrator to integrate the flood story,&#xA;which had originally been an independent story (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atra-Hasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atrahasis story&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above, I consider it unlikely that Enkidu is being punished for failing to defeat Gilgamesh.&#xA;Enkidu had been created after the people of Uruk had complained to the gods about their treatment by Gilgamesh's,&#xA;who did not conduct himself as the &quot;good shepherd&quot; he was expected to be.&#xA;After he has become friends with Gilgamesh, the epic no longer mentions this inappropriate behaviour.&#xA;Gilgamesh starts neglecting his kingly tasks again after Enkidu's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction by Andrew George. London: Penguin, 1999.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Translated and edited by Benjamin R. Foster. Second Edition. Norton, 2019. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frahm, Eckart: &lt;em&gt;Geschichte des alten Mesopotamien&lt;/em&gt; [History of Ancient Mesopotamia]. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-19T19:13:51.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13716" CreationDate="2020-04-19T23:43:21.547" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second paragraph of the book gives us an indication of Emma's financial situation. She is &amp;quot;the mistress&amp;quot; of her father's house, implying that she has some level of access to the family's accounts, from which she presumably pays her personal expenses (he is noted to be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;indulgent&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;), as well being his presumptive heir to £30,000, equivalent to several million pounds in today's money, along with the title to Hartfield itself, which in itself is a fair definition of being &amp;quot;rich&amp;quot;. There's no good indication that she has wealth that's not connected to her family's fortune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father; and had, in consequence of her sister's marriage, been &lt;strong&gt;mistress of his house from a very early period.&lt;/strong&gt; Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses; and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the genesis of the family fortune, their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landed_property&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;landed properties&lt;/a&gt; aren't large but they evidently draw a passive income from the Hartfield estates. Additionally they have 'old money' from other, more nebulous sources, likely inheritances and whatnot but not described in any detail by the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He only wanted to aggrandise and enrich himself; and if &lt;strong&gt;Miss Woodhouse of Hartfield, the heiress of thirty thousand pounds,&lt;/strong&gt; were not quite so easily obtained as he had fancied, he would soon try for Miss Somebody else with twenty, or with ten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it was not fair to expect him to feel how very much he was her inferior in talent, and all the elegancies of mind. The very want of such equality might prevent his perception of it; but he must know that in fortune and consequence she was greatly his superior. He must know that &lt;strong&gt;the Woodhouses had been settled for several generations at Hartfield, the younger branch of a very ancient family&lt;/strong&gt;—and that the Eltons were nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The landed property of Hartfield certainly was inconsiderable, being but a sort of notch in the Donwell Abbey estate, to which all the rest of Highbury belonged; but their fortune, from other sources, was such as to make them scarcely secondary to Donwell Abbey itself, in every other kind of consequence; and the Woodhouses had long held a high place in the consideration of the neighbourhood&lt;/strong&gt; which Mr. Elton had first entered not two years ago, to make his way as he could, without any alliances but in trade, or any thing to recommend him to notice but his situation and his civility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T08:00:43.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13767" CreationDate="2020-04-20T07:42:02.083" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sense of ‘glimpse’ that we need here is this one, cognate with ‘gleam’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;glimpse, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, 1.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A momentary shining, a flash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this sense in mind, we can imagine that on this cold night, when “the air bites shrewdly”, the wind blows clouds across the face of the moon, so that it shines for a moment and then is hidden again. Then, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;, we can take “the glimpses of the moon” to stand for the scene which the Ghost revisits: the castle of Elsinore, or more generally, the Earth, by night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glimpse is lost, or nearly so, in the sense in which Shakespeare here uses it. The following passage in Harington’s &lt;em&gt;Ariosto&lt;/em&gt; contains the word in the same sense: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Untill it was his fortune toward night&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    To come fast by a mountaine, in whose side&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Forth of a cave he saw a &lt;em&gt;glims&lt;/em&gt; of light.—&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/orlandofuriosoin00ario/page/94/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto XII. St. 65&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Poet makes the scene thus more picturesque, by introducing the moon sending forth her beams on the platform, either through interstices of dark clouds floating in the heavens, or, what is more probable, through the openings among the battlements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Hunter (1845). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/newillustration00unkngoog/page/n229/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, pp. 222–223&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. B. Nichols.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Contra Hunter, I prefer the “interstices of dark clouds” interpretation, since in my opinion the moon moves too slowly in the sky for fixed battlements to create ‘glimpses’.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-20T09:10:07.143" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T09:10:07.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13767" CreationDate="2020-04-20T13:07:50.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;T. J. B. Spencer's edition of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (New Penguin Shakespeare, 1980, page 236) provides the following endnote for &quot;glimpses of the moon&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the earth illuminated by the uncertain light of the moon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. R. Hibbard's edition (The Oxford Shakespeare, 1987, page 182) offers the following gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;flickering gleams of moonlight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions (revised by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford University Press, 1986) defines &quot;glimpse&quot; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Transient brightness, flash&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm rather skeptical about the idea that the Elizabethans saw the moon flicker or flash.&#xA;The more plausible explanation for this characterisation of the moon's light as unreliable is that it intensifies the changes during the lunar cycle.&#xA;Remember Juliet's words in Act II, scene 2 in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;O swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That monthly changes in her circled orb&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ghost of Hamlet's father only appears at night, when the moon is shining, and disappears again at or before dawn.&#xA;See for example Act I, scene 1, where Horatio says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I have heard, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  The cock, that is the trumpet of the morn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding throat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Awake the god of day, and at this warning,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Th'extravagant and erring spirit hies &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  To his confine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the moonlight as uncertain fits with the uncertainty about the identity of the ghost:&#xA;is it really the ghost of Hamlet's father or malicious spirit attempting to lead Hamlet to his doom (as Horatio suggests later in Act I, scene 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-20T13:07:50.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-20T16:36:21.333" Score="5" ViewCount="461" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R. K. Narayan's short story &quot;The Missing Mail&quot;, from the 1943 collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading online&lt;/a&gt;, the resident Ramanujam is desperately trying to arrange a marriage for his daughter Kamakshi. At one point he says to Thanappa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The season would be closing, with only three more auspicious dates, the last being May 20. The girl would be seventeen in a few days. The reminders from her grand-father were becoming fiercer. Ramanujam had exhausted all the possibilities and had drawn a blank everywhere. He looked helpless and miserable. ‘Postman,’ he said, ‘I don’t think there is a son-in-law for me anywhere. . .’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later, during negotiations with the family that Thanappa found for him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘But,’ the lady added, half-overwhelmed with happiness and half-worried, ‘there is this difficulty. We had an idea of doing it during next Thai month. . . It will be so difficult to hurry through the arrangements now. But they say that if the marriage is done it must be done on the twentieth of May. If it is postponed the boy can’t marry for three years. He is being sent away for some training. . .’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end the wedding takes place successfully on the 20th of May. My question is: why is this date considered special?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is the 20th of May a generally significant date for Hindu marriages? Or is it &quot;auspicious&quot; for Kamakshi only because of some &lt;em&gt;personal&lt;/em&gt; factors?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T03:00:05.480" Title="Is there any general significance to 20 May in Hinduism, or was it just personally auspicious?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13774" CreationDate="2020-04-20T16:59:52.893" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not the 20th of May specifically - we have our own &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_calendar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;calendar&lt;/a&gt;, which is used alongside the western Gregorian calendar. Since dates don't map precisely you often find that we talk about dates in the Tamil system with the corresponding western dates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the important context here is &quot;with only three more auspicious dates&quot; - there are specific dates, usually looked up using an almanac such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pambu_Panchangam&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pambu panchangam&lt;/a&gt;, but also taking into account other factors like star signs and other astrology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... 20th May is the day when the last auspicious day considered suitable for a wedding. I would assume from context that it was the month of &quot;thai&quot; - considered essentially wedding season, but due to other circumstances, it would have to be done on that specific date. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2219" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T03:00:05.480" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T03:00:05.480" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12039" CreationDate="2020-04-21T07:09:36.267" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not find JRRT's stories particularly Christian, but I do really enjoy them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having been exposed to some radical fundamentalists any mention of Magic is an aspect of demons at work to deceive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Bible Baptists Publications, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.biblebaptistpublications.org/occult.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wizards, Witches, and the Word of God&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.”  (Rev. 9:21)  “And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.” (Rev. 18:23) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The above scripture comes from the book of Revelation, the final book of God’s word, which deals with the end-time.  One might expect murder, fornication, and theft to be widespread sins in the last days because we see a continual increase of these sins with every passing year.  But notice that a fourth sin is mentioned as well: sorcery.  According to God’s word, we can expect to see an increase in sorcery as the second coming of the Lord Jesus Christ draws near.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;According to Webster, the word “sorcery” means “magic; enchantment; witchcraft; divination by the assistance or the supposed assistance of evil spirits, or the power of commanding evil spirits.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One does not have to look very far to see that God’s word is being fulfilled before our very eyes.  Along with numerous other Biblical signs that our Lord’s return is near, we are also witnessing a tremendous increase in occultism.  Much of this is obviously due to the way many books, movies, and television programs are glamorizing such evil practices as witchcraft and wizardry.  God’s word clearly condemns all such practices, yet millions of &gt;people, especially young people, are being led to believe that it is possible to be a good witch or a good wizard.  Nothing could be further from the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Satan is playing a very nasty trick on our children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Eric Barger, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ericbarger.com/lotr.c.c.2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord of the Rings: Christian or Cultic?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Tolkien (and Lewis) created their stories in a day when the occult was not the norm, when there was NOT a mass proliferation of occult philosophy and practice and when the majority of the church had little or no understanding of such things. This does not justify the “white vs. black” magick scenarios in their works, but could serve to explain it. In my mind, this is another very important reason that Rings and other works of its kind are off limits in our day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then came the 1960’s and the great outpouring of evil activity that led us to the drug culture, the sexual revolution, and the blurring of truth in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Evolution, abortion and nihilism replaced God, life and hope. Along with this cultural shift came an insatiable demonically induced hunger to experience the paranormal.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If the mind lives for any substantial amount of time in the fantasy realm of the occult, sorcery and witchcraft, there is certainly a possibility that when facing the same occultism in real life that our human response will not be one that immediately opposes it. It is obvious that rather than rejecting the occult, what is happening is that entire generations are increasingly reacting in a positive fashion to its practices and practitioners. Smaller, yet more tragic are the numbers from this group who are not just favorably reading about Satan’s playground of sorcery and spells but are instead desirous to actually participate in it! Our response as Christians is to understand that the occult – the same practices promoted by Tolkien’s heroes – is repulsive in the site of God. He condemns such in no uncertain terms with the use of the word “abomination” three times in Deuteronomy 18:9-12. The Hebrew word here is the strongest condemnatory language used in the entire Bible on any issue! Dare we react in any other way? We had better call evil “evil” and never confuse it for “good.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9905" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T08:47:14.717" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T08:47:14.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13790" CreationDate="2020-04-21T08:21:42.907" Score="4" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following quote is from the story &amp;quot;Fellow-Feeling&amp;quot; in R. K. Narayan's short story collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading it online&lt;/a&gt;, and this story is only 5 pages long). Emphasis added by me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rajam Iyer found a seat and made himself comfortable opposite a sallow, meek passenger, who suddenly removed his coat, folded it and placed it under his head and lay down, shrinking himself to the area he had occupied while he was sitting. With his knees drawn up almost to his chin, he rolled himself into a ball. Rajam Iyer threw at him an indulgent, compassionate look. He then fumbled for his glasses and pulled out of his pocket a small book, which set forth in clear Tamil the significance of the obscure Sandhi rites that every Brahmin worth the name performs thrice daily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was startled out of this pleasant languor by a series of growls coming from a passenger who had got in at Katpadi. The newcomer, looking for a seat, had been irritated by the spectacle of the meek passenger asleep and had &lt;strong&gt;enforced the law of the third-class&lt;/strong&gt;. He then encroached on most of the meek passenger’s legitimate space and began to &lt;strong&gt;deliver home-truths which passed by easy stages from impudence to impertinence and finally to ribaldry&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is &amp;quot;the law of the third-class&amp;quot;? (The context is a crowded train named the Madras-Bangalore Express, between Katpadi and Jalarpet, and the story was published in 1943 and set certainly some time during the British rule in India.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is meant by &amp;quot;home-truths&amp;quot; here? To me this term means true facts about oneself, often unwelcome but useful to know. In this case it seems to mean pointless insults against a stranger? It doesn't say who the newcomer is speaking to, but it seems he's just mindlessly insulting the meek passenger?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T06:54:01.143" Title="What does this passage mean about third-class passengers in the Madras-Bangalore Express?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13779" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12219" CreationDate="2020-04-21T08:50:07.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every phrase highlighted is discussing their capacity to survive in situations of trouble. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;If it came to it&quot;, where &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;a situation of trouble&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;when put to it&quot;, where &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; is overcoming &lt;em&gt;a situation of trouble&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather&quot;, where &lt;strong&gt;rough handing&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;em&gt;a situation of trouble&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is explaining the counterintuitive capabilities of the characterised people. Because of their appearances people would, intuitively, consider hobbits to be incapable of surviving well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grief is a situation where they are losing a loved one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Foe is an opposer that intends to harm them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Weather is an act of nature that delivers a problem.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being rough handled by any of these situations means the hobbits are suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9853" LastEditorUserId="9853" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T08:57:04.523" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T08:57:04.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-21T12:52:24.810" Score="6" ViewCount="377" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might seem like a really obscure question, but it's somewhat significant, because whether the city in Northern Ireland is called &quot;Derry&quot; or &quot;Londonderry&quot; is a contentious political issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I re-read Stephen King's &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; recently, and there's a mention of Derry being named after the city of Derry in Ireland. However, I have a memory of reading it the first time, in my teens (over 25 years ago) where the same sentence said it was named after Londonderry. As I said it's an obscure thing to remember, but I noticed it at the time because of the aforementioned political implication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an old edition of the book which calls it (i.e. the Irish city, not the Maine one) &quot;Londonderry&quot; or is it my faulty memory? And if I'm right, what was the reason behind the change? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7907" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T13:05:22.880" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T13:26:31.187" Title="In &quot;It&quot;, was Derry, Maine said to be named after Derry or Londonderry?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;it&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13780" CreationDate="2020-04-21T13:26:31.187" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Internet Archive has three editions of &lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt;, spanning more than 30 years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/it00king_1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;November 1986, New York: Viking&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/it00king_0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;September 1987, New York: Signet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/it0000king&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;July 2017, New York: Scribner&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All three have the same text, namely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My home town. Named after the county of the same name in Ireland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I suggest that you correctly remembered that the name was politically controversial, but mis-remembered the exact text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the narrator says that the town in Maine is named after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Londonderry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;county&lt;/em&gt; in Ireland&lt;/a&gt;, not the &lt;em&gt;city&lt;/em&gt;, as claimed in the post. This shows how easy it is to make this kind of minor mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T13:26:31.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="930" CreationDate="2020-04-21T19:00:28.353" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase “the edge of doom” comes from Shakespeare’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearesson01shakgoog/page/n108/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 116&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loue alters not with his breefe houres and weekes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But beares it out euen to the edge of doome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Doom” means “fate” or “judgement” and here it is being used with the meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Doom, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, 6.&lt;/strong&gt; The last or great Judgement at the end of the world&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that “to the edge of doom” means “until the end of the world”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/117/1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Into My Own&lt;/a&gt;’ the phrase turns the dimension of space (the trees stretching away into the distance) into a metaphor for the passage of time until the end of the world, and the speaker’s journey through the trees into a metaphor for his life and poetic career. And just as the speaker in Shakespeare’s sonnet says that true love never alters, so the speaker in ‘Into My Own’ says that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; will never alter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They would not find me changed from him they knew—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only more sure of all I thought was true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One way to read this is that the speaker is determined to stick to his own style of writing poetry, regardless of the judgement or “doom” of his critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T19:00:28.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-21T23:29:08.747" Score="12" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last pages of part 1 of Nabokov's &lt;em&gt;Lolita&lt;/em&gt; Humbert relates Dolores's description of her own previous sexual experiences, in the course of which she mentions ways in which some of her coevals at school had been &quot;pretty bad.&quot; She implies that by the end of 6th grade several of the class had experience of sexual intercourse. My own prejudices concerning the not famously permissive 1940s would not have led me to expect this. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be curious to discover any evidence concerning the actual level of sexual development and experience shown by New England 6th graders in the 1940s, and consequently whether Nabokov might have drawn inspiration from actual knowledge of the normal experience of such children, as well as any theories on whether it was the author's intention that the reader should accept Lolita's portrait of her pre-adolescent &lt;em&gt;milieu&lt;/em&gt; as plausible, or whether it is deliberately surprising. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9909" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T18:28:56.033" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:28:56.033" Title="Were the early sexual experiences of Lolita and her classmates inspired by the real experience of children in New England in 1947?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;&lt;lolita&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13784" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13785" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" Score="0" Body="for the 1955 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. Use with the [vladimir-nabokov] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" LastActivityDate="2020-04-21T23:34:05.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13789" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-22T03:15:18.993" Score="1" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I happened to notice that different books published by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Science%2BBusiness_Media&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Springer&lt;/a&gt; sometimes have slightly different names listed next to the copyright © symbol. For instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-79066-4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mirrors and Reflections&lt;/a&gt; by Borovik and Borovik says © Springer Science+ Business Media, LLC 2010&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-27596-7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Combinatorics of Coxeter Groups&lt;/a&gt; by Bjorner and Brenti says © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6762-5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Limits, Series, and Fractional Part Integrals&lt;/a&gt; by Furdui says © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first example we have &quot;LLC&quot;, in the second &quot;Inc.&quot;, and in the third the place of publication (I think?) &quot;New York&quot;. There's also a space between the &quot;+&quot; symbol and &quot;Business&quot; in the first example, which is not there in the other two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know these are really minor differences that won't come up in any matter of significance. It's just that I'm curious and want to know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; there are these minor differences. I would expect the name printed on the copyright page to be standardised so I found it surprising to see (what looks like) inconsistencies and typos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the reason for these differences in the copyright information?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some additional information which might or might not be relevant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;These are all Mathematics textbooks. The first belongs to the series &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/bookseries/223&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Universitext&lt;/a&gt;, the second to &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/bookseries/136&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GTM&lt;/a&gt; (Graduate Texts in Mathematics), and the third to &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/bookseries/714&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PBM&lt;/a&gt; (Problem Books in Mathematics). However, the differences are not consistent across the different series (one can check by going through other books in the links above).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page on Springer mentions that Springer Science+Business Media became a part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springer_Nature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Springer Nature&lt;/a&gt; through a series of mergers, but that happened in 2015, which is after the dates of publication of my examples.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have tried looking up the difference between LLC and Inc. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.in/search?q=what+is+the+difference+between+llc+and+inc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the web&lt;/a&gt;, but I haven’t understood enough to be able to point out anything of help.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I searched for related questions on the SE network (specifically on Law SE, Academia SE and Mathematics SE) and found the following question on Academia SE that is related but significantly different: &lt;a href=&quot;https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/58891/87949&quot;&gt;Referencing Springer products: what name to use for the publisher?&#xA;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T05:56:45.293" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:51:44.080" Title="Why are there differences in the copyright information in various books of the same publisher (Springer)?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13778" CreationDate="2020-04-22T04:51:10.320" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;law of the third-class&amp;quot; (well, second class now, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.irfca.org/faq/faq-history5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the third class has long since been abolished&lt;/a&gt;) is that as many people can sit on a space as is (in)humanly possible. That's to say, while seating may actually be for &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; people per bench, in a crowded train (occasionally even when it's not crowded) &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt;+&lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; people will be sitting, for some &lt;em&gt;k &amp;gt; 0&lt;/em&gt;. Usually &lt;em&gt;k&lt;/em&gt; is 1, but I have seen it go up to &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; for small values of &lt;em&gt;n&lt;/em&gt; (~3). (Something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pinterest.com/pin/785104147524681230/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this image&lt;/a&gt;.) This does happen rather rarely in first class compartments (usually when a person who rarely rides in first class somehow manages to get a ride there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit earlier in the text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the next halt, Mandhakam, most of the passengers got down. The compartment built to ‘seat 8 passengers; 4 British Troops, or 6 Indian Troops’ now carried only nine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it's possible some people might have been standing, I think it's more likely that Rajam himself found a place to sit thanks to the law of the third-class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now-a-days, you're more likely to find references to this using the term &amp;quot;adjust&amp;quot;. For example, take this article from Faking News (Indian equivalent of The Onion): &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fakingnews.com/india/thoda-adjust-karlo-declared-national-tagline-india-23328&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Thoda adjust karlo' declared national tagline of India&lt;/a&gt;. (&amp;quot;Thoda adjust karlo&amp;quot; ~ literally &amp;quot;adjust a little&amp;quot; in Hindi, meaning &amp;quot;scoot over&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He sat on the third seat in a second class compartment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An army of commuters blasted in at Dadar station and before he could realise what was happening, 3 people walked in the seating area murmuring ‘Thoda adjust karlo’. To add to this, one guy told him to shift a little to the inside saying ‘Thoda adjust karlo’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context, a second class compartment in suburban local trains has benches facing each other, each supposed to seat three passengers. So we have three passengers sitting on a bench, and then three more coming to stand in the space between that bench and the one facing it, and yet another guy asking a sitting person to scoot over (to make room for him to sit). The article is satire, but this &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; happen countless times every day on Mumbai local trains (and on trains elsewhere in India, but with different layouts and language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &amp;quot;home-truths&amp;quot; here? To me this term means true facts about oneself, often unwelcome but useful to know. In this case it seems to mean pointless insults against a stranger?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meh, I wouldn't find it surprising if a boisterous passenger were to loudly comment on passing strangers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T04:51:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13791" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13793" CreationDate="2020-04-22T04:58:26.333" Score="10" ViewCount="748" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story &quot;Fellow-Feeling&quot; from R. K. Narayan's short story collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading online&lt;/a&gt;), a proverb is mentioned in passing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rajam Iyer leaned back in his seat, reminding himself of a proverb which said that if you threw a stone into a gutter it would only spurt filth in your face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd never heard this before, but I like it. In context it's a metaphor for not arguing with idiots, along the same lines as &lt;em&gt;&quot;don't mud-wrestle with a pig, because you'll both get filthy but the pig will enjoy it&quot;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&quot;don't play chess with pigeons: they'll knock over the pieces, crap all over the board, and then strut around like they've won&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. But I like this one even better, and I'd like to know its source. The story suggests it's a traditional or well-known proverb, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/06inU.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Googling it&lt;/a&gt; only gave me pages about this very story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did Narayan invent this saying, or is it really a proverb? If the latter, what language/culture does it come from?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that my Google search for a real proverb failed because this only became known in &lt;em&gt;English&lt;/em&gt; through Narayan, and in some Indian language/culture it might indeed be well known. For what it's worth, the character Rajam Iyer is a Brahmin, reading a book in Tamil, travelling from Madras to Bangalore. (I don't know enough about Indian cultures to know which of these facts is most likely to be relevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T07:07:55.713" Title="Is Narayan really quoting a traditional proverb, and from which Indian language/culture?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13791" CreationDate="2020-04-22T06:32:38.987" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a bit of an odd translation - but the actual proverb goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;சேற்றில கல்லெறிஞ்சா அது மூஞ்சிலே தெறிக்கும்&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you throw a stone at mud, it will splatter on your face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently it is Tamil, but not specifically unique to the Tamil-Brahmin culture, who have a few linguistic quirks of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a less polite version that seems a better fit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;பீ மேலே கல்லெறிஞ்சா உன் உதட்டுல தெறிக்கும்&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  If you throw stones at urine, it will land on your mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm unsure if a conservative/orthodox Brahmin would use such a term, I'm assured that linguistic standards of that generation were much less Puritan than ours. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2219" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T07:01:17.380" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T07:01:17.380" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13791" CreationDate="2020-04-22T06:56:47.110" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book &lt;em&gt;A Classified Collection of Tamil Proverbs&lt;/em&gt; by the Rev. Herman Jensen, Danish Missionary, Madras (published in 1897 by The Methodist Episcopal Publishing House, Madras) lists the proverb on page 258:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proverb 2327: சேற்றிலே கல் விட்டு எறிந்தால், மேலே தெறிக்கும்.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you throw stones into mud it will splash over yourself.    &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&quot;If you will stir up the mire, you must bear the smell.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;&quot;He who blows in the dust fills his eyes with it.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;&quot;Do not throw clods into dung to splatter your own clothes.&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15919&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transliteration&lt;/a&gt; of the proverb would read: &lt;em&gt;cēṟṟilē kal viṭṭu eṟintāl, mēlē teṟikkum.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A scanned copy of the book can be accessed at the website of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rarebooksocietyofindia.org/postDetail.php?id=196174216674_10150930350756675&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rare Book Society of India (RBSI)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pk2D2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/pk2D2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tamil Proverbs, Rev. Herman Jensen, page 258&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T07:07:55.713" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T07:07:55.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13795" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-22T13:20:05.487" Score="12" ViewCount="3101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just come across the short story &quot;Do You Love Me?&quot; by Peter Carey via &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/230250/33591&quot;&gt;a story-ID over at SFF&lt;/a&gt;. The basic premise of the story is that when something isn't loved, it disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upon reading through the story, I came across a repeated phrase that I'm unfamiliar with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;9&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;A Contradiction&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Look at those fools,&quot; my father said, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;they wouldn’t know if they were up themselves.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My father stiffened and sat bolt upright. The pressure of his hand on my knee increased until I yelped with pain, and still he held on, hurting me terribly.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You are a fool,&quot; he said, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The world needs Cartographers,” he said softly, “because if they didn’t have Cartographers the fools wouldn’t know where they were. They wouldn’t &lt;strong&gt;know if they were up themselves&lt;/strong&gt; if they didn’t have a Cartographer to tell them what’s happening. The world needs Cartographers,” my father said[.]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(all emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this phrase &quot;to be up oneself&quot; or whatever mean? It's not immediately obvious from context, and it's a phrase I'm unfamiliar with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T13:25:15.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T14:05:20.583" Title="What does it mean for a person to be &quot;up&quot; themselves?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;peter-carey&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13795" CreationDate="2020-04-22T14:22:47.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is my interpretation that from the father's point of view &quot;up&quot; in this context means that their &quot;time is up&quot;; their time on earth and literally vanishing up into thin air. We see the father describe many people as fools and the son tells us the Cartographers are a proud group. They are so foolish in the father's opinion that they wouldn't know if they had stopped being loved and would therefore begin to vanish. But he knows as a Cartographer what the real cause of the vanishings are...  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the great irony here that it is the father that was the fool that didn't know he was &quot;up himself&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do believe that when flipped back to the context of father directly (and therefore playing into the irony) it can also cross into the meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/up_one%27s_own_ass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;being up your own ass&quot;&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/up_oneself&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;up yourself&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (as also mentioned by Rand in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/13795/what-does-it-mean-for-a-person-to-be-up-themselves#comment21635_13795&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt;). Indeed the father was smug, arrogant, and self important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T14:31:38.117" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T14:31:38.117" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14072" CreationDate="2020-04-22T18:36:29.460" Score="7" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warden_of_the_Tomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Warden of the Tomb&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is an expressionist play fragment by Kafka. Although incomplete, possibly extremely so, it's still decently long - about fourteen pages. Sadly (to me at least), as far as I can tell it has received little attention: basically the only writing in English I can find on it are a &lt;a href=&quot;http://static.dergipark.org.tr:8080/article-download/imported/1023001161/1023000977.pdf?&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper of Burç İdem Dinçel&lt;/a&gt; and a (medical!) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944142/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paper of Mishara&lt;/a&gt;. Even in German there seems to be little written on it, with the only example I can find being &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/43028077?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a paper by Meinel&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;(although since I can't read German it's quite possible I've missed many)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm not particularly familiar with the field so my &quot;literature search&quot; has been essentially limited to just googling, and I'm well aware that there could be lots of great sources on the topic which aren't so easy to find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in whether there are other sources at least partially focusing on &lt;em&gt;Warden&lt;/em&gt;. To avoid asking for a list of references, I'll phrase my question as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is there &quot;reasonably serious&quot; secondary literature at least partially focusing on &lt;em&gt;Warden&lt;/em&gt; other than the papers mentioned above? Failing that, where are places I might look for such literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm especially, although not exclusively, interested in sources in English (sadly, that's the only language I can read). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9912" LastEditorUserId="223" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T14:10:36.677" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T21:39:51.250" Title="Secondary literature on &quot;The Warden of the Tomb&quot;" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-warden-of-the-tomb&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13686" CreationDate="2020-04-22T19:00:16.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The section that most resembles your description seems to be a portion of chapter XXXV and XXXVI, where Renzo finds Fra Cristoforo in the lazzeretto. There you can find a few descriptions of him and other Capuchin frias while they tend to the sick. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arrivò in quel punto un cappuccino con la barba bianchissima, portando due bambini strillanti, uno per braccio, raccolti allora vicino alle madri spirate; e una donna corse a riceverli, e andava guardando tra la brigata e nel gregge, per trovar subito chi tenesse lor luogo di madre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that moment a Capuchin friar with a very white beard arrived, carrying two screaming babies, one on each arm, picked up just at that moment from the deceased mothers; and a woman ran to receive them, and she went looking through the group and the crowd, to find immediately who could play the role of the mother for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(my translation)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7822" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T19:00:16.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13799" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13800" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Warden of the Tomb' ('Der Gruftwächter') by Franz Kafka, which was published posthumously. Use this tag with [franz-kafka] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" LastActivityDate="2020-04-22T19:02:38.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13801" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-22T20:09:24.517" Score="5" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel 1984, Winston Smith writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly does Smith, or anyone else, think that Big Brother will discover their thoughtcrimes? Do they think Big Brother can read their minds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8383" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T07:08:41.880" Title="In 1984, how did people think their thoughtcrime would be discovered?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13795" CreationDate="2020-04-22T22:33:41.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT:&lt;/strong&gt; In the context of this question, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/1138/esco&quot;&gt;Esco&lt;/a&gt;'s answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13803/9915&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Original post:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an Australian, I can confirm that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/9914/jogloran&quot;&gt;jogloran&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/17/rand-althor&quot;&gt;Rand al'Thor&lt;/a&gt;'s comments are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://outbackdictionary.com/up-yourself/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Outback Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, in Aussie slang being 'up yourself' is to 'have a high opinion of yourself'. If someone accuses you of being up yourself, they likely think you are behaving in an arrogant or self-absorbed manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9915" LastEditorUserId="9915" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T05:57:57.937" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T05:57:57.937" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13795" CreationDate="2020-04-23T05:04:03.907" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &quot;up yourself&quot; being &quot;conceited&quot; (&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/up_one%27s_own_ass&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;being up your own ass&lt;/a&gt;&quot; or &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/up_oneself&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;up yourself&lt;/a&gt;&quot;) from @skooba and @Michael Finn is correct, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but neither answer fully captures the particular context you have mentioned (Sorry Skooba, but I disagree with your interpretation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They wouldn’t know if they were [&lt;em&gt;conceited&lt;/em&gt;] if they didn’t have a&#xA;  Cartographer to tell them what’s happening&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a slightly vulgar play on language by Carey's character which is actually referring to the meaning of &quot;Up yourself&quot; - what he's saying is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;They wouldn’t know if they [&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;had their head up their arse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;] if they didn’t have a&#xA;  Cartographer to tell them what’s happening&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, they are so stupid, clueless/ignorant, detached from common sense/experience &amp;amp; &lt;strong&gt;so self-unaware (e.g. conceited)&lt;/strong&gt; that they would be confused as to the position of their head if it was inserted into their own bodily orifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another similar phrase that springs to mind is &quot;they wouldn't know their arse from their elbow&quot; which is usually deployed to describe someone's lack of specific knowledge, or general stupidity, but is very often used to particularly denigrate someone who over-states their abilities - thereby making themselves look arrogant and conceited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e.g. &quot;He always carried on about how much he knew about cars and how he was a big expert, but when the car broke down and he just opened the bonnet and stared, clearly not knowing what to do, was obvious that he didn't know his arse from his elbow when it came to car maintenance.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1138" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T05:04:03.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13808" CreationDate="2020-04-23T05:29:18.627" Score="4" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 5-page short story &amp;quot;Fellow-Feeling&amp;quot; in R. K. Narayan's short story collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which I've been &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading online&lt;/a&gt; is about a few travellers on a train in India. Rajam Iyer, the protagonist, sees a meek passenger bullied by a newcomer, and decides to stand up to the newcomer. He pretends to have magic Brahmin powers and successfully bluffs the bully into backing down from a fight and leaving the train. After the bully leaves the train at Jalarpet, saying his ticket would take him no further, Rajam Iyer &lt;em&gt;lies to the other passengers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The train had left Jalarpet at least a mile behind. The meek passenger still sat shrunk in a corner of the seat. Rajam Iyer looked over his spectacles and said, ‘Lie down if you like.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meek passenger proceeded to roll himself into a ball. Rajam Iyer added, ‘Did you hear that bully say that his ticket was for Jalarpet?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well,’ he lied, ‘he is in the fourth compartment from here. I saw him get into it just as the train started.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though the meek passenger was too grateful to doubt this statement, one or two other passengers looked at Rajam Iyer sceptically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does Rajam Iyer say this?&lt;/strong&gt; It's clear the bully left the train in fear of him, and quite likely that the bully was lying about his ticket being for Jalarpet, but why would Rajam Iyer just make up having seen him get back onto the train? What difference does this make to the situation or to anyone's perception of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T05:25:36.763" Title="Why does Rajam Iyer lie about the bully at the end of &quot;Fellow-Feeling&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13801" CreationDate="2020-04-23T06:58:35.897" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;They think Big Brother knows and sees all, and they're pretty much right.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very first chapter, in the opening paragraphs of the story, the first time we're introduced to the telescreens, we're also introduced to the normality of permanent all-encompassing surveillance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The&#xA;telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston&#xA;made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,&#xA;moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal&#xA;plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course&#xA;no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How&#xA;often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual&#xA;wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all&#xA;the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted&#xA;to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the&#xA;assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in&#xA;darkness, every movement scrutinized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation has always been that the possibility mentioned only as &amp;quot;conceivable&amp;quot; was indeed the truth: that the Thought Police were watching everybody all the time. In any case, people know that it's a possibility, and even the possibility is enough to make people afraid &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt;, knowing that everything they do is (or might be) being watched.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughtcrime is not visible, you might say. They can watch everyone, but they don't have mind-reading technology. To that I reply, a good psychologist can figure out what someone is thinking just by watching them closely enough: their body language, their posture and position, their eyes, the pattern of their breathing - all of these things are clues towards someone's inner self. Presumably the Party would have such experts in their Thought Police, people who spend years watching citizens and figuring out what they're thinking. It's in this way that people can be found and &amp;quot;vaporised&amp;quot; before they even have a chance to act on their rebellious thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, after Winston is captured and tortured, it's confirmed that the Party has been watching him for years, has seen everything he's been doing and deduced his inner thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knew now that for seven years the Thought Police had watched him&#xA;like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word&#xA;spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had&#xA;not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his&#xA;diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him,&#xA;shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself.&#xA;Yes, even...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoughtcrime is easy to detect when you're watching everything that everyone does all the time. You just need to figure out the reasons behind the acts, and that's easy to do with so much information about the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T06:58:35.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13806" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T09:28:32.760" Score="6" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/search?q=henriad&amp;amp;room=1037&quot;&gt;recent chatroom discussion&lt;/a&gt; about how to tag the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/13758/2191&quot;&gt;Portrayal of Henry Bolingbroke through different Shakespeare plays&lt;/a&gt; led to the question what &quot;Henriad&quot; actually means. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henriad&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Shakespeare scholars have used the term to refer to the sequence &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part 2&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;. (These plays were also written in a chronological order that matches the order of the historical events they are inspired by.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some scholars have also included the plays inspired by the War of the Roses: &lt;em&gt;Henry VI, Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI, Part 2&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI, Part 3&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;. (In this sequence, the play now known as &lt;em&gt;Henry VI, Part 1&lt;/em&gt; was written &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the other Henry VI plays.) Since this &quot;tetralogy&quot; was written before the one mentioned above, it is also referred to as the &quot;first tetralogy&quot;, while the sequence starting with &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; is referred to as the &quot;second tetralogy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Henriad&quot; can refer to just the &quot;second tetralogy&quot; or can include all of the above plays, except when the term &quot;second Henriad&quot; is used, i.e. as a synonym for &quot;second tetralogy&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia tells us that Alvin Kernan &quot;popularized&quot; the term in a article published in 1969. The term sounds like an anglicisation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henriade&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henriade&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the title of a poem about Henry IV of France (not England) written by Voltaire in 1723.&#xA;Since popularising a term is not the same thing as coming up with a term, it is not entirely clear whether Kernan was the first scholar to use the term &quot;Henriad&quot; to refer to the second or first tetralogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who was the first scholar to use the term &quot;Henriad&quot; as described in Wikipedia and how was the term originally defined?&#xA;Was it Kernan or somebody else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T08:41:22.473" Title="Who was the first scholar who used the term Henriad to refer to a subset of Shakespeare's history plays?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13795" CreationDate="2020-04-23T14:05:20.583" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It can  suggest that somebody is too egotistical,  and is more interested in themselves and their own opinions than they are of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9923" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T14:05:20.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13804" CreationDate="2020-04-23T14:09:25.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a saying that &quot;A bully is always a coward.&quot; Through his lie, Rajam Iyer is driving home this point: for all his bluster, the &quot;newcomer&quot; turned out to be a cheap coward who ran away in fear of Rajam Iyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Shall I keep a seat for you?’ asked Rajam Iyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘No, my ticket is for Jalarpet,’ the newcomer answered and quickened his pace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;newcomer&quot; is implying that he is only getting down at Jalarpet because his ticket was for that station, not because he was terrified of what Rajam Iyer might do to him in a brawl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, Rajam Iyer is not ready to let the &quot;newcomer&quot; off the hook that easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Did you hear that bully say that his ticket was for Jalarpet?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Yes.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘Well,’ he lied, ‘he is in the fourth compartment from here. I saw him get into it just as the train started.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rajam Iyer is implying that the &quot;newcomer&quot; needed to be on the train, yet did not dare stay in the same compartment as him, which is why he jumped down in a hurry and boarded a compartment further away. Thus, he is establishing the &quot;newcomer&quot; to be a coward: the &quot;newcomer&quot; had no problem throwing his weight around on those weaker than him, but when push came to shove he showed his true colours and ran with his tail between his legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does Rajam Iyer say this?&lt;/strong&gt; It's clear the bully left the train in fear of him, and quite likely that the bully was lying about his ticket being for Jalarpet, but why would Rajam Iyer just make up having seen him get back onto the train? What difference does this make to the situation or to anyone's perception of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear to us as the reader that the bully left the compartment in fear of Rajam Iyer (regardless of his true destination), but I can imagine it not being so clear to a somewhat crowded compartment, and especially not to an apathetic crowd that looks at ongoing violence as entertainment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Out of the corner of his eye he noted that the other passengers were waiting eagerly to see how the issue would be settled and were not in the least disposed to intervene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such a crowd easily accept Rajam Iyer's psychological victory over the bully? Likely not, which is why Rajam Iyer wants to drive the point home with his little lie. The conclusion of the encounter has a lot more weight in favour of Rajam Iyer if it reads, &quot;The newcomer got down in a hurry at Jalarpet because he was scared of sharing a compartment with Rajam Iyer,&quot; rather than &quot;The bully got down in a hurry at Jalarpet because that was his stop to get down anyway.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not everyone buys it (perhaps some even saw the &quot;newcomer&quot; walk away on the platform), but at least he has the gratitude of the &quot;meek passenger&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though the meek passenger was too grateful to doubt this statement, one or two other passengers looked at Rajam Iyer sceptically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T05:25:36.763" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T05:25:36.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13809" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13806" CreationDate="2020-04-23T19:48:24.037" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Kernan's 1969 article definitely wasn't the first use of &amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; ...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=henriad+shakespeare&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;amp;as_ylo=1700&amp;amp;as_yhi=1950&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Scholar&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; Shakespeare&lt;/code&gt; threw up a few results from before 1950:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/utq.17.2.152&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. M. McLuhan, &amp;quot;Henry IV, a Mirror of Magistrates&amp;quot;, University of Toronto Quarterly 17(2) (&lt;strong&gt;1948&lt;/strong&gt;), 152-160&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The themes on which Shakespeare descants in the &amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; are associated with honour, the desire and the deserving of the praise of good men. [...] In the years of the &amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; (1597-1600) the party of the patristic or humanist theologians was fighting very hard in England against the Calvinist and scholastic party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mentioned here in a couple of throwaway lines, in quotes. This clearly wasn't the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; place to coin the term, but the quote marks suggest it might not have been widely accepted terminology then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/openview/30509390b417587a12f8f710246bcc3d/1?cbl=1819145&amp;amp;pq-origsite=gscholar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G. Tillotson, &amp;quot;Peacock, R., The Poet in the Theatre&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/openview/e8f091c0bcd4ba76fddfdcecd2af2085/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&amp;amp;cbl=1819145&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Book Review)&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;The Modern Language Review&lt;/em&gt; 44 (&lt;strong&gt;1949&lt;/strong&gt;), 117-118&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When writing &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare may have felt that the expression of grand patriotic emotion about the launching of a fleet and about Agincourt would fare better if entrusted to poems rather than to action: but the words are words spoken on the stage; they are part of a play played in the theatre, and an effective part of it; Shakespeare did not feel the need to abandon a play for a &lt;em&gt;Henriad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find the Peacock book to determine whether the word &amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; was used there or only in Tillotson's review. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&amp;amp;id=aWYGAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=henriad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;search on Google books&lt;/a&gt; suggests that it &lt;em&gt;wasn't&lt;/em&gt; used in the book. In any case, it seems that by the late 1940s the term was at least reasonably known among literary scholars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;... but I couldn't find who &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the first, only that it goes back at least to Granville-Barker.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Henriad&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CHenriad%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CHenriad%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams search&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;Henriad&lt;/code&gt; wasn't very revealing, as most of the earlier results found were about Voltaire's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henriade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henriade&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. An improved &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Shakespeare%27s+Henriad&amp;amp;year_start=1700&amp;amp;year_end=2000&amp;amp;corpus=15&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;share=&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2CShakespeare%20%27s%20Henriad%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CShakespeare%20%27s%20Henriad%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ngrams search&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;Shakespeare's Henriad&lt;/code&gt; showed nothing before the 1960s. But even this gave some results predating Kernan's 1969 article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The former Australian newspaper &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_Review&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nation Review&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; had &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Yj9aAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22shakespeare%27s+henriad%22&amp;amp;dq=%22shakespeare%27s+henriad%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj6qLbkqP_oAhVE3KQKHQLZDD0Q6AEILDAB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article&lt;/a&gt; which mentioned in passing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but then neither are the stories which went into the making of Shakespeare's Henriad, Ibsen's &amp;quot;Peer Gynt&amp;quot; or Brecht's &amp;quot;Another Courage.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22henriad%22+shakespeare+-voltaire&amp;amp;lr=lang_en&amp;amp;source=lnt&amp;amp;tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1825%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1964&amp;amp;tbm=bks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; Shakespeare -Voltaire&lt;/code&gt; (filtering out results related to Voltaire's &lt;em&gt;Henriade&lt;/em&gt;, with which most of the older Google Books results for &amp;quot;Henriad&amp;quot; were concerned) also threw up a few results from before 1960. Most interestingly, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.198086/2015.198086.Prefaces-To-Shakespeare_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harley Granville-Barker, &lt;em&gt;Prefaces to Shakespeare, Second Series&lt;/em&gt; (first published &lt;strong&gt;1930&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Antony breaks from Cleopatra to patch up&#xA;an insincere peace with Caesar, since Pompey&#xA;threatens them both; he marries Octavia, and&#xA;deserts her to return to Cleopatra; war breaks&#xA;out, Caesar defeats them and they kill themselves.&#xA;That is the plot ; and every character is concerned&#xA;with it and hardly a line is spoken that does not&#xA;relate to it. There is no under-plot, nor any such&#xA;obvious relief as Falstaff, Nym, Bardolph, Pistol&#xA;and Fluellen give to the heroics of the Henriad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is again a throwaway mention in the context of another play. I couldn't find any &amp;quot;Preface&amp;quot; of Granville-Barker specifically devoted to Henriad plays, but it's conceivable that he might have been the one to coin the term, as his &lt;em&gt;Prefaces to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; seems to have been pretty influential.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T19:56:41.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13810" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-23T20:54:00.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T20:54:00.780" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T20:54:00.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13811" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-23T20:54:00.780" Score="0" Body="Peter Philip Carey, Order of Australia (May 7th, 1943 - present) is an Australian novelist and creative writing teacher. He is a twice recipient of the Booker Prize, for his novels Oscar and Lucinda; the other being True History of the Kelly Gang. If this is a question about one of his works, that should be tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T21:35:32.843" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T21:35:32.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13812" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-23T21:04:26.903" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T21:04:26.903" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T21:04:26.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13813" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-23T21:04:26.903" Score="0" Body="The Running Hare: The Secret Life of Farmland or The Running Hare (published May 5, 2016), is a nonfiction book by John Lewis-Stempel that recounts the disappearing of native wildlife in England due to industrial farming and other environmentally damaging practices. He also provides an alternative solution to restoring the wildlife that was lost. Questions with this tag should also be tagged with [john-lewis-stempel]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T21:35:39.523" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T21:35:39.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13814" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-23T21:31:53.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-23T21:31:53.147" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T21:31:53.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13815" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-23T21:31:53.147" Score="0" Body="The Day of the Triffids (published December 1951) is a post-apocalyptic novel written by John Wyndham. Taking place in a world where most of the population is blinded by a meteor shower and a fictional species of plant (triffids) starts to attack people. Should be tagged with [john-wyndham]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T01:39:03.907" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T01:39:03.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13816" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-23T23:32:54.493" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sentence is part of a paragraph of a book titled &lt;em&gt;The Almost Perfect Murder&lt;/em&gt; by Hulbert Footner. Here is the complete paragraph (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My employer, Madame Storey, who knows everybody in the great world, had become acquainted with Fay, and through her I had met the girl.   By degrees, I can hardly say how, Fay and I had become intimate friends.  &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;She brought colour and incident into my life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. To a plain Jane like me, she was marvellous.  I was the recipient of all her charming confidences—or nearly all; and as well as I could, I steered her with my advice amongst the pitfalls that beset a popular favourite. For one in the limelight she was incredibly ignorant of evil.  And you could not bear to show her the ugly side of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the word &quot;incident&quot; in the bold sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9927" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T05:26:55.440" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T07:55:04.250" Title="What is the meaning of the word &quot;incident&quot; in &quot;She brought colour and incident into my life&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;hulbert-footner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13806" CreationDate="2020-04-24T01:37:47.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1935 in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/257944862/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Observer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was a good idea to supplement the first part of the ‘Henriad’, now on view at His Majesty's, with its even greater sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also have an example from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=6XNpUssbzKgC&amp;amp;pg=PA76&amp;amp;lpg=PA76&amp;amp;dq=%22I%20wanted%20to%20do%20the%20Henriad%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=fEVZZTVSdm&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1jvsm-qFzxdIVKjtC72lfdWZ63cw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjEjam89f_oAhU6lnIEHWZNCV0Q6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22I%20wanted%20to%20do%20the%20Henriad%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1944 letter&lt;/a&gt; (printed in a 2004 book). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an earlier example of the word? Perhaps, but we don’t know for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prefaces to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, as mentioned by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13809/5747&quot;&gt;Rand&lt;/a&gt;, is not the 1930 copy. We don’t know therefore if the 1930 copy contains the word (I can’t find it online so far). The version linked is from 1947. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This particular OED page was updated in 2019, which I have found means that the research is likely very solid (as opposed to first or second edition entries which I have found can often easily be outdone by anyone with Google Books). It’s very possible that they looked into &lt;em&gt;Prefaces in Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; but I have no evidence either way. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T08:41:22.473" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T08:41:22.473" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14089" CreationDate="2020-04-24T01:54:19.600" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crcsite.org/rosicrucian-library/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, there are 3 or 4 texts which I can only find English translations of online. Do the original German or Latin ones exist anywhere online or off?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fama Fraternitatis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Confessio Fraternitatis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Chymical Wedding of C.R.C.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5056" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T15:21:07.143" Title="Where are the Rosicrucian Original Texts in Latin or German (online or offline)?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11587" CreationDate="2020-04-24T05:08:49.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Personally, I have not found any early 20th century Japanese literary work that has the notion of &quot;the dead don't lie&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One would assume that dead people do not lie because they lack such motivation. However, in the story of &lt;em&gt;In a Groove&lt;/em&gt;, Takehiro does seem to have a motivation to lie, and the motivation is similar to that of others: he wants to be viewed as an honorable person. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bandit Tajōmaru wants to appear to be a swordsman with skill and honor, so he says he released Takehiro and finished him in a duel. Similarly, Takehiro may not want to be viewed as an inferior swordsman who cannot protect his wife, so he says he committed an honorable suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case I would say Takehiro does have the motivation to lie, and I think this is exactly the point that Akutagawa tried to criticize: among all kinds of ways people try to glorify themselves, the notion of absolute truth is shattered. This may be related to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_de_si%C3%A8cle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fin de siècle&lt;/a&gt; movement, which Akutagawa himself briefly mentions it in his work &lt;em&gt;Cogwheel&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;Spinning Gear&lt;/em&gt; (歯車)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many compare &lt;em&gt;In a Groove&lt;/em&gt; to Naoya Shiga's &lt;em&gt;Han's Crime&lt;/em&gt;, which explores the similar topic. You may want to take a look.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9929" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T05:08:49.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13778" CreationDate="2020-04-24T06:54:01.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to complement the nice &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13790/5387&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/168/muru&quot;&gt;@muru&lt;/a&gt;, you're right that &quot;home-truths&quot; are unpleasant facts about oneself, so when RK Narayan writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[the newcomer] began &lt;strong&gt;to deliver home-truths&lt;/strong&gt; which passed by easy stages from impudence to impertinence and finally to ribaldry&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he means that the &quot;newcomer&quot; began loudly pointing out faults in the character of the &quot;meek passenger&quot;, continuously increasing in his rudeness. One can very well imagine the &quot;newcomer&quot; saying things along the following lines, mostly directed to his co-passengers to indirectly mock the &quot;meek passenger&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Some people think the entire seat is for their use.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Commentary on the kind of upbringing leads to such thoughtless behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Assigning blame for all evils in society to the existence of such people.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Easy speculation about the &quot;manhood&quot; of such persons.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Etc. etc.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is quite common for noisy, packed train compartments in India to feature a couple of passengers who pompously impart their deep wisdom, never mind that no one asked for it. Not everyone is a pest like the &quot;newcomer&quot;—think of benevolent grandpas with somewhat outdated views—but it is still a common feature of travel by train in India for it to be relatable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that Rajam Iyer himself is not above such impulses!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What is all this?’ Rajam Iyer asked suddenly, in a hard tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘What is what?’ growled back the newcomer, turning sharply on Rajam Iyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘Moderate your style a bit,’ Rajam Iyer said firmly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You moderate yours first,’ replied the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A pause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘My man,’ Rajam Iyer began endearingly, &lt;strong&gt;‘this sort of thing will never do.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The newcomer received this in silence. Rajam Iyer felt encouraged and &lt;strong&gt;drove home his moral: ‘Just try and be more courteous, it is your duty.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;‘You mind your business,’ replied the newcomer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Rajam Iyer shook his head disapprovingly and drawled out a ‘No.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, in his defence Rajam Iyer engages the &quot;newcomer&quot; because of the latter's rude behaviour, and not to inflate his own ego.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T06:54:01.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9358" CreationDate="2020-04-24T07:22:43.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Bentley’s edition of Milton&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1732, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bentley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Bentley&lt;/a&gt; published an edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Milton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Bentley was master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and an eminent classical scholar, whose editions of the works of the Roman poets &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horace&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terence&lt;/a&gt; had been well received. But his edition of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; was a disaster, against which many pamphlets were published in reply, disputing and refuting Bentley’s editorial remarks, and pouring a torrent of sarcasm and mockery on his learned head. His biographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Henry_Monk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Monk&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Bentley] took up the text of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; with the determination of not only detecting every slip of language in a poem whose author was unable to revise what he had dictated in his moments of inspiration, but also of noting for rejection all the instances of bad taste or incorrect imagery that his lynx-eyed criticism could discover. For a person who was neither a poet, nor possessed of poetical taste, to venture upon such a task, was no common presumption: but it would have been well had he stopped here. Wishing that &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; should be read in his edition agreeably to his notions of a perfect poem, he proposed, in every case, his own alterations of Milton’s verses, printed in the margin. For such an undertaking, which hardly any endowments or acquirements could justify, Bentley wanted almost every qualification. He not only was destitute of poetical talent, but had contracted an aversion to the rapturous flights of genius and glowing language which distinguish the divine poem. Scarcely ever was he able to sympathize with the author; and was, besides, frequently ignorant of his allusions and the source of his phrases and imagery. Of the works of the Italian poets, to which &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; is greatly indebted, Bentley knew nothing: and with the writers of romance, who had been the delight of Milton’s earlier years, and from whom many of his allusions are drawn, he was equally unacquainted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Henry Monk (1833). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/liferichardbent00monkgoog/page/n323/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Richard Bentley&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, pp. 310–311&lt;/a&gt;. London: Rivington.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edition of Milton earned Bentley a drubbing in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pope&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dunciad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dunciad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thy mighty scholiast, whose unwearied pains&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton’s strains.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Critics like me shall make it prose again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexander Pope (1743). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksalexanderp03warbgoog/page/n262/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dunciad&lt;/em&gt;, book IV, lines 211–214&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this answer, I’m going to draw attention to four significant features of Bentley’s notes on &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, and then discuss how they relate to the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Canon determination&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bentley divides the text into the canonical parts, which he assigns to Milton, and interpolations which he supposes to have been introduced by an anonymous editor: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Our celebrated author, when he compos’d this poem, being obnoxious to the Government, poor, friendless, and, what is worst of all, blind with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaurosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gutta Serena&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, could only dictate his Verses to be writ by another. Whence it necessarily follows, That any Errors in Spelling, Pointing, nay even in whole Words of a like or near Sound in pronunciation, are not to be charg’d upon the Poet, but on the Amanuensis. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But more Calamities, than are yet mention’d, have happen’d to our Poem: for the Friend or Acquaintance, whoever he was, to whom Milton committed his Copy and the Overseeing of the Press, did so vilely execute that Trust, that &lt;em&gt;Paradise&lt;/em&gt;, under his Ignorance and Audaciousness, may be said to be &lt;em&gt;twice lost&lt;/em&gt;. […] &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For this suppos’d Friend, (call’d in these notes &lt;em&gt;the Editor&lt;/em&gt;), knowing &lt;em&gt;Milton’s&lt;/em&gt; bad Circumstances […] thought he had a fit Opportunity to foist into the Book several of his own Verses,† without the blind Poet’s Discovery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Bentley (1732). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton’s Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Preface&lt;/a&gt;. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Here and elsewhere Bentley uses ‘verse’ with the meaning ‘line of verse’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I doubt that Bentley was serious in putting forward this story, and I find it more likely that it was intended to be a transparently humorous fiction by which Bentley could abuse the text of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; as much as he pleased, under the pretense that he was only excising the interpolations of the supposed “Editor” and restoring the true intentions of Milton. But the joke, if it was a joke, misfired—the Preface gave readers the impression of being a piece of mean-spirited mockery of a much-beloved author, and no doubt this contributed in large part to the vehemence of the replies to Bentley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Documentary approach&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bentley treats &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; as if it is an attempt to document a consistent fictional universe, so that departures from internal consistency are mistakes that must be corrected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does Heaven have a vault?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hurling defiance toward the vault of Heav’n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1667). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n41/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, book I, line 669.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is the Vault of Heaven? &lt;em&gt;Hell&lt;/em&gt; needed a Vault, to inclose all the Damned, and hinder their Eruption; often mentioned by our Author […] But &lt;em&gt;Heaven&lt;/em&gt; here meant, the Habitation of God and Angels, far above the Sphere of Fixt Stars, was never describ’d as &lt;em&gt;Vaulted&lt;/em&gt;, not once so hinted by &lt;em&gt;Milton&lt;/em&gt;. To what purpose a Vault there? from the imagin’d Soil, the Plain of Heaven, the Ethereal Highth extends &lt;em&gt;in Infinitum&lt;/em&gt;. […] But allowing that these Heavens were &lt;em&gt;vaulted&lt;/em&gt;, yet if the Devils hurl’d &lt;em&gt;toward that Vault&lt;/em&gt;, they hurl’d quite beyond the Mark: for their Enemies did not reside in the Vaults, but on the Plains of Heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Bentley (1732). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n32/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton’s Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, note to book I, line 669&lt;/a&gt;. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is Hell above or below the Abyss?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;T’ whom &lt;em&gt;Satan&lt;/em&gt; turning boldly, thus. Ye Powers&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Spirits of this nethermost Abyss&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n75/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, II.968–969&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;’Twas hard, if not impossible, in our Poet’s Condition, not sometimes to forget, and make his Fictions inconsistent, against the natural and establish’d Rule,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum.&lt;/em&gt; †&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We have here, and &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 956, &lt;em&gt;The nethermost Abyss&lt;/em&gt;; but He makes not that the nethermost, but all Hell below it, as &lt;em&gt;Chaos&lt;/em&gt; tells &lt;em&gt;Satan&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 1003.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;                                                &lt;em&gt;First&lt;/em&gt; Hell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;Your Dungeon stretching far and wide&lt;/em&gt; beneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;Belzebub&lt;/em&gt; owns, that the Abyss was higher than Hell, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 403.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;                &lt;em&gt;Or steer his airy flight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Upborn &lt;em&gt;over the vast Abrupt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;Satan&lt;/em&gt;, when he first left Hell and took his flight into the Abyss, he aims upwards, not downwards;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;                &lt;em&gt;And in the surging Smoke&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Uplifted &lt;em&gt;spurns the ground.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n53/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to II.969&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† “Be your subject what it will, let it be merely simple and uniform.” Horace, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.02.0064&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De Arte Poetica&lt;/em&gt; 1.23&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by C. Smart and Theodore Alois Buckley.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the Sun conveyed on wheels?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soon as they forth were come to open sight&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of day-spring, and the Sun, who scarce up risen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With wheels yet hov’ring o’re the Ocean brim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n141/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, V.138–140&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Who can blame &lt;em&gt;Wheels&lt;/em&gt;, when both old and new Poets figure the Sun riding in a Chariot? but yet an Author should be consistent with himself. &lt;em&gt;Milton&lt;/em&gt; in the rest of his Book considers the Sun philsophically, as a Globe of Lights, sometimes as the Center of his System, sometimes as a Planet moving round our Earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n92/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to V.140&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are highbrow equivalents of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/klingon-foreheads.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klingon forehead question&lt;/a&gt;, and they derive from a similar reluctance to engage with a work of fiction on multiple levels simultaneously. In &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt;, anything we see on screen is at the same time an object in the fictional world, and also an artefact of the production process. In &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, nouns like “Vault”, “Abyss”, and “Wheels” can be at the same time concrete objects or places in the narrative, and also metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Extended universe&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; makes frequent reference to Greek and Roman myths, and Bentley treats the targets of the allusions as if they formed an extended universe with which &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; needs to be consistent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did Medusa stand guard in Hell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But fate withstands, and to oppose th’ attempt&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Medusa&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Gorgonian&lt;/em&gt; terror guards&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Ford&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n65/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, II.610–612&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If the Author gave it thus, it’s a slip of human Inattention. &lt;em&gt;Medusa&lt;/em&gt; one of the &lt;em&gt;Gorgons&lt;/em&gt;, never did such work in Hell: Her snaky petrifying Head was fix’d in the Shield of &lt;em&gt;Minerva&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n46/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to II.611&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to resist the riposte, “but Medusa was fixed there only after Perseus beheaded her, hence long after the events of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;”, but this would be conceding to Bentley his assumption that these two stories are part of the same extended universe.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How many Furies are there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;                        black it stood as Night,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n67/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, II.670–671&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another spurious interpolation. The modern Poets make a pleasure &lt;em&gt;a thousand Furies&lt;/em&gt;: not so the ancients, when they introduce them as Persons, but confine them to Three. But to make one Person &lt;em&gt;Death&lt;/em&gt; to be as fierce as &lt;em&gt;Ten Furies&lt;/em&gt; together, smells of trivial and common Chat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n48/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to II.671&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Did Ulysses have Scylla on his left, or Charybdis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Or when &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; on the Larbord shunnd&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Charybdis&lt;/em&gt;, and by th’ other whirlpool steard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n77/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, II.1019–1020&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;Larbord&lt;/em&gt; in Heroic Stile is abominable. Let &lt;em&gt;Dryden&lt;/em&gt; disparage his &lt;em&gt;Virgil&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Larbord and Starbord&lt;/em&gt;: I am glad, that I can clear &lt;em&gt;Milton&lt;/em&gt; from this vile Distich. For they that will suspect his Affectation, will never charge him with Want of Letters. The Story is told in &lt;em&gt;Homer&lt;/em&gt;, whom our Poet had all by Heart. &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; sailing homewards from his Mistress &lt;em&gt;Circe&lt;/em&gt; through the &lt;em&gt;Tyrrhene&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Sicilian Seas&lt;/em&gt;, had not Charybdis on the &lt;em&gt;Larbord&lt;/em&gt;, his &lt;em&gt;Left&lt;/em&gt; Hand, but on his &lt;em&gt;Right&lt;/em&gt;. The Editor misled himself from a Verse in &lt;em&gt;Virgil&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Laevum implacata Charybdis obsidet&lt;/em&gt; †&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but &lt;em&gt;Aeneas&lt;/em&gt; steered a contrary Course to &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;, so that what was at his Left Hand, was at &lt;em&gt;Ulysses’s&lt;/em&gt; Right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n54/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to II.1019&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† “the left is given to pitiless Charybdis” &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Verg.+A.+3.420&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virgil, &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; III.420&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Theodore C. Williams.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Difficulty with figuration&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bentley clearly has trouble with figurative language, and the further the poem gets from the literal, the more trouble he has. He has no trouble understanding simile, though he sometimes objects to it. He has more difficulty with metaphor, and we have already seen above how the literal use of a word like “Vault” can prevent him from understanding another use of the same word as a metaphor. But he is all at sea when it comes to figures like hypallage, metonymy, and paradox. I’ll give one example of each of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hypallage&lt;/a&gt; is an exchange of the relation between words, for example, an adjective that properly applies to one noun is moved to another (a transferred epithet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A multitude, like which the populous North&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Pour’d never from her frozen loyns, to pass&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Rhene&lt;/em&gt;† or the &lt;em&gt;Danaw&lt;/em&gt;‡, when her barbarous Sons&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Came like a Deluge on the South&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n31/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, I.351–354&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Rhine. ‡ Danube.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is not the loins that are frozen, but the North.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suspect the following five Verses to be spurious. After he has compared the Devils for number to the Cloud of &lt;em&gt;Locusts&lt;/em&gt; that darken’d all &lt;em&gt;Ægypt&lt;/em&gt;, as before to the &lt;em&gt;Leaves&lt;/em&gt; that cover the Ground in Autumn, ’tis both to clog and to lessen the Thought, to mention here the &lt;em&gt;Northern Excursions&lt;/em&gt;, when all Human Race would be too few. Besides, the diction is faulty: &lt;em&gt;Frozen Loins&lt;/em&gt; are improper for Populousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n25/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to I.351&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metonymy&lt;/a&gt; is a figure whereby one thing stands for another that is closely associated with it, for example, “crown” for “monarch”, or “sail” for “ship”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Thither came &lt;em&gt;Uriel&lt;/em&gt;, gliding through the Eeven&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On a Sun beam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n121/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, IV.555–556&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here evening stands for the sky at evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I never heard but here, that the &lt;em&gt;Evening&lt;/em&gt; was a Place or Space to &lt;em&gt;glide&lt;/em&gt; through. &lt;em&gt;Evening&lt;/em&gt; implies Time, and he might with equal propriety say, &lt;em&gt;Came gliding through Six a clock.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n80/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to IV.555&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paradox&lt;/a&gt; is a figure which appears at first to be self-contradictory, challenging the reader to resolve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A Dungeon horrible on all sides round&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No light, but rather darkness visible&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Serv’d only to discover sights of woe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostpoem00milt_0/page/n23/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Milton, I.61–64&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Darkness visible&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Darkness palpable&lt;/em&gt; are in due place very good Expressions: but the next Line makes &lt;em&gt;visible&lt;/em&gt; here a flat Contradiction. &lt;em&gt;Darkness visible&lt;/em&gt; will not serve to &lt;em&gt;discover sights of Woe&lt;/em&gt; through it, but to cover and hide them. Nothing is visible to the Eye, but so far as it is Opake, and not seen through; nor by transmitting the Rays, but by reflecting them back. To come up to the Author’s Idea, we may say thus,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;No Light, but rather&lt;/em&gt; a transpicuous Gloom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gloom&lt;/em&gt; is equivalent to Darkness, yet so as to be in some measure &lt;em&gt;transparent&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n19/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bentley, note to I.63&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bentley’s notes on Milton don’t correspond in every respect to the nameless literary theory described in the question, but there are substantial overlaps, and I think some of his remarks are recognizable as things that might have been written by science fiction fans. It was Bentley’s ill luck to have a chosen a text which was singularly unsuited to this approach: Milton’s inconsistent world-building, his mixture of Biblical and mythical reference, his flexible grammar, and frequent use of complex figuration, are all unsuited to the documentary approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reaction to Bentley shows, I think, a plausible reason why the theory remains nameless and unstudied. That is: his approach to &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; is regarded as deriving not from a &lt;em&gt;theory&lt;/em&gt;, but from a &lt;em&gt;want of skill and taste&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bentley was born in the year 1662, and he brought with him into the world, like most men born near that date, a prosaic mind; not did all his immense study of the classics avail to confer on him a true appreciation of poetry. While he dealt with the classical poets he was comparatively safe, for in dealing with these a prosaic mind is not so grave a disqualification as a dithyrambic mind; and Bentley had lived with the ancients till he understood them as no one will ever understand them who brings to their study a taste formed on the poetry of Elizabeth’s time or ours. But that jealous deity which loves, Herodotus tells us, to strike down towering things, put it into his heart to invade a literature with which he was ill acquainted. […] Here was a man of true and even colossal genius, yet you see in matters poetical the profoundest knowledge of the classics profited him nothing, because he had been born without the organs by which poetical excellence is achieved. And so are most men born without them; and the quickening and refining influences special to literature run off them like water off a duck’s back. […] True, we are not all so easily found out as Bentley, because we have not Bentley’s intrepid candour. There is a sort of savage nobility about his firm reliance on his own bad taste: we on the other hand usually fit our judgments not to the truth of things nor even to our own impressions of things, true or false, but to the standard of convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;A. E. Housman (1892). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/b22445225/page/12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Introductory Lecture, Delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science in University College, October 3, 1892&lt;/em&gt;, p. 12&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, his blunders with regard to Milton were regarded as so egregious that they cast doubt on his other scholarship:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Bentley’s edition of Milton] was notoriously lamentable. Yet in what, we may ask, did it differ from those in which Bentley was held to have acquitted himself magnificently? And if Bentley was incapable of appreciating the poetry of Milton, how can we accept his verdict upon Horace and Homer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Virginia Woolf (1925). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.27898/page/n247/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Bentley&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Common Reader&lt;/em&gt;, p. 248. London: Hogarth Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What academic could risk taking Bentley’s implicit theory of literature seriously, with this kind of denunciation in store for them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T07:22:43.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13816" CreationDate="2020-04-24T07:55:04.250" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &quot;incident&quot; is commonly used to mean &quot;an incident&quot;. Google's built in dictionary has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;n instance of something happening; an event or occurrence:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;several amusing incidents&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it also has a less commonly used, wider sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the occurrence of dangerous or exciting things.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;my period in Egypt wasn't without incident&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is this second sense that is being used in the question. If we substitute the definition, &quot;She bought colour and incident into my life&quot; could be read as &quot;She bought colour and dangerous and exciting occurrences into my life&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, this is also how the word &quot;colour&quot; is being used. From the Cambridge dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;interesting or exciting qualities or details:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Michael was there so that added a bit of colour to the evening's proceedings.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that there's a peculiarity in English here. The second definition of incident might seem to make more sense if it was pluralised: &quot;She bought colour and incidents into my life.&quot; But when used it that manner, it's always singular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T07:55:04.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-24T10:03:42.460" Score="4" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading online&lt;/a&gt; R. K. Narayan's 1943 collection of short stories &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I've noticed the character of &quot;the Talkative Man&quot; appear several times so far in apparently unrelated stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;The Tiger's Claw&quot;, there is a frame story in which he tells &quot;us&quot; (some unidentified plural first-person characters) his story about his past encounter with a tiger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;The Snake-Song&quot;, again there is a frame story with an unidentified &quot;us&quot; whom he tells his story about training to play music.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;Engine Trouble&quot;, there is not even a frame story, just a parenthical &quot;said the Talkative Man&quot; at the beginning. Perhaps this may be seen as a continuation of the immediately preceding &quot;The Snake-Song&quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; mentions that he is &quot;a recurring character in several short stories&quot;, but even the first time he appears in this collection, he is just mentioned as if readers are expected to already know who that is. Is this because he'd already be familiar to Narayan's readers of Malgudi stories? His first novels were also set in Malgudi, and written a decade earlier than the &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; stories. Or is he just a device to enable first-person narration in these largely third-person stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In which of Narayan's works was the Talkative Man first introduced?&lt;/strong&gt; And is any more known about this character than just his various stories which may or may not be true?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T10:03:42.460" Title="Who is R. K. Narayan's &quot;Talkative Man&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13824" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13887" CreationDate="2020-04-24T12:26:07.643" Score="9" ViewCount="2869" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is too full o' the milk of human kindness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In line 2, what does the pronoun 'what' refer to?&#xA;Why doesn't she just use an appropriate noun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T12:45:15.873" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T00:11:49.503" Title="What does Lady Macbeth mean by &quot;what thou art promised&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2020-04-24T13:59:31.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Lady Macbeth means with &lt;em&gt;&quot;what thou art promised&quot;&lt;/em&gt; is the kingdom that Macbeth was supposedly &quot;promised&quot; in the witches' prophecy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he is Thane of Glamis, became Thane of Cawdor and the remaining thing for him to become now is the very king of Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now why doesn't she just say &lt;em&gt;&quot;Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be&#xA;king&quot;&lt;/em&gt; right away? Beyond being ultimately a question of taste and poetic wording, there might be a bit more to it than that. It emphasises that &lt;strong&gt;Lady Macbeth doesn't see the prophecy as merely a foretelling of the future&lt;/strong&gt;, but even more so a &lt;em&gt;&quot;promise&quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Macbeth is promised the position of king by fate and thus it is &lt;strong&gt;his right to take it&lt;/strong&gt; for himself because it is his anyway. She (and Macbeth, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/4963/50&quot;&gt;be it by persuasion or his own will&lt;/a&gt;) uses the supposed inevitability of the prophecy as absolution for actively working towards it by any means necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it is this classic misinterpretation, impatience or overambition (depending how you want to see it) that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/10919/50&quot;&gt;ultimately makes the prophecy self-fulfilling&lt;/a&gt; and is at the very core of the tragedy's unfortunate events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="5694" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T13:12:26.497" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T13:12:26.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2020-04-24T14:50:32.707" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be / What thou art promised&quot; can be explained as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are Thane of Glamis (Macbeth's title at the beginning of the play),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You are Thane of Cawdor (a title conferred on Macbeth after the original Thane of Cawdor defected to the invading Norwegians; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/70/4112.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;You shall be (or become) what you have been promised. This refers to the prediction by the Third Witch in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/70/4113.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;All hail, Macbeth! that shalt be king hereafter.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verb &quot;be&quot; in &quot;and shalt be&quot; here takes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammar-monster.com/glossary/subject_complement.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subject complement&lt;/a&gt;, and this subject complement is on the next line: &quot;What thou art promised&quot; (i.e. what you have been promised).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that &quot;&lt;strong&gt;shall&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (as in &quot;shalt be&quot;) can mean &quot;will&quot; (&quot;you will be king&quot;) but also &quot;&lt;strong&gt;will inevitably or assuredly, be bound to, must&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; (see &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions, revised by R. D. Eagleson, 1986). When the witches say &quot;thou shalt be king hereafter&quot; and Lady Macbeth mimics these words, there is more going on than a simple prediction: the words also have overtones of &lt;strong&gt;unavoidable destiny&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Lady Macbeth's point of view, Macbeth's kingship is something that requires effort, and even an effort to overcome whatever humaneness exists in Macbeth's character (see the related question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/13886/2191&quot;&gt;What kind of language features appear in Lady Macbeth's line “too full o' the milk of human kindness”?&lt;/a&gt;). Whether the witches use &quot;shall&quot; in the sense of &quot;will&quot; or &quot;will inevitably or assuredly&quot; is ambiguous and is interpreted differently by different characters. Macbeth's initial reaction (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/70/4113.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;) in incredulity: &quot;and to be king / Stands not within the prospect of belief&quot;, whereas Lady Macbeth begins to think of means to turn that prediction into reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T17:04:01.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T17:04:01.263" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13827" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13828" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Japanese writer Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (芥川 龍之介, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, 1892 – 1927) and his life as a writer. He is known for his short stories, which include &quot;Rashōmon&quot; and &quot;In a Grove&quot;. Use this tag with [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:11:04.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13829" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:16:02.747" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:16:02.747" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:16:02.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13830" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:16:02.747" Score="0" Body="Questions about Shakespeare's history play 'Henry IV, Part 2', first published in 1598. Use this tag with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:52:49.943" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:52:49.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13831" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13832" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer Eugene Field Sr. (1850 – 1895) and his life as a writer. Field is known for his children's poetry and humorous essays." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:18:19.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13833" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13834" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Italian poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1785 – 1873) and his life as a writer. Manzoni is best known for his novel 'I promessi sposi' ('The Betrothed', 1827). Use this tag with the tag [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:21:47.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13835" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13836" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about Alessandro Manzoni's novel 'I promessi sposi' ('The Betrothed', 1827). Use this tag with the tags [alessandro-manzoni] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:22:43.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13837" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13838" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Satan in Goray' (1955) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Use this tag with the tags [isaac-bashevis-singer] and [yiddish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:25:26.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13839" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13840" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel '1Q84' (いちきゅうはちよん, Ichi-Kyū-Hachi-Yon, 2009) by Haruki Murakami. Use this tag with the tags [haruki-murakami] and [japanese-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:32:51.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13841" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13842" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 2014 novel 'A Brief History of Seven Killings' by Marlon James. Use this tag with the tag [marlon-james]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:34:51.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13843" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13844" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English occultist, poet, painter and novelist Aleister Crowley (1875 – 1947) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:37:15.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13845" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13846" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) and his life as a writer. Whitehead is best known for his 'Principia Mathematica' (1910–1913, co-authored with Bertrand Russell) and the philosophical work 'Process and Reality' (1929)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:46:49.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13847" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13848" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American humour writer Charles Farrar Browne (1834 –1867), who is better known under his pen name Artemus Ward." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:49:03.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13849" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:54:23.207" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Farid ud-Din&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;Attar of Nishapur&lt;/strong&gt; (c. 1145 – c. 1221; full name: Abu Hamid bin Abu Bakr Ibrahim) is an influential 12th century Sufi poet and writer, best known for his works &lt;em&gt;The Conference of the Birds&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Mantiq-ut-Tayr&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;The Book of Divine&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Ilahi-nama&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/persian-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;persian-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;persian-literature&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related tags:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/the-conference-of-the-birds&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;the-conference-of-the-birds&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;the-conference-of-the-birds&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T14:47:13.940" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T14:47:13.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13850" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:54:23.207" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work of the Persian writer Farīd ud-Dīn or Attar of Nishapur (c. 1145 – c. 1221) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [persian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:54:23.207" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:54:23.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13851" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13852" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'Building Great Sentences: How to Write the Kinds of Sentences You Love to Read' by Brooks Landon. Use this tag with the tag [brooks-landon]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:58:03.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13853" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13854" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Brooks Landon, professor of English at the University of Iowa." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T15:59:40.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13855" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13856" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were generated using natural-language generation processes." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:01:23.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13857" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:08:47.463" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:08:47.463" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:08:47.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13858" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:08:47.463" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T14:24:27.660" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T14:24:27.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" Score="0" Body="Questions about Terry Pratchett's series of comic fantasy novels that are set on the planet Discworld. Use this tag with the tag [terry-pratchett]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:14:59.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13861" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13862" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German philosopher, philologist, cultural critic and poet Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) and his life as a writer. He is best known for philosophical works such as 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra', 'Human, All Too Human', 'Beyond Good and Evil' and 'Untimely Meditations'. Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:19:23.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13863" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13864" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about the story 'Goldfish' (1936) by Raymond Chandler. Use this tag with the tag [raymond-chandler]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:24:36.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13865" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13866" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of children's stories by Val Biro which concern a 1926 Austin 12 also known as &quot;Gumdrop&quot;. Use this tag with the tag [val-biro]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:27:26.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13867" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13868" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Hungarian children's author, artist and illustrator Val Biro (1921 – 2014) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:29:29.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13869" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13870" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American academic and literary critic Irving Babbitt (1865 – 1933). He is known for works such as 'The Masters of Modern French Criticism' (1912), 'Rousseau and Romanticism' (1919) and 'Democracy and Leadership' (1924)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:39:51.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13871" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13872" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Russian-American poet and essayist Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (1940 – 1996) and his life as a writer. He was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:42:49.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13873" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13874" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of twelve short narrative poems or lais by Marie de France (fl. 1160 to 1215). Use this tag with [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:49:20.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13875" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13876" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French poet Marie de France (fl. 1160 to 1215) and her life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:51:10.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13877" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13878" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Le Bourgeois gentilhomme' by Molière. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:55:40.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13879" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13880" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Irish poet and playwright Louis MacNeice (1907 – 1963) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:57:46.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13881" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13882" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the the works of the Jamaican writer Marlon James (born 1970) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T16:59:44.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13883" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13884" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction work 'My Country and My People' (1935) by Lin Yutang. Use this tag with the tag [lin-yutang]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T17:04:18.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13885" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13908" CreationDate="2020-04-24T17:48:16.670" Score="2" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0070&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 70 (The Sphynx)&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;, Ahab states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From prior research conducted I have gleaned the meaning of the first half of the quote to be: Ahab presupposing there being correspondences between physical and transcendental realms, between matter and spirit/soul, and articulating the impossibility to construct a theory/ analogy which faithfully describes their relationship between these domains in of themselves. However the latter half, I fail to grasp conceptually and semantically. Here are some of my qualms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does Ahab use &quot;mind&quot; interchangeably with &quot;spirit/soul&quot; in this instance?&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is &quot;cunning&quot; in this instance defined as: &quot;attractive or quaint&quot; or as &quot;ingenious (Both Lexico/Oxford)&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;atom&quot; in this instance denote (as Oxford defines it): an extremely small amount of something; or does Ahab instead refer to a proto-atomic theory reminscent of Democritus' conceptions being:  one of the minute indivisible particles of which according to ancient materialism the universe is composed (Merriam Webster). Though I may be wrong I don't think he would be referring to Dalton's conception of atoms at this point of time.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If using the first definition of &quot;atom&quot; proposed, would Ahab then be expressing that qualitative descriptions of the world don't exist physically but in the same vain as numbers, I suppose; possibly even suggesting that they exist on a transcendental level.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;However if Ahab uses the 2nd definition of &quot;atom&quot;, is he then supposing that atoms don't constitute matter? Or exist &quot;on&quot; matter, whatever that means. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some editions of the text portray the quote as &quot;lives (in) matter&quot; rather than &quot;(on) matter&quot;, so I was wondering whether those are the result of typos or decisions on the account of the author or publishers, and also whether it has any bearing on interpretations of the quote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T07:38:31.613" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T11:13:52.460" Title="Bewilderment at &quot;not the smallest atom stirs ...&quot; in &quot;Moby-Dick&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13886" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-24T17:55:47.333" Score="5" ViewCount="4836" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Macbeth Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It is too full o' the milk of human kindness&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of language features can be found in the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;too full o’ the milk of human kindness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what does it mean about how she views Macbeth’s ability to grasp after power and status?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9932" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:39:40.360" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T12:46:30.257" Title="What kind of language features appear in Lady Macbeth's line &quot;too full o' the milk of human kindness&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:05:49.663" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;The other answers have explained the meaning of the line—that Macbeth shall be king, as he was promised by the witches—but there is more to say about the choice of wording.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difficulty here arises because Lady Macbeth is expressing herself evasively. Why doesn’t she come straight out and say, “thou shalt be &lt;em&gt;king&lt;/em&gt; as thou art promised”? The reason is that she is already contemplating the murder of Duncan to put her husband on the throne of Scotland, an act which she knows is against law and society and religion, and this discomfort reveals itself in her choice of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s more evasive language later in the same speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                Yet do I fear thy nature.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To catch &lt;strong&gt;the nearest way&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “the nearest way” she means “the murder of Duncan”, which is the nearest (most direct) way for Macbeth to become king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                Thou’ldst have, great Glamis,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; which cries, “&lt;strong&gt;Thus&lt;/strong&gt; thou must do, if thou have &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;;”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;that&lt;/strong&gt; which rather thou dost fear to do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than wishest should be undone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These four lines are particularly difficult as all substantive nouns have been removed, and the syntax is unclear as well. “That which cries” is the crown of Scotland, and by “Thus” and “that which thou dost fear to do” she means “murder”. The phrase “if thou have it” could mean “if thou have &lt;em&gt;courage&lt;/em&gt;”, or maybe “if thou &lt;em&gt;wouldst&lt;/em&gt; have &lt;em&gt;the crown&lt;/em&gt;”? There seems to be a missing or implied “&lt;em&gt;thou must do&lt;/em&gt;” before “that which rather”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evasive language, contorted syntax, and missing words, indicate Lady Macbeth’s discomfort with the idea of murder. She knows that it is wrong, and so she cannot speak of it plainly or coherently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coleridge pointed out that although Lady Macbeth is speaking about her husband in this passage, she is at the same time talking about her own character and desires. She too would rather become queen “holily”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth is described by Lady Macbeth so as, at the same time to reveal her own character. Could he have every thing he wanted, he would rather have it innocently;—ignorant, as alas! how many of us are, that he who wishes a temporal end for itself, does in truth will the means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1849). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/notesandlecture02colegoog/page/n265/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notes and Lectures Upon Shakespeare and Some of the Old Poets and Dramatists&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 246&lt;/a&gt;. London: William Pickering.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T07:07:23.790" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13888" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13889" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English poet and hymn writer William Cowper (1731 – 1800) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:49:01.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13890" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13891" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about Jules Verne's 1888 novel 'Two Years' Vacation' (French: 'Deux ans de vacances'). Use this tag with the tags [jules-verne] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:50:38.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13892" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13893" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1927 mystery novel 'Unnatural Death' by Dorothy L. Sayers. Use this tag with the tag [dorothy-l-sayers]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:54:22.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13894" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13895" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Mexican author Valeria Luiselli (born 1983) and her work as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:55:53.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13896" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13897" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the crime novel 'Three Act Tragedy' (1934) by Agatha Christie. Use this tag with the tag [agatha-christie]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T18:57:26.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13898" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13899" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" Score="0" Body="Questions about the body of work that presents the background to J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novel 'The Lord of the Rings'. Use this tag with [j-r-r-tolkien], [christopher-tolkien] or both, depending on the focus of the question." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:01:43.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13900" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13901" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novel 'The War in the Air' (1907/1908) by  H. G. Wells. Use this tag with the tag [h-g-wells]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:03:26.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13902" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13903" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English cleric, novelist and poet Thomas Ingoldsby (pseudonym of Richard Harris Barham, 1788 – 1845) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T19:06:02.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13886" CreationDate="2020-04-24T20:32:41.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The rhythm has a double iamb (&lt;em&gt;it is too full&lt;/em&gt;), an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapaest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anapest&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;o’ the milk&lt;/em&gt;), and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘feminine’ ending&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;kindness&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;x  x     /   /     x    x  /     x   /     x   /       x&#xA;It is | too full | o' the milk | of hu- | man kind- | ness&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;‘Milk’ is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The line as a whole is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ironic&lt;/a&gt;: Macbeth has only just enough kindness to balk at outright murder, and Lady Macbeth knows it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We are somewhat surprised to hear from her that Macbeth is “too full o’ the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way”, because in the whole drama we find no trace of this milk of human kindness. We have to assume that the lady still has an over-high opinion of her husband, which, however, she will shortly lose. We already know him as a ruthlessly determined “murderer in thought” and as a perfect hypocrite: this nature of his is not contradicted by the letter; it is only somewhat veiled in it. The lady knows immediately what he wants; she also knows and openly confesses that his “milk of human kindness” will not deter him from attempting the death of old King Duncan, but only from “catching the nearest way”, that is, doing the deed with his own hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Friedrich Bodenstedt (1873). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/williamshakespe06wilbgoog/page/n327/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare’s dramatische Werke: Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, p. vi&lt;/a&gt;. Leipzig: F. A. Brodhaus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T20:32:41.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13886" CreationDate="2020-04-24T20:35:18.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding your first question, it contains a multitude of different literary devices, but the closest to the &quot;milk of human kindness&quot; is I think a reification. It's defined as a &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Complex idea for when you treat something immaterial — like happiness, fear, or evil — as a material thing.&quot; [Vocabulary.com]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the &quot;human kindness&quot; is being objectified into milk. So we're also dealing with a symbol here now. So we ask ourselves, what is milk? Milk represents food for an infant, something nourishing and gentle. This is further explored when several lines later in the &quot;Come Ye Spirits&quot; soliloquy Lady Macbeth asks to &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Come to my woman’s breasts,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And take my milk for gall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;here, invoking milk to relate to womanhood and motherhood to something hardened and undesirable like gall (which is another word for bile). The last literary device is probably a metaphor. It's comparing Macbeth's nature (or personality) to be filled with the milk of human kindness. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, Lady Macbeth does not believe that her husband is strong enough to &quot;do whatever it takes&quot; to become king, and she believes she has to be the ruthless force that drives Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-24T20:35:18.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3984" CreationDate="2020-04-25T00:53:21.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know it’s been 3 years since this was asked, but I just remembered reading this book a while ago and was looking for it too. I think the book is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiles_to_Go&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smiles to Go&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jerry Spinelli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The novel begins with a short prologue in which Will, on a visit to an eccentric neighbor, learns about protons, a microscopic particle of matter which, the neighbor tells him, is the indestructible building block of all matter. The impressionable Will wonders whether, because he is matter, he too is indestructible, narration soon revealing that, over the years since, he has come to believe exactly that. One day, however, Will learns that protons are, in fact, finite and do come to an end. His belief that part of him is indestructible is profoundly shaken, and he goes to school wondering what this news now means for his life, which up to that moment had been safe, secure, and predictable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9938" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T14:22:19.877" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T14:22:19.877" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13907" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13909" CreationDate="2020-04-25T08:05:47.933" Score="4" ViewCount="313" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malgudi_Days_(short_story_collection)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a short story collection by R. K. Narayan. According to Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; is a collection of short stories by R. K. Narayan published in 1943 by Indian Thought Publications. The book was republished outside India in 1982 by Penguin Classics. The book includes 32 stories, all set in the fictional town of Malgudi, located in South India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._K._Narayan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narayan's own&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia page also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His first collection of short stories, &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;, was published in November 1942, followed by The English Teacher in 1945.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in one of the stories of &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the collection itself&lt;/a&gt;, &quot;Lawley Road&quot;, the following passage appears:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Municipality kept itself in the background, and remained so till the country got its independence on the fifteenth of August 1947. History holds few records of such jubilation as was witnessed on that day from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is too accurate to be a hopeful prediction: the exact date is correct. This story must have been written and published after 1947. I'm reading the Penguin Classics version from 1982, but presumably the stories weren't edited or new ones added when the collection was &quot;republished&quot;.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;I noticed also that the stories of &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; are not all in one unified collection. They are separated into three parts as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title &quot;From &lt;em&gt;An Astrologer’s Day&lt;/em&gt;&quot; precedes the first sixteen stories: &quot;An Astrologer's Day&quot;, &quot;The Missing Mail&quot;, &quot;The Doctor's Word&quot;, &quot;Gateman's Gift&quot;, &quot;The Blind Dog&quot;, &quot;Fellow-Feeling&quot;, &quot;The Tiger's Claw&quot;, &quot;Iswaran&quot;, &quot;Such Perfection&quot;, &quot;Father's Help&quot;, &quot;The Snake-Song&quot;, &quot;Engine Trouble&quot;, &quot;Forty-Fice a Month&quot;, &quot;Out of Business&quot;, &quot;Attila&quot;, &quot;The Axe&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title &quot;From &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road&lt;/em&gt;&quot; precedes the next eight stories: &quot;Lawley Road&quot;, &quot;Trail of the Green Blazer&quot;, &quot;The Martyr’s Corner&quot;, &quot;Wife’s Holiday&quot;, &quot;A Shadow&quot;, A Willing Slave&quot;, &quot;Leela’s Friend&quot;, &quot;Mother and Son&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The title &quot;New Stories&quot; precedes the last eight stories: &quot;Naga&quot;, &quot;Selvi&quot;, &quot;Second Opinion&quot;, &quot;Cat Within&quot;, &quot;The Edge&quot;, &quot;God and the Cobbler&quot;, &quot;Hungry Child&quot;, &quot;Emde&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if this is relevant. Perhaps the first sixteen were published in 1942 or 1943, as I didn't notice any anachronisms in them (at least one is certainly set before Indian independence, given the mention of British soldiers) and the other sixteen later.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;Clearly, Wikipedia is wrong. &lt;strong&gt;What is the real publication history of these stories? When were they first published?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T09:26:29.473" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T09:26:29.473" Title="When were the short stories of Malgudi Days published?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13885" CreationDate="2020-04-25T08:44:10.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage in &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; is a paraphrase of Swedenborg†:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been given me to know from much experience, that in the natural world, and in its three kingdoms‡, there is not the smallest thing which does not represent something in the spiritual world, or which has not something there to which it corresponds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emanual Swedenborg (c. 1752). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksswedenborg13swed/page/54/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcana Cœlestia&lt;/em&gt;, volume IV, p. 55&lt;/a&gt;. London: Swedenborg Society (1879).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† For this observation I am indebted to William S. Gleim (1929). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/359241&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Theory of &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The New England Quarterly&lt;/em&gt; 2:3, p. 403. ‡ The animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emanuel Swedenborg&lt;/a&gt; was a mystical Christian philosopher who propounded the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_(theology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doctrine of correspondence&lt;/a&gt;, of which the following is a fair sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is no one thing existing in the created world, which has not correspondence with the things existing in the spiritual world, and which does not thereby, in its manner and measure, represent somewhat in the Lord’s kingdom; hence are derived the existence and subsistence of all things. If a man knew how the case really is in this respect, he would on no account, as he is wont, attribute all things to nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence it is, that all and every thing contained in the universe represent the Lord’s kingdom, insomuch that the universe with its heavenly constellations, with its atmospheres, and with its three kingdoms, is nothing else but a kind of theatre representative of the Lord’s glory which is in the heavens. In the animal kingdom not only man, but also each particular animal, even the least and vilest, are thus representative; even the worms, which creep on the ground, and feed on the leaves of plants; these, when the time of their nuptials approaches, become chrysallises, and presently are furnished with wings, and thereby are elevated from the ground into the atmosphere, which is their heaven, where they enjoy their delights and their freedom, sporting one with another, and feeding on the choicest parts of flowers, laying their eggs, and thus providing for posterity. And on this occasion, in consequence of being in the state of their heaven, they are also in the fulness of their beauty; that these things are representative of the Lord’s kingdom, may be obvious to every one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksswedenborg13swed/page/56/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swedenborg, p. 57&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, comparing with Swedenborg, we can read the passage from Melville as follows: “atom” means “particle, small thing”; “lives on matter” means “exists in the natural (material) world”; “cunning” means “ingenious”; and “mind” means “the spiritual world”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for “lives on matter” versus “lives in matter”, the choice of preposition is going to depend on how you conceptualize these material and spritual worlds. If you conceptualize them as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_(esotericism)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;planes or levels of existence&lt;/a&gt;, then “on” is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T11:13:52.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13909" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13907" CreationDate="2020-04-25T10:42:50.760" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The very PDF you link to has part of the answer. See page 15 (in the PDF, not page number 15 as the book numbers it), for a list of other titles from the author, which includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;SHORT FICTION&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Dodu and Other Stories (1943)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  *Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A Horse and Two Goats (1970)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Malgudi Days (1982)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1993)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[…]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;*Published in India only&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And looking around in Google Books, I found this snippet from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=OLZlAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22malgudi+days%22+1943&amp;amp;dq=%22malgudi+days%22+1943&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;R. K. Narayan as a novelist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by P. S. Sundaram (1988), which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The distribution of stories is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A) &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; (1943) 19 stories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems certain that some of the stories included in the 1982 book were not in the original publication and were published after it. &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road and other stories&lt;/em&gt; is stated in the Penguin publications as having been published in 1956, so Narayan definitely wasn't predicting a future date of Indian Independence back in 1943.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking further, I found an article titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://literariness.org/2019/11/23/analysis-of-r-k-narayans-stories/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysis of R. K. Narayan’s Stories&lt;/a&gt; by Nasrullah Mambrol, stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Among the nineteen stories in Narayan’s first collection, &lt;em&gt;Malgudi&#xA;  Days&lt;/em&gt;, there are two stories, “Old Bones” and “Neighbours’ Help,” that&#xA;  are laced with supernatural elements. This volume includes such&#xA;  memorable stories as “The Gold Belt,” “The White Flower,” “An End of&#xA;  Trouble,” and “Under the Banyan Tree.” [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One of the finest stories in the collection, “The Mute Companions,”&#xA;  centers on the ubiquitous Indian monkey[.] [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;, it should be noted, is also the title of a later collection, published in the United States in 1982. Eight of the&#xA;  thirty-two stories in this collection—“Naga,” “Selvi,” “Second&#xA;  Opinion,” “Cat Within,” “The Edge,” “God and the Cobbler,” “Hungry&#xA;  Child,” and “Emden”— were previously uncollected; the remaining&#xA;  stories were selected from Narayan’s two earlier volumes, &lt;em&gt;An&#xA;  Astrologer’s Day&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/24157228&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Short Stories of R.K. Narayan&lt;/a&gt;, H. C. Trivedi and N. C. Soni (Indian Literature Vol. 16, No. 3/4 (JULY—DECEMBER 1973), pp. 165-179) state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; is another collection of nineteen fresh and original stories out of which two stories &amp;mdash; &lt;em&gt;Old Bones&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Neighbour's Hip&lt;/em&gt; deal with the supernatural element. The collection contains delightful stories like &lt;em&gt;The Gold Belt&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The White Flower&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An End of Trouble&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Under the Banyan Tree&lt;/em&gt;. [...] &lt;em&gt;Gardens&lt;/em&gt; introduces sparrows and &lt;em&gt;The Mute Companions&lt;/em&gt;, a monkey. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Cyclone and other Stories&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This collection brings us a fresh stock of eighteen stories that&#xA;  mirror quite accurately Indian life and character. The remarkable&#xA;  quality of these stories is the ingenuity of their plots. &lt;em&gt;The&#xA;  Doctor's Word&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;An Astrologer's Day&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Roman Image&lt;/em&gt; are good&#xA;  illustrations of this fact. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;An Astrologer's Day and other stories&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Those who have read the earlier collections may not find this volume very interesting as twenty-four stories out of the collection of thirty have been reproduced here. Of the six remaining stories &lt;em&gt;The Tiger's Claw&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Watchman&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt; deserve careful consideration. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;h3&gt;Lawley Road and other Stories&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The volume contains twenty-eight stories out of which fourteen have&#xA;  been reprinted from the earlier collection. However, stories like&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Marty's Corner,&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Wife's Holiday&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Half-a-Rupee&lt;/em&gt; are really good. &lt;em&gt;Uncle's Letters&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Another Community&lt;/em&gt; mark a departure from the traditional stories. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original version of An Astrologer's Day, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.76639/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on archive.org&lt;/a&gt; has 30 stories. We can see that &lt;em&gt;Old Bones&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Under the Banyan Tree&lt;/em&gt; are listed there. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=sqBjpV9OzcsC&amp;amp;pg=PA273&amp;amp;lpg=PA273&amp;amp;dq=lawley%20road%201956&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of Indian Literature: 1911-1956, struggle for freedom: triumph and tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;by Sisir Kumar Das (Sahitya Akademi, 2005) mentions one more title from the 1943 &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; is one of the best collections of stories he wrote.&#xA;  Its themes include [...] an artist refusing to  accept an award&#xA;  convinced that he failed in his mission ('The Comedian') [...].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another useful resource is &lt;a href=&quot;https://etheses.saurashtrauniversity.edu/828/1/barlow_ae_thesis_english.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Audrey E. Barlow's PhD thesis&lt;/a&gt;,  &lt;em&gt;A critical study of the autobiographical elements in the fictional works of R. K. Narayan&lt;/em&gt; (2005), specifically Chapter V: &lt;em&gt;Subjectivity in his short stories&lt;/em&gt;. In footnotes, Barlow has noted some stories which have appeared in both 1943 and 1982 versions of &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Father's Help&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Shadow&quot; (also in &lt;em&gt;Lawley's Road&lt;/em&gt; (1956))&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Willing Slave&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for some other tales in 1982 &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Lawley Road&quot;, &quot;Trail of the Green Blazer&quot; and &quot;The Martyr's Corner&quot; are originally from &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road and other stories (1956)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Leela's Friend&quot; and &quot;Engine Trouble&quot; are originally from &lt;em&gt;Dodu and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt; (1943).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize a bit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; (1943) had 19 stories, of which I could find mentions of these titles:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Old Bones&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Neighbours’ Help&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Gold Belt&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The White Flower&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;An End of Trouble&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Under the Banyan Tree&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Gardens&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Mute Companions&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Father's Help&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Shadow&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;A Willing Slave&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Comedian&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dodu and other stories&lt;/em&gt; first show:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Leela's Friend&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Engine Trouble&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cyclone and other stories&lt;/em&gt; (1945) has the first appearance of:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;An Astrologer's Day&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Missing Mail&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Doctor's Word&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Blind Dog&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Fellow Feeling&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Iswaran&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Such Perfection&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Astrologer's Day and other stories&lt;/em&gt; (1947) first includes:&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Tiger's Claw&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lawley Road&lt;/em&gt; (1956) marks the first appearance of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Lawley Road&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Trail of the Green Blazer&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Martyr's Corner&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Wife's Holiday&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; (1982) has 32 stories of which 8 are new, and at least 14 originally appeared in a collection other than the 1943 &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; (2 from &lt;em&gt;Dodu,&lt;/em&gt; 7 from &lt;em&gt;Cyclone&lt;/em&gt;, 1 from &lt;em&gt;An Astrologer's Day&lt;/em&gt; and 4 from &lt;em&gt;Lawley Road&lt;/em&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That leaves 10 possible stories common to both 1943 and 1982. And at least 9 titles from 1943 were not included in 1982, also leaving 10 possible common stories. We know three of these (&quot;Father's Help&quot;, &quot;A Shadow&quot;, &quot;A Willing Slave&quot;), but I can't be sure about the remaining 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Gateman's Gift&quot; (this could plausibly be from 1943 - given retirement after 25 years of service starting around 1918).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Snake-Song&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Forty-Five A Month&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Out Of Business&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Attila&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Axe&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Mother And Son&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, many of these stories were &lt;em&gt;originally&lt;/em&gt; originally published in &lt;em&gt;The Hindu&lt;/em&gt; newspaper, before being included in these collections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if there's no way to derive 19 from 16, 8 and 8, well, after the first three collections (&lt;em&gt;Dodu and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; (1943) and &lt;em&gt;Cyclone and other stories&lt;/em&gt;), the various collections each included stories that were included in previous collections as well as new ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T15:17:27.413" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T15:17:27.413" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13911" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13917" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:28:41.823" Score="3" ViewCount="1738" Body="&lt;p&gt;In British releases, the mystery novel written by Stuart Turton was released as &lt;em&gt;Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle&lt;/em&gt;. However, the novel in America is released as &lt;em&gt;The Seven&lt;/em&gt; and a half &lt;em&gt;Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle&lt;/em&gt;. Why is that? Was there a significant plot change between the two versions? Or is there some other reason that the book was released with different titles (like the emphasis on what the deaths of Evelyn were?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Due to the mystery nature of the novel, please use spoilers when talking about any plot points, in case someone wants to read this book. Thank you for your cooperation.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T16:36:48.023" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T17:10:07.657" Title="Why the difference in title between English title and American title of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;stuart-turton&gt;&lt;seven-deaths-of-evelyn-hardcastle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13912" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:32:03.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T16:32:03.773" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T16:32:03.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13913" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:32:03.773" Score="0" Body="Stuart Turton is an English born author and journalist, most famous for his novel The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. If this is a question about a specific literary work of his, please also tag that work as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T16:40:55.263" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T16:40:55.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13914" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:34:35.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T16:34:35.913" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T16:34:35.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13915" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:34:35.913" Score="0" Body="The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (released in the U.S. as Seven-and-a-Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle) is a mystery novel written by English author Stuart Turton. Questions regarding this work should also be tagged with [stuart-turton]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T16:40:40.047" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T16:40:40.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13886" CreationDate="2020-04-25T16:38:58.463" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lady Macbeth fears that her husband has too much humanity in the sense of &quot;compassion characteristic of humane persons&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, edited by A. R. Braunmuller, 1997).&#xA;Braunmuller points out that the First Folio had &quot;humane&quot; instead of &quot;human&quot; and that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'humane' (= gentle, compassionate) was not distinguished orthographically from 'human' before 1700 (...),&#xA;  'kindness' principally means 'kinship', but also connotes 'category' ('kind' = classification, group)&#xA;  and 'naturalness' ('kind' = nautre).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth drank in this milk from his mother and it binds him &quot;to the social order of Man&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, edited by G. K. Hunter, 1967).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The association between milk and some type of weakness can also be found elsewhere in Shakespeare. In &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt;, Act I, scene 4,&#xA;Gonerill says to her husband, the Duke of Albany:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No, no, my lord,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  This milky gentleness and course of yours (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 1, where Flaminius asks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has friendship such a faint and milky heart &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  It turns in less than two nights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, milky can be understood as &quot;weak, timorous&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt;, edited by G. R. Hibbard, 1970).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lady Macbeth uses the word &quot;milk&quot; figuratively;&#xA;she thinks her husband is too &quot;humane&quot; (in more than one sense) or possibly to weak (i.e. insufficiently courageous or determined)&#xA;to take the shortest route (&quot;nearest way&quot;) to what has been promised to him, i.e. kingship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T16:38:58.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13911" CreationDate="2020-04-25T17:10:07.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, the answer is a lot less scandalous than I thought.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Apparently, the reason why the title is different in the U.S. is that another book called &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1501139231&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was being released right around the same time, and publishers wanted the book to not be confused with the very similar title of &lt;em&gt;The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle&lt;/em&gt;. As Stuart Turton stated in an interview, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The US title is different because it came out after a book called The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and we were trying to avoid too much confusion. Our plan hasn’t entirely worked, to be honest! I get so many people telling me they bought one, meaning to buy other. Some people think 7 ½ Deaths is a sequel or a prequel to Seven Deaths, or Seven Husbands. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/blogs/lapl/interview-author-stuart-turton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;-LAPL Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot doesn't get changed, and it's the exact same book. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course, for those of y'all that are &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; curious on why it's still called Seven 7-and-a-Half Deaths... well read the book, major spoilers spoiler warning.&#xA;Here's the synopsis, according to Goodreads:     &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; &quot;Tonight, Evelyn Hardcastle will be killed... again. It is meant to be a celebration but it ends in tragedy. As fireworks explode overhead, Evelyn Hardcastle, the young and beautiful daughter of the house, is killed. But Evelyn will not die just once. Until Aiden – one of the guests summoned to Blackheath for the party – can solve her murder, the day will repeat itself, over and over again. Every time ending with the fateful pistol shot. The only way to break this cycle is to identify the killer. But each time the day begins again, Aiden wakes in the body of a different guest. And someone is determined to prevent him ever escaping Blackheath...&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36337550-the-7-deaths-of-evelyn-hardcastle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here's the catch (&lt;strong&gt;spoiler warning&lt;/strong&gt;):  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Aiden has eight hosts he can inhabit. He stops Evelyn Hardcastle from dying on the seventh day and &quot;solves&quot; the murder on the eight-day (well he's technically right but like he's not). Except... that wasn't actually Evelyn that's been dying. It was someone the &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; Evelyn hired to take her place because Evelyn Hardcastle was trying to fake her death. The real Evelyn, in the most dramatic twist actually tries to kill Aiden and his friend Anna, and the fake Evelyn (whose name you'll find out) kills the real one, saving Aiden. So the assumption is that there are 6 deaths of the fake Evelyn, and the final death of Evelyn, making it seven, while in the U.S. version, it can be seen as the seventh day (where the fake Evelyn &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; dies), being the half death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, go read the book!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T17:10:07.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8928" CreationDate="2020-04-25T19:59:56.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &lt;em&gt;et tu Brute&lt;/em&gt; was in common use among the Elizabethans before Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. It is a Latin translation of a Greek phrase which Suetonius ascribed to the dying Caesar in his “The Twelve Caesars”. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Et tu Brute” can be found in a 1584 play in Latin, by Richard Edes, “Caesar Interfectus”; in a 1591 play, “The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York”, supposedly by Thomas Middleton, but sometimes attributed to Shakespeare; and in Ben Jonson’s “Every Man out of his Humor”, which was first performed in the same year as “Julius Caesar”, 1599. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus &lt;em&gt;et tu Brute&lt;/em&gt; had a life of its own before Shakespeare. An apt allusion to the betrayal of someone by a friend, it soon became a cliché, to the point where more often than not it was (and still is) used flippantly, rather than seriously.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, although almost universally attributed to Shakespeare, &lt;em&gt;et tu Brute&lt;/em&gt; is just another Latin phrase - like &lt;em&gt;carpe diem&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;ad nauseum&lt;/em&gt; – that has become part of English usage. That is why we do not hear it followed by Shakespeare’s typically ambiguous and meaningful appendage, “Then fall Caesar.” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-25T20:03:16.513" LastActivityDate="2020-04-25T20:03:16.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13824" CreationDate="2020-04-25T23:43:50.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a much more interesting question than the o/p perhaps understood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is legitimate scholarly opinion to the effect that Shakespeare did not include any Witches in his play. The modern notion of 'witches' is a misunderstanding; or perhaps may be classed rather as an exaggeration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text which modern academics ascribe to Shakespeare speaks of 'weird sisters', not of witches. There is much ambiguity in this play, as in many of his plays, due to corruption of the text during the process of printing it, under the exceedingly primitive conditions so long ago. The printed text contains much textual corruption. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, above all, it is now thought that some scenes which appear in modern editions of the play were added by another author, perhaps in the years between Shakespeare's death and the First Folio printing. The references to witches are thought to have been added by another hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling them witches certainly attributes supernatural powers to them, such as could account for their having an ability, with some credibility, to foretell the future. But although Shakespeare is still thought to have written the scene in which Lady Macbeth appears to urge her husband to murder King Duncan, some part of the ambiguity in her words can now be accounted for by the fact that she may be referring to a rather different version of Act 1 Scene 3 than is currently included in modern printings of this text. Shakespeare may have written her dialogue without any witches in mind, and they may have been added by another author so as to strengthen Lady Macbeth's position in this scene, among others, where she needs to call on a supernatural prophecy that Macbeth 'wilt be King hereafter'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 16th century, playhouse audiences loved magic -- which most common people still firmly believed in. So adding witches to this play certainly strengthened its appeal for audiences. By adding supernatural elements, Shakespeare had improved other plays -- such as where he uses the ghost of Hamlet's father to include a ghost in that play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet he seems to have only had three 'weird sisters' in mind in Macbeth. Someone unknown made the play a better box office attraction, by inserting just one extra scene with a reference to witches -- throughout the rest of the play the term was not originally used -- to give a better justification for Lady Macbeth's claims that fate has prophesied that Macbeth will become king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her words, perhaps made ambiguous by simple textual corruption, but maybe because they originally referred to a quite different scene to the one now included in the play, have very little meaning. But the reason seems not to lie with Shakespeare but with the unknown hand who &quot;collaborated&quot; with him on the script - perhaps long after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed the Folio text of 1623 is thought to be a revision of the original play, probably adapted by Thomas Middleton (and unquestionably using Middleton’s material), and is very short by Shakespeare’s standards, suggesting abridgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9944" LastEditorUserId="9944" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T00:11:49.503" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T00:11:49.503" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13925" CreationDate="2020-04-26T04:21:14.560" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying unsuccessfully to remember the name of American author who wrote a series of very popular books during the sixties or seventies on his encounter with a Mexican guru. Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9945" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T12:48:04.113" Title="Author of books about Mexican guru" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8533" CreationDate="2020-04-26T07:35:28.383" Score="7" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Evidence&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this answer, I considered all the books until &lt;em&gt;Asterix in Belgium,&lt;/em&gt; i.e., all books with contributions from both, Uderzo and Goscinny. Since I only have the German editions, I won’t provide direct quotes. Page counts refer to the ones in the panels (usually at the bottom left) and should be independent of the edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;A: with potion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This concerns the invulnerability of people that have drunk the potion (or can be assumed to have), except Obelix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix the Gaul,&lt;/em&gt; p. 11: The (yet unnamed) smith hammers a piece of metal with his bare fist.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix the Gaul,&lt;/em&gt; p. 15: After drinking the potion, Caligula Minus hauls a bear-sized rock into the air and crushes himself with it. He quickly recovers. Getafix remarks that the potion does not make you invulnerable (for which an extra potion exists).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Goths,&lt;/em&gt; p. 8: In the druid show-off, the druid Valueaddedtax presents a potion that grants immunity to pain (and heat) while Getafix presents his potion. Valueaddedtax’ potion is not regarded as a subset of Getafix’ one.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Goths,&lt;/em&gt; p. 38: After Metric and Rhetoric have both drunk the potion and fought for hours, they are pretty battered up.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix in Britain,&lt;/em&gt; p. 21: Obelix knocks out the legionary who drunk the potion (and a lot of wine) with one hit.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix in Britain,&lt;/em&gt; p. 35: A knocked-out rugby player gets immediately revitalised when being fed the potion. This could be attributed to things like showmanship (pretending to be more injured than you are) and the placebo effect.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Laurel Wreath,&lt;/em&gt; p. 8: Asterix cautions that the potion does not grant invulnerability.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;B: without potion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are occasions where people who are not under the influence of the potion, are surprisingly robust:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous occasions: Romans, pirates, Cacofonix, Goths, Normans, robbers, etc. survive and often even quickly recover from being beaten to pulp.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous occasions: The pirates survive being shipwrecked at open sea.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix the Gaul,&lt;/em&gt; p. 18: After the potion’s effect subsides, Caligula Minus gets crushed by another bear-sized rock and quickly recovers.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and Cleopatra,&lt;/em&gt; p. 24 ff.: Cleopatra’s taster survives quite some while after having eaten a blatantly poisoned cake (and then gets cured by Getafix).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Big Fight:&lt;/em&gt; Getafix, Psychoanalytix, and Cassius Ceramix survive being hit by a menhir. Psychoanalytix and Cassius Ceramix permanently lose their memory though.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Big Fight:&lt;/em&gt; Getafix survives various explosions.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix in Switzerland:&lt;/em&gt; Vexatius Sinusitus survives being severely poisoned for at least a day without medical attention and for the entire adventure with Getafix’ medical attention, but without the antidote.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix in Corsica,&lt;/em&gt; p. 19: The pirates survive their ship exploding.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and Caesar's Gift,&lt;/em&gt; p. 36: Asterix (who has not drunk the potion) literally catapults himself out of the Roman camp, suffering only a concussion.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix in Belgium,&lt;/em&gt; p. 36: A Belgian survives a headshot by a catapult.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;C: Obelix&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous occasions: Obelix is unaffected by direct hits, e.g., in &lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Roman Agent&lt;/em&gt; (p. 36) he ignores Magnumopus hitting his helmet-covered head with a club.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous occasions: Obelix is incapacitated or knocked out by alcohol consumption.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Numerous occasions: Obelix eats a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Banquet,&lt;/em&gt; p. 34: Obelix is unaffected by eating an entire boar poisoned with some sleeping drug. One bite of the same boar instantly knocks out Uptotrix.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Laurel Wreath,&lt;/em&gt; p. 19: Obelix is unaffected by the hangover cure from hell. He considers it stale.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Conclusions&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even without the potion, the Asterix universe is pretty lenient when it comes to dying and lasting damage (B1–10). There is possibly only one case where permanent damage is caused on page (B5).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The potion itself is not considered to grant invulnerability (A2, A3, A7) and this is also directly evidenced at times (A2, A4, A5). However, there are two exceptions where the potion boosts robustness (A1, A6). One of them (A1) is very early in the series and the other (A6) could have other reasons. In neither case, it grants clear invulnerabilty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even considering the leniency of the universe, Obelix is comparably resistant to mechanical damage (C1), but then again he is not that far out. He seems to have a peculiar digestive system (C2–C5), being immune to poisons (C3–4) other than alcohol (C2). The extents of this and whether this is connected to falling into the potion as a child remains unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastEditorUserId="34" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T13:47:58.627" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T13:47:58.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T08:12:51.000" Score="4" ViewCount="509" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fictional character of Frederick Lawley, a prominent British figure in colonial India, is the main object of R. K. Narayan's &quot;Lawley Road&quot; (a short story first published in 1956 in the eponymous collection, also republished in the 1982 collection &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt; which I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currently reading online&lt;/a&gt;) and his name also crops up in other stories since several places in Malgudi are named after him. In the story &quot;Lawley Road&quot;, people at first think he was a monster of British oppression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For they unearthed a lot of history about Sir Frederick Lawley. He was a combination of Attila, the Scourge of Europe, and Nadir Shah, with the craftiness of a Machiavelli. He subjugated Indians with the sword and razed to the ground the villages from which he heard the slightest murmur of protest. He never countenanced Indians except when they approached him on their knees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later, after they remove his statue, they receive a lot of letters to the contrary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They were from every kind of historical society in India, all protesting against the removal of the statue. We had all been misled about Sir F. All the present history pertained to a different Lawley of the time of Warren Hastings. This Frederick Lawley (of the statue) was a military governor who had settled down here after the Mutiny. He cleared the jungles and almost built the town of Malgudi. He established here the first cooperative society for the whole of India, and the first canal system by which thousands of acres of land were irrigated from the Sarayu, which had been dissipating itself till then. He established this, he established that, and he died in the great Sarayu floods while attempting to save the lives of villagers living on its banks. He was the first Englishman to advise the British Parliament to involve more and more Indians in all Indian affairs. In one of his despatches he was said to have declared, ‘Britain must quit India someday for her own good.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these claims are quite specific, and not only related to the fictional town of Malgudi but to the British occupation of India in general. So I wonder: &lt;strong&gt;was this fictional Frederick Lawley based on a real figure?&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;There's a similar question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Who-is-Frederick-Lawley-Did-he-really-exist-or-is-it-an-imaginary-name-in-the-Malgudi-Days-series&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;, where an answer says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Frederick Lawley is a fictional character, but is believed to have been based upon the real-life &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Lawley,_6th_Baron_Wenlock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Lawley, 6th Baron Wenlock&lt;/a&gt;, who was once upon a time the Governor of Madras. Perhaps, some details of the fictional Lawley’s life, death and legacy were also inspired by the life-story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Munro,_1st_Baronet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Thomas Munro, 1st Baronet&lt;/a&gt;, another Governor of Madras.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... but without any sources or analysis to support those suggestions. Can this site do better? I'm hoping for specific similarities with Narayan's descriptions of Frederick Lawley, if possible; definitely something more than just a name, which could in any case be the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; Lawley mentioned in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T08:12:51.000" Title="Was Frederick Lawley based on a real figure in British India?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13923" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T08:40:50.337" Score="4" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first stanza of Robert Frost's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&lt;/a&gt;&quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I think I know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His house is in the village though;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will not see me stopping here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To watch his woods fill up with snow.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, while Robert Frost might think he knows whose woods these are, &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; certainly don't. The rest of the poem does a very good job of setting a cold, dark scene, but not a very good job of explaining whose woods these are (a major oversight, in my opinion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the poem referencing something or someone in particular? Is it just setting the tone of the poem? Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T18:49:19.383" Title="Who is being referenced in the opening line of &quot;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11745" CreationDate="2020-04-26T12:38:02.180" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The speaker of this poem is a young man of rural lower-class origins who enlisted as an infantryman and who has just killed an enemy soldier (“my foe”) in battle. The symmetry of the situation strikes and puzzles him and he tries unsuccessfully to work out why he should have killed the other, since in every way they are fellow men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballad#Ballad_form&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ballad form&lt;/a&gt;: stanzas of four lines rhyming ABAB, in iambic trimeter except for the third line which is iambic tetrameter. The ballad form is traditionally used for tragic, comic, and heroic tales in plain language, appropriately for this soldier’s story, which is all three.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem conveys the speaker’s background through small touches of vocabulary: the dialect term “nipperkin” for a small drinking-glass; the abbreviation “’list” for “enlist”; and the use of “like” instead of “likely”. The phrase “old ancient inn” in the second line would be an unacceptable &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleonasm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pleonasm&lt;/a&gt; in the usual elevated language of poetry, but in the speaker’s plain language, we understand “old” as meaning “ordinary, commonplace, usual”. In the third stanza, the speaker imagines that the dead foe might have “sold his traps” (that is, he had been a poacher, but in destitution had sold his only means of living, forcing him to join the army to avoid starvation), an idea that suggests the speaker himself had been familiar with poaching. In the last stanza, the speaker rhymes “war is” with “bar is”, which locates his accent, via the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Card%E2%80%93cord_merger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;card–cord merger&lt;/a&gt;, in the West Country of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker has difficulty understanding the reason he killed his foe. This difficulty comes to a head in the third and fourth stanzas. He hesitates, repeating the word “because” and the phrase “my foe”; he tries to convince himself by saying “That’s clear enough” even though it is far from clear; his syntax becomes fractured, with incomplete phrases linked by dashes; and most strikingly, there is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;enjambment&lt;/a&gt; after “although” that spans the two stanzas, breaking the normal rule of ballad form that each verse should end on a stop. These are all indications of the speaker’s inability to make sense of the situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The symmetry between the speaker and his foe is suggested throughout. They found themselves “staring face to face” like a man looking at himself in a mirror. In two places a phrase is repeated but with the elements in mirrored order (a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiasmus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chiasmus&lt;/a&gt;): “I shot at him as he at me” in the second stanza and “he was my foe … my foe of course he was” in the central lines of the the third (central) stanza. In the fourth stanza, the speaker guesses that his foe had enlisted for the same or similar reason (“just as I”), emphasizing the similarity of their social positions. In the last stanza, the pronoun has changed from “I” to “you”, suggesting that the speaker and his foe have swapped places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole structure of the poem is symmetrical: the first and fifth stanzas both describe how he would have shared a drink (“wet many a nipperkin” / “met where any bar is”), or even his pay (“help to half-a-crown”) with the foe, had they met under happier circumstances. The second and fourth stanzas both describe how they came to face each other: through enlisting in the fourth stanza, and through being “ranged as infantry” (lined up in battle) in the second. And the third stanza sets out the central unsolved conundrum: why did the speaker kill his foe and not the other way around? A question for which he can supply no adequate answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T12:38:02.180" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13920" CreationDate="2020-04-26T12:48:04.113" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carlos Castaneda&lt;/a&gt;, whose books on travelling through Mexico and psychedelic experiences, beginning with &quot;The Teachings of Don Juan&quot; were indeed very popular in the seventies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T12:48:04.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13926" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13937" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:11:17.960" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Part Two R. K. Narayan's novel &lt;em&gt;The Painter of Signs&lt;/em&gt;, Daisy, who works for the Indian government's Family Planning Program, and Raman, the painter of signs from the book's title, visit a remote village. The Family Planning Program aims to reduce the number of children per family to two. However, the population in the remote village they are visiting has grown from 600 to &quot;seven-hundred odd&quot; in twelve month's time, so Daisy immediately asks the village teacher to gather the families under the banyan tree in the centre of the village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After speaking to the villagers for an hour,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the chiefman said, 'There is an old shrine in a cave over there where barren women can go and pray and bear children. How would you explain it?' Daisy simply answered, 'You should ask the priest of that temple,' and Raman admired the courage and subtlety of her reply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what way is Daisy's replay courageous and subtle? At this point of the story, Daisy and Raman have not yet visited the shrine or seen the priest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T04:03:01.590" Title="In what way is Daisy's reply about the temple courageous and subtle?" Tags="&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;&lt;the-painter-of-signs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13927" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13928" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about R. K. Narayan's 1976 novel 'The Painter of Signs'. Use this tag with [r-k-narayan]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:21:22.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13929" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13930" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about Gabriel García Márquez' 1985 novel 'Love in the Time of Cholera' ('El amor en los tiempos del cólera'). Use this tag with [gabriel-garcia-marquez] and [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:32:32.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13931" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13932" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of S. Y. Agnon (Shmuel Yosef Agnon, 1888 – 1970) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with [hebrew-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:37:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13933" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13934" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about Margaret Atwood's 2003 novel 'Oryx and Crake'. Use this tag with [margaret-atwood]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" LastActivityDate="2020-04-26T19:38:47.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-26T19:58:24.323" Score="7" ViewCount="235" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first stanza of Robert Frost's &quot;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&quot; reads as follows in its original publication in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/New_Hampshire/a9xaAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;New Hampshire&lt;/em&gt; (1923)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I think I know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His house is in the village though;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will not see me stopping here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To watch his woods fill up with snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nzJuC.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nzJuC.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of original text&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had always thought the first line was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I &lt;strong&gt;do not&lt;/strong&gt; know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Incidentally, this would resolve &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/13923/who-is-being-referenced-in-the-opening-line-of-stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-eve&quot;&gt;this difficulty&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now of course it is possible that I had simply misremembered the words, but an internet search of the phrase &quot;whose woods these are I do not know&quot; turns up a lot of results in which people seem to think that this is indeed the line in Frost's poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence of different versions by the author? Alternatively, is there any evidence of someone (deliberately, or unintentionally) altering the text, such that others might have subsequently used a faulty source and learned the poem incorrectly from the start?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2020-04-26T20:07:22.550" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T14:10:17.777" Title="Why do I have a different version of &quot;Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5379" CreationDate="2020-04-26T20:37:20.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You say in the question,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The natural way I would read this as prose would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;ev-&lt;/strong&gt; | ery &lt;strong&gt;spi-&lt;/strong&gt; | rit up- | &lt;strong&gt;on earth&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The natural way to read the line is nearly always the best way, and you should have the courage to stick to your guns! The last four syllables of the line form a &lt;em&gt;double iamb&lt;/em&gt;, which is a common feature of English verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ll give six examples of the double iamb, but once you are familiar with it you’ll find it everywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Let&lt;/strong&gt; me | &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; to | the &lt;strong&gt;mar-&lt;/strong&gt; | riage of | &lt;strong&gt;true minds&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 116&lt;/a&gt;, line 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At the | &lt;strong&gt;round earth’s&lt;/strong&gt; | im&lt;strong&gt;a-&lt;/strong&gt; | gined &lt;strong&gt;cor-&lt;/strong&gt; | ners, &lt;strong&gt;blow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Donne. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44105/holy-sonnets-at-the-round-earths-imagind-corners-blow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holy Sonnets VIII&lt;/a&gt;, line 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That &lt;strong&gt;Shep-&lt;/strong&gt; | herd, who | &lt;strong&gt;first taught&lt;/strong&gt; | the &lt;strong&gt;cho-&lt;/strong&gt; | sen &lt;strong&gt;Seed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1667)/Book_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, book I&lt;/a&gt;, line 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bright star,&lt;/strong&gt; | would &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; | were &lt;strong&gt;stead-&lt;/strong&gt; | fast as | &lt;strong&gt;thou art—&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Keats. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bright star&lt;/a&gt;’, line 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In his | &lt;strong&gt;first splen-&lt;/strong&gt; | dour, &lt;strong&gt;val-&lt;/strong&gt; | ley, &lt;strong&gt;rock&lt;/strong&gt;, | or &lt;strong&gt;hill&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Wordsworth. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45514/composed-upon-westminster-bridge-september-3-1802&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Composed upon Westminster Bridge&lt;/a&gt;’, line 10.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; shall | go &lt;strong&gt;back&lt;/strong&gt; | a&lt;strong&gt;gain&lt;/strong&gt; | to the | &lt;strong&gt;bleak shore&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edna St Vincent Millay. ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148562/i-shall-go-back-again-to-the-bleak-shore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I shall go back again&lt;/a&gt;’, line 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;History&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The double iamb does not seem to have been properly recognized until the mid-20th century. At the beginning of the century, the phenomenon was doubtful enough for C. M. Lewis to prefix it with a cautionary disclaimer, “Metrists usually say”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Metrists usually say that the pyrrhic is sometimes admitted in iambic verse; and some leading authorities point out that it generally is found with a spondee immediately afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;C. M. Lewis (1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/principlesengli00lewigoog/page/n55/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Principles of English Verse&lt;/em&gt;, p. 42&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Henry Holt.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bridges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Bridges&lt;/a&gt; noted it as “a common irregularity” in Milton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The matter stands thus: in all Milton’s verse there is a frequent occurrence of the following rhythm, that is, a foot of two unstressed short syllables preceding a foot composed of two heavy syllables, as in these lines from Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Midsummer-Night’s Dream&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The ploughman lost his sweat, and the &lt;strong&gt;green corn&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Before milkwhite, now purple with &lt;strong&gt;love’s wound&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;    &#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Love takes the meaning in &lt;strong&gt;love’s con&lt;/strong&gt;ference. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is common in Milton’s early verse, which is much influenced by the verse of Shakespeare’s first style; and he always made use of it. Whatever the account may be, it is pleasant to the ear in the smoothest verse, and is so, no doubt, by a kind of compensation in it. In typical cases there is no possibility of stress in the first short foot, and the first heavy syllable of the next foot seems to carry what has been omitted, with an accentuation bearing relation to the sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Instances occur everywhere in Milton. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Bridges (1901). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/miltonsprosodyby00briduoft/page/58/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton's Prosody&lt;/em&gt;, p. 58&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The double iamb was, I think, first stated in the form of a rule by American poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crowe_Ransom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Crowe Ransom&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;These are substantially the exceptions as codified by Bridges in &lt;em&gt;The Prosody of Milton&lt;/em&gt; [sic], the best handbook we have on iambic pentameters. What Bridges codified was Milton’s code, as it had been for several generations the code of Milton’s predecessors, and would be for his successors over a century and a half; since then it has been well known to poet-prosodists, and adhered to systematically when they pleased. But it is not quite complete, in my judgment. I wish Bridges had added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;Any two successive iambic feet might be replaced by a double or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionic_meter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ionic foot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Crowe Ransom (1956). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4333692&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Strange Music of English Verse&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The Kenyon Review&lt;/em&gt; 18:3, pp. 470-471.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name “double iamb” was not introduced until the 1990s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We should drop the pyrrhic foot and accept in its place the double-iamb, as one of the six foot-terms necessary: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, double-iamb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This change was suggested by John Crowe Ransom […] Ransom uses the Greek term “ionic foot”, but plain English seems preferable, carrying with it a reminder that a &lt;em&gt;double-iamb&lt;/em&gt; counts as two feet, and having the advantage of suggesting that this pattern is quite normal to the iambic base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Wallace (1993). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Mti4tXQpxaYC&amp;amp;pg=PA26&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meter in English&lt;/a&gt;’. In David Baker, ed. (1996). &lt;em&gt;Meter in English: A Critical Engagement&lt;/em&gt;. University of Arkansas Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some metrists objected to “double iamb” on the grounds that the term was also used for a pair of iambs. But it seems to have stuck, perhaps due to the advantages noted by Wallace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Effect in ‘The Darkling Thrush’&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The general effect of a double iamb is to slow the rhythm by placing two stressed syllables adjacent to each other, and to alter the general iambic pattern, avoiding a metronomic regularity and making us pay a bit more attention to the stressed words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of ‘The Darkling Thrush’, we are led by the rhythm to interpret this line as saying that the spirits upon earth &lt;em&gt;in particular&lt;/em&gt; seemed fervorless, with the implication that there are other spirits, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; upon earth, that still seem fervored. And indeed, the poem goes on to describe one such spirit in the next two stanzas. Without the change in rhythm, we might miss this implication, interpreting the line as saying that the spirits, &lt;em&gt;which happen to be&lt;/em&gt; upon earth, seemed fervorless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Note on scansion&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhythm of the poem is not quite as even as suggested in the question. When I read it, I find a stress on “sharp” in line 1, an anapest (“-tury’s corpse”) in line 2, and only one stress in “canopy”, so that the double iamb is not so surprising to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T18:37:54.060" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T18:37:54.060" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13926" CreationDate="2020-04-27T04:03:01.590" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The implication is that the women aren't barren, their husbands are. And the children are the priest's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not unheard of in India even now. See, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/2165680/prayed-child-raped-godman-indias-deadly-childbirth-superstitions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this South China Morning Post article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“The problem does not pertain to rural India alone. In the National Capital Region [which encompasses Delhi and several districts around it], we have identified 2,000 self-styled godmen – they’re present in every city all over the country,” he says. “Each year, at least 45 to 50 women come out, stating they’ve been sexually exploited by these gurus, who claim to have conception cures. And that number is only the tip of the iceberg.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering what she's alleging and how she implies it, that was indeed pretty courageous and subtle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T04:03:01.590" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8127" CreationDate="2020-04-27T06:43:26.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;what is the dreadful thing that was skipped over?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell is painting a picture of a dissident in a totalitarian regime and how that system suffocates the human spirit. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 'dreadful thing' is exactly what Winston thought of this system. It's dreadful and terrifying. Once his spirit is broken then it's no longer dreadful, everything was 'all right'. 'There was no more pain' because he was no longer able to resist. 'And the last detail of his life was laid bare' is the panoptician in operation - Big Brother who is no brother at all. And being laid bare he is 'understood' which is a travesty of being understood. And his dissidence is 'forgiven', which is a travesty of the Christian virtue of forgiveness, as well as in other major traditions. (Remember, Orwell was writing at a time when the Christian tradition was much stronger than it is in today's mostly secular society. And he could draw on that tradition in his writing). By inverting the sense of understanding and forgiveness, Orwell is referencing The Ministry of Truth, which as readers we know as The Ministry of Lies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;why is he swallowed up into a pair of eyes? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because his spirit is 'swallowed up' by the panoptic apparatus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Near at hand some kind of instrument was ticking slowly and regularly. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't know what the instrument actually is as Orwell doesn't describe it. What it is isn't important to the narrative arc. What is important is the 'ticking' which references time and mortality. For human beings, because we are finite creatures and live in time, time is always of the essence and always present. The ticking of clocks was redolent of time then as clocks ticked.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Orwell in this passage is tackling the question of why some people break under torture. It should be obvious - it's torture. Nevertheless, some people show far more fortitude than others. Orwell doesn't touch this question. Nadezhda Mandelstam, the wife of Osip Mandelstam, wrote a book of their life together under the repressive Stalinist regime. One thing she wrote has stayed with me. That some people - a few - did not break gave her hope for the future. That hope proved true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T08:24:01.220" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T08:24:01.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13801" CreationDate="2020-04-27T07:08:41.880" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winston, in the novel, did not die. So to some extent, to say 'thoughtcrime IS death' is not quite true. It's true at the level of how the human spirit can be crushed. Nevertheless, the two totalitarian regimes we do know of in history were defeated. And this cannot be the case if the human spirit remains crushed, and is always crushed under a totalitarian regime. The human spirit is such that it always finds a way, even in the most terrible and adverse of conditions. Remember, the Stalinist system was broken down by the Russian people themselves - it didn't take an external force like it did with the Nazis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Orwell is painting is a picture of how a totalitarian system works. He didn't spell out the details, the brushstrokes he painted should be enough. We read peoples minds all the time, surely you've been in situations where you could finish the sentence someone is about to say? It happens all the time. Orwell is relying on an understanding of psychology by the reader, which he can expect, since after all, the novel has one of its important themes - human psychology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Orwell was interested in is how a totalitarian regime could co-opt something natural and turn it into something terrible. He was interested in laying bare the twisted logic of it all - from the panoptic Big Brother, the Ministry of Lies, the two minute Hate and so on. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to concentrate on details is to miss the big picture. After all, Hannah Arendt wrote that the totalitarian regime, although defeated, remains a possibility that the West could take again. And so to avert that possibility requires vigilance. But if it arrives, the details will be different. It's not going to announce itself but hide until its omnipresent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T07:08:41.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13940" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T08:51:08.580" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;strong&gt;CW&lt;/strong&gt;: mentions of self-harm.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliza Grace's song &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Eliza-grace-i-cant-save-the-world-if-im-not-happy-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I Can't Save the World If I'm Not Happy&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is quite obviously a song about depression; there are several mentions of self-harm (&quot;you can't calm your wrists with a razor blade&quot;) and the whole song has a very depressed feel to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The outro of the song (that's a bit hard to hear if you're not paying attention) goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I've been noticing all your ties are bending, breaking&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Because you've been thinking you're not happy anymore&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that line &quot;all your ties are bending, breaking&quot; mean? What does &quot;ties&quot; mean here, and in what way are they bending and breaking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T12:21:59.707" Title="What does &quot;all your ties are bending, breaking&quot; mean in &quot;I Can't Save the World If I'm Not Happy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;eliza-grace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T11:01:22.553" Score="3" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R. K. Narayan's short story &quot;A Willing Slave&quot; (which I read as part of his 1982 collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), the nanny Ayah tells a story to the young girl Radha:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Ayah squatted below the cot and narrated the story of the black monkey which rolled in a sack of chalk powder, became white and married a princess; at the wedding somebody sprinkled water on him and he came out in his true colour; he was chased out; presently a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhobi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dhobi&lt;/a&gt; took pity on him and washed, bleached and ironed him, in which state he regained the affection of the princess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a real fairy tale told in some Indian culture?&lt;/strong&gt; I searched the internet for Indian stories about a black monkey and a princess, but failed to find anything that fits. Perhaps someone with more subject knowledge will know the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T11:01:22.553" Title="Is this a real Indian fairy tale about a monkey who changes colour and marries a princess?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13945" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13940" CreationDate="2020-04-27T12:21:59.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I have no experience with actual depression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see no indication in the lyrics that &quot;ties&quot; would mean anything but &quot;relationships&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would take &quot;your ties are bending, breaking&quot; to mean: when you are depressed, the relationships (&quot;ties&quot;) you have to other people are under stress. These others may feel they need to treat you differently because of your depression; they will feel the need to strain to keep up their relationship with you (&quot;bending&quot;). They may even give up altogether (&quot;breaking&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does take a lot of effort to maintain a relationship with someone who's not happy, and there are many do's and don'ts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T12:21:59.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13946" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T19:05:51.830" Score="4" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second part of R. K. Narayan's novel &lt;em&gt;The Painter of Signs&lt;/em&gt;, Raman and Daisy are on their way back from a remote village. They have spent a night on the road, Raman sleeping under a bullock cart and Daisy sleeping in the bullock cart. Or at least, that's where Raman thought Daisy was sleeping, since it turns out she spent the night in a tree because she had heard a tiger. In reality, she had climbed into the tree when she had heard Raman climb into the cart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on the event, she says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I now realize the meaning of the proverb, &quot;When you are married to the devil, you must be prepared to climb the tamarind tree&quot;—they must have had me in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raman later thinks to himself,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What did she mean by this proverb? He had often heard his aunt mention it. Did she think of herself as married to him already? Or did she have any clue as to the thoughts crossing his mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is threefold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is this a real proverb or did Narayan invent it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If it is a real proverb, what does it mean outside this specific context?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does Daisy mean by it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T19:12:17.907" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T06:05:31.983" Title="What does Daisy's proverb about being married to the devil mean?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;&lt;the-painter-of-signs&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-27T20:27:11.020" Score="6" ViewCount="163" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a theory that certain oddities in the rhythms of Shakespeare and other early modern English poets could best be explained by &lt;strong&gt;recession of accent&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of this theory seems to be as follows. In the 1870s, Alexander Schmidt compiled a collection of examples of “Changeable accent of dissyllable adjectives and participles” in Shakespare’s iambic verse. By this he meant two-syllable words which Shakespeare placed starting on an odd syllable in one line, and on an even syllable in another, so that &lt;em&gt;in order to scan both lines as perfect iambic pentameter&lt;/em&gt;, the word has to be pronounced with different stress in the two instances. Schmidt’s examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Therefore my verse to constancy con&lt;strong&gt;fined&lt;/strong&gt;, [Sonnet 105]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Supposed as forfeit to a &lt;strong&gt;con&lt;/strong&gt;fined doom. [Sonnet 107]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He means, my lord, that we are too re&lt;strong&gt;miss&lt;/strong&gt;. [&lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; III.2]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That thus we die, while &lt;strong&gt;re&lt;/strong&gt;miss traitors sleep. [&lt;em&gt;I Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; IV.3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whilst thou liest warm at home, se&lt;strong&gt;cure&lt;/strong&gt; and safe. [&lt;em&gt;Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt; V.2]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Upon my &lt;strong&gt;se&lt;/strong&gt;cure hour thy uncle stole. [&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; I.5]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Alexander Schmidt (1875). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearelexi05schmgoog/page/n752/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespare-Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 1413–1415&lt;/a&gt;. London: Williams and Norgate.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schmidt concluded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And thus it may be stated as a general rule, that dissyllabic oxytonical† adjectives and participles become paroxytonical‡ before nouns accented on the first syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearelexi05schmgoog/page/n752/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schmidt, p. 1413&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† stressed on the last syllable ‡ stressed on the penultimate syllable&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his influential &lt;em&gt;Milton’s Prosody&lt;/em&gt; (1893), Robert Bridges described this as the “&lt;strong&gt;rule of the recession, or retreating of accent&lt;/strong&gt;” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/miltonsprosodyby00briduoft/page/12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 13&lt;/a&gt;), and in a detailed discussion of the rule, he argued for an expanded definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The only fault to find with [Schmidt’s] definition is that it confines recession of accent to adjectives and participles, and that it requires the determining (following) word to be a noun, which it is true that it is in all his instances; but I should be inclined to consider this unessential, and treat the recession as being due entirely to collision of accents. I do not see that it has anything to do with the sense, or with the adjective being in the predicate or not, as implied by Dr. Schmidt’s remarks. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Bridges (1893). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/miltonsprosodyby00briduoft/page/54/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton's Prosody&lt;/em&gt;, p. 54&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theory continued to be accepted at least into the 1920s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The deliberate violation of normal word-accent to fit the metrical stress […] is not such an entirely arbitrary procedure as it might at first seem; for at one period in the history of the language the accent of many words (especially those of French origin) was uncertain. Chaucer could say, without forcing, either &lt;em&gt;ná&lt;/em&gt;ture or na&lt;em&gt;túre&lt;/em&gt;. The revival of English poetry in the sixteenth century owed a great deal to Chaucerian example, and thus a tradition of variable accent was accepted and became practically a convention, not limited to those words in which it had originally occurred. […] The wrenching of accent for metrical purposes, moreover, is not confined to the dissyllabic words which show the simple recession of accent. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Paull Franklin Baum (1922). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.46166/page/n201/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Principles Of English Versification&lt;/em&gt;, p. 190&lt;/a&gt;. Harvard University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I have been unable to find, is the body of evidence for the theory, beyond the pairs of lines from Shakespeare collected by Schmidt, and other examples of lines that are difficult to scan as iambic verse. The theory seems to rely on the assumption that the scansion is given, so that we can work out the pronunciation of the words from the scansion. But absent an independent body of evidence, we have no justification for proceding this way: it makes just as much sense to take the pronunciation of the words as given, and work out the scansion from the pronunciation. So the theory, at least insofar as it is presented by the authors I have quoted here, seems unconvincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find in Richard Bentley’s 1732 edition of Milton’s &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, the following note on Milton’s line “Encamp their Legions; or with obscure wing”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I suspect, He gave it, with more Art, and smoother Accent, “Encamp their Legions; &lt;em&gt;oft&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;wing obscure&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Bentley (1732). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ParadiseLostRichardBentley1732/page/n37/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton’s Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, note to book II, line 132&lt;/a&gt;. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under the “recession of accent” theory the accent was smooth in the original line so that Bentley had nothing to object to, unless the practice had already died out the early 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my questions are,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the modern consensus, if any, on the “recession of accent” theory?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there a body of independent evidence for the theory?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, what is it? If not, how was the record corrected?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:16:34.163" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:16:34.163" Title="What evidence is there for the &quot;recession of accent&quot; theory?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13949" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14054" CreationDate="2020-04-27T21:46:28.997" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Wikipedia, the &quot;uncanny&quot; is defined as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the psychological experience of something as strangely familiar, rather than simply mysterious. It may describe incidents where a familiar thing or event is encountered in an unsettling, eerie, or taboo context. - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite understand what the definition means. In one YouTube video going over the element of Gothic literature, the uncanny is vaguely described as &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;...something seemingly new, and nevertheless transports us to an event or emotions own past or harks back to a bygone era ... situations or characters that may appear unfamiliar at first, but soon reveals to be known or recognized by the characters producing an uneasy or even frightening effect.&quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/fUNuFLHvVng?t=597&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Features of Gothic Literature, timestamp 9:57&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these make much sense to me. What's the significance of this whole &quot;familiar&quot; or &quot;known&quot; element? Can someone explain the uncanny element more clearly with examples from literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T14:30:10.553" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:30:10.553" Title="What is the &quot;uncanny&quot; element of Gothic Literature?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13950" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:15:47.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T22:15:47.637" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T22:15:47.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13951" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:15:47.637" Score="0" Body="For general questions about gothic works of literature. If your question is about a specific gothic work, use the title and author tags instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T23:52:50.947" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T23:52:50.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13952" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:20:00.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T22:20:00.113" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T22:20:00.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13953" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:20:00.113" Score="0" Body="For works about or related to author Sim Kern. If this is a question about a specific work of theirs, that work should be tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:04:55.980" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:04:55.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13954" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:24:22.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T22:24:22.410" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T22:24:22.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13955" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-27T22:24:22.410" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Canadian-born American writer Hulbert Footner (1897 – 1944) and his life as a writer. He is primarily known for his works on detective fiction, which include &quot;Ramshackle House&quot; and the &quot;Madame Story&quot; series. If this is a specific work about his, that work should be tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-27T23:56:34.707" LastActivityDate="2020-04-27T23:56:34.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T00:39:35.603" Score="4" ViewCount="2593" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is, that how could it be possible for Marlowe to deny the existence of God while at the same time, produce such a masterpiece like &lt;em&gt;Dr. Faustus&lt;/em&gt; whose topics are God, Lucifer, angels, virtue and sin, Heaven and hell and most of all, the conclusion itself. If this is the work of Marlowe, then why is he called an atheist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7794" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T10:32:42.940" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T12:12:43.487" Title="Why is Christopher Marlowe considered an atheist?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;christopher-marlowe&gt;&lt;doctor-faustus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13958" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13973" CreationDate="2020-04-28T08:20:58.873" Score="4" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In R. K. Narayan's short story &quot;A Willing Slave&quot; (which I read as part of his 1982 collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), the old lady known simply as &quot;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ayah#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ayah&lt;/a&gt;&quot; takes care of many responsibilities, but her main duty is to look after the young girl Radha. The story says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Her main job, for which she received two meals a day, fifteen rupees a month and three saris a year, kept her active for over twelve hours in the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being paid in rupees is natural enough, and being paid in meals is not strange for a house servant. But being paid in saris? Does &quot;saris&quot; in this context mean &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the garment&lt;/a&gt;, or is there another meaning? Was it normal in those days in India for servants to be paid in &lt;em&gt;clothing&lt;/em&gt;, or does this tell us something about the relations between the Ayah and her employers in this story? I don't fully understand the cultural significance of saris, so I may be missing something here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:19:56.260" Title="Was the Ayah paid partly in clothes, and was this standard practice?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13956" CreationDate="2020-04-28T09:13:12.190" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR:&#xA;1 - Marlow was not an atheist in the modern sense.&#xA;2- Dr Faustus is not as clearly religious as it first appears&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's start by pointing out that &amp;quot;atheism&amp;quot; doesn't necessarily stop an author from writing about theism. Umberto Eco, for example, is a professed atheist yet is the author of &lt;em&gt;The Name of the Rose&lt;/em&gt;, a novel set in a medieval monastery which examines many themes in religion and belief. There is no particular problem, therefore, in reconciling the religious elements in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Faustus&lt;/em&gt; with having been written by an atheist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, the question of Marlowe's atheism is not a straightforward one. Not least because the definition of &amp;quot;atheism&amp;quot; used in the Elizabethan era is not the same as the one used today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth's father, Henry VIII had founded the church of England and made himself the head of that church. Therefore, to be an atheist in England was literally equivalent to treason: in denying God, you are denying the monarch's divine right to rule. By Elizabeth's time, this was even more problematic because her succession to the throne was dependent on the legality of Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, which he was only able to push through as the head of his own church. So, by the time of Marlowe, the term &amp;quot;atheist&amp;quot; had acquired a wider subtext equivalent to &amp;quot;anarchist&amp;quot; in modern usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, Marlowe is often counted among the &amp;quot;School of Night&amp;quot;, a loose group of critical thinkers including Sir Walter Raleigh. These men were often referred to as atheists in their era but a modern examination of their writing and behaviour suggests they are more what we would today call religious dissenters or perhaps agnostics. People who doubted the literal truth of the Bible and its interpretation and practices as laid down by the Church of England not, necessarily, people who denied the existence of God outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Raleigh as an example. In his book &amp;quot;The History of the World&amp;quot; he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the rest; I do also account it not the meanest, but an impiety&#xA;monstrous, to confound God and Nature; be it but in terms. ....  It is God that commandeth all: it is Nature that&#xA;is obedient to all: it is God that doth good unto all, knowing and&#xA;loving the good He doth: It is Nature, that secondarily doth also&#xA;good, but it neither knoweth nor loveth the good it doth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, God is good and lord over all nature. Does that sound like the writing of someone who rejects the existence of God? Raleigh was also known as an aider and supporter of puritan priests. Rather, Raleigh was someone who saw the value of rational thinking and was prepared to use that thinking to challenge the orthodox dogma of the church and - by extension - the state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, having established that &amp;quot;atheism&amp;quot; in the 16th century had a much wider meaning than it does today, let's return to Marlowe. Much of the evidence we have of his atheism rests on the charge of a single informer, Richard Baines. Baines was a spy, whose work was to ferret out Catholic sympathisers in protestant England. His continued employment was, to some extent, thus dependent on him finding such sympathisers. He is the only direct source we have for Marlowe's atheism which, in itself, seems a valid reason to question whether Marlowe was, in fact, an atheist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we presume that Baines was telling the truth, here are some of the things he claims Marlowe to have written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom ... that he used him as the sinners of Sodom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at these statements in the light of how Elizabethans defined &amp;quot;atheism&amp;quot; it seems likely, then, that Marlowe was an &amp;quot;atheist&amp;quot; in the same way Raleigh was: someone who doubted the literal truth of scripture rather than doubted God outright. Nothing in these statements or any of the other 14 items Baines laid against Marlowe suggests an absolute rejection of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, if we look at &lt;em&gt;Dr. Faustus&lt;/em&gt;, it is arguable that the play itself is espousing this kind of &amp;quot;atheism&amp;quot;, which rejects dogma but not Christianity as a whole. The ending of the play falls in with the dominant Christian concept of heaven and hell, suggesting a broad acceptance of scripture. But as for the details, take the following lines from the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within this circle is Jehovah’s name/ Forward and backward anagrammatized;/ The abbreviated names of holy saints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How! Bell, book, and candle, book and bell, / Anon you shall hear a hog grunt, a calf bleat, and an ass bray, / Because it is St. Peter’s holy day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both these cases, Faustus can be seen as critiquing organised religion. In the first instance, he is subverting the value placed on the holy name of Jehovah. In the second he is comparing the liturgies of religious rituals with animal noises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the play, the Pope's men urge God to curse Faustus for his behaviour, chanting in Latin. But nothing happens. This pokes fun at the idea that God can be invoked through religious ritual. It can also, of course, be read as suggesting that God does not exist. By the end of the play, all we can be certain of, in a religious sense, is that the devil exists. In which case we could argue that the play is, in fact, wholly atheist: rejecting God and using Satan merely as a plot device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boas, Frederick Samuel (1940). Christopher Marlowe: a biographical and critical study. Oxford: Clarendon Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kocher, Paul H. (1940). Marlowe's Atheist Lecture. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Webb, Susanne S (1969). Raleigh, Hariot, and Atheism in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T12:12:43.487" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13960" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13961" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" Score="0" Body="Questions about Christopher Marlowe's play 'Doctor Faustus', published posthumously in 1604 (the A text) and again in 1616 (the B text). Use this tag for either version of Marlowe's play and add the tag [christopher-marlowe]. Do not use this tag for Goethe's 'Faust, Part One' and 'Faust, Part Two'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T10:35:26.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T10:56:53.140" Score="5" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Part Two of R. K. Narayan's novel &lt;em&gt;The Painter of Signs&lt;/em&gt;, Raman and Daisy visit a remote village, after which they return to Malgudi. Due to unforeseen circumstances, they need to spend a night on the road, Daisy sleeping in a bullock cart and Raman sleeping under it. The next morning, Raman discovers that Daisy spent much of the night in a tree:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then he asked suddenly, 'When did you learn tree climbing?'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  'We used to play Gorilla when I was young; whoever becomes a Gorilla must climb a tree and stay there. We used to play this for hours day after day, and that's been helpful. (...)'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this based on a real game or did Narayan make this up? If it is a real game, what were or are the rules? If multiple versions of this game exist (or existed) in India, I am most interested in a or the version played in the state of Tamil Nadu, from which Narayan originated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T10:56:53.140" Title="Is Daisy's Gorilla game based on a real game?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;&lt;the-painter-of-signs&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8449" CreationDate="2020-04-28T20:23:50.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, I doubt that Carton was going there to support Darnay. Although Darnay and Lucie treat him like family, Carton still feels inadequate in the presence of Darnay. As he states in Chapter 20, &quot;The Plea&quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I dare say, to know that I had it.”  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Carton most likely was there to visit Lucie, since that seems to be the main reason why he visited them previously before, with how Carton is described as,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother....  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text isn't really specific on why. Sydney Carton tells Miss Pross, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don’t be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. Lorry’s, to his surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not present myself elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be useful; I present myself here, to beg a little talk with your brother. I wish you had a better employed brother than Mr. Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr. Barsad was not a Sheep of the Prisons.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be that he came to comfort Lucie, but I think it's most likely Carton came to trade his life with Darnay. That's why Carton said that he was waiting to until things got better or how he could help. His plan of help was to free Darnay and take his place, but he had to be sure that Darnay's life was in danger. So I doubt it was actually a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;s&gt;Team Stryver all the away&lt;/s&gt; Rest in peace, Mr. Carton. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T20:23:50.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-28T22:53:21.437" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Carton throughout &lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt; is shown as a man who hates who he is, and wishes he could be someone different but cannot. I think one of the best quotes to represent this is in &quot;Fellow of No Delicacy&quot;, where he says to Lucie,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down, but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He only truly feels he has done something good in his life when he dies in the place of Darnay, for the sake of Lucie and her family. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... why? I know Dickens never really writes in &lt;em&gt;A Tale of Two Cities&lt;/em&gt; about Carton's past, but are there other clues in the text explaining why he feels unredeemable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T22:53:21.437" Title="Why does Carton feel so bad about himself?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-tale-of-two-cities&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13965" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:45:12.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T23:45:12.023" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T23:45:12.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13966" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:45:12.023" Score="0" Body="Kazuo Iwamura (1939-to present) is a Japanese children's author and illustrator. Use this tag for questions related to him or any of his works. If this is a specific question about one of his works, that work should be tagged as well, and a Japanese work by him should also include [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:51:54.413" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:51:54.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13967" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:49:23.877" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T23:49:23.877" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T23:49:23.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13968" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:49:23.877" Score="0" Body="Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc (1864-1941) is a French novelist and short story writer, famous for his character Arsene Lupin. Use this tag if a question involves him or any of his works. If this question is related to one of his works originally written in French, use the tag [french-literature], along with either a tag for a specific longer work or the tag [short-stories]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T06:40:15.960" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T06:40:15.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13969" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:51:16.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-28T23:51:16.307" LastActivityDate="2020-04-28T23:51:16.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13970" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-28T23:51:16.307" Score="0" Body="Use this tag for questions about or related to Maurice LeBlanc's mystery novel, &quot;The Hollow Needle&quot;. This tag should always be tagged with the author [maurice-leblanc] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:52:25.547" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:52:25.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13714" CreationDate="2020-04-29T00:39:00.410" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Memoirs are by definition subjective, so they definitely can have an air of self-awareness associated with them.  Three that come to mind are Benjamin Franklin's &lt;em&gt;Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, Frederick Exley's &lt;em&gt;Notes from a Fan&lt;/em&gt; and William Borroughs' &lt;em&gt;Junkie&lt;/em&gt;. In Franklin, the feeling is more like a Horatio Alger dime novel that a real life.  He seems more intent on showing the correct method of developing his moral life than chronicling the actual events.  I'm not sure how much he expected the reader to see this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exley explicitly subtitled his novel as &quot;A Fictional Memoir&quot;. He freely embellished his own life in an attempt to give the feeling of what his life was like and to give better narrative cohesion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Burroughs has a distanced view of his life and feels like a comment on it as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you accept Exley's &quot;fictional memoir&quot; stance you can start thinking of autobiographical fiction that often has a strong self-awareness associated with it.  I think of examples such as &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;, or Ellison's &lt;em&gt;Invisible Man&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8776" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T00:39:00.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13958" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:19:56.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Saris&quot; in this context indeed refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the garment&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might help to think of the three saris that the Ayah received every year to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/perquisite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;perquisite&lt;/a&gt;, rather than a part of her regular salary. It is customary in India, even today, to provide a small bonus to one's employees before important festivals. Most likely the bonuses that the Ayah received were in the form of saris rather than cash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ayah would also not have to spend too much money on herself for new clothes if she was receiving three saris every year, so the arrangement probably suited her as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the most important Tamil festivals include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pongal_(festival)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pongal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puthandu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Puthandu&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navaratri&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Navaratri&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deepavali&lt;/a&gt;, and the Ayah probably received new clothes for some of these occasions. In fact, it is traditional to shop for new clothes for the entire family specifically to celebrate these festivals. One can expect the markets to be filled with fresh stocks accompanied by heavy discounts. It might very well have been cheaper and more convenient for the mistress to buy an additional sari for the Ayah along with the bulk purchasing before a festival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another point worth mentioning is that since the Ayah was residing under the same roof as her employers, the mistress would probably feel &lt;em&gt;obligated&lt;/em&gt; to provide new clothes for the Ayah too when purchasing new clothes for the rest of the family, since she was a part of the household in a way. Certainly there would be an aspect of social pressure in creating such a sentiment, considering the unfavourable reaction in the family when the Ayah failed to return immediately from her trip to her home in Saidapet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Radha's] mother and others were furious. ‘She has perhaps been run over and killed,’ they said. ‘Such a blundering, blind fool. I am surprised it didn’t happen before. She must have taken it into her head to give herself a holiday suddenly. I will dismiss her for this. No one is indispensable. These old servants take too much for granted, they must be taught a lesson.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible (but less likely, in my opinion) that the three saris the Ayah received every year were not bonuses for any festival, but were instead &lt;em&gt;gifts&lt;/em&gt; of old saris belonging to the mistress that were still serviceable. It would be less wasteful to give them to the Ayah compared to throwing them away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:19:56.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13974" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:36:31.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:36:31.533" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:36:31.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13975" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:36:31.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the musical artist Eliza Grace or about her writings. If this is a question about literary aspects of her work such as lyrics, it should be tagged along with [song-lyrics]. If it does not relate to literature, it may belong in either Music Practice &amp; Theory SE or Music Fans SE depending on the respective community guidelines. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T06:38:12.957" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T06:38:12.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13976" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:38:58.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:38:58.333" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:38:58.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13977" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T03:38:58.333" Score="0" Body="For questions about or related to &quot;Moonchild&quot;, a novel written by British occultist Aleister Crowley. This tag should be used in conjunction with the tag [aleister-crowley]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T03:52:35.223" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T03:52:35.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T07:17:51.583" Score="3" ViewCount="222" Body="&lt;p&gt;My professor asked me this for an assignment. It was to identify a Dante's Inferno reference in Much Ado About Nothing. I don't know what he meant by this. Where is this reference? Does not have to be a long statement, just a statement or a phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9973" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-30T16:19:07.207" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T16:19:07.207" Title="Dante's Inferno reference in Much Ado About Nothing" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;much-ado-about-nothing&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13979" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T09:05:23.783" Score="3" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;How does the plot of &lt;em&gt;The Moviegoer&lt;/em&gt; show the influence of existentialist authors, specifically Kierkegaard, on Percy's writing. I've also noticed some similarities between the &quot;leap of faith&quot; between Kierkegaard and Walker, but it's too abstract for me to put into words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9974" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:10:52.093" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:10:52.093" Title="In what ways does The Moviegoer echo Kierkagaardian existentialist principles?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;soren-kierkegaard&gt;&lt;the-moviegoer&gt;&lt;walker-percy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13978" CreationDate="2020-04-29T09:05:25.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no direct, obvious reference to Dante's &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;. However, there is a tangential link between the two works in their character and plot: both can be conceived as love stories driven by a female character called Beatrice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beatrice in the &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; is based on Beatrice Portinari. Dante met her at around the age of nine and remained smitten with her, even after she married another man and then died at the age of 25. In the book, she represents Dante's ideal of womanhood, sending Dante's first guide Virgil to guide him into Hell as the first part of his journey to redeem him from sin. Beatrice eventually becomes Dante's guide herself when she reaches heaven in the third book of &lt;em&gt;The Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Paradisio&lt;/em&gt;. She represents religion, grace and faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be framed as a love story because it is Beatrice's love for Dante that causes her to reach out and redeem him at no small cost to herself: it is implied she descends to hell in order to free Virgil to become Dante's first guide. And, of course, the ultimate goal of his journey is to reach the ultimate expression of love in God's love for humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The love story in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; is much more straightforward of course: it's the courtship between Beatrice and Benedick which ends with their marriage. It's a very different kind of love story, of course, far more turbulent than the idealised romance of &lt;em&gt;The Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;. And the Beatrice in this story is almost the opposite of Dante's character, being sharp, shrewd and rational. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet there is one more tantalising comparison we can make between them. In &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, Benedick makes the following speech about Beatrice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;This can be no trick: the&#xA;  conference was sadly borne. They have the truth of&#xA;  this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady: it&#xA;  seems her affections have their full bent. Love me!&#xA;  why, it must be requited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Canto V of the &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;, Dante writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which translates roughly as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these focus on the importance of romantic love being requited: otherwise, it is simply pining for another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footnotes to the Oxford World's Classics edition of &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Sheldon P. Zitner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T09:05:25.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13981" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13982" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about Walker Percy's debut novel 'The Moviegoer' (1961). Use this tag with the tag [walker-percy]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:16:26.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13983" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13984" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist Walker Percy (1916 – 1990) and his life as a writer. He was awarded the National Book Award for Fiction for his novel 'The Moviegoer'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:18:33.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13985" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13986" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the writings of the inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:25:18.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13987" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13988" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla', originally published in 1919 and re-edited after Tesla's death. Use this tag with [nikola-tesla]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T10:28:37.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="13992" CreationDate="2020-04-29T11:19:57.780" Score="12" ViewCount="1615" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question on our site asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/13978/2191&quot;&gt;whether Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; contained a reference to Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In his answer, Matt Thrower mentions Beatrice, the name of both a character in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Portinari&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the woman who inspired some of Dante's writings&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Dante%27s_Divine_Comedy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;not translated into English until 1782&lt;/a&gt;, roughly a century and a half after Shakespeare's death. Dante's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vita_Nuova&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Vita Nuova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was inspired by his love for Beatrice Portinari, was probably not translated into English until much later; Wikipedia mentions  Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation from 1848.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Chaucer admired Dante, since he wrote, for example, in the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Redeth the grete poete of Ytaille &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That highte Dant, for he kan al devyse &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Fro point to point; nat o word wol he faille&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(More mentions can be found by searching for &quot;Dant&quot; or &quot;Dante&quot; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.archive.org/stream/CanterburyTales-Chaucer/CanterburyTales-Chaucer_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text of the &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we have no evidence that Shakespeare read Italian (or no convincing evidence, as far as I know). There is a similar question on Quora (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Did-Shakespeare-read-Dante?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Did Shakespeare read Dante&lt;/a&gt;), which does not cite any sources or evidence. In addition, Shakespeare may have learnt about the content of Dante's works by other means than &lt;em&gt;reading&lt;/em&gt; them. So through which route might Shakespeare have become familiar with at least some of the content of the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; or any other work by Dante?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:00:44.960" Title="How might Shakespeare have become familiar with Dante's work?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13990" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13991" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" Score="0" Body="Questions about philology, the scholarly study of texts (literary or non-literary, oral or written), their provenance, authenticity and original form. Philology can also include questions about meaning; however, please use the [meaning] tag for questions that are purely about meaning." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T11:54:07.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13992" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13989" CreationDate="2020-04-29T12:53:51.660" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR: Shakespeare was clearly familiar with a lot of Italian literature second-hand, and there is circumstantial evidence for first-hand.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's Italian influence is a question that's aroused a lot of interest. How could it not, when a third of his known plays were set at least partially in Italy in a wide range of geographical locations? Indeed, it has been noted that he correctly included a lot of local details in his scenes, such as church names and routes via canal. Yet this is in an age when international travel was still relatively uncommon. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever went there, and his relatively modest wealth compared with the aristocracy would have made it very unlikely. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do know that Shakespeare was intimate with at least one person who had travelled to Italy: the actor Will Kemp who was part of the same company as Shakespeare. He is documented to have travelled in both Germany and Italy sometime after 1599. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Italy was inspirational among poets of the era. Many of the terms used to describe poetry at the time are rooted in Italian: stanza, sestina, sonetto. This is partly due to the national stereotype of Italians as being passionate and charismatic, making them ideal dramatic foils. By setting plays in a foreign country he could include political allusions in his plays while avoiding accusations of bias, both crucial at a time of high political paranoia in England. Given its popularity among poets and dramatists, what better setting than Italy? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it seems likely that Shakespeare would have been surrounded by people who were versed in Italian literature and language, due to its popularity. And he'd have been talking to them to get the necessary details for the Italian settings of his plays. Dante's work was certainly known in 17th century England so it seems inconceivable that Shakespeare would not have heard about them, likely in detail, at least in second hand. The limited parallels drawn between &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt; in the referenced question and answer require no more than limited knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, there is a fair degree of circumstantial evidence that Shakespeare could read Italian. It seems likely, for example, that he was well versed in French since an entire scene of Henry V is written in that language. On the presumption he did go to grammar school, he would also have learned Latin, and in the preface to an edition of the First Folio poet Ben Jonson salutes Shakespeare in spite of his &quot;small Latin and lesse Greeke&quot;. So he seems to have had some skill in at least two languages other than English, both of which are structurally similar to Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another clue is that many of Shakespeare's plays are inspired by Italian originals. A sub-plot in &lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, for example, seems to have been based on &lt;em&gt;I Suppositi&lt;/em&gt; by Ludovico Ariosto. This is further evidence that, whether he could speak Italian or not, he was certainly familiar with its cultural influence. But we can go further. Othello follows the plot of &lt;em&gt;Un Capitano Moro&lt;/em&gt; by Cinthio and there is compelling evidence that Shakespeare took his inspiration from the original source. There was no English translation of this available at Shakespeare's time and while a French translation existed, the structural and linguistic similarities are much closer between Othello and the original Italian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it seems that Shakespeare, a man of relatively common birth, aspired to be seen as a contemporary gentleman. He was active in ensuring his father was given a coat of arms which he himself inherited in 1601. In &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Shakespeare has Portia complain of her suitor that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian, and you will come into the court and swear that I have a poor pennyworth in the English. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that Shakespeare felt a familiarity with all three was a necessary accomplishment for an English gentleman. If he himself could not boast those skills, writing this line would open him up to the mockery of his peers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Richard Paul Roe. &lt;em&gt;The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Retracing the Bard's Unknown Travels&lt;/em&gt;. HarperCollins, 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Laura Tosi, Shaul Bassi (editors). &lt;em&gt;Visions of Venice in Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;. Routledge, 2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Werner P. Friederich. &lt;em&gt;Dante's Fame Abroad&lt;/em&gt;. University of North Carolina Press, 1950&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Naseeb Shaheen. &quot;Shakespeare's Knowledge of Italian&quot;. &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Survey&lt;/em&gt; 47 (1994).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:00:44.960" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:00:44.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15460" CreationDate="2020-04-29T13:37:50.347" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34216194-failure-to-communicate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this promising book&lt;/a&gt; and while I did find several online shops who sell it as &amp;quot;paperback&amp;quot;, I was unable to find an ebook version of it. Even though the website clearly sells ebooks as well as paper books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only exception was for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.fr/gp/product/B01N81A1XO/ref=x_gr_w_bb_sin?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;tag=x_gr_w_bb_fr-21&amp;amp;linkCode=ur2&amp;amp;camp=1642&amp;amp;creative=6746&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example of a bookstore selling the paper version but not the ebook: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/failure-to-communicate-kaia-s-nderby/1130380317?ean=9789198529708&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barnes and Noble&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why is that? Why don't bookstores always sell the ebook version of a story when they sell the (recently published) paper version of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7957" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T15:17:49.797" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T15:17:49.797" Title="Why are some recently published book available on paper format but not on ebook?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;ebooks&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13993" CreationDate="2020-04-29T14:53:06.567" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason for some newly-published books being available on paper but not digitally is that the author can refuse to publish it as an e-book.&#xA;For example, when &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt; was published in 2005, &lt;a href=&quot;https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-06-14-rowling-refuses-ebooks_x.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. K. Rowling was refusing e-book versions&lt;/a&gt; for the Harry Potter books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;J.K. Rowling has not permitted any of the six Potter books to be released in electronic form, not even during the peak of the e-book craze a few years ago. Neil Blair, a lawyer with Rowling's literary agency, would only say that &quot;this has not been an area that we have sought to license&quot; and did not comment directly on whether pirated e-books, a common phenomena for Potter titles, were hurting sales.&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2005-06-14-rowling-refuses-ebooks_x.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;J.K. Rowling refuses e-books for Potter&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, USA Today, 14 June 2005)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article also mentions that &quot;books by (...) many other popular children's authors, including Lemony Snicket, Cornelia Funke and R.L. Stine&quot; are (or were, possibly) not available digitally. The article briefly discusses the reasons for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Several reasons are cited, from authors preferring books on paper to concerns over digital piracy to competition from television and other media. But the greatest problem is the lack of a popular reading device, a handicap that has held back the whole e-book business from the start.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article is 15 years old by now and e-book readers have become much more widely available. However, this does not change the fact that authors can refuse to have their books published in digital format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T14:53:06.567" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13995" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13996" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" Score="0" Body="Questions about Elif Shafak's 2006 novel 'The Bastard of Istanbul'. The book was originally published in English, so questions about it should not be tagged with [turkish-literature].&#xD;&#xA;Use this tag with the tag [elif-shafak]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:36:34.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13997" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T15:58:11.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T15:58:11.337" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T15:58:11.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13998" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T15:58:11.337" Score="0" Body="A self-help book written by Orison Swett Marden. Questions regarding this work should also be tagged with [orison-swett-marden]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:19:20.583" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:19:20.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="13999" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:02:31.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:02:31.013" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:02:31.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14000" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:02:31.013" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the Spanish-language novel, &quot;The Story of My Teeth&quot; by Valeria Luiselli. Use this tag with the [valeria-luiselli] tag and the [spanish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:22:16.910" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:22:16.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14001" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:04:47.117" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:04:47.117" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:04:47.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14002" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:04:47.117" Score="0" Body="For questions related to American poet and novelist Stephen Crane and any of his works. If this is a question about one of his novels that work should be tagged as well. If this is a question about one of his short stories, use the [short-story] tag instead. If this is a question regarding one of his poems, use the [poetry] tag instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:23:30.497" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:23:30.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:09:45.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:09:45.377" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:09:45.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:09:45.377" Score="0" Body="For questions about or related to the fantasy novel &quot;The Book of Lost Things&quot; by John Connolly. Use this tag with the [john-connolly] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:20:17.493" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:20:17.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14005" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:10:57.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:10:57.060" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:10:57.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14006" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:10:57.060" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Irish author John Connolly or any of his works. If this is a question about one of his novels, the novel or series should be tagged as well. If it is about his short stories, just use the [short-stories] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:21:24.630" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:21:24.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14007" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:13:43.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:13:43.850" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:13:43.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14008" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:13:43.850" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel &quot;Outer Dark&quot;, a novel by  American writer Cormac McCarthy. Questions regarding this work should also be tagged with [cormac-mccarthy]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:22:39.930" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:22:39.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14009" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13733" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:15:42.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I also asked that question on Reddit &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/g31u8c/any_ars%C3%A8ne_lupin_fans_around_here_a_question/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;r/books&lt;/a&gt; and here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/user/VladimirOo/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;u/VladimirOo&lt;/a&gt;'s answer :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then, Lupin's motives are never that clear in the novel. He might have&#xA;  made a mistake by accidentally dropping the paper - after all, he&#xA;  rarely got challenged like in this story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My guess is that he did it intentionally to test out Isidore's&#xA;  abilities. When the hollow needle's secret is uncovered, he had&#xA;  already given up on his thieving life and is ready to pass its&#xA;  property on. So dropping clues and mysteries behind him might be done&#xA;  on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9876" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:15:42.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14010" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:18:33.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:18:33.723" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:18:33.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14011" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:18:33.723" Score="0" Body="Ruskin Bond (1934-present) is an Indian-British author most famous for his works in children's literature. Use this tag for questions about him or any of his works, with the work in question tagged accordingly if it is a novel, or with the [short-stories] tag if it is about a short story." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:25:26.707" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:25:26.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14012" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:24:30.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:24:30.643" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:24:30.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14013" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:24:30.643" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel &quot;The Fall of the King&quot; by Johannes V. Jensen. This question should be tagged with [johannes-v-jensen] and [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:25:46.177" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:25:46.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14014" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:51:49.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:51:49.937" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:51:49.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14015" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:51:49.937" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Ingoldsby Legends', a collection of myths, legends, and short stories written by Richard Harris Barham, under the pseudonym &quot;Thomas Ingoldsby of Tappington Manor&quot;. Questions regarding this work should be tagged under [richard-harris-barham]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:04:33.960" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:04:33.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14016" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:52:52.893" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:52:52.893" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:52:52.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14017" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:52:52.893" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Korean-American author Min Jin Lee (born 1968) or any of her works. If this is a question about one of her novels, that work in question should be tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:05:54.187" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:05:54.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14018" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14019" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American-British novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (1888 – 1959) and his life as a writer. He is known for novels such as 'The Big Sleep' (1939),  Farewell, My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1953)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:56:05.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14020" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:57:06.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T16:57:06.570" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T16:57:06.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14021" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T16:57:06.570" Score="0" Body="For questions about the historical-fiction novel &quot;Pachinko&quot; by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee. Questions about this work should also be tagged with [min-jin-lee]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:04:39.807" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:04:39.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14022" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14023" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" Score="0" Body="Questions about the writings of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121 – 180). For writings in Greek, especially his 'Meditations', use the [greek-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:08:56.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14024" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14025" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Meditations' by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. Use this tag with the [greek-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:09:47.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14026" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14027" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran (1883 – 1931) and his life as a writer. He is best known for 'The Prophet' (1923, in English). For questions about writings of his that were published in Arabic, add the tag [arabic-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:14:42.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:17:43.220" Score="5" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the 1982 collection &lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; of R. K. Narayan short stories, I noticed a common theme appearing in several of them, namely that of &lt;strong&gt;an artist who leaves their creative work behind forever&lt;/strong&gt;. All of these are stories reproduced from the earlier collection &lt;em&gt;An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt; (1947).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;Gateman's Gift&quot;, the protagonist is a gatekeeper who retires and begins making clay sculptures and sending them to his revered former boss. After almost going completely mad because of imagined disapproval, he decides to quit his hobby forever even though in fact he received approval from all sides.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;Such Perfection&quot;, Soma creates a statue of the god Nataraja which is so perfect that displaying it causes the god to be angry and bring about natural disasters. Even after it becomes imperfect and the disasters cease, he &quot;never touched his mallet and chisel again&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In &quot;The Snake-Song&quot;, the Talkative Man learns to play incredible music, but after refusing to help a wandering &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadhu&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sadhu&lt;/a&gt; he is forced to play only one tune to charm a cobra, and therefore gives up music altogether.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is this a recurring theme in Narayan's writing in general?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it just a coincidence that three stories in the same collection have this theme? &lt;strong&gt;Is there any significance to it?&lt;/strong&gt; For example, is it based on experience in Narayan's own life, or perhaps on someone he knew?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:17:43.220" Title="Is artists leaving their art forever a significant theme in R. K. Narayan's writing?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14029" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14030" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" Score="0" Body="Questions about Art Spiegelman's graphic novel 'Maus'. Use this tag with [art-spiegelman] and [comics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:17:51.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14031" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:19:26.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:19:26.823" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:19:26.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14032" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:19:26.823" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American cartoonist Art Spiegelman (born 1948) or his life as an artist." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T23:22:54.813" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:22:54.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14033" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14034" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about the writings of the American author and venture capitalist James David Vance (born 1984) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:27:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14035" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14036" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Irish writer Kevin Barry (born 1969) and his life as a writer. Barry has published collections of short stories and the novel 'City of Bohane'," OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:34:06.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14037" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14038" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet (and painter and filmmaker) Richard Siken (born 1967) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:38:03.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14039" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14040" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" Score="0" Body="Questions about Thomas Pynchon's 1965 novel 'The Crying of Lot 49'. Use this tag with [thomas-pynchon]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T17:40:06.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14041" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14042" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini (born 1965) and his life as a writer. He has published 'The Kite Runner' (2003), ' A Thousand Splendid Suns' (2007) and 'And the Mountains Echoed' (2013)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:01:26.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14043" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14044" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" Score="0" Body="Questions about Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel 'The Kite Runner' . Use this tag with [khaled-hosseini]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:02:32.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14045" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14046" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:40:02.310" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Europe, fairytales have various different names of the same story, or variants. One example of this is Charles Perrault's Cinderella (&quot;Cendrillon ou la petite pantoufle de verre&quot;) and the much darker, violent version of Cinderella by the Brother Grimms (&quot;Aschenputtel&quot;), where the latter story involves mutilation of the feet and the eyes of the step-sisters and the step-mother being plucked out.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Charles Perrault has another similar story known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkeyskin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donkeyskin&lt;/a&gt;. The plot is a bit different, but the main premise of an object that only fits onto the specific person (destined to marry) still remained. A similar variant exists as &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catskin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catskin&lt;/a&gt;&quot; in England by Joseph Jacobs.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Cinderella isn't just limited to Europe. One of the earliest version of Cinderella actually comes from China, under the title of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ye_Xian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ye Xian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There's a version in Korea known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://koreabridge.net/post/story-korean-cinderella-%E2%80%93-kongjwi-and-patjwi-breeze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kongjwi and Patjwi&lt;/a&gt;, and variants found throughout Africa.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Cinderella is probably one of the most famous examples of this, it isn't the only one: See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Riding_Hood#Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://members.home.nl/marcmarti/yugur/folktale/tale11.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Riding Hood&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honest_Woodcutter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Honest&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://workingfable.blogspot.com/2016/02/more-korean-fairy-tales.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Woodcutter&lt;/a&gt;, any many others.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can so many children's stories be so widespread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:40:02.310" Title="Why are so many fairy tales so similar?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14045" CreationDate="2020-04-29T18:40:02.310" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, let's clear the first misconception:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Fairy tales aren't for children&lt;/strong&gt;. Or at least, not all of them weren't meant to be for children until much later. Most fairy tales originated as folk tales that peasants and farmers would tell each other, presumably to pass time and lighten the drudgery of working. Zohar Shavit, in an analysis of fairytales in, &quot;The Concept of Childhood and Children's Folktales: Test Case - &quot;Little Red Riding Hood&quot;, states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Up until the nineteenth century, folktales were told and read... by adults (even among the upper class). Children, who were constituted part of adult society, were acquainted with them in the same way, although the tales were not considered meant for them.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is pretty obvious when you see earlier European examples of famous fairy tales such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sleeping Beauty&lt;/a&gt; (which involves rape, incest, and cannibalism), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Red_Riding_Hood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Red Riding Hood&lt;/a&gt;, (which also deals with cannibalism, strip-teasing, and metaphorical rape), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bluebeard&lt;/a&gt; (Perrault's version includes graphic descriptions of violence; gives me nightmares when I think about them). Brothers Grimm were amongst the first to actually have these fairytales be fully intended for children (Perrault had intended for children and adults alike, and you can find many &quot;winks&quot;, if you will in his texts).  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now back to how fairytales are so similar. There are two widespread theories on this topic:   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first theory is that all fairy tales originated from a single, or a collection of a few sources that spread throughout the world.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second theory states that fairy tales stem from common human experiences, and therefore similarities can arise from them.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is entirely possible that it can be some combination of both, and fairy tales were also most likely transmitted via oral culture through trade, which could account for the similarities. Since it's orally passed down however, it is harder to pinpoint the &quot;origin&quot; of the stories, only the earliest sources of these stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T18:40:02.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14048" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14049" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Confessions of Frannie Langton' (2019) by Sara Collins. Use this tag with the tag [sara-collins]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:04:37.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14050" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14051" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet, novelist and essayist Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:06:28.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14052" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nico Cipri's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ninocipri.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ninocipri.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14053" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the queer and trans/nonbinary writer and editor Nino Cipri and their life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" LastActivityDate="2020-04-29T21:10:40.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13949" CreationDate="2020-04-30T04:24:23.090" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to use a character well-known in the gothic for this answer: Dracula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Count Dracula is uncanny because he reminds us of a human, yet something is amiss in his appearance. He is simultaneously new and old - new to the story, characters, yet from a time period that goes way back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The uncanny in the gothic is quite simply something that doesn't seem to be as it should. Imagine a zombie as another uncanny trope. It seems human, it should be human, but something &lt;em&gt;just isn't right.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be applied to just about anything - the feeling derived is that though everything looks okay, in your heart you feel that something is wrong. That feeling is &quot;uncanny&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a non-character based example, think about &quot;The Yellow Wallpaper&quot; . The character in the story realizes there is something uncanny about the wallpaper and the house. It looks fine on the surface, yet something is perceived to be not right. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9982" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T04:24:23.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14055" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-30T16:04:59.317" Score="3" ViewCount="270" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1980 R. K. Narayan was appointed to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajya_Sabha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rajya Sabha&lt;/a&gt;, the upper house of the bicameral Parliament of India.&#xA;In his maiden speech to the Rajya Sabha, the author &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;spoke of children having so much homework that they had no time to play. He focused on the school bag. &#xA;  “The school bag has become an inevitable burden for the child. I am now pleading for abolition of the school bag, as a national policy, by an ordinance if necessary.&#xA;  I have investigated and found that an average child carries strapped to his back, like a pack-mule,&#xA;  not less than six to eight kilograms of books, note books and other paraphernalia of modern education in addition to lunch box and water bottle..”.&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bunpeiris.org/indian-writers/r-k-narayan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bunpeiris: R. K. Narayan&lt;/a&gt;, no date)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several sources, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/ampquotR.K.-Narayan-resonates-across-culturesampquot/article15738037.ece&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;R.K. Narayan resonates across cultures&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Hindu&lt;/em&gt;, 13.10.2006),&#xA;point out that the focus of Narayan's speech was not surprising because the author had already written about the burden experienced by children in his debut novel &lt;em&gt;Swami and Friends&lt;/em&gt; (1935).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/edit-page/Leave-Those-Kids-Alone-Committee-recommends-school-curriculum-reform/articleshow/1120557.cms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Leave Those Kids Alone: Committee recommends school curriculum reform&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;in the &lt;em&gt;Times of India&lt;/em&gt;, 24.05.2005, adds that  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;[Narayan's] speech led to&#xA;  the appointment of a committee chaired by Prof Yash Pal in 1991, but its report,&#xA;  Learning Without Burden, received little by way of serious attention. Its main&#xA;  point, that our system of education confuses knowledge with information, proved&#xA;  too obvious to be recognised as an indictment of curriculum designers. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched online for the text of this speech using search terms such as &quot;Indian parliament&quot;, &quot;Rajya Sabha&quot;, &quot;Narayan&quot; and quotes from the first source mentioned above, but I have come up empty-handed.&#xA;Is Narayan's speech to the Rajya Sabha available &lt;em&gt;anywhere&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T04:13:17.343" Title="Where can I find R. K. Narayan's maiden speech to the Indian parliament?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14056" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14055" CreationDate="2020-04-30T17:21:09.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;In the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=YDpGXYw9F_oC&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Story-teller's World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1989 by Penguin Books India.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least that's where I found it, after searching Google for part of the quote that you provided in your question. Other collections may also contain it, but this is where I found the clearest indication that it is the full text of his maiden speech to Parliament. It is in the second section of the collection, &amp;quot;Short Essays&amp;quot;, on pages 72-73. The title is &amp;quot;Cruelty to Children&amp;quot;, with a footnote that this is &amp;quot;Narayan's maiden speech as a Member of Parliament delivered at the Rajya Sabha in 1989&amp;quot;, and the text is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the stress of the concerns of the adult world, the problems or rather the plight of children pass unnoticed. I am not referring to any particular class but to childhood itself. The hardship starts right at home, when straight from sleep the child is pulled out and got ready for school even before its faculties are awake. He (or she) is groomed and stuffed into a uniform and packed off to school with a loaded bag on his back. The school-bag has become an inevitable burden for the child. I am now pleading for abolition of the school-bag, as a national policy, by an ordinance if necessary. I have investigated and found that an average child carries strapped to his back, like a pack-mule, not less than six to eight kgs of books, notebooks and other paraphernalia of modern education in addition to lunch-box and water bottle. Most children on account of this daily burden develop a stoop and hang their arms forward like a chimpanzee while walking, and I know cases of serious spinal injuries in some children too. Asked why not leave some books behind at home, the child explains it is her teacher's orders that all books and notes must be brought every day to the class, for what reason God alone knows. If there is a lapse, the child invites punishment, which takes the form of being rapped on the knuckles with a wooden scale, a refinement from our days when we received cane cuts on the palm only. The child is in such terror of the teacher, whether known as Sister, Mother Superior, or just Madam, that he or she is prepared to carry out any command issued by the teacher, who has no imagination or sympathy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dress regulation particularly in convent schools is another senseless formality - tie and laced shoes and socks, irrespective of the climate, is compulsory. Polishing a shoe and lacing it becomes a major task for a child first thing in the day. When the tie has become an anachronism even in the adult world, it's absurd to enforce it on children. A simple uniform and footwear must be designed and brought into force and these should be easier to maintain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After school hours when the child returns home her mother or home tutor is waiting to pounce on her, snatch her bag and compel her to go through some special coaching or homework. For the child the day has ended; with no time left for her to play or dream. It is a cruel, harsh life imposed on her, and I present her case before this house for the honourable members to think out and devise remedies by changing the whole educational system and outlook so that childhood has a chance to bloom rather than wilt in the process of learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other areas where the child needs protection is from involvement in adult activities such as protest marches, parades, or lining up on road-sides for waving in VIPs; children are made to stand in the hot sun for hours without anyone noticing how much they suffer from fatigue, hunger and thirst. Children must be protected, and cherished which would seem especially relevant in this year of the Nehru centenary. How it is to be done is upto our rulers and administrators to consider - perhaps not by appointing a commission of enquiry, but in some other practical and peaceful manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I transcribed this by hand, so any typing mistakes are mine, although grammatical mistakes are not. Note that &amp;quot;upto&amp;quot; in the last paragraph is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; my typing mistake: it is in the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-04-30T17:21:09.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14058" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14055" CreationDate="2020-04-30T19:03:54.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The website &lt;a href=&quot;https://rsdebate.nic.in/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rajya Sabha Official Debates&lt;/a&gt; is a portal maintained by the Govt. of India containing transcripts of all the debates held in the Rajya Sabha since its first session.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;RK Narayan's speech titled &lt;em&gt;Over-Burdening of School Children&lt;/em&gt; (not &lt;em&gt;Cruelty to Children&lt;/em&gt;, as mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/17/rand-althor&quot;&gt;@Randal'Thor&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14056/5387&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;) was delivered during the 150th session of the Rajya Sabha on 27th April, 1989. The transcript of the entire day's proceedings can be viewed &lt;a href=&quot;http://164.100.47.5/Official_Debate_Nhindi/Floor/150/F27.04.1989.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. RK Narayan's speech appears in the section &lt;em&gt;Special Mentions&lt;/em&gt; on pages 183–186 of the document (pages 92–93 of the PDF file).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEAnX.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uEAnX.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;RK Narayan's Parliament Speech-1&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lCltH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/lCltH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;RK Narayan's Parliament Speech-2&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The transcript has some typographical errors, to be sure. My guess is that too much effort was not expended on correcting such mistakes, which were probably induced by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OCR&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might also be interesting to note that the transcript contains a response to the above speech by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Srimati&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smt.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita_Pritam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amrita Pritam&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindi&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;before the concluding remarks by the Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Najma_Heptulla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Najma Heptulla&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typos in the transcript make reading it a bit of a pain, but the content  (except for the title, oddly) is exactly the same as provided by @Randal'Thor, so I recommend heading over to that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14056/5387&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to avoid the hassle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;I might as well add that the information given by @Randal'Thor that the speech was delivered in 1989 helped me narrow my search—it was becoming quite a pain, browsing through every single transcript from the year 1986 onwards!&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T04:13:17.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14059" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14064" CreationDate="2020-04-30T20:43:58.007" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Content warning:&lt;/strong&gt; the story, and this question, concern implied mutilation.&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In R. K. Narayan's short story &quot;The Edge&quot;, which I read as part of his 1982 collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://eruditesdps.files.wordpress.com/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Malgudi Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the knife sharpener Ranga is picked up by a friendly man in a car painted with &quot;TWO WILL DO, a propaganda for birth control&quot;. He is taken to a camp in the countryside, offered food and money, and asked a number of questions about his age and family. Then they unexpectedly lay him on a table and prepare for a surgical operation on him - the implication being that they wish to castrate him. He runs away and the story ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He recollected his butcher friend reading from a newspaper how the government was opening camps all over the country where men and women were gathered and operated upon so that they could have no children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: &lt;strong&gt;did anything like this really happen?&lt;/strong&gt; The time in which this story is set is as unclear as Ranga's age, but did &lt;em&gt;any&lt;/em&gt; government of India attempt to organise castration camps? Or if not the government, any other organisation? Or were there really rumours in the newspapers of such things, even if unfounded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T04:43:42.580" Title="Were there really such camps in India as attempts to prevent overpopulation?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;r-k-narayan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14061" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-30T23:49:14.830" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if anybody could help me to understand the last line of the poem “&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/managed-diversity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Managed Diversity&lt;/a&gt;”, written by Daniel Borzutzky: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The global economy brightens my room with the surveillance of my rotten assets&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The focus here is on the motive or the circumstance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Motive = The surveillance is the reason WHY the poetic persona’s room gets bright(er).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Circumstance = The global economy brightens my room WHEN it surveils my rotten asset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9990" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T13:59:21.040" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T14:00:18.557" Title="What does the last line of Daniel Borzutzky's &quot;Managed Diversity&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;daniel-borzutzky&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14059" CreationDate="2020-05-01T04:32:48.363" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sadly, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This happened during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emergency_(India)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emergency&lt;/a&gt; from 1975 to 1977 under Prime Minister &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indira_Gandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indira Gandhi&lt;/a&gt;. The programme of forced sterilization was headed by her son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjay_Gandhi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanjay Gandhi&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia has a little bit to say about this period in section 3.3 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Emergency_(India)&amp;amp;oldid=952738721#Forced_sterilization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Forced sterilization&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In September 1976, Sanjay Gandhi initiated a widespread compulsory sterilization programme to limit population growth. . . .&#xA;  The campaign primarily involved getting males to undergo vasectomy. Quotas were set up that enthusiastic supporters and government officials worked hard to achieve. There were allegations of coercion of unwilling candidates too. In 1976–1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, most of them forced, up from 2.7 million the previous year. The bad publicity led every government since 1977 to stress that family planning is entirely voluntary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the story &quot;The Edge&quot; appeared in the 1982 collection, after the Emergency was lifted, it is certainly based on the true events of the Emergency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what its worth, the forced sterilization programme was probably not a forced &lt;em&gt;castration&lt;/em&gt; programme. But, the general public might have confused the two things. The Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:The_Emergency_(India)&amp;amp;oldid=886995151#Castration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Talk page&lt;/a&gt; on the Emergency has a small discussion on this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T04:43:42.580" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T04:43:42.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14066" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-01T16:25:43.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T16:25:43.297" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T16:25:43.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14067" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-01T16:25:43.297" Score="0" Body="Daniel Borzutzky is an American poet and translator. Questions about his poems should be tagged with the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T16:31:04.870" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T16:31:04.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-01T16:48:04.967" Score="1" ViewCount="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the general introduction to &lt;em&gt;Before the Muses: An Anthology of Akkadian Literature&lt;/em&gt; (third edition, CDL Press, 2005)&#xA;Benjamin R. Foster discusses the &quot;Akkadian literary languages&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Babylonians believed that literature required a special idiom,&#xA;  using grammar, vocabulary, syntax, sound, and even spelling removed from&#xA;  common usage. The most refined literary style of this period is known as&#xA;  the &quot;hymnic-epic dialect&quot;. (...)&#xA;  In the Mature and Late periods of Akkadian literature, (...),&#xA;  another literary style known as &quot;Standard Babylonian&quot; was used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Foster's introduction does not give examples that clarify&#xA;how the hymnic-epic style and Standard Babylonian differed from each other.&#xA;What exactly were the differences from the point of view of grammar,&#xA;vocabulary, syntax and sound?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T16:48:04.967" Title="What features distinguish the hymnic-epic style from Standard Babylonian?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-01T17:15:14.800" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;So throughout the comic strip &lt;em&gt;Peanuts&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Schulz, Snoopy has been seen doing a fair number of ... shall we say &lt;em&gt;unusual&lt;/em&gt; activities. These range from being a WWI Flying Ace, to his obsession with chocolate-chipped cookies (and how he's completely unfazed by the effects), to even writing (albeit terrible) short stories.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;His most intriguing characteristic, however, is his uncanny ability to communicate with all forms and levels of life, including cats (like the cat next door), birds (Woodstock and his friends, he's a beagle scout master), and most importantly, other characters such as Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus, and pretty much everyone else. More impressively, however, it's not that Snoopy merely &lt;em&gt;understands&lt;/em&gt; the other characters, but the other characters seem to understand him too.&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LTHqO.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LTHqO.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3f9f2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3f9f2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how does he do it? Is there like a canonical answer/explanation to this phenomenon?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T17:32:36.147" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T17:32:36.147" Title="Is Snoopy a telepath?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;charles-m-schulz&gt;&lt;peanuts&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-01T18:00:47.700" Score="3" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a boy who wants to work at a vet's office, although I don't think his family/father was in favor of it.  One story that stands out in my memory is helping a deaf white kitten (possibly albino) get healthy, and then it gets adopted by a truck driver/delivery man.  The setting gives me a vague 50s feel, possibly Mid-west or New England-y?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this book in school, probably 4th-6th grade (~1990).  May have been a Newbery winner/honor book but I can't be 100% sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching google/goodreads/here hasn't turned up anything so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9997" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T18:00:47.700" Title="Looking for a book where a boy starts volunteering at a vet's office after school" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-01T18:57:29.340" Score="1" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking for the original latin or greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corpus Hermeticum&lt;/a&gt; online somewhere in text format (i.e. not a PDF). Does such a thing exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5056" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T21:04:38.627" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T06:01:01.353" Title="Does the Greek or Latin &quot;Corpus Hermeticum&quot; exist online anywhere in text format?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13797" CreationDate="2020-05-01T20:16:10.940" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below are a few references in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;S. Zhao (2012): &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/298436747_Kafka_Hamlet_and_the_Modern_Psyche%27s_Ecology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Kafka, Hamlet and the Modern Psyche's Ecology&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Foreign Literature Studies, 34(1):152-159.&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;From the abstract: &quot;Shakespeare's Hamlet has special appeal to Franz Kafka, and the two have a deep spiritual relationship. The paper tries to use the relevant records in Kafka's diaries, letters and literary works, especially the play The Warden of the Tomb, to analyze this relationship. (...)&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Andrew Zuliani: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/34917752/Kissing_the_Kolossoi_The_Staging_of_Bare_Life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Kissing the Kolossoi: The Staging of Bare Life&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, December 2016. &lt;br /&gt;This article discusses &lt;em&gt;The Warden of the Tomb&lt;/em&gt; and other plays in the context of an analysis of Georgio Agamben’s &lt;em&gt;Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life&lt;/em&gt; as a &quot;theatrical text&quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Burç DİNÇEL: &lt;a href=&quot;https://studyres.com/doc/12863162/the-warden-of-the-tomb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;REPRESENTING THE “OTHER” ON STAGE: A DRAMATURGICAL APPROACH TO FRANZ KAFKA'S “THE WARDEN OF THE TOMB” AND “THE HUNTER GRACCHUS”&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/teddergi/issue/18475/194540&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available in Turkish&lt;/a&gt;; already found by the OP.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aaron L Mishara (2010): &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2944142/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Kafka, paranoic doubles and the brain: hypnagogic vs. hyper-reflexive models of disrupted self in neuropsychiatric disorders and anomalous conscious states&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine, 2010; 5: 13. (One paragraph discussing the play; already found by the OP.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter F. Neumeyer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/docview/1301326282&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Franz Kafka, Sugar Baron&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 17, Iss. 1,  (Spring 1971): 5. (This apparently &lt;em&gt;mentions&lt;/em&gt; the play, but I can't access the full text to find out how much of the text discusses it.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on search engine results (see Rand al'Thor's comment), the following publication (or part of it) also appears to discuss &lt;em&gt;The Warden of the Tomb&lt;/em&gt; but I have not been able to access an abstract or a preview to verify this:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;M. Lazar and R. Gottesman, Eds.: &lt;em&gt;The Dove and the Mole: Kafka's Journey Into Darknenss and Creativity&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Interplay&lt;/em&gt;, No. 5 (1987 or 1988, depending on the source, see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://openlibrary.org/books/OL8214705M/The_Dove_and_the_Mole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Open Library&lt;/a&gt;)). (&lt;em&gt;Interplay&lt;/em&gt; is or was series of conference proceedings published by &lt;a href=&quot;http://undena.com/INTER.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Undena&lt;/a&gt; and should not be confused with the &lt;a href=&quot;http://interplay.thu.edu.tw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Interplay&lt;/em&gt; journal&lt;/a&gt;, which began in 2014.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnotes to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/43028077&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Katharina Meinel's article&lt;/a&gt; that Gareth Rees mentions in a comment contain references to articles in German (not in English); see Heinz Ide and Peter Cersowsky. It is somewhat easier to find German references than English ones:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heinz Ide: &quot;Franz Kafka. Der Gruftwächter und Die Truppenaushebung. Zur religiösen Problematik im Kafka-Werk&quot;. Jahrbuch der Wittheit zu Bremen. Band 5 (1961): S. 11.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter Cersowsky: &quot;Kafkas philosophisches Drama: Der Gruftwächter&quot;. Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, Band 40 (1990): S. 54-65.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sandra Fluhrer: &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/view/book/9783846760352/BP000011.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Vorkehrungen gegen das Tragische: Die Gruftwächter-Fragmente&quot;&lt;/a&gt;. In Sandra Fluhrer's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fink.de/view/title/52458?rskey=YrsCBy&amp;amp;result=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Konstellationen des Komischen. Beobachtungen des Menschen bei Franz Kafka, Karl Valentin und Samuel Becket&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Wilhelm Fink, 2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; by Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross, Rolf J. Goebel and Clayton Koelb (2005) has an entry on &lt;em&gt;Der Gruftwächter&lt;/em&gt; which ends with a short &quot;Further Reading&quot; section that lists the articles by Peter Cersowsky, Heinz Ide and Katharina Meinel that are already listed above. It does not list any secondary literature in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T21:39:51.250" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T21:39:51.250" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="509" CreationDate="2020-05-01T21:07:10.247" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you plug Strattenburg in google maps, you get one result which says Strattenburg, Pennsylvania. When you click on it, it is actually a school in the North-Center of Pennsylvania. And it is about 300 miles from Chapel Hill. If you were driving at 50 mph, you get to chapel hill in about 6 - 7 hours depending. This is why I am inclined to believe that John Grisham based the name and location of this town on Stattenburg, Pennsylvania - the school&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9999" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T21:07:10.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14071" CreationDate="2020-05-01T21:50:23.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Online versions of the Greek text are available at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.w66.eu/elib/html/poimandres.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ἑρμου του Τρισμεγιστου - ΠΟΙΜΑΝΔΡΗΣ on w66.eu&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.greek-language.gr/digitalResources/ancient_greek/anthology/literature/browse.html?text_id=631&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;«ΕΡΜΗΣ Ο ΤΡΙΣΜΕΓΙΣΤΟΣ»: 240. – Ποιμάνδρης on Greek-Language.org&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/erudits/hermestrismegiste/livre1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HERMÈS TRISMÉGISTE - Greek and French side by side&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear whether these Greek texts incomplete, however; they are suspiciously short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Latin version appears to be available on the blog &lt;em&gt;Pymander Aquarian&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;http://pymanderaquarian.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-pymander-in-latin.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Pymander in Latin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ficino's Latin translation is easier to find as a scanned version than as text, e.g. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ita-bnc-in2-00000705-001/page/n8/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;De potestate et sapientia Dei (Tr: Marsilius Ficinus) on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ENS01_LGphi494D_8/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mercurii Trismegisti Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei per Marsilium Ficinum traductus ..., on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.bnf.fr/fr/12244585/hermes_trismegiste_traites_hermetiques/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the list in the BnF database&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T22:28:04.043" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T22:28:04.043" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14075" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oriah Mountain Dreamer's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://oriahmountaindreamer.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oriahmountaindreamer.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14076" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Canadian author Oriah Mountain Dreamer and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" LastActivityDate="2020-05-01T22:12:05.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14077" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11207" CreationDate="2020-05-02T00:11:32.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Valorum pointed out in a comment, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.preteristarchive.com/Books/pdf/1618_deloney_canaans-calamitie.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Works of Thomas Deloney&lt;/em&gt;. Edited from the Earliest Extant Editions &amp;amp; Broadsides with an Introduction and Notes by Francis Oscar Mann&lt;/a&gt; (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912) contains the following endnote for &quot;ketha&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ketha&lt;/em&gt;. A variant of ‘quotha’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the glossary in &lt;em&gt;An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Paul Salzman (Oxford University Press, 1987, 1998) contains the following entry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;ketha&lt;/em&gt;, quotha = says he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the meaning that editors agree on, in spite of the reservations I expressed in my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T00:11:32.573" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T00:55:15.257" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sara Collins' website is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://saracollinsauthor.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;saracollinsauthor.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T01:03:10.863" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T01:03:10.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T00:55:15.257" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Sara Collins and her life as an author. Questions about her works should be tagged likewise." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T01:01:10.970" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T01:01:10.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14081" CreationDate="2020-04-23T02:04:07.850" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my copy of The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chuckled at that typo, imagining finance guys as a fundamental building block of the universe. I searched Google to see if anyone else caught it, though, and none of the results seemed to notice it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not going crazy, am I? The author clearly meant &quot;quarks&quot; unless there's some meaning from the seventies I'm not aware of, correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Slothario" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T13:05:53.627" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T13:06:28.267" Title="&quot;particles, photons and quants&quot; - a typo in &quot;The Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance&quot;?" Tags="&lt;zen-and-art-of-motorcycle-maint&gt;&lt;robert-m-pirsig&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14080" CreationDate="2020-04-23T02:32:13.150" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word “quants” &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; used in quantum physics, usually in the phrase “light quants”. Here is an example from 1932:  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The light energy..always remains concentrated in the form of ‘light quants’, or grains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Castelfranchi's Rec. Adv. Atomic Physics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" OwnerDisplayName="Laurel" LastActivityDate="2020-04-23T02:32:13.150" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14082" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14084" CreationDate="2020-04-30T18:27:26.643" Score="4" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n77/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oracle of the Dog&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the daughter of a murdered rich colonel was talking about her husband, a nobleman and skilled surgeon, who wanted to challenge the secretary to a duel, for he was angry with him, because the secretary accused him of murdering the old colonel. She said: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Does [the secretary] think my husband, who has given up a crest and a coronet as old as the Crusades for his principles, would kill an old man in a summer-house for a legacy like that?” Then she laughed again and said, “My husband isn’t killing anybody except &lt;strong&gt;in the way of business&lt;/strong&gt;. Why, he didn’t even ask his friends to call on the secretary.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the meaning of &lt;strong&gt;business&lt;/strong&gt; here? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing that he wanted to kill the secretary in the duel, but his wife dissuaded him?!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" OwnerDisplayName="Ahmed Samir" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:10:02.090" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:10:02.090" Title="What does &quot;in the way of business&quot; mean in &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot; by G. K. Chesterton?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5019" CreationDate="2020-05-02T04:15:21.213" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Oh this is super late. I'm actually seeing this to see if there are any answers I can link for my students but this is like the 5th google result so maybe not. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take: He doesn't die. It's Vonnegut's depiction of Billy considering that he has no ability to influence his destiny -- only on Earth is there any talk of free will. Since Billy can't control his free will, he invites the opportunity for this to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But really, this is all just a manifestation of guilt. He feels guilty about being responsible for the Germans capturing he and Weary, that Weary later dies, that all these people die in Dresden, and on the plane, and that Valencia dies. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be argued whether it actually happens or not, but if it does happen, it's because Billy invites the situation by going public, calling attention to himself, so as to make his destiny happen. And as the tralfamdorians say, the moment is structured that way. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also, it doesn't matter, as they say at the beginning of chapter 5: There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author (Vonnegut) has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end....(112)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10002" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T04:15:21.213" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14082" CreationDate="2020-05-02T10:48:18.220" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dr. Valentine is a surgeon, so his &quot;business&quot;—what he does for a living—is or includes performing surgery.&#xA;Surgical procedures are not without risk; if the procedure goes wrong, the patient can even die of the consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is how a surgeon may unintentionally cause somebody's death.&#xA;Cynically put, one may say that the surgeon's &quot;business&quot; or job has killed the patient.&#xA;This is what Dr. Valentine's wife meant when she said that &quot;[her] husband isn't killing anybody except in the way of business&quot;: his work may unintentionally cause a patient's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T10:48:18.220" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9073" CreationDate="2020-05-02T12:15:18.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found somewhere that provides a proper source, although it seems the interview was conducted and probably published in Chinese, so it may be difficult to actually find the original unless you speak Chinese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a footnote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=lTSYk4Ema28C&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul B. Foster, &lt;em&gt;Ah Q Archaeology: Lu Xun, Ah Q, Ah Q Progeny and the National Character Discourse in Twentieth Century China&lt;/em&gt;, Lexington Books, 2006&lt;/a&gt;, chapter 8 footnote 20, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=lTSYk4Ema28C&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PP1&amp;amp;ots=zoDyGMbtrq&amp;amp;sig=Q4_Wbs8Ox51VT388ymhApB-eUvk&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=snow&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 331&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lu Xun recognized exactly this point, as reported by Edgar Snow, who asked him: &quot;Since the Nationalist Party has made the second revolution, do you think there are just as many Ah Q's now as before?&quot; Lu Xun replied laughing: &quot;It's even worse. Now they are governing the country.&quot; Edgar Snow, &quot;Lu Xun he Meiguo jizhe Aidejia Sinuo tan A Q&quot; [Lu Xun talks about Ah Q with American reporter Edgar Snow], in &lt;em&gt;Shuo bu jin de A Q&lt;/em&gt; [The immutable Ah Q], gen. ed. Chen Shuyu (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1997), 120.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/shuo-bu-jin-de-a-q-wu-chu-bu-zai-de-hun-ling/oclc/47277619&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Worldcat&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/4190410&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford Libraries&lt;/a&gt; have entries for this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/103782042000291088?needAccess=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul B. Foster, &quot;Ah Q genealogy: Ah Q, &lt;em&gt;Miss Ah Q&lt;/em&gt;, national characterand the construction of the Ah Q discourse&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Asian Studies Review&lt;/em&gt;, 28(3) (2004), pp. 243-266&lt;/a&gt;, also cites this comment to the same source, the 1997 book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by first searching for Snow's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;amp;q=%E2%80%9CLu+Shun%2CMaster+of+Pai-Hua.%E2%80%9D&amp;amp;btnG=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Snow, &quot;Lu Shun: Master of Pai-Hua&quot;, &lt;em&gt;Asia (January)&lt;/em&gt; (1935): pp. 40-43&lt;/a&gt;, which I couldn't find online, but then searching for anything which &lt;em&gt;cites&lt;/em&gt; this article - of which Google Scholar found 6, one of them being the book quoted above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T12:15:18.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14080" CreationDate="2020-05-02T13:06:28.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Guidebook to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values&lt;/em&gt; (New York: William Morrow, 1990), Ron L. DiSanto and Tom J. Steele&#xA;included a section with notes to Pirsig's novel. There is also a note on the term &quot;quants&quot; (page 368):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;quants&quot;. This is a variation of &quot;quanta&quot;, most often found in the singular in the phrase &quot;light quant&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For those who want to look up the context of the quote: see Part I, chapter 3 in &lt;em&gt;Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance&lt;/em&gt;. Or see page 31 in the 40th anniversary edition, Vintage, 2004.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T13:06:28.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14061" CreationDate="2020-05-02T14:00:18.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_analytics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Predictive analytics&lt;/a&gt; refers to a variety of statistical techniques &#xA;that can be used to make predictions about things that are as diverse as&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/advanced-analytics-in-asset-management-beyond-the-buzz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;business assets&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and ...&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.businessinsider.com/sc/how-to-predict-the-next-refugee-crisis-2018-6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;refugees&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;two types of &quot;assets&quot; that are contrasted in Borzutzky's poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The global economy, or at least the &quot;digital economy&quot; has increasingly come to rely on statistical techniques and the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_economy#Reliance_on_Data&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;harvesting of data from internet users&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(&quot;surveillance&quot; in the poem's last line) to increase its profits.&#xA;From this point of view, everyone sitting in a room using the internet as an &quot;asset&quot; through the data that can be collected about them.&#xA;This type of economy literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/keep-the-lights-on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;keeps the lights on&lt;/a&gt; for part of the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, many online services that we use are made available free of charge because we &quot;pay&quot; for them with the data we provide on websites.&#xA;From this point of view, these services can continue to appear on our computer or smartphone screens, which also brighten our rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T14:00:18.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8208" CreationDate="2020-05-02T14:24:52.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;After reading Anne Frank's diary, I also read &lt;em&gt;Het Anne Frank Huis: een biografie&lt;/em&gt; by Jos van der Lans and Herman Vuisje (Boom, 2010)&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;Herinneringen aan Anne Frank&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miep_Gies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miep Gies&lt;/a&gt; (Bakker, 2009).&#xA;These books do not comment on the name Dussel as being somehow unflattering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, I have checked two editions of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Dale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-volume Van Dale dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, Johannes Franck's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/etymologischwoo00frangoog/page/n135/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymologisch woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;Etymological Dictionary of the Dutch Language&amp;quot;, 1892), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.interglot.nl/woordenboek/de/nl/search?q=Dussel&amp;amp;m=&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interglot&lt;/a&gt; (which lists it as a German word, not a Dutch one),&#xA;and asked other native speakers of Dutch. I have not found any evidence that &amp;quot;dussel&amp;quot; is a word in Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, I assume that biographer Matthias Heyl, whose native language is presumably German,&#xA;simply thought that the German noun &amp;quot;Dussel&amp;quot; also existed in Dutch with the same meaning.&#xA;Note that Anne Frank was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and was raised speaking German before the Frank family moved to the Netherlands,&#xA;so it is safe to assume that she knew what the German word meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T17:10:00.073" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T17:10:00.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13818" CreationDate="2020-05-02T15:21:07.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fama Fraternitatis is available in German at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.12koerbe.de/lapsitexillis/fama.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Allgemeine und General-Reformation der ganzen weiten Welt beneben der Fama Fraternitatis&lt;/a&gt; on 12koerbe.de,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.anthroweb.info/erweiterungen/quellen/fama-fraternitatis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fama Fraternitatis des löblichen Ordens des Rosencreutzes&lt;/a&gt; on anthroweb.info (translation into modern German),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/famafraternitati00andr/page/n6/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fama fraternitatis, oder, Entdeckung der Brüderschafft des löblichen Ordens dess Rosen Creutzes : beneben der Confession, oder, Bekantnus derselben Fraternitet ...&lt;/a&gt; (scan of an edtion from 1615).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Confessio Fraternitatis is available in German at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.12koerbe.de/lapsitexillis/confess.htm#Characteres%20und%20Buchstaben%20der%20Schrift%20der%20Natur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confessio Fraternitatis Oder Bekanntnuß der löblichen Bruderschafft deß hochgeehrten Rosen Creutzes an die Gelehrten Europae geschrieben&lt;/a&gt; on 12koerbe.de,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/famafraternitati00andr/page/54/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confession, oder, Bekantnus der löblichen Bruderschaft ...&lt;/a&gt; (scan of an edition from 1615, in the same volume as &quot;Fama fraternitatis&quot;, listed above),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.anthroweb.info/erweiterungen/quellen/confessio-fraternitatis.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Confessio Fraternitatis&lt;/a&gt; on anthroweb.info (translation into modern German).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chymical Wedding of C.R.C. is available in German at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.12koerbe.de/lapsitexillis/chym.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Valentin Andreae: Chymische Hochzeit: Christiani Rosencreutz Anno 1459&lt;/a&gt; on 12koerbe.de,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chymischehochzei00rose/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chymische Hochzeit, by Rosencreutz, Christian&lt;/a&gt; (scanned version of an edition from 1616),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/book/view/valentin_hochzeit_1616?p=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andreä, Johann Valentin: Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz Anno 1459. Straßburg, 1616&lt;/a&gt; on DeutschesTextArchiv.de (scanned image and text side by side),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.anthroweb.info/erweiterungen/quellen/chymische-hochzeit.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosenkreutz&lt;/a&gt; on anthroweb.info.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T15:21:07.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-02T16:42:15.930" Score="4" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book V of Robert Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ring_and_the_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ring and the Book&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1868), Count Guido Franceschini compares his plight to that of a character in a story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Sacchetti&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franco Sacchetti&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Aha, Sacchetti again!—“Dame,”—quoth the Duke,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “What meaneth this epistle, counsel me,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I pick from out thy placket* and peruse,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Wherein my page averreth thou art white&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And warm and wonderful ’twixt pap and pap?”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  “Sir,” laughed the Lady, “’t is a counterfeit!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Thy page did never stroke but Dian’s breast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The pretty hound I nurture for thy sake:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To lie were losel†,—by my fay‡, no more!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* a pocket in a skirt or dress † worthless ‡ faith&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hawlin and Burnett describe this passage as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a parody of Sacchetti, not an actual quotation from his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett, eds. (2001). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=krNwzIbd42EC&amp;amp;pg=RA3-PA61&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poetical Works of Robert Browning: Volume VIII. The Ring and the Book, Books 5–8&lt;/em&gt;, p. 61.&lt;/a&gt; Oxford: Clarendon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of Sacchetti’s stories, and what elements of them, are being parodied here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T16:42:15.930" Title="Which of Sacchetti’s stories are parodied in &quot;The Ring and the Book&quot;?" Tags="&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;the-ring-and-the-book&gt;&lt;franco-sacchetti&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14091" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14092" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" Score="0" Body="Franco Sacchetti (c. 1335–c. 1400), Italian poet and novelist, known for his &quot;Novelle&quot; (short stories)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T16:44:17.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14093" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:13:03.133" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:13:03.133" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:13:03.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14094" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:13:03.133" Score="0" Body="For questions about illustrators of works of literature as defined by the Help Center. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:16:33.810" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:16:33.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:17:02.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:17:02.320" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:17:02.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:17:02.320" Score="0" Body="A novel series by Rebecca Roanhorse. Questions about this work should be tagged with [rebecca-roanhorse]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:46:24.840" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:46:24.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14097" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:22:07.440" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:22:07.440" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:22:07.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14098" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:22:07.440" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life of and works by Khamoshi Shayari, an Indian poet. Should be tagged with the [poetry] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:47:20.990" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:47:20.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14099" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:29:08.920" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:29:08.920" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:29:08.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14100" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:29:08.920" Score="0" Body="For works by the Austrian-American physicist Harold P. Fürth (1930 – 2002) and his life as defined by the Help Center. If this is a specific question about physics, it should be asked on Physics SE instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:45:38.207" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:45:38.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14101" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:34:48.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:34:48.253" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:34:48.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14102" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:34:48.253" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the series of novels 'Strangers and Brothers' by C.P. Snow. Also tag such questions with [c-p-snow]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:42:02.703" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:42:02.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14103" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:37:39.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:37:39.493" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:37:39.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14104" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:37:39.493" Score="0" Body="Also known as a &quot;choose-your-own-story&quot;, books where the plot and endings are determined by the reader. Questions using this tag should be about the genre in general. Specific works should be tagged with that work in question and the author instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:42:30.530" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:42:30.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Swedish writer and cartographer Olaus Magnus (Olof Månsson, 1490 – 1557) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:38:06.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14107" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:42:20.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:42:20.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:42:20.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14108" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:42:20.777" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life or works by Johannes V. Jensen.(1873 – 1950). He is considered the best Danish author of his time. Questions about his works should be tagged with that work in question and the [scandinavian-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T17:44:07.547" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T17:44:07.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14109" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:56:59.467" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kay Chronister's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://kaychronister.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;kaychronister.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:01:26.477" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:01:26.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14110" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T17:56:59.467" Score="0" Body="For questions about horror author Kay Chronister and her works. If this is a question about one of her novels, that should be tagged as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:00:18.577" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:00:18.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14111" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-02T18:07:32.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:07:32.930" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:07:32.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14112" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-02T18:07:32.930" Score="0" Body="Charlotte Riddell, also known as Mrs. J.H. Riddell, was an Irish-born author during the Victorian era. Questions should be about her life as an author or specific works by her, with that work tagged accordingly. If this is a question about one of her short stories, use the [short-story] tag instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-02T18:07:59.513" LastActivityDate="2020-05-02T18:07:59.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-02T20:21:44.433" Score="2" ViewCount="923" Body="&lt;p&gt;Meursault in &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; seems to spend a lot of time describing the temperature, and especially the heat. There are &lt;em&gt;numerous&lt;/em&gt; cases where he mentions the sun and the heat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It occurred to me that all I had to do was turn around and that would be the end of it. But the whole beach, throbbing in the sun, was pressing on my back. I took a few steps toward the spring. The Arab didn't move. Besides, he was still pretty far away. Maybe it was the shadows on his face, but it looked like he was laughing. I waited. The sun was starting to burn my cheeks, and I could feel drops of sweat gathering in my eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the day I'd buried Maman, and like then, my forehead especially was hurting me, all the veins in it throbbing under the skin. It was this burning, which I couldn't stand anymore, that made me move forward. I knew that it was stupid, that I wouldn't get the sun off me by stepping forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and&#xA;covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt. All I could feel were the cymbals of sunlight crashing on my forehead and, indistinctly, the dazzling spear flying up from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed at my eyelashes and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That's when everything began to reel. The sea carried up a thick, fiery breath. It seemed to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down fire. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver. The trigger gave; I felt the smooth underside of the butt; and there, in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, is where it all started. I shook off the sweat and sun.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, part 1: chapter 6&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again without any apparent logic, the magistrate then asked if I had fired all five shots at once. I thought for a minute and explained that at first I had fired a single shot and then, a few seconds later, the other four. Then he said,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Why did you pause between the first and second shot?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Once again I could see the red sand and feel the burning of the sun on my forehead.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, part 2: chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can honestly say that the time from summer to summer went very quickly. And I knew as soon as the weather turned hot that something new was in store for me. My case was set down for the last session of the Court of Assizes, and that session was due to end some time in June. The trial opened with the sun glaring outside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A short time later a small bell rang in the room. Then they took my handcuffs off. They opened the door and led me into the dock. The room was packed. Despite the blinds, the sun filtered through in places and the air was already stifling.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, part 2: chapter 3&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is Meursault's obsessions with the heat all about?&lt;/strong&gt; Why is it so consistently mentioned and brought up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T15:48:24.417" Title="What is Meursault's problem with the heat?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-02T21:01:01.750" Score="5" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Camus' novel &lt;em&gt;L'étranger&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, Meursault gets arrested for shooting &quot;an Arab&quot;. During his pre-trial detention, his girlfriend Marie pays him a visit in prison and tries to give him some hope:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elle a crié de nouveau : « Tu sortiras et on se mariera! » J'ai répondu : « Tu crois? » mais c'était surtout pour dire quelque chose. Elle a dit alors très vite et toujours très haut que oui, que je serais acquitté et qu'on prendrait encore des bains.&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;(Deuxième partie, II)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She shouted again, ‘You will get out and we'll get married!’ I answered, ‘You think so?’ but mainly to say something back. Then she quickly and still very loudly said yes and that I would be acquitted and that we would go swimming again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Marie so sure that Meursault would be acquitted? Is this conviction inspired by a two-tier justice system that existed in French Algeria? Based on what I read in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alg%C3%A9rie_fran%C3%A7aise#Justices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Algeria#Discrimination&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia articles, there was indeed discrimination, but these articles don't say whether a Frenchman would so easily get away with murdering an Algerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to Marie's words, there's also the words by Meursault's lawyer near the start of Part II:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mon affaire était délicate, mais il ne doutait pas du succès, si je lui faisait confiance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My case was tricky, but he had no doubts about its success if I trusted him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this is a murder case, it seems hard to believe Meursault would be acquitted without the existence of a two-tier justice system that treated French citizens much less strictly for crimes against committed against Algerians than, for example, the other way round.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update regarding historical background&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Capital punishment executed by guillotine&lt;/a&gt; existed in the French justice system until 1981; the last execution by guillotine was executed in 1977. In addition, we even know who the executioner in French Algeria was at the time of the publication of &lt;em&gt;L'étranger&lt;/em&gt;, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules-Henri_Desfourneaux&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maurice Meyssonnier&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this question, I am looking for evidence that there was a two-tier justice system in Algeria that would allow a French murderer of an Algerian to escape a death sentence, and that Camus, who grew up in French Algeria, was aware of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T12:57:35.537" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T00:35:10.930" Title="Is Marie's comment based on the existence of a two-tier justice system in French Algeria?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-03T08:32:00.813" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Edgar Allan Poe's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://poestories.com/read/purloined&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Purloined Letter&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a minister known only as D-- has a letter which he is keeping for the purposes of blackmail, and the police prefect G-- comes to Dupin for help in finding and retrieving it. Dupin succeeds in doing so, knowing D-- well enough to figure out where he hid the letter (in plain sight), and recovering it by means of a ruse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;D-- rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D-- cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to &quot;imitate [a cipher] by means of a seal formed of bread&quot;? How could he do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T10:01:53.573" Title="What does Dupin mean about a seal formed of bread?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14117" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-03T09:52:04.943" Score="4" ViewCount="867" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching an answer for the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14116/58&quot;&gt;What does Dupin mean about a seal formed of bread?&lt;/a&gt;, I was looking up material related to the author Edgar Allan Poe and his use of puns. I found this quote, attributed to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this is several places, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4537962-of-puns-it-has-been-said-that-those-who-most&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/edgar_allan_poe_386860&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BrainyQuote&lt;/a&gt;. However, I'm unable to find the original source or context of this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where is this quote from and what's the context?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T10:45:00.477" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T14:37:13.530" Title="Where is the Poe quote &quot;Of puns it has been said that those who most dislike them are those who are least able to utter them&quot; from?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14118" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14116" CreationDate="2020-05-03T10:01:53.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's part of an elaborate set of puns. Shosuke Kinugawa, in the paper &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/englishalsj/2015/14/2015_5/_pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taking Yet Mistaking: Puns in “The Purloined Letter”&lt;/a&gt;&quot; explains it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are six interrelated puns here. First is the triple pun on the phrase “D── cipher.” First and foremost it is a pun on the word “decipher,” suggesting “very conspicuously” that the reader must decipher something. The imperative to decipher the “D── cipher” then suggests that the “cipher” (monogram) of “D── ” is also a&#xA;  “cipher” in the sense of a cryptogram. So then “D── cipher” reads: decipher the&#xA;  “D── ” cipher (monogram) as a cipher (cryptogram). The other two puns are&#xA;  related to the material of which Dupinʼs replica of the D── cipher is made:&#xA;  bread. &lt;strong&gt;As Servanne Woodward notes, the bread is a pun on Dupinʼs last name&lt;/strong&gt; (42). &lt;strong&gt;In French, “bread” is “pain,” and “of” is “de.” So a seal formed of bread is a seal formed “de pain” (pronounced “du pan”), and thus the seal “of Dupin.”&lt;/strong&gt; In other words, the seal of D── is also Dupinʼs seal in that it is made of material that signifies “Dupin.”&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;bread&quot; is there purely to form a bilingual pun with the name &quot;Dupin&quot;, and is part of a host of other puns that Poe included in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14117/58&quot;&gt;Apparently&lt;/a&gt;, Poe loved puns, although I'm having trouble pulling up examples of this literary device in other Poe works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T10:01:53.573" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14117" CreationDate="2020-05-03T10:43:16.197" Score="6" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poe wrote it in his Marginalia, but it seems he didn't invent this saying himself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's written in Poe's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marginalia&lt;/a&gt;, which were originally published &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/info/pmmar.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;variously&lt;/a&gt; but can be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H0ZBAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA560&amp;amp;dq=puns+those+who+most+dislike&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjW9dKiupfpAhUF0qYKHbGWACMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=in%20getting%20my%20books%20I%20have&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;collected together&lt;/a&gt; in some editions of his complete works. This particular quote is from an item of marginalia which has been designated &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=H0ZBAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA560&amp;amp;dq=puns+those+who+most+dislike&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjW9dKiupfpAhUF0qYKHbGWACMQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=puns%20those%20who%20most%20dislike&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as number 168&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/misc/mar0845.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as number 119&lt;/a&gt; of his Marginalia, which I quote in full as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All true men must rejoice to perceive the decline of the miserable rant and cant against originality, which was so much in vogue a few years ago among a class of microscopical critics, and which at one period threatened to degrade all American literature to the level of Flemish art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of puns it has been said that those most dislike who are least able to utter them&lt;/strong&gt;; but with far more of truth may it be asserted that invectives against originality proceed only from persons at once hypocritical and commonplace. I say hypocritical - for the love of novelty is an indisputable element of the moral nature of man; and since to be original is merely to be novel, the dolt who professes a distaste for originality, in letters or elsewhere, proves in no degree his aversion for the thing in itself, but merely that uncomfortable hatred which ever arises in the heart of an envious man for an excellence he cannot hope to attain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dUDWqBAOacUC&amp;amp;pg=PA49&amp;amp;dq=puns+those+who+most+dislike&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjW9dKiupfpAhUF0qYKHbGWACMQ6AEIOTAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=puns%20those%20who%20most%20dislike&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first published&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=dUDWqBAOacUC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, Vol. XXX (1845)&lt;/a&gt;. I found it by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=puns+%22those+who+most+dislike%22&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;source=lnt&amp;amp;tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1899&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwj3wsvAuJfpAhVewMQBHa8BCggQpwUIHg&amp;amp;biw=1536&amp;amp;bih=760&amp;amp;dpr=1.25&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching Google Books for &lt;code&gt;puns &amp;quot;those who most dislike&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; with results restricted to the 19th century&lt;/a&gt;. Interestingly, Poe's overall introduction to his Marginalia also makes another quip about puns:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be as well to observe, however, that just as the goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More interestingly, it seems that although modern authors frequently attribute this quote to Poe, and perhaps he was indeed the one who first phrased it exactly like that, he is clearly not coining a new phrase here: he writes &amp;quot;it has been said&amp;quot;, suggesting a claim that was already known at the time of his writing. I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RV8TAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA27&amp;amp;lpg=PA27&amp;amp;dq=%22nobody+dislikes+a+pun+but+he+who+cannot+make+one%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=nb3ge0mM4S&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0h9RHED-DTecows0gpwzS1O_Y3cQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj1zLavv5fpAhUSqXEKHYeTABsQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22nobody%20dislikes%20a%20pun%20but%20he%20who%20cannot%20make%20one%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another source&lt;/a&gt; which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A celebrated author says &amp;quot;Nobody dislikes a pun but he who cannot make one.&amp;quot; So say I; for it stands to reason that one defective in that ready wit which is necessary in the punster will not like to hear another capable of doing that which he knows himself incapable of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes from the article &amp;quot;On Punning&amp;quot; written by an author given only as &amp;quot;T.H.B.&amp;quot; in the magazine &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=RV8TAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;*The Satchel: a Repository of Wit, Whimsies, and Whatnot (Volume 9, 1831)&lt;/a&gt; - predating Poe's 1845 piece of marginalia. But the identity of this &amp;quot;T.H.B.&amp;quot;, and of the &amp;quot;celebrated author&amp;quot; that they quote, remains a mystery. I tried to search the web for the phrase &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Nobody dislikes a pun but he who cannot make one&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;, and came up with only this one source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T10:43:16.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14117" CreationDate="2020-05-03T12:03:19.583" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following on from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14120/58&quot;&gt;Rand's answer&lt;/a&gt;, I decided to do a bit of digging myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=SKoeAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA155&amp;amp;dq=dislikes+%22puns%22+%22make%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwitl7zpz5fpAhUEx4UKHRvJCukQ6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=dislikes%20%22puns%22%20%22make%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;found this quote&lt;/a&gt; from an old magazine called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monthly_Mirror&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Monthly Mirror&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, which ran from 1795 to 1811, in the July 1807 edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vmqkr.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Vmqkr.png&quot; alt=&quot;transcription below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EVERY MAN HIS OWN PUNSTER&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Puns are disliked by none but those who can't make them.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; Swift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Editor,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The following fragment has been transmitted to me by Mr. O'Nick, of St. Patrick's, in Dublin, who assures me that it is an unpublished MS. of Dean Swift. There is, I think, internal evidence sufficient to prove the affirmative, and whilst I express my pleasure in communicating it to the public, through your work, I cannot refrain from grieving that so little of the original design has been accomplished. It is called, as you will perceive, Rules for punning, &lt;em&gt;or puns for all persons and seasons&lt;/em&gt;: but the Dean has only left us the &lt;em&gt;ébauche&lt;/em&gt; of a single day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Dean Swift&amp;quot; would seem to refer to the author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Swift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jonathan Swift&lt;/a&gt; (1667-1745). (Wikipedia notes &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;...became Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, hence his common sobriquet, &amp;quot;Dean Swift&amp;quot;.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;) This would seem to fit the 1831 description of a &amp;quot;celebrated author&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it by searching variations of &lt;code&gt;dislikes &amp;quot;puns&amp;quot; &amp;quot;make&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; in Google Books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T14:37:13.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14123" CreationDate="2020-05-03T14:07:43.447" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was talking about a secretary of a murdered colonel, who was very active and always doing everybody’s work, saying (emphasis added): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It would be a joy to you to watch him make things hum, as he calls it. He made the house of mourning hum. He filled the funeral with all the snap and zip of the brightest sporting event. There was no holding him, &lt;strong&gt;after something had really happened&lt;/strong&gt;. I’ve told you how he used to oversee the gardener as he did the garden, and how he instructed the lawyer in the law.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant here by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;after something had really happened&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, as I don't see anything in the whole paragraph to indicate this particular &quot;&lt;strong&gt;thing&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:09:53.597" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:09:53.597" Title="What does &quot;after something had really happened&quot; mean in this G. K. Chesterton story?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14122" CreationDate="2020-05-03T14:48:37.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is not referring to a specific thing, but rather to the general idea of that a significant event had happened. &quot;Really&quot; isn't being used to indicate the truthfulness of the event, such as you might have if a child is telling their parent, &quot;No, the dog &lt;strong&gt;really&lt;/strong&gt; ate my homework,&quot; but rather the thing that had happened was &quot;really something&quot;. I believe that the intended effect of the sentence was to differentiate him from a more common sort of administrator who spends a great deal of effort on very small things that aren't important, but rather that he's the sort who works on things that are actually important, and makes them that much better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T14:48:37.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" Score="0" Body="For questions about the British author Jonathan Stroud or about any of his works of literature, mostly novels for children and young adults. If asking about one of his novels, please also use the appropriate novel or series tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T15:19:49.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14126" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:21:07.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T15:21:07.930" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T15:21:07.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14127" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:21:07.930" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Bartimaeus Sequence of fantasy novels by Jonathan Stroud, consisting of 'The Amulet of Samarkand', 'The Golem's Eye', 'Ptolemy's Gate', and a prequel novel 'The Ring of Solomon'. Always use this tag with the [jonathan-stroud] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T20:45:16.900" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T20:45:16.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14128" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14129" CreationDate="2020-05-03T15:55:27.277" Score="3" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a alternative-history comic that I saw a few years ago&#xA;in which one or more Mesoamerican peoples (the Mayas or the Aztecs or even an alliance of Mesoamerican peoples)&#xA;invade Europe, probably during the late Middle Ages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People have speculated about how that would have turned out if such a thing had happened.&#xA;See for example the Quora questions&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-if-the-Aztecs-invaded-Europe-in-the-14th-century?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What if the Aztecs invaded Europe in the 14th century?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/How-would-the-world-have-looked-in-2013-if-the-Aztecs-Incas-or-Mayans-had-invented-sea-faring-and-navigation-before-the-Europeans-discovered-Europe-first-and-proceeded-to-colonize-them?share=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How would the world have looked in 2013 if the Aztecs, Incas, or Mayans had invented sea-faring and navigation before the Europeans, &quot;discovered&quot; Europe first, and proceeded to colonize them?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;Some people seem to assume that the Mesoamerican invasion would have failed because the invaders lacked armour and horses,&#xA;or because they would have been decimated by a number of European diseases against which they had no immunity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, there is also a&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://crusaderkings-two.fandom.com/wiki/Aztecs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crusader Kings II game&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;based on the premise that the Aztecs set out to conquer the known world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what I am looking for is not a game, a novel or a non-fiction book&#xA;but a comic based on this type of premise.&#xA;I browsed this comic in a shop that sold comics both in Dutch and in French,&#xA;so the comic may have been in either language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T16:13:49.403" Title="Comic about Mayas and/or Aztecs invading Europe instead of the other way round" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14128" CreationDate="2020-05-03T16:13:49.403" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Luxley&lt;/em&gt; (2005) by Valérie Mangin and Francisco Ruizgé?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bedetheque.com/BD-Luxley-Tome-1-Le-mauvais-oeil-47259.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bédéthèque&lt;/a&gt;, adapted from DeepL's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1191; the Third Crusade. France and England await the return of their kings, Philip Augustus and Richard the Lionheart, who have gone to fight Saladin. Nothing seems to threaten the Christian West. And yet.. &lt;strong&gt;the unimaginable happens: a huge army of Mayans, Aztecs, and other warriors undertakes a bloody invasion of unarmed Christendom. The New World has dared to invade the Old...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eight years have passed. The so-called Atlanteans dominate Europe. All cannot be lost. Robin of Luxley, known as Robin Hood, is convinced of that. Alas, on a secret mission of rebellion, he is captured by the Atlantean governor of France...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What will become of the freedom of the last rebels, the survival of the young King of France and the fate of all Europe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;bande dessinée aztèques envahissent europe&lt;/code&gt; (&lt;code&gt;comics aztecs invade europe&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T16:13:49.403" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14130" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-03T16:17:26.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T16:17:26.677" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T16:17:26.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14131" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-03T16:17:26.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Call of the Wild' (1903),  an adventure book written by Jack London. Questions about this book should be tagged with the author, [jack-london]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T23:14:59.027" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T23:14:59.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14134" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14135" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature in the Egyptian language, from the Old Egyptian stage to Coptic." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T21:53:45.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1135" CreationDate="2020-05-03T21:57:23.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not conforming: I believe the concept you are getting at is when they refer to &quot;deepening&quot;. Deepening is a metaphysical understanding and empathy between physically separate entities. Conforming is mindless, hive-like, being controlled, not being connected to others but everyone being tethered to a higher, controlling idea. Deepening is opening up, ultimate vulnerability to something benevolent, being in control of one's self but also opening to others in the most profound way. It is the antithesis of conformity. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10015" LastActivityDate="2020-05-03T21:57:23.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14204" CreationDate="2020-05-04T07:42:07.343" Score="2" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading an &lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/153615/gene-wolfe-proust-science-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article about the late Gene Wolfe&lt;/a&gt; which called him &quot;the Proust of Science Fiction&quot;. Specifically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His four-volume masterpiece &lt;em&gt;The Book of the New Sun&lt;/em&gt; (of which &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Torturer&lt;/em&gt; is the first tome) is an almost indescribable combination of speculative Christian eschatology with a Conan the Barbarian adventure story, written in a prose that can fairly be described as Proustian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean for prose to be &quot;Proustian&quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; I've never read Proust, and I don't really know what characteristics distinguish his writing so clearly as to turn him into an adjective. The word &quot;Proustian&quot; even &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Proustian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appears&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/proustian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionaries&lt;/a&gt;, but they simply define it as &quot;relating to or resembling Proust or his writings&quot;, which doesn't help with what I want to know: resembling &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt;? The New Republic article linked above attributes to Wolfe &quot;a syntax, sensibility, precision, and analytical power reminiscent of Proust&quot;, but precision and analytical power can't be enough to call something Proustian. Nor can &quot;middle-class and aristocratic&quot; (Dictionary.com) or &quot;derived from personal memory&quot; (Wiktionary). Is it a combination of these, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I've tagged this question just with &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/marcel-proust&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;marcel-proust&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;marcel-proust&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/terminology&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;terminology&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;terminology&lt;/a&gt; since I'm interested in what Proustian means in general. If you can describe what makes &lt;em&gt;The Book of the New Sun&lt;/em&gt; Proustian or why it's described as such, I'd also be very interested in that as a welcome bonus, but it's not necessary for a good answer here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:56:06.680" Title="What is Proustian prose?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;marcel-proust&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14138" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11800" CreationDate="2020-05-04T11:57:49.050" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It was &quot;wish fulfillment&quot; on J.K. Rowling's part as revealed in an interview for Wonderland magazine.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpts from the British newspaper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jk-admits-harry-should-have-wed-hermione-j39vv800cnw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sunday Times&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment,” she says. “That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Rowling even realizes that it may not have been her best idea and that some fans did like the pairing.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I know, I’m sorry,” she continued, “I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;That being said, Harry viewed Hermione as sister not a romantic interest. While speaking to Ron after his return in &lt;em&gt;Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt; he admits as much:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“She’s like my sister,” he went on. “I love her like a sister and I reckon she feels the same way about me. It’s always been like that, I thought you knew.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T11:57:49.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14139" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5397" CreationDate="2020-05-04T12:43:12.953" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this stanza “seize” means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of an object of perception, a fact, etc.: To arrest, hold (the attention), to impress irresistibly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and “game” means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of a person or animal: full of pluck, spirit, or fight; spirited, plucky; intrepid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of dogs, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gameness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gameness&lt;/a&gt;” specifically refers to the quality of aggression that was bred or trained into fighting dogs. Bulldogs were bred for the sport of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull-baiting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bull baiting&lt;/a&gt;, where the dog needed to be willing to attack the much larger and stronger bull; and fox terriers were bred to pursue foxes into their earths and kill them there (hence the name “terrier”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron’s point in this stanza is that expecting to frighten the enemy into capitulation is unrealistic: the enemy will almost always fight back as hard as he can. So why does do warriors sometimes believe this “phantasy”? Clearly this is wishful thinking: the warriors would like to avoid a battle, since they themselves are frightened of the prospect. Only warriors who are “game as bull-dogs” would actually want to fight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T13:37:50.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14140" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14141" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Begali poet and playwright Sukanta Bhattacharya (1926 – 1947) and his life as a writer. Most of his works of his works were published posthumously. Use this tag with the [bengali-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T12:58:46.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14142" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14143" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature written in the Bengali language, an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T13:00:03.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14145" CreationDate="2020-05-04T14:59:31.197" Score="5" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;A recent question asked about the source of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14117/2191&quot;&gt;quote about puns attributed to Edgar Allen Poe&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;@Rand al'Thor found out that the quote could be found in Poe's marginalia but that the idea was older.&#xA;@Mithical then found a similar quote attributed to Jonathan Swift:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Puns are disliked by none but those who can't make them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is quoted in a letter to the editor(s) of the magazine &lt;em&gt;The Monthly Mirror&lt;/em&gt; in July 1807.&#xA;However, the quote does not come from the fragment attributed to Swift that follows the letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found that Swift worked on a text entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksrevjonatha66nichgoog/page/n397/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Art of Punning&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;(in an 1808 edition of his work that can be consulted on Archive.org)&#xA;but that text, nor the volume in which it was published appear to contain the quote mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So did Jonathan Swift really say or write this, or is this yet another example of misattributed quotations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:17:55.850" Title="Did Swift really say, ‘Puns are disliked by none but those who can't make them’?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;jonathan-swift&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14144" CreationDate="2020-05-04T15:53:10.763" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It looks like it did come from Swift, albeit not quite in those exact words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015057619416&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=84&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift ...: Accurately Revised ... Adorned with Copper-plates; with Some Account of the Author's Life, and Notes Historical and Explanatory, Volume 1&lt;/a&gt;&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=UVTRAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1754  according to Google&lt;/a&gt;, written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hawkesworth_(book_editor)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Hawkesworth&lt;/a&gt;, it &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=UVTRAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA60&amp;amp;dq=punning+excelled&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwjlztjtw5rpAhWt4YUKHYX4CusQ6AEIKDAA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=punning%20excelled&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gHKF4.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gHKF4.png&quot; alt=&quot;transcription below&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;His rule was never to speak more than a minute at a time, and then to wait, at least, as long for others to take up the conversation, after which he had a right to speak again. His colloquial stile, like that of his writings, was clear, forcible, and concise. He greatly excelled in punning; &lt;strong&gt;a talent, which, he said, no man affected to despise, but those who were without it;&lt;/strong&gt; and his conversation would have furnished a more excellent compendium of this species of wit, than was ever yet compiled, or, perhaps, ever will; some of these sallies of his imagination are still remembered, and among others, the following, which may serve for examples.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;(emphasis added)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the earliest example I was able to find of any version of this quote, searching Google Books for works restricted to before 1807, trying various combinations of words such as &lt;code&gt;&quot;punning&quot;&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion (after three questions): &lt;strong&gt;It looks like Swift did use to say this, but didn't write it down; it was later written down and attributed to him, but then changed wording over the years.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:17:55.850" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:17:55.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:09:38.707" Score="3" ViewCount="292" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The director stopped at the door of a small building. &quot;I'll leave you now, Monsieur Meursault. If you need me for anything, I'll be in my office. As is usually the case, the funeral is set for ten o'clock in the morning. This way you'll be able to keep vigil over the departed. One last thing: it seems your mother often expressed to her friends her desire for a religious burial. I've taken the liberty of making the necessary arrangements. But I wanted to let you know.&quot; I thanked him. While not an atheist, Maman had never in her life given a thought to religion.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, part 1, chapter 1&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is happening here? Why would Maman have &quot;often expressed to her friends her desire religious burial&quot; if she's never given a thought to religion? (Who talks about what kind of burial they want &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; anyway?) Is this meant to imply that the director is lying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's happening here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T12:02:50.043" Title="Why would Maman ask for a religious burial?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18720" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:50:27.233" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1986 musical &lt;em&gt;The Phantom of the Opera&lt;/em&gt; by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Phantom seems to frequently refer to both himself and Christina as &quot;Angel of Music&quot;. For example, in &quot;The Mirror/Angel of Music (Reprise)&quot;, where the Phantom sings,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I am your Angel of Music&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Come to me: Angel of Music  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again in &quot;Phantom of the Opera&quot; he sings,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Sing!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sing for me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sing, my Angel of Music!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Sing for me!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does he refer to both himself and Christina as &quot;Angel of Music&quot;? What's the significance behind this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:11:08.057" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T07:43:01.727" Title="Why does the Phantom call both Christina and himself &quot;Angel of Music?&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-phantom-of-the-opera-musical&gt;&lt;andrew-lloyd-webber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14150" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:55:38.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T16:55:38.433" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T16:55:38.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14151" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:55:38.433" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the 1986 musical, &quot;The Phantom of the Opera&quot; composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, lyrics by Charles Hart, and the stage book by Richard Stilgoe. Questions about this work should be tagged with [andrew-lloyd-webber]. Not to be confused with the novel by Gaston Leroux, if this is a question solely about the novel, it should be tagged as [the-phantom-of-the-opera-novel] and [gaston-leroux] instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T08:03:50.340" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T08:03:50.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14152" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:58:16.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T16:58:16.530" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T16:58:16.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14153" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-04T16:58:16.530" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life of English composer, playwriter, and musical theatre writer Andrew Lloyd Webber and his works as it relates to literature. Questions about his works should be tagged likewise. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T18:43:56.577" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T18:43:56.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14154" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-29T11:00:43.360" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading the poem &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0CIxDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT35&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Miracle at Sea&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_ibn_Naghrillah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shmuel HaNagid&lt;/a&gt; (translated from Hebrew by Peter Cole), and I came across a passage that really confused me. This is the second stanza of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;By the lives of all who’d come&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      to console and assist the stricken,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          by the life of each who came&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      when I was in need and saw me panicked,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would really appreciate it if someone could explain it to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Lily Tiger" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T18:52:36.607" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T20:00:37.603" Title="&quot;By the lives of all who’d come to console and assist the stricken&quot; What does it mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;samuel-ibn-naghrillah&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14155" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-04T18:57:01.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T18:57:01.567" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T18:57:01.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14156" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-04T18:57:01.567" Score="0" Body="Samuel ibn Naghrillah also known as Samuel HaNagid(שמואל הנגיד, Shmuel HaNagid) was a Spanish Talmudic poet, scholar, politician and more during the time of Muslim Spain. Questions about his works should include the [hebrew-literature] tag and his poems should be tagged with the [poetry] tag as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-04T19:02:33.360" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T19:02:33.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14154" CreationDate="2020-05-04T20:00:37.603" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Your example is only part of the sentence spoken by the narrator and lacks the context and the first verse&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is when at sea, the narrator has seen a creature so horrible that the sight of it leaves those who see it disturbed for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first verse the narrator asks the rhetorical question “Do people help each other?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does not answer the question directly but informs you indirectly that people do come and try to assist those who have been traumatised and he adds that, in particular, people have come to help him. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;By the lives of all who’d come&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;to console and assist the stricken,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;by the life of each who came&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;when I was in need and saw me panicked,&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*could it be there’s never respite from anguish, that desolate land is desolate forever? *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does this by using (as indicated by Isabel Archer) “By the lives/life of” is a mild oath (now old-fashioned or literary) used as solemn emphasis. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oaths are sworn in this manner &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; a respected person, a thing, a deity, etc.: they are not always &quot;solemn.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;By God! I will avenge the murder of my father!&quot;; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;By all that I hold dear, release my children&quot;; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;By the stars in heaven! There is a ship coming to save us.&quot;&#xA; &#xA;The narrator is clearly grateful for the help that is offered but nevertheless, the help was of no use to him or, (we assume) the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first four lines can be omitted: it is the fifth line, another rhetorical question, that is important. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10022" LastActivityDate="2020-05-04T20:00:37.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14159" CreationDate="2020-05-04T20:43:01.430" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Spoilers for the solution to &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n77/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oracle of the Dog&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was talking about&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; a gambler nephew, who had left the Indian police through breaking some red-tape regulations and took a sudden decision to kill his rich uncle, who wore a white coat, from his back by a sword through the thin loopholed wall of his summer house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brown said (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is the megalomania of the gambler. The more incongruous the coincidence, the more instantaneous the decision, the more likely he is to snatch the chance. The accident, the very triviality of the white speck and the hole in the hedge intoxicated him like a &lt;strong&gt;vision of the world’s desire&lt;/strong&gt;. Nobody clever enough to see such a combination of accidents could be cowardly enough not to use them! That is how the devil talks to the gambler. But the devil himself would hardly have induced that unhappy man to go down in a dull, deliberate way and kill an old uncle from whom he’d always had expectations. It would be &lt;strong&gt;too respectable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's is meant here by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;vision of the world’s desire&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how a murder would be &quot;&lt;strong&gt;too respectable&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:09:31.683" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:09:31.683" Title="Meaning of &quot;vision of the world’s desire&quot; in &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14158" CreationDate="2020-05-04T21:44:34.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Vision of the world’s desire” is an allusion to the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Desire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World’s Desire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1890) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._Rider_Haggard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. Rider Haggard&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Lang&lt;/a&gt;. In chapter 2, also titled “The Vision of the World’s Desire”, the goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Athena&lt;/a&gt; shows &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odysseus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odysseus&lt;/a&gt; a vision of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen of Troy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Nay, Odysseus, didst thou not once give me one little hour? Fear not, for thou shalt not see me at this time, but lift thy head and look on &lt;strong&gt;The World’s Desire!&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the Wanderer lifted his head, and he saw, as it were in a picture or in a mirror of bronze, the vision of a girl. She was more than mortal tall, and though still in the first flower of youth, and almost a child in years, she seemed fair as a goddess, and so beautiful that Aphrodite herself may perchance have envied this loveliness. She was slim and gracious as a young shoot of a palm tree, and her eyes were fearless and innocent as a child’s. On her head she bore a shining urn of bronze, as if she were bringing water from the wells, and behind her was the foliage of a plane tree. Then the Wanderer knew her, and saw her once again as he had seen her, when in his boyhood he had journeyed to the Court of her father, King Tyndareus. For, as he entered Sparta, and came down the hill Taygetus, and as his chariot wheels flashed through the ford of Eurotas, he had met her there on her way from the river. There, in his youth, his eyes had gazed on the loveliness of Helen, and his heart had been filled with the desire of the fairest of women, and like all the princes of Achaia he had sought her hand in marriage. But Helen was given to another man, to Menelaus, Atreus’ son, of an evil house, that the knees of many might be loosened in death, and that there might be a song in the ears of men in after time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang (1890). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worldsdesire00hagguoft/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World’s Desire&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 18–19&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Greek myths, Helen is the most beautiful of women, desired by all, hence “the world’s desire”. In “The Oracle of the Dog”, the sudden apprehension of how he can clear his debts and restore his fortunes by secretly murdering his uncle strikes the young man with as much force as the sight of Helen of Troy struck the princes of Achaia. It is quite a grotesque comparison: monetary greed likened to sexual cupidity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Too respectable” is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;—of course murder is not respectable. There are two ways to resolve it, depending on how we interpret “the devil himself would hardly have induced”. If we take this to mean “the devil himself would hardly have &lt;em&gt;wanted to induce&lt;/em&gt;”, then what Father Brown means is that killing one’s rich relation in order to inherit their fortune is a commonplace, ordinary kind of murder, the kind carried out by ordinary and respectable people, and the devil is not interested in that kind of murder. But if we take it to mean “the devil himself would hardly have &lt;em&gt;been able to induce&lt;/em&gt;”, then what Father Brown means is that the young man’s self-conception would not permit him to carry out a murder in a commonplace manner, but that a daring and risky chance was something he could not resist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T15:50:50.650" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14168" CreationDate="2020-05-05T01:54:30.190" Score="9" ViewCount="193" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the Vintage edition of &lt;em&gt;War &amp;amp; Peace&lt;/em&gt; with the translation by Pevear &amp;amp; Volokhonsky.  In Volume II, part I, chapter 11, the farewell dinner for Nikolai at the Rostov's is held on &quot;the third day of Christmas&quot; (i.e. December 27th, 1806).  We are told at the same time that Rostov and Denisov will &quot;be leaving for their regiment after Epiphany&quot; (January 6th, 1807).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of chapter 16, we learn that Rostov &quot;spent two more weeks in Moscow&quot; in order to settle his debt before he leaves.  We are then told, however, that he &quot;[leaves] at the end of November to catch up with his regiment, which was already in Poland.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Vol II, Part II, chapter 15, Rostov has rejoined the regiment and been with it for some time by April, 1807.  So the last sentence of Vol II Part I is a clear mistake:  &quot;November&quot; should read &quot;January.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is whether it's a simple editing mistake in this particular edition, a careless mistake in Tolstoy's original, or a deliberate mistake by Tolstoy.  (The reason why it might be a deliberate mistake:  Austerlitz occurred in late November, by the Russian calendar, and Rostov feels defeated and betrayed when he leaves Moscow, so he might be in an &quot;end of November of the soul,&quot; so to speak....)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone familiar with Tolstoy's original confirm whether he wrote &quot;November&quot; there?  If so, is there any scholarship as to whether it might deliberate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:42:39.403" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T18:19:18.790" Title="Is this mistake in Tolstoy's original, or just this translation?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;&lt;timeline&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T02:06:41.210" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;How are the &quot;songs&quot; or &quot;verses&quot; (or indented sections) to be read in this Thai epic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vajirayana.org/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%AD/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%AD&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://vajirayana.org/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%AD/%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%95%E0%B8%9E%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B0%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%AD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it read &quot;left right left right&quot;, or &quot;left left left left, right right right right&quot;, for each numbered verse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there are two verses here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rvuYF.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/rvuYF.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you read, for each &quot;verse block&quot;, read the left chunk top-to-bottom first, then the right chunk (4 lines each in the first verse above), or do you read left/right/left/right moving like an English text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same with &lt;a href=&quot;https://vajirayana.org/%E0%B9%82%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%87%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A8%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A0%E0%B8%B8%E0%B8%8D%E0%B8%8A%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%A2/%E0%B9%82%E0%B8%84%E0%B8%A5%E0%B8%87%E0%B8%99%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A8%E0%B8%AB%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%A0%E0%B8%B8%E0%B8%8D%E0%B8%8A%E0%B8%B1%E0%B8%A2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hsDzf.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hsDzf.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5056" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T05:29:21.310" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T05:29:21.310" Title="How to read the &quot;Lilit Phra Lo&quot; (Thai: ลิลิตพระลอ) verses?" Tags="&lt;reading&gt;&lt;thai-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8442" CreationDate="2020-05-05T02:17:06.110" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Be honest of your feelings, don’t disguise  or be distrustful even in loneliness  nor horrible experience love is evergreen an will always be around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10023" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T02:17:06.110" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T07:24:02.680" Score="2" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the lines in Hayley Kiyoko's &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0MT8SwNa_U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Girls Like Girls&lt;/a&gt;&quot; song (which, as you may have guessed from the title, is very lesbian) goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell the neighbors I'm not sorry if&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm breaking walls down&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Building your girl's second story&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ripping all your floors out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't see what this verse has to do with the rest of the time, which mostly involves singing about how she's going to steal your girlfriend. Is this stanza innuendo (&quot;ripping all your floors out&quot;)? If not, what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does this stanza mean?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T08:57:03.533" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T17:47:22.760" Title="What does the &quot;Tell the neighbors I'm not sorry&quot; line in &quot;Girls Like Girls&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;hayley-kiyoko&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14165" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-05T08:02:52.727" Score="5" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the course of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14120/17&quot;&gt;answering&lt;/a&gt; a question about an Edgar Allan Poe quote on puns, I came across a 19th-century magazine called &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=RV8TAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Satchel: a Repository of Wit, Whimsies, and What-Not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in London, apparently weekly at a price of 1d. Reading the linked volume (Volume 9, Issues 1-9, Saturday 5 March - 30 April 1831), I couldn't find any actual names of contributors. Articles are signed with initials such as &quot;J.S.&quot; or &quot;T.H.B.&quot; I also couldn't find any more information about &lt;em&gt;The Satchel&lt;/em&gt; online, although my search-fu may be bad here since &quot;satchel&quot; is a common noun as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where can I find more information about &lt;em&gt;The Satchel&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm particularly interested in a list of authors/contributors, if possible - some information more than just their initials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T08:02:52.727" Title="Where can I find more information about the 19th-century magazine The Satchel?" Tags="&lt;the-satchel&gt;&lt;magazines&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14167" CreationDate="2020-04-22T11:55:00.127" Score="3" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n77/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oracle of the Dog&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“YES,” said Father Brown, “I always like a dog, so long as he isn’t spelt backwards.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;so long as he isn’t spelt backwards&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, knowing that Father Brown was a priest?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" OwnerDisplayName="Ahmed Samir" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:09:46.097" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:09:46.097" Title="Meaning of &quot;spelt backwards&quot; in &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14166" CreationDate="2020-05-05T09:02:09.060" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The character Fiennes immediately explains the remark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he stopped in the torrent of his talk in a momentary bewilderment before he saw the priest’s very simple meanmg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You mean that people make too much of them?” he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word “dog” spelt backwards is “god”, so what Father Brown means is that he doesn’t like the way that some people treat dogs as gods: that is, they assign their dogs’ behaviour a significance it does not deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the theme of the story, as indicated by the title. There are two instances in which Fiennes interprets the behaviour of the dog ‘Nox’ as having a mystic or oracular significance. First, the dog fails to retrieve the stick thrown by Harry Druce into the sea, and sets up “a howl of wail of woe” which Fiennes interprets as the dog knowing that his owner has just been murdered. Second, on returning to the house, the dog rushes up to the lawyer Traill “barking at him madly, murderously” which Fiennes interprets as the dog denouncing Traill as the killer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Father Brown explains that once you stop treating the dog as if it is a god, then its behaviour provides a clue to how the murder was committed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The dog had everything to do with it,” said Father Brown, “as you’d have found out if you’d only treated the dog as a dog and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes to to explain the dog’s behaviour as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; First, the dog failed to retrieve the stick from the sea because it was a &lt;em&gt;sword&lt;/em&gt;-stick, and being made largely of steel it was heavier than water, so that it sank to the bottom. The dog howled because he couldn’t find it. Second, the dog barked at Traill because the lawyer was nervous of dogs and “dogs hate nervous people”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common theme in Chesterton’s stories, in which modern, secular people are actually credulous and superstitious, while only Catholics like Father Brown are properly skeptical and rational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T09:29:57.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14168" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14161" CreationDate="2020-05-05T09:13:37.887" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is indeed &lt;em&gt;end of November&lt;/em&gt; in the actual Russian text and all my research so far shows that this is a genuine author's mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Он исписал альбомы девочек стихами и нотами и, не простившись ни с кем из своих знакомых, отослав, наконец, все сорок три тысячи и получив расписку Долохова, уехал &lt;strong&gt;в конце ноября&lt;/strong&gt; догонять полк, который уже был в Польше.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3b1qQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3b1qQ.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least one more English-speaking person had spotted this back in 2006:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://readingmiddlemarch.blogspot.com/2006/07/tolstoys-bloopers.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tolstoy's bloopers&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol start=&quot;6&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;It's the third day of Christmas holidays; Nikolai and Denisov plan to rejoin their regiments after Epiphany (January 6 by our calendar).&#xA;  There's dinner, a ball, a couple days go by, gambling, Denisov leaves,&#xA;  Rostov stays on a couple weeks, then leaves at the end of November.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mistake is also mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://litresp.com/chitat/ru/%D0%A1/saraskina-lyudmila/besi-roman-preduprezhdenie/2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this work&lt;/a&gt; by L. Saraskina about Dostoevsky's &quot;Demons&quot;. The translation is available &lt;a href=&quot;http://shows.vtheatre.net/devils/texts/ludmila.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Here is an excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Action of the novel War and Peace begins in July 1805 and ends in&#xA;  December 1820. Fifteen years of life of Tolstoy’s characters unfold&#xA;  against background of universal historical events with which they are&#xA;  most closely connected. This connection actually determines the&#xA;  internal chronology of the novel: all episodes connected with wars,&#xA;  battles and other historical events are dated exactly, literally up to&#xA;  an hour. When, however, the narration deals with characters’ personal&#xA;  lives the chronology can be sufficiently approximate: “in the middle&#xA;  of Winter”, “in Summer”, “in the beginning of Fall” and so on.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The calendar is sometimes &lt;strong&gt;intentionally&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3b1qQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; imprecise. Here is one of the “peace” episodes: having lost in cards to Dolohov forty three&#xA;  thousand rubles during Christmas holidays (in the text it is indicated&#xA;  even more precisely: two days after the third day of Christmas, in&#xA;  other words on December 29), Nicolay Rostov “spent two more weeks in&#xA;  Moscow …and …having sent, finally, all forty three thousand and having&#xA;  received Dolohov’s receipt, he left in the end of November in order to&#xA;  catch his regiment.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Chronology is sometimes respected only in relation to one particular character but does not correspond to life circumstances of&#xA;  other characters. For example a surprising appearance of Andrey&#xA;  Bolkonski, whom everybody considered dead, at his father’s house in&#xA;  this very night from 19 to 20 March 1806, when his son will be born&#xA;  and his wife will die, is almost a miracle. Princess Mary is afraid to&#xA;  believe this miracle: “No, this cannot be, this would be to&#xA;  incredible”. Prince Andrej, seriously wounded in the battle of&#xA;  Austerlitz around twentieth of November 1805 was left to the care of&#xA;  local residents. Four months that took his recovery and the old&#xA;  prince’s search for his son considered missing seem to be a realistic&#xA;  period of time and in this sense the date of prince Andrej’s return is&#xA;  not surprising. The author had to go against the low of nature,&#xA;  however, in order that his character had time to arrive at such an&#xA;  important moment. We remember that the little princess, Andrej&#xA;  Bolkonski’s wife, was heavy and clumsy, wearing a special dress and&#xA;  not going out “because of her pregnancy” already in July 1805 in the&#xA;  salon of Anna Pavlovna Sherer. She gives birth nine months after, in&#xA;  other words in March 1806. It would mean, however, that the condition&#xA;  that was supposed to prevent princess Lisa from going out could not&#xA;  yet be so noticeable and important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3b1qQ.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; An important bit about the above translation is that the word &quot;заведомо&quot; has been translated as &lt;em&gt;intentionally&lt;/em&gt;, which is an arguable choice. I believe that &quot;заведомо&quot; here was used in a sense of &lt;em&gt;definitely&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;obviously&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a final remark, it appears that the novel does contain quite a lot of mistakes of all sorts, this particular one being so minor compared to the others that few people noticed it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="7659" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T15:48:03.383" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T15:48:03.383" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14169" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14166" CreationDate="2020-05-05T09:17:48.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a multi-layer pun.  Clearly the first is reverse spelling, i.e. 'a god', lower case indicating a pagan deity, somewhat contrary to the Catholic faith of Father Brown. However, that seems, but a red herring.  The title,&quot;Oracle of the Dog&quot;, clues us further.  'Spelt' is also a play on 'spell' of the magical sort, evocative of a magical spell gone wrong.  There are superstitions about dogs being able to see dead people and a howling dog being an omen of death. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chesterton, with a strong YES, is being very clear about his faith and sense of order in the universe, vis-a-vis dogs. Simply, put the author is toying with the reader, while Father Brown, is being clear that a dog's place is being a dog and nothing more, no omens, no oracle, no special powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, Cerberus, a three headed dog, guarded the gates Hades, preventing the dead from leaving.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10026" LastEditorUserId="10026" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T09:36:30.080" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T09:36:30.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14170" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14171" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature written in the Thai language (historically also known as Siamese)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T10:01:21.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14172" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14173" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" Score="0" Body="Questions about the songs (and possibly other works) of the American singer, songwriter and actress Hayley Kiyoko (born 1991) and her life as a (song)writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T10:03:00.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14185" CreationDate="2020-05-05T11:03:21.177" Score="4" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene 2, when I encountered the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.....what might you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or my dear majesty your queen here, think,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;If I had play'd the desk or table-book,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or given my heart a winking, mute and dumb....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/hamlet_2_2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt; glosses this as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if I had shown myself of no more intelligence than a desk or memorandum-book (which have secrets committed to their keeping, but no power to take any action regarding those secrets).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how can a &amp;quot;desk&amp;quot; be a secret keeper?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9895" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T20:15:42.547" Title="How can a &quot;desk&quot; be considered a secret keeper?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14164" CreationDate="2020-05-05T13:05:10.257" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song as a whole is written from the point of view of a woman who is having a relationship with another woman who, in turn, appears to be in an existing relationship with a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I'm breaking walls down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is suggestive of an unapologetic stance on homosexual relationships. The term &quot;wall&quot; is a relatively common euphemism for a societal barrier rather than a literal one. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge dictionary&lt;/a&gt; has it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;a way of feeling or behaving that completely prevents two groups of people from communicating with or understanding each other:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;There is a wall of mistrust between the two groups.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a weak echo of this in the term &quot;closet&quot; used to denote hidden homosexual tendencies, not least since a closet is usually surrounded by walls. The walls being broken in the song are thus societal taboos around same-sex relationships that the singer is proud, &quot;not sorry&quot;, to be challenging and breaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's another parallel to this metaphor which is the term &quot;homewrecker&quot; to mean someone intent on breaking up a relationship which the singer is clearly doing. So she's &quot;breaking walls&quot; in more than one metaphorical sense, becoming a homewrecker. It is interesting to note that while the term is not gendered, it is far more often applied to promiscuous women than to men. So this also shines a light on the unequal expectations and morals placed on men and women's sexual behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense the next line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Building your girl's second story&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;becomes a continuation of these two building metaphors but is also a play on words. &quot;Story&quot; can both a tale or a floor of a building (they're actually spelt differently in British English but the singer is American). The singer is &quot;building&quot; a new &quot;story&quot; for the object of her affections, a second one in which she is opened up to the possibility of homosexual relationships after her first, heterosexual story with her existing partner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not aware that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ripping all your floors out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has any particular sexual connotations. Rather it seems to be another play on words to continue the theme of demolition. Having the floor fall out from under someone is another common metaphor for a big shock or surprise, particularly in terms of important life events. The shock for the &quot;boy&quot; in this song, of course, is having his girlfriend leave him for another woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T13:10:07.727" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T13:10:07.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13676" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:17:50.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're looking for &quot;Boat Song&quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Jicai&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Feng Jicai&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Баркарола&lt;/em&gt; is Russian for &quot;barcarolle&quot;, a traditional song of Venetian gondoliers, so I wouldn't say it means nothing in Russian, it's actually a decent translation, assuming the original Chinese name means &quot;boat song&quot; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been a while since I last read it, but I remember that the artist did not die in the earthquake but rather committed suicide by smashing his head against the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, all your details check out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:17:50.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14188" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:24:23.190" Score="1" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n77/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Oracle of the Dog&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was talking about someone, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;To be found with a weapon, let alone a blood-stained weapon, would be fatal in the search that was certain to follow. If he left it anywhere, it would be found and probably traced. Even if he threw it into the sea the action might be noticed, and &lt;strong&gt;thought noticeable&lt;/strong&gt;—unless indeed he could think of some more natural way of covering the action. As you know, he did think of one, and a very good one. Being the only one of you with a watch, he told you it was not yet time to return, strolled a little farther, and started the game of throwing in sticks for the retriever. But &lt;strong&gt;how his eyes&lt;/strong&gt; must have rolled darkly over all that desolate sea-shore before they alighted on the dog!” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant here by &quot;thought noticeable&quot;, as he already said that &quot;the action might be noticed&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &quot;&lt;strong&gt;how his eyes&lt;/strong&gt; ...&quot; mean &quot;&lt;strong&gt;it's a big wonder that his eyes&lt;/strong&gt; ...&quot;? If so, does Father Brown mean that this happened before this person started the game of throwing in sticks, and then he got the idea? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:09:39.220" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:09:39.220" Title="Why both &quot;noticed&quot; and &quot;thought noticeable&quot; in &quot;The Oracle of the Dog&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14178" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:32:40.843" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T16:32:40.843" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:32:40.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14179" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:32:40.843" Score="0" Body="Questions about magazines in general or about any specific magazines that publish works of literature or literary criticism. When possible, please use tag the question with the appropriate author and language tag. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T16:37:00.217" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:37:00.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14180" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14186" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:55:37.110" Score="2" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the musical Beauty and the Beast (composed by the legend Alan Menken himself), Belle sings the song &quot;A Change in Me&quot; after she returns to her father when the Beast lets her go. She tells (or rather sings) to her father, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I - I never thought I'd leave behind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My childhood dreams&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  But I don't mind&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For now I love the world I see&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  No change of heart&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A change in me  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For in my dark despair&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I slowly understood&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My perfect world out there&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Had disappeared for good  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in its place I feel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  A truer life begin&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And it's so good and real&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  It must come from within  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Belle mean in this passage? What childhood dream did she love behind? What did she not love about the world she saw before? What's the perfect world that disappeared? What truer life? What does she mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:17:46.910" Title="Why does Belle mean in this part in &quot;A Change in Me&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;beauty-and-the-beast-musical&gt;&lt;alan-menken&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14181" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:59:07.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T16:59:07.580" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T16:59:07.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14182" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-05T16:59:07.580" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alan Menken (born 1949), an American composer, lyricist, and conductor, most notable for his compositions for Disney movies and musicals such as 'Beauty and the Beast', 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame', 'The Little Mermaid', 'Aladdin' and many more. Note that questions about movies or their adaptations are considered off-topic." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T10:51:13.893" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T10:51:13.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14183" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-05T17:10:56.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T17:10:56.420" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T17:10:56.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14184" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-05T17:10:56.420" Score="0" Body="For the 1994 Disney musical &quot;Beauty and the Beast&quot; with music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashton and Tim Rice, and book by Linda Woolverton. Questions about the musical should be tagged with [alan-menken]. Questions about the movie are considered off-topic, and questions about the fairy tale should be tagged as [fairy-tales] instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T17:46:15.063" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T17:46:15.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14174" CreationDate="2020-05-05T17:43:58.747" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare uses the word &quot;desk&quot; in two plays: &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene 2 (cited in the question) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/comedy_4_1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;, where Antipholus of Ephesus says (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Give her this &lt;strong&gt;key&lt;/strong&gt;, and tell her, &lt;strong&gt;in the desk&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That's cover'd o'er with Turkish tapestry,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  There is a purse of ducats; let her send it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that &quot;desk&quot; refers to a type of furniture where you can store things and that you can lock with a key. Because of this, it can also be used for storing things that the owner wants to keep secret. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several such &quot;desks&quot; in the Victoria &amp;amp; Albert Museum in London. For example, an &lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O112359/desk-unknown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oak desk from around 1600&lt;/a&gt;, an &lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O79021/table-desk-unknown/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inlaid table desk from the years 1580-1620&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O58582/duke-of-urbino-writing-desk-desk-dumesnil-robert/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Duke of Urbino Writing Desk&lt;/a&gt; from around 1600.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikimedia has the following image of &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_VIII%27s_writing_box.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry VIII's writing box&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8KRG.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/c8KRG.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;wooden box in walnut and oak, lined with painted and gilded leather and silk velvet, shown opened so one can see its subdivisions and small drawers&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the cited passage from &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Polonius asks Claudius what he (the king) might have thought of him if he had kept his knowledge about Hamlet's and Ophelia's relationship to himself (instead of telling Ophelia she should avoid prince Hamlet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T20:15:42.547" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T20:15:42.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14180" CreationDate="2020-05-05T18:10:29.173" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the early Act I song “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyq5VI2486I#t=5m10s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belle&lt;/a&gt;” she complained about the monotony of small-town life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Little town, it’s a quiet village&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Every day like the one before […]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Every morning just the same&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Since the morning that we came&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To this poor provincial town […]&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  There must be more than this provincial life!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyq5VI2486I#t=30m40s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Belle (reprise)&lt;/a&gt;” she described her dreams:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want much more than this provincial life!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I want adventure in the great wide somewhere&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I want it more than I can tell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And for once it might be grand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To have someone understand&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I want so much more than they’ve got planned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these are her “childhood dreams”—to escape from the provinces, have adventures, travel places, and have people understand her ambitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyq5VI2486I#t=1h55m55s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Change in Me&lt;/a&gt;” (late in Act II), she realises that if she marries the Beast she is going to have to stay in the provinces, and will never have the “perfect world” she imagined for herself in Paris or wherever. But she is happy with this because she loves him, and so feels that this will be the “truer life”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-05T18:17:46.910" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:17:46.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14177" CreationDate="2020-05-05T18:42:14.027" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;That &quot;the action might be noticed&quot; simply means that someone might just see him throwing the sword-stick into the sea.&#xA;In addition, that witness may have &quot;thought &lt;strong&gt;noticeable&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; what he saw, in other words, that person may have thought that it was &lt;strong&gt;significant&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;After all, throwing a sword-stick or a walking stick into the sea looks a bit strange, unlike throwing a normal stick or stones.&#xA;In the context of the murder case, that witness may have remembered that action when asked by the police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the murderer was looking over the beach for a way to make throwing away that sword-stick more &quot;natural&quot;, or,&#xA;in Chesterton's words, &quot;his eyes (...) rolled darkly over all that desolate sea-shore&quot;.&#xA;When he sees the dog, he figures out what to do: throwing a stick into the water for a dog to fetch is a perfectly normal game.&#xA;And during that game of throwing sticks, he also throws that sword-stick into the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:42:14.027" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14177" CreationDate="2020-05-05T18:46:21.153" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;Noticeable&quot; here means more &quot;&lt;em&gt;worthy&lt;/em&gt; of being noticed&quot; than &quot;&lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to be noticed&quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/noticeable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noticeable&lt;/a&gt; has two different, albeit related meanings, which coul be summarised as &quot;&lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to be noticed&quot; and &quot;&lt;em&gt;worthy&lt;/em&gt; of being noticed&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;ol&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;attracting notice or attention; capable of being noticed:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;a noticeable lack of interest.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;li&gt;worthy or deserving of notice or attention; noteworthy:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;a book that is noticeable for its vivid historical background.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, Father Brown is using the word in the second sense. An action can be noticed, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; thought noticeable. For example, the action of throwing sticks for a dog to fetch might also be noticed: I've often noticed people doing that at beaches or in parks, and rarely thought much of it. The criminal didn't care about being noticed, as long as he was not noticed doing something suspicious or memorable (&lt;em&gt;noticeable&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&quot;How&quot; here is used as an &lt;em&gt;exclamation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/exclamations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exclamation &quot;how&quot;&lt;/a&gt; is usually used together with adjectives or adverbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How wonderful it is to see you!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;How beautifully she sang! Everyone was delighted.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in slightly more old-fashioned English (not old-fashioned as in Shakespearean; you'll see it commonly in writing from a few decades ago too), exclamation &quot;how&quot; can be used together with a whole sentence. Note the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence in your quote: it doesn't mean &quot;it's a big wonder that his eyes must have rolled ...&quot; but more along the lines of &quot;think of how his eyes must have rolled ... !&quot; It's similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning B1 of &quot;how&quot; here&lt;/a&gt;: used for &lt;strong&gt;emphasis&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-05T18:46:21.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14191" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11011" CreationDate="2020-05-06T02:23:35.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Violent_Bear_It_Away&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Violent Bear It Away&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The old man was in a position to know what his ideas were. He had lived for three months in the nephew’s house on what he had thought at the time was Charity but what he said he had found out was not Charity or anything like it. All the time he had lived there, the nephew had secretly been making a study of him. The nephew, who had taken him in under the name of Charity, had at the same time been creeping into his soul by the back door, asking him questions that meant more than one thing, planting traps around the house and watching him fall into them, and finally coming up with a written study of him for a schoolteacher magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T02:23:35.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14192" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-06T10:10:42.357" Score="2" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first line of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know. I got a telegram from the home: &quot;Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.&quot; That doesn't mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault doesn't know exactly what day his mother (Maman) died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this opening, he reiterates the same point a couple times - &quot;Or yesterday maybe&quot;, &quot;Maybe it was yesterday&quot;. That, combined with &quot;That doesn't mean anything&quot;, is hinting to me that perhaps it's not sitting quite right with him that he doesn't know what day she died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Meursault bothered by the fact that he doesn't know what day Maman died?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T19:50:09.000" Title="Is Meursault bothered that he doesn't know what day Maman died?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14193" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-06T10:32:13.667" Score="4" ViewCount="1299" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter II of Part II of Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, Meursault narrates a story that he read in an old newspaper cutting that he found under his mattress in prison. Below is a summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man from a Czech village makes a fortune abroad and returns to his village twenty-five years later. He leaves his wife and daughter in a hotel and then checks into the hotel run by his mother and sister (to surprise them), who don't recognise him. During the night, they kill him for his money. The next morning, the man's wife and daughter arrive at the hotel and unintentionally reveal who the man was. The victim's mother and sister kill themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can remember, Meursault never refers to this story again in the remainder of the novel. What is its relevance here or to the novel as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T14:26:42.507" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T14:49:36.160" Title="How is the Czechoslovak traveller's story relevant to The Stranger as a whole?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14193" CreationDate="2020-05-06T12:26:39.870" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story reminds me of Oedipus, who unintentionally kills his actual father and marries his mother, and on finding out the truth, exiles himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, Camus himself was interested in this ancient story as we know he studied classics, and he also wrote an essay, the &lt;em&gt;Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;. But this does not mean that this story is of any direct relevance to &lt;em&gt;l'Etranger&lt;/em&gt;, after all, it's mentioned only in a newspaper cutting, and then in passing. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T12:26:39.870" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14113" CreationDate="2020-05-06T12:49:33.473" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Novelists, unlike dramatists, actually describe place to the extent that some critics have said place is an additional character in a novel, but I don't think that this is the case here. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merseault does not seem to take much of an interesting in life, or in living. To me, the novel is a study in anomie rather than absurdity. And a stifling, suffocating heat must only be a way of how Camus is indicating Merseault finds or thinks of life. That is suffocating, stifling and intolerable. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T12:49:33.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14197" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14147" CreationDate="2020-05-06T13:00:21.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camus was secular even though he maintained an interest in spiritual matters. After all, he called Simon Wril, 'one of the truly great spirits of our time.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given his interest in the figure of the rebel, of transgression, of revevaluating the norms of bourgeois society, I'd say he was a Nietzschean and here, he was suggesting that religion be given a decent burial, and by doing so, he was acknowledging it's greatness, but also that its time had passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was interested in the new man, of the new century. Hence his interest in the promethean figure of the rebel who would put aside all old things as though they were toys. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that this new century was a century full of atrocities, one might say he was being a little hasty in thinking the new  was to be rapturously and blindly welcomed. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T13:00:21.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-06T16:54:17.343" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 2015 musical, &lt;em&gt;Hamilton&lt;/em&gt; written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Aaron Burr serves as the foil to Alexander Hamilton. While Alexander is rash, hasty, and always on the move, Aaron sits back and watches for things to happen, as a passive bystander. Essentially, Hamilton's philosophy seems to be to &quot;make an opportunity&quot; while Burr's seems to be &quot;wait for an opportunity&quot;. This is best seen in the song, &quot;Wait for it,&quot; where he sings,  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And if there's a reason I'm still alive&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  When everyone who loves me has died&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm willing to wait for it.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I'm willing to wait for it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this characterization consistent/based on who Burr historically was? Or was this simply a creative liberty Lin-Manuel Miranda took to highlight the foil that would also serve as irony later on in the musical?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T16:54:17.343" Title="What historical similarities are there to Burr's characterization in &quot;Hamilton&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;hamilton-musical&gt;&lt;lin-manuel-miranda&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14200" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-06T16:58:51.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T16:58:51.173" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T16:58:51.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14201" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-06T16:58:51.173" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Lin-Manuel Miranda, an American composer, songwriter, actor, and playwright (along with a plethora of other things) most famous for his musical &quot;Hamilton&quot;. Questions about his works should be tagged likewise. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:28:46.707" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:28:46.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14202" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-06T17:04:21.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T17:04:21.497" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T17:04:21.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14203" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-06T17:04:21.497" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2015 historical musical &quot;Hamilton&quot; by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Not to be confused with the tag [alexander-hamilton], which is for questions about the actual person and his works. Questions about the musical should be tagged with [lin-manuel-miranda].  " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T18:30:31.203" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:30:31.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14137" CreationDate="2020-05-06T18:56:06.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that what Jeet Heer had in mind is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Proustian, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Of, relating to, or characteristic of Proust, his writings, or his style, particularly with reference to the recovery of the lost past and the stimulation of unconscious memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the features of Proust’s &lt;em&gt;Remembrance Of Things Past&lt;/em&gt; is a first-person narrator who is interested not only in the things that happened, but also in the process of remembering those things. The episode of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madeleine_(cake)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;madeleine&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Swann’s Way&lt;/em&gt; is well known:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me, when one day in winter, as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing I did not ordinarily take. I declined at first, and then, for no particular reason, changed my mind. She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called ‘petites madeleines,’ which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it; perhaps because I had so often seen such things in the interval, without tasting them, on the trays in pastry-cooks’ windows, that their image had dissociated itself from those Combray days to take its place among others more recent; perhaps because of those memories, so long abandoned and put out of mind, nothing now survived, everything was scattered; the forms of things, including that of the little scallop-shell of pastry, so richly sensual under its severe, religious folds, were either obliterated or had been so long dormant as to have lost the power of expansion which would have allowed them to resume their place in my consciousness. But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Marcel Proust (1913). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7178/7178-h/7178-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Swann’s Way&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gene Wolfe also used first-person narrators who were interested the nature of memory and the process of remembering. In &lt;em&gt;The Book of the New Sun&lt;/em&gt; the narrator Severian often makes remarks like these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as all that appear imperishable tends towards its own destruction, those moments that at the time seem the most fleeting recreate themselves—not only in my memory (which in the final accounting loses nothing) but in the throbbing of my heart and the pricking of my hair, making themselves new just as our Commonwealth reconstitutes itself each motning in the shrill tones of its own clarions. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is my nature, my joy and my curse, to forget nothing. Every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell, and taste, remains changeless in my mind, and though I know it is not so with everyone, I cannot imagine what it can mean to be otherwise, as if one had slept when in fact an experience is merely remote. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I think back on that time, it is that moment I recall first; to remember more, I must work forward or backward from that. In memory it seems to me I stand always so, in gray shirt and ragged trousers, with the blade poised above my head. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have said, I remember everything; but often I can find a fact, face, or feeling only after a long search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gene Wolfe (1980). &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Torturer&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Timescape.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolfe’s novel &lt;em&gt;Soldier of the Mist&lt;/em&gt; (1986) is also concerned with memory, but in this novel, the first-person narrator has a head wound that has makes it impossible for him to form new memories, so that as each day begins he has to figure out who he is by re-reading his own written narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another similarity between the prose styles of the two writers is the narrators’ penchant for gnomic aphorisms. Here’s an example from &lt;em&gt;Swann’s Way&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here’s one from &lt;em&gt;The Shadow of the Torturer&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A crowd is not the sum of the individuals who compose it. Rather it is a species of animal, without language or real consciousness, born when they gather, dying when they depart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T18:56:06.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14205" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10919" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:50:44.143" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no evidence that Shakespeare intended the three &lt;em&gt;weird sisters&lt;/em&gt; to be witches!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I have mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/13824/what-does-lady-macbeth-mean-by-what-thou-art-promised/13919&quot;&gt;elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; there is legitimate scholarly opinion to the effect that Shakespeare did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; include witches in his play. The modern notion of 'witches' is a misunderstanding: the text which modern academics ascribe to Shakespeare speaks of &lt;em&gt;weird sisters&lt;/em&gt; not of witches. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is much ambiguity in this play, as in many of his plays, due to corruption of the text during the process of printing it under the exceedingly primitive conditions so long ago. The printed text contains a good deal of textual corruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, above all, it is now thought that some scenes which appear in modern editions of the play were added by another author, in the years between Shakespeare's death in 1616 and the First Folio printing in 1623. The references to witches are thought to have been added by another hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling them &lt;em&gt;witches&lt;/em&gt; attributes supernatural powers to them, such as could account for their having an ability, with some credibility, to foretell the future. But although Shakespeare is still thought to have written the scene in which Lady Macbeth appears to urge her husband to murder King Duncan, some part of the ambiguity in her words can be accounted for by the fact that she may be referring to a rather different play than is currently included in modern printings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Shakespeare may have written her dialogue without witches in mind, and they may have been added by another author so as to strengthen Lady Macbeth's position in this scene, among others, where she needs to call on a supernatural prophecy that Macbeth 'wilt be King hereafter'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Folio text of 1623 is thought to be a revision of the original play, probably adapted by Thomas Middleton (and unquestionably using Middleton’s material, from his 1616 play &lt;em&gt;The Witches&lt;/em&gt;). And &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is very short by Shakespeare’s standards, suggesting abridgement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems to have only had three 'weird sisters' in mind. Someone unknown, possibly Middleton, made the play a better box office attraction by inserting at least one extra scene with a reference to witches -- in the rest of the play the term was not originally used -- to give a better justification (in our eyes) for Lady Macbeth's claims that fate has prophesied that Macbeth will become king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her words, perhaps made ambiguous by simple textual corruption, but maybe because they originally referred to a quite different scene to the one now included in the play, have very little meaning. But the reason seems not to lie with Shakespeare but with the author who &quot;collaborated&quot; with him on the script - perhaps long after his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, Shakespeare's reference to 'weird' sisters in Act 1 scene 3 - originally spelled (i.e. before the modern versions) as in the old Norse fashion - and the fact that there are, tellingly, three of them, all seems to be more in keeping with their having been intended to represent the three Norse &lt;em&gt;fates&lt;/em&gt; - beings with the gift of prophesy. A 16th century audience might have understood that reference rather better than we do -- who remembers the Norse fates today? Whereas 'witches' remains a concept which we do understand. So perhaps Middleton had a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the &lt;em&gt;witches&lt;/em&gt; give a prophesy? They didn't, they were added later, not by Shakespeare: he continues to speak of &lt;em&gt;weird sisters&lt;/em&gt;, as in Act 1 scene 5, line 9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the &lt;em&gt;weird sisters&lt;/em&gt; give a prophesy? Because they were intended to be the three Norse &lt;em&gt;fates&lt;/em&gt;, who a 16th century audience would have understood to have the gift of prophesy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our terms, the three sisters represent the three spirits in Charles Dickens's &lt;em&gt;A Christmas Carol&lt;/em&gt;: the ghosts of Christmas &lt;em&gt;past&lt;/em&gt;, of Christmas &lt;em&gt;present&lt;/em&gt;, and of Christmas &lt;em&gt;yet-to-come&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth is a man, a real man, not a caricature. Like Hamlet, when he is urged by supernatural forces to commit murder, he recoils from the notion, and has to be talked into it -- in Macbeth's case by his politically ambitious wife. Macbeth is quite squeamish, she calls him a coward for being &lt;em&gt;too full of the milk of human kindness&lt;/em&gt; (she actually &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; that term: Shakespeare invented it, in this play). But her husband behaves like a real person might: he is sceptical of the so-called supernatural, and is unwilling to murder anyone, even King Duncan, just to fulfill his wife's political ambitions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare portrays the &lt;em&gt;weird sisters&lt;/em&gt; as beyond human comprehension: we don't get any great insight into their motivation -- perhaps because this text is an abridged, greatly shortened version of the original. But most likely, much of what we do see of them is added later, and only their first appearance is genuinely by the author himself. Probably they are intended to be mysterious, beyond our comprehension. And the play is an exploration of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth's&lt;/em&gt; comprehension of them, not ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9944" LastEditorUserId="9944" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:30:04.007" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:30:04.007" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14206" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:58:40.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Muchamore's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.muchamore.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.muchamore.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:05:01.800" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:05:01.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14207" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:58:40.243" Score="0" Body="For questions about the English author Robert Muchamore (born 1972) and his works, most famously for his book series 'CHERUB' and 'Henderson's Boys'. Questions about his works should be tagged accordingly." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:00:41.637" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:00:41.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14208" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:59:53.683" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T19:59:53.683" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T19:59:53.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14209" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-06T19:59:53.683" Score="0" Body="&quot;Hendersons Boys&quot; is a young adult spy book series written by Robert Muchamore. Questions about this work should be tagged with [robert-muchamore]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:00:47.783" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:00:47.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14210" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-06T20:00:53.737" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:00:53.737" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:00:53.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14211" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-06T20:00:53.737" Score="0" Body="CHERUB is a spy novel book series written by English author Robert Muchamore. Questions about this work should be tagged with [robert-muchamore]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-06T20:25:52.567" LastActivityDate="2020-05-06T20:25:52.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14212" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-04-01T21:10:04.803" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Fitzstephen wrote a biography of Thomas Becket in the 1170s, which included a description of London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The citizens of London are everywhere noted above all others, for the polish of their manners, their genteel dress, and well ordered table. The inhabitants of other cities are called citizens, but those of London are called nobles. An oath with them decides every dispute. &lt;strong&gt;The matrons of the city are very Sabines.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Translated from Latin by John Allen Giles, 1846.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by Sabines here? Attractive? Brave? I know about the story of the Rape (capture?) of the Sabine women: it mentions how they gave up their freedom to save their people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Alan" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T09:51:33.983" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T16:35:46.960" Title="Meaning of &quot;the matrons are very Sabines&quot; in Fitzstephen's description of London" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-fitzstephen&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14213" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14212" CreationDate="2020-04-01T21:44:01.780" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oed.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (subscription required) has this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transferred&lt;/em&gt; in allusion to the proverb &lt;em&gt;Sabini quod volunt somniant&lt;/em&gt;, ‘the Sabines dream what they will’ (Festus).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;together with this quote from 1610&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grimsby, which our Sabins or conceited persons dreaming what they list, and following their owne fansies, will have to be so called of one Grime a merchant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1917" OwnerDisplayName="Gerald Edgar" LastActivityDate="2020-04-01T21:44:01.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14212" CreationDate="2020-05-07T11:29:39.037" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sabine women were a byword for &lt;strong&gt;married virtue and chastity&lt;/strong&gt;. Here are two examples from classical Latin writers with whom Fitzstephen was likely familiar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But if a chaste wife, assisting on her part [in the management] of the house, and beloved children (such as is the Sabine, or the sun-burned spouse of the industrious Apulian), piles up the sacred hearth with old wood, just at the approach of her weary husband […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Horace (c. 10 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.41174/page/n121/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epodes, Ode II&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Christopher Smart (1856). &lt;em&gt;The Works Of Horace&lt;/em&gt;, p. 115. London: Henry G. Bohn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you say no worthy wife is to be found among all these crowds? Well, let her be handsome, charming, rich and fertile; let her have ancient ancestors ranged about her halls; let her be more chaste than the dishevelled Sabine maidens who stopped the war—a prodigy as rare upon the earth as a black swan! yet who could endure a wife that possessed all perfections?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Juvenal (early C2nd). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Juvenal_and_Persius/The_Satires_of_Juvenal/Satire_6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Satire 6, ‘The Ways of Women’&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by George Gilbert Ramsay (1918).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petrarch, writing a couple of centuries after Fitzstephen, included &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hersilia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hersilia&lt;/a&gt; and the other Sabine women in his ‘Triumph of Chastity’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Next came Hersilia, the Roman dame&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (Or Sabine rather), with her valorous train,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Who prove all slanders on that sex are vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Petrarch (c. 1351). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sonnetstriumphs01campgoog/page/n546/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Triumph of Chastity&lt;/a&gt;’. Translated by Thomas Campbell (1859). &lt;em&gt;The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch&lt;/em&gt;, p. 364. London: Henry G. Bohn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pliny&lt;/a&gt;, the Sabines had a reputation for religious piety, and perhaps this is how the idea originated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Sabini (called, according to some writers, from their attention to religious observances and the worship of the gods, Sevini) dwell on the dew-clad hills in the vicinity of the Lakes of the Velinus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pliny the Elder (c. 79). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.41174/page/n121/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Natural History&lt;/em&gt;, book III, chapter 17&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (1855). London: Henry G. Bohn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T12:29:29.437" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T12:29:29.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14215" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14216" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English cleric William Fitzstephen (died c. 1191) and his works. He wrote a biography of Thomas Becket, the 'Vita Sancti Thomae' ('Life of St. Thomas'). Use this tag with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T15:58:17.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14749" CreationDate="2020-05-07T16:10:53.543" Score="2" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just begun reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the complete short stories of Guy de Maupassant&lt;/a&gt;, starting with one of his most famous, &quot;Boule de Suif&quot; (variously translated as &quot;Dumpling&quot;, &quot;Butterball&quot;, etc.) In an early passage of the story, when the passengers of the coach are being introduced one by one to the reader, Monsieur Carre-Lamadon is described as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Beside them, dignified in bearing, belonging to a superior caste, sat Monsieur Carre-Lamadon, a man of considerable importance, a king in the cotton trade, proprietor of three spinning-mills, officer of the Legion of Honor, and member of the General Council. During the whole time the Empire was in the ascendancy he remained the chief of the well-disposed Opposition, merely in order to command a higher value for his devotion when he should rally to the cause which he meanwhile opposed with “courteous weapons,” to use his own expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does all this mean?&lt;/strong&gt; I haven't finished reading the story, but it seems that understanding the political leanings of the various passengers is going to be important for the story. What are the &quot;Legion of Honor&quot;, the &quot;General Council&quot;, and the &quot;well-disposed Opposition&quot;? In the last sentence, which cause is being referred to and what are &quot;courteous weapons&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T13:27:14.610" Title="What political leanings are being described for Monsieur Carre-Lamadon?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14218" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14229" CreationDate="2020-05-07T16:20:45.703" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's poem “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/43687&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tyger&lt;/a&gt;” from &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt; utilizes &quot;the&quot; in an interesting manner in two separate couplets of the 4th stanza, lines 9 and 11: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What the hammer? what the chain,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In what furnace was thy brain?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What the Anvil, what dread grasp&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Dare its deadly terrors clasp!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although being syntactically incorrect &quot;the&quot; does preserve the metre throughout the stanza, however is this its only purpose? Is it possible that one could interpret Blake utilising the 2nd sense of Lexico's 1st definition of &quot;the&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/the&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(used to refer to a person, place, or thing that is unique.)&lt;/a&gt;, albeit in an unorthodox manner, to place significance on the objects being pre-material forge-related tools, of divine origin. In this way they would be considered &quot;the&quot; tools that crafted all matter. Is this interpretation valid with respect to Blake's Intent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T03:48:47.313" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T03:48:47.313" Title="Does &quot;the&quot; only serve to preserve metre in &quot;The Tyger&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14212" CreationDate="2020-05-07T16:35:46.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this is a translation, it's worth looking at the original sentence first, which can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/survey-of-london-stow/1603/pp218-229#p12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British History Online&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vrbis matronæ ipsæ Sabinæ sunt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be more than one way to translate this (&quot;The matrons / wives of the city are themselves / real Sabines&quot;) but the comparison shows at least that &quot;Sabines&quot; comes from the Latin text and not the translator's poetic licence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leo T. Gourde's 1943 Master's Thesis &lt;a href=&quot;http://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1621&amp;amp;context=luc_theses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;An Annotated Translation of the Life of St. Thomas Becket by William Fitzstephen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains the following footnote for &quot;Sabines&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Sabines were an Italic tribe of central Italy and contemporaneous with early Rome. Known for their simple lives and physical courage, they had a reputation for severe discipline and sturdy character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this doesn't rhyme well with the preceding sentences in John Allen Giles's translation, we need to look at the Latin original again (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ciues Londoniæ, vbicumque locorum, præ omnibus aliis ciuibus &lt;strong&gt;ornatu morum, vestium, et mensæ&lt;/strong&gt;, locutione spectabiles et noti habentur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giles translated &quot;ornatu&quot; as &quot;genteel&quot;, in which the meanings &quot;refined&quot; and &quot;stylish&quot; are perhaps a bit stronger than in the Latin adjective &quot;ornatus&quot;, which can also mean &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/28932/ornatus-ornata&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;distinguished, honored&lt;/a&gt;. In addition, &quot;mores&quot; (plural of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.latin-dictionary.net/definition/27301/mos-moris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;mos&quot;&lt;/a&gt;) means much more than &quot;manners&quot; in the sense of etiquette, it also refers to character and moral rectitude (both combined into a single concept).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, the step from being &quot;ornatu morum&quot; to being a &quot;Sabine&quot; in the sense of &quot;exhibiting severe discipline and sturdy character&quot;. It is as if Fitzstephen was trying to describe Londoners in a way that would have pleased the moralists of the Roman Republic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T16:35:46.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-07T18:58:52.733" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the song &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Halsey-graveyard-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Genius.com: &amp;quot;Graveyard&amp;quot; lyrics&quot;&gt;Graveyard&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by Halsey, there's one line that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You look at me&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  With eyes so dark, don't know how you even see&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  You push right through me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song overall is about someone in a relationship with a person who's heading into a bad place (mentally) and their partner following them there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what does this line about &quot;dark eyes&quot; mean? Is it referring to physically dark eyes, like from lack of sleep? Or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:22:56.493" Title="What does the &quot;with eyes so dark&quot; line of Halsey's &quot;Graveyard&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;halsey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14221" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:10:58.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:10:58.993" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:10:58.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14222" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:10:58.993" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane (born 1994), known by her stage name as &quot;Hasley&quot; as they relate to literature. Questions about her songs should be tagged under [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:16:59.270" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:16:59.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14223" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:18:50.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:18:50.543" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:18:50.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14224" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:18:50.543" Score="0" Body="For questions about Youtuber Rhett Mclaughlin and his works as they relate to literature. Rhett is the co-host of the Youtube channel &quot;Good Mythical Morning&quot; along with his friend Link Neal. Question about their YouTube channel or videos are considered off-topic unless they is related to one of their published works." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:26:25.000" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:26:25.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14225" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:19:53.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:19:53.170" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:19:53.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14226" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-07T19:19:53.170" Score="0" Body="For questions about Youtuber Charles Lincoln &quot;Link&quot; Neal and his works as they relate to literature. Link is the co-host of the Youtube channel &quot;Good Mythical Morning&quot; along with his friend Rhett McLaughlin. Questions about their YouTube channel or videos are considered off-topic unless they are related to one of their published works." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T19:25:41.407" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T19:25:41.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14218" CreationDate="2020-05-07T20:22:59.720" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘The Tyger’ contains a series of rhetorical questions, which we understand to be about the nature of the creator of the Tyger. The first questions are given in conventional English syntax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What immortal hand or eye,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In what distant deeps or skies&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  On what wings dare he aspire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then as the poem progresses, words begin to be omitted. At first it is easy to fill in the gaps: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What [is] the hand, [that] dare seize the fire?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage this is no more than conventional poetic elision, but the omissions give the impression of haste, as if the message is so urgent that there is no time to spell out the details, and so important that syntax can be abandoned. The omissions increase in frequency as the poem goes on, giving an impression of acceleration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And when thy heart began to beat,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What dread hand […]? &amp;amp; what dread feet […]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What […] the hammer […]? what […] the chain […],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In what furnace was thy brain […]?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What […] the anvil […]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here it is not quite so easy to fill the gaps. We must stretch our imagination to figure out what the poet must have intended the questions to be. We can tell from the fragments that we are presented with, that the creator is being personified as a blacksmith, so that the questions must be along these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What dread hand [could wield the hammer]? &amp;amp; what dread feet [could pump the bellows]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What [is] the hammer [that beat thee]? what [is] the chain [that lifted thee],&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In what furnace was thy brain [forged]?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What [is] the anvil [on which thou wert beaten]?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this dramatic and compressed climax the poem returns to conventional syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are not obliged to read the poem in this way, but if you do, then there is no difficulty with the presence of the word “the”: it is used in its normal sense, but stands out because so many other words have been elided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-07T20:47:02.820" LastActivityDate="2020-05-07T20:47:02.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-07T20:44:40.213" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am having trouble with this question from &quot;A Tale of Two Cities.&quot; Just wondering if someone could help with this. If anyone could bring up quotes as well, that would be great!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10044" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T07:38:37.710" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T07:38:37.710" Title="To what degree is Charles Darnay’s decision to go to Paris at the end of Book the Second a noble or virtuous decision?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;a-tale-of-two-cities&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14231" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14239" CreationDate="2020-05-07T22:17:04.627" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n195/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dagger with Wings&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown went to someone, Mr Aylmer, who was asking for protection against  another one who wants to kill him, but the priest wasn't sure whether this man has only a monomania, or he is really being chased by someone. So Father Brown went to him without prior notice, and the man was a little afraid of the priest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about Mr Aylmer’s unrestful eye prompted the priest to go straight to the point. If the man’s persecution was only a monomania, he would be the less likely to resent &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I was wondering,” said Father Brown softly, “whether it is quite true that you never expect visitors.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are right,” replied his host steadily. “I always expect one visitor. And he may be the last.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For which thing does &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;it&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; refer here? I can't get the whole meaning of this sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it means &amp;quot;going straight to the point&amp;quot;, what's the relation between that and determining whether if this man has only a monomania, or he is really being chased by someone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T11:45:48.130" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T11:45:48.130" Title="What would Mr Aylmer resent in &quot;The Dagger with Wings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14232" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T06:52:56.363" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has &quot;which were&quot; been omitted before &quot;noted&quot; in this text from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16167/16167-h/16167-h.htm#link2HCH0010&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7&lt;/em&gt;, last page of Chapter IX&lt;/a&gt;? See the quoted passage below, with emphasis added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;naturally made all haste to reach his capital. Meanwhile the desire of keeping his army intact caused him to refrain from any movement which involved the slightest risk of bringing on a battle, and, in fact, reduced him to inaction. So much is readily intelligible. But what at this time withheld Sapor, when he had so grand an opportunity of making an impression upon Rome—what paralyzed his arm when it might have struck with such effect it is far from easy to understand, though perhaps not impossible to conjecture. The historian of the war ascribes his abstinence to a religious motive, telling us that the auguries were not favorable for the Persians crossing the Tigris. &lt;strong&gt;But there is no other evidence that the Persians of this period were the slaves of any such superstition as that noted by Ammianus&lt;/strong&gt;, nor any probability that a monarch of Sapor’s force of character would have suffered his military policy to be affected by omens. We must therefore ascribe the conduct of the Persian king to some cause not recorded by the historian—same failure of health, or some peril from internal or external enemies which called him away from the scene of his recent exploits, just at the time when his continued presence there was most important. Once before in his lifetime, an invasion of his eastern provinces had required his immediate presence, and allowed his adversary to quit Mesopotamia and march against Magnentius. It is not improbable that a fresh attack of the same or some other barbarians now again happened opportunely for the Romans, calling Sapor away, and thus enabling Constantius to turn his hack upon the East, and set out for Europe in order to meet Julian. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10045" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-08T12:20:14.477" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T12:41:11.610" Title="Has &quot;which were&quot; been omitted before &quot;noted&quot; in this text?" Tags="&lt;seven-great-monarchies&gt;&lt;george-rawlinson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14234" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T11:36:53.910" Score="5" ViewCount="244" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the song &amp;quot;Defying Gravity&amp;quot;, part of the musical &lt;em&gt;Wicked&lt;/em&gt;, there's this section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you care to find me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Look to the western sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As someone told me lately&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Everyone deserves the chance to fly&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I'm flying solo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At least I'm flying free&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To those who ground me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take a message back from me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell them how I am&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Defying gravity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm flying high&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Defying gravity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And soon I'll match them in renown&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first few times I heard the line &amp;quot;and if I'm flying solo&amp;quot;, I thought it was &amp;quot;and if I'm flying so &lt;em&gt;low&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; - as in, not very high, and interpreted it to mean &amp;quot;even if I'm not very good at it at least I'm free&amp;quot;. I was a bit surprised the first time I actually looked at the lyrics and discovered it was &amp;quot;solo&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this supposed to be a pun, using both &amp;quot;solo&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;so low&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T16:59:59.017" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T16:59:59.017" Title="Is &quot;and if I'm flying solo&quot; a pun in &quot;Defying Gravity&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;stephen-schwartz&gt;&lt;wicked&gt;&lt;winnie-holzman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14232" CreationDate="2020-05-08T12:41:11.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The grammar of the clause &quot;But there is no other evidence that the Persians of this period were the slaves of any such superstition as that noted by Ammianus&quot; is correct.&#xA;The addition of &quot;which were&quot; before &quot;noted&quot; would be grammatically incorrect, since &quot;any such superstition as that&quot; assumes a single superstition, whereas &quot;which were&quot; is plural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to find similar constructions elsewhere, for example (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;This would appear to be the same structure &lt;strong&gt;as that noted&lt;/strong&gt; by OS.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://canmore.org.uk/event/733670&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archaeology Notes&lt;/a&gt;, Canmore)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Brexiteers’ alternative to the EU is just as imaginary &lt;strong&gt;as that described by&lt;/strong&gt; Lear as a habitation for the Jumblies.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-theresa-may-defeat-war-military-edward-lear-jumblies-a8648896.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Independent&lt;/em&gt;, 23.11.2018&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The prayer related here by Luke is not precisely the same &lt;strong&gt;as that mentioned by&lt;/strong&gt; Matthew; and indeed it is not likely that it was given at the same time.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/niv/luke/11-1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commentary on Biblehub&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Director of the global research and analysis team at Kaspersky Lab, Costin Raiu, told Forbes the malware Mehta was investigating appeared to be the same &lt;strong&gt;as that found by&lt;/strong&gt; BAE Systems, linking the Bangladesh bank heist group with Lazarus.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/05/15/whos-behind-the-ransomware-pandemic-one-small-clue-points-to-north-korea/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Forbes, 15.05.2017&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T12:41:11.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T14:59:46.020" Score="3" ViewCount="196" Body="&lt;p&gt;In two YouTube videos about Albert Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;L'étranger&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, I have found the following quote,&#xA;which supposedly comes from an interview from 1955:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault est le seul Christ que nous méritions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault is the only Christ we would deserve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that &amp;quot;méritions&amp;quot; is in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood#French&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;subjunctive mood&lt;/a&gt; due to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.conjugaison.com/grammaire/subjonctif.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;le seul que&lt;/a&gt;; the present tense in the indicative mood would be &amp;quot;méritons&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this quote in the videos&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/2uJuSpdNbHE?t=896&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albert Camus, L'Étranger - Résumé analyse de l'oeuvre complète&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwp54yGrMeo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphaël Enthoven 4 - Meursault est le seul christ que nous méritions&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;but I have not been able to track down the interview from which the quote is claimed to be taken. Where was this interview published?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T23:08:35.477" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T23:18:41.247" Title="In which interview did Camus say that Meursault is the only Christ we deserved?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14238" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T21:51:52.467" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/selectionsfromje00rich/page/24/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Uhlane&lt;/a&gt;&quot; is a short story by Jean Richepin, whose English translation &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm#2H_4_0005&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lancer's Wife&lt;/a&gt;&quot; was erroneously attributed to Guy de Maupassant in the Walter Dunne edition of Maupassant's works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It focuses on a band of French &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francs-tireurs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;francs-tireurs&lt;/a&gt;, initially sitting in Switzerland recovering from a bad campaign and being cared for by the Swiss, who get bored and decide to go and kill some Prussians. To do so they cross apparently into &lt;em&gt;France&lt;/em&gt; (under occupation by Prussian forces?), for which they need to smuggle themselves past (Swiss? neutral? Prussian?) guards before getting into a region where they can lie low and make plans for guerilla action against Prussians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get exactly what's going on here, perhaps due to poor historical knowledge. It seems the Swiss are neutral, hence willing to look after suffering French soldiers, while the Prussians hold part of France itself, so the little band of Frenchmen needs to sneak past two sets of guards, first the Swiss standing between the enemies and then the Prussians guarding their claim in France (?) The following line confuses me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You are forgetting the treaty,” another soldier said; “we shall run the risk of doing the Swiss an injury, if Manteuffel learns that they have allowed prisoners to return to France.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are &quot;prisoners&quot; in this context? Do the protagonists count as prisoners of the neutral Swiss, or would they be prisoners only if captured by the Prussians? How would their actions affect the &quot;treaty&quot; (between who?) or the standing of the Swiss? Presumably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Freiherr_von_Manteuffel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this is Manteuffel&lt;/a&gt;, but does he have political power or only military?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Let us stop here,” said the captain. “I cannot believe that the war is going to end like this. The devil take it! Surely there are men still left in France; and now is the time to prove what they are made of. The spring is coming on, and the armistice is only a trap laid for the Prussians. During the time that it lasts, a new army will be raised, and some fine morning we shall fall upon them again. We shall be ready, and we have a hostage—let us remain here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again there is mention of an &quot;armistice&quot;, but how is that &quot;only a trap laid for the Prussians&quot;? To tempt them into occupying parts of France only to be driven out later by the French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ideally I'd like an answer drawing both on historical facts and on the text of this story. Historical facts may be what I'm missing in my understanding, but they are only useful here if explained in context. An answer purely from the text of the story would be great, but I suspect Richepin is assuming a lot of contextual knowledge which would have been common knowledge for his contemporary target audience.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T09:52:16.193" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T09:52:16.193" Title="Political backdrop to &quot;The Lancer's Wife&quot; (Franco-Prussian War)?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;jean-richepin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14231" CreationDate="2020-05-08T22:06:07.570" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;It&quot; refers back to &quot;go[ing] straight to the point&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the man's thoughts are dominated by paranoia (the monomania in this story), then he will sense that any indirect questions asked by Father Brown are attempts to find something out about him without being open about it. General questions and comments that are often used to break the ice, e.g. comments about the weather, would sound irrelevant and therefore irritating to someone who expects his murderer to enter the house at any moment. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Father Brown probably does not want to let out immediately that he knows about this real or imaginary threat, so he gives Mr. Aylmer the opportunity to explain his fear by asking whether it is true that the man does not expect visitors. He thereby implicitly admits that he has heard rumours about this and that this is the reason for his visit. This allows the conversation to move straight to the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-08T22:06:07.570" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14240" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14506" CreationDate="2020-05-08T23:21:22.590" Score="3" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.harpers.org/2009/10/pdf/HarpersMagazine-2009-10-0082667.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJXATU3VRJAAA66RA&amp;amp;Expires=1481740554&amp;amp;Signature=pZ99HLByl2ZZAA0mexCir30Z360%3D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;HYGIENE&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, By Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales, published this fall by&#xA;Penguin. Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only Nikolai and Elena are named in this story. My first instinct is that an author intends to empathize with named characters more than the unnamed ones, but this does not seem to be the case in this story. I am wondering if there's any other reason why an author would do this, or better yet some evidence of Petrushevskaya's motivation here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10039" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T13:44:03.773" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T15:10:41.517" Title="Why are only some characters in Petrushevskaya's Hygiene given names?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;lyudmila-petrushevskaya&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14241" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-08T23:37:04.860" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robots and automation once again have become very popular, introducing for example cooking robots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would be the earliest reference to an advanced appliance for either cooking or eating?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Billow Feeding Machine in &lt;em&gt;Modern Times&lt;/em&gt; (1936)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Iron Chancellor&lt;/em&gt; by R. Silverberg (1958)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1693" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T08:36:05.220" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T01:51:51.657" Title="What is the earliest known concept of a fictional advanced appliance for either cooking or eating?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14241" CreationDate="2020-05-09T00:52:27.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From 1925 or maybe 1911: the &amp;quot;scientific restaurants&amp;quot; in the 1925 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_124C_41%2B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Gernsback&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hugo Gernsback&lt;/a&gt;. It was originally &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?743245&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;serialized&lt;/a&gt; in Gernsback's &lt;em&gt;Modern Electrics&lt;/em&gt; magazine in 1911–1912, which I have not seen. The excerpt below is from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60944&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; etext of the 1950 second edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it neared noon Ralph escorted his companion to a luxurious eating place, which across its entrance bore the name &lt;em&gt;Scienticafé&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;This is one of our best restaurants, and I think you will prefer it to the old-fashioned masticating places,&amp;quot; he told her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they entered, a deliciously perfumed, yet invigorating fragrance greeted them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They proceeded at once to the Appetizer, which was a large room, hermetically closed, in which sat several hundred people, reading or talking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two sat down on leather-upholstered chairs and looked at a humorous daily magazine which was projected upon a white wall, the pages of the magazine changing from time to time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had been in the room but a few minutes when Alice exclaimed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I am ravenously hungry and I was not hungry at all when we entered. What kind of a trick is it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is the Appetizer,&amp;quot; Ralph exclaimed laughing, &amp;quot;the air in here is invigorating, being charged with several harmless gases for the purpose of giving you an appetite before you eat—hence its name!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both then proceeded to the main eating salon, which was beautifully decorated in white and gold. There were no attendants and no waiters, and the salon was very quiet except for a muffled, far-off, murmuring music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then sat down at a table on which were mounted complicated silver boards with odd buttons and pushes and slides. There was such a board for each patron. From the top of the board a flexible tube hung down to which one fastened a silver mouthpiece, that one took out of a disinfecting solution, attached to the board. The bill of fare was engraved in the board and there was a pointer which one moved up and down the various food items and stopped in front of the one selected. The silver mouthpiece was then placed in the mouth and one pressed upon a red button. The liquid food which one selected would then begin to flow into the mouth, its rate of speed controlled by the red button. If spices, salt or pepper were wanted, there was a button for each one which merely had to be pressed till the food was as palatable as wanted. Another button controlled the temperature of the food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meats, vegetables, and other eatables, were all liquefied and were prepared with utmost skill to make them palatable. When changing from one food to another the flexible tube, including the mouthpiece, were rinsed out with hot water, but the water did not flow out of the mouthpiece. The opening of the latter closed automatically during the rinsing and opened as soon as the process was terminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While eating they reclined in the comfortably upholstered leather arm-chair. They did not have to use knife and fork, as was the custom in former centuries. Eating had become a pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Do you know,&amp;quot; said Ralph, &amp;quot;it took people a long time to accept the scientific restaurants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;At first they did not succeed. Humanity had been masticating for thousands of years and it was hard to overcome the inherited habit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;However, people soon found out that scientific foods prepared in a palatable manner in liquid form were not only far more digestible and better for the stomach, but they also did away almost entirely with indigestion, dyspepsia, and other ills, and people began to get stronger and more vigorous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The scientific restaurants furnished only foods which were nourishing and no dishes hard to digest could be had at all. Therein lay the success of the new idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;People at first did not favor the idea because the new way of eating did not seem as aesthetic as the old and seemed also at first devoid of the pleasures of the old way of eating. They regarded it with a suspicion similar to a 20th century European observing a Chinaman using his chopsticks. This aversion, however, soon wore off as people became used to the new mode of eating, and it is thought that the close of the century will witness the closing of all old-fashioned restaurants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You will notice, however, that the liquid scientific foods are not absolutely liquid. Some of them, especially meats, have been prepared in such a manner that slight mastication is always necessary. This naturally does away with the monotony of swallowing liquids all the time and makes the food more desirable.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T00:52:27.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14243" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14244" CreationDate="2020-05-09T04:06:58.427" Score="8" ViewCount="911" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book I'm currently reading has a &quot;C.P. - (number)&quot; footnote every 20 pages. What does C.P. mean, and what is the purpose of this marking? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EkYPp.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/EkYPp.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5149" LastEditorUserId="5149" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T04:12:36.070" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T19:29:41.853" Title="Meaning of &quot;C.P.&quot; footnote" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14243" CreationDate="2020-05-09T08:35:23.400" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signature_mark&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;signature mark&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've often seen this in older bound hardback books, although the practice has passed out of use with more modern bookbinding techniques. Probably the copy of this book that you're reading is a few decades old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letters are the &lt;strong&gt;initials of the book's title&lt;/strong&gt;: in your case, &quot;C.P.&quot; stands for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Phlebas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Consider Phlebas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (I did a quick web search for one of the quotes seen in your images, to be sure what book it was). The number is a &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(bookbinding)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;section&lt;/a&gt; number&lt;/strong&gt;: you will find these footnotes running from &lt;code&gt;C.P.–1&lt;/code&gt; up to at least &lt;code&gt;C.P.–8&lt;/code&gt; and maybe further, depending on the size of the book. They'll only be seen in the first half of the book, of course, because the binding is such that the pages in the second half are on the same double-sheets of paper as those in the first half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://collation.folger.edu/2012/08/deciphering-signature-marks/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Further information on signature marks&lt;/a&gt; - although that page focuses on much older books, from a few centuries ago rather than just a few decades, when signature marks looked rather different and more archaic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T08:35:23.400" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1663" CreationDate="2020-05-09T13:13:57.227" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas’s biographer Byron Rogers speculated that the bitter contempt exhibited in some the poems was provoked by the loneliness and alienation of the poet. After studying at university in Bangor and being ordained as an Anglican priest, Thomas took up the living of the remote parish of Manafon in Powys. Whatever romantic notions the young man had about life on Welsh hill farms must have been rapidly dispelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The loneliness is everywhere in the poems. Partly that of the priest in the lonely parish, cut off by his learning and his cloth, it is also the result of personal choice. ‘I had one or two friends at Bangor, but we didn’t keep in touch after. I haven’t got any now.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Byron Rogers (2006). &lt;em&gt;The Man Who Went Into the West&lt;/em&gt;, p. 8. London: Aurum.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas’s subjects were not just his fellow countrymen, but his own parishioners and neighbours, and his insensitivity to them seems quite extraordinary. Perhaps he thought that ‘Iago Prytherch’ and ‘Llew Puw’ did not read or listen to poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1998, forty-four years after he had left the village and two years before his death. R. S. Thomas came back to Manafon. […] But there was something even more remarkable about the visit. He had come to read his poems. ‘I had heard him read before,’ said Dr Glyn Tegai Hughes, who was there that night. ‘It was at Gregynog, and he said they would be in two sections, first the poems about Wales, then those about God. There would, he went on, be an interval. During the interval a very young girl got up and said, “What would you like to happen to Wales, Mr Thomas?” He said, “Send the English back, then concrete everything over.” “But what would you have to write about then, Mr Thomas?” He said, “This is probably a good time to go on to the second part.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But the Manafon reading, that was an unusual event, at least that is how I remember it. There was certainly a feeling among some of the people there, it wasn’t just my feeling, that he owed some explanation to the people of Manafon.’ […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing was, his audience were the children of people whose half-witted grins&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; he had described; he had talked about the frightening vacancy of their minds,&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; mentioned their skulls,&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; laughed at the hill-farmers of his parish on their brand-new tractors,&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; and shown his readers around poverty-stricken home after poverty-stricken home.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; Some of those poems he read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It was insensitive, you might say,’ said Hazel Boulton. ‘One of the poems he chose to read was about a man dying with his face to the wall.&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; His people were in the church that night.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Rogers, pp. 172–173.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;1.,2. ‘A Peasant’ 3. ‘A Welsh Testament’ 4. ‘On The Farm’ 5. for example, ‘Evans’ 6. ‘Death of a Peasant’&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks, “How did Thomas reconcile his nationalistic sentiments with these extremely dim views of the Welsh?” Thomas’s response, “Send the English back, then concrete everything over” suggests that the answer might be that his nationalism was rooted in hatred of the English rather than love of the Welsh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T13:50:29.393" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14246" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:26:06.207" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:26:06.207" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:26:06.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14247" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:26:06.207" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 2003 Broadway musical &quot;Wicked&quot;, with music by Stephen Schwartz and book by Winne Holzman. Use with [stephen-schwartz] and [winne-holzman], as well as [song-lyrics] if applicable." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T01:28:01.513" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T01:28:01.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14248" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:27:45.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:27:45.083" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:27:45.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14249" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:27:45.083" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life and works of George Rawlison  (1812 – 1902), a British scholar, historian, and Christian theologian. Questions regarding his works should be tagged appropriately as well." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:37:49.550" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:37:49.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14250" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:31:34.643" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:31:34.643" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:31:34.643" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14251" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:31:34.643" Score="0" Body="For questions about the historical text 'Seven Great Monarchies' by George Rawlinson. Questions about this work should be tagged with [george-rawlinson]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:38:11.640" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:38:11.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14252" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:35:56.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T17:35:56.580" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T17:35:56.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14253" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-09T17:35:56.580" Score="0" Body="For questions about the life Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (born 1938), a Russian author, and her literary works. Questions about her works should be tagged with [russian-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-09T18:50:33.037" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T18:50:33.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14243" CreationDate="2020-05-09T19:29:41.853" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Rand al'Thor says in his answer, this is indeed a signature mark. I am adding this answer to note that, if these marks are present, they will occur throughout the book, not just in the first half, at intervals of 16 or 20 pages (or some other multiple of 4 pages), almost always at the left of the bottom margin of a right-hand page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you look carefully at the top of the spine of a traditionally bound hardback book (it helps to open the book so the covers are at about 60 degrees to each other), you will see that it is assembled from sets of 4 or 5 sheets of paper, folded in half (so that each sheet has four pages printed on it) and stitched to the binding; these sets of pages are called &quot;signatures&quot;. If you open the book to a page in the middle of a signature (page 103 or 123 in the case of the OP's book), you will see the stitching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding#Terms_and_techniques&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia article on Bookbinding&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I would make this as a comment, but I don't have the reputation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10053" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T19:29:41.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14255" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14256" CreationDate="2020-05-09T19:34:27.703" Score="4" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;There are men who radiate a special charm. They attract without wanting to, —&lt;strong&gt;one must believe in their personality, and then there is a certain quality which repels.&lt;/strong&gt; One is not conscious what it consists of, but it is there. They are branded with the brand of Art. So was Oscar Wilde,—so was Edgar Allan Poe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's from an essay on Edgar Allan Poe by the German author &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Heinz_Ewers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanns Heinz Ewers&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/edgarallanpo00ewer/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated by Adèle Lewisohn, 1917&lt;/a&gt;). I didn't understand the bold part. What do you think the author meant by believing their personality? I also didn't get why he said that they have a special charm in the first sentence and they have a repelling quality in the second? Isn't that contradicting?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10052" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T16:50:27.007" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T16:50:27.007" Title="What does Hanns Heinz Ewers mean in this quote about Edgar Allan Poe?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;hanns-heinz-ewers&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14255" CreationDate="2020-05-09T21:27:41.243" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &quot;one must believe in their personality&quot; most likely means that one can't resist admiring or approving of that person's behaviour or words (or both, it is hard to tell without more context). At the same time, it is possible that that same person has characteristics that one dislikes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perfectly possible to have contradictory feelings about a person or about something. One example of this type of ambivalence is the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love%E2%80%93hate_relationship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;love-hate relationship&lt;/a&gt;. Below are a few examples of attraction combined with repulsion from other texts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;As Josie struggles to understand Michael's death and hold onto the true world he shared with her, &lt;strong&gt;she finds herself both repelled by and attracted to&lt;/strong&gt; his pianist mother, Meredith, who holds Josie responsible for her son's torment.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.readinggroupguides.com/reviews/paint-it-black-a-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;About the Book Paint It Black: A Novel&quot; on ReadingGroupGuides.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;&lt;strong&gt;I was both attracted to him and repelled by him.&lt;/strong&gt; He had charisma and lunacy at the same time.&quot; (Quoted from the book &lt;em&gt;The 3 Mistakes of My Life&lt;/em&gt; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3320520-the-3-mistakes-of-my-life&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;GoodReads.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;When the narrator meets a support group member named Marla, who is pretending – like he is – to be terminally ill, &lt;strong&gt;he is both attracted and repelled&lt;/strong&gt;: (...)&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://culturevulture.net/books-cds/fight-club-chuck-palahniuk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk&lt;/a&gt;, CultureVulture)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;From its first appearance in 1818, &lt;strong&gt;Mary Shelley’s &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; both fascinated and repelled audiences&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/frankenstein/exhibition4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature: Transformation of a Monster&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Semi-autobiographical, partly inspired by Stendhal's &lt;em&gt;The Charterhouse of Parma&lt;/em&gt;, and set in 1962 in his native Parma, the film is deeply indebted to the French new wave and centres on &lt;strong&gt;Fabrizio, a 20-year-old introspective haut bourgeois student both attracted to and repelled by middle-class conformity and revolutionary Marxism&lt;/strong&gt;.&quot; (Philip French: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/apr/10/before-revolution-review-bernardo-bertolucci&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Before the Revolution – review&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, The Observer, 10.04.2011)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-09T21:27:41.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14258" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14255" CreationDate="2020-05-10T07:30:50.637" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is the &lt;em&gt;suspension of disbelief&lt;/em&gt;. as described Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his &lt;em&gt;Biographia Literaria&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1817,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We experience 'suspension'. in experiencing fairy tales, science fiction, romance.&#xA;At root, we have a reflection the notion  of :Cognitive Dissonance:  We need to accept the dissonance, and do so unconsciously, even though it is not resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10026" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T08:59:12.760" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T08:59:12.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14260" CreationDate="2020-05-10T10:26:47.940" Score="5" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to @GarethRees's sleuthing and editing, I just learned that several French short stories found in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Project Gutenberg version of the &quot;Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories&quot;&lt;/a&gt; are in fact not by Maupassant at all, but by other authors and falsely attributed to him. These include &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/posts/14238/revisions&quot;&gt;&quot;The Lancer's Wife&quot; by Richepin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/posts/11346/revisions&quot;&gt;&quot;The Confession&quot; by Maizeroy&lt;/a&gt;, and I don't know how many others. So my question now is threefold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Exactly &lt;strong&gt;which&lt;/strong&gt; short stories are falsely attributed to Guy de Maupassant in collections of his complete works?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where&lt;/strong&gt; did these misattributions begin? Can we blame Walter Dunne's collection of English translations, or does the origin go back further? Have French-language collections ever contained stories misattributed to Maupassant?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why&lt;/strong&gt; did this happen? Was it just poor research on the part of Walter Dunne or whoever, or was there any ulterior motive for over-promoting Maupassant?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T17:50:42.730" Title="Which short stories are falsely attributed to Guy de Maupassant, and why?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14259" CreationDate="2020-05-10T11:57:57.120" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ‘which’ and ‘where’ parts of the question were answered by Maupassant’s biographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Steegmuller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francis Steegmuller&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A smart American publisher and bookseller named M. Walter Dunne, whose specialty was large and showily produced “sets,” felt that the time had come to confront the American public with all of Maupassant; and he issued [starting in 1903], in seventeen volumes, the first large-scale collection of the stories, novels, travel-writings and verse in English. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the most remarkable feature of the Dunne collection is its contents: for in it are included no less than sixty-five stories which are not the work of Maupassant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these sixty-five stories has ever been included in any French edition of Maupassant’s works; I have been able to identify four as tales from the collected works of one of Maupassant’s fellow-journalists, René Maizeroy; the authorship of the remainder is unknown; but almost without exception internal evidence shows them to be non-Maupassantian. Falsity is particualrly obvious in those dealing with Central and Eastern European life, especially Vienna and Budapest society, territory never explored by Maupassant, and here described in a very non-Maupassant style. Almost all of the sixty-five give the impression of having been trash in their original language or languages, whatever it or they may have been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dunne collection was followed, during subsequent years, by many smaller, less elaborate Maupassant collections for smaller purses, and although Dunne's collection was copyright it seems to have been without real protection, for in the later collections various of the fake stories first published by Dunne continued to appear and reappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Francis Steegmuller (1949). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/maupassantlionin00stee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maupassant: A Lion in the Path&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 355–357&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Grosset &amp;amp; Dunlap.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following list gives, for each of the fake Maupassant stories, its English title (or titles; some stories were reprinted under different titles), its author, its original title, and the collection in which it appeared. The list was compiled by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Maizeroy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kazuhiko Adachi&lt;/a&gt; (足立和彦) and contains the 65 fake stories found by Steegmuller, plus one more (‘Mad’) found by Onishi Tadao (大西忠雄). The stories are by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Maizeroy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Maizeroy&lt;/a&gt; (28), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Richepin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Richepin&lt;/a&gt; (20), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leopold von Sacher-Masoch&lt;/a&gt; (18).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_ACCENT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Accent&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘L’Accent’, &lt;em&gt;En folie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#AN_ADVENTURE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Adventure&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Une Aventure&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#AN_ARTIST&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Artist&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/30/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Artiste&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#BABETTE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babette&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/168/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ch’tiote&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_BANDMASTERS_SISTER&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bandmaster’s Sister&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f235.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Sœur du chef&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_CARNIVAL_OF_LOVE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Carnival of Love&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA146&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Karnevale der Liebe&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_CARTERS_WENCH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Carter’s Wench&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LA_FILLE_AUX_ROULIERS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Fille aux rouliers&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#CAUGHT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caught&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA166&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gefangen&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_CLOWN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Clown&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/214/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pouillards&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_CONFESSION&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Confession&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘Le Confession’, &lt;em&gt;En folie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#COUNTESS_SATAN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Countess Satan&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/50/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Comtesse Satan&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_DEBT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Debt&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/256/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Dette&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#A_DEER_PARK_IN_THE_PROVINCES&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Deer Park in the Provinces&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA159&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ein Hitschpark in der Provinz&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#DELILA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Delila&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n33/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Delila&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#FALSE_ALARM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;False Alarm&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f81.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fausse Alerte&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#A_FASHIONABLE_WOMAN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Fashionable Woman&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA179&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Frau nach der Mode&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#GHOSTS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ghosts&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n113/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gepenster der Kirche&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#A_GOOD_MATCH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Good Match&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA191&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eine gute Partie&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#HAPPINESS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Happiness&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f21.item&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Bonheur&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_HERMAPHRODITE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hermaphrodite&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LHERMAPHRODITE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L’Hermaphrodite&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#AN_HONEST_IDEAL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Honest Ideal&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6O_XfSqfzksC&amp;amp;pg=PA54&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ein eheliches Ideal&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Falscher Hermelin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_ILL-OMENED_GROOM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ill-Omened Groom&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n199/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Der verhängnisvolle Jockey&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#CAUGHT_IN_THE_VERY_ACT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Flagrante Delictu/Caught in the Very Act&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f9.item&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Flagrant Délit&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#IN_HIS_SWEETHEARTS_LIVERY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In His Sweetheart’s Livery&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6O_XfSqfzksC&amp;amp;pg=PA16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In der Livree der Geliebten&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Falscher Hermelin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/593/593-h/593-h.htm#chap18&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In Various Roles/An Exotic Prince&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ein exotischer Prinz&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_JENNET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Jennet&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f191.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Genêt&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#JEROBOAM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeroboam&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/264/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jéroboam&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#JULOTS_OPINION&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Julot’s Opinion&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/130/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L’Opinion de Julot&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_LANCERS_WIFE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lancer’s Wife&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/selectionsfromje00rich/page/24/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Uhlane&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Les morts bizarres&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_LAST_STEP&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Last Step&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LE_DERNIER_PAS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Dernier Pas&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#LILIE_LALA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lilie Lala&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f219.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lilie Lala&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#LA_MORILLONNE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Morillonne&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/62/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Morillonne&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#CRASH&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lost/Crash&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA203&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Krach&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#MAD10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mad&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘En folie’, &lt;em&gt;En folie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#MADEMOISELLE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mademoiselle&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/228/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mademoiselle&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#MAMMA_STIRLING&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mamma Stirling&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f39.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maman Sterling&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_MAN_WITH_THE_BLUE_EYES&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Man with the Blue Eyes&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L’Homme aux yeux pâles&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_MAN_WITH_THE_DOGS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Man with the Dogs&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/184/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cht’Heumme-aux-quiens&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#MARGOTS_TAPERS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margot’s Tapers&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k964320/f21.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Cierges de Margot&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Le mal d’aimer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_MARQUIS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Marquis&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/270/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Marquis&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#A_MESALLIANCE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Misalliance&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n51/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eine Mesalliance&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_MOUNTEBANKS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mountebanks&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k80325s/f6.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Monteflores&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Celles qu’on aime&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_NEW_SENSATION&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New Sensation&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LE_FRISSON_NOUVEAU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Frisson nouveau&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#A_NIGHT_IN_WHITECHAPEL&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Night in Whitechapel&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/212/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ivres-morts&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_ODALISQUE_OF_SENICHOU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Odalisque of Senichou&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sozialeschatten01masgoog/page/n133/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eine Smichower Odaliske&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Soziale Schattenbilder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_OLD_MAID&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Old Maid&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f131.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vielle fille&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#PROFITABLE_BUSINESS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Profitable Business&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/240/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Une Bonne Affaire&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_READ_ONE_AND_THE_OTHER&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Real One and the Other&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LA_VRAIE_LAUTRE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Vraie et L’Autre&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_RELICS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Relics&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f65.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Reliques&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#A_RUPTURE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Rupture&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#RUPTURE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rupture&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#THE_SEQUEL_TO_A_DIVORCE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sequel to a Divorce&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k68701d/f113.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suite de divorce&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Coups de cœur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#STABLE_PERFUME&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stable Perfume/On Perfumes&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stall-Parfum&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#SYMPATHY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sympathy&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/188/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Correspondances&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_THIEF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Thief&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LE_VOLEUR&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Voleur&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/21327/21327-h/21327-h.htm#Page_376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ugly&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/96/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laid&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#UNDER_THE_YOKE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Under the Yoke&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘Sous le joug’, &lt;em&gt;Sur l’amour et sur le baiser&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#AN_UNFORTUNATE_LIKENESS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Unfortunate Likeness&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LE_MAUVAIS_MIRAGE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Mauvais Mirage&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_UPSTART&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Upstart&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#PARVENU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parvenu&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#A_USEFUL_HOUSE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Useful House&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37133/37133-h/37133-h.htm#LHOTEL_A_TOUT_FAIRE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L’Hôtel à tout faire&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;La Fête&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_VENUS_OF_BRANIZA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Venus of Braniza&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘Die Venus von Braniza’, &lt;em&gt;Neue Judengeschichten&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#THE_VIATICUM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Viaticum&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘Le Viatique’, &lt;em&gt;En folie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#VIOLATED&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Violated&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cauchemars00rich/page/252/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Violé&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Cauchemars&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#VIRTUE_IN_THE_BALLET&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtue in the Ballet&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6O_XfSqfzksC&amp;amp;pg=PA251&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die Tugen beim Ballett&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Falscher Hermelin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17376/17376-h/17376-h.htm#KIND_GIRLS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virtue/Kind Girls&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Richepin, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/truandailles00rich/page/118/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bonnes filles&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Truandailles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17377/17377-h/17377-h.htm#THE_WHITE_LADY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The White Lady&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Sacher-Masoch, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=V_BbAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA66&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die weiße Frau&lt;/a&gt;’, &lt;em&gt;Die Messalinen Wiens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17375/17375-h/17375-h.htm#WIFE_AND_MISTRESS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wife and Mistress&lt;/a&gt;’ ⟶ Maizeroy, ‘Naufrage’, &lt;em&gt;En folie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the ‘why’ of the question is probably impossible now, but it is easy to imagine plausible scenarios. Perhaps the publisher had employed a translator in Paris to go to the archives of &lt;em&gt;Gil Blas&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;La Lanterne&lt;/em&gt; and so on, dig out old stories by Maupassant, and submit English translations, at so many cents a word. An unscrupulous translator might have found it tempting to eke out a little extra cash by passing off some stories by other authors. Or, more likely, the publisher deliberately included the more risqué and sensational stories of Maizeroy, Richepin and Sacher-Masoch, in order to increase the appeal of the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T17:50:42.730" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14261" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14262" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of René Maizeroy (pseudonym of baron René-Jean Toussaint, 1856 - 1918). His best-known work is the novel 'Les Deux Amies' (1885). Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:05:03.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14263" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14264" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Auguste-Jules Richepin, usually known as Jean Richepin (1849 - 1926) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:07:01.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14265" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14266" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American dramatist, screenwriter and poet Winnie Holzman (born 1954) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T14:08:46.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14271" CreationDate="2020-05-10T15:46:04.067" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished the book &quot;The Murder on the Links&quot; by Agatha Christie. In the end it is revealed that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Marthe Daubreuil&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was the murderer. But there is no explanation on how she did it. Poirot deduces that she overheard the Renauld's plan and killed him in the night. But since the beginning Poirot claimed that a woman can not dig a grave. Then how did she dig it? And if Renauld had already dug the grave, then how did she cover the body in soil?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4998" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T19:13:28.753" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T19:13:28.753" Title="In the &quot;Murder On The Links&quot; by Agatha Christie, how is the murderer able to dig the grave?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;murder-on-the-links&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14268" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14269" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" Score="0" Body="the 1923 detective fiction novel by Agatha Christie, featuring Hercule Poirot and Captain Arthur Hastings. Use with the [agatha-christie] tag" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T16:04:10.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1689" CreationDate="2020-05-10T17:46:47.160" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two strands of allusions or associations in the long exchange about flowers: one about nature versus &amp;quot;art&amp;quot; and another about the associations of specific flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nature versus &amp;quot;Art&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;debate of nature versus &amp;quot;art&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;art&amp;quot; had a broader meaning and here also includes the craft of gardening)&#xA;is illustrated in the following exchange between Perdita and Polixenes (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Perdita&lt;/strong&gt;: (..) our carnations and streak'd gillyvors,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which some call &lt;strong&gt;nature's bastards&lt;/strong&gt;: of that kind&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To get slips of them.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Polixenes&lt;/strong&gt;: Wherefore, gentle maiden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do you neglect them?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Perdita&lt;/strong&gt;: For I have heard it said&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is an &lt;strong&gt;art&lt;/strong&gt; which in their piedness shares&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With great creating &lt;strong&gt;nature&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Polixenes&lt;/strong&gt;: Say there be;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet &lt;strong&gt;nature is made better by no mean&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But nature makes that mean&lt;/strong&gt;: so, over that art&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which you say adds to nature, is &lt;strong&gt;an art&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That nature makes&lt;/strong&gt;. You see, sweet maid, we marry&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A gentler scion to the wildest stock,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And make conceive a bark of baser kind&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By bud of nobler race: this is an art&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which does mend nature, change it rather, but&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The art itself is nature&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Perdita&lt;/strong&gt;: So it is.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Polixenes&lt;/strong&gt;: Then make your garden rich in gillyvors,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And do not call them bastards.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perdita does not wish to give Polixenes and Camillo any carnations or gillyflowers&#xA;because there are hybrids (&amp;quot;bastards&amp;quot;) developed by gardeners,&#xA;as opposed to flowers that nature produced.&#xA;Polixenes does not simply respond that &amp;quot;art&amp;quot; is the equal of or even superior to nature;&#xA;his stance is more subtle, since he claims that even the gardener's craft&#xA;is a product of nature (&amp;quot;an art / That nature makes&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perdita's position reflects that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essayestranslate02montuoft/page/54/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Montaigne's essay &amp;quot;Of cannibals&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;in which the French thinker said (in John Florio's 1603 translation; emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are even savage, as we call those fruits wilde which &lt;strong&gt;nature of her selfe&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;and of her ordinarie progresse hath produced : whereas indeed, they are those&#xA;which our selves have **altered by our artificiall devicesand diverted from their&#xA;common order, we should rather terme savage. In those are the true and most&#xA;profitable vertues, and naturall properties most lively and vigorous, which in these&#xA;we have &lt;strong&gt;bastardized&lt;/strong&gt;, applying them to the pleasure of our corrupted taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A contemporary formulation of Polixenes's position can be found in&#xA;George Puttenham's &lt;em&gt;The Art of English Poesie&lt;/em&gt; (1589):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ſome cafes we ſay &lt;strong&gt;arte is an ayde and coadiutor to nature&lt;/strong&gt;, and a furtherer of her actions to good effect,&#xA;or peraduenture &lt;strong&gt;a meane to ſupply her wants&lt;/strong&gt;, by renforcing the cauſes wherein ſhee is impotent and defecting.&#xA;as doth the arte of phiſicke, by helping the naturall concoction, retention, diſtribution, expulſion, and other&#xA;vertues, in a weake and vnhealthie bodie. Or as the good gardiner ſeaſons his ſoyle by ſundrie ſorts of compoſt&#xA;(...)&#xA;In another reſpect arte is not only an aide and coadiutor to nature in all heraclions, but an alterer of them,&#xA;and in ſome ſort &lt;strong&gt;a ſurmounter of her skill&lt;/strong&gt;, ſo as by meanes of it her owne effects ſhall appeare more&#xA;beautifull or ſtraunge and miraculous, as in both caſes before remembred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the theme of art as &lt;em&gt;imitation&lt;/em&gt; of nature is mentioned in Act V, scene 2, in the discussion of the statue of Hermione.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It perfectly fits Perdita's character to defend unadulterated nature, since she grew up in an uncomplicated rural environment.&#xA;Her words reinforce her portrayal as an ideal pastoral character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrary to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1700/2191&quot;&gt;Joshua Engel's claim&lt;/a&gt;, the above passage from the play&#xA;is not about the engagement between Perdita and Florizel, at least not from Polixenes's point of view.&#xA;There is no evidence that the king is not serious here or later in the scene,&#xA;when he disowns Florizel for wanting to marry Perdita.&#xA;However, the exchange on grafting and creating hybrids creates dramatic irony due to its contrast with Polixenes's reaction later in the scene.&#xA;(Note that theatregoers in Shakespeare's time would not have been surprised about the king's reaction to the engagement between Florizel and Perdita.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also dramatic irony in the sense that Perdita is of noble birth but certain circumstances have &amp;quot;grafted&amp;quot; her onto a pastoral environment.&#xA;Shakespeare here reuses the theme of a noble birth that still shines through in a completely different environment,&#xA;which he had also used in &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, in which the kidnapped princes Guiderius and Arviragus grew up in a cave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Associations of flowers&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exchange about nature versus art interrupts the flower giving by Perdita.&#xA;The flowers in this scene have different associations or meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rosemary&lt;/strong&gt;: remembrance, as explicitly mentioned by Perdita,&#xA;and by Ophelia in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.4.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV, scene 5&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rue&lt;/strong&gt;: Ophelia says of this plant (&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV, scene 5): &amp;quot;we may call it / herb-grace o' Sundays&amp;quot;.&#xA;Perdita wishes Polixenes and Camillo to be remembered after their deaths and to achieve divine grace.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;carnations&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;gilly-flowers&lt;/strong&gt; (or clove-scented pinks): it is not clear whether these have any &amp;quot;symoblic&amp;quot; meaning;&#xA;they lead into the debate about nature versus art discussed above. In addition, the first flowers Perdita had given are &amp;quot;flowers of winter&amp;quot;,&#xA;whereas now she gives them flowers of (mid)summer, wich, in Perdita's words, are appropriate for &amp;quot;men of middle age&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hot lavender&lt;/strong&gt;: herbs were classified as &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;cold&amp;quot; in a way similar to the classification of temperaments according to the&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_temperaments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory of humours&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mint&lt;/strong&gt;: (no specific associations).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;savoury&lt;/strong&gt;: (no specific associations).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;marjoram&lt;/strong&gt;: (no specific associations, but the herb was popular in soups and other dishes and was also used as a &amp;quot;strewing herb&amp;quot; on floors; see Jessica Kerr: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Flowers&lt;/em&gt;. Kestrel Books, 1969, page 61).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;marigold&lt;/strong&gt;: This flower closes its petals at sundown and opens them again at sunrise, presumably &amp;quot;weeping&amp;quot; because wet with dew. It was also referred to as &amp;quot;Sponsus solis&amp;quot;, the spouse of the sun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;daffodils&lt;/strong&gt;: Jessica Kerr (page 75) mentions &amp;quot;the belief, found in early plant lore, that those spring flowers that hang their heads, such as daffodils, violets, and snow-drops, symbolize grief and tears.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;violets&lt;/strong&gt;: See above. In addition, Kerr (page 46) also points out that the violet was sometimes pitied by poets for the shortness of its life; &amp;quot;For this reason it is often associated with death, like the primrose.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;primroses&lt;/strong&gt;: &amp;quot;[T]he primrose is pictured as dying unmarried, in early spring, before the bridegroom, Phoebus (the sun), has reached manhood.&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Ernest Schanzer. Penguin, 1969)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;oxlips&lt;/strong&gt;: These are also mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/midsummer/midsummer.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Act II, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;They are &amp;quot;natural hybrids between the cowslip (...) and the primrose&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, edited by R. A. Foakes. Cambridge University Press, 1984).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;crown imperial&lt;/strong&gt;: According to Ernest Schanzer, this is &amp;quot;the tall, yellow fritillary (which had been introduced to England from Constantinople in the 1590s)&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;lilies, flower-de-luce&lt;/strong&gt;: According to Ernest Schanzer, &amp;quot;flower-de-luce&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;probably the iris, which was not uncommonly classed among the lilies&amp;quot;.&#xA;The flower-de-luce is also mentioned in other plays, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, Act V, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryvi/1henryvi.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Henry VI, Part I, Act I, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have avoided the term &amp;quot;symbolism&amp;quot; because Perdita, like Ophelia in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, finds it necessary to explicitly add what some of these flowers stand for.&#xA;Some flowers don't seem to have any specific &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; or none that seems directly relevant.&#xA;However, several of the spring flowers that Perdita gives to Florizel are associated with grief, a short life or death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Perdita and Proserpina&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flower catalogue also links Perdita with the Roman goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proserpina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proserpina&lt;/a&gt;. In Book V of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(tr._Golding)/Book_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a translation that Shakespeare knew, we find the following passage about Proserpina:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While in this garden Proserpine was taking hir pastime,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In gathering eyther Violets blew, or Lillies white as Lime,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And while of Maidenly desire she fillde hir Maund and Lap,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Endevoring to outgather hir companions there, by hap&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dis spide hir: lovde hir: caught hir up: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Ovid uses the names &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C4%ABs_Pater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dis&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pluto&lt;/a&gt; interchangeably.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his introduction to the Oxford Shakespeare edition of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; (page 43), Stephen Orgel writes (my emphasis):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The classic model for the destructive intrusion of royalty into pastoral is invoked by Perdita herself: the appearance of Dis, King of the Underworld, to carry Proserpina off from the Sicilian field of Enna &lt;strong&gt;as she gathers the flowers Perdita catalogues&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is worth pointing out that in Shakespeare's source, Robert Greene's &amp;quot;novel&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Pandosto&lt;/em&gt;, the corresponding scene is set in Sicily instead of Bohemia. In switching Bohemia and Sicily while adapting his source material into a play, Shakespeare appears to have weakened the parallel between Perdita and Proserpina.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T12:19:58.153" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T12:19:58.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14267" CreationDate="2020-05-10T19:13:09.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The grave was dug, Poirot concludes, by M. Renauld himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That night Renauld will first bind and gag his wife, and then, taking a spade, will dig a grave in that particular plot of ground where he knows a—how do you call it?—bunkair? is to be made.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1923). &lt;em&gt;The Murder on the Links&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 21. London: Bodley Head.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did not matter whether the murderer had the strength to cover the body, because the body was not covered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[M. Hautet, the Juge d’Instruction, said] ‘That is one of the most extraordinary features of the case. Monsieur Poirot, the body was lying face downwards, on an &lt;strong&gt;open grave&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christie, chapter 3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T19:13:09.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14272" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14273" CreationDate="2020-05-10T20:03:59.300" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please don't look at this post if you haven't read Agatha Christie's &lt;em&gt;The Hollow&lt;/em&gt;, in case of spoilers!!! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading The Hollow, there are still a few points I do not quite understand. I would feel very grateful if anyone can help me answer the following questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did Agatha write any hint at the early stage of this book that foreshadows that John wanted Henrietta to protect Gerda? Or Henrietta literally immediately understood that John wanted her to protect Gerda from the police by saying Henrietta's name at the moment of his death? This latter explanation sounds unbelievable to me!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How was Poirot able to find the revolver? Henrietta said that she hid the revolver inside the clay model, which in general police won't destroy an artist's masterpiece. This makes sense to me. But Poirot said, &quot;The fact that you chose to model a horse. The horse of Troy was the unconscious association in your mind.&quot; Did Poirot went to Henrietta's studio and immediately realized that the revolver should be inside the horse model once he saw the model? How was Poirot able to recognize that immediately?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I still don't understand why near the end of the book, Gerda must (at least tried to) murder Henrietta?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7697" LastEditorUserId="7697" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T20:11:05.303" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T21:49:55.443" Title="Agatha Christie: some questions about The Hollow" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;the-hollow&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14272" CreationDate="2020-05-10T21:44:32.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The explanation seems extraordinary, but that’s what Henrietta says, and if she’s lying then we have nothing better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Because John asked me to! That’s what he meant when he said ‘Henrietta.’ It was all there in that one word. He was asking me to protect Gerda. You see, he loved Gerda… I think he loved Gerda much better than he ever knew he did. Better than Veronica Cray—better than me. Gerda belonged to him, and John liked things that belonged to him… He knew that if anyone could protect Gerda from the consequences of what she’d done, I could—And he knew that I would do anything he wanted, because I loved him.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1946). &lt;em&gt;The Hollow&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 29. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three clues to this explanation, though you would have to be very astute to put them together. First, there is a clue that the &lt;em&gt;manner&lt;/em&gt; of John’s dying message is important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(“Henrietta!” the dying man had said. He had said it &lt;strong&gt;in a very curious way&lt;/strong&gt;. A way that reminded Poirot of something—of some incident… now, what was it? No matter, it would come to him.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 11.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, we learn what kind of ‘incident’ Poirot was reminded of, and the dying man’s manner of speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Dr. Christow knew perfectly what he was saying. His voice was as alive and conscious as that of a &lt;strong&gt;doctor doing a vital operation&lt;/strong&gt; who says sharply and &lt;strong&gt;urgently&lt;/strong&gt;, ‘Nurse, the forceps, please.’”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 18.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, we are told how Poirot interprets the man’s state of mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“His voice was urgent—that is all I can say—urgent. It seemed to me neither accusing nor emotional—but urgent, yes! And of one thing I am sure. He was in full possession of his faculties. He spoke—yes, he spoke like a doctor—a doctor who has, say, a sudden surgical emergency on his hands—a &lt;strong&gt;patient who is bleeding to death&lt;/strong&gt;, perhaps…”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 19.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The obvious way to interpret this analogy is that John himself was the patient, since he was literally bleeding to death as he spoke. But that can’t be right, since a doctor can’t be his own patient. It must be the case that &lt;em&gt;someone else&lt;/em&gt; was the patient. Looked at this way round, the patient corresponds to &lt;em&gt;Gerda&lt;/em&gt;, who is metaphorically ‘bleeding to death’: that is, facing conviction and death by hanging.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Poirot did not find the revolver by deducing that it was in the sculpture of the horse, it was the other way round: he deduced that it must have been hidden in the horse because he found the revolver in his own hedge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Hercule Poirot had been staring out of the window for some moment… His eye had been attracted by an irregularity in the symmetry of his domain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He said now:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You want a solid fact! Eh bien, unless I am much mistaken there is a solid fact in the hedge by my gate.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 26.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly before this discovery Poirot had met Henrietta in the woods coming from the direction of his house, and she had said, “I have just been to call upon you. But you were out.” That gave Henrietta the opportunity to plant the revolver in his hedge. She had just come from her studio in London, so she must have brought it with her, and since the police had searched her studio, it must have been well hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are given a clue to the hiding place, though again you would have to be very astute to follow Poirot’s line of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Nothing there either. She went straight back to Chelsea and we’ve kept an eye on her ever since.† The revolver isn’t in her studio or in her possession. She was quite pleasant about the search—seemed amused. Some of her fancy stuff gave our man quite a turn. He said it beat him why people wanted to do that kind of thing—statues all lumps and swellings, bits of brass and aluminum twisted into fancy shapes, horses that you wouldn’t know were horses—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Poirot stirred a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Horses, you say?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well a horse. If you’d call it a horse! If people want to model a horse why don’t they go and look at a horse!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“A horse,” repeated Poirot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Grange turned his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“What is there about that that interests you so, M. Poirot? I don’t get it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Association&lt;/strong&gt;—a point of the psychology.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 26.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† This must be a mistake, as if it were true then they would have seen her put the revolver in Poirot’s hedge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only explanation we get is that once Gerda realized that Henrietta knew she was the murderer, she was afraid that Henrietta would betray her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Oh, no, it was meant for you. It was in your teacup.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“For me?” Henrietta’s voice was incredulous. “But I was trying to help her.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“That did not matter. Have you not seen a dog caught in a trap—it sets its teeth into anyone who touches it. &lt;strong&gt;She saw only that you knew her secret&lt;/strong&gt; and so you too must die.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 29.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-10T21:49:55.443" LastActivityDate="2020-05-10T21:49:55.443" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14274" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14276" CreationDate="2020-05-11T07:15:35.700" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the original text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      the leaves in the night still where the day had placed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      them, the animal heads of the flowers where they had&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      arisen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;          to think at the sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the &quot;animal heads of the flowers&quot;. Are they the animals' heads with flower rings on them? If they are, does the verse &quot;the animal heads of the flowers where they had arisen&quot; suggest that these animals are still and have not moved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7991" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T07:50:46.943" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T08:47:54.963" Title="What are the &quot;animal heads of the flowers&quot; in Allen Ginsberg's Transcription of Organ Music?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allen-ginsberg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14275" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14278" CreationDate="2020-05-11T08:30:20.083" Score="5" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;The introduction by Pol Neveux to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the complete short stories of Guy de Maupassant&lt;/a&gt; (the edition that's on Project Gutenberg - I couldn't pin down its exact details) says the following about the article Maupassant wrote in &lt;em&gt;Le Gaulois&lt;/em&gt; announcing the publication of &lt;em&gt;Les Soirees de Medan&lt;/em&gt; including his own short story &amp;quot;Boule de Suif&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He undertook to write the article for the Gaulois and, in cooperation with his friends, he worded it in the terms with which we are familiar, amplifying and embellishing it, yielding to an inborn taste for mystification which his youth rendered excusable. The essential point, he said, is to “unmoor” criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was unmoored. The following day Wolff wrote a polemical dissertation in the Figaro and carried away his colleagues. The volume was a brilliant success, thanks to Boule de Suif. Despite the novelty, the honesty of effort, on the part of all, no mention was made of the other stories. Relegated to the second rank, they passed without notice. From his first battle, Maupassant was master of the field in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean to &amp;quot;unmoor&amp;quot; criticism?&lt;/strong&gt; Where did Maupassant say it, and how was it achieved? I can't really grasp the meaning of the word &amp;quot;unmoor&amp;quot; in this context, and I couldn't find the original French text of what he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T01:21:51.120" Title="What does it mean to &quot;unmoor criticism&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14274" CreationDate="2020-05-11T08:47:54.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a metaphor to emphasize the difference between the movable heads of flowers and their static leaves and stems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, note how the poem is at pains to point out that the leaves stay still:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The rambler vine climbed up the cottage post,&#xA;  the leaves in the night still where the day had placed&#xA;  them, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;still where the day had placed them&quot; here meaning the leaves remain in position at night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flowers of many plants, by contrast, do not stay still but turn to face the sun, a phenomenon known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heliotropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heliotropism&lt;/a&gt; - the word derives from the Greek for &quot;sun turn&quot; - or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototropism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;phototropism&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the animal heads of the flowers where they had&#xA;  arisen&#xA;  to think at the sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The flowers thus have &quot;animal heads&quot; because the heads can move like an animal can, in contrast to the still, passive nature of the rest of the plant. They have &quot;arisen&quot; because they are upright, having tracked the sun in the sky above. To &quot;think&quot; at the sun reinforces the animal metaphor because, again, plants do not think whereas animals enjoy basking in it - including humans, who often find such time mentally stimulating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that a general theme of this poem is the hopefulness of youth: the open-mindedness to new experience and the expectation of good things to come. In this light, the metaphor for flowers opening and moving in response to the sun is a strong one. The sun is often seen as a symbol of renewed hope, as is the opening of new flowers in the spring after the long darkness of winter. Spring and the dawn, in turn, are both metaphors for youth. By emphasising their &quot;animal&quot; nature, the poet is tying the botanical flowers closer to his own animal status. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ginsberg, Allen. &quot;Notes Written on Finally Recording 'Howl.'&quot; Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995. Ed. Bill Morgan. NY: Harper Collins, 2000&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T08:47:54.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14275" CreationDate="2020-05-11T09:04:00.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original French of this fragment can also be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; and goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il se chargea d'écrire l'article du Gaulois et d'accord avec ses amis,&#xA;  il le rédigea dans les termes que l'on sait, brodant et enjolivant,&#xA;  cédant sans violence à un goût naturel pour une mystification&#xA;  qu'innocentait sa jeunesse. L'essentiel, disait-il, est de faire&#xA;  «démarrer» la critique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Elle démarra. Le lendemain Wolff au Figaro polémiquait, entraînait ses&#xA;  confrères. Le succès du volume fut éclatant grâce à Boule de Suif. En&#xA;  dépit de la nouveauté, de la probité de l'effort de tous, on se tut&#xA;  sur les autres nouvelles. Reléguées au second plan, elles passèrent&#xA;  indifférentes. Dès sa première bataille, Maupassant dominait la&#xA;  littérature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Démarrer&quot; could &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/french-english/d%C3%A9marrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mean&lt;/a&gt;: to get started, to get moving; in this context perhaps: to unleash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T09:04:00.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14275" CreationDate="2020-05-11T11:09:07.607" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The article mentioned in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/revisions/14275/1&quot;&gt;original version of the question&lt;/a&gt; is not&#xA;&quot;Boule de Suif&quot; (which is a novella) but the article&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bouledesuifcorre00maupuoft/page/80/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Les Soirées de Médan&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;that Maupassant published in the newspaper &lt;em&gt;Le Gaulois&lt;/em&gt; on 27 April 1880.&#xA;At the time, de Maupassant was still unknown as an author. &#xA;The &quot;soirées&quot; he talks about are evenings that several authors spent at the house of Émile Zola in Médan,&#xA;who had by then already published a few works of literature and criticism.&#xA;These soirées resulted in the publication of the collective work&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Soir%C3%A9es_de_M%C3%A9dan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Soirées de Médan&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on 17 April 1880.&#xA;This volume contained new or reworked novellas by Zola, Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans and three&#xA;currently less well-known authors, namely Henry Céard, Léon Hennique and Paul Alexis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article criticises romanticism: Maupassant writes that &quot;the works of [Victor] Hugo partly destroyed the works of Voltaire and Diderot&quot;.&#xA;The sentimentality of romanticism had turned against logic, the old &quot;common sense&quot; and the wisdom Montaigne and Rabelais.&#xA;The authors also read stories to each other, which were subsequently published in the volume mentioned above.&#xA;Attacking a &lt;em&gt;monstre sacré&lt;/em&gt; like Victor Hugo may have triggered criticism, although Neveux writes that it was above all the quality of &quot;Boule de Suif&quot; that contributed to the volume's success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neveux writes in his essay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L'essentiel, disait-il [Maupassant], est de faire «démarrer» la critique.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Elle démarra. Le lendemain Wolff au &lt;em&gt;Figaro&lt;/em&gt; polémiquait, entraînait ses confrères. Le succès du volume fut éclatant grâce à Boule de Suif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unmoor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unmoor&lt;/a&gt; has a naval meaning,&#xA;whereas the primary meaning of the French verb &lt;em&gt;démarrer&lt;/em&gt; is &quot;to start&quot; or &quot;to put in motion&quot;,&#xA;and the naval meaning is now only a secondary meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Oxford Hachette French Dictionary (French-English, English-French)&lt;/em&gt; (second edition, 1998) does not mention the naval meaning of démarrer; its English-French part does not even list &quot;unmoor&quot;.&#xA;(The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/d%C3%A9marrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entry on Wiktionnaire&lt;/a&gt; is based on an older dictionary&#xA;that seems to order meanings based on historical principles rather than frequency of usage, which would explain why the naval meaning is listed first. &lt;em&gt;Le nouveau Petit Robert 2006&lt;/em&gt; (which is not as &quot;petit&quot; as its name suggests) also lists meanings in the chronological order in which they appeared.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unmoor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; also lists the following meaning of &quot;unmoor&quot;: &quot;to become less involved with, connected with or influenced by something, or to make someone or something do this&quot;. It is obvious that this meaning is irrelevant to Maupassant's article; it is not a translation of any of the meanings of &quot;démarrer&quot; that I could find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion is that &quot;unmoor&quot; is an incorrect translation, possibly based on the components of the French verb &quot;démarrer&quot;: &quot;un-&quot; matches &quot;dé-&quot;, and &quot;moor&quot; matches the French noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/amarre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amarre&lt;/a&gt; (moorings).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intended meaning by Neveux, however, is that Maupassant wanted critics to start talking about the new book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T01:21:51.120" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T01:21:51.120" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14279" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14280" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the 2005 novel &quot;Kokopelli &amp; Company in Attack of the Smart Pies&quot;, by Larry Gonick. Use this tag with the [larry-gonick] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T12:06:47.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14283" CreationDate="2020-05-11T12:15:29.883" Score="7" ViewCount="581" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n195/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dagger with Wings&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing the falling of snow,that appeared through a barely opened door, saying: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What he had seen shining through the crack was not only the most &lt;strong&gt;negative whiteness&lt;/strong&gt; of daylight but the &lt;strong&gt;positive whiteness&lt;/strong&gt; of snow. All round, the sweeping fall of the country was covered with that shining pallor that seems at once hoary and innocent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant here by &lt;strong&gt;negative whiteness and positive whiteness&lt;/strong&gt;? Does it simply mean &lt;strong&gt;dismal and delightful&lt;/strong&gt;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:09:05.443" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:09:05.443" Title="What is &quot;negative&quot; and &quot;positive whiteness&quot; in &quot;The Dagger with Wings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14283" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14281" CreationDate="2020-05-11T16:32:51.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, if a door is open a crack, at the bottom of it you will see something dark. It might be the grass, or dirt, or whatever else is outside the door. Above that you will see whiteness. That whiteness isn't a thing - it's the absence of things, emptiness, daylight. That's &quot;negative&quot; space -- the lack of stuff to see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in this case, surprisingly, the white is snow, perhaps up against the door, perhaps filling the air because it's falling very thickly, certainly covering the grass and dirt and whatnot that you might see out of the door. This is &quot;positive&quot; space, space filled up with stuff (snow in this case), and there's a hint in this wording to make you feel that the snow itself is emitting light and is a source of whiteness, though that's not literally true. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the words aren't being used to mean good and bad, the fact that they also carry those meanings probably sets you up to like the snow from this description. The primary meaning is around absence or presence of stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="417" LastActivityDate="2020-05-11T16:32:51.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14320" CreationDate="2020-05-11T21:47:45.633" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kamel Daoud's novel &lt;em&gt;The Meursault Investigation&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Meursault, contre-enquête&lt;/em&gt;, 2013) is a retelling of and sequel to &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt; by Albert Camus.&#xA;But that is not the only Camus novel it references. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Meursault_Investigation&amp;amp;oldid=941787650#Relationship_to_Camus&amp;#39;_The_Stranger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the novel&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Another of Camus's novels, The Fall, is referenced in Daoud's book through the narrative style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this claim does not have a source to back it up.&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meursault,_contre-enqu%C3%AAte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article about the novel&lt;/a&gt;, by contrast, does not contain such a claim.&#xA;Does &lt;em&gt;The Meursault Investigation&lt;/em&gt; really reference &lt;em&gt;The Fall&lt;/em&gt; through its narrative style and, if yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: It was pointed out in a now deleted comment that the claim about the reference to the fall was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Meursault_Investigation&amp;amp;diff=814976390&amp;amp;oldid=813385416&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;added by an IP-only user&lt;/a&gt;, which appears to reduce the claim's validity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T16:53:40.293" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T17:06:46.257" Title="How does The Meursault Investigation reference The Fall?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;kamel-daoud&gt;&lt;the-meursault-investigation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14285" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14306" CreationDate="2020-05-11T21:57:19.910" Score="4" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n195/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dagger with Wings&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing a situation where Father Brown was sitting in a central room with a staircase leading up from it on one side and a door leading out of it on the other, and central door with red glass let into a passage that ended with second door on the garden. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then Father Brown went back and sat down again, staring at the dark carpet, which again glowed blood-red with the light from the glass door. Something in the filtered light set his mind drifting on certain borderlands of thought, with the first white daybreak before the coming of colour, and &lt;strong&gt;all that mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed that the dark carpet glowed blood-red with the light from the glass door because the second door behind it had been opened and shut on the garden, but I can't get what he meant by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;all that mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed in the symbol of windows and of doors&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:08:58.163" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T15:14:59.147" Title="What's meant by &quot;in the symbol of windows and of doors&quot; in &quot;The Dagger with Wings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11793" CreationDate="2020-05-12T09:38:35.013" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The confusion comes from a misunderstanding of the differences in genetics between humans and non-humans. The non-human genetic code is &quot;stronger&quot; or dominant over the human code.&#xA;The standard 2/4/8 sequence in establishing the genetic lines do therefore not apply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10062" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T09:38:35.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14236" CreationDate="2020-05-12T09:45:41.387" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find if it really comes from a 1955 &lt;em&gt;interview&lt;/em&gt; or not, but Camus &lt;em&gt;wrote&lt;/em&gt; such a claim in his Preface to &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; (January 1955), available &lt;a href=&quot;http://olenglish.pbworks.com/f/Preface+to+The+Stranger.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in English translation (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;One would therefore not be much mistaken to read &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; as the story of a man who, without any heroics, agrees to die for the truth. &lt;strong&gt;I also happen to say, again paradoxically, that I had tried to draw in my character the only Christ we deserve.&lt;/strong&gt; It will be understood, after my explanations, that I said this with no blasphemous intent, and only with the slightly ironic affection an artist has the right to feel for the characters he has created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same claim is repeated in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abebooks.com/Albert-Camus-Theatre-Recits-Nouvelles-Jean/30314780515/bd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Théâtre Récits Nouvelles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1962), for which I found the original French version of the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il m'est arrivé de dire aussi, et toujours paradoxalement, que j'avais essayé de figurer dans mon personnage le seul Christ que nous méritions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated by me and Google Translate (I'm not sure if the tenses can be correct in the above translation of the 1955 version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I also happened to say, and always paradoxically, that I had tried to represent in my character the only Christ that we deserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; quote &quot;Meursault est le seul Christ que nous méritions&quot; in any Camus writings, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&amp;amp;q=%22Meursault+est+le+seul+Christ+que+nous+m%C3%A9ritions%22&amp;amp;oq=%22Meursault+est+le+seul+Christ+que+nous+m%C3%A9ritions%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very few results for this exact phrase&lt;/a&gt; even on the web. This suggests to me that it's a paraphrase of Camus's exact words, written with &quot;Meursault est&quot; so as to make the context clear, and then has been reproduced and quoted in this form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T09:45:41.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8311" CreationDate="2020-05-12T14:00:03.140" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Not in the mythos as Lovecraft conceived it&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to prove a negative: there is no categorical statement in Lovecraft's oeuvre that definitively rejects the Abrahamic God. Even if there was, since it is fiction the writer would be free to change their mind from tale to tale as it suited. Nevertheless, we can say with some certainty that it was not Lovecraft's intention for three key reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It stood against what he felt was the source of horror&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft's key aim in writing horror stories was to make the reader feel small and powerless. He was constantly at pains to emphasise how feeble humanity was in the face of the impossible cosmic horrors lurking at the edge of our &quot;guarded threshold&quot;. He explained this many times in essays and letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;fixed laws of Nature&quot; would be the preserve of a benevolent God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, God here would be master of the &quot;order of nature&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would seem a direct rejection of the concept of a loving creator-God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's perhaps a stretch but the Biblical testament could be seen among the &quot;common myths and legends&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all of this, we have to note that the Abrahamic God is supposed to care for humanity and to be all-powerful. If people in Lovecraft's mythos could call on the support of a loving and omnipotent deity with confidence, it would weaken the effect of horror he was seeing to achieve. Even if that God were unreachable and somehow allowed such cosmic terrors to exist in the universe where they held dominion, the existence of such a being would bring spiritual comfort, at odds with the chasms of lunacy Lovecraft sought to portray as yawning under his protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There already was a supreme being&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of Lovecraft's tales discuss the being Azathoth. They are pretty unequivocal that this being was the ultimate ruler of the mythos.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos ... to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name 'Azathoth' in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal horror too horrible for description&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose center sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a demonic flute held in nameless paws&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this madly chaotic creature is &quot;Lord of All Things&quot;, it doesn't leave much room for the Abrahamic God to share that title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, it's worth referencing the effect of Azathoth in terms of Lovecraft's goals for horror stories listed in point one. By reducing the &quot;Lord of All Things&quot; to a gibbering wreck, it makes a nonsense of mankind's desire to see order and meaning in the universe. A God who created the universe for a fixed purpose, however unknowable, stands in opposition to this source of horror.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lovecraft himself was an atheist&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 1932 letter to Robert E Howard he wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hairsplitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory, I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi goes further, noting in an interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Lovecraft constantly engaged in (more or less) genial debates on religion with several colleagues, notably the pious writer and teacher Maurice W. Moe. Lovecraft was a strong and antireligious atheist; he considered religion not merely false but dangerous to social and political progress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems very unlikely that someone taking such a strong stance on the existence of God, especially in a far more religious age than our current one, would specifically seek to verify the reality of God in their fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T15:25:52.533" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T15:25:52.533" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14289" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14299" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:21:03.240" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n195/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dagger with Wings&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Mr Aylmer was talking to Father Brown, trying to convince him by mesmerism&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and &lt;strong&gt;all things return&lt;/strong&gt;; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where &lt;strong&gt;men melt into Man&lt;/strong&gt; and Man into God?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;all things return&quot; mean turn repeatedly on this wheel? &#xA;And does &quot;men melt into Man&quot; mean &quot;they melt to &quot;humans&quot; as I found that &quot;Man&quot; equal &quot;humans&quot;. If so, it's supposed that men are humans already?! Or he means they melt into One man?!  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:08:47.460" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:08:47.460" Title="What's meant by &quot;all things return&quot; in &quot;The Dagger with Wings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14290" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:45:08.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:45:08.340" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:45:08.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14291" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:45:08.340" Score="0" Body="For questions regarding the works Stephen Schwartz, an American musical composer and lyricist. Questions about his larger works (i.e. musicals) should be tagged as is, individual songs should just be tagged with [song-lyrics].   " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T17:00:54.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T17:00:54.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14292" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:48:07.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:48:07.070" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:48:07.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14293" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:48:07.070" Score="0" Body="Questions regarding the novel 'The Mersault Investigation' (French: 'Meursault, contre-enquête') by Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. It is a retelling of 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus but from the perspective of the murdered Algerian man's brother Harun. Questions about this work should be tagged with [kamel-daoud] and [french-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T17:00:38.480" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T17:00:38.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14294" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:52:27.027" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:52:27.027" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:52:27.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14295" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:52:27.027" Score="0" Body="Questions about the detective fiction novel 'The Hollow' by Agatha Christie featuring her famous Belgian detective Hercules Poirot. Questions regarding this work should be tagged with [agatha-christie]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:59:18.090" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:59:18.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14296" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:56:03.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:56:03.333" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:56:03.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14297" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-12T16:56:03.333" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life and works of Kamel Daoud (born 1970), an Algerian writer and journalist. Questions regarding his works should be tagged with the name of that work, along with [french-literature]. His short stories should be tagged under [short-stories] instead." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-12T16:58:50.673" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T16:58:50.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11033" CreationDate="2020-05-12T17:54:51.187" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Yes, he cannot see his own wrong and instead blames the goddess of love.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For context here, it's useful to know a little about the classical reference that Frank Ashurst is making. It's first put into the reader's mind all the way back at the beginning, in the epigraph of this story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;~ Murray's &amp;quot;Hippolytus of Euripides&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This refers to the ancient Greek tragic play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippolytus_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt; by Euripides&lt;/a&gt;, as translated into English by Gilbert Murray (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8418/8418-h/8418-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated version available on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;). The quote used for this epigraph comes from a chorus spoken in the play just as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedra_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phaedra&lt;/a&gt;, wife of Theseus, is about to kill herself after being spurned by Theseus's son Hippolytus whom she loves. In the context of the play, this line refers to the idea of fleeing to the garden of the Hesperides with their singing and their golden apple trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same line has inspired other authors: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jean-nordhaus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Nordhaus&lt;/a&gt; wrote a poem entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/210807&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Apple Tree, the Singing, and the Gold&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which again is about death and loss, referring also to unrequited love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt; is emphasised again in Galsworthy's story, as Ashurst is reading it (in Murray's translation) while sitting on the moor and waiting for his wife to finish her sketching. In this story, &amp;quot;The Apple Tree&amp;quot; refers to a real apple tree in the Devon countryside, the place where Frank and Megan consummated their relationship, as well as the place supposedly haunted by the &amp;quot;gipsy bogle&amp;quot; that scares Megan so much. This is the most important physical location in the story, but to refer to it in the context of Euripides's &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt; emphasises the connection with romantic tragedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Skipping ahead to the paragraph you quoted near the very end of the story, this immediately precedes a longer quote from &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For mad is the heart of Love,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And gold the gleam of his wing;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And all to the spell thereof&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bend, when he makes his spring;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All life that is wild and young&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In mountain and wave and stream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All that of earth is sprung,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or breathes in the red sunbeam;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yea, and Mankind. O'er all a royal throne,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cyprian, Cyprian, is thine alone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &amp;quot;Love&amp;quot; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eros, the ancient Greek god of love&lt;/a&gt;, while &amp;quot;Cyprian&amp;quot; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphrodite&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love&lt;/a&gt;, sometimes known as Cyprian since she was supposedly born in Cyprus. The context of this quote in &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt; is again a chorus, this time spoken after Theseus hears of his son's mortal injury without remorse, and just before Artemis arrives to tell him the truth about his wife and son. This chorus sets up the goddess of love as an all-powerful entity who brought about all the tragedy of the story, as Artemis confirms moments later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Galsworthy's story, Ashurst is using the words of the ancient Greek play as a high-brow way to excuse his own behaviour. He appeals to ancient philosophy in order to make the case (even if only to himself) that Love, either as an abstract concept or a personified deity, is to blame for the tragic death of Megan, rather than the actions of people - more specifically, his own actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it just Love seeking a victim! The Greek was right, then--the words of the &amp;quot;Hippolytus&amp;quot; as true to-day!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The capitalisation of Love, along with the reference to a &amp;quot;victim&amp;quot;, shows that, like Euripides in &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt;, he places the blame for events on the shoulders of an abstract or deified Love. He tells himself openly that &amp;quot;The Greek [Euripides] was right&amp;quot;, and quotes the passage which exalts Aphrodite as holding power over all. The &amp;quot;victim&amp;quot; referred to is of course the poor dead Megan, but he would like to see himself as a victim also: a victim of the whims of the love goddess, just like both Phaedra and Hippolytus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even earlier, near the beginning of the story, Ashurst ponders on &amp;quot;the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold&amp;quot;, and the supposed unachievability of lasting happiness for mortal men:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maladjusted to life--man's organism! One's mode of life might be high and scrupulous, but there was always an undercurrent of greediness, a hankering, and sense of waste. Did women have it too? Who could tell? And yet, men who gave vent to their appetites for novelty, their riotous longings for new adventures, new risks, new pleasures, these suffered, no doubt, from the reverse side of starvation, from surfeit. No getting out of it--a maladjusted animal, civilised man! There could be no garden of his choosing, of &amp;quot;the Apple-tree, the singing, and the gold,&amp;quot; in the words of that lovely Greek chorus, no achievable elysium in life, or lasting haven of happiness for any man with a sense of beauty--nothing which could compare with the captured loveliness in a work of art, set down for ever, so that to look on it or read was always to have the same precious sense of exaltation and restful inebriety. Life no doubt had moments with that quality of beauty, of unbidden flying rapture, but the trouble was, they lasted no longer than the span of a cloud's flight over the sun; impossible to keep them with you, as Art caught beauty and held it fast. They were fleeting as one of the glimmering or golden visions one had of the soul in nature, glimpses of its remote and brooding spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Re-reading this passage in light of the revelations later in the story about his past life, this might reflect Ashurst's lasting dissatisfaction with his own life. Even when starting to read about him and Stella, before learning of his past with Megan, I got the impression of a married couple who were content but not truly loving. The description of both spouses is rather clinical and emotionless, the only positive words about Stella being &amp;quot;comely and faithful&amp;quot;, and even these are sandwiched between remarks on how she is no longer young (and even her youthful self is never described as exceptionally beautiful or attractive). Perhaps Ashurst believes that &amp;quot;civilised man&amp;quot; has no chance of lasting happiness because he himself gave up that chance, gave up passion and romance for a steady orthodox life with a steady orthodox wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing the plots of Euripides's &lt;em&gt;Hippolytus&lt;/em&gt; and Galsworthy's &amp;quot;The Apple Tree&amp;quot;, the conclusion is quite damning for Ashurst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ancient Greek characters are truly manipulated by malicious gods; Phaedra's love for her stepson Hippolytus is forbidden and impossible, and he does not return her love. It is the manipulation of her heart by a jealous Aphrodite, and his lack of affection due to Artemis, that causes tragedy. The whole series of events is almost inevitable after Phaedra falls in love with Hippolytus.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The English characters, on the other hand, are much more free agents. Ashurst &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have left the Hallidays and continued his romance with Megan as he planned. The reason he fails to do so is his own indecision; the reason he ultimately decides against Megan is the difference in their social class, surely a much less compelling reason not to marry someone (whom he also loves!) than her being his father's wife. He knows that Megan loves him, and his own feeling for her seems much stronger than for Stella, but he lacks the backbone even to go and tell her that he is abandoning her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as a forty-eight-year-old man in the framing story, he seeks to justify his own actions by telling himself that they all - he, Megan, and perhaps Stella too - were only victims of a cruel prank of the goddess of Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T17:54:51.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14289" CreationDate="2020-05-12T21:23:13.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the man appears to be saying is that Mr. Aylmer and Mr. Strake may have been reborn or reincarnated,&#xA;after having been other types of creatures in earlier lives (birds or other animals or both)&#xA;and that they may have tried to kill each other in these previous lives.&#xA;In other words, their struggle returns each time they are reborn.&#xA;This appears to be how their souls returned, as if on a wheel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear what else would return according to this rather informally formulated theory.&#xA;It is possible that the man is mixing various concepts, such as the above-mentioned reincarnation of the soul,&#xA;time as a cyclical phenomenon (see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wheel of time&lt;/a&gt;),&#xA;and good and evil being somehow interconnected and dependent on each other, like&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yin and yang&lt;/a&gt; in ancient Chinese philosophy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, in the last sentence, he says that &quot;men melt[s] into Man and Man into God&quot;&#xA;he means that individual people somehow come together in the larger concept of Humanity&#xA;and that this concept eventually becomes one with the concept of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-12T21:23:13.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T02:36:53.490" Score="22" ViewCount="6050" Body="&lt;p&gt;The themes of witchcraft and magic loom large over Shakespeare’s later plays. While there is no overt use of magic and spells in Othello, per se, as compared to the witches in Macbeth conjuring on stage, or Prospero using magic to control the weather, the use of magic, charms, and spells is subtler, in some ways, but nonetheless profound and dramaturgically engaging. In any case, there is witchcraft at work in all these plays in one form or another. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was Shakespeare able to use witchcraft in his plays in a time when “public anxiety” regarding witchcraft in England was unusually “intense” (Kaula 112)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Kaula, David. Othello Possessed: Notes on Shakespeare’s Use of Magic and Witchcraft. ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2004&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Russell, Jeffrey. Witchcraft in the Middle Ages. Cornell University Press, 1984.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T00:16:29.530" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T00:16:29.530" Title="How did Shakespeare get away with staging witchcraft in his plays such as Othello, Macbeth, or The Tempest?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14301" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14300" CreationDate="2020-05-13T11:01:55.657" Score="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The public saw the plays were fiction, perhaps even a warning against witchcraft, and the magic in them is divorced of religious overtones.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy that the two Shakespeare plays which deal most overtly with magic, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; were both written during the reign of King James I. James was an enthusiastic believer in the dangers of witchcraft and wrote an entire book on it, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemonologie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daemonologie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In doing so, he was echoing the beliefs of the majority of his subjects. To them, witchcraft was a real danger. They would have needed no suspension of disbelief to view the magicians in the plays as a genuine menace. But at the same time, they knew the plays were fiction. Shakespeare gives no quarter in portraying the witches as villainous, nor does he provide any &quot;real magic&quot; for people to copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, it seems likely he added these elements to his plays specifically to please his new king. While belief in witchcraft was widespread, this era saw the first significant doubts about the validity of witches emerge. Reginald Scot wrote &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discoverie_of_Witchcraft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Discoverie of Witchcraft&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; which argued most &quot;witches&quot; were women with mental illness. James I wrote &lt;em&gt;Daemonologie&lt;/em&gt; partly in response to this tract and had all copies of Scot's opposing work burned when he took the throne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; thus supports James' belief in the reality of witches. Furthermore, it actually borrows elements of &lt;em&gt;Daemonologie&lt;/em&gt; in its depiction of witchcraft. The book discusses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Berwick_witch_trials&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berwick Witch trials&lt;/a&gt; of 1590 which, like the play, took place in Scotland and, like the play, saw the witches accused of raising storms. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Second Witch: I'll give thee a wind.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  First Witch: Thou'rt kind.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Third Witch: And I another.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  First Witch: I myself have all the other,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the very ports they blow,   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the trials, the storms were said to be sent against James himself, giving this a particularly personal angle to the King. In fact the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Though his bark cannot be lost,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Yet it shall be tempest-tost.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is thought to refer directly to this incident. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are further parallels. One of the witches says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But in a sieve I'll thither sail,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And during the trials, one of the alleged witches was said to have attempted to cross the Firth of Forth in a sieve. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The witches in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; generally behave in a manner similar to that described by King James in his book. He has them dancing at rituals, rifling graves for body parts, stirring cauldrons and performing magic with toads, all of which are mirrored in the play. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact, far from causing trouble by including magic in his plays, Shakespeare was simply conforming to and supporting the prevailing trend and pleasing his new monarch. There was no threat to him in doing so and, to be sure, he was careful never to mention magic in a religious context nor to make his sorcerers into heroes. The nearest he comes to a sympathetic wizard, Prospero, repents and gives up magic at the end of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, thus saving the playwright from any possible accusation he was portraying witchcraft in a positive light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="566" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T06:50:46.990" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T06:50:46.990" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-13T13:44:51.853" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has read the novella &lt;em&gt;The Shawl&lt;/em&gt; by Cynthia Ozick might have noticed it is rich with gustatory imagery. In the first part of the novella, food imagery (i.e. lack of food) illustrates hunger and deprivation; while in the second part of the novella there is food in plenty--denoting sustenance. Is there more to the food imagery than merely denoting deprivation in the first half and sustenance in the second half?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-13T14:58:00.357" LastActivityDate="2020-05-13T14:58:00.357" Title="What is the purpose of all the gustatory imagery (food imagery) in &quot;The Shawl&quot; by Cynthia Ozick?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;cynthia-ozick&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14305" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-14T07:59:03.787" Score="7" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned recently that in Shakespeare's day, stage dressing was often minimal. This makes sense given that there was a wide variety of theatre styles, the stages were often uncovered and surrounded on all sides by seating. Educational resource &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folger.edu/shakespeares-theater&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folger&lt;/a&gt; states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bare stages of Shakespeare's day had little or no scenery except for objects required by the plot, like a throne, a grave, or a bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that plays set in more exotic locations such as &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; sometimes have the characters talk about the scenery, so the audience is better able to imagine the setting. However, I'm more interested in why, given the relatively empty stages of the era, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is furnished with such bold stage directions. For example in Act 3, Scene 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enter PROSPERO above, invisible. Enter several strange Shapes, bringing in a banquet; they dance about it with gentle actions of salutation; and, inviting the King, &amp;amp; c. to eat, they depart&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thunder and lightning. Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table, and with a quaint device the banquet vanishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He vanishes in thunder; then, to soft music enter the Shapes again, and dance, with mocks and mows, and carrying out the table&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These would seem a tall order with the options available to a company in Shakespeare's time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read that some of the stage directions in the First Folio may not have been written by Shakespeare but were added by a scribe, Ralph Crane. But since it is the same era, this does not shed light on how or why any author at the time would think these were suitable stage directions? Or, indeed, how companies at the time dealt with them in staging the production?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T23:19:24.757" Title="How can we reconcile the bareness of Shakespearean stages with the complex stage directions of The Tempest?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;theater&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14306" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14285" CreationDate="2020-05-14T11:27:28.210" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;After a lot of searching and thinking, I think that he mean that Father Brown felt a mystery which is alternately veiled and revealed (as if) some general doors and windows (not necessarily the doors and windows of this room) were opened to reveal it then closed to veil it again. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T11:43:15.947" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T11:43:15.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14307" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-14T14:12:41.000" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poems of Robert Frost generally start with some events that are quite common, like &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whose woods these are I think I know.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  His house is in the village though;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He will not see me stopping here&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To watch his woods fill up with snow.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And sorry I could not travel both.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Toward heaven still,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And there's a barrel that I didn't fill.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Beside it, and there may be two or three&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the poem remains quite calm and commonly eventful, but at ending stanzas these common events become a contemplation on our part. Robert Frost at the end makes us think differently about these events. The most important thing is that at last we (at least I) can connect our lives completely to the poem. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is: did these things &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; happen to him, did he really stop by woods on a snowy evening, or two roads diverged into two, or he picked up apples and he wrote a poem on it? Or is it something like that pondered like a poet to give us such fine piece of poetry?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These questions can be helpful in understanding Robert Frost, because as Charles Bukowski said &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCrn1LDDoRc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;It's true I was there, even worse off than most of them but I wonder if they realize where their letter arrives&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-14T14:56:53.653" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T14:56:53.653" Title="Did those things really happen to Robert Frost?" Tags="&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14310" CreationDate="2020-05-14T15:12:33.863" Score="4" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463891/page/n195/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Dagger with Wings&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was explaining some philosophical aspects of the murderer, saying: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It was his whole game with me to be as idealistic as possible; and whenever that is attempted by that sort of man, you will generally find it is that sort of ideal. That sort of man may be &lt;strong&gt;dripping with gore; but he will always be able to tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is better than Christianity&lt;/strong&gt;. Nay, he will tell you quite sincerely that Buddhism is more Christian than Christianity. That alone is enough to throw a hideous and ghastly ray of light on his notion of Christianity.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the relationship between &quot;&lt;strong&gt;dripping with gore&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &lt;strong&gt;Buddhism &amp;amp; Christianity&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in a later paragraph, he say: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It isn’t defending a man to say he is a genius,” said Father Brown. “Far from it. And it is simply a psychological fact that &lt;strong&gt;an artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity&lt;/strong&gt;. Leonardo da Vinci cannot draw as if he couldn’t draw. Even if he tried, it will always be a strong parody of a weak thing. This man would have made something much too fearful and wonderful out of the Wesleyan Methodist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's exactly meant by &lt;strong&gt;an artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T07:08:38.590" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T07:08:38.590" Title="What connects &quot;dripping with gore&quot; and Buddhism &amp; Christianity in &quot;The Dagger with Wings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2843" CreationDate="2020-05-14T21:14:39.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In fact, owl eyes refers to a drunk man whom Nick meets in Gatsby's library. He was in the library because he wants to discover the truth about Gatsby while other guests are very busy with silly rumors about Gatsby. Actually, he takes one of the books from the shelf, but he is shocked because they seem real , but at the same time they are new. That is mean no one read and touch them even Gatsby himself, so Gatsby used them for just showing his huge wealth.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10078" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T21:14:39.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14308" CreationDate="2020-05-14T22:14:44.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Dripping with gore&quot; indicates that the man had just committed a violent murder and was literally dripping with blood from the victim.  However if he were philosophically inclined, he could hold forth on views that Buddhism was better than Christianity -- or, in view of the way Father Brown is discussing European criminals, those notions of Buddhism that were current in the knowledge of the time.  The reincarnation and re-occurrence that Father Brown mentioned were common knowledge and derived, however distantly, from Buddhism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The betrayal bit means that when trying to pretend to be something he's not, he will accidentally say what he sincerely believes.  This will give away the pretense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-05-14T22:14:44.007" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14311" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-15T19:39:34.440" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T19:39:34.440" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T19:39:34.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14312" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-15T19:39:34.440" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American author Cynthia Ozick and her works. Her works should be tagged with the appropriate medium tags for her shorter stories, her works published in book form should be tagged with the title. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-15T21:46:17.747" LastActivityDate="2020-05-15T21:46:17.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14313" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14360" CreationDate="2020-05-16T08:15:15.693" Score="6" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm sure many here have encountered a common error in written English, whereby 'have' is substituted by 'of'; 'should of', 'would of', 'could of', etc. It's my understanding that this is always grammatically incorrect, and derives from when people contract 'have' to 've' ('should've', etc.) which sounds a bit like 'of'. However, there are a couple of instances of this error appearing in books I've read, most recently The Great Gatsby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 32 of my edition (Penguin Classics, 2010), Myrtle says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet, and when she gave&#xA;  me the bill you'd of thought she had my appendicitus out.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, on page 74, Wolfshiem says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;It was four o'clock in the morning then, and if we'd of raised the&#xA;  blinds we'd of seen daylight.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my mind, these instances should use 'have' instead of 'of'; &quot;you'd have thought...&quot;, &quot;if we'd have raised...we'd have seen...&quot;. So either;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm wrong about this being bad grammar.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a grammatical use which was acceptable when Fitzgerald was writing but no longer (though that doesn't explain the same error in Terry Pratchett's and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's an error with my copy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's a deliberate error to indicate a 'lower' use of language by these specific characters to contrast with the likes of Nick, Gatsby, etc, like how Myrtle says 'appendicitus' when she means either 'appendicitis' or 'appendix', or Wolfshiem calling Oxford 'Oggsford'. (This might also explain the use in Good Omens.) If this is the case, it's quite subtle for what is supposed to be dialogue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="736" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T16:59:16.960" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T15:54:37.900" Title="Bad Grammar in The Great Gatsby?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13923" CreationDate="2020-05-16T09:36:27.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question supposes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9358/3003&quot;&gt;particular theory about literature&lt;/a&gt;: namely, that the role of the text is to describe a fictional world, and the task of the reader is to determine facts about that world. According to this theory, it is unsatisfactory for Frost to tell us that he thinks he knows whose woods these are, but not to tell us who he thinks that is: by teasing a fact but not revealing it, the poet is interfering with the reader’s proper task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear that this theory does not work very well when applied to this poem. The reason that it does not work is that the poem uses implicit metaphor, a technique which relies upon ambiguity, and ambiguity relies upon lack of detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphor is a rhetorical device in which one thing represents another. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; gives the example “All the world’s a stage” from Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, where the representation (of the world by the stage) is explicitly stated. But metaphors also work implicitly, where the poet does not tell you exactly what is being represented, or how the comparison works. This leaves room for the metaphor to work in multiple ways, allowing the reader to bring in multiple associations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;To take a famous example, there is no pun, double syntax, or dubiety in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but the comparison holds for many reasons; because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are carved in knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by a sheltering building crystallized out of the likeness of a forest, and colored with stained glass and painting like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the gray walls colored like the skies of winter […] these reasons, and many more […], must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Empson (1930). &lt;em&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;, p. 3. London, Chatto and Windus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† From Shakespeare’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_Sonnets_(1883)/Sonnet_73&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 73&lt;/a&gt;: a metaphor for the branches of a tree in winter, which are themselves a metaphor for the love-lorn mood of the speaker.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of ‘Stopping by Woods’ the woods are “lovely, dark and deep” and the speaker would explore them if he could, but he has “promises to keep”. This is a metaphor for any situation in which desire and duty are opposed: perhaps the woods represent a poetic career, but the speaker has to earn a living; perhaps the woods represent escape to a life of adventure, but the speaker has a family; perhaps the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/934/3003&quot;&gt;woods represent death&lt;/a&gt;, but the speaker has dependents to look after. The poem provides no steer towards resolving this ambiguity, so that the reader’s own ideas about the conflict between desire and duty, whatever they are, can mix with the image in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ambiguity extends naturally to the owner of the woods, so that, for example, if you have a religious metaphor in mind (the woods represent death, or eternity, or monastic seclusion) then the owner of the woods might be God, and his house might be the village church. Or if you have a psychological metaphor (the woods represent the speaker’s life, or subconscious mind) then the owner of the woods might be the speaker himself, whose home is with the villagers to whom he has obligations. The richness of the poem comes from this cloud of implicit metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the more facts we learn about a thing, the more it can represent only itself, and the less it is capable of metaphorically representing something else. The more that Frost tells us about the owner of the woods, the harder it would become to fit the owner into any metaphorical scheme of interpretation, and the more the woods would leave the realm of poetry and become a commercial forestry enterprise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The woods were bought by Farmer Black&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Whose cousin Bill’s a lumberjack.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He paid five-ten an acre for it—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  ’Twas thought a bargain, nine years back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Bill says that when the woods are sawed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nine hundred thousand feet of board&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Will go to build three hundred homes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In Boston, Springfield, and Concord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-16T10:21:59.237" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T10:21:59.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13935" CreationDate="2020-05-16T13:34:38.010" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is impossible for us to say how come &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; have a different version—we’d have to know how you learned the poem, which you didn’t tell us, and you likely don’t remember. But we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; investigate the general problem of corruption of texts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fallibility of memory&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People are capable of prodigous feats of memorization: the actor playing the lead in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, for example, has to deliver more than 1,500 lines, and in the theatrical world this is not considered a particularly notable feat. But memory does not work like a camera or printing press: the process of recollection involves a certain amount of reconstruction, and that can result in the introduction of errors. Poetry is &lt;a href=&quot;https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758/BF03193301.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more resilient to error than prose&lt;/a&gt; because rhythm, rhyme, and imagery help anchor the major words in their places. But the minor words are subject to change, and minor words can change the whole meaning of a passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s an example of this process from a notable writer. George Orwell found it easy to memorize poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I know a respectable quantity of Eliot’s earlier work by heart. I did not sit down and learn it, it simply stuck in my mind as any passage of verse is liable to do when it has really rung the bell. Sometimes after only one reading it is possible to remember the whole of a poem of, say, twenty or thirty lines, the act of memory being partly an act of reconstruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Orwell (1942a). ‘Points of View: T. S. Eliot’. &lt;em&gt;Poetry London&lt;/em&gt;, October–November 1942. Reprinted in &lt;em&gt;The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, pp. 272–3. London: Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This facility of memory must have been a benefit to Orwell when composing his critical essays, because it obviated the need to visit his bookshelves, or the library, find the volume containing the lines to be quoted, and locate them in the text. But how accurate was his memory? Here are a couple of examples, with differences in bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The stream of the world has changed its course&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And with the stream my thoughts have run&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Into some &lt;strong&gt;cloudy&lt;/strong&gt; thunderous spring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That is its mountain source—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Aye, to &lt;strong&gt;some&lt;/strong&gt; frenzy of the mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;For&lt;/strong&gt; all that we have done’s undone,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William B. Yeats (1914). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hourglass00yeatrich/page/34/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hour-Glass&lt;/em&gt;, p. 34&lt;/a&gt;. Privately printed.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The philosopher in the play dies on the knowledge that all his lifetime of thought has been wasted (I am quoting from memory again):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;    &lt;p&gt;The stream of the world has changed its course&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    And with the stream my thoughts have run&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Into some &lt;strong&gt;cloudly&lt;/strong&gt;, thunderous spring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    That is its mountain-source;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    Ay, to &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt; frenzy of the mind,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;That&lt;/strong&gt; all that we have done’s undone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Orwell (1943). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/yeats/english/e_yeats&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W. B. Yeats&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Horizon&lt;/em&gt;, January 1943. Reprinted in &lt;em&gt;The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, pp. 315–316. London: Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The substitution of ‘that’ for ‘for’ in the last quoted line substantially changes the meaning. In Yeats’s original, the Wise Man says that his thoughts have become frenzied &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; things have been undone. But Orwell’s version has the causation the other way round: his thoughts have become frenzied &lt;em&gt;so that&lt;/em&gt; things can be undone. This better suits his criticism that this passage is “by implication profoundly obscurantist and reactionary”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ’eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t &lt;strong&gt;’alt&lt;/strong&gt; to see,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till I ’eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ’e ran,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An’ I thought I knew the voice an’—it was me! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Rudyard Kipling (1896). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.208362/page/n199/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That Day&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Seven Seas&lt;/em&gt;, p. 180. London: Methuen.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I ’eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t &lt;strong&gt;stop&lt;/strong&gt; to see,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Till I ’eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ’e ran,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  An’ I thought I knew the voice an’—it was me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Orwell (1942b). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/kipling/english/e_rkip&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rudyard Kipling&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Horizon&lt;/em&gt;, February 1942. Reprinted in &lt;em&gt;The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, p. 222. London: Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case Orwell doesn’t say explicitly that he is quoting from memory, only that “verse is a mnemonic device, among other things”. But the mistake suggests that he is. Here “stop” alliterates with “see”, and it doesn’t have the dropped aitch of “’alt”, which Orwell finds embarrassing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final ‘g’s’ carefully omitted. Very often the result is as embarrassing as the humorous recitation at a church social. And this accounts for the curious fact that one can often improve Kipling’s poems, make them less facetious and less blatant, by simply going through them and transplanting them from Cockney into standard speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Orwell (1942b).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Examples from Literature Stack Exchange&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/story-identification&quot;&gt;story-identification&lt;/a&gt; questions on this site will show the operation of memory: questions where minor details have been mis-remembered are the rule rather than the exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/12450/3003&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, lines from &lt;em&gt;Honey Bear&lt;/em&gt; by Dixie Willson have been remembered, but “places where the sky looked through” has become “spaces” (logically enough—there must be spaces between the leaves of the trees) and “big old hollow tree” has become “deep” (again, logically enough, the hollow must be deep enough for the bear to live there).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9206/3003&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about ‘The Most Dangerous Game’ by Richard Connell, a pipe knocked out of the protagonist’s mouth by a rope has become a cigar knocked out of his hand by a sail—the kind of detail you might come up with if you retained a general impression of the scene and had to reconstruct it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11588/3003&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; about ‘Go to the ant’ by Stanley J. Sharpless, “one up on us guys” has become “as good as us guys” (a natural change because “one up on us” is rather awkward, and “good” alliterates with “guys”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Lectio difficilior&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see from the examples above, recollected versions often have features that are ‘better’ (for certain purposes) than the original. Orwell’s recollection of Yeats changes the causation in a way that better supports his criticism of Yeats as reactionary; his recollection of Kipling avoids the embarrassing dropped aitch; the changes to &lt;em&gt;Honey Bear&lt;/em&gt; are logical improvements; the change to ‘Go to the ant’ makes the wording smoother and adds an alliteration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same kind of ‘improvement’ is going on in the altered version of ‘Stopping by Woods’. It is easier to read the “though” in the second line as referring backwards (“I do know, though, that his house is in the village”) rather than forwards (“he won’t mind me stopping here, though, because his house is in the village”). And if you followed this easier reading then the first line would make more sense if it were contrastive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the fact that the remembered versions are ‘improvements’ on the commonly accepted versions is actually evidence that the remembered versions are the corruptions, because it is more likely that you would make a reading smoother, or easier to understand, or better suited to your purposes, than the other way round. This is the principle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectio_difficilior_potior&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;lectio difficilior potior&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (“the more difficult reading is the stronger”) in textual criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once an ‘improved’ version becomes established, it persists because it is easier to remember, or makes more sense, than the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T14:10:17.777" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T14:10:17.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14317" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14313" CreationDate="2020-05-16T19:03:16.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's possibility 4. These are dialog, and they are undoubtedly meant to convey a pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; without the /h/. You could also spell this pronunciation: &lt;em&gt;if we'd've raised the blinds we'd've seen daylight.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that there are other mistakes in this dialog. The second &lt;em&gt;'d&lt;/em&gt; in the second sentence is also incorrect grammar (of a form that is quite common among Americans now, and presumably was not unknown, but which probably was more noticeable as wrong, when Fitzgerald wrote the novel). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T15:54:37.900" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T15:54:37.900" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-16T22:24:54.743" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've started reading the Igbo short novel &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/igbo/nzeako/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Night has Fallen in the Afternoon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (freely available online both in the original Igbo language and in English translation). As the translator &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/igbo/nzeako/transintro.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;[t]his little story is so packed with so many obscure proverbs&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Many of those are explained in the English version with parenthetical notes by the translator, but sometimes their relevance to the story is still left to the reader's deduction. The following passage is from near the start of Chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All widows tried, like it or not, to give themselves and their children to wealthy people and their spirits and their kith and kin, because one who wants to fully harvest the topmost fruits of his oil bean tree cannot climb down at the same place where he climbed up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those people oversaw them the way a chicken guards its chicks so that hawks might not carry them off, and they were barely able to breathe [worked to death like slaves], and the elders said that one who performed in-law duties in the lizard's house must surely hear running, because see-it-and-hold-it-for-me is a spear aimed at the stomach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, it seems that widows and their children were considered weak and exploitable by the society of that place and time, so they tried to attach themselves to wealthy people as a sort of protection. Some of the proverbial references in these paragraphs are clear enough, but others are harder to puzzle out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the relevance of the &amp;quot;harvest the topmost fruits of his oil bean tree&amp;quot; proverb to this situation?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does it mean to &amp;quot;perform in-law duties in the lizard's house&amp;quot;? What is &amp;quot;see-it-and-hold-it-for-me&amp;quot;, and how does this connect with weapons and running?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T18:41:43.217" Title="What is the relevance of these Igbo proverbs to the situation of widows and their children?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;igbo-literature&gt;&lt;j-u-tagbo-nzeako&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14305" CreationDate="2020-05-16T23:15:23.443" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bareness of the stage in The Globe and other theatre venues used by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the King's Men should not be taken to imply that there weren't any other elements of stagecraft. G. Blakemore Evans points out that &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the actors depended on relatively lavish costuming, most of it bought second- or third-hand (...), and a probably fairly sparing use of common properties (bed, throne of state, chairs, stools, trestle tables, tree, rock, chariot, etc; (...)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(G. Blakemore Evans: &lt;em&gt;Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: A New Mermaid Background Book&lt;/em&gt;. London, A &amp;amp; C Black, 1989, page 70.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Shakespeare's plays and plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries suggest that the theatres used certain special properties. For example, thunder could be suggested by &quot;rolling a cannon-ball down a wooden or metal trough, or by drum rolls&quot; (Blakemore Evans, page 70); &quot;rain and hail storms were simulated by 'raining' down dried peas from the 'heavens' (from which a &lt;em&gt;deus ex machina&lt;/em&gt;, ..., could be lowered; ...)&quot; (Blakemore Evans, page 71; see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Hodge%27s_conjectural_Globe_reconstruction.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. Walter Hodges's conjectural reconstruction of The Globe&lt;/a&gt;, where the 'heavens' can be seen above the stage). There was also stage blood (e.g. &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take the examples from the question one by one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Enter PROSPERO above, invisible.&quot; Prospero may have appeared on the &quot;balcony&quot; above the &quot;inner stage&quot; (the &quot;inner stage&quot; is behind the curtains in &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Hodge%27s_conjectural_Globe_reconstruction.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. Walter Hodges's conjectural reconstruction of The Globe&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Enter several strange Shapes, bringing in a banquet&quot;. These would be actors wearing unusual costumes carrying in a table or a trestle table on which &quot;food&quot; can be seen; they also carry it away again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Thunder and lightning&quot;. The thunder would be made using the means mentioned above (cannon ball or drum rolls). How lightning would be simulated is not clear, especially during performances in public theatres, which would start at 2 or 3 p.m.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Enter Ariel, like a harpy, claps his wings upon the table&quot;. Ariel, wearing an appropriate costume, might either walk onto the stage, or lowered down from the 'heavens'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;with a quaint device the banquet vanishes&quot;. This is less clear. (It is important to know that the theatre may have had a trapdoor (see C. Walter Hodges's drawing again), however, it is not clear how this trapdoor may have been used to make the banquet disappear without removing the table. Alternatively, the banquet was actually on a plank on top of the table, and that plank was hauled up to the 'heavens'.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;He vanishes in thunder&quot;. For the thunder, see above.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the above list, I have assumed that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was performed at The Globe or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blackfriars Theatre&lt;/a&gt;. Except for costumes and instruments, some aspects of stagecraft and scenography mentioned above would not have been available during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest#Shakespeare&amp;#39;s_day&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;performance at court on 1 November 1611&lt;/a&gt; (see also &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Stephen Orgel. Oxford University Press, 1987, page 2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another aspect to consider. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Crane&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ralph Crane&lt;/a&gt; was a scribe who is known to have worked for the King's Men. Eugene Giddens writes that &quot;Crane's stage directions often seem like descriptions written for the benefit of readers&quot; (Giddens: &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press, 2011, page 32). The best-known example of this occurs in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 3 (the banquet scene cited in the question):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Enter Ariell (like a Harpey) claps his wings upon the Table, and with a quient deuice the Banquet vanishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giddens comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Presumably the acting company would need to be aware of the kind of quaint device that the author had in mind, but this direction seems to describe the action after it has happened, and for a reader's imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that none of this implies that Ralph Crane filled in stage directions where &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; existed before, as was suggested by the question based on an older answer to a related question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-16T23:15:23.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14284" CreationDate="2020-05-17T00:28:46.180" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most striking characteristic that Camus's &lt;em&gt;The Fall&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt; and Daoud's &lt;em&gt;Meursault, contre-enquête&lt;/em&gt; have in common is that they are written as a &lt;strong&gt;second-person narrative&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt;, the main character tells his story to another person whom he addresses as &quot;vous&quot; (&quot;you&quot;, polite form); neither the main character nor the other person formally introduce themselves to each other. The same applies to &lt;em&gt;Meursault, contre-enquête&lt;/em&gt;, although here the main character addresses the other person as &quot;tu&quot; (&quot;you&quot;, informal form). We gradually learn that he is the brother of the &quot;Arab&quot; shot by Meursault but we find out his name only indirectly, when he cites the words of his dead brother's ghost. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both novels, the narrator and the listener initially meet each other in a bar; the bar &lt;em&gt;Mexico-City&lt;/em&gt; in Amsterdam in &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt; and the bar &lt;em&gt;Djebel Zendel&lt;/em&gt; (named after a mountain) in Oran in &lt;em&gt;Meursault, contre-enquête&lt;/em&gt;. The chapters that follow continue the narrative on subsequent encounters. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn very little about the &quot;listener&quot; in both novels.  In &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt;, the listener is a compatriot, i.e. a Frenchman. We learn at the very end of the novel that is a lawyer, just like the narrator used to be. In Daoud's novel, we gradually learn that the listener comes from Paris, that he has read the novel about Meursault and that he wants to write some sort of thesis based on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't find out what this secondary character says or does, except when the main character responds to or comments on something said by the listener. the closest analogy to this type of narrative is overhearing one side of a telephone conversation, so you can only infer what the person at the other line has said based on the reactions of the person you can actually hear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an example from the first chapter of Daoud's novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;En poussant la porte de ce bar, tu as ouvert une tombe, mon jeun ami. Est-ce que tu as le livre dans ton cartable? D'accord, fais le disciple et lis-moi les premiers passages ... &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Tu as compris? Non? Je t'explique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you pushed the door to this bar, you opened a grave, my young friend. Do you have the book with you in your briefcase? OK, play the disciple and read to me the fist passages ... &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Have you understood? No? I'll explain it to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is an example from the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quand je vivais en France, je ne pouvais rencontrer un homme d'esprit sans qu'aussitôt j'en fisse ma société. Ah! je vois que vous bronchez sur cette imparfait du subjonctif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When I lived in France, I could not meet a wit without seeking his companionship. Oh! I see you react negatively to that imperfect subjunctive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: Both &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Meursault, contre-enquête&lt;/em&gt; take the form of a &lt;strong&gt;confession&lt;/strong&gt; to an anonymous listener whom the main character has met in a bar. The confession is spread out over a number of encounters. For this reason, the claim on Wikipedia that the narrative style in Daoud's novel is inspired Camus's &lt;em&gt;La Chute&lt;/em&gt; is justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T17:06:46.257" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T17:06:46.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14241" CreationDate="2020-05-17T01:51:51.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure this answers your question, but nevertheless, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Baron Munchausen&lt;/a&gt; during his second trip to the Moon, ca 1780, observed that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As to the natives of the moon, none of them are less in stature than thirty-six feet: they are not called the human species, but the cooking animals, for they all dress their food by fire, as we do, but lose not time at their meals, as &lt;em&gt;they open their left side, and place the whole quantity at once in their stomach, then shut it again&lt;/em&gt; till the same day in the next month; for they never indulge themselves with food more than twelve times a year, or once a month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks extremely advanced to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T01:51:51.657" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2100" CreationDate="2020-05-17T03:36:20.053" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is classified as a Novel of Ideas, which are sometimes labeled as Philosophical Novels. Other examples are Voltaire's &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt;, and all novels by  Goethe and by J.-J. Rousseau. Of course, those three were all philosophers, while Tolstoy is primarily known as a novelist, but he did have his own philosophical perspective, particularly on the nature of history (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://voegelinview.com/consciousness-memory-history-tolstoys-war-peace/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trepanier&lt;/a&gt; on the second epilogue, in particular, since you mentioned it). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;, as you know, is preoccupied with history, and as Tolstoy sets the principal characters in motion they tend to become caught up in forces much bigger than they are, even while their individual character traits influence their actions. To some extent, fiction is always grappling with the question of history. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Because fiction--at least the novel and short story--are narrative art forms. And narrative means events exist in a sequence. As Aristotle famously said about the drama, it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end (not necessarily in that order). It sounds obvious, but think about what that implies: all narrative is necessarily a kind of history, in which the outcomes are a consequence of previous actions. What happens in the beginning affects what follows. So novels tend to display a theory of history, just because they rely on a narrative form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some are more self-conscious about this aspect of fiction than others, and Tolstoy falls into this category. You can view it, even, as a form of intellectual honesty: he is putting his cards on the table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I really like the way you phrase your question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;So I wondered whether this novel should be considered fiction, non-fiction or an amalgamation. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, you accept that it is a novel, and you are even open to the possibility of it being a non-fiction novel (that's a genre that would become prominent in the twentieth century, with writers like Truman Capote and &lt;em&gt;In Cold Blood&lt;/em&gt;). &quot;Fiction&quot; is easier to define than &quot;novel,&quot; though, as the invention of a imagined reality which nonetheless is assumed to contain some truth about actual social reality. So fiction is quite different from &quot;fantasy&quot;. And most of &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; certainly fits that definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Novels need not be uniform in their generic type. The Russian theorist of the novel M. M. Bakhtin argued famously that the novel is a combination of other generic forms, and that it has no generic identity of its own. He called it the &quot;anti-genre&quot; that comments on other genre forms: like journalism, science, cookbooks, and even philosophy. I don't remember if he used &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; as an example, but--as you noticed--it serves very well as a case study of just how multi-faceted a novel can be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7964" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T03:36:20.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-17T13:03:04.943" Score="5" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's from &quot;The Empire of Ants&quot; by H.G. Wells. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the paragraph it's in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Captain Gerilleau, who was Holroyd's sole distraction from these physical distresses, developed into a formidable bore, telling the simple story of his heart's affections day by day, a string of anonymous women, as if he was telling beads. Sometimes he suggested sport, and they shot at alligators, and at rare intervals they came to human aggregations in the waste of trees, and stayed for a day or so, and drank and sat about, and, one night, danced with Creole girls, who found Holroyd's poor elements of Spanish, without either past tense or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these were mere luminous chinks in the long grey passage of the streaming river, up which the throbbing engines beat. &lt;strong&gt;A certain liberal heathen deity, in the shape of a demi-john, held seductive court aft, and, it is probable, forward.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I especially didn't understand the second part of the sentence: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;held seductive court aft, and, it is probable, forward.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if anyone can simplify the whole sentence for me, it'll be much appreciated. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10052" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T13:21:31.710" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T11:18:16.333" Title="What is the meaning of this sentence by H.G. Wells about a &quot;liberal heathen deity&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14324" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-17T15:05:46.863" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapters of Guy de Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;, the main character, Georges Duroy, is trying to learn the craft of journalism.&#xA;The end of the book's fourth chapter tells us that he meets all sorts of people while looking for news, information and gossip that may be used for articles (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Il eut des rapport continus avec des ministres, des concierges, des généraux, des agents de police, des princes, des &lt;strong&gt;souteneurs&lt;/strong&gt;, des courtisanes, des ambassadeurs, des évêques, des &lt;strong&gt;proxénètes&lt;/strong&gt;, des rastaqouères, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He was in constant contact with ministers, caretakers (doorkeepers), generals, police constables, princes, pimps, courtesans, ambassadors, bishops, pimps, parvenus, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have always assumed that &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/souteneur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;souteneur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/proxenete&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;proxénète&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were synonyms, which is why I translated both terms as &quot;pimp&quot;. However, this repetition does not make much sense. Is Maupassant distinguishing between two categories of pimps or does he have other meanings of &quot;souteneur&quot; and &quot;proxénète&quot; in mind? If the latter, which would be those meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T12:58:35.957" Title="What is the difference between souteneur and proxénète in Maupassant's Bel-Ami?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14325" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14326" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" Score="0" Body="Questions about Guy de Maupassant's 1885 novel 'Bel-Ami'. Use this tag with the tags [guy-de-maupassant] and [french-literature] ." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" LastActivityDate="2020-05-17T15:09:08.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14467" CreationDate="2020-05-17T16:06:21.717" Score="7" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short poem &quot;Alone&quot; by Edgar Allan Poe was written in 1829 or 1830, when he was a young man, but only published in 1875 long after his death. Its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/alonea.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text&lt;/a&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From childhood’s hour I have not been&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As others were — I have not seen&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As others saw — I could not bring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My passions from a common spring —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the same source I have not taken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My sorrow — I could not awaken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My heart to joy at the same tone —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And all I lov’d — I lov’d alone —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then — in my childhood — in the dawn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of a most stormy life — was drawn&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From ev’ry depth of good and ill&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  The mystery which binds me still —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the torrent, or the fountain —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the red cliff of the mountain —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the sun that ’round me roll’d&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In its autumn tint of gold —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the lightning in the sky&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As it pass’d me flying by —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  From the thunder, and the storm —&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And the cloud that took the form&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of a demon in my view — &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts off being about a young person who feels isolated and different from everyone else around them, but the second half of the poem seems deeper and more mysterious. What is &quot;the mystery which binds me still&quot;, and how does it relate to landscapes and weather? What is the significance of the cloud taking the form of a demon? Why does the poem end suddenly, mid-sentence? Is there any significance to the frequent dashes used throughout the poem, or the lack of paragraphing into stanzas? How about the choices of metaphor, e.g. does the &quot;spring&quot; in line 4 relate to the &quot;torrent&quot; or &quot;fountain&quot; in line 13, or the &quot;stormy life&quot; in line 10 to the &quot;lightning&quot; and &quot;thunder&quot; later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; tag, I'm seeking a full analysis and interpretation of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T07:51:10.737" Title="Edgar Allan Poe's &quot;Alone&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14324" CreationDate="2020-05-18T00:09:42.570" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wiktionnaire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/souteneur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le souteneur&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Celui qui, vivant du gain d’une prostituée, prétend assurer, en retour, &lt;em&gt;sa protection&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/prox%C3%A9n%C3%A8te&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le proxénète&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Personne qui tire &lt;em&gt;profit&lt;/em&gt; de la prostitution d’autrui ou bien la favorise.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le souteneur: gives protection for money.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Le proxénète: just looks for profit. La Celestina is a good example of this.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10094" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T18:54:06.190" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T18:54:06.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14330" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14343" CreationDate="2020-05-18T01:28:48.787" Score="4" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his &quot;To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time&quot;, Robert Herrick concluded his carpe diem plea with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For having lost but once your prime, &lt;br /&gt; You may forever tarry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be two ways to understand this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you (the virgins) miss the opportunity of youth, you will forever linger in loneliness&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you (the virgins) lose your virginity now, you can rest and relax for the rest of your lives&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the origin of this ambiguity originates from the meaning of the word &quot;prime&quot;, which can mean both the best period of something (matching the first interpretation) and the first period of something (which may imply virginity). I was discussing this poem in my AP English Literature class and my teacher agrees with the second when all of us read it the first way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any &quot;canonical&quot; way to understand these two lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10096" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T18:38:26.217" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:05:27.647" Title="Two Interpretations of Robert Herrick's &quot;To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-herrick&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13946" CreationDate="2020-05-18T06:05:31.983" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a translation of a common Tamil proverb that goes something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;பேய்க்கு வாக்கப்பட்டால் புளிய மரத்தில் ஏறித்தான் ஆகணும்&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_15919&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Transliteration&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Pēykku vākkappaṭṭāl puḷiya marattil ēṟittāṉ ākaṇum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Translation: If you are married to a ghost, then you have no choice but to climb the tamarind tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context behind the proverb is that ghosts reside on tamarind trees — at least, this is a common belief in south India — so, if you are a girl who is married to a ghost, then you'll have to move in to your husband's home, which in this case would be the tamarind tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The proverb is used to express the idea that one has no choice but to face the (unsavoury) consequences of some action. If a friend of mine joined the marketing department but complains that he doesn't want to travel so much, I might tell him &quot;Well, if you're married to a ghost, you've got to climb the tamarind tree.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not very well equipped to answer your last question since I haven't read &lt;em&gt;The Painter of Signs&lt;/em&gt; (yet), but from the context you have provided it sounds like&#xA;Daisy is just making a play on the words of the proverb here, since she literally climbed a tamarind tree that night. The pun makes a &lt;em&gt;bit&lt;/em&gt; more sense if she's romantically interested in Raman, because maybe that's why she ended up spending a night on the road with him and climbing a tamarind tree? No wonder that Raman's thoughts are along those lines, poor fellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T06:05:31.983" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14330" CreationDate="2020-05-18T07:07:19.347" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right that there is double meaning in the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For having lost but once your prime,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The double meaning works because “once” means not only “at some point or period in the past” but also “at one time only” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). In a discussion of virginity, a reference to losing something “but once” has a clear implication, and “prime” has the meaning “the beginning or first age of something” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) which we can take to be a metaphor for virginity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we have to be careful in teasing out the consequences of the double meaning, because  “tarry” does not mean “relax” but rather “wait; linger; abide”. And the idea that virginity might be something a young woman might be anxious about, so that she would relax once it is lost, is a modern idea, and it would be anachronistic to read it back into Herrick’s time, when female virginity was conventionally conceived as something precious, to be preserved for marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think it is better to take the last two lines in the context of the stanza, which is explicit that it is advising the virgins to marry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Then be not coy, but use your time,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      And while ye may, go marry;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  For having lost but once your prime,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;      You may forever tarry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the two meanings are: “once you have lost your youth, you may wait in vain to marry (because you are no longer beautiful)” and “once you have lost your virginity (outside of wedlock), you may wait in vain to marry (because you have lost your respectability)”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These conventional morals seem rather disappointing after the vivid imagery of the first three stanzas (“gathering rosebuds” as a metaphor for sex, “the glorious lamp of heaven” as a metaphor for youthful vigour), and it is natural to look for something more out of the last stanza.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The metaphors in the poem are all about the passage of time leading to decay and death: the flower will be dying tomorrow, the sun races towards its setting, time turns the best to the worst. With these progressions in mind, wouldn’t it be better to tarry? So rather than interpreting the last line as a warning (“you may wait in vain to marry”) we can find in it an opportunity: “through sex, you may be able to delay the progression of time” (though in this reading “forever” would be hyperbole: perhaps if the sex were good enough it would &lt;em&gt;seem&lt;/em&gt; like forever).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks whether there is a “canonical” reading of the poem. I recommend not worrying too much about this: poetry is an art form which exploits ambiguity of language to create and support multiple readings. So long as an interpretation is grounded in the text and convincingly argued then there is no need to be concerned whether other interpretations exist. The fact that a poem has a second (or third, etc.) reading does not mean that the first reading is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T15:35:33.507" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T15:35:33.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9223" CreationDate="2020-05-18T11:19:52.797" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CDqlSFzRSsIC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muncle Trogg&lt;/a&gt; by Janet Foxley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A topsy-turvy fairy tale about a small giant on a big adventure!Let's&#xA;  get ready to grumble! Mount Grumble is where the giants live. But&#xA;  (contrary to what you might think, maybe because of their name) not&#xA;  every &quot;giant&quot; (see?) is, um...big. In fact, Muncle Trogg is so SMALL&#xA;  that all the other giants make fun of him for being (uh-oh)&#xA;  people-sized. And toss him around like a football!Fed up, Muncle Trogg&#xA;  climbs down Mount Grumble to take a look at the Smallings (that would&#xA;  be humans) he supposedly looks like. What he discovers is......a sulky&#xA;  green dragon and a terribly sensible girl? But when Mount Grumble is&#xA;  put in harm's way, it's up to little Muncle to be the bigger smallest&#xA;  giant, prove that size doesn't matter, and somehow save his home!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T11:19:52.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14334" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11680" CreationDate="2020-05-18T11:59:13.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One should consider the context of this passage. The porter is obviously very drunk, and when McDuff and Lennox come in, the following exchange occurs (quoted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Mac_F1/scene/2.3/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, emphasis added; line breaks from the First Folio):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macd.&lt;/em&gt; Was it so late, friend, ere you went to Bed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  That you doe &lt;strong&gt;lye&lt;/strong&gt; so late?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Port.&lt;/em&gt; Faith Sir, we were carowsing till the second Cock:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And Drinke, Sir, is a great prouoker of three things.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Macd.&lt;/em&gt; What three things does Drinke especially&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  prouoke?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Port.&lt;/em&gt; Marry, Sir, Nose-painting, &lt;strong&gt;Sleepe&lt;/strong&gt;, and &lt;strong&gt;Vrine&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) Therefore&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  much Drinke may be said to be an &lt;strong&gt;Equiuocator&lt;/strong&gt; with Le-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  cherie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) in conclu-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  sion, [drink] equiuocates him in a sleepe, and &lt;strong&gt;giuing him the Lye&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  leaues him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Macd.&lt;/em&gt; I beleeue, Drinke &lt;strong&gt;gaue thee the Lye&lt;/strong&gt; last Night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &quot;lye so late* means &quot;(still) lie in bed at this late hour&quot;. &#xA;The porter then introduces other concepts that are related to &quot;lye&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Equivocation could refer to the Jesuit doctrine of mental reservation that &quot;permitted one to express virtual falsehoods in a verbally true form to satisfy the speaker's conscience&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. Cambrdidge University Press, 1997, page 150). Elsewhere in Shakespeare, equivocation refers to using ambiguous words. This is not quite the same thing as lying, but it is a method of deception.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Urine&quot; introduces another meaning of lye or at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/Chamber-lye&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chamber-lye&lt;/a&gt; (which could be used as a detergent; see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oldandinteresting.com/washing-with-lye.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lye and chamber lye&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the porter says &quot;giving him the lye*, there are at least three meanings (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. edited by G. K. Hunter. Penguin, 1967, page 154):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(1) deceives him; (2) floors him; (3) makes him urinate (lie = lye).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braunmuller's &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; edition adds the following meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(4) makes him lose his erection; (5) accuses him of lying (has Lady Macbeth did Macbeth, 1.7.47-51).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Macduff says to the porter, &quot;Drinke gaue thee the Lye&quot;, each of the above meanings may be at work. However, the porter's words &quot;I requited him for his Lye&quot; focus the meaning on lying and deception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert S. Miola glosses &quot;i'the very Throat on me&quot; as &quot;deeply, egregiously&quot; (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Robert S. Miola. Second edtion. Norton, 2014).&#xA;Note also that lying in one's throat is an expression that occurs elsewhere in Shakespeare's work, e.g. &lt;em&gt;King Henry IV, Part II&lt;/em&gt;, Act I, scene 2 (&quot;I had lied in my throat&quot;). Lying in the throat was worse than lying fromm the lips (notes on lines 65, 67 in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/2kh4_1_2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Henry IV, Part II&lt;/em&gt; in Shakespeare Online&lt;/a&gt;), hence the interpretation as &quot;outrageous lie&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T11:59:13.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14335" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-18T14:20:47.453" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the questions on this site asks &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3054/do-a-lot-of-shakespeare-characters-break-the-fourth-wall&quot;&gt;Do a lot of Shakespeare characters break the fourth wall?&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;However, assuming a &quot;fourth wall&quot; in English Renaissance theatre appears to be anachronistic since&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;spectators surrounded the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apron_stage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apron stage&lt;/a&gt; on three sides in theatres such as The Globe and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the concept wasn't defined until the eighteenth century by Denis Diderot.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fourth_wall&amp;amp;oldid=955396966#History_of_the_convention&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The concept is usually attributed to the philosopher, critic and dramatist Denis Diderot.&lt;sup&gt;[when?]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comment &quot;&lt;sup&gt;[when?]&lt;/sup&gt;&quot; was inserted into the article because the actual source in Diderot's writings is not mentioned.&#xA;Hence my question: Was Diderot really the first to define this concept? If yes, where, when and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T16:03:06.523" Title="Which publication first defined the theatre convention of the fourth wall?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14336" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14338" CreationDate="2020-05-18T15:13:13.033" Score="4" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Secret of Father Brown&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;If you try to talk about a truth that’s merely moral, people always think it’s merely metaphorical. A real live man with two legs once said to me: ‘I only believe in the Holy Ghost in a spiritual sense.’ Naturally, I said: ‘In what other sense could you believe it?’ And then he thought I meant he needn’t believe in anything except evolution, or &lt;strong&gt;ethical fellowship&lt;/strong&gt;, or some bilge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant here by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;ethical fellowship&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, as I don't see anything like it in my search? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I didn't get &lt;strong&gt;why&lt;/strong&gt; the listener thought Brown meant he needn’t believe in anything except....? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T12:46:06.260" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T12:46:06.260" Title="Meaning of &quot;ethical fellowship&quot; in &quot;The Secret of Father Brown&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14330" CreationDate="2020-05-18T15:17:12.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Prime&quot; does not refer to virginity. After an admittedly brief search, I could not find any examples of such usage. Clearly, what Herrick is referring to is the prime of life, specifically and biologically, the most fecund period of life, when organisms are most sexually active. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His poem is an example of a genre which might be called Carpe Diem seduction that was commonplace in the 17th century and drew on the tenets of Hedonism (&quot;Eat, drink, be merry - and make love - for tomorrow we die.&quot;) Marvell's &quot;To His Coy Mistress&quot; (&quot;Had we but world enough and time) is an elaborate and beautiful example. Then there is the Clown's song in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/twelfth_night/twelfth_night.2.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What is love? ’tis not hereafter;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Present mirth hath present laughter;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What’s to come is still unsure:&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  In delay there lies no plenty,—&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-18T17:53:38.283" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T17:53:38.283" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14336" CreationDate="2020-05-18T15:23:07.640" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Ethical fellowship&amp;quot; is a sort of a keyphrase for secular beliefs that there are right and wrong actions distinct from any religious framework, as per Felix Adler's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ethical Movement&lt;/a&gt;. So Father Brown is basically alluding to two secular (often associated with atheism) movements, evolution and ethical fellowship, to take a dig at people believing that anything spiritual is merely hypothetical or metaphorical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xXIxAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA109&amp;amp;lpg=PA109&amp;amp;dq=%22ethical+fellowship%22,&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=gAIKah3GmL&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1JGG-TeQOa2j4NR-ZSiafx0_WIpA&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwivxujM2r3pAhW1lHIEHT4SDZsQ6AEwBnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22ethical%20fellowship%22%2C&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Basis and Obligations of Ethical Fellowship&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (bolding mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ethical Movement is based on the belief that the good life is the supreme object of human endeavor, and that mutual help and combined effort are needed to attain that object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its bond of fellowship is the desire -- nay the imperious sense of man's sacred duty -- to realize this goodlife; to be continually confirmed and aided in practical devotion to it; and to see more clearly and widely wherein such a life, in all its personal and social requirements, consists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance of such a bond may be appreciated by comparing it with that which ordinarily binds men in sectarian religious association. The latter involves an agreement to think alike upon certain disputable problems as to the ultimate meaning of human life and man's relation to the world in which he lives. On the other hand, this bond of &lt;strong&gt;ethical fellowship&lt;/strong&gt; is based on the common recognition and pursuit of a duty, binding upon us all, of living according to conscience and knowledge....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amusingly, the choice of &amp;quot;ethical fellowship&amp;quot; may have resulted from a personal grudge as per an account in Ian Kerr's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=CW6U5YfcmosC&amp;amp;pg=PA139&amp;amp;lpg=PA139&amp;amp;dq=gk+chesterton+ethical+fellowship&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=DEDfJRY2k7&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0mpHPz7GkgbWpZO4yLhMZYUZ0xdw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi5nZmY5b3pAhUvlXIEHZzJBN4Q6AEwAHoECBAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=gk%20chesterton%20ethical%20fellowship&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G.K. Chesterton: a Biography&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... The 'immeasurable annoyance' with which Chesterton had to decline an invitation to 'sup' with the publisher John Lane and his wife was 'increased by a bitterly ironic fact' that he was 'engaged ... to lecture to a body bearing the wonderful name of THE PECKHAM ETHICAL FELLOWSHIP. Isn't it too beautiful? I'm sure they come out of a book. I only wish they'd go back into it.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T08:26:05.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14335" CreationDate="2020-05-18T16:03:06.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason why the concept is usually attributed to Denis Diderot is the following passage in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/uvresdethatred02dide/page/300/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Discours sur la poésie dramatique&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Soit donc que vous compoſiez, ſoit que vous jouïez, ne penſez non plus au ſpectateur que s'il n'exiſtoit pas. Imaginez ſur le bord du théâtre un grand mur qui vous ſépare du Parterre. Jouez comme ſi la toile ne ſe levoit pas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Regardless whether you are writing (&quot;composing&quot;) or playing, don't think about the spectator, as if he did not exist at all. Imagine that there is a big wall at the edge of the stage that separates you from the pit. Play as if the curtain was never raised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;curtain that is never raised&quot; constitutes the &quot;fourth wall&quot;, the other three being the stage's back, left and right walls. This assumes a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_set_(theatre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;box set&lt;/a&gt; as a theatre type, as opposed to e.g. the ancient &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_ancient_Greece#Architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_theatre_(structure)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roman theatre&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;street theatre&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_in_the_round&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;theatre in the round&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T16:03:06.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9488" CreationDate="2020-05-18T17:47:10.983" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although I understand your read, I think it's incorrect. The seeming ambiguity is in the line &quot;to the ancients spoke.&quot; If the remainder of the poem was what the tree said, I would expect a colon after &quot;spoke,&quot; and the rest of the poem to be in quotes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I believe the narrator is human. She is contrasting the experience of the ancients, who demanded a special tree to talk to, with her own experience, which is that a person can communicate with any tree, if only she is willing to listen instead of talk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T17:47:10.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14342" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-18T18:17:28.180" Score="2" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found three editions of How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.  One was published on 9/30/14; a second one was from 1972; a third was from the 1940s.  Is one of these versions better than the others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update: My goal is to read complex fiction and sophisticated philosophy with greater comprehension.  I would like to remember more details books that I read.  I believe that this book gives some ideas on how to do this.  The newest version would likely refer to using the internet.  I would prefer to read a shorter book rather than a longer book, so I thought an older one may be better.  My other concern is that Adler was a better writer (which may not be true), and that the most recent version has lower quality ideas in it compared to the earlier versions.  But I do not know much about the differences of the different editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10103" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T00:19:04.050" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T00:19:04.050" Title="Which edition of How to Read a Book by Adler and Van Doren is the best?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;how-to-read-a-book&gt;&lt;mortimer-adler&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14343" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14330" CreationDate="2020-05-18T18:36:08.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Early Modern English, &amp;quot;prime&amp;quot; could mean &amp;quot;early years, prime of life, fullness of youth&amp;quot;, but also &amp;quot;perfection, fullness&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;spring, springtime&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?letter=p&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Words&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;&amp;quot;Tarry&amp;quot; could mean &amp;quot;stay for, wait for&amp;quot; (among other meanings; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?letter=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Words&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, interpreting the last stanza as &amp;quot;Get married while you are in the prime of life, otherwise you'll wait forever for an opportunity to find a husband&amp;quot; is perfectly plausible and defensible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly, the occurrence of the words &amp;quot;virgins&amp;quot; (in the title) and &amp;quot;coy&amp;quot; (in the last stanza) may have inspired a sexual interpretation.&#xA;It is possible to find both contemporary and older carpe-diem texts that move in that direction. For example, Andre Marvell's&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_His_Coy_Mistress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To His Coy Mistress&lt;/a&gt; is roughly contemporary with Herrick's poem (though published posthumously in 1681).&#xA;And there are older examples of male characters encouraging female characters to lose their virginity.&#xA;For example, in Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/allswell/allswell.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;All's Well That Ends Well&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the character Parolles&#xA;discusses virginity at length and tells Helena,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with&#xA;lying; the longer kept, the less worth: off with 't&#xA;while 'tis vendible; answer the time of request. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, both the narrator in Marvell's poem and Parolles are trying to convince a woman to become his lover, while Robert Herrick's poem is not written from that point of view.&#xA;The narrator in &amp;quot;To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time&amp;quot; is not pushing his own agenda but encouraging young women generally to get married while young.&#xA;For this reason, the first reading is &lt;em&gt;more plausible&lt;/em&gt; than the second, even if it is possible to read the second meaning into Herrick's poem.&#xA;The second reading would imply, for example, that Herrick's narrator is merely &lt;em&gt;pretending&lt;/em&gt; to take a neutral stance while silently hoping that one of those virgins will prefer him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading literature is not like solving a mathematical equation that allows only one solution.&#xA;Literary texts can usually be interpreted in multiple ways, depending on the literary theory, the &amp;quot;political&amp;quot; agenda one adopts or for other reasons.&#xA;For this reason, presenting alternative interpretations as &amp;quot;either/or&amp;quot; options of which only one is &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; does a disservice to literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T11:05:27.647" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:05:27.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14318" CreationDate="2020-05-18T18:41:43.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I can't puzzle through the second proverb, and this is just my best guess on the first:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oil-bean tree looks to be fairly large and spread out. If you wanted to get all the fruit, you'd have to travel quite a bit around in its branches. Climbing up would thus be a metaphor for your impoverished birth family. You can't get much fruit (resources) from staying in that same spot. You've got to climb down at a different place (in a different family) to get all the available fruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Traditionally, much African literature is built heavily on proverbs and allusions. You can also see this in music of the African diaspora --there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/890572&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rap&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/291696&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reggae dancehall&lt;/a&gt; songs that are essentially long series of popular culture allusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T18:41:43.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13923" CreationDate="2020-05-18T18:49:19.383" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost is &lt;strong&gt;talking to himself&lt;/strong&gt; in this poem. We can tell, because he says the owner will not mind &quot;me&quot; stopping here, not &quot;us.&quot; So it's just he and the horse there, and he's not talking &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; the horse, because he talks &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; the horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He therefore has no need to explain who he's thinking about. He knows who he's talking about. The poem is just &lt;strong&gt;a record of his otherwise private thoughts&lt;/strong&gt; on a particular snowy evening, thus immortalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T18:49:19.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14342" CreationDate="2020-05-18T19:29:28.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Book&lt;/em&gt; was first published in 1940; this is what the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1972edition/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to the 1972 edition states&lt;/a&gt;. There was only one revision, namely the one that the original author, Mortimer J. Adler, wrote in co-operation with the writer and editor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Van_Doren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Van Doren&lt;/a&gt; (incidentally the son of poet and literature professor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Van_Doren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark Van Doren&lt;/a&gt;, who died in 1972).&#xA;All other editions I am aware of are reprints of either the 1940 edition (e.g. in 1967 with a different subtitle) or the 1972 edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, the choice is between two versions: the 1940 edition by Adler (and reprints thereof) or the 1972 edition by Adler and Van Doren (or reprints thereof). The preface to the second edition mentions what has been added since the 1940 edition. More specifically (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The exposition in Part Three of the different ways to approach different kinds of reading materials—practical and theoretical books, &lt;strong&gt;imaginative literature (lyric poetry, epics, novels, plays)&lt;/strong&gt;, history, science and mathematics, social science, and philosophy, as well as reference books, current journalism, and even advertising—is the most extensive addition that has been made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if you are interested in choosing an edition that would be more useful for reading literary works, the 1972 edition or its reprints appear to be the best choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T19:29:28.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-18T16:24:09.843" Score="3" ViewCount="318" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the significance and the intention of King using the word &quot;flesh&quot; halfway through his speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all &lt;strong&gt;flesh&lt;/strong&gt; shall see it together&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it related to the main theme of the speech concerning segregation and injustice or am I missing the point here? From research, I also realized it's a verse from the Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user385661" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T22:19:08.467" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T22:19:08.467" Title="Why does Martin Luther King use the word &quot;flesh&quot; in his speech?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;martin-luther-king&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14349" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14350" CreationDate="2020-05-18T20:51:12.037" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Secret of Father Brown&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was saying that he prefers studying the murder from inside not outside: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I don’t try to get outside the man. I try to get inside the murderer. . . . Indeed it’s much more than that, don’t you see? I am inside a man. I am always inside a man, moving his arms and legs; but I wait till I know I am inside a murderer, &lt;strong&gt;thinking&lt;/strong&gt; his thoughts, wrestling with his passions; till I have bent myself into the posture of his &lt;strong&gt;hunched and peering hatred&lt;/strong&gt;; till I see the world with his bloodshot and squinting eyes, looking between the blinkers of his half-witted concentration; looking up the short and sharp perspective of a straight road to a pool of blood. Till I am really a murderer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &quot;think&quot; here mean &quot;&lt;strong&gt;think about&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; his thoughts or &quot;&lt;strong&gt;think by&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; his thoughts as we are the same person?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's meant by &quot;&lt;strong&gt;hunched and peering hatred&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;, as I never met such a posture with such a feeling? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T12:45:23.870" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T12:45:23.870" Title="Does &quot;think&quot; mean &quot;think about&quot; or &quot;think by&quot; in &quot;The Secret of Father Brown&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14349" CreationDate="2020-05-18T21:31:33.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the phrase &quot;thinking his thoughts&quot;, &quot;think&quot; means neither &quot;think about&quot; nor &quot;think by&quot;. It means having the same thoughts, holding the same thoughts in your mind. This is part of being &quot;inside&quot; the murder: Father Brown tries to experience the murderer's thoughts in order to better understand him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;posture of his hunched and peering hatred&quot; would be a posture that is distorted by the murderer's thoughts and passions. These emotional stress caused by these thoughts and passions can cause physical stress, which may result in a change in posture. The phrase also reminds me of the phrase &quot;warped mind&quot;, which can also be found in the Bible, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+6%3A14-16&amp;amp;version=VOICE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proverbs&lt;/em&gt;, 6:14&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;With a warped mind and twisted heart, he constantly looks for his own gain at others’ expense, causing friction everywhere he goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I cannot prove whether Father Brown (or G. K. Chesterton) had the psychosomatic effect or a Biblical reference in mind, or perhaps even both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-18T21:31:33.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14347" CreationDate="2020-05-19T02:00:08.230" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martin Luther King (MLK) was a seminary graduate and used biblical imagery and allusions prolifically in his civil rights speeches—as you probably already know. In any case, as you are also probably aware, the phrase from Isaiah 40:5 and is used in the context of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: “And the glory of the LORD shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the LORD hath spoken it.”  The word ‘flesh’ in this context is translated from the Hebrew בָּשָׂר (&lt;em&gt;basar&lt;/em&gt;) meaning, not surprisingly, flesh of humans or animals (Davidson 123). So, I don’t think a simple etymology offers any particularly keen or deeper insight into MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech.  It is just an archaic way of saying humankind (and you can include animals for even more purchase). Rhetorically, archaic language is sometimes used to add authoritative register to a speech enhancing a speaker’s &lt;em&gt;ethos&lt;/em&gt;.  Even John F. Kennedy used it occasionally; but not as richly as MLK. On another note, King is using the phrase as messianic imagery, recognizing that, ultimately, it probably will not be until the return of Christ that peace will be restored upon the earth. So, this is essentially the meaning in context of the 1963 speech given in Washington, D.C. But knowing King, he chose these words deliberately and there is more to be seen here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To unpack it further you want to examine the usage of the word in its &lt;em&gt;sitzimleben&lt;/em&gt; (“setting in life”)—that is to say the biblical/historical context. Here you have a rich discussion which might add deeper meaning to the context of MLK’s speech. Since the phrase is from Isaiah 40:5, this is our biblical/historical context and we ask, “What do these words mean in the context of Isaiah?”  Isaiah was arguably the most prolific prophet of Israel—his book being the longest among the prophetical books of the Old Testament divided into 66 chapters. He wrote at a time when Israel was nearing its demise—being decimated by the Assyrians and Babylonians respectively. Isaiah himself was eventually taken captive by the Babylonians. Much of his book is a call to repentance so Israel would not be wiped-out by her enemies. After many chapters of chastising Israel for its sin, finally, in chapter 40  Isaiah begins offering some consolation prophesying eventual deliverance from exile and peace at some future date. Scholars would say this portion of scripture is especially messianic in nature. Of course, MLK would have known this. King is looking to the future—looking to better times. I might be taking some liberties here, but it is striking to note that “all flesh” has a potent register to it when considering the context of the civil rights movement—it is, arguably, about flesh—black and white, as it were. The notion of “all flesh” means we are all in this together which resonates in the historical context of the book of Isaiah (see Young 3: 31) and the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. We might be different colors, but still people of the same “flesh”—as such, we need to celebrate our common humanity—and realize the “true meaning of [our] creed . . .’that all men are created equal.’” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidson, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Henrickson Publishers, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Bible&lt;/em&gt;, (King James Version). Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Young, Edward J. &lt;em&gt;The Book of Isaiah&lt;/em&gt; (3 Volumes). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T02:16:29.610" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T02:16:29.610" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14347" CreationDate="2020-05-19T06:10:52.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;All &quot;flesh&quot; is all &quot;human beings.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference is that &quot;and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only humans are capable of understanding the glory of the Lord. And when it is revealed, &quot;everyone&quot; will see it together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T06:10:52.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14336" CreationDate="2020-05-19T06:16:31.450" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, the man is saying that he is a &quot;secularist.&quot; Specifically, he is an &quot;evolutionist&quot; (as opposed to a &quot;creationist&quot; who would believe in the &quot;divinity&quot; of the Holy Spirit, rather than just its &quot;existence&quot; in a &quot;spiritual sense.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, if the man doesn't believe in &quot;divinity,&quot; from what does his views on right and wrong derive. The answer may be, &quot;ethical fellowship,&quot; which is another name for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;social contract.&lt;/a&gt; Whatever the faults of this construct, it's still better than a &quot;Hobbesian&quot; world of &quot;all versus all,&quot; because there is &quot;peer pressure&quot; against people's basest instincts, and an impetus to helping others in a mutually beneficial fashion, enlightened self-interest if you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T06:45:24.337" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T06:45:24.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14327" CreationDate="2020-05-19T06:35:16.273" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a young man, Poe felt more than &quot;isolated and different from everyone else.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was as if he felt &quot;vision impaired&quot; or &quot;sensory impaired&quot; and was unable to &quot;pick up&quot; things that were obvious to ordinary people. (This sometimes happens to very bright people whose intelllectual standards are so high that they miss out on what everyone else &quot;knows.&quot; As one such person said to me, I don't want to just &quot;get it,&quot; I want to &quot;kill it.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;mystery which binds me still&quot; is this cognitive block. It &quot;keeps&quot; him &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;From the torrent or the fountain...&quot; and a bunch of things that other people manage to enjoy, &quot;as it pass'd me, flying by.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And most people would say that &quot;the heaven was blue,&quot; but &quot;the cloud took the form of a demon in my view.&quot; This is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fool.com/investing/value/2006/03/09/whats-your-variant-perception.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;variant perception&quot;&lt;/a&gt;,* and is considered the mark of either a genius or a fool.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*This term comes from the investment world, and refers to the tendency of high level investors to &quot;go against the crowd.&quot; I am the published author on a book about investing,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.amazon.com/A&lt;/a&gt; Modern-Approach-Graham-Investing, whose thesis was a &quot;variant perception.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T06:35:16.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14356" CreationDate="2020-05-19T09:49:57.510" Score="2" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, Book II, Chapter 1 &amp;quot;Many Meetings&amp;quot; (page 258):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doors were thrown open, and they went across a wide passage and through other doors, and came into a further hall. In it were no tables, but a bright fire was burning in a great hearth between the carven pillars upon either side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frodo found himself walking with Gandalf. &amp;quot;This is the Hall of Fire&amp;quot; said the wizard. &amp;quot;Here you will hear many songs and tales—if you can keep awake. But except on high days it usually stands empty and quiet, and people come here who wish for peace, and thought. There is always a fire here, all the year round, but there is little &lt;strong&gt;other light&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;other light&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T12:58:09.323" Title="What does &quot;other light&quot; mean in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14355" CreationDate="2020-05-19T10:36:35.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Gandalf explained to Frodo, they are in the &quot;Hall of Fire&quot;, where &quot;a bright fire was burning in a great hearth&quot;. Fire can be both a source of heat and a source of light. In this hall, the fire in the hearth is the main source of light; the fire is even described as &quot;bright&quot;, emphasizing that it is a source of light. The phrase &quot;little other light&quot; means that there is not much light from other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T10:36:35.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14358" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-19T12:50:12.830" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Father Brown is an English Catholic priest and detective in a series of 53 stories by G. K. Chesterton. He uses his intuition and understanding of human nature to solve crimes. The stories have been collected in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Innocence of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; (1911)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wisdom of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; (1914)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Incredulity of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; (1926)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secret of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; (1927)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scandal of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; (1935)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father Brown stories have been adapted for film, radio, and television.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T07:13:51.110" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T07:13:51.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14359" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-19T12:50:12.830" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of 53 short stories by G. K. Chesterton featuring Father Brown, an English Catholic priest and detective. Use with [g-k-chesterton] and [short-stories]&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T07:14:00.003" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T07:14:00.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14313" CreationDate="2020-05-19T16:29:32.080" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &quot;deliberate&quot; bad grammar to portray uneducated people who are not part of the elite. So their using &quot;would of&quot; in place of &quot;would have&quot; is part of the &quot;characterization&quot; of such people. At some level, they don't really belong in a novel with people like Nick, Daisy, Jordan, or even Gatsby. Except that they were &quot;hangers on,&quot; Myrtle as the mistress of Tom Buchanan, Wolfshiem as the mentor to Gatsby. Note that even the elite can develop deep dependencies on people far outside their circle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolfshiem was a smart man, but he was &quot;street smart&quot; rather than book smart. Upon meeting Gatsby, the older man knew at least three things about the younger: 1) Gatsby lacked his own street smarts, and could thereby be controlled. 2) Gatsby &quot;caught on&quot; quickly, and in Wolfshiem's fractured English (he was an immigrant), &quot;I knew that I could use him good.&quot; 3) Gatsby, besides being a &quot;WASP,&quot; had the &quot;polish&quot; that Wolfshiem knew he lacked. While he hadn't exactly graduated from &quot;Oggsford,&quot; he had attended &quot;college&quot; for five months, and it showed. And not just any college, but one that was then regarded as one of the five best in the world (alongside Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cambridge).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T16:34:34.003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T16:34:34.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5210" CreationDate="2020-05-19T16:58:49.820" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I were to fault your analysis, I would say that it lacks &quot;concreteness.&quot; That said, I would consider it entirely plausible. And maybe the &quot;fault&quot; is with the novel itself, and not your analysis. After all, we are almost 100 years removed in time from it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't have necessarily predicted a &quot;bad&quot; end, but the glitches portrayed in Chapter 5 don't give me a good feeling. There's still room for a happy ending, but that would happen to Gatsby and Daisy in spite of, rather than because of themselves. They were swimming &quot;upstream,&quot; because Daisy was a married woman. Nowadays, one can easily imagine Daisy getting a divorce from Tom Buchanan for &quot;abuse,&quot; but that was far less acceptable in the &lt;strong&gt;19&lt;/strong&gt;20s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the &quot;default&quot; condition is that Gatsby fails. Nothing in Chapter 5 or later ultimately changes that, although at one point, at what I call the &quot;high water mark&quot; it seemed like Gatsby might have succeeded against the odds. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T16:58:49.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14362" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14365" CreationDate="2020-05-19T17:37:25.547" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I found this again several years ago, and learned it was a series, but I first read it when I was in elementary school (although I think it was supposed to be for older readers). The main character is a samurai in Japan. I don't know if he'd been sent by someone, or if he was doing it on his own, but the village that the story is set in has had a rash of killings where people have been found with their throats torn out, with the eerie yowl of a cat heard from a distance. I think the actions in the book happened during winter because I have a vague memory of one of the fights happening in the middle of a snow storm, maybe connected with the assumption of supernatural events since the victims were apparently killed when no one was around according to the tracks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; It turns out that the killer is a former samurai, known to the protagonist, maybe his brother, who'd had his throat severely damaged, causing him to emit the catlike yowl. He was killing people with a grappling hook, explaining the throats torn out with no tracks nearby. When he is found out, the protagonist allows him to commit &lt;em&gt;seppaku&lt;/em&gt;, serving as his second to cut off his head after he had sliced his belly open (this was the first time I'd heard of this form of ritual suicide, so it made a big impression on me).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember any details about the cover or the author, but I do remember it as a hardback book, probably over a hundred pages. It might have still been marketed as a kid's book, but I was dipping into the adult section of the library at an early age, so I can't swear to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T18:17:12.587" Title="Hardback book, read in the late 1980s, involving a wandering samurai investigating a cat demon tearing peoples' throats out around a village" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14363" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14364" CreationDate="2020-05-19T17:38:43.393" Score="2" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Book II, Chapter 1 (page 258):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Why, sitting and thinking. I do a lot of that nowadays, and this is the best place to do it in, as a rule. &lt;strong&gt;Wake up, indeed!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Bilbo tell himself &quot;Wake up, indeed!&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-19T18:01:54.723" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T10:06:51.297" Title="Why did Bilbo tell himself &quot;Wake up, indeed&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14363" CreationDate="2020-05-19T18:08:27.367" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bilbo isn't talking to himself at this point, as the context makes clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elrond went forward and stood beside the silent figure. ‘Awake, little&#xA;master!’ he said, with a smile. Then, turning to Frodo, he beckoned to him. ‘Now at last the hour has come that you have wished for, Frodo,’ he said. ‘Here is a friend that you have long missed.’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The dark figure raised its head and uncovered its face. ‘Bilbo!’ cried Frodo with sudden recognition, and he sprang forward.&#xA;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What were you doing?’ [Frodo asked]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;‘Why, sitting and thinking. I do a lot of that nowadays, and this is the best&#xA;place to do it in, as a rule. Wake up, indeed!’ he said, &lt;strong&gt;cocking an eye at Elrond.&lt;/strong&gt; There was a bright twinkle in it and no sign of sleepiness that Frodo could see. &lt;strong&gt;‘Wake up! I was not asleep, Master Elrond.&lt;/strong&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two sentences he speaks are directed to Frodo, who had asked what he was doing before the company entered the Hall of Fire. The words that followed are addressed to Elrond, who had asked him to wake up. &amp;quot;Wake up&amp;quot; repeats Elrond's words; the addition of &amp;quot;indeed&amp;quot; roughly means &amp;quot;as if I needed to be woken up from sleep&amp;quot; (since Bilbo wasn't actually asleep, whereas he had often seen Frodo asleep).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T10:06:51.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14365" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14362" CreationDate="2020-05-19T18:17:12.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ah, I found it via TV Tropes and their &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HooksAndCrooks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hooks and Crooks&lt;/a&gt; entry. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/993759.Village_of_the_Vampire_Cat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Village of the Vampire Cat&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the fourth book in the &lt;em&gt;Zenta and Matsuzo&lt;/em&gt; mystery series by Lensey Namioka, published in 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When Zenta and Matsuzo, two masterless samurai, arrive at the home of Zenta's old friend and former teacher, the two discover that the village has been tormented by an unknown force. A mysterious killer, known as the Cat because of his sharp claws, has already killed four young girls, now Zenta and Matsuzo must solve the mystery and put an end to the terror. Zenta and Matsuzo are wondering ronin (masterless samurai) with a skill and code of honor unlike the ordinary citizens of Japan. Together the stoic Zenta and carefree Matsuzo fall in and out of extraordinary adventures-solving mysteries that leave others baffled. Set in sixteenth century Japan, the books in the Zenta and Matsuzo Mystery series present unique and complex plots that are full of action, intrigue, and suspense. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/a/lensey-namioka-7/village-of-the-vampire-cat/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Kirkus review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; The culprit turns out to be Ikken's sword-master son, not killed three years back but hideously disfigured . . . and not only nursing a grievance against the villagers but loco about Asa, to whom he'd been engaged. In the wind-up, Ikken and son Shunken both commit hara-kiri, freeing Zenta and Matsuzo--more one-dimensional than in previous episodes--to go on to new challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T18:17:12.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14366" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-19T19:18:56.230" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first few chapters of Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;, the main character, Georges Duroy, is learning the ropes of journalism. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Bel-Ami/%C3%89dition_Ollendorff,_1901/Premi%C3%A8re_Partie/IV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter IV of Part I&lt;/a&gt;, he accompanies the journalist nicknamed Saint-Potin, who tells him something about their boss (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Et &lt;strong&gt;il a des mots à la Balzac&lt;/strong&gt;, ce grigou. Figurez-vous que, l’autre jour, je me trouvais dans son cabinet avec cette antique bedole de Norbert, et ce Don Quichotte de Rival, quand Montelin, notre administrateur, arrive, avec sa serviette en maroquin sous le bras, cette serviette que tout Paris connaît. Walter leva le nez et demanda : Quoi de neuf ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Montelin répondit avec naïveté : — Je viens de payer les seize mille francs que nous devions au marchand de papier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Le patron fit un bond, un bond étonnant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Vous dites ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Que je viens de payer M. Privas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Mais vous êtes fou !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Pourquoi ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— Pourquoi… pourquoi… pourquoi…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Il ôta ses lunettes, les essuya. Puis il sourit, d’un drôle de sourire qui court autour de ses grosses joues chaque fois qu’il va dire quelque chose de malin ou de fort, et avec un ton gouailleur et convaincu, il prononça : — &lt;strong&gt;Pourquoi ? Parce que nous pouvions obtenir là-dessus une réduction de quatre à cinq mille francs.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Montelin, étonné, reprit : — Mais, monsieur le directeur, tous les comptes étaient réguliers, vérifiés par moi et approuvés par vous…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;« Alors le patron, redevenu sérieux, déclara : — &lt;strong&gt;On n’est pas naïf comme vous. Sachez, monsieur Montelin, qu’il faut toujours accumuler ses dettes pour transiger.&lt;/strong&gt; »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Et Saint-Potin ajouta avec un hochement de tête de connaisseur : — Hein ? &lt;strong&gt;Est-il à la Balzac, celui-là&lt;/strong&gt; ? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksguydemaupa17maupgoog/page/n475/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Works of Guy de Maupassant&lt;/em&gt;, 1909, on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“And he says things worthy of Balzac, the old shark. &#xA;  Fancy, the other day I was in his room with that old &#xA;  tub Norbert, and that Don Quixote Rival, when Montelin,&#xA;  our business manager, came in with his morocco &#xA;  bill-case, that bill-case that everyone in Paris knows, &#xA;  under his arm. Walter raised his head and asked : &#xA;  ‘What news ?’ Montelin answered simply : ‘I have &#xA;  just paid the sixteen thousand francs we owed the paper &#xA;  maker.’ The governor gave a jump, an astonishing &#xA;  jump. ‘What do you mean?’ said he. ‘I have just &#xA;  paid Monsieur Privas,’ replied Montelin. ‘But you &#xA;  are mad.’ ‘Why ?’ ‘Why — why — why —’ he &#xA;  took off his spectacles and wiped them. Then he smiled &#xA;  with that queer smile that flits across his fat cheeks &#xA;  whenever he is going to say something deep or smart, &#xA;  and went on in a mocking and derisive tone, ‘Why? &#xA;  Because we could have obtained a reduction of from &#xA;  four to five thousand francs.’ Montelin replied, in &#xA;  astonishment : ‘But, sir, all the accounts were correct, &#xA;  checked by me and passed by yourself.’ Then the governor,&#xA;  quite serious again, observed: ‘What a fool &#xA;  you are. Don't you know, Monsieur Montelin, that &#xA;  one should always let one's debts mount up, in order &#xA;  to offer a composition?’ ” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And Saint-Potin added, with a knowing shake of his &#xA;  head, “Eh! isn't that worthy of Balzac?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Duroy, I have not read any of Balzac's works, so I'm a little bit out of my depth here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earlier, Saint-Potin had told Duroy that Mr. Walter is a Jew and the above anecdote is meant to illustrate his avarice. In view of the widespread anti-Semitism in late nineteenth-century France (the novel was published nine year before the beginning of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dreyfus affair&lt;/a&gt;), I doubt that the depiction of Mr. Walter as avaricious is the remarkable part of the story, i.e. for a nineteenth-century reader. For this reason, it is not clear to me what it is in the words of Mr. Walter that is &quot;worthy of Balzac&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-19T19:18:56.230" Title="What is so Balzacian about Mr. Walter's words to Mr. Montelin in Maupassant's Bel-Ami?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;honore-de-balzac&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14367" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-20T09:39:30.937" Score="2" ViewCount="1899" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &quot;Summer Wine&quot;, written by Lee Hazlewood, describes a girl seducing a man with her 'summer wine'. At some point the man tells us &quot;She reassured me with an unfamiliar line&quot;.&#xA;What can it possibly mean?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are the relevant lines and the video for context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My eyes grew heavy and my lips they could not speak &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  I tried to get up but I couldn't find my feet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;She reassured me with an unfamiliar line&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And then she gave to me more summer wine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ohh-oh-oh summer wine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=791z7Nb985Y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Summer Wine - YouTube&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10115" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T10:50:33.673" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T14:06:52.823" Title="Summer Wine: what was the 'unfamiliar line' with which the girl reassured her lover?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14368" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14381" CreationDate="2020-05-20T18:08:40.473" Score="0" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1 (page 261):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At first the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of &lt;strong&gt;the throbbing air about him&lt;/strong&gt;, and it drenched and drowned him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;the throbbing air about him&quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T06:37:29.993" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T11:03:40.103" Title="Meaning of &quot;the throbbing air about him&quot; in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14369" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14371" CreationDate="2020-05-20T18:17:46.373" Score="3" ViewCount="206" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a name of the type of narrative used in J. K. Rowling's &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; novels, where the events are written in third person but exclusively follow the perspective of Harry Potter? Only events that Harry experiences (or is told about) are written in the story, even down to feelings and emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10118" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T18:41:56.840" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T18:41:56.840" Title="What is the narrative type used in &quot;Harry Potter&quot; called?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-20T18:42:07.823" Score="4" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've come across books that have multiple first editions that were all published in the same year. For example, the Silmarillion was published in 1977 in a first UK edition, first export edition, and a first US edition. Although using that as an example, there are other books that are considered collectable, but they have similar publication patterns (printed in various first editions around the same time). In cases such as this, how do you determine which edition is the true first edition? What if they are printed simultaneously on the same date in various countries, then how is the true first edition determined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10119" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T06:09:00.470" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T06:09:00.470" Title="Which first edition is the &quot;true&quot; first edition of a book?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;book-collecting&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14371" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14369" CreationDate="2020-05-20T18:57:46.977" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When a story is told from a single character's point of view, this type of narrative is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/narratology/terms/limited.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;third-person-limited narration&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/narratology/terms/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terms Used by Narratology and Film Theory&lt;/a&gt; by Dino Franco Felluga, Pudue University). This type of narration can be contrasted with other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person_voices&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;third-person narratives&lt;/a&gt;, such as the omniscient third-person narration and the objective third-person narration. (Some sources use the term &quot;subjective third-person narration&quot; as an alternative to &quot;third-person-limited narration.) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-fiction/why-third-person-limited-point-of-view&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Third-Person Limited: Analyzing Fiction's Most Flexible Point of View&lt;/a&gt; by Peter Mountford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T18:57:46.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14372" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14367" CreationDate="2020-05-20T20:44:55.170" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &quot;unfamiliar line&quot; spoken by the girl was &quot;I'm not after your money&quot; (or words to that effect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The (unspoken) fear of most men in a relationship is &quot;she is a gold digger.&quot; These fears have been stoked for at least two centuries by (feminine) social commentary like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;It is a truth &lt;strong&gt;universally acknowledged&lt;/strong&gt; that any single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.&quot;* [emphasis added].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &quot;Summer Wine&quot; woman was memorable for convincing the hero that she wasn't like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fifth verse (two verses after the one you cited) tells a different story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;When I woke up, the sun was shining in my eyes &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  My silver spurs were gone, my head felt twice its size &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  She took my silver spurs, a dollar and a dime &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And left me craving for...more summer wine &lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Oh..oh..summer wine.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course she was, and when he took &quot;inventory,&quot; a dollar and a dime&quot; were missing, as were his silver spurs. (To give you some idea of value, &quot;in the old days,&quot; the value of an ounce of silver was a dollar (now about $15)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I'm not sure that the first claim of &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot; is actually true. I believe, however, that it is &quot;universally acknowledged,&quot; thanks in large part to Jane Austen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T05:22:46.270" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T05:22:46.270" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14373" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-20T21:49:29.750" Score="3" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter VII of the first part of Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;, the main character, Georges Duroy, is insulted by another journalist.&#xA;The disagreement escalates and leads to a duel using pistols. During the night before the duel, Georges Duroy, who has never duelled before,&#xA;sleeps very badly and worries about all sorts of questions. Among these questions are the following (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mon adversaire s'est-il déjà battu? a-t-il fréquenté les tirs? est-il connu? &lt;strong&gt;est-il classé?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Has my opponent duelled before? Has he visited a shooting range? Is he well known? &lt;strong&gt;Is he classed/ranked?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel#Duels_de_presse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article about &quot;duel&quot;&lt;/a&gt; lists 10 famous duels between journalists. One of them, between Robert Caze and Paul Bonnetain Avril 1883, took place in the year before Maupassant finished writing &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;. However, neither this article nor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article on &quot;duel&quot;&lt;/a&gt; have anything to say about classes or ranks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Maupassant here referring to some sort of ranking for duellists that existed in late nineteenth-century France? Or is he referring to some sort of ranking for shooters? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T21:49:29.750" Title="Is Maupassant referring to a ranking of duellists or shooters that existed in late nineteenth-century France?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14374" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:15:24.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T22:15:24.953" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T22:15:24.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14375" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:15:24.953" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Igbo language, regardless of where they were published.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T22:53:41.090" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T22:53:41.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14376" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14377" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" Score="0" Body="Works of literature written in Malayalam, a Dravidian language spoken mainly in the Indian state of Kerala." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T22:17:06.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14378" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14379" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Goat Days' (2008) by the Indian author Benyamin. Use this tag with the tags [benyamin] and [malayalam-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" LastActivityDate="2020-05-20T22:19:50.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14381" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14368" CreationDate="2020-05-21T11:03:40.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When we say that something throbs, we mean that it appears to vibrate, possibly making a steady noise.&#xA;This can refer to vibrations caused by objects, but also to music. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;Already the engine was throbbing&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/morning-star-12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Morning Star&quot; by Matt Mooney&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The Haunted Woods was full of the groans of mighty trees wrung in the tempest, and the air throbbed with the thunderous crash of billows on the distant shore.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/ann-XL.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XL of &lt;em&gt;Anne of the Island&lt;/em&gt; by Lucy Maud Montgomery&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;The air throbbed with the sounds of hip hop, electronica and funk. &quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://bgindependentmedia.org/dancing-the-night-away-at-toledo-museums-block-party/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dancing the night away at Toledo Museum’s Block Party&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&quot;But, as we sat, the stillness of the night was broken by the song of a bird, faint and hesitating at first, but gradually gathering volume, till the whole air was throbbing with the melody.&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/64075/wwi-centennial-second-battle-artois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Battle of Artois&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passage from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, the air is throbbing with the &quot;melodies and of the interwoven words in elven-tongues&quot;.&#xA;The music charms Frodo so much (&quot;the enchantment...&quot;) that it begins to feel like something that overwhelms him (&quot;an endless river of swelling gold and silver&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T11:03:40.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14382" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14383" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Indian writer Benyamin (pen name of Benny Daniel, born 1971) and his life as a writer. He is best known for his novel 'Goat Days' (2008). Use this tag with [malayalam-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:13:18.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sources for the tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/davies_mary_carolyn_ca_1890_/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Carolyn Davies (1888-1940?)&lt;/a&gt; in the Oregon Encyclopedia.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-carolyn-davies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Carolyn Davies&lt;/a&gt; by Poetry Foundation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.findagrave.com/memorial/28534274/mary-_carolyn_-davies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary (Carolyn) Davies&lt;/a&gt; on FindAGrave.com.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American poet Mary Carolyn Davies (1888-1940?) and her life as a writer. She is not to be confused with the Welsh poet Mary Davies (1846 – 1882)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:19:47.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14386" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Source for the tag wiki excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frances W. Pritchett: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/igbo/nzeako/transintro.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translator's introduction to &lt;em&gt;Night Has Fallen in the Afternoon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://igbocountry.com/igbo-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Igbo literature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14387" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Joseph Uchechuku Tagbo Nzeako (born 1940) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [igbo-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T13:28:39.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14389" CreationDate="2020-05-21T17:53:52.147" Score="4" ViewCount="171" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter VI of Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;, the journalist Robert de Varenne describes the Baroness de Livar as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Une grande sèche, soixante ans, frisons faux, &lt;strong&gt;dents à l'anglaise&lt;/strong&gt;, esprit de Restauration, toilettes même époque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A tall dried-up woman, sixty years old, false curls, &lt;strong&gt;English-style teeth&lt;/strong&gt;, ideas from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourbon_Restoration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Restoration Era&lt;/a&gt;, style of dressing from the same period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by &quot;dents à l'anglaise&quot;? (And is my translation even correct?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T20:06:10.187" Title="What does it mean to have teeth in the English style?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14388" CreationDate="2020-05-21T20:06:10.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;A Google search for the term reveals that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=bucktooth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;it means the same thing as &quot;buck teeth&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, large front teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In French, buck teeth are called &lt;em&gt;dents à l'anglaise&lt;/em&gt;, literally &quot;English teeth.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.languefrancaise.net/Bob/17822&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;dents à l'anglaise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  &lt;em&gt;Dents longues et proéminentes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1hz3r0/til_in_french_buck_teeth_are_called_dents_%C3%A0/cazldjs/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's apparently not in current usage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-05-21T20:06:10.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14391" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-22T00:31:07.520" Score="3" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Akutagawa Ryunosuke's suicide is considered the end of the literary tradition of the Taisho period (see the article &quot;The Disintegrating Machinery of the Modern: Akutagawa Ryūnosuke's Late Writings&quot;), based on aestheticism and hermeticism, along with the depiction on themes disjointed from the present social situation (like Akutagawa did in his early phase, retelling stories from the Heian period with great psychological depth). But has Akutagawa influenced other writers? If so, who and in which ways? The only writers I know who were influenced were Dazai Osamu and Murakami Haruki&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10128" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-22T11:30:48.177" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T11:30:48.177" Title="Did Akutagawa Ryunosuke influence others?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;ryunosuke-akutagawa&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-22T06:47:47.677" Score="5" ViewCount="516" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book II of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Milton makes an elaborate simile comparing Satan’s flight in Hell to the voyage of a fleet of ships in the Indian Ocean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Satan&lt;/em&gt; with thoughts inflamed of highest design,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Puts on swift wings, and toward the Gates of Hell&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Explores his solitary flight; sometimes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  He scours the right hand coast, sometimes the left,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soars&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Up to the fiery concave towering high.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  As when far off at Sea a Fleet descried&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;strong&gt;Hangs in the Clouds&lt;/strong&gt;, by Æquinoctial Winds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Their spicy Drugs: they on the trading Flood&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole. So seemed&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Far off the flying Fiend&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1667). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1667)/Book_II&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, book II, lines 629–643&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can a fleet of ships “hang in the clouds”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T06:47:47.677" Title="In &quot;Paradise Lost&quot;, how can a fleet of ships &quot;hang in the clouds&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14393" CreationDate="2020-05-22T06:47:47.677" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wordsworth thought that the phrase was a leap of pure imagination:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Here is the full strength of the imagination involved in the word, &lt;em&gt;hangs&lt;/em&gt;, and exerted upon the whole image: First, the Fleet, an aggregate of many Ships, is represented as one mighty Person, whose track, we know and feel, is upon the waters; but, taking advantage of its appearance to the senses, the Poet dares to represent it as &lt;em&gt;hanging in the clouds&lt;/em&gt;, both for the gratification of the mind in contemplating the image itself, and in reference to the motion and appearance of the sublime object to which it is compared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Wordsworth (1815). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924105330140/page/n31/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt;, preface to volume I, pp. xxii–xxiii&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to me Milton’s description suggests a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fata Morgana&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a form of atmospheric distortion—a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirage#Superior_mirage&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;superior mirage&lt;/a&gt;—that can form multiple images of objects close to the horizon. The images are stacked vertically and some may be inverted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Occasionally, in the western extremity of the Mediterranean, where the sea narrows as it approaches the straits, lofty arches of clouds, extending from Spain to Africa, span the flood like the roof of a huge vault. Upon the surface of this roof, a traveller, returning from the East, beheld an extraordinary picture, painted by means identical, probably, with those which, in the neighbourhood of Scylla and Charybdis, give fleeting existence to the Fata Morgana, of which I shall presently speak. From the ship’s deck on which he stood, the traveller, looking westward, saw &lt;strong&gt;in the clouds a fleet in full sail, though with the hulls upward, and the masts and rigging pointing to the sea&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1868). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8LQvBrfsBJUC&amp;amp;pg=PA821&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pictures in the Clouds&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Chambers’s Journal&lt;/em&gt;, 26 December 1868, p. 821.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; has various photos showing the phenomenon: in the one below, there are three distinct horizontal bands just above the horizon, giving the impression of a cloudy or misty background (but actually consisting of three images of the sea surface), against which three images of a boat can be seen, the middle image being inverted, thus appearing to “hang in the clouds” in the manner described by Milton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4N3GHm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot;&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘Brocken Inaglory’ (2008). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superior_mirage_of_a_small_boat.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Superior mirage of a small boat&lt;/a&gt;’. CC-BY-SA.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But could Milton have known about the ‘Fata Morgana’ phenomenon? As noted in ‘Pictures in the Clouds’, the phenomenon was particularly common in the Straits of Messina (“the neighbourhood of Scylla and Charybdis” as the writer puts it). Accordingly, a number of early writers on the phenomenon were Italian, most notably Ignatio Angelucci:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;La mattina dell’ Assontione della Beatissima Vergine, standomi solo alla fenestra, viddi cose tant, e tanto nuove che di ripensarle non mai satio, estanco. […] Il Mare, che bagna la Sicilia si gonfiò, e diventò per dieci miglia in circa di lunghezza, come una spina dimontagna nera; e questo della Calabria spianò, e comparve in un momento un cristallo chiarissimo, e trasparente che parea uno specchio, che con la cima appoggiasse su quella montagna di acqua, e col piede al Lido di Calabria. In questo Specchio comparve subito di colore chiaro oscuro une fila di più di 10000. Pilastri d’uguale larghezza, e altezza, tutti equidistanti, e di un medesimo vivessimo chiarore, come di una medesima ombratura erano gli sfondati frà pilastro e pilastro. In un momento poi i pilastri si smezzarono d’altzza, e si arcuarono in forma di cotesti aquedotti di Roma, ò delle sustruttioni di Salome; e restò semplice specchio il resto dell’ acqua, sino all’ acqua ammontonata di Sicilia: mà per poco, che tosto sopra l’arcata si formò un gran cornicione: frà poco sopra del cornitione si sormarono castelli reali in quantità, disposti in quella vastissima piazza di vetro, e tutti di una forma, e la voro: frà poco, deili castelli rimasero quantità di torri tutte uguali: frà poco le torri si cambiarono in teatro di colonnati: frà poco il teatro si stese, e secene una doppia fuga: frà, poco la fuga de colonnati diventò lunghissima facciata di fenestre in dieci fila: della facciata si sè varieta di selue di pini, e cipressi eguali, e d’altre varietà d’arbori. E qui il tutto disparue, e’l mare con un poco di vento ritornò mare. Questa è quella Fata Morgana, che ventisei anni ho stimata inverisimile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;On the fifteenth of August, 1643, as I stood at my window, I was surprised with a most wonderful, delectable vision. The sea that washes the Sicilian shore swelled up, and became, for ten miles in length, like a chain of dark mountains; while the waters near our Calabrian coast grew quite smooth, and in an instant appeared as one clear polished mirror, reclining against the aforesaid ridge. On this glass was depicted, in chiaro scuro, a string of several thousands of pilasters, all equal in altitude, distance, and degree of light and shade. In a moment they lost half their height, and bent into arcades, like Roman aqueducts. A long cornice was next formed on the top, and above it rose castles innumerable, all perfectly alike. These soon split into towers, which were shortly after lost in colonnades, then windows, and at last ended in pines, cypresses, and other trees, even and similar. This is the Fata Morgana, which, for twenty-six years, I had thought a mere fable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ignatio Angelucci. Letter of 22 August 1643. Quoted in Athanasius Kircher (1671). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/viae001105_to085_cor-26051_0000000/page/n643&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae&lt;/em&gt;. p. 704–705&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Henry Swinburne, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=wv8KAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA264&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Travels in the Two Sicilies&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 264–265&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milton was fluent in Latin and Italian, and had travelled in Italy, so that he could have learned of the phenomenon there, or read a description in de Ferrariis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quandoque figurae nubium, sunt quae Navium, et velorum simulachra reddunt: ubi nulla est classis. Haec Phasmata non solum in expertos fefellerunt. Non diu est quod tota ora quae est ab Hydrunto &#xA;  ad Garganum Montem, una et eadem hora ante ortum solis vidit classem ab Orientis parte velificantem, creditum est Turcarum illam fuisse, et antequam Phasma, seu illa delusio albicante Aurora detegeretur variae huc atque illuc literae scriptae sunt, ac missi Nuntii de adventu ingentis Classis. Hoc fortasse modo, aut altero, quem diximus, ut credo, à Lilybeo vidit nescio quis classem e portu Carthaginis exeuntem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And as these figures are of mists, they give likenesses of ships and sails, where there is no fleet. These apparitions deceive not only the inexperienced. It is not long since the whole coast, from Hydrunto* to Monte Gargano, at one and the same hour before sunrise, saw a fleet sailing from the east. It was thought to have been that of the Turks,† and before that specter or delusion was revealed by the lightening dawn, various letters were composed here and there and messengers were sent concerning the approach of this imposing fleet. Perhaps in this way or another of which we shall speak, as I believe, someone (I don’t know who) from Lilibeo‡ saw a fleet leaving the port of Carthage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Antonio de Ferrariis (1558). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_ZH37UyeFmw4C/page/n105/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Liber de situ Iapygiae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://aty.sdsu.edu/bibliog/bibliog.html#Ferrariis1558l&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew T. Young&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Otranto † The Ottomans had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_invasion_of_Otranto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recently (1480) sacked Otranto&lt;/a&gt; ‡ Marsala&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T06:47:47.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14396" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-22T19:08:51.000" Score="4" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 41 (&quot;Snowden&quot;), Yossarian is under medical care after an attempt on his life. He's apparently fading in and out of consiousness at this point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Yossarian vomited, and Colonel Korn shot to his feet at the first cough and fled in disgust, so it seemed indeed that there was a silver lining in every cloud, Yossarian reflected, as he drifted back into a suffocating daze. A hand with sharp fingers shook him awake roughly. He turned and opened his eyes and saw a strange man with a mean face who curled his lip at him in a spiteful scowl and bragged, “We’ve got your pal, buddy. We’ve got your pal.” Yossarian turned cold and faint and broke into a sweat. “Who’s my pal?” he asked when he saw the chaplain sitting where Colonel Korn had been sitting. “Maybe I’m your pal,” the chaplain answered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of people who could be Yossarian's &quot;pal&quot;, including Dunbar, who was &quot;disappeared&quot; by military officials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But perhaps the identity of the pal isn't the point. And maybe it doesn't matter if the strange man is a hallucination or not. Maybe his taunt just serves to highlight the loss of so many of Yossarian's friends, since Yossarian can't tell who is being referred to. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we have reason to believe that a particular person is Yossarian's &quot;pal&quot;, and if so, who is it? And what is the meaning of this event?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10133" LastActivityDate="2020-05-22T19:08:51.000" Title="Who is Yossarian's pal?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;catch-22&gt;&lt;joseph-heller&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9416" CreationDate="2020-05-22T21:52:44.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hemingway's generation was what William Strauss and Neil Howe called a &amp;quot;reactive&amp;quot; generation in their book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0688119123&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Generations: A History of America's Future, 1584-2069&lt;/a&gt;. This is one of four generational &amp;quot;types&amp;quot; that rotate in an (almost) fixed sequence. (The most modern &amp;quot;reactive&amp;quot; generation is Generation X.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;reactive&amp;quot; generations follow &amp;quot;Idealist&amp;quot; generations who start intellectual awakenings and &amp;quot;consciousness revolutions&amp;quot; (the Great Awakeners, the Baby Boomers, the &amp;quot;Transcendenals of Lincoln and Hawthorne, and in the case of Hemingway, what S&amp;amp;H call the Missionary Generation (and what I call the &amp;quot;Rendezvous With Destiny Generation.&amp;quot;) Such generations have a self-appointed mission: &amp;quot;No taxation without representation, or &amp;quot;make the world safe for democracy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young people of &amp;quot;reactive&amp;quot; generations are &amp;quot;tasked&amp;quot; with making these ideals come true (and paying the price, of say, Wilson's 14 Points.) As Gertrude Stein, (a &amp;quot;Missionary&amp;quot; woman) said, ‘All of you young people who served in the war. You are all a lost generation.’ They &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt; to have &amp;quot;no purpose and drive&amp;quot; (of their own), because they are busy serving the purposes and drives of other (older) generations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;you have no respect for anything means &amp;quot;You have no respect for us (Idealists).&amp;quot; There is an old saying that &amp;quot;A master is never a hero to his valet.&amp;quot; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Lewis were all members of a common generation, born in the 1880s and 1890s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1557" LastEditorUserId="1557" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T02:51:02.320" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T02:51:02.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14367" CreationDate="2020-05-22T22:12:08.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To all appearances, the man was drugged with something the woman gave him to drink. The drink is not necessarily the only meaning of &quot;summer wine&quot;, just like angel's kiss is ambiguous: a kiss by a woman who looks &quot;angelic&quot;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://clickamericana.com/recipes/drink-recipes/how-to-make-30-classic-cocktails-drinks-1946&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classic cocktail named &quot;angel's kiss&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, or a less obvious meaning. However, &quot;let's pass some time&quot; suggests that there was an enticement of amorous congress and not just enjoying a drink together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I couldn't find my feet&quot; is nicely ambiguous: (1) the man can't even struggle to his feet or (2) he can't &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/find-your-feet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;act independently and confidently&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;If&lt;/em&gt; he suspects that something is wrong with his drink, he needs to be reassured. This is where the &quot;unfamiliar line&quot; comes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The unfamiliar words may suggest that the woman isn't using some meaningless cliché, which might have increased his suspicion. Using an original line instead can suggest genuine concern, whereas a cliché may have suggested indifference or that the whole thing is a routine.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The man is too confused to make any sense of what the woman says—even to such an extent that anything she said would sound unfamiliar—and he is simply reassured by her tone of voice. In that case, the exact words she spoke are irredeemably lost.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, he wakes up feeling his &quot;head felt twice its size&quot;, unable to remember the details of what happened. Because of this, we will probably never find out what that &quot;unfamiliar line&quot; exactly was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-23T12:37:54.550" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T12:37:54.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9416" CreationDate="2020-05-23T02:19:29.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of the “lost generation” is best seen in Hemingway’s &lt;em&gt;The Sun Also Rises&lt;/em&gt; in which theme of emptiness looms large. The title itself, succinctly captures the idea in the Bible and in light of the biblical context, it is clearly pregnant with meaning.  Here is the passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher; “Vanity of vanities, all is&#xA;  vanity.”  What profit has a man from all his labor In which he toils&#xA;  under the sun? One generation passes away, and another generation&#xA;  comes; But the earth abides forever. The sun also rises, and the sun&#xA;  goes down, And hastens to the place where it arose. The wind goes&#xA;  toward the south, And turns around to the north; The wind whirls about&#xA;  continually, And comes again on its circuit. All the rivers run into&#xA;  the sea, Yet the sea is not full; To the place from which the rivers&#xA;  come, There they return again. All things are full of labor; Man&#xA;  cannot express it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, Nor the ear&#xA;  filled with hearing. That which has been is what will be, That which&#xA;  is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.&#xA;  Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”? It has&#xA;  already been in ancient times before us. There is no remembrance of&#xA;  former things, Nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to&#xA;  come By those who will come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11, KJV)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hebrew word for “vanity” is הֶבֶל (hebel) meaning “vapor” or “breath” and is similar to the Hebrew habel meaning “emptiness” and can also denote a gentle breeze.  All these definitions carry connotations of temporary, transient, or transitory—in keeping with the theme in TSAR; and the reoccurring motif of movement. The conversations tend to be quite trivial and often about what the group should do next, or where the group should go next—they are always on the move—that is, transient. These characters are living an empty, meaningless existence.   The idea of loss of religion is also a theme. This passage speaks to that notion as well.  “Life without God is in fact meaningless”—seems to be the central message of this passage.  Even the sun itself is moving and transient as it “hastens” to “where it arose.”  The sun שֶׁמֶשׁ (shemesh) denotes brightness, warmth, and life, but even it acts out the transient nature of life as it lives and dies every day.  This passage also denotes the idea of the “lost generation.”  The Hebrew דּוֹר (dowr) denotes “generation”; all; or many who “pass away” הָלַךְ (halak).  It is interesting to note that הָלַךְ (halak) in Hebrew means “to go, walk, come, depart, proceed, move, go away; to die, live, manner of life.”  The constant coming and going of the main characters in TSAR is clearly symbolic of spiritual death—“the lost generation.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidson, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Bible&lt;/em&gt; (King James Version). Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T23:54:57.503" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T23:54:57.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T09:56:54.397" Score="6" ViewCount="266" Body="&lt;p&gt;This site has received questions such as &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14330/2191&quot;&gt;Two Interpretations of Robert Herrick's “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”&lt;/a&gt;, &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8401/2191&quot;&gt;Interpretation of “The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger&lt;/a&gt; (literally asking whether there is an &quot;official interpretation)&#xA;and questions based on multiple-choice questions (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/8706/2191&quot;&gt;What is the effect of using “silver” to describe the “horn” ...&lt;/a&gt;).&#xA;What these questions have in common is that the assumption that a literary text can have only one correct meaning or interpretation, much like a mathematical equation have only one correct solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reminded me that I once read a poem in which the narrator was presumably someone who taught poetry and who criticises the fact that many readers, presumably students, tend to approach poems like a police interrogation instead of enjoying them. The poem was in English and most likely by an American author. I read it online less than five years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T08:10:14.443" Title="Poem criticising students' tendency to try to pry the one true meaning out of a poem" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14367" CreationDate="2020-05-23T14:06:52.823" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “unfamiliar line” is the one that appears (in slight variations) at the end of each verse of the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And I will give to you my summer wine&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an unfamiliar (meaning “original”) pick-up or come-on line. “Wine” is a metaphor for something delightful and intoxicating (here, sex), and “summer” is metaphorically hot, languid, ripe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T14:06:52.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T17:04:55.200" Score="2" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt;, do opposites attract? or do similars attract? What evidence is there either way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought about how the characters are opposites in many ways, mentally and physically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10135" LastEditorUserId="10135" LastEditDate="2020-05-23T17:36:13.990" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T08:40:54.670" Title="In &quot;A Midsummer Night's Dream&quot;, do opposites attract?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;a-midsummer-nights-dream&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14400" CreationDate="2020-05-23T17:09:29.507" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction to Poetry&lt;/a&gt;’ (1988) by Billy Collins, which ends with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I want them to waterski&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  across the surface of a poem&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  waving at the author’s name on the shore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But all they want to do&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  is tie the poem to a chair with rope&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  and torture a confession out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;They begin beating it with a hose&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  to find out what it really means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if Collins deliberately intends it, but there seems to be some irony here. Waterskiing is not easy, and waterskiing with one hand (so that you can wave with the other) is very hard. If you want your students to be able to perform a difficult skill (one-handed waterskiing, or interpreting poetry) with grace and ease, you are going to have to teach them, starting with the basics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T08:10:14.443" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T08:10:14.443" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-23T23:15:26.417" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;All's Well That Ends Well&lt;/em&gt;, Act IV, Scene 3, contains the following line (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=allswell&amp;amp;Act=4&amp;amp;Scene=3&amp;amp;Scope=scene&amp;amp;LineHighlight=2389#2389&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Shakespeare, line 2390&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;so, look about you: know you any here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of these words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10137" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-23T23:19:37.790" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T23:25:52.280" Title="Meaning of &quot;look about you: know you any here?&quot; in &quot;All's Well That Ends Well&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;alls-well-that-ends-well&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14405" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14404" CreationDate="2020-05-23T23:25:52.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Parolles was blindfolded while he was being questioned by noblemen and soldiers who belonged to the same camp as himself. Just before the words &quot;so, look about you: know you any here?&quot;, one of these lords removes the blindfold. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words mean: &quot;Look around you. Do you know any of the people here?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parolles then recognises the people around him, including Bertram, and understands he has been fooled into confessing things that he would rather have kept to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-23T23:25:52.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14402" CreationDate="2020-05-24T08:40:54.670" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this seems to be a school essay prompt, I’ll give some advice on how to approach it. A feature of essay prompts like this, is that there isn’t necessarily a right answer, and in any case the teacher or examiner doesn’t care about the answer. The purpose of the prompt is to give you the chance to show that you know the material in the play (who are the characters? what are they like? what happens to them?) and that you can write about it intelligently and clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this case I would start by making a list of the romantic pairings in the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theseus &amp;amp; Hippolyta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hermia &amp;amp; Lysander&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Demetrius &amp;amp; Hermia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helena &amp;amp; Demetrius&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lysander &amp;amp; Helena&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Titania &amp;amp; Oberon&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bottom &amp;amp; Titania&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then for each pairing I’d make a list of ways in which the characters are similar and ways in which they are opposite. This is a good time to gather quotes from the play to illustrate the points that you are later going to make in the essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, let’s take Theseus &amp;amp; Hippolyta. Here are three points where they are similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are monarchs (Dramatis personae, “Duke of Athens” &amp;amp; “Queen of the Amazons”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both are warriors (I.I, “I woo’d thee with my sword”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both like hunting with hounds (IV.I, “My love shall hear the music of my hounds”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And two points where they are dissimilar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They disagree on whether the four young lovers’ stories are credible (V.I, “I never may believe / These antique fables” vs “More witnesseth than fancy’s images”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They disagree on whether it is entertaining to watch people humilate themselves (V.I, “I love not to see wretchedness o’er-charged” vs “Our sport shall be to take what they mistake”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence in this case seems to be equivocal on the opposites/similarities question. But repeat the exercise for all the other pairings, and maybe something will stand out that you can turn into the thesis of your essay: “Shakespeare favours opposite/similar romantic pairings”. But if nothing stands out then that should be the thesis: “Shakespeare presents a variety of different types of romantic pairing”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T08:40:54.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-24T13:16:27.097" Score="3" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the second chapter of Part Two of Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;, Georges Duroy's wife turns out to have interesting connections that allow the couple to write newspaper articles that can make or break a politician's career. One day, she tells her husband,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Figure-toi que le ministre de la justice vient de nommer deux magistrats qui ont fait partie des commissions mixtes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Can you imagine? The Minister of Justice has just appointed two magistrates who were / have been members of the mixed committees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contraction &quot;des&quot; suggests that these committees were not just any &quot;mixed committees&quot; but that Duroy's wife (and therefore presumably also Maupassant) had very specific committees in mind. &#xA;What were these committees (which presumably existed in late 19th-century France) and why would it be a bad idea for the minister to appoint former members of these committees as magistrates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the French Wikipedia, the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_mixte_paritaire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commission mixte paritaire&lt;/a&gt; is about an institution that was created in the 1950s, and&#xA;the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_mixte_internationale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Commission mixte internationale&lt;/a&gt; is about an organization established by the governments of the United States and Canada, so I appear to be searching in the wrong direction there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T17:05:07.550" Title="In Maupassant's Bel-Ami, why would it be compromising for a magistrate to have been in (the) mixed committees?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-24T14:42:36.000" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Horwood's short novel &lt;em&gt;Callanish&lt;/em&gt; is about a golden eagle in London Zoo and his struggles with captivity and freedom. It was Horwood's second novel about eagles, after the extraordinarily good &lt;em&gt;The Stonor Eagles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, this book could be seen as simply a way to draw sympathy for animals kept in zoos and their plight of captivity away from their homelands. But, like many animal stories, it feels like there should be an allegorical reading of the story in terms of humans. The character of Wolski provides one obvious parallel between the situation of zoo animals and that of some particularly unfortunate humans, but is there anything less extreme? Could there be a less direct interpretation in terms of some other type of freedom, such as freedom of the mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T14:42:36.000" Title="Symbolic interpretations of William Horwood's Callanish?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;william-horwood&gt;&lt;callanish&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14407" CreationDate="2020-05-24T16:28:23.193" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;mixed commissions&lt;/em&gt; were kangaroo courts set up by the régime of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon_III&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte&lt;/a&gt; after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1851_French_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;coup of 1851&lt;/a&gt; to punish suspected Republican sympathisers. The name “mixed” refers to their being composed of both civilian and military judges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;La manque d’armes et de munitions, joint à la terreur imprimée dans la masse par les exéctions sommaires, obligea bientôt le défenseurs de la République à se soumettre, et Bonaparte n’eut plus pour le présent à rédouter aucune opposition. Mais les conspirateurs, le crime une fois consommé, se trouvent face à face avec un inconnu redoutable, l’avenir. Résolu de prévenir, en les écrasant dans l’oeuf, tous les essais de révolte ultérieurs, Bonaparte instituta sur toute l’étendue du territoire des commissions composées mi-partie de magistrats dévoués et mi-partie d’officiers signalés pour leur haine contre la République. Ces commissions «&lt;em&gt;mixtes&lt;/em&gt;» devaient rechercher et punir tour ceux qui s’étaient opposés à l’usurpation du président.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le nombre des condamnations prononcées par ces tribunaux d’exception et les conseils de guerre dépasse 15,000, comme il résulte d’un rapport du préfet de police Maupas. Ces 15,000 victimes du Coup d’Etat peuvent se diviser ainsi: environ 500 condamnés à mort, 250 déportés à Cayenne, 10,000 déportés en Algerie, 1,500 exilés et 1,000 internés dans &lt;em&gt;différents endroits&lt;/em&gt;. Ces chiffres parlent d’eux-mêmes et dispensent de tous commentaires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lack of arms and ammunition, together with fear instilled in the general population by the summary executions, soon forced the defenders of the Republic to submit, and for the present Bonaparte had no longer to fear any opposition. But the conspirators, if they had once committed the crime, found themselves face to face with an unknown and frightening future. Resolved to prevent, by crushing them in the egg, all subsequent attempts at revolt, Bonaparte created through the whole expanse of territory, commissions composed half of loyal magistrates and half of officers noted for their hatred of the Republic. These “mixed” commissions were required to investigate and punish all those who had opposed the usurpation of the president*.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The number of sentences passed by these emergency tribunals and military courts surpassed 15,000, according to a report from the chief of police Maupas†. These 15,000 victims of the coup d’état could be divided as follows: about 500 sentenced to death; 250 deported to Cayenne‡; 10,000 deported to Algeria; 1,500 exiled; and 1,000 interned in various places. These figures speak for themselves and dispense with all commentaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Lassez (1874), &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=yBvUJb3BY3UC&amp;amp;pg=PA28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le verité sur le deux décembre&lt;/em&gt;, p. 28&lt;/a&gt;. Paris: Chevalier. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Bonaparte had been president of the Second Republic, having been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1848_French_presidential_election&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elected in 1848&lt;/a&gt; † &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne_de_Maupas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charlemagne de Maupas&lt;/a&gt; ‡ the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_French_Guiana#1800s_and_the_Penal_Era&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prison colony of French Guiana&lt;/a&gt;, effectively a death sentence due to harsh discipline and tropical disease&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the fall of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_French_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Empire&lt;/a&gt; in 1870, there was controversy over how, or whether, the magistrates of these mixed commissions could be rehabilitated. I’ve quoted Lassez to show the kind of feeling about the commissions that was prevalent among republicans at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern historians confirm Lassez’s account, and give similar figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mixed Commissions represented […] a solution to the problem of harmonizing military and civilian perspectives. These administrative tribunals also enabled the government to formalize repressive measures in departments where the state of siege had not been declared. The commanding general, the prefect, and a &lt;em&gt;procureur&lt;/em&gt; in every department would exercise jointly the same discretionary authority to recommend measures of “general security” against moderate Republicans as well as Montagnards, electoral leaders and militants as well as conspirators and rebels. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initiated by the head of the newly created Ministry of Police on February 3 [1852], the commissions were expected to use political rather than legal criteria in their deliberations. […] At the severe end of the spectrum on police controls were deportation to Cayenne, reserved for “especially culpable” men with police records; deportation to an Algerian penal colony; or deportation to an Algerian town where the suspect would reside under police surveillance. An intermediate range of sanctions included explusion from France; temporary exile; and forced residence under police surveillance in a French town assigned by the authorities. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether they were guilty as charged was quite another matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ted Margadant (1979). &lt;em&gt;French Peasants in Revolt: the Insurrection of 1851&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 318–320. Princeton University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T17:05:07.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14324" CreationDate="2020-05-24T20:31:23.987" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The famous &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Littré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; dictionary (four volumes, 1880s) provides the following definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1889dictionnaire04littuoft/page/2020/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;souteneur&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; Particulièrement, celui qui se fait le champion d'une maison de jeu ou de quelque mauvais lieu. Un souteneur de filles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Free translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Particularly, someone who acts as the champion/defender of a gambling house or some house of ill repute. A &lt;em&gt;souteneur&lt;/em&gt; of &quot;girls&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have left &quot;souteneur&quot; untranslated to keep the circularity of the definition.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volume 3 of the same dictionary defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1883dictionnaired03littuoft/page/1370/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proxénète&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; Aujourd'hui, en mauvaise part, entremetteur de certains marchés honteux entre les deux sexes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Today, in a negative sense, matchmaker/procurer for certain shameful deals between the two sexes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delvau's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire de la langue verte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (literally &quot;dictionary of green language&quot;, i.e. argot) defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedela00delvuoft/page/424/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;souteneur&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Homme qui vit aux dépens des filles, — dans l'argot du peuple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Man who lives at the expense of girls, — in popular argot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dictionary has no entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedela00delvuoft/page/372/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;proxénète&quot;&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;although the term is used in entries for other terms (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedela00delvuoft/page/254/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lanceuse&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedela00delvuoft/page/316/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ogresse&lt;/a&gt;, a &quot;madam&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Delesalle's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire Argot-Français &amp;amp; Français-Argot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1896) provides the following definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnaireargo00deleuoft/page/274/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;souteneur&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Celui qui vit aux dépens des prostituées, et qu'on appelle ainsi parce qu'il est censé les soutenir quand elles sont instultées.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He who lives at the expense of prostitutes and who is called this [i.e. souteneur] because he is supposed to support them when they are insulted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dictionary entry for &quot;proxénète&quot; says &quot;Voy. Entremetteur&quot; (See &quot;entremetteur&quot;); the entry for &quot;entremetteur&quot; says &quot;Voy. Proxénète. Voy. Rouspant, Dariolet, Dariolette, Eléphant&quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wiktionnaire&lt;/strong&gt; provides the following definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/souteneur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;souteneur&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Celui qui, vivant du gain d’une prostituée, prétend assurer, en retour, sa protection. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He who, living from the gains of a prostitute, claims to protect her in return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aspect of protection is mentioned by Littré but not by Delvau.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wiktionnaire defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/prox%C3%A9n%C3%A8te&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proxénète&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Personne qui tire profit de la prostitution d’autrui ou bien la favorise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Person who profits from the prostitution of another person or furthers it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition does not state whether a &lt;em&gt;proxénète&lt;/em&gt; is male or female, but quotes a sentence from Proust that illustrates that it could be a woman (&quot;mais il l’aimait comme une proxénète&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Virmaitre's &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionnaire d'argot fin-de-siècle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (1894) provides the following definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedarg00virmuoft/page/232/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proxénète&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proxénète: Ou maquerelle; c'est la même chose.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  La &lt;em&gt;proxénète&lt;/em&gt; est à l'affût de toutes les misères pour livrer les malheureuses à la prostitution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Proxénète: Or madam; it's the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionnairedarg00virmuoft/page/276/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;souteneur&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Souteneur: Individu qui vit des filles qui se livrent à la prostitution, fainéant, voleur et assassin si l'occasion se présente; on le trouve en haut comme en bas de l'échelle sociale (Argot du peuple).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Individual who lives off girls who prostitute themselves; idler, thief and murderer if the opportunity presents itself; found both at the top and at the bottom of the social ladder (People's argot).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, we have the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;proxénète&lt;/em&gt; is a woman according to Virmaitre, and can be a woman based on Delvau and Wiktionnaire. Littré provides no information on this matter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;souteneur&lt;/em&gt; is a man (in fact, the ending &lt;em&gt;eur&lt;/em&gt; already suggests this), who, according to Littré, Delesalle and Wiktionnaire, provides &quot;protection&quot; (the quotes are mine) while living of the gains made by prostitutes. The aspect of protection is not mentioned by Delvau and is at best ambiguous in Virmaitre.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T12:58:35.957" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T12:58:35.957" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14411" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14412" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English magazine 'The Satchel: a Repository of Wit, Whimsies, and What-Not', which published only 9 issues in 1831." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:04:03.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14413" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14414" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist, short story writer and poet Alice Walker (born 1944) and her life as a writer. She is best known for the novel 'The Color Purple'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:06:06.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14415" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14416" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" Score="0" Body="Questions about Alice Walker's 1982 novel 'The Color Purple'. Use this tag with the tag [alice-walker]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:07:09.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14417" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14418" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'All's Well That Ends Well' by William Shakespeare. Use this tag with the tag [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:08:42.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14419" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14420" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English author and academic Ian McGuire (born 1964) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:10:28.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14421" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14422" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" Score="0" Body="Questions about Ian McGuire's 2016 novel 'The North Water'. Use this tag with the tag [ian-mcguire]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:11:16.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14423" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14424" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Guyanese poet Grace Nichols (born 1950) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:12:43.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14425" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Horwood's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.williamhorwood.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.williamhorwood.co.uk&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14426" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist William Horwood (born 1944) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:13:53.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14427" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14428" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1984 novel 'Callanish' by William Horwood. Use this tag with the tag [william-horwood]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T22:14:58.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6485" CreationDate="2020-05-24T23:13:19.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, the city (German: Stadt) is not an important concept in Hegel's philosophy. However, the state (German: Staat) is an important concept, especially in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_of_the_Philosophy_of_Right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elements of the Philosophy of Right&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (German: &lt;em&gt;Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts&lt;/em&gt;). Since the German words Stadt and Staat differ by only one letter, I strongly suspect that either Camus or the source he consulted a mistranslated text by or about Hegel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the importance of the state in Hegel's philosophy, I will simply quote the start of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elements_of_the_Philosophy_of_Right#Summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's summery of &lt;em&gt;Elements of the Philosophy of Right&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added): &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Philosophy of Right&lt;/em&gt; (as it is usually called) begins with a discussion of the concept of the free will and argues that the &lt;strong&gt;free will can only realize itself in the complicated social context&lt;/strong&gt; of property rights and relations, contracts, moral commitments, family life, the economy, the legal system, and the polity. A person is not truly free, in other words, unless he is a participant in all of these different aspects of the life of the &lt;strong&gt;state&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a statement that comes close to what Camus writes (minus the mix-up of &quot;Stadt&quot; and &quot;Staat&quot;), see the Zusatz (addition) to &lt;a href=&quot;http://texte.phil-splitter.com/html/staat1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;§ 258&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Der Staat ist der Geist, der in der Welt steht und sich in derselben mit Bewußtsein realisiert, während er sich in der Natur nur als das Andere seiner, als schlafender Geist verwirklicht. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The state is the spirit that stands in the world and that in it realises itself through (self)consciousness, whereas in nature it only realises itself as a sleeping spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until someone can show that Hegel's work contains a sentence that can be literally translated into what Camus wrote, I will assume that Camus was paraphrasing an incorrect translation of an unidentified German text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-24T23:13:19.630" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-25T00:49:40.557" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Novel about a &lt;strong&gt;talented young computer programmer&lt;/strong&gt; (maybe a child-protege..?) who makes a splash in the programming world and ends up moving to Dallas. I don’t really remember much of the plot, but I think he ends up getting in some trouble there because of Dallas’ “incomparable nightlife”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;“incomparable Dallas nightlife”&lt;/strong&gt; might not be an exact quote, but I think it’s pretty close. Didn’t work in any of the book-finder search engines I tried though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was written sometime &lt;strong&gt;around 1995&lt;/strong&gt; - but might be two or three years off - either earlier or, more probably, a little later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a &lt;strong&gt;novel&lt;/strong&gt;, not a non-fiction book about computers or programming, although I seem to remember the author included quite a lot of material about both. This was about the time that computers and the internet were really starting to take off, and I think the author wanted to show how cool the computer industry was becoming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was probably not a book released by a big, well-known publisher - but I don't know that for sure either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m guessing &lt;strong&gt;the book probably didn't sell very well&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a lot to go on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been impressed with how well people on this site are able to identify things with very little information, but I'll be very impressed if someone comes up with this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10139" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T00:49:40.557" Title="Mid-1990s novel about young programmer who gets into trouble in Dallas" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14431" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-25T10:20:38.393" Score="3" ViewCount="230" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terry Eagleton's book &lt;em&gt;How to Read Literature&lt;/em&gt; contains a chapter entitled &quot;Character&quot; which discusses various approaches toward &quot;character&quot; throughout the history of literature. One of the authors Eagleton briefly discusses is D. H. Lawrence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;D. H. Lawrence declared he was not concerned with character or personality, since the depths of selfhood he was plumbing lay far beneath the conscious ego.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did D. H. Lawrence make the statement on which the above quote is based? I have been unable to locate a source using &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22D.+H.+Lawrence%22+not+concerned+with+character+personality+selfhood&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DuckDuckGo&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22D.+H.+Lawrence%22+concerned+with+character+personality+selfhood&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=-5rLXvTuD-WlrgTY-K3wAQ&amp;amp;start=0&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwi02NGs5M7pAhXlkosKHVh8Cx44FBDy0wMIgAE&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=919&amp;amp;dpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T12:43:01.290" Title="Where did D. H. Lawrence say that (in his works) he is not concerned with character or personality?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;d-h-lawrence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14431" CreationDate="2020-05-25T10:42:51.040" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eagleton is paraphrasing a letter from Lawrence to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Garnett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Garnett&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt; of the character. There is another &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt;, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged element. (Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say, ‘Diamond, what? This is carbon.’ And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.) You must not say my novel &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; shaky—it is not perfect, because I am not expert in what I want to do. But it is the real thing, say what you like. And I shall get my reception, if not now, then before long. Again I say, don’t look for the development of the novel to follow the lines of certain characters. The characters fall into the form of some other rhythmic form, as when one draws a fiddle-bow across a fine tray delicately sanded, the sand takes lines unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;D. H. Lawrence (5 June 1914). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.186102/page/n231/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Edward Garnett&lt;/a&gt;. In Aldous Huxley, ed. (1932). &lt;em&gt;The Letters of D. H. Lawrence&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 198–199. London: Heinemann. Some punctuation added.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The way that I found this was to guess that Eagleton had heavily paraphrased Lawrence, but that the most significant word, “ego”, might have appeared in the original. Searching for “lawrence ego” on Google Books, I found, as the third hit, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=E3FFqk9MtJ4C&amp;amp;pg=PA47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critical study by Doo-Sun Ryu&lt;/a&gt; which quotes the “now famous letter” and gives a reference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T12:43:01.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-25T13:52:14.463" Score="7" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://americangods.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American Gods Wikia site&lt;/a&gt; claims that Mr World is a personification of globalisation. That definitely seems to be true in the TV series (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tfjJcLmyfY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the creepiest rant ever made about salsa&lt;/a&gt;), but in the novel he seems a much more mysterious figure, IIRC never even &lt;em&gt;seen&lt;/em&gt; &quot;on stage&quot; until near the very end, when&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; it's revealed that he's actually Loki (aka Low-Key), and only &quot;leading&quot; the New Gods as part of a massive two-man con with Wednesday/Odin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the book, does Mr World represent/symbolise something specific among the New Gods?&lt;/strong&gt; The &quot;fat kid&quot; (called Technical Boy in the TV series) is clearly a god of &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/157118/31394&quot;&gt;technical stuff like computers&lt;/a&gt;, while Media ... well, the name says it all. Can Mr World as a god of globalisation be read from the novel? Or could he be a god of &quot;everything&quot;, the whole world, enabling him to claim that role of leadership? Or something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-25T17:03:30.597" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T17:03:30.597" Title="What does Mr World represent in the American Gods book?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6755" CreationDate="2020-05-25T16:24:38.547" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I managed to locate the book: it is &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contexts for Criticism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by Donald Keesey (second edition, Mayfield Publishing, 1994).&#xA;It contains seven chapters, each with three examples of theory and three &quot;applications&quot; that illustrate the theory.&#xA;Each chapter contains one &quot;application&quot; for Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, one for Keats's &quot;Ode on a Grecian Urn&quot; and one for Kate Chopin's &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chapters and their subchapters are the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical Criticism I: Author as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;E. D. Hirsch: Objective Interpreation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;George Watson: Are Poems Historical Acts?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alastair Fowler: Intention Floreat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fredson Bowers: Hamlet as Minister and Scourge&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Allen C. Austin: Toward Resolving Keats' Grecian Urn Ode&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nancy Walker: Feminist or Naturalist: The Social Context of Kate Chopin's The Awakening&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Formal Criticism: Poem as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleanth Brooks: Irony as a Principle of Structure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.: The Structure of the Concrete Universal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Monroe C. Beardsley: Textual Meaning and Authorial Meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Robert Ornstein: Historical Criticism and the Interpretation of Shakespeare&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cleanth Brooks: Keats's Sylvan Historian: History without Footnotes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John R. May: Local Color in The Awakening&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reader-Response Criticism: Audience as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Louise M. Rosenblatt: The Quest for &quot;The Poem Itself&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wolfgang Iser: Readers and the Concept of the Implicit Reader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Norman Hollland: The Miller's Wife and the Professors: Questions about the Transactive Theory of Reading&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Norman Halland: &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;-My Greatest Creation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Douglas B. Wilson: Reading the Urn: Death in Keats's Arcadia&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pat Shaw: Putting Audience in Its Place: Psychosexuality and Perspective Shifts in &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mimetic Criticism: Reality as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A. D. Nuttall: The Two Languages of Criticism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bernard Paris: The Uses of Psychology&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Josephine Donovan: Beyond the Net: Feminist Criticism as a Moral Criticism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jacqueline Rose: &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;-the Mona Lisa of Literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eva T. H. Brann: Pictures in Poetry: Keats' &quot;Ode on a Grecian Urn&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cynthia Griffin Wolff: Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin's &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intertextual Criticism: Literature as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Northrop Frye: The Critical Path&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jonathan Culler: Structuralism and Literature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mikhail Bakhtin: From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phyllis Gorfain: Toward a Theory of Play and the Carnivalesque in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lore Metzger: &quot;Silence and Slow Time&quot;: Pastoral &lt;em&gt;Topoi&lt;/em&gt; in Keats's Odes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sandra M. Gilbert: The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin's Fantasy of Desire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poststructural Criticism: Language as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jacques Derrida: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul de Man: Semiology and Rhetoric&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stanley Fish: What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David J. McDonald: &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and the Mimesis of Absence: A Post-Structuralist Analysis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Barbara Jones Guetti: Resisting the Aesthetic&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patricia S. Yaeger: &quot;A Language Which Nobody Understood&quot;: Emancipatory Strategies in &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Historical Criticism II: Culture as Context&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Terry Eagleton: Literature and History&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Catherine Belsey: Literature, History, Politics&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stephen Greenblatt: Culture&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Annabel Patterson: The Very Age and Body of the Time His Form and Pressure&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Daniel P. Watkins: Coming to the Sacrifice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Margit Stange: Personal Property: Exchange Value and the Female Self in &lt;em&gt;The Awakening&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-25T16:24:38.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-26T08:52:00.927" Score="5" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;The empire of Nilfgaard becomes very important in the Witcher saga starting from the end of &lt;em&gt;Sword of Destiny&lt;/em&gt; and continuing through the novels starting with &lt;em&gt;Blood of Elves&lt;/em&gt;. The name has always intrigued me (and slightly confused me as I never remember whether it's Nilfgaard or Niflgaard). It looks Scandinavian, with &quot;aa&quot; often being used as an anglicisation of the Scandinavian letter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;å&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/g%C3%A5rd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gård&lt;/a&gt; being a common Scandinavian suffix, but is Nilfgaard in the books written to resemble any Scandinavian culture? The name seems to be preserved by translation, being &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiedzmin.fandom.com/wiki/Nilfgaard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the same in the original Polish&lt;/a&gt;; does it have a Scandinavian ring to the Polish-speaking eye too, or does it mean/suggest something in the Polish language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the origin and significance of the name Nilfgaard?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T08:52:00.927" Title="What is the origin of the name Nilfgaard?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3485" CreationDate="2020-05-26T13:39:31.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;the cat by a clarinet playing staccato in a low register&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On my reading, at least, it is not entirely true that each character is represented by an instrument, but rather by a combination of theme and timbre. Prior to the cat's appearance in the narration, the clarinet plays an accompanying role with the bassoon (grandfather, also unintroduced), accompanying the flute and oboe. It is possible that this is meant to imply that the cat and grandfather are already spying from afar, but I don't think this is a strong interpretation: the low staccato clarinet comes out with a unique timbre that keeps it distinct from the oboe and bassoon, a timbre which these early clarinet appearances avoid entirely. Representing Peter with the string quartet frees up individual string instruments to be used similarly to the clarinet in these &quot;non-cat&quot; passages; to be used with a different sound that doesn't put Peter in the spotlight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for these breaks from &quot;instrument-characterization&quot; is that the work is made up of relatively few themes that are heavily repeated, so something is needed to keep it interesting. Peter's theme is one of the most repeated, so giving him the string quartet allows for more variations, again for interest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;String instruments also sound quite similar to each other, so this solution has the added benefit of avoiding the timbrical confusion of which specific string instrument represents Peter; rather than one arbitrary string instrument that the audience may not be able to keep track of, it is the volume and range of the quartet working together that unambiguously represents Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this is all speculation, but to the best of my knowledge, Prokofiev never commented on why he chose the instruments he did; speculation is all we have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10145" LastEditorUserId="10145" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T14:03:19.470" LastActivityDate="2020-05-26T14:03:19.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14440" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11580" CreationDate="2020-05-26T14:29:01.830" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;Abortive&quot; means &quot;failing to produce results,&quot; so it denotes a sorrow, probably short-lived, that doesn't cause the person to change.  Likewise a &quot;shortwinded&quot; person quickly loses his breath on exercise, and therefore an elation is &quot;shortwinded&quot; if it ends quickly because it's exhausted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Gatsby is dead by the end of the novel -- and the reference is to &quot;men&quot; in the plural -- Nick must have lost interest in men in general, because their emotional storms, however dramatic, quickly fade out with no impact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-05-27T01:40:54.493" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T01:40:54.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14441" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-26T16:15:46.687" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; was probably written in the years 1610-1611, making it one of the author's last plays. The play's text was first published in the &quot;First Folio&quot; of 1623, seven years after the author's death.&#xA;Many of Shakespeare's earlier plays were first published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_plays_in_quarto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quarto editions&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;before they were republished in the collection known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and the differences between the quarto and folio texts sometimes point to revision after their first publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For other plays, the argument for revision would need to be made based on other evidence.&#xA;In the case of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, what evidence is there that Shakespeare revised the play after 1611?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T11:19:18.203" Title="What evidence is there that Shakespeare revised The Winter's Tale after 1611?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14448" CreationDate="2020-05-26T18:08:35.233" Score="7" ViewCount="278" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago I read a story of a man who experimented with a magnet strapped to his forehead. From what I remember, he examined this experiment in his attic study. He harnessed a magnet on his forehead for what I believe was an hour per day. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a time, he noticed a ghostly boy running through his study. Then, his world was immersed within another, noticing a young man and a woman sitting next to a tree. A final vision of the same man and women, but this time they actually notice him also and seem frightened. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't recall if this was a fiction or some actual claim of an experiment. I've been trying all over the web to find it with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Adding as many details as I can. I'm having trouble remembering everything about it but I'll try my best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The age of the story: Really foggy on this but I want to say between the 1850s and the early 1900s. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medium, read online, was definitely a shorter story. If printed would be maybe just a few pages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time when the story was read: I read this story online about 15 years ago. I can't remember the website or the format of the site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language of the story: English (possibly from the US). I believe the subject in the story was some kind of a self-proclaimed modern philosopher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Location: I am from the US but given that I read it online and I'm foggy with the details, the origin could have been from elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appearance of the book: There where no photos or scans of an actual book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10148" LastEditorUserId="10148" LastEditDate="2020-05-26T18:45:25.913" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T20:59:36.050" Title="Trying to find a story of a man who strapped a magnet to his forehead, has visions" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14900" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:16:11.883" Score="5" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Shakespeare play &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; does not actually take place entirely in winter (unlike, say, &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; where almost all the action does indeed take place on midsummer night). The only line in the play that seems relevant to the title is Mamillius's &quot;&lt;em&gt;A sad tale's best for winter&lt;/em&gt;&quot;, but why was this throwaway line used to name the entire play? Was &quot;winter's tale&quot; a well-known metaphor or proverb in Shakespeare's time, informing the audience what kind of story to expect?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why the title &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T15:26:59.057" Title="Why the name &quot;The Winter's Tale&quot; for Shakespeare's play?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14443" CreationDate="2020-05-27T14:26:36.980" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Winter afforded plenty of time to sit around and tell each other stories, since there was a lot less work and the weather was inclement.  The popular tales were often unrealistic fairy tales or similar stories.  It's alerting the audience to expect such a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T14:26:36.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-27T17:59:11.620" Score="4" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The beginning of Chapter V in Part Two of Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt; tells us about political discussions regarding the French colonisation of North Africa. One of the members of Parliament (the Third Republic had a bicameral system and the novel does not clarify whether this is person is a member of the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies) holds a remarkable speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Personne, au fond, ne croyait à une expédition vers Tanger, bien que, &#xA;  le jour de la séparation du Parlement, un député de la droite,&#xA;  le comte de Lambert-Sarrazin, dans un discours plein d'esprit, &#xA;  applaudit même par les centres, eût offert de parier et de donner en gage sa moustache,&#xA;  comme avait fait jadis un célèbre vice-roi des Indes, contres les favoris &#xA;  du chef du Conseil que le nouveau cabinet ne se pourrait tenir d'imiter l'ancien&#xA;  et d'envoyer une armée à Tanger, en pendant à celle de Tunis, par amour&#xA;  de la symétrie, comme on met deux vases sur une cheminée.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ce discours, demeuré célèbre, avait servi de thème à Du Roy&#xA;  pour dix articles sur la colonie algérienne, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksguydemaupa17maupgoog/page/n695/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Works of Guy de Maupassant&lt;/em&gt; on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although it was only the beginning of October, the Chambers were&#xA;  about to resume their sittings, for matters as regarded Morocco were&#xA;  becoming threatening. No one at the bottom believed in an expedition against&#xA;  Tangiers, although on the day of the prorogation of the Chamber,&#xA;  a deputy of the Right, Count de Lambert-Sarrazin, in a witty speech,&#xA;  applauded even by the Center had offered to stake his moustache,&#xA;  after the example of a celebrated Viceroy of the Indies, against the&#xA;  whiskers of the President of the Council, that the new Cabinet could&#xA;  not help imitating the old one, and sending an army to Tangiers,&#xA;  as a pendant to that of Tunis, out of love of symmetry, as one&#xA;  puts two vases on a fireplace. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  This speech, which became famous, served as a peg for Du Roy&#xA;  for half a score of articles upon the Algerian colony (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some historical background to Maupassant's novel:&#xA;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scramble for Africa&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;including the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881.&#xA;In the novel, &quot;Marocco&quot; is substituted for &quot;Tunisia&quot;&#xA;and the country's debt also play a role&#xA;(for historical background, see for example&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tambour.agoraafricaine.info/2020/04/09/1881-la-dette-larme-qui-a-permis-a-la-france-de-sapproprier-la-tunisie/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1881 | La dette : l’arme qui a permis à la France de s’approprier la Tunisie&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, some characters in the novel are based on historical figures,&#xA;some of them fairly directly. With this in mind, I would like to know&#xA;whether the speech mentioned above is also an allusion to a real speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T17:59:11.620" Title="Is Lambert-Sarrazin's moustache speech in Bel-Ami an allusion to a real speech?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14447" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="933" CreationDate="2020-05-27T20:06:02.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a copy of that article! Koppett wrote it for The Sporting News, and my download dates the article from 8/27/1998, although it could have been a reprint from 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article Koppett refers to a session of the Court of Historic Appeals in San Francisco on July 12 of 1979(?), aimed at determining the authorship and timing of the original poem.  Koppett expressed dismay (he writes as if he attended the court proceedings) that the court ignored 18 lines that were erased from the original tape recording, as dictated by Thayer prior to transcribing.  Before you say &quot;What ... tape recorder in 1888?&quot; ... Koppett noted in the article that Thayer was a good buddy of Alexander Graham Bell, who made a tape-recording device for Thayer's private use since he (Thayer) was in poor health back then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been much speculation about whether or not the poem is pure fiction or represents an actual event.  Koppett insisted that there had been evidence amassed that the poem [quoting the article:] &quot;referred specifically to a game played in Stockton, which has a low-lying district that has been called Mudville, and that 'Casey' was modeled on a local hero named John Cahill (who, before that, had played 252 major league games in three seasons with a lifetime batting average of .205).&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his article Koppett referred to several things that have baffled &quot;experts&quot; about the poem: (1) why didn't the pitcher waste one with an 0-2 count?; (2) why would losing an early season game make an entire town so joyless?; (3) why so much despair over one strikeout?; (4) why such ambiguity over the location of the game?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Koppett, as did others, believed that Casey conspired with his Uncle Arnold in the stands to take bets and throw the game, and that Thayer, who worked as an investigative reporter, uncovered the story but was forced to suppress the details due to underworld pressure. In response to (4) above, Casey and Arnold had been running a coast-to-coast con game.  How's that for a conspiracy theory?  The missing text was actually found on the surviving &quot;blank&quot; piece of tape through audio reconstruction using advanced technology.  Anyway, here are the 18 missing lines--starting with &quot;@&quot;--and their place in the poem [note: this website bunches short lines together, so the stanzas are intact, but the lines separate with &quot;/&quot;]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Fraud!&quot; cried the maddened thousands, and the echo answered fraud; / But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed. / @They knew he’d never fail them and they still refused to doubt / While suddenly a voice declared, “I’ll bet you he strikes out!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five thousand roars of laughter soon because a rising din. / &#xA;I’ll take that bet,” and “So will I,” and “Hey, there, count me in.” / &#xA;And while the gambling fever swept the stands from every side, / &#xA;The pitcher threw a wide one and “Ball One” the umpire cried. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ball Two inflamed the spirit of the Mudville betting clan / &#xA;“Come on, let’s raise the ante, stranger,” yelled a local man. / &#xA;And more and more believers in their Casey’s artistry / &#xA;Displayed their faith with wagers while the pitcher threw Ball Three. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And now excitement mounted as the count had run its string / &#xA;A walk would put the winning run on base—a foolish thing. / &#xA;“I still say he will miss it,” called the stranger, loud and brash. / &#xA;“I’ll double every bet and cover any extra cash!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crowd responded wildly, turning to this reckless knave. / &#xA;And no one paid attention to the wink that Casey gave. / &#xA;For the stranger came from Reno—and Arnold was his name. / &#xA;And his brother’s son was Casey, who’d agreed to throw the game.@&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,&#xA;And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.&#xA;[Etc. ... continues as commonly known]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Koppett insists that Thayer was writing about an actual event and purposely wanted to uncover fraud.  He (Koppett) also is certain that Casey and Uncle Arnold had connections of the type that could keep Thayer quiet, hence the missing 18 lines.  Also noted in the article is that Thayer didn't have much regard for his own poem, but did express hostility toward DeWolf Hopper, the actor who was revered for reciting the poem so many times ... and making it famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10154" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T20:06:02.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14448" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14442" CreationDate="2020-05-27T20:59:36.050" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You may be looking for &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20051023052852/http://ascension2000.com/ConvergenceIII/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Science of Oneness&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message83119/pg1?c1=1&amp;amp;c2=1&amp;amp;disclaimer=Continue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the discussion here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walter Rawls, who worked with the effects of monopolar magnetic fields on matter with the late Albert Roy Davis, told me in a telephone conversation of his experiments with a North pole magnet situated over the pineal gland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mask was made which held the North pole end of a long cylindrical magnet over the pineal gland. The purpose was to stimulate the gland and see if there was anything to this ‘third eye’ business. Exposure was in the range of 10-30 minutes per day over a period of about 4 weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Within the first week, he was sitting at his desk reading documents when he noticed something move out of the corner of his eye. As he looked up, the ghostly figure of a man had walked through one wall, moved across the room and disappeared through another wall. The figure was totally unaware of Walter. Further exposures to this North pole field took place over a second and third week.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second week, the same ghostly figure moved through the room and glanced toward Walter as he passed through. This time, the figure appeared to have slightly more detail, not quite so ghostly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third week, while busy working on documents, Walter noticed a change in the room. When he looked up, the wall had dissolved away and he was looking at a small hill where a man and woman sat beneath a tree. It was the same ghostly male figure who he had seen on the other occasions. He sat quit still, watching this pastoral scene for several minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man looked over toward Walter and appeared startled. It was as if he clearly SAW Walter this time and possibly recognized Walter as the ghost that he had seen the previous week! The image faded away and the wall restored to its normal condition. From that moment on, Walter never used the pineal stimulator again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with a search for &lt;code&gt;science fiction &amp;quot;magnet * forehead&amp;quot; pineal gland&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T20:59:36.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4188" CreationDate="2020-05-27T21:27:11.910" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &quot;figure out your problem with me&quot; is to reason out what the person's problem with the speaker is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the person deduces that she herself is the problem, not the speaker, it would be, as the speaker says, &quot;you.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the stepmother has blamed the problems on her stepson, but it's actually all her, and she has to work that out for herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-05-27T21:27:11.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-28T00:57:11.847" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alexei Vronsky is first mentioned by Stepan Oblonsky, in Part One chapter XI. This is how he is presented there by Stiva (Pevear translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Vronsky is one of the sons of Count Kirill Ivanovich Vronsky and one of the finest examples of the gilded youth of Petersburg. I got to know him in Tver, when I was in government service there and he came for the conscription. Terribly rich, handsome, big connections, an imperial aide-de-camp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, later in the novel, the reputation of his family - notably, his mother - is called into question multiple times. For example, when Stiva implies Vronsky was probably considered by the Shcherbatsky's to be more aristocratic than Konstantin Levin, Levin protests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don’t. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn’t have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families’ past&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the questionable reputation of Vronksy's mother was mentioned in some other places too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wouldn't that reputation be a huge problem in Russian society of the time, by itself enough to lower Vronsky's social status below that of Levin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would assume that lineage would be crucial to aristocratic status, so how can Vronky's family be considered very noble if they can't trace four generations back?  And what of the description of Vronsky's father as a man who &quot;crept out of nothing by wiliness&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, I cannot reconcile the apparent contradiction between the fact that many characters in the novel consider Vronsky to enjoy a very high aristocratic status, while at the same time multiple sources treat his mother's reputation as notoriously compromised, and Levin at least presents his ancestors generally and his father specifically as having little or no aristocratic status.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8661" LastEditorUserId="8661" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T00:59:00.110" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T17:45:36.057" Title="What is the exact social status of Alexei Vronsky?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5148" CreationDate="2020-05-28T11:37:53.727" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the other answers already point out both the technical basis for Roark's claims as well as a general cultural precedent for disregarding the blind following of tradition for tradition's sake in favour of doing what's &quot;right&quot;, there is an even more &lt;strong&gt;direct historical basis for Roark's broader sentiments against blindly replicating the replicas of Greek monuments if we look at the emerging American architecture around the turn of the century&lt;/strong&gt; -- especially two individuals therefrom -- which the book draws a lot of inspiration from. In fact the broader historical precedent permeates the primary artistic conflict throughout the story and its specific inception is hinted at not too much later in Chapter 3 when Henry Cameron is introduced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But first let's make an excursion into that time at the end of the 19th century in our own world, specifically to the place that can be regarded as the breeding ground for modern American architecture: Chicago. The great fire of 1871 &quot;freed up&quot; a lot of space for an upcoming generation of architects to realize a new Chicago, together with the new possibilities for height that the concept of steel framing brought. Among the most prominent of those early figures would certainly be &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Sullivan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis Sullivan&lt;/a&gt;, often seen as an inspiration for Roark's mentor Henry Cameron&lt;/strong&gt;. And while Sullivan's position as a truely &quot;modern&quot; architect could be debated in today's understanding&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, he was nevertheless instrumental and influential in shaping not only Chicago but the modern American city (and isn't without reason called the &quot;father of skyscrapers&quot;, not dissimilar to Cameron), yet supposedly swallowed by a historicising movement that also swallowed Cameron.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Cameron is introduced, his downfall is brought in direct connection to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_Columbian_Exposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World's Columbian Exposition in 1893&lt;/a&gt;, which was basically the World's Fair but with the added claim of celebrating the 400th anniversary of discovering the &quot;New World&quot;, held nowhere else than in Chicago. The most prominent feature of this exhibition was the shaping of the &quot;White City&quot; (not to be confused with the ones in Tel Aviv and Gondor), an extensive complex of buildings called that for its literally whitewashed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;neoclassical architecture&lt;/a&gt;, a style that deliberately seeks to &lt;strong&gt;replicate the grandeur of the classical antiquity with its &lt;em&gt;&quot;famous columns and triglyphs&quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the White City and Columbian Exposition was instrumental in advancing not only the city of Chicago and its architecture but also ideas of urban planning, it wasn't without criticism, specifically the neoclassical style it propagated. And while Sullivan himself, like Henry Cameron, was a critic of this neoclassical approach&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, it was primarily a &lt;strong&gt;young generation of architects that didn't see much sense in replicating these old European buildings instead of creating something new&lt;/strong&gt;, befitting which is also the fact that many of the buildings were indeed made from &lt;em&gt;whitewashed plaster copying &quot;copies in marble of copies in wood&quot;&lt;/em&gt;, at the most extreme maybe more akin to a temporary film set than genuine buildings. Add to this that this idea of copying the &quot;Old World&quot; (itself copying the &lt;em&gt;old&lt;/em&gt; Old World) could in fact be seen as a slap in the face of the Columbian Exposition's intention to represent the New World. The novel echoes some of these sentiments, especially with regards to Cameron's fate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The Rome of two thousand years ago rose on the shores of Lake Michigan, a Rome improved by pieces of France, Spain, Athens and every style that followed it. It was a &quot;Dream City&quot;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; of columns, triumphal arches, blue lagoons, crystal fountains and popcorn. Its architects competed on who could steal best, from the oldest source and from the most sources at once. It spread before the eyes of a new country every structural crime ever committed in all the old ones. It was white as a plague, and it spread as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A country flung two thousand years back in an orgy of Classicism could find no place for him and no use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And making the turn back to this idea of a &lt;em&gt;New World&lt;/em&gt;, the most prominent of this young generation of architects would certainly be &lt;strong&gt;Sullivan's apprentice &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Lloyd Wright&lt;/a&gt;, who was the inspiration for Howard Roark himself&lt;/strong&gt; in many aspects (albeit not all). With the advent of the new century Wright departed from his mentor's firm, ultimately forming the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_School&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prairie Style&lt;/a&gt;, largely regarded as the first truely North American architectural style, supposedly devoid of European baggage&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; (which was also pretty much the intention behind it as being fit to the American Midwest prairie). And while strongly related to the Arts and Crafts movement and one might at first hesitate to directly call this &quot;modern architecture&quot; yet (albeit being a rather fuzzy term in itself) when comparing it to later movements like Bauhaus and the International Style, it was already exhibiting a lot of its core principles&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; and is thus very much early modernist architecture. &lt;strong&gt;In his 1901 lecture &quot;The Art and Craft of the Machine&quot; (as also part of &lt;em&gt;Modern Architecture, Being the Kahn Lectures for 1930&lt;/em&gt;) Wright echoes not only Roark's sentiments (with a not too dissimilar rhetoric) but also the state of education&lt;/strong&gt; at Stanton Institute of Technology as depicted in that same conversation with the dean (hereby the Chicago Art Institute, though). To quote just a few passages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Yet, why should an American university in a land of democratic ideals in a machine age be characterized by second-hand adaptation of Gothic forms, themselves adapted previously to our own adoption by a feudalistic age with tools to use and conditions to face totally different from anything we can call our own? [...] Nine out of ten public buildings in almost any American city are the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...These students at best are to concoct from a study of the aspect of these blind reverences an extract of antiquity suited to modern needs, meanwhile knowing nothing of modern needs, permitted to care nothing of them, and knowing just as little of the needs of the ancients which made the objects they now study [...] And this is an education in art in these United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...You are sunk in “Imitation.” [...] a general cheap machine-made “profusion” of -- copies of copies of original imitations. To you, proud proprietors -- do these things thus degraded mean anything aside from vogue and price? Aside from your sense of quantitative ownership, do you perceive in them some fitness in form, line and color to the purposes which they serve? [...] If not, you are a victim of habit, a habit evidence enough of the stagnation of an outgrown Art...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this also brings us to another important idea that is inherent to Howard Roark's quoted criticism, namely that the &lt;strong&gt;materials and architecture of a building should fit to its purpose, echoing Sullivan's idea that &quot;form follows function&quot;, as well as its environment, echoing Wright’s idea of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Organic Architecture&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. Because Roark's argument isn't just that copying past cultures' works inhibits our individual creativity, but more that this &lt;strong&gt;copy misses the original purpose of the architecture it copies as well as that of the building it's trying to create&lt;/strong&gt;, the same as the Greeks supposedly already missed the purpose of the wooden columns and triglyphs when they were copying them into marble (not to speak of the later generations copying those copies). Or as &lt;em&gt;DQdIM&lt;/em&gt; also puts it in his comment, it compromises the building's integrity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to bring all these ramblings back to &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt; and the inspiration it draws from the Chicago architecture scene, specifically the likes of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright&lt;sup&gt;7&lt;/sup&gt;, the argumentation employed by Roark in this scene is &lt;strong&gt;directly referencing this revolt against empty replication of the old with neoclassicism without respecting the purpose of architecture, that was emerging at the turn of the century&lt;/strong&gt;. While Chicago and the US weren't necessarily alone in these efforts, specifically in Chicago it ushered in a truely American and early modernist architecture propagated by noone else than Howard Roark's real-life inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though, we have to note that &lt;strong&gt;Ayn Rand is about one generation late with this revelation&lt;/strong&gt; when having it happen in the 1920s in the novel, when neoclassicism had already fallen quite out of vogue, the Prairie School was declining already too&lt;sup&gt;8&lt;/sup&gt; and post-WWI Europe was picking up its legacy (or incorporating it into its own modernist aspirations). Roark's style is also more reminiscent of Wright's (and others') later work from around the time when she wrote the book, yet clearly &lt;strong&gt;building on and referencing an architectural philosophy emerging in those earliest days&lt;/strong&gt;. Likewise does she exaggerate the neoclassicism and the buildings it produces to almost caricatural heights, as well as the dogmatism with which it supposedly crushes any other way of thinking. But even if strongly inspired by the personalities and work of specific individuals, it is ultimately neither a history book nor a biography rather than a novel seeking to transport its ideas through a more generalized look at architecture. And even in real architecture the conflict between modernist up to postmodernist approaches and more conservative and historicising ones isn't a one-way street either rather than repeating itself in various forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1) &lt;sub&gt;While himself part of a broader generation of American architects trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was nevertheless eschewing excessive neoclassicism, while still not entirely avoiding &quot;ambitious ornamentation&quot;. He has an interesting place in the transition from classic to modern.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2) &lt;sub&gt;Though, with all romanticising the two architects' supposedly similar fates we still have to keep in mind that Sullivan's decline can also be attributed to economical reasons and might not be &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; to blame on a cultural mood shift&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3) &lt;sub&gt;But in contrast to Cameron, Sullivan did not refuse to contribute to the Exposition and instead actually contributed the only not purely white neoclassical building.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4) &lt;sub&gt;This sarcastic use of &lt;em&gt;&quot;Dream City&quot;&lt;/em&gt; can't help but evoke the image of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architect%27s_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Cole's &lt;em&gt;The Architect's Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, even if likely a nightmare for Henry Cameron.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;5) &lt;sub&gt;It is of course debatable how truely original &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt; can be, especially in a culture born out of European colonies, and considering in turn the influences of Japanese art that Wright brought into his work. Nor is this necessarily a bad thing.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;6) &lt;sub&gt;E.g. opening the floorplan, elongated window bands for natural light, concrete as a cheap and flexible material, embracing the building materials rather than hiding them, clear geometric shapes without superfluous ornament.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;7) &lt;sub&gt;Of course the architectural landscape of ~1900 USA, including the ones daring onto new grounds, consisted of more than those two figures, but not only are they the most recognized from that era, they are also widely understood and documented as the direct inspiration for Henry Cameron and Howard Roark respectively.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;8) &lt;sub&gt;And when Wright himself was delving into an even more unconventional architectural approach, specifically the Los Angeles textile block episode, ironically not entirely devoid of ornamentation and the not always unintended or non-stereotypical influence of earlier styles, albeit this time pre-Columbian Meso-American.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-30T20:46:35.143" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T20:46:35.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14452" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14454" CreationDate="2020-05-28T13:23:31.290" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about the sentence I’m not really sure how to interpret in The Boscombe Valley Mystery by Conan Doyle, preferably to someone who’s already read the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Well, it is not for me to judge you,” said Holmes, as the old man&#xA;  signed the statement which had been drawn out. “I pray that we may&#xA;  never be exposed to &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;such a temptation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is uttered at about the end of the episode.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;What I want to know is what this “a temptation” indicates.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Is this “to judge you”? as Homes said the beginning of his sentence? Holmes got this perpetrator’s confession in writing as the last resort to save the wrongfully-can-be-condemned young man. But at the same time, he felt some sympathy for the perpetrator, so he doesn’t want to use and make public his confession if he can avoid it, hence “ I pray that we don’t get the urge to use it”?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Or, this perpetrator killed the victim (half) impulsively when he was listening to the victim speaking about perpetrator’s daughter, so this “temptation” meant the urge to kill someone? “I pray that we don’t get such urge to kill somebody”? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T13:44:18.650" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T15:18:42.347" Title="How to interpret this &quot;temptation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14456" CreationDate="2020-05-28T14:52:10.017" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently finished reading &quot;Gone Girl&quot; and, although I enjoyed it, there is a part of the story that sounded kind of weird for me, and it kind of keeps bothering me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt; Amy starts planning everything a year before &quot;the day of&quot;. As part of her plan, she writes some diaries simulating diary entries which were supposed to be 6 years old. If there were a forensic way of determining the age of the diaries they could have known that Nick was telling the truth, even if the method was not very precise, the difference between 1 and 6 is huge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In real life, would this be a plot hole or there is no way the police could find out such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10155" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-05-28T14:57:59.343" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T21:10:22.147" Title="Is this a plot hole in &quot;Gone girl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;gillian-flynn&gt;&lt;gone-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14452" CreationDate="2020-05-28T15:18:42.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The old man in question had committed a murder.  On the other hand, the victim had blackmailed him for years and had just demanded that their children marry.  Holmes thinks that this is so great a provocation that he is, in fact, letting the murderer off on the condition that he make a statement that he did it, so that Holmes can produce the statement if it looks like an innocent man will be convicted of the crime, &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes admits that were they in such a situation, he and Watson would probably have felt the temptation to murder the blackmailer, and possibly even acted on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-05-28T15:18:42.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-28T18:11:06.310" Score="4" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Maupassant's novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt; the Comte de Vaudrec is a wealthy member of the nobility who comes to dine at the Forestiers' home every Monday evening. After Madeleine's husband Charles Forestier has died and she has married George Duroy (the novel's &quot;Bel-Ami&quot;), this routine is simply continued. Near the end of the novel, the Count leaves (almost) his entire fortune to Madeleine, much to George's surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when searching the entire text of the novel, Vaudrec is mentioned less than a dozen times and he is rarely a &quot;player&quot; in the scenes in which he is mentioned. (I think he makes only three &quot;live&quot; appearances, usually brief.) So what exactly is the nature of his relationship with Madeleine, since it leads to this huge inheritance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T14:08:05.863" Title="What is the nature of the relationship between Madeleine and the Comte de Vaudrec in Bel-Ami?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;bel-ami&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14453" CreationDate="2020-05-29T01:22:25.743" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;I don't believe so:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Checking document age is a very tricky thing and it is very imprecise. Tests can with a certain dose of precision say is the document a 200 years old authentic or a modern forgery, but to determine has the text been written 1 or 6 years ago... not so much. For example, you can order a test at this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ipstesting.com/our-services/fiber-science/age-dating-paper-forensics/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;private company here&lt;/a&gt;, which can  analyse the structure of the paper. I seriously doubt that the mass produced notebook from 6 years ago would be much different than one from 1 year ago:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;While exact age dating of papers is not possible, the process is often able to exclude samples as being made in the time period of question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The age of the document can be forged (or at least obscured) quite easily - all you need to do is get it pretty dirty and all the chemical analysis is suddenly very uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Police officer couldn't just go and order a top-tech NASA/MIT document analysis without going through her supervisors. Such things are costly and somebody has to pay for it.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even if such tests would exist, supervisors would agree to them, they would be probably useless in court because both sides could prove how easily they can be manipulated.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in short, the forgery was quite convenient and there was no point (or most likely the ability) to check its age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T21:10:22.147" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T21:10:22.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14450" CreationDate="2020-05-29T08:35:16.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'll give it a go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start with providing an extended quote from Levin's dialogue with Oblonsky:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this&#xA;  aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such&#xA;  aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an&#xA;  aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by&#xA;  wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with...&#xA;  No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like&#xA;  myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their&#xA;  families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and&#xA;  intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves&#xA;  before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my&#xA;  grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count&#xA;  the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to&#xA;  Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else,&#xA;  while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for...&#xA;  We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs&#xA;  from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich&#xA;  sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among&#xA;  those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to note that Levin says the above while being offended by the fact that his proposal was turned down by Kitty Shtcherbatskaya (or, rather, by her mother - as Stiva tries to reassure him), and the higher social status and the wealth of Vronsky was presumably the main reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin here outlines his personal view on what he considers to be &quot;true aristocratism&quot; and this view is a bit idealistic, with the stress on 'honesty', 'reputation', 'education' and the independence &quot;from the mighty of this world&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, to comment on your specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Wouldn't that reputation be a huge problem in Russian society of the time, by itself enough to lower Vronsky's social status below that of Levin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, not really. A few idealists like Levin might have despised you but as long as you're rich and stick to the aristocratic life style (banquets, balls, duels, etc) you'd be surrounded by crowds of people looking up at you. Besides, it was his mother whose reputation was questionable, not him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Also, I would assume that lineage would be crucial to aristocratic status, so how can Vronsky's family be considered very noble if they can't trace four generations back?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don't, actually, know about the lineage, Levin speaks about &quot;three or four &lt;strong&gt;honest&lt;/strong&gt; generations in their families' past&quot; but, as I said, this view wouldn't be shared by many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And what of the description of Vronsky's father as a man who &quot;crept out of nothing by wiliness&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy never explains what exactly is meant by &quot;crept out of nothing by wiliness (in other translations: &lt;em&gt;by intrigue&lt;/em&gt;)&quot; in regards to Vronsky's father (at least I couldn't find anything on this), so we are left to make any sort of wild guesses. I would assume that Vronskys are a noble family in many generations but only his father somehow managed to creep into the &quot;top of the tops&quot; and acquire great wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, apart from Levin, everyone else refers to the de-facto aristocratism of Vronsky - he is a Count, very rich, graduated from a very prestigious military school and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;In a way, you can see it as two different meanings of the word &lt;em&gt;aristocrat&lt;/em&gt; being used here and the difference is somewhat similar to the meaning of &quot;gentleman&quot; in English as outlined &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/gentleman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;For most of the Middle Ages, when the basic social distinction was between nobiles (the tenants in chivalry, whether earls, barons, knights, esquires, or freemen) and ignobiles (serfs, citizens, and burgesses) the word gentleman was roughly equivalent to nobilis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sense, Vronsky is definitely an aristocrat.&#xA;Levin, however, refers to the moral aspects of what he calls the real aristocratism, as in (from the same source):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In general, however, the modern &quot;gentleman&quot; is well mannered rather than necessarily well bred or well off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="7659" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T17:45:36.057" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T17:45:36.057" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14458" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14459" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" Score="0" Body="Questions about Arthur Miller's 1949 play 'Death of a Salesman'. Use this tag with the tag [arthur-miller]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T11:15:27.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14460" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-29T14:52:36.533" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about the short poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=This_Is_Just_to_Say&amp;amp;oldid=946494770&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;This Is Just to Say&quot;&lt;/a&gt; claims the text is an imagist poem without backing up that claim.&#xA;Williams contributed to the anthology &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Des_Imagistes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Des Imagistes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1914.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time he published &lt;em&gt;Spring and All&lt;/em&gt; in 1923, &quot;Williams, like his peer and friend Ezra Pound, had already rejected the Imagist movement&quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams#Poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Carlos Williams&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia).&#xA;&quot;This Is Just to Say&quot; dates from 1934, which is even later, and much closer in time to&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;objectivism&lt;/a&gt;, which emerged in the 1930s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to the question whether &quot;This Is Just to Say&quot; is an imagist poem, an objectivist poem or something wholly independent of these movements.&#xA;If it belongs to either of the two aforementioned movements, why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-29T16:55:24.687" LastActivityDate="2020-05-29T16:55:24.687" Title="Is Williams's This Is Just to Say an imagist poem, an objectivist poem or neither?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-30T14:29:46.777" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, one of Shakespeare's last plays, depicts the character of Leontes, King of Sicily, as someone who suddenly becomes jealous. Scholars and readers have often criticised the play because this jealousy appears to be unmotivated, or, at best, insufficiently motivated. This is particularly true if one compares Leontes with Othello.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Othello has a Iago to manipulate him into jealousy, there is no such figure in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;, readers can follow Iago's manipulation of Cassio, Roderigo and his wife Emilia in order to gradually convince Othello that Desdemona has an affair with Cassio. There is no such gradual build-up in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;; Leontes's jealousy already comes to a head in the first act of the play. However, at what point exactly, before or during the play, did Leontes become jealous?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T08:00:18.757" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T21:52:48.083" Title="At what point did Leontes become jealous?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14462" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14464" CreationDate="2020-05-30T15:36:57.027" Score="2" ViewCount="503" Body="&lt;p&gt;The novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Happy_Death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written in the late 1930s and published posthumously in 1971, has a main character named Patrice &lt;strong&gt;Mersault&lt;/strong&gt;. Camus's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stranger_(Camus_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, written a few years later and published in 1942, has a main character named &lt;strong&gt;Meursault&lt;/strong&gt;. I was struck by the fact that these two characters in two different novels by the same author have &lt;em&gt;almost&lt;/em&gt; identical names. It would've been less surprising if the names were completely identical, as a more obvious reflection of some relationship between the characters/stories; making them almost-but-not-quite identical just seems confusing for anyone who wants to read both stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of this?&lt;/strong&gt; Either the significance of either/both of the names themselves (do they mean something?) or the significance of the &lt;em&gt;difference&lt;/em&gt; between them (that letter U) or the significance of their similarity (denoting very similar characters?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T06:19:53.633" Title="What is the significance of the names Mersault and Meursault?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;&lt;a-happy-death&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14462" CreationDate="2020-05-30T17:24:15.100" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camus loved the sea and nature generally. His unfinished early novel &lt;em&gt;La &#xA;Mort heureuse&lt;/em&gt; contains a scene in which Patrice Mersault goes swimming in &#xA;the sea; the scene is described in very sensuous terms. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bacfrancais.com/bac_francais/168-camus-mort-heureuse-bain-de-mer.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albert &#xA;Camus, La Mort heureuse, Le bain de &#xA;mer&lt;/a&gt;, in French.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on a very literal level, Mersault can be read as &lt;em&gt;mer&lt;/em&gt; (sea) and &#xA;&lt;em&gt;sault&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/saut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;saut&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (jump; the 'l' in &#xA;'sault' is silent); when ignoring that French creates compounds in a &#xA;very different way than English, the name can be read as &quot;jump into the &#xA;sea&quot; (French equivalent: &quot;saut à la mer&quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After abandoning &lt;em&gt;La Mort heureuse&lt;/em&gt;, Camus started working on &#xA;&lt;em&gt;L'étranger&lt;/em&gt;. He reused elements from &lt;em&gt;La Mort heureuse&lt;/em&gt;, but &#xA;obviously changed many other things, including the narrative &#xA;perspective (the third person narrative was replaced with a &#xA;first person narrative). The change from Mersault to Meursault leads to &#xA;a name that actually already existed: &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meursault&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meursault&lt;/a&gt; is the name of a &#xA;commune in France (now familiar to anyone who has watched the 1966 film &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Grande_Vadrouille&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Grande &#xA;Vadrouille&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change also introduces a wordplay: &quot;meur&quot; sounds like &quot;meurs&quot; and &#xA;&quot;meurt&quot;, which are singular forms of the present indicative of the verb &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/mourir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mourir&lt;/a&gt;. From this point of &#xA;view, Meursault &quot;jumps&quot; to his death by killing the Arab in the first &#xA;part of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Looking for the Stranger&lt;/em&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Alice Kaplan presents the following story about how the name change may have come about (page 65-66):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the only surviving manuscript of the novel, (...), Camus still &#xA;  spells his narrator's last name &quot;Mersault&quot;, identical to the hero of &lt;em&gt;A &#xA;  Happy Death&lt;/em&gt;. Later, he would differentiate him from the main character &#xA;  of &lt;em&gt;A Happy Death&lt;/em&gt;, by adding the &quot;u&quot; to Meursault's name. When you &#xA;  pronounce &quot;Meursault&quot; without the &quot;u&quot;, it sounds ethnically Spanish, &#xA;  like &quot;Merso&quot; (...).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  (...) Some Camus experts claim he thought of the name change at a &#xA;  dinner party where he was served the delicious and expensive white &#xA;  Burgundy wine, Meursault. Whether or not the story about the Paris &#xA;  dinner party is true, there is something more expected about the way &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;Meur&lt;/em&gt;-sault sounds to a French ear than &lt;em&gt;Mer&lt;/em&gt;-sault, and the &#xA;  coincidence might have pleased Camus since the extra &quot;u&quot;—signifying &#xA;  &lt;em&gt;meur&lt;/em&gt; (death)—served his novelistic purposes in every other way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-30T19:52:10.377" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T19:52:10.377" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14465" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14466" CreationDate="2020-05-30T17:44:08.183" Score="4" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;For as long as I can remember, whenever I'm presented with a choice between a small and a large box in a video game or something, I've had the idea that I should pick the small box rather than the large one. It's similar to The Honest Woodcutter, so I imagine it's also from some sort of fairy tale or fable, but I'm just not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10161" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T18:36:46.573" Title="What story is the idea that it's better to pick a small box rather than a large one from?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14466" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14465" CreationDate="2020-05-30T18:36:46.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's from scores of fairy tales. There is the trope where asking for one means you get given the other, but there is the trope where the less impressive looking thing is the more powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The casket itself is used in &lt;A href=&quot;https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lfb/or/orfb11.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Two Caskets&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl left the room to go to the loft, and as soon as she got outside, she found all the cats waiting for her. Walking in procession, as was their custom, they followed her into the loft, which was filled with caskets big and little, plain and splendid. She lifted up one and looked at it, and then put it down to examine another yet more beautiful. Which should she choose, the yellow or the blue, the red or the green, the gold or the silver? She hesitated long, and went first to one and then to another, when she heard the cats' voices calling: 'Take the black! take the black!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words make her look round—she had seen no black casket, but as the cats continued their cry she peered into several corners that had remained unnoticed, and at length discovered a little black box, so small and so black, that it might easily have been passed over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the consequence that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;then she placed the little casket on a small shelf in the corner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Now I may open it,' she said to herself; and unlocking it with the key which hung to its handle, she raised the lid, but started back as she did so, almost blinded by the light that burst upon her. No one would ever have guessed that that little black box could have held such a quantity of beautiful things! Rings, crowns, girdles, necklaces—all made of wonderful stones; and they shone with such brilliance that not only the stepmother and her daughter but all the people round came running to see if the house was on fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But later, another girl choose differently&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were the caskets, blue and red, green and yellow, silver and gold; and there in the corner stood a little black casket just like the one her stepsister had brought home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'If there are so many jewels in that little black thing, this big red one will hold twice the number,' she said to herself; and snatching it up she set off on her road home without even going to bid farewell to her mistress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with the consequence&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So mother and daughter carried it proudly upstairs and put it on a shelf over the fireplace; then, untying the key from the handle, they opened the box. As before, a bright light leapt out directly the lid was raised, but it did not spring from the lustre of jewels, but from hot flames, which darted along the walls and burnt up the cottage and all that was in it and the mother and daughter as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-05-30T18:36:46.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14467" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14327" CreationDate="2020-05-31T03:43:05.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This 22-line poem is constructed in iambic tetrameter with rhyming couplets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has studied Shakespeare will know the structure of his iambic pentameter and its biological association with a heartbeat. Poe’s use of iambic tetrameter is similar in nature and fitting structure for a poem that is, arguably, about life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With negatively charged diction woven with chaotic weather patterns establishes his hallmark gothic tone—but does not reach the full eerie register of his later poems such as “The Raven.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title “Alone” denotes ‘apart’, ‘separated’, ‘isolated’ carrying the negative connotations associated with such synonyms. However, the notion of “separation” might also convey “set apart” (or holiness). So even the concise title, in addition to his trademark gothic tone— gives us metaphysical possibilities—another hallmark of Poe’s work.  Connection to life and weather–his being stormy–is yet set apart as if for some sacred purpose. In Hebrew the word קֹדֶשׁ qodesh denotes not only “apartness” but also “holiness” and “sacredness” (Davidson 654). Taking this notion deeper, one could say Poe had premonitions of a deeper purpose to his life–the source or outcomes of which could prove to be holy (or unholy)—but he is set apart, i.e. “alone”, by design nonetheless. This notion being “set apart” for some special fate is framed by the title and by the end line “Of a demon in my view” (line 22) denoting the supernatural at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might read the poem as the normal adolescent struggles of the speaker’s (or Poe’s) acceptance into society—trying to fit in, as it were, or find one’s place in the world. But another possibility is that the speaker (or Poe) KNOWS early in life that he is indeed set apart (i.e. alone) for some special purpose. He is different from others—for better or worse as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From childhood’s hour I have not been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As others were—I have not seen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As others saw—I could not bring&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My passions from a common spring &lt;em&gt;(lines 1-4)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enjambment of these lines denotes the continuity of theme of his separation, aloneness,&#xA;because he “[sees]” what others do not (line 3) and his “passions” (4) (i.e. desires and cravings) come from a different source (“spring”) entirely (4). Even in his youth (“childhood”) Poe recognizes that he is drinking from a different well than his peers (or perhaps choses to do so). The word ‘spring’ as a source denotes gustatory imagery of imbibing something peculiar, “uncommon”, and begs the question of what source is he then partaking? With this question in mind, the line registers as delightfully ambiguous. He drinks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the same source I have not taken&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My sorrow—I could not awaken&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My heart to joy at the same tone—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone— &lt;em&gt;(lines 5-8)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partaking  of the same source as his “others” (arguably his peers) would not bring him joy—shifting from gustatory to sonic imagery—‘tone’—is to say that listening to what others hear would not bring him joy either—even though his own “source” (line 5) seems to bring him “sorrow” (line 6). What he loves (even though sorrowful) he loves “alone” (8)—denoting his mournful, yet “preferred” separation from others. Again, as to whether this is physical, metaphysical, or intellectual separation is not defined—yet registers his uniqueness or individuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reflecting backward in time with the transition,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then—in my childhood—in the dawn &lt;em&gt;(line 9)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with “dawn” denoting very early stage—his genesis, Poe draws on potent meteorological imagery of a “stormy life” (10) conjuring images of a wild, unpredictable, or unstable existence—over which he has no control. And for better or worse “good or ill” (11) he is [“bound”] (12) to this stormy, unpredictable, fate even as an adult and also signifies the ambiguity—the “mystery” (line 12)—of the source of his fate to which he is assigned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poe’s anaphoric use of ‘from’ in the subsequent lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the torrent, or the fountain—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the red cliff of the mountain—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the sun that ’round me roll’d&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In its autumn tint of gold—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the lightning in the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As it pass’d me flying by—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the thunder, and the storm &lt;em&gt;(lines 13-19)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;catalogue a plethora of natural elements: “torrent” (denoting perhaps rain); “fountain”; “mountains”; the “sun”; the “lightening”; “thunder”; and “storm” notably all natural (notably non-sentient sources) FROM which his fate might originate. They additionally serve as a crescendo to the final lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the cloud that took the form&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(When the rest of Heaven was blue)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of a demon in my view— &lt;em&gt;(lines 20-22)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “cloud” (20), yet another meteorological element, stands itself alone (like Poe) contrasted against the “blue” of “Heaven” registers with more ominous portent. One might think of the proverbial “dark cloud” hanging over Poe’s young head. The fact that ‘Heaven’ (21) is capitalized might carry fifth dimensional connotations as it is associated with the afterlife. It also contrasts with the word “demon” in final line which registers as conflict in the supernatural realm—the struggle between the forces of Heaven and Hell, as it were. The personification of the cloud as a demon opens numerous metaphysical possibilities. The term ‘demon’ from the classical Greek δαίμων (daimon) can denote “gods” and “divine powers”—thus signifying supernatural powers at work (Kittle 2: 2). It can also, of course, carry more nefarious connotations—as found in the New Testament (Kittle 2: 17) and other places—where they are beings to be avoided. The demon itself is merely a personification of the cloud—but this personification speaks to unseen forces at work and is distinguished from the natural elements catalogued in the previous lines—and is itself alone (set apart)—in Poe’s Heavenly gaze. The duality of the possible nature of the demon—by definition being either good or bad— punctuates Poe’s motif of ambiguity leaving us (and him) to ponder who or what is ultimately responsible for his fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Sources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidson, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kittle, Gerhard. &lt;em&gt;Theological Dictionary of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt; (10 Volumes). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lust, J. et. al. &lt;em&gt;Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T07:51:10.737" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T07:51:10.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-05-31T11:27:19.253" Score="4" ViewCount="256" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Albert Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;La chute&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Fall&lt;/em&gt;, the main character &#xA;talks about his life to an unnamed listener. In the second chapter, he &#xA;makes the following statement while talking about friends and relatives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Quant à ceux dont c’est la fonction de nous aimer, je veux dire les parents, les alliés (quelle expression !), c’est une autre chanson. Ils ont le mot qu’il faut, eux, mais c’est plutôt le mot qui fait balle ; ils téléphonent comme on tire à la carabine. Et ils visent juste. Ah ! les Bazaine ! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;As for those whose function is to love us, I mean parents, allies (what &#xA;  an expression!), that's a diffferent story [literally: song]. They &#xA;  always know the right words [literally: word], but they rather serve as &#xA;  bullets; they call like one fires a rifle. And they aim well. Ah! the &#xA;  Bazaines!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bazaines is a family with several well-known members, at least in the 19th century: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Dominique_Bazaine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre-Dominique Bazaine &#xA;(1786-1838)&lt;/a&gt;, an engineer who worked in &#xA;Russia for many years,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolphe_Bazaine-Vasseur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre-Dominique Bazaine (1809-1893), also known as Dominique Bazaine-Vasseur&lt;/a&gt;, an engineer, son of the above,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Achille_Bazaine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;François Achille Bazaine (1811-1888)&lt;/a&gt;, an army officer, youngest son of Pierre-Dominique Bazaine (1786-1838),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Albert_Bazaine-Hayter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georges Albert Bazaine-Hayter (1843-1914)&lt;/a&gt;, an army officer (and &#xA;general), son of Pierre-Dominique Bazaine (1809-1893).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is not clear to me what the narrator in &lt;em&gt;La chute&lt;/em&gt; has in mind when he says &quot;Ah! les Bazaine!&quot; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;NB&lt;/strong&gt;: Please note that &quot;les Bazaine&quot; is a correct plural form and not an error. When you refer to a family, you use the plural &quot;les&quot;, but you don't modify the family name itself. Hence &quot;les Bazaine&quot;, without adding an &quot;s&quot; to the family name. So I assume the narrator is not referring only to François Achille Bazaine, who was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Achille_Bazaine#Trial&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sentenced to death for treason&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T13:18:57.510" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T14:48:22.173" Title="Meaning of «Ah! les Bazaine» in La chute / The Fall" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14471" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14472" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" Score="0" Body="Questions about Albert Camus's 1956 novel 'The Fall' (French: 'La chute'). Use this tag with the tags [albert-camus] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" LastActivityDate="2020-05-31T12:07:05.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14476" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T12:04:46.830" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is about a book that comes out of nowhere (the author is dead and connected to cults). Whenever a person reads the book they believe they are a character within that book and they attempt to convert people&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I remember it having a three word title that is the same as the above mentioned book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was part of a trilogy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The cover of the first book had a Jester. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I cannot remember an author or publication date, but it was after 2010 as far as I know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10172" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T16:08:00.483" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T10:24:20.397" Title="Trying to find a Horror book involving a book that when read the reader believes they are a character in that book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T17:07:52.217" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;“The astronaut in Isolation” by Rosalind Morris is a poem that was published on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-04-30-unlocked-poems-for-critical-times-part-nine/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daily Maverick&lt;/em&gt; on 30 April 2020&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;It's a new poem and there is no interpretation of this anywhere on the web. I would like the poem's symbolism and the spaces in lines 9 &amp;amp; 10 (quoting lines 7-10 here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the sound of leafstorm,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dreams of turning his face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to the sun,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    and       for a moment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10175" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T21:44:19.530" Title="Outline the symbolism of “The astronaut in Isolation” by Rosalind Morris" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;rosalind-c-morris&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14478" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://anthropology.columbia.edu/content/rosalind-c-morris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rosalind C. Morris&lt;/a&gt; should not be confused with the writer and playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://rosalindwriter.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rosalind Morris&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14479" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Rosalind C. Morris, professor at the Department of Anthropology at the Columbia University in the City of New York." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" LastActivityDate="2020-06-01T21:46:45.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-01T21:59:23.420" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the most striking moments in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; is the scene in which Leontes's wife Hermione, whom both he and the audience thought dead, turns out to be alive (Act V, scene 3). The play also contains another recognition scene: in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, when Leontes finds out that he has an heir whom he had also thought dead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third Gentleman&lt;/strong&gt;: (...) that which you hear you'll swear you&#xA;  see, there is such unity in the proofs. The mantle&#xA;  of Queen Hermione's, her jewel about the neck of it,&#xA;  the letters of Antigonus found with it which they&#xA;  know to be his character, the majesty of the&#xA;  creature in resemblance of the mother, the affection&#xA;  of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding,&#xA;  and many other evidences proclaim her with all&#xA;  certainty to be the king's daughter. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Third Gentleman&lt;/strong&gt;: Then have you lost a sight, which was to be seen,&#xA;  cannot be spoken of. There might you have beheld one&#xA;  joy crown another, so and in such manner that it&#xA;  seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their&#xA;  joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes,&#xA;  holding up of hands, with countenances of such&#xA;  distraction that they were to be known by garment,&#xA;  not by favour. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike the scene in which Leontes discovers that his wife is still alive, the scene in which he learns his daughter is still alive is merely reported, not shown. Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T04:48:46.587" Title="Why is the scene in which Leontes recognises his daughter merely reported?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15280" CreationDate="2020-06-01T23:52:53.140" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &quot;problem play&quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is largely inspired by Robert Greene's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandosto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pandosto&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; written a few decades earlier. One of the major differences between &lt;em&gt;Pandosto&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; is in the ending between the jealous king and his wife accused of adultery. In &lt;em&gt;Pandosto&lt;/em&gt;, the wife (Bellaria) truly dies and her repentant husband (Pandosto) commits suicide. Shakespeare (uncharacteristically?) changed the ending to a happier one, wherein Hermione's apparent death was revealed to be a ruse and she is reconciled with Leontes after the surreal scene of a supposed statue coming to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any known inspiration for the statue revival scene?&lt;/strong&gt; Whether it's interpreted as Hermione having lived in hiding for sixteen years, or as Paulina performing magic to revive her, it's surely one of the more striking and unusual scenes in Shakespeare plays. Did he take this aspect of the story from something else besides &lt;em&gt;Pandosto&lt;/em&gt;, or is it (as far as we know) original?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T10:10:37.120" Title="Any inspiration for the statue revival scene in Shakespeare's &quot;The Winter's Tale&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14482" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14480" CreationDate="2020-06-02T00:09:16.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Having both scenes dramatized -- as in &lt;I&gt;Pericles&lt;/I&gt;, where the reunions with both daughter and wife appear on stage -- confuses the story by having two climactic scenes in rapid succession.  By having only one, &lt;I&gt;Winter's Tale&lt;/I&gt; rises to a single unified climax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-06-02T04:48:46.587" LastActivityDate="2020-06-02T04:48:46.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3058" CreationDate="2020-06-02T12:38:20.103" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paul Simon was in South Africa during 1985 and 1986. There was a boycott against South Africa because of apartheid. For South Africans, the word associations arising from ‘fingerprints’ are typically police, passbooks and apartheid. The Myth of Fingerprints immediately suggests a political song with an anti-apartheid theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the cornerstone apartheid laws related to the passbook. A black man was always obliged to carry his passbook with him. It was an identity document with photograph, fingerprints and other information. Without a passbook you could be arrested and sent back to your homeland. The situation changed on July 23, 1986 when the South African government lifted the requirement to carry passbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The topic of passbooks was newsworthy for many months, especially on talk radio.&#xA;John Berks was active while Paul Simon was doing his South African project. John was a pioneer of talk radio. His job as a talk show host was to engender opinions, instil debate and communicate. The job was risky because there was no free speech in South Africa. He vigorously defended his right to say what he wished while on air and regularly offended listeners from all walks of life. Given the political situation and the censorship laws, he needed to be outside the country to do his job.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John worked for Capital Radio 604, a radio station that broadcast to listeners in South Africa from transmitters located in Port St Johns, Transkei using Medium Wave (AM) on 603 kHz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Port St Johns is the border town on the Indian Ocean coast that is over the mountains. John Berks lived there. At the border post your fingerprints are checked. Once the system of passbooks was scrapped the border post was abandoned and the whole reason for homelands such as the Transkei disappeared. Words like 'war' and 'army' are accurate. In the 1980s South Africa deployed the army to control civil unrest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the Myth of Fingerprints suggests a future scenario in South Africa where there is equality before the law for all people regardless of the fingerprints in their passbook.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10179" LastEditorUserId="10179" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T14:46:05.843" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T14:46:05.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14461" CreationDate="2020-06-03T04:50:32.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;True, Leontes's jealousy and Othello's jealousy intensify in different ways, but while Leontes's jealousy does manifest suddenly, it also surges with his insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your suggestion about the possibility of Leontes's jealousy occurring before the events of the play is perhaps unanswerable.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polixenes mentions events that are foregrounded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We were (fair Queen) &lt;br&gt; Two Lads, that thought there was no&#xA;  more behind, &lt;br&gt; But such a day tomorrow, as today,&lt;br&gt; And&#xA;  to be Boy eternal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; (1.2 lines 62-65)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We were as twyn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp; &amp;nbsp;&#xA;  (º twinned) &lt;br&gt;  And did bleat the one at th' other: what we&#xA;  chang'd&lt;br&gt; Was Innocence, for Innocence: We knew not &lt;br&gt; The&#xA;  Doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd &lt;br&gt; of any that did:&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; (1.2 lines 67-71)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leontes mentions Herminone's wedding vows at lines 101-105. The wedding between Leontes and Hermione could have been at most 23 or 24 years preceding the beginning of the play.  This is evidenced by lines 153-156 where Leontes states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Looking on the lines &lt;br&gt; Of my Boys face, me thoughts I did&#xA;  recoil&lt;br&gt; Twenty three years...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; (1.2 lines 153-155)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the preceding passage, Shakespeare is referring specifically to Leontes's delusion of seeing himself 23 years younger as he looks on the boy.  (This idea is echoed in the Sonnets) It also gives readers a glimpse into events that are foregrounded.  The question remains of what Mamillius's age is.  If Mamillius is 23 and Leontes is 46, we might presume that Leontes and Hermione were married at least 23 years ago.  The difficulty with this reading is that Mamillius is very immature for a 23 year old.  It seems more likely his age is about eight years old and Leontes is 31 at the beginning of the play.  In this scenario, Leontes is about 23 years old when he and Hermione are married.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the progression of Leontes's jealousy and insanity, this instance &#xA; of Leontes's mental state (when he hallucinates he is seeing himself younger) occurs after his jealousy is initially triggered.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the same scene, Leontes rants his with a jealous imagination, where previously, he could show a courtly grace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Is whispering nothing? &lt;br&gt; Is leaning Cheek to Cheek? is meeting&#xA;  noses &lt;br&gt; Kissing with in-side lip? stopping the Career of Laughter,&#xA;  with a sigh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;(&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; 1.2 lines 283-286)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leontes's insane jealousy increases steadily and quickly causing him to believe facts that cannot have happened.  In the Second Act, despite have earlier acknowledged that his son looks exactly like him.  (It is said of the father and son that they &quot;are almost as alike as Eggs.&quot; &lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; 1.2 lines 129-130)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leontes now believes that that Polixenes is the father. (&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; 2.1 lines 60-63) &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer your question, the exact moment of the onset of Leontes's jelousy is when he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Too hot, too hot:&lt;br&gt; To mingle friendship far, is mingling&#xA;  bloods.&lt;br&gt; I have &lt;em&gt;Tremor Cordis&lt;/em&gt; on me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;WT&lt;/em&gt; 1.2 lines 108-110)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The stage direction, &quot;[&lt;em&gt;She gives her hand to Polixenes.&lt;/em&gt;]&quot; which precedes the quotation is not in the First Folio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The line numbers given are approximate and follow the Bantam edition, and note the quoted text is my edit from a facsimile of the First Folio.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastEditorUserId="10183" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T21:52:48.083" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T21:52:48.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-03T16:33:47.187" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Anne of Green Gables&lt;/em&gt; by L. M. Montgomery, Marilla criticizes Anne for talking too much:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Well, I guess I'll light the lamp and get to work,&quot; said Marilla. &quot;I see plainly that you don't want to hear what Miss Stacy had to say. You're &#xA;  more interested in the sound of your own tongue than in anything else.&quot; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Oh, indeed, Marilla, I do want to hear it,&quot; cried Anne contritely. &quot; I won't say another word — not one. I know I talk too much, but I am really trying to overcome it, and although I say far too much, yet if you only knew how many things I want to say and don't, you'd &lt;strong&gt;give me some credit&lt;/strong&gt; for it. Please tell me, Marilla.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Anne mean by &quot;give me some credit&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10184" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T16:48:49.403" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T18:58:41.790" Title="Meaning of &quot;Give me some credit&quot; in &quot;Anne of Green Gables&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;l-m-montgomery&gt;&lt;anne-of-green-gables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14488" CreationDate="2020-06-03T18:58:41.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne is saying that she is been trying to talk less and that if Marilla had been aware of her efforts, she would have expressed appreciation or possibly given her praise for it (=given her credit for it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For another example of &quot;giving someone credit&quot; in a different context, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/learningenglish/spanish/features/the-english-we-speak/ep-150818&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Give me credit&lt;/a&gt; on BBC Learning English (18 August 2015).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T18:58:41.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14490" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14491" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" Score="0" Body="L[ucy] M[aud] Montgomery (1874–1942), Canadian novelist, best known for &quot;Anne of Green Gables&quot; (1908)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T19:20:46.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14492" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14493" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" Score="0" Body="&quot;Anne of Green Gables&quot; (1908), a novel by L. M. Montgomery. Use this tag with the [l-m-montgomery] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T19:21:23.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14494" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14495" CreationDate="2020-06-03T20:21:41.110" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n97/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Song of the Flying Fish&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing a group of neighbours, a collector, a priest, a biologist, a bank manager and a traveller, that usually got together in each other's house saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That afternoon, one stranger had indeed broken into the magic circle: a hatchet-faced fellow with fierce tufts of eyebrows and moustache, and &lt;strong&gt;so shabbily dressed that he must have been a millionaire or a duke&lt;/strong&gt; if he had really (as was alleged) come down to do business with the old collector. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can he be &quot;&lt;strong&gt;so shabbily dressed&lt;/strong&gt;&quot; and &quot;&lt;strong&gt;must have been a millionaire&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;?! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there is something wrong in the text? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-03T20:26:18.243" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T22:14:48.717" Title="How can he be &quot;so shabbily dressed&quot; and &quot;must have been a millionaire&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14494" CreationDate="2020-06-03T22:14:48.717" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extremely wealthy (or powerful) people can get away with offending against conventions that other people are bound by, because other people don't want to offend them.  Also, an ordinary person wanted to do business with the collector would have had to show that he was taking the matter seriously by dressing properly, but either a duke or a millionaire could show that just by showing up to make the deal personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-03T22:14:48.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14496" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14586" CreationDate="2020-06-04T08:18:53.277" Score="0" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Zero to One: Notes on Start Ups, or How to Build the Future&lt;/em&gt;, Peter Thiel writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: &quot;&lt;strong&gt;What important truth do very few people agree with you on?&lt;/strong&gt;&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain what was Peter's answer to this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10187" LastEditorUserId="10187" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T04:15:15.890" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T15:48:00.593" Title="Meaning of &quot;What important truth...?&quot; in &quot;Zero to One&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;peter-thiel&gt;&lt;zero-to-one&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14497" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14498" CreationDate="2020-06-04T14:26:40.027" Score="6" ViewCount="2411" Body="&lt;p&gt;During Simon's encounter with the Lord of the Flies, the Lord of the Flies says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close! I’m the reason why it’s no go? Why&#xA;  things are what they are?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the general idea of the sentence, that Simon is the only one who realizes that the Beast is inside the boys, but why are there so many question marks?  It makes sense for &quot;You knew, didn't you?&quot;, but for &quot;I'm part of you?&quot;, &quot;I'm the reason why it's no go?&quot;, and &quot;Why things are what they are?&quot; it seems odd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have an idea as to why Golding included these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10189" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T04:22:04.750" Title="Why is there an odd use of question marks in Lord of the Flies?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14497" CreationDate="2020-06-04T16:56:38.457" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;With appropriate vocal inflection, any statement can be turned into a question. Typically, this would have been done by ending with a rising vocal pitch, rather than a falling one. So he is asking the listener whether they agree with a series of statements, in an attempt to conciliate them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2020-06-04T16:56:38.457" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14499" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-05T01:41:29.233" Score="4" ViewCount="221" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Othello is brought before an “ad hoc” court of law for surreptitiously marring Desdemona, Brabantio essentially accuses him of using “witchcraft” as a means of seducing his daughter suggesting,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She is abused . . . By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks . .&#xA;  . Sans witchcraft could not. (1.3.60-64)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Othello emphatically denies any witchcraft and claims his amazing stories are the only &quot;charm&quot; he used. However, later Othello admits that the handkerchief he had given Desdemona (his first gift to her) was given to his mother by a “charmer” and was actually used by his own mother to “subdue [his] father” (3.4.58ff).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Othello is convincing in his defense of not using witchcraft to woo Desdemona, this story of the Egyptian woman in Act 3 makes it appear that Othello was lying previously. Was his defense a harmless inexactitude; or was he (understandably) lying to save himself from the allegation of using witchcraft to charm Desdemona? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bate, Jonathan and Rasmussen, Eric. &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;. The Modern Library, 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-05T09:00:18.567" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T17:47:03.073" Title="Is Othello being deceptive when he says, “This only is the witchcraft I have used” (Act 1.3.184)" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;othello&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5425" CreationDate="2020-06-05T03:48:46.093" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;At present, Amazon seems to have two annotated versions: one which is published in paperback (ISBN-10: 1980425523; ISBN-13: 978-1980425526), and one which is published for Kindle (ASIN: B075MGR281).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10194" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T03:48:46.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14497" CreationDate="2020-06-05T04:22:04.750" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Speaking with a rising inflection or turning everything into a question is known as uptalk or upspeech or, to get technical, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;high rising terminal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To some people, it projects uncertainty, but according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://lifehacker.com/uptalk-actually-serves-a-powerful-purpose-1795688458&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some researchers&lt;/a&gt;, there is a conversational purpose to it as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;it invites the listener to listen actively, to nod or confirm, much like adding “you know?” or “right?” to a sentence. It also serves a more basic function of “floor-holding,” preventing interruption by indicating there’s more to come; it turns a period into a semicolon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a normal conversation, it would seem that the speaker is trying to elicit agreement from the listener. In this case, however, the speaker is a hallucination of the listener, so Simon has no choice but to agree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T04:22:04.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14502" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14476" CreationDate="2020-06-05T10:24:20.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Robin Jarvis' &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8713020-dancing-jax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dancing Jax&lt;/a&gt;, first in the Dancing Jax trilogy. From Goodreads,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, a group of teenagers have decided to hang out in the old haunted house. Dismissing the fears of the others, their leader Jezza goes down into the basement… and comes back up with a children’s book, full of strange and colourful tales of a playing-card world, a fairytale world, full of Jacks, Queens and Kings, unicorns and wolves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the book is no fairytale. Written by Austerly Fellows, a mysterious turn-of-the-century occultist, it just might be the gateway to something terrifying…and awfully final. As the children and teenagers of the town are swept up by its terrible power, swept into its seductive world, something has begun that could usher in hell on earth. Soon, the only people standing in its way are a young boy with a sci-fi obsession, and his dad – an unassuming maths teacher called Martin…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7466" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T10:24:20.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14499" CreationDate="2020-06-05T10:25:46.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.3.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 4, lines 65-67&lt;/a&gt;, Othello says about the handkerchief:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...): she [Othello's mother], dying, gave it me;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  And bid me, when my fate would have me wive,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  To give it her. I did so: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it is possible to argue that Othello gave the handkerchief to Desdemona only after she had married him or after she had consented to marry him. In either case, there would be no evidence that the handkerchief was used in the seduction of Desdemona.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it may be difficult to pinpoint at exactly what point in the play Othello would have given Desdemona the handkerchief: just before the beginning of the play, before the &quot;trial&quot;, at some point between the trial and the departure for Cyprus? The timeline between the last scene in Venice (Act I, scene 3) and the arrival of various characters, who travelled on different ships, on Cyprus seems a bit messy; this should be treated as &quot;dramatic time&quot; rather than literal time in a consistent fictional universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T17:47:03.073" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T17:47:03.073" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14505" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-05T12:12:25.097" Score="4" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Close reading&lt;/a&gt; discusses the history of the concept and the influence of I. A. Richards and others on the New Criticism: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;American New Critics in the 1930s and 1940s anchored their views in similar fashion [i.e. focusing on language and form, like I. A. Richards], and promoted close reading as a means of understanding that the autonomy of the work (often a poem) mattered more than anything else, including authorial intention, the cultural contexts of reception, and most broadly, ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Criticism&lt;/a&gt; points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Close reading (or &lt;em&gt;explication de texte&lt;/em&gt;) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United States, aesthetic concerns and the study of modern poets were the province of non-academic essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. The New Criticism changed this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Mark Pennington (&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.penningtonpublishing.com/reading/close-reading-dont-read-too-closely/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Close Reading: Don’t Read Too Closely&lt;/a&gt;, 16 August 2017),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The New Critics first coined the term &lt;em&gt;close reading&lt;/em&gt; to describe this process of text dependent literary analysis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it would seem that the New Critics coined the term &quot;close reading&quot; (in English) or were the first to use it in the context of literary analysis, but I have not been able to find out which person did this, or which publication by the New Critics first used this term. Would it be possible to find which publication in the area of literary criticism first used this term?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T21:02:43.783" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T21:02:43.783" Title="Who introduced the term close reading in the context of literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;close-reading&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14506" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14240" CreationDate="2020-06-05T15:10:41.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think there is a special reason. Just the language convenience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, there would be no names at all. Like a traditional scary story, it would be abstract. &quot;Once upon a time there was a little girl...&quot; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, with more than 2-3 related characters it quickly becomes messy. There is a three-generation family in the story, plus a young man. The girl, grandma and grandpa are unambiguous. Incidentally, these are normal and common adresses for people in Russian. However, it is not normal to address someone as &quot;man&quot; or &quot;woman&quot;. There are not many workarounds that wouldn't be awkward or sound odd in the context. It is common to say &quot;young man&quot;, but this designator is already taken by another character, and there is no equivalent in Russian for a woman [1]. Besides, the lack of definite article in Russian makes references a bit more ambiguous and/or repetitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Addressing as &quot;father&quot; and &quot;mother&quot; would be ambiguous in a family with grandparents. The easiest thing is just to name them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Technically, this is constructed as &quot;young human [masculine]&quot; in Russian, and it is not possible to say &quot;human&quot; (человек) in feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastActivityDate="2020-06-05T15:10:41.517" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14507" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14499" CreationDate="2020-06-06T02:11:21.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the four major tragedies, &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; is the play most grounded in reality.  Yes, the handkerchief is a family heirloom, and Othello honors his dying mother's request to give the handkerchief to his wife when he decides to marry.  This doesn't necessarily mean that Othello believes in enchantments. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems a misinterpretation to view Othello, a general to the Duke, as knowingly dabbling in enchantments to win Desdemona, who is very devoted to Othello.  Even when the handkerchief is taken by Emilia, we can presume that Desdemona remains faithful to Othello.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before Brabantio accuses Othello of using enchantments, the father accuses Othello of theft.  The escalation of the charges in public is the histrionics of a man beside himself with grief.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brabantio has said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...For my particular grief &lt;br&gt; Is of so flood-gate and o'rebaring Nature&#xA;  &lt;br&gt; That it engulfs, and swallows other sorrows, &lt;br&gt; and it is still&#xA;  itself.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oth.&lt;/em&gt; 1.3.57-60&lt;/code&gt;   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Othello's defense should be understood as direct and honest.  He is not telling a &quot;harmless inexactitude&quot; nor is he in a circumstance that he would need to lie.  After all, it is a fact that Othello has married Desdemona. Brabantio, once he sees that Desdemona is safe and happy, is quick to accept Othello as his son-in-law. Othello's defense is his life story, which is remarkable, and Desdemona is enchanted to hear it.   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Othello's defense should be viewed in it's full context at &lt;code&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oth.&lt;/em&gt; 1.3.130-171 &lt;/code&gt; in the Bantam edition, &lt;br&gt; &#xA;or at &lt;code&gt; &lt;em&gt;Oth.&lt;/em&gt; 1.3.120-179 &lt;/code&gt; in the Arden Edition.&#xA;Preceding the line in the discussion question, Othello says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She loved me for the dangers that I passed,&lt;br&gt; And I loved her that&#xA;  she did pity them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines are, of course, very ironic when one knows how the play turns out.  But Othello could not have foreseen the outcome, and there is no reason to think that in Act One, he is lying.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastEditorUserId="10183" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T03:45:44.010" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T03:45:44.010" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T10:24:08.860" Score="-1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301051h.html#chap10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume I of &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Arthur Conan Doyle quotes a letter from Dion Boucicault describing a performance by &quot;the Davenport brothers and Mr W. Fay&quot; on October 11, 1864.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How had Mr. Fay's coat left him while his hands were bound tightly?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The next part of the séance was performed in the dark. One of the&#xA;  Messrs. Davenport and Mr. Fay seated themselves amongst us. Two&#xA;  ropes were thrown at their feet, and in two minutes and a half they were&#xA;  tied hand and foot, &lt;strong&gt;their hands behind their backs bound tightly to their&#xA;  chairs&lt;/strong&gt;, and their chairs bound to an adjacent table. While this process&#xA;  was going on, the guitar rose from the table and swung or floated round&#xA;  the room and over the heads of the party, and slightly touching some.&#xA;  Now a phosphoric light shot from side to side over our heads; the laps&#xA;  and hands and shoulders of several were simultaneously touched, struck,&#xA;  or pawed by hands, the guitar meanwhile sailing round the room, now&#xA;  near the ceiling, and then scuffling on the head and shoulders of some&#xA;  luck less Wight. The bells whisked here and there, and a light thrumming&#xA;  was maintained on the violin. The two tambourines seemed to roll hither&#xA;  and thither on the floor, now shaking violently, and now visiting the&#xA;  knees and hands of our circle—all these foregoing actions, audible or&#xA;  tangible, being simultaneous. Mr. Rideout, holding a tambourine,&#xA;  requested it might be plucked from his hand; it was almost&#xA;  instantaneously taken from him. At the same time, Lord Bury made a&#xA;  similar request, and a forcible attempt to pluck a tambourine from his&#xA;  grasp was made which he resisted. Mr. Fay then asked that his coat&#xA;  should be removed. We heard instantly a violent twitch, and here&#xA;  occurred the most remarkable fact. A light was struck before &lt;strong&gt;the coat had&#xA;  quite, left Mr. Fay's person&lt;/strong&gt;, and it was seen quitting him, plucked off him&#xA;  upwards. It flew up to the chandelier, where it hung for a moment and&#xA;  then fell to the ground. Mr. Fay was seen meanwhile bound hand and&#xA;  foot as before. One of our party now divested himself of his coat, and it&#xA;  was placed on the table. The light was extinguished and this coat was&#xA;  rushed on to Mr. Fay's back with equal rapidity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastEditorUserId="10201" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T11:14:32.643" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T11:55:21.387" Title="How had Mr. Fay's coat left him while his hands were bound tightly in Arthur Conan Doyle's &quot;The History of Spiritualism&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14509" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14508" CreationDate="2020-06-06T11:55:21.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boucicault’s letter says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next part of the séance was performed &lt;strong&gt;in the dark&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it is clear from the way the letter is phrased that during this performance the spectators were unable to see the performers. For example, near the end, Boucicault writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Fay was &lt;strong&gt;seen&lt;/strong&gt; meanwhile bound hand and foot &lt;strong&gt;as before&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;whereas, if he had been able to watch Mr. Fay throughout the performance, he would have written something more like, “Mr. Fay remained bound hand and foot throughout”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the explanation is that the three performers did not remain bound, but escaped from the ropes, performed various tricks in the dark, and resumed the appearance of being bound before the light was struck. How could they have done this? Well, escapologists have various “rope-tie” techniques that allow them to give the illusion of being tightly bound, while in fact being able to quickly escape the knot and resume it later. The techniques involve taking up slack in the rope, and concealing it somehow to give the illusion of tautness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davenport_brothers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ira Davenport&lt;/a&gt; gave an interview to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harry Houdini&lt;/a&gt; and told him how the brothers had worked their trick:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We talked far into the night, I with notebook in hand, he with a long piece of rope initiating me into the mysteries of the real “Davenport tie,” which converted thousands to a belief in Spiritualism and was the genesis of of the rope-tying stunts which gave such a stimulus to Spiritualistic discussion in connection with the brothers. Though many attempts were made to imitate it, to the best of my knowledge and belief, no one, not even the magical fraternity, was ever able to detect the method used in these famous rope tricks, the secret being guarded so carefully that Ira Davenport’s children did not know it. I have tested it and for uses such as they made of it I consider it one of the best rope ties in existence to-day, and it is only because I want it on record when I eventually pass to the Beyond that I am explaining to the public the modus operandi which was as follows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Built into either side of the cabinet used by the Davenports was a bench through which two holes had been bored a little distance apart. The Brothers seated themselves on these benches, and opposite one another, with their feet squarely on the floor in front of them. The end of a rope was passed around the legs of one of the brothers, close up by the knees, and tied. The rope was then wound around the legs several times, fastened at the ankles, the remaining portion carried straight across the cabinet to the other brother’s ankles, fastened, wound about his legs and tied at the knees. A shorter piece of rope was, then tied to each of their wrists with the knots lying next to the pulse. These ropes were threaded through the holes and the wrists drawn down to the benches, and the ends of the ropes fastened to the ankles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their method of releasing themselves was comparatively simple. While one extended his feet the other drew his in thus securing slack enough in the wrist ropes to permit working their hands out of the loops. The second brother was released by reversing the action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the demonstrations were completed the brothers slipped their hands back into the loops from which they had drawn them, placed their feet in the original positions and were ready to he examined. When the cabinet was opened the ropes appeared as taut as when put on by the committee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Harry Houdini (1924). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n39/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Magician Among The Spirits&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 20–22&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they had a dark enough room then darkness could substitute for the closed cabinet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T11:55:21.387" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14510" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T14:20:01.270" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;Ministry of Angels&amp;quot; refer to in Volume I of &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur Conan Doyle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judge Edmonds was pointed at in the streets as a crazy Spiritualist. Wealthy merchants were compelled to assert their claims to be considered sane and maintain their commercial rights by the most firm and determined action. Professional men and tradesmen were reduced to the limits of ruin, and a relentless persecution, originated by the Press and maintained by the pulpit, directed the full flow of its evil tides against the cause and its representatives. Many of the houses where circles were being held were disturbed by crowds who would gather together after nightfall and with yells, cries, whistles and occasional breaking of windows try to molest the quiet investigators in their unholy work of &amp;quot;waking the dead,&amp;quot; as one of the papers piously denominated the act of seeking for &lt;strong&gt;the &amp;quot;Ministry of Angels&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301051h.html#chap10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter X. — The Davenport Brothers, in &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10201" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T13:47:15.417" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T13:47:15.417" Title="What does &quot;Ministry of Angels&quot; refer to in &quot;The History of Spiritualism&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14511" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14510" CreationDate="2020-06-06T15:41:18.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In that context &quot;ministry&quot; must mean the original meaning -- the action of ministering, or attending to the needs of, someone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, while the crowds were angry over the impious act of disturbing the dead (which is indeed the original sense of &quot;necromancy&quot;), the paper reframed it as piously seeking out the help of angels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T15:41:18.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14512" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T18:53:29.710" Score="2" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guy de Maupassant published his short stories and novellas in newspapers and periodicals such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Figaro&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Figaro&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Blas_(periodical)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gil Blas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Gaulois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Gaulois&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27%C3%89cho_de_Paris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Écho de Paris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; before they were published in book form. &lt;em&gt;Le Figaro&lt;/em&gt; has always been known as rather conservative (right to centre-right on the political spectrum); &lt;em&gt;Gil Blas&lt;/em&gt; seems to have provided entertainment for a wide readership (and published works by many well-known authors such as Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Hector Malot, Octave Mirbeau, Jules Renard, Jules Vallès, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam and Émile Zola); &lt;em&gt;Le Gaulois&lt;/em&gt; was well-informed and conservative, and had many readers among the nobility and the rich bourgeosie; &lt;em&gt;L'Écho de Paris&lt;/em&gt; was initially conservative and patriotic but later became close to the French Social Party.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that these newspapers had different readerships with different tastes and moral orientations, did Maupassant adapt the stories he published in them to those different readerships? What I am looking for are differences in both style and content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T19:07:23.030" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T19:07:23.030" Title="Did Maupassant adapt the style and content of his stories to the newspapers that published them?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14513" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-06T19:04:24.580" Score="6" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question about the opening lines of the second scene in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Act 1, scene 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pol.&lt;/em&gt; Nine Changes of the Watry-Starre hath been &lt;br&gt; The Sheppards Note since we have left our Throne&lt;br&gt; Without a Burthen: Time as long&#xA;  againe &lt;br&gt; Would be fill'd up (my Brother) with our Thanks,&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This follows the First Follio closely. I have rendered &quot;haue&quot; as &quot;have&quot;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &quot;Nine changes to the watery star&quot; mean?  The watery star is glossed as meaning moon because it affects the tides.  I'm guessing that Shakespeare's coined this, or was this a more usual way to refer to the moon?  But later in the play, &quot;the moon&quot; is referenced without figurative language. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Astrological references appear throughout the play.   The implication being — it is the stars that are causing Leontes's unusual behavior.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had thought that the phrase meant it was nine nights that had passed (nine phases of the moon), but another interpretation reads this as being nine months is also possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastEditorUserId="10183" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T21:53:43.633" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T21:53:43.633" Title="In The Winters Tale what does &quot;Nine changes of the Watery-Star&quot; mean? Does it mean nine nights or nine months?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14513" CreationDate="2020-06-06T21:38:01.317" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be precise, these lines are from Act 1, Scene 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “wat'ry-star” is a metaphor for moon and in this context, the line means nine months. This metaphor also carries sexual connotations referring to nine months (approximately) of gestation for a human child.  It also serves to denote the motif of time—i.e. the importance of time— throughout the rest of &lt;em&gt;The Winter’s Tale.&lt;/em&gt; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gibson, Rex, et. al. &lt;em&gt;Cambridge School Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press, 1998.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2020-06-06T22:02:42.177" LastActivityDate="2020-06-06T22:02:42.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-07T02:26:30.843" Score="3" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;I went through Tolstoy's story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2061/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;God Sees the Truth, But Waits&lt;/a&gt; but I wonder what the title suggests and how it suits the story in regard to the protagonist Aksionov. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good innocent man is wrongly imprisoned on charge of a murder, punished for 26 years and is made to lose everything and his entire life for no fault or crime of his, but only on the basis of evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, the truth comes to light in the end when the actual murderer Makar Semyonich confesses it and the order for the release of Aksionov comes but Aksionov is dead by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that God knows the truth that Makar committed the murder but waits to punish him and he gets punished even if delayed. So, the title of the story sounds suitable in the case of Makar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the case of the protagonist Aksionov, God knows the truth that he is innocent but He made him suffer so long - 26 years - in prison &amp;amp; lose his entire life and why his life is taken away in the climax when he is granted release.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of Aksionov, what truth did God see and what did God wait for - whether to bring to light his innocence and restore the life with his family that he deserved or to end the life of such a good and innocent man so cruelly and unjustly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is Leo Tolstoy trying to convey through this story and what does the title suggest in regard to Aksionov?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really don't understand how to relate the title and the plight of Aksionov and I am baffled about the title and the climax of the story. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T11:54:18.933" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T22:32:53.630" Title="Relationship between title and protagonist's fate in Tolstoy's God Sees the Truth, but Waits" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14521" CreationDate="2020-06-07T08:10:59.297" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the suicide note of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, he talks about a story by Régnier:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;No one has yet written candidly of the mental state of one who is to commit suicide. This may be due to the self-respect of the suicide victim, or perhaps a lack of psychological interest in his own state of mind. In this, my final letter to you, I will endeavour to make clear my mental state. But even if I should fail to convey my motives to you accurately, I will still be satisfied in the attempt. In one of his short stories, &lt;strong&gt;Régnier depicts a man who commits suicide, but does not himself understand for what reason.&lt;/strong&gt; You can find many motivations for suicide in the police section of the newspaper, from fiscal hardship or ill health to mental anguish. In my experience these do not represent the totality of motives, but only speak of the journey towards the true reason. Those who commit suicide are for the most part as Régnier depicted, unaware of their real motivation. Suicide, as with all our actions, involves a complexity of motives. In my case, I am driven by, at the very least, a vague sense of unease: some indistinct sense of unease towards my future. It is possible that you will not be able to take me at my word. Ten years of experience have taught me that for those who are not my close and constant acquaintances, my words dissipate like a song in the wind. So I would not blame you…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which Régnier and which story or text is Akutagawa referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10204" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T16:23:31.583" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T06:58:47.623" Title="In what story of Régnier does a man commit suicide without understanding the reason?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14518" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14513" CreationDate="2020-06-07T10:22:11.503" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted three annotated editions of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;; they confirm the meaning &quot;nine months&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ernest Schanzer's edition (Penguin, 1969) provides the following endnote for the first two-and-a-half lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Polixenes has been the guest of Leontes for nine months, time enough to make it possible for him to be Perdita's father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another endnote explains that &quot;watery star&quot; refers to the moon (without explaining why).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen Orgel (The Oxford Shakespeare / World's Classics, 1996) provides the following explanation for &quot;changes ... star&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;changes of the moon (&quot;watery&quot; because of its association with the tides), hence months&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J. H. P. Pafford's edition (The Arden Shakespeare, second series, 1963) provides the fullest explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The shepherd has recorded the passage of nine months. This period is a minimum to make it possible that Polixenes could be the father of Hermione's child. It can also be regarded as a maximum for reasonable holiday absence from a throne and family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After explaining the connection between the moon and water, Pafford also adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Although associated with Diana and therefore with chastity, the moon is also associated with fertility and with growth and decay (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T10:22:11.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14470" CreationDate="2020-06-07T14:48:22.173" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though only &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Achille_Bazaine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;François Achille &#xA;Bazaine&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;was accused of treason (and sentenced for it), it appears that his &#xA;family name became a synonym for treason. Bazaine surrendered an army &#xA;of 180,000 to the Prussians in October 1870.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/parislivr00flougoog/page/n135/mode/2up?q=%22les+Bazaine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paris &#xA;livré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1871, Gustave Flourens already used the phrase &quot;les Bazaine&quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;(...) ce gouvernement de traîtres dont il révélait chaque &#xA;  perfidie, combattant dans chacune de ses pages les Bazaine et les &#xA;  Trochu, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are part of a chapter entitled &quot;La trahison de Bazaine &#xA;cachée aux Parisiens par Jules Favre&quot; (&quot;Bazaine's treason hidden from &#xA;the Parisians by Jules Favre&quot;); the text criticizes &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Favre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Favre&lt;/a&gt;, vice-president &#xA;after the capitulation in the Franco-Prussian war, rather than Bazaine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An unidentified author wrote in &#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sabaudiarevuehi00unkngoog/page/n316/mode/2up?q=%22les+Bazaine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sabaudia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1872,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Ce Bazaine de l'époque (...) s'enfuit méprisé de tous. (...) En &#xA;  1870, l'Als[ace et] la Lorraine sont le fruit de cette trahison; &#xA;  (...). &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Mais les Bazaine sont rare, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;That Bazaine of those days (...) fled under general contempt. (...)&#xA;  In 1870, Alsace and Lorraine are the results of this treason. (...)&#xA;  But the Bazaines are rare, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The right side of the page was not scanned completely, which leads to &#xA;gaps in the sentences.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/GuerreDe18701871Vol11?q=%22les+Bazaine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Guerre de &#xA;1870-1871&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1896, Alfred Duquet wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;mais il y avait encore moyen de sortir du mortel guêpier où les &#xA;  Mac-Mahon et les Bazaine avaient jeté la France, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;but there was still a way to get out of the deadly wasp's nest into &#xA;  which the Mac-Mahons and the Bazaines had thrown France, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mac-Mahon refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_de_MacMahon#War_and_the_Paris_Commune&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patrice de &#xA;MacMahon (1808 – 1893)&lt;/a&gt;, French &#xA;general and politician, who had suffered several military defeats in &#xA;the Franco-Prussian war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/legnralbourbaki00grangoog?q=%22les+Bazaine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le général &#xA;Bourbaki&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1898 (the year following &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Denis_Bourbaki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bourbaki's&lt;/a&gt; death), Léonce Grandin wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;C'est elle [la guerre] qui é créé les plus grands homme de notre &#xA;  armée, les Turenne, les Condé, les Villars; c'est elle aussie qui a &#xA;  produit les profondes erreurs de nos souverains, les Soubise, les &#xA;  Contades; nous pourrions dire aussi les ... Bazaine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is she [the war; the word is feminine in French] who created our &#xA;  army's greatest men, the &#xA;  &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_La_Tour_d%27Auvergne_(vicomte_de_Turenne)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turennes&lt;/a&gt;, the Condés [presumably &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_V_Joseph_de_Bourbon-Cond%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis V Joseph de Bourbon-Condé&lt;/a&gt;], the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude-Louis-Hector_de_Villars&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Villars&lt;/a&gt;; it is also &#xA;  she who produced the deep error of our monarchs, the Soubises &#xA;  [presumably &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_de_Rohan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benjamin de Rohan&lt;/a&gt;], the &#xA;  Contades [possibly &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89rasme_Gaspard_de_Contades&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Érasme Gaspard de Contades&lt;/a&gt;]; we might also say the ... Bazaines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lalanternedebrua130unse/page/146/mode/2up?q=%22les+Bazaine%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Laterne de &#xA;Bruant&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the singer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristide_Bruant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristide Bruant&lt;/a&gt; included the following words in one of his songs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Mais ... entendonds-nous: N'en faut plus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  S'ils veulent jouer les Bazaine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But ... let's agree: there's no need for them to play the Bazaines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the French believed in a family's collective guilt when one &#xA;family member became guilty of treason or another crime, &quot;les Bazaine&quot; &#xA;refers to &quot;François Achille Bazaine and other people who would do &#xA;something similar (or defend him)&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T14:48:22.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14517" CreationDate="2020-06-07T16:38:22.970" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lesuicideetlamor00bayeuoft/page/142/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le suicide et la &#xA;morale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1922), Albert Bayet wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Henri de Régnier fait parler un homme qui se tue sans savoir pourquoi, sans crainte ni désespoir, sans chagrin de cœur, uniquement parce qu'il est « destiné » au suicide (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_R%C3%A9gnier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henri de Régnier&lt;/a&gt; lets a man speak who kills himself without knowing &#xA;  why, without fear or despair, without grief/chagrin, solely because he &#xA;  is &quot;destined&quot; for suicide (3).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnote (3) says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;H. de Régnier, &lt;em&gt;L'inexplicable&lt;/em&gt; dans &lt;em&gt;Couleur du Temps&lt;/em&gt;, 261.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://data.bnf.fr/fr/temp-work/bd135f8a51fda1e8e680226d9333801f/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Couleur du &#xA;Temps&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was a volume of short stories published by Mercure &#xA;de France in Paris in 1909.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I have not been able to find a digitised version of Régnier's &#xA;&lt;em&gt;Couleur du temps&lt;/em&gt;. Apparently, several authors published works with &#xA;the same title: there is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=KTzfAgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;dq=couleur+du+temps&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play by Guillaume &#xA;Apollinaire&lt;/a&gt; published in 1918, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/couleurdutemps00desr/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collection of short stories by Michelle LeNormand&lt;/a&gt; published in 1919, a book by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Bainville&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques Bainville&lt;/a&gt; published in 1928 and a book by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7oise_Chandernagor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Françoise Chandernagor&lt;/a&gt; published in 2004.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additions by MaudPieTheRocktorate:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some searching, I found a lot more info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200608225811/https://ikoma-san-jin.hatenablog.com/entry/20171223/1513982739&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HENRI DE RÉGNIER『Couleur du Temps』（アンリ・ド・レニエ『時の色』） - 古本ときどき音楽&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L’INEXPLICABLE（説明しがたいこと）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;　自殺をする前に友に宛てた手紙。何も辛いこともなく、悲しくもなく、虚栄心からでもなく、酔っぱらってもいないが、これから自殺する。理由は説明し難い。ただある女性とのふとしたことがきっかけなだけだ。と旅先の中東で出会ったある女性とのほのかな恋の一瞬を物語る。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google Translation, edited:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;L’INEXPLICABLE（The inexplicable thing）&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A letter to a friend before committing suicide. No pain, no sadness, no vanity, no drunkenness, and still he commits suicide. The reason is hard to explain. It just happened to be triggered unexpectedly by an issue with a woman. And it tells a moment of faint love with a woman he met in the Middle East while traveling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also found this strange footnote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20200608230125/http://210.243.166.78/udndataLTT/pdf/uni/335/pdf/036_038.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Chinese translation of the suicide note&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;法國後期象徵主義詩人。此處所指短篇小說應為〈復讐〉（當時由森林太郎，即森鷗外翻譯），多數評者指出芥川作品〈竹藪中〉（藪の中）明顯受〈復讐〉影響。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;French late symbolist poet. The short story referred to here should be &quot;Revenge&quot; (translated by Mori Rintarō at the time, that is, Mori Ōgai), and most commentators pointed out that Akitagawa's work &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Grove&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In a Grove&lt;/a&gt;&quot; (薮の中) is obviously affected by &quot;Revenge&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any mention of &quot;Revenge&quot; online, and just from the title, it does not look like it is a story about an inexplicable suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T06:58:47.623" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T06:58:47.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-07T17:58:00.343" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Matt Ruff's horror novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lovecraft_Country_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lovecraft Country&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2016). The second chapter, entitled &quot;Dreams of the Which House&quot;, is a story about a haunted house. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the title plays on Lovecraft's original work, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dreams_in_the_Witch_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Dreams in the Witch House&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1932).&#xA;I guess it's a kind of wordplay because 'which' and 'witch' are homophones.&#xA;But still, I can't quite grasp what &quot;the which house&quot; in Matt Ruff's novel  means. Can I interpret it as the witch house but in kind of parodic way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8217" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:10:56.047" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:10:56.047" Title="Meaning of wordplay on 'which' and 'witch' in Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;&lt;matt-ruff&gt;&lt;lovecraft-country&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14523" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14534" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:04:02.423" Score="1" ViewCount="614" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm studying reader-response theory and wonder what is the difference between &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_of_expectation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Horizon of expectation - Wikipedia&quot;&gt;horizon of expectation&lt;/a&gt; and a simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectation_(epistemic)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Expectation (epistemic) - Wikipedia&quot;&gt;expectation&lt;/a&gt;. In my understanding, the horizon of expectation is just expectation. It just discusses more about cultural code and other texts from the reader's period/generation. Is that correct? And how is horizon relevant here? What not call it as system of expectation? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:19:42.377" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T19:44:54.010" Title="What is the difference between horizon of expectation and expectation?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14524" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14525" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about Matt Ruff's 2016 novel 'Lovecraft Country'. Use this tag with the tag [matt-ruff]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:12:05.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14526" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14527" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author Matt Ruff (born 1965) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:13:01.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14528" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14529" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The History of Spiritualism', a collection of essays about spiritualism by Arthur Conan Doyle published in 1926. Use this tag with the tag [arthur-conan-doyle]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:15:46.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14530" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14531" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel (born 1967)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:17:03.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14532" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14533" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction book 'Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future' (2014) by Peter Thiel. Use this tag with the tag [peter-thiel]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T18:18:50.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14523" CreationDate="2020-06-07T19:44:54.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The horizon of expection(s) (German: &lt;em&gt;Erwartungshorizont&lt;/em&gt;) goes beyond a &#xA;single reader's expectations. According to Hans Robert Jauss, the &#xA;evaluation of a literary work requires a reconstruction of the &quot;horizon &#xA;of expectation(s)&quot; that the author's contemporaries would have brought to &#xA;that work. This &quot;horizon of expectations&quot; refers to the set of &#xA;expectations and assumptions witch which readers from a specific generation &#xA;and a specific culture read literary works. (Readers are not &#xA;necessarily constantly aware of the entire set of expectations while reading.)&#xA;Obviously, Shakespeare's contemporaries would have approached &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; &#xA;with totally different expectations than early 21st-century readers or &#xA;theatre goers. For example, theatre was not as highly regarded as a &#xA;genre as today, and Elizabethans would have been much more familiar &#xA;with the conventions of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revenge &#xA;tragedy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Jauss, each of a work's &quot;receptions&quot; by successive generations of &#xA;readers is a valid object of study; he described this succession of &#xA;receptions as a “continuous establishing and altering of horizons”.&#xA;A specific literary work may expand one's (aesthetic) horizon (in which case it is &#xA;valuable) or not (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;formula &#xA;fiction&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nasrullah Mambrol: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literariness.org/2018/02/01/key-theories-of-hans-robert-jauss/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Key Theories of Hans Robert Jauss &#xA;&lt;/a&gt;, 01.02.2018.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Muhammad Naeem: &lt;a href=&quot;https://neoenglish.wordpress.com/2010/12/10/terry-eagleton-author-text-and-the-reader/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Terry Eagleton – Author, Text and the &#xA;Reader&lt;/a&gt;, 10.12.2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Robert_Jau%C3%9F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hans Robert &#xA;Jauß&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia, &#xA;German).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_of_expectation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horizon of expectation&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T19:44:54.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8589" CreationDate="2020-06-07T22:12:19.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This book is by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Oliver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chad Oliver&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is called &lt;em&gt;Mists of Time&lt;/em&gt; and is by Chad Oliver.  It was published in the 50's.  I read it in secondary school and I have never forgotten it.  The young boy is called Mark and the time machine is his uncle's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10207" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-07T22:45:08.863" LastActivityDate="2020-06-07T22:45:08.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-07T22:42:34.190" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelo_Beolco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Angelo Beolco&lt;/a&gt;, also known as Ruzzante, was a 16th-century actor and playwright. He is little known today, but when the Italian playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dario_Fo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dario Fo&lt;/a&gt; was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1997, he put Ruzzante on the same level as Molière (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1997/fo/lecture/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dario Fo's Nobel lecture&lt;/a&gt; on NobelPrize.org; emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Above all others, this evening you’re due the loud and solemn thanks of an extraordinary master of the stage, little-known not only to you and to people in France, Norway, Finland … but also to the people of Italy. Yet &lt;strong&gt;he was, until Shakespeare, doubtless the greatest playwright of renaissance Europe&lt;/strong&gt;. I’m referring to Ruzzante Beolco, &lt;strong&gt;my greatest master along with Molière&lt;/strong&gt;: both actors-playwrights, both mocked by the leading men of letters of their times. (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Ruzzante, &lt;strong&gt;the true father of the &lt;em&gt;Commedia dell’Arte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, also constructed a language of his own, a language of and for the theatre, based on a variety of tongues: the dialects of the Po Valley, expressions in Latin, Spanish, even German, all mixed with onomatopoeic sounds of his own invention. It is from him, from Beolco Ruzzante, that I’ve learned to free myself from conventional literary writing and to express myself with words that you can chew, with unusual sounds, with various techniques of rhythm and breathing, even with the rambling nonsense-speech of the &lt;em&gt;grammelot&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is quite an impressive eulogy on an author that few people remember. When looking for his works, I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%28ruzzante%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned editions on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikisource.org/wiki/Autore:Angelo_Beolco&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six texts on the Italian Wikisource site&lt;/a&gt; but not a single translation. Hence my question: have any of Ruzzante's works ever been translated into English or French?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:22:18.797" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T14:22:18.797" Title="Have any of Angelo Beolco's works ever been translated into English or French?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;angelo-beolco&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14455" CreationDate="2020-06-08T13:49:23.810" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comte de Vaudrec is mentioned roughly a dozen times in the novel.&#xA;He appears for the first time in Chapter 3 of Part I: George Duroy is making a visit to Mrs Madeleine Forestier when Vaudrec enters the room without having been announced. Mrs. Forestier seems to be embarrased &quot;for a second&quot;, then introduces the men to each other. The second occurrence follows almost immediately after the first: Duroy thinks back to the elderly rich man without being able to put him out of his mind; he even imagines that the other man had been displeased to see him with Mrs. Forestier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaudrec is mentioned again in Chapter 4, which describes how Duroy accomanies his colleague Saint-Potin to learn the basics of journalism. Saint-Potin claims that Mrs. Forestier is Vaudrec's mistress and that the count provided her dowry when she married.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaudrec is not mentioned again until the end of Part I (chapter 8): Duroy and Madeleine Forestier have held wake for Mr. Forestier, and Duroy is already weighing up his chances of marrying the newly widowed woman. At this point he thinks back to the rumour that Vaudrec had provided Mrs. Forestier's dowry (apparently without remembering he heard it from his colleague).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaudrec makes another appearance at the home of Madeleine, now Mrs. Duroy, in the second chapter of Part II. George Duroy has bought a bunch of roses on his way home to surprise his wife, only to find out that there is already a vase with roses on the chimney because Mrs. Duroy is expecting the comte de Vaudrec for dinner. George suppresses his suddden urge to throw away the roses he has bought. His wife wants the count to continue the weekly visits and hopes that the two men will get on good terms, which is also what happens. After Vaudrec has left, Mrs. Duroy describes him as a true and faithful friend.&#xA;Vaudrec is mentioned again in the same chapter when the narrator says that député Laroche-Mathieu comes to dinner every Tuesday, one day after Vaudrec.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vaudrec is briefly mentioned in chapter 3 of Part II in a context that does not appear to have any relevance to Mrs. Duroy.&#xA;He is mentioned again twice in chapter 5 of Part II, in which we learn that he is dying. Madeleine is very upset by this news; she goes to his house, and she and a nephew of Vaudrec's stay with the count during his final hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next day (chapter 4), Mr. and Mrs. Duroy learn that the comte de Vaudrec has left almost his entire fortune (worth 600.000 francs) to Mrs. Duroy. George wants to know whether his wife had been the count's mistress, which she denies. The count's decision to leave his fortune to her had already been documented in his original testament, which was written when she was still Mrs. Forestier. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Duroy's suspicion reflects his own lifestyle: soon after their marriage, he had already asked his wife whether she had made her first husband a cuckold, but his wife denied it. Duroy himself cheats on his wife with two other women; in fact, there is even a scene in which one of his mistresses accuses him of cheating on her with another mistress. In the penultimate chapter, Duroy and the police catch his wife and Laroche-Mathieu (now a minister) in the act and the journalist uses this to demand a divorce. It never occurs to him that he punishes his wife for something that he takes for granted as a man; he never reflects critically about his own adultery. It is probably for this reason that an illicit relationship is the only reason he can see for Vaudrec's testamentary decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is another possibility, which was already suggested by Saint-Potin's statement that Vaudrec had provided Madeleine's dowry. A dowry is usually provided by the bride's parents.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksguydemaupa17maupgoog/page/n633/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1 of Part II&lt;/a&gt; mentions that Madeleine did not know her father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;She recalled her own mother, of whom she never spoke to anyone—a governess, brought up at Saint-Denis—seduced, and died from poverty and grief when she, Madeleine, was twelve years old. An unknown hand had had her brought up. Her father, no doubt. Who was he? She did not exactly know, although she had vague suspicions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most likely, Madeleine suspects that Vaudrec is her biological father. This would explain why the novel never has Duroy try to catch Madeleine and Vaudrec together in bed. On the other hand, the text never gives the reader certainty, which would have been easy enough by letting the count leave a letter (e.g. as part of his will, stating that the letter must only be opened by Madeleine) confirming his paternity. The novel does not even let Madeleine make her suspicion explicit to her husband, thereby leaving the relationship between her and Vaudrec as a puzzle for the reader to solve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T13:49:23.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-08T14:59:31.657" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says&lt;/a&gt;, without citation, that C. S. Lewis's novel &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt; was &quot;heavily influenced by the writing of Lewis's friend and fellow Inkling Charles Williams&quot;. I did notice that this novel seems different in style from Lewis's other work that I've read (Narnia, &lt;em&gt;Till We Have Faces&lt;/em&gt;, and even the other novels of his Space Trilogy): it's much more grounded and down-to-earth, set in our own modern world, its sci-fi/fantasy elements much less obtrusive into the very setting of the story. But, not having read any Charles Williams, I didn't realise that this style difference was due to influence from another author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the evidence for Charles Williams having influenced &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; Did Lewis explicitly say so, as he did acknowledge influence from Olaf Stapledon in the preface? Is it purely based on analysis of the book by critics? Or is there some other evidence e.g. from contemporaneous Inklings meetings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T07:13:34.303" Title="How does That Hideous Strength show the influence of Charles Williams?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;&lt;charles-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14540" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14541" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British poet, novelist, playwright and literary critic Charles Williams (1886 – 1945) and his life as a writer. Williams was a member of the Inklings, a group of mostly academics that included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Nevill Coghill." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:02:46.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14542" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14543" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Italian playwright and actor Angelo Beolco (c. 1496 – 1542), also known as Ruzzante, and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" LastActivityDate="2020-06-08T17:05:13.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14539" CreationDate="2020-06-09T01:13:36.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his letters, J.R.R. Tolkien says that Williams was an influence on it.  (He lamented it; he thought the influence had ruined it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Williams' influence actually only appeared with his death: That&#xA;Hideous Strength, the end of the trilogy, which (good though it is in&#xA;itself) I think spoiled it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Tolkien's Letters, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_257&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter 257&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T07:13:34.303" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14516" CreationDate="2020-06-09T01:29:28.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is quintessential Tolstoy the man, Tolstoy the philosopher. The point is not to judge or second-guess God's actions. He has His own ways, and we can only be sure that He knows everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The argument is the same as one of those put forth today against death penalty: wrongful convictions do happen, even in the face of 'hard evidence', and when (if!) the truth becomes known, it may be too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy, the man of strong convictions and integrity, comes to the conclusion (at least later in his life) that we people just can't judge each other. Only God can. Consequently, the whole institution of courts and judges is fundamentally flawed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the very idea of authority of one man over another is wrong. Notice that Aksionov doesn't dob Makar to the guard, even though he is very tempted to. The truth is revealed through his reliance on God, deferral to His actions. And this is not so much a question of having faith; rather, this is a moral choice over human judgement and actions (which Axionov have experienced very well).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T01:29:28.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14546" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T11:26:14.843" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;Sever&quot; from the Karate album  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_(album)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Unsolved&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2000), we can hear the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because in my life there was only asbestos&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And Raymond Williams, you always took the best ones&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Now, like failed pedestrian dreams&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  That's how it seems to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Williams&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raymond Williams&lt;/a&gt; &#xA;(1921 – 1988) was a Welsh Marxist theorist who is well-known in literary theory for his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/marxismliteratur00will_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marxism and Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1977) and his influence on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_materialism_(cultural_studies)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cultural materialism&lt;/a&gt;. However, why would the song say that he &quot;always took the best ones&quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T11:52:33.713" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T11:52:33.713" Title="Why did Raymond Williams always take the best ones?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;karate&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14547" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14548" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lyrics of the songs by the American band Karate." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T11:27:06.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T12:46:52.570" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a book from 1970s or 1980s about physics written in a popular informal way. It described relative motion by example of shooting an arrow from the back of a train, it described the Michelson-Morley experiment and it contained a quote from Lewis Carroll.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I was thinking of a plan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To dye one's whiskers green,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And always use so large a fan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That they could not be seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me identify the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally my question was here &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349133/where-to-ask-in-order-to-locate-a-book&quot;&gt;https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/349133/where-to-ask-in-order-to-locate-a-book&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional info: I think that it also contained a description about two lightbulbs inside a closed box and that the two lightbulbs are turned on, then the question is whether or not there will be a shadow from any of the lightbulbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I remember that the cover was white and green and that it was quite easy reading and popular science because I could understand it even though I did not know calculus at the time but it did explain relativity with words and examples instead of mathematical equations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10214" LastEditorUserId="10214" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T11:42:50.473" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T14:38:20.573" Title="Popular informal physics book containing a quote from Lewis Carroll" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14549" CreationDate="2020-06-09T14:09:53.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looks like what you're talking about is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0jmZDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA31&amp;amp;lpg=PA31&amp;amp;dq=But+I+was+thinking+of+a+plan%0ATo+dye+one%27s+whiskers+green,%0AAnd+always+use+so+large+a+fan%0AThat+they+could+not+be+seen.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=YNIJdRAM7n&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1p6pKrXKbSOUHSnGD_szuusyJrGw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjWrZup8_TpAhU5ZhUIHZC3BMIQ6AEwBXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=But%20I%20was%20thinking%20of%20a%20plan%20To%20dye%20one&amp;#39;s%20whiskers%20green%2C%20And%20always%20use%20so%20large%20a%20fan%20That%20they%20could%20not%20be%20seen.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The nature of the physical world: THE GIFFORD LECTURES 1927&lt;/strong&gt; by Sir Arthur Eddington.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to admit I've found it by googling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T14:09:53.667" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14551" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14558" CreationDate="2020-06-09T15:37:44.263" Score="7" ViewCount="744" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Worst Crime in the World&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was saying in its beginning: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;FATHER BROWN was wandering through a picture gallery with an expression that suggested that he had not come there to look at the pictures. Indeed, he did not want to look at the pictures, though he liked pictures well enough. Not that there was anything immoral or improper about those highly modern pictorial designs. He would indeed be of an inflammable temperament &lt;strong&gt;who was stirred to any of the more pagan passions by the display of interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken cylinders&lt;/strong&gt; with which the art of the future inspired or menaced mankind. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant by these obscure geometrical shapes, and what's the whole meaning of that sentence? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T16:41:56.327" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T16:41:56.327" Title="Meaning of &quot;interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken cylinders&quot; in &quot;The Worst Crime in the World&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T15:51:00.840" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following excerpt is taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;. I don't understand which statement is referred to by &quot;this latter statement&quot; and which one is referred to by &quot;the former&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is to be remarked that the Davenports themselves, as contrasted with&#xA;  their friends and travelling companions, never claimed any&#xA;  preternatural origin for their results. The reason for this may have been&#xA;  that as an entertainment it was more piquant and less provocative when&#xA;  every member of the audience could form his own solution. Writing to&#xA;  the American conjurer Houdini, Ira Davenport said in his old age, &quot;We&#xA;  never &lt;em&gt;in public&lt;/em&gt; affirmed our belief in Spiritualism. That we regarded as&#xA;  no business of the public, nor did we offer our entertainment as the&#xA;  result of sleight-of-hand, or, on the other hand, as Spiritualism. We let&#xA;  our friends and foes settle that as best they could between themselves,&#xA;  but, unfortunately, we were often the victims of their disagreements.&quot;&#xA;  &lt;br /&gt;Houdini further claimed that Davenport admitted that his results were&#xA;  normally effected, but Houdini has himself stuffed so many errors of&#xA;  fact into his book, &quot;A Magician Among the Spirits,&quot; and has shown such&#xA;  extraordinary bias on the whole question, that his statement carries no&#xA;  weight. The letter which he produces makes no such admission. A&#xA;  further statement quoted as being made by Ira Davenport is&#xA;  demonstrably false. It is that the instruments never left the cabinet. As a matter of fact, &lt;em&gt;The Times&lt;/em&gt; representative was severely struck in the face by a floating guitar, his brow being cut, and on several occasions when a light was struck instruments dropped all over the room. If Houdini has completely misunderstood this &lt;strong&gt;latter&lt;/strong&gt; statement, it is not likely that he is very accurate upon the &lt;strong&gt;former&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;vide&lt;/em&gt; Appendix).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anybody explain these references?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10215" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-09T19:34:10.580" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T20:52:32.723" Title="The words &quot;latter&quot; and &quot;former&quot; refer to which statements here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14551" CreationDate="2020-06-09T17:24:30.510" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&quot;The Worst Crime in the World&quot; was published in 1927 in the collection &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt;. At that time, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cubism&lt;/a&gt; was roughly 20 years old. Some cubist painters depicted human bodies as made up of geometric shapes such as cones and cylinders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can see examples of this in Marcel Duchamp's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_Descending_a_Staircase,_No._2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2&lt;/a&gt; (1912), below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MzU6I.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MzU6I.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;the successive movements of a human body composed of nested, conical and cylindrical abstract element, using shades of ochre and brown&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernand_L%C3%A9ger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fernand Léger&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://useum.org/artwork/Soldier-with-a-pipe-Fernand-Leger-1916&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soldier with a pipe&lt;/a&gt; (1916), below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HH0sH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HH0sH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;painting of cylinders, spheres, cones and cuboids in shades of gray that represent the upper body and head of a person wearing a hat and smoking a pipe&quot;&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other examples include work by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyubov_Popova&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lyubov Popova&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &quot;The Model&quot;, 1913), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimir_Malevich&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kazimir Malevich&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &quot;Boy&quot;, 1928/19 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knifegrinder&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The Knifegrinder&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, 1912-13) and Albert Gleizes (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Femme_aux_Phlox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;La Femme aux Phlox&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, 1910).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not everybody appreciated this type of art. For example, Duchamp's &quot;Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2&quot; was quickly parodied. To those who preferred more traditional styles of painting or who thought that art should represent beauty, cubism, cubo-futurism and other styles that broke with traditional aesthetics may have looked ugly and unpleasant, and therefore even menacing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T17:24:30.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14554" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14552" CreationDate="2020-06-09T20:01:28.823" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the second of the two paragraphs, Houdini made two claims &#xA;about statements by Ira Davenport. Houdini first claimed that Ira &#xA;Davenport had said the illusions in the shows of by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davenport_brothers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Davenport &#xA;brothers&lt;/a&gt; &quot;were &#xA;normally effected&quot; (i.e. the supernatural was not involved). However, &#xA;Houdini apparently produced a letter by Ira Davenport that does not &#xA;support the claim that the American magician made such a statement.&#xA;Doyle then describes another claim by Houdini (&quot;A further statement quoted as &#xA;being made by Ira Davenport ...&quot;), namely that Ira Davenport had said that &quot;[their] instruments never left the cabinet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the face of it, &quot;the former&quot; appears to refer to the first of the above &#xA;two statements (&quot;Davenport admitted that his results were normally &#xA;effected&quot;), while &quot;this latter statement&quot; would refer to the claim that &quot;the &#xA;instruments never left the cabinet&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Appendix contains a &quot;Note to chapter X&quot; entitled &quot;Were the &#xA;Davenports jugglers or spiritualists?&quot;, which quotes a letter by the &#xA;Davenports that was published in 1868. This letter shows that the &#xA;magicians &quot;would not renounce Spiritualism, and declare [them]selves &#xA;jugglers&quot;. This bears more relevance to the claim that the Davenports &#xA;&quot;never &lt;em&gt;in public&lt;/em&gt; affirmed [their] belief in Spiritualism&quot; than to the &#xA;claim that their illusions &quot;were normally effected&quot;, because the quote &#xA;from the letter is a statement about belief in Spiritualism rather &#xA;than a claim about how their illusions were achieved. For this reason, &#xA;I think that &quot;the former&quot; actually refers to the claims in the first of &#xA;the two quoted paragraphs and not to the first claim in the second &#xA;paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrases &quot;the former&quot; and &quot;the latter&quot; are normally used to refer back to the &#xA;first and second (respectively) of &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; statements, and Doyle seems to have confused the references by discussing three statements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T20:01:28.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14555" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T20:04:11.480" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this quote a few years ago and cannot remember the source. I could be misremembering it or combining two quotes together? I just took up birding and this quote is so true: there are not many places (outdoors) that you can be alone from humans and not occasionally hear a bird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think I adapted it from either of these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kpcnews.com/columnists/article_b92d875b-07b8-51f0-a9ac-8656ce742975.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;With birds for company, though I stay away from people, I’m never alone.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Neil Case. But this is from May 6, 2020 and I definitely read the quote before then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ninelives.fandom.com/wiki/You_Will_Never_Be_Alone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The birds will always sing / And you will never be alone.&quot;&lt;/a&gt; From a TV show I've never heard of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10217" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T20:04:11.480" Title="Quote like &quot;Learn the call of birds and you will never be alone&quot; source?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T20:06:52.790" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note: The question concerns a somewhat touchy topic - prostitution. I am not a native English speaker, therefore, I cannot be sure which terms are suitable for a discussion. I am using words of the same root as the words in my native language (Russian) which are considered not to be derogatory and the words I have come across in the Bible. Unfortunately, I might have not written everything down right. I am sorry in advance in case I misused some terms - I would be more than willing to correct myself.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of my favourite characters in classical Russian literature is Sonya Marmeladova of &quot;Crime and Punishment&quot; by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At school, while studying the book I have always been told that Sonya was interesting to Raskolnikov as she did not abide by the rules of the Lord, just like himself. Thus, it was their mutual effort to make up for their sins during hard labour. Indeed, if we turn to the Old Testament, we would stumble upon (for instance) Hosea 4:11:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Harlotry, wine, and new wine enslave the heart. - NKJV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, truth be told, I have always reckoned this perception to be quite idle and mechanic. No one argues that Sonya was forced into sinful labour but (from my point of view) there is way more to this character rather than just a simple prostitute. In fact, Sonya appears to be more Christian than many other characters, who did not break any Commandments directly. To back this up I usually turn to the 4th chapter of the 5th part, where Sonya exclaims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But I can’t know the Divine Providence...(Original: Да ведь я Божьего промысла знать не могу...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This occurs to me to be a direct link towards the New Testament, Romans 11:33, to be more precise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! - NKJV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I fail to believe that Dostoevsky did not mean to hint at Sonya's righteousness. Yet, I might be wrong. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, I wonder whether there are any sources where Dostoevsky expressed his own feelings towards the character and/or prostitution itself. Has anyone come across anything like that? Besides, are my arguments plausible in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10216" LastEditorUserId="10216" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T11:24:56.490" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T11:24:56.490" Title="Dostoevsky's attitude towards Sonya Marmeladova" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14557" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14552" CreationDate="2020-06-09T20:28:42.907" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “former statement” is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davenport admitted that his results were normally effected [that is, they were tricks, not genuine spiritual phenomena]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the “latter statement” is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the instruments never left the cabinet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Doyle’s argument seems to be that since the latter statement is wrong, then Houdini must have misquoted or misunderstoood Ira Davenport, and if he could get one statement wrong, he could do the same for another. But it is &lt;em&gt;Doyle&lt;/em&gt; who has misread or misremembered his sources, for Houdini did not quote Ira Davenport as saying, “the instruments never left the &lt;strong&gt;cabinet&lt;/strong&gt;”, but rather:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the musical instruments never left &lt;strong&gt;our hands&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ira Davenport, quoted in Harry Houdini (1924). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Magician Among The Spirits&lt;/em&gt;, p. 25&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think what must have happened is that Doyle, who never saw the Davenport brothers give a performance (William Davenport died in 1877, when Doyle was just eighteen), had to rely on accounts written by gullible spectators, and in his imagination he conflated elements of two different types of performance into one impossible version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Davenport brothers&lt;/a&gt; seem to have given at least two types of performance, one in which the effects were hidden from the spectators by the closed doors of their cabinet, and another in which the effects were hidden by darkness. Houdini quotes a newspaper description of a typical “dark” performance thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The musical instruments, bells, etc., were placed on the table; the Brothers Davenport were then manacled, hands and feet, and securely bound to the chairs by ropes. A chain of communication (though not a circular one) was formed, and the instant the lights were extinguished the musical instruments appeared to be carried all about the room. The current of air, which they occasioned in their rapid transit was felt upon the faces of all present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The bells were loudly rung; the trumpets made knocks upon the floor, and the tambourine appeared running around the room, jingling with all its might. At the same time sparks were observed as if passing from South to West. Several persons exclaimed that they were touched by the instruments, which on one occasion became so demonstrative that one gentleman received a knock on the nasal organ which broke the skin and caused a few drops of blood to flow.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Houdini, p. 25&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Houdini says that this report is from the &lt;em&gt;London Post&lt;/em&gt;, but the British Newspaper Archive shows that it was syndicated and appeared in various newspapers, including the &lt;em&gt;Sun&lt;/em&gt; for Thursday 29 September 1864.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be clear that in the dark, the man who was struck on the nose could not have known what kind of object he had been struck with, and although Doyle imagines it to be a floating guitar, we are not compelled to agree with him. Houdini writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After I finished reading [the newspaper report] Ira exclaimed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Strange how people imagine things in the dark! Why, the musical instruments never left our hands yet many spectators would have taken an oath that they heard them flying over their heads.” *&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* As to the delusion of sound. Sound waves are deflected just as light waves are reflected by the intervention of a proper medium and under certain conditions it is a difficult thing to locate their source. Stuart Cumberland told me an interesting test to prove the inability of a blindfolded person to trace sound to its source. It is exceedingly simple; merely clicking two coins over the head of the blindfolded person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Houdini, pp. 25–26&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magicians are well aware of this tendency for people to conflate two different performances of an effect into a single version combining features of both, calling it “&lt;strong&gt;cancelling methods&lt;/strong&gt;” because each performance can “cancel” a different theory about how the trick is done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T20:52:32.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14551" CreationDate="2020-06-09T21:26:58.703" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tsundoku's answer explains the meaning in context of the geometric objects referred to, but the structure of the whole sentence is a bit confusing too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;He would indeed be of an inflammable temperament who was stirred to any of the more pagan passions by the display of interrupted spirals, inverted cones and broken cylinders with which the art of the future inspired or menaced mankind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;He&quot; in this sentence does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; refer to the specific man in the preceding sentences, Father Brown. This is a more general statement: read &quot;He ... who was stirred&quot; as the subject of the main verb &quot;would indeed be&quot;. Rephrasing in a more easy-to-understand order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Anyone who was stirred to any of the more pagan passions by [modern art] would indeed be of an inflammable temperament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it is ridiculous to suppose that Father Brown was offended or outraged by the display of geometric modern art (as described by Tsundoku).&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;The only part I can't quite get is &quot;pagan passions&quot;. Presumably this is an old-fashioned way of referring to emotions such as anger, from a Christian point of view, but not one I've come across before or can find in phrase dictionaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T21:26:58.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14559" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5643" CreationDate="2020-06-09T21:43:59.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;h1&gt;It's because he &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;see&amp;quot; them for he doesn’t &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; about them and this lack of recognition &lt;em&gt;shatters the very existence&lt;/em&gt; of people who only define themselves through others.&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This cuts right down to the core theme of the novel and the primary aspect of Howard Roark's character, which is that &lt;strong&gt;he just doesn't give a damn what other people think about him&lt;/strong&gt; or his work. Compare to one of the earliest scenes of him walking the streets of Stanton in Part 1, Chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People turned to look at Howard Roark as he passed. Some remained staring after him with sudden resentment. They could give no reason for it: it was an instinct his presence awakened in most people. Howard Roark saw no one. For him, the streets were empty. He could have walked there naked without concern...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He repeatedly exclaims that he follows his vision for his own sake or rather that he does what &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; thinks is best and doesn't let others judge that &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; him. He goes about shaping the world around him on his own terms and without compromise. In the way the novel intends to make a case for &lt;strong&gt;individualism and independence, Howard Roark is the embodiment of that ideal&lt;/strong&gt;. To say it with his own words during the Cortlandt trial in Part 4, Chapter 18:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now first of all, speaking with a little vest-pocket psychology, a personal part of this is that he is also often described as &lt;strong&gt;calm and concentrating on himself and his work&lt;/strong&gt;, without being too much into hollow chit-chat or disingenuous politeness (which is also part of why he struggles with the business side of his trade at the beginning). He is honest, straight-to-the-point and matter-of-fact. So not seeing much of others is part of &lt;strong&gt;how the novel transports Howard Roark's focus and determination&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect that adds into this is that there probably isn't much of substance for him to see in many people anyway, in the sense that &lt;strong&gt;for him they lack somewhat of a personality of their own&lt;/strong&gt;. We see this when he meets possible clients early after opening his own office in Part 1, Chapter 13, many of which are presented as only wanting what others determined for them and thus according to him lacking their own character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He tried to explain and to convince. He knew, while he spoke, that it was useless, because his words sounded as if they were hitting a vacuum. There was no such person as Mrs. Wayne Wilmot; there was only a shell containing the opinions of her friends, the picture postcards she had seen, the novels of country squires she had read; it was this that he had to address, this immateriality which could not hear him or answer, deaf and impersonal like a wad of cotton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Mundy listened blankly. And Roark felt again a bewildered helplessness before unreality: there was no such person as Mr. Mundy; there were only the remnants, long dead, of the people who had inhabited the Randolph place; one could not plead with remnants or convince them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he doesn’t dislike or resent them for their lack of integrity, there's just nothing of interest for him there and nothing to get from them. &lt;strong&gt;He just doesn't care&lt;/strong&gt;. This &lt;em&gt;indifference&lt;/em&gt; is also expressed in his confrontation with Toohey in Part 2, Chapter 15 (and contrasted to Toohey himself who is eager to know what others think of him):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;But I don’t think of you.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So metaphorically speaking he really doesn't see a lot of these people. &lt;strong&gt;He sees what he &lt;em&gt;wants and needs&lt;/em&gt; to see&lt;/strong&gt;. But this goes even further when we consider that this isn't just about him not seeing them, but even more so them &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt; not being seen by him. And this idea of making his surroundings feel unseen or nonexistent is also picked up again in the effect he has on his eventual coworkers in Part 1, Chapter 4, where it adds it into the larger significance Roark has as an individualist and &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; everyone else hates that and works against it. He himself is &lt;strong&gt;a presence that tends to intimidate people with less of a strong individual personality than his, thereby overshadowing their presence&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both men disliked Roark. He was usually disliked, from the first sight of his face, anywhere he went. His face was closed like the door of a safety vault; things locked in safety vaults are valuable; men did not care to feel that. He was a cold, disquieting presence in the room; his presence had a strange quality: it made itself felt and yet it made them feel that he was not there; or perhaps that he was and they weren’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he doesn't see those people because on the one hand &lt;strong&gt;they don't matter to him but also because their lack of individualism makes them disappear against his own presence&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a large part of why people like Peter Keating hate him and want to see him fail, he supposedly reminds the lesser men of that fact and makes them feel insignificant. He makes everyone else resent the integrity he has for they don't have it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this also relates back to the topic of individualism and the idea of &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;second-handers&amp;quot; who live only through others and their opinions and are thereby the antithesis to Howard Roark's independence. They seek themselves in him, but don't find anything&lt;/strong&gt;. The majority of people around him constantly need to see their own existence reflected in others but in Roark it isn't since he doesn't care about them. They don't exactly feel unseen, &lt;strong&gt;they feel un&lt;em&gt;recognized&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. His conversation with Gail Wynand on his yacht in Part 4, Chapter 11 sums up this idea:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That, precisely, is the deadliness of second-handers. They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: ’Is this true?’ They ask: ’Is this what others think is true?’ Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. [...] Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation--anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think your second-handers understand this, try as they might not to admit it to themselves. Notice how they’ll accept anything except a man who stands alone. They recognize him at once. By instinct. There’s a special, insidious kind of hatred for him. [...] They’ve got to force their miserable little personalities on every single person they meet. The independent man kills them--because they don’t exist within him and that’s the only form of existence they know. Notice the malignant kind of resentment against any idea that propounds independence. Notice the malice toward an independent man. Look back at your own life, Howard, and at the people you’ve met. They know. They’re afraid. You’re a reproach.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for a counter-example that also directly references this, we can contrast it with the effect he has on someone who on the one hand &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; matter to Howard and who on the other hand himself incorporates Roark's individualist ideals, Henry Cameron in his first meeting with Roark in Part 1, Chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People had always lost their sense of existence in Roark’s presence; but Cameron felt suddenly that he had never been as real as in the awareness of the eyes now looking at him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now this answer is based solely on &lt;em&gt;The Fountainhead&lt;/em&gt; and its characters and themes of individualism. I don't know much about Rand's broader oeuvre, the thematic of which it is supposedly to be classified into. But while we &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; understand the novel as part of a larger monolith of objectivist philosophy, we don't necessarily &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; to. Maybe the themes of individualism aren't as strong in the other works as they are in this novel. But at the end of the day, they're ultimately different characters in different novels employing different stylistic devices and nothing precludes them from simply not having the exact same traits Howard Roark has or making the same point about the people around him. But I'll leave comparative studies of Rand’s characters with regards to her broader ideological framework to other answers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T21:43:59.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14560" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-09T21:47:18.153" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy includes some detailed worldbuilding of the island of Hybras (a.k.a. Atlantis), located off the Bay of Biscay and, at least at the time the story starts, divided into ten kingdoms (Lyonesse, Dahaut, Troicinet, Dascinet, North Ulfland, South Ulfland, Godelia, Pomperol, Blaloc, Caduz). The geographic worldbuilding is very detailed, including not only countries but cities, landmarks, habitats, and roads. One of the major roads on the island is called the &lt;strong&gt;Icnield Way&lt;/strong&gt; - a name which, for anyone familiar with the ancient history of England, will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icknield_Way&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;familiar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, from the out-of-universe perspective the fictional road was inspired by the real one. But it's not silly to think about the in-universe perspective too. In many other ways, the fictional land of Hybras is designed to be consistent with histories of real places in western Europe: for example, the round table of Cairbra an Meadhan, in the story, later inspired King Arthur's Round Table, and Arthur himself was a descendant of refugees from Hybras. Is there a similar &quot;backstory&quot; behind the similarity in road names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did a road in ancient Hybras and an ancient road in England come to have the same name, in-universe?&lt;/strong&gt; Was one of them named after the other? Were they both named after the same thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T21:47:18.153" Title="How can there be an Icnield Way in Hybras?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;jack-vance&gt;&lt;lyonesse-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14561" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14567" CreationDate="2020-06-09T23:50:22.713" Score="7" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Background&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been getting into philosophy lately, and I've been wanting to read some of Nietzsche's work. But history has it that after his mental decline, and subsequent death, his sister became the curator of his works, and edited a lot of it to fit her &quot;aryan master race&quot; ideals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whenever I find a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, there is no mention of whether or not this is his intended work, or one of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's alterations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I tell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10218" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T09:49:37.477" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T20:09:32.187" Title="If I find a book by Nietzsche, how do I know if it's Friedrich's original work, and not work that was edited by his nazi sister, Elisabeth?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;friedrich-nietzsche&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14562" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2020-06-09T23:59:47.980" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Search &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;The Servant of Two Masters: and Other Italian Classics&lt;/em&gt; / edited by Eric Bently, and you should find a library near you with a copy.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ruzzante returns from the wars&lt;/em&gt; by Angelo Beolco is in it.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastActivityDate="2020-06-09T23:59:47.980" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14563" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-10T11:46:35.383" Score="3" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of Albert Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;The Fall&lt;/em&gt;, the narrator asks his addressee a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Possédez-vous des richesses? Quelques-unes? Bon. Les avez-vous partagées avec les pauvres? Non. Vous êtes donc ce que j'appelle un saducéen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that Camus writes &quot;saducéen&quot; with one 'd', unlike the French Wikipedia article  &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadduc%C3%A9ens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sadducéens&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Do you own any wealth? Some? Good. Have you shared it with the poor? No. You are then what I call a Sadducee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading both the English Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sadducees&lt;/a&gt; and the corresponding French Wikipedia article, I learnt a few interesting facts about this group of Jews that became extinct some time after 70 CE. For example, unlike the Pharisees, they did not believe that the soul was immortal, that there was an afterlife or that there were rewards or penalties after death. However, since the novel's narrator does not seem to believe that God exists or at least that he is still he useful concept, it is not clear to me how the Sadducees are relevant to the addressee's not sharing his wealth with the poor. Can anybody shed light on this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T17:28:25.357" Title="Why would not giving money to the poor qualify a person as a Sadducee?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14564" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14563" CreationDate="2020-06-10T12:48:55.973" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably sloppy reading of the Gospels.  Jesus talks with a Sadducee once over a dispute about resurrection.  He also tells a parable about a rich man who shared nothing with the poor.  The narrator is conflating those two, whether accidentally or intentionally.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether Camus is conflating them or this is a reflection of the narrator's character is not clear from that passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T12:48:55.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14566" CreationDate="2020-06-10T16:12:49.313" Score="4" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Worst Crime in the World&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, a solicitor was talking to Father Brown about Captain Musgrave whose old father was living in an old castle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This young Musgrave,” he said, “wants to raise a big sum from us on a post obit on his old father in Northumberland. The old man’s long past seventy and presumably will obit some time or other; but what about the post, so to speak? What will happen afterwards to his cash and castles and portcullises and all the rest? It’s a very fine old estate, and still worth a lot, but strangely enough it isn’t entailed. So you see how we stand. The question is, &lt;strong&gt;as the man said in Dickens, is the old man friendly&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;If he’s friendly to his son you’ll feel all the friendlier&lt;/strong&gt;,” observed Father Brown. “No, I’m afraid I can’t help you. I never met Sir John Musgrave, and I understand very few people do meet him nowadays. But it seems obvious you have a right to an answer on that point before you lend the young gentleman your firm’s money. Is he the sort that people cut off with a shilling?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who's &amp;quot;the man said in Dickens&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:36:08.147" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T08:36:53.070" Title="Who is &quot;the man in Dickens&quot; in &quot;The Worst Crime in the World&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14565" CreationDate="2020-06-10T16:34:43.490" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who is &amp;quot;the man in Dickens&amp;quot;? The answer is that Chesterton is referring to the following passage from Charles Dickens's &lt;em&gt;The Old Curiosity Shop&lt;/em&gt;, in which the question &amp;quot;is the old [man] friendly&amp;quot; is repeated twice by the character of Mr Swiveller:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Fred!’ cried Mr Swiveller, tapping his nose, ‘a word to the wise is sufficient for them—we may be good and happy without riches, Fred. Say not another syllable. I know my cue; smart is the word. Only one little whisper, Fred—is the old min friendly?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Never you mind,’ replied his friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Right again, quite right,’ said Mr Swiveller, ‘caution is the word, and caution is the act.’ with that, he winked as if in preservation of some deep secret, and folding his arms and leaning back in his chair, looked up at the ceiling with profound gravity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Fred,’ said Mr Swiveller stopping short, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, and speaking in the same audible whisper as before, ‘is the old min friendly?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What does it matter?’ returned his friend peevishly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No, but is he?’ said Dick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, of course. What do I care whether he is or not?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emboldened as it seemed by this reply to enter into a more general conversation, Mr Swiveller plainly laid himself out to captivate our attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Charles Dickens, &lt;em&gt;The Old Curiosity Shop&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/700/700-h/700-h.htm#chap02&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's later referred to again by the same character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Before I leave the gay and festive scene, and halls of dazzling light, sir,’ said Mr Swiveller, ‘I will with your permission, attempt a slight remark. I came here, sir, this day, under the impression that the old min was friendly.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Proceed, sir,’ said Daniel Quilp; for the orator had made a sudden stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Inspired by this idea and the sentiments it awakened, sir, and feeling as a mutual friend that badgering, baiting, and bullying, was not the sort of thing calculated to expand the souls and promote the social harmony of the contending parties, I took upon myself to suggest a course which is the course to be adopted to the present occasion. Will you allow me to whisper half a syllable, sir?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without waiting for the permission he sought, Mr Swiveller stepped up to the dwarf, and leaning on his shoulder and stooping down to get at his ear, said in a voice which was perfectly audible to all present,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The watch-word to the old min is—fork.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- ibid, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/700/700-h/700-h.htm#chap03&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:36:53.070" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T08:36:53.070" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14561" CreationDate="2020-06-10T19:08:13.763" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;That Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche falsified her brother's letters and other writings was something that several scholars had already been aware of before her death in 1935. This includes scholars such as Heinrich Rickert and Erich Friedrich Podach. The Nietzsche-Archiv founded by Elisabeth Nietzsche supported several editions of the philosopher's work. These include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An edition by &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Koegel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fritz Koegel&lt;/a&gt; comprising eight volumes of works and four volumes of Nietzsches &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nachlass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Nachlass&amp;quot; / literary remains&lt;/a&gt;, published in the years 1895 - 1897. In the literature, this edition is identified as GAK (&amp;quot;Gesamtausgabe ed. Koegel&amp;quot;). This edition may be reliable. It was later criticised by Ernst Horneffer of the Nietzsche-Archiv, but this attack may be seen as a tactic to justify a new edition; Rudolf Steiner defended Koegel and exposed Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's incompetence with regard to her brother's philosophy.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The so-called &lt;em&gt;Großoktavausgabe&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;big octavo edition&amp;quot;, due to its format) in 19 volumes published in the years 1894–1913.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Several editions of what is known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Power_(manuscript)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Wille zur Macht&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Will to Power&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; drawn from the philosopher's Nachlass by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Heinrich Köselitz (1901, 1906, 1911, 1917, 1930).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An edition published in the years 1895–1904 and known as &lt;em&gt;Kleinoktavausgabe&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;small octavo edition&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cheap editions of Nietzsche's works during World War I.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One or more editions by &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Oehler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Oehler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Max Oehler&lt;/a&gt;, who both worked to create an image of Nietzsche's philosophy that conformed to Nazi ideology. These editions include the 20-volume edition published by the Musarion Verlag in Munich in the 1920s and the leather-bound 23-volume edition by Musarion in 1929, which can still be bought from antiquarian bookshops (if your pockets are deep enough; some of the leather-bound volumes are sold for over €3,000).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe&lt;/em&gt;, starting 1933, which was never completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers who want to avoid editions of Nietzsche's works overseen by Nazi sympathisers should steer clear of any edition that describes itself as &amp;quot;im Auftrag von Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche veranstaltete Werkausgabe&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;edition arranged on behalf of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche&amp;quot;) or any edition from the years 1901-1945 that were published on behalf of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche or the Nietzsche-Archiv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any edition published before 1894, the year of the Nietzsche-Archiv's foundation, would also be free of interference by Nazi sympathisers, but those original editions tend to be unaffordable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The safest bet is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#Ausgaben&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;editions&lt;/a&gt; by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, starting in the late 1960s. There are several options here, depending on how serious you are about studying Nietzsche's work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Werke&lt;/em&gt;. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1967 and later. This contains a very extensive critical apparatus and is not for the general reader (both because of the editorial content and its price). In the literature, this edition is referred to as KGW.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sämtliche Werke&lt;/em&gt;, Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich and New York: De Gruyter, 1980. This is a somewhat more affordable edition based on the &amp;quot;Kritische Gesamtausgabe&amp;quot;. In the literature, this edition is referred to as KSA.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://doc.nietzschesource.org/de/ekgwb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe von Nietzsches Werken und Briefen (eKGWB)&lt;/a&gt;: digital version of Colli and Montinari's Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the print editions by De Gruyter are expensive, it is advisable to look for other editions based on the work by Colli and Montinari. For example, the edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reclam.de/detail/978-3-15-019167-5/Nietzsche__Friedrich/Richard_Wagner_in_Bayreuth__Der_Fall_Wagner__Nietzsche_contra_Wagner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Der Fall Wagner. Nietzsche contra Wagner&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; published by Reclam states that it is based on Colli and Montinari's KSA (Kritische Studienausgabe).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an alternative to Colli and Montinari's edition, one should look to the volumes edited by Claus-Artur Scheier and published by &lt;a href=&quot;https://meiner.de/autoren/friedrich-nietzsche-a01&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meiner&lt;/a&gt; in Hamburg since 2013. Meiner is a publisher that specialises in editing and publishing philosophical and theological works. The Nietzsche edition consists of six volumes based on the original editions from the 1880s, i.e. well before Elisabeth Wagner's interference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking for a &lt;strong&gt;translation&lt;/strong&gt;, one should &lt;strong&gt;always check which German edition the translation is based on&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. texts published before 1894 or (preferably) Colli's and Montinari's edition. (In fact, Colli and Montinari started their edition because they were looking for a reliable starting point for an Italian translation of Nietzsche's work and they couldn't find anything that met their criteria.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T20:09:32.187" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T20:09:32.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14568" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14563" CreationDate="2020-06-10T20:32:04.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot speak to the Camus misspelling in the French, however, in the context of the New Testament (NT) the Sadducees are (ironically) considered heretics by the larger more prominent faction of religious leaders--the Pharisees. It is the Sadducees (chief priests (Lk 22:2)) who are the ones ultimately responsible for the crucifixion of Christ—who condemned him in a religious court of law and handed him over to the state—i.e. Pontius Pilot (see Lk 22:66). During his ministry, Christ chastised both groups of religious leaders (i.e. Pharisees and Sadducees) with equal impunity. Additionally, they (Sadducees) consisted of “wealthy aristocratic families who controlled the office of the High Priest” (Yamauchi 22). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference to the Sadducees occur only in the synoptic gospels (Matthew (Mt); Mark (Mk); and Luke (Lk); but, interestingly not in the Gospel of John (at least not by name where they are referred to only as “the Jews”); and in the book of Acts. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the following are all the occurrences in the synoptic gospels: &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees come to his baptism, he said unto them, O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Mt 3:7, KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Pharisees also with the Sadducees came, and tempting desired him that he would shew them a sign from heaven” (Mt 16:1, KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then Jesus said unto them, ‘Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees’” (Mt 16:6, KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“But when the Pharisees had heard that he had put the Sadducees to silence, they were gathered together” (Mt 23:34).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no resurrection; and they asked him, saying” (Mk 12:18, KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there is any resurrection; and they asked him” (Lk 20:27, KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, none of these occurrences in the NT have to do with giving or not giving money to the poor directly. Camus might have had in mind the fact of their aristocratic status—thus making them elevated religious leaders with little or no regard for the poor &lt;em&gt;per se&lt;/em&gt;. This of course is speculation as I do not know how well aquatinted Camus was with the particulars of religious sects as recorded in the NT. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess would be Camus had in mind Jesus’ encounter with a rich young ruler. The other gospels refer to him as a rich young man; it is only Luke that calls him a rich young ruler: “And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? (Lk 18:18ff). The word 'ruler' in Greek ἄρχων (&lt;em&gt;archon&lt;/em&gt;) may indeed be referring to a Sadducee.” Jesus replied to him “sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich” (Lk 18:22-23). By virtue of this description of the man, makes him at least qualified to be a Sadducee; and the fact goes on his way sorrowful (that is to day decides not to give his money to the poor) seems to fit Camus notion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aland, Kurt, et. al. &lt;em&gt;The Greek New Testament&lt;/em&gt; (Third Edition). United Bible Societies, 1975.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bauer, Walter, et. al. &lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago &#xA;Press, 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Bible&lt;/em&gt;, Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yamauchi, Edwin. &lt;em&gt;Harper’s World of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt;. Harper and Row, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2020-06-10T21:22:26.967" LastActivityDate="2020-06-10T21:22:26.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14569" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14598" CreationDate="2020-06-11T09:17:19.257" Score="3" ViewCount="216" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is an extract from &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;; I'd like to know whether or not the clause in bold contains a religious image. And what does it mean? Does it have anything to do with being saintly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;The saintly soul of Elizabeth shone like a shrine-dedicated lamp in our peaceful home. &lt;strong&gt;Her sympathy was ours&lt;/strong&gt;; her smile, her soft voice, the sweet glance of her celestial eyes, were ever there to bless and animate us. She was the living spirit of love to soften and attract: I might have become sullen in my study, rough through the ardour of my nature, but that she was there to subdue me to a semblance of her own gentleness. And Clerval—could aught ill entrench on the noble spirit of Clerval?—yet he might not have been so perfectly humane, so thoughtful in his generosity—so full of kindness and tenderness amidst his passion for adventurous exploit, had she not unfolded to him the real loveliness of beneficence, and made the doing good the end and aim of his soaring ambition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T14:37:29.867" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T12:39:11.547" Title="Her sympathy was ours" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14570" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-11T11:16:46.100" Score="2" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Worst Crime in the World&lt;/a&gt;&quot; by G. K. Chesterton, a lawyer was talking to Father Brown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“I must apologize for everything I said about the Captain,” he said to the priest as they drifted together towards the door. “He’s a thoroughly sensible fellow and quite sees my point. He asked me himself why I didn’t go north and see his old father; I could hear from the old man’s own lips how it stood about the inheritance. Well, he couldn’t say fairer than that, could he? But he’s so anxious to get the thing settled that &lt;strong&gt;he offered to take me up in his own car to Musgrave Moss&lt;/strong&gt;. That’s the name of the estate. &lt;strong&gt;I suggested that&lt;/strong&gt;, if he was so kind, &lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt; might go together; and we’re starting to-morrow morning.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this &quot;we&quot; mean Brown and the lawyer? as the lawyer already said that &quot;the captain offered to take me up in his own car to Musgrave Moss&quot;, so how can he suggest again on the captain to go together with him? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a later paragraph, this captain said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;“Look here,” he cried, speaking naturally enough, though they fancied his colour was changed. “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Granby, but I find I can’t come north with you to-morrow. Of course, you will take the car all the same. Please do; I shan’t want it. I — I have to be in London for some days. &lt;strong&gt;Take a friend with you if you like.&lt;/strong&gt;” &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He suggested &quot;Take a friend with you if you like&quot;, as if &quot;we&quot; in the first passage didn't mean the &quot;the lawyer and his friend Brown&quot; already!! &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So does the offer of &quot;he offered to take me up in his own car to Musgrave Moss&quot; mean &quot;he offered me to go alone by his car with his chauffeur? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T16:43:42.613" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T16:43:42.613" Title="Who are &quot;we&quot; in &quot;The Worst Crime in the World&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14571" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14570" CreationDate="2020-06-11T12:37:03.953" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that, in that first paragraph, Granby is actually just talking about himself and the Captain. He was only asking Father Brown's opinion of the man initially, not looking to invite him to come along. It is a little bit odd that he twice discusses them driving up together, but I suspect it's just a conversational flourish, mentioning that they're going together in the same sentence that he indicates that he had requested to go the next morning. Father Brown doesn't get introduced into the trip until the following lines from your second quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My friend, Father Brown——&amp;quot; began the lawyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If Captain Musgrave is really so kind,&amp;quot; said Father Brown gravely. &amp;quot;I may explain that I have some status in Mr. Granby's inquiry, and it would be a great relief to my mind if I could go.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, I could reasonably see the initial offer from the Captain to Granby as being one of offering his car and chauffeur and the lawyer's second sentence indicating that he expected the Captain to come with him, but that's not how I understood it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, as we know by the end of the story, the Captain had no intent of actually traveling up with the lawyer for obvious reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &amp;quot;They happened to be almost exactly alike,&amp;quot; said the priest. &amp;quot;You could see from the family portraits how strong the likeness ran. And then you talk of his disguising himself. But in a sense everybody's dress is a disguise. The old man disguised himself in a wig, and the young man in a foreign beard. When he shaved and put the wig on his cropped head he was exactly like his father, with a little make-up. Of course, you understand now why he was so very polite about getting you to come up next day here by car. It was because he himself was coming up that night by train. He got in front of you, committed his crime, assumed his disguise, and was ready for the legal negotiations.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T12:42:27.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14569" CreationDate="2020-06-11T12:51:47.660" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that they had her sympathy as if it were a possession of theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T12:51:47.660" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14536" CreationDate="2020-06-11T13:03:50.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the volume edited by Eric Bentley that Benjamin Godfrey's answer already mentioned (&lt;em&gt;The Servant of Two Masters And Other Italian Classics&lt;/em&gt;. Republished by Rowman &amp;amp; Littlefield in 2000; ISBN 978-0-936839-20-2), I also found the following translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruzante: &lt;em&gt;L'Anconitana. The Woman from Ancona&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction and notes by Nancy Dersofi. Biblioteca Italiana. University of California Press, 1994. (192 pages) ISBN 9780520085268.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Angelo Beolco: &lt;em&gt;Retour de guerre suivi de Bilora&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by Jean-Louis Benoit. Éditions Les Solitaires Intempestifs, 2005. (80 pages) ISBN 978-2-84681-128-6. (&lt;em&gt;Retour de guerre&lt;/em&gt; is a translation of the same play that is included in Bentley's translation.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fanelli, Carlo; Trumper, John Bassett: &lt;em&gt;A Translation from &quot;Pavan&quot; into English of Angelo Beolco's Parlamento de Ruzante, qual giera stò in campo / Ruzante's Discourse on Coming Back from the Battlefield&lt;/em&gt;. Edwin Mellen, 2012. (128 pages) ISBN 978-0-7734-4078-4. This is a rather expensive study that contains a translation of one of Beolco's plays.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T13:03:50.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13720" CreationDate="2020-06-11T13:13:50.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all we need to start with Dominique's relationship to Howard, as I think your question doesn't do that full justice. &lt;strong&gt;Their relationship is rather complicated&lt;/strong&gt;, from their very first encounter in the granite quarry and the infamous quasi-rape scene, over her seeming work against him while simultaneously sleeping with him, to her complete renunciation of him. It is also a relationship that is ultimately driven by the novel's core themes of individualism and how society supposedly tries to crush it. I don't quite claim to fully understand what drives all aspects of their relationship, since it is indeed a little confusing at first and laden with a lot of ideologically motivated gestures, but it doesn't just come down to a sudden realization at the end, neither for Dominique nor for Howard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it does seem at first that she disdains him, that is not the whole truth and in fact I would pose that they fell in love at the very first moment they saw each other in the quarry. And that is not because Dominique is an exceptionally beautiful woman, since I don't think Roark would care much about that. If anything, both their outward presences are likely a representation of their inward attitudes. It is because &lt;strong&gt;she ultimately &lt;em&gt;shares&lt;/em&gt; his individualistic ideals, she just has a different way of dealing with it&lt;/strong&gt; and the forces working against it. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5643/50&quot;&gt;He &lt;em&gt;sees&lt;/em&gt; her in a way he doesn’t see many other people&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, at first the relationship does start as kind of a hate-love and their supposed control over each other is a large part of the tension that keeps it going. Their public professional antagonism is what gives their private encounters meaning. Quoting from their first night in his apartment in Part 2, Chapter 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You know that I hate you, Roark. I hate you for what you are, for wanting you, for having to want you. I’m going to fight you--and I’m going to destroy you--and I tell you this as calmly as I told you that I’m a begging animal. I’m going to pray that you can’t be destroyed--I tell you this, too--even though I believe in nothing and have nothing to pray to. But I will fight to block every step you take. I will fight to tear every chance you want away from you. I will hurt you through the only thing that can hurt you--through your work. I will fight to starve you, to strangle you on the things you won’t be able to reach. I have done it to you today--and that is why I shall sleep with you tonight.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;I have hurt you today. I’ll do it again. I’ll come to you whenever I have beaten you--whenever I know that I have hurt you--and I’ll let you own me. I want to be owned, not by a lover, but by an adversary who will destroy my victory over him, not with honorable blows, but with the touch of his body on mine. That is what I want of you, Roark. That is what I am. You wanted to hear it all. You’ve heard it. What do you wish to say now?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is with him that she can actually be herself. It is possible a true love only develops from that later on, but even if maybe both don't realize it at first, it is a loving relationship albeit one drenched in mutual control and pain. Yet the above passages highlight why Dominique also hates Howard. &lt;strong&gt;She hates him, and herself for loving him, because he is incorporating an individualistic ideal that is ultimately &lt;em&gt;doomed&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. We already know she deeply appreciates his work. She herself hates the society of phonies that she is part of and expresses that with mockery and a cold reclusion. There is already a hint of this when we look at her criticism/praise of the Enright House in Part 2, Chapter 8:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A few days later, in his room, sitting on the edge of his drafting table, she looked at a newspaper, at her column and the lines: &quot;I have visited the Enright construction site. I wish that in some future air raid a bomb would blast this house out of existence. It would be a worthy ending. So much better than to see it growing old and soot-stained, degraded by the family photographs, the dirty socks, the cocktail shakers and the grapefruit rinds of its inhabitants. There is not a person in New York City who should be allowed to live in this building.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Roark came to stand beside her, his legs pressed to her knees, and he looked down at the paper, smiling.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You have Roger completely bewildered by this,&quot; he said.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Has he read it?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;I was in his office this morning when he read it. At first, he called you some names I’d never heard before. Then he said, Wait a minute, and he read it again, he looked up, very puzzled, but not angry at all, and he said, if you read it one way...but on the other hand...&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;What did you say?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Nothing. You know, Dominique, I’m very grateful, but when are you going to stop handing me all that extravagant praise? Someone else might see it. And you won’t like that.&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;Someone else?&quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &quot;You know that I got it, from that first article of yours about the Enright House. You wanted me to get it. But don’t you think someone else might understand your way of doing things?&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I myself at first read it as a praise in that way and was surprised by that. Not only does that hint at her ultimately helping him with her criticism (especially when we see that in connection to her earlier meeting with Toohey where he says that he doesn't write about Roark at all in order to not give him attention and a platform). It also highlights a controversial aspect of &lt;strong&gt;why she wants to stop Roark, which is so that the rest of society &lt;em&gt;can't&lt;/em&gt; crush him themselves&lt;/strong&gt;. It is his ultimate failure that she wants to protect him, but even more so herself, from. She doesn't think him fitting into society but instead of helping him she thinks that a lost cause and wants to inhibit his success at the seed. His existence and actions &lt;em&gt;worsen&lt;/em&gt; her pain in this society. This true attitude of hers is seen best in her sarcastic and disillusioned testimony at the Stoddard trial in Part 2, Chapter 12:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Howard Roark built a temple to the human spirit. He saw man as strong, proud, clean, wise and fearless. He saw man as a heroic being. And he built a temple to that. A temple is a place where man is to experience exaltation. He thought that exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeing the truth and achieving it, of living up to one’s highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame, of being able to stand naked in full sunlight. He thought that exaltation means joy and that joy is man’s birthright. He thought&#xA;  that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I do not condemn Ellsworth Toohey. I condemn Howard Roark. A building, they say, must be part of its site. In what kind of world did Roark build his temple? For what kind of men? Look around you. Can you see a shrine becoming sacred by serving as a setting for Mr. Hopton Stoddard? For Mr. Ralston Holcombe? For Mr. Peter Keating? When you look at them all, do you hate Ellsworth Toohey--or do you damn Howard Roark for the unspeakable indignity which he did commit? Ellsworth Toohey is right, that temple is a sacrilege, though not in the sense he meant. I think Mr. Toohey knows that, however. When you see a man casting pearls without getting even a pork chop in return--it is not against the swine that you feel indignation. It is against the man who valued his pearls so little that he was willing to fling them into the muck and to let them become the occasion for a whole concert of grunting, transcribed by the court stenographer...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...The Stoddard Temple must be destroyed. Not to save men from it, but to save it from men. What’s the difference, however? Mr. Stoddard wins. I am in full agreement with everything that’s being done here, except for one point. I didn’t think we should be allowed to get away with that point. Let us destroy, but don’t let us pretend that we are committing an act of virtue. Let us say that we are moles and we object to mountain peaks. Or, perhaps, that we are lemmings, the animals who cannot help swimming out to self-destruction. I realize fully that at this moment I am as futile as Howard Roark. This is my Stoddard Temple--my first and my last.&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in fact the Stoddard trial and its outcome, especially after she herself participated in the temple's aspirations to her seeming enjoyment, is the final drop for her that crushes all hope to see Howard Roark prevail in this world rather than just wasting himself to it. It is right after that that she abandons him completely and marries Peter. &lt;strong&gt;She just &lt;em&gt;gives up&lt;/em&gt;. While she shares Howard's ideals, she doesn't share his indifference to the rest of the world. She hates the world for what it does to Howard and she hates Howard for &lt;em&gt;having&lt;/em&gt; it be done to him. Yet she loves him for the man he is and can't bear to see him fail. But she sees no other way than to sacrifice herself to this world&lt;/strong&gt; and letting herself be engulfed and punished by it, as well as cutting ties to Howard. She thinks she can only function in either extreme, embracing individualism or denouncing it. So she becomes the negating parody of the empty shells she sees walking around everywhere, married to someone she despises and not allowing herself to be happy in a world controlled by &quot;second-handers&quot;. To quote from her ultimate surrender to Howard and the rest of the world in her final visit to him in Part 2, Chapter 14:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...Roark, I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the halfway, the almost, the just-about, the in-between. They may have their justifications. I don’t know. I don’t care to inquire. I know that it is the one thing not given me to understand. When I think of what you are, I can’t accept any reality except a world of your kind. Or at least a world in which you have a fighting chance and a fight on your own terms. That does not exist. And I can’t live a life torn between that which exists--and you. [...] Am I too weak because I can’t do this? I don’t know which is the greater strength: to accept all this for you--or to love you so much that the rest is beyond acceptance. I don’t know. I love you too much.&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You’re not aware of them. I am. I can’t help it, I love you. The contrast is too great. Roark, you won’t win, they’ll destroy you, but I won’t be there to see it happen. I will have destroyed myself first. That’s the only gesture of protest open to me. What else could I offer you? The things people sacrifice are so little. I’ll give you my marriage to Peter Keating. I’ll refuse to permit myself happiness in their world. I’ll take suffering. That will be my answer to them, and my gift to you. I shall probably never see you again. I shall try not to. But I will live for you, through every minute and every shameful act I take, I will live for you in my own way, in the only way I can.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can't quite brush her motivations off as disdain and running off with his rival while waking up at the end to realize who her true love is. She knows it the whole time, she just can't live with it. She is quite a controversial and tragic character in that way. It is only at the end, or rather in the course of the Cortlandt demolition, that she overcomes this hatred of the world, Howard, and herself and literally rises up to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there in that heart-breaking testimony of love we also understand Howard's ongoing love for &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Not only has he found a strong individual personality in her that he can &quot;exist against&quot;. He also understands what she does to herself and why she does it and he knows that it is necessary&lt;/strong&gt; but ultimately will go over. He could not love her as the empty shell that she gives Peter Keating, yet he knows that she can't exist in this world in any other way and that it is a sacrifice of love she commits. But &lt;strong&gt;he knows that she will eventually overcome her fears and her hatred and when that finally happens, we will be there for her.&lt;/strong&gt; So yes, I think he saw that &quot;superwoman&quot; in her &lt;em&gt;from the getgo&lt;/em&gt;, only it took time to surface:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;...I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breathe air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me. If you married me now, I would become your whole existence. But I would not want you then. You would not want yourself--and so you would not love me long. To say ’I love you’ one must know first how to say the ’I.’ The kind of surrender I could have from you now would give me nothing but an empty hulk. If I demanded it, I’d destroy you. That’s why I won’t stop you. I’ll let you go to your husband. I don’t know how I’ll live through tonight, but I will. I want you whole, as I am, as you’ll remain in the battle you’ve chosen. A battle is never selfless.&quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;You must learn not to be afraid of the world. Not to be held by it as you are now. Never to be hurt by it as you were in that courtroom. I must let you learn it. I can’t help you. You must find your own way. When you have, you’ll come back to me. They won’t destroy me, Dominique. And they won’t destroy you. You’ll win, because you’ve chosen the hardest way of fighting for your freedom from the world. I’ll wait for you. I love you. I’m saying this now for all the years we’ll have to wait. I love you, Dominique.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to some degree maybe it is a bit like you write in your own story that you compare it with. Howard sees something in Dominique that maybe she doesn't fully see herself or can’t accept. &lt;strong&gt;He sees the bigger person she is &lt;em&gt;bound&lt;/em&gt; to be&lt;/strong&gt;, accepting that she can't yet realize that herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T13:13:50.697" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14575" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14577" CreationDate="2020-06-11T13:27:07.717" Score="2" ViewCount="320" Body="&lt;p&gt;This famous quote is from &lt;em&gt;The Mourning Bride&lt;/em&gt; by William Congreve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does &quot;breast&quot; in this quote mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10224" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T13:31:36.617" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T20:46:21.450" Title="What does &quot;savage breast&quot; mean in the Congreve quote?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-congreve&gt;&lt;the-mourning-bride&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14563" CreationDate="2020-06-11T13:44:09.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to my question is probably much more straightforward than the two previous answers suggest. According to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadducees#General&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Sadducees believed&lt;/a&gt; that there were &quot;no rewards or penalties after death&quot; (Wikipedia's words).&#xA;It is in the light of this statement that I interpret the narrator's words: if there are no penalties after death, there is no penalty for not sharing part of your wealth with the poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is consistent with other statements by the narrator in &lt;em&gt;The Fall&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. that we should not wait for the Last Judgment (people judge each other every day anyway) and that the name of God has gone out of fashion.&#xA;(The narrator does not straight out deny the existence of God or of gods generally, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T13:44:09.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14575" CreationDate="2020-06-11T15:06:01.317" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Breast’ is used here in the following sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;breast, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 5.a.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;fig.&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;transf.&lt;/em&gt; The seat of the affections and emotions; the repository of consciousness, designs, and secrets; the heart; hence, the affections, private thoughts and feelings. (Commonly plural in Old English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clear from the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;ALMERIA. Musick has Charms to sooth a &lt;strong&gt;savage Breast&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  To soften &lt;strong&gt;Rocks&lt;/strong&gt;, or bend a &lt;strong&gt;knotted Oak&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  I’ve read, that things inanimate have mov’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  And, as with living Souls, have been inform’d,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  What then am I? Am &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; more senseless grown&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Than &lt;strong&gt;Trees&lt;/strong&gt;, or &lt;strong&gt;Flint&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Congreve (1697). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mourningbridetra00cong/page/n17/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mourning Bride&lt;/em&gt;, act I, scene I&lt;/a&gt;. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing the first two lines with the last two, “knotted Oak” corresponds to “Trees”, “Rocks” to “Flint” and so “savage Breast” must correspond to “I”: that is, it is Almeria’s feelings of grief that ought to be soothed by the charms of music (but are not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Almeria says that she has read that inanimate things have been moved by music, and I think that the book she refers to is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ovid&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In Arthur Golding’s translation, the music of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orpheus&lt;/a&gt; delights “savage beasts”, “stones”, and “trees”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Now whyle the &lt;em&gt;Thracian&lt;/em&gt; Poet with this song delyghts ye mynds&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  Of savage beastes, &amp;amp; drawes both stones and trees ageynst their kynds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ovid. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924026559777/page/n243/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, book XI&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Arthur Golding (1567).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These correspond to the elements in the passage in Congreve, but with a punning change from “beasts” to “breast”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T20:46:21.450" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T20:46:21.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14578" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14579" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English playwright and poet William Congreve (1670 – 1729) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T16:06:31.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14580" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14581" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about William Congreve's tragedy 'The Mourning Bride' (1697). Use this tag with the tag [william-congreve]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" LastActivityDate="2020-06-11T16:07:46.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14582" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14584" CreationDate="2020-06-11T16:58:24.140" Score="6" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am searching for a short story that my 7th grade social studies teacher told me many years ago, and that I have never forgotten.&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Below is what I remember from the text. &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I recall it being written in English by a fairly esteemed professor or PhD. (likely of psychology or philosophy)&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The story explains several normal human activities in a light that makes us sound like total savages. One of these activities is going to the dentist. The author writes factually about the human tradition of going to the dentist, but phrases our actions so that they sound more like the traditions of an ancient Amazonian tribe. &#xA;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;If I recall correctly, the story does not reveal to the reader what it is about until its last sentence. When my 7th grade class had it read to us, we were all reeling at the seemingly inhuman things these people were doing. We were well and truly shocked to realize it was about us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10225" LastEditorUserId="10225" LastEditDate="2020-06-11T18:21:53.167" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T08:21:46.303" Title="Short story about humans that portrays them as savages" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14583" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-12T01:19:49.520" Score="1" ViewCount="148" Body="&lt;p&gt;In social media &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/liberadordemex/status/1093978039959064577&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(1)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/Moodlivingph/posts/according-to-charles-bukowski-the-sadness-is-caused-by-intelligence-the-more-you/125566699097784/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(2)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/beastpublcations01/posts/according-to-charles-bukowski-sadness-is-caused-by-intelligence-the-more-you-und/118688403139027/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(3)&lt;/a&gt;, I have found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;Sadness is caused by intelligence, the more you understand certain things, the more you wish you didn't understand them.&quot; &#xA;  —  Charles Bukowski.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yet I have no reliable source that can confirm me.&#xA;I will be grateful if you please tell me about the real quote-author and origin of this quote with proper resources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10231" LastEditorUserId="10231" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T10:25:42.900" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T10:25:42.900" Title="Origin of the quote &quot;Sadness is caused by intelligence&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14582" CreationDate="2020-06-12T02:16:38.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Copying from my answer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92100/short-story-about-aliens-observing-people-going-to-the-dentist&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; at scifi.SE:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nacirema#.22Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema.22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Body Ritual Among the Nacirema&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mitchell_Miner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Horace Mitchell Miner&lt;/a&gt;. Originally published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anthropologist&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;American Anthropologist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (June, 1956), it has been anthologized in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?217933&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Baker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert A. Baker&lt;/a&gt;, ed.) and in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?36401&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Apeman, Spaceman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Stover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leon E. Stover&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?28&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harry Harrison&lt;/a&gt;, eds.) The text is available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Body_Ritual_among_the_Nacirema&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the Wikipedia summary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the paper, Miner describes the Nacirema, a little-known tribe living in North America. The way in which he writes about the curious practices that this group performs distances readers from the fact that the North American group described actually corresponds to modern-day Americans of the mid-1950s. The article sometimes serves as a demonstration of a gestalt shift with relation to sociology.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Miner presents the Nacirema as a group living in the territory between the Canadian Cree, the Yaqui and Tarahumare of Mexico, and the Carib and Arawak of the Antilles. The paper describes the typical Western ideal for oral cleanliness, as well as providing an outside view on hospital care and on psychiatry. The Nacirema are described as having a highly developed market economy that has evolved within a rich natural habit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Miner's article became a popular work, reprinted in many introductory anthropology and sociology textbooks. It is also given as an example of process analysis in &lt;em&gt;The Bedford Reader&lt;/em&gt;, a literature textbook. The article itself received the most reprint permission requests of any article in &lt;em&gt;American Anthropologist&lt;/em&gt;, but has become part of the public domain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;  &lt;br&gt;Some of the popular aspects of Nacirema culture include: Medicine men and women (doctors, psychiatrists, and pharmacists), a charm-box (medicine cabinet), the mouth-rite ritual (brushing teeth), and a cultural hero known as Notgnihsaw (Washington spelled backwards). These ritual practices are prescribed as how man should comport himself in the presence of sacred things. These sacred aspects are the rituals that the Nacirema part take in throughout their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the passage from &quot;Body Ritual Among the Nacirema&quot; about going to the dentist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In addition to the private mouth-rite, the people seek out a holy-mouth-man once or twice a year. These practitioners have an impressive set of paraphernalia, consisting of a variety of augers, awls, probes, and prods. The use of these objects in the exorcism of the evils of the mouth involves almost unbelievable ritual torture of the client. The holy-mouth-man opens the client's mouth and using the above-mentioned tools, enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth. Magical materials are put into these holes. If there are no naturally occurring holes in the teeth, large sections of one or more teeth are gouged out so that the supernatural substance can be applied. In the client's view, the purpose of these ministrations is to arrest decay and to draw friends. The extremely sacred and traditional character of the rite is evident in the fact that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T02:22:26.310" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T02:22:26.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14599" CreationDate="2020-06-12T14:53:53.313" Score="0" ViewCount="1097" Body="&lt;p&gt;My literature homework about poetry involves the poem '&lt;strong&gt;Tich Miller&lt;/strong&gt;' of Wendy Cope.&#xA;it is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tich Miller wore glasses&#xA;  with elastoplast-pink frames&#xA;  and had one foot three sizes larger than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When they picked teams for outdoor games&#xA;  she and I were always the last two&#xA;  left standing by the wire-mesh fence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;We avoided one another’s eyes,&#xA;  stooping, perhaps, to re-tie a shoelace,&#xA;  or affecting interest in the flight&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;of some fortunate bird, and pretended&#xA;  not to hear the urgent conference:&#xA;  ‘Have Tubby!’  ‘No, no, have Tich!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Usually they chose me, the lesser dud,&#xA;  and she lolloped, unselected,&#xA;  to the back of the other team.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;At eleven we went to different schools.&#xA;  In time I learned to get my own back,&#xA;  sneering at hockey-players who couldn’t spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tich died when she was twelve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who is Tich Miller?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What has happened to her?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why was this poem written about her? &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10234" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T16:39:34.133" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T12:41:07.940" Title="Who is Tich Miller? What has happened to her? Why was this poem written about her?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;wendy-cope&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14586" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14496" CreationDate="2020-06-12T15:48:00.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the same chapter, Peter Thiel describes the question &quot;What important truth do very few people agree with you on?&quot; as a &quot;contrarian question&quot; and adds that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A good answer takes the following form: &quot;Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to define two types of progress: horizontal or extensive progress versus vertical or intensive progress. Horizontal progress takes things that already work somewhere and makes them work everywhere; according to Thiel, this is what globalisation does. Vertical progress is technology or, more precisely, the invention of new technology. Horizontal progress takes the world from 1 to n (e.g. you have a typewriter and mass-produce it), while technology takes the world from 0 to 1 (e.g. you have a typewriter and you invent a word processor).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, it is possible to understand Thiel's own answer, which he also explains in the first chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My own answer to the contrarian question is that &lt;strong&gt;most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see how it takes the form described earlier in the chapter: &quot;Most people believe x&quot; (x = &quot;the future of the world will be defined by globalization&quot;), &quot;but the truth is the opposite of x&quot; (the opposite of x is &quot;technology matters more&quot;). However, technology is not the opposite of globalisation. In fact. a few paragraphs above his own answer, Thiel writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Because globalisation and technology are different modes of progress, it's possible to have both, either, or neither at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different doesn't mean &quot;opposite&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T15:48:00.593" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14587" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14588" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet Wendy Cope (born 1945) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" LastActivityDate="2020-06-12T16:58:58.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-13T12:03:52.247" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Maupassant's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Short_Stories_of_Guy_de_Maupassant/That_Pig_of_a_Morin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;That Pig of a Morin&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse_(Havard,_1894)/Ce_cochon_de_Morin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ce cochon de Morin&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;the narrator, Labarbe, says to a woman he finds very attractive (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Parce que vous êtes une des plus belles créatures qui soient ; parce que ce serait pour moi un brevet, un titre, une gloire, que d’avoir voulu vous &lt;strong&gt;violenter&lt;/strong&gt;. Parce qu’on dirait après vous avoir vue : «Tiens, Labarbe n’a pas volé ce qui lui arrive, mais il a de la chance tout de même.»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation on Wikisource goes as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;'Because you are one of the most beautiful creatures living; because it would be an honor and a glory for me to have &lt;strong&gt;offered you violence&lt;/strong&gt;, and because people would have said, after seeing you: &quot;Well, Labarbe has richly deserved what he has got, but he is a lucky fellow, all the same.&quot;' &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violenter has &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/violenter#Verbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;multiple meanings&lt;/a&gt;, including to force someone to do something and to use violence. However, it is clear from the context that the intended meaning is rape, and Labarbe later goes to the young woman's room to force himself onto her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the other stories in &lt;em&gt;Contes de la Bécasse&lt;/em&gt; is even more extreme.&#xA;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/4290/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Son&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse_(Havard,_1894)/Un_fils&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Un fils&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;two old frieds, one a member of the French Academy, the other a senator, talk about extramarital children:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;You see, my friend, that there is scarcely a man who has not some children that he does not know, children—'father unknown'—whom he has generated almost unconsciously, just as this tree reproduces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The member of the French Academy also adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;From eighteen to forty years, in fact, counting in every chance cursory acquaintanceship, we may well say that we have been intimate with two or three hundred women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then talks about a maid at an inn where he had stayed when he was twenty-five years old:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;But one night, after I had stayed quite late with my friend and was going back to my room, I passed the girl, who was going to her room. It was just opposite my open door, and, without reflection, and more for fun than anything else, I abruptly seized her round the waist, and before she recovered from her astonishment I had thrown her down and locked her in my room.  She looked at me, amazed, excited, terrified, not daring to cry out for fear of a scandal and of being probably driven out, first by her employers and then, perhaps, by her father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then describes that he raped her. A few paragraphs later, he adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;A week later I had forgotten this adventure, so &lt;strong&gt;common and frequent when one is travelling&lt;/strong&gt;, the &lt;strong&gt;inn servants being generally destined to amuse travellers in this way&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many years later, when staying at the same inn, he asks the owner whether he remembers a maid who had worked there many years before and learns that she had died in childbirth almost nine months after his previous stay. As far as the innkeeper knows, the girl did not have any lovers at the time and she never wanted to say how she got pregnant.&#xA;She bore a son, who now works as a stable boy at the inn because he does not have the intellectual abilities to do anything more demanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, the senator says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;It is good to be twenty-five and even to have children like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether Maupassant shared the callousness towards women that these characters exhibit; one should not confuse narrator and author. For this question I am interested in finding how female readers at the end of the 19th century responded to this callousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The women in the Maupassant stories I have read so far (and the novel &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt;) never speak out about it; violence against women usually remains a secret, apparently because the women seem to fear social rejection. But that does not mean that readers needed to remain silent about it. For this reason, I would like to know whether there are any comments by women on this type of violence in Maupassant stories. These comments need not have been published in the late 19th century; they may also be part of letters or diaries that were published later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-13T12:24:28.267" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T12:24:28.267" Title="How did contemporary female readers respond to the sexual violence in the Contes de la Bécasse?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3752" CreationDate="2020-06-13T21:16:53.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Baudelaire's &lt;em&gt;Les Fleurs du mal&lt;/em&gt; contained two poems with almost identical titles:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/180&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Femmes Damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte)&quot;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;and&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fleursdumal.org/poem/181&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Femmes damnées&quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;When Baudelaire and his publisher were prosecuted for obscenity and blasphemy in 1857 (by the same lawyer who had prosecuted Flaubert),&#xA;six poems were to be removed from &lt;em&gt;Les Fleurs du mal&lt;/em&gt;, including &quot;Femmes Damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte)&quot; but not &quot;Femmes damnées&quot;.&#xA;(These poems were not allowed to be published in France until 1949, so they were printed abroad, for example in the volume &lt;em&gt;Les Épaves&lt;/em&gt;, published in Belgium in 1866.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The court did not find any obsene or immoral passages or expressions in &quot;Femmes Damnées&quot;.&#xA;In stanzas 2-5, the poet describes four categories of women, which the sixth stanza describes as &quot;searchers of the infinite&quot;.&#xA;The fourth category (fifth stanza) wear a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.catholiccompany.com/content/how-to-use-the-scapular&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scapular&lt;/a&gt; under their clothes.&#xA;The scapular is meant to be worn so that one of the patches rests on the chest and the other on the back.&#xA;Apparently, these women also practice &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-flagellation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-flagellation&lt;/a&gt;, which is usually a form of penance or purification, but in this case causes both pleasure and pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, the women in the fifth stanza are not nuns, or the court in 1857 did not interpret the poem in this way. Apparently, the court did not interpret &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapular&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scapular&lt;/a&gt; as the &quot;monastic scapular&quot;, since that is an outer garment worn over a tunic and that would therefore not touch the skin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources (other than those already linked above):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Fleurs du mal&lt;/a&gt; on the French Wikipedia, especially the section on the trial, which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Fleurs_du_mal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; does not discuss.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Warning: not for minors!) &lt;a href=&quot;https://saphisme.pagesperso-orange.fr/s19/charlesb.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Du lesbianisme chez Charles Baudelaire&lt;/a&gt;, saphisme.com, 28.06.2003, updated 20.01.2006.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/text/poetrys-place-history-banned-books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry's Place in the History of Banned Books&lt;/a&gt;, poets.org, 13.09.2018.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harald Sack: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scihi.org/charles-baudelaire-flowers-evil/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Baudelaire and the Flowers of Evil&lt;/a&gt;, SciHi Blog, 09.04.2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T21:16:53.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10889" CreationDate="2020-06-13T23:35:05.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that the reason MacPhee is in the story is because the author wanted a counterweight to all the magic and fantasy stuff. MacPhee is a cynic and a skeptic and a realist. He is there as a proxy for all the cynical and skeptical readers. Lewis wanted the cynical point of view to be nearly omnipresent in the story, and yet always have Ransom's sagely responses to counter it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2020-06-13T23:35:05.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18016" CreationDate="2020-06-14T04:01:04.920" Score="10" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Two of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sketchautobio00franrich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autobiography&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benjamin Franklin&lt;/a&gt; discusses a trick he and one of his friends played on the rest of their group, wherein Franklin pretended to be the author of his friend's poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the time of our meeting drew nigh, Ralph called on me first, and let me know his piece was ready. I told him I had been busy, and, having little inclination, had done nothing. He then show'd me his piece for my opinion, and I much approv'd it, as it appear'd to me to have great merit. &amp;quot;Now,&amp;quot; says he, &amp;quot;Osborne never will allow the least merit in any thing of mine, but makes 1000 criticisms out of mere envy. He is not so jealous of you; I wish, therefore, you would take this piece, and produce it as yours; I will pretend not to have had time, and so produce nothing. We shall then see what he will say to it.&amp;quot; It was agreed, and I immediately transcrib'd it, that it might appear in my own hand.    (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sketchautobio00franrich/page/52/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 52&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty clear here that the one who wrote the poem and passed it off as Franklin's was Ralph, while Osborne was the one who was tricked. Yet at the end of the next paragraph Franklin writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When we next met, Ralph discovered the trick we had plaid him, and Osborne was a little laught at.    (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sketchautobio00franrich/page/53/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 53&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not seem to make sense, as Ralph was not the one on whom the trick was played; he was the one who played the trick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked several editions of the autobiography to see if this was merely a mistake in the particular edition, but every version I saw has Ralph as the subject of that phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I missing something here? Is there some explanation of how this sentence can be read while still upholding Ralph as the one who played the trick? Or did Franklin simply mix up the names when writing this? If the final option, has this been noted anywhere? (None of the editions I saw had any note relating to this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Franklin, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sketchautobio00franrich/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1771–1790. New York: Houghton, 1896. Archive.org. Retrieved 17 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T02:08:12.833" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T02:08:12.833" Title="Did Benjamin Franklin mix up his friends?" Tags="&lt;benjamin-franklin&gt;&lt;autobiography-of-benjamin-franklin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14593" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14600" CreationDate="2020-06-14T06:34:32.117" Score="6" ViewCount="236" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the English version of &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UigzN-4JR14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;Simple and Clean&quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Utada Hikaru:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;When you walk away&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   You don't hear me say&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   Please, O baby, don't go&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   It's hard to let it go&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't structure the fourth line into verses because I don't have a sense of the meter. What type of poetic meter is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4729" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T12:55:26.833" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T13:22:35.200" Title="How does this song lyric &quot;Simple and Clean&quot; scan?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14594" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14595" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American polymath Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) and his life as a writer. His writings include 'Poor Richard's Almanack', 'The Way to Wealth' (1758) and 'The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T10:28:29.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14596" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14597" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" Score="0" Body="Questions about Benjamin Franklin's unfinished memoirs or autobiography, which are usually published under the title 'The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin'. Franklin's account of his own life has a complex publication history, which is why other titles have also been used. Use this tag with the tag [benjamin-franklin] ." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T10:53:25.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14569" CreationDate="2020-06-14T11:26:33.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Her sympathy was ours” is ambiguous between two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“her sympathy was [the same as] our sympathy”, that is, she was sympathetic to the same things that we were sympathetic to (whatever they were);&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“her sympathy belonged to us”, that is, she was sympathetic with us.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both readings, “we” and “us” refer to the narrator, Victor Frankenstein, and his friend Henry Clerval. In the second reading, “sympathy” is being used in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sympathy, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 3a.&lt;/strong&gt; Conformity of feelings, inclinations, or temperament, which makes persons agreeable to each other; community of feeling; harmony of disposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and not in sense 3c, “the quality or state of being thus affected by the suffering or sorrow of another”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of the sentence, which says that her smile, voice, and eyes “were ever there to bless and animate us”, inclines us towards the second meaning: if these attributes were always there for us, then presumably her sympathy was always there with us too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly the whole passage is making use of religious images: Elizabeth is described as having a “saintly soul” which shines like a “shrine-dedicated lamp”; she has “celestial [heavenly] eyes”; she “blesses” us, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don’t find any specific Christian reference in “her sympathy was ours”. The word “sympathy” in the sense used here is an early modern coinage, and is not found in the King James Version of the Bible, which uses “pity” or “compassion” instead. Moreover, the suggestion, made in comments, that the Catholic doctrine of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intercession_of_saints&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intercession of the saints&lt;/a&gt; is being alluded to, seems quite implausible:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Intercession is a process in which the believer asks the saint to influence God on their behalf, but Frankenstein does not seem to be asking anything of Elizabeth in this passage.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mary Shelley was not especially sympathetic to Catholicism. For example, she wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;we are disgusted by the Catholics setting the corruption, profligacy and imbecility of Papal Rome, in comparison with her ancient glories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mary Shelley (1829). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/westminsterrevi11wasogoog/page/n143/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Modern Italy&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Westminster Review&lt;/em&gt;, number XXI.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-14T12:39:11.547" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T12:39:11.547" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14585" CreationDate="2020-06-14T12:41:07.940" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Tich Miller is a character who went to primary school with the narrator of the poem. The name “Tich” is a nickgame given in England to small people. She had “one foot three sizes larger than the other” (suggestive of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clubfoot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;clubfoot&lt;/a&gt;), she was physically awkward (“lolloped” rather than “walked” or “ran”), and she was never chosen by the team captains during the school’s cruel procedure for dividing the class into hockey teams.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She died when she was twelve, and the poem does not say why. Perhaps her clubfoot indicated a rare developmental disorder like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loeys%E2%80%93Dietz_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loeys–Dietz syndrome&lt;/a&gt;, which comes with increased risk of death due to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneurysm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aneurysm&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps her physical awkwardness led to an accidental death such as falling from a tree or being hit by a car. Perhaps bullying at her high school drove her to suicide. Or perhaps it was unrelated to anything described in the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One possibility, of course, is that Tich Miller represents a real person who was at school with Wendy Cope, and Cope wanted to tell her story. But we should be cautious about making that kind of assumption: poems are not documentaries, and poets are free to invent and fictionalize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;My first collections of poems, &lt;em&gt;Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis&lt;/em&gt;, has featured on a couple of A-level syllabuses in recent years. When I first learned about this I was pleased to have been chosen by the examination boards but I did have some doubts about the suitability of the book for school pupils. It includes a number of parodies and other literary jokes that can’t mean much to readers who haven’t encountered the works they refer to. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Some of my visits to schools confirmed these misgivings. In one school the pupils had been encouraged to look in my poem ‘Budgie Finds His Voice’ for evidence of my attibute to environmental issues. They hadn’t understood that the poem is a parody of Ted Hughes. When I explained this they were disappointed and tried to argue that it might, none the less, say something about Wendy Cope’s views on pollution and global warming. I had to be very firm. And I was uncomfortable, because the last thing I want to do is undermine teachers in front of their students.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Wendy Cope (2008). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=DKwOf4UpQ4EC&amp;amp;pg=PT5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979–2006&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Faber and Faber.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is much more likely is that Tich Miller is a fictional character who dramatises the experience of seeing someone being bullied for physical awkwardness or disability, and yet repudiating solidarity with them (“avoided one another’s eyes”), for fear of the bullying being turned against oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T12:41:07.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14593" CreationDate="2020-06-14T13:22:35.200" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The line scans like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; /   x x     /   x    x  /    x   x      / x    x  /    x /&#xA;Simple and clean is the way that you're making me feel tonight&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so one way to describe this would be “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalectic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dactylic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hexameter&lt;/a&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochee&lt;/a&gt; in the penultimate foot”. But really the song isn’t regular enough in its rhythm for that kind of prosodic description to be useful. What you might say instead is that the song is mostly stressed on every &lt;em&gt;second&lt;/em&gt; syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  /   x   /   x /&#xA;When you walk away&#xA;&#xA;/    x     /    x  /&#xA;You don't hear me say&#xA;&#xA;  /    x  / x  /     x&#xA;Please O baby don't go&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but then switches to being stressed on every &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; syllable for this line, making it stand out from the rest, appropriately enough, as it is delivering the theme and title of the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T13:22:35.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14601" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14602" CreationDate="2020-06-14T14:13:22.270" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Worst Crime in the World&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown and his friend, a lawyer, was talking to a  rich old man who has lived alone in a castle for a long time, and who has just said that he will never talk to his son as long as he lives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lawyer said: “Why, what on earth has he — — ”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I am &lt;strong&gt;a private gentleman&lt;/strong&gt;,” said Musgrave, “as well as the custodian of a great inheritance. And my son did something so horrible that he has ceased to be — I will not say a gentleman — but even a human being. It is the worst crime in the world. Do you remember what Douglas said when Marmion, his guest, offered to shake hands with him?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes,” said Father Brown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“‘My castles are &lt;strong&gt;my king’s&lt;/strong&gt; alone, from turret to foundation stone,’” said Musgrave. “‘The hand of Douglas is his own.’”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;private&amp;quot; may mean many things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;living alone&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;em&gt;And he was living alone indeed as I said&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;made his wealth independently&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;prefer the privacy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the third meaning is the most suitable in this context, isn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;my king's&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;mine&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, as I never met it before and can't find its meaning in any source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T20:39:44.077" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T20:39:44.077" Title="Meaning of &quot;private gentleman&quot; in &quot;The Worst Crime in the World&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14602" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14601" CreationDate="2020-06-14T14:20:44.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fourth position:  I do not hold a position of public trust.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an official, it would be his duty to deal with odious people.  As a private individual, he has no such duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why I think this likely is the anecdote about Douglas.  His castle was a public trust -- the king had installed him and his family in it, in return for his services as an earl -- but his hand was his own and therefore he could keep it private.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That is what he meant by &quot;the king's alone&quot; -- it was, in reality, only the property of the king, he was just entrusted with it.  Bit of hyperbole in that, but a declaration of absolute loyalty.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T14:20:44.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14603" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-14T15:18:25.447" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;The woman is upper-class British, stranded I believe somewhere in the Middle East late 19th century or so (she's waiting for an often-cancelled train).  While stuck there alone, she starts to realize that her husband was madly in love with a friend of theirs; her children have rejected her, and so on.   At the end, as she finally travels back into more hospitable Europe, she decides she was fantasizing and none of that could be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;edit&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this 25 years ago, but my impression was that it was written by a British author during or shortly after the time-period in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="574" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-14T19:24:01.213" Title="Trying to find novel about a woman who goes into deep introspection while stranded away from home" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14608" CreationDate="2020-06-15T08:59:55.087" Score="3" ViewCount="168" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colin Dexter's protagonist was Detective Chief Inspector (Endeavour) Morse, in many novels and the TV series where he was played by John Thaw. Morse was named after the polymath crossword puzzle enthusiast Sir Jeremy Morse, on the back of whose authoritative chess tome &lt;em&gt;Chess Problems: Tasks &amp;amp; Records&lt;/em&gt; it is written: &quot;In his spare time he has pursued a career in banking, which included the Chairmanship of Lloyds Bank from 1977 to 1993.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But sidekick Sgt Lewis (played by Kevin Whateley in &lt;em&gt;Morse&lt;/em&gt; and later in his own TV series) was named after another rival clue-setter, Mrs B. Lewis. Is anything more known about Mrs Lewis' life and accomplishments?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Morse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inspector Morse&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10241" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T09:32:09.990" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T09:57:47.733" Title="Who was Mrs B.Lewis?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;colin-dexter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14606" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14607" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the English crime writer Colin Dexter (1930 – 2017) and his life as a writer. Dexter is best known for his 'Inspector Morse' series of novels." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T09:42:19.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14605" CreationDate="2020-06-15T09:57:47.733" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Mrs B. Lewis” was the pseudonym used by &lt;strong&gt;Dorothy Taylor&lt;/strong&gt; (1911–2009) for entering crossword competitions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dorothy used to enter competitions under the pseudonym Mrs B Lewis, which was the maiden name of her sister-in-law. One of her fellow crossword compilers and solvers was Colin Dexter, the author of the Inspector Morse detective novels, and when he came to name the characters in his books he often drew on the names of his crossword colleagues. Dorothy was one of his favourite compilers and he named Morse’s Sergeant Lewis after her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David Taylor (2009). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/aug/09/obituary-dorothy-taylor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Obituary for Dorothy Taylor&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, Sunday 9th August 2009.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dorothy Taylor compiled the &amp;quot;Everyman&amp;quot; crossword in &lt;em&gt;The Observer&lt;/em&gt; from 1963 to 1993. &lt;em&gt;The Observer&lt;/em&gt; is weekly, and she alternated with co-compiler Alec Robins, so that she set about 780 crosswords for the newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T09:57:47.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14662" CreationDate="2020-06-15T12:52:00.657" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In C. S. Lewis's novel &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, the main character Jane Studdock had the maiden name Jane Tudor. This is only mentioned once in the book itself - I had forgotten it and only noticed it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Hideous_Strength&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; - and its significance is not delved into. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Tudor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tudor&lt;/a&gt;, of course, is a significant name in the history of Britain, and the history of Britain is very relevant to this story in other ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the implication that Jane is descended from royalty? Or does the name have some particular symbolism connected with her abilities? &lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of this name Tudor?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T10:53:31.250" Title="What is the significance of Jane's maiden name Tudor in That Hideous Strength?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-space-trilogy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14611" CreationDate="2020-06-15T14:48:13.747" Score="5" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading Lynette Hunter's lecture text &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/what-is-literary-value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;What Is Literary Value?&quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Gresham College, 1997), I came across the following passage (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;What gets into and what stays out of the canon is largely decided by an interlocking relationship between education and publishing, and I will now go on to talk about each of these. First, education. When Matthew Arnold, in the 1860s to 70s, along with others, proposed and saw through the passing of the Education Acts, he was faced with, among many other things, a problem of what the pupils were to learn. (...) The teachers were frequently women, or impoverished men, neither with sufficient income to buy several copies of individual authors, so &lt;strong&gt;Arnold and his associates compiled a textbook, an anthology of the texts thought most appropriate for teaching the young people of England&lt;/strong&gt;, and of course making it possible to examine them all on the same basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hunter adds that Arnold's canon remained in place for 50 years, when it was updated by people such as F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot, resulting in a canon that was still largely in place in the late 1990s. However, I have been unable to find the textbook or anthology Hunter refers to. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on Matthew Arnold&lt;/a&gt; does not appear to mention it, in spite of the influence it must have had. Searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=matthew%20arnold%20literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt; gives results for Arnold's fiction and non-fiction but nothing that looks like a textbook or anthology for use in schools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When was this textbook or anthology published for the first time, what was its title and who, besides Arnold, compiled it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T20:07:22.400" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T20:07:22.400" Title="Matthew Arnold's anthology of literature for use in schools" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;canon&gt;&lt;matthew-arnold&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14611" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14610" CreationDate="2020-06-15T15:25:41.310" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hunter may have been referring to the four-volume &lt;a href=&quot;http://oldsite.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/anthologies/Ward.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&quot;The English Poets. Selections with Critical Introductions by Various Writers and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold&quot;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Thomas Humphry Ward, published by Macmillan in 1880. Ward was married to Arnold's niece (novelist, Mrs. Humphry Ward). &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Preface to the anthology begins, &quot;The aim of this book is to supply an admitted want -- that of an anthology which may adequately represent the vast and varied field of English Poetry.&#xA;Nothing of the kind at present exists.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T15:25:41.310" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14613" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-15T17:43:23.993" Score="1" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is often stated that it is nearly impossible to tell Shakespeare's point of view or to hear his personal voice behind his characters.  While I accept this premise, as one reads more of Shakespeare, one feels that one can locate Shakespeare, but I wonder if this is an illusion of perception.  Many commentators hypothesize that certain obscure passages are Shakespeare's personal commentary on the play.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many scholars tend to agree that Hamlet's voice is similar to Shakespeare's voice.  Some critics find Shakespeare's voice in the Sonnets, a point I find unconvincing for several reasons.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stumbled on the dedication to &quot;The Rape of Lucrece&quot;, and like his other dedication, I was surprised to find a nicely formal, but somewhat butt-kissy note to the Earl of Southhampton.  I won't quote it in full (the text is readily available.) It is a development of, &quot;The gift is small, the thought is all...&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;&quot;..Were my worth greater, my duty would show greater, meantime, as it&#xA;  is, it is bound to your lordship, to whom I wish long life still&#xA;  lengthened with all happiness..&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, I am trying to remember where the above is echoed in the plays. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastEditorUserId="10183" LastEditDate="2020-06-15T22:50:23.563" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T23:07:25.737" Title="Shakespeare's voice" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;twelfth-night&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14614" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14631" CreationDate="2020-06-15T22:19:29.573" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paulina, a wife of one of the aristocrats, speaks these lines to Leontes in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And thou, good goddess Nature, which hast made it &lt;br&gt; So like to him&#xA;  that got it, if thou hast &lt;br&gt; The ordering of the mind too, 'mongst all&#xA;  colors &lt;br&gt; No yellow in 't, lest she suspect, as he does, &lt;br&gt; Her children&#xA;  not her husband's!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, 2.3. lines 104-108&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would someone, please, help me with the interpretation of these lines?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I have the following which doesn't make sense to me: &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&quot;Thou&quot; refers to Nature but could also refer to Hermione.  The suggestion is who would Nature look for in order to make a child that looks like it's father, but also that Nature doesn't need a father to have children.   The question if nature has an ordering of the mind (like Leontes?) except without jealousy---Otherwise, Hermione (who is she in line 107?) would suspect as Leontes does that her children are illegitimate.  If she doesn't have the mad jealousy why would she entertain an alternate parenting reality?   &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it be &quot;,...if thou hast not \ The ordering of the mind too, 'mongs all colors...&quot; ?  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T15:17:21.987" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T19:46:11.333" Title="The Winter's Tale, Act 2 scene 3, lines 104-108. What do these lines mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14615" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14613" CreationDate="2020-06-15T22:49:00.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even here, Shakespeare eludes us.  We learn that he behaves with the proper societal decorum when addressing those of a greater social standing.  We see him as a typical man  of the English Renaissance.    But even here, we could argue that Shakespeare is masked   due to the formalities required in such circumstances.  Similarly, were one to apply for an NEH grant, one would expect that the language of the request to be more formal.  (Perhaps the process could be streamlined so that we could apply via Twitter as in: &quot;Need good dough 4 Big Bird--L8.&quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;, Viola is placed in a several circumstances where she has to address her social superiors, but she is not able to reveal herself.  In her address to Olivia, Viola has to present herself with a false and uncomfortable formality that evokes laughter.  With Malvolio, one would argue that there isn't much difference between his formality and his real personality.  Even at the very end, when the formality is stripped away from Malvolio, we see an unlikable man.  Yet, we still feel some sympathy toward him.       &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastActivityDate="2020-06-15T22:49:00.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14616" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8391" CreationDate="2020-06-16T00:40:05.883" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your example is a simile, but not by a strict textbook definition.  Similes usually follow a rather specific pattern.  &quot;The sea is like dark wine&quot; is a simile.  &quot;The wine dark sea.&quot; is not a simile.  In the poem, &quot;the soul&quot; goes through a variety of figurative language . In the last stanza, it is not so clear that &quot;Like Stone,&quot; refers to the soul making it similar to a simile, or if the poem is addressing the reader to &quot;Chose One...Like Stone&quot;.  The language is too complex to be classified as a simile, but a more unambiguous example should have been used for the test.  &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10183" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T00:40:05.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14617" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-16T09:05:10.437" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Maupassant's short story &quot;Le Signe&quot; / &quot;The Signal&quot;, part of the collection &lt;em&gt;Le Horla&lt;/em&gt; (1887), the baroness de Grangerie tells her friend the marchioness de Rennedon how a woman of ill repute had taken up residence in a house across the street and how she had started studying the subtle body language the woman uses to attract customers. The baroness then wanted to find out whether she would be able to imitate that body language. She explains (quoted from the text on &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Horla_(recueil,_Ollendorff_1895)/Le_Signe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Je crois que nous avons des âmes de singes, nous autres femmes. On m’a affirmé du reste (c’est un médecin qui m’a dit ça) que le cerveau du singe ressemblait beaucoup au nôtre. Il faut toujours que nous imitions quelqu’un.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/completeshortst00maupgoog/completeshortst00maupgoog_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Short Stories of Guide de Maupassant&lt;/em&gt; on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;I believe that we women have the souls of monkeys. I have been told (and it was a physician who told me) that the brain of a monkey is very like ours. Of course we must imitate some one or other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that people imitate others is very old; for example, Aristotle had already observed that people learn through imitation (see e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/aristotle/gloss/gloss4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle: Poetics&lt;/a&gt; on CriticaLink). What I would like to know is whether Maupassant thought women more imitative than men and whether this conception was based on the even stranger conception that women would be more similar (than men) to monkeys. I am looking for evidence outside the story &quot;Le Signe&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T20:35:50.787" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T20:35:50.787" Title="For Maupassant, were women more inclined to imitate others than men?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8852" CreationDate="2020-06-16T10:51:16.857" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the original source is confucius&#xA;The man who asks a stupid question is a fool for a minute&#xA;The man who does not ask a stupid question is a fool for life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10245" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T10:51:16.857" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14619" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-16T11:25:00.670" Score="1" ViewCount="381" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/a-father-to-his-son-by-carl-sandburg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Father to His Son&lt;/a&gt;, the poet says, &quot;&lt;strong&gt;Time as a stuff can be wasted&lt;/strong&gt;'. In most of the summaries of this poem, it is mentioned that the poet says that time can be wasted &lt;em&gt;as if the poet advocated the point that wasting of time is not wrong.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this interpretation correct? I wonder how anyone would advocate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the poet says that time can be wasted &lt;em&gt;if it were just a stuff,&lt;/em&gt; and since it is not so it can't be wasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my perception right? I seek clarification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T15:07:30.847" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T15:27:47.943" Title="Interpretation of “ Time as a stuff can be wasted” in Sandburg's A Father to His Son" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;carl-august-sandburg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14621" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14622" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Magnus Pack series of romance novels by Shelly Laurenston. Use this tag together with the [shelly-laurenston] tag." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T12:15:36.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet, biographer and journalist Carl August Sandburg (1878 – 1967) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T15:00:41.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14619" CreationDate="2020-06-16T15:27:47.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poet contrasts two types of advice a father might give his son. The first type of advice is represented by the quote &quot;Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.&quot; The poet then proposes an alternative type of advice, introduced by the quote &quot;Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.&quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first type of advice is expanded in lines such as &quot;Tell him too much money has killed men&quot;, which probably implies not wasting money. Not wasting time would fit into the same mindset: &quot;work hard, don't waste money, don't waste time, be tough, be serious&quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This mindset is contrasted with the one the poet proposes, which includes the lines,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Tell him to be a fool every so often&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  and to have no shame over having been a fool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet is indeed saying that one should not beat oneself up over time that appears to have been wasted. However, when one reads one, the poet does not seem to simply say that wasting time is good; instead, he appears to be saying that spending time on what turns out to be a folly is not wasted &lt;em&gt;when one learns a lesson from it&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;yet learning something out of every folly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  thus arriving at intimate understanding&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  of a world numbering many fools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing such follies as wasted time seems to represent the first mindset, which the poet rejects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T15:27:47.943" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2536" CreationDate="2020-06-16T15:38:46.580" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although comments above point to earlier examples (e.g., Les Diaboliques and The Mousetrap), I would argue that the &quot;spoiler&quot; first became a modern phenomenon, at least in American popular culture, with the Alfred Hitchcock's famous advertisements surrounding his 1960 film &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt;. The unexpected murder of Janet Leigh's character, and of course the final reveal of the murderer's alternate personality, were protected with a famous anti-spoiler marketing strategy. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see this anti-spoiler marketing in this short doc: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/DjRzj_Ufiew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/DjRzj_Ufiew&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These strategies included:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Not allowing latecomers into the theater&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A tag line in theaters that read: &quot;If you can’t keep a secret, please stay away from people after you see &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt;.&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Print advertising that encouraged viewers from not revealing the ending. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hitchcock personally buying all remaining copies of Robert Bloch's novel Psycho. &lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're looking for any specific works on the history of spoiler-aversion, I'd recommend C. Namwali Serpell's &lt;em&gt;Seven Modes of Uncertainty&lt;/em&gt;, specifically the second chapter, &quot;Enfolding.&quot; The chapter offers a nice review of the thought around spoiler aversion, and the second footnote there has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Alfred Hitchcock's &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt; (1960) did a lot to get the idea of spoilers off the ground. His stringent restrictions on the revelation of the film's secret twists were advertised widely, and for the first time in film history, audiences weren't allowed to come into the theater after the movie began. &quot;It is required that you see &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt; from the very beginning,&quot; read posters depicting a comically stern Hitchcock tapping his watch. Hitchcock was probably inspired to develop these techniques because of Henri-Georges Clouzot's &lt;em&gt;Les Diaboliques&lt;/em&gt; (1955), the end of which included an &quot;anti-spoiler&quot; message. A decade later, Doug Kenney wrote a piece for &lt;em&gt;National Lampoon&lt;/em&gt; called &quot;Spoilers,&quot; which revealed the plots of famous films. (330-331)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namwali Serpell's chapter goes on to focus on the spoiler in literature, specifically Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, &lt;em&gt;Atonement&lt;/em&gt;, as it relates to the literary mode of uncertainty he terms &lt;em&gt;enfolding&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10252" LastEditorUserId="10252" LastEditDate="2020-06-16T16:20:40.647" LastActivityDate="2020-06-16T16:20:40.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14630" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16590" CreationDate="2020-06-17T12:49:14.427" Score="6" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; is largely a sequel to the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, both of them being attributed to Homer and describing events which are roughly part of a single overall story (Odysseus first fighting in the Trojan War and then returning home). Modern retellings of these stories are often sold together, like two parts of a single series. But were the original versions more independent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, in its original version, assume or require knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is all the necessary story background on &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; events provided in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; itself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T20:15:45.937" Title="Can the Odyssey be consumed independently of the Iliad?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14614" CreationDate="2020-06-17T15:18:21.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yellow is the colour of jealousy. Below are examples from other plays from the same period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksofjohnwebst03webs/page/156/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Northward Ho&lt;/em&gt; (Act I, scene 3)&lt;/a&gt; by John Webster and Thomas Dekker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Jealous men are either knaves or coxcombs ; be you neither : you wear yellow hose without cause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksofjohnwebst01webs/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The White Devil&lt;/em&gt; (Act I, scene 1)&lt;/a&gt; by John Webster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;True, but they that have the yellow jaundice think all objects they look on to be yellow. Jealousy is worser; her fits present to a man, like so many bubbles in a bason of water, twenty several crabbed faces, many times makes his own shadow his cuckold-maker. &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is my line-by-line paraphrase of Paulina's words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;And you, good goddess Nature, who have made it [i.e. the baby]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  so like/similar to the man who conceived it [i.e. her / the baby], if you [i.e. Nature] have&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  control over the mind too, among all colours&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  allow no yellow in it [i.e. girl's mind], or she will suspect, like he [i.e. her father] does,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  that her children are not her husband's!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordering means &quot;control&quot;, &quot;management&quot;, &quot;direction&quot;. For another example of this word in Shakespeare's works, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Jn_M/scene/5.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King John, Act V, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;Have thou the ordering of this present time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T15:18:21.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14635" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-17T19:37:08.393" Score="1" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Crookes imply here that the paper was pierced and then suspended by a thread?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;  &lt;p&gt;In the case of Miss [Kate] Fox it seems only necessary for her to place her hand on any substance for loud thuds to be heard in it, like a triple pulsation, sometimes loud enough to be heard several rooms off. In this manner I have heard them in a living tree—on a sheet of glass—on a stretched iron wire—on a stretched membrane—a tambourine—on the roof of a cab —and on the floor of a theatre. Moreover, actual contact is not always necessary. I have had these sounds proceeding from the floor, walls, etc., when the medium's hands and feet were held—when she was standing on a chair—when she was suspended in a swing from the ceiling—when she was&#xA;  enclosed in a wire cage—and when she had fallen fainting on a sofa. I&#xA;  have heard them on a glass harmonicon—I have felt them on my own&#xA;  shoulder and under my own hands. I have heard them on a sheet of&#xA;  paper, &lt;strong&gt;held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one&#xA;  corner&lt;/strong&gt;. With a full knowledge of the numerous theories which have been&#xA;  started, chiefly in America, to explain these sounds, I have tested them in&#xA;  every way that I could devise, until there has been no escape from the&#xA;  conviction that they were true objective occurrences not produced by&#xA;  trickery or mechanical means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;  &#xA;  &lt;p&gt;— William Crookes, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/researchesinphe02croogoog/page/n92/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;, p. 87&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10259" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-17T19:57:27.027" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T20:32:58.867" Title="Meaning of &quot;held between the fingers by a piece of thread passed through one corner&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-crookes&gt;&lt;researches-in-the-phenomena-of-spir&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14635" CreationDate="2020-06-17T20:32:58.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation seems correct to me. A piece of paper was pierced near one corner, a thread passed through the hole and tied to finger and thumb of one hand, so that the paper could be suspended in the air without touching the hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suspending a piece of paper in this way leaves it free to move according to air currents, and presumably the idea was to attempt to detect the movement of spirits via the disturbance of the paper. Crookes writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Movement of Heavy Bodies with Contact but without Mechanical Exertion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the simplest forms of the phenomena observed. It varies in degree from a quivering or vibration of the room and its contents to the actual rising into the air of a heavy body when the hand is placed on it. The retort is obvious that if people are touching a thing when it moves, they push it, or pull it, or lift it; I have proved experimentally that this is not the case in numerous instances, but as a matter of evidence I attach little importance to this class of phenomena by itself, and only mention them as a preliminary to other movements of the same kind, but without contact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These movements and indeed I may say the same of every kind of phenomenon are generally preceded by a peculiar cold air, sometimes amounting to a decided wind. &lt;strong&gt;I have had sheets of paper blown about by it&lt;/strong&gt;, and a thermometer lowered several degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Crookes (1874). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/researchesinphe02croogoog/page/n92/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;, p. 86&lt;/a&gt;. London : J. Burns.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Crookes, it is clear, was monumentally gullible, and his claim that the rappings of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_sisters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fox sisters&lt;/a&gt; “were true objective occurrences not produced by trickery” should be compared with Margaret Fox’s own explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Underhill, my eldest sister, took Katie and me to Rochester. There it was that we discovered a new way to make the raps. My sister Katie was the first to observe that by swishing her fingers she could produce certain noises with her knuckles and joints, and that the same effect could be made with the toes. Finding that we could make raps with our feet—first with one foot and then with both—we practiced until we could do this easily when the room was dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like most perplexing things when made clear, it is astonishing how easily it is done. The rappings are simply the result of a perfect control of the muscles of the leg below the knee, which govern the tendons of the foot and allow action of the toe and ankle bones that is not commonly known. Such perfect control is only possible when a child is taken at an early age and carefully and continually taught to practice the muscles, which grow stiff in later years. A child at twelve is almost too old. With control of the muscles of the foot, the toes may be brought down to the floor without any movement that is perceptible to the eye. The whole foot, in fact, can be made to give rappings by the use only of the muscles below the knee. This, then, is the simple explanation of the whole method of the knocks and raps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Margaret Fox (1888), quoted in Harry Houdini (1924). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/1924HoudiniAMagicianAmongTheSpirits/page/n23/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Magician Among The Spirits&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 7–8&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[…] we first got the idea of producing with the joints similar sounds to those we had made by dropping apples with a string. From trying it with our fingers we then tried it with our feet, and it did not take long for us to find out that we could easily produce very loud raps by the action of the toe-joints when in contact with any substance which is a good conductor of sound. My sister Katie was the first to discover that we could make such peculiar noises with our fingers. We used to practice first with one foot and then the other, and finally we got so we could do it with hardly an effort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Margaret Fox (1888), quoted in Reuben Davenport (1888). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/deathblowtospiri00daverich/page/90/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Death Blow to Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;, p. 90&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Dillingham.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T08:28:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-06-17T20:32:58.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14638" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-17T21:34:29.813" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In O. Henry's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/o_henry/1014/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gift of the Magi&lt;/a&gt;, Della's hair is likened to a &amp;quot;brown waterfall.&amp;quot; Why is that symbolism significant? I've been wracking my brain, and I was thinking it maybe had to do with natural beauty, but I feel like it's more than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, why is time an important theme? The author keeps mentioning time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She had had many happy hours planning something nice for him.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, and the next two hours seemed to fly. She was going from one shop to another, to find a gift for Jim.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Within forty minutes her head looked a little better.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it have to do with just adding suspense? Or emphasizing that time in and of itself is a sacrifice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10261" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T07:14:57.453" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T07:16:44.243" Title="&quot;The Gift of the Magi&quot; Literary Analysis: Symbolism and Time" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14640" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14641" CreationDate="2020-06-18T12:10:06.583" Score="7" ViewCount="409" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n267/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chief Mourner of Marne&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Mallow went to Father Brown to consult him about very serious problem, but he found him sitting on the floor with a serious expression, and attempting to pin the somewhat florid hat belonging to a wax doll on to the head of a teddy bear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A new atmosphere of attention seemed to be created with the mention of the newspaper proprietor. Father Brown neither knew nor cared that his attitudes were comic or commonplace. He continued to sit on the floor, where his large head and short legs made him look very like a baby playing with toys. But there came into his great grey eyes a certain expression that has been seen in the eyes of many men in many centuries through the story of nineteen hundred years; only the men were not generally sitting on floors, but at council tables, or on the seats of chapters, or the thrones of bishops and cardinals; a far-off, watchful look, heavy with &lt;strong&gt;the humility of a charge&lt;/strong&gt; too great for men. Something of that anxious and far-reaching look is found in the eyes of sailors and of those who have steered through so many storms the ship of St. Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant by this, &lt;strong&gt;especially &amp;quot;humility&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;low&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;modest&amp;quot;, so how it could be &amp;quot;very great&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T12:13:28.127" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T21:07:41.190" Title="Meaning of &quot;the humility of a charge&quot; in &quot;The Chief Mourner of Marne&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14640" CreationDate="2020-06-18T12:16:18.897" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of the phrase here is that the phrase, &amp;quot;the humility of a charge too great for men&amp;quot;, refers to the idea that someone has been given a very important task which they may not completely understand, but which they know they must complete. And so they are humble because it is the task that is great, not them. They are merely a tool being used in a great purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the phrase is being used for humor because pinning the hat of a doll onto a teddy bear is not important, but Father Brown seems to be approaching it with great seriousness and concentration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:13:55.047" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T14:13:55.047" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14642" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14643" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the author and scholar Miriam Roth (1910 – 2005) and her life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [hebrew-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T13:55:05.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14644" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-18T13:55:16.427" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt; contains the passage quoted below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his presidential address before the British Association at Bristol&#xA;in 1898, Sir William briefly referred to his earlier researches. He&#xA;said: &lt;strong&gt;Upon one other interest I have not yet touched—to me the&#xA;weightiest and farthest—reaching of all&lt;/strong&gt;. No incident in my scientific&#xA;career is more widely known than the part I took many years ago in&#xA;certain psychic researches. Thirty years have passed since I published&#xA;an account of experiments tending to show that outside our scientific&#xA;knowledge there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing&#xA;from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals . I have nothing to&#xA;retract. I adhere to my already published statements. Indeed, I might&#xA;add much thereto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;one other interest I have not yet touched—to me the weightiest and farthest—reaching of all&amp;quot; mean? does it refer to a particular subject of presidential address?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10263" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:20:38.907" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T21:18:45.237" Title="Meaning of &quot;Upon one other interest I have not yet touched—to me the weightiest and farthest—reaching of all&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14645" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14646" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British chemist and physicist William Crookes (1832 – 1919)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T14:15:21.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14647" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14648" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism' by William Crookes. Use this tag with the tag [william-crookes]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T14:16:53.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14644" CreationDate="2020-06-18T14:44:37.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Crookes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about William Crookes&lt;/a&gt; points out that he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was named president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His presidential address was his first speech to the association as a president. This address touched (up)on (i.e. discussed or mentioned briefly) several topics. From Wikipedia's point of view, the most important topic he discussed was the food shortage he thought would be coming without the production of nitrogen fertiliser. Arthur Conan Doyle is more interesting in another topic that Crookes discussed and that the scientist introduced with the words &amp;quot;Upon one other interest I have not yet touched — to me the weightiest and farthest-reaching of all&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the topic of the existence of &amp;quot;a Force exercised by intelligence (...)&amp;quot; was the &amp;quot;most important&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;weightiest&amp;quot;) topic in his speech and the one with the greatest influence (&amp;quot;farthest-reaching&amp;quot;) on science. Looking back to this statement 130 years later, the implicit claim that spiritualism was a more important topic than a threat of food shortage may seem hard to take seriously, but that appears to be what he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T21:18:45.237" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T21:18:45.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14651" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14640" CreationDate="2020-06-18T21:07:41.190" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To offer a contrasting view to that given: the nineteen hundred years are since the time of Jesus. Father Brown is a Catholic priest, and Catholicism is a rather hierarchical faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;charge too great for men&amp;quot;, of which he is unworthy, is to speak on behalf of God and uphold his religion. With Father Brown, his comic appearance and humility sometimes disguise his devotion. He may be playing with a toy but his thoughts are on deeper things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9940" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T21:07:41.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14638" CreationDate="2020-06-18T22:22:00.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title Gift of the Magi, is a biblical allusion from Matthew 2:1 reading: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem” (KJV).  The Greek word for ‘wise men’ is Μάγοι (magoi) (plural form of μάγος (magos)) meaning a Magian, i.e. Oriental scientist; by implication, a magician:—sorcerer, wise man (Bauer 484).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You observed that her hair is twice described “like a cascade of brown waters.” Water—or waterfall in literature can often be symbolic of purity. The beauty of Della’s hair is compared to the natural beauty and purity of a waterfall (&amp;quot;cascade&amp;quot;). ‘Brown’ is an earthly color denoting ordinary, earthly quality it is the color of Della’s hair, her old coat, and her old hat—ordinary, well-used apparel. Compare to Jim’s need of “a new overcoat” and being “without gloves.” The extraordinary beauty of Della’s “cascade” of hair is juxtaposed with her ordinary garments—highlighting the richness (majestic quality) of her hair, “almost a garment for her”, compared to the ordinary clothing she wears. Della’s hair is more exquisite even that “Her Majesty’s jewels.” So, we have two seemingly ordinary people with extraordinary assets. Della with her hair that would make the Queen envious; and Jim with his watch that would make even “Solomon” (the richest king who ever lived) “pluck his beard with envy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in context her hair is connected (as you astutely observed) to the motif of time denoted by Christmas (time), Jim’s watch, and the “[fastness]” with which Della’s hair will grow back: “My hair grows awfully fast”; “My hair grows so fast Jim”; “saving for months.” While the sacrifice of her hair is significant, it is not permanent—time will restore her beautiful hair—as she wisely observes. It is a renewable resource. Thus, her gift is “wisely” purchased, as it were—though arguably not practical from a realistic perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Della also states “Maybe the hairs on my head were numbered” which is another biblical allusion from the gospels reading: “But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows” (Luke 12:7, KJV). In context of the Gospel narrative, Jesus is reminding his disciples how much God loves them—God even knows how many hairs on our heads—and a fitting correlation of Della’s saccharine “quip” to Jim, “nobody could ever count my love for you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The motif of time grounds the story in reality—makes the reader conscious of time—and offers as you duly noted, an element of suspense. Additionally, we note the specific reference to time passing as &amp;quot;Within forty minutes her head looked a little better.&amp;quot; Forty is a significant number. In the Bible, forty is found numerous times and is the number of completion—The Israelites lingered forty years in the wilderness and afterward entered the promise land (see Joshua 5:6); it rained for forty days before the flood (see Genesis 7:4); Moses was in the mountain forty days (see Exodus 24:18); Jesus fasted for forty days (see Matthew 1:13). Della’s forty minutes completes her transformation—perhaps from in some way extraordinary to completely ordinary--punctuating her sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another observation with the connection to hair, is that Della’s name is similar to Delila in the Old Testament—the woman who cut off Samson’s hair—the source of his strength—and was summarily subdued by his enemies (see Judges 16:4-21). As Samson’s hair was the source of his strength, Della’s hair in terms of her own perception, is the source of her beauty worried that her husband will pejoratively think of her as a “Coney Island chorus girl” and even praying, “Please God, make him think I am still pretty” as she has sold it (her hair) to purchase Jim’s Christmas present. But Jim proves his is not so shallow as all that when “He enfolded his Della” after his ironic revelation that he has sold his watch to purchase her present of expensive “tortoiseshell” hair combs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As arguably impractical as these gifts seem to be of these “foolish children”, they are given sacrificially—each sacrificed their most valuable treasure—illustrating Jim and Della’s boundless (albeit perhaps impractical) love for one another. This is the theme of the gospels in which O. Henry has framed his story—“For God so loved the world” (Jn 3:16). The time motif also reflects squarely back into the gospel narratives of Christmas (or the birth of Christ) as being in the fullness of time: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son”&#xA;(Galatians 4:17 KJV).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, the story depicts lives of seemingly ordinary New Yorkers who are as significant as any person of notoriety.  These are ordinary people who give extraordinary gifts to each other—comparable to not only the gifts of the Magi (wisemen) who visited young Jesus—but to the wisemen themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bauer, Walter, et. al. &lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago Press, 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Bible,&lt;/em&gt; Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2020-06-18T22:29:00.437" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T22:29:00.437" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14516" CreationDate="2020-06-18T22:32:53.630" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story title is a Russian proverb, Бог правду видит, да не скоро скажет. IMHO, more correct (at least, more literal) translation would be &amp;quot;God sees the truth, but not too soon He will tell it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many Russian proverbs, it is kind of cryptic, and could be interpreted in many ways, like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The truth will eventually be revealed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;General dissatisfaction with how God acts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By the time the truth it revealed it might be useless; if you care about the truth &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; must act, and you must act &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Many more&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Back to the story. I didn't have a chance to ask Tolstoy directly. I may only speculate that he had in mind the third meaning, and he used it at the meta level. The title is not about the destiny of the characters. It is about the fundamental flaws of human justice, as @Zeus mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2020-06-18T22:32:53.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-19T15:56:23.480" Score="3" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Somewhere behind us in the circuits of time, one of my college Lit teachers casually mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thirty-Six_Dramatic_Situations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations&lt;/a&gt; during a seemingly improvisational moment in a lecture she was giving. It's been awhile but, &lt;em&gt;as I remember it&lt;/em&gt;, she said only three works were known to implement all of the 36 situations: The Bible, The Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars†.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was fascinated by that tidbit and never once doubted it or thought to question it, and I've been regurgitating it for years. However I mentioned this in a random conversation with a friend the other day, and after giving it solid consideration, she reported back that she could not recall any adultery in either LOTR or Star Wars. Of course, there's adultery in the Bible, where David's affair with Bathsheba stands out as the preeminent example. I'll have to take her word that there is no adultery in LOTR. But respecting Star Wars, I can't recall any adultery in the movies, not even by an arguable stretch. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_expanded_to_other_media#Holocron_database_and_canonicity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Star Wars canon is a debated topic&lt;/a&gt;, but for the professor to have been correct about implementing the 36 situations, it would have needed to be true for Star Wars by 1998.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, setting aside the disturbance in my world that required taking this achievement from both LOTR and Star Wars, now I'm left with the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does the Bible, or do any other works, satisfy the requirements necessary to have implemented each of Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Googling this question has proved fruitless. But I really want to believe some author has accomplished this, so I'm hoping someone in this community may have additional insight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;†For the purposes of this question, please be willing to consider that while Star Wars may not qualify as literature, the plot mechanics necessary to create drama are nearly identical, regardless of an audience's original experiential format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10268" LastEditorUserId="10268" LastEditDate="2020-06-19T16:15:06.300" LastActivityDate="2020-06-19T16:15:06.300" Title="Are any works of literature known to implement all of Polti's Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations?" Tags="&lt;plot-element&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-19T17:24:25.267" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this in the early 1990s as a book checked out from the library in Ashland, KY. I didn't get very far into it, but an early scene made a huge impression on me. The protagonist wakes up to the sound of his mother smashing his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggy_bank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bank&lt;/a&gt; open to get to the money inside it. She explains that a family member (I think his brother) needed to be bailed out (I think actual bail). I want to say that the bank was a ceramic globe. The mother was apologetic about the situation and I think the protagonist was resigned to the fact that this family member was going to ruin his life in this way. They then reflected on something they'd learned in science class, that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.livescience.com/33179-does-human-body-replace-cells-seven-years.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the human body completely regenerates itself every seven years&lt;/a&gt; (a common factoid) and imagines staying in his room, not moving, for those seven years, so that he can exit as a new person. I want to say he specifically references how pink his skin would be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know this is a weird fragment of a story, but I'm hoping that someone else remembers that opening scene as vividly as I do, and also remembers the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T23:15:38.463" Title="Book involving a child whose mother breaks into his piggy bank to bail out his brother, and he imagines waiting in his room until his body regenerates" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14656" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-19T18:34:39.300" Score="-2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;the plaster stripping off the walls&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;a wall with fallen chunks of plaster&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rumours of the strange doings which occurred in the Eddy&#xA;homestead had got abroad, and raised an excitement similar to that&#xA;caused by the Koons's music-room in earlier days. Folk came from all&#xA;parts to investigate. The Eddys seem to have had ample, if rude,&#xA;accommodation for their guests, and to have boarded them in a great&#xA;room &lt;strong&gt;with the plaster stripping off the walls&lt;/strong&gt; and the food as simple as&#xA;the surroundings. For this board, of course, they charged at a low rate,&#xA;but they do not seem to have made any profit out of their psychic&#xA;demonstrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0301051h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism, Vol. I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Arthur Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10269" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T20:42:06.230" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T13:55:37.580" Title="Meaning of &quot;the plaster stripping off the walls&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14656" CreationDate="2020-06-20T00:16:08.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not rhetorical or metaphorical, but rather a description of what is. Do a search for &amp;quot;1930's plaster walls&amp;quot;. In the later 19th and early 20th Centuries, in America (and I'm not sure where else), before what we now know as drywall panels were developed, a lot of houses were built with their interior walls actually plastered on. Plaster 'mud' was troweled on to a mesh and smoothed and when dried could be painted or wallpapered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you've ever watched a American home DYI program, or one of the popular 'flip this house' programs, and seen a scene where they are removing a wall, and instead of seeing drywall, like you would expect, you see many slats of thin pieces of wood (lathes), it was on these lathes that the plaster would be put.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, in A. C. D.'s description of &amp;quot;with the plaster stripping off the walls&amp;quot; he is simply describing an older room that hasn't been properly cared for and has been allowed to start 'peeling' or chunking off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Drywall is also known as plasterboard, because they are simply easy to use, easy to carry, pre-made boards, of plaster. Now, when there are holes in the drywall, we take a small amount of what is basically the same as was used before, to 'plaster' the holes. Before, the same stuff, the plaster, was spread over the whole wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10270" LastEditorUserId="10270" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T13:55:37.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T13:55:37.580" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-20T05:56:56.097" Score="5" ViewCount="679" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... my invention&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frize,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It plucks out brains and all. But my muse labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And thus she is deliver'd:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If she be fair and wise, fairness, and wit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The one's for use, the other useth it.&#xA;(Iago in II.1.125–130)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to say birdlime comes from frize? I have read that birdlime was sticky and used to trap birds but what does that have to do with frize which I have seen defined as woolen cloth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the other sentence &amp;quot;If she be fair and wise, fairness, and wit, The one's for use, the other useth it.&amp;quot; Again I am at a loss. What is the one and the other here ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5385" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T07:03:06.357" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T17:36:19.843" Title="What does this passage from Othello mean?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;othello&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14658" CreationDate="2020-06-20T07:31:27.147" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, some context. Desdemona has just asked Iago how he would praise her. So he replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am about it; but indeed, my invention&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Comes from my pate [etc.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Iago is saying is that though he is trying to come up with a creative response, his creativity (&amp;quot;invention&amp;quot;) is not sharp enough. He says creativity comes out of his head as easily as birdlime comes out of woolen cloth—i.e., not easily at all. Just as trying to remove birdlime stuck to frize would cause the wool itself to be torn out along with the birdlime, Iago claims that he finds being inventive so difficult, the effort pulls his brains out from his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the second question, an explanation of &amp;quot;wit&amp;quot; is in order. &amp;quot;Wit&amp;quot; in Shakespeare's day meant something more than the  aptness for quickly making clever jokes that the term implies today.  It implied the ability to see deep connections between superficially unalike things. The Old English verb &amp;quot;witan&amp;quot; meant &amp;quot;to know&amp;quot;. As a noun, &amp;quot;witan&amp;quot; was a plural meaning &amp;quot;wise men&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sages&amp;quot;, specifically those who were members of the witenagemot, an advisory council to the king. (Now you know where JK Rowling got the word &amp;quot;wizengamot&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Iago uses &amp;quot;wit&amp;quot;, he means it as the noun form of &amp;quot;wise&amp;quot;, just as &amp;quot;fairness&amp;quot; is the noun form of &amp;quot;fair&amp;quot;. In fact, the words &amp;quot;wise&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wit&amp;quot; both come from Old English &amp;quot;witan&amp;quot;. Iago says that of the two qualities a beautiful and intelligent woman such as Desdemona has, one of them (&amp;quot;fairness&amp;quot;) is to be used, while the other (&amp;quot;wit&amp;quot;) uses it. That is to say, an intelligent woman will know how to put her beauty to good use to achieve her ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course Iago is being falsely modest when he says he's not intelligent or creative enough. He is the most cunning character in the play, and his dissimulation here reveals his deceptive nature. His response to Desdemona boils down to &amp;quot;oh, you're smart enough to know how to use your looks to get what you want&amp;quot;; it is basically an insult disguised as praise. So this passage reveals his misogyny as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T17:36:19.843" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T17:36:19.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14660" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14661" CreationDate="2020-06-20T10:07:40.487" Score="16" ViewCount="4815" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thorin and co. with the hobbit take such an immense journey to Erebor as known to everyone who has read the book. But isn't it absurd that 14 men do undertake such a perilous journey  without ever discussing the chief issue, that is how to deal with Smaug the dragon?&#xA;Isn't that an ill made plot?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10071" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T10:27:19.277" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T20:55:11.723" Title="How could Thorin and co. journey all the way to Erebor without discussing how to deal with Smaug?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-06-20T10:24:47.693" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Partly: it's explored in the first chapter then hand-waved away.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This &amp;quot;plot hole&amp;quot; is in fact the driver of the entire plot of The Hobbit: the reason why a hobbit is involved at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That would be no good,&amp;quot; said the wizard, &amp;quot;not without a mighty Warrior, even a Hero. I tried to find one; but warriors are busy fighting one another in distant lands, and in this neighbourhood heroes are scarce, or simply lot to be found. Swords in these parts are mostly blunt, and axes are used for trees, and shields as cradles or dish-covers; and dragons are comfortably far-off (and therefore legendary). That is why I settled on burglary-especially when I remembered the existence of a Side-door. And here is our little Bilbo Baggins, the burglar, the chosen and selected burglar. So now let's get on and make some plans. &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Gandalf has given some thought to the idea of fighting the Dragon and has decided that, as you say, the company of 14 is not enough to defeat Smaug. Instead, he reasons that knowledge of the side-door and a small and crafty hobbit will be enough to get into the mountain, explore its secrets and hopefully escape with some treasure. Bilbo summarises it well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, I should say that you ought to go East and have a look round. After all there is the Side-door, and dragons must sleep sometimes, I suppose. If you sit on the doorstep long enough, I daresay you will think of something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, Thorin mentions the obvious problem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Before we go, I suppose you mean,&amp;quot; said Thorin. &amp;quot;Aren't you the burglar? And isn't sitting on the door-step your job, not to speak of getting inside the door?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the conversation is derailed by talk of breakfast and not bought up again. So although it's clear that the company is not meant to fight Smaug, quite how the burglary is supposed to proceed and what it is hoped to accomplish is quietly hand-waved away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth mentioning that this kind of plot-stretch is not uncommon in children's books, which is what The Hobbit is supposed to be. In the modern lens, due to its connection with The Lord of the Rings, readers tend to treat it more seriously. But children are more credulous than adult readers, and will just enjoy the adventure without worrying about plot holes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T10:24:47.693" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14609" CreationDate="2020-06-20T10:53:31.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Tudor&amp;quot; suggests, in Lewis's history of England as shown in this novel, a representative of Logres as opposed to Britain.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fantastical theory of English history which is described in &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, and which perhaps in some part reflects Lewis's own views on the history and culture of this country, is described most clearly in Chapter 17, part IV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It all began,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;when we discovered that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it--it will do as well as another. And then . . . gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What haunting?&amp;quot; asked Camilla.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell: a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney--and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites? But what they mistake for hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He paused and took a sip of wine before proceeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was long afterwards,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;after the Director had returned from the Third Heaven, that we were told a little more. This haunting turned out to be not only from the other side of the invisible wall. Ransom was summoned to the bedside of an old man then dying in Cumberland. His name would mean nothing to you if I told it. That man was the Pendragon, the successor of Arthur and Uther and Cassibelaun. Then we learned the truth. There has been a secret Logres in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. That old man was the seventy-eighth from Arthur: our Director received from him the office and the blessing; to-morrow we shall know, or to-night, who is to be the eightieth. Some of the Pendragons are well known to history, though not under that name. Others you have never heard of. But in every age they and the little Logres which gathered round them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull, to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story, &lt;em&gt;Logres&lt;/em&gt; is the ancient nation of King Arthur, of poets and romance, represented in the modern day by Ransom's little community at St. Anne's, while &lt;em&gt;Britain&lt;/em&gt; is the modern nation of wars and empires, represented in the modern day by the N.I.C.E. at Belbury. &lt;em&gt;England&lt;/em&gt; is described as &amp;quot;swaying to and fro between Logres and Britain&amp;quot;, and all the events of this story, the rise and fall of the N.I.C.E., as a time when &amp;quot;Britain rebelled most dangerously against Logres and was defeated only just in time&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To see how this ties into Jane's surname, it is necessary to venture outside of the text of the story and look at Lewis's mention of the Tudors in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=huOXBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA18&amp;amp;lpg=PA18&amp;amp;dq=lewis+%22that+goes+back+through+the+tudors+to+cadwallader%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another context&lt;/a&gt;, his letter to a fan dated 26 January 1954:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We wouldn't call Alfred and Egbert and all those the &amp;quot;British&amp;quot; line. They are the &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; line, the Angles, who come from Angel in South Denmark. By the &lt;em&gt;British&lt;/em&gt; line we'd mean the Celtic line that goes back through the Tudors to Cadwallader and thence to Arthur, Uther, Cassibelan, Lear, Lud, Brut, Aeneas, Jupiter. The present royal family can claim descent from both the British and the English lines. So, I suppose, can most of us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this paragraph, although his usage of the word &amp;quot;British&amp;quot; here has different connotations from its usage in &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, Lewis is clearly describing the Tudors as part of the line of King Arthur. In the mythos of &lt;em&gt;That Hideous Strength&lt;/em&gt;, this would put the Tudors firmly into the Logres camp, which fits thematically with Jane's maiden name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may even be the case that Jane is literally descended, somehow, from the Tudor monarchs. Merlin said explicitly that her (and Mark's) ancestry was significant and their union had been planned for centuries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For a hundred generations in two lines the begetting of this child was prepared; and unless God should rip up the work of time, such seed, and such an hour, in such a land, shall never be again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when Jane's maiden name is mentioned for the only time in the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What was your maiden name?&amp;quot; asked Miss Ironwood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Tudor,&amp;quot; said Jane. At any other moment she would have said it rather self-consciously, for she was very anxious not to be supposed vain of her ancient ancestry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to indicate that Jane really does have &amp;quot;ancient ancestry&amp;quot; as the name suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T10:53:31.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14697" CreationDate="2020-06-20T18:13:46.753" Score="5" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Georg Büchner was &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1287/17&quot;&gt;recently proposed as a topic challenge for Lit.SE&lt;/a&gt;, and both that proposal and his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_B%C3%BCchner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; concur that he is considered an important figure in the history of German literature, despite living for less than 24 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is he considered so important?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it because of social commentary in his works (I notice some of them concern social injustice, satirise the nobility, or examine the working classes) that had some influence in real society, or his writing style inspiring many other authors in a particular way of writing, or what? Neither the meta answer nor Wikipedia really explain this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-06-21T13:56:30.047" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T18:45:39.417" Title="Why is Georg Büchner considered such an important figure in German literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;georg-buechner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14665" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-20T21:04:22.283" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French publisher Gallimard has a short biography of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Contributeurs/Guy-de-Maupassant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guy de Maupassant&lt;/a&gt; on its website. The last lines read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vers 1885, Maupassant ressent les premiers symptômes de la maladie nerveuse qui l'emportera. Il sombre dans la tristesse, il se croit entouré d'êtres invisibles. C'est à cette époque qu'il écrit «Le Horla». On finira par l'interner dans une clinique où il mourra, dix-huit mois plus tard, le 6 juillet 1893.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Around 1885, Maupassant feels the first symptoms of the mental illness that will get the better of him. He sinks into sadness, he thinks he is surrounded by invisible beings. It is at that time that he writes &amp;quot;The Horla&amp;quot;. He will eventually be committed to a hospital, where he will die eighteen months later, on 6 July 1893.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The future tenses are a literal rendering of the French original.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Horla&lt;/a&gt; was first published in 1886; a revised version was published in 1887. However, it is not the only of Maupassant's stories that of evokes the themes of madness and the supernatural. What is not clear based on what I have read so far is whether there was a biographical connection between Maupassant's own mental health and his interest in these themes. More specifically, did Maupassant write more stories about madness, the supernatural or both after 1885 than before?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T21:04:22.283" Title="Was Maupassant's interest in madness and the supernatural linked to his own mental health?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14666" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14667" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German author Georg Büchner (1813 – 1837) and his life as a writer. Due to his early death, Büchner produced very few works: 'Danton's Death', 'Lenz', 'Leonce and Lena' and 'Woyzeck'. Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" LastActivityDate="2020-06-20T22:01:26.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14668" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-06-21T00:03:28.420" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first read The Hobbit as an adult. My interpretation was that there were three different views:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dwarves trust the competence of a professional burglar selected by Gandalf. The burglar will need to see the configuration of Smaug's cave, especially the side door, before deciding anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gandalf knows that Bilbo has reserves of courage and cleverness that he is not using, and will never use if he stays in his comfortable hole. The writer, elf-friend, and poet of Lord of the Rings is unrealized potential at risk of being lost. An adventure is just what Bilbo needs to bring out the best in him. Gandalf does not want the dwarves to find out how little burglary experience Bilbo has, and does not want Bilbo to find out how much the dwarves are depending on him, until Bilbo is trapped and has to act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo is totally confused, but assumes the rest of the party, especially Gandalf, know what they are doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of those views call for any planning discussion, and Gandalf wanted to prevent discussion. Instead, they need to concentrate on the immediate problems of getting to Smaug's cave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5887" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T00:03:28.420" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14669" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14674" CreationDate="2020-06-21T10:49:02.457" Score="7" ViewCount="2855" Body="&lt;p&gt;When making crèpes for my children this morning, I recalled a comics strip I would like to identify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is American, contemporary and I saw it a few years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It features a father who is about to make pancakes for his children. There are at least three of them, with a girl being the youngest (about 6-8 yo) and she has a big brother (and one+ other sibling).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father is asking the children which shapes he should make the pancakes. The older ones ask for normal shapes and the younger one - for a complicated mathematical composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father then asks one of the kids to hold his laptop so that he can check what this is. The older brother who is at the table with the young girl tells her that Wikipedia should be grateful (or something like that) for the traffic she brings them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2369" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-21T16:44:07.803" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T08:27:13.080" Title="Identification of an American comics strip about mathematically shaped pancakes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-21T12:38:47.523" Score="7" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before Good Omens has even started, officially, on page xiv in my copy, there's a list of characters. These include...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SUPERNATURAL BEINGS&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;God (God)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Metatron (The Voice of God)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Satan (A Fallen Angel; the Adversary)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Crowley (An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;APOCALYPTIC HORSEPERSONS&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;DEATH (Death)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;War (War)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THEM&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ADAM (An Antichrist)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pepper (A Girl)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wensleydale (A Boy)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Brian (A Boy)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As can be seen, the only two characters to have their names entirely capitalized are DEATH and ADAM. (Not even God gets entirely capitalized.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is this? Why is Adam's name entirely capitalized here, even if he is the Antichrist, when even such characters as Satan and God don't get this same treatment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T07:15:00.560" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T07:15:00.560" Title="Why is Adam's name completely capitalized in the Good Omens character list?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14673" CreationDate="2020-06-21T13:06:07.440" Score="5" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n267/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chief Mourner of Marne&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Mr. Outram was talking to Father Brown about an old duel between Mr. James Mair, whose second was Mr. Outram himself, and his cousin Maurice Mair, whose second was Hugo Romaine, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hugo Romaine was his second; the great actor, you know. Maurice was mad on acting and had taken up Romaine (who was then a rising but still a struggling man), and financed the fellow and his ventures in return for taking lessons from the professional in his own hobby of amateur acting. But Romaine was then, I suppose, practically dependent on his rich friend; though he’s richer now than any aristocrat. &lt;strong&gt;So his serving as second proves very little about what he thought of the quarrel.&lt;/strong&gt; They fought in the English fashion, with only one second apiece; I wanted at least to have a surgeon, but Maurice boisterously refused it, saying the fewer people who knew, the better; and at the worst we could immediately get help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant here by this statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean what's the link between serving as second and his thoughts of the quarrel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does he mean that &amp;quot;because he was dependant on his friend, he was bound to serve as his second anyhow?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2020-06-21T14:03:32.703" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T14:58:44.663" Title="What's meant here by &quot; his serving as second proves very little about what he thought of the quarrel&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-06-21T13:44:04.367" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;They know there is no hope. Approaching a dragon is a suicide mission! But their world is one of myth and feats and, especially, &lt;em&gt;fortune.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fortune will either smile on them, or it will not. But they have nothing to lose, they are fed up with having no home and menial work, and they want to restore the family honour. It's treasure or bust. (Getting rid of the dragon is a bonus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two things to consider— why they even begin without a plan in the first place, and why, during the journey, the topic never seems to come up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are partly in denial about their impossible mission. Nobody wants to be reminded of the &lt;strike&gt;dragon&lt;/strike&gt; elephant in the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Further to that, it makes it easier to ignore the problem if they assume Bilbo has it under control.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also &amp;quot;we'll cross that bridge when we get there.&amp;quot; If they dwell too much on the final problem they might lose heart and quit before they've started.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They are partly throwing their fate into the hands of fortune. Either they were meant to retake the mountain or they weren't. If they were meant to then &lt;em&gt;some good fortune will come their way&lt;/em&gt; that they can't predict. Just as the map landed in their lap, which happened &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; they decided to head to the Mountain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far we have had no clear idea what to do. We thought of going East...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point being, &lt;em&gt;the only way they could possibly succeed is if something   unexpected happened&lt;/em&gt;—and they know it. They know it is virtually impossible to kill a dragon, so there is not a lot of point talking about it. They set out bravely with a purpose and it is up to fortune as to how it will end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was hard to make a plan when they knew so little of what had happened at the Mountain—they didn't know if Smaug was alive until they got there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dragon is still alive and in the halls under the Mountain then—or I imagine so from the smoke,&amp;quot; said the hobbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that the Dwarves hadn't even gone west of Rivendell for a long time. In the first chapter they discussed the basics of dragons, but coming up with a detailed plan depended on too many question marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The races of middle-Earth don't really get on well. Bilbo was always a bit of &amp;quot;hired help&amp;quot; and not one of the family. The Dwarves had their reservations about sharing too much with him. They ought to have had more detailed discussions with him, but he wasn't a professional burglar and didn't ask them for the right information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems a little absurd that old tales of dragons hadn't come up &amp;quot;around the campfire&amp;quot; on the way across, but actually they had and we didn't hear all of them. In Beorn's house:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the verses were like this, but there were many more, and their singing went on for a long while&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it makes perfect sense as to why they set out without a plan. But it doesn't seem like they actually discussed what could be done about Smaug along the way. So it's either a topic they avoided, or really a plot hole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10280" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T13:44:04.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14671" CreationDate="2020-06-21T14:28:10.070" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It carries the implication that if Romaine had not acted as his second, even if he thought Maurice  ought not to fight the duel, Maurice  might have cut off the money, which he was dependent on.  (This could be Maurice  exploiting his dependence, or it could be Maurice  regarding his acting as a second as part of their friendship, and so refusing is showing that Romaine is willing to take from his friend but not to give back.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stems from the context.  In other contexts, that sentence might mean that he hoped to reconcile the duelists before the duel -- the traditional first step in a duel was an attempt by the seconds to get them to call it off, though it was often a hollow formality -- or to assist with any injury, and thus be willing to act as a second in a duel he thought wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T14:28:10.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14669" CreationDate="2020-06-21T14:58:09.797" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://foxtrot.com/2012/10/14/fancy-pancakes/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a &lt;em&gt;Foxtrot&lt;/em&gt; strip&lt;/a&gt; from October 14, 2012.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWB1j.png&quot; alt=&quot;Jason requesting complex pancakes&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Paige&lt;/strong&gt;: Can you make my pancakes heart-shaped?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Roger&lt;/strong&gt;: Not a problem!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Peter&lt;/strong&gt;: Can you make my pancakes football-shaped?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Roger&lt;/strong&gt;: You got it!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Jason&lt;/strong&gt;: Can you make my pancakes heptagon-shaped and tile them on the plate in a Poincaré disk model of the hyperbolic plane? You can make as many as you want, by the way.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Peter&lt;/strong&gt;: Wikipedia should thank you for all the traffic you send their way.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Roger&lt;/strong&gt;: Jason, can you come hold my laptop while I pour the batter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to over-explain the joke, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_disk_model&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poincaré disk model&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_geometry&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hyperbolic&lt;/a&gt; plane with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptagon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;heptagons&lt;/a&gt; looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6y5ofm.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6y5ofm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Poincaré disk model of the hyperbolic plane with heptagons&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read your description, it sounded very much like a Bill Amend joke, so I Googled &lt;code&gt;foxtrot pancakes&lt;/code&gt; and it came up. Jason is not female, but his big hair could be mistaken for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="680" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T08:27:13.080" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T08:27:13.080" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14671" CreationDate="2020-06-21T14:58:44.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to general Outram, Maurice Marne had been taking acting lessons with Hugo Romaine. At that time, Romaine was not yet a celebrated actor, so giving acting lessons was a very welcome source of income. The general says, &amp;quot;Romaine was then, I suppose, practically dependent on his rich friend.&amp;quot; In other words, at that time, the acting lessons he gave Maurice Marne were a more important source of income than his own acting career.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second in a duel is usually chosen among trusted friends, but the relationship between Hugo Romaine and Maurice Marne was of a completely different nature from the general's point of view (as explained above). Hence, from the general's point of view, Romaine served as Maurice's second because he depended on him financially, so it is impossible to say with certainty that he supported Maurice Marne's jealousy..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T14:58:44.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2525" CreationDate="2020-06-21T21:35:18.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The type of prologue that can be found at the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; (at least in the 1579 and 1599 quartos but not in the 1623 folio edition) was not unusual in Elizabethan drama. It can also be found in, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorboduc_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gorboduc, or Ferrex and Porrex&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville (1561/1562), George Gascoigne's prose comedy &lt;em&gt;Supposes&lt;/em&gt; (1566) and the first edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selimus_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Selimus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (published in 1594).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. Blakemore Evans writes in his edition (The New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1984),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cast as a 'Shakespearean' sonnet, this prologue-chorus serves as what was called 'The Argument of the Tragedie' (&lt;em&gt;Gorboduc&lt;/em&gt; (1561)), usually prefixed to both tragedies and comedies written under classical or neo-classical influence (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jill L. Levenson writes in her edition of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; (The Oxford Shakespeare, 2000),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prologue both imitates a common practice of contemporary tragedies written for the public stage and and followed Brooke's 'Argument', (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levenson assumes that the prologue was performed in the theatre (i.e. it was probably not just added for the benefit of readers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When reading the prologue of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, one realises that &lt;strong&gt;it does not really &amp;quot;spoil&amp;quot; that much&lt;/strong&gt;. It does not tell you why or how those two families revive their feud, whether the deaths of the two lovers is related to the feud, why exactly they take their own lives, let alone how and under what circumstances. For example, when Juliet takes the drug that induces a death-like sleep (in Act IV, scene 1), there is no reason why the audience would assume she would at some point take her own life, unless they expect the story to follow a similar pattern as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramus_and_Thisbe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pyramus and Thisbe&lt;/a&gt;. But since most of the audience was not familiar with ancient literature, it is unlikely that the prologue would have spoilt much of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, &lt;strong&gt;a literary work is more than just its plot; &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; a story is presented is very important&lt;/strong&gt;. Based on the prologue, one would not imagine, for example, that the play contains so much comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the impression of the prologue as being a spoiler stems from the fact that some readers who are already familiar with it, project their knowledge onto those first fourteen lines. A theatre goer who is unfamiliar with the story would not guess what the play's plot is like, especially when &lt;strong&gt;being engrossed in the play makes them forget what exactly the prologue has said&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-21T21:35:18.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14679" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-21T22:54:06.977" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1960s the French philosopher, sociologist and literary theorist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucien_Goldmann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucien Goldmann&lt;/a&gt; developed a theory known as &amp;quot;genetic criticism&amp;quot; (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;Sciences humaines et philosophie. Suivi de structuralisme génétique et création littéraire&lt;/em&gt;, 1966). This theory uses several terms whose meaning is not immediately obvious, e.g. &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;collective subject&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; in Goldmann's genetic structuralism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T15:23:44.650" Title="Meaning of vision du monde in Lucien Goldmann's genetic structuralism" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;lucien-goldmann&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="58" CreationDate="2020-06-22T04:57:56.487" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;First, it is not yellow that is evil, it is gold, and not always.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yellow is in fact more commonly associated with &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; things than negative in Tolkien's work. The Sun is the Yellow Face and strikes fear into the evil Gollum, for instance. It is true that every now and then there is an orc with yellow teeth, or a trail of yellow slime, but those instance are outweighed by soft beams of golden light, the yellow hair of the Rohirrim, yellow drinks, yellow leaves, and so forth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even gold is not always evil, despite canonically being the element into which Morgoth put the most of his essence, and of which the One Ring is made. Tolkien is far from averse from using it to show royalty and nobility. Remember, Tolkien is writing from a conservative Catholic viewpoint: greed for what is not one's own is evil, but the riches of the rightful and noble ruler are appointed by Eru. For the Haradim, gold probably signifies their greed, since they are villains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, red is certainly evil. The Red Arrow represents ill tidings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Red Arrow!&amp;quot; said Théoden, holding it, as one who receives a&#xA;summons long expected and yet dreadful when it comes. His hand&#xA;trembled. &amp;quot;The Red Arrow has not been seen in the Mark in all my&#xA;years! Has it indeed come to that? And what does the Lord Denethor&#xA;reckon that all my strength and all my speed may be?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Southrons have red banners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines of fire became flowing torrents, file upon file of Orcs&#xA;bearing flames, and wild Southron men with red banners, shouting with&#xA;harsh tongues, surging up, overtaking the retreat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so forth. Evil mentions of red outnumber even &lt;em&gt;neutral&lt;/em&gt; mentions about five to one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for black, well, it is not even a contest. It almost always symbolizes something morbid or outright evil, as examples like the Black Gate, the Black Speech, the Black Hands, the Black Riders, and so forth make abundantly clear. Not to mention Gandalf literally calling Sauron &amp;quot;The Black.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it is not just the orcs who are represented by these colors. The example given was of the Haradim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With respect to the shields and such, although I did not think of it, there is a very immediate referent: the Roman scuta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2vZU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colors are faded, but as we can see &lt;a href=&quot;https://museum-of-artifacts.blogspot.com/2015/10/roman-scutum-shield-this-is-only-known.html?m=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; from the reproductions in the second image, the shield was likely painted bright red and yellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why they are evil....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Symbolic influences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Sauron and Morgoth are constantly associated with fire and shadow. The Balrog, for instance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It came to the edge of the fire and the light faded as if a cloud had&#xA;bent over it. Then with a rush it leaped across the fissure. The&#xA;flames roared up to greet it, and wreathed about it; and a black smoke&#xA;swirled in the air. Its streaming mane kindled, and blazed behind it.&#xA;In its right hand was a blade like a stabbing tongue of fire; in its&#xA;left it held a whip of many thongs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also many mentions of red flashes, red fire, and so forth. For Tolkien it seems fire—at least, evil fire—is red:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Right across the floor, close to the feet of two huge pillars a great&#xA;fissure had opened. Out of it a fierce red light came, and now and&#xA;again flames licked at the brink and curled about the bases of the&#xA;columns. Wisps of dark smoke wavered in the hot air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is good fire, as wielded by Gandalf, which tends to be white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, Sauron lives next to a literal volcano, in a land shrouded in darkness due to its miasmata. I think the &amp;quot;shadow and flame&amp;quot; association with Sauron is also fairly self-evident. This probably explains the majority of the red and black references in the context of the forces of Sauron. The roots of this are probably largely Biblical: evil is associated with shadows in the Bible itself, and since at least the &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt; if not early, the Devil has been associated with fire: not merely as a form of punishment, as with the lake of fire in the Bible, but as one of his traits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Racial influences&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Haradim and the other peoples allied with Sauron are clearly based on non-white, non-Western ethnicities, and negative versions of them at that. Tolkien even admitted that the orcs were based on Asians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Z put beaks and feathers on Orcs!? (Orcs is not a form of&#xA;Auks.) The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human'&#xA;form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad,&#xA;flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact&#xA;degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely&#xA;Mongol-types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeah....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of the world, save the West, is essentially aligned with Sauron and engaged in Morgoth-worship at the time of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, whence Sauron's limitless armies. If they did not worship Morgoth, they simply worshipped Sauron directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the east and south well nigh all Men were under his dominion, and&#xA;they grew strong in those days and built many towns and walls of&#xA;stone, and they were numerous and fierce in war and aimed with iron.&#xA;To them Sauron was both king and god; and they feared him exceedingly,&#xA;for he surrounded his abode with fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien was clearly influenced by racist conceptions of the forces of the uncivilized East (Asia) and South (Africa and Middle East) arrayed against the civilized bulwark of the West. See also his harangue against the &amp;quot;Orientalization&amp;quot; of Alexander. It is partly in that context that we see the first quote: the Haradim mostly represent Arabs, and their dark hair and eyes, and their red battle paint, are portrayed in a negative, frightening manner specifically in the context of their ethnicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in this context, also, that we see a description of the evil physical characteristics of the inhabitants of Far Harad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He now was destroyed; but Gothmog the lieutenant of Morgul had flung&#xA;them into the fray; Easterlings with axes, and Variags of Khand.&#xA;Southrons in scarlet, and out of &lt;strong&gt;Far Harad black men like half-trolls&#xA;with white eyes and red tongues.&lt;/strong&gt; Some now hastened up behind the&#xA;Rohirrim, others held westward to hold off the forces of Gondor and&#xA;prevent their joining with Rohan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, a description of Africans as barely more than trolls that hits all the usual stereotypical elements, and of evil Asians with hachets. Pretty stereotypical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that we are &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; merely seeing Tolkien's association of red and black with Sauron influence his depiction of Sauron's minions, but that these sorts of examples illustrate that Tolkien &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; associated red and black (the latter more obviously) with non-European groups, as this example and the one in the question illustrate, and that this association also influenced his choice of the colors for Sauron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Side note with respect to Jews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the analysis in the other answer has something to it, and I am loathe to disagree with such a careful scholarly analysis as that cited therein, I am unsure that can be the primary explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien &lt;em&gt;liked&lt;/em&gt; Jews, as hinted at in the famous letter where he criticized a Nazi by saying he regretted that he did not have any Jewish ancestors. That does not mean that he was not prejudiced against them in some way, or that he did not buy into some anti-Semitic stereotypes. In fact, the dwarves have a Jewish influence by Tolkien's own admission, and their defining flaw is made their greed and lust for gold. They are also clannish, industrious, learned, and pretty much every other Jewish stereotype one could think of. But they are not the villains. They are rather a heroic race. I doubt Tolkien would have intentionally based his villainous characters on Jews, or employed imagery that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; associated with Jews to characterize the forces of evil. Not to mention that what I mentioned previously about yellow actually being far more often associated with &lt;em&gt;positive&lt;/em&gt; figures undercuts the argument somewhat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it is possible that Tolkien drew on generic Middle Eastern stereotypes to characterize the clothing of the Haradim, and that medieval Christians did the same when they depicted Jews (who, after all, came from the Middle East), but I am skeptical that it goes further than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="254" LastEditorUserId="254" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T00:39:03.483" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T00:39:03.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14682" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14683" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French philosopher, sociologist and theorist of literature Lucien Goldmann (1913 – 1970). Note that not all of his work is directly relevant to literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T08:55:21.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14684" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T09:07:33.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T09:07:33.663" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T09:07:33.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14685" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T09:07:33.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of George Büchner (1813 – 1837) and his life as a writer. Büchner wrote 'Der hessische Landbote' (pamphlet), 'Dantons Tod' (play, 1835), 'Lenz' (novella), 'Leonce und Lena' (play, 1836) and 'Woyzeck' (play, unfinished). Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T09:39:50.983" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T09:39:50.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14686" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14687" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the American educator and author Edith Hamilton (1867 – 1963) and her life as a writer. Hamilton is best known as a classicist who published several works on ancient mythology." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T10:52:42.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14688" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14689" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Danish Girl', David Ebershoff's debut novel, published in 2000. Use this tag with the tag [david-ebershoff]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T11:28:01.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14690" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14691" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author and editor David Ebershoff and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T11:28:51.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2020-06-22T12:24:55.063" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor_Branestawm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Professor Branestawm&lt;/a&gt; books might stretch the definition of a series but were all written by the same author, Norman Hunter, and set in the same universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were published between 1933, when &lt;em&gt;The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm&lt;/em&gt; was released, and 1983's &lt;em&gt;Professor Branestawm's Hair-Raising Idea&lt;/em&gt;, for a total of &lt;strong&gt;50 years&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After writing the first two books in the 1930's, the author then waited until retirement before picking up the series again in 1970. There is thus a &lt;strong&gt;33 year gap&lt;/strong&gt; between the second and third books in the series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author sadly passed away in 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T13:05:02.483" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T13:05:02.483" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2020-06-22T16:14:27.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a complete series, Alan Garner's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fantasticfiction.com/g/alan-garner/alderley/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Alderly&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series, consisting of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Weirdstone of Brisingamen&lt;/em&gt; (1960),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Moon of Gomrath&lt;/em&gt; (1963),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Boneland&lt;/em&gt; (2012),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was published over a span of 52 years. He has been saying that there was an unwritten third book in the series since shortly after publishing the second (although I expect the third book looks very different from how it would have looked had he written it right after &lt;em&gt;The Moon of Gomrath&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/15/alan-garner-weirdstone-brisingamen-trilogy-boneland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garner's own words&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I set out at three minutes past four on Tuesday the fourth of September 1956 to discover whether or not I could write, I saw the first piece of work as a trilogy, but I didn't know why that was so, nor what shape it would take,&amp;quot; said Garner today. &amp;quot;Trilogies are strange creatures. The lack of the third book, I discovered, gave the readers of the first two a sense of urgency. There are nuggets in the text that hint of unfinished business. The links to the book-not-written had become subliminal cliffhangers. Why did it take so long for Boneland to gestate? All I can say is that it took as long as it took.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T16:14:27.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2020-06-22T16:20:00.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I enjoyed the short-lived 12 novel series &lt;em&gt;A Dance to the Music of Time&lt;/em&gt;, by Anthony Powell, published  between 1951 and 1975, a comparative flash in the pan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T17:25:07.647" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T17:25:07.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11434" CreationDate="2020-06-22T16:36:29.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stanza is based on a passage from a book by the scientist Robert Boyle. See Edward B. Davis, “Robert Boyle as the Source of an Isaac Watts Text Set for a William Billings Anthem,” &lt;em&gt;The Hymn&lt;/em&gt; 53, no. 1 (January 2002): 46-47. The Hymn (journal of the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada) is available in Hathitrust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10293" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T16:36:29.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14664" CreationDate="2020-06-22T18:45:39.417" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will base this answer on what I remember from school - we discussed Büchner extensively, but then this was more than 30 years ago. So this will be a stand-in until somebody more knowledgable gives a better answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Politically, Büchner is important because he lived, and actively took part in, auspicious times. This is now known as the &amp;quot;Vormärz&amp;quot; (pre-march), the time before the abortive March revolution of 1848. Despite the reforms forced by the Napoleonic occupation Germany was not a unified state. Politically interested Germans, who had come to learn about the ideals of the French revolution, started to dream of a united German national state. The main factions where the Liberals, who imagined a constitutional monarchy with a strong middle class, and the Democrats, who placed a lot more emphasis on equality for all the state's subjects. Either way, this was a direct challenge to the power of regional potentates, and the would-be revolutionaries suffered political persecution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Büchner belonged to the Democratic faction. His &amp;quot;Hessischer Landbote&amp;quot; was not nilly-willy social criticism, even in the heavily edited form it was eventually published in it was quite literally a declaration of war upon feudal power (after all it proclaimed &amp;quot;war upon the palaces&amp;quot;). The idea of a united German state with its citizens as sovereign was progressive to a point where basically every established German power tried to stop it, and Büchner was a preeiminent voice of that idea (which, incidentally, is now enshrined as a founding principle in the German constitution).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as form is concerned, he was important because he dispensed with the romanticism of his time in favor of social realism, replaced stylized with colloquial language and featured lower-class characters (supporting in &amp;quot;Danton's Death&amp;quot;, main character in &amp;quot;Woyzeck&amp;quot;) who where not comic relief, but psychologically fully fleshed out (Büchner was, after all, a trained scientist, although in anatomy and medicine rather than psychology; still, I guess that is how he honed his observational skills).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having said that, there is a certain romantic aura that surrounds the person of Büchner himself. He was, after all, a brave, youthful rebel who eloquently took on the ruling powers, and had nothing but an early death to show for it - a sort of Kurt Cobain of his time, even if that was obviously not a sentiment from his contemporaries. He has also the rare advantage (for a writer who is taught in schools) that he is quite appealing to young people - &amp;quot;I feel crushed under the horrible fatalism of history&amp;quot; is a sentiment every teenager can relate to who ever thought that they could build a better world by next Tuesday, if those pesky old people would not get in the way all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His work is also accessible because it is short (you can read all of the collected Büchner in a couple of days) and internally consistent - Büchner did not live long enough to revise any of his opinions, and there are not two diametrically opposed phases (no &amp;quot;Sturm und Drang&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;classic Büchner&amp;quot;) that are hardly reconcilable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T18:45:39.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-22T19:52:48.973" Score="1" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guy de Maupassant is best known as an author of short stories and novels. It is less well known that he also wrote plays. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Maupassant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia article about the author&lt;/a&gt; only mentions his early comedy &lt;em&gt;À la feuille de rose, maison turque&lt;/em&gt;, which was performed in 1875 but not published until 1945.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Maupassant#Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; lists four other plays by Maupassant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histoire du vieux temps&lt;/em&gt; (1879)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Une répétition&lt;/em&gt; (1880)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Musotte&lt;/em&gt; (1891)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Paix du ménage&lt;/em&gt; (1893)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the French Wikipedia article, &lt;em&gt;Histoire du vieux temps&lt;/em&gt; was quite successful. Nevertheless, it appears that Maupassant's plays have essentially gone out of print. (And I don't know if they have even been translated into English.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Une répétition&lt;/em&gt; was published one year after &lt;em&gt;Histoire du vieux temps&lt;/em&gt; and followed by a ten-year gap before the publication of his next play in 1891. It is possible that the author lost interest in the genre, for example, because he was so successful at writing short stories. It is also possible that it was so badly received that he avoided the genre for ten years. Hence my question: how did Maupassant's contemporaries respond to his play &lt;em&gt;Une répétition&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T19:52:48.973" Title="How did Maupassant's contemporaries respond to his play Une répétition?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;une-repetition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14699" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14700" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about Guy de Maupassant's play 'Une répétition' (1880). Use this tag with the tags [guy-de-maupassant] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" LastActivityDate="2020-06-22T19:55:42.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14702" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14707" CreationDate="2020-06-23T08:51:02.850" Score="-4" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;What may be the possible (hidden) interpretations of this poem (written by me), which uses a form of Japanese poetry called 'haiku'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a filled bow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;stretched with zest-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the smile flies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How would the nuances of meanings change if I replaced 'flies' with 'escapes'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10296" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-09T11:20:24.787" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T11:20:24.787" Title="In how many ways can you interpret this haiku poem?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;haiku&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2020-07-09T08:33:28.130" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-06-23T08:59:40.373" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Faith was a powerful force in Tolkien's world.  As he had faith in his own abilities and decisions, I believe he projected that faith into his characters.  Gandalf had faith in his Hobbit friend and faith in the stalwart companions he thrust him into business with.  More importantly, Gandalf had faith in his own abilities to skew providence and likely ensure the success of his mission... which was to ensure the continued safety of Middle Earth and not simply promote a band of dwarves.  I believe Gandalf's private plan was to spur Smaug to action before Smaug became someone's pet or ally; and given that, the less said, the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe WWI seasoned Tolkien in ways few of us could comprehend, let alone appreciate.  Beyond his personal navigation and avoidance of several nasty ends, I think he noted the valor of the common soldier and recognized that valor as an occasional source of fantastic and improbable outcomes.  Sargeant Alvin Cullum York comes to mind.  (I'm from the U.S., but I'm sure there were fine British examples as well.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also those dwarves drank a &lt;em&gt;lot&lt;/em&gt;...  &amp;quot;We don't need a plan to kill a wyrm Master Baggins!  Hold my meade and watch this!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10300" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T20:55:11.723" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T20:55:11.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14704" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-23T11:18:15.530" Score="5" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.528506/page/n267/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chief Mourner of Marne&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; by G. K. Chesterton, the main character was named &lt;strong&gt;James Mair&lt;/strong&gt;, and his cousin was named &lt;strong&gt;Maurice Mair&lt;/strong&gt;; the author said that after the death of Maurice Mair, James &lt;strong&gt;inherited the title&lt;/strong&gt; of &amp;quot;The &lt;strong&gt;Marquis of Marne&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; automatically. And in some positions in the story, he was called Marne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the title of &amp;quot;Marquis&amp;quot; change the name of its holder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean is &amp;quot;Marne&amp;quot; the name of their family, and whoever remains alive from the family becomes &amp;quot;The Marquis of Marne&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T07:59:46.493" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T07:59:46.493" Title="Does the title of &quot;Marquis&quot; change the name of its holder?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14704" CreationDate="2020-06-23T12:37:46.783" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, he remains James Mair.  Any children would have the name Mair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, a noble is addressed by title, not by name -- Lord Marne.  And uses it, too.  He would sign things James Marne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-23T12:37:46.783" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-06-23T15:07:24.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It isn't spelled out exactly, but it seems like Gandalf's plan was to recruit Beorn to come along in the role of dragon slayer. He and the dwarves executed the same kind of routine they used to bring in Bilbo, just Beorn wasn't the joining type.  Not long after that, Gandalf was called away to deal with Dol Guldur and Thorin's group was left on their own. At that point the plan seemed to be to reconnoiter the situation and see what opportunities arose to reclaim heirlooms, mainly the Arkenstone. Killing Smaug was clearly beyond what they could hope to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thorin's worldview is thoroughly medieval. Besides Gandalf, Thorin didn't talk about big plans to any of the rest of the company because he was the nobility and the rest were there to do whatever he told them to do. Gandalf was the only person in the group Thorin respected as anything close to equal (at the least he had earned some respect by his connection with Thrain and having delivered the map to Thorin).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither Thorin nor Gandalf is a point-of-view character, and they are the ones with the knowledge and the plans. The story is told from Bilbo's point of view, and he was regarded as hired help (so didn't rank as high as the retinue which was at least family); it seems unlikely that Bilbo would be included in planning discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8727" LastEditorUserId="8727" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T21:07:20.807" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T21:07:20.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14702" CreationDate="2020-06-23T18:47:02.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here are my immediate thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a “bow” in line 1, it is “stretched” in line 2, and something “flies” in line 3. So this could be a description of someone shooting an arrow from a bow by stretching the bowstring. However, “filled” in line 1 doesn’t fit very well with this idea: it is not clear what it means to describe a bow as “filled”. So maybe I am on the wrong track with this idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In line 3, it is not an arrow that flies from the bow, but a “smile”. So this could be a metaphor in which the archer is happy with how good their shot was, so that they smile with pleasure at hitting the bull’s-eye. This idea is reinforced by “with zest” in line 2, which could mean “enthusiastically”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In a short poem where there is no “reality” to ground us, a metaphor can work either way. So the poem could be a description of someone’s smile, that is “stretched” by the muscles of the face. Perhaps the smile is metaphorically a bow due to its shape. This makes better sense of “filled” in line 1, because lips can be thus described (“filled” meaning “plump”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The trouble with this idea is that if the smile is (metaphorically) a bow, then it seems to be shot from itself in line 3. But a bow can’t be its own arrow! So maybe I am on the wrong track here too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Flies” can mean “flies away; flees” so maybe it is a description of a fleeting smile. This could work with “stretched” meaning “strained” but not with “zest” which only has positive senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So however I arrange things there is a piece that won’t fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an aside, I would be cautious about describing a poem as a “haiku” unless it is written in the Japanese language. The haiku form traditionally has three requirements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seventeen phonetic units (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_(Japanese_prosody)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;音, &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) divided into groups of five, seven, and five.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A juxtaposition of two ideas or descriptions via a ‘cutting word’ (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kireji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;切れ字, &lt;em&gt;kireji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A word relating to a season (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kigo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;季語, &lt;em&gt;kigo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the English language doesn’t have &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;kireji&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;kigo&lt;/em&gt;, I think it’s better to describe short poems like this as “inspired by haiku” and not “haiku” &lt;em&gt;tout court&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-25T11:37:23.060" LastActivityDate="2020-06-25T11:37:23.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14217" CreationDate="2020-06-24T06:20:39.473" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Legion of Honor&amp;quot;: initially a very high honor created by Napoleon Bonaparte, but can be gifted to civilians and as such tends to designate an old, respectable Frenchman who has done service to his country.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legiondhonneur.fr/fr/page/la-legion-dhonneur-en-10-questions/108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;source&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;General Council&amp;quot;: now called the Departmental council, this is the department-level government. Essentially, what this says is that he's a civil servant in good standing. &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_d%C3%A9partemental%20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia&quot;&gt;Wikipedia, sorry, everything else I find is about the Swiss council&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;well-disposed Opposition&amp;quot;: I think this is a mistranslation. He's the &amp;quot;well-disposed(amiable) head of the Opposition&amp;quot;. The Opposition party is, as far as I can tell, the equivalent of the Shadow Cabinet in England. Anecdotally, they're seen as a bit stick-in-the-mud, although I don't know if that was the opinion at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;courteous weapons&amp;quot;: this is &amp;quot;armes courtoises&amp;quot; in the original and I think &amp;quot;weapons of courtesy&amp;quot; conveys the idea better. He fights for his cause using courtesy - he argues for it rather than fighting for it. In context, I think this whole description is just meant to convey the image of a highly respectable, inoffensive older man. I'm still rereading it myself but from what I remember the politics don't matter much except for characterization - Maupassant likes political description regardless of its relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10307" LastEditorUserId="10307" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T07:54:59.740" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T07:54:59.740" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6173" CreationDate="2020-06-24T06:57:46.527" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation, in-universe so to speak, would be that you need a new unique name to see the Childlike Empress, and &amp;quot;Mondenkind&amp;quot; isn't really a word that existed before in the German language (certainly not in common parlance). Even the more correct compound noun &amp;quot;Mondkind&amp;quot; would be unusual. &amp;quot;Monden&amp;quot; ist dative plural, so &amp;quot;Mondenkind&amp;quot; would be &amp;quot;child belonging to the moons&amp;quot; or something, but is more likely to be a stylised form. In German, shoving extra syllables into a word is sometimes used to make words sound more &amp;quot;antique&amp;quot; and courtly. And (speculative) the Childlike Empress does not shine her own light, she projects back the phantasies of children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The less mundane out of universe answer is that, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikizero.com/de/Inhalt_und_Interpretation_der_Unendlichen_Geschichte#Herrscherin_Phant%C3%A1siens:_Die_Kindliche_Kaiserin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;some&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_unendliche_Geschichte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources&lt;/a&gt;, it is a reference to the novel &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonchild_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moonchild&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by British occultist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleister_Crowley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aleister Crowley&lt;/a&gt;. This is borne out by the fact that among Michael Ende's possessions was, according to the newspaper &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mittelbayerische.de/kultur-nachrichten/eine-grosse-entdeckung-das-kleine-michael-ende-museum-21853-art590854.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mittelbayerische&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, an &amp;quot;Äquinox&amp;quot; (now on display in the Ende museum), the seal of Crowley's occult society &amp;quot;Thelemic Golden Dawn&amp;quot;, which bears the inscription &amp;quot;Tu was du willst, soll sein das ganze Gesetz&amp;quot;, or in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.otaan.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original English&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law&amp;quot;, which is also the inscription on the Auryin medallion in the Neverending Story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many left wing would be revolutionaries from the 1968 student protest who went into political &amp;quot;inner emigration&amp;quot;, Michael Ende believed in any number of strange things (some of them even true, such as climate change), so a reference to occultism isn't perhaps that unusual. However, at least as far as I can recall, the connection was not widely known or discussed at the time of publication (but then I was eight when it was published, so I wouldn't really have been interested in that kind of discussion).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T06:57:46.527" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-24T11:35:43.243" Score="4" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was printed in 1623, several years after the author's death, and is known is the First Folio. (Later editions are known as the Second Folio, etc., and have less authority than the First Folio.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio#Holdings,_sales_and_valuations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the First Folio&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is believed that &lt;strong&gt;around 750 copies&lt;/strong&gt; of the First Folio were printed, of which there are 235 known surviving copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the sources for this statement is the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/First_Folios_at_the_Folger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folios at the Folger&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Researchers believe that &lt;strong&gt;about 750 copies&lt;/strong&gt; were originally printed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The two other sources are newspaper articles.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/First-Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt; in the online Encyclopaedia Britannica (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actors John Heminge and Henry Condell undertook the collection of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, and &lt;strong&gt;about 1,000 copies&lt;/strong&gt; of the First Folio were printed, none too well, by Jaggard’s son, Isaac.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe I have read elsewhere (in books) that (around?) 1,000 copies were printed, but I can't exactly remember where. What are such estimations based on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T11:35:43.243" Title="How do scholars estimate the original number of copies of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14711" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14712" CreationDate="2020-06-24T11:36:27.920" Score="11" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.209866/page/n37/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Quick One&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Scandal of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing two strange men entered a hotel with beach, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two quaintly assorted figures did, indeed, enter that quiet hotel on that sunny afternoon; one being conspicuous in the sunlight, and visible over the whole shore, by the fact of wearing a lustrous green turban, surrounding a brown face and a black beard; the other would have seemed to some even more wild and weird, by reason of his wearing a soft black clergyman’s hat with a yellow moustache and yellow hair of leonine length. He at least had often been seen preaching on the sands or &lt;strong&gt;conducting Band of Hope services with a little wooden spade&lt;/strong&gt;; only he had certainly never been seen going into the bar of an hotel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_UK&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Band of Hope&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is a charity that educates children and young people about drug and alcohol abuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I can't get the link between &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;little wooden spade&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;educating teetotalism&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or do clergymen usually use spades?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T08:03:37.897" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T08:03:37.897" Title="Do clergymen usually use spades?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14711" CreationDate="2020-06-24T12:27:28.970" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of only two possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is that as the children gathered for a service, he would play along with the children in the sand with a spade, and then, as it transitioned, he would gesture with the spade in hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other is that the Band would sing or play instruments (a musical service) and that he would use the spade as a baton because it was handy on the shore.  Such services could be held on the beach to attract attention from children who did not belong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T12:27:28.970" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-24T14:06:57.857" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Suzanne Collins recently released &lt;em&gt;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&lt;/em&gt; rather abruptly, without much advertising or announcement, during the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic (May 19, 2020). I follow the series fairly closely, and I didn't realize that it had been released until nearly a month later. I was not able to find it on the June 21 or May 31 editions of the &lt;em&gt;New York Times&lt;/em&gt; bestseller list, and I do not recall seeing it before (unless I missed something). (Admittedly, though, it stands at #10 on Amazon.com as of 6/24/2020).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I mistaken, or has the publisher done very little advertising of this and offer no advanced notice of its publication? If so, why did they do this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T14:42:18.937" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T14:42:18.937" Title="Why didn't the publisher advertise &quot;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&quot; more heavily?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14714" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14715" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes' (2020) by Suzanne Collins. Use this tag with the tag [suzanne-collins]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" LastActivityDate="2020-06-24T16:50:55.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-24T19:02:26.533" Score="9" ViewCount="156" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Note this question will be based heavily on my experience as an American and the systems we have in place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was reading some &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5606/56&quot;&gt;questions on this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/233278/57310&quot;&gt;another SE site&lt;/a&gt; about age appropriateness for so called &amp;quot;children's books&amp;quot;. It seems that are many sites that do rate books and will give a general age bracket such as &amp;quot;middle grade&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;young adult&amp;quot; but I noticed these are generally just review style sites and not a governing body like other media has;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Film has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Association_film_rating_system#MPAA_film_ratings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motion Picture Association of America&lt;/a&gt; and the MPAA Rating System (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Music has the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association_of_America&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recording Industry Association of America&lt;/a&gt; (RIAA) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/parental-advisory-label/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parental Advisory Label&lt;/a&gt; (just a black sticker)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Video games have the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_Software_Rating_Board#Ratings&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Entertainment Software Rating Board&lt;/a&gt; (ESRB) (EC, E, E10+, T, M, AO)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Internet usage in general falls under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ftc.gov/enforcement/rules/rulemaking-regulatory-reform-proceedings/childrens-online-privacy-protection-rule#:%7E:text=Rule%20Summary%3A,under%2013%20years%20of%20age.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule&lt;/a&gt; (COPPA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why does literature not have a similar rating system?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it because there are  different categories such as fiction and non-fiction where non-fiction cannot be rated, was there was early precedence that &amp;quot;books are for everyone&amp;quot;, was it to stop over-zealous puritans from banning or burning books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am willing to except a global view on this manner but personally would be concerned more about the history as it pertains to the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T07:04:30.493" Title="Why does literature not have a governing body for content ratings?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-25T19:12:40.877" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m losing my mind, because I’ve lost a quotation that I had a few weeks ago and now can’t relocate it for the life of me. It was from either Brian Boyd’s two-volume biography of Nabokov or Boyd's book &lt;em&gt;Stalking Nabokov&lt;/em&gt;, and it is a page in which he states something to the effect of “We may suspect that language can't accurately capture reality&amp;quot; and then he quotes a short vivid passage by Nabokov that implicitly invokes then refutes this idea. It's likely a passage from one of his novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7366" LastEditorUserId="7366" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T19:31:28.583" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T19:31:28.583" Title="Where is this passage by Nabokov on the power of language located?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14723" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14734" CreationDate="2020-06-25T21:47:06.383" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Quick One&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing a man, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Raggley was generally regarded as a crank. He was the sort of man who writes letters to the newspaper, which generally do not appear in the newspaper; but which do appear afterwards as pamphlets, printed (or misprinted) at his own expense; and circulated to a hundred waste-paper baskets. He had quarrelled alike with the Tory squires and the Radical County Councils; he hated Jews; and he distrusted nearly everything that is sold in shops, or even in hotels. But there was a backing of facts behind his fads; he knew the county in every corner and curious detail; and he was a sharp observer. Even the manager, a Mr Wills, had a shadowy respect for Mr Raggley, &lt;strong&gt;having a nose for the sort of lunacy allowed in the gentry&lt;/strong&gt;; not indeed the prostrate reverence which he had for the jovial magnificence of Mr Jukes, who was really good for trade, but a least a disposition to avoid quarrelling with the old grumbler, partly perhaps out of fear of the old grumbler’s tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/have-a-good-nose-for-sth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;have a nose for&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;have a natural ability to find or discover&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So It may be reworded as &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;because he is good at finding the sort of allowed foolishness in the gentry&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I still can't get the whole meaning that the author meant!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T21:38:49.613" Title="What's meant here by &quot;the sort of lunacy allowed in the gentry&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14723" CreationDate="2020-06-26T02:14:16.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The man is obviously a bit nuts.  However, there's a degree of insanity required before you can be institutionalized, and the degree would be higher for people of higher social status (and more clout).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, having concluded that the man, though lunatic, will not be institutionalized, he regards him with a degree of respect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T02:14:16.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14725" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14726" CreationDate="2020-06-26T15:50:33.940" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something terrible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12875258-tell-the-wolves-i-m-home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tell the Wolves I'm Home&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Carol Rifka Brunt. What does this passage mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the background:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It’s just us now, isn’t it?” I said. But even as the words were&#xA;coming out, I knew it wasn’t really true. Finn was always there. Finn&#xA;would always be there. And then I thought something terrible. I&#xA;thought that if Finn were still alive, Toby and I wouldn’t be friends&#xA;at all. If Finn hadn’t caught AIDS, I would never even have met Toby.&#xA;That strange and awful thought swirled around in my buzzy head. Then&#xA;something else occurred to me. What if it was AIDS that made Finn&#xA;settle down? What if even before he knew he had it, AIDS was making&#xA;him slower, pulling him back to his family, making him choose to be my&#xA;godfather. It was possible that without AIDS I would never have gotten&#xA;to know Finn or Toby. There would be a big hole filled with nothing in&#xA;place of all those hours and days I’d spent with them. If I could&#xA;time-travel, could I be selfless enough to stop Finn from getting&#xA;AIDS? Even if it meant I would never have him as my friend? I didn’t&#xA;know. I had no idea how greedy my heart really was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stood there staring at the sky over Canal Street as it faded from&#xA;orange to a dusty pink. An old lady dragged a shopping cart filled&#xA;with bags down the street, click click clicking over the sidewalk. The&#xA;sun kept on with its slipping away, and I thought how many small good&#xA;things in the world might be resting on the shoulders of something&#xA;terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10324" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:45:35.280" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:45:35.280" Title="What does this passage from a novel mean" Tags="&lt;tell-the-wolves-im-home&gt;&lt;carol-rifka-brunt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14725" CreationDate="2020-06-26T15:55:15.067" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first clause is describing the setting of the sun and the second is the narrator pondering how many good things proceeded from terrible things. They provide the example that Finn getting AIDS was what led to positive things in the narrator's life, from Finn himself to Toby. I personally also see it as an implicit recognition that, while we might speculate on how we might change the past, we can't, and maybe we shouldn't, since good things can come from tragedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T17:48:16.150" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T17:48:16.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14728" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14729" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American novelist and short fiction writer Carol Rifka Brunt (born 1970) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:51:13.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14730" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14731" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Tell The Wolves I'm Home' (2012), Carol Rifka Brunt's debut novel. Use this tag with the tag [carol-rifka-brunt]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T19:52:08.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-26T20:07:10.760" Score="1" ViewCount="201" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 3 of his essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Le Mythe de Sisyphe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Camus discusses how several philosophers who have dealt with what he calls the absurd. One of these is Kierkegaard, of whom he writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;«Dans son échec, dit Kierkegaard, le croyant trouve son triomphe.»&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In his failure, says Kierkegaard, the believer finds his triumph.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find the source of this quote on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikiquote site&lt;/a&gt; or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/S%C3%B8ren_Kierkegaard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikiquote site&lt;/a&gt;. It is also possible that Camus did not quote Kierkegaard literally, in spite of the quote marks; see for example this &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/6485/2191&quot;&gt;question on a quote that Camus attributed to Hegel&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know the source of this “quote”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T22:06:40.550" Title="A quote on failure and triumph attributed to Kierkegaard by Camus" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;soren-kierkegaard&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14732" CreationDate="2020-06-26T20:32:54.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a couple of quotes from Kierkegaard's &lt;a href=&quot;https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/thesicknessuntodeath.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sickness Unto Death&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which are sort of similar to the view cited by Camus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The believer perceives, and understands, humanly speaking, his destruction (in what has befallen him and in what he has ventured), but he believes. Therefore he does not succumb. He leaves it wholly to God how he is to be helped, but he believes that for God all things are possible. To believe in his own destruction is impossible. To understand that, humanly, it is his own destruction, and then nevertheless to believe in the possibility, is what is meant by faith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, this is about how a believer may trust in God to provide the possibility of salvation even when he is facing impending destruction. Faith is said to be the ability to believe in that possibility. I don't think this is likely to be what Camus was referring to, but it's possible to interpret Camus as talking about Kierkegaard's belief that failure (destruction) is where faith is most strongly found (triumph).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now for Christianity! Yea, he who defends it has never believed in it. If he believes, then the enthusiasm of faith is . . . not defense, no, it is attack and victory. The believer is a victor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, I think, is more likely to be what Camus meant. Kierkegaard is here arguing that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;To defend anything is always to discredit it&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; - thus, a believer who appears to be in failure (by failing to defend his own religion) has found triumph (to be a &amp;quot;victor&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe someone will find something that fits even better. But these seem close enough to be possibly what Camus was referring to, albeit not exactly matching the &amp;quot;quote&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T20:32:54.767" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14723" CreationDate="2020-06-26T21:38:49.613" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;the sort of lunacy allowed in the gentry&amp;quot; is an allusion to the (real or perceived) eccentricity of the English aristocracy, i.e. that eccentricity is more common among the gentry or the aristocrats than among the rest of the population. In fact, a search for &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=eccentric+english+aristocrats+&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;eccentric English aristocrats&lt;/a&gt; gives quite a lot of results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the narrator of Chesterton's story, being an eccentric, a crank or a lunatic is all on the same spectrum of, uh, non-standard mental states. The phrase &amp;quot;allowed in the gentry&amp;quot; implies that aristocrats can exhibit unusual behaviour or express strange ideas without suffering negative consequences (possibly because they don't actively harm anybody), whereas people from lower classes might suffer at least social consequences. (It does not sound as if Raggley's behaviour would lead to being sent to a mental asylum if he hadn't been an aristocrat, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Wills apparently has the ability to detect this sort of eccentricity or crankiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-26T21:38:49.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-27T03:34:54.713" Score="3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a quote in the Internet which says: &amp;quot;Life is a balance between holding on and letting go&amp;quot;. People cited it to Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī (Rumi). My question is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the exact address of this quote in his poems?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the exact poem/sentence in Persian for that?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10326" LastEditorUserId="10326" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T06:31:23.850" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T06:31:23.850" Title="Source of the quote &quot;Life is a balance between holding on and letting go&quot; from Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;rumi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-27T18:07:50.737" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following quote from Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;em&gt;History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;, does &amp;quot;coming and going of their own accord&amp;quot; refer to &amp;quot;ectoplasmic forms&amp;quot;? What does &amp;quot;will to do&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One observation which Olcott made was that these ectoplasmic forms&#xA;were quick to obey any mental order from a strong-minded sitter,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;coming and going as they were willed to do&lt;/strong&gt;. Other observers in various séances have noted the same fact, and it may be taken as one&#xA;of the fixed points in this baffling problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: Arthur Conan Doyle: &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt; (hosted by Project Gutenberg Australia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10329" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:38:38.883" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T08:54:25.877" Title="Does &quot;coming and going on their own accord&quot; refer to &quot;ectoplasmic forms&quot;? What does &quot;will to do&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14737" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-27T20:40:24.303" Score="2" ViewCount="403" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me analyze the alliteration from the line above. Which 'L' words attribute to the alliteration? Lo, Li from Lolita and light, life, loins? Or just light, life, loins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10332" LastEditorUserId="10332" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T20:50:52.273" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T09:02:47.050" Title="Analyzing the alliteration of the first line of Lolita" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;vladimir-nabokov&gt;&lt;lolita&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-27T20:43:42.907" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_historicism&amp;amp;direction=next&amp;amp;oldid=960843212&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Historicism&lt;/a&gt; is a form of literary theory that focuses on the relation between literature and history (and which is more complex than I wish to explain here). It was developed by scholars such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Greenblatt#New_Historicism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Greenblatt&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Montrose&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis Montrose&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article about New Historicism,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bloom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harold Bloom&lt;/a&gt; criticizes the new historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history, and for not paying attention to the details involved in analyzing literature.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This claim requires a citation. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_historicism&amp;amp;direction=next&amp;amp;oldid=328378697&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oldest version of that Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; that mentions Harold Bloom dates from 1 December 2009, when the wording was as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some complaints (including those of Harold Bloom) sometimes made about New Historicism are that it seems to reduce literature to a footnote of history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement has no source either, but what is striking compared to the newer version is that this criticism is no longer directly attributed to Harold Bloom. Searching for other sources that &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22harold+bloom%22+%22new+historicism%22+literature+footnote+history&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;attribute this criticism to Harold Bloom&lt;/a&gt; shows that some people simply copied the statement from Wikipedia (or the other way around?). So did Harold Bloom ever criticise New Historicism in this way? If yes, where? Or does the criticism come from a different source?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-10T20:09:44.620" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T20:09:44.620" Title="Did Harold Bloom ever criticise New Historicism for reducing literature to a footnote of history?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;harold-bloom&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14739" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14740" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American literary critic Harold Bloom (1930 – 2019). He is best known for works such as 'The Anxiety of Influence' (1973), 'The Western Canon' (1994) and 'Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human' (1998)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T20:56:54.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14741" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14738" CreationDate="2020-06-27T21:35:22.120" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Harold Bloom certainly criticised New Historicism.&lt;/strong&gt; In his book &lt;em&gt;The Western Canon&lt;/em&gt;, he said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever the convictions of our current New Historicists,&#xA;for whom Shakespeare is only a signifier for the social energies of&#xA;the English Renaissance, Shakespeare for hundreds of millions&#xA;who are not white Europeans is a signifier for their own pathos,&#xA;their own sense of identity with the characters that Shakespeare&#xA;fleshed out by his language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he frequently referred disparagingly to New Historicists as &amp;quot;resenters&amp;quot;, or more specifically as one of the &amp;quot;six branches of the School of Resentment: Feminists, Marxists, Lacanians, New Historicists, Deconstructionists, Semioticians.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this via the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yorku.ca/etopia/docs/turningon/Marquez.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Neglect of the Author in New Historicism&amp;quot; by Patricia Ana Marquez&lt;/a&gt;, which says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his introduction to The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom writes a controversial polemic against New Historicists. His work attempts to map the influence of writers belonging to the Western “canon,” showing that every great writer has been influenced by a writer preceding him or her. The “canon” is in jeopardy according to Bloom, and he writes that he finds it “absurd and regrettable” that an author like Shakespeare is critiqued through a New Historical lens, reducing him to the “‘social energies’ of the English Renaissance” (3).  Bloom perceives this reduction with disdain because Shakespeare, arguably the most influential writer in the English language, has been aesthetically lumped into comparability with less significant writers.  One of the reasons, according to Bloom, is due to a trend in schools to discard aesthetics. In trying to “expand the canon” by including all forms of literature previously neglected in history, scholars have instead destroyed the canon (7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His description of New Historicism in the above-quoted paragraph &lt;strong&gt;may be paraphrased as reducing literature to a footnote of history&lt;/strong&gt; - &amp;quot;Shakespeare is only a signifier for the social energies of the English Renaissance&amp;quot; - but the exact phrase &amp;quot;footnote of history&amp;quot; does not appear. Searching through the full text of some of his books such as &lt;em&gt;The Western Canon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Anxiety of Influence&lt;/em&gt; does not give any results for this exact phrase, nor does it appear in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?biw=1536&amp;amp;bih=760&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=t7n3Xu67IcavrgS7s62gDA&amp;amp;q=inauthor%3A%22Harold+Bloom%22+%22footnote+of+history%22&amp;amp;oq=inauthor%3A%22Harold+Bloom%22+%22footnote+of+history%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a Google Books search&lt;/a&gt; in any of his books. I couldn't track down any original source for this phrase in reference to New Historicism; it may have been coined by whoever wrote that Wikipedia page, since everywhere I can find on the internet that mentions both &amp;quot;New Historicism&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;footnote of history&amp;quot; looks as though it's sourced or copied from that same Wikipedia page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T21:35:22.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14776" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:19:55.367" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Amélie Nothomb's novel &lt;em&gt;Soif&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Thirst&lt;/em&gt;) tells us Jesus's memoirs on the eve of the crucifixion. Jesus defends against the accusations made to him by referring to his omniscience as being imperfect. I understand, from two passages, that he knows some things about the future, but not all. In fact, Jesus says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My knowledge of the times is no different from that of my destiny: I&#xA;know Τι, I do not know Πως.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My translation: I have only the French original at hand.) And elsewhere:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He is omniscient, isn't he?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good question. I always know Τι, and&#xA;never Πως.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last passage then goes on to describe this difference in grammatical terms:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the &lt;em&gt;compléments d'objet&lt;/em&gt; and never the &lt;em&gt;compléments&#xA;circonstantiels&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have left these terms untranslated because I'm not sure of their English counterparts, and moreover, that is not the point of my question, which is: what are Τι and Πως? A search on Google and in a dictionary reveals only vague translations (&amp;quot;what&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;which&amp;quot;) that do not explain in what way Jesus would and wouldn't be omniscient. In any case I couldn't find Τι and Πως as opposing philosophical concepts, as you might expect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:41:57.953" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T00:57:37.277" Title="Meaning of Greek concepts on omniscience in Amélie Nothomb's Soif" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;amelie-nothomb&gt;&lt;soif&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:43:40.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The author's website is at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.amelie-nothomb.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;amelie-nothomb.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:49:00.210" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T22:49:00.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:43:40.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Belgian Francophone novelist Amélie Nothomb (born 1966) and her life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:43:40.473" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T22:43:40.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14745" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14746" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about Amélie Nothomb's 2019 novel 'Soif' (French; literally 'Thirst'). Use this tag with the tags [amelie-nothomb] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" LastActivityDate="2020-06-27T22:45:00.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14748" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14753" CreationDate="2020-06-28T13:15:48.250" Score="6" ViewCount="1608" Body="&lt;p&gt;Who brought sonnet to English literature? Thomas Wyatt or William Shakespeare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their contributions to English literature: Shakespeare wrote a book that contains 154 sonnets, but I couldn't find something like that about Wyatt. Could you help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T20:35:23.930" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T07:55:36.687" Title="Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-wyatt&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14217" CreationDate="2020-06-28T13:27:14.610" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is set during the winter of 1870-1871, several months after the fall of Napoléon III's Second Empire (early September 1870) but before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles_(1871)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preliminary peace treaty signed in Versailles&lt;/a&gt; on 26 February 1871. Since the &lt;strong&gt;Prussian forces entered Rouen in December 1870&lt;/strong&gt; (apparently, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gabrielle-dubois.com/2018/02/07/hiver-1870-des-prussiens-dans-le-lit-de-flaubert/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prussian soldiers even used Flaubert's bed&lt;/a&gt;), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Paris_(1870%E2%80%9371)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;siege of Paris&lt;/a&gt; (19 September 1870 - 28 January 1871) is still ongoing; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_National_Defense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Government of National Defence&lt;/a&gt; (4 September 1870 - 13 February 1871) was in a sense the first government of the Troisième République.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Empire&amp;quot; is the &amp;quot;Second Empire&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, established after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1851_French_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's coup d'état of December 1851&lt;/a&gt; and the man's coronation as Napoléon III in December 1852. His reign is divided into two periods: an authoritarian period (1852-1860) and a &amp;quot;liberal&amp;quot; period (1860-1870). Those who supported him, like Boule de Suif, were bonapartists; there were several types of &lt;strong&gt;opposition&lt;/strong&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orl%C3%A9anist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orléanism&lt;/a&gt; (supporting the constitutional monarchy by the House of Orléans, represented in the story by the comte Hubert de Bréville) and republicanism (represented in the story by Cornudet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Legion of Honour / &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordre_national_de_la_L%C3%A9gion_d%27honneur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Légion d'honneur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was established in 1804 by consul Napoléon Bonaparte (months before his coronation as emperor) because the French Revolution has abolished all types of decorations that existed under the &lt;em&gt;Ancien Régime&lt;/em&gt;. From the beginning, the Legion of Honour &lt;strong&gt;could be awarded both to servicemen and to civilians&lt;/strong&gt;. Napoleon is supposed to have said, &amp;quot;Je veux décorer mes soldats et mes savants&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;I want to decorate my soldiers and my scholars&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;General Council refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conseil_d%C3%A9partemental&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;conseil général de département&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a type of assembly established after the French revolution; since 1833, the members of this assembly were elected. During the Second Empire, the &lt;em&gt;conseil départemental&lt;/em&gt; was a kind of deliberative assembly, since government had been centralised and the executive power at the level of the &lt;em&gt;département&lt;/em&gt; was in the hands of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A9fet_de_d%C3%A9partement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;préfet de département&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, who represented the centralised power. However, during the liberal period of the Second Empire, there was some pressure to decentralise government and the conseil général was given a few more competencies. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_du_conseil_d%C3%A9partemental_du_Loiret#Second_Empire_(1852-1870)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Histoire du conseil départemental du Loiret&lt;/a&gt;; I assume that the description there is representative of the Second Empire in general; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://havrincourt.monsite-orange.fr/page6/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Conseil Général du Pas De Calais&lt;/a&gt;, which points out that the &lt;em&gt;conseil départemental&lt;/em&gt; did not have much real power.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;well-disposed opposition&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (there is no uppercase letter in the French original: &amp;quot;opposition bienveillante&amp;quot;) is a bit harder to define, especially when taking into account hat the powers that be could could propose &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidat_officiel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;official candidates / &amp;quot;candidats officiels&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; for elections of assemblies such as the &lt;em&gt;conseil général&lt;/em&gt;. Since Carré-Lamadon had been awarded the &lt;em&gt;Légion d'honneur&lt;/em&gt;, it is likely that he was such an official candidate. The best explanation for his &amp;quot;opposition&amp;quot; that I can think of is that he may prefer the older more authoritarian style of government to the more liberal style that dominated since 1860. The entire description of his political position (&amp;quot;the well-disposed Opposition, merely in order to command a higher value for his devotion when he should rally to the cause which he meanwhile opposed&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;l’opposition bienveillante, uniquement pour se faire payer plus cher son ralliement à la cause qu’il combattait&amp;quot;) suggest that he does not want to commit himself too strongly so he can turn his coat when the political winds should change; in other words, he is practising the venerable &lt;strong&gt;political art of opportunism&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T13:27:14.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14736" CreationDate="2020-06-28T14:19:55.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;coming and going as they were willed to do&amp;quot; means that the ectoplasmic forms came and went however the &amp;quot;strong-willed sitter&amp;quot; mentally told them to. &amp;quot;To will someone to do something&amp;quot; is to make something happen by wishing for it (source)&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macmillandictionary.com/amp/dictionary/british/will_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;source&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;. The strong-willed sitter wishes very hard for the ghosts to come or go, and they do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10307" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T14:19:55.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14748" CreationDate="2020-06-28T15:40:19.480" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Jakob Schippers's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofenglish00schiuoft/page/372/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A History of English Versification&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first English sonnet writers were Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_(poet)#Wyatt%27s_poetry_and_influence&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wyatt's poems&lt;/a&gt; appear to have circulated at court, but they were not published under his name until after his death in 1542. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottel%27s_Miscellany&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tottel's Miscellany&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the first printed anthology of English poetry, was first published in 1557 and was reprinted many times. The anthology contained poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey and several others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Wyatt (1542) and Surrey (1547) died before Shakespeare was even born (in 1564), so the English sonnet is definitely older than Shakespeare. The conventions of what we now call the Shakespearean sonnet had already been established by Wyatt and Surrey: the rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg) and the breaking up of the last six lines into a quatrain and a couplet (whereas the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarchan_sonnet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Petrarchan sonnet&lt;/a&gt; ended with two tercets) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/volta&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;volta&lt;/a&gt; or turn before the last couplet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's sonnet were first published in 1609, while sonnet cycles reached their high point in the 1590s. It is not clear when exactly Shakespeare's sonnets were written (see Jonathan F. S. Post: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Sonnets and Poems: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, 2017, pages 75-76).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T15:40:19.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14754" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14737" CreationDate="2020-06-28T17:00:06.967" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In poetry, alliteration requires stressed syllables that begin with the same consonant sound. Nabokov's novel &lt;em&gt;Lolita&lt;/em&gt; is written in prose, so we don't need to analyse the metre to determine which syllables are stressed; we only need to know each word's main stress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Nabokov's first two sentences, we can find two groups of alliterations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;based on the &amp;quot;l&amp;quot; sound: &amp;quot;Lo&lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ita, &lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ight of my &lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;ife, fire of my &lt;strong&gt;l&lt;/strong&gt;oins&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;based on the &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; sound: &amp;quot;My &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;in, my &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;oul.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two other sound patterns that strengthen these strings of alliterations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assonance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;assonance&lt;/a&gt; of the &amp;quot;i&amp;quot; sound in &amp;quot;l&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;ght&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;l&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;fe&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;f&lt;strong&gt;i&lt;/strong&gt;re&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the assonance between &amp;quot;L&lt;strong&gt;o&lt;/strong&gt;lita&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;l&lt;strong&gt;oi&lt;/strong&gt;ns&amp;quot; (obviously with some liberty, since &amp;quot;o&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;oi&amp;quot; are not exactly the same sounds),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the repetition of &amp;quot;my&amp;quot;, which on the one hand exhibits assonance with &amp;quot;light&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;life&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fire&amp;quot;, and on the other hand provides a bridge between the first group of alliterations (&amp;quot;my life&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;my loins&amp;quot;) and the second group &amp;quot;My sin, my soul&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can see that Nabokov does not only use alliteration in these opening sentences but reinforces this sound effect by means of other sound effects. The next sentence continues the alliterations, this time based on the letter &amp;quot;t&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lo-lee-ta: the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ip of the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ongue &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;aking a &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;rip of three steps down the palate &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;o &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;ap, at three, on the &lt;strong&gt;t&lt;/strong&gt;eeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Humbert Humbert, speaking the girl's name is a sensual experience. He can't resist the sound effects, just like he can't resist the girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T09:02:47.050" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T09:02:47.050" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14755" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14756" CreationDate="2020-06-28T19:13:05.087" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to remember a science fiction story I read that involved a civilization of sentient manta rays living in Jupiter. The book starts with the main character, a human, being given a body to join the manta rays, and ends with the humans and manta rays realizing that they can use the core of Jupiter to travel to other solar systems. I would have read this in the late 90s, earlier 2000s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10334" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T23:46:03.093" Title="Sentient manta rays living in Jupiter?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14755" CreationDate="2020-06-28T19:29:37.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably &lt;strong&gt;Timothy Zahn's &lt;em&gt;Manta's Gift&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/216441.Manta_s_Gift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads summary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Matt Raimey had his accident, he thought his life was over. He never dreamed, in his wildest fantasies, that he'd end up in a spot like this. In the toxic atmosphere of Jupiter, born into the body of an enormous creature that looked like a cross between a manta ray and a dolphin, he is living a new life, unlike any humankind had previously experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.scifi-review.net/mantas-gift-by-timothy-zahn.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Science Fiction Review&lt;/a&gt; with more details about the story (although without revealing the ending).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I searched Google for &lt;code&gt;science fiction manta rays jupiter&lt;/code&gt;, the top hits were all about this book. Then again, Google search results are different for everyone, and I've done a lot of searching for science fiction stories to answer people's story-ID questions; maybe you'd get completely different results with the same search.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T19:29:37.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14758" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14759" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English politician and poet Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542) and his life as a writer. Wyatt and his contemporary Henry Howard are credited with introducing the sonnet into English literature." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" LastActivityDate="2020-06-28T21:23:53.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-28T22:32:08.210" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Guy de Maupassant wrote almost all of his fiction during a single decade: the 1880s. This was also the decade that saw the construction of the Eiffel Tower, namely in the years 1887-1889. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Artists%27_protest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the Eiffel Tower&lt;/a&gt; states that Maupassant was one of a number of writers, painters and other notable cultural figures who signed an open letter to the Minister of Works protesting against the construction of the tower. The article even adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes me wonder whether Maupassant ever mentioned the Eiffel Tower in his later works. (The works I have read so far were published before 1888 and the tower is not mentioned in them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:54:26.827" Title="Did the Eiffel Tower feature in any of Maupassant's stories or novels?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14748" CreationDate="2020-06-29T03:21:13.423" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; Nobody could credibly claim that Shakespeare was the first to write sonnets in English. He wasn't even the first to use what we now think of as the typical &amp;quot;Shakespearean&amp;quot; rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. Nor is his the first sonnet sequence (series of linked sonnets) in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Details&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a supplement to and clarification of, not a replacement for, @Tsundoku's excellent answer. As @Tsundoku wrote, there is no doubt that the sonnet was long established in English poetry before Shakespeare. Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet form to England from Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The typical Italian sonnet form, as epitomized in Petrarch's poems, consisted of an octave and a sestet. The octave consisted of two quatrains that rhymed abba abba. The sestet consisted of two tercets, but the rhyme scheme was variable: cdc ede, or cde cde, or cdd cee, or cdc dee, etc. A volta, or turn in thought, occurred between the octave and the sestet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyatt did write the first sonnets in the English language. However, he did not use the &amp;quot;Shakespearean&amp;quot; rhyme scheme that became well-established in English poetry later. Wyatt's sonnets invariably preserve the Italian octave: abba abba, with its &amp;quot;enclosed&amp;quot; rhyme scheme. The sestet form he used was varied, but he did favor a closing couplet. Here are two examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My galley, chargèd with forgetfulness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through sharp seas in winter nights doth pass&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And every hour a thought in readiness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As though that death were light in such a case.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An endless wind doth tear the sail apace&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hath done the wearied cords great hinderance;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wreathèd with error and eke with ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stars be hid that led me to this pain;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Drownèd is Reason that should me comfort,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I remain despairing of the port.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We see here the abba abba octave; the volta, or turn, from describing his present situation to describing what caused it; and the sestet with its two tercets, cdd cee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example from Wyatt shows the same structure of an enclosed-rhyme octave and two tercets, rather than a quatrain and a couplet, for the sestet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The longë love that in my thought doth harbour&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And in mine heart doth keep his residence,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into my face presseth with bold pretence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therein campeth, spreading his banner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She that me learneth to love and suffer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And will that my trust and lustës negligence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be rayned [note 1] by reason, shame, and reverence,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With his hardiness taketh displeasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wherewithall unto the heart's forest he fleeth,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And there him hideth and not appeareth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What may I do when my master feareth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But in the field with him to live and die?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For good is the life ending faithfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem, a translation of Petrarch's sonnet 140 (&amp;quot;Amor, che nel penser mio vive et regna&amp;quot;), uses the rhyme scheme abba abba cdc cdd [note 2]. Although it does have a closing couplet, the couplet does not stand alone. Both syntactically and by rhyme scheme, it is connected to the earlier part of the sestet. Syntactically, it isn't a grammatically complete unit, and the &amp;quot;d&amp;quot; rhyme, &amp;quot;die/faithfully,&amp;quot; is introduced before the couplet with &amp;quot;cry.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's instructive, and also a bit of a cliché, to compare this with Surrey's translation of the same sonnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Love, that doth reign and live within my thought,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And built his seat within my captive breast,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clad in the arms wherein with me he fought,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oft in my face he doth his banner rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But she that taught me love and suffer pain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My doubtful hope and eke my hot desire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With shamefast look to shadow and refrain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her smiling grace converteth straight to ire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And coward Love, then, to the heart apace&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Taketh his flight, where he doth lurk and plain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His purpose lost, and dare not show his face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For my lord's guilt thus faultless bide I pain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet from my lord shall not my foot remove:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sweet is the death that taketh end by love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surrey no longer uses enclosed rhyme, but open rhyme: abab cdcd ece cff. That's a pretty huge innovation in the history of the English sonnet. But here too, the sestet is still not a &amp;quot;Shakespearean&amp;quot; sestet of efef gg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surrey does, however, have other poems with the typically &amp;quot;Shakespearean&amp;quot; rhyme scheme. Here's one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set me whereas the sun doth parch the green&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or where his beams do not dissolve the ice,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In temperate heat where he is felt and seen;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In presence prest of people, mad or wise;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set me in high or yet in low degree,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In longest night or in the shortest day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In clearest sky or where clouds thickest be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In lusty youth or when my hairs are gray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set me in heaven, in earth, or else in hell;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In hill, or dale, or in the foaming flood;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thrall or at large, alive whereso I dwell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sick or in health, in evil fame or good:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hers will I be, and only with this thought&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Content myself although my chance be nought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We finally see an example of the sonnet form as Shakespeare used it: three open quatrains, abab cdcd efef; a closing couplet, gg; and a volta between them, with the speaker going from describing various possibilities to asserting that no matter which of them happens, he will be happy because he is in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: Wyatt gets credit for introducing the sonnet form into English; Surrey for introducing the specific form of the &amp;quot;Shakespearean&amp;quot; sonnet. How about sonnet sequences? Wyatt and Surrey wrote stand-alone sonnets, but Petrarch's was a sequence: a long series that told a developing story. Shakespeare's sonnets do tell a story of sorts. The textual history of Shakespeare's sonnets makes it hard to be certain that we have the whole story, or even that the sonnets are in the right order. But there's no doubt that there are connections between his sonnets and they're not stand-alone. So his is a sonnet sequence. And AFAIK it is the longest of the sonnet sequences of the English Renaissance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, it was by no means the first sonnet sequence in English. The first person to write a series of linked sonnets that told a developing story was Anne Locke. Her first name is variously spelled An, Ann, or Anne; her last, Lok, Lock, Luk, Luck, or Locke [note 3]. Locke's &lt;a href=&quot;http://https:/www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/locke2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Meditation of a Penitant Sinner&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1560, consists of 26 sonnets based on Psalm 51. This is an extremely interesting religious work of the most devout Protestantism, quite far in theme from the love intrigues of Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare. One might make the case, though, that Locke's description of the agonies a sinner faces in being separated from God do echo some of the laments of the Petrarchan lovers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Shakespeare wasn't the first person to write a sonnet sequence in English. He wasn't even the first to write a Petrarchan sonnet sequence, i.e., one that takes romantic love for its theme, in the language. That honor goes to Philip Sidney, whose &lt;em&gt;Astrophel and Stella&lt;/em&gt; sonnets were in circulation in the 1580s. Sidney sticks with Petrarch in theme, but his rhyme schemes are dazzlingly varied; the sequence is worth looking through simply to see how many different patterns Sidney employs before repeating one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dozens of poets followed Sidney's example before Shakespeare wrote his sonnet sequence: Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, etc. Sidney's friend Edmund Spenser deserves special mention for having come up with an innovative rhyme scheme for his sequence, &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; (1595): abab bcbc cdcd ee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this brief overview of the history of the English sonnet prior to Shakespeare shows, @Tsundoku is completely correct in pointing out that &amp;quot;the English sonnet is definitely older than Shakespeare&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the conventions of what we now call the Shakespearean sonnet had already been established&amp;quot; well before Shakespeare's own began to circulate. I'd hesitate to say that Wyatt and Surrey established them—they started the process, and Surrey in particular got it well on its way. But beginning with Wyatt and Surrey, English poets had worked with the sonnet for a long time, and very fruitfully, before Shakespeare. His sequence has its merits: it seems startlingly modern at times in its psychological insight; his handling even of tired Petrarchan tropes can be fresh and inventive; and as one might expect, his creative use of language is always exciting. Giving him credit for pioneering the sonnet form itself, however, is groundless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Spelling left unmodernized because the word is actually a pun: reined (curbed) or reigned (ruled) are both part of the meaning. Using either one would flatten the pun and emphasize one meaning above the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yes, cry/die/faithfully are a single rhyme. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_rhyme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Wikipedia page on eye rhymes&lt;/a&gt;, which uses the example enemies/flies as something that actually rhymed in Shakespeare's day. Pronunciation has changed a lot since then. In fact, pronunciation changed a lot even between Wyatt and Shakespeare. I would argue that we don't really know how to scan Wyatt because we don't know for certain how he would have pronounced anything. That's a whole 'nother question for someone to ask on this forum. Hint, hint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Anne Locke provides a great example of how anti-Stratfordians—those who claim Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays or poems attributed to him—base their arguments on poor historical scholarship. We have six signatures in Shakespeare's handwriting. None of them uses the spelling &amp;quot;Shakespeare,&amp;quot; and there are four variants of spelling in the six samples. This is often used as &amp;quot;evidence&amp;quot; that Shakespeare was illiterate and could not have written the works that are generally accepted as his. As the case of Locke shows, the matter is simply that spellings, even of names, weren't standardized in Shakespeare's day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T07:55:36.687" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T07:55:36.687" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14761" CreationDate="2020-06-29T06:54:26.827" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;He mentioned it in &lt;em&gt;La Vie Errante&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Wandering Life&lt;/em&gt;), published 1890.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a quote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://occursus.org/2013/01/20/guy-de-maupassant-will-self-the-eiffel-tower-and-the-shard/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;, both in French and in Amanda Crawley Jackson's English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J’ai quitté Paris et même la France, parce que la tour Eiffel finissait par m’ennuyer trop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Non seulement on la voyait de partout, mais on la trouvait partout, faite de toutes les matières connues, exposée à toutes les vitres, cauchemar inévitable et torturant. Ce n’est pas elle uniquement d’ailleurs qui m’a donné une irrésistible envie de vivre seul pendant quelque temps, mais tout ce qu’on a fait autour d’elle, dedans, dessus, aux environs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comment tous les journaux vraiment ont-ils osé nous parler d’architecture nouvelle à propos de cette carcasse métallique, car l’architecture, le plus incompris et le plus oublié des arts aujourd’hui, en est peut-être aussi le plus esthétique, le plus mystérieux et le plus nourri d’idées ? Il a eu ce privilège à travers les siècles de symboliser pour ainsi dire chaque époque, de résumer, par un très petit nombre de monuments typiques, la manière de penser, de sentir et de rêver d’une race et d’une civilisation. Quelques temples et quelques églises, quelques palais et quelques châteaux contiennent à peu près toute l’histoire de l’art à travers le monde, expriment à nos yeux mieux que des livres, par l’harmonie des lignes et le charme de l’ornementation, toute la grâce et la grandeur d’une époque.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mais je me demande ce qu’on conclura de notre génération si quelque prochaine émeute ne déboulonne pas cette haute et maigre pyramide d’échelles de fer, squelette disgracieux et géant, dont la base semble faite pour porter un formidable monument de Cyclopes et qui avorte en un ridicule et mince profil de cheminée d’usine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I left Paris and even France because in the end, the Eiffel Tower annoyed me too much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only could you see it from wherever you went in the city, but you also found it everywhere, made in every material known to man, on sale in all the shop windows, an unavoidable and agonising nightmare. It wasn’t only the Eiffel Tower, however, that gave me an irresistible desire to live alone for a while, but everything that was done around, inside, above and adjacent to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Really – how could all the newspapers speak to us of a new architecture in relation to this metallic carcass, because architecture, the least understood and the most forgotten of the arts today is perhaps also the most aesthetic, the most mysterious and the most nourished with ideas. It has had the privilege, across the centuries, of symbolizing as it were each age, of summarizing in a very small number of typical monuments a race and a civilisation’s way of thinking, feeling and dreaming. A few temples and churches, palaces and châteaux contain more or less the world’s entire history of art, and express visually, better than books, through the harmony of lines and the charm of ornamentation all the grace and grandeur of an epoch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder what will be concluded of our generation if some future riot does not topple this tall, skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this ungainly, giant skeleton whose base appears designed to carry a formidable monument of the Cyclops and which aborts in a ridiculous, thin profile of a factory chimney.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I couldn't find much information about this book online in English, but it has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Vie_errante&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; which describes it as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9cit_de_voyage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;récit de voyage&lt;/a&gt; (travelogue), a genre perhaps more non-fiction than fiction, but still written in a style intended to entertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;It's not mentioned in any of his short stories.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I checked the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3090/3090-h/3090-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complete Maupassant short stories&lt;/a&gt; available on Project Gutenberg (which even includes &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14259/17&quot;&gt;some non-Maupassant stories&lt;/a&gt;), but searching the text for &amp;quot;Eiffel&amp;quot; produced no results, and even searching for &amp;quot;tower&amp;quot; didn't give anything which could refer to the Eiffel Tower (mostly rural church towers and the like).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T06:54:26.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14764" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14769" CreationDate="2020-06-29T10:02:43.680" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Quick One&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was talking to his friend, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Didn’t you see how that old man, with the heart of a lion, stood up and forgave his enemy as only fighters can forgive? He jolly well did do what that temperance lecturer talked about; he set an example to us Christians and was a model of Christianity. And when there is foul and secret murder of a man like that — then I do think it matters, matters so much that even the modern machinery of police will be a thing &lt;strong&gt;that any respectable person&lt;/strong&gt; may make use of ... &lt;strong&gt;Oh, don’t mention it&lt;/strong&gt;. And so, for once in a way, I really do want to make use of you.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found, in almost every dictionary, that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/don%27t_mention_it&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;don't mention it&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;A polite expression used to indicate that an apology or an expression of thanks is not necessary.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that doesn't make sense in this context, so I guess that he mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;shut up my mouth&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; because he praised himself as a respectable man, doesn't he?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T18:22:27.297" Title="What's meant here by &quot;Don't mention it&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-29T12:35:45.477" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following extract is from &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; by Mary Shelley. I'd like to know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What the &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; refers to. Does the &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; refer to the circumstances in general?&#xA;If so, in what ways were the circumstances different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whether &amp;quot;the science&amp;quot; refers to modern natural philosophy or alchemy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, I had a contempt for the uses of modern natural philosophy. &lt;strong&gt;It&lt;/strong&gt; was very &lt;strong&gt;different&lt;/strong&gt;, when the masters of &lt;strong&gt;the science&lt;/strong&gt; sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand: but now the scene was changed. The ambition of the enquirer seemed to limit itself to the annihilation of those visions on which my interest in science was chiefly founded. I was required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T13:35:35.107" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T09:15:09.930" Title="&quot;It was very different, when the masters of the science sought immortality and power&quot; in Frankenstein" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14768" CreationDate="2020-06-29T14:01:53.120" Score="0" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m reading &lt;em&gt;The Picture of Dorian Gray&lt;/em&gt; by Oscar Wilde. So far, I have read the first few pages, and I noticed Basil saying things like “I meet him [Dorian Gray], I cannot be happy without meeting him” and “He, too, felt that we were destined to be introduced” (no verbatim is claimed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this novel progress into explicit homosexual topics or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T10:03:23.280" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T10:03:23.280" Title="Does “The Picture of Dorian Gray” contain any explicit content?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;&lt;the-picture-of-dorian-gray&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9590" CreationDate="2020-06-29T14:36:48.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most likely explanation is that Kleinstück got his facts wrong. As Paul Grimstead's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-makes-great-detective-fiction-according-to-t-s-eliot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;, 02.02.2016) points out, Eliot wrote several reviews of detective fiction in the literary magazine &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Criterion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Criterion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reviews of detective novels he published anonymously in &lt;em&gt;The Criterion&lt;/em&gt;, a magazine he had created, include &amp;quot;Homage to Wilkie Collins: An omnibus review of nine mystery novels&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Recent Detective Ficion: An omnibus review of sixteen detective novels and of &lt;em&gt;Problems of Modern American Crime&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Both are available in &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/book/41952&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (volume 3 of an eight-volume edition of Eliot's prose).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Homage to Wilkie Collins: An omnibus review of nine mystery novels&amp;quot; (January 1927) discusses the following novels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The D'Arblay Mystery&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._Austin_Freeman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;R. Austin Freeman&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Footsteps that Stopped&lt;/em&gt; by A. Fielding (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of Sin&lt;/em&gt; by Allen Upward (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Diamond in the Hoof&lt;/em&gt; by Traill Stevenson (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dangerfield Talisman&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Walter_Stewart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. J. Connington&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Disappearances&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_McLeod_Winsor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;G. McLeod Winsor&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Footsteps in the Night&lt;/em&gt; by C. Fraser-Simson (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bishops Park Mystery&lt;/em&gt; by Donald Dike (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Massingham Butterfly&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._Fletcher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. S. Fletcher&lt;/a&gt; (1926).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Recent Detective Ficion: An omnibus review of sixteen detective novels and of &lt;em&gt;Problems of Modern American Crime&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (June 1927) discusses the following works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Benson Murder Case&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._S._Van_Dine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;S. S. Van Dine&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Crime at Diana's Pool&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Whitechurch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victor L. Whitechurch&lt;/a&gt; (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Three Taps&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Knox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ronald A. Knox&lt;/a&gt; (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Verdict of You All&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Henry_Aubrey-Fletcher,_6th_Baronet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Wade&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Venetian Key&lt;/em&gt; by Allen Upward (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mr. Forune Please&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._C._Bailey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;H. C. Bailey&lt;/a&gt; (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Colfax Book-Plate&lt;/em&gt; by Agnes Miller (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Clue in the Glass&lt;/em&gt; by W. B. M. Ferguson (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mortover Grange Mystery&lt;/em&gt; by J. S. Fletcher (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Green Rope&lt;/em&gt; by J. S. Fletcher (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mellbridge Mystery&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur O. Cooke (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cathra Mystery&lt;/em&gt; by Adam Gordon Macleod (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Devil's Tower&lt;/em&gt; by Olivier Ainsworth (Faber &amp;amp; Gwyer, 1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spider's Den&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_McCulley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harrington Strong&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Four Knocks on the Door&lt;/em&gt; by John Paul Seabrooke (1927),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Murder for Profit&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bolitho_Ryall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Bolitho&lt;/a&gt; (1926),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Problems of Modern American Crime&lt;/em&gt; by Veronica and Paul King (1926).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I added the publisher's name to Ainsworth's book because Faber and Gwyer, later Faber &amp;amp; Faber, was Eliot's employer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grimstead quotes one of Eliot's letters to Virginia Woolf:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a June, 1927, letter to his friend Virginia Woolf he described himself, only half-jokingly, as a “person who specializes in detective stories and ecclesiastical history.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above reviews, one understands why Grimstead writes &amp;quot;half-jokingly&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T14:36:48.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14766" CreationDate="2020-06-29T15:19:04.550" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Sex between two men is implied, but not outright stated&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the book (Basil to Dorian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, yes, it is clear that Basil is in love (or at least heavily infatuated) with Dorian, and the subtext was blatant enough that, as per &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/deceptive-picture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the Wilde trials of 1895, the opposing attorneys read aloud from “Dorian Gray,” calling it a “sodomitical book.” Wilde went to prison not because he loved young men but because he flaunted that love, and “Dorian Gray” became the chief exhibit of his shamelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T15:19:04.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14769" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14764" CreationDate="2020-06-29T15:35:45.957" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I do not know of any explicit statement of what was meant there, but my interpretation of it was that he was being met by a gesture of appreciation by Inspector Greenwood for his inspiring speech, and was trying to fend off that implied praise. My impression was that Father Brown started making this grand speech about Raggley being the best sort of Christians, and that the Inspector may have made some gesture of approval, something like quiet applause, nodding, or the raising of a hand as if as a toast, prompting Father Brown to beg off the praise. Of course, no such gesture is described, but that is the distinct impression I got in reading the passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could also see a reasonable interpretation for that he was cutting himself off either because he felt that he was going off-topic, or even lapsing into preaching. Or, as you say, because he'd accidentally labeled himself a &amp;quot;respectable person&amp;quot;. In that case, the &amp;quot;don't mention it&amp;quot; is a little closer to saying &amp;quot;forget it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T18:22:27.297" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T18:22:27.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14770" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12544" CreationDate="2020-06-29T16:52:02.783" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enrique Suárez Figaredo, in his edition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=GsGDaGuHy0AC&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA479&amp;amp;lpg=RA1-PA479&amp;amp;dq=%C3%A1tomos&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=hrSJHexmcf&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0gZIn-9XeP6ZY3J_Of68GUOGLHwA&amp;amp;hl=it&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi1yNvKqafqAhXEyIUKHWLTAz0Q6AEwCHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%C3%A1tomos&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de La Mancha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, uses the contents of the entry &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.es/books?id=K10MJdL7pGIC&amp;amp;pg=RA2-PA102&amp;amp;lpg=RA2-PA102&amp;amp;dq=%22%C3%A1tomos+aquellas+moticas%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=e_N5u5s2DV&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2Yy1EXosHIKVo1MQXYLHEDePmAow&amp;amp;hl=it&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiF7oXjqqfqAhUCSxoKHTB8CYsQ6AEwAXoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22%C3%A1tomos%20aquellas%20moticas%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;átomo&amp;quot; in the &lt;em&gt;Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española&lt;/em&gt; by Sebastián de Covarrubias&lt;/a&gt; to interpret it as specks of dust:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;n. 52 átomos del sol: motas de polvo. Lo explica el &lt;em&gt;Tesoro&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;Comúnmente llámamos átomos aquellas moticas que andan en el aire y sólo se perciben por el rayo de sol que pasa por el resquicio de la ventana&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;n. 52 &amp;quot;átomos del sol&amp;quot;: specks of dust. As explained in the &lt;em&gt;Tesoro&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;We commonly call atoms those small specks of dust that hang in the air and are only perceived by the ray of sunlight that passes through the gap in the window&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesoro_de_la_lengua_castellana_o_espa%C3%B1ola&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is the first dictionary of the Spanish language, compiled by Sebastián de Covarrubias in 1611.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10143" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T16:52:02.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14771" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14773" CreationDate="2020-06-29T17:38:45.377" Score="4" ViewCount="375" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Quick One&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was talking to his friend about a murder that happened in the hotel lounge after a very serious altercation between two men because of another man's speech about the teetotalism saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well,’ said Father Brown, with broad-minded calm, ‘you started by talking about fanatics; and how a fanatic could do anything. Well, I suppose we had the honour of &lt;strong&gt;entertaining in&lt;/strong&gt; this bar-parlour yesterday, &lt;strong&gt;about&lt;/strong&gt; the biggest and loudest and most fat-headed fanatic in the modern world. If being a pig-headed idiot with one idea is the way to murder, I &lt;strong&gt;put in a claim for&lt;/strong&gt; my reverend brother Pryce-Jones, the Prohibitionist, in preference to all the fakirs in Asia, and it’s perfectly true, as I told you, that his horrible glass of milk was standing side by side on the counter with the mysterious glass of whisky.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;entertain about&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;distract about&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;entertain because&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;put in a claim for&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;I'd choose .... instead of&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm a bit confused about the whole meaning that he wanted to convey, as this reverend brother wasn't the killer, and Father Brown knew that already!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T18:30:22.673" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T18:39:07.593" Title="Does &quot;entertain about&quot; mean &quot;distract about&quot; or &quot;entertain because&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14772" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14765" CreationDate="2020-06-29T18:18:33.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It&amp;quot; does not refer to anything; it is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/it#Pronoun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impersonal pronoun&lt;/a&gt; that is required by the syntax but does not have any real meaning. It is basically the same &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;It's ten o'clock.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;the science&amp;quot;, the narrator means science in general, which for him apparently includes both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;natural philosophy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and alchemy. It is not obvious why he would write &amp;quot;the science&amp;quot; instead of simply &amp;quot;science&amp;quot;, unless the addition of the definite article is intended to reflect German usage, according to which the article is required (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;die&lt;/em&gt; Wissenschaft&amp;quot; = science).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quest for immortality or the prolongation of life had been part of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_alchemy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chinese alchemy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasayana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indian alchemy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchemy#Medieval_Europe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medieval European alchemy&lt;/a&gt;. The narrator is more interested in this type of quest than in natural philosophy that professor Krempe expects him to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German theologian, physician and alchemist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Conrad_Dippel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Conrad Dippel&lt;/a&gt; (1673 – 1734), who was born at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankenstein Castle&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have been a source of inspiration for Mary Shelley, also attempted to created an &amp;quot;elixir of life&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt; in response to comments by Apollyon:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It&amp;quot; does not appear to refer to &amp;quot;modern natural philosophy&amp;quot;: the passage contrast contemporary trends in science (&amp;quot;natural philosophy&amp;quot;, chemistry) with the older and outdated alchemy. The &amp;quot;difference&amp;quot; is the shift from alchemy to more modern ideas, which includes the abandonment of the search for elixirs and treatments that promise eternal life. For this reason &amp;quot;the science&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;the masters of the science&amp;quot; either refers to science in general (as stated above) or it refers to alchemy because the narrator is (linguistically) getting his reference wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T09:15:09.930" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T09:15:09.930" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14771" CreationDate="2020-06-29T18:28:18.927" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Entertain&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; are not linked. They (honestly, in this case, the &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/391917/impersonal-we&quot;&gt;more general usage of the pronoun&lt;/a&gt;, not any indication that he himself was doing the entertaining) were &amp;quot;entertaining&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;showing hospitality to&amp;quot; the people in the hotel lounge. The man they are speaking of is being stated to be &amp;quot;about the biggest and loudest&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;almost the biggest and loudest&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;just about the biggest and loudest&amp;quot;, with the &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; being used in the sense of a qualifier indicating that there might be more extreme cases, but this person is close to being the worst (or, in other sentences, the best) example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;put in a claim for&amp;quot; is being used to indicate that Father Brown believes that &amp;quot;reverend brother Pryce-Jones&amp;quot; is a better case for being &amp;quot;a pig-headed idiot with one idea&amp;quot;. His &amp;quot;claim&amp;quot; is the statement that said Prohibitionist is more pig-headed than &amp;quot;all the fakirs in Asia&amp;quot; and would be thus as likely to be the murderer under that reasoning of fanaticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T18:35:18.073" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T18:35:18.073" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14774" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14771" CreationDate="2020-06-29T18:39:07.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the above excerpt, &amp;quot;about&amp;quot; is not directly connected to the verb &amp;quot;entertain&amp;quot;, so it does not work like, e.g. &amp;quot;talk about&amp;quot;. The structure is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;we had the honour of entertaining ...&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where? &amp;quot;in this bar-parlour&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When? &amp;quot;yesterday&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Whom? &amp;quot;about the biggest and loudest and most fat-headed fanatic in the modern world&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/about#Adverb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;about&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; here is &amp;quot;nearly&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;approximately&amp;quot; (as in &amp;quot;The castle is about three-quarters of a mile away&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T18:39:07.593" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14736" CreationDate="2020-06-29T20:41:02.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In present-day English, the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/will#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;will&lt;/a&gt; is typically used as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_verb#List_of_auxiliaries_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;auxiliary verb&lt;/a&gt;, either to express a future action or a habit; in these cases, it accompanies another verb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage from Doyle's &lt;em&gt;The History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;will&amp;quot; is used as a transitive verb. For example, as in the phrase &amp;quot;He willed me to do it&amp;quot;, which means &amp;quot;He strongly wanted me to do it&amp;quot;. However, in the context of the above passage from Doyle's book, &amp;quot;will&amp;quot; has a slightly different implication, since you cannot simply &lt;em&gt;tell&lt;/em&gt; or convince a substance (the &amp;quot;ectoplasmic forms&amp;quot;; cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ectoplasm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ectoplasm&lt;/a&gt; to do something or to move in a move in a specific direction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Olcott is describing (according to Doyle) is that a person (&amp;quot;a strong-minded sitter&amp;quot;) used their mind to move those substances; in other words, that person &amp;quot;willed&amp;quot; those substances to move. This is obviously only possible if you believe in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychokinesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;telekinesis or psychokinesis&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T08:54:25.877" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T08:54:25.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14742" CreationDate="2020-06-29T20:52:09.000" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of a word governs its meaning of course; but here are some usages of your words in question. There is not much of a mystery here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;τι&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;ti&lt;/em&gt;) is the genitive form of &lt;strong&gt;τις&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;tis&lt;/em&gt;) is an interrogative pronoun in direct, indirect, and rhetorical questions meaning “who?” “which (one)?”; “what?” usages include but are not limited to the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In questions to which the answer “nobody” is expected&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who? In the sense of what sort of (a) person?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Who are you? What sort of man are you?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Which of two?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why? For what reason?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why? For what purpose?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;With what? through whom?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Because of what thing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In exclamation “how?”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;πῶς&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;pos&lt;/em&gt;) as an interrogative, particle means how? In what way? In direct questions a. to determine how something is happening, or should happen; w. indicative how? or in what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b. in questioning indicating surprise “how is it possible that?”; or “I do not understand how”; a series of questions expressing surprise, introduced again and again by Πως. E.g. how is it possible you do not understand me? (Mt 16:11; Mk 8:21); “how is it you have no faith?” (Mk 4:40; Mt 21:20).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. in questions denoting disapproval or rejection “with what right?”; “how dare you?”; how is it that you are bold enough to come in here?”; “how can you say?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;d. in rhetorical questions that call an assumption into question or reject it altogether “how (could or should)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;e. in questions of deliberation with deliberative subjunctive “what comparison can we find in the kingdom?” (Mk 4:30); “how are you to escape? = “you will not escape at all” (Mt. 23:33).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In direct questions—a. with indicative after verbs of knowing, saying, asking, etc. In exclamation “how. . . !”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walter Bauer, et. al. &lt;em&gt;A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt;, The University of Chicago Press, 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wesley J. Perschbacher, &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Greek Lexicon,&lt;/em&gt; Hendrickson Publishers, 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernard Taylor, &lt;em&gt;Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint&lt;/em&gt;, Hendrickson Publishers, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T20:52:09.000" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-29T20:54:51.943" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14698/2191&quot;&gt;earlier question&lt;/a&gt;, it is a little-known fact that Maupassant did not only write narrative prose but also plays.&#xA;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Maupassant#Th%C3%A9%C3%A2tre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; lists several plays by Maupassant:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histoire du vieux temps&lt;/em&gt; (1879)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Une répétition&lt;/em&gt; (1880)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Musotte&lt;/em&gt; (1891)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;La Paix du ménage&lt;/em&gt; (1893)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a gap of eleven years, during which he wrote most of his stories and novels, the author returned to the dramatic genre with &lt;em&gt;Musotte&lt;/em&gt;, which was followed by &lt;em&gt;La Paix du ménage&lt;/em&gt;. (Maupassant was admitted to hospital in January 1892 and stayed there until his death in July 1893, which is why I assume the last play was written before 1892.) Does this quick succession of two plays that &lt;em&gt;Musotte&lt;/em&gt; was successful? How did Maupassant's contemporaries respond to this play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T20:54:51.943" Title="How did Maupassant's contemporaries respond to his play Musotte?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;musotte&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" Score="0" Body="Questions about Guy de Maupassant's play 'Musotte' (1891). Use this tag with the tags [guy-de-maupassant] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T20:57:58.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9475" CreationDate="2020-06-29T22:20:51.097" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Michel Foucault, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/discourse#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discourse&lt;/a&gt; does not simply mean &amp;quot;verbal exchange&amp;quot;; in and through his work it has come to mean (quoted from Wiktionary),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An institutionalized way of thinking, a social boundary defining what can be said about a specific topic (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madness_and_Civilization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Madness and Civilization&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Folie et déraison&lt;/em&gt;, 1961)&lt;/a&gt; he described how the Age of Reason adopted a new type of discourse about &amp;quot;madness&amp;quot;, which led to the confinement of &amp;quot;lunatics&amp;quot; and other marginalised individuals in newly created institutions. In other words, this type of discourse is also linked with power over certain classes of people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a different and more general formulation, I refer to Gary Gutting and Johanna Oksala's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/foucault/#MajoWork&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Michel Foucault&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The focus of his questioning is the modern human sciences (biological, psychological, social). These purport to offer &lt;strong&gt;universal scientific truths&lt;/strong&gt; about human nature that are, in fact, often mere expressions of ethical and political commitments of a particular society. Foucault’s “critical philosophy” undermines such claims by exhibiting how they are the outcome of contingent &lt;strong&gt;historical forces&lt;/strong&gt;, not scientifically grounded truths. Each of his major books is a critique of historical reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;universal scientific truths&amp;quot; are types of discourse; in fact, presenting certain statements as universal and scientific is part of the &amp;quot;discourse&amp;quot;. However, Foucault's work shows how these &amp;quot;truths&amp;quot; are not universal but the product of a specific society and a specific historical context. Identifying this context and showing how the discourse functions in that context is to &lt;strong&gt;historicize&lt;/strong&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foucault studied power relationships by studying discourse, i.e. by studying language as found in texts. In this way, history became &lt;strong&gt;textualized&lt;/strong&gt;. (See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucauldian_discourse_analysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foucauldian discourse analysis&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sociologygroup.com/discourse-postmodernism-foucaults-theory/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DISCOURSE: In Relation To Postmodernism And Foucault’s Theory On Discourse&lt;/a&gt; on SociologyGroup.com.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T22:20:51.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14781" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14782" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French philosopher, historian of ideas and literary critic Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" LastActivityDate="2020-06-29T22:23:14.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-30T10:14:57.423" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Last summer's manifestations&amp;quot; here refers to which &amp;quot;manifestations and incidents&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe they have been latterly playing us false, which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be only&#xA;supplementing the genuine with the spurious, but it does cast a doubt&#xA;on &lt;strong&gt;last summer's manifestations&lt;/strong&gt;, so that I shall probably not use&#xA;them in my next book on Spiritualism. It is a loss, but you and Mr.&#xA;Crookes have amply made it up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from Henry Steel Olcott's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=OMsIwSefYokC&amp;amp;pg=PA429&amp;amp;lpg=PA429&amp;amp;dq=%22I%20believe%20they%20have%20been%20latterly%20playing%20us%20false,%20which%20maybe%20only%20supplementing%20the%20genuine%20with%20the%20spurious,%20but%20it%20does%20cast%20adoubt%20on%20last%20summer%27s%20manifestations,%20so%20that%20I%20shall%20probably%20not%20usethem%20in%20my%20next%20book&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NCAha38Eb9&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2_1k02nBhMxjMwK1wZgKWJrwuFmw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiEx9m7panqAhVXTBUIHbYUDH0Q6AEwAnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22I%20believe%20they%20have%20been%20latterly%20playing%20us%20false%2C%20which%20maybe%20only%20supplementing%20the%20genuine%20with%20the%20spurious%2C%20but%20it%20does%20cast%20adoubt%20on%20last%20summer%27s%20manifestations%2C%20so%20that%20I%20shall%20probably%20not%20usethem%20in%20my%20next%20book&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;People From the Other World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and Arthur Conan Doyle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=ghqqNPvWHIQC&amp;amp;pg=PA321&amp;amp;lpg=PA321&amp;amp;dq=%22I%20believe%20they%20have%20been%20latterly%20playing%20us%20false,%20which%20maybe%20only%20supplementing%20the%20genuine%20with%20the%20spurious,%20but%20it%20does%20cast%20adoubt%20on%20last%20summer%27s%20manifestations,%20so%20that%20I%20shall%20probably%20not%20usethem%20in%20my%20next%20book&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Bvk3C8P6w2&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1skK504X9TIyPCHrKzH6fXt7a45Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiEx9m7panqAhVXTBUIHbYUDH0Q6AEwA3oECAYQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22I%20believe%20they%20have%20been%20latterly%20playing%20us%20false%2C%20which%20maybe%20only%20supplementing%20the%20genuine%20with%20the%20spurious%2C%20but%20it%20does%20cast%20adoubt%20on%20last%20summer%27s%20manifestations%2C%20so%20that%20I%20shall%20probably%20not%20usethem%20in%20my%20next%20book&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;History of Spiritualism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10343" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T10:59:38.997" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T00:59:36.320" Title="&quot;Last summer's manifestations&quot; here refers to which &quot;manifestations and incidents&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;the-history-of-spiritualism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14786" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14787" CreationDate="2020-06-30T16:55:24.230" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;This poem is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1 (page 263):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through Evernight he back was borne&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on black and roaring waves that ran&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;o'er leagues unlit and foundered shores&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that drowned before the Days began,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;until he heard on strands of pearl&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where ends the world the music long,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where ever-foaming billows roll&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the yellow gold and jewels wan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-06-30T17:05:36.167" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T22:07:19.320" Title="Meaning of lines from Bilbo's &quot;Song of Eärendil&quot; in &quot;The Lord of the Rings&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14787" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14786" CreationDate="2020-06-30T17:54:53.763" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The syntax is completely mangled here in order to allow the incredibly strict scheme of internal assonance and rhymes (which is really a &lt;em&gt;tour de force&lt;/em&gt;). You have to untangle it before you can understand it. Mangling syntax so as to make your rhyme scheme work was out of fashion in poetry well before Tolkien's time, but Tolkien, one of whose academic specialties was mediaeval literature, didn't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through Evernight he back was borne&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on black and roaring waves that ran&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;o'er leagues unlit and foundered shores&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that drowned before the Days began,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;until he heard on strands of pearl&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where ends the world the music long,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where ever-foaming billows roll&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the yellow gold and jewels wan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming &lt;em&gt;strands&lt;/em&gt; is a pun,&#xA;what it means is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was carried back through a night without end&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on black waves that roared,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;over miles of sunless, sunken shores&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that drowned before day and night began,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;until he heard long music sound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on beaches of pearls at the earth's rim&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;where billows foam, while tossing around&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the yellow gold and pale gems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T22:07:19.320" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T22:07:19.320" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14788" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-30T18:13:50.973" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the first questions in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/a/1255/2191&quot;&gt;Guy de Maupassant reading challenge&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14238/2191&quot;&gt;Political backdrop to “The Lancer's Wife” (Franco-Prussian War)?&lt;/a&gt;. After I was unable to find the story in French, it turned out that the English translator had actually attributed a story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Richepin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Richepin&lt;/a&gt; to Guy de Maupassant. This led to a new question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14259/2191&quot;&gt;Which short stories are falsely attributed to Guy de Maupassant, and why?&lt;/a&gt; The stories listed there were by Jean Richepin, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Maizeroy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Maizeroy&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leopold von Sacher-Masoch&lt;/a&gt; (who is best known for, uh, &lt;em&gt;stuff&lt;/em&gt; that has nothing to do with literature).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 and Richepin in 1849, they were contemporaries. Both contributed to the literary periodical &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Blas_(periodical)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gil Blas&lt;/a&gt; and both contributed a preface to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crlv.org/glossaire-francfort/la-grande-bleue-avec-pr%C3%A9faces-de-guy-de-maupassant-paul-bourget-pierre-loti-paul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;La grande Bleue&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Maizeroy (published in 1888). However, is there any evidence that they met each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T23:24:36.220" Title="Did Maupassant and Richepin know each other?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;&lt;jean-richepin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14789" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14791" CreationDate="2020-07-01T07:40:41.277" Score="2" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is an extract from &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;. What does the &amp;quot;habits&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;returned to my old habits&amp;quot; mean? It does not seem to refer to habits like drinking, staying up late, etc. If it refers to something else, how would you express the idea in current English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless, and almost frantic, impulse, urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had &lt;strong&gt;returned to my old habits&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="1162" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T07:51:50.797" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T12:17:45.323" Title="&quot;the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits&quot; in Frankenstein" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10915" CreationDate="2020-07-01T08:54:51.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing it was an attack on impressionists. From &lt;em&gt;The Ezra Pound Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;, p. 123:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wanting to preserve the salutary effects of Ford's &amp;quot;French Flaubertian tradition&amp;quot; from being distorted, Pound joined Lewis in attacking Impressionism in &lt;em&gt;BLAST&lt;/em&gt; as rightly superceded by Vorticism: &amp;quot;As to the lean belated Impressionism at present attempting to eke out a little life on these islands: Our vortex is fed up with your dispersals, reasonable chicken-men. . . . Our vortex rushes out like an angry dog at your Impressionistic fuss&amp;quot; (Lewis and Pound 149). In 1922, Pound named Joyce, whom he no longer identified with Impressionism, as Flaubert's true successor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5641" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T10:07:31.690" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T10:07:31.690" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14789" CreationDate="2020-07-01T11:40:09.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this case, &amp;quot;habits&amp;quot; is probably using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; of &amp;quot;a settled tendency or usual manner of behavior&amp;quot;. Once this trance that led to him creating the Creature had passed, he returned to his normal way of life, and he was acutely aware of what it was that he had been doing, now making his limbs tremble and eyes swim as he thinks back on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you wanted a slightly more colloquial interpretation:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;.... I had returned to my &lt;strong&gt;usual routine&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-07-01T12:17:45.323" LastActivityDate="2020-07-01T12:17:45.323" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14793" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-01T22:38:25.990" Score="4" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the BBC mini-series Little Dorrit there is a scene in which Mrs. General tells Amy the correct opinions which she is to express concerning the sites that she and other English tourists visit on the European mainland. Amy asks why she should not just give her honest opinions of these things. Mrs. General reacts with astonishment and tells Amy that society is not the place for unburdening oneself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That’s how I remember it, anyhow. But I cannot find that scene in the book now. Am I right about the scene? Where is it in the book? Or, failing that, where does the book attribute this view to Mrs. General, that the purpose of conversation in society is simply to repeat fashionable opinions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="902" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T19:16:07.503" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T09:25:12.567" Title="Where in the book Little Dorrit does Mrs. General tell Amy that society is not the place for unburdening oneself?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;little-dorrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3228" CreationDate="2020-07-02T17:05:06.553" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;James K. Vardaman was my great-grandfather (he was also later a US senator for MS). My brother has done a lot of family research, and though &amp;quot;Vardhaman&amp;quot; is I think Hindi/India, it seems my family on my father's side (and further back) is somewhere in the Scandinavian area. I heard many years ago it's possibly a misspelled variation on &amp;quot;Waterman&amp;quot; - which suggests some kind of boater or fisher. My brother scanned a copy (from the MS Dept Of Archives) of a payslip to an ancestor Jeremiah Vardaman for his service in the War Of 1812. So parts of my family have lived in MS before MS was even a state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a pretty uncommon name, but the Vardamans in MS are mostly related to me, some also around Birmingham, AL. There are also Vardamans in Indiana, but not sure if they are related to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure if it's a Southern thing, but I'm actually related to at least one distant cousin who has the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; name of &amp;quot;Vardaman&amp;quot;. Seems like back then people would swap first and last names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10351" LastEditorUserId="10351" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T17:11:16.010" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T17:11:16.010" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14796" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14797" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Little Dorrit' (1855-1857) by Charles Dickens. Use this tag with the tag [charles-dickens]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" LastActivityDate="2020-07-02T19:17:21.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14798" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14716" CreationDate="2020-07-03T01:01:34.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since there is no answer, let me try to provide one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the two misconceptions in the OP:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Movies need to be rated by MPAA.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not true, this is a voluntary process. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.filmratings.com/RatingsGuide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ratings guide&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE RATING SYSTEM?&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Movie ratings provide parents with advance information about the content of movies to help them determine what movies are appropriate for their children at any age&lt;/strong&gt;. After all, parents are best suited to knowing each of their children’s individual sensitivities and sensibilities to pick movies for them. Ratings are assigned by a board of parents who consider factors such as violence, sex, language and drug use, then assign a rating they believe the majority of American parents would give a movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DO ALL MOVIES HAVE TO BE RATED?&#xA;No. Submitting a movie for a rating is a voluntary decision made by filmmakers. However, the overwhelming majority of filmmakers have their movies rated, and each member of the Motion Picture Association has agreed to have all its theatrically released movies rated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's more, the age rating is not legally binding (with an exception for obscenity - in many places worldwide it is illegal to expose minors to overly sexual material), so if a movie theatre owner will let your kid watch R-rated &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335345/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Passion of Christ&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there is not that much you can do (I've actually seen people encouraging their children to see it &amp;quot;because it is religious&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if the theater sold you a ticket to an R-rated movie, even though you're under 17 and not accompanied by an adult, then you have a right to be there. If you are removed, the theater will likely have to refund your ticket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There are no agencies that rate books&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @GarethRees pointed, there  are such agencies, for example &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.compassbookratings.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Compass BookRating&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compass Book Ratings provides a standardized rating system so everyone can more easily evaluate their reading options. These book reviews are for parents, teachers, librarians, readers, and anyone looking for a book that best fits their preferences for story and content.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, their purpose is not to enforce some legal control, but to provide easier guidance system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is quite a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long list of books&lt;/a&gt; banned by the various government at various times. The reasons also vary - from &amp;quot;obscenity&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;The Decameron&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Lolita&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;120 days of Sodom&lt;/em&gt;), through religious (&lt;em&gt;The Satanic verses&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Quran&lt;/em&gt;) to political ones (&lt;em&gt;Mein Kampf&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Protocols of the Elders of Zion&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Catch-22&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if we get back to the age rating, I think it boils down to the old saying &amp;quot;The picture is worth thousand words&amp;quot;: It is easy to look at the picture and see all the gory details, getting all that just from plain text is not as easy and strong. I can write &amp;quot;the executioner cut Jane's head off; blood splashed on the onlookers&amp;quot; and no one would probably think twice about it (ok, it might not look good in a kids book but even then there are exceptions - some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vagabomb.com/10-Dark-and-Disturbing-Origins-of-Popular-Nursery-Rhymes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old nursery rhymes are much creepier than you think&lt;/a&gt;), but if I'd try to draw it or show it to on a movie... Which is why you will notice the age suggestion more often on a graphic novel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JvVN3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JvVN3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;than on a book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2DcVK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2DcVK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T06:57:09.220" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T06:57:09.220" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14660" CreationDate="2020-07-03T05:37:55.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the implication was that the dwarves' original plan called for Gandalf to be at the Lonely Mountain to help defeat Smaug. Gandalf himself doesn't promise this, and once he leaves to deal with the Necromancer, he pretty much leaves them to their own devices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is no use arguing. I have, as I told you, some pressing business away south; and I am already late through bothering with you people. We may meet again before all is over, and then again of course we may not.&amp;quot; (Gandalf, &lt;em&gt;Chapter 7: Queer Lodgings&lt;/em&gt;, The Hobbit)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once they had gained access to the underground city in the Lonely Mountain, the dwarves decided to start by sending Bilbo in to reconnoiter, hoping that maybe Smaug had left or died. I'd guess that, had he brought them back information on Smaug, they would have then decided on what to do next: wait for Bilbo, send back to Laketown for reinforcements, or come up with some trick that would allow them to defeat Smaug unaided. They didn't anticipate that not only would Bilbo run into Smaug and wake him up, but that he would leave immediately for Laketown -- and his doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="132" LastEditorUserId="132" LastEditDate="2020-07-03T20:20:17.213" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T20:20:17.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14793" CreationDate="2020-07-03T09:25:12.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this be the fragment you are thinking of? It is in Book The Second: Riches, chapter 5: Something Right Somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Mr Dorrit,’ returned Mrs General, ‘I have conversed with Amy several&#xA;times since we have been residing here, on the general subject of the&#xA;formation of a demeanour. She has expressed herself to me as wondering&#xA;exceedingly at Venice. I have mentioned to her that it is better not&#xA;to wonder. I have pointed out to her that the celebrated Mr Eustace,&#xA;the classical tourist, did not think much of it; and that he compared&#xA;the Rialto, greatly to its disadvantage, with Westminster and&#xA;Blackfriars Bridges. I need not add, after what you have said, that I&#xA;have not yet found my arguments successful. You do me the honour to&#xA;ask me what to advise. It always appears to me (if this should prove&#xA;to be a baseless assumption, I shall be pardoned), that Mr Dorrit has&#xA;been accustomed to exercise influence over the minds of others.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. General doesn't actually tell Amy in this scene that society is not the place for unburdening oneself (although it wouldn't have been out of place), but it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; mention that it is better not to wonder about Venice all that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastActivityDate="2020-07-03T09:25:12.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-04T12:53:22.810" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the general name or literature examples of the following common psychological phenomenon, its nomenclature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone is accused of something, i.e. prostitution or murder,&#xA;after a while the person no longer fights it back but instead turns&#xA;into a character suitable with the accusations, although he/she was&#xA;innocent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10361" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T19:00:25.080" Title="name of the phenomenon: accepting accusations and mold of character into the accused one" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14804" CreationDate="2020-07-04T14:50:27.750" Score="1" ViewCount="690" Body="&lt;p&gt;This poem is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1 (page 265):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a matter of fact it was all mine. Except that Aragorn insisted on my &lt;strong&gt;putting in a green stone&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-04T17:46:13.900" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T17:46:13.900" Title="What is the meaning/significance of Aragorn putting a green stone into Bilbo's song?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14803" CreationDate="2020-07-04T15:09:27.297" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage comes right after Bilbo's poem about Earendil the Mariner, the details of which came from Bilbo's familiarity with the story, and presumably his research into the history of the Elves (Earendil was Elrond's father). Before Bilbo sings it out, he goes to a corner with Aragorn to work on the poem together and polish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the reading, Bilbo challenges the listening Elves to tell which parts were his and which added by Aragorn, which they fail to do:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But really we cannot answer your question at one hearing!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;`What!' cried Bilbo. 'You can't tell which parts were mine, and which were the Dúnadan's?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'It is not easy for us to tell the difference between two mortals' said the Elf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo then  gives Frodo the answer, saying that the only line that Aragorn added was &lt;code&gt;upon his breast an emerald&lt;/code&gt; (an emerald being a green jewel), the last line in the second stanza, which was important for Aragorn to add.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason Aragorn wanted it put in is that in addition to this green stone - the Elessar, or Elfstone - there was a second, similar green stone, also named Elfstone, that was given by Galadriel to her daugher Celebrian, who then gave it to &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; daughter, Arwen, who then gave it to Aragorn, thus fulfilling a prophecy that the Elfstone will help restore the Dunedain to Gondor. Aragorn, knowing this, wanted to preserve and enhance this relationship between his stone (he was later crowned King Elessar, or Elfstone) and Earendil, to enhance the link between his people and the elves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10313" LastEditorUserId="10313" LastEditDate="2020-07-04T16:49:16.923" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T16:49:16.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14802" CreationDate="2020-07-04T16:19:24.580" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not certain if it's exactly what you're looking for, but the TV Tropes site, which attempts to catalog tropes in various forms of media, calls this &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThenLetMeBeEvil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Then Let Me Be Evil&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the supposed &amp;quot;forces of good&amp;quot; in a story treat an &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; character badly enough, for long enough, that the &amp;quot;evil&amp;quot; character just gives up trying to show the heroes that they are not evil and becomes a villain for real. Prolonged exposure to the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism has conditioned this character to accept the fact that Humans Are the Real Monsters, and if they want to get anywhere in life, they have to be every bit as dirty and cruel as they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, a genuinely innocent person being repeatedly framed up for committing things they never did into a stage where they have no chance to redeem themselves might as well become exactly what they are being framed as and repay their favors onto everyone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T16:19:24.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14806" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14808" CreationDate="2020-07-04T17:19:42.767" Score="4" ViewCount="310" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1, page 265 (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You needn't,&amp;quot; said Bilbo. &amp;quot;As a matter of fact it was all mine. Except that Aragorn insisted on my putting in a green stone. He seemed to think it important. I don't know why. &lt;strong&gt;Otherwise he obviously thought the whole thing rather above my head&lt;/strong&gt;, and he said that if I had the cheek to make verses about Eärendil in the house of Elrond, it was my affair. I suppose he was right.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Bilbo say that Aragorn thought the whole thing rather above his head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T03:57:31.077" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T03:57:31.077" Title="What did Bilbo mean by telling Frodo that Aragorn &quot;thought the whole thing rather above my head&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14807" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14924" CreationDate="2020-07-04T17:25:50.617" Score="0" ViewCount="255" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1, page 266:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he had the &lt;strong&gt;cheek&lt;/strong&gt; to make verses about Eärendil in the house of Elrond, it was my affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T03:58:42.870" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T07:48:37.763" Title="What does &quot;cheek&quot; mean in the following phrase below in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14808" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14806" CreationDate="2020-07-04T20:56:34.667" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This conversation between Bilbo and Frodo follows after Bilbo recites his own poem about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E%C3%A4rendil_and_Elwing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earendil the Mariner&lt;/a&gt;. Poetry played a big role in the history of Middle Earth; it was &lt;em&gt;created&lt;/em&gt; through what was described as 'holy music', and The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings contain many old poems about historical events. Poetry was held in high regard by the elves, and Aragorn ('he' in your qoute), being a regular guest in Rivendell for hundreds of years, knew this. An attempt by a mere mortal like Bilbo to compose a poem not about Hobbit history, but about one of the defining events of the First Age, surely is out of the ordinary. 'Above my head' is one of the ways to express that in English ('out of my league' would be another idiomatic one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-07-04T20:56:34.667" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-05T06:12:53.490" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, in Roger Zelazny's &amp;quot;Nine Princes in Amber&amp;quot;, when Corwin's in the dungeon he tries to figure out how long it would be before it would be noticed, were he to go missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[There was an] odor of decaying flesh. I wondered, if I were to die,&#xA;how long would it be before someone took notice? How many chunks of&#xA;bread and bowls of slop would go uneaten before the guard thought to&#xA;check within after my continued existence? ... The death odor was&#xA;around for a long while. I tried to think in terms of time again, and&#xA;it seemed that it persisted for over &lt;strong&gt;a week&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He eventually escapes by means of a magic drawing, provided by Dworkin, of the Lighthouse of Cabra.  Note that in addition to depicting his destination, it was also palpably magical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turned quickly and considered the Lighthouse of Cabra before the&#xA;match failed. Yes, the power was there. I could feel it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He steps through the magic drawing, ends up at the lighthouse...and stays there for &lt;em&gt;three months&lt;/em&gt;?!?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stayed with him for three months, as I recovered my strength.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems impossibly foolish - he knows that his absence will likely be noticed in roughly a week, he's the most important prisoner in the dungeon, he left a magic drawing in his cell both depicting his destination and providing instantaneous transport there, and he's just going to hang out at the other end?!?  Not only that, but it &lt;em&gt;works!&lt;/em&gt;  Nobody figures it out, no army of soldiers surrounds the lighthouse in the night!  Is there some detail I'm missing, some note that makes this make sense, or is this as unbelievable as it seems on the surface?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Also, I sure hope that lighthouse keeper can convince Eric that he had no idea that it was Corwin, else RIP lighthouse keeper.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10364" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T06:23:16.517" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T21:56:13.103" Title="Nine Princes in Amber: Questionable Lighthouse Stay" Tags="&lt;timeline&gt;&lt;roger-zelazny&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-amber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14810" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14811" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer Roger Zelazny (1937 – 1995) and his life as a writer. His works include poetry, science fiction and fantasy." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T13:07:46.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14812" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14813" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'The Chronicles of Amber' a series of novels and short stories by Roger Zelazny. Use this tag together with the tag [roger-zelazny]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T13:08:49.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14816" CreationDate="2020-07-05T13:42:22.017" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Crime of The Communist&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing three men and the surrounding architecture of Mandeville College, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They themselves, in a curious quiet way, were quite harmonious with their surroundings. Though the Tudor arches that ran like a cloister round the College gardens had been built four hundred years ago, at that moment when the Gothic fell from heaven and bowed, or almost crouched, &lt;strong&gt;over the cosier chambers of&lt;/strong&gt; Humanism and the Revival of Learning — though they themselves were in modern clothes (that is in clothes whose ugliness would have amazed any of the four centuries) yet something in the spirit of the place made them all at one. The gardens had been tended so carefully as to achieve the final triumph of looking careless; the very flowers seemed beautiful by accident, like elegant weeds; and the modern costumes had at least any picturesqueness that can be produced by being untidy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that Gothic means &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Gothic architecture&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, which is well-known for its arches and bowed patterns, and that Revival of Learning refers to &lt;strong&gt;the Renaissance&lt;/strong&gt;, and that cosy means &lt;strong&gt;relaxed&lt;/strong&gt;, but I can't get the whole meaning of this sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T17:49:17.467" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T18:37:01.293" Title="What's meant here by &quot;over the cosier chambers of Humanism ...&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14815" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-05T17:20:14.450" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia, the American poet and literary critic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yvor_Winters&amp;amp;oldid=953125593&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yvor Winters&lt;/a&gt; (1900 – 1968)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;attacked Romanticism, particularly in its American manifestations, and assailed Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The claim has no source and there is no mention of Yvor Winters on the Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ralph_Waldo_Emerson&amp;amp;oldid=957785358&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ralph Waldo Emerson&lt;/a&gt;. Digging a little deeper, I found that this claim has been around since the very &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Yvor_Winters&amp;amp;oldid=6573000&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first version of the article about Winters&lt;/a&gt;, in which the wording was barely different:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He attacked romanticism, particularly in American manifestations, and set about Emerson's reputation as that of a sacred cow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find a source for this statement. Is it, perhaps, a free paraphrase of Winters' criticism of Emerson?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:16:57.680" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:16:57.680" Title="Did Yvor Winters describe Emerson's reputation in America as that of a sacred cow?" Tags="&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;yvor-winters&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14814" CreationDate="2020-07-05T18:37:01.293" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think Chesterton is packing multiple allusions and metaphors into the opening paragraphs of that short story. The first paragraph says there was &amp;quot;something that blasted like lightning&amp;quot;, which is followed in the second paragraph by &amp;quot;when the Gothic fell from heaven&amp;quot;. These phrases are reminiscent of Luke 10, 18:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He replied, &amp;quot;I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (...)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Gothic_architecture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gothic architecture in England&lt;/a&gt;, which can still be seen mainly in churches and other religious buildings. One of the striking characteristics of Gothic architecture is its pointed arches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Catholic faith, of which Father Brown is a (fictional) 20th-century representative, fell from grace (rather than from heaven) under king Henry VIII, the second Tudor king. The Act of Supremacy (1534) established the king as head of the Church of England, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation#Dissolution_of_the_monasteries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissolution of the monasteries&lt;/a&gt; led to the closing of many religious houses. Religious buildings had used a lot of stone, but due to the dissolution of the monasteries, stone became more widely available for other types of buildings. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://historyplex.com/tudor-architecture-history-facts-characteristics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tudor Architecture: History, Facts, and Characteristics&lt;/a&gt;.) When Chesterton writes in 1935 (when &lt;em&gt;The Scandal of Father Brown&lt;/em&gt; was published) that those &amp;quot;Tudor arches that (...) had been built four hundred years ago&amp;quot;, he is referring exactly to this period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Renaissance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Renaissance&lt;/a&gt; also began during the Tudor period. The phrase &amp;quot;the cosier chambers of Humanism and the Revival of Learning&amp;quot; may have several meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literally, the chambers in which the humanists lived where cosier than those of their (Catholic) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholasticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scholastic&lt;/a&gt; predecessors.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Humanism and Renaissance thought were &amp;quot;cozier&amp;quot; in the sense of more forgiving than Catholicism. (Simply put, humanity replaced God as the centre of interest. This does not imply that humanism in general was anti-Christian or anti-clerical, but it is possible that some people in the early 20th century still believed it was.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On another literal level, the dissolution of the monasteries allowed the University of Oxford (of which Mandeville is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_Oxford_colleges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fictional college&lt;/a&gt;) to build cozier lodgings than before, using stone that would otherwise have been used for religious buildings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T18:37:01.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14817" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14818" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet and literary critic Yvor Winters (1900 –  1968) and his life as a writer. As a critic, Winters was to some extent controversial because he proposed his own alternative canon of Elizabethan poetry." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" LastActivityDate="2020-07-05T22:54:36.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14783" CreationDate="2020-07-06T00:59:36.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;last summer's manifestations&amp;quot; refers to the manifestations (i.e. becoming visible), according to witnesses, of the spirit called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_King_(spirit)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Katie King&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently, a woman named Eliza White had come forward and revealed that she had impersonated Katie King at séances organised by Jennie and Nelson Holmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;they have been latterly playing us false&amp;quot; refers to the Holmeses and the impersonation mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T00:59:36.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14820" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14809" CreationDate="2020-07-06T01:14:47.627" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;His escape was discovered, but not the way of it&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one thought that Corwin managed to escape via the painting. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only Dworkin knows how to create Trumps. No one has seen him for quite a while and he is considered dead. And even if he was alive, what would he do in the Corwnin's cell?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Trumps are made as cards and each is a little masterpiece. The drawings on the walls are crude in comparison, made using spoon on the wall. Yes, Dworkin has signed them with his name, but that doesn't mean anything - it is like if someone would create a spray painted graffiti on the wall and sign it &amp;quot;Rembrandt&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Corwin has been blinded and everyone (him included) believe that it was a permanent disability. While the drawings might suggest otherwise, there are blind painters and sculptors, so the existence of those etchings doesn't prove that he  has regained his sight. Why is that important? Because blind people cannot travel through Shadows!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So whoever found the empty cell (probably indeed about week later) came to the conclusion that Corwin had outside help (there is even proof in the form of burned matches), that he left via the door and that he is hiding somewhere in Shadows. No one thought that he escaped via the Trump on the wall and that he would be still in Amber.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even later, Corwin doesn't admit to the way he'd escaped:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And of your escape?&amp;quot; he [Benedict] asked. &amp;quot;How did you manage that?&amp;quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I had help, of course,&amp;quot; I admitted, &amp;quot;in getting out of the cell. Once out -- Well, there are still a few passages of which Eric is unaware.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I like to think so,&amp;quot; he said. Then, &amp;quot;I understand you left the partly whittled cell door locked behind&#xA;you, had set fire to your bedding, and had drawn pictures on the wall.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;Prolonged confinement does something to a man's mind. At least, it did to mine. There&#xA;are long periods during which I know I was irrational.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, it seems that they gave up the search after a while, believing that Corwin is dead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We looked for you. Did you know that, Corwin?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;Brand searched for you in many&#xA;shadows, as did Gerard. You guessed correctly as to what Eric said after your disappearance that day.&#xA;We were inclined to look farther than his word, however. We tried your Trump repeatedly, but there&#xA;was no response. It must be that brain damage can block it. That is interesting. &lt;strong&gt;Your failure to respond to&#xA;the Trump led us to believe you had died&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T21:56:13.103" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T21:56:13.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14821" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T12:44:35.953" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve come across the following passage in Chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Dickens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause, some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who made a fortune by it, ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long &lt;strong&gt;matted well&lt;/strong&gt; (but you might look in vain for truth at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the &lt;strong&gt;silk gowns&lt;/strong&gt;, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports, mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excerpt From&#xA;Bleak House&#xA;Charles Dickens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does a ‘long matted well’ mean here? Was Dickens using an actual well as a metaphor or is ‘well’ used to mean ‘the place in a law court where the clerks and ushers sit?’ (My interpretation is that the solicitors are so numerous and close together as to give an appearance of being ‘matted’ and that the ‘well’ is used metaphorically to highlight the length (depth?) of the line of solicitors.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do the ‘silk gowns’ refer to the gowns that the Chancery judges would be wearing?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T12:44:35.953" Title="Meaning of ‘matted well’ and ‘silk gowns’ in Bleak House" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;bleak-house&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14815" CreationDate="2020-07-06T13:42:53.260" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Hyatt Howe Wagoner's book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=-P99BgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA44&amp;amp;lpg=PA44&amp;amp;dq=%22Edwards+unfortunately+for+later%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2MaOHkCEBq&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U20EXJHjtkGc7z9YFR4Wj1kv1t66g&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiQo_q1zLjqAhUqmHIEHVaXA1wQ6AEwAHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Edwards%20unfortunately%20for%20later%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Emerson as Poet&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... the crucial fact about Emerson for Winters is that, as he says quite truly, “Emerson was the most influential preacher to appear in America after Edwards.”&#xA;Unfortunately for later Americans, Winters thought, the content of Emerson's preaching was not just vacuous but pernicious, as Hart Crane's suicide seemed so aptly to illustrate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google books shows (unfortunately, only in snippet view) that the quote &amp;quot;Emerson was the most influential preacher to appear in America after Edwards,&amp;quot; appears in Winters' book &lt;em&gt;Maule's Curse; Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism&lt;/em&gt; (later collected in his book &lt;em&gt;In Defense of Reason&lt;/em&gt;), so this is presumably where one can find Winters' criticism of Emerson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T13:42:53.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14823" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T14:32:45.717" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Upon learning about Coriolanus Snow being forced to join the Peacekeepers due to his cheating in the Hunger Games, Tigris said the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You were set up to fail,&amp;quot; said Tigris. &amp;quot;The Hunger Games are an unnatural, vicious punishment. How could &lt;strong&gt;a good person like you&lt;/strong&gt; be expected to go along with them?&amp;quot;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;You musn't say that to anyone but me. It isn't safe,&amp;quot; Coriolanus warned her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Snow at a minimum doesn't disagree with this assessment, and there are multiple hints in the books that he's horrified by the entire process (such as his insistence on feeding the Tributes due to his disgust at the Gamemakers not feeding them in days). Nevertheless, his selfishness and manipulativeness always seems to be competing with his morality throughout the book, and the &lt;em&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; books obviously imply that his selfishness wins out in the end as he eventually becomes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/166134/is-president-snow-sadistic-or-simply-ruthless&quot;&gt;ruthless, albeit likely not sadistic,&lt;/a&gt; President of Panem. Tigris is also later shown to have joined the resistance movement, having evidently fallen out with Snow at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Tigris say this? Is she mistaken about Snow's character, or did he become a bad person later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T14:32:45.717" Title="Why does Tigris call Coriolanus Snow a &quot;good person&quot;?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14549" CreationDate="2020-07-06T14:38:20.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was it Martin Gardner's book &lt;em&gt;Relativity for the Million&lt;/em&gt;? This appeared originally in 1962, although it has been updated and retitled twice since then. Google Books shows that the latest version, &lt;em&gt;Relativity Simply Explained&lt;/em&gt; (1997) contains the Lewis Carroll poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T14:38:20.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14825" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T15:09:53.610" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Throughout the book, Snow is seen repeatedly trying to manipulate other characters, such as him appearing to fake friendship with Sejanus Plinth (and his unsuccessful attempt to manipulate Plinth for money at their first encounter). Later, he convinces Clemensia to forgive him; the books make it clear that he's not being entirely honest with her, but it's unclear whether he's actually trying to gaslight her or just being manipulative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's also rather horrified by being treated as &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ordinary&amp;quot; and expects special treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These attributes are highly characteristic of narcissists. That being said, was Suzanne Collins consciously presenting him as a narcissist (or at least having narcissistic tendencies)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T13:02:41.670" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T13:02:41.670" Title="Does &quot;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&quot; present Coriolanus Snow as a narcissist?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14826" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T15:19:41.687" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/14823/why-does-tigris-call-coriolanus-snow-a-good-person&quot;&gt;Why does Tigris call Coriolanus Snow a &amp;quot;good person&amp;quot;?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&lt;/em&gt; contains the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coriolanus felt disconnected from their &amp;quot;romantic notions&amp;quot; [about the war], as he didn't share a romanticized view of the war. Courage in battle was often necessary because of someone's poor planning. He had no idea if he would take a bullet for Festus and had no interest in finding out. As to the noble ideas of the Capital, did he really believe that? &lt;strong&gt;What he desired had little to do with nobility and everything to do with being in control. Not that he didn't have a strong moral code; certainly he did. But almost everything in war between its declaration and the victory parades, seemed a waste of resources.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed, throughout the book, his selfishness and desire for control frequently seems at odds with his sense of morality (such as his horror at the treatment of the Hunger Games contestants).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later tells Katniss Everdeen that, whatever his other flaws, he was not wasteful. He clearly continued with his desire to be in control as President, as well as his desire not to waste resources, but what about his &amp;quot;strong moral code?&amp;quot; Did he continue in that, or did he gradually abandon that in his desire for control?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T15:19:41.687" Title="Was Snow still following his morality in the Hunger Games series?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14827" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T16:33:23.593" Score="3" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;In literary criticism one can sometimes read statements such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Helena’s love therefore is overdetermined to a degree unusual even in Shakespeare&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://michaeldelahoyde.org/shakespeare/awtew1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Delahoyde quoting [Harold] Bloom&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'Abel believes Antoinette’s madness is “overdetermined” to show her relationships with Rochester is “part of an archetypal confrontation” (172).' (Stephanie Bradberry in &lt;a href=&quot;https://hubpages.com/literature/A-New-Perspective-of-Madness-in-Jean-Rhyss-Wide-Sargasso-Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A New Perspective of Madness in Jean Rhys’s &amp;quot;Wide Sargasso Sea&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;But if any 'beginning' is to found in this overdetermined discourse it is to be found in the many beginnings of colonial occupation.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://silo.pub/edward-said-and-the-post-colonial.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Said and The Post-Colonial&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Postmodernism was a phenomenon complex enough to be multiply overdetermined, externally as well as internally&amp;quot; (Brian McHale quoted by Biwu Shang in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Postmodernist+poetics+and+narratology%3a+a+review+article+about...-a0387349131&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Postmodernist poetics and narratology: a review article about McHale's scholarship&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of literary criticism, what does it mean if something in a literary text is overdetermined?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T17:07:34.773" Title="What do literary critics mean when they say a text is overdetermined?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14827" CreationDate="2020-07-06T17:07:34.773" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Terry Eagleton's book &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (second edition, 1996) offers the following explanation (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literary work continually enriches and transforms mere dictionary meaning, generating new significances by the clash and condensation of its various 'levels'. And since any two words whatsoever may be juxtaposed on the basis of some equivalent feature, this possibility is more or less unlimited. Each word in the text is linked by a whole set of formal structures to several other words, and its &lt;strong&gt;meaning is thus always 'overdetermined', always the result of several different determinants acting together&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may still sound obscure: does the &amp;quot;set of formal structures&amp;quot; narrow down the set of potential meanings or expand it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Barry's book &lt;em&gt;Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory&lt;/em&gt; (1995, 2002) traces the term back to the French Marxist philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis Althusser&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such [concept] is the notion of &lt;strong&gt;overdeterminism&lt;/strong&gt;, a word borrowed from Freud, which designates &lt;strong&gt;an effect which arises from a variety of causes, that is, from several causes acting&#xA;together, rather than from a single (in this case, economic) factor&lt;/strong&gt;. This concept of linked and interacting causes is intended to undercut simplistic notions of a one-to-one correspondence between base and superstructure. A related term is the notion of relative autonomy, which is the view that in spite of the connections between culture and economics, art has a degree of independence from economic forces. This concept too is a way of attacking simplistic views of a superstructure entirely determined by the nature of the economic base.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this relate to literature? Barry uses the term again in a passage in which he discusses Hardy's &lt;em&gt;Tess of the D'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Hardy's &lt;em&gt;Tess of the D'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;, Tess's subjection to the social and physical superiority of Alec is  expressed both in terms of what is said, and in terms of the grammatical structure of the 'seduction' (or 'rape' scene), for his having power is reinforced subliminally by Alec (or some attribute of him) frequently being the subject of sentences, while Tess's lack of power is reinforced by her frequently being the grammatical object: thus sentences have patterns like: he [subject] touched her [object]; his fingers [subject] sank into her [object], and so on. This kind of argument, if accepted, has implications about how literary effects are created and how they operate. The implication is that the powerful &lt;strong&gt;literary effect is 'overdetermined', that is, it comes from different factors combining, so that content is subtly reinforced by grammatical structure, overall 'discourse structure', word choice, imagery, and so on&lt;/strong&gt;. Literary meaning, this suggests, goes down to the very roots of language and is reflected at the level of grammar and sentence structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to suggest that overdetermination is a matter of linguistics or stylistics, whereas the previous quote about Althusser's concept seemed to suggest it was related to social or economic factors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance&lt;/em&gt; (1996), Julian Wolfreys and William Baker provide a clearer definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics use the term 'overdetermined' to indicate a text which can easily be interpreted from numerous perspectives, and which contains within it in a highly visible manner the signs of a range of discourses, topics, issues and themes. An overdetermined text is, furthermore, not ostensibly resistant to a form of interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition appears to explain what we read above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An overdetermined text &amp;quot;enriches and transforms mere dictionary meaning&amp;quot; (see Eagleton), thereby allowing interpretation from various perspectives.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Overdetermination &amp;quot;arises from a variety of causes&amp;quot; (see Barry on Althusser): multiple &amp;quot;forces&amp;quot; may be active in a literary work; these forces may even work against each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains why literary works allow very diverse and even contradictory interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T17:07:34.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14829" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:43:41.847" Score="4" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;Connie Willis' &amp;quot;Ado&amp;quot; is a short story in which language is censored to an absurd degree so as to not offend anyone. The protagonist is a school teacher who decides to cover Shakespeare, but first he and his colleague Ms. Harrows have to edit out any &amp;quot;problematic&amp;quot; language found in the plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After taking care of the objections of such organizations as the Royal Society for the Restoration of Divine Right of Kings, the Angry Women's Alliance and the American Bar Association, it is the turn of Morticians International:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;? Never mind, I know that one. &lt;em&gt;Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;? The Anti-Defamation League?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;No. American Bar Association. And Morticians International. They object to the use of the word 'casket' in Act III.&amp;quot; She blew her nose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand what motivates the objection to the word 'casket'. Isn't it just a synonym for coffin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T18:59:21.937" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T12:04:00.430" Title="In Connie Willis' short story &quot;Ado&quot;, what is Morticians International's objection to the use of the word 'casket' in *The Merchant of Venice*?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;connie-willis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14830" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:50:17.930" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about Connie Willis (1945–present; full name Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis), the celebrated American science fiction and fantasy writer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Willis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Connie Willis - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sftv.org/cw/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Connie Willis . Net&lt;/a&gt; - official website&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T18:57:25.623" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T18:57:25.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14831" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-06T18:50:17.930" Score="0" Body="For questions about the American science fiction and fantasy writer Connie Willis (1945–present) and her work." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T18:57:19.740" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T18:57:19.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14832" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14833" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:00:04.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14815" CreationDate="2020-07-06T19:30:14.967" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yvor Winters's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Reason&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Defense of Reason&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1947, combining critical essays from three earlier books) contains very strong criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the book, he criticises Romanticism in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Romantics, however, although they offer a relatively realistic view of the power of literature, offer a fallacious and dangerous view of the nature both of literature and of man. The Romantic theory assumes that literature is mainly or even purely an emotional experience, that man is naturally good, that man's impulses are trustworthy, that the rational faculty is unreliable to the point of being dangerous or possibly evil. The Romantic theory of human nature teaches that if man will rely upon his impulses, he will achieve the good life. When this notion is combined, as it frequently is, with a pantheistic philosophy or religion, it commonly teaches that through surrender to impulse man will not only achieve the good life but will achieve also a kind of mystical union with the Divinity: this, for example, is the doctrine of Emerson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winters also describes the Romantics and Emerson as relativists:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Emersonian formula is the perfect one: that is right for me which is after my constitution; that is right for you which is after yours; the common divinity will guide each of us in the way which is best for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conflicts with Winters's own view of literature, which he calls &amp;quot;absolutist&amp;quot;. Winters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;believe[s] that the work of literature, in so far as it is valuable, approximates a real apprehension and communication of a particular kind of objective truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After quoting a few lines of verse by Emerson, Winters comments harshly,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just how much Emerson meant by this passage it would be hard to say; it is always hard to say just how much Emerson meant, and perhaps would have been hardest for Emerson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This criticism is soon followed by the following summary of Emerson's doctrine (see also the romantic reliance on impulses mentioned earlier):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no possibility of error, the revision of judgment is meaningless; immediate inspiration is correct; but immediate inspiration amounts to the same thing as unrevised reactions to stimuli; unrevised reactions are mechanical; man in a state of perfection is an automaton; an automatic man is insane. Hence, Emerson's perfect man is a madman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same page, Winters adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Emersonian and allied doctrines differ in their moral implications very little from any form of Quietism or even from the more respectable and Catholic forms of mysticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another essay included in the book, &amp;quot;Maule's Curse, or Hawthorne and the Problem of Allegory&amp;quot;, Winters also criticises Emerson before turning the Hawthorne' work:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerson eliminated the need of moral conviction and of moral understanding alike, by promulgating the allied doctrines of equivalence and of inevitable virtue. In an Emersonian universe there is equally no need and no possibility of judgment; it is a universe of amiable but of perfectly unconscious imbeciles; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the essay &amp;quot;Jones Very and R. W. Emerson. Aspects of New England Mysticism&amp;quot;, Winters makes the following comment on Emerson's influence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerson was the most influential preacher to appear in America after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Edwards_(theologian)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwards&lt;/a&gt;, for the lecture platform was merely the ultimate step in the secularization of the pulpit, a step that was inevitable after Unitarianism had displaced Calvinism, and Emerson, moreover, succeeded in focussing upon his romantic amoralism a national religious energy which had been generated by a doctrine and by circumstances now equally remote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essay contains many other criticisms of Emerson, for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerson at the core is a fraud and a sentimentalist, and his fraudulence impinges at least lightly upon everything he wrote: (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Maule's Well, or Henry James and the Relation of Morals to Manners&amp;quot;, Winters states that the &amp;quot;anti-moral philosophy&amp;quot; of Emerson and other romantics had a &amp;quot;corrupting influence&amp;quot; [in New England].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the book's &amp;quot;Post Scripta&amp;quot;, he adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I respectfully submit that only a minute portion of what has been written on Poe or Emerson or any other subject has any considerable value, and that a good deal of what has been written and very respectably published is unmitigated twaddle; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is because, as Winters explained in the preceding paragraphs, many Emerson specialists are unfamiliar with the works of his contemporaries and many American Poe specialists are unfamiliar with the French symbolists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winters does not use the phrase &amp;quot;sacred cow&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;In Defense of Reason&lt;/em&gt;, but he claims that Emerson did not really understand what he wrote (or if he did, he refused to live by the principles he preached), that the Emersonian universe was &amp;quot;a universe of (...) imbeciles&amp;quot;, that the man was a fraud, etcetera. These are very outspoken attacks on Emerson's doctrines and reputation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-06T19:30:14.967" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14836" CreationDate="2020-07-06T21:47:14.947" Score="1" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Crime of The Communist&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, there is a conversation between many persons about the communism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well, you’re all very down on Communism, of course,’ said the Master, with a sigh. ‘&lt;strong&gt;But do you really think there’s so much of it to be down on&lt;/strong&gt;? Are any of your heresies really big enough to be dangerous?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I think they have grown so big,’ said Father Brown gravely, ‘that in some circles they are already taken for granted. &lt;strong&gt;They are actually unconscious. That is, without conscience&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get the whole meaning of this two quotes, especially the bolded phrases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the first phrase mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;there’s so much of it that deserve to be down on&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second one mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;They are actually unconscious. That is, without conscience&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T11:42:48.473" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T11:42:48.473" Title="What's meant here by &quot;[the heresies] are actually unconscious?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14836" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14835" CreationDate="2020-07-07T03:57:22.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;there’s so much of it that deserve to be down on&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Master is trying to indicate that Communism is not nearly as prevalent or as dangerous as they think. They're taking what is a minor issue, that the tendency of young students to profess an admiration  for Socialism or Communism isn't some indicator that there's a great movement that must be fought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;They are actually unconscious. That is, without conscience.&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father Brown is indicating that the ideas have become so prevalent that people don't even stop to think if they are right or wrong. He is making kind of a etymological pun in that &amp;quot;unconscious&amp;quot;, or without thinking, comes from the same root as &amp;quot;conscience&amp;quot;, in that both are about being aware, although the former is a general lack of awareness (being unconscious) and the latter is a matter of not stopping to think, and thus not being aware, &amp;quot;without conscience&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that Father Brown is less directly condemning communism (although, in his time period, it would have been a common view), and more condemning people accepting and espousing ideas without actually critically thinking about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T03:57:22.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14838" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-07T09:46:13.080" Score="6" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex (emphasis mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lawrence adds that to merit this devotion, man must be authentically&#xA;invested with a higher purpose; if his project is but a sham, the&#xA;couple sinks into insignificant mystification; better still to enclose&#xA;one’s self in the feminine cycle—love and death—like Anna Karenina and&#xA;Vronsky or Carmen and Don José, than to &lt;strong&gt;lie to each other like Pierre&#xA;and Natasha&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read War and Peace, it is not clear to me that Pierre and Natasha lied to each other so pervasively throughout the book as to merit Beauvoir's comment. How did they lie to each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10372" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T10:00:58.007" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T10:00:58.007" Title="How do Pierre and Natasha &quot;lie to each other&quot; in 'War and Peace'?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14841" CreationDate="2020-07-07T19:00:10.500" Score="10" ViewCount="1749" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book about 10 years ago in either late elementary/middle school. It was a light fantasy novel (perhaps YA) and I'll try to summarize all the main points I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main character was a girl named Petra and she had gray eyes (which was important to the book) and powers related to metal/machinery. She has a pet metal spider who drinks oil.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Her father left home a long time ago to help and never came back. Around the start of the story I believe she receives his eyes from palace messengers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She meets a boy who is Romani and he teaches her to throw daggers, which she's uncannily good at&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This same boy is extremely talented at pickpocketing because he has a power that gives him &amp;quot;invisible fingers&amp;quot; and a small backstory is explained for this that goes thousands of years back (I think it had something to do with this man who had his fingers cut off, but I can't be sure)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This girl goes to the palace to work for the prince in disguise as a maid (the aforementioned boy works there as a stableboy and so does his sister, but as a maid if I remember correctly)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Petra gets tossed around a bunch and eventually ends up working for this woman named Iris(?) who works with dyes and almost no one likes her and I believe she's also very ugly. They come up with a new color for the arrogant prince in this story&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The last two vague details I remember are something with a clock tower and also a metal beating heart that hurts to touch&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10376" LastEditorUserId="5473" LastEditDate="2020-07-07T22:54:34.137" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T20:14:23.313" Title="Young adult fantasy book about a girl with gray eyes and powers related to metal" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14840" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-07T19:40:03.370" Score="5" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following part from Barack Obama's &lt;em&gt;Dreams from My Father&lt;/em&gt; I cannot understand and it relates to history and some figures. These people, per my Wiki search, were influential in literature; but the context Obama used for them eludes me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there was no escape to be had. In every page of every book, in Bigger Thomas and invisible men, I kept finding the same anguish, the same doubt; a self-contempt that neither irony nor intellect seemed able to deflect. Even DuBois’s learning and Baldwin’s love and Langston’s humor eventually succumbed to its corrosive force, each man finally forced to doubt art’s redemptive power, each man finally forced to withdraw, one to Africa, one to Europe, one deeper into the bowels of Harlem, but all of them in the same weary flight, all of them&#xA;exhausted, bitter men, the devil at their heels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obama says that it has something to do with their unsuccessful ends?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10377" LastEditorUserId="8723" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T12:35:22.373" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T07:55:15.560" Title="Cannot understand part from 'Dreams from My Father' by Barack Obama" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;dreams-from-my-father&gt;&lt;barack-obama&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14839" CreationDate="2020-07-07T21:39:42.327" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cabinet of Wonders&lt;/em&gt; (2008) by Marie Rutkoski, first book of the &lt;em&gt;Kronos Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2850734-the-cabinet-of-wonders&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petra Kronos has a simple, happy life. But it's never been ordinary. &lt;strong&gt;She has a pet tin spider named Astrophil who likes to hide in her snarled hair and give her advice&lt;/strong&gt;. Her best friend can trap lightning inside a glass sphere. Petra also has a father in faraway Prague who is able to move metal with his mind. He has been commissioned by the prince of Bohemia to build the world's finest astronomical clock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petra's life is forever changed when, one day, her father returns home – blind. The prince has stolen his eyes, enchanted them, and now wears them. But why? Petra doesn't know, but she knows this: &lt;strong&gt;she will go to Prague, sneak into Salamander Castle&lt;/strong&gt;, and steal her father's eyes back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Joining forces with Neel, whose fingers extend into invisible ghosts that pick locks and pockets&lt;/strong&gt;, Petra finds that many people in the castle are not what they seem, and that her father's clock has powers capable of destroying their world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;fantasy novel petra gray eyes site:goodreads.com/book&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastActivityDate="2020-07-07T21:39:42.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-07T23:18:49.933" Score="7" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt;, and as you might expect am really enjoying it. Fascinating book. But there is one passage that is a little confusing to me, in particular the use of the word 'aesthetics'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is Part Three, Chapter Six, pages 328 to 329 in my Penguin Classics edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo - and a scraggy, horrid pen-pusher's widow, a hag, a money-lender with a red box beneath her bed; it's a bit much even for the likes of Porfiry Petrovich to digest! ... Not to mention the rest of them! ... &lt;strong&gt;Aesthetics will intervene&lt;/strong&gt;: would a Napoleon really go crawling under the bed of some &amp;quot;old hag&amp;quot;! Please!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also used later on the same page where he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an &lt;strong&gt;aesthetic louse&lt;/strong&gt;, that's all there is to it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what exactly does Dostoyevsky mean by aesthetic in these two cases? What does he mean when he says aesthetics will intervene, and what precisely is an 'aesthetic' louse? The meaning of the word aesthetic as I understand it doesn't seem to make sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Concerned with beauty'. Is he suggesting that in some way, because he has just killed an old hag, there is less beauty, and so he is inferior to Napoleon? I feel like I am on entirely the wrong page!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10379" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T17:27:39.340" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T07:00:14.993" Title="Use of the word 'aesthetic(s)' in this passage from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14843" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-08T11:11:26.240" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does G.K. Chesterton mean when in the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Defendant/A_Defence_of_Skeletons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Defence of Skeletons&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Defendant&lt;/em&gt; he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know what Ygdrasil is, but does this &amp;quot;take hold &lt;em&gt;upon&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; mean that the tree is rooted in/upon those stars (which is kind of illogical since its treetop is in the heavens, and the roots are in the underworld)? Or does it simply mean that the upper part of the tree (i.e. the treetop) contains, holds, grasps the stars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10383" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T11:43:02.237" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T14:56:32.023" Title="What does GKC mean when he says &quot;trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;the-defendant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14844" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-08T11:32:09.273" Score="5" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;At a school I no longer go to (Sydney, Australia, early 2010s, the book was in English), I read this book in the library that was a collection of Aesop's fables. The author had this very distinctive style that I feel has heavily influenced me in my own writing even now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The book was pretty tall&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This isn't a exhaustive or comprehensive list of all the fables in there, but it had fables of the vain jackdaw, the ant and the grasshopper, tortoise and the eagle, fox and the sour grapes, dog and a bone&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was illustrated in a very realistic, painterly art style&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author was a woman. I vaguely remember her first name starting with H, and even more vaguely being Hannah or spelled similar so that might be a red herring. She had an &amp;quot;about the author&amp;quot; written at the end of the book in the same prosy whimsical style, but I only remember the start where she talks about being a shy girl who made mud pies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Another part that sticks very very clearly in my mind: in its telling of the ant and the grasshopper, it ends with the ant acidically telling the grasshopper that if he sang all summer he should dance all winter. It looks like this is not an original prose and I've found retellings online which includes this but it made a MASSIVE impression on me when I read it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10384" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T14:58:31.363" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T21:49:12.577" Title="Identify a detailed-prose book of Aesop fables" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;aesop&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14843" CreationDate="2020-07-08T14:56:32.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;My read on it is more than he is alluding to the idea that Yggdrasil was present in all of the Nine Worlds. Similarly, among the trees, seeing them reach up into the heavens, he was entertaining the conceit that they, too, stretched into another world, that of the stars, such that one could traverse the tree and arrive there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T14:56:32.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14846" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-08T17:48:44.930" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Miroslav Krleža was one of the most important 20th-century Croatian authors. He published poetry, novels, novellas, short stories and plays. The English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=962385638#Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about him&lt;/a&gt; has the following to say about one of his plays:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Golgota is another play, political in nature.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not found a source for this statement; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=171498395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=201637635&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; articles about the author don't say anything about the content of this play. In what way is this play &amp;quot;political&amp;quot;? Does it directly or indirectly discuss the political situation in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which included Croatia at the time? Or is it political in a much more general or abstract sense? And what political stance does the play take?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:15:06.990" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:15:06.990" Title="In what way is Miroslav Krleža's play Golgota &quot;political in nature&quot;?" Tags="&lt;croatian-literature&gt;&lt;miroslav-krleza&gt;&lt;golgota&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14847" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14848" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Croatian poet, novelist and dramatist Miroslav Krleža (1893 – 1981) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [croatian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T18:09:28.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14849" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-08T18:10:40.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-08T18:10:40.353" LastActivityDate="2020-07-08T18:10:40.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14850" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-08T18:10:40.353" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Croatian language, regardless of whether they were published in Croatia or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T17:34:14.593" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T17:34:14.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14851" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-09T08:39:22.260" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Regarding Brecht's play &lt;em&gt;The life of Galileo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a part where Andrea says 'unhappy the land that has no heroes'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Galileo says 'No, unhappy the land that needs heroes'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you make reference to the play and explain which one of these statements does Brecht himself side with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10388" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-09T11:26:11.230" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T11:26:11.230" Title="Brecht's Life of Galileo and the need for hero" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;bertolt-brecht&gt;&lt;life-of-galileo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14853" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14855" CreationDate="2020-07-09T12:32:06.817" Score="11" ViewCount="1376" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &amp;quot;Expendable&amp;quot; by Philip K. Dick, the protagonist is a man who can communicate with spiders. At one point, after fighting off a home invasion by an army of ants, the protagonist is seated at his desk, armed and despairing, when a spider drops by to talk to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The spider slid down beside him onto the desk top. &amp;quot;Sorry. Hope you aren't frightened, as in the poem.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this line mean? Is there some famous poem about a man being frightened by a spider landing beside him, or by facing an invasion of ants? If so, is the spider actually supposed to be familiar with literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T08:49:19.800" Title="What is &quot;the poem&quot; that the spider refers to in Philip Dick's short story &quot;Expendable&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;philip-k-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14853" CreationDate="2020-07-09T12:51:24.053" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mother Goose, in fact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little Miss Muffet &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sat on a tuffet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eating her curds and whey;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Along came a spider,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who sat down beside her,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And frightened Miss Muffet away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has the spider, the fright, and being Mother Goose, the pop-cultural awareness for the reader to recognize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-12T08:49:19.800" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T08:49:19.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14853" CreationDate="2020-07-09T12:53:50.143" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be a reference to the classical nursery rhyme &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46957/little-miss-muffet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Miss Muffet&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little Miss Muffet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sat on a tuffet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eating her curds and whey;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Along came a spider,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who sat down beside her,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And frightened Miss Muffet away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was what immediately came to my mind on seeing &amp;quot;spider&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;beside&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;frightened&amp;quot; in the same sentence. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Miss_Muffet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's&lt;/a&gt; a fairly well-known children's poem, I think (at least in the UK - not sure about the US where Philip K. Dick grew up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for whether the spider's supposed to be familiar with literature ... I suspect we aren't supposed to overthink this one. It's a short story, and spiders are depicted as intelligent sentient beings, part of a great war between species. Making a spider character refer to literature helps to emphasise that effect, if you can suspend your disbelief enough not to wonder why spiders would (or could) read human poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T12:53:50.143" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-09T19:22:33.990" Score="4" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Miroslav Krleža was one of the most important 20th-century Croatian authors. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=962385638#Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about him&lt;/a&gt; lists several influences on his work, including &amp;quot;key authors like (...) Nietzsche&amp;quot;. However, that statement has no source and there is no similar statement (with or without a source) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=171498395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=201637635&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia articles about Krleža.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly constituted Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Miroslav Krleža?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:13:43.930" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:13:43.930" Title="What was Nietzsche's influence on Miroslav Krleža?" Tags="&lt;friedrich-nietzsche&gt;&lt;miroslav-krleza&gt;&lt;croatian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14857" CreationDate="2020-07-09T20:01:26.013" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The appropriate citation is to Mirjana Stančić's book &lt;em&gt;Miroslav Krleža i njemačka književnost&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Miroslav Krleža and German literature&lt;/em&gt;), in which the first chapter is entitled &amp;quot;Najveci filozofski ucitelj epohe i njegov ucenik. Krleza i Nietzsche&amp;quot; (The greatest philosophical teacher of the era and his student. Krleza and Nietzsche). Unfortunately, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.njuskalo.hr/monografije/mirjana-stancic-miroslav-krleza-njemacka-knjizevnost-oglas-29915699&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this book&lt;/a&gt; is written in Croatian and doesn't seem to have been translated into English (I don't know if translations into other languages exist).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LH8nR.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LH8nR.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this via &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aMZKDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA104&amp;amp;lpg=PA104&amp;amp;dq=nietzsche+krleza&amp;amp;source=bl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vladimir Biti, &lt;em&gt;Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which says in Chapter 3, pp. 103-104, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was now time to redefine the values that remained deeply rooted in the consciousness of the alienated Croatian intelligentsia. To this end, the young Krleža, like other East-Central European intellectuals of his time, enthusiastically employed Friedrich Nietzsche's program of resolutely re-defining all values in the sphere of the politics of the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with a footnote citing &amp;quot;Nietzsche's influence on Krleža&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;Stančić 13-50&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also some research papers on specific aspects of the connection between Krleza and Nietzsche, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=clanak&amp;amp;id_clanak_jezik=157766&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anđela Vidović, &amp;quot;Connections between Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Krleža’s work on the example of The Days of Long Ago&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Kroatologija: časopis za hrvatsku kulturu&lt;/em&gt; 3.2 (2012)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main intention of this paper is to show evident connections between Nietzsche’s masterpiece &lt;em&gt;Thus  Spoke  Zarathustra&lt;/em&gt;, and Krleža’s memoir entries &lt;em&gt;Diary  1914–1917:  The  Days  of  Long Ago  I&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Diary  1918–1922:  The  Days  of Long Ago II&lt;/em&gt;. The analysis focuses on seven memoir entries from the war period of 1914 – 1918, where &lt;em&gt;Zarathustra&lt;/em&gt; motifs are observable in Krleža’s writings. It is argued that Krleža’s reading of &lt;em&gt;Zarathustra&lt;/em&gt; is unsystematic, impulsive and emotional, as well as that there are obvious contrasts in his interpretation: aesth/etics, life/death, creation/demolition, ecstasy/skepticism. Intimate readings of young Krleža show how he combines a close/distant relationship towards his mentor in accordance with his own po/ethic (antitetička vrteška).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I couldn't find many specific details about Nietzsche's influence on Krleža, it certainly seems to be an established fact that there &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; influence, even to the extent of multiple sources referring to Nietzsche as Krleža's teacher or mentor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-09T20:01:26.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14859" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14842" CreationDate="2020-07-10T01:25:47.957" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First the definition would be good. Sadly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yourdictionary.com/aesthetic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;there are quite a few&lt;/a&gt; but I think that only one is important:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Relating to the philosophy or theories of aesthetics.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Of or concerning the appreciation of beauty or good taste: aesthetic&#xA;judgment; the aesthetic appeal of the exhibit.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Attractive or appealing: the more aesthetic features of the building. Characterized    by a heightened sensitivity to beauty: the poet and his aesthetic friends.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Being or relating to a work of art; artistic: The play was&#xA;an aesthetic success.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Informal Conforming to accepted notions of good&#xA;taste.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;often Aesthetic Of or characteristic of aestheticism in the&#xA;arts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we can agree, that if someone/something is aesthetic than it it beautiful, worthy of admiring. Or, we could go even further and replace the word &amp;quot;aesthetic&amp;quot; with &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Art&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, which often has been treated as something seemingly alive and conscious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the examples from the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aesthetics will intervene:&lt;/strong&gt; would a Napoleon really go crawling under the bed of some &amp;quot;old hag&amp;quot;! Please!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let me show you this in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different translation&lt;/a&gt; (by Constance Garnett)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One sudden irrelevant idea almost made him laugh. Napoleon, the pyramids, Waterloo, and a wretched skinny old woman, a pawnbroker with a red trunk under her bed—it’s a nice hash for Porfiry Petrovitch to digest! &lt;strong&gt;How can they digest it! It’s too inartistic.&lt;/strong&gt; “A Napoleon creep under an old woman’s bed! Ugh, how loathsome!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is impossible to imagine someone so great as Napoleon doing something as despicable and loathsome as hiding under a bed of some old hag - those two things are just too opposite in the aesthetics spectrum, too inartistic (it is like painting a nude act of a beautiful woman sitting on a toilet!); it is so despicable that some sort of higher force should intervene! Following this chain of thought, someone who indeed was hiding under an old woman's bed cannot think about himself as being as great (as aesthetic) as Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm an aesthetic louse, that's all there is to it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLiteraryStudies/comments/5p2m26/dostoevskys_crime_and_punishment_atheistical_or/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different translation&lt;/a&gt; makes it more clear&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aesthetically speaking, I am a louse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Raskolnikov keeps self-depreciating himself - it is bit more clear further on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ech, I am an æsthetic louse and nothing more,” he added suddenly, laughing like a madman. “Yes, I am certainly a louse,” he went on, clutching at the idea, gloating over it and playing with it with vindictive pleasure. “In the first place, because I can reason that I am one, and secondly, because for a month past I have been troubling benevolent Providence, calling it to witness that not for my own fleshly lusts did I undertake it, but with a grand and noble object—ha-ha! Thirdly, because I aimed at carrying it out as justly as possible, weighing, measuring and calculating. Of all the lice I picked out the most useless one and proposed to take from her only as much as I needed for the first step, no more nor less (so the rest would have gone to a monastery, according to her will, ha-ha!). And what shows that I am utterly a louse,” he added, grinding his teeth, “is that I am perhaps viler and more loathsome than the louse I killed[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he says that he is just ugly, despicable like a louse - a parasite that lives in dirt and feeds on blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T23:50:42.880" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T23:50:42.880" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14829" CreationDate="2020-07-10T13:56:57.697" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In British English, &amp;quot;casket&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;a case for holding jewels, etc&amp;quot;; in American English, it means &amp;quot;coffin&amp;quot;.  Shakespeare, of course, used the term in the former sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in  &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; the problem  comes up, of choosing  which suitor should marry rich orphaned Portia. Her father's will specified that a kind of game show be played out: each suitor is given a chance to pick a golden casket, a silver casket, or  a lead casket; whoever picks the right box wins the bride. (The two wrong boxes hold put-downy &amp;quot;sorry!&amp;quot; notes; the right one (in Act 3) holds a &amp;quot;congrats, you chose wisely&amp;quot; note.)&#xA;The setup is described in Act 1, scene 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NERISSA.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your father was ever virtuous, and holy men at their death have good inspirations. Therefore the lott’ry that he hath devised in these three chests of gold, silver, and lead, whereof who chooses his meaning chooses you, will no doubt never be chosen by any rightly but one who you shall rightly love. But what warmth is there in your affection towards any of these princely suitors that are already come?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and again in Act 2, scene 7&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PORTIA.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Go, draw aside the curtains and discover&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The several caskets to this noble princegrave.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now make your choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PRINCE OF MOROCCO.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The first, of gold, who this inscription bears,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Who chooseth me shall gain what many men desire.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The second, silver, which this promise carries,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This third, dull lead, with warning all as blunt,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How shall I know if I do choose the right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in these passages &amp;quot;casket&amp;quot; andgrave &amp;quot;chest&amp;quot; are used synonymously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spoiler alert:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  The right box is the lead one, which of course Mr Right figured out, by reverse psychology&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point about the morticians is that they  did not know the story.  The play is not offensive to their trade, and they are too ignorant to know this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willis's development of the character of the MI is the opposite of  nuanced. It supports the conclusion that the MI's objection is founded on ignorance, but anything beyond that seems to me silly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exercise of contorted illogic might let one guess that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; Shakespeare had written  about coffins and not jewel boxes (as he didn't), then Willis's morticians might have supposed the play advocates the use of lead coffins rather than gold or silver ones, so reducing their profits. But this kind of subjunctive counterfactual is not needed to understand Willis's story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T12:00:32.643" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T12:00:32.643" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14862" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14864" CreationDate="2020-07-10T16:43:14.780" Score="5" ViewCount="98" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years ago (late '60s to '70s), I read a story about a boy with a group of hikers on a ridge who get caught in a lightning storm. They all run off the ridge, and, apparently, the boy went down the wrong side, and he got lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy ended up needing to survive on his own. He used a paperclip that was on a letter from his parents to make a fishhook. When the hook (his lifeline) got caught in the water, he had to dive down to retrieve it, and on the way up, he cracked his head, getting a bad concussion, and that led to the bad decision of moving from his spot (always stay where you are so the rescuers can find you).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last year, I attended something, and one of the presentations was by a very old man on Wilderness Survival. It was a very good presentation, and he talked about a few stories he read. I told him about this one, and he really wanted the name of it, but I simply have no idea what it is. If anyone has any idea about this story, I would really appreciate it so I can tell this man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written in English and set in the U.S., which is where I read it, but I really do not remember if it was a short story or novel. Remember, this was around 50 years ago. I get accused of remembering everything, but, unfortunately, it is not true. It may have been in the library of my elementary school or junior high school, or maybe the public library. I was reading at a college level in elementary school, and, as I remember it, it was written at least a high school level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10399" LastEditorUserId="10399" LastEditDate="2020-07-10T20:04:45.107" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T20:17:32.770" Title="Story About a Boy Lost in the Wilderness" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14863" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-10T22:01:02.503" Score="13" ViewCount="488" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am wondering about what Dostoyevsky means by the word 'propaganda' in part six, chapter four of &lt;em&gt;Crime and Punishment&lt;/em&gt;. None of the meanings that I understand make sense in the context of the book. Here are the quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once, after lunch, Avdotya Romanovna caught me alone on one of the paths in the garden and, eyes flashing, &lt;em&gt;demanded&lt;/em&gt; that I leave poor Parasha alone. It was virtually our first tête-à-tête. I, needless to say, considered it an honour to satisfy her wish, tried my best to look stricken and abashed, and, in short, carried it off rather well. A relationship began: mysterious conversations, admonitions, exhortations, supplications, entreaties, even tears - can you believe it? - even tears! &lt;strong&gt;The things a passion for propaganda can do to a girl!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is page 571 of my Penguin Classics edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I committed another stupidity. &lt;strong&gt;I set about mocking all this propaganda and oratory in the most vulgar way imaginable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what does he actually mean by propaganda here? And what does he mean when he said that he 'mocked' the propaganda?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10379" LastEditorUserId="5745" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T17:20:43.240" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T22:06:04.410" Title="What does Dostoyevsky mean by 'propaganda' in Crime and Punishment?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14864" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14862" CreationDate="2020-07-10T22:38:09.573" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I finally found what I was looking for. The book from 1965 is called &lt;em&gt;The Summer I was Lost&lt;/em&gt;. Apparently, it was re-released in 1972 under the title &lt;em&gt;Terror on the Mountain (The Summer I was Lost)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written by Phillip Viereck. The &lt;em&gt;Terror on the Mountain&lt;/em&gt; title sounds familiar, and that is probably the release I read around the time it was released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy thought himself a loser, and was picked on. The hike was to build self-esteem, which he has in plenty at the end of the book when he manages to survive on his own in the wilderness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be out of print in either title, but I think I found a copy of each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10399" LastEditorUserId="8723" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T07:45:31.100" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T07:45:31.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14863" CreationDate="2020-07-11T00:17:00.880" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;propaganda&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; at that time was not understood the way we tend to understand it today.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is more or less safe to understand it based on its etymology, i.e. based on the verb &amp;quot;propagate&amp;quot; - &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/propaganda&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;propaganda&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;A concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviour of large numbers of people.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; - just remove the &amp;quot;large number of people&amp;quot; from this modern definition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dostoyevsky, or, rather, Svidrigailov uses this fancy word to express the idea that the girl tried all the ways she could think of (&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;even tears!&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;) to get what she wanted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. Unfortunately, all the links that I have to support my claim are in Russian. I'm not sure it makes much sense to provide them here. I'm adding &lt;a href=&quot;http://journals.uspu.ru/i/inst/ling/ling29/ling_29_16.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; (PDF file) just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from the original goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Раз, после обеда, Авдотья Романовна нарочно отыскала меня одного в аллее в&#xA;саду и с сверкающими глазами потребовала от меня, чтоб я оставил&#xA;бедную Парашу в покое. Это был чуть ли не первый разговор наш вдвоем.&#xA;Я, разумеется, почел за честь удовлетворить ее желанию, постарался&#xA;прикинуться пораженным, смущенным, ну, одним словом, сыграл роль&#xA;недурно. Начались сношения, таинственные разговоры, нравоучения,&#xA;поучения, упрашивания, умаливания, даже слезы, — верите ли, даже&#xA;слезы! Вот до какой силы доходит у иных девушек страсть к &lt;strong&gt;пропаганде&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second occurrence is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Тут я опять сглупил.&#xA;Пустился грубейшим образом издеваться насчет всех этих &lt;strong&gt;пропаганд&lt;/strong&gt; и&#xA;обращений; Параша опять выступила на сцену, да и не она одна, — одним&#xA;словом, начался содом.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I should add here that the word &amp;quot;пропаганда&amp;quot; (propaganda) here feels slightly odd even for a native Russian speaker. I can't really judge how this was perceived at the time the book was written. I suspect that it still did sound weird even then - so it might be a detail of the Svidrigailov's character. He uses some &amp;quot;fancy words&amp;quot;, the meaning of which he might not be actually sure of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="7659" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T22:06:04.410" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T22:06:04.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14866" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14868" CreationDate="2020-07-11T14:16:10.460" Score="6" ViewCount="1419" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase has been taken from &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter II, page 271:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, we must find counsel for the peril of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T13:59:50.400" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T13:59:50.400" Title="What did Elrond mean by telling the council &quot;it is so ordered ...&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14867" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14866" CreationDate="2020-07-11T15:17:58.010" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The full paragraph is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the moment of the Council of Elrond, there's a rather diverse gathering of people in Rivendell. It didn't see many visitors in those times, but they all happened to be together at the same time, at the same place. Elrond believes this isn't by chance but rather some form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;predestination&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_Intervention&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;divine intervention&lt;/a&gt;; the visitors were there &lt;em&gt;on purpose&lt;/em&gt; even though the purpose wasn't known to them upfront.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-07-11T15:30:04.143" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T15:30:04.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14866" CreationDate="2020-07-11T16:09:27.110" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Elrond is saying it was not chance but Providence that brought them all together.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To expand on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14867/17&quot;&gt;Glorfindel's correct answer&lt;/a&gt;, let me explain the passage phrase by phrase. This is actually pretty important in terms of understanding Tolkien's theology of Middle-earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That [what shall we do with the Ring] is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distant lands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he is saying that the diverse collection of travellers and representatives were &lt;em&gt;called&lt;/em&gt; to Rivendell in order to take part in the Council of Elrond - but &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; called by Elrond himself. Then by whom?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here he also discounts the possibility that they all came to Rivendell at the same time by pure chance. Even if it may seem like chance, it's not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the key point: Elrond says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;it is so ordered&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; that the various people gathered together at that particular place and time should discuss together and decide the fate of the Ring and of Middle-earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ordered by whom, then? In a real-world context, this would refer to the notion of divine providence. In Middle-earth, written by the devout Catholic Tolkien, the analogue of God is called &lt;strong&gt;Eru Ilúvatar&lt;/strong&gt;, a supreme being who intervenes rarely but crucially in the affairs of the world. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/108937/31394&quot;&gt;Who called and ordered the Council of Elrond?&lt;/a&gt;, a question on another site inspired by the same quote that you're asking about. Note that the answers to that question don't confirm for sure that it was Eru Ilúvatar who called them all to Rivendell - it could have been a lesser immortal such as the Valar. I don't think this is ever explicitly addressed in canon material such as Tolkien's letters, and I don't know Tolkien's theology well enough to be sure if it was definitely supposed to be Eru Ilúvatar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/23106/31394&quot;&gt;When did Eru interfere in Arda directly?&lt;/a&gt;, there were a few times during the course of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; when Eru Ilúvatar intervened directly in the world, notably bringing Gandalf back from the dead and &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/67834/31394&quot;&gt;tripping Gollum into the volcano&lt;/a&gt;. For him to intervene in bringing all those people to Rivendell at the right time to form the Council of Elrond certainly seems plausible. (Note also that Tolkien tends to talk about this stuff very indirectly, as you can see from the quotes in the posts linked above. He doesn't come right out and say &amp;quot;Eru is God, and He did this or that&amp;quot;, but uses euphemisms and suggestive language to make it clear.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-11T16:09:27.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14869" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14871" CreationDate="2020-07-12T16:24:24.240" Score="6" ViewCount="425" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &lt;em&gt;Improvement of the Mind&lt;/em&gt; (1741) by Isaac Watts, and at various instances in the book he mentions people whom I have a hard time tracking down. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=LMwAAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;source=gbs_ge_summary_r&amp;amp;cad=0#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=sobrino&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Page 14&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sobrino is a temperate man and philosopher (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or on page 11:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucidas and Scintillo are young men of this stamp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure what I should make of these passages, since I can’t find anything on Google, for example the philosopher Sobrino. Who is Watts referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10398" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T16:46:04.077" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T00:56:34.847" Title="Who are the people Isaac Watts is talking about in &quot;Improvement of the Mind&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;isaac-watts&gt;&lt;improvement-of-the-mind&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14870" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T16:54:52.563" Score="1" ViewCount="184" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter II, page 273:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'And not so many, nor so fair, as when Thangorodrim was &lt;strong&gt;broken&lt;/strong&gt;, and the Elves deemed that evil was ended for ever, and it was not so.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;broken&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8436" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-12T17:02:13.163" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T18:02:39.243" Title="How was Thangorodrim &quot;broken&quot; in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14869" CreationDate="2020-07-12T17:24:58.013" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: These are fictional &lt;em&gt;types&lt;/em&gt;, not real people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take your first example with a little more context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Man much addicted to Luxury and Pleasure, Recreation and Pastime, should never pretend to devote himself entirely to the Sciences, unless his Soul be so reform’d and refin’d that he can taste all these Entertainments in his Closet, among his books and papers. &lt;em&gt;Sobrino&lt;/em&gt; is a &lt;strong&gt;temperate&lt;/strong&gt; Man and Philosopher, and he feeds upon Partridge and Pheasant, Venison and Ragouts, and every Delicacy, in a growing Understanding and a serene and healthy Soul, tho’ he dines on a Dish of Sprouts or Turnips. &lt;em&gt;Languinos&lt;/em&gt; lov’d his Ease, and there chose to brought up a Scholar; he had much &lt;strong&gt;Indolence&lt;/strong&gt; in his Temper, and as he never cared for Study, he falls under universal Contempt in his Profession, because he has nothing but the Gown and the Name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Isaac Watts (1743). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LMwAAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;pg=PA14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Improvement of the Mind&lt;/em&gt;, p. 14&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. Brackstone. My emphasis.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first sentence is a little moral homily about the proper behaviour to be adopted by scholars. Then the next two sentences are (fictional) positive and negative examples. The name &lt;em&gt;Sobrino&lt;/em&gt; is modelled on Italian &lt;em&gt;sobrio&lt;/em&gt; meaning “sober, temperate”; the character follows the advice, and prospers. The name &lt;em&gt;Languinos&lt;/em&gt; is modelled on Italian &lt;em&gt;languido&lt;/em&gt; meaning “languid, indolent”; the character neglects the advice and declines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your other example, &lt;em&gt;Lucidas&lt;/em&gt; is modelled on &lt;em&gt;lucido&lt;/em&gt; meaning “bright, shining” and &lt;em&gt;Scintillo&lt;/em&gt; is modelled on &lt;em&gt;scintilla&lt;/em&gt; meaning “spark”. Their names suit their characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lucidas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Scintillo&lt;/em&gt; are young Men of this Stamp: They &lt;strong&gt;shine&lt;/strong&gt; in Conversation, they spread their native Riches before the Ignorant; they pride themselves in their own lively Images of Fancy, and imagine themselves Wise and Learned; but they had best avoid the &lt;em&gt;Pretense of the Skilful&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;em&gt;Test of Reasoning&lt;/em&gt;; and I would advise them once a Day to think forward a little, what a contemptible Figure they will make in Age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=LMwAAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;pg=PA11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watts, p. 11&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T17:24:58.013" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14869" CreationDate="2020-07-12T17:27:16.630" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Watts includes small vignettes at regular intervals in his book. They have names such as Arithmo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/20/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 21 in the 1885 reprint&lt;/a&gt;), Positivo (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/26/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 26&lt;/a&gt;), Jocander (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/28/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 28&lt;/a&gt;), Niveo and Euron (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/48/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 49&lt;/a&gt;), Studentio and Plumbinus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/54/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 54&lt;/a&gt;), Cario and Faber (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/64/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 64&lt;/a&gt;), Divito, Politulus and Aulinus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/64/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 65&lt;/a&gt;), Solinus and Probus (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/66/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 66&lt;/a&gt;), Pellucido (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/82/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 83&lt;/a&gt;), Penseroso (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/126/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 127&lt;/a&gt;), Lectorides (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/128/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 128&lt;/a&gt;), Mnemon (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/136/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 137&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names such as Positivo (cf. the adjective &amp;quot;positive&amp;quot;), Studentio, Sobrino (cf. the adjective &amp;quot;sober&amp;quot; in the sense of &amp;quot;moderate&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;serious&amp;quot;) and Mnemon (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mnemo-#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mnemo- on Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;) suggest that these names are fictitious. The vignettes appear to be intended to bring to life the concepts Watts discusses. (They remind me of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personas in user experience design&lt;/a&gt;, though much less detailed.) The name &amp;quot;Penseroso&amp;quot; may even have been borrowed from John Milton's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Penseroso&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Il Penseroso&lt;/a&gt; (1645/1646).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are apparently exceptions. For example, Watts mentions John Milton and his poem &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/68/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 69&lt;/a&gt;), Zeno (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/98/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 99&lt;/a&gt;), Isaac Newton (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/102/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 103&lt;/a&gt;; it is not obvious whether Mathon was a real person), Plato, Cicero, Boyle, Locke and Newton (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/improvementofmind00watt/page/122/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 123&lt;/a&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Grey_(priest)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Grey&lt;/a&gt; (page 144, author of &lt;em&gt;Memoria technica&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T00:56:34.847" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T00:56:34.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14873" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T17:38:09.977" Score="2" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell what this metaphor means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can die on St. Helena without being Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to be related to history, and the life of Napoleon. I found this metaphor on Quora in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/profile/Paul-Fraynt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Fryant&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-beautiful-metaphor-you-have-ever-come-across-What-does-it-mean/answer/Paul-Fraynt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-beautiful-metaphor-you-have-ever-come-across-What-does-it-mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is the most beautiful metaphor you have ever come across? What does it mean?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10411" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T11:27:49.623" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T11:27:49.623" Title="What does this metaphor mean: &quot;You can die on St. Helena without being Napoleon.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14873" CreationDate="2020-07-12T17:58:37.343" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Napoleon died in exile on St. Helena, but many people have died there without being Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a metaphor for how various similarities to great figures do not mean you yourself are great.  It is impossible to tell without context, but it may additionally hold the connotation that the person is claiming greatness on the basis of being metaphorically exiled to St. Helena, that is, suffering because of the actions of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T17:58:37.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14870" CreationDate="2020-07-12T18:01:05.247" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thangorodrim was destroyed in the war that brought down Morgoth -- the dragon  Ancalagon fell on them and crushed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T18:01:05.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14876" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14870" CreationDate="2020-07-12T18:02:39.243" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This refers to the War of Wrath during the First Age. Thangorodrim referrred to three volcanic peaks raised by Morgoth (see chapter 9, &amp;quot;Of the flight of the Noldor&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillon&lt;/em&gt;) Chapter 24, &amp;quot;Of the voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath&amp;quot;, explains (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Eärendil came, shining with white flame, and about Vingilot were&#xA;gathered all the great birds of heaven and Thorondor was their captain, and there&#xA;was battle in the air all the day and through a dark night of doubt. Before the&#xA;rising of the sun Eärendil slew Ancalagon the Black, the mightiest of the dragon-&#xA;host, and cast him from the sky; and &lt;strong&gt;he fell upon the towers of Thangorodrim,&#xA;and they were broken in his ruin&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, when the great dragon Ancalagon was killed, its fall crushed the towers of Thangorodrim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T18:02:39.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14877" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T21:24:41.473" Score="15" ViewCount="3683" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Macduff's son defends his father's honor when the murderers sent by Macbeth call Macduff a traitor in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, they wind up stabbing the son:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Enter Murderers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRST MURDERER: Where is your husband?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;LADY MACDUFF: I hope, in no place so unsanctified where such as thou mayst find him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRST MURDERER: He’s a traitor.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SON: Thou liest, thou shag-ear’d villain!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRST MURDERER: What, you egg! &lt;em&gt;[Stabbing him.]&lt;/em&gt; Young fry of treachery!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's up with the &amp;quot;What, you egg!&amp;quot; line? Why does the murderer call the son an egg? It seems completely unrelated to anything else, and doesn't seem like a witty comeback to the son's &amp;quot;shag-ear'd villain&amp;quot; insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:51:39.480" Title="Why does the murderer call Macduff's son &quot;egg&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14877" CreationDate="2020-07-12T21:49:12.187" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;A. R. Braunmuller (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1997) provides the following gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemptuous epithet for a young person (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; Egg &lt;em&gt;sb&lt;/em&gt; 2b, citing only this line and another from 1835); (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. K. Hunter's edition of the play (New Penguin Shakespeare, 1967) doesn't provide a gloss here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braunmuller also links the murderer's word choice with the proverb &amp;quot;An evil bird lays an evil egg&amp;quot; (cited in Robert W. Dent's &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Proverbial Language: An Index&lt;/em&gt;, 1981, B376).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The murderer also calls Macduff's son &amp;quot;fry of treachery&amp;quot;. Fry means fish-spawn (G. K. Hunter) or &amp;quot;progeny, (...), brood&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fry#Noun_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;) and is another &amp;quot;contemptuous epithet&amp;quot;. It is also worth noting that the word choice &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot; fits the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/macbeth/Birds.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bird imagery&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T21:49:12.187" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T21:51:51.713" Score="6" ViewCount="3137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Ted Hughes' &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=hz5O0laGLOgC&amp;amp;pg=PT339&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Smile&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://stihi.ru/2010/11/13/2039&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;text version&lt;/a&gt;), and I'm trying to understand its plotline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically: what's the nature of the scenes wherein the poem's protagonist, the smile, goes through? and how does each scene connects to its subsequent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I see it, and my explanation for each scene:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Verse I + II: Nature&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Began under the groan of the oldest forest&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It ran though the clouds, a third light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And it ran through the skin of the earth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It came circling the earth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like the lifted bow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of a wave's submarine running&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tossing the willows, and swelling the elm-tops&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Looking for its occasion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The smile begins in a forest,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;goes through the clouds,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and circles the earth as a wave.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all images of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. verse III: Battlefield?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But people were prepared&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They met it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With visor smiles, mirrors of ricochet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With smiles that stole a bone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And smiles that went off with a mouthful of blood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And smiles that left poison in a numb place&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or doubled up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Covering a getaway&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clues that indicate a battlefield:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Visor_(armor)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;visor&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ricochet&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;blood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/540476/double-up-of-a-military-formation&quot;&gt;doubling up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/outflank&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;outflanking&lt;/a&gt; (first line of the next verse).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, though: the &amp;quot;bone&amp;quot; being stolen and the &amp;quot;poison in a numb place&amp;quot; doesn't seem to fit this presumed-context.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These could be explained if we interpret this scene as the creation of Eve (a prominent subject in Crow's Collection) from the ribs of Adam, but then the other images become hard to explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;visor smiles&amp;quot; probably simply means &amp;quot;disguised smiles&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=3zp6BxnUq9MC&amp;amp;pg=PA423&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;see this old dictionary&lt;/a&gt;), so this is not the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.il/books?id=txU5AQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA273&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moveable helmet part&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Smiles that stole a bone&amp;quot; probably alludes to Hyenas, mentioned in various places along Crow poems. This seems to fit: Hyenas &amp;quot;smile&amp;quot;, they eat bones, and may actually &amp;quot;steal&amp;quot; a bone to enjoy it quietly (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ideas.ted.com/everything-you-know-about-hyenas-is-wrong-these-animals-are-fierce-social-and-incredibly-smart/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; is a nice read, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4ZgoXtoTwU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; is lovely video).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. verse IV: ?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the smile was too vast, it outflanked all&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It was too tiny it slipped between the atoms&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So that the steel screeched open&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like a gutted rabbit, the skin was nothing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then the pavement and the air and the light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Confined all the jumping blood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No better than a paper bag&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;People were running with bandages [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what's going on here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the smile suddenly attack humanity (&amp;quot;people were running with bandages&amp;quot;)? unlikely, given its positive nature (which becomes evident at the poem's end, when it's &amp;quot;mending everything&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, what's that &amp;quot;pavement&amp;quot; does here? and how does it, together with &amp;quot;the air and light&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;confined all the jumping blood&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;4. verse V-VIII: Jesus crucifixion?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there was the unlucky person's eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pinned under its brow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Widening for the darkness behind it [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at that very moment the smile arrived&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the crowd, shoving to get a glimpse of a man's soul&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stripped to its last shame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Met this smile&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That rose through his torn roots&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Touching his lips, altering his eyes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are clues that indicate the crucifixion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The single &amp;quot;person's eye&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Matthew_6:22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Methew 6:22&lt;/a&gt;) which is &amp;quot;pinned&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shoving crowd&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fact that this man is &amp;quot;stripped to its last shame&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/hebrews/12-2.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hebrews 12:2&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Also, the fact that this presumably-Jesus eventually smiles can be seen as Hughes' consistent mocking of Christian ideas.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure, though: this presumed-context is completely unrelated to the previous verses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me find a unifying narrative for this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T21:16:39.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:55:48.877" Title="Understanding the plotline of “The Smile” by Ted Hughes" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-12T23:10:21.877" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Miroslav Krleža was one of the most important 20th-century Croatian authors. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=962385638#Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about him&lt;/a&gt; lists several influences on his work, including &amp;quot;key authors like (...) Proust&amp;quot;. However, that statement has no source and there is no similar statement (with or without a source) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=171498395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miroslav_Krle%C5%BEa&amp;amp;oldid=201637635&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia articles about Krleža.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Y11PDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT298&amp;amp;dq=Krle%C5%BEa+proust&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiih92v6MjqAhXnxIsKHW0hC3EQ6AEwAHoECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Krle%C5%BEa%20proust&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, I found the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.anthempress.com/socialist-realism-in-central-and-eastern-european-literatures-under-stalin-hb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures under Stalin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Evgeny Dobrenko &amp;amp; Natalia Jonsson-Skradol (Anthem Press, 2018):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only measure of value which can be applied to a work seeking to express beauty should be that of the artist's talent, and Krleža vividly demonstrated this by the example of Proust:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proust is a conservative snob and an overbearing bluestocking, and apart from the fact that he is a disguised royalist, he is an ingenious lyricist of psychoanalysis, a writer disproportionately more significant [...] than any left-wing and loud-voiced character of the so-called social fiction of the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is evidence that Krleža was familiar with Proust's work, but does it constitute evidence of influence? Is there any more convincing evidence that Krleža's work was influenced by Proust's?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:12:06.743" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:12:06.743" Title="What was Proust's influence on Miroslav Krleža?" Tags="&lt;marcel-proust&gt;&lt;miroslav-krleza&gt;&lt;croatian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14880" CreationDate="2020-07-13T06:00:44.700" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Krleza wrote an entire essay discussing Proust, and has been noted as influenced by Proust in more credible sources than Wikipedia.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Krležijana website (an online encyclopedia dedicated to Krleža), there is a page about Marcel Proust which says (Google Translated from the original Croatian):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krleža's attitude towards Proust is defined by consistent ambivalence, simultaneous negation and affirmation. In his essay On Marcel Proust (Književna republika, 1927, vols. IV, nos. 2 and 3-4), K. appreciates Proust's ability to realize the novel as an aesthetic totality, but objects to his ideological blindness to the reality he writes about and his indifference to specific events of time and space. He attributes the search for timeless existence and idealistic autonomy to art to Proust's morbidity and French spiritual coquetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His ambivalent position on Proust will not change either in the Preface to Krsto Hegedušić's &amp;quot;Podravina Motives&amp;quot; (Zagreb 1933) or in the diary entries (Dnevnik 1958-69, Sarajevo 1977), although it will be far sharper, but with a peaceful tendency to timely retreat, which is typical of his evaluation of Proust. Krleža's critique of him has never been simple or unambiguous, just as one cannot speak of the purely lexical, or thematic or compositional influence of Proust on Krleža, although the reminiscences of Proust's reading are undeniable. In the power of Krleža's analytical procedure, artistic and musical style, description of the landscape, nostalgic experiences and richness of linguistic expression, Proust's poetic influence could also be distinguished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The literary magazine &lt;em&gt;Kriticna Masa&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Critical Mass&lt;/em&gt;) about Croatian authors also says in its &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kriticnamasa.com/autor_en.php?id=50&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page on Krleža&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Krleža's formative influences include Scandinavian drama, French Symbolism and Austrian and German expressionism and modernism, with key authors like Ibsen, Strindberg, Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Rilke and Proust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These sources are enough to confirm that Krleža was indeed influenced by Proust, and to give some sources for further reading about Krleža's views on Proust, at least if you understand Croatian. I couldn't find much detail about &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; exactly Proust's influence appears in Krleža's work, except for the broad-strokes stuff mentioned above: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;analytical procedure, artistic and musical style, description of the landscape, nostalgic experiences and richness of linguistic expression&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T06:00:44.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T08:53:09.113" Score="12" ViewCount="2360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m quite familiar with novels and stories, if my personal view is concerned I would say that story is just a compact and summarised form of novel. The level of detail in novels is, obviously, much more than in a stories. But what is an epic? Is it just a more detailed version of a novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my course book, there is a short paragraph of John Milton and it reads like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Milton (1608-74) is acknowledged as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare. As a product of the Reformation Movement in England, he combines the Renaissance passion for truth and beauty with the religious fervour is the Puritans. He is best known for &lt;strong&gt;Paradise Lost, the only epic composed in English Language so far&lt;/strong&gt;. His literacy art is so consummate that he is credited as being ‘the most sublime of English Poets’ and known as ‘master of the grand style.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why there are no other epics in English Language than &lt;strong&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/strong&gt;? Is there some specific reason for that? Or is the English language is simply more used to novels and poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: My question is related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6017/what-happened-to-the-epic-poem&quot;&gt;this post&lt;/a&gt; but there are some differences which the answerer should focus on. My question is mostly about &lt;strong&gt;English Literature&lt;/strong&gt; and the book’s emphasis on “only epic composed so far”. My question asks for a clear definition of an epic, in contrast with novel and story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T11:56:29.403" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T10:54:43.660" Title="What is an epic and why is there “only one epic in English Language so far”?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14883" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14897" CreationDate="2020-07-13T09:57:36.130" Score="3" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201031h.html#story9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Vampire of the Village&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Dr. Mulborough was talking to Father Brown about a Great Scandal in their village, while they were going to a village by a train, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Oh, even our scandal is on old-established melodramatic lines. Need I say that the clergyman’s son promises to be our problem? &lt;strong&gt;It would be almost irregular, if the clergyman’s son were quite regular&lt;/strong&gt;. So far as I can see, he is very mildly and almost feebly irregular. He was first seen drinking ale outside &lt;strong&gt;the Blue Lion&lt;/strong&gt;. Only it seems he is a poet, which in those parts is next door to being a poacher.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't get what's meant by &amp;quot;It would be almost irregular, if the clergyman’s son were quite regular&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that &amp;quot;what he done would be almost strange and shocking if he was a straight man&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how the author used &amp;quot;were&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;a single person&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And is&amp;quot;the Blue Lion&amp;quot; a pub, or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T08:52:47.553" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T08:52:47.553" Title="What's meant by &quot;It would be almost irregular, if the clergyman’s son were quite regular&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14882" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:41:39.163" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since Milton is often discussed in the context of Renaissance literature, I'll quote the definition of &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; from &lt;em&gt;The Renaissance&lt;/em&gt; (edited by Marion Wynne-Davies, Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature, Bloomsbury, 1992):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A narrative of heroic actions, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular cultural or national tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Milton wrote two works that fit this definition, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Regained&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Regained&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, thereby disproving the claim that he wrote &amp;quot;the only epic composed in English Language&amp;quot;.&#xA;Another Renaissance poet, Edmund Spenser, wrote the epic poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (published in the 1590s).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Epic_poems_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia lists more than 40 epic poems in the English language&lt;/a&gt;, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Geoffrey Chaucer's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troilus_and_Criseyde&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Criseyde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1380s),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Blake's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton:_A_Poem_in_Two_Books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton: A Poem in Two Books&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1804-1810),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Keats's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_Hyperion:_A_Dream&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1850s),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Hiawatha&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Song of Hiawatha&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1855),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Algernon Charles Swinburne's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristram_of_Lyonesse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tristram of Lyonesse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1882),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Carlos Williams's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paterson&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1940s-1950s),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Derek Walcott's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeros&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Omeros&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1992).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a handbook claims that John Milton wrote the only epic poem in the English language, its author or authors are wrong. They may not be competent enough to write about the history of English literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T09:10:01.753" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T09:10:01.753" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14885" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14886" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction work 'The Improvement of the Mind' by Isaac Watts, published in 1741 as a supplement to his textbook on logic. Use this tag with the tag [isaac-watts]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:49:02.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14887" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14888" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Life of Galileo' ('Leben des Galilei', 1938) by Bertolt Brecht. Use this tag with the tags [bertolt-brecht] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:50:48.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14877" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:51:39.480" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Shakespeare uses an unfamiliar or idiomatic word or phrase, he quite often doubles it with a more conventional one, with the effect of explaining it &amp;quot;in place.&amp;quot; There's a good example of this elsewhere in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, when the eponymous villain says &amp;quot;Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Incarnadine&lt;/em&gt; is thus explained as &lt;em&gt;making the green one red.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we view the same technique at work here, then &amp;quot;egg&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;young fry of treachery.&amp;quot; So Macduff Jr. is being here accused of following in the traitorous footsteps of his father. The apple does not fall far from the tree, nor the egg from the hen that laid it, being the general implication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:51:39.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14890" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14891" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction work 'The Defendant' (1901) by G. K. Chesterton. Use this tag with the tag [g-k-chesterton]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:53:28.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14892" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14893" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German author Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956) and his life as a writer. Brecht is best known as a playwright, but also wrote poems and short stories. Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:55:45.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14894" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14895" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Golgota' by Miroslav Krleža. Use this tag with the tags [miroslav-krleza] and [croatian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T10:57:42.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14883" CreationDate="2020-07-13T11:55:04.320" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I can't get what's meant by &amp;quot;It would be almost irregular, if the clergyman’s son were quite regular&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's pretty close to what you think. They're saying this would be abnormal behavior in general for the sober individual that you might expect of the son of clergy, but it's normal for him. So he is abnormal, but that's normal behavior for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And how the author used &amp;quot;were&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;a single person&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive#:%7E:text=I%20was%2C%20you%20were%2C%20he,(that)%20I%20were%20not.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;past subjunctive&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. that it's a hypothetical or desired state rather than a factual one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And is&amp;quot;the Blue Lion&amp;quot; a pub, or something like that?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=k-4SrdUPNFoC&amp;amp;pg=PA230&amp;amp;lpg=PA230&amp;amp;dq=english%20pub%20%22blue%20lion%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=GqPK_etCtc&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2qvqzGKripyoWvRXqYo3d36kSC2w&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi9zMPNlcrqAhVUoXIEHejzAVg4ChDoATAAegQIChAB#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=english%20pub%20%22blue%20lion%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Most likely&lt;/a&gt; based on context and the number of pubs and inns with that name (due possibly to an association with heraldry).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T11:55:04.320" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14898" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-13T13:07:13.393" Score="4" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Joseph Conrad's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Youth_(Conrad)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Youth: A Narrative&lt;/a&gt;, Conrad writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What made them do it—what made them obey me when I, thinking consciously how fine it was, made them drop the bunt of the foresail twice to try and do it better? What? They had no professional reputation—no examples, no praise. It wasn’t a sense of duty; they all knew well enough how to shirk, and laze, and dodge—when they had a mind to it—and mostly they had. Was it the two pounds ten a month that sent them there? They didn’t think their pay half good enough. No; it was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don’t say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn’t have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct—a disclosure of something secret—of that hidden something, that gift, of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Researching the last sentence of the passage, I found an interpretation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.au/books?id=q1Ua05fPsSAC&amp;amp;pg=PA70&amp;amp;lpg=PA70&amp;amp;dq=of%20good%20or%20evil%20that%20makes%20racial%20difference,%20that%20shapes%20the%20fate%20of%20nations.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=e6OnlJMONx&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3wJEaHo9s5MUkTCA84I_hYwjHU8Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwit7KfgmcrqAhWWA3IKHbrHCDIQ6AEwAHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=of%20good%20or%20evil%20that%20makes%20racial%20difference%2C%20that%20shapes%20the%20fate%20of%20nations.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)&lt;/a&gt; stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sailors’ very Englishness, a force beyond their understanding or control, makes them act nobly in an emergency. Yet here Marlow’s belief in the existence of a “hidden something” does not amount to any sort of racial theory of history. The uneven distribution of character appears to him as an inexplicable secret, and it just so happens that the English have more of it than other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although in Bloom's Interpretation he (from my interpretations) identifies nobleness as a product of this &amp;quot;hidden something&amp;quot; due to the crew's Englishness, he later quantifies what he termed &amp;quot;character&amp;quot; such that he could justify an English Crew definitely acting in this manner, and a French or German crew not necessarily succeeding, due to their having lesser of this &amp;quot;character&amp;quot;. Thus Bloom equates Englishness to this &amp;quot;hidden something&amp;quot; and I don't exactly know what he is defining as &amp;quot;character&amp;quot;, English Culture perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are threefold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What action is Marlow ascribing there being a &amp;quot;completeness in&amp;quot; or itself being the &amp;quot;disclosure of something secret&amp;quot;. Is it the sailor's obedience to Marlow, or their action of &amp;quot;drop[ing] the bunt of the foresail twice to try and do it better?&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the last sentence the &amp;quot;hidden something&amp;quot; is equated to a &amp;quot;gift, of good or evil that makes racial difference&amp;quot;. What exactly is this &amp;quot;hidden something&amp;quot;, why is he uncertain as to its being &amp;quot;good or evil&amp;quot; and how does it relate to race?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In what way does this &amp;quot;hidden something&amp;quot; shape the fate of nations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T14:30:49.570" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T14:30:49.570" Title="What is the &quot;hidden something&quot; in Joseph Conrad's: Youth" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14899" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14911" CreationDate="2020-07-13T14:20:27.480" Score="4" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the below passage sourced from Joseph Conrad's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Youth_(Conrad)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Youth: A Narrative&lt;/a&gt;, Conrad describes a &amp;quot;conical flame with a twisted top&amp;quot;. What exactly is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course they very soon found out in the steamer that the rope was&#xA;gone. She gave a loud blast of her whistle, her lights were seen sweeping in a wide circle, she came up ranging close alongside, and stopped. We were all in a tight group on the poop looking at her. Every man had saved a little bundle or a bag. Suddenly a conical flame with a twisted top shot up&#xA;forward and threw upon the black sea a circle of light, with the two vessels side by side and heaving gently in its center.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An ealier passage provides context to the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speed of the towing had fanned the smoldering destruction. A blue gleam appeared forward, shining below the wreck of the deck. It wavered in patches, it seemed to stir and creep like the light of a glowworm. I saw it first, and told Mahon. ‘Then the game’s up,’ he said. ‘We had better stop this towing, or she will burst out suddenly fore and aft before we can clear out.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I suspect that Conrad is describing one of the mast's being consumed with flames, and thus after fire has consumed the totality of the mast,  the light produced by it creates a circle occuped by the both the steamer and the Judea(name of Marlow's ship).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T16:23:43.607" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T09:18:37.147" Title="What is &quot;a conical flame with a twisted top&quot; in Youth: A Narrative" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14443" CreationDate="2020-07-13T15:26:59.057" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksofwilliamsh18shak/page/n83/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition published in 1909&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;Israel Gollancz simply notes in a gloss to Mamillius's words in Act II, scene 1,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A sad tale's best for winter&amp;quot;, hence the title of the play. - I[srael] G[ollancz]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many other editors say essentially the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Israel Gollancz writes in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksofwilliamsh18shak/page/n15/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to the same edition&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;incongruities and&#xA;anachronisms are not out of place in &amp;quot;a winter's tale&amp;quot;:&#xA;he [Shakespeare] certainly bettered Greene's example, &amp;quot;making Whitsun&#xA;pastorals. Christian burial, Giulio Romano, the Emperor&#xA;of Russia, and Puritans singing psalms to hornpipes, all&#xA;contemporary with the oracle of Delphi,&amp;quot; — the island of&#xA;Delphi !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot; is repeated later in the play. For example, when Paulina reports Hermione's death in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Acti III, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, she says (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thousand knees&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon a barren mountain and still &lt;strong&gt;winter&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In storm perpetual, could not move the gods&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To look that way thou wert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, we don't know that there will be a gap of sixteen years in the play, during which Leontes lives with repentance and remorse.&#xA;Paulina's words here &lt;strong&gt;link &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot; with repentance&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.5.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;, Camillo says (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My lord, your sorrow was too sore laid on,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which &lt;strong&gt;sixteen winters&lt;/strong&gt; cannot blow away,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So many summers dry; scarce any joy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Did ever so long live; no &lt;strong&gt;sorrow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But kill'd itself much sooner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words again &lt;strong&gt;link &amp;quot;winter&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;sorrow&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perdita, by contrast, is associated with &lt;strong&gt;spring&lt;/strong&gt;, especially through the sheep-shearing festival and the flower catalogue in Act IV.&#xA;(If Perdita is born in winter, as Mamillius's words in Act II, scene 1 indirectly imply, she was conceived during spring.) This creates a contrast between winter (Leontes's accusations and his sixteen years of repentance) and spring (Perdita).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another way in which &amp;quot;winter's tale&amp;quot; is relevant to the play.&#xA;A &amp;quot;winter's tale&amp;quot; may be an &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;old wives' tale&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0013%3Aact%3D2%3Ascene%3D1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act II of Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;The Jew of Malta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I remember those old &lt;strong&gt;womens words&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who in my wealth wud tell me &lt;strong&gt;winters tales&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And speake of spirits and ghosts that glide by night&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even a play by George Peele entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oldwivestale00peelrich/page/24/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Old Wives' Tale&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in which one of the characters says (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sport does well [an it were not &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;sorcery]; but methinks, gammer, a &lt;strong&gt;merry winter's &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;tale&lt;/strong&gt; would drive away the time trimly: come, I &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;am sure you are not without a score.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&amp;quot;Sport&amp;quot; here means entertainment, not physical exercise.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication of these examples is that &lt;strong&gt;the story needn't be very plausible or credible&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact, several aspects of Shakespeare's play seem to enforce this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Bohemia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kingdom of Bohemia&lt;/a&gt; having a seacoast, even though we know Bohemia as a landlocked area (Shakespeare followed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandosto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his source&lt;/a&gt; in this respect),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a character being eaten by a bear (not because bear attacks would be implausible, but because an actor in a bear costume would have had a comic effect; Shakespeare's audience would have known what bears looked like, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear-baiting#Great_Britain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bear-baiting arenas&lt;/a&gt; were located in the same part of London as the Globe theatre),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the aspects listed by Gollancz (cited above), e.g. combining the oracle of Delphi, the Emperor of Russia, etcetera, all in the same play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title and the implausible combination of faulty geography and conflicting historical references can be seen as an &lt;strong&gt;alienating device&lt;/strong&gt; created by Shakespeare (when not borrowed from his source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T15:26:59.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14902" CreationDate="2020-07-13T17:02:33.633" Score="23" ViewCount="4149" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, the character Bilbo Baggins &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Song_of_E%C3%A4rendil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recites a poem&lt;/a&gt; beginning with these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eärendil was a mariner&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that tarried in Arvernien;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he built a boat of timber felled&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in Nimbrethil to journey in;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;her sails he wove of silver fair,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of silver were her lanterns made,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;her prow was fashioned like a swan,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and light upon her banners laid.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the poem about? Where does the unusual scheme of rhymes and assonance come from? What role does the poem play in the narrative of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;? It is full of obscure names and references that can’t be elucidated even with the help of the appendices (Arvernien, Nimbrethil, etc.) and some not even with the help of &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillon&lt;/em&gt; (Evernight, Shadowmere, etc.). What is the effect of putting obscure references into the novel? Can any of them be elucidated?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T17:44:54.797" Title="Bilbo’s song of Eärendil in “The Fellowship of the Ring”" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14901" CreationDate="2020-07-13T17:02:33.633" Score="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer grew too long for a single post, so I’ve split it in two, with history and analysis in this part, and detailed line notes in the other part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Summary&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo’s poem retells the myth of the half-elven hero Eärendil, who lived long ago, in the First Age of Middle-earth. He was a sailor who voyaged into the western seas, seeking the land of the gods (Valinor) to ask their help in the war against the dark lord Morgoth. His wife Elwing gave him a Silmaril, a magical jewel, and with the help of its light he found the way to Valinor and delivered his plea. The gods lifted Eärendil and his ship into the sky, and the light from the Silmaril became the planet Venus (the evening and morning star).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Role within &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem has puzzled many readers! Even if the outlines of the story are clear, it is full of names and references and details that are mysterious. Readers who have been paying careful attention will recall the name “Elbereth” from Gildor’s song in book I, chapter 3, and the names “Eärendil”, “Elwing”, and “Silmaril” from Aragorn’s telling of the tale of Tinúviel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘For of Beren and Lúthien was born Dior Thingol’s heir; and of him Elwing the White whom Eärendil wedded, he that sailed his ship out of the mists of the world into the seas of heaven with the Silmaril upon his brow. And of Eärendil came the Kings of Númenor, that is Westernesse.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book I, chapter 11. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are the barest of references, and the other names in the poem are obscure. Where are “Arvernien” and “Tarmenel” and “Tirion”? Why is Elwing “flying” when she comes to him? Who is the “Elder King”? Who are “they” who teach him melodies and build him a new ship? There is no way within the novel to figure these things out, not even with the help of the appendices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, that is just what you would expect if you went to a far-off country: the people there would have a history full of people and places and events that you had never heard of. So the effect of these unexplained references is to give a sense of depth and richness to the setting, to suggest that the world extends beyond the pages of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poems and stories in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; also reveal something of the character of the people who tell them. The reason why the tale of Tinúviel is so important to Aragorn is that he sees a reflection of his own situation in that of Beren. Similarly, we might ask why the character of Eärendil appeals to Bilbo. Perhaps it is because Bilbo has always been attracted to adventure and exploration, even if such an inclination is not quite respectable for hobbits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As [the dwarves] sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1937). &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; progresses, we encounter more references to the characters and events of these stories, cementing the impression of a cohesive world, in which figures out of legend can emerge into the present of the story, giving them a mythic grandeur. For example, soon after Bilbo recites his poem, Elrond reveals his connection to that story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Eärendil was my sire, who was born in Gondolin before its fall; and my mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien of Doriath.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This explains why Aragorn had to said to Bilbo that it was “cheek to make verses about Eärendil in the house of Elrond”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And much later, at a moment of great peril, Sam will link his own story to the stories of Beren and Lúthien and Eärendil, and be heartened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got—you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, book V, chapter 8. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Eärendil&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name ‘Eärendil’ has a special significance in Tolkien’s mythology, because it inspired him to embark on the whole project. In 1913, Tolkien was an undergraduate at Oxford, studying Old English language and literature, and he was struck by these lines of alliterative verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eala earendel,     engla beorhtast,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ofer middangeard     monnum sended,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ond soðfæsta     sunnan leoma,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;torht ofer tunglas,     þu tida gehwane&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of sylfum þe     symle inlihtes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hail shining light, brightest of angels,†&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over middle-earth sent to men,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And true light of the sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Brighter than stars, you ever enlighten&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All seasons from yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (c. 800). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_I&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crist&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† “engla” also means “English”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien’s biographer described the effect of these lines on the young man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Earendel&lt;/em&gt; is glossed by the Anglo-Saxon dictionary as ‘a shining light, ray’, but here it clearly has some special meaning. Tolkien himself interpreted it as referring to John the Baptist, but he believed that ‘Earendel’ has originally been the name for the star presaging the dawn, that is, Venus. He was strangely moved by its appearance in the Cynewulf† lines. ‘I felt a curious thrill,’ he wrote long afterwards, ‘as if something had stirred in me, half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Humphrey Carpenter (1977). &lt;em&gt;Tolkien: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;, p. 72. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;em&gt;Crist&lt;/em&gt; was formerly attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynewulf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cynewulf&lt;/a&gt; due to the surviving manuscript being bound together with Cynewulf’s poems, but these are no longer thought to be by the same writer.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[In September 1914] he wrote a poem. It was headed with the line from Cynewulf’s &lt;em&gt;Crist&lt;/em&gt; that had so fascinated him: &lt;em&gt;Eala Earendel engla beorhtast!&lt;/em&gt; Its title was ‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’, and it began as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earendel sprang up from the Ocean’s cup&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    In the gloom of the mid-world’s rim;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the door of Night as a ray of light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Leapt over the twilight brim,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And launching his bark like a silver spark&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    From the golden-fading sand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down the sunlit breath of Day’s fiery Death&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    He sped from Westerland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The succeeding verses describe the star-ship’s voyage across the firmament, a progress that continues until the morning light blots out all sight of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This notion of the star-mariner whose ship leaps into the sky had grown from the reference to ‘Earendel’ in the Cynewulf lines. But the poem that it produced was entirely original.‡ It was in fact the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Carpenter, p. 79.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‡ Carpenter is mistaken when he writes “entirely original”: the poem is a pastiche of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/270/5/372.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arethusa&lt;/a&gt;’ (1820) which begins, “Arethusa arose / From her couch of snows”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting in the winter of 1914 Tolkien wrote three more poems about Earendel, adding place-names and other mythological details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;West of the Sun, east of the Moon†&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lies the haven of the star,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The white town of the Wanderer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the rocks of Eglamar.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There Wingelot is harboured,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While Earendel looks afar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O’er the darkness of the waters&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Between here and Eglamar—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Out, out, beyond Taniquetil&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Valinor afar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1915–1920). Extract from ‘The Shores of Faery’. In Christopher Tolkien (1984), &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt;, p. 272.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† An allusion to the Norwegian fairy story, ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_of_the_Sun_and_West_of_the_Moon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;East of the Sun and West of the Moon&lt;/a&gt;’.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien took the name ‘Wingelot’ for Earendel’s ship from ‘Guingelot’, the name of the boat belonging to the mythological figure &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_(folklore)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wade&lt;/a&gt;. Evidently the story of Wade’s boat was once a familiar piece of English folklore, for Chaucer mentions a ‘Tale of Wade’ in &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Criseyde&lt;/em&gt; and alludes to “Wade’s boat” in &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, but the story has been lost. The other names are original to Tolkien, and it seems that he was already working on a project to create a mythological canvas to explain the background for his Earendel poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea had its origins in his taste for inventing languages. He had discovered that to carry out such inventions to any degree of complexity he must create for the languages a ‘history’ in which they could develop. Already in the early Earendel poems he had begun to sketch something of that history; now he wanted to record it in full. […] And there was a third element playing a part: his desire to create a mythology &lt;em&gt;for England&lt;/em&gt;. He had hinted at this during his undergraduate days when he wrote of the Finnish &lt;em&gt;Kalevala&lt;/em&gt;: ‘I would that we had more of it left—something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ This idea grew until it reached grand proportions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Carpenter, p. 97.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien began at least eleven versions of the story of Eärendil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’ (poem, 1914–1915), in &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt; (1984).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Lay of Earendel’ (three linked poems, 1914–1915), in &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt; (1984).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Tale of Eärendel’ (outline, c. 1917), in &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt; (1984).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘Lay of Eärendel’ (unfinished poem, c. 1920), in &lt;em&gt;The Lays of Beleriand&lt;/em&gt; (1985).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘Sketch of the mythology’ (prose summary, c. 1926), in &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt; (1986).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt; (prose summary, c. 1930), in &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt; (1986).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Lost Road’ (brief story-within-a-story, c. 1937), in &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt; (1987).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Conclusion of the Quenta Silmarillion’ (story fragment, c. 1937), in &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt; (1987).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘Annals of Beleriand’ (annalistic outline, c. 1937), in &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt; (1987).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘Bilbo’s song of Eärendil’ (poem, c. 1940), in &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; (1954).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;‘The Tale of Years’ (annalistic outline, c. 1951), in &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt; (1994).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the story of Eärendil was the earliest of Tolkien’s writings about Middle-earth, and he returned to it so many times, it is something of a puzzle that he never completed a version in prose. When, after the success of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien revised the &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; for publication, he got as far as ‘The Wanderings of Húrin’ (which became the first part of the chapter ‘The Ruin of Doriath’ in the completed &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;) and then broke off. His son Christopher wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We come here to the furthest point in the narrative of the Elder Days that he reached in his work on &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; (in the widest sense) after the Second War and the completion of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. There are bits of information about the succeeding parts—not much—but no further new or revised narrative; and the promise held out in his words “Link to the Necklace of the Dwarves, &lt;em&gt;Sigil Elu-naeth&lt;/em&gt;, Necklace of the Woe of Thingol” was never fulfilled. It is as if we come to the brink of a great cliff, and look down from highlands raised in some later age onto an ancient plain far below. For the story of the Nauglamir and the destruction of Doriath, the fall of Gondolin, the attack on the Havens,† we must return through more than a quarter of a century to the &lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt;, or beyond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1994). &lt;em&gt;The War of the Jewels&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 297–298. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Part of the story of Eärendil.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/12216/3003&quot;&gt;speculated elsewhere&lt;/a&gt; that this may have been a psychological difficulty—the story of the fall of Gondolin was written in 1916–1917 while Tolkien was on sick leave from the Western Front, and perhaps the memories of that time were too difficult to revisit. But another possible source of difficulty is Tolkien’s changing conception of the nature of the mythology. The idea that the planet Venus is the apotheosis of the mariner Eärendil belongs to a pre-scientific kind of mythology, and this was fundamentally incompatible with the kind of rational and detailed ‘subcreation’ represented by &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and Tolkien’s subsequent developments of the mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[My father] had come to believe that […] that the cosmos of the old myth was no longer valid; and at the same time he was impelled to try to construct a more secure ‘theoretical’ or ‘systematic’ basis for elements in the legendarium that were not to be dislodged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Errantry&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo’s song of Eärendil has another source, Tolkien’s poem ‘Errantry’. It went through many versions, but the earliest manuscript begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a merry passenger,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a messenger, an errander;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he took a tiny porringer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and oranges for provender;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1930). ‘Errantry’, lines 1-4. In Christopher Tolkien (1989). &lt;em&gt;The Treason of Isengard&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poetic form was original to Tolkien:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is for one thing in a metre I invented (depending on trisyllabic assonances or near-assonances, which is so difficult that except in this one example I have never been able to use it again—it just blew out in a single impulse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (22 June 1952). Letter to Rayner Unwin. Number 133 in Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (1981). &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien’s claim, “I have never been able to use [the metre] again” might seem rather surprising in the light of the fact that ‘Erranty’ has the same rhythm (iambic tetrameter) and rhyme scheme as Bilbo’s song. But we’ll see later that ‘Errantry’ and Bilbo’s song are really two versions of a single work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is of course a piece of verbal acrobatics and metrical high-jinks; and was intended for recitation with great variations of speed. It needs a reciter or chanter capable of producing the words with great clarity, but in places with great rapidity. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The piece has had a curious history. It was begun very many years ago, in an attempt to go on with the model that came unbidden into my mind: the first six lines, in which, I guess, ‘D’ye ken the rhyme to porringer’ had a part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1967). Letter to Donald Swann. In Christopher Tolkien (1989). &lt;em&gt;The Treason of Isengard&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verse that Tolkien refers to here is a piece of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobitism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacobite&lt;/a&gt; doggerel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    O what’s the rhyme to porringer?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;King James the Seventh* had ae dochter,†&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    And he ga’e her to an Oranger.‡&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Ken ye how he requited him?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Ken ye how he requited him?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The lad has into England come,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    And ta’en the crown in spite o’ him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1828). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/jacobiteminstrel00glas/page/28/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jacobite Minstrelsy&lt;/em&gt;, p. 28&lt;/a&gt;. Glasgow: R. Griffin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_II_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James VII and II&lt;/a&gt; † &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_II_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary II&lt;/a&gt; ‡ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_III_of_England&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William of Orange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Errantry’ was published in &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Magazine&lt;/em&gt; in 1933. In this version the opening lines were:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a merry passenger&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a messenger, a mariner:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he built a gilded gondola&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to wander in, and had in her&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a load of yellow oranges&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and porridge for his provender;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he perfumed her with marjoram&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and cardamom and lavender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1933). ‘Errantry’, lines 1-8. In &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, 52:5, 9 November 1933.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this stage the poem had no connection to the mythology: it was a whimsical piece of metrical invention whose “knights of Faerie” have little or no resemblance to the elves of Middle-earth. But he continued to revise the poem (“there are no less than fifteen manuscript and typescript texts”), and the “merry passenger” became the mariner Eärendil. Tolkien later ingeniously fictionalized his own revisions of the poem into revisions supposedly made by Bilbo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. 3 [Errantry] is an example of another kind which seems to have amused Hobbits: A rhyme or story which returns to its beginning, and so may be recited until the hearers revolt. Several specimens are found in the Red Book, but the others are simple and crude. No. 3 is much the longest and most elaborate. It was evidently made by Bilbo. This is indicated by its obvious relationship to the long poem recited by Bilbo, as his own composition, in the house of Elrond. In origin a ‘nonsense rhyme’, it is in the Rivendell version found transformed and applied, somewhat incongruously, to the High-elvish and Númenorean legends of Eärendil. Probably because Bilbo invented its metrical devices and was proud of them. They do not appear in other pieces in the Red Book. The older form, here given, must belong to the early days after Bilbo’s return from his journey. Though the influence of Elvish traditions is seen, they are not seriously treated, and the names used (Derrilyn, Thellamie, Belmarie, Aerie) are mere inventions in the Elvish style, and are not in fact Elvish at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1962). &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Bombadil&lt;/em&gt;. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Textual history&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the puzzles I noted at the start of this answer is why Elwing is “flying” when she meets Eärendil? This is rather more puzzling than Tolkien intended it to be: he had revised this part of the poem to include more context and detail, but the revised manuscript was mislaid and an earlier version went to the publishers instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the history of this, perhaps the most protean, in its scale, of all my father’s works, does not end here. It ends, in fact, in the most extraordinary way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This text C was not the last, although the published form of the poem was achieved in it. Another typescript (D) was made, doubtless at the same time as C, and given the title ‘The Short Lay of Eärendel’;† In this, a new element entered at the beginning of the fourth stanza (There flying Elwing came to him): the attack of the four surviving sons of Fëanor on the Havens of Sirion, Elwing’s casting herself into the sea, bearing the Silmaril, and her transformation into a seabird, in which guise she flew to meet Eärendel returning. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What actually happened one can only surmise. I believe the most likely explanation to be that the texts D, E, F were mislaid, and that at the crucial time the version represented by C went to the publishers, as it should not have done. It looks also as if these lost texts did not turn up again until many years had passed, by which time my father no longer remembered the history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Christopher Tolkien (1989). &lt;em&gt;The Treason of Isengard&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† The &lt;em&gt;long&lt;/em&gt; Lay being the poem in alliterative verse begun in 1920 and never completed.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In version F the fourth stanza begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In might the Fëanorians&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that swore the unforgotten oath&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;brought war into Arvernien&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;with burning and with broken troth;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and Elwing from her fastness dim&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;then cast her in the waters wide,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but like a mew† was swiftly borne,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;uplifted o’er the roaring tide.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through hopeless night she came to him,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and flame was in the darkness lit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;more bright than light of diamond&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the fire upon her carcanet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1940). In Christopher Tolkien (1989). &lt;em&gt;The Treason of Isengard&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† A seagull&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T17:02:33.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14903" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14901" CreationDate="2020-07-13T17:04:27.260" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the second part of my answer, containing detailed line notes for the poem. If I’ve omitted any difficulties, let me know in the comments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have preferred to use illustrative quotations from the &lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; (c. 1937), and not from the later revisions that led to the text of &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; (1977), because when Tolkien was composing Bilbo’s song (c. 1940), the &lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; was at that time the latest development of the mythology. In a few cases I have used later revisions when they had the clearest text, and in other cases I have had to go back to the &lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt; (c. 1930), due to the &lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; lacking a complete account of the story of Eärendil. (This is the “great cliff” which I discussed in the other answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Line notes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;tarry&lt;/em&gt;. Used here in the archaic sense “remain, stay, abide”, not the more common sense “delay, linger” which appears in line 73 (“He tarried there from errantry”).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arvernien&lt;/em&gt;. A region of Beleriand, near the mouths of the river Sirion, where refugees settled after the sack of the city of Gondolin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;he built a boat&lt;/em&gt;. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wingelot’ he built, fairest of the ships of song, the Foam-flower; white were its timbers as the argent moon, golden were its oars, silver were its shrouds, its masts were crowned with jewels like stars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1930). &lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 17. In Christopher Tolkien (1986). &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt;, p. 152. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nimbrethil&lt;/em&gt;. A wood in Arvernien. The name is elvish (Sindarin) for ‘silver birch’, but birch is a poor source of timber for boat-building, so it seems likely that there were other kinds of tree.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;5&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;silver&lt;/em&gt;. Eärendil is associated with silver from the earliest accounts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He launched his bark like a silver spark […]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And his face in silver flame. […]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the mighty silver one. […]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In his argent-timbered bark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1914). ‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’. In Christopher Tolkien (1984). &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt;, p. 268. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How her sails were all silvern and taper her mast,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And silver her throat with foam&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1914). ‘The Bidding of the Minstrel’, lines 30–31. In Christopher Tolkien (1984). &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt;, p. 270. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;7&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;like a swan&lt;/em&gt;. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And silver her throat with foam and her limber&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Flanks as she swanlike floated past!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘The Bidding of the Minstrel’, lines 31–32.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien often likens boats to swans, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Teleri came in their ships to Valinor, and dwelt upon its eastern strands; and there they made the town and haven of Alqualondë, that is Swanhaven, thus named because they moored there their swans, and their swan-shaped boats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). ‘Annals of Valinor’ V.Y.2111. In Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, p. 125. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;chainèd rings&lt;/em&gt; = (chain) mail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;15&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;habergeon&lt;/em&gt;. A tunic of mail.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;16&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;chalcedony&lt;/em&gt;. A precious or semi-precious mineral, now usually a kind of quartz. This line is quite fanciful, as whatever kind of mineral the word represents, it would hardly be a suitable material for making scabbards. The line survives from ‘Errantry’, where the fancy is more appropriate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of crystal was his habergeon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;his scabbard of chalcedony&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word “chalcedony” is of Latin origin (&lt;em&gt;calcedonius&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek χαλκηδών), which makes it unusual in Tolkien’s mythological writings, where he preferred to use words of Germanic origin. As noted above, in this case the word is a survival from ‘Errantry’, which did not originally belong to the mythology, so that he was free to use a wider vocabulary. Other Latinisms in the poem include “mariner” (line 1) and “flammifer” (line 124).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;18&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;adamant&lt;/em&gt;. A mythical metal that’s harder than steel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;20&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;emerald&lt;/em&gt;. Bilbo says that he added this detail at Aragorn’s urging:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘As a matter of fact it was all mine. Except that Aragorn insisted on my putting in a green stone. He seemed to think it important. I don’t know why.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The green stone worn by Eärendil was the Elessar, the elf-stone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was in Gondolin a jewel-smith named Enerdhil, the greatest of that craft among the Noldor after the death of Fëanor. Enerdhil loved all green things that grew, and his greatest joy was to see the sunlight through the leaves of trees. And it came into his heart to make a jewel within which the clear light of the sun should be imprisoned, but the jewel should be green as leaves. And he made this thing, and even the Noldor marvelled at it. For it is said that those who looked through this stone saw things that were withered or burned healed again or as they were in the grace of their youth, and that the hands of one who held it brought to all that they touched healing from hurt. This gem Enerdhil gave to Idril the King’s daughter, and she wore it upon her breast; and so it was saved from the burning of Gondolin. And before Idril set sail she said to Eärendil her son: “The Elessar I leave with thee, for there are grievous hurts to Middle-earth which thou maybe shalt heal. But to none other shalt thou deliver it.” And indeed at Sirion’s Haven there were many hurts to heal both of Men and Elves, and of beasts that fled thither from the horror of the North; and while Eärendil dwelt there they were healed and prospered, and all things were for a while green and fair. But when Eärendil began his great voyages upon the Sea he wore the Elessar upon his breast, for amongst all his searchings the thought was always before him: that he might perhaps find Idril again; and his first memory of Middle-earth was the green stone above her breast, as she sang above his cradle while Gondolin was still in flower. So it was that the Elessar passed away, when Eärendil returned no more to Middle-earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien. ‘The Elessar’. In Christopher Tolkien (1982). &lt;em&gt;Unfinished Tales&lt;/em&gt;, p. 249. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either two elf-stones were made, or the first stone was returned somehow to Middle-earth, for later Galadriel gives one to Aragorn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yet maybe this will lighten your heart,’ said Galadriel; ‘for it was left in my care to be given to you, should you pass through this land.’ Then she lifted from her lap a great stone of a clear green, set in a silver brooch that was wrought in the likeness of an eagle with outspread wings; and as she held it up the gem flashed like the sun shining through the leaves of spring. ‘This stone I gave to Celebrían my daughter, and she to hers; and now it comes to you as a token of hope. In this hour take the name that was foretold for you, Elessar, the Elfstone of the house of Elendil!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “token of hope” she means the hope that Aragorn shall be able to marry Celebrían’s daughter Arwen, which is why mentioning the stone in the poem is so significant to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;23&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;bewildered on enchanted ways&lt;/em&gt;. After the destruction of the Two Trees, the gods defended Valinor with enchantments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that time, which songs call the Hiding of Valinor, the Enchanted Isles were set, and filled with shadows and bewilderment, and all the seas about were filled with shadows; and these isles were strung across the Shadowy Seas from north to south before Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle, is reached, sailing west; and hardly might any vessel come between them in the gloom or win through to the Bay of Elvenhome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). &lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6. In Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, p. 266. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;24&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mortal lands&lt;/em&gt;. The lands of Middle-earth, where mortals live, in contrast to Valinor, the land of the gods, where the inhabitants are immortal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now measured time came into the world, and the growth, changing, and ageing of all things was hereafter more swift, even in Valinor, but most swift in the Hither Lands upon Middle-earth, the mortal regions between the seas of East and West.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘Annals of Valinor’, p. 135.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;25&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Narrow Ice&lt;/em&gt;. A frozen strait:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the North these shores, in the ancient days after the Battle of the Gods, sloped ever westward, until in the northernmost parts of the earth only a narrow sea divided the Outer Land, upon which Valinor was built, from the Hither Lands; but this narrow sea was filled with grinding ice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3, p. 242.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;27&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;nether&lt;/em&gt; = southern.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;27&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;waste&lt;/em&gt; = desert.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;30&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Night of Naught&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps the same place as “Evernight” on line 53.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;32&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;shining shore&lt;/em&gt;. Eärendil is seeking the shore of Valinor, which shines with gems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many jewels the Noldor gave them [the Teleri], opals and diamonds and pale crystals, which they strewed upon the shores and scattered in the pools. Marvellous were the beaches of Elende in those days. And many pearls they won for themselves from the sea, and their halls were of pearl, and of pearl were the mansions of Elwë at the Haven of the Swans, lit with many lamps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3, p. 250.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;32&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;light he sought&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps this is the “light of Valinor”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still therefore the light of Valinor is greater and fairer than upon Middle-earth, because the Sun resteth there, and the lights of heaven draw nearer to the land in that region; moreover the Valar store the radiance of the Sun in many vessels, and in vats and pools for their comfort in times of dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 6, p. 266.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;35&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;from west to east&lt;/em&gt;. Middle-earth lies to the east of Valinor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eärendel found not Tuor nor Idril, nor came he ever on that journey to the shores of Valinor, defeated by shadows and enchantment, driven by repelling winds, until in longing for Elwing he turned him homeward toward the East. And his heart bade him haste, for a sudden fear was fallen on him out of dreams, and the winds that before he had striven with might not now bear him back as swift as his desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 17, p. 152.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;36&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;unheralded&lt;/em&gt; = unannounced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;37&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;flying Elwing came to him&lt;/em&gt;. This line is rather more mysterious than it needed to be due to eight missing lines here (see the discussion in my other answer). Elwing escaped from the sack of the havens of Sirion by throwing herself into the sea, and the sea-god Ulmo turned her into a bird:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so came in the end to pass the last and cruellest of the slayings of Elf by Elf; and that was the third of the great wrongs achieved by the accursed oath. For the sons of Fëanor came down upon the exiles of Gondolin and the remnant of Doriath and destroyed them. […] And yet Maidros gained not the Silmaril, for Elwing seeing that all was lost and her child Elrond taken captive, eluded the host of Maidros, and with the Nauglafring upon her breast she cast herself into the sea, and perished as folk thought. But Ulmo bore her up and he gave unto her the likeness of a great white bird, and upon her breast there shone as a star the shining Silmaril, as she flew over the water to seek Eärendel her beloved. And on a time of night Eärendel at the helm saw her come towards him, as a white cloud under moon exceeding swift, as a star over the sea moving in strange course, a pale flame on wings of storm. And it is sung that she fell from the air upon the timbers of Wingelot, in a swoon, nigh unto death for the urgency of her speed, and Eärendel took her unto his bosom. And in the morn with marvelling eyes he beheld his wife in her own form beside him with her hair upon his face; and she slept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 17, p. 153.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;40&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;carcanet&lt;/em&gt;. A jewelled necklace. The Nauglafring (or “Nauglamír” in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;) was a necklace made by Dwarves for Thingol, king of Doriath, in which the Silmaril was set. It was an unlucky piece of jewellery, the cause of many deaths.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;41&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Silmaril&lt;/em&gt;. The Silmarils were three jewels made by the elvish craftsman Fëanor, and stolen by the dark lord Morgoth. They were the cause of much strife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he [Fëanor] swore a terrible oath. His seven sons leaped straight-way to his side and took the selfsame vow together, each with drawn sword. They swore an oath which none shall break, and none should take, by the name of the Allfather, calling the Everlasting Dark upon them, if they kept it not; and Manwë they named in witness, and Varda, and the Holy Mount, vowing to pursue with vengeance and hatred to the ends of the world Vala, Demon, Elf, or Man as yet unbom, or any creature great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5, p. 257.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;42&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;living light&lt;/em&gt;. The Silmarils contained the light of the Two Trees of Valinor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fëanor, son of Finwë, began a long and marvellous labour; and he summoned all his lore, and power, and subtle skill; for he purposed to make things more fair than any of the Eldar had yet made, that should last beyond the end of all. Three jewels he made, and named them Silmarils. A living fire burned within them that was blended of the light of the Two Trees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4, p. 249.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;45&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Otherworld&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps another name for Valinor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;47&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tarmenel&lt;/em&gt;. An elvish (Quenya) word meaning “high heaven”, apparently a region of the atmosphere; perhaps this is another name for Ilmen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ilmen is that air that is clear and pure being pervaded by light though it gives no light. Ilmen lies above Vista, and is not great in depth, but is deepest in the West and East, and least in the North and South. In Valinor the air is Ilmen, but Vista flows in at times especially in Elvenhome, part of which is at the eastern feet of the Mountains; and if Valinor is darkened and this air is not cleansed by the light of the Blessed Realm, it takes the form of shadows and grey mists. But Ilmen and Vista will mingle being of like nature, but Ilmen is breathed by the Gods, and purified by the passage of the luminaries; for in Ilmen Varda ordained the courses of the stars, and later of the Moon and Sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1930). ‘Of the Fashion of the World’. In Christopher Tolkien (1986). &lt;em&gt;The Shaping of Middle-earth&lt;/em&gt;, p. 236. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;52&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;from east to west&lt;/em&gt;. Eärendil sails away from Middle-earth towards Valinor again.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;53&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Evernight&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps a region where it is always night. Compare “Evereven” on line 101. An early draft of the poem also had “Evermorn” and “Evernoon” to complete the cycle. This doesn’t seem to correspond to any place in Tolkien’s cosmology, so it may be a fanciful idea that survived into the published version, like “chalcedony” on line 16.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;55&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;leagues unlit&lt;/em&gt;. This is consistent with the interpretation that ‘Evernight’ on line 53 is a region where it is always night.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;56&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;that drowned before the Days began&lt;/em&gt;. When the gods first came to Middle-earth they built two great lamps to light the world, and there was no cycle of day and night. When these were destroyed many lands were drowned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the light of the lamps of the Valar went out over the Earth so that all was lit as it were in a changeless day. […] But at length Melkor returned in secret […] and when he saw his time he revealed himself and made war again on the Valar, his brethren; and he threw down the lamps, and a new darkness fell on the Earth, arid all growth ceased; and in the fall of the lamps (which were very great) the seas were lifted up in fury, and many lands were drowned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘Ainulindalë’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 32–33. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first Days were those creating by the waxing and waning of the light of the Two Trees of Valinor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;57&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;strands of pearl&lt;/em&gt;. See note to line 32.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;58&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;the music long&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps the music of the sea-elves, who lived in the part of Valinor where Eärendil came ashore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Teleri dwelt long by the shores of the western sea […] and they grew to love the sound of the waves, and they made songs filled with the music of water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3, p. 243.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;60&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;yellow gold and jewels wan&lt;/em&gt; See note to line 32.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;61&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;the Mountain&lt;/em&gt;. Taniquetil, the highest mountain of Valinor, on which stands Ilmarin, the hall of the god Manwë.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;62&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;knees&lt;/em&gt;. The foot-hills of Taniquetil.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;63&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Valinor&lt;/em&gt;. The land of the gods.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;63&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eldamar&lt;/em&gt;. The homeland of the Elves in Valinor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;65&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;escaped from night&lt;/em&gt;. That is, from ‘Evernight’ (line 53).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;66&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;haven&lt;/em&gt; = harbour, port.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;67&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;white&lt;/em&gt;. The harbour of Alqualondë in Valinor is the “white haven” because the sea-elves (Teleri) have white ships resembling swans (see note to line 7). Compare with the “Grey Havens” of the Third Age:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the Elves of the High Kindred had not yet forsaken Middle-earth, and they dwelt still at that time at the Grey Havens away to the west, and in other places within reach of the Shire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). ‘Concerning Hobbits’. In &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;67&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elvenhome&lt;/em&gt;. Eldamar; see note to line 63.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;69&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hill of Ilmarin&lt;/em&gt;. Ilmarin is the home of the god Manwë upon the summit of Taniquetil.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;71&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;lamplit towers of Tirion&lt;/em&gt;. Tirion was a city of the Elves in Eldamar (see note to line 63):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Elves took possession of Eldamar, and began the building of the green hill of Túna in sight of the Sea. And upon Túna they raised the white walls of the Watchful City, Tirion the Hallowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘The Annals of Aman’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;, p. 84. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;72&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shadowmere&lt;/em&gt;. In a very early description of the building of Tirion (which at that point was called “Kor”) an inlet of the Shadowy Seas approached the city, and perhaps that is meant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Behold there is a low place in that ring of mountains that guards Valinor, and there the shining of the Trees steals through from the plain beyond and gilds the dark waters of the bay of Arvalin, but a great beach of finest sand, golden in the blaze of Laurelin, white in the light of Silpion, runs inland there, where in the trouble of the ancient seas a shadowy arm of water had groped in toward Valinor, but now there is only a slender water fringed with white. At the head of this long creek there stands a lonely hill which gazes at the loftier mountains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1918). ‘The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kor’. In Christopher Tolkien (1983). &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 1&lt;/em&gt;, p. 125. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;73&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;errantry&lt;/em&gt; = wandering in search of adventure. The word survives from the earliest version of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And beyond the ken of mortal men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Set his lonely errantry,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’, lines 43–44.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;74&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;melodies they taught to him&lt;/em&gt;. “They” are the elves of Tirion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;79&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Calacirian&lt;/em&gt;. The only pass through the Mountains of Valinor. See note to line 104.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, though they saw and marvelled at the light and bliss of Valinor, the Elves forgot not Middle-earth and the starlight whence they came, and they longed at times to look upon the stars and walk a while in shadow. Wherefore the Gods made that cleft in the mountain-wall which is called the Kalakilya the Pass of Light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). ‘Lhammas’. In Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, p. 189. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;80&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;hidden land&lt;/em&gt;. Valinor is the “hidden land” because it is guarded by a wall of mountains (see note to line 104), and by the enchantments of the Shadowy Seas (see note to line 23).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;80&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;forlorn&lt;/em&gt; = lost, doomed. Eärendil believed that he would die after delivering his message to the gods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Eärendel, alone of living Men, landed on the immortal shores; and he said to Elwing and to those that were with him […]: ‘Here shall none but myself set foot, lest you fall under the wrath of the Gods and the doom of death; for it is forbidden. But that peril I will take on myself for the sake of the Two Kindreds.’ And Elwing answered: ‘Then shall our paths be sundered for ever. Nay, all thy perils I will take on myself also!’ And she leaped into the white foam and ran towards him; but Eärendel was sorrowful, for he deemed that they would now both die ere many days were past. And there they bade farewell to their companions and were taken from them for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). ‘The Conclusion of the Quenta Silmarillion’. In Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, p. 358. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;81&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;timeless halls&lt;/em&gt;. Elsewhere in the mythology the Timeless Halls are the dwellings of the gods outside the world:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Valar entered into the World they were at first astounded and at a loss, for it was as if naught was yet made which they had seen in vision, and all was but on point to begin, and yet unshapen; and it was dark. For the Great Music had been but the growth and flowering of thought in the Timeless Halls, and the Vision only a foreshowing; but now they had entered in at the beginning of Time, and the Valar perceived that the World had been but foreshadowed and foresung, and they must achieve it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘Ainulindalë’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;, p. 14. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that can’t be the meaning here: the halls in this line must refer to Ilmarin, the dwelling of the god Manwë on Taniquetil (see note to line 61), and “timeless” must be used in the sense “unaffected by the passing of time” and not “where time does not pass”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;83&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elder King&lt;/em&gt;. This is Manwë, king of the gods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the highest and holiest of the Valar was Manwë Súlimo, and he dwelt in Valinor, sitting in majesty upon his throne; and his throne was upon the pinnacle of Taniquetil, which is the highest of the mountains of the world, and stands upon the borders of Valinor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1937). ‘The Music of the Ainur’. In Christopher Tolkien (1987). &lt;em&gt;The Lost Road&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 177–178. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;87&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;beyond the world were visions showed&lt;/em&gt;. The “visions” are the plans of the gods for the world and its peoples. See note to line 81.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;89&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A ship then new they built for him&lt;/em&gt;. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now at the bidding of the Man of the Sea do those islanders with great speed fashion a new ship for Ælfwine and his fellows, since he would fare no further in Orm’s ship; and its timbers were cut, as the ancient sailor had asked, from a grove of magic oaks far inland that grew about a high place of the Gods, sacred to Ulmo Lord of the Sea, and seldom were any of them felled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A ship that is wrought of this wood,’ said the Man of the Sea, ‘may be lost, but those that sail in it shall not in that voyage lose their lives; yet may they perhaps be cast where they little think to come.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1920). ‘Ælfwine of England’. In Christopher Tolkien (1984). &lt;em&gt;The Book of Lost Tales 2&lt;/em&gt;, p. 319. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;90&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;mithril&lt;/em&gt;. This is the first mention of the metal in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, but Gandalf explains it later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;em&gt;Mithril&lt;/em&gt;! All folk desired it. It could be beaten like copper, and polished like glass; and the Dwarves could make of it a metal, light and yet harder than tempered steel. Its beauty was like to that of common silver, but the beauty of &lt;em&gt;mithril&lt;/em&gt; did not tarnish or grow dim.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 4.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;92&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;silver mast&lt;/em&gt;. This passage corresponds in detail to the description of Eärendil’s ship in lines 5–8: the first ship had silver sails, the second a silver mast; the first had silver lanterns, the second the Silmaril as a lantern; the first had banners with light laid on it, the second a banner bright with the light of the Silmaril.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;94&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;living flame&lt;/em&gt;. See note to line 42.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;95&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elbereth&lt;/em&gt;. The elvish (Sindarin) name for the goddess Varda, meaning “star-queen”. Other names for her include “Gilthoniel” (star-kindler) and “Fanuilos” (snow-white), which have already appeared in Gildor’s song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gilthoniel! O Elbereth!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clear are thy eyes and bright thy breath!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Snow-white! Snow-white! We sing to thee&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In a far land beyond the Sea.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book I, chapter 3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;97&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;wings immortal&lt;/em&gt;. A poetic description of Eärendil’s apotheosis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they took Vingelot, and they hallowed it, and they bore it away through Valinor to the uttermost rim of the world, and there it passed through the Door of Night and was lifted up even into the oceans of heaven. Now fair and marvellous was that vessel made, and it was filled with a wavering flame, pure and bright; and Eärendel the mariner sat at the helm, glistening with dust of elven-gems; and the Silmaril was bound upon his brow. Far he journeyed in that ship, even into the starless voids; but most often was he seen at morning or at eve, glimmering in sunrise or sunset, as he came back to Valinor from voyages beyond the confines of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘The Conclusion of the Quenta Silmarillion’, p. 361.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;99&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;shoreless skies&lt;/em&gt;. Tolkien often metaphorically likens skies to seas; compare “oceans of heaven” in the note to line 97.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;100&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;behind the Sun&lt;/em&gt;. When Venus is the evening star it appears to follow the path of the Sun in the sky. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He threaded his path o’er the aftermath&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the splendour of the Sun&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’, lines 9–10.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;101&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Evereven&lt;/em&gt;. See note on “Evernight” (line 53). This may be the same place as “Ever-eve” in Galadriel’s song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beneath the stars of Ever-eve in Eldamar it shone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;104&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mountain Wall&lt;/em&gt;. A chain of mountains cutting off Valinor from the world, and breached by a single pass (see note to line 79).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The gods] built then in the uttermost West the land of Valinor. It was bordered by the Outer Sea, and the Wall of the World beyond that fences out the Void and the Eldest Dark; but eastward they built the Mountains of Valinor, that are highest upon earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quenta Noldorinwa&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1, p. 80.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;105&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;World’s End&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps this means the literal “Wall of the World” (see note to line 104), in which lies the “Door of Night” through which Eärendil passed (see note to line 97).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;108&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;island&lt;/em&gt; = separate, solitary. Compare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he glimmering passed to the starless vast&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As an isled lamp at sea&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star’, lines 41–42.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;110&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;before the Sun&lt;/em&gt;. When Venus is the morning star it appears to precede the path of the Sun in the sky. Compare with line 100.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;112&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Norland&lt;/em&gt;. The northern lands of Middle-earth; Beleriand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;114&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;sore&lt;/em&gt; = sorrowful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;116&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elder Days&lt;/em&gt;. The First Age of Middle-earth.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;118&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;orbèd&lt;/em&gt; = spherical.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;120&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hither Shores&lt;/em&gt;. The shores on this side of the Great Sea, that is, the shores of Middle-earth. See notes to lines 24 and 25.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;120&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;where mortals are&lt;/em&gt;. See note to line 24.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;124&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flammifer&lt;/em&gt; = flame-bearer. A Latinism: see note to line 16.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;124&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Westernesse&lt;/em&gt;. This is normally a name for Númenor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And of Eärendil came the Kings of Númenor, that is Westernesse.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book I, chapter 11.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but this does not seem to be the right meaning here, as Eärendil’s voyage happened prior to the founding of Númenor. When Venus is the evening star, it shines to the west, so perhaps “Westernesse” is used here meaning simply “the west”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T17:44:54.797" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T17:44:54.797" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14904" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13704" CreationDate="2020-07-13T21:22:21.210" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;No. &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt; is very far from any drug culture, and from methamphetamine usage during war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Magic potions are older than print. They appear in Greek mythology, for example (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason#The_arrival_in_Colchis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jason&lt;/a&gt; puts the dragon to sleep with a potion, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circe#Homer%27s_Odyssey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Circe&lt;/a&gt; turns men into swine with a potion, not to mention love potions). I can't name a potion that grants strength or invincibility, but I put this down to my unfamiliarity with mythology: it's hardly such a far-fetched idea that it could only arise from a direct real-world source of inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of the magic potion in &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt; is very different from methamphetamine. The magic potion has a purely physical effect: it primarily grants superhuman strength, and also cures some ailments that make one weak. It does not have a direct effect on mood. Characters are usually happy after drinking the potion, but that's because they were happy before: the Gauls take the potion before fighting, and they love fighting. I can't recall the book(s) offhand, but I do remember Astérix being annoyed at an adversary (a Roman?) who is obstructing him, drinking some potion, and thumping away the obstruction. This doesn't make him feel any less annoyed, it just removes an obstacle that was in the way. This is completely different from methamphetamine, which as I understand it enables feats of strength because it allows one to ignore the limiting feedback from one's body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gauls are depicted as enjoying life. They are the very picture of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bon_vivant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;bons vivants&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. They don't need drugs for that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Violence in &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt; is always sanitized. Pain is only conveyed discretely if at all and injuries only last a few panels. Nobody dies from having their head bashed into a wall. This is true even in &lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Roman Agent&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;La Zizanie&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Great Divide&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Le Grand fossé&lt;/em&gt;), both of which can be said to criticize violent conflict. &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt; is never about the horrors of war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In French culture, the use of methamphetamine in war is little known: it's primarily known for its use for doping in sport and by students who want to stay awake. As far as I know, amphetamines were not in common use in the French army, unlike German, Italian, US and British armies. At least that's what I gather from French language sources (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lemonde.fr/culture/article/2019/08/20/allies-et-nazis-sous-amphetamines-pervitine-et-benzedrine-drogues-de-combat_5501050_3246.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article in &lt;em&gt;Le Monde&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; mentioning only German and British trooes, not French troops; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.defense.gouv.fr/actualites/articles/optimiser-la-vigilance-du-combattant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern article published by the French army&lt;/a&gt; discussing historical use during WWII by German, British and US troops, but not by French troops, and stating that the French army today doesn't use them). It is unlikely that a French author would have associated amphetamines with war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2XpNBQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA139&amp;amp;dq=Goscinny+potion+magique&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjsgZuf_MrqAhUD1qwKHenBDyMQ6AEwA3oECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Goscinny%20potion%20magique&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Goscinny raconte les secrets d'Astérix&lt;/em&gt; (René Goscinny, Cherche Midi, 2014)&lt;/a&gt;, René Goscinny, the writer of &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt;, briefly discusses the origin of the magic potion. My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the magic potion that grants the indomitable Gauls superhuman strength, it was only meant to appear in the first episode. But it had so much success that we kept it. (…) The magic potion is something I use to show that our wars are not serious, since all it takes to make everything better is a sip of a drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the intended narrative goal is also completely different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T21:49:26.513" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T21:49:26.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14905" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14921" CreationDate="2020-07-13T21:32:27.593" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&lt;/em&gt; contains the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Did I ever go to District Two?&amp;quot; Maude Ivory asked.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;No, baby, that's out west. The Covey stayed more east,&amp;quot; Barb Azure told her.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Sometimes we went north,&amp;quot; said Tam Amber, and Coriolanus realized it was the first time he'd heard him speak.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;To what district?&amp;quot; asked Coriolanus.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;No district, really,&amp;quot; said Barb Azure. &amp;quot;Up where the Capitol doesn't care about.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Coriolanus felt embarrassed for them. No such place existed. At least not anymore. &lt;strong&gt;The Capitol controlled the known world.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume that &amp;quot;up north&amp;quot; would refer to somewhere in modern-day Canada. With that said, what does the text mean by the Capitol controlling the &amp;quot;known world&amp;quot;? Does its influence extend beyond North America?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-13T21:43:08.917" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T17:48:05.860" Title="Does the Capitol's influence extend beyond the United States?" Tags="&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8533" CreationDate="2020-07-13T21:47:32.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least the early albums in the Asterix series don't directly tell if the potion gives invincibility in addition to superhuman strength and speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, they do: the potion is often referred to as “the magic potion that makes one invincible”. I don't recall offhand if the word “invincible” (&lt;em&gt;invincible&lt;/em&gt;) appears in the first album (&lt;em&gt;Asterix the Gaul&lt;/em&gt; — &lt;em&gt;Astérix le Gaulois&lt;/em&gt;). The text makes invincibility broadly synonymous with superhuman strength and speed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invincibility does not mean invulnerability. This is already established in the first album when a roman (Caligula Minus) drinks the potion (while disguised as a Gaul) and holds a boulder over his head. He throws the boulder in the air and it falls on his head, crushing him (with cartoon violence, as always in &lt;em&gt;Asterix&lt;/em&gt;, so he gets out from under the boulder). Getafix (the druid) remarks that there is such a thing as a potion of invulnerability, but this is not the one. As far as I recall, a potion of invulnerability never comes up again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite being a popular phrasing both in the books and in French popular culture, “magic potion of invincibility” is not quite accurate. It makes the drinker unbeatable in an unarmed fight (assuming the opponent hasn't drunk the potion himself: otherwise it's a draw, no matter how strong the fighters are naturally) — although the Normans (&lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Normans&lt;/em&gt;) come close. But the potion does not make one immune to weapons such as spears and swords (for example, in &lt;em&gt;Asterix and the Laurel Wreath&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Les Lauriers de César&lt;/em&gt;), at one point, Astérix warns Obélix not to resist when they are confronted with a large troupe of elite Roman guards.). The Gaul village always beat the Roman legions around them in part because they mostly get the dregs: it's a posting that Roman soldiers dread, given out as punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that invincibility would take away a lot of the tension from the stories and I doubt this has been René Goscinny's and Albert Uderzo's original intention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't their original intention. But they knew of and embraced this effect when they made it a recurring element. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=2XpNBQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA139&amp;amp;dq=Goscinny+potion+magique&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjsgZuf_MrqAhUD1qwKHenBDyMQ6AEwA3oECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Goscinny%20potion%20magique&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Goscinny raconte les secrets d'Astérix&lt;/em&gt; (René Goscinny, Cherche Midi, 2014)&lt;/a&gt; (my translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the magic potion that grants the indomitable Gauls superhuman strength, it was only meant to appear in the first episode. But it had so much success that we kept it. The potion (…) had unforeseeable consequences on the flow of the story. It killed suspense. We know in advance that the Gauls will win! But maybe this is an advantage. The reader never really fears for the Gauls… And never really fears the Romans… The magic potion is something I use to show that our wars are not serious, since all it takes to make everything better is a sip of a drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T21:47:32.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14907" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14883" CreationDate="2020-07-13T22:53:25.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A clergyman's son was often expected to a little wild, in revolt against a strict upbringing.  Therefore a perfectly regular clergyman's son would be irregular -- that is, not what was expected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;were&amp;quot; is used because it's in the subjunctive mode, expressing a hypothetical condition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Blue Lion is a pub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T22:53:25.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14788" CreationDate="2020-07-13T23:24:36.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There appears to be evidence that Maupassant and Richepin met each other. A contemporary author, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octave_Mirbeau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Octave Mirbeau&lt;/a&gt; (1848 – 1917), wrote in a letter to the sculptor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Auguste Rodin&lt;/a&gt; dating from December 1885 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=O3nV83vDIKwC&amp;amp;pg=PA406&amp;amp;dq=richepin+maupassant+mirbeau&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjZutvSp8vqAhUEyqQKHdObCtAQ6AEwA3oECAMQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=richepin%20maupassant&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le diner des &lt;em&gt;Bons Cosaques&lt;/em&gt; est fixé au vendredi 8 janvier. Il aura lieu au Restaurant du Pied de Mouton, 29 rue Vauvilliers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mirbeau mentions neither Maupassant nor Richepin in his letter, but a footnote in volume 1 of a recent editions of his letters, &lt;a href=&quot;https://lagedhomme.com/ouvrages/octave+mirbeau/correspondance+generale+i/3075&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Correspondance générale I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2003), adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le premier dîner regroupait, outre Mirbeau, Hervieu et Rodin, Félicien Rops, Bourges, Bonnières, Bouchor, Maupassant, Richepin, Bourget, Huysmans, Grosclaude, Lavedan, Rod, Raffaëlli, auxquelles s'adjoindront par al suite, Ganderax, Cazin, Monet, Heredia, Renoir, Lemaître, Mallarmé etc.&#xA;Il aura lieu le premier vendredi de chaque mois.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first diner brought together, besides Mirbeau, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Hervieu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hervieu&lt;/a&gt; and Rodin, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licien_Rops&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Félicien Rops&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89l%C3%A9mir_Bourges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bourges&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_de_Bonni%C3%A8res&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bonnières&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Bouchor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bouchor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Maupassant&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Richepin&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bourget&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bourget&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joris-Karl_Huysmans&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huysmans&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Grosclaude&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grosclaude&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Lavedan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lavedan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Rod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rod&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois_Raffa%C3%ABlli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raffaëlli&lt;/a&gt;, who would later be joined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Ganderax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ganderax&lt;/a&gt;, Cazin [&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Cazin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marie Cazin&lt;/a&gt;?, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Charles_Cazin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean-Charles Cazin&lt;/a&gt;?], &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Monet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monet&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9-Maria_de_Heredia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heredia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Auguste_Renoir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renoir&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Lema%C3%AEtre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lemaître&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Mallarm%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mallarmé&lt;/a&gt; etc.&#xA;It would take place every first Friday of the month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnote also quotes an article by Marcelle Adam in &lt;em&gt;Le Figaro&lt;/em&gt; dated 22 May 1908, in which the journalist wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J'ai connu là Maupassant, séduisant et capricieux; (...) Richepin, fougueux et bohème; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is where I met Maupassant, attractive and capricious; (...) Richepin, enthusiastic and bohemian; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear from this information how well Maupassant and Richepin knew each other; only that they met at least once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-13T23:24:36.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14909" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14910" CreationDate="2020-07-14T06:50:41.350" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Youth_(Conrad)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Youth: A Narrative&lt;/a&gt;, Joseph Conrad writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We had fair breezes, smooth water right into the tropics, and the old&#xA;Judea lumbered along in the sunshine. When she went eight knots everything cracked aloft, and we tied our caps to our heads; but mostly she strolled on at the rate of three miles an hour. What could you expect? She was tired—that old ship. Her youth was where mine is—where yours is— you fellows who listen to this yarn; and what friend would throw your years and your weariness in your face? We didn’t grumble at her. To us aft, at least, it seemed as though we had been born in her, reared in her, had lived in her for ages, had never known any other ship. I would just as soon have abused the old village church at home for not being a cathedral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't exactly understand the last sentence, but my intuitions are that the sentiment of the last sentence contradicts that of the former sentences. It seems to me, that initially Marlow expresses a sentimentality for the ship, and possibly a veneration for its endurance as it becomes increasingly dilapidated, and requiring of repairs during its journey to Java head, whereas the last sentence conveys the sentiment that he would rather chastise a similar old object (a church) for not having the efficacy that an, assumedly, well-furnished and maintained cathedral would, without consideration of its past service. Is this sarcasm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T07:34:55.057" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T08:07:52.933" Title="Why would Marlow have &quot;abused the old church at home for not being a cathedral&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14910" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14909" CreationDate="2020-07-14T07:01:51.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator first says &amp;quot;We didn't grumble at her&amp;quot;, and then says &amp;quot;I would &lt;strong&gt;just as soon have&lt;/strong&gt;...&amp;quot; This is saying that he &lt;em&gt;wouldn't&lt;/em&gt; grumble at the old church, and he doesn't grumble at the ship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In both cases, he's saying that he's satisfied with what he's got. No matter how much grumble, your old local church isn't going to turn into a grand cathedral. It's pointless.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the same vein, it's also pointless to grumble at the ship. It's an old ship, and it's been through a lot. It'll go at the speed that it goes and that's that. It'll do as much good to complain about the old church not being a grand cathedral as it'll do to complain about the ship being old and not the fastest - i.e., none. It's pointless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;I would just as soon&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;I am equally likely to do X as to do Y&amp;quot;. In this case, X is &amp;quot;berate the church&amp;quot; and Y is &amp;quot;berate the ship&amp;quot;. He is equally likely to berate the church as he is to berate the ship. Since he has already stated that the likelihood of him berating the ship is none, we can conclude that the likelihood of him berating the church is equal to that - also none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-07-14T08:07:52.933" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T08:07:52.933" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14899" CreationDate="2020-07-14T09:18:37.147" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As precise as Conrad is with his nautical descriptions, I think if he had meant a mast was consumed he would have said so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spent a number of years as a merchant seaman, though Im not aware he was ever in a ship that went on fire. My reading is that he is just describing the vigour of the first flame to break from the space below decks, and the effect of the rush of oxygen into the lazarette propelling it high and bright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-07-14T09:18:37.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14912" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14914" CreationDate="2020-07-14T17:10:37.060" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201031h.html#story9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Vampire of the Village&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, the author was describing Father Brown while visiting some persons, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conversation of Miss Carstairs-Carew, on whom he called next, was certainly calculated to paint the parson’s son in the darkest colours. But as it was devoted to blasting him with all the special vices which Father Brown was quite certain the young man did not exhibit, he put it down to a common combination of Puritanism and gossip. The lady, though lofty, was quite gracious, however, and offered the visitor a small glass of port-wine and a slice of seed-cake, in the manner of everybody’s most ancient great-aunts, before he managed to escape from a sermon on the general decay of morals and manners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His next port of call was very much of a contrast; for he disappeared down a dark and dirty alley, where Miss Carstairs-Carew would have refused to follow him &lt;strong&gt;even in thought&lt;/strong&gt;; and then into a narrow tenement made noisier by a high and declamatory voice in an attic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean &amp;quot;not at all&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or not even in imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T08:54:30.897" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T08:54:30.897" Title="What does &quot;follow him even in thought&quot; mean in &quot;The Vampire of the Village&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-14T23:08:26.783" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Question summed up: Can anyone help me find the part of Eugène Sue's &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt; wherein a sinister Jesuit plot is unveiled, which may have, through a game of 'telephone' by plagiarism, inspired parts of the anti-Semitic forgery, &lt;em&gt;The Protocols of the Elders of Zion&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one of the essays in his &lt;em&gt;Six Walks in the Fictional Woods&lt;/em&gt;, Umberto Eco mentions that the French writer Eugène Sue's last novel &lt;em&gt;Les Mystères du peuple&lt;/em&gt; (in English &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt;) includes the revelation of a &amp;quot;Jesuit world conspiracy.&amp;quot; Eco claims that this was more or less plagiarized by the French writer Maurice Joly in his &lt;em&gt;Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu&lt;/em&gt;, wherein the plot is transferred to Machiavelli (who is a stand-in for Napoleon III). Joly's book was then, in turn, a major source plagiarized for the infamous anti-Semitic forgery &lt;em&gt;The Protocols of the Elders of Zion&lt;/em&gt;. Still following?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being interested in how conspiracy theories evolve, &amp;quot;borrow,&amp;quot; and converge, I wanted to read the original bit in &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt;. My issue is that &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt; is actually a series of 19 novels and novellas, and Eco doesn't indicate in his essay in which book this passage appears. Rather than read the whole thing, I was hoping somebody might know, or advise how to narrow it down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's what I know:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An important distinction is that the series in question is &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;The Mystery of Paris&lt;/em&gt;, another, much more famous, book by Sue. Nor is it &lt;em&gt;The Wandering Jew&lt;/em&gt;, another more famous book of his that includes Jesuit villains.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The primary English translation of &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt; is by Daniel De Leon.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;18 of the 19 English translations (as well as some, maybe all, in the original French) are &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1186&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;; the odd one out is available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=IHFJAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;rdid=book-IHFJAQAAMAAJ&amp;amp;rdot=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eco includes a lengthy quote in his essay (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eZEKBAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, pp 134-135 - if the link just takes you to the book, rather than the pages, use the Search Inside This Book function and look for 'Rodin'). Googling that quote or parts of it only leads you back to the Eco book. So either Eco made it up, or he's not using the De Leon translation (actually fairly likely, since Eco translated books from French himself).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Even doing a text search in the Gutenberg books for some of the most key words in the quote doesn't turn up an obvious candidate.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eco mentions that this part in the book involves (in a further complicating development) a Monsieur Rodin (a character from Sue's &lt;em&gt;The Wandering Jew&lt;/em&gt;), a Rodolphe of Gerolstein (a character from his &lt;em&gt;The Mystery of Paris&lt;/em&gt;), and a Father Roothaan (a real historical figure).  I searched all three names in the text, with hits that seemed to be part of what Eco described ('Rodin' and 'Gerolstein' (but not Rodolphe) occur, but they might be referred to by other titles elsewhere in the text; Roothaan doesn't appear at all, but he was Superior-General of the Jesuits at the time, and there are references that seem to be to a Jesuit Superior-General - but again, none that seem to include the revelation of a plot).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eco claims he identified &amp;quot;no less than seven pages&amp;quot; of Joly's book that appear to be lifted from Sue's. So the source material in Sue isn't just some passing sentence, it must be several pages worth of narrative.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the Protocols were stolen liberally from Joly is well-documented. However, any mention of Joly stealing from Sue always points back to the Eco essay. It seems unlikely to me that he would make something like that up with so bold a claim as having found 7 pages worth of cribbing. (Don't be confused, though, he also talks about this connection his fictional novel &lt;em&gt;Foucault's Pendulum&lt;/em&gt;, which just complicates things more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not holding out much hope that anyone has actually read &lt;em&gt;The Mysteries of the People&lt;/em&gt; and can point me straight to the right book, but I was thinking maybe somebody who knows French lit, or knows how an Italian might translate French into English, might think of something I haven't and can give me a new clue to pursue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10445" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T04:59:51.007" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T04:59:51.007" Title="What book of Eugène Sue's 'The Mysteries of the People' inspired M. Joly's 'Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli &amp; Montesquieu', as claimed by U. Eco?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;plagiarism&gt;&lt;umberto-eco&gt;&lt;eugene-sue&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14912" CreationDate="2020-07-15T01:51:02.010" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not even in imagination.  She would have thought that even thinking about such a place would taint her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T01:51:02.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14916" CreationDate="2020-07-15T03:44:49.663" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 3 of &lt;em&gt;The Phantom of the Opera&lt;/em&gt;, it says that the retiring managers had&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;determined to “die game”, as we now say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have searched the web with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10446" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T06:53:37.400" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T09:38:08.097" Title="What does it mean to “die game”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;the-phantom-of-the-opera&gt;&lt;gaston-leroux&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14915" CreationDate="2020-07-15T09:38:08.097" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is the entire sentence from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Phantom_of_the_Opera/Chapter_III&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During  this time, the farewell ceremony was taking place. I have already said that this magnificent function was being given on the occasion of the retirement of M. Debienne and M. Poligny, who had determined to &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;die game,&amp;quot; as we say nowadays&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the corresponding part in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Fant%C3%B4me_de_l%E2%80%99Op%C3%A9ra/Chapitre_III&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French version (on Wikisource)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pendant ce temps avait lieu la cérémonie des adieux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J’ai dit que cette fête magnifique avait été donnée, à l’occasion de leur départ de l’Opéra, par MM. Debienne et Poligny qui avaient voulu mourir &lt;strong&gt;comme nous disons aujourd’hui : en beauté.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can translate &amp;quot;mourir en beauté&amp;quot; (literally &amp;quot;die in beauty&amp;quot;) as &amp;quot;to end on a high note&amp;quot;. (Gareth Rees mentioned in a comment that &amp;quot;game&amp;quot; here means &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gamely#Adverb&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gamely&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of the fact that Debienne and Poligny are retiring as opera managers,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody remarked that the retiring managers looked cheerful, as is the Paris way. None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T09:38:08.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14917" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14919" CreationDate="2020-07-15T11:21:07.527" Score="2" ViewCount="489" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201031h.html#story9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Vampire of the Village&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G. K. Chesterton, Father Brown was talking about an old parson and his son, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I mean,’ said Father Brown, ‘that the son still speaks of his father in a hard unforgiving way; but he seems after all to have done more than his duty by him. I had a talk with the bank manager, and as we were inquiring in confidence into a serious crime, under authority from the police, he told me the facts. The old clergyman has retired from parish work; indeed, this was never actually his parish. Such of the populace, which is pretty pagan, &lt;strong&gt;as goes to church at all, goes to Dutton-Abbot, not a mile away&lt;/strong&gt;. The old man has no private means, but his son is earning good money; and the old man is well looked after. He gave me some port of absolutely first-class vintage; I saw rows of dusty old bottles of it; and I left him sitting down to a little lunch quite recherche in an old-fashioned style. It must be done on the young man’s money.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &amp;quot;at all&amp;quot; be used in a positive statement, and what does it mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T08:54:28.183" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T08:54:28.183" Title="What does &quot;at all&quot; mean in &quot;The Vampire of the Village&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14917" CreationDate="2020-07-15T11:29:56.800" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not certain what you mean by a &amp;quot;positive statement&amp;quot; here, but what Father Brown is saying here is that most of the town's populace are &amp;quot;pagan&amp;quot; (not Christian) and that the ones who do go to church go to Dutton-Abbot. The &amp;quot;at all&amp;quot; here kind of means &amp;quot;even once&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;occasionally&amp;quot; with an implication that few of them do so consistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T11:29:56.800" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14917" CreationDate="2020-07-15T11:36:03.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, &amp;quot;at all&amp;quot; can be used in a positive sense: think of it as the opposite of &amp;quot;not at all&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/british/at-all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macmillan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/at-all&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge&lt;/a&gt; for the usage of &amp;quot;at all&amp;quot; in a positive sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, the implication is that much of the populace does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; go to church at all: hence the parenthetical &amp;quot;which is pretty pagan&amp;quot;. Maybe the structure of this sentence, with many chunks of just a few words separated by commas, is a bit confusing, so let me rephrase it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such of the populace, which is pretty pagan, as goes to church at all, goes to Dutton-Abbot, not a mile away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The populace is pretty pagan, but those who &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; go to church (at all) go to Dutton-Abbot, less than a mile away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T11:36:03.017" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14920" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14943" CreationDate="2020-07-15T14:51:28.373" Score="3" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;This short Korean folk story has been variously translated into English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thekrazemagazine.com/latest-updates/2019/1/13/korean-folklore-the-tiger-and-the-persimmon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tiger and the Persimmon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/topic/detail/6016&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tiger and Dried Persimmon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pitara.com/fiction-for-kids/stories-for-kids/the-tiger-and-the-dried-persimmons/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tiger and the Dried Persimmons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gogohanguk.com/en/blog/the-tigers-in-korean-folktales/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything about the Korean language, how plurals and articles work and whether there's a different word for &lt;em&gt;dried&lt;/em&gt; persimmons (like raisins vs grapes in English). What is the most accurate translation or way of referring to this story in English? With or without &amp;quot;the&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;dried&amp;quot;, or pluralisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T23:55:03.127" Title="What is the original Korean title of &quot;The Tiger and the Persimmon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14905" CreationDate="2020-07-15T17:48:05.860" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In this post-apocalyptic future, the &amp;quot;known world&amp;quot; seems restricted to North America.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/10784/31394&quot;&gt;Are there other governments in The Hunger Games world?&lt;/a&gt;, a question on another SE site. Throughout the Hunger Games series, there is never any mention of societies or even geographic locations outside of North America. It seems that whatever disaster brought North American society to this post-apocalyptic state also either destroyed the rest of the world too or at least severed it from Panem's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still possible that there are other human societies out there, maybe in a worse state technologically than the Capitol and Panem. But the new rulers of North America either don't have the resources, or don't have the capability, to go out and re-discover those parts of the world. It seems they're content with ruling their own continent and don't even bother about the rest of the world. It's no threat to them, so they're content to live and let live.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the Capitol does control the known world, but its influence doesn't extend beyond North America. It probably does, though, extend beyond what's now the United States: see &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/7620/31394&quot;&gt;Where were the locations of the districts in The Hunger Games?&lt;/a&gt; Although there's no clear information on exactly where the districts and locations of Panem are relative to today's geography, it's at least a strong possibility that parts of what's now Canada and Mexico are also included. There'd be no particular reason for a future post-apocalyptic state to respect our time's borders, anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-15T17:48:05.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14922" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-15T19:05:16.347" Score="1" ViewCount="159" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 23 of &lt;em&gt;Persuasion&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Austen, Anne Elliot and Captain Harville have been discussing whether men or women are more constant in love. Anne says to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I do justice to all that is felt by you, and by those who resemble you.  God forbid that I should undervalue the warm and faithful feelings of any of my fellow-creatures! I should deserve utter contempt if I dared to suppose that true attachment and constancy were known only by woman.  No, I believe you capable of everything great and good in your married lives.  I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as—if I may be allowed the expression—so long as you have an object.  I mean while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. &lt;strong&gt;All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the last sentence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10184" LastEditorUserId="8723" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T11:13:35.270" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T11:13:35.270" Title="Anne Elliot's speech about constancy in love in &quot;Persuasion&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;persuasion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14924" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14807" CreationDate="2020-07-15T19:56:43.237" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Aragorn uses “cheek” here with the meaning “impertinence” or “mild disrespect”. Bilbo has just recited a poem about the mythical figure Eärendil, in verse that is playful in metre and vocabulary, and at times rather fanciful (for example, it’s doubtful that Eärendil’s scabbard was made of chalcedony). But we learn shortly that Eärendil was Elrond’s father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So it was indeed,’ answered Elrond gravely. ‘But my memory reaches back even to the Elder Days. &lt;strong&gt;Eärendil was my sire&lt;/strong&gt;, who was born in Gondolin before its fall; and my mother was Elwing, daughter of Dior, son of Lúthien of Doriath. I have seen three ages in the West of the world, and many defeats, and many fruitless victories.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 2. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aragorn is right that it is a little bit impertinent for a guest to recite poetry about his host’s father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T07:48:37.763" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T07:48:37.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14925" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-15T21:24:58.737" Score="1" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm currently re-reading The Fellowship of the Ring (Swedish translation from 1971) after 20+ years. I'm 170 pages in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing that strikes me, and which I didn't remember at all, is the numerous songs displayed with full lyrics, occurring regular intervals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time, I thought it was nice and perhaps could offer a glimpse into the way that hobbits make songs and sing, but then it happened again... and again... and again... and &lt;em&gt;again&lt;/em&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems as if everyone loves singing weird songs. The hobbits must have extremely good memory since they can seemingly memorize an entire long text by just hearing it once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Tolkien always want to become a song composer or something? I find that it distracts and annoys me a lot when the &amp;quot;story text&amp;quot; is interrupted by these songs which I have to attempt to come up with a melody for in my head, and it seems to &amp;quot;ruin&amp;quot; the book in a hard to describe manner. Almost as if this is &amp;quot;filler content&amp;quot; that was added but could just as well have just been mentioned/described rather than fully laid out in text for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's with all the songs? And that Tom Bombadil guy is even weirder than I remember him...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10453" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-15T21:25:48.747" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T01:30:06.980" Title="Is there something I'm missing about the numerous songs in &quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14926" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14922" CreationDate="2020-07-16T01:16:54.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;That, while men and women can be equally constant and faithful when they have reciprocated love, or hope that their love will be reciprocated , if a man's beloved died, or is otherwise irrevocably lost (married the other guy), his love is more likely to fade and let him love another woman, while a woman's love will remain constant despite the impossibility.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As she observes, this is not a very pleasant situation for the woman to be in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T01:16:54.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14925" CreationDate="2020-07-16T01:30:06.980" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a heavily oral culture, rather than one dependent on the written word.  This tends to strengthen the memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also one in which there is no recorded music.  As a consequence, one has to sing, or listen to a friend sing, if one wants music.  This also aids in learning music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the pre-modern and even early modern societies that Tolkien drew upon, regularly singing would be a commonplace thing.  You would also be able to draw up new lyrics spontaneously, not from nothing, but from having long mastered many standard lyrical tropes and putting them together in new ways.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T01:30:06.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-16T06:45:40.563" Score="32" ViewCount="15108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read in a few sources that the Korean equivalent of the &amp;quot;once upon a time ...&amp;quot; which often begins English folk stories is something like &amp;quot;back when tigers smoked ...&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;when tigers used to smoke ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why has this become a standard way to start Korean folk stories? What is the historical and cultural significance of tigers smoking, or what does this refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T14:34:27.247" Title="Why do many Korean folk tales start with &quot;back when tigers smoked&quot;?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14929" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:26:25.733" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:26:25.733" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:26:25.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14930" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:26:25.733" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Korean language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Korea or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:33:27.420" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:33:27.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14931" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14932" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French novelist Eugène Sue (1804 – 1857) and his life as a writer. Sue is best known for the novel 'The Mysteries of Paris'. Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:28:51.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14933" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14934" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French journalist and author Gaston Leroux (1868 – 1927) and his life as a writer. Leroux is best known for his novel 'The Phantom of the Opera' ('Le Fantôme de l'Opéra'). Use this tag with the [french-literature] tag. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:31:53.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14935" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14936" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Phantom of the Opera' (French: 'Le Fantôme de l'Opéra') by Gaston Leroux. Use this tag with the tags [gaston-leroux] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:33:09.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14937" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14928" CreationDate="2020-07-16T12:54:36.720" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;That went a lot further down the rabbit-hole than I expected. There doesn't seem to be a lot of agreement on the origin of the phrase. It wouldn't seem like it would be a very old reference, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://10mag.com/how-tobacco-was-introduced-to-korea-throughout-history/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tobacco was introduced to Korea in the early 1600s&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/bcsogp/is_back_when_tigers_used_to_smoke_a_common/el3rdxw?utm_source=share&amp;amp;utm_medium=web2x&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Reddit post&lt;/a&gt; claims that it comes from an earlier phrase about eating the tobacco and might actually have originally been referencing catnip. Overall, I've found two main theories. First, it may have simply been an indication of a highly fictional story, since obviously tigers don't smoke normally. Secondly, some people tie it directly to a kind of democracy and liberty. When tobacco was initially introduced to Korea, practically everyone smoked, and it was considered medicinal, but during the Joseon period, it became a practice restricted to the aristocrats, smoked in absurdly long pipes that required servants to light the pipe from the other end. Invoking tigers (part of &lt;a href=&quot;http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=44801&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korea's mythological tale&lt;/a&gt; of how the nation came to be) smoking invokes an idea of when everyone was equal, even humans and animals. For example, from the previously mention Reddit Post:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is often said &amp;quot;back when tiger used to smoke&amp;quot; to denote something that happened ages ago as in myths and legends. If you want to get real technical about it. Tabbacco didn't enter Korea until 1618. There are lot of articles mentioning it wasn't originally back when tigers 'smoked' but 'ate' as in ate catnip. A different article points out that the reason why back when tiger used to smoke is because according to &amp;quot;Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666&amp;quot; everybody regardless age and gender would smoke in Korea. Until it started getting class restricted and lower class was no longer allowed to smoke infront of higher classes. So, according to this theory phrase is refering to back when equality still existed. Whatever the case, I think it's a cool phrase regardless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, the saying has an additional layer of meaning now because &lt;a href=&quot;https://bigcatrescue.org/tigers-of-korea-100-years-ago/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wild tigers are extinct in South Korea&lt;/a&gt; (North Korea claims to still have them), killed off in the early 20th century by hunters and the occupying Japanese.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T12:54:36.720" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14938" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16387" CreationDate="2020-07-16T15:27:43.820" Score="6" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this verse of the great Indian poet Saint Kabir:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;बिरहा बुरहा जिनि कहौ, बिरहा है सुलतान।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;जिस घटि बिरह न संचरै, सो घट सदा मसान॥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;birahaa burahaa jini kahau, birahaa hai sulataan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;jis ghaTi biraha na sa.ncharai, so ghaT sadaa masaan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://m.facebook.com/AnmolDohe/photos/a.180570815461359/1096693867182378/?type=3&amp;amp;source=57&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This page&lt;/a&gt; gives the English translation of that verse as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not consider virah/disconnection as foolish, virah is a sultan; the cremation in which the heart does not break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but the way the translation is written it is very hard to understand it. So, I moved to someone whose native language is Hindi and here is how he translates it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54962722#54962722&quot;&gt;Bereavement is not studpidity, bereavement is king&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Heart without bereavement is like burial site&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unable to understand why a heart which grieves for loved ones is said to be a  king (Sultan in the original verse)? And why a heart without bereavement is like a burial site? As far as I can think, king/sultan is used when we have to show someone as powerful or mighty, but this meaning doesn't seem to be suitable to me in this case. If a heart doesn't mourn for loved ones, it is strong, but how is that related to burial sites? I understand that a burial site is where people go when someone dies, it is related to death and mourning and quite ghastly, but I can't see how this is related to a stone heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T10:45:32.273" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T11:10:05.507" Title="Why is a sorrowing heart called &quot;Sultan&quot; and a stone heart called &quot;burial site&quot; in this verse of Saint Kabir?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;hindi-literature&gt;&lt;kabir&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14928" CreationDate="2020-07-16T15:36:53.553" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;As mentioned in the comments, a challenge was posted contesting the content of this answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14964/10302&quot;&gt;I answered the challenge&lt;/a&gt; with multiple real-world usages and the alleged origins of the expression. I'm linking it here as it serves as a further elaboration of this answer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to add a counteranswer here, not because I think Sean's answer is wrong, but because it's a literary device used more broadly than just in Korean folklore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To that end, there needn't be a reference to tigers smoking. Some cultural usages cannot be traced other than noting them coming into use. I cannot find any explicit reference on the origins of the Korean tiger-smoking phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In (Flemish) Dutch, a similar turn of phrase is used, translating to &amp;quot;back when animals still spoke&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite agree that there should be a specific reference, or that facts about the introduction of tobacco are relevant to the literary device itself. The Dutch variant makes it clearer that the intention is not to point to a factually accurate period in the past, but rather to paint the picture of a completely different world which has no relation to the one we (the narrator and reader/listener) are in, so the reader/listener doesn't bother trying to find connections that aren't there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, observe the well known Star Wars intro:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nW4YQ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nW4YQ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This loosely translated to &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The following story is entirely unrelated to our current world, don't bother looking for connections to it.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; It encapsulates the story in a world of its own and suggests to the viewer that it should be viewed as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the main reasons that Star Wars needed to do so is because there is a race of humans, but they are not the humans who once lived on Earth. There is no Earth, there is no reason to think that there is a backstory related to Earth or human origins, and it needs to be made clear to the viewer that this line of thinking is not relevant to follow the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all mentioned cases (Korean, Dutch, Star Wars), the intention is to very quickly get the reader/listener to stop looking for real-world references and instead focus on the story at hand, since this world/time period is &lt;em&gt;clearly&lt;/em&gt; not our own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparatively, &amp;quot;once upon a time&amp;quot; is much less explicit about there being no real-world connections. It doesn't actually restrict the possibility that we're telling a story that is grounded in the real world, though it is generally inferred to introduce a story that isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10302" LastEditorUserId="10302" LastEditDate="2020-07-19T14:34:27.247" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T14:34:27.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14941" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-16T16:47:13.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T16:47:13.573" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T16:47:13.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14942" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-16T16:47:13.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Indian poet and saint Kabir (15th century). Use this tag with the tag [hindi-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T14:29:04.497" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T14:29:04.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14943" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14920" CreationDate="2020-07-16T17:16:00.317" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Korean, the story is called &lt;strong&gt;호랑이와 곶감&lt;/strong&gt;. I would personally go with the translation: “The Tiger and the Dried Persimmons&amp;quot;, but this isn't the exact translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, I’ll address the food, because it’s simpler. In Korean, it's called 곶감.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are actually four types of persimmons enjoyed in Korea, but I'll just explain the two types.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regular persimmon is called &amp;quot;단감&amp;quot; (fuyu persimmon):  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ognuy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ognuy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As a fun fact, (at least back when I was a kid) the color orange is more commonly associated with this fruit than the fruit itself!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you leave this specific variety of persimmon outside for it to dry for weeks during the end of fall/beginning of winter (around the first or second week of November, it's considered winter there), the water basically evaporates and sugar builds until it literally becomes like a raisin. Except it's WAY better than raisins. You can look up pictures online. The white stuff you see on the surface is actually sugar from the persimmon! This variety is called 곶감 in Korea, like in the title of the story. (As a quick aside, I have no clue why it's called the way it is. I always just assumed it's because it kind of looks like the word 곶?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the actual language:&#xA;The most literal translation of this title would actually be “Tiger and Dried Persimmon” &lt;em&gt;or&lt;/em&gt; “Tiger and Dried Persimmons” (though 와 by itself can also mean &amp;quot;with&amp;quot;). You see, Korean doesn’t have articles such as “a”, “an”, and “the”, and they also don’t really have plural forms. The importance of how one knows something is plural is MOST dependent on the context that is given. Take this question for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have a child?&#xA;Do you have children?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Korean, this is just,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;자녀 있어요?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It's translated as &amp;quot;children&amp;quot; but it can also just be &amp;quot;child&amp;quot;. That's why I say it's either &amp;quot;persimmon&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;persimmons&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about the tiger though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can assume that there is just one tiger in this story. It's due to the first part &amp;quot;호랑이와&amp;quot;. If there were more than one, normally it would specify (다섯 호랑이와; &amp;quot;Five Tigers and....&amp;quot;) or a more general plural (호랑이들와). But adding &amp;quot;들&amp;quot; is normally only for talking about a general plural number of tigers, not as a result of an inflection. The usage of &amp;quot;들&amp;quot; is kind of situational and also doesn't apply to every noun (I can't think off the top of my head the ones that work) and it's only to make sure that people know there are more than one of the subject discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason why the plurality doesn’t really matter with the persimmon is that the story doesn’t really change whether there was just one persimmon or ten. The idea is that the Tiger was scared away by something as trivial as a persimmon our of ignorance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why would I go with the plural form of persimmon? Because typically in English (from my knowledge) you use plural form when there is an unspecified or unknown amount of something (whether there is just one or not). It’s like how you ask “Do you have children” as opposed to “Do you have a child”. Since Korean doesn’t &lt;em&gt;differentiate&lt;/em&gt; between most plural forms, I’d just go with the plural. Add the articles for the sake of grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-07-16T23:55:03.127" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T23:55:03.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14928" CreationDate="2020-07-16T17:44:51.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;when Koreans say &amp;quot;back when tigers smoked,&amp;quot; this is kind of the equivalent of Americans saying &amp;quot;long ago, when dinosaurs used to roam the Earth&amp;quot; except that dinosaurs actually existed and we're not sure if tigers ever smoked. It just means to say that it was a very long ago. A lot of Korean folktales have to do with tigers if you have noticed. There is such a tale of the grandmother and the tiger, the tiger and the persimmon, yin and yang, etc. because the tiger is representative of Korean identity and culture throughout history. It does not really have any deep meaning between a tiger and tobacco smoking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10464" LastActivityDate="2020-07-16T17:44:51.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-06-29T11:17:06.107" Score="2" ViewCount="2814" Body="&lt;p&gt;I love Defeat (by Kahlil Gibran) but I don't understand these lines in the fourth stanza of this poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defeat, my Defeat, my bold companion,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;You shall hear my songs and my cries and my silences,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;And none but you shall speak to me of the beating of wings,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And urging of seas,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And of mountains that burn in the night,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please could somebody help me understand what this could mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess it means that only in our own defeat can we really understand and feel the depths of our being. This would be consistent with what I feel when I read the 'urging of seas' and 'mountains that burn in the night' but what about 'the beating of wings'- what could that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Mr Pringle" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T15:06:01.077" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T03:51:42.177" Title="What does stanza 4 of Defeat by Kahlil Gibran mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14945" CreationDate="2020-06-30T00:35:51.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Great verse!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My companion&amp;quot; castes Defeat as his old friend, one he is familiar with.&#xA;He looks forward to sharing his songs, cries and silences with his familiar friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one but his pal, Defeat is allowed to taunt him with the sounds of wings beating; meaning no one else is allowed to tease him with the idea of escape by flight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one else may tease him with the idea of escape over the vast seas or over mountain ranges that he might attempt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you alone shall climb my steep and rocky soul; Only you shall know my difficult and troubled soul.  He is giving up and having done with it. No more fighting and will have no one but Defeat as his friend, taking it pretty hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Elliot" LastActivityDate="2020-06-30T00:35:51.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-17T20:43:27.290" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an older &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2525/2191&quot;&gt;question about the purpose of the prologue in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Cory Howell asked in a now &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5822/2191&quot;&gt;deleted answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it's worth, the Prologue is not included in the First Folio version of Romeo and Juliet. So one must wonder, was it traditional to omit the Prologue by the time the First Folio was printed in 1623?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt; contained 36 plays, 18 of  which had been published before in quarto format. There are differences between the quarto and folio versions of the reprinted plays and sometimes these are considerable. If the quarto version contained a prologue, was it traditional to omit it in the First Folio edition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T21:27:13.060" Title="Was it traditional to omit the prologue from Shakespeare's plays in the First Folio?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14947" CreationDate="2020-07-17T21:27:13.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Of the Shakespeare plays that were &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Shakespeare_plays_in_quarto#Plays_first_published_before_1623&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published in quarto before 1623&lt;/a&gt;, the following contained a prologue:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Rom_Q1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, first quarto, 1597&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Per_Q1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was, however, &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; included in the First Folio,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/2H4_Q1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Second part of King Henry the Fourth&lt;/em&gt;, first quarto, 1600&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot; spoken by Rumour).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at the First Folio versions of these plays, we see the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Rom_F1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; omits the prologue;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/2H4_F1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part 2&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; still has the &amp;quot;induction&amp;quot; spoken by Rumour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking at &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, we observe the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/H5_Q1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, first quarto, 1600&lt;/a&gt; has &lt;em&gt;no prologue&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/H5_F1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt; in the First Folio&lt;/a&gt; has a prologue where the first quarto didn't have one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; is another special case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Tro_Q1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;, first quarto 1609&lt;/a&gt; begins with an &amp;quot;epistle&amp;quot; to the reader (i.e. not a speech to the theatre audience),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Tro_F1/complete/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; in the First Folio&lt;/a&gt; omits the epistle and adds a prologue.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it is not possible to make the general claim that prologues were omitted when plays be Shakespeare were republished in the First Folio. In fact, the quarto editions of &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; had no prologue, whereas the First Folio versions of these plays did.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryviii/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of King Henry the Eighth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; also has a prologue but was not published before the First Folio.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-17T21:27:13.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14951" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15046" CreationDate="2020-07-18T10:18:04.403" Score="7" ViewCount="494" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; author C.S. Lewis makes at least 3-4 references to the characters making sure to not latch the wardrobe from the inside &amp;quot;as every sensible person [knows] that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is mentioned enough times that it seems to be more than a passing bit of advice, although I imagine at least one purpose was to discourage any impressionable young readers from getting trapped and suffocating inside a wardrobe in their own imaginative attempts to reach Narnia. Is there any other known reason for harping on this rule?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T20:53:18.607" Title="Why is C.S. Lewis so concerned with being locked into a wardrobe?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14952" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14954" CreationDate="2020-07-18T10:29:42.023" Score="19" ViewCount="3159" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I originally read &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; I read an older boxset which has the books numbered in original publication order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was later changed by the publishers to be in chronological order as pertaining to the timeline of Narnia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never understood the reason for this change and I can't think of any other cases where a series of novels' order was changed by a publisher. What was the reason the publishers decided to make this change in reading order of The Chronicles of Narnia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="36" LastEditorUserId="417" LastEditDate="2020-07-19T07:03:58.360" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T12:07:48.210" Title="Why is the order of The Chronicles of Narnia changed from original publication?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14953" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1884" CreationDate="2020-07-18T10:58:36.263" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem to me, a genius, I read this and to me it is very clearly and I mean clearly, a what is life about, what is life's meaning poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It starts with a beginning, identifying perhaps being born rich is better and moving through potential phases of meaning in ones life, do we finally reach our gold, do we then settle on our laurels and enjoy life, then we die. It identifies that your whole life could be considered and contained in a bazaar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By putting the magicians so late in the poem, since she see's them as a young girl, means she is wondering if her life is almost over, is there only a get married and die phase for her now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is an existential poem that you all missed, every reader of this, or the meaningless meanderings of a simple child's mind, but I choose the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10489" LastEditorUserId="10489" LastEditDate="2020-07-18T11:11:38.973" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T11:11:38.973" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14952" CreationDate="2020-07-18T12:48:23.337" Score="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question of reading order for &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Reading_order&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a complicated one&lt;/a&gt;, with much debate even among avid fans of the series. But you've asked only &lt;strong&gt;why publishers changed the order&lt;/strong&gt;, which is much easier to answer objectively than which order is &amp;quot;best&amp;quot;/preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer lies in a letter which Lewis wrote, dated April 1957, to a young American fan named Laurence Kreig. The boy preferred internal chronological order (starting with &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;) while his mother preferred publication order (starting with &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;). Lewis said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote &lt;em&gt;The Lion&lt;/em&gt; I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote &lt;em&gt;P. Caspian&lt;/em&gt; as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done &lt;em&gt;The Voyage&lt;/em&gt; I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I’m not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published. I never keep notes of that sort of thing and never remember dates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In C.S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;Collected Letters&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 3, pp. 847-8, the following footnote is added to this letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the summer of 1963 Lewis had Walter Hooper write down the order in which he preferred the stories to be read: &lt;em&gt;The Magician’s Nephew&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;. Regarding the order in which the stories were written, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books/about/C_S_Lewis.html?id=6_TtPwAACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CG&lt;/a&gt;, ‘The Writing of the Narnias’, pp. 401–5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The US publication rights were originally owned by Macmillan, who preferred the original publication order starting with &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. In 1994, Harper Collins took over the US publication rights, and they changed the order to internal chronological order starting with &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;. Why? In the 2005 Harper Collins editions, the publishers added the following note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; was written several years after C. S. Lewis first began &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, he wanted it to be read as the first book in the series. HarperCollins is happy to present these books in the order in which Professor Lewis preferred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Lewis himself expressed a preference for internal chronological order, at least a couple of times, and the publishers of later editions decided to follow this.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Further reading: Paul Ford, &lt;em&gt;Companion to Narnia: A Complete Guide to the Magical World of C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt;, 2005. Hat-tip also to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Reading_order&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/jericson/jericson.github.io/issues/14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jon Ericson's blog and comments&lt;/a&gt; for guiding me to some useful sources.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-18T16:05:10.393" LastActivityDate="2020-07-18T16:05:10.393" CommentCount="13" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-18T15:06:59.267" Score="2" ViewCount="178" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Seven of Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, I saw the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized &lt;strong&gt;just at the time that I dated my creation&lt;/strong&gt;, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Judging by the structure, one might be tempted to analyze the sentence as having two relative clauses modifying &lt;strong&gt;the nervous fever&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remembered also the nervous fever ​&#xA;(a) with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, ​&#xA;and ​&#xA;(b) which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the plot apparently contradicts this analysis. Two paragraphs before the quoted passage, Victor said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two years had now nearly elapsed since the night on which he first received life&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This specification of his creation as happening approximately two years before took place during the night prior to his return to his father's house. In other words, he dated his creation during the night, when he encountered the monster. It is thus rather likely that the boldfaced prepositional phrase is meant to describe the time of Victor's recalling the fever, and should have been positioned to modify the main clause, not the relative clause.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that his nervous fever didn't strike him until after his friend Henry Clerval had visited him, and that was already some time after he created the monster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My dear Victor,&amp;quot; cried he, &amp;quot;what, for God's sake, is the matter? Do not laugh&#xA;in that manner. How ill you are! What is the cause of all this?&amp;quot;&#xA;&amp;quot;Do not ask me,&amp;quot; cried I, putting my hands before my eyes, for I thought I&#xA;saw the dreaded spectre glide into the room; &amp;quot;he can tell.—Oh, save me! save&#xA;me!&amp;quot; I imagined that the monster seized me; I struggled furiously, and fell&#xA;down in a fit. Poor Clerval! what must have been his feelings? A meeting, which he&#xA;anticipated with such joy, so strangely turned to bitterness. But I was not the&#xA;witness of his grief; for I was lifeless, and did not recover my senses for a&#xA;long, long time. &lt;strong&gt;This was the commencement of a nervous fever&lt;/strong&gt;, which confined me for&#xA;several months. During all that time Henry was my only nurse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T18:42:45.043" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T10:18:04.210" Title="&quot;just at the time that I dated my creation&quot; in Frankenstein" Tags="&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14959" CreationDate="2020-07-18T17:41:44.067" Score="3" ViewCount="145" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a Korean folk story entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/topic/detail/6006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;해와 달이 된 오누이&lt;/a&gt;, variously translated as &amp;quot;The Origin of the Sun and the Moon&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Sister Sun and Brother Moon&amp;quot; etc. I read it &lt;a href=&quot;http://members.home.nl/marcmarti/yugur/folktale/tale11g.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, cited to Pyun Yung-tai, &lt;em&gt;Tales from Korea&lt;/em&gt; (Seoul, 1948). It recounts how two children, being pursued by a tiger, made their way up into the sky and ended up becoming the sun and the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is essentially whether this origin story is &amp;quot;remembered&amp;quot; in other Korean folk stories. It doesn't make sense to talk about a &amp;quot;continuity&amp;quot; in a body of folk legends, of course, but &lt;strong&gt;are the sun and moon always portrayed as personified?&lt;/strong&gt; (Cf. ancient Greek legends, in which there is always a &amp;quot;sun god&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;moon goddess&amp;quot;, although the identity of the sun god sometimes varies between Helios and Apollo.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T19:02:41.203" Title="Are the sun and moon generally personified in Korean folklore, or just in this origin story?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14957" CreationDate="2020-07-19T00:48:37.937" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, not as far as I know of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most Korean folk tales are similar to European fairy tales in the sense that each story may share similar themes and motifs, the specifics don't seem to relate. I could be wrong, but this seems to be an independent folk tale rather than part of a continuity of a sort. The sun and the moon don't normally make an appearance in most folk tales I remember. However, there is one notoriously famous Korean folktale I forgot to link called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulgae&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (불개, lit. &amp;quot;fire dog&amp;quot;). It's part of a larger &lt;a href=&quot;https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/topic/detail/5640&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean story about the solar eclipe&lt;/a&gt;. Here's the general gist of the &amp;quot;bulgae&amp;quot; section:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time there's a kingdom of darkness that wants light. The king sends a dog to catch the sun and bring it, but when the dog catches it, the dog's mouth burns and lets go of the sun. The king was undeterred, and sent another dog to catch the moon. The dog caught the moon, but had to let go of it, because it was freezing cold. The king keeps on trying though, and that's why we have solar eclipse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The important note you'll see though, it that the sun and the moon are NOT personified in this story, the sun is literally just a blazing fireball, and the moon is a freezing ball, rather than being personified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a second example, but I couldn't find another story posted on it, so I'll ask it as a separate question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But yeah, from my knowledge, the sun and moon aren't typically personified, since people don't really &amp;quot;pray&amp;quot; to the sun and the moon. There are also a lot of conflicting stories regarding each the moon in particular, like how there are bunnies on top of the moon making tteok (떡, rice cakes) in certain Korean folklore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T19:02:41.203" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T19:02:41.203" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5973" CreationDate="2020-07-19T04:30:21.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The German phrase &amp;quot;ist sie wahrlich eine...&amp;quot; also occurs in Arthur Schopenhauer's &lt;em&gt;Dialogue on Religion&lt;/em&gt;. Religion, the character Philalethes says, is &amp;quot;wahrlich eine pia fraus&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;truly a pious fraud&amp;quot; — a fraud justified by its beneficial consequences. Maybe that's what the Childlike Empress is. (Maybe that's what all fiction is.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10495" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T04:30:21.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14979" CreationDate="2020-07-19T08:26:06.377" Score="7" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Korean folk story &lt;a href=&quot;https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/en/topic/detail/6006&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;해와 달이 된 오누이&lt;/a&gt;, translated &lt;a href=&quot;http://members.home.nl/marcmarti/yugur/folktale/tale11g.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;The Origin of the Sun and the Moon&amp;quot; from Pyun Yung-tai, &lt;em&gt;Tales from Korea&lt;/em&gt; (Seoul, 1948), two children are pursued by a tiger and end up becoming the sun and the moon. To escape the tiger, they call on God to let down a chain from the sky so that they can climb up, and this is how they end up in the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What struck me is the notion of &amp;quot;God&amp;quot; in this story, and I couldn't figure out what sort of religious background it comes from. Quoting from the translation linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stretching out their tiny hands toward Heaven, they began praying, &amp;quot;O Heavenly Lord, send help and save us two souls! Let down a strong chain, if you are pleased to save us, and send us a rotten straw rope, if you mean to forsake us.&amp;quot; Presently a chain came down, to their joy, and took them up.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The cunning beast thought that he was sure to be forsaken by God, and likewise prayed. &amp;quot;Heavenly Lord, if you mean to help me, send me a rotten straw rope; if you want to forsake me, send me a chain.&amp;quot; His prayer was also answered by the all-helpfull &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; Lord, and accordingly a straw rope appeared, which snapped half way up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to suggest a monotheistic religion, belief in a single &amp;quot;Heavenly Lord&amp;quot; a la Christianity. I did a little research on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Korea&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;religion in Korea&lt;/a&gt; and learned that Christianity only began to gain a foothold in the 19th century, although presumably this story is older than that. Before then, Confucianism and Buddhism were popular in Korea, but as far as I know neither of them has the concept of a &amp;quot;Heavenly Lord&amp;quot;. The older &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_shamanism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean folk religion&lt;/a&gt; is polytheistic and animistic, which again doesn't seem to fit well with this story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What gives?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it a poor translation, putting the story into more Christian terms when originally it was something like &amp;quot;the god of the sky&amp;quot; rather than just &amp;quot;God&amp;quot;? Did the story evolve over time as different religions became dominant in Korea? Is the story newer than I presumed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T00:09:36.510" Title="What religion is suggested by the &quot;God&quot; in the Korean sun/moon origin story?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-19T12:27:06.970" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14928/2191&quot;&gt;Why do many Korean folk tales start with “back when tigers smoked”?&lt;/a&gt;, user &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/10302/flater&quot;&gt;@Flater&lt;/a&gt;, who comes from the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium (i.e. Flanders), claims that the Dutch counterpart of &amp;quot;back when tigers smoked&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;back when animals still spoke&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;toen de dieren nog spraken / konden spreken&amp;quot;). User &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/10475/tonny&quot;&gt;@Tonny&lt;/a&gt;, who lives on the Belgium-Netherlands border and who has many relatives in Flanders, says that they have never heard this fairy tale opening; the standard opening is &amp;quot;Er was eens ...&amp;quot; (which corresponds to &amp;quot;Once upon a time, there was ...&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a native speaker of Dutch from Flanders, I have never heard &amp;quot;Toen de dieren nog spraken / konden spreken&amp;quot; as the beginning of a fable or a fairy tale. I have read it, however, in columns (not necessarily as an introduction) in newspapers and magazines, where it is intended ironically, as if anticipating comments such as, &amp;quot;You must be really old if you talk about things like that&amp;quot;. Below are a few examples I found online (including examples from blogs):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Vroeger, in de jaren stillekes, toen de dieren nog konden spreken en er nog geen e-mail was, had je bij kranten stenotypistes die de ingesproken bandjes van verslaggevers uittikten.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://josbloemkolk.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/hoorfout/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bob Frommé&lt;/a&gt;, 28.02.2017) &lt;br /&gt;English: &amp;quot;In the olden days, when animals could still speak and there was no e-mail, newspapers still employed stenotypists to type out the tapes recorded by journalists.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Stillekes&amp;quot; is informal Dutch for &amp;quot;silently&amp;quot;, which would not make much sense in a literal translation.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Heel lang geleden, toen de dieren nog konden spreken en de Brusselaars nog uit Brussel kwamen, was het enigszins anders.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bruzz.be/samenleving/column-freddi-smekens-toelendans-2012-12-23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Freddi Smekens&lt;/a&gt;, 23.12.2012) &lt;br /&gt;English: &amp;quot;A very long time ago, when the animals could still speak and the citizens of Brussels still came from Brussels, it was slightly different.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Toen de dieren nog konden spreken werden in Nederland en Vlaanderen pogingen gedaan om werkelijk journalistiek en politiek – financieel onafhankelijke – linkse weekbladen recht te houden.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikel/2012/09/28/knack-bdw-dodelijk-wit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Koen Calliauw&lt;/a&gt;, 28.09.2012) &lt;br /&gt;English: &amp;quot;When the animals could still speak, there were attempts in the Netherlands and Flanders to keep alive left-wing magazines that genuinely independent from a journalistic and political point of view, i.e. financially independent.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above examples, the phrase &amp;quot;when the animals could still speak&amp;quot; refers to a time period that is at most a few decades ago and introduces customs and circumstances that may seem quaint to young readers today. I have not been able to find online examples of fairy tales that use this introduction, so I would like to see evidence that it was used at all. In the context of this question, I would like to see evidence that meets the following criteria:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phrase should be used in &lt;strong&gt;at least three collections&lt;/strong&gt; of fables or fairy tales published by a &lt;strong&gt;Flemish publisher&lt;/strong&gt; (not from the Netherlands). (In other words, at least three collections that contain at least one example of a fable or a fairly tales that begins with the phrase in question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;These &lt;strong&gt;fables or fairy tales should not be translations&lt;/strong&gt;, e.g. from the brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen or Charles Perrault (the three main sources of translated fairy tales in Flanders, as far as I know). (Translations can be used for comparison with Flemish sources, though.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fables or fairy tails should be aimed at children and not be, e.g., some sort of ironic or parodistic variations for adults.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though the original claim was not about printed texts, I am specifically asking for evidence from printed versions of fables or fairy tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-19T22:57:31.707" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T22:57:31.707" Title="What is the evidence that Flemish fables or fairy tales began with the words “back when the animals could still speak”?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14963" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14965" CreationDate="2020-07-19T13:50:59.613" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I read this just a few years ago, but that it is an older story, maybe from the 60s or the 70s. I think it starts with the main character descending into a cave with someone else helping in running the belaying cable (which is a metal cable on an electric winch, I think) and then it either transitions to the airport attack or the origin of the main character. The former involves a set of terrorists opening fire on a group of Jewish Nazi hunters, only to be gunned down by a heroic CIA agent. The origin of the main character is a bit ambiguous in my head. He is a foreigner in the land where he is (maybe Japan?) and works his way up through the military hierarchy through his intelligence and hard work. Something happens that results in him being thrown into jail, and it's there where he hones his skills through solitary practice, including learning various languages through the books in his cell. The latter results in an odd quirk where he speaks Basque Spanish in an idiomatic way because he learned entirely by puzzling out translations based on one or two books, so he gets a pronunciation rule wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part of the book has the sole survivor of the airport massacre, the grand-daughter of one of those killed, seeking out the protagonist's help. I believe she survived because the terrorists didn't realize she was a part of the group. I think there was also something involving the customs agent being very distracted by the cleavage in her open shirt. Anyhow, her grand-father had done a service for the protagonist, and had told her to seek him out if she was in trouble, which she does. I vaguely remember there being a few legs to the trip, and her stopping at an inn on the way to where he lives and there being some confusion over money. Anyhow, she arrives, and learns that he's mostly retired, living life as an aesthete, but he tells her he will help her. Not long after that, she gets up early to gather flowers on the nearby mountainside and she's gunned down, leading to the main character setting off on a course of revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last part gets a little hazy. I remember that the bad guys freeze his assets, and try to bribe him into turning back by offering to unfreeze them. At some point, we wind up back in the cave, where the winch gets sabotaged and he winds up badly injured in the depths of the cave, only to escape through swimming blind through a hole in the cave that eventually opens up into a larger body of water (I was reminded of this book when reading &lt;em&gt;Seizure&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virals&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virals&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; series, which involves a similar escape), and eventually has him getting his revenge on the person behind it all, who turns out to have been the CIA agent in the airport massacre, who was just killing the remaining witnesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to say that the title of the book was a foreign word. &lt;em&gt;Shibari&lt;/em&gt; is coming to mind, but searches on that... well, it's an erotic rope-binding technique, and does not seem to relate to the book I am looking for. I think I listened to it as an audiobook, and it was a usual novel length.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T23:11:31.963" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T23:11:31.963" Title="Novel with a spy/assassin who helps the grand-daughter of a Nazi hunter, speaks Basque from learning it from a book, escapes a cave through water" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14964" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14962" CreationDate="2020-07-19T14:31:29.870" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Your arbitrary criteria&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am contesting your criteria. Your criteria are not relevant to my original claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your requirement for Dutch originating sources: Belgium is trilingual and the language regions may predominantly be separate, but the local culture is shared and/or overlaps. Just because the Flemish speak Dutch doesn't mean that their entire culture is rooted only in Dutch-speaking traditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Historically, the region known as Belgium today has been part of both the French and Dutch empires (and, by extension of the Dutch, even the Spanish empire), which means that part of our cultural heritage is French and Dutch. &lt;strong&gt;French and Dutch cultural history from before or during the time Belgium was part of that empire are fair game when justifying or referring to Belgian culture.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Your requirement for printed fables which use the explicit phrase. I didn't not state that Flemish fables used it, nor that it was used in printed fables (it is the case that it originated from a fable, as proven below, &lt;em&gt;but I did not claim it to be the case&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stated that the expression is used in Flemish, meaning &amp;quot;a long time ago&amp;quot;. That may include fables but is not strictly limited to them.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Regardless, I added ample evidence of its usage, in several cases with an explicitly mentioned context of fairy tales, alongside the alleged origin of the quote from a French fable by Jean de la Fontaine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even by the Korean context that sparked this challenge, &amp;quot;folk tale&amp;quot; is not the same as &amp;quot;printed fable&amp;quot;. And again, I didn't even claim that it's used in a specific folk tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also keep in mind that fables in print are easier to historically track, but it's not the only way in which they are passed down. From personal experience and that of three friends I talked to today; grandparents, great grandparents and kindergarten/primary school teachers used the expression when telling stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea why children should be the target demographic according to your criteria. Historically, fables have not been solely targeted at children, so the requirement is nonsensical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above examples, the phrase &amp;quot;when the animals could still speak&amp;quot; refers to a time period that is at most a few decades ago and introduces customs and circumstances that may seem quaint to young readers today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time is relative. In the examples you and I both refer to, it's used tongue-in-cheek to pretend like the period in focus was a very long time ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's the point: the expression explicitly means &amp;quot;a long time ago&amp;quot;, but is comically used in cases where the time period in focus is relatively recent. Overstating something is a very common and casual form of comedy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;User @Tonny, who lives on the Belgium-Netherlands border and who has many relatives in Flanders, says that they have never heard this fairy tale opening; the standard opening is &amp;quot;Er was eens ...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never claimed &amp;quot;toen de dieren nog spraken&amp;quot; was the only or predominant introduction to fairy tales. I agree that &amp;quot;er was eens&amp;quot; is more prevalent, partly because the Netherlands Dutch region exclusively uses it (as far as I'm aware).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Usage in Dutch/Flemish&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vlaamswoordenboek.be/definities/term/vroeger+toen+de+dieren+nog+spraken&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flemish dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;vroeger toen de dieren nog spraken&lt;/strong&gt; (uitdr.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;heel, heel lang geleden&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the past, when the animals still spoke&lt;/strong&gt; (expression)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a long long time ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It is also the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tenduinen.be/nl/toen-de-dieren-nog-spraken-een-verhaal-als-een-zaadje-dat-je-de-grond-gooit-het-komt-niet-altijd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an event centered around storytelling&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.demorgen.be/meningen/en-zo-kreeg-het-sprookje-de-vlaampjes-en-de-wolf-een-not-so-happy-end%7Ebf7bca5c/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This article&lt;/a&gt; uses the phrase specifically to mean &amp;quot;a long time ago&amp;quot;. It's behind a paywall but if you disable scripts you can read the relevant part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Het was nochtans geleden van toen de dieren nog spraken dat we hier nog eens een echte wolf mochten verwelkomen. In een paar jaar tijd werden het er drie. En dit voorjaar bleek wolvin Naya zelfs zwanger: het zou de wolvenpopulatie in ons land verdubbelen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google translated with a minor improvement from me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was back when the animals spoke when we would welcome a real wolf here. In a few years it became three. And this spring, she-wolf Naya even turned out to be pregnant: it would double the wolf population in our country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nederlandsepoezie.org/jl/1946/zz_toen_de_dieren_nog_spraken.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1947 collection of fables&lt;/a&gt; uses it as a title. The foreword focuses on fables and specifically points out that animals/inanimate objects are the actors in the stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[..] het vertellen van een verhaal, ontleend aan dieren- doch ook wel aan planten-leven, welk leven door den verhalenden dichter min of meer wordt ver-menschelijkt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't translate this as it's an older variant of Dutch and quite poetically phrased, Google struggles. My above summary is an accurate translation of the relevant part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.althea-coaching.be/blogs-vlogs/artikel-in-welke-van-deze-3-marketing-sprookjes-geloof-jij-nog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; uses the expression to herald back to the &amp;quot;ancient time&amp;quot; of when their company was brand new:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ik neem jullie even mee naar de beginjaren van mijn bedrijf. Toen de dieren nog spraken en ik nog geloofde in ondernemers-sprookjes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll take you back to the first years of my company. Back when animals still spoke and I still believed in entrepreneurial fables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cocon.be/nieuws/reisverhalen/er-was-eens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site&lt;/a&gt; uses the expression and specifically points out that the expression is used in the context of a fairy tale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;En het busje kwam. Een echt prachtexemplaar. Maar wel een uit de jaren stillekens. Om in de sprookjessfeer te blijven : uit de tijd toen de dieren nog spraken. Niks geen vering. Er was een stuur en er was ook nog een gaspedaal en daar moesten we al dik tevreden mee zijn!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the minivan came. A beautiful minivan. But from the old days. To stay in the context of fairy tales, back when the animals still spoke. No suspension. There was a steering wheel and an accelerator and that's what we had to settle for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point I'm just quoting Google so let's leave it here. Google &amp;quot;toen de dieren nog spraken&amp;quot; and skip the first page as it mainly refers to the event (my second usage case), not the phrase itself. Starting from page 2, most search results are original usages of the expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Origins&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote seems to originate from a fable by Jean de La Fontaine, who is famous for writing animal-centric fables reminiscent of classic Greek/Roman natural analogies (Aesop among others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French translation is &amp;quot;le temps où les bêtes parlaient&amp;quot;. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cairn.info/revue-le-genre-humain-2006-1-page-183.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this site&lt;/a&gt;, it's pulled straight from one of de La Fontaine's fables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Du temps que les bêtes parlaient&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Les lions entre autres voulaient&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;être admis dans notre alliance &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Reference: Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, iv, 1 (1668), éd. Marc Fumaroli, Paris, La Pochothèque, 1985, p. 197.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot personally confirm if this quotes the fables, but multiple sources claim it is a direct quote when you Google those three lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site I also delves into how many cultures have fables revolving around anthropomorphised animals. I Google translated part of the linked page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who lived their childhood in languages ​​other than ours were able to learn to name this time, pretty much whatever that language was. While &lt;strong&gt;this universality of the animal apologue has been noticed at least since the eighteenth century&lt;/strong&gt;, it is strange that it still has not, to my knowledge, been the subject of a systematic study of this universality, which means that a&lt;strong&gt;nimals speak not only in the languages ​​of Europe, but also in those of the Chinese, Berbers or Samos,&lt;/strong&gt; [..]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note the definition of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apologue&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An apologue or apologis a brief fable or allegorical story with pointed or exaggerated details, meant to serve as a pleasant vehicle for a moral doctrine or to convey a useful lesson without stating it explicitly. [..] &lt;strong&gt;The term is applied more particularly to a story in which the actors or speakers are either various kinds of animals or are inanimate objects&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://taalfluisteraar.be/2020/06/02/er-was-eens-sprookjes-in-andere-talen/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This website&lt;/a&gt;, which coincidentally also mentions the Korean tiger-smoking phrase that sparked this discussion, attributed the speaking-animals phrase to Catalan culture, but since I can also find references to Dutch and French usage, it seems to be much broader than only the Catalan region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that all instances I've found so far are relatively close to France, which makes sense if the quote originated there. The regions spanning from Spain to the Netherlands have also historically been part of the same empire (Belgium-France, Belgium-Netherlands, Netherlands-Spain), so the usage may possibly have transferred from being the same empire (temporarily).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10302" LastEditorUserId="10302" LastEditDate="2020-07-19T15:48:24.823" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T15:48:24.823" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14963" CreationDate="2020-07-19T21:26:02.623" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure it's Gisela Stege Trevanian's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/828107.Shibumi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shibumi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A westerner raised in Japan, he survived the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and its most accomplished assassin. His greatest desire is to attain a state of effortless perfection . . . shibumi. But he is about to face his most sinister and corrupt enemy -- a supermonolith of espionage and monopoly bent on destroying&#xA;him. . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Shibumi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes page&lt;/a&gt; mentions him learning Basque from a book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Hel acquires a Basque book and starts learning it from scratch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As well as the girl he is helping:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;.... When Hannah Stern escapes as the only survivor from a fake 'Black September' raid staged by the CIA she runs to Hel for help since her uncle saved Hel's life many years ago. ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are enough matches for me to be pretty certain this is the right book. Perhaps, when the libraries re-open here, I can check out a copy to verify.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T21:26:02.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-19T22:51:54.287" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, some fables or fairy tales (or both) begin with the words &amp;quot;[lang geleden] toen de dieren nog spraken / konden spreken&amp;quot;, i.e. &amp;quot;[a long time ago] back when the animals still spoke / could still speak&amp;quot;. While it is not clear &lt;em&gt;how common&lt;/em&gt; this type of introduction is in fable or fairy tales, it has been attested (though &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14962/2191&quot;&gt;I know it mostly from texts that are decidedly not fairy tales or fables&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question here is whether the origin of this phrase is known and, if yes, what that origin is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-19T22:51:54.287" Title="Origin of the phrase “back when the animals could still speak” in Dutch fables or fairy tales" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14967" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-19T23:49:36.277" Score="5" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find the name of a story. The plot is set in the age when Europeans were sailing to the Americas and contacting the local tribes. My memory is vague but here are some of the points I can remember and hopefully in the order they happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This is probably not how the story begins but is the earliest event I can remember.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; The captain of a ship docked somewhere in Americas need food for the crew and tries to get corn from the local tribals which they grow plentyful. The tribals demand guns/artillery in exchange for corn. The deal happens and also leads more transaction. Slowly the relationship between the visitors and the tribals starts to get better.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The captain falls in love with one of the local women (most likely the chief's daughter?). There is a huge uproar among the tribals due to this, of course! But, somehow they get married and they return to Europe (my best guess is Portugal). They have a good life there.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can't remember what happens from there, maybe he went on the next voyage?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; But, for some reason the captain is now imprisoned in a remote island similar to what happens in &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This could be following a shipwreck.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In prison, the captain interacts with a man (but doesn't see him, though) who promises him that he could escape if he manages to somehow remove a particular brick. Over a period of time he manages to shake and remove the brick from the wall, squeezes past the wall and gets to the other side. But to his dismay, realises that he only managed to get to the adjacent cell.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The next door neighbour who happens to be an old man is the one who promised the escape. The captain is mad that he wasted all this time only to get to the next cell. The captain gets back to his cell and puts the brick back.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One day the old man dies and the guards put his body into a sack and plan to throw him into the sea. The captain grabs this opportunity and 'switches' position when the guards go out of the prison cell. Finally he is free. He later on reunites with his wife. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Of course, I am sure there will be more to the story before reuniting with his wife.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few points to note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I watched this as an animation almost 2 decades ago but I am guessing it might be a famous novel or something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thinking back about the quality of the animation it may be from the 80s or even 70s.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is not &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; as the protagonist is married to a South American woman and it is definitely not &lt;em&gt;Pocahontas&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10502" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T07:56:51.237" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T07:56:51.237" Title="Story about a European captain marrying a tribal woman, part of the plot similar to *The Count of Monte Cristo*?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14969" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15000" CreationDate="2020-07-20T09:59:02.727" Score="6" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two common reading orders for the Chronicles of Narnia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original publication order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chronological order, preferred by C.S. Lewis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/14952/why-is-the-order-of-the-chronicles-of-narnia-changed-from-original-publication&quot;&gt;Why is the order of The Chronicles of Narnia changed from original publication?&lt;/a&gt; asks why publishers changed their minds regarding the reading order; but this question is asking for the reasons for and against reading the books in the two orders listed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, I am interested in things such as, For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the reading order affects the reader's understanding of the world, if they are approaching it for the first time. Does one reading order make it harder to follow than the other?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do you notice a lack of character progression (or not get introduced to a character properly) if you read in a different order to the order in which the books were written?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does reading the books in a different order add to or lose some of their algeorical impact?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does reading the books not in in-universe-chronological order cause issues when reading them?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for objective reasons to back up your possibly-subjective answers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10507" LastEditorUserId="10507" LastEditDate="2020-07-20T13:25:04.307" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T12:17:13.980" Title="For and Against different Reading Orders for Narnia" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14970" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-20T13:27:46.210" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hayley Kiyoko's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Hayley-kiyoko-wild-and-wicked-world-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wild and Wicked World&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, the second verse goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take me to the moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where I can sleep 'til noon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Living my today&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I don't care what you say&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I scream and shout, they shun me out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I'm trying hard to make it count&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I get by, I can't deny&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know every single reason why&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the last line is supposed to mean. It doesn't seem (to me) to be related to any of the previous lines, and immediately after is the chorus, which... doesn't exactly explain what she know every single reason why &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt;. Every single reason why... what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T07:51:16.880" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T07:51:16.880" Title="What does the line &quot;I know every reason why&quot; mean in &quot;Wild and Wicked World&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;hayley-kiyoko&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14972" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12081" CreationDate="2020-07-20T15:24:15.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was right about the author, it was just the title being one word off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &amp;quot;The Automatic Girl&amp;quot; by Alesister Crowley, from PDF page 143 of the &lt;em&gt;erotic&lt;/em&gt; poetry book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.100thmonkeypress.com/biblio/acrowley/books/snowdrops_1903/snowdrops.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Snowdrops From A Curate's Garden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is mentioned in only about 261 pages on the internet, according to Google, and isn't mentioned on Wikipedia, so it's not that well known.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="566" LastActivityDate="2020-07-20T15:24:15.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14973" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-20T21:25:16.417" Score="11" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;A major theme in 1984 is that the Party is never wrong and commonly changes all past references to reflect this. Why would the Party have numbered editions of their Newspeak dictionary, as opposed to creating a new version and claiming that this had always been their dictionary (as they do for all other media)? Using any edition numbers besides 1 implies that they have made changes, which they otherwise would never admit to doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10512" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T18:10:35.747" Title="In 1984 why does the Newspeak dictionary have numbered editions?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14974" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14973" CreationDate="2020-07-21T01:39:11.083" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even the Party has to make some concessions to reality.  Sure, they can work on Winston until&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O'Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But they still make aircraft for their war, and they do not have the pilots float off the ground like a soap bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Better one concession with the edition numbers than risking a comrade getting an old edition and not realizing what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, it's a chance for the good Party member to practice his doublethink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T01:39:11.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14975" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14973" CreationDate="2020-07-21T18:10:35.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While edition 1 is not imperfect, edition 2 is &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; perfect than edition 1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Repeat as each new, more perfect, edition is released. After all, &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; is not necessarily an absolute quality in Newspeak. (As exemplified in the latest, doubleplusperfect, edition of the dictionary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8480" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T18:10:35.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14976" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14977" CreationDate="2020-07-21T18:50:57.700" Score="12" ViewCount="1795" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his short poem which begins &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148153/tagus-farewell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Tagus, farewell'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, the English poet &lt;strong&gt;Sir Thomas Wyatt&lt;/strong&gt; wrote of his longing to return to an unnamed city. For anyone familiar with the rudiments of either Wyatt's biography or English geography, this city is self-evidently London. However, I remain unable to make sense of one line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to the town which Brutus sought by dreams&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is London 'the town which Brutus sought by dreams'?&lt;/strong&gt; Has anyone ever decoded this reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T19:46:56.837" Title="Why is London 'the town which Brutus sought by dreams'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-wyatt&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14977" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14976" CreationDate="2020-07-21T19:25:23.377" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_(disambiguation)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;many people named Brutus&lt;/a&gt;. The most famous one is probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Junius_Brutus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Junius Brutus&lt;/a&gt;, who is one of the figures discussed by Plutarch and is a character in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another well-known Brutus is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Junius_Brutus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucius Junius Brutus&lt;/a&gt;, semi-legendary founder of the Roman Republic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Brutus that Wyatt is thinking of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_of_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brutus of Troy&lt;/a&gt;, a descendant of Aeneas and legendary founder and first king of Britain. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutus_of_Troy#Historia_Regum_Britanniae&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia explains&lt;/a&gt; based on Geoffrey of Monmouth's &lt;em&gt;Historia Regum Britanniae&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;History of the kings of Britain&amp;quot;),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brutus then founds a city on the banks of the River Thames, which he calls Troia Nova, or New Troy. The name is in time corrupted to Trinovantum, and the city is later called London.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See Chapter XI in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/gem/gem02.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book One of &lt;em&gt;Historia Regum Britanniae&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After he had nine times repeated this, he walked four times round the altar, poured forth the wine he held upon the hearth of offering, laid him down upon the fell of a hind that he had stretched in front of the altar, and after invoking slumber fell on sleep. For as at that time it was the third hour of the night, wherein are mortals visited by the sweetest sleep. Then it seemed him the goddess [Diana] stood there before him, and spake unto him on this wise:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Brute,—past the realms of Gaul, beneath the sunset&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lieth an Island, girt about by ocean,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Guarded by ocean—erst the haunt of giants,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Desert of late, and meet for this thy people.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seek it! For there is thine abode for ever.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There by thy sons again shall Troy be builded&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There of thy blood shall Kings be born, hereafter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sovran in every land the wide world over.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the goddess Diana tells Brute (Brutus) in a dream to found a &amp;quot;new Troy&amp;quot; on an island west of Gaul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-21T19:46:56.837" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T19:46:56.837" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14978" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-21T22:59:26.823" Score="9" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maybe this is explained later, and if so, please don't mention the resolution. However, if it's never mentioned again, I'd like to hear some reasoning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, Strider leads the hobbits and that mistreated pony to a place where it seems like they (or he) had agreed to meet with Gandalf. Although I can't remember reading that, even though I've been so careful and really tried to follow every detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway, let's assume that they &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; arrange to meet Gandalf there. Even if so, it strikes me as bizarre that Strider would notice and turn around a random little rock in that area, find some minor scratches and immediately assume that they mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gandalf was here at the third day of this month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's clear that he just guesses and that they didn't have some kind of secret agreement to communicate using special rocks which they place in a specific way and use a secret code language. He just draws this conclusion based on... something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it indeed turns out that it was Gandalf who etched those lines into the bottom of that rock, and if it really meant what Strider guessed it means, that almost stretches the story beyond my suspension of disbelief even in spite of all the supernatural elements. It just seems too strange, unless they indeed have such a &amp;quot;system&amp;quot; agreed upon between them two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm being too impatient, and should finish the books before I draw any conclusion about this, but it makes me feel uncomfortable due to how far-fetched it seems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10521" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-22T04:47:39.290" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T16:39:09.217" Title="In the middle part of The Fellowship of the Ring, how did Strider find and interpret that rock message supposedly from Gandalf?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14979" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14961" CreationDate="2020-07-21T23:25:21.210" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;You don't know how funny it is to read this. This requires both cultural knowledge of Korea as well as the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Heavenly Lord&amp;quot; or in this context is formally called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haneullim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haneulnim&lt;/a&gt; (하늘님, &amp;quot;Heavenly King&amp;quot;). &amp;quot;Heaven&amp;quot; in this context is not the afterlife, but the literal sky and everything in the sky. I'm not too sure on the lore behind it, but Haneulnim is considered like the &amp;quot;top deity&amp;quot; of the Korean culture. I believe there are some other deities but it's considered the &lt;em&gt;most&lt;/em&gt; powerful. Not all-powerful per se, but most-powerful. He's typically thought of with a very long goatee/beard and dressed in an all-white traditional Korean clothing. This being is (I believe) largely part of Korean shamanism, but honestly, this being isn't tied to a specific religion. This being could be monotheistic or part of a polythestic religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, this can get very confusing with the Korean word for &amp;quot;God&amp;quot; (in the Judeo-Christian sense) which is Hannahnim (하나님, One King, more or less). These two words sound extremely similar in Korean and are distinctly differentiated to avoid confusion. My suspicion is that Koreans changed the word &amp;quot;하늘&amp;quot; (sky) with &amp;quot;하나&amp;quot; (one), with 하나님 fitting into the monotheistic belief of Judeo-Christianity (i.e., there is one God).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Update:&#xA;The Wikipedia post says this is based on the Dangun (단군) mythology. His original name is &amp;quot;Hwanin&amp;quot;(환인) or also Sangje (상제, lit. &amp;quot;highest being&amp;quot;). I'm not familiar with this myth so I can't give too much commentary. But in general, Haneulnim is the like highest deity. He's not the only deity in Korean folklore (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/Culture/view?articleId=123012&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Honest Woodcutter in Korean&lt;/a&gt;. That deity is like a water deity that's similar to Haneulnim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T00:09:36.510" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T00:09:36.510" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14755" CreationDate="2020-07-21T23:46:03.093" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Iain M Banks, The Algebraist. It involves nearly immortal manta ray like creatures living in a gas giant, with a gate in its core.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10522" LastActivityDate="2020-07-21T23:46:03.093" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14981" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14983" CreationDate="2020-07-22T09:34:39.410" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ran across a title.  Out of curiosity, tried trolling the internet for more info.  No joy.  Does anyone know anything about a book titled &amp;quot;Wisdom is One&amp;quot; by Benjamin Williams Huntsman printed/copyrighted Jan 1, 2000?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10523" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-22T09:38:26.683" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T14:20:11.217" Title="Info about &quot;Wisdom is One&quot; by Benjamin Williams Huntsman?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14981" CreationDate="2020-07-22T14:20:11.217" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually, the book was originally published in &lt;strong&gt;1947&lt;/strong&gt;. Here are a few editions that I found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wisdom is one : being a collection of quotations from the sayings and writings of some of the masters and their followers, collated to show the fundamental identity of all veritable teachings&lt;/em&gt; / compiled by B.W. Huntsman. This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://lccn.loc.gov/99073734&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition from 2000 in the Library of Congres&lt;/a&gt;, but the note in the catalogue entry says, &amp;quot;Originally published: London : A. Dakers, &lt;strong&gt;1947&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/wisdom-is-one-being-a-collection-of-quotations-from-the-sayings-and-writings-of-the-masters-and-their-followers-compiled-by-bw-huntsman-1st-ed-reprinted/oclc/561079518&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint by Watkins (London), &lt;strong&gt;1953&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; listed in WorldCat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0722400411&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint by Stuart &amp;amp; Watkins, &lt;strong&gt;1969&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, currently on Amazon.com. (This is presumably the same publisher as the previous one, possibly after a merger with another publisher.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/wisdom-is-one-being-a-collection-of-quotations-from-sayings-and-writings-of-some-of-the-masters-and-their-followers-collated-to-show-the-fundamental-identity-of-all-vertitable-teachings/oclc/946484039&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint by C.E. Tuttle (Rutland, Vermont), &lt;strong&gt;1985&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; listed in WorldCat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/wisdom-is-one-being-a-collection-of-quotations-from-the-sayings-and-writings-of-some-of-the-masters-and-their-followers-collated-to-show-the-fundamental-identity-of-all-veritable-teachings/oclc/56527908&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint by Aeon (Mamaroneck, New York), &lt;strong&gt;2000&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; listed in WorldCat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T14:20:11.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1161" CreationDate="2020-07-22T15:48:36.760" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that the Gnommish cipher has no relevance to what Artemis decoded in the first book. I just think that the Gnommish cipher was just supposed to be a little bit of fun for the readers. The real Gnommish texts are probably modifications of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, it wouldn't be conventional to include the Easter egg in real Gnommish since it's Artemis level decoding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10529" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T15:48:36.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14978" CreationDate="2020-07-22T16:25:19.420" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I'm going to attempt to answer this from the perspective of the reader at that point in time.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question is regarding this passage in Book 1, Chapter 11, &amp;quot;A Knife in the Dark&amp;quot;--&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the top they found..., a wide ring of ancient stonework, now&#xA;crumbling or covered with age-long grass. But in the centre a cairn of&#xA;broken stones had been piled. They were blackened as if with fire.&#xA;About them the turf was burned to the roots and all within the ring&#xA;the grass was scorched and shrivelled, as if flames had swept the&#xA;hill-top....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, the reader has only one way of knowing what could have happened here. Earlier in the chapter, we read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Frodo lay..., it seemed to him that far away there came a light in&#xA;the eastern sky: it flashed and faded many times.... The dawn... was&#xA;still some hours off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'What is the light?'....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strider answered, 'It is too distant to make out. It is like&#xA;lightning that leaps up from the hill-tops.'....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a long while Frodo could still see the white flashes....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Weathertop lies to the East of where Strider and the hobbits set up camp. (Anytime Tolkien mentions a direction, check your map!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader, with this shred of evidence, is forced to rely on the superior tracking and observation skills of Strider, who notices that one rock in particular sticks out like a sore thumb!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly Strider stopped and looked at the stone on top of the&#xA;cairn; it was flatter than the others, and whiter, as it had escaped&#xA;the fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as for that translation - It's a bit of a stretch, and somebody more familiar with Tolkien languages/writing may be able to chime in -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But Strider already knew something supernatural happened here on October 3rd.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Strider arrives at Weathertop on October 6th, TA 3018&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easier to solve this clue when you already have a confirmation bias!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We get some closure on this later on in Book 2, Chapter 2 &amp;quot;The Council of Elrond,&amp;quot; where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Gandalf recounts his fight with the Nazgul&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I galloped to Weathertop like a gale, and I reached it before sundown on my second day from Bree — and they were there before me. They drew away from me, for they felt the coming of my anger and they dared not face it while the Sun was in the sky. But they closed round at night, and I was besieged on the hill-top, in the old ring of Amon Sûl. I was hard put to it indeed: such light and flame cannot have been seen on Weathertop since the war-beacons of old. . .At sunrise I escaped and fled towards the north.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10291" LastEditorUserId="10291" LastEditDate="2020-07-22T16:39:09.217" LastActivityDate="2020-07-22T16:39:09.217" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14987" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="14988" CreationDate="2020-07-23T22:34:06.407" Score="7" ViewCount="1831" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the nursery rhyme Hot Cross Buns, there's the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One a penny, two a penny, hot cross buns&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that you can buy a hot cross bun for either 1p or 0.5p? If so, why would anyone buy only one bun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10534" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T08:37:26.397" Title="Hot Cross Bun Paradox" Tags="&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14987" CreationDate="2020-07-23T23:06:49.447" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;No paradox involved. Hot cross buns were traditionally consumed at the end of Lent, and the nursery rhyme derives from the cries of street vendors. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hot cross buns, hot cross buns;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One a penny poker,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Two a penny tongs,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Three a penny fire shovel,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hot cross buns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, a one-penny bun was of better quality (or simply larger) than a half-penny bun. Going by the comparisons with fireside implements in the above street-cry, my guess is that it would be the quality that varies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poker -- used to stoke a fire, and therefore relatively clean.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tongs -- used to handle coals and therefore likely to be contaminated with coal dust.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fire shovel -- used to remove the ashes from the grate of a fire.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might consider the social class of the people likely to use these implements in an upper-class household in, say, Victorian times. A poker might be used by the owner of the household if he/she did not want to bother a servant. Tongs (to make up a fire) would probably be used by the butler or a maid. Lastly, cleaning out the fire grate would probably be the job of a scullery maid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has a interesting, albeit short, entry, and gives the earliest known street cry containing the phrase &amp;quot;one or two a penny&amp;quot; a date of 1733 (&lt;em&gt;Poor Robin's Almanack&lt;/em&gt;). An online currency converter indicates that 1d (one penny) in 1730 would have a purchasing power of about £0.49 (UK) today. Supermarket prices of £0.38 and £0.15 for premium and cheap Hot Cross Buns (Tesco) compare favourably with 1730 street prices. (Thanks to Gareth Rees for this info.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Cross_Buns&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia : Hot Cross Buns&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T08:37:26.397" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T08:37:26.397" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14989" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-24T03:58:04.510" Score="4" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/621/what-is-hobbes&quot;&gt;What is Hobbes?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the comic strip &lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;, Calvin has a radically different point of view than any of his peers or the adults in the story. One notable example is Hobbes himself, whose status as a &amp;quot;real&amp;quot; or stuffed tiger is never resolved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, is Calvin an unreliable narrator? Or is this point ambiguous in the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T13:05:07.740" Title="Is Calvin an unreliable narrator?" Tags="&lt;bill-watterson&gt;&lt;calvin-and-hobbes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14990" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14989" CreationDate="2020-07-24T13:05:07.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per Bill Watterson&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calvin sees Hobbes one way, and everyone else sees Hobbes another&#xA;way. I show two versions of reality, and each makes complete sense to&#xA;the participant who sees it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is reliably telling what he experiences, and the reader is not given enough knowledge to tell whether he's deluding himself or experiencing something that others can't see.  (Though we do notice that Calvin's father saw him tied to the chair, which Calvin could not have done to himself, which is at least some evidence toward Hobbes being real.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T13:05:07.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14991" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14992" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist Rosemary Sutcliff (1920 – 1992) and her life as a writer. She is best known as an author of chidren's books such as 'The Eagle of the Ninth' (1954), 'The Lantern Bearers' (1959) and 'The Mark of the Horse Lord' (1965)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T14:42:27.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14993" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14994" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The High Deeds of Finn MacCool' (1967), a children's novel by Rosemary Sutcliff. Use this tag with the tag [rosemary-sutcliff]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T14:43:44.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-24T15:35:43.407" Score="8" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been trying to recall a short story for a while now, one which I read in 2009-2010 but is possibly older (it was part of a children's story collection whose name I cannot recollect, although I don't think that the themes discussed in the story are those commonly observed in children's stories). I believe that the story incorporates the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A man from Norfolk.&lt;/strong&gt; This stands out to me vividly — the man was described as old and wearing a straw hat. I am 100% sure that the man was from Norfolk, and the story almost certainly begins with a short discussion of the mysticism of the seemingly mundane British County. He also lives in a small house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The protagonist is a journalist or reporter of some kind.&lt;/strong&gt; The protagonist is male, married (his wife is referred to in the story) and likely an editor for a local newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The protagonist goes to meet the strange man.&lt;/strong&gt; I know that their interaction is described, but can't remember exactly why or how they meet — I think the most likely reason is that the protagonist forgot something small at the man's house, but although the old man is not scary, the protagonist is still wary around him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story takes place in autumn/winter.&lt;/strong&gt; This is because the trees are described in the story, although I can't for the life of me remember whether they were described to have red leaves or no leaves at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story glorifies the English Countryside.&lt;/strong&gt; The small villages dotting England were discussed and the beauty of the wooden houses was also talked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm greatly sorry for the little information, but I was very young when I read it and it left a strong impression on my mind, likely because I found it out of place and different from the other stories. There are two other stories from the collection which I can recall — one was an excerpt from the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totto-Chan:_The_Little_Girl_at_the_Window&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window&lt;/a&gt; and another one which involved talking foxes and bears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from this, I think that the story involved a post-office and the man might have been trying to send a letter (although I may be completely incorrect on this one).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As per &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/778/guidelines-for-good-story-id-questions&quot;&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; page, I have added a few more points which may help in identification of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that the collection was particularly old (likely not pre-2000) and the book was certainly not in any stage of decay for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The collection was very thin — and after more thought I think that it might be an old elementary/middle school textbook! Since I read it in India (where English as a subject mostly consists of reading short stories assigned throughout the year) I assume that the story might be in a textbook as the binding of the book was either a simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://calitho.com/what-is-saddle-stitch-binding/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;saddle stitch&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bookbindingworkshopsg.com/perfect-binding-tutorial/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;perfect binding&lt;/a&gt;. Of course, I'm not sure, but this seems likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If it helps, the size of the collection was about 150-200 pages, and bigger than the average paperback — probably 6x10'', I would guess. Very thin, and large pages commonly found in picture books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8592" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T05:28:02.813" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T05:28:02.813" Title="Short (possibly children's) story set in Norfolk glorifying the English Countryside" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14996" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15054" CreationDate="2020-07-24T15:50:50.923" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm first time reading a novel by Joseph Conrad; I was inspired and revered him  since I saw &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Apocalypse Now&lt;/a&gt;. But as Mr.Joseph is regarded as a very skillful, &lt;em&gt;detailful&lt;/em&gt; and prolific writer so I must admit that my knowledge is a little low to fully understand him, therefore confusion arises and I have to come here for clearing up a doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of &lt;strong&gt;An Outcast of the Islands&lt;/strong&gt;, Willems (the novel's main character) is described as very powerful and somewhat as sophomaniac. To quote from the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] he kept them [the Da Souza tribe] singing his praises in the midst of their laziness, of their dirt, of their immense and hopeless squalor: he was greatly delighted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They [the Da Souza tribe] lived now by the grace of his will. This was power. Willems loved it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he depicts himself as intelligent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willems knew all about himself. On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch East-Indiaman in Samarang roads, he had commenced that study of himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling qualities of which led him toward that lucrative position which he now filled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, these remarks suggest that Willems was very powerful and law himself, and more importantly he himself made him. But a little later in the same chapter, when Willems is going home, the narrator writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaning against one of the brick pillars, Mr. Vinck, the cashier of Hudig &amp;amp; Co., smoked the last cheroot of the evening. Amongst the shadows of the trimmed bushes Mrs. Vinck crunched slowly, with measured steps, the gravel of the circular path before the house.&#xA;&amp;quot;There's Willems going home on foot- and drunk I fancy,&amp;quot; said Mr. Vinck over his shoulder. &amp;quot;I saw him jump and wave his hat&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been mentioned in the first chapter that Willems is a clerk for &lt;strong&gt;Hudig &amp;amp; co.&lt;/strong&gt;, and at the same time his prowess is talked about. The confusion is that in my society and as far as I have seen, clerks are the ones who give receipts for something, to be a bit direct: they are  employees of relatively low power. So, given that Willems is the head of the whole Da Souza tribe and everyone lives by his grace, how come Mr. Vink makes such remarks on him? And how could he be just a clerk of a company when he got such powers (whole army of that tribe) which hardly anyone in that company have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kindly explain me the situation of Willems as can be deduced from the first and second chapter of &lt;strong&gt;An Outcast of the Islands&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;UPDATE&lt;/strong&gt;: In the third chapter it is written that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had married her [Joanna] to please Hudig, and the greatness of his sacrifice ought to have made her happy without any further exertion on his part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m lost even more here as to who Hudig was and how marrying Joanna would have pleased him? &lt;strong&gt;Hudig &amp;amp; co.&lt;/strong&gt; can be imagined as a company which transports its products over the whole Europe and these Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia. I’m unable to understand how the Da Souza tribe is related to &lt;strong&gt;Hudig &amp;amp; co.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T17:58:36.923" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T18:28:26.920" Title="How powerful is Willems in the beginning of An Outcast of the Islands?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;an-outcast-of-the-islands&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14997" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-24T17:11:56.643" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a quote attributed to Walt Whitman with the following approximate meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding faults with others requires a bit of ability,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but stopping yourself from abusing that information requires a world of sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact quote (if there is one)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10538" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T05:20:39.570" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T05:20:39.570" Title="Searching for a Whitman quote" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14998" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="14999" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'An Outcast of the Islands', Joseph Conrad's second novel, published in 1896. Use this tag with the tag [joseph-conrad]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T17:18:30.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14969" CreationDate="2020-07-24T18:35:17.127" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first read the books in the chronological ordering when I was about five. And that, I think, makes a big difference, because to a five-year-old, &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is a slog. I didn't understand what the Victorian era was, or why we were in the Victorian era, or why the characters used such odd slang, or what a hansom cab was, or any of the references Lewis was making to other genres of literature, or how the whole book is a clever fantasy spin on Genesis and original sin. Don't get me wrong; it's a great book, and I got a lot out of reading it at such a young age. There was imagery and symbolism that was so powerful I could feel exactly what it was meant to express, even if I missed the delicate web of references it spun. But it's not representative of the rest of the series. It doesn't set the tone for what's to come, and it's harder for younger readers to get through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, I absolutely loved &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. I was less bothered about the details of the real world, because the book seals itself off in the Professor's country estate, and the war that drives the Pevensie children there is more stage-setting. &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; sets the tone for the series much better than &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;. It's a lighthearted adventure with fun moments alongside its scary moments, heroes alongside its villains. The characters have agency and grow, and redemption, one of the major themes of the series, comes through much stronger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So after I finished &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, I was eager for the next book and I picked up &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;. I was in for another shock, because even though the Pevensie siblings (in their adult forms) appear as minor characters, the main characters are completely unrelated to anyone we saw in either of the first two books, and the action takes place entirely outside Narnia. The tone is much closer to &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; than to &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;, but it was still odd to think of the book as a sequel to either of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then with &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; we're back with the Pevensies and it's a direct sequel to &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;. And that continues with each of the last four books in the chronological ordering. Edmund and Lucy and Caspian himself reappear in &lt;em&gt;Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, then their cousin Eustace brings Jill Pole into Narnia in &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;, and Eustace and Jill come back to finish things off in &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;. The tone is always fairly consistent, though &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; reintroduces some of the cosmic tone of &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt;, especially towards the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's an obvious through line to &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;. Four of the five books have got a Pevensie in there somewhere (only &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; has no Pevensies at all). All of them have got at least one major character from the previous book. All of them have a tone of lighthearted adventure that gets heavier at certain moments. All of them have themes of redemption, and give their child heroes agency in the plot. Reading &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; before the other books muddles and confuses things. It shares some elements with them, but I found when I reread it later that a lot of it lands better if you already know Narnia. To take a very obvious example, there's a throwaway line on or near the last page that explains how the wardrobe from &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; came to be. If you've read &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, that line causes a little thrill as you see the pieces come together. But the first time I read the book, all that line made me think was &amp;quot;What's a wardrobe?&amp;quot; That's always the way with prequels; they're written after the original, so they assume you understand the significance of certain things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, to more directly answer the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; first means that you understand exactly how Narnia was made from the beginning. But if you've never seen Narnia before, who cares how it was made? Reading &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; first teaches you what Narnia is and why you should care about it. At that point, you're more interested to see what's in that world outside Narnia in &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt;. And the beginning and end of Narnia that you see in &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; have a lot more impact.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The characters still develop naturally in the chronological order. Time in Narnia passes more quickly than in our world, so the children often show up hundreds of years after the last time they were there, and that means there are very few recurring characters. &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; aren't important to the development of any of the major characters, and the other five books are still in the same order relative to each other as the release order, so it's more like you get the same character arcs but they're interrupted by extra material in the chronological ordering.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some might prefer to read &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; before &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; because it contains the allegory for original sin, while &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; contains the allegory for Jesus dying on the cross. On the other hand, Aslan's sacrifice in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; is perfectly well motivated within that book, and if you understand the Biblical context enough to care about this, you probably already understand what original sin is. What allegory &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; has is more general and self-contained, and the other books are in the same relative order either way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Reading the five books that I think of as the &amp;quot;Pevensie arc&amp;quot; out of order could make things very confusing. These books do continue on from each other, and you'll miss important character development if you read them out of order. It's especially important to read &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; last, because it really is the end of all things Narnia. You could read &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; pretty much anywhere and be fine, but I think they'll make more sense and land better if you read them after &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To wrap up, this is my preferred reading order for continuity of plot, character, theme, and tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; - It introduces the four Pevensies, who are pivotal characters in Narnia. It introduces the world of Narnia, and Aslan is a major presence instead of being on the outskirts like he is in a lot of the other books. The later books have lots of references back to it. Only sometimes are these vital to the plot, but it's still nice to get them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt; - The direct sequel to &lt;em&gt;The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt;, with the same cast of four Pevensies.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; - The middle to end of &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; to me feels like the point where the series starts to get a little more mature, a little less lighthearted. &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; has the same lighthearted tone as the earlier books, so I recommend reading it here. &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; also wraps things up for the Pevensie siblings, so it makes sense to see them as kings and queens in &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; before then.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Voyage of the Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt; - Introduces Eustace, the Pevensies' cousin, who will be important for the last few books. Wraps up Caspian's arc for the series.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; - Eustace returns, along with Jill, who will be the main character for this one and &lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; continues the slightly darker tone that began in &lt;em&gt;Dawn Treader&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; - I think this is the right time to see how Narnia was made, once you care about it from reading the previous books. This book also has a darker tone, which will be less jarring if you've read &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; already. Otherwise it's pretty self-contained. Most of the characters are completely new. It's the first book to really dive into the weird cosmic multiverse stuff.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last Battle&lt;/em&gt; - This needs to go last. It's basically Narnia's version of the Book of Revelation. Jill and Eustace return from &lt;em&gt;The Silver Chair&lt;/em&gt; as main characters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="115" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T18:35:17.127" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-24T23:18:33.093" Score="6" ViewCount="131" Body="&lt;p&gt;Near the very end of the first part, it's mentioned that they now only have &amp;quot;old bread and dried fruit&amp;quot; left of their food, having wandered around for many days in the nothingness outside of Hobbit Land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are no other descriptions at all of their food &amp;quot;out in the field&amp;quot; that I can remember; it's only mentioned that they &amp;quot;had a meager meal before going to sleep&amp;quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly does that &amp;quot;meager meal&amp;quot; consist of? Some kind of meat? Can you really carry meat around for so long? Do they heat it up on the fire? It would've been very interesting to hear what exactly they eat, and it bugs me that this is left out while the author never tires of describing the confusing (to me) geometry of the landscapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's even more strange since both the hobbits and Tolkien seem to love to eat and describe the food in detail whenever they get to have a &amp;quot;proper hobbit meal&amp;quot; while in safety. It makes me hungry reading each such scene. I wish I could join the hobbits in those moments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this considered a &amp;quot;meaningless detail&amp;quot; which is so obvious as to not require any kind of mention besides that one line I already paraphrased from? Maybe it was once described early on and I've just forgotten about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems strange to me that such comfortable hobbits, used to eating tons of food every day, would so quickly and without complaining at all adapt to eating whatever small amount of whatever they might get to eat while camping. From the sound of it, each hobbit normally eats the entirety of their food supply in one go, so it's very strange to me that none of them ever complain about the lack of food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10543" LastActivityDate="2020-07-24T23:18:33.093" Title="What exactly did the hobbits eat in the first half of The Fellowship of the Ring when journeying for many days?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15002" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-25T17:15:32.517" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm interested in reading works by the Chinese philosopher Pan Pingge. His work entitled &lt;em&gt;Searching for Humanity&lt;/em&gt; or 求仁录 appears, from secondary sources, to be a good place to start. However, I cannot track down any English translations of works by him. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10545" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T05:28:06.783" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T05:28:06.783" Title="Where can I find an English translation of Pan Pingge Searching for Humanity (求仁录)?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;pan-pingge&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15003" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-25T20:41:28.277" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In H. E. Bates' novella &amp;quot;A Month By The Lake&amp;quot;, Miss Bentley and Miss Beaumont have to get changed in the same hut to go swimming (because most huts are occupied). Miss Bentley emerges laughing, evidently having seen something funny in Miss Beaumont's appearance or behaviour. Much later on, at the end of the story, she whispers to Major Wilshaw, finally telling him what she was laughing about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are we supposed to infer that Miss Bentley saw?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10546" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-25T22:40:42.853" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T22:40:42.853" Title="What did Miss Bentley see in &quot;A Month By The Lake&quot; by H. E. Bates?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;h-e-bates&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15004" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-25T20:43:42.737" Score="4" ViewCount="605" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1: Scene 1, when Bernardo asks if Horatio is there, Horatio responds &amp;quot;A piece of him&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MARCELLUS. Holla! Bernardo!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;BERNARDO. Say, What, is Horatio there?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HORATIO. A piece of him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;BERNARDO. Welcome, Horatio; welcome, good Marcellus.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet Act 1: Scene 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Horatio answer &amp;quot;a piece of him&amp;quot;? Was this a common response at the time, or was he responding jokingly (the way someone might say &amp;quot;no&amp;quot; when asked &amp;quot;are you there&amp;quot;), or what? What's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T08:06:00.523" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T08:06:00.523" Title="Why does Horatio answer &quot;a piece of him&quot; when asked if Horatio is there?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12530" CreationDate="2020-07-25T22:13:12.970" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Per the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Inventions:_The_Autobiography_of_Nikola_Tesla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;, Ben Johnston was the one who edited the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10482" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T06:59:43.537" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T06:59:43.537" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15004" CreationDate="2020-07-25T22:36:33.743" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interpretations of this line appear to vary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Bernard Lott (New Swan Shakespeare, Advanced Series. Longman, 1968, 1990), the line may mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that he [Horatio] has not yet woken up fully to the surroundings and has left part of him downstairs in the warmth. Horatio is not in sympathy with all the tension that the others feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to G. R. Hibbard (The Oxford Shakespeare, 1987), the phrase means &amp;quot;All's that's left of him&amp;quot;; he adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare Lychorida's description of the new born Marina as &amp;quot;this piece | of your dead queen.&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, 3.1.17-18 and 20). Horatio humorously implies that he is shrinking away in the bitter cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Harold Jenkins (The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. Methuen/Routledge, 1982),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hand he [Horatio] offers is real enough, but the dark which conceals the rest of him enables him to reserve full participation. The sceptic is already characterized by his tone of humorous deflation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of the differences in interpretation at the literal level, these three glosses have something in common: that Horatio's humorous comment distances himself from the tension suggested by the interactions between the others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-25T22:36:33.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15007" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15010" CreationDate="2020-07-26T17:32:46.310" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1402921h.html#c1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Case of the White Footprints&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, a woman was talking to a detective about a situation in her hotel, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Bergson wasn't drunk, but he was excitable and noisy, and when I told him he mustn't come again he made such a disturbance that two of the gentlemen boarders—Mr. Wardale and Mr. Macauley—had to interfere. And then he was most insulting to them, especially to Mr. Macauley, who is a coloured gentleman; called him a &amp;quot;buck nigger&amp;quot; and all sorts of offensive names&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And how did the coloured gentleman take it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not very well, I am sorry to say, considering that &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; is a gentleman—a law student with chambers in the Temple. In fact, &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; language was so objectionable that Mr. Wardale insisted on my giving &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; notice on the spot. But I managed to get him taken in next door but one; you see, Mr. Wardale had been a Commissioner at, Sierra Leone—it was through him that Mr. Toussaint got his appointment—so I suppose he was rather &lt;strong&gt;on his dignity with coloured people&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &lt;strong&gt;the bolded &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; refers to the coloured man&lt;/strong&gt;, but &lt;strong&gt;the bolded &amp;quot;his &amp;amp; him&amp;quot; refer to &amp;quot;Mr. Bergson&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? As it is illogical that Mr. Wardale wanted her to dismiss the coloured man!! Is that right?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;on his dignity with coloured people&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;he think that &lt;strong&gt;coloured people must be respected&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;he &lt;strong&gt;treated their dignity as if it was his own&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T08:25:29.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T08:25:29.110" Title="What does &quot;on his dignity with&quot; mean in &quot;The Case of the White Footprints&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15008" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15009" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" Score="0" Body="R[ichard] Austin Freeman (1862–1943), British writer of detective stories and novels, many featuring the forensic scientist Dr. Thorndyke." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T18:06:38.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15010" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15007" CreationDate="2020-07-26T18:54:52.207" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To be on your dignity is to act in a very formal manner, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stand-on-your-dignity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in order to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to demand to be shown the respect that you think you deserve:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, Mr. Wardale is being demanding because Mr. Macauley's language is so objectionable (despite the provocation) that it shows too much disrespect.  (Into the logic of that we shall not delve.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a Commissioner, being on his dignity was necessary to keep his work going, so he got into the habit and expects it even here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T18:54:52.207" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15011" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15012" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of H. E. Bates (1905 – 1974) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T19:02:24.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15013" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15014" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Chinese philosopher Pān Pínggé (潘平格; 1610–1677)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T19:04:00.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15015" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15018" CreationDate="2020-07-26T19:47:08.000" Score="5" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks14/1402921h.html#c1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Case of the White Footprints&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; (1923) by R. Austin Freeman, a woman was talking to a detective about a situation in her hotel, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I noticed that she seemed very nervous and upset when she got the letters from hospital, and still more so when the last letter came. Of course, I don't know what he said to her in those letters. It may be that he had heard something about Mr. Bergson, and threatened to take some action. Of course, I can't say. I only know that she was very nervous and restless, and &lt;strong&gt;when we saw in the paper four days ago that the ship he would be coming by had arrived in Liverpool&lt;/strong&gt; she seemed dreadfully upset. And she got worse and worse until—well, until last night.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it common for newspapers to report the arrivals of ships?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T08:25:44.223" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T08:25:44.223" Title="Was it common to publish the times of voyages in the newspapers?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15016" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-26T20:08:36.137" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Wee Free Men&lt;/em&gt; - and other places where the Nac Mac Feegle are mentioned - they are quite obviously depicted as Scottish. The easiest example of that is their speech:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Crivens! We wanna coo beastie, no' a ship beastie!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Ach, one's as goo' as t'other! C'mon, lads, a' grab aholt o' a leg!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Aye, all the coos are inna shed, we tak what we can!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wee Free Men&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 3: &amp;quot;Hunt the Hag&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also wear kilts, are red-haired, and get drunk a lot - all of which are associated with the Scots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any particular reason why the Nac Mag Feegle are Scottish? (In-universe, it doesn't look like anyone else speaks or behaves like them (including the Fairy Queen (or the &amp;quot;Quin&amp;quot;)), but I haven't read all of the books yet.) Out of universe, what purpose does them being Scottish serve for the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-07-26T20:08:36.137" Title="Why are the Nac Mag Feegle Scottish?" Tags="&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;discworld&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11824" CreationDate="2020-07-26T21:54:06.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recent is rather vague. &amp;quot;The Duel&amp;quot; was included in Volume IV of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad&lt;/em&gt;, edited with an introduction by Samuel Hynes&lt;/strong&gt; (New York: Ecco Press, 1992/1993). This volume also contained &amp;quot;Falk: A Reminiscence&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;A Smile of Fortune&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Freya of the Seven Isles: A Story of Shallow Waters&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;The Planter of Malata&amp;quot; and author's notes. This was the last volume of a four-volume set. In 1999 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_Press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecco Press&lt;/a&gt; was acquired by HarperCollins, who no longer sell this set of books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other collections that contain &amp;quot;The Duel&amp;quot; are print-on demand volumes by publishers who want to gain easy money by publishing texts that have entered the public domain (or what I call &amp;quot;public-domain sharks&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a scholarly edition of the story, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://brill.com/view/title/31662?language=en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conrad’s “The Duel”: Sources / Text&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by J.H. Stape and John G. Peters (Rodopi/Brill, 2015). Below is an excerpt of the description provided by the publisher:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the publication of Joseph Conrad’s “Author’s Note” (1920) to &lt;em&gt;A Set of Six&lt;/em&gt; (1908), readers have been aware that the plot for the Napolonic [sic!] tale “The Duel” derived from an existing account. What has been unknown till now is the large number of venues in which that account variously appeared. This volume traces the tale’s fascinating genealogy and the immediate contemporary source that inspired Conrad’s 1907 story. A transcription of the story’s typescript-manuscript sheds light on the story’s development.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-27T18:04:56.977" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T18:04:56.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15015" CreationDate="2020-07-27T00:27:07.853" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  It would be back page news but it was crucial to businesses to know such information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theshipslist.com/ships/Arrivals/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here are some samples.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T00:27:07.853" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-27T02:46:45.767" Score="9" ViewCount="3788" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently begun re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'm over halfway through The Fellowship of the Ring now. In spite of having the story in &amp;quot;fresh memory&amp;quot;, I &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; can't remember the details, or didn't understand them to begin with. I did read it carefully, and I know everything that happened, but I have a bad concept of &lt;em&gt;when&lt;/em&gt; it happened, in relation to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to create a simple &amp;quot;timeline&amp;quot; which states, not using years but rather the ages of Bilbo/Frodo, or the relative time when:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo leaves for his original journey. (Not described in detail in the trilogy.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo comes back from his original journey. (Not described in detail in the trilogy.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo leaves for good. (This one I know Bilbo's age for: 111. Not sure about Frodo's.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo arrives at Rivendell, apparently from just walking around randomly and openly in spite of the dangers. (This confused me as well, even though he no longer had the Ring.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frodo leaves with his friends and the ponies, first to his fake &amp;quot;new home&amp;quot; and soon after on the great adventure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frodo arrives at Rivendell and meets Bilbo, apparently after not seeing him for a long time. (To me, it seemed like at most a couple of years, or even months.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd much appreciate to get the ages of both hobbits for these moments, or alternatively the time that has passed between each point. (Ideally, both!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10549" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-27T07:12:51.867" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T07:25:42.703" Title="What were the ages of Bilbo and Frodo for these six major plot points?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15020" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15019" CreationDate="2020-07-27T05:58:42.670" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Lord of the Rings contains several appendices at the end of The Return of the King, and Appendix B, called The Tale of Years (Chronology of the Westlands), contains a timeline of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following years are 'Third Age', at the end of which the events in The Lord of the Rings takes place. The appendix lists Bilbo's birth year as 2890, and 2968 as Frodo's, but no birth date for both – from the first chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring we know it's September 22nd:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo and Frodo happened to have the same birthday, September 22nd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The start of Bilbo's journey is in 2941, according to 'The Hobbit' just before May; he is 50 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He returns next year (2942), on June the 22nd (in the middle of an auction selling his property) and is 51 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo's farewell feast is on his/their birthday in 3001; he is 111 years old, and Frodo 33. This is mentioned in the first chapter as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo was going to be &lt;em&gt;eleventy-one&lt;/em&gt;, 111, a rather curious number, and a very respectable age for a hobbit (the Old Took himself had only reached 130); and Frodo was going to be &lt;em&gt;thirty-three&lt;/em&gt;, 33, an important number: the date of his ‘coming of age’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo settles in Rivendell the next year (3002); he is 111/112 years old and Frodo is 33/34.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Frodo leaves Bag End on September 23, 3018 (by 3018, the appendix starts to list days, since the events happen in rapid succession). Bilbo is 128 by then, and Frodo 50 (about the same age when Bilbo started his journey).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The hobbits escape across the Ford of Bruinen, into Rivendell on October 20th that same year, but Frodo doesn't wake up until October 24th. So Frodo and Bilbo haven't seen each other in sixteen years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-07-29T05:52:50.560" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T05:52:50.560" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15021" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15019" CreationDate="2020-07-27T06:10:55.993" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;All timeline information can be found in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix B: &amp;quot;The Tale of Years (Chronology of the Westlands)&amp;quot;. Selecting the relevant pieces of information for your answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2890&lt;/strong&gt;: Bilbo born in the Shire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2941&lt;/strong&gt;: Thorin Oakenshield and Gandalf visit Bilbo in the Shire. Bilbo meets Sméagol-Gollum and finds the Ring. The White Council meets; Saruman agrees to anattack on Dol Guldur, since he now wishes to prevent Sauron from searching the River. Sauron having made his plans abandons Dol Guldur. The Battle of the Five Armies in Dale. Death of Thorin II. Bard of Esgaroth slays Smaug. Dáin of the Iron Hills becomes King under the Mountain (Dáin II).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2942&lt;/strong&gt;: Bilbo returns to the Shire with the Ring. Sauron returns in secret&#xA;to Mordor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2968&lt;/strong&gt;: Birth of Frodo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3001&lt;/strong&gt;: Bilbo's farewell feast. Gandalf suspects his ring to be the One Ring. The guard on the Shire is doubled. Gandalf seeks for news of Gollum and calls on the help of Aragorn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3002&lt;/strong&gt;: Bilbo becomes a guest of Elrond, and settles in Rivendell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3018 [...] September 23&lt;/strong&gt;: Four Riders enter the Shire before dawn. The others pursue the Rangers eastward,and then return to watch the Greenway. A Black Rider comes to Hobbiton at nightfall. Frodo leaves Bag End. Gandalf having tamed Shadowfax rides from Rohan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;October 20&lt;/strong&gt;: Escape across the Ford of Bruinen.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;October 24&lt;/strong&gt;: Frodo recovers and wakes. Boromir arrives in Rivendell at night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, Bilbo and Frodo have a joint birthday party; Bilbo is 111, as you recall (&amp;quot;eleventy-one&amp;quot;), and the sum of their ages is 144 (&amp;quot;one gross&amp;quot;), so that makes Frodo 33. This fits with their birth years and the year of the Long-Expected Party as mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So going through the events you mentioned and checking ages and the relative timeline (noting that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15020/17&quot;&gt;the other answer&lt;/a&gt; also found proof that their shared birthday is 22 September):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo makes his journey &amp;quot;There and Back Again&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;strong&gt;50-51 years old&lt;/strong&gt; (he leaves in spring and returns the next spring, so one birthday while he's away). Frodo is born 26 years later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bilbo leaves for good and settles in Rivendell at &lt;strong&gt;111 years old&lt;/strong&gt;; Frodo is &lt;strong&gt;33 years old&lt;/strong&gt; at this time.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frodo leaves his old home and travels to Rivendell sixteen years later, at &lt;strong&gt;50 years old&lt;/strong&gt;, when Bilbo is &lt;strong&gt;128 years old&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-27T15:39:52.013" LastActivityDate="2020-07-27T15:39:52.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15022" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-27T19:04:10.323" Score="5" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am in reference to Lord Byron's &lt;em&gt;Childe Harold's Pilgrimage&lt;/em&gt; (see: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childe_Harold%27s_Pilgrimage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the opening stanza of the work (TO IANTHE):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not in those climes where I have late been straying,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠Though Beauty long hath there been matchless deemed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠Not in those visions to the heart displaying.&#xA;⁠Forms which it sighs but to have only dreamed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠Hath aught like thee in Truth or Fancy seemed:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠Nor, having seen thee, shall I vainly seek.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠To paint those charms which varied as they beamed—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠To such as see thee not my words were weak;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To those who gaze on thee what language could they speak?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is about the capitalized nouns i.e. &lt;strong&gt;Beauty&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;Truth&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Fancy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are those three nouns capitalized?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assumed the choice of the capital letter could be denoting an allegory. But then why capitalize a noun and not another? In other words why Byron would choose to capitalize those three nouns above but not other nouns in the stanza?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any comment welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10553" LastEditorUserId="8723" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T07:49:55.363" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T07:49:55.363" Title="Meaning of capitalized nouns in a Lord Byron poem" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15024" CreationDate="2020-07-28T13:28:10.833" Score="2" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Case of the White Footprints&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; (1923) by R. Austin Freeman, Dr. Jervis said to his friend that the chief officer found fingerprints in the crime scene after Dr. Jervis himself found peculiar footprints, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I think so, excepting that I learned from Foxton that Superintendent Platt has obtained the complete fingerprints of a right hand.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thorndyke raised his eyebrows. &amp;quot;Fingerprints!&amp;quot; he exclaimed. &amp;quot;Why, &lt;strong&gt;the fellow&lt;/strong&gt; must be a mere simpleton. &lt;strong&gt;But there,&amp;quot; he added, &amp;quot;everybody—police, lawyers, judges, even Galton himself—seems to lose every vestige of common sense as soon as the subject of fingerprints is raised&lt;/strong&gt;. But it would be interesting to know how he got them and what they are like. We must try to find that out. However, to return to your case, since your theory and the police theory are probably the same, we may as well consider the value of your inferences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would the subject of the fingerprints make everybody lose their common sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean that &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;because the footprints are already peculiar, there are no logical use for the fingerprints&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;the fellow&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;the murderer or the Superintendent Platt&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T08:27:19.793" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T08:27:19.793" Title="Why would the subject of fingerprints make everybody lose their common sense?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15023" CreationDate="2020-07-28T14:20:56.947" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.crimescene-forensics.com/History_of_Fingerprints.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fingerprinting was still a relatively new and &amp;quot;cutting edge&amp;quot; technique&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1901 - Sir Edward Henry, an Inspector General of Police in Bengal, India, develops the first system of classifying&#xA;fingerprints. ... This system of classifying fingerprints was first adopted as the official&#xA;system in England, and eventually spread throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the police are likely to jump onto fingerprint evidence the same way we often do DNA evidence, or digital signatures, as absolute proof. Dr. Thorndyke is annoyed because he feels they will ignore the other evidence in favor of the fingerprints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, I think &amp;quot;the fellow&amp;quot; does refer to the Superintendent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-07-28T15:25:17.583" LastActivityDate="2020-07-28T15:25:17.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3691" CreationDate="2020-07-29T08:38:56.300" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0531070816&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragon Gets By&lt;/a&gt; (by &lt;em&gt;Captain Underpants&lt;/em&gt; creator Dav Pilkey) in which a cute chubby dragon does everything backwards. It's from 1991.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this particular segment, he sees his kitchen is out of food and goes shopping. He drives up a hill to the store, but he ends up buying too many groceries and they can't all fit in his car. His solution is to eat them all (which indeed includes &lt;strong&gt;drinking a bottle of catsup with a straw&lt;/strong&gt;), but then &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; can't fit in his car!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, the dragon does look a bit like a hippo or a rhino. The book can currently be viewed on Youtube &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMGaT4D2_kw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; and the segment is around 2:25.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T08:38:56.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6533" CreationDate="2020-07-29T08:58:40.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pretty sure this is &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Way Through Doors&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jesse Ball. It's from 2009 and everything you mentioned is there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's about a man &lt;strong&gt;appointed 'municipal inspector' by his uncle&lt;/strong&gt; who then &lt;strong&gt;witnesses a young woman getting into an accident&lt;/strong&gt;. He poses as her boyfriend and looks after her (she's kind of concussed), but he has to keep her awake or &lt;strong&gt;she'll slip into a coma&lt;/strong&gt;. To that end, &lt;strong&gt;he starts telling her stories within stories, which feature him and her.&lt;/strong&gt; And from then on it does become quite surreal and experimental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find it &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0307387461&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T08:58:40.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15030" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3684" CreationDate="2020-07-29T09:21:58.037" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a book called &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B001DF64CY&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fat: A Love Story&lt;/a&gt; by Barbara Wersba from 1987. From what I gather, everything fits:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heroine (Rita) is &lt;strong&gt;16, American and overweight&lt;/strong&gt; and starts a relationship with &lt;strong&gt;a guy who's 32 and artistic&lt;/strong&gt;. The book is &lt;strong&gt;short (156 pages)&lt;/strong&gt; and followed by a &lt;strong&gt;sequel&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0060263660&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Love Is the Crooked Thing&lt;/a&gt;) where &lt;strong&gt;she has a job&lt;/strong&gt; (which is a bit meta - she writes a trashy romance novel) &lt;strong&gt;and their relationship is in trouble because of her parents&lt;/strong&gt;; there's also a third book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0060263636&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beautiful Losers&lt;/a&gt;. And yes, &lt;strong&gt;the cover is extremely 80s&lt;/strong&gt; with her in an 80s workout outfit daydreaming about a good-looking guy in the background and it's all lit like a soap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xkH5x.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xkH5x.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2020-07-29T09:21:58.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11903" CreationDate="2020-07-29T14:16:59.333" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hemingway knew Joyce personally, as they were both expatriates in Paris at the same time.  In 1923, the year Hemingway’s first collection of stories was published, Hemingway claimed that Joyce was “the best writer in the world.”  (For that, and gossip about their drinking-buddies relationship, see  the blogpost &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2015/11/james-joyce-picked-drunken-fights-then-hid-behind-ernest-hemingway.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;James Joyce Picked Drunken Fights, Then Hid Behind Ernest Hemingway&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on Open Culture, 3 November 2015.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, Joyce was a big influence on Hemingway, at least in his early years, though Hemingway quickly developed his own style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="181" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:39:11.920" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:39:11.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15032" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15033" CreationDate="2020-07-30T06:51:20.410" Score="8" ViewCount="1926" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/hamlet/act-1-scene-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet, Act I, Scene II&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does &amp;quot;too&amp;quot; occur twice?&#xA;It is one in a series of repetitions which occur in this soliloquy. But what does it mean &amp;quot;too, too sullied&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it is also a reference to &amp;quot;this too&amp;quot;, being Claudius and the Queen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9885" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T13:38:21.983" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:28:43.290" Title="&quot;Too too sullied flesh&quot; in Hamlet. Why twice?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15032" CreationDate="2020-07-30T09:23:54.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand it as an &lt;em&gt;intensifying repetition&lt;/em&gt; as in &lt;em&gt;'very very brave'&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;'long long time ago'&lt;/em&gt; but, apparently, there is no full agreement on this fragment even between the specialists (or, at least, in 1877, there wasn't):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;too too]&lt;/strong&gt; Nares pointed out the intensive effect of this reduplication, giving instances from Holinshed and Spenser, and adding that it is common. Halliwell (&lt;em&gt;Sh. Soc. Papers&lt;/em&gt;, 1844, i, 39) showed that 'too-too' is a provincial word recognized by Ray, and explained by him as meaning 'very well or good,' and that Watson a few years afterwards says it is 'often used to denote &lt;em&gt;exceeding&lt;/em&gt;.' In proof '&lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; TOO-TOO, &lt;em&gt;as used by our early writers, is one word, denoting &amp;quot;exceedingly,&amp;quot; and that it ought to be so printed&lt;/em&gt;' Halliwell gives from the poets twelve instances, from Skelton down to Hudibras, and refers to over thirty other passages where the phrase is found, extending from &lt;em&gt;Promos and Cassandra&lt;/em&gt; to Young's &lt;em&gt;Night Thoughts&lt;/em&gt;. [After all, Halliwell did not so print it in his edition.] Hunter doubts if this reduplication be emphatic. It appears to him to have been in sense neither more nor less than &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt;, and he cites many instances from prose writers. Palsgrave, he adds, has beside &lt;em&gt;to-much&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to-little&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp;c., &lt;em&gt;to to much&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to to great&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to to little&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;to to small&lt;/em&gt;, answering to &lt;em&gt;par trap trop peu&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;par trop trop grant&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;par trop trop petit&lt;/em&gt;. The pronunciation was &lt;em&gt;too-toó&lt;/em&gt;, as appears by this line of Constable's: 'But I did too-too inestimable wey her.' That the phrase was used with intensifying iteration, White thinks is clear from instances like the present, and from the similar iteration of other adverbs and adjectives in the literature of Shakespeare's day. For instance: 'Thy wit dost use &lt;em&gt;still still&lt;/em&gt; more harmes to finde,'—Sidney's &lt;em&gt;Arcadia&lt;/em&gt;, ii, p. 225, ed. 1603; 'While he did live &lt;em&gt;far, far&lt;/em&gt; was all disorder,'—&lt;em&gt;Ib.&lt;/em&gt; v, p. 430; 'your lesson is &lt;em&gt;Far far&lt;/em&gt; too long to learne it without booke,'—&lt;em&gt;Astrophel and Stella&lt;/em&gt;, St. 56, &lt;em&gt;Ib.&lt;/em&gt; p. 537; 'Stop you my mouth with &lt;em&gt;still still&lt;/em&gt; kissing me,'—&lt;em&gt;Ib.&lt;/em&gt; St. 81, &lt;em&gt;Ib.&lt;/em&gt;, p. 547; 'Even to thy pure and &lt;em&gt;most most&lt;/em&gt; loving breast,'—&lt;em&gt;Sh. Son.&lt;/em&gt; 110. In any case the compound epithet must have originated in the frequent iterative use of the word. Staunton thinks that the present instance must be regarded as an exception to Halliwell's rule. Here the repetition of &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; is not only strikingly beautiful, rhetorically, but it admirably expresses that morbid condition of the mind which makes the unhappy prince deem all the uses of the world but 'weary, stale, flat and unprofitable.' Halliwell notes that his copy of F&lt;sub&gt;2&lt;/sub&gt; reads 'too-too,' with the hyphen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Horace Howard Furness, ed. (1877). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anewvariorumedi02furngoog/page/n68/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 41–42&lt;/a&gt;. Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T10:44:54.847" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T10:44:54.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15034" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-30T09:39:59.230" Score="3" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just read the Korean folk tale &lt;a href=&quot;https://sites.google.com/site/koreanfolktales/home/the-magpie-and-the-bell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Magpie and the Bell&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (I don't know whose translation this is), in which a huge snake claims to be able to transform into a dragon and rise to heaven:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fine. Listen carefully. Deep in this mountain, there is an old abandoned temple. No one lives there now. In that temple, there is a huge bell still hanging. If you toll that bell three times, I will let you go.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes, that can't be too difficult.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But wait, my boy! You are jumping the gun! Don't be so sure! You must ring the bell from here, from right where you are now!&amp;quot; And the snake continued to tell him that if he tolled the bell three times she would be transformed into a dragon and rise to Heaven, and that that was the only way he could save his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How is it possible for a snake to transform into a dragon?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it a standard trope/belief in Korean folklore that snakes have this ability or are related to dragons? &lt;a href=&quot;http://personal.psu.edu/swl5588/Assignment%203.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reading&lt;/a&gt; about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dragon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dragons&lt;/a&gt; in Korean mythology, I found a few references to &lt;strong&gt;Imugis&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;quot;lesser dragons&amp;quot;, which are said to resemble giant snakes and to be able to transform into dragons under certain conditions. But they are also said to be benevolent or to bring good luck, so I find it unlikely that the evil snakes in this story are Imugis. The only linked page I saw for further info on Imugis &lt;a href=&quot;https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%9D%B4%EB%AC%B4%EA%B8%B0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;was in Korean&lt;/a&gt;, so I'm not sure if it's possible that these snakes are Imugis or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T09:39:59.230" Title="In &quot;The Magpie and the Bell&quot;, how can the snake transform into a dragon?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14969" CreationDate="2020-07-30T12:03:42.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The first list is in date of publication (but not necessarily date of writing) order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second is in &amp;quot;apparent timeline order&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is unquestionably first in time order (within Narnian space-time).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In other space-times anything can happen relatively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The time-location of &lt;em&gt;The Horse and His Boy&lt;/em&gt; is more uncertain but its position in the second list is reasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of which answers your question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll assert, with certainty of disapproval from some, that in providing his &amp;quot;approved order&amp;quot; list, and having become immersed in the Narnia universe as a whole, Lewis lost touch with his original vision, for his reasons for writing the original story and for the effect that his suggestion would have on his target audience.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why publishers do what they do is more inscrutable - but using Lewis's approved order is reason enough if you don't care about the effect on the target audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLTWATW is written solidly for both children and adults. The master storyteller is talking to you, no matter how old you are. There are hard lessons and harrowing passages and pain and anguish, but that young children are an utterly essential part of the target demographic is never forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By itself TLTWATW is a stand alone story - which is how Lewis originally intended it.&#xA;We start off with a little scene setting (London in the Blitz meant children being evacuated and ...) - handled incredibly well by the opening scenes of the film. We rapidly progress to wonderment (what's in the wardrobe) friendship and betrayal (Tumnus) greed and betrayal by those close to you (Turkish delight) with forays into talking Beavers - indeed, talking everything, an unexplained magical something happening (always winter and never Christmas) and hints that the King is coming to set things right. Some fearsome stuff happens along the way. But a well watched over child might almost read the story, learn much, become a little more adult quicker than otherwise, and not end up vastly more scarred in the process. Everything is &amp;quot;well enough explained&amp;quot; along the way. Knowing where Jadis fits into the picture, why she thinks she knows the rules, why Aslan knows she doesn't and more might be useful knowledge, but the story is complete without this knowledge, because that's how Lewis originally intended it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; is a completely different affair. It reeks of evil, murderous malfeasance and occult practice throughout. Lewis finely crafts Digory's uncle as an execrable, despicable, crawling failure. But it's hardly children's fare. The lessons of the magic rings are not good ones. The search for rings to get back to Narnia is never identified as the utter antithesis of &amp;quot;What would Aslan do?&amp;quot; which it clearly is. Mass murder beyond anything we have ever known - with pride and refusal to fail the key element - certainly an intended image of Lucifer but not how any childhood educator would choose to present the subject to impressionable minds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the series as an adult starting, thankfully, with TLTWATW.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I read the Magician's Nephew last (I think). It was in large part a terrible tale - redolent of evil. Not badly written as a story, but not what I'd want in any part as a childhood memory. Or as a founding adult one. If I'd read &lt;em&gt;The Magician's Nephew&lt;/em&gt; first I may well have read no further. Its &amp;quot;explanations&amp;quot; were interesting, but hardly necessary to any of the other stories. I would not consider introducing a child to the series with TMN. Nothing in the tale is essential and much is dangerous. The impression given overall is nasty. The story has its place, but not as flagship to a most valuable series of stories. The others all have hard and demanding lessons. But no other so consistently descends to TMN's depths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR (at the end)&lt;/strong&gt; For only the second time in my experience*, Lewis got it wrong :-).&#xA;There may be other occasions, but I've not noticed them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Unrelatedish, but: The other was re his comments on the role of women in public worship. As a long time CSL reader and enthusiast, when I came upon it I thought I was about to read a reasoned &amp;amp; definitive statement on a rather fraught matter. I was astounded at the lack of overall perspective and amazed that the Lewis that I thought I knew had written it. Almost all else of his that I've met I lap up :-).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7925" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T12:17:13.980" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T12:17:13.980" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15037" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-07-30T12:43:24.400" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Conference of the Birds&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Speech of the Birds&lt;/em&gt; (Persian: &lt;em&gt;Mantiq-ut-Tayr&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Maqamat-ut-Tuyur&lt;/em&gt;) is a Persian poem written by the 12th century Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar or Attar of Nishapur (c. 1145 – c. 1221; full name: Abu Hamir bin Abu Bakr Ibrahim).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the poem. Questions with this tag should also use the tags &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/farid-ud-din-attar&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;farid-ud-din-attar&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;farid-ud-din-attar&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/persian-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;persian-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;persian-literature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Useful links&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conference_of_the_Birds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Conference of the Birds - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attar_of_Nishapur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attar of Nishapur - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T12:55:23.213" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T12:55:23.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15038" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-07-30T12:43:24.400" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Persian poem titled The Conference of the Birds, or Speech of the Birds (Persian: Mantiq-ut-Tayr, or Maqamat-ut-Tuyur), written by the 12th century Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, also known as Attar of Nishapur. Use with the [farid-ud-din-attar] and [persian-literature] tags." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T12:55:15.393" LastActivityDate="2020-07-30T12:55:15.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15032" CreationDate="2020-07-30T18:15:01.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;On top of the answer provided by @tum_ (great answer, btw), in earlier English--particularly in Old English (aka Anglo Saxon) and Middle English, though also in early modern English as in the case with Shakespeare--repeated modifiers were a way to emphasize the point. This was especially true with multiple negatives. Whereas today there is the idea that a double negative = positive, historically that was not the case. To use multiple negatives (&amp;quot;I will not never eat lima beans&amp;quot;) was a way to make it extra extra negative (heh...just noticed what I typed there). Professor Michael D.C. Drout discusses this in several of his Modern Scholar courses, most of which are available on Audible. The one I listened to most recently that touched on it was &amp;quot;Way with Words: Writing Rhetoric and the Art of Persuasion.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to &amp;quot;too, too solid&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;too, too sullied,&amp;quot; that depends upon which Shakespeare text you are looking at. The First Quarto (also known as the &amp;quot;Bad Quarto&amp;quot;) actually has the line as &amp;quot;too, too sallied,&amp;quot; which--given that sallied means to be attacked or besieged--I would argue doesn't seem to fit the context. Editors often change the word to &amp;quot;sullied,&amp;quot; meaning contaminated or made dirty. The First Folio (1623) uses &amp;quot;too, too solid.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My personal opinion (Shakespeare was my secondary focus in grad school, right after medieval English literature) is that &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; seems to fit the best, given that it is followed by &amp;quot;melt&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;thaw.&amp;quot; My opinion is that &amp;quot;melt&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;thaw&amp;quot; work better in opposition to &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; than they do &amp;quot;sullied.&amp;quot; Like I said, just my opinion, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a good link that discusses this: &lt;a href=&quot;https://interestingliterature.com/2019/08/a-short-analysis-of-hamlets-o-that-this-too-too-solid-flesh-would-melt-soliloquy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Short Analysis of Hamlet’s ‘O that this too too solid flesh would melt’ soliloquy&lt;/a&gt; by Oliver Tearle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10572" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T21:28:43.290" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:28:43.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15042" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-07-30T19:18:39.163" Score="8" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;Don, a soldier sleeping in a hammock, is abruptly awakened some hours earlier than expected and is quite alarmed, thinking the camp may be under attack by the enemy. The company headquarters runner who woke him up says, &amp;quot;The Old Man [i.e. the commanding officer] wants to see you.&amp;quot; Then we are told:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don made a rhetorical and most ungracious suggestion as to what the captain could do about it and slid silently to his feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the author reports the use of what is presumably coarse language without quoting it. This cannot be called euphemism: it doesn't say that something bad is something good. So my question is whether there is a standard name for this device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This is from Robert Heinlein's novel &lt;em&gt;Between Planets&lt;/em&gt;, which appeared in 1951.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2097" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-07-30T19:36:44.243" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T01:06:38.480" Title="The name of a device by which an author reports the use of coarse language without quoting it?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15044" CreationDate="2020-07-31T09:13:52.250" Score="7" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Albert Camus once defined the novel as the place where the human being is abandoned to other human beings&lt;/strong&gt;. The plague novel is the place where all human beings abandon all other human beings. Unlike other species of apocalyptic fiction, where the enemy can be chemicals or volcanoes or earthquakes or alien invaders, the enemy here is other humans: the touch of other humans, the breath of other humans, and, very often – in the competition for diminishing resources – the mere existence of other humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is a passage from Jill Lepore's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/30/what-our-contagion-fables-are-really-about&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;, which is also published in the print edition of the March 30, 2020, issue, with the headline “Don’t Come Any Closer.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How to understand Camus's &amp;quot;defining the novel as the the place where the human being is abandoned to other human being&amp;quot;? Is there anything that Camus directly said or wrote, and where? Or other original text that I can resort to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10576" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-07-31T10:02:36.963" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T10:35:38.540" Title="Where did Camus define &quot;the novel as the place where the human being is abandoned to other human beings&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15044" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15043" CreationDate="2020-07-31T10:35:38.540" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Albert Camus' essay &lt;em&gt;L'Homme révolté&lt;/em&gt; (1951, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rebel_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rebel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) contains a chapter entitled &amp;quot;Roman et révolte&amp;quot;, in which the author says (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qu’est-ce que le roman, en effet, sinon cet univers où l’action trouve sa forme, où les mots de la fin sont prononcés, &lt;strong&gt;les êtres livrés aux êtres&lt;/strong&gt;, où toute vie prend le visage du destin ? Le monde romanesque n’est que la correction de ce monde-ci, suivant le désir profond de l’homme. Car il s’agit bien du même monde. La souffrance est la même, le mensonge et l’amour. Les héros ont notre langage, nos faiblesses, nos forces. Leur univers n’est ni plus beau ni plus édifiant que le nôtre. Mais eux, du moins, courent jusqu’au bout de leur destin, et il n’est même jamais de si bouleversants héros que ceux qui vont jusqu’à l’extrémité de leur passion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a fairly literal translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the novel actually, if it is not that universe in which action takes shape, in which the words of the end are spoken, &lt;strong&gt;beings handed over / surrendered to other beings&lt;/strong&gt;, in which each life takes the face of destiny. The novelistic worlds is only a correction of this world according to man's profound desire. For it is really about the same world. The suffering is the same, [and so are] lying and love. The heroes/characters have our language, our weaknesses, our strengths. Their universe is neither more beautiful nor more edifying than ours. But they at least run to the end of their destiny, and no heroes are more deeply moving than those who go to extremes / extremity of their passion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the words Camus uses are ambiguous and it can be difficult to decide whether a specific meaning should be chosen or whether the ambiguity should be retained. For example, &amp;quot;Livrer&amp;quot; can mean, among other things, &amp;quot;deliver&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;hand over&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;se livrer&amp;quot; can mean &amp;quot;to give oneself up&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;to confide in (someone)&amp;quot;. The French word &amp;quot;héros&amp;quot; does not always correspond with the English word &amp;quot;hero&amp;quot;; it can also mean &amp;quot;main character&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Extrémité&amp;quot; can both mean &amp;quot;extreme(s)&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;far end&amp;quot;. (&amp;quot;Romanesque&amp;quot; is an adjective derived from &amp;quot;roman&amp;quot;, the French word for &amp;quot;novel&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lepore's &amp;quot;the place where the human being is abandoned to other human beings&amp;quot; is based on, or is an interpretation of, &amp;quot;cet univers où (...)  les êtres [sont] livrés aux êtres&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T10:35:38.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15042" CreationDate="2020-07-31T20:22:50.777" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;In TV Tropes terms, this is called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NarrativeProfanityFilter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narrative Profanity Filter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, you're writing a book, and one of your characters, for whatever&#xA;reason, has to swear. Not a problem - unless your intended audience&#xA;are children or people who are generally against swearing. Is the risk&#xA;of offending them worth the artistic reward of using exactly the right&#xA;word? What can you do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Easy: Just say that the character swore, without going into exactly&#xA;what he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a section explicitly talking about Heinlein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert A. Heinlein loves this trope, since he was both writing in the&#xA;days when such curses were still considered somewhat unprintable, and&#xA;often for the juvenile market. So his characters sometimes will say&#xA;things like &amp;quot;Expletive Deleted!&amp;quot; or the first-person narrator will&#xA;merely describe the profanity in vague and general terms such as &amp;quot;I&#xA;told him what I thought of him, using words I hardly ever use.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T20:22:50.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14951" CreationDate="2020-07-31T20:53:18.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to an article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/The_Lion_the_Witch_and_the_Wardrobe_FullArticle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;CS Lewis Institute website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actual wardrobe that prompted the stories was one made by Lewis’s&#xA;grandfather and was in the family home in Belfast. Later, it was moved&#xA;to Lewis’s home at Oxford and now resides at the Wade Center, at&#xA;Wheaton College. One of C.S. Lewis’s cousins, Claire, remembered&#xA;occasions when various cousins along with “Jack” (C.S. Lewis) and his&#xA;brother Warren, would climb into the wardrobe while young Jack would&#xA;tell them stories he had invented. It is interesting to note that&#xA;Lewis mentions a few times that “it is foolish to shut oneself into&#xA;any wardrobe” perhaps because he always kept a crack of light when he&#xA;told his stories and also because he was warned. &lt;strong&gt;When Lewis sent a&#xA;draft of LWW to friend Owen Barfield, Barfield’s wife Maud was&#xA;concerned lest children read the story and accidentally lock&#xA;themselves in a wardrobe. So Lewis added five warnings to LWW.&lt;/strong&gt; The&#xA;wardrobe is such a vivid image that one Oxford boy, after reading the&#xA;book, chopped a hole in the back of the family wardrobe trying to get&#xA;to Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the Barfield's daughter Lucy was Lewis's goddaughter, and Lucy Pevensie is her namesake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This information seems to originate from the book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0787978906&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Into the Wardrobe: C.S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by David Downing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2020-07-31T20:53:18.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15047" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-01T11:13:19.347" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/6702/how-does-derridas-signifying-obfuscate-his-writing#comment12262_6702&quot;&gt;comment&lt;/a&gt; below the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/6702/2191&quot;&gt;How does Derrida's Signifying obfuscate his writing?&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/4230/djohnson&quot;&gt;DJohnson&lt;/a&gt; wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the record Derrida has been quoted as stating that he deliberately made his presentations and books &lt;em&gt;difficult&lt;/em&gt; and/or, if you prefer, impenentrable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Claims that Derrida is hard to read are easy enough to find. See for example this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/33oxhv/could_someone_please_explain_to_me_the_criticism/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit question from five years ago&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jean_searle_on_foucault_and_the_obscurantism_in_french_philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is Searle on Derrida's obscurantism&lt;/a&gt;. The general gist of the criticism is that Derrida is intentionally obtuse and difficult to read which makes it hard to know exactly what he's saying.  Any criticism of Derrida is deflected with a &amp;quot;well, you just don't understand him.&amp;quot; This makes it easy to reject all criticism as non-substantive and based on a poor reading of Derrida.  It seems that Derrida himself used this tactic, which is probably why fans of his work sometimes do as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The link in the above quote points to the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.openculture.com/2013/07/jean_searle_on_foucault_and_the_obscurantism_in_french_philosophy.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Searle and the Obscurantism in French Philosophy&lt;/a&gt; on Open Culture (01.07.2013), which contains the following quote from an interview in the magazine &lt;em&gt;Reason&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, &amp;quot;He says so and so,&amp;quot; he always says, &amp;quot;You misunderstood me.&amp;quot; But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of &lt;em&gt;obscurantisme terroriste&lt;/em&gt; (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking in French. And I said, &amp;quot;What the hell do you mean by that?&amp;quot; And he said, &amp;quot;He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying. That's the obscurantism part. And then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part.&amp;quot; And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these criticisms may be justified, they don't prove that &amp;quot;Derrida &lt;strong&gt;has been quoted as stating&lt;/strong&gt; that he deliberately made his presentations and books &lt;em&gt;difficult&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Hence my question: did Derrida ever say such a thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T11:13:19.347" Title="Where did Derrida say that he deliberately made his works difficult?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jacques-derrida&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15048" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="957" CreationDate="2020-08-01T13:29:45.247" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Aurorar0001 says, &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; is a real place name in Hampshire, England. The following comments are meant to shed some light on the origin of this place name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second part, &lt;strong&gt;Down&lt;/strong&gt;, is a noun and here has a meaning similar to 'hill'. To quote the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a down is &amp;quot;an undulating usually treeless upland with sparse soil — usually used in plural: &lt;em&gt;sheep grazing on the grassy downs&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/down&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;; &amp;quot;down, noun (2)&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part, &lt;strong&gt;Watership&lt;/strong&gt;, derives from Old English &lt;em&gt;wæterscipe&lt;/em&gt;, a neuter noun with the meaning 'a body of water, a piece of water, water' (Bosworth Toller's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, &lt;a href=&quot;http://bosworth.silent3.ff.cuni.cz/34532&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;). Another source gives the meaning of the Old English word as 'conduit, water-channel' (Gover et al. 1970, p. 346).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word part &lt;em&gt;-ship&lt;/em&gt; here has nothing to do with a boat, but is a derivational suffix like in &lt;em&gt;friendship&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hardship&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;township&lt;/em&gt; etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Names similar to &lt;em&gt;Watership&lt;/em&gt; occur also in Warwickshire, and if you were to look for them, you would likely find them in other areas of England as well. For Warwickshire, you find &lt;em&gt;Watershut Meadow&lt;/em&gt; and (in a historical spelling) &lt;em&gt;Watershippe feilde&lt;/em&gt; (Gover et al. 1970, p. 346).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name &lt;strong&gt;Watership Down&lt;/strong&gt; therefore had an original meaning 'uplands in the watery area', 'uplands by the water-channel' or something along these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/epns/downloads.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. E. B. Gover, A. Mawer and F. M. Stenton, in collaboration with F. T. S. Houghton, &lt;em&gt;The Place-Names of Warwickshire&lt;/em&gt;, English Place-Name Society 13 (1970 reprint)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10582" LastEditorUserId="10582" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T09:11:50.740" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T09:11:50.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15032" CreationDate="2020-08-01T13:33:30.913" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was published in several editions during the Jacobethan era, it is worth looking at how these early editions rendered these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/scene/2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first quarto (Q1)&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1603, which has sometimes been called a &amp;quot;bad quarto&amp;quot;, gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O that this too much grieu'd and sallied flesh &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Would melt to nothing, or that the vniuersall &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Globe of heauen would turne al to a Chaos!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q2/scene/1.2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second quarto (Q2)&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1604, gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, that this too too sallied flesh would melt, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_F1/scene/1.2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1623,  gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thaw, and resolue it selfe into a Dew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ShakesearesWords.com gives two meanings of &amp;quot;too&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(adverb) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?Id=5618&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;very&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(adverb) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeareswords.com/Public/Glossary.aspx?Id=6072&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anyway, in any case&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two other meanings recorded in C. T. Onions's &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;adv.&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;and too&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; And at the same time. &amp;quot;wild, and yet, too, gentle* (&lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt; 3.1.110).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;prep.&lt;/em&gt; (var. in F. of) To. &amp;quot;if they come too't&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; 4.5.60).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, the most plausible meaning of &amp;quot;too too&amp;quot; is an intensification of &amp;quot;very&amp;quot;. So what do modern editions of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; say?&#xA;The modern editions I have consulted comment on &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; but not always on &amp;quot;too too&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernard Lott (The New Swan Shakespeare, Advanced Series, Longman, 1968) says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;too too solid&lt;/em&gt;: This is how the First Folio reads. Other early editions, the Quartos, give the word &lt;em&gt;sallied&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt;, which in Shakespeare's English can mean 'troubled'. But &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; contrasts with &lt;em&gt;melt&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;dew&lt;/em&gt; in the following line, and is probably the correct reading. Hamlet is speaking of the flesh of his own body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. J. B. Spencer (The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1980) chose &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot; with the following rationale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2 reads 'sallied' (which could be a spelling of &lt;em&gt;sullied&lt;/em&gt;). F reads 'solid', which contrasts well with &lt;em&gt;melt, | Thaw, and resolve itself...&lt;/em&gt; and until the twentieth century was generally preferred by editors. But it may have an unpleasantly comic effect, especially if Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Hamlet, were putting on weight (compare &lt;em&gt;He's fat and scant of breath&lt;/em&gt;, V.2.281). &lt;em&gt;Sullied&lt;/em&gt; fits well into the feeling of contamination expressed by Hamlet; and for &lt;em&gt;sullies&lt;/em&gt; (F 'sulleyes') at II.1.39. Q2 has the spelling 'sallies'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. R. Hibbard (The Oxford Shakespeare, 1987) glosses &amp;quot;too too&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;altogether too, much too. The reduplication of &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; for emphasis was very common from about 1540 to 1660 (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; 4).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hibbard comments on the two lines in an appendix on pages 382-384, which also discusses John Dover Wilson's theory, already mentioned by Spencer, that &amp;quot;solid flesh&amp;quot; would have provoked mirth due to Burbage's girth [I couldn't resist the pun] but without agreeing with it. His choice for &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; is based on other arguments.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hibbard's gloss appears to settle the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One final comment: the difference between the first quarto and the other editions is the type of deviation that once gave rise to theories that this &amp;quot;bad quarto&amp;quot; might have been a pirated text, either by someone in the theatre writing down the playtext in shorthand during a performance or some actors of minor roles restoring the playtext from memory. Such theories no longer enjoy general support among Shakespeare scholars. The more interesting observation is the wording &amp;quot;too much&amp;quot;, where the second quarto and the folio have &amp;quot;too too&amp;quot;; this also suggests that the repetition of &amp;quot;too&amp;quot; was intended as an intensifying device and not, as Alexander Sloane's answer claims, that one of these adverbs here means &amp;quot;also&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T13:33:30.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15050" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11316" CreationDate="2020-08-01T15:14:15.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://aws-cf.imdoc.fr/prod/photos/0/7/3/9639073/28027576/big-28027576915.jpg?v=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diagram from Machiavelli's comment&lt;/a&gt; is perhaps a bit misleading. It gives the impression that there are two main &lt;em&gt;categories&lt;/em&gt; of paratext (each with further subdivisions), namely spatial and temporal, whereas spatial and temporal are two &lt;em&gt;characteristics&lt;/em&gt; of paratext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at paratext from a spatial point of view, you can subdivide it into peritext and epitext. The distinction between peritext and epitext for a specific text is not fixed forever. For example, a letter by or an interview with a book's author that is published elsewhere is epitext because it is outside the book's boundaries. However, if a later edition of the book reprints that letter or interview in, for example, an afterword or an annex, then that text becomes peritext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at paratext from a temporal point of view, you can locate it in time compared to a specific book: texts published before the publication of a specific text or book, the original edition itself, and texts published later. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://internt.ht.lu.se/doc/1408547525.calendarEvents.6300.pdf.0.Introduction_to_the_paratext.pdf/Introduction%20to%20the%20paratext.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Introduction to the Paratext&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;New Literary History&lt;/em&gt;, 1991), Genette gives the following example of &amp;quot;anterior paratexts&amp;quot; (italics from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;certain elements of the paratext appeared (publicly) at an earlier date: this is the case for prospectuses, advertisements that the book is &amp;quot;forthcoming,&amp;quot; or again of elements&#xA;linked to a prepublication in a newspaper or review, which sometimes disappear in the volume, like the famous Homeric titles of the chapters of Ulysses whose official existence will have been, if I may put it in this way, entirely prenatal-and thus, &lt;em&gt;anterior&lt;/em&gt; paratexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other texts appear after the original edition of a book. As Genette explains,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;others appear later than the text, for example thanks to a second edition, like the preface to &lt;em&gt;Thérèse Raquin&lt;/em&gt; (a four months' interval), or to a much later re-edition, like that of the &lt;em&gt;Essai sur les revolutions&lt;/em&gt; (twenty-nine years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Genette considers the preface to &lt;em&gt;Thérèse Raquin&lt;/em&gt; an example of &amp;quot;subsequent paratext&amp;quot;, while the the re-edition that appeared 29 years later as &amp;quot;belated paratext&amp;quot;. Paratexts that appear after the original edition can also be subdivided depending on whether they were published during the author's lifetime (&amp;quot;anthumous paratext&amp;quot;) or after the author's death (&amp;quot;posthumous paratext&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, we can look at the examples provided in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The novel’s title: a novel's title is not published before or after the novel, so only the spatial characteristic needs to be considered here. Since it is part of the book, it is peritext.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The author’s foreword written for the second edition of the novel: from a spatial point of view, this is peritext (for the second edition); from a temporal point of view, this is later paratext (subsequent paratext, assuming that the second edition was published not too long after the first edition).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Film adaptation of the novel: from a spatial point of view, this is epitext, since the film is not part of the novel (unless the DVD is included with the book, in which case it is or becomes peritext); from a temporal point of view it is later paratext.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The film’s trailer: in relation to the film itself, this is epitext (spatially) and anterior paratext (&amp;quot;published&amp;quot; or released before the film itself).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T15:14:15.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15051" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15052" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" Score="0" Body="Questions related to the works of the French literary theorist Gérard Genette (1930 – 2018). He is best known for the essays in the series of volumes entitled 'Figures', 'Palimpsestes : La Littérature au second degré' (1982) and 'Nouveau Discours du récit'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T15:18:05.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15054" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14996" CreationDate="2020-08-01T18:28:26.920" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Willems isn't powerful in the way that a local ruler may be powerful. He works as &amp;quot;confidential clerk&amp;quot; in a company involved in trade. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clerk#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; defines &amp;quot;clerk&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;One who occupationally works with records, accounts, letters, etc.; an office worker&amp;quot; but this does not seem an appropriate description of what Willems actually does. For example, the first chapter describes the types of affairs that Hudig entrusts to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he reviewed the more important affairs: the quiet deal in opium; the illegal traffic in gunpowder; the great affair of smuggled firearms, the difficult business of the Rajah of Goak. He carried that last through by sheer pluck; he had bearded the savage old ruler in his council room; he had bribed him with a gilt glass coach, which, rumour said, was used as a hencoop now; he had overpersuaded him; he had bested him in every way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he essentially trades on behalf of Hudig &amp;amp; Co. instead of being a clerk in the sense known to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willems describes his job as a &amp;quot;lucrative position&amp;quot;, i.e. he gains a lot of money. This is why&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he could give them [the da Souza family] all they wanted without ruining himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And because he has money to distribute to the impoverished descendants of Portuguese conquerors (Da Souza or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousa_(surname)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sousa or de Souza&lt;/a&gt; is a common Portuguese family name),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he had their silent fear, their loquacious love, their noisy veneration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, his &amp;quot;munificence&amp;quot; appears to make them dependent on his money:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;probably his greatest delight lay in the unexpressed but intimate conviction that, should he close his hand, all those admiring human beings would starve. His munificence had demoralised them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Da Souza are descendants of Portuguese colonisers or traders; Willems calls them a tribe because he considers them inferior to himself, not because they are a tribe in an anthropological sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he had the worship of the Da Souza tribe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the only occurrence of &amp;quot;tribe&amp;quot; in the entire novel; elsewhere, he refers to them as the Da Souza family. So there is no &amp;quot;Da Souza tribe&amp;quot; with its own army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vinck, the cashier, is another employee at Hudig &amp;amp; Co. who is less impressed by Willems' prosperity than the Da Souza family. Willems has no &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; outside that family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Willems&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vinck&lt;/a&gt; are family names that are most common in Flanders. Hudig is much less common, but, interestingly, there used to be a shipping line named &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudig_%26_Pieters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hudig &amp;amp; Pieters&lt;/a&gt;, which may have inspired the name &amp;quot;Hudig &amp;amp; Co&amp;quot; in Conrad's novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-01T18:28:26.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9119" CreationDate="2020-08-02T12:10:33.503" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is correct to say that Lynn Hejinian says that there are multiple readings of an &amp;quot;open text&amp;quot;. However, she does not say that all readings would be equally viable or valid. There are two passages in her essay that address this. First, she writes (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;though the  “story” and “tone” of such works may be interpreted differently by different readers, nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word strings are permissive, &lt;strong&gt;they do not license a free-for-all&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further down, she approvingly quotes a passage from Umberto Eco's &lt;em&gt;The Role of the Reader&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I call these interpretative moves inferential walks: they are not mere whimsical initiatives on the part of the reader, but are &lt;strong&gt;elicited by discursive structures and foreseen by the whole textual strategy&lt;/strong&gt; as indispensable components of the construction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, due to a text's &amp;quot;discursive strategies&amp;quot; some readings of a text will be more convincing than others. The text will more strongly &amp;quot;resist&amp;quot; interpretations that work against it. For this reason, not all readings will be equally viable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not an unusual position. See for example chapter 4 (&amp;quot;Interpretation&amp;quot;) in Terry Eagleton's book &lt;em&gt;How to Read Literature&lt;/em&gt; (Yale University Press, 2013):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary works may best be seen not as texts with a fixed sense, but as matrices capable of generating a whole range of possible meanings. They do not so much contain meaning as produce it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this does not imply that &amp;quot;anything goes&amp;quot;. Eagleton later says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no single correct interpretation of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' [a nursery rhyme that Eagleton had discussed earlier in the book], or for that matter of any other literary work. Even so, there are more and less plausible ways of making sense of it. A persuasive reading must take account of the textual evidence, though establishing this evidence itself involves interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Eagleton, unlike Lynn Hejinian, does not exclude &amp;quot;some contemporary lyric poetry&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;detec­tive fiction&amp;quot;, which Hejinian categorises as &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; types of texts. From the point of view of modern literary theory, Hejinian's category of &amp;quot;closed texts&amp;quot; comes across as a strawman, since theory would not reduce, for example, the meaning of a detective story to just the revelation that the butler did it with the candle stick in the conservatory. Meaning is much more than that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;: This is a response to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/revisions/9119/5&quot;&gt;version of the question from 14.01.2019 - 02.08.2020&lt;/a&gt;, which asked, &amp;quot;I just wondered if each different method, way, of reading a text is equally viable.&amp;quot; The words &amp;quot;if they are at all viable&amp;quot; were added after this answer was submitted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-03T10:33:18.767" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T10:33:18.767" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-02T17:43:54.887" Score="4" ViewCount="1216" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was originally written in an archaic form of Japanese, and has been translated both into modern Japanese and into English multiple times. Wikipedia says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The first English translation was attempted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suematsu_Kencho#Literary_activities&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 1882&lt;/a&gt; but was of poor quality and incomplete&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, and lists a whole bunch of translators:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suematsu Kenchō, Arthur Waley, Edward G. Seidensticker, Helen McCullough, Royall Tyler, Dennis Washburn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the variety of English translations from various people and eras, which one is the closest to the original text? I'd like to read a translation rather than a retelling, and I'm happy to read something written in a deliberately old-fashioned style of English, but not something that's equally hard for modern English readers as the original story is for modern Japanese readers (think Austen or Shakespeare but not Chaucer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T05:50:46.710" Title="Which English translation of The Tale of Genji is the most accurate yet readable?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15057" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-02T19:22:56.813" Score="3" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Inga-Stina Ewbank's essay &amp;quot;The Triumph of Time in The Winter's Tale&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Review of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;, 5 (1964); reprinted in &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. A Casebook&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Kenneth Muir, 1968), I encountered the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics of the myth-making school read these lines as a confirmation of the essentially mythical nature of the play: there, they argue, is the first direct sign of the regeneration of the King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ewbank does not reference any examples of scholarly publications, nor does she mention any critics that would belong to this school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Cindy M. Okamura, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ejfarrell/from_ccat/temp/Cindy/mythcrit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Myth-Criticism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is an interpretative approach to literature which may be used in conjunction with other approaches and reading techniques. A myth-critical approach generally uncovers or identifies manifestations of mythology in a literary work--whether as the creation of an original myth, as the appropriation of a traditional mythological figure, story, or place, or in the form of allusions--and uses these mythological elements to aid interpretation of the work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Caroline Hagood, writing on the Kenyon Review Blog (&lt;a href=&quot;https://kenyonreview.org/2019/12/what-the-heck-is-myth-criticism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What the Heck is Myth Criticism?&lt;/a&gt;, 06.12.2019),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myth criticism would best be applied to writing replete with archetypes, such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s &lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King&lt;/em&gt;, for instance. Tennyson’s work is rich with both myth-making and mythic archetypes, such as the wise seer, Merlin, who is “bard, and knew the starry heavens; / The people call’d him wizard” (Merlin and Vivien).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Myth criticism applied to &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; would discuss mythical aspects in the play (there are many references to Greek and Roman gods such as Apollo and Proserpina) and the significance of winter and spring in the play. However, this does not explain what the &amp;quot;myth-making &lt;em&gt;school&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; was, especially in the context of Shakespeare criticism. If there is such a school of Shakespeare criticism, who were its founding and/or leading figures? Did they publish any interpretations of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T19:22:56.813" Title="What is the myth-making school of Shakespeare criticism?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14862" CreationDate="2020-08-02T20:17:32.770" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This also sounds somewhat like &lt;em&gt;My Side of the Mountain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10590" LastActivityDate="2020-08-02T20:17:32.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15042" CreationDate="2020-08-03T01:06:38.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you want the general idea, then it's an &amp;quot;omitted the vulgar language&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;ellided over the swearing&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;summarized his insults&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a singular term of art in linguistics for the concept... I don't know of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="566" LastActivityDate="2020-08-03T01:06:38.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15063" CreationDate="2020-08-03T12:36:14.703" Score="12" ViewCount="1021" Body="&lt;p&gt;While looking up about the passage asked about in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15032/17&quot;&gt;this previous question&lt;/a&gt;, I noticed that there are different versions of the same line in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, Act I Scene II, line 333:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O that this too too solid flesh would melt,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, that this too too sullied flesh would melt,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, that this too too sallied flesh would melt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ignoring minor differences like punctuation, which are common in Shakespeare anyway, what's with the solid/sullied/sallied triscrepancy? Why are there three different versions of this line? What is the history behind each one, and the arguments for and against considering each one as the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T09:32:58.997" Title="Why are there three different versions of the &quot;solid/sullied/sallied flesh&quot; line in Hamlet?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15062" CreationDate="2020-08-03T14:38:14.280" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was published in several editions during the Jacobethan era, it is worth looking at how these early editions rendered these lines, using the old-spelling editions published by &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Shakespeare Editions&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/scene/2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first quarto (Q1)&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1603, which has sometimes been called a &amp;quot;bad quarto&amp;quot;, gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O that this too much grieu'd and sallied flesh &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Would melt to nothing, or that the vniuersall &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Globe of heauen would turne al to a Chaos!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q2/scene/1.2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second quarto (Q2)&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1604, gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, that this too too sallied flesh would melt, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_F1/scene/1.2/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1623,  gives the lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh that this too too solid Flesh, would melt, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thaw, and resolue it selfe into a Dew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So originally, we only had the alternatives &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot;. In present-day English &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; only exists as the past tense and the past participle of the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sally#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sally&lt;/a&gt;, which does not make sense in the context of the above lines. Hence, a modern editor needs to decide what to do with &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; and this decision will be based on several factors and principles:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text's meaning, both at the level of the individual lines and at the level of larger units (scene, act, entire play, especially for imagery and language patterns used beyond the lines or speech under consideration).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The approach to modernisation, usually set out by the series editor(s) (e.g. T. J. B. Spencer and Stanley Wells for the New Penguin Shakespeare, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor for the Oxford Shakespeare, etc.).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The general principle of giving priority to the First Folio versus the quartos or vice versa. For example, the RSC Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, &amp;quot;uses the Folio as base text wherever possible&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;About the text&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI, Parts I, II and III&lt;/em&gt;, Macmillan, 2012, page 13).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a book-length discussion of these types of issues, I refer the reader to &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text&lt;/em&gt; by Eugene Giddens (Cambridge University Press, 2011).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first quarto of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (1603) is just over half the length of the second quarto (1604) (2200 lines versus 3800 lines) and many speeches appear &amp;quot;mangled&amp;quot; compared to how modern readers know them. One striking example is the famous &amp;quot;To be or not to be&amp;quot; speech in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Ham_Q1/scene/7/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first quarto's seventh scene&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;To be, or not to be, I there's the point, / To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:/ (...)&amp;quot; The first quartos of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt; have also been considered &amp;quot;bad quartos&amp;quot;. The term was introduced by A. W. Pollard in &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Folios and Quartos&lt;/em&gt; (1909) and has often been challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concept of &amp;quot;bad quarto&amp;quot; is relevant here because it influences an editor's choice of a base text. Historically, there have been different tendencies in modern Shakespeare scholarship. For a long time, editors created &amp;quot;conflated editions&amp;quot; of plays that were available in both quarto and folio editions. Simply put, the editor looked at both the quarto and folio texts and somehow combined them: lines that appeared in one edition but not in the other might end up in the conflated edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, editors changed their approach. Currently, what used to be known as &amp;quot;bad quartos&amp;quot; are now treated as legitimate editions in their own right. This has led to editions that just print the quarto text, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/de/academic/subjects/literature/literary-texts/first-quarto-hamlet?format=PB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The First Quarto of Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; edited by Kathleen O. Irace (Cambridge University Press, 1999). There have also been editions that print a/the quarto and the folio edition side by side, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.routledge.com/King-Lear-Parallel-Text-Edition/Weis/p/book/9781408204122&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Lear: Parallel Text Edition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by René Weis (Longman, 1993, 2nd edition, 2010). Compared to the earlier approach, in which an editor intervened much more heavily, this has sometimes been called &amp;quot;unediting&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the choice of a base text does not solve all editorial issues, since editors also need to make decisions that affect readability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Renaissance play texts use a different (and inconsistent) spelling and punctuation;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the texts contain words that are no longer in use;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they contain words and even lines that are obviously incorrect, even when allowing that Early Modern English used different rules than present-day English.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even an editor of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; who wants to use the second quarto as a base text (or use &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that text because it would have been closest to Shakespeare's manuscript) would need to decide whether to regularise the spelling and punctuation and decide what to do with &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot;. For example, should &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; be left in place and glossed as a variant of &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot; or should it be replaced by &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot; for the sake of readability? Or when using the Folio as a base text, is it possible to adduce arguments to replace &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; with the quarto's &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. J. B. Spencer's edition (New Penguin Shakespeare, 1980) uses the second quarto (Q2) as a base text and uses a number of lines and readings from the Folio (F). As his &amp;quot;Account of the Text&amp;quot; explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this edition, changes made in F are admitted into the text when they seem to represent a genuine amendment of a probable error in Q2. When the changes are merely a 'modernization' of grammar or of the form of a word, the Q2 reading is usually retained. The longer passages contained in F but printed in Q2 are included.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spencer emends &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q2 reads 'sallied' (which could be a spelling of &lt;em&gt;sullied&lt;/em&gt;). F reads 'solid', which contrasts well with &lt;em&gt;melt, | Thaw, and resolve itself...&lt;/em&gt; and until the twentieth century was generally preferred by editors. But it may have an unpleasantly comic effect, especially if Richard Burbage, the actor who first played Hamlet, were putting on weight (compare &lt;em&gt;He's fat and scant of breath&lt;/em&gt;, V.2.281). &lt;em&gt;Sullied&lt;/em&gt; fits well into the feeling of contamination expressed by Hamlet; and for &lt;em&gt;sullies&lt;/em&gt; (F 'sulleyes') at II.1.39. Q2 has the spelling 'sallies'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harold Jenkins (Arden Shakespeare, 1982) also uses the second quarto as a base text (see &amp;quot;The Editorial Problem and the Present Text&amp;quot; in the introduction). Like Spencer, Jenkins prints &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;. The decision is discussed in one of the &amp;quot;longer notes&amp;quot; near the end of the volume (pages 436-438), which notes that this &amp;quot;is the most debated reading in the play in recent years.&amp;quot; He admits that &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; would also be apt in this context and cites lines from &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/2H4_Q1/scene/3.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry IV, part two&lt;/em&gt;, III.1&lt;/a&gt;, as a parallel (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that one might (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...) see (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the continent &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Weary of &lt;strong&gt;solide&lt;/strong&gt; firmenesse &lt;strong&gt;melt&lt;/strong&gt; it selfe &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the sea, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Citing S. Warhaft, Jenkins mentions that &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; also makes sense in the context of the theory of humours. He then goes on to provide arguments in favour of &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The textual evidence for &lt;em&gt;sullied&lt;/em&gt;, ..., cannot be dismissed. For &lt;em&gt;sallied&lt;/em&gt; is less likely to be a corruption of &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; than the other way about, and though Q2 may have derived it from Q1, this suggests that &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; did not occur in Q2's manuscript authority, while Q1 is against it having been familiar in performance (...). Further, the fact that Q2 &lt;em&gt;sallied&lt;/em&gt; here and &lt;em&gt;sallies&lt;/em&gt; at II.i.40 occur in the work of different compositors argues for a manuscript origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;G. R. Hibbard's edition (Oxford Shakespeare, 1987) use the First Folio text as a base text and therefore has &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot;. This decision is discussed in a long note near the end of the volume (pages 382-384). Until John Dover Wilson's &lt;em&gt;The Manuscript of Shakespeare's Hamlet and the Problems of its Transmission&lt;/em&gt; (2 volumes, 1934), editors had usually preferred the Folio's &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; over the quarto reading. After Wilson's 1934 monograph and his &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; edition of the same year, editors began to prefer the Second Quarto's &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot;, which Wilson took for a misprint of &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hibbard provides several arguments to favour &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot; over &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hibbard had argued in his textual introduction (pages 67-130) that the Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was based on Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095808476&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fair copy&lt;/a&gt;. Based on this, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; is either what Shakespeare wrote in his first draft or a revision of what he wrote there&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Q2's &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; may come from Q1 and would therefore by suspect.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He rejects Wilson's argument that Hamlet would have been thinking of snow and wished his &amp;quot;sullied flesh&amp;quot; would melt as snow. Hibbard counters that when snow melts, it is dirt that remains and not something as pure as dew.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hibbard rejects Wilson's theory, also mentioned by Spencer, that &amp;quot;solid flesh&amp;quot; would have provoked mirth due to Burbage's girth: &amp;quot;[Wilson] imports the twentieth-century anxiety about weight into Elizabethan England, and he gives &lt;em&gt;solid&lt;/em&gt; overtones which it does not have&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cyrus Hoy's edition (Norton Critical Editions, W. W. Norton, second edition, 1992) considers the second quarto as the most authoritative version of the play (page 103):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all its typographical imperfections, the second quarto gives as a text of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; that must be regarded as superior to that of the folio, not only because it is fuller, but because it is closer to a Shakespearean manuscript source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoy prints &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; (not &amp;quot;sullied&amp;quot;!) with the following footnote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sallied&amp;quot; is the reading of Q2 (and Q1). F reads &amp;quot;solid&amp;quot;. Since Hamlet's primary concern is with the fact of the flesh's impurity, not with its corporeality, the choice between Q and F clearly lies with Q. &amp;quot;Sally&amp;quot; is a legitimate sixteenth-century form of &amp;quot;sully&amp;quot;; it occurs in Dekker's &lt;em&gt;Patient Grissil&lt;/em&gt; (I.i.12), printed in 1603, as F. T. Bowers has pointed out (in &amp;quot;Hamlet's 'Sullied' or 'Solid' Flesh. A Bibliographical Case-History&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Survey&lt;/em&gt; 9 [1956]: p. 44); and it occurs as a noun at II.i.39 of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this non-representative sample of editions, &amp;quot;sallied&amp;quot; seems to have been the most frequently preferred reading since John Dover Wilson's 1934 monograph on and edition of the play. However, Shakespeare scholars appear to have been moving away from the idea that the quartos have greater authority over the folio or vice versa, or that it is possible to establish once and for all which version comes closest to what Shakespeare wrote (especially when considering that Shakespeare may have revised his texts after the quarto publication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T09:32:58.997" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T09:32:58.997" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15064" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-03T14:58:27.390" Score="6" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is regarding Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Chapter 24 (also known as Volume II Chapter V).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Jaggers has two casts in his office, revealed by Wemmick to be death masks of his former clients.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wemmick says they are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Famous clients of ours that gave us a world of credit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he then reveals that these were the masks made after the criminals were executed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cast was made in Newgate, directly after he was taken down&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my understanding is these were Mr Jaggers' clients and they were executed for their crimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If they were executed for their crimes, why did Mr Jaggers (the man hired to defend them) get a world of credit? Or am I misunderstanding the word 'client' here? Because it seems odd to me that he and Wemmick would keep reminders of their clients who were executed, rather than ones who they stopped from being executed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if I am totally missing the point, which I feel I may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many thanks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I am quoting from 1996 Penguin Classics edition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10379" LastEditorUserId="10379" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T20:55:37.940" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T20:55:37.940" Title="Why did Mr Jaggers have death masks of two of his former clients, Great Expectations Chapter 24?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-03T23:02:09.193" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a book. Every few pages, in the bottom left margin, it repeats its own title, preceded by an increasing number:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;24 The Fellowship of The Ring&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the point of this? Surely they cannot think that anyone would forget which book they are reading, and are too lazy to flip it around to look at the cover? Is it some sort of copyright protection? Does it somehow, in some way that escapes my mind, prevent some sort of undesirable behaviour? That's usually what things like this end up being, but in this case, I cannot even think of a reason. If somebody copies the entire book, what does it matter if it says the title of the book on every Xth page?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It does &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; say something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(C) 1950 J. R. R. Tolkien. Copying forbidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10597" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-04T05:57:40.187" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:43:33.957" Title="What is the purpose of the redundant book titles printed in the bottom margin every few pages of many books?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-08-07T08:52:51.103" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T07:53:33.257" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;One weekend evening in late 2010, I heard a short story on British radio (probably BBC Radio 4) whose main characters were two women (I think Scottish?), one of them the first-person narrator. The story went as follows. Since I don't remember their names at all, I'm going to use A and B to refer to the two characters for simplicity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The opening sentence was something gorey sounding, like &amp;quot;being up to our elbows in guts&amp;quot;, but in the next sentence it was established that they were just doing their everyday work in a fish factory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are dissatisfied with their jobs and their lives. The viewpoint character (A) specifically bemoans her old television set on which she likes to watch &lt;em&gt;Sex and the City&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second character (B) is established as someone who likes to tell tall tales, I think often involving glamorous new jobs. A habitually humours her in these stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Today, B claims to have got a new career as an &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;international contract killer&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. (I specifically remember this phrase, spoken in a Scottish accent.) A continues to humour her, not believing a word of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After work, they get into B's car and go to the shops. A notices something under a blanket on the back seat, and B says it's a dead body. I think she claims to have killed a man with a rolling pin. A still doesn't believe a word of it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;While B is in the shop (I think), A gets curious and lifts up the blanket. Another specific phrase I remember: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;It was a man. He was dead.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; A begins screaming, and tells B she'll have to call the police.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;B convinces A not to call the police and instead to help her dispose of the body, saying this will be the last time and she won't kill anyone else.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They bury the body together. B does something which shows how much money she earned for this murder (maybe pulling out a fancy new phone?) A asks what was the fee.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When B tells her how much she got for killing this man, and how much A's cut will be just for helping to bury the body, A decides to join B in this new business. The last line of the story is something like: &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;I might be going to hell, but at least I'll have a dirty great plasma-screen telly to watch &lt;em&gt;Sex and the City&lt;/em&gt; on while I wait!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00c83jm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Fishwife's Lament&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but I can't find any information about this story online to confirm the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was this story, and does any extant recording or written version of it exist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T07:53:33.257" Title="Short story on British radio about fish gutters turned contract killers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15069" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15150" CreationDate="2020-08-04T15:22:20.100" Score="9" ViewCount="210" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any implication in Shakespeare's text that Othello had &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impostor syndrome&lt;/a&gt;, or any feeling of inadequacy (in love, or another aspect of interpersonal relationships) because his background is different? Something that was made evident/suggested by the text of the play, and could be linked to Othello's background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Logically, since he was much more successful than other men with a similar background, he could have had it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, if he had it, it could have made him more vulnerable to Iago's lies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any evidence in the text of the play to support this hypothesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7759" LastEditorUserId="7759" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T15:49:33.313" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T20:51:56.793" Title="Does Othello have impostor syndrome, or any other problem because his background is different?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;othello&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T16:43:47.703" Score="6" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about Orwell's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nineteen_Eighty-Four&amp;amp;oldid=970792989#Influences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Nineteen Eighthy-Four&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During World War II, Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war. The question being &amp;quot;Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below?&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When looking up whether the sentence in quotation marks was something Orwell wrote literally, I cannot find a source. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=435SW2rQMfAC&amp;amp;pg=PA226&amp;amp;dq=%22Would+it+end+via+Fascist+coup+d%27%C3%A9tat+from+above+or+via+Socialist+revolution+from+below?%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiU053f-IHrAhVEsaQKHYzNAHkQ6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Would%20it%20end%20via%20Fascist%20coup%20d%27%C3%A9tat%20from%20above%20or%20via%20Socialist%20revolution%20from%20below%3F%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One source on Google Books&lt;/a&gt; simply quotes Wikipedia. Another source, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=VO8nDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA359&amp;amp;dq=%22Would+it+end+via+Fascist+coup+d%27%C3%A9tat+from+above+or+via+Socialist+revolution+from+below?%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiU053f-IHrAhVEsaQKHYzNAHkQuwUwAXoECAIQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Would%20it%20end%20via%20Fascist%20coup%20d%27%C3%A9tat%20from%20above%20or%20via%20Socialist%20revolution%20from%20below%3F%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;juvenile edition of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt; published in 2016&lt;/a&gt; looks like it also uses Wikipedia, but without proper acknowledgement: the quoted passage was added to Wikipedia before the publication of the book. See for example the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nineteen_Eighty-Four&amp;amp;oldid=698823458#Influences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version of the article from January 2016&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During World War II (1939–1945) Orwell believed that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the question being &amp;quot;Would it end via Fascist coup d'état from above or via Socialist revolution from below&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement has been part of the Wikipedia article for a very long time, but not always with quotes. For example, here is the version from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nineteen_Eighty-Four&amp;amp;oldid=40689035#History_according_to_1984&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;22 February 2006 version of the article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In articles written during the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist takeover from above or by a Socialist revolution from below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This suggests that the statement may actually be a paraphrase of something Orwell wrote and that the quotation marks, which were added later, only make it &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; like a quote. Since Wikipedia claims Orwell expressed the idea in that passage repeatedly, what was the first article in which he expressed it? How close does it come to the wording used in Wikipedia? And did he ever use the exact wording used on Wikipedia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:08:03.353" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:08:03.353" Title="Where did Orwell ask whether British democracy would end through a Fascist takeover or by a Socialist revolution?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T17:43:03.617" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this novel, a girl goes to (northern England? southern England? Cornwall? The UK somewhere). I think she's looking for her father, who was/is an archaeologist. The dig is looking for (Roman? Bronze?) artifacts. Ultimately, there's a (bronze?) helmet that the villain is willing to kill for. One of the villains is the much-younger wife of an archaeologist who is described as a nymphomaniac. Towards the end of the book, the heroine and the love interest are, I think, trapped underground. They locate the helmet and I think a corpse down there? Ultimately, if I recall correctly, the nymphomaniac villain is washed away and drowns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was a library edition, hardcover, and I think it was green but could be wrong. It was set in modern times, and since it was old when I checked it out in the early 2000s, was probably written late 70s-late 90s. I read it in English, when I was somewhere between thirteen and fifteen, and it was a bit age-inappropriate (what with the nymphomaniac, lol - that was the first time I ran across that word, which is probably why it stuck with me). It was clearly intended for adults. The author's name was probably somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, since I think I found it when I was looking for Barbara Michaels novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has been bothering me for about fifteen years now. I would love to reread it - I don't even care if it's good, as long as I FINALLY know what the darn book was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10604" LastActivityDate="2020-08-04T17:43:03.617" Title="Identify an Archaeology Romantic Suspense or Mystery Novel - with nymphomaniacs! Well, one" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15084" CreationDate="2020-08-04T19:09:15.933" Score="4" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across a couplet today in Ben Jonson's verse letter &amp;quot;Epistle to Elizabeth Countess of Rutland&amp;quot; which I'm still trying to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How many equal with the &lt;strong&gt;Argive queen&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have beauty known, yet none so famous seen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was this Argive queen? In history and mythology, the city of Argos had many queens, and I'm told that, in both ancient and Renaissance literature, 'Argos' is often used to mean 'Mycenae', broadening the field of candidates even further. Does anyone know which particular monarch or consort Jonson was referencing here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:35:34.803" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T13:38:06.977" Title="To which 'Argive queen' was Ben Jonson referring in his verse letter to the Countess of Rutland?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ben-jonson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15073" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-04T19:29:07.900" Score="7" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first section of his short story &amp;quot;The Lottery in Babylon&amp;quot;, Borges writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have known that thing the Greeks knew not -- uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, there was nothing specific that Babylonians knew about randomness, chance, or probability of which ancient Greeks were not aware. This got me wondering if this statement refers to any specific fact from Greek/Babylonian history, philosophy, or something else - or if it was just thrown in as a stylistic element such as when the narrator says that they don't have much time as their ship is set to sail out soon later in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10605" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:36:18.853" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:36:18.853" Title="What does Borges' reference to the Greek mean in &quot;The Lottery in Babylon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15066" CreationDate="2020-08-04T21:15:01.600" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Page headers / footers are usually used to aid the reader's orientation within a book by showing page numbers as well as the title of the current chapter or subheading to which the page belongs to (this can be esp. handy when looking for something in a non-fiction book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some conventions for this, e.g. that the author's name or book title is usually put on the left-hand page, whereas the subheading is put on the right-hand page. These stem from tradition, but I could not find any information as to their historical use, therefore I'd assume they are added to make the layout more even. If e.g. the chapter title is the same for a two-page spread, it would look odd to repeat it on both pages, but it would also look odd to have something in the header on only one of the two pages, therefore I presume additional information like the author or book title is added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See e.g. these sources for more info:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_header&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Page header&lt;/a&gt; (Wikipedia),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/03/how-to-design-running-heads-for-your-book/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Design Running Heads for Your Book&lt;/a&gt; by Joel Friedlander on The Book Designer (31 March 2014).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10605" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T13:43:33.957" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T13:43:33.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15070" CreationDate="2020-08-05T00:33:28.730" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell&lt;/em&gt;, he expresses this view many times.  (After the war, he reflected on how he tended to overestimate forces pushing toward socialism and underestimate on those pushing away.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem with identifying exactly when he said the concept first is that you have to decide exactly how close the idea comes before it qualifies as the first.  For instance, up to the outbreak of WWII (the writings in the first volume &lt;em&gt;An Age Like This&lt;/em&gt;), he holds the opinion that there are only the fascists and the socialists, and Great Britain and the other democracies are already fascists.  He even discusses making plans on how to work against the war effort if war broke out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it did, he had a horrible night and realized that England had his support for the war. (The essay &amp;quot;My Country Right Or Left.&amp;quot;)  He expresses views much closer to phrasing in the next volume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T00:33:28.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15076" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15077" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English playwright and poet Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637) and his life as a writer. Jonson is best known for plays such as ' Every Man in His Humour', 'Volpone' and 'The Alchemist'. He also wrote masks, poems and a grammar of the English language." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:55:26.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15078" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15079" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Tale of Genji' (源氏物語, Genji monogatari), a novel written in the early 11th century by Murasaki Shikibu. Use this tag with the tags [murasaki-shikibu] and [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:57:20.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15080" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15081" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Japanese novelist and poet Murasaki Shikibu (紫 式部) and her life as a writer. She is best known as the author of 'The Tale of Genji' (源氏物語, Genji monogatari). Use this tag with the tag [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T08:59:01.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15082" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15083" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson; 1928 – 2014) and her life as a writer. Angelou published seven works of autobiography, starting with 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' (1969)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T09:01:23.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15084" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15072" CreationDate="2020-08-05T09:48:37.083" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Argive queen is Helen, also known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_of_Troy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen of Troy&lt;/a&gt;. The hint that Argos could refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenae#Homeric_Poems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mycenae&lt;/a&gt; (Helen was the wife of Menelaos), combined with the mention of beauty (see Marlowe's &amp;quot;Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/19/2/23.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) was very helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;Argive queen&amp;quot; was used in George Chapman's translation of Homer (the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapman's Homer that impressed John Keats&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=P7nTAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=%22argive+queen%22&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjfuvrbuoPrAhVO6qQKHYHiD5YQ6AEwA3oECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22argive%20queen%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapman´s translation of Homer´s Iliad, edited by Richard Hooper, 2nd edition, 1865&lt;/a&gt;, contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amongst her maids was set the Argive Queen, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Commanding them in choicest works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hooper provides the following gloss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Argive queen - Helen, formerly queen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sources, somewhat ironically, identify her as &amp;quot;Helen of Troy&amp;quot;, even though Troy was famously never her real home, let alone that she was a queen there. See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=keQeAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;q=%22argive+queen%22+helen&amp;amp;dq=%22argive+queen%22+helen&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiq7ue84YPrAhVHi6QKHXP0Dv04ChDoATAAegQIAhAC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Ben Jonson Companion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Dewey Heyward Brock (Indiana University Press, 1983): &amp;quot;Argive Queen: Helen of Troy&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=8dyBCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&amp;amp;dq=%22argive+queen%22+helen&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjKl_SU4YPrAhVEy6QKHauaDn0Q6AEwBHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22argive%20queen%22%20helen&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Ben Jonson Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by D. Heyward Brock and Maria Palacas (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016): &amp;quot;Argive Queen: Helen of Troy. Mentioned in &lt;em&gt;Forest&lt;/em&gt; 12&amp;quot;. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/editions/forest.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Forest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains the &amp;quot;Epistle to Elizabeth Countess of Rutland&amp;quot; quoted in the question.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-05T13:38:06.977" LastActivityDate="2020-08-05T13:38:06.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-05T20:32:41.423" Score="4" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fyodor_Dostoevsky&amp;amp;oldid=971222427#Death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fyodor Dostoyevski&lt;/a&gt; contains a section about the author's death that begins with the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On 25 January 1881, while searching for members of the terrorist organisation Narodnaya Volya (&amp;quot;The People's Will&amp;quot;) who would soon assassinate Tsar Alexander II, the Tsar's secret police executed a search warrant in the apartment of one of Dostoevsky's neighbours&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;. On the following day, Dostoevsky suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage. Anna denied that the search had caused it, saying that the haemorrhage had occurred after her husband had been looking for a dropped pen holder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has no source to support the claim in the first sentence quoted above. I checked the corresponding sections in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fjodor_Michailowitsch_Dostojewski&amp;amp;oldid=202540475#Die_letzten_Lebensjahre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fiodor_Dosto%C3%AFevski&amp;amp;oldid=173423576#La_maturit%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fi%C3%B3dor_Dostoyevski&amp;amp;oldid=127592551#Muerte&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish&lt;/a&gt; Wikipedia articles about the author, but these versions do not contain that specific claim. So what is the source of the story about the search warrant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:05:02.380" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:05:02.380" Title="Did the Tsar's secret police search the apartment of one of Dostoevsky's neighbours?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15086" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-06T10:19:35.933" Score="4" ViewCount="336" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just come out from Moria with the Fellowship of the Ring. They didn't quite see or hear me, but I was hovering around there and mentally &amp;quot;saw&amp;quot; their journey through reading about it in text form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What strikes me is how dwarves long ago, even in the context of the story, somehow were able to dig out entire gigantic mountains with numerous levels of hallways and endless paths and stairways leading all over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is supposed to be a &amp;quot;low-tech&amp;quot; world, albeit with magical elements, so they clearly did not have modern technology or even 18th century technology from our world to dig with. I get the idea that they were basically just hacking away at the mountains in large numbers for a long time with pickaxes, but it seems like such an insane enterprise even if you love doing that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is Moria so incredibly oversized? I know that they &amp;quot;got greedy&amp;quot; and wanted to &amp;quot;dig ever deeper&amp;quot;, but how was this even &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; with such primitive equipment? Maybe they had some kind of automation to do it in their world, probably at least some sort of explosive to create new areas and to then &amp;quot;fine-tune&amp;quot; them manually with manual labor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find that Tolkien likes to skip over important (to me) details about the story which start bugging me until I ask about it. He could at least have had one of the younger hobbits mention this at some point, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Golly! This sure is a mighty huge place! How ever did your ancestors do it, Gimli?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then Gandalf could've interrupted with something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas, their digging technology got far too advanced for their own good! While neglecting other, more important matters, they kept developing their specialized machines to automate much of their work, allowing them to expand Moria both wider and deeper, much quicker... Those damned fools!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... nope. I can't remember any such comment, and I have it in fresh memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how did they do it? Is it ever explained or implied?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10608" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-06T12:16:30.770" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T18:49:07.263" Title="How did the dwarves possibly &quot;dig out&quot; gigantic hallways in the mountains to create Moria with such &quot;primitive&quot; technology?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15087" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15085" CreationDate="2020-08-06T21:31:14.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seriously doubt that claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Russian wiki does not have it as well. According to its account, the haemorrhage  was caused by an emotional conversation with his sister regarding an inheritance. The conversation happened at January 26th.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell (given my limited knowledge of the languages you've linked), neither article mentioned this conversation. Below is my translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At January 26th 1881 the writer's sister Vera Mikhailovna visited the house of Dostojevskys to beg her brother to waive his stake in the inheritance of their aunt A. F. Kumanina. (His daughter) L. F. Dostoyevsky recalled a very emotional encounter, with mutual accusations and tears, after which Dostoyevsky had a haemorrhage attack[300].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The [300] link to the memoirs of L. F. Dostoyevsky appears to be broken. It is worth noticing though that the book was published in 1922; if there was an evidence (no matter how dubious) that the secret police did play a role (no matter how small) in his death, rest assured it would be trumpeted very loudly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastActivityDate="2020-08-06T21:31:14.023" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15088" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-07T04:35:06.600" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a book which is formatted like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- No! said Gandalf, looking around. We must not go further before we have had a sip of the elf water! The old wizard looked very worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible to &amp;quot;interpret&amp;quot; this if you spend enough time and effort, but it's anything but obvious where the &amp;quot;quote&amp;quot; ends and the narration begins. And I did not just make up an absurd example (although the content was made up); I see this exact situation repeated constantly throughout the book, and I've seen it many times before as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If using the (to me) far superior &amp;quot;quote style&amp;quot; format, it would be like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No!&amp;quot; said Gandalf, looking around. &amp;quot;We must not go further before we have had a sip of the elf water!&amp;quot; The old wizard looked very worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, it's 100% clear what is being said by the character and what is the book's narration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before you say something like: &amp;quot;the whitespace/formatting makes it clear&amp;quot;, this is just not the case. Perhaps this is due to my book being a pocket format, thus is made even more compact than a larger book would be, but they frequently have a character go on and talk for a huge paragraph only to suddenly &amp;quot;cut it off&amp;quot; with narration, with zero indication that this has happened. I always read it in my head as the character's voice until I realize it's switched to the book describing something again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This style also means that basic punctuation marks are often omitted, such as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- How can you say that, Frodo, Merry asked. The younger hobbit looked scared. Where would one hide such a dangerous ring?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the question mark is not used, and it's not at all obvious whether the last part is asked by &amp;quot;the book&amp;quot; or by Merry. The correct (IMO) formatting would be (assuming that Merry did say the last part):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can you say that, Frodo?&amp;quot; Merry asked. The younger hobbit looked scared. &amp;quot;Where would one hide such a dangerous ring?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how I think about this, and how much I've &lt;em&gt;attempted&lt;/em&gt; to like this &amp;quot;style&amp;quot;, I just can't help but find it fundamentally, objectively &lt;em&gt;wrong&lt;/em&gt;. It's not even that I &amp;quot;grew up with&amp;quot; the quote style. In fact, I actually saw this &amp;quot;dash style&amp;quot; much more commonly in the early books I read, since I'm from Sweden, and they seem to love to (almost) always pick the most silly way of doing things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there are books of both styles here. I just don't understand who would ever prefer this confusing &amp;quot;dash style&amp;quot; (in lack of a better term). If I had written a book and somebody reformatted it in this manner, I would be very upset, even if it resulted in millions of more sold copies. I may make more money, but all those people would be experiencing it in a very sub-optimal and unintended manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can somebody &lt;em&gt;please&lt;/em&gt; tell me even just &lt;em&gt;one&lt;/em&gt; pro side of this style? I don't find it easier to read, better looking, more &amp;quot;inviting&amp;quot;, or anything other than just plain stupid. And again, I grew up with this style and have no reason to reject it simply because of not being familiar with it. I just can't see what possible reason anyone could have for preferring or inventing it in the first place, and I'd love to hear why it's a thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, there is at least &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; which motivates an alternative approach, but in this case, I can't think of a single argument &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; this style -- only many &lt;em&gt;against&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10610" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T02:47:36.873" Title="What is the intention and purpose behind the &quot;dash style&quot; book format compared to the &quot;quote style&quot; one?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;writing-process&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15089" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-06T21:48:43.587" Score="6" ViewCount="280" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Hayworth_and_Shawshank_Redemption&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; says that Stephen King’s novella &lt;em&gt;Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption&lt;/em&gt; “has been thought to be loosely based on Leo Tolstoy's 1872 short story &amp;quot;God Sees the Truth, But Waits&amp;quot;”.  But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Sees_the_Truth,_But_Waits&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; says “Stephen King's novella &lt;em&gt;Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption&lt;/em&gt; was widely thought to be based on Tolstoy's short story &amp;quot;God Sees The Truth, But Waits&amp;quot;, which Stephen King has disavowed.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is, is there any truth to the notion that it’s based on Tolstoy’s story?  Has Stephen King discussed the issue at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1078" OwnerDisplayName="Keshav Srinivasan" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-07T10:02:12.957" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T02:02:10.180" Title="Is The Shawshank Redemption based on a Leo Tolstoy story?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;rita-hayworth-shawshank-redemption&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15090" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8238" CreationDate="2020-08-07T13:42:44.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Turns out I was right about it being Camus, and I found the quote whilst re-reading &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Question: how can one manage not to lose time? Answer: experience it at its full length. Means: spend days in the dentist's waiting-room on an uncomfortable chair; live on one's balcony on a Sunday afternoon; listen to lectures in a language that one does not understand, choose the most roundabout and least convenient routes on the railway (and, naturally, travel standing up); queue at the box-office for theatres and so on and not take one's seat; etc.’ [p 22, trans. Robin Buss, Penguin]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coincidentally enough, I am reading it simultaneously in both French and English, so here's the original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;« Question : comment faire pour ne pas perdre son temps? Réponse : l'éprouver dans toute sa longueur. Moyens : passer des journées dans l'anticambre d'un dentiste après-midi ; écouter des conférences dans une langue qu'on ne comprend pas, choisir les itinéraires de chemin de fer les plus longs et les moins commodes et voyager debout naturellement ; faire la queue aux guichets des spectacles et ne pas prendre sa place, etc. » [Gallimard]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4940" LastActivityDate="2020-08-07T13:42:44.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15089" CreationDate="2020-08-07T17:09:39.663" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In today's era, saying someone's work is based on someone else's work is equivalent to calling the former as ungrateful and the latter as unacknowledged. We tend to relate things and find patterns in similar things, but we fail to grasp the real exquisite feeling that produced the work. It happened with every subject at some point in history where people thought that someone's work was inspired or based on someone else's work. A very famous example from mathematics is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz%E2%80%93Newton_calculus_controversy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;who invented calculus&lt;/a&gt;, as there was an intense debate and heated arguments over who came up with the idea of calculus, was it Leibniz or was it Newton? Later it was found that &lt;strong&gt;both of them independently came up with the same concept&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that King's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Hayworth_and_Shawshank_Redemption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption&lt;/a&gt; has the very same nature which Tolstoy's &lt;a href=&quot;http://lol-russ.umn.edu/PopLit/god_sees_the_truth,_but_waits.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;God sees the truth, but waits&lt;/a&gt; (written 110 years before King's) has. &lt;strong&gt;Hope&lt;/strong&gt; is dignified in King's novella, while in Tolstoy's story &lt;strong&gt;hope&lt;/strong&gt; is given up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember that hope is a good thing, Red, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Aksyónof wrote no more petitions; gave up all hope, and only prayed to God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, there is a kind of intense similarity between them. In both works we find that the main characters (prisoners) get a good reputation among other convicts and become a judge, to quote from &lt;em&gt;God Sees the Truth, but Waits&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and his fellow-prisoners respected him: they called him 'Grandfather,' and 'The Saint.' When they wanted to petition the prison authorities about anything, they always made Aksyónof their spokesman, and when there were quarrels among the prisoners they came to him to put things right, and to judge the matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, in King's novella, Andy trades with Hadley for beer for his fellow prisoners, and even tried to teach Tommy some basics.  And the most important of all is that in both of the works, the main character (and us) get to know who actually committed the murder. So, they are very profoundly similar. We can argue that King's novella is &lt;em&gt;based&lt;/em&gt; on Tolstoy's story, someone can argue that they are not similar as both of them have a very different endings which matters a lot. An educated man can argue for anything, no matter how absurd or self-evident the topic is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find any interview or things like that where Stephen King disavowed or even discussed the matter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://neilrathmell.com/2013/03/08/stephen-kings-debt-to-tolstoy/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is a blog&lt;/a&gt; which discusses the same issue, but still we don't find Stephen King denying or confirming that his novella is based (loosely or not) on Tolstoy's short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T00:11:49.107" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T00:11:49.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-07T23:46:21.330" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand Enoch's character arc somewhat, some vague notion of missing human connection and having a more animal nature, and the parallel between putting on the gorilla costume and the Biblical Enoch being taken up into heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as far as I can tell, this has very little impact on the &amp;quot;main&amp;quot; story, except for the scene when Enoch delivers the mummy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see some parallels between Enoch and Haze in that they're isolated, and they have... some sort of change at the end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this character add to the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10617" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T10:14:19.950" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T10:14:19.950" Title="How is Enoch's story relevant to the rest of Wise Blood?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;flannery-oconnor&gt;&lt;wise-blood&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15088" CreationDate="2020-08-08T02:47:36.873" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your examples aren't representative of how I've seen dash style used (mostly in books in Spanish, but James Joyce also used it, perhaps because of his exposure to it while living in France).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there's something more than a dialogue tag, it's typical for there to be a additional dashes to introduce the additional dialogue, e.g.,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— No! — said Gandalf, looking around. — We must not go further before we have had a sip of the elf water! The old wizard looked very worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I notice from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Quotation_dash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on quotation marks&lt;/a&gt; that the quotes that they give from James Joyce are in line with the practice that you use in your examples (it's been a while since I've read Joyce, while I'm in the middle of an Isabel Allende novel so my recollections of Joyce were apparently defective). But given the density of Joyce, his idiosyncratic quoting style are just one challenge in reading his prose and it may be an intentional effort to force the reader to slow down in reading. I'd note that other twentieth century writers (such as Cormac McCarthy) dispense of quotation marks entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T02:47:36.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15095" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-08T11:28:06.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wise Blood&lt;/em&gt; is a novel written by American novelist, short story writer and essayist Mary Flannery O'Connor (1925 – 1964), published in 1952. It is based on various short stories that O'Connor had published earlier in several magazines. The novel follows the life and actions of a World War II veteran who returns to his homeland and faces a crisis of faith. O'Connor states in the introduction to the book's 10th anniversary publication that it is about freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the novel &lt;em&gt;Wise Blood&lt;/em&gt;. Questions with this tag should also use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/flanner-oconnor&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;flanner-oconnor&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;flanner-oconnor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;See also:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wise_Blood&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wise Blood - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannery_O%27Connor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flannery O'Connor - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T13:30:38.073" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T13:30:38.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15096" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-08T11:28:06.277" Score="0" Body="For questions about the novel 'Wise Blood' (1952), the first novel by American author Flannery O'Connor. Use this tag with the [flannery-oconnor] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T19:52:09.270" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T19:52:09.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15097" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15099" CreationDate="2020-08-08T11:39:37.723" Score="6" ViewCount="274" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Golden_Age&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Golden Age&lt;/a&gt; of the arts, one of the key figures in Spanish literature was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lope_de_Vega&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lope de Vega&lt;/a&gt;, a prolific author of plays, poetry, and novels. He was approximately contemporary with William Shakespeare (Vega 1562-1635, Shakespeare 1564-1616), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruled_Britannia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in some alternate-history fiction&lt;/a&gt; they met and interacted with each other. In the real world, although political relations between Spain and England were not friendly at the time, artistic influence and inspiration between the two countries might still have been possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that Vega inspired or influenced Shakespeare?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I hope this isn't an obvious or well-known question. I only learned about Vega just now, and his Wikipedia page doesn't mention Shakespeare except in relation to the above-mentioned alternate-history novel.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15109/17&quot;&gt;Is there any evidence that William Shakespeare influenced Lope de Vega?&lt;/a&gt; (Originally both parts were in the same question, but I split them since different types of research and expertise will be required for the two parts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T17:27:50.717" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T17:27:50.717" Title="Is there any evidence that Lope de Vega influenced William Shakespeare?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;lope-de-vega&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15085" CreationDate="2020-08-08T12:36:58.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dostoyevsky's neighbor was Alexander Barannikov, a revolutionary and terrorist, who participated in the murder of the Russian chief of police and Moscow bombings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story was first discovered by Viktor Shklovsky, our great literary scholar, who included official letter about the search in his novellette published in 1933.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later this story was further investigated by Igor Volgin, Russian historian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ru/books?id=9f7RDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA744&amp;amp;lpg=PA744&amp;amp;dq=barannikov%20dostoyevsky%20volya&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=BrxVnhQD9A&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2b8xx4Tq4cSJkxElqQpWJ_WV5wJw&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiGz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Frank's biography&lt;/a&gt; tells the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;other events were taking place in the very building where the&#xA;Dostoevskys occupied apartment 10. Apartment 11 was actually a small&#xA;rooming house where individuals could rent single accommodations.&#xA;Sometime before midnight on the twenty-fifth, the police entered that&#xA;apartment and carried out a thorough search of one of the rooms in the&#xA;presence of witnesses. Its inhabitant had been arrested elsewhere&#xA;earlier that day, and, although he carried a false passport, there was&#xA;a wellfounded suspicion that he was a member of the executive&#xA;committee of the terrorist Narodnaya Volya&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the search police made an ambush and the next day, January 26th, another revolutionary was caught in this apartment, Nikolay Kolodkevich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dostoyevsky's wife Anna doesn't mention this in her Reminiscences, but both Shklovsky and Volgin try to cast doubt on her account of the events. Anna mentions her husband &amp;quot;moving a heavy bookcase” which led to him rupturing his artery. But in her original draft it is him &amp;quot;having lifted a heavy chair&amp;quot;. Was she making things up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volgin cites police report of the search and gives the document's code number in the State Archive, so I guess it should settle the question of the possibility of the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Tsar's assasination Barannikov was actively preparing himself and his family for the death penalty. However, his actual sentence was 20 years of &lt;em&gt;katorga&lt;/em&gt;. That unexpected turn crushed him. He died in a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shklovsky's novellette was published in the Soviet magazine Krasnaya Nov, 1933, December, p. 151&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Volgin's book - [Volgin I. Posledniy god Dostoevskogo : istoricheskie zapiski [The Last Year of Dostoevsky: Historical Notes]. Moscow, AST Publ., Zebra Publ.] Chapter XX&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joseph Frank - &amp;quot;Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871-1881&amp;quot; - 2002 by Princeton University Press, pp. 744, 745&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastEditorUserId="10619" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T19:43:58.797" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T19:43:58.797" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15097" CreationDate="2020-08-08T14:14:15.627" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I consulted a number of reference works, handbooks and biographies on Shakespeare to check whether Lope de Vega is mentioned at all. The results are listed below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964&lt;/em&gt;, edited by F. E. Halliday (Penguin 1964) has an entry on Lope de Vega containing the following information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the time that Shakespeare was writing &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, Lope de Vega was also dramatizing the story in his &lt;em&gt;Castelvines y Monteses&lt;/em&gt; (Capulets and Montagues). The apparently dead and concealed Julia speaks to her father who thinks it is her ghost and promises to forgive her husband whom she had secretly married. Roselo and Julia appear, and their marriage is ratified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both authors were apparently inspired by the same source but this does not imply influence on each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, 1986) does not mention Lope de Vega or Spanish literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Margareta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2010) does not mention Lope de Vega or Spanish literature, either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Russ McDonald (second edition, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001) mentions Lope de Vega in a context that has nothing to do with influence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...), the Spanish playwright Lope de Vega, a contemporary of Shakespeare, speaks of professional dramatic pirates who went to the theater deliberately to memorize and reproduce plays for print (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare-Handbuch&lt;/em&gt; edited by Ina Schabert et al (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992; almost 1,000 pages) dedicates almost 100 pages to Shakespeare's influence on other authors but does not mention Lope de Vega at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: A New Mermaid Background Book&lt;/em&gt;, edited by G. Blakemore Evans (London: A &amp;amp; C Black, 1988) mentions neither Lope de Vega nor Spain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Renaissance: A Guide to English Renaissance Literature: 1500-1660&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Marion Wynne-Davis (Bloomsbury, 1992) contains an entry entitled &amp;quot;Spanish influence on English literature&amp;quot;. This entry mentions the English translation of &lt;em&gt;Don Quijote&lt;/em&gt; (Part 1 in 1612, i.e. near the end of Shakespeare's theatrical career; Part 2 in 1620, i.e. after Shakespeare's death). The second paragraph in this entry is more relevant (with additional links):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 16th and 17th centuries in Spain were known as the Golden Age, which paralleled in quality, but greatly exceeded in abundance of texts, the creativity of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages in England. The plays of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_Calder%C3%B3n_de_la_Barca&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pedro Calderón de la Barca&lt;/a&gt; (1600–81) have often been compared to those of Shakespeare. Spanish Golden Age influence on contemporary English drama can be seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shirley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Shirley's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Young Admiral&lt;/em&gt; (1633) and &lt;em&gt;The Opportunity&lt;/em&gt; (1634), as well as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Beaumont&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beaumont&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fletcher_(playwright)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fletcher's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Love's Cure&lt;/em&gt; (1629).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples mentioned here are later than Shakespeare. The third paragraph in this entry discusses translations of prose works but no concrete examples of influence on English literature, let alone Shakespeare's plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Renaissance&lt;/em&gt; also contains on entry on &amp;quot;Spanish intrigue comedy&amp;quot; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English comedy influenced by, or using as its source, a type of Spanish play known as '&lt;em&gt;comedia de capa y espada&lt;/em&gt;' (comedy of cape and sword). The originals include works by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81), &lt;strong&gt;Lope de Vega&lt;/strong&gt; (1562-1635), and Tirso de Molina (1571–1648). The plays frequently turn on conflicts of love and honour and are dominated by busy intrigue plots involving problems of mistaken identity, duelling and concealment. One of the first of this variety was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Samuel_Tuke,_1st_Baronet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Samuel Tuke's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Adventure of Five Hours&lt;/em&gt; (1663), based on a play by Calderón, and commissioned by Charles II. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, one of the first examples of &amp;quot;Spanish intrigue comedy&amp;quot; was written several decades after Shakespeare's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: A Life in Drama&lt;/em&gt; by Stanley Wells (Norton, 1995) does not mention Lope de Vega; Spain is only mentioned once (because of the Armada).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; by Stephen Greenblatt (Jonathan Cape, 2004) does not mention Lope de Vega. Greenblatt discusses Spain mainly in the context of political relations between that country and England or when mentioning Queen Elizabeth's physician &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderigo_Lopez&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roderigo Lopez&lt;/a&gt;, who was executed in 1594 on an accusation of an attempt to poison the queen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Biography&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto &amp;amp; Windus, 2005) does not mention Lope de Vega; Spain is mentioned only in the context of political relationships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Germaine Greer's book &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Wife&lt;/em&gt; does not mention Lope de Vega or Spanish literature. The only entry for &amp;quot;Spain&amp;quot; in the index refers to a passage in Chapter 10 that mentions that England imported steel knitting needles from Spain before the 1570s. (Knitting needles made in England were made out of wood or bone.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After consulting eleven sources on Shakespeare and English Renaissance literature, I am not aware of any concrete examples of influence by Lope de Vega on Shakespeare. Influence in the opposite direction, if any existed, would be easier to find in works on Lope de Vega.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T14:14:15.627" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15101" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-08T16:39:21.123" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anne Frank addressed her diary entries to Kitty and there has been much conjecture whether this name referred to a real person or was inspired by one. The English Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl&amp;amp;oldid=971638809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Diary of Young Girl&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains the following sequence of unsourced statements about the identity of Kitty:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theodor Holman wrote in reply to Sietse van der Hoek that the diary entry for 28 September 1942 proved conclusively the character's fictional origin.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt; Jacqueline van Maarsen agreed,&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt; but Otto Frank assumed his daughter had her real acquaintance in mind when she wrote to someone of the same name.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tagebuch_der_Anne_Frank&amp;amp;oldid=202378129#Form_und_Inhalt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia article about Anne Frank's diary&lt;/a&gt; also discusses Kitty's identity but omits the unsourced statements. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Het_Achterhuis_(dagboek)&amp;amp;oldid=56806051&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; does not attempt to summarise the discussion about the identity of Kitty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question now is the following: what are the sources on which the claims by Theodor Holman, Jacqueline van Maarsen and Otto Frank are presumably based?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T23:50:10.760" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T23:50:10.760" Title="Sources for claims about the identity of Kitty, the addressee of Anne Frank's diary entries" Tags="&lt;dutch-literature&gt;&lt;anne-frank&gt;&lt;the-diary-of-a-young-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15102" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15104" CreationDate="2020-08-08T20:43:40.200" Score="6" ViewCount="231" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few days ago I remembered a short story that I was taught in high-school, and I'm trying to find from what book it comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Roman senator was at a dinner party, he was bored of the people there because he thought that no one matched his intellectual standards. Until a few hours later when he met another man, they start talking and the senator was pleased to see a kindred spirit in that party, a man of rich culture, and a broad mind. He was so pleased and he enjoyed so much the time spent with this person that he asked him to meet again, but the man replied:-&amp;quot;I can't I don't think my master would allow it&amp;quot;. The senator left immediately in an outrage, and then he told another senator:-&amp;quot;This is unbelievable, we should pass a law forcing slaves to wear something to identify themselves, so this doesn't happen again&amp;quot; and the other senator replied:-&amp;quot;I don't think that would be possible, if we do it they will figure out that there are more of them than us.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a short story from that book, and well, I've been searching for that book, but I haven't found it so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any clue would help. Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10621" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T21:37:02.427" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T21:42:06.987" Title="Trying to identify the source of a Roman short story about a senator and a slave" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15103" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-08T21:39:42.200" Score="0" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;Faulkner in the University&lt;/em&gt; (edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner. University of Virginia Press, 1995) and some parts are ambiguous for me. I was wondering what does he mean when he says: “The will of man to prevail“ or in general what does the italic part mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I brought the interviewer question (Q) and Mr. Faulkner’s answer (A) for more detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Q. In Quentin, for instance, [he] seemed to have the cards stacked against him … it seems to be inherently impossible, and I wondered … .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. True, and his mother wasn’t much good and he had an idiot brother, and yet in that whole family there was Dilsey that held the whole thing together and would continue to hold the whole thing together for no reward, &lt;em&gt;that the will of man to prevail will even take the nether channel of the black man, black race, before it will relinquish, succumb, be defeated.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: &lt;em&gt;Faulkner in the University&lt;/em&gt;, page 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10570" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-08T21:48:01.973" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T21:48:01.973" Title="What does it mean when Faulkner says: “The will of man to prevail“?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-faulkner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15102" CreationDate="2020-08-08T21:42:06.987" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short story you are looking for may have combined a non-fiction text with another text. The second part of the story may have its source in Lucius Annaeus Seneca's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Clementia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De Clementia&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;On Mercy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_Clemency/Book_I#XXIV.&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXIV of Book I&lt;/a&gt; of that work begins as follows (quoted from Wikisource):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A proposal was once made in the Senate to distinguish slaves from free men by their dress: it was then discovered how dangerous it would be for our slaves to be able to count our numbers. Be assured that the same thing would be the case if no one's offence is pardoned: it will quickly be discovered how far the number of bad men exceeds that of the good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only a partial answer, since it is not clear yet where the story of the senator and the slave comes from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-08T21:42:06.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15106" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-09T03:32:54.890" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Shakespeare wrote a a play titled &lt;em&gt;Taming of the shrew&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;I think this conversely likens to a Carpenters song &amp;quot;Strength of a woman&amp;quot;, which contains the line &amp;quot;Sometimes it takes the strength of a woman&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this is opposite thinking. What does this line mean? Does this mean a woman will have to gather strength to the maximum extent? or a man should pretend to be a woman like to understand the weakness of a man? Perhaps this is usually a man or woman who needs the assistance of a woman to understand the weakness of a man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T11:46:36.243" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T11:46:36.243" Title="Meaning of the line &quot;Sometimes it takes the strength of a woman&quot; (The Carpenters)" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;the-carpenters&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15108" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6355" CreationDate="2020-08-09T05:43:00.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original phrase is from Crowley's Book of Law which goes like this: Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Wilt does not mean want, wish, or dream, but instead a combination of Will(noun) and Will(verb)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books to read are the Book of Law and Magick Without Tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10623" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T05:43:00.367" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15109" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-09T07:55:13.997" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Golden_Age&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Golden Age&lt;/a&gt; of the arts, one of the key figures in Spanish literature was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lope_de_Vega&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lope de Vega&lt;/a&gt;, a prolific author of plays, poetry, and novels. He was approximately contemporary with William Shakespeare (Vega 1562-1635, Shakespeare 1564-1616), and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruled_Britannia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in some alternate-history fiction&lt;/a&gt; they met and interacted with each other. In the real world, although political relations between Spain and England were not friendly at the time, artistic influence and inspiration between the two countries might still have been possible. Vega lived twenty years longer than Shakespeare, perhaps enough time for the latter's fame and influence to spread to Spain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that Shakespeare inspired or influenced Vega?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(I hope this isn't an obvious or well-known question. I only learned about Vega yesterday, and his Wikipedia page doesn't mention Shakespeare except in relation to the above-mentioned alternate-history novel.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15097/17&quot;&gt;Is there any evidence that Lope de Vega influenced William Shakespeare?&lt;/a&gt; (Originally both parts were in the same question, but I split them since different types of research and expertise will be required for the two parts.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T17:27:40.087" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T17:27:40.087" Title="Is there any evidence that William Shakespeare influenced Lope de Vega?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;lope-de-vega&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15110" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-09T15:10:40.357" Score="6" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Thirteen of &lt;em&gt;The Prince and the Pauper&lt;/em&gt; we have the following observation about sewing practices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did as men have always done, and probably always will do, to the end of time – held the needle still, and tried to thrust the thread through the eye, which is the opposite of a woman's way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in Chapter Eleven of &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn&lt;/em&gt; we find the exact opposite:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do a girl a tolerable poor, but you might fool me, maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle, don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it – that's the way a woman most always does; but a man always does 'tother way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can these passages in two books by Mark Twain be reconciled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In previously researching this I found two mentions of this problem. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=qTgFAQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA108&amp;amp;source=gbs_selected_pages&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a children's activity book&lt;/a&gt; R. Kent Rassmusen glosses over it, leaving out part of the contradiction and just assuming that Twain wasn't sure. This, of course, hardly explains why he would write contradictory passages each written with no hint of uncertainty, and one of which need not have been written at all (i.e. it did not contribute to the plot as the other instance did).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; (Seventh Series, Volume Fourth), published in 1887 while Twain would yet live another 20+ years, Ernest A. Ebblewhite raised the contradiction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'The Prince and the Pauper' (Chatto &amp;amp; Windus, 1881), at p. 133, Miles Hendon soliloquizes, while endeavouring to use a needle and thread, :Now shall I have the demon's own time to thread it.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;And,&amp;quot; observes Mark Twain, &amp;quot;so he had. He did as men have always done, and probably always will do to the end of time – held the needle still and tried to thrust the thread through the eye, which is the opposite of a woman's way.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three years later, in 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (Chatto &amp;amp; Windus), p. 95, Mrs. Judith Loftus thus apostrophizes that precocious youth: 'Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle, don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it: hold the needle still and and poke the thread at it – that's the way a woman most always does: but a man always does t' other way.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contradiction has puzzled me as much as the description of Mrs. Weller, in the 'Pickwick Papers,' as the immortal Sam's &amp;quot;mother-in-law.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, neither Twain nor anyone else responded to this query.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T17:00:35.540" Title="Never the Twain shall meet – conflicting accounts of sewing practices" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;adventures-of-huckleberry-finn&gt;&lt;the-prince-and-the-pauper&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15111" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-09T15:45:12.040" Score="9" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scholarly editions of Shakespeare's works always discuss real or potential sources for the plots and other aspects of a play or poem. Shakespeare invented very few plots and used sources such as Thomas North's translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plutarch's &lt;em&gt;Lives&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Arthur Golding's translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamorphoses#In_English_translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matteo_Bandello#Plays_by_Shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matteo Bandello's stories&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holinshed%27s_Chronicles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. For Italian sources, it is not always clear whether Shakespeare used the original Italian text, a French translation or an English translation that was later lost (e.g. in the case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Giraldi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cinthio&lt;/a&gt; as a source for &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most frequent settings of Shakespeare's plays are England, Rome (or the Roman Empire) and contemporary Italy. Spain or Spanish literature does not appear to have a great appeal for Shakespeare. Only one play, &lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt; in set in Spain, and after reading scholarly editions of Shakespeare's plays, I can't remember a single Spanish source with the exception of lost &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Cardenio&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cardenio&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was likely based on an episode from Cervantes's &lt;em&gt;Don Quijote&lt;/em&gt;. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearespain00thomuoft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;lecture published in 1922 (&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare and Spain&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt;, Henry Thomas said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of late years Shakespeare's possible Spanish sources have been diligently investigated, with but little result; indeed, many of the 'discoveries' dealt with above may seem hardly worthy of serious treatment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book is almost a hundred years old now and a lot of additional research has been done since 1922, including research on sources. Hence my question: is there any evidence that Shakespeare ever used a Spanish source for any of his plays? I am specifically looking for &lt;strong&gt;evidence that Shakespeare would have read Spanish source in Spanish rather than a translation&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by two comments by Peter Shor. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/13989/how-might-shakespeare-have-become-familiar-with-dantes-work#comment21811_13989&quot;&gt;first comment&lt;/a&gt; read,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation is that he read Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian fluently. I expect the idea that he didn't comes from the Anti-Stratfordians, who didn't want to believe that a commoner could have produced the greatest works in the English language, as well as Johnson's quote &amp;quot;small Latin and less Greek&amp;quot;, which I would say was a metonym for having had no formal schooling beyond grammar school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/15097/is-there-any-evidence-that-lope-de-vega-influenced-william-shakespeare/15099#comment24098_15099&quot;&gt;second comment&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is pretty well established that Shakespeare could read Italian, French, and Latin. (He put French bilingual puns in his plays — how could he have done that without knowing French well?) Knowing these Romance languages, it would have been fairly easy for him to learn Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't subscribe to any of the anti-Stratfordian conspiracy theories that Peter Shor mentions in his first comment, but the fact that Shakespeare knew Latin, French and (probably) Italian does not imply that he actually learnt Spanish. Evidence for Shakespeare's knowledge of Spanish would need to be provided by finding Spanish sources that were not available in translation when Shakespeare wrote the plays that were inspired by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T21:06:20.610" Title="Is there any evidence that Shakespeare ever used a Spanish source for any of his works?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15110" CreationDate="2020-08-09T16:04:47.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation is the following: one should not confuse a book's &lt;strong&gt;narrator&lt;/strong&gt; with the biographical author, i.e. in this case, Mark Twain. Narrators can espouse views that are not shared by the author, even in the case of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person,_omniscient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;omniscient narrator&lt;/a&gt;. From this point of view, the statements about threading the needle from both books don't even need to be reconciled, because narrators can be fallible or express things that aren't true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T17:00:35.540" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T17:00:35.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15113" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15114" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Prince and the Pauper' by Mark Twain, first published in 1881. Use this tag with the tag [mark-twain]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T16:07:50.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15115" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15116" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lyrics of The Carpenters, consisting of the siblings Karen and Richard Carpenter. Use this tag with the tag [song-lyrics] when asking questions about their lyrics." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T16:11:12.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15120" CreationDate="2020-08-09T17:51:02.520" Score="3" ViewCount="288" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Dante's Divine Comedy. In many cantos, souls predict Dante's future, and it is said that God knows everything past, present and future and that souls can enter heaven only if they are chosen by God with his grace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder where is free will in all this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="577" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-09T18:13:47.813" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T19:30:19.297" Title="Free will in Dante's Divine Comedy" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15119" CreationDate="2020-08-09T18:27:59.260" Score="7" ViewCount="998" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/n13/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Blue Scarab&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Mr. Blowgrave, whose deed-box was stolen, was talking to Dr. Thorndyke:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The story concerns my great-grandfather Silas Blowgrave, and his doings during the war with France. It seems that he commanded a privateer of which he and his brother Reuben were the joint owners, and that in the course of their last cruise they acquired a very remarkable and valuable collection of jewels. Goodness knows how they got them; not very honestly, I suspect, for they appear to have been a pair of &lt;strong&gt;precious rascals&lt;/strong&gt;. Something has been said about the loot from a South American church or cathedral, but there is really nothing known about the affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've never met the word &amp;quot;precious&amp;quot; with a bad adjective, &lt;strong&gt;does it mean &amp;quot;great&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T07:59:34.200" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T07:59:34.200" Title="What does &quot;precious rascals&quot; mean in &quot;The Blue Scarab&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15119" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15118" CreationDate="2020-08-09T18:44:16.083" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;precious, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 4.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;colloquial.&lt;/em&gt; a. As an intensifier: complete, utter, out-and-out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T18:44:16.083" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15120" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15117" CreationDate="2020-08-09T19:30:19.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following lines in Canto III of &lt;em&gt;Paradiso&lt;/em&gt; appear to discuss this (quoted from the translation provided by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldofdante.org/comedy/dante/paradise.xml/3.3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldOfDante&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essence of this blessed life consists &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in keeping to the boundaries of God’s will,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;through which our wills become one single will;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;so that, as we are ranged from step to step&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;throughout this kingdom, all this kingdom wills&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that which will please the King whose will is rule.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And in His will there is our peace: that sea&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to which all beings move—the beings He&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;creates or nature makes—such as His will.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Christians should align their will with God's. But how does this make them free? Compare or contrast the above passage with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Romans-Chapter-6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romans 6, 12-14&lt;/a&gt; (quoted from the King James Version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin: but yield yourselves unto God, as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage appears to say that it is sin that enslaves you and will prevent you from attaining grace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another motif in the Bible that seems relevant to grace and free will is that the individual needs to respond to a call by God. There are several Bible passages that illustrate this, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And ere the lamp of God went out in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was, and Samuel was laid down to sleep;&lt;br /&gt; That the LORD called Samuel: and he answered, Here am I. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1-Samuel-Chapter-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;1 Samuel&lt;/em&gt; 3: 3-4&lt;/a&gt;, admittedly rather literal here)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son, &lt;br /&gt;And sent forth his servants to call them that were bidden to the wedding: and they would not come. (...) (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Matthew-Chapter-22/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Matthew&lt;/em&gt; 22: 2-...&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/John-Chapter-6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;John&lt;/em&gt; 6:44&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that people have the freedom to choose whether to answer God's call or not, and thereby implies free will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Admittedly, none of the above passages address the conflict between God's omniscience and man's free will head on. It would seem that neither early Christians nor medieval believers saw a conflict; they seem to have accepted that when God created man, he gave him free will, and that was sufficient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/51151/23586&quot;&gt;Philosophy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt; someone drew a comparison between God's omniscience and the knowledge of a chess grandmaster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chess grand-master may well brag that he shall checkmate the novice chess player's king with a specific piece and reliably carry out that brag. In no case was the novice's free will violated, but the brag was true all the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a clever comparison: it resolves the conflict by assuming that God can manipulate the boundaries within which humans move; within these boundaries, humans still have free will. However, based on the above findings, one should ask whether this assumes a willingness to find contradictions in the Bible that believers may not have cared for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-09T19:30:19.297" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15111" CreationDate="2020-08-09T20:37:31.250" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some people believe Shakespeare used a Spanish source for &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, but the authorities have also found other possible (earlier) sources which were available in languages Shakespeare knew (namely English, French, or Italian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/510670?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Narrative Sources of The Tempest&lt;/a&gt;, by J. M. Nosworthy, (1948) says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only tolerably close parallel to Shakespeare's effectual plot is found in the fourth chapter of Antonio de Eslava's Noches de Invierno, published at Pamplona in 1609 and reprinted the same year at Barcelona.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our best guess for when &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; was written is 1610 or 1611, so this would have come out just before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author goes on to say that this probably isn't Shakespeare's source, in part because people don't think Shakespeare could read Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can scarcely be denied that &lt;em&gt;Noches de Invierno&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; tell the same tale, but it is very doubtful that Shakespeare's source stands here revealed. We may well question whether Shakespeare commanded sufficient Spanish to read Eslava's book ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a 1948 paper; since then other possible sources have been found (which may be ones that de Eslava drew on). So this evidence is inconclusive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most noteworthy of these other sources seems to be &lt;em&gt;Primaleon, Prince of Greece&lt;/em&gt;, which was published in Spanish in 1516, and translated to Italian in 1559 and to French in 1572. It was also translated to English, but while the second part of it appeared in 1595, the third part did not appear until 1619, which means that Shakespeare presumably read at least the third part in a foreign language (but maybe not Spanish). See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870674&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Primaleon&lt;/em&gt;, a New Source&lt;/a&gt;, by Gary Schmidgal (1986).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, given the fact that if you know French, Latin, and Italian, you are probably able to understand Spanish fairly well&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, there is no definitive reason to exclude sources on the grounds that Shakespeare couldn't speak Spanish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;In college, some of us ran into a visitor from Italy who couldn't speak English and thought she was having a heart attack (as it turned out, luckily, she wasn't). A student who had grown up bilingual in French and Spanish could understand her perfectly, but she couldn't understand anything he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T21:06:20.610" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T21:06:20.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15122" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-10T01:59:28.240" Score="-2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/em&gt; is a classic science fiction adventure by French writer Jules Verne (1828-1905). It was adapted into a 1954 American technicolor science fiction adventure film. The submarine &lt;em&gt;Nautilus&lt;/em&gt; is a fictional submarine in which Captain Nemo, Arronax, and the company traveled. It's a classic book about a submarine and sea expedition. 20 thousand leagues are 60000 miles. Captain Nemo dies of unspecified natural causes onboard the Nautilus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not find any word which is worthy to sufficiently praise the book and the author Jules Verne. Though the book is total and complete and no question can be raised about the book, all I can say that the book and the movie are shining like bright and luminous stars in my mind. The science fiction is incomparable. I could not find any other science fiction which is comparable to this science fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: what are the other books that Jules Verne wrote and were the books filmed? What happened to Arronax, the company, and Cyrus Smith who administered the last rites after captain Nemo's death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-12T18:16:07.817" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T18:16:07.817" Title="A question about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;20000-leagues-under-the-sea&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-08-13T14:35:37.397" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15125" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5244" CreationDate="2020-08-10T03:43:50.783" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Silver is tried or put seven times on the fire ; so as to , furnish it (or make it glow)  in its silvery colour.        (1st line)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly a judgement should also be tested seven times&#xA;(just a number;Which means anything should be judged much carefully)                                                              (2nd line)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A judgement which is tested several times is never wrong or amiss.                                                                             (3rd line)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some people kiss shadows (pull illusions (believe that a thing is true but it is actually not)).For e.g. Here, Arragon chooses silver just because it is unique from gold(what many men desires)  and lead(which is considered as  inferior); moreover, silver was inscripted with &amp;quot;as much as he deserves &amp;quot; so just to show his nobility to Portia he chooses that he actually deserves, the silver casket :and becomes happy as he had given a vivid description of the casket he chooses and arrogantly Arragon believed the portrait or picture of Portia is contained in the silver casket as silver was also unique from others as he knew his deserving and was not trying to cozen or cheat his deserving to get higher. Thus, he had a wrong thoughts against the casket as one does give all his hazards or affections for getting  his love: but a deserved or arranged love doesn't last forever : as the man is only getting the lady due to his qualification and birth religion; and not by his love.Hence he was just choosing his quality and nobility but not love... Thus,  he got a shadowy thought or illusion  (not true) that a man who has enough quality(high wisdom and rich birth) to woo a woman are made for each other.....but not love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally will get a appearance of happiness(before opening it) due to his reasoning ; but not the real happiness(after opening the casket) .(bliss means blessing)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3rd and 4th line)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10627" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T11:43:32.390" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T11:43:32.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-10T06:28:32.680" Score="4" ViewCount="133" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've just started re-reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://butterfluff1066.tripod.com/toll/phantomtollbooth.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a fantastic tale of wit and wordplay. Every place and person that Milo meets through this story is rich in symbolism, and every piece of description seems carefully chosen. That said, I'm struggling to figure out the Whether Man. Aside from the obvious pun in his name/title, why does he live specifically in the land of Expectations, and why does he talk in an idiosyncratically repetitive way? Surely these connections can't be coincidental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the first sound from the horn a little man in a long coat came rushing from the house, speaking as fast as he could and repeating everything several times:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My, my, my, my, my, welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to the land of Expectations, to the land of Expectations, to the land of Expectations. We don't get many travelers these days; we certainly don't get many travelers these days. Now what can I do for you? I'm the Whether Man.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm the Whether Man, not the Weather Man, for after all it's more important to know whether there will be weather than what the weather will be.&amp;quot; And with that he released a dozen balloons that sailed off into the sky. &amp;quot;Must see which way the wind is blowing,&amp;quot; he said, chuckling over his little joke and watching them disappear in all directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What kind of a place is Expectations?&amp;quot; inquired Milo, unable to see the humor and feeling very doubtful of the little man's sanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Good question, good question,&amp;quot; he exclaimed. &amp;quot;Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not. Now what else can I do for you?&amp;quot; And before Milo could reply he rushed into the house and reappeared a moment later with a new coat and an umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Splendid, splendid, splendid,&amp;quot; exclaimed the Whether Man. &amp;quot;Whether or not you find your own way, you're bound to find some way. If you happen to find my way, please return it, as it was lost years ago. I imagine by now it's quite rusty. You did say it was going to rain, didn't you?&amp;quot; And with that he opened the umbrella and walked with Milo to the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad you made your own decision. I do so hate to make up my mind about anything, whether its good or bad, up or down, in or out, rain or shine. Expect everything, I always say, and the unexpected never happens. Now please drive carefully; good-by, good-by, good-by, good...&amp;quot; His last good-by was drowned out by an enormous clap of thunder, and as Milo drove down the road in the bright sunshine he could see the Whether Man standing in the middle of a fierce cloudburst that seemed to be raining only on him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The land of Expectations itself has a clear enough symbolic meaning: it's described as fantastically bright and shiny, like people's good expectations of a thing before it happens. The moral in the Whether Man's explanation is that people should go beyond expectations to reach reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;what does the Whether Man represent, and why does he live in Expectations?&lt;/strong&gt; And, whatever he does represent, does it relate symbolically to his repetitive style of speaking (often a character's idiosyncracies somehow reflect whatever it is they correspond to), and to the fact that in the end it rains only on him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T12:55:34.327" Title="Why does the Whether Man live in Expectations, and why does he talk like this?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15126" CreationDate="2020-08-10T12:55:34.327" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Whether Man also represents possibilities.  For Milo himself, the road ahead is full of them, such as whether he will take the right road and reach the city, or the wrong one and end up in the Doldrums.  His manner is excited just as the region is bright, because those possibilities are exciting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T12:55:34.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15118" CreationDate="2020-08-10T15:57:18.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Thorndyke stories are set in the early 20th century (contemporaneous with the author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this time, &amp;quot;precious&amp;quot; was used as a magnifier as described in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15119/10632&quot;&gt;earlier answer&lt;/a&gt; (which I lack the rep to add context in comments to, hence the separate answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional negative meanings can be the current pretentious/fussy (&amp;quot;the lyrics were rather precious for my taste&amp;quot;) or dismissive (&amp;quot;here's your precious ring!&amp;quot;), and an earlier 18th century meaning of &amp;quot;worthless&amp;quot;; none of which seem relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of examples of the utter/complete/etc usage in newspaper articles, within about 40 years or so earlier - when Freeman was in his mid-twenties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/AS18870510.2.44&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A precious scoundrel.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1886/08/19/archives/a-precious-villain-at-large.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A precious villain.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10632" LastEditorUserId="10632" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T16:06:08.260" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T16:06:08.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-10T16:32:23.360" Score="2" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about H. P. Lovecraft contains a section on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=H._P._Lovecraft&amp;amp;oldid=972136995#Literary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;critical reception of Lovecraft's work&lt;/a&gt; that contains the following unsourced statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1962 Colin Wilson, in his survey of anti-realist trends in fiction &lt;em&gt;The Strength to Dream&lt;/em&gt;, cited Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the &amp;quot;assault on rationality&amp;quot; and included him with M. R. James, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, J. R. R. Tolkien and others as one of the builders of mythicised realities contending against the failing project of literary realism.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt; Subsequently, Lovecraft began to acquire the status of a cult writer in the counterculture of the 1960s, and reprints of his work proliferated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Colin_Wilson&amp;amp;oldid=969402638#Non-fiction_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colin Wilson&lt;/a&gt; lists &lt;em&gt;The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination&lt;/em&gt; (1962) among the author's non-fiction works and the book is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=yvU1wAEACAAJ&amp;amp;dq=The+Strength+to+Dream&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjC1Jb7gpHrAhWQzKQKHaT3AsYQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books (Germany)&lt;/a&gt;. However, I don't have access to a preview of that book. My question now is: how and where does Wilson describe Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the &amp;quot;assault on rationality&amp;quot;? I would appreciate getting the exact quote and page number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:07:43.870" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:07:43.870" Title="Where exactly did Colin Wilson describe Lovecraft as one of the pioneers of the &quot;assault on rationality&quot;?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15131" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-08T06:43:46.090" Score="0" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;After Apple-Picking&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;em&gt;North of Boston&lt;/em&gt; (1914) is, at least at the surface level, a poem about harvesting apples and sleep. But what is actually its central theme and how is that revealed in the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10655" OwnerDisplayName="Rayan" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T14:56:09.457" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T14:56:09.457" Title="What is a central theme in Robert Frost's &quot;After Apple-Picking,&quot; and how is it revealed in the poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15130" CreationDate="2020-08-10T17:45:38.250" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colin Wilson's book &lt;em&gt;The Strength to Dream: Literature and the Imagination&lt;/em&gt; (which you found) has an entire chapter entitled &amp;quot;The Assault on Rationality&amp;quot;, in which Lovecraft features prominently as one of the authors discussed. Wilson takes a very dim view of Lovecraft and his writing (and I quote: &amp;quot;it must be admitted that Lovecraft is a very bad writer&amp;quot;), but here are some passages which summarise the idea you're looking for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lovecraft is interesting mainly because he is a perfect example of the &amp;quot;escapist imagination&amp;quot;. It is hard to agree with August Derleth that his death was &amp;quot;a great loss to American letters&amp;quot; because he had not yet reached &amp;quot;the fullest development of his powers.&amp;quot; It is doubtful whether Lovecraft had any more to say. As it is, he wrote far too much. Moreover, since &lt;strong&gt;he so determinedly created an unreal world in opposition to the real world&lt;/strong&gt;, it seems that he willed his own death. His whole life is a spectacle of self-destruction; he strikes one as being like a chronic alcoholic or a drug addict.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, it is interesting to compare him with W. B. Yeats. We tend to think of Yeats as a combination of poet and politician; he has been compared to the older Goethe. And yet Yeats, like Lovecraft, &lt;strong&gt;created his own world of myths and symbols, and tried to force it upon the &amp;quot;real world.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- pp. 10-11&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Lovecraft did his best to convince the reader of the reality of his unseen world&lt;/strong&gt;, but he never asserted in print that he had seen Cthulhu. Yeats's extraordinary attack on the &amp;quot;materialistic world&amp;quot; reached a climax in a strange book called &lt;em&gt;A Vision&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- p. 13&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilde epitomises the imagination as &amp;quot;escapism&amp;quot;. Yeats and Lovecraft &lt;strong&gt;set up the imagination as a faculty for challenging and defying the &amp;quot;real world&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;; but Wilde carried the defiance to the point of suicide. For these writers, &lt;strong&gt;the imagination was essentially the &lt;em&gt;alternative&lt;/em&gt; to reality.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- p. 20&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All bold emphasis mine in the above quotes. The book is &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/strengthtodreaml00wils/page/20/mode/2up?q=lovecraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on the Internat Archive for borrowing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the phrase &amp;quot;assault on rationality&amp;quot; does not literally appear in the same sentence as the word &amp;quot;Lovecraft&amp;quot;, the lengthy discussion of Lovecraft's approach to writing in a chapter entitled &amp;quot;The Assault on Rationality&amp;quot; is enough to make the connection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For further reading, there are other sources predating Wilson, but at least one of them may be harder to track down:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following facts are taken from August Derleth's &lt;em&gt;H. P. L.: A Memoir&lt;/em&gt;. I would like also to acknowledge Mr. Derleth's help in providing me with additional information about Lovecraft. My other chief source of information has been J. Warren Thomas's unpublished hesis on Lovecraft, which I consulted in the John Hay Library of Brown University, Providence, R. I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- p. 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-10T17:54:18.203" LastActivityDate="2020-08-10T17:54:18.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15717" CreationDate="2020-08-11T12:16:54.547" Score="4" ViewCount="303" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Norton Juster's witty wacky fantasy &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;, during their stay in the Dictionopolis dungeon Milo and Tock meet a &lt;s&gt;witch&lt;/s&gt; Which. She used to be in charge of selecting &lt;em&gt;which&lt;/em&gt; words to use, hence her title of Which, until she became too miserly with words and got banished to the dungeon where now people fear her as a &lt;em&gt;witch&lt;/em&gt;. But while I understand the wordplay and significance in her title, her name still puzzles me: &lt;strong&gt;Faintly Macabre&lt;/strong&gt;, or Aunt Faintly as she kindly allows Milo to call her. Is there any significance in this, or any reason that name might be chosen for a kindly Which?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Most probably by pure coincidence, I once read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/77550-pongwiffy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another kids' fantasy series&lt;/a&gt; featuring a Scottish witch called Macabre. I mention this on the offchance that it isn't coincidence.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T14:52:18.640" Title="Why is the not-so-wicked Which called Faintly Macabre?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15134" CreationDate="2020-08-11T12:53:52.127" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's merely a mild pun.  Her association with witches makes her macabre, disturbing, but only faintly so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T12:53:52.127" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-11T17:00:59.583" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a book I remember from the 1980s (but I had older siblings, so it may have been a decade earlier) that followed the structure of &amp;quot;the house that jack built&amp;quot; but was about 2 brothers that may have been trolls. I think one brother stole berries or maybe a pie from the other, so he was trying to get a rope to hang him. He goes to get the rope, but has to get something else first, and then that sends him to something else and at the end he decides not to hang his brother. Each page repeated and built upon the previous one. The brothers' names were something like Munchin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10624" LastActivityDate="2020-08-11T17:00:59.583" Title="What is the children's book about a troll looking for a rope to hang his brother?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15137" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15608" CreationDate="2020-08-11T18:48:43.383" Score="6" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50486/madrigal-like-the-idalian-queen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a madrigal&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;William Drummond of Hawthornden&lt;/strong&gt; (laird of the same) yesterday. It's an astonishingly beautiful poem, but I'm having trouble making sense of some of the phrases and allusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;First Uncertainty&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Cyprus' gardens gathering those fair flowers &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which of her blood were born,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some Googling, multiple websites tell me that, in mythology, &lt;strong&gt;Venus/Aphrodite created red roses by pricking her fingers on the thorn of a white rose bush, and spilling her blood on the petals&lt;/strong&gt;. (I'm ashamed to say I hadn't come across that myth before.) However, I'm having trouble finding a primary source. &lt;strong&gt;Could anyone point me to a text from the ancient world in which this story is mentioned or related?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Second Uncertainty&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as their aspen stalks those fingers band,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm having great difficulty making sense, on a basic grammatical level, of that line. &lt;strong&gt;Could someone paraphrase it for me?&lt;/strong&gt; Is 'band' being used as a verb here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Third Uncertainty&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That she might read my case, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A hyacinth I wished me in her hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, thankfully, does make sense to me on a gramatical level. I'm still having difficulty making sense of it on a more semantic level, however. &lt;strong&gt;I can think of a few different meanings of 'read my case', but none of them fit as something which the speaker would want a beautiful woman to do to him.&lt;/strong&gt; What am I missing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T14:05:05.510" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T09:29:02.607" Title="What does it mean for Venus to 'read my case' in Drummond of Hawthornden's madrigal?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;myths&gt;&lt;william-drummond-of-hawthornden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15139" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-11T21:38:51.573" Score="2" ViewCount="369" Body="&lt;p&gt;When talking about the coming of age genre a friend of mine mentioned Harry Potter as an example. I found myself incapable of sharing this idea since not only I do not think that the core of the plot of HP is about his growth but I think HP does not portrait any kind of notable growth of the protagonist(s) when compared to other titles of the genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the internet one explicit mention on this topic that I found is given in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mugglenet.com/2012/03/harry-potter-a-coming-of-age-story/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this article, the author says that in the various books Harry finds out that many of the adults he trusted had at some point or another lied to him, through this realization and acceptance he says that our protagonist grows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find this rather weak, just because you accepted or realized that people lie doesn't mean you are mature or an active and integrated member of society. On a side note, this article speaks more about the adults than it speaks about Harry, but nevertheless knowing that adults lie doesn't show a change or growth in the protagonist or in how he behaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other explicit mention on this topic I found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://comingofageharrypotter.weebly.com/events.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coming of Age in Harry Potter&lt;/a&gt; where the authors draw a parallel between the normal experiences of a child in his adolescence and the experience of Harry's adolescence. The parallels are well drawn and believable but what they describe are iconic events in a growing child, what they fail to show are what changes these events bring to Harry. Even the point made about his acceptance into Hogwarts: he learns something about his past he didn't know and this heralds his growth. This event misses the whole point because we are indeed introduced to a meek protagonist who was a victim of prolonged bullying but the resolution to this status is that of overpowering him: he is a mage and thus there is no reason to be fearful of non magical beings. We can extremize this setting to &amp;quot;you are a God Harry&amp;quot;, and thus there is no reason to fear mortals. The solution to a life of bullying is not trying to find a connection between the two parties but to tear away Harry from that situation and put him in the magic world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The coming of age genre usually portraits a protagonist detached from or at odds with either society or their parents or in some cases with themselves, and by overcoming the difficulties in the story the protagonist reconciles with the person or concept of interest. This is better describe in the first parts of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRjHL8kbkZk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this video critic of Brave&lt;/a&gt;  where Merida is at odds with her mother and through her with society. The video explores some possible more realistic resolutions since the published one isn't really adequate, but my point is about the introduction and the divergences in views between her and the mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the beginning HP is a story of a hero that will slay his dragon. Since the hero is an eleven year old kid going to school we will have to spectate his stumbling over common life experiences but this story was never about these experiences, it is about going against the final boss. This boss appears in every book minus the third to remind us that this is the epic of Potter &amp;quot;the Voldemort slaying mage&amp;quot; and not his growing up story. In a coming of age story the story elements should be the instrument to talk about the protagonist and not the center of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What suggests HP is a coming of age story? What suggests it isn't? What I am interested in are either further motivations to support my thesis or motivations to disprove it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10640" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T23:15:26.527" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T23:15:26.527" Title="Is Harry Potter a coming of age story?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15142" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15122" CreationDate="2020-08-12T14:15:52.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what are the other books that Jules Verne wrote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jules Verne wrote a lot of novels and a few short stories, and became famous already in his lifetime with them.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne#Romans_et_nouvelles_publi%C3%A9s_du_vivant_de_l%27auteur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A definitive list of his works can be found in the article about him on fr.Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.  The linked section and the next one lists all the books published that he wrote.  More than half of these books is science fiction, and more than half of them are really good and worth to read.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne_bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;En.Wikipedia has an equivalent list.&lt;/a&gt;  &lt;a href=&quot;http://jv.gilead.org.il/FAQ/#C7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Jules Verne FAQ by Ariel Pérez, Garmt de Vries and Jean-Michel Margot&lt;/a&gt; says that the two most well-known books of Jules Verne are &lt;em&gt;Twenty thousands leagues under the seas&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Around the world in 80 days&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of Jules Verne's works went to public domain forty years ago; the few posthumously published novels that were edited by his son Michel Verne also went public domain more than twenty years ago.  Because of this, you can find copies of all or almost all of his books on the internet.  I recommend &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fr.Wikisource, where you can find copies of most of his original works.&lt;/a&gt; That page also has links to Wikisource sites in more than fifteen other languages that have some translations.  Many translations are already public domain, but the best translations tend to be modern ones where the copyright term hasn't expired yet, but even these you can often find in libraries or bookstores cheaply.  &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/v#a60&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg also has copies of many originals and translations of the books,&lt;/a&gt; although many of those have been copied to Wikisource.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pages containing the original books on Wikisource also contain the original etchings used in the illustrated original editions of Jules Verne's books. These &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Auteur:Jules_Verne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;medium resolution scans of all of these etchings are available thanks to&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://jv.gilead.org.il/rpaul/equipe.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the crew of &amp;quot;The Illustrated Jules Verne&amp;quot; website&lt;/a&gt;.  High resolution scans of most of the etchings are sadly not yet available on the internet.  However, you can find many of the illustrations in later editions of his works that are readily available: many older translated editions from the 1890s were published with the original editions, and those older editions later got exact reproduction editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;were the books filmed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of adaptations have been made of Verne's books, including many with shoddy quality.  There are a lot of films based at least somewhat on his books. Donald Hosek already linked to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0894523/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IMDB's full list of known such films&lt;/a&gt;, and that's probably as precise and complete as you'll get.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne#Adaptations_au_cin%C3%A9ma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fr.Wikipedia also lists selected film adaptations and other adaptations.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What happened to Arronax, the company, and Cyrus Smith who administered the last rites after captain Nemo's death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jules Verne describes Captain Nemo's death and meeting with Cyrus Smith in the sequel novel &lt;em&gt;L'Île mystérieuse&lt;/em&gt;.  Let me sum this up in short.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cyrus Smith the distinguished engineer and four more companions escaped from a city under siege in a hot air balloon.  The winds took the balloon to an uninhabited island.  The five companions lived there for two years, together with Tom Ayrton, who got left on the neighboring island twelve years ago from another of Jules Verne's novels &lt;em&gt;Les Enfants du capitaine Grant&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Captain Nemo, after all his companions left or died, parked his electric submarine in a cave inside the island.  He's been secretly observing and helping the team of shipwrecked settlers, and has saved his lives several times.  When he finally reveals himself and admits all this, he also tells that his submarine is stranded inside the cave, because the island is volcanic and the entrance of the cave has risen above sea level.  Cirus Smith, meanwhile, informs Captain Nemo that they already know about his story from the protagonist of &lt;em&gt;Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea&lt;/em&gt;, Aronnax, who escaped from the submarine with his two companions and published the story.  Captain Nemo dies in the submarine inside the cave, and the slowly sinking submarine becomes his grave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The settlers are finally almost ready to escape with a raft that they are building, and dreaming of later returning to this wonderful island and start a small colony.  All six, however, have to run to the raft before they can finish packing food, and barely escape the island, which is completely destroyed by its volcanic eruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2020-08-12T15:51:30.943" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T15:51:30.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15143" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-12T14:56:04.153" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the short story &amp;quot;The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County&amp;quot; by Mark Twain. I was wondering if the author's usage of the phrase &amp;quot;lurking suspicion&amp;quot; in the first paragraph is an instance of humour?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In compliance with the request of a friend of mine, who wrote me from the East, I called on good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler, and inquired after my friend's friend, Leonidas W. Smiley, as requested to do, and I hereunto append the result. I have a lurking suspicion that Leonidas W. Smiley is a myth; that my friend never knew such a personage; and that he only conjectured that, if I asked old Wheeler about him, it would remind him of his infamous Jim Smiley, and he would go to work and bore me nearly to death with some infernal reminiscence of him as long and tedious as it should be useless for me. If that was the design, it certainly succeeded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10644" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-12T15:21:19.733" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T15:21:19.733" Title="Is the phrase &quot;lurking suspicion&quot; in this context humour?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15144" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-12T15:54:50.780" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just learned from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15143/17&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; about a short story by Mark Twain entitled &amp;quot;The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County&amp;quot;, which, when I looked it up online to find a copy-pastable version, turned out to be called &amp;quot;The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County&amp;quot;. Curious, I &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebrated_Jumping_Frog_of_Calaveras_County&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looked it up on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and discovered that it's been published under both these names and also &amp;quot;Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog&amp;quot;. The Wikipedia page has some information about where and when it was published under which title, but nothing about why.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was the title of this story changed, at least twice?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-12T15:54:50.780" Title="Why was the title of Mark Twain's jumping frog short story changed so much?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-12T15:55:41.210" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/278659/rand-althor&quot;&gt;@Randal'Thor&lt;/a&gt;'s creative &amp;quot;edit summary&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ring a ding dillo, hey Puzz, merry Puzz, Work a place illo&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;on &lt;a href=&quot;https://meta.stackexchange.com/revisions/352934/5&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and it got a chuckle out of me, but also got me thinking whether there is any technical term for this kind of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The structure is clearly intended to point strongly to the original work, in the case a song sung by the character Tom Bombadil from Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is derived only by modifying certain phrases, and not wholesale rephrasing or rewriting.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not (necessarily?) intended to mock the original work, but it instead takes the original work and applies it to a new situation, or extends the scope of the original work. I'm not sure if this is a characteristic feature, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some reason, my brain is telling me that there's a word/phrase that describes this kind of writing, but I can't find it. If I can find more examples describing what I have in mind, I'll add them to this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rand &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/55227665#55227665&quot;&gt;suggests&lt;/a&gt; that the word I'm looking for could be &amp;quot;parody&amp;quot;, but I'm not sure. Perhaps there is something more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T14:51:13.123" Title="Is there a technical term for a work that is based on another, and created by modifying a few words in critical places?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15146" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15157" CreationDate="2020-08-13T00:21:02.880" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;A few details of this book that I remember include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A specific type of parchment was purchased to forge either the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. This parchment was old enough to fool carbon dating.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A man urgently needed money for a bus ticket and traded his expensive watch for that money.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There might have been some type of plastic surgery on someone's face to change his or her identity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think this was set in either the United States or another English speaking country like England.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think there was a part with a woman on a train or a bus who was being sexually harassed by some (possibly British) men who said something along the lines of &amp;quot;I like black birds&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read this around 9 years ago and at the time thought it was a very well-known book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been wondering what this was called for years and I would appreciate it if someone could figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10645" LastEditorUserId="10645" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T19:17:06.793" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T19:50:44.563" Title="What book involved forging one of the United States' founding documents?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15147" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T09:15:48.610" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original manuscript of the 11th-century Japanese novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has been lost. According to the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Textual_tradition_of_The_Tale_of_Genji&amp;amp;oldid=817394114&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Textual tradition of &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;the number of manuscript copies of it is very large&amp;quot;. Already by the 13th century there were many variations between the manuscripts that were in circulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these two Wikipedia articles mention when the novel was first printed. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wdl.org/en/item/2930/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;World Digital Library&lt;/a&gt;, the first printed edition was a 54-volume edition produced during the Keichō Era (1596–1615). However, according to Julie L. Mellby at Princeton University (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.princeton.edu/%7Egraphicarts/2011/04/summer_reading.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Summer reading: The Tale of Genji&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, 29 April 2011),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first printed edition of The Tale of Genji was published in 1654 and includes woodcuts by Yamamoto Shunshô (1610-1682). Known as the Tale of Genji, Jou-oh Edition, our copy is complete with 54 volumes of main text and 6 commentaries, a grand total of 60 volumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever edition was published first, I would like to know what manuscript or manuscripts the first edition was based on, if those handwritten pages still exist. If the source manuscripts still exists, is there any information about textual variations between them and the printed edition? If they have been lost, is there any extant manuscript that comes close to the printed edition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:54:00.047" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:54:00.047" Title="What manuscript or manuscripts was the first printed edition of the Tale of Genji based on?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15154" CreationDate="2020-08-13T14:12:45.337" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/StephenKingCarriev5.0pdf?ref=ol#page/n23/mode/2up/search/Arkham&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part I of &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen King writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when she talks of Carrie White her face takes on an odd pinched look that is more like Lovecraft out of Arkham than Kerouac out of Southern Cal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than an understanding of the relation between the locations stated, real or otherwise, and the respective authors who wrote about them, I don't quite understand the phrasing of &amp;quot;out of&amp;quot; which King employs to link the aforementioned authors and locations. Would &amp;quot;Lovecraft out of Arkham&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Kerouac out of Southern Cal&amp;quot; refer to the respective faces of Lovecraft or Kerouac when placed in these locations,  implied to be of immense terror and blitheness respectively, due to contrasting natures of the respective locations (Arkham and California)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T14:26:19.897" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T19:35:57.663" Title="What does this sentence from Carrie mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;carrie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15069" CreationDate="2020-08-13T15:55:33.760" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most likely, it is the case. His wealth, social status and even marriage were due to his military successes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In every other matter, he was an outsider, and he was constantly reminded of that. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/othello/page_36/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brabantio told&lt;/a&gt; that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To fall in love with what she feared to look on?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is a judgment maimed and most imperfect&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That will confess perfection so could err.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/othello/page_42/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his wife, when summoned by the Duke, firstly referred to him as &amp;quot;Moor&amp;quot; and only then as &amp;quot;Othello&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so much duty as my mother showed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To you, preferring you before her father,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So much I challenge that I may profess&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Due to the Moor my lord.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most probably, when constantly reminded that he is different, unworthy of love etc. anyone will start feeling inadequate no matter how strong-willed they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Only adding my own answer as there are no alternative answers. This is the initial version, I will add more details later.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7759" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T20:51:56.793" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T20:51:56.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15139" CreationDate="2020-08-13T18:00:22.757" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why can't HP be both?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I particularly like your comment about HP being a hero-slaying-the-dragon story, and I agree that if you have to choose 1 trope to force HP into, this may be the best one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I think HP is very much a coming-of-age story, and more so than most coming-of-age stories. Here are some of my best thoughts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry grows to know more about the world around him, whether that be the social world of relationships he must navigate as he realizes life is not as simple as he thought as a child, or the academic world of magic where he learns that there is a realm of morality and responsibility that comes with the boon of magical powers. He has to come to terms with his feelings on his own parents death - this is seen (spoilers)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; in the final book where Harry realizes that &amp;quot;I open at the close&amp;quot; golden snitch is a gift from Dumbledore to give him encouragement and help him come to terms with feelings of loss even as he is about to lose his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The final chapter of the final book, where Harry and his friends are all grown up, can be seen as Harry having succeeded in his growth journey - he is now an adult himself, sending his own kids off to Hogwarts for their own adventures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry has multiple father figures (Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Lupin) and some mother figures (Mrs. Weasley, at times McGonagall) throughout the book, and their aim&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; (other than perhaps Dumbledore who strategically groomed Harry to face Voldemort)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was for Harry's own wellbeing, which was to grow as an individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; I would even argue that the Harry of any other book than book 7 would not be capable of facing Voldemort. In the end, Harry does not beat Voldemort through sheer force of magic, which is how Voldemort expects to be faced and how Dumbledore consistently fought him. Rather, Harry beats Voldemort through his own mature realizations that love is more powerful than fear/violence. This is only achieved through the immense growth that occurs in all books leading up to the finale. Keep in mind that growth is slow, not something achieved overnight, and Rowling expertly grows Harry from a scrappy and unsure young kid living underneath a stairway into a capable and confident young adult (of the wizarding world) ready to face his demons, when they come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consistently throughout the book the focus steers more towards the daily life of Harry and his companions (see especially books 5 and 6) instead of focusing on skills and strategies to overcome the enemy. Great care is taken by Rowling to develop subplots involving Snape, Harry's parents, and Sirius Black &amp;amp; company. These subplots force Harry to come to terms with his own parents' and others' actions, and to decide the kind of person that he will become.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last point is not about the storyline itself but rather the style in which it was written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the character HP is growing older, so too is Rowling's audience. Her readers learn from and empathize with the characters in the book, growing as these characters grow. This is something that she was one of the first to pioneer, due in part to the fact that massively more youth today are more literate than in the past, books being more accessible, and books being sold as series instead of as the more traditional stand-alone novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10648" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T18:00:22.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15069" CreationDate="2020-08-13T18:21:17.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that Othello suffered from impostor syndrome. If he did, I would expect this to be reflected in at least some of his speeches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he speaks in his professional capacity as general in the Venetian military, his speeches are metrically very regular, which, combined with their actual content, can be interpreted as a mark of self-confidence. From the point of view of content, he know that the Venetian needs him because of the services he has rendered them. See for example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let him [Brabantio, Desdemona's father] do his spite:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My services which I have done the signiory&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shall out-tongue his complaints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on Act 1, scene 3, Norman Sanders writes in his edition of the play (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1984; emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every line Othello utters in his normal manner illustrates how all he has experienced has been related to himself with a &lt;strong&gt;breathtaking egocentricity&lt;/strong&gt; which is clearly signalled by the grammatical focus of his avowal of the sincerity of his love for Desdemona: &amp;quot;She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them&amp;quot; (1.3.166-7).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such egocentricity hardly seems compatible with the self-doubt of someone with impostor syndrome. If Shakespeare had wished to make us think Othello experienced impostor syndrome, I would have expected soliloquies that counter the above impression, e.g. telling us that his public attitude is just bravado. However, it is Iago who gets almost all the soliloquies, which expose him as a Janus-faced schemer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In &lt;em&gt;The Story of the Night: Studies in Shakespeare's Major Tragedies&lt;/em&gt; (1961), John Holloway showed that Othello's manner and speech conform with the sixteenth-century conduct manuals on how princes should behave.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For evidence of an impostor syndrome in his private life, one would look at the speeches in which he talks to or about Desdemona, i.e. to look for indications that he might not feel he deserves her. For example, this is how he greets Desdemona after his arrival on Cyprus (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 2, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It gives me wonder great as my content&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To see you here before me. O my soul's joy!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If after every tempest come such calms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;May the winds blow till they have waken'd death!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If it were now to die,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My soul hath her content so absolute&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That not another comfort like to this&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Succeeds in unknown fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I man who believes he is not worthy of his wife would not be so unreservedly relieved and happy at seeing her again; his relief would be dampened by his self-doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more interesting speech is his soliloquy in the middle of the play, after Iago has started sowing the seeds of doubt (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.3.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haply, for I am black&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And have not those soft parts of conversation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That chamberers have, or for I am declined&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the vale of years,--yet that's not much--&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She's gone. I am abused; and my relief&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That we can call these delicate creatures ours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And live upon the vapour of a dungeon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than keep a corner in the thing I love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For others' uses. Yet, 'tis the plague of great ones;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Prerogatived are they less than the base;&lt;br /&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first few lines mention him being black and older than Desdemona, but he dismisses these reasons saying, &amp;quot;yet that's not much&amp;quot;. Instead of feeling loathed, he says, &amp;quot;my relief / Must be to loathe her&amp;quot;, i.e. the negative feelings are now aimed at Desdemona instead of at himself. Then they seem to shift back to himself: &amp;quot;That we can call these delicate creatures ours, / And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad&amp;quot;. However, the reason he gives for this is Desdemona's unfaithfulness, not a belief in his own (real or imagined) shortcomings, since he continues, &amp;quot;'tis the plague of great ones&amp;quot;; these are not the words of someone who doubts his own accomplishments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are his last words before he stabs himself in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 5, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soft you; a word or two before you go.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have done the state some service, and they know't.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more of that.&#xA;The tone is now of one who is used to giving commands but who know that he has been horribly deceived: &amp;quot;Soft you&amp;quot; commands silence rather than politely requesting it; &amp;quot;they know't&amp;quot; sounds like an allusion to his words on Act 1, scene 2 cited above. He then turns his attention to what happened in his private life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I pray you, in your letters,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of one that loved not wisely but too well;&lt;br /&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He asks those around him to describe himself and his actions as objectively as they can. He regains his dignity and nobility, not just by taking responsibility for his mistakes but by doing this in measured language using mostly end-stopped lines. I think it would be difficult for someone experiencing impostor syndrome to show so much dignity in their last words, just before they take their life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T18:21:17.787" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15153" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T19:11:51.123" Score="4" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lewis Carroll's famous flight of fantasy &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt;, a sequel to the even more famous &lt;em&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt;, contains a lot of nonsense poetry, much of which relates to fish. As I recall, the same is true of &lt;em&gt;Alice's Adventures in Wonderland&lt;/em&gt; too, but it's in &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt; that Alice explicitly remarks on this in the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Do you know, I’ve had such a quantity of poetry repeated to me to-day,’ Alice began, a little frightened at finding that, the moment she opened her lips, there was dead silence, and all eyes were fixed upon her; ‘and it’s a very curious thing, I think—every poem was about fishes in some way. Do you know why they’re so fond of fishes, all about here?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She never gets an answer to this question, only yet another poem about fish. From an out-of-universe literary analysis perspective, can we answer the question better than the Queens could?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is so much of the &lt;em&gt;Alice&lt;/em&gt; poetry about fish, and is there any significance or symbolism in this?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T19:11:51.123" Title="Why so many poems about fish in Through The Looking-Glass?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;lewis-carroll&gt;&lt;through-the-looking-glass&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15149" CreationDate="2020-08-13T19:35:57.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Lovecraft out of Arkham” refers to the horror writing of H. P. Lovecraft whose writing includes the fictional setting of Arkham, Massachusetts. “Kerouac out of Southern Cal” conversely refers to the beat writing of Jack Kerouac (best known for &lt;em&gt;On the Road&lt;/em&gt;). The meaning here is that her face is horrifying rather than beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T19:35:57.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15155" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-13T19:45:37.257" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien's &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; contains many lovely riddles, posed in-universe by Gollum and Bilbo to each other. Most of them are original compositions by Tolkien himself, &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/81153/79840&quot;&gt;as he explained in one of his letters&lt;/a&gt;. One of these is the &amp;quot;fish-riddle&amp;quot;, asked by Gollum, which goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alive without breath,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As cold as death;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Never thirsty, ever drinking,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All in mail never clinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is, of course, &lt;em&gt;fish&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I first came across this riddle in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childcraft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Childcraft&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series, which is sort of an encyclopedia created for children. In Volume 1 of the series, titled &lt;em&gt;Stories and Poems&lt;/em&gt;, this riddle appears alongside several others but with a small change (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alive &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; breath;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As cold as death.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Never thirsty, ever drinking;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All in mail never clinking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering the care with which the &lt;em&gt;Childcraft&lt;/em&gt; series is made, I find it hard to believe that this change is just a typo, and not a deliberate choice on the part of the editor. But, I personally find that &amp;quot;Alive without breath&amp;quot; is more descriptive of a fish, because one typically doesn't imagine gills as lungs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a strong justification for the change in the first line of the riddle compared to Tolkien's original? Does this riddle appear in the modified form in any other prominent places, like popular compilations of nursery rhymes/riddles?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-13T20:35:08.817" LastActivityDate="2020-08-13T20:35:08.817" Title="Is a fish &quot;Alive with breath&quot; or &quot;Alive without breath&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15156" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T05:55:12.627" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1971/01/07/an-open-letter-to-my-sister-miss-angela-davis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Baldwin's open letter to Angela Davis&lt;/a&gt; contains the following sentence (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The will of the people, in America, has always been at the mercy of an&#xA;ignorance not merely phenomenal, but sacred, and sacredly cultivated:&#xA;the better to be used by a carnivorous economy which &lt;strong&gt;democratically&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;slaughters and victimizes whites and blacks alike.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've found two candidate definitions that might fit with the above usage of &lt;strong&gt;democratically&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1)&lt;/a&gt; Of a democracy (of a government by the people).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2)&lt;/a&gt; Relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect Baldwin has in mind the first meaning; but, if so, I'm not sure how to make clear sense of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8764" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T08:59:52.520" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T08:59:52.520" Title="What does James Baldwin mean by 'democratic' in his open letter to Angela Davis?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;james-baldwin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15146" CreationDate="2020-08-14T08:04:18.170" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &amp;quot;Honour Amongst Thieves&amp;quot; by Jeffrey Archer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;But the toughest requirement proved to be the parchment itself, because Dollar Bill wouldn't consider anything that was less than two hundred years old. He tried to explain to Angelo about carbon dating.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;If you can't pay, you've gotta debus 'cause that's what the regulations say.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;'I'll give you a dollar for that watch,' said a young man seated in the second row who'd been enjoying the confrontation.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;'My friend Marv fancies you. Did you know that, Sloane?' Hannah smiled at him as she began planning the route she would have to take out of the carriage once the train pulled in to the next station. 'Quite like you myself,' he said. 'But I prefer black birds.'&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10651" LastEditorUserId="10645" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T19:50:44.563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T19:50:44.563" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15158" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15159" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet and activist James Baldwin (1924 – 1987) and his life as a writer. His novels include 'Go Tell It on the Mountain' (1953) and 'Giovanni's Room' (1956)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:13:32.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15160" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15161" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" Score="0" Body="Questions about Lewis Carroll's novel 'Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There' (1871), the sequel to 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' (1865). Use this tag with the tag [lewis-carroll]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:16:12.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15162" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15163" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Carrie' (1974), Stephen King's first published novel. Use this tag with the tag [stephen-king]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T09:18:33.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15165" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15174" CreationDate="2020-08-14T14:19:42.403" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/StephenKingCarriev5.0pdf?ref=ol#page/n39/mode/2up/search/Arizona&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part I of &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Stephen King writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Flatlands Society, the Rosicrucians, or the Corlies of Arizona, who are positive that the atomic bomb does not work, these unfortunates are flying in the face of logic with their heads in the sand-and beg your pardon for the mixed metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing that The Flatlands Society, which I assume is an alternative title for &amp;quot;The Flatearth Society&amp;quot;, and Rosicrucians are pseudoscientic movements, I assume the Corlies of Arizona would be aswell, however I haven't been able to find any groups bearing such a title. What exactly is the &amp;quot;Corlies of Arizona&amp;quot;, an informal name perhaps for an organisation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T14:24:48.770" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T04:55:49.497" Title="Who are the Corlies of Arizona?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;carrie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15234" CreationDate="2020-08-14T14:55:58.550" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;for bad's come over her&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I even went to a policeman, a good enough sort of man, but a fellow&#xA;I'd never spoke to before because of his livery, and I asks him if his&#xA;'cuteness could find any thing out for us. So I believe he asks other&#xA;policemen; and one on 'em had seen a wench, like our Esther, walking&#xA;very quickly, with a bundle under her arm, on Tuesday night, toward&#xA;eight o'clock, and get into a hackney coach, near Hulme Church, and we&#xA;don't know th' number, and can't trace it no further. I'm sorry enough&#xA;for the girl, &lt;strong&gt;for bad's come over her&lt;/strong&gt;, one way or another, but I'm&#xA;sorrier for my wife. She loved her next to me and Mary, and she's&#xA;never been the same body since poor Tom's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2153/2153-h/2153-h.htm#c1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, &lt;em&gt;Mary Barton&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel published in 1848 in the United Kingdom, Barton's wife's sister, Esther, has mysterious disappeared, wearing her Sunday gown, from her lodging house owned by Mrs. Bradshaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Barton is telling his friend how he tried hard to find out anything about Esther, even asking a policeman to search for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Barton is in a way sorry for Esther, &amp;quot;for bad's come over her,&amp;quot; but he thinks Esther has gone off with somebody and doesn't take seriously about her disappearance. (He was not on friendly terms with Esther, because he had always disapproved of her behavior, including spending money on her dress and stopping out until late at night.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Barton's wife takes on very sadly about Esther, and thinks Esther has drowned herself and is terribly worried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not clearly understand what Barton intended to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T16:40:24.360" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T13:42:44.900" Title="What does &quot;for bad's come over her&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-gaskell&gt;&lt;mary-barton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15167" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T15:53:19.070" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt; is all about the boy Milo's voyage of discovery through the allegorical lands of Wisdom (and Ignorance). At the beginning of the story, he starts off in the real world being bored and dissatisfied, seemingly with nothing to do or enjoy in his life. When he returns after everything he's seen and done, he finds himself and the world around him full of life and interest, and even says he's too busy to go back and re-start his adventure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do we know anything more about his life in the real world?&lt;/strong&gt; Does he have parents? How old is he? Any information at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T07:12:46.403" Title="How old is Milo? Does he have a family?" Tags="&lt;norton-juster&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15168" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-14T16:32:33.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T16:32:33.583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T16:32:33.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15169" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-14T16:32:33.583" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life'. Should be tagged with the author [elizabeth-gaskell]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-14T18:44:47.843" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T18:44:47.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15171" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T20:53:37.230" Score="5" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this somewhere in the late 1980s to the early 1990s as a library book in Ashland, KY. Most of my memories of the book are pretty fragmentary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was an English hardback, probably less than 100 pages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It involved at least one Caucasian boy along with one or more friends who were solving mysteries they came upon (I think it was entirely things they just kind of happened upon).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the conceits of the book is that partway through the story, it would instruct you to go to a later page to continue the story, much like how many magazines did to keep all of the stories in the early pages.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think there were at least four stories, but only one of them has actually stuck in my head. (Below information is for this one story)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The kids were investigating a ghost town for missing gold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a scene with text along the lines of &amp;quot;And when he opened the closet, out fell the skeleton&amp;quot; with an appropriate illustration of the skeleton falling onto the boy .&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I'm pretty sure it was a black-and-white illustration, fairly realistic proportions, looking like pen-and-ink drawing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This was followed by the prompt for the later page, which began with &amp;quot;key&amp;quot;, belying the former illustration.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I remember that the plot then had them encounter a sinister adult figure who was also looking for the gold.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the boys stuffed the key into his pocket, making his waistline sag noticeably.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a reveal that the black (seemingly iron) skeleton key was actually made out of gold painted black, accounting for the abnormal weight.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, that's just about all of the details I can recall... I'm pretty sure there were other stories, but it was that illustration (which I occasionally wondered if it was intentional or the result of the illustrator only being given that page to work off of) that has stuck in my head decades later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T23:25:34.547" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T19:11:02.327" Title="Book with stories continued on later pages with at least one misleading illustration due to the split involving a skeleton falling out of a closet" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15172" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15167" CreationDate="2020-08-14T21:26:52.863" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no explicit information in the story, which I assume was intentional to allow readers to more closely identify with Milo. What we know is that he lives in an apartment building with an elevator and goes to school. He's young enough to have a toy car he can drive. He's apparently a latchkey kid which is unusual for the era at which the book was published. I first encountered &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt; in excerpts which illustrated Milo as an African-American boy so even with the Jules Feiffer illustrations, I still tend to think of him as African-American.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own personal take is that he's a fourth grader, but that's largely based on the age I was when I first read &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T21:26:52.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-14T23:19:22.253" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read it like 7 years ago. Many scientists — I remember Einstein — are there. You can only go if you are invited. Every time someone leaves, you can see from the window of the hotel the time he/she came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10656" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-08-15T12:55:10.480" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T12:55:10.480" Title="Looking for a SF short story about a hotel frozen in time" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15165" CreationDate="2020-08-15T04:55:49.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's likely that this is an invention of Stephen King. As you've noted the only references to said group are &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt; itself. The idea being that these are groups with a conspiracy-based view of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T04:55:49.497" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15175" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16446" CreationDate="2020-08-15T08:43:43.477" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a question regarding the numbering of the Petrarch's sonnets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt transcribed for piano three of the Sonnets: 47, 104, 123. We can be sure of which sonnets Liszt had in mind, because there's an earlier version of the three pieces for voice and piano, where the tenor sings the Italian words of the original poem by Petrarch; so the three Sonnets Liszt seems to have taken inspiration from are respectively &lt;em&gt;Benedetto sia 'l giorno&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Pace non trovo&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;I' vidi in terra angelici costumi&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the problem: in my Italian edition of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Canzoniere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rerum vulgarium fragmenta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the numbering of the three sonnets simply doesn't correspond: the three Sonnets, in all the editions I could find, are respectively 61, 134, 156.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the question: has there been any renumbering of the sonnets (by Petrarch himself, or in following editions, considering Liszt composed these pieces around 1850), which I'm not yet aware of, that is the cause of this mismatch?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have already asked this question on Music Stack Exchange; you can follow the discussion at &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/103867/liszt-petrarch-sonnet-104&quot;&gt;Liszt Petrarch Sonnet 104&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10658" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T11:40:40.180" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T12:16:09.467" Title="Numbering of Petrarch's sonnets" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;music&gt;&lt;philology&gt;&lt;francesco-petrarca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15176" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-15T11:04:33.783" Score="3" ViewCount="308" Body="&lt;p&gt;The fourth line of the last stanza (stanza 6) in the poem &amp;quot;Confessions of a Born Spectator&amp;quot; by Ogden Nash is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buy tickets worth their radium&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does 'radium' mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the phrase 'worth their radium' mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would the meaning be if &lt;strong&gt;'their'&lt;/strong&gt; were not there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean with &lt;strong&gt;'their'&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1957" LastEditorUserId="1957" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T04:57:21.583" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T22:42:25.170" Title="What does &quot;radium&quot; mean in Confessions of a Born Spectator by Ogden Nash?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ogden-nash&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15177" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-15T16:28:32.627" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished the book &amp;quot;The Fellowship of the Ring&amp;quot;. Now I've started with &amp;quot;The Two Towers&amp;quot;. It begins by recapping the story of the first book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For who exactly is this &amp;quot;recap&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you haven't read the first book, it would be insanity to start reading the second in the trilogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; read the first book, why do you need to be told in extremely broad terms what you already just read in detail?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always hated it when TV series would show a &amp;quot;this has happened&amp;quot; series of clips before the show starts, but at least it's more understandable due to the &amp;quot;viewing habits&amp;quot; of the general public. However, reading a book series is quite different. Nobody in their right mind jumps into the middle of a trilogy and starts reading it without having read the first part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who is it for? What is the purpose? Why does it not simply state on the first page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the second part in a series. If you haven't already done so, please read the first book before continuing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;? Or even leave that out entirely and just get right to the story? Imagine how fundamentally confused one would be if they started reading &amp;quot;The Two Towers&amp;quot; with just the knowledge from the one page of &amp;quot;recap&amp;quot;. They'd be jumping right into an epic adventure that has already gone very far. They would be utterly confused about so many things. It wouldn't make a bit of sense in any possible manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps if you got stranded on a remote island for 40 years and only had The Two Towers, it would make sense to read it and try to &amp;quot;reconstruct&amp;quot; the story from the first book using the recap page, but other than that very specific and very unlikely situation, I just don't understand why this was ever a &amp;quot;thing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10661" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T16:28:32.627" Title="What is the point of &quot;the story so far&quot;/recaps in book series?" Tags="&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15176" CreationDate="2020-08-15T21:00:27.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://samacheerkalvi.guru/samacheer-kalvi-11th-english-solutions-poem-chapter-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this source&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why does the poet prefer to buy tickets worth their weight in radium?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bring out the significance of the metal referred to here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answer:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Radium is more expensive than diamonds. It is a rare metal discovered by Madam Curie. The poet was ready to buy tickets as expensive as radium just to stay as a spectator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it looks like @PeterShor nailed it in his comment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastEditorUserId="7659" LastEditDate="2020-08-15T22:42:50.030" LastActivityDate="2020-08-15T22:42:50.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-15T23:30:30.973" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book when I was younger that my grandma brought me and loved it. It was about a panda who ate liquorice and used a sudoku square to do magic. I really would like to find this book for my son&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10663" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T08:04:59.630" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T13:58:09.597" Title="Book about a panda who ate liquorice and used a sudoku square to do magic" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T10:28:24.107" Score="3" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the song &amp;quot;Whiskey in the Jar&amp;quot;, would Captain Farrell have been British or Irish? What was the historical setting and context of the song's tale?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10666" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T10:38:17.133" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T19:19:12.210" Title="In the song &quot;Whiskey in the Jar&quot;, would Captain Farrell have been British or Irish?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15180" CreationDate="2020-08-16T12:21:32.993" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bellsirishlyrics.com/whiskey-in-the-jar.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Whiskey in the Jar&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_in_the_Jar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.liveabout.com/whiskey-in-the-jar-3552959&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiveAbout&lt;/a&gt;) is a traditional Irish folk song about a man who robs an army officer and then is betrayed by his lover. Originally an oral tradition with many variations, it has been recorded by various bands and singers in the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of this song would have been during the time of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_rule_in_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British rule in Ireland&lt;/a&gt;, whether the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordship_of_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lordship or Ireland&lt;/a&gt; (pre-1542, dominated by feudal English lords with some regions still controlled by Gaelic chiefs), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kingdom of Ireland&lt;/a&gt; (1542-1800, ruled by the English or British monarch, &lt;em&gt;de jure&lt;/em&gt; as a separate state but largely dominated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantations_of_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English nobles&lt;/a&gt;) or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_of_Great_Britain_and_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland&lt;/a&gt; (post-1800, part of a unified state). According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pm04AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;q=Lomax+%22whisky+in+the+jar%22&amp;amp;dq=Lomax+%22whisky+in+the+jar%22&amp;amp;pgis=1&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alan Lomax's &lt;em&gt;The Folk Songs of North America, in the English Language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, this song likely inspired the 1728 work &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar%27s_Opera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Beggar's Opera&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which would place its origin in the 18th century or earlier. Given the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_(armed_forces)#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;captain&lt;/a&gt; and the apparent organisational structure of the armed forces, as well as the use of pistols, it must also come from the 16th century or later. That sets the origin of the song during the Kingdom of Ireland. During this time there was an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Royal_Army&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irish Royal Army&lt;/a&gt;, which mostly consisted, at least in its leadership, of Englishmen stationed in Ireland, although there were always &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_in_the_British_Armed_Forces&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;many Irishmen serving as soldiers&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song &amp;quot;Whiskey in the Jar&amp;quot; has a rebellious theme, with the Irish rogue robbing the rich officer. For this reason it &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey_in_the_Jar#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;became popular in colonial America&lt;/a&gt;, specifically for the theme of rebellion against the British. This is evidence for Captain Farrell being a &lt;em&gt;British&lt;/em&gt; officer. On the other hand, the name &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrell_(surname)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Farrell&lt;/a&gt; is an Irish one, originating from the clan of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93_Fearghail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ó Fearghail&lt;/a&gt;. This is evidence for Captain Farrell being originally Irish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, whether he came from English or Irish roots himself, by serving as an officer in the British Army &lt;strong&gt;Farrell &lt;em&gt;represents&lt;/em&gt; the oppression of Ireland by the English&lt;/strong&gt;, either as a colonist or as a collaborator. This strengthens the theme of rebellion in the song: it's not only a highwayman robbing a rich man, but an Irishman robbing a British Army officer. Even if Farrell was also Irish, he may have been &amp;quot;Brittified&amp;quot;, representing the rule of Britain and not the spirit of Ireland. The context of this song is set against a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Irish_uprisings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long history&lt;/a&gt; of Irish rebellions against the British. Even if he wasn't part of an uprising, &lt;strong&gt;the highwayman in &amp;quot;Whiskey in the Jar&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;represents&lt;/em&gt; the same spirit of Irish rebellion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course it's also possible to interpret the song at face value: a simple story of a man who robbed an army officer and was betrayed by his lover. Perhaps that's what it was when first composed, and how many singers and listeners thought of it. But it would certainly fit in with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_rebel_song&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;long tradition of&lt;/a&gt; Irish folk songs that are more explicitly about rebellion against the British, more recent ones including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCnGD6xv5ik&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Come out ye Black and Tans&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-I8bB3K07c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Kinky Boots&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (both gloriously cheeky). Although less openly rebellious and anti-British, &amp;quot;Whiskey in the Jar&amp;quot; can be, and has been, interpreted as part of the same tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T12:21:32.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15183" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15186" CreationDate="2020-08-16T12:42:13.513" Score="6" ViewCount="1485" Body="&lt;p&gt;While listening to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXLnSkGmTdQ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Irish Rovers version&lt;/a&gt; of the traditional Irish song &amp;quot;Star of the County Down&amp;quot;, I noticed an apparent discrepancy in her name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Near Banbridge town, in the County Down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One morning in last July&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down a boreen green came a sweet Colleen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And she smiled as she passed me by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As she onward sped, sure I scratched me head&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I looked with a feeling rare.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I said, says I, to a passerby&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Who's the maid with the nut brown hair?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, he looked at me, and he said to me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;That's the gem of Ireland's crown.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Young Rosie McCann from the banks of the Bann&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She's the star of the County Down.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If her name is Rosie McCann, then why does he keep calling her Colleen (including in the chorus of the song)? For that matter, why does he call her Colleen before even knowing who she is, as he needs to ask a passerby? Was Colleen in Ireland just a &amp;quot;placeholder&amp;quot; name, to be used for someone if you don't know their actual name, like Jimmy in Glasgow or Charlie in Ghana?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:47:42.513" Title="Why is the Star of the County Down referred to as Colleen?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15064" CreationDate="2020-08-16T13:25:32.187" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read Dicken's GREAT EXPECTATIONS recently and I was 'creeped out' by those death masks that were hanging so indecorously in Attorney Jaggers office.  I don't remember any of the characters offering any good reason to Pip for why they were there.  The death masks just added a touch of the macabre and an unnerving presence to the ambience of the room.  You would think that Jaggers would want to advertise his successes and not his failures, but he was enigmatic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10667" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T13:25:32.187" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15183" CreationDate="2020-08-16T14:36:17.357" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colleen is the Anglicised version of the Irish Gaelic &lt;em&gt;cailín&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;young woman&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;maid&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derivation: &lt;em&gt;caile&lt;/em&gt; (“maid”) +‎ -&lt;em&gt;ín&lt;/em&gt; (diminutive suffix)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although girls are sometimes &lt;em&gt;named&lt;/em&gt; Colleen, in the context of the lyric it shouldn't have a capital C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teanglann.ie/en/fgb/cail%C3%ADn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New English-Irish dictionary&lt;/a&gt; has other usages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T14:42:30.197" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T14:42:30.197" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T17:44:47.670" Score="3" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/1-norton.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Burnt Norton&lt;/a&gt; by T.S. Eliot. I have read its background (that manor house theme) and a few months ago read &lt;em&gt;Murder in the Cathedral&lt;/em&gt; (as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_Norton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia says&lt;/a&gt; says, &amp;quot;He created it while working on his play &lt;em&gt;Murder in the Cathedral&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;). Despite these things I find the poem to be not making the ordinary and perceptible sense. If we look at these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time present and time past.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are both perhaps present in time future,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And time future contained in time past.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If all time is eternally present.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All time is unredeemable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may mean that, &amp;quot;present&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;past&amp;quot; is contained in &amp;quot;future&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;future&amp;quot; is contained in &amp;quot;past&amp;quot; and if all the &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; is present &amp;quot;now&amp;quot; then everything is going to be wicked. But it feels like I have not understood it, it should feel like something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone tell me how this poem ought to be understood? (I know everyone gets their own meaning out of every work of literature but I should at least be able to get my own meaning.) For example, how did Ezra Pound see this poem?  (If no records or mentions are available then an answer will also be accepted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:46:49.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:46:49.333" Title="Why do all the lines of Burnt Norton seem unconnected?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15183" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:47:42.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colleen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; for Colleen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colleen is a common English language name of Irish-American origin and &lt;strong&gt;a generic term for Irish women or girls&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Irish cailín 'unmarried girl/woman', the diminutive of caile 'woman, countrywoman'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:47:42.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15190" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15191" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarca, also known as Petrarch (1304 – 1374) and his life as a writer. For works he wrote in Latin, add the tag [latin-literature]; for works he wrote in Italian, add the tag [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:50:54.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15192" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15193" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T18:54:16.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15194" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-16T20:15:56.123" Score="0" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Various sites on the Internet claim that the Quran is the most beautiful book written in the Arabic language, e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;https://alhadithandislamicstudies.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-meaning-of-word-quran.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blogspot&lt;/a&gt; and a chapter from the course &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coursehero.com/file/8294904/Islam-Notes/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keane World Religions on Course Hero&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The core of my question is: is it that Quran really has the most beautiful Arabic, or is that people defined beauty using the language in the Quran? Can this claim about the Quran be defended on the basis of its literary features?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10670" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T18:26:20.923" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T18:26:20.923" Title="Why is the Quran said to be the most beautiful Arabic literature?" Tags="&lt;religion&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;koran&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15195" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8064" CreationDate="2020-08-16T20:39:09.670" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Selina Hastings' &lt;em&gt;The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;, Maugham's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;first extant letter, written at the age of six and addressed to his parents, is in French: &lt;em&gt;cher papa, chere maman, votre petit willie est heureux au jour de noel de vous exprimer ses meilleurs souhaits, et sa reconnaissante affection, croyez-moi, cher papa, chere maman, votre fils respectueux, willie maugham&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after the death of both his parents, he was sent to England at the age of eight, so his education continued in English. My searches in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=hD_7DQAAQBAJ&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=secret+lives+of+William+Somerset+Maugham&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjP4JXQxqDrAhWIlqQKHejXAX8Q6AEwAHoECAMQAg#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=education&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham: A Biography&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Selina Hastings, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=k8qZW26bc6oC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=Somerset+Maugham:+A+Life&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwio__KdyaDrAhXL2qQKHdRvCkcQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Somerset%20Maugham%3A%20A%20Life&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Somerset Maugham: A Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jeffrey Meyers and &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=H0MqigagKTkC&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&amp;amp;dq=A+William+Somerset+Maugham+Encyclopedia&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiypZLLyKDrAhWNM-wKHbrpDAUQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=A%20William%20Somerset%20Maugham%20Encyclopedia&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Samuel J. Rogal did not find any works he might have written in French instead of English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meyers writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though Maugham could not write French as well as English and rarely used French expressions in his letters or works, he'd been fluent in the language since childhood. He thought it was easier than English, for the vocabulary was smaller, the structure relatively simple, the grammatical rules clear. If you followed them, you could write good French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it appears he wrote in English because he knew that language better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T20:39:09.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15196" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2008" CreationDate="2020-08-16T21:49:34.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;How much weight you should give to an author's declaration about intended meaning or interpretation depends on the theory of literature you espouse. In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/6809/2191&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;, I briefly discussed E. D. Hirsch's brand of intentionalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most literary theories simply ignore authorial intent. In &lt;em&gt;How to Read Literature&lt;/em&gt; (Yale University Press, 2014), Terry Eagleton discusses several reasons why authorial intent does not settle the question of a literary work's meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Authors may propose interpretations that don't make sense. For example, T. S. Eliot famously provided footnotes to his poem &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; but later also claimed that the poem was nothing more than a piece of rhythmical grousing. (Page 134)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Authors may forget what they meant. Eagleton cites the example of one of Robert Browning's more obscure poems, about which the author said, &amp;quot;When I wrote this poem, God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now, God knows.&amp;quot; (Page 135)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Most importantly, &amp;quot;works of literature do not mean just one thing&amp;quot; (page 135).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; use authorial intent to guide one towards an interpretation, but most of the time, such statements are not available. Literary theory typically ignores it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:49:34.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British playwright, novelist and short story writer William Somerset Maugham (1874 – 1965) and his life as a writer. He is best known for the novels 'Of Human Bondage' (1915), 'The Moon and Sixpence' (1919) and 'The Razor's Edge' (1944). If asking about one of his plays or novels, use this tag with the appropriate title tag. If asking about one of his short stories, use this tag together with [short-stories]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T21:54:44.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15176" CreationDate="2020-08-16T22:42:25.170" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have quoted from a slightly garbled version of Ogden Nash's poem which can be found in many places on the internet. You might have guessed there was something wrong with the quotation from the failure of scansion. (Nash wrote many prose-like verses with no pretense of scansion, but this was not one of them.) Here is the last stanza as it appears in Nash's 1941 collection &lt;em&gt;The Face Is Familiar&lt;/em&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Athletes, I'll drink to you or eat with you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or anything except compete with you;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Buy tickets worth their &lt;strong&gt;weight in&lt;/strong&gt; radium&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To watch you gambol in a stadium,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And reassure myself anew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That you're not me and I'm not you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons for putting &amp;quot;radium&amp;quot; here have been explained in another answer:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(1) &amp;quot;worth one's weight in gold&amp;quot; is a popular idiom;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) radium is rarer and costlier than gold;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(3) and mainly, &amp;quot;radium&amp;quot; rhymes with &amp;quot;stadium&amp;quot; whereas &amp;quot;gold&amp;quot; does not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2020-08-16T22:42:25.170" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15167" CreationDate="2020-08-16T23:24:47.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I seem to recall &amp;quot;Milo,&amp;quot; the boy who eventually restores the sisters, Rhyme &amp;amp; Reason, to the Kingdom of Knowledge, as being said to be 10 years of age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 9, a boy in the sky discusses the following perspective with Milo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What a silly system.&amp;quot; The boy laughed. &amp;quot;Then your head keeps changing its height and you always see things in a different way? Why, when you're fifteen things won't look at all the way they did when you were ten, and at twenty everything will change again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I suppose so,&amp;quot; replied Milo, for he had never really thought about the matter.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it's not definitive, this passage suggests that Milo is now seeing the world from the height of a 10-year-old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10667" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T07:12:46.403" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T07:12:46.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15210" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:04:25.553" Score="2" ViewCount="373" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question had come to my mind after reading Twain's &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt;; I knew he more often had put Indians as his story villains, but I wasn't paying attention to it till I read that novel myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AwrC1CoOmjpfMVAACzNPmolQ;_ylu=X3oDMTByOHZyb21tBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--?qid=20160707144420AAFMW25&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; asked by me on &lt;em&gt;Yahoo!&lt;/em&gt; Answers 3 years ago; but the answers didn't properly convince me. Thus I'm asking it here today to get answers from some literature experts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Mark Twain a racist? I praise Twain's works, but this question about him, i.e. opinions he expressed outside of his fiction works, and not about the characters he created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10613" LastEditorUserId="10613" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T16:57:07.923" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T16:57:07.923" Title="Was Mark Twain a racist?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15202" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15209" CreationDate="2020-08-17T15:35:24.900" Score="2" ViewCount="3485" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/dhW1mh7U6-U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Tír na nÓg&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, like many of the Celtic Woman songs, is partly in English and partly in Irish Gaelic. Unlike many of those Celtic Woman songs, this one doesn't seem to be based on a traditional Irish ballad, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%ADr_na_n%C3%93g_(disambiguation)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as far as I can tell&lt;/a&gt; - it may have been written specifically for Celtic Woman. This makes it difficult to find out the meaning of the lines in Gaelic, the chorus of this song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Celtic-woman-tir-na-nog-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genius.com&lt;/a&gt; has the following lyrics, which are certainly what the words &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; like but (knowing what Gaelic is like) almost certainly nowhere near the correct spelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sha ta co ti oh scum ne rivna&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sha ta co ti oh nugga Tír na nÓg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sha ta co ti oh scum ne rivna&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nug a Tír na nÓg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.karaoke-lyrics.net/lyrics/celtic-woman/tir-na-nog-ft-oonagh-775665&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;KaraokeLyrics.net&lt;/a&gt; has the following lyrics, which look much more believable as the correct spelling for the Gaelic words that sound like the above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saeta-Ceatia sciamh-ne riabhanach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Saeta-Ceatia nuige Tír na nÓg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Saeta-Ceatia sciamh-ne riabhanach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nuige, Tír na nÓg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://lyricstranslate.com/en/t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-land-young.html-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LyricsTranslate.com&lt;/a&gt; has the following translated lyrics, but I'm unsure of the source for this translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, Who is it?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yes, who took tea from the land of the young?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yes, Who is it?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nave from Land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting the words from KaraokeLyrics.net (the most believable Gaelic spelling) into &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=Saeta-Ceatia%20sciamh-ne%20riabhanach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt;, it recognises them as Irish but doesn't provide any English translation. Trying &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=riabhanach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a single word&lt;/a&gt; gives the translation &amp;quot;zebra&amp;quot;, which doesn't seem believable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%ADr_na_n%C3%93g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tír na nÓg&lt;/a&gt; itself is of course the Irish name for the Celtic Otherworld, but that only gives us a few words of the chorus and potentially hints at the overall meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How are the words of this Gaelic chorus really spelled, and what is their meaning?&lt;/strong&gt; Looking for believable sources, such as the people who wrote/produced this song (assuming it isn't a traditional one) or a native/fluent speaker of Irish Gaelic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T13:54:57.007" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:54:57.007" Title="What is the meaning of the Gaelic lines in the song &quot;Tír na nÓg&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;gaelic-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15203" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-17T17:18:59.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-17T17:18:59.227" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T17:18:59.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15204" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-17T17:18:59.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature originally written in the Gaelic language." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T19:41:03.023" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T19:41:03.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-17T17:58:41.017" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Macbeth&amp;amp;oldid=972914626#As_a_tragedy_of_character&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; contains a section on reading the play as a tragedy of character. This section contains the following unsourced statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johnson asserted that Macbeth, though esteemed for his military bravery, is wholly reviled.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find a source for this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/johnsononshakesp00johnuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Johnson on Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Walter Raleigh, 1908&lt;/a&gt; (on Archive.org) and on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&amp;amp;q=samuel+johnson+macbeth+reviled&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; but without success. Where did Johnson make this statement? (Did he actually use the word &amp;quot;reviled&amp;quot;?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:53:00.173" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:53:00.173" Title="Where did Samuel Johnson say Macbeth is wholly reviled?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;samuel-johnson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15205" CreationDate="2020-08-17T19:05:20.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Samuel Johnson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139056472.006&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;General Observations on the plays of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (I couldn't find a full text of this publication online, but it's quoted in several places including the paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/511908?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Sherbo, &amp;quot;Dr. Johnson on Macbeth: 1745 and 1765&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;The Review of English Studies&lt;/em&gt; 2(5) (1951), pp. 40-47&lt;/a&gt;, which claims this quote to be at pp. 161-162):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passions are directed to their true end. Lady Macbeth is merely detested; and though the courage of Macbeth preserves some esteem, yet every reader rejoices at his fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may be the sentence which has been re-told for the Wikipedia page. The word &amp;quot;revile&amp;quot; is not there, but the word &amp;quot;esteem&amp;quot; is, specifically in reference to Macbeth's &amp;quot;courage&amp;quot; (presumably meaning on the field of battle), and &lt;em&gt;wholly reviled&lt;/em&gt; is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw if &amp;quot;every reader rejoices&amp;quot; at the defeat and death of Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T19:05:20.637" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15207" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-17T20:18:18.823" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a story many years ago (possibly around 2010-2011) about a man who is a part of a criminal organization; it was some type of brotherhood where loyalty was incredibly important. I think they had tattoos to identify each other. The man joined the brotherhood in one city, then moved to another city and continues taking part in the organization there with the local chapter. Despite being part of this bad organization, I still found myself rooting for/sympathizing with him. At one point, the organization burns down a house to target a family, but somehow the family was warned and left before the attack. You later find out that the man is an undercover officer who was sent to join the organization to help bring them down or uncover criminal activity. He had been gathering information and thwarting their plans, including warning the family who's house got burned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can remember, Sherlock Holmes was never directly in the story (he may have been mentioned once or twice) but I think it was narrated by Watson. I think the man the story focuses on was friends or acquaintances with Watson and may have told Watson about what happened through letters. I used to be very sure that it was narrated by Watson and connected to Holmes somehow, but I cannot find the story included in any Sherlock Holmes collections. I have also not had any luck looking at other things written by Arthur Conan Doyle. Still, I was wondering if it could be one of the 'non-canon' stories written by someone other than Arthur Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some other details that I am less sure about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May take place in England&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the end, the man and maybe someone else were on a boat going home (they could have been sailing back to England?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was some implication that the man was probably going to be killed by the organization by the time that his letter reached Watson (or the narrator) for betraying them; a sort of &amp;quot;by the time you read this I will already be dead&amp;quot;, maybe?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10677" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T20:18:18.823" Title="Story where undercover officer infiltrates a dangerous criminal organization; possibly connected to Sherlock Holmes and Watson" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15202" CreationDate="2020-08-17T23:40:10.473" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://lyricstranslate.com/en/t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-celtic-woman-macaronic-chorus-translated-irish-gaelic.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page at lyricstranslate.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the lyrics are spelled as in your second rendering, and translated into English they are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seata-Ceatía, our beautiful, handsome, young man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seata-Ceatía, come with me/us until Tír na nÓg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seata-Ceatía, our beautiful, handsome, young man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come with me/us as far as Tír na nÓg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, losing the &amp;quot;until&amp;quot; and translating the words left untranslated:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seata-Ceatía, our beautiful handsome young man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seata-Ceatía, come with me/us to the Land of the Young&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seata-Ceatía, our beautiful handsome young man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come with me/us as far as the Land of the Young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Seata-Ceatía&amp;quot; is described as &amp;quot;a faerie name used in enchantment&amp;quot;. I'm not sure what any specific denotations are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10679" LastActivityDate="2020-08-17T23:40:10.473" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15202" CreationDate="2020-08-18T00:14:12.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lyrics are not in Irish Gaelic. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/manstuff/videos/1683796561654783/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an interview&lt;/a&gt; held by the Irish web magazine Joe.ie, the lyrics of the chorus were invented by Oonagh, the guest artist for that song. When the hosts of the show ask what the chorus means, Mairead Carlin very bluntly says &amp;quot;Nothing!&amp;quot; Éabha McMahon says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oonagh made it up. We have people all the time saying, Éabha, you speak&#xA;Irish, what does &amp;quot;shatta cutio scum de areevna&amp;quot; mean? I'm like, I&#xA;don't know! Ask Oonagh!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The relevant part of the interview starts at around the 13:30 mark of the video.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the song has an &amp;quot;elvish&amp;quot; theme and Oonagh has recorded songs in the past with lyrics in Tolkien's Elvish languages, it's possible that the chorus is in Sindarin, or Quenya, or some variant. I'm inclined to think that if the lyrics had a meaning, Oonagh would have shared that meaning with the Celtic Woman leads. She evidently didn't, which suggests there may not have been anything to share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3026" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T00:14:12.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15201" CreationDate="2020-08-18T01:31:30.677" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a concise and direct answer to your question, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twainquotes.com/Prejudice.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is a quote&lt;/a&gt; from Twain's essay &amp;quot;Concerning the Jews&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or&#xA;caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand&#xA;any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human&#xA;being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To go into it a bit deeper (it may not seem at first that it does, but I think it does), the following is an excerpt from chapter 56 of my book “&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/107331071X&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rebel with a Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs&lt;/a&gt;”; this portion could be entitled “IN DEFENSE OF MARK TWAIN’S USE OF ‘THE ‘N’ WORD’ IN ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ Note: I also recorded the below, and you can hear it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTGMoMtebB8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an 1885 letter to his publisher, Charles Webster, Twain wrote the following about the negative reaction to Huck Finn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Charley,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass. have given us a rattling tiptop puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twain later expounded on the personal benefits to him of this banning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will deter other libraries from buying the book and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And secondly it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book, after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Explaining the reason behind their action, one member of the Concord library committee wrote of “Huck Finn”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality, … and all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions …The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people, and it is trash of the veriest sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The New York World’s headline was, “‘Humor’ of a Very Low Order—Wit and Literary Ability Wasted on a Pitiable Exhibition of Irreverence and Vulgarity”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the verdict of the Concord library committee and some newspaper reviewers may have been good for Twain and his company book-sales-wise, the author doubtless also enjoyed receiving positive reviews . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The San Francisco Chronicle’s review of “Huck Finn” in March of 1885 was positive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mark Twain may be called the Edison of our literature. There is no limit to his inventive genius, and the best proof of its range and originality is found in this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;H. L. Mencken called it “a truly stupendous piece of work, perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English” and opined that Twain was “the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist. He was, by great odds, the most noble figure America has ever given to English literature.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much later, Ernest Hemingway also famously said of “Huck Finn” (in 1935, on the book’s gold anniversary): “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As previously noted, at the time of publication, though, Huck was not popular with everyone by any means. One magazine described it as being full of “blood-curdling humor” and “coarse and dreary fun” and judged its “gutter realism” as being unsuitable for young people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, even went so far as to scold the author: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination says: “Huckleberry Finn was once barred from certain libraries and schools for its alleged subversions of morality. The authorities had in mind the book’s endemic lingo, the petty thefts, the denigrations of respectability and religion, the bad language and the bad grammar.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;. . .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As far as today’s view of “Huck Finn” goes, it is most often criticized for its use of the “N-Word.” But those who criticize it for this reason fail to take into account the context (of the text and the times) and perhaps have not even read the book. And if they have indeed read it, the question should be raised as to whether they understood it; understood its point and theme, that is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critics should note what prominent African-Americans of the time thought of Twain. Frederick Douglass, who penned an account of his early life entitled &lt;em&gt;Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave&lt;/em&gt;, and who had been assisted in escaping from slavery by Twain’s future in-laws in 1838, was a friend. So was Booker T. Washington, one of the founders of Tuskegee Institute and author of &lt;em&gt;Up From Slavery&lt;/em&gt;, who wrote of Huckleberry Finn’s friend Jim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author, without making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for ‘Jim,’ in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is exceedingly unlikely that Twain’s success along these lines was unconscious. In fact, Twain once said to an interviewer: “Everything I have ever written has had a serious philosophy or truth as its basis. I would not write a humorous work merely to be funny.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More recently, in Mark Twain’s America, Bernard DeVoto wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam Clemens grew up among Negroes: the fact is important for Mark Twain. . . . In his books the Negroe is consistently a noble character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of even more recent vintage is the following quote from the late Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, who deemed the banning of Huck Finn “elitist censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the preface to his book Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece, Andrew Levy posited the provocative question: “Is the book racist, or a textbook illustration of the antiracist uses of racism?” The fact that Twain refused to allow the “N-Word” to be used in his presence in most situations should provide a good clue as to how we should reply to Levy’s rhetorical question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long-time portrayer of Twain Hal Holbrook had this to say about “Huck Finn” and its message:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes painful to read, but that’s because Twain is pushing our nose into painful realities. The material and the audiences rise above the political correctness issue. Look, frightened and faint-hearted people don’t know how to think. They’re absolutely paralyzed by political correctness. They’re so frightened of a word, they miss the larger issue. They miss the wonderful message that preaches against prejudice and hatred. We get so distracted by these truly small-minded deviations like political correctness that we don’t deal with the big problems that are becoming almost insurmountable in our society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, wrote in 1953:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huckleberry Finn knew, as did Mark Twain, that Jim was not only a slave but a human being …in freeing Jim, Huck makes a bid to free himself of the conventionalized evil taken for civilization by the town …Twain …was as highly moral an artist as he was a believer in democracy, and vice versa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern detractors may be interested to know that early denigrators of “Huck Finn” did not take issue with the “racist” language (the “N-Word”). They rather took umbrage at the fact that Twain presented the “runaway slave” Jim as a real person with thoughts and feelings rather than as a caricature from a minstrel show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something else to consider: As for reparations, Twain held that such should be made to the negroes, both through personal actions and by civil reforms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Giving further evidence of where Twain’s heart was in the matter of race relations and equality is the fact that he had a picture of school-teacher Prudence Crandall on the wall of his billiards room at his Hartford home. Crandall was the first educator to integrate an American classroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="15" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T12:59:33.050" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T12:59:33.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15211" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T05:06:29.070" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;Billy Nolan is a resentful, vindictive and abusive teenager who supplies Chris Hargensen with Pig blood for a prank that occurs within Stephen King's story &lt;em&gt;Carrie&lt;/em&gt;. In it, King writes several passages relating to Billy's possessions, actions and circumstances. Below are some of these passages (in chronological order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://novels80.com/carrie/chapter-nine-66109.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Part 1&lt;/a&gt;. A description of Billy's car:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;61 Biscayne, which was fender-dented, rusted out, jacked in the back, and equipped with dual glasspack mufflers. One headlight was out; the other flickered in the midnight dark when the car struck a particularly rough bump.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://novels80.com/carrie/chapter-eleven-66111.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Part 2&lt;/a&gt;. A description of Billy's Car, recklessness and broken home&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Billy's car was old, dark, somehow sinister, the windshield was milky around the edges, as if a cataract was beginning to form. The seats were loose and unanchored. […] And of course he drove fast. / On the third ride home one of the bald front tyres blew at sixty miles an hour, the car went into a screaming slide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He came from what the social workers called a broken home; his father had taken off after the failure of a badly managed gas-station venture when Billy was twelve, and his mother had four boyfriends at last count.  […] But the car: the car fed him power and glory from its own mystic lines of force. It made him someone to be reckoned with, someone with mana. It was not by accident that he had done most of his balling in the back seat. The car was his slave and his god. It gave, and it could take away. Billy had used it to take away many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://novels80.com/carrie/chapter-eighteen-66118.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Also from Part 2&lt;/a&gt;. A description of spotted surfaces and Billy's comb:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;began to comb his hair, bending down to see his reflection in the spotted, ancient mirror. […] The loops and swirls were almost right. They glistened in the light of the dun, flyspecked globe like eddies on deep water. His face was calm, reposeful. The comb he used was a battered old Ace, clotted with grease. His father had given it to him on his eleventh birthday, and not one tooth was broken in it. Not one&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the symbolism invoked by the physical condition of Billy's car and how does it relate to Billy's mentality?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of several surfaces (Front-Car Window, and Mirrors) being described as &amp;quot;milky&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;spotted&amp;quot;? How does this relate to Billy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does King attempt to relate Billy's obsession with mana, &amp;quot;a cultivation or possession of energy and power&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as per wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt; with paternal (and possibley maternal) negligence that he had previously experienced?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of the comb retaining all of its teeth, despite becoming battered over the years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own interpretations of these questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The car is a representation of Billy's psyche: The dilapidated exterior, &amp;quot;fender-dented [...] jacked in the back&amp;quot; et cetera and unstable interior, &amp;quot;the seats were loose and unanchored&amp;quot; represent Billy's unstable/chaotic personality, which he is able to hide by maintaining a composed air, upheld by his calm face and sleeked hair. This chaotic, and possibly self-destructive feature is also demonstrated by his fast and reckless driving &amp;quot;bald front tyres blew at sixty miles an hour&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I hazard a guess that the obscured car window and mirrors indicate Billy's own decreasing perception of reality, but don't really see any other supporting evidence of this interpretation within the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Billy, due to his experience in a &amp;quot;broken home&amp;quot;, may have gained a sense of resentment or bitterness against the world for his poor circumstances in life. Billy describes the car as able to give and &amp;quot;take away&amp;quot;, thus he may act on his vindictive feelings to commit immoral actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T19:20:40.987" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T19:20:40.987" Title="Symbolism of Billy Nolan in Carrie" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;carrie&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15212" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15259" CreationDate="2020-08-18T05:31:25.863" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first section of first part of Burnt Norton seems to be focused on &amp;quot;time&amp;quot;, although it is too abstract and as I say &amp;quot;beyond my perceptible sense&amp;quot; but in the least we understand the topic and the narrator. However, the last few lines of the first section&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down the passage which we did not take&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Towards the door we never opened&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the rose-garden. My words echo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thus, in your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to understand how, when and for what purpose we moved from &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;rose-garden&amp;quot;? The second section seems to be somewhat related to this &amp;quot;rose garden&amp;quot;, but the very first lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other echoes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pose some problems as to what &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; refer to? And is there any significance of the bird here? And finally who/what are &amp;quot;them&amp;quot;? Can you please summarize the second section of the first part of Burnt Norton?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, I have asked so many questions (little ones) but an answerer might not be tempted to refrain from writing just because of &lt;em&gt;little questions&lt;/em&gt;, he/she can answer the main question (that is about the summary of the second section) and the answer might be accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T15:28:27.590" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T15:28:27.590" Title="Understanding the second section of first part of Burnt Norton by T.S. Eliot" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8407" CreationDate="2020-08-18T11:09:28.500" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Phil Bowen, author of &lt;em&gt;A Gallery to Play to: The Story of the Mersey Poets&lt;/em&gt; (Liverpool University Press, 2008), the text was first published in Patten's 1988 collection &lt;em&gt;Storm Damage&lt;/em&gt;. Bowen writes (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=0J1xx9kb_TUC&amp;amp;pg=PA146&amp;amp;dq=%22a+fallible+lecture%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwio8Or0yqTrAhVGyqQKHVVOApYQ6AEwAHoECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22a%20fallible%20lecture%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At nearly 90 pages &lt;em&gt;Storm Damage&lt;/em&gt; is by far Patten's longest collection, but it lacks cohesion and cries out for an editor. There is much to admire in the book. (...) 'The Almost Loveless Alphabet' and 'Hair Today, No Her Tomorrow' are effectively quicksilver performance pieces, the latter arguably his most successful comic poem for adults, while the somewhat uneven 'A Fallible Lecture' was to become a regular opener for Patten's developing live set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Storm Damage&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/storm-damage/oclc/246939993&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published by Unwin Hyman (London) in 1988&lt;/a&gt; and republished by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/storm-damage/oclc/1023188979&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HarperCollins in 1995&lt;/a&gt; but appears to have gone out of print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T11:09:28.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15217" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T11:48:27.303" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a short story on the internet a decade or so ago. It was told in first person, from the perspective of a middle class (male?) in the USA, who had some kind of medical problem that was treated with legal opiate patches. One day he finds that he can get a much better effect if he consumes a patch in a shorter timeframe, but this results in him running out of patches before his next dose could be legally obtained. Thus he turns to illegal ways, which lead to him traveling to Mexico in his car to buy more for less money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the way back he is caught by the border agents of Mexico and detained in prison under horribly inhumane circumstances, like the only source of &amp;quot;drinkable&amp;quot; water being the bucket used to mop the floor. His suffering is quite detailed as he goes through the &amp;quot;cold turkey&amp;quot; withdrawal process after years of addiction to a hard drug.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a while he is told that his withdrawal symptoms have confirmed that he is addicted to the stuff himself and not a dealer, so he is let go now that he is clean. But he finds that the guards have maxed out his credit cards, only leaving him a small amount (50$?) of cash. He buys a lot of soda for 4$ to cure his dehydration and heads back towards the border with total clarity and a renewed sense of purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Then on the way back to the border he encounters a dealer selling the same kind of patches, on which he spends his remaining 46$. AFAIK the story ends with these exact words: &amp;quot;How many for 46$?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried searching with Google for the main keywords, like &amp;quot;mexico&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;prison&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;drugs&amp;quot;, resulting only in lots of unrelated hits (and probably landing me on some kind of government agency watchlist...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10683" OwnerDisplayName="zovits" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T12:28:22.873" Title="Short story about a drug addict in a prison in Mexico" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15218" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15179" CreationDate="2020-08-18T13:08:47.617" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issi_Noho&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Issi Noho.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Issi Noho is a panda with magic powers. His magic results from completing the vacant square in a series of magic number squares that he inherited from his Chinese ancestors. In a magic square the numbers must come to the same total in whichever direction they are added up, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. Issi's poor arithmetic causes frequent mathematical errors, with unexpected and humorous consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T13:08:47.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12265" CreationDate="2020-08-18T14:03:07.993" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It sounds like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Investigators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Three Investigators&lt;/a&gt; series. And you may be conflating two or more books.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_series_of_The_Three_Investigators&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The books had various geographical settings. THe detectives did a lot of traveling. There was definitely at least one with a Western setting. It's a long time since I read them. Memory is hazy. I think the Western setting is probably &lt;em&gt;The Mystery of Death Trap Mine&lt;/em&gt;.  There was a different book where they discovered a cave that could only be reached by swimming through an underwater tunnel. I think that was probably &lt;em&gt;The Secret of Skeleton Island&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T14:03:07.993" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T18:13:01.637" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French Wikipedia article on Gustave Flaubert contains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gustave_Flaubert&amp;amp;oldid=173555011#Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section on &lt;em&gt;Bouvard et Pécuchet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the author's unfinished novel. This section contains the following unsourced statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Critiquant les idées reçues, Flaubert montre que, contrairement à ce que pense Hegel, l'Histoire n'a pas de fin, elle est un éternel recommencement&lt;sup&gt;[réf. souhaitée]&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Criticising received ideas, Flaubert shows that, contrary to what Hegel thought, History has no goal but eternally repeats itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement is not to be found in the French Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet&amp;amp;oldid=172941290&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bouvard et Pécuchet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; nor in the corresponding articles &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet&amp;amp;oldid=915548694&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bouvard et Pécuchet&lt;/em&gt; in the English Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bouvard_und_P%C3%A9cuchet&amp;amp;oldid=195870170&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bouvard und Pécuchet&lt;/em&gt; in the German Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (let alone in the articles about the author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for instances of &amp;quot;histoire&amp;quot; in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online version of &lt;em&gt;Bouvard et Pécuchet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; did not help either. Hence my question: did Flaubert really show that history repeats itself? If yes, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:51:48.120" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:51:48.120" Title="How did Flaubert show in Bouvard et Pécuchet that history repeats itself?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;gustave-flaubert&gt;&lt;bouvard-et-pecuchet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15221" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15222" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880) and his life as a writer. Flaubert is best known for his novel 'Madame Bovary' (1857). Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T18:17:21.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15223" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15224" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" Score="0" Body="Questions about Gustave Flaubert's unfinished novel 'Bouvard et Pécuchet', published posthumously in 1881. Use this tag with the tags [gustave-flaubert] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T18:25:35.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15225" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T19:14:51.563" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to identify the passage from the Arabic original text of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah whose translation is the following one. It corresponds to Chapter 38 of Book 6, and the quoted translation is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.muslimphilosophy.com/ik/Muqaddimah/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;, with emphasis added.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;38&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The instruction of children and the different methods employed in the Muslim cities.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be known that instructing children in the Qur'an is a symbol of Islam. Muslims have, and practice, such instruction in all their cities, because it imbues hearts with a firm belief (in Islam) and its articles of faith, which are (derived) from the verses of the Qur'an and certain Prophetic traditions. The Qur'an has become the basis of instruction, the foundation for all habits that may be acquired later on. &lt;strong&gt;The reason for this is that the things one is taught in one's youth take root more deeply (than anything else). They are the basis of all later (knowledge). The first impression the heart receives is, in a way, the foundation of (all scholarly) habits. The character of the foundation determines the condition of the building.&lt;/strong&gt; The methods of instructing children in the Qur'an differ according to differences of opinion as to the habits that are to result from that instruction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I am only a beginner in Arabic and I cannot find it. Could any Arabic speaker show me where the equivalent original Arabic text is, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/muqaddimatalalla008800/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this edition of the text&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10687" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T15:28:34.253" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T15:28:34.253" Title="I would like to identify a specific part of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;arabic-literature&gt;&lt;ibn-khaldun&gt;&lt;muqaddimah&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15226" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-18T21:42:46.410" Score="2" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was in an anthology of short stories published prior to 1999 and written by a woman, maybe with the first name Anne, but I'm not certain.&#xA;I recall her going into detail about beetles copulating in the woods but that's as much as I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just loved the pacing and tone of the story and Google for it every few years but haven't for the life of me been able to find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10689" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-18T21:46:16.947" LastActivityDate="2020-08-18T21:46:16.947" Title="Short Story About a Mystical Bog and Illicit Affair Involving a Professor" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15238" CreationDate="2020-08-18T23:13:01.093" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I buy a &amp;quot;Barnes &amp;amp; Noble Classics Series&amp;quot; edition of a book that is in public domain, can I be confident that it is &amp;quot;correct,&amp;quot; in the sense of being unabridged, un-bowdlerize, and identical to the original?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers to the likely follow-up questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Barnes &amp;amp; Noble?&#xA;I have a gift card.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What book? The Brothers Karamazov by Fydor Dostoyevsky; translated by Constance Garnett&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody knows Garnett is inferior to Pevear/Volokhonsky (or whomever you prefer); why would you want her translation?&#xA;Two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read the P&amp;amp;V translations of Demons and did not like it nearly as much as I had liked Crime and Punishment (Sidney Monas translation) or The Idiot (not sure whose translation, but almost certainly pre-dated P&amp;amp;V). It could be that it's just a lesser book, of course.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of my main reasons for wanting to read it is that several authors and other thinkers that I really enjoy/admire considered it a big influence on them - and it happens that most of the folks in mind would likely (or definitely) have read the Garnett translation. If it was good enough for William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day, etc, it should be good enough for me. I may read another translation some time, but I want to read what they read.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's your concern exactly?&#xA;Before I had the epiphany that I wanted to read the translation that helped shape the evolution of the 20th century novel, I did a lot of searching around looking for opinions on the &amp;quot;best&amp;quot; translation. The main thing that concerned me about Garnett was that, because her translation is in the public domain now, you have to worry about getting versions that are abridged, badly formatted, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only Garnett translation available from B&amp;amp;N is from their &amp;quot;Barnes &amp;amp; Noble Classics Series.&amp;quot; It seems like I should be able to trust B&amp;amp;N to publish a quality text (the quality of the binding and such is less important to me), but I just want some outside opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10445" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T18:36:34.840" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T18:36:34.840" Title="Are Barnes &amp; Noble editions of public domain works of reliable quality?" Tags="&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15232" CreationDate="2020-08-19T11:14:40.083" Score="5" ViewCount="1763" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story &lt;em&gt;The Portrait of a Lady&lt;/em&gt;, written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khushwant_Singh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khushwant Singh&lt;/a&gt;, there are sentences which I couldn't understand properly (highlighted bold in the following excerpt):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day I announced that we were being given music lessons. She was&#xA;very disturbed. &lt;strong&gt;To her music had lewd associations. It was the&#xA;monopoly of harlots and beggars and not meant for gentlefolk.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I first read these sentences, I didn't understand the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;lewd&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;harlot&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When I searched the meaning of lewd, I mostly found meanings which were related to sexual stuff, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lewd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;like this&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;lewd&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;adjective&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; • disapproving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;(of behaviour, speech, dress, etc.) sexual in an obvious and rude way:&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ignore him - he's being lewd.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;a lewd suggestion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does music have anything to do with sex or sexual stuff?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I searched the meaning of harlot. The meaning of harlot is a woman prostitute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the grandmother consider music as a monopoly of prostitutes and beggars?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the grandmother mean by gentlefolk?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who is interested to read the story can read it &lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?kehb1=1-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10691" LastEditorUserId="10691" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T14:05:21.533" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T16:25:40.357" Title="Why does Khushwant Singh's grandmother consider music as a 'monopoly of harlots and beggars and not meant for gentlefolk'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;khushwant-singh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15229" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15244" CreationDate="2020-08-19T11:19:24.623" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/90/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The New Jersey Sphinx&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke went to a porter to know the vacant chambers to let, and asked him whether it's quiet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Quiet?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, pretty quiet. There's a metallurgist overhead—Highley—used to be Burt &amp;amp; Highley, but Burt has gone to the City, and I don't think Highley does much business now.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Let me see,&amp;quot; said Thorndyke, &amp;quot;I think I used to meet Highley sometimes—a tall, &lt;strong&gt;dark man&lt;/strong&gt;, isn't he?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No, that would be Burt. Highley is a little, &lt;strong&gt;fairish man&lt;/strong&gt;, rather bald, with a pretty &lt;strong&gt;rich complexion&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;—here Mr. Larkin tapped his nose knowingly and raised his little finger—&amp;quot;which &lt;strong&gt;may account for the falling off of business&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;fairish&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;blonde or light skinned&amp;quot;, but what's the meaning of &amp;quot;rich complexion&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;rich appearance&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? or &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;vivid skin color&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;why should that account for &amp;quot;falling of business&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T07:58:34.980" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T07:58:34.980" Title="What do &quot;fairish man&quot; &amp; &quot;rich complexion&quot; mean in &quot;The New Jersey Sphinx&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15230" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-19T11:45:59.557" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T11:45:59.557" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T11:45:59.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15231" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-19T11:45:59.557" Score="0" Body="Questions about Khushwant Singh (1915 – 2014), an Indian author, or any of his works." OwnerUserId="10691" LastEditorUserId="10691" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T14:38:24.827" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T14:38:24.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15228" CreationDate="2020-08-19T11:51:10.913" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The keyword here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devadasi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;devadasi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Devadasis were female artistes who served the presiding deity of a temple. Until the British rule, temples were an important economic and social centre of every village and town in India, and devadasis were held in high prestige. They did not marry since they were considered to be wedded to the Lord in the form that He held in the temple. Apart from taking care of the temple duties, they would also perform music and dance for their &amp;quot;husband&amp;quot;, the deity in the temple. As such, they held an important place in preserving and carrying the traditions of Indian classical music and dance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the British rule, devadasis were systematically shunned by equating them with prostitutes. The public perception of devadasis was successfully changed by the colonizers, and the average person came to believe that the word &lt;em&gt;devadasi&lt;/em&gt; is a synonym for a person of low morals, one who sings and dances for the pleasure of other people and for the sake of money. Today, temples are no longer considered to be economic or social centres, and the devadasi institution has vanished. The last devadasi, associated to the Puri Jagannath temple in Odisha, passed away a few years ago in 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Khushwant Singh's grandmother considered music and dance as something that was practiced only by devadasis, and so she associated these with &amp;quot;harlots&amp;quot;, and also &amp;quot;beggars&amp;quot; because it is a common sight (even today) to see people in India begging on the streets — and in second class train compartments, in particular — by singing devotional or other popular songs. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gentlefolk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gentlefolk&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; refers to those people who have had a good or moral upbringing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure, the purpose behind the music influences these associations in the grandmother's mind. Traditional songs would be sung in temples, this much is true, but such devotional music would be sung or chanted for the Lord, and maybe in a group. So, the grandmother is not opposed to all music; for instance, she hums some prayers as a part of her morning routine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She used to wake me up in the morning and get me&#xA;ready for school. She said her morning prayer in a monotonous&#xA;sing-song while she bathed and dressed me in the hope that I&#xA;would listen and get to know it by heart; I listened because I&#xA;loved her voice but never bothered to learn it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the author's school was attached to the temple, some of the lessons involved learning the morning prayers, which were also chanted or sung:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My grandmother always went to school with me because&#xA;the school was attached to the temple. The priest taught us&#xA;the alphabet and the morning prayer. While the children sat in&#xA;rows on either side of the verandah singing the alphabet or the&#xA;prayer in a chorus, my grandmother sat inside reading the&#xA;scriptures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, singing privately for an audience — that would be a strict no-no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incident with the music lessons occurs after the &amp;quot;turning point&amp;quot; in the author's relationship with his grandmother, which happened when they shifted to the city and the author was enrolled in an English school. The lessons and traditions taught in the English school were generally foreign to the grandmother and they made her uncomfortable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would tell her English words and little things of&#xA;western science and learning, the law of gravity, Archimedes’&#xA;Principle, the world being round, etc. This made her unhappy.&#xA;She could not help me with my lessons. She did not believe in&#xA;the things they taught at the English school and was distressed&#xA;that there was no teaching about God and the scriptures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately following this is the description of the music lessons quoted in the question. So, the grandmother's problem with the music lessons should be seen in the context of her discomfort with the unfamiliar lessons and traditions taught in the English school. For example, one can also be sure that the music that the author was being taught in the English school was very different from the traditional prayers that the grandmother knew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, her &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/science/cognitive-dissonance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cognitive dissonance&lt;/a&gt;, if you will, following the &amp;quot;turning point&amp;quot; would have increased her tendency to associate that sort of music lessons with the other &amp;quot;improper&amp;quot; music-related activities that she knew of, namely that of the devadasis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T16:25:40.357" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T16:25:40.357" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14704" CreationDate="2020-08-19T12:14:05.967" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the title of &amp;quot;Marquis&amp;quot; change the name of its holder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sort of, yes.&lt;/strong&gt; The naming system for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British peers&lt;/a&gt; is quite complicated and confusing to those who haven't encountered it. Every person has their own name and surname, but when they inherit, or are given, a sufficiently high title, then the name of that title is generally (at least in formal communication) used for the person instead of their own personal name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A historical example to illustrate the point: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wellesley,_1st_Duke_of_Wellington&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Wellesley&lt;/a&gt; was awarded a peerage (firstly as a marquess, later as a duke) for his military achievements. He (or more exactly his brother acting on his behalf) chose to name his peerage after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wellington,_Somerset&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wellington&lt;/a&gt;, a town in Somerset, as the name was reasonably close to his family surname and there was a manor available there. Subsequently he was referred to as &amp;quot;Lord Wellington&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the Duke of Wellington&amp;quot; rather than as &amp;quot;Sir Arthur Wellesley&amp;quot;. The peerage title of Wellington &lt;em&gt;replaced&lt;/em&gt; the family name of Wellesley, when addressing or referring to this man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquesses_in_the_United_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marquess&lt;/a&gt; (sometimes spelled Marquis in the French style) is the second highest &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peerages_in_the_United_Kingdom#Ranks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;peerage rank&lt;/a&gt; after Duke. &amp;quot;Marne&amp;quot; is a fictional Marquessate, not among the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_marquesses_in_the_peerages_of_Britain_and_Ireland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;real ones&lt;/a&gt; in Britain and Ireland, but the general &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_address_in_the_United_Kingdom#Peers,_peeresses_and_non-peerage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;form of address&lt;/a&gt; for a marquess would be as &amp;quot;Lord&amp;quot; followed by the name of their title, so in this case &amp;quot;Lord Marne&amp;quot;. &lt;strong&gt;The title holder would have an actual name, like &amp;quot;James Mair&amp;quot;, and Mair would be the family surname, but he would be generally referred to as &amp;quot;Lord Marne&amp;quot; after receiving the title.&lt;/strong&gt; Cf. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Paulet,_18th_Marquess_of_Winchester&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the current Marquess of Winchester&lt;/a&gt;, whose name is Nigel Paulet but who would be formally addressed as Lord Winchester. (Sometimes, just to make it even more confusing, &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/38050/are-there-any-british-peers-whose-surname-matches-their-title&quot;&gt;the family surname may match the peerage title&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is &amp;quot;Marne&amp;quot; the name of their family, and whoever remains alive from the family becomes &amp;quot;The Marquis of Marne&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marquessates are usually (always?) hereditary, and certainly the fictional one in this story is since James inherited it from Maurice. Therefore, yes, &lt;strong&gt;the title would continue to be passed on through the family&lt;/strong&gt; until/unless the family line died out. (For example, the title of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess_of_Willingdon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marquess of Willingdon&lt;/a&gt;, the most recently created Marquessate, was established in 1936 for Freeman Freeman-Thomas, then passed to his only surviving son, who never had children, so the title was abolished when he died in 1979.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;other members of the family would still be called Mair, unless they also received noble titles&lt;/strong&gt;. Some peers have multiple titles, in which case they use the highest-ranking one, while their sons may be entitled to use some of the others. (Recall that Duke &amp;gt; Marquess &amp;gt; Earl &amp;gt; Viscount &amp;gt; Baron.) For example, the current &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marquess of Salisbury&lt;/a&gt; also has a right to the title of Viscount Cranborne. He uses the Marquess title since a Marquess is higher than a Viscount, but while his father was alive he was referred to as Lord Cranborne (not having inherited the title of Lord Salisbury yet), or even Baron Cecil (the lowest of the associated titles) when he joined the House of Lords, and his elder son and heir currently uses the title of Viscount Cranborne. So if James Mair had a son, he wouldn't necessarily be just &amp;quot;Mr Mair&amp;quot; until receiving the title of &amp;quot;Lord Marne&amp;quot;; he might have some other subsidiary titles. But certainly &lt;strong&gt;Marne is not the family name; it's a title held only by one person at any time&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T12:14:05.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15166" CreationDate="2020-08-19T13:42:44.900" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means &amp;quot;for something bad has come over her.&amp;quot; What exactly does that mean? It's really vague (since Barton doesn't know what happened), but the general meaning is that something bad has happened to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T13:42:44.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15236" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-19T14:31:12.570" Score="-3" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;Someone sent me this literature joke but I don't get it, can someone help me please?&#xA;He wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*writing in the time of covid-19&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently the joke has something to do with literature, so if anyone understands it, can they please explain it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10693" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T20:39:17.460" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T20:39:17.460" Title="Does the line &quot;writing in the time of covid-19&quot; reference some work of literature?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2020-08-23T13:43:55.777" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15236" CreationDate="2020-08-19T19:03:03.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's most likely a reference to the title of Gabriel García Márquez's novel, &lt;em&gt;Love in the Time of Cholera&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;[noun] in the time of Covid-19&amp;quot; has become commonplace enough to be cliché now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T19:03:03.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2020-08-19T19:10:17.463" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unlike, say, Dover Editions which are photoreproductions of public domain texts, the Barnes &amp;amp; Noble classic editions are, in fact, newly typeset texts. They don't give any attribution to their source text on the copyright page and are probably not working from Project Gutenberg texts which can often include OCR errors, especially in longer/more obscure texts which get less attention. Since B&amp;amp;N has a commercial interest in keeping book buyers happy, I would assume that they've had the text professionally proofread before going to press so it shouldn't have any gross errors or omissions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T19:10:17.463" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15239" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-19T23:47:25.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T23:47:25.563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T23:47:25.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15240" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-19T23:47:25.563" Score="0" Body="Questions about Ibn Khaldun, an Arab Islamic scholar, and his various works. Questions about his works should be tagged with [arabic-literature] and the name of his said work." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T05:47:47.767" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T05:47:47.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15241" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-19T23:51:08.740" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-19T23:51:08.740" LastActivityDate="2020-08-19T23:51:08.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15242" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-19T23:51:08.740" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book Muqaddimah, also known as  Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (مقدّمة ابن خلدون) or Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena (Προλεγόμενα). Questions using this tag should also use [ibn-khaldun] and [arabic-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T05:48:00.343" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T05:48:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15243" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-20T04:26:37.673" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an English-language novel around 2005 that chronicled the life of a fictional man from 1800's England—his childhood, work as a sailor, marriage, and promotion to captain. The cover shows part of a ship in water, and seemed to be written for young adults. Throughout the book, the man is especially methodical and skilled at navigation. In the last chapter, he's returning to London during an especially foggy night (perhaps Christmas Eve?). His wife and a friend are waiting for him, and the friend hopes he doesn't arrive that night because he assumes the main character would crash in such weather. But despite no visibility, the main character uses only a compass and his own calculations to safely navigate home and surprise the friend that night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried searching various combinations of &amp;quot;fiction&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;British&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;captain&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;navigation&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;adolescent&amp;quot; with no luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10697" LastEditorUserId="10697" LastEditDate="2020-08-20T16:28:25.563" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T16:28:25.563" Title="Book about a mathematical British captain" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15244" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15229" CreationDate="2020-08-20T06:50:43.780" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interpretation of rich complexion (in this context) is flushed or red. This often a side effect of drinking or alcoholism and Larkin is implying that is the reason the business is failing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7595" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T06:50:43.780" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5322" CreationDate="2020-08-20T17:24:58.163" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rush, especially drummer and lyric writer Neil Peart, was heavily influenced by Ayn Rand.  Her philosophy of objectivism generally rejects both government and religion.  It is much more focused on the individual and individual rights.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10699" LastActivityDate="2020-08-20T17:24:58.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4124" CreationDate="2020-08-21T01:56:17.060" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Golden_Asse#THE_MARRIAGE_OF_CUPID_AND_PSYCHES&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Golden Ass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Cupid does not give any reason why explicitly.  He simply forbid her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he gave her a further charge saying, Beware that ye covet not (being moved by the pernicious counsel of you sisters) to see the shape of my person, lest by your curiosity you deprive your selfe of so great and worthy estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he realizes she disobeyed him, his reaction centers on that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The god beeing burned in this sort, and perceiving that promise and faith was broken, hee fled away without utterance of any word,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and in a later reproach, he does mention that he disobeyed his mother but not that he forbade her because of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Cupid followed her downe, and lighted upon the top of a Cypresse tree, and angerly spake unto her in this manner: O simple Psyches, consider with thy selfe how I, little regarding the commandement of my mother (who willed mee that thou shouldst bee married to a man of base and miserable condition) did come my selfe from heaven to love thee, and wounded myne owne body with my proper weapons, to have thee to my Spowse: And did I seeme a beast unto thee, that thou shouldst go about to cut off my head with a razor, who loved thee so well?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It is possible that it was forbidden so she could break the command, as it's the standard trope in this kind of fairy tale, but that we can only speculate about.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T01:56:17.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T13:23:56.737" Score="3" ViewCount="5460" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;em&gt;A Photograph&lt;/em&gt; (written by Shirley Toulson), I didn't understand some sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first stanza, the poet says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cardboard shows me how it was&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When the two girl cousins went paddling,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each one holding one of my mother’s hands,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And she the big girl — some twelve years or so.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All three stood still to smile through their hair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At the uncle with the camera. A sweet face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My mother’s, that was before I was born.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the sea, which appears to have changed less,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Washed their &lt;strong&gt;terribly transient feet&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second stanza, the poet says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some twenty — thirty — years later&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She’d laugh at the snapshot. “See Betty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Dolly,” she’d say, “and look how they&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dressed us for the beach.” The sea holiday&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was her past, mine is her laughter. &lt;strong&gt;Both wry&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With the laboured ease of loss.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third stanza, the poet says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now she’s been dead nearly as many years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As that girl lived. &lt;strong&gt;And of this circumstance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is nothing to say at all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Its silence silences.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the meanings of the sentences highlighted in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10691" LastEditorUserId="10691" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T06:01:00.847" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T08:42:24.423" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;Both wry with the laboured ease of loss.&quot; and &quot;And of this circumstance.... Its silence silences.&quot; in 'A Photograph'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;shirley-toulson&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15250" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15623" CreationDate="2020-08-21T14:41:22.503" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading an interesting short story (fairly sure it was in an early level college lit class) where a man falls off a ladder while hanging a picture or performing maintenance inside his home. He shakes off the initial pain, but doesn't realize he has caused an internal wound that will slowly kill him. The bulk of the rest of the story are the reflections of his past ethical decisions/interactions with family/belief in an afterlife etc. I think he sees some demons at some point. You know, the normal things that occur when you think you are going to die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story was in English, but I'm unsure if it was translated into that language. I'm also unsure which publication it may have appeared in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10702" LastEditorUserId="10702" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T19:52:30.347" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T04:16:56.717" Title="Short Story About a Man Slowly Dying From Internal Injury" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15251" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-21T15:28:50.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T15:28:50.663" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T15:28:50.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15252" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-21T15:28:50.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British author and poet Shirley Toulson and her works. If this is a question about one of her works, it should be tagged either with the appropriate novel tag, or with [poetry] if it is a question about her short poems. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T17:04:18.717" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T17:04:18.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15253" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T16:02:47.823" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ages ago I read a detective novel which I remember very little about, and the few things I &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; remember are not very helpful for googling it. Maybe somebody here can help me with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One thing I distinctly remember is that one of the police officers was a gay man, and I think he was pretty much the main character. In one scene, that character and a younger police officer (?) go to Karaoke, and the younger guy sings &amp;quot;Total Eclipse of the Heart&amp;quot;. I think the younger guy was also gay, and seemed interested in the older guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the book was part of a series (and not the first one in the series), and it might have been set in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is basically all I remember about it, sadly, and those things seem so oddly specific that I am not entirely sure if this book actually exists or I'm just getting confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10704" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditorDisplayName="user10704" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T16:10:44.323" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T17:07:20.633" Title="Crime novel with gay policeman as main character" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T18:07:24.113" Score="3" ViewCount="1204" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of Antony's words &amp;quot;Ambition should be made of sterner stuff&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act III of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10705" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T19:46:15.273" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T15:54:43.587" Title="Meaning of the words &quot;Ambition should be made of sterner stuff&quot; from Julius Caesar" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15254" CreationDate="2020-08-21T18:22:10.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin of the expression is Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; Act III, Scene V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was my friend, faithful and just to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Brutus says he was ambitious;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Brutus is an honourable man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He hath brought many captives home to Rome&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Brutus is an honourable man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the meaning here is to argue that Caesar was, in fact, not ambitious, that if he were, he would be more dedicated to his ambition, i.e., &lt;em&gt;Ambition should be made of sterner stuff&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T18:22:10.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-21T20:34:52.210" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Les_dieux_ont_soif&amp;amp;oldid=166394278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article about &lt;em&gt;Les dieux ont soif&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Gods Are Athirst&lt;/em&gt;), a novel by Anatole France, contains the following quote attributed to Joseph Conrad:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;« C’est un grand analyste d’illusions. Il en pénètre et en sonde les plus secrets replis comme s’il s’agissait de réalités faites de substances éternelles. Et c’est en quoi consiste son humanité : elle est l’expression de sa profonde et inaltérable compassion. »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Joseph Conrad &lt;sup&gt;[réf. nécessaire]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I couldn't find Conrad's original words, which were presumably in English, here is my own translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is a great analyst of illusions. He pierces and probes their most secret recesses as if they were realities made out of eternal substances. And this is what his humanity consists in: the expression of his deep and unalterable compassion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&amp;amp;q=%22C%E2%80%99est+un+grand+analyste+d%E2%80%99illusions.+Il+en+p%C3%A9n%C3%A8tre+et+en+sonde+les+plus+secrets+replis+comme+s%E2%80%99il+s%E2%80%99agissait+de+r%C3%A9alit%C3%A9s+faites+de+substances+%C3%A9ternelles%22&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reproduced on countless websites&lt;/a&gt;, but, as far as I can tell, always without a source. Some sites, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://online-litterature.com/anatole-france/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;online-litterature.com&lt;/a&gt; add &lt;em&gt;La Révolte des anges&lt;/em&gt;, but that is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_R%C3%A9volte_des_anges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different novel by Anatole France&lt;/a&gt; and not one of Joseph Conrad's works. Based on this, it is possible that the Wikipedia article about &lt;em&gt;Les dieux ont soif&lt;/em&gt; actually uses a quote about a different novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried to find comments by Conrad on Anatole France on Google Books and I found something in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=q3RODwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT6522&amp;amp;dq=Joseph+Conrad+%22The+Gods%22+anatole+france&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiS5fivkazrAhWJMewKHZulCQ8QuwUwA3oECAUQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Joseph%20Conrad%20%22The%20Gods%22%20anatole%20france&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=1baJDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT6728&amp;amp;dq=Joseph+Conrad+%22The+Gods%22+anatole+france&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiS5fivkazrAhWJMewKHZulCQ8QuwUwAHoECAMQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Joseph%20Conrad%20%22The%20Gods%22%20anatole%20france&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Joseph Conrad: The Complete Collection&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The context is a discussion of Anatole France's novella &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Crainquebille,_Putois,_Riquet_et_plusieurs_autres_r%C3%A9cits_profitables/Putois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Putois&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All this is told with the wit and the art and the philosophy which is familiar to M. Anatole France's readers and admirers. For it is difficult to read M. Anatole France without admiring him. He has the princely gift of arousing a spontaneous loyalty, but with this difference, that the consent of our reason has its place by the side of our enthusiasm. He is an artist. As an artist he awakens emotion. The quality of his art remains, as an inspiration, fascinating and inscrutable; but the proceedings of his thought compel our intellectual admiration. (...)&#xA;The vision of M. Anatole France, the Prince of Prose, ranges over all the extent of his realm, indulgent and penetrating, disillusioned and curious, finding treasures of truth and beauty concealed from less gifted magicians. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be possible to quote more passages about Anatole France, but none of those I have access to come close to the wording quoted in Wikipedia. What is the actual source of that quote and which of Anatole France's works is Conrad discussing in that context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:48:38.577" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T17:18:10.750" Title="Where did Joseph Conrad praise Anatole France as an analyst of illusions?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;anatole-france&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15257" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15258" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French poet and novelist Anatole France (1844 – 1924) and his life as a writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1921. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" LastActivityDate="2020-08-21T20:38:34.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15212" CreationDate="2020-08-22T01:26:18.077" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you unwittingly truncated that verse and cut off one line. The fuller verse is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Footfalls echo in the memory&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down the passage which we did not take&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Towards the door we never opened&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the rose-garden. My words echo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thus, in your mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take notice of the key phrases here: &amp;quot;the passage we did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; take&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;the door we &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; opened&amp;quot;. We (humanity) didn't take that passage to the Garden of Eden. The road to it has always been a one-way street. We, or our original ancestors, the primordial humans, first representatives of the human race, were expelled from it. Thus, we, never opened the door to the Garden of Eden. But the garden exists in our collective memory, through time and throughout time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emphasis should also be placed upon what precedes this verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might have been and what has been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Point to one end, which is always present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One popular interpretation of these lines as well as the temporal theme of the poem is that it is thus evidenced by these lines how Eliot considers only the present, not the future or past, really matters. The present moment, some would argue, is the only real moment in Eliot's poem, as the past cannot be changed and the future has yet to happen and is forever decidedly unknown. I disagree. The past and the future both &lt;em&gt;point to&lt;/em&gt; the present and manifest through the present. In a sense they are &lt;em&gt;part of&lt;/em&gt; the present. The past and the future &lt;em&gt;fold onto&lt;/em&gt; the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You ask &amp;quot;how, when and for what purpose we moved from &amp;quot;time&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;rose-garden&amp;quot;&amp;quot;. It is a rather seamless and smooth flow. Consider the Garden of Eden, there is a perpetual &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;what might have been&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; in front of the humankind, the ultimate mystery: &lt;strong&gt;What might have the humankind been like had Adam and Eve not eaten the forbidden fruit?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can't answer that. No mortal soul can. That is why prior to those two lines Eliot wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What might have been is an abstraction&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Remaining a perpetual possibility&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only in a world of speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We mortals can only speculate. We sinned, and we were punished. The other path has always and will always remain a possibility, an abstraction, a blur. So to answer your first question, I'd say Eliot is not moving per se from a discussion of temporality to a random rose garden, but rather the Garden is the thing he is trying to get to by leading with a brief discussion of temporality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We&amp;quot; refers to humanity. Eliot is taking all of us on a virtual/impossible tour in the Garden of Eden. Keep in mind that the poem had been partially inspired by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnt_Norton_(house)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;real-life manor house in Gloucestershire, England&lt;/a&gt;. Eliot is giving us spatial images the same way he handles time: he brings the imaginary Garden of Eden onto the destroyed and deserted Burnt Norton estate. Through his poetic language we see spaces, temporalities, and possibilities all overlap. That is why although the place in real life was burned and deserted -- a metaphorical reference to the Garden of Eden being destroyed and abandoned -- we are taken to a beautiful garden full of joy, guided by &amp;quot;the bird&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bird here could be a biblical reference to the birds in the Garden of Eden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and &lt;strong&gt;the birds&lt;/strong&gt; in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” (Genesis 1:26)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and &lt;strong&gt;the birds&lt;/strong&gt; in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Genesis 1:28)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hans Christian Andersen wrote of such a bird:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beneath the tree of knowledge in the garden of paradise stood a rosebush. And here, in the first rose, a bird was born. His plumage was beautiful, his song glorious, and his flight was like the flashing of light. But when Eve plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and she and Adam were driven from paradise, a spark fell from the flaming sword of the angel into the nest of the bird and set it afire. The bird perished in the flames, but from the red egg in the nest there flew a new bird, the only one of its kind, the one solitary phoenix bird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phoenix bird! Don't you know him? The bird of paradise, the holy swan of song? (The Phoenix Bird/Fugl Føniks by HC Andersen)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it could also be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;MacGuffin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Why a bird? Because they are seen as cheerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T01:26:18.077" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15188" CreationDate="2020-08-22T02:06:56.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15259/2500&quot;&gt;my answer here&lt;/a&gt; should give you a pretty clear idea of what Burnt Norton is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although some minor details (for that matter analytical tools as well) might be open to interpretation, the major motifs and themes are pretty well known and well discussed. It is about Christianity, clearly, unambiguously. Even in Eliot's time, a lot of commentaries and criticisms focused on the religiosity of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Orwell comments on the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So long as man regards himself as an individual, his attitude towards death must be one of simple resentment. And however unsatisfactory this may be, if it is intensely felt it is more likely to produce good literature than a religious faith which is not really felt at all, but merely accepted against the emotional grain... Eliot's escape from individualism was into the Church, the Anglican Church as it happened. (All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at your cited lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And time future contained in time past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason the future is contained in the past is that the choice has been made and our path has been chosen for us. He is talking about the one most critical moment in human history, according to Christian cosmology: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the fall of man&lt;/a&gt;. Of course you could interpret this part &lt;strong&gt;also&lt;/strong&gt; as a mediation on our mundane life. Sure that is not a problem. But it should be noted the poem was written right after Eliot converted to Anglicanism and at a time when he was waxing religious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both the past and the present may be present in the future because the present is viewed by Eliot as a fixed point onto which both the past and the future fold. Also later in the poem he goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time past and time future&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Allow but a little consciousness.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To be conscious is not to be in time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The moment in the draughty church at smokefall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be remembered; involved with past and future.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Only through time time is conquered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time is continuous, and the past and the future cannot be separated from the present. To be conscious does not give us enough to be in time, because by being in time, immersed in time, we need to be aware of the past and the future. And only by achieving that can we call to mind, understand, and appreciate the moment we had in the Garden of Eden, a moment&#xA;&amp;quot;in the arbour where the rain beat&amp;quot;, and a &amp;quot;moment in the draughty church at smokefall&amp;quot;. A total recall, if you will. Thus &amp;quot;Only through time time is conquered&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:45:01.460" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:45:01.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15263" CreationDate="2020-08-22T03:31:22.700" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald's Choir Treat&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are really indecently vain of your appearance.  A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You agree with me that the two are incompatible.  I always say beauty is only sin deep.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;beauty is only sin deep&amp;quot; mean? Is Saki implying that sin is required to attain, or maintain, one's beauty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T06:00:11.893" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T06:00:11.893" Title="What does &quot;beauty is only sin deep&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15262" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-22T04:09:46.320" Score="1" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on the Academy&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(EDIT: Some additional context is provided by the preceding 5 lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I suffered in that way just now,” said Reginald plaintively, “from a woman whose word I had to take that she had met me last summer in Brittany.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I hope you were not too brutal?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I merely told her with engaging simplicity that the art of life was the avoidance of the unattainable.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Did she try and work it out on the back of her catalogue?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not there and then.  She murmured something about being ‘so clever.’  Fancy coming to the Academy to be clever!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T21:06:01.707" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T21:06:01.707" Title="What does &quot;To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15261" CreationDate="2020-08-22T04:24:40.187" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a play on &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/59200.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;beauty is only skin deep&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; -- the second character agrees about the vanity but is willing to accept the sin for the beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T04:24:40.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15264" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15271" CreationDate="2020-08-22T04:41:48.903" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on the Academy&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]: &amp;quot;To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, does this quote from Reginald imply that he is adverse to being painted by Sargent (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singer_Sargent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Singer Sargent&lt;/a&gt;, 1856-1925), and if so why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Secondly, how would one reach heaven prematurely, or quicker, than someone painted by Sargent? Is Heaven, in this context, defined not as the christian afterlife but, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/heaven&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; defines it, &amp;quot;a place, state, or experience of supreme bliss.&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T07:06:32.297" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T13:59:59.323" Title="What does &quot;To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to Heaven prematurely.&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15270" CreationDate="2020-08-22T05:04:06.020" Score="3" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saki begins his short story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald's Choir Treat&lt;/a&gt;, with the following line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Never,” wrote Reginald to his most darling friend, “be a pioneer.  It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion&amp;quot; mean, and how does this relate to being a pioneer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T07:08:11.347" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T13:55:23.497" Title="What does &quot;It's the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15266" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-22T05:12:57.260" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on the Academy&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“To have reached thirty,” said Reginald, “is to have failed in life.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Reginald consider it a failure to reach the age of thirty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T07:07:21.103" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T16:02:33.257" Title="What does &quot;To have reached thirty, is to have failed in life.&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15267" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15288" CreationDate="2020-08-22T05:46:28.133" Score="4" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald at the Theatre&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, well, ‘dominion over palm and pine,’ you know,” quoted the Duchess hopefully; “of course we mustn’t forget that we’re all part of the great Anglo-Saxon Empire.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]: “Which for its part is rapidly becoming a suburb of Jerusalem.  A very pleasant suburb, I admit, and quite a charming Jerusalem.  But still a suburb.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Reginald mean when he calls Britain &amp;quot;a suburb of Jerusalem&amp;quot;, and why, if I'm interpreting this correctly, does he view it in a negative light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Researching the religious demographics of Jerusalem, I was able to find that in the surrounding years of the publicaton of Reginald (1904), that the Jewish population was the majority in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Jerusalem#Jews_as_absolute_or_relative_majority&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1896 and 1905&lt;/a&gt;. As Saki lived during the Edwardian era, it's possible that he acquired anti-semitic, and as Jerusalem also had a sizeable Muslim population, Islamaphobic prejudices. Thus, does this passage contain Anti-semitic or potentially Anti-Islamic/Islamaphobic sentiments, or am I reading too much into this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T20:17:52.567" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T20:17:52.567" Title="Why does Reginald call Britain &quot;a suburb of Jerusalem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15268" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15269" CreationDate="2020-08-22T10:12:15.217" Score="8" ViewCount="417" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2830/2830-h/2830-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Besetting Sins: The Woman Who Told The Truth&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And at last the dreadful thing came, as the Woman had foreseen all along that it must; it was one of those paltry little truths with which she harried her waking hours.  On a raw Wednesday morning, in a few ill-chosen words, she told the cook that she drank.  She remembered the scene afterwards as vividly as though it had been painted in her mind by Abbey.  The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that the antepenultimate sentence (&amp;quot;The cook was ...&amp;quot;) is an example of paraprosdokian sentence, in that the first usage of &amp;quot;go&amp;quot; was idiomatic and the last usage, that referring to physical translocation, made the second half of the sentence unexpected, however I don't understand exactly &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; the woman &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt; when the cooks left. Why exactly would she go, when the cook left?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T07:50:28.327" Title="What does &quot;The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15268" CreationDate="2020-08-22T10:30:29.497" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; who went is the cook, who was also a woman.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this is your misunderstanding. It's the cook herself who went, not the Woman (the main character of the story, referred to with the capital W). With that it makes more sense. Just to break it down since it's a fun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraprosdokian&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;paraprosdokian&lt;/a&gt; (and thank you for teaching me that word today!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cook was a good cook, as cooks go;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here &amp;quot;as cooks go&amp;quot; is used in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/as_%E2%80%94_go&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;idiomatic sense&lt;/a&gt; meaning, roughly, &amp;quot;among cooks&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and as cooks go she went.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, as you said, &amp;quot;go&amp;quot; is directly referring to physical translation (the cook quit her job and &lt;em&gt;went&lt;/em&gt;), while &amp;quot;as&amp;quot; is either in the sense of &amp;quot;because&amp;quot; or in the sense of &amp;quot;in the way that&amp;quot;. This part of the sentence is saying, ironically, either that &amp;quot;cooks go, therefore this cook went&amp;quot;, or that &amp;quot;the cook quit in the way that cooks do&amp;quot;. Either of these would be a slightly odd choice of phrasing normally, but in juxtaposition with the other meaning of &amp;quot;as cooks go&amp;quot; from the previous phrase, it makes for a good piece of wordplay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T07:50:28.327" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T07:50:28.327" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15265" CreationDate="2020-08-22T13:55:23.497" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a slight twist on the common aphorism that &amp;quot;The early bird gets the worm&amp;quot;, i.e. that being the first one, a pioneer, means you're also the first to face the danger. Here, they're alluding to possibly apocryphal situation where the &lt;a href=&quot;https://theconversation.com/mythbusting-ancient-rome-throwing-christians-to-the-lions-67365&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roman emperors would sacrifice Christians to the lions in the Coliseum for sport&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The emperor Nero is referred to as the first persecutor of the Christians by Lactantius. After the Great Fire of Rome in A.D. 64, when rumours swirled that the emperor himself was responsible, Nero blamed the Christians instead. According to the Roman historian Tacitus, Nero had the Christians covered in wild beast skins and torn to death by dogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also sometimes expressed with the phrase, &amp;quot;The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T13:55:23.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15264" CreationDate="2020-08-22T13:59:59.323" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe that this is exactly the artist he is referring to, and the meaning of the phrase is to essentially say that being painted by Sargent is something that should be done in one's lifetime, with the mention of going to heaven being used as an allusion to dying. So if you die before you get your portrait painted by Sargent, you died too early.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine a similar phrase of &amp;quot;If you die before you go to Disney World, you died too early.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T13:59:59.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15253" CreationDate="2020-08-22T14:06:34.053" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think this is your book, but I'm posting this as a partial answer that matches the title so that it might help further querents. When I was in high school, I read John Peyton Cooke's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1821946877?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chimney Sweeper&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which is indeed about a gay policeman, but it's a standalone novel and it isn't set in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Kinky gay noir mystery which is not porn but has it darkly erotic moments. A drifter who is homophobic (clearly because he is fighting his same-sex urges kills a transvestite who has tried to force him to have sex, stuffs her body up a chimney in an abandoned house, and leaves town. A couple of years later, as he slowly gives in to his attractions, he is now a kept man and an openly gay cop--though he still doesn't not identify as gay personally--in that town. When the body in the chimney is found, he fears he will fall under suspicion. All the erotic scenes in this novel are tied to perversity of some sort, and the central character is very well written. However, the last quarter of the book goes so over-the-top (bondage leading to threat of emasculation) that I found myself chuckling where I clearly should not have been. Still, the overall atmosphere is compelling and memorable, and I look forward to reading more by this author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you only read the earlier parts of the book, it starts with the protagonist's high school years, where he has an older female (I can't remember if it was a neighbor or his mother) making casts of his penis to be made into either female sex toys or candles meant to be used as such, and there's a non-consensual scene where he believes that a teacher at school wants to have sex with him, so he forces her into it, seemingly to no future repercussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T14:06:34.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15273" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15267" CreationDate="2020-08-22T14:23:26.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jerusalem is also a holy city in Christianity.  With the context you are giving, he certainly may mean nothing much that with all its increases in size and power, the empire is also growing more Christian, or more intensely Christian, that he likes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T14:23:26.063" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15262" CreationDate="2020-08-22T14:28:07.087" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without more context it could mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;People want their dinner guests to be dull and staid, to avoid offense.  Being clever in the afternoon risks having no one be willing to have you as a guest.  (Invitations to formal dinner parties generally had more lead time, against this, but he may not be too serious.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Someone who is going to a dinner party will want to be witty, charming, and sparkling at it, rather than being clever for people he merely meets in the afternoon, but someone who tries to impress those people has no one he will want to impress at dinner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T14:28:07.087" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15266" CreationDate="2020-08-22T14:32:47.603" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Without any more context it would appear to be a flippant way of saying that all that is worthwhile in life is the province of the young -- to grow as old as thirty is to become a staid, dull person living a quite pointless life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T14:32:47.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15276" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15266" CreationDate="2020-08-22T15:47:44.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is simply an ironic summary of the preceding sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Someone who Must Not be Contradicted said that a man must be a success by the time he’s thirty, or never.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have achieved nothing of note by the time that you have attained your thirtieth year, you are unlikely to achieve anything afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="141" LastEditorUserId="141" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T16:02:33.257" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T16:02:33.257" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15249" CreationDate="2020-08-22T18:02:07.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of comments have led me to believe I probably should have made my answer clearly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the poem is written &lt;strong&gt;in the first person&lt;/strong&gt;. That is to say the entire poem is a &lt;strong&gt;first-person narrative&lt;/strong&gt;, told from the perspective of the poet, Shirley Toulson. This is made abundantly clear in the first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sweet face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My mother’s, that was before I was born.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the sea, which appears to have changed less,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Washed their terribly transient feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;quot; refers to the poet herself. This is first-person narration. And focus of the poem is on the mother and the daughter (Toulson)'s connection with the mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sea holiday&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was her past, mine is her laughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mine&amp;quot; refers to my (the poet's) past corresponding to &amp;quot;her past&amp;quot;. Now let's turn to your troubling lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both wry / With the laboured ease of loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Both&amp;quot; refers to both the mother's past and the mother's laughter. Both are wry and both with labored ease of loss. Why wry? Note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wry&lt;/a&gt; has a strong denotation of distortion and has the sense of &amp;quot;twisted&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bent&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;abnormal&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;deliberate&amp;quot;, which makes it a perfect reverberant point echoing two words that follow: &amp;quot;labored&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;loss&amp;quot;. The mood is nostalgic and melancholy. Both her past and her laughter are twisted because it is the loss of our childhood, out past, and our beloved ones that we have to grapple with. Hence the &amp;quot;labored ease&amp;quot;. We need to and will eventually come to terms with our loss but it takes work for us to reach inner peace with those losses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the poem lies the verse you quote. That verse reveals to us the mother has been dead for many years &amp;quot;as many years / As that girl lived&amp;quot;. The mood is sorrowful and mournful. The poet is missing her mother. She mourns her passing by starting the poem on a happy, celebratory note in the first stanza, slowly coming to a pensive and melancholy second stanza, and ending on a lugubrious note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of this circumstance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is nothing to say at all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Its silence silences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This circumstance, as Old Brixtonian has pointed out, refers to the fact that her mother died at a young age. The approximate age the mother died at is &amp;quot;hidden&amp;quot; in something of a riddle in the poem. Let's decipher it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And she the big girl — some twelve years or so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then in the second stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some twenty — thirty — years later&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She’d laugh at the snapshot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother would have been anywhere between 32 and 42. The third stanza tells us:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now she’s been dead nearly as many years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As that girl lived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So her mother has been dead for about 12 years. Since we don't know how much time has elapsed since the poet and the mother shared a moment looking at the old photo, it is unclear how old exactly the mother was when she passed. But the idea that the mother died young, was cut down in her prime, is clear. That is what &amp;quot;this circumstance&amp;quot; is. The pronoun its also points here. This situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is nothing more to be said, declares the poet who sits in silent mourning of her mother. The silence is sorrowful and full of happy memories and lingering thoughts. The silence itself silences [more words].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T17:55:27.133" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T17:55:27.133" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15278" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-22T18:06:23.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-22T18:06:23.107" LastActivityDate="2020-08-22T18:06:23.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15279" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-22T18:06:23.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the collection of short stories 'Reginald' by Saki, published in 1904. Use this tag with the tag [saki]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T14:45:26.143" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T14:45:26.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15280" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14481" CreationDate="2020-08-22T20:48:19.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several sources that may have provided inspiration for the &amp;quot;statue scene&amp;quot;, as it is usually called, but no exact precursors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's most obvious source is the &lt;strong&gt;story of Pygmalion in Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which Shakespeare probably read in Arthur Golding's translation. The story can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(tr._Golding)/Book_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book X&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now in the whyle by wondrous Art an image he did grave &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of such proportion, shape, and grace as nature never gave &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor can to any woman give.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Art competing with nature is a theme that also occurs in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: the supposed statue by Julio Romano is described in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.5.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) a piece many &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;years in doing and now newly performed by that rare &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;eternity and could put breath into his work, would &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ape: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Venus grants Pygmalion's wish for a wife as beautiful as his statue by bringing that statue to life. Golding's translation contains the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her body streyght a warmenesse seemd to spred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This appears to be mirrored in Leontes's words about the &amp;quot;statue&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/winters_tale/winters_tale.5.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act V, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, she's warm!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Hermione had only pretended to be a statue, whereas Galatea (the name used in sources other than the &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;) was a statue that had come to life. For this reason, it makes sense to look for additional sources of inspiration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential source is the story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcestis_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alcestis&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is best known through Euripides's play. The god Apollo had persuaded the Fates to allow king Admetus to live longer than the time allotted to him, on the condition that someone else would die in his stead. His wife Alcestis is the person who eventually agrees to die in his stead. After her death, Thanatos leads Alcestis away to the underworld, but Heracles intervenes and brings Alcestis back from the dead. Wikipedia's summary goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he [Heracles] returns, he brings with him a veiled woman whom he tells Admetus he has won in a competition. He asks his host to take her and look after her while Heracles is away on his labours. After much discussion, he finally forces a reluctant Admetus to take her by the hand, but when he lifts the veil, he finds that it appears to be Alcestis, back from the dead. Heracles has battled Death and forced him to give her up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important parallel between &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Alcestis&lt;/em&gt; is that theatre goers are made to believe that the king's wife has died; from that point of view, both queens return from the dead, even though Hermione's dead was not real. (Pretending someone had died while keeping her hidden is a plot element that Shakespeare had already used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Ado_About_Nothing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. in the Claudio-Hero plot.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The removal of the veil in &lt;em&gt;Alcestis&lt;/em&gt; may remind readers of Paulina drawing the curtain before Hermione's statue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Biography&lt;/em&gt; (London: Chatto &amp;amp; Windus, 2005), Peter Ackroyd mentions another potential source of inspiration (Chapter Seventy-Six). When James I entered London on 15 March 1604, Shakespeare and his fellow actors were probably part of the procession. Ackroyd writes (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were seven triumphal gates, created in the style of Roman arches by Stephen Harrison; there were fountains, and flames, and &lt;strong&gt;living statuary&lt;/strong&gt;. Shakespeare himself adopted the device of a statue coming alive, at a later date, in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot element of a male character believing his wife dead for more than a decade (sixteen years in &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;): Shakespeare had already used this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pericles,_Prince_of_Tyre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles, Prince of Tyre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which he and George Wilkins wrote two or three years before &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;. Pericles assumes his wife Thaisa dead for fourteen or fifteen years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T10:10:37.120" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T10:10:37.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15281" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14441" CreationDate="2020-08-22T21:31:18.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in my question, &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; only survives in the text included in the First Folio of 1623, so it cannot be compared to other versions that might have represented earlier stages in the development of the play. For this reason, scholars can only rely on eyewitness accounts of performances in the early seventeenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only surviving eyewitness account of a performance of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; was written by astrologer Simon Forman, who attended a performance at the Globe on 15 May 1611. The description is included in a manuscript known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/formans-account-seeing-plays-globe-macbeth-cymbeline-winters-tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bocke of Plaies and Notes therof per forman for Common Pollicie&lt;/a&gt;. The website Shakespeare Online provides a modernised version of Forman's description of that performance (Mabillard, Amanda. &amp;quot;Going to a Play in Shakespeare's London: Simon Forman's Diary&amp;quot;. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2000):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe there how Leontes, the king of Sicilia, was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the king of Bohemia, his friend, that came to see him. How he contrived his death, and would have had his cupbearer to have poisoned him: who have the king of Bohemia waning thereof and fled with him to Bohemia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember also how he sent to the oracle of Apollo, and the answer of Apollo — that she was guiltless and that the King was jealous, etc.; and how, except the child was found again that was lost, the King should die without issue. For the child was carried into Bohemia and there laid in a forest and brought up by a shepherd. The King of Bohemia's son married that wench. And how they fled into Sicilia to Leontes. The shepherd, having shown the letter of the nobleman by whom Leontes sent away that child and the jewels found about her, she was known to be Leontes' daughter, and was then sixteen years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Remember also the rogue that came in all tattered like Coll Pixie; how he feigned him sick and to have been robbed of all that he had. How he cozened the poor man of all his money. And, after, came to the sheep-shearing with a pedlar's pack and there cozened them again of all their money. How he changed apparel with the King of Bohemia's son, and then how he turned courtier, etc. Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is striking about this description is that the &lt;strong&gt;statue scene is conspicuously absent&lt;/strong&gt;. (Antigonus running off the stage, &amp;quot;pursued by a bear&amp;quot;, arguably Shakespeare's most famous stage direction, is also missing.) The statue scene draws part of its force from the conviction in both the characters &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the audience that Hermione is dead, whereas in other Shakespeare plays, the audience tends to be in the know (e.g. in &lt;em&gt;Much Ado About Nothing&lt;/em&gt;, Claudio thinks Hero has died but the audience knows this is a trick; in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, Ferdinand believes his father has perished in the storm but the audience knows he is on the island). In addition, the illusion of a statue coming to life can also be very strong. Testimonies of later performances, e.g. in the 19th century with Helen Faucit as Hermione and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Macready&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macready&lt;/a&gt; as Leontes, show that this scene can be very powerful (see &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Kenneth Muir; Casebook Series, Macmillan, 1968, pages 48-51). For this reason, it is difficult to believe that Forman would not mention the statue scene if he had seen it. This is what led to speculation that the astrologer might have seen an earlier version with a different final scene. However, hard evidence for this theory is missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christopher Hardman cites another argument for the existence of an earlier version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has sometimes been said that the appearance of Hermione to Antigonus was evidence of a version of the play in which the queen did indeed die, as no one in Shakespeare's day would have thought it possible to see the spirit of someone still alive. (&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;. Penguin Critical Studies. Penguin, 1988. Page 15.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In Shakespeare's main source, Robert Greene's Pandosto, Hermione dies and Leontes eventually commits suicide.) Hardman also points out that in a version without the statue scene, the entire last act would be very different from the version we have now.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T11:19:18.203" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T11:19:18.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-23T11:22:45.647" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prosper Mérimée's&lt;/a&gt; novella &lt;em&gt;Carmen&lt;/em&gt; (1845/1847) is best known as the source for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Bizet's opera &lt;em&gt;Carmen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1875). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carmen_(nouvelle)&amp;amp;oldid=173576082&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; about the novella contains the following unsourced statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dans &lt;em&gt;Carmen&lt;/em&gt;, Mérimée mêle les genres de la tragédie classique, du drame romantique et du roman picaresque pour illustrer le Mal que représente la passion amoureuse et ravageuse, qui pousse les individus à dépasser leurs limites, à effacer toutes traces de raison et de vertu dans leur âme afin qu’ils commettent des actes condamnables et qui réduiront leur vie à néant&lt;sup&gt;[réf. nécessaire]&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Carmen&lt;/em&gt;, Mérimée mixes the genres of classical tragedy, romantic drama and picaresque novel to illustrate how the Evil represented by passionate and destructive love, which pushes individuals to transgress their limits, wipes out all traces of reason and virtue in their souls so they commit reprehensible acts that will destroy their own lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement has been copied on other sites, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/Carmen%20(nouvelle)/fr-fr/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sensagent / Le Parisien&lt;/a&gt; (which simply copied an older version of the Wikipedia entry), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etudier.com/dissertations/Carmen/62101606.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etudier.com&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fichesdelecture.com/livres/prosper-merimee/carmen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fiches de lecture&lt;/a&gt; (partially). There is no corresponding statement (with or without a source) in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_(M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German&lt;/a&gt; counterparts of the French Wikipedia article. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/essentiels/merimee/carmen/propos-oeuvre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;À propos de l’œuvre&lt;/a&gt; by Marie Galvez on Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France) makes no mention of it either. Searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=m%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e+carmen+mix+genres&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=CUpCX-lSjtWSBbyvv6gI&amp;amp;start=10&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwip-7_xk7HrAhWOqqQKHbzXD4UQ8NMDCJAB&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=919&amp;amp;dpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; didn't result in sources either, or at least none that I can access.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a source for the statement in the French Wikipedia article? I am looking for sources for each of the claims in that statement, i.e. not only the mixing of the three genres but also what Mérimée is supposed to have achieved with it. (I am explicitly not interested in statements about Bizet's opera or other adaptations of Mérimée's novella.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:47:19.867" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:47:19.867" Title="How does Mérimée's Carmen mix the genres classical tragedy, romantic drama and picaresque novel?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;prosper-merimee&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15284" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2020-08-23T12:58:49.333" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only explanation to me is that he didn't love her, if he had slept with her, it would be giving in to lust only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10709" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T12:58:49.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1569" CreationDate="2020-08-23T13:30:12.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1946, Stuart Gilbert translated the novel's first sentence as “Mother died today” instead of “Mother has died today”. Since &amp;quot;today&amp;quot; implies a time frame that is not yet closed, you would expect the present perfect instead of the past simple, but the past simple sounds terser. (For the rules regarding past simple and the present perfect, I assume British English, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Gilbert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stuart Gilbert&lt;/a&gt; was English. See e.g. the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar-reference/present-perfect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Present perfect&lt;/a&gt; on the British Council's website.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the challenges of translating &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt; is how to render its past tenses. Novels and autobiographies traditionally used &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_simple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passé simple&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &amp;quot;elle mourut&amp;quot;: she died) to represent events in the past. This tense is not used in spoken French, and even in written French it has gradually been replaced by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_compos%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passé composé&lt;/a&gt; (e.g. &amp;quot;elle est morte&amp;quot;: she died or she has died, depending on the time frame). For a long time, roughly from the sixteenth to the late twentieth century, French authors used a &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass%C3%A9_simple_en_fran%C3%A7ais#D%C3%A9clin_du_pass%C3%A9_simple_et_rar%C3%A9faction_%C3%A0_l%27oral&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;24-hour rule&lt;/a&gt; to choose between the passé simple and the passé composeé: for events more than 24 hours ago, use the passé simple, for events less than 24 hours ago, use the passé composé.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time indication in the novel, &amp;quot;aujourd'hui&amp;quot; (i.e. &amp;quot;today&amp;quot;), refers to a point in time less than 24 hours ago, hence the passé composé (&amp;quot;maman est morte&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the novel spans at least eleven months and Meursault relates the events from a point in time that is not consistent throughout the novel: in the novel's second paragraph, he says he'll take the bus; starting from the third paragraph, everything is in the past, and as the novel progresses, the distance in time between the events and the narration gradually increases until the end of the trial (Part Two, chapter IV). The first three chapters in the second part of the novel narrate events that are more than 24 hours in the past, so it is reasonable to expect the passé simple based on the rule mentioned above. In spite of this, Camus chose the passé composé. In the book's last two chapters, the distance in time is less obvious, but these also use the passé composé, like the rest of the novel. (Camus uses the imparfait when grammatical rules require this. I have found only two instances of the passé simple in the entire novel.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the most famous analysis of the novel is Jean-Paul Sartre's &amp;quot;Explication de L’Étranger&amp;quot;, first published in &lt;em&gt;Cahiers du Sud&lt;/em&gt; in February 1943. This essay contains insightful comments on Camus's choice of tenses. According to Sartre, each sentence is an island separated from the story's other sentences; each sentence is another creation &lt;em&gt;ex nihilo&lt;/em&gt;. Sarter writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C’est pour accentuer la solitude de chaque unité phrastique que M. Camus a choisi de faire son récit au parfait composé. Le passé défini est le temps de la continuité : « Il se promena longtemps », ces mots nous renvoient à un plus-que-parfait, à un futur ; la réalité de la phrase, c’est le verbe, c’est l’acte, avec son caractère transitif, avec sa transcendance. « Il s’est promené longtemps » dissimule la verbalité du verbe ; le verbe est rompu, brisé en deux :(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in order to emphasise the solitude of each sentence unit that Mr. Camus chose to write his narration in the *parfait composé&amp;quot; [i.e. passé composé]. The &lt;em&gt;passé défini&lt;/em&gt; [i.e. passé simple] is the tense of continuity: &amp;quot;Il se promena longtemps&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;He walked for a long time&amp;quot;), these words refer to a &lt;em&gt;plus-que-parfait&lt;/em&gt; [&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect#Romance_languages&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pluperfect&lt;/a&gt;], to a &lt;em&gt;futur&lt;/em&gt; [literally &amp;quot;future&amp;quot; but also future tense]; the reality of the sentence is in the verb, the action, with its transitive nature, with its transcendence. &amp;quot;Il s’est promené longtemps&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;He walked for a long time&amp;quot;) conceals the verb's &amp;quot;verb nature&amp;quot;; the verb is fracture, broken in two pieces: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The identical translations of &amp;quot;Il se promena longtemps&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Il s’est promené longtemps&amp;quot; illustrate the issue: it is impossible to translate the passé composé without undoing the fracturing of the verb that resulted from Camus's choice for that tense. For example, &amp;quot;J'ai pris l'autobus à deux heures&amp;quot; is translated as &amp;quot;I took the two-o’clock bus&amp;quot;. a literal translation would be &amp;quot;I have taken the bus at two o'clock&amp;quot;, but that would fix the narration in a time frame that is less than 24 hours after the event and it is not obvious that this is what Camus intended. For this reason, the English translation of the passé composé will never be &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; because the use of a specific English tense will always imply a choice of time frame that Camus appears to have left open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T23:35:16.377" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T23:35:16.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15286" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15249" CreationDate="2020-08-23T13:35:07.110" Score="5" Body="&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...The sea holiday&#xA;Was her past, mine is her laughter.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is as you say, technastic_tc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The holiday was then in her mother's past: her mother's laughter is now in the daughter's past. Her mother remembers the holiday: the daughter remembers the laughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her mother mocks the old fashioned beachwear, laughing to conceal her pain at remembering long-gone days. The daughter's happy memory of her mother's laughter, as well as what it hid, is both happy and sad. So their memories are &lt;strong&gt;bittersweet&lt;/strong&gt;, mixing happiness with a sense of loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...Both wry&#xA;With the laboured ease of loss:&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wryness is closely associated with irony: something is revealed by its very concealment. Presumably the poet smiles when she first remembers her mother laughing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'laboured' means &amp;quot;done with great difficulty.&amp;quot;&#xA;'ease' means &amp;quot;absence of discomfort.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it means, &amp;quot;Both trying to hide - but revealing - the difficulty with which we ease our pain.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BTW, as 'ease' can also mean 'absense of difficulty', there is a suggestion of the apposition of &lt;em&gt;with difficulty&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;without difficulty&lt;/em&gt;, echoing that of their bitter/sweet thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;...And of this circumstance&#xA;There is nothing to say at all.&#xA;Its silence silences.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The circumstance - her mother dying quite young, when the poet was only in her mid-twenties - saddens her so much that she cannot speak of it. Both she and her mother are silenced by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as the poet mentions the &lt;em&gt;absence&lt;/em&gt; of sound, the sound of the sea creeps into the final line, harking back to the last lines of the first verse and saying more than she can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the way, 'transient feet' &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be a reference to the poem itself. When 'feet' are mentioned in a poem, you do wonder!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T21:42:03.963" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T21:42:03.963" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15287" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15145" CreationDate="2020-08-23T14:51:13.123" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest term I can think of is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pastiche&lt;/a&gt;. According to Wikipedia,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the term denotes a literary technique employing a generally light-hearted tongue-in-cheek imitation of another's style; although jocular, it is usually respectful. The word implies a lack of originality or coherence, an imitative jumble, but with the advent of postmodernism pastiche has become positively constructed as deliberate, witty homage or playful imitation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term does not imply that the author only modifies part of the words found in the original, but that may be one of the ways to create a pastiche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Pastiche&amp;quot; appears to be a closer fit than parody because a parody usually implies exaggeration or ridicule, whereas a pastiche does not. (The English Wkipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parody&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parody&lt;/a&gt; cites Linda Hutcheon as saying, &amp;quot;parody ... is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text&amp;quot;, but unfortunately without a source.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another term that is interesting in this context is what German literary theory calls &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travestie_(Literatur)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Travestie&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;eine komische Gattung, bei der der Inhalt eines Werks oder eines Mythos beibehalten, aber in eine unangemessene sprachliche Form gebracht wird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a comic genre, in which the content of a literary work or myth is retained but delivered in an inappropriate linguistic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, the content of a classical work of literature may be rendered in slang instead of its original high-literary style. Conversely, an entirely trivial story may be rewritten in a lofty exalted style. However, this technique typically goes beyond &amp;quot;modifying a few words in critical places&amp;quot;, so &lt;em&gt;Travestie&lt;/em&gt; appears to fit the requested technique less well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T14:51:13.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15288" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15267" CreationDate="2020-08-23T15:15:37.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the line mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reginald is probably commenting on the increasing number of Jews living in England (and doing it in a snide, anti-Semitic, way).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Jews#Antisemitism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the late 19th and early 20th century, the number of Jews in Britain greatly increased due to the exodus from Russia, which resulted in a large community forming in the East End of London. Popular sentiment against immigration was used by the British Union of Fascists to incite hatred against Jews ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that Saki himself was anti-Semitic? I don't think it means anything of the sort; it merely means that Reginald was anti-Semitic. Since the Reginald stories are a satire of upper-class British society, this doesn't shed any light on Saki's own attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Saki himself anti-Semitic? I don't know. I haven't found any convincing evidence for or against this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T15:15:37.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15289" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15290" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French author Prosper Mérimée (1803 –  1870) and his life as a writer. Mérimée is best known for novellas such as 'Mateo Falcone' and 'Carmen'. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T18:56:37.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15291" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15314" CreationDate="2020-08-23T21:42:07.027" Score="4" ViewCount="587" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walt Whitman's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45472/i-sing-the-body-electric&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I Sing the Body Electric&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a sort of celebration of the human body. A phrase that recurs a few times is &amp;quot;balks account&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression of the face balks account,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does &amp;quot;balks account&amp;quot; mean in this setting?&lt;/strong&gt; This seems to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oCqBp.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;frequently asked question on the internet&lt;/a&gt;, but although a couple of non-reliable sources claim it means &amp;quot;cannot be described&amp;quot;, I didn't find any webpage clearly posing this question and answering it in a verifiable way. Let's do that here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a related bonus question, &lt;strong&gt;why this choice of phrasing?&lt;/strong&gt; It's not for rhyme; is there any double meaning, or any significance to this particular choice of words, rather than e.g. &amp;quot;defies description&amp;quot; or something clearer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T22:20:12.113" Title="What does &quot;balks account&quot; mean in Walt Whitman's &quot;I Sing the Body Electric&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6376" CreationDate="2020-08-23T23:54:21.513" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question reminds me of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/91/2191&quot;&gt;“why didn't character x act rationally” questions&lt;/a&gt; were discussed on the meta site a few years ago. It also reminds me of the type of discussion that Terry Eagleton talks about in the first chapter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205305/how-read-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to Read Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Yale University Press, 2014): readers talk about characters as if they were real people and someone overhearing their discussion (Eagleton uses  Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff as examples) wouldn't guess that they were talking about a literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we ignored the literary context of this question, we could counter it by asking, &amp;quot;Why would it occur to Othello that Iago, and only Iago, might be upset about being passed over for promotion of lieutenant?&amp;quot; After all, Othello has many officers and he only promoted Cassio. Surely you can't expect a general to worry about the hurt feelings of each of his officers? The army, a machine for killing and maiming people, does not work that way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are all non-literary considerations, since we don't hear any other officers complain about Cassio's promotion. Characters have no backstory besides what is mentioned in the play. We don't know what &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/girlhoodofshakes00clar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the girlhood of Shakespeare's heroines&lt;/a&gt; was like or &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/howmanychildrenh0000knig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;how many children Lady Macbeth had&lt;/a&gt;. This type of character analysis, which was popular in the 19th century, is completely outdated now. (And psychoanalytic criticism is an entirely different beast.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moving back to the play: it doesn't occur to anybody that Iago might feel slighted because he doesn't mention it to anybody except Roderigo (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;). Iago fools all those around him about his intentions except Roderigo and his wife Emilia, both of whom need quite some time before they become suspicious enough to say something that might give the game away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Readers who think that Othello is easily fooled should take into account that the general is not the only character who calls Iago &amp;quot;honest&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;good&amp;quot;: Cassio does the same in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.2.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 2, scene 3&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;Good night, honest Iago&amp;quot;; notably after Iago got him drunk in order to provoke the fight that gets Cassio demoted!) and &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 1&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;I never knew /&#xA;A Florentine more kind and honest.&amp;quot;); Desdemona addresses him as &amp;quot;good Iago&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.4.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another factor is that nobody except Iago considers Cassio unfit for the position to which he gets promoted. For example, when Lodovico arrives in Cyprus with a message from the Duke of Venice in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.4.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;, it appears that &amp;quot;they [the senate of Venice] command him [Othello] home, / Deputing Cassio in his government.&amp;quot; In other words, the senators consider Cassio up to the task of taking charge of the military on Cyprus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true, as Gareth Rees has pointed out, that Othello &amp;quot;does not take independent steps&amp;quot; to check whether Desdemona is faithful to him. Instead, he responds to the situation as a general: he quickly delegates the task to an officer, i.e. Iago. In other words, the qualities that serve him well as a military leader work against him when unthinkingly transferred to the private realm, where this delegation is inappropriate. But why should he suspect Iago at all? Iago always appears to defend those who appear to be at fault. In Act 2, scene 3, he pretends to defend Cassio after the drunken brawl: e.g. &amp;quot;I had rather have this tongue cut from my mouth / Than it should do offence to Michael Cassio&amp;quot;. Similarly, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.3.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;, the central manipulation scene, he defends both Cassio (&amp;quot;For Michael Cassio, / I dare be sworn I think that he is honest.&amp;quot;) and Desdemona (&amp;quot;She may be honest yet.&amp;quot; even though he admits the handkerchief speaks against her).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norman Sanders points out in his edition of &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; (New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1984) that critics of the play fall into two camps with regard to the main character: those who defend him as the &amp;quot;noble Moor&amp;quot; and those who condemn him as an easy victim of Iago's manipulations. Apparently, these views are not exclusively based on the play itself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is obvious that the two main views of Othello are based as much on the ideals of the critics themselves as on their reading of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The view that critics have on Iago is linked with their view on Othello. Those who defend Othello see his fall as evidence of Iago's expert manipulation skills; those who condemn him regard Iago as a &amp;quot;miscalculating improviser&amp;quot; (Sanders, p. 25). Whatever view one takes, &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; would have been an entirely different play if its title character had not blindly trusted Iago, i.e. not the play that Shakespeare had in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-23T23:54:21.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15295" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T01:38:43.533" Score="5" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a quarter into &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;. Just before Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli enter the Ent woods, they camp outside in the night as they suddenly see a sketchy, strange old man standing there, not saying a word. I've already forgotten the exact details, but he quickly disappears and they realize that their fast Rohan horsies have been released/scared away, so that they now have to walk/run again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gimli assumes that it's Saruman, which later actually turns out to be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, as they have found the old Ent's &amp;quot;lookout rock&amp;quot; with the stone-carved steps, an old man appears in daylight. This time, it actually turns out to be Gandalf. After the initial shock, Gimli oddly asks Gandalf if the man they saw the night before at the camp was him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would he ask this?! Isn't that an absurd thing to ask? Why would Gandalf, the good-hearted wizard who is an extremely central person in the whole story and their beloved and (assumed) dead friend, come back only to sneak around their camp in the middle of the night and look at them without saying a word, and scare away their horses? It really annoys me that Gimli asked that. Everything in these books seem so well thought-through, but this is just absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Naturally, if it was Gandalf, he would make himself known in some friendly way and immediately address them by name and definitely not do anything to their horses. Gandalf's answer to Gimli confused me as well, but he seems like he almost took it as a joke question. However, it's my impression that Gimli seriously asked this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would make the dwarf ask such a question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I found it odd that they wait so very long until they bring up the fact that Gandalf somehow survived after they had seen him fall to his death and was assumed dead by all in the Fellowship. You'd think they would be more shocked and immediately ask how he can be alive and whatnot, but they almost don't seem surprised at all. And Gandalf's way of approaching them also seems quite careless, even if he used magic to make them unable to use their weapons, but that's a side-track.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I primarily wonder why Gimli asked that stupid question and why they took so long to ask about how he survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10713" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T07:18:01.550" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T07:18:01.550" Title="Why did Gimli think that Gandalf would sneak around their camp in the middle of the night, not say a word and scare away their horses?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15295" CreationDate="2020-08-24T05:55:43.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Gimli is more or less convinced that they've met Saruman, his companions cast some doubt on this at the beginning of the chapter 'The White Rider':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That would not baffle a Ranger,’ said Gimli. ‘A bent blade is enough for Aragorn to read. But I do not expect him to find any traces. It was an evil phantom of Saruman that we saw last night. I am sure of it, even under the light of morning. His eyes are looking out on us from Fangorn even now, maybe.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It is likely enough,’ said Aragorn; ‘yet I am not sure. I am thinking of the horses. You said last night, Gimli, that they were scared away. But I did not think so. Did you hear them, Legolas? Did they sound to you like beasts in terror?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No,’ said Legolas. ‘I heard them clearly. But for the darkness and our own fear I should have guessed that they were beasts wild with some sudden gladness. They spoke as horses will when they meet a friend that they have long missed.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That turns out to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Shadowfax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shadowfax&lt;/a&gt;, Gandalf's new steed. See this passage from the end of the chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘There is more than one horse coming,’ said Aragorn. ‘Certainly,’ said Gandalf. ‘We are too great a burden for one.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘There are three,’ said Legolas, gazing out over the plain. ‘See how they run! There is Hasufel, and there is my friend Arod beside him! But there is another that strides ahead: a very great horse. I have not seen his like before.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Nor will you again,’ said Gandalf. ‘That is Shadowfax. He is the chief of the Mearas, lords of horses, and not even Théoden, King of Rohan, has ever looked on a better. Does he not shine like silver, and run as smoothly as a swift stream? He has come for me: the horse of the White Rider. We are going to battle together.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's not a stupid question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T05:55:43.747" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15056" CreationDate="2020-08-24T05:56:05.623" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji#English_translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first partial translation of Genji Monogatari into English was by Suematsu Kenchō, published in 1882. Arthur Waley published a six-volume translation of all but one chapter, with the first volume published in 1921 and the last in 1933. In 1976, Edward Seidensticker published the first complete translation into English, made using a self-consciously &amp;quot;stricter&amp;quot; approach with regards to content if not form. The English translation published in 2001 by Royall Tyler aims at fidelity in content and form to the original text. The most recently written (&amp;quot;Genji and the Luck of the Sea&amp;quot;) dates from 2007. Its initial version has been extensively revised, retitled, and updated for this publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Major English translations in chronological order&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Suematsu Genji (1882) – Suematsu's Genji was the first translation into English, but is considered of &lt;strong&gt;poor quality&lt;/strong&gt; and is not often read today. Significantly, only a few chapters were completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Waley Genji (1921–1933) –Waley's Genji is considered a great achievement for his time, although &lt;strong&gt;some purists have criticized Waley's changes to the original&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Others have criticized as overly-free the manner in which Waley translated the original text&lt;/strong&gt;. Regardless, it continues to be well-appreciated and widely read today. When the Waley Genji was first published, it was eagerly received. For example, Time explained that &amp;quot;the reviewers' floundering tributes indicate something of its variegated appeal. In &lt;strong&gt;limpid prose&lt;/strong&gt; The Tale combines curiously modern social satire with great charm of narrative. Translator Waley has done service to literature in salvaging to the Occident this masterpiece of the Orient.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Seidensticker Genji (1976) – Seidensticker's Genji is an attempt to correct what were perceived to have been Waley's failings without necessarily making his translation obsolete. Seidensticker hews more closely to the original text, but in the interests of readability, he takes some liberties. For example, he identifies most of the characters by name so that the narrative can be more easily followed by a broad-based audience of Western readers. (In 2008, a 4,400-page Braille version of the Seidensticker Genji was completed. This Braille edition was the product of five Japanese housewives from Setagaya, Tokyo, working voluntarily for five years and was subsequently donated to the Japan Braille Library (日本点字図書館) and the Library of Congress. It is also available for download.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The McCullough Genji (1994) – An abridgement.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Tyler Genji (2001) – Tyler's Genji contains more extensive explanatory footnotes and commentary than the previous translations, describing the numerous poetical allusions and cultural aspects of the tale. Tyler consciously attempted to mimic the original style in ways that the previous translations did not. For example, this version does not use names for most characters, identifying them instead by their titles in a manner which was conventional in the context of the 11th-century original text – &amp;quot;...while wonderfully evocative of the original, can be difficult to follow...&amp;quot;. Tyler's version &amp;quot;makes a special virtue of attending to a certain ceremonial indirectness in the way the characters address one another. The great temptation for a translator is to say the unsaid things, and Tyler never gives in to it.&amp;quot;[attribution needed] This has been praised by some critics[who?] as &amp;quot;preserving more of what once seemed unfamiliar or strange to English readers&amp;quot;,[attribution needed] as understanding the culture of Lady Murasaki's time is arguably a chief reason for reading Genji.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Washburn Genji (2015) – Dennis Washburn's Genji separates the poems from the prose and puts interior thoughts in italics. The translation has been received slightly more controversially than Tyler's.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can safely cross the Suematsu Genji off the list as Wikipedia suggests it is of poor quality. I doubt &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suematsu_Kench%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suematsu Kenchō&lt;/a&gt; was proficient in either classical Japanese or English, as it seems he didn't receive enough training in either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer I am going to post today is probably a non-answer, or an incomplete one at best, because I have not seen all of the translations you list here and there is no way in hell I can read and comment on all of them in one go. But I'd like to get this answer rolling by digging at the translations one by one, making comments and pointing things out based on my understanding as I encounter them. It is decidedly going to be a work in progress for a long while, and at any point anyone who wishes to add to this answer as opposed to start their own is welcome to make this answer a community wiki. Otherwise, I will add to this answer from time to time. I don't plan on going too deep into a translation if I spot things that I consider fatal, things that take away from the translation's accuracy. I am for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestication_and_foreignization&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;foreignization&lt;/a&gt; especially when it comes to ancient texts and I think altering the meaning to the point the tone changes is unacceptable. So this answer might eventually shape up to be a list of dealbreakers for me but caveat emptor: everybody is welcome to weigh the pros and cons and make their own decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your question states the The original text Tale of Genji is not an easy read for modern Japanese readers. It has to be read in translation in Japan. Excerpts of the Tale of Genji are taken out and taught in high school as part of the Japanese classics curriculum (高校古典). Even competent native Japanese speakers have to pay attention in class to fully grasp the grammar and content of the text. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikibooks.org/wiki/%E9%AB%98%E7%AD%89%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1%E5%8F%A4%E5%85%B8B/%E6%BA%90%E6%B0%8F%E7%89%A9%E8%AA%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikibooks Japanese has a list&lt;/a&gt; of the passages used in high school textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As of now the only Genji text in English I have been able to find online is the Arthur Waley translation through &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.182984&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/1284/announcing-the-july-august-2020-topic-challenge-the-tale-of-genji?cb=1&quot;&gt;meta challenge announcement&lt;/a&gt;. The first few pages read fine, but I find the flow of the text and the way things are explained more in line with what the English reader would have been accustomed to a century ago than the way courtiers would have acted in Murasaki Shikibu's time. It is not difficult to see why Time praised the Waley Genji for using &amp;quot;limpid prose&amp;quot; and making the &amp;quot;masterpiece of the Orient&amp;quot; accessible to the Western literati.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing Waley's translation with the original Japanese text and modern Japanese translations, I have spotted many places where Waley took outrageous and scandalizing liberties with the original text, reflecting how limited Waley's knowledge of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;classical Japanese&lt;/a&gt; (古文) must have been. Elaborating on any one of them takes a whole lot of time and energy, so I will just talk about one particular example that I find downright unacceptable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;輦車の宣旨などのたまはせても、また入らせたまひて、さらにえ許させたまはず。 「限りあらむ道にも、後れ先立たじと、契らせたまひけるを。さりとも、うち捨てては、え行きやらじ」&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the Waley translation of this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Waley Genji:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In great trouble and perplexity he sent for a hand litter. But when they would have laid her in it, he forbad them, saying 'There was an oath between us that neither should go alone upon the road that all at last must tread. How can I now let her go from me?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, does this English passage make sense? Yes it does, unfortunately. (I will get to why it is unfortunate that this passage makes sense but doesn't fly with me.) &amp;quot;He&amp;quot; is the Emperor; she the Wardrobe lady (Kiritsubo Consort). This English passage presents us with a coherent account of how much it pained the Emperor to part with his consort. Sure, the idea is there. But did Waley get the details right? No. This is a good example of a &amp;quot;Close, but no cigar&amp;quot; case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some comments at first glance: &amp;quot;In great trouble&amp;quot; is a bit of a dated usage that means the Emperor is in pain and deeply troubled. It doesn't mean the same as the modern usage that he is in trouble with the authorities. Hand litter is an OK translation but I would probably prefer &amp;quot;handcart&amp;quot; or more specifically &amp;quot;hand-pulled litter on wheels&amp;quot; to set it apart from the Chinese or Korean litter. This is a 輦 or 輦車:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uxjNz.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uxjNz.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern readers, especially readers of foreign translations, need to understand this passage is a very difficult passage--and for that matter so is the entirety of the Tale--because the subject and object of each clause are usually omitted, a syntactic holdover shared by modern Japanese. Complements and adverbials indicating time, location, etc. are also omitted. To understand who does what, who is the subject and performs a certain action, you need to understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Japanese honorific speech&lt;/a&gt; (敬語). In general there are three types of 敬語: 尊敬語 (respectful language), 丁寧語 (polite language), 謙譲語 (humble language). What kind of speech style you use depends on the absolute &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; relative social status of the action performer and action receiver. To complicate the matter further, remember we have a constant and ubiquitous third party in the text--the narrator Murasaki Shikibu. Her personal voice follows us throughout the telling of the story as it was imperative that she pay proper respect to her characters depending on their statuses. A lot of the times she had to use &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E9%AB%98%E6%95%AC%E8%AA%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;最高敬語&lt;/a&gt; (respectful speech of the highest order) as the story she told is of royalty. This is not Japanese.SE and I am no expert in 敬語 in any sense, so I won't go into further detail on 敬語. Just know that even highly proficient native Japanese speakers make mistakes with archaic and/or complex honorific form all the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern Japanese scholars and translators of Japanese classics have reached consensus and corrected mistakes in older translations--this includes translations into modern Japanese and into foreign languages. Let's look at the standard modern interpretation of this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern translation:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;手車を許可する勅使も出したが、すぐ自分が入ってしまいどうしても手元から離さないのであった。&#xA;「死ぬ時も一緒、後れたり先んじたりしない、と約束していたではないか。まさかわたしを捨てて先には行かせないぞ」&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I am basing the modern Japanese translation on several sources, to list a few: &lt;a href=&quot;http://james.3zoku.com/genji/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.manabu-oshieru.com/daigakujuken/kobun/genji.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://genjisite.jp/01kiritsubo/chapter-3-7/#toc_id_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikibooks.org/wiki/%E9%AB%98%E7%AD%89%E5%AD%A6%E6%A0%A1%E5%8F%A4%E5%85%B8B/%E6%BA%90%E6%B0%8F%E7%89%A9%E8%AA%9E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ameblo.jp/aiaia18/entry-10297510792.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;5&lt;/a&gt;. These translations vary in their wording but a convergence is reached by all of them on the plot and actions. I am using the first one because it cites a laundry list of authoritative references from renowned Japanese Genji scholars and also because it is in plain text and allows me to pull the copy and paste trick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Allow me to translate it into English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The Emperor] ordered a hand-pulled litter on wheels [for Kiritsubo Consort to go back to her hometown]. But [when the litter arrived] he immediately went back [to Kiritsubo Consort's room] and wouldn't let go of her [, and said] &amp;quot;[We] made a promise [to each other] that neither of us shall fall behind or go ahead of the other on the journey beyond our worldly limits. You are not leaving me behind, are you!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this to Waley's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In great trouble and perplexity he sent for a hand litter. But when they would have laid her in it, he forbad them, saying 'There was an oath between us that neither should go alone upon the road that all at last must tread. How can I now let her go from me?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see Waley got a number of things wrong. He failed to translate また入らせたまひて correctly because he mistook Kiritsubo Consort for the performer of the action. The action is &amp;quot;enter&amp;quot; and he thought it was the consort who was described to be entering something, so he put down &amp;quot;when they would have laid her in it&amp;quot;. But it is actually the Emperor who is performing the entering. How do we know this for sure? Remember what I said about honorifics in Japanese? Verbs conjugate based on who the subject is, who the object is, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; their relative social status. Here Murasaki uses respectful speech of the highest order, so it is only possible that she is describing the Emperor. It is the Emperor who (re)enters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waley also mistranslated 限りあらむ道. He put down &amp;quot;the road that all at last must tread&amp;quot;. The idea is clear as this is a euphemistic reference to death, but it seems to me he didn't understand 限り. That word means limit. I would translate it as a journey that extends beyond our worldly limits. There is no mention of &amp;quot;all at last must tread&amp;quot; in the original text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How can I now let her go from me?&amp;quot; is so glaring a mistake that I doubt he could speak the language (apparently he taught himself to read classical Japanese/Chinese, probably not speak). The line is addressed to Kiritsubo Consort, so the object should be the second person pronoun &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;. Also the tone is slightly reproachful albeit full of pain. This is the Emperor talking, so even in a moment of great pain and love showing and even to the object of his affection, he still retains his undisputed authoritativeness and unquestionable power. &amp;quot;You made a promise to me. How could you leave me (and die first)?&amp;quot; would roughly be the modern equivalent. But it is said more elegantly and with more respect. In comparison, Waley mistakenly rendered it as a short soliloquy in the form of a rhetorical question exuding self-doubt that simply isn't there in the original text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion I completely disagree with this statement on Wiki: &amp;quot;Regardless, it continues to be well-appreciated and widely read today.&amp;quot; No it deviates from the original so much that it should stop being read. Arthur Waley taught himself classical Japanese which might have been a feat back in his day but, without formal training, would be decidedly inadequate today. His translation clearly fumbled the meaning of many key words and strayed too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Donald Keene also points to the beginning of the fourth chapter and compares Waley and Seidensticker's translations (source: &lt;em&gt;Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, Keene, Donald, 1999, pp 477-514):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any passage would do almost equally well to suggest the&#xA;complexities, which tend to disappear in fluent translations that eliminate&#xA;run-on sentences or augment the original with explanations. The following&#xA;passage occurs near the beginning of the “Yugao” chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mikuruma irubeki kado wa sashitarikereba, hito shite Koremitsu&#xA;mesasete, matasetamaikeru hodo, mutsukashige naru oji no sama wo&#xA;miwatase shitamaeru ni, kono ie no katawara ni, higaki to iu mono wo&#xA;atarashu shite, kami wa, hajitomi shigoken bakari agewatashite, sudare&#xA;nado mo ito shiro suzushige naru ni, okashiki hitaitsuki no sukikage,&#xA;amata miete nozoku. Tachisamayouran shimotsukata omoiyaru ni,&#xA;anagachi ni taketakaki kokochi zo suru.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not possible to make an absolutely literal rendering, but the&#xA;meaning is approximately: “Because the gate through which carriages were&#xA;admitted was locked, he sent a man for Koremitsu, and while he waited, he&#xA;ran his eyes along the disreputable-looking street [and noticed] that&#xA;[someone] in the house next door had newly [put up] what they call a&#xA;cypress-bark fence, above which [someone] had lifted the row of four or five&#xA;shutters; the blinds looked very white and cool, and he could dimly see&#xA;through them many charming foreheads peeping [at him]. When he tried&#xA;imagining the lower parts [of the figures] that seemed to be wandering&#xA;around, he had a feeling that they must be very tall.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation by Arthur Waley renders this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[H]e managed to find the house; but the front gate was locked&#xA;and he could not drive in. He sent one of his servants for&#xA;Koremitsu, his foster-nurse’s son, and while he was waiting began&#xA;to examine the rather wretched-looking by-street. The house&#xA;next door was fenced with a new paling, above which at one place&#xA;were four or five panels of open trellis-work, screened by blinds&#xA;which were very white and bare. Through chinks in the blinds a&#xA;number of foreheads could be seen. They seemed to belong to a&#xA;group of ladies who must be peeping with interest into the street&#xA;below. At first he thought that they had merely peeped out as they&#xA;passed; but he soon realized that if they were standing on the&#xA;floor they must be giants. No, evidently they had taken the&#xA;trouble to climb on to some table or bed; which was surely rather&#xA;odd!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edward Seidensticker’s translation is closer to the original&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The carriage entrance was closed. He sent for Koremitsu and&#xA;while he was waiting looked up and down the dirty, cluttered&#xA;street. Beside the nurse’s house was a new fence of plaited cypress.&#xA;The four or five narrow shutters above had been raised, and new&#xA;blinds, white and clean, hung in the apertures. He caught outlines&#xA;of pretty foreheads beyond. He would have judged, as they&#xA;moved about, that they belonged to rather tall women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waley’s &lt;strong&gt;amplification&lt;/strong&gt; of the text—especially his placing the women on&#xA;“some table or bed,” though it is hard to imagine a Heian room containing&#xA;either—&lt;strong&gt;was undoubtedly inspired by his desire to make the text as&#xA;immediately intelligible as possible to the European reader.&lt;/strong&gt; Murasaki&#xA;Shikibu does not explain why the women looked tall, and Waley felt obliged&#xA;to insert an explanation. Seidensticker evidently preferred not to mention the peeping of the women nor their lower parts (shimotsukata), nor did he&#xA;attempt to explain the tallness of the women. &lt;strong&gt;Waley is perhaps closer to the&#xA;original than Seidensticker in the leisurely pace of the sentences. But&#xA;probably no translator could be completely faithful both to the original and&#xA;to the English language.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T05:50:46.710" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T05:50:46.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15298" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15295" CreationDate="2020-08-24T07:17:50.567" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Gandalf &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; act strangely before revealing his identity to them.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the new Gandalf (not the apparition of Saruman) first appears to Legolas, Gimli, and Aragorn, it is as a mysterious silent figure, who comes softly through the forest towards them and then stands looking at them for a long time without speaking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aragorn looked and beheld a bent figure moving slowly. It was not far away. It looked like an old beggar-man, walking wearily, leaning on a rough staff. His head was bowed, and he did not look towards them. In other lands they would have greeted him with kind words; but now they stood silent, each feeling a strange expectancy: something was approaching that held a hidden power – or menace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At that moment the old man quickened his pace and came with surprising speed to the foot of the rock-wall. Then suddenly he looked up, while they stood motionless looking down. There was no sound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when he breaks the silence, he speaks with them as a stranger rather than an old friend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well met, I say again!’ said the old man, coming towards them. When he was a few feet away, he stood, stooping over his staff, with his head thrust forward, peering at them from under his hood. ‘And what may you be doing in these parts? An Elf, a Man, and a Dwarf, all clad in Elvish fashion. No doubt there is a tale worth hearing behind it all. Such things are not often seen here.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You speak as one that knows Fangorn well,’ said Aragorn. ‘Is that so?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Not well,’ said the old man: ‘that would be the study of many lives. But I come here now and again.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Might we know your name, and then hear what it is that you have to say to us?’ said Aragorn. ‘The morning passes, and we have an errand that will not wait.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘As for what I wished to say, I have said it: What may you be doing, and what tale can you tell of yourselves? As for my name!’ He broke off, laughing long and softly. Aragorn felt a shudder run through him at the sound, a strange cold thrill; and yet it was not fear or terror that he felt: rather it was like the sudden bite of a keen air, or the slap of a cold rain that wakes an uneasy sleeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘My name!’ said the old man again. ‘Have you not guessed it already? You have heard it before, I think. Yes, you have heard it before. But come now, what of your tale?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this is how Gandalf behaves on his actual first meeting with his old friends, is it so far-fetched to wonder if he previously appeared to them without even speaking? The ways of wizards are often strange and inscrutable to mortals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, &lt;strong&gt;Gimli was shocked&lt;/strong&gt;. He was by far the last to react to the revelation that the mysterious old man was Gandalf resurrected, and perhaps his mind was still working over it even while the others talked. It took him more time to recover from the shock, and perhaps he thought the nightly apparition was &lt;em&gt;probably&lt;/em&gt; Saruman but wanted to make sure. The text doesn't say he was accusatory, so maybe his question was just confirmatory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wait a minute!’ cried Gimli. ‘There is another thing that I should like to know first. Was it you, Gandalf, or Saruman that we saw last night?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why they took so long to ask about what happened to Gandalf after Moria, the simplest explanation is that &lt;strong&gt;there were more pressing matters to discuss&lt;/strong&gt;: the fate of the Ring and Frodo, the plotting of Saruman relatively near at hand, the fate of the two hobbits they'd been pursuing for so long to that very spot, the future of the world between Mordor and Isengard, and other things of vital importance to the future. Their curiosity about Gandalf's resurrection could wait a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T07:17:50.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15299" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15304" CreationDate="2020-08-24T08:17:07.657" Score="12" ViewCount="4346" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_at_the_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald at the Theatre&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]: “There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is it that &amp;quot;It always turns out to be the King of Sweden&amp;quot;? Is this a reference to the then contemporary Swedish monarch, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_II#Science_and_the_arts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oscar II&lt;/a&gt; (who reigned from 1872-1907), and if so why? If not, may this relate to a trope founded on a Swedish stereotype?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T12:04:45.213" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:22:55.340" Title="Why does &quot;it always turn out to be the King of Sweden&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15300" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T08:34:21.427" Score="2" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_on_Besetting_Sins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Besetting Sins: The Woman who told the Truth&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]: Children are given us to discourage our better emotions.  That is why the stage, with all its efforts, can never be as artificial as life; even in an Ibsen drama one must reveal to the audience things that one would suppress before the children or servants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Reginald use an Ibsen Drama in particular as an example of a play where nothing is hidden from the audience?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T08:48:33.413" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T08:48:33.413" Title="Why are Ibsen Dramas in particular mentioned in Reginald?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;&lt;henrik-ibsen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15301" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17263" CreationDate="2020-08-24T08:41:42.230" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several characters in Shakespeare's plays have strong skills in rhetoric and oration: for example, Mark Antony in the play &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, who is able to sway the fickle populace of Rome from supporting the conspirators to hating them in a single speech. Shakespeare himself must have had some skills in writing words to sway audiences, even if in a different context. So I wonder if he studied any classical texts on rhetoric (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, etc.) or if he learned about these skills by practising them or from other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that Shakespeare did, or did not, read classical texts on rhetoric?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T19:21:51.023" Title="Is there any evidence that Shakespeare studied or read classical rhetoric?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T11:32:36.163" Score="1" ViewCount="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;In an earlier question I asked, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14441/2191&quot;&gt;What evidence is there that Shakespeare revised The Winter's Tale after 1611?&lt;/a&gt; One of the arguments cited in the answer comes from Christopher Hardman's study &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; (Penguin Critical Studies. Penguin, 1988. Page 15):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has sometimes been said that the appearance of Hermione to Antigonus was evidence of a version of the play in which the queen did indeed die, as no one in Shakespeare's day would have thought it possible to see the spirit of someone still alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Hardman does not cite any sources, so it is not clear which critics have cited this as evidence. I have not encountered this argument in other works that I recently read, i.e. two editions of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; (Ernest Schanzer's edition for the New Penguin Shakespeare and Stephen Orgel's edition for the Oxford Shakespeare) and an anthology of criticism edited by Kenneth Muir (&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;. Casebook Series. Macmillan, 1968). Hence my question: who was the first critic who used Antigonus's as an argument for the theory that there may have been an earlier version of &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; in which Hermione really dies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T11:32:36.163" Title="Which critic first claimed that Antigonus's dream was evidence of an earlier version of The Winter's Tale?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-winters-tale&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2020-08-24T12:45:32.007" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is a parody of the &lt;strong&gt;folklore motif known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/1259682&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the king in disguise&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. In Norse mythology &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Odin&lt;/a&gt; was said to wander in disguise among humans. Shakespeare used the king-in-disguise motif in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/henryv/henryv.4.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 1 of &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Outside of fiction, a number of real kings and queens have been said to disguise themselves, e.g. King Charles XI of Sweden (1655 – 1697), who supposedly wanted to check for himself whether local officials were corrupt and suppressed the people. (A &lt;a href=&quot;http://maplemonarchists.weebly.com/blog/top-10-royals-who-traveled-incognito&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog on Weebly.com&lt;/a&gt; is not the most reliable source, but stories that aren't based on true facts are still valid illustrations of a specific motif.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement that it &amp;quot;always turns out to be the King of Sweden&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be an allusion to King Charles XI of Sweden, but the key part is the adverb &amp;quot;always&amp;quot;, which is a &lt;strong&gt;comic exaggeration&lt;/strong&gt;, since Charles XI is not the only royal in history who disguised himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote may also parody a motif found in legends and fairy tales: a character meets an unassuming or even unattractive person and their behaviour towards that person turns out to have an unexpected effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An example from Arthurian legends is the story of Gawain and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loathly_lady&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;loathly lady&lt;/a&gt;, for example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marriage_of_Sir_Gawain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Marriage of Sir Gawain&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_of_Sir_Gawain_and_Dame_Ragnelle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle&lt;/a&gt;. In the latter story, Gawain must consent to marry an &amp;quot;old hag&amp;quot; in order to solve a serious problem that King Arthur is confronted with. Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wedding_of_Sir_Gawain_and_Dame_Ragnelle#Plot_summary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, the newlyweds [Gawain and the loathly lady] retire to their bedroom. After brief hesitation, Gawain assents to treat his new bride as he would if she were desirable, and go to bed with her as a dutiful husband is expected to do. However, when he looks up, he is astonished to see not an ugly hag, but the most beautiful woman he has ever seen standing before him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another variation on the same theme is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Frog_Prince&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Frog Prince&lt;/a&gt;, which is best known in the version preserved by the brothers Grimm (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tale, a spoiled princess reluctantly befriends the Frog Prince, whom she met after dropping a gold ball into a pond, and he retrieves it for her in exchange for her friendship. The Frog Prince magically transforms into a handsome prince. In the original Grimm version of the story, the frog's spell was broken when the princess threw it against the wall, while &lt;strong&gt;in modern versions the transformation is triggered by the princess kissing the frog&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T12:45:32.007" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15305" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15306" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about Thomas Mann's novel 'The Magic Mountain' (German: 'Der Zauberberg'), first published in 1924. Use this tag with the tags [thomas-mann] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T15:28:05.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15307" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15308" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Piercing the Darkness' (1988) by Frank E. Peretti. Use this tag with the tag [frank-peretti]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T15:29:33.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15920" CreationDate="2020-08-24T16:45:44.833" Score="2" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;I (well, currently my wife, but I plan to as well) am trying to read Victor Hugo's &lt;em&gt;Hunchback of Notre Dame&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/B08FP5TXKN&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a beautiful faux-suede edition&lt;/a&gt; that we received as a gift. However, there are various references to French history and the like that would be nice to understand, plus an untranslated Greek word that apparently is the key to the whole novel. This edition &lt;em&gt;says&lt;/em&gt; that it's annotated (on Amazon, anyway), but some of the notes are themselves in French!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any such thing as a Reader's Companion to this book that explains such things? A book, a website, anything? I've even looked at &amp;quot;study guides&amp;quot; (ugh) like Schmoop, to no avail. I'd even take an actual annotated edition of the book. Various versions of the book I've found online claim to be &amp;quot;annotated,&amp;quot; but there's no description, no reviews, no indication that it's actually what it claims to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10721" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T19:39:25.127" Title="Is there a Reader's Guide to Hunchback of Notre Dame?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;the-hunchback-of-notre-dame&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15310" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T17:44:46.127" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the third section of Burnt Norton we find these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eructation of unhealthy souls&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the faded air, the torpid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eructation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eructation&lt;/a&gt; have two meanings&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Belching&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eruption&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, if we take up the second meaning then &amp;quot;eructation of unhealthy souls&amp;quot; could mean death, that is soul is erupting out of the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking up the first meaning and considering this &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/55339836#55339836&quot;&gt;chat discussion&lt;/a&gt;, we find few things that requires little explanation. First, how belching is related to souls? And after all what does &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;unhealthy&lt;/strong&gt; souls&amp;quot; mean? Does this belching have some biblical refernces of what &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/334627&quot;&gt;North&lt;/a&gt; found and quoted :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revelations 3:16&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So, because you are lukewarm - neither hot nor cold - I am about to spit you out of my mouth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we take up the first meaning of &amp;quot;Eructation&amp;quot; from above, and refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/users/226081&quot;&gt;Tsundoku's&lt;/a&gt; paraphrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a haunting evocation of commuters traveling by tube to work.&#xA;The metro belches forth the commuters&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it becomes strange as suddenly commuters and metros have come up in the poem. As I say, every line of Burnt Norton seems unconnected, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43289/easter-1916&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minute by minute they change&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T17:44:46.127" Title="Understanding the meaning of &quot;Eructation of unhealthy souls&quot; in T.S. Eliot's Burnt Norton" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2020-08-24T18:36:20.227" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saki was likely taking a jab at the popular fiction of the time, in which a people of the upper class were often going in disguise or being mistaken for commoners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10722" LastActivityDate="2020-08-24T18:36:20.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15312" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17078" CreationDate="2020-08-24T19:06:37.860" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dante's Divine comedy is divided up in Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory), and Paradiso (Paradise) – each of these consists of 33 cantos. Now I'm wondering if there is any indication about how long one canto would be, or if time exists in none, one off, or all of the cantiche?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know he started the night before Good Friday and got back Wednesday after Easter (6 days). But did time pass the same way as it would on &amp;quot;Earth&amp;quot; and would therefore constitute 2 days per cantica?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one case Dante dedicates 13 cantos to the eighth circle of Hell, which if time exists there is substantially long (as noted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/questions/2321/why-does-dante-spend-so-much-time-in-malebolge&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is : How much time did one canto in Dante's Divine Comedy represent (if any)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10725" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-24T20:40:09.657" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T21:57:14.913" Title="How much time did one canto in Dante's Divine Comedy represent (if any)?" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-24T19:28:50.563" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Jorge Borges say that all great literature is filled with ambiguities and obscurities? That it takes two people to write a novel, one the writer and the other the reader. If so, could you source it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T15:49:57.430" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T15:49:57.430" Title="Did Jorge Borges write that it takes two to write a novel?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15291" CreationDate="2020-08-24T20:57:51.393" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might help if you look at the possible meanings of both words - ‘balk’ and ‘account’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Balk’ has a range of meanings, and they might seem quite different; however, as is often the case, the etymology of the word offers an interesting interconnecting link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the OED on the origin of ‘balk’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Common Germanic, presenting several variant stems, with partial&#xA;differentiation of sense: Old English &lt;em&gt;balca&lt;/em&gt; ridge, bank = Old Frisian&#xA;&lt;em&gt;balca&lt;/em&gt;, Old Saxon &lt;em&gt;balco&lt;/em&gt;, Middle Dutch &lt;em&gt;balke, balc&lt;/em&gt;, Dutch &lt;em&gt;balk&lt;/em&gt;, Old&#xA;High German &lt;em&gt;balcho, balco&lt;/em&gt;, Middle High German &lt;em&gt;balke&lt;/em&gt;, German &lt;em&gt;balken&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;‘beam, trabs’, also Old English &lt;em&gt;bolca&lt;/em&gt; ‘gangway of a ship’, and Old&#xA;Norse &lt;em&gt;bjalki&lt;/em&gt; (Swedish &lt;em&gt;biælke, bielke&lt;/em&gt;, Danish &lt;em&gt;bjelke&lt;/em&gt;) ‘beam’,&#xA;corresponding respectively to a Germanic ablaut-series *balkon- ,&#xA;*bolkon- , *belkon- ; also Old Norse &lt;em&gt;bálkr, bǫ́lkr&lt;/em&gt;, ‘beam, bar, partition, division’, Old Swedish &lt;em&gt;balker, bolker&lt;/em&gt;, Swedish &lt;em&gt;balk&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;‘beam, balk, partition, section of a law’ &amp;lt; Germanic *balku-z . Old&#xA;English &lt;em&gt;balc&lt;/em&gt; ‘porca’ (see 3), is either an error for &lt;em&gt;balca&lt;/em&gt;, or = Old&#xA;Norse &lt;em&gt;bálkr&lt;/em&gt;. The relation of Old English &lt;em&gt;bælc&lt;/em&gt; ‘covering (? flooring)’&#xA;is doubtful. The original sense was perhaps ‘bar’; compare Latin&#xA;&lt;em&gt;suf-fla(g)men&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;lt; Aryan *bhalg-, bhlag- . The Old English &lt;em&gt;balca&lt;/em&gt; (balc)&#xA;and Old Norse &lt;em&gt;bálkr&lt;/em&gt; appear to be combined in the Middle English;&#xA;whether the latter distinguished &lt;em&gt;balke&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;balk&lt;/em&gt;, the evidence does&#xA;not show. &lt;em&gt;Balk&lt;/em&gt; is the analogous spelling: compare &lt;em&gt;stalk, talk, walk&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;etc.; but &lt;em&gt;baulk&lt;/em&gt; is frequent, and in Billiards (sense 9) the&#xA;prevailing spelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the OED on the usage of ‘balk’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to ploughing: To make balks in ploughing; to plough&#xA;up in ridges. (This sense is now obsolete.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to missing or avoiding, overlooking, refusing,&#xA;letting slip, and stopping short at an obstacle.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1783    Ainsworth's Thes. Linguæ Latinæ (new ed.) at Balk &lt;em&gt;I will not&#xA;balk your house&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1848    L. Hunt Jar of Honey Pref. 4   &lt;em&gt;No topic is&#xA;baulked if it come uppermost.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a1784    S. Johnson in Boswell Life Johnson (1831) I. 236   &lt;em&gt;I&#xA;never ... balked an invitation out to dinner.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1826    H. Smith Gaieties &amp;amp; Gravities in C. Gibbon Casquet of Lit.&#xA;(1877) I. 326/2   &lt;em&gt;My adviser insisted upon my not baulking my luck.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1862    Melbourne Leader 5 July   &lt;em&gt;His horse balked at a leap, and&#xA;threw him.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to checking or thwarting: to check, hinder,&#xA;thwart (a person or his action); to check (feelings, or a person in&#xA;his feelings); to frustrate, foil, render unsuccessful.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1821    Ld. Byron Two Foscari  i. i, in  Sardanapalus 195   &lt;em&gt;They shall&#xA;not balk my entrance.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1746    Earl of Malmesbury Lett. I. 37   &lt;em&gt;Lord Talbot was not much&#xA;baulked with this rebuke.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1873    H. Spencer Study Sociol. vii. 161   &lt;em&gt;Time after time our hopes&#xA;are balked.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1848    C. Kingsley Saint's Trag.  ii. v. 90   &lt;em&gt;With which we try to&#xA;balk the curse of Eve.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the OED on the usage of  ‘account’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to counting, enumerating, or calculating numerically&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to accounting for money paid and received&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to a statement of money held, etc., and related&#xA;senses, for instance, a statement as to the discharge of&#xA;responsibilities generally; an answering for conduct&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to estimation, consideration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Senses relating to narration, relation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three senses might be well understood; for the last two senses, here are some examples from the OED:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1920    J. Sargeaunt Trees, Shrubs, &amp;amp; Plants of Virgil 46   &lt;em&gt;The kind&#xA;[of spelt] called ‘rutilum’ had ... a reddish grain, and was held in less&#xA;account.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1992    B. Unsworth Sacred Hunger xxvii. 264   &lt;em&gt;Anyone that has not&#xA;these marks they look on as of no account.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1953    V. Nabokov Let. 2 May in  Sel. Lett. (1989) 137   &lt;em&gt;I wonder if&#xA;your account of your trip will make me Europe-sick, or at least&#xA;France-sick.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2009    P. Glennie &amp;amp; N. Thrift Shaping Day ii. 56   &lt;em&gt;Our contention ... is&#xA;that Martin's omission of the clock from his account of church and&#xA;parish life provides a specific instance of the&#xA;‘taken-for-grantedness’ of timekeeping.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2004    HMV Choice Mar. 30/2   &lt;em&gt;Viennese pianist Fellner's account of&#xA;the opening Prelude In C Major is, accordingly, songful and&#xA;mellifluous.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, Whitman’s intended meaning could be interpreted through usage in senses related to thwarting, checking, foiling, frustrating for ‘balk’ and in senses related to consideration, narration, relation for ‘account’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The love of the body of man or woman balks account,  the body itself&#xA;balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is&#xA;perfect. The expression of the face balks account,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Whitman telling us that he feels that the nature of love of the body and the nature of the body itself frustrate all attempts to give them a full description? In the preceding part of the poem Whitman asks the questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal&#xA;themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who&#xA;defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the&#xA;soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps, in Whitman’s view, these questions ‘balk account’, or frustrate attempts to find answers to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be impossible to define the body, but it is possible to observe people and see manifestations of the nature of the human body in people's behaviour; Whitman describes people and their bodies in the remainder of the poem - for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the&#xA;horse-man in his saddle,  Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is important to remember that we can explore the meaning of words and their etymologies, and attempt to interpret the writer’s intentions, however, at some point, we enter into the territory where the reader must make his or her own decisions as to what the writer’s words mean for him or her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Framework for 'why this choice of phrasing'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, examining how an author uses a particular word across his/her works might give a deeper insight into his possible intended meaning, as there may be unique patterns in his usage that might offer clues as to what significance any particular word may have held for him. Here are a few other examples of the use of ‘balk’ in Whitman works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these&#xA;balk others they do not balk me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No danger shall balk Columbia’s lovers,  If need be a thousand shall&#xA;sternly immolate themselves for one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,&#xA;For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other instances of use of balk, balks, balk’d in Whitman’s works can be found here: &lt;a href=&quot;https://quotations.ch/quotations/#authors=Whitman&amp;amp;words=balks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;balks&lt;/a&gt;;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quotations.ch/quotations/#authors=Whitman&amp;amp;words=balk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;balk&lt;/a&gt;;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://quotations.ch/quotations/#authors=Whitman&amp;amp;words=balk%27d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;balk'd&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. For the sake of completeness, here is the OED on the origin of ‘account’:&#xA;Anglo-Norman &lt;em&gt;acunt, acunte, acount, acounte, account, accompt&lt;/em&gt;, Anglo-Norman and Old French &lt;em&gt;acont&lt;/em&gt;, Anglo-Norman and Old French, Middle French &lt;em&gt;aconte&lt;/em&gt;, Anglo-Norman and Middle French &lt;em&gt;acompte, accompte&lt;/em&gt; financial statement or record, rendering of accounts (12th cent.), calculation, reckoning, claim, mention, reason, narrative, (in law) action of account, plea in an action (all 13th cent.), worth, importance (16th cent. or earlier), probably &amp;lt;  &lt;em&gt;a-&lt;/em&gt; a- prefix5 + &lt;em&gt;conte, cunte&lt;/em&gt; count n.1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.P.S. Probably that &amp;quot;couple of non-reliable sources&amp;quot; that claim &amp;quot;it means &amp;quot;cannot be described&amp;quot;&amp;quot; are not particularly &amp;quot;non-reliable&amp;quot;:)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10550" LastEditorUserId="10550" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T22:20:12.113" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T22:20:12.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T00:16:12.323" Score="6" ViewCount="275" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rowling recently came out as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;radical feminist&lt;/a&gt;, but the book series she is famous for seems to have some problems from that perspective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the main character is a male, anointed as the chosen one. (He even bears a stigmata, a tiny scar, but nothing extreme like Sparrowhawk's horrific scarring from Earthsea that would make Harry not cute to the opposite sex.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My take on radical feminism is that it is a response to conditions like violence against women.  (I think of works like the SCUM manifesto.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does the Harry Potter series fare when viewed through a radical feminist lens?  Through a non-radical feminist lens?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question was inspired by a re-read of Earthsea, including Tehanu, which hadn't been written when I first read them.  (It was apparently considered controversial for being feminist when it was first released, and is arguably the greatest of those novels in stature in terms of social critique, which tends to distinguish the most important speculative fiction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that feminist literature extends back at least to Euripides, with his Trojan War plays &amp;amp; the Medea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T19:58:06.520" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:09:08.647" Title="What is the radical feminist take on Harry Potter?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T02:34:28.000" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_on_Tariffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Tariffs&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are only two classes that really can’t help taking life seriously—schoolgirls of thirteen and Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt. &lt;strong&gt;Albanians come under another heading; they take life whenever they get the opportunity.  The one Albanian that I was ever on speaking terms with was rather a decadent example.  He was a Christian and a grocer, and I don’t fancy he had ever killed anybody.&lt;/strong&gt;  I didn’t like to question him on the subject—that showed my delicacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Reginald state that Albanians &amp;quot;take life whenever they get the opportunity&amp;quot;? Was the basis of this statement a concurrently existing stereotype?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T13:43:44.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T13:43:44.030" Title="Why do Albanians &quot;take life whenever they get the opportunity&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15318" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15415" CreationDate="2020-08-25T02:49:00.970" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/Reginald_in_Russia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald in Russia&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess’s salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are mentioning the figures Louis Quinze and Wilhelm II significant in relation to the disparate style of furniture in the room?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T03:20:25.497" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:28:37.303" Title="What is the influence of Louis Quinze and Wilhelm II on furniture styling?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald-in-russia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15326" CreationDate="2020-08-25T03:01:23.000" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/The_Reticence_of_Lady_Anne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Reticence of Lady Anne&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Tarquinio lay astretch on the Persian rug, basking in the firelight with superb indifference to the possible ill-humour of Lady Anne. His pedigree was as flawlessly Persian as the rug, and his ruff was coming into the glory of its second winter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ruff of Don Tarquinio, A Cat , is said to be &amp;quot;coming into the glory of its second winter&amp;quot;. What is Don Tarquinio's ruff? Is it implied to be apart of their body, or is it, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjUtuWTrrXrAhXfyzgGHWCIASkQFjAOegQICRAB&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lexico.com%2Fdefinition%2Fruff&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw3XXFt3CBqZYcF9FDWrvyI0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; defines it, &amp;quot;a projecting starched frill worn round the neck, characteristic of Elizabethan and Jacobean costume.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T08:36:07.473" Title="What is the Ruff of Don Tarquinio?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15320" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15339" CreationDate="2020-08-25T03:19:34.973" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/The_Reticence_of_Lady_Anne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Reticence of Lady Anne&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Egbert and Lady Anne would have preferred something from The Yeomen of the Guard, which was their favourite opera. In matters artistic they had a similarity of taste. They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted &amp;quot;Bad News,&amp;quot; suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the remark &amp;quot;Bad News&amp;quot; which both Egbert and Lady Anne are able to &amp;quot;see what it was meant to convey&amp;quot; and are then able to &amp;quot;explain it to friends of duller intelligence.&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:26:17.760" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T13:57:35.680" Title="What is the hidden meaning of &quot;Bad News&quot; known to Egbert and Lady Anne?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald-in-russia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15321" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15639" CreationDate="2020-08-25T03:35:44.027" Score="4" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/The_Lost_Sanjak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Sanjak&lt;/a&gt;, Saki Writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and, in the midst of a string of questions on indifferent topics, the examining counsel asked me with a diabolical suddenness if I could tell the Court the whereabouts of Novibazar. I felt the question to be a crucial one; something told me that the answer was St. Petersburg or Baker Street. I hesitated, looked helplessly round at the sea of tensely expectant faces, pulled myself together, and chose Baker Street. And then I knew that everything was lost. The prosecution had no difficulty in demonstrating that an individual, even moderately versed in the affairs of the Near East, could never have so unceremoniously dislocated Novibazar from its accustomed corner of the map. It was an answer which the Salvation Army captain might conceivably have made—and I had made it. The circumstantial evidence connecting the Salvationist with the crime was overwhelmingly convincing, and I had inextricably identified myself with the Salvationist. And thus it comes to pass that in ten minutes' time I shall be hanged by the neck until I am dead in expiation of the murder of myself, which murder never took place, and of which, in any case, I am necessarily innocent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Chaplain returned to his quarters some fifteen minutes later, the black flag was floating over the prison tower. Breakfast was waiting for him in the dining-room, but he first passed into his library, and, taking up the Times Atlas, consulted a map of the Balkan Peninsula. &amp;quot;A thing like that,&amp;quot; he observed, closing the volume with a snap, &amp;quot;might happen to any one.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1)  What  is the significance of the raised black flag? Was this a regular practise at the time, of raising a black flag when an execution or killing occured?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) What is the meaning and implication of the Chaplains concluding remark, &amp;quot;A thing like that, might happen to any one.&amp;quot;? Is he implying that Novibazar is so insignificant and that ignorance of its location is understandable, thus the court case may have been fixed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T03:42:25.563" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T17:56:01.697" Title="What is the significance of a raised black flag?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald-in-russia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15322" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15373" CreationDate="2020-08-25T04:04:56.337" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ac/jr/001.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Living Chattel&lt;/a&gt;, Anton Chekhov writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Impersonal Witness] I pressed Groholsky's hand, and got into the train. He bowed towards the carriage, and went to the water-barrel—I suppose he was thirsty!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is implied when Groholsky is seen heading toward the water barrel? That he is intending on drowning himself perhaps, or that he earnestly is thirsty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:19:08.673" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T16:37:02.403" Title="Why does Groholsky head toward the water barrel?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15370" CreationDate="2020-08-25T04:24:02.510" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Enigmatic_Nature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Enigmatic Nature&lt;/a&gt;, Anton Chekhov writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I am a suffering soul in some page of Dostoevsky. Reveal my soul to the world, Voldemar.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Happiness comes tapping at my window, I had only to let it in - but -&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later concludes the story with the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But what—what stands in your way? I implore you tell me! What is it?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Another old general, very well off——&amp;quot;&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The broken fan conceals the pretty little face. The author props on his fist his thought—heavy brow and ponders with the air of a master in psychology. The engine is whistling and hissing while the window curtains flush red with the glow of the setting sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Why does she voluntarily seek out &amp;quot;Another old general, very well off&amp;quot;, when she had just gained wealth on the death of the previous one, and had intended to marry the person she actually loved after his death?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) And how does Fyodor Dostoyevsky relate to the character(the Lady)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:16:59.170" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T08:08:14.470" Title="Why is the Lady &quot;a suffering soul in some page of Dostoyevsky&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15319" CreationDate="2020-08-25T08:36:07.473" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cat’s pedigree is Persian. If we look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://cfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/persian-standard.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Persian Breed Standard&lt;/a&gt; we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;COAT: long and thick, standing off from the body. Of fine texture, glossy and full of life. Long all over the body, including the shoulders. The ruff immense and continuing in a deep frill between the front legs. Ear and toe tufts long. Brush very full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this we can appreciate that the ruff is the collar of long hair around the animal’s neck that stands out somewhat as an Elizabethan ruff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T08:36:07.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15328" CreationDate="2020-08-14T10:11:27.143" Score="2" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I know that &amp;quot;dole&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;benefit paid by the state to the unemployed&amp;quot;. But I wonder how it is related to the following context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I wish you didn’t have to go away,’ she blurts out and although she&#xA;doesn’t cry, her face contorts into anger and sadness and she punches&#xA;the wall of the bus shelter three times, hard. She feels strong with&#xA;Katie. All the rest of it doesn’t matter when Katie’s here. When she’s&#xA;with Katie she thinks she could go robbing from one of the empty&#xA;houses like the men do and steal an iron bar or something and bash&#xA;Tony and her ma and stupid Daniel in with it. Sometimes she sees it in&#xA;her head. Her doing just that. Katie watching and laughing and&#xA;clapping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Me too, me too,’ Katie says and wraps her arms tight around&#xA;her. ‘I hate not seeing you.’ She breaks away and rummages in her bag.&#xA;‘But it’s only two weeks. It feels like forever but it’s only fourteen&#xA;days.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘One dole cheque,’&lt;/strong&gt; I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Exactly.’ Charlotte knows Katie&#xA;doesn’t understand dole cheques any more than Charlotte understands&#xA;music lessons, but she loves her for pretending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Cross Her Heart&lt;/em&gt; by Sarah Pinborough&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10556" OwnerDisplayName="BeatsMe" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T13:33:07.023" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T08:20:45.070" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;dole cheque&quot; in the following context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;cross-her-heart&gt;&lt;sarah-pinborough&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15327" CreationDate="2020-08-14T10:15:51.300" Score="5" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But it’s only two weeks. It feels like forever but it’s only fourteen days.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘One dole cheque,’ I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dole cheques are paid every fourteen days. Therefore ‘One dole cheque,’ re-emphasises fourteen days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10831" OwnerDisplayName="Greybeard" LastActivityDate="2020-08-14T10:15:51.300" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15329" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15330" CreationDate="2020-07-12T11:28:11.517" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/White_Fang/16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;White Fang&lt;/a&gt;, Jack London writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was preëminently unbeautiful.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is &amp;quot;antithesis&amp;quot; used in the example provided and what does the sentence &amp;quot;To antithesis was due his naming&amp;quot; actually mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" OwnerDisplayName="TomDot Com" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:03:20.873" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:03:20.873" Title="Use of &quot;antithesis&quot; by Jack London" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;white-fang&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15329" CreationDate="2020-07-12T11:37:09.023" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In your question, you left out a previous sentence that is important for figuring out what this means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This man was called &amp;quot;Beauty&amp;quot; by the other men of the fort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What your sentence means is that it's an &amp;quot;ironic nickname&amp;quot;, like when a two meter tall man is called &amp;quot;Shorty&amp;quot;; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IronicNickname&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVtropes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=antithesis&amp;amp;oq=antithesis&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j0l6j69i60.10542j0j7&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antithesis&lt;/a&gt;: a person or thing that is the direct opposite of someone or something else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Jack London is saying that he was given his nickname because it's the direct opposite of one of his attributes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: the OP asked about the grammaticality of the sentence. Here is my answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence is inverted (which is grammatical, but somewhat uncommon); in the more usual word order, it says &amp;quot;His naming was due to antithesis.&amp;quot; Here, &amp;quot;was due to&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;was because of&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;naming&amp;quot; means being given a name, so put in more everyday language, the sentence becomes &amp;quot;he was given his name because of antithesis.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" OwnerDisplayName="Peter Shor" LastActivityDate="2020-07-12T12:57:13.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15331" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15332" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'White Fang' (1906) by Jack London. Use this tag with the tag [jack-london]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:07:07.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15299" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:22:55.340" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many Swedish kings have been known for travelling incognito, but the most likely reference is to Gustav IV Adolf, who was deposed in 1809 and spent the rest of his life travelling the continent using the name Colonel Gustafsson (and other aliases). He would have met many people who at first didn't realize he was a former king of Sweden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the time Saki was writing ex-king Gustav would have been long dead (he died in 1837), but it's close enough in time that older people could still remember meeting him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_IV_Adolf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7595" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:22:55.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15334" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15335" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" Score="0" Body="Questions about the short-story collection 'Reginald in Russia' (1910) by Saki. Use this tag with the tag [saki]. For questions about specific stories from this collection, also add the tag [short-stories]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T09:23:18.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T10:36:47.243" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The works of the French philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques Derrida&lt;/a&gt; (1930 – 2004) had a significant impact on literary theory, leading to the development of a method of analysis known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deconstruction&lt;/a&gt;. (Derrida said deconstruction in his own writings did &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction#Not_a_method&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not refer to a method&lt;/a&gt;, but that is a different minefield.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Derrida's work is difficult to read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just read some Derrida and I gotta say...I feel ten times more stupid than when I started it. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/CarrShelb/status/1172656925676310528&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PhD student Shelby Carr on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;, 14 September 2019).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, people try to find good introductions to Derrida. On a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/46u0vb/any_good_books_that_introduce_derrida/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reddit thread from four years ago&lt;/a&gt;, somebody said (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that the best book is Jonathon [sic] Culler's &lt;em&gt;On Deconstruction&lt;/em&gt; - &lt;strong&gt;it was the only book that Derrida himself said was a good introduction&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statement has no source, so I'm curious to know where Derrida said this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T20:39:09.367" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T20:39:09.367" Title="Where did Derrida say that Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a good introduction to his work?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jacques-derrida&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15762" CreationDate="2020-08-25T12:36:13.093" Score="3" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;Hoo's fully resolved t' sew up meawth an' eend&amp;quot; means in the following stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eawr Marget declares had hoo cloo'as to put on,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo'd goo up to Lunnon an' talk to th' greet mon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An' if things were na awtered when there hoo had been,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Hoo's fully resolved t' sew up meawth an' eend&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Hoo's neawt to say again t' king,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    But hoo loikes a fair thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An' hoo says hoo can tell when hoo's hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2153/2153-h/2153-h.htm#c4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, &lt;em&gt;Mary Barton&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is published in 1848 in the United Kingdom, Alice hosted a tea party at her own house, to which Mary and Margaret were invited. During the party, Alice asked Margaret, a very good singer, to sing &amp;quot;The Oldham Weaver.&amp;quot; At this request, Margaret began to sing this Lancashire ditty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This song is about a very poor cotton weaver, who lives with his daughter Margaret (or Marget).&#xA;They are very poor so that they have nothing to eat, and they are being driven to starvation.&#xA;That is why Margaret is determined to go to London to see &amp;quot;the great man&amp;quot; to explain their circumstances.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what the stanza in bold means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T00:42:25.700" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T00:42:25.700" Title="What does &quot;Hoo's fully resolved t' sew up meawth an' eend&quot; mean in &quot;Mary Barton&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;elizabeth-gaskell&gt;&lt;mary-barton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15338" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:03:14.697" Score="4" ViewCount="209" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this English (could be a translation) short story ~20 years ago in my school. There was an executioner who executed convicts on an electric chair. He never cared about (or looked into) the convicts. Then he comes across the fact the next convict is a young man of a cheerful nature. (I don't remember if that exact word is used). And while going through the things of this young man, he comes across this watch which he gifted to his son, and it was too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember much details about that story, except the use of the phrase &amp;quot;throwing the switch&amp;quot;. I looked online but couldn't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What short story is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10715" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T06:27:58.567" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T13:26:06.277" Title="Short story: an executioner, uncaring to convicts, discovers a watch that he gifted to his son" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15320" CreationDate="2020-08-25T13:57:35.680" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is explained by the previous sentence, which &amp;quot;tells&amp;quot; what the specific description of a painting &amp;quot;shows&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This says that their taste in paintings is to prefer things that don't need much explanation: a picture that tells its own story, the story being clear enough just from looking at the picture itself and its title or caption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted &amp;quot;Bad News,&amp;quot; suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This description is of a painting whose context and &amp;quot;story&amp;quot; is clear just from looking at it and its &amp;quot;marginal note&amp;quot; or caption. A warhorse would suggest some military connection; the horse being in disarray, staggering, and without its rider, suggests that some ill has befallen it; and the women being pale and swooning sugests that its very appearance heralds some bigger misfortune. All of this taken together points towards a &amp;quot;military catastrophe&amp;quot; such as a grave defeat in battle, this horse being a survivor even if its rider might be dead or injured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the picture tells its own story, and just in case it's not clear enough just from looking, the caption lends some &amp;quot;generous assistance&amp;quot;. Knowing that the painting depicts &amp;quot;Bad News&amp;quot; just confirms what could have been guessed from looking at it: the horse's appearance heralds some bad news, presumably something related to its experience as a warhorse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence again tells us what the second-to-last one did: what they like in paintings is to be able to see what it's meant to convey. Their inner art critic is good enough to do that, and the implication is that they may enjoy feeling superior to their friends who have less experience of interpreting art, referred to somewhat superciliously as people &amp;quot;of duller intelligence&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T13:57:35.680" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T14:48:25.657" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book in elementary school (less than 10 years old) so I think it was a young adult or children's book. It's about inhabitants of a valley that were cut off from the outside world. The main characters were kids in school. It was like an agrarian society of some sort, like a small village or maybe a series of small villages. I think people from outside are coming into the valley and the characters inside are worried about it upsetting their peaceful society (but it's not dystopian, their society really is peaceful).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most clear distinguishing detail I can remember is that the main characters find a bag with a map or something like that in it, and they are shocked when they find out the bag is made out of a mysterious material that turns out to be leather (they don't kill animals so they have no leather).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kids try to find the exit to the valley I think. There may be like a cliff or canyon involved at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The characters might have been animals, like rabbits maybe, but I can't remember for sure. It was all text, not a picture book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was written in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10728" LastEditorUserId="10728" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T15:04:46.587" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T15:04:46.587" Title="Book about people cut off from rest of the world that don't kill animals" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15352" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:46:42.710" Score="5" ViewCount="100" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;An' hoo says hoo can tell when hoo's hurt&amp;quot; means in the following stanzas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;VII.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eawr Marget declares had hoo cloo'as to put on,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo'd goo up to Lunnon an' talk to th' greet mon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An' if things were na awtered when there hoo had been,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo's fully resolved t' sew up meawth an' eend;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Hoo's neawt to say again t' king,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    But hoo loikes a fair thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;An' hoo says hoo can tell when hoo's hurt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2153/2153-h/2153-h.htm#c4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, &lt;em&gt;Mary Barton&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is published in 1848 in the United Kingdom, Alice hosted a tea party at her own house, to which Mary and Margaret were invited. During the party, Alice asked Margaret, a very good singer, to sing &amp;quot;The Oldham Weaver.&amp;quot; At this request, Margaret began to sing this Lancashire ditty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This song is about a very poor cotton weaver, who lives with his daughter Margaret (or Marget). They are very poor so that they have nothing to eat, and they are being driven to starvation. That is why Margaret is determined to go to London to see &amp;quot;the great man&amp;quot; to explain their circumstances.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I could not understand what the stanza in bold means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean she can &amp;quot;speak&amp;quot; when she &amp;quot;suffers&amp;quot;? Or that she can &amp;quot;discern/know&amp;quot; when she &amp;quot;suffers&amp;quot;...?&#xA;(These are just my wild guesses.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T20:39:51.723" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T15:42:14.517" Title="What does “An' hoo says hoo can tell when hoo's hurt” mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;elizabeth-gaskell&gt;&lt;mary-barton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15342" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15343" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British novelist Sarah Pinborough (born 1972) and her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T15:50:41.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:55:08.033" Score="2" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;While answering &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15320/17&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt;, I read Saki's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/The_Reticence_of_Lady_Anne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Reticence of Lady Anne&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; from his &lt;em&gt;Reginald in Russia&lt;/em&gt; collection. Inasmuch as a story this short can be said to have &amp;quot;plotlines&amp;quot;, there are two parts of this story (spoiler alert!):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The main plot is Egbert trying to resolve an argument with his wife, who maintains an icy aloofness and refuses to reply to anything he says. At the end of the story, it's revealed that she's been dead for two hours.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A subplot introduces two pets, the singing bullfinch and the Persian cat. At the end of the story, the cat, &amp;quot;carrying out a long-formed theory of action with the precision of mature deliberation&amp;quot;, apparently eats the bird.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any symbolic or thematic connection between these two plotlines? It feels like there should be, otherwise why put them both together in the same story, but I can't make the link.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T07:47:16.657" Title="Is there any connection between the reticence of Lady Anne and the cat-bird subplot?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald-in-russia&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15345" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15346" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Cross Her Heart' (2018) by Sarah Pinborough. Use this tag with the tag [sarah-pinborough]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" LastActivityDate="2020-08-25T15:55:57.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15347" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-25T16:27:00.397" Score="16" ViewCount="3668" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Shadow is trying to tell Wednesday about his dream with the thunderbirds, Wednesday gets quite angry and then says they're heading to San Francisco:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I dreamed of thunderbirds...,&amp;quot; said Shadow. &amp;quot;And a tower. Skulls...&amp;quot; It seemed to him very important to recount his dream.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I know what you were dreaming. Everybody damn well knows what you were dreaming. Christ almighty. What's the point in hiding you, if you're going to start to fucking advertise?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shadow said nothing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There was a pause at the other end of the telephone. &amp;quot;I'll be there in the morning,&amp;quot; said Wednesday. It sounded like the anger had died down. &amp;quot;We're going to San Francisco. The flowers in your hair are optional.&amp;quot; And the line went dead.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 11&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the line &amp;quot;the flowers in your hair are optional&amp;quot; mean? I presume it has something to do with the fact that Shadow was &amp;quot;advertising&amp;quot; where he was, but I'm not quite sure exactly what this is supposed to be implying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T22:14:20.100" Title="What does Wednesday mean by &quot;the flowers in your hair are optional&quot;?" Tags="&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;american-gods&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15347" CreationDate="2020-08-25T17:27:01.280" Score="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a reference to the song ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/Fil7iAyQJRA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear [Some] Flowers in Your Hair)&lt;/a&gt;’. Written by John Phillips and performed by Scott Mackenzie, it was one of the best-selling singles of the 1960s and has been called the unofficial anthem of the counter-culture movements of that decade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you're going to San Francisco&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you're going to San Francisco&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You're gonna meet some gentle people there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether there is a deeper significance to the reference in the book, I can’t say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T09:38:46.830" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T09:38:46.830" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15349" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T00:56:36.870" Score="14" ViewCount="4403" Body="&lt;p&gt;At roughly page 155 of &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;, assuming that the English original follows roughly the same page numbers as my rather sloppy Swedish translation from 1970, king Théoden mentions that he now misses &amp;quot;both my old and new advisor&amp;quot;, as Gandalf is away at the moment, rushing around on Shadowfax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Gríma was his old advisor, I assume that he means that Gandalf is his new. So does that mean that he actually wishes for the evil traitor Gríma to give him advice, having just banished him from his land days before? Or is Gandalf considered his &amp;quot;old advisor&amp;quot; (since Gandalf did use to visit him every now and then to give advice), and he's referring to somebody else as his new one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gríma clearly did not give him good advice, so it seems unthinkable that he misses his &amp;quot;old advisor&amp;quot;. This part, at least in my translation, is extremely ambiguous. Maybe the original is far clearer about who is being referred to, or I've missed some major plot point where he officially assigns somebody as his new advisor, and who is now also away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not too many things about the story is really confusing to me, besides the descriptions of the landscapes and areas, but this is one of them which I'd like explained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10732" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T07:03:36.353" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T09:38:56.877" Title="Does Théoden actually say that he misses Gríma (his &quot;old advisor&quot;) at one point in The Two Towers?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="6" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15351" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T03:01:50.393" Score="0" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cultural Marxism is a theory claiming that there exists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an unholy alliance of abortionists, feminists, globalists, homosexuals, intellectuals and socialists who have translated the far left’s old campaign to take away people’s privileges from “class struggle” into “identity politics” and multiculturalism. (Samuel Moyn, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The New York Times&lt;/em&gt;, 13.11.2018).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People defending this theory trace Cultural Marxism back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frankfurt School&lt;/a&gt;, a school of social theory and critical philosophy founded at the Goethe University Frankfurt in the 1920s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a response published on the website of the Mises Institute, Allen Mendenhall wrote a response claiming that &lt;a href=&quot;https://mises.org/wire/cultural-marxism-real&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Cultural Marxism Is Real&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (January 2019). In his article, Mendenhall attempts to trace all major schools of literary theory (not only Marxist literary theory but also New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and New Historicism) back to Cultural Marxism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section on Cultural Marxism&lt;/a&gt; in the Wikipedia article about the Frankfurt School cites Joan Braune writing that scholars of the Frankfurt School are called &amp;quot;Critical Theorists&amp;quot;, rather than &amp;quot;Cultural Marxists&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Critical theory&lt;/a&gt;, a social philosophy of the Frankfurt School described on Wikipedia as &amp;quot;Western-Marxist&amp;quot;, seems to be a lens of media criticism rooted in literary criticism. However, even after reading the Wikipedia article, I'm still clueless about it and its connection with the theory of &amp;quot;Cultural Marxism&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, what are Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory? Did both emerge from literary criticism? If yes, how? If not, how are they related to literary criticism?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10734" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T21:24:02.153" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T21:24:02.153" Title="What are Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory and how are they related to literary criticism?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="12" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15341" CreationDate="2020-08-26T03:03:11.017" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to John Harland, in his 1875 &lt;em&gt;Ballads and Songs of Lancashire&lt;/em&gt;, the song - which he knew as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/balladssongsofla00harl/page/168/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jone O'Grinfilt Junior&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; - was written just after the Battle of Waterloo and was once very popular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His last lines are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hoo says hoo'd begin, un' feight blood up to th' e'en,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo's nout agen th' king, bur hoo loikes a fair thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Un' hoo says hoo con tell when hoo's hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says, &amp;quot;This ballad is still a favourite in many parts of Lancashire; and the last three lines have become 'house-hold words.'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked for other versions to see if any of them made the sense clearer. As often happens with folk songs it became mixed up with a quite different song. And to make matters worse, they were known by different names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ballad called &lt;a href=&quot;http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/05000/03775.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Original Joan O' Grinfield&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is at the Bodleian Library. It has the Roud (folk song index) number 1460, and is a different song from yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However &lt;a href=&quot;http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/static/images/sheets/30000/25623.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Joan O'Grinfield&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (Roud 937), has almost the same words as yours but with the Oldham dialect turned down a notch. Unfortunately the last line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And hoo ses hoo can tell when hoos hurt.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is still sufficiently Oldham to keep us guessing at its meaning!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps the writer left out the word &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; because it didn't scan. Then it could mean &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;And she says she can tell when she's been hurt&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; — a bit like the still-common line &amp;quot;I know when I'm not wanted&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Harland's remark that the last three lines &amp;quot;have become 'house-hold words'&amp;quot; makes me wonder if &amp;quot;I know when I'm hurt&amp;quot; was simply a saying of the time. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=cAE8KD9BiLAC&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA120&amp;amp;lpg=RA1-PA120&amp;amp;dq=Punch%20%22There%20you%20go%20with%20your%20eye%20out!%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=MfzyP1F6Tp&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U234kTbOcfLj-m7eX3qhV50q_2Z_Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj574fo7LfrAhXKWRUIHau-AVcQ6AEwBHoECAEQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Punch%20%22There%20you%20go%20with%20your%20eye%20out!%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Punch of 1877&lt;/a&gt; mentions some popular sayings from &amp;quot;other days&amp;quot;, including “What a shocking bad hat!”, “How are you off for soap?” and “There you go with your eye out!” whose appeal is barely comprehensible to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T20:39:29.877" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T20:39:29.877" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T03:48:02.710" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Doris Bargen, &lt;em&gt;The Search for Things Past in the Genji monogatari&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginning of the Genji, as established by literary tradition, is&#xA;indeed deceptively matter-of-fact about events of grave impact. Genji and his&#xA;stepmother Fujitsubo commit symbolic incest. Since it is said that the&#xA;Emperor Hsüan Tsung had originally intended Yang Kuei-fei for one of his&#xA;sons, Genji’s incestuous love is an even closer analogy to the Chinese legend&#xA;than his parents’ excessive but otherwise legitimate passion. With this form&#xA;of illicit love, Genji does more than break a moral taboo; he violates a social&#xA;religious taboo. To the pursuit of a mother figure is added the cuckolding of&#xA;the father on the one hand and the blasphemous offense against the sun&#xA;goddess Amaterasu-omikami on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bargen is very vague whether this is her own understanding or something that can be inferred from the original text. I don't see this offense mentioned in Genji. Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, is mentioned a couple of times in The Tale of Genji, but not where Bargen is pointing us to -- Genji's affair with Fujitsubo, and not in the manner Bargen describes here. So where in the Tale of Genji does it tell us that Genji's affair with Fujitsubo offends Amaterasu?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T13:07:18.870" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T13:07:18.870" Title="Where in the Tale of Genji does it say Genji's affair offends Amaterasu?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15354" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-08-26T05:42:49.803" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.nl/books?id=12e8PJ2T7sQC&amp;amp;pg=PT82&amp;amp;lpg=PT82&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original passage&lt;/a&gt; from the chapter Helm's Deep:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It will go ill with Wormtongue, if Gandalf comes upon him,’ said Théoden. ‘Nonetheless I miss now both my counsellors, the old and the new. But in this need we have no better choice than to go on, as Gandalf said, to Helm’s Gate, whether Erkenbrand be there or no. Is it known how great is the host that comes from the North?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that Swedish translation and your reverse translation are accurate. My &lt;em&gt;interpretation&lt;/em&gt; is that having a counselor, even a bad one, takes away the burden of having to make a decision. So at that very moment Théoden misses even Grima, though it's indeed not plausible that he actually wants him back permanently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T05:42:49.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-08-26T06:03:30.700" Score="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;to miss&amp;quot; usually means &amp;quot;to regret no longer having&amp;quot;. But it may mean simply &amp;quot;to no longer have&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;to have lost&amp;quot;, without experiencing regret. This seems to be the meaning here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/miss&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; on wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[8] (transitive) To be wanting; to lack something that should be present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The car is missing essential features.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that Tolkien is using a (pseudo?) archaic language for his heroes' speech, so while a modern person would be unlikely to use the word &amp;quot;to miss &lt;em&gt;someone&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; without emotional meaning, this might not be the case for Théoden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/The_Two_Towers/12e8PJ2T7sQC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;dq=It%20will%20go%20ill%20with%20Wormtongue,%20if%20Gandalf%20comes%20upon%20him&amp;amp;pg=PT82&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt; from &amp;quot;The Two Towers&amp;quot; actually could speak in favour of this interpretation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Has aught been seen of Gandalf?’ asked Théoden. ...&#xA;‘It will go ill with Wormtongue, if Gandalf comes upon him,’ said Théoden. ‘Nonetheless I miss now both my counsellors, the old and the new. &lt;strong&gt;But in this need we have no better choice&lt;/strong&gt; than to go on, as Gandalf said, to Helm’s Gate, whether Erkenbrand be there or no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could this mean? That he has warm feelings towards Grima (and Gandalf), but has to go to Helm’s Gate? Hardly makes sense. It looks like a statement of fact: a situation arose which would normally involve seeking advice from a counsellor, but none is present, so the King has to make a decision on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2658" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T13:19:11.087" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T13:19:11.087" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T10:10:59.203" Score="4" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_and_the_Beast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, there are several versions of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. Do any of them punish the bad sisters? If so, were the punishments &amp;quot;in line with&amp;quot; cultural expectations of what a reasonable punishment would be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10731" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T13:43:25.907" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T19:35:51.723" Title="Is there a version of Beauty and the Beast where the bad sisters get punished?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15357" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-26T11:47:27.680" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy associated with the University of Frankfurt's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Frankfurt_Institute_for_Social_Research&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Institute for Social Research (German: Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS)&lt;/a&gt;. It is known for its Critical Theory, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School&amp;amp;oldid=974993341#Critical_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; describes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Traditional and Critical Theory&lt;/em&gt; (1937), Max Horkheimer defined critical theory as social critique meant to effect sociologic change and realize intellectual emancipation, by way of enlightenment that is not dogmatic in its assumptions.[...] The purpose of critical theory is to analyze the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society, by showing that the dominant ideology misrepresents how human relations occur in the real world, and how such misrepresentations function to justify and legitimate the domination of people by capitalism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the philosophers and thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;György Lukács&lt;/a&gt;, who is best known in the field of literary criticism for his work &lt;em&gt;The Theory of the Novel&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Die Theorie des Romans&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School&amp;amp;oldid=974993341#Criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;section on criticism of the Frankfurt School&lt;/a&gt; cites &lt;em&gt;The Theory of the Novel&lt;/em&gt; as a work published in 1971, but the German edition of that work &lt;em&gt;Die Theorie des Romans&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1920 (and written in the years 1914-1915), long before Horkheimer's &lt;em&gt;Traditionelle und kritische Theorie&lt;/em&gt;, cited above, and before the establishment of the Frankfurt School itself. (1971 was when the English translation of &lt;em&gt;Die Theorie des Romans&lt;/em&gt; was published.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Wikipedia describes as the purpose of Critical Theory (&amp;quot;to analyze the true significance of the ruling understandings (the dominant ideology) generated in bourgeois society etc&amp;quot;) can be perfectly done in literary criticism. For this reason, I would like to find out &lt;strong&gt;whether literary theory (not just criticism) has been influenced by Critical Theory&lt;/strong&gt;, and, if yes, &lt;strong&gt;if there is something like a leading theorist in this area&lt;/strong&gt;[1]. I am especially interested in literary theory that predates the trend in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_studies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cultural studies&lt;/a&gt; to subsume literary studies that emerged in the 1960s or 1970s. (I have capitalised &amp;quot;Critical Theory&amp;quot; in order to refer to philosophies that emerged from the Frankfurt School and to emphasise I am not using the term as a synonym for literary theory.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] This is not intended to ask for opinions from Stack Exchange users. When reading about literary theory, it is easy to find out, for example, that Stephen Greenblatt established New Historicism and that Raymond Williams developed Cultural Materialism. I am looking for a leading figure or a seminal publication on Critical Theory applied to literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:44:57.753" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T03:06:33.207" Title="How did the Frankfurt School's Critical Theory influence literary theory?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15358" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15368" CreationDate="2020-08-26T13:30:01.537" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/128/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Touchstone&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke went to an old disused chalk-pit, where a dead man found after he fall from  above path, the edges of which were covered by bushes and branches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, apart from the robbery, a clear fall of over thirty feet is enough to account for a fractured skull. Will you stay here, Jervis, while I run up and look at the path?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He went off towards the entrance, and presently I heard him above, pulling aside the bushes, and after one or two trials, he appeared directly overhead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There are plenty of footprints on the path,&amp;quot; said he, &amp;quot;but nothing abnormal. No &lt;strong&gt;trampling&lt;/strong&gt; or signs of a struggle. I am going on a little farther.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;trampling&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Tread on and crush&amp;quot;, but does it here mean &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;violence&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;attack&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? As I can't see its dictionary meaning suitable here!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T08:29:26.350" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:12:01.897" Title="Does &quot;trampling&quot; mean &quot;violence&quot; or &quot;attack&quot; in &quot;The Touchstone&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-08-26T14:22:23.770" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just to back up the existing answers, here is the Swedish quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-Det kommer att gå Ormstunga illa, om Gandalf råkar på honom, sade Théoden. Inte desto mindre saknar jag nu båda mina rådgivare, den gamle såväl som den nya. Men som det nu är har vi intet annat att göra än bara fortsätta till Helms portar, som Gandalf sade, antingen Erkenbrand är där eller inte. Känner man till hur pass stor styrkan är, som kommer norrifrån?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;sakna&amp;quot; can be used in two ways just like the original English &amp;quot;to miss&amp;quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/sakna&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; on Wiktionary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Känna sorg eller längtan (för något eller någon man tidigare hade)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brevet sa: Du &lt;em&gt;saknas&lt;/em&gt; av oss alla, hoppas du kommer hem snart!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vara utan någonting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Den här artikeln &lt;em&gt;saknar&lt;/em&gt; rubrik.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Théoden is without doubt talking about Grima and Gandalf, and I think the ambiguity might be intentional, since Théoden is both without advisors and missing their advice. If either one had been there they would have helped him be sure about what to do, instead of just trusting that what Gandalf told him before is still valid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7595" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T14:22:23.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15360" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15316" CreationDate="2020-08-26T15:59:00.323" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Defining flavours of feminism is difficult, but let's go with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_feminism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical reordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is very difficult to see Harry Potter in this light. Indeed it's been a source of fierce debate whether Harry Potter is feminist at all. We'll return to this but in terms of radical feminism, the books make clear that the wizarding world is male-dominated. Most figures of wisdom, power and seniority in it are male. At the end of the books, this remains intact, having been saved by a male wizard (Harry). This is simply not compatible with radical feminism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also hard to square with a more generalist reading of feminism. However, digging into the plot and characters of the novels it is possible to discern some more feminist leanings between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For starters the hero, Harry, although male has some distinctly feminized characteristics which have likely helped to give the series its wide appeal. He often shows his bravery in the form of caring for his friends rather than physical &amp;quot;toughness&amp;quot;, for example. His greatest power stems from the fact he was saved by his mother's love. There are parallels to be drawn between Harry and the &amp;quot;Cindarella&amp;quot; motif in mythology - cruel parents and siblings, desertion etc. Harry is also an object of attraction in his world, as women are in the real world. In this sense, Harry's struggles shed light on the everyday struggles of women in society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there is, of course, Hermione. At first, she represents an archetypical &amp;quot;awkward&amp;quot; female: bossy, unpopular and over-emotional. However, her entire character arc across the novels is extremely positive. She goes from this weak starting point to one where, by the climax of the series, she is wise, resilient and very powerful. Indeed given her contributions it's not too much of a stretch to argue that she is instrumental in Harry's victory, far more so than the relatively useless Ron. From this point of view, the world is saved not really by a male but a female working in concert with a feminist ally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hermione is also the lynchpin of another motif of the series which is the reversal of oppression in all its forms. She begins this with her awakening to the unjust situation facing the House Elves. But by the end of the books, the fight against oppression has widened to all magical species who are maligned by Lord Voldermort's narrow view of magical &amp;quot;purity&amp;quot; as well as &amp;quot;half-blood&amp;quot; wizards. It is worth noting that this, in particular, prevents the novel from being read as radically feminist since its focus is on all forms of oppression, not just male oppression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, male oppression is very much a real thing in the wizarding world and the novels do reflect on how much misery this causes. Voldermort himself is driven to evil partly due to an abusive, uncaring father. Snape is perhaps the archetypical &amp;quot;Incel&amp;quot;, a lonely man made angry and bitter by his one-sided pursuit of a woman who rejects him. There are various other examples such as Lockheart and the family history of both Sirius Black and Dumbledore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to why the author of a series of novels which are quasi-feminist at best has come out as a radical feminist, this is no great difficulty. Rowling herself has said that although she identifies as a feminist there was no conscious effort to make her novels a feminist mouthpiece. And Rowling's radical feminist views have only become prominent over the last couple of years, a decade after the novels were complete and plenty of time for someone to take on new, or more radical views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wtamu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/11310/20/GREIF-THESIS-2015.pdf?sequence=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Women In Harry Potter's World: A Feminist Perspective. Grief, Julia, MA Thesis, West Texas A&amp;amp;M University, 2015&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sosyalarastirmalar.com/cilt2/sayi9pdf/mikulan_krunoslav.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harry Potter through the Focus of Feminist Literary Theory:&#xA;Examples of (Un)Founded Criticism. Mikulan, Krunoslav. The Journal of International Social Research, Volume 2 / 9 Fall 2009&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T10:09:08.647" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:09:08.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-08-26T16:32:23.013" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've read it in English, and what I assumed he meant was that &amp;quot;missed&amp;quot; meant a &amp;quot;lack&amp;quot; of any advisor, both new (Gandalf) and old (Grima), and now he has no advice at all, neither good nor bad, and not really in a sense of &amp;quot;missing with his heart&amp;quot; for the old advices of Grima. I guess because some advice, whether it's good or bad, is better than nothing as it would lift some weight from the king's heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10746" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T20:05:07.030" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T20:05:07.030" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15362" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-26T18:20:48.827" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mein Kampf&lt;/em&gt; is the autobiographical manifesto of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945), the German politician and leader of the Nazi party, known for initiating World War II in Europe and perpetrating the Holocaust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the book &lt;em&gt;Mein Kampf&lt;/em&gt;. Questions with this tag should also use the tag &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/adolf-hitler&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;adolf-hitler&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;adolf-hitler&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T18:27:26.473" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:27:26.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15363" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-26T18:20:48.827" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Mein Kampf', the autobiographical manifesto of Adolf Hitler. Use this tag with the [adolf-hitler] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T18:27:35.493" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:27:35.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15364" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-26T18:21:34.700" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) was a German politician, known for leading the Nazi party, initiating World War II in Europe, and perpetrating the Holocaust. The most well-known of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bibliography_of_Adolf_Hitler&amp;amp;oldid=974829848&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writings&lt;/a&gt; is his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_manifesto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;autobiographical manifesto&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Mein Kampf&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the writings and speeches of Adolf Hitler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T18:27:13.007" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:27:13.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15365" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-26T18:21:34.700" Score="0" Body="For questions about the German politician Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and his work." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-26T18:27:40.710" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T18:27:40.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-08-26T20:16:24.180" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The modern English interpretation could work here, as well. We only see Grima as a traitor to Theoden, but according to Gandalf, &amp;quot;once [he] was a man, and did you service in [his] fashion&amp;quot; (pg 125). Theoden lost the counsel of the old, faithful Grima to Saruman's seduction, and Gandalf (temporarily) because the latter was now busy elsewhere, and could easily have wished he had one or the other to advise him still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="652" LastActivityDate="2020-08-26T20:16:24.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15358" CreationDate="2020-08-27T01:37:41.807" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trample&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trample&lt;/a&gt; in Merriam-Webster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;tram·​ple &lt;br&gt;1 : TRAMP&lt;br&gt;especially : to tread heavily so as to bruise, crush, or injure&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If someone is walking outside, their steps may crush vegetation or otherwise cause damage to the ground. This is especially likely if someone is not merely walking casually, but is engaged in a struggle. And if that struggle involves throwing someone to the ground, that probability increases further. So while &amp;quot;trampling&amp;quot; does not refer directly to a struggle, it can be a &lt;em&gt;result&lt;/em&gt; of a struggle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10427" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:12:01.897" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:12:01.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15369" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T06:27:35.203" Score="6" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur Waley seems to be a champion, practitioner, and repeat offender of domesticating translation. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/11410/why-did-arthur-waley-change-the-title-in-his-translation-of-journey-to-the-west&quot;&gt;This Q&amp;amp;A&lt;/a&gt; tells us his translation of Journey to the West significantly abridges the original work and alters the moral of the story. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15297/2500&quot;&gt;My own answer to this question here&lt;/a&gt; also demonstrates how conspicuously his translation of The Tale of Genji strays from the original text. It is clear that he would as soon add stuff, sometimes based on figments of his imagination rather than the original text, in order to ensure the flow of the translation and its intelligibility and readability to the Western reader, often at the expense of accuracy, reliability, and original flavor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But interestingly his translation of The Tale of Genji uses transcriptions as some chapter titles as opposed to translations. Later translators all chose a different path, having the chapter titles translated into proper English. So the Waley Genji's titles seem to be of a different style than its content. Why this discrepancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Tale_of_Genji&amp;amp;oldid=968129010#List_of_chapters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Chapter&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Japanese&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Waley&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Seidensticker&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Tyler&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;Washburn&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;01&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Kiritsubo (桐壺)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Kiritsubo&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Paulownia Court&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Paulownia Pavilion&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Lady of the Paulownia-Courtyard Chambers&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;02&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Hahakigi (帚木)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Broom-Tree&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Broom-Tree&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Broom-Tree&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Broom Cypress&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;03&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Utsusemi (空蝉)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Utsusemi&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Shell of the Locust&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Cicada Shell&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;A Molted Cicada Shell&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;04&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Yūgao (夕顔)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Yugao&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Evening Faces&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Twilight Beauty&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;The Lady of the Evening Faces&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;05&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Wakamurasaki (若紫)&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Murasaki&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Lavender&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Young Murasaki&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&amp;quot;Little Purple Gromwell&amp;quot;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;...&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T05:06:37.313" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T05:06:37.313" Title="Why did Waley choose to transcribe the titles of some chapters as opposed to translating them in The Tale of Genji?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15370" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15323" CreationDate="2020-08-27T08:08:14.470" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This short story is a hilarious caricature on the--oh so typical--characters. Both of them are pathetically &amp;quot;ignoble&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;, repulsive, and senseless&amp;quot;, and being such, they of course blame the world on it. Exposing these traits is the centrepoint of much of Chekhov's output.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this &amp;quot;another old general&amp;quot; is the punch line, so to speak. Like everything else, this &amp;quot;obstacle&amp;quot; is blamed (implicitly or explicitly) on the circumstances, on the &amp;quot;environment&amp;quot;. Yeah, really?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With inevitable simplification, it can be said that Dostoyevsky was an antithesis of Chekhov. (Or rather, the other way round, of course). Dostoyevsky (apparently) prided himself, and was/is respected by many, for his psychologism, but Chekhov's take on it was akin to &lt;em&gt;You want some one to saw my finger with a blunt saw while I howl at the top of my voice -- that's what you mean by psychology&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (from his &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1274/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Teacher of Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). So throwing Dostoyevsky in (&amp;quot;suffering in a manner of Dostoyevsky&amp;quot;) is yet another indication of fake and pathetic &amp;quot;psychologism&amp;quot; of the characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poshlost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The original word&lt;/a&gt; that is used here sums up the whole spectacle perfectly, but even Nabokov struggled to translate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7463" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T08:08:14.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15371" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-27T11:47:16.873" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Urantia Book&lt;/em&gt; (also known as &lt;em&gt;The Urantia Papers&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Fifth Epochal Revelation&lt;/em&gt;) is a spiritual work of uncertain authorship, first published in 1955. The book claims to be a series of revelations presented by celestial beings. It consists of a series of 196 &amp;quot;papers&amp;quot; discussing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_cosmology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;religious cosmology&lt;/a&gt;, some amount of contemporary science, and the life of Jesus Christ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about &lt;em&gt;The Urantia Book&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Related links:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Urantia_Book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Urantia Book&lt;/em&gt; - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T13:33:59.663" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:33:59.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15372" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-27T11:47:16.873" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Urantia Book' (also known as 'The Urantia Papers' and 'The Fifth Epochal Revelation'), a spiritual work of uncertain authorship, written sometime in the early 20th century." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T13:34:04.297" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T13:34:04.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15322" CreationDate="2020-08-27T16:26:20.447" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Drowning is out of question, for a few reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the word translated as water-barrel in Russian original is кадушка; a vessel holding perhaps four or five gallons at most. It physically impossible to drown in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the entire story is in past tense, except that Groholsky&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is staying with Bugrov to this day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is in present. This surely means that he is alive by the time the story is told.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact symbolism of the final sentence is not clear; we can only guess why Chekhov mentioned it. It could be that Groholsky is about to burst in tears and needs water to wash his eyes (very melodramatic, but in line with his character). It could be that he has a hangover (Russian tradition associates the sudden attack of thirst with hangover). It could have no hidden meaning at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastEditorUserId="3099" LastEditDate="2020-08-27T16:37:02.403" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T16:37:02.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15374" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15860" CreationDate="2020-08-27T16:41:36.670" Score="2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/128/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Touchstone&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke and his friend, Gervis, found a print of a boot with an iron toe-tip on loam soil, then they found another print that had, in addition to the toe-tips, &lt;strong&gt;half-tips to the heels&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found by research that these are the toe-tips as shown in this first image,&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SaeeM.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SaeeM.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;toe-tip&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but I didn't find results for &amp;quot;tips to the heels&amp;quot;, especially these &amp;quot;half-tips&amp;quot;, except the rubber tips that fit to the &lt;strong&gt;below&lt;/strong&gt; surface of the heel, as shown in the second image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mi7C1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Mi7C1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;rubber tips&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think that the author meant &amp;quot;heel caps&amp;quot; that fit &lt;strong&gt;around&lt;/strong&gt; the heel, as shown in this third image, didn't he?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qodFa.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qodFa.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;heel cap&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or did he just mean that both the toe-tip and heel-tip were fitted under the boot like that image?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/klaVA.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/klaVA.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;taps&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these are called &amp;quot;taps&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;tips&amp;quot;!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T08:30:12.493" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T21:03:46.863" Title="What are &quot;half-tips to the heels&quot; in &quot;The Touchstone&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15375" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15316" CreationDate="2020-08-27T22:35:38.687" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to approach this from a mythological perspective to show how the series strongly reinforces the idea of patriarchy via symbolism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harry is an &amp;quot;Athenian&amp;quot; hero&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I mean in the sense of the goddess Athena.  This connection is explicit in that his familiar is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athena#Epithets_and_attributes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;owl&lt;/a&gt;, the bird of Athena.  Like Athena, Harry grew up without a mother.  For Athena, this condition is held as one of her rationales for her tie-breaking vote at the trial of Orestes, where the son was acquitted for the murder of his mother.  (One of the Apollo's arguments at the trial is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The mother of what is called her child is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo. The one who mounts is the parent, whereas she, as a stranger for a stranger, preserves the young plant, if the god does not harm it. And I will show you proof of what I say: a father might exist without a mother. A witness is here at hand, the child of Olympian Zeus, who was not nursed in the darkness of a womb, and she is such a child as no goddess could give birth to.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is one of the most misogynist statements in western literature, supports the modern anti-choice stance, and &lt;em&gt;strongly reinforces the idea of patriarchy&lt;/em&gt;: the outcome of the trial is that the old powers of the Goddess (the Furies) are disempowered such that the new male hierarchy is affirmed, a reflection of the Olympian Zeus' usurpation of Gaia's powers (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanomachy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Titanomachy&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_(Greek_mythology)#The_Gigantomachy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gigomachy&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metis_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metis/Athena&lt;/a&gt; myth is literally that unrestrained female wisdom threatens the established patriarchal order, such that Zeus tricks and swallows the Titan, giving birth to Athena from his head.  Thus, wisdom/craft/skill is safely subjugated.  (And, without Metis' intervention, Zeus never would have prevailed over Cronus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dumbledore is a retreat to paternalism&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, the idea of comfort of having a father figure looking after one. There is no strong mother figure for Harry.  (Mrs. Weasley does play a role as an ancillary mother figure, but, although she plays an important part in the Wizarding War, she is portrayed mainly as a traditional housewife.  Note that the name Molly is almost certainly a reference to the magic plant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moly_(herb)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moly&lt;/a&gt;, associated with the witch Circe in Greek mythology.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dumbledore is a &amp;quot;sky father&amp;quot;, and a reflection Odin, the &amp;quot;first wizard&amp;quot;. (The wizard's staff and pointed hat come from descriptions of Odin in his guise as wanderer, who undertook to various quests to gain magical powers.  He was also the template for Gandalf.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norse mythology also reflects the usurpation of the feminine powers &amp;amp; attributes in that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanir&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vanir&lt;/a&gt;, fertility gods of the earth, are subjugated and incorporated into the Aesir, often understood as skygods.  Freya still has highest honor, but is subject to Odin's rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://harshitawrites.wordpress.com/tag/hermione-granger/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It's also been noted&lt;/a&gt; that Rowlings' take on the House Elves is a reprise of Kipling's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden#Text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;White Man's Burden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is as paternalistic as it gets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chthonic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chthonic&lt;/a&gt; powers are the nemesis&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note that the chthonic wiki here is inaccurate in that chthonic powers are absolutely associated with Gaia, in that they literally exist within the earth, her body. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaia&lt;/a&gt; gave birth to the Titans, Cyclopses &amp;amp; Giants, who were the nemeses of the Olympian order.   Fertility goddesses such as Demeter are later additions, after the usurpation of female power, and function within the Olympian patriarchy.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voldemort returns from the dead (underworld).  He has a giant pet snake.  [See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B6rmungandr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jörmungandr&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Python].&lt;/a&gt;  The slaying of the Python is a prime example of usurpation of female power—in slaying it, Apollo becomes the god of prophecy.  The priestesses are still women, but subject to Apollo. Similarly, most of the monsters in Harry potter are distinctly underworldly, as is mistrusted &lt;a href=&quot;https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Slytherin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slytherin&lt;/a&gt; in relation to the sky oriented, heroic &lt;a href=&quot;https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Gryffindor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gryffindor&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has the effect of reinforcing the idea that feminine powers are dark &amp;amp; evil, such that women can only be seen to acting in a socially productive way within the framework of patriarchy. (Athena as a prime example.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Market Forces &amp;amp; Commercial Assumptions about Audience&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's no surprise that the central character of the series is male, as the general assumption until very recently has been that the fantasy audience is male dominated, and that even girls prefer male protagonists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, despite the international popularity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pippi_Longstocking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pippi Longstocking&lt;/a&gt;, the OG &amp;quot;strong girl&amp;quot;, one is hard pressed to find female protagonists, or even females with agency, in best-selling fantasy literature.  (Notable exceptions are the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyra_Belacqua&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Golden Compass&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Pevensie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucy Pevensie&lt;/a&gt;, who is the catalyst for the Narnia cycle.  It is Lucy who opens the world for the Pevensie children via her own agency.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katniss_Everdeen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hunger Games&lt;/a&gt; is also a paragon, though technically science fiction.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hermione is a decidedly modern female fantasy character in that she has agency, and is an essential helper to the hero, but her role is subordinate to Harry's.  There are many heroic, and villainous, women in the story, but all within the structure of patriarchy, whether good or evil. The Potter series at least is hopeful, casting the world as a fairly egalitarian society, where women have opportunities. To this end, &lt;a href=&quot;https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Minerva_McGonagall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minerva&lt;/a&gt;, (the Roman name of Athena,) succeeds Dumbledore as headmaster of Hogwarts, even if the entrenched system is maintained.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's notable that this condition surely influenced &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Wizard_of_Earthsea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Wizard of Earthsea&lt;/a&gt;, in that, when Le Guin was commissioned, there seemed to be no question the central character would be male. Le Guin did use this as a jumping off point to cast a female as the central character of the second novel, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tombs_of_Atuan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tombs of Atuan&lt;/a&gt;, and eventually drove the series to explicate the history behind the disempowerment of women in Earthsea, which also functions as relevant social commentary.  (One of the critiques of Atuan was that it was a female character within a male dominated hierarchy, but that was part of the point.  Le Guin even rejected the characterization of Tenahu as &amp;quot;feminist&amp;quot;, stating that she merely wanted to tell a woman's story involving womens' issues.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The market significance of casting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rey_(Star_Wars)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rey&lt;/a&gt; as the central character in the final Star Wars trilogy may be the upending of the trope that female protagonists in speculative fiction &amp;quot;don't sell&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T20:01:27.570" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T20:01:27.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15376" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15379" CreationDate="2020-08-27T23:51:24.583" Score="4" ViewCount="180" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm only two paragraphs in with &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Innocence/Chapter_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Age of Innocence&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and already I'm having trouble, specifically with this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To come to the opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way&#xA;of arriving as in one's own carriage; and departure by the same means&#xA;had the immense advantage of enabling one (with a playful allusion to&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;democratic principles&lt;/strong&gt;) to scramble into the first Brown conveyance in&#xA;the line, instead of waiting till the cold-and-gin congested nose of&#xA;one's own coachman gleamed under the portico of the Academy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;democratic principles&amp;quot; refer to here? How exactly do democratic ideas come into play in this context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T13:12:35.993" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:06:31.640" Title="What does Edith Wharton mean by &quot;democratic principles&quot; in The Age of Innocence" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edith-wharton&gt;&lt;the-age-of-innocence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15377" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-28T00:37:38.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T00:37:38.003" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T00:37:38.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15378" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-28T00:37:38.003" Score="0" Body="For question involving feminist literature and feminist literary criticism." OwnerUserId="391" LastEditorUserId="391" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T10:51:54.707" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T10:51:54.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15376" CreationDate="2020-08-28T02:53:37.410" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edith Wharton was writing in 1919-20, using intentionally flowery and high-flown language. It is understandably a tough read for modern readers. Don't worry if you find it difficult. Everyone does. Her cultural references are old and obscure enough to stump most people who are not familiar with the time (NYC in the 1870s). After all, we are no longer innocent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately before this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was Madame Nilsson’s first appearance that winter, and what the daily&#xA;press had already learned to describe as “an exceptionally brilliant audience”&#xA;had gathered to hear her, transported through the slippery, snowy streets in&#xA;private broughams, in the spacious family landau, or in the humbler but more&#xA;convenient “Brown coupe”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From earlier paragraphs we already now the opera Faust is on and Christine Nilsson is performing. And that draws throngs of people to the Academy of Music in New York City. This line tells us people go to the Academy in various modes of transportation despite the snowy and slippery streets. They can go in their private broughams, or in spacious landaus, or in Brown coupes. First let's get the terminology and historical context out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brougham_(carriage)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brougham&lt;/a&gt; was a type of small carriage used before the advent of the automobile. It is not to be confused with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brougham_(car_body)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brougham car body style&lt;/a&gt; which borrowed its name and shared design and stylistic similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brougham (pronounced &amp;quot;broom&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;brohm&amp;quot;) was a light, four-wheeled horse-drawn carriage built in the 19th century. It was named after the politician and jurist Lord Brougham, who had this type of carriage built to his specification by London coachbuilder Robinson &amp;amp; Cook in 1838 or 1839. It had an enclosed body with two doors, like the rear section of a coach; it sat two, sometimes with an extra pair of fold-away seats in the front corners, and with a box seat in front for the driver and a footman or passenger. Unlike a coach, the carriage had a glazed front window, so that the occupants could see forward. The forewheels were capable of turning sharply. A variant, called a brougham-landaulet, had a top collapsible from the rear doors backward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau_(carriage)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Landau&lt;/a&gt; was a bigger carriage, hence &amp;quot;spacious&amp;quot;. Not to be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landau_(automobile)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the eponymous automobile design&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A landau is a coachbuilding term for a type of four-wheeled, convertible carriage. It was a city carriage of luxury type. The low shell of the landau provides maximal visibility of the occupants and their clothing, a feature that makes a landau still a popular choice for the Lord Mayors of certain cities in the United Kingdom on ceremonial occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly the Brown coupe was also a kind of light carriage. And today's two door cars of course borrow their name from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/technology/coupe-carriage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the historic carriage&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coupé, also spelled Coupe, four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage that was based on the coach but was smaller and lighter in weight. While originally the word coupé described any cut-down coach body, it later became associated with a specific type of truncated coach body that came into general use in western Europe and America in the mid-18th century. A coupé usually contained one enclosed seat for two passengers and a higher, outside seat for a driver, although the largest model, the clarence, had two enclosed seats and accommodated four passengers. In the 20th century the name was given to the closed, two-door, two-passenger automobile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a coupe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iiViU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iiViU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The capitalization of &amp;quot;Brown&amp;quot; signifies it is either a carriage service for hire for people who don't own their own transportation or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.coachbuilt.com/bui/b/brown/brown.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manufactured by a company called Brown&lt;/a&gt;. Either way, it is a relatively cheap mode of transport. Theatergoing plays a crucial role back in the day with enormous social significance. The elite class don't go to the theater to enjoy the opera but to be seen in a display of wealth. The mode of transport a family arrives in shows their financial means and social status. A brougham is a voguish and flashy vehicle, like a sports car in today's world; a landau a family car; a Brown coupe an entry level economy car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Democratic principles&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; here alludes to the fact that despite the social stratification, people who take the Brown coupe will get in their transportation first. &amp;quot;Democratic&amp;quot; in the sense that rich people who have their own Brougham or Landau don't necessarily cut to the front of the line; they have to wait. Wharton is being jocular with her words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T15:06:31.640" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T15:06:31.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6339" CreationDate="2020-08-28T06:41:36.237" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, Erik Simon wrote in the afterword of his german translation that the novel was deemed too political, especially the criticism of nationalism and mass media. The publishing house of the Komsomol was one of the few venues that would touch SF, the Strugatskies decided to write a story about a Komsomol in space. It's possible the censors were miffed because the story was too political for the young minds they imagined the audience to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4386" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T06:41:36.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15381" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-28T13:28:39.063" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Age of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by the American writer Edith Wharton. It was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, and was later published as a novel in the same year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the novel &lt;em&gt;The Age of Innocence&lt;/em&gt;. This tag is to be used with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/edith-wharton&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;edith-wharton&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;edith-wharton&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Related links&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Innocence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Age of Innocence&lt;/em&gt; - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edith Wharton - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1921_Pulitzer_Prize&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1921 Pulitzer Prize - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T13:48:09.813" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T13:48:09.813" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15382" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-28T13:28:39.063" Score="0" Body="Questions about Edith Wharton's 1920 novel 'The Age of Innocence'. Use this tag with the [edith-wharton] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T13:47:55.400" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T13:47:55.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-28T16:57:07.110" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French author André Gide (1869 – 1951) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. The author died in February 1951; in the following year, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Gide&amp;amp;oldid=968958874#1930s_and_1940s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vatican placed his works on the Index of Forbidden Books&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Gide&amp;amp;oldid=173931477#Mort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia article about the author&lt;/a&gt; contains additional unsourced statements about this decision:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L'ensemble de son œuvre est mis à l'Index par le Vatican en 1952&lt;sup&gt;47&lt;/sup&gt;. Cette nouvelle scandalise les admirateurs enthousiastes de l'écrivain&lt;sup&gt;[réf. souhaitée]&lt;/sup&gt;. Quant à ses détracteurs, qui pourtant l'attaquent avec violence, ils ne sont guère convaincus de l'utilité d'une telle discrimination&lt;sup&gt;[réf. souhaitée]&lt;/sup&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1952, the entirety of his oeuvre is placed on the Index by the Vatican. This news scandalises the author's enthusiastic admirers. As far as his detractors are concerned, who attacked him violently, they are hardly convinced of the utility of this act of discrimination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no source for the statement about his admirers, nor for the part about his detractors. The English Wikipedia, referenced above, does not mention these reactions at all. Neither does the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Gide&amp;amp;oldid=202524089#Der_Zweite_Weltkrieg_und_die_Nachkriegszeit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;, which adds, however, that the Vatican's action implied a recognition of the importance of Gide's work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can any sources for the reactions described above be found?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_Librorum_Prohibitorum#Abolition_(1966)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Index Librorum Prohibitorum&lt;/a&gt; was abolished 14 years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:57:07.110" Title="Evidence for the claim that placing Gide's works in the Index of Forbidden Books scandalised the author's admirers?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;andre-gide&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French author André Gide (1869 – 1951) and his life as a writer. Gide is best known for novels such as 'L'immoraliste' ('The Immoralist'), 'La porte étroite' ('Strait Is the Gate'), 'La Symphonie Pastorale' ('The Pastoral Symphony') and 'Les faux-monnayeurs' ('The Counterfeiters'). Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T16:59:55.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15086" CreationDate="2020-08-28T18:49:07.263" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that perhaps a bit of Dwarven tenacity is the answer here. It is clear that Dwarves were Aulë's chosen, the strongest and the sturdiest, but also the most ingenious and stubborn for projects of great complexity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since they were to come in the days of the power of Melkor, Aulë made the Dwarves strong to endure. Therefore they are stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity, and they suffer toil and hunger and hurt of body more hardily than all other speaking peoples; and they live long, far beyond the span of Men, yet not for ever.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;—'Silmarillion'&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/k/khazaddum.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Khazad-dûm&lt;/a&gt;'s construction started quite early during the Years of the Trees and continued through that period, through the First and Second Age well into the Third Age. &lt;strong&gt;Khazad-dûm was also untouched by the wars which destroyed Belegost and Nogrod, giving it approximately 6,000 years of uninterrupted expansion (excluding the events where Sauron's forces destroyed Eregion).&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If one considers that the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/k/kingunderthemountain.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kings under the Mountain&lt;/a&gt; ruled Erebor for 201 + 180 years (accounting for an interregnum) and accomplished &lt;em&gt;a lot&lt;/em&gt;, it is perhaps not inconceivable that during six millennia, the city of Khazad-dûm was developed into an unrivalled scene of wealth and power—in fact, I think that Khazad-dûm was the most successful (i.e., longest lasting) kingdom in Middle Earth of all time (Lorien, the second by my thinking has about a thousand years less to it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1736" LastActivityDate="2020-08-28T18:49:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15387" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-29T01:18:32.063" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Oscar Wilde's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-house-of-judgement/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The House of Judgment&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and it uses the phrase. I have seen it in other older texts. What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a copy of the passage. The phrase is bolded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And there was silence in the house of Judgment, and the Man came naked before God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And God opened the Book of the Life of the Man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And God said to the Man, ‘Thy life hath been evil, and thou hast shown cruelty to those who were in need of succour, and to those who lacked help thou hast been bitter and hard of heart. The poor called to thee and thou didst not hearken, and thine ears were closed to the cry of My afflicted. The inheritance of the fatherless thou didst take unto thyself, and thou didst send the foxes into the vineyard of thy neighbour’s field. Thou didst take the bread of the children and give it to the dogs to eat, and My lepers who lived in the marshes, and were at peace and praised Me, thou didst drive forth on to the highways, and on Mine earth out of which I made thee thou didst spill innocent blood.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the Man made answer and said, &lt;strong&gt;‘Even so did I.’&lt;/strong&gt;*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10767" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T10:58:27.993" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T11:56:54.813" Title="What does &quot;even so did I&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-29T05:03:37.300" Score="3" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;Donald Keene comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Murasaki Shikibu] dismissed as old-fashioned the kind of unreality present in The Tale of the&#xA;Bamboo Cutter—the birth of a little girl inside a stalk of bamboo, or Kaguyahime’s ability to vanish at will—and she looked down on other early works that relied on the supernatural for their plots. (source: &lt;em&gt;Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, Keene, Donald, 1999, pp 477-514):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure this is drawn from The Tale of Genji. If not Genji, then where did Murasaki Shikibu write about The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (竹取物語), an equally important classic piece of Japanese literature from an earlier time. I don't know if Murasaki Shikibu ever wrote literary commentary or criticism. Or is this from her early poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T15:48:53.507" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T15:48:53.507" Title="What exactly does Murasaki Shikibu say about The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15389" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15409" CreationDate="2020-08-29T05:16:31.100" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;Congressman John Lewis, a noted American civil rights activist and politician, passed away on July 17, 2020. Jon Meacham wrote a biography of him that was published on August 25, slightly over a month afterwards, and only 6 months after the February 18 publication of &lt;em&gt;The Hope of Glory&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was he able to write the book that quickly? When did he start writing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T15:39:52.543" Title="How was Jon Meacham able to complete his biography of John Lewis so quickly?" Tags="&lt;biography&gt;&lt;jon-meacham&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15624" CreationDate="2020-08-29T09:16:13.450" Score="7" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I learned of a story in my high school time(sometime during year 2000-2002) as part of the English textbox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about two men having a conversation in a train, one is a disabled man who lost his wife during delivery(or something similar) and hence doesn't like kids, the other is a father of a kid who always waves at the train from the crossing near his house but the kid is sad that no one is waving him back and hence the dad is going to take a return train next day and wave at his kid to make him happy. The guys somehow end up sharing the room and the next day&#xA;the father misses the train, returning home depressed but finds a hysterically happy kid at his home. He tells his father that someone today not only waved at him, but tied a handkerchief to his stretcher and waved it till the train went out of sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story moved me as a kid so much that I still vigorously wave back at any kid who waves at me when I'm in a bus, train or any other vehicle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to read that story once again but was unable to find it anywhere. Tried google search for possible titles and keywords but looks like there are other stories with titles similar to this but entirely different story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story appeared in a English textbox as part of high school curriculum in Kerala, India. The year I learned it is probably around 2000-2002.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10769" LastEditorUserId="9934" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T09:28:37.733" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T22:48:36.303" Title="Identify a story about the kid who waves at the train" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15387" CreationDate="2020-08-29T11:56:54.813" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an archaic style of English, presumably used by Wilde in an attempt to give the poem a &amp;quot;biblical&amp;quot; feel, mimicking the style of English seen in translations of the Bible such as the King James Bible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Even&amp;quot; here is used in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/even#Adverb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following archaic sense&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;archaic&lt;/em&gt;) Exactly, just, fully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I fulfilled my instructions even as I had promised.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;You are leaving tonight? — Even so.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;This is my commandment, that ye love one another, even as I have loved you.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So&amp;quot; is used in the sense of &amp;quot;thus, as stated, in this way&amp;quot;, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning 1 (especially 1c) in Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The order of subject and verb is reversed from the usual, a permissible stylistic choice under poetic license. So &amp;quot;did I&amp;quot; here does not denote an interrogative, as it normally would in modern English (&amp;quot;did I?&amp;quot;), just a way of saying &amp;quot;I did&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole phrase, then: &amp;quot;Even so did I&amp;quot; could be rewritten in a more standard/modern English way as &amp;quot;Exactly in this way I did&amp;quot; (a word-for-word rewriting), or more idiomatically as something like &amp;quot;Indeed I did as you describe&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T11:56:54.813" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15392" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15410" CreationDate="2020-08-29T12:18:45.617" Score="3" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Didn%27t_They_Ask_Evans%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Why Didn't They Ask Evans?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a novel by Agatha Christie. In the story, a dying man's last words &amp;quot;Why didn't they ask Evans?&amp;quot; inspires an amateur detective investigation, in which ultimately&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &amp;quot;Evans&amp;quot; turns out to be a parlourmaid, Gladys Evans, and the fact that she was &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; asked to witness a will turns out to be significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told once that the title of this story was inspired by a phrase Agatha Christie overheard, &amp;quot;why didn't they ask Evans?&amp;quot;, and she decided to write a story with this title. But I don't know if this is true or not, and couldn't find this claim online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, inspired the title of this novel?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T08:14:41.663" Title="What inspired the title of &quot;Why Didn't They Ask Evans?&quot;?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;why-didnt-they-ask-evans&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15393" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15408" CreationDate="2020-08-29T13:42:18.563" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Murder in Cathedral&lt;/em&gt; by T.S. Eliot, when Archbishop Thomas Becket returns from France, and sees the second priest scolding the women of Chorus, he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They know and do not know, that acting is suffering&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor the patient act. But both are fixed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In an eternal action, an eternal patience&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To which all must consent that it may be willed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And which all must suffer that they may will it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We note that Eliot wrote this play after his conversion to Anglicanism, and this play contains many of his theological ideas. It is known that Eliot made use of Hindu philosophy in his works, and I speculate that this action and suffering description above is related to Hinduism philosophy of action and suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I want to know is the significance and meaning of the phrases “they know and do not know”; it not only adds the poetic beauty to this dialogue but really makes me feel something which I believe is there but I don’t understand. Kindly tell me what it means and if some historical fact is available about the use of antitheses by Eliot then please share that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T17:12:04.210" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T16:11:56.377" Title="Understanding the first dialogue of Archbishop Thomas Becket involving antitheses" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;murder-in-the-cathedral&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-29T15:48:15.053" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The French playwright Jean Anouilh wrote the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Becket&amp;amp;oldid=971979661&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Becket or The Honour of God&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Becket ou l'Honneur de Dieu&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Becket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archbishop Thomas Becket's&lt;/a&gt; conflict with king Henry II. (In 1964, five years after its premier on stage, the play was adapted into a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becket_(1964_film)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;film starring Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton and John Gielgud&lt;/a&gt;.) The Wikipedia article about the play contains the following unsourced statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains many historical inaccuracies, which the author acknowledged.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding article on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Becket_ou_l%27Honneur_de_Dieu&amp;amp;oldid=173369347&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; makes no mention of these inaccuracies. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Becket_(obra_de_teatro)&amp;amp;oldid=125937621&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; makes the same claim about the historical inaccuracies, again without providing a source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contiene muchas inexactitudes históricas, que el autor ha reconocido.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This translates to the same sentence quoted above from the English Wikipedia article.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the statement has not been made up, where did Jean Anouilh acknowledge that the play contains many historical inaccuracies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T15:54:24.880" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T17:22:13.723" Title="Where did Anouilh acknowledge that his play Becket contains many historical inaccuracies?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;jean-anouilh&gt;&lt;becket-or-the-honour-of-god&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15395" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15396" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French dramatist Jean Anouilh (1910 – 1987) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T16:16:26.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15397" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15398" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" Score="0" Body="Questions about Jean Anouilh's play 'Becket or The Honour of God' (French: 'Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu', 1959). Use this tag with the tags [jean-anouilh] and [french-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T16:22:50.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15399" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15356" CreationDate="2020-08-29T17:13:16.330" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am using as a reference for this answer &lt;em&gt;Beauty and the Beast Tales from Around the World&lt;/em&gt; by Heidi Anne Heiner, which is 830 pages long -- so, yes, there are a few variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The thing is that &lt;em&gt;Beauty and the Beast&lt;/em&gt; itself is a literary re-telling of a very old tale.  It is considered a unique subtype of that tale (with a fair number of variants) because of its psychological plot -- usually the heroine has to go on a long quest or otherwise through great effort undo the effects of her violating a prohibition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest written version we have of the general tale is the tale of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.surlalunefairytales.com/a-g/beauty-beast/stories/cupid3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cupid and Psyche&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; where, after the sisters tricked Psyche, and Cupid had fled,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she had recovered some degree of composure she looked around her, but the palace and gardens had vanished, and she found herself in the open field not far from the city where her sisters dwelt. She repaired thither and told them the whole story of her misfortunes, at which, pretending to grieve, those spiteful creatures inwardly rejoiced. &amp;quot;For now,&amp;quot; said they, &amp;quot;he will perhaps choose one of us.&amp;quot; With this idea, without saying a word of her intentions, each of them rose early the next morning and ascended the mountains, and having reached the top, called upon Zephyr to receive her and bear her to his lord; then leaping up, and not being sustained by Zephyr, fell down the precipice and was dashed to pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first actual version of the specific tale, by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, has Beauty forgiving her sisters -- who aren't really her sisters in this tale -- but it is better known in the (heavily redacted) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.surlalunefairytales.com/a-g/beauty-beast/stories/beaumont.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;version&lt;/a&gt; by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont which includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to you, ladies,” said the fairy to Beauty’s two sisters, “I know your hearts, and all the malice they contain. Become two statues, but, under this transformation, still retain your reason. You shall stand before your sister’s palace gate, and be it your punishment to behold her happiness; and it will not be in your power to return to your former state, until you own your faults, but I am very much afraid that you will always remain statues. Pride, anger, gluttony, and idleness are sometimes conquered, but the conversion of a malicious and envious mind is a kind of miracle.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately the fairy gave a stroke with her wand, and in a moment all that were in the hall were transported into the prince’s dominions. His subjects received him with joy. He married Beauty, and lived with her many years, and their happiness—as it was founded on virtue—was complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In neither story -- or in any of the others where the sisters are punished -- is there any suggestion that the punishment is unreasonable, as opposed to the way in de Villeneuve's version the fairy who cursed the prince to be a beast (as punishment for refusing to marry her) is derided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T19:35:51.723" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T19:35:51.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15400" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15401" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American  writer, reviewer and biographer Jon Ellis Meacham (born 1969) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T19:57:13.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15402" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15403" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" Score="0" Body="Questions about Agatha Christie's 1934 novel 'Why Didn't They Ask Evans?' Use this tag with the tag [agatha-christie]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" LastActivityDate="2020-08-29T20:00:57.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-30T03:36:42.857" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The search for literary sources has been inspired largely by the&#xA;difficulty scholars have experienced in imagining that a work of the&#xA;magnitude of &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt; could have been created without models. The&#xA;early commentators found sources in the Tendai Buddhist scriptures, the&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Records of the Historian&lt;/em&gt; of Ssu-ma Ch’ien, the &lt;em&gt;Spring and Autumn Annals&lt;/em&gt;, and&#xA;other Chinese sources. Other commentators, concerned less with literary&#xA;sources than with the moral intent of the work, provided a simplistic&#xA;Buddhist explanation that persists to this day: &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt; is the story of&#xA;a man who was punished for his affair with his stepmother when his own wife&#xA;betrayed him with another man.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best-known and most persuasive interpretation, however, was that&#xA;of Motoori Norinaga, who denied Buddhist and Confucian intent behind the&#xA;novel and treated The Tale of Genji as a work embodying the principle of&#xA;mono no aware, a sensitivity to things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Motoori, later in the same essay, declared that the purpose of the&#xA;author of &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt; was similar to that of a man who collects muddy&#xA;water in order to have lotuses bloom: “The impure mud of illicit love affairs&#xA;described in &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt; is there not for the purpose of being admired&#xA;but for the purpose of nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow of&#xA;human existence.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Motoori’s explanation is correct, Murasaki Shikibu was inspired by a&#xA;literary rather than a didactic purpose, and similarities between &lt;em&gt;The Tale of&#xA;Genji&lt;/em&gt; and Buddhist or Confucian writings are therefore coincidences or of&#xA;only minor significance. (source: &lt;em&gt;Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest Times to the Late Sixteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, Keene, Donald, 1999, pp 477-514)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage makes me wonder if Donald Keene really gave Buddhist interpretations of Genji their due credit, as his argument doesn't sound very convincing. Per his explanation, Genji scholars and critics since the work's completion and before &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoori_Norinaga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motoori Norinaga&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%AC%E5%B1%85%E5%AE%A3%E9%95%B7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;本居宣長&lt;/a&gt;) all took either the Buddhist or the Confucian/Chinese influence route and all failed to satisfactorily explain the central theme of Genji. But the summary of those failed attempts given by Keene is so pithy and oversimplified that it sounds insincere and mischaracterized. The period between Genji and Motoori spans almost eight centuries. 800 years is a long time. 800 years of literary reviews, commentary, interpretations, analysis all come down to one convergent reading that Genji is a didactic edification where iniquity must be punished? And after the old guards of the Japanese literati all failed, this miracle kid Motoori invented a new concept that perfectly explains everything in Genji. How could that be fair or true to Japanese literary history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equally puzzling is Keene's explanation of Motoori's interpretation which, built on Motoori's newly coined concept &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;mono no aware&lt;/a&gt;, rings uncannily Buddhist/Zen. It seems to bear a great deal of resemblance with several key Buddhist concepts, including but definitely not limited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence#:%7E:text=Impermanence%2C%20called%20anicca%20(P%C4%81li),transient%2C%20evanescent%2C%20inconstant%22.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impertinence&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;anicca&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;anitya&lt;/em&gt;), suffering (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du%E1%B8%A5kha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;duhkha&lt;/a&gt;), and emptiness (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sunyata&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage makes me wonder if there had been Buddhist interpretations beyond Keene's over simplified digest. What are some examples? How do them compare to Motoori's reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T15:26:13.417" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T15:26:13.417" Title="Buddhist interpretation of The Tale of Genji" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;&lt;motoori-norinaga&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-30T16:09:41.963" Score="2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji#Manuscripts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;manuscripts of &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; no longer exist. Royall Tyler writes in the introduction to his translation (Penguin 2003, page xviiii) that by the 13th century, the manuscripts of the work were becoming corrupt, so two scholars independently attempted to restore the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamoto_no_Mitsuyuki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minamoto no Mitsuyuki&lt;/a&gt; created a version that is now known as &lt;strong&gt;Kawachi-bon&lt;/strong&gt; (Kawachi text) because he was governor in Kawachi province.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/Fujiwara_no_Teika&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fujiwara no Teika&lt;/a&gt; created a version that is now known as &lt;strong&gt;Aobyoshi-bon&lt;/strong&gt; (Aobyoshi text). Royall Tyler makes the following comment about the differences between the two lines of manuscripts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the standpoint of the nonspecialist, especially the reader of a translation, there is no striking discrepancy between the &lt;em&gt;Kawachi-bon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Aobyoshi-bon&lt;/em&gt; lines, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume this means that there are no significant differences at the level of chapter divisions and the plot, but it is not clear at what level of granularity the differences between both lines of manuscripts are to be found. Is this at the level of individual sentences? Individual works? Names of characters? Omission of certain poems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T18:18:22.500" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T18:18:22.500" Title="What is the nature of the differences between the Kawachi-bon and the Aobyoshi-bon lines of the Tale of Genji manuscripts?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15406" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15407" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Japanese scholar Motoori Norinaga (本居 宣長, 1730 – 1801) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" LastActivityDate="2020-08-30T18:49:05.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15393" CreationDate="2020-08-30T21:27:15.483" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The crux of this verse is to understand the meaning of &amp;quot;suffering&amp;quot;. It is crucial that we understand &amp;quot;suffering&amp;quot; means not the modern and more popular sense of &amp;quot;undergoing pain&amp;quot; or at any rate not just that. It mainly serves as a counterpart concept in Eliot's poetry to &amp;quot;action&amp;quot;. If we read it as &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt; we wouldn't be able to see its close connection with &lt;em&gt;patience&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;action&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in his work Eliot is invoking a somewhat archaic sense of the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;suffer&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, after all this is a play Eliot composed about a historical event that took place in the 12th century. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suffer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;suffer&lt;/strong&gt; v.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to allow especially by reason of indifference&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;the eagle suffers little birds to sing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— William Shakespeare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You suffer something or someone means you allow them to perform an action by &lt;em&gt;reason of indifference&lt;/em&gt;. That is, you don't care the action is taken or not. It makes no difference to you. No skin off your back. You are a &lt;strong&gt;passive party&lt;/strong&gt; in the performance of the &lt;em&gt;action&lt;/em&gt;; you are a &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt;. Here the word &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt; is also to be understood differently from the prevalent modern usage (an individual under medical treatment). Again, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/patient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam Webster&lt;/a&gt;'s definition of &lt;strong&gt;patient&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;one that is acted upon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;are agents as well as patients and observers in the world&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— C. H. Whiteley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to say &lt;em&gt;suffering&lt;/em&gt; does not have the meaning of enduring or undergoing misery or pain. It does. But that sense of the word is kind of secondary to the &amp;quot;pain&amp;quot; interpretation, at least not primordial. That is why &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_L._Martz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis L. Martz&lt;/a&gt; in his literary criticism essay &lt;em&gt;The Wheel and the Point: Aspects of Imagery and Theme in Eliot's Later Poetry&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One must first recognize the double meanings in the words, &lt;em&gt;suffering&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;patience&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Suffering&lt;/em&gt; is not simply undergoing &lt;em&gt;misery&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;pain&lt;/em&gt;, it is also &lt;em&gt;permitting&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;consenting&lt;/em&gt;; he who consents to an action must suffer for it, must accept responsibility for it. The Chorus of Women of Canterbury, the &amp;quot;type of the common man,&amp;quot; understands no such responsibility as the play begins: &amp;quot;For us, the poor, there is no action,/But only to wait and to witness.&amp;quot; It is this responsibility that the women strive to evade as they realize they are being &amp;quot;drawn into the pattern of fate&amp;quot;; this is what they finally admit at their great moment of exaltation and vision: &amp;quot;I have consented, Lord Archbishop, have consented.&amp;quot; It is the admission of sin which Eliot describes and demands in his prose writings--in the essay on Baudelaire's &lt;em&gt;Journaux Intimesy&lt;/em&gt; for example, where he insists that &amp;quot;the recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life,&amp;quot; and finds the greatness of Baudelaire (like the greatness of the Chorus here) to reside in his capacity for suffering pain in the knowledge of good which comes from the recognition of evil. It is the view expressed in one of Eliot's notes to &lt;em&gt;The Idea of a Christian Society&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;The notion of communal responsibility, of the responsibility of every individual for the sins of the society to which he belongs, is one that needs to be more firmly apprehended.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, too, the &lt;em&gt;patient&lt;/em&gt; is everyone, martyr, murderer, and spectator: he is at once suffering pain and permitting action; in Becket and the Chorus, he is also self-controlled. The same ideas are seen in the lyric of &amp;quot;East Coker,&amp;quot; where the &amp;quot;hospital&amp;quot; patient is saved by Christ from &amp;quot;Adam's curse&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Beneath the bleeding hands we feel/The sharp compassion of the healer's art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Martz makes the argument that Eliot's poetry puts action in the same position as suffering. Suffering is action and of action, which means suffering comes from action but also identifies with action. At the same time action has the same identification effect and causality on suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I said above, we can discern two distinguishable meanings of &amp;quot;suffer&amp;quot;. To experience anguish or torment and to have something done to you. Suffering thus signifies passive acceptance or passive endurance, submission. Action, on the other hand, is actively doing things (to others). From this Eliot develops a conceptual double correspondence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;suffer       act&#xA;suffering    action&#xA;patient      actor&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here some scholars see suffering taking on a third (or second) connotation. Paul Lapworth argues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas's words at this point span the developing experience of the Chorus. What happens to us is one thing; understanding and knowledge of what happens to us is another. We are aware of experiencing something, but we cannot explain its significance. This is a double suffering. The Chorus know (are aware) that they are suffering; they do not know (do not understand) the significance of what is happening to them. When they understand and consent, then action and suffering are one.&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd like to add that I see it as a third connotation, not a second meaning, because we have to take into account the first two meanings that I mentioned above. Granted this new connotation should be subsumed under the &lt;em&gt;suffering&lt;/em&gt; sense, so not a full-fledged independent meaning. The Chorus are both in the know and in the dark. They are only partially aware of what is happening and the action taken on them. They do not take an active part in what they see as bound to happen. Action is an individual's strong will to change their own fate. Suffering is passive acceptance of one's fate as inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately after your quoted verse the poem goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the suffering, that the wheel may turn and still&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be forever still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conjuring up &amp;quot;the wheel&amp;quot; Eliot explains the action/suffering duality through the order of the universe, created by God and willed to move by God. To understand Eliot's further ideas about the will of God we would have to go beyond this quoted verse. To sum, through Thomas Becket Eliot argues one must willfully submit to God's will, thus bring suffering and action together. Suffering thus is action, and duality becomes one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sewanee Review&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1947), pp. 126-147&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot&lt;/em&gt;, Paul Lapworth, Macmillan International Higher Education, Nov 11, 1988, p 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T16:11:56.377" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T16:11:56.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15389" CreationDate="2020-08-31T15:39:52.543" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;He didn't write it that quickly. He had been working on it well before Lewis's death. In fact, there was a notice about it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.axios.com/john-lewis-biography-jon-meacham-09573800-16eb-470b-8b3f-275fe2441726.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Axios on June 16th&lt;/a&gt; announcing that it was coming and that Lewis was contributing an afterward to the book (which was delivered according to the cover of the book.) There were interviews &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2020/aug/29/john-lewis-biography/530972/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;earlier this year&lt;/a&gt; in the writing of the book which was originally slated for publication in October but the publication date was pulled forward after Lewis's death. It's also worth noting that Meacham says of the book,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;This is not a full-scale biography,&amp;quot; Meacham explains. &amp;quot;It is,&#xA;rather, an appreciative account of the major moments of Lewis' life in&#xA;the movement, of the theological understanding he brought to the&#xA;struggle and of the utility of that vision as America enters the third&#xA;decade of the 21st century amid division and fear.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which implies it is not necessarily a long-term fully-researched project like some of Meacham's earlier work, although it still is extensively documented in its sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every so often, a book happens to come out with coincidental timeliness, whether it's a biography that appears right around the time of its subject's death or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200722-eerily-prescient-2020-plague-novels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eerily prescient plague novels&lt;/a&gt; or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0241967414&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book about Vatican politics&lt;/a&gt; that came out a week and a half after Pope Benedict announced he was resigning the papacy. This is one of those cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T15:39:52.543" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15392" CreationDate="2020-08-31T16:41:45.133" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if the claim you heard was a conflation of a few things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could find two sources online stating that the title of &lt;em&gt;Why Didn't They Ask Evans&lt;/em&gt; was something Christie overheard. The first is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2801173/?ref_=tt_urv&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this IMDB review&lt;/a&gt; from 2013, which claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of the book actually came from a conversation Ms. Christie&#xA;overheard coming out of a movie theater, and she built a whole story&#xA;around it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is &lt;a href=&quot;https://thombeckett.com/blog/why-didnt-they-ask-evans-by-agatha-christie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her autobiography, Agatha Christie talks about how she comes by&#xA;ideas for various books. This one started with the title, which was a&#xA;phrase she overheard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've read the autobiography, and have it on Kindle. I searched every variation of &amp;quot;ask&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;asked&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;question&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;overheard&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Evans&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;theatre&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;title&amp;quot; and etc that I could think of and didn't find any reference to this particular novel or inspirations for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a reference in the autobiography to one piece of inspiration Christie did get from overhearing a conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I considered writing another book. Supposing I did--what should it be&#xA;about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question was solved for me one day when I was having tea in an&#xA;ABC. Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody&#xA;called Jane Fish. It struck me as a most entertaining name. I went&#xA;away with the name in my mind. Jane Fish. That, I thought, would make&#xA;a good beginning to a story--a name overheard at a tea shop--an&#xA;unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane&#xA;Fish--or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This became &lt;em&gt;The Secret Adversary&lt;/em&gt; (1922):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Funny scraps one does overhear,” murmured Tommy. “I passed two&#xA;Johnnies in the street to-day talking about some one called Jane Finn.&#xA;Did you ever hear such a name?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the movie theater, take a look at this quote from Christie's &lt;em&gt;Lord Edgware Dies&lt;/em&gt; (published a year before &lt;em&gt;Why Didn't They Ask Evans&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We were passing a big cinema.&lt;/strong&gt; People were streaming out of it&#xA;discussing their own affairs, their servants, their friends of the&#xA;opposite sex, and just occasionally, the picture they had just seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a group of them we crossed the Euston Road.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I loved it,’ a girl was sighing. ‘I think Bryan Martin’s just&#xA;wonderful. I never miss any picture he’s in. The way he rode down the&#xA;cliff and got there in time with the papers.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her escort was less enthusiastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Idiotic story. &lt;strong&gt;If they’d just had the sense to ask Ellis right away.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Which anyone worth sense would have done—’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clearly someone overhearing a phrase, where the speaker is wondering why someone whose name begins with E wasn't asked--while coming out of a movie theater. However, the difference is that the overhear-ers here are Poirot and Hastings, not Christie herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's certainly possible that Christie reused the phrasing from &lt;em&gt;Lord Edgware Dies&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Why Didn't They Ask Evans&lt;/em&gt;. However, I can find no evidence that she herself ever overheard this specific phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2186" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T16:41:45.133" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15394" CreationDate="2020-08-31T17:05:06.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Anouilh hints at this in the preface to the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je n'ai pas été chercher dans les livres qui était vraiment Henri II -&#xA;ni même Becket. J'ai fait le roi dont j'avais besoin et le Becket&#xA;ambigu dont j'avais besoin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't gone reading books about who Henry II really was - nor even&#xA;Becket, for that matter. I have created the king that I needed, and&#xA;the ambiguous Becket that I needed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.persee.fr/doc/bude_1247-6862_1964_num_23_4_4223#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le thème de Thomas Becket dans &lt;em&gt;Becket ou l'honneur de Dieu&lt;/em&gt; de J. Anouilh, et &lt;em&gt;Meurtre dans la cathédrale&lt;/em&gt;, de T. S. Eliot&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Bulletin de l'Association Guillaume Budé&lt;/em&gt;, nr. 23, 1964, Marguerite Rabut writes that the same book was the source of both Anouilh's and Eliot's work: &lt;em&gt;Histoire de la conquête de l'Angleterre par des Normands&lt;/em&gt; by Augustin Thierry, published in 1856. Rabut finds that Anouilh's play comes close to the facts described by Thierry, and, if there is any discrepancy, it would be one of emphasis rather than of fact. However, the description of Becket by Thierry is clearly flawed, and at some points completely wrong. Rabut does not mention whether Anouilh based his characters on Thierry's work in good faith, or that he could have known that it was problematic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, from the tone of the Preface, Anouilh does not seem to care one way or the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-08-31T17:22:13.723" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T17:22:13.723" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-31T18:02:28.707" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;Scholars of Elizabethan theatre agree that the stage in Elizabethan playhouses could have a trap door, for example in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre#Layout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Globe Theatre&lt;/a&gt; (built in 1699) and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lion_(theatre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Lion&lt;/a&gt;. In his study &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; (Penguin, 1988), Christopher Hardman writes (page 95, emphases added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stage dimensions are calculated to be forty-three feet wide by approximately twenty-seven feet from back to front, on the evidence of the Fortune, and there was &lt;strong&gt;a trap in the stage certainly big enough for two men to go through at the same time&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardman does not cite a source for the dimensions of the trap and I could not find any mentions of the width in sources such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=WyFH_Aj9fnkC&amp;amp;pg=PA3&amp;amp;dq=elizabethan+playhouse+stage+trap+door+wide&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjt9OaS_cXrAhXHyaQKHfXJASAQ6AEwBXoECAMQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%20stage%20trap%20%20wide&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Survey 52: Shakespeare and the Globe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=HRc6SofULLcC&amp;amp;pg=PA28&amp;amp;dq=elizabethan+playhouse+stage+trap++wide&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjR4fzXgMbrAhWD2KQKHdyhCm0Q6AEwAXoECAQQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=stage%20trap%20%20wide&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Hattaway or &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=sB2BDAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA14&amp;amp;dq=elizabethan+playhouse+stage+trap+door+wide&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjt9OaS_cXrAhXHyaQKHfXJASAQ6AEwAnoECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%20trap%20door%20wide&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespearean Entrances&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by M. Ichikawa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I assume the claim about the width of the trap door would be based either on stage directions that require two persons to disappear simultaneously or descriptions by contemporaries. What is the evidence that would support Christopher Hardman's claim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T18:52:54.630" Title="What is the evidence for the width of the trap in the stage of Elizabethan playhouses?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15412" CreationDate="2020-08-31T18:52:54.630" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256472442_What_the_Hell_is_Under_the_Stage_trapdoor_use_in_the_English_Senecan_tradition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This paper&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew J. Power gives a fairly comprehensive use of trapdoors in the Shakespearean era. It's worth noting that the trap would be used any time there is a need for a depression in the stage, so it was almost certainly used for, e.g., the graveyard scene in Hamlet V.i which was big enough to hold the two actors playing the gravediggers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-08-31T18:52:54.630" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15414" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-31T23:02:16.927" Score="4" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Piggybacking on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/15404/buddhist-interpretation-of-the-tale-of-genji&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt;, I am still curious about the mono no aware (物の哀れ) reading of The Tale of Genji. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoori_Norinaga#Works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norinaga's most important works include the Kojiki-den (Commentaries on the Kojiki), made over a period of around 35 years, and his annotations on the Tale of Genji. Using the methods of Kokugaku and Kaozheng, Norinaga claimed that the Kojiki was the oldest surviving Japanese text. He used the supposed antiquity of the Kojiki to develop an idea of indigenous Japanese religion, laws, and religion which were later used in the development of an idea of State Shinto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%AC%E5%B1%85%E5%AE%A3%E9%95%B7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;本居宣長's Japanese Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; has a similar paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;本居宣長は、『源氏物語』の中にみられる「もののあはれ」という日本固有の情緒こそ文学の本質であると提唱し、大昔から脈々と伝わる自然情緒や精神を第一義とし、外来的な儒教の教え（「漢意」）を自然に背く考えであると非難し、中華文明を参考にして取り入れる荻生徂徠を批判したとされる。&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently in his attempt to seek Japanese nativist philosophy Motoori Norinaga chose to develop a new concept as a counter to Buddhism and Chinese influence, both foreign and thus undesirable in a time Japan was pining for national identity and national ethos, whence Shintoism was later born and propagated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I wonder: was the concept of 物の哀れ developed for the sole purpose of Genji analysis? I haven't read Kojiki-den, but I wonder if Motoori had used the idea of mono no aware in his earlier works. Where did that idea come from? What inspired and informed his conceptualization of mono no aware?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's understandable that he chose Genji. Again from his Wikipedia page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hitherto scholars of ancient literature had shown a preference for the grandness and masculinity of Man'yōshū poetry and an aversion to works like the Tale of Genji, which were regarded as unmanly and feminine. Norinaga resurrected the position of the Tale of Genji, which he regarded as an expression of mono no aware, a particular Japanese sensibility of &amp;quot;sorrow at evanescence&amp;quot; that Norinaga claimed forms the essence of Japanese literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I don't see any reason he wouldn't use his newly minted idea on other classic works of Japanese literature. I am very curious about his &lt;em&gt;sources of inspiration&lt;/em&gt;. Where did the idea of mono no aware come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T22:37:12.163" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T22:37:12.163" Title="Where did the idea of mono no aware come from?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;&lt;motoori-norinaga&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15318" CreationDate="2020-09-01T02:28:37.303" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Louis Quinze and Wilhelm II are relevant to the styles of furniture in the room, though perhaps not in a way some readers might expect. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_XV_furniture&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Louis XV&lt;/a&gt;'s name is connected with one of several styles of furniture developed in France because several French rulers (or those around them, e.g. Louis XV's mistress Madame de Pompadour) were patrons of the arts. It is no coincidence that the eighteenth century is sometimes described as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.metmuseum.org/TOAH/hd/ffurn/hd_ffurn.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the golden age of French furniture&lt;/a&gt;. This patronage led to the creation of styles of furniture that are still collected today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_II,_German_Emperor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilhelm II&lt;/a&gt;, by contrast, who was roughly a contemporary of Saki's, is not remembered as a patron of the arts but for his militarism and belligerent foreign policy. That does not mean that no great style of furniture was developed in the German-speaking part of Europe; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugendstil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jugendstil&lt;/a&gt; also had its influence on furniture style, but has nothing to do with the Kaiser. When Reginald mentions Wilhelm II, he is definitely not thinking of Jugendstil. (Speaking more generally, German pre-twentieth-century furniture has never been as attractive as French furniture. Jugendstil, which started in the 1890s, is not mainly remembered for its furniture.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, Reginald's comment about the furniture means that the Princess tried to furnish the salon with stylish (and presumably collectible and expensive) French furniture but also had to compromise and settle from some contemporary, totally unremarkable and cheaper pieces of furniture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T02:28:37.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15249" CreationDate="2020-09-01T08:42:24.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Eddie Kal and Old Brixtonian explained the doubts asked in the question. But I wanted to add the meaning of 'terribly transient feet'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found the meaning of 'terribly transient feet' from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.learncram.com/english-summary/a-photograph-summary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything has changed since then, her mother grew up; now she was&#xA;dead and the poet was reviving her memories. The only thing that has&#xA;remained unchanged is the sea which was washing the feet of all three&#xA;girls. The mention of the word ‘transient’ indicates the ever-changing&#xA;lives of human beings as well as the shortness of their stay on this&#xA;World, in contrast to the eternality of nature. The girls’ life&#xA;changed drastically during this period but the sea has not changed.&#xA;The stanza beautifully explains the transient nature of human beings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Transient feet’ is an example of the transferred epithet in the poem.&#xA;It refers to human feet but it is used to describe the lack of&#xA;permanence of human life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10691" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T08:42:24.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15419" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-01T17:46:13.683" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if either of these two scenarios ever happened:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author A: &lt;em&gt;writes story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author B: This stinks. &lt;em&gt;writes derivative work of A's work that fixes perceived weakness from the original&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author A: &lt;em&gt;writes story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Author B: I disagree with a premise found in A's story. &lt;em&gt;writes derivative with different premise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second scenario doesn't &lt;em&gt;necessarily&lt;/em&gt; have to be a philosophical/ideological disagreement. It could also be a disagreement like &amp;quot;The author doesn't understand the real cause in 1830s China of that problem; if I wrote it, this would be the consequence of doing that given the situation...&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don't know of anyone who would react that way to the inciting incident/climax, and this colors the rest of the story for me. Let me fix that...&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;The author sets up this situation thinking it's a good thing, but I think that would be awful to happen to me! I'd like to see a character that hates this setup...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that there is probably less of either of this &lt;em&gt;explicitly&lt;/em&gt; nowadays due to copyright. &lt;strong&gt;Do these ever happen, and how does an author pull off &amp;quot;improving&amp;quot; a work without doing looking like they're attempting to do insult to the original/original's author?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &amp;quot;well-known&amp;quot; I mean, and please take these as metaphors, &amp;quot;not something you'd find on Wattpad,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;not from a vanity publisher,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;something you may or may not have heard about in a college literature survey class depending on the sort of professor you had,&amp;quot; and/or &amp;quot;has had at least a million pairs of eyes touch it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10352" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T12:03:52.457" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T15:41:07.287" Title="Are there well-known examples of &quot;fanfictions&quot; of works written because an author disagreed with the original?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2020-09-03T11:31:26.143" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15421" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15422" CreationDate="2020-09-01T20:41:59.000" Score="1" ViewCount="111" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a Sherlock Holmes mystery where the detective and his assistant are in their apartment and Watson is working over some decision that he has to make. Suddenly Holmes pipes in to give his opinion on the matter, which utterly confounds Watson, because Watson had been having the debate with himself internally. Holmes explains that he had watched John throughout the night, and had been able to follow Watson's train of thought as clearly as if Watson had been verbalizing it the whole way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just can't remember which case this scene takes place in. Can anyone help me recall it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10785" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-01T21:38:35.600" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T22:01:36.757" Title="What was the case where Sherlock answers Watson's private thoughts?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15422" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15421" CreationDate="2020-09-01T22:01:36.757" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This happens twice in the Sherlock Holmes canon, openly inspired by Poe's Dupin.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening passage of &amp;quot;The Adventure of the Dancing Men&amp;quot;, from the collection &lt;em&gt;The Return of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (1905), is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product. His head was sunk upon his breast, and he looked from my point of view like a strange, lank bird, with dull grey plumage and a black top-knot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“So, Watson,” said he, suddenly, “you do not propose to invest in South African securities?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes's curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How on earth do you know that?” I asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wheeled round upon his stool, with a steaming test-tube in his hand and a gleam of amusement in his deep-set eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,” said he.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I am.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Because in five minutes you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I am sure that I shall say nothing of the kind.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You see, my dear Watson”—he propped his test-tube in the rack and began to lecture with the air of a professor addressing his class—“it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did NOT propose to invest your small capital in the goldfields.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I see no connection.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Very likely not; but I can quickly show you a close connection. Here are the missing links of the very simple chain: 1. You had chalk between your left finger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. 2. You put chalk there when you play billiards to steady the cue. 3. You never play billiards except with Thurston. 4. You told me four weeks ago that Thurston had an option on some South African property which would expire in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. 5. Your cheque-book is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. 6. You do not propose to invest your money in this manner.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How absurdly simple!” I cried.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Early in the controversial story &amp;quot;The Adventure of the Cardboard Box&amp;quot;, from the collection &lt;em&gt;Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes&lt;/em&gt; (1894), a similar conversation takes place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finding that Holmes was too absorbed for conversation I had tossed side the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair I fell into a brown study.Suddenly my companion’s voice broke in upon mythoughts: “You are right, Watson,” said he. “It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Most  preposterous!”  I  exclaimed,  and  then suddenly realizing how he had echoed the inmost thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What is this, Holmes?” I cried. “This is beyond anything which I could have imagined.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He laughed heartily at my perplexity.&#xA;“You remember,” said he, “that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe’s sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion,  you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Then I will tell you. After throwing down your paper, which was the action which drew my attention to you, you sat for half a minute with a vacant expression. Then your eyes fixed themselves upon your newly framed picture of General Gordon, and I saw by the alteration in your face that a train of thought had been started. But it did not lead very far. Your eyes flashed across to the unframed portrait of Henry Ward Beecher which stands upon the  top  of  your  books.   Then  you  glanced  up  at the wall, and of course your meaning was obvious. You were thinking that if the portrait were framed it would just cover that bare space and correspond with Gordon’s picture there.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You  have  followed  me  wonderfully!”  I  exclaimed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“So  far  I  could  hardly  have  gone  astray. But now your thoughts went back to Beecher, and you looked  hard  across  as  if  you  were  studying  the character in his features.  Then your eyes ceased to pucker, but you continued to look across, and your face was thoughtful.  You were recalling the incidents of Beecher’s career. I was well aware that you could not do this without thinking of the mission which he undertook on behalf of the North at the time of the Civil War, for I remember your expressing your passionate indignation at the way in which he was received by the more turbulent of our people. You felt so strongly about it that I knew you could not think of Beecher without thinking of that also. When a moment later I saw your eyes wander away from the picture, I suspected that your mind had now turned to the Civil War, and when I observed that your lips set, your eyes sparkled, and your hands clenched I was positive that you were indeed thinking of the gallantry which was shown by both sides in that desperate struggle. But then, again, your face grew sadder, you shook your head. You were dwelling upon the sadness and horror and useless waste of life. Your hand stole towards your own old wound and a smile quivered on your lips, which showed me that the ridiculous side of this method of settling international questions had forced itself upon your mind. At this point I agreed with you that it was preposterous and was glad to find that all my deductions had been correct.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that, way back in the very first Sherlock Holmes story &lt;em&gt;A Study in Scarlet&lt;/em&gt;, Holmes makes reference to this trick as used by Poe, but with a very different tone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. &amp;quot;No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,&amp;quot; he observed. &amp;quot;Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness, I include here the passage from Edgar Allan Poe's first Dupin story &lt;em&gt;The Murders in the Rue Morgue&lt;/em&gt; which inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write similar scenes for his own detective character:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We were strolling one night down a long dirty street in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He is a very little fellow, that’s true, and would do better for the Théâtre des Variétés.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There can be no doubt of that,” I replied unwittingly, and not at first observing (so much had I been absorbed in reflection) the extraordinary manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Dupin,” said I, gravely, “this is beyond my comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How was it possible you should know I was thinking of ——-?” Here I paused, to ascertain beyond a doubt whether he really knew of whom I thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—“of Chantilly,” said he, “why do you pause? You were remarking to yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was precisely what had formed the subject of my reflections. Chantilly was a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the rôle of Xerxes, in Crébillon’s tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Tell me, for Heaven’s sake,” I exclaimed, “the method—if method there is—by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.” In fact I was even more startled than I would have been willing to express.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It was the fruiterer,” replied my friend, “who brought you to the conclusion that the mender of soles was not of sufficient height for Xerxes et id genus omne.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The fruiterer!—you astonish me—I know no fruiterer whomsoever.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The man who ran up against you as we entered the street—it may have been fifteen minutes ago.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I now remembered that, in fact, a fruiterer, carrying upon his head a large basket of apples, had nearly thrown me down, by accident, as we passed from the Rue C —— into the thoroughfare where we stood; but what this had to do with Chantilly I could not possibly understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was not a particle of charlatanerie about Dupin. “I will explain,” he said, “and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will first retrace the course of your meditations, from the moment in which I spoke to you until that of the rencontre with the fruiterer in question. The larger links of the chain run thus—Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not help acknowledging that he had spoken the truth. He continued:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We had been talking of horses, if I remember aright, just before leaving the Rue C ——. This was the last subject we discussed. As we crossed into this street, a fruiterer, with a large basket upon his head, brushing quickly past us, thrust you upon a pile of paving stones collected at a spot where the causeway is undergoing repair. You stepped upon one of the loose fragments, slipped, slightly strained your ankle, appeared vexed or sulky, muttered a few words, turned to look at the pile, and then proceeded in silence. I was not particularly attentive to what you did; but observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You kept your eyes upon the ground—glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement, (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones,) until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word ‘stereotomy,’ a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement. I knew that you could not say to yourself ‘stereotomy’ without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so. You did look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps. But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly, which appeared in yesterday’s ‘Musée,’ the satirist, making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler’s change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted a Latin line about which we have often conversed. I mean the line&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Perdidit antiquum litera sonum.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion; and, from certain pungencies connected with this explanation, I was aware that you could not have forgotten it. It was clear, therefore, that you would not fail to combine the two ideas of Orion and Chantilly. That you did combine them I saw by the character of the smile which passed over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler’s immolation. So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. At this point I interrupted your meditations to remark that as, in fact, he was a very little fellow—that Chantilly—he would do better at the Théâtre des Variétés.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no doubt that this is the passage which inspired Doyle and Holmes, because in &amp;quot;The Adventure of the Cardboard Box&amp;quot; Watson mentioned that in the passage which Holmes read to him, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;If I remember right, [Poe's character] stumbled over a heap of stones,  looked up at the stars, and so on.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-01T22:01:36.757" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15423" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15424" CreationDate="2020-09-01T23:43:47.707" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Agatha Christie's &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;. Can anyone help me understand what &amp;quot;her face was innocent of make&amp;quot; means in the following paragraph?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was, I think, her appearance of calm good sense that so attracted me. A quiet girl, pretty in the old-fashioned sense-certainly not smart. &lt;strong&gt;Her face was innocent of make-up&lt;/strong&gt; and she wore a simple, rather shabby, black evening dress. She had frank blue eyes, and a pleasant slow voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7697" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T01:45:34.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T02:04:26.150" Title="What does &quot;her face was innocent of makeup&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15424" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15423" CreationDate="2020-09-02T00:26:48.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Make-up&amp;quot; is a single compound word meaning cosmetics applied on the face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Innocent&amp;quot; here simply means &amp;quot;without&amp;quot;. Per Google/Lexico:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;without; lacking.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;a street quite innocent of bookstores&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;her face was innocent of make-up&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;her face was without make-up&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;she didn't use any cosmetics on her face.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T00:26:48.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15425" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15428" CreationDate="2020-09-02T01:44:14.070" Score="2" ViewCount="186" Body="&lt;p&gt;Please do not look at the following if you haven't read &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;, in case of &lt;strong&gt;spoilers&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After reading this book, I had the following questions. I would feel very grateful if anyone can share the opinion to any of the questions below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How did Poirot know Mrs Rice was not at Tavistock?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How did Poirot know that Nick was engaged with Michael Seton (It turns out that Maggie, rather than Nick, was engaged to Seton, though)? Was it just a pure guess? I don’t see there’s a direct connection between Nick and Seton.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did Freddie’s husband want to kill her? It did not make sense that the man tried to kill someone when there were many people around. He should have attempted murder when Freddie was alone. Also, I feel that Freddie’s husband was an unnecessary character in this book. Without him, this story still ran well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Nick told some lies that she had some narrow escapes at the beginning of the book, did she have the whole plans already? There was no way she could know that Seton would die at that time, right?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In my opinion, one bad aspect about this book is that the story required too many coincidences. I would appreciate if you can provide your disagreement!&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nick and Maggie needed to have the same full name.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both Matthew Seton and Michael Seton needed to die.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poirot needed to ask Nick to send a friend to accompany her.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nick needed to have access to Maggie’s love letters and needed to quickly sort out some letters that didn’t contain Maggie’s names. She also needed to hide the rest of the letters properly. Otherwise, she would have let the cat out of the bag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nick needed to isolate herself and Maggie from others, and the firework should be loud enough to cover the sound of the gun.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nick's friends could not be able to give an alibi to each other. Otherwise, the possibility of the murderer would be narrowed down quickly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7697" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T11:37:31.087" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T13:02:48.037" Title="Some questions about Agatha Christie's Peril at End House" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;peril-at-end-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15426" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15423" CreationDate="2020-09-02T02:04:26.150" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Make-up was long held to be morally questionable.  You wore it to be more alluring, it misrepresented what you actually looked like, and you were risking your life and health for mere vanity, perhaps, especially if you used lead-based or arsenic-based make-up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This view was decreasing but not wholly gone by the time this book published.  Therefore, metaphorically calling the absence of make-up &amp;quot;innocence&amp;quot; was implying she had a degree of virtue for not wearing it -- and underscoring how she was still so &amp;quot;old-fashioned&amp;quot; as to refrain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T02:04:26.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15427" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15459" CreationDate="2020-09-02T05:30:17.097" Score="7" ViewCount="239" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was surprised to notice, when exploring &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's Epithets in Homer&lt;/a&gt;, that Agamemnon's individual epithet (or at least one of them) was &amp;quot;son of Atreus (Ἀτρείδης Atreídēs: also transliterated Atrīdēs)&amp;quot;. That made me look into the House Atreides in 'Dune', and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Atreides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's Paul&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert's son and biographer, House Atreides was based on the heroic but ill-fated Greek mythological House Atreus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though this is not sourced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Atreides&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia's Paul&lt;/a&gt; further adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A primary theme of Dune and its sequels is Frank Herbert's warning about society's tendencies to &amp;quot;give over every decision-making capacity&amp;quot; to a charismatic leader. He said in 1979, &amp;quot;The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes it sound as if the link between Agamemnon and the Atreides is concrete, and an example of why heroes are not the best people to follow in everything. Agamemnon himself, after all, is a very complicated character though almost certainly over-haughty. How relevant are these links?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS. It's interesting that the Atreides' link symbol is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Atreides_Hawk..svg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a red hawk&lt;/a&gt;, as below. Is this also linked to Greek mythology (the eagle being a symbol of Zeus)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/STpQP.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/STpQP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1736" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T12:00:47.650" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T18:58:11.643" Title="How relevant is the Atreides' link to Agamemnon in 'Dune'?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;dune&gt;&lt;frank-herbert&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15425" CreationDate="2020-09-02T11:34:41.427" Score="3" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He deduced it from the way she avoided answering his questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I wonder, Madame, what were the names of the friends with whom you were staying.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She raised her eyebrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Is there any reason why I should tell you that?’ she asked coldly. Poirot was immediately all innocent surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A thousand pardons, Madame. I was most maladroit. But I myself, having friends at Tavistock, fancied that you might have met them there… Buchanan—that is the name of my friends.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Rice shook her head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I don’t remember them. I don’t think I can have met them.’ Her tone now was quite cordial. ‘Don’t let us talk about boring people. Go on about Nick. Who shot at her? Why?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1932). &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was a guess based on the following observations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Tell me, Hastings, the answer to these three questions. Why has Mademoiselle Nick been sleeping badly lately? Why did she buy a black evening dress—she never wears black? Why did she say last night, “I have nothing to live for—now”?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only explanation we get is that given by Mrs Rice:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘He was—completely debased. He was a drug fiend. He taught me to take drugs. I have been fighting the habit ever since I left him. I think—at last—I am nearly cured. But it has been difficult. Oh! so horribly difficult. Nobody knows how difficult!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I could never escape from him. He used to turn up and demand money—with threats. A kind of blackmail. If I did not give him money he would shoot himself. That was always his threat. Then he took to threatening to shoot me. He was not responsible. He was mad—crazy…’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 20.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The role of Mr Rice is to heighten the dramatic effect of the real solution. The reader will recognize that they are in the last chapter of the novel and so the solution must be close at hand. But if Mr Rice were the murderer of Maggie Buckley, for no motive but madness, how unsatisfying a solution that would be! And yet something like it has been trailed since chapter 9, where Poirot hypothesized that the murderer might be an unknown, “J”, and wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of J. would explain (1) Ellen’s lack of surprise at crime and her pleasurable satisfaction. (But that might be due to natural pleasurable excitement of her class over deaths.) (2) The reason for Croft and his wife coming to live in lodge. (3) Might supply motive for F. R.’s fear of secret being revealed or for jealousy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this false solution has a certain amount of plausibility, meaning that some readers will be sorely disappointed at how poor a solution it is. For these readers the surprise and astonishment when the true solution is revealed will be enhanced by the contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The disappearance of Michael Seton has already appeared in the newspapers when the novel begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I picked up the morning paper which had fallen from my hand and resumed my perusal of the morning’s news. […] ‘Still no news of that flying fellow, Seton, in his round-the-world flight. Pretty plucky, these fellows. That amphibian machine of his, the Albatross, must be a great invention. Too bad if he’s gone west. Not that they’ve given up hope yet. He may have made one of the Pacific islands.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note Hastings’ phrasing, “still no news”, which implies that this is a story that has been running for some time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Nick recounts her three “escapes from death” in chapter 2, she doesn’t give any dates, and only in the third case (the problem with the brakes on her car) is there any possibility of corroboration from independent witnesses (“You can go and ask them at Mott’s Garage”). So the following sequence of events seems to be indicated: (1) Nick learns of Matthew Seton’s death (in chapter 7 he is said to have “died about a week ago”); (2) Nick learns of Michael Seton’s disappearance, suspects that he is dead, and prepares her plan; (3) Nick starts telling unverifiable stories of “escapes from death” that she backdates to before the news of Seton’s disappearance; (4) She deliberately detaches her car’s brakes and crashes it into the hedge; (5) Poirot and Hastings arrive at St Loo; (6) on the night of the party, Nick listens to the nine o’clock news and hears that Michael Seton’s death has been confirmed; (7) Nick kills Maggie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The problem with coincidence is that it is not realistic, and so it is not appropriate to include in a realistic novel. (I wrote more about this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5842/3003&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Golden Age detective stories are not realistic! They are artificial puzzles, offering a combination of intellectual challenge and dramatic effect. The solution needs to be &lt;em&gt;possible&lt;/em&gt; but does not need to be realistic, provided that the unrealistic elements have all been satisfactorily clued. Coincidence is one of the techniques by which Golden Age authors made the solution surprising, knowing that readers are likely to ignore or discard theories that seem to be too far fetched, even if the coincidence is clued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the case of &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The coincidence of names was of course already known to Nick, and she built her plan around it. It is clued in chapter 2: “There have been lots of Magdalas in the Buckley family” and chapter 18: “‘There aren’t many abbreviations of Frederica,’ I said. ‘It’s not like Margaret where you can have half a dozen—Maggie, Margot, Madge, Peggie—’”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The death of the Setons prompted Nick to make the plan, as discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nick’s plan didn’t rely on Poirot suggesting that she send for a friend: it was natural that she should have invited her cousin to the party. In fact, Nick’s being too keen to make use of this piece of luck was what set Poirot on the right track:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘For Maggie Buckley wrote a letter home immediately on arrival, and in it she used one innocent phrase that puzzled me: “I don’t see why Nick should have telegraphed for me the way she did. Tuesday would have done just as well.” What did that mention of Tuesday mean? It could only mean one thing. Maggie had been coming to stay on Tuesday anyway. But in that case Mademoiselle Nick had lied—or had at any rate suppressed the truth.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 20.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Poirot suggests in chapter 20 that “Doubtless she [Maggie] reads to her cousin parts of her fiancé’s letters”. Certainly it was a weakness in Nick’s plan that if Maggie did not bring the letters with her, then they might be discovered at a later date by Maggie’s parents and cast doubt on Nick’s claim to have been engaged to Michael Seton. But possibly Nick had asked Maggie to bring them, or possibly she had a backup plan: as Maggie’s cousin and friend, it would have been natural for her to offer to assist Maggie’s parents in handling her papers and possessions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The coincidence of there being fireworks on the night of the party was already known to Nick. It is clued in chapter 3: “It’s Regatta week, you know” and chapter 12, where it is clear from Ellen’s evidence that Nick has a party every year during Regatta week to watch the fireworks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The lack of alibis was lucky for Nick, but she could afford to take the chance that alibis, if they existed, would not be convincing to the police. Her own defence was strong, as she apparently had no time to dispose of the gun between shooting Maggie and appearing at the window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-02T13:02:48.037" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T13:02:48.037" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15429" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15419" CreationDate="2020-09-02T15:41:07.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To pick a narrow and specific interpretation of your question that doesn't devolve into a list of historic &amp;quot;derived works&amp;quot; like Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; retelling Biblical stories, or any of the hundreds of King Arthur or Robin Hood retellings, I'll focus on works that explicitly &lt;em&gt;reject&lt;/em&gt; an aspect of the original work and seek to redress its shortcomings, not just a retelling of classic stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think a good example that illustrates your concept would be Kirill Eskov's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Last Ringbearer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, described by Wikipedia as &amp;quot;an alternative account of [..] the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings&amp;quot;. The core conceit of the book is that the narrative of Lord of the Rings is one &amp;quot;written by the victors&amp;quot;, which in this case is the anti-industrial, anti-technological regime of the Elves and their Gondorian vassals, who oppose the nations of Mordor who focus on developing industrial technology to challenge the ancient superstitions of the elves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This work is an explicit rejection of the ideological mindset that underpins the original work, and an attempt to create an alternate version with a modernist, possibly rationalist mindset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10313" LastActivityDate="2020-09-02T15:41:07.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-03T01:36:33.990" Score="1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Julie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miss Julie&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%B6ken_Julie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fröken Julie&lt;/a&gt;), a seminal play and central piece of modern Swedish literature, the two main characters are named &amp;quot;Julie&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Jean&amp;quot;. Why &amp;quot;Julie&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Jean&amp;quot; though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a contemporary perspective, &amp;quot;Julie&amp;quot; may seem slightly more reasonable than its counterpart, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Julie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it does exist in Sweden as a female first name that parents would give to their daughter&lt;/a&gt;. However, I don't believe it is a Swedish name in origin. And &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nordicnames.de/w/images/statistics/d72a8efd072f1c05a2368900471ac894.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this graph&lt;/a&gt; also tells us its usage previous to 2000 was vanishingly sparse, much less one and a half centuries ago. It had not appeared in non-French literary works either until Miss Julie came along.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first appearance of Julie in a popular non-French literary work occurred with Swedish playwright August Strindberg's tragedy Miss Julie in 1888. As it became one of the most widely performed plays in the English-speaking world, the choice of Julie as a name expanded along with it. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_(given_name)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of &amp;quot;Jean&amp;quot; is a bigger mystery: it is obviously a French name, popular in French speaking regions. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nordicnames.de/wiki/Jean_m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the name has never had any kind of popularity in Sweden that could be spoken of&lt;/a&gt;. The character Jean is a local peasant boy hoping to climb up the social ladder and take some short cuts while doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did August Strindberg choose these two names? French influence? Even so I imagine he'd have had allusions and literary references in mind when making these choices as these names were minusculely rare if at all existent back in his day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T15:20:14.897" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T16:20:20.020" Title="Why did August Strindberg pick the names &quot;Julie&quot; and &quot;Jean&quot; for the protagonists of his play Miss Julie (1888)?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;&lt;august-strindberg&gt;&lt;miss-julie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1527" CreationDate="2020-09-03T03:02:15.510" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was Tatyana's nanya, who said that she was forced to marry at 13 and her husband was even younger. Nanya was a serf.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Vladimir, Tatiana, and Olga grew up playing together, and Lenskiy constantly refers to that happy time in his life. All three have to be about the same age. There is little difference in age between Tatyana and Olga, so all three are between 17 and 19. There is no mention of a specific age for any of them. Still, this is 19th Century Russia and not 16th Century Verona - they are of proper marriageable age. If Lensky were any younger, his friendship with Onegin would be more of a teacher and protege, which is not likely to result in a duel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onegin was about 23 at the start of the poem and 26 at the end of it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onegin (once more I rehearse&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His story) having killed his friend,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Without an aim on which to fix,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Reaching the age of twenty-six,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prince Gremin and Tatyana have been married for about two years, as he said to Onegin at the ball:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Wait, I'll introduce you.-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Who is she? - My wife.-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;So you're married! I didn't know the wound!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How long had it been?&amp;quot; - About two years.-&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the text we know that Tatyana was taken to Moscow to find a husband, about one year after the duel, and that's where she met Prince Gremin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10788" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T07:34:23.427" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T07:34:23.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15432" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15433" CreationDate="2020-09-03T03:52:46.540" Score="1" ViewCount="130" Body="&lt;p&gt;A paragraph from Chapter 38 of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she firmly believed and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She was not sorry, however, to have the recital of them interrupted by the entrance of the lady from whom they sprung.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Poor Charlotte! it was melancholy to leave her to such society! But she had chosen it with her eyes open; and though evidently regretting that her visitors were to go, she did not seem to ask for compassion. Her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns, had not yet lost their charms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I somehow could not manage to understand what the bold sentence actually means. Does that exemplify her detest towards Lady Catherine de Bourgh? Or that just shows Elejabeth's concern over her friend any one confirm that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10707" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T16:28:49.497" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T16:28:49.497" Title="I am having trouble understanding a passage from &quot;Pride And Prejudice&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15432" CreationDate="2020-09-03T09:43:13.300" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth doesn't particularly like talking to Mr Collins about how great his marriage to Charlotte is. She is described in the previous paragraph as having to try &amp;quot;to unite civility and truth&amp;quot; -- this suggests that telling the truth about her feelings would not be polite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The particular sentence you have bolded says that she was glad his speech about &amp;quot;his&#xA;domestic comforts&amp;quot; was interrupted when Charlotte herself arrived. It doesn't particularly speak to detesting Lady Catherine. The rest of the paragraph is clear that Elizabeth thinks Charlotte is in an unpleasant situation but doesn't realize it yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="417" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T09:43:13.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3042" CreationDate="2020-09-03T10:55:18.733" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rest is referred to in Hebrews chapters 3 and 4. esp. 4.1-3. There it is certainly an end of life event which is compared to God's entering into His rest at the end of creation (Genesis chapters 1 and 2 esp. 2.2.) For the Christian believer it is a state of being that occurs when God's work is completed and the whole universe is under his rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10790" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T10:55:18.733" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-03T12:22:09.007" Score="4" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first part of the Shahnameh, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/01shahs_of_old.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Shahs of Old&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the Deev-influenced king Zohak has a dream in which he foresees his own downfall at the hands of Feridoun and his cow-headed mace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zohak dreamed he beheld a youth slender like to a cypress, and he came towards him bearing a cow-headed mace, and with it he struck Zohak to the ground. Then the tyrant awoke and trembled, and called for his Mubids, that they should interpret to him this dream. And they were troubled, for they foresaw danger, and he menaced them if they foretold him evil. And they were silent for fear three days, but on the fourth one who had courage spake and said-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There will arise one named Feridoun, who shall inherit thy throne and reverse thy fortunes, and strike thee down with a cow-headed mace.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How could the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mubids&lt;/a&gt; tell that the youth's name should be Feridoun?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm guessing this would make more sense in Persian: perhaps the word &amp;quot;Feridoun&amp;quot; is similar to one meaning &amp;quot;cypress&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;slender&amp;quot;, or another word used in the description of the youth in the dream. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fereydun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; mentions the etymology of the name, but is not helpful in constructing any connection with this dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T19:54:26.147" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:54:26.147" Title="How could Zohak's advisors deduce the name Feridoun from his dream?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15430" CreationDate="2020-09-03T12:42:32.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is purely speculative, based on what you have said and reviewing the plot summary in the Wikipedia article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You point out that the names are not common in Sweden at that time, which points to an underlying reason for their choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking this as a given and looking to the play itself, I see that it is set at Midsummer, the turning point of the year, and explores Darwinian themes of inheritance and fitness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would speculate then that the names Jean and Julie reference the months of June and July (in Swedish &lt;em&gt;Juni&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Juli&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The play is set near the end of June as the year turns and gives way to July. It may be that the names are intended to gently reference an evolving human society by highlighting that she belongs to the future and he the past, or possibly that she represents a doomed evolutionary branch.  I suspect one needs real familiarity with the play to theorise further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other aspect of the name Jean is a possible reference to St John the Baptist, on whose feast day the second part of the play is set. the Gospels portray John as the precursor or forerunner of Christ, which may again play to themes of succession in the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: It’s just struck me that someone called ‘August’ may well have enjoyed naming his characters for months of the year...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T16:20:20.020" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T16:20:20.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-03T14:34:07.903" Score="8" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently acquired a volume from the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_de_la_Pl%C3%A9iade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliothèque de la Pléiade&lt;/a&gt; from an antiquarian bookseller. These volumes always have two fabric bookmarks and as you can see from the image below, the bookmarks in this volume are creased.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ld9Bc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ld9Bc.png&quot; alt=&quot;spine of a volume of Camus's works lying flat with with a creased yellow bookmark in front of it&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to iron the bookmarks but I have no idea what type of fabric Gallimard uses for them. Hence, I don't know at which temperature I can safely iron them. Can anybody give advice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: Since the age of the book may be relevant to the materials used for the bookmark (i.e. synthetic or not), I want to add that the volume in question is Albert Camus: &lt;em&gt;Théâtre - récits - nouvelles&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Roger Quilliot. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Gallimard, 1967. (This volume is not to be confused with &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Bibliotheque-de-la-Pleiade/Theatre-Recits-et-nouvelles-Essais2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Théâtre - Récits et nouvelles - Essais&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in two volumes, published in 1980.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T11:14:11.453" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T16:26:53.840" Title="At what temperature can I safely iron the fabric bookmarks in the volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15438" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-03T15:27:30.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T15:27:30.983" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T15:27:30.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15439" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-03T15:27:30.983" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Swedish playwright, novelist and poet August Strindberg (1849 – 1912) and his life as a writer. Questions about his works should include the tag [scandinavian-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T19:46:34.540" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T19:46:34.540" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15440" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-03T15:30:08.837" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T15:30:08.837" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T15:30:08.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15441" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-03T15:30:08.837" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play &quot;Miss Julie&quot; (&quot;Fröken Julie&quot;) by August Strindberg. Should be used with the tag [august-strindberg] and [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T15:31:05.477" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T15:31:05.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15437" CreationDate="2020-09-03T16:17:02.463" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don’t know what fabric the ribbons are made from, but there are a number of precautions you can take to minimise risk of damaging the ribbons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Don’t iron directly onto the fabric, always use an intervening layer of a cotton or linen fabric. This much reduces the risk of melting or scorching the ribbons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Use moist heat. I probably wouldn’t use an iron at all, but a steamer that doesn’t actually need to make contact. I have a couple of different types: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Quest-4198-Steam-Cleaner-Litre/dp/B00WB95JJA/ref=asc_df_B00WB95JJA/?tag=googshopuk-21&amp;amp;linkCode=df0&amp;amp;hvadid=214192173502&amp;amp;hvpos=&amp;amp;hvnetw=g&amp;amp;hvrand=15614761069270594929&amp;amp;hvpone=&amp;amp;hvptwo=&amp;amp;hvqmt=&amp;amp;hvdev=m&amp;amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;amp;hvlocint=&amp;amp;hvlocphy=20342&amp;amp;hvtargid=pla-440989874847&amp;amp;psc=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this kind intended for cleaning&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Muro-Steamer-Clothes-Portable-Handheld/dp/B07X4GK5DG&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this kind intended for dewrinkling clothes&lt;/a&gt;. (Neither of these is the actual models I have, but you get the idea). The steam will help to relax the creases out of the ribbon better than heat alone, but I would recommend then pressing the ribbon between flat heavy object until fully cooled and not putting between you’d book pages until &lt;em&gt;utterly&lt;/em&gt; dry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of a steamer you can iron the ribbon between dampened cloths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Needless to say, steam and damp air are no friends to previous editions and you should take steps to adequately protect the book during these operations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T16:17:02.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15443" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-03T17:06:14.517" Score="2" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chorus of Halsey's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/halsey/colors.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colors&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everything is blue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His pills, his hands, his jeans&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And now I'm covered in the colors pulled apart at the seams&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And it's blue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And it's blue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering about the second line here. Why are the pills blue? Is it referring to a specific type of pill that's usually blue? (And why are the hands blue, also?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGulAZnnTKA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;music video&lt;/a&gt;, but I've never watched it, only listened to it on Spotify.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T03:55:26.603" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T03:55:26.603" Title="What are the blue pills referred to in Halsey's &quot;Colors&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;halsey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15444" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15463" CreationDate="2020-09-03T17:35:08.413" Score="6" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Third Girl&lt;/em&gt; (1966) by Agatha Christie, the character Dr Stillingfleet describes the condition of his patient:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“She’s down at Kenway Court. Came like a lamb. Can’t tell you much yet. The girl’s full of drugs. I’d say she’d been taking purple hearts, and &lt;strong&gt;dream bombs&lt;/strong&gt;, and probably L.S.D.… She’s been all hopped up for some time. She says no, but I wouldn’t trust much to what she says.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a “dream bomb”? I would have guessed that it was an invention, except that “purple heart” really was 1960s drugs slang:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;purple heart, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 3.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;British colloquial.&lt;/em&gt; Originally: a tablet of the drug Drinamyl, containing dextroamphetamine and amylobarbitone (in reference to its colour and shape). Later also: a tablet of any amphetamine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T15:22:19.353" Title="What is a &quot;dream bomb&quot; in Agatha Christie's &quot;Third Girl&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;third-girl&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15445" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:47:14.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T19:47:14.147" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:47:14.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15446" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:47:14.147" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Third Girl' (1966), a novel by Agatha Christie, featuring the famous Hercules Poirot. Questions about this book should be tagged with [agatha-christie]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T21:00:20.417" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T21:00:20.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15447" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:51:50.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T19:51:50.190" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:51:50.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15448" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:51:50.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Persian epic poem 'Shahnameh' (c. 977 – 1010 CE). Questions about this work should be tagged with [ferdowsi] and [persian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T00:30:39.930" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T00:30:39.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15449" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3983" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:57:01.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s called &amp;quot;Enjoying the Chase&amp;quot; by Kirsty Moseley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10793" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T20:07:52.963" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T20:07:52.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15450" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:57:47.843" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-03T19:57:47.843" LastActivityDate="2020-09-03T19:57:47.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15451" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-03T19:57:47.843" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life and work of Ferdowsi (born 935 or 940, died between 1019 to 1026), a Persian poet famous for his epic poem 'Shanahmeh'. Questions about his works should be tagged with [persian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T21:11:09.017" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T21:11:09.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-03T21:20:26.513" Score="3" ViewCount="269" Body="&lt;p&gt;At roughly page 277 (I'm reading a translation) of The Two Towers, where Gollum is talking to himself as Frodo is sleeping, it says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam had lain still, fascinated by this debate, but watching every move that Gollum made from under his half-closed eye-lids. &lt;strong&gt;To his simple mind ordinary hunger, the desire to eat hobbits, had seemed the chief danger in Gollum. He realized now that it was not so: Gollum was feeling the terrible call of the Ring.&lt;/strong&gt; The Dark Lord was He, of course; but Sam wondered who She was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Huh?! I was fully convinced that Sam had been extremely aware of this threat since long before they ever met Gollum. How is it possible that Frodo did not think it was necessary to even mention this to his trusty companion and only friend, facing such extreme dangers? It seems downright idiotic by Frodo and putting them in an even worse danger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, in spite of the explanation that Frodo feels pity and mercy toward Gollum, I found it baffling how careless they both were in handling Gollum. Not even having his foot tied to the rope, allowing themselves to go to sleep both at the same time, etc. Even if Gollum didn't desire the Ring, or even knew about it, he is such a weird and sketchy figure that this alone should make them far more careful and cautious. They seemed to trust him for absolutely no good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What on Earth did Sam think that Gollum was? Why was this weird creature following them around for so long and repeatedly tried to stab/suffocate/bite/attack/flee from them? Just some crazy guy who happens to have found them and is looking for &amp;quot;hobbit meat&amp;quot;? Even if that had been the case, Sam's behaviour is absolutely bizarre to me. And Frodo's is even worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why exactly did Frodo (apparently) not tell Sam about this extremely important detail? Why did Sam never question or ask about it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also find it strange that Tolkien says &amp;quot;simple mind&amp;quot;, as if Sam was some kind of mentally challenged hobbit. Maybe that's what's implied... But he seems very capable to me, albeit strangely submissive to Frodo in a way which I don't quite understand. But for him to think that this Gollum person was following them around to Mordor just to kill and eat them makes zero sense to me. Sam doesn't appear even nearly that stupid/ignorant in the rest of the story to me. To me, he just seems &amp;quot;slightly less sophisticated&amp;quot; than Frodo, and presumably relatively poor since he worked for Frodo back home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't understand why Sam would hold Frodo's hand and almost kiss it and cry over it sometimes. That doesn't seem like normal hobbit behaviour. Or even something that a servant would do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part actually made me uncomfortable, way more than the environment/setting of the story. It makes me feel as if I've missed some major point of the whole story. Maybe &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; am too stupid to realize that Sam has been described throughout the whole story to be a real &amp;quot;simpleton&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10794" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T14:07:19.070" Title="How is it possible that Sam only realizes that Gollum wants the Ring so very late?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15453" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15454" CreationDate="2020-09-03T23:19:20.133" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hk-lawyer.org/content/face-face-hon-henry-litton-gbm-cbm-jp-former-permanent-judge-court-final-appeal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Face to Face with Hon. Henry Litton GBM CBM JP, Former Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal | Hong Kong Lawyer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A good judge is also humble – they “see the world as the common man and woman sees it.” They don’t judge from “some great height”, with a &lt;em&gt;“wrinkled brow and sneer of cold command”&lt;/em&gt;, he said, referencing the poet Keats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&amp;amp;q=keats++%E2%80%9Cwrinkled+brow+and+sneer+of+cold+command%E2%80%9D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; couldn't find it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GxQ6.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1GxQ6.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Image of results Google search for &amp;quot;keats wrinkled brow and sneer of cold command&amp;quot;, showing the response &amp;quot;It looks like there aren't great matches for your search&amp;quot; and a number of irrelevant responses.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="175" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T07:36:52.943" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T07:36:52.943" Title="Where did Keats write “wrinkled brow and sneer of cold command”?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15453" CreationDate="2020-09-03T23:23:04.287" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is because it is a slight misquote, the line being&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/a&gt;, by Percy Shelley, not Keats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T07:57:30.937" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T07:57:30.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-04T03:12:59.220" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gigi, the female protagonist of Colette's novella &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigi_(novella)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gigi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1944), is full of character. Independent and mischievous, and a little tomboyish, she leaves a lasting impression on the reader. I am wondering if she was based on a real person in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colette&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colette&lt;/a&gt;'s life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colette grew up in Burgundy and seems to have lived in Paris and known the city pretty well by the time &lt;em&gt;Gigi&lt;/em&gt; came out. I am not sure Gigi would have been considered a typical Parisian girl at that time, but she certainly comes off as an interesting character to the modern reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T16:55:31.440" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T16:55:31.440" Title="Was the main character in Gigi based on a real-life person?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;colette&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15456" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-08-27T06:12:14.340" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;King Crimson's song &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/O8-5N4rsjh4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;I talk to the wind&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; starts with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Said the straight man to the late man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where have you been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure that the songwriter is creating a contrast (e.g., an antithesis) between &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt;, but I don't know what that could be... my first hunch was that &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt; could mean &lt;em&gt;punctual&lt;/em&gt;, but I did a quick research and that doesn't seem to be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any contrast here between &lt;em&gt;straight&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10800" OwnerDisplayName="Gerardo Furtado" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T10:03:59.677" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T10:03:59.677" Title="Is there a contrast between &quot;straight&quot; and &quot;late&quot; in this example?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15456" CreationDate="2020-08-27T07:06:13.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assonance or rhyming has poetic force. Contrast - if any was intended (I cannot say for sure) - may lie in the straightness of the man who is straight and unmoved by the wind compared to the lateness of the man who has been travelling, perhaps blown by the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Anton" LastActivityDate="2020-08-27T07:06:13.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-04T10:33:11.917" Score="1" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical Persian epic poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt; (a compilation and retelling of previous mythological and historical Persian literature) is mostly credited to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferdowsi&lt;/a&gt;, who spent over thirty years (977-1010 CE) composing it. However, the first person who started working on this versification was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daqiqi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daqiqi&lt;/a&gt;, who died in 977 CE after writing 1000 verses. These thousand verses were included in the Shahnameh by Ferdowsi when he compiled it, and apparently the difference in style between Daqiqi's and Ferdowsi's writing is still observable when you read the original text today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where in the Shahnameh are those 1000 verses?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm reading &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/shahnameh.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen Zimmern's translation available online&lt;/a&gt;, which is divided into 18 sections; where within this story can we find the work of Daqiqi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T10:33:11.917" Title="Which part of the Shahnameh is the work of Daqiqi?" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;&lt;daqiqi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15427" CreationDate="2020-09-04T12:34:31.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is relevant because in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Emperor_of_Dune&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;God Emperor of Dune&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Leto II reveals how, over the past 3500+ years, he has had conversations with the memories of his ancestors, including Agamemnon, and is determined that the only way humanity will survive is if he avoids the mistakes that they made during their lifetimes. That gives some legitimacy to his observations and motives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Emperor_of_Dune#Concept_and_themes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using his ancestral memories, Leto II has knowledge of the entirety of human history and is able to recall the effects and patterns of tyrannical institutions, from the Babylonian Empire through the Jesuits on ancient Earth...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1701" LastEditorUserId="1701" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T14:37:18.577" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T14:37:18.577" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15460" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13993" CreationDate="2020-09-04T12:57:13.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order for an author to participate in KDP Select, the book must be offered in electronic format only on Amazon, though it can be offered in other forms in other venues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T12:57:13.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15461" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2020-09-04T13:06:06.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is late, and not the longest, but the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune_(franchise)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dune&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; novels span &lt;strong&gt;51 years&lt;/strong&gt;, from 1965 to 2016.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1701" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T13:06:06.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15462" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15452" CreationDate="2020-09-04T14:07:19.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The Nature of Hobbits&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd start with 'Concerning Hobbits':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.&lt;/strong&gt; They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... Their faces were as a rule good-natured rather than beautiful, broad, bright-eyed, red-cheeked, with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them). &lt;strong&gt;They were hospitable and delighted in parties, and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted.&lt;/strong&gt; ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At no time had Hobbits of any kind been warlike, and &lt;strong&gt;they had never fought among themselves&lt;/strong&gt;. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire), who was elected every seven years at the Free Fair on the White Downs at the Lithe, that is at Midsummer.&lt;/strong&gt; As mayor almost his only duty was to preside at banquets, given on the Shire-holidays, which occurred at frequent intervals. But the offices of Postmaster and First Shirriff were attached to the mayoralty, so that he managed both the Messenger Service and the Watch. These were the only Shire-services, and the Messengers were the most numerous, and much the busier of the two. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only put in the most relevant of the passages which I believe illustrate what it means when Samwise is a &amp;quot;simple&amp;quot; person. Namely, there is no duplicity in him (as there is not in most hobbits). Also, they essentially did not know about politics because such a thing did not take place in the Shire. Hence, Sam could not understand something as complex as an 'ever-burning desire for the One Ring' because it was so far out of the (simple, i.e., straightforward) world that he had experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Sam, Frodo, &amp;amp; Sméagol&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sam knows of Gollum originally from Bilbo and then their mutual wanderings; when Bilbo discusses Gollum, then his intention had been to eat Bilbo. Hence, Sam's first knowledge of Gollum is as someone who eats hobbits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, of course Sam has also been aware of the effects of the Ring on Bilbo and Frodo, but it seems to me that throughout the story nearly everyone (except for Cirdan, Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel) underestimate the true power of the Ring—and the hold it takes on its owner, and, especially, on Gollum who had it for such a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding what Frodo mentions or doesn't mention, I think it's quite apparent that he knows a lot but lets on little: there are other times as well when he could talk and expand on subjects, but does not do it. As odd as it is, this sounds to me as an aspect of politeness—and, again, though Frodo knows more about the Ring than Samwise does, he still underestimates the depths to which it takes ahold of the wearer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this small understanding also made Frodo think that swearing on this symbol would be enough to keep Sméagol truthful: which it actually was, more or less, for a very long while. &lt;strong&gt;This worked a lot better than the rope which actively hurt Sméagol, at the very least, and it also gave the hobbits a basis for trusting him.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Frodo &amp;amp; Sam&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding your last question... The behaviour—of Sam holding Frodo's arm—may seem quaint to us in the 21st century, and could even be the aspect of the book which has aged quickest as modern male gestures have shirked away from intimacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, Sam &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; Frodo's servant and gardener—more than that, they are also close friends, though Frodo is a few years older than Sam. Sam clearly cared about Frodo enough to depart the Shire and to help him on his journey, along with Merry and Pippin, because they felt they couldn't allow their friend to embark on that journey alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're now months on into the expedition, and Frodo and Sam have been travelling together, Sam mostly helping Frodo on because of how weak he is. I think it's human (&lt;em&gt;hobbit&lt;/em&gt;?) to show concern and care for someone in such a situation, and Samwise displays the strongest empathy when he does do so. The same applies in the &amp;quot;If I can't carry it, I'll carry you&amp;quot; situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also think Sam can see (to his greatest regret) a situation where only he has the strength to make it back—and that makes him even more regretful of the circumstances they find themselves in. He clearly wouldn't want to come out himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1736" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T14:07:19.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15463" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15444" CreationDate="2020-09-04T15:22:19.353" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plot hinges on the dream state induced in Norma by drugs administered by Robert Orwell, posing as her father, and his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe that Christie introduces the notion of there being lots of 'new' drugs around, possibly as an authorial defense against people picking holes in the storyline if some real named drug such as LSD or Purple hearts wouldn't have quite the effect required by the narrative, but also as a means of dropping breadcrumbs for the reader that 'dreams' and 'drugs' are linked and important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one point in the story, Claudia and Frances are in discussion, about Norma, David, the drug and party scene etc:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was up too late last night,&amp;quot; she said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;At Basil's party. I feel dreadful. Oh well, I suppose black coffee will be helpful. Have some more before I've drunk it all? Basil would make us try some new pills — Emerald Dreams. I don't think it's really worth trying&#xA;all these silly things.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with the Op's question about 'Dream Bombs' and the 'Emerald dreams' Frances sampled we have two drugs introducing the notion of an induced dream state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, having searched online and using Google books and found nothing to link either name to drugs, I think it safe to say that neither of the 'dream drugs' map to contemporaneous street pharmaceuticals but are there as signposts to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T15:22:19.353" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15437" CreationDate="2020-09-04T16:26:53.840" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;What I have done so far is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To be on the safe side, I used the iron at its lowest temperature, which is suitable for synthetic fabrics for synthetic fabrics (even though I doubt that the material is synthetic). This does not lead to a &lt;em&gt;perfectly&lt;/em&gt; flat bookmark, but at least it remains flat; the book's gravity (2200 pages of bible paper) can do the rest.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I flattened centimetre by centimetre with my fingers, held the fabric in place using the forefinger and middle finger and put the tip of the iron on the piece of fabric between my fingers. The reason for this is that this narrow strip (just 4 millimetres wide) is not simply creased but folded and I want to verify that it remains flat until the iron is actually on it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I did not use steam for two reasons: (1) I'm rather reluctant to use steam near &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_paper&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bible paper&lt;/a&gt;, which is extremely thin, and (2) the steam function on my iron no longer works very well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;For the part near the spine, I needed to put the book on its spine (between two other objects to hold it in that position) in order to iron the last 1.5 - 2 cms of the bookmark. (This is where steam would be even riskier.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see the result below. It's not perfect, but as I said above, the book's gravity can do the rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jB3nl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jB3nl.png&quot; alt=&quot;bookmark with visible creases but without folds, held between the book's spine and an object hidden from view&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T16:26:53.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Abu Manṣūr Muḥammad ibn Ahmad Daqīqī (usually known by his descriptive pen-name Daqiqi, even though &amp;quot;Muhammad ibn Ahmad&amp;quot; was his personal name and &amp;quot;Abu Mansur&amp;quot; his patronymic or family name) was a poet who lived from 932 to 977 CE in the Samanid Empire of Iran. He wrote poetic verse in the Persian language, and started to write a verse form of the Persian national epic &lt;em&gt;The Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; before his untimely death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" Score="0" Body="For questions about the Persian poet Abu Mansur Daqiqi (ابومنصور دقیقی‎) or about any of his literary works. If the question concerns some of his short poems, use the [poetry] tag too." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T16:41:00.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-04T17:16:29.353" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is somewhat of a cliché that Romantic literature is escapist or at least tends to be escapist. Here is an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The study and understanding of reasons and nature of the presence of this tendency of Escapism in English Romanticism becomes necessary in order to interpret, analyze, understand its usefulness and limitations and enjoy the works of great Literature. (mkatiyar: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wattpad.com/59756128-escapism-in-english-poetic-romanticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Escapism in English Poetic Romanticism&lt;/a&gt;, published on Wattpad)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the terms &amp;quot;escapist&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;escapism&amp;quot; are not used in the Wikipedia articles &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romantic_literature_in_English&amp;amp;oldid=965805130&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic literature in English&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romantic_poetry&amp;amp;oldid=973361738&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic poetry&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=English_Romantic_sonnets&amp;amp;oldid=931480460&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Romantic sonnets&lt;/a&gt;. The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Romanticism&amp;amp;oldid=975905062&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romanticism&lt;/a&gt; states (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an &lt;strong&gt;attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What these articles and several &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=romantic+literature+escapism&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;ei=PXFSX-LhPOGN1fAP6qSn2Ac&amp;amp;start=10&amp;amp;sa=N&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwii9MDD-8_rAhXhRhUIHWrSCXsQ8NMDCJMB&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=880&amp;amp;dpr=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sources on Google Books&lt;/a&gt; do not explain is where this characterisation comes from. For example, in the case of the English Romantics, did this characterisation come from contemporaries of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley, or did it emerge later, for example, at the rise of Realism? Which critic or critics first described Romanticism as escapist (in a negative way)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T17:16:29.353" Title="What is the origin of the charge that Romantic literature is escapist?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15468" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15469" CreationDate="2020-09-04T22:08:24.680" Score="3" ViewCount="4886" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman calls his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neilgaiman.com/mediafiles/exclusive/shortstories/emerald.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Study in Emerald&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;* a Lovecraft/Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. And indeed it is exactly that: it uses the narration and story structure pretty characteristic to one from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about the famous detective. The difference is in the background: in this story, the Cthulhu Mythos Creatures live happily among us... mostly as nobility, which is happy to devour body, mind or soul of any commoner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the story, the narrator returns from the war in Afghanistan and finds a room with an eccentric genius living at Baker Street. Soon, they are approached by Scotland Yard to help solving the murder of a German prince, whose green blood has been splattered over the walls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The antagonists are apparently a doctor and an actor who enjoys changing his appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is - if we assume that this is indeed the world of Arthur Conan Doyle - who is who from the &amp;quot;Sherlock Holmes&amp;quot; universe? Is it (as in the original) Holmes and Watson chasing Moriarty and his cronies, even if they've committed murder to protect humanity? Or is it other way around - Holmes and Watson are the outlaws being pursued by the law-abiding Moriarty?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T05:56:23.150" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T04:21:02.450" Title="Who are the main characters of &quot;A Study in Emerald&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15469" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15468" CreationDate="2020-09-05T01:03:42.360" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Holmes and Watson are the criminals being chased by James Moriarty and Sebastian Moran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the clues about the main characters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It mentions  'The Dynamics of an Asteroid' as the paper written by the detective friend; this is written by Moriarty in Doyle's works.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The narrator tells what a crack shot he was, as Moran is -- and as Watson never was&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The narrator is both referred to as Sebastian and has the initials SM.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Watson is indeed identified as not only the &amp;quot;Limping Doctor&amp;quot;, but explicitly as &amp;quot;John (or perhaps James) Watson&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes is referred as Sigerson, an alias he used in Doyle's stories, and his disguise skills have been repurposed to make him an actor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T01:03:42.360" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-05T02:10:53.967" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central theme in the Japanese light novel/manga &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toradora!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Toradora!&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%81%A8%E3%82%89%E3%83%89%E3%83%A9!&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;とらドラ!&lt;/a&gt;) around which the entire story unfolds is the love triangle between the male protagonist Takasu Ryuji and his two girl friends, Aisaka Taiga and Kushieda Minori (Minorin). At the beginning of the story Ryuji has a crush on Minorin, and Taiga likes Ryuji's male friend. The story then brings Ryuji and Taiga closer, but also makes hints at Minorin's possible concealed romantic interest in Ryuji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in Freudian or other psychoanalytical interpretations of the story. Possible connections are evidenced by the constant references and comparisons to a nuclear family made by their friend Kawashima Ami that Ryuji is like the father, Minorin the mother, and Taiga the daughter. Ami also never fails to remind Ryuji because of the way Ryuji--and to a lesser extent Minorin too--cares for Taiga, their entangled and twisted relationship is doomed and people will eventually get hurt. I thought there might be a clear Oedipal tie (more accurately an Electra one) between Ryuji and Taiga. Taiga's parents are absent. Her dad abandoned her. Her mother only makes an appearance once in a blue moon. I am having difficulty taking it further from here. Maybe it is too direct a tie to expand on further in a Freudian reading? Of course Ryuji doesn't constitute an overpowering and stern father figure to Taiga.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three people in the love triangle are accused by Ami of playing house. I thought that was interesting, but haven't figured out where to put it. Also interesting is a line by Minorin early in the story. &amp;quot;I think I might like girls.&amp;quot; (私、女の子のほうが好きなのかな) This indicates Minorin may be gay, despite the later heteronormative plot development. Immediately Freudian penis envy (&lt;em&gt;Penisneid&lt;/em&gt;) springs to mind, considering her reported maternal role in the mock nuclear family. (Disclaimer: penis envy is an old idea, not without fatal flaws in the face of newer feminist thought.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh almost forgot to mention later in the story Ryuji starting to identify Taiga with his mother because they both like to say to Ryuji &amp;quot;It's fine. Don't worry.&amp;quot; Too many love interest/parent allusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for answers that explain the plot in a psychoanalytical or feminist framework. Freudian theory is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; a must, as it is deeply flawed. Answers borrowing from Freud and drawing on feminist theory would be even better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T15:35:23.613" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T15:35:23.613" Title="Freudian/psychoanalytical interpretation of the triangular relationship in Toradora!" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;manga&gt;&lt;toradora&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15473" CreationDate="2020-09-05T17:38:34.230" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical Persian epic poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt; was written over a millennium ago, 977-1010 CE, compiled in verse form from traditional mythology and history by the poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdowsi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferdowsi&lt;/a&gt;. Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh#Illustrated_copies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tells us&lt;/a&gt; about some of the &lt;em&gt;illustrated&lt;/em&gt; manuscripts, including the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mongol_Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Mongol manuscript&lt;/a&gt;, which is apparently the oldest surviving &lt;em&gt;illustrated&lt;/em&gt; Shahnameh manuscript, probably dating to the 1330s, although its original form &amp;quot;has not been recorded&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;it is thought it was never completed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the oldest surviving manuscript (illustrated or otherwise) of the Shahnameh?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If that one is partial or incomplete, what is the oldest surviving &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; manuscript (illustrated or otherwise)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T00:47:36.647" Title="Earliest known manuscripts of the Shahnameh?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15472" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-05T18:03:38.960" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22692740-symptoms-of-being-human&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Symptoms of Being Human&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jeff Garvin tells the story of Riley, and the story of her navigating a new school, people bullying him, and being outed as genderfluid to their family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recently on Writing Twitter, there's been a lot of discussion about Ownvoices (a member of a marginalized community writing about their own community) stories. This made me think about &lt;em&gt;Symptoms&lt;/em&gt;. Jeff - the author - is a cis man (so &lt;em&gt;Symptoms&lt;/em&gt; is not Ownvoices). Given that there have been a not-insignificant number of people saying that especially trans stories&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; should be told by people who are actually members of the community, I'm wondering what the sentiment was at the time that the book was released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How was &lt;em&gt;Symptoms of Being Human&lt;/em&gt; received by the queer community in 2016, when the book was released?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Note that this is specifically &lt;em&gt;trans stories&lt;/em&gt;, as opposed to &lt;em&gt;stories with trans characters&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T18:46:59.967" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T18:46:59.967" Title="How was &quot;Symptoms of Being Human&quot; received by the queer community?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;symptoms-of-being-human&gt;&lt;jeff-garvin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15471" CreationDate="2020-09-05T18:18:04.400" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If Wikipedia can be trusted, the oldest surviving manuscript is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Florence Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt;, dating from 1217 CE, &amp;quot;200 years after the final completion of the epic poem in 1010&amp;quot;. This manuscript is not illustrated. Also according to Wikipedia, the Florence &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; is &amp;quot;is incomplete and contains only half of the &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Wikipedia &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be wrong, it is worthwhile to check other sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to an end note in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=HQFNfOPAS04C&amp;amp;pg=PA335&amp;amp;dq=florence+shahnameh+oldest+manuscript&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiUtsO8zdLrAhVHyaQKHW8yCt0QuwUwAHoECAQQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=florence%20shahnameh%20oldest%20manuscript&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World of Persian Literary Humanism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Hamid Dabashi, a specific story (described in a section of the book that I cannot access)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;dates back to the earliest manuscripts of Ferdowsi's &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt;, such as the famous Florence manuscript of 1217, in which there are two prose introductions, in one of which the story appears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=LWNbDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT65&amp;amp;dq=florence+shahnameh+oldest+manuscript&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiUtsO8zdLrAhVHyaQKHW8yCt0QuwUwAXoECAUQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=florence%20shahnameh%20oldest%20manuscript&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, also by Hamid Dabashi, the scholar Djala Khaleghi-Motlagh, whom Dabashi describes as &amp;quot;the eminent &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; scholar of our time&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the oldest manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; (...) are from the thirteenth century, from which we have two copies in Florence (1217) and London (1276). From the fourteenth century are nine copies now in libraries in Istanbul (1330, 1371), Leningrad (1333), Dublin (1340, another undated), Cairo (1341, 1394, a third undated), and Mumbai (undated).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find information about the completeness of the Florence &lt;em&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt; in Dabashi's &lt;em&gt;The Shahnameh: The Persian Epic as World Literature&lt;/em&gt;, but at least Dabashi confirms that this manuscript is the oldest that has survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be difficult to establish what the oldest &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot; manuscript is, since scholars of critical editions of the epic try to get as close as possible to what Ferdowsi might have written by comparing several manuscripts. Some of these manuscripts are treated as base texts, while others are treated as secondary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Moscow edition&amp;quot; (1966-1971), edited by Bertel et al, used the London/British Museum manuscript (1276) and the Leningrad manuscript (1333) as base texts; at that time, the older Florence manuscript, discovered in 1977, had not yet come to light. The more recent edited by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh et al (1990-2008) used the Florence manuscript and the British Museum manuscript as its base texts, treating the Leningrad manuscript as secondary. (See Dick Davis, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-middle-east-studies/article/abulqasem-ferdowsi-the-shahnameh-vol-3-ed-djalal-khaleghimotlaghmazda-publishers-in-association-with-bibliotheca-persica-1992/AF059F839042C396242B61FAC0BDAA7B&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Review of &lt;em&gt;The Shahnameh&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 3, ed. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, Mazda Publishers in association with Bibliotheca Persica, 1992&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;International Journal of Middle East Studies&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 27, Issue 3, August 1995, pp. 393-395).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T00:47:36.647" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T00:47:36.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15474" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:44:26.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T19:44:26.447" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T19:44:26.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15475" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:44:26.447" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work and life of French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873 – 1954), more commonly known mononymously as Colette. Use this tag with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T20:50:32.403" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T20:50:32.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15476" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:52:47.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T19:52:47.820" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T19:52:47.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15477" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:52:47.820" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Japanese light-novel manga series 'Toradora', written by Yuyuko Takemiya and illustrated by Yasu. Questions with this tag should use the [japanese-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T20:47:44.437" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T20:47:44.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15478" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:54:25.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T19:54:25.460" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T19:54:25.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15479" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T19:54:25.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Symptoms of Being Human' (2016) by Jeff Garvin. Questions with this tag should also be used with [jeff-garvin]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T20:47:22.593" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T20:47:22.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15480" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T21:13:53.297" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T21:13:53.297" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T21:13:53.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15481" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T21:13:53.297" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Jeff Garvin, and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:23:57.457" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:23:57.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15482" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15483" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet (and painter and filmmaker) Richard Siken (born 1967) and his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:17:39.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15484" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:25:06.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:25:06.547" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:25:06.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15485" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:25:06.547" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life and works Margaret Mitchell (1900 – 1949), an American novelist most famous for book, 'Gone With the Wind'. Questions about her books should be tagged appropriately." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:34:36.473" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:34:36.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15486" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:27:26.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:27:26.907" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:27:26.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15487" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:27:26.907" Score="0" Body="Question about Margaret Mitchell's novel 'Gone With the Wind', published in 1936. Questions about the book should also be tagged with [margaret-mitchell]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:35:35.143" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:35:35.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15488" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15489" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" Score="0" Body="CHERUB is a spy novel book series written by English author Robert Muchamore. Questions about this work should be tagged with [robert-muchamore]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:32:34.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15490" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15491" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" Score="0" Body="Questions about the English author Robert Muchamore (born 1972) and his works, most famously for his book series 'CHERUB' and 'Henderson's Boys'. Questions about his works should be tagged accordingly. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:33:13.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15492" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:37:23.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-05T23:37:23.587" LastActivityDate="2020-09-05T23:37:23.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15493" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:37:23.587" Score="0" Body="'Hendersons Boys' is a young adult spy book series written by Robert Muchamore. Questions about this work should be tagged with [robert-muchamore]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T02:18:49.653" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T02:18:49.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-05T23:51:33.410" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;So during the Korean Folktale Topic Challenge, I was actually searching for a specific story that I thought was associated with a mythical beast called &lt;a href=&quot;https://skindeep.fandom.com/wiki/Haetae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Haetchi&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; or a &amp;quot;Haetae&amp;quot;. It's been a while, and I may be confusing the story with the story of the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulgae&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. The basic premise of the story is a dog trying to find its owner after he doesn't come home (because the owner died, I think). The dog tried to ask the sun or something for help? Something happens and it ends up chasing the sun, but it never does. I think it was a way of Korea explaining the day/night cycles. Anybody have any idea of the story? I didn't have any luck finding anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T13:04:46.887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T13:04:46.887" Title="Tale of a Dog Chasing the Sun/Trying to Find Its Owner?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15495" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15494" CreationDate="2020-09-06T00:27:15.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest match I can find in &lt;em&gt;Myths and Legends from Korea: An Annotated Compendium of Ancient and Modern Materials&lt;/em&gt; by James H. Grayson (Routledge, 2001) is Tale 100: &amp;quot;The Origin of Eclipses&amp;quot; (pages 253-255). This story describes a Dark Land neither sunlight nor moonlight. Dogs were raised in that land that were known as &amp;quot;Fire Dogs&amp;quot; (Grayson's translation does not use the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bulgae&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The king of the Dark Land sent out the strongest Fire Dog to steal the sun. However, the sun was too hot, so the dog had to drop it and return to the Dark Land to explain the problem to the king. The king then sent out the dog to steal the moon, but the moon was cold as ice so the dog had to spit it out. The Dark Land is still submerged in darkness. When the Fire Dog tries to steal the sun, people [elsewhere] call this an eclipse of the sun; when the Fire Dog tries to steal the moon, people call this an eclipse of the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book contains a total of 191 myths and legends, some of which involve dogs, but none comes closer to the description in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T00:27:15.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5843" CreationDate="2020-09-06T02:14:46.850" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Goldmann explains &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot; (French: &amp;quot;homologie&amp;quot;) in the Preface to &lt;em&gt;Pour une sociologie du roman&lt;/em&gt; (Gallimard, 1964). Goldmann explains that the study of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs#Pre-Marxist_period&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;György Lukács's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Theory of the Novel&lt;/em&gt; (1914/15, 1920) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;René Girard's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque&lt;/em&gt; (1961; &lt;em&gt;Deceit, Desire and the Novel&lt;/em&gt;) led him to formulate certain hypotheses&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;concerning, on the one hand, the homology between the classical structure of the novel (French: &lt;em&gt;la structure romanesque classique&lt;/em&gt;) and the structure of exchange in liberal economy, and, on the other hand, the existence of certain parallelisms between their later development. (page 22 of the 1964 edition)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Goldmann erroneously thought that Girard's study considered the novel as &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt;, whereas in actual fact it was about how &lt;em&gt;certain novels&lt;/em&gt;—by Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust and Dostoevsky—expose desire as mimetic. Much later, in 1991, Girard published &lt;em&gt;A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, which showed that Shakespeare's plays also exposed desire as mimetic. However, this is beyond the scope of this question.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann's hypothesis about homology can be found on page 36 of the same edition (italics from the original text):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;La forme romanesque nous paraît être en effet &lt;em&gt;la transposition sur le plan littéraire de la vie quotidienne dans la société individualiste née de la production pour le marché&lt;/em&gt;. Il existe une &lt;em&gt;homologie rigoureuse&lt;/em&gt; entre la forme littéraire du roman, telle que nous venons de la définir à la suite de Lukács et de Girard, et la relation quotidienne des hommes avec les biens en général, et par extension, des hommes avec les autres hommes, dans une société productrice pour le marché.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novelistic form seems indeed &lt;em&gt;the transposition on the literary plan of daily life in an individualistic society born from production for a market&lt;/em&gt;. There exists a &lt;em&gt;strict homology&lt;/em&gt; between the literary form of the novel as we have just defined based on Lukács and Girard, and people's day-to-day relationship with possessions in general and, by extension, between people, in a society that produces for the market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann explains that this is a society in which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;use value&lt;/a&gt; of commodities has been replaced by their &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchange_value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exchange value&lt;/a&gt;. In this kind of society, the qualitative aspect of things is gradually replaced by a quantifiable exchange value. People who focus on the use value of objects become &amp;quot;problematic individuals&amp;quot; (French: &amp;quot;individus problématiques&amp;quot;) and become marginalised (page 38).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel presents individuals who search for quality and use value in a society that has oriented itself towards exchange value, and who thereby become &amp;quot;problematic individuals&amp;quot; (page 39). This is essentially the source of the homology between a market-oriented society and the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T13:11:08.497" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T13:11:08.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-06T07:41:24.500" Score="2" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ishay Ribo's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKoNZloRvQ&amp;amp;ab_channel=%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keter Melucha&lt;/a&gt; / כתר מלוכה&amp;quot; (Royal Crown), a song written about, essentially, COVID and lockdown, there's a stanza that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;בין ויקהל לפקודי&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;אין איש בעיר ובשדה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;כבר אין מול מי להתנהל&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;מגדל בבל שוב מתבלבל&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between Vayakhel and Pekudei&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's no person in the city or the field&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There are no people to interact with&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Tower of Babel again confuses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(my own translation)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...it sounds better in Hebrew (and rhymes!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the Tower of Babel line have to do with anything? Traditionally, the Tower was the cause of the mixing of languages and the dispersion of people around the world; what relevance does it have here, especially after the line about there being nobody in the city or fields?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;Names of weekly Torah readings. This year, those two were read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/vayakhel-pekudei-20200321&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;March 15-21&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T16:54:05.277" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T19:05:49.430" Title="What does the line about the Tower of Babel mean in Ishay Ribo's &quot;Keter Melucha&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;ishay-ribo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5843" CreationDate="2020-09-06T08:11:54.873" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15496/2500&quot;&gt;Tsundoku's answer&lt;/a&gt; has sufficiently explained &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot;, I won't repeat what's already said. Here are a couple of other supplementary points about &amp;quot;homology&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea was originally borrowed from biology. &amp;quot;Homology&amp;quot; in biology refers to similarity shared by organismal structures. A common ancestor is assumed in evolutionary biology between homologous structures. The Wikipedia page on biological homology has some interesting exmaples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common example of homologous structures is the forelimbs of vertebrates, where the wings of bats and birds, the arms of primates, the front flippers of whales and the forelegs of four-legged vertebrates like dogs and crocodiles are all derived from the same ancestral tetrapod structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of illustration &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homology_(biology)#/media/File:Homology_vertebrates-en.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt; from that same page probably works even better. The biology concept has at its core the workings of genes, and organisms structurally resemble each other because they are genetically connected. This is what Goldmann tried to get at by building the theory of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;genetic&lt;/strong&gt; structuralism&amp;quot; as a critique of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saussurean&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;structuralism&lt;/a&gt;, although I don't think the things he connected with his idea of homology had any real genetic or historical connections. But that is his central point. He is pointing to the similarity between the form of the novel and the structures of exchange (the capitalist market), two synoptic categories, claiming they are homologous because there are historical and sociological ties between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here a &lt;strong&gt;collective or transindividual subject&lt;/strong&gt; is necessarily implied, because the direct structural homology examines the novel as a collective product of society or people who write it. Inevitably Goldmann privileges the intelligentsia, namely &amp;quot;creators, writers, artists, philosophers, theologians&amp;quot; who &amp;quot;remain dominated by qualitative values.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann sees the creative bunch as representative of humanity. Thus his conceptualization of &amp;quot;the collective subject&amp;quot; is pretty easy to distinguish from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Durkheim&lt;/a&gt;'s concept by a similar name. Durkheim's collective consciousness sits outside individual consciousness, but the Goldmann collective subject is the way human beings in a group behave together. History, thus, is the product of the collective praxis of different collective subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann contrasts his idea of the collective subject with psychoanalytical collective consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For psychoanalysis, this intelligibility is always related to an&#xA;individual subject. Social behavior is only secondary and derived;&#xA;in the last analysis, its intelligibility is imposed from without,&#xA;even if later interiorized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For dialectical thought, on the other hand, behavior is made&#xA;intelligible by relating it to a collective subject. In this case the '&#xA;individual subject is subordinate and secondary in explaining&#xA;behavior, since it presents such irrational phenomena as&#xA;madness, dreams or even the Freudian slip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, we are not faced with a collective consciousness&#xA;which is situated outside individual consciousnesses, there being&#xA;no consciousness apart from that of individuals. Only, some&#xA;individuals find themselves in relations which are intrasubjective&#xA;rather than intersubjective and, thus, constitute the subject of all&#xA;thought and action which is social and cultural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every time we approach an important cultural text or a historical&#xA;event, we find ourselves before an object of study in which the&#xA;transindividual subject, or the collective subject if you will, is&#xA;expressed at a much higher level of coherence than that attained&#xA;by the consciousness of average individuals (mine or yours, for&#xA;example), i.e., at a level where positive study can abstract the&#xA;individual factor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The individual could not penetrate the work of art without&#xA;weakening or destroying it, except so far as it is integrated into a&#xA;collective meaning.&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann argues any analysis of works of art should be attempted at in a collective approach. Rather than examining the life events of the author or artist, we should focus on the society at large, because what the individual artist/writer was driven by--libidinal relations-- existed similarly at different places in different people. This concept is crucial to Goldmann constructing his theoretical plane as well as to us understanding Goldmann's entire body of theory because it sets him apart from some other prominent structural Marxist thinkers or structural anthropologists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, one of the most important discussions in the human sciences today is that of knowing whether men or structures generate historical transformations ... ; genetic structuralism asserts that structures, being a universal aspect of all human thought, sensibility or behavior, could in no instance replace man as a historical subject.&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldmann contends that a lot of his contemporary Marxist theorists were too deterministic in their viewing structures as ahistorical and preconstructed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Vision du monde&amp;quot;, or world view, or Weltanschauung is a neo-Kantian concept, owing much to Kant and later Kantian thinkers, and associated with another important concept: totality. A Weltanschauung is a unifying and all-encompassing point of view of a society on every aspect of itself/human activity in all of its dimensions. Departing from Georges Lukacs, Wilhelm Dilthey, and Max Weber, Goldmann writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 'world view' we mean a coherent and unitary perspective&#xA;concerning man's relationships with his fellow men and with the&#xA;universe. Since the thought of individuals is rarely coherent and&#xA;unitary, a world view rarely corresponds to the actual thought of&#xA;a particular individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, a world view is not a given empirical reality, but a conceptual&#xA;instrument for doing research; an extrapolation&#xA;constructed by the historian which, however, is not arbitrary,&#xA;since it is founded on the structure of the real thought of individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;World views are historical and social facts. They are&#xA;totalities of ways of thinking, feeling and acting which in given&#xA;conditions are imposed on men finding themselves in a similar&#xA;economic and social situation, that is, imposed on certain social&#xA;groups.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lucien Goldmann, Towards a Sociology of the Novel, tr. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1975, pp. 1-15. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lucien Goldmann, &lt;em&gt;The Subject of the Cultural Creation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Linguagginella Societtl e nella Technica (Edizioni di Communit~: Milan, 1970), p. 152&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Lucien Goldmann, &lt;em&gt;Theses on the Use of the Concept &amp;quot;World View&amp;quot; in the History of Philosophy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other sources:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Michael Löwy (1997) Lucien Gold mann or the communitarian wager, Socialism and Democracy, 11:1, 25-35 &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T17:14:11.490" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T17:14:11.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-06T15:52:44.087" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a newbie in literary reading and I'm confused about narration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read Katherine Mansfield's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/women/mansfield/bliss/governess.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Little Governess&lt;/a&gt;, which is written in third person narration.&#xA;But I am confused about the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish it wasn't night time. I wish there was another woman in the carriage. I'm frightened of the men next door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1.Is this called an internal dialogue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2.This sentence looks like the character is talking to herself in her mind (the narrator reveals her thoughts) using first person narration, right?&#xA;Because the text use pronoun &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;, but compared with &amp;quot;she felt really glad to have the old man in the carriage with her&amp;quot;, here,her thought is revealed in third person narration, right? How is it different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3.I searched using Google. Some websites said, &amp;quot;we don't include dialogue in third person narration&amp;quot;. Why? If that dialogue reveals the character's thought and the ability to reveal the character thought is one of the third person narration ability. Why isn't it included?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10806" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T16:03:53.080" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:56:30.270" Title="Narration and internal dialogue in Mansfield's The Little Governess" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;katherine-mansfield&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15501" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-06T18:47:21.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T18:47:21.980" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T18:47:21.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15502" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-06T18:47:21.980" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life and works of Ishay Ribo (ישי ריבו), an Israeli singer-songwriter. Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T19:09:34.590" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T19:09:34.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15503" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-06T18:54:30.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T18:54:30.773" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T18:54:30.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15504" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-06T18:54:30.773" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Kathleen Mansfield Murry (née Beauchamp; 1888 – 1923), and her life as a writer. She is known by her pen name as Katherine Mansfield" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:25:04.440" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:25:04.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15497" CreationDate="2020-09-06T19:05:49.430" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The central theme of the song is being alone. This is illustrated with the lines &amp;quot;no one in the city or field&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;no one to interact with&amp;quot;, even in that first stanza. A little further on, in the chorus there are the lines &amp;quot;ולא להיות לבד&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;and not to be alone&amp;quot;) and &amp;quot;ואיך נדע להתאחד בפרוד הזה&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;and know how to deal with this separation&amp;quot;), with many other examples extant in the song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tower of Babel here represents the scattering and separation it caused. Before the Tower, all the people of the Earth spoke the same language and were able to connect with each other. After the events of the Tower, everyone was separated - languages were split up, nations could no longer interact in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song here is comparing lockdown (Israel went into enforced lockdown in April and March 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19) with the Tower of Babel, because both situations meant that people are separated and can no longer interact the same way they did beforehand.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Both situations caused (in the eyes of the song) a large amount of people who once could interact to no longer be able to interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;מתבלבל&amp;quot; doesn't just mean &amp;quot;confuses&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;this test confused me&amp;quot;. It can also mean &amp;quot;mixed up&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;causes disruption&amp;quot;. The wording of &amp;quot;שוב מתבלבל&amp;quot; implies that it is once again causing the same disruption as last time (i.e. dispersing people).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can read the line as &amp;quot;again, the disruption of the Tower of Babel&amp;quot;, which means that it's just like the disruption caused by the Tower (as opposed to &amp;quot;the Tower is once again causing disruption&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T19:05:49.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:05:30.870" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kyd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Kyd&lt;/a&gt; (1558—1594) is best known as the author of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a play that shares several similarities with Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. These similarities include a ghost demanding vengeance, a play-within-the-play used to trap the (suspected) murderer and (feigned or real) madness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kyd is also thought to have written a play now identified as &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, which may have been an earlier version of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ur-Hamlet&amp;amp;oldid=971350946#Related_writings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some scholars&lt;sup&gt;[who?]&lt;/sup&gt; believe that the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; had influence from the German work &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fratricide_Punished&amp;amp;oldid=899617431&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about the German play mentions several scholars in the section about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fratricide_Punished&amp;amp;oldid=899617431#Relationship_to_Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relationship between that play and &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but has fairly little to say about the play's relationship to the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Volume 1 of Simon Williams's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=lHZf6xHg0XQC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeare on the German Stage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Cambridge University Press, 2004) contains the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=lHZf6xHg0XQC&amp;amp;pg=PA38&amp;amp;dq=%22Ur-Hamlet%22+%22Der+bestrafte+Brudermord%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwic97y6odXrAhWLGewKHXDFCmYQuwUwAnoECAEQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Ur-Hamlet%22%20%22Der%20bestrafte%20Brudermord%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;footnote&lt;/a&gt; discussing the relationship between &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (especially the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_Q1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Quarto&lt;/a&gt; of that play), the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vexed question of the relationship between &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; and the various versions of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is discussed in detail by Reinhold Freudenstein in &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord: Shakespeares Hamlet auf der Wanderbühne des 17. Jahrhunderts&lt;/em&gt; (Hamburg, 1958). He reviews the thirty-five articles on the subject written between 1857 and 1958. Four of these claim it was based solely on the first quarto, four of them on both quartos, one of them on the First Folio, seven of them on the First Folio and the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, and nineteen of them on the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; alone. Some authorities even believe &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; may be translation of the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Freudenstein insists that whoever wrote it did not base his version on any source, but used whatever elements he felt would please the audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above quote, the first scholarly publication about the relationship between &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; may have been published in 1857. Is that unnamed publication the first one to claim that the German play influenced the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;? Or did that publication assume the influence was in the opposite direction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T09:31:39.480" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T09:31:39.480" Title="Who was the first scholar who claimed that the Ur-Hamlet was influenced by the German play Der bestrafte Brudermord?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;english-renaissance-theater&gt;&lt;der-bestrafte-brudermord&gt;&lt;thomas-kyd&gt;&lt;ur-hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15507" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15508" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English playwright Thomas Kyd (1558—1594) and his life as a writer. Kyd is best known as the author of the revenge tragedy 'The Spanish Tragedy'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:07:38.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15509" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15510" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lost play 'Ur-Hamlet', usually attributed to Thomas Kyd, which may have been an earlier version of Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. Use this tag with the tag [thomas-kyd]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:09:35.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15511" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15512" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about the anonymous German-language play 'Der Bestrafte Brudermord' (known in English as 'Fratricide Punished'), which bears similarities to Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'. Use this tag with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" LastActivityDate="2020-09-06T20:23:24.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15513" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15514" CreationDate="2020-09-07T01:59:42.997" Score="4" ViewCount="3213" Body="&lt;p&gt;Author Brit Bennett's new novel has hit and stayed on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for months as of now. I have not been able to get a copy. Reading the reviews and synopsis makes me want to read it as soon as I get a chance. I applaud Bennett's bold and novel approach to the extremely thorny issue of racial identity in America. At the same time though I do wonder about the author's choice of Louisiana for the story setting. From its &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Half&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel is a multi-generational family saga set between the 1940s to the 1990s and centers on identical twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes. The two light-skinned black sisters were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, and witness the lynching of their father in the 1940s. In 1954, at the age of 16, the twins run away to New Orleans. However, Stella disappears shortly thereafter. In 1968, Desiree leaves an abusive marriage in Washington, D.C. and returns to Mallard with her eight-year-old daughter, Jude. Jude grows older and moves to Los Angeles through a track scholarship at University of California, Los Angeles. While working part time at a bar in Beverly Hills, Jude sees a woman who appears to be her mother's doppelgänger. The woman is actually Stella, who has been passing as white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://britbennett.com/about&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The author herself was born and raised in Southern California&lt;/a&gt; and it makes sense she would set a lot of her stories in Los Angeles--writers write about what they know best, especially when it comes to places and cities. I haven't found any evidence that suggests she's spent any significant time in Louisiana. Why New Orleans and Mallard, LA? Of course as a deep south state Louisiana had its fair share of racial hatred and discrimination in the Jim Crow era. On the other hand New Orleans was one the first Southern cities to prosper, leading other urban areas like Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami. New Orleans has been a relatively more progressive city in the South.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A review reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story centers on twin sisters from a Louisiana town called Mallard, which is inhabited by Black residents who purposely intermarry so their children will be lighter-skinned. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/vanishing-author-brit-bennett-unpacks-novels-take-race-identity-is-complicated-1305774&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am especially interested in the trope of &amp;quot;mixed race&amp;quot; as a weapon for non-white people to deconstruct the dominant race narrative and overturn white-normativity and categorization by color. Blurring the race line is a way to empower, and I wonder if that is the author's intention too. In what ways would New Orleans or Mallard in the backdrop be conducive to constructing a story where key issues like identity, multiraciality, and gender could be best explored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T08:18:29.763" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T08:18:29.763" Title="Why is &quot;The Vanishing Half&quot; set in Louisiana?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;race-issues&gt;&lt;brit-bennett&gt;&lt;the-vanishing-half&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15513" CreationDate="2020-09-07T02:39:27.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's set in Louisiana because the town is based on a real town as she mentions in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/870303515/brit-bennett-set-her-novel-50-years-ago-she-didnt-expect-it-to-be-timely&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;NPR interview&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got the idea for the book from a conversation I had with my mother,&#xA;who told me very offhandedly one day about a town she remembered from&#xA;her Louisiana childhood, where everyone sort of intermarried so that&#xA;their children would get lighter with each generation. I wanted to&#xA;kind of explore the idea of a place like this. And I was able to draw&#xA;on some research from similar Creole communities that were similarly&#xA;sort of insular and organized around people having light skin. ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit deeper than mixed race, if I recall the full interview correctly, in that Bennet was also exploring &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/fall-2015/whats-colorism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;colorism&lt;/a&gt;—the fact that even within the Black community, lighter-skinned people are often held in higher esteem and treated better than darker skinned people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T02:39:27.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T11:13:40.813" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;My college assignment is to write about parody in Beckett's &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt; and I need to write about the parody of human feelings in this novel too. I would appreciate if someone could tell me which sources and bibliography to use.&#xA;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt; in the English translation. Only English language is OK for secondary sources. I could not find relevant sources anywhere. I searched Google Books, Google Scholar and JSTOR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10811" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T23:38:56.457" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T00:43:00.387" Title="Where can I find sources that could help me write about parody of human feelings in Beckett's novel &quot;Molloy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;samuel-beckett&gt;&lt;molloy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T11:17:51.043" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In S. Y. Agnon's short story &amp;quot;The Kerchief&amp;quot;, there's an entire section (section 4) dedicated to a dream that the protagonist would have when his father was selling things in Lashkowitz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And while lying and meditating thus, my eyes would close of their own accord; and before they did entirely I would take my fringed garment and count the knots I had made in the fringes, indicating the number of days my father stayed in Lashkowitz. Then all sorts of lights, green, white, black, red, and blue, used to come toward me, like the lights seen by wayfarers in fields and woods and valleys and streams, and all kinds of precious things would be gleaming and glittering in them; and my heart danced for joy at all the good stored away for us in the days to come, when our just Messiah would reveal himself, may it be speedily and in our days, Amen.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While I rejoiced so, a great bird would come and peck at the light. Once I took my fringed garment and tied myself to his wings and said &amp;quot;Bird, bird, take me to Father.&amp;quot; The bird spread its wings and flew with me to a city called Rome. I looked down and saw a group of poor men sitting at the gates of the city, and one beggar among them binding his wounds. I turned my eyes away from him in order not to see his sufferings. When I turned my eyes away, there grew great mountain with all kinds of thorns and thistles upon it and evil beasts grazing there, and impure birds and ugly creeping things crawling about it, and a great wind blew all of a sudden and flung me onto the mountain, and the mountain began quaking under me and my limbs felt as though they would fall asunder; but I feared to cry out lest the creeping things should enter my mouth and the impure birds should peck at my tongue. Then Father came and wrapped me in his tallit and brought me back to my bed. I opened my eyes to gaze at his face and found that it was day. At once I knew that the Holy One, blessed be He, had rolled away another night of the nights of the fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This whole dream sequence seems... a bit odd. What's the purpose of this dream? How can it be interpreted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T11:17:51.043" Title="What's the meaning of the dream in Agnon's &quot;The Kerchief&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;s-y-agnon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15517" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14192" CreationDate="2020-09-07T12:57:24.577" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the novel's paradoxes is that Camus employs a first-person narration, which normally allows the reader access to the character's inner thoughts and feelings (see e.g. Charlotte Brontë's &lt;em&gt;Jane Eyre&lt;/em&gt;), but does not give us much insight into Meursault's thoughts and feelings. Meursault admits to the examining magistrate (Part Two, Chapter I) that he has lost the habit of questioning himself, and the rest of the novel bears this out. He is also indifferent to many things that people say to him, e.g. Marie's marriage proposal and Raymond's question whether he wants to be his pal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault's admission that he does not attach great importance to the question whether his mother died on the day he received the telegram or the day before is the beginning of the pattern of indifference that runs through the entire novel. (Near the end he even says that life is not worth living.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a purely &lt;em&gt;technical&lt;/em&gt; perspective, Meursault is right in saying he does not know on which day his mother died. The telegram says the funeral will take the next day but does not say whether his mother died that morning, the day before or during the night. However, Meursault does not frame the issue in this way; instead of mourning about the loss of his mother and a plan to find out the day of her decease, we only get, &amp;quot;That doesn't mean anything.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we accept Meursault's story (i.e. the novel as a whole) as what he truly thinks and feels, then he is not bothered by it. However, it is also plausible that he simply has no access to his inner feelings and that his seeming indifference is a symptom rather than the cause of his strange reactions. This might be connected to his focus on physical and sensory impressions that pervade the novel (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14113/2191&quot;&gt;What is Meursault's problem with the heat?&lt;/a&gt;). This enigma appears to be related to Camus's artistic credo at the time, expressed both in his notebooks (&lt;em&gt;Carnets&lt;/em&gt;) and in &lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;The true work of art is the one that says less&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Le véritable œuvre d'art est celle qui dit moins&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; has also been subjected to psychoanalytic interpretations, for example in the light of Freud's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mourning_and_Melancholia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mourning and Melancholia&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Trauer und Melancholie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. According to Freud, mourning could one of two paths. (I am using Danielle Trudeau's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://depthcounseling.org/blog/mourning-and-melancholia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mourning and Melancholia: Freud’s Thoughts on Loss&lt;/a&gt; here. See also pages 114-123 in Bernard Pingaud's book &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger d'Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt;, Gallimard, 1992.) Either the person in mourning feels their loss in an external way. In that case, they can reform their feeling of loss and the process ends with a kind of acceptance. Or the person in mourning feels their pain in an internal way; it is felt in the unconscious, where the person is not aware of it. In that case, according to Freud, the grief is so heavy that it is repressed and cannot be processed by the conscious mind. This would explain why, at the funeral, Meursault behaves in a way that witnesses later describe as insensitive. It would also explain why his mother is mentioned again and again later in the book, for example, when he hears Salamano weep over the loss of his dog, he suddenly thinks of his mother but can't explain why (end of Part One, chapter III).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T19:50:09.000" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T19:50:09.000" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15519" CreationDate="2020-09-03T20:35:22.833" Score="16" ViewCount="838" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, What is the meaning of this word? In context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fall&#xA;(&lt;strong&gt;bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-&#xA;nuk!&lt;/strong&gt;) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later&#xA;on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the&#xA;offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse&#xA;solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an&#xA;unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and&#xA;their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where&#xA;oranges have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved&#xA;livvy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ref:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://editura.mttlc.ro/fwliniarized/FW%20LINEARIZED%20full%20text%20pp%203-628.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joyce, J (1939). Finnegans Wake. MacMillian Co. Pg. 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="kmiklas" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T14:40:42.123" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:40:25.787" Title="Meaning of &quot;bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15518" CreationDate="2020-09-03T20:41:44.807" Score="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/nonce&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nonce word&lt;/a&gt; and is used only in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://editura.mttlc.ro/fwliniarized/FW%20LINEARIZED%20full%20text%20pp%203-628.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I have no clue why Joyce made it so long (perhaps he wanted to catch readers' attention and persuade them to read Finnegans Wake). It's defined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.yourdictionary.com/bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Your Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sound which represents the symbolic thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About it's origin, YourDictionary says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A coinage from Finnegans Wake author James Joyce said to represent the thunderclap associated with the fall of Adam and Eve. The word is a hybrid of words in many languages that relate to thunder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.interestingliterature.com/2014/02/the-longest-words-in-literature/amp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Interesting Literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyce uses the word &lt;em&gt;Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk&lt;/em&gt;, which is meant to denote the symbolic thunderclap which accompanied the Fall of Adam and Eve &lt;em&gt;(a meaning that is imbued with greater significance in light of Joyce’s lifelong fear of thunder)&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a 101-letter word&#xA;that depicts the word for &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt; in various languages. There's &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/TV3vT5nW_I4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a video on Adam Harvey's YouTube channel&lt;/a&gt; where he pronounces it himself and explains how to pronounce it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He breaks it down into its constituent parts and explains what each word means and where it came from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the summary of his explanation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bababadal:&lt;/strong&gt; It's a reference to the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;gharaghta:&lt;/strong&gt; (Hindi) karak, gargarahat, (Arabic) ra'd: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;kamminarronnkon:&lt;/strong&gt; (Japanese) kaminari: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bron:&lt;/strong&gt; (Greek) brontê: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tonnerronn:&lt;/strong&gt; (French) tonnerre: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tuonn:&lt;/strong&gt; (Italian) tuonno: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thun:&lt;/strong&gt; (English) thunder: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;trovarr:&lt;/strong&gt; (Portuguese) trovão: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hounawnskawn:&lt;/strong&gt; (Swedish) åska, (Irish) scán: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;toohoohoordenen&lt;/strong&gt; (with a bit of a stutter): (Danish) torden: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;thurnuk:&lt;/strong&gt; (Irish) tórnach: &lt;em&gt;thunder&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/TV3vT5nW_I4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Adam Harvey - YouTube]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took me a while to transcribe in the IPA how Adam Harvey pronounced it, though I'm still sceptical about my transcription:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;[baːbabaːdɑ̟ːlhəɻʌχtʰəkɑːmĩnəɻɔ̃nkõ̜nbɻõntõneɻõntwõnθũntɻovaːrhunɑːnskɑːntuhuːhuːɻdenenθɜɻnʊk]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also explained in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=gkGwCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Annotations to Finnegans Wake by Roland McHugh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Google Books). Each word is explained at &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/index.php/Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnegans Web&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same explanation can also be found at &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://fweet.org/cgi-bin/fw_grep.cgi?srch=bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk%21&amp;amp;cake=&amp;amp;icase=1&amp;amp;accent=1&amp;amp;beauty=1&amp;amp;hilight=1&amp;amp;escope=1&amp;amp;tscope=1&amp;amp;rscope=1&amp;amp;dist=4&amp;amp;ndist=4&amp;amp;fontsz=100&amp;amp;shorth=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fweet.org&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6PftL.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6PftL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Finnegans Wake&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://factionparadox.fandom.com/wiki/Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk_warship&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Faction Paradox Wiki&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has also used it to refer to the blaring sound of a warship (I guess):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk warships&lt;/em&gt; (also called planet-killer warships) were piloted by praxis-enabled posthumans from the Pilots' Coterie. The name came from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, where it meant &amp;quot;a thunderclap so loud that it symbolises the Fall of Eden&amp;quot;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are 100+ pronunciations of this word (by people from different countries) on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pronouncekiwi.com/bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pronounce Kiwi&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10812" OwnerDisplayName="Decapitated Soul" LastEditorUserId="10812" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:40:25.787" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:40:25.787" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15518" CreationDate="2020-09-03T22:19:21.773" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ahh yes, the impeccable word: &lt;em&gt;bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur- nuk!&lt;/em&gt; only opposed by Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;honorificabilitudinitatibus&lt;/em&gt; and the timelessly delightful &lt;em&gt;supercalifragilisticexpialidocious&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyways back to your question: It is a biblical word coined in James Joyce's &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; which is widely regarded as being an exceedingly difficult and tormenting book to get through (as is expected from Joyce). Joyce wrote it periodically during a term of seventeen years and it is fittingly considered Joyce's final work (published a little more than a year before his untimely death). I very humbly read it once and find it exceptionally tragic that it is so neglected in the minds' of readers, especially absurdists–to an absurdist, this is the stuff that dreams are made on!–It is a very strange masterpiece indeed (as is expected with Joyce) and I find it quite honorable that such a strange book holds in its pages one of the equally strange and divinely profound words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is defined as the great thunder-crack (metaphorically) which strikes the hour that Satan triumphed, and God's masterstrokes: Adam and Eve face their &amp;quot;paradise lost&amp;quot; fall from grace condemnation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word is considered to be &amp;quot;unpronounceable&amp;quot; but I would adore seeing someone give the word some serious thought and try to come up with something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the passage where the word appears in Joyce's Finnegans Wake:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fall (&lt;strong&gt;bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur — nuk!&lt;/strong&gt;) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, this refers to a very simple biblical allusion, Joyce is comparing the situation with the great fall from grace of Adam and Eve.-- thus spoke as &amp;quot;The Fall&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" OwnerDisplayName="Tom O' Bedlam" LastActivityDate="2020-09-04T10:10:15.733" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T20:57:31.023" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;La faute de l'abbé Mouret&lt;/em&gt; by Émile Zola, Jeanbernat threatens to cut off Frère Archangias' ear (book 3, chapter 5) and then does so (final chapter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeanbernat has clear reasons for hating Archangias, but why does his assault take this form?  Is it some literary or biblical reference that I'm missing (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malchus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malchus&lt;/a&gt; does not seem relevant) or is it something in the culture of the Midi?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T21:15:27.087" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:15:27.087" Title="Why did Jeanbernat cut off Frère Archangias' ear?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;emile-zola&gt;&lt;la-faute-de-l-abbe-mouret&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:09:26.723" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, I asked a question about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15506/2191&quot;&gt;relationship between the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Fratricide Punished&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia page about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fratricide_Punished&amp;amp;oldid=899617431#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fratricide Punished&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; says that the play was first published in its entirety in 1781 even though it may have been written as early as 1586. However, at some point after 1781, the only extant manuscript of the play was lost, so all later editions of the play are based on the first print edition rather than the manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I could not find in the Wikipedia article nor elsewhere is how and when the manuscript was lost. Was it lost in a fire? Was it stolen? Who was the last known owner after it had appeared in print?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:09:26.723" Title="When and how was the manuscript of Fratricide Punished / Der bestrafte Brudermord lost?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;der-bestrafte-brudermord&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15523" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15524" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'La Faute de l'abbé Mouret' (1875) by Émile Zola. Use this tag with the tags [emile-zola] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:16:41.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15525" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:31:14.340" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T21:31:14.340" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T21:31:14.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15526" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-07T21:31:14.340" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of African-American writer Brit Bennett (born 1990) or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:12:23.467" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:12:23.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15527" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-07T22:04:01.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T22:04:01.043" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T22:04:01.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15528" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-07T22:04:01.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Vanishing Half' (2020) by Brit Bennet. Use this tag with the tag [brit-bennett]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-07T22:28:40.033" LastActivityDate="2020-09-07T22:28:40.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-07T23:41:56.027" Score="1" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;While spending one complete year each on the study of Japanese and Chinese literature (in translation), it was a pleasure to experience the cultural differences among the Western body of writings and their emergence in ancient sagas, historical depictions and the short story and novel, and the stark difference in the formation of the body of literature of the other two cultures. In the Japanese tradition, reading Sei Shonagon and her 'Pillow Book', and the poetry and travels of Basho, the short stories like, 'Some Prefer Nettles' and even the modern phenomenological works, like the one about that teacher who came to class drunk and watched his world dissolve around him. (My library is packed for a move and I can't recall the title or author.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through it all, one thing has eluded me and that is the significance of &lt;em&gt;The Tale of Genji&lt;/em&gt;. It feels like in the interlude where, while traveling through a snowy landscape, the entire entourage was halted so that Prince Genji could observe an early blossom popping up through the snow, while everyone stood in reverence and admired him.  I can only assume that it is my lack of cultural exposure to the aspect of the role of the aristocracy in ancient Japan. Can someone enlighten me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question has to do with the overall storyline and development. Not unlike my reading, again in English, of &lt;em&gt;À la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt;, I am failing to grasp the significance of the task. Perhaps I'm requesting a synopsis and rationale for the reverence it appears to be held in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10819" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T09:50:27.880" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T09:50:27.880" Title="Need help in appreciating the significance of The Tale of Genji" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;the-tale-of-genji&gt;&lt;murasaki-shikibu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15515" CreationDate="2020-09-08T00:43:00.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For a bibliography about Beckett and his works, you can refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-grove-companion-to-samuel-beckett/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Work, Life, and Thought&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by C.J. Ackerley and Stanley Gontarski (Grove Press, 2004). It has an extensive bibliography at the end of the book. (I assume the same book is available in the UK as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.faber.co.uk/9780571227389-the-faber-companion-to-samuel-beckett.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find publications specifically about Beckett's parody of human feelings in &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt;, so I think one should make sure to understand what is meant be that based on other studies about Beckett's work and then go back to &lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt; to detect examples of it in that novel. For example, page 148 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=8NRfPa20It8C&amp;amp;pg=PA149&amp;amp;dq=parody+of+feelings&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiYq6rul9jrAhVNmqQKHStYA3oQuwUwAHoECAAQBg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=parody%20feelings&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;astiches, Parodies &amp;amp; Other Immitations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Marius Buning, Matthijs Engelberts and Sjef Houppermans (Rodopi 2002), points out that Beckett's story &amp;quot;Yellow&amp;quot; &amp;quot;appears to parody our notions of suffering, sympathy and 'human feeling'&amp;quot;. (The context is a discussion of how Beckett appears to use allusions to Shakepeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; in a parodic way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/samuel-beckett-a-collection-of-critical-essays/oclc/307098&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Martin Esslin (Prentice-Hall, 1965) contains the essay &amp;quot;Samuel Beckett and Universal Parody&amp;quot; by Jean-Jacques Mayoux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/companion-to-samuel-beckett/oclc/854470218&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Companion to Samuel Beckett&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by S. E. Gontarski (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) contains the essay &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Molloy&lt;/em&gt;, or Life without a Chambermaid&amp;quot; by Patrick A. McCarthy (chapter 18, pages 263-274).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/new-cambridge-companion-to-samuel-beckett/oclc/1125293417&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Dirk Van Hulle (Cambridge University Press, 2015) contains the essay &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Malone&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Malone Dies&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Unnamable&lt;/em&gt;: The Novel Reshaped&amp;quot; by Angela Moorjani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T00:43:00.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15531" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15532" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" Score="0" Body="Questions about Samuel Beckett's novel 'Molloy', first written in French (1951) and then translated into English by the author and Patrick Bowles (1955)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T00:45:06.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-08T05:05:25.887" Score="10" ViewCount="2235" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following up on this question and answer &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1885/what-is-close-reading&quot;&gt;What is close reading?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, effected by close attention to individual words, the syntax, and the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as the reader scans the line of text. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is close reading needed? Where is it needed? And how does it benefit the reader compared to just reading reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T17:21:57.130" Title="Why is &quot;close reading&quot; necessary?" Tags="&lt;close-reading&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15534" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15621" CreationDate="2020-09-08T05:20:36.197" Score="7" ViewCount="190" Body="&lt;p&gt;Julian Huxley was an avid science populariser, researched into the metamorphosis of axolotls, and wrote poetry. I'm pretty sure that these interests were combined in a poem I once came across, possibly in his book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nature.com/articles/112682a0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Essays of a Biologist&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The verse that I remember best (you can see why) went something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Growing up, without, this curious gland,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He cannot hope, to salamand,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His life's ambition, doomed to throttle,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He must remain, an axolotl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody recognise it? I've tried searching Google, and also the databases of several poetry societies. None of the latter accept Julian Huxley as a poet, and I can't find the text through them or through Google. I'm surprised that very little of Huxley's writing is online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note added September 9th&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've remembered that (I think) Huxley wrote that either the final two lines I quoted, or the entire verse, weren't his but were given him by a friend. I recall that when I first read that, it confirmed my thought that they had a different feel to the rest of the poem. Less serious, and in my opinion, more enjoyable. Maybe I felt the rest rather portentous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10820" LastEditorUserId="10820" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T00:08:14.187" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T13:36:48.677" Title="Did Julian Huxley write a poem about an axolotl, and if so, what was it?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;julian-huxley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2020-09-08T05:56:51.980" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Note the opening to the paragraph you quote :&amp;quot;In literary criticism&amp;quot; - close reading isn't necessarily a technique for the casual or even invested reader, but a tool to extract more nuance and insight from a text. It arose from religious traditions and their careful examination of scripture for every scrap of divine nuance, but developed into a tradition of literary criticism that focuses on the text itself (the use of language, metaphor, etc) as the primary approach to understanding a text, while alternative approaches might focus on authorial intent or social context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So to answer your question: close reading doesn't necessary give a &lt;em&gt;reader&lt;/em&gt; much, just like you don't need to understand chord progressions to enjoy music. But for some readers - not all - knowing &amp;quot;how the sausage is made&amp;quot; makes the reading (or listening, or watching) more enjoyable. For others, though, it might detract from the enjoyment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10313" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T05:56:51.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15536" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-08T07:21:55.640" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ishay Ribo's &amp;quot;Keter Melucha / כתר מלוכה&amp;quot; (a song written in early 2020 about lockdown in Israel), the opening stanza goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;בין תרומה לתצווה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;יום הולדת קצת משונה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;הכל רגיל כאן לכאורה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;במה קהל ואהבה&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between T'rumah and Tetzaveh&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A birthday slightly strange&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everything normal for the moment&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stage, crowd, and love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(my own translation)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The timeframe given is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.hebcal.com/sedrot/terumah-20200229&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;February&lt;/a&gt;, during which time Israel was still operating largely normally. Ishay Ribo's birthday is, indeed, in February.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would he say &amp;quot;a birthday slightly strange&amp;quot; and then immediately afterwards &amp;quot;everything normal for the moment&amp;quot;? If something was off - e.g. a birthday not fully celebrated due to virus concerns - why would he say that everything is normal immediately after?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T07:21:55.640" Title="Why is the birthday slightly different in Ishay Ribo's &quot;Keter Melucha&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;ishay-ribo&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-08T09:46:29.150" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barsetshire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barsetshire&lt;/a&gt; is a fictional county of England, created by Anthony Trollope for his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Barsetshire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicles of Barsetshire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; series published in the mid-19th century. The county town is the equally fictional Barchester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsetshire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borsetshire&lt;/a&gt; is a fictional county of England, created for the extremely long-running and popular BBC radio soap &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Archers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Archers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; running from 1951 to the present day. The county town is the equally fictional Borchester.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that surely the Archers' county name must have been based on Trollope's, but &lt;strong&gt;is this definitively confirmed&lt;/strong&gt;? A &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150126063328/http://www.anthonytrollope.com/abouttrollope/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;website about Anthony Trollope&lt;/a&gt; made this claim as one of their &amp;quot;Top Five Did You Know?&amp;quot;, but this doesn't seem very reliable without a proper source or reference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T09:46:29.150" Title="Did Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire inspire the Archers' Borsetshire?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;anthony-trollope&gt;&lt;chronicles-of-barsetshire&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15540" CreationDate="2020-09-08T12:51:44.180" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/162/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Fisher of Men&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke was talking about a man who went to visit another one who wants to buy his expensive necklace, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mr. Montague's destination was Isleworth, in which rather &lt;strong&gt;unlikely neighbourhood&lt;/strong&gt; Mr. Jacob Lowenstein, late of Chicago, and now of Berkeley Square, has a sort of river-side villa with a motor boat-house attached. Lowenstein &lt;strong&gt;had secured the option&lt;/strong&gt; of purchasing the blue diamond necklace, and Montague was taking it down to exhibit it and carry out the deal.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the meaning of &amp;quot;unlikely&amp;quot; itself, but I can't see its meaning in this context!&#xA;Does it mean &amp;quot;remote&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is meant by &amp;quot;secured the option&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T09:11:29.600" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T09:11:29.600" Title="What does &quot;unlikely neighbourhood&quot; mean in &quot;A Fisher of Men&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15533" CreationDate="2020-09-08T13:54:02.180" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Close reading is probably the most important legacy of the New Criticism. Historically, it was a reaction against criticism that was not rigorous enough (&amp;quot;impressionistic&amp;quot;) but it did not disappear when New Criticism was replaced by structuralism and the deluge of theories that have followed since the 1960s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avner Shahar-Kashtan says that it arose from religious traditions without explicitly mentioning either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_hermeneutics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblical hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hermeneutics&lt;/a&gt; in the sense of &amp;quot;the theory and methodology of interpretation&amp;quot;. Jonathan Culler uses the term &amp;quot;hermeneutics&amp;quot; refer to a type of criticism of which New Criticism is an example, and contrasts it with &amp;quot;poetics&amp;quot; (italics in the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Poetics is] an understanding of the devices, conventions and strategies of literature, of the means by which literary works create their effect. In opposition to &lt;em&gt;poetics&lt;/em&gt; I set &lt;em&gt;hermeneutics&lt;/em&gt;, the practice of interpretation, whose goal is to discover or determine the meaning of text.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In principle, these two enterprises are diametrically opposed: poetics starts with attested meaning or effects and seeks to understand what structures or devices make them possible, whereas hermeneutics argues about what the meanings are or should be. Anglo-American New Criticism had made hermeneutics or interpretation the orthodoxy of literary studies, and I argued that rather than aim at discovering new yet sound interpretations of literary works, literary studies should seek to understand how produce the effects they have for readers (effects such as meanings). &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Jonathan Culler: &amp;quot;Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Structuralist Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, Routledge, 2002; the book was originally published in 1975.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of literary criticism, both hermeneutics (e.g. New Criticism) and poetics (e.g. structuralism) require, or at the very least benefit from, a close attention to formal characteristics such as style, metaphor, rhythm, rhyme etc in addition to meaning. (This is where New Criticism seemed to have gone beyond the religious traditions from which, according to Avner Shahar-Kashtan, close reading arose. I am not aware that the religious hermeneutic traditions devoted much attention to language as &lt;em&gt;a reality in itself&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;a vehicle for something distinct&lt;/em&gt; from language as such.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler also discusses close reading in &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (Oxford University Press, 1997), more specifically in chapter 3: &amp;quot;Literary and Cultural Studies&amp;quot;. Culler cites the introduction to &lt;em&gt;Cultural Studies&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Lawrence Grossberg et al (1992), which states: &amp;quot;although there is no prohibition against close textual readings in cultural studies, they are also not required.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This assurance that close reading is not prohibited is scarcely reassuring to the literary critic. Freed from the principle that has long governed literary studies—that the main point of interest is the distinctive complexity of individual works—cultural studies could easily become a kind of non-quantitative sociology, treating works as instances or symptoms of something else rather than of interest in themselves, and succumbing to other temptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication of this comment is that close reading is (or was) something like the foundation on which literary critics build their analysis (even though the &lt;em&gt;process&lt;/em&gt; of close reading is not necessarily visible in the resulting interpretation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You don't need close reading if you are just reading for pleasure or if you use literature as &amp;quot;a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness and sanity&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RCFLobfqcw&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What is literature for?&lt;/a&gt; by The School of Life). You need it if you want to &lt;strong&gt;increase your understanding of how literature works&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You also don't need it if your method of analysis relies on computational methods to explore larger corpora of texts rather than interpreting individual text. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Distant reading&lt;/a&gt; (no pun intended on my part), for example, is described as &amp;quot;an approach in literary studies that applies computational methods to literary data, usually derived from large digital libraries, for the purposes of literary history and theory&amp;quot; (quoted from Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: whether close reading is &amp;quot;necessary&amp;quot; depends on your method of analysis; it is unnecessary if analysis is not what you are interested in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T13:54:02.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15540" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15538" CreationDate="2020-09-08T14:45:27.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isleworth is described as an &amp;quot;unlikely neighbourhood&amp;quot; because Dr. Thorndyke would not have expected of men of such means to live there. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isleworth#Georgian_and_Victorian_times&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Isleworth during Georgian and Victorian times had attracted many &amp;quot;aristocrats and high achievers&amp;quot; who built &amp;quot;many mansions and large houses&amp;quot;. From this perspective, it would not have been strange for someone who wants to buy a £70,000 necklace to have a residence in Isleworth. However, railway expansion in the second half of the 19th century also brought factories to Isleworth, which may have made the town less attractive to the rich by the early twentieth century. (&lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1923.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Jacob Lowenstein had &amp;quot;secured the option&amp;quot; to buy the necklace, i.e. he had paid a nominal fee to ensure that Mr. Lionel Montague's firm would not sell the necklace to another buyer before he (i.e. Lowenstein) had decided whether he wanted to buy it or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T15:24:58.067" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T15:24:58.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15541" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:04:43.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T18:04:43.760" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T18:04:43.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15542" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:04:43.760" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel series Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope, set in the eponymous fictional English county. Questions with this tag should be used with the [anthony-trollope] tag." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T18:20:11.623" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T18:20:11.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15543" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:12:01.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-08T18:12:01.630" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T18:12:01.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15544" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:12:01.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Julian Huxley, a renowned biologist, and his life as it relates to literature. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:05:25.597" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:05:25.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15545" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18500" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:25:54.577" Score="1" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I was rereading through some of the songs from the Disney animated/live musical, &lt;em&gt;The Hunchback of Notre Dame&lt;/em&gt;, and there's a verse in &amp;quot;Someday&amp;quot; which goes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Till then, on days when the sun is gone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We'll hang on&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And we'll wish upon the moon&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean &amp;quot;and we'll wish upon the moon&amp;quot;? And what is &amp;quot;days when the sun is gone&amp;quot;? I don't think that's a reference to night, is it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T04:01:38.437" Title="Meaning of this verse from &quot;Someday&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;alan-menken&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3485" CreationDate="2020-09-08T18:59:46.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peter is represented by the string quartet because he is the main character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In most types of orchestral work that is NOT a concerto (that is, an extended solo performance of an instrument), the string section is the &amp;quot;main character&amp;quot;, so to speak. They are the largest section by far in the orchestra, and often employ the &amp;quot;body&amp;quot; of many works, with brass and woodwind being the added &amp;quot;color&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sound&amp;quot; in a symphonic work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This runs true of virtually any &amp;quot;full orchestral work&amp;quot; where strings are present. Sometimes the brass may get a solo here and there, and the woodwinds may carry the melody, but the main body of the piece is &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the string, though they may sometimes take a backseat and give the spotlight to some other instruments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, &amp;quot;Peter and the Wolf&amp;quot; isn't a completely full orchestral piece, but it uses a good majority of the instrumentation employed in full symphonic composition. Peter, as the main character, leads the story, and everything revolves around Peter (more or less), like how orchestral music is &lt;em&gt;often&lt;/em&gt; centered on the strings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also makes sense in the explanation, as it states,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Thereby, the children learn to distinguish the sonorities of the instruments during the performance of this tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the reason for the existence of &amp;quot;Peter and the Wolf&amp;quot; is to teach children about the different sounds of instruments and how they all work together to make music (or tell a story). By having the entire string section (not merely just say the violins) represent Peter is important, because it engrains into the children's early about the importance of the strings in an orchestral piece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The instrumentation also creates auditorial imagery. By listening to the leitmotif of Peter, one can imagine a jolly little lad skipping around, full and vibrant with energy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final reason is I think commented a bit by Peter Smith, and it's to distinguish between texture and timbre. It's very interesting to note that each instrument has its own unique timbre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flute: Light, airy, and clear.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oboe: Darker, more &amp;quot;reedy&amp;quot;, (kind of sounds like a duck, doesn't it?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarinet: Full, airy, and &amp;quot;fluffy&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bassoon: Darker and heavier than the oboe.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strings: Light, majestic, and vibrant&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-French Horns/Brass: Menacing and loud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Timpani: Short and loud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a full orchestra, strings tend to function as one unit, rather than detached. This works well in their favor because strings have a timbre that harmonizes well together. So I think having the full string section represent Peter probably speaks to the complexity of humans, similar to how the hunters are represented by a mixture of trumpets &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; woodwinds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2020-09-08T18:59:46.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2773" CreationDate="2020-09-09T00:17:51.107" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I discovered this post from the bygone ages of the Stack Exchange abyss, and I thought I could contribute an answer to it, so excuse my tardiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I most certainly agree that Shel Silverstein intended his poetry to be read devoutly with his delightfully morbid illustrations. And on the point of your question, here is some evidence of a poem (albeit shorter than usual) which entirely fails to succeed without the illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/koaPm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/koaPm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Draw a crazy picture, / Write a nutty poem&lt;/strong&gt;, / Sing a mumble-gumble song, / Whistle through your comb. / Do a loony-goony dance / 'Cross the kitchen floor, / Put something silly in the world, / That ain't been there before.&amp;quot; -Silverstein&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T00:17:51.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15548" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15549" CreationDate="2020-09-09T00:31:04.890" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw this quote in C. S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;The Inner Ring&lt;/em&gt; and I'm having trouble figuring out what it means. What does this quote in Don Juan by Lord Byron mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10826" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T06:09:26.643" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T06:09:26.643" Title="What does this quote in Don Juan by Lord Byron mean? &quot;Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet The unexpected death of some old lady&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15548" CreationDate="2020-09-09T01:25:11.127" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means, &amp;quot;To be left money or property is sweet (pleasant/agreeable/nice) and the unexpected death of an old lady is &lt;em&gt;extremely&lt;/em&gt; sweet (pleasant/agreeable/nice).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad to see the poem continues more even-handedly!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;Or gentleman of seventy years complete,&#xA;     Who've made 'us youth' wait too--too long already&#xA;For an estate, or cash, or country seat&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[ &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.faculty.umb.edu/elizabeth_fay/donjuan4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanza CXXV&lt;/a&gt; ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T01:39:43.177" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T01:39:43.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15427" CreationDate="2020-09-09T02:27:42.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The prequels provide bit more details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some stage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Old_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;human history&lt;/a&gt;, a group of rebels managed to take over  the Old Empire. To cement their power, they've transferred their brains into immortal machines called &amp;quot;cymeks&amp;quot; and adopted names of famous characters  from the history and mythology - Dante, Barbarossa, Ajax, Hecate...and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Agamemnon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agamemnon&lt;/a&gt;, who apparently indeed could track his lineage to the ancient Greek hero. This group was later subdued when Omnius - a powerful Thinking Machine - has taken over the control. All cymeks finally met their end during the Butlerian Jihad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cymek-Agamemnon fathered (using his saved sperm) an unknown number of children, the last and most promising one was Vorian Atreides, the ancestor of Paul Atreides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hawk symbol has also a backstory: during the final Battle for Corrin, Omnius placed most of the human slaves on the orbit in small ships rigged to explode if the attack would commence as a way of deterring the attackers. Vorian, knowing that this is the only moment when humanity could succeed against the machines decided to attack, even after being called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/doves-and-hawks#:%7E:text=DOVES%20AND%20HAWKS%20are%20terms,much%20older%20than%20that%20conflict.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hawk&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by his friend Abulurd Harkonnen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T18:58:11.643" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T18:58:11.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15552" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15555" CreationDate="2020-09-09T05:58:35.427" Score="0" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found the following quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://javascript.info/ninja-code&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dao hides in wordlessness. Only the Dao is well begun and well completed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Laozi, &lt;em&gt;Dàodé Jīng / Tao Te Ching&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the exact meaning and context of this quote? I was curious to know what is meant by the word &lt;strong&gt;Dao&lt;/strong&gt; in the context of the given quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10827" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:08:27.540" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:08:27.540" Title="Who is &quot;Dao&quot; in this quote from Laozi's Tao Te Ching?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;dao-de-jing&gt;&lt;laozi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15553" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15554" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" Score="0" Body="For questions about the literary work of the famous Renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, usually called simply Michelangelo, or about aspects of his life that relate to literature or are on-topic for this site." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:04:50.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15552" CreationDate="2020-09-09T14:17:44.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Dao&lt;/strong&gt; is the more recent translation of the word formerly rendered &lt;strong&gt;Tao&lt;/strong&gt;.  The original Chinese term, in ordinary usage, means the Way.  However, in Daoism (Taoism), it became a philosophical concept of great depth, pervasive to the philosophy, and one of its teaching is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dao which can be explained is not the true Dao.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the Dao &amp;quot;exists in wordlessness&amp;quot; -- it exists though it can not be explained in words -- and because it is the fundamental root of things, it is complete in itself, always beginning and ending things properly.  More or less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This will get deep into philosophy if you want to consider it further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T14:17:44.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15556" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-09T15:30:00.760" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 17th-century motif of Tom O' Bedlam has always been one that I hold much affection and wonder for (as can be assumed by the choice of username on my part.)&#xA;The motif most famously makes an appearance in William Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Tragedie of King Lear&lt;/em&gt;;&#xA;Here being two examples of the text spoken by Edgar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...)I will preserve myself, and am bethought&#xA;To take the basest and most poorest shape&#xA;That ever penury in contempt of man&#xA;Brought near to beast. (...)&lt;strong&gt;Of Bedlam beggars&lt;/strong&gt;, who with roaring voices&#xA;(...)Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,&#xA;Enforce their charity. “Poor Turlygod!” “&lt;strong&gt;Poor Tom!&lt;/strong&gt;”—&#xA;That’s something yet. Edgar I nothing am.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who gives anything to &lt;strong&gt;poor Tom&lt;/strong&gt;?&#xA;(...)Bless thy five wits! &lt;strong&gt;Tom's&lt;/strong&gt; a-cold. O! do&#xA;De, do de, do de. Bless thee from whirlwinds,&#xA;Star-blasting, and taking! Do &lt;strong&gt;poor Tom&lt;/strong&gt; some&#xA;Charity(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And of course the masterfully written, anonymous ballad of &amp;quot;Tom O' Bedlam's song&amp;quot; which is certainly the magnum opus of the motif in use (assumed to have been written soemtime in the 1620s but first published in 1720) which the late-great literary critique Harold Bloom famously very much admired-- Here being my favorite part of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gypsies, Snap and Pedro,/&#xA;Are none of Tom's comradoes,/&#xA;The punk I scorn, and the cutpurse sworn/&#xA;And the roaring boy's bravadoes./&#xA;The meek, the white, the gentle,/&#xA;Me handle not nor spare not;/&#xA;But those that cross Tom Rynosseross/&#xA;Do what the panther dare not./&#xA;Although I sing, Any food, any feeding,/&#xA;Feeding, drink or clothing;/&#xA;Come dame or maid, be not afraid,/&#xA;Poor Tom will injure nothing./&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another early appearance from &amp;quot;The Belman of London&amp;quot; (published in 1608)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aUSjw.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/aUSjw.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FgrBy.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/FgrBy.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I distinctly recall reading about the origin of the concept of &amp;quot;Tom o' Bedlam&amp;quot; in numerous writings and remember that the concept of &amp;quot;Bedlam&amp;quot; may be a biblical allusion to The Christ's Bethlehem, and this biblical (albeit blasphemous) almost holy connotation to the madhouse of Bedlam corresponds pleasantly with the ancient belief that madman was in some way &amp;quot;divine&amp;quot; in their minds (Plato's Theia mania and what have you--See. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_madness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Divine Madness&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not to forget there were numerous uses of the word &amp;quot;Tom&amp;quot; in the context of a &amp;quot;Madman&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;fool&amp;quot; (see. &amp;quot;tom-fool&amp;quot; defined as a &amp;quot;buffoon, clown,&amp;quot; circa. 1640s) and according to Online Etymology Dictionary the word Bedlam comes from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem&amp;quot; in London, founded 1247 as a priory, mentioned as a hospital 1330 and as a lunatic hospital 1402; it was converted to a civic lunatic asylum on dissolution of the monasteries in 1547. It was spelled Bedlem in a will from 1418, and Betleem is recorded as a spelling of Bethlehem in Judea from 971.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question has numerous sections all relating to the topic of &amp;quot;Tom O' Bedlam&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where else in early-modern-English can this motif be found?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why was it so widely used? (I think it is quite evident that the concept was quite common in the minds of Elizabethan and Jacobean society, as it appears so heavily in the literature of the period.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And what is its overall etymology?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight would be humbly appreciated. Thank you so very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" OwnerDisplayName="Tom O' Bedlam" LastEditorUserId="10815" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T18:05:35.220" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T18:05:35.220" Title="The motif of Tom O' Bedlam" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;motif&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15557" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T15:59:57.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T15:59:57.230" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T15:59:57.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15558" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T15:59:57.230" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American travel author Paul Theroux (born 1941) and his life as a writer.&#xD;&#xA;Questions regarding his book-length works should be tagged with the book's title." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:21:35.557" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:21:35.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:03:44.503" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T16:03:44.503" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:03:44.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:03:44.503" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Chinese philosopher and writer Laozi (or Lao Tzu or Lao-Tze). Questions regarding his works should be tagged with [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:21:52.783" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:21:52.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15561" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:05:13.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T16:05:13.200" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:05:13.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15562" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:05:13.200" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'Dàodé Jīng' or  'Tao Te Ching' (道德经), a philosophical attributed to Laozi. Should be tagged with [laozi] and [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:10:34.220" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:10:34.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15563" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:19:13.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T16:19:13.670" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:19:13.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15564" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:19:13.670" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'Oxford English Dictionary' or OED, as it relates to literature. Should not be confused with other dictionaries." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:12:17.753" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:12:17.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15565" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:33:45.393" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The King of the Fields&lt;/em&gt; by Isaac Bashevis Singer, there's this scene early on in the book - the section &amp;quot;Cybula and Nosek&amp;quot; - where Cybula, who is on his way with his daughter for a peace meeting with the invaders, muses about some birds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The birds had all settled down on branches of trees, except for two, which flew about squwaking at each other — a couple that could not find a fitting branch on which to bed down. But why? There were so many trees and so many branches! Cybula understood these creatures' behavior no better than he could understand the behavior of men. Some songbirds ceased singing, while others warbled and trilled. They slept in pairs close to each other, kissed each other with their little beaks, groomed each other's feathers and plucked out vermin. Yet he saw males attack the females, even peck them to death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a metaphor for human behavior - such as the farmers invading the hunters? How can this be interpreted as a metaphor for human behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:33:45.393" Title="Is Cybula's musings about the birds a metaphor?" Tags="&lt;isaac-bashevis-singer&gt;&lt;yiddish-literature&gt;&lt;the-king-of-the-fields&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15566" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:40:18.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T16:40:18.940" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T16:40:18.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15567" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-09T16:40:18.940" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'King of the Fields' (1988) by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Should be tagged with [yiddish-literature] and [isaac-bashevis-singer]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T17:13:16.577" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T17:13:16.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15569" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-09T21:39:02.540" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an account of, or historical information about: Jean-Michel Jasiensko's Polish-French translation of Solaris. Particularly, why did he vary the text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox's collaborative French-English translation. How did it work? Why was Cox involved? Faber is silent. I know that Jasiensko was a busy translator. Kilmartin is always called &amp;quot;distinguished&amp;quot; and was likewise productive, but, beyond the Times obit, there is nothing online. 'Steve Cox' is a common name - it turns out. Is he still around? So: Maybe a link to some obscure online data? And I'm happy to hear informed conjecture.&#xA;(I am well up on this, so I DON'T need other, easily-found material, thanks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10832" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-09T21:47:00.600" LastActivityDate="2020-09-09T21:47:00.600" Title="About Solaris translators Jasiensko (French), Kilmartin and Cox" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;stanislaw-lem&gt;&lt;solaris&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-09-10T20:47:16.237" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15572" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T06:30:15.213" Score="3" ViewCount="194" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I'm approaching the end of The Two Towers, I'm increasingly frustrated by how, other than in the very beginning of the story in the first book, we never hear a single phrase such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frodo immediately sat up, looking around for Gollum, realizing that Sam was still sleeping next to him, reaching for the chain tucked away underneath his mithril mail, making sure that the Ring was still in his possession. With a sigh of relief, he woke Sam and...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You never see that kind of thing in the entire story so far. Not even when they first encounter Gollum in the wilderness. Not once. Tolkien seems to have thought of every little detail, but apparently never felt the need to add such small reminders of how important the Ring is and how worried Frodo is to miss it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are numerous times, besides all those sleepovers with Gollum freely roaming around them, when it would make perfect sense for Frodo to at least make sure that The One is still secure. Maybe it's implied, but it seems to me almost as if Frodo has entirely forgotten all about it at this point. Or stuffed it somewhere where he constantly feels it. I may have forgotten about it, but I don't know where exactly he keeps it, other than it being attached to a chain and supposedly in one of his pockets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just the fact that they sleep with this Ring-crazed creature, who clearly goes to any length to get his &amp;quot;Preccccious&amp;quot; back, is in itself very strange to me, but that he seems so incredibly careless and doesn't even make sure that it's still on him is just downright &lt;em&gt;bizarre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than the poetry, my biggest complaint about the book are the very elaborate and confusing descriptions of the surroundings. With all that description of their surroundings, it makes me constantly wish for more details about the hobbits themselves and what they are thinking and doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounds a bit weird to say it, but there are many scenes where I think I could have slightly improved them by simply mentioning that Frodo is reaching for the Ring or moving his hands in that direction while somebody is talking or acting suspicious. I expected this to happen regularly throughout the entire series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10835" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T08:03:05.660" Title="Why does Tolkien barely mention the Ring in terms of Frodo's physical handling of it?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15573" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T06:59:49.230" Score="2" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Normani's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXSh14svlQ&amp;amp;ab_channel=NormaniVEVO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motivation&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (video slightly NSFW), there's a repeated line that goes &amp;quot;I'ma break you off, let me be your motivation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the first stanza / chorus goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'ma break you off, let me be your motivation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To stay and give it tonight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, baby, turn around, let me give you innovation, hey&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause I do it so right&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The music video gives the impression that &amp;quot;let me be your motivation&amp;quot; is speaking to Black girls out there. However, I'm unsure how this works with the &amp;quot;I'ma break you off&amp;quot; part that precedes it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these two parts of the line work together? What's this line talking about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T08:30:24.803" Title="What does &quot;let me be your motivation&quot; mean in Normani's &quot;Motivation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;normani&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15574" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T07:11:08.923" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;The audience at the opera watches a feather float slowly down and spiral into the mouth of the lead soprano, and she chokes to death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this sometime in the last decade, but don't remember when or where. I don't have any more information. I've searched Google but can't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8525" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T07:11:08.923" Title="What story is this from ? A feather chokes an opera singer to death on stage" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15572" CreationDate="2020-09-10T08:03:05.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allow me to look at your problem from a slightly different angle. It's what I like about books (as opposed to movies): a good book encourages you to continually 'visualize' what happens yourself and immerse yourself in the world of the book. This includes details which the author deemed not worthy of mentioning over and over again, such as Frodo's interactions with the Ring, or what they (or the other members of the fellowship) had for lunch each day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Frodo wears the chain (often? always?) on his neck, so it would not be easy to grasp it from him without noticing. Perhaps that's the reason he doesn't worry too much?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he had dressed, Frodo found that while he slept the Ring had been hung about his neck on a new chain, light but strong.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring - Many Meetings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T08:03:05.660" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15573" CreationDate="2020-09-10T08:19:47.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Popular song lyrics are usually full of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_entendre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;double entendres&lt;/a&gt;. Because the targeted audience is usually young and matches certain demographics, the lyrics usually have to be explicitly racy and sometimes make plenty of references to sex. This is especially common in rap, pop, R&amp;amp;B. The subject matter is often prurient in taste. Well, as they say, sex sells.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Break off&amp;quot; is a very good example of this. The phrasal verb &amp;quot;break off&amp;quot; means to make something discontinue or detach. &amp;quot;I am going to break off the discussion.&amp;quot; means I am going to quit the discussion. &amp;quot;I just broke off with a partner&amp;quot; means I just parted ways with a partner. So that line could be interpreted to mean something like &amp;quot;I am going to break you off from your old relationship/an unwanted entanglement.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But!&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;Break someone off&amp;quot; also means, and to certain groups, primarily means &amp;quot;to have sex with someone&amp;quot;, especially referring to rough sex. See Urban Dictionary's definitions &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=break%20you%20off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;break you off&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=break%20me%20off&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;break me off&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which I am disinclined to quote in their entirety in the interest of keeping proper decorum. Just a glimpse: &amp;quot;Usually used as a statement to describe what you are going to do, occasionally used after what you already have done.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is why it is followed by &amp;quot;let me be your motivation / To stay and give it tonight&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Give it tonight&amp;quot; is another reference to sex. In this context &amp;quot;motivation&amp;quot; is taken to mean something along the lines of &amp;quot;reason&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Let me motivate you to stay with me tonight and 'give it'&amp;quot;. That resonates with &amp;quot;'Cause I do it so right&amp;quot;. And the lyrics asks the other party to &amp;quot;turn around&amp;quot; and they will give some &amp;quot;innovation&amp;quot; (new ideas). Well, you get the idea. The sexual innuendos are actually quite obvious from the video.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course we &lt;em&gt;don't have to&lt;/em&gt; interpret the lyrics &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; that way. Having double meanings is the power of popular music. The song as you say is also a perfectly peppy inspirational song for young girls. We can read those lines as &amp;quot;I will help break you off (from something unwanted). Let me motivate you to stay and fight.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A lot of these songs are written in such a way that they resonate with the target audience. Young girls are expected to like the song well enough to memorize the lyrics and be able to sing the song. So the songwriters always build into their lyrics things that would hook teens because they are cool, like sex, gang life, individuality, dreams and love, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One important thing to note is when you try to critically read lyrics keep in mind that songwriters and singers are artists too, and they share one very important attribute with practitioners in other fields of art: intertextuality. Especially popular musicians. They listen to popular music in the same genre that came before them. So Normani and her songwriters must have had some hit songs in mind when creating this song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_NvtAxmDEM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Roots - Break You Off&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1XozsBN5Z4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kelly Rowland ft. Lil Wayne - Motivation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later songs very likely will reference earlier huge hits. And it's not hard to spot similar lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Kelly Rowland, Lil Wayne song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baby I'ma be your motivation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Go, go, go, go, motivation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Go, go, go, go&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In The Roots song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comin' to break you off&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T08:30:24.803" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T08:30:24.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15577" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T10:26:01.237" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure I once (a long time ago) read a Joyce quote where he said that only twelve (or was it thirteen?) readers would ever fully understand &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;.  But I couldn't convince Google to find a source for this.  Do I remember correctly or did my memory make this up?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10836" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T22:05:44.923" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T22:05:44.923" Title="Did Joyce &quot;estimate&quot; how many readers would understand Finnegans Wake?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15578" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15579" CreationDate="2020-09-10T10:28:43.163" Score="2" ViewCount="271" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rilke's poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/pieta-0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pietà&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there is this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fills now my cup&lt;/strong&gt;, and past thought is my fulness thereof. I harden as a stone sets hard at its heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;Fills now my cup&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Italian, this is traslated as &amp;quot;misfortune&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;misery&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T10:52:01.433" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T10:52:01.433" Title="What does &quot;Fills now my cup&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;rainer-maria-rilke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15578" CreationDate="2020-09-10T10:51:42.387" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your assumption is correct; it means “misery”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the German original, the line reads&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jetzt wird mein Elend voll,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which literally translates as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now my misery becomes full&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user10838" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T10:51:42.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15580" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9435" CreationDate="2020-09-10T14:59:47.300" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is aggressive unfair trade and marketing . There is a public domain concept called the common core.  No one owns it.  Then there is a very aggressive private marketing effort by a single publisher - Carson Delossa - to Sell andpromote ‘common core connections’ workbooks eyc. as their property.  They take advantage of the billions spent by state and federal government promoting the common core concept and now seem intent to use resulting confusion for profit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10839" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T14:59:47.300" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15581" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-10T15:21:38.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T15:21:38.467" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T15:21:38.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15582" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-10T15:21:38.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of American songwriter and performer Normani Kordei Hamilton, mononymously known as Normani. Questions about her songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:05:46.947" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:05:46.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15627" CreationDate="2020-09-10T15:32:16.660" Score="7" ViewCount="237" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tolkien's legendary series &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is centered around a magical artifact known as the &amp;quot;One Ring&amp;quot;, and part of this story recounts the tale of a Hobbit traveling to destroy this Ring. The ring was first &amp;quot;re-discovered&amp;quot;, if you will, by Bilbo Baggins in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The One Ring is shown to be both very destructive and evil in the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, but it doesn't seem to explicitly manifest itself in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;. Does the Ring's true nature appear/get foreshadowed in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit?&lt;/em&gt; If so, how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T09:13:37.690" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T19:22:14.663" Title="Was the One Ring's malevolent nature foreshadowed in the Hobbit? If so, how?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-10T16:51:51.150" Score="3" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently started reading &lt;strong&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/strong&gt;, and came across the below passage in a letter Tolkien sent to Milton Waldman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Anyway all this stuff is mainly concerned with Fall, Mortality, and the Machine. With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say, sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, it is indeed usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities of ‘Fall’.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While it is clear that Tolkien is talking about the general theme of the Silmarillion, I'm still unable to decipher the exact meaning of the passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10841" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T20:33:06.023" Title="What Tolkien essentially means by &quot;Fall, Mortality and The Machine&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-silmarillion&gt;&lt;tolkiens-legendarium&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15585" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15593" CreationDate="2020-09-10T16:54:26.280" Score="3" ViewCount="128" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've recently seen the term &amp;quot;psychoanalysis&amp;quot; used a few times here on Literature Stack Exchange. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoanalysis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Looking it up&lt;/a&gt;, I learned that it seems to be more a branch of psychology or philosophy than literature, however:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 21st century, psychoanalytic ideas are embedded in Western culture,&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;[vague]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; especially in fields such as childcare, education, literary criticism, cultural studies, mental health, and particularly psychotherapy. Though there is a mainstream of evolved analytic ideas, there are groups who follow the precepts of one or more of the later theoreticians. Psychoanalytic ideas also play roles in some types of literary analysis such as Archetypal literary criticism.&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relevance of psychoanalysis to literary criticism? Can it be used for a theory of literature, or as a lens for viewing works of literature, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Please forgive any terminological inaccuracies in this question. I'm not an expert in literary theory, still less in psychology or philosophy.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T17:02:37.680" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T09:09:16.347" Title="How is psychoanalysis relevant to the study of literature?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;psychoanalysis&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet, memoirist and civil rights activist Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson; 1928 – 2014) and her life as a writer. Angelou published seven works of autobiography, starting with 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings' (1969)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:53:48.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15588" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15589" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about psychoanalytic literary criticism, a mode of interpretation that attempts to uncover what goes on in literary works by using methods and concepts developed in psychoanalysis. The two main influences from psychoanalysis are the works of Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) and Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981). Use this tag for questions about psychoanalytic literary theory or criticism, not for questions requesting a psychoanalytic interpretation." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T20:59:04.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15577" CreationDate="2020-09-10T22:05:33.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a quote that may be what you're remembering, or slightly misremembering. It's not from Joyce himself, but I think it's close enough to be worth posting as an answer. It concerns &lt;em&gt;Work in Progress&lt;/em&gt;, the title Joyce used to refer to &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; before its complete publication, and the idea that only twelve or thirteen people might be able to fully understand the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone  who  is  prepared  to  make  the  reading  of  James  Joyce’s new, incomplete book a life’s career, and who has the lexicographical skill  to  construct  a  James  Joyce  encyclopædic  dictionary  might conceivably derive emotional benefit from&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Work in Progress&lt;/em&gt;,  and might procure the same benefit for at most a dozen other bizarre human  beings.  Apart  from  such  thirteen  human  beings,  &lt;em&gt;Work  in Progress&lt;/em&gt; will not be read, because it cannot be read by any individual normally constituted.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; has had many respectable imitators. &lt;em&gt;Work  in  Progress&lt;/em&gt;  will  never  be  respectably  imitated.  I  think  it ought to rank as the oddest novel written. It will probably be unique.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If James Joyce is content with a possible thirteen readers, that is&#xA;his affair and his alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Arnold Bennett, ‘Books and Persons: The Oddest Novel Ever Written’, &lt;em&gt;Evening Standard&lt;/em&gt; (8 August 1929), 7. Reproduced in &lt;a href=&quot;https://epdf.pub/james-joyce-volume-2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert H. Deming (ed.), &lt;em&gt;James Joyce: the Critical Heritage, Volume 2: 1928-41&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T22:05:33.823" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14234" CreationDate="2020-09-10T22:36:34.280" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's definitely an argument made that you can interpret it that way, and I think there's good reason too. From the lyrics, there seems to be an emphasis of &amp;quot;my way or the highway&amp;quot; sort of mentality with Elphaba, and her her yearning for independence if it means freedom and truth is reflected numerously in this song. For example, at the beginning of the song, Glenda says to Elphaba:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen to me! Just say you're sorry!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You can still be with the Wizard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which she replies back,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I don't want it - no!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I can't want it anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is further elaborated a bit later in the song where she goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Too long I've been afraid of&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Losing love, I guess I've lost&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Well if that's love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It comes at much too high a cost&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She encourages Glenda to join her in her quest, in which Glenda hesitates and decides to stay behind, which is the reason why Elphaba says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I'm flying solo, at least I'm flying free&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning although she's going to be alone in this, she is completely independent of what anybody else tells her to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about the &amp;quot;so low&amp;quot; part? In order to understand this, you need to go back to the song that comes before it, titled &amp;quot;Sentimental Man&amp;quot;. It's sung by the Wizard, and it's pretty short. It goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a sentimental man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who always longed to be a father&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That's why I do the best I can&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To treat each citizen of Oz as son or daughter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So Elphaba, I'd like to raise you high&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause I think everyone deserves the chance to fly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And helping you with your ascent allows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Me to feel so parental&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For I am a sentimental man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now look at this line again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Elphaba, I'd like to raise you high,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause I think you deserve a chance to fly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And helping you with your ascent....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oz is saying in the previous song about how he's going to use his influence and power to raise Elphaba's stature. But in the events which follow after, Elphaba discovers that Oz is a fraud. This makes Elphaba echo Oz's own words back when she sings,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As someone told me lately&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Everyone deserves the chance to fly&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She uses Oz's own words back &lt;em&gt;at&lt;/em&gt; him, saying, &amp;quot;Yeah, that's right, 'everyone deserves a chance to fly', and I'm going to use that chance!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think it's any coincidence that the line directly after &amp;quot;everyone deserves the chance to fly&amp;quot; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if I'm flying solo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At least I'm flying free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in one sense, she's saying &amp;quot;I'm doing this by myself, but at least &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; (i.e. Oz), aren't telling me what to do.&amp;quot; On the other hand, she's rejecting Oz's offer to &amp;quot;raise her high&amp;quot;, and saying, &amp;quot;even if I'm flying &lt;em&gt;so low&lt;/em&gt;, at least I'm doing it on my own.&amp;quot; She's acknowledging the risks that come with defying the wizard (tarnished reputation, being hunted, etc.) and saying &amp;quot;Screw that clout&amp;quot;. This is modeled perfectly by Elphaba says to Glenda,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope you're happy too&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I hope you're proud how you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Would grovel in submission&#xA;To feed your own ambition&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the entire musical, Elphaba and Glenda are considered foils. Glenda is one who follows the rules and is willing to conform to progress in her status, while Elphaba is willing to break those even if it means her stature or how other people view her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope this helps!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-10T22:45:50.650" LastActivityDate="2020-09-10T22:45:50.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15585" CreationDate="2020-09-11T00:00:30.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peter Barry (&lt;em&gt;Beginning Theory&lt;/em&gt;, fourth edition. Manchester University Press, 2017, p. 97):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychoanalytic criticism is a form of literary criticism which uses some of the techniques of psychoanalysis in the interpretation of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychoanalysis investigates the connection between the conscious and the unconscious with the aim to cure mental disorders. In addition to methods, the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, developed a number of theories and concepts, such as the Oedipus complex; id, ego and super-ego; libido; castration anxiety; death drive; repression; sublimation; the Freudian slip; and dream work. (Freud did not discover &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; of these concepts, but he combined them into a theory that was his own and that evolved over several decades.) Psychoanalytic critism does not only use the techniques mentioned in Peter Barry's brief definition but can also use the concepts Freud developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Culler describes psychoanalytic criticism (next to Marxist criticism) as one of the most powerful modern &amp;quot;hermeneutics&amp;quot;, by which he means that it is a theory that is applied to help understand what is going on in a literary work (as opposed to &amp;quot;poetics&amp;quot;, which attempts to uncover &lt;em&gt;how&lt;/em&gt; literary works achieve their effects). (See Jonathan Culler: &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 1997, pages 128-129.) But how can the methods of psychoanalysis be applied to literary works? Do works of fiction have mental disorders? Can you invite them to lie down on a couch and talk freely using free associations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons why literary critics are interested in psychoanalysis is that literary works have something in common with emanations from the unconscious such as dreams: they do not speak directly and explicitly but through the use metaphors, symbols, imagery etcetera. Hence, what psychoanalytic literary critics do is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They associate the conscious mind with a text's &amp;quot;overt&amp;quot; content, and the unconscious with what the text is &amp;quot;really&amp;quot; about. The goal is than to disentangle these two levels in the text.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They look for unconscious motives and feelings, not only in what characters say and do, but also by looking at the author's biography.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They point out the presence of psychoanalytic symptoms or conditions such as those listed above (Oedipus complex, repression etcetera) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosexual_development#Freudian_psychosexual_development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;psychosexual development phases&lt;/a&gt; (anal stage, genital stage, oral stage, ...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The hidden meaning they uncover is privileged over other aspects such as class conflict (see e.g. Marxist literary criticism) or specific types of relationships between literature and society (see e.g. New Historicism and Cultural Materialism).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above list is (mainly) paraphrased from Peter Barry's &lt;em&gt;Beginning Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (4th edition, page 107), so I will briefly discuss an example of psychoanalytic criticism from a different source. Bernard Pingaud's study of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;em&gt;L’Étranger d’Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt; (Gallimard, 1992). Meursault's narration in &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; can be read as one that hides a different, latent narration. The first thing we learn at the beginning of the novel is that the narrator's mother has died &amp;quot;today&amp;quot;, or perhaps &amp;quot;yesterday&amp;quot;, but the exact day does not seem to matter much. Later on, Meursault does not weep at the funeral, he admits he does not know his mother's age, he goes to the cinema to watch a comedy film the day after the funeral, all as if his mother's death had not affected him at all. This is later held against him at the trial in the second part of the book: the public prosecutor accuses him of having &amp;quot;morally killed his mother&amp;quot; and in one fell swoop also declares him guilty of the murder of his father. In reality, Meursault's crime is killing &amp;quot;an Arab&amp;quot;, his mother died of natural causes, his father died when he was still a small child, and the accusation of parricide is inspired by a parricide trial that was scheduled to begin after Meursault's trial. (So far, this is all in the &amp;quot;overt&amp;quot; text, not &amp;quot;latent&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault never talks about his mother, but he does not talk very much in general. However, his mother is mentioned again at several stages in the book. For example, the dog of Salamano, his neighbour across the landing, has gone missing. Meursault hears Salamano weep over the loss of his dog and this suddenly makes him think of his mother, without knowing why (end of Part One, Chapter IV). This is something that can be interpreted as a symptom of repression: Meursault's grief for his mother is only felt in his unconscious, where he is not aware of it and cannot process it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only moment when Meursault thinks of his father is when he is thinking of his own execution. His mother had once told him that his father had wanted to witness an execution and that he had returned feeling so ill that it made him throw up. Meursalt adds that watching an execution (for which the French still used the guillotine at the time) was &amp;quot;the only really interesting thing for man&amp;quot; (Part Two, Chapter V). From a Freudian point of view, the execution can refer to castration and the reason why Meursault's father was so ill after the execution was that it was really the punishment of his son for sleeping with his own mother. To support the latter claim, critics point out that Camus's mother had been attacked and beaten by an unknown man. At the request of the doctor, Camus had returned to his mother's house to support her; he had lied down on the bed next to her and fallen asleep there, thereby, in truly Oedipal fashion, taking the place of his father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above paragraphs give only an incomplete, shortened and simplified version of what may be found in psychoanalytic interpretations of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, but it gives an idea of what this type of criticism may be looking for. For another example of Freudian interpretation, see Freud's own comments on &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;The Interpretation of Dreams&lt;/em&gt; (1899) and Ernest Jones's study &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_and_Oedipus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet and Oedipus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1949).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is based on Freudian concepts, whereas the most important influence of psychoanalysis on literary theory does probably not come from Freud but from Jacques Lacan. Where the validity of Freud's theories has been questioned, both from a scientific and a feminist point of view, this is even more the case for Lacan, who was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1959. (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.critical-theory.com/noam-chomsky-calls-jacques-lacan-a-charlatan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noam Chomsky&lt;/a&gt;, for example, considered Lacan a &amp;quot;total charlatan&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Barry warns readers that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lacan's own explication of his ideas is often intimidatingly obscure. I would suggest that in reading him you should devote some study time to reading the same piece several times, rather than reading through a great deal of his work once only.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Lacan, Barry explains, psychoanalytical investigation of the unconscious &lt;em&gt;examines&lt;/em&gt; language and &lt;em&gt;uses&lt;/em&gt; language to perform the analysis, which makes psychoanalysis a verbal science. Lacan claims that &amp;quot;what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language&amp;quot; (Barry, &lt;em&gt;Beginning Theory&lt;/em&gt;, page 113). He claims that Freud's concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displacement_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;displacement&lt;/a&gt; (the unconscious mind subsitutes one object or person for another that seems too dangerous or unacceptable to mention or reveal) corresponds with the figure of speech known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;. He also sees a correspondence between Freud's concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensation_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;condensation&lt;/a&gt; (a single object or idea stands for several other ones) and the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;. For Lacan, the unconscious is the location of true selfhood but also a linguistic effect. However, language as a system is already in place before we make our appearance, and if our unconscious is merely a linguistic effect, it follows that our notions of &amp;quot;self&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;unique character&amp;quot; become untenable. As a consequence, literary critics can no longer hold on to the traditional view of characterisation in literary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is only an incomplete and shortened introduction to some of Lacan's ideas that are relevant to literature. The best known example of Lacanian literary criticism is Lacan's own &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lacan.com/purloined.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seminar on Edgar Allan Poe's short story &amp;quot;The Purloined Letter&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T09:09:16.347" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T09:09:16.347" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15583" CreationDate="2020-09-11T01:58:00.183" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once Tolkien revised it, it was (slightly) foreshadowed by the way Bilbo lied about the ring.  In the first edition, once Gollum lost the contest, he tried to give Bilbo the ring and was ashamed that he could not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo’s pardon. He kept on saying: “We are ssorry; we didn’t mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only only pressent, if it won the competition.” He even offered to catch Bilbo some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revised, of course,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Where iss it? Where iss it?” Bilbo heard him crying. “Losst it is, my precious, lost lost! Curse us and crush us, my precious is lost!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, of course, turns on the in-universe explanation that Bilbo wrote the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T01:58:00.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-11T06:34:40.277" Score="2" ViewCount="199" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Maya Angelou's poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48991/the-mothering-blackness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mothering Blackness&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there are a bunch of different colors mentioned. For instance, the first verse goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She came home running&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   back to the mothering blackness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   deep in the smothering blackness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;white tears icicle gold plains of her face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are mentions of black, white, and gold here in the first verse alone. It feels to me like the colors are being contrasted here; the black is contrasted with the white tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How are the various colors used throughout this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T08:35:42.900" Title="How are colors being used in Maya Angelou's &quot;The Mothering Blackness&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15596" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-11T05:22:16.937" Score="4" ViewCount="1216" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a poem entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jccsskc.edu.hk/english/poem/SpeechFestival14-15/S2G14.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Choosing Their Names&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Thomas Hood&lt;/strong&gt; a stanza is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is black, with a frill of white,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And her feet are all white fur, too;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you stroke her she carries her tail upright&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And quickly begins to purr, too!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think we shall call her this –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think we shall call her that –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now don’t you think that &lt;strong&gt;Sootikin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is a nice name for a cat? &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I googled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=sootikin%20meaning&amp;amp;oq=soot&amp;amp;aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i60l2j0l2.2146j0j7&amp;amp;client=ms-android-oppo&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome-mobile&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sootikin&lt;/a&gt; it showed that &lt;strong&gt;sootkin&lt;/strong&gt; is an awful word meaning &lt;strong&gt;deposit at women's vagina who do not wear underwear.&lt;/strong&gt; I didn't find any other meaning except this. But I am sure it doesn't mean this at least here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean?&#xA;What is the opinion of a native speaker?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a question too in a 3rd grade book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the poet think &lt;strong&gt;sootikin&lt;/strong&gt; is a suitable name for the cat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" OwnerDisplayName="user100323" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T18:37:38.177" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T08:16:41.007" Title="Why the word &quot;sootikin&quot; in a children's poem &quot;Choosing Their Names&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-hood&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15596" CreationDate="2020-09-11T06:11:06.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sooty is often used as a name for black coloured pets, and -ikins is an affectionate diminutive ending. The other alleged 'meaning' does not make sense to any adult, and seems (from a brief Google search) to be mainly chuckled about by schoolboys. It also appears to be mentioned in a paper about internet trolling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4993" OwnerDisplayName="Michael Harvey" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T06:24:15.490" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15596" CreationDate="2020-09-11T06:11:20.233" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt that vulgar definition is relevant. It looks more like a combination of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soot + i/y + kin&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See entries below.) In other words, &lt;em&gt;Sootikin&lt;/em&gt; is simply a made-up cutesy, fanciful name based on the word &lt;em&gt;soot&lt;/em&gt;, just like the other names in the poem: Pepperpot and Scratchaway. Similar made-up names would be Bestyboo, Mitchikins, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or more specific to these cats using i/y+kin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pepperpot has emerald eyes: Greenikin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sootikin has white fur on her feet, and such cats are often named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Socks&lt;/a&gt;: Socksikin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scratchaway is quarrelsome: Brawlikin&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can create a number of nicknames and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/pet-name&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pet names&lt;/a&gt; this way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/soot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;soot&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;noun&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a black, carbonaceous substance produced during incomplete combustion of coal, wood, oil, etc., rising in fine particles and adhering to the sides of the chimney or pipe conveying the smoke: also conveyed in the atmosphere to other locations.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Dictionary.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/-y?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;-y&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a noun-forming suffix with a variety of functions in contemporary English, added to monosyllabic bases to create words that are almost always informal. Its earliest use, probably still productive, was to form endearing or familiar names or common nouns from personal names, other nouns, and adjectives (Billy; Susie; birdie; doggie; granny; sweetie; tummy). The hypocoristic feature is absent in recent coinages, however, which are simply informal and sometimes pejorative (boonies; cabby; groupie; hippy; looie; Okie; preemie; preppy; rookie). Another function of -y2 (-ie ) is the formation from adjectives of nouns that denote exemplary or extreme instances of the quality named by the adjective (baddie; biggie; cheapie; toughie), sometimes focusing on a restricted, usually unfavorable sense of the adjective (sharpie; sickie; whitey). A few words in which the informal character of -y2 (-ie ) has been lost are now standard in formal written English (goalie; movie).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Dictionary.com)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;-kin&lt;/a&gt; noun suffix&#xA;\ kən \&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;variants: or less commonly -kins \ kənz \&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Definition of -kin (Entry 3 of 3)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: little&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// catkin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// babykins&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(M-W)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Em." LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T06:38:06.723" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15618" CreationDate="2020-09-11T07:13:57.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to look for a dictionary for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Vernacular_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;African-American Vernacular English (AAVE)&lt;/a&gt; but I haven't found one, not even one. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=african%20american%20vernacular%20english%20dictionary&amp;amp;rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS910US910&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk02DrwY54sF6TIQUN7DbW6MewI7T6Q:1599804147414&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=bks&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi6iKrvtuDrAhVYgp4KHc_ZA984FBD8BSgBegQIDBAJ&amp;amp;biw=1920&amp;amp;bih=969&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; shows some introductory and general reference materials. I see one book titled A Dictionary of Varieties of English, and another one Dictionary of American Regional English. Neither is really dedicated to the vocabulary of Black English. And if we do have AAVE dictionaries which is the most accurate and comprehensive yet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T15:39:31.587" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T01:44:44.333" Title="Has there ever been an African-American Vernacular English dictionary?" Tags="&lt;dictionary&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-09-13T14:54:07.497" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15595" CreationDate="2020-09-11T08:04:25.040" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem tells of sadness, loss, seeking maternal comfort. You are very observant to have noticed its masterly use of colors both in parallel and in contrast to each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the first stanza we immediately know something is wrong. &amp;quot;She&amp;quot;, presumably a young girl, corresponding to &amp;quot;mothering&amp;quot;, is depicted to be running. And that running is directional: she is running home. I read the two occurrences of &amp;quot;blackness&amp;quot; in the first stanza as a symbol of home. Home is mothering and comforting. It is a breeding source of perpetual comfort. That is why it is &amp;quot;mothering&amp;quot;. It is symbolized by &amp;quot;blackness&amp;quot; because the girl is black and her mother is black. Black is beautiful and blackness is her source of loving care, a harbor she can always go back to and hide in. That is why it is &amp;quot;mothering&amp;quot;. But it is also smothering, because that's the reason &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; ran away from home. She didn't want to stay home so she left. But now she is coming back, running back to it looking for shelter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;white tears icicle gold plains of her face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line is an epitome of modern poetic creativity, because it forms a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_line&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;golden line&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Angelou verbs &amp;quot;icicle&amp;quot; in a very creative and subtle way that makes the line an uncommon English sentence. White tears stream down, dry, and streak her gold-plain-looking face just like icicles. The tears are white because of the sharp contrast they present to her face. Her face is gold colored probably because she is of a lighter skin tone, corroborated by this later line from the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich &lt;em&gt;brown face&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as I mentioned, that line is a golden line with two mirroring noun phrases punctuated by a verb. &amp;quot;White tears&amp;quot; corresponds to &amp;quot;gold plains&amp;quot; and their relationship is determined by the verb &amp;quot;icicle&amp;quot;. So &amp;quot;gold&amp;quot; here also metaphorically and self-referentially alludes to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;how&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; the colors are used, they are used creatively. The face of a light skinned Black girl is described as gold plains streaked by white tears. Gold is not a color commonly used to describe skin color. But gold is beautiful, so is a light shade of Black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the blackness in the first stanza could also be interpreted as the darkness of the night. The night is mothering and smothering because it is anthropomorphized and repressive. It doesn't make too big a difference to my preferred interpretation. Only in that reading the girl comes home in the second stanza as opposed to the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T08:35:42.900" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T08:35:42.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-11T15:02:33.623" Score="3" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember three things about a book I read as a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The cover was blue-green, and had either stars, fireflies, or some other kind of orbs of light on it. I don't remember the title, and all of these memories are fuzzy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There was a small character, maybe the main character's best friend. I remember he had large feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the setting was a past summer in a swampy, humid environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I believe the target age range was 12-15&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The plot may have involved a murder or had a theme of growing up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book was in English and probably set in America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book was not Bogwoppit, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp nor was it related to the Chronicles of Narnia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book may have been published around the 1990s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the title of this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10844" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T15:13:29.897" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T15:13:29.897" Title="Girl in a marshy village setting whose friend is small with big feet" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15602" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-11T15:21:56.967" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-11T15:21:56.967" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T15:21:56.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15603" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-11T15:21:56.967" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:21:21.357" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:21:21.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15604" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15607" CreationDate="2020-09-11T15:49:05.777" Score="5" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/162/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Fisher of Men&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Dr. Jervis was digging the earth with his friend, while they saw a stranger man coming along the path, then that man was for the moment hidden from them by a bend of the path and a near clump of bushes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this moment the stranger reappeared, &lt;strong&gt;walking as if for a wager&lt;/strong&gt;, and I began to peck up the earth with my pocket-knife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched for its meaning, but I didn't find anything that I can understand in this context!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/wager&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wager (in Lexico)&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://susannaives.com/wordpress/2014/03/1819-play-bills-from-the-theatre-royal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1819 Play Bills From The Theatre Royal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T01:32:51.233" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T01:32:51.233" Title="What does &quot;walk for a wager&quot; mean in &quot;A Fisher of Men&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-11T16:28:17.100" Score="3" ViewCount="328" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this site is called Literature Stack Exchange, one of the most basic questions we could ask here is how scholars of literature define literature. We have an older question on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3492/what-are-the-ways-academics-have-defined-literature-over-the-years&quot;&gt;the ways academics have defined literature over the years&lt;/a&gt;, but that question focuses on the &lt;strong&gt;evolution of the definition over time&lt;/strong&gt;, whereas the question I'm interested in here is how literature is defined &lt;strong&gt;now&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surprisingly, we haven't had any question defining literature itself, even though we've had so much discussion and disagreements in the past about what should be on-topic on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;what is literature? What differentiates between literary and non-literary work?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not a question about site scope, nor a request for opinions by Stack Exchange users. Answers should be based on available academic literature (including introductions to literary theory).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T20:32:52.697" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T22:52:54.410" Title="What is literature?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15596" CreationDate="2020-09-11T20:37:48.367" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ‘mouse-shaped deposit’ meaning is more properly linked to the word ‘souterkin’, meaning, per the OED&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An imaginary kind of afterbirth formerly attributed to Dutch women&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest usage example in the OED is from 1658 and says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There goes a Report of the Holland Women, that together with their Children, they are delivered of a Sooterkin, not unlike to a Rat, which some imagine to be the Off-spring of the Stoves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from 1862:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The housewives of Holland no longer bring forth sooterkins by sitting over the lighted chauffers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term, per the OED was also applied to people, specifically as a designation for the Dutch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ye Jacobites as sharp as Pins, Ye Mounsieurs, and ye Sooterkins, I'll teach you all the Dance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But also applied to those of dark visage whether by occupation or nature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highwayman pushed poor Sooterkin [= chimney-sweep] out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the sugar beside, which the hands of the sooterkin negro Reared [etc.].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the references to stoves and chauffers: in that period in the Netherlands women would have small ceramic stoves that they would tuck under their skirts when doing stationary work. Hence the idea that things under the skirts might get ‘sooty’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aronson.com/pair-polychrome-stoves-braziers/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;This site explains&lt;/a&gt; and hosts paintings showcasing their use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foot stoves were used to warm the feet and were a common accessory in the Dutch household. The stoves were constructed with a wooden box that was ventilated on one side with holes or a slab at the top. Heat was conducted by burning charcoal that was placed in a ceramic or metal bowl (brazier) inside the stove. The feet were warmed by resting on top of the stove.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, while the definition of ‘sootikin’ which abounds online is a slightly bastardised version of the original, it is possible that sootikin is being used in the transferred meaning of referring to the dark features of the cat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OED does offer another, obselete, and older definition, from the 1500s in Anglia, of ‘Sweetheart, mistress’ with an etymology of ‘older Dutch or Flemish *soetekijn &amp;lt; soet sweet.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So possibly the use of ‘sootikin’ in the poem carries traces of this meaning also.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T20:37:48.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15607" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15604" CreationDate="2020-09-11T21:03:11.460" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Competitive walking, known as ‘pedestrianism’, was the forerunner of today’s walking races.&#xA;Per &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrianism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pedestrianism was a 19th-century form of competitive walking, often professional and funded by wagering, from which the modern sport of racewalking developed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-11T21:03:11.460" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15608" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15137" CreationDate="2020-09-11T21:36:46.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Venus and the rose&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bion_of_Smyrna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bion&lt;/a&gt;’s ‘Lament for Adonis’ is the earliest surviving version of the myth of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adonis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adonis&lt;/a&gt; to mention the rose, and in this version Adonis’s blood becomes the rose:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Thou diest, oh thrice-desired, and my desire hath flown away as a dream.  Nay, widowed is Cytherea,* and idle are the Loves† along the halls!  With thee has the girdle of my beauty perished. For why, ah overbold, didst thou follow the chase, and being so fair, why wert thou thus overhardy to fight with beasts?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Cypris‡ bewailed her, the Loves join in the lament:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished the lovely Adonis!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tear the Paphian§ sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and blood on the earth are turned to flowers. &lt;strong&gt;The blood brings forth the rose, the tears, the wind-flower.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Bion (2nd century BCE). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/theocritusbiona00biongoog/page/n212/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lament for Adonis&lt;/a&gt;’. Translated by Andrew Lang (1880). London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* Aphrodite, so-called because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Aphrodite,_Kythira&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cythera&lt;/a&gt; was the first island she passed after her birth from the sea, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesiod&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hesiod&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0130%3Acard%3D173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theogony&lt;/em&gt;, 190–200&lt;/a&gt;. † The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erotes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erotes&lt;/a&gt;, a group of winged gods in Aphrodite’s retinue. ‡ Another name for Aphrodite, because “she was born in billowy Cyprus”, again according to Hesiod. § Yet another name for her, after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_of_Aphrodite_Paphia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;location in Cyprus&lt;/a&gt; where she was said to have been born.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek text is “αἷμα ῥόδον τίκτει, τὰ δὲ δάκρυα τὰν ἀνεμώναν”: Lang has chosen to translate “ἀνεμώνη” (anemone) as “wind-flower” because the word is etymologically “wind-daughter”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ovid&lt;/a&gt;’s ‘The Death of Adonis’ has a similar account, but he conflates the two types of flower so that Adonis’s blood becomes the anemone instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cytherea, borne in her light chariot through the middle of the air, had not yet arrived at Cyprus upon the wings of her swans. She recognized afar his groans, as he was dying, and turned her white birds in that direction. And when, from the lofty sky, she beheld him half dead, and bathing his body in his own blood, she rapidly descended, and rent both her garments and her hair, and she smote her breast with her distracted hands. And complaining of the Fates, she says, ‘But, however, all things shall not be in your power; the memorials of my sorrow, Adonis, shall ever remain; and the representation of thy death, repeated yearly, shall exhibit an imitation of my mourning. But thy blood shall be changed into a flower. Was it formerly allowed thee, Persephone, to change the limbs of a female into fragrant mint; and shall the hero, the son of Cinyras, if changed, be a cause of displeasure against me?’ Having thus said, she sprinkles his blood with odoriferous nectar, which, touched by it, effervesces, just as the transparent bubbles are wont to rise in rainy weather. Nor was there a pause longer than a full hour, when &lt;strong&gt;a flower sprang up from the blood, of the same colour with it, such as the pomegranates are wont to bear&lt;/strong&gt;, which conceal their seeds beneath their tough rind. Yet the enjoyment of it is but short-lived; for the same &lt;strong&gt;winds which give it a name&lt;/strong&gt;, beat it down, as it has but a slender hold, and is apt to fall by reason of its extreme slenderness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ovid (8 CE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26073/26073-h/Met_VIII-XI.html#bookX_fableX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, book X, fable X&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Henry T. Riley (1893). London: George Bell &amp;amp; Sons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid does not explicitly name the flower, but it is clear that an anemone is intended, because the “winds give it a name”, as discussed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The version of the story alluded to by William Drummond appears in the &lt;em&gt;Progymnasmata&lt;/em&gt; (“preliminary exercises”, a textbook of rhetoric) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphthonius_of_Antioch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aphthonius of Antioch&lt;/a&gt;. The second example text is “διήγημα τὸ κατὰ ρόδον” (narrative concerning the rose):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let anyone who admires the rose for its beauty consider Aphrodite’s wound. The goddess was in love with Adonis and Ares in turn was in love with her, and the goddess was to Adonis what Ares was to her: a god was in love with a goddess and a goddess was pursuing a mortal. The emotion was the same even if the species was different. Struck with jealousy, Ares wanted to do away with Adonis, thinking the death of Adonis would be the end of the love. Ares attacks Adonis. Learning what has been done, the goddess hurried to his rescue, and in her haste, falling on a rose, she stumbled among the thorns and pierces the bottom of her foot. The &lt;strong&gt;blood from the wound dropped on the rose and changed its color&lt;/strong&gt; to the now familiar appearance; the rose, originally having been white, changed to the appearance it now has.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aphthonius (4th century CE). &lt;em&gt;Progymnasmata&lt;/em&gt;. Translated by George Alexander Kennedy (2003). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=21ka6pWJ-pkC&amp;amp;pg=PA97&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt;, p. 97&lt;/a&gt;. Leiden: Brill.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aphthonius’s textbook was popular and his examples were much copied, for example his narrative of the rose is clearly the basis of this passage from the 10th century &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoponica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Geoponika&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a Byzantine collection of agricultural knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let him that admires the beauty of the rose, reflect on the wound of Venus, they say; for the goddess indeed loved Adonis, and Mars on the other hand loved her: but Mars in a fit of jealousy killed Adonis, thinking that the death of Adonis would put an end to her affection for him; but the goddess, having understood what had been done, hastened to be revenged; and throwing herself in a hurry on the rose, when without her sandals, she was wounded by the thorns of the rose in the sole of her foot; and &lt;strong&gt;the rose, which was before white, from the blood of Venus, changed into the colour in which it is now seen, and it became red&lt;/strong&gt; and sweet-scented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anonymous (10th century CE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Geoponica02/page/n107/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Geoponika&lt;/em&gt;, book XI, chapter XVII&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Thomas Owen (1806). London.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Latin version of this story is given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Moore&lt;/a&gt; in a footnote to his translation of the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacreon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anacreon&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following epigram this hue [that is, of the rose] is differently accounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ipsa quidem studiosa suum defendit Adonim,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Gradivus stricto quem petit ense ferox,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Affixit duris vestigia caeca rosetis,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Albaque divino picta cruore rosa est.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the enamour’d queen of joy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Flies to protect her lovely boy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    On whom the jealous war-god rushes;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She treads upon a thorned rose,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And while the wound with crimson flows,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    The snowy flowret feels her blood and blushes!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Moore (1800). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/odesanacreontra00moorgoog/page/n227/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Odes of Anacreon&lt;/em&gt;, p. 195&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Stockdale.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven’t been able to trace the source of this epigram, and I suspect it to be original to Moore. Nonetheless, the story in the version given by Aphthonius was evidently well known to the Elizabethans, for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Spenser&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser&lt;/a&gt; alludes to it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White as the native rose before the chaunge&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which Venus blood did in her leaves† impresse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edmund Spenser (1591). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/153/106.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daphnaïda&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: William Ponsonby.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† petals&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Band&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most likely meaning here is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;band, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 1.&lt;/strong&gt; To bind or fasten with a band or bands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, having picked the roses, the subject of the poem is tying them into a posy with a band or ribbon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Hyacinth&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an allusion to the myth of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyacinth_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyacinthus&lt;/a&gt;, who was accidentally killed by his lover, the god Apollo, in a game of quoits. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Apollo declares his grief thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And oh! that I could give my life for thee, or together with thee; but since I am restrained by the decrees of destiny, thou shalt ever be with me, and shalt dwell on my mindful lips. The lyre struck with my hand, my songs, too, shall celebrate thee; and, &lt;strong&gt;becoming a new flower, by the inscription on thee, thou shalt imitate my lamentations&lt;/strong&gt;. The time, too, shall come, at which a most valiant hero† shall add his name to this flower, and it shall be read upon the same leaves.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While such things are being uttered by the prophetic lips of Apollo, behold! the blood which, poured on the ground, has stained the grass, ceases to be blood, and a flower springs up, more bright than the Tyrian purple, and it assumes the appearance which lilies have, were there not in this a purple hue, and in them that of silver. This was not enough for Phœbus,‡ for ’twas he that was the author of this honour. &lt;strong&gt;He himself inscribed his own lamentations on the leaves, and the flower has “ai, ai,” inscribed thereon; and the mournful characters§ there are traced.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ovid (8 CE). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26073/26073-h/Met_VIII-XI.html#bookX_fableV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, book X, fable V&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Henry T. Riley (1893). London: George Bell &amp;amp; Sons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_the_Great&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Telamonian Ajax&lt;/a&gt;, the first characters of whose name are also “Αι”. ‡ An epithet for Apollo, literally “bright”. § “Ai, ai” was an ancient Greek expression of lamentation or grief.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Drummond’s poem, the speaker wishes that his beloved might have a hyacinth in her hand, so she could “read his case” (“case” meaning “condition, mental state”) from the association between the hyacinth and lamentation. Presumably he laments because she does not return his love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T09:29:02.607" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T09:29:02.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15611" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-12T14:06:57.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T14:06:57.583" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T14:06:57.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15612" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-12T14:06:57.583" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Scottish poet William Drummond (1585–1649) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:19:37.827" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:19:37.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14193" CreationDate="2020-09-12T14:25:52.117" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both the newspaper article that Meursault finds in his prison cell and the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Misunderstanding&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Malentendu&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Misunderstanding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are inspired by a newspaper article that Camus cut out off an Algerian newspaper in June 1935, which reported a real event (B. Pingaud: &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger d'Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt;. Gallimard, 1992; page 145). The story's significance becomes clear when we compare the traveller's attitude towards truthfulness with Meursault's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Meursault talks to his lawyer for the first time after his arrest, the lawyer tells him that witnesses had described him as insensitive at his mother's funeral and that this might be used against him during the murder trial. The lawyer asks him whether he would be willing to say that he had tried to control his emotions at the funeral (&amp;quot;dire que ce jour-là j'avais dominé mes sentiments&amp;quot;), Meursault responds, &amp;quot;No, because &lt;strong&gt;it would be untrue&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Non, parce que c'est faux&amp;quot;; emphasis added). The lawyer is not pleased by this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the narrative is also constructed in a way that suggest that Meursault is put on trial for being committed to the truth, as opposed to agreeing to follow the rules of the game by lying when necessary. However, in order to present Meursault as someone whom society wants to eliminate for his commitment to truth, he also needs to be portrayed as an &amp;quot;innocent murderer&amp;quot;. There are two important ways in which the novel achieves this. First, the killing of the Arab (end of Part One, chapter VI) is described as a unfortunate accident (Meursault is half-blinded by the reflection of the sun on the Arab's knife blade, and just at that moment, the sweat that had gathered over and in his eyebrows rushes down into his eyes, so he pulls the trigger). In the second part of the novel, the Arab is never mentioned again (except once, during the trial; questions about the killing are otherwise about &amp;quot;the shots&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the body&amp;quot;). The prosecution asks him why he fired five shots (Meursault says it was the sun) but the trial focuses mostly on Maursault's behaviour at his mother's funeral, what he had done the day after (go swimming with a woman he likes, then go to the cinema and spend the night with her) and what he had done for Raymond Sintès, who is suspected of being a pimp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The behaviour of the traveller from the newspaper article contrast with Meursault in that he is willing to play games: by not revealing who he is to his own mother and sister, he shows that he is willing to pretend to be different that he really is. He pretends to be a stranger. (Ironically, this makes him another stranger inside a story discovered inside a novel about &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; stranger.) Meursault comments: &amp;quot;I thought that the traveller had deserved it to some extent and that you should never play games&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;ju trouvais que le voyageur l'avait un peu mérité et qu'il ne faut jamais jouer&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conclusion from the comparison between Meursault and the traveller is rather depressing: if you consistently stick to the truth, society will try to get rid of you; if you play games, those may also end deadly. There is no way out. And this impression of having no way out is present in other passages in the novel. At the end of Part One, Chapter 1, the nurse who accompanies the funeral procession comments on the heat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If we walk slowly, we risk risk getting sunstroke. But if we walk too fast, we work up a sweat and catch a chill inside the church.&amp;quot; She was right. There was no way out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note that the French text uses the indefinite pronoun &amp;quot;on&amp;quot;, which may be translated as &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; (very formal when compared to the novel's overall style), &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; (which is plausible in this specific context) or &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; (as some translators have done).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meursault's struggle with the heat leading up to the killing (the end of Part One, chapter VI) is also reminiscent of this concept. When Meursault sets out to the rock where the &amp;quot;Arabs&amp;quot; had been earlier, he feels as if the heat were pressing against him, but once he is close to the Arab, he feels as is the heat is pressing him forward, as if preventing him from turning around and letting go of the earlier incident. Again, there seems to be no way out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T14:49:36.160" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T14:49:36.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14113" CreationDate="2020-09-12T15:52:07.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The three parts of the book where the heat is most oppressive are all connected with &lt;strong&gt;death&lt;/strong&gt;. These are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the last few pages of the first chapter, which describe the funeral procession for Meursault's mother,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the last few pages of Part One, Chapter VI, which describe the events at the beach leading up to the killing of the Arab, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the description of the trial, especially Part Two, Chapter III, which leads to Meursault's death sentence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a discussion of what Algeria meant for Camus, Bernard Pingaud (&lt;em&gt;L'Étranger d'Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt;. Gallimard, 1992, pages 29-31) points out that &lt;strong&gt;the sea and the sun had a special meaning&lt;/strong&gt; to the author. The sea as a symbol is always positive and represent the &amp;quot;domain of acquiescence&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;domaine de l'acquiescement&amp;quot;). Swimming means getting as close as possible to the &amp;quot;world&amp;quot;. How much Camus liked swimming is well known to biographers. Camus even wrote in his notebooks, &amp;quot;I need to write just like I need to swim; my body demands it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sun, however, is ambiguous. When associated with the sea, it can show its welcoming side. In &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, this can be seen in the two passages in which he goes swimming with Marie, i.e. in Part One, Chapter II (the day after the funeral) and Part One, Chapter VI (the chapter that ends with the killing). Meursault seems happy during this moments. (I write &amp;quot;seems&amp;quot; because he does not describe his feelings or emotions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most of the times, the sun represent an ordeal because its heat dries out and burns and can thereby cause death. Pingaud mentions other early works by Camus—&lt;em&gt;L'Été à Alger&lt;/em&gt; (Summer in Algeria) and &lt;em&gt;Le Désert&lt;/em&gt; (The Desert)—that also reflect the sun's ambiguous meaning: the sun existed before us, will continue to exist when we are gone and shines on a world that does not need us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world's indifference towards us is an important premise of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Camus wrote around the same time as &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;. (Camus sometimes referred to the essay &lt;em&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/em&gt;, the novel &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; and the play &lt;em&gt;Caligula&lt;/em&gt; as his &amp;quot;three absurds&amp;quot;.) Combining this with the prominent descriptions of heat in the passages listed above, one might say that Meursault (symbolically) feels the world's indifference most strongly during those moments that are most strongly associated with death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it is also possible to come up with a more psychological explanation. As I wrote in my answer to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15517/2191&quot;&gt;Is Meursault bothered that he doesn't know what day Maman died?&lt;/a&gt;, a psychoanalytical interpretation of the novel would explain Meursault's insensitivity as a symptom of repression. Similarly, one may read Meursault's focus on the heat as a symptom of emotional stress that he does not fully understand and that he does not want to acknowledge or look into. (Descriptions of sensory impressions pervade the entire novel, whereas descriptions of the narrator's feelings are absent.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T15:48:24.417" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T15:48:24.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15615" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T16:18:00.997" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the title of the poem by Szymborska which contains a line worded something like “whose life has ever turned out as they thought it would anyway”? I believe that the poem was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine some years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10849" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-12T18:40:10.783" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:16:23.543" Title="Title of poem by Wisława Szymborska" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wislawa-szymborska&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-12T17:27:14.670" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Normani's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKXSh14svlQ&amp;amp;ab_channel=NormaniVEVO&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Motivation&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (video slightly NSFW), there's a stanza that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You got a bad one, baby, don't you?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Got a bad one, baby, don't you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And we both know there's no&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One better, boy, no one better, boy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Too late, won't make it, I'ma tell 'em (yeah)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Get you naked, but I won't tell 'em&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause you know that there's no&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One better, boy, no one better, boy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused what's happening with the two lines &amp;quot;Too late, won't make it, I'ma tell 'em&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Get you naked, but I won't tell 'em&amp;quot;. What's she going to tell (and to who) in the in &amp;quot;I'ma tell 'em&amp;quot; line, and why does it suddenly switch around to &amp;quot;but I won't tell 'em&amp;quot; immediately afterwards? I'm a bit lost as to what's going in in these two lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T17:27:14.670" Title="What's with the &quot;I'ma tell 'em&quot; in Normani's &quot;Motivation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;normani&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15617" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2704" CreationDate="2020-09-12T20:01:27.330" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;IIRC, the answer from Voigt was that logis was supposed to be khoros, proposed by I don't remember who, and r6kh was supposed to be rhóa, proposed by Edmonds. More on that &lt;a href=&quot;http://michelegorini.blogspot.com/2018/01/i-want-to-have-died.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, I suppose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1662" LastActivityDate="2020-09-12T20:01:27.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15599" CreationDate="2020-09-13T01:44:44.333" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's not really a distinct vocabulary to AAVE so much as a distinct grammar (and pronunciation). A lot of the debate about AAVE is tainted by politics and racism. There's a tendency to downplay it as mere slang rather than a dialect or creolization of English, more from a standpoint of insisting that there's one proper English and all else is unworthy of our attention. The famed Oakland School Board attempt at having AAVE treated as a distinct language was heavily distorted in the media as “teaching Ebonics” when instead it was an attempt at marshaling ESL techniques (and funding) to assist students in speaking and writing standard written English. Again, racism and politics conspired to prevent this from going forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T01:44:44.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15620" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-13T03:37:36.617" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Hercule Poirot, Nick and Captain Hastings are sitting at a table outside the hotel, supposedly a bullet passes through Nick's hat and ends up on the ground near the table, which Hercule finds. Who shot the bullet? Did Nick make the hole in the hat earlier and then drop a bullet on the ground?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10853" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T06:08:33.063" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T17:59:39.210" Title="In Peril At End House by Agatha Chistie, who shot the bullet that Hercule Poirot finds near the table in the hotel garden?" Tags="&lt;agatha-christie&gt;&lt;peril-at-end-house&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15621" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15534" CreationDate="2020-09-13T03:51:06.737" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211318/page/n437/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;At the Water Zoo&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by &amp;quot;Evoe&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._V._Knox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. V. Knox&lt;/a&gt;), published in &lt;em&gt;Punch&lt;/em&gt;, 9th April 1924:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of his peculiar gland,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He may not hope to salamand;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His life's ambition forced to throttle,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He still remains an axolotl.*&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original publication in &lt;em&gt;Punch&lt;/em&gt; there was a footnote to this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* This account of the emotions of the axolotl was kindly supplied by Professor Julian Huxley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains how the poem came to be mistakenly attributed to Huxley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T13:36:48.677" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T13:36:48.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15622" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-13T03:57:28.600" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into some type of beetle or roach-like creature, he gives little thought to whys and wherefores but just seems to attempt to deal with his obviously extremely distressing situation with a fairly straightforward acceptance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What clues are there in the story, if there are any, that point to what Kafka intended to express about society or life or German culture, is there any commentary that serves to illuminate Kafka's intentions in writing it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10808" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T07:57:05.443" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T07:57:05.443" Title="What was Kafka's point in The Metamorphosis'?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;&lt;the-metamorphosis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15250" CreationDate="2020-09-13T04:16:56.717" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This looks like &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Ivan_Ilych&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Death of Ivan Ilyich&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leo Tolstoy&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He (Ivan Ilyich) was so interested in it all that he often did things himself, rearranging the furniture, or rehanging the curtains. Once when mounting a step-ladder to show the upholsterer, who did not understand, how he wanted the hangings draped, he mad a false step and slipped, but being a strong and agile man he clung on and only knocked his side against the knob of the window frame. The bruised place was painful but the pain soon passed, and he felt particularly bright and well just then. He wrote: &amp;quot;I feel fifteen years younger.&amp;quot; He thought he would have everything ready by September, but it dragged on till mid-October. But the result was charming not only in his eyes but to everyone who saw it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist then falls sick (although it does not explicitly say in the story that it was because of this trauma)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were all in good health. It could not be called ill health if Ivan Ilych sometimes said that he had a queer taste in his mouth and felt some discomfort in his left side. But this discomfort increased and, though not exactly painful, grew into a sense of pressure in his side accompanied by ill humour. And his irritability became worse and worse and began to mar the agreeable, easy, and correct life that had established itself in the Golovin family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, goes through a painful period of acceptance of death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair. In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;, and (spoiler alert!) dies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He drew in a breath, stopped in the midst of a sigh, stretched out, and died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T04:16:56.717" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15390" CreationDate="2020-09-13T05:39:18.603" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.navin.com.np/post/58425026401/the-night-at-the-hotel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Night at the Hotel&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Lenz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Siegfried Lenz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Then,’ Schwamm said, ‘he goes on to his school. But when he returns home, he acts bewildered and in a daze, and sometimes even breaks out in tears. He can’t do his homework, he doesn’t want to play or talk to anyone. This has been going on for months, day after day. The boy is simply making himself sick.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What’s the reason for his behaviour?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You see,’ said Schwamm, ‘this is the strange thing: the boy waves and – sad for him to note- none of the passengers ever waves back. And he takes this so to heart that we, my wife and I are highly worried about him.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His son met him at the door, beaming all over and wildly elated. He threw himself at Schwamm, pummelling his thigh with tightly closed fists and shouting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A man waved today! Waved for ever so long!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘With a crutch?’ Schwamm asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, with a cane. And then he tied his handkerchief to the cane and held it out of the window, and held it until I couldn’t see it any longer.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T05:39:18.603" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15625" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-13T07:40:01.317" Score="3" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the opening stanza of Maya Angelou's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Still I Rise&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, the syllables go 9 / 7 / 9 / 6. The second verse goes 8 / 7 / 9 / 7. All of these are within two or three syllables of each other, and relatively long.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The third verse, however, goes 6 / 7 / 6 / 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just like moons and like suns,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With the certainty of tides,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Just like hopes springing high,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Still I'll rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last line breaks the patterns - it's shorter than other line in the poem so far (and for most of the rest of the poem), literally half as long as the previous shortest line (6 syllables).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How does this affect our reading? What effect does breaking the pattern like this have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T07:40:01.317" Title="How does the change in syllables change the reading in Maya Angelou's &quot;Still I Rise&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15583" CreationDate="2020-09-13T09:12:03.850" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In the original version of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, no.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any version of the Hobbit, the Ring is not shown to have much effect on Bilbo. He uses it as a useful tool, a way of turning invisible which gets him out of various scrapes and helps him through the story. A simple invisibility ring is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_of_Gyges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ancient trope&lt;/a&gt; in literature, and in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; the Ring doesn't function as anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, at the time he wrote &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien hadn't yet conceived of the ring as being the vastly important artefact it becomes in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. He &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/76417/31394&quot;&gt;had already built up a lot of the Middle-earth backstory and mythos&lt;/a&gt; by that time, but not the Rings of Power, which were a later invention emerging while he wrote &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. For this reason, there was certainly &lt;strong&gt;no authorial intent to foreshadow the Ring's malevolent power&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anything be interpreted from the story in this way, regardless of Tolkien's intent? Well, again sticking to the original (1937) version of the text, no: not only does Bilbo view it only as a useful tool, but even Gollum, who's had it for years, doesn't have any special attachment to it. He willingly offers it as a prize in the riddle contest with Bilbo, and is genuinely sorry that he can't hand it over when he loses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Both wrong,&amp;quot; cried Bilbo very much relieved; and he jumped at once to his feet, put his back to the nearest wall, and held out his little sword. But funnily enough he need not have been alarmed. For one thing Gollum had learned long long ago was never, never, to cheat at the riddle-game, which is a sacred one and of immense antiquity. Also there was the sword. He simply sat and whispered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What about the present?” asked Bilbo, not that he cared very much, still he felt that he had won it, pretty fairly, and in very difficult circumstances too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Must we give it the thing, preciouss? Yess, we must! We must fetch it, preciouss, and give it the present we promised.&amp;quot; So Gollum paddled back to his boat, and Bilbo thought he had heard the last of him. But he had not. The hobbit was just thinking of going back up the passage—having had quite enough of Gollum and the dark water's edge—when he heard him wailing and squeaking away in the gloom. He was on his island (of which, of course, Bilbo knew nothing), scrabbling here and there, searching and seeking in vain, and turning out his pockets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Where iss it? Where iss it?&amp;quot; Bilbo heard him squeaking. &amp;quot;Lost, lost, my preciouss, lost, lost! Bless us and splash us! We haven't the present we promised, and we haven't even got it for ourselves.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo turned round and waited, wondering what it could be that the creature was making such a fuss about. this proved very fortunate afterwards. For Gollum came back and made a tremendous spluttering and whispering and croaking; and in the end Bilbo gathered that Gollum had had a ring—a wonderful, beautiful ring, a ring that he had been given for a birthday present, ages and ages before in the old days when such rings were less uncommon. Sometimes he had it in his pocket; usually he kept it in a little hole in the rock on his island; sometimes he wore it—when he was very, very hungry, and tired of fish, and crept along dark passages looking for stray goblins. The he might even venture into places where the torches were lit and made his eyes blink and smart; for he would be safe. Oh yes! very nearly safe; for if you slipped that ring on your finger, you were invisible; only in the sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that was a faint and shaky sort of shadow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know how many times Gollum begged Bilbo's pardon. He kept on saying: &amp;quot;We are ssorry; we didn't mean to cheat, we meant to give it our only only pressent, if it won the competition.&amp;quot; He even offered to catch Bilbo some nice juicy fish to eat as a consolation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, 1st ed. (1937)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in fact, where the original edition is concerned, we can go further than saying there is no foreshadowing: &lt;strong&gt;the text of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; (1937) is actually &lt;em&gt;inconsistent&lt;/em&gt; with the Ring's malevolent nature as described in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Even Bilbo and Frodo, after bearing the Ring for some years, are unable to relinquish it even when they know they must. Gollum is a pitiful wreck consumed by his desire for the Ring, and he had it for centuries longer than them; it's completely implausible, in the context of the portrayal in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, that he would be willing to relinquish it as a prize in a riddle game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Tolkien actually retconned the text of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After writing &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; during the late 1930s and early 1940s, of course Tolkien was aware of the discrepancy between the portrayal of Gollum's relationship with the Ring in the two texts. He wrote about it in a letter to his publisher, Sir Stanley Unwin, dated 31 July 1947:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rayner &lt;em&gt;[the publisher's son]&lt;/em&gt; has, of course, spotted a weakness (inevitable): the linking. I am glad that he thinks that the linking has on the whole been well done. The is the best that could be hoped. I have done the best I could, since I had to have hobbits (whom I love), and must still have a glimpse of Bilbo for old times' sake. But I don't feel worried by the discovery that the ring was more serious than appeared; that is just the way of all easy ways out. Nor is it Bilbo's actions, I think, that need explanation.  The weakness is Gollum, and his action in offering the ring as a present. [...] The proper way to negotiate the difficulty would be slightly to remodel the former story &lt;em&gt;[The Hobbit]&lt;/em&gt; in its chapter V &lt;em&gt;[Riddles in the Dark]&lt;/em&gt;. That is not a practical question; though I certainly hope to leave behind me the whole thing revised and in its final form, for the world to throw into the waste-paper basket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;, Letter 109&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same year Tolkien sent his publisher a revised version of the riddle chapter from &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;for the possible amusement of yourself and Rayner&amp;quot; (Letter 111, 21 September 1947). He was not actually expecting it to be published in a revised edition, and the publisher did this on his own initiative. Tolkien's response to seeing the second edition was one of surprise, as seen in the following letter dated 1 August 1950:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;: I return the proofs herewith. They did not require much correction, but did need some consideration. The thing took me much by surprise. It is now a long while since I sent in the proposed alteration of Chapter V, and tentatively suggested the slight remodelling of the original &lt;em&gt;Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;. [...] However, I never heard any more about it at all; and I assumed that alteration of the original book was ruled out. The sequel now depends on the earlier version; and if the revision is really published, there must follow some considerable rewriting of the sequel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I must say that I could wish that I had had some hint (in any circumstances) this change might be made, before it burst on me in page proof. However, I have now made up my mind to accept the change and its consequences.  The thing is now old enough for me to take a fairly impartial view, and it seems to me that the revised version is in itself better, in motive and narrative - and certainly would make the sequel (if ever published) much more natural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;, Letter 128&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the revised text, for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_editions_of_The_Hobbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second edition published in 1951&lt;/a&gt;, Gollum's obsession and addiction to the Ring is knowingly foreshadowed. Other &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit#Revisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;revisions&lt;/a&gt; were made in this and subsequent editions, but only minor ones: the main change in the text was this one to Chapter V, &amp;quot;Riddles in the Dark&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is even an in-universe explanation for Tolkien's retconning regarding the Ring. In &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, it is revealed that Bilbo originally lied about how he acquired the Ring, telling the story that was included as fact in the original edition of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;. As Gandalf says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wondered often how Gollum came by a Great Ring, as plainly it was--that at least was clear from the first.  Then I heard Bilbo's strange story of how he had 'won' it, and I could not believe it.  When I at last got the truth out of him, I saw at once that he had been trying to put his claim to the ring beyond doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2: &amp;quot;Shadows of the Past&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the end, as one might expect from an author as careful and diligent as Tolkien, everything fits together in a sort-of consistent way within the story even after a major retcon of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Consistency yes, but foreshadowing?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the above shows that Tolkien made sure the revised text of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; was at least &lt;strong&gt;consistent&lt;/strong&gt; with the story of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, with Gollum's ring being a thing of immense corrupting power. But does the revised text actually actively &lt;strong&gt;foreshadow&lt;/strong&gt; the revelations of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the first time the ring is mentioned in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; (1951 edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wanted it because it was a ring of power, and if you slipped that ring on your finger, you were invisible; only in the full sunlight could you be seen, and then only by your shadow, and that would be shaky and faint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My birthday-present! It came to me on my birthday, my precious.&amp;quot; So he had always said to himself. But who knows how Gollum came by that present, ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the clearest foreshadowing of the Ring being an important and powerful object, even referring directly to Sauron, the Lord of the Rings himself. It's notable that the original text &amp;quot;when such rings were less uncommon&amp;quot; has been changed to &amp;quot;when such rings were still at large in the world&amp;quot;. The former phrase suggests that the ring was at some time nothing special; the latter phrase suggests that it is, at the least, one of a group of special things, &amp;quot;a ring of power&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be argued that there's some foreshadowing in Gollum's obsession with the ring, &amp;quot;the only thing he had ever cared for&amp;quot; (then again, the only pretty thing down in that cave), and his insanity and talking to himself as a consequence of its effect (then again, perhaps natural for a strange creature living alone in a cave for so long), as well as in Bilbo's lying to the others about how he got the ring (then again, wanting to impress the dwarves could also have been his original motivation in not telling them about it). But, given my parentheticals above, I think the clearest hints towards the Ring's power are in the paragraphs I've quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Further reading&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0618134700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Douglas A. Anderson (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://musingsofatolkienist.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-original-riddles-in-dark-chapter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Original Riddles in the Dark Chapter&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a blog post which includes an excerpt from the original 1937 edition.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/15493/31394&quot;&gt;What are the revisions in the (Revised Edition) of The Hobbit?&lt;/a&gt;, a question on another Stack Exchange site.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T19:22:14.663" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T19:22:14.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15692" CreationDate="2020-09-13T09:44:32.433" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;Szymborska's poem &amp;quot;Tarsier&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Tarsjusz&amp;quot; in the original Polish) has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/25777690?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated&lt;/a&gt;, in a version that says &amp;quot;Translations and Comments by Magnus J. Krynski and Robert A. Maguire&amp;quot;, as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tarsier, son of tarsier,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;grandson of tarsier and great-grandson,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I tarsier,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;know how important it is to be tarsier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tubagbohol.mikeligalig.com/poetry/tarsier-by-wislawa-szymborska/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another&lt;/a&gt; English translation (I don't know who was the translator here) uses less idiosyncratic grammar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I, a tarsier,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;know well how essential it is to be a tarsier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these translations better captures the style of the original Polish poem? Did Szymborska write in an &amp;quot;I tarsier&amp;quot; style of grammar, perhaps indicating a simple childish creature, or in fully correct grammatical sentences?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It should be noted that Polish, like many/all Slavic languages, has no articles, no equivalent words for &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the&amp;quot;. When translating from Polish to English, the choice of where to put articles may sometimes be a stylistic one. But is it the translators putting their own style into &amp;quot;I tarsier&amp;quot;, or trying to capture Szymborska's original style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T23:50:20.660" Title="Why is Szymborska's &quot;Tarsier&quot; sometimes written (in translation) with simplistic grammar?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;wislawa-szymborska&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15629" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15620" CreationDate="2020-09-13T12:06:26.973" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bullet had struck the terrace of the hotel close to Poirot, and Hastings mistook it for a pebble:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Eh, ma foi, I do not say that if a bullet should strike the wall by my head, I would not investigate the matter! One is human after all!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little pebble had just struck the terrace beside us, and Poirot's fanciful analogy from it tickled my fancy. He stooped now and picked up the pebble as he went on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Agatha Christie (1932). &lt;em&gt;Peril at End House&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 1. London: Collins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More or less immediately Nick came into sight in the hotel garden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, to my surprise, [Poirot] rose and descended the couple of steps that led from the terrace to the garden. As he did so, a girl came into sight hurrying up towards us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nick could not have dropped the bullet and then immediately appeared at the other end of the garden, so she must have fired the shot. Presumably she fired it from behind the cover of bushes in the garden. The shot must have been at extreme range, or with a reduced charge, for Hastings, who had fought in France in World War I and must have been familiar with being shot at, to have mistaken it for a pebble. Nick relied on the noise of motor-boats to cover the sound:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘All this morning, my friend, speedboats have been making trips in the bay. You complained at first—soon, you did not even notice. But, ma foi, you could fire a machine gun almost and not notice it when one of those boats is on the sea.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nick could have fired the shot through her hat, or as suggested in the question, she could have made the holes in preparation, before coming to the hotel. She had planned to leave the hat with Poirot, knowing that he would not miss the holes, in order to create an independent witness to the supposed attacks on her life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And then—she sees my name in the paper. (I told you, Hastings, everyone knew Hercule Poirot!) and she has the audacity to make me an accomplice! The bullet through the hat that falls at my feet. Oh! the pretty comedy. And I am taken in! I believe in the peril that menaces her! Bon! She has got a valuable witness on her side.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T12:06:26.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15630" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-13T13:56:48.690" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The brothers Adrian and Boris Strugatsky were two Soviet-Russian science fiction authors who collaborated on a number of novels. Several of their books take place within the &lt;em&gt;Noon Universe&lt;/em&gt; (also called the &lt;em&gt;World of Noon&lt;/em&gt; or the &lt;em&gt;Wanderers Universe&lt;/em&gt;) — a futuristic utopian society based on the ideals of the erstwhile Soviet Union. The Noon Universe derives its name from the title of the chronologically first novel in the series, Noon: 22nd Century (Russian: Полдень. XXII век; romanization: Polden'. Dvadcat' vtoroy vek).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Use this tag for questions about the works set in the &lt;em&gt;Noon Universe&lt;/em&gt;. Use this tag with the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/russian-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;russian-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;russian-literature&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/strugatsky-brothers&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;strugatsky-brothers&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;strugatsky-brothers&lt;/a&gt; tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;See also&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noon Universe - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkady_and_Boris_Strugatsky&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T15:49:08.623" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:49:08.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15631" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-13T13:56:48.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works within the Noon Universe, the setting for a series of science fiction novels written by the Strugatsky Brothers, the first of which is titled 'Noon: 22nd Century'. Use with the [russian-literature] and [strugatsky-brothers] tag." OwnerDisplayName="user5387" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T15:48:48.340" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:48:48.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15632" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15633" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" Score="0" Body="Questions about Franz Kafka's novella 'The Metamorphosis' (German: 'Die Verwandlung'). Use this tag with the tags [franz-kafka] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T15:21:14.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15635" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1176" CreationDate="2020-09-13T16:03:23.447" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two main approaches to finding an explanation to the killing of the Arab. One is based on the novel's meaning (i.e. looking beyond character analysis); another approach looks beyond over character motivation to find motives that are not apparent at the surface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does not work well is looking for motivation at the surface level of the text. This is due to Camus's narrative technique. The entire story is told from a first-person perspective, i.e. a type of perspective that, in French literature before &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;, had been used to allow introspection. But introspection is exactly what we don't get; instead we get a narrative that gives us roughly the same insight into Meursault as a third-person perspective, almost as if an outsider were observing Meursault; only it is Meursault himself telling that story. Several early critics have commented on this, for example Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Blanchot and Claude-Edmonde Magny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, analysing Meursault like a character from a realist novel is a vain pursuit. Camus himself remarked in his notebooks (in a draft for a letter in response to a review of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;), &amp;quot;Realism is a meaningless word (&lt;em&gt;Madame Bovary&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Demons&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are realist novels and they have nothing in common.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Le réalisme est un mot vide de sens (&lt;em&gt;Mme Bovary&lt;/em&gt; et &lt;em&gt;Les Possédés&lt;/em&gt; sont des romans réalistes et ils n'ont rien en commun.&amp;quot; Quoted in Bernard Pingaud: &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger d'Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt;. Gallimard, 1992, page 187.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned above, Meursault tells his story with a kind of outsider's objectivity. He is also presented as a character that refuses to lie and play by society's conventional rules. After his mother's death, he does not seem to be mourning: he is not interested in having his mother's coffin opened so he can take a last look at her, he smokes during the wake, even falls asleep, and he doesn't weep during the funeral. These are examples of not playing by the normal social rules: he does not want to feign grief when he doesn't feel any. His lawyer later tells him that this could be used against him during the murder trial and suggest that he might say that his insensitivity at the funeral was not real but the result of an attempt to control his emotions. Meursault immediately rejects the idea because it was &amp;quot;untrue&amp;quot;. This illustrates his refusal to lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, during the trial, the killing of the Arab becomes an issue of secondary importance compared to Meursault's insensitiveness. Witnesses are questioned about Meursault's character and about his behaviour during and after the funeral but not about what they know about the killing. Meursualt is accused of &amp;quot;morally killing&amp;quot; his own mother; during his closing speech, the prosecutor even claims Meursault is also guilty of killing his father. (In reality, the cause of his mother's death is not known but she was definitely not killed by Meursault, while his father died when he was still a small child.) The prosecution's closing speech appears to mention the killing of the Arab only briefly, adding that Meursault &amp;quot;knows the value of words&amp;quot;, which is another allusion to Meursault's commitment to truth (though probably not from the prosecutor's point of view).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this point of view, as I already mentioned in my discussion of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15613/2191&quot;&gt;Czechoslovak traveller's story&lt;/a&gt;, Meursault is put on trial for refusing to lie and not playing by society's conventional rules. However, a novel about a character that is prosecuted solely for this reason would be implausible. This is why society needs an excuse to put Meursault on trial, and by letting Meursault unintentionally kill an Arab, the novelist provides exactly that excuse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another way of approaching Meursault's &amp;quot;motivation&amp;quot; to kill the Arab is provided by psychoanalysis. As mentioned before, Meursault does not show any signs of grief or mourning after his mother's death. From a Freudian point of view, a person in mourning  can feel their loss in an external way. In that case, they can reform their feeling of loss and the process of mourning ends with a kind of acceptance. Or a person in mourning feels their pain in an internal way; it is felt in the unconscious only, where the person is not aware of it. In that case, according to Freud, the grief is so heavy that it is repressed and cannot be processed by the conscious mind. This would explain why, at the funeral, Meursault behaves in a way that witnesses later describe as insensitive. It would also explain why his mother is mentioned again and again later in the book, for example, when he hears Salamano weep over the loss of his dog, he suddenly thinks of his mother but can't explain why (end of Part One, chapter III).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freudian interpretations take this further to explain other aspects of the novel. (See for example, Bernard Pingaud: L'Étranger d'Albert Camus. Gallimard, 1992; page 114-123.) At the end of a normal mourning process, the mourner eventually prefers himself over the lost &amp;quot;object&amp;quot;; at the end of a pathological process, the mourner is unable to give up the lost &amp;quot;object&amp;quot;, ascribe the lost to himself and decides to share its fate (see Freud's &lt;em&gt;Mourning and Melancholia&lt;/em&gt;). This would explain Meursault's unusual behaviour each time people ask him something about his mother. (For example, during his first conversation with the investigating magistrate in Part Two, Chapter I, the magistrate asks him whether he had loved his mother. Meursault answers, &amp;quot;Yes, like everybody&amp;quot;, after which he notices that the clerk behind him suddenly interrupts his regular typing as if had mistyped something and needed to delete it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly before that he had already thought to himself: &amp;quot;I probably loved mother, but that didn't mean anything. All sane beings had more or less wished for the death of those they loved.&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Sans doute, j'aimais maman, mais cela ne voulait rien dire. Tous les être sains avaient plus ou moins souhaité la mort de ceux qu'ils aimaient.&amp;quot;) For Freudian critics, Meursault's wish for his mother's death is as if he had effectively killed here, so it would only be just for him to share her fate. From this point of view, the killing of the Arab is a roundabout way of committing suicide, using the justice system as an instrument. (This reading puts the prosecutor's claim that Meursault had &amp;quot;morally killed&amp;quot; his mother in a different light than the previous interpretation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these interpretations are rather unintuitive but they uncover aspects of the novel that remain hidden when reading the novel and analysing its characters as if &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; were a realist novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:03:23.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14220" CreationDate="2020-09-13T16:22:56.493" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The singer describes being in a relationship with someone who is unhappy and self-destructive (“drunk at the steering wheel”) but loves them so much that she would follow them to destruction, as she declares repeatedly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I woulda followed all the way to the graveyard&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, “dark” has a couple of meanings. First,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dark, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 9.&lt;/strong&gt; Not able to see; partially or totally blind; sightless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, the subject of the song is unable to notice the singer (“don't know how you even see”), and “pushes right through” her (treats her as if she doesn’t exist). Second,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dark, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 5. a.&lt;/strong&gt; Devoid of that which brightens or cheers; gloomy, cheerless, dismal, sad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;, the eyes standing for the person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T16:22:56.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15637" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15638" CreationDate="2020-09-13T17:00:40.733" Score="11" ViewCount="2241" Body="&lt;p&gt;So, I was recently re-reading the Inferno, and I have come across this quote which I can't make sense of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Daddy Satan, daddy Satan aleppe,&amp;quot; (VII.1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seemed rather weird that it wouldn't be translated (I am reading the Dorothy Sayers translation), so I tried to translate it. Unfortunately, what came out (&amp;quot;Daddy Satan, daddy Satan aleppe&amp;quot;) didn't make any more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this quote mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10857" LastEditorUserId="10857" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T00:51:37.970" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T07:11:29.623" Title="What did Dante mean by &quot;Papè Satan, papè Satan aleppe&quot; in the Inferno?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;inferno&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15638" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15637" CreationDate="2020-09-13T17:31:48.107" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a nauseatingly numerous amount of theories on what that illustriously ambiguous line could mean. It very well might have merely been indented by Dante to represent a sort of invocation (and legibility is not usually the most overwhelming of necessities when clucking one's lips on an Invocation). The chant most likely refers to the Triumph of Satan. It is screeched forth by Plutus, Roman god of wealth, and the underground mines therein. To Dante, Plutus is characterized as a verminous watcher to the Fourth Circle of Inferno. The Fourth Circle being the punishment of overindulgence in wealth and gluttony in the acts of greed, hence the guardian of the circle is fittingly Plutus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Popoi Satan, popoi Satan! Alezorul!'/ So Plutus-- Shrill voice clucking on-- began. (Canto 7, Inferno,  Kirkpatrick trasnaltion)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now whether that opening line is cried out in content, misery, or anger (More likely anger as the lines following reads thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be silent, thou accursed wolf / Consume within thyself with &lt;strong&gt;thine own rage&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is beside the point of attempting to translate the line.--Although our worshipful William Blake made Plutus look rather wretched in his fitful madness:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3HgZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/A3HgZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is the line in original &amp;quot;Italian&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!&amp;quot;,&#xA;cominciò Pluto con la voce chioccia;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the line cut from an early 1487 edition of La Devina Commedia (It was first published in 1472, so this is quite an early printing, and thus it may be assumed it is quite authentic to Dante's initial choice of words for the line:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X5nq2.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X5nq2.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;My only note on analyzing this early printing of the lines is the thought-provoking idea on why the &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; (a medial &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; in this printing) is not Capitalized. Why satan (ſatan) and not Satan? This at first might leave no interest-spurring idea to it, but once noticing that Pluto (the name &amp;quot;Plutus&amp;quot; was commonly used interchangeably with &amp;quot;Pluto&amp;quot;--even in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;) is indeed capitalized-- why not then Satan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;http://The%20word%20%22pap%C3%A9%22%20(or%20%22pape%22)%20might%20be%20a%20rendering%20of%20Latin%20papae,%20or%20from%20Greek%20%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%80%CE%B1%CE%AF%20(papa%C3%AD).%20Both%20words%20are%20interjections%20of%20anger%20or%20surprise,%20attested%20in%20ancient%20authors%20(comparable%20to%20the%20English%20%22damn!%22,%20or%20just%20%22oh!%22).%20The%20word%20%22aleppe%22%20could%20be%20an%20Italian%20version%20of%20the%20word%20for%20%22alef%22,%20the%20Hebrew%20letter%20%D7%90%20(a)%20(compare%20Phoenician%20alep%20and%20Greek%20alpha)%20The%20consonant%20shift%20here%20is%20comparable%20to%20that%20in%20Giuseppe,%20the%20Italian%20version%20of%20the%20name%20Joseph.%20In%20Hebrew,%20alef%20also%20means%20%22number%20one%22%20or%20%22the%20origin%20that%20contains%20everything%22.%20It%20may%20also%20be%20interpreted%20as%20a%20metaphor%20for%20the%20%22head%22,%20%22the%20first%20and%20foremost%22.%20This%20was%20an%20attribute%20for%20God%20in%20late%20medieval%20expressions,%20meaning%20%22the%20majesty%22%20(of%20God).%20%22Alef%22%20was%20also%20a%20medieval%20interjection%20(like%20%22Oh%20God!%22).%20The%20word%20%22Satan%22%20comes%20from%20the%20Hebrew%20word%20%D7%94%D6%B7%D7%A9%D6%B8%D7%82%D7%98%D6%B8%D7%9F%20(ha-Satan),%20which%20translated%20literally%20means%20%22the%20adversary%22.%20The%20meaning%20of%20the%20words%20then%20becomes,%20%22Oh%20(pap%C3%A9),%20our%20foremost%20(aleppe)%20enemy%20of%20God/demon%20(ha-Satan),%20as%20aleppe%20is%20the%20first%20letter%20of%20the%20alphabet%20(aleppe)!%22,%20which%20is%20%22Oh,%20Satan,%20o%20Satan,%20god,%20king!%22.%20Thus,%20the%20sentence%20would%20be%20a%20mixture%20of%20Greek%20and%20Latin.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt;, breaking down the words to their earliest meanings could bring you to this understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1.) The word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;papé&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;pape&amp;quot;) might be a rendering of Latin papae, or from Greek παπαί (papaí). Both words are interjections of anger or surprise, attested in ancient authors (comparable to the English &amp;quot;damn!&amp;quot;, or just &amp;quot;oh!&amp;quot;).           (2.) The word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;aleppe&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; could be an Italian version of the word for &amp;quot;alef&amp;quot;, the Hebrew letter א (a) (compare Phoenician alep and Greek alpha) The consonant shift here is comparable to that in Giuseppe, the Italian version of the name Joseph. In Hebrew, alef also means &amp;quot;number one&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the origin that contains everything&amp;quot;. It may also be interpreted as a metaphor for the &amp;quot;head&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;the first and foremost&amp;quot;. This was an attribute for God in late medieval expressions, meaning &amp;quot;the majesty&amp;quot; (of God). &amp;quot;Alef&amp;quot; was also a medieval interjection (like &amp;quot;Oh God!&amp;quot;).&#xA;(3.) The word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Satan&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; comes from the Hebrew word הַשָׂטָן (ha-Satan), which translated literally means &amp;quot;the adversary&amp;quot;. The meaning of the words then becomes, &amp;quot;Oh (papé), our foremost (aleppe) enemy of God/demon (ha-Satan), as aleppe is the first letter of the alphabet (aleppe)!&amp;quot;, which is &amp;quot;Oh, Satan, o Satan, god, king!&amp;quot;. Thus, the sentence would be a mixture of Greek and Latin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But thereafter there is an exceptional amount of further theories coined by numerous schollers throughout the centuries of the Divine Comedy's fame. (see here under  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pape_Sat%C3%A0n,_pape_Sat%C3%A0n_aleppe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Possible Explanations&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My favorite of the explanations has always been the Hebrew Theory, as the contradiction to the words of The Christ and the blasphemy represented therein seems like something Satan would pleasure in quite luxuriously indeed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some commentators claim that the sentence is phonetic Hebrew, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Bab-e-sciatan, bab-e-sciatan, alep!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. This would be the opposite of the sentence that Jesus spoke in the Gospel according to &lt;strong&gt;St Matthew 16:18&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;quot;...and &lt;strong&gt;the gates of Hell&lt;/strong&gt; shall not prevail against it&amp;quot;. The meaning of this utterance would be that Hell (Satan) has conquered. (Source: WIKIPEDIA)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another intriguing translation is by Domenico Guerri who put forth a more simple understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Satan Oh, oh God Satan.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another short essay on the subject of the line's ambiguity written quite delightfully. It may be found &lt;a href=&quot;https://classicsincontext.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/canto-vii-pape-satan-pape-satan-aleppe/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And speaking of that opening line: &lt;strong&gt;no one knows what the hell it means.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;It’s not Italian.&lt;/strong&gt; It’s the fourteenth century equivalent of Nell-speak. (And God bless the poor sap who had to transcribe Jodie Foster’s gibberish for the closed-captioning. [typing]Gai’ainja! Gai’ainja! Tai tai, spay fo nay![/typing] “Dude, I’m out. I’m going to do something easier than this, like naming Pokemon monsters or writing speeches for Michele Bachman.”) The gist of it is: Plutus, the moster guarding the entrance to the Fourth Circle, is yelling something to the effect of “Get out of here, poet!” and Virgil is having none of it, so he defeats Plutus by chanting at him. (Taci, maladetto lupo!/consuma dentro te con la tua rabbia; “Silence, accursed wolf! Let your fury feed itself inside you.” And then, a little later, we’re told tal cadde a terra la fiera crudele; “so fell that cruel beast to the ground.”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, here is a rather insightful footnote worth considering. Found &lt;a href=&quot;http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu/reader?reader%5Bcantica%5D=1&amp;amp;reader%5Bcanto%5D=7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plutus, the god of wealth in classical myth, wishes to prevent the passage of this living soul through Satan's kingdom.&lt;/strong&gt; That, at least, is what we must surmise from Virgil's reaction, vv. 4-6, which assuages Dante's fear. (...)&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Pape Satàn, Pape Satàn, aleppe&lt;/strong&gt;. The third verse &lt;strong&gt;suggests that Virgil understands these words spoken by Plutus&lt;/strong&gt;. If that is correct, he is perhaps the only one to have done so. &lt;strong&gt;Over the centuries a continuing debate addresses, rather confusedly, the precise nature of these five words&lt;/strong&gt;: whether they are part of a recognizable language or not; whether they are totally meaningless or have some meaning; whether they are an invocation of the power of Satan against invading Dante or an oath giving expression to the monster's surprise at the presence of a living soul in hell. For a review of the question see Hollander (Dante and Paul's “five words with understanding,” Occasional Papers, No. 1, Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Texts and Studies [Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992]), who sees this and Nimrod's similarly nonsensical five words (Inf. XXXI.67) as parodic inversions of the five words of clear speech called for by St. Paul, concerned about the over-reliance of the faithful on speaking in tongues (I Corinthians 14:19). Plutus's oath may be garbled speech, but it does contain 'pseudo-words' that have meaning: Pape represents either a Latin interjection (papae) of admiration, as many ancient commentators think, or/and a debased form of the Italian and Latin for 'pope' (papa – see Inf. VII.47: papi); Satàn would fairly clearly seem to be a form of the Italian 'Satana' or of the Latin 'Sathanas' and thus 'Satan'; aleppe, as some of the first commentators noticed, is the Italian form of the Hebrew word for the first letter of the alphabet, 'aleph,' as in the Latin expression 'alpha ed omega' (the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, signifying 'the beginning and the end'), as God defines Himself in the Bible (Apoc. 1:8, repeated at Apoc. 21:6 and Apoc. 22:13). If one had to render these nonsense words in English one might say something like 'O Pope Satan, my god.' Fortunately, one does not have to. For the connection of these words in mixed language to those in the first verses of the seventh canto of Paradiso (there, naturally, totally positive in tone and meaning) – &lt;strong&gt;the parallelism is certainly striking&lt;/strong&gt; – see Gian Roberto Sarolli, Prolegomena alla “Divina Commedia” (Florence: Olschki, 1971), pp. 289-90. Lorenzo Renzi (“Un aspetto del plurilinguismo medievale: dalla lingua dei re magi a 'Papé satan aleppe,'” in Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo [Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1993]), pp. 61-73, &lt;strong&gt;presents evidence for a possible connection between instances of glossalalia in French medieval plays&lt;/strong&gt;, some of which come from the mouths of pagan deities, and Dante's polyglot phrase here and in Inferno XXXI.67.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T07:09:53.527" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T07:09:53.527" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15321" CreationDate="2020-09-13T17:56:01.697" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Under the provisions of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Punishment_Amendment_Act_1868&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868&lt;/a&gt;, the Home Secretary (probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bruce,_1st_Baron_Aberdare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Bruce&lt;/a&gt;) had issued the following rules for executions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;black flag to be hoisted at the moment of execution&lt;/strong&gt;, upon a staff placed on an elevated and conspicuous part of the prison, and to remain displayed for one hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The bell of the prison, or if arrangements can be made for that purpose, the bell of the parish or other neighbouring church, to be tolled for fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after the execution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Quoted in Robert Wilkinson (1878). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=o8EDAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA228&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Law of Prisons in England and Wales&lt;/em&gt;, p. 228&lt;/a&gt;. London: Knight &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These rules remained in force until 1902, after which the black flag was no longer raised. This means that there is a mild anachronism in the Saki story as the tale post-dates the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Crisis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(First) Balkan Crisis&lt;/a&gt; of 1908.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is the punch-line of the joke! The point is that the story told by the prisoner is a wholly unbelievable farrago of improbabilities. The prisoner happened to have a plausible but unverifiable reason to change identity with the dead man! He happened to be carrying enough cash to support his new life! None of his friends or relations could identify him! A relative of the dead man wrongly identified the prisoner as her nephew! Such a series of catastrophes could not happen to anyone, and the prisoner’s story is clearly a bunch of lies. So when the chaplain concludes that anyone, even an expert on the Balkans, might have forgotten the location of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjak_of_Novi_Pazar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanjak of Novibazar&lt;/a&gt;, he is comically focussing on the least important point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T17:56:01.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15641" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18237" CreationDate="2020-09-13T18:48:43.393" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember a children's fiction book I read as a child.  I only remember vague key words and ideas.  Do you know what this story is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Language: English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Date read: mid 2000s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where I would've found it: Midwest USA public library or school library&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Keywords&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atlantis.  Something about an archeological dig finding ruins from Atlantis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Analog vs Digital.  The dig found some sort of &amp;quot;disc&amp;quot; in Atlantis that let you control... something.  The villain tried to make a replica of this disc, but something about the replica was digital instead of analog, and so his plan didn't work?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Elements.  The four Greek elements were in play somehow, and I think there was a scene where characters were talking near a candle flame.  The villain was listening? through the flame or something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Golems.  Some sort of elemental being I think called a golem was in the book.  Maybe summoned by the discs?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching these keywords every time I recall this story, but I don't find anything similar.  I'd appreciate it if anyone could help me find this novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10859" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T15:15:33.113" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T14:39:26.850" Title="Identify a fiction novel about Atlantis and digital or analog &quot;discs&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9239" CreationDate="2020-09-13T21:11:52.903" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it myself, it was &amp;quot;The Bigger They Come&amp;quot; by A. A. Fair (the pen name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erle_Stanley_Gardner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Erle Stanley Gardner&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the first book in his series about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_and_Lam#Bibliography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald Lam and Bertha Cool&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, she’s assigning a detective to work on the case — no — no, not herself... No, she doesn’t go out by herself. She’s — she’s hardly—’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bertha Cool said, ‘Don’t be bashful. Tell her I’m fat.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The district attorney said, ‘Your honor, we don’t need to believe his story. We can hold him for further developments. Perhaps he—?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Apparently you don’t appreciate the diabolical ingenuity of the petitioner’s position,’ Judge Oliphant said. ‘He can’t be extradited from Arizona. He isn’t a fugitive from justice ― not from California at any rate. I doubt if there is enough evidence to connect him with this Kansas City crime. If there is, there will be little difficulty in finding the petitioner. He certainly is not going to leave the State of Arizona. Here he enjoys legal immunity. Elsewhere, he would not, and the perspicacity of this petitioner is such that he not only realizes that fact but will take full technical advantage of it. I even doubt if he could be extradited to Kansas City. The petitioner is discharged.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5740" LastActivityDate="2020-09-13T21:11:52.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15645" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T07:05:36.977" Score="4" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an epigraph a T. S. Eliot verse appears at the beginning of Toni Morrison's &lt;em&gt;Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am moved by fancies that are curled&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Around these images, and cling:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The notion of some infinitely gentle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Infinitely suffering thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. S. Eliot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from “Preludes, IV”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Morrison choose this verse and how does it connect with the rest of the chapter &lt;strong&gt;Black Matters&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T07:36:23.150" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T07:36:23.150" Title="Why does the first chapter of Toni Morrison's &quot;Playing in the Dark&quot; open with this Eliot verse in Black Matters?" Tags="&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;toni-morrison&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15646" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T13:05:25.647" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does Lorca mean in his poem &amp;quot;Romance sonámbulo&amp;quot; when he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tiny tin-leaf lanterns&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;were trembling on the tiles.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A thousand crystal tambourines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;were wounding dawn's dark sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(English translation by Will Kirkland, in &lt;em&gt;Selected Poems&lt;/em&gt;, Penguin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original Spanish text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Temblaban en los tejados&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;farolillos de hojalata.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mil panderos de cristal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;herían la madrugada.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10863" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T15:17:43.207" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T12:10:50.333" Title="Meaning of Lorca's &quot;Romance sonámbulo&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;federico-garcia-lorca&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T14:22:24.990" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a poem entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/153792/archery-5ed6f65e9da61&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archery&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Phillips&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carl Phillips:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first few lines read as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was still a thing, then. To have timed your arrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;perfectly meant watching the air for a moment...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a basic reader I saw a poem starting with &lt;strong&gt;a small letter&lt;/strong&gt; for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it any &lt;strong&gt;literary device?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, does the phrase &lt;strong&gt;time your arrow&lt;/strong&gt; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to release the arrow just at the right time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-14T14:30:14.667" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T16:14:32.467" Title="Starting a poem with a &quot;small letter&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15647" CreationDate="2020-09-14T16:14:32.467" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You could argue that the poem starts with the title, so it reads 'Archery was still a thing then.' I'm not aware of this being a named literary device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The aspect of timing of an arrow may be a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Arrow_paradox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zeno's Paradox&lt;/a&gt; of the Arrow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest at that instant of time, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless at that instant of time and at the next instant of time but if both instants of time are taken as the same instant or continuous instant of time then it is in motion.[15]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— as recounted by Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b5&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the arrow paradox, Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one (duration-less) instant of time, the arrow is neither moving to where it is, nor to where it is not.[16] It cannot move to where it is not, because no time elapses for it to move there; it cannot move to where it is, because it is already there. In other words, at every instant of time there is no motion occurring. If everything is motionless at every instant, and time is entirely composed of instants, then motion is impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the first two paradoxes divide space, this paradox starts by dividing time—and not into segments, but into points.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or it may just literally be a reference to that lacuna you experience when you shoot an arrow, they move slower than bullets or projectiles in computer games and there is a brief moment of breath-holding after you loose the arrow while you wait to see where it lands. I've only ever shot at fixed targets, where timing is not a crucial thing, if you are shooting at a moving target, an animal or person you have to anticipate the space the target is moving into, so timing becomes more important.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That does itself flag up the potential for a crossover with Zeno's tortoise paradox, which says that a pursuer can never catch up with the pursued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, Achilles is in a footrace with the tortoise. Achilles allows the tortoise a head start of 100 meters, for example. Suppose that each racer starts running at some constant speed, one faster than the other. After some finite time, Achilles will have run 100 meters, bringing him to the tortoise's starting point. During this time, the tortoise has run a much shorter distance, say 2 meters. It will then take Achilles some further time to run that distance, by which time the tortoise will have advanced farther; and then more time still to reach this third point, while the tortoise moves ahead. Thus, whenever Achilles arrives somewhere the tortoise has been, he still has some distance to go before he can even reach the tortoise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T16:14:32.467" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15649" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15652" CreationDate="2020-09-14T16:29:53.880" Score="-2" ViewCount="306" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, hates Antonio. Bassanio, in need of money, approaches Antonio for a loan so that he can pursue Portia, as he is in love with her, and wants to marry her. Antonio at that time cannot afford the amount of the loan, and instead he advises Bassanio to approach Shylock for the loan on the security of an approaching shipment on Antonio's ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shylock agrees to extend the loan to Bassanio. The loan amount is to be repaid in three months and no interest will be charged, but in case of failure to repay the loan, Shylock asks for a pound of Antonio's flesh. Portia, as a lawyer, saves Antonio from having a &amp;quot;pound of flesh&amp;quot; cut off his body, using her clever wit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;pound of flesh&amp;quot; means something which is owed that is required to be paid back: a lawful but unnecessary repayment. In the phrase meaning the words &amp;quot;unnecessary repayment&amp;quot; are included. Had SHYLOCK DECIDED BEFOREHAND AND WAS DETERMINED TO KILL ANTONIO. Does this clause also say &amp;quot;lawful&amp;quot;, The phrase has a double meaning which could have been made use in the court?  Who helped Antonio from behind with the one who pleaded for Antonio? Perhaps Shylock did not want to thwart Portia's marriage with Bassanio either. He was concerned with Jessica's future too. So the bond was cleverly drafted. I am sure Shylock saved the case in favor of Antonio from behind. What Bassanio did with the huge amount of money, spent with Portia, spent on luxurious living or kept a big part for repayment of the loan. Maybe there was a playful attempt of the three, even four persons even though not a conspiracy but is the plot. It is hard to believe that Shylock, a seasoned moneylender, had not gone through the bond. So I have referred to the word &amp;quot;Humor&amp;quot;: Shylock was not unaware of it, whose only aim was to insult Antonio. A fine comedy play though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is how Antonio saved his pound of flesh? Was it that the bond and deed were cleverly drafted, so execution was nearly impossible?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorUserId="10622" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T08:15:55.040" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T08:15:55.040" Title="What does the Idiom &quot;pound of flesh&quot; mean to &quot;Shylock&quot;? Was this a sense of humor of Shylock?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14945" CreationDate="2020-09-14T19:39:12.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I realise this is a late response, but this is one of my favourite poems, so I thought I'd give my 2 cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he refers to &amp;quot;My Defeat&amp;quot; he's humanizing failure as his &amp;quot;old companion&amp;quot; -- this being the overarching theme (that our failures are an intrinsic part of us). As opposed to defining what we can't do, failure shapes who we become.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poetry's always open to different interpretations, but here's my own personal take of your highlighted lines...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can view these three things as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The beating of wings = Peace (wings being symbolic of joy and&#xA;freedom)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The urging of seas = Challenge (the open sea being symbolic of&#xA;journey and intrepidity)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mountains that burn in the night = Danger (fire being symbolic of...&#xA;well, disaster)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My failures define my happiness and triumphs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's from my failures that I draw courage&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's my failures that inform me of where dangers and threats lie&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That interpretation's also in-beat with the preceding line:&#xA;&amp;quot;You shall hear my songs (when I'm up) and my cries (when I'm trying) and my silences (when I'm beat)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10865" LastActivityDate="2020-09-14T19:39:12.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T21:00:59.697" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking through Maya Angelou's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Maya-angelou-on-the-pulse-of-morning-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Pulse of Morning&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, and noticed that there's an interesting use of capitalization in the poem. (I checked multiple version to make sure that this was consistently used and not just one transcription's weirdness.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, the words &amp;quot;Rock&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;River&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Tree&amp;quot; are capitalized throughout the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Rock, A River, A Tree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hosts to species long since departed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Across the wall of the world,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A River sings a beautiful song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This I interpreted as these three things being the main theme of the poem, and so worthy of capitalization. But then I came to this stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The African and Native American, the Sioux,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They hear. They all hear&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The speaking of the Tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every single person here (such as Gay, Straight, Teacher) is capitalized except for &amp;quot;privileged&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;homeless&amp;quot;. I found this odd; why would these two specifically be &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; capitalized? Sure, words like Asian, Muslim, Irish usually get capitalized... but &amp;quot;teacher&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;preacher&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;gay&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;straight&amp;quot; etc. don't. Once you're capitalizing some of these words, why not all of them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are these two words in particular &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; capitalized, and how does it tie in to how capitalization is used in the poem as a whole?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T17:50:44.847" Title="How is capitalization being used in Maya Angelou's &quot;On the Pulse of Morning&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15649" CreationDate="2020-09-14T21:21:22.913" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps your confusion arises from the fact that a &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_of_Flesh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pound of flesh&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; meaning something required to be paid back more or less originates from the play (there were earlier predecessors, including the 14th-century tale &lt;em&gt;Il Pecorone&lt;/em&gt; by Giovanni Fiorentino, which was published in Milan in 1558, but Shakespeare is the primary example these days). Shylock requested the pound of flesh both as an indicator that the debt truly must be paid back, by providing a second additional consequence, and possibly also because it provided a way of Shylock getting revenge on those who exploited him by having a legal way of enacting violence on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as you are most likely familiar with from the play, the protagonists welsh on their agreement. The Duke, with Portia's help, negates the debt by claiming that Shylock would be murdering a Christian by insisting on this debt (not only taking a pound of flesh, but also spilling Christian blood), something criminally punishable by death, and demanding that Shylock not only forgive the debt, but also forfeit all of his wealth. One way of reading this is that an offer was made to Shylock to provide financial recompense in the courts and he instead insisted on vengeance, leading to him losing everything. Another is that he is a tragic figure within a rigged system. Antonio borrowed money from him knowing that Shylock could not demand recompense (Jewish people historically being stuck with moneylending due to usury laws and tradition, and a history of them being murdered to eliminate a debt), and when Shylock insisted on payment, those he opposed leaned on the legal system to instead brand Shylock as the criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I can tell, there is no indication in the text of the play, or in what marginalia we have from scripts, that Shylock is to be seen in an favorable way as someone trying to help the protagonists. Rather he is cast as a villain, albeit a tragic one who is undone by his hubris and a society where he is at a great disadvantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T13:20:55.610" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T13:20:55.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15654" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T23:29:38.613" Score="0" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/selectedstorieso0000welt/page/240/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Worn Path&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Eudora Welty, how can the story's point of view be described? How does the point of view affect what we know about the situation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10867" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T08:53:07.457" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T11:24:13.017" Title="Point of view in Eudora Welty's &quot;A Worn Path&quot;" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;eudora-welty&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15654" CreationDate="2020-09-15T11:24:13.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point of view in ‘A Worn Path’ can be described as “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Third-person&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third-person, limited, objective&lt;/a&gt;”. That is, it is told from the point of view of a “third person”, a narrator who not themselves a character in the story; it is “limited” (as opposed to “omniscient”), describing only things seen and experienced by the protagonist; and it is “objective” (as opposed to “subjective”) describing appearances and events, but not the protagonist’s thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of “limited” narration is to give a strong impression of what it is like to see things from the perspective of the protagonist. For example, when she comes across a scarecrow, it is described like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A first she took it for a man. It could have been a man dancing in the field. But she stood still and listened, and it did not make a sound. It was silent as a ghost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ghost,” she said sharply, “who be you the ghost of? For I have heard of nary death close by.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This conveys the threat to the protagonist inherent in the landscape—the figure of a man is dangerous to her—and her sense of the numinous, the possibility that she might meet the ghost of someone who recently died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, because the narration is objective, the reader gets no insight into what the protagonist is thinking or intending, except for what she says out loud or reveals through her actions and expressions. This allows Welty to preserve suspense as to why the protagonist is making this difficult and dangerous journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T11:24:13.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15657" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T14:11:26.297" Score="40" ViewCount="10282" Body="&lt;p&gt;In one sense, it might refer to &amp;quot;the lord of&amp;quot; the rings, as in the person or entity currently in possession of The One ring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another way, it could (IMO) mean that The One ring is &amp;quot;the lord&amp;quot; out of the rings. As in, it &amp;quot;owns&amp;quot; the lesser rings, and rules over them (and everything and everyone else, including the person who currently wears/carries it). The &amp;quot;lord&amp;quot; out of the rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Swedish, it was translated into &amp;quot;Härskarringen&amp;quot;, which also ambiguously could mean &amp;quot;the ring which rules&amp;quot; but also &amp;quot;the ring of/owned by the ruler&amp;quot;. This is perhaps the main reason I'm asking about this, wondering if the same ambiguity really exists in English and whether or not it was intentional or just a coincidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Swedish translations are infamous for always/frequently getting things wrong and warping the meaning in idiotic ways, they could have easily called it &amp;quot;Ringhärskaren&amp;quot; = literally and unambiguously &amp;quot;The lord/owner of the rings&amp;quot;. But they didn't. This suggests to me that the original title is meant to be ambiguous and that it doesn't necessarily refer to the person or entity currently in possession of the ring, but rather that the ring itself rules over those who wear/carry it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10870" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T17:28:06.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T00:36:03.783" Title="Was the title &quot;The Lord of the Rings&quot; picked on purpose to be ambiguous?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;title&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15657" CreationDate="2020-09-15T15:06:16.233" Score="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase “the Lord of the Rings” is ambiguous in the same way in English: it might, in theory, refer either to the One Ring, which rules the other rings, or to Sauron, who can use it to rule all the rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the text does not make use of this ambiguity. The phrase “the Lord of the Ring(s)” appears four times in the text, and three times it’s clear that Sauron is intended:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, I knew of them. Indeed I spoke of them once to you; for the Black Riders are the Ringwraiths, the Nine Servants of &lt;strong&gt;the Lord of the Rings&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 1. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But in any case,’ said Glorfindel, ‘to send the Ring to [Bombadil] would only postpone the day of evil. He is far away. We could not now take it back to him, unguessed, unmarked by any spy. And even if we could, soon or late &lt;strong&gt;the Lord of the Rings&lt;/strong&gt; would learn of its hiding place and would bend all his power towards it.’ [II.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here Bilbo’s hand ended and Frodo had written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE DOWNFALL&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;OF &lt;strong&gt;THE&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;LORD OF THE RINGS&lt;/strong&gt; AND THE&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;RETURN OF THE KING&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, book VI, chapter 9. London: Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth case Pippin uses the phrase as a joke, and Gandalf quickly corrects him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Hurray!’ cried Pippin, springing up. ‘Here is our noble cousin! Make way for Frodo, &lt;strong&gt;Lord of the Ring&lt;/strong&gt;!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Hush!’ said Gandalf from the shadows at the back of the porch. ‘Evil things do not come into this valley; but all the same we should not name them. &lt;strong&gt;The Lord of the Ring&lt;/strong&gt; is not Frodo, but the master of the Dark Tower of Mordor, whose power is again stretching out over the world!’ [II.1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the characters want to emphasize the role of the One Ring in controlling the other rings, they use the phrase “Ruling Ring” instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It has been said that dragon-fire could melt and consume the Rings of Power, but there is not now any dragon left on earth in which the old fire is hot enough; nor was there ever any dragon, not even Ancalagon the Black, who could have harmed the One Ring, &lt;strong&gt;the Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt;, for that was made by Sauron himself.’ [I.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘For in the days of Isildur &lt;strong&gt;the Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt; passed out of all knowledge, and the Three were released from its dominion.’ [II.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘[Saruman] came and laid his long hand on my arm. “And why not, Gandalf?” he whispered. “Why not? &lt;strong&gt;The Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt;? If we could command that, then the Power would pass to us.”’ [II.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Alas, no,’ said Elrond. ‘We cannot use &lt;strong&gt;the Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt;. That we now know too well. It belongs to Sauron and was made by him alone, and is altogether evil.’ [II.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But what then would happen, if &lt;strong&gt;the Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt; were destroyed as you counsel?’ asked Glóin. [II.2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘The Ringwraiths are deadly enemies, but they are only shadows yet of the power and terror they would possess if &lt;strong&gt;the Ruling Ring&lt;/strong&gt; was on their master’s hand again.’ [II.4]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Tolkien had chosen the title with an eye to its ambiguity, I would have expected him to make use of the ambiguity somewhere in the text, but he does not: he maintains a consistent distinction between “the Lord of the Rings” and “the Ruling Ring” to convey the two senses. This suggests that the title was not chosen on purpose to be ambiguous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T15:06:16.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11919" CreationDate="2020-09-15T17:13:10.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since the quote is taken from an interview, I wouldn't treat it as a literary text. When Siken says, 'much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,”' he is giving an example of the self-awareness he had mentioned earlier in the interview. According to the poet, self-awareness can undercut emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles Stangor's &lt;a href=&quot;https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/the-cognitive-self-the-self-concept/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Principles of Social Psychology – 1st International Edition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; defines &lt;strong&gt;self-awarenes&lt;/strong&gt; as &amp;quot;the extent to which we are currently fixing our attention on our own self-concept&amp;quot; and &lt;strong&gt;private self-consciousness&lt;/strong&gt; as &amp;quot;the tendency to introspect about our inner thoughts and feelings&amp;quot;. Neither concept fits perfectly what Siken describes but it is probably clear that becoming aware that you are falling to the floor crying (to continue using Siken's example) creates some distance between yourself as experiencing emotions and yourself as an observer, which can create a mild form of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissociation&lt;/a&gt; that helps you cope with the emotions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Siken then adds is that the observation of something entirely banal, like noticing that part of a wall was badly painted, can draw your attention even further away from your emotions, thus &amp;quot;undercutting&amp;quot; them even more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't consider these explanations as a &amp;quot;deeper meaning&amp;quot; but just a wordier version of the surface meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T17:13:10.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15661" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T18:07:42.570" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shelley's famous sonnet, which begins &lt;strong&gt;'Lift not the painted veil'&lt;/strong&gt;, the &amp;quot;turn&amp;quot; is placed - unusually - in the seventh line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lift not the painted veil which those who live&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And it but mimic all we would believe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I knew &lt;strong&gt;one who had lifted it&lt;/strong&gt;—he sought,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For his lost heart was tender, things to love,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But found them not, alas! nor was there aught&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The world contains, the which he could approve.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through the unheeding many he did move,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A splendour among shadows, a bright blot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this line, the poet mentions &lt;strong&gt;'one who had lifted it'&lt;/strong&gt;, and then goes on to describe some of the miseries of that person's unhappy life. &lt;strong&gt;Are there any interesting theories as to who that person might have been?&lt;/strong&gt; From the little I know of Shelley's life, John Keats seems like a good candidate, but Shelley's descriptions are vague enough that they could be made to fit several figures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a side note: Shelley refers to &lt;strong&gt;'the Preacher'&lt;/strong&gt; in the poem's last line. Is this a reference to Ecclesiastes? (I presume it's not a reference to &lt;em&gt;Poltergeist II: The Other Side&lt;/em&gt;!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastEditorUserId="7745" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T18:18:01.147" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T22:08:38.540" Title="Who is the 'one who had lifted it' in Shelley's sonnet about 'the painted veil'?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15662" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:03:51.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:03:51.303" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T19:03:51.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15663" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:03:51.303" Score="0" Body="For questions about the works of American short writer Eudora Welty (1909 – 2001) or about her life as a writer. Questions about her short stories should also be tagged [short-stories]; questions about her novels should be tagged with the novel's title.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:03:33.627" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:03:33.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15664" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:07:48.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:07:48.067" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T19:07:48.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15665" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:07:48.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German philosopher, political theorist and social revolutionary Karl Marx (1818 – 1883). Questions about his works should be focused on the literary aspects and tagged accordingly." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T21:23:54.113" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T21:23:54.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15666" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:08:56.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:08:56.847" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T19:08:56.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15667" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:08:56.847" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American poet Richard Siken and his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:21:26.730" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:21:26.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15668" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:13:15.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T19:13:15.313" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T19:13:15.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15669" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:13:15.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Pomes-Penyeach' (1927), a collection of 13 poems by James Joyce. Specific poems within the title should be used with [poetry] instead. Use with [james-joyce]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T19:38:42.553" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T19:38:42.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15670" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T19:19:05.990" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ishay Ribo's song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKoNZloRvQ&amp;amp;ab_channel=%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%91%D7%95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keter Melucha&lt;/a&gt; / כתר מלוכה&amp;quot; (Royal Crown), a song written about, essentially, COVID and lockdown, there's a stanza that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;בין תצווה לכי תישא&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;אסתר פורים משתה שמחה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;מי יחנה ומי יסע&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ומי ישא בתוצאה&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between Tetzaveh and Ki Tisa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ester, Purim, feasting, joy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who will stay and who will travel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And who will bear the consequences&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(my own translation)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the line &amp;quot;ומי ישא בתוצאה&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;and who will bear the consequences&amp;quot;) mean here? The consequences of gathering for Purim? A play on words with the previous line (&amp;quot;travel&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;bear&amp;quot; being pronounced the same way)? What?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T09:50:37.353" Title="What does the line &quot;and who will bear the consequences&quot; mean in Ishay Ribo's &quot;Keter Melucha&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;ishay-ribo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15671" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15672" CreationDate="2020-09-15T20:33:52.393" Score="4" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where can I locate the letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to A.A. Milne, the author of Winnie the Pooh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web page &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/JRRTolkien&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creator / J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/a&gt; on TV Tropes claims far far down that Tolkien once wrote a strongly worded letter to A.A. Milne complaining about his stage adaption of Wind in the Willows, which it seems Tolkien had much disliked. I would really really like to find this letter. It would be fantastic for my essay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, I can't. Does anyone have a lead on where I might locate it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The tropes edit history dead ends, so I can't ask the person who first wrote it. I'm not able to travel to an archive.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10874" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:51:26.583" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:51:26.583" Title="Where can I locate the letter J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to A.A. Milne?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-wind-in-the-willows&gt;&lt;a-a-milne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15671" CreationDate="2020-09-15T20:54:28.490" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The TV Tropes editor was probably thinking of the following passage from Tolkien’s notes to his essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Fairy-Stories&lt;/a&gt;’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no suggestion of dream in &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;. ‘The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little house.’ So it begins, and that correct tone is maintained. It is all the more remarkable that A. A. Milne, so great an admirer of this excellent book, should have prefaced to his dramatized version a ‘whimsical’ opening in which a child is seen telephoning with a daffodil. Or perhaps it is not very remarkable, for a perceptive admirer (as distinct from a great admirer) of the book would never have attempted to dramatize it. Naturally only the simpler ingredients, the pantomime, and the satiric beast-fable elements, are capable of presentation in this form. The play is, on the lower level of drama, tolerably good fun, especially for those who have not read the book; but some children that I took to see &lt;em&gt;Toad of Toad Hall&lt;/em&gt;, brought away as their chief memory nausea at the opening. For the rest they preferred their recollections of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1947). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essayspresentedt0000barf/page/84/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Fairy-Stories&lt;/a&gt;’. In C. S. Lewis, ed. (1947). &lt;em&gt;Essays presented to Charles Williams&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essay has appeared in many collections, including &lt;em&gt;Tree and Leaf&lt;/em&gt; (1964), &lt;em&gt;The Tolkien Reader&lt;/em&gt; (1966), and &lt;em&gt;The Monsters and the Critics&lt;/em&gt; (1983).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T20:54:28.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15673" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-15T21:26:37.857" Score="-3" ViewCount="272" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just watched a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXb0X_eM4sY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comedy bit&lt;/a&gt; by Sean Lock.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was at the zoo the other day and I got told off. I said, &amp;quot;Look! There's a mongoose!&amp;quot; Can't say that any more. &amp;quot;Special needs goose&amp;quot;. That's what we got to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is a mongoose a &amp;quot;special needs goose&amp;quot;? This joke escapes me. Why is it funny and why is a mongoose a &amp;quot;special needs goose&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T09:17:50.067" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T09:17:50.067" Title="Why is a mongoose a &quot;special needs goose&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sean-lock&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ClosedDate="2020-09-18T04:44:10.113" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15673" CreationDate="2020-09-15T21:53:55.960" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It took me quite some research to connect the dots. Apparently the humor should have something to do with &amp;quot;mon&amp;quot;, so I tried to draw a connection between &amp;quot;mon&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;special needs&amp;quot;. But neither &amp;quot;Monday&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Hmong&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;mono-&amp;quot; makes sense in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I then realized the key could be &amp;quot;mong&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;mon&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; lists it as British&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;offensive&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A person who is stupid or who has learning difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a contraction of &amp;quot;Mongoloid&amp;quot;. So the joke hinges on &amp;quot;mongoose&amp;quot; being taken apart as &amp;quot;mong&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;goose&amp;quot;. And because of political correctness, according to the comedian Sean Lock, we are not supposed to say &amp;quot;mong&amp;quot; so we have to say &amp;quot;special needs goose&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T21:53:55.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15676" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-15T22:34:18.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-15T22:34:18.750" LastActivityDate="2020-09-15T22:34:18.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15677" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-15T22:34:18.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English comedian Sean Lock (born 1963). " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T10:48:35.037" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T10:48:35.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15680" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15649" CreationDate="2020-09-16T11:57:22.790" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1600 AD or before such a case was possible. The court case seems to be a farce at the present age. The court case filed was in keeping with the usual practice at that time. Portia saved Antonio using her clever wit and judgement was in favor of Antonio. And solution of the case was also keeping with usual practice prevalent at that age. The judgement was proper. Above all, court judges and specified standards of judgement reigns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorDisplayName="user5387" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T12:30:02.670" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T12:30:02.670" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15699" CreationDate="2020-09-16T12:54:00.257" Score="7" ViewCount="370" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, there is a part where Lady Catherine visited the Bennets. She wished to ward off Elizabeth and wanted her to refuse Darcy's proposal and was stumped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did Lady Catherine find out about Darcy's proposal?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T14:23:01.400" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T14:23:01.400" Title="In Pride and Prejudice, how did Lady Catherine find out about Darcy's proposal?" Tags="&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15682" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15823" CreationDate="2020-09-16T15:03:33.693" Score="-2" ViewCount="121" Body="&lt;p&gt;The problem with Fairy Tales is that with the passage of time they were &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Tech-Culture/2012/1220/Brothers-Grimm-saved-classic-fairy-tales-by-changing-them-forever&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;changed in order to become more politically correct&lt;/a&gt;. Which version of the Grimms' fairy tales was least affected by &amp;quot;political correctness&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read that lots of the Grimms' tales were actually translations from a French book. What is the name of this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10897" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T11:06:44.690" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T12:16:04.297" Title="Original Grimms' fairy tales" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;brothers-grimm&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15683" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15806" CreationDate="2020-09-16T17:09:33.767" Score="3" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I once read a book about an American ex-spy, but remember nether its title nor the author. I remember that author was an American ex-spy who took part in covert ops in several countries including Panama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book starts with the author's young years when he worked for the Peace Corps. I think there was an insight into his school years before that, but not sure. Later he was recruited by (I think) by the CIA (he had a woman handler if I'm not mistaken). He helped to lobby USA oil interests, to offer something cheap for the oil that country had. There was an example he described when the US offered some Arabian country (Saudi Arabia or the UAE) street cleaning equipment and trash recycling technology in exchange for their oil because they thought that it was below their dignity to sweep streets and only goats walked the streets eating trash laying around.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He also took part in ensuring the US interests in the Panama Canal.&#xA;At the end of the book he had enough of the service, he founded his own company (I think it was an IT company) with one of his friends or former colleagues. He also had a child (could be a son, but it's probably a daughter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not any of the books with &amp;quot;Panama&amp;quot; in the title, not one of John le Carré's books and not &lt;em&gt;The Spy Who Dumped Me&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be grateful if anyone could help me with identifying the author and the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10899" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T09:31:40.757" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:50:55.203" Title="A book by an American ex-spy who took part in the Panama canal-related coup" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-16T19:31:26.887" Score="2" ViewCount="384" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Maya Angelou's poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48991/the-mothering-blackness&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Mothering Blackness&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there's a verse that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She came down creeping&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;       here to the black arms waiting&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;       now to the warm heart waiting&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;       She came down creeping&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not entirely sure what the line &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;...rime of alien dreams...&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is supposed to mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First off, I don't recognize the word &amp;quot;rime&amp;quot;. I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/rime&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;looked it up&lt;/a&gt;, and apparently it's like a thin freeze of ice droplets (which matches with the &amp;quot;befrosts&amp;quot;).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But... I'm still not clear on the line. What are the &amp;quot;alien dreams&amp;quot;, and what's the &amp;quot;rime&amp;quot; that comes from them? Why are they befrosting her face? What's going on in this line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T18:00:35.360" Title="What does &quot;rime of alien dreams&quot; mean in Maya Angelou's &quot;The Mothering Blackness&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2020-09-16T20:10:50.290" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The way that I read this stanza is that the daughter has been woken by nightmares (“alien dreams”) and has come downstairs weeping to her mother for comfort. Here “alien” is used in the sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;alien, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Of a foreign nature or character; strange, unfamiliar, different. Also: hostile, repugnant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “rime” that “befrosts” her face is a metaphor for the tears that coat her face:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;rime, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 1.d.&lt;/strong&gt; In extended use: a thin layer or coating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of “rime” and “befrosts” contrasts with the “warm heart” of line 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T20:10:50.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11835" CreationDate="2020-09-16T20:40:07.637" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The ceremony of innocence is drowned&amp;quot;to my level understanding it means that  ceremony of innocence..is the act of being a good faith and hope even though our hope is been drowned.&#xA;Infact the role of any ceremony is to keep us from forgetting what must not to be forgotten.....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10903" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T20:40:07.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15687" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15688" CreationDate="2020-09-16T21:23:34.467" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/200/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stolen Ingots&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Mr. Badger was standing on a bridge watching a barge and brawley&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes. There’s a little ramshackle bawley from Leigh—but her crew of two ragamuffins are not Leigh men. And they’ve made a mess of their visit—got their craft on the mud &lt;strong&gt;on the top of the spring tide&lt;/strong&gt;. There she is, on that spit; and there she’ll be till next spring tide. But I’ve been over her carefully and I’ll swear the stuff isn’t aboard her. I had all the ballast out and emptied the lazarette and the chain locker.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And what about the barge?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“She’s a regular trader here. Her crew—the skipper and his son—are quite respectable men and they belong here. &lt;strong&gt;There they go in that boat&lt;/strong&gt;; I expect they are &lt;strong&gt;off on&lt;/strong&gt; this tide. But they seem to be making for the bawley.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually these bolded parts are a bit obscure for me, but that's my guessing about them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;on the top of = drived by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;there they go&amp;quot;, I don't know why didn't he say &amp;quot;they do&amp;quot; directly, or does he mean &amp;quot;they usually go&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;off on = not sailing during&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is that correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:54:19.120" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:54:19.120" Title="What does &quot;on the top of the spring tide&quot; mean in &quot;Stolen Ingots&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15687" CreationDate="2020-09-16T21:56:14.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘On the top of the spring tide’ refers to the timing of when they got their boar stuck in the mud, which in turn affects &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; it got stuck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ‘Spring Tide’ is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tide of maximum amplitude after new and full moon, when the forces of the sun and moon act in the same direction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;i.e. it is one of the two highest tides in a month. To get stuck in the mud on the top of the spring tide means that they ran their boat into mud while the Spring Tide was at its peak. So immediately after they got stuck the water level started to drop away, leaving their boat stranded. When the tide drops the sea retracts from the shore leaving areas that were shallowly covered, exposed. The boat is stuck in mud above the water level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There they go in that boat; I expect they are off on this tide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this as the speaker indicating to their interlocutor that the people are leaving in the boat &lt;em&gt;right now&lt;/em&gt;, as in ‘Look! There they go...’&#xA;‘Off on this tide’ indicates that they are leaving (off) as the tide ebbs out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vessel can exploit the tides for getting in and out of harbour, rather than trying to go in the opposite direction from the tide, you have an easier time coming in on a rising tide and going out on an ebbing tide. It’s easier to ‘go with the flow’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-09-16T22:08:16.567" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T22:08:16.567" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15657" CreationDate="2020-09-16T22:28:41.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For grammatical reasons it does not, in English, mean &amp;quot;The ring that is lord of the other rings&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The&lt;/strong&gt; Lord of the Rings&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;  refers to a being who is lord over all the rings including the &amp;quot;One ring that rules them all&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Lord&lt;/strong&gt; of the Rings&amp;quot; would be ambiguous only as a &lt;em&gt;title&lt;/em&gt; because some abbreviation is allowed in a title (such as omitting the definite article). However, in normal usage, &amp;quot;Lord of the Rings&amp;quot;, without the initial definite article, would normally refer to a ring whose function or title was to be a lord of other rings. This would be even clearer if the phrase was &amp;quot;Lord of Rings&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the answer, in my opinion, is No, there is no ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10741" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T22:28:41.320" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15690" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-16T22:46:08.247" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camus says somewhere that there is only death in the universe. By 'death' he simply means physics (energy, matter). He is rejecting the metaphysics of a universal dualism: Life and Death. I believe this is an epigram from one of his notebooks, but in any case I would appreciate being reminded of where he wrote this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10832" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T08:37:50.857" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T08:37:50.857" Title="Notebook epigram referring to 'only death in the universe'" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2020-09-16T23:06:36.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a beautiful parallelism between the fourth lines of each stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;white tears icicle gold plains of her face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rime of alien dreams befrosts her rich brown face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;threats of northern winds die on the desert’s face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;white tears&amp;quot; that &amp;quot;icicle&amp;quot;, the &amp;quot;rime&amp;quot;, and the &amp;quot;threats of northern winds&amp;quot; all are  associated with whiteness and cold, while the faces in these lines are gold, brown, and sand-colored, respectively. And the word &amp;quot;gold&amp;quot; resonates with &amp;quot;rich&amp;quot;, while &amp;quot;plains&amp;quot; resonates with &amp;quot;desert&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in these lines whiteness is associated with cold and alienness, while brownness is associated with warmth and richness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is actually going on? It's hard to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees's answer suggests that the second stanza may be talking about waking up form nightmares; if it is, they are possibly about the incident that precipitated the first stanza. And the third stanza suggests that she eventually recovers from her experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also seems possible that the three stanzas are about three different girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T18:00:35.360" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T18:00:35.360" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15628" CreationDate="2020-09-16T23:50:20.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think the first translation you mention is more accurate.&lt;/strong&gt; Still, omitting comma in first line and adding in last would be more accurate, and here is why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In original it's&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ja tarsjusz syn tarsjusza,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wnuk tarsjusza i prawnuk,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ja tarsjusz&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wiem, jak bardzo trzeba być tarsjuszem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first row it's not &amp;quot;Ja jestem tarsjusz&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Ja jestem tarsjuszem&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Jestem tarsjusz&amp;quot;, ''Jestem tarsjuszem'' - while &amp;quot;Ja&amp;quot; (I) can be omitted, omitting &amp;quot;jestem&amp;quot; (am) would normally go with comma (Ja, tarsjusz = I, tarsier). So, it's rather a matter of punctuation then grammar. Why is it like that? I don't think it's conveying any childishness, rather it makes the line a sort of &amp;quot;not a list&amp;quot;. Together with second line it conveys certain... timelessness, or universality, which should also be translated. That's why there should be no articles in translation - it's not about a tarsier, or the tarsier - not any particular, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/246032/man-or-a-the-man&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. It also preserves highly condensed from of these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1355" LastActivityDate="2020-09-16T23:50:20.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11835" CreationDate="2020-09-17T01:08:47.810" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;His usage of similar imagery in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14635/a-prayer-for-my-daughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Prayer for My Daughter&lt;/a&gt; shows some of his thinking on connections between ceremony and innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And may her bridegroom bring her to a house&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For arrogance and hatred are the wares&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Peddled in the thoroughfares.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How but in custom and in ceremony&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are innocence and beauty born?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And custom for the spreading laurel tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ceremonious order of a good home is the source of innocence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T01:08:47.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15695" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-14T19:19:09.777" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story, so far...&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a kid, I read a story about a guy, who was sent to a country as a spy. He ended up working with doing propaganda for said countrys government, but is secretly sending messages to resistance people, informing them on weapon drops and warning people about where raids will be conducted and who is suspected of being with the resistance etc.&#xA;In the end, it is revealed that the government knew he was a spy (or at least suspected it), but they didn't care, because he was doing such a good job recruting and keeping morals high, that whatever they lost, was easily gained back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What else&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read the story back in the mid 90'es, but it is possible that the comic was actually older than that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think it was a short story and not a full comic in it self.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I also read a lot of Tales from the Crypt/Creepshow, and I have a feeling that it could be one of those &amp;quot;I thought I was doing good, but actually did bad&amp;quot; stories. This also fits with it story being a short, and not a full comic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is quite possible that the setting was WWII and the guy was from one of the allied countries, the bad guys (of course) being the Nazis.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I do believe that the comic itself was in black and white&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've been searching for the story using key terms, but &amp;quot;WWII propaganda comic&amp;quot; really covers a lot and I cannot think of any names or places, so it's hard to be more specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Fizk" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T07:52:46.770" Title="WWII (?) comic about a spy doing propaganda for the bad guys" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15696" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-17T09:03:33.780" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 2008 I read a book (fiction) about a boy living with a carnival. The carnival was a bunch of radical environmentalists. I can't recall the title or the author so I'm hoping somebody on here can help me.&#xA;I read the book whilst sitting beside my mother's bed in hospital and I have brain dog about that period of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10908" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T09:34:04.563" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T09:34:04.563" Title="Finding a book involving a boy and carnival" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-17T10:46:57.490" Score="3" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the Peruvian writer Sui-Yun's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/september-2020-asian-peruvian-four-poems-sui-yun-jennifer-shyue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Four Short Poems&lt;/a&gt; (translated from Spanish by Jennifer Shyue) is written as addressed to &amp;quot;Eve, my eternal mother&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope I'm not being excessively dirty-minded in reading the verse about &amp;quot;licking the tip of evil&amp;quot; as a sexual reference: particularly in light of the poems as a whole being described as meditations &amp;quot;on sin and sensual pleasure&amp;quot;, and the last two containing more blatant sexual imagery. But the rest of the poem is more confusing to me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To turn away from evil&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’ve crammed my jars full&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of somber recollections&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;calling to the unknown silks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;radiating from my body&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To turn away from evil&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’ve added every letter of your body&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to my body, tattooing myself whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;jars&amp;quot; presumably refers to jars of memory, being filled with recollections to remind the speaker to turn away from evil. But what are the &amp;quot;unknown silks radiating from my body&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last verse is even stranger: why would the speaker tattoo every letter of Eve onto her body? What does this represent? How does it (or for that matter the things described in the earlier verses) help her to erase sins or &amp;quot;turn away from evil&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the jars, silks, and tattoos actually symbolise something else? Is there some biblical significance, perhaps relating to the original story of Adam and Eve?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T10:46:57.490" Title="What do the silks and tattoos represent in Sui-Yun's poem about Eve?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;sui-yun&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15700" CreationDate="2020-09-17T10:58:41.260" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/200/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stolen Ingots&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Mr. Badger was standing on a bridge watching a boat running with a stolen case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Badger cursed volubly, and, turning to the fishermen, exclaimed in a rather offensively peremptory tone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I want a boat. Now. This instant.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The elder piscator regarded him doggedly and replied: “All right. I ain’t got no objection.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Where can I get a boat&lt;/strong&gt;?” the inspector demanded, nearly purple with excitement and anxiety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Where do you think?” the mariner responded, evidently nettled by the inspector’s masterful tone. “Pastrycook’s? Or &lt;strong&gt;livery stables&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Look here,” said Badger. “I’m a police officer and I want to board that barge, and I am prepared to pay handsomely. Now where can I get a boat?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't get the connection between a boat and livery stables?! &lt;strong&gt;Or did he just mock him?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:52:28.347" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:52:28.347" Title="What's the connection between a boat and livery stables in &quot;Stolen Ingots&quot;?" Tags="&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15681" CreationDate="2020-09-17T11:23:50.210" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scene you refer to takes place in chapter 56. In Chapter 57 we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from what the report of their engagement could originate, Elizabeth was at a loss to imagine; till she recollected that &lt;em&gt;his&lt;/em&gt; being the intimate friend of Bingley, and &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; being the sister of Jane, was enough, at a time when the expectation of one wedding made everybody eager for another, to supply the idea. She had not herself forgotten to feel that the marriage of her sister must bring them more frequently together. And her neighbours at Lucas Lodge, therefore (for through their communication with the Collinses, the report, she concluded, had reached Lady Catherine), had only set &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; down as almost certain and immediate, which &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; had looked forward to as possible at some future time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Elizabeth is pondering how Lady Catherine found out, she remembers that the respective closeness of Darcy and herself to Bingley and Jane, whom everyone is expecting will marry, is enough to give rise to a general expectation that one wedding will lead to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had, herself, thought that she would see Darcy more often once Jane and Bingley wed, and that Charlotte's family at Lucas Lodge had likely taken that fact as indicative of a certainty of a match and communicated that to Mr Collins and Charlotte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is borne out a little later on when Mr Bennet calls Elizabeth to his study to discuss a letter he has received from Mr Collins: (bolding mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I have received a letter this morning that has astonished me exceedingly. As it principally concerns yourself, you ought to know its contents. I did not know before, that I had &lt;strong&gt;two daughters on the brink of matrimony&lt;/strong&gt;. Let me congratulate you on a very important conquest.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colour now rushed into Elizabeth’s cheeks in the instantaneous conviction of its being a letter from the nephew, instead of the aunt; and she was undetermined whether most to be pleased that he explained himself at all, or offended that his letter was not rather addressed to herself; when her father continued:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You look conscious. Young ladies have great penetration in such matters as these; but I think I may defy even your sagacity, to discover the name of your admirer. &lt;strong&gt;This letter is from Mr. Collins&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“From Mr. Collins! and what can he have to say?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Something very much to the purpose of course. He begins with congratulations on the approaching nuptials of my eldest daughter, of which, it seems, &lt;strong&gt;he has been told by some of the good-natured, gossiping Lucases&lt;/strong&gt;. I shall not sport with your impatience, by reading what he says on that point. What relates to yourself, is as follows: ‘Having thus offered you the sincere congratulations of Mrs. Collins and myself on this happy event, let me now add a short hint on the subject of another; of which we have been advertised by the same authority. &lt;strong&gt;Your daughter Elizabeth, it is presumed, will not long bear the name of Bennet&lt;/strong&gt;, after her elder sister has resigned it, and the chosen partner of her fate may be reasonably looked up to as one of the most illustrious personages in this land.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Can you possibly guess, Lizzy, who is meant by this? ‘This young gentleman is blessed, in a peculiar way, with every thing the heart of mortal can most desire,—splendid property, noble kindred, and extensive patronage. Yet in spite of all these temptations, let me warn my cousin Elizabeth, and yourself, of what evils you may incur by a precipitate closure with this gentleman’s proposals, which, of course, you will be inclined to take immediate advantage of.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Have you any idea, Lizzy, who this gentleman is? But now it comes out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“‘My motive for cautioning you is as follows. We have reason to imagine that his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, does not look on the match with a friendly eye.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Mr. Darcy, you see, is the man! Now, Lizzy, I think I have surprised you. Could he, or the Lucases, have pitched on any man within the circle of our acquaintance, whose name would have given the lie more effectually to what they related&lt;/strong&gt;? Mr. Darcy, who never looks at any woman but to see a blemish, and who probably never looked at you in his life! It is admirable!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T11:23:50.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15698" CreationDate="2020-09-17T12:43:22.003" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no more connection between a livery stable and a boat than there is a Pastrycook’s and a boat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mariner is mocking the Inspector sarcastically, by suggesting businesses that have nothing to do with boats, because he thinks the Inspector’s question is ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T12:43:22.003" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15701" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-17T15:46:12.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T15:46:12.437" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T15:46:12.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15702" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-17T15:46:12.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the life and works of A.A. Milne (1882 – 1956), an English author famous for his work 'Winnie the Pooh'." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T19:32:16.073" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T19:32:16.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15684" CreationDate="2020-09-17T16:03:07.740" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While most interpretations of this poem that one finds online describe the work as clearly relating to a mother and daughter, I find myself wondering if it relates to a different theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was released in a 1972 collection, putting it in the wake of Angelou's own soujourn in Egypt and Ghana from 1961 to 1965. She first went to Egypt with her then partner Vusumzi Make, but with her son, Guy, moved to Ghana after breaking up with make.&#xA;Ghana at that time ran a programme encouraging African-Americans to move there. (Ghana had recently become the first colony in the Sub-Saharan region of Africa to gain its independence from European colonial powers under the leadership of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah -&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_Ghana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia: African-Americans in Ghana&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this, there is a possible reading of the poem as an autobiographical work where 'she' represents Angelou and the Mothering Blackness represents Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this reading the alien dreams  may be seen as the nightmare of the slave trade itself, taking ancestors to an alien land. ‘Rime’ would have the meaning of the salt of dried tears looking like a layer of frost, dried tears being appropriate to recovering from a nightmare and the idea of frost being a contrast to the welcoming heat of sub-Saharan Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to both the slave trade and freedom is emphasised in the third verse, Hagar was a slave, taken out of her own country and then cast aside with her son. Sheba was a Queen who returned, by some stories, to her own land to bring up her son alone. This may be a metaphor for Angelous' break up with Make and arrival in Ghana with her son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T16:21:37.787" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T16:21:37.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15605" CreationDate="2020-09-17T16:33:33.163" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm going to offer two answers, one from a famous literary critic, the other my own formulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important writer who is now out of favor (for obvious reasons), Ezra Pound, once proclaimed in his &lt;em&gt;The ABC of Reading&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Literature is news that STAYS news.&amp;quot; There is a metaphor here; the word &amp;quot;news&amp;quot; refers not only to any text that we read for information, but a text that is written quickly, read once or maybe twice at most, then discarded. It is a text containing information whose value ages quickly, often in a matter of hours. (Only historians are interested in old newspapers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Pound uses it in a paradoxical fashion: we read the text, extract the information, yet come back to the text in order to extract more information. Literature, he implies, is a text whose information whose value is perennial; not only can one read it again and again, but it can be read for profit centuries or even millennia later. Texts that Pound recommends include such ancient works as Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, almost 3 millennia old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to the question how do we determine if a text or work is literature? That is the purpose of literary criticism, which provides approaches that allow us to return time and again to reap new and fresh meanings. The best works of literature are those that are richest in meaning, and the best readers are those who continue to find new meanings in a work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leads to my second definition, which is not as artfully written as Pound's, but I feel a little more accessible: literature is writing where the author has taken care with her or his words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you compare a work that is considered literature to one that isn't, one constant is that the first always reveals its creator has taken time in its creation. A newspaper article or an airplane novel can be poorly written, as long as it accomplishes its goal: in the first case, to convey information; in the second, to entertain. But a work of literature will draw us back with a memorable phrase, a juxtaposition of scenes, an attention to significant detail. The author has infused those items with meaning that continues to burn with a hard, gemlike flame long after we left off reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a careful writer, sometimes by conscious intent but more often by inexplicable intuition, will infuse their text with meanings that can only be reaped through tools we must be taught to use, such as the &amp;quot;close reading&amp;quot; of the New Critics. Maybe even thru the approaches contemporary literary critics offer, if one can understand them. (I admit I don't always. While I am fascinated in how Roland Barthes prefigured the idea of hypertext, I am more than happy to leave de Saussure in his fogbanks of ambiguities.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when you come down to it, after the experts have had their say, and one has digested their insights and proclamations, so much depends upon the words an author has chosen to assemble her or his text with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if I've met the requirement of relying on &amp;quot;available academic literature&amp;quot;, but in offering my answers I have alluded both explicitly and implicitly to a few whom a curious reader might wish to study further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8480" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T11:57:25.803" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T11:57:25.803" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15705" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15709" CreationDate="2020-09-17T17:49:20.667" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/200/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stolen Ingots&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, there was a boat that chases a barge in a tidal river and amongst muddy banks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile the fugitive barge, having got some two miles start, seemed to be drawing ahead. But it was only at intervals that we could see her, for the tide was falling fast and we were mostly hemmed in by the high, muddy banks. Only when we entered a straight reach of the river could we see &lt;strong&gt;her sails over the land&lt;/strong&gt;; and every time that she came into view, she appeared perceptibly smaller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Still gaining?&amp;quot; asked Badger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Aye. She's a-going to slip across the tail of Foulness Sand into the deep channel. And that's the last we shall see of her.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But can't we get into the channel the same way?&amp;quot; demanded Badger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, d'ye see,&amp;quot; replied the fisherman, &amp;quot;'tis like this. Tide's a-running out, but there'll be enough for her. It'll just carry her out through the Whitaker Channel and across the spit. &lt;strong&gt;Then it'll turn, and up she'll go, London way, on the flood&lt;/strong&gt;. But we shall catch the flood-tide in the Whitaker Channel, and a &lt;strong&gt;rare old job&lt;/strong&gt; we'll have to get out; and when we do get out, that barge'll be miles away.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could its sails be over the land?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And as for the second bolded sentence &amp;quot;Then it'll turn, and up she'll go, London way, on the flood.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a bit obscure for me because of these too much commas!&#xA;Does it mean &amp;quot;the tide will turn london way, and she will go on the flood&amp;quot;? or &amp;quot;she herself will go london way?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for the last bolded thing, what's meant by &amp;quot;rare old job&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:51:48.830" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:51:48.830" Title="What's meant by &quot;her sails over the land!&quot; in &quot;Stolen Ingots&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15707" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-17T18:19:30.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T18:19:30.337" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T18:19:30.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15708" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-17T18:19:30.337" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Sui-Yun (pseudonym of Katie Wong Loo, born 1955), a Peruvian poet born of Chinese parents, and her life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [spanish-literature]. Questions about her poems should also be tagged [poetry]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T22:02:36.190" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T22:02:36.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15705" CreationDate="2020-09-17T18:21:07.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are sailing on a navigable river, the river has twists and turns through the landscape. This means that the pursuers cannot always see the river itself, but when the barge’s sails are not screened from their view by landform or vegetation they see them across the intervening land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to the ‘then it’ll turn’ section: I looked up the ‘Whitaker channel’ and founds this to be near the mouth of the River Crouch. The River Crouch seems to be the next navigable river going north from the Thames, so they may be on the Crouch or it’s smaller tributary the Roach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore we can understand that the ebbing tide, which the barge left on in your previous question, will still be high enough to carry the barge out into the sea, over a sand spit at the river mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the tide will turn and the rising tide (also called the flood tide)will make it easy going for the barge, having sailed down the coast to the Thames, to sail up it towards London on the tide. Going with the flow both out of the Crouch and into the Thames.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our gallant pursuers however are too far behind the barge to benefit from the tides and will have to fight a rising tide, ‘go against the flow’, to get out of the mouth of the Crouch into the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ‘rare old job’ means an extraordinarily hard task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T18:29:44.480" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T18:29:44.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15710" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15711" CreationDate="2020-09-17T20:48:43.293" Score="2" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;When the Emperor Was Divine&lt;/em&gt;, by Julie Otsuka:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He put down his suitcase and looked at her. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Did you...&amp;quot; she [the mother] said &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Every day,&amp;quot; he [the father] replied. Then he got down on his knees and he took us into his arms and over and over again, he uttered our names, but still we could not be sure it was him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point in the novel, the father has just returned from an internment camp. I cannot find any direct references to something secret he might do every day, though I suspect it is religion (Shinto) related. What is the mother asking?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10918" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-17T21:49:13.757" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T22:00:17.140" Title="What is meant here by &quot;Did you...&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;julie-otsuka&gt;&lt;when-the-emperor-was-divine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15710" CreationDate="2020-09-17T22:00:17.140" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, I don't see a Shinto allusion there. Speaking of religious ties among ordinary Japanese families, Buddhism is just as likely a source of spirituality as Shintoism. That said, there is no sign this is about anything ritualistic or religious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In preceding passages the father returns home, morally beat and physically different, so much so the kids don't even recognize him. The mother still does. As a loving and worried wife, first and foremost she wants to know if he is okay, what kind of life did he live every day after they were separated, and how he spent his days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My understanding is the family is uprooted from California and sent to a concentration camp in Topaz Utah. The family is broken up and separated, the kids and mother coming back home earlier than the father. The dialogue you cite is excerpted from the part where the father is just coming back home with a seeming disconnection that shocks his kids and makes him seem like a stranger to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mother and father are talking about different things but not at cross purposes because they understand each other. The mother is apparently most concerned with her husband's well-being and life in the camp, so her complete sentences would have been: &amp;quot;Did you suffer in the camp?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Did you eat well?&amp;quot; I would be greatly surprised that a wife and mother would want to know if her husband prayed every day the day he comes back from the internment camp. Even if she is that concerned with religious formality she would first make sure her husband is okay and then ascribe his well-being to kami-sama (the gods).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The father on the other hand of course is more concerned about his family rather than himself. So he is replying &amp;quot;I thought of you every day.&amp;quot; (Very likely in Japanese sentimentality and sensibility. This is something people would say in Japanese.) &amp;quot;Every day I wondered how you were.&amp;quot; or in a more American way (they are a Japanese American family after all) &amp;quot;I missed you all every day.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastActivityDate="2020-09-17T22:00:17.140" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15712" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15738" CreationDate="2020-09-18T01:36:37.020" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many years back, in school, I read a story about a tourist who goes to a new country and gets a tattoo from a renowned artist. When the artist dies, the two countries fight for the rights to the tattoo on the back and the tourist is detained. A diplomatic crisis ensues. Finally, a fanatic throws acid on the back of the tourist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for more work from the author as this story highlights many aspects of our society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a recollection from my memory and might be inaccurate. Could somebody point me to the story, author, etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10920" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T10:26:05.017" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T07:16:54.733" Title="Looking for the author of a story about a tourist who got a tattoo from a renowned artist" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15714" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15729" CreationDate="2020-09-18T12:08:38.683" Score="8" ViewCount="1582" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the book &amp;quot;Moonwalking with einstein&amp;quot; by &lt;strong&gt;Joshua Foer&lt;/strong&gt; In chapter 7 &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;The end of Remembering&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the last places where this tradition of recitation still survives is in&#xA;the reading of the Torah, an ancient handwritten scroll that can take upward&#xA;of a year to inscribe. &lt;strong&gt;The Torah is written without vowels&lt;/strong&gt; or punctuation&#xA;(though it does have spaces, an innovation that came to Hebrew before&#xA;Greek), which means it’s extremely difficult to sight-read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot understand what he means by saying that Torah is written without vowels. Can someone help me regarding this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10924" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T12:40:37.823" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T13:58:11.633" Title="Torah is written without vowels?" Tags="&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15714" CreationDate="2020-09-18T12:38:48.360" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Vowels in Hebrew - called n'kudot - are written as dots and lines surrounding the letters. In an actual Torah - written on parchment - these symbols aren't there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example, here's a picture of a book called a &amp;quot;tikkun&amp;quot;, which is used to help learn the chanting for the traditional way to read the Torah:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.imgur.com/I5Xjtpq.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;description below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the right side is text with punctuation and vowels. You'll notice that there are dots and lines and other symbols surrounding the text. (Along with the n'kudot is the &amp;quot;t'amei mikra&amp;quot;, which show the traditional chanting tune.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the left is the text as it appears in the Torah. There is no punctuation or vowels. (You'll notice that there are symbols on top of certain letters - these are called &amp;quot;crowns&amp;quot; and are decorational for the most part.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T12:43:53.683" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T12:43:53.683" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-18T13:57:28.687" Score="2" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;As all of us who have read Silmarillion know, Sauron wasn't the original &amp;quot;Lord of Darkness&amp;quot;. In fact, he is a much lesser, and later, one. Melkor (AKA &amp;quot;Morgoth&amp;quot;) was the original. Knowing this, it's almost difficult to take Sauron seriously, since he wasn't one of the original beings from the very beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was always confused as to why Tolkien had Sauron create The One ring, rather than Melkor. If Melkor had made it, at least this would explain why Sauron doesn't just take a short stroll to his nearby Mount Doom and forge a new ring instead of bothering searching for elusive hobbits all over the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Melkor is banished into some sort of &amp;quot;empty black void&amp;quot; for eternity, that explains why he cannot make another ring (or do anything else). But Sauron can, unless I have missed some detail explaining why this is not possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This new ring could be at least equal or (more likely) &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; powerful than the first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet he doesn't. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10925" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T13:57:28.687" Title="If Sauron made The One ring, why couldn't he just make another, even better, instead of searching for the first?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;the-silmarillion&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15134" CreationDate="2020-09-18T14:52:18.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you said, the literal meaning of the words humorously indicates a less-threatening witch. A possible reason for the &lt;em&gt;exact&lt;/em&gt; choice of &amp;quot;Faintly Macabre&amp;quot; is that, when spoken quickly, it &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; a lot like a name, more than your proposed similar names &amp;quot;Mildly Disturbing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Slightly Scary&amp;quot; do. For example, &amp;quot;Macabre&amp;quot; sounds a bit like &amp;quot;MacArthur&amp;quot; or other &amp;quot;Mac-&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Mc-&amp;quot; last names. And many female first names in English end in &amp;quot;-y&amp;quot;, like &amp;quot;Dorothy&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Rosemary&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Hilary&amp;quot;, including some &amp;quot;-ly&amp;quot; ones like &amp;quot;Emily&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Beverly&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Lesley&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Shirley&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Faintly Macabre&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Miss Macabre&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Aunt Faintly&amp;quot;, etc. all seem to me like they could &amp;quot;flow&amp;quot; in speech like an ordinary, unremarkable name. Plus, using less common, more academic words helps with this effect, making it easier to half-forget that they're real words and imagine it as a real name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1039" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T14:52:18.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:53:55.400" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/september-2020-poetry-contest-learning-late-letters-nguyen-hoang-guyen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Learning Late Letters&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a poem originally written in Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, was one of the winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/poetry-contest-winners-2020-words-without-bordersacademy-of-american-poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest&lt;/a&gt;. The narrator is remembering their dead father and his letters. The middle part of the text consists of 36 short two-word sentences beginning with &amp;quot;Die&amp;quot;, and in the following paragraph the number 36 is repeated many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is there any particular significance to the number 36 here?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it regarded as a magical number in Vietnamese culture? Does the usage of this number, to a Vietnamese reader of the original text, imply something, like a particular type of magic or people?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T16:53:55.400" Title="What is the significance of 36 in the Vietnamese poem &quot;Learning Late Letters&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;vietnamese-literature&gt;&lt;nguyen-hoang-quyen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:58:22.957" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T16:58:22.957" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T16:58:22.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-18T16:58:22.957" Score="0" Body="Questions about any work of literature which was originally written in the Vietnamese language, whether written or published in Vietnam or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T10:46:59.387" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T10:46:59.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15721" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:08:35.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T17:08:35.467" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T17:08:35.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15722" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:08:35.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Japanese-American writer Julie Otsuka (born 1962) and her life as a writer.  " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:22:32.397" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:22:32.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15723" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:10:30.793" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T17:10:30.793" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T17:10:30.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15724" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:10:30.793" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'When the Emperor Was Divine' (2002) by Japanese-American author Julie Otsuka. Always use this tag together with [julie-otsuka]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T10:47:45.530" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T10:47:45.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15725" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:17:59.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-18T17:17:59.490" LastActivityDate="2020-09-18T17:17:59.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15726" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-18T17:17:59.490" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Vietnamese translator and writer Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên. Note that questions about works which were only translated by him should instead be tagged with the name of the original author." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:29:43.453" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:29:43.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15727" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-19T00:43:06.133" Score="26" ViewCount="7270" Body="&lt;p&gt;Something which strikes me both while reading the book and watching the movie is the very striking name &amp;quot;Wormtongue&amp;quot;. He might as well be named &amp;quot;Evil Dude&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems over-the-top sleazy and destructive, even &lt;em&gt;looking&lt;/em&gt; downright evil and insane. Why do they allow him to give &amp;quot;advice&amp;quot; to the king when he is so obviously a bad influence and with such a revealing name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10929" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T20:23:06.220" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T20:23:06.220" Title="Isn't Gríma Wormtongue a very revealing name?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15727" CreationDate="2020-09-19T01:30:27.883" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Grima calls Gandalf &amp;quot;Lathspell&amp;quot; -- Ill News -- because he hated him and wanted Theoden to mistrust him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, &amp;quot;Wormtongue&amp;quot; is what people who already hate him call him.  It is true that Gandalf says to Theoden &amp;quot;him that all but you call Wormtongue,&amp;quot; but that was probably a slow development.  People call him that to urge others to mistrust him and naturally picked the most loaded name they could.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The looks, however, are Jackson's choice.  He's less impressively and obviously evil in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T01:30:27.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15714" CreationDate="2020-09-19T03:13:04.940" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;As other answers have mentioned, what is meant is simply what is said: many renderings of the Torah leave out the vowel markers (and punctuation). As several comments have offered, this is a common feature of a lot of Hebrew text, and more broadly, is found in quite a few languages (off the top of my head, I believe Arabic is also often written this way, and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; written this way—that writing system doesn’t even &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; a way to indicate vowels). You sometimes see words from these languages rendered this way in the Roman alphabet, particularly 1. the names of deities, and 2. ancient words where the vowels used are uncertain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are Hebrew and Arabic often written without their vowel markings? Because for a long time, they didn’t have any, the same as Egyptian hieroglyphics. These writing systems are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;abjads&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; after the first four letters of Arabic, just as “alphabets” (which have vowels) are named for the first two letters of Greek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I think is the real impetus behind this question is something more like “How?” or perhaps “Why?” And the answer is simply because it works, and changing it makes things &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; to read (for those who already know how to read it the other way), not easier. Fluent readers don’t read letter-by-letter, after all; they recognize words, or even phrases, and don’t check each individual letter. For a semi-infamous example in English, there’s the “Cmabrigde Uinervtisy” chain e-mail that seemed to end up in everyone’s inboxes around the turn of the millenium. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; has a solid write-up of it, but as a demonstration, look at this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chain e-mail isn’t particularly accurate—and definitely leaves out a lot of details. But nonetheless, this &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; fairly readable for most English readers, and those mostly aren’t English words. There was another similar chain e-mail—that I can’t find now, so I suppose it was less famous—that had you counting the letter “o” in a fairly-long passage, and most readers got it wrong because they consistently skipped the word “of” even when they were looking for o’s. And that’s because the brain is lazy and skips work when it can—so if it can tell at a glance what a word probably is, it’s not going to carefully go through all the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Same thing happens in every other language, and that includes those written in abjads. And since the reader’s brain is just recognizing words, it doesn’t need vowel marks—indeed, that might mess up your recognition of the word if you are used to it without.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nd w cld d th sm n Nglsh f w wntd—ftr ll, cn y rd ths?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; And we could do the same in English if we wanted—after all, can you read this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Not easily, I’d guess, but you probably more-or-less can—and if this was normal, it likely wouldn’t even be hard).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other thing here, as TRiG and slebetman mentioned in comments, is that the languages themselves lend themselves to this kind of writing style. In the English example above, there are a fair few ambiguous entries, even only considering common words. Other languages could be worse—most Romance languages require vowels, because a word may well differ &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; in its vowels when it is declined and/or conjugated. Since those languages rely on those different forms to make a sentence intelligible, you really can’t leave the vowels out. But the abjads for Arabic and Hebrew are, well, designed with those languages in mind—they can handle the different words of those languages with limited ambiguity. Those languages &lt;em&gt;don’t&lt;/em&gt; often rely on vowels as the only distinctions between words. If they did, their scripts would most likely have been alphabets instead of abjads, because they would have needed to indicate vowels to make it understood. But since they don’t, the abjad works fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Technically, Egyptian hieroglyphics aren’t an abjad, or at least aren’t &lt;em&gt;just&lt;/em&gt; an abjad, though particularly later in their history they were mostly used like one. Basically, this is what happens when you’re the first: you kind of have to figure it out as you go along. Hieroglyphics developed from simple pictograms/icons, which you’d just draw the thing you meant, into more abstract forms representing words (as in many Asian scripts, for example), then syllables (also found in several Asian scripts), and finally letters. The hundreds of pictograms and word-glyphs didn’t go away, though, so all told there are about a thousand hieroglyphics, even though the core abjad that eventually developed is a more reasonable number.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1157" LastEditorUserId="1157" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T19:07:47.543" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T19:07:47.543" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15727" CreationDate="2020-09-19T09:22:34.937" Score="35" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No, except yes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; ‘Wormtongue’ is a deliberately negative name given by his enemies, so it can’t be faulted for being pejorative, even if it’s not as unflattering as it might seem to modern ears. But ‘Gríma’ itself isn’t much better!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15728&quot;&gt;Mary points out&lt;/a&gt;, ‘Wormtongue’ is a nickname applied to Gríma by his opponents (which, Gandalf implies, is everyone but Théoden). We’re not told exactly how Gríma—a sly schemer in a kingdom where warlike deeds are prized—came to be so influential, but it certainly seems to be due to his cunning with words. His depressing speech to Éowyn in the movie is actually Gandalf’s &lt;em&gt;description&lt;/em&gt; of her in the book, but we do get some other examples of Gríma swaying people with words, and even an almost-complimentary response from Gandalf when he calls him ‘bold and cunning… he plays a game with peril and wins a throw.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the name Wormtongue is well earned. Keep in mind that a ‘worm’ doesn’t have to be an earthworm, tapeworm, or anything else we call a ‘worm’ in modern English. Historically any narrow creeping or crawling animal (snakes, slugs, caterpillars) could be termed a ‘worm’. In legend and Tolkien, it’s used for dragons, too, and Smaug certainly had a gift of cunning speech. Here, though, I think the reference is more likely to be to a snake; Gandalf calls Gríma a snake more than once. So ‘Snaketongue’, or &lt;em&gt;maybe&lt;/em&gt; ‘Dragontongue’, is perhaps a less ‘Evildude’ rendering of the nickname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But with all that said… the name Gríma itself is not very positive. Like other examples of the Rohirric language, it’s a real word borrowed from Old English. It means ‘mask’ or ‘secret’, also ‘spectre’, and most positively ‘helmet’ (but we know Helm was a Rohirric name with positive connotations, and it seems unlikely that Gríma would be treated as a synonym). It gets even worse when we consider his father’s name, Gálmód, meaning ‘wanton’! (So bad, in fact, that I’ve encountered the theory that it wasn’t really his father’s name, and that ‘son of Gálmód’ was an insult Gandalf made up.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this is all in keeping with Gríma’s likely inspiration in the character of Unferth, from &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;, whose name Tolkien interpreted as ‘un-peace’ or ‘quarrel’. A sly advisor to the king, opposing the hero(es), bearing an unflattering name? Sounds familiar…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10934" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T09:22:34.937" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15731" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15349" CreationDate="2020-09-19T09:38:56.877" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would say that &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, Théoden was saying he ‘misses’ Gríma in both senses that others have pointed out: he wishes he had someone to advise him &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; he misses Gríma personally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I base this on two passages in Chapter VII, ‘Helm’s Deep’, that I see no-one else quoting. The first is just after Gandalf has ridden away:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What does that mean?’ said one of the guard to Háma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That Gandalf Greyhame has need of haste,’ answered Háma. ‘Ever he goes and comes unlooked-for.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wormtongue, were he here, would not find it hard to explain,’ said the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘True enough,’ said Háma; ‘but for myself, I will wait until I see Gandalf again.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Maybe you will wait long,’ said the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret this passage as saying that Théoden’s guard didn’t fully trust Gandalf and thought maybe he was deserting them. Even though this individual uses the negative nickname ‘Wormtongue’, he seems at least to think Gríma had the right idea in talking Gandalf down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second is after the wall is taken and Théoden is trapped in the Hornburg. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Had I known that the strength of Isengard was grown so great, maybe I should not so rashly have ridden forth to meet it, for all the arts of Gandalf. His counsel seems not now so good as it did under the morning sun.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Théoden is certainly doubting Gandalf now. It is plausible, then, that he had doubts already when they turned aside to Helm’s Deep, and wished he had Gríma to advise him as he had done for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10934" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T09:38:56.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15732" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-19T12:52:48.217" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt; usually refers to the Persian epic poem written by Ferdowsi in 977-1010 CE, although this versification was mostly a rewriting of existing mythological and historical stories of the history of Iran/Persia and more broadly the Greater Iran region, and some of these other stories &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/55480229#55480229&quot;&gt;are also called&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Shahnameh&amp;quot;. According to Wikipedia (although this sentence is uncited), just some parts of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh were his own original writing rather than based on pre-existing tales:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Shahnameh is a monument of poetry and historiography, being mainly the poetical recast of what Ferdowsi, his contemporaries, and his predecessors regarded as the account of Iran's ancient history. Many such accounts already existed in prose, an example being the Abu-Mansuri Shahnameh. A small portion of Ferdowsi's work, in passages scattered throughout the Shahnameh, is entirely of his own conception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Which parts did Ferdowsi conceive of himself rather than using older sources?&lt;/strong&gt; Are there any detailed studies analysing this? I'd be interested to know in which chapters/parts they appear and which events they describe, so that I can find them in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/shahnameh.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;presumably abridged English translation&lt;/a&gt; I'm reading. Also, how is it known that he did create some parts himself, rather than drawing on sources which have since been lost?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-19T22:14:34.023" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T22:14:34.023" Title="Which parts of the Shahnameh were the original work of Ferdowsi?" Tags="&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15733" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16204" CreationDate="2020-09-19T14:32:31.597" Score="4" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my favorite things about Dr. Seuss's &lt;em&gt;One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish&lt;/em&gt; is the combination of rhyme and rhythm or meter in its poems. I think I've found satisfying rhythms for reading all of them except the second-to-last one. This one always sounds off to me when I read it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look what we found&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;in the park&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;in the dark.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;We will take him home.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;We will call him Clark.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;He will live at our house.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;He will grow and grow.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;Will our Mother like this?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;We don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried reading it with emphasis only on the one most stressed word per line, but that ends up feeling very irregular. I've tried something similar to 4-4 time with the emphasis on the back-beat (dactylic tetrameter?), and many pauses. But whatever rhythm I try, I end up tripping over one line or another. The 2nd, 3rd, and last lines are the most different and I imagine require pauses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that many children's books are written to rhyme but not with the meter in mind. But every other poem in this particular book seems to me to fit rhythms well, so I'm guessing this was not supposed to be an exception. Some of the other poems seem to change their rhythm partway through. This one does have a visual break, but the stressed syllables on the lines before and after look similar to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the syllables I hear as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;most&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; stressed, and possibly &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; stressed, in the words of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Look what &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;we&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; found&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;park&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;dark.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; will take him &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;home.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;We&lt;/em&gt; will call him &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Clark.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; will live at &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;our&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; house.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;He&lt;/em&gt; will &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grow&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and grow.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Will&lt;/em&gt; our &lt;em&gt;Mo&lt;/em&gt;ther &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; this?&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't know.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone have a way to read this, that works from start to end?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1039" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T22:33:03.793" Title="How to scan the &quot;Clark&quot; poem from &quot;One Fish, Two Fish&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;dr-seuss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15735" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15605" CreationDate="2020-09-19T17:57:25.397" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For the purposes of Stack Exchange's Literature section, it is clear that any published work about which someone has a question, and seeks an answer here, is literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More broadly, “literature” is one of those words, like “love” and “art” which defy stable, accepted definitions. These are words which different people, different peoples, different eras define differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the Gospels and the Koran, for example. Many scholars of comparative religion might refer to both of them as literature. Many of those who regard them as sacred texts might bristle at lumping them together with “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Castle of Otronto”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I bristle at including as “literature” many of the works discussed on this literature website – at the inclusion, for example, (looking at today’s questions) of Dr. Seuss and “The Phantom Tollbooth”. On the other hand, acquaintances of mine similarly bristle when I claim that “The Lord of the Rings” is literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something else to ponder: I see that in 1828 Daniel Webster (or one of his minions) defined “Literature” not as a body of writing, but as a personal attribute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;LIT'ERATURE, noun [Latin literatura.] Learning; acquaintance with letters or books. literature comprehends a knowledge of the ancient languages, denominated classical, history, grammar, rhetoric, logic, geography, etc. as well as of the sciences. A knowledge of the world and good breeding give luster to literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorUserId="8370" LastEditDate="2020-09-19T18:26:12.090" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T18:26:12.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15737" CreationDate="2020-09-19T19:23:46.053" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/200/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stolen Ingots&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman,the chief officer and the inspector were insisting on that they have captured the stolen ingots, but Thorndyke was a bit skeptical. His friend narrates the situation, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superintendent retired with wrinkled brows and presently returned with a screwdriver, a hammer and a case-opener. Very deftly he broke the seals, extracted the screws and prised up the lid of the case, inside which were one or two folds of thick canvas. Lifting these with something of a flourish, he displayed the upper pair of dull, yellow bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Are you satisfied now, sir?&amp;quot; demanded Badger. &amp;quot;Or do you want to see the other two?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thorndyke looked reflectively at the two bars, and the two officers looked inquiringly at him (&lt;strong&gt;but one might as profitably have watched the expression on the face of a ship's figure&lt;/strong&gt;). Then he took from his pocket a folding foot-rule and quickly measured the three dimensions of one of the bars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant by this obscure bolded statement?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:51:10.213" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:51:10.213" Title="Meaning of &quot;profitably watch the expression on the face of a ship's figure&quot; in &quot;Stolen Ingots&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15736" CreationDate="2020-09-19T21:13:17.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A ‘ship’s figure’ is a carved figurehead. Its expression cannot change so there is nothing to be gained or learned from watching it, as it will always look the same. It profits an observer nothing to watch it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3vMm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/k3vMm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;figurehead in Aberdeen Maritime Museum &quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the Inspector’s face is as unchanging as a carved figurehead and the two officers can learn nothing from staring at the Inspector’s face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-19T22:49:50.510" LastActivityDate="2020-09-19T22:49:50.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15712" CreationDate="2020-09-20T00:28:51.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good samaritan on Reddit shared with me a link to the story by none other than HH Munro (Saki). It is a short story titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/hh-munro-saki/short-story/the-background&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Background&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signor Pincini was, perhaps, the most brilliant master of tattoo craft that Italy had ever known, but his circumstances were decidedly impoverished, and for the sum of six hundred francs he gladly undertook to cover his client's back, from the collar-bone down to the waist-line, with a glowing representation of the Fall of Icarus. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he bore on his back the burden of the dead man's genius. On presenting himself one day in the steaming corridor of a vapour bath, he was at once hustled back into his clothes by the proprietor, who was a North Italian, and who emphatically refused to allow the celebrated Fall of Icarus to be publicly on view without the permission of the municipality of Bergamo. Public interest and official vigilance increased as the matter became more widely known, and Deplis was unable to take a simple dip in the sea or river on the hottest afternoon unless clothed up to the collar-bone in a substantial bathing garment. Later on the authorities of Bergamo conceived the idea that salt water might be injurious to the masterpiece, and a perpetual injunction was obtained which debarred the muchly harassed commercial traveller from sea bathing under any circumstances. Altogether, he was fervently thankful when his firm of employers found him a new range of activities in the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. His thankfulness, however, ceased abruptly at the Franco-Italian frontier. An imposing array of official force barred his departure, and he was sternly reminded of the stringent law which forbids the exportation of Italian works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] And then one day, at an anarchist congress at Genoa, a fellow-worker, in the heat of debate, broke a phial full of corrosive liquid over his back. The red shirt that he was wearing mitigated the effects, but the Icarus was ruined beyond recognition. His assailant was severely reprimanded for assaulting a fellow-anarchist and received seven years imprisonment for defacing a national art treasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10920" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T07:16:54.733" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T07:16:54.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15727" CreationDate="2020-09-20T02:47:58.210" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hello and welcome to this site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you note, that name is a bit too revealing, and Tolkien is much too&#xA;subtle to have used it if he didn’t have a particular reason, in my opinion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An important thing to consider is that the books &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Lord&#xA;of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; were both intended (by Tolkien, in at least several&#xA;occasions) to be seen as transcriptions taken by Tolkien from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red Book&#xA;of Westmarch&lt;/a&gt; (written&#xA;by hobbits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As hobbits have their own way of valuing truthfulness (and a simple life),&#xA;it makes sense that they would despise Gríma deeply, and thus write him in&#xA;that book under the foulest name he was given by the people around them at&#xA;the time. He may have been known by the King under a nicer name (Gríma?)&#xA;until Gandalf pointed out to him that most others at that time called him&#xA;“Wormtongue”, and thus Gríma Wormtongue is what the Red Book’s authors&#xA;chose to name him when writing about those events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That surname (Wormtongue) may also have been intended by Tolkien to be&#xA;(from the people calling him, or from the literate Bilbo of Frodo&#xA;themselves) a hint at a famous Worm’s tongue far in the past (specifically:&#xA;the sweet/foul talking of the Dragon Glaurung, that also used his cunning&#xA;and treacherous ways to abuse and fool Túrin Turambar, back in Middle&#xA;Earth’s First Age).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note&lt;/em&gt;: Túrin and Glaurung can be read about in several books, the first&#xA;being the marvellous &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, which everyone who likes &lt;em&gt;The Lord of&#xA;the Rings&lt;/em&gt; should read: for the first few chapters, just write the names of&#xA;the Valar, Maiar, kings and queens, and just keep on reading! It eases up&#xA;quickly and becomes epic and awe inspiring, and includes some of the best&#xA;tales Tolkien every wrote. It really shows how deep the world is, as some&#xA;of its materials predate &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; by more than 20 years, and&#xA;Tolkien kept working on parts until well after that novel was published, and it took some more years for his son Christopher to put together the most coherent versions of each of those parts and publish them in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1757" LastEditorUserId="1757" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T16:52:35.283" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T16:52:35.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-20T06:48:06.387" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nick's surname sounds a lot like care-away, and I've seen a number of online sources that state that this Fitzgerald intended for this to be so. I find this hard to believe, considering that Nick isn't characterised as a particularly careless or carefree person. Is there any authoritative source, or good reason, to support his being named 'Carraway'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10828" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T08:45:49.727" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T08:45:49.727" Title="In The Great Gatsby, is Nick Carraway's name intentional?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15746" CreationDate="2020-09-20T07:46:53.727" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/02feridoun.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second part&lt;/a&gt; of the Shahnameh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Five hundred years did Feridoun rule the world, and might and virtue increased in the land, and all his days he did that which was good. And he roamed throughout the kingdom to seek out that which was open and that which was hid, and wrong was righted at his hands. With kindness did he curb the sway of evil. He ordered the world like to a paradise, he planted the cypress and the rose where the wild herb had sprouted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it signify to &amp;quot;plant the cypress and the rose where the wild herb had sprouted&amp;quot;? Does this represent the conquest of civilisation over wilderness, by replacing wild plants with cultivated ones? Or is there more symbolism to these specific plants mentioned?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T17:36:51.807" Title="What do the cypress, rose, and wild herb symbolise in this description of Feridoun's rule?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15745" CreationDate="2020-09-20T09:06:22.937" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this an example of any rhetorical/stylistic device or literary technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But can one really call it a life? If to live is to endure endless pain and destitution and to suffer humiliation so deep that it afflicts each and every fiber of one’s being, if it means fluttering ceaselessly against the walls of a cage that will never open, then there is no doubt that I and others like me did “live,” in the fullest sense of the word. But if the word encompasses a wealth of spirit and possibility, a modicum of rights, a few rare moments of inner bliss, with a dash of trust in the outside world, and a sense of fairness and balance in dealing with one’s fellow man and suchlike—well, then things are quite different.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is from &lt;em&gt;The Time Regulation Institute&lt;/em&gt; (English translation by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe, Penguin 2013) by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10947" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T10:51:53.403" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T11:29:27.397" Title="Identify rhetorical/stylistic device in Tanpınar's The Time Regulation Institute" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American abolitionist and women's rights activist Sojourner Truth (c. 1797 – 1883)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T10:31:14.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15745" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15742" CreationDate="2020-09-20T11:29:27.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage appears to use the rhetorical device of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aporia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;aporia&lt;/a&gt;: the narrator asks a question expressing a certain doubt (&amp;quot;But can one really call it a life?&amp;quot;) and then proceeds to give two possible answers. However, neither of these answers really resolves the question; instead, they read like an elaboration of the doubt expressed by the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the narrator had given a clear and definite answer to the question, that would have been an example of a different device, i.e. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypophora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hypophora&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note also that the narrator presents only two potential answers to his question, as if no other answers existed. He may have fallen victim to the fallacy known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;false dilemma or false dichotomy&lt;/a&gt;. However, there seems to be no intention on the part of the narrator to mislead the reader or listener, so this is not being used as a rhetorical trick here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T11:29:27.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15741" CreationDate="2020-09-20T17:07:32.420" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupressus_sempervirens#Iran%27s_ancient_cypresses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The cypress was the most popular tree for Persian gardens&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://irantourismcenter.com/rose-garden/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roses also have a long history.&lt;/a&gt;  Therefore, giving the cypress and the rose lets the poet avoid using a generic &amp;quot;tree&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;flower&amp;quot; and use archetypal garden plants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, Omar Khayyam made use of both&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And many a Garden by the Water blows,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perplext no more with Human or Divine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lose your fingers in the tresses of&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Cypress--slender Minister of Wine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T17:36:51.807" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T17:36:51.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15747" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-20T20:32:30.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-20T20:32:30.350" LastActivityDate="2020-09-20T20:32:30.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15748" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-20T20:32:30.350" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Demons' (Russian: 'Бѣсы' or ''Бесы, 1871–72) by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Use with the [fyodor-dostoyevsky] and [russian-literature] tags. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T09:04:13.413" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T09:04:13.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15749" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15759" CreationDate="2020-09-20T21:17:08.553" Score="5" ViewCount="334" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does  anyone remember a short story (perhaps in &lt;em&gt;Analog&lt;/em&gt; around the 1970s) which included a joke about engineers similar to what are called &amp;quot;Polish&amp;quot; jokes in the US and &amp;quot;Irish&amp;quot; jokes in England?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It revolved around the proposition that all odd numbers are prime, which supposedly generated three responses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematician - Three five and seven are prime but nine isn't, so proposition is false.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scientist - Well, eleven and thirteen are also prime, so the proposition is generally correct with just the odd exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Engineer - Three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a hazy recollection that the story ends with another joke, in which the engineer comes off best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4640" OwnerDisplayName="Mike Stone" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T07:00:16.527" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T11:03:45.313" Title="Short Story with &quot;All Odd Numbers Are Prime&quot; Joke" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15750" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T01:16:29.230" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I perused this crime novel sometime in the late 90's, most likely 1998. It was a used paperback for sale at the local library. Likely an undocumented donation to aid library funding. I only read a dozen pages or so randomly flipping through it while I was waiting for someone. But I recall the storyline specifically because I was already using online communication myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A serial killer is loose in a large city, possibly Chicago or New York City during the winter.  He is responsible for at least one child abduction and murder. I don't recall if he killed children exclusively, but he leaves handwritten notes with each victim. His communications show a penchant for using emoticons (the use of punctuation and letters to create smiley, sad, angry faces).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The police are apparently baffled by this, not having experienced online communication in the pre-internet days. At some point a journalist gets word of this and becomes involved. As it turns out the notes' language and use of emoticons strikes a chord because she believes it is someone she has been texting online with in a chatroom.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely recall the cover showed a body on a rooftop half-buried in the snow with a sheet of paper pinned to it. The cover art might have been a crime-scene photograph with a note pinned to it in one corner. In both cases, I believe there was possibly a smiley-face on the note.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect the book itself could have been written between 1985-1991, but the specific storyline would have been lost on even publishers until at least 1991 or 1992 (before AOL in early 90's there was CompuServe and GEnie, as well as localized BBS's)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10846" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T07:02:19.737" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T07:02:19.737" Title="Mass market paperback about a serial killer who communicated with protagonist online" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2020-09-21T06:36:45.303" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a cold-blooded answer -- he may have wanted to protect Lenny from the violence of the lynch mob but it is also may be that he finally decided to do something selfish. He realized that there was no way to escape and even if they managed to, two things: Lenny would almost certainly get them into trouble again and also, the mob, if they caught George with Lenny, might well lynch George also -- he was after all assisting a murderer escape and Curly had a strong dislike, if not hatred, for George who had brought Lenny to the ranch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T06:36:45.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T06:52:06.097" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is easy to see Lenny as an innocent who had simple longings, an unfortunate due to his disability but fundamentally a sympathetic character; however, it seems to me that while most of his violence was accidental and he did not start the fight with Curly that resulted in Curly's hand being injured, there is evidence that he is not completely incapable of initiating violence and is in no way generous or interested in the welfare of others, including -- and especially -- George.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Crooks, the injured ranch hand (also disabled,also excluded), teases Lenny (foolishly and somewhat sadistically but perhaps more cruelly than he had intended or, perhaps deliberate in his cruelty) about George not returning, Lenny rapidly becomes angry and it seems very possible that he might have attacked and injured Crooks. Even in his fight with Curly, although clearly not Lenny's fault, he might well have killed Curly had no one intervened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, where in the novel does Lenny express any interest in George beyond the place he hopes they live in together? Every single conversation with George centers around Lenny: what Lenny wants or what Lenny is doing wrong that might endanger himself or them both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even his desire to handle animals is fundamentally selfish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this was deliberate on Steinbeck's part, to have a character who despite his innocence is not actually particularly kind or generous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT: To show that I am not a very sophisticated reader, I am rewatching the Hangover, Part II in which we see the nasty side further of Alan; Alan reminds me of Lenny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastEditorUserId="5052" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T01:14:39.427" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T01:14:39.427" Title="Was Lenny Small actually not a fundamentally good person?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;of-mice-and-men&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15753" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15749" CreationDate="2020-09-21T06:59:28.057" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many versions of this joke. I think I first saw it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/%7Emarkl/teaching/IUM/Advanced-Problems-Mathematics-1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Siklos's university entrance exam preparation text &lt;em&gt;Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mathematicians should feel as insulted as engineers by the following joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer enter a mathematics contest, the first task of which is to prove that all odd number are prime. The mathematician has an elegant argument: ‘1’s a prime, 3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime. Therefore, by mathematical induction, all odd numbers are prime.’ It’s the physicist’s turn: ‘1’s a prime, 3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, 11’s a prime, 13’s a prime, so, to within experimental error, all odd numbers are prime.’ The most straightforward proof is provided by the engineer: ‘1’s a prime, 3’s a prime, 5’s a prime, 7’s a prime, 9’s a prime, 11’s a prime . . . ’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sean Duggan mentioned in a comment another version from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/ProofsTextbooks/Mathematics%20and%20Plausible%20Reasoning%20I%20by%20Polya_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georg Polya's &lt;em&gt;Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 1: &lt;em&gt;Induction and Analogy in Mathematics&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Look at&#xA;this mathematician,’ said the logician. “He observes that the first ninety-&#xA;nine numbers are less than hundred and infers hence, by what he calls&#xA;induction, that all numbers are less than a hundred.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A physicist believes,” said the mathematician, “that 60 is divisible by&#xA;all numbers. He observes that 60 is divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. He&#xA;examines a few more cases, as 10, 20, and 30, taken at random as he says.&#xA;Since 60 is divisible also by these, he considers the experimental evidence&#xA;sufficient.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes, but look at the engineers,” said the physicist. “An engineer&#xA;suspected that all odd numbers are prime numbers. At any rate, 1 can be&#xA;considered as a prime number, he argued. Then there come 3, 5, and 7,&#xA;all indubitably primes. Then there comes 9; an awkward case, it does not&#xA;seem to be a prime number. Yet 11 and 13 are certainly primes. ‘Coming&#xA;back to 9/ he said, ‘I conclude that 9 must be an experimental error.’ ”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jokes like this have long since passed into the folklore of the mathematical/scientific/engineering community, being passed around mostly orally and changed slightly each time. The joke you remember isn't exactly the same as either of the versions above (much closer to the Siklos one than the Polya one), but whether you're slightly misremembering or you heard a slightly different version is hard to guess. For more of these kinds of jokes (or if you want to have all the humour ruined by a thoroughly scientific dissection of them), see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200501/fea-dundes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Renteln and Dundes, &amp;quot;Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Notices of the AMS&lt;/em&gt; 52(1) (2005), pp. 24-34&lt;/a&gt;. This particular joke isn't featured there, but you can see something of how such jokes mutate and evolve as they pass through the community by word of mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T06:59:28.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15757" CreationDate="2020-09-21T07:51:29.340" Score="2" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;North and South&lt;/em&gt; by Elizabeth Gaskell, was Mr. Bell really thinking of proposing to Margaret?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter XLI, he says he was worried he'd be tempted by the aunt, then says there may be another way of getting a home, and he wonders aloud to Mr. Thornton which way to throw his voice. But John doesn't catch on at all if so. Would it have made a difference to Mr. Bell if John had revealed more of his love for Margaret? As it was, John annoyed Mr. Bell by not admiring her aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10893" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:06:02.820" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T09:26:39.337" Title="In &quot;North and South&quot;, was Mr. Bell really thinking of proposing to Margaret?" Tags="&lt;elizabeth-gaskell&gt;&lt;north-and-south&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15755" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-21T08:06:49.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T08:06:49.180" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T08:06:49.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15756" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-21T08:06:49.180" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'North and South' (1854), a novel by Elizabeth Gaskell. Use with the [elizabeth-gaskell] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:29:02.113" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:29:02.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15754" CreationDate="2020-09-21T09:26:39.337" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems clear that Bell would marry Margaret if she would take him. In conversation with his old friend Hale he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Now, Hale; you know that girl of yours [Margaret] has got pretty nearly all my heart. I told you that before. Of course, as your daughter, as my god-daughter, I took great interest in her before I saw her the last time. But this visit that I paid to you at Milton made me her slave. I went, a willing old victim, following the car of the conqueror. For, indeed, she looks as grand and serene as one who has struggled, and may be struggling, and yet has the victory secure in sight. Yes, in spite of all her present anxieties, that was the look on her face. And so, all I have is at her service, if she needs it; and will be hers, whether she will or no, when I die. Moreover, I myself, will be her &lt;em&gt;preux chevalier&lt;/em&gt;, sixty and gouty though I be.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Elizabeth Gaskell (1854). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4276/4276-h/4276-h.htm#CHAPTER_XLI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;North and South&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XLI&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This speech is rather facetious in its choice of images: it was in Roman triumphs that a train of captured slaves “followed the car [chariot] of the conqueror”, and a “preux chevalier” is a gallant knight in a medieval romance. But facetiousness can be a cover for genuine emotion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether he was actually thinking of proposing is another matter. Bell clearly appreciates the poor prospects of his position: a “preux chevalier” in a romance &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtly_love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;admires his lady from afar&lt;/a&gt;; and he declares his willingness to stand aside for Henry Lennox, and even to favour the union with his money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Bell meets Thornton in the train on his way to Milton, he is more cautious about revealing his feelings: after all, they are mere acquaintances, not life-long friends. Instead Bell says that he would like to look after Margaret as a daughter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I would take a live dragon into my house to live, if by hiring such a chaperon, and setting up an establishment of my own, I could make my old age happy with having Margaret for a daughter.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that Bell, a bachelor, cannot take an unrelated woman like Margaret into his household without causing a social scandal. He must marry first so that the situation is respectable. Note again the use of facetious imagery: by “live dragon” he means his prospective wife in this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And there’s her Aunt, Mrs. Shaw. There might be a way open, perhaps, by my offering to marry that worthy lady! but that would be quite a &lt;em&gt;pis aller&lt;/em&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marrying Mrs Shaw is the most plausible way for Bell to be able to make his household suitable for Margaret. But a “pis aller” is a last resort. What then is the first resort? Bell does not say, and Thorton is too caught up in his own thoughts about Margaret to pay attention to the clues that Bell is dropping:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither Mr. Bell nor Mr. Thornton was in a laughing humour; so the oddity of any of the speeches which the former made was unnoticed by them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question asks, “Would it have made a difference to Mr. Bell if John had revealed more of his love for Margaret?” I am not sure that it would have made any difference. Bell clearly suspects that Thornton admires Margaret:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Do you know,” said Mr. Bell, wheeling round, and shutting one eye, the better to bring the forces of the other to bear with keen scrutiny on Mr. Thornton’s face, “that I once fancied you had a little tenderness for Margaret?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a sensitive man like Bell can surely read between the lines of Thornton’s reply:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Mr. Bell,” said he, “before you speak so, you should remember that all men are not as free to express what they feel as you are.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T09:26:39.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15605" CreationDate="2020-09-21T09:34:11.887" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is literature? You'd think this would be a central question for literary theory, but in fact it has not seemed to matter very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are the opening words of the second chapter, &amp;quot;What is Literature and Does it Matter?&amp;quot;, in &lt;strong&gt;Jonathan Culler's &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; (Oxford University Press, 1997). I will skip Culler's discussion of why this has been so, even though it is worth reading, and skip to his discussion of the question whether there are &amp;quot;any essential, distinguishing features that literary works share&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The modern sense of literature as &amp;quot;imaginative writing&amp;quot; is roughly 200 years old, even though we use the term to denote writings that are much older. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/epic-of-gilgamesh&quot;&gt;Gilgamesh questions&lt;/a&gt; on this site, for example, are about texts that are up to 4,000 years old.) As a consequence, the term refers to many types of texts from a great diversity of cutures and time periods. This makes the concept very slippery, so Culler suggests that rather than asking &amp;quot;what is literature?&amp;quot; we should ask &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;what makes us treat something as literature?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler goes through a number of thought experiments to find out what to find what under what conditions we are more likely to treat a text as literary and concludes (page 25),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They [the thought experiments] suggest, first of all, that when language is removed from other contexts, detached from other purposes, it can be interpreted as literature (though it must possess some qualities that make it responsive to such interpretation). If literature is language decontextualized, cut off from other functions and purpose, it is also itself a context, which promotes or elicits special kinds of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the assumptions that readers bring to texts is the &amp;quot;hyper-protected cooperative principle&amp;quot;. When two people communicate with each other, each assumes that the other person is cooperating and that what they say is relevant to the conversation. This is the &amp;quot;cooperative principle&amp;quot;. We also make this assumption about texts. However, when texts have gone through a process of selection (typically reviewing and publishing), we assume that the text is worth reading, thus making the cooperative principle &amp;quot;hyper-protected&amp;quot;. This leads us to the assumption that features in a literary text, such as rhymes, metaphors and even apparent nonsense, are relevant at some level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes it is the literary context (e.g. a text being somehow presented as &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;) that makes us treat a specific text as literature, sometimes it is specific features (&amp;quot;special ways of organizing language&amp;quot;, p. 27) that make us treat it as literary. Neither the context alone nor the language alone are sufficient to turn a text into literature. Culler concludes his chapter on the definition of literature by describing five &lt;em&gt;perspectives&lt;/em&gt; on literature (rather than &lt;em&gt;features&lt;/em&gt; of literature) that theorists have used to describe the nature of literature, none of which, however, fully encompasses the other ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Literature as the 'foregrounding' of language&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; This is most obvious in poetry, which may draw attention to the language through sound patterns such as end rhyme, alliteration and assonance. See, for example, the poems &lt;a href=&quot;https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/inversnaid/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inversnaid&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44402/the-windhover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Windhover&lt;/a&gt; by Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, prose can also do this, even though we don't always pay attention to it. This foregrounding of language is not sufficient for a text to be treated as literary; tongue-twisters, for example, are usually not considered literature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Literature as the integration of language&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Literature brings various elements of a text into a complex relationship, e.g. sound and meaning (e.g. by making specific words rhyme) or grammatical organisation and themes. However, Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidential campaign slogan &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft_Eisenhower_movement#Winter_of_Discontent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I like Ike&lt;/a&gt; also creates a relationship between sound and meaning without being literary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Literature as fiction&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Literary works project a fictional world including a narrator and fictional events. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deixis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deictic references&lt;/a&gt; in a literary work don't refer to the real world but have meaning only in this fictional world. (For example, &amp;quot;this morning&amp;quot; in Hopkins's &amp;quot;The Windhover&amp;quot; is unrelated to the day on which I'm writing this Stack Exchange contribution.) The relationship between what the narrator (or any character) says and what the author thinks is a matter on interpretation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Literature as aesthetic object&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Unlike, for example, recipes or advertisements, literary works are separated from a practical context, and without this practical communicative goal they draw the reader's attention to the relationship between form and content. This is what makes a literary work an aesthetic object. Culler also cites Kant's concept of &amp;quot;purposiveness without a purpose&amp;quot;: works of art &amp;quot;are made so that their parts will work together to some end&amp;quot;, but that end is the work of art itself. When we examine a text as literature, we look at how its parts contribute to the effect of the whole.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Literature as intertextual or self-reflexive construct&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; Literary works exist between or among other texts that they reference, repeat or transform. For example, Alexander Pope's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Lock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rape of the Lock&lt;/a&gt; contains elements that allude to or parody earlier epic poems. This is known as &amp;quot;intertextuality&amp;quot;. In addition, literary works can also be read as at some level about literature itself; this is referred to as &amp;quot;self-reflexivity&amp;quot;. For example, Gustave Flaubert's &lt;em&gt;Madame Bovary&lt;/em&gt; can be read as a novel about how romantic literature (e.g. of the kind that Emma Bovary reads) and Flaubert's own novel itself make sense of the kind of experiences that Emma Bovary has. Note that intertextuality is not unique to literature or the arts; it even exists in &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22intertextuality+in+advertising%22&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;advertising&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The five aspects listed above can be read as &lt;em&gt;properties&lt;/em&gt; of literary works, or they can be read as the &lt;em&gt;results of a specific kind of attention&lt;/em&gt; that we accord literary works. Culler points out that &amp;quot;[t]he qualities of literature can't be reduced either to objective properties or to consequences of ways of framing language&amp;quot; (page 35). This is because language resists the frames we try to impose on it when we read literary texts; we have to &amp;quot;work on it&amp;quot; for the analysis to work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s (&lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; was first published in 1997) did not focus much on the distinction between literary and non-literary texts. Instead, it focused on how it functioned (or was meant to function) in specific historical or ideological contexts. Literature has both been seen as a civilising institution (see e.g. Chris Baldick's &lt;em&gt;The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848-1932&lt;/em&gt;) or as an instrument to increase acceptance of the current hegemony. Literature is also a paradoxical type of discourse because on the one hand, it relies on specific conventions while on the other hand constantly testing the limits of these conventions and going beyond them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler finishes his chapter on the definition of literature by pointing out that the question &amp;quot;What is literature?&amp;quot; is not raised because people are concerned that they might mistake the message in a fortune cookie for a poem. The background to the question is that theory has highlighted the literariness of many types of texts that are usually not considered literary. The aim of discussing the definition of literature is &amp;quot;to promote what [critics and theorists] take to be the most pertinent critical methods and to dismiss methods that neglect the most basic and distinctive aspects of literature.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of the same properties mentioned by Jonathan Culler can also be found in *&lt;em&gt;Terry Eagleton's &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell, 1983). He cites the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_formalism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian formalists&lt;/a&gt;, who focused on &amp;quot;literary language as a deviation from the norm&amp;quot; (pages 2-4) but points out that literariness can also be found in non-literary texts (see Culler's first perspective). He points out we sometimes know something is literature because of its context (e.g. a work of fiction; page 5; see Culler's third perspective). Literature can also be seen as &amp;quot;non-pragmatic discourse&amp;quot; that is &amp;quot;taken to refer to a general states of affairs&amp;quot; (page 7). Literary works can &amp;quot;signal that what is at stake is a way of talking&amp;quot;, i.e. it is self-referential language (page 8; see Culler's fifth perspective). He concludes that literature is not so much defined by an inherent set of properties but by &amp;quot;a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing&amp;quot; (page 9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Eagleton and Culler suggest that the concept of &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; may be similar to &amp;quot;weed&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Weed&amp;quot; is not a type of plant that can be found in a biological taxonomy; it is a collective noun for plants that gardeners and farmers want to get rid of. In philosophical terms, both &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;weed&amp;quot; are functional rather than ontological concepts: they are defined by what we do with them rather than by inherent properties. (This similarity to the concept of &amp;quot;weed&amp;quot; was suggested by John M. Ellis in &lt;em&gt;The Theory of Literary Criticism: A Logical Analysis&lt;/em&gt;, 1974.) Which types of text count as &amp;quot;literary&amp;quot; has evolved over time: both Eagleton and Culler point out that our modern concept of literature is fairly recent and began to emerge during the Romantic period. What both theorists have done is teasing out some reasons why we, as descendants of the Romantics (at least in this regard), treat certain texts as literature and arguing that this concept is not set in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Eagleton and Culler are both representatives of English-speaking academia, it seems worthwhile to compare their approach with a non-English one. The German textbook &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Französische Literaturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (freely translated: &amp;quot;An Introduction to the Study of French Literature&amp;quot;) by Maximilian Gröne and Frank Reiser (4th edition. Narr Francke Attempto, 2017) also discusses the definition of literature in the first chapter (pages 4-18). The authors discuss various characteristics that may make a text &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poetic language deviates from everyday language; literary texts may deviate from ordinary language in order to foreground language. Gröne and Reiser point out that deciding whether a text's language is &amp;quot;poetic&amp;quot; or innovative becomes increasingly difficult as we read increasingly older texts. In addition, some literary texts don't deviate from ordinary language.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literary texts may be fictional, i.e. they present characters, events etcetera as not existing in the real world. (The authors draw the reader's attention to a distinction between &amp;quot;Fiktionalität&amp;quot; or fictionality on the one hand and &amp;quot;Fiktivität&amp;quot; or fictitiousness on the other. The characters in Voltaire's &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt;, for example, are fictitious; the novella itself is fictional. The characters in a historical novel may be real but the novel presents actions, statements and thoughts that may never have occurred, so the novel is fictional. A study of Voltaire's &lt;em&gt;Candide&lt;/em&gt; would contain many statements about the fictitious characters in the novalla, but that would not make this study fictional.)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gröne and Reiser point out that it is not always easy to establish a text's fictionality; this requires knowledge from outside the text itself. The status of a text may even change over time. For example, the Old Testament's creation narrative was considered non-fiction for many centuries but is no longer generally considered as &amp;quot;true&amp;quot; today.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;However, even texts that use no poetic language and that don't appear as fictional may be read as literary texts. As an example, Gröne and Reiser cite the enumeration of tools and materials for decorating a room from George Perec's novel &lt;em&gt;La Vie mode d'emploi&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Life: A User's Manual&lt;/em&gt;. We read Perec's enumeration as a literary text because the text is clearly removed from pragmatic discourse (&amp;quot;entpragmatisiert&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;défonctionnalisé&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last point leads to a discussion of factors that make us treat a text as literary. One factor is that the context in which we encounter these texts presents them as literary, for example, by means of a bookcover that explicitly identifies a book as a novel (this is common in the German-speaking world, where the German world for novel—&amp;quot;Roman&amp;quot;—is usually printed on a novel's front cover) or by identifying the text as having been written by a specific author. Gröne and Reiser admit that &amp;quot;literature&amp;quot; is a category with vague boundaries and that the characteristics discussed above don't result in a definition that remains valid across time and across cultures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T22:52:54.410" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T22:52:54.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15749" CreationDate="2020-09-21T09:46:23.973" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?51132&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epicycle&lt;/a&gt; by P. J. Plauger. It was published in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?57188&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analog, November 1973&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first mention in the story is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;No, seriously,&amp;quot; I hurried on. &amp;quot;If you were to ask a mathematician to test it he might say: 'Let me see, now. One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime. Nine? Nine's not prime. Clearly the theorem is false.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But a physicist is more pragmatic. She, I mean he,&amp;quot; the slip was calculated, and had the usual effect on a male listener, &amp;quot;might say: 'Let me see, now. One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime. Nine? That may be an experimental error—let's go on.' &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jenkins smiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Eleven is prime, thirteen is prime, fifteen is… Well, that's a lot of data points. The theorem is probably true.'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He laughed outright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But if you ask an engineer to test the theorem, he might say: 'Let me see, now.&#xA;One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is prime, nine is prime, eleven is…'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the later mention is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little vindictively, I began, &amp;quot;You know, I just thought of another of those stories we used to tell back in school.&amp;quot; Again, my entertainment-starved audience was all ears.&#xA;&amp;quot;This is about a hotel, where a mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are spending the night in separate rooms. Late at night a fire breaks out and spreads rapidly to each of the rooms. What do you suppose they do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, the engineer wakes up, smelling smoke. He sees the fire and quickly dashes out into the corridor, grabs a fire extinguisher off the wall, runs back to his room and drowns the flames. For safety, he then soaks the walls, ceiling, floor and mattress.&#xA;Tossing the empty extinguisher aside, he climbs into his soggy bed to get what sleep he can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Then the physicist wakes up, smelling smoke. He sees the fire and quickly dashes out into the corridor, grabs a fire extinguisher off the wall, runs back to his room and makes a brief test blast. After a quick calculation, he aims a four-second blast at the base of the fire and puts it out. Setting the extinguisher next to his bed, he lies down to rest and watch for another outbreak.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was my favorite part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Then the mathematician wakes up, smelling smoke. He sees the fire and quickly grabs a pad of paper and a pencil. He makes a number of calculations, glances at the fire, makes a few more. After a while, he wanders into the bathroom, turns on the tap and dabbles his fingers in the water. Looking back at the fire, he smiles and says:&#xA;'Aha! A solution exists!' Then he goes back to bed.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10957" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T09:46:23.973" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T10:40:03.133" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Did Lois Lowry name Jonas, the protagonist of the Giver, after the biblical prophet Jonah? Both of them are at one point reluctant to follow their calling that they didn't choose, so there is some similarity. But I haven't seen this confirmed or denied in an interview.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T19:43:16.193" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T19:43:16.193" Title="Did Lois Lowry name the protagonist of the Giver from the biblical prophet?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;the-giver&gt;&lt;lois-lowry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15761" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3500" CreationDate="2020-09-21T10:43:52.407" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literary theory does not treat music as part of literature. For example, the introductory chapter to Terry Eagleton's book &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (Blackwell, 1983, pages 1-16) discusses what literature is. This discussion focuses exclusively on texts (e.g. novels, poems and plays); even examples of what is usually not considered literature (e.g. Marx's writings) are texts. Music, video, visual arts don't even enter the discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same is true for Jonathan Culler's book &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; (Oxford University Press, 1997). Chapter 2, &amp;quot;What is Literature and Does it Matter?&amp;quot;, discusses the definition of literature based on the concept of text and language (i.e. language relying on the use of words). Music and the visual arts are not treated as part of literature. Note that Culler's book was published after &amp;quot;cultural studies&amp;quot; had become a major activity in the humanities. Culler discusses the between literature and cultural studies in the third chapter of his book; he does not conclude that the definition of literature has expanded to include, for example, music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler and Eagleton come from English-speaking countries, so let's look at some other languages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Germany, Ralf Klausniter's &lt;em&gt;Literaturwissenschaft. Begriffe - Verfahren - Arbeitstechniken&lt;/em&gt; (2nd edition, De Gruyter, 2012) contains an introductory chapter that discusses what a &amp;quot;literary text&amp;quot; is, thus implying that literature refers to certain types of texts, at the exclusion of music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maximilian Gröne and Frank Reiser's &lt;em&gt;Französische Literaturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Introduction to the Study of French Literature&amp;quot;, 4th edition, Narr, 2017) also presents literature as based on text. Interestingly, this textbook also discusses the relationship between literature and other &amp;quot;sign systems&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Zeichensysteme&amp;quot;), such as films, paintings and comics. 80% of the book focuses on the analysis of literary texts, while the last two chapters discuss other media. For example, comics is described as a genre that sits between graphics and literature (as opposed to being part of literature). The last chapter discusses film and TV because of the existence of film adaptations of literary works; such films are not considered as part of literature, however. The textbook does not discuss music, except in the context of film adaptations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dutch textbook &lt;em&gt;Algemene literatuurwetenschap: Een theoretische inleiding&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Literary studies: a theoretical introduction&amp;quot;, Het Spectrum, 1993) by Barend van Heusden and Els Jongeneel discusses what literature is and what distinguishes it from other types of language. In other words, the concept of literature discussed in this book is exclusively based on text, thus excluding music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: In the above discussion, I have interpreted music as &amp;quot;instrumental music&amp;quot;;   lyrics are texts in the sense employed in the above introductions and textbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T10:43:52.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15762" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15337" CreationDate="2020-09-21T11:57:19.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The main difficulty is the pronoun “hoo” meaning “she”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hoo&lt;/strong&gt; Now English regional (chiefly west midlands and south-western).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;pron.&lt;/em&gt; The subjective case of the feminine third person singular pronoun.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;1.&lt;/strong&gt; The female person or animal previously mentioned or implied or easily identified; = she &lt;em&gt;pron.1&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third person singular personal pronoun in Old English was declined like this (according to the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;nominative&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;accusative&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;dative&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;genitive&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;possessive&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;masculine&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hē&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hine&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;him&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;his&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;his&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;feminine&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hēo&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hīe, hī&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hire&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hire&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hire&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;neuter&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hit&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;hit&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;him&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;his&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;his&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nominative feminine form “hēo” developed into “hoo” before being replaced by the new word “she”. The old word survived longest in remote rural districts like Lancashire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, we can rewrite the verse in standard spelling, substituting “she” for “hoo”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Margaret declares had she clothes to put on,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She’d go up to London and talk to the great man;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And if things were not altered when there she had been,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She’s fully resolved to sew up mouth and end;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    She’s naught to say against the king,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    But she likes a fair thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And she says she can tell when she’s hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, if Margaret had suitable clothes, she would travel to London to petition the king to relieve the people’s hunger, and if this did not work then she would (threaten to) sew up her mouth and put an end to herself by starvation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ballad was also collected by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Harland&lt;/a&gt;, who gives more combative words for this verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eawr Marget declares, if hoo’d clooas to put on,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo’d go up to Lunnun to see the great mon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Un’ if things didno’ awter, when theere hoo had been,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo says hoo’d begin, un’ feight blood up to th’ e’en,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hoo’s nout agen th’ king, bur hoo loikes a fair thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And hoo says hoo con tell when hoo’s hurt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Harland, ed. (1865). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ye4_AAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA227&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ballads and Songs of Lancashire Chiefly Older Than the 19th Century&lt;/em&gt;, p. 227&lt;/a&gt;. London: Whittaker &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T00:31:55.717" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T00:31:55.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14147" CreationDate="2020-09-21T12:02:50.043" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;During the first half of the 20th century, 90% of the French were Catholics and 95% of burials in France were religious burials (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89glise_catholique_en_France#La_Seconde_Guerre_mondiale_et_l%27apr%C3%A8s-guerre_(1939-1950)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipédia: Église catholique en France&lt;/a&gt;). Assuming that Catholicism and catholic burials were just as widespread in French Algeria as in &amp;quot;mainland&amp;quot; France, Maman's wish for a religious burial would be completely unremarkable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel, in a way, also tells us why Meursault would not have known about his mother's wish for a religious burial. First, he is an atheist, as he admits to the investigating magistrate in Part Two, chapter I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, during the trial Salamano  (Part Two, chapter III) says that Meursault no longer had anything to say to maman and that he had sent her to the old people's home for that reason (&amp;quot;je n’avais plus rien à dire à maman et que je l’avais mise pour cette raison à l’asile&amp;quot;). Meursault had mainly invoked financial reasons when asked about that decision, although he at one point also admitted that he and maman no longer expected anything from each other (&amp;quot;j’ai répondu que ni maman ni moi n’attendions plus rien l’un de l’autre&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, after sending his mother to the old people's home in Marengo, Meursault had eventually reduced the frequency of his visits; in the last year before his mother's death, he had hardly visited her at all (&amp;quot;C’est un peu pour cela que dans la dernière année je n’y suis presque plus allé.&amp;quot; Part One, chapter 1). If he had visited her more often, he might have heard what maman supposedly only said to her friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, it seems that Meursault's comment says more about himself than about his mother. It shows that Meursault has become so estranged from his mother (a tendency that had started even before he sent her to Marengo) that he was unaware of a wish that would be perfectly natural for French citizens in the early 1940s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T12:02:50.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15752" CreationDate="2020-09-21T14:28:16.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that 'good' and 'bad' are concepts which, whilst they appear quite basic on the surface, are too complex for Lennie to apply to his own motivations, though I suspect her recognises them in other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lennie is almost permanently in a state of fear and anxiety. He doesn't understand people and he doesn't understand the world. He understands that he finds comfort in animals, and that George protects him and promises him a place of refuge filled with animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His state of fear and anxiety means he is, in many ways on a 'survival setting', &lt;em&gt;all the time&lt;/em&gt;. He has a single goal of reaching the refuge of their farm. My interpretation of him is that while he can communicate with people, that communication doesn't extend to understanding their feelings or motives much beyond being able to tell when they are angry with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lennie does exhibit care for George, when we first meet them and Lennie drinks from the pool, he thinks the water is good (George is more dubious) and encourages him to drink. He wants George to share the good water. Then when they make camp and eat the beans which George was carrying, Lennie keeps going on and on about how he likes ketchup with his beans, and how he wants mice and rabbits to pet. George gets cross with him and Lennie's response is to tell George that he was only joking about ketchup and if they had any George could eat it all. Then he asks if George wants him to go away, after George says what a great life he would have without Lennie. he seems to make the offer in all sincerity:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George still stared morosely at the fire. &amp;quot;When I think of the swell&#xA;time I could have without you, I go nuts. I never get no peace.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lennie still knelt. He looked off into the darkness across the&#xA;river, &amp;quot;George, you want I should go away and leave you alone?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Where the hell could you go?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, I could. I could go off in the hills there. Some place I’d find&#xA;a cave.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yeah' How’d you eat. You ain’t got sense enough to find nothing&#xA;to eat.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I’d find things, George. I don’t need no nice food with ketchup. I’d&#xA;lay out in the sun and nobody’d hurt me; An’ if I foun’ a mouse, I&#xA;could keep it. Nobody’d take it away from me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George looked quickly and searchingly at him. &amp;quot;I been mean, ain’t&#xA;I?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you don’ want me I can go off in the hills an’ find a cave. I can&#xA;go away any time.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although we can speculate that Lennie wouldn't actually stay away for long, the consequence of going away from George would be giving up the hope of ultimate refuge at the farm. That is an act of self sacrifice which many would accept of proof of capacity for 'goodness', even if there is only one person he would tender that kindness to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T14:28:16.433" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15767" CreationDate="2020-09-21T15:00:59.727" Score="4" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a novel about a man working as a train station manager in Kazakhstan. The train station is in a remote location in a plains environment, and only rarely do trains pass. He works and lives there alone with his wife. The story's time setting is some time between the second world war and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The station was used during the war to transport weapons and other war time material, but now it is all but forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a recurring mantra in the book that goes something like &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;From west to east the track goes&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, and then something about the wind and the plains. It is repeated several times, possibly every chapter. The climate is very harsh, with lots of wind, and cold, snowy winters. It is made clear that life is very rough there, but that he knows nothing else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character also has a herd of camels, where the leader camel (a male) is his favorite. He describes it as strong and majestic, with a hot temperament. He rides it at least once, and it can run further and at greater speeds than other camels. I think its color is black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has a wife as well, at least for part of the story, but I can't remember if he has children. A few times he travels to a nearby city, and I think he goes there with his wife at one time, or possibly that he met his wife during one of the trips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a vague memory of a UFO as well. That he saw a vision of one landing close by, or that the aliens communicated with him. I'm not 100% sure of this memory, it might come from other books I read around the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know anything about the author or original language. I read it in English or Swedish around 2010 (+-2 years).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Help me Literature StackExchange, you're my only hope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10959" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T18:59:22.323" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T18:59:22.323" Title="Novel about a Kazakh train station manager" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9206" CreationDate="2020-09-21T16:28:37.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literature is not defined by the presence or absence of coincidence. Moreover, Rainsford falling overboard would be better described as the element that sets the plot in motion rather than &amp;quot;coincidence&amp;quot;. Since Rainsford is a hunter rather than a seaman, his falling from the rail isn't particularly improbable. It is not less believable than, for example, the cavalry arriving just in time to save the beleaguered settlers, like a &lt;em&gt;deus ex machina&lt;/em&gt; in ancient Greek drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/15605/what-is-literature/15758#15758&quot;&gt;What counts as literature&lt;/a&gt; is influenced, rather than determined, by other aspects, such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the text fiction? The text was published in the magazine &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collier%27s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Collier's&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which published both journalism and short stories. The text of &amp;quot;The Most Dangerous Game&amp;quot; presents itself as fiction. If it were journalism, we would expect it to tell us, for example, when and where exactly the events took place, the name and itinerary of the yacht, and how the author learned about the events from Mr. Rainsford. We would not expect the text to launch straight into dialogue without telling us who the speakers (rather than the &amp;quot;characters&amp;quot;) are. We may also expect to hear about judicial proceedings that would be triggered by the type of crime described in the story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literature often foregrounds language. This is especially the case in poetry and less so in prose. The story makes use of a number of similes, e.g. &amp;quot;it was like trying to see through a blanket&amp;quot;, but if it foregrounds anything, it is plot rather than language itself.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literature is a kind of &amp;quot;non-pragmatic discourse&amp;quot;. Whereas journalism wants to &lt;em&gt;inform&lt;/em&gt; us about certain specific events or circumstances, the text of &amp;quot;The Most Dangerous Game&amp;quot; does not serve any pragmatic purpose. It just wants to entertain its readers with a gripping story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be reasons for excluding &amp;quot;The Most Dangerous Game&amp;quot; from what some people call &amp;quot;great literature&amp;quot; (or Literature with an uppercase L). For example, in the version available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Most_Dangerous_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;, there appears to be a gap between the two last sentences; the fight between the two men appears to have been elided in an inelegant way. (But perhaps that is just me? Or it may be an artefact of the transfer from the printed text to Wikisource.) General Zaroff may be perceived as too simplistically villainous; a more competent author may have made him more interesting by giving him a conscience, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The teacher may have discounted the story as literature because it did not meet their criteria for &amp;quot;good literature&amp;quot;, let alone &amp;quot;great literature&amp;quot;. However, if we used such criteria consistently to exclude certain texts from &lt;em&gt;Literature&lt;/em&gt;, the distinction between &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; literature would cease to be meaningful. This is not what literary theory and criticism do, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-25T12:37:52.607" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T12:37:52.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15765" CreationDate="2020-09-21T18:49:22.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably this is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/366889.The_Day_Lasts_More_Than_a_Hundred_Years&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the Kyrgyz author &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/209681.Chingiz_Aitmatov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chingiz Aitmatov&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting from one of the Goodreads reviews:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel begins with Yedigei learning about the death of his longtime friend, Kazangap. All of Kazangap's crucial relatives have been forewarned of his impending death, and it is decided to set off to bury him the next day. To the consternation of his son, Sabitzhan, who is indifferent toward his father's burial, it is decided to travel across the Sarozek to the Ana-Beiit cemetery in order to bury Kazangap. The procession promptly leaves the next morning, and experiences that took place throughout Yedigei's lifetime, as well as various Sarozek legends, are recollected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially, Yedigei recalls how he had fought in World War II but had been dismissed from duty due to shell shock. As a result, he was sent to work on the railway. Through his work, he met Kazangap, who convinced him to move to what would become his permanent home, the remote Boranly-Burannyi junction, from which he gained his namesake. Kazangap and Yedigei become dear friends, and Kazangap eventually gives Yedigei the gift of a camel, named Karanar, which becomes legendary across the Sarozek because of its strength and vitality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of 1951, Abutalip and Zaripa Kuttybaev move to Boranly-Burranyi junction with their two young sons. They initially have a hard time adjusting to living on the Sarozek because of the harsh environment; however, they eventually become adjusted. Before relocating, both had been school teachers. Abutalip also fought in the war and had been taken prisoner by the Germans, but he escaped and fought with the Yugoslav partisan army. Nevertheless, upon his return to the Soviet Union he still retained the stigma of having been a prisoner of war and was often relocated because of political reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set in Kazakhstan, check. Set between WW2 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, check. Man working at a remote railway station, check. A majestic camel, check. Space missions are involved (potentially UFOs, but the reviews avoid spoilers), check. It was first published (in Russian) in 1980, and has been translated into English at least. The book also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_Lasts_More_Than_a_Hundred_Years&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I found this by searching &lt;code&gt;fiction novel kazakh train station camel&lt;/code&gt; in Google.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T18:49:22.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15768" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-21T21:06:32.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T21:06:32.993" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T21:06:32.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15769" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-21T21:06:32.993" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author Michael Connelly (born 1956) and his life as a writer.&#xD;&#xA;He is most famous for his detective novels and crime fiction." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:22:41.367" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:22:41.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15770" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-21T21:08:00.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T21:08:00.390" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T21:08:00.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15771" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-21T21:08:00.390" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author David Housewright (born 1955) and his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:24:57.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:24:57.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15772" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-21T21:54:25.443" Score="8" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trans-Atlantyk&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Witold Gombrowicz&lt;/strong&gt; is a satire of Polish identity. However, it is difficult to know what exactly is being satirized if you're not Polish, and not intimately acquainted with Polish history and society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story starts off quite realistically (and indeed semi-autobiographically), with the author being stranded in Argentina at the outbreak of World War II. At first his meetings with Polish officials, who are delusional about how Poland will conquer Germany, and who want to parade Gombrowicz around Argentinian high society as an example of Polish genius, can be read as straightforward parody. Later on, his employment in the company run by three feuding Polish businessmen, and the story about the gay man who tries to seduce the Polish young man and the ensuing duel with his father, can still be deciphered up to a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, when the characters become part of the spur-wearing secret society eternally locked in the cellar, things become so weird that it is difficult to make sense of it all. I assume that this represents an element of &amp;quot;Polishness&amp;quot; as viewed by Gombrowicz, but as an outsider reading the (albeit excellent) translation by Danuta Borchardt, I felt completely lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read Gombrowicz's Diary, but I don't remember it containing a detailed explanation of &lt;em&gt;Trans-Atlantyk&lt;/em&gt;, and the feeling I got from it was that Gombrowicz didn't like to literally explain the details of his work. &lt;strong&gt;Is there a standard interpretation of what aspects of &amp;quot;Polishness&amp;quot; are represented by the various characters and events in &lt;em&gt;Trans-Atlantyk&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-21T22:00:17.687" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T13:48:33.517" Title="What is being satirized in Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;satire&gt;&lt;witold-gombrowicz&gt;&lt;trans-atlantyk&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15773" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6810" CreationDate="2020-09-21T22:56:02.167" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He discusses this in his section on the &amp;quot;Mythos of Spring&amp;quot;, where he portrays the archetypal comedy story as a young man and a young woman (both fairly colorless) want to marry but are obstructed by older and richer characters who must to be stopped -- for instance, the hero's father wants to marry her himself, though she's (obviously) young enough to be his daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His claim is that comedy treats this father's flaws with not so much as moral condemnation -- how horrible that he has the power to play the tyrant! -- as ridicule -- he doesn't even realize how foolish it is for such an old bag of bones to woo a young beauty!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-21T22:56:02.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15774" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-22T01:03:35.733" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt; is a sci-fi classic by Dan Simmons which takes its name from the poem by John Keats of the same name. The novel makes multiple references to the poem by Keats and actually Keats is even a character in the story and Hyperion also happens to be name of the planet where portion of the story takes place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, beside the above obvious use of the name and reference to the author of the poem is there 'deeper' philosophical connection between the two pieces of literature? Is there some deeper thematic connection there? Is the story of the poem somehow 'woven' into the story of the novel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10964" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T01:36:46.490" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T01:36:46.490" Title="Is there any deep connection between Hyperion (the sci-fi novel) and Hyperion (the poem)?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;dan-simmons&gt;&lt;hyperion-cantos&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2020-09-22T10:48:49.343" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15775" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5178" CreationDate="2020-09-22T01:10:00.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the third book, they drive to Maine to hike and canoe up the Bear Trail (which I think is made up, I was trying to find it to see if we could do it with the kids for fun) so they are likely in the Northeast somewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a well-to-do neighborhood in Fairfield CT called Greenfield Hill, and Meriden CT is nicknamed Silver City. Perhaps she borrowed from these?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author was born in and lived in Putnam, Connecticut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10965" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T05:17:30.163" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T05:17:30.163" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15777" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-22T03:08:28.793" Score="2" ViewCount="158" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since he doesn't suspect that they are going to destroy it, just like the Dark Lord doesn't suspect this, what &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; he think? Why else would these mysterious hobbits be traveling to such a place, with the Preciousss, if not to destroy it? Gollum is very anxious about Sauron getting it back, but doesn't seem to think further than &amp;quot;they asked me to go there so I will lead them there&amp;quot; and, at some point, &amp;quot;I'll let the big spider eat them and then take the Preciousss back&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the books, he never once questions this or asks them about it (that I can remember, having very recently read them). I find this very strange. Gollum may be odd and obsessed, but he clearly still has the ability to think, scheme and feel various emotions. He is not some kind of &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; zombie or madman, even in his rather extreme state when he finds the hobbits close to Mordor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's weird to me how Frodo and Sam didn't at least come up with some cover story. Some excuse to go there with the Ring. Anything to make Gollum not guess the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gollum started following them early on, when they were still the full Fellowship. Did he not hear them talk or wonder why a bunch of people are walking with Frodo and the Ring to increasingly hostile places, further and further to The Enemy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't for the life of me figure out what Gollum think they were doing or what would happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10968" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T03:26:50.020" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T00:40:17.133" Title="What errand did Gollum think that the hobbits have in Mordor with the Ring?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Polish novelist and playwright Witold Gombrowicz (1904 – 1969) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the [polish-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T11:26:49.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15781" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15714" CreationDate="2020-09-22T13:18:02.897" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The vowel pointing was added about 600 AD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are two speculations as to why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To make the pronunciation easier.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To hide allusions to Christ which exist when applying the 32 rules of Rabbi Eliezer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#1 doesn't make much sense since vowels are not used in Modern Hebrew newspapers.&#xA;#2 has the strength of argument in that the Jews who rejected Christ had persecuted the church until the government put an end to it. Allusions to Christ in the text were then obfuscated by the addition of vowels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Amar' means both 'word' and 'Lamb'. [1] When John the baptist said &amp;quot;Behold the Lamb of God, some heard him say &amp;quot;Behold the word of God.&amp;quot; but by the addition of vowels we see in the Hebrew dictionaries that they are now two words; amar, and emeer. The effectiveness of the obfuscation is noted in the Theologian's problem of where John got the 'Logos' in John 1:1, presuming that it is a new idea from Philo, rather than a natural part of the Hebrew language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prevalent idea that the square text doesn't have vowels is actually a modern invention. The language has been re-invented a couple times. Most recently it was a dead language which was reconstructed to support the Zionist movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the Sefir Yetzirah, a book commonly believed to be an esoteric source for Cabbalism, is actually a kind of Grammar for Hebrew, but it begins with phonetics. It explains that vowels are breath and consonants interrupt breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every consonant has an 'implied' vowel. When you speak a consonant you naturally speak the associated vowel. Some have the breath before the consonant, some have it after as the breath explodes from the build up of air behind it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is said that there are five consonants that act like vowels, but because the vowel (breath ) is foundational to all consonants, it is better explained as five vowels which also are used like consonants. they are placed on one side of the consonant to change the natural flow of area around the consonant 'b' ב is b-ah  'ab' אב is 'ahb' .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only does Hebrew have vowels, but all the letters have meanings which are combined to form the meaning of the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adam came from the adamah (ground) and is formed of blood (dam) and spirit (ah).&#xA;This is called 'formations' when a word is built up, and 'notarikon' when the word is divided into it's smaller parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issue concerned with the OP is based on the common misconception, which gives us an idea of his pedantic understanding of Hebrew. When you sight read, you do not look at the details of a word.  Consider aplpe , Jhon, Cnostinoplante. As long at teh frist ltteer and lsat are in pitosoin, and the rest of the letters are there, we can still read them easily. We can also read them easily if the lower half of the letters are chopped off by the shape of the line formed by letters in the proper order on top. Sight reading needs very little information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] אמר, without vowels which were added about 600 AD,  is both 'word' Ps 68:11 and lamb Ezr 6:9.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10971" LastEditorUserId="10971" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T13:58:11.633" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T13:58:11.633" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15782" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-22T13:47:40.787" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;T.S. Eliot's first professionally published poem was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, in which Eliot narrates the experience of a character named J. Alfred Prufrock. Similarly, Ezra Pound's &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Ezra-pound-hugh-selwyn-mauberley-complete-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Hugh Selwyn Mauberley&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is about Mauberley's failure (actually Pound's own self) as a poet. Are the names of these two characters completely arbitrary? It seems quite strange that these two contemporary poets used such a long and unconventional (in today's sense) name for their poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T16:59:45.043" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T23:15:37.607" Title="Are the names J. Alfred Prufrock and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley completely arbitrary?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;ezra-pound&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15783" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2567" CreationDate="2020-09-22T15:33:16.887" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin, in a way or the other, is a self-portrait of the author Tolstoy himself. So, your question if Levin would have Oblonsky as his friend in real life seems answerable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Part 1, Chapter 5, it is mentioned that Levin and Oblosnky were childhood friends,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin comes to Oblonsky’s office, interrupting a council meeting. Levin and Oblonsky are friends from childhood, but they have led very different lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the initial chapters (after Levin gets introduced) we instantly understand that Levin is an &lt;strong&gt;independent-minded&lt;/strong&gt; man. Oblonsky is not a man with a great serious emotional depth, he can't settle on any one feeling for very long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dolly was no longer attractive and good-looking to Stiva, so to satisfy his shallow  emotional urges, even forgetting that he was father of five children (two of them couldn't survive), he went for other women to satisfy his desires and as Tolstoy writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin being independent-minded  and &lt;strong&gt;socially awkward&lt;/strong&gt; didn't take that flaw of Stiva's character as a barrier in their childhood friendship. We, accepting Levin as his own person and follows his own vision of things, cannot say of Levin's view on Stiva's adultery in entirety. But even if Levin were to accept the majority's view and holds some group's prefabricated views then also it seems plausible and reasonable why Levin didn't break from Stiva, because Dolly herself didn't break from Oblonsky even after more than one adultery and also none of Scherbatskys shunned Oblonsky, not even an intellectual personality and Levin's own half-brother Sergei Ivanovich didn't consider Stiva's adultery in their friendship, then why would Levin do that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T15:33:16.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15782" CreationDate="2020-09-22T19:39:35.043" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Christopher Ricks (Eliot, T. S. Inventions of the March Hare), in his drafts of the poem T. S. Eliot subtitled it &lt;em&gt;Prufrock among the Women&lt;/em&gt;. And an article in the Kipling Journal of 1959, The Unfading Genius of Rudyard Kipling, reports Eliot saying &lt;em&gt;'The Love Song of'&lt;/em&gt; came from Rudyard Kipling's poem &lt;em&gt;The Love Song of Har Dyal.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot admitted, some years after writing Prufrock, that although he hadn't realized it at the time, he must have got the name from the Prufrock-Littau Company, a St Louis furniture store, who had advertised in the December 1912 edition of a local literary weekly less than three years before the poem was published. Eliot was born in St. Louis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Monteiro &lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZoRk3gsIKJEJ:https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3c99/44cc9818aa8bf119f7671ab169274140caae.pdf%20&amp;amp;cd=6&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;ct=clnk&amp;amp;gl=uk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;observed&lt;/a&gt; that if the name were to be split &lt;em&gt;prüf-rock&lt;/em&gt;, and read as &lt;em&gt;proof-rock&lt;/em&gt; it would mean the same as &lt;em&gt;touchstone&lt;/em&gt;: a stone used to test the genuineness of gold, or '&lt;em&gt;a standard or criterion by which something is judged or recognized.&lt;/em&gt;' [Lexico] And Touchstone, the fool in As You Like It, performs that function: testing the worth of both court fashions and Arcadian ideals. So too, says Monteiro, does Prufrock, &amp;quot;at times playing the Shakespearean touchstone of hard reality.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Touchstone had ever seen himself objectively he too might have admitted,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I am] an attendant lord, one that will do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To swell a progress, start a scene or two,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are similarities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Touchstone procures two pages to sing his love song to Audrey, then tells them, &amp;quot;Though there was no great matter in the ditty[...] I count it but time lost to hear&#xA;such a foolish song.[...] God mend your voices!&amp;quot; Prufrock's love song is addressed to nobody.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alas! I am unable to &lt;em&gt;furnish&lt;/em&gt; you with any information about Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T23:15:37.607" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T23:15:37.607" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15785" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-22T20:13:40.843" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Chinese-Peruvian poet Julia Wong Kcomt wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/september-2020-asian-peruvian-two-poems-julia-wong-kcomt-jennifer-shyue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two poems&lt;/a&gt; for Words Without Borders about her experiences as a product of two different cultures. I'm particularly interested in the first of them, entitled &amp;quot;The Red Rooster&amp;quot;, which begins and ends with the following two verses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peru dies.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like garlic bulbs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;this whim of blouses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;cut so masterfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our Peru is dying.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The rooster’s crow will return when the stone flies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is going on in this poem? Why is Peru dying? What is the relevance of garlic, blouses, iron windows, paint, and ovaries? What do the cherry tree, the sakura, the lotus flower, and the olive bush symbolise? Why is Jesus Christ sifting through grape seeds? Why is the rooster important, and what does &amp;quot;the stone flies&amp;quot; refer to? What is the poet indicating about her feeling regarding Chinese culture and Peruvian culture - does the poem suggest one as more important than the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T20:13:40.843" Title="Julia Wong Kcomt, &quot;The Red Rooster&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;julia-wong-kcomt&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15786" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15777" CreationDate="2020-09-22T21:40:46.323" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Fellowship doesn't talk about the Ring much on the way.  Certainly not about why they want to get to Mordor.  This leaves Gollum with no way of figuring out what Frodo intends but what he can reason out based on his own thinking -- insofar as he thought about it rather than the all-important question of how to get the Ring back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And his own thinking would be based on the way HE went to Mordor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But I am afraid&#xA;there is no possible doubt: he had made his slow, sneaking way, step by&#xA;step, mile by mile, south, down at last to the Land of Mordor.&amp;quot;&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;A heavy silence fell in the room. Frodo could hear his heart beating.&#xA;Even outside everything seemed still. No sound of Sam's shears could&#xA;now be heard.&lt;br/&gt;&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, to Mordor,&amp;quot; said Gandalf.  &amp;quot;Alas! Mordor draws all wicked things,&#xA;and the Dark Power was bending all its will to gather them there. The Ring&#xA;of the Enemy would leave its mark, too, leave him open to the summons.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T21:40:46.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15787" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-22T23:05:54.753" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T23:05:54.753" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T23:05:54.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15788" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-22T23:05:54.753" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book &quot;Trans-Atlantyk&quot;, a semi-autobiographical novel by Polish author Witold Gombrowicz. Should be tagged with [polish-literature] and [witold-gombrowicz]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T06:57:58.077" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T06:57:58.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15789" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-22T23:08:19.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-22T23:08:19.550" LastActivityDate="2020-09-22T23:08:19.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15790" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-22T23:08:19.550" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Chinese-Peruvian poet Julia Wong Kcomt and her life as a writer. Questions about her works originally written in Spanish should be tagged with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T23:44:17.523" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T23:44:17.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15777" CreationDate="2020-09-23T00:40:17.133" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's weird to me how Frodo and Sam didn't at least come up with some cover story. Some excuse to go there with the Ring. Anything to make Gollum not guess the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gollum was basically: we need to get into Mordor, it's not your business why. If you want to come with us, these are our conditions. In fact, Gollum &lt;em&gt;pleads&lt;/em&gt; to allow him to guide them, and is a half-prisoner, he is not in a situation to request explanations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frodo and Sam do not talk about that among themselves either, the ring is a black cloud upon them, something they need to do, but little more than because &lt;em&gt;it must be done&lt;/em&gt; (and they aren't really prepared for the task).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why else would these mysterious hobbits be traveling to such a place, with the Preciousss, if not to destroy it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would someone want to destroy the ring?? That's inconceivable. It's like someone carrying several million dollars across the country, just to use them on a bonfire. Surely the driver would have expected anything but that. Paying someone? Buying a propriety? A donation? Even giving it away to people you crossed by would make more sense!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We&lt;/strong&gt; know &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; they are doing it, and it kinda makes sense (it's a crazy idea, but they are desperate), and you are seeing it through that light, but it would be hard to come up with that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, Gollum has no idea about mount Doom or how the ring cannot be destroyed anywhere else. Had he known, he might have have thought on it when seeing the hobbits take the route marked with &amp;quot;Take this path to destroy your magic belongings&amp;quot; (albeit at that point he was not with them)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sauron had all the information at his disposal, but the idea that someone might want to destroy it never crossed his mind (until when it turned out to be too late).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10749" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T00:40:17.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14742" CreationDate="2020-09-23T00:57:37.277" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The idea of Jesus's omniscience  is a dividing point between Catholic and many Protestants.  The Catholics hold that the doctrine of 'kenosis' is a heresy, even though Peter says Jesus 'humbled&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;emptied&amp;quot; himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Catholic position, that there was no difference in the two natures of Jesus, leads some to wild speculations that baby Jesus could fly and give life to  clay birds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some non-Catholics go so far as to say that his two natures were so different that Jesus was merely a man who possessed a divine spirit.   Neither of these positions satisfy the demands of a comprehensive doctrine on the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The middle ground is probably closer to the truth. He was the pre-incarnate Word, also known as the un-begotten Son.  He then 'humbled' or emptied himself as he became a baby. Consider closing your eyes. you do not become blind but simply choose not to use sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the Word chose to 'close his eyes' to his divinity and operate fully in the flesh... able to 'open his eyes at any time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is part of his temptation. Would he have to face the cross, or could by his divine nature, figure out another way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he had given in and 'opened his eyes' he would forfeit the position as our high priest, who was tempted in every way that we are, but did not sin. If he used divine power to resist sin, then he would not really understand our temptation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So before becoming incarnate, he wrote notes for himself in the &amp;quot;mystery hidden from the beginning&amp;quot;. To understand the mystery he had to approach the scriptures as a little child: in trust, asking questions, and without filters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the notes he left himself in the OT. He discovered who he was, and what he was to do. He chose to be obedient to what he discovered there. He had to decide to be the savior of Israel at the wedding of Cana, and to be the savior of the gentiles in his encounter with the Samaritan woman. He had to choose to die, though his flesh resisted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He knew God's plan as revealed in the mystery. He was often surprised by the means of the Father's will being accomplished. The 'miracles' and signs were not to convince the masses. After all, he taught in parables so that they would not believe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They were a dialog between Father and son where a 'dinner theater' was being acted out in the literal history, which was shadow of the cross. Jesus would choose to participate in the 'play' showing that he understood his role in the cross, and the Father would do the miracle as an encouragement to him to continue toward the cross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jesus said that he would only perform one sign, in his own strength, and that was the sign of his own resurrection, which he accomplished by opening his eyes to his divinity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His knowledge of the future was only that contained in the 'mystery', some are stated purposes and some are quite detailed in methods. But he himself did not know the day of his coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I upvoted Dave's answer because it is more direct, and added this as 'color'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10971" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T00:57:37.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15793" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15796" CreationDate="2020-09-23T12:37:31.613" Score="6" ViewCount="469" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Scott Turow's legal mystery &lt;em&gt;The Last Trial&lt;/em&gt;, the point of view character is an old man. Pinky is his grand-daughter. The following passage occurs near the end of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinky says nothing to him [Lep], but instead strikes one index finger against the other, as if making fire. The gesture seems comical, but Lep stops cold when he takes in the fierce look Pinky is giving him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this gesture? Is it something that only young people would be acquainted with?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T22:53:10.700" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T22:53:10.700" Title="What does this gesture mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;scott-turow&gt;&lt;the-last-trial&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15794" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15795" CreationDate="2020-09-23T12:40:39.777" Score="-1" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;A sentence in the Enigma song Rivers of Belief goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Silence covered the sky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a Biblical reference here. But I would like to know, what is the meaning of the line and what does the line imply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T14:05:03.667" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T14:29:51.620" Title="Meaning of lines about the lamb in the Enigma song Rivers of Belief" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;michael-cretu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15794" CreationDate="2020-09-23T14:29:51.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lines are an allusion to the Book of Revelations, more specifically the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/revelation-kjv.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;end of chapter 7 and the beginning of chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Chapter 7: 17] For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Chapter 8: 1] And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[2] And I saw the seven angels which stood before God; and to them were given seven trumpets.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[3] And another angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer; and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/revelation/8-1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BibleHub.com&lt;/a&gt; for alternative translations of Revelations 8:1.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song title &amp;quot;Rivers of Belief&amp;quot; refers to the role that rivers, sometimes sacred rivers, play in some religions. For example, Jesus was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_of_Jesus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;baptised in the river Jordan&lt;/a&gt;. For Hindus, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ganges&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamuna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yamuna&lt;/a&gt; are sacred rivers in India. While the song almost literally quotes the Bible, the line &amp;quot;I will return&amp;quot; can also be read as an allusion to reincarnation, which is a belief in Hinduism (among other religions).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of the seventh seal and the silence that follows its opening is a matter of Biblical hermeneutics. The Wikipedia article about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_seals#Seventh_seal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seven seals&lt;/a&gt;, for example, summarises five views: the preterist view, the historicist view, the futurist view, the idealist view and the Mormon view. The answers to the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/1606/in-revelation-81-does-opening-the-seventh-seal-do-anything&quot;&gt;In Revelation 8:1 does opening the seventh seal do anything?&lt;/a&gt; on Biblical Hermeneutics Stack Exchange present an additional set of interpretations. It seems that the meaning of that line remains open to debate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T14:29:51.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15793" CreationDate="2020-09-23T15:16:55.927" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;As described, and being unfamiliar with the work in question, this would appear to the the North American finger gesture for 'shame'.&#xA;per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gestures#Two_handed&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shame is symbolized in North America by rubbing the back of one forefinger with the other forefinger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of similar gestures in different cultures, as illustrated in these two screenshots taken from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PxFjBgAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PP1&amp;amp;dq=BODYTALK%3A%20A%20WORLD%20GUIDE%20TO%20GESTURES&amp;amp;pg=PT183#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=shame&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J4MCP.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/J4MCP.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/58VZc.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/58VZc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T15:29:00.560" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T15:29:00.560" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15928" CreationDate="2020-09-23T17:23:26.377" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/02feridoun.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second book of the Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt;, King Feridoun tests his three sons by appearing to them as a dragon. The eldest son runs away, the middle one takes up arms against the monster, and the youngest one seeks to cow it with words. Afterwards, Feridoun gives his son names according to this event:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;O my sons, listen unto the words that I shall speak. The raging dragon whose breath was danger was but your father, who sought to test your hearts, and having learned them gave way with joy. But now will I give to you names such as are fitting unto men. The first-born shall be called Silim (may thy desires be accomplished in the world!) for thou soughtest to save thyself from the clutches of the dragon, nor didst thou hesitate in the hour of flight. A man who fleeth neither before an elephant nor a lion, call him rather foolhardy than brave. And the second, who from the beginning showed his courage, which was ardent as a flame, I will call him Tur, the courageous, whom even a mad elephant cannot daunt. But the youngest is a man prudent and brave, who knoweth both how to haste and how to tarry; he chose the midway between the flame and the ground, as it beseemeth a man of counsel, and he hath proven himself brave, prudent, and bold. Irij shall he be called, that the gate of power may be his goal, for first did he show gentleness, but his bravery sprang forth at the hour of danger.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this Feridoun divides his kingdom into three parts for his three sons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Feridoun had thus opened his lips he called for the book wherein are written the stars, and he searched for the planets of his sons. And he found that Jupiter reigned in the sign of the Archer in the house of Silim, and the sun in the Lion in that of Tur, but in the house of Irij there reigned the moon in the Scorpion. And when he saw this he was sorrowful, for he knew that for Irij were grief and bale held in store. Then having read the secrets of Fate, Feridoun parted the world and gave the three parts unto his sons in suzerainty. Roum and Khaver, which are the lands of the setting sun, did he give unto Silim. Turan and Turkestan did he give unto Tur, and made him master of the Turks and of China, but unto Irij he gave Iran, with the throne of might and the crown of supremacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of the names Silim, Tur, and Irij?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Do they somehow denote the sons' behaviour when faced with the dragon - for example, in the Persian language, does &amp;quot;Silim&amp;quot; suggest cowardice, &amp;quot;Tur&amp;quot; bellicosity,  and &amp;quot;Irij&amp;quot; wisdom?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Furthermore, do these names relate to the lands given to each son? I noticed that &amp;quot;Tur&amp;quot; forms part of the words &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkestan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkestan&lt;/a&gt; (these being originally Persian words), while &amp;quot;Irij&amp;quot; is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iran&lt;/a&gt;, but the word &amp;quot;Silim&amp;quot; bears no relation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BBm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roum&lt;/a&gt; or to &amp;quot;Khaver&amp;quot; (where is that?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T12:01:50.180" Title="Significance of the names Silim, Tur, and Irij for the sons of Feridoun?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15798" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-23T22:48:54.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T22:48:54.923" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T22:48:54.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15799" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-23T22:48:54.923" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author and lawyer Scott Turow, and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:19:50.003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:19:50.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15800" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-23T22:52:30.047" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T22:52:30.047" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T22:52:30.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15801" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-23T22:52:30.047" Score="0" Body="Questions about Michael Cretu, a German-Romanian singer-songwriter and founder of the German musical project Enigma. Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T09:12:37.617" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:12:37.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15802" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-23T23:00:44.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-23T23:00:44.707" LastActivityDate="2020-09-23T23:00:44.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15803" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-23T23:00:44.707" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;The Last Trial&quot;, a legal thriller written by Scott Turow. Questions about this work should be tagged with [scott-turow]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T09:12:27.337" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:12:27.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15804" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15807" CreationDate="2020-09-24T02:37:03.860" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the song &amp;quot;The Ballad of the Shape of Things to Come&amp;quot; (lyrics &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/1142348/Blossom+Dearie/The+Ballad+of+the+Shape+of+Things&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Triangular is the piece of pie I eat to ease my sorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Triangular is the hatchet blade I plan to hide tomorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Triangular the relationship which now has ceased to be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And triangular is the &lt;strong&gt;garment thin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That fastens on with a safety pin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To a &lt;strong&gt;prize I had no wish to win&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It's a lasting memory&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That my true love gave to me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a non-native speaker, and the meaning is unclear to me. What could be this &amp;quot;garmet thin&amp;quot; of triangular shape? And what is the &amp;quot;prize I had no wish to win&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that the two might be related so I clumped them into a single question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S. Who is the author of the ballad? I haven't found the author. The Kingston Trio?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T03:05:11.020" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T04:04:42.430" Title="What are the &quot;garment thin&quot; and the &quot;prize&quot; in the song &quot;The Ballad of the Shape of Things to Come&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15683" CreationDate="2020-09-24T06:46:56.747" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it! It's a book called &lt;em&gt;Confessions of an Economic Hit Man&lt;/em&gt; by John Perkins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is not as much about the biography or any specific historic event, instead, it describes several cases when America used its powers to gain access to natural resources. Including Panama, Saudi Arabia, and other countries. The author worked for a private company, he was a volunteer for the Peace Corps, he had a daughter, he had a woman handler - Claudine. He didn't start an IT company, however, he started an independent power company. And he wasn't technically a spy, but rather an economic hitman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what extent the story is true-to-life, but nevertheless. Thank you for helping me to identify the story!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know for sure that this is the story, I dug into my old e-book archives and found it there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDod7.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NDod7.png&quot; alt=&quot;cover of &amp;quot;Confessions of an Economic Hit Man&amp;quot;, showing an eagle landing on / striking at a globe, against a backdrop of the US flag&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10899" LastEditorUserId="10899" LastEditDate="2020-09-24T09:50:55.203" LastActivityDate="2020-09-24T09:50:55.203" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15804" CreationDate="2020-09-25T04:04:42.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Converting &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/15804/what-are-the-garment-thin-and-the-prize-in-the-song-the-ballad-of-the-shape#comment25008_15804&quot;&gt;Robusto's comment&lt;/a&gt; to an answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The garment is a diaper, and the prize &amp;quot;I had no wish to win&amp;quot; is a baby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T04:04:42.430" CommentCount="0" CommunityOwnedDate="2020-09-25T04:04:42.430" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15808" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-25T09:11:28.077" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/september-2020-poetry-contest-learning-late-letters-nguyen-hoang-guyen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Learning Late Letters&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, originally written in Vietnamese by Nguyễn Hoàng Quyên, was one of the winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/poetry-contest-winners-2020-words-without-bordersacademy-of-american-poets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academy of Americans Poets Poems in Translation Contest&lt;/a&gt;. But, looking at the text of this short piece of literature, it doesn't fit with what I (having read mostly English poetry) would think of as a &amp;quot;poem&amp;quot;. Rhyme and rhythm could be lost in translation, of course, but there are no &lt;em&gt;lines&lt;/em&gt; in this piece! My instinct would be to call it short prose instead, but then I know nothing about Vietnamese poetry and its norms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What defines &amp;quot;poetry&amp;quot; in Vietnamese literature, or why is this particular work called a poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T09:11:28.077" Title="Why is the short Vietnamese piece &quot;Learning Late Letters&quot; called a &quot;poem&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;vietnamese-literature&gt;&lt;nguyen-hoang-quyen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15809" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-25T18:24:32.367" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English title of the Japanese song &lt;a href=&quot;https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8A%E3%82%92%E5%90%91%E3%81%84%E3%81%A6%E6%AD%A9%E3%81%93%E3%81%86&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;上を向いて歩こう&lt;/a&gt; is a head scratcher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;上を向いて歩こう&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;涙がこぼれないように&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;思い出す 春の日&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;上を向いて歩こう&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;にじんだ星をかぞえて&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;思い出す 夏の日&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;幸せは 雲の上に&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;幸せは 空の上に&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;上を向いて歩こう&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;涙がこぼれないように&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;泣きながら 歩く&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;思い出す 秋の日&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;悲しみは星のかげに&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;悲しみは月のかげに&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;上を向いて歩こう&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;涙がこぼれないように&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;泣きながら 歩く&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;一人ぽっちの夜&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/kyusakamoto/sukiyakiuewomuitearukou.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I look up while I walk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So the tears won't fall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Remembering those spring days&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But tonight I'm all alone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I look up while I walk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Counting the stars with teary eyes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Remembering those summer days&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But tonight I'm all alone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Happiness lies beyond the clouds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Happiness lies above the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I look up while I walk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So the tears won't fall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I cry while I walk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For I am alone tonight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Remembering those autumn days&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But tonight I'm all alone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sadness hides in the shadow of the stars&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sadness hides in the shadow of the moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I look up while I walk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So the tears won't fall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My heart is filled with sorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For tonight I am alone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For tonight I am alone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What part of the lyrics gave us &amp;quot;sukiyaki&amp;quot;? Who titled the song &amp;quot;sukiyaki&amp;quot;? What does this act of titling mean? And what is its cultural significance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-25T18:49:03.960" LastActivityDate="2020-09-25T18:49:03.960" Title="How do the lyrics of &quot;上を向いて歩こう&quot; relate to its English title &quot;Sukiyaki&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15682" CreationDate="2020-09-26T01:02:17.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Grimm brothers were the first writers to actually try to collect and preserve fairy tales as such, and not as raw material to make literary works out of.  Nevertheless they did modify the tales for various reasons, for instance, thinking they were reconstructing an original tale from a defective copy.  After their first edition, they also made alterations because of complaints that their &amp;quot;Household and &lt;em&gt;Children's&lt;/em&gt; Tales&amp;quot; were not, in fact, suited for children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first edition has the fewest changes.  I believe there are surviving notes for some stories -- for instance, I have run across discussions of how in the notes Snow White was abandoned by her mother in the woods, where in the first edition, the mother used the huntsman (and of course, in the second and later, became a stepmother) -- but I have never run across them in book form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French tales were not, in fact, translations from a French book.  They were told by French Huguenots living in Germany, but were clearly and obviously based on Charles Perrault's tales from &lt;em&gt;Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé&lt;/em&gt;, and so obviously that the brothers purged many, such as &amp;quot;Bluebeard,&amp;quot; from the second edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T01:02:17.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15813" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-26T08:38:52.003" Score="2" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/december-2017-bengali-bollywood-house-of-wax-subodh-ghosh-somrita-ganguly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The House of Wax&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a short story by Subodh Ghosh, translated from Bengali to English by Somrita Ganguly. It's about a man and woman who meet at a train station years after getting divorced from each other and both re-marrying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few paragraphs of the story cover their memories of some of the bad moments in their marriage which provided to them &amp;quot;real, empirical proof&amp;quot; that their love had faded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One day Madhuri had sat immersed in a book in her room while Shatadal packed his clothes in a suitcase in another room. He was leaving for Bhubaneswar for a week to supervise an archaeological survey. Madhuri had not come out of her room, not even once, as he was about to leave. Shatadal had found the sunshine that had crept in through the window that early winter morning and spread itself out on the floor absolutely meaningless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later that year, in spring, one Sunday evening had also wrought havoc in their lives. Madhuri, like every other week, had dressed up that evening as well, ready to go out, waiting in her room. Shatadal had remained in the other room making sketches, with intense concentration, of the foundations of temples from the Chalukya dynasty. He had forgotten all about the evening plans. Madhuri had looked out of her window at the sky and thought how meaningless it was for the setting sun to color the clouds crimson. It was merely a tease. Soon darkness would envelop everything. Why did the sun play these tricks, then? It would have been so much better if it set all at once, swiftly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these memories give significance to sunlight: Shatadal &amp;quot;found the sunshine [...] absolutely meaningless&amp;quot; when his wife didn't pay attention to him, and Madhuri &amp;quot;thought how meaningless [the sunlight] was&amp;quot; when her husband didn't pay attention to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the importance of the sunlight in this passage?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it tie in to the other metaphors used in the story? Elsewhere similes and metaphors like the titular house of wax are used, but this seems to be the only place where the characters dwell entirely on sunlight without the connection with their emotions and personal lives being commented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T08:38:52.003" Title="What is the symbolism of the sun in this Bengali short story &quot;The House of Wax&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;subodh-ghosh&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15814" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-26T13:03:27.057" Score="3" ViewCount="978" Body="&lt;p&gt;I want to know the line by line explanation of the poem &amp;quot;The Laburnum Top&amp;quot; (written by Ted Hughes).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?kehb1=3-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; (Page 31)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Laburnum top is silent, quite still&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the afternoon yellow September sunlight,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Till the goldfinch comes, with a twitching chirrup&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The whole tree trembles and thrills.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is the engine of her family.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She stokes it full, then flirts out to a branch-end&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Showing her barred face identity mask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She launches away, towards the infinite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the laburnum subsides to empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10691" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-26T14:23:02.590" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T13:52:06.630" Title="&quot;The Laburnum Top&quot; by Ted Hughes - poem explanation" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15816" CreationDate="2020-09-26T17:36:31.270" Score="4" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Liar's Key&lt;/em&gt; by Mark Lawrence, a banker is informing Jalan about the stock exchange process:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Stakes are purchased using the &lt;strong&gt;calendula paddle&lt;/strong&gt; to attract the seller’s attention,’ Marco continued as if I hadn’t so much as twitched my lips. ‘Both parties then retire to one of the transaction booths after contracting a House Gold witness to officiate the paperwork. The sale must then be registered at—’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;calendula paddle&amp;quot; mean? I think it's used literally but it sounds too weird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2871" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-26T19:15:52.907" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T11:00:27.943" Title="Is &quot;calendula paddle&quot; used in the literal sense in &quot;The Liar's Key&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mark-lawrence&gt;&lt;the-red-queens-war&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15815" CreationDate="2020-09-26T18:27:13.643" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is that the narrator is selling stakes “in three of the finest merchantmen beneath sail” on a “trading floor”, so “paddle” would seem to mean a bidding paddle of the kind used in auction rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But “calendula” is a mystery. The only plausible explanation I can come up with is that “calendula”, the generic name of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendula_officinalis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;marigold&lt;/a&gt;, is intended to refer to the colour of the paddle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;marigold, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Of the colour of the marigold flower, bright orange-yellow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is plausible because the trading floor is operated by “House Gold”, which seems to be a fantasy equivalent of a Renaissance banking family like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;House of Medici&lt;/a&gt;. Such a family might well decorate their equipment in their house livery, which would likely be a colour close to gold, to suggest their name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this theory is right, it would be a misuse of the word, because although “marigold” refers to the colour as well as the flower, “calendula” does not: it refers only to the flower. But since &lt;em&gt;The Liar’s Key&lt;/em&gt; is a fantasy novel, perhaps the misuse is deliberate, to give a sense of estrangement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T11:00:27.943" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T11:00:27.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-26T20:48:08.957" Score="16" ViewCount="589" Body="&lt;p&gt;Though he was brought home by Mr. Earnshaw following a journey to Liverpool, there is no definitive answer to his ethnicity. Liverpool by 1740 had surpassed Bristol and London as the slave-trading capital of Britain. Did Emily Brontё envisage him to be a black man by mentioning Liverpool? Nelly once said to Heathcliff: “If you were a regular black …”. He was also described as a “dark-skinned gypsy”, or  “a little Lascar”, and dark haired, with a “half-civilized ferocity” that “lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire”, and with dusky skin. Were these references merely meant to imply foreignness, otherness, and, frankly, danger and nothing to imply race? What was his ethnicity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10940" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T01:50:17.710" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T01:50:17.710" Title="What was the ethnicity of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights?" Tags="&lt;race-issues&gt;&lt;emily-bronte&gt;&lt;wuthering-heights&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2020-09-26T21:03:46.760" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last line &amp;quot;'Tis folly to be wise&amp;quot; is a contradiction. &amp;quot;No more&amp;quot; is used as &amp;quot;This should stop&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence becomes clear if it is extended like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No more; where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise. But rather: where ignorance is cowardice, it's brave to be wise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10992" LastEditorUserId="10992" LastEditDate="2020-09-26T21:29:03.007" LastActivityDate="2020-09-26T21:29:03.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15822" CreationDate="2020-09-27T12:53:43.350" Score="8" ViewCount="2962" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/238/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Funeral Pyre&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman (1924), Thorndyke found a dental plate of a dead man by a gate at the crossing of a ditch, and he wanted to know whether he come through this gate or was he only passing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“We had better not make too many assumptions while we have so few facts,” said Thorndyke. He put down his case &lt;strong&gt;beside the gate, which guarded a bridge across a broad ditch&lt;/strong&gt;, or drainage dyke, and opened his map.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The question is,” said he, “did he come through this gate or was he only passing it? This dyke, you see, opens into the creek about three-quarters of a mile farther down. The probability is, therefore, that if he came up from the river across the marshes he would be on this side of the ditch and would pass the gate. But we had better try both sides. Let us leave our things by the gate and explore the ground for a few hundred yards, one on either side of the ditch. Which side will you take?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I elected to take the side nearer the creek, and, having put my camera down by the research-case, &lt;strong&gt;climbed over the padlocked gate and began to walk slowly along by the side of the ditch,&lt;/strong&gt; scanning the ground for foot-prints showing the impression of boot-protectors. At first the surface was far from favourable for imprints of any kind, being, like that immediately around the gate, covered with thick turf. About a hundred and fifty yards down, however, I came upon a heap of worm-casts on which was plainly visible the print of a heel with a clear impression of a kidney-shaped protector such as I had seen in the hut. Thereupon I hailed Thorndyke and, having stuck my stick in the ground beside the heel-print, went back to meet him at the gate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This is rather interesting, Jervis,” he remarked, when I had described my find. “&lt;strong&gt;The inference seems to be that he came from the creek—unless there is another gate farther down.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it common that the bridges of ditches or creeks had guarding gates in 1924?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've searched for a photo that may show that, but I didn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:50:06.513" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:50:06.513" Title="Was it common that the bridges of ditches or creeks had guarding gates in 1924?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15821" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15819" CreationDate="2020-09-27T16:07:24.070" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know if it was common, but I suspect that it has happened.  Let me point to my favourite occurence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajdahunyad_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Vajdahunyad Castle&lt;/a&gt; in the Budapest City Park is a modern castle built shortly before 1896, imitating the style of mediaeval castles of Hunyadi.  It was first built as a hasty wooden structure so that it may be ready for the Millenium celebrations of 1896, but later rebuilt to stone and brick until 1908.  The castle is currently home to a museum and some tourist attractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The castle is surrounded by a moat.  This moat is partly connected to the lake of the City Park.  The moat and the nearby ice skating rink has water only during the summer, when it can be navigated by small rowboats, a pastime advertised to lovers and tourists.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moat has four bridges crossing it.  The largest of them is the lion bridge that leads directly through the north front gate of the castle.  I am, however, more interested in a small gate on the east side.  This one is pedestrian-only, and is built from steel and concrete.  This bridge has railings and a short two-winged gate made of cast iron that has now rusted so it's in a permanent half-open state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a modern photo that shows this gate, viewing from the Castle end.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vajdahunyad_v%C3%A1ra_-_gyalogos_h%C3%ADd_fel%C5%91l.JPG&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See also a photo from the opposite end&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A1jl:H%C3%ADd_a_Vajdahunyad_v%C3%A1ra_el%C5%91tt._Fortepan_17896.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The bridge is visible on a photo dated 1900, so it was built before that, probably together with the castle&lt;/a&gt;, but on that photo, the bridge clearly does not have the gate yet.  Aside from that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Tudakoz%C3%B3/Arch%C3%ADvum/2018-03-06&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the bridge is insignificant enough that we can't track its history&lt;/a&gt;.  I thus won't be able to tell you if the gate was there in 1929, but I suspect so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A1jl:Budapest,_City_Park,_1146_Hungary_-_panoramio_(5).jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2a/Budapest%2C_City_Park%2C_1146_Hungary_-_panoramio_(5).jpg/660px-Budapest%2C_City_Park%2C_1146_Hungary_-_panoramio_(5).jpg&quot; alt=&quot;(photo)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other examples.  The forest area called Lajosforrás, to the west of Szentendre, is a popular excursion place for us who live in Budapest, because it's approachable by car but remote enough from city noises.  You usually arrive to Lajosforrás from the Szentendre side.  There is a free parking lot here, after which cars are not allowed to continue without special permit.  To discourage cars from entering, there is a barrier on a road bridge over a creek.  The barrier consists of a single rail that opens upwards from a hinge on a side, so that cars with permit can enter, and is sometimes secured by a padlock.  (The people who enter are mostly those who harvest wood, though the area is also used as a military shooting range.)  I believe this counts as a gate for your purposes.  Alas, I don't have a photo of this bridge, and this gate probably postdates 1929.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I've also seen such gates on bridges over small ditches that lead to private property, but I can't recall a specific example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T12:43:32.400" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T12:43:32.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15819" CreationDate="2020-09-27T16:54:37.893" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some geographical context might be helpful. The scene of the crime is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Kent_Marshes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;North Kent Marshes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A shocking tragedy has come to light in a &lt;strong&gt;meadow about a mile from Dartford&lt;/strong&gt;. About two o’clock this morning, a rural constable observed a rick on fire out on the &lt;strong&gt;marshes&lt;/strong&gt; near the creek.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. Austin Freeman (1924). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/238/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Funeral Pyre&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Blue Scarab&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 238–239. New York: Dodd, Mead &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The marshes between Dartford and the Thames have now largely been built on, and only a couple of small regions of marsh remain (the Crayford Marshes on the west side of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Darent&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Darent&lt;/a&gt;, and the Dartford Marshes on the east), but in the early 20th century this whole area was farmland. Here’s the 1910 Ordnance Survey 6-inch sheet showing the region between Dartford (centre left) and the Thames (top right). You can see a large expanse of marsh, labelled “Stone Marshes”, towards the top of the map. This is split into fields by a network of creeks (natural waterways) and dykes (drainage ditches), over which there are many foot-bridges, labelled “F.B.” Click on the map for a zoomable version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://maps.nls.uk/view/101428083&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZGCI8.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The marshes were used for grazing cattle and sheep, and so the reason for putting a gate on the bridge was to prevent livestock from crossing the dyke. If the farmer ever needed to set livestock to graze in the field on one side of the dyke, but not the other, then the bridge needed to be closed off. In the story, the burned hay-rick indicated that the farmer had been hay-making in the field on one side of the bridge: a gate on the bridge leading to this field would have been necessary to prevent livestock from eating or trampling the hay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a modern (2016) photo taken on the Cliffe Marshes, about fifteen miles east of Dartford, showing a foot-bridge over a creek (the Cliffe Fleet) with a gate at each end. The stiles suggest that the gates are left locked by the farmer and have to be climbed by walkers, just as in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4969979&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/MKhkd.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Photo by Chris Whippet, licensed CC-BY-SA.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T20:07:05.703" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T20:07:05.703" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15682" CreationDate="2020-09-27T18:38:23.913" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of their fairy tale collection in 1812 (first volume) and 1815 (second volume). This collection was republished in 1819, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1850 and 1857. This collection eventually contained 211 fairy tales and is known as the &amp;quot;big edition&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;große Ausgabe&lt;/em&gt;). In addition, there was a &amp;quot;small edition&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;kleine Ausgabe&lt;/em&gt;) containing 50 fairy tales, which was printed in 1825, 1833, 1836, 1841, 1844, 1847, 1850, 1853 and 1858.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea to collect fairy tales had been suggested by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, but when the brothers Grimm sent their manuscript to Brentano in 1810, Brentano didn't do anything with it and the manuscript disappeared, only to be rediscovered in the 20th century. Fortunately, the brothers Grimm had made a copy of the manuscript, so the could proceed to publish the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Especially Jacob was interested in publishing the fairy tales as faithfully as they had been recorded, without embellishments. Even though the fairy tales had been collected in Hessen, later research has shown that &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; fairy tales indirectly derived from texts published by Charles Perrault, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_d%27Aulnoy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madame d'Aulnoy&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte-Rose_de_Caumont_de_La_Force&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mademoiselle de La Force&lt;/a&gt;. One of the brothers Grimms' sources was Marie Hassenpflug, who descended from Huguenots who had once fled France. The fairy tales she told the brothers Grimm include Little Brother and Little Sister (&lt;em&gt;Brüderchen und Schwesterchen&lt;/em&gt;), Briar Rose (&lt;em&gt;Dornröschen&lt;/em&gt;; collected by Perrault in France) and The Girl Without Hands (&lt;em&gt;Das Mädchen ohne Hände&lt;/em&gt;). In addition to oral sources, the brothers Grimm also used manuscripts and books dating from the 16th to the 18th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas Jacob Grimm emphasised faithfulness, his brother Wilhelm, who was the main editor starting with the second volume, tended to amplify. For example, Wilhelm tended to replace the present tense with the preterite, indirect speech with direct speech and foreign words with German or Germanic words. He also liked proverbs, archaic expressions, diminutive forms and emotion words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the second edition onwards, Wilhelm Grimm increasingly fashioned the fairy tale collection as a children's book and some of his modifications can be explained by this: he removed objectionable passages or euphemised them to make them compatible with bourgeois decency. The &amp;quot;small edition&amp;quot; was even more strongly conceived as children's literature, both in its selection (a preference for fairy tales involving children) and in it style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who wish to read the fairy tales in versions that come closest to what the brothers Grimm recorded should consult reprints or facsimiles of the first edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heinz Rölleke (editor): &lt;em&gt;Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm. Synopse der Urfassung von 1810 and der Erstdrucke von 1812&lt;/em&gt;. Cologny-Genève, 1975.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Friedrich Panzer (editor): &lt;em&gt;Die KHM der Brüder Grimm&lt;/em&gt;. 1913.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heinz Rölleke and Ulrike Marquardt (editors): &lt;em&gt;KHM, Faksimile der Erstauflage (1812/1815) mit den hs. Nachträgen der Brüder Grimm (Transkription, Kommentar, Nachwort)&lt;/em&gt;. 3 volumes. 1986.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(KHM = &lt;em&gt;Kinder- und Hausmärchen&lt;/em&gt;. hs. = &lt;em&gt;handschriftlich&lt;/em&gt;, manuscript (adjective))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Source&lt;/strong&gt;: Max Lüthi: &lt;em&gt;Märchen&lt;/em&gt;. 8th edition, revised by Heinz Rölleke. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-28T12:16:04.297" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T12:16:04.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15824" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15825" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Indian author Subodh Ghosh (1909–1980) and his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [bengali-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T19:37:00.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15826" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-27T20:39:28.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T20:39:28.987" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T20:39:28.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15827" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-27T20:39:28.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American-British novelist Mark Lawrence (born 1966) and his life as a writer. He is most famous for his &quot;Broken Empire&quot; trilogy." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:24:46.423" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:24:46.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15828" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-27T20:41:03.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-09-27T20:41:03.687" LastActivityDate="2020-09-27T20:41:03.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15829" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-27T20:41:03.687" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Red Queen's War', a book series written by American-British author Mark Lawrence. Questions about this series should also be tagged with [mark-lawrence]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:28:18.183" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:28:18.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-28T08:23:36.857" Score="2" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/02feridoun.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the second part&lt;/a&gt; (Helen Zimmern's translation) of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt;, the youngest son Irij is killed by his brothers, who send his head back to their father Feridoun:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now when they were come to the garden of Irij, Feridoun faltered in his sorrow, and he pressed the head of the young King, his son, unto his breast. And he cast black earth upon his throne, and tore his hair, and shed tears, and his cries mounted even unto the seventh sphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;the seventh sphere&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; I tried to search for the phrase on the internet, but the results were all related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://myelementality.com/products/copy-of-seventh-sphere-lenormand-deck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tarot&lt;/a&gt;, and searching for this phrase together with &amp;quot;Persian&amp;quot; gave no relevant results. Is it a cultural or religious thing, perhaps?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T17:31:37.307" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T18:01:20.117" Title="What is &quot;the seventh sphere&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15023" CreationDate="2020-09-28T12:14:12.470" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The point that Thorndyke is making is that in order for a fingerprint to show that a particular person committed the crime, two things need to be established:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The print was left by that person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only the criminal could have left the print.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But often the only evidence presented is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The print matches that person’s finger.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) goes some way towards establishing (1), but it does not help with (2), which needs to be established by other means. However, people can be so dazzled by the uniqueness of fingerprints that they completely forget the need for (2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ‘The Case of the White Footprints’ the fingerprints on the bottle of poison were assumed by Superintendent Platt to be those of the murderer, but in fact they belonged to Dr Foxton, who had picked up the bottle when he examined the body:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Foxton placed his fingers on the blackened plate and then pressed them on the paper pad, leaving on the latter four beautifully clear, black fingerprints. These Superintendent Platt scrutinized eagerly, and as his glance travelled from the prints to the photographs he broke into a sheepish grin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sold again!” he muttered. “They are the same prints.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well,” said Miller, in a tone of disgust, “you must have been a mug not to have thought of that when you knew that Dr. Foxton had handled the bottle.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The fact, however, is important,” said Thorndyke. “The absence of any fingerprints but Dr. Foxton’s not only suggests that the murderer took the precaution to wear gloves, but especially it proves that the bottle was not handled by the deceased during life. A suicide’s hands will usually be pretty moist and would leave conspicuous, if not very clear, impressions.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. Austin Freeman (1924). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/82/mode/2up?q=moist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Case of the White Footprints&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Blue Scarab&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 82–83. New York: Dodd, Mead &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freeman’s first novel, &lt;em&gt;The Red Thumb Mark&lt;/em&gt;, is also concerned with the evidential value of fingerprints. He wrote in the preface:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may happen that the book may serve a useful purpose in drawing attention to certain popular misapprehensions on the subject of finger-prints and their evidential value; misapprehensions the extent of which may be judged when we learn from the newspapers that several Continental commercial houses have actually substituted finger-prints for signed initials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. Austin Freeman (1924). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/redthumbmark00free_0/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Red Thumb Mark&lt;/em&gt;, p. v&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Dodd, Mead &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Red Thumb Mark&lt;/em&gt; describes a case in which (3) and (2) are well-established and this seems to be conclusive as to the criminal’s identity, but Thorndyke is able to demonstrate that (1) does not follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T12:14:12.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3627" CreationDate="2020-09-28T15:07:32.157" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/jack-london/short-story/the-apostate&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Apostate&amp;quot;, by Jack London&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story starts with Johnny being woken by his mother to go to work in a factory as he does every day to earn money for them and his younger siblings. Towards the end of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had long known his mother's ambition for the younger boy, but the thought of it no longer rankled. Nothing mattered any more. Not even that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know, ma, what you've ben plannin' for Will--keepin' him in school to make a book-keeper out of him. But it ain't no use, I've quit. He's got to go to work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;An' after I have brung you up the way I have,&amp;quot; she wept, starting to cover her head with the apron and changing her mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You never brung me up,&amp;quot; he answered with sad kindliness. &amp;quot;I brung myself up, ma, an' I brung up Will. He's bigger'n me, an' heavier, an' taller. When I was a kid, I reckon I didn't git enough to eat. When he come along an' was a kid, I was workin' an' earnin' grub for him too. But that's done with. Will can go to work, same as me, or he can go to hell, I don't care which. I'm tired. I'm goin' now. Ain't you goin' to say goodbye?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The houses and factories thinned out and the open spaces increased as he approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, grotesque and terrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11000" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T09:17:31.457" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T09:17:31.457" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6048" CreationDate="2020-09-28T19:54:54.870" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book to which you are referring is entitled &amp;quot;The Lark and the Laurel&amp;quot;, by Barbara Willard.  It is the first in a series of five books about England in the time beginning in 1485.  The main character's name is Cecily Jolland.  Due to the fact that her father has to flee England because of Henry Tudor's accession to the throne she is put in custody of her gruff aunt. She learns much from her aunt and eventually comes to love her and begins to distrust her father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11006" LastActivityDate="2020-09-28T19:54:54.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15835" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-28T20:34:35.413" Score="0" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've talked to someone who studied English literature and the concept of Anthropocene recently, and the person quoted Wordsworth during our conversation. Unfortunately I can not remember the quote, but would like to find it again. My two clues are that it might contain the word &amp;quot;we&amp;quot;, and that it should be rather famous, since it was said to me in a way as if I as university educated person (although a completely different field) might know about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you have any clue as to which line (or at least which poem) it could have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11007" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T00:16:34.330" Title="Looking for a famous quote by William Wordsworth probably relevant to the concept of the Anthropocene" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15841" CreationDate="2020-09-29T07:30:16.263" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a famous quote that I forget the reference. The saying is similar to &amp;quot;when you know something, it is hard to pretend not to know.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A similar saying from Ludwig Wittgenstein is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this quote from Wittgenstein delivers a different meaning.&#xA;So anyone knows who and which sentence am I looking for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11012" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T10:03:04.813" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T08:37:15.853" Title="Who said that when you know something, it is hard to pretend not to know?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12364" CreationDate="2020-09-29T07:38:14.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;For completeness's sake, here is the original &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/bede/bede2.shtml#13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin version&lt;/a&gt; of the section of Bede provided in kimchi lover's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuius suasioni uerbisque prudentibus alius optimatum regis tribuens assensum, continuo subdidit: ‘Talis,’ inquiens, ‘mihi uidetur, rex, uita hominum praesens in terris, ad conparationem eius, quod nobis incertum est, temporis, quale cum te residente ad caenam cum ducibus ac ministris tuis tempore brumali, accenso quidem foco in medio, et calido effecto caenaculo, furentibus autem foris per omnia turbinibus hiemalium pluuiarum uel niuium, adueniens unus passerum domum citissime peruolauerit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit. Ipso quidem tempore, quo intus est, hiemis tempestate non tangitur, sed tamen paruissimo spatio serenitatis ad momentum excurso, mox de hieme in hiemem regrediens, tuis oculis elabitur. Ita haec uita hominum ad modicum apparet; quid autem sequatur, quidue praecesserit, prorsus ignoramus. Unde si haec noua doctrina certius aliquid attulit, merito esse sequenda uidetur.’ His similia et ceteri maiores natu ac regis consiliarii diuinitus admoniti prosequebantur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/oldenglishversio01bede?ref=ol#page/134/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Old English text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Þæs wordum ōðer cyninges wita and ealdormann geþafunge sealde, and tō ƿǣre sprǣce fēng and þus cwæð: &amp;quot;Þyslic me is gesewen, þū cyning, þis andwearde līf manna on eordon, tō wiðmeteness þǣre tīde þe ūs uncūð is, swālic swā þu æt swǣsendum sitte mid þīnum ealdormannum and þegnum on wintertīde, and sīe fȳr onǣlæd and þīn heall gewyrmed, and hit rīne and snīwe and styrme ūte; cume ān spearwa and hrædlīce þæt hūs þurhflēo, cume þurh ōþre duru in, þurh oþre ūt gewīte. Hwæt, hē on þā tīd þe hē inne bið ne bið hrinen mid ðȳ storme þæs wintres, ac þæt bið ān ēagan bryhtm and þæt lǣsste fæc, ac hē sōna of wintra on þone winter eft cymeð. Swā þonne þis monna līf tō medmiclum fæce ætȳweð; hwæat þǣr foregange oððe hwæt þǣr eftflyge, wē ne cunnun. For þon gif þēos nīwe lār ōwiht cūðlicre and gerisenlicre brenge, þæs weorþe is þat wē þǣre fylgen.&amp;quot; Þeossum wordum gelīcum ōðre aldormen and þæs cyninges geþeahteras sprǣcan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the translation of the Old English (ibid):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another of the king's counsellors, one of his chief men, assented to his words, and taking up the discussion thus spoke : ' O king, the present life of man on earth, in comparison with the time unknown to us, seems to me, as if you sat at table with your chief men and followers in winter time, and a fire was kindled and your hall warmed, while it rained, snowed, and stormed without; and there came a sparrow and swiftly flew through the house, entering at one door and passing out through the other. Now as long as he is inside, he is not pelted with winter's storm; but that is the twinkling of an eye and a moment of time, and at once he passes back from winter into winter. So then this life of man appears for but a little while ; what goes before, or what comes after, we know not. So, if this new doctrine reports anything more certain or apt, it deserves to be followed.' The other elders and the king's counsellors expressed themselves in similar terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin original was written around 731 CE. The Old English translation dates to around 900 CE. The OE doesn't seem much like modern English, does it? But it's actually quite recognizably English if you squint: &lt;em&gt;on wintertīde, and sīe fȳr onǣlæd and þīn heall gewyrmed, and hit rīne and snīwe and styrme ūte; cume ān spearwa and hrædlīce þæt hūs þurhflēo&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;in wintertime, and the fire laid on and the hall warmed, and it rains and snows and storms out; comes a sparrow and readily that house through flies&lt;/em&gt;. Every word is hrædlīce mappable to its modern English equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Funny story: when I was studying Old English, we had to translate bits and pieces of Bede, including this passage. The edition we were using was bilingual Latin-Old English. Our professor warned us: &amp;quot;Now, translate from the Old English! Don't cheat by translating from the Latin!&amp;quot; I gave a short laugh, then realized with a shock that not only was he perfectly serious, I was also the &lt;em&gt;only&lt;/em&gt; person of the half-dozen or so in the class who actually was entirely incapable of translating the Latin. [I did study Latin later, though.])&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T07:38:14.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15814" CreationDate="2020-09-29T12:28:38.373" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the poem verse by verse. For a Hughes poem, it is surprisingly literal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Laburnum top is silent, quite still&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the afternoon yellow September sunlight,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A few leaves yellowing, all its seeds fallen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet describes a Laburnum tree. It is still on an autumn afternoon, the leaves getting ready to fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Till the goldfinch comes, with a twitching chirrup&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A suddenness, a startlement, at a branch end.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then sleek as a lizard, and alert, and abrupt,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She enters the thickness, and a machine starts up&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small bird, a goldfinch, arrives at the tree. The poet uses unfamiliar terms such as &amp;quot;suddenness&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;startlement&amp;quot; to jar the reader's comprehension, just as the frenetic activity of the bird contrasts with the still tree. The bird goes into the foliage of the tree, and there is further commotion described via the metaphor of a machine starting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of chitterings, and a tremor of wings, and trillings —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The whole tree trembles and thrills.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is the engine of her family.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She stokes it full, then flirts out to a branch-end&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Showing her barred face identity mask&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The commotion continues, shaking the whole tree. Continuing the machine metaphor, the poet casts the baby goldfinches in the tree as &amp;quot;the engine&amp;quot;: they are clamouring for food as their mother has come to feed them. Her giving them food to eat until they are satiated is - again with the machine metaphor - described as stoking the engine full. She flies out, stopping to look directly at the poet with her &amp;quot;barred face&amp;quot;: the patterns on her plumage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then with eerie delicate whistle-chirrup whisperings&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She launches away, towards the infinite&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the laburnum subsides to empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bird makes a brief, quiet noise and then flies away - the hugeness of the sky and the possibilities of flight are summaried as &amp;quot;the infinite&amp;quot;. The tree is silent and still once more: &amp;quot;empty&amp;quot; in the parlance of the engine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The purpose of this poem is to highlight the importance of relationships between different species in nature. The bird uses the tree as shelter for her family and without her presence the tree seems lifeless and barren, especially to human eyes. The opening of the poem with its autumnal overtones makes us think of the bare branches, empty of leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way the stanzas break into three parts highlight this relationship. The first stanza uses long, languid words and describes the still tree. The second uses shorter, sharper sounding words to communicate the quick, flurrying activity of the bird. Then it goes back to the quieter more reflective language for the third, after the bird has left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T13:52:06.630" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T13:52:06.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15842" CreationDate="2020-09-29T13:15:39.097" Score="3" ViewCount="151" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, when England invaded Scotland, was no one left to fight for Macbeth? I was wondering why? I also can't find good quotes to prove this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11014" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T14:03:33.073" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T15:32:08.977" Title="In the end, was no one loyal to Macbeth and willing to fight for him, and why?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15841" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15837" CreationDate="2020-09-29T13:24:58.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;What you describe sounds like the cognitive bias known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;curse of knowledge&lt;/a&gt;. The term was coined in 1989 but the concept has been around longer. It was especially popularised in the book &lt;em&gt;Made to Stick&lt;/em&gt; by Chip and Dan Heath, where you can find the following formulation (quoted from the website of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://heathbrothers.com/made-to-stick-introduction/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heath brothers&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the Curse of Knowledge. Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shunryu_Suzuki#Zen_Mind,_Beginner%27s_Mind_(1973)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shunryu Suzuki's &lt;em&gt;Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is sometimes explained in a similar way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, due to his knowledge, the expert rejects certain options out of hand or does not even see them, while the beginner is not (yet) hampered by the knowledge that the expert has accumulated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T08:37:15.853" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T08:37:15.853" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15842" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15840" CreationDate="2020-09-29T15:32:08.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In act V, scene II, the rebel commanders describe the condition of Macbeth’s support:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Menteith.&lt;/strong&gt; What does the tyrant?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Caithness.&lt;/strong&gt; Great Dunsinane he strongly fortifies.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some say he’s mad; others, that lesser hate him,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do call it valiant fury; but, for certain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Within the belt of rule.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Angus.&lt;/strong&gt; Now does he feel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His secret murders sticking on his hands;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Those he commands move only in command,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nothing in love: now does he feel his title&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon a dwarfish thief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (c. 1606). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1533/1533-h/1533-h.htm#sceneV_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, act V, scene II&lt;/a&gt;. Project Gutenberg.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What they are saying here is that Macbeth’s crimes have caused him to lose his authority as a ruler (“He cannot buckle his distemper’d cause within the belt of rule”), so that his soldiers obey out of fear and discipline rather than out of loyalty (“move only in command, nothing in love”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course these claims might not be true: the Earls of Caithness and Angus might well exaggerate the weakness of Macbeth’s support, in order to  legitimize their own position and motivate their own supporters. Shakespeare’s historical source for the play says something similar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But after that Macbeth perceived his enemies’ power to increase, by such aid as came to them forth of England with his adversary Malcolm, he recoiled back into Fife, there purposing to abide in camp fortified, at the castle of Dunsinane, and to fight with his enemies, if they meant to pursue him; howbeit some of his friends advised him, that it should be best for him, either to make some agreement with Malcolm, or else to flee with all speed into the Isles, and to take his treasure with him, to the end he might wage sundry great princes of the realm to take his part, &amp;amp; retain strangers, in whom he might better trust than in &lt;strong&gt;his own subjects, which stole daily from him&lt;/strong&gt;: but he had such confidence in his prophesies, that he believed he should never be vanquished, till Birnam wood were brought to Dunsinane; nor yet to be slain with any man, that should be or was born of any woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Raphael Holinshed (1578). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofengl05holiuoft/page/276/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland&lt;/em&gt;, volume V, p. 276&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. Johnson, et al. (1808). Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But chroniclers would have been similarly motivated to retrospectively legitimize the rebellion by portraying Macbeth as a tyrant only capable of ruling through force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the play it’s not clear whether Macbeth’s remaining supporters abandoned him. He comes to end fighting alone against Macduff, but single combat is a dramatic convention and it’s not clear if we’re meant to take it literally in this case: after all, just because Macduff fights on his own doesn’t mean that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; has been abandoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holinshed, however, says that Macbeth fled from Dunsinane without giving battle, which suggests that he had no confidence in his men:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, he [Macbeth] brought his men in order of battle, and exhorted them to do valiantly, howbeit his enemies had scarcely cast from them their boughs, when Macbeth perceiving their numbers, betook him straight to flight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Holinshed, p. 277. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holinshed explains the single combat by suggesting that Macduff was the hottest in pursuit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macduff pursued [Macbeth] with great hatred even till he came unto Lunfannaine†, where Macbeth perceiving that Macduff was hard at his back, leapt beside his horse, saying, “Thou traitor, what meaneth it that thou shouldst thus in vain follow me that am not appointed to be slain by any creature that is born of a woman, come on therefore, and receive thy reward which thou hast deserved for thy pains,” and therewithall he lifted up his sword thinking to have slain him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Holinshed, p. 277. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumphanan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lumphanan&lt;/a&gt; in Aberdeenshire.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, this is a dramatization and can’t be taken literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T15:32:08.977" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15844" CreationDate="2020-09-29T16:59:23.020" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Funeral Pyre&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book&lt;/em&gt; by R. Austin Freeman, Gervis and Thorndyke were at the station where they found the bookstall keeper in the act of sticking up a placard of the evening paper, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On our arrival at the station, we found the bookstall keeper in the act of sticking up a placard of the evening paper on which was the legend: &amp;quot;Rick tragedy; Sensational development.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We immediately provided ourselves each with a copy of the paper, and sitting down on a seat, proceeded to read the &lt;strong&gt;heavily-leaded&lt;/strong&gt; report.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;leading&amp;quot; in print may mean &amp;quot;the spacing between lines&amp;quot;, so does it mean here &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;large spacing between lines&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;bolded writing&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leaded_type&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leaded_type&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhYKx.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/yhYKx.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:44:16.073" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:44:16.073" Title="What does &quot;heavily-leaded&quot; mean in &quot;The Funeral Pyre&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;r-austin-freeman&gt;&lt;dr-thorndyke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15843" CreationDate="2020-09-29T18:41:04.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As surmised in the question, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leading&lt;/a&gt;” refers to the strips of lead that were used by hand typesetters to add space between lines of text, and “heavy leading” means wider spacing between lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the type face is thin, if the individual letters are closely spaced in the words, or if the leading between the lines is very slight, the spacing between words should be correspondingly thin. On the other hand, a combination of wide type, open-spaced letters, and &lt;strong&gt;heavy leading&lt;/strong&gt; calls for wider spacing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.5694/page/n17/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Manual of Style&lt;/em&gt;, p. 7&lt;/a&gt;. University of Chicago Press. Eleventh edition (1949).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The difference between light and heavy leading in a publication is usually subtle, no more than a point or two. The wide spacings shown on the right side of the Wikipedia illustration are only used for drafts or proofs, to leave room for a proof-reader or editor to make corrections between the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ‘The Funeral Pyre’, the implication is that the newspaper is trying to make a limited amount of material fit the available space by increasing the spacing between the lines. This suggests that the report arrived so recently that there was no time to rewrite it to make it a better fit before going to press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:41:04.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15845" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-09-29T18:47:39.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T18:47:39.827" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T18:47:39.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15846" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-09-29T18:47:39.827" Score="0" Body="The &quot;Dr. Thorndyke&quot; series of detective stories and novels by R. Austin Freeman, from &quot;The Red Thumb-Mark&quot; (1907) to &quot;The Jacob Street Mystery&quot; (1942). Use this tag with the [r-austin-freeman] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-09-29T19:27:18.177" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T19:27:18.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15847" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-29T23:03:52.777" Score="2" ViewCount="282" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I understand it, Gondor is the big country where a lot of important stuff happens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minas Tirith, with its series of walls going in circles, is simply the main city of Gondor. The capital if you will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why does Théoden say things which suggest that the city is called &amp;quot;Gondor&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arise, arise, Riders of Theoden! Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter! Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered, a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises! Ride now, ride now! &lt;strong&gt;Ride to Gondor!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... they are right there? They already are in Gondor. He should be saying: &amp;quot;To Minas Tirith! Attack!&amp;quot; or something like that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The multiple different names for everything and everyone has repeatedly confused me throughout the books, as well as in Silmarillion, and led to an enormous amount of confusion in my head. However, I'm pretty sure that Minas Tirith is the city and Gondor is the country where the former is located. They aren't synonyms or words used by different peoples/species...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would've made sense if he had shouted: &amp;quot;For Gondor!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Ride for Gondor!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Fight for Gondor!&amp;quot;, because that implies/says that they are coming to Gondor's rescue/aid, as in the nation/people, by defending their main city Minas Tirith. I was frustrated that he did not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Ride to Gondor!&amp;quot; part partially ruins the rest of his speech for me, but perhaps this is another case of archaic English being misinterpreted by me...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11016" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T08:32:18.277" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T09:22:46.437" Title="Why is Minas Tirith called &quot;Gondor&quot; in Return of the King by king Théoden?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15847" CreationDate="2020-09-29T23:29:11.460" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Théoden is the king of the Mark of Rohan. An old kingdom ally of Gondor.&#xA;The warning beacons were part of an agreement of mutual aid &lt;em&gt;between kingdoms&lt;/em&gt;. Rohan is not part of Gondor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, the Rohirrim go to help &lt;em&gt;the country of Gondor&lt;/em&gt;, not just the city of Minas Tirith (which yes, is an important part of helping Gondor, specially since the previous capital was abandoned centuries ago).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Théoden could have chosen a different term for its speech, but it would probably not had the impact of 'We are going to save the kingdom of Gondor' (which has typically been a much more powerful entity than Rohan).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10749" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T23:29:11.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15849" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-30T04:45:44.157" Score="6" ViewCount="378" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt; contains the following passage in chapter 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When asked whether he was not happier now that Jones was gone, he&#xA;would say only “Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a&#xA;dead donkey,” and the others had to be content with this cryptic&#xA;answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Benjamin give this cryptic answer? What is the meaning of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10167" LastEditorUserId="10167" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T20:40:31.763" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T20:40:31.763" Title="What is the meaning of Benjamin the donkey's cryptic answer?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15850" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-30T07:52:13.590" Score="4" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;Pehliva&amp;quot; is used several times in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iranchamber.com/literature/shahnameh/03zal.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the third part of the Shahnameh&lt;/a&gt; (Helen Zimmern translation), particularly to refer to Sam/Saum, apparently a ruler in Seistan (which I thought might be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sistan&lt;/a&gt;, but that Wikipedia page says that Sistan is called Zabulistan in the Shahnameh - so I'm confused whether Seistan in the Shahnameh is a southern part of Iran or a separate kingdom lying to the south of Iran).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seistan, which is to the south of Iran, was ruled by Sam, the Pehliva, girt with might and glory, and, but for the grief that he was childless, his days were happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For thy father is Sam the hero, the Pehliva of the world, greatest among the great, and he is come hither to seek his son, and splendour awaiteth thee beside him.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;O Pehliva of the world, the Shah enjoineth you have a care of this noble youth, and guard him for the land of Iran.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does &amp;quot;Pehliva&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/strong&gt; At first I thought it might be a name for a ruler, like Shah - Sam is the Pehliva of Seistan? - but later they refer to him as &amp;quot;the Pehliva of the world&amp;quot;. Searching Google for &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;pehliva&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;pehliva&amp;quot; iran&lt;/code&gt; gives results which are either not relevant or from this Shahnameh translation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T08:51:50.700" Title="What is a Pehliva?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;&lt;shahnameh&gt;&lt;ferdowsi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15849" CreationDate="2020-09-30T09:05:00.987" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the narration claims this is a cryptic answer, it is more in the sense of being cryptic to the other animals than to the reader. Benjamin is the oldest animal and the reader can intuit from this that he has seen a lot of events on the farm that the other animals have not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the meaning of &amp;quot;Donkeys live a long time&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;None of you has ever seen a dead donkey,&amp;quot; had a twofold meaning: in the first instance, it supports the original statement that donkeys are long-lived and in the second it implies that they are hardy and will survive and endure no matter what privations are inflicted on them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to understanding what Benjamin is implying here is to situation the quote in the context of what he's being asked: is he happier now that Jones has gone? By refusing to answer in the positive, we can understand that he is not. By his statement about his long life, he is implying that he has seen other attempts at bettering the working life on animals on the farm and that they have not succeeded. By then stating his endurance he is, in fact, suggesting it will likely do more harm than good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benjamin is a curious character in the novel because almost all the other characters either represent specific characters from Russian communism (i.e. Napoleon is Stalin), or a particular social class (i.e. Boxer is the working class). It is not entirely clear who Benjamin represents. His long memory of what has come before suggest he may represent the older people of Russia. His clear intelligence and critical attitude suggest he may be a member of the intelligentsia. He may also be a member of the middle classes, educated but not powerful or interested enough to engage with the revolution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T09:05:00.987" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15853" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-09-30T12:59:11.227" Score="4" ViewCount="175" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have some lines from my dad's favourite poem, but they’re jumbled as he was 94. The lines may not be in the correct order.  He couldn’t remember the writer, and several internet searches have not helped, except they landed me here.&#xA;We’d like to find it so we can read it at his remembrance service after covid.  Here’s the lines I have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today I saw 10,000 fish observing me with solemn eyes. In the aquarium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And fish that floating on the tide transparent show their whole inside.&#xA;Not Ray fish these but should you wish they may be termed the X-ray fish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The salamander whose sole desire to be an axolotl fills its bosom with (?)exotic thrills&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His life's ambition forced to throttle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It still remains an axolotl&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11017" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-09-30T16:10:15.990" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T16:10:15.990" Title="Can you identify this poem about axolotl, fish, salamander" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15854" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15853" CreationDate="2020-09-30T13:32:08.247" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was already &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15621/3003&quot;&gt;identified by Quassnoi here&lt;/a&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211318/page/n437/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Water Zoo&lt;/a&gt;’ by “Evoe” (a pseudonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._V._Knox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;E. V. Knox&lt;/a&gt;), published in &lt;em&gt;Punch&lt;/em&gt;, 9th April 1924. The fragments your father remembered were well-recalled! Here’s how they correspond to the original lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Today I saw 10,000 fish observing me with solemn eyes. In the aquarium.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To-day I have seen all I wish,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For I have seen four thousand fish,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        Inscrutable and rum,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oberving me with solemn eyes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That hold no anger or surprise,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        In the Aquarium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“And fish that floating on the tide transparent show their whole inside. Not Ray fish these but should you wish they may be termed the X-ray fish”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And fish that, floating on the tide&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Transparent, show their whole inside:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not ray-fish these, but, should you wish,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They might be termed the X-ray fish;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The salamander whose sole desire to be an axolotl fills its bosom with exotic thrills”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And salamanders dark and dire,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And axolotls, whose desire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To be a salamander fills&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their bosom with ecstatic thrills;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“His life’s ambition forced to throttle It still remains an axolotl”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His life’s ambition forced to throttle,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He still remains an axolotl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of the poem is available via &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211318/page/n437/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T13:32:08.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15855" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15831" CreationDate="2020-09-30T17:27:42.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a partial answer, not definitive as I haven't been able to get my hands on a full unabridged translation of the original text of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, let's note that the era being described in this part of the Shahnameh is an ancient time in Persia before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Persia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Islamic conquest&lt;/a&gt;, when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zoroastrianism&lt;/a&gt; was the dominant and state religion. This is confirmed by noting the many references to Ahriman, Deevs, etc. in the early parts (at least - I haven't read it all yet) of the Shahnameh. So we should bear this in mind when unravelling cultural and especially religious references.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched on the internet for &lt;code&gt;seventh sphere zoroastrianism&lt;/code&gt; to see if there is any such concept in their religion. One of the search results was a text, &lt;a href=&quot;http://michaelstausberg.net/old_site/Texts/Stausberg%20Hell%20Numen%2056.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Stausberg, &amp;quot;Hell in Zoroastrian History&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Numen&lt;/em&gt; 56 (2009), pp. 217–253&lt;/a&gt; citing a Zoroastrian priest who said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heaven hell depends on your deed. Heaven is your good deeds and hell is your bad deed. There are seven dakhyus [= spheres]. After death, you are assigned a plane and place depending on your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further searching with the keyword &lt;code&gt;dakhyu&lt;/code&gt; led me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://zoroastrians.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/a-manual-of-khshnoom.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;more information about Zoroastrian beliefs&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dakhyus are wide expanses of inconceivably huge magnitude, and hence referred to in Avesta in language of this material world as &amp;quot;Vouru gaoyaoiti' (Yt. 10.3) literally 'wide pastures'. They are enumerated in Meher Yt; 144 (from upper to lower) as under;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Aiwi; Dakhyu;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(2) Antare; Dakhyu;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(3) Aa; Dakhyu;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(4) Upairi; Dakhyu;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(5) Adairi; Dakhyu;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(6) Pairi; Dakhyu; and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(7) Aipi; Dakhyu;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our earthy globe which represents the point of the spinning-top mentioned above is mostly located in the Aipi Dakhyu at the bottom, with its (globe's) upper portion in the Zamrir, transitional region between the Aipi Dakhyu below, and Pairi Dakhyu above. The composition of the top three Dakhyus is superethereal, and lower four ethereal, with the earthy globe, of course, material.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the seven Dakhyus with their respective Zamrirs, transitional regions, make concentric domes, being ranged like the petals of an onion - the smallest (at bottom) enclosed within next larger, that is, the second; that within the third still larger, and so on; but with this distinction that these Dakhyus being ethereal in composition are inter-penetrating at the bottom Zamrir, and mot one above the other as the onion petals are arranged. In other words, these Dakhyus may be described as concentric and geo-centric with dome within dome, the whole Nisti or the Space in its outer aspect resembling a gigantic spinning top, as stated above, the uppermost widest circumference of which being that of the topmost Aiwi Dakhyu spiraling down to the globe of the earth, which represents the lowest point of the spinning top. Thus the dome of the Aipi Dakhyu at the bottom is encaged in that of the Pairi Dakhyu next larger above it (with Zamrir transitional region between) (please see the Chart); then the dome of Pairi Dakhyu contained in that of Adairi Dakhyu still larger; and so on, till the dome of the Antare Dakhyu being contained in that of the top dome of Aiwi Dakhyu.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So one possibility is that &amp;quot;the seventh sphere&amp;quot; could refer to the uppermost of the &lt;em&gt;dakhyus&lt;/em&gt;, the voice of the mourning Feridoun rising through all seven of these mystical spheres of existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another option, mentioned already in comments, is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;celestial spheres&lt;/a&gt;, originating from Ancient Greek models of the universe, but which had made their way to Persian scientists by the time of Ferdowsi's writing. In this case, there are seven &amp;quot;spheres&amp;quot; corresponding to the seven visible &amp;quot;planets&amp;quot; or moving bodies in the sky: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. (This set of seven bodies was &lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.stackexchange.com/a/1174&quot;&gt;immensely important&lt;/a&gt; for many ancient thinkers, potentially giving rise to the supposed magical significance of the number seven in many cultures and beliefs even to this day.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-09-30T17:27:42.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15856" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-01T04:11:55.333" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I find the poetic imaginary in this verse from kind of disturbing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And he said:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your children are not your children.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They come through you but not from you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You may give them your love but not your thoughts,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For they have their own thoughts.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You may house their bodies but not their souls,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. 22For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;archer&lt;/strong&gt; sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let your bending in the &lt;strong&gt;Archer’s&lt;/strong&gt; hand be for gladness;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For even as he loves the arrow that flies, &lt;strong&gt;so He loves also the bow that is stable.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With &amp;quot;Archer&amp;quot; being a metaphor for the divine, why does He love for the bow to be stable? What does &amp;quot;stability&amp;quot; refer to here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also I don't know if it is the same in the original script or printed copies, but interestingly in the Project Gutenberg text the first &amp;quot;archer&amp;quot; is not capitalized while the second one is. Why is that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The references of the arrow and bow are readily understood. With this question I am looking for something deeper. If we assume the target is a target of reproduction, what does &amp;quot;stable&amp;quot; mean in that context? The arrow has to hit the target because the divine wants the offspring to be &amp;quot;straight&amp;quot;? Straight how? That is kind of disturbing to think about. What would &amp;quot;unstable&amp;quot; mean then? I think there's more to this than meets the eye. Full of imagery with metaphorical implications worth scrutinizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T17:11:34.577" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T16:05:35.573" Title="Why does the bow have to be stable in &quot;The Prophet&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;&lt;the-prophet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15857" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-01T04:43:06.910" Score="7" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And he raised his head and looked upon the people, and there fell a stillness upon them. And with a great voice he said:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When love beckons to you, follow &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; ways are hard and steep.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And when &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; wings enfold you yield to &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though the sword hidden among &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; pinions may wound you.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And when &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; speaks to you believe in &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For even as love crowns you so shall &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; for your pruning.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Even as &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So shall &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is love a &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; to Kahlil Gibran? I know it is tempting to say it is an arbitrary choice of gender pronoun, but I think there might be some reason for the male gender pronoun, be it cultural, linguistic, religious, or social. I would be asking the same question if it were &amp;quot;she&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T07:01:15.027" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T08:39:00.843" Title="Why is love a &quot;he&quot; to Kahlil Gibran?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;kahlil-gibran&gt;&lt;the-prophet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15858" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15859" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'The Prophet' (1923) by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. Use this tag with the tag [kahlil-gibran]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T16:27:35.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15860" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15374" CreationDate="2020-10-01T21:03:46.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s clear from the context that the “tips” were on the underside of the boots:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the shady hollows, the soft loam bore prints of many feet, and among them we could distinguish one with an iron toe-tip, but it was nearly obliterated by another studded with hob-nails. […] And here we both halted abruptly, for in the damp ground were the clear imprints of a pair of boots which we could see had, in addition to the toe-tips, half-tips to the heels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. Austin Freeman (1924). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bluescarab00free/page/146/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Touchstone&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Blue Scarab&lt;/em&gt;, p. 146. New York: Dodd, Mead &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The decorative toe-tip illustrated in the question could not have left a mark in the soil, as it is fitted to the upper part of the boot. (I guess it is intended to protect the toe of the boot from the metal stirrup when riding a horse.) Later in the story Thorndyke says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I suppose you noticed his boots?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I am afraid I didn’t,” I had to admit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, I did. I watched his feet constantly, and when he crossed his legs I could see that he had iron toe-tips on his boots. That was what gave me confidence to push the cross-examination.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. Austin Freeman, p. 162.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the tips had been on top of the boots Thorndyke wouldn’t have needed to wait for the suspect to cross his legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the last photo in the question is the right one. For evidence that these metal plates were known as “tips”, I submit the following passage from &lt;em&gt;The Art of Boot and Shoemaking&lt;/em&gt; (1889):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gare’s Patent Heel Tips are suited to the wear of both feet—in other words, they are rights and lefts. As will be seen, advantage has been taken of the knowledge that the heaviest wear falls upon the outside of the boot or shoe, and there, as Figs. 53 and 54 illustrate, extra metal has been supplied. By the lightening of the inner range, this great advantage has been obtained without materially increasing their weight. They are made from the best malleable iron, and are easily attached. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLTTY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iLTTY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Figure 53 shows a heel tip for a left boot, and figure 54 (a mirror image) for a right boot. The tips are pieces of metal in the shape of horse-shoes, with square studs around the outer edge, and round holes for nails at intervals around the inner edge.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whole Tips.—Top pieces are not used when whole tips are employed, their interim spaces being filled in with leather level to the height of the tips.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half or Quarter Tips.—In making provision for either a half or quarter tip, it is usual to place the one or the other upon the top piece, score it round with the dull knife, and cut away till level.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Bedford Leno (1889). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/artofbootshoemak00leno/page/128/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Art of Boot and Shoemaking&lt;/em&gt;, third edition, pp. 128–129&lt;/a&gt;. London: Crosby Lockwood &amp;amp; Son.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess that a “half tip” is so called because it only goes halfway round the heel, and correspondingly for a “quarter tip”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-01T21:03:46.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15861" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-02T02:47:33.513" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;For context, this reading is entirely devoted to pleasure. I am not analyzing (academically) nor performing the plays, and my desire to read the plays derive completely from my profound affection towards William Shakespeare, and the language of the period and the point that I have been known to perform his work also is a source of reason why. I have read almost all of Shakespeare's tragedies, so the archaic language is not a nauseating barrier for me at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: should one who wants to read &lt;em&gt;The Tragedy of Richard III, with the landing of Earl of Richmond, and the battle at Bosworth Field&lt;/em&gt;, beforehand read &lt;em&gt;King Henry the sixth, part three&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am already aware of the ending of Henry 6, part 3, with the infamous murder sequence, and, I also have read and know by heart the &amp;quot;I can change colours of the Chameleon&amp;quot; soliloquy delivered by Richard, Duke of Gloucester in the middle of the play (actually Shakespeare's longest soliloquy in the canon, as far as the Folio text is concerned)   So by all of this, what I am trying to say is I know the overall essence of &lt;em&gt;Henry 6, part 3&lt;/em&gt;, and my overall goal is to read &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, and thus, would anyone who has read both plays advise the reading of &lt;em&gt;Henry 6, part 3&lt;/em&gt; to fully understand the context of &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, and further understand his character? Or does anyone believe that reading &lt;em&gt;Henry&lt;/em&gt; is not that important in understanding &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;? and if so, what are some things, if anything, I should know from &lt;em&gt;Henry 6, part 3&lt;/em&gt;, if I decide to skip it and move on to reading &lt;em&gt;Richard?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insight would be immensely appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Images courtesy of the archives of the British Library&#xA;(Both from Volume 4 of Rowe's 1709, first illustrated edition of the Works of Shake-spear)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NKHL2m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NKHL2m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;1709 Henry 6, part 3--ROWE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fjfi6m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Fjfi6m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;1709, Richard III--ROWE&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" LastEditorUserId="10815" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T19:03:28.967" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T12:32:41.200" Title="Should Henry 6, Part 3 be read prior to reading Richard III?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;&lt;henry-vi-part-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15856" CreationDate="2020-10-02T12:32:46.497" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context, the &amp;quot;arrow&amp;quot; is the children, the &amp;quot;bow&amp;quot; is the parents.  The parents launch their children into the world without themselves being launched.  He loves the bow for being stable exactly because it enables the arrows to move and to do so precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By thus making it metaphorical, the poet does not have to specify which target the children are aimed at (what life or actions they are needed for) or what exactly the parents are doing to launch them.  Thus, he can generalize and still get in specific imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T14:33:59.320" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T14:33:59.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15864" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-02T13:58:38.150" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lady Audley’s Secret&lt;/em&gt; (1862) is a novel by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. It has been adapted for the stage several times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would like to find an instance of theatricality in the novel itself and analyse its significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11026" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-02T14:14:19.903" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T14:14:19.903" Title="Identify an instance of theatricality and analyse its significance in Lady Audley’s Secret" Tags="&lt;lady-audleys-secret&gt;&lt;mary-elizabeth-braddon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15861" CreationDate="2020-10-02T16:51:17.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Richard III stands on its own, so it wouldn't be strictly necessary. The histories may not have been written in chronological order (there is circumstantial evidence to place Henry VI, part 1 as the last of the Henry VI plays to be written). I read the whole War of the Roses tetralogy in order when I first read them, and had the good fortune of being able to see staged readings of all of the plays (I also saw the second half of the Henriad—Richard II, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V—as part of the same series).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bottom line, no, you don't need the earlier plays in the Wars of the Roses tetralogy but you might find it useful/entertaining to have read them and I wouldn't discourage you from reading the Henriad (set earlier but written later) as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T16:51:17.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15857" CreationDate="2020-10-02T16:56:44.153" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may be because, while he wrote &lt;em&gt;The Prophet&lt;/em&gt; in English, his first language was Arabic which has two grammatical genders. The word for love/passion is عشق which is masculine and would be referred to as &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; when used as a pronoun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-10-02T16:56:44.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15867" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:14:41.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T00:14:41.400" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T00:14:41.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15868" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:14:41.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the history play 'Henry VI, Part III', originally published as 'The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of Yorke (...),' by William Shakespeare. Questions about this work should also be tagged with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T11:01:19.440" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T11:01:19.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15869" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:17:57.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T00:17:57.853" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T00:17:57.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15870" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:17:57.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835 – 1915) and her life as a writer. If the question is about one of her novels, please add the appropriate novel tag if possible." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T19:44:57.127" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T19:44:57.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15871" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:19:26.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T00:19:26.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T00:19:26.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15872" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-03T00:19:26.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Lady Audley's Secret' (1862), Mary Elizabeth Braddon's most famous novel. Questions about this work should also be tagged with [mary-elizabeth-braddon]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:28:01.207" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:28:01.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15857" CreationDate="2020-10-03T08:39:00.843" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The portrayal of Love in quoted lines (in OP) by Kahlil Gibran is showing the hard and awry paths of love but after few lines more the poem reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then he assigns you to his sacred fire,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart,&#xA;and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in the above lines the sublime nature and act of Love is portrayed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://theprint.in/features/why-kahlil-gibrans-the-prophet-made-him-the-third-most-sold-poet-after-shakespeare-laozi/157138/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;After Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Laozi, Gibran’s work from 1923, The Prophet, has made him the third most-sold poet of all time.&lt;/a&gt;. Although, there is no direct source where it is written that Gibran was influenced by Shakespeare but some of the things that he wrote seem to suggest Shakespeare's influence on him, for example he wrote a book whose is name العواصف (translated as 'The Tempests&amp;quot;), and he is also compared to Shakespeare and referred to as &amp;quot;Shakespeare of Middle East&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benvolio: Alas that love, so gentle in &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; view,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romeo: Alas that love, whose view is muffled still,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should without eyes see pathways to &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; will!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above lines, Shakespeare has personified Love as &amp;quot;he&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;Benvolio's&lt;/em&gt; portrayal of love and Gibran's portrayal are quite similar, they know and say about the &lt;em&gt;gentleness&lt;/em&gt; of love but aware that the path of love is &lt;em&gt;rough&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hard&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;steep&lt;/em&gt;. So, it seems in some way that Gibran's &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; for Love was influenced by Shakespeare's &amp;quot;he&amp;quot; for Love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T08:39:00.843" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15856" CreationDate="2020-10-03T10:14:36.310" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I myself don't read too much into the stability. In this entire work, after all, the Prophet describes in detail how always both sides of a quality, i.e. the quality's presence and absence, are equally valuable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my pondering, I found two lines of thought which are actually quite distinct (though not mutually exclusive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the same way that other characterisations are used elsewhere in the work—the positive is good, but the negative is not bad—also applies here with 'stability' when referring to parents: children will have an easier time in life if they come from stable parents, i.e., if their home is safe and secure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the more I think about the line, the less happy I am with this reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, I started to think that the ongoing activity of the flight of the arrow also refers to the many parents who lose sight of what they were doing before once their children start moving away: for the people whose main purpose was raising a child this can be a very difficult process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reading matches the start of this passage with &amp;quot;Your children are not your children&amp;quot;, reinforcing that parents need to have their own journey (and not live through their children). This would also translate into the imagery where the Archer's action of bending a bow is representative of having a child, but the arrow's flight—the child's path—is their own making (and that of the Archer, of course). The bow—the parents—are only a vehicle through which this is happening. The parents cannot control what their children do or think, and they shouldn't strive to do it. Stability is, in this case, the self-containment of the parents' wishes and desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I should note &lt;a href=&quot;http://leb.net/gibran/works/prophet/prophet4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;my copy&lt;/a&gt; didn't capitalize either 'archer' compared to yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1736" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T10:14:36.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15861" CreationDate="2020-10-03T12:09:53.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have never come across claims by scholars that you should read specific Shakespeare plays before specific other Shakespeare plays. I am claiming this based on all I have read by or about Shakespeare so far (i.e. based on reading all of his work in individual annotated editions, writing my final thesis at university about Shakespeare and reading a number of volumes of Shakespeare criticism).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at books that introduce Shakespeare to university students, you find the same picture. You will not find advice related to reading order &lt;em&gt;based on plot&lt;/em&gt; in books such as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beginning Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt; by Lisa Hopkins (Manchester University Press, 2005),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakespeares Dramen&lt;/em&gt; by Ulrich Suerbaum (Francke, 1996), or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to Study a Shakespeare Play&lt;/em&gt; by John Peck and Martin Coyle (second edition, Macmillan, 1995).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, Peck and Coyle devote a 34-page chapter to &amp;quot;Studying a history play&amp;quot;, which opens with the following statement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's principal English history plays are &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry IV Parts One and Two&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; plays are omitted, which seems to imply that you can perfectly read &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt; (which is probably listed first due to its popularity) without having read the &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, it can be &lt;em&gt;convenient&lt;/em&gt; to read the plays of the &amp;quot;first tetralogy&amp;quot; in a plot-based order (i.e. &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part One&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Two&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Three&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;) rather than the order in which those plays were written (i.e. &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Two&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Three&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part One&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;). However, this is because it is otherwise difficult to follow who is related to whom (by birth or by marriage), who has killed whom and who is in league with whom. But that is an issue with each of these plays, even when you read them in isolation. (This is why some editions include family trees.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;PS&lt;/strong&gt;: Note also that the plays &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Two&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part Three&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part One&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt; are known as the &amp;quot;first tetralogy&amp;quot;, whereas the plays *Richard II *, &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part 1&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Henry IV, Part 2&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Henry V&lt;/em&gt;, which were written later, are known as the &amp;quot;second tetralogy&amp;quot;. The naming of these tetralogies is not based on the chronology of the events that inspired them but on their order of composition. Indirectly, this also suggests that scholars don't care about plot-based reading order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-03T12:32:41.200" LastActivityDate="2020-10-03T12:32:41.200" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15876" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-03T17:06:27.683" Score="1" ViewCount="1016" Body="&lt;p&gt;I saw a vernacular poem that appears to have been passed down and passed around in various parts of the UK. A couple of different versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yum yum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pig's bum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wrap it up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In chewing gum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have a slice&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Very nice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yum yum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pig's bum&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first question is why wrap it up in chewing gum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version is &lt;a href=&quot;http://mind-motion.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-full-english-17.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;purportedly&lt;/a&gt; Irish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yum, yum, pig's bum,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cabbage and potatoes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://mind-motion.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-full-english-17.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Another one&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yum yum bubble gum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;stick it up the teachers bum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if it sticks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pull her tits&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and turn it into weetabix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did this verse originate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T07:37:47.230" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T07:37:47.230" Title="&quot;Yum yum pig's bum&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15880" CreationDate="2020-10-03T17:42:44.707" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;A mention in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15875/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; of the &amp;quot;popularity&amp;quot; of &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, compared with some of Shakespeare's other history plays, made me wonder if this claim can be quantified. Of course there are various ways of measuring the &amp;quot;popularity&amp;quot; of a play: number of different productions, overall number of performances, number of printed publications, number of retellings, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a standard way of assessing this, among Shakespeare experts or people who study theatrical literature in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for asking is that I'd be interested to see a list of Shakespeare plays ordered from most to least popular (I'm guessing &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Romeo &amp;amp; Juliet&lt;/em&gt; would be among the most popular with &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Two Gentlemen of Verona&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Troilus &amp;amp; Cressida&lt;/em&gt; among the least popular), but such a question would be difficult to answer without providing a method of measuring popularity, and first I'd like to know if there is a &amp;quot;usual&amp;quot; method to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T14:50:24.350" Title="Is there a commonly accepted way to measure the relative &quot;popularity&quot; of Shakespeare plays?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;reception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15847" CreationDate="2020-10-03T20:30:00.753" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Gondor” standing for “Minas Tirith” is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt;, a figure of speech in which a part of something stands for the whole, or (as in this case) the whole of something stands for a part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason for choosing “Gondor” over “Minas Tirith” is that the former fits the rhythm and the latter does not. The speech consists of five lines of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alliterative verse&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ise, a&lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ise,     &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;iders of &lt;em&gt;Thé&lt;/em&gt;oden!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;F&lt;/strong&gt;ell deeds a&lt;em&gt;wake&lt;/em&gt;:     &lt;strong&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt;ire and &lt;em&gt;slaugh&lt;/em&gt;ter!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Sp&lt;/strong&gt;ear shall be &lt;strong&gt;sh&lt;/strong&gt;aken,     &lt;strong&gt;sh&lt;/strong&gt;ield be &lt;strong&gt;sp&lt;/strong&gt;lintered,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a &lt;strong&gt;sw&lt;/strong&gt;ord-day, a &lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ed day,     ere the &lt;strong&gt;s&lt;/strong&gt;un &lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ises!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;ide now, &lt;strong&gt;r&lt;/strong&gt;ide now!     &lt;strong&gt;R&lt;/strong&gt;ide to &lt;em&gt;Gond&lt;/em&gt;or!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alliterative verse has four stresses per line. I’ve marked the alliterating consonsants in bold, and the other (non-alliterating) stresses in italic. “Ride to Minas Tirith!” would put a fifth stress into the last line, spoiling the rhythm at what should be the climax of the speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old English was the language that Tolkien studied and taught, and alliterative verse was the predominant form of Old English poetry. For example, the epic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowulf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; consists of 3,182 alliterative lines. In &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, Tolkien based many aspects of the culture of the Rohirrim on the Anglo-Saxons, and their songs use this Anglo-Saxon verse form. Tolkien included &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tolkien%27s_alliterative_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;several other alliterative poems&lt;/a&gt; and fragments in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, including the lament for Théoden (V.3 “From dark Dunharrow in the dim morning”), and the song of the Mounds of Mundburg (V.6 “We heard of the horns in the hills ringing”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Théoden’s speech in V.5 has echoes of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byrhtnoth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Byrhtnoth&lt;/a&gt;’s speech in the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_of_Maldon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Battle of Maldon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Hige sceal þe heardra,     heorte þe cenre,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;mod sceal þe mare,     þe ure mægen lytlað.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Resolve shall be the harder, heart the keener,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Courage shall be the more, as our strength dwindles.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular “spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered” has a similar pattern of words to “hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre”. Like Théoden, Byrhtnoth inspires his troops to fight, although they are greatly outnumbered by the enemy, and is killed in the ensuing battle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-04T09:22:46.437" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T09:22:46.437" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15880" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15877" CreationDate="2020-10-04T14:50:24.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare scholars use various criteria when discussing the popularity of specific Shakespeare plays. They do this mainly to increase understanding of how the reception of a specific play evolved over time, which does not only involve quantifiable criteria such as number of reprints and productions (or performances), but also non-quantifiable criteria expressed in criticism. I am not aware of a &amp;quot;standard way of assessing [popularity]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the period until the closing of the theatres in 1642, scholars look mainly at the number of reprints and the number of productions. This type of information is necessarily incomplete: some printings may not have survived and many productions must have gone unrecorded. Based on the number of reprints, Shakespeare's most popular play during this period was, perhaps surprisingly, &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, which saw 6 quarto reprints during the 17th century [Schabert, p. 525] in spite of the text's corruptness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Information about productions or performances during the Jacobethan period is available from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henslowe#Henslowe%27s_diary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Henslowe's &amp;quot;diary&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (which does not mention Shakespeare), the Accounts of the Revels Office (for information about court performances), the Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber (also for information about court performances) [Halliday, p. 118] and occasional mentions in diaries and letters by other people. As mentioned above, this does not give us a complete account of the number of productions or performances of Shakespeare's plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the period after the Restoration in 1660, scholars look mostly at productions (in the late 17th century, these were often &amp;quot;improved&amp;quot; versions) rather than editions. (Starting with Rowe in 1709, various individuals began publishing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_editors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collected editions of Shakespeare's plays&lt;/a&gt;, instead of editions of individual plays, so scholars can't continue counting quarto editions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, scholars will note that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since R. Burbage, who was the first the play the part of Richard [III], almost all great English actors, D. Garrick (1741), J. P. Kemble (1783), C. Kean (1837), B. Holloway (1923) and L. Olivier (1944), among others, have celebrated great successes with this role. [Schabert, p. 398, my translation]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even counting productions, to the extent that information is available, is somewhat problematic, since many productions have been adaptations. For example, during the Restoration, Nahum Tate (1681) created an adaptation of &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt; that omitted the Fool and replaced Shakespeare's ending with a happy end in which Cordelia and Edgar got married [Schabert, p. 626]. This version remained popular until the end of the 18th century. But was it still Shakespeare?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; plays were neglected until 1680, when John Crowne created a two-part &amp;quot;updated&amp;quot; version adding anti-papal content and making other modifications that agreed more with Restoration tastes. The original text of the &lt;em&gt;Henry VI&lt;/em&gt; plays was not performed again until the jubilee of 1864 [Schabert, p. 390].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other Shakespeare plays that were adapted during the Restoration period are &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt;. Nineteenth-century producers would restore the original texts, whereas twentieth-century producers reverted to adaptation [Halliday, p 22-23].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, adaptations can also be counted as a measure of popularity, but from the point of view of reception, scholars prefer to distinguish between productions of the original text, adaptations and other works that represent something new. For example, John Dryden's play &lt;em&gt;All for Love&lt;/em&gt; (1677) &amp;quot;professes to imitate the divine Shakespeare&amp;quot; (Dryden's Preface) and displaced Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt; on the stage until the early nineteenth century [&lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Michael Neill, p. 25]; however, it stands at a much greater distance from Shakespeare's original play than other Restoration adaptations and is is usually treated as a work on its own. For this reason, a staging of &lt;em&gt;All for Love&lt;/em&gt; would no longer count as a Shakespeare production (Restoration audiences might have disagreed), even though Shakespeare's influence on it can be regarded as evidence of Shakespeare's popularity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that counting the number of productions and adaptations says nothing about their success. For example, John Dennis thought he could improve upon Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt;, but his adaptation of Coriolanus &amp;quot;was driven from the Drury Lane stage after three performances in 1719&amp;quot; [Halliday, p. 132]. The same applies to editions: we usually don't know how many copies were printed or how many remained on the shelves unsold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, counting productions, adaptations and editions is a bit like counting apples and oranges, since the printed format provides a totally different than a live production.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Halliday, F. E.: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Companion 1564 - 1964&lt;/em&gt;. Penguin Books, 1964.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schabert, Ina (editor): &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Handbuch&lt;/em&gt;. Third, revised edition. Stüttgart: Kröner, 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Michael Neill. The Oxford Shakesepare. Oxford University Press, 1994. (Pages 23-67 discuss &amp;quot;The play in performance&amp;quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T14:50:24.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1104" CreationDate="2020-10-04T17:13:39.453" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A real bridge does exist, over the Eresma stream. It's south side housed a small front line republican position, though manned by regular troops, not guerillas. The remains of trenches and living quarters can still be seen here. However, the book suggests that this was to be destroyed before the Nationalists counterattacked. In reality the republican 14th International Brigade crossed the bridge in their attack, and again in their retreat.&#xA;It is also implied in the book that the attack failed through treachery and incompetence. A republican sergeant did in fact betray details of the attack to the nationalists, but was ignored. What alerted them to the imminent offensive was seeing the headlights of lorries moving troops towards the front line. Disunity in the republican ranks certainly played a large part in the attack's failure, though, with a conspicuous lack of communication between the infantry, artillery and air forces. One unit got lost in the woods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11035" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T17:13:39.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-04T20:42:18.737" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In section 9 of S. Y. Agnon's short story &amp;quot;The Kerchief&amp;quot;, the narrator / protagonist gives us the scene at the Shabbat lunch meal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I came back with Father from the small prayer room she was already seated at the table wearing her kerchief, and the table was prepared with wine and cakes, large and small, round and doubled over. Father entered, said, &amp;quot;A Sabbath of peace and blessing,&amp;quot; put his tallit on the bed, sat down at the head of the table, said &amp;quot;The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,&amp;quot; blessed the wine, tasted the cake, and began, &amp;quot;A Psalm of David: The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two psalms specified here are Psalm 23 and Psalm 24, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first time I read this, it threw me, because as far as I was aware, those psalms aren't generally said at the lunch meal; Psalm 23 is traditionally said at the &lt;em&gt;third&lt;/em&gt; meal, according to what I had learned (and practice).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I did some research, though, and discovered that there are people who say these specific psalms at lunch, but they're a rather small minority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the point of specifying specifically which psalms were being said? Aside from it being slightly confusing for those of us for whom that's &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; our custom, how does it advance the story? What effect does including them have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-10-04T20:42:18.737" Title="Why does the narrator specify which psalms are being said at the meal in Agnon's &quot;The Kerchief&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;s-y-agnon&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15835" CreationDate="2020-10-05T00:16:34.330" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One possibility is the line &amp;quot;Little we see in Nature that is ours&amp;quot; from Wordsworth's sonnet &amp;quot;The world is too much with us&amp;quot;. The poem reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is too much with us; late and soon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Little we see in Nature that is ours;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The winds that will be howling at all hours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For this, for everything, we are out of tune;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordsworth was a founder of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_literature_in_English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Romantic movement in England&lt;/a&gt;, and deeply concerned with the relationship of human beings to nature. Like other European Romantics, Wordsworth believed that engagement with the natural world was an ethical necessity: without an abiding connection to nature, we become coarse and materialistic. Civilization, by definition cut off from nature, also cuts us off from us own natural instincts of goodness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Industrial Revolution and the rapid urbanization of England in the late 1700s and early 1800s accelerated what Wordsworth saw as this unnatural coarsening of human sensibility. Written around 1802, &amp;quot;The world is too much with us&amp;quot; is representative of his thinking. Caught up in worldly pursuits, we no longer are in harmony with nature. We are &amp;quot;out of tune&amp;quot; with the natural beauty that would keep us from giving &amp;quot;our hearts away&amp;quot;, i.e., becoming heartless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordsworth claims that being a pagan who sees divinities in natural phenomena is preferable to a life of &amp;quot;getting and spending&amp;quot;. This exaltation of the noble savage over the urban merchant is a typical Romantic attitude. Wordsworth's reverence for the natural world, and his belief in the ethical necessity of such reverence, are diametrically opposed to the Adamic worldview that has established the Anthropocene: the view that humans have mastery over nature, whose resources exist merely for us to exploit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T00:16:34.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T09:27:25.483" Score="5" ViewCount="226" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rabindranath Tagore's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/rabindranath-tagore/short-story/the-cabuliwallah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cabuliwallah&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, Rahmun, the eponymous Cabuliwallah, has come to Calcutta to make a living selling nuts and dried fruits from his native Afghanistan. In lieu of a photograph, he carries with him a handprint in ink of the daughter he has left behind in Kabul. Toward the end of the story, Rahmun shows the narrator this handprint. The narrator comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That impression of the hand of his little Pārbati in her distant mountain home reminded me of my own little Mini.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pārbati&lt;/em&gt; is how people from Calcutta would pronounce Pārvati, a fairly common name for girls in India. Since Mini is the narrator's daughter, when I first read the story I assumed that Pārbati was likewise Rahmun's daughter's name. On a subsequent reading, that seemed strange to me. Pārvati is a typically Hindu name and it would be unusual, to say the least, for a Muslim from Afghanistan to name his daughter that. It would be analogous to a Greek girl's being named Brünhilde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in the story does Rahmun actually mention his daughter's name. Given the unlikelihood of the name Pārbati for an Afghani girl, it appears that Pārbati is what the narrator calls her rather than her actual name. Why does he refer to her as Pārbati? What is the significance of the name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T21:23:34.403" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T21:23:34.403" Title="Why does the narrator in Tagore's story call the Cabuliwallah's daughter &quot;Parbati&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T09:58:05.363" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Cruel-Kindness---------English-translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cruel Kindness&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is written in the second person, addressing a &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I seek so many things with all my heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But you have saved me denying.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All through my life&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This your cruel kindness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Has filled my being.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is but your kindness, I know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now you shove me away to take me later&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Making me fit for my union with you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Saving me from my half-hearted love.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(translated by Kumud Biswas)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; mentioned throughout this poem? Who's the poem addressing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T08:51:02.563" Title="Who is Tagore's &quot;Cruel Kindness&quot; addressed to?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15884" CreationDate="2020-10-05T10:50:35.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Sanskrit word for mountain is &lt;em&gt;parvat&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Pārvati&lt;/em&gt; is a patronymic meaning &amp;quot;the daughter of the mountains&amp;quot;. Such patronymics are very common in Indian mythology. For example, Sītā, the daughter of king Janaka, is often called Jānakī. Similarly, one of the Vedic sun deities is Savitṛ, and his daughter is Sāvitrī. In &amp;quot;The Cabuliwallah&amp;quot;, Tagore's narrator calls Rahmun's daughter Parbati in the first place because she lives in a mountainous country. But the name also has mythological undertones that contribute to the story's evocative power.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between the distant, mountainous Afghanistan from where Rahmun hails and the flat Gangetic delta of Bengal where the story is set is thematically important in the story. The narrator remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, never stirring from my little corner in Calcutta, would let my mind wander over the whole world. At the very name of another country, my heart would go out to it, and at the sight of a foreigner in the streets, I would fall to weaving a network of dreams,—the mountains, the glens, and the forests of his distant home, with his cottage in its setting, and the free and independent life of far-away wilds. Perhaps the scenes of travel conjure themselves up before me and pass and repass in my imagination all the more vividly, because I lead such a vegetable existence that a call to travel would fall upon me like a thunder-bolt. In the presence of this Cabuliwallah I was immediately transported to the foot of arid mountain peaks, with narrow little defiles twisting in and out amongst their towering heights. I could see the string of camels bearing the merchandise, and the company of turbanned merchants carrying some their queer old firearms, and some their spears, journeying downward towards the plains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between the comfortably middle-class life of the narrator at home in Calcutta and the life in exile of the migrant worker from Kabul is highlighted by a series of accompanying contrasts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between the mountains, glens, and forests of Afghanistan and the broad streets of Calcutta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between the exoticized image of travel the stay-at-home narrator spins and the realities of Rahmun's precarious existence in Calcutta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between the &amp;quot;free and independent&amp;quot; life the narrator imagines for foreigners and the literal imprisonment Rahmun undergoes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But underlying these contrasts is the connection the narrator and Rahmun have as fathers of little girls. The Cabuliwallah strikes up a friendship with Mini because she reminds him of his own daughter, and this in turn strikes a chord with the narrator. The connection between Mini, the daughter of the Gangetic delta, and Rahmun's daughter in the mountains around Kabul is what causes the narrator to refer to the latter as Pārbati, a name that could more easily have been his own daughter's than Rahmun's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mythological identity of &lt;em&gt;Pārbati&lt;/em&gt; is also appropriate to the story. In mythology, Parvati is Uma, the daughter of Himavat, the king of the Himalayas. She is called Parvati because of the identification of her father with the mountain range. Parvati is determined to marry the ascetic god Shiva, and undergoes severe trials to earn both his love and her parents' approval of the match. Ultimately, she succeeds, and Shiva and Parvati get married in a ceremony whose comic and terrible aspects are part of Indian lore. &amp;quot;The Cabuliwallah&amp;quot; too ends with a marriage which entails distinctly mixed feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rahmun visits the narrator's home the day after completing a prison term of several years. He expects to pick up his relationship with Mini as before, playing with the little girl, giving her gifts of raisins and almonds, etc. But as it turns out, that very day is Mini's wedding day. Seeing Mini in her bridal attire turning away from him in shyness, it suddenly dawns on Rahmun that his own daughter too will have grown up and will be a stranger to him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Understanding his heartbreak, the narrator gives Rahmun some of the money set aside for the wedding expenses so that he can return to Kabul. The wedding therefore no longer has electric lights and a military band, and this causes great hand-wringing among Mini's mother and the other women of the household.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tagore's expert handling of the comic as well as poignant aspects of the situation recall the stories told of the marriage of Shiva and Parvati. Her parents' shock at the ascetic's uncouth behavior during the ceremony, and their lamentations about their delicate daughter leaving their palace for his no-frills hermitage, are mirrored in a couple of ways in this scene:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; - The consternation caused by Rahmun's unwelcome appearance at Mini's wedding is rather like the consternation Uma's parents feel at the sight of their soon-to-be son-in-law Shiva's matted hair, ash-streaked body, pet snakes, and generally ungroomed appearance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; - The sorrow of having a daughter leave for her husband's home, felt by both Uma's parents and Mini's, is contrasted with Rahmun's situation, where he is the one who has left home and his daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name Pārvati, therefore, has both local and broader relevance to this story. Locally, Pārvati simply means the little girl of the mountains. But the use of that particular name in the context of a wedding brings to mind the wedding of the mythological Pārvati to Shiva, which gives the moving story a greater resonance because of the parallels evoked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T10:50:35.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16341" CreationDate="2020-10-05T12:30:09.647" Score="2" ViewCount="299" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's poem '&lt;a href=&quot;https://bn.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0_%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%80/%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0_%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%80&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonar Tari&lt;/a&gt;', written in Bengali, was translated into English as '&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/The-Golden-Boat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Golden Boat&lt;/a&gt;'. The last stanza reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ঠাঁই নাই, ঠাঁই নাই! ছোট সে তরী&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;আমারি সোনার ধানে গিয়েছে ভরি’।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;শ্রাবণ গগন ঘিরে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ঘন মেঘ ঘুরে ফিরে,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;শূন্য নদীর তীরে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;রহিনু পড়ি’,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;যাহা ছিল নিয়ে গেল সোনার তরী।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     Thaai naai, Thaai naai! chhoTo se tari&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aamaari sonaar dhaane giyechhe bhari'.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;shraavaNa gagana ghire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ghaNa megh ghure phire&#xA;shuunya nadir tiire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rahinu pa.Di',&#xA;yaahaa chhila niye gela sonar tari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In William Radice's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No room, no room, the boat is too small.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Loaded with my gold paddy, the boat is full.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Across the rain-sky clouds heave to and fro,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the bare river-bank, I remain alone—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What had has gone: the golden boat took all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did the boat-woman take the golden paddy into her boat, leaving the narrator (the paddy cutter) alone on the shore? Why did he forlornly surrender to fate on a rainy day?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10622" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T09:19:29.440" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:19:29.440" Title="Why was the narrator left alone on the shore in Tagore's &quot;Sonar Tari&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T13:38:46.403" Score="1" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading Edgar Allan Poe's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32037&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eureka: A Prose Poem&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;an essay on the material and spiritual universe&amp;quot;. I have come across a sentence where I can't get what the author is trying to say. It seems impossible for me to sort out the syntax. Here is the context, with the difficult sentence in bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, of these atoms, thus diffused, or upon diffusion, what conditions are we permitted—not to assume, but to infer, from consideration as well of their source as of the character of the design apparent in their diffusion? Unity being their source, and difference from Unity the character of the design manifested in their diffusion, we are warranted in supposing this character to be at least generally preserved throughout the design, and to form a portion of the design itself:—that is to say, we shall be warranted in conceiving continual differences at all points from the uniquity and simplicity of the origin. But, for these reasons, shall we be justified in imagining the atoms heterogeneous, dissimilar, unequal, and inequidistant? More explicitly—are we to consider no two atoms as, at their diffusion, of the same nature, or of the same form, or of the same size?—and, after fulfilment of their diffusion into Space, is absolute inequidistance, each from each, to be understood of all of them? In such arrangement, under such conditions, we most easily and immediately comprehend the subsequent most feasible carrying out to completion of any such design as that which I have suggested—the design of variety out of unity—diversity out of sameness—heterogeneity out of homogeneity—complexity out of simplicity—in a word, the utmost possible multiplicity of relation out of the emphatically irrelative One. &lt;strong&gt;Undoubtedly, therefore, we should be warranted in assuming all that has been mentioned, but for the reflection, first, that supererogation is not presumable of any Divine Act; and, secondly, that the object supposed in view, appears as feasible when some of the conditions in question are dispensed with, in the beginning, as when all are understood immediately to exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T14:37:08.677" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T14:01:37.823" Title="What does Edgar Allan Poe mean by &quot;supererogation is not presumable of any Divine Act&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;eureka-a-prose-poem&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15850" CreationDate="2020-10-05T14:57:43.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We, in Turkey, use the word 'Pehlivan' as a synonym of 'wrestlers' (we do not use 'Pehliva' but phonetically it must be the singular form of 'Pehlivan') and metaphorically for 'valiant', 'brave', 'gallant' men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etimolojiturkce.com/kelime/pehlivan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Etimoloji Türkçe&lt;/a&gt;, this word is based etymologically on 'pahlavān پهلوان ' (a Late-Persian word) which again means 'valiant', 'brave.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it must have been evolved from the name 'pahlavīk' who was a member of the East Iranian tribe and invaded Iran in the 3rd century BC and ruled for 450 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, most probably, it means 'Ruler' in this context. Ruler - a valiant ruler - of the World.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T08:51:50.700" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T08:51:50.700" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-05T15:05:49.167" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't remember the name of a book about a guy in his late teens/early twenties who goes to live with a family to tutor their teenage son. Subsequently, the guy/tutor has an affair with the mother, while the teen son develops a crush on his tutor. I've only read the synopsis on Goodreads and the first chapter, so that's all I can describe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11037" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T15:05:49.167" Title="Identify book about a guy in his late teens/early twenties who goes to live with a family to tutor their teenage son" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15891" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15892" CreationDate="2020-09-29T15:40:29.593" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading (aloud with my kids) the German translation of the Harry Potter series and I am a bit surprised that the German word 'Eingeweide' is used so often. 'Entrails', 'guts', 'bowels' are some English words that translate to the German word 'Eingeweide' as far as my favorite dictionary tells me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am talking about &amp;quot;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix&amp;quot; here, but also observed this in &amp;quot;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire&amp;quot; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In German it seems a bit odd that this specific translation is used that often, since the word 'Eingeweide' is not very common in German, especially not if talking about books that primarily target younger readers. In my opinion this is a very &amp;quot;heavy&amp;quot; word in German that invokes heavy emotions on the reader. So I can not understand that this have been used that often, even for describing &amp;quot;minor&amp;quot; feelings and though there are surely a few more German expressions to explain this &amp;quot;feeling&amp;quot; in different nuances (in my dictionary, this would be things like &amp;quot;heart is in the boots&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;feeling queasy&amp;quot; in English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I do not have an English original for Harry Potter, I am keen to know if the English original also uses one word, or maybe a phrase really, so often for feelings of such a kind, and if so what that word or phrase is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two examples -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harry and Cho are in Hogsmeade at Madam Puddifoot. Cho is talking about Cedric and then:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In den ein, zwei Sekunden, die er brauchte, um zu begreifen, was sie gesagt hatte, wurden Harrys Eingeweide zu Eis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Before Harry goes to the ministry for defending about the dementor incident&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry war irgendwie dankbar, dass er sich nicht am Gespräch beteiligen musste. Seine Eingeweide krümmten sich.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11038" OwnerDisplayName="Stefan Korn" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T15:25:48.527" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T15:25:48.527" Title="Harry Potter German translation - use of word &quot;Eingeweide&quot;" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15892" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15891" CreationDate="2020-09-29T16:45:28.760" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first example in &lt;em&gt;Der Orden des Phönix&lt;/em&gt; seems to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Solch   wilde   Gedanken   wirbelten durch  Harrys  Kopf,  und  seine  Eingeweide  verknoteten  sich  vor  Zorn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original English is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These furious thoughts whirled around in Harry’s head, and his insides writhed with anger&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next we find&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry spürte, wie seine Eingeweide einen mächtigen Satz machten, als  ob  er  gerade  eine  Stufe  treppab  verpasst  hätte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harry felt a great jolt in his guts as though he had just missed a step going  downstairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angst  stach  ihm  wie  Nadeln  in  die  Eingeweide,  wenn  er  sich  fragte,  was  aus  ihm  werden  sollte,  falls  sie  ihn  der  Schule  verwiesen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fear  jabbed  at  his  insides  like  needles  as  he  wondered  what  was  going  to  happen  to  him  if  he  was  expelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one German word is being used to translate (at least) two different English words, so there doesn't appear to be a strict one-to-one substitution.  But we do see that all three passages are quite similar in tone and content.  They all describe an intense distress that's felt in the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;insides&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;guts&lt;/em&gt;, on their own, don't sound too heavy or mature. They are both used fairly frequently in writing for children.  However, as I wrote above, these situations are not light.  They're meant to sound somewhat upsetting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also note that none of these specific phrases - &amp;quot;insides writhed with anger&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;a jolt in his guts&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Fear jabbed at his insides like needles&amp;quot; - is very common.  They don't sound unnatural, or unidiomatic, but they are not fixed or well-known phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11658" OwnerDisplayName="Juhasz" LastActivityDate="2020-09-29T16:45:28.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15893" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15894" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" Score="0" Body="&quot;Eureka: A Prose Poem&quot; (1848), a philosophical essay by Edgar Allan Poe. Use this tag with the [edgar-allan-poe] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T21:40:06.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15895" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-05T21:40:28.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-05T21:40:28.337" LastActivityDate="2020-10-05T21:40:28.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15896" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-05T21:40:28.337" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) or his life as a writer. He was a Bengali poet, dramatist, and novelist, best known for the poetry collection 'Gitanjali' (1910)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T08:02:40.070" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T08:02:40.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="192" CreationDate="2020-10-06T02:50:49.340" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum writes is true. Lennie did indeed kill accidentally just because of his nature, and without understanding what he did or why. George does want to spare Lennie from the pain of a trial, a hanging, or a lynching. Yes, he could have led the lynch mob away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But George realizes an important thing. Even if he rescues Lennie now, there will one day be another woman and another lynch mob. He won't be able to protect Lennie for ever. Not only will Lennie still get to suffer, but there will be another dead woman in the future. It is better to have Lennie die now, at peace and with his friend, than painfully in the future that must come, and with another woman needlessly dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are likely to be other factors. In good literature, as in life,  decisions like this are rarely for one reason. Lennie does deserve to die. He did really kill the woman. Lennie's death will free George from the intolerable burden of caring for him. It will mean George won't have to lie to cover for his friend. And any future killings by Lennie would be on George's conscience, since he could have prevented them. Deciding which factors weigh most with George is part of the enjoyment of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T11:17:53.623" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T11:17:53.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15344" CreationDate="2020-10-06T07:47:16.657" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;(Couldn't fit this into a comment….)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that, in this story, the cat primarily serves the function of atmosphere (that of having something else in the room rather than just Egbert and Lady Anne); otherwise the (already very short) story would be even shorter, and boring. I don't think any deeper symbolism needs to be looked for: while, as far as &amp;quot;philosophy&amp;quot; goes, there is no doubt a certain spirit and attitude towards things that pervades Saki's stories, it appears he wrote primarily to entertain. But also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This picture of family life (the couple had a bird and a cat, and presumably no children) says something about them. (Some reviewers have expressed the opinion that Saki was disdainful of childless women.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Many of Saki's stories (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Clovis/Tobermory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tobermory&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) have the idea of animals (and cats in particular) being superior and more intelligent than, if not most people, definitely the kinds of people Saki was contemptuous of (as here he is of their artistic taste and intelligence). So here, making explicit the superiority of the cat (the line about &amp;quot;superb indifference&amp;quot;, the cat refusing to act as a vacuum cleaner, and finally the fact that the cat, which thinks of Egbert as “A fool”, seems to know of the death already, unlike him, and is only waiting for his exit) expresses the character of the couple better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The punchline becomes stronger: The penultimate sentence, “[The bird] had cost twenty-seven shillings without the cage, but Lady Anne made no sign of interfering” sets up the idea that while a lady like that might well ignore her husband after a quarrel, to ignore the loss of an expensive purchase— now &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; is truly unusual and demands an explanation, and this expectation is answered by the final sentence: “She had been dead for two hours.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="869" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T07:47:16.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T12:45:36.160" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Rabindranath Tagore's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/At-The-End-Of-The-Day---------English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;At the End of the Day&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there's one stanza that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To you I only pray –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Before I go let me know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Looking at the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why mother earth so green&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gave me a call&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why the silence of the night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Told me the stories of the stars&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why the lights of the day&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Raised waves in my mind –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is what I pray.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused by the line &amp;quot;Why the lights of the day  / Raised waves in my mind&amp;quot;. What are the &amp;quot;waves&amp;quot; in the mind, and why would the lights of the day be raising them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T12:59:41.233" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T12:57:32.913" Title="What does &quot;raised waves in my mind&quot; mean in Tagore's &quot;At the End of the Day&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15888" CreationDate="2020-10-06T14:01:37.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A paraphrase would be &lt;strong&gt;God doesn't do more than He needs to&lt;/strong&gt;. To paraphrase more closely &lt;em&gt;we cannot presume that any divine act would include anything unnecessary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supererogation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Supererogation&lt;/a&gt; means doing more than is asked of you or than is required; it generally refers to what is morally required, but can refer to what is legally required or other areas as well (as the link shows). Poe is usually considered as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/edgallpoerev.19.2.0274&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;holding some form of monism&lt;/a&gt; (a belief that the universe is at bottom all one thing or all unified) and in the extract he appears to be arguing that God wouldn't create lots of different unrelated atoms but instead would create lots of atoms that are fundamentally the same, all derived from a basic unifying principle he refers to as the &amp;quot;One&amp;quot;. (The fact that God is supposedly all-knowing would add weight to Poe's claim that God doesn't do anything unnecessary.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But good luck understanding &lt;em&gt;Eureka&lt;/em&gt;; academic opinion seems to differ on whether and to what extent it's serious or a joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T14:01:37.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15901" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15902" CreationDate="2020-10-06T14:24:25.593" Score="3" ViewCount="166" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing a business man in London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His was a name to conjure with in certain circles. In others it was never mentioned. The financial lords of the City—the Farings, the Wertheiners, the Scott-Teasons—had no official knowledge of his existence. They went about their business calmly, loaning their millions at a ridiculously small percentage, issuing Government loans, discounting bills, buying bullion, and such-like operations which filled the hours between eleven o’clock, when their electric broughams set them down in Threadneedle Street, and four o’clock, when their electric broughams picked them up again. They read of Colonel Black &lt;strong&gt;in their grave way&lt;/strong&gt;, because there were days when he dominated the financial columns. They read of his mighty stock deals, of his Argentine electric deal, his &lt;strong&gt;rubber notations&lt;/strong&gt; and his Canadian copper mines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;in their grave way&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;with their serious attitude&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's exactly meant by &amp;quot;rubber notations&amp;quot;, is it &amp;quot;rubber figures&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T14:33:17.953" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T15:15:55.027" Title="What are &quot;rubber notations&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15901" CreationDate="2020-10-06T14:57:21.870" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is right that “grave” is used with the sense “dignified; serious”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Notations” is a typographical error for “flotations”. You can check this against &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/justmenofcordova00wall/page/32/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 32 of the 1931 Ward, Lock, and Co. edition&lt;/a&gt; on the Internet Archive:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/justmenofcordova00wall/page/32/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4EU4O.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Rubber” is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_rubber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;natural rubber&lt;/a&gt; (latex), which is used in the manufacture of pneumatic tyres and many other objects. In the early 20th century there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rubber_boom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rubber boom&lt;/a&gt; (a large expansion of rubber production) in South America, financed in part by the non-fictional equivalents of Colonel Black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “flotation” is “the act of getting (a company, scheme, etc.) afloat or fully started” (&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;), usually referring to the raising of funds by selling shares in a stock market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When using a public domain source of digitized texts, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;, you always have to be aware of the possibility of typographical errors. Typically these texts are produced by starting with a scan of a printed copy of the work, using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;optical character recognition&lt;/a&gt; (OCR) software to digitize the text, and then using volunteer proof-readers to correct the mistakes made by the OCR software. It is easy for the volunteers to miss mistakes, especially when the result of the mistake is a real word, as it is in this case. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/12323/3003&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; for another case where an OCR error yielded a real word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You should consider correcting the error at Wikisource using the “Edit” link near the top right of the Wikisouce page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T15:15:55.027" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T15:15:55.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15903" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-06T15:28:31.380" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T15:28:31.380" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T15:28:31.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15904" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-06T15:28:31.380" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Edgar Wallace (1875–1932), British writer of thrillers and adventure stories, best known for his film script for &quot;King Kong&quot; (1933)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:06:12.970" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T07:06:12.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15905" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-06T15:29:18.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T15:29:18.480" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T15:29:18.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15906" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-06T15:29:18.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Just Men of Cordova' (1917), a novel by Edgar Wallace. Use this tag with the [edgar-wallace] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:26:59.270" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:26:59.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T16:18:53.760" Score="4" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;, did the writer take those characters out of real life? Or did he just build the characters with time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11045" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T10:07:42.483" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T17:00:34.710" Title="In the Brothers Karamazov, did Dostoyevsky take those characters out of real life?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T18:47:40.577" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title is suggestive enough to elicit an understanding that Andrade probably purposefully made this poem difficult to read for people who are not familiar with Tupi culture. A conscious effort of Mário de Andrade to &lt;strong&gt;rebuke the Eurocentric mindset&lt;/strong&gt; is evidenced by the abundant symbolic imagery.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virtude de urubutinga&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De enxergar tudo de longe!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Não carece vestir tanga&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pra penetrar meu caçanje!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Você sabe o francês &amp;quot;singe&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mas não sabe o que é guariba?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— Pois é macaco, seu mano,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que só sabe o que é da estranja.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;urubutinga&amp;quot; mean here? What does it refer to? Shouldn't it be &amp;quot;urubitinga&amp;quot; aka the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_black_hawk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;great black hawk&lt;/a&gt; native to Brazil?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;See for example Alfredo Cesar Melo's discussion in &amp;quot;The Predicaments of Transculturation: A Materialist Reading of “Meu tio o Iauaretê” by João Guimarães Rosa&amp;quot; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T18:54:16.190" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T18:54:16.190" Title="What is the meaning and significance of &quot;urubutinga&quot; in Mário de Andrade's &quot;O lundu do escritor difícil&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;mario-de-andrade&gt;&lt;lusophone-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15910" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15911" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature which were originally written in the Portuguese language." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T19:23:30.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15912" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T22:12:57.703" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;em&gt;City of Blinding Lights&lt;/em&gt; by U2 contains the following verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the city of blinding lights,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The more you know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The less you feel&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Some pray for, others steal&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Blessings not just for the ones who kneel, luckily&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the last line refer to? Why do blessings go both to the ones who steal and the ones who pray?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-10-06T22:12:57.703" Title="Why does &quot;City of Blinding Lights&quot; say that blessings go to both those who pray and those who steal?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;u2&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15913" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-06T22:28:46.730" Score="3" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeking the title/author of a 1920-30s poem, closing with the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is no reward for devotion such as this, I'll take my chances in hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator being a soldier returned from Post WWI France trench warfare, speaking of the unit's pet dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11048" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T16:24:23.600" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T08:57:05.503" Title="Seeking Title and Poet of Post WWI poem closing with &quot;If there is no reward for devotion such as this, I'll take my chances in hell&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15914" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-07T00:53:02.147" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-07T00:53:02.147" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T00:53:02.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15915" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-07T00:53:02.147" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Brazilian poet Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (1893 – 1945) or about any of his literary works. If the question is about any of his short poems, please use the [poetry] tag as well." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:26:29.367" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:26:29.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15817" CreationDate="2020-10-07T09:48:10.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heathcliff's precise ethnicity is still open to debate. In the mid-nineteenth century, the term &amp;quot;gypsy&amp;quot; could refer to a Romani individual, or it could more be used to describe someone who appears &amp;quot;non-English&amp;quot;. Perhaps he is either Eastern or Southern European, or part-Indian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11052" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T09:48:10.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15917" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15907" CreationDate="2020-10-07T13:54:12.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any evidence, that any of the characters are taken from the real life. Researchers point some character inspirations from the real life but these are just theories. And yes, Dostoevsky did build and develop the characters while creating the novel. &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%98%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B7%D0%B4%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0_%C2%AB%D0%91%D1%80%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%8C%D1%8F_%D0%9A%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%C2%BB&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian's Wikipedia featured article&lt;/a&gt; on the topic is rather comprehensive, I don't know about any resources about it in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1178" LastActivityDate="2020-10-07T13:54:12.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15918" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15913" CreationDate="2020-10-07T14:38:57.323" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Poem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/poem/8619985-Rags-by-Edmund-Vance-Cooke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Rags' by Edmund Vance Cooke&lt;/a&gt;, and the verse you partially recall is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if there's no heaven for love like that,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For such four-legged fealty—well!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If I have any choice, I tell you flat,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll take my chance in hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's actually a pretty gruesome tale, Rags saves the narrators life twice on the Front and is brought back to the UK with the Regiment, but is 'stolen away'. The narrator next encounters Rags&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in a vivisection laboratory, &amp;quot;tacked and tied&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; And slit like a full-dressed fish,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; With his vitals pumping away inside&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rags recognises the narrator, wags his tail a little and dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In case it is of interest how I found it, when I had no success searching your phrasing directly I tried substituting 'heaven' for 'reward', as a likely juxtaposition to 'hell' and 'take my chance' rather than 'take my chances' just because I thought it had greater strength for a closing line. That brought it up on the first page of returned search results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-08T08:57:05.503" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T08:57:05.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15919" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-07T20:57:08.310" Score="6" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of Rabindranath Tagore's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/A-Dream-------English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dream&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, there's one part (the ending) that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the gate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The lamp went out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the temple&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the banks of Shipra&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The prayers stopped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comes after the rest of the poem is describing coming home to &amp;quot;my beloved&amp;quot;, with descriptions of this woman and their emotions. But what relevance does this last part have? Why is it important that &amp;quot;the prayers stopped&amp;quot;? Why finish the poem with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T09:26:25.030" Title="Why do the prayers stop in Tagore's &quot;A Dream&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15920" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15309" CreationDate="2020-10-08T19:39:25.127" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 1906 Clarendon Press edition of the French text of the novel, edited by Léon Delbos, is available at the Internet Archive and has comprehensive notes starting at &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/notredamedepar1906hugo/page/352/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 353&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Page 1. (Heading of chapter.) &lt;em&gt;La Grand’Salle&lt;/em&gt;. The apostrophe was first used by French grammarians between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, under the mistaken idea that an &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; had been omitted in such expressions as &lt;em&gt;grand mère&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grand route&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grand messe&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;grand image&lt;/em&gt; (p. 99, l. 5). It was not so, however, and French simply followed the example of Latin by making no difference between masculine and feminine where Latin used the same form for both genders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Victor Hugo (1831). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/notredamedepar1906hugo/page/352/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Notre-Dame de Paris&lt;/em&gt;, p. 353&lt;/a&gt;. Léon Delbos, ed. (1906). Oxford: Clarendon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although these notes refer to the French text and you are reading an English translation, it should not be too difficult to find the corresponding passages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have difficulties on any point, then by all means ask a question here at Literature Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Greek word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ananke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ἈΝΆΓΚΗ&lt;/a&gt; upon which “this book is founded”, as Hugo puts it, does not go untranslated! Its meaning is elucidated in book VII, chapter IV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Jehan boldly raised his eyes. “Brother,” said he, “would you like me to explain in simple French, the Greek word written there upon the wall?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; “Which word?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; “ἈΝΆΓΚΗ!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; A slight hush tinged the pallid cheek of the archdeacon, like the puff of smoke which betokens the secret commotions of a volcano. The student scarcely perceived it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; “Well, Jehan,” stammered the elder brother with some effort, “what is the meaning of that word?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; “FATALITY.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; &lt;sub&gt;Hugo (1831). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.85577/page/204/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hunchback of Notre Dame&lt;/em&gt;, p. 205&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Frederic Shoberl (1833).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-08T19:39:25.127" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15921" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-08T22:17:16.593" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Along-The-Way--English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Along the Way&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; several times refers to &amp;quot;your touch&amp;quot;, such as in this first stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I walk along my way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I receive your touch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now and then&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I don’t know how and when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I receive your touch all on a sudden&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When there is great sorrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whose touch is the author feeling? Who is this entity that &amp;quot;your touch&amp;quot; is referring to? And does it have anything to do with the &amp;quot;and death deals a deadly blow&amp;quot; line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T12:35:45.397" Title="In Tagore's &quot;Along the Way&quot;, who is the entity that the &quot;your touch&quot; is referring to?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15922" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15939" CreationDate="2020-10-08T22:57:18.203" Score="0" ViewCount="259" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, Zeus happily allows Poseidon to turn a ship into stone, killing everyone aboard. I think it's safe to say most people alive today would consider this immoral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are some other examples of Zeus intentionally inflicting direct harm on humans for no reason justifiable by modern ethics (i.e. something that would get him uncontroversially convicted in a western judicial system like first degree murder, rape, armed robbery, and extortion). If that's too Eurocentric for all you moral relativists, I'll define &amp;quot;immoral&amp;quot; from a utilitarian standpoint: an action, behaviour, thought, or mindset that -- regardless of its significance -- moves the world into a state of increased net suffering and decreased net prosperity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm writing about Zeus in general, so examples from any text will work. But if that's too broad, &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Illiad&lt;/em&gt; will more than suffice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11065" LastEditorUserId="11072" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T20:37:13.757" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T17:30:47.050" Title="Examples of Zeus's Immoral Nature" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="7" ClosedDate="2020-10-12T21:28:29.080" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8458" CreationDate="2020-10-09T11:06:03.273" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kimya at the time was fifteen years old. When Prophet (peace be upon him) got married to Hazrat Aisha she was 8 years old but the marriage was solemnized when she turned eighteen. Thus, it was only right that Shams stayed away before his wife had reached the right age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11069" LastActivityDate="2020-10-09T11:06:03.273" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-10T07:52:52.210" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;Emily Jane Pfeiffer’s sonnet ‘To the Blind Architect of the City of Life, whose Humble Homes are the Creatures of Earth, Water, and Air, and whose “Meeting-House” is Man’ was first published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nEXWAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA194&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Littel’s Living Age&lt;/em&gt; (1874)&lt;/a&gt; and reprinted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sonnetssongs00pfeigoog/page/n32&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonnets and Songs&lt;/em&gt; (1880)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How true thy work, blind Builder of the homes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Which throng the paths of Life—beasts, fishes, birds,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    All things which be, they are as bodied words.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or moving thoughts of some high whole which looms&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Above us in the star-dust and the mist.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Around us in the voices of the night.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Within us in quick glimpses of love-light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That leave us doubting if we dreamed or wist.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But true thy art, its unmeant meanings telling,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Blind Builder of the city, on whose crown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Man stands—a temple for a God’s indwelling,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Thy finest—no! thy sole false work—Cast down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The lying altar, raze it to the sod,—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What means a temple where there is no God?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this poem about? Who is the addressee? In what way are they “blind”? What does it mean for animals to be “bodied words”? How is Man a “Meeting-House” and a “false work”? What is the “lying altar” and why must it be destroyed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T07:52:52.210" Title="Emily Jane Pfeiffer’s “To the Blind Architect of the City of Life”" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;emily-jane-pfeiffer&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15927" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-10T09:48:51.990" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/vespers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Vespers&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Iris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Wild Iris&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a 1992 book of poetry written by Louise Glück, the 2020 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your extended absence, you permit me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;use of earth, anticipating&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;some return on investment. I must report&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;failure in my assignment, principally&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;regarding the tomato plants.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I think I should not be encouraged to grow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the heavy rains, the cold nights that come&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;so often here, while other regions get&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;twelve weeks of summer. All this&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;belongs to you: on the other hand,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;multiplying in the rows. I doubt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you have a heart, in our understanding of&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that term. You who do not discriminate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;immune to foreshadowing, you may not know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the red leaves of the maple falling&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for these vines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the second-person addressee, the &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; whose &amp;quot;extended absence&amp;quot; does not excuse them from blame for heavy rains and cold nights, who has no heart and &amp;quot;do[es] not discriminate between the dead and the living&amp;quot;? Does the tomato blight symbolise anything else, or is the poem just about a disappointed gardener? Why is a maple mentioned as well as tomato plants? Was this poem inspired or influenced by any others (for some reason it reminds me of William Carlos Williams's &amp;quot;This is Just to Say&amp;quot;)? What is the effect of the poem's casual style, without rhyme or metre or starting lines with capital letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T09:48:51.990" Title="Louise Glück's &quot;Vespers&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;louise-gluck&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15797" CreationDate="2020-10-10T11:36:42.900" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iraj&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia Iranica page on &amp;quot;Iraj&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; contains another retelling of this story, with slightly different versions of the brothers' names (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reappearing in person, Ferēdun welcomed them to his palace and, “seating them upon the thrones of majesty,” revealed the truth; he added: “I have chosen fit [throne] names for you” (ibid., p. 105). The eldest, who wisely sought &lt;strong&gt;“safety” (salāmat), he called Salm&lt;/strong&gt; (here wrongly interpreted as derived from Arabic slm); the second, who showed &lt;strong&gt;unrestrained daring, he named Tur (i.e., tur, “reckless, brave”)&lt;/strong&gt;; and to the youngest, who exhibited the right character of prudent bravery and was thus “alone worthy of praise,” he gave the name &lt;strong&gt;“Iraj” (i.e., from ēr “noble”)&lt;/strong&gt;. Then Ferēdun “divided the world” into three realms. He created one kingdom for Salm by joining Rum and the West (ḵāvar); China and Turān he assigned to Tur, who became known as Turānšāh; and on Iraj he bestowed Iran and Arabia as well as the golden throne, crown of chiefs, and the royal seal (ibid., p. 107).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Even in modern Farsi, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=fa&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=salamat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=fa&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translate&lt;/a&gt;, the word &amp;quot;salamat&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;سلامت&amp;quot;) can be translated as &amp;quot;health, safety, peace, security&amp;quot;. That explains the name of the eldest son, who is not ruling over eponymous kingdoms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The second son's name Tur comes from a word for &amp;quot;reckless, brave&amp;quot;. His eponymity with his kingdom is no coincidence: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Turan#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;etymology of the name &amp;quot;Turan&amp;quot; for the region&lt;/a&gt; is from a Persian word meaning &amp;quot;the land of Tur&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The youngest son's name has been given as either Irij or Iraj, the latter being even closer to the name of his kingdom Iran. I haven't been able to find any confirmed etymological connection though: the prince's name comes from &amp;quot;ēr&amp;quot; meaning &amp;quot;noble&amp;quot;, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_(word)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the name of the country&lt;/a&gt; originally meant &amp;quot;the land of Aryans&amp;quot;, deriving from a word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan#Etymology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;with an etymology potentially stretching back to Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;. Maybe someone with a better knowledge of ancient Persian history and linguistics can do better, but it seems to me that the name &amp;quot;Iran&amp;quot; is older than the name &amp;quot;Iraj/Irij&amp;quot;, so either the prince was named partly after the country as well as the word for &amp;quot;noble&amp;quot;, or it was a linguistic coincidence, but not that the country was named after the prince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T11:36:42.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15931" CreationDate="2020-10-10T12:15:39.957" Score="5" ViewCount="620" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc163&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Book X, Chapter IV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say this only to you. I am not at all anxious to fall into the&#xA;clutches of the secret police and take lessons at the Chain bridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long will you remember&#xA;The house at the Chain bridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;strong&gt;Chain bridge&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T18:38:10.947" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T18:38:10.947" Title="The Brothers Karamazov - What is the &quot;Chain bridge&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15921" CreationDate="2020-10-10T12:35:45.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Along-The-Way--English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page you link to&lt;/a&gt; calls this a &amp;quot;devotional song&amp;quot;, suggesting that it's religious and that the entity &amp;quot;touching&amp;quot; the narrator is &lt;strong&gt;God&lt;/strong&gt;. This makes sense as an interpretation of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I walk along my way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I receive your touch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now and then&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I don’t know how and when.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator feels close to God at specific moments, but expresses uncertainty about exactly what those moments are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it in the scent of an unknown flower&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or in the joy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I feel in the song of a travelling singer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Joyful sensual experiences allow the narrator to feel the touch of the divine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do I receive your touch all on a sudden&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When there is great sorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And my world is shaken&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All the traces of my way are effaced&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All the bonds are broken&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And death deals a deadly blow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the narrator is also thinking about tragic experiences, and whether they too enable him to feel the touch of the divine. I think the most likely interpretation here is that the narrator is turning to God for refuge in these times of great sorrow and death. (The answer to the question &amp;quot;Do I ...&amp;quot; might be no, since the whole poem has a tone of uncertainty, but the phrase &amp;quot;all on a sudden&amp;quot; suggests that it's something the narrator really does feel. An alternative explanation might be that this is about the power of God, or how an omnipotent entity who created everything can do bad as well as good, but I don't think this fits with the theme.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem ends on the same note of uncertainty as it began.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this interpretation fit in with Tagore's religious views more generally? Well, we're lucky in that Tagore's works include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Religion_of_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Religion of Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a book of philosophical discussion on the nature of humanity and the divine, which is &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/religionofmanbei027987mbp/page/n245/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read on the Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;. Near the beginning, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This thought of God has not grown in my mind through any process of philosophical reasoning. On the contrary, it has followed the current of my temperament from early days until it suddenly flashed into my consciousness with a direct vision. The experience which I have described in one of the chapters which follow convinced me that on the surface of our being we have the ever-changing phases of the individual self, but in the depth there dwells the Eternal Spirit of human unity beyond our direct knowledge. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the discussion of my own religious experience I have expressed my belief that the first stage of my realization was through my feeling of intimacy with Nature - not that nature which has its channel of information for our mind and physical relationship with our living body, but that which satisfies our personality with manifestations that make our life rich and stimulate our imagination in their harmony of forms, colours, sounds and movements. It is not that world which vanishes into abstract symbols behind its own testimony to Science, but that which lavishly displays its wealth of reality to our personal self having its own perpetual reaction upon our human nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing a connection with Nature as a religious experience is certainly consistent with this poem's description of receiving the touch of God in the scent of a flower or the song of a singer. But, in light of these religious views as expressed by Tagore, perhaps we should interpret &amp;quot;God&amp;quot; in his way as a sort of ideal representation of humanity as a whole, &amp;quot;the divinity of Man the Eternal&amp;quot; as he writes in his book. Whether at moments of joy or moments of sorrow, the narrator is a part of humanity, and can be reminded of his own connection with the &lt;strong&gt;universal human spirit&lt;/strong&gt;, which is Tagore's interpretation of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T12:35:45.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15931" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15929" CreationDate="2020-10-10T13:48:35.150" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Where the translator (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Garnett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constance Garnett&lt;/a&gt;) used “secret police”, the Russian text is “Третьего отделения” (tretyego otdeleniya) meaning “third section”, that is, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Section_of_His_Imperial_Majesty%27s_Own_Chancellery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Third Section of His Imperial Majesty’s Own Chancellery&lt;/a&gt;, the secret police department of the Imperial Russian government from 1826 to 1880.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its headquarters were near the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panteleymonovsky_Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Panteleymonovsky Bridge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in St Petersburg, which was (at that time) a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chain bridge&lt;/a&gt;, that is, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;suspension bridge&lt;/a&gt; with the deck suspended from chains instead of wire cables. Here’s how it looked in 1853:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bianki_5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x8OzV.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bridge has a single span suspended from five chains which pass over a supporting tower at each end. The supporting towers appear to made of iron girders, and have four arches, the two inner arches are wide for vehicles, and the two outer arches are narroew for pedestrians. A horse approaches the bridge pulling a sleigh.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The description of the secret police headquarters as “the house at the chain bridge” evokes the chains with which the prisoners were bound, and the “lessons” which Kolya does not want to learn there are a euphemism for torture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15936/3003&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for the origin of the lines of verse that Kolya quotes in this passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T22:34:58.673" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T22:34:58.673" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15932" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15933" CreationDate="2020-10-10T14:23:55.527" Score="6" ViewCount="154" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc97&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Book VI, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And how suprised men would be if I were to say that from these meek&#xA;monks, who yearn for solitary prayer, the salvation of Russia will&#xA;come perhaps once more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But God will save Russia as He has saved her many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father Zossima seems to be referring to previous times when Russia was saved... What exactly is he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T18:38:45.427" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T18:38:45.427" Title="The Brothers Karamazov - When was Russia saved before?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15933" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15932" CreationDate="2020-10-10T17:00:47.387" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's most probably referring to the events in Russian history when Russia was on a brink of ceasing to exist as a state. There were a number of grave moments throughout the centuries, to name a few:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Kievan_Rus%27&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus&lt;/a&gt; (XIII-XV centuries)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Смутное Время (&amp;quot;Time of Troubles&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;as Wiki puts it&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt; (late XVI - early XVII)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Patriotic War of 1812, Napoleon's invasion&lt;/a&gt; - which is, obviously, the closest one to the time &amp;quot;The Brothers Karamazov&amp;quot; is set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T17:00:47.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15934" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15936" CreationDate="2020-10-10T17:36:36.950" Score="4" ViewCount="827" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc163&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Book X, Chapter IV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long will you remember&#xA;The house at the Chain bridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you remember? It's splendid. Why are you laughing? You don't suppose I am fibbing, do you?” (“What if he should find out that I've only that one number of The Bell in father's bookcase, and haven't read any more of it?” Kolya thought with a shudder.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;The Bell&amp;quot; that Kolya is referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T18:34:54.960" Title="The Brothers Karamazov - What is &quot;The Bell&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15934" CreationDate="2020-10-10T17:51:31.417" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This must refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolokol_(newspaper)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kolokol&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which means &amp;quot;Bell&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The Bell&amp;quot; (Russian doesn't have a word for &amp;quot;the&amp;quot;) in Russian. It was a weekly Russian-language 19th-century newspaper with significant revolutionary and socialist leanings, which was banned in Russia at the time. From the Wikipedia article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Kolokol's base was a theory of Russian peasant socialism, elaborated by Herzen. Its political platform included democratic demands for liberation of peasants with land, and abolition of censorship and corporal punishment. Besides the articles by Herzen and Ogaryov, Kolokol published a variety of material on people's living conditions, social struggle in Russia, and information about abuses and secret plans of the authorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would make sense in the context of the character Kolya, a young boy who proclaims his socialist beliefs without fully understanding what he's talking about. (At least according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov#Book_Ten:_Boys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;: I haven't read &lt;em&gt;The Brother Karamazov&lt;/em&gt; myself.) He is thinking to himself that a real socialist firebrand, in Russia at that time, might be expected to be an avid consumer of &lt;em&gt;Kolokol&lt;/em&gt;, but he has only seen one issue in his father's bookcase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T17:51:31.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15934" CreationDate="2020-10-10T18:34:54.960" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolokol_(newspaper)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Колокол&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Kolokol&lt;/em&gt; meaning “bell”) was a mid-19th century dissident Russian-language newspaper, printed in London and Geneva to evade Russian state censorship. Commenting on the lines of verse quoted by Kolya:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long will you remember&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The house at the Chain bridge&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Victor Terras writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two lines are from a widely known antigovernment satire, repeatedly printed in various émigré periodals and almanacs, first in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=o6ReAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA214&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The North Star&lt;/em&gt; 6 (1861): 214&lt;/a&gt;. Though it did not appear in &lt;em&gt;The Bell&lt;/em&gt;, best known of these publications, &lt;em&gt;The Bell&lt;/em&gt; did print a sequel to this poem (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=iLvckhjohRgC&amp;amp;pg=PA1812&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no. 221 [1 June 1866], p. 1812&lt;/a&gt;). […] At any rate, Dostoevsky commits another anachronism, since Kolya’s father had died many years before the appearance of any of these publications. &lt;em&gt;The Bell&lt;/em&gt; was published from 1857 to 1867, which means that it began to appear after Mr. Krasotkin’s death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Victor Terras (1981). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=eaoZZ10VgekC&amp;amp;pg=PA352&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Karamazov Companion&lt;/em&gt;, p. 352&lt;/a&gt;. University of Wisconsin Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s the first appearance of the poem (“ПОСЛАНІЯ” meaning “Letters”) in &lt;em&gt;Полярная звезда&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The North Star&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o55SW.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/o55SWl.png&quot; alt=&quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two lines Kolya quotes are the last two lines of the second verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Будешь помнить зданіе&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;У Цепнаго моста.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point of the paragraph is that Kolya is showing off, pretending to knowledge of dissident literature that he doesn’t possess: his father only had the one issue of &lt;em&gt;The Bell&lt;/em&gt; and Kolya hasn’t even read the whole of that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T18:34:54.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15937" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-10T19:53:04.270" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T19:53:04.270" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T19:53:04.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15938" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-10T19:53:04.270" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet and essayist Louise Glück (born 1943) and her life as a writer. She was awarded the 2020 Nobel prize in Literature. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T20:38:49.307" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T20:38:49.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15922" CreationDate="2020-10-10T20:58:52.750" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Considering Zeus’s actions in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; from the point of view of the modern law of England and Wales, I find that five criminal offences are reported by Homer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zeus caused two eagles to fight:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So spake Telemachus, and in answer to his prayer did Zeus, of the far borne voice, send forth two eagles in flight, from on high, from the mountain-crest. Awhile they flew as fleet as the blasts of the wind, side by side, with straining of their pinions. But when they had now reached the mid assembly, the place of many voices, there they wheeled about and flapped their strong wings, and looked down upon the heads of all, and destruction was in their gaze. Then tore they with their talons each the other’s cheeks and neck on every side, and so sped to the right across the dwellings and the city of the people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Homer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-h/1728-h.htm#chap02&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; II&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang (1879). Project Gutenberg.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an offence under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/45/section/8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Animal Welfare Act 2006 §8(1)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person commits an offence if he—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) causes an animal fight to take place, or attempts to do so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zeus incited strife among the Achaeans:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when we came to Tenedos, we did sacrifice to the gods, being eager for the homeward way; but Zeus did not yet purpose our returning, nay, hard was he, that roused once more an evil strife among us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-h/1728-h.htm#chap03&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; III&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on what Homer means by “evil strife” then Zeus’ encouragement of it may be an offence under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2007/27/part/2/crossheading/inchoate-offences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Serious Crime Act 2007 §44(1)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person commits an offence if—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a) he does an act capable of encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(b) he intends to encourage or assist its commission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zeus called up a storm that wrecked Menelaus’ ships:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when he [Menelaus] in his turn, faring over the wine-dark sea in hollow ships, reached in swift course the steep mount of Malea, then it was that Zeus of the far-borne voice devised a hateful path, and shed upon them the breath of the shrill winds, and great swelling waves arose like unto mountains. There sundered he the fleet in twain, and part thereof he brought nigh to Crete, where the Cydonians dwelt about the streams of Iardanus. Now there is a certain cliff, smooth and sheer towards the sea, on the border of Gortyn, in the misty deep, where the South-West Wind drives a great wave against the left headland, towards Phaestus, and a little rock keeps back the mighty water. Thither came one part of the fleet, and the men scarce escaped destruction, but the ships were broken by the waves against the rock; while those other five dark-prowed ships the wind and the water bare and brought nigh to Egypt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-h/1728-h.htm#chap03&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; III&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an offence under the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1971/48/section/1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Criminal Damage Act 1971 §1(1)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another intending to destroy or damage any such property or being reckless as to whether any such property would be destroyed or damaged shall be guilty of an offence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Zeus murdered &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iasion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iasion&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So too when fair-tressed Demeter yielded to her love, and lay with Iasion in the thrice-ploughed fallow-field, Zeus was not long without tidings thereof, and cast at him with his white bolt and slew him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-h/1728-h.htm#chap05&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; V&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murder is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_in_English_law&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;common law offence&lt;/a&gt; in England and Wales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the question, Zeus encouraged Poseidon to turn the Phaeacian ship to stone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Zeus the gatherer of the clouds, answered him, saying: “Friend, learn now what seems best in my sight. At an hour when the folk are all looking forth from the city at the ship upon her way, smite her into a stone hard by the land; a stone in the likeness of a swift ship, that all mankind may marvel, and do thou overshadow their city with a great mountain.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1728/1728-h/1728-h.htm#chap13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; XIII&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear from the text whether any Phaeacians were injured or killed as a result, but at the very least Poseidon is guilty of criminal damage, and so Zeus’ encouragement of him is also a crime as noted above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T21:12:00.610" LastActivityDate="2020-10-10T21:12:00.610" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15922" CreationDate="2020-10-10T21:51:53.277" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it seems that this question has initially received a negative vote, I will give an answer (according to my readings, my analysis and my understanding or interpretation of ancient texts) in an attempt to provide plausible explanations or clarifications about ancient mythology, ancient stories, the stories of the gods and the actions of Zeus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an example of a related or relevant ancient text, I will start with an excerpt from the beginning of &lt;em&gt;The Works and Days&lt;/em&gt; by the ancient poet Hesiod, where he shows that Zeus judges everyone fairly, defends the weak, elevates the humble and denounces the arrogant, and gives everyone what he or she deserves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Muses of Pieria who give glory through song, come hither, tell of Zeus&#xA;your father and chant his praise. Through him mortal men are famed or&#xA;un-famed, sung or unsung alike, as great Zeus wills. For easily he&#xA;makes strong, and easily he brings the strong man low; easily he&#xA;humbles the proud and raises the obscure, and easily he straightens&#xA;the crooked and blasts the proud […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The gods of Greece and Rome were related to, identified with, and frequently represented another version of other gods or deities in the Near East or in the Mediterranean region.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zeus or Jupiter was called Amun-Ra by the Egyptians, and was called Baal by the Canaanites , Phoenicians and Carthaginians. When Alexander the Great came to Egypt, he was declared the son of Zeus-Ammon or Jupiter-Ammon, which indicates that Amun-Ra and Zeus Ammon were the same deity. Some writers identify Ahura Mazda, the supreme god of the ancient Persians and of Zoroastrianism, with Zeus or Jupiter. The Hindu god Indra has many characteristics with Zeus. Each region might have had its own specific or local deities, some syncretisms were elaborated, but the principal supreme gods and the main deities were the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One has to take into account that the ancient mythological stories were related to ancient religions and to beliefs and practices that people followed in their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stories of the gods may have been embellished and somewhat modified with the passing of time and centuries, with metaphorical, mystical or exaggerated elements added to them, but beneath the myths there was realistically a historical basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the doctrine of Euhemerism, the ancient gods and goddesses were great men and women of the past who made great accomplishments and were deified after their death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zeus was described and viewed by the majority of writers, poets and authors in antiquity as just, fair, and all powerful. As an example, the ancient stoic philosopher Cleanthes and the poet Callimachus wrote hymns praising Zeus, and depicted him as the universal embodiment of law, order and justice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zeus was regarded as the protector of the social order by ancient Greeks, and Jupiter was viewed as the protector of the Roman republic and the Roman empire by the ancient Romans. People in Antiquity clearly did not view Zeus as &amp;quot;moving the world into a state of increased net suffering and decreased net prosperity&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; as well as in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, Zeus is constantly praised and described as the greatest and the most powerful of the gods, and as someone who was always fair and just. It is not mentioned in book 13 of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; that Zeus &amp;quot;happily&amp;quot; allowed Poseidon to turn a ship into stone. If one looks at what happened earlier, it is found that Poseidon was angry at Odysseus because he had blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus (Poseidon's son) by hardening a wooden stake in the fire and driving it into Polyphemus' eye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poseidon is angered after seeing that the Phaeacians helped Odysseus and gave him treasure, so he complains to Zeus. Zeus considers Poseidon's complaint somewhat trivial, but nevertheless allows his brother to soothe his anger and turn the ship into stone, so that the Phaeacians might honor and respect the god of the sea. It is said in the Odyssey that the ship was turned into stone and sank, but it is not mentioned whether the people on the ship died or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zeus was depicted as neutral, just and unbiased in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. Unlike some of the other gods, Zeus didn’t take sides with those involved in the war, and strived to act and to judge everyone impartially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word “rape” has an older meaning referring to “abduction” or “seizing away”, sometimes by using force. An example would be the “rape of Europa”, referring to the story of the abduction of the Phoenician princess Europa by Zeus. The word “rape” could also be synonymous with “rough sex”. In Antiquity one was regarded as a hero when he was always able to seduce and win or get the girl. Women generally liked having a powerful and handsome hero who could protect and support them. The ruler of the gods exemplified these traits and was supposed to be very fertile and sexually active.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During Antiquity people had somewhat different, more positive and accepting views of sexuality in its various forms, including incest and incestuous relationships. For example, the “Hieros Gamos” or the sacred marriage and the wedding between Zeus and his sister-wife Hera was publicly celebrated by ancient Greeks, indicating that people in Antiquity were not inconvenienced by incest. From a historical point of view, in ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Persia and in several other places, kings and rulers married their siblings or their direct relatives.  For example, the laws of Lycurgus of Sparta and the laws of Solon in Athens allowed marriage between brother and sister. It is known from ancient documents that brother-sister marriage was permitted in ancient Egypt until the end of the third century CE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to mention one more remark related to the story of Prometheus. For many centuries during Antiquity and beyond, poets and authors depicted Prometheus as a trickster who didn't help or benefit anyone by his theft of fire and who was rightfully held accountable and punished. Then when the time was right Prometheus was released and saved by Herakles under the instructions of his father Zeus. In the &lt;em&gt;Theogony&lt;/em&gt;, Hesiod depicted  Prometheus as a jealous or lowly contender to the omnipotence of Zeus. The ancient playwright Aeschylus praised Zeus in all his plays. The play &lt;em&gt;Prometheus Bound&lt;/em&gt; was misinterpreted, since Aeschylus was using irony, and as he made Prometheus talk in the play he intended to show him as conceited and delusional. It was only in the last two centuries that romantic writers decided to change the narrative without justification, and made a hero or benefactor out of Prometheus. If one reads and analyses ancient texts and authors without adding a contemporary, christian interpretation or bias or preconceived opinion, it will be noticed that Prometheus deserved to be punished, just as mush as other similar characters such as Tantalus or Sisyphus deserved to be punished. By the way early Christian writers such as Tertullian described Prometheus as an impostor and warned against comparing him to Jesus or anything of that sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, as a supreme deity and ruler who had control and influence over practically everything in the Universe, the stories written about Zeus contained allegorical, &amp;quot;embroidered&amp;quot; elements that could be interpreted in more than one way or could have more than one meaning, sometimes in relation to earlier context. So it would not be useful or accurate to apply modern particular laws or current standards (which may change in the future) to the actions of Zeus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The actions of Zeus as narrated in ancient poems and stories also reflect the ideas, mentalities,  beliefs, standards, opinions, and possibly prejudices of the authors or poets who created or wrote those poems and stories at a particular period of time in ancient history. And nowadays those who judge or try to evaluate the actions of Zeus are influenced by their own intellectual, cultural, and/or religious background(s) .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that parts of this answer are taken or inspired from answers I wrote on Quora.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11072" LastEditorUserId="11072" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T17:30:47.050" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T17:30:47.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15941" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15942" CreationDate="2020-10-10T23:07:10.627" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm a big fan of The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. I remember a favorite quote somewhere in the text that goes something like the key to life is being unborable...and he met two such men in the summer of... or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote actually shows up partially &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/6498897-the-pale-king&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; but I can't find the page again. What page is it, so I can get the full quote?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2484" LastEditorUserId="2484" LastEditDate="2020-10-10T23:12:56.947" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T01:56:36.440" Title="Where is the &quot;unborable&quot; quote in The Pale King?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;david-foster-wallace&gt;&lt;the-pale-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15941" CreationDate="2020-10-10T23:17:00.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Found It! Page 440, at the end of Chapter 44. The whole quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. I met, in the years 1984 and '85, two such men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2484" LastEditorUserId="2484" LastEditDate="2020-10-11T01:56:36.440" LastActivityDate="2020-10-11T01:56:36.440" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15943" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-12T00:10:04.803" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T00:10:04.803" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T00:10:04.803" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15944" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-12T00:10:04.803" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Pale Kinge', an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. Should be tagged with [david-foster-wallace]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:26:10.133" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:26:10.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-12T05:44:53.827" Score="32" ViewCount="11651" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Palantir of Orthanc the King will keep, to see what is passing in his realm, and what his servants are doing. &lt;strong&gt;For do not forget, Peregrin Took, that you are a knight of Gondor, and I do not release you from your service. You are going now on leave, but I may recall you. And remember, dear friends of the Shire, that my realm lies also in the North, and I shall come there one day.&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, I never could understand why Pippin would volunteer to become a soldier of a different people/species. He didn't at all have to do that just to help them and fight with/for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But once he had fulfilled his duty and fought and helped them and it was all over, and he is now returning back to his home, far away, why would Aragorn be this seemingly rude? It would stress me out beyond words to hear that I now can never relax in my hobbit village in the Shire, but have to constantly fear that I'm called to travel all the way back and help them out. Aragorn should've released him with a &amp;quot;honorable leave&amp;quot; and thanked him instead of putting this pointless pressure on him. It's almost as if he wants to subtly punish him for his &amp;quot;rash decision&amp;quot; to join their army. Which, again, I didn't understand in the first place, and seemed entirely out of character for Pippin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And not only this. Aragorn goes on to claim that &amp;quot;his realm&amp;quot; also &amp;quot;lies in the North&amp;quot;. What does that mean? Gondor is way down South on the map as far as I can tell. Is Aragorn claiming to be the king of all of Middle-Earth now? Not just Gondor?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I strongly doubt that this is meant to be interpreted as Aragorn showing a weakness and &amp;quot;evil side&amp;quot;, as in, an increasing thirst for power and control. But maybe that's what's being implied here; that he has changed now that he is officially a mighty king. But still, I don't think this is the intention by the author, and it would seem oddly ominous in the context, but also fit in with the repeated fact of humans being weak and easily corrupted...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I reading too much into this? Am I misunderstanding Aragorn? Did he mean it more in a joking and friendly manner? He frankly seems almost threatening when he says this to Pippin. It makes me frustrated that he would not let Pippin go back without &amp;quot;strings attached&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11085" LastEditorUserId="11096" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T08:47:04.820" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T17:23:42.940" Title="Why is Aragorn so weird to Pippin when they make their final farewell before going back to the Shire?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15945" CreationDate="2020-10-12T11:39:42.120" Score="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: In this scene Aragorn confirms to Pippin that their relationship remains one of &lt;em&gt;liege-lord&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;vassal&lt;/em&gt; within the &lt;em&gt;feudal system&lt;/em&gt; of Gondor and Arnor. This confers high status and honour upon Pippin, as well as obligation: in fact, these are two sides of the same relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The north-kingdom&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Aragorn says that his “realm lies also in the north” he is referring to the kingdom of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Arnor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arnor&lt;/a&gt;. The history as described during the Council of Elrond:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of Númenor he [Elrond] spoke, its glory and its fall, and the return of the Kings of Men to Middle-earth out of the deeps of the Sea, borne upon the wings of storm. Then Elendil the Tall and his mighty sons, Isildur and Anárion, became great lords; and &lt;strong&gt;the North-realm they made in Arnor&lt;/strong&gt;, and the South-realm in Gondor above the mouths of Anduin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 2. London: George Allen and Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/War_of_the_Last_Alliance&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;War of the Last Alliance&lt;/a&gt;, Gondor flourished but Arnor did not:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘In the North after the war and the slaughter of the Gladden Fields the Men of Westernesse were diminished, and their city of Annúminas beside Lake Evendim fell into ruin, and the heirs of Valandil removed and dwelt at Fornost on the high North Downs, and that too is desolate. Men call it Deadman’s Dike, and they fear to tread there. For the folk of Arnor dwindled, and their foes devoured them, and their lordship passed, leaving only green mounds in the grassy hills.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt; II.2.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Gondor flourished at first, eventually “the line of Meneldil son of Anárion failed” and the kings were replaced by ruling Stewards, of whom Denethor was the last. This means that Aragorn, who “is descended through many fathers from Isildur Elendil’s son”, is now the heir to the crown of Gondor and of Arnor, a claim that he hopes to use to establish &lt;em&gt;feudal rule&lt;/em&gt; over the former territory of Arnor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Feudalism&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this feudal rule that Aragorn hopes to establish? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feudalism&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was a form of government in medieval Europe that operated by personal relationships of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fealty&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;fealty&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. A feudal lord owned a territory that was too large to administer in person, and there was no system of civil administration on which he could depend, so he installed trusted &lt;em&gt;vassals&lt;/em&gt; as tenants on parts of his territory. The vassals swore &lt;em&gt;fealty&lt;/em&gt; to their &lt;em&gt;liege-lord&lt;/em&gt; and there was a mutual relationship of support and security between them: the vassals were expected to support their lord by providing military service, and the lord was expected to support his vassal through gifts of land and treasure, and to protect the vassal if he was threatened by invasion, raids, or rebellion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing the origin of the feudal system in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, Marc Bloch wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Martel&lt;/a&gt; and his successors] wanted to establish order and Christian peace through their reams. They wanted soldiers to spread their dominion far and wide and to carry on the holy war against the infidel, an enterprise both conducive to the growth of their own power and beneficial for souls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older institutions appeared inadequate for this task. The monarchy had at its disposal only a small number of officials: but these were in any case not very reliable men and—apart from a few churchmen—they lacked professional tradition and culture. Moreover, economic conditions precluded the institution of a vast system of salaried officals. Communications were slow, inconvenient and uncertain. The principal difficulty, therefore, which faced the central government was to reach individual subjects, in order to exact services and impose the necessary sanctions. Thus there arose the idea of utilizing for the purposes of government the firmly established network of protective relationships. The lord, at every level of the hierarchy, would be answerable for his ‘man’ and would be responsible for holding him to his duty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Marc Bloch (1939). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/feudalsociety000bloc/page/156/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feudal Society&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. 157&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by L. A. Manyon (1961). University of Chicago Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus vassals governed their own territories by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subinfeudation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;subinfeudation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, appointing their own sub-vassals to form a &lt;em&gt;feudal hierarchy&lt;/em&gt;. This system was held together by personal relationships: ties of family and marriage, campaigning together in times of war, hunting, feasting, gift-giving, and so on. Vassals sent their sons to serve with their lord, and their daughters to serve their lord’s wife, in order to acquire these connections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As kings they had to get supporters and above all create an army. So they attracted into their service—frequently in return for gifts of land—many men who were already of high rank. Former members of the military following, establishied on property granted by the ruler, did not cease to be regarded as his vassals; and his new followers were considered to be bound to him by the same tie, even if they had never been his companions-in-arms. Both groups served in his army, followed by their own vassals, if they had any. But, since most of their time was spent away from their master, the conditions under which they lived were very different from those of the household warriors of but a short time before. Each one of them was the centre of a more or less widely scattered group of dependants whom he was expected to keep in order; if necessary, he might even be required to exercise a similar supervision over his neighbours. Thus, among the populations of the vast empire, there became distinguishable a relatively very numerous class of ‘vassals of the Lord’—that is, ‘of the Lord King’ (&lt;em&gt;vassi dominici&lt;/em&gt;). Enjoying special protection of the sovereign and being responsible for furnishing a large part of his troops, they also formed, through the provinces, the links of a great chain of loyalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/feudalsociety000bloc/page/158/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bloch, pp. 158–159&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Government of Arnor&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this model in mind, we can see what is happening in the exchange between Aragorn and Pippin. Aragorn has just been crowned king of Gondor, and he also claims the crown of Arnor by his descent from Isildur. In Gondor, there seems to be a well-established system of feudal loyalty, as we can see from the description of the &lt;em&gt;feudal levy&lt;/em&gt; summoned by Denethor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The men of Ringló Vale behind the son of their lord, Dervorin striding on foot: three hundreds. From the uplands of Morthond, the great Blackroot Vale, tall Duinhir with his sons, Duilin and Derufin, and five hundred bowmen. From the Anfalas, the Langstrand far away, a long line of men of many sorts, hunters and herdsmen and men of little villages, scantily equipped save for the household of Golasgil their lord. From Lamedon, a few grim hillmen without a captain. Fisher-folk of the Ethir, some hundred or more spared from the ships. Hirluin the Fair of the Green Hills from Pinnath Gelin with three hundreds of gallant green-clad men. And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and company of knights in full harness riding grey horses; and behind them seven hundreds of men at arms, tall as lords, grey-eyed, dark-haired, singing as they came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1955). &lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, book V, chapter 1. London: George Allen and Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aragorn has secured his hold over these lords of Gondor through his bravery and leadership in the War of the Ring. But in the case of Arnor his rule is much less secure: the Rangers of the north are his loyal kinsmen, but Arnor is a vast land. Aragorn needs all the help he can get while he cements his rule by rebuilding the strongholds of &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Ann%C3%BAminas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Annúminas&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Fornost_Erain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fornost Erain&lt;/a&gt; and installing loyal vassals there. A peaceful and loyal Shire will be an useful bulwark of the kingdom during this period of uncertainty, and so he reminds Pippin of the oath of fealty he swore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Here do I swear fealty and service to Gondor, and to the Lord and Steward of the realm, to speak and to be silent, to do and to let be, to come and let go, in need or plenty, in peace and war, in living or dying, from this hour henceforth, until my lord release me, or death take me, or the world end. So say I, Peregrin son of Paladin of the Shire of the Halflings.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; V.1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as discussed above, the obligation goes both ways: if Pippin, as a vassal of the king of Gondor, is obliged to provide service to his lord, then Aragorn, as Pippin’s liege-lord, is obliged to support him in turn. It seems very likely that after the coronation of Aragorn, his vassals, including Pippin, swore fealty to him, and Aragorn swore his part of the obligation using similar words to those of Denethor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And this do I hear, Denethor son of Ecthelion, Lord of Gondor, Steward of the High King, and I will not forget it, nor fail to reward that which is given: fealty with love, valour with honour, oath-breaking with vengeance.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; V.1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This two-way relationship means that Aragorn, in reminding Pippin of his duty, also confers on him the honour and status as the personal representative of the king. We can see hints of this status in VI.6, where on the journey north “Pippin rode with the knights of Gondor”, establishing personal relations with his peers of the realm. We can see Pippin making use of this status when he returns to the Shire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I am a messenger of the King,’ he said. ‘You are speaking to the King’s friend, and one of the most renowned in all the lands of the West. You are a ruffian and fool. Down on your knees and ask pardon, or I will set this troll’s bane in you.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; VI.8.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the appendices we find that Aragorn uses his personal relationships with the members of the fellowship of the ring to help cement his control of the Shire and the lands to the west of it (the Westmarch):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1434 Peregrin becomes the Took and Thain. King Elessar makes the Thain, the Master† and the Mayor‡ Counsellors of the North-kingdom. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1436 King Elessar rides north, and dwells for a while by Lake Evendim. He comes to the Brandywine Bridge, and there greets his friends. He gives the Star of the Dúnedain to Master Samwise, and Elanor¶ is made a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maid_of_honour&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;maid of honour&lt;/a&gt; to Queen Arwen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1451 Elanor the Fair marries Fastred of Greenholm on the Far Downs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1452 The Westmarch, from the Far Downs to the Tower Hills, is added to the Shire by the gift of the King. Many hobbits remove to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1462 At his [Sam’s] request the Thain makes Fastred Warden of Westmarch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Merry, the Master of Buckland. ‡ Sam, the Mayor of the Shire. ¶ Daughter of Sam and Rose.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, Appendix B.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note Aragorn’s use of gifts of treasure (the Star) and land (the Westmarch) to his vassals, and his recruitment of Elanor (his vassal’s daughter) to his court to ensure that these relationships persist into the next generation. Elanor’s husband is then appointed lord of the Westmarch, extending Aragorn’s control over this region of Eriador through ties of loyalty and kinship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pippin’s motivation&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question wonders what motivated Pippin to offer his fealty to Denethor. But Pippin explains this clearly: it is a repayment of a debt he owes to Boromir, who died at Amon Hen in an attempt to save the hobbits. He cannot repay the debt to Boromir, but he can repay it to Boromir’s father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pippin flushed and forgot his fear. ‘The mightiest man may be slain by one arrow,’ he said; ‘and Boromir was pierced by many. When last I saw him he sank beside a tree and plucked a black-feathered shaft from his side. Then I swooned and was made captive. I saw him no more, and know no more. But I honour his memory, for he was very valiant. He died to save us, my kinsman Meriadoc and myself, waylaid in the woods by the soldiery of the Dark Lord; and though he fell and failed, my gratitude is none the less.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Pippin looked the old man in the eye, for pride stirred strangely within him, still stung by the scorn and suspicion in that cold voice. ‘Little service, no doubt, will so great a lord of Men think to find in a hobbit, a halfling from the northern Shire; yet such as it is, I will offer&#xA;it, &lt;strong&gt;in payment of my debt&lt;/strong&gt;.’ Twitching aside his grey cloak, Pippin drew forth his small sword and laid it at Denethor’s feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt; V.1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T17:23:42.940" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T17:23:42.940" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-12T15:44:41.413" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an English-language novel in the mid-2000s about a group of 2 or 3 kids, probably siblings and/or cousins. I think they travel from out of town to a relative's home in the southern United States. They wander through a swamp or bayou and find some sort of entrance to a magical realm. Like Narnia, the realm is controlled by the bad guys, and the kids are savior figures who get chased around. Unfortunately that's all I remember, except for the fact that there's a giant flying/gliding snake that the kids ride to travel from the realm's surface to the bottom of a huge, open underworld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was written for a juvenile or young adult audience. I haven't found any matches with search terms like &amp;quot;fiction magic giant flying snake&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10697" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T15:44:41.413" Title="Book about kids riding a flying snake in a magical realm" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15945" CreationDate="2020-10-12T17:48:02.347" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I agree almost entirely with Gareth Rees' answer, I think it can be made simpler with a bit of cultural context. Aragorn is a king. He's in a position to command, and while he's not the king of all Middle Earth, he has claimed the throne of Arnor as his birthright, which includes the part of Eriador that the Hobbits call the Shire. Pippin is a high noble of the Hobbits, the heir of the Thain of the Shire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Aragorn had said to Pippin &amp;quot;go now, with my thanks. You've served me well, now return to your Shire and live as you will&amp;quot;, then, leaving aside the material benefts that Gareth Rees discusses, it would have been quite an insult to Pippin and to the Hobbits! A dismissal would have been a statement that Pippin had nothing to offer that Aragorn could want, that Hobbits were irrelevant, and that the Shire should go back to obscurity and not get involved in the affairs of the big people. Instead he's saying &amp;quot;we've defeated Sauron, but there's been so much destruction, and now it's time to rebuild the world. I want you, my trusted friend and sworn servant, to help me with that job, and in return, I will make sure that you, and the Shire, benefit from it.&amp;quot; That this comes as a solemn command, with no option of refusal, well, that's just part of the cultural trappings of feudalism — but it was still a mark of trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="965" LastEditorUserId="965" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T01:27:07.253" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T01:27:07.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14614" CreationDate="2020-10-12T18:33:00.673" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Her refers to the babe - eventually. Nature, if you can order her mind as well as her face to be like her father's, then please put no yellow, or jealousy like his, within her. So that she will never suspect, like he (her father) does, that her children are not her husband's children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11091" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-12T19:46:11.333" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T19:46:11.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15950" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15945" CreationDate="2020-10-12T19:41:12.100" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I entirely agree with the answers already given, but possibly there is another - probably minor - additional point here.  During the time of the Fellowship, Pippin has a few times shown poor judgement, for example at the well in Moria (&amp;quot;Fool of a Took!&amp;quot;) and when he picked up the Palantir and was seen by Sauron.  Possibly by telling Pippin that he will be watching, Aragorn is nudging Pippin to act with greater forethought, so he will grow in wisdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11093" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T19:41:12.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15945" CreationDate="2020-10-12T21:17:31.813" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the content of the answers of Gareth Rees and hobbs, however, aside from the content of what he said, I think it's also important to address Aragorn's tone here. In particular: &lt;strong&gt;He's joking.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aragorn's 'harsh' tone to Pippin here is &lt;em&gt;firmly tongue-in-cheek&lt;/em&gt;. His statement is a humorous way of expressing his appreciation for Pippin's service to him, to Gondor, and to the mission of the fellowship, as well as and his desire to continue their friendship and for them to work together again in the future. He is indeed expressing the value and importance of Pippin's service to Gondor as the other answers point out, but he's just using a humorous tone to do it. His firm and harsh tone is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony#Verbal_irony&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;verbal irony&lt;/a&gt; meant to humorously contrast with the gratitude and respect he's actually conveying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there were any doubt about how Aragorn felt about the four hobbits, it should be completely dispelled (in the movies, at least) in &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/rBtzudk40pE&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another line when he's being completely serious&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friends, You bow to no one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While that particular scene isn't in the book, Aragorn's respect for and gratitude to the Hobbits certainly is. At the beginning of the chapter &lt;em&gt;Many Partings&lt;/em&gt;, Frodo goes to Aragorn, who tells him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I know what you have come to say, Frodo: you wish to return to your own home. Well, dearest friend, the tree grows best in the land of its sires; but for you in all the lands of the West there will ever be a welcome. And though your people have had little fame in the legends of the great, they will now have more renown than many wide realms that are no more.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few paragraphs later, Aragorn further tells Frodo,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'But now before you go I will confirm the words that Faramir spoke to you, and &lt;strong&gt;you are made free for ever of the realm of Gondor; and all your companions likewise.&lt;/strong&gt; And if there were any gifts that I could give to you to match with your deeds you should have them; but whatever you desire you shall take with you, and you shall ride in honour and arrayed as princes of the land.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aragorn's statement to Pippin was but one of many examples of tongue-in-cheek dialog Tolkien employed in the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; books. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/15945/why-is-aragorn-so-weird-to-pippin-when-they-make-their-final-farewell-before-goi#comment25204_15946&quot;&gt;chepner mentioned&lt;/a&gt; in a comment on another answer, another example of this, also from Aragorn, was his 'punishment' of Beregond for spilling blood in the Hallows and leaving his post without leave (in order to save Faramir's life from Denethor):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the King said to Beregond, 'Beregond, by your sword blood was spilled in the Hallows, where that is forbidden. Also you left your post without leave of Lord or of Captain. For these things, of old, death was the penalty. Now therefore I must pronounce your doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'All penalty is remitted for your valour in battle, and still more because all that you did was for the love of the Lord Faramir. Nonetheless you must leave the Guard of the Citadel, and you must go forth from the city of Minas Tirith.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The the blood left Beregond's face, and he was stricken to the heart and bowed his head. But the King said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'So it must be, for you are appointed to the White Company, the Guard of Faramir, Prince of Ithilien, and you shall be its captain and dwell in Emyn Arnen in honour and peace, and in the service of him for whom you risked all, to save him from death.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien provided us with more amusing tongue-in-cheek dialogue a few pages later between Gimli and Eomer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And before he [Eomer] went to his rest he sent for Gimli the Dwarf, and he said to him: 'Gimli Gloin's son, have you your axe ready?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Nay, lord,' said Gimli, 'but I can speedily fetch it, if there be need.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'You shall judge,' said Eomer. 'For there are certain rash words concerning the Lady in the Golden Wood that lie still between us. And now I have seen her with my eyes.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Well, lord,' said Gimli, 'and what say you now?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Alas!' said Eomer. 'I will not say that she is the fairest lady that lives.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Then I must go for my axe,' said Gimli.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'But first I will plead this excuse,' said Eomer. 'Had I seen her in other company, I would have said all that you could wish. But now I will put Queen Arwen Evenstar first, and I am ready to do battle on my own part with any who deny me. Shall I call for my sword?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This humorous exchange references back to when Gimli and Eomer first met as Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli encountered Eomer's company of horsemen in the second chapter of &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt; while chasing the Uruk-Hai orcs who had captured Pippin and Merry. Eomer had spoken unkindly about Galadriel, leading Gimli to threaten him. That encounter ended with the exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Farewell, and may you find what you seek!' cried Eomer. 'Return with what speed you may, and let our swords hereafter shine together!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I will come,' said Aragorn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'And I will come, too,' said Gimli. 'The matter of the Lady Galadriel lies still between us. I have yet to teach you gentle speech.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'We shall see,' said Eomer. 'So many strange things have chanced that to learn the praise of a fair lady under the loving strokes of a Dwarf's axe will seem no great wonder. Farewell!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1585" LastEditorUserId="1585" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T04:45:52.850" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T04:45:52.850" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15919" CreationDate="2020-10-12T23:26:57.950" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can see, the end of the poem sees the lovers reunited, with total perfection (reference to the lotus):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a lotus bending on its stem, she slowly bent her head on my breast&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the prayers stopping is most likely about the end of the need for prayer, as all is now fulfilled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9885" LastActivityDate="2020-10-12T23:26:57.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15953" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15971" CreationDate="2020-10-13T02:33:42.363" Score="7" ViewCount="137" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was re-reading Edgar Allen Poe's magnificently disturbing novel, &lt;em&gt;The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket&lt;/em&gt;, this last month and began to wonder why suddenly, starting with Chapter 14 and going all the way into chapter 18, (chapters 14-17 are almost half-made-up of coordinates and physical descriptions of animals) Poe begins to get extensively technical in longitude and latitude descriptions, as well as he suddenly begins to speak very distinctly on the different birds found on &lt;em&gt;Christmas Harbour&lt;/em&gt;. This is undoubtedly a very strange departure from the mood of the rest of the novel; in the novel, before the chapters of detailed descriptions, Poe writes of Pym surviving a violent mutineer, almost starving to death and having to resort to committing cannibalism, and almost being devoured by Sharks, and after all of this, once Pym and Peters are miraculously saved by the &lt;em&gt;Jane Guy of Liverpool&lt;/em&gt;, and then suddenly all this technical stuff—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just can't wrap my head around why Poe would do this. It is not very like him to get technical in his work, not even with his literary critic work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any insight on this matter would be appreciated greatly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T06:26:58.100" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T18:08:50.847" Title="Why does Poe's &quot;Arthur Gordon Pym&quot; become so Technical and Scientific all of a sudden?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;&lt;the-narrative-of-arthur-gordon-pym&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T08:12:40.047" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently acquired an old novel by Peter Ling, based on the now defunct &lt;em&gt;Eagle&lt;/em&gt; comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Entitled, &lt;em&gt;The Three Js and the Pride of Northbrook&lt;/em&gt;, it followed the adventures of three boys whose first names all began with J, and who attended an English private school called Northbrook. I remember these from the original comic, which I read as a boy in the 1950s, but am a little confused on one point. I always remembered Northbrook as a boarding school (the usual setting for school-based stories in that era) but in the novel it is described as a day school (though the boys' parents play so small a role that they might as well have &lt;em&gt;been&lt;/em&gt; boarders).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone of my vintage help me out? Is my memory going, or was Northbrook changed to a day school in order (presumably) to attract a wider readership?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4640" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T19:04:30.353" Title="Old Eagle Novel - Was Northbrook Boarding or Day School?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15945" CreationDate="2020-10-13T09:50:47.890" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just read The Lord of the Rings to my kids (yes, the whole thing! took a while...)&#xA;We live in the UK, and they are 7 and 9 respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I read that particular passage, they both sniggered (and the youngest hid his face under his blanket to muffle the noise. He very much identifies with Pippin...)&#xA;Aragorn is &lt;strong&gt;joking&lt;/strong&gt;. The mood of that particular scene is that, after all these adventures together, they are now parting company (and it's a bit sad). And Aragorn is letting them know that this is good-bye, not farewell: they are still friend, he's not forgetting them, and they will meet again. He might be King, but he's also still Strider. They have a bond, and this bond was in fact made stronger, not weaker, through him becoming King: their fellowship is now enshrined in law. That's pretty strong!&#xA;That's how I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, by the way, the entire book is littered with serious characters making tongue-in-cheek jokes from times to times. It's a very &amp;quot;British academic&amp;quot; thing. So culturally, probably not very accessible to most people (and easy to misread), but obvious if you're part of the culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11101" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T09:50:47.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15956" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T10:33:03.463" Score="6" ViewCount="240" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Frodo is leaving Rivendell for home, Bilbo gives him a bunch of notes which are signed &amp;quot;B. S.&amp;quot; (in the Swedish translation), or &amp;quot;B.B.&amp;quot; in the English original, for Bilbo... S? I felt a cold sensation down my spine, as if I had missed something crucial about the entire story, and looked it up on Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilbo_Baggins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilbo_Baggins&lt;/a&gt; doesn't mention anything about &amp;quot;Bilbo S&amp;quot; as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilbo_Bagger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilbo_Bagger&lt;/a&gt; (the Swedish-language version of the same article) does mention that Bilbo Bagger (the Swedish name for Bilbo Baggins) is &amp;quot;also called&amp;quot; Bilbo Secker... But I have no memory of this being mentioned at any point before, and the English article has no mention of an alternate name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's with &amp;quot;Secker&amp;quot;? The only thing I can think of is that &amp;quot;Secker&amp;quot; sounds like &amp;quot;Säcker&amp;quot;, which might be alluding to &amp;quot;säck&amp;quot; which means &amp;quot;bag&amp;quot;, as in &amp;quot;Baggins&amp;quot;... but that's pretty far-fetched, especially as he is referred to as &amp;quot;Bilbo Bagger&amp;quot; in Swedish in all other places except for the initials on his noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's with Bilbo &amp;quot;S.&amp;quot;/&amp;quot;Secker&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear, the only reason I &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; about &amp;quot;Secker&amp;quot; is the Wikipedia article, which could be making it up for all I know; I don't remember reading it in the actual books. (But I could've forgotten about it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11102" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T12:19:10.110" Title="What is the English name for &quot;Bilbo Secker&quot;, and why is Bilbo Baggins apparently &quot;alternatively&quot; called that?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15967" CreationDate="2020-10-13T13:22:55.287" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing a young constable and very rich man in London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Constable Fellowe, the man of whom I have complained, had the good fortune to render a service to the daughter of Mr. Theodore Sandford—I see you know the gentleman.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sergeant nodded; he had heard of Mr. Theodore Sandford, as who had not? For Theodore Sandford was a millionaire ironmaster who had built a veritable palace at Hampstead, had purchased &lt;strong&gt;the Dennington “Velasquez,”&lt;/strong&gt; and had presented it to the nation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Your constable,” continued Colonel Black, “sprang upon a motor-car Miss Sandford was driving down a steep hill, the brakes of which had gone wrong, and at some risk to himself guided the car through the traffic when, not to put too fine a point on it, Miss Sandford had lost her head.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, it was him, was it?” said the sergeant disparagingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It was him,” agreed the colonel out of sheer politeness. “&lt;strong&gt;Now these young people&lt;/strong&gt; have met unknown to the father of Miss Sandford, and—well, you understand.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, all what I found by searching &lt;strong&gt;is that &amp;quot;Dennington&amp;quot; is a village in London, and &amp;quot;Velasquez&amp;quot; may refer to the spanish painter &amp;quot;Diego Velázquez&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, so does it mean &amp;quot;a painting for the village that Diego had paint it&amp;quot; or something like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;these young people&amp;quot; refer to &amp;quot;the young constable and miss Stanford&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, but it's a bit strange description, so I just wanted to make sure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T13:56:50.680" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T14:14:34.937" Title="What is &quot;the Dennington Velasquez&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15958" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T16:21:35.907" Score="2" ViewCount="1530" Body="&lt;p&gt;José Rizal's play &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14796/14796-h/14796-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;El Consejo de los Dioses&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (The Council of the Gods) uncovered some relative aspects covering the social components of the western humanistic viewpoint, (that human beings have the right, capacity, and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives) into a literary context, and in view of the Philippine culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A growing outlook that of which striving for self-knowledge is the key for recognition, as Rizal further investigates the genuine importance of the humanly need for information and allegorically represented the rules for a Filipino theoretical thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portraying Olympian gods talking about western artistic norms, it turns into a reference text of scholarly analysis in the Philippines. Justice weighs the scale in giving or finding value in literary texts as they serve more than just an addition to the normative culture of literature itself (formalism) but to create or denote moralism, values, ethics, and the importance of justice as tied with human rights (as previously mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the impacts or relevance of the play in our current or modern age, in your own analysis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11108" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T09:33:21.283" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T09:33:21.283" Title="The relevance of &quot;El Consejo De Los Dioses&quot; by José Rizal" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jose-rizal&gt;&lt;el-consejo-de-los-dioses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15959" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="15963" CreationDate="2020-10-13T16:49:48.177" Score="8" ViewCount="1192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his novel &amp;quot;The Last Day of a Condemned Man&amp;quot;, Victor Hugo writes the following sequence in reference to poor people who turn to crime out of hunger:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunate beings, whom, by means of a school and a workshop, you might have rendered good, moral, useful; and with whom you now know not what to do; flinging them away like a useless burthen, sometimes into the red ant heaps of Toulon, sometimes into the silent cemetery of Clamart; cutting off life after taking away liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I get that &amp;quot;flinging them away [...] into the silent cemetery of Clamart&amp;quot; means to execute them, but what does it mean to fling someone away &amp;quot;into the red ant heaps of Toulon&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11110" LastEditorUserId="11110" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T20:10:20.640" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T20:10:20.640" Title="What does Victor Hugo mean by &quot;the red ant heaps of Toulon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;the-last-day-of-a-condemned-man&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15960" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15954" CreationDate="2020-10-13T17:02:49.367" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read The Eagle but I'm afraid I have only the dimmest memory of The Three J's. I certainly don't remember whether they were boarders or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://eagle-times.blogspot.com/2008/09/eagle-writers-peter-ling-1926-2006.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Eagle Society&lt;/a&gt;, Northbrook School was &lt;em&gt;'a setting broadly based on Whitgift School'&lt;/em&gt;, the school Peter Ling had attended, in Haling Park, South Croydon. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitgift_School#History&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says of Whitgift School:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Originally a day school, boarding was introduced in 1992.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Might you be mis-remembering? Some schools had a mixture of boarders and day boys of course. Is that a possibility?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T18:12:42.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T18:12:42.643" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15959" CreationDate="2020-10-13T18:10:12.503" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just figured out the answer to my own question. By the &amp;quot;Red ant heaps of Toulon&amp;quot;, Hugo most likely means the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagne_of_Toulon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bagne of Toulon&lt;/a&gt;, the prison that is also prominently featured in &amp;quot;Les Misérables&amp;quot; as the place in which the protagonist Jean Valjean is imprisoned for many years. It was, by modern definition, more of a forced labor camp than a modern prison, and thus the term &amp;quot;ant heaps&amp;quot; makes a lot of sense. So &amp;quot;flinging them away [...] into the red ant heaps of Toulon&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;subjecting them to forced labor in a prison.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11110" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T18:10:12.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-13T18:22:08.913" Score="2" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like your help to find a story I read some years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I remember about the story is that it's set in a western style world in the 1800 century probably in USA.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The story begins by following a young woman who is sent away from her close family to stay with a relative who lives across the country. She goes by train and somewhere along the way, the train makes a stop at a small western town.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The girl gets off the train to use a public toilet in the town and because some kids are teasing her, she fails to get back to the train before it departures and is thus stuck in the town. She ends up staying at either the town mayor, the doctor or a more or less outlaw woman. Again... As I recall it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you please help identify this story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11111" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T20:06:46.717" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T20:06:46.717" Title="Story ID: a woman missing the train and living among strangers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15959" CreationDate="2020-10-13T18:33:57.763" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;By “the red ant heaps of Toulon”, Hugo means the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagne_of_Toulon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bagne de Toulon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a notorious prison where the convicts wore red jackets and red caps. This is the prison where Jean Valjean serves nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread, in Hugo’s &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L’habillement du forçat qui est différent pour chaque bagne, se compose à Toulon, dit l’auteur, d’une &lt;strong&gt;casaque de moui† rouge&lt;/strong&gt;, dont la durée est fixée à deux ans, d’un pantalon de drap jaune, fendu de chaque côté dans la longueur des jambes, de manière à laisser passer la chaîne et pouvoir la vérifier. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le forçat reçoit aussi deux chemises de toile grossière et un &lt;strong&gt;bonnet en drap rouge&lt;/strong&gt; ou vert, selon que la durée de la condamnation est à temps ou à perpétuité.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The clothing of the convict, which is different for each prison, consists at Toulon, according to the author, of a jacket of coarse red cloth, which is required to last for two years, and of trousers of yellow cloth, which are split on each side along the whole leg, to allow them to pass the chain, and so that it can be checked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The convict is also given two coarse linen shirts and a cap in red or green cloth, depending on whether the sentence is to a stretch of time or for life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pierre Zaccone (1877). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/histoiredesbagne02zacc/page/536/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histoire des bagnes depuis leur création jusqu’à nos jours&lt;/em&gt;, p. 536&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† I couldn’t find this term in any of the French dictionaries I checked, but it seems to be jargon for the poor-quality cloth making up the prison uniform. “Les condamnées à temps portent bonnet et casaque rouges avec pantalon jaune: le tout en une grossière étoffe nommée &lt;em&gt;moui&lt;/em&gt;.” (Amable Tastu, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=iOsOAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA393&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Voyage en France&lt;/em&gt;, p. 393&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T18:33:57.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15964" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-13T20:06:48.883" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-13T20:06:48.883" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T20:06:48.883" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15965" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-13T20:06:48.883" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1829 short novel 'The Last Day of a Condemned Man' (French: 'Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné') by French author Victor Hugo, which also served as an appeal for the abolition of capital punishment. " OwnerUserId="11110" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T10:19:41.690" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T10:19:41.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15966" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15956" CreationDate="2020-10-13T21:58:41.447" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two Swedish translation of Lord of the Rings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One by Åke Ohlmarks, of which Tolkien was very critical, and a much more recent translation by Erik Andersson which is much better regarded.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A post on &lt;a href=&quot;https://global-lingo.com/translations-of-bilbo-baggins/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Global-lingo.com&lt;/a&gt; gives the following information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Swedish translation (by Åke Ohlmarks’ 1959-1961) he is called Bilbo Bagger (bagge = male sheep). In Erik Andersson’s 2004-2005 translation he is more appropriately called Bilbo Secker (säck = sack/bag).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-10-13T21:58:41.447" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15957" CreationDate="2020-10-14T05:58:07.593" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &lt;em&gt;the Dennington “Velásquez”&lt;/em&gt; do suggest a Velásquez painting that was in the possession of a person or place named Dennington. Similarly diamonds and Stradivarius violins are often given names that reflect their provenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any connection between the painter and anyone named Dennington.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dennington is a village in Suffolk. I think your search took you instead to &lt;em&gt;Kennington&lt;/em&gt; - the district in South London which is home to The Oval cricket ground.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unlikely &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Vel%C3%A1zquez&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Velásquez&lt;/a&gt; would have had any contact with the Suffolk village. He was court painter to Philip IV of Spain for much of his life and although the king occasionally sent him to Italy to buy statues and paintings for the court, he never sent him to England, let alone East Anglia. And he wouldn't have found much to buy at Dennington. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.suffolkchurches.co.uk/Dennington.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;church&lt;/a&gt; has a remarkable relief of a &lt;em&gt;sciapod&lt;/em&gt; - a man sheltering under his own enormous foot - carved into the end of a bench, but since medieval times the village seems not to have taken much interest in art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.denningtonhallfarms.co.uk/about-us-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dennington Hall&lt;/a&gt;, which has belonged to the same family for six hundred years, their main interests seem to have been deer-hunting and farming rather than art. They don't seem to have had any connection with Velásquez.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps Edgar Wallace knew &lt;em&gt;the Rokeby Venus&lt;/em&gt;, a Velásquez painting (&amp;quot;Venus at her Mirror&amp;quot;) &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.artfund.org/supporting-museums/art-weve-helped-buy/artwork/27/the-toilet-of-venus-&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;smuggled&lt;/a&gt; out of Spain in 1813 during the Napoleonic wars, which reappeared at the house of John Morritt in Yorkshire. The name of the house was Rokeby Park, and the picture became known as the Rokeby Venus just as the Venus found at Milos became known as the Venus de Milo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;the Rokeby Venus&lt;/em&gt; inspired Wallace's &lt;em&gt;the Dennington “Velásquez&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, but I don't know why the painter's name is in quotation marks. Perhaps they indicate that the painting turned out to be a fake: a &lt;em&gt;so-called&lt;/em&gt; Velásquez.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Unlike Wallace's Theodore Sandford, John Morritt &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; present it to the nation. In 1906 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rokeby_Venus#Provenance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it was acquired&lt;/a&gt; for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/diego-velazquez-the-toilet-of-venus-the-rokeby-venus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Gallery&lt;/a&gt; after a fundraising campaign. A few years later it was slashed five times by a suffragette.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, I'm sure you're right: &amp;quot;these young people&amp;quot; refers to the young constable and Miss Stanford.&amp;quot; It doesn't seem strange for Colonel Black to call them that. He and Sergeant Gurden are considerably older than they are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T14:14:34.937" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T14:14:34.937" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-14T15:12:58.690" Score="0" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found different versions of the Gwendolyn Brooks´ &amp;quot;The Ballad of Rudolph Reed&amp;quot;. Could someone provide me with a reliable version?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11121" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-14T15:24:38.137" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T15:24:38.137" Title="The Ballad of Rudolph Reed" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;gwendolyn-brooks&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15969" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-14T16:56:50.013" Score="4" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merry looked round in dismay and disgust. 'Let's get out!' he said. 'If I had known all the mischief he had caused, I should have stuffed my pouch down Saruman's throat.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'No doubt, no doubt! But you did not, and so I am able to welcome you home.' There standing at the door was Saruman himself, looking well-fed and well-pleased; his eyes gleamed with malice and amusement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;http://readfreenovelsonline.com/the-return-of-the-king/book-vi-chapter-8-128580&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Return of the King&lt;/em&gt;, Book VI, Chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just read this part (in a physical book, 2005 Swedish translation), and it confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While they do meet Saruman on their way homeward, and his name is mentioned in the chapter, nothing (to me) suggests that &amp;quot;Sharkey&amp;quot; is supposed to refer to Saruman. It's almost as if the author meant to have Merry drop that comment &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; Saruman had made himself known, which happens just after Merry refers to him having caused all the mayhem in their hometown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless I'm mistaken, when Saruman speaks at the door, it's supposed to be the &amp;quot;last big plot twist&amp;quot;, with only clues suggesting that it might be Saruman, but nothing has been established... except for Merry the &amp;quot;spoiler hobbit&amp;quot; inexplicably saying it right before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've probably just missed something again. I seem to be easily confused as I've had quite a few instances while reading this trilogy where things didn't seem to make sense before somebody else explained it to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11122" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T01:11:04.053" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T01:11:04.053" Title="How could Merry know about who &quot;Sharkey&quot; was just before he showed up in end of The Return of the King?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15970" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15969" CreationDate="2020-10-14T17:27:06.703" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Merry was responding to Frodo, so immediately before your quote, there is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Yes, this is Mordor,' said Frodo. 'Just one of its works. Saruman was&#xA;doing its work all the time, even when he thought he was working for&#xA;himself. &lt;strong&gt;And the same with those that Saruman tricked, like Lotho.&lt;/strong&gt;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chapter discusses Lotho, who made the money to buy up property by selling provisions and pipeweed to Saruman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Bill Ferny was posited as an informer working with the other unsavory types in Bree in the first book. In this chapter, the &amp;quot;ruffians&amp;quot; are directly linked to Saruman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] they were disturbed to see half a dozen large ill-favoured Men&#xA;lounging against the inn-wall; they were squint-eyed and sallow-faced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Like that friend of Bill Ferny's at Bree,' said Sam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Like many that I saw at Isengard,' muttered Merry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So they were generally disposed to blame Saruman for creating the conditions for what was happening in the Shire. It wasn't until Saruman shows up that they realize that Saruman is Sharkey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="669" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T17:27:06.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15971" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15953" CreationDate="2020-10-14T18:08:50.847" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The consensus of scholars is that Poe assembled &lt;em&gt;Arthur Gordon Pym&lt;/em&gt; in a series of stages under financial and deadline pressure, that his conception of the novel changed at each stage, and that the published text represents an unfinished and unpolished draft that Poe lacked the time or inclination to revise into a coherent whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither the chronicle of the voyage of the &lt;em&gt;Grampus&lt;/em&gt; nor the sequence which follows Pym’s rescue by the &lt;em&gt;Jane Guy&lt;/em&gt; is consistent even within itself. Each part promises actions which never occur; each has confusing shifts in characterization; each contains many discrepancies in factual detail. The only explanation which will account for this unusually flawed text is that Poe worked on it at several periods between the end of 1836 and the early summer of 1838, that he changed his mind &lt;em&gt;several&lt;/em&gt; times about the direction of his story line, and that he made a hurried but inefficient attempt to turn his disconnected narrative into a whole at the very moment when the volume was being put to press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. V. Ridgely and Iola S. Haverstick (1966). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40753886&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chartless Voyage: The Many Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Texas Studies in Literature and Language&lt;/em&gt; 8:1, p. 63.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first section of the text, the childhood of Pym and the voyage of the &lt;em&gt;Grampus&lt;/em&gt;, was begun in 1836 as a serialized story for the &lt;em&gt;Southern Literary Messenger&lt;/em&gt; where Poe was assistant editor. At this point Poe’s conception of the work seemed to be that of a true-life sea adventure, in the manner of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Henry_Dana_Jr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Dana&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years_Before_the_Mast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Two Years Before the Mast&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1834) or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Marryat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frederick Marryat&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr_Midshipman_Easy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mr Midshipman Easy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1836). Two installments were published, in January and February 1837, but Poe resigned (or was sacked) from the &lt;em&gt;Messenger&lt;/em&gt; and stopped work on the project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, struggling financially in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Panic of 1837&lt;/a&gt;, Poe sold the novel to Harper and Brothers, and wrote the &lt;em&gt;Jane Guy&lt;/em&gt; section. At this point Poe’s conception seemed to be a pastiche of a journal of oceanic exploration, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Morrell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benjamin Morrell&lt;/a&gt;’s popular &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anarrativefourv00morrgoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Narrative of Four Voyages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1832). In fact, much of the material in the &lt;em&gt;Jane Guy&lt;/em&gt; chapters is copied from Morrell and other authors, with only a little in the way of paraphrase. For example, compare these two descriptions of the albatross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This [the albatross] is one of the largest and most formidable of the South Sea birds; being of the gull kind, and taking its prey upon the wing. Like many other oceanic birds, the albatross never comes on land except for the purpose of breeding; when the attachment that exists between it and the penguin is evinced in many remarkable instances; indeed it seems as firm as any that can be formed by the sincerest friends. Their nests are constructed with great uniformity near to each other; that of the albatross being always in the centre of a little square, formed by the nests of four penguins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Benjamin Morrell (1832). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anarrativefourv00morrgoog/page/n68/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Narrative of Four Voyages&lt;/em&gt;, p. 50&lt;/a&gt;. New York: J. &amp;amp; J. Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The albatross is one of the largest and fiercest of the South Sea birds. It is of the gull species, and takes its prey on the wing, never coming on land except for the purpose of breeding. Between this bird and the penguin the most singular friendship exists. Their nests are constructed with great uniformity upon a plan concerted between the two species—that of the albatross being placed in the centre of a little square formed by the nests of four penguins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edgar Allan Poe (1838). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_Arthur_Gordon_Pym/Chapter_14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XIV&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper and Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shameless copying in the &lt;em&gt;Jane Guy&lt;/em&gt; chapters suggests that at this point in the composition of the novel, Poe was lacking in time or motivation. However, in the Spring of 1838 the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Exploring_Expedition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;United States Exploring Expedition&lt;/a&gt; was authorized by Congress, and with the country enthused by the prospect of Antarctic discoveries, Poe was evidently keen to catch the coat-tails of public sentiment, and accordingly in chapter XVI the narrative changes course for the South Pole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subtantial passages in this part of the narrative are copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_N._Reynolds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeremiah N. Reynolds&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/addressonsubjec00reyngoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the South Seas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1836) in which he had stated the case for the expedition. Compare these two descriptions of Cook’s first crossing of the Antarctic Circle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the year 1772, Captain Cook, in the &lt;em&gt;Resolution&lt;/em&gt;, accompanied by Lieutenant Freneau, in the &lt;em&gt;Adventure&lt;/em&gt;, embarked on his first voyage in search of a southern continent. Having, in December, attained the fifty-eighth degree of south latitude, in longitude 26° 57′ east, he fell in with narrow fields of ice, running north-west and south-east, from six to eight inches in thickness, and appearing to have been formed in bays or rivers. This ice was in large flat pieces, and, in some instances, packed so closely, that the vessels, with difficulty, passed through it. Here were seen great numbers of penguins, which, with other coinciding circumstances, induced the supposition of land being in the vicinity. This opinion was afterwards shown to be erroneous, the ice proving to be unattached to any shore. In latitude 61° 12′, the voyagers met with considerable ice-islands, many of which were passed unseen, by reason of the thick haze. Three degrees further south, in longitude 38° 14′ E., they had mild weather, with gentle gales, for five days; thermometer thirty-six, and prevalent winds east and east by south. In January, 1773, they crossed the Antarctic circle in latitude 66° 36′ 30″; and, on reaching latitude 67° 15′, found the ice closed the whole extent, from east to west-south-west, and no indication of an opening. This immense area was filled with ice of different kinds, high hills, broken masses compactly pressed together, and field ice. A float of the latter, to the south-east, appeared sixteen or eighteen feet above the water, and its extremities could not be seen from the mast head. As the summer of that region was nearly half spent, and it would have taken some time, even if practicable at all, to get round the ice, Captain Cook determined to retrograde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1836). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/addressonsubjec00reyngoog/page/n99/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the South Seas&lt;/em&gt;, p. 90–91&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper and Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1772 he [Captain Cook] sailed to the south in the &lt;em&gt;Resolution&lt;/em&gt;, accompanied by Lieutenant Furneaux in the &lt;em&gt;Adventure&lt;/em&gt;. In December he found himself as far as the fifty-eighth parallel of south latitude, and in longitude 26 degrees 57′ E. Here he met with narrow fields of ice, about eight or ten inches thick, and running northwest and southeast. This ice was in large cakes, and usually it was packed so closely that the vessel had great difficulty in forcing a passage. At this period Captain Cook supposed, from the vast number of birds to be seen, and from other indications, that he was in the near vicinity of land. He kept on to the southward, the weather being exceedingly cold, until he reached the sixty-fourth parallel, in longitude 38 degrees 14′ W. Here he had mild weather, with gentle breezes, for five days, the thermometer being at thirty-six. In January, 1773, the vessels crossed the Antarctic circle, but did not succeed in penetrating much farther; for upon reaching latitude 67 degrees 15′ they found all farther progress impeded by an immense body of ice, extending all along the southern horizon as far as the eye could reach. This ice was of every variety—and some large floes of it, miles in extent, formed a compact mass, rising eighteen or twenty feet above the water. It being late in the season, and no hope entertained of rounding these obstructions, Captain Cook now reluctantly turned to the northward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edgar Allan Poe (1838). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_Arthur_Gordon_Pym/Chapter_16&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym&lt;/em&gt;, chapter XVI&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper and Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, the reasons for the abrupt shifts of style are that Poe did not carry through a fixed plan for the novel, but changed direction with changing circumstances, and that he responded to the pressure of deadlines by copying long passages out of Morrell, Reynolds, and others, resulting in clashes between Poe’s own narrative style and that of his sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning he was concerned only in the creation of a verisimilar voyage narrative, in which the character of young Pym was to be as important as his adventures. In the later stages—having failed to finish his planned cruise before he came under the influence of renewed interest in Antarctic exploration—he tried to transmute his protagonist into an older and self-effacing reporter of incredible but actual discoveries. As a result, the book was thrown wildly off balance, and much of the earlier material was rendered irrelevant in terms of preparation for the final scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ridgely and Haverstick, p. 80.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T18:08:50.847" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15972" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:19:17.107" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a trope known in Russian as &amp;quot;говорящее имя&amp;quot;, i.e. &amp;quot;speaking name&amp;quot;. The point of this trope is that a character's name (or surname) indicates its important, sometimes defining, feature. An example of it could be Pomona Sprout, a Herbology professor in &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt;. Another, even more important to the plot, is Remus Lupin, whose feature is that he's a werewolf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this trope have a name in English?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10901" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T04:53:15.840" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T14:23:11.073" Title="What is the trope known in Russian as &quot;speaking name&quot; called in English?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15973" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15972" CreationDate="2020-10-14T21:39:03.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's called &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charactonym&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;charactonym&lt;/a&gt;. From the link (Merriam-Webster dictionary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of charactonym&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;: a name especially for a fictional character (such as Mistress Quickly or Caspar Milquetoast) that suggests a distinctive trait of the character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10901" LastActivityDate="2020-10-14T21:39:03.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-14T23:49:18.753" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;The reason I phrased the title like that is to avoid spoiling the story for somebody who might see it and haven't read the books. I've just finished the last one in the trilogy, minutes ago, but I don't quite get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Okay, so obviously, the Ring has some kind of fundamental, barely-explained psychological/spiritual effect on whoever wears it, even if just briefly (like with Sam). I get it: wear the ring, and you have to go over the sea to the mythical continent of Gods and elves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why exactly? Having both read the books long ago, and watched the movies, I knew roughly what was coming, but I expected it to be a whole major scene in the end where Frodo sits down with his friends, or at the very least Sam, and discuss this, with the others wanting him to stay, but he &amp;quot;has to go&amp;quot;, and everyone is sad, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, Sam and him just go on some kind of casual stroll (I thought they were going back to Rivendell for Bilbo...) and just so happen to meet the elves on the way. Apparently, Sam &amp;quot;had a hunch&amp;quot;, even though the reader (at least this reader) is absolutely baffled when, basically out of nowhere, Frodo now has to go with the elves and Gandalf on a ship, across the ocean, away from Middle-earth forever, never to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is handled in a very dissatisfying manner according to me. I was more frustrated by this than anything else in the entire epic story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I have read Silmarillion, several times, and even recently, I don't quite understand if this other continent is actually a physical place, or just a metaphor for death. Is Frodo basically going to Heaven? Once he arrives on those white shores, does he just jump off the ship and start living in a house there and talk with a bunch of elves and gods? Is that how it works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sorry if it seems like I'm not respecting the mystery of the story or something, but I don't like it when things are &lt;em&gt;too&lt;/em&gt; vague and when even the characters inside the story don't ask any questions that you'd expect them to do. Sam's best friend is leaving forever, &amp;quot;because he has to&amp;quot;, without any real explanation or (as far as I can tell) without any of them having any understanding of what happens once they reach that magical island, far away across the sea, which you cannot get to unless you travel with an elf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm just stupid, but I feel as if this was barely touched on even in Silmarillion, and certainly not in The Lord of the Rings. Apparently, Frodo assumes (or has been told) that he will get bliss and no more pain from his wound... which also sounds like an allegory for the afterlife to me. But Pippin and Merry just die normally. According to the appendix list of events, first Sam and then Legolas and Gimli (!) also sail away in the same manner, albeit many years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Something about the last part of the story makes me feel very uneasy and depressed. To me, it's even sadder than any of the things that happened during their adventures, and I'm not just referring to the destruction of their home village.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11126" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T14:47:28.993" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T01:10:14.077" Title="Why exactly did Bilbo, Frodo and Sam have to leave?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15972" CreationDate="2020-10-15T12:30:52.927" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Antonomasia&lt;/strong&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/antonomasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Encyclopedia Britannica&lt;/a&gt; (bold emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Antonomasia, a figure of speech in which some defining word or phrase is substituted for a person’s proper name (for example, “the Bard of Avon” for William Shakespeare). &lt;strong&gt;In fiction, the practice of giving to a character a proper name that defines or suggests a leading quality of that character (such as Squire Allworthy, Doctor Sawbones) is also called antonomasia.&lt;/strong&gt; The word is from the Greek &lt;em&gt;antonomasía&lt;/em&gt;, a derivative of &lt;em&gt;antonomázein&lt;/em&gt;, “to call by a new name.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11052" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T14:23:11.073" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T14:23:11.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15979" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:06:52.587" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:06:52.587" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:06:52.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15980" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:06:52.587" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Narrative of Author Gordon Pym' by Edgar Allen Poe. Questions about this work should be tagged with [edgar-allen-poe]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:39:08.357" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:39:08.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15981" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:08:53.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:08:53.233" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:08:53.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15982" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:08:53.233" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'El Consejos De Los Diosese, written by Filipino writer José Rizal. Questions about this work should be tagged with [jose-rizal] and [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:38:48.230" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:38:48.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15983" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:11:33.357" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:11:33.357" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:11:33.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15984" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:11:33.357" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Filippino writer José Rizal (1861 – 1896) and his life as a writer. He is considered a national hero in the Philippines." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:40:42.390" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:40:42.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15985" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:13:10.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T15:13:10.567" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:13:10.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15986" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:13:10.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about the African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) or about any of her literary works." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T17:33:47.703" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T17:33:47.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15615" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:16:23.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although it doesn't specifically contain the line you paraphrased, her poem titled &amp;quot;Life While-You-Wait&amp;quot;, from 1976, describes the sentiment expressed in it, i.e. that life isn't scripted and can't be planned, and you have to take it as it comes and improvise. Perhaps this is the poem you're referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a few excerpts, in a translation by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life While-You-Wait.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Performance without rehearsal.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Body without alterations.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Head without premeditation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know nothing of the role I play.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I only know it’s mine, I can’t exchange it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to guess on the spot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;just what this play’s all about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I could just rehearse one Wednesday in advance,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or repeat a single Thursday that has passed!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But here comes Friday with a script I haven’t seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And whatever I do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;will become forever what I’ve done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;From: Wisława Szymborska, &amp;quot;Poems, New and Collected, 1957-1997&amp;quot;, translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh, Harcourt Brace, 1998.&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=YDKAAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books link&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T15:16:23.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3047" CreationDate="2020-10-15T15:26:11.000" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;O'Brien is the party, he is the one who creates the reality for others. He is a member of the &amp;quot;Inner Party&amp;quot; and the one who creates the illusion; O'Brien is the one in charge of everything and controlling society, and he is the one that labels thought criminals so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11133" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T16:37:29.107" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T16:37:29.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16004" CreationDate="2020-10-15T16:02:47.697" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc185&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Book XI, Chapter IX&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The expression &amp;quot;eighteen stone&amp;quot; is mentioned 3 times in the whole book, all in same chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I dream of is becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant's wife weighing &lt;strong&gt;eighteen stone&lt;/strong&gt;, and of believing all she believes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are for ever angry, all you care about is intelligence, but I repeat again that I would give away all this super-stellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to be transformed into the soul of a merchant's wife weighing &lt;strong&gt;eighteen stone&lt;/strong&gt; and set candles at God's shrine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, this wild legend belongs to our middle ages—not yours, but ours—and no one believes it even among us, except the old ladies of &lt;strong&gt;eighteen stone&lt;/strong&gt;, not your old ladies I mean, but ours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the relevancy of it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T15:04:26.457" Title="The Brothers Karamazov - ladies of the eighteen stone?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15990" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16070" CreationDate="2020-10-15T16:16:10.297" Score="5" ViewCount="380" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bernard&amp;quot; is first mentioned in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc175&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book XI. Ivan, Chapter IV&lt;/a&gt;, in an exchange between Dmitri and Alyosha:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ethics?” asked Alyosha, wondering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes; is it a science?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes, there is such a science ... but ... I confess I can't explain to&#xA;you what sort of science it is.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Rakitin knows. Rakitin knows a lot, damn him! He's not going to be a&#xA;monk. He means to go to Petersburg. There he'll go in for criticism of&#xA;an elevating tendency. Who knows, he may be of use and make his own&#xA;career, too. Ough! they are first-rate, these people, at making a&#xA;career! Damn ethics, I am done for, Alexey, I am, you man of God! I&#xA;love you more than any one. It makes my heart yearn to look at you.&#xA;Who was Karl &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Karl &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;?” Alyosha was surprised again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No, not Karl. Stay, I made a mistake. Claude &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;. What was he?&#xA;Chemist or what?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“He must be a savant,” answered Alyosha; “but I confess I can't tell&#xA;you much about him, either. I've heard of him as a savant, but what&#xA;sort I don't know.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, damn him, then! I don't know either,” swore Mitya. “A scoundrel&#xA;of some sort, most likely. They are all scoundrels. And Rakitin will&#xA;make his way. Rakitin will get on anywhere; he is another &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Ugh, these &lt;strong&gt;Bernards&lt;/strong&gt;! They are all over the place.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Bernard&amp;quot; is then used throughout the rest of book as a insult by Dmitri. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc175&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book XI, Chapter IV&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the use of the counsel? I told him all about it. He's a soft, city-bred rogue—a &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt;! But he doesn't believe me—not a bit of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html#toc193&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book XII, Chapter II&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I've been arrested, he has borrowed money from me! He is a contemptible &lt;strong&gt;Bernard&lt;/strong&gt; and opportunist, and he doesn't believe in God; he took the bishop in!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the significance of using &amp;quot;Bernard&amp;quot; as an insult?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T13:26:35.320" Title="The Brothers Karamazov - Why does Dmitri use &quot;Bernard&quot; as an insult?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-15T16:57:11.757" Score="8" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the introduction to Constance Garnett's translation of Crime and Punishment, she quotes this Russian critic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling&#xA;inspired by Dostoevsky: &amp;quot;He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood&#xA;and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more&#xA;deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom&#xA;of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All&#xA;his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and&#xA;through it he became great.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone help me find the original Russian text of this critical review? I would like to memorize it, because it echoes my feelings about Dostoevsky when I first read him in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11148" OwnerDisplayName="I. Hasanov" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-15T18:44:48.617" LastActivityDate="2020-10-15T18:44:48.617" Title="Can someone help me find the original Russian text of this review of Crime and Punishment?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-15T23:53:19.980" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'd like to put a name to the group of expectations established by the narration of a story, including explicit framing devices, verb tense choices, and the narrator's omniscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A story in diary or epistolary format implies that each day's entry or letter is informed only by events up to and including the time of writing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A story told in limited first person implies that the narrator is or was privy to all the information being given to the reader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peter Carey's &lt;em&gt;Oscar and Lucinda&lt;/em&gt; is about the long-dead ancestors of a first-person narrator. The action of the novel does not concern the narrator's discovery of the &amp;quot;facts&amp;quot;, only these &amp;quot;facts&amp;quot; themselves. The action all takes place in past tense and, since the narrator is informed, with a near-omniscient viewpoint. Characters are described as being at a loss when confronted with problems, but the narrator knows how they responded.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The very first page of Stephenie Meyer's &lt;em&gt;Twilight&lt;/em&gt; is in first person and references the narrator's arrival in Forks in the past. This creates the expectation that Bella, the first-person narrator of the subsequent story beginning with her arrival in Forks, will survive at least until the events on the first page occur.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are of course no guarantees that these implications will be followed. In real life as in fiction, a diary entry can be edited days later. Plot twists revealing that there were multiple first-person narrators don't necessarily fail to make sense, but the point of them is to defy expectations. I'm looking for the concept/field of study/terminology that describes these expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11139" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T05:52:26.590" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T05:52:26.590" Title="Is there a term for the boundaries of expectation as established by a story's narration?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15994" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16000" CreationDate="2020-10-16T04:16:03.383" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about a sentence in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Last_Bow.-_The_War_Service_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Arthur Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You yacht against them, you hunt with them, you play polo, you match&#xA;them in every game, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;your four-in-hand takes the prize at Olympia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know whether this last line, your four-in-hand takes the prize at Olympia, was one of figurative speeches or not. Well, I thought this to be one.&#xA;The speaker refers to (and addressing to) a remarkable international spy who uses sports activities as a means to associate with locals to get some information of course. He obviously involves in various activities and associate with various people, so I thought the line in question was figuratively saying like “your multi-tasking is really remarkable” as a four-in-hand driver manipulates four horses well. So horses are metaphor for several activities, sports or some people in this case maybe? I don’t know.&#xA;Or, is it just literally saying he has a remarkable carriage maneuvering skill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:22:43.547" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T12:34:37.263" Title="Implication of &quot;your four-in-hand takes the prize&quot; in &quot;His Last Bow&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-16T04:56:12.447" Score="2" ViewCount="112" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about a sentence in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Last_Bow.-_The_War_Service_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Arthur Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to you, Watson, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;you are joining us with your old service&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, as I&#xA;understand, so London won’t be out of your way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t exactly tell what the speaker Holmes means by the line above, especially about his use of the word “service”.&#xA;It certainly isn’t about military service, is it?  So what’s this?&#xA;They are taking a man to the Scotland Yard here, so is this “service” old friends in the police force like Lestrade, Hopkins and some others? (I don’t think they were there though, for the setting of this episode is way later than when Holmes was an active consulting detective in London) .&#xA;Or maybe this “service” doesn’t refer to any organization or society, but a quality of someone’s character or something? By this line, is Holmes’ saying something like “you were a good sport, my devoted assistant, friend-helping guy, so of course you’re coming along with me like a good sport, your old self right?”   I don’t know.&#xA;Could someone paraphrase this please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T07:23:59.740" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T03:42:40.353" Title="What is Watson's &quot;old service&quot; in &quot;His Last Bow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15995" CreationDate="2020-10-16T11:27:26.443" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It transpires that part of the confusion with this sentence arises from a difference in the text between the first UK publication in the Strand magazine of September 1917 and the later collected stories as published in book form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Strand edition says (my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'you are joining &lt;em&gt;up&lt;/em&gt; with your old service'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oshZW.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/oshZW.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story takes place on the 2nd of July 1914, less than a week after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Britain stood on the brink of officially declaring itself at War with Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr Watson had been an Army Surgeon in India and in the second Anglo-Afghan war, so 'joining up with his old service' simply means rejoining the Army Medical Corps. he is likely doing this in anticipation of the army requiring the 'old hands' of wartime surgeons in view of what is to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr Watson's previous military attachment was to the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot, which by 1914 had been amalgamated into the Royal Berkshire Regiment who were garrisoned in Reading. As the story is set in either Suffolk or Essex (the lights of Harwich can be seen which limits the possibilities), Watson would be likely to go through London if he were headed there, hence Holmes' statement about London not being 'out of [his] way'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The form of 'joining us with your old Service' has been continued into many editions, including the Gutenberg text, but on balance, the legibility and clear meaning of the original version gives no reason to suppose that the change from the Strand edition was intended to be a correction rather than a typographical error in its own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am much indebted to Alexis Barquin at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=Main_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arthur Conan Doyle encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt; for a swift response to my enquiry on this matter and for their inclusion of the scan from the Strand Magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T03:42:40.353" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T03:42:40.353" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15998" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16078" CreationDate="2020-10-16T11:54:48.890" Score="3" ViewCount="189" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muhammad Iqbal&lt;/a&gt; was a 19th-to-20th-century Muslim poet, philosopher, and politican, one of the most important figures in Urdu poetry and also influential in Farsi poetry, who received a British knighthood and is considered the national poet of Pakistan. One of his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal#See_also&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;famous works&lt;/a&gt; is the Urdu poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iblees_Ki_Majlis-e-Shura&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Iblees Ki Majlis-e-Shura&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;The Parliament of Satan&amp;quot;)&lt;/a&gt;, which is a piece of satirical political criticism as well as literary writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia links to &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.defence.pk/forums/members-club/30585-devils-council-iblees-ki-majlis-e-shura.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An uncredited English translation&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but the link is dead. There is also &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYqVzR5z_tA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An English explanation of the poem in a youtube video&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but I would prefer to be able to &lt;em&gt;read&lt;/em&gt; it in English directly. Searching online has led me to various blog posts about the poem, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://tadbeeer.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/satans-parliament-part-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; where it's hard to tell which parts are direct translations and which are commentaries or retellings, and also various academic papers about it, but nary a plain English translation of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Has an English translation of this poem been published?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there one available online, just a direct translation with a credited translator?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T05:36:14.507" Title="Is there a published English translation of Muhammad Iqbal's &quot;The Parliament of Satan&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;urdu-literature&gt;&lt;muhammad-iqbal&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="15999" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16007" CreationDate="2020-10-16T12:00:05.910" Score="5" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do these lines mean, in Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardii/richardii.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; (act II, scene 1)&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose compass is no bigger than thy head;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet, incaged in so small a verge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The waste is no whit lesser than thy land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically I don't get the connection between the first three lines and the last one.‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11142" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T12:21:08.843" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T22:11:57.737" Title="What is &quot;the waste&quot; and why is it &quot;no whit lesser than thy land&quot; in &quot;Richard II&quot;?‎" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-ii&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15994" CreationDate="2020-10-16T12:34:37.263" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first International Horse Show was held at Olympia in Jone 1907, and until halted by the First World War&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;established itself as one of the social events of the annual calendar. ‘In those great and far-off days almost everyone was horse-minded so it was hardly surprising that great success became the under-taking,’ wrote Geoffrey DS Bennett in Horse &amp;amp; Hound in 1954.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://olympiahorseshow.com/information-british-showjumping/olympia-history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://olympiahorseshow.com/information-british-showjumping/olympia-history/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage in the story is setting out how well the character's cover as a sporting gentleman had been established. There is no reason that this particular reference any more than those relating to yachting, polo or hunting, should be figurative. All have in common that they are appropriate to the social class Von Bork is occupying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Von Herling goes on to say 'What is the result? Nobody takes you seriously'. If the objective is for Von Bork not to be taken seriously, Von Herling would not be applauding him for publicly demonstrating his ability to multi-task. he is commending him on seeming like a fellow who likes to do physical things rather than be a deep thinker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T12:34:37.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16001" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16006" CreationDate="2020-10-16T14:19:15.433" Score="3" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about a sentence in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/His_Last_Bow.-_The_War_Service_of_Sherlock_Holmes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;His Last Bow&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Arthur Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Segregation of the Queen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’d like to make sure what this “the Segregation of the Queen” above exactly means, more specifically, whether it is what is called a spontaneous colony fission or some artificial arranging.&#xA;I heard the queen of a bee colony leave the colony with some worker bees when the time comes to start a new colony, in that way giving place to the new queen from the old home. So is this “the segregation..” is referring to such natural, spontaneous phenomenon in the ecology of the insect?&#xA;Or I also heard in beekeeping, they separate the queen bee from the rest in a tiny box for some time until they (bee farmers).. I don’t know the beehive is somehow ready before letting the bees to start a colony. Is this “the segregation” such artificial arrangement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T15:24:16.597" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T03:45:57.903" Title="What is &quot;the Segregation of the Queen&quot; in &quot;His Last Bow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16002" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-16T14:33:31.227" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-16T14:33:31.227" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T14:33:31.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16003" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-16T14:33:31.227" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Muslim poet Muhammad Iqbal (1877 – 1938) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:04:06.200" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:04:06.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15989" CreationDate="2020-10-16T15:04:26.457" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The translator chose to &amp;quot;translate&amp;quot; the Russian measure of weight of that time into something that would make sense to English natives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original text Dostoevsky uses the phrase &lt;em&gt;семипудовая купчиха&lt;/em&gt;, where &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&amp;amp;sl=ru&amp;amp;u=https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25D0%259F%25D1%2583%25D0%25B4&amp;amp;prev=search&amp;amp;pto=aue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;пуд&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is approx. 16 kilos, while &lt;em&gt;семь&lt;/em&gt; means &amp;quot;seven&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator (&amp;quot;devil&amp;quot; from Ivan's nightmare) alludes to a stereotypical image of a &amp;quot;merchant's wife&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;купчиха&lt;/em&gt;), usually depicted as.. well, a couple of examples can explain it better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UdlDF.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UdlDF.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZDfe.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fZDfe.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T15:04:26.457" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15584" CreationDate="2020-10-16T20:33:06.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s a lot to unpack here, as you might imagine when an author tries to sum up his life’s work in three words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Fall&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “fall” Tolkien means “descent or lapse into a sinful state”. This idea comes from Christian myth, in which angels and people were originally sinless. This is clear in Tolkien’s letter to Waldman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth. These tales are ‘new’, they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all stories are ultimately about the fall—at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1951). Letter to Milton Waldman. Number 131 in Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (1981). &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;. London: George Allen &amp;amp; Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall” I think Tolkien means that dramatic narrative requires conflict between characters, which cannot happen if all the characters remain sinless. Tolkien puts something like this idea into the mouth of Iluvater:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that has not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall be but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘Ainulindalë’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Christian myth there are two falls: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_angel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fall of Satan&lt;/a&gt; (Luke 10:18, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven”) together with the other rebel angels, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fall of man&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Genesis&lt;/em&gt; chapter 3). In &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; there are likewise two falls: the fall of Melkor and the fall of the elves. But within these broad similarities, Tolkien chooses different motives for his characters. In Christian myth, Satan’s motive is pride:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Th’infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv’d&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Mother of Mankinde, what time &lt;strong&gt;his Pride&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Had cast him out from Heav’n&lt;/strong&gt;, with all his Host&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Rebel Angels, by whose aid aspiring&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To set himself in Glory above his Peers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He trusted to have equal’d the most High&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1674). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Paradise_Lost_(1667)/Book_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; I.34–40&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Tolkien’s myth, Melkor’s motive is a desire to create things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as the theme progressed, it came into the heart of Melkor to interweave matters of his own imagining that were not in accord with the theme of Iluvatar; for he sought therein to increase the power and glory of the part assigned to himself. […] For &lt;strong&gt;desire grew hot within him to bring into Being things of his own&lt;/strong&gt;, and it seemed to him that Iluvatar took no thought for the Void, and he was impatient of its emptiness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘Ainulindalë’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien relates Melkor’s desire to “bring into being things of his own” with his (Tolkien’s) own desire to engage in literary world-building, which he calls “sub-creation”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[The sub-creative desire] may become possessive, clinging to the things made as ‘its own’, the sub-creator wishes to be the Lord and God of his private creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Tolkien (1951).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, the motivation for Fëanor’s fall is his love for the work of his hands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Fëanor spoke then, and cried bitterly: ‘Verily for the less even as for the greater there is some deed that he may accomplish but once only. And in that deed his heart shall rest. Mayhap I can unlock my jewels, but never again shall I make their like; and if they be broken, then broken will be my heart, and I shall die: first of all the Children of Eru.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (c. 1950). ‘The Annals of Aman’. In Christopher Tolkien (1993). &lt;em&gt;Morgoth’s Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: HarperCollins.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence both falls are associated with the characters’ relationship with their own creations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the whole matter from beginning to end is mainly concerned with the relation of Creation to making and sub-creation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). Letter to Peter Hastings. Number 153 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Mortality&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “mortality” Tolkien means the &lt;em&gt;problem of death&lt;/em&gt;: how to reconcile a supposedly loving God with the existence of death. In Christian myth, death is explained as a punishment for sin. But in Tolkien’s mythology the mortality of humans is contrasted with the immortality of Elves:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The doom of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world, to bring it to full flower with their gifts of delicacy and perfection, to last while it lasts, never leaving it even when ‘slain’, but returning—and yet, when the Followers [that is, humans] come, to teach them, and make way for them, to ‘fade’ as the Followers grow and absorb the life from which both proceed. The Doom (or the Gift) of Men is mortality, freedom from the circles of the world. Since the point of view of the whole cycle is the Elvish, mortality is not explained mythically: it is a mystery of God of which no more is known than that ‘what God has purposed for Men is hidden’ a grief and an envy to the immortal Elves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1951). Letter to Milton Waldman. Number 131 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien portrays the immortality of Elves as having negative aspects: world-weariness, ‘fading’, confinement to the ‘circles of the world’ and so on. Against this Elvish point of view the mortality of humans can be recontextualized and positive aspects discerned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mortality, that is a short life-span having no relation to the life of Arda, is spoken of as the given nature of Men: the Elves called it the Gift of Ilúvatar (God). But it must be remembered that mythically these tales are Elf-centred, not anthropocentric, and Men only appear in them, at what must be a point long after their Coming. This is therefore an ‘Elvish’ view, and does not necessarily have anything to say for or against such beliefs as the Christian that ‘death’ is not part of human nature, but a punishment for sin (rebellion), a result of the ‘Fall’. It should be regarded as an Elvish perception of what death—not being tied to the ‘circles of the world’—should now become for Men, however it arose. A divine ‘punishment’ is also a divine ‘gift’, if accepted, since its object is ultimate blessing, and the supreme inventiveness of the Creator will make ‘punishments’ (that is changes of design) produce a good not otherwise to be attained: a ‘mortal’ Man has probably (an Elf would say) a higher if unrevealed destiny than a longeval one. To attempt by device or ‘magic’ to recover longevity is thus a supreme folly and wickedness of ‘mortals’. Longevity or counterfeit ‘immortality’ (true immortality is beyond Ea) is the chief bait of Sauron—it leads the small to a Gollum, and the great to a Ringwraith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1951). Letter to Milton Waldman. Number 131 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Machine&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “Machine”, Tolkien means something like “the dehumanizing effects of industrial civilization”. Anyone familiar with &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; will have noticed the author’s attitude to industry and machinery. In Tolkien’s works, it is the evil characters who employ machinery, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the &lt;strong&gt;machines that have since troubled the world&lt;/strong&gt;, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1937). &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 4. London: Allen and Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I don’t know what Saruman thought was happening; but anyway he did not know how to deal with it. His wizardry may have been falling off lately, of course; but anyway I think he has not much grit, not much plain courage alone in a tight place without &lt;strong&gt;a lot of slaves and machines and things&lt;/strong&gt;, if you know what I mean.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Two Towers&lt;/em&gt;, book III, chapter 9. London: Allen and Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas the good characters use their hands:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hobbits are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today; for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt. &lt;strong&gt;They do not and did not understand or like machines&lt;/strong&gt; more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (1954). &lt;em&gt;The Fellowship of the Ring&lt;/em&gt;. London: Allen and Unwin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an unprepossessing attitude in someone who did not have to earn his living through manual labour, but his view seems to have been that the employment of machinery has a corrupting effect on the person using it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, it attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this World; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction. Labour-saving machinery only creates endless and worse labour. And in addition to this fundamental disability of a creature, is added the Fall, which makes our devices not only fail of their desire but turn to new and horrible evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (7 July 1944). Letter to Christopher Tolkien. Number 75 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien included “magic” under the umbrella of “machinery”, and suggested that in Middle-earth it has a similarly corrupting influence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Enemy, or those who have become like him, go in for ‘machinery’—with destructive and evil effects—because ‘magicians’, who have become chiefly concerned to use &lt;em&gt;magia&lt;/em&gt; for their own power, would do so (do do so). The basic motive for &lt;em&gt;magia&lt;/em&gt;—quite apart from any philosophic consideration of how it would work—is immediacy: speed, reduction of labour, and reduction also to a minimum (or vanishing point) of the gap between the idea or desire and the result or effect. But the &lt;em&gt;magia&lt;/em&gt; may not be easy to come by, and at any rate if you have command of abundant slave-labour or machinery (often only the same thing concealed), it may be as quick or quick enough to push mountains over, wreck forests, or build pyramids by such means. Of course another factor then comes in, a moral or pathological one: the tyrants lose sight of objects, become cruel, and like smashing, hurting, and defiling as such. It would no doubt be possible to defend poor Lotho’s introduction of more efficient mills; but not of Sharkey and Sandyman’s use of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. R. R. Tolkien (September 1954). Unsent draft of letter to Naomi Mitchison. Number 155 in Carpenter (1981).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This theme is barely present in &lt;em&gt;The Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt;, but Tolkien explores it more thoroughly in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, where he gives us Sauron’s scheme to rule Middle-earth through the magical rings, and Saruman’s fouling of the River Isen and the Shire-Water with industrial pollution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-16T20:33:06.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16006" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16001" CreationDate="2020-10-17T01:21:37.547" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is practice in modern-day beekeeping to have part of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langstroth_hive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;hive&lt;/a&gt; separated by a gap that is large enough for the worker bees to get through but too small for the queen (a queen excluder).  This ensures that the queen only lays eggs in part of the hive (the brood box), and you can freely harvest the rest for honey.  This was invented by the Rev. Lorenzo Langstroth, in 1852.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bee-keeper will certainly write up the importance of ensuring that the eggs and honey are not intermingled in practical notes on bee-keeping.  All the more so in that old-fashioned bee-keeping practices were slow to change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its literary effect is to underscore the sincerity of his retirement:  writing up how to keep bees, instead of catch criminals as he did in the years when he worked, show how his interest have changed.  The segregation of the queen bee is probably to add some local detail that he really does know his stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T03:45:57.903" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T03:45:57.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16007" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15999" CreationDate="2020-10-17T12:57:52.537" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's time, &amp;quot;compass&amp;quot; could have meanings that have since become obsolete, for example, &amp;quot;circle, circumference&amp;quot; (see Peter Ure's edition) and &amp;quot;bounds, limits, range&amp;quot; (see Onions and &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 4: &amp;quot;Why should we in the compass of a pale (...)&amp;quot;).&#xA;In addition, &amp;quot;crown&amp;quot; could also mean &amp;quot;head&amp;quot;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/richardiii/richardiii.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, Act III, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;I'll have this crown of mine cut from my shoulders&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John of Gaunt appears to be playing on words, since a crown in the conventional sense is circular (see the first meaning of compass mentioned above) and within the small space of Richard's crown or head, &amp;quot;a thousand&amp;quot; flatterers are trying to gain favours from the king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third line, &amp;quot;verge&amp;quot; has three meanings that appear relevant &amp;quot;(1) compass; (2) the sphere of jurisdiction of the king's marshal, twelve miles round the royal residence; (3) a measure of land of from fifteen to thirty acres&amp;quot; (Stanley Wells's edition, p. 192-193). Peter Ure points out that &amp;quot;verge&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;a quibble on 'limit', with special reference to the metal rim of a diadem (...)&amp;quot;. So the word is (among other things) another allusion to royal headgear and a reference to a type of jurisdiction related to the king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth line, &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; has its conventional meaning but also the legal meaning of &amp;quot;a tenant's destruction of his landlord's property&amp;quot; (see both Stanley Wells and Peter Ure). Note that earlier in the same scene, John of Gaunt gave his famous &amp;quot;This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,&amp;quot;-speech, in which he had lamented that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This land of such dear souls (...) &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like to a tenement or pelting farm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the legal meaning of &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; probably also refers back to these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can the &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; caused by the flatterers be as big as the country, as the fourth line implies? For the answer to this, we need to look back to an earlier line spoken by John of Gaunt to Richard II:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John of Gaunt describes the flatterers' influence on the king as an illness and this illness affects the entire country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Onions, Charles Talbut: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. Enlarged and Revised Throughout by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;King Richard the Second&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Stanley Wells. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;King Richard II&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Peter Ure. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1994.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T22:11:57.737" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T22:11:57.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-07T10:38:52.210" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/167/the-planet-of-the-dead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Planet of the Dead&lt;/a&gt; by Clark Ashton Smith, I would like to understand the meaning of &amp;quot;half-primitive vigor&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had lived as an intellectual sybarite; and by virtue of a&#xA;half-primitive vigor, had not yet fallen upon the spiritual exhaustion&#xA;and desolation, the dread implacable ennui of racial senescence, that&#xA;marked so many of his fellows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several meanings in the dictionary but none make really sense to me with &amp;quot;half&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="John V" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T13:37:05.017" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T17:47:11.593" Title="What does &quot;half-primitive vigor&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;clark-ashton-smith&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-14T15:58:03.583" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is Penelope in Homer's &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; a strong or weak character? What does her character reveal about Homer’s characterization of women in general?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Vernon Byrd" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T18:25:32.757" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T18:25:32.757" Title="Homer’s characterization of Penelope" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-odyssey&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16009" CreationDate="2020-10-17T14:28:57.030" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm suprsed that the question was migrated. The use of &amp;quot;half + adjective&amp;quot; is common enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He was half-dead with exhaustion&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She was half-aware of a conversation taking place in the adjoining room&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was half-convinced by the ridiculous argument.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;half&amp;quot; is not literal but more &amp;quot;partly&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;to a lesser degree&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;almost&amp;quot; - the context will decide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus  &amp;quot;and by virtue of a half-primitive vigor&amp;quot; =  and by virtue of &lt;strong&gt;his&lt;/strong&gt; vigor which comprised a mixture of basic survival instincts common to all people and creatures, as well as more sophisticated techniques learned from his experience, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10831" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T14:28:57.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16012" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14285" CreationDate="2020-10-17T15:14:59.147" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Windows and doors are often used as symbols, representing transition, or access to something, especially without fully immersing in it. Consider:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;when one door closes, another opens&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I shut the door on that possibility&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the eyes are the window to the soul&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;for a brief window anything seemed possible&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage seems to me to say that being surrounded by windows and doors got him thinking about transitions, possibilities, glimpses of mystery, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="417" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T15:14:59.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-17T16:45:39.410" Score="3" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the hobbits are on the way home, they meet Saruman walking around, defeated and angry. When they finally get back to their home village(s), they find that they are utterly destroyed and turned into some kind of police state nightmare, apparently led by Saruman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, it was very unclear to me how Saruman could have managed to do this so quickly. He must have started long before meeting the hobbits on the way home, right? And he was just out on some kind of errand? He didn't rush straight to their village, managed to manipulate everyone and turned it into a dystopian nightmare in the matter of days... correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But my main question is: Why exactly? Was there some purpose to this other than simply &amp;quot;getting back at&amp;quot; the hobbits, by deliberately destroying their homes? Even Saruman had no belief/intention to &amp;quot;create a new Isengard and restore evil&amp;quot; after the defeat of both himself and Sauron, right? And even Saruman didn't think that the new buildings looked good or that he was going some kind of &amp;quot;improvement&amp;quot;? He just did everything he could to mess with the hobbits for stopping his evil plans earlier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way I understood it, it was already kind of in a state of terror from the management of the &amp;quot;kinda evil&amp;quot; hobbit (whose name escapes me), but Saruman arrived and took over and made it much, much worse. But still, I wonder if he really could have done it so quickly, and &lt;em&gt;solely&lt;/em&gt; as an act of revenge. It seems petty even for Saruman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11151" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T07:49:38.740" Title="Did Saruman exclusively want to mess with the Hobbits in the end of the third book?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16009" CreationDate="2020-10-17T17:47:11.593" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comparison here turns on &amp;quot;half-primitive vigor&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;racial senescence.&amp;quot;  A people early in their history (by which is generally meant their appearance in historical records -- a concept more applicable to &lt;em&gt;civilizations&lt;/em&gt;, though not strong even there, but unfortunately commonly applied to races in 1932) are bursting with life and can-do vigor.  As their history accumulates, the people &lt;em&gt;as a whole&lt;/em&gt; age through a maturity and end up in senescence -- decadence being a more direct and less metaphorical term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the character referred to does not actually have &amp;quot;primitive vigor&amp;quot; -- he does not come from a young, vigorous, energic race.  However, through some fluke, he has inherited a half-measure of it (half not being precise here) from his ancestors, and this prevents his sybarite habits from turning him into a case of spiritual exhaustion and desolation,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T17:47:11.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16015" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-17T23:28:36.670" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-17T23:28:36.670" LastActivityDate="2020-10-17T23:28:36.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16016" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-17T23:28:36.670" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer Clark Ashton Smith (1893 – 1961) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T20:10:07.793" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T20:10:07.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16017" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16018" CreationDate="2020-10-18T01:43:26.000" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the topics of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;power&lt;/strong&gt;. In the play, it has been demonstrated that one can use &lt;strong&gt;power&lt;/strong&gt; to achieve what they want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unable to find good, powerful quotes to prove this topic, can I get some help finding good quotes in the play that demonstrates the topic of &lt;strong&gt;power&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11014" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T14:42:32.810" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T15:24:28.463" Title="Macbeth is a play about power, what quote demonstrates this?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16017" CreationDate="2020-10-18T15:24:28.463" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is not &lt;em&gt;primarily&lt;/em&gt; about power; if the play has one overarching theme, it would be the reversal of natural order, which begins in the human realm (the murders perpetrated by Macbeth, especially the murder of Duncan) and expands to the cosmic realm (as reflected in the imagery).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not mean that power is not one of the play's themes; after all, Macbeth attempts to grab power by murdering kill Duncan. It is interesting to see how different characters use the word &amp;quot;power&amp;quot;. In Act II, scene 1, Banquo calls upon heaven to restrain the ambitious dreams trigged by the prophecy by the three weird sisters (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;merciful powers&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gives way to in repose!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act III, scene 1, when Macbeth sends out two murderers to kill Banquo, he uses the word power in a way that contrasts with Banquo's usage (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and though I could&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With &lt;strong&gt;barefaced power&lt;/strong&gt; sweep him from my sight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And bid my will avouch it, yet I must not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The power Macbeth has in mind is the opposite of merciful and is an instrument for maintaining his own (political) &amp;quot;power&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act IV, scene 1, the apparition apparition conjured up by the three weird sisters also uses the word &amp;quot;power&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;power of man&lt;/strong&gt;, for none of woman born&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shall harm Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words encourage Macbeth to continue on the path he has chosen and suggest that there is a power strong than that of man that protects him. (The prophecy that follows says that Macbeth will not be vanquished until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane. Both these prophecies are examples of the theme of reversal of natural order mentioned above.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act IV, scene 3, Duncan's son Malcolm tests Macduff by using language that would also fit Macbeth. For example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nay, had I power, I should&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Uproar the universal peace, confound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All unity on earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Less interesting in the context of this discussion is the usage of &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; in the sense of &amp;quot;army&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;military forces&amp;quot;, e.g. by Ross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw the tyrant's power a-foot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and by Malcolm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;our power is ready&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, a discussion on the theme of power need not exclusively look at how the &lt;em&gt;word&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; is used, but in this case, such an analysis shows that the usage of the word &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; reflects the self-image that some characters want to project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T15:24:28.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16019" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16013" CreationDate="2020-10-18T16:48:17.273" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Saruman's links to the Shire start long before his arrival there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Two Towers,&amp;quot; chapter &amp;quot;Floatsam and Jetsam&amp;quot;, when Aragon, Gimli, and Legolas meet Merry and Pippin in Orthanc:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gimli took some and rubbed in in his palms and sniffed it. 'It feels good, and it smells good,' he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'It is good!&amp;quot; said Merry. 'My dear Gimli, it is Longbottom Leaf! There were the Hornblower brandmarks on the barrels, as plain as plain.  How it came here, I can't imagine.  For Saruman's private use, I fancy.  I never knew that it went so far abroad.  But it comes in handy now?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And near the end of the same chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'All except one thing,' said Aragon: 'leaf from the Southfarthing in Isengard. The more I consider it, the more curious I find it. I have never been in Isengard, but I have journeyed in this land, and I know well the empty countries that lie between Rohan and the Shire. Neither goods nor folk have passed that way for many a long year, not openly.  Saruman had secret dealings with someone in the Shire, I guess. Wormtongues may be found in other houses than King Theoden's. Was there a date on the barrels?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Return of the King,&amp;quot; chapter &amp;quot;The Scouring of the Shire:&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'There isn't no pipe-weed now,' said Hob; 'at least only for the Chief's men. All the stocks seem to have gone. We do hear that waggon-loads of it went away down the old roud out of the Southfarthing, over Sarn Ford way.  That would be the end o' last year after you left. But it had been going away quietly before that, in a small way. That Lotho -'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as purpose, we get some of that in the same chapter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I did not,' said Frodo. 'But I might have guessed. A little mischief in a mean way: Gandalf warned me that you were still capable of it.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Quite capable,' said Saruman, ' and more than a little.  You made me laugh, you hobbit-lordlings, riding along with all those great people, so secure and so pleased with your little selves.  You thought you had done very well out of it all, and could not just amble back and have a quiet time in the country. Saruman's home cold be all wrecked, and he could be turned out, but no one could touch yours. Oh no! Gandalf would look after your affairs.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saruman laughed again. 'Not he! When his tools have done their task he drops them. But you must go dangling after him, dawdling and talking, and riding round twice as far as you needed. &amp;quot;Well,&amp;quot; thought I, &amp;quot;if they're such fools, I will get ahead of them and teach them a lesson. One ill turn deserves another.&amp;quot; It would have been a sharper lesson, if only you had given me a little more time and more Men. Still I have done much that you will find it hard to mend or undo in your lives. And it will be pleasant to think of that and set it against my injuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meeting in Isengard occurred on March 5, 3019. Gandalf, Frodo, etc. pass Saruman on Aug 28, 3019, and Frodo, etc., arrive that the Brandywine bridge on the evening of Oct 30, 3019.  So we are talking about at least seven months, and probably closer to a year to establish connections, and close to two months of time in the Shire to do his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8335" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T07:49:38.740" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T07:49:38.740" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16020" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-18T19:49:49.977" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nick Joaquin's story &amp;quot;The Woman Who Had Two Navels&amp;quot; opens with the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she told him she had two navels he believed her at once: (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She&amp;quot; is Connie de Vidal, who tells Pepe Monson that her mother and the maids had always pretended not to see that she had two navels and that she had always hidden her secret from other people. We never find out whether Connie really has two navels and her mother denies the claim. Nevertheless, the two navels are part of the story's title, so they must have meaning beyond the literal level. What do Connie's two navels actually represent or symbolise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T19:49:49.977" Title="What do Connie's two navels represent?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16021" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16022" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Filipino writer and journalist Nick Joaquin (1917 – 2004) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" LastActivityDate="2020-10-18T20:11:38.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16023" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16029" CreationDate="2020-10-19T11:26:54.980" Score="2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melv/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 7 (&amp;quot;The Chapel&amp;quot;) of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Herman Melville:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh! ye whose dead lie buried beneath the green grass; who standing among flowers can say—here, &lt;em&gt;here&lt;/em&gt; lies my beloved; ye know not the desolation that broods in bosoms like these. What bitter blanks in those black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes! What despair in those immovable inscriptions! &lt;strong&gt;What deadly voids and unbidden infidelities in the lines that seem to gnaw upon all Faith, and refuse resurrections to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave.&lt;/strong&gt; As well might those tablets stand in the cave of Elephanta as here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the narrator mean by the sentence in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English is not my native language. I don't want to skip any line of this book.  I want to know what the narrator is thinking here. I tried to use Google Translate for this particular line, which wasn't of any help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11154" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T11:35:32.000" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T18:14:01.197" Title="What are &quot;deadly voids and unbidden infidelities&quot; in &quot;Moby-Dick&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16024" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-19T11:31:14.447" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mark Strand's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52959/eating-poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Eating Poetry&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the first several lines appear to be about a person who has been consuming poetry - I interpreted this as metaphorical, &amp;quot;eating&amp;quot; poetry as in reading it rather than literally eating books. Halfway through the poem, dogs are mentioned as coming up from the basement. Then, towards the end, the first-person narrator starts acting like a dog too. Or was he a dog all along, literally eating books? Surely not, because the poem says &amp;quot;I am a new &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (emphasis mine).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's going on here? Is the poem supposed to be ambiguous, or why does the human bookworm suddenly become a dog? Do dogs have some metaphorical or symbolic meaning, just like &amp;quot;eating&amp;quot; poetry doesn't need to have its most literal meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T15:01:18.787" Title="What's with the dogs in Mark Strand's &quot;Eating Poetry&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;mark-strand&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16025" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16026" CreationDate="2020-10-19T11:54:54.230" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_6&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 6 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing a young boxer constable and his work under his bad superior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frank Fellowe was agitating a punch-ball in one of the upper rooms of his little cottage, and with good reason.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was “taking out” of the ball all the grievances he had against the petty irritants of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sergeant Gurden had bothered him with a &lt;strong&gt;dozen and one&lt;/strong&gt; forms of petty annoyance. He had been given the least congenial of jobs; he had been &lt;strong&gt;put upon melancholy point work&lt;/strong&gt;; and he seemed to be getting more than his share of extra duty. And, in addition, he had the extra worry of checking, at the same time, the work of Black’s organization. He might, had he wished, put away all the restrictions which hampered his movements, but that was not his way. The frustration of Black’s plans was one of Frank’s absorbing passions. If he had other passions which threatened to be equally absorbing, he had the sense to check them—for a while—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I found that &amp;quot;put upon&amp;quot; may mean have too much work, but it has been actually said after it that he get &amp;quot;more than his share of extra duty&amp;quot;, so I think it means another meaning, but I can't get it!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's exactly meant by this &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;point work&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; term?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I think that &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;dozen and one&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;a lot of&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; not &amp;quot;thirteen&amp;quot; literally, doesn't it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T12:13:13.430" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T14:45:52.160" Title="What's meant by &quot;melancholy point work&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16025" CreationDate="2020-10-19T14:45:52.160" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Put upon” is just being used in its ordinary (non-idiomatic) sense of “placed in a particular situation or position”. The constable has been put upon (assigned to) a particular duty, namely that of “point work”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You noted in the question that “put upon” has another sense, namely “imposed on, taken advantage of” and this other sense is attractive because the context is one of Constable Fellowe being given unpleasant duty by his Sergeant. I think this is just an unfortunate choice of words: if Wallace had written “he had been put &lt;strong&gt;on&lt;/strong&gt; melancholy point work” then the meaning would have been the same and the confusion would not have arisen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that “point work” is a mistake for (or just possibly a rare variant of) “point duty”, that is,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;point duty, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; The duty of a police constable stationed at a particular point in a thoroughfare, to regulate traffic, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s an example of its use:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hampshire County Council decided on Monday not to destroy the picturesque bridge which carries the Romsey-to-Ringwood main road at Romsey, and which is known as Middlebridge. On account of its steep gradient, which prevents approaching drivers obtaining a line of sight until they are within a short distance of each other, it was decided to erect large warning notices on each side, and to ask the Standing Joint Committee to consider the possibility of stationing permanently a police-constable on &lt;strong&gt;point duty&lt;/strong&gt; at the spot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/buildingnewseng105londuoft/page/238/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Building News&lt;/em&gt; No. 3058 (15th August 1913), p.238&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point duty is “melancholy” (sad) because it’s tedious and lonely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The question is right that “dozen and one” is used in the sense of “many” or “umpteen”. Here are a couple of examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Went] to a party at William Strutt’s, where I found duets on the harp and pianoforte going on; and, in spite of my &lt;strong&gt;dozen and one&lt;/strong&gt; speeches, was obliged to muster up voice enough for the same number of songs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Moore. Diary entry for 31st February 1828. In John Russell, ed. (1854). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/memoirsjournala01moorgoog/page/n269/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence of Thomas Moore&lt;/em&gt;, volume V, p. 256&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly always some bad judgment about food or drink causes the headaches, sleeplessness, bowel troubles, heart failure, nervousness and a &lt;strong&gt;dozen and one&lt;/strong&gt; other disturbances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Advertisement for ‘Postums’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_i2wyAQAAMAAJ/page/n275/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harper’s Weekly&lt;/em&gt; (4th October 1913), p. 29&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T14:45:52.160" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16027" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-19T17:13:45.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T17:13:45.173" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T17:13:45.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16028" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-19T17:13:45.173" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mark Strand (1934 – 2014) and his life as a writer. Questions about his poetry should be tagged as [poetry]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-19T19:49:10.950" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T19:49:10.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16023" CreationDate="2020-10-19T18:14:01.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sentence is far from easy even for native English speakers! But we can get at its meaning if we pay attention to the context, and take it word by word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ishmael is attending the Sunday morning service at the Whaleman’s Chapel (a lightly fictionalized &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seamen%27s_Bethel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seamen's Bethel&lt;/a&gt;) in New Bedford, Massachusetts. On the walls of the chapel are marble tablets commemorating sailors who were lost at sea, for example one reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melv/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dkveAl.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;SACRED To the Memory OF The late CAPTAIN EZEKIEL HARDY, Who in the bows of his boat was killed by a Sperm Whale on the coast of Japan, August 3d, 1833. THIS TABLET Is erected to his Memory BY HIS WIDOW.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ishmael ponders on the feelings of the relatives of these dead sailors, and imagines that their grief is increased by the loss of the body of the deceased. When a loved one is buried in the churchyard, Ishmael says, there is some comfort in being able to lay flowers on their grave, but in the case of men lost at sea, there are only “black-bordered marbles which cover no ashes”. Then we get to the difficult sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The “deadly voids” are the absences (“voids”) of the bodies of the dead sailors (“deadly” in the sense “relating to the dead”, not in the usual sense of “fatal”); these absences being implied by the wording of the tablets (“lost overboard”, “towed out of sight by a whale”, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The “unbidden infidelities” are “infidelities” (losses of faith) in the Christian promise of resurrection; losses that are not “bidden” (directed) by the tablets but nevertheless suggested or provoked by them. Ishmael sees, or imagines, that the bereaved members of the congregation receive little consolation from their religion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The “lines” are the epitaphs carved on the tablets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tablets “gnaw upon all Faith” by “gnawing” (eating away at) the certainty of resurrection, undermining the whole of Christian belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The tablets “refuse resurrection to the beings who have placelessly perished without a grave” because the Christian idea of life after death is based on the idea of bodily resurrection, for example, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/john/5-28.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 5:28–29&lt;/a&gt;, “all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth”, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/matthew/27-52.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew 27:52–53&lt;/a&gt;, “the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection”. But how can a sailor “come out of his grave” if his body was lost at sea and he has no grave?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perhaps no coincidence that the last of the cenotaphs observed by Ishmael in the Whaleman’s Chapel is dedicated to a captain named Ezekiel Hardy. In the contexts of burial and bereavement, the captain’s name conjures images of the Valley of Dry Bones that God reveals to Ezekiel the prophet. Despite its initially grim appearance, this biblical valley is a trope of optimism: the Lord shows Ezekiel how the power of the Holy Spirit can restore flesh and skin to the desiccated, scattered remains and breathe new life into lifeless bodies (&lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ezekiel/37-1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezek. 37:1–10&lt;/a&gt;). The dry bones of the valley attest, not to the finality of loss, but to the miraculous power of the Lord to bring new life to the spiritually desolate. Melville, however, renders darker prophecies than Ezekiel. In his narrative, the prospect of resurrection is thwarted because Captain Hardy has left no bones to rejoin and return to the flesh. The bones of Melville’s Ezekiel lie not in a dry valley, but beneath the waters of the Pacific; the wherewithal for the performance of the miracle has been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John T. Matteson (2006). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ungraspablephant0000unse/page/124/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Deadly Voids and Unbidden Infidelities”: Death, Memory and the Law in &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. In John Bryant, Mary K. Bercaw Edwards, and Timothy Marr, eds. &lt;em&gt;“Ungraspable Phantom”: Essays on Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt;, p. 124. Kent State University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-19T18:14:01.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16031" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16032" CreationDate="2020-10-20T00:25:20.780" Score="2" ViewCount="505" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there is any professional English translation of &amp;quot;I will not see the famous Phaedra&amp;quot; (Я не увижу знаменитой «Федры») by Osip Mandelstam. Can anyone provide a link where it can be found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11159" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T11:26:42.380" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T11:26:42.380" Title="English translation of &quot;I will not see the famous Phaedra&quot;?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;osip-mandelstam&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16032" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16031" CreationDate="2020-10-20T01:21:48.897" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a translation &lt;a href=&quot;https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/49878/Goldberg_Book4CD.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, in the book &lt;em&gt;Mandelstam, Blok, and the boundaries of mythopoetic symbolism&lt;/em&gt; by Stuart Goldberg, that looks okay to me (although I can't say for sure, since I don't read Russian). It starts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will not see the celebrated &lt;em&gt;Phèdre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In a venerable, many-tiered theater,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the high, soot-smoked gallery,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the light of guttering candles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T01:26:57.483" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T01:26:57.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16033" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T07:12:20.047" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;In class we talked about the inverse of gender roles in Macbeth. The only way for Lady Macbeth to gain power is through Macbeth using her rhetoric. But what about Macbeth? Do you think that the tragedy of Macbeth is the consequence of Macbeth being too sensitive to masculinity? What does Masculinity mean for Macbeth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess what is the message of the play about Masculinity? Break the gender hierarchy or not?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11161" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T17:44:31.163" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T17:44:31.163" Title="What is the message of Macbeth in terms of masculinity?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16034" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15772" CreationDate="2020-10-20T08:46:17.787" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://slavic.illinois.edu/directory/profile/ggasyna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Z. Gasyna&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Trans-Atlantuk&lt;/em&gt; (...) parodies utopian landscapes of collectivities and dismantles the cultural conditions that call for them. Gombrowicz's second novel, further, embarks on a linguistic satire (as well as a spectacular gloss on) the strongly escapist movement of seventeenth-century Poland known as Sarmatian baroque. The work is written in a polysemic style that employs Sarmatian themes and language, in particular a narrative genre known as &lt;em&gt;gawęda&lt;/em&gt;, all the while polemicizing the highly ambivalent legacy of Sarmatian philosophies on modern letters and culture, from patriotic romanticism to the most militant strains of the interwar avant-garde. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Ay3m1kbOhQUC&amp;amp;pg=PA9&amp;amp;dq=%22satire+of%22+Witold+Gombrowicz+Trans-Atlantyk&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjqtujrnLHsAhWC4IUKHcWbA8EQuwUwAHoECAIQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22satire%20of%22%20Witold%20Gombrowicz%20Trans-Atlantyk&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Polish, Hybrid, and Otherwise: Exilic Discourse in Joseph Conrad and Witold Gombrowicz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. A &amp;amp; C Black, 2011. Page 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a detailed discussion of Sarmatian baroque, Gasyna refers the reader to &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/%7Eethomp/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ewa M. Thompson's&lt;/a&gt; monograph &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/witold-gombrowicz/oclc/474970774/editions?editionsView=true&amp;amp;referer=br&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Witold Gombrowicz&lt;/em&gt;. Boston: Twayne, 1979&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia has an article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarmatism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sarmatism&lt;/a&gt;, which explains that it is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an ethno-cultural concept with a shade of politics designating the formation of an idea of Poland's origin from Sarmatians, an Iranic people, within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article also points out that Sarmatism enjoyed a comeback in the late 19th century due to the publication of Henryk Sienkiewicz's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trilogy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Trilogy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which consists of &lt;em&gt;With Fire and Sword&lt;/em&gt; (1884), &lt;em&gt;The Deluge&lt;/em&gt; (1886) and &lt;em&gt;Sir Michael&lt;/em&gt; (1888)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ewa M. Thompson, in the chapter &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=f2J5DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA3&amp;amp;dq=%22Sarmatism,+or+the+secrets+of+Polish+essentialism%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi-6bHp38LsAhVO3KQKHWzUAacQuwUwAHoECAMQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Sarmatism%2C%20or%20the%20secrets%20of%20Polish%20essentialism%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Sarmatism, or the secrets of Polish essentialism”&lt;/a&gt; that she contributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://utorontopress.com/us/being-poland-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918&lt;/a&gt;*, edited by Tamara Trojanowska et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), describes Sarmatism as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a pre-modern Polish cultural episteme built on the belief that at the centre of human endeavours reside metaphysical realities rather than the desire for power, and that all human concerns should play second fiddle to those realities. This belief is central to Christianity, and it was the Christian articulation of it that provided the stimulus for Sarmatian creativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This metaphysical aspect is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article. Thompson also points out that, since the late eighteenth century, Sarmatism has been criticised both by Polish and foreign critics. In the section on Sarmatism's legacy, Thompson states that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sarmatism was the most influential cultural paradigm that Poland produced. It far surpassed Romanticism, which influenced only the educated part of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T13:48:33.517" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T13:48:33.517" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16035" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16061" CreationDate="2020-10-20T10:30:35.953" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;[throughout this question by 'English' I only mean the 'language English' ]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember from my childhood a English language poem from a middle/high school general English textbook (India).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can only recollect following information about that poem -&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Language - English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Genre - Comedy or little childish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read it in a old general English textbook of middle/high school (India) around 10-12 years ago.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The poem is about a joker (I'm not sure if he's really a joker or just a man being funny) with disorganized attire&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That man is was wearing a cooking pan as hat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was wearing (probably) socks as gloves&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He was travelling in a train or tram and leaves his station behind. (When he asks someone which station the train had reached he got shocked to hear the name of the station as he left his station behind. )&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess, This poem must be at least 2-3 decades old (or more) [since it mentions train / tram it must belong to 19th or 20th century]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please tell me name of the poem or poet if anyone remembers such poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11171" OwnerDisplayName="ShivCK" LastEditorUserId="11171" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T09:08:27.023" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T00:42:02.743" Title="Poem about a joker with disorganized attire" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16036" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T14:52:29.433" Score="6" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a book from 1989 that I inherited recently. The cover and some of the pages have these dark stains and/or mold. It does not seem to have a bad odor (as far as I can tell).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is it possible to clean this book to remove the stains/mold?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, how can I clean this as DIY at home?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How can I prevent the stain/mold from spreading?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If need be, I might be willing to consider a professional job, if such a thing exists. I know there's book repair but from what I found, they seem to focus on binding. And Google tends to return results on carpet cleaning (sometimes Google is strange)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there professionals that will do this?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are book cleaning professionals, what kind of cost can I expect?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If there are book cleaning professionals, is it actually worth it? More specifically, are they likely to do a better job than I can at home?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N3y7h.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/N3y7h.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Dark mold and stains on book cover and pages&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11001" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T16:01:35.480" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T19:26:06.013" Title="How can I clean a book and remove mold / stains?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;book-care&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16037" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-20T14:55:51.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T14:55:51.607" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T14:55:51.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16038" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-20T14:55:51.607" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891 – 1938) or his life as a writer. Use this tag with the tag [russian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T15:09:27.087" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T15:09:27.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16049" CreationDate="2020-10-20T15:21:08.983" Score="7" ViewCount="919" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;King Henry 6 part 3&lt;/em&gt;, we are truly introduced to that devilishly delightful Richard for the first time by means of his first and longest soliloquy wherein he introduces to the audience what he wants, why he wants it, and how he plans to get it (&amp;quot;it&amp;quot; being the English Crown of course!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He speaks the following line about half-way through the soliloquy and refers to himself as a &amp;quot;Chaos&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dis-proportion me in every part:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Like to a Chaos&lt;/strong&gt;, or an un-lick'd Bear-whelp,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That carries no impression like the Dam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The capitalization is not a mistyping on my part, but is how the Folio has it printed. I thought keeping the capitalization would be important as in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, John Milton in the eleventh line of the epic poem wrote (or I suppose spoke, due to his blindness)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the beginning how the heavens and earth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rose out of &lt;strong&gt;Chaos&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am assuming the word &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; is capitalized to signify that this is no ordinary &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; but thé great &amp;quot;void&amp;quot; itself at the beginning of the book of Genesis, wherein God creates all things from no thing; hence the great &amp;quot;Chaos&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I bring this point up because I feel like I am missing something in Richard's speech. When he refers to himself as a &amp;quot;Chaos&amp;quot; (due to his &amp;quot;bunch-back'd Toad&amp;quot; deformities) what is he referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary puts the following definitions for &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;late 14c., &amp;quot;gaping void; empty, immeasurable space,&amp;quot; from Old French&#xA;chaos (14c.) or directly from Latin chaos, from Greek khaos &amp;quot;abyss,&#xA;that which gapes wide open, that which is vast and empty,&amp;quot; from&#xA;*khnwos, from PIE root *ghieh- &amp;quot;to yawn, gape, be wide open.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meaning &amp;quot;utter confusion&amp;quot; (c. 1600) is an extended sense from&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;theological use of chaos in the Vulgate version of &amp;quot;Genesis&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (1530s in&#xA;English) for &amp;quot;the void at the beginning of creation, the confused,&#xA;formless, elementary state of the universe.&amp;quot; The Greek for &amp;quot;disorder&amp;quot;&#xA;was tarakhe, but the use of chaos here was rooted in Hesiod&#xA;(&amp;quot;Theogony&amp;quot;), who describes khaos as the primeval emptiness of the&#xA;Universe, and in Ovid (&amp;quot;Metamorphoses&amp;quot;), who opposes Khaos to Kosmos,&#xA;&amp;quot;the ordered Universe.&amp;quot; Sometimes it was personified as a god,&#xA;begetter of Erebus and Nyx (&amp;quot;Night&amp;quot;).&#xA;Meaning &amp;quot;orderless confusion&amp;quot; in human affairs is from c. 1600.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any of these definitions Shakespeare might have known about (with the exception of maybe the c.1600 definitions since the play in question was written sometime in mid to later part of the 1590s). So which is he referring to? Is the capitalization used to signify a biblical allusion, or is it something else entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P.S I do know spelling and capitalization were highly unmanaged during Elizabethan and Jacobean England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10815" LastEditorUserId="10815" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T21:37:34.153" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T21:37:34.153" Title="Meaning of &quot;Chaos&quot; spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III)?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;henry-vi-part-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16041" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16040" CreationDate="2020-10-20T16:30:15.850" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of Shakespeare’s rhetorical techniques is to follow a piece of difficult language with a gloss or explanation in simpler terms, so that you can get the overall meaning of a passage even if you don’t understand every word. I suggest re-reading the lines with this technique in mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To dis-proportion me in every part:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like to a Chaos, or an un-lick’d Bear-whelp,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That carries no impression like the Dam.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bear cub is born hairless and blind, resembling an embryo rather more than its mother. So it must be the case that “Chaos” is here used to mean “an object that is disproportionate, shapeless, or unformed”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Commenting on Shakespeare’s use of “indigest” in &lt;em&gt;King John&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be of good comfort, prince; for you are born&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To set a form upon that &lt;strong&gt;indigest&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude.†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Note that here too Shakespeare glosses “indigest” as soon as he has used it.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Indigest.&lt;/em&gt; Used to express a mass of confusion or disorder, a chaos or chaotic state; Latin, &lt;em&gt;indigestus&lt;/em&gt;, disordered, confused. It has been pointed out that Ovid has an almost similar passage:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quem dixere chaos &lt;em&gt;rudis indigestæque&lt;/em&gt; moles.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0029%3Abook%3D1%3Acard%3D5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses I.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which Chaos hight, a huge &lt;em&gt;rude&lt;/em&gt; heape: […]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No sunne as yet with lightsome beames the &lt;em&gt;shapelesse&lt;/em&gt; world did vew.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924026559777/page/n45/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Golding’s Translation.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From which it would seem as though both the original and the translated versions were known to Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, eds. (1870). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playsofwilliamsh02shak_0/page/50/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Note to &lt;em&gt;King John&lt;/em&gt;, act V, scene VII&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;The Plays of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 51. London: Cassell, Peter, and Galpin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid’s &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; was one of Shakespeare’s favourite classical sources: he drew on it for &lt;em&gt;Venus and Adonis&lt;/em&gt;, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night’s Dream&lt;/em&gt;, Lavinia’s denunciation of Demetrius and Chiron in &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, and many other works. So it seems likely that he got “Chaos” in this sense of “amorphous or formless mass or lump” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;) directly out of this passage from Ovid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-20T16:36:06.863" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T16:36:06.863" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16042" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15907" CreationDate="2020-10-20T17:00:34.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My source for this answer is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/197091.A_Karamazov_Companion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Karamazov Companion&amp;quot; by Vitor Terras (1981), University of Wisconsin Press&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terras writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Brothers Karamazov contains more autobiographic ele­ments than most of Dostoevsky’s works (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's go through some of the characters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Aliosha&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Aliosha was based on people from real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aliosha Karamazov’s im­age is designed on the pattern of a saint, specifically Saint Alexis. These correspondences are made quite explicit in the&#xA;novel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 22)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a footnote for this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vetlovskaia suggests that these correspondences relate specifically to the folk version of the life of Saint Alexis. Thus, Dmitry at one point calls Aliosha (a tall young man) “ a little man,” which is the epithet fondly given Saint Alexis in the folk legend. Grushen’ka calls Aliosha a “ prince,” which Saint Alexis is in the folk legend. The name of the saint’s bride in the folk legend is either Katerina or Lizaveta. A girl named Lizaveta is mentioned at the same time that Saint Alexis first comes up in the novel (Book Two, chap, iii, p. 44)—while Aliosha and Liza Khokhlakov are also present. Vetlovskaia points out many other such details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Dostoevsky's wife thought Aliosha's character was also inspired by their son with the same name, who died before Dostoevsky started writing the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) together with the name, all of a father’s tenderness, all the unrealized hopes for his son’s brilliant future, were transmitted to the novel’s young hero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 27)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fiodor Karamazov&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite some theories, it seems that the father Karamazov's character was &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; based on Dostoesky's own father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least since Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “ Dostoevsky and Parricide ,” 65 many people have assumed that Mikhail An­ dreevich Dostoevsky, the writer’s father, was the prototype for Fiodor Pavlovich Karamazov. But the only trait which connects them is the family tradition—never verified by Dostoevsky him­ self and quite possibly false—that Mikhail Andreevich was mur­ dered by the peasants of his village, Chermashnia, who alleg­ edly resented his carrying on with their women. Other than that, Dr. Dostoevsky bore little resemblance to Fiodor Pavlovich. He was not a colorful character, and he was by the standards of his day a good father. The commentators of PSS quite properly re­ject this connection .66&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 27)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is uncertain if Fiodor was inspired by anyone specific.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dmitry&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is in contrast with Dmitry Karamazov character, since he:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) has a real-life prototype in a sublieu­ tenant, Il'inskii, whom Dostoevsky had met in Omsk prison. The first sketches of this character still bear Il'inskii’s name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 28)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the novel's character, Il'inskii's also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; was convicted for parricide but denied that he had done it, despite overwhelming evidence against him&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Torres also explains that both of them have similar personalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Father Zosima&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zosima's character seems to have been inspired by a number of different people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is Father Amvrosy (1812-91), whom Dostoevsky had visited at Optina Pustyn' in 1878.71 The mon­astery and Zosima’s cell are patterned after Optina Pustyn' and Father Amvrosy’s cell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 29)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Father Zosima of Tobolsk (1767-1835), whose secular name was Zakhary Verkhovsky, had a biography reminiscent of Zo­sima’s .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 29)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more important is Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-83).75 Linnér compares Zosima with the historical Tikhon and finds that, while Zosima has inherited many of Tikhon’s traits, he is also different (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 29)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a number of other possible prototypes for Father Zosima&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 29)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Ivan&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ivan doesn't seem to have been inspired by anyone specific but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braun is probably right when he suggests that Ivan is “an independent, creatively formed personage, with the author himself, as well as some other individuals (Belinsky, for instance), serving as a model.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 30)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Other characters&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizaveta, Grushen'ka, Rakitin and the laywer Fetiukovich might also be inspired on real people:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dostoevsky’s brother Andrei Mikhailovich identifies a re­tarded girl named Agrafena as the prototype for Elizaveta Smerdiashchaia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 30)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A young woman named Agrippina (“ Grushen'ka” ) Men'shov, mentioned in Dostoevsky’s letter to his wife of 25 July /6 August 1879 (Pis'ma 4:76), may be the pro­ totype for Grushen'ka Svetlov, whose Polish ex-lover insists on calling her Agrippina, instead of Agrafena or Grushen'ka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 30)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rakitin is drawn after Grigory Eliseev (1821-91), a journalist whose biography was more or less that which Ivan projects for Rakitin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 30)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lawyer Fetiukovich is a composite drawing of several liberal&#xA;lawyers, Vladimir Spasovich (1829-1906) in particular&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(Page 31)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11077" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T17:00:34.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16043" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16052" CreationDate="2020-10-20T18:07:06.287" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a story (fable) that I remember reading or hearing when I was young (UK, probably between 2000-2010). It felt more like an older fable than a story written then in the 2000s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part I remember is of two men who were going for a long journey. This journey would take them through a large forest and based on the weather (or route) it might take a different amount of time. Either a quick journey or a long one. One man (angry man) packs enough food for the worst case scenario and it’s really heavy, the other man (happy man) only packs enough for the short journey and so is much lighter and happier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately the route ends up being the long one so the happy man runs out of food. He begs the angry man for some and agrees to lose an eye in exchange for some food. Sometime later he runs out of food again and exchanges his second eye for more food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t remember much else except me maybe regains his eyesight by a pool of water and there is a crow somewhere there too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have tried searching for this online but I haven’t hit on the right keywords to get the story yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9780" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T11:26:39.873" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:23:12.997" Title="Story about two men walking through the forest" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2957" CreationDate="2020-10-20T18:28:43.430" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I doubt this refers to a specific novel. It sounds to me like it references western literature, generally. If it referenced a specific book, I suspect he would have provided more details to indicate what actual novel he meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11165" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T18:28:43.430" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16036" CreationDate="2020-10-20T19:26:06.013" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to NLR in Australia, there are various ways to [get rid of mould in books]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HEPA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HEPA&lt;/a&gt; vacuum,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;gamma irradiation,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;freeze drying with anti-microbial treatments,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;fogging treatments,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vapourisation and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;vinegar / alcohol solutions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The page contains a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUdZOF_l374&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;video showing someone using a HEPA vacuum cleaner&lt;/a&gt;. The cost of this service is not mentioned on the NLR website; you need to request a quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The YouTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-bC87cd30U&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mould Removal&lt;/a&gt; by Archives Society of Alberta also demonstrates a method that is more appropriate for libraries and archives than for private individuals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you want to remove the mould yourself, most of the methods listed above require too much extra equipment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The YouTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqbzZAXkU2g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Smelly books: How to easily kill/remove mildew and mold spores&lt;/a&gt; proposes a different methods: put the book into a plastic bag (e.g. a zipper storage bag), add some sodium bicarbonate (also known as baking soda) and store this in the freezer for a week. The bag needs to be sealed very well and it is recommended to change the sodium bicarbonate a few times. (How often this should be done is not mentioned.) This should kill the mould. The video also mentions that putting the book in the microwave also works, but heat can damage some books, especially older ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The YouTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw7IBLIYZa8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How to Clean a Mould affected book&lt;/a&gt; shows how to remove mould using a tea tree oil, which consists of 5% tea tree and 95% ethanol. This video only shows how the covers are cleaned, not the pages inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The YouTube video &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCfhPLgsREU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Only Sure-Fire Way to Deal with Book-Mildew!&lt;/a&gt; by Steve Donoghue has a more radical way of getting mildew in books, but it comes at a price ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T19:26:06.013" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-20T22:45:45.010" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of Mr. Jones's gun’s placement at the foot of the flagpole? Is there anything that this represents?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11158" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T06:52:20.060" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T06:52:20.060" Title="In Animal Farm, what is the significance of the gun’s placement at the foot of the flagpole?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16040" CreationDate="2020-10-20T23:28:04.783" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norman Sanders's edition of &lt;em&gt;The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth&lt;/em&gt; (Penguin, 1981) glosses &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; (III.2.161) as &amp;quot;piece of shapeless matter&amp;quot;, which is rather less cosmic than the Biblical meaning. Sanders adds a comment to &amp;quot;unlicked bear-whelp&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was believed that bear cubs were born without form and licked into proper shape by their mother; hence the proverbial saying 'lick into shape'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The edition by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (RSC Shakespeare, 2012) glosses &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;shapeless mass&amp;quot; and has a footnote for &amp;quot;unlicked bear-whelp&amp;quot; that points out the same belief as Norman Sanders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most thoroughly annotated edition, by John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (Arden Shakespeare, Thomson Learning, 2001) glosses &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;amorphous mass or lump&amp;quot; (with a reference to the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;). For &amp;quot;unlicked bear-whelp&amp;quot;, Cox and Rasmussen add a quote from Arthur Golding's translation (published in 1567 and believed to have been used by Shakespeare) of Ovid's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(tr._Golding)/Book_15&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; (Book 15)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bearwhelp also which &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Beare hath newly littred, is no whelp immediatly.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But like an evill favored lump of flesh alyve dooth lye.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The dam by licking shapeth out his members orderly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of such a syse, as such a peece is able to conceyve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the editions cited above spells &amp;quot;chaos&amp;quot; in lowercase. The capitalised &amp;quot;Chaos&amp;quot; in the First Folio very likely had no special meaning; such capitalisations could even be introduced by typesetters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-20T23:28:04.783" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16111" CreationDate="2020-10-21T08:44:21.673" Score="5" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Les Miserables, one of the Protagonists, Fantine, attacks a citizen on the open street after he insulted her and put snow in the back of her dress. She is then arrested by Javert, the local police chief. In his office, he sentences her to six months of prison for attacking that man. The book tells us that he can do that and that it's within his power to sentence a prostitute to prison. Then the mayor, M. Madeleine, steps in and orders him to release the captive.&#xA;So my question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did a police chief have the power to sentence a criminal to jail time without a trial in the first place? I thought that there already were proper criminal courts in France at the time. Shouldn't she be put in front of one of those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does the mayor have the power to step in? Was criminal justice part of a mayor's job at that time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether this question is better suited for the literature or the history board, please forgive me if I'm mistaken for putting it here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11110" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T07:51:48.360" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T18:40:43.613" Title="In Les Miserables, why can Javert be the judge of Fantine and why does Monsieur Madeleine have the power to stop him?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16051" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3317" CreationDate="2020-10-21T10:41:31.960" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The dust jacket is more delicate than the stiff covers of a hardcover book, so it does not really be around the book while you're reading it. In fact, that is a good argument for temporarily removing the book jacket while you're reading the book. As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblio.com/book-value?page=book_value&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Biblio.com&lt;/a&gt; points out (emphasis added),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dust jacket is both the most decorative part of a book, and the most delicate. &lt;strong&gt;A missing dust jacket, or a dust jacket that is in poor condition, can cut a collectible book's value more than 50%&lt;/strong&gt;, and make it harder to find a buyer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.skinnerinc.com/news/blog/antique-books-value-guide/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Skinner Inc&lt;/a&gt; points out,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is one single thing that is a make or break for book value, it would be the dust jacket. The value of a first edition copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s &lt;em&gt;Tender is the Night&lt;/em&gt; with dust jacket is around $6,000. Without a dust jacket….$300. This huge difference in value is largely due to the fact that more than 90% of dust jackets are destroyed, either deliberately or due to their ephemeral and fragile nature. If you have one on a good book, treasure it and be sure to protect it with a plastic sleeve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(If you watch TV shows such as &lt;em&gt;The Antiques Road Show&lt;/em&gt;, you may have noticed that the condition of an old book greatly influences its value. This includes the presence and condition of the dust jacket, if the book originally had one.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, not all books are collectible, at least not when they are new. But even new hardcover books can become collectible later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The aesthetic argument and the information printed on the dust jacket, mentioned in NiceOrc's answer, are also valid, of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T10:41:31.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16043" CreationDate="2020-10-21T12:03:00.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is, apparently, a German story of the type&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Two Travelers: Truth and Falsehood&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;folktale of Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 613&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsurprisingly, the tables are turned by the end of the tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pitt.edu/%7Edash/type0613.html#grimm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Two Travelers: Truth and Falsehood&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What?&amp;quot; said the tailor. &amp;quot;Haul bread for seven days on one's back like a beast of burden and not be able to look about? I shall trust in God, and not trouble myself about anything. The money I have in my pocket is as good in summer as in winter, but in hot weather bread dries out and gets moldy on top of that. Even my coat reaches only to my ankles. Why shouldn't we find the right way? Bread for two days, and that's enough.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore each person bought his own bread, and then they tried their luck in the forest. It was as quiet there as in a church. No wind stirred, no brook murmured, no bird sang, and no sunbeam found its way through the thickly leaved branches. The shoemaker did not speak a word. The bread weighed so heavily on his back that the sweat streamed down his cross and gloomy face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tailor, however, was quite merry. Walking on with a spring in each step, he whistled on a leaf, or sang a song, and thought to himself, &amp;quot;God in heaven must be pleased that I am so happy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lasted two days, but on the third there was still no end to the forest, and the tailor had eaten up all his bread. Thus his heart sank down a yard deeper. Nevertheless, he did not lose courage, but relied on God and on his luck. On the evening of the third day he lay down hungry under a tree, and rose again the next morning still hungry. The fourth day was the same, and when the shoemaker seated himself on a fallen tree and devoured his dinner the tailor was only a spectator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he begged for a little piece of bread, the other laughed mockingly, and said, &amp;quot;You have always been so merry. Now you can see for once what it is like to be sad. Birds that sing too early in the morning are caught by the hawk in the evening.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, he was merciless. On the fifth morning the poor tailor could no longer stand up and was hardly able to utter one word for weakness. His cheeks were white, and his eyes were red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the shoemaker said to him, &amp;quot;I will give you a bit of bread today, but in return for it, I will put out your right eye.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:23:12.997" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:23:12.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-21T14:03:40.207" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope that's the right site to post this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a famous quote of Helen Keller's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder - what is this about?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is the context?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What did she mean?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who is being caught and who is the catcher?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And most importantly - what was the basis of her assumption?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11175" LastEditorUserId="11175" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T14:52:03.840" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T14:52:03.840" Title="Helen Keller quote about avoiding danger: context and meaning" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;helen-keller&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16054" CreationDate="2020-10-21T14:48:08.800" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/letushavefaith00hele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let Us Have Faith&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a book published in 1940, i.e. after the beginning of World War II. (Keller mentions &amp;quot;the wrecking of half a civilization&amp;quot; in the book's first sentence.) Because of those dark times, Keller wanted people to have faith (page 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For faith is thought directed toward good, and like all thought-power it is infinite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote in the question comes from the chapter entitled &amp;quot;Faith Fears Not&amp;quot;, more specifically a paragraph that discusses &amp;quot;security&amp;quot;. By security, I assume Keller means the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_security&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eternal security&lt;/a&gt;, also known as &amp;quot;once saved, always saved&amp;quot;. Keller writes (pages 50-51):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist&#xA;in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole&#xA;experience it. God Himself is not secure, having&#xA;given man dominion over His works! Avoiding&#xA;danger is no safer in the long run than outright&#xA;exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the&#xA;bold. Faith alone defends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calvinism affirms the doctrine of eternal security, whereas Catholic theology does not. However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller#Writings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Helen Keller's faith&lt;/a&gt; was influenced by the Swedish theologian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg#Sola_Fide_(Faith_Alone)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emanuel Swedenborg&lt;/a&gt;, who rejected the concept of salvation through faith-alone, a doctrine that was important to Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli and other Protestant reformers. This may have influenced Keller's stance against the doctrine of eternal security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T14:48:08.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16056" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16057" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" Score="0" Body="Questions about lexicology and sociolinguistics are off topic." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T15:30:12.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-21T18:03:49.240" Score="3" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm searching for the source of the Japanese story of a samurai spat upon which Joseph Campbell relates in &lt;em&gt;The Power of Myth.&lt;/em&gt; (Oddly, the book has no citation on this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . . there is a story . . . of the samurai, the Japanese warrior, who&#xA;had the duty to avenge the murder of his overlord. When he cornered&#xA;the man who had murdered his overlord, and he was about to deal with&#xA;him with his samurai sword, the man in the corner, in the passion of&#xA;terror, spat in the warrior’s face. And the warrior sheathed the sword&#xA;and walked away. [he did this] because he was made angry, and if he&#xA;had killed that man in anger, then it would have been a personal act.&#xA;And he had come to do another kind of act, an impersonal act of&#xA;vengeance . . .&#xA;&lt;br/&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers&lt;/em&gt;, page 75.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a primary source or reference to the original source to this Japanese story or legend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware of Islamic/ Sufi stories with similar plot elements, but I'm interested in the Japanese story Campbell mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have asked a well-read friend in Japan but he is unaware of this legend.&#xA;I have also searched in &lt;em&gt;The Revenge of the Forty-seven Samurai&lt;/em&gt; - Haugaard, Erik Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11176" LastEditorUserId="11176" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T21:30:57.717" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T21:30:57.717" Title="Source of the Japanese story Joseph Campbell tells of a samurai spat upon in The Power of Myth" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;joseph-campbell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16060" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16065" CreationDate="2020-10-21T20:24:39.697" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Crow Improvises&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://mr-stapleton.livejournal.com/284547.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;text version&lt;/a&gt;), the protagonist conjoins a list of disparate objects, where each pair of objects ignites a spark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting aside the symbolic meaning of each object, it is clear to me what each object &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; - except for one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was this man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who took the sun in one hand, a leaf in the other -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The spark that jumped burned out his name.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So he took his &lt;strong&gt;lavender-bag ancestors&lt;/strong&gt; under one arm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And his twisting dog under the other -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The spark that flash-thumped fused his watch of all things,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And left a black orifice instead of a time-sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Considering that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;lavender bag&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachet?oldformat=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sachet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;lavender-bag&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; is used here as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnoun?oldformat=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;adnoun&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;ancestors&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;lavender-bag ancestors&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T22:17:02.237" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T23:53:11.463" Title="What could &quot;lavender-bag ancestors&quot; mean in Ted Hughes' &quot;Crow Improvises&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16035" CreationDate="2020-10-21T21:58:45.097" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your recollections match very well (I would say, precisely) a pretty famous Russian poem by Samuil Marshak, &lt;em&gt;Рассеянный с улицы Бассейной&lt;/em&gt;, written in 1930. I found quite a number of English translations in Internet, but they all seem to be fairly recent and amateurish, so I cannot point the version you have read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best bet is to find a paper edition of Marshak's poetry collection, and look for something like &lt;em&gt;What an absent-minded guy&lt;/em&gt; (this is how it is called in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuil_Marshak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wiki page on Marshak&lt;/a&gt;); I am sure the piece would be there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: In the original, he was wearing gloves on his feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3099" LastEditorUserId="3099" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T00:42:02.743" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T00:42:02.743" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16062" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-21T22:26:49.447" Score="2" ViewCount="467" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;, where is Napoleon during the battle of the cowshed? Is this significant? Please explain in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11158" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T06:50:52.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T21:51:23.710" Title="Where is Napoleon during the battle of the cowshed?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16063" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-21T23:42:00.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-21T23:42:00.750" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T23:42:00.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16064" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-21T23:42:00.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the deaf-blind author, activist, and lecturer Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)  or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T19:50:27.580" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T19:50:27.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16065" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16060" CreationDate="2020-10-21T23:53:11.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It popped up to me that it could be a typical Hughesean macabre way of referring to the protagonist's ancestors' cremation remains, put into a sachet bag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation suits well to the refraining chorus of burned up objects, and also with those two lines that refer to mourning and burial:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The spark that banged burned out his weeper.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So he leaned one hand on a gravestone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2020-10-21T23:53:11.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2290" CreationDate="2020-10-22T03:31:51.017" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; - Act 1, Scene 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First Witch:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in a sieve, I'll thither sail,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, like a rat without a tail,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11178" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T09:58:32.080" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T09:58:32.080" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16033" CreationDate="2020-10-22T07:13:58.657" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lady Macbeth received Macbeth's letter about witches' prophesy and became ambitious, immoral and a tempter. She did say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unsex me here&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this has nothing to do with her gender, a lot of times it has happened in history that women have played deceitfully, immorally and cruelly for example you can take Helena, wife of Chandragupta Maurya and daughter of Alexander's General Seleucus Nicator, was &lt;a href=&quot;https://nationalviews.com/facts-helena-maurya-chandra-gupta-maurya-wife#:%7E:text=Helena%20Maurya%20in%20Chakravartin%20Ashoka,or%20even%20get%20him%20killed.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cruel and ambitious&lt;/a&gt; too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only way for Lady Macbeth to gain power is through Macbeth using her rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was true, she rewired the brain of Macbeth (which was already fighting with the &lt;em&gt;ambitious&lt;/em&gt; Devil) and made him to do what he &lt;em&gt;feared&lt;/em&gt;. But not only she used rhetoric but also showed &lt;em&gt;masculinity&lt;/em&gt; by taking the blooded daggers from Macbeth and placing it &lt;em&gt;there&lt;/em&gt;. But again this rhetoric persuasion should not be related with gender, as we find in Julius Caesar; Cassius persuaded Brutus with murderous  thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do you think that the tragedy of Macbeth is the consequence of Macbeth is being too sensitive to masculinity? What does Masculinity mean for Macbeth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth was not less masculine, in Act 1 Scene 2 he is depicted as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;for brave Macbeth – well he deserves that name&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he is considered violent too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He unseamed him from the nave to th’chops&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but it is unjust to think of his pure conscience as a sensitive masculine character, he after murdering the king Duncan expresses his inner voice as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am afraid to think what I have done;&#xA;Look on't again I dare not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, considering the above saying of Macbeth and comparing it with &amp;quot;He unseamed him from the nave to th’chops&amp;quot; it doesn't seem that Macbeth was afraid of &lt;em&gt;blood&lt;/em&gt;, he was afraid of &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Higher Self&lt;/em&gt;, even at his death his last words were&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;. . .my soul is clog’d with blood—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I cannot rise! I dare not ask for mercy—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is too late, he drags me down; I sink,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I sink, — my soul is lost forever! — Oh! — Oh!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He thinks and worries about his soul, his feeling of guilt was overtaking him. The hallucination of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banquo#:%7E:text=Lord%20Banquo%20%2F%CB%88b%C3%A6,meet%20the%20Three%20Witches%20together.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Banquo&lt;/a&gt; was just another portrayal of how deeply Macbeth was aware of his murderous sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some of the lines in Macbeth that do demonstrate gender hierarchy, Macbeth said to Lady Macbeth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bring forth men-children only;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For thy undaunted mettle should compose nothing but males&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Witches warned Macbeth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth! be bloody, bold and resolute;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;laugh to scorn the power of &lt;strong&gt;man&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for none of &lt;strong&gt;woman&lt;/strong&gt; born shall harm Macbeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To re-quote your question&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Masculinity mean for Macbeth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth was valor, and respected by whole men of Duncan. Macbeth knew what sins always bring to the sinners at last, his extreme feeling of guilt and consequential hallucination was because of the transparency of his heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T07:13:58.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16068" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-22T07:30:01.287" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Nobel prize winning work &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitanjali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Rabdinranath Tagore quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lilies and jasmines surge up on the &lt;strong&gt;crest&lt;/strong&gt; of the &lt;strong&gt;waves&lt;/strong&gt; of light&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is he referring to the actual &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/science/light/The-Michelson-Morley-experiment&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;electromagnetic wave&lt;/a&gt; nature of light? The mention of &lt;em&gt;crest&lt;/em&gt; seems to suggest that he is, but given that &lt;strong&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/strong&gt; was written in 1910 and by that time the particle nature of light was also discovered it seems quite odd to think like that. And given the family background of Rabindranath Tagore, his previous generation was also devoted to music, literature and philosophy and his brothers were too in the field of art and bureaucracy, so that kind of scientific allusion seems a little off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the analysis of that line and does it have any scientific allusions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:22:35.450" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:22:35.450" Title="Is Rabindranth Tagore talking about the actual wave nature of light here in Gitanjali?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;gitanjali&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16069" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-22T11:33:01.453" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 9 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Earl of Verlond was a stickler for punctuality: a grim, bent old man, with a face that, so &lt;strong&gt;Society&lt;/strong&gt; said, told eloquently the story of his life, his bitter tongue was sufficient to maintain for him the respect—or if not the respect, the fear that so ably substitutes respect—of his friends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that &amp;quot;Society&amp;quot; refers here to &amp;quot;rich and fashionable people&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it usual for &amp;quot;Society&amp;quot; to be written with an initial capital? or does it mean certain society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T13:06:38.797" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T13:06:38.797" Title="Was it usual for &quot;Society&quot; to be written with an initial capital?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16070" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15990" CreationDate="2020-10-22T13:26:35.320" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;After the first mention of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Bernard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Claude Bernard&lt;/a&gt;, Mitya uses him as a sort of personalised synecdoche for the worldview that he feels such scientists represent, the conquest of religion by science.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;Bernard&amp;quot; appears 13 times in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-h/28054-h.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the text of &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Most of them are already quoted in your question, and the others shed no further light on the meaning of the term as used by Mitya, being just further reminders that he uses the term without anyone understanding what he means by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He sees &amp;quot;savants&amp;quot; such as chemists as &amp;quot;all scoundrels&amp;quot;, and nowadays &amp;quot;all over the place&amp;quot;, but why? His thought process may be revealed by another quote from Mitya in Book XI, Chapter IV (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That I am sorry to lose God? It's chemistry, brother, chemistry! &lt;strong&gt;There's no help for it, your reverence, you must make way for chemistry. And Rakitin does dislike God.&lt;/strong&gt; Ough! doesn't he dislike Him! That's the sore point with all of them. But they conceal it. They tell lies. They pretend. ‘Will you preach this in your reviews?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, well, if I did it openly, they won't let it through,’ he said. He laughed. ‘But what will become of men then?’ I asked him, ‘without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?’ ‘Didn't you know?’ he said laughing, ‘a clever man can do what he likes,’ he said. ‘A clever man knows his way about, but you've put your foot in it, committing a murder, and now you are rotting in prison.’ He says that to my face! A regular pig! I used to kick such people out, but now I listen to them. He talks a lot of sense, too. Writes well. He began reading me an article last week. I copied out three lines of it. Wait a minute. Here it is.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God is also mentioned in the passage that you quote from Book XII, Chapter II (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Since I've been arrested, he has borrowed money from me! &lt;strong&gt;He is a contemptible Bernard and opportunist, and he doesn't believe in God&lt;/strong&gt;; he took the bishop in!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems from these lines that Mitya sees scientific advances, such as those made by Claude Bernard, to be a threat to God and religion. Without context, it's impossible to make the connection between this worldview and the word &amp;quot;Bernard&amp;quot;, which is why other characters are mystified by his references to &amp;quot;Bernards&amp;quot;. But the reader, unlike most of the characters, has the advantage of having seen Mitya's exchange with Alyosha where Bernard is first mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T13:26:35.320" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16071" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-22T17:43:37.917" Score="9" ViewCount="1346" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a short story about three robots sent as ambassadors to (I think) Mars. It was an attempt by Earth to prevent a Martian invasion or war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The robots arrived in a spaceship designed for them - no defence from lack of atmosphere etc, which confused the Martians. However, the Martians were quite arrogant and felt they were still superior. The Martians assume that the robots are earthlings and their arrogant behaviour towards the robots prevents them from explaining they are mistaken. The Martians remain dismissive of earthlings and provide a guided tour of Mars in order to display their superiority. On the tour, one of the robots enters an acid lake (out of curiosity) and reappears unharmed, carrying the dead body of one of the most feared creatures on the planet. The robots are apologetic for the accidental death of the creature, but by now the Martians are subdued. They rethink their plans to invade Earth, thinking that all earthlings are like the robots.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cannot remember the title or who it was by. Can anyone help?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11182" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T06:28:29.053" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T06:28:29.053" Title="Searching for a sci-fi short story: three robots sent as ambassadors to prevent an interplanetary war" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16074" CreationDate="2020-10-22T18:28:37.273" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book about 15 years ago and I don't remember hardly any of the details at all. What I do remember of the plot is that a white man pays a black man a hefty sum of money in order to keep him caged in his basement for a specified amount of time (a month? a year?). Possibly motivated by some combination of white guilt or a personal fetish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the cover may have been a picture of some aspect of a house in black and white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wish I had more details. I haven't had any leads Googling this stuff either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11183" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T18:42:14.347" Title="Novel about a man who voluntarily has himself locked in another man's basement" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16071" CreationDate="2020-10-22T18:40:19.920" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that the planet was actually Jupiter? In that case, the story may be Isaac Asimov's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victory Unintentional&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what extent do the characteristics of both descriptions (question and Wikipedia article) match?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;three robots&amp;quot;: ZZ One, ZZ Two, and ZZ Three,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;spaceship designed for them&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;spacecraft ... does not need to provide them with any protection against outer space&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;arrogance, feeling superior: &amp;quot;the Jovians are culturally inclined to believe themselves superior&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;dismissive of earthlings&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;believe themselves superior to the extent that they consider all other life forms, including humans, 'vermin'&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;acid&amp;quot;: not mentioned on Wikipedia, which has &amp;quot;immunity to extremes of heat, cold and radiation&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;dead body of one of the most feared creatures on the planet&amp;quot;: not mentioned on Wikipedia,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;They rethink their plans to invade Earth&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;the Jovians (...), unexpectedly, swear eternal peace with humanity&amp;quot;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;thinking that all earthlings are like the robots&amp;quot;: &amp;quot; ZZ Three thoughtfully realizes that the three robots never thought to mention that they were robots, and the Jovians must have simply mistakenly assumed that they were humans.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, I think this story matches the description very well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T18:40:19.920" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16072" CreationDate="2020-10-22T18:42:14.347" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Gu5bDwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Man in My Basement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2004) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mosley&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter Mosley&lt;/a&gt;. From a review on goodreads.com:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story begins with a strange request: a wealthy white man named Bennet asks to rent out the basement of the home of Charles Blakey, who is black. Bennet builds a cage in the basement, and eventually locks himself inside it. Blakey is confused by the man’s actions, and after some philosophical discussions, learns that Bennet is trying to atone for something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Diane’s Reviews (2007). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4585307&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Review of &lt;em&gt;The Man in My Basement&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. goodreads.com.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching for “site:goodreads.com cage basement”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-22T18:42:14.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16075" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16076" CreationDate="2020-10-22T19:36:16.343" Score="9" ViewCount="800" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Passing_of_Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Idylls of the King: The Passing of Arthur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Alfred Tennyson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To him replied the bold Sir Bedivere:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'&lt;strong&gt;It is not meet&lt;/strong&gt;, Sir King, to leave thee thus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Aidless, alone, and smitten through the helm—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A little thing may harm a wounded man;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet I thy hest will all perform at full,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Watch what I see, and lightly bring thee word.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;it is not meet&amp;quot; mean in the context of leaving someone ill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10751" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-22T19:54:22.880" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T07:56:44.827" Title="What does &quot;It is not meet&quot; mean in &quot;Idylls of the King&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;&lt;idylls-of-the-king&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16075" CreationDate="2020-10-22T19:40:00.840" Score="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is not meet&amp;quot; basically means &amp;quot;it is not appropriate&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;it is not right&amp;quot; (probably a better interpretation in this context). He's saying, more or less, that they shouldn't just leave Arthur in the state he's in, but someone should stay with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meet, as defined in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/meet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[archaic]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Suitable; fit; proper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't pop up as a definition if you just search for &amp;quot;meet meaning&amp;quot;, mind! You have to be sure to search for &amp;quot;meet meaning adjective&amp;quot;, or some combination thereof.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11184" LastEditorUserId="11184" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T07:56:44.827" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T07:56:44.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15998" CreationDate="2020-10-23T05:36:14.507" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Iblees Ki Majlis-e-Shura&amp;quot; has been artfully translated as &amp;quot;Satan's Parliament&amp;quot; by V. G. Kiernan in his 1955 book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.2950/page/n109/mode/2up?q=%22satan%27s+parliament%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems from Iqbal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translation is quite different from the snippets translated by Raja for &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20110904123200/http://www.asianpa.net/ijapa/v-1-08/3.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his paper&lt;/a&gt;, but by comparing the sections described by Raja with the corresponding sections of Kiernan's translation, you can see that they are the same poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where Raja has (Satan speaking):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I showed the &lt;em&gt;Farangi&lt;/em&gt; the dream of kingship&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I broke the spell of the Church and the mosque&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I taught the poor the lesson of fate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I gave the rich the madness of capitalism&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who can dowse this raging fire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That blazes with the vigor of &lt;em&gt;Iblees&lt;/em&gt; (Raja, 2008, p. 42)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiernan has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I it was&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who drew in Europe's brain the fantasy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of empire, I who snapped the spell of mosque,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of church, of temple ; I who taught the homeless&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That all is ruled by Fate, and filled their guardians&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With capitalism's hot frenzy. Who shall quench&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The devouring blaze in him whose paroxysm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fires that rage in Satan's soul have fed (Kiernan, 1955, p. 79)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, Raja has (third advisor speaking):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what’s the answer to the mischief of that wise Jew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That Moses without light, that cross-less Jesus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not a prophet, but with a book under his arm (Raja, 2008, p. 44)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Kiernan has (third counsellor speaking):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what answer shall we give&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To that accursed creature, that vile Jew,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That prophet of no Sinai, that Messiah&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Without a cross—no messenger of God,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet in his clasp a Book? (Kiernan, 1955, p. 81)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other parallels. Both Raja (p. 45) and Kiernan in his Notes (p. 110) identify the &amp;quot;Jew&amp;quot; as Karl Marx.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that Raja's translation may have been ad hoc and limited to the excerpts he was quoting in his English-language paper. Kiernan has translated the entire poem as well as over 100 other works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I recommend reading Kiernan's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.2950/page/n27/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note on his translation&lt;/a&gt; before reading the poem itself. You may also want to refer to the Notes section at the end of the book while reading the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kiernan, V. G. (1955). &lt;em&gt;Poems from Iqbal&lt;/em&gt;. John Murray Ltd.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Raja, M. A. (2008). Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, the West, and the quest for a modern Muslim identity. &lt;em&gt;International Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association, 1&lt;/em&gt;(1), 37-49.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T05:36:14.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16079" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16163" CreationDate="2020-10-23T07:27:49.993" Score="3" ViewCount="160" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;,‎ Henry Bolingbroke raises an army and comes to demand King Richard return his ancestral lands.‎ However,‎ he claims that if they are restored,‎ he will return to being a loyal citizen,‎ and Richard accepts.‎ In the next scene however,‎ Richard is coming to Bolingbroke to announce his resignation.‎ Is there an explanation for what changed in between those two exchanges?‎ Did Bolingbroke always intended to depose Richard,‎ but just was acting deferential for appearances?‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11142" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T08:06:03.297" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T09:56:21.820" Title="Why does Richard step down in Shakespeare's Richard II" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-ii&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16080" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16081" CreationDate="2020-10-23T08:23:23.750" Score="2" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of Shakespeare's plays are written in iambic pentameter,‎ which is part of what makes the verse so powerful.‎ However,‎ due to differences between different manuscripts of the text, and words that have a different number of syllables in Shakespeare's English than ours,‎ it is often hard for a layperson to determine how a given line breaks up into the appropriate meter.‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example,‎ this line of &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; where John of Gaunt addresses his son Henry Bolingbroke:‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honour&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And not the king exiled thee; or suppose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Devouring pestilence hangs in our air&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And thou art flying to a fresher clime&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard for me to see how you could fit the first line into ten syllables.‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering if there is some scholarly work that has broken the lines up,‎ or someone who comments on these things,‎ or merely if anyone has tips for a novice trying to find the meter for verses in Shakespeare when it seems ambiguous.‎&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11142" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-23T11:57:37.057" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T10:01:43.050" Title="Resources for determining the meter of a line in Shakespeare" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;richard-ii&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16081" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16080" CreationDate="2020-10-23T11:59:30.890" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Reading comes first&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s plays are written to be spoken by actors on stage, to convey meaning, nuance, and emotion to an audience. This dramatic purpose comes first, before considerations of metre. So the way to scan Shakespeare’s verse drama is to start by reading it aloud, and figuring out where the stress needs to go to best convey the sense, without worrying (at this stage) where the foot boundaries go, or how to fit the stresses into the metre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s how I read this passage (stressed syllables in bold):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Go&lt;/strong&gt;, say &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; sent thee &lt;strong&gt;forth&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;purch&lt;/strong&gt;ase &lt;strong&gt;hon&lt;/strong&gt;our&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;king&lt;/strong&gt; ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt;† thee; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; sup&lt;strong&gt;pose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De&lt;strong&gt;vour&lt;/strong&gt;ing &lt;strong&gt;pest&lt;/strong&gt;ilence &lt;strong&gt;hangs&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;strong&gt;our air&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;thou&lt;/strong&gt; art &lt;strong&gt;fly&lt;/strong&gt;ing to a &lt;strong&gt;fresh&lt;/strong&gt;er &lt;strong&gt;clime&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† See the “Language change” section below for “ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt;”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first line, I’ve put stress on “I” rather than “sent” because Gaunt is saying that it would be expedient to pretend that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; has sent Bolingbroke away, not the king. Thus the “I” in the first line contrasts with the “king” in the second, and both words should be stressed to bring out this contrast. For the same reason I have stressed “our” in the third line. In the second line, I’ve put a stress on “or” to bring out that Gaunt is casting about for alternative ways to console his son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you have a different interpretation of the passage, you might prefer to put the stress on other words! If you disagree with me about the point being to contrast “I” and “king”, then you might prefer to stress “sent” in the first line and leave “our” unstressed in the third. Similarly, you might prefer to stress “thee” rather than “or” in the second line. There are many ways to deliver Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have a line-reading that you like, then you can figure out how to scan it as iambic metre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Exceptions in iambic metre&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare was writing in iambic pentameter. But if every line were to scan perfectly, the result would be terribly monotonous. Some flexibility in metre is necessary to allow the poet to break the monotony, employ a wider and more natural choice of expressions, and throw stress on significant parts of the line. So within the English poetic tradition, iambic metre came to allow certain kinds of exception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, each of the five feet should be iambic. But that proved hard to manage in any spirited and spontaneous kind of language. Custom quickly came to license the following exceptions, and if we must date the event it was during that period when modern English was finding its poetic language, a period concluded triumphantly in the verse of Sidney and Spenser.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two unstressed syllables could replace the one which iambic permits, if “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elision&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elision&lt;/a&gt;” was possible whether actually in speech, or only theoretically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;An extra unstressed syllable after the tenth made a “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feminine ending&lt;/a&gt;,” and did not count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In any foot except the last the iambic could be reversed, i.e., replaced by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochaic foot&lt;/a&gt;.†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are substantially the exceptions as codified by [Robert] Bridges in &lt;em&gt;The Prosody of Milton&lt;/em&gt;‡, the best handbook we have on iambic pentameters. What Bridges codified was Milton’s code, as it had been for several generations the code of Milton’s predecessors, and would be for his successors over a century and a half; since then it has been well known to poet-prosodists, and adhered to systematically when they pleased. But it is not quite complete, in my judgment. I wish Bridges had added:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;4&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any two successive iambic feet might be replaced by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionic_meter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;double or ionic foot&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Crowe Ransom (1956). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4333692&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Strange Music of English Verse&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;The Kenyon Review&lt;/em&gt; 18:3, p. 471.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Most prosodists also allow substitution by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spondee&lt;/a&gt;, including in the last foot. ‡ Sic; the work is titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924014156859/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Milton’s Prosody&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these exceptions in mind, we can scan my preferred reading as follows. In the first line the first two feet are substituted with trochees (Ransom’s exception 3) and there is a feminine ending (exception 2):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Go&lt;/strong&gt;, say | &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; sent | thee &lt;strong&gt;forth&lt;/strong&gt; | to &lt;strong&gt;purch-&lt;/strong&gt; | ase &lt;strong&gt;hon&lt;/strong&gt;our&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second line is regular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; | the &lt;strong&gt;king&lt;/strong&gt; | ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt; | thee; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; | sup&lt;strong&gt;pose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third line the fourth foot is substituted with a trochee and the fifth with a spondee, but there is a problem with the third foot, which doesn’t have any stress:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De&lt;strong&gt;vour-&lt;/strong&gt; | ing &lt;strong&gt;pest&lt;/strong&gt; | ilence | &lt;strong&gt;hangs&lt;/strong&gt; in | &lt;strong&gt;our air&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can rescue the scansion by placing a little stress on “-lence”, a so-called “promoted stress” or “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_stress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;secondary stress&lt;/a&gt;”, making the foot an iamb. English always has some variation in stress on adjacent syllables, so this is not unreasonable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth line also needs a promoted stress on “to”, but is otherwise regular:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;strong&gt;thou&lt;/strong&gt; | art &lt;strong&gt;fly-&lt;/strong&gt; | ing &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; | a &lt;strong&gt;fresh-&lt;/strong&gt; | er &lt;strong&gt;clime&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;What if this doesn’t work?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might find, after going through this exercise, that your preferred reading can’t be scanned as iambic pentameter, even after employing all the exceptions. There are a few reasons why this might happen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You’ve misunderstood the line and so put some of the stresses in wrong places. You might look at annotated editions of the play to see how other readers have interpreted the line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare pronounced some of the words with stresses in different places. For example, “exiled” in the second line of this passage. See the “Language change” section below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The line is exceptional. For example, a couple of lines before this passage, there’s the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think not the king did banish thee&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which has only eight syllables. Either two syllables two have been lost from this line, or else Shakespeare was content to vary the rhythm with an occasional tetrameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Language change&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When scanning Shakespeare, we always have to bear in mind that four hundred years of language change have taken place, and so Shakespeare and his contemporaries pronounced words and phrases somewhat differently from us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the passage from &lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt; the main difficulty of this form is “exiled” in the second line, which is now always pronounced “&lt;strong&gt;ex&lt;/strong&gt;iled”, with the stress on the first syllable. However, it seems that Shakespeare could also pronounce it “ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt;”, with the stress on the second syllable, if he chose. It has this property in common with many other English words of French origin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps there is no language in which, within a comparatively short period, more words have shifted their accent, than has been the case in the English tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking generally, the wholesale stress-shifting which French words had undergone in becoming English ones, had been consummated before Shakespeare’s time; still, the number of deviations from the modern practice in this regard to be found in his works, is a very respectable one. Of such deviations we give examples in the first column of the following list […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ex&lt;strong&gt;ile&lt;/strong&gt; (verb) &lt;em&gt;M. N. D.&lt;/em&gt; iii, 2, 386.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Bastiaan Adriaan Pieter van Dam and Cornelis Stoffel (1900). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/williamshakespe00stofgoog/page/n189/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare: Prosody and Text&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 178–180&lt;/a&gt;. Leyden: E. J. Brill.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line referred to is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They wilfully themselves exil’d from light,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (c. 1595). &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night’s Dream&lt;/em&gt;, act III scene II.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An even clearer example of the phenomenon is this line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both you and I, for Romeo is exil’d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (c. 1595). &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, act III scene II.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This kind of internal evidence for pronunciation can never be wholly conclusive: we can’t use the scansion to tell us the stress unless we know what Shakespeare intended it to be, which we don’t. But the line from &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; would be quite ugly with “&lt;strong&gt;ex&lt;/strong&gt;iled”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Resources&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several web sites which give scansions for Shakespeare’s complete works. But you mustn’t take these as gospel, because as discussed above, the scansion has to follow from the stress that you put on the lines when reading, and that depends on how you interpret the lines, and what you think needs to be conveyed to the audience. Different interpretations will give rise to different scansions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://prescannedshakespeare.aruffo.com/history/rch2/rch21_3.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prescanned Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt; gives the following scansion. Their notation uses &lt;code&gt;^&lt;/code&gt; for an elision (exception 1), &lt;code&gt;2&lt;/code&gt; for two unstressed syllables in a foot, &lt;code&gt;T&lt;/code&gt; for a “double foot in which three long syllables are put together”, and &lt;code&gt;??&lt;/code&gt; for a difficult line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ,           ,           ,         ,          ,&#xA; Go say^I | sent thee | forth to | purchase | honor  ??&#xA;      ,          ,     T  T    T      2     ,&#xA; And not | the king | exiled thee;| or suppose&#xA;    ,        ,      ,       ,             ,&#xA; Devour|ing pest|ilence | hangs in | our air&#xA;       ,         ,       ,       ,        ,&#xA; And thou | art fly|ing to | a fresh|er clime:&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion this is a terrible way to scan the passage! It is hard to read, misses the sense, destroys the iambic rhythm by substituting all five feet in the first line, and the “double foot [with] three long syllables” is not admitted as an iambic variant by Bridges, Ransom or other prosodists. Therefore I would advise caution when using this site!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespearescanned.com/shakespeare.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare Scanned&lt;/a&gt; gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Go, &lt;strong&gt;say&lt;/strong&gt; I &lt;strong&gt;sent&lt;/strong&gt; thee &lt;strong&gt;forth&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;purch&lt;/strong&gt;ase &lt;strong&gt;hon&lt;/strong&gt;our&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;king&lt;/strong&gt; ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt; thee; &lt;strong&gt;or&lt;/strong&gt; sup&lt;strong&gt;pose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De&lt;strong&gt;vour&lt;/strong&gt;ing &lt;strong&gt;pest&lt;/strong&gt;i&lt;strong&gt;lence&lt;/strong&gt; hangs &lt;strong&gt;in&lt;/strong&gt; our &lt;strong&gt;air&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;thou&lt;/strong&gt; art &lt;strong&gt;fly&lt;/strong&gt;ing &lt;strong&gt;to&lt;/strong&gt; a &lt;strong&gt;fresh&lt;/strong&gt;er &lt;strong&gt;clime&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This scansion regularizes all the feet (except for the feminine ending in the first line), which seems a little dull to me. Also, it is hard to reconcile an unstressed “Go” in the first line with the comma that follows it. But at least this scansion is readable, unlike the one at Prescanned Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Example performance&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo-J9wOGI28#t=33m28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here’s Michael Pennington&lt;/a&gt; delivering the speech at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His choices for this passage are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Go&lt;/strong&gt;, say &lt;strong&gt;I&lt;/strong&gt; sent thee &lt;strong&gt;forth&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;purch&lt;/strong&gt;ase &lt;strong&gt;hon&lt;/strong&gt;our&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;king&lt;/strong&gt; ex&lt;strong&gt;iled&lt;/strong&gt; thee; or sup&lt;strong&gt;pose&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De&lt;strong&gt;vour&lt;/strong&gt;ing &lt;strong&gt;pest&lt;/strong&gt;ilence &lt;strong&gt;hangs&lt;/strong&gt; in our &lt;strong&gt;air&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;thou&lt;/strong&gt; art &lt;strong&gt;fly&lt;/strong&gt;ing to a &lt;strong&gt;fresh&lt;/strong&gt;er &lt;strong&gt;clime&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But other actors will make different choices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-24T10:01:43.050" LastActivityDate="2020-10-24T10:01:43.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16098" CreationDate="2020-10-23T15:20:52.513" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nick Joaquin's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Literature/Short%20Stories/May%20Day%20Eve.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May Day Eve&lt;/a&gt; skips back and forth between different eras of time. There is the night after a party when a young woman and young man look in a mirror and meet each other; then, in the future, the woman tells her daughter and the man tells his grandson about that meeting. In the end, it's made clear that all of them are part of the same family in the future:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What a horrid mirror this is, Grandpa,&amp;quot; whispered the boy. [...] &amp;quot;Well, you saw this witch in it. And Mama once told me that Grandma once told her that Grandma once saw the devil in this mirror. Was it of the scare that Grandma died?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Badoy started. For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had perished---the poor Agueda; that they were at peace at last, the two of them, her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the earth---from the trap of a May night; from the snare of summer; from the terrible silver nets of the moon. She had been a mere heap of white hair and bones in the end: a whimpering withered consumptive, lashing out with her cruel tongue; her eye like live coals; her face like ashes... Now, nothing--- nothing save a name on a stone; save a stone in a graveyard---nothing! was left of the young girl who had flamed so vividly in a mirror one wild May Day midnight, long, long ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the boy's mother is the woman's daughter ... but now which grandfather is that? There are two options: either the man and woman from the party night eventually got married, or they both found other partners but their children got married and produced the grandson. &lt;strong&gt;Is there enough evidence in the story to conclude which of these is the case?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I noticed that Agueda talking to her daughter compares the &amp;quot;devil&amp;quot; she saw in the mirror to her &amp;quot;Papa&amp;quot;, suggesting that the young man she met there was her future husband. But the way that Don Badoy remembers Agueda somehow doesn't seem like he's remembering his own dead wife, so overall I'm not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T23:45:06.540" Title="Who are/were the man and woman in Nick Joaquin's &quot;May Day Eve&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16084" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-23T17:40:05.257" Score="1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nick Joaquin's story &amp;quot;The Order of Melchizedek&amp;quot;, Sid and Mrs. Borja are trying to retrieve a card that Sid had pushed down an edge of the upholstery in a taxi. The girl who has washed the taxi tells them she sometimes finds things that had been forgotten in taxis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes I look in the cars first, but not always , no-just to see was something forgotten. Sometimes a magazine, or a fallen coin. Very often, panties. Aie, &lt;em&gt;por bida man guid&lt;/em&gt;, I would not touch those, no, not even if golden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;por bida man guid&amp;quot; mean? I have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&amp;amp;q=%22por+bido+man+guid%22&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unable to find the phrase online&lt;/a&gt;. &amp;quot;Bida&amp;quot; reminded me of &amp;quot;vida&amp;quot;, as in the Spanish phrase &amp;quot;en mi vida&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;never in my life&amp;quot;), which would make sense in this context. (The Philippines were a Spanish colony from 1565 to 1898.) But it could also be a phrase from one of the local languages, such as Tagalog or Cebuano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-23T17:40:05.257" Title="What does 'por bida man guid' mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16085" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-24T19:34:55.180" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nick Joaquin's story &amp;quot;Cándido's Apocalypse&amp;quot;, the 17-year-old Bobby starts behaving rather strangely. After going &amp;quot;stowaway&amp;quot; and being brought back home, he wakes up the next morning and sees his father sitting on his bed. Bobby now sees his father in a different light than before,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and he was reminded about what they said was the difference between &lt;em&gt;siga&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;rugged&lt;/em&gt;: that some boys thought they were &lt;em&gt;rugged&lt;/em&gt; and acted &lt;em&gt;siga&lt;/em&gt; until they got one real thrashing that knocked the wind out of them and after that they could never be confident again, but the real &lt;em&gt;rugged&lt;/em&gt; could get beaten up till they were half-dead but they would only go for lost afterward and act as though life were just something to throw away—&amp;quot;Kung mapatay di madeadball&amp;quot;—and he saw now that the old Dad, so full of charm and jokes and pep and confidence was not the real man but just a &lt;em&gt;siga&lt;/em&gt; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious from the context what the meaning of &amp;quot;Kung mapatay di madeadball&amp;quot; might be. Most other non-English words used in the story are either Spanish or Tagalog (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagaloglang.com/siga/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;siga&lt;/a&gt;), but I have not been able to find out what language this phrase or quote is in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Kung&amp;quot; appears to be a word in &lt;a href=&quot;https://cebuano.pinoydictionary.com/word/kung/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cebuano&lt;/a&gt; and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagaloglang.com/?s=kung&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tagalog&lt;/a&gt;. I found &amp;quot;kung mapatay&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://news.abs-cbn.com/news/07/24/17/duterte-confronts-militants-at-sona-rally&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;words attributed to president Duterte&lt;/a&gt;, a native speaker of Cebuano who also speaks Filipino/Tagalog. &amp;quot;Cándido's Apocalypse&amp;quot; was first published in 1965, so if the phrase is a quote, its source must be older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T09:11:43.370" Title="What does ‘Kung mapatay di madeadball ’ mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-25T06:09:12.823" Score="19" ViewCount="8356" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may only be 37 pages into &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, re-reading it after 20+ years, but several things already confuse me. First of all, and this is what I'm mainly asking about, Bilbo is casually mentioned as some kind of skilled burglar or thief. And the hobbit doesn't seem to object to this at all. The narrator doesn't explain it in any way, unless I somehow missed it. Huh?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why would this wealthy hobbit be a skilled burglar? That doesn't sound like the honest and upstanding hobbit citizen I thought that Bilbo was. Maybe it's purposely not explained because of some reveal later on in the book. If so, I have forgotten all about it, and don't really want it spoiled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side-note, which doesn't deserve its own question, I was shocked by how quickly Tolkien has the &amp;quot;fellowship&amp;quot; leave not just Hobbiton but all of Hobbit land, which took forever in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. In this earlier book, it seems like hobbits are barely explained at all, with the story rushing away to far-out locations and adventures very quickly. I found this strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11197" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T01:08:03.053" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T01:08:03.053" Title="What's the deal with Bilbo being some kind of &quot;burglar&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16087" CreationDate="2020-10-25T08:07:55.767" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always interpreted that as 'being stealthy', not as 'being good at stealing'. Hobbits are nimble creatures (they're even described as being able to seemingly disappear without a trace), especially compared to dwarves which are much louder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo's value to the party is not being a good fighter; rather, he has a unique skill (which becomes even better after finding the Ring). A skill &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; for the dwarves' mission to succeed, because they can't take the object they're looking for,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; the Arkenstone, in possession of the dragon Smaug&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by brute force. Anyway, they all seem to understand that he's not a thief but an honorable person; this is what one of the dwarves says in Chapter 1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes, yes, but that was long ago,” said Gloin. “I was talking about &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;. And I assure you there is a mark on this door—the usual one in the trade, or used to be. &lt;em&gt;Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward&lt;/em&gt;, that’s how it is usually read. You can say &lt;em&gt;Expert Treasure-hunter&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;Burglar&lt;/em&gt; if you like. Some of them do. It’s all the same to us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for your side-question, &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; was written at a time when Tolkien's ideas about Middle Earth weren't as fleshed out yet. Also, it was intended as a children's book, so perhaps he didn't include much details on purpose and left it to his readers' imagination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The journey to Rivendell was not without danger (see the trolls they meet in the second chapter) but it makes a lot of difference if you do it with thirteen battle-hardened adventurers and a (for a hobbit) experienced traveler versus four young, slightly naïve hobbits, even if they were halfway met by Strider/Aragorn. And Black Riders weren't a problem for Bilbo and the dwarves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-10-25T10:14:54.763" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T10:14:54.763" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16089" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16093" CreationDate="2020-10-25T10:45:09.807" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 9 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“A gentleman and a policeman?” asked the earl incredulously. Horace nodded. “A new profession for &lt;strong&gt;the younger son&lt;/strong&gt;, eh?” remarked Lord Verlond sardonically. “No more &lt;strong&gt;running away and joining the army&lt;/strong&gt;; no more serving before the mast; no more &lt;strong&gt;cow-punching on the pampas&lt;/strong&gt;—”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A look of pain came into Lady Mary’s eyes. The old lord &lt;strong&gt;swung round&lt;/strong&gt; on her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sorry” he growled. “I wasn’t thinking of that young fool. No more dashing away to the ends of the earth for the younger son; no dying picturesquely in the Cape Mounted Rifles, or turning up at an appropriate hour with &lt;strong&gt;a bag of bullion under each arm to save the family from ruin&lt;/strong&gt;. Join the police force, that’s the game. You ought to write a novel about that: a man who can write letters to the sporting papers can write anything.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually there are three obscure points for me in this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What has the younger son to do with &amp;quot;cow-punching&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;holding a bag of bullion under each arm for the sake of family&amp;quot;, and why &amp;quot;the younger son&amp;quot; in particular?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can someone &amp;quot;run away&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;join the army&amp;quot; in the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found by searching that &amp;quot;swing round&amp;quot; take &amp;quot;to&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;on&amp;quot;, so does &amp;quot;swing round on&amp;quot; have another meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T16:37:59.673" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T16:37:59.673" Title="What has the &quot;younger son&quot; to do with &quot;cow-punching on the pampas&quot;? in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16091" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16097" CreationDate="2020-10-25T18:47:01.067" Score="3" ViewCount="411" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To set my brother Clarence and the King&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In deadly hate, the one against the other:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And if King Edward be as true and just&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As I am subtle, false and treacherous,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Spoken by Richard (Act 1, Scene 1))&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;King Richard III&lt;/em&gt; by Shakespeare the above sentences are part of the soliloquy of Richard III, son of King Edward. Now my question: when he said alone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be –&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dive, thoughts, down to my soul: here Clarence comes.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he mean by 'G'? Is that the first letter of his name prophesized by the three witches later?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5000" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-25T18:54:54.017" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T22:40:09.327" Title="What did Shakespeare mean in King Richard III when he said that ‘G’ Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;richard-iii&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16093" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16089" CreationDate="2020-10-25T19:23:22.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order of the highlighted portions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the younger son in particular because the oldest son will inherit the title and the estate.  It's probably entailed on him.  The younger sons need to make a living somehow.  I note that many of the situations described after it are more likely in novels of adventure and drama than real life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leaving the family home abruptly is (with a bit of exaggeration) called &amp;quot;running away from home.&amp;quot;  It might indicate a younger son who quarreled with his family and enlisted in order to escape them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of them in fact moved to South America, where they might work as a cowboy.  Possibly work his way up to being a rancher of some kind and wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Swung round&amp;quot; here means &amp;quot;turned around.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;on her&amp;quot; means he faced her when he was done turning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;a bag of bullion under each arm to save the family from ruin&amp;quot; -- the younger son might show up with a lot of money, having gotten rich in South America or Australia or some place and unexpectedly save the family in their poverty.  (MUCH more likely in a novel than real life.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T19:23:22.387" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16087" CreationDate="2020-10-25T19:33:15.270" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Good Master Thorin,  I fear you have been misinformed by the wizard Gandalf.  The wizard has prepared a plan for recapturing the dragon's horde without a hero, or even a great warrior (heroes are not to be found and warriors are all waring in distant lands). Gandalf promised you a burglar but gives you this timid gentlehobbit. But Gandalf says that Bilbo will be a burglar, and a fine one at that, when the time arrives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now then Master Thorin, you have a choice. You can take Gandalf the Grey at his word, and believe that this foolish hobbit has more about him than meets the eye.  Or you can go without him in a party of 13 and have all the bad luck you can get.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bilbo might not yet be a burglar, but he will be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do remember when first reading  (or rather being read by my father) &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; I too was disturbed by the description of Bilbo as a burglar. But it is clear from a perspective of 35 years or more, that this was just Gandalf's tricks or Gandalf's wisdom.  You never can tell with wizards...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="684" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T19:33:15.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16091" CreationDate="2020-10-25T20:30:34.823" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It becomes clear a few lines later when Richard is talking to Clarence. Clarence is actually George, the Duke of Clarence. It's all part of Richard's plot to remove Clarence by spreading terrible rumors to set King Edward against him. (Edward is Richard's older brother, incidentally, not his father.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prophecy actually comes true later, though--Richard starts out as the Duke of &lt;strong&gt;G&lt;/strong&gt;loucester, and he has Edward's heirs killed. It's one of those wonderful equivocal things that Shakespeare loved to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2991" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T20:30:34.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15975" CreationDate="2020-10-25T20:36:24.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;They didn't &lt;strong&gt;have&lt;/strong&gt; to, with the possible exception of Frodo, who needed it to have any hope of healing the various wounds, physical and psychological that he received from the Ring and other sources (the Nazgul blade, Shelob's venom).  Being allowed to go to Aman, as mortals, was a reward not an obligation.  Bilbo was old and on the verge of death already when he left, Frodo was in frequent unbearable pain, that no one in Middle-Earth could heal.  Sam did not have either of these issues, that is probably why he had to wait longer to go and he was also rather old when he finally did leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T20:36:24.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16091" CreationDate="2020-10-25T22:40:09.327" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Richard has three older brothers: Edward (king Edward IV); Edmund, Earl of Rutland; and George, Duke of Clarence. If Richard wants to mount the throne, he needs to get rid of his brothers and of his oldest brothers two sons (Edward V and Richard, Duke of York).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;About a prophecy, which says that ‘G’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mew'd up&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;confined&amp;quot;. The reason why Edward IV sends Clarence to the Tower is a prophecy that Shakespeare most likely found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mirror_for_Magistrates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mirror for Magistrates&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A prophecy was found which sayd a G, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Edwardes children should destruccion be. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Me to be G, because my name was George  &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My brother thought, and therfor did me hate. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Quoted in &lt;em&gt;King Richard III&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Antony Hammond. The Arden Shakespeare. Methuen, 1981)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Edward IV's two sons would be killed by someone whose name begins with a &amp;quot;G&amp;quot;. This is the prophecy that Clarence talks about a few lines later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And from the cross-row plucks the letter G.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And says a wizard told him that by G&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His issue disinherited should be;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, for my name of George begins with G,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It follows in his thought that I am he.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T22:40:09.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16098" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16083" CreationDate="2020-10-25T23:45:06.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Agueda and young man from the first part of the story are the same persons as the Don Badoy and his dead wife from the end of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story makes a few jumps in time, dividing the text into four parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May 1847: the young Agueda goes to the mirror. This part ends with &amp;quot;he heard a step behind her, and a smothered giggle, and instantly opened her eyes.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Presumably years later: a young girl asks her mother, Doña Agueda, about what she saw in the mirror.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May 1847: the continuation of the first part: how the encounter between Agueda and Badoy Montiya ended.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;May 1890: Don Badoy Montiya's grandson wants to see his future wife in a mirror; this reminds the old man of a time in May, when he was still young, when he himself had stared into that mirror.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connection between the first and the second part is established by the beginning of the second part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And what did you see, Mama? Oh, what was it?&amp;quot; But Doña Agueda had forgotten (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doña Agueda from the second part is Agueda from the first part, many years later. Agueda from the first part had expected to see in that mirror either her future husband or the devil. Doña Agueda says she saw the devil; this devil had mustaches and the same scar as her daughter's father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The connection between the second and the third part by the transition between these parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And did he speak to you, Mama?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes… Yes, he spoke to me,&amp;quot; said Doña Agueda. (...)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Charms like yours have no need for a candle, fair one,&amp;quot; he had said, smiling at her in the mirror (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third part, we learn that Badoy Montiya had just returned from Europe, that he is drunk and that he wants to dance with Agueda. But Agueda wants to get away from him and when he does not let her pass, she bites his hand and runs away. Badoy swears he will have his revenge but also realises he is in love with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last part, Don Badoy Montiya has forgotten about the incident until he glances into the sala again and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he shuddered, he stopped, his blood ran cold—for he had seen a face in the mirror there—a ghostly candlelit face with the eyes closed and the lips moving, a face that he suddenly felt he had seen there before though it was a full minutes before the lost memory came flowing, came tiding back (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This description is one of several passages that connect the fourth part with the first and third parts. In the third part, Agueda &amp;quot;shuddered in her white gown&amp;quot;; in the first part, she had stood in front of the mirror with her eyes closed and &amp;quot;whispered the incantation&amp;quot;. Don Badoy remembers he had seen this shortly after he had returned from Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other connections between the fourth and the first part are the &amp;quot;roofs looming like sinister chessboards&amp;quot; (literally repeated in both parts), Don Badoy's tears while standing at the window, &amp;quot;the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee&amp;quot; (literally repeated) and the watchman's song (&amp;quot;Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.&amp;quot;, also literally repeated). Based on this, there can be no doubt that Don Badoy Montiya of the fourth part is Badoy Montiya from the first part, 43 years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do we know whether Doña Agueda was Don Badoy Montiya's wife? The hints for this are more subtle. First, there is the following exchange between the grandson and Don Badoy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was just foolishness, Grandpa. They told me I would see my wife.&amp;quot; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Wife? What wife?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don Badoy's reaction makes most sense if thinking back to May 1847 had made the old man think of his own wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another passage provides a clearer indication. When the grandson asks, &amp;quot;Was it of the scare that Grandma died?&amp;quot;, Don Badoy realises that (emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[f]or a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had perished—the poor Agueda; that &lt;strong&gt;they were at peace at last, the two of them&lt;/strong&gt;, her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the earth—&lt;strong&gt;from the trap of a May night&lt;/strong&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &amp;quot;they were at peace at last, the two of them&amp;quot; makes most sense if Don Badoy and Doña Agueda were married. The alternative theory, that Doña Agueda's daughter got married with a son of Don Badoy's (none of the man's children are mentioned in the story), is less likely, since there is not a single hint in that direction. The story implies that Badoy (Agueda's &amp;quot;devil&amp;quot;) and Agueda (Badoy's &amp;quot;witch&amp;quot;) did not have a happy marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-25T23:45:06.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16087" CreationDate="2020-10-26T00:31:17.137" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;How dare you suggest Gandalf chose the wrong man or the wrong house. That's right. Let us have no more argument. Gandalf has chosen Mr. Baggins and that ought to be enough for you. If Gandalf says he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actual text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;(...) I assure you there is a mark on this door-the usual one in the trade, or used to be. Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward, that's how it is usually read. You can say Expert Treasure-hunter instead of Burglar if you like. Some of them do. It's all the same to us. Gandalf told us that there was a man of the sort in these parts looking for a Job at once, and that he had arranged for a meeting here this Wednesday tea-time.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Of course there is a mark,&amp;quot; said Gandalf. &amp;quot;I put it there myself. For very good reasons. You asked me to find the fourteenth man for your expedition, and I chose Mr. Baggins. Just let any one say I chose the wrong man or the wrong house, and you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He scowled so angrily at Gloin that the dwarf huddled back in his chair; and when Bilbo tried to open his mouth to ask a question, he turned and frowned at him and stuck oat his bushy eyebrows, till Bilbo shut his mouth tight with a snap. &amp;quot;That's right,&amp;quot; said Gandalf. &amp;quot;Let's have no more argument. I have chosen Mr. Baggins and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11202" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T00:31:17.137" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16100" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16101" CreationDate="2020-10-26T01:06:45.860" Score="3" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nick Joaquin's story &amp;quot;Cándido's Apocalypse&amp;quot;, Pete Henson tells Bobby, the story's main character, that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Joey Perez and some fellows went joyriding and dog-hunting and they caught a good one. They're going to roast it in the vacant lot behind the Gatdulas and they have a fine collection of longnecks and &lt;em&gt;cuatro cantos&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;barkada&lt;/em&gt;'s there. (...)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pete and Bobby are members of a band named The Vultures. Barkada (from Spanish &lt;em&gt;barcada&lt;/em&gt;) is Tagalog for gang or clique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wiktionary.org/wiki/canto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Canto&lt;/a&gt; is Spanish for &amp;quot;song&amp;quot; but from the context it is doubtful that Pete is talking about songs here. I assume &amp;quot;cuatro cantos&amp;quot; (literally &amp;quot;four songs&amp;quot;) is slang for something else here, but I have not been able to figure out what it means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update&lt;/strong&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/longneck&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;longneck&lt;/a&gt; can mean &amp;quot;a type of beer bottle with a long neck&amp;quot;, so &amp;quot;cuatro cantos&amp;quot; is most likely related to alcoholic beverages.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T12:16:32.667" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T01:57:07.707" Title="What does cuatro cantos refer to?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16100" CreationDate="2020-10-26T03:40:10.937" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the online supermarket &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lazada.com.ph/products/ginebra-san-miguel-gin-700ml-i385186136.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lazada&lt;/a&gt;, Ginebra San Miguel, introduced in 1834, &amp;quot;is the first gin in the Philippines and likewise recognized as the no. 1 selling gin in the world.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It became known as &lt;em&gt;cuatro cantos&lt;/em&gt; because the bottle in which it was originally sold had four corners: &lt;a href=&quot;https://pulutan.club/drinks/6-facts-of-the-legend-of-ginebra-gin/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cuatro cantos&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;em&gt;Canto&lt;/em&gt; can indeed also mean 'song'.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.esquiremag.ph/life/ginebra-san-miguel-logo-frontliners-a00293-20200511&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esquire Magazine&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;The artwork on the label, popularly known as Marca Demonio, features St. Michael, the Archangel, defeating Satan in the celestial battle during the War in Heaven described in the Book of Revelations.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, &amp;quot;a cuatro cantos&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;on all fours&amp;quot;. Perhaps that's part of the appeal of the name: drink enough of it and you end up 'on four corners'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T01:57:07.707" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T01:57:07.707" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16102" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16087" CreationDate="2020-10-26T08:52:41.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I was reading the book to my kids they said that Bilbo is like a kid but then grows up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From a D&amp;amp;D perspective, you can think of Bilbo as being a level 1 rogue/thief. He starts off with little to no skill, nearly succeeding but eventually failing the saving throw when sneaking up on the trolls, wakes Gandalf up at the Orcs front door but gets caught, then gains the &amp;quot;bonus when worn by rogue class&amp;quot; ring, sneaks about in the forest elves' stronghold, etc etc. He's had the title of burglar thrust upon him and works to gain levels, eventually standing up to a dragon and getting the Arkenstone. Go Bilbo!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11204" LastEditorUserId="11204" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T14:23:57.620" LastActivityDate="2020-10-26T14:23:57.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16103" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16104" CreationDate="2020-10-26T10:10:36.343" Score="15" ViewCount="2333" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today in &amp;quot;Messages from Firefox&amp;quot; (some annoying thing that comes up in my browser), I saw the following which piqued my interest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens invented the scary clown, the ‘80s perfected it. Read all about the monsters and ghosts that haunt us in these stories from Pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iaauO.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/iaauO.png&quot; alt=&quot;screenshot of the above quote as it looks in my browser&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What does it mean that &amp;quot;Dickens invented the scary clown&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Which Dickens story featured a scary clown, and how much effect did that story really have on the modern-day trope of &amp;quot;scary clowns&amp;quot; in popular culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:26:57.737" Title="Dickens invented the scary clown?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16104" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16103" CreationDate="2020-10-26T10:49:53.467" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;The claim that ‘Dickens invented the scary clown’ seems to be rooted in the work of Andrew McConnel Scott, Professor of English at the University of Buffalo, through his paper ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5005b49dc4aa8b4d97612c80/t/5733657662cd945589676146/1462986125588/Clowns+on+the+Verge+of+a+Nervous+Breakdown.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clowns on the Verge of a nervous breakdown: Dickens coulrophobia and the &lt;em&gt;Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;' where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through a focus on the career of the British pantomimist Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) and a reading of his Memoirs (1838), edited posthumously by Charles Dickens, this essay seeks to demonstrate that what we often term coulrophobia (the fear of clowns) has its origins in a narrative of memorializing that takes place in the midst of rapid social change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just to set the scene a little, Grimaldi is credited with being the essential creator of clowns as we know them today, including being the originator of whiteface make-up.&#xA;Per Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._Grimaldi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. S. Grimaldi&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the early 1800s, he expanded the role of Clown in the harlequinade that formed part of British pantomimes, notably at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden theatres. He became so dominant on the London comic stage that the harlequinade role of Clown became known as &amp;quot;Joey&amp;quot;, and both the nickname and Grimaldi's whiteface make-up design were, and still are, used by other types of clowns.&#xA;Dickens was invited to edit and improve an existing ‘clumsily written life of Grimaldi, which had been based on the clown's own notes’, which Dickens did under his regular nom de plume, &amp;quot;Boz&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to an article on the Smithsonian Magazine website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-history-and-psychology-of-clowns-being-scary-20394516/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The History and Psychology of Clowns Being Scary&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, July 31, 2013):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grimaldi’s real life was anything but comedy—he’d grown up with a tyrant of a stage father; he was prone to bouts of depression; his first wife died during childbirth; his son was an alcoholic clown who’d drank himself to death by age 31; and Grimaldi’s physical gyrations, the leaps and tumbles and violent slapstick that had made him famous, left him in constant pain and prematurely disabled. As Grimaldi himself joked, “I am GRIM ALL DAY, but I make you laugh at night.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his essay Stott states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens shared a suspicion of theatricality with many of his contemporaries, even to the extent of viewing performance as an “inherently destructive endeavor,” in which the ideal of sympathetic imagination so prized by Romantic theater critics was viewed as “antithetical to reason, deliberation and control” by the generation that followed (Woods 144).23 In the case of clowns, this distrust is redoubled by his view of pantomime clowning as not just anachronistic, but also somehow constituting an affront toward the cherished memories of childhood. To this end, Dickens can be considered one of the first artists to substantively represent clowning in terms that were to significantly influence later formulations of coulrophobia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Referencing the reference to a beggar in clown’s attire in the Pickwick Papers, he goes on to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In what is certainly the first example of “dark carnival” in English literature, “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/pickwick/3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stroller’s Tale&lt;/a&gt;” portrays the clown as a monstrous contradiction, a ghoul disfigured by the immorality of the man who plays him and who later dies in a fit of terrifying hallucinations that blur fiction with reality. It is the foundational statement of coulrophobia: all humor having fled, the object of spectatorship resents being watched, is unable to differentiate between the play world and the real world, and transposes his personal demons onto the supposed joviality of his mask.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Smithsonian article, referencing the work of Stott states that he goes ‘so far as to say that Dickens &lt;em&gt;invented&lt;/em&gt; the scary clown’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;by creating a figure who is literally destroying himself to make his audiences laugh. What Dickens did was to make it difficult to look at a clown without wondering what was going on underneath the make-up: Says Stott, “It becomes impossible to disassociate the character from the actor.” That Dickens’s version of Grimaldi’s memoirs was massively popular meant that this perception, of something dark and troubled masked by humor, would stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SlCl9.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SlCl9.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;NYT advert for Grimaldi memoir&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T21:26:57.737" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:26:57.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16105" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16024" CreationDate="2020-10-26T13:00:50.440" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reading poetry requires effort on the part of the reader. Before you can digest the words, you need to roll them around your mouth and chew them, as in the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/252052-don-t-live-by-my-words-don-t-die-by-them-chew&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quote&lt;/a&gt;, attributed to Stanley Victor Paskavich (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't live by my words, don't die by them, &lt;strong&gt;chew them slowly digest them&lt;/strong&gt;, and smile if they give nourishment to your soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Digestion as a metaphor for learning and assimilation is not new. See for example Francis Bacon's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essaiesofsrfranc00baco/page/100/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;On Studies&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1613):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some Bookes are to bee taſted, others to be ſwallowed, and ſome few to bee chewed and digeſted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the &amp;quot;chewing&amp;quot; is taken literally, however, you end up eating (paper and) ink; as a result &amp;quot;The poems are gone&amp;quot; (line 7). This implies that poetry, standing in for &amp;quot;high culture&amp;quot;, gets destroyed. At the opposite end of high culture are the dogs in the basement. They intrude into the library, which stands for rules (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.librarianshipstudies.com/2018/12/anglo-american-cataloguing-rules-aacr.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cataloguing rules&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://libguides.nyls.edu/c.php?g=646580&amp;amp;p=4532540&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shelving rules&lt;/a&gt;) and order. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the basement can even be seen as a metaphor for the Freudian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;id&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. one's uncoordinated instinctual desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poetry and the library &amp;quot;go to the dogs&amp;quot;. The librarian is powerless against this backward development and hence &amp;quot;does not believe what she sees&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;walks with her hands in her dress&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;begins to stamp her feet and weep&amp;quot;. Man without culture becomes an animal, in this case a dog. He sees himself as a &amp;quot;new man&amp;quot;, possibly because he considers himself freed from the shackles of culture. At the same time, however, the light first becomes &amp;quot;dim&amp;quot; (line 8) and is eventually replaced by darkness (18); on a literal level, this makes reading impossible, on a metaphorical level, the light of civilisation has given way to the darkness that represents the absence of culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, the shaking off of the shackles of culture is not reflected in the poem's form: the poem consistently uses three lines per stanza until the end of the poem and the syntax remains regular (i.e. subject followed by predicate). Even though the &amp;quot;new man&amp;quot; &amp;quot;romp[s] with joy in the bookish dark&amp;quot;, that darkness is still &amp;quot;bookish&amp;quot;; culture eventually still wins out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T15:01:18.787" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T15:01:18.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16108" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16112" CreationDate="2020-10-26T15:30:50.373" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 10 of The &lt;em&gt;Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was living at Somers Town at that time a little man named Jakobs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a man &lt;strong&gt;of some character&lt;/strong&gt;, albeit an unfortunate person with “something behind him.” The something behind him, however, had come short of a &lt;strong&gt;lagging&lt;/strong&gt;. “Carpets” (&lt;strong&gt;three months’ hard labour) almost innumerable had fallen to his share&lt;/strong&gt;, but a &lt;strong&gt;lagging&lt;/strong&gt; had never come his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I met some obscure points in this second passage:-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Firstly I didn't get the meaning of &amp;quot;man of some character&amp;quot; as every one has a character already! Then I found by searching that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/character&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;character&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;good reputation&amp;quot;, but how can someone, who had received many sentences of hard labour, be a man of good reputation?!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;something behind him&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;he has a bad history&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-26T16:38:40.193" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T03:19:54.757" Title="What's meant by &quot;man of some character&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16109" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16087" CreationDate="2020-10-27T00:47:04.357" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You definitely missed something. The narrator, Bilbo, other hobbits, Gandalf and the dwarfs all have different opinions of Bilbo's propensity to burglary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; starts out as a children's tale which evolves into a larger fantasy novel. This shows in the structure of the novel, and reflects the history of the work. In a 1955 letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien relates the genesis of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I remember about the start of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's Map. But it became &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; in the early 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough&lt;sup&gt;42&lt;/sup&gt;), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu, and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin. It was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown up I think I should never have got the Trilogy published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;42&lt;/sup&gt; Not any better I think than &lt;em&gt;The Marvellous Land of Snergs&lt;/em&gt;, Wyke-&#xA;Smith, Ernest Benn 1927. Seeing  the  date, I should say that this was probably an unconscious source-book for the Hobbits, not of anything else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Children's tale or fantasy novel, &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; has a reliable narrator. The narrator does choose to withhold information information and is not necessarily omniscient, much in the way that fairy tales often leave out some information, such as “[the villain] ran away and was never seen again”, to make it plausible that the narrator was a first-hand witness, but the narrator does not outright lie. (More on this, somewhat spoily, at the very end of this answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first thing we learn about hobbits, in the opening paragraph, is that they are creatures of comfort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with  nothing  in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for Bilbo himself, the narrator tells us that he is quite an honest, upstanding citizen. But if you read the third and fourth paragraph closely, you'll notice that Bilbo comes from a boring, respectable family, but he himself isn't exactly described as respectable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of asking him. This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbours' respect, but he gained-well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(…) the mother of this hobbit - of Bilbo Baggins, that is - was the fabulous Belladonna Took, (…) once in a while members of the Took-clan would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared, and the family hushed it up; but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer. Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she became Mrs. Bungo Baggins. (…) Still it is probable that Bilbo, her only son, although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father, got something a bit queer in his makeup from the Took side, something that only waited for a chance to come out. The chance never arrived, until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbit-hole built by his father, which I have just described for you, until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how the narrator states that Bilbo's family was considered respectable, but not that Bilbo himself was, except by inference from his father's family. And the narrator states that Bilbo has a hidden adventurous streak that, until the events of the book, had never manifested himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gandalf knows, or thinks, differently. Gandalf is a mysterious character who knows a lot. He is a wandering wizard and evidently more long-lived than normal people (even hobbits, for whom “fifty years old or so” is a young adult).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort I of&#xA;remarkable tale. Tales and adventures sprouted up all over the place wherever he went, in the most extraordinary fashion. He had not  been down that way under The Hill for ages and ages, not since his friend the Old Took died, in fact, and the hobbits had almost forgotten what he looked like. He had been away over The Hill and across The Water on business of his own since they were all small hobbit-boys and hobbit-girls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a mysterious and impressive figure may well know something about Bilbo that Bilbo himself doesn't realize. Certainly, when Gandalf first broaches the subject of&#xA;adventure, Bilbo is shocked by the idea. We don't know his exact thought process, so we don't know whether he is consciously or subconsciously tempted, but outwardly he is not at all tempted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“(…) I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them,” said our Mr. Baggins&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first occurrence of the word “burglar” in the book is in dialog from a dwarf, and we learn that it was Gandalf who described Bilbo as a burglar to the dwarfs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what he heard, Gloin speaking: “Humph! (…). It is all very well for Gandalf to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but (…) I think it sounded more like&#xA;fright than excitement! In fact, if it had not been for the sign on the door, I should have been sure we had come to the wrong house. As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow  bobbing and puffing on the mat, I had my doubts. He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point, Bilbo's adventurous side erupts, but even still he does not endorse the appellation “burglar”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Mr. Baggins turned the handle and went in. The Took side had won. He suddenly felt he would go without bed and breakfast to be thought fierce. (…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Pardon me,” he said, “if I  have overheard words that you were saying. I don't pretend to understand what you are talking about, or your reference to burglars, but I think I am right in believing” (this is what he called being on his dignity) “that you think  I am no good. I will show you. I have no signs on my door — it was painted a week ago —, and I am quite sure you have come to the wrong house. As soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step, I had my doubts. But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want done, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the East of East and fight the wild Were-worms in the Last Desert. (…)”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note how he might talk of fighting “wild Were-worms”, but in his mind the worst aspect of adventure he can imagine is to ”go without bed and breakfast“.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some discussion, the wise, oracular figure (Gandalf) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him  than  you guess, and a deal more than he has any idea of himself.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no, Bilbo is not a skilled burglar, and he does not think of himself as suited for burglary in any way. If he has any predisposition for burglary, it's his nature as a hobbit. Hobbits are good at going about unnoticed. They're more inclined to sneaking away than to sneaking in, but they're good at sneaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy&#xA;of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort  which helps them to  disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a  noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The rest of this answer may be mildly spoily for &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; and other works set in the same universe.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding the differences in how much harder the start of the journey is in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; compared to &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, there are several reasons. There are multiple in-story reasons which are enough explanations in themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; One reason is that in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, there are villains actively hunting the party, whereas in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, the only dangers are the ones encountered on the road. This forces the party in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; to go off-road. Another reason is that in the decades between the two books, evil has spread around the world and the world is a more dangerous place than it used to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, there are out-of story reasons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; was originally not set in the same universe of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. In fact, at the time Tolkien wrote &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, the LOTR universe as we know it now was very different: Middle-earth was only what later became known as the First Age. &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; was Tolkien's effort to tie &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; to the world he loved and make a marketable book out of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not only is there a difference of tone between &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; — the latter book is more serious, more “adulty” — but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The story in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; doesn't perfectly match the story in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;. The narrator in &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; is reliable within the context of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; itself, but not in the context of Tolkien's legendarium as a whole. In fact, in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, we learn that the tale that Bilbo told of his adventures wasn't the truth. That tale was the original edition of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, but what actually happened was the later editions of the book, tweaked to fit LOTR better. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/3726/why-was-gandalf-involved-with-the-dwarves-quest-to-rob-smaug/3736#3736&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/76415/how-much-of-the-middle-earth-universe-had-tolkien-invented-when-he-wrote-the-hob&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/155898/what-did-frodo-mean-by-he-told-me-the-true-story/155899#155899&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T00:47:04.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16110" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15975" CreationDate="2020-10-27T01:10:14.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It was a gift given to those who did a great service.  They did not have to leave, but as a way to find peace and healing for their spirits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also there is some mention somewhere (in an appendix perhaps) of Gimli being given the same gift too so he could sail with Legolas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9905" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T01:10:14.077" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16050" CreationDate="2020-10-27T02:38:03.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you are asking about the historical reasons, then asking in History.SE might be better. From the literature point of view the answer lies in text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This class of women is consigned by our laws &lt;strong&gt;entirely to&#xA;the discretion of the police. The latter do what they please&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;punish them, as seems good to them, and confiscate at their&#xA;will those two sorry things which they entitle their industry and their liberty&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Take three men and conduct this creature to jail.’ Then, turning to Fantine, ‘You are to have six months of it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that Javert is legally able to sentence a prostitute to jail. Notice - &amp;quot;jail&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;prison&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We define prison as “a place of confinement especially for lawbreakers”, and jail as “a place of confinement for persons held in lawful custody.[...]Prison is “an institution (such as one under state jurisdiction) for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes” and &lt;strong&gt;jail is “such a place under the jurisdiction of a local government (such as a county) for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.&lt;/strong&gt;” &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/jail-vs-prison-difference&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in current world, police can send you to jail for a short time (24-48 hours, depending on country) without conviction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the mayor stepping in: he can override Javert's rule, because mayor is the chief of police - Javert's boss and appears to have legal rights to do so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then M. Madeleine folded his arms, and said in a severe&#xA;voice which no one in the town had heard hitherto:—&#xA;‘The matter to which you refer is one connected with the&#xA;municipal police. According to the terms of articles nine,&#xA;eleven, fifteen, and sixty-six of the code of criminal examination, I am the judge. I order that this woman shall be set&#xA;at liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/61756/in-19th-century-france-were-police-able-to-send-people-to-jail-without-a-trial/61759#61759&quot;&gt;this question on History.SE&lt;/a&gt;: it seems that the actions depicted in the book are possible for one strange reason - prostitution was a crime that was tolerated, but also &lt;strong&gt;punished without a trial&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legality of prostitution was left conveniently vague; women were, however, allowed to engage in the trade so long as they followed police regulations governing their conduct. &lt;strong&gt;Violation of the rules resulted in something euphemistically referred to as &amp;quot;administrative detention,&amp;quot; or imprisonment without trial.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The arrested woman had no recourse to a court of law. Indeed, she was for all intents and purposes already placed outside the law by the very fact of her accusation.&lt;/strong&gt; As soon as the commissaire in her quartier had written up a procès-verbal of the offense, the woman was arbitrarily subject, as a report of 1819 puts it, &amp;quot;to incarceration by administrative decision.&amp;quot; Her hearing before the Bureau of Morals was a purely procedural matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T18:40:43.613" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T18:40:43.613" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16108" CreationDate="2020-10-27T03:19:54.757" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;man of character&lt;/strong&gt; is someone who has a strong character, i.e. someone who has positive personality traits such as honesty, dependability, perseverance, loyalty, etc. Calling someone a &lt;em&gt;man of some character&lt;/em&gt; suggests that the person has those traits, but only to a degree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That the man &lt;strong&gt;has something behind him&lt;/strong&gt; means that there is something unfortunate in his past. This seems to be an ironic use of the expression &lt;em&gt;to have something behind you&lt;/em&gt;, because it is more often used for positive things, such as having an education behind you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;lagging&lt;/strong&gt; is an archaic slang term for being sentenced to transportation, i.e. being sent to a penal colony. A &lt;strong&gt;carpet&lt;/strong&gt; (rhyming slang for &lt;em&gt;carpet-bag&lt;/em&gt; → &lt;em&gt;drag&lt;/em&gt;) means three months of hard labour, a sentence typically given for theft (the slang word for which was a &lt;em&gt;drag&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;em&gt;carpets almost innumerable had fallen to his share&lt;/em&gt; that would mean that the man had been convicted of theft, and done three months of hard labour, many times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repetition of the fact that &lt;em&gt;a lagging had never come his way&lt;/em&gt; emphasizes that the man was a petty criminal, repeatedly caught for theft, but not for more serious crimes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole fragment appears to be written in an ironic, typically British understated way, and as such it is not easy to decipher whether the man is actually being shown in a positive light, or whether the positive tone in which he is described as being &lt;em&gt;of some character&lt;/em&gt; and not having been sentenced to a &lt;em&gt;lagging&lt;/em&gt; is in fact meant to humorously emphasize that he is a vulgar career criminal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1558" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T03:19:54.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16113" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T03:31:20.660" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a popular song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drink_to_Me_Only_with_Thine_Eyes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drink To Me Only with Thine Eyes&lt;/a&gt;, first published in 1616 as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Oxford_Book_of_English_Verse_1250-1900/To_Celia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Celia&lt;/a&gt; by Ben Jonson, did the phrase &lt;strong&gt;drink to someone&lt;/strong&gt; mean the same thing as nowadays, i.e. &lt;strong&gt;to say cheers for someone?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7717" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T11:25:05.290" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T20:42:07.160" Title="Did &quot;drink to someone&quot; imply the same thing back then?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ben-jonson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16114" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T04:42:12.767" Score="7" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may be mistaken, but allegedly, Tolkien really took great offense to the first (and only, during his entire lifetime and decades beyond) Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings. He called the person responsible for it &amp;quot;conceited&amp;quot; and basically seemed to strongly dislike, if not hate, him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My parents had the first two books as the original Swedish translation. I read them as an almost-teenager and then borrowed the third book from the library, still about six years before the new translation was released (which occurred in 2004-2005).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quite recently, I re-read them, then again borrowed the third one from the library. This time, I got the 2005 Swedish version of The Return of the King. This translation, the first new one in Swedish since the original, has many changes, which were very jarring to me initially. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Vattnadal&amp;quot; (Rivendell) is now called &amp;quot;Riftedal&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Lavskägge&amp;quot; (Treebeard) is now called &amp;quot;Trädskägge&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Hobsala&amp;quot; (Hobbiton) is now called &amp;quot;Hobbinge&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Bilbo Baggins&amp;quot; (Bilbo Baggers) is now called &amp;quot;Bilbo Secker&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Hober&amp;quot; (hobbits) are now called &amp;quot;hobbitar&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of these changes (and many more) are supposed to be &amp;quot;more faithful&amp;quot; to the original, English text. And they are, in some objective sense, but they don't really sound right to me. I almost get a &amp;quot;Swenglish&amp;quot; kind of feeling about this, as if they tried too hard to literally translate everything with no concern to what sounds natural or &amp;quot;more fitting&amp;quot; in Swedish. However, the book has a page explaining that they &amp;quot;now know far more about Tolkien's ideas&amp;quot; than they did in the 1960s when the first translation was made, and apparently, critics and fans far prefer this new version.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, in particular, I find &amp;quot;hober&amp;quot; (the old Swedish translation) to sound a million times better and more natural in Swedish than &amp;quot;hobbitar&amp;quot;. Let's face it: Swedish is not the exact same language as English. Tolkien may have been extremely skilled at (with? In?) English, and with languages in general, but he was not a native Swedish speaker (which he even mentions as a possible explanation), so why was he apparently so shocked/disgusted by this translation, which he cannot possibly have read in any meaningful manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to say that I actually find it &lt;em&gt;enriching&lt;/em&gt; to have experienced (at least parts) of the story in multiple different &amp;quot;interpretations&amp;quot;. Tolkien's own world is absolutely &lt;em&gt;full&lt;/em&gt; of redundant and varying names/labels/words for everyone and everything; named in many different languages and even varying between different characters and ages and sub-species/races. It almost feels like &amp;quot;Lavskägge&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Trädskägge&amp;quot; are different peoples' names for Treebeard, or used in different eras by the same people! (Which is technically the case...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me, the hobbits are forever &amp;quot;hober&amp;quot;. Not &amp;quot;hobbitar&amp;quot;. Of course, I call them &amp;quot;hobbits&amp;quot; when writing or speaking in English, and I have read parts of the books in the original language as well. I mostly didn't this time just to cling on to my dying language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side-note: I don't even think that he brought this up in his criticism, but one thing that I genuinely &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; hate about the original Swedish translation is that it uses the vile &amp;quot;dash format&amp;quot; instead of quotes, making it impossible to know what is part of dialogue and what is narration, without constantly trying to &amp;quot;read ahead&amp;quot; and guess what's what. I can't tell you how many times I was continuing the dialogue in my head when it was suddenly the narrator who had taken over, and the other way around.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Tolkien, himself so interested in languages and using so many different names for everything, get so angry/upset/offended when the Swedish translation didn't use what he, as a non-Swedish speaker (to the best of my knowledge), considered &amp;quot;more appropriate&amp;quot;? And he even compliments the Dutch translation at the same time, another language which I don't think that he was an expert in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: I'm not &amp;quot;bashing Tolkien&amp;quot;. I'm just wondering about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11219" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T00:55:15.007" Title="Why did Tolkien take such extreme offense to the original Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16116" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T09:08:54.913" Score="3" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nick Joaquin's short story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Tagalog/Literature/Short%20Stories/May%20Day%20Eve.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;May Day Eve&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; begins and ends with two extremely long sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old people had ordered that the dancing should stop at ten o’clock but it was almost midnight before the carriages came filing up the departing guests, while the girls who were staying were promptly herded upstairs to the bedrooms, the young men gathering around to wish them a good night and lamenting their ascent with mock signs and moaning, proclaiming themselves disconsolate but straightway going off to finish the punch and the brandy though they were quite drunk already and simply bursting with wild spirits, merriment, arrogance and audacity, for they were young bucks newly arrived from Europe; the ball had been in their honor; and they had waltzed and polka-ed and bragged and swaggered and flirted all night and where in no mood to sleep yet--no, caramba, not on this moist tropic eve! not on this mystic May eve! --with the night still young and so seductive that it was madness not to go out, not to go forth---and serenade the neighbors! cried one; and swim in the Pasid! cried another; and gather fireflies! cried a third—whereupon there arose a great clamor for coats and capes, for hats and canes, and they were a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage rattled away upon the cobbles while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tile roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wile sky murky with clouds, save where an evil young moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable childhood fragrances or ripe guavas to the young men trooping so uproariously down the street that the girls who were desiring upstairs in the bedrooms catered screaming to the windows, crowded giggling at the windows, but were soon sighing amorously over those young men bawling below; over those wicked young men and their handsome apparel, their proud flashing eyes, and their elegant mustaches so black and vivid in the moonlight that the girls were quite ravished with love, and began crying to one another how carefree were men but how awful to be a girl and what a horrid, horrid world it was, till old Anastasia plucked them off by the ear or the pigtail and chases them off to bed---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobble and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his great voice booming through the night, &amp;quot;Guardia serno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had bitten his hand and fled and how he had sung aloud in the dark room and surprised his heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore up his throat and eyes that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the boy away; stood up and looked out----looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul street where a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage was rattling away upon the cobbles, while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tiled roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wild sky murky with clouds, save where an evil old moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable the window; the bowed old man sobbing so bitterly at the window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his hair and one hand pressed to his mouth---while from up the street came the clackety-clack of the watchman’s boots on the cobbles, and the clang-clang of his lantern against his knee, and the mighty roll of his voice booming through the night: &amp;quot;Guardia sereno-o-o! A las doce han dado-o-o!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, each of those quoted paragraphs is just one single sentence. There are also some parallels between them, notably the way each paragraph ends, with the same cry of the night watchman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the purpose or literary effect of these extremely long sentences bookending the story?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T09:08:54.913" Title="What is the literary effect of such long opening and closing sentences in &quot;May Day Eve&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16117" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16127" CreationDate="2020-10-27T09:24:52.653" Score="3" ViewCount="1461" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does 'vaulting' mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth uses the term in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.1.7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 7&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no spur&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To prick the sides of my intent, but only&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And falls on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though Macbeth states this as a reason to justify his evil deed of killing Duncan, can we say that ambition could be used in a positive way as well? Or is vaulting ambition a negative trait overall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say that Macbeth willingly contributed to creating this ambition of his for anything he did? Or for the sole purpose to kill Duncan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, could we say that Macbeth's &amp;quot;vaulting ambition&amp;quot; was in no way related to the murder, but it was a trait he held long before the thought of murder aroused to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can this ambition of his be considered good in any way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11162" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T14:35:51.077" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T14:35:51.077" Title="Why is Macbeth's &quot;vaulting ambition&quot; so important and famous?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16118" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16275" CreationDate="2020-10-27T10:22:45.593" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chapter XI of &lt;em&gt;My Boyhood Days&lt;/em&gt; (1940; &lt;em&gt;ছেলেবেলা&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Chhelebela&lt;/em&gt; in Bengali) contains the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old indigo factory was still standing, with the river Padma in the distance. The zemindari office was on the ground floor, and our living quarters on the upper floor. (...) Today, the blustering shouts of the sahebs are completely silent. Where is now the indigo factory's steward, that 'messenger of death'? Where the troop of bailiffs, loins girded up and &lt;em&gt;lathis&lt;/em&gt; on shoulder?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The zemindari or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamindar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zamindari&lt;/a&gt; were big landowners who also collected taxes. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lathi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lahti&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;a long, heavy bamboo stick used by Indian police as a baton&amp;quot;. The Wikipedia page about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo#Spirituality&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;indigo&lt;/a&gt; does not mention any special significance attached to this colour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the former indigo factory is now used by the zamindar or one of his officers, it is not obvious why the &amp;quot;steward&amp;quot; would necessarily be a &amp;quot;messenger of death&amp;quot;, since that phrase implies that he always announces death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T11:21:31.927" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T09:14:09.670" Title="Why would the indigo factory's steward be a messenger of death?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;my-boyhood-days&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16120" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16121" CreationDate="2020-10-27T13:30:10.670" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 10 of The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing an employer, Jakobs, who usually stole unconsidered stamps and such loose coinage as might be found in the office of his manager, Black, who was notoriously careless in the matter of small change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had stolen quietly into the managing director’s office one day in the ordinary course of business, for Master Jakobs stole quietly, but literally and figuratively. He was in search of unconsidered stamps and such loose coinage as might be found in the office of a man notoriously careless in the matter of small change. He had expected to find the room empty, and was momentarily paralysed to see the great Black himself bending over the recumbent figure of a man, busily searching the pockets of a dead man for a letter—for the silent man on the floor had come with his resignation in his pocket and had indiscreetly embodied in this letter his reasons for taking the step. Greatest indiscretion of all, he had revealed the existence of this very compromising document to Colonel Black.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willie Jakobs knew nothing about the letter—had no subtle explanation for the disordered pocket-book. To his primitive mind Colonel Black was making a search for money: it was, in fact, &lt;strong&gt;a stamp-hunt&lt;/strong&gt; on a large scale, and in his agitation he blurted this belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;stamp-hunt&amp;quot; mean that he &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;was searching for the letter that hold a certain stamp&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T13:31:29.443" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T14:06:00.740" Title="What's meant by &quot;stamp-hunt&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16121" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16120" CreationDate="2020-10-27T13:46:30.907" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Colonel Black is interested in something much more valuable to him than stamps and small coins, namely a very specific letter. This letter wouldn't have a stamp on it, &amp;quot;for the silent man on the floor had come with his resignation &lt;strong&gt;in his pocket&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jakobs knows nothing about the letter, so from his point of view, Colonel Black is not looking for a letter but for money, i.e. more than just &amp;quot;unconsidered stamps and (...) loose coinage&amp;quot;. Wallace seems to be combining the two points of view by describing the scene as &amp;quot;stamp-hunt on a large scale&amp;quot;, in which &amp;quot;large scale&amp;quot; refers to higher value of what Colonel Black is looking for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T14:06:00.740" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T14:06:00.740" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16122" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6757" CreationDate="2020-10-27T14:56:40.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Antonin Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986 and his first book on textualism, &lt;em&gt;A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law&lt;/em&gt;, dates from 1997.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea that the interpretation of the Constitution should be based on &amp;quot;what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have understood the ordinary meaning of the text to be&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Originalism&amp;amp;oldid=985710342&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original meaning theory / textualism&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia) is reminiscent of &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Robert_Jau%C3%9F#Blick_auf_die_Hauptschriften&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hans Robert Jauß's&lt;/a&gt; view from 1957 that literary criticism should try to reconstruct the horizon of expectation of contemporary readers (cf. „Versuch, diesen (...) Text vom Erwartungshorizont seines zeitgenössischen Publikums aus zu interpretieren“). Jauß's theory clearly predates Scalia's textualism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is an important difference between Scalia's and Jauß's views. For Scalia, textualism was a way of pushing his own conservative agenda by presenting it as the only correct reading of the constitution. Jauß, by contrast, recognised that there are multiple ways to try to understand a text. (In fact, this is implied by the title of the last book published during his lifetime, &lt;em&gt;Wege des Verstehens&lt;/em&gt; (literally &amp;quot;ways of understanding&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/Reception_Theory.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reception theory&lt;/a&gt; points out that readers who lived at the time when classical works of fiction were published will not rise from the dead to tell us how they interpreted those texts. Moreover, those readers would have been unable to envisage what we would learn about their lifetime that they were unaware of. By rejecting the notion that text can &amp;quot;live&amp;quot; in this way, Antonin Scalia takes a point of view that is alien to modern literary theory and criticism. I am not aware of him (or any other judges or jurists for that matter) having had any influence on literary theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T15:27:58.763" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T15:27:58.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16123" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-27T15:31:17.410" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Gitanjali, Or: Song-offerings of Rabindranath Tagore&lt;/em&gt; May Sinclair writes the following aobut St. Catherine of Genoa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She would at times, when in the garden, seize hold of the thorn-covered twigs of the rose-bushes with both her hands; and would not feel any pain while thus doing it in a transport of mind. She would also bite her hands and burn them, and this in order to &lt;strong&gt;divert, if possible, her interior oppression&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for the explanation of “divert, if possible, her interior oppression”. It is clear that spirituality is being talked about here, and St. Catherine’s love for God is what is intended to mean (I may be wrong) but I need a clear explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-27T16:07:52.220" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T16:16:28.667" Title="What does it mean to divert one’s interior oppression?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;may-sinclair&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16124" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16123" CreationDate="2020-10-27T16:16:28.667" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interior oppression here refers to the suffering caused by the fear of losing God, typically because of one's sins. For a similar usage of &amp;quot;oppression&amp;quot;, see Teresa of Avila's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.catholictreasury.info/books/interior_castle/ic17.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Interior Castle&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where one can read the following (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For her understanding is so dim that it is incapable of seeing the truth, but believes what the imagination (now mistress of the understanding) presents to it and the nonsense which the devil attempts to present to it, &lt;strong&gt;when Our Lord gives him leave to test her soul, and even to make her think herself cast off by God&lt;/strong&gt;. For there are many things which assault her soul with &lt;strong&gt;an interior oppression so keenly felt and so intolerable that I do not know to what it can be compared&lt;/strong&gt;, save to the torment of those who suffer in hell, for in this spiritual tempest no consolation is possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Catherine of Genoa this suffering is so intense that she resorts to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-harm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-harm&lt;/a&gt; to distract (cf. &amp;quot;divert&amp;quot;) from the psychological or emotional pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T16:16:28.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16113" CreationDate="2020-10-27T20:42:07.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's plays preceded Ben Jonson's song. And Shakespeare uses &lt;em&gt;drink to&lt;/em&gt; with this meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I drink to the general joy o' the whole table. (&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With drinking healths to my niece: I'll drink to her as long as there is a passage in my throat and drink in Illyria: he's a coward and a coystrill that will not drink to my niece till his brains turn o' the toe like a parish-top. (&lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is another definition listed in the OED that was current then,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To hand or present beverage for his use; to give drink to. &lt;em&gt;Obsolete&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1470–1485, T. Malory, &lt;em&gt;Morte d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;: Thenne they lough and made good chere and eyther dranke to other frely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this earlier meaning doesn't seem possible in Ben Jonson's song.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T20:42:07.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16127" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16117" CreationDate="2020-10-27T23:08:47.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a passage that has puzzled many readers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Vault” means “jump or leap, especially over or onto something”. The word is still used for various kinds of gymnastic feat, whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vault_(gymnastics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;over equipment&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equestrian_vaulting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on the backs of horses&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in these lines, Shakespeare gives us two metaphors in quick succession. In the first, Macbeth likens his intent (his plan to murder Duncan) to a horse and his ambition to the spur which is the only way to make the horse go forward. In the second, Macbeth likens his ambition to a rider jumping into the saddle of a horse, who leaps too high (tries to seize the crown of Scotland) misses his seat, and falls (meets with disaster).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I apprehend that there is not here one long-drawn metaphor, but two distinct ones. I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent; I have nothing to &lt;em&gt;stimulate&lt;/em&gt; me to the execution of my purpose but ambition, which is apt to overreach itself; this he expresses by the second image, of a person meaning to vault into his saddle, who, by taking too great a leap, will fall on the other side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edmond Malone (1821). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill11shakiala/page/80/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume XI, p. 81&lt;/a&gt;. London: F. C. and J. Rivington.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But difficulties arise if you attempt to reconcile the two metaphors into a single figure, for then you have to figure out how ambition can be both a spur and a rider. And if you have difficulty finding a satisfying combination, you might be tempted to suppose a misprint, insert a missing word, or invent a new sense of a word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a selection of attempts by critics over the years to resolve these difficulties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here it may be permitted the Editor to profit by … correcting in Shakespeare what is absolute nonsense as now printed: “&lt;em&gt;Vaulting&lt;/em&gt; ambition that o’erleaps &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;”. It should be its &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Sell&lt;/em&gt; is saddle, in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Walter Savage Landor (1834). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/citationandexam01landgoog/page/n80/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare&lt;/em&gt;, p. 65&lt;/a&gt;. London: Saunders and Otley.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been proposed (by whom we do not recollect) to read, instead of &lt;em&gt;itself&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;its sell&lt;/em&gt;, its saddle. However clever may be the notion, we can scarcely admit the necessity for a change of the original. A person (and vaulting ambition is personified) might be said to &lt;em&gt;overleap&lt;/em&gt; himself, as well as overbalance himself, or overcharge himself, or overlabor himself, or overmeasure himself, or overreach himself. There is a parallel use of the word &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; in Beaumont &amp;amp; Fletcher. “Prove it again, sir; it may be your sense was set too high, and so &lt;em&gt;overwrought itself&lt;/em&gt;.” The word &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt; in all these cases is used in the sense of too much. … After &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; Hanmer introduced &lt;em&gt;side&lt;/em&gt;. The commentators say that the addition is unnecessary, inasmuch as the plural noun, &lt;em&gt;sides&lt;/em&gt;, occurs just before. But surely this notion is to produce a jumble of the metaphor. Macbeth compares his &lt;em&gt;intent&lt;/em&gt; to a courser: I have no spur to urge him on. Unprepared, I am about to vault into my seat, but I overleap myself and fall. It appears to us that the sentence is broken by the entrance of the messenger; that it is not complete in itself; and would not have been completed with &lt;em&gt;side&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Knight (1846). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/standardeditiono07shak/page/n27/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Standard Edition of the Pictorial Shakspere&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 16&lt;/a&gt;. London: Charles Knight.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not perceive any difficulty here, when we consider that the image in the Poet’s mind was that of horseman gallantly mounting into his seat. The words “spur” and “vault” plainly shew what was in the Poet’s mind. Macbeth says that it is no instigation from without, only the working of ambition within; the purposes of which are often defeated, as a person mounting a horse may take too high a leap, and so, instead of seating himself in the saddle, fall on the other side of the horse. The word “oft” seems lost before “o’erleaps,” and the word “side” is wanting to make the sense complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Hunter (1845). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/newillustration01huntgoog/page/n176/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;New Illustrations of the Life, Studies, and Writings of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 178&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. B. Nichols.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here ‘other’ may be used substantively, as equivalent to ‘other side,’ which reading was given by Hanmer, and has support in the fact that it completes the quota of syllables for a perfect line. Perhaps ‘side’ was meant to be understood, with reference to the occurrence of the word in the preceding clause of the sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Grant White (1862). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workswilliamsha12shakgoog/page/n524/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Works of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume X, p. 520&lt;/a&gt;. Boston: Little Brown.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone’s explanation … does not assist us much; still less does the fanciful suggestion to read for “itself” &lt;em&gt;its sell&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;i.e.&lt;/em&gt; its saddle. The only resolution of the enigma which presents itself to our mind is to suppose &lt;em&gt;Intent&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Ambition&lt;/em&gt; are represented in Macbeth’s disordered imagination by two steeds, the one lacking all incentive to motion, the other so impulsive that it overreaches itself and falls on its companion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Howard Staunton (1864). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/works_of_william_shakespeare_vol_IV/page/n321/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Works of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, volume IV, p. 315&lt;/a&gt;. London: Routledge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the text stands … we have in shadowy imagery a most extraordinary horse and rider. Macbeth was no more likely to wear a single spur that &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; strike on &lt;em&gt;both&lt;/em&gt; sides than the Irishman was to discover the gun that would shoot round the corner. Moreover, his horse must have had three sides to it at the least. Now a horse may have four sides, right and left, inside and outside, and the street &lt;em&gt;gamins&lt;/em&gt; will at times advise an awkward horseman to ride inside for safety, but it cannot have three sides. And if the single spur had pricked &lt;em&gt;two sides&lt;/em&gt;, there could have been no &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt; left for ‘vaulting ambition’ to fall on. The truth is that ‘&lt;em&gt;sides&lt;/em&gt;’ is a misprint. The single spur of course implies a single &lt;em&gt;side&lt;/em&gt;—the side of Macbeth’s intent, which leaves ‘&lt;em&gt;the other&lt;/em&gt;’ for the ‘vaulting ambition’ to alight on in case of a somersault—the side of Macbeth’s &lt;em&gt;unintent&lt;/em&gt;. The passage comes perfectly right if we read—‘To prick the &lt;em&gt;side&lt;/em&gt; of my intent …’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gerald Massey (1866). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakspearessonn01massgoog/page/n616/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakspeare's Sonnets Never Before Interpreted: His Private Friends Identified&lt;/em&gt;, p. 599&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth says he has nothing to goad him on to the deed,—nothing to stimulate his flagging purpose, like the private wrongs which he urges upon the murderers of Banquo,—but mere ambition, which is like one who, instead of leaping into the saddle, leaps too far and falls on the other side. The passage supplies a good example of confusion of metaphors. If the sentence be complete, ‘the other’ must be taken to mean ‘the other side,’ a not unnatural ellipsis, but one for which we can adduce no example. Hanmer reads ‘on the other side,’ which makes both sense and metre complete. Rowe prints ‘on th’other—,’ as if the sentence were interrupted by the entrance of Lady Macbeth. Mason conjectured ‘on the rider,’ and Bailey ‘on the earth’. For ‘itself’ in the previous line Singleton guessed ‘its sell’, i.e. ‘its saddle’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Clark &amp;amp; William Wright (1869). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/macbeth00wriggoog/page/n146/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, p. 99&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford: Clarendon.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now by what aspect of the figure of equitation† shall this vacillation be set before us? Is it by the image of one getting &lt;em&gt;on&lt;/em&gt; his horse, as the commentators explain; or of one mounted, and urging his steed towards the goal? The former might symbolise a single act of mind, but the case demands a figure that shall set forth a double, nay, a complex and conflicting state of motives. Moreover a person mounting clearly would not need any spurs either as instruments of or incitements to mounting. … No; Shakespeare’s hero is already mounted, and eager for the goal; but he and his steed are not of one mind, and for want of a spur, cannot be brought into harmony of action. To set forth the conflict between Macbeth’s ambition and his irresolution—whether this irresolution sprang from weakness, cowardice or conscience—what so apt as the two-fold image of an eager horseman on a balking horse, the spurless rider leaning forward (vaulting) on his laggard steed? This was the poet’s metaphor. … Manifestly we have here a figure of equitation. ‘Intent’ is the steed, ‘Ambition’ is the rider. The rider has no spur to prick on his halting steed, while he himself is urged forward by strong desires. Rising in his stirrups, and bending over (‘vaulting’), he overleaps himself. The goal of Macbeth’s ‘intent’ is the assassination; the goal of his ‘ambition’ is the throne. Macbeth must be a murderer before he can be a monarch. If the intent to murder halts, the desire to mount the throne will be futile. All this Macbeth knows and feels. He does not repine at any lack of ambition; that is in full force and action; it is o’erwrought: but over his purpose he mourns—that is infirm; over his courage—that needs ‘screwing to the sticking place’; and so, like an eager rider on a sluggish steed, he o’erleaps himself and ‘&lt;em&gt;falls on the withers&lt;/em&gt;,’ and so Shakespeare wrote. … This reading seems to me to meet all the demands of the passage. &lt;em&gt;Withers&lt;/em&gt; calls for no explanation, it explains itself. Whether copied by eye or ear, it was easy to mistake in sound or appearance ‘other’ for &lt;em&gt;withers&lt;/em&gt;. This reading charges Shakespeare with no mixed or imperfect metaphors. It leaves his rhetoric and imagination unsuspect, brings the whole passage into harmony with itself and with the character of Macbeth—too ambitious to be innocent in thought, too cowardly to be guilty in deed. His imagination sicklied o’er with the pale cast of conscience, he is vacillating in purpose, irresolute in action, and querulous in speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Baugher Bittinger (1876). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qkZpPunlIJgC&amp;amp;pg=RA1-PA39&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Shakespeare knew of horsemanship—a new reading of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; I.7&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the American Philological Association&lt;/em&gt; 1876, p. 40.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Horsemanship.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my opinion, Malone is right that there are two metaphors here—no doubt the second metaphor was suggested or inspired by the first, but it is still a separate figure—and if you try to combine them and get something as absurd as Staunton’s show-jumping, or Bittinger’s theory that “vault” meant “lean forward” rather than “leap” and “other” was a misprint for “withers”, that is a sign that your criticism has o’erleaped itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-27T23:08:47.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16128" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T00:54:21.043" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_on_Tariffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Tariffs&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]: I’m not going to discuss the &lt;strong&gt;Fiscal Question&lt;/strong&gt; (said Reginald); I wish to be original.  At the same time, I think one suffers more than one realises from the system of free imports.  I should like, for instance, a really prohibitive duty put upon the partner who declares on a weak red suit and hopes for the best.  Even a free outlet for compressed verbiage doesn’t balance matters.  And I think there should be a sort of bounty-fed export (is that the right expression?) of the people who impress on you that you ought to take life seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have several questions regarding the above passage; the emboldened portion of text I do not understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &amp;quot;Fiscal Question&amp;quot; that Reginald refers to? From my impressions of Reginald's monologue it appears to relate to tariffs, as also suggested by the title of the story, however is this all it refers to? Researching into the term, I was able to find &amp;quot;The Fiscal Question&amp;quot;(1908) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;amp;rct=j&amp;amp;q=&amp;amp;esrc=s&amp;amp;source=web&amp;amp;cd=&amp;amp;cad=rja&amp;amp;uact=8&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiEmYHko7XrAhX-yDgGHfe7B9YQFjAAegQIAxAB&amp;amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBonar_Law&amp;amp;usg=AOvVaw3_8sgDaJ6V5HPBcjDrqxZw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Bonar Law&lt;/a&gt;, in addition to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/people/marquess-of-hartington/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Report&lt;/a&gt;(1906), that features this particular phrasing however these were published after Reginald(1904), and so did this phrasing appear earlier than Saki's use?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T00:54:21.043" Title="What does Saki mean by &quot;the Fiscal Question&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16129" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16132" CreationDate="2020-10-28T00:57:17.337" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_on_Tariffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Tariffs&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]:  I should like, for instance, a really prohibitive duty put upon the partner who &lt;strong&gt;declares on a weak red suit and hopes for the best.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to declare &amp;quot;on a weak red suit&amp;quot;? Would &amp;quot;suit&amp;quot; refer to a piece of clothing or a playing card suit in this instance, and what is the significance of it being red? (There is also a reference to a &amp;quot;weak red tendency&amp;quot; at the conclusion of the story.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T11:56:20.060" Title="What does it mean to declare &quot;on a weak red suit&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16130" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T01:00:31.247" Score="3" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald/Reginald_on_Tariffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reginald on Tariffs&lt;/a&gt;, Saki writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Reginald]:  And I think there should be a sort of bounty-fed export (is that the right expression?) of the people who impress on you that you ought to take life seriously.  &lt;strong&gt;There are only two classes that really can’t help taking life seriously—schoolgirls of thirteen and Hohenzollerns; they might be exempt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Reginald refer to the Hohenzollerns as apart of the &amp;quot;two classes that really can't help taking life seriously&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9934" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T01:00:31.247" Title="Why is it that Hohenzollerns &quot;can't help taking life seriously&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;saki&gt;&lt;reginald&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16129" CreationDate="2020-10-28T09:41:56.210" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;the partner who declares on a weak red suit and hopes for the best&amp;quot; is certainly a reference to the card game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_bridge#Scoring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bridge&lt;/a&gt;, specifically the early form called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_whist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bridge Whist&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The game is played by two pairs of players, known as &lt;em&gt;partnerships&lt;/em&gt;; this structure makes any player very dependent on their partner's ability, particularly in the opening stage where an unwise declaration (choice of suits) can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pagat.com/auctionwhist/biritch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expensive, particularly in the valuable red suits&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11224" LastEditorUserId="11224" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T11:56:20.060" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T11:56:20.060" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16133" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15884" CreationDate="2020-10-28T10:36:47.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Cabuliwallah' is a beloved tale of love and loss and nostaligia for a cessation of time. But time moves on relentlessly and leaves in its wake, heartbreak and human efforts to reconcile with this situation.&#xA;I liked the answer given above, which is Parbati referring to Goddess Parbati, since it lifts the story to mythic/cosmic dimensions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thinking aloud here. Parbati, the daughter of the mountains of Kabul, is absent physically in the story. Yet it is her absent-presence that fuels the story -- the affection of the Cabuliwallah for little Mini, the bond between the two men, and finally the realisation that some things in life- like love for daughters, present or absent,  are more important than any material possession. Parbati in Bengal, is worshipped as DURGA, the Goddess who slays the evil demon, Mahishasur. However in Bengal, Durga is the daughter who comes every year from the mountainous home of her husband to visit her father's home in the plains. Curious reversal!!&#xA;So Parbati - the daughter of the mountains (parbat) is an archetypal figure for daughterhood- the one who is always a child to her father-- whether young or old, whether little or married, she like Durga, Parbati, is the daughter always beloved, an essential part of the Bengali psyche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11225" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T10:36:47.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16134" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15956" CreationDate="2020-10-28T12:19:10.110" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Spagirl said, &amp;quot;B.S.&amp;quot; stands for &amp;quot;Bilbo Secker&amp;quot; in the second Swedish translation of &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, based on the translation &amp;quot;bag&amp;quot; -&amp;gt; &amp;quot;säck&amp;quot; (pronounced &amp;quot;seck&amp;quot;). While the word &amp;quot;bag&amp;quot; exists in modern Swedish, it's an obvious direct import from English and does not work in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is however a bit more depth to this story. The original Swedish translator of the &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; trilogy, Åke Ohlmarks, was a bit of a special character. He took great liberties with his translations, and would both embellish the language and try to figure out the origins of a name to recreate it in Swedish rather than translate it. This made his translations quite popular among the readers, but his rushed work, agnostic view of proof-reading and sometimes spotty knowledge of English would often lead to more or less glaring mistranslations. He also didn't take kindly to any form of criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These mistranslations caught Tolkien's eye, as language was very important to him (being a philologist and all), and would lead to an escalating conflict between the Tolkien family and Åke Ohlmarks over the years. This lead Tolkien to produce a translation guide for his books to make sure the mistake would never be repeated again, and when Swedish publisher Norstedt approached the Tolkien family to ask for permission to do a second translation, Christopher Tolkien only allowed it on condition that it would have nothing to do with Ohlmarks' translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second Swedish translator, Erik Andersson, employed a group of Swedish Tolkien fans to review his translation and provide suggestions, but his faithfulness to Tolkien's laconic prose over Ohlmarks more poetic translations combined with the fact that a lot of names had to be changed to follow the translation guidelines (Bilbo's and Frodo's surname being a prime example) means many Swedish fans still prefer Ohlmarks' translation to this day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To return to the original name, I personally don't believe Ohlmarks mistook the root of &amp;quot;Baggins&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;bagge&amp;quot; (ram, male sheep) in his translation, but rather that he didn't think the name meant anything at all and simply changed the ending to roll better off the tongue in Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11238" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T12:19:10.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T15:19:22.263" Score="-3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;As said I have never read the Harry Potter books but in the case that I do in what order should I read them in?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11242" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T20:05:46.630" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T20:05:46.630" Title="In what order should I read the Harry Potter series that makes the most sense?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;reading-order&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16140" CreationDate="2020-10-28T18:22:42.583" Score="0" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 10 of The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing a thief, Wellie, who returned to stealing after his master, Black, had stopped sending him money, that he was sending to keep him silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Willie, furious and hurt at the base ingratitude and duplicity of his patron, carried the letter and a story to a solicitor, and the solicitor said one word—“Blackmail!” Here, then, was a disgruntled Willie Jakobs forced to work: to depend upon chance bookings and precarious liftings. Fortunately his right hand had not lost its cunning, nor, for the matter of that, had his left. He “clicked” to good stuff, fenced it with &lt;strong&gt;the new man&lt;/strong&gt; in Eveswell Road (he was lagged eventually because he was only an amateur and gave too much for the stuff), and did well—so well, indeed, that he was inclined to take a mild view of Black’s offences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't meet any other mention in the story about this &amp;quot;new man&amp;quot; nor this road, so does that have a certain meaning, or refer to a particular one?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-28T18:37:15.677" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T18:41:00.197" Title="Does &quot;the new man&quot; have a certain meaning in the world of gangsters and thieves?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16139" CreationDate="2020-10-28T18:41:00.197" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this context, &amp;quot;the new man&amp;quot; is a new &amp;quot;fence&amp;quot; that Jakobs had not dealt with before. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fence#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fence&lt;/a&gt; is a noun with several meanings, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who hides or buys and sells stolen goods, a criminal middleman for transactions of stolen goods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fence#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;fence&amp;quot; can also be a verb&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;engage in the selling or buying of stolen good&amp;quot;) and Wallace already used that verb in the same sentence, he probably did not want to repeat &amp;quot;fence&amp;quot; as a noun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-10-28T18:41:00.197" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16141" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16248" CreationDate="2020-10-28T19:29:15.227" Score="2" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lowell&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Lowell's Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; states that Helen Vendler, in contrast to certain other critics, praised Lowell's final publication, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day by Day&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, especially because of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;his descriptions of &lt;strong&gt;impotence&lt;/strong&gt;, depression, and old age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, the word &lt;em&gt;impotence&lt;/em&gt; can mean several things, but the context strongly suggests the sense of &lt;em&gt;erectile dysfunction&lt;/em&gt; to my mind. (Or perhaps I just need to be psychoanalysed!) And, for what it's worth, whoever wrote that portion of the Wikipedia page agrees with me: the word &lt;em&gt;impotence&lt;/em&gt; is hyperlinked to the erectile dysfunction page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is erectile dysfunction discussed in &lt;em&gt;Day by Day&lt;/em&gt;? And, if so, in which poems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7745" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T22:33:14.450" Title="In which poem(s) in Day by Day does Robert Lowell describe erectile dysfunction?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-lowell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-28T21:47:03.163" Score="-2" ViewCount="109" Body="&lt;p&gt;While reading the third book, I was waiting constantly for the moment when the Ents would show up on the final battlefield, together with their newly found Fem-Ents, combining their powers into one fierce force of nature, far more powerful than when they tore down Isengard (&amp;quot;off-camera&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That never happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, there was not a word to mention them even getting a lead as to where those Fem-Ents could possibly reside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will admit to not reading the appendixes too carefully while I had the book, and now I no longer have it here (it was borrowed), so maybe it is indeed mentioned somewhere in those. Still, I really did think that this would be a major plot point in the main story, and not just left out entirely as a &amp;quot;loose end&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Tolkien consciously do this to make it seem more &amp;quot;realistic&amp;quot; in the sense that reality rarely wraps everything up neatly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11247" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:09:49.980" Title="What happened with the Fem-Ents?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16142" CreationDate="2020-10-28T23:55:37.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1695/did-the-ent-wives-become-trolls&quot;&gt;Did the Ent-Wives become trolls?&lt;/a&gt; on Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See the accepted answer.  It is not addressed definitively in the story itself, but Tolkien essentially confirms they had been dead for over 3,000 years.  No new Ents in a very long time, and only reason any are left is they are immortal, like the Elves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T21:09:49.980" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:09:49.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16114" CreationDate="2020-10-29T00:55:15.007" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Åke Ohlmarks took liberties in everything and never backed down&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Åke Ohlmarks was quite the special character. He considered it a translator's liberty and duty to reinterpret any work and improve it in the translation, and he took similar liberties in interpretting the original author's inspirations as well as in the way he portrayed people in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien did not appreciate any attempts to find allegories in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; to historical or contemporary people or events. The reason why events transpire in his world is solely contained within the world itself, not necessitated by some action in the real world. Furthermore, both Tolkien and Ohlmarks were philologists, and language was very imporant to Tolkien, and &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt; is written in a style similar to the old Icelandic tales.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know if Tolkien was especially curious in seeing how a philologist in Nordic languages would translate his work, or if he simply took interest in all translations (only the Dutch translation came before the Swedish, and Tolkien criticised that one as well), but over a year before the publishing of &lt;em&gt;Härskarringen&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_204&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tolkien expresses concerns about Ohlmarks translation efforts&lt;/a&gt;. Three years later, he wrote &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_229&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this letter to his publisher&lt;/a&gt; after having read &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkien.mbor.se/forord1.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Swedish foreword to &lt;em&gt;Sagan om Ringen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Letter_228&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The previous letter&lt;/a&gt; also criticises Ohlmarks, but in this case I suspect Tolkien made a mistake as well. Tolkien knew some Swedish, but not a lot. I do not have Ohlmarks' translation at hand, but since &amp;quot;fjäder&amp;quot; can mean both &amp;quot;feather&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;spring&amp;quot;, I strongly suspect Ohlmarks translated &amp;quot;leathery&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;fjädrande&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;springy&amp;quot;), which Tolkien mistranslated back to &amp;quot;feathery&amp;quot;. These problems with reverse translation only served to aggravate the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Ohlmarks basked in the attention and praise the translation of the books brought him, and took to styling himself as one of the foremost experts in Tolkienology impervious to criticism. He continued to peddle his interpretations of the books despite all denials and sometimes even his own admittance that they were far-fetched. Eventually, he would be forbidden from translating &lt;em&gt;Silmarillion&lt;/em&gt; into Swedish (I haven't found any definitive source on whether it was J. R. R. or Christopher Tolkien who made the decision), which Ohlmarks took as a grave insult.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, Ohlmarks would gradually become enemies with everyone associated with Tolkien, which culminated in the book &lt;em&gt;Tolkien och den svarta magin&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Tolkien and the Black Magic&amp;quot;, 1982) in which he accuses Tolkien of forgery, the Tolkien estate of being a money-grubbing mafia and the different Tolkien societies around the world of being satanic cults which do the mafia's dirty business while engaging in orgies and ritual murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11238" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T00:55:15.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16145" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-29T04:44:01.630" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 4, &amp;quot;Over Hill and Under Hill&amp;quot;, I suddenly read this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley &lt;strong&gt;the stone-giants were out and were hurling rocks at one another for a game&lt;/strong&gt;, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I backtracked several pages in order to attempt to find any mention of &amp;quot;stone-giants&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;giants&amp;quot;, but this seems to be the first time they were mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What &amp;quot;stone-giants&amp;quot;?! Are they giants made out of stone? Like the trolls that turned into stone? Bigger? Moving mountain-giants?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first, I thought this was a poetic way of describing the &lt;em&gt;mountains&lt;/em&gt; themselves and the rocks falling down from them, but the narrator seems to be talking about literal giants made out of stone? Which are just suddenly mentioned without as much as a basic description?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is a mention of &amp;quot;various horrors/dangers&amp;quot; in the mountains, I didn't expect them to just have giants made out of stone existing there, without some sort of explanation or history. The sentence reads just as if they had been already established, the way it says &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; stone-giants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched an online copy of the book and there is no mention of the literal word &amp;quot;giant&amp;quot; before that in the same chapter or the previous one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11249" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T04:59:51.530" Title="What's with the beyond-casual introduction of &quot;stone-giants&quot; in The Hobbit?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16145" CreationDate="2020-10-29T04:59:51.530" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That’s what you get with the Hobbit, don’t expect to find any sort of additional detail.  The Hobbit was in Tolkien’s mind intended for children so things aren’t always explained to the degree they might be in the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With most other subjects you might expect to find more in Tolkien’s other writing, but not giants.  They don’t exist in any of the final published works, only other references are in early drafts that you have to be very careful with, considering how much changed between them and the final drafts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T04:59:51.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16148" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16136" CreationDate="2020-10-29T16:53:13.570" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most important books in the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series are the seven books of the main storyline. They should be read in order, as each builds upon the previous ones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone&lt;/em&gt; (aka &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone&lt;/em&gt; in the USA)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then there are additional works, often originally written for charity. These add some colour and background to the story, but are not necessary. A number of them are named after a fictional counterpart in the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; universe. Those can be read after their first mention in the books, or after the main series. If read before the main series, they might contain spoilers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them&lt;/em&gt; (not to be confused with the film series of the same title)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Quidditch Through the Ages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An unnamed &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; prequel (of which the manuscript has been stolen)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tales of Beedle the Bard&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide&lt;/em&gt; (e-book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists&lt;/em&gt; (e-book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies&lt;/em&gt; (e-book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The odd one out is &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter and the Cursed Child&lt;/em&gt;, which is a play of which the script is available as a book. It is a sequel to the main stories, but retcons parts of them. Reception within the fan community was mixed, with some regarding it almost as fan fiction. You may want to skip it altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13" LastEditorUserId="13" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T17:57:05.187" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T17:57:05.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16149" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:33:42.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T23:33:42.447" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:33:42.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16150" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:33:42.447" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Gitanjali', a collection of poems by Rabindranath Tagore published in 1910. Use with [rabindranath-tagore], [bengali-literature], and [poetry]" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:28:14.880" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:28:14.880" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16151" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:34:30.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T23:34:30.580" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:34:30.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16152" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:34:30.580" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Robert Lowell (1917–1977), American poet, or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:03:25.767" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:03:25.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16153" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:35:16.393" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T23:35:16.393" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:35:16.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16154" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:35:16.393" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863 – 1946) or her life as a writer. She is better known by her pseudonym, May Sinclair. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T16:03:41.197" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T16:03:41.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16155" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:37:19.990" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T23:37:19.990" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:37:19.990" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16156" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:37:19.990" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;My Boyhood Days&quot; (1940) by Rabindranath Tagore. Questions about this work should be tagged with [rabindranath-tagore] and [bengali-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T09:53:23.560" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T09:53:23.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16157" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:38:37.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-29T23:38:37.283" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:38:37.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16158" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:38:37.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work &quot;Idylls of the King&quot; (1859–1885) by Alfred Tennyson, a cycle of twelve poems telling the legend of King Arthur. Questions about this work should be tagged with [alfred-tennyson]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-10-30T09:52:38.267" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T09:52:38.267" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5528" CreationDate="2020-10-29T23:59:38.223" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), Le Guin included an introduction to each story; the one for Winter's King goes into some detail to discuss the pronouns. It is short, copied out in full here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;When I wrote this story, a year before I began the novel&lt;/em&gt; The Left Hand of Darkness, &lt;em&gt;I did not know that the inhabitants of the planet Winter or Gethen were androgynes. By the time the story came out in print I did, but too late to emend such usages as “son”, “mother” and so on.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Many feminists have been grieved or aggrieved by&lt;/em&gt; The Left Hand Of Darkness &lt;em&gt;because the androgynes in it are called “he” throughout. In the third person singular, the English generic pronoun is the same as&#xA;the masculine pronoun. A fact worth reflecting upon. And it's a trap,&#xA;with no way out, because the exclusion of the feminine (she) and the&#xA;neuter (it) from the generic/masculine (he) makes the use of either of&#xA;them&lt;/em&gt; more &lt;em&gt;specific,&lt;/em&gt; more &lt;em&gt;unjust, as it were, than the use of “he”. And I find made-up pronouns “te” and “heshe” and so on, dreary and annoying.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;In revising the story for this edition, I saw a chance to redress that injustice slightly. In this version, I use the feminine pronoun for all Gethenians—while preserving certain masculine titles such as King and Lord, just to remind one of the ambiguity. This may drive some nonfeminists mad, but that's only fair.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The androgyny of the characters has little to do with the events of this story, but the pronoun change does make it clear that the central, paradoxical relationship of parent and child is not, as it may have seemed in the other version, a kind of reverse Oedipus twist, but something less familiar and more ambiguous. Evidently, my unconscious mind knew about the Gethenians long before it saw fit to inform me. It's always doing things like that.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11224" LastActivityDate="2020-10-29T23:59:38.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16160" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T13:12:21.743" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often see this quote from Joyce Rachelle being posted: “Don't be afraid to make mistakes. But if you do, make new ones. Life is too short to make the wrong choice twice.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was wondering if anyone knows when she said it? Or in what context? Was it a speech? One of her books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11256" OwnerDisplayName="Nova" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T17:11:07.053" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T17:11:07.053" Title="In what context did Joyce Rachelle say this quote?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;joyce-rachelle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16161" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16142" CreationDate="2020-10-30T18:41:49.327" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;We don't know.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ultimate fate of the Entwives, and the reason for their mysterious disappearance eons ago, are never definitively explained in the text of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, the appendices, or any of the supplementary material of Tolkien's legendarium. The closest Tolkien ever comes to addressing this is in one of his letters to a fan, which I quote as follows (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Tom Bombadil] has no connexion in my mind with the Entwives. &lt;strong&gt;What had happened to them is not resolved in this book&lt;/strong&gt;. [Bombadil] is in a way the answer to them in the sense that he is almost the opposite, being say, Botany and Zoology (as sciences) and Poetry as opposed to Cattle-breeding and Agriculture and practicality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I think that in fact the Entwives had disappeared for good, being destroyed with their gardens in the War of the Last Alliance (Second Age 3429-3441)&lt;/strong&gt; when Sauron pursued a scorched earth policy and burned their land against the advance of the Allies down the Anduin (vol. II p. 79 refers to it). They survived only in the 'agriculture' transmitted to Men (and Hobbits).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some, of course, may have fled east, or even have become enslaved&lt;/strong&gt;: tyrants even in such tales must have an economic and agricultural background to their soldiers and metal-workers. If any survived so, they would indeed be far estranged from the Ents, and any rapprochement would be difficult – unless experience of industrialized and militarized agriculture had made them a little more anarchic. I hope so. &lt;strong&gt;I don't know.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;em&gt;The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien&lt;/em&gt;, Letter #144&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that, in true Tolkien style, he is still writing from an &amp;quot;in-universe&amp;quot; point of view, never acknowledging himself as the creator of these fictional worlds and characters, but rather reporting on information &amp;quot;available to him&amp;quot; which may be incomplete or inaccurate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By writing this ambiguously bittersweet response, Tolkien maintains the mystery and the pathos of the Entish species. He could have written that Sauron destroyed all the Entwives, or that they ultimately came back home to the Ents, or even that most of them were killed but eventually a few returned to ensure the survival of the Entish line. Instead, he deliberately left the question open, so that fans of the book (even those who set store in extratextual authorial commentary as &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot;) can choose their own preferred ending to the story of the Ents and Entwives. There's a whole range of possibilities, ranging from tragic to hopeful:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they and their gardens were all destroyed in the Second Age;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;they, or at least some of them, fled or became enslaved;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the survivors became so estranged from their roots (pun intended) that, even if the Ents found them in future, they would find it hard to reconcile;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there might be hope for a reunion of spirits in the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's up to you which one you'd like to go with or accept as &amp;quot;headcanon&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Fair disclosure: this answer was largely inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/112892/31394&quot;&gt;an existing answer to the same question on another SE site&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-10-30T18:41:49.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16162" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-30T19:35:18.440" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this book (in English) 10+ years ago at a library and now I can not for the life of me remember the title.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Plot things that I remember&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the first book, there are two groups of hobbit-like people.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first group live like us in houses and have schools.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second group all live together in one group under a tree (I believe)&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This group has horrible names, like Grub.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One member of the second group is a young girl who tricks a boy from the first into believing she's part of his group.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the second book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of the boys meets a human boy&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This is bad because humans cannot usually see them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is also a scene where the boy from the first book is standing near a pond in a cave. He talks to someone on the other side who he thinks is the young girl. He asks what colour her bedroom is. The voice says yellow, but that is wrong because she always says it's blue with yellow.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I really remember, I think there was something about clocks in the second book but I'm not sure. I've tried looking in the library where I first read it but I think it may have been removed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help at all would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11255" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T21:32:58.720" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:32:58.720" Title="Looking for the name of a children's book about hobbit-like people" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16079" CreationDate="2020-10-31T09:56:21.820" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Clarifying the question&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I understand it right, the question is asking how to reconcile Bolingbroke’s pledge of loyalty if his lands are restored (III.3):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henry Bolingbroke&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On both his knees doth kiss King Richard’s hand,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sends allegiance and true faith of heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To his most royal person; hither come&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Even at his feet to lay my arms and power,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Provided that my banishment repeal’d&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lands restor’d again be freely granted&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with Richard’s abdication (IV.1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give this heavy weight from off my head,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The pride of kingly sway from out my heart;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With mine own tears I wash away my balm,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With mine own hands I give away my crown,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With mine own breath release all duteous oaths;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All pomp and majesty I do forswear;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My manors, rents, revenues, I forgo;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My acts, decrees, and statutes, I deny.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;God pardon all oaths that are broke to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;The garden scene&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first thing to say about this difficulty is that Richard’s abdication is not “in the next scene” as suggested in the question. Shakespeare wrote an intervening scene (III.4) to provide some breathing room between the highly dramatic scenes on either side, and to allow time for the actors to change out of the war gear of III.3 into the court dress of IV.1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stage direction for III.3 is “Wales. Before Flint Castle” and this scene represents the events of 19th August 1399, when Richard surrendered to Bolingbroke. The stage direction for IV.2 is “Westminster Hall” and this scene compresses the events between 29th September 1399 (Parliament assembles to witness Richard’s abdication) and 13th October 1399 (Bolingbroke is crowned king Henry IV). In the intervening six weeks Bolingbroke escorted Richard to London, confined him in the Tower, and pressured him to abdicate. This is described in III.4 by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_of_Langley,_1st_Duke_of_York&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;duke of York&lt;/a&gt;’s gardener:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;King Richard, he is in the mighty hold&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Bolingbroke. Their fortunes both are weigh’d.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In your lord’s scale is nothing but himself,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And some few vanities that make him light;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But in the balance of great Bolingbroke,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Besides himself, are all the English peers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And with that odds he weighs King Richard down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that a director might choose to cut III.4 to save time, but if it is cut then it makes it harder to follow the sequence of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Why did Richard abdicate?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What pressure was Bolingbroke able to bring to bear on Richard in this period? The chronicler &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raphael_Holinshed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Raphael Holinshed&lt;/a&gt; (one of Shakespeare’s sources for the play) wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next day after his coming to London, the king from Westminster was had to the Tower, and there committed to safe custody. Many evil disposed persons, assembling themselves together in great numbers, intended to have met with him, and to have taken him from such as had the conveying of him, that they might have slain him. But the mayor and aldermen gathered to them the worshipful commoners and grave citizens, by whose policy, and not without much ado, the other were revoked from their evil purpose: albeit, before they might be pacified, they coming to Westminster, took master John Sclake dean of the king’s chapel, and from thence brought him to Newgate, and there laid him fast in irons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Raphael Holinshed (1585). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofengl00holi/page/500/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of England&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 501–502&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, Richard had made many enemies when he was king, who saw his downfall as a chance to get their revenge. No doubt Bolingbroke put it to the king that if he did not abdicate then he would abandon him to the mercy of these enemies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Froissart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean Froissart&lt;/a&gt; gave a more explicit account of Richard’s motives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;King Richard knowing himself taken, and in the danger of the Londoners, was in great sorrow in his heart, and reckoned his puissance nothing: for he saw how every man was against him, and if there were any that owed him any favour, it lay not in their powers to do him any aid, nor they dared not show it. Such as were with the king said: Sir, we have but small trust in our lives as it may well appear; for when your cousin of Lancaster came to the castle of Flint, and with your own good will you yielded you to him, and he promised that you and twelve of yours should be his prisoners and have no hurt, and now of those twelve, four be executed shamefully, we are like to pass the same way. […] we see for truth that these Londoners will crown your cousin of Lancaster as king, and for that intent they sent for him, and so have aided him and do; it is not possible for you to live, without you consent that he be crowned king. Wherefore sir, we will counsel you, to the intent to save your life and ours, that when your cousin of Lancaster comes to you to demand any thing, than with sweet and treatable words say to him how that you will resign to him the crown of England, and all the right that you have in the realm, clearly and purely into his hands, and how that you will that he be king; thereby you shall greatly appease him and the Londoners also; and desire him effectuously to suffer you to live and us also with you, or else every man a part, as it shall please him, or else to banish us out of the realm for ever; for he that loses his life, loses all. King Richard heard those words well, and fixed them surely in his heart, and said he would do as they counselled him, as he that saw himself in great danger. And then he said to them that kept him, how he would gladly speak with his cousin of Lancaster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jean Froissart (1400). English translation by John Bourchier, Baron Berners (1525). In W. E. Henley, ed. (1903). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chronicleoffrois06froi/page/374/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chronicle of Froissart&lt;/em&gt;, volume VI, pp. 374–375&lt;/a&gt;. London: David Nutt. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Was Bolingbroke sincere?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what did Bolingbroke mean by sending “allegiance and true faith of heart / To his most royal person” in III.3? I can see three possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bolingbroke was sincere in III.3 but changed his mind afterwards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems doubtful to me, because in III.3 he follows the conditional pledge of loyalty that I quoted above with this naked threat:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If not, I’ll use the advantage of my power&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lay the summer’s dust with showers of blood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rain’d from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The which how far off from the mind of Bolingbroke&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is such crimson tempest should bedrench&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fresh green lap of fair King Richard’s land,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My stooping duty tenderly shall show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s hard to read “stooping duty” and “tenderly” as other than sarcastic in this context, but no doubt a skillful actor could do it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bolingbroke’s words were a &lt;em&gt;ruse de guerre&lt;/em&gt;, that is, a lie to trick Richard into surrendering quietly, without further fighting and loss of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is more plausible, though if Bolingbroke intended Richard to believe it, he should have left the threat unsaid. Perhaps we are to understand the threat as being an aside to Northumberland, and not part of the message, or at least it could be played that way. Certainly Richard is not fooled: he knows right away that Bolingbroke has come to depose him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What must the King do now? Must he submit?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The King shall do it. Must he be depos’d?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The King shall be contented. Must he lose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The name of king? A God’s name, let it go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bolingbroke’s words were a piece of conventional politeness, perhaps with an eye for propaganda purposes (keeping up the pretense that his rebellion is only the act of a loyal subject concerned to restore his rightful privileges) and the promises were not intended to be kept, nor to be believed by Richard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A director of the play could choose any of these (or a mixture of them) depending on how they intend their production to portray the character of Bolingbroke: is he a loyal subject finally driven to rebellion by mistreatment, an opportunist who takes advantage of Richard’s weakness, or a proud man easily provoked to violence? Shakespeare gives us Bolingbroke’s public words but not his private thoughts (he has no soliloquys) so all of these (and more) are playable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare modelled III.3 on Holinshed’s account of Richard’s surrender:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The king herewith went to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaumaris_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beaumaris&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;amp; after to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caernarfon_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caernarfon&lt;/a&gt;: but finding no provision either of victuals or other things in those castles, no not so much as a bed to lie in, he came back again to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conwy_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Conwy&lt;/a&gt;, and the mean time was the castle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holt_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Holt&lt;/a&gt; delivered to the duke of Hereford,† by those that had it in keeping wherein was great store of jewels, to the two hundred thousand marks, besides a hundred thousand marks in ready coin. After this, the duke, with advice of his council, sent the earl of Northumberland‡ unto the king, accompanied with four hundred lances, &amp;amp; a thousand archers, who coming to castle of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flint&lt;/a&gt;, had it delivered until him; and from thence he hasted forth towards Conwy. But before he approached near the place, he left his power behind him, hid closely in two ambushes, behind a craggy mountain, beside the highway that leadeth from Flint to Conwy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This done, taking not past four or five with him, he passed forth, till he came before the town, and then sending a herald to the kind, requested a safe conduct from the king, that he might come and talk with him, which the king granted, and so the earl of Northumberland passing the water,§ entered the castle, and coming to the king, declared to him, that if it might please his grace to undertake, that there should be a parliament assembled, in the which justice might be had, against such as were enemies to the commonwealth, and had procured the destruction of the duke of Gloucester, and other noblemen, and herewith pardon the duke of Hereford of all things wherein he had offended him, the duke would be ready to come to him on his knees, to crave of him forgiveness, and as a humble subject, to obey him in all dutiful services. The king taking advice upon these offers, and other made by the earl of Northumberland on the behalf of the duke of Hereford; upon the earl’s oath, for assurance that the same should be performed in each condition, agreed to go with the earl to meet the duke, and here upon taking their horses, they rode forth, but the earl rode before, as it were, to prepare dinner for the king at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhuddlan_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rhuddlan&lt;/a&gt; but coming to the place where he had left his people, he stayed there with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The king keeping on his way, had not ridden past four miles, when he came to the place where the ambushes were lodged, and being entered within danger of them, before he was aware, showed himself to be sore abashed. But now there was no remedy: for the earl being there with his men, would no suffer him to return, as he gladly would have done if he might; but being enclosed with the sea on the one side, and the rocks on the other, having his adversaries so near at hand before him, he could not shift away by any means, for if should have fled back, they might easily have overtaken him, ere he could have got out of their danger. And thus of force he was the constrained to go with the earl, who brought him to Rhuddlan, where they dined, and from thence they rode unto Flint […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The king […] came forth into the outer ward, and sat down in a place prepared for him. Forthwith as the duke got sight of the king, he showed a reverend duty as became him, in bowing his knée, and coming forward, did so likewise the second and third time, till the king took him by the hand, and lift him up, saying; “Dear cousin, you are welcome.” The duke humbly thanking him said; “My sovereign lord and king, the cause of my coming at this present, is (your honour saved) to have again restitution of my person, my lands and heritage, through your favourable licence.” The king hereunto answered; &amp;quot;Dear cousin, I am ready to accomplish your will, so that you may enjoy all that is yours, without exception.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Raphael Holinshed (1585). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofengl00holi/page/500/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of England&lt;/em&gt;, p. 500&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Bolingbroke. ‡ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Percy,_1st_Earl_of_Northumberland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland&lt;/a&gt;. § The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Conwy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Conwy&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You’ll see that Shakespeare reordered and simplified the sequence of events, but kept the essential points: that Bolingbroke sent Northumberland to the king with promises to get him out of his castle; that the king surrendered himself to Bolingbroke, and that the latter professed that his cause was only to restore his lands and titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s ambiguity about Bolingbroke’s sincerity is also present in Holinshed, though the “four hundred lances, &amp;amp; a thousand archers” that Bolingbroke sends with Northumberland, and the latter’s preparation of an ambush, show that they intend force of arms to have the last word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Froissart, on the other hand, said that it was Bolingbroke who delivered his own message, and was fairly clear that any promises he made were a &lt;em&gt;ruse de guerre&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earl of Derby† and the Londoners had their spies going and coming, who reported to them all the state of the king. And also the earl knew it by such knights and squires as daily came from the king’s part to the earl, who had sure knowledge that the king was gone to the castle of Flint, and had no company with him but such as were of his own household, and semed that he would no war, but to escape that danger by treaty. Then the earl determined to ride thither, and to do so much to have the king out by force or by treaty. Then the earl and all his company rode thither, and within two miles of the castle they found a great village: there the earl tarried and drank, and determined in himself to ride to the castle of Flint with two hundred horse, and to leave the rest of his company still there. And he said he would do what he could by fair treaty to enter into the castle by love and not by force, and to bring out the king with fair words, and to assure him from all peril, except going to London, and to promise him that he shall have no hurt of his body, and to be mean‡ for him to the Londoners, who were not content with him. The earl’s device semed good to them that heard it, and they said to him: Sir, beware of dissimulation: this Richard of Bordeaux must be taken either quick or dead, and all the other traitors that be about him and of his counsel, and so to be brought to London and set in the tower; the Londoners will not suffer you to do the contrary. Then the earl said: Sirs, fear not, but all that is enterprised shall be accomplished; but if I can get him out of the castle with fair words, I will do it; and if I can not, I shall send you word thereof, and then you shall come and lay siege about the castle. And then we will do so much by force or by assault, that we will have him quick or dead, for the castle is well pregnable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chronicleoffrois06froi/page/364/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Froissart, pp. 365–366&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Bolingbroke. ‡ “to be mean” = to be an intermediary.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bolingbroke delivering his own message to the king in a castle under siege seems very implausible, but possibly Froissart had misunderstood the sequence of events, conflating the king’s surrender to the rebels at Conwy with his meeting with Bolingbroke at Flint on the following day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T09:56:21.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16164" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-10-31T14:33:11.127" Score="6" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Nick Joaquin's story or novella &amp;quot;The Order of Melchizedek&amp;quot;, Guia, the main character's younger sister, has become a member of a religious organisation that is referred to as the Order of Melchizedek. Another member of the &amp;quot;order&amp;quot;, Sister Juana, explains,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, Mr. Estiva, we try you might say, uh, to bring the Vatican Council to the masses. For example, more public participation in ritual. But our parish priests don't have the time to train all their flocks in the procedure. This is where we come in. Wherever we go we gather a crowd to train. We use the techniques of traveling salesmen: our personnel put on a show. We are usually a combo of four, with guitars. Sister Guia here does an exhibition of the twist or the frug, we sing Beatles songs. But we also slip in the songs now enjoined for Mass. Presently the crowd is joining in. It's the guitars, Mr. Estiva. They make even sacred songs native and contemporary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Vatican_Council&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Vatican Council&lt;/a&gt; took place in the years 1962–1965; &amp;quot;The Order of Melchizedek&amp;quot; was published in December 1966.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;order&amp;quot; later turns out to be something more sinister. For this reason, I would like to know whether Joaquin is here referring to an organisation or efforts that really existed in the Philippines after the Vatican Council and is using the order's violence as indirect criticism of things that really happened in the Philippines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T20:18:32.273" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T07:05:07.943" Title="Does the Order of Melchizedek's professed goal to bring the Vatican Council to the masses refer to a historical reality?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;nick-joaquin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16117" CreationDate="2020-10-31T16:20:36.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees has cited several 19th-century editors, some of whom saw two metaphors in these lines from &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Modern editors tend to agree to the extent that they see two plausible interpretations, but they differ in the details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, G. K. Hunter writes in his edition (New Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin, 1967),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The horse imagery of 'Striding' and 'horsed' leads now (1) to a view of Macbeth's intention to murder as a horse that must be spurred, and (2) to a view of ambition (which could be a spur or stimulus) as a rider vaulting into his saddle, but overshooting the mark and falling on the other side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. R. Braunmuller's edition of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; (New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1997) also presents two interpretations of these lines. The first one is based on the observation that the lines continue the equine imagery from the preceding lines (&amp;quot;Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin horsed ...&amp;quot;). Hunter points out a distinction that other editors don't mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macbeth distinguishes his intent to murder, which he imagines as an unspurred horse, from his ambition to be king, which he imagines as an eager rider who overdoes his vault (&amp;quot;o'erleaps&amp;quot;) and thus fails to land in the saddle; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braunmuller's second interpretation is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;horse and rider together fall when the pair fails to over-leap an obstacle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For support for the second interpretation, Braunmuller refers to Catherine Belsey's paper &amp;quot;Shakespeare's 'vaulting ambition'&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;English Language Notes&lt;/em&gt;, 1972), which associated Shakespeare image with medieval and renaissance &amp;quot;depictions of Pride as a vaulting figure&amp;quot; (Braunmuller, page 133).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both interpretations assume that Lady Macbeth's entrance prevents Macbeth from completing the sentence with the word &amp;quot;side&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kenneth Muir's edition (The Arden Shakespeare. Routledge, 1962, 1984) adds, among other comments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[John Dover] Wilson mentions that vaulting into one's saddle was a much-admired feat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(John Dover Wilson's edition of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; in the older Cambridge Shakespeare series was published in 1947.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of these editions follow Walter Savage Landor's suggestion to emend &amp;quot;itself&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;its sell&amp;quot; (i.e. its saddle).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Editors don't gloss &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;vaulting&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; because the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vault#Verb_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vault&lt;/a&gt; here as the same meaning as today: &amp;quot;to jump or leap over&amp;quot;. (For this reason, the verb has no entry in &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions, revised by Robert D. Eagleson; Oxford University Press, 1986.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the footnotes and endnotes cited above don't comment on is the concept of &lt;strong&gt;ambition&lt;/strong&gt;, which is not listed in &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;, either. It can be instructive to look at other passages in Shakespeare's plays that use the words &amp;quot;ambition&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;ambitious&amp;quot;. For example, Brutus says in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Caesar loved me, I weep for him;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ambition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambition is mentioned also in other passages in the play, for example, Antony's defence of Julius Caesar against Brutus's accusation of ambition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oliver says in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/asyoulikeit/asyoulikeit.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll tell thee, Charles:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;it is the stubbornest young fellow of France, full&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of ambition, an envious emulator of every man's&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;good parts, a secret and villanous contriver against&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;me his natural brother&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryiv/1henryiv.5.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry IV Part I&lt;/em&gt;, Act 5, scene 4&lt;/a&gt; Prince Henry speaks the words&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ill-weaved ambition, how much art thou shrunk!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are spoken after the death of Henry Percy (Hotspur), leader of the northern rebellion against King Henry IV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These passages are intended to show that the word ambition in Shakespeare's works had stronger negative connotations than today; it is often associated with political figures who try to gain more power than was appropriate for their position in society. In Shakespeare's works, this type of ambition is not merely a matter between humans, but disturbs the natural order (see also the images of strange natural phenomena in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;) and has more &amp;quot;cosmic&amp;quot; implications. For a fuller exposition of this connection between human and natural order, see Ulysses's speech on &amp;quot;degree&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/troilus_cressida/troilus_cressida.1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;, Act 1, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T14:54:31.717" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T14:54:31.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16166" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16175" CreationDate="2020-10-31T21:02:32.217" Score="2" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone happen to know if &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Clockwork Orange&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Anthony Burgess has been translated into Latvian? If so, is there a Latvian word list for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nadsat&lt;/a&gt;, the fictional teen slang in the book, and is it available online (even just an excerpt)? The usual suspects (Wikipedia and your favourite search engine) yield no results.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11262" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T21:22:14.437" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T16:02:03.817" Title="A Clockwork Orange: Latvian translation of Nadsat" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;&lt;anthony-burgess&gt;&lt;a-clockwork-orange&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16177" CreationDate="2020-10-31T22:00:23.890" Score="5" ViewCount="169" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was watching a video on YouTube where an elderly Gore Vidal made mention that he was working on a book about the Mexican-American war.  In the video Gore Vidal was already in a wheelchair but he was still very witty.  I suspect he passed away before completing the manuscript.  Does anyone know if the manuscript ever survived or was completed by someone else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Video: &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/KMui1QZB5yw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gore Vidal in conversation with Melvyn Bragg&lt;/a&gt; (Intelligence Squared, 2008).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11263" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T21:53:28.697" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T21:53:28.697" Title="Gore Vidal’s book about the Mexican-American war: was anything published?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;gore-vidal&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16168" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-10-31T22:48:20.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T22:48:20.860" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T22:48:20.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16169" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-10-31T22:48:20.860" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Gore Vidal (1925-2012) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-10-31T22:49:03.373" LastActivityDate="2020-10-31T22:49:03.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="102" CreationDate="2020-11-01T02:13:50.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Others have already correctly pointed out that &amp;quot;they pluck out mine eyes&amp;quot; is a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Matthew-Chapter-18/#9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew 18.9&lt;/a&gt; (here quoted in the King James Version):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if thine eie offend thee, plucke it out, and cast it from thee: it is better for thee to enter into life with one eie, rather then hauing two eies, to be cast into hell fire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Mark-Chapter-9/#47&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark 9.47&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, then hauing two eyes, to be cast into helfire:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The separation of or contrast between the eyes and the body from the line in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; can also be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Luke-Chapter-11/#34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luke 11.34-36&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light: but when thine eye is euill, thy body also is full of darkenesse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take heede therefore, that the light which is in thee, be not darknesse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If thy whole body therefore be full of light, hauing no part darke, the whole shalbe full of light, as when the bright shining of a candle doeth giue thee light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also an echo of Sophocles's &lt;em&gt;Oedipus Rex&lt;/em&gt;, especially the following excerpt from a speech by the Second Messenger (here quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tragedies_of_Sophocles_(Plumptre_1878)/Oedipus_the_King&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward H. Plumptre's translation&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tearing from her robe the clasps,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All chased with gold, with which she decked herself,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He with them struck the pupils of his eyes, ⁠&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With words like these—&amp;quot;Because they had not seen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What ills he suffered and what ills he did,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They in the dark should look, in time to come,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On those whom they ought never to have seen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor know the dear ones whom he fain had known,&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With such like wails, not once or twice alone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Raising his eyes, he smote them (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the entire passage contains more references to other works:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is't with me, when every noise appals me? &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What hands are here? ha! they pluck out mine eyes. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The multitudinous seas in incarnadine, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Making the green one red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines about Neptune and washing away the blood may have been inspired by Seneca's &lt;em&gt;Phaedra&lt;/em&gt; (here quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tragedies_of_Seneca_(1907)_Miller/Phaedra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Justus Miller's 1907 translation&lt;/a&gt;; Shakespeare may have read John Studley's 1581 translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Tanaïs will make me clean again? &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or what Maeotis rushing to the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With its barbaric waves? Not Neptune's self,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With all his ocean's waters could avail&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To cleanse so foul a stain. &lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And see also Seneca's play &lt;em&gt;Hercules Furens&lt;/em&gt;, which Shakespeare may have read in Jasper Heywood's 1581 translation (but quoted here in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Tragedies_of_Seneca_(1907)_Miller/Hercules_Furens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frank Justus Miller's 1907 translation&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Tanaïs or Nile,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What Tigris, with the waves of Persia mad,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What warlike Rhine, or Tagus, flowing full &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And turgid with Iberia's golden sands,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can ever cleanse this right hand of its stains?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Making the green one red&amp;quot; may be a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/1611_Revelation-Chapter-16/#3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revelation 16.3&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second Angel powred out his viall vpon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and euery liuing soule died in the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see also &lt;em&gt;The Downfall and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington&lt;/em&gt; by Anthony Munday and (possibly) Henry Chettle; Act 4, scene 1 (cited by Muir):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And made the greene sea red with Pagan blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by G. K. Hunter. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin, 1967.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Kenneth Muir. The Arden Shakespeare. Methuen, 1962, 1984.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T02:13:50.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16171" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16173" CreationDate="2020-11-01T09:35:42.910" Score="1" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Fay Weldon's short story &amp;quot;Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo&amp;quot; I found the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We went to a restaurant for lunch, since it was too wet to do what we loved to do: that is, buy bread, cheese, sausage, wine, and go off somewhere in our hired  car, into the woods or the hills, and picnic and make love. It was a private restaurant — Yugoslavia went over to a mixed capitalist-communist economy years back, so you get either the best or worst of both systems, depending on your mood - that is to say, &lt;strong&gt;we knew we would pay more but be given a choice&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We chose the wild boar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know the meaning of the part in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we knew we would pay more but be given a choice&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11269" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T14:31:22.973" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T14:31:22.973" Title="Meaning of a sentence in &quot;Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;fay-weldon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16172" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-01T12:39:19.240" Score="2" ViewCount="93" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Terry Eagleton’s preface to the first (1983) edition of &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt; he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book sets out to provide a reasonably comprehensive account of modern literary theory for those with little or no previous knowledge of the topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In light of this stated purpose, a curious aspect of the book is that Eagleton never explains what “literary theory” is. The introduction begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If there is such a thing as literary theory, then it would seem obvious that there is something called literature which it is the theory of. We can begin, then, by raising the question: what is literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reader might imagine that Eagleton is merely postponing the explanation of “literary theory” until after he has explained “literature”, but this does not happen: chapter 1 is a narrative of the rise of the academic study of English literature, and chapters 2 to 5 consider various twentieth-century academic trends (phenomenology; structuralism; post-structuralism; psychoanalysis). Finally, in the conclusion, Eagleton writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of this book we have considered a number of problems of literary theory. But the most important question of all has as yet gone unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reader might think that by this point “the most important question of all” is, “what is literary theory?” But no! The question is actually:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &lt;em&gt;point&lt;/em&gt; of literary theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This lacuna—failing to explain or define the very subject of the book—is so glaring that it demands some account. Did Eagleton forget? Did he assume that all readers (even the intended reader from the preface with “no previous knowledge of the topic”) would already know what it is? Was the omission deliberate? If deliberate, what was Eagleton’s reason for omitting it? Did Eagleton think that it would be best for his readers to form the concept of “literary theory” by generalization from the examples he gives? Was there an &lt;em&gt;aporia&lt;/em&gt; or difficulty in committing to a particular meaning of the term? Was it a case of “the Tao that can be named is not the true Tao” or “if you have to ask, you ain’t never gonna know”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Eagleton eventually recognized there was a problem is, I think, evident from the new preface he wrote for the 2008 edition, where he does give a definition (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/terryeagletonliterarytheoryanintroductionzlib.org/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page viii&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T13:51:56.793" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T13:51:56.793" Title="Why did Eagleton omit to explain &quot;literary theory&quot; in &quot;Literary Theory: An Introduction&quot;?" Tags="&lt;terry-eagleton&gt;&lt;literary-theory-an-introduction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16171" CreationDate="2020-11-01T13:16:36.663" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a state restaurant, the food would have been less expensive but the choice would have been limited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a private restaurant, there was a choice of dishes, but the food was more expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T13:16:36.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16174" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16274" CreationDate="2020-11-01T16:01:16.713" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;The anthology &lt;em&gt;The Definitive Tagore&lt;/em&gt; (Rupa Publishing, 2017) contains several works, including five short stories. The book does not contain any information on the author, nor dates of publication or names of translators (except for the translator of &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of these short stories is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Victory_(Tagore)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Victory&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Neither Wikisource nor Wikipedia mention when this story was written. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=0g3H7eY5K6MC&amp;amp;pg=PA137&amp;amp;dq=tagore+%22the+victory%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjJ9JqW2OHsAhWKzaQKHcxuDs4Q6AEwA3oECAEQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=tagore%20%22the%20victory%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books preview of &lt;em&gt;Recritiquing Rabindranath Tagore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Samiran Kumar Paul and ‎Amar Nath Prasad (Sarup &amp;amp; Sons, 2006, page 137) provides some information about the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore himself translated 'Jay-Para jay' ('The Victory'), in preference to Jadunath Sarkar's translation, 'Victorious in Defeat' (&lt;em&gt;The Modern Review&lt;/em&gt;, December 1911).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, the short story was definitely written before 1911, but if Tagore started writing before or around 1877, that leaves us with a broad time span. Can the date of this story be fixed more precisely?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T23:55:29.887" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T10:39:05.750" Title="When did Tagore write &quot;The Victory&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16166" CreationDate="2020-11-01T16:02:03.817" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does a Latvian translation of the book exist?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If so, what is the translation of the made-up word Nadsat?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 1: &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mehāniskais apelsīns&lt;/em&gt; was translated by Silvija Brice and published by Atēna Publishers in Riga in 1999.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ISBN-10 is 9984635155 and the ISBN-13 is 9789984635156.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Question 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The made-up word Nadsat may not have been translated. A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2722699324&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comment on a GoodReads review&lt;/a&gt; of the book, in Latvian, uses the term Nadsat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tvnet.lv/6924109/tris-antiutopiski-romani-ko-palasit-karantina/page/3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;review and summary&lt;/a&gt; of the book in Latvian also uses the term NADSAT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be sure, you would want to find the book and inspect it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=xhGQGQAACAAJ&amp;amp;dq=isbn:9984635155&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;source=gbs_api&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; has the bibliographic information but not an electronic copy of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?field1=ocr;q1=Mehaniskais%20apelsins;a=srchls;lmt=ft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HathiTrust&lt;/a&gt; does not seem to have the book either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/491643072&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt; lists only two libraries with the book, but not all libraries have their information in OCLC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://kopkatalogs.lv/F/?func=find-b&amp;amp;find_code=WRD&amp;amp;adjacent=N&amp;amp;request=Meh%C4%81niskais%20apels%C4%ABns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;National Library of Latvia&lt;/a&gt; in Riga seems to have a couple of copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://katalogs.rcb.lv/Alise/lv/search.aspx?q=Meh%C4%81niskais+apels%C4%ABns+&amp;amp;language=&amp;amp;materialType=&amp;amp;year=&amp;amp;c=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Riga Central Library&lt;/a&gt; has the 1999 Atēna edition as well as a 2006 edition published by Mediasat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may be able to obtain the book from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ibook.lv/BD_mehaniskais-apelsins-entonijs-berdzess.aspx?BID=0ff86181-5d48-46b6-9ff8-394a0aeff593&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iBook&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mybook.lv/lv/sludinajums/mehaniskais-apelsins-50529/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MyBook&lt;/a&gt; sites for 3–6€.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T16:02:03.817" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16176" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16167" CreationDate="2020-11-01T16:15:48.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge Gore did not publish any such book. Should I discover differently (from his publishers) I will inform you later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11271" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T16:15:48.223" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16167" CreationDate="2020-11-01T17:19:05.817" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gore Vidal died in 2012, but ten years earlier, he had selected Harvard University's Houghton Library as the place where his papers would be archived after his death. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gorevidalpages.com/2012/08/gore-vidals-papers-to-be-housed-at-harvards-houghton-library.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gore Vidal’s Papers to Be Housed at Harvard’s Houghton Library&lt;/a&gt;, The Gore Vidal Pages, August 2012.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this did not imply that the author's papers would soon become available as a searchable archive that may be accessed by scholars interested in publishing unfinished manuscripts (such as the possibly unfinished manuscript on the Mexican-American War). Eugenia Williams's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/03/04/gore-vidal-archive/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paper Trail: An Abundant Gore Vidal Collection Gets Archived&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Boston Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, 4 March 2014) explains why scholars and other interested readers need to be patient (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Vidal’s gift wends its way through the legal system (&lt;strong&gt;his half-sister has challenged his will&lt;/strong&gt;), some of his papers sit in boxes waiting to be cataloged in the basement office of Houghton curator Leslie Morris. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an archive arrives at the library, Morris and her colleagues roughly sort it into boxes. Hence the present disordered state of Gore Vidal’s papers, which came to Harvard in &lt;strong&gt;nearly 400 cartons&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the manuscript is in one of those almost 400 cartons, access to it will only be possible after the legal issue has been resolved and those cartons have been catalogued. This may explain why Vidal's manuscript about the Mexican-American War has not been published yet (assuming that it is in a publishable or near-publishable state). (The Houghton Library didn't &lt;a href=&quot;https://library.harvard.edu/events/gore-vidal-bequest-celebration&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;celebrate the bequest&lt;/a&gt; until November 2018.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T17:19:05.817" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16178" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12574" CreationDate="2020-11-01T22:23:58.913" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the 'Whoever' informs your question about who is doing the following and being. rather than specifying a single person and asking who that one person is, the statement then would address a general reader. No matter who it is 'up there' looking down reading his words they ought to keep a strong heart and carry on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the lines read almost like a template: &amp;quot;But a day or two more, for [I] see the frame all wasted and sinking, and the yellow-blue countenance [I] see&amp;quot;. By leaving out the pronoun &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; the reader is included, and 'see' becomes an imperative, instructing the reader to 'see' for themself what the words describe. The image is drawn into further light this way, because it matters not who is doing the seeing, only that the wounds are being seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11272" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-01T22:43:55.627" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T22:43:55.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14236" CreationDate="2020-11-01T23:18:41.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Rand al'Thor has pointed out, the source is a preface that Camus wrote in 1955. In all sources that I have read, this preface is presented as a preface to an &amp;quot;American edition&amp;quot;. (For example in &lt;em&gt;L'étranger d'Albert Camus&lt;/em&gt; by Bernard Pingaud; Gallimard, 1992; page 55.) The 1962 Pléiade edition of Camus's works, &lt;em&gt;Théâtre Récits Nouvelles&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Roger Quilliot, reprints this &amp;quot;Préface à l'édition américaine&amp;quot; on pages 1928-1929 and adds a footnote saying,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Signée du 8 janvier 1955. Publiée par Methuen, Londres, 1958.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I.e. &amp;quot;Signed/dated 8 January 1955. Published by Methuen, London, 1958.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Worldcat does not list a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3AL%27etranger+au%3Acamus&amp;amp;fq=yr%3A1958..1958+%3E+%3E+x0%3Abook+%3E+mt%3Afic&amp;amp;qt=advanced&amp;amp;dblist=638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;school or university edition from 1958&lt;/a&gt;, unless the edition by Vintage in New York was such an edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bernard Pingaud's book, which reprints the preface in French, does not mention in which the text was first printed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alice Kaplan writes that Camus wrote the preface for &amp;quot;a 1955 American school edition of &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Looking for The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;; University of Chicago Press, 2018; page 195). WorldCat does indeed list two &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3AL%27etranger+au%3ACamus&amp;amp;fq=yr%3A1955..1955+%3E&amp;amp;qt=advanced&amp;amp;dblist=638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;American editions from 1955&lt;/a&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/etranger/oclc/886908948&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one printed by Prentice-Hall (French text; preface and introduction in English)&lt;/a&gt; (an educational publisher) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/etranger-the-stranger-edited-by-germaine-bree-and-carlos-lynes/oclc/70459272&amp;amp;referer=brief_results&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one by Appelton-Century-Crofts&lt;/a&gt;. However, both editions were edited by Germaine Bree and Carlos Lynes, so both editions may contain Camus's preface.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English version was presumably translated by a native speaker of English, since Camus's English was not even good enough to read Stuart Gilbert's translation of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The preface has an interesting background. In 1950, Camus's publisher Gallimard had been thinking about publishing the novel in a cheap edition; until then, the novel had only been available in the more expensive &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Blanche/L-Etranger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cream-coloured edition (&amp;quot;Collection Blanche&amp;quot;)&lt;/a&gt; with the NRF mark. In July 1950, Camus wrote to Michel Gallimard that he was reticent to see &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; leave the selective circle of readers of the Collection Blanche, adding that &amp;quot;Unlike &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;, it is not a book for everyone&amp;quot; (Alice Kaplan's translation in &lt;em&gt;Looking for The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;; University of Chicago Press, 2018; page 195).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons for this was the so-called J3 trial that followed a murder by a seventeen-year old schoolboy. (See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1951/05/03/i-un-fait-divers-hors-serie_2080448_1819218.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I. - Un fait divers hors série&lt;/a&gt; by Jean-Marc Théolleyre in &lt;em&gt;Le Monde&lt;/em&gt;, 3 May 1951.) This schoolboy used Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; in his defence, and Camus could not claim with certainty that the novel had not inspired the murderer, since he found that &amp;quot;writers bore responsibility for their words&amp;quot; (Alice Kaplan: &lt;em&gt;Looking for The Stranger&lt;/em&gt;; University of Chicago Press, 2018; page 194). This is why Camus may have found that he had to explain himself, or at least his novel, in a preface like the one he wrote in 1955.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-01T23:18:41.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-02T01:24:01.900" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;, Rieux, the main character of the novel, in Chapter 15, claims that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he mean by that? How exactly does seeing a lot of patients make one averted to the possibility of collective punishment? One line of reasoning that I can see is that in hospital, one encounters a lot of different and unique medical conditions, thus the idea of collective punishment doesn't make sense, which presumes a uniformity in the disease that is sent upon the masses. But in the case of Rieux, the argument wouldn't work since it was the plague itself which was termed to be the collective punishment (which is a lot uniform in its symptoms).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11275" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T05:59:31.133" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T05:59:31.133" Title="Interpretation of a Camus Quote" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-plague&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16181" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-02T02:57:56.520" Score="1" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;While thinking about &amp;quot;holes&amp;quot; in the wonderful, epic The Lord of the Rings story, I had a thought:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did they go through all this trouble of very slowly sneaking around with a whole fellowship, when they could have simply had Gandalf call for his Eagle friends and have them transport Frodo, carrying the ring in a sealed bag, all the way from Baggend to Minas Tirith (in order to not go straight to Mordor), then wait a little while and then do the same thing from Minas Tirith straight to Mount Doom? And there, the Eagle would drop off Frodo, have him throw the ring still in the bag into the fiery lava without even seeing it (as to not tempt him), and then simply bring him back immediately?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the trip from Baggend to Minas Tirith, they could have lots of protection eagles flying around or nearby, without raising any suspicion from Mordor, since they are not heading there. For the last part, which is a relatively short flight (Minas Tirith =&amp;gt; Mount Doom), they probably will only want to use one (the fastest) Eagle, as to minimize the risk that Sauron sees this as an attack, or even notices it at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems to me as if they could have saved a ton of problems by doing it this way instead of all the slow, dangerous sneaking. It's not like they didn't bring attention to themselves on the way anyway, and by foot (mostly), on the ground, it took them over a year instead of hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ring could have been destroyed in hours from Gandalf arriving to Frodo after realizing what the ring was, assuming that Gandalf could easily call for the Eagles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's probably something I'm forgetting to take into consideration here, but the Eagles almost seem like a &amp;quot;deus ex machina&amp;quot;, in both Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. They basically come to save the day when everything is hopeless, but why do they always wait until the very last minute? Even if the Eagles don't care about anyone other than themselves (which doesn't seem to be the case at all), it should definitely be in their interest to not have Darkness take over Middle-earth completely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Feel free to poke holes in my &amp;quot;clever&amp;quot; solution. I'm sure there's some fundamental issue with it, as Tolkien seemed to have thought of everything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11276" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T08:45:04.427" Title="Why did Gandalf not have the Eagles simply transport Frodo almost straight to Mount Doom and drop the ring in there?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8803" CreationDate="2020-11-02T03:56:23.260" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johnson is not making any kind of statement about &amp;quot;lower professions.&amp;quot; Just a relatable joke about not getting credit for his work. You know, start things off with a little humor and insight about fear of failure. stackexchange users didn't exist in his day so he could afford to write with that kind of subtlety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11277" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T03:56:23.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-02T04:08:05.823" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif-Index%5Fof%5FFolk-Literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;motif-index for folk-literature&lt;/a&gt; composed by Stith Thompson. I wonder if there is a&#xA;similar index regrouping fables by the moral they convey? As a rough example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;G.&lt;/strong&gt; Blinded by greed&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;G.1.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;The labours of others it is often another who profits''&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aesop's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The%5FLion,%5Fthe%5FBear%5Fand%5Fthe%5FFox&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lion, the Bear and the Fox&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;G.2.&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;The preservation instinct lost in front of profits''&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zhuangzi's &lt;a href=&quot;https://ctext.org/dictionary.pl?if=en&amp;amp;id=2860&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the magpie behind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;EDIT&lt;/strong&gt;: I'm indeed looking for a scholarly index, but other relevant sources are welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10686" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T17:35:48.057" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T17:35:48.057" Title="Is there a &quot;moral-index&quot; of fables?" Tags="&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;moral&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5529" CreationDate="2020-11-02T05:13:45.837" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could this possibly be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edgecombe, R. S. (2011). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41440729&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The deictic in “diese Töne”: Thoughts on the finale’s proem in the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Musical Times, 152&lt;/em&gt;(1917), 31–44.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This article is written from a musical point of view rather than literature. It is primarily about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, but it does mention both Hamlet and Rossini in the context of silence and speech and how in-your-face the music is. Here are a couple of relevant excerpts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charades, dumbshow, Hamlet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the chaos blast of the Ninth's proem (a double-exposure of tonic and flattened submediant) recurs in &lt;em&gt;The sleeping beauty&lt;/em&gt;'s pas de six, it figures as a mordant harmonic spice rather than a screech. By the same token, while Mahler and Scriabin break into symphonic song without a by-your-leave, Beethoven had carefully and ceremoniously to prepare the ground for a reunion of voice and orchestra. And what better way to have effected that union than through the lead-in of proximate speech (the string recitatives) upon which an actual utterance supervenes in a double act of clarification. After the persisted failures to secure meaning, actual words come as a relief, the start having functioned less as a game of charades (&lt;em&gt;pace&lt;/em&gt; Cooper) than as a dumbshow, designed, like its counterparts in Renaissance drama, to elucidate and condense a complex action. Dumbshows get the plot out of the way so that the more important concerns of theme and character can leap into prominence. Just as Hamlet provides a voice-over for 'The mousetrap', so too does Beethoven's baritone provide one for the musical pageant that has passed before our ears — but with one crucial difference: he gives us the story of the symphony rather than its plot, its temporal sequence rather than the causality of the failed search that Tovey and others have ascribed to the work. (Edgecombe, 2011, pp. 42-43)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swaggering march, Rossini:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as the oboe solo in the Fifth resembles a recitative more than it does a cadenza . . ., so the reverse obtains in the cadenza-like recitatives of the Ninth. Indeed, Beethoven's first draft of the baritone's intervention demanded a tessitura and fioriture beyond the competence of his soloist, and had to be curtailed. Thereby hangs a tale, for the floridity nudges these prosaic 'speech' passages of the symphony back in the direction of the baroque &lt;em&gt;recitativo accompagnato&lt;/em&gt; . . . and forward — such is the generous inclusiveness of Beethoven's gesture — to those hybrid arias, halfway houses between declamation and melody, that Rossini had made his own ('Una voce' — &lt;em&gt;Il barbiere di Siviglia&lt;/em&gt; — would be a case in point). And while Rossini is in the picture, I should like to remark en passant on another 'rossinisto' touch that I believe to be present in the symphony, the so-called Turkish march sung by the tenor. This, devoid of the shrillness and that strumming habit we find in &lt;em&gt;The ruins of Athens&lt;/em&gt; and from Mozart's K331, seems much closer to the sort of swaggering march at the ends of &lt;em&gt;Il barbiere&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;La Cenerentola&lt;/em&gt; and with which Rossini would still be 'sinning' in his old age (the 'Cuius animam' of the &lt;em&gt;Stabat Mater&lt;/em&gt;). (Edgecombe, 2011, pp. 33–34)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-26T02:08:25.610" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T02:08:25.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16185" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16181" CreationDate="2020-11-02T08:29:43.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is essentially the same question as this very popular one on our sister site Science Fiction &amp;amp; Fantasy Stack Exchange: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/2333/44520&quot;&gt;Why didn't Gandalf or Frodo Fly to Mount Doom?&lt;/a&gt; Several in-universe and out-of-universe explanations are given:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;nobody can willingly destroy the Ring, the story needed the 'accident' of Gollum falling off the cliff with the Ring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in particular the Eagles would keep the Ring themselves instead of destroying it&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stealth was needed to get safely into Mordor as long as Sauron was still in power&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the story would be too short and not interesting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it would be contrary to the main theme of the story&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T08:29:43.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16187" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-02T13:10:00.443" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a vague recollection of a scientist sharing a problem solving strategy. The content of that quote or strategy, which I do not recollect literally, can be summarized as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keep a list of 10 unsolved problems (that you would like to solve) in&#xA;your head, and every time a mathematician/physicist comes up with a&#xA;new solution to some problem, take that solution and try to see if you&#xA;can apply it to any of the problems in the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was Robbert Dijkgraaf telling that Robert Oppenheimer said something to this extent, but I cannot seem to find the quote or fragment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know who gave this quote or strategy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11281" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T13:35:34.377" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T17:45:43.027" Title="Looking for famous scientist who originated the quote: &quot;keep ten problems in your mind..&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16188" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-02T14:08:02.620" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm very confused by this quote, found in Sean Crist's article &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sean-crist.com/personal/pages/eagles/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Could the eagles have flown Frodo into Mordor?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. [Gandalf] by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.&amp;quot; (Letter 210)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's how I interpret it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Eagles are problematic, and because of this, I have not used them much in my stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. [Gandalf] by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is &amp;quot;the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness&amp;quot;? What does that mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is that? And does this simply mean that he means that it's &amp;quot;absurd&amp;quot; for a Great Eagle to descent somewhere in the Shire? How so? Why is it absurd?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it also makes the later capture of G. [Gandalf] by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand each word, and I know how the story goes, but don't grasp at all what is meant by this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien quotes from letters make very little sense to me in the way they are written. It's not that he uses very difficult words, but they seem to make no sense to my brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Edvardo Santiano" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T01:12:33.843" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T01:12:33.843" Title="What did Tolkien mean by &quot;The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16188" CreationDate="2020-11-02T14:31:40.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Eagles are a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/deus-ex-machina&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;deus ex machina&lt;/a&gt;: a way to solve a difficult problem the foreground characters can't solve themselves. Naturally a good writer wants to minimize the use of such a technique, because it's more interesting if the characters struggle their way out of the problem on their own efforts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's absurd to have them come to the Shire from the Misty Mountains to do a rescue, because that's something like the distance between Vienna and, oh, Dublin. It's too far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But using them to rescue the dwarves + Mr. Baggins from goblins near the Misty Mountains is less a stretch -- it's close to their home -- and rescuing Gandalf from Saruman is also less of a stretch, if we're to believe that Saruman's area, which &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; close to the Misty Mountains, is &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; close to a place where the eagles live.  It's still a stretch because Gandalf is human-sized and too big for a real eagle to pick up. So these must be super-eagles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I recall, they also picked up Frodo at a place far from their home, but IIRC they were in that area because they had joined the war. And Tolkien is always emphasizing that hobbits are small.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11282" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T14:31:40.987" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16190" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16199" CreationDate="2020-11-02T14:58:45.880" Score="3" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, if duels were popular in Russia in Pushkin's times. 37 is a high number of years and Pushkin did shoot many humans, before was shot downed by d'Anthès.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to &lt;code&gt;grep&lt;/code&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD,_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80_%D0%A1%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B3%D0%B5%D0%B5%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ru.wikipedia.org&lt;/a&gt; with &amp;quot;дуэль&amp;quot; - and there is only one... and it is only little paragraph about his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any suggestions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11285" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:40:37.603" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:14:34.787" Title="How many people did Alexandr Sergeevich Pushkin kill in duels before d'Anthès stopped him?" Tags="&lt;biography&gt;&lt;alexander-pushkin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16191" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:41:02.993" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:41:02.993" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:41:02.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16192" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:41:02.993" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Plague' (French: 'La Peste', 1947) by Albert Camus. Questions about this work should be tagged with [albert-camus] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:42:26.910" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:42:26.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16193" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:45:16.107" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:45:16.107" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:45:16.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16194" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:45:16.107" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Fay Weldon (1931) or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:52:00.343" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:52:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16195" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:54:22.180" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:54:22.180" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:54:22.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16196" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:54:22.180" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Literary Theory: An Introduction' (1983) by Terry Eagleton. Questions about this work should be tagged with [terry-eagleton]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:56:37.923" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:56:37.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:56:20.130" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:56:20.130" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:56:20.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-02T15:56:20.130" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Terry Eagleton (born 1943) or his life as a literary critic and theorist." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T15:57:18.683" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T15:57:18.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16199" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16190" CreationDate="2020-11-02T17:21:14.747" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pushkin didn't kill (or even wound) anybody in duels before he was killed in one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a full list of Alexander Pushkin's duels in Rina Tim's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://rinatim.com/2016/12/03/alexander-pushkins-duels/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Pushkin’s Duels&lt;/a&gt;. There were 26 of them. Most of them were called off, and in several of the others, Pushkin did not shoot. In two of them, both participants shot and missed (although it's not stated whether they were trying to miss or not). The only one where a bullet hit a participant was the one where Pushkin was killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T15:14:34.787" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:14:34.787" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16201" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16203" CreationDate="2020-11-02T19:10:48.583" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 11 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing an old man who was changing the topics of talking very quickly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old man had a trick of striking off at a tangent; from one subject to another he leapt like a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Horace had framed half a dozen words the old man &lt;strong&gt;was dragging his unwilling victim along a piscatorial road, and Sir Isaac was floundering out of his depths in a morass—if the metaphor be excused—of salmon-fishing, trout-poaching, pike-fishing&lt;/strong&gt;—a sport on which Sir Isaac Tramber could by no means deem himself an authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get what's meant by &amp;quot;drag him along a piscatorial road&amp;quot;! Does he mean that &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;he make him trying to catch him, as if he was a fish, from one topic to another&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;?!!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-02T19:21:00.917" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:22:40.453" Title="What's meant by &quot;drag him along a piscatorial road&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16201" CreationDate="2020-11-02T21:22:40.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Piscatorial” means “relating to the sport of fishing” and “dragging his unwilling victim along a road” is a metaphor for one of the participants in a conversation choosing a topic that the other does not enjoy talking about. Putting this together, Lord Verlond is insisting on talking about fishing to Sir Isaac, who is not at all interested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wallace expresses this simple idea in an absurdly laboured way, with a mixed metaphor (Sir Isaac cannot be simultaneously being dragged down a road and floundering in a morass) followed by an aside drawing the reader’s attention to this catachresis. The author probably intended it to be funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T21:22:40.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16204" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15733" CreationDate="2020-11-02T22:33:03.793" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rhythm of this poem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accentual_verse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;accentual&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimeter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dimeter&lt;/a&gt;: that is, it has two stresses per line, and an irregular complement of unstressed syllables. I read it like this, treating the second and third lines as if they are a single line that has been split:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Look&lt;/strong&gt; what we &lt;strong&gt;found&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in the &lt;strong&gt;park&lt;/strong&gt; in the &lt;strong&gt;dark&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We will &lt;strong&gt;take&lt;/strong&gt; him &lt;strong&gt;home&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We will &lt;strong&gt;call&lt;/strong&gt; him &lt;strong&gt;Clark&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He will &lt;strong&gt;live&lt;/strong&gt; at our &lt;strong&gt;house&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He will &lt;strong&gt;grow&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;grow&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will our &lt;strong&gt;Moth&lt;/strong&gt;er &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; this?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;We&lt;/strong&gt; don't &lt;strong&gt;know&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accentual dimeter is quite common in nursery rhymes and children’s songs, for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Baa&lt;/strong&gt;, baa, &lt;strong&gt;black&lt;/strong&gt; sheep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Have&lt;/strong&gt; you any &lt;strong&gt;wool&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Or&lt;/strong&gt;anges and &lt;strong&gt;lem&lt;/strong&gt;ons&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Say the &lt;strong&gt;bells&lt;/strong&gt; of St &lt;strong&gt;Clem&lt;/strong&gt;ens&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-02T22:33:03.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-03T07:46:57.950" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Has the general image of explorers or exploring teams in Arctic novels in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries really changed in essence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10576" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T07:46:57.950" Title="What is the change in the characterization of the explorers in arctic novels in the past two centuries?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16206" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2615" CreationDate="2020-11-03T11:34:31.753" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difficulty with this question is that there have been so many children's books that combined the stories of Münchhausen, Till Eulenspiegel and Die Schildbürger. Below are a few examples, each of which is a hardcover edition. (I have not included the links to Amazon.de, since these will become invalid over time.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) &lt;em&gt;Die schönsten Vorleseklassiker: Till Eulenspiegel, Münchhausen, Rübezahl, Die Schildbürger. Vorlesebuch und Geschenkbuch&lt;/em&gt;, published by Gondolino in 2013 (but this may be a reprint).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u2sV1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u2sV1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bookcover of the above book; in addition to the words from the tittle, it also shows colourful illustrations for each of the four stories listed on the cover&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) &lt;em&gt;Narrenstreiche - Münchhausen; Die Schildbürger; Till Eulenspiegel - Drei lustige Erzählungen, für die Jugend bearbeitet von Friedrich Hanke&lt;/em&gt;, published by Verlag Jugendhort in 1920. See the bookcover below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1x5Zk.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1x5Zk.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bookcover with the title 'Narrenstreiche' and an illustration in black, red and white&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(3) &lt;em&gt;Till Eulenspiel &amp;amp; Münchhausen &amp;amp; Die Schildbürger&lt;/em&gt;, edited or retold by Kurt Eigl and illustrated by Ernst Schrom, published by Bertelsmann in 1962. See the bookcover below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTAo5.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NTAo5.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bookcover with the title 'Till Eulenspiel - Münchhausen - Die Schildbürger' and an illustration for each of the stories&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) &lt;em&gt;Narrenstreiche. Münchhausen. Die Schildbürger. Till Eulenspiegel&lt;/em&gt;, edited or retold by Hanke and illustrated by Hanetzog; published by Jugendhort in 1910 (some editions of the same volume were published earlier or without a year of publication). See the bookcover below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r1gR2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r1gR2.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Bookcover with the title 'Narrenstreiche' and an illustration of Münchhausen dangling from a rope attached to the moon&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(5) &lt;em&gt;Erich Kästner erzählt: Münchhausen, Gullivers Reisen, Till Eulenspiegel, Die Schildbürger, Don Quichotte&lt;/em&gt; Cecillie Dressler Verlag, 1975. See the bookcover below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l8kco.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/l8kco.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Cover with the above book title and an illustration of Münchhausen flying over a battlefield on a cannonball&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T11:34:31.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16207" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16210" CreationDate="2020-11-03T13:58:46.153" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this quote in &lt;em&gt;Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South&lt;/em&gt; by Shirley Abbott&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also realized that these two women had unmatronly desires, usually involving beautiful dresses and travel, that otherwise went unmentioned--merely the circumspect fantasies of a pair of young housewives caught &lt;strong&gt;in the coils of the commonplace.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the author trying to convey by saying &amp;quot;in the coils of the commonplace&amp;quot; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T19:38:02.133" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T19:38:02.133" Title="What does &quot;in the coils of the commonplace&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;shirley-abbott&gt;&lt;womenfolks-growing-up-down-south&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16208" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11100" CreationDate="2020-11-03T14:19:09.527" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bowl's significance is that it is used to practise &lt;em&gt;chāyā dān&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;chhayadan&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;chaaya daan&lt;/em&gt; (depending on the transcription). In Northern India, the &lt;em&gt;chāyā dān&lt;/em&gt; can be part of one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.matrimonialsindia.com/blog/significance-of-7-pheras-in-wedding.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seven pheras of Hindu weddings&lt;/a&gt;, as explained in Gloria Goodwin Raheja's study &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Hy-eaXmEwggC&amp;amp;pg=PA138&amp;amp;dq=%22chaya+patra%22&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjI7Lf6vObsAhVKUhoKHQgoCYIQuwUwAHoECAQQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22chaya%20patra%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poison in the Gift: Ritual, Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian Village&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 1988):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the conclusion of the &lt;em&gt;pherā&lt;/em&gt;, an additional prestation is sometimes made. A dish filled with clarified butter is brought and a ten-&lt;em&gt;paisā&lt;/em&gt; coin is placed in it. Both the bride and the groom are made to cast their reflections into it. This &lt;em&gt;chāyā pātra&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;reflection vessel&amp;quot;) is then given to a Dakaut, with an appropriate &lt;em&gt;sankalp&lt;/em&gt;. Wenever a &lt;em&gt;chāyā dān&lt;/em&gt; is given, the purpose, as we have seen, is to remove from the donor negative substances engendered by particular circumstances. The words of the &lt;em&gt;sankalp&lt;/em&gt; once again describe the purpose of the &lt;em&gt;chāyā dān&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;to remove the various afflictions&amp;quot; (...) caused by the marriage (...), this &lt;em&gt;chāyā dān&lt;/em&gt; is given to the Dakaut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to other sources, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://hindusphere.com/chaaya-daan-on-shani-amavasya/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindusphere.com&lt;/a&gt;, chāyā dān is also performed on Shani Amavasya. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday#Name_and_associations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shanivara&lt;/a&gt; means Saturday; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shani&lt;/a&gt; refers to the planet Saturn; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amavasya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amavasya&lt;/a&gt; refers to the lunar phase of the New moon in Sanskrit.) According to the above Hindusphere.com article,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Shani Amavasya Chaaya Daan has to be performed. The process of performing Chaaya Daan is very easy. Pour Mastard Oil in  a bowl and place it beside your head or under the bed right under your head on the night before to Shani Amavasya. As soon as we get up the first thing to do is to look into bowl and see ones reflection in the oil. Then this oil has to be donated to a Brahmin or to be given away in the temple of Lord Shani on Shani Amavasya. This is called Chaaya Daan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Performing of Chaaya Daan on Shani Amavasaya would please lord Shani immensely and people under the effect of Lord Shani would get relief in the difficulties caused in their lives because of Shani.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;relief in the difficulties&amp;quot; sounds similar to the removal of negative substances mentioned in Gloria Goodwin Raheja's study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear whether he poet's parents used the bowl only for Shani Amavasya or also during their wedding; in the latter case it would definitely be filled with significant memories. Since it is an heirloom, it may also have been used by ancestors, but since the poem does not explicitly mention ancestors, this remains speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-03T22:31:11.180" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T22:31:11.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16210" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16207" CreationDate="2020-11-03T17:56:15.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is difficult to say precisely what type of coils Shirley Abbott intended to the reader to picture, she may have envisaged coils of rope, coils of barbed wire or even the coils of a serpent. However, not withstanding that we can extrapolate the meaning from the sentence itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She says that they are 'caught in the coils' so she is expressing that their freedom to indulge these unmatronly desires are constrained by metaphorical coils of their commonplace lives and circumstances. They can't travel, they have husbands to care for, they can't wear silks because they have houses to keep, housework to do. It is all a little ordinary, even if they are happy, so they dream of more glamorous lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-11-03T17:56:15.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16211" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-04T09:37:48.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T09:37:48.137" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T09:37:48.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16212" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-04T09:37:48.137" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz (1934–2019) or her life as a writer. She was an American editor and memoirist and the author of &quot;Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South&quot; (1983)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-11T22:44:46.907" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T22:44:46.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16213" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-04T09:38:22.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T09:38:22.223" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T09:38:22.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16214" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-04T09:38:22.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South' (1983), a memoir by Shirley Abbott. Use this tag with the [shirley-abbott] tag." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T16:42:39.280" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T16:42:39.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16215" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16221" CreationDate="2020-11-04T13:25:08.557" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12 of The Just Men of Cordova (1917)&lt;/a&gt; by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing a crowd in a horse racing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were regular followers of the game who had known no holiday, and had followed the jumping season with religious attention. There were rich men and comparatively poor men; little tradesmen who found this the most delightful of their holidays; members of Parliament who had snatched a day from the dreariness of the Parliamentary debates; sharpers on the look-out for possible victims; these latter quiet, unobtrusive men whose eyes were constantly on the move for a likely subject. There was a sprinkling of journalists, &lt;strong&gt;cheery and sceptical&lt;/strong&gt;, young men and old men, farmers in their gaiters—all drawn together in one great brotherhood by a love of the sport of kings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually this statement is &lt;strong&gt;a bit obscure for me because of the arrangement of commas&lt;/strong&gt;; I mean that &lt;strong&gt;it should have been written &amp;quot;cheery and sceptical young men and old men&amp;quot; without the second comma&lt;/strong&gt;, if it refers to the young men and old men, right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;And if it refers to the journalists, then I can't get why would the author describe the journalists as such?&lt;/strong&gt;!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T13:34:41.307" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T01:25:27.467" Title="To whom does &quot;cheery and sceptical&quot; refer in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;style&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16215" CreationDate="2020-11-04T13:50:11.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The adjective group &amp;quot;cheery and skeptical&amp;quot; refers back to the journalists. I assume the reason for putting it after &amp;quot;journalists&amp;quot; instead of before it has to do with rhythm. Compare the rhythm with Wallace's version with the alternative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wallace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;strong&gt;sprink&lt;/strong&gt;ling of &lt;strong&gt;jour&lt;/strong&gt;nalists, |  &lt;strong&gt;cheery&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;scep&lt;/strong&gt;tical, | &lt;strong&gt;young&lt;/strong&gt; men and &lt;strong&gt;old&lt;/strong&gt; men, | &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt;mers in their &lt;strong&gt;gai&lt;/strong&gt;ters (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternative version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &lt;strong&gt;sprink&lt;/strong&gt;ling of &lt;strong&gt;cheery&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;scep&lt;/strong&gt;tical &lt;strong&gt;jour&lt;/strong&gt;nalists, | &lt;strong&gt;young&lt;/strong&gt; men and &lt;strong&gt;old&lt;/strong&gt; men, | &lt;strong&gt;far&lt;/strong&gt;mers in their &lt;strong&gt;gai&lt;/strong&gt;ters (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Wallace's version, you have a subtle pause after each word group, each of which is balanced: &amp;quot;sprinkling of journalists&amp;quot; (two substantives on each side of &amp;quot;of&amp;quot;), &amp;quot;cheery and sceptical&amp;quot; (two adjectives on each side of &amp;quot;and&amp;quot;), &amp;quot;young men and old men&amp;quot; (an adjective-noun combination on each side of &amp;quot;and&amp;quot;)and &amp;quot;farmers in their gaiters&amp;quot; (two nouns on each side of &amp;quot;in their&amp;quot;). In each group, the words that carry meaning (nouns and adjectives) are nicely balanced around the words in between them. After each group, the reader can pause briefly (and, if reading aloud, breathe in again during any of these breaks).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you look at the alternative version, &amp;quot;a sprinkling of cheery and sceptical journalists&amp;quot; becomes a long phrase without the balance or the breaks that you see in Wallace's version. In addition, putting the adjectives before &amp;quot;journalists&amp;quot; would give them more prominence, which may not have been the author's intent. By putting them after the noun, they become less prominent, even almost an afterthought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T13:50:11.330" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-04T15:46:45.397" Score="5" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;Two major characters in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Under_Fire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rose Under Fire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (by Elizabeth Wein) have names that mean the same thing. One is named Róża (&amp;quot;Rose&amp;quot; in her native language) and the other Rose. As far as I can remember, this is brought up a few times, but only used as banter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One theory that I have as to why they share a name is to emphasize how they act as foils to each other. Róża is largely defined by Ravensbrück (the concentration camp the two meet in), while Rose is defined by who she is outside the camp. This is explicitly brought up here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There wasn't any part of Róża that wasn't connected to Ravensbrück, even her work, even the parts of her body that had escaped experimentation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ravensbrück doesn't &lt;em&gt;define&lt;/em&gt; me. I had a lot of being Rose to cling to when I landed there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Both quotes from &amp;quot;3. DRAG&amp;quot; (part 3 of the ending magazine article)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However I can't explain this theory very well, and it fells ill-defined to me. I'm interested in other's interpretations of the name-sharing. &lt;strong&gt;Is there some deeper significance behind the fact they share the same name meaning?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-04T15:59:59.743" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T15:59:59.743" Title="Why are there two characters named &quot;Rose&quot; in Rose Under Fire?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;elizabeth-wein&gt;&lt;rose-under-fire&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16219" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-04T18:33:57.393" Score="7" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of my teachers of French once told an anecdote about Gustave Flaubert in class. I'm not certain I remember all the details correctly, so what follows is how I remember, or possibly misremember after more than 25 years, the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flaubert was staying in (presumably) a hotel and was writing or improving a draft of one of his works. When he had finished a chapter or a section, he read it aloud. As the window of his room was open, passers-by on the street stopped to listen to the story. When Flaubert stopped reading, he noticed that a small crowd had gathered near the window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Flaubert worked very intensely on improving his style and that he loved to read aloud are no secrets. For example, James Wood writes in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Chngj6SJVbIC&amp;amp;pg=PA142&amp;amp;dq=flaubert+read+aloud+window&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjLnougmensAhUKhRoKHRPCA4AQuwUwAHoECAYQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=flaubert%20read%20aloud%20window&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How Fiction Works&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flaubert loved to read aloud. It took him thirty-two hours to read his over-blown lyrical fantasia &lt;em&gt;The Temptation of Saint Anthony&lt;/em&gt; to two friends. And when he dined in Paris at the Goncourts, he loved to read out examples of bad writing. Turgenev said that he knew of 'no other writer who scrupled in quite that way'. Even Henry James, the master stylist, was somewhat appalled by the religious devotion with which Flaubert assassinated repetition, unwanted clichés, unwanted sonorities. The scene of his writing has become notorious: the study at Croisset, the slow river outside the window (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have quoted the above passage so extensively because it might contain clues about the correct version of the story I tried to reproduce from memory: perhaps the story was reported to one of the friends or authors mentioned above, perhaps it can be found in their or Flaubert's correspondence or other biographical writings, and perhaps Flaubert was not staying in a hotel after all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of my efforts, I have not been able to find the anecdote in sources I could find online. I would be grateful if someone could find its source and, if that information is available, the title of the work that Flaubert was writing at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T18:33:57.393" Title="Authenticity of an anecdote about Flaubert unintentionally attracting a crowd by reading his draft aloud near an open window" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;gustave-flaubert&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16220" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2054" CreationDate="2020-11-04T20:08:12.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As muru mentioned in his answer, the Upanishad Eliot is referencing is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.dharmapedia.net/wiki/Brihadaranyaka_Upanishad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brihadaranyaka Upanishad&lt;/a&gt;. Eliot added the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wasteland.windingway.org/401/then-spoke-the-thunder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;following footnote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka—Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen's Sechsig Upanishads des Veda, p. 489.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am quoting this note because there are a few issues with it, as Harish Trivedi pointed out in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=R9RRAQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Manchester University Press, 1995, page 126):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we all know, this [“Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata”] comes from the &lt;em&gt;Brihadaranyaka Upanishad&lt;/em&gt;, even if some commentators on Eliot and/or their copy-editors still cannot spell &lt;em&gt;Brihadaranyaka&lt;/em&gt; correctly and consistently). Many critics have pointed to the puzzling fact that the order in which the three injunctions occur in the Sanskrit, “Damyata, Datta, Dayadhvam”, has been reshuffled by Eliot to become “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata”, but as we do not have even a persuasive surmise much less a reasonable explanation as to why he should have done so, there is perhaps some reason to suspect a little private trick on Eliot's part, a little harmless pedantic joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harish Trivedi also points out that Eliot's footnote sends readers to the wrong part of the Upanishad, namely Chapter 5 section 1 instead of Chapter 5 section 2. For a translation of the relevant section, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/upanishads02ml/page/188/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Upanishads&lt;/em&gt; by Max Müller&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The threefold descendants of Pragâpati, gods, men, and Asuras (evil spirits), dwelt as Brahmakârins (students) with their father Pragâpati. Having finished their studentship the gods said: ' Tell us (something), Sir.' He told them the syllable Da. Then he said: 'Did you understand?' They said: 'We did understand. You told us &amp;quot;Damyata,&amp;quot; Be subdued.' 'Yes,' he said, 'you have understood.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then the men said to him: 'Tell us something, Sir.' He told them the same syllable Da. Then he said: 'Did you understand?' They said: 'We did understand. You told us, &amp;quot;Datta,&amp;quot; Give.' 'Yes,' he said, 'you have understood.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Then the Asuras said to him: ' Tell us something, Sir.' He told them the same syllable Da. Then he said: 'Did you understand ?' They said: 'We did understand. You told us, &amp;quot;Dayadham,&amp;quot; Be merciful.' 'Yes,' he said, 'you have understood.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For commentary on this section, see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.swami-krishnananda.org/brdup/brhad_V-01.html#Second&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad by Swami Krishnananda&lt;/a&gt;. Swami Krishnananda points out that the three types of beings understand the same syllable differently depending on their nature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harish Trivedi also points out that Eliot's footnote sends his readers to a German translation, which would have been out of reach for many of his readers, instead of an English one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Harish Trivedi points out that Eliot may have been attracted to a rhetorical device:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the device through which this single syllable [&amp;quot;Da&amp;quot;] evokes and expands into three independent and disparate words and thus, what was obscure becomes explicit, what was cryptic becomes lucid, and what was elementally incoherent becomes humanly discernible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, Eliot's footnote provides &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; eludication because it explains or translates “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata”. However, the reader is sent to the wrong section of the Upanishad, possibly intentionally, since some of Eliot's other footnotes are less than helpful (e.g. &amp;quot;The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): ....&amp;quot;), as if Eliot were actually parodying the concept of footnotes itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-04T20:08:12.050" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16215" CreationDate="2020-11-05T01:25:27.467" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the context of reading the whole quote, the author is trying to describe the diversity of the crowd. As such, to my reading the four clauses separated by commas are each self-contained.&#xA;I read it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There were people from optimistic (cheery) through to pessimistic (sceptical)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All ages of men were there&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He saw all sorts of people from different walks of life: different professions / different classes / from both country and city&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He includes journalists as an example of modern, intellectual city dwellers, and farmers as traditional, manual-working country folk. Remember this was written more than 100 years ago, before farming was industrialised and when journalism was probably a cutting edge profession of &amp;quot;modernity&amp;quot; and the contrast is even more stark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Combine this with tradesmen, politicians, and &amp;quot;sharpers&amp;quot; (con-men) from the previous sentence to build up the broad range of the &amp;quot;great brotherhood&amp;quot; that he is describing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11299" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T01:25:27.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16222" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16254" CreationDate="2020-11-05T10:14:49.477" Score="3" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Endless-Time&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Endless Time&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Rabindranath Tagore as follows, which I interpret as being about a mortal human speaking to God, someone living a rushed human life and comparing it to God's timeless existence, someone who wishes to pass through the heavenly &amp;quot;gate&amp;quot; at the end of their life:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time is endless in thy hands, my lord.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is none to count thy minutes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou knowest how to wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have no time to lose,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and having no time we must scramble for a chance.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We are too poor to be late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And thus it is that time goes by&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;while I give it to every querulous man who claims it,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but I find that yet there is time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where and when was this poem originally published, and in which language? The AllPoetry site linked above doesn't provide the original source, and other sites I've found mentioning this poem just cite it to AllPoetry. I'm assuming it was originally in Bengali since it's Tagore, hence the &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/bengali-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;bengali-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;bengali-literature&lt;/a&gt; tag, but I don't know what the original title was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T07:14:03.563" Title="What is the original source of Rabindranath Tagore's &quot;Endless Time&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16223" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16224" CreationDate="2020-11-05T13:07:24.950" Score="3" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author was describing the situation of two horses, Nemesis and Timpolino, in the betting on horse racing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous day, on the opening of the racing season, his stable had run a horse in a selling plate, and it was encouraging that this animal, though carrying top weight, beat his field easily. It was this fact that had brought Nemesis to the position of short-priced favourite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gresham himself had very little money upon her; he did not bet very heavily, though he was credited with making and losing fabulous sums each year. He gained nothing by contradicting these rumours. He was sufficiently indifferent to the opinions of his fellows not to suffer any inconvenience from their repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the shortening of price on Nemesis was a serious matter for the connection of Timbolino. &lt;strong&gt;They could not cover their investments by “saving” on Nemesis without a considerable outlay&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found by searching, and through &lt;a href=&quot;https://practicalpunting.com.au/pp-online/a-z-of-betting/staking-plans/multiple-betting/savers-are-they-worth-it-20130514&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this link&lt;/a&gt;, that the one, who &amp;quot;saves&amp;quot; in betting, makes something like &amp;quot;reserve betting&amp;quot; on another horse, to insure he won't lose all his investment. But I still don't get the meaning of this bolded statement.&#xA;And what's the connection between the team of Timpolino and the betting on Nemesis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T13:26:35.297" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T13:49:35.237" Title="What's exactly meant by &quot;“saving” on Nemesis&quot; in The Just Men of Cordova?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16224" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16223" CreationDate="2020-11-05T13:49:35.237" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word “saving” is being used in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;save, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 13.d.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;transitive.&lt;/em&gt; Horse Racing slang. To hedge so as to protect (a person, esp. oneself, or one’s bets) from loss, or so as to recover (a certain sum) out of one’s losses (&lt;em&gt;upon&lt;/em&gt; a horse). Also &lt;em&gt;intransitive&lt;/em&gt;: to hedge one’s bets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To figure out how to apply this sense, we need to look at the preceding sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the shortening of price on Nemesis was a serious matter for &lt;strong&gt;the connection of Timbolino&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here “connection” is used in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;connection, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 7.&lt;/strong&gt; A body, or circle of persons connected together […] by commercial relations&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The connection of Timbolino” is thus the group of people who have a commercial interest in the performance of the horse: that is, the group of people who have placed bets on it. This includes Sir Isaac Tramber, the owner of Timbolino, and we soon learn that he has placed a heavy bet on his horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have also been told that the bookmakers have reduced the odds on Nemesis, making it the “short-priced favourite”. This has two bad consequences for Sir Isaac. First, it suggests that Nemesis has a better chance of winning the race than Timbolino, and so he is likely to lose his bet. One way that he could cope with this possibility would be to “hedge” or “save” his position by placing a second bet on Nemesis. Then whichever of these horses wins, his losses on the one will be compensated by his winnings on the other. (Of course if neither horse wins, then Sir Isaac’s losses will be doubled.) Second, the shorter the odds, the bigger the “saving” bet will need to be in order for the potential winnings on Nemesis to compensate for the potential losses on Timbolino.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T13:49:35.237" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2020-11-05T19:18:07.550" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;He simply means he laughs with a k sound — literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When most people laugh, they laugh with the letter H as in HA HA HA HA HA HA&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Count from Sesame Street laughs with letter A. A is for AH AH AH AH AH AH (sorry had to get that joke in).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laughing with the letter K is like saying Kick minus the CK which would sound something like saying Kiss but don't use the two &amp;quot;s's&amp;quot; from kiss and give it a hissing sound with your mouth. A better way to imagine it is if you know the &amp;quot;FRIDAY THE 13th sound effect&amp;quot; where the creepy sound goes &amp;quot;ki ki ki ki ha ha ha&amp;quot; now imagine laughing with that ki ki ki faster and hissing more or the word ca(boose) minus the word &amp;quot;boose&amp;quot;. ka ka ka ka ka! There are more ways but I think you get the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I sometimes laugh with the letter S which is just hissing with the letter S&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11301" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T19:39:30.157" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T19:39:30.157" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16226" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-05T19:58:08.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T19:58:08.833" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T19:58:08.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16227" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-05T19:58:08.833" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Elizabeth Wein (1964) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T07:43:36.087" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T07:43:36.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16228" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-05T19:59:37.363" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T19:59:37.363" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T19:59:37.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16229" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-05T19:59:37.363" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Rose Under Fire&quot; (2013) by Elizabeth Wein. Should be tagged with [elizabeth-wein]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T07:42:47.027" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T07:42:47.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16230" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16240" CreationDate="2020-11-05T20:03:14.933" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I struggle, especially in poetry and older English books, with comprehension and I think one of the biggest problems is that I lose track of the subject that is in view during long passages that distract from the subject before returning to it. As an example, in the poem &amp;quot;The Raven&amp;quot; (1780) by William Cowper:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Raven, while with glossy breast&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her new-laid eggs she fondly press'd,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, on her wicker-work high mounted,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her chickens prematurely counted&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(A fault philosophers might blame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If quite exempted from the same),&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Enjoy'd at ease the genial day;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the time I get down to the last line I've quoted I've forgotten about the Raven and so I'm clueless as to who is enjoying the genial day. Then I have to stop and re-read to figure out that the raven is enjoying the day. Is this simply a matter of focus? Are there ways of getting better at reading passages like this without losing track of the subject and thus not having to re-read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11302" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T20:07:29.960" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T16:19:48.217" Title="How can I get better at remembering the subject in lengthy, complicated passages (poems or otherwise)?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;reading&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16231" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-05T22:11:23.913" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-05T22:11:23.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-05T22:11:23.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16232" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-05T22:11:23.913" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Amarjit Chandan (1946) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works originally published in Punjabi should be tagged with [punjabi-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T07:43:32.733" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T07:43:32.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16233" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="119" CreationDate="2020-11-06T01:18:17.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;as an allegory, he represents the average bystander. -- a quote -- &amp;quot;life will go as it always goes -- that is, badly.&amp;quot; //he knows what it was like with jones and comes to the conclusion that no matter who is in charge or what changes are made at the farm, it will remain an unpleasant place to be. he also knows of all the injustice occurring on Animal/Manor Farm, but doesn't find is significant enough to address until he sees his only comrade, boxer, be sent to his death, and therefore regrets his silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11304" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T01:18:17.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16234" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16238" CreationDate="2020-11-06T03:05:37.927" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this quote in &lt;em&gt;The Spirit of the Place&lt;/em&gt; by Samuel Shem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, standing on the tracks, he realized how that moment had been &lt;strong&gt;one end of the thread that had unspooled all these years&lt;/strong&gt; in a life spent running, a life restless with questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;the thread that had unspooled all these years&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T03:50:09.977" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T14:03:59.723" Title="What does &quot;the thread that had unspooled all these years&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-spirit-of-the-place&gt;&lt;samuel-shem&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16236" CreationDate="2020-11-06T03:49:23.470" Score="5" ViewCount="586" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the novel &lt;em&gt;The Spirit of the Place&lt;/em&gt; by Samuel Shem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Selma stared at him. He saw &lt;strong&gt;a cloud pass across her gaze.&lt;/strong&gt; She sighed. &amp;quot;Orville-doll, there's nothing else but this.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;a cloud pass across her gaze&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T07:43:26.063" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T13:54:31.377" Title="What does &quot;a cloud pass across her gaze&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;samuel-shem&gt;&lt;the-spirit-of-the-place&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16235" CreationDate="2020-11-06T08:13:44.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;This phrase is a less-common variant of a common metaphor which uses cloudy weather to represent &lt;strong&gt;negative emotion visible in a person's face&lt;/strong&gt;. Here are some dictionary sources to demonstrate some other variants of this metaphor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a person's face clouds over, they suddenly look unhappy or worried:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;At the mention of her dead husband, her face clouded over.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cloud-over&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary, &lt;strong&gt;cloud over&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, meaning 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used to refer to a state or cause of gloom, suspicion, trouble, or worry.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;‘the only cloud on the immediate horizon is raising a mortgage’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A frowning or depressed look.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;‘a cloud passed over Jessica's face’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/cloud&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico, &lt;strong&gt;cloud&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, meaning 2&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If your eyes or face cloud or if sadness or anger clouds them, your eyes or your face suddenly show sadness or anger.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;[literary]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Trish's face clouded with disappointment.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;As he looked at Katherine, great sorrow clouded his eyes.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cloud&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins Dictionary, &lt;strong&gt;cloud&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, meaning 6&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T08:13:44.163" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16234" CreationDate="2020-11-06T14:03:59.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The unspooling thread is used as a metaphor for the line of Orville's life. In this passage, he is returning to his hometown by train (and then by walking along the tracks, after the train's air conditioning breaks down), and the smell of creosote brings back a childhood memory to him:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Creosote. All at once he saw himself as a six-year-old, one summer's day, lying on his back in a neglected grassy field down the street from his house on Ten Broek Lane. The scent of creosote was strong  from the railroad tracks running nearby. Alone, he stared up at the clouds passing across the sky and suddenly had the sense that the world as he was seeing it was only a part of something else. For the first time in his life he saw himself as part of some whole, some whole world to which his own being was seamlessly connected. He felt lighter, more alive, as if something else had clicked on—or in. He leapt to his feet, making his legs go as fast as they could, and ran home to tell his mother. He burst into the kitchen and blurted out his discovery as the screen door slammed—bam!—behind him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Selma Ariel Fleischer Rose, a large, aproned shape looming over the stove, didn't respond.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He persisted, dragging a chair over, climbing up, and telling her again, slowly and loudly.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Something else! Mom, I'm part of something else!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Selma stared at him. He saw a cloud pass across her gaze. She sighed. &amp;quot;Orville-doll, there's nothing else but this.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The boy felt a rough, twisting pain in his chest. He clenched down on it, trying to make it go away. He fought back tears.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;What's wrong, honey-bunny?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dread was rising, the pain was going. He felt him-self numbing up, like his mouth did when he was at the dentist's. He broke eye contact. Feeling her fearful con-cern, he said, &amp;quot;Nothing.&amp;quot; He turned and ran back out the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage immediately precedes the paragraph that you quote in your question. That moment from his childhood began the pathway of his life, which he likens to a thread unspooling, and which consists of running and being restless with questions for years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/unspool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unspooling&lt;/a&gt; means a thread coming off a roll, starting from a fixed point (the spool of thread or, in the metaphor, that moment in Orville's childhood) and extending outwards (in the metaphor, into the future of Orville's life). I found an illustrative gif of unspooling thread:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/auh0e.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/auh0e.gif&quot; alt=&quot;GIF of thread unspooling&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T14:03:59.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16240" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16230" CreationDate="2020-11-06T16:19:48.217" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I think the real answer is practice, I certainly follow such texts better than I used to years ago, you can probably use strategies like marking up text as you go. This calls your attention very specifically to the subject, which should itself help you to remember, but also makes it easier to glance back quickly to remind yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that not everyone wants to mark up their books, if you have copies that you are sensitive about, you might be able to buy a cheap copy to mark up, or you could explore using sticky notes, writing very lightly in pencil, jotting down the subject of each sentence on a separate sheet of notepaper as you go, you could get a sheet of acetate and draw a box on it that you can place to highlight the keyword temporarily, make a cardboard bookmark and cut a little window in it that you can use to highlight the subject... the possibilities are endless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that you wouldn't have to spend very long using any of these practices for remembering the word to become second nature to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T16:19:48.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16241" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-06T18:54:54.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T18:54:54.320" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T18:54:54.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16242" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-06T18:54:54.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American psychologist Samuel Shem (1944) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T19:09:10.927" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T19:09:10.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16243" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-06T19:11:03.570" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T19:11:03.570" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T19:11:03.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16244" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-06T19:11:03.570" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;The Spirit of the Place&quot; by Samuel Shem. Questions about this work should be tagged with [samuel-shem]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-06T19:22:45.717" LastActivityDate="2020-11-06T19:22:45.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16245" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-06T20:53:23.127" Score="2" ViewCount="99" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Fay Weldon's short story &amp;quot;Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo&amp;quot; I found the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Hungro-Austrarian Empire,” said Peter to me, “didn't so much&#xA;collapse as fail to exist any more. War destroys social organizations.&#xA;The same thing happened after World War II. There being no organized&#xA;bodies left between Moscow and London and for London read Washington,&#xA;then as now—it was left to these two to put in their own puppet&#xA;governments. Yalta, 1944. It's taken the best part of forty-five years&#xA;for nations of West and East Europe to remember who they are.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble understanding this passage. My questions are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What are &amp;quot;social organizations&amp;quot;? What are some examples?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is &amp;quot;organized bodies&amp;quot; referring to the same thing as &amp;quot;social organizations&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &amp;quot;read&amp;quot; mean in the phrase &amp;quot;London read Washington&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does it say &amp;quot;these two&amp;quot;, and who are they? (I thought it was referring to the nations at the Yalta conference, but there were three of them)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does it mean for Europe to &amp;quot;remember who they are after 45 years&amp;quot;? (Does it have something to do with the Iron Curtain?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11269" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-07T00:46:31.493" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T15:54:43.950" Title="Meaning and historical reference in &quot;Ind Aff&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;fay-weldon&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16246" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="436" CreationDate="2020-11-07T20:29:21.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;laugh like the letter k&amp;quot; sounds like the way speakers of Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, represent laughter. See the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-49212893&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jajaja, 55555, kkkkk: las curiosas formas de escribir risas en otros idiomas&lt;/a&gt; on BBC News Mundo (4 September 2019). See especially the following paragraph (emphasis from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Los hablantes, principalmente en Brasil, expresan la risa con &lt;strong&gt;la letra k, la cual se pronuncia como &amp;quot;kja&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; y al unirse en una cadena de la misma letra terminan produciendo la onomatopeya de la risa: kkkkkk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speakers [of Portuguese], especially in Brazil, express laughter with &lt;strong&gt;the letter k, which is pronounced &amp;quot;kja&amp;quot;[1]&lt;/strong&gt; and when joined in a chain of the same letter, they end up producing the onomatopoeia for laughter: kkkkkk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Note that the Spanish pronunciation of &amp;quot;j&amp;quot; is different from the English one. For an example, listen to the pronunciation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalape%C3%B1o&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;jalapeño&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching for &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=reir+como+%22letra+k%22&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;reir como &amp;quot;letra k&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (i.e. &lt;code&gt;laugh like &amp;quot;letter k&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T20:29:21.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16247" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-07T20:51:35.853" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I hope to get an answer, if I want to write about this topic. How does Harper Lee's &lt;em&gt;To Kill a Mockingbird&lt;/em&gt; represent the notion of self-conflict? I am looking for an answer based on psychoanalytic criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11315" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T01:46:12.707" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T01:46:12.707" Title="How does Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird represent the notion of self-conflict?" Tags="&lt;harper-lee&gt;&lt;to-kill-a-mockingbird&gt;&lt;psychoanalysis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16141" CreationDate="2020-11-07T21:39:39.457" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Looking through &lt;em&gt;Day by Day&lt;/em&gt;, I found two poems that might be talking about impotence, although neither of them mentions it explicitly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Ear of Corn&lt;/em&gt;, about an old wine baron, the following lines at least show the inability of the subject to make young women be attracted to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;someone's young wife is on his right—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She cannot cure his hallucination&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he can bribe or stare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;any woman he wants into orgasm...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He fills her ear&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;with his old sexual gramophone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like belief,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he makes nothing happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;em&gt;The Downlook&lt;/em&gt; is also suggestive of impotence. It even contains the word (although possibly in another context, unless &amp;quot;two-way traffic&amp;quot; is a metaphor for sexual intercourse, which I suspect it is).  Here are what I think are the most suggestive lines from this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;nothing lovelier than waking to find&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;another breathing body in my bed ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;glowshadow halfcovered with dayclothes like my own,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;caught in my arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Last summer nothing dared impede&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the flow of the body's thousand rivulets of welcome ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;winding effortlessly, yet with ambiguous invention—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;safety in nearness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now the downlook, the downlook—small fuss,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;each miss must be a mile&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if one risk the narrow two-lane highway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's impotence and impertinence to ask directions,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;while staring right and left in two-way traffic.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ah, loved perhaps before I knew you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;others have been lost like this,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;yet found foothold&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;by winning the dolphin from the humming water.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Lowell suffered episodes of depression for much of his life. However, depression can cause impotence, and I believe that this is indeed a subtext here.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Downlook&lt;/em&gt; seems to be primarily about depression (which is also one of the definitions of the word &lt;em&gt;downlook&lt;/em&gt;). And this is indeed how Lowell used the word: Google finds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a letter to Blair Clark, Lowell speaks of the “downlook” as an inward feeling of depression (the aftermath of manic attack)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11316" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-07T22:33:14.450" LastActivityDate="2020-11-07T22:33:14.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16249" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16252" CreationDate="2020-11-07T23:41:55.487" Score="4" ViewCount="204" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a copy of the 1923 novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/westofwatertower00croy/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;West of the Water Tower&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Homer Croy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere in the book is the author named, nor is there an &amp;quot;about the author&amp;quot; section. The last couple of pages advertise books by other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Mr. Croy and/or the publisher (Harper's) want to conceal the authorship of the work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="15" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T08:03:20.330" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T12:25:13.423" Title="Why is the author of the novel &quot;West of the Water Tower&quot; not named?" Tags="&lt;homer-croy&gt;&lt;west-of-the-water-tower&gt;&lt;anonymity&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16250" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-08T00:19:57.103" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;If there were an uninhabited tropical island (assumed to be in the Pacific) with the conditions and history necessary for pigs, and pink granite, what would the boys likely have eaten?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mentioned that they predominately eat fruit and nuts, with the occasional fish or crab. Later, they start eating pork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what kinds of edible flora would there likely be, are there almost definitely other animals there, and could they have a balanced diet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2147" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T08:23:33.983" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T08:23:33.983" Title="What would be the diet on the Lord of the Flies's island?" Tags="&lt;lord-of-the-flies&gt;&lt;william-golding&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16222" CreationDate="2020-11-08T01:10:58.920" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore translated some of his own devotional poetry into English, and it was published in 1910 in an English book called &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali: Song Offerings&lt;/em&gt;. This translation of &lt;em&gt;Endless Time&lt;/em&gt; comes from that book. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/82&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;See Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;. It was thus translated by Tagore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore also published a Bengali book of poetry called &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, but the English and Bengali titles don't contain the same poems.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_Offerings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says that of the 100 or so poems in &lt;em&gt;Song Offerings&lt;/em&gt;, 69 came from the Bengali &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; and the rest came from other of Tagore's books in Bengali. In &lt;em&gt;Song Offerings&lt;/em&gt;, Tagore says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These translations are of poems contained in three books—Naivédya, Kheyá, and Gitánjali [...] and of a few poems which have appeared only in periodicals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a different translation of the Bengali &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Show Yourself to my Soul,&lt;/em&gt; translated by James Talarovic), and the original of &lt;em&gt;Endless Time&lt;/em&gt; does not appear to be in this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparing Talarovic's translations with Tagore's, Tagore's translations are often very free, diverging significantly from the original, although I'd say they all give a good rendering of the spirit of the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T01:20:06.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T01:20:06.030" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16252" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16249" CreationDate="2020-11-08T09:33:36.137" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Jolas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eugene Jolas&lt;/a&gt; says that Harper’s were concerned that the serious novel did not fit Croy’s established brand as a humorous writer of “lighter yarns”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will be remembered that [Croy] was the subject of a great literary mystery when Harper’s published his &lt;em&gt;West of the Water Tower&lt;/em&gt;. Rescued out of a prize competition, it was published anonymously, and the secret was kept for almost three months. “Because I had previously confined my literary activities  to writing humorous and lighter yarns, Harper’s, when they decided to publish , did not want to bill me as a ‘serious thinker,’” he said to us whimsically. […] “Percy Hammond of the &lt;em&gt;New York Herald Tribune&lt;/em&gt; got hold of the fact one day, while we were having a party at the home of Burns Mantle, dramatic critic of the &lt;em&gt;Daily News&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Chicago Tribune&lt;/em&gt;. Somebody evidently put him wise, and when he asked me some questions about it point-blank, I did not realize that he was not aware of it. I gave it away. Then he wrote a long, laudatory article revealing my name. The next morning Harper’s called me up, and there was a great deal of excitement. I had to dictate a flat-footed denial of the authorship, but it was considered too strong, and I finally decided on a humorous, evasive answer. The reply was published, but it was too late. I had become a ‘serious thinker.’”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Eugene Jolas (1924). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0ek9VP-2n-MC&amp;amp;pg=PA53&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rambles Through Literary Paris&lt;/em&gt;, number 36&lt;/a&gt;. In Klaus H. Kiefer and Rainer Rumold, eds. (2009). &lt;em&gt;Eugene Jolas: Critical Writings 1924–1951&lt;/em&gt;, p. 53. Northwestern University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;David Anderson says that Croy was concerned about criticism due to his choice to write in the old-fashioned “home-town” genre:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;West of the Water Tower&lt;/em&gt; [… is] rooted in the tradition defined by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Van_Doren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Carl Van Doren&lt;/a&gt; in his 1921 essay “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/contemporaryame00vand/page/146/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Revolt from the Village&lt;/a&gt;,” and Croy, aware of home-town criticism received by [Sherwood] Anderson and others, published &lt;em&gt;West of the Water Tower&lt;/em&gt; anonymously in 1923.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;David D. Anderson (2001). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ZnuYKJSoHCMC&amp;amp;pg=PA125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer Croy&lt;/a&gt;’. In Philip A. Greasley, ed. (2001). &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Midwestern Literature&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1, p. 125. Indiana University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these two accounts I find that of Jolas the more plausible, being closer in time to the events and based on the testimony of the author. But the accounts are not incompatible: Harper’s could have been concerned both about the work being off-brand and out-of-date. Some impression of how the “home-town” genre was perceived at the time can be found in the opening to a contemporary review of Croy’s novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older novels of “local color” that spread pandering quaintness before complacency and drew out unctuous gobs of fat laughter from leering superiority, and the more pretentious tales of the simple life that preyed upon the factitious tear from the more or less practicable eye have given place to satires and tragedies of small towns and farms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John W. Crawford (1923). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.c041399039&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=696&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cotton and Corn&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Nation&lt;/em&gt; 116:3022 (6th June 1923), p. 668.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T12:25:13.423" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T12:25:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16222" CreationDate="2020-11-08T12:07:10.727" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;হে রাজেন্দ্র, তব হাতে কাল অন্তহীন (&lt;em&gt;he raajendra, taba haathe kaal antahiin&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Verses/naibedyo-43/he-raajendra-taba-haate-kaal-antaheen-3293&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poem 39&lt;/a&gt; from Tagore's 1901 collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.290490/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;নৈবেদ্য&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naibedya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;naibedya&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Endless Time&amp;quot; appears as Poem 82 in Rabindranath Tagore's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spiritualbee.com/media/gitanjali-by-tagore.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitanjali (Song Offerings)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. This collection of 103 poems was originally published in 1912 by the India Society, London. Tagore's identically-titled Bengali collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kWylVJoEgoMrA7traa9ETPJ_18HzwSni/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;গীতাঞ্জলি&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;giitaañjali&lt;/em&gt;), which literally means &amp;quot;Song Offerings&amp;quot;, had appeared in 1910. However, the English collection is not a complete translation of the Bengali volume. It includes only 59 poems from the latter. The remaining 44 of the 103 poems in the English collection comprise translations of poems from several of Tagore's previously published Bengali works. All translations were Tagore's own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Endless Time&amp;quot; is a rendition of a poem that appeared in the 1901 collection নৈবেদ্য (&lt;em&gt;naibedya&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Oblation&lt;/em&gt;). The poems in &lt;em&gt;naibedya&lt;/em&gt; lack titles, being merely numbered. This is typical for Tagore, whose poems are usually referred to by their first lines. The source for &amp;quot;Endless Time&amp;quot; is poem 39, হে রাজেন্দ্র, তব হাতে কাল অন্তহীন (&lt;em&gt;he raajendra, taba haathe kaal antahiin&lt;/em&gt;; my translation: &amp;quot;O king of the gods, in your hands is time without end&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2011, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Radice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Radice&lt;/a&gt; published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0670085421&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;groundbreaking edition&lt;/a&gt; of the English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; that included not only Tagore's renditions, but also Radice's new translations of Tagore's Bengali originals. Radice translates &lt;em&gt;he raajendra&lt;/em&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O Great Lord, Time in your hands is unending.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beyond all counting, days and nights arrive&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And pass, ages forming and then expending.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You do not permit delay, yet never strive&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For speed. You know how to wait. For hundreds of years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You slowly prepare the blooming of one bud.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Time is not in our hands; our jostling careers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Grasp at what, once missed, can’t be made good.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our service to you, Lord, only comes after&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tasks we spend too long to complete. Empty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of gifts, alas, now falls our plate for your pooja.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But when at wrong moments, fearful and hasty,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    We rush to you, we find we are not too late:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    There’s time still left for us; it doesn’t abate. (p. 194)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to Tagore's free verse rendition, Radice casts the poem as a Shakespearean sonnet. Tagore's Bengali original also has 14 lines, but is in rhymed couplets, not in sonnet form per se. Nevertheless, Radice's translation actually is closer to the literal meaning of the Bengali original than Tagore's own. For example, Tagore writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou knowest how to wait.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bengali lines are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;প্রতীক্ষা করিতে জান। শতবর্ষ ধ'রে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;একটি পুষ্পের কলি ফুটাবার তরে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;চলে তব ধীর আয়োজন।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pratiikShaa karite jaana. shatabarSha dha're&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ekaTi puShper kali phuTaabaar tare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;chale taba dhiira aayojan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal line-by-line translation would go something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know how to wait. For a century&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;toward the blossoming of a single flower-bud&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;moves your deliberate plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radice's translation follows the Bengali admirably closely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     You know how to wait. For hundreds of years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You slowly prepare the blooming of one bud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radice's appendices also provide a list of the sources of each poem in Tagore's English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, and it specifies &lt;em&gt;naibedya&lt;/em&gt; 39 as the original of &amp;quot;Endless Time&amp;quot;. For anybody interested in knowing the antecedents and textual history of each poem in the English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, as well as for those wishing for an English rendition of Tagore's Bengali originals that's more faithful than Tagore's own rather free translations, Radice's edition is indispensable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Disclaimer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My Bengali is &lt;em&gt;dreadful&lt;/em&gt;. It's only about my fourth language. I understand it well enough to get by, and can more or less hold my own in a conversation; but I read it only with some difficulty, and can't write it at all, though I can type it. Reading non-literary prose is difficult enough, and reading poetry ups the ante a fair bit. I've probably made deathless howlers in my attempted translations above. Rely on them strictly AYOR. Corrections are of course welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transliteration of Bengali above follows the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans scheme&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T07:14:03.563" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T07:14:03.563" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-08T14:03:37.167" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt; (1917)&lt;/a&gt; by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing a horse race:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The field was at the starting-post: “Your horse is drawn in the middle,” she said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He put up his glasses. He could see the &lt;strong&gt;chocolate and green&lt;/strong&gt; plainly enough. Sir Isaac’s—&lt;strong&gt;grey vertical stripes on white, yellow cap&lt;/strong&gt;—was also easy to see. He had drawn the inside right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The field was giving the starter all the trouble that twenty-four high-spirited thoroughbreds could give to any man. For ten minutes they backed and sidled and jumped and kicked and circled before the two long tapes. With exemplary patience the starter waited, directing, imploring almost, commanding and, it must be confessed, swearing, for he was a North-country starter who had no respect for the cracks of the jockey world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Sir Isaac the period of waiting had increased the tension. His hands were shaking, his glasses went up and down, jerkily; he was in an agony of apprehension, when suddenly the white tape swung up, the field bunched into three sections, then spread again and, like a cavalry regiment, came thundering down the slight declivity &lt;strong&gt;on its homeward journey.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“They’re off!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A roar of voices. Every glass was focused on the oncoming field. There was nothing in it for two furlongs; the start had been a splendid one. They came almost in a dead line. Then something on the rail shot out a little: it was Timbolino, going with splendid smoothness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That looks like the winner,” said Horace philosophically. “Mine’s shut in.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the middle of the course the jockey on Nemesis, seeking an opening, had dashed his mount to one which was impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He found himself boxed between two horses, the riders of which showed no disposition to open out for him. The field was half-way on its journey when the boy pulled the filly out of the trap and &lt;strong&gt;“came round his horses.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Timbolino had a two-length clear lead of Colette, which was a length clear of a bunch of five; Nemesis, when half the journey was done, was lying eighth or ninth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I don't have much knowledge about the horse racing, and I searched a lot about the possible meanings of these bolded words, but I didn't get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Do these &amp;quot;colours and cap&amp;quot; refer to garments of the horse or clothes of the jockey?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;It seems that &amp;quot;on its homeward journey&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;the field of horses&amp;quot;, but aren't they supposed to be going to the finish line?! So what's meant by &amp;quot;homeward&amp;quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I think that &amp;quot;come round his horses&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;rejoin the other horses&amp;quot;, but why did the author used &amp;quot;his&amp;quot; and why did he put it between quotation marks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T14:55:01.657" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T14:55:01.657" Title="What's exactly meant by &quot;on its homeward journey&quot; in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16256" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16262" CreationDate="2020-11-08T15:24:09.517" Score="4" ViewCount="138" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Disclaimer: this is going to be a stupidly obvious question for anyone who speaks either Hindi or Bengali, but with zero knowledge of either language I can't really eke out an answer. Apologies if this comes across as a silly question.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's poem &amp;quot;This Dog&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/This-Dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on AllPoetry.com&lt;/a&gt; is given in two languages, English and (supposedly) Hindi. But I thought that Tagore wrote in Bengali and not Hindi. Is this Hindi text also a translation, or is it not really Hindi at all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting the &amp;quot;Hindi&amp;quot; version into &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/#view=home&amp;amp;op=translate&amp;amp;sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%B9%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A4%20%E0%A6%8F%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%B0%0A%0A%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A7%20%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%9F%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A5%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87%0A%0A%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B7%E0%A6%A3%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%20%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%0A%0A%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B6%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BF%E0%A7%9F%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A5%A4%0A%0A%E0%A6%8F%E0%A6%9F%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%BF%20%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%AD%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF%0A%0A%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%E0%A6%BF%20%E0%A6%89%E0%A6%A0%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B9%20%E0%A5%A4%0A%0A%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%A8%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A3%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%95-%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9D%E0%A7%87%0A%0A%E0%A6%8F%E0%A6%87%20%E0%A6%9C%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%AC%20%E0%A6%B6%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%A7%E0%A7%81%0A%0A%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%8B%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A6%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AC%20%E0%A6%AD%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A6%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF%0A%0A%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%96%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%AE%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A3%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%B7%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%20%3B%0A%0A%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%96%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A3%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%93%E0%A7%9F%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A7%9F%0A%0A%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A2%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%93%E0%A7%9F%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A7%9F%20%E0%A6%85%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%95%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%AE%20%2C%0A%0A%E0%A6%85%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%AE%20%E0%A6%9A%E0%A7%88%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%87%0A%0A%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A5%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%96%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%87%E0%A7%9F%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A7%9F%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B9%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%9A%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A5%A4%0A%0A%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%96%E0%A6%BF%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%95%20%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%9F%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0%0A%0A%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A3%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A3%20%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%A8%0A%0A%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%9C%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A7%9F%E0%A7%87%20%2C%0A%0A%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BF%E0%A7%9F%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%87%20%E0%A6%93%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%80%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B7%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%0A%0A%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%A8%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%B9%E0%A6%9C%20%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%A7%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%82%E0%A6%AA%E0%A7%87%20%3B%0A%0A%E0%A6%AD%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B7%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B9%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%A8%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%B7%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%9F%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%A3%20%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%BE%0A%0A%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%9D%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B9%E0%A6%BE%20%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%8B%E0%A6%9D%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%20%2C%0A%0A%E0%A6%86%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%9D%E0%A6%BE%E0%A7%9F%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%87%E0%A7%9F%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%B7%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%9F%E0%A6%BF-%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9D%E0%A7%87%20%E0%A6%AE%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0%20%E0%A6%B8%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%20%E0%A6%AA%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%9A%E0%A7%9F%20%E0%A5%A4&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate&lt;/a&gt;, it auto-recognises the text as Bengali. Trying &lt;a href=&quot;https://translatedlabs.com/language-identifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translated Labs' Language Identifier tool&lt;/a&gt;, it auto-recognises the text as Hindi. So I'm still confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What language was this poem originally published in? What language is the text on the AllPoetry website?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Exact publication details would also be interesting, to see when and where this was originally published as well as in what language, but not strictly necessary to get the accepted answer.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T03:41:22.203" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T03:41:22.203" Title="What language was Tagore's &quot;This Dog&quot; written in?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16257" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16245" CreationDate="2020-11-08T15:54:43.950" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peter has a rather unusual view on certain historical events and entities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Based on the context in the story, Peter appears to be referring to countries and states as &amp;quot;social organizations&amp;quot;. In a way, they are, but the term &amp;quot;social organisation&amp;quot; is more commonly used to refer to organisations within a society.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Organized bodies&amp;quot; may refer to countries and states again, but it might also refer to intergovernmental organizations. However, it would be incorrect to claim that there were no countries or states left between Russia (&amp;quot;Moscow&amp;quot;) and the UK (&amp;quot;London&amp;quot;). On the other hand, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Nations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;League of Nations&lt;/a&gt; was an intergovernmental organisation that was founded in 1920, i.e. only after World War I. Before the League of Nations, there were changing alliances such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Entente&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Triple Entente&lt;/a&gt; between the Russian Empire, France and Great Britain. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;After World War II, countries that had been occupied by Nazi Germany needed to resurrect their political structures, their economy etc. In some cases, governments that had been in exile returned to their respective countries. So it is a bit of an overstatement that there were &amp;quot;no organized bodies left between Moscow and London&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;for London read Washington&amp;quot; means that Great Britain was somehow subordinate to the USA in the aftermath of World War II.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;these two&amp;quot; refers back to Moscow and Washington, representing the two dominant military powers whose armies met in the middle of Europe in April-June 1945. There were indeed three countries represented at the Yalta Conference, i.e. the United States, the United Kingdom and Soviet Russia. But in Peter's view, the UK was subordinate to the USA and hence didn't really count.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The short story &amp;quot;Ind Aff or Out of Love in Sarajevo&amp;quot; was published in 1988, almost 45 years after the Yalta Conference and one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not obvious what Peter is referring to here. Since he had earlier used the name &amp;quot;Hungro-Austrarian Empire&amp;quot; instead of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austria-Hungary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Austro-Hungarian Empire&lt;/a&gt;, he may have in mind an opinion that is his alone.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T15:54:43.950" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16258" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16260" CreationDate="2020-11-08T17:07:05.117" Score="21" ViewCount="6180" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Pern novels, characters use words that would normally be innocuous as profanity. Some prominent examples are &amp;quot;shards&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;shells&amp;quot;.  There's a list of in-universe curse words that I found at the back of &lt;em&gt;Dragonflight&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PERNESE OATHS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the Egg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the first Egg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the Egg of Faranth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Scorch it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shards&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By the shards of my dragon's egg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shells&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through Fall, Fog, and Fire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;In the &amp;quot;Dragondex&amp;quot; under &amp;quot;SOME TERMS OF INTEREST&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These words are used in the place of &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; curse words. Words that would be interpreted as swearing in a real-world conversation are not used. Is there a reason why these regular words are used as profanity in the books, in the place of normal curse words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-08T17:22:23.230" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T15:10:33.030" Title="Why do the Pern novels use regular words as profanity?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;anne-mccaffrey&gt;&lt;dragonriders-of-pern&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16259" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16258" CreationDate="2020-11-08T18:36:36.417" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two issues here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Using real world profanity may make books fall afoul of censors. This was even more of an issue back in the 60s and 70s when the first books were published, especially given that minors might take them out of libraries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Real world profanity can break suspension of disbelief.  Religious in particular, for Pern, since it is depicted without religion, but even sexual and scatological may make a person think it sounds modern. (I have known readers who were thrown out of historical novels by use of profanity that was actually period, because they didn't realize it was.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T18:36:36.417" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16258" CreationDate="2020-11-08T23:35:17.290" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minced oaths&lt;/a&gt;, from well-known ones like &amp;quot;gosh&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;darn&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;heck&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fricking&amp;quot;, to more obscure ones, are common in the real world, but even more so in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oaths_in_media&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fiction&lt;/a&gt; and especially fantasy. I've read children's stories, set in versions of the real world with some fantasy elements, where characters say &amp;quot;ruddy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bliddy&amp;quot; instead of the mild swear-word &amp;quot;bloody&amp;quot;. In fully imaginary worlds, it's even more plausible to have completely invented curses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usual reason for this, I think, is to &lt;strong&gt;keep the book family-friendly&lt;/strong&gt; while still having a realistic amount of characters swearing. This particularly applies to the cases like &amp;quot;ruddy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;bliddy&amp;quot; mentioned above, but can also apply to fantasy like &lt;em&gt;The Dragonriders of Pern&lt;/em&gt; set in entirely imaginary worlds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reason is to &lt;strong&gt;increase immersion in the imaginary world&lt;/strong&gt;. You wouldn't expect people in Pern to utter oaths like &amp;quot;oh Christ!&amp;quot;, because Jesus Christ is a religious figure in &lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; world. Creating some invented curses, especially those which have some theme related to that imaginary world (like dragon eggs in Pern), helps to remind the reader that this is an imaginary world and make them feel more immersed in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, many real-world oaths, especially older ones, are ultimately based on something religious, ranging from &amp;quot;goddamn&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;hell&amp;quot; and many others. Swearing by the legendary Faranth could be seen as the Pern equivalent of swearing by Jesus Christ in real-life Europe or America.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cf., for example, the &lt;em&gt;Wheel of Time&lt;/em&gt; series, another work of fantasy set in an entirely imaginary world, where we see a lot of characters using &lt;a href=&quot;https://wot.fandom.com/wiki/Swearing_and_Insults&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;various curses&lt;/a&gt; like &amp;quot;oh Light&amp;quot; (the Light being a sort of mystic source of goodness from the Creator, often used metaphorically) or &amp;quot;blood and ashes&amp;quot; (an invented curse but similar enough to some real ones like &amp;quot;bloody&amp;quot; that it's clearly a curse). Some of them reflect facets of particular cultures: e.g. Shienarans use &amp;quot;peace&amp;quot; as a general blessing, even in odd contexts like &amp;quot;peace favour your sword&amp;quot;, because they're Borderland people who've never known peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-08T23:35:17.290" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16261" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16263" CreationDate="2020-11-09T05:07:32.307" Score="4" ViewCount="258" Body="&lt;p&gt;On multiple places on-line, including Wikipedia, there is information that Saint Isidore of Seville claimed that the name of the Roman god of wine, Bacchus, got his name from &amp;quot;baculus&amp;quot; meaning &amp;quot;walking stick&amp;quot;, as drunk people need a walking stick to walk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An idea of the quality of Isidore's etymological knowledge is given by Peter Jones: &amp;quot;Now we know most of his derivations are total nonsense (eg, he derives baculus, 'walking-stick', from Bacchus, god of drink, because you need one to walk straight after sinking a few)&amp;quot;.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae#Overview&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymologiae&lt;/em&gt; (Wikipedia)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a lovely story to tell, but is that true? I can't find anything like that in the original works of Isidore of Seville. The only thing I could find Isidore of Seville wrote about the name &amp;quot;Bacchius&amp;quot; is the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacchius appellatus est eo, quod eo pede Bacchia, id est Liberi sacra celebrabantur.&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore/1.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isidore: Etymologiae I&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of his etymologies are in the scroll 10 of Etymologiae, but it doesn't mention either &amp;quot;Bacchius&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;baculus&amp;quot; (you can search digitally in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/isidore/10.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isidore: Etymologiae X&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;br/&gt;&#xA;So, where does that claim come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8400" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T01:35:51.240" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T01:35:51.240" Title="Did Isidore of Seville ever claim Roman god of wine, Bacchus, got his name from &quot;baculus&quot; (walking stick)?" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;isidore-of-seville&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16256" CreationDate="2020-11-09T06:01:14.800" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Golly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not Hindi at all. It's Bengali. Those languages are as different as Spanish and Italian. They don't even &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; the same, because they use very distinct, albeit related, scripts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bengali, which along with Assamese uses the Bengali script (duh), looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;প্রত্যহ প্রভাতকালে ভক্ত এ কুকুর&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;স্তব্ধ হয়ে বসে থাকে আসনের কাছে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;যতক্ষণে সঙ্গ তার না করি স্বীকার&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;করস্পর্শ দিয়ে ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hindi on the other hand uses the Devanagari (aka Nagari) script, as do Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, and some flavors of Konkani. Devanagari looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;प्रत्यह प्रभातकाले भक्त ए कुकुर&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;स्तब्ध हये बसे थाके आसनेर काछे&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;यतक्षणे सञ्ग तार ना करि स्वीकार&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;करस्पर्श दिये ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bengali lines are the first four lines of Tagore's poem, of course. The Devanagari lines are simply a letter-for-letter transliteration of the Bengali. The Bengali and Devanagari scripts are pretty much exactly equivalent; each letter in the one has a counterpart in the other, so transliterating between the two is a cinch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this is a transliteration, not a translation. The lines would not be meaningful in any of the languages that use the Devanagari script. Some of the words would be, either because of the Sanskrit-derived vocabulary common to many Indic languages (e.g., ভক্ত / भक्त / &lt;em&gt;bhakta&lt;/em&gt;, which means a devotee) or by happenstance (e.g., তার / तार / &lt;em&gt;taar&lt;/em&gt;, which means &amp;quot;his&amp;quot; in Bengali but also means &amp;quot;metal string&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;wire&amp;quot; in pretty much any Indic language; a Hindi speaker looking at the above transliteration would misrecognize तार as &amp;quot;wire&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt;, the lines would be rendered as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;pratyaha prabhaatkaale bhakta e kukur&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;stabdha haye vase thane aasaner kaachhe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;yatakShaNe sa~nga taar naa kari sviikaar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;karasparSha diye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal translation would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every dawn this devoted dog&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;silently stays seated by [my] seat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for as long as I don't accept his company&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;by patting him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was published in Tagore's 1941 Bengali collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Arogya1941&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;আরোগ্য&lt;/a&gt; (आरोग्य / &lt;em&gt;aarogya&lt;/em&gt;, meaning &lt;em&gt;Convalescence&lt;/em&gt;). Tagore wrote original works in both Bengali and English. He also wrote a cycle of 22 poems, &lt;em&gt;ভানুসিংহ ঠাকুরের পদাবলী / bhaanusi~Nh Thakurer padaavalii&lt;/em&gt;, in a pastiche of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brajabuli&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brajabuli&lt;/a&gt;, imitating the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaishnava_Padavali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vaishava Padavali&lt;/a&gt; tradition that flourished in the 15th through the 17th C. He frequently translated his own Bengali poems, stories, etc. into English as well. He did not, however, write in Hindi. Many of his works have been translated into Hindi by other hands, but cursory Googling didn't turn up a Hindi translation of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why Translated Labs and AllPoetry think this is Hindi. Or at least I do: because ethnocentrism. But that's an explanation, not an excuse. Considering that Hindi and Bengali are each &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spoken by literally hundreds of millions of people&lt;/a&gt;, and are both among the top ten languages spoken worldwide, it's a pretty shocking mistake. The world is simply jam-packed with speakers of those languages, and those websites can't find a single speaker of either to verify which one this is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's mind-boggling that the web should be propagating such an indefensible error, and it's good to be able to clear it up. Thanks for this question and asking me to answer it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obligatory disclaimer: My Bengali is dreadful, and the translation of the four lines given above probably has deathless howlers in it, so it's strictly AYOR and corrections are welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tangentially relevant funny story: my late husband had quite the gift for languages. He began learning Hindi in his forties. He had just mastered the Devanagari script when he and I went to watch Satyajit Ray's মহানগর (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahanagar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahanagar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, The Big City), at an arthouse cinema. The titles came on and I noticed he was peering at the screen with an increasingly puzzled expression. I leaned over and whispered &amp;quot;It's Bengali.&amp;quot; A look of relief came over his face as he remembered that Bengali uses a completely different script from Hindi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T08:52:13.723" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T08:52:13.723" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16261" CreationDate="2020-11-09T09:11:18.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage you are looking for is from book XX:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baculus a Bacco repertore vitis fertur inventus, quo homines moti vino inniterentur. Sicut autem a Bacco baculus, ita a baculo bacillum per diminutionem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is said that the staff, &lt;em&gt;baculus&lt;/em&gt;, was invented by Bacchus, the discoverer of the grapevine; people affected by wine are supported by it. Just as &lt;em&gt;baculus&lt;/em&gt; is from Bacchus, so a stick, &lt;em&gt;bacillum&lt;/em&gt;, is from &lt;em&gt;baculus&lt;/em&gt; by diminution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Isidore of Seville (c. 625). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/isidori01isiduoft/page/n791/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymologiae&lt;/em&gt;, XX.13.1&lt;/a&gt;. English translation by Patricia Throop (2005). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6jjsJ9NP6hYC&amp;amp;pg=PT339&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Isidore of Seville's Etymologies&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not to be taken seriously: modern etymologists derive &lt;em&gt;baculum&lt;/em&gt; from a proto-Indo-European root, making it cognate with English &lt;em&gt;peg&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage you quoted in the question is about the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bacchius&lt;/a&gt;, a metrical foot of three syllables, short–long–long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacchius appellatus est eo, quod eo pede Bacchia, id est Liberi sacra celebrabantur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bacchius&lt;/em&gt; is named because the rites celebrated to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liber&lt;/a&gt;, or Bacchus, were in this meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Isidore of Seville (c. 625). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/isidori01isiduoft/page/n55/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Etymologiae&lt;/em&gt;, I.17.11&lt;/a&gt;. English translation by Patricia Throop (2005). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=igxC93_A-fIC&amp;amp;pg=PR49&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Isidore of Seville's Etymologies&lt;/em&gt;, volume 1&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T09:20:09.763" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T09:20:09.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16265" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14323" CreationDate="2020-11-09T11:18:16.333" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to extracting the true meaning of this sentence is the word &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;demi-john&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, which means a large bottle commonly used for alcohol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6GLtnm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/6GLtnm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;image of a demijohn&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this context, it seems that the &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;liberal heathen deity&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is the ancient Graeco-Roman god &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dionysus or Bacchus&lt;/a&gt;, the god of wine and winemaking, often associated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bacchanalia&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;even in much later centuries&lt;/a&gt; with drunkenness and revelry. Here &amp;quot;heathen&amp;quot; is used to refer to the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heathen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;as opposed to&lt;/a&gt; Christianity and other Abrahamic religions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, this sentence describes Bacchus, &amp;quot;in the shape of a demi-john&amp;quot;, presiding over some sort of drinking party. It is this ancient god, referred to metaphorically, who &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;held court&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hold-court&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;presided&lt;/a&gt;), the adjective &amp;quot;seductive&amp;quot; being added perhaps to describe the addictive nature of alcoholism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What about &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;aft&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;forward&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? These refer metaphorically to the different classes of seamen aboard the ship. It was common to refer to the ordinary sailors as those &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/before_the_mast&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;before the mast&lt;/a&gt; or &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forecastle&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forecastle&lt;/a&gt; hands&amp;quot;, according to where they had their quarters, while the senior officers would typically be stationed towards the rear of the ship. The terms &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aft&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;aft and forward&lt;/a&gt;, in naval slang, refer to the back and front parts of the ship respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, as kimchi lover said in a comment, the real meaning of the quoted sentence could be condensed as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The officers drank, and probably the other ranks did too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T11:18:16.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16266" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="409" CreationDate="2020-11-09T12:25:49.830" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Actually &amp;quot;Kefitsat Hadderach&amp;quot; is a Jewish term which as said does literally mean shortening of the way and does literally refer to their prophesied Messiah, the problem is in proving that quotes from Daniel where the term Stem of Jesse, or one from the line of King David who will be Gods son and bring peace to Earth for example are good sources for citation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11323" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T20:53:18.020" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T20:53:18.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16258" CreationDate="2020-11-09T18:00:56.297" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As others have suggested in their answers, English language curses and profane expressions also routinely use regular words. To understand this we have to ask why we call them &amp;quot;curse words&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;profanities&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To curse literally means to &amp;quot;call down evil&amp;quot; either on another person or on oneself. It is a prayer or wish that some divine power will punish the person named. Self cursing is conditional. An example would be &amp;quot;May God strike me dead here where I stand if I am lying!&amp;quot; This is also an example of &amp;quot;swearing&amp;quot; since to swear means to make a solemn statement or promise. The word &amp;quot;damn&amp;quot; is a word for cursing because it means to condemn to punishment, especially to hell. So someone might swear &amp;quot;May I be damned if I have touched anything that belongs to you!&amp;quot; To the extent such curses are a genuine attempt to assert one's position and accept the consequences of deception they are not considered profanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &amp;quot;profanity&amp;quot; comes from the idea of profaning. To profane is to take something that is holy (highly respected, reserved for a very special purpose) and to use it for something ordinary or frivolous. Cursing becomes profanity when the curse is pronounced without solemn intent. For example if in response to the question &amp;quot;When does the store open?&amp;quot; one were to respond &amp;quot;Damned if I know!&amp;quot;, that would be profanity. It is not the use of the word &amp;quot;damn&amp;quot; which makes it profane, it is the inappropriateness of invoking God's judgement in this circumstance which renders it disrespectful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Invocations can also be profane. An invocation is an appeal to the hearer to remember some high person or principle and act accordingly. Examples would be &amp;quot;Stop in the name of the law!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Open in the name of the king!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;I charge you in the name of all you hold holy to tell us what you have done!&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;No! In the name of Heaven, No!&amp;quot; Invocations involving religious figures and concepts are considered profane when used frivolously. So if someone expresses surprise at seeing an unusual object by asking &amp;quot;What in the name of God is that?!&amp;quot;, that is profanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it is perfectly normal that in the Pern novels profane expressions consist of normal words referring to respected figures, objects, and concepts or to punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11325" LastEditorUserId="11325" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T18:22:20.563" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T18:22:20.563" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16271" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-09T21:26:46.633" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Stephen_King&amp;amp;oldid=987357155#Influences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about Stephen King&lt;/a&gt;, one of the author's influences was Richard Matheson, author of &lt;em&gt;I Am Legend&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Hell House&lt;/em&gt; and other works. The article claims,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a current edition of Matheson's &lt;em&gt;The Shrinking Man&lt;/em&gt;, King is quoted as saying, &amp;quot;A horror story if there ever was one...a great adventure story—it is certainly one of that select handful that I have given to people, envying them the experience of the first reading.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching Amazon and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3Athe+shrinking+man+au%3Amatheson&amp;amp;qt=advanced&amp;amp;dblist=638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt; I have been unable to identify that edition. One current edition has appeared in the SF Masterworks series, but the results in WorldCat make no mention of a preface by Stephen King. The 2011 edition by  RosettaBooks does not appear to contain a preface either. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/shrinking-man/oclc/262559447?referer=br&amp;amp;ht=edition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2001 edition by Gauntlet Publications&lt;/a&gt; has an afterword by David Morell but nothing by Stephen King.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What edition of &lt;em&gt;The Shrinking Man&lt;/em&gt; contains a foreword or an afterword by Stephen King? Does that text also mention other works by Matheson that influenced King?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-09T21:41:40.610" LastActivityDate="2020-11-09T21:41:40.610" Title="What edition of The Shrinking Man contains a foreword by Stephen King?" Tags="&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;richard-matheson&gt;&lt;the-shrinking-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16297" CreationDate="2020-11-10T06:51:37.980" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm more interested in literature than law here. I think this means the same thing as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/What-does-your-rights-end-where-mine-begin-mean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;your rights end where mine begin&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;? Scalia iss alluding to Henry David Thoreau, but my English is too unproficient to read Thoreau. Why does Scalia allude to Thoreau? What's &amp;quot;beau ideal&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;   An example of an opinion rejecting the evaluative portion of a policy argument is Justice Scalia's separate concurring opinion&#xA;the &amp;quot;nude dancing&amp;quot; case &lt;em&gt;Barnes v. Glen Theatre&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;sup&gt;323&lt;/sup&gt; In finding that there was no First Amendment right to perform or view nude dancing,&#xA;Scalia wrote, &amp;quot;There is no basis for thinking that our society&#xA;ever shared the &lt;strong&gt;Thoreauvian 'you-may-do-what-you-like-so-long-&#xA;as-it-does-not-injure-someone-else' beau ideal&lt;/strong&gt;—much less for&#xA;thinking that it was written into the Constitution.&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;324&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilson Huhn. &lt;em&gt;The Five Types of Legal Argument&lt;/em&gt; (2 ed, 2014). Pg 140.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1WDGH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/1WDGH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;scanned pages from Wilson Huhn's book The Five Types of Legal Argument, an excerpt of which is quoted above&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T10:53:57.533" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T09:20:33.047" Title="What does Justice Scalia mean by &quot;Thoreauvian 'you-may-do-what-you-like-so-long-as-it-does-not-injure-someone-else' beau ideal&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;henry-david-thoreau&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16174" CreationDate="2020-11-10T06:59:26.000" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;October/November 1892&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bengali original of &amp;quot;The Victory&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.315766/page/n131/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;জয় পরাজয়&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;jay paraajay&lt;/em&gt;,  &amp;quot;Victory and Defeat&amp;quot;) appears in the first volume of a multi-volume collection called &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.315766/page/n3/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;গল্পগূচ্ছ&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;galpaguuchchha&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;A Bouquet of Stories&amp;quot;). This volume was published in 1926. A Bengali calendar month and year are given at the end of the story: কার্তিক ১২৯৯ (&lt;em&gt;kaartik 1299&lt;/em&gt;). That date corresponds to late October or early November 1892. Presumably this is the date of composition rather than of first publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, &lt;em&gt;galpaguuchchha&lt;/em&gt; v.1 provides no bibliographic information about the original publication of &lt;em&gt;jay paraajay&lt;/em&gt; or any of the other stories therein. It is unlikely that &lt;em&gt;jay paraajay&lt;/em&gt; remained unpublished for 34 years. For one thing, as mentioned in the question, Jadunath Sarkar's translation of the story had appeared in 1911 with the title &amp;quot;Victorious in Defeat&amp;quot;. Sarkar must have come across the Bengali original somewhere. Of course it's possible, albeit improbable, that Sarkar was working off Tagore's unpublished manuscript.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequently, Tagore's own translation of the story, entitled &amp;quot;The Victory&amp;quot;, appeared in a 1916 collection, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.503490/page/n279/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Hungry Stones and Other Stories&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.503490/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt; states that &amp;quot;The Victory&amp;quot; was translated by Tagore himself. Further bibliographical information is not provided. As with &lt;em&gt;galpaguuchchha&lt;/em&gt;, this collection too does not specify the first appearance of the original &lt;em&gt;jay paraajay&lt;/em&gt;. Nor is there any indication whether this translation by Tagore had been previously published elsewhere. However, Pulinbihari Sen and Subhendusekhar Mukhopadhyay's far from definitive &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/23329376&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bibliography of English translations of Tagore's works&lt;/a&gt;, which appeared in a 1960/1961 volume of &lt;em&gt;Indian Literature&lt;/em&gt;, does list this as the first appearance of Tagore's translation of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Summary&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Bengali original, &lt;em&gt;jay paraajay&lt;/em&gt;, appears in a 1926 collection of Tagore's stories, and the date of composition given there is 1892&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first known English translation, by Jadunath Sarkar, was published in volume 10 issue 6 of &lt;em&gt;Modern Review&lt;/em&gt;, a Calcutta monthly, in December 1911, under the title &amp;quot;Victorious in Defeat&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagore's own English translation, &amp;quot;The Victory&amp;quot;, was most likely first published 1916 in &lt;em&gt;The Hungry Stones and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bengali script is romanized following &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T10:39:05.750" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T10:39:05.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16118" CreationDate="2020-11-10T10:12:52.683" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Hindu mythology, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yama_(Hinduism)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;god of death&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yama&lt;/a&gt;. His attendants are called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamaduta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;yamaduut&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, literally Yama's messengers (&lt;em&gt;duut&lt;/em&gt;). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://bn.wikisource.org/wiki/%E0%A6%9B%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B2%E0%A6%BE/%E0%A7%A7%E0%A7%A7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali original&lt;/a&gt; of ছেলেবেলা / &lt;em&gt;chhelebelaa&lt;/em&gt; uses the phrase যমের দূত / &lt;em&gt;yamer duut&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;the messenger of Yama&amp;quot;, rather than the substantive যমদূত &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt;, but the reference is the same. The word &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt; is the same in singular and plural forms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the job of a &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt; to approach at the moment of death, tell the dead person that they are now dead, and escort the person's soul to the afterlife. Naturally &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt; are much feared. Metaphorically, any person whose presence foretells calamity can be called a &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word translated &amp;quot;steward&amp;quot; is দেওয়ান / &lt;em&gt;deoyaan&lt;/em&gt;, which is the Bengali spelling for &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dewan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. A dewan was a revenue officer. So the question asked here boils down to: &amp;quot;why would the &lt;em&gt;dewan&lt;/em&gt; of an indigo plantation be feared enough to be equated with a &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indigo planting in India was notoriously exploitative. Farmers were persuaded to replace food crops with indigo. The indigo plants were sold to them on credit, the interest rates being such that farmers could never pay down the principal. The accrued debt was passed on to their heirs. Entire generations of farmers were in servitude to the planters as a result. Farmers also received a paltry sum for their indigo crops, amounting to only about 2.5% of the market value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the revenue officer of the plantation, the dewan managed the accounts with the farmers. He would be the one who paid the farmers for their indigo plants, but more importantly, he would also be the one to collect the interest due on the loans made, as well as the tax due on the cultivated land. Since the latter amounts typically exceeded the payment the farmers received, any dealings with the dewan were frightening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equivalence between a dewan and a &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt; could often be quite literal: E. De-Latour, a witness before the British commission to look into the conditions of the indigo trade, &lt;a href=&quot;https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/hemispheres/_files/pdf/eti/Indigo.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;testified&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;not a chest of Indigo reached England without being stained with human blood&amp;quot;. Conditions finally reached the point where the peasant farmers &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_revolt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebelled&lt;/a&gt; against the planters. The Indigo Revolt began in 1859, just a couple of years before Tagore was born. The revolt was successful, insofar as measures were laid out that marginally improved conditions for the farmers. But by the turn of the twentieth century, the manufacture of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo_dye#Synthetic_development&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synthetic indigo became commercially viable&lt;/a&gt;. Indigo plantation in India, being no longer profitable, came to an end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage from Tagore's memoir, written in 1940, recalls this history from about a half-century previous. The indigo factory still stands, but it isn't used to manufacture indigo any more. The white planters, their dewans, and the bailiffs who served as enforcers against the farmers have all disappeared. But Tagore remembers the toll the exploitative system took on the peasants, particularly the fear inspired by the dewans, so great that they were regarded as &lt;em&gt;yamaduut&lt;/em&gt; or Death's henchmen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T09:14:09.670" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T09:14:09.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16277" CreationDate="2020-11-10T11:19:18.403" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quote from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=k4HpLw48J8kC&amp;amp;pg=PA36&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fitting the Ground to Plant&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bruchac&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Bruchac&lt;/a&gt;, collected in &lt;em&gt;Rooted in Rock: New Adirondack Writing, 1975-2000&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Jim Gould:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thirty years after that day when my grandfather put the stone axhead in my hands, I understood at last why, as I held that stone, my mind had filled with images of tall corn swaying in the wind, images of women dancing as they held the season’s harvest in their hands. Hearing [my friend and teacher] Maurice Dennis tell the story of the coming of corn &lt;strong&gt;was the last stroke of the hoe&lt;/strong&gt; that fit my own mind to the earth my grandfather had given to me. And I knew that as long as my hands had the strength to hold a hoe, I would work that garden where corn had been cared for by my grandparents and by my great grandparents before them. I would listen to that land just as it had once been listened to by other men and women, generations of Abenaki people and Mohawk people whose stories were told in a tongue as old as the soil. Spring would find me preparing the earth for the Corn Maiden, find me fitting the ground of my grandfather’s garden to plant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why the action of &amp;quot;hearing a story&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;the last stroke of the hoe&amp;quot;? And what's the hidden meaning of &amp;quot;the last stroke of the hoe&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-10T13:28:52.417" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T23:53:05.737" Title="What does &quot;hearing a story was the last stroke of the hoe&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;joseph-bruchac&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16276" CreationDate="2020-11-10T23:53:05.737" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key to the meaning is in the words that follow:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hearing Maurice Dennis tell the story of the coming of corn was the last stroke of &lt;strong&gt;the hoe that fit my own mind to the earth my grandfather had given to me&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bruchac's grandfather has bequeathed him a plot of land, i.e., some &amp;quot;earth&amp;quot;. In order to plant crops, that earth needs to be prepared. One prepares the earth for planting by hoeing, i.e., loosening the soil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bruchac moves very beautifully between the literal and the metaphoric here. He says that hearing Dennis's story prepared his mind for cultivating his grandfather's land in the way that hoeing prepares a plot of earth for cultivating corn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Farming and gardening are deep metaphors for connections with nature, history, community, and one's own identity. We speak of our &amp;quot;roots&amp;quot;, or of &amp;quot;planting a seed in someone's mind&amp;quot;, or of an effort's being &amp;quot;fruitful&amp;quot;. Dennis's story puts Bruchac in the frame of mind that allows him to see how the act of planting a garden reinforces his connection with community and history. He finally understands why holding a stone axhead gave him a vision of processes that continue throughout history, such as growing corn and participating in the harvest. He commits to working in the garden as his grandparents did, because Dennis's story has prepared his mind for that in the way that a hoe prepares the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-10T23:53:05.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16278" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:14:55.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:14:55.447" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:14:55.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16279" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:14:55.447" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Native American writer Joseph Bruchac (1942 - ) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:17:15.703" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:17:15.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16280" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:15:58.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:15:58.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:15:58.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16281" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:15:58.597" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author Richard Matheson (1926-2013), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:17:21.013" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:17:21.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16282" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:17:44.890" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:17:44.890" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:17:44.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16283" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:17:44.890" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;The Shrinking Man&quot; by Richard Matheson. Should be tagged with [richard-matheson]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:19:07.470" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:19:07.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16284" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:20:14.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:20:14.590" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:20:14.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16285" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:20:14.590" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Isidore of Seville (c. 560 - 636), who lived in what is now Spain and has been called &quot;the last scholar of the ancient world&quot;, or about his life as a writer. Questions regarding his works should be tagged with [latin-literature], since they were all written in the Latin language, not with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:19:00.353" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:19:00.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16286" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:21:24.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:21:24.043" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:21:24.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16287" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:21:24.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Homer Croy (1883-1965), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:16:02.943" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:16:02.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16288" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:27:01.463" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:27:01.463" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:27:01.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16289" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:27:01.463" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'West of the Water Tower' (1923) by Homer Croy. Should be tagged with [homer-croy]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T11:05:24.787" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T11:05:24.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16290" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:27:42.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:27:42.077" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:27:42.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16291" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:27:42.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Fences&quot; by August Wilson. Should be tagged with [august-wilson]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T06:15:22.743" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T06:15:22.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16292" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:33:21.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T01:33:21.373" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T01:33:21.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16293" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T01:33:21.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the anonymity of works whose author was not known at the time of publication or cannot be identified. This tag should be used for questions about anonymity as such, not for questions about other aspects of works that were published anonymously." OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T19:27:21.150" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:27:21.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16296" CreationDate="2020-11-11T07:54:34.543" Score="0" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an excerpt (no origin given) from &lt;a href=&quot;https://actacademy.act.org/assessment/act-conventions-of-standard-english-2-2/9451374&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an ACT test&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every thousand feet, we came to a small station constructed of tin and cement, barely able to block the wind. At each one, we noted the roof piled high with fallen rocks and felt both unsettled and reassured by this evidence of the station’s protective ability. We rested uneasily for a moment as a clerk &lt;strong&gt;burned the station brand into our walking sticks&lt;/strong&gt;, proof of our &lt;strong&gt;progress through the darkness.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does it mean to &amp;quot;burn the station brand into our walking sticks&amp;quot;? What does &amp;quot;station brand&amp;quot; symbolize? And why does it count as progress?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T21:03:16.963" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T21:03:16.963" Title="What does &quot;burned the station brand into our walking sticks&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16295" CreationDate="2020-11-11T08:14:25.617" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's difficult to be certain without more context. But the words make literal sense. A brand is literally an identifying mark that is burned onto a surface. Typically this is done by heating a metal die that has the mark, then applying the die onto the receiving surface. Livestock are often branded in this way. When sheep graze in common pasture, flocks from different farms mingle together, but when it's time to separate those flocks and return them to their farms, the brand helps identify the owners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the walkers move ahead from one station to the next during the night. At each station, a clerk burns the identifying mark for that station into the walkers' sticks. This attests that the walkers have been there. So the brands provide &amp;quot;proof of our progress through the darkness&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T08:19:43.463" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T08:19:43.463" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16273" CreationDate="2020-11-11T09:05:51.127" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thoreau was a proponent of limited government. His famous essay &lt;a href=&quot;https://xroads.virginia.edu/%7EHyper2/thoreau/civil.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Civil Disobedience&lt;/a&gt; begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heartily accept the motto, &amp;quot;That government is best which governs least&amp;quot;; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe- &amp;quot;That government is best which governs not at all&amp;quot;; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thoreau took the motto &amp;quot;That government is best which governs least&amp;quot; from an unsigned editorial in &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924077700031&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the first issue of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review&lt;/a&gt; (1837). This quote from the editorial explains Scalia's characterization of Thoreau's political philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best government is that which governs least.... Government should have as little as possible to do with the general business and interests of the people. If it once undertake these functions as its rightful province of action, it is impossible to say to it, &amp;quot;thus far shalt thou go, and no farther.&amp;quot;  (p. 6–7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, government should not regulate anything that it does not absolutely have to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Its domestic action should be confined to the administration of justice, for the protection of the natural equal rights of the citizen, and the preservation of social order.  (p. 7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a libertarian, laissez-faire ideology. Under such an ideology, viewing nude dancing would not be banned. If someone is willing to dance nude, and someone else willing to watch, it's not the government's business to step in and outlaw that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scalia argues that beautiful as this philosophy might be, it is not widely shared in American society. He also says it cannot be found in the Constitution and so is not fundamental to American government. He therefore says that regulating nude dancing is something that would fall under the government's remit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, of course, I find neither this alleged beau ideal nor Antonin Scalia's jurisprudence the slightest bit attractive, nor even intellectually honest, but that's neither here nor there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T09:20:33.047" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T09:20:33.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16298" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16299" CreationDate="2020-11-11T12:19:49.620" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 5 of &lt;em&gt;The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author describes an outside broker and financier talking to his friend about their hard financial condition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black tossed a letter across to him. “What do you think of that?” he asked. “Here’s a demand from Tangye’s, the brokers, for ten thousand pounds, and a hint that failing its arrival I shall be posted as a defaulter.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Pay it,” suggested Sir Isaac languidly, and the other laughed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Don’t talk rot,” he said, with offensive good humour. “Where am I going to get ten thousand pounds? I’m nearly broke; you know that, Tramber; we’re both in the same boat. I’ve got two millions on paper, but I don’t think we could raise a couple of hundred ready between us if we tried.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The baronet pushed back his plate. “I say,” he said abruptly, “you don’t mean what you said?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“About the money?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“About the money—yes. You nearly gave me an attack of heart disease. My dear chap, we should be pretty awkwardly fixed if money dried up just now.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colonel Black smiled. “That’s just what has happened,” he said. “Fix or no fix, we’re in it. I’m overdrawn in the bank; I’ve got about a hundred pounds in the house, and I suppose you’ve got another hundred.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I haven’t a hundred farthings,” said the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Expenses are very heavy,” Black went on; “you know how &lt;strong&gt;these things&lt;/strong&gt; turn up. &lt;strong&gt;There are one or two in view, but beyond that we have nothing&lt;/strong&gt;. If we could bring about the amalgamation of those Northern Foundries we might both sign cheques for a hundred thousand.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I found by searching that &amp;quot;turn up&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;appear or occur suddenly&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;one or two&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;few&amp;quot;, but I don't know what's meant by &amp;quot;these things&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;one or two&amp;quot; of which thing exactly?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T13:53:57.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T13:53:57.913" Title="What's meant by &quot;these things&quot; in The Just Men of Cordova?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16298" CreationDate="2020-11-11T13:52:39.580" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For an explanation of &amp;quot;these things&amp;quot;, the reader needs to remember the description of Colonel Black's line of business from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 2: Colonel Black, Financier&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They [Black and Gram] recommended to their clients certain shares, and the clients bought or sold according to the advice given, and at the end of a certain period of time. Black and Gram wrote politely regretting that the cover deposited had been exhausted, and urgently requesting, with as little delay as possible, the discharge of those liabilities which in some extraordinary fashion the client had incurred. (...)&#xA;They [the financial lords of the City] read of his mighty stock deals, of his Argentine electric deal, his rubber notations and his Canadian copper mines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black recommends his clients to buy shares in mines or companies abroad. These clients don't have the means to check for themselves if those mines or companies can turn out a profit. If these companies create losses (as Black and Gram claim), the clients don't get dividends but need to share in the debt. Black has not been successful in making a lot of money in this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had organized successful combinations, but the cost had been heavy. Millions had flowed through his hands, but precious little had stuck. He was that curious contradiction—a dishonest man with honest methods. His schemes were financially sound, yet it had needed almost superhuman efforts to get them through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;these things&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;combinations&amp;quot; and other opportunities for making money in the way described above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T13:52:39.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16258" CreationDate="2020-11-11T15:10:33.030" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many realworld curses are ordinary words that we have endowed with particular significance. There's a whole set of words, unknown in American English, and stripped of all their original connotations in British English, that were originally used as cursewords in Shakespearian times because they were blasphemous references to holy attributes of Jesus Christ. Thus &amp;quot;bloody&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;God's blood.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Zounds&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;God's wounds.&amp;quot; And &amp;quot;Odd's bodkins&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;God's little body.&amp;quot; To an American, however, &amp;quot;bloody&amp;quot; sounds like an ordinary word that the British inexplicably find offensive (and the substitute curse &amp;quot;ruddy&amp;quot; is even harder to understand).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the world of Pern, the Dragons have a sacred significance because they are the only real defense against the life-threatening catastrophe of &amp;quot;Thread.&amp;quot; Therefore, referring casually to their attributes is mildly taboo, and thus appropriate for generating cursewords such as &amp;quot;by the Egg.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T15:10:33.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16302" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16313" CreationDate="2020-11-11T19:47:23.777" Score="2" ViewCount="207" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the poem &amp;quot;Elizabeth Childers&amp;quot; by Edgar Lee Masters, published in &lt;em&gt;Spoon River Anthology&lt;/em&gt; (1915):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dust of my dust,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And dust with my dust,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O, child who died as you entered the world,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dead with my death!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not knowing Breath, though you tried so hard,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With a heart that beat when you lived with me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And stopped when you left me for Life.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is well, my child. For you never traveled&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The long, long way that begins with school days,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When little fingers blur under the tears&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That fall on the crooked letters.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the earliest wound, when a little mate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Leaves you alone for another;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sickness, and the face of Fear by the bed;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The death of a father or mother;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or shame for them, or poverty;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The maiden sorrow of school days ended;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And eyeless Nature that makes you drink&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the cup of Love, though you know it’s poisoned;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;To whom would your flower-face have been lifted?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Botanist, weakling? Cry of what blood to yours?—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pure or foul, for it makes no matter,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It’s blood that calls to our blood.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And then your children—oh, what might they be?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what your sorrow? Child! Child!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Death is better than Life!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you help me understand the lines in bold? English not being my first language doesn't help, but I really can't figure the meaning of these verses in the context of this poem. Botanist? Cry of blood? I'm lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11346" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T19:58:25.087" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T08:32:57.287" Title="Meaning of &quot;Elizabeth Childers&quot; by Edgar Lee Masters?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-lee-masters&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16303" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-11T20:00:46.137" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T20:00:46.137" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T20:00:46.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16304" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-11T20:00:46.137" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-11T20:02:50.460" LastActivityDate="2020-11-11T20:02:50.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1022" CreationDate="2020-11-11T20:38:42.220" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The rhyme is introduced as a part of O’Brien’s interview of Winston in the context of &lt;em&gt;The Book and The Brotherhood&lt;/em&gt;. It seems to a have been given as sign/countersign as an initiation into the Brotherhood, so that one can tell who is a member of the secret society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sign: Oranges and lemons&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Countersign: Say the bells of St. Clement’s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My read is that O’Brien’s very long observational interest in Winston (seven years), combined with how O’Brien relates to Winston (“I admire your mind. It is so much like my own”), indicates that O’Brien sees Winston as a potential member of the Inner Party – if Winston can master double-think, the sine qua non of an Inner party member. Everyone around Winston is destroyed (Julia, Parsons, Sykes, Ampleforth) but Winston is “spared.” His potential for doublethink is apparent at the end of the novel, and with the cryptic “He loved Big Brother” his reprogramming conversion is complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11347" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T01:35:39.260" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T01:35:39.260" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16306" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T00:23:50.950" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coriolanus describes the people and tribunes as many-headed in multiple instances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[H]e himself stuck not to call us the many-headed / multitude&amp;quot; (2.3.16-17).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the citizens discuss whether or not they will give their votes to Coriolanus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You grave but reckless senators, have you thus / Given Hydra here to choose an officer&amp;quot; (3.1.124-25).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Coriolanus tells the Senators that they have allowed the tribunes, a Hydra, to determine his Consulship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The beast / With many heads butts me away&amp;quot; (4.1.1-2).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the people exile Coriolanus, he calls them a beast with many heads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11350" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-13T18:14:55.430" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T22:09:32.223" Title="Why does Coriolanus describe the common people as many-headed?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;coriolanus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16312" CreationDate="2020-11-12T01:57:34.373" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &amp;quot;Just this Side of Byzantium&amp;quot; by Ray Bradbury:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began to learn the nature of surprises, thankfully, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea &lt;strong&gt;folds up its paws&lt;/strong&gt;, turns on its back, &lt;strong&gt;fixes its eyes on eternity,&lt;/strong&gt; and dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think Bradbury wants to convey the idea that forcing an idea into existence will backfire, but I don't understand the figurative language in &amp;quot;folds up its paws, fixes its eyes on eternity.&amp;quot; What connection does this have to the main idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T02:05:59.477" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T08:27:50.347" Title="What does &quot;folds up its paws&quot; and &quot;fixes its eyes on eternity&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16308" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16321" CreationDate="2020-11-12T02:04:56.560" Score="6" ViewCount="2988" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &amp;quot;Just this Side of Byzantium&amp;quot; by Ray Bradbury:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I &lt;strong&gt;floundered&lt;/strong&gt; into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why Bradbury uses &amp;quot;flounder&amp;quot; which seems to have a negative connotation, but I think, based on the context, &amp;quot;a word-association process&amp;quot; is a gift for the writer, by which Bradbury writes his stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T08:57:09.753" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T03:18:07.010" Title="Why does Ray Bradbury use &quot;flounder&quot; for an action with a positive outcome?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2747" CreationDate="2020-11-12T04:12:54.663" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't address the entirety of the Mind Game, so I will just deal with your more specific question: &lt;strong&gt;the symbolism/meaning of the Giant's Drink&lt;/strong&gt;. For Ender's Game I have the paperback Author's Definitive Edition (1991), and for Speaker for the Dead I have a paperback (not sure which edition). Both are from Tor publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ender's Game online &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.schlowlibrary.org/Record/346204/TOC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;table of contents&lt;/a&gt;, and Speaker for the Dead online &lt;a href=&quot;http://hermiene.net/books/title/67&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;table of contents&lt;/a&gt; (scroll down and expand)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, let's establish what the Giant's Drink is intended to be by the adults who run the school. It is supposed to turn children away and make them give up. Surrendering in the face of overwhelming odds is seen as the good, rational decision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the game had no victory conditions--no matter what the child did, his analogue died a gruesome death. The human psychologists measured a child's persistence at this game of despair to determine his level of suicidal need. Being rational, most children abandoned the Giant’s Drink after no more than a dozen visits with the great cheater.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Speaker for the Dead, Chapter 11: Jane, page 192&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ender himself knows that the Giant’s Drink is an impossible game. Despite this, he feels an obligation to try it, and is unable to keep away and call it a loss. He doesn’t make the expected, “rational” choice of giving up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not through the mousehole this time, he told himself. I'm sick of the Giant. It's a dumb game and I can't ever win. Whatever I choose is wrong. But he went through the mousehole anyways.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ender’s Game, Chapter 6: The Giant's Drink, page 62&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The game itself is a representation of how the adults who run the school can’t fathom any options besides the binary choose how to die/choose to give up. Additionally, they expect every child who attempts the game to accept that there are no other options, without question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Giant only played the guessing game. Stupid computer. Millions of possible scenarios in its memory, and the Giant could only play one stupid game.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ender’s Game, Chapter 6: The Giant's Drink, page 63&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Ender does not accept these assumptions. The adults who created it only saw two choices, Ender attacking the Giant, then, is a clear repudiation of the rules and boundaries the officers try to set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And instead of pushing his face into one of the liquids [the choice he's supposed to make], he kicked one over, then the other, and dodged the Giant's huge hands as the Giant shouted, &amp;quot;Cheater, cheater!&amp;quot;... and as the Giant screamed, Ender's figure burrowed into the eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ender’s Game, Chapter 6: The Giant's Drink, page 64-65&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He tried to get his onscreen analogue to do outrageous things, things not &amp;quot;allowed&amp;quot; by the rules of that portion of the Fantasy Game... finally, one day, the boy surpassed the program's ability to defeat him&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Speaker for the Dead, Chapter 11: Jane, page 192&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But there’s more to Ender’s choice than it simply being unexpected by the creators of the game. Ender considers his third option immoral, &lt;em&gt;even though it was the option he chose&lt;/em&gt;. He is disgusted with himself to resorting to gruesome violence. He feels betrayed, as it “was supposed to be a game” - the Mind Game, living up to its name, suddenly becomes very real to him through how his actions affect his mental state. To win, he became ruthless. Just like his hated older brother, Peter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had made it. He ought to explore. He ought to climb down from the Giant’s face and see what he had finally achieved.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Instead he signed off, put his desk in his locker, stripped off his clothes and pulled his blanket over him. He hadn’t meant to kill the Giant. This was supposed to be a game. Not a choice between his own grisly death and an even worse murder. I’m a murderer, even when I play. Peter would be proud of me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Ender’s Game, Chapter 6: The Giant’s Drink, page 65&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So, to recap: the Giant’s Drink&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is expected to be unwinnable&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prompts Ender to make an choice not expected by the creators of the game&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leads to Ender being disgusted with himself for making that choice&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would say that the Giant’s Drink, and especially Ender’s attacking the Giant, symbolizes his unorthodox decision-making. He at the same time embraces a cold, ruthless side of himself to win the game, and is disgusted with himself for his action within the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hmm…. that sure sounds like another part of the book, doesn’t it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or multiple parts. The lessons of the Giant’s drink serve as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/56011215#56011215&quot;&gt;main symbolic parallel for the whole book&lt;/a&gt;. I’ll list the parallels in chronological order through the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Chapter 1&lt;/strong&gt; Stilson, a bully, challenges Ender to a fight. No adults are around to protect him. There seems to be no good way out. Ender makes a completely unexpected choice and not only defeats Stilson but &lt;em&gt;destroys&lt;/em&gt; him, beating on him even after Stilson is down for the count. Then he leaves feeling disgusted with himself for such violence. He knows that what he did went against the etiquette for such fights, but he felt that he had to do so to win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Chapter 4&lt;/strong&gt; Bernard harasses Ender while the two are in the shuttle. Again, no adults to help. Ender again goes for the “overreaction” and pulls Bernard out of his seat, throwing the boy across the shuttle. He is again surprised at himself for how much damage he does, though in the moment he saw it as the only way to “win”, to stop the bullying then and there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In Chapter 12&lt;/strong&gt; Bonzo tries to hurt, and possibly kill, Ender. Ender again does the unexpected and beats Bonzo hard enough to kill. Though he doesn’t know that Bonzo dies at the time, he knows that he used more violence than necessary and is, again, disgusted with himself. He is aware that the “rules” for such a fight do not allow for such damage as he inflicted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Right after that&lt;/strong&gt;, still in Chapter 12, Dragon Army is forced to fight against two other armies at once. The traditional means of winning  (take out all enemy soldiers, and then pass through the gate) is no longer viable. So Ender breaks the rules again. With the idea that “the enemy’s gate is down” he sacrifices the majority of his army to distract from a few sneaking to the gate. The fact that the adults broke their rules by pitting two armies against one, and the trauma of his fight with Bonzo, leads to him giving up on the game, on th school, on the future where he is the star commander of the Bugger war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And finally, &lt;strong&gt;in Chapter 14&lt;/strong&gt; there is the climatic battle. The final battle, at the Buggers’ home planet, is expected to be impossible to win. The adults running the program can see no options that result in victory. But Ender makes an unexpected choice - sacrifice every ship just to get close enough to the planet’s surface to deploy the Little Doctor. With that he oversees the (almost) total genocide of a species. When he finds out what he has done, he is horrified with himself. &lt;em&gt;He didn’t want to win if it came at such a high cost.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In none of these situations does Ender do the &amp;quot;rational&amp;quot; thing and give up. In all of them he finds an unexpected paths that he hates himself for taking. The Giant's Drink is the epitome of the idea that while taking a third path may be necessary to &amp;quot;win&amp;quot;, it will still hurt to go against one's morals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;So the Giant’s Drink is the main symbolic parallel for the &lt;em&gt;entire book&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt; Over and over again, the motif of Ender being forced into a rule-breaking choice and then regretting it deeply comes up. Over and over again Ender finds a loophole and is disgusted by himself for doing so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T04:12:54.663" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16311" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16315" CreationDate="2020-11-12T08:24:31.890" Score="5" ViewCount="1124" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English speaker. I am struggling with the last few paragraphs of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm#link2HCH0026&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 26&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;Knights and Squires&amp;quot;) of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; by Herman Melville.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried using a dictionary and even translating to my native language but the dots don't seem to connect. I am not able to get the intuitive feeling of these paragraphs. I tried reading it multiple times, but I don't feel satisfied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't want to skip any line of a book that plays such an important role in English Literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance,&#xA;the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce&#xA;might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul.&#xA;Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may&#xA;have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so&#xA;noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature,&#xA;that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows&#xA;should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate&#xA;manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it&#xA;remains intact though all the outer character seem gone;&#xA;bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a&#xA;valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful&#xA;sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity&#xA;of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has&#xA;no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm&#xA;that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity&#xA;which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference&#xA;of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark;&#xA;weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at&#xA;times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that&#xA;workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all&#xA;mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over&#xA;all my kind! Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God!&#xA;who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale,&#xA;poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered&#xA;leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old&#xA;Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from&#xA;the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who&#xA;didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all&#xA;Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest&#xA;champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O&#xA;God!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before these paragraphs, the narrator was talking about the qualities of Starbuck, and it was making sense. But then, he diverged.&#xA;He went from Starbuck to democratic God(what does that mean?) very abruptly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11355" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T08:39:53.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T10:09:54.227" Title="Melville's chain of thought in the &quot;great democratic God&quot; passage in &quot;Moby-Dick&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16307" CreationDate="2020-11-12T08:27:50.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Animals who &amp;quot;fold up their paws&amp;quot; are frequently considered to be preparing for retreat / preparing to enter a defensive posture; it is not generally believed to be a sign of comfort and ease, but rather of stress and distrust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;fix one's eyes on eternity&amp;quot; is to cease attempting to deal with the physical world, but instead turn all of one's attention to the afterlife; another common way of saying this is to &amp;quot;give up the ghost&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1743" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T08:27:50.347" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16313" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16302" CreationDate="2020-11-12T08:32:57.287" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem is narrated by a woman who died in childbirth, addressing the daughter who died with her (“dust with my dust”). The narrator says that it is better to be dead, because life is miserable, and she lists the kinds of suffering that her daughter might have gone through, had she lived. Near the end of this list appears “the cup of Love” (the metaphor of “cup” meaning “allotted portion” coming from the Bible), and then we have the difficult passage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator wonders with whom her daughter would have fallen in love (“to whom would your face have been lifted”). “Flower-face” means “face like a flower”, that is, pretty, smooth, innocent, upturned, etc. This is a common image, for example, from the same year as &lt;em&gt;Spoon River Anthology&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;she looked up at him, &lt;strong&gt;her face like a flower&lt;/strong&gt; in the sun, so bright and attractive&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;D. H. Lawrence (1915). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28948/28948-h/28948-h.htm#chap11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rainbow&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 11&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Modern Library&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Botanist” and “weakling” are two possibilities she imagines for the daughter’s lover. “Botanist” is suggested by the “flower” metaphor and perhaps means someone who would have treated her like a botanical specimen rather than a woman. Possibly the speaker has particular candidates in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next lines build on the stock phrase “blood calls to blood”, which means that people who are closely related to each other share an affinity or bond. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Were you his daughter, my heart would not rebel—&lt;strong&gt;blood calls to blood&lt;/strong&gt;, and a child’s duty is paramount. But you are no child of his […]”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mary Shelley (1837). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/falknernovel00shel/page/252/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Falkner&lt;/em&gt;, p. 252&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are our kin, and, in trouble, &lt;strong&gt;blood calls to blood&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Longan Stuart (1911). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/fenellaanovel00presgoog/page/n156/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fenella&lt;/em&gt;, p. 144&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Doubleday.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the implication of this phrase in ‘Elizabeth Childers’ seems to be that the daughter’s lover would have been a close relation (for example, a cousin) and that whether his “blood” (meaning “disposition; temperament”) is good or bad would not have mattered, because of the affinity of kinship. The use of “&lt;em&gt;our&lt;/em&gt; blood” suggests that the narrator had the same experience she is imagining for her daughter. This interpretation perhaps explains the question that follows, “And then your children—oh, what might they be?”, since the children of cousins have a higher risk of birth defects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T08:32:57.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16314" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T08:47:55.717" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I studied a novel/story around 1995/1997 while I was in 7th grade or so. I vaguely remember the storyline. But I am unable to get the name or author of the story. The storyline goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Protagonist buys a multipurpose furniture which can be turned into an easy chair (recliner), ironing board and a ladder. He was very proud owning that and everything was going fine for quite some time. Later, the springs of this furniture gets into trouble and in the most unwanted time, the furniture will transform to the other one on its own. While he iron press his dress, it turns into a chair. While sitting on the chair, it turns into a table and so... This creates a lot of problems in his life. At the end, he laments, that piece of furniture is in his attic; even now, when some mouse run over it, he can hear the sound of that furniture changing from one form to another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do anyone recognize this storyline? If so, please let me know the name or author of this story. Much thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11356" LastEditorUserId="139" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T11:11:46.777" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T11:11:46.777" Title="Multipurpose furniture shapeshifts at inconvenient times, abandoned in attic" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16311" CreationDate="2020-11-12T09:05:37.533" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TLDR: Starbuck is a great man because he has worked hard to elevate himself. Hard work is the ultimate democratic quality because anyone can do it, and it comes from God. If the author should spend a lot of time and words and purple prose repeating this sentiment, then he asks God to defend him from earthly critics.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But were the coming narrative to reveal in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the story ahead reveals a failure of Starbuck’s courage, the author would not want to write it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human beings may seem bad, commit bad acts, even look bad but at the same time the ideal of humanity is so noble that we can excuse the minor errors of those who approach it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because we know how great humanity can be, someone who approaches that ideal then falls low is a terrible thing to witness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highest ideal of humanity is behaving in a dignfied manner, but don't be fooled by those who merely look dignified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is the dignity of hard work. God has given everyone the capacity to achieve that dignity if they choose to work hard, therefore it is democractic and equal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, then, to meanest mariners, and renegades and castaways, I shall hereafter ascribe high qualities, though dark; weave round them tragic graces; if even the most mournful, perchance the most abased, among them all, shall at times lift himself to the exalted mounts; if I shall touch that workman’s arm with some ethereal light; if I shall spread a rainbow over his disastrous set of sun; then against all mortal critics bear me out in it, thou Just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author describes the work of ordinary, even mean-seeming people, in over-glowing terms then God, the &amp;quot;spirit of equality&amp;quot; will defend him from critical readers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear me out in it, thou great democratic God! who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl; Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes; Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne! Thou who, in all Thy mighty, earthly marchings, ever cullest Thy selectest champions from the kingly commons; bear me out in it, O God!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;God has seen fit to protect the reputations of writers such as Bunyan, Cervantes. To pull from obscurity the military leader and later President Andrew Jackson. Who continues to elevate the worthy from the mass of humanity. So please see fit to protect the author's opinion on dignity and hard work from critics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T09:05:37.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16316" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16311" CreationDate="2020-11-12T10:09:54.227" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Matt Thrower has explained the overall shape of the passage, so I will content myself with elucidating Melville’s references to three men who overcame hardship and achieved fame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who didst not refuse to the swart convict, Bunyan, the pale, poetic pearl;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bunyan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Bunyan&lt;/a&gt; was convicted in 1660 for failure to conform to the Church of England. While imprisoned in Bedford County Gaol, he began &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pilgrim%27s_Progress&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Pilgrim’s Progress&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a work of relgious allegory that he likens to a pearl in the ‘Author’s Apology for his Book’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If that a &lt;strong&gt;pearl&lt;/strong&gt; may in a toad’s head dwell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And may be found too in an oyster-shell;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If things that promise nothing do contain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What better is than gold; who will disdain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That have an inkling of it, there to look,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That they may find it? Now, &lt;strong&gt;my little book&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Though void of all these paintings that may make&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It with this or the other man to take)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is not without those things that do excel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What do in brave but empty notions dwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to Bunyan is followed by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou who didst clothe with doubly hammered leaves of finest gold, the stumped and paupered arm of old Cervantes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Miguel de Cervantes&lt;/a&gt; was wounded at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lepanto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Lepanto&lt;/a&gt; in 1571, rendering his left arm useless. He is remembered now for the invention of the modern novel in his mock-heroic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Melville was a fan, calling Cervantes’ character “that sagest sage that ever lived” in his story ‘The Piazza’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we have U.S. president &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andrew Jackson&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thou who didst pick up Andrew Jackson from the pebbles; who didst hurl him upon a war-horse; who didst thunder him higher than a throne!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “pebbles” represent the hardship from which Jackson rose: he was the child of poor immigrants and orphaned at 14. He rose to national prominence as a military commander (“upon a war-horse”) by fighting native Americans in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creek_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creek&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seminole_Wars&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seminole&lt;/a&gt; wars, and the British at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Orleans&lt;/a&gt; in 1815.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether Melville meant “higher than a throne” to be sincere or ironic is something that critics have pondered: is this a phrase of approbation (democratic election being inherently worthier than primogeniture), or criticism (Jackson appropriating to himself powers that even George III did not possess)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melville’s attitude to Jacksonian republicanism is, however, far from straightforward. He inherited from his family a deeply ambivalent attitude toward America’s seventh president who was idolized by [Herman’s brother] Gansevoort but excoriated by older relatives who blamed him for Melville’s grandfather being removed from political office […] In &lt;em&gt;Redburn&lt;/em&gt;, written about a year before &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt;, Melville parodies Jackson naming the most brutal and uncouth of the common sailors after the President and even having him claim descent from “Old Hickory.” There, Redburn, the protagonist, expresses mainly distaste for Jackson but also, importantly, a grudging respect for the mysterious power he wields over his fellows : &amp;quot;It is not for me to say, what it was that made the whole ship’s company submit so to the whims of one poor miserable man like Jackson. I only know that so it was.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ian McGuire (2003). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/27557332&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Who ain’t a slave?”: &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; and the Ideology of Free Labor&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Journal of American Studies&lt;/em&gt; 37:2, pp. 292–293.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T10:09:54.227" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16320" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:08:25.587" Score="0" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &amp;quot;Just this Side of Byzantium&amp;quot; by Ray Bradbury:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they &lt;strong&gt;had to&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the author use the auxiliary word &amp;quot;had to&amp;quot; here, making me feel the action &amp;quot;offer&amp;quot; is compulsory? I think it'd be better to leave out &amp;quot;had to.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T11:20:23.840" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:56:06.530" Title="Why does Bradbury use &quot;had to&quot; in &quot;what they had to offer.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;ray-bradbury&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16068" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:32:24.457" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore was interested in science, and even arranged to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/27/when-einstein-met-tagore/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;meet Einstein&lt;/a&gt; in 1930. So it is tempting to speculate that Tagore had the wave nature of light in mind when he wrote in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/57&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poem 57&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spiritualbee.com/media/gitanjali-by-tagore.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there is no evidence for this claim. The poem treats light both as a visible phenomenon and a metaphor, but it does not approach the nature of light in a scientific way. Here is the entire poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Light, my light, the world-filling light, the eye-kissing light, heart-sweetening light!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, the light dances, my darling, at the centre of my life; the light strikes, my darling, the chords of my love; the sky opens, the wind runs wild, laughter passes over the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The light is shattered into gold on every cloud, my darling, and it scatters gems in profusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mirth spreads from leaf to leaf, my darling, and gladness without measure. The heaven's river has drowned its banks and the flood of joy is abroad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening line itself describes the light as &amp;quot;world-filling&amp;quot;, which isn't particularly scientific. The light is also described as dancing, striking chords, etc.; such descriptions are not compatible with a strictly scientific view of light as electromagnetic waves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highly metaphoric nature of this light is clear even in the context of the line in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The butterflies spread their sails on the sea of light. Lilies and jasmines surge up on the crest of the waves of light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific use of the word &lt;em&gt;waves&lt;/em&gt; follows the idea of butterfly wings as &lt;em&gt;sails&lt;/em&gt; upon a &lt;em&gt;sea of light&lt;/em&gt;. The flowers that follow are also on the waves on that sea; those are not electromagnetic waves. This is light as a metaphor for joy and liberation, not light as objective phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Radice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Radice&lt;/a&gt;, in his own &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0670085421&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of the poems in the 1912 English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; from their original Bengali sources, provides a much more beautiful version—to my mind, anyway. He translates the relevant lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Streams of light for sails of thousands&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     of butterflies;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Waves of light where dancing jasmines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     buoyantly rise.     (p. 185)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Source Info&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original source of Poem 57 is a song from Tagore's 1911 play &lt;a href=&quot;https://pandulipimela.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/4/8/10483841/rabindra_-_ochoyaloyoton-_pdf_file.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;অচলায়তন&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;em&gt;achalaayatan&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Immobile&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;আেলা, আমার আেলা, ওগো&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     আেলা ভুবনভরা ।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;আেলা নয়ন-ধোওয়া আমার&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     আেলা হৃদয়হরা ।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;aalo aamaar aalo, ogo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     aalo bhuvan_bharaa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aalo nayan-dho_oya, aamaar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     aalo hR^iday_haraa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literal translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Light, my light, oh,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     world-filling light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eye-cleansing light, my&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     heart-captivating light!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radice translates the opening lines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Light, light, light, oh light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     that fills the world!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eye-bathing light by which&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     our hearts are swirled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line about &amp;quot;waves of light&amp;quot; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;আলোর স্রোতের পাল তুলেছে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     হাজার প্রজাপতি।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;আলোর ঢেউয়ে উঠল নেচে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     মল্লিকা মালতী।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;aalor sroter paal tulechhe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     haajaar prajaapati&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aalor Dheuye uThala neche&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     mallikaa maalatii&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literal translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the stream of light, the sails/wings are raised&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     of thousands of butterflies;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on the waves of light have risen, dancing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     jasmine flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his introduction, Radice describes the context of the song within the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Achalayatan is about an oppressive, stultifying ashram, in which the boys who are educated there are deprived of all freedom. One of the boys in the ashram, Panchak, rebels against the orthodoxy of the ashram and slips out of it to meet communities that are beyond its grip. Another boy called Subhadra commits the heinous sin of opening a window in a wall of the ashram in order to look outside. The Acharya [i.e., teacher] in charge of the ashram, however, reassures his colleagues that the ashram’s ‘guru’ will soon come to restore order. But when the guru arrives he turns out to be a force for change and revolution, breaking down its walls and letting in light. The light pours in ‘as if the whole sky is rushing into this abode’, and the boys of the ashram sing the song to the light that Panchak has taught them: &lt;em&gt;Alo, amar alo, ogo alo bhuban-bhara&lt;/em&gt;.    (p.41)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Nugget&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a 1983 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRiVgX0OaG0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;recording&lt;/a&gt; of the song. The lyrics and composition are of course Tagore's. The arrangement and choral direction are by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suchitra_Mitra&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Suchitra Mitra&lt;/a&gt;, one of the most celebrated interpreters of Rabindranath's music. The singers listed on the album cover are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sumitra Ray&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shailen Das&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tanmoy Chatterjee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bani Thakur&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shrikumar Chatterjee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Aditi Sengupta&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swapna Ghoshal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bithin Banerjee.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knock yerselves out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As always, transliteration from the Bengali follows &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; conventions&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The question is a bit inaccurate about the date of &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;. Tagore published a Bengali collection called &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; in 1910, but the English collection to which he gave the same title was published in 1912. It did not include translations of all the poems from the Bengali collection of that title; but it included translations of several other poems from various sources, such as this song, which wasn't written until 1911. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16254/289&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; for a fuller description.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T12:27:54.363" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T12:27:54.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16308" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:51:25.227" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an interesting observation. Checking definitions of the word &amp;quot;flounder&amp;quot; reveals that they are, as the OP claims, mostly very negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key to the usage in this sentence is, I think, this definition from the Oxford dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Struggle or stagger clumsily in mud or water.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;‘he was floundering about in the shallow offshore waters’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we replace the word &amp;quot;flounder&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;stagger&amp;quot; in Bradbury's sentence, his meaning is perhaps clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I &lt;strong&gt;staggered&lt;/strong&gt; into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What he seems to be trying to communicate is that this protagonist came into this word-association process by happy accident. It wasn't a deliberate choice. He &amp;quot;blundered&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;staggered&amp;quot; into it by happenstance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:51:25.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16317" CreationDate="2020-11-12T11:56:06.530" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Had' is not used in the same sense in 'had to offer' as it is in 'had to send'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 'had to send' 'had' denotes, as you observe, a sense of compulsion. In 'had to offer' it denotes possession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To paraphrase; the speaker feels compelled to send himself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they have, that they can offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T11:56:06.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16321" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16308" CreationDate="2020-11-12T13:52:05.820" Score="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;While &amp;quot;flounder&amp;quot; is a negative term, it denotes a process, not an end result.  If you flounder ashore after a shipwreck, that you have escaped drowning does not make your motion retroactively graceful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bradbury is emphasizing that he was trying different things, basically at random, without much thought, and one of them proved fruitful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T13:52:05.820" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16322" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-12T19:31:50.710" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Just_Men_of_Cordova/Chapter_12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 12 of The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing the situation of the odds of two horses, Timboilino, the owner of which is Isaac, and Nemesis, the owner of which is Gresham, after they tied and before the run-off between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black reassured his friend, Isaac, that Timbolino will win easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Somewhat reassured by his companion’s optimism. Sir Isaac awaited the conclusion of the run-off in better spirits. It added to his assurance that the ring took a similar view to that which Black held. They were &lt;strong&gt;asking for odds about&lt;/strong&gt; Timbolino. &lt;strong&gt;You&lt;/strong&gt; might have got two to one &lt;strong&gt;against&lt;/strong&gt; Nemesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But only for a little while. Gresham had gone into the tea-room with the girl, and was standing at the narrow entrance of the county stand, when the cry, “&lt;strong&gt;Two to one Nemesis&lt;/strong&gt;!” caught his ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;They’re not laying against my horse!&lt;/strong&gt;” he exclaimed in astonishment. He beckoned a man who was passing. “&lt;strong&gt;Are they laying against Nemesis?&lt;/strong&gt;” he asked. The man nodded. He was a commission agent, who did whatever work the young owner required. “Go in and back her for me. Put in as much money as you possibly can get. &lt;strong&gt;Back it down to evens&lt;/strong&gt;,” said Gresham decidedly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was not a gambling man. He was shrewd and business-like in all his transactions, and he could read a race. He knew exactly what had happened. His money created some sensation in a market which was not over-strong. Timbolino went out, and Nemesis was a shade odds on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then it was that money came in for Sir Isaac’s horse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black did not bet to any extent, but he saw a chance of making easy money. The man honestly believed all he had said to Sir Isaac. He was confident in his mind that the jockey had ridden a “jolly race.” He had sufficient credit amongst the best men in the ring to invest fairly heavily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again the market experienced an extraordinary change. Timbolino was favourite again. Nemesis went out—first &lt;strong&gt;six to four&lt;/strong&gt;, then two to one, then five to two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now the money began to come in from the country. The results of the race and its description had been published in the stop-press editions in hundreds of evening papers up and down England, Ireland and Scotland. Quick to make their decisions, the little punters of Great Britain were re-investing—some to save their stakes, others to increase what they already regarded as their winnings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here the money was for Nemesis. The reporters, unprejudiced, had no other interest but to secure for the public accurate news and to describe things as they saw them. And the race as they saw it was the race which Sir Isaac would not believe and at which Black openly scoffed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last event was set for half-past four, and after the field had come past the post, and the winner was being led to the unsaddling enclosure, the two dead-heaters of the memorable Lincolnshire Handicap came prancing from the paddock on to the course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of the draw was immaterial. There was nothing to choose between the jockeys, two experienced horsemen, and there was little delay at the post. It does not follow that a race of two runners means an equable start, though it seemed that nothing was likely to interfere with the tiny field getting off together. When the tapes went up, however, Nemesis half-turned and lost a couple of lengths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’ll back Timbolino,” yelled somebody from the ring, and a quick staccato voice cried, “&lt;strong&gt;I’ll take three to one.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A chorus of acceptances met the offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually I don't have much knowledge about the horse racing, and I searched a lot about the possible significance of these bolded words, but I didn't get them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;ask for odds about&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;want to know the odds or want to bet on&amp;quot;, and what did the author mean by &amp;quot;You&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;you might have got two to one against&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did the odds become &amp;quot;Two to one Nemesis&amp;quot; although he said &amp;quot;two to one against Nemesis&amp;quot; in the previous statement? ِAnd I found that &amp;quot;lay against&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;bet on the losing of&amp;quot;, so why was he astonished?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How did Gresham say: &amp;quot;They’re not laying against my horse?&amp;quot; although it was already said &amp;quot;two to one against Nemesis&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;back it down to evens&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;back it till the odds become evens&amp;quot;? And why he wanted to back the odds to evens?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't the author say simply &amp;quot;three to two&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;six to four&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How could someone say &amp;quot;I’ll take three to one&amp;quot;? I mean could an ordinary man set the odds by himself?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know it's a long and complicated question, but I really can't understand it by searching!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T21:33:17.500" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T21:33:17.500" Title="What's the significance of these odds in horse racing in &quot;The Just Men of Cordova&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16323" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16329" CreationDate="2020-11-12T20:41:18.490" Score="5" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Bengali poem &amp;quot;Aaji Hote Shata Barsha Pare&amp;quot; by Rabindranath Tagore, translated into English as &amp;quot;A Hundred Years Hence&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;A Hundred Years From Now&amp;quot;, is a poem written in the year 1302 of the Bengali calendar and looking ahead to the year 1400, wondering who will be reading this poet's work. In two places the poem mentions the southern direction: keeping the southern door or gate open, and the southern wind bringing the scent of flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm not including direct quotes here, because I can't read the Bengali original and I've read three different English translations, at &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/A-Hundred-Years-Hence--English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;All Poetry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://sunriseranch.org/quote/rabindranath-tagore-2/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sunrise Ranch&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45667/the-gardener-85&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt;. The third one is much shorter than the others, presumably abridged, and doesn't mention the south at all. But the consistency between the other two convinces me that the south is indeed a feature of the original poem.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the significance of the south here?&lt;/strong&gt; Why are the door and the wind described as southern? Does the south have some special meaning in Bengali language or culture?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T05:41:12.347" Title="What is the significance of &quot;southern&quot; in Tagore's poem &quot;A Hundred Years From Now&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16324" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-12T23:30:19.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-12T23:30:19.933" LastActivityDate="2020-11-12T23:30:19.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16325" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-12T23:30:19.933" Score="0" Body="Questions about the tragedy Coriolanus, written by William Shakespeare. Should be tagged with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-13T09:29:07.723" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T09:29:07.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8886" CreationDate="2020-11-13T00:32:48.523" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That depends what you're really asking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't look for the marines…&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;Don't look for any rescuers…&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't look for the cavalry…&amp;quot; has the same, if not a wider meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Don't look for any knights in shining armour…&amp;quot; could have the same meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are those other definitions or sub-meanings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10079" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T00:32:48.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17114" CreationDate="2020-11-13T00:53:12.313" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Paraphrasing, because I’m getting white-noised by google with results about removing candle wax from stone floors:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not as water dripping on a stone (rock?) where over time it weathers it away, but as drops of wax, that eventually cover (change?) it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe it was said by an American founding father of the revolution, Thomas Jefferson, Paine?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11361" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2020-11-13T01:35:32.843" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T16:59:19.407" Title="Water on a stone, wax on a stone: revolutionary war era/founding father quote" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1427" CreationDate="2020-11-13T01:45:35.117" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;That’s not a “peculiarity”. To most who enjoy the genre that's much, if not most of the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Melville's reason for including so much technicality was simply to show realism. Consider why Hollywood did much the same in &lt;em&gt;en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby_Dick_(1956_film)&lt;/em&gt;, the major difference being simply the time taken to watch a movie or to read a book…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isn’t the real Question, to what genre does &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; belong? Adventure? Seafaring? Whaling? What?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a quite separate, singular example consider &lt;em&gt;Seven Pillars of Wisdom&lt;/em&gt;, the autobiography of TE Lawrence (of Arabia) who at one point spends three pages describing nothing more “interesting” than the different kinds of gravel found along the sides of a valley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still, &lt;em&gt;Seven Pillars&lt;/em&gt; was called the best adventure story ever written in English by both Sir Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, both military heroes, literary giants and political masters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider CS Forrester’s &lt;em&gt;Hornblower&lt;/em&gt;; Patrick O'Brian's &lt;em&gt;Aubrey–Maturin&lt;/em&gt;; Bernard Cornwell’s &lt;em&gt;Sharpe&lt;/em&gt;. Go back 100 years to Talbot Mundy’s &lt;em&gt;Tros&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All those, and many others, simply would not work without their technical details. Any good writer could translate exactly the same stories into current or future fiction, except that the technical details you ask about would need to be re-invented. All those stories could be switched to &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; and I suggest the reason that hasn’t happened is not the Copyright fees, but the technical details…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jame T Kirk or Jean-Luc Picard need only to say “Set course…” or “Make it so…” because the writers want the audience not to concentrate on details they couldn't possibly understand because basically, those &amp;quot;details&amp;quot; are nonsense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio Hornblower or Richard Sharpe need to explain what’s required not only to their men but also to their readers because the technicalities will seem strange… who doesn't see the difference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Moby Dick&lt;/em&gt; every reader has and in &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; almost no-one has an opportunity to study the technicalities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s vitally interesting to one reader is boring to another and why would the other finish reading the work, including you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10079" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T01:45:35.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16323" CreationDate="2020-11-13T02:27:36.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geography.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The door and the wind are southern because of the tilt of the earth's axis. &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthsky.org/earth/can-you-explain-why-earth-has-four-seasons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;No, really&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bengal is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latlong.net/place/west-bengal-india-2976.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a bit north&lt;/a&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/place/Tropic-of-Cancer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tropic of Cancer&lt;/a&gt;. So the sun is always in the south and never directly overhead. Houses there naturally have their greatest sunlight exposure in the south. To maintain heat and light as efficiently as possible during the winter, the main door would be south-facing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's setting is early spring. Tagore speaks of &lt;em&gt;নববসন্তের প্রভাতের আনন্দ / navabasanter prabhaater aananda&lt;/em&gt;, the joy of daybreak in early spring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I transmit to you who are so far away&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A bit of the joy I feel this day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At this new spring dawn&#xA;      (Fakrul Alam's translation at Sunrise Ranch)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a garden north of the house would be in shadow all year round, gardens would be south of the house. Early spring is when flowers just begin to bloom again. So a breeze from the south is what would carry the fragrance of flowers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Bibliographic data&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;১৪০০ সাল / The Year 1400&lt;/em&gt; was published in Tagore's 1896 collection &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/chitra1896/page/n5/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;চিত্রা&lt;/a&gt; / chitraa&lt;/em&gt;, a star in the constellation Virgo. The date of composition printed after the poem says &lt;em&gt;২ ফাল্গুন, ১৩০২ / 2 Phalgun, 1302&lt;/em&gt;. That &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.banglatext.com/bangla-date-converter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;corresponds&lt;/a&gt; to Valentine's Day 1896 in the Gregorian calendar. Tagore is wondering about the reception of this poem roughly a hundred years later, in the Bengali year 1400 / Gregorian year 1994.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1913, Tagore published 85 poems in his own translations from the Bengali in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6686/6686-h/6686-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gardener&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. His very abridged recasting of &lt;em&gt;১৪০০ সাল / The Year 1400&lt;/em&gt; was included as the last poem in this collection. This is the version at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45667/the-gardener-85&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kumud Biswas's translation of the entire poem is at &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/A-Hundred-Years-Hence--English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AllPoetry&lt;/a&gt;, and Fakrul Alam's at &lt;a href=&quot;https://sunriseranch.org/quote/rabindranath-tagore-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sunrise Ranch&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On Translatability&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translations by both Biswas and Alam are competent enough. It's hard to capture Tagore's effects in translation, though; even &lt;strong&gt;he&lt;/strong&gt; pretty much sucked at it. Take for instance the lines you cite about the southern breeze:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;উড়ায়ে চঞ্চল পাখা পুষ্পরেণুগন্ধমাখা&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      দক্ষিণসমীর--&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;সহসা আসিয়া ত্বরা রাঙায়ে দিয়েছে ধরা&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      যৌবনের রাগে&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;u.Daaye chañchal paakha puShpareNugandhamaakhaa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      dakShiNasamiir--&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;sahasaa aasiyaa tvara raaÑgaaye diyechhe dharaa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      yauvanera raage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biswas translates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spreading its restless wings&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The southern breeze blew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Carrying the scent of flowers’ pollen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All on a sudden soon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They coloured the world with a youthful glow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alam translates, taking rather reckless liberties with the order of the lines (and therefore the semantics) of Tagore's original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There could blow with the southern breeze,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Impatient and eager to please,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Flying on restless wings,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Full of pollen and the scent of flowers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And of what youth desires,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An impulse ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Impatient and eager to please&lt;/em&gt; are from an earlier line, as is &lt;em&gt;an impulse&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;There could blow&lt;/em&gt; is definitely not what Tagore wrote; Biswas has it right with &lt;em&gt;blew&lt;/em&gt;. But this is not to fault Alam's translation &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; translation; those choices are his to make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is merely that neither translation quite gets it right in the way that Tagore does. Here's a literal translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The south wind, flying on excited/fleet/mischievous wings anointed with the fragrance of pollen, has suddenly, swiftly painted the earth in the colors/melodies/desires of youth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two words that defy simple translation are &lt;em&gt;চঞ্চল / chañchal&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;রাগ / raag&lt;/em&gt;. The former means something that's light-hearted, high-spirited, fickle, swift, mischievous, excited, and sharp. Think of a shying young deer with a playful sense of humor, and you get something of the sense of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line &lt;em&gt;যৌবনের রাগে / yauvanera raage&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;in the &lt;strong&gt;raaga&lt;/strong&gt; of youth&lt;/em&gt;. That word &lt;em&gt;raaga&lt;/em&gt; can mean three things. First, it can mean color, and that's the most fundamental meaning here. Biswas translates it as &amp;quot;youthful glow&amp;quot;, which is close enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it can mean a melodic mode. Indian classical music is based on the concept of raga. Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A raga or raag (IAST: rāga; also raaga or ragam; literally &amp;quot;coloring, tingeing, dyeing&amp;quot;) is a melodic framework for improvisation akin to a melodic mode in Indian classical music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, it can mean an overmastering impulse, something that takes over one's mind. Alam gets it right when he speaks of &amp;quot;what youth desires&amp;quot;, because young sexual desire bubbling over as springtime sets in is in fact the overwhelming force here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translations can't capture that sort of polysemy, but a Bengali reader would immediately be affected by all three meanings, as they all apply here. Translation also misses out on the synesthesia. The breeze is anointed (&lt;em&gt;মাখা / maakhaa&lt;/em&gt;) with fragrance; scent and touch both operate here. As for &lt;em&gt;রাগে / raage&lt;/em&gt;, that gets sight (color), hearing (music), and the psychophysical state of sexual desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Essentially, through such paronomasia and synesthesia, Tagore gathers up the entire sensory and affective experience of the early spring dawn in a couple of well-chosen phrases, and wonders how his poem can communicate that experience to some reader a hundred years hence. His original Bengali succeeds pretty admirably. The translations, nice try, but not so much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Two &lt;em&gt;Chitra&lt;/em&gt;s, two &lt;em&gt;Chitrangada&lt;/em&gt;s&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1896 Bengali collection &lt;em&gt;Chitra&lt;/em&gt; in which this poem first appeared has nothing to do with Tagore's 1913 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitra_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Chitra1914/page/n1/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chitra&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The latter is his translation of the 1892 Bengali &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitrangada_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.8135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;চিত্রাঙ্গদা / chitraaÑgadaa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, based on an episode in the Mahabharata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To complicate matters further, late in his life Tagore wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindra_Nritya_Natya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dance drama&lt;/a&gt; depicting the same Mahabharata episode, and called this play &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geetabitan.com/dance-drama/chitrangada/suchonaa.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chitraaÑgadaa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; as well. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%9F%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%AF_%E0%A6%9A%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%A4%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%99%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%97%E0%A6%A6%E0%A6%BE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali-language Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;নৃত্যনাট্য চিত্রাঙ্গদা হল রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুরের লেখা প্রথম পূর্ণাঙ্গ নৃত্যনাট্য। ১৯৩৬ সালে কলকাতায় অভিনয়ের উদ্দেশ্যে প্রকাশিত এই নৃত্যনাট্যটির সঙ্গে ১৮৯২ সালে রচিত চিত্রাঙ্গদা কাব্যনাট্যের বিষয়বস্তু ও তত্ত্ব এক ও অভিন্ন।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dance Drama Chitrangada&lt;/em&gt; is Rabindranath Tagore's first through-composed dance drama. Published in 1938 with an eye to a Calcutta performance, this dance drama entirely shares its subject and theme with the verse play &lt;em&gt;Chitrangada&lt;/em&gt; that had been published in 1892.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lopamudra Banerjee has &lt;a href=&quot;https://learningandcreativity.com/rabindranath-tagore-chitrangada-english-translation-part-i/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated&lt;/a&gt; the script of the dance drama. A performance is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAwYMpBAxv8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on YouTube&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course none of this has anything to do with the poem, but it's useful data to bear in mind. Tagore really needed to be more creative with his titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transliteration of Bengali above follows &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T05:41:12.347" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T05:41:12.347" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16330" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-13T02:49:32.467" Score="2" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I realize that they were eager to go back to the party, and the person responsible for the barrel management said they were empty, but surely they must have felt that they were obviously not empty when they contained big, heavy dwarves? How did they not check inside?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought for the whole time that it was Bilbo himself who would roll them down one by one into the hatch after opening the gate. I didn't expect that the elves would be doing this without noticing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I know that elves and everything in Middle-earth wasn't &amp;quot;fully fleshed out&amp;quot; when this first book was written, but I think those elves acted a bit non-elf-like. It seems to me that elves are extremely careful and eager to do things correctly and according to protocol and would never just leave suspicious barrels like that, while they had prisoners, just to rush back to the party and take the guard's word for it even though he was obviously asleep from having drank so much, or such strong wine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like a plot hole in this otherwise very good book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11362" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T06:21:28.160" Title="How did the elves not check the barrels which they noted were &quot;probably not empty&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9560" CreationDate="2020-11-13T05:08:07.397" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/magicmountainder00mann/page/718/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;February 1960&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/magicmountainde00mann/page/718/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May 1965&lt;/a&gt; printings of the 1952 Alfred A. Knopf edition, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/magicmountainder2010mann/page/716/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;March 1969 Vintage Books edition&lt;/a&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/magicmountain00mann_0/page/745/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1992 Modern Library edition&lt;/a&gt;, there is an author's note at the back of the book called &amp;quot;The Making of &lt;em&gt;The Magic Mountain&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; which was originally printed in the January 1953 issue of &lt;em&gt;The Atlantic Monthly&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That author's note contains the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oddly enough, it is not a difficulty for me, but rather the reverse, that I have to discuss &lt;em&gt;The Magic Mountain&lt;/em&gt; in English. I am reminded of the hero of my novel, the young engineer Hans Castorp. At the end of the first volume, he makes an extraordinary declaration of love to Madame Chauchat, the Kirghiz-eyed heroine, veiling its strangeness in the garment of a foreign tongue. It eases his embarrassment and helps him to say things he could never have dared to say in his own language. &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Parler français,&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; he says, &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;c'est parler sans parler, en quelque manière.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; In short, it helps him over his inhibitions—and an author who feels embarrassed at having to talk about his own works is in the same way relieved at being able to talk about them in another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/backissues/year/1953/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Atlantic&lt;/em&gt; website&lt;/a&gt; has archives of some past issues, but while it has November 1952 and March 1953, it is missing the January 1953 issue, and I do not have access to issues that old, so I am unable to confirm whether this essay appeared in the January 1953 issue of &lt;em&gt;The Atlantic Monthly&lt;/em&gt;. I do not have access to an old &lt;em&gt;Readers Guide to Periodical Literature&lt;/em&gt;, which would index the original article, and none of the online indexes I can find list this article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you can read the full author's note in any of the editions of &lt;em&gt;The Magic Mountain&lt;/em&gt; linked in the first paragraph of this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T05:08:07.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9184" CreationDate="2020-11-13T05:46:53.963" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sally Fitzgerald, in 1979, published a massive volume of Flannery O'Connor's letters titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/habitofbeinglett00ocon/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Habit of Being&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Fitzgerald's book, in 1948, O'Connor began an exchange of letters with Elizabeth McKee. During this exchange, in late 1948 and early 1949 they discussed shopping O'Connor's novel chapters around to various publishers. O'Connor mentioned that John Selby, editor-in-chief at Rinehart (publishers), wanted to see the first nine chapters before he would write up a contract. After he received the chapters, he wrote to O'Connor a letter that is not preserved in this book. However, O'Connor's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/habitofbeinglett00ocon/page/8/mode/2up?q=selby&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter to McKee discussing Selby's letter&lt;/a&gt; is printed in full in the book. An excerpt is below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;February 17, 1949&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I received Selby's letter today. . . .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The criticism is vague and really tells me nothing except that they don't like it. I feel the objections they raise are connected with its virtues, and the thought of working with them specifically to correct these lacks they mention is repulsive to me. The letter is addressed to a slightly dimwitted Camp Fire Girl, and I cannot look with composure on getting a lifetime of others like them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camp Fire Girls (now &lt;a href=&quot;https://campfire.org/about/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Camp Fire&lt;/a&gt;) was started in 1910 to give girls outdoor experiences; it went co-ed in 1975. A Camp Fire Girl would therefore be a child of between 6 and 17.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T05:46:53.963" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16333" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16330" CreationDate="2020-11-13T06:21:28.160" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, the wine from Dorwinion is not regular wine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy; but this wine, it would seem, was the heady vintage of the great gardens of Dorwinion, not meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king's feasts only, and for smaller bowls, not for the butler's great flagons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The elves rolling the barrels &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; already at the party and may have drunk some (regular) wine already:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had left a merry feast in one of the halls and were bent on returning as soon as they could. “Where's old Galion, the butler?” said one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and they got another round of the potent wine at the cellar:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  Come give us a taste of your sleeping-draught before we fall to! No need to wake the turnkey yonder. He has had his share by the looks of it.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Then they drank once round and became mighty merry all of a sudden. But they did not quite lose their wits. “Save us, Galion!” cried some, “you began your feasting early and muddled your wits! You have stacked some full casks here instead of the empty ones, if there is anything in weight.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they did notice that the barrels weren't empty, but apparently the seniority of the butler (who was more drunk than the others were, save the guard captain) convinced them to do their job anyway:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;  “Get on with the work!” growled the butler. “There is nothing in the feeling of weight in an idle toss-pot’s arms. These are the ones to go and no others. Do as I say!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  “Very well, very well,” they answered rolling the barrels to the opening. “On your head be it, if the king’s full buttertubs and his best wine is&#xA;pushed into the river for the Lake-men to feast on for nothing!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, these elves are wood elves, and while that means they are probably wiser and more careful than your average human, they descend from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Nandor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nandor&lt;/a&gt;, elves that didn't make the journey to Valinor and weren't 'awakened', unlike e.g. the elves that inhabit Rivendell (Elrond c.s.) or Lothlorien (Galadriel c.s.). Legolas, also a wood elf, was an exceptional fighter for wood elf standards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-11-13T06:21:28.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16336" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16308" CreationDate="2020-11-14T03:18:07.010" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;He used flounder &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt; of the negative connotation.  He is disclaiming all credit, saying that it happened despite his incompetence, not because of his competency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a way of emphasizing that it wasn’t just a happy accident, that it it was &lt;strong&gt;undeserved&lt;/strong&gt; good luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He didn’t sit down and plan out a good work habit, he didn’t look back on his past work and determine that he did his best work under condition X.  He tried various things and one of the things he tried just happen to click with him.  He doesn’t say so, but he can’t even recommend it to anyone else, as he doesn’t know why or how it works for him, he can only report that it does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of saving someone’s life by vomiting at an intersection so that they slip and fall and then don’t get ran over by a runaway truck.  Yes, your actions saved their life, and they might even be grateful, but you didn’t do anything worthy of praise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11376" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T03:18:07.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16337" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15885" CreationDate="2020-11-14T08:29:56.133" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The addressee of the poem is God. The somewhat timid translation obscures this, but it's pretty clear in the original Bengali.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Kumud Biswas's note to her translation says, the original of &amp;quot;Cruel Kindness&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Verses/gitanjali-62/ami-bahu-basonay-3080&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poem 2&lt;/a&gt; in the Bengali collection &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kWylVJoEgoMrA7traa9ETPJ_18HzwSni/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;গীতাঞ্জলি&lt;/a&gt; / giitañjali&lt;/em&gt; (1910). This poem was not included in the English collection also called &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; (1912). The poem begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;আমি     বহু বাসনায় প্রাণপণে চাই,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     বঞ্চিত করে বাঁচালে মোরে।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          এ কৃপা কঠোর সঞ্চিত মোর&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;               জীবন ভ'রে।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;aami     bahu vaasanaay praaNapane chaaii&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     bañchita kare baa.Nchaale more&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          e kR^ipa kaThor sañchita mor&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                         jiivan bhare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal translation would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I desire many things lustfully and ardently. By depriving me of them, you save/preserve/rescue me. This cruel mercy fills my entire life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem continues through a series of paradoxes that elaborate on the &amp;quot;cruel mercy&amp;quot;. God has given him many gifts without his asking: sky, light, body, soul, and life. These keep him from wanting too much. When God has (apparently) turned away from him, it's in order to draw him closer, because the suffering the poet undergoes in such moments perfects him for ultimate union with God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that, unlike what one would expect in a Christian context, lust is not considered something to be overcome per se. Instead, it becomes the starting point of a more transcendental spiritual desire. The unfulfilled bodily wants and desires of the first verse yield, by the final verse, to a yearning for union with God. The poet ends by saying that by withholding the fulfillment of his earthly desires, God keeps him from being half-hearted in his desire for union with the divine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My Bengali is dreadful, so rely on the translations above AYOR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The romanization of Bengali uses the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; scheme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T08:51:02.563" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T08:51:02.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16338" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16339" CreationDate="2020-11-14T09:06:59.607" Score="4" ViewCount="549" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read Ian McEwan's Saturday and remember a part where the daughter, who was into poetry, tried to get her father, a neurosurgeon, to read more books. She recommended South American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The father answered something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No more magical realism, please. Reality ought to offer plenty of material for a novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot find this quote so maybe I got the words wrong or it's from a different book. Does it ring a bell?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11377" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-14T16:38:21.523" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T18:02:07.007" Title="Ian McEwan's quote &quot;No more magical realism&quot; in Saturday" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;ian-mcewan&gt;&lt;saturday&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16339" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16338" CreationDate="2020-11-14T09:42:30.900" Score="9" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Madame Bovary&lt;/em&gt; […] had the virtue, at least, of representing a recognisable physical reality, which could not be said for the so-called magical realists she [Daisy] opted to study in her final year. What were these authors of reputation doing—grown men and women of the twentieth century—granting supernatural powers to their characters? He [Henry] never made it all the way through a single one of these irksome confections. And written for adults, not children. In more than one, heroes and heroines were born with&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; or sprouted wings&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;—a symbol, in Daisy’s term, of their liminality; naturally, learning to fly became a metaphor for bold aspiration. Others were granted a magical sense of smell,&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt; or tumbled out of high-flying aircraft.&lt;sup&gt;4&lt;/sup&gt; One visionary saw through a pub window his parents as they had been some weeks after his conception, discussing the possibility of aborting him.&lt;sup&gt;5&lt;/sup&gt; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No more magic midget drummers,”&lt;sup&gt;6&lt;/sup&gt; he pleaded with her by post, after setting out his tirade. “Please, no more ghosts, angels, satans or metamorphoses. When anything can happen, nothing much matters. It’s all kitsch to me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ian McEwan (2005). &lt;em&gt;Saturday&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 2. London: Jonathan Cape.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My best guess as to the works referred to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gabriel García Márquez (1965), ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Angela Carter (1984), &lt;em&gt;Nights at the Circus&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Patrick Süskind (1985), &lt;em&gt;Perfume: The Story of a Murderer&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Salman Rushdie (1988), &lt;em&gt;The Satanic Verses&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ian McEwan (1987), &lt;em&gt;The Child in Time&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Günter Grass (1959), &lt;em&gt;The Tin Drum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Characters having or sprouting wings is a common trope and McEwan might have had different works in mind, for example &lt;em&gt;Mr Pye&lt;/em&gt; (1953) by Mervyn Peake, or &lt;em&gt;Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith&lt;/em&gt; (2000) by Gina B. Nahai.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inclusion of one the author’s own novels in this list is a signpost as to how seriously the reader is intended to take Henry’s tirade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-14T18:02:07.007" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T18:02:07.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15899" CreationDate="2020-11-14T10:03:55.877" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet's asking, &amp;quot;What is the meaning of life?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kumud Biswas's translation of  &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Songs/pooja-233/jani-go-din-jabe-4980&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;জানি গো, দিন যাবে এ দিন যাবে&lt;/a&gt; / jaani go, din jaabe e din jaabe&lt;/em&gt; strikes me as a bit inept. Bengali nouns have the same form in singular and plural, and in at least two critical places I think she mistranslates by substituting one for the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyric is about the poet's knowledge that his life will come to an end eventually. It therefore makes more sense to treat the word &lt;em&gt;দিন / din&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;day&amp;quot;, as plural rather than singular: &amp;quot;I know these &lt;em&gt;days&lt;/em&gt; will pass&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;I know this day will come to an end&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the line you ask about, too, I disagree with the translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the lights of the day&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Raised waves in my mind –&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would translate &lt;em&gt;পরানে ঢেউ তুলেছিল কেন দিনের জ্যোতি / paraane Dheu tulechhila kena diner jyoti&lt;/em&gt; as: &lt;em&gt;Why did the &lt;strong&gt;light&lt;/strong&gt; of day agitate/quicken my soul?&lt;/em&gt; It's true that &lt;em&gt;ঢেউ তুলেছিল / Dheu tulechhila&lt;/em&gt; is literally &lt;em&gt;raised waves&lt;/em&gt;, but the sense is idiomatic. It's rather like the English expression &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/make-waves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;make waves&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: stir things up, agitate matters, except that the connotation isn't necessarily negative in Bengali.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song lyric is about the poet's knowledge that his time on earth will end eventually. It is his prayer that &lt;strong&gt;before he dies, he understand why he was given life in the first place&lt;/strong&gt;. Tagore moves between the literal and the metaphoric seamlessly throughout the poem. When he asks why daylight stirs his heart, he's asking, on the one hand, why he is moved by the experience of daylight. More fundamentally, he's asking why his soul was awakened at all; why, instead of a dark nothingness, he actually experiences light and life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the idiom &lt;em&gt;never see the light of day&lt;/em&gt;. It means, basically, something that doesn't ever come into being. Tagore is asking why he did see the light of day. What is the reason he was brought into being?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's a good reason to use &lt;em&gt;quicken&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;agitate&lt;/em&gt; in the translation, actually. &lt;em&gt;Quicken&lt;/em&gt; can mean both &amp;quot;make faster&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;make alive&amp;quot;, and that sort of double meaning is very much a part of Tagore's strategy in in his seamless blend of literal and metaphoric in this lyric. It's true that the word &amp;quot;quicken&amp;quot; has no literal counterpart in the lyric, but a literal &amp;quot;raise waves&amp;quot; is slavishly faithful while completely obscuring the deftness of Tagore's poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating &lt;em&gt;জ্যোতি / jyoti&lt;/em&gt; as &amp;quot;lights&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;light&amp;quot;, and treating the waves literally, obscures the literal and metaphoric sense of the line in an unfortunate way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;My Bengali is dreadful. Rely on translations above AYOR.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bengali transliteration follows the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; scheme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKBh_Zo5f20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recording&lt;/a&gt; of the song by Suchitra Mitra. Lyrics and music are of course Tagore's.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Obiter dicta: October/November 2020 was when I realized exactly how poorly Tagore has been served by translations, even his own. The dude really deserved that Nobel, and you'd never know it reading his works in the available English translations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-14T12:57:32.913" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T12:57:32.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15887" CreationDate="2020-11-14T11:23:17.950" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Literally, there's no room left in the boat after the paddy is loaded, so the paddy cutter can't get on board. As for what that means metaphorically, there's no one answer. Here are some possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A representation of how a poet's works outlast the poet&lt;/strong&gt;. The first stanza includes the phrase &amp;quot;The sheaves lie gathered.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Sheaves&lt;/em&gt; refers of course to the paddy, but we also speak of sheaves of paper. The paddy harvest could represent Tagore's writing. He doesn't know how his works will spread in the world; he doesn't even know where they'll end up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh to what foreign land do you sail?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come to the bank and moor your boat for a while.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Go where you want to, give where you care to,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But come to the bank a moment, show your smile -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take away my golden paddy when you sail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has sent his poems on their way. He knows his works will make a difference in the world—the goldenness of the paddy has been transferred to the boat itself, and it's now a golden boat. But the ship has sailed, as it were, and he has no control over how his work will be received. They are out of his hands, and he's left behind helpless and alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A poetic depiction of one of the best-known tenets of Hindu philosophy&lt;/strong&gt;. One of the most famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://vivekavani.com/bhagavad-gita-chapter-2-verse-47/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;passages&lt;/a&gt; from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;karmaNyevaadhikaaraste ma phaleShu kadaachana&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;maa karmaphalaheturbhuurma te saÑgo.ostvakarmaNi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have the right only to labor, not ever to the fruits thereof; don't let your motive be the fruits of your labour, nor allow yourself to be idle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that our actions are within our control, but the results aren't. To take one example: all I can do is vote for my preferred candidate; I can't control the outcome of the election. If I vote with the idea that my preferred candidate &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; win, I will be disappointed. But I shouldn't just say, &amp;quot;what difference does it make whether I vote or not?&amp;quot; and stay home either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The paddy farmer's story exemplifies this. It's his job to harvest the paddy and send it along. He has no control over what happens to the paddy, but he still has to do his job even though he can't sail away with the harvest and enjoy the results. This interpretation isn't very different from the first; it's a more generalized way of saying the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Romantic love&lt;/strong&gt;. The paddy farmer has to do whatever he can to win the love of the boat-woman, whom he knows and wants to woo, but while he gives her his all, she has no room in her boat/heart for him. This would be a more convincing interpretation if the Bengali original actually had the same pronouns as William Radice's translation. Radice is hands down the best translator Tagore has ever had. But Bengali pronouns lack gender, and a Bengali reader would find Radice's choice to translate &lt;em&gt;চিনি উহারে / chini uhaare&lt;/em&gt; as &amp;quot;I know &lt;strong&gt;her&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;I know &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; a bit unusual. Culturally, the Gangetic delta has boatmen, not boat-women. Of course, if Radice had used a male pronoun, this lovelorn interpretation probably wouldn't occur to most readers, because heteronormativity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A symbolic portrait of death&lt;/strong&gt;. The paddy, which the narrator has tended, is now ready to be gathered. The paddy is his soul, and its being harvested means that his life has come to an end. The boatman (or woman) is a Charon-like figure. The narrator's being unable to stay with the paddy means he is separated from his soul, i.e., he is dead. He doesn't know what is in store after death, so doesn't know to what foreign land, what &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56965/speech-to-be-or-not-to-be-that-is-the-question&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn / no traveller returns&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; the paddy is headed. His being left behind alone is the body left behind after the soul departs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there are plenty of interpretations; no doubt other readers could come up with several more just as convincing (or otherwise). Nor are these interpretations mutually exclusive, as they all could be operative at once.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's never a great idea to try to pin down the exact meaning of a poem. As Archibald MacLeish &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poem should not mean&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asking exactly why the narrator is left behind is a bit beside the point; he's left behind because that's how the poem works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T05:32:57.470" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T05:32:57.470" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16342" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16401" CreationDate="2020-11-14T14:50:18.167" Score="5" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;As verbose recently remarked in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16340/17&quot;&gt;an answer&lt;/a&gt; about a Tagore poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;October/November 2020 was when I realized exactly how poorly Tagore has been served by translations, even his own. The dude really deserved that Nobel, and you'd never know it reading his works in the available English translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If even Tagore's &lt;em&gt;own&lt;/em&gt; translations of his works from Bengali to English are so poor, is it because his skills as a poet weren't transferrable to skills as a translator, or does it relate to his own mastery of the English language? Trying to research this question, I found the following nuggets on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In his school years, Tagore disliked English, but that doesn't mean he didn't master it later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He learned drawing, anatomy, geography and history, literature, mathematics, Sanskrit, and English—his least favourite subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Yeats, who was familiar with Tagore's work, wrote that &amp;quot;Tagore does not know English&amp;quot;, but given his follow-up &amp;quot;no Indian knows English&amp;quot;, this may have been based more on racism than a real personal assessment of Tagore's abilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats, unimpressed with his English translations, railed against that &amp;quot;Damn Tagore [...] We got out three good books, Sturge Moore and I, and then, because he thought it more important to see and know English than to be a great poet, he brought out sentimental rubbish and wrecked his reputation. Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How good was Tagore's English in his life?&lt;/strong&gt; Either in speaking or in writing, what can be said about the standard of his English, other than from his translations of his own stories and poems?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T13:16:45.737" Title="How good was Rabindranath Tagore's English, in general?" Tags="&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16344" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-14T16:48:23.153" Score="2" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first read The Hobbit over 20 years ago, when I was still a child. I remember it as an extremely cozy and &amp;quot;non-epic&amp;quot; story about a bunch of dwarves, a wizard and of course Bilbo. In particular, I remembered the part when they took the &amp;quot;barrel ride&amp;quot; from some kind of house for some reason, and the dragon in the end was a big deal with a lot of trickery and talking and running around and scheming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I'm re-reading it (modern copy) and there are only a few pages left. The five-army battle has just begun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I realize that, in the original version, there were &amp;quot;some changes&amp;quot;. In particular, Gollum was just some crazy, creepy individual who actually was prepared to give away the Ring to Bilbo if he guessed the riddles correctly, which of course had to be rewritten by Tolkien once he had made The Lord of the Rings, which clearly made this utterly impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don't remember if my first copy had Gollum gambling with his ring or not. It was borrowed from a library, and it didn't seem like it was from the 1930s, so most likely, it was the revised version. It's frustrating to not know for sure, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What shocked me was how short the interaction with Smaug was. Basically, all this build-up just for a very short talk session between invisi-hobbit and him, and then he just flies away and they never see him again? And some entirely separate person shoots him down after the bird gives him Bilbo's tip? That... was unexpected. An anticlimax if you will. I kept thinking that the dragon was going to rise from its watery grave, until the narrator started talking about it decaying. I felt almost cheated somehow. Most of all, it perplexed me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could it really be that my memory had muddled up the story to the point where I really did think that Bilbo and the dwarves spent a long time with combined efforts to trick the dragon somehow, all by themselves, in the treasure chamber, and that it was Bilbo who used his elf-sword to finally slaughter the beast? Or &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; this how it happened, and Tolkien decided that since he changed the Gollum part, he might as well also add an epic battle in the end to make it work better with LOTR, no longer just a plain &amp;quot;dragon slaying adventure&amp;quot; for children? While unlikely, I wouldn't be surprised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember them killing the dragon there and then, not barricading themselves and sitting around like greedy dwarves when they didn't even do anything and just released the dragon to kill and destroy the city. Granted, I've not read it all the way to the end yet, so please don't spoil it if Smaug does indeed return somehow, or they all become friends after the orc battle (which I strongly suspect).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose it's good that the story isn't completely predictable, but this final battle made it far more &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; than I both remembered, wanted and expected. Could it be that this was actually added in later, and it wasn't part of the original The Hobbit? Did Tolkien make such drastic changes to the story? Or is this just another case of my memory getting mixed up with fantasies and expectations and possibly those (mostly) deadly dull movies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11381" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:17:22.830" Title="Did the original &quot;The Hobbit&quot; really feature that five-army battle in the end?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16306" CreationDate="2020-11-14T22:09:32.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Coriolanus describing the people as many-headed brings together a number of interesting aspects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the play contains many animal metaphors, especially because political opponents are described as beasts.&#xA;For example, Menenius talks of &amp;quot;Rome and her rats&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act I, scene 1&lt;/a&gt; and&#xA;calls the plebeians &amp;quot;beastly&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 2, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Other animal references include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the bear, e.g. &amp;quot;As children from a bear, the Volsces shunning him&amp;quot; (Volumnia in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.1.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;), and &amp;quot;He's a lamb indeed, that baes like a bear&amp;quot; (referring to Coriolanus, in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.2.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 2, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dog, e.g. &amp;quot;he's a very dog to the commonalty&amp;quot; (referring to Coriolanus, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the dragon, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.4.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the osprey, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.4.7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 7&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the tiger, e.g. &amp;quot;in him than there is milk in a male tiger&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.5.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 5, scene 4&lt;/a&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the eagle, e.g. &amp;quot;like an eagle in a dove-cote&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/coriolanus.5.6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 6, scene 6&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all of these animal metaphors and comparisons are negative, but if when they aren't they create distance between, on the one hand, the person being described and, on the other hand, humans generally and Romans in particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the scene that contains the first reference to the &amp;quot;many-headed multitude&amp;quot; is Act 2, scene 3, also represents the beginning &amp;quot;the beginning of the great central section of the play, dealing with the clash between Coriolanus and the people&amp;quot; (G. R. Hibbard's edition of &lt;em&gt;Coriolanus&lt;/em&gt; (The New Penguin Shakespeare, Penguin, 1967), page 216). If you look at the animal metaphors and comparisons used throughout the play, you will see that they are used by both sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there is the more genral aspect of Shakespeare's views on citizens as individuals versus citizens as members of a crowd. When citizens become members of a crowd, they lose their indviduality, their good humour and their common sense. The crowd can have an urge to destroy, so comparisons with a monster suggest themselves. For earlier examples of crowd scenes, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/2henryvi/2henryvi.4.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 4, scene 1 in the &lt;em&gt;Second Part of Henry VI&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which contains the infamous line &amp;quot;The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.&amp;quot;) and the crowd scenes in &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt;, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hydra metaphor nicely combines these aspects of the play: if you cut off one of the Hydra's heads, it regrows two heads; when transferring this metaphor to a crowd, you risk making it more destructive by using violence against it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-14T22:09:32.223" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16348" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15919" CreationDate="2020-11-15T08:43:25.307" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator dreams of a visit to the ancient city of Ujjayani, on the banks of the Kshipra river. Ujjayani was the capital of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avanti_(Ancient_India)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avanti&lt;/a&gt; kingdom that flourished roughly 700 BCE–300 BCE. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://dic.mp.nic.in/ujjain/mahakal/default.aspx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mahakal Shiva temple&lt;/a&gt; referred to in the poem still stands in modern &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujjain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ujjain&lt;/a&gt;, though the current building dates back only to the 18th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with any temple, services are conducted at specific times of the day. The poem's setting is sunset:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the temple of Mahakal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The evening prayer bell rang&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The crowded roads were now empty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The dusk was falling&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the rooftops were glowing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With the rays of setting sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sunset &lt;em&gt;আরতি / aarati&lt;/em&gt;, worship rite, would be part of the temple's schedule. The bell for beginning that rite has rung just before the narrator arrives at his former lover's house, and the rite ends as he is seated beside her. The end of the prayers is consistent with the poem's timeline.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original, the poem ends as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;রজনীর অন্ধকার&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;উজ্জয়িনী করি দিল লুপ্ত একাকার।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          দীপ দ্বারপাশে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;কখন নিবিয়া গেল দুরন্ত বাতাসে।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          শিপ্রানদীতীরে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;আরতি থামিয়া গেল শিবের মন্দিরে।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;rajaniir andhakaar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ujjayinii kari dila lupta ekaakaar.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          diip dvaarapaashe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;kakhana nibiyaa gela duranta baataashe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          shipraanadiitiire&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;aarati thaamiya gela shiver mandire&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literal translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The darkness of the night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rendered Ujjayani hidden, indistinguishable.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          The lamp by the door&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;was long extinguished by a gust of wind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          On the banks of the river Shipra&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The worship rite ended in Shiva's temple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As always, Tagore's specific descriptions are wonderfully evocative. The blotting out of Ujjayani by the darkness, and the extinguished lamp by the beloved's door, could signify just the end of the dream. It could also be an acknowledgment that this is only a dream. If the narrator is paying homage to a lost love by dreaming of her, then the end of the dream is also the end of the homage, rather like the end of a worship rite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I agree with the other answer given here, which states that the lovers have reached a state of perfection. One reason to question that interpretation is found in Tagore's own translation of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/A-Dream-------English-Translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Dream&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is Kumud Biswas's translation of Tagore's Bengali poem &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Verses/kolpona-41/swopno-1530&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;স্বপ্ন&lt;/a&gt; / swapna&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Dream&amp;quot;. The poem was published in the 1900 collection &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.bengal.10689.11143/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;কল্পনা&lt;/a&gt; / kalpanaa&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Imagination&amp;quot;. The date of composition given at the end of the printed poem in that collection is &lt;em&gt;৯ জ্যৈষ্ঠ ১৩০৪, 9 jyaiShTha 1304&lt;/em&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.banglatext.com/bangla-date-converter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;corresponds&lt;/a&gt; to 23 May 1897 in the Gregorian calendar. Tagore's own rather truncated translation of this poem was published as &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/In-The-Dusky-Path-Of-A-Dream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poem 62&lt;/a&gt; in the 1913 collection &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6686/6686-h/6686-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Gardener&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Gardener&lt;/em&gt; 62 ends on a rather despondent note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought and thought; our names would not come to my mind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tears shone in her eyes. She held up her right hand to me. I took it and stood silent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze and died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This undercuts any optimistic reading of the end of the original or the translation. In all versions, the entire poem underlies the lack of connection between the lovers, who don't even speak the same language any more. I believe the connection between the prayer's ending and the darkness that falls around the lovers suggests the acknowledgment of loss rather than the attainment of perfection. It's true, of course, that the darkness and silence gives the lovers the opportunity to be intimate; but even in that case it seems more a last farewell than a new beginning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The usual disclaimer: my Bengali is dreadful, so rely on the translations above AYOR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Romanized Bengali is transliterated using the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; scheme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-15T09:26:25.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T09:26:25.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1065" CreationDate="2020-11-15T13:29:36.040" Score="-5" Body="&lt;p&gt;My research, which is extremely controversial, indicates that Dickens didn't write &amp;quot;A Christmas Carol.&amp;quot; Rather, he hurriedly revised an existing manuscript to get it ready for publication in time for the 1843 Christmas season, and to avoid impending debt. The original was written by American authors Mathew Franklin Whittier, and his wife, Abby Poyen Whittier. To answer your question specifically, my research suggests that the next-to-last paragraph of that book was originally the conclusion; and that Dickens revised it by adding the last paragraph. If you look at the next-to-last paragraph closely, the viewpoint expressed in it is not consistent with a famous, successful author; however, it is a precise match for Mathew, a humorist, and Abby, who had been persecuted by the townspeople as a witch. It suggests that the narrator is accustomed to being laughed at and misunderstood, and laughs it off. The paragraph that Dickens added at the end, would be inconsistent with Mathew and Abby, who believed in Spiritualism--it would, however, be consistent with Dickens, who thought of the entire novel as a &amp;quot;ghost story,&amp;quot; and who was a skeptic in such matters. Only Dickens would have narrated that Scrooge had no further contact with spirits, as though he was abstaining from alcohol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I note that the instructions below say to avoid &amp;quot;making statements based on opinion.&amp;quot; I do have a great deal of evidence for my conclusions, but I hardly have room to give them, here. I've substantiated my answer with as much logical evidence as it seemed fit to provide in this format.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11385" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T13:29:36.040" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16351" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16352" CreationDate="2020-11-15T16:27:36.663" Score="4" ViewCount="1219" Body="&lt;p&gt;Today, at church, the priest was discussing the Sacrament of Reconciliation, both commenting on how even priests and nuns go to Confession regularly and on how, as a priest, he's noticed that people tend to come in with the same sins week after week, so he sometimes wondered how many of us truly examine ourselves and try to improve yourselves (this being in light of the Gospel reading about the three servants entrusted with their master's wealth, and what they did with them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think I read this in the mid 1990s. I remember the author had several books, all in a dark humor category, but I can't recall his name, although I remember the concept of religious orders popping up in another series. This book was a standalone. The main character was an adult male who is a member of a religious (Catholic, I'm pretty sure) order that sequestered themselves away from the world in order to pursue a life of quiet contemplation and prayer. As I recall it, he was trying to be a good member of the order, but didn't quite feel like he reached the right level of piety despite his attempts. I recall that he commented on how they were expected to go to Confession regularly, and were not allowed to leave without confessing something, which led to him making up sins, and then feeling guilty about lying, and confessing those lies. What kicked off the plot was that something is going on with the order where they needed to send someone out into the world to resolve a matter, I think maybe involving some aspect of land ownership where the monastery is? The protagonist is chosen to go into the outside world, which is set somewhere in the 1970s to 1990s, I think (nothing stuck out as being particularly &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; sounding, but I don't remember cell phones coming up, or the Internet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that, I don't remember much of the rest of the plot. It's largely humor about the protagonist being a fish out of water, dealing with the sinful regular world, and when he returns to the monastery (I think successful in his endeavor), he at first thinks the outside world has corrupted him, but he instead realizes that he joined the monastery not out of devotion, but as a way to escape his former life, and that that is the wrong motivation. I do remember that he takes a trip on an airplane and experiences the wonders of miniature liquor bottles (I want to say they were complimentary, which would probably date this story as being further in the past when there wasn't as much cost-cutting and flying was seen as a luxury experience), and I think he comes home with a suitcase full of them, many of them empty because he just likes the way they clink together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a hardback, probably in the 200-300 page range, and when I read it, it looked at least a few years old. The pages had some wear and were starting to darken with age, but didn't seem yellow and brittle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T04:03:24.473" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T04:03:24.473" Title="Humorous novel about a man in a religious order who is sent into the outside world by his order, and has his worldview changed by his experiences" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16351" CreationDate="2020-11-15T16:27:36.663" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the process of writing the question, I remembered the author, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30953.Donald_E_Westlake&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Donald E. Westlake&lt;/a&gt; (I went through a bunch of his &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/52540-dortmunder&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dortmunder&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; books, of which our local library had a fair collection), and a search for &lt;code&gt;donald westlake religious brother&lt;/code&gt; led me to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1256955.Brothers_Keepers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brothers Keepers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the order's lease on the Park Avenue monastery expires, sixteen monks face a greedy real-estate mogul, and Brother Benedict falls in love with the mogul's daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3139891334?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;One of the reviews&lt;/a&gt; mentions the confession scene and better describes the plot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Starting in inimitable Westlake style with a confession scene that had me bursting out laughing,this newly repackaged and republished copy of ‘Brothers Keepers’ is a pure delight to the very last page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It captures a time in the mid 70’s that most of us would find hard to recall,especially not this reviewer, ahem, who is FAR too young to remember and heard about it from her grandparents, and that in and of itself is part of the book’s charm. This tiny patch of land, this monastery is the last bastion on Park Avenue against the encroaching tide of skyscrapers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brother Benedict , a 34 year old Christinian monk who has lived in the monastery for the past 10 years after converting to Catholicism to win the heart of a girl who ran off and left him anyway, prefers life inside the cloisters. It’s quiet, straight forward and the routine gives a lot of comfort to a man at odds with modern 20th Century life in New York.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He accidentally comes across the plans to demolish several buildings, including theirs, in an architectural think piece published in the Sunday Times, his weekly indulgence. The journalist is outraged at the encroachment of modern building and the underhand methods used to acquire either land,buildings or both.The monastery has stood on leased land, for 2 centuries, passing from the monastery founder to the Flattery family after the original 99 year lease expired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now 16 world weary, but also unworldy, monks have the fight of their lives on their hands. It’s them versus the Flattery’s as they battle to preserve their way of life in a world that no longer recognises the rights of this minority religious order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T16:27:36.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-15T20:11:23.920" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my 8th grade social studies class two decades ago, we studied the following poem, recollected from memory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life is but a savage test &lt;br&gt;&#xA;of who is least and who is best. &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Those who fall may lack the wit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The winners are the ones most fit.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;This may seem harsh, but shun the whine.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Take in your breath, and toe the line.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Who will be the ones who lose?&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Tis’ for God, not us, to choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I recall correctly, it was in the context of studying the social Darwinism that predominated in the US during Gilded Age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But upon Googling, not a single phrase in that poem is turning up any results.  So who wrote this poem and when?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1078" LastActivityDate="2020-11-15T20:11:23.920" Title="Identifying a poem about life as a test" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-16T00:34:01.237" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bilbo may not have told anyone about going away, but Gandalf did lock the door after him. (At least that's heavily implied.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About one year is not a very long time. What kind of bizarre society is Hobbiton where you have to constantly be on your guard and show yourself every day outside or else people start breaking into your home and presume that it's abandoned and go through your stuff and sell it off for nothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It frustrated me that Bilbo went so far as to &lt;em&gt;pay for his own stuff&lt;/em&gt; to get it back. I cannot express in words how furious I would be if the same thing had happened to me, &lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; after all those adventures. If anything, that should have given him the confidence to really get angry and demand that they put every last object back or they get to taste the elf-sword!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11389" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T14:20:00.143" Title="How did people assume that Bilbo's house was abandoned after only a year, and how did they get in?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-hobbit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2409" CreationDate="2020-11-16T00:44:28.793" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, absolutely.&lt;/strong&gt; The quote in question is from a book by JK Rowling, so the quote is attributable to her. Not just &amp;quot;technically&amp;quot;, as you ask; it is without qualification a quote from Rowling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of whether the quoted remark reflects what she herself feels is a different one altogether. To assume it does so is a categorical error. In fiction or drama, what a character says is part of the author's depiction of that character, not a straightforward expression of the author's viewpoint.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A claim such as: &amp;quot;When Dumbledore says X, he represents what Rowling really thinks, but when Voldemort says Y, that's not what Rowling really thinks&amp;quot; can be justified only through evidence, either internal or external. Internal evidence would be something like: &amp;quot;The plot of the entire &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series is constructed in such a way that it reinforces the truth of what Dumbledore says here, so Rowling must have meant us to agree with it.&amp;quot; External evidence could be something like an essay or opinion piece written in Rowling's own name and voice that reiterates Dumbledore's sentiment; or a historical analysis of Rowling's life and times that includes a discussion of the prevalent attitudes toward truth and how Rowling's work intersects with those attitudes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the words in a creative work aren't spoken by a character, but in the first person (as in, say, Shakespeare's sonnets), literary analysis attributes those words to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;persona&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;a character established by an author, one in whose voice all or part of a narrative takes place&amp;quot;. It's naïve to read Shakespeare's sonnets and assume that they are a straightforward depiction of autobiographical incidents. As with fictional characters, any claim that the first person speaker in the sonnets is actually Shakespeare needs to be supported using internal and external evidence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That doesn't make the actual works themselves any less Rowling's or Shakespeare's. It would be downright silly to say &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/you-it-act-ii-scene-vii-all-worlds-stage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All the world's a stage&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; isn't a quotation from Shakespeare. Yes, it's Jacques in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt; who actually says it. And yes, the play gives every indication that Jacques isn't a character we're supposed to find particularly reliable. But when asked, &amp;quot;who said 'All the world's a stage?'&amp;quot; it's ridiculously pedantic to object to the answer &amp;quot;Shakespeare.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussions about how a quote-within-a-quote should be cited, or how one should indicate that this might not represent the writer's view, etc. are good ones to have, but the basic point remains: if I write something, and you quote from that something, you're quoting me. It does not follow that you're representing me fairly and objectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yeah, the other answers are all wrong and/or miss the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T01:08:31.587" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T01:08:31.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15357" CreationDate="2020-11-16T04:04:46.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is a bit difficult to answer because of the constraints put on it. The Frankfurt School was hugely influential on cultural critique; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacques Derrida&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michel Foucault&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fredric Jameson&lt;/a&gt;, to name three towering figures, were all steeped in critical theory. But none of them is a member of the Frankfurt School per se. For one thing, they came of age a generation or so later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, Derrida and Foucault aren't exactly literary theorists, and would question the distinction between literary and non-literary. (Jameson is more traditionally a literary scholar, but his bent is Marxist to a degree that the Frankfurt School itself would characterize as dogmatic.) Derrida and, especially, Foucault underwrote what you call &amp;quot;the trend in cultural studies to subsume literary studies&amp;quot;. When critical theory itself is responsible for that trend, it would be difficult to find a space for a purely &lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt; theory that reflects the tenets and practices of the Frankfurt School without engaging in broader historical and cultural critique. I'm not aware of any theorist who, while broadly accepting the tenets of the Frankfurt School, has nevertheless argued for a specific role of the literary realm that sets it apart from other cultural artifacts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than identifying a literary theorist whose work is influenced by the Frankfurt School, it might be fruitful to ask what the members of the school themselves had to say about literature or, more broadly, aesthetics. At least three members of the School thought of the examination of the aesthetic realm as important to the larger examination of society: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodor Adorno&lt;/a&gt;, György Lukács, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter Benjamin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adorno thought of modernism, with its creative disjunctions and its abandonment of the ideal of a self-contained, self-sufficient work of art, as reflecting the contradictions of modern society. In that way, art opened up a space for social critique. His collected &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://cup.columbia.edu/book/notes-to-literature/9780231179652&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notes to Literature&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; include many essays exemplifying this; however, these essays are more in the nature of literary criticism than theory. It is also important to note that Adorno's writings on aesthetics focused more on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520231597/essays-on-music&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;music&lt;/a&gt; than literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've mentioned Lukács's being &lt;em&gt;hors de combat&lt;/em&gt; because his &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0262620278&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;best-known work&lt;/a&gt; of literary theory was written during World War I and published in 1920, three years before the Institute for Social Research itself was founded at Frankfurt. Indeed, Lukács himself repudiated &lt;em&gt;The Theory of the Novel&lt;/em&gt;. But his later work, such as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0803279108&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Historical Novel&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1937) and &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://criticaltheoryindex.org/assets/RealismintheBalance---Lukacs-Georg.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Realism in the Balance&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1938) does put forward a theory of literary realism. In contrast to Adorno's valorization of modernism, Lukács argued that traditional realists like Walter Scott and Tolstoy depict historical realities in a way that makes revolution possible. Lukács was rather dismissive of what he saw as Adorno's ivory tower view of the realm of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Walter Benjamin also made important contributions to literary theory. For example, in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist2019-20/benjamin_motifs_in_baudelaire.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Some Motifs in Baudelaire&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1939), Benjamin links Baudelaire's poetry to the philosophy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Bergson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henri Bergson&lt;/a&gt; and the psychoanalytic theories of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sigmund Freud&lt;/a&gt;. The essay argues that Baudelaire, like Bergson, depicts the world in a way that is historically specific without being limited to historical determinism. In this essay, one might argue, Benjamin articulates a theory of literature that bridges the gap between Adorno and Lukács. Adorno valorizes modernism for using explicitly non-realistic, subjective techniques to defamiliarize the world; Lukács praises realism for its presentation of an objective world in all its contradictions; Benjamin praises Baudelaire for presenting a world that's historically specific while also rendering it not transparent, so that one can't assume it's the only possible world there could be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benjamin wrote on the theory of translation as well. But his work too went beyond literary theory and criticism to broader cultural critique. His work on Parisian street culture, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcades_Project&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Arcades Project&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, was left unfinished when he committed suicide while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Right from its inception, the members of the Frankfurt School did not maintain boundaries between literary criticism and theory on the one hand, and broader cultural critique and critical theory on the other. So while their influence on aesthetics and literary criticism has been tremendous, to ask whether there is any purely &lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt; theorist who shares their approach, methodology, and goals seems a bit self-contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T03:06:33.207" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T03:06:33.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16354" CreationDate="2020-11-16T04:11:27.150" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This isn’t the modern world.  Most people in Middle-Earth don’t just randomly go off traveling great distances without telling anyone.  This is even more true of Hobbits, who almost never leave the Shire (or Bree for the ones living there).  On the contrary randomly disappearing without explanation is in fact very unusual and doing so for a year is a rather long time in this setting, and even more so for a Hobbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastEditorUserId="11201" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T14:20:00.143" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T14:20:00.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16358" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15506" CreationDate="2020-11-16T06:14:29.297" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first such claim probably was made in the Wikipedia article you mention. It's a pretty flimsy claim that would collapse under the slightest scrutiny, and there's no evidence that any scholar has made such a claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scholarly consensus around &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; is that it is a version of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; based upon performances in Germany of Shakespeare's play by traveling actors in the early 17th C. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.33964/page/n2/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The &amp;quot;Bad&amp;quot; Quarto of &lt;strong&gt;Hamlet&lt;/strong&gt;: A Critical Study&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1941), George Ian Duthie &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.33964/page/n247/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is not the slightest doubt that &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; represents an English play, carried over to Germany by English travelling actors about the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. We know that English actors went to Germany as early as 1586; and we know that a play called &lt;em&gt;Tragoedia von Hamlet einen Printzen in Dennemark&lt;/em&gt; was performed by English actors at Dresden in 1626.    (p. 248)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the monograph you mention in the question, &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord: Shakespeares Hamlet auf der Wanderbühne des 17. Jahrhunderts&lt;/em&gt;, Reinhold Freudenstein &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JBV5DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA8&amp;amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt; that the earliest proposed date for the production of &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; is 1616. He does not accept this date, and argues that the first performance that can be dated with certainty was in 1626, the same Dresden performance Duthie mentions. Even accepting the earlier date, &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; still postdates &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; by at least fifteen years. The exact date of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;'s first performance is uncertain, but it might have been as early as 1599, and was certainly no later than 1601, when the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bad-quarto-of-hamlet-1603&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; quarto&lt;/a&gt; was printed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his introduction to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0174434693&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1982 Arden Shakespeare edition&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Jenkins_(Shakespeare_scholar)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harold Jenkins&lt;/a&gt; writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;em&gt;BB&lt;/em&gt; is neither a text nor a source of Shakespeare's play, it cannot legitimately claim extended treatment here. But since it has often been held (wrongly in my belief) to descend from the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and so to afford illumination on Shakespeare's source, the question of its precise relation to Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; cannot quite be ignored.   (p. 112)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jenkins also mentions &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; earlier, in his discussion of the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There have been numerous attempts to reconstruct [the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;] in detail; but since they depend on working back fom one or both of the First Quarto and the German play &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; on the now untenable assumption that these somehow derive from it rather than from Shakespeare's play, such attempts need not concern us.   (p. 85)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether or not &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt; actually derives from the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is beside the point for the purposes of this answer. The point is that when the relationship of the German play to the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is considered, the premise is always that the former derives from the latter, and never vice-versa. Given that fifteen years separate the terminus ante quem of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and the terminus post quem of &lt;em&gt;Der bestrafte Brudermord&lt;/em&gt;, there are no grounds to argue that the latter influenced the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, which by definition would predate &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T06:14:29.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16359" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-16T10:11:25.803" Score="8" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tom Clancy wrote many speculative works on confrontation between the blocs during the Cold War, most notably the &amp;quot;Cold War gone hot&amp;quot; scenario Red Storm Rising, together with Larry Bond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm wondering, were there any similar or analogous authors active in any country in the &amp;quot;East&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ideally, I'd like to find a &amp;quot;mirror work&amp;quot; to Red Storm Rising from the Warsaw Pact perspective, but I'd be interested in anything resembling the genre written in the east bloc. Barring that, any military techno-thriller written from a non-&amp;quot;Western&amp;quot; perspective would be interesting (regardless of era.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11392" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T10:11:25.803" Title="Is there an east bloc analogue to Tom Clancy?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;tom-clancy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16361" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18187" CreationDate="2020-11-16T15:52:50.370" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the duology of &lt;em&gt;Six of Crows&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Crooked Kingdom&lt;/em&gt;, there are several criminal gangs. The two most important ones are the Dregs (crow symbol) and the Dime Lions (lion symbol). The gangs take pride in their symbols, to the point that they identify &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; their symbols:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If you're not from the Barrel, you might find it hard to tell lions from crows.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Kaz, &lt;em&gt;Crooked Kingdom&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 33&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasoning behind the crow symbol is explained in &lt;em&gt;Crooked Kingdom&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Kaz,&amp;quot; she asked suddenly. &amp;quot;Why crows?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;The crow and cup? Probably because crows are scavengers. They take the leavings.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Crows remember human faces. They remember the people who feed them, who are kind to them. And the people who wrong them too... They don't forget. They tell each other who to look after and who to watch out for.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 44&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this passage also explains the name &amp;quot;Dregs&amp;quot;, as the gang sees themselves as scavengers - they take the dregs, and are seen as the dregs of society themselves. But that begs the question, what about the Dime Lions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dime Lions' leader (Pekka Rollins) is the sworn enemy of Kaz Brekker, a main character, and the gang acts as an antagonistic organization at a few points throughout the books. Therefore it stands to reason that there is a meaning behind &amp;quot;Dime Lions&amp;quot;. I'm interested both in why this gang would have a lion symbol, and why they would qualify their name with &amp;quot;Dime&amp;quot;, which seems to suggest that they are cheap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, is there a deeper significance behind the name &amp;quot;Dime Lions&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T17:52:38.787" Title="Does the Dime Lions' name have a deeper significance?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;six-of-crows-duology&gt;&lt;leigh-bardugo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15254" CreationDate="2020-11-16T15:54:43.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In present-day English, the term ambition is often used with a positive connotation; see the third meaning listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ambition#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A personal quality similar to motivation, not necessarily tied to a single goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used an older meaning of the term that corresponds with the first meaning listed in Wiktionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eager or inordinate desire for some object that confers distinction, as preferment, honor, superiority, political power, or literary fame; desire to distinguish one's self from other people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caesar makes sure not to appear as ambitious. In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, Casca reports to Brutus and Cassius that Mark Antony had three times offered Caesar a crown and that Caesar had refused it each time. Still according to Casca, Caesar had noticed that &amp;quot;the common herd was glad he refused the crown&amp;quot;, in other words, Casca sees the refusal as a trick to make Caesar more popular with the plebeians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, Mark Antony, an opponent of the conspirators who killed Caesar, speaks the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ambition should be made of sterner stuff&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stern has two meanings (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stern#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Having a hardness and severity of nature or manner.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grim and forbidding in appearance.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Caesar wept, he did not appear as &amp;quot;hard or severe&amp;quot;; by claiming that Caesar did not possess &amp;quot;a hardness and severity of nature or manner&amp;quot;, he denies Brutus's accusation that Caesar wanted to grab power (&amp;quot;ambition&amp;quot;). Of course, he conveniently ignores that the goal of Caesar's military campaign in Gaul was to gain command over a number of war-hardened legions that would be loyal to him and that his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Rubicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;crossing of the Rubicon&lt;/a&gt; with the 13th legion, which was illegal, was nothing less than an act of insurrection against the Roman Senate. Caesar's ambition was definitely made of the &amp;quot;sterner stuff&amp;quot; that Mark Antony denies him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T15:54:43.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16363" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:30:23.260" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:30:23.260" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:30:23.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16364" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:30:23.260" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;The Mayor of Casterbridge&quot; by Thomas Hardy. Should be tagged together with [thomas-hardy]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:48:34.920" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:48:34.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16365" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:35:03.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:35:03.013" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:35:03.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16366" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:35:03.013" Score="0" Body="Questions about the British fantasy book series Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake, consisting of the main trilogy Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone (partially finished at the time of the author's death), as well as the unfinished fragment Titus Awakes (originally planned to be the fourth novel) and the novella A Boy in Darkness. Use this tag together with [mervyn-peake]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:46:38.147" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:46:38.147" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16367" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:35:44.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:35:44.927" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:35:44.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16368" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:35:44.927" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) and his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:14:06.893" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:14:06.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16369" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:36:43.100" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:36:43.100" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:36:43.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16370" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:36:43.100" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Should be tagged with [ian-mcewan]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:14:11.627" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:14:11.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16371" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:42:29.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:42:29.607" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:42:29.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16372" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:42:29.607" Score="0" Body="Questions about Chokher Bali, a novel by Rabindranath Tagore. Should be tagged with [bengali-literature] and [rabindranath-tagore]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:14:19.823" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:14:19.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16373" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:44:34.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:44:34.800" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:44:34.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16374" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:44:34.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the US author Leigh Bardugo (born 1975) or about her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:48:22.103" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:48:22.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16375" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:49:25.960" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T16:49:25.960" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T16:49:25.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16376" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-16T16:49:25.960" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book series Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. Should be tagged with [leigh-bardugo]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-16T18:13:55.257" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T18:13:55.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11247" CreationDate="2020-11-16T19:55:02.850" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;No idea why I hadn't seen your post before; I recognised the story instantly from your description, and for some reason it stuck very vividly in my mind both when I first read it as a child and when I reread it as a teenager.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;This is almost certainly &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2701047-annerton-pit&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Annerton Pit&lt;/em&gt; by Peter Dickinson&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only detail that I'm surprised you missed or forgot is that &lt;strong&gt;the main character is blind&lt;/strong&gt; (the younger of the two boys). If this too rings a bell, then I'm absolutely certain it was &lt;em&gt;Annerton Pit&lt;/em&gt; that you read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boys are Jake and Martin, two brothers. Martin is around 18; Jake is younger, maybe around 13, and blind. (One of the most memorable things about this book for me, especially on second reading, was its convincing portrayal of life as a blind person. Sometimes I would come away from the book after some chapters and feel that I too needed to rely on my non-sight senses to get around.) They go on a motorbike together in search of their missing grandfather, who is interested in the supernatural.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually they trace him to an old mine in the north of England (Yorkshire?): the titular &amp;quot;Annerton Pit&amp;quot;. But they find that a group of terrorists has kidnapped their grandfather, and proceed to capture the boys too, because they're using the mine as their headquarters and don't want their plans to be discovered. The trio are initially kept in a caravan, but later they escape (?) to the mine tunnels underground. The boys' grandfather is in bad health and they fear for his life. At the end of the story, they escape through the tunnels, and one of the terrorists&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; blows up the mine with himself inside, to avoid being taken by the police. This man had previously told the boys something like &amp;quot;I was told that you're really committed to a cause when you're willing to die for it, but now I learned that you're &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; committed to a cause when you're willing to kill for it&amp;quot;. At the end of the book is the line &amp;quot;[Name], unable to kill for his cause, had deliberately died for it.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is also a supernatural angle. Annerton Pit was closed years before due to a mining disaster where many people died, and there was speculation about a creature living underground, which is what led the boys' grandfather there in the first place. Towards the end of the story,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Jake, crawling blindly through the tunnels, feels a presence there with him. I think he even communicates with it somehow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching online for cover images, I can't find the one from the edition I read (which was more realistic/&amp;quot;photographic&amp;quot; in style), but here's one which matches your description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qvolg.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qvolg.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;cover image with a blind boy crawling through a tunnel underground&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T19:55:02.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8704" CreationDate="2020-11-16T21:46:56.857" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is one of a small number of Shakespeare plays for which there is no obvious source for the plot. (The others are &lt;em&gt;A Midsummer Night's Dream&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt;.)&#xA;When discussing sources of inspiration, critics mainly list &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne/Book_I/Chapter_XXX&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Montaigne's essay &amp;quot;Of cannibals&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (for Gonzalo's speech in Act 2, scene 1), travel writing, especially the &amp;quot;Bermuda pamphlets&amp;quot; about the wreck of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Venture&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sea Adventure&lt;/a&gt; in Bermuda in 1609, and a passage from Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt; (of which they find an echo in the fifth act).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Bermuda pamphlets&amp;quot; include William Strachey's &lt;em&gt;A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight&lt;/em&gt; (excerpted in Orgel's Oxford edition), Sylvester Jourdain's &lt;em&gt;Discovery of the Bermudas&lt;/em&gt; (1610) and the Council of Virginia's &lt;em&gt;True Declaration of the state of the Colony of Virginia&lt;/em&gt;. However, the pamphlets do not appear to be sources for the characters or the plot in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. The origin of the characters appear to be a mystery (Anne Barton, p. 24). (Though Orgel poins out that Sycorax is based on the figure of Medea in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Metamorphoses_(tr._Golding)/Book_7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 7 of Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.) The edition by Hulme and Sherman (Norton, 2004) contains a 33-page section for &amp;quot;Sources and Contexts&amp;quot; (i.e. excerpts of sources that Shakespeare may have used or contemporary discussions of similar themes), none of which suggest a source for Caliban. Ackroyd's biography mentions that there was a riding master in London named Prospero (page 460) but mentions no real-life inspiration for Caliban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Hulme's 2002 lecture &amp;quot;&amp;quot;Shakespeare's Spanish Tempest&amp;quot; discusses a few other &lt;em&gt;potential&lt;/em&gt; sources, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaspar_Gil_Polo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaspar Gil Polo's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Diana enamorada&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Primaleon, Prince of Greece&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Primaleon&lt;/em&gt; may have provided the source for Prospero but not necessarily for Caliban.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above are all textual sources, however. In the discussions of sources (see the editions listed below) and the biographies I have consulted (see Ackroyd and Wells, below), I have not been able to find evidence that Caliban may be based on a real person. In addition, none of the sources I consulted mention Antonio Pigafetta.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Anne Barton. The Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin, 1968, 1996. (See especially pages 23-25.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Norton Critical Editions. W. W. Norton, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Stephen Orgel. The Oxford Shakespeare. [1987] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ackroyd, Peter: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: The Biography&lt;/em&gt;. Chatto &amp;amp; Windus, 2005.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hulme, Peter: &amp;quot;Shakespeare's Spanish Tempest: Colonial Sources, Postcolonial Readings&amp;quot;, The Sir Henry Thomas Memorial Lecture, University of Birmingham, February 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wells, Stanley: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare: A Life in Drama&lt;/em&gt;. W. W. Norton, 1995.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T21:46:56.857" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="827" CreationDate="2020-11-16T23:40:03.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer by ktm5124 and some of the comments on both the question and ktm5124's answer assume the following definition of honest, which is still in use today (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/honest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scrupulous with regard to telling the truth; not given to swindling, lying, or fraud; upright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Shakespeare often uses other meanings of &amp;quot;honest&amp;quot;, which are no longer current (quoted from &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions, revised by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford University Press, 1986):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Holding an honourable position, respectable. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(4) Not seeming other than it is, genuine. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 4&lt;/a&gt;, Hamlet had said to the ghost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spirit of health here means &amp;quot;good spirit&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;of health&amp;quot; contrast with &amp;quot;damn'd&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 5&lt;/a&gt;, Hamlet also swears &amp;quot;by Saint Patrick&amp;quot; before saying it is &amp;quot;an honest ghost&amp;quot;. Saint Patrick was a keeper of purgatory, which is where the ghost supposedly comes from, whereas a &amp;quot;damned spirit&amp;quot; would come from hell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, as Anne Barton points out in the introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition of the play (Penguin, 1980, page 51),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ending of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; resolves nothing that really matters. The nature of the Ghost, the question of what Hamlet ought to have done, the enigma of his delay and his own inability to explain it, (...): these issues, of far more consequence than the killing of Claudius, are left untouched by that killing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-16T23:40:03.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16380" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8704" CreationDate="2020-11-17T10:28:38.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Shakespeare must have got the name “Setebos” for Caliban’s god from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Pigafetta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antonio Pigafetta&lt;/a&gt; via Richard Willes’ &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyoftrauayl00angh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Travel in the West and East Indies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1577), but Bergreen’s claim that the character of Caliban is “inspired in part” by Pigafetta’s description of a captive Patagonian is speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Bergreen’s case&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bergreen has overstated the case for Pigafetta’s influence on Shakespeare. The following two points suggest a writer who is eking out a teaspoon of evidence with a ladleful of rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bergreen writes that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; contains “distinctive features” that “could only have come from Pigafetta’s account”, without saying what they are, leaving the reader with the impression that there are multiple points of borrowing. But in fact there is only one such feature, the name “Setebos” for Caliban’s god.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Bergreen writes that “Caliban &lt;strong&gt;quotes&lt;/strong&gt; Pigafetta’s account”, and follows this with three lines from &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, leaving the reader with the impression that all three lines are quoted from, or at the very least paraphrased from, Pigafetta. But this is not true: the only word in the quoted passage that comes from Pigafetta is “Setebos”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, Bergreen says that Shakespeare read Pigafetta in “an English translation by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Eden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Eden&lt;/a&gt;”. But it is not clear that the first English translation of Pigafetta was in fact by Eden: it was printed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyoftrauayl00angh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Travel in the West and East Indies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1577), edited by Richard Willes. This volume combines Eden’s 1555 translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Martyr_d%27Anghiera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter Martyr&lt;/a&gt;’s first three &lt;em&gt;Decades&lt;/em&gt; with a number of other texts about the New World. The title page says, “augmented and finished by Richard Willes”, and it is nowhere stated who is responsible for each translation. Bergreen’s failure to acknowledge this difficulty suggests that he did not consult this source. Bergreen’s quotations from Pigafetta are much closer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/firstvoyageroun00pigagoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1874 translation&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stanley,_3rd_Baron_Stanley_of_Alderley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Stanley&lt;/a&gt;, but this was not, of course, available to Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Pigafetta&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the passages from &lt;em&gt;The History of Travel in the West and East Indies&lt;/em&gt; (1577) where the name “Setebos” appears. First, in a description of how the Spanish captured two Patagonians:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There came four other giants without any weapons, but had hid their bows and arrows in certain bushes. The captain retained two of these which were youngest and best made. He took them by a deceit in this manner, that giving them knives, shears, looking glasses, bells, beads of crystal, and such other trifles, he so filled their hands that they could hold no more: then caused two pair of shackles of iron to be put on their legs, making signs that he would also give them those chains: which they liked very well because they were made of bright and shining metal. And whereas they could not carry them because their hands were full, the other giants would have carried them: but the captain would not suffer them. When they felt the shackles fast about their legs, they began to doubt: but the captain did put them in comfort and bade them stand still. In fine when they saw how they were deceived they roared like bulls and cried upon their great devil &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Setebos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; to help them. Being thus taken, they were immediately separated and put in sundry ships. They could never bind the hands of the other two. Yet was one of them with much difficulty overthrown by nine of our men, and his hands bound; but he suddenly loosed himself and fled, as did also the other that came with them. In their flying, they shot of their arrows and slew one of our men. They say that when any of them die, there appear 10 or 12 devils leaping and dancing about the body of the dead, and seem to have their bodies painted with diverse colours. And that among other, there is one seen bigger then the residue, who maketh great mirth and rejoicing. This great devil they call &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Setebos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and call the less &lt;em&gt;Cheleule&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Antonio Pigafetta (c. 1523). &lt;em&gt;A brief declaration of the voyage or navigation made about the world&lt;/em&gt;. In Richard Willes, ed. (1577). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyoftrauayl00angh/page/n891/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The History of Travel in the West and East Indies&lt;/em&gt;, p. 434&lt;/a&gt;. London: Richard Jugge. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, a discussion of how Pigafetta learned some words of the Patagonian language:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other giant which remained with them in the ship, named bread &lt;em&gt;Capar&lt;/em&gt;: water, &lt;em&gt;Oli&lt;/em&gt;: red cloth, &lt;em&gt;Cherecai&lt;/em&gt;: red colour, &lt;em&gt;Cheiche&lt;/em&gt;: black colour, &lt;em&gt;Amel&lt;/em&gt;: and spoke all his words in the throat. On a time, as one made a cross before him and kissed it, showing it unto him, he suddenly cried &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Setebos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, and declared by signs that if they made any more crosses, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Setebos&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would enter into his body and make him burst. But when in fine he saw no hurt come thereof, he took the cross and embraced and kissed it oftentimes, desiring that he might be a Christian before his death. He was therefore baptized and named Paul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyoftrauayl00angh/page/n891/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pigafetta, pp. 434–435&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T10:28:38.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16381" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-17T12:49:53.693" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;Which Chinese book is the most sold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I mean a book written in the Chinese language by a Chinese author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2402" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T16:30:55.937" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T16:30:55.937" Title="What is the best selling Chinese book?" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16382" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-17T13:00:13.157" Score="3" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore composed and wrote the lyrics for approximately 2,200 songs, collectively known as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindra_Sangeet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rabindra Sangeet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Rabindra music&amp;quot;. These songs remain immensely popular in India and Bangladesh; each country has a Tagore composition as its national anthem. Outside South Asia, Tagore is best known as a poet, but on the subcontinent, his songs are easily the most widely circulated of his works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet the status of Tagore's song lyrics vis-à-vis his poetry is hard to pin down. His poetry and songs are often treated as two separate entities. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TagoreWeb&lt;/a&gt;, the online portal that presents all Tagore's works, maintains two separate headings for &amp;quot;Verses&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Songs&amp;quot;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Wikipedia entry on Tagore&lt;/a&gt; also has separate sections for &amp;quot;Poetry&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Songs&amp;quot;. The latter includes a throwaway phrase that suggests his songs are categorically different from his poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Bengalis, the songs' appeal, stemming from the combination of emotive strength and beauty described as &lt;em&gt;surpassing even Tagore's poetry&lt;/em&gt;, was such that the Modern Review observed that &amp;quot;[t]here is in Bengal no cultured home where Rabindranath's songs are not sung or at least attempted to be sung....Even illiterate villagers sing his songs&amp;quot;. [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it is not clear whether the added &amp;quot;emotive strength and beauty&amp;quot; derive from the music's enhancing the song text, or whether the lyrics themselves are somehow different from, and more immediately appealing than, his poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%AC%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%A8%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%A6%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%B0%E0%A6%A8%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A5_%E0%A6%A0%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%95%E0%A7%81%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%87%E0%A6%B0_%E0%A6%B8%E0%A7%83%E0%A6%B7%E0%A7%8D%E0%A6%9F%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%95%E0%A6%B0%E0%A7%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; is equally enigmatic about the relationship between Tagore's lyrics and his poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;রবীন্দ্রনাথের গান তার সাহিত্যের সঙ্গেও অঙ্গাঙ্গীভাবে জড়িত – তার বহু কবিতা যেমন গানে রূপান্তরিত হয়েছে, তেমনই তার উপন্যাস, গল্প বা নাটকেও বিশিষ্ট ভূমিকা নিয়েছে তার গান।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath's songs are intimately linked to his literary works—just as many of his poems have been transformed into songs, so also his songs have played a prominent role in his novels, stories, and drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entry does not elaborate any further on the relationship between Tagore's songs and his literary output. However, the statement that &amp;quot;many of his poems have been transformed into songs&amp;quot; does indicate that there is at least an overlap between Tagore's poetry and his song lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the best essay on Tagore that I have read, Amartya Sen also &lt;a href=&quot;https://newrepublic.com/article/89649/rabindranath-tagore&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments&lt;/a&gt; on this overlap:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore’s poetry, which often takes the form of songs in an innovative style of lyrical singing, called Rabindrasangeet, has transformed popular Bengali music with its particular combination of reflective language and compatible tunes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not clear, however, exactly how Tagore's song lyrics fit in with his poetry as a whole. For example, looking through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kWylVJoEgoMrA7traa9ETPJ_18HzwSni/view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; (1910), one comes across some poems whose musical settings are well-known. One example is Poem 8, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSojHbOB6UM&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;আজ ধানের খেতে রৌদ্রছায়ায়&lt;/a&gt; / aaj dhaaner khete raudrachhayaay&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Today, in the dappled sun and shadow of the rice field&amp;quot;). This poem is included under both the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Verses/gitanjali-62/aj-dhaner-khete-roudro-chhayay-3086&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verse&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Songs/prakriti-236/aj-dhaner-khete-roudra-5235&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Songs&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; sections of Tagoreweb, with the line breaks being the only apparent difference. Other poems in the Bengali &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; haven't been set to music at all, or at least, not by Tagore (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Verses/gitanjali-62/amar-matha-noto-kore-3079&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poem 1&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;আমার মাথা নত করে দাও / aamaar maathaa nata kare daao&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Compel my head to bow&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same can be observed of the poems Tagore translated himself. Analyzing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spiritualbee.com/media/gitanjali-by-tagore.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; (1912), Partha Pratim Ray and B.K. Sen &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.informaticsjournals.com/index.php/srels/article/view/5098&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;note&lt;/a&gt; that 42 of the 103 translations are of poems that Tagore had given a musical setting (see Table 10). That leaves 61 of the translations to be presumably of poems that Tagore had not set to music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question, then, is: &lt;strong&gt;what is the relationship between Tagore's song lyrics and his poems?&lt;/strong&gt; To be more specific:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is clear that Tagore set some of his poems to music. On what basis did he choose these poems? Are they stylistically or in some other way clearly distinguishable from those he did not set to music?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are the lyrics of Rabindra Sangeet a subset of Tagore's poems? That is to say, is the corpus of Rabindra Sangeet merely those poems Tagore chose to set to music? Or are there songs Tagore composed whose lyrics are not considered poems—i.e., which were published in songbooks rather than in collections of poetry? If so, what distinguishes those lyrics stylistically from his poetry proper?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagore's plays incorporate song as part of the action. Some of his best-known songs are in fact from his plays. Were the included songs written specifically for the plays, or were they poems or pre-existing songs of his that he repurposed for the plays?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Standard disclaimer: all translations from Bengali above are my own, and my Bengali is dreadful, so rely on them AYOR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transliterations from Bengali follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; scheme.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T01:59:57.527" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T01:59:57.527" Title="What is the relationship between Tagore's poems and his song lyrics?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16383" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16381" CreationDate="2020-11-17T13:17:08.823" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of best-selling books&lt;/a&gt;, this would be &lt;strong&gt;Jiang Rong's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Totem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wolf Totem&lt;/em&gt; / 狼图腾, published in 2004&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, a semi-autobiographical book set during China's Cultural Revolution. According to an article in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20080519011627/http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afc7e59c-ee43-11dc-a5c1-0000779fd2ac.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Financial Times&lt;/em&gt; dated 15 March 2008&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it first appeared in 2004, Jiang Rong’s &lt;em&gt;Wolf Totem&lt;/em&gt; has sold as many as 20 million copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of best-selling books&lt;/a&gt; also points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung&lt;/em&gt;, also known as the &lt;em&gt;Little Red Book&lt;/em&gt;, has produced a wide array of sales and distribution figures — with estimates ranging from 800 million[2] to over 6.5 billion printed volumes [4]. Some claim the distribution ran into the &amp;quot;billions&amp;quot;[5] and some cite &amp;quot;over a billion&amp;quot; official volumes between 1966 and 1969 alone as well as &amp;quot;untold numbers of unofficial local reprints and unofficial translations.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20150315025558/http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-book-of-non-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Best selling book of non-fiction | Guinness World Records&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[4] Fu, Zhengyuan: &lt;em&gt;Autocratic Tradition and Chinese Politics&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press 1994, p. 186.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[5] Kent, Allen; Lancour, Harold; Daily, Jay E.: &lt;em&gt;Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 22, CRC Press 1977, p.31.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BBC News article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34932800&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who, What, Why: What is the Little Red Book?&lt;/a&gt; (26 November 2015) claims that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than a billion copies have been published, making the book, often wrapped in its distinctive vinyl cover, one of the most widely produced of all time. During China's &amp;quot;Cultural Revolution&amp;quot; it became virtually mandatory to own and carry one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article does not provide a source for that figure. Since Mao Zedong wrote mostly non-fiction, &lt;em&gt;Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong&lt;/em&gt; is probably out of scope for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Matt McIntyre's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://wealthygorilla.com/best-selling-books/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 20 Best-Selling Books of All Time (Updated 2020)&lt;/a&gt; on Wealthy Gorilla, the best-selling Chinese fiction book is the 18th-century classic &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_of_the_Red_Chamber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dream of the Red Chamber&lt;/em&gt; / 红楼梦&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, which the author claims has been sold 100 million times. McIntyre's list also mentions a non-fiction book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_Zidian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Xinhua Zidian / 新华字典&lt;/a&gt;  (literally &amp;quot;New China Character Dictionary&amp;quot;), which has been sold 400 million times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same two Chinese books are also included in Ed Grabianowski's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/literature/21-best-sellers.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 21 Best-selling Books of All Time&lt;/a&gt; (HowStuffWorks, 2011, updated August 2020).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since dictionaries are non-fiction, &lt;em&gt;Xinhua Zidian&lt;/em&gt; is probably out of scope for this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the source one trusts most, either Jiang Rong's &lt;em&gt;Wolf Totem&lt;/em&gt; or the classic &lt;em&gt;Dream of the Red Chamber&lt;/em&gt; is the Chinese work of fiction that has sold most copies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T17:22:03.097" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T17:22:03.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16384" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-17T18:21:21.483" Score="4" ViewCount="150" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can you help me identify the short story or article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was set in Florida in the summer of 1969&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The writer asks a black man, working at his hotel, what he thinks of the excitement over the moon landing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The black man answers along the lines of &amp;quot;Do you see any black man on the moon or on TV? Until then it means nothing.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Giorgio Lauri" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-17T20:55:47.730" LastActivityDate="2020-11-17T20:55:47.730" Title="Story/article about the 1969 moon landing's meaning to a black man" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5669" CreationDate="2020-11-17T21:40:42.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The blogpost &lt;a href=&quot;https://ranternalaffairs.wordpress.com/2020/11/17/calum-p-cameron-answers-weird-questions-no-one-was-asking-hooked-on-a-feeling/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Calum P Cameron Answers Weird Questions No-one was Asking: Hooked on a Feeling&lt;/a&gt; (17.11.2020) makes a compelling case for Captain Hook being the Etonian William James Sinclair Blacklock. It looks at evidence from the books, the Eton lecture, and historical documents including the Eton College register where, in the year James Hook and Blacklock probably graduated Eton, he is listed right next to a fellow student Lewis Edward Starkey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11398" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:22:40.883" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:22:40.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16387" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14938" CreationDate="2020-11-18T09:36:51.627" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's a translation that I think captures the literal sense better:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't call (the pain of) separation bad; it is king. A body that doesn't suffer (the pain of) separation is always a graveyard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;घट / ghaT&amp;quot; is literally a clay pot. In Kabir, it's a common metaphor for a person's body, in the sense of physical frame (not corpse).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;बिरहा / birahaa&amp;quot; literally means separation but connotes the pain one feels at being parted from a loved one. Kabir says that although we consider being parted from a loved one something bad, undergoing that pain is a sign that our love is alive, and so we should honor that pain the way we honor a king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we did not undergo this pain, then the person we are parted from is absent not just physically, but also from our emotions. That makes the absent person effectively dead to us. Since they no longer live in our hearts, our hearts are their graveyard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This दोहा / &lt;em&gt;dohaa&lt;/em&gt;, couplet, of Kabir's exemplifies the tremendous philosophical, psychological, and emotional insight he is celebrated for being able to pack in just two lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Emotionally, if two lovers are separated, each of them does suffer the pangs of separation. Kabir says this is in fact a sign that their love is true, and that if they did not feel such pangs, their love is dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Psychologically, this couplet also serves as consolation to those who are bereaved. Kabir points out that a bereaved person's grief honors the dead person, and keeps that person alive. If the survivor didn't feel such grief, then the person would be truly dead, and the survivor would be that person's eternal graveyard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophically, this couplet is about the individual soul's yearning for union with God. Kabir was at once hard-headed and a mystic; his poetry is antiromantic while being deeply spiritual. He says that our awareness of our distance from God is something that should rule over us like a king. If we lose sight of that awareness, then we are eternally dead in every way that matters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, when Kabir says that birahaa is सुलतान / sultaan, a sultan, that characterization is doing double duty. On the one hand, he's acknowledging that grief is often overmastering, and does rule our emotions as a king would. On the other, he's also saying grief should be honored as a king. Our actions should be governed by our sense of separation from God the way subjects are governed by a king. As always in Kabir, there's a didactic or ethical precept underlying his poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So feeling the pangs of separation is what keeps our love, our loved ones, and our relationship to God alive. If we don't feel them, then all those are dead, and our bodies are just graveyards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: transliterations from Hindi in the question and the answer follow &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; conventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T11:10:05.507" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T11:10:05.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16388" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-18T10:00:52.650" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a book whose title roughly translates to &amp;quot;Way to Oregon&amp;quot;. The author was a person of color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about a group who were involved in trade when Europeans first arrived in America. There were frequent killing bison and natives to clear land for new settlements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was a Bengali version translated from English. I do not remember the genre, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11400" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T10:21:05.947" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T12:20:53.433" Title="Looking for a book whose title roughly translates to Way to Oregon" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-18T20:57:13.847" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have just started reading &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;. I want to improve my English, and since I'm not a native speaker, I have difficulty understanding what &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; means in the following piece of text:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable &lt;strong&gt;raw&lt;/strong&gt; afternoon towards evening.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain what &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; means in this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11404" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-18T23:16:14.693" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T23:16:14.693" Title="What does &quot;raw&quot; mean in this context from Great Expectations?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16391" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16390" CreationDate="2020-11-18T21:10:45.790" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the context of this sentence, &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; refers to the weather. The following definition from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/raw#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; applies here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unpleasantly cold or damp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Pip is saying that the weather that evening was unpleasantly cold or damp. (Later in the same chapter, the escaped convict is described as &amp;quot;glancing about him over the cold wet flat&amp;quot;. The ground appears to be soaked with water, probably for the same reason that the weather is damp.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-18T21:10:45.790" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16344" CreationDate="2020-11-19T09:17:22.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: the only major changes between editions were in the characterisation of Gollum.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can read a summary of revisions to &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit#Revisions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tolkiencollector.com/hobbhist.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tolkien Collector&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were many &lt;em&gt;small&lt;/em&gt; revisions done to the text at various times, including to bring the story of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; more into line with the later epic &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;: for example, &amp;quot;elves, that are now called Gnomes&amp;quot; made it through the first and second editions but was changed to &amp;quot;High Elves of the West, my kin&amp;quot; in the third edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the only &lt;em&gt;large&lt;/em&gt; revision was done in the second revision to the chapter &amp;quot;Riddles in the Dark&amp;quot;, again to make the story of Gollum and his ring consistent with the compelling power of the One Ring as it's written in &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;. Even that didn't change the overall shape of the plot: regardless of Gollum's attitude, the end result was that Bilbo got the ring by accident and it had the power to make him invisible. See also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15583/17&quot;&gt;Was the One Ring&amp;#39;s malevolent nature foreshadowed in the Hobbit? If so, how?&lt;/a&gt; Changes to this chapter are recorded in detail &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ringgame.net/riddles.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certainly the plot of the story was never changed after first publication in such major ways as altering Smaug's fate or adding the Battle of Five Armies. Tolkien was never such a casual writer as to think he &amp;quot;might as well also add an epic battle&amp;quot;: even the Gollum changes were retconned to achieve an in-universe explanation of the original version of the text (namely, Bilbo was lying).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolkien did once attempt to rewrite &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt; to better fit the tone of &lt;em&gt;The Lord of the Rings&lt;/em&gt;, making it less of a children's tale and more of a serious epic. But he abandoned the attempt after just a few chapters, on the advice of reviewers who told him it &amp;quot;just wasn't &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt; (to your title question), or &lt;strong&gt;no&lt;/strong&gt; (to your question of whether Tolkien made such drastic changes/additions in the later parts of the book).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further reading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0618134700&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Douglas A. Anderson (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, 2002&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_The_Hobbit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John D. Rateliff (ed.), &lt;em&gt;The History of the Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;, 2007&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tolkiencollector.com/hobbhist.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Publication History of &lt;em&gt;The Hobbit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; at Tolkien Collector&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15583/17&quot;&gt;Was the One Ring&amp;#39;s malevolent nature foreshadowed in the Hobbit? If so, how?&lt;/a&gt; at Literature SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/15493/31394&quot;&gt;What are the revisions in the (Revised Edition) of The Hobbit?&lt;/a&gt; at Sci-Fi &amp;amp; Fantasy SE&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T09:17:22.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-19T09:31:01.997" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The key thing I remember about this story:&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;In-universe, the folklore goes something like: if you go to the woods, and find the house, and press your face against the glass, there's a sudden horrifying realisation that the reflection you're looking at isn't your own but is the mad scientist looking out at you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is everything else I can recall:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story takes place in either city outskirts/suburbs or a small town. The town/main area ends, then there is some amount of field/parkland before a forest takes over, and there is a local folklore about an abandoned house in the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Supposedly the house belonged to a mad scientist and no one knows what happened to him, he disappeared several (maybe tens of) years ago&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main characters are kids/teens who go to find the house, get inside and have a snoop around, have an adventure and escape. The main character may have been able to see into the woods from his bedroom at night and may have seen the house lights go on one night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They may have found huge amounts of breakfast cereal in the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Things I am not 100% on:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Once inside, the MCs discover a labyrinthine sewer/tunnel network under the house and a terrifying spider creature down there. After/during escaping, it is revealed that the spider creature was in fact the scientist who did some sort of experiment on himself and had been living in the tunnels eating breakfast cereal since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born 1994 and was fairly young when I read this, so I assume it's a 90s/early 2000s book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11409" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T12:42:50.813" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T12:42:50.813" Title="Help identifying a 90s children's horror/adventure story featuring an abandoned house, mad scientist, and spider creature" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16394" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-19T15:50:25.860" Score="3" ViewCount="245" Body="&lt;p&gt;I continue to read &amp;quot;Great Expectations&amp;quot; and there is another question about some words that I'd like to put.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fearful man, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;in a coarse gray&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, with a great &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;iron&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on his leg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I emphasized the words I don't understand. Would you be so kind and tell me what they signify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11404" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T16:29:40.710" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T18:59:21.213" Title="What does &quot;in coarse gray&quot; and &quot;iron&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16394" CreationDate="2020-11-19T17:14:30.923" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Dickens is describing Pip's first encounter with a convict, Magwitch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in a coarse gray&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is shorthand for &amp;quot;coarse gray cloth&amp;quot;. It is uncommon, but not unfamiliar, in English to describe clothes by the cut of their cloth. So you might say of a wealthy lady that she was &amp;quot;in a fur&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;in furs&amp;quot; to mean a fur coat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, I think you're either misquoting the line or quoting it from a mistranslation. I believe the original is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In which case the meaning of &amp;quot;coarse grey&amp;quot; is the same, but it sounds a little more forgiving to the modern ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;coarse gray&amp;quot; here indicates a prison uniform. &amp;quot;Coarse&amp;quot; means the cloth is of poor quality, rough against the skin. Gray was the colour worn by most convicts at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a great iron on his leg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This indicates that the man is shackled: he is wearing a heavy iron manacle and/or chain on his leg to slow him down. The shorthand is similar to the one used above: the reader can draw on the context to work out what the author means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One does not normally wear iron on the body, let alone the singular &amp;quot;a great iron&amp;quot;, so we interpret it as meaning a single large piece of metal. Together with the prison uniform, the reader can now work out that this is an escaped prisoner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens is trying to paint Magwitch as he might be seen by a young boy such as Pip, emphasising the strange and scary aspects of his person. He uses many negative words: Magwitch is &amp;quot;fearful&amp;quot; in appearance, wears &amp;quot;coarse&amp;quot; cloth and comes shackled with &amp;quot;great iron&amp;quot;. The odd turn of speech used in the sentence heightens the sense of fear being communicated to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-11-19T18:59:21.213" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T18:59:21.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16396" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16397" CreationDate="2020-11-19T18:35:50.897" Score="11" ViewCount="1600" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michael Crichton’s 1996 novel “Airframe” opens with two quotations, one of which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The irony of the Information Age is that it has given new respectability to uninformed opinion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is attributed to “Veteran reporter John Lawton, 68, speaking to the American Association of Broadcast Journalists in 1995”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Crichton was a master of blending fact and fiction to the point that it becomes difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. Several of his novels feature “quotations” that are easily identified as fictional as they are attributed to a character in the novel. This particular quotation appears next to another one attributed to the founder of the fictional Norton Aircraft company in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotation in question is in somewhat wide circulation online (use your favorite search engine to verify), sometimes with the full attribution as it appears in the novel, sometimes just “John Lawton”, and I believe I have also seen instances which attribute it to Crichton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an online search for John Lawton reveals nothing other than this quotation, as well as some content which does not look related at all. In short, I cannot verify the existence of the purported author (John Lawton, journalist born in &lt;del&gt;1936/37&lt;/del&gt; 1926/27).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone have reliable information on the origins of said quotation? Is it an actual quotation by an existing person named John Lawton, or entirely fictional—or maybe inspired by some real-world statement and attributed to a fictional character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11262" LastEditorUserId="11262" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T13:00:52.617" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T13:00:52.617" Title="Is the opening quote in Michael Crichton’s “Airframe” real or fictional?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16396" CreationDate="2020-11-19T22:01:04.620" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;It’s a fabrication. Rather than trying to verify the existence (or not) of John Lawton, the simpler route is to try to verify the existence (or not) of The American Association of Broadcast Journalists. Such an organization, if it existed, would have some presence on the internet, if only in a wikipedia article, but any &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&amp;amp;rls=en&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk00H7WiaqA2_wwkPy73ci0dB-oiPyw%3A1605823120163&amp;amp;ei=kOq2X6i8CYiGtQWI-r-wAw&amp;amp;q=%22American%20Association%20of%20Broadcast%20Journalists%22&amp;amp;oq=%22American%20Association%20of%20Broadcast%20Journalists%22&amp;amp;gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQAzIFCAAQzQIyBQgAEM0CMgUIABDNAjoECAAQR1DeNFjBS2CwT2gAcAJ4AIABqwGIAfwBkgEDMS4xmAEAoAEBqgEHZ3dzLXdpesgBCMABAQ&amp;amp;sclient=psy-ab&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwioxJilzY_tAhUIQ60KHQj9DzYQ4dUDCAw&amp;amp;uact=5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;search on the term&lt;/a&gt; reveals only the Crichton quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-11-19T22:01:04.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-11-20T05:12:28.027" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Find ugly meanings in beautiful things.&amp;quot; : Tendency to, in an unbalanced way, hyper focus on the newly found bad aspects of a traditionally praised person, place, or thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Corrupt without being charming.&amp;quot; : Perhaps the only reason the &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; was noticed in the first place is because of our own insecurities or unfavorable traits. Regardless, this new found truth is often excitedly relayed to others with the expectation of receiving praise (being charming) but the message is almost always unwittingly delivered in a self righteous and patronizing way eliciting disgust instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of every &amp;quot;wake up sheeple&amp;quot; person you have met :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11415" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T05:12:28.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-20T05:57:36.570" Score="4" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rudyard Kipling's &lt;em&gt;Kim&lt;/em&gt; (1901) and Rabindranath Tagore's &lt;em&gt;Gora&lt;/em&gt; (1910) have several parallels. Each is about an Irish orphan who passes for Indian. Each is also a Bildungsroman, portraying their respective protagonists' coming into self-realization. The imperialist context informs both novels: the Indian nationalist movement is central to &lt;em&gt;Gora&lt;/em&gt;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Game&lt;/a&gt; underpins the action of &lt;em&gt;Kim&lt;/em&gt;. Both novels deal with the theme of personal identity as shaped by ethnicity, adopted and/or attributed, in a colonial context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stark difference is that Kim is aware of his Irish identity throughout, while Gora discovers that he is not of Indian blood only during the course of the novel. For Gora, discovering that he is adopted and not Indian by birth causes him to question not only his own identity, but also Indianness itself. For Kim, on the other hand, his ability to pass for Indian is an asset, providing a disguise as he conducts espionage on behalf of the Empire. Such parallels and contrasts have been discussed in many fora, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/44296899?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scholarly articles&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.navhindtimes.in/2011/01/15/magazines/panorama/panorama-tagore-and-kipling-two-titans-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;newspaper pieces&lt;/a&gt;. Supriya Chaudhuri has commented that &amp;quot;there is of course a minor industry of articles comparing&amp;quot; the two novels (p. 109).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet I have not come across any discussion that takes into account the &lt;em&gt;Irishness&lt;/em&gt; of both Kim and Gora. Typically, when the novels are compared, the difference between Englishness (or Britishness, more broadly) and Irishness is elided. For example, Dhananjaya Bhat writes: &amp;quot;Strangely enough the heroes of both the world classics were half Indian / half English.&amp;quot; Given that coming of age against a colonial background is at the heart of these novels, the Irishness, specifically, of the protagonists would seem worthy of attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonists' being Irish would problematize any straightforward distinction between a white colonizer and a brown subject. Both novels were written during a tumultuous time for Anglo-Irish relations. At the turn of the 20th century, Ireland was entirely under British rule, but a powerful independence movement led to the formation of the Republic of Ireland in 1921. By virtue of being an Irishman, Kim is situated in opposition to the imperial project, despite being a player on the English side in the Great Game; and while Gora's self-identification as Indian is undercut by his whiteness, his Irishness reinforces his identity as a colonized subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Insofar as Gora and Kim cross the strictly policed boundaries between the Indian and the white man, their Irishness would seem to reinforce their liminality. As Irishmen they could be identified as both colonizers and colonized. The question, then, is this: &lt;strong&gt;how do &lt;em&gt;Kim&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Gora&lt;/em&gt; thematize Irishness in their explorations of subject-formation in the Indian colonial context?&lt;/strong&gt; Perhaps scholarship around the novels has discussed this issue already. If so, I'd be grateful for pointers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bhat, Dhananjaya.&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.navhindtimes.in/2011/01/15/magazines/panorama/panorama-tagore-and-kipling-two-titans-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tagore and Kipling: Two Titans of Literature&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;Navhind Times&lt;/em&gt; (Panjim, Goa), 15 January 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chaudhuri, Supriya. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/2432109/The_Nation_and_Its_Fictions_History_and_Allegory_in_Tagores_Gora_in_South_Asia_Journal_of_South_Asian_Studies_Routledge_35_1_2012_97_117&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Nation and Its Fictions: History and Allegory in Tagore's &lt;em&gt;Gora&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies&lt;/em&gt; 35:1 (2012), 97-117.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T08:55:35.867" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T08:55:35.867" Title="How does Irishness affect subject-formation and national identification in Kipling's *Kim* and Tagore's *Gora*?" Tags="&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;rudyard-kipling&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16342" CreationDate="2020-11-20T12:16:06.513" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was fine for ordinary conversation and non-creative writing, but perhaps not good enough to capture the expressivity of his Bengali originals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore was curiously diffident about his English. On 6 May 1913, the year after the English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; had been published to great acclaim, he wrote a letter in Bengali to his niece Indiradevi Chaudhurani. Chaudhurani's own partial translation of this says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That I cannot write English is such a patent fact that I never had even the vanity to feel ashamed of it. If anybody wrote an English note asking me to tea, I never felt equal to answering it. Perhaps you think that by now I have got over the delusion. By no means. That I have written in English seems to be the delusion. (p. 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet this same letter goes on to say that he felt impelled to translate his poems into English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did not undertake this task in a spirit of reckless bravado. I simply felt an urge to recapture through the medium of another language the feelings and sentiments which had created such a feast of joy within me in the days gone by.  (p. 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems confident enough that the act of translating into English would enable him to &amp;quot;recapture&amp;quot; his &amp;quot;feelings and sentiments&amp;quot;; this comports uneasily with the claim that he feels incapable of responding to a polite social note in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the long introduction to his 2011 edition of &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, William Radice translates a subsequent portion of this letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English language there are all these slippery things like articles, prepositions, &amp;quot;shall&amp;quot; versus &amp;quot;will&amp;quot;: they can't be got right with common sense—they have to be learned. I have the notion that they're all living somewhere in my &amp;quot;subliminal consciousness&amp;quot; like worms underground. When I let go of the rudder and sit down to write with my eyes shut, they all come creeping out of the dark to do their stuff—but if I look at them in the light of full consciousness they wriggle off again all higgledy-piggledy—so in the end I feel that I can't rely on them at all. That's why it's still true to say that I don't know English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Tagore is saying here is that he is self-conscious about his English. As long as he doesn't think about it, he manages to wield the language fluently enough; as soon as he begins to reason his way to a conscious understanding of the rules of the language, he loses his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, his fluency in the language was never raised as an issue in any of the social interactions he had with English speakers in India, the UK, and the US. Radice's Appendix E contains a narrative by one John Rattray about his meeting Tagore in 1938. Rattray says Tagore &amp;quot;spoke in English with a fine choice of words&amp;quot;. Likewise, Radice discusses the enthusiastic accounts Tagore's audience in London gave of the 1912 evening where he first read out his own translations at a soirée arranged by the painter William Rothenstein. None of the accounts feels the need to make any sort of allowance for Tagore's English; they all suggest that Tagore held his own perfectly well in that language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore's letters in English read just fine as well. For example, Radice quotes one to Thomas Sturge Moore. Tagore bemoans the poor job he has done with his own translations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am convinced that I myself in my translations have done a grave injustice to my own work. My English is like a frail boat—and to save it from an utter disaster I had to jettison the most important part of its cargo. But the cargo being a living one it has been mutilated: which is a literary crime that carries its own punishment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with the letter to his niece, here too Tagore's words can't be taken entirely at face value. There is a lack of concord between what is being claimed (&amp;quot;I don't know English&amp;quot;) and the medium in which he expresses that claim (a perfectly well-written letter in that language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore's speeches on various occasions also show a better than adequate command of the English language. In 1917, during a tour of the US, he delivered a lecture on &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tagoreweb.in/Essays/nationalism-216/nationalism-in-india-2626&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nationalism in India&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. The lecture was written specifically for the occasion, and therefore originally in English. Here is a well-known passage from the essay:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many people in this country ask me what is happening as to the caste distinctions in India. But when this question is asked me, it is usually done with a superior air. And I feel tempted to put the same question to our American critics with a slight modification, ‘What have you done with the Red Indian and the Negro?’ For you have not got over your attitude of caste toward them. You have used violent methods to keep aloof from other races, but until you have solved the question here in America, you have no right to question India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage is eloquently argued and does not suggest that the writer is struggling to express himself in the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we have Tagore's translations of poetry from English into Bengali. In 1886, long before he began translating his poetry into English, Tagore published a collection called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/KariOKomal/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;কড়ি ও কোমল&lt;/a&gt; / ka.Di o komal&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Sharps and Flats&amp;quot;. The collection included a group of about 15 poems by poets such as Percy Shelley, Christina Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, among others, rendered into Bengali by Tagore. The poems are collectively called &lt;em&gt;বিদেশী ফূলের গুচ্ছ / videshii phuuler guchchha&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;A Bouquet of Foreign Flowers.&amp;quot; At the age of 25, then, Tagore was comfortable enough to be reading English poetry and translating it, quite competently, into Bengali.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of this negates the fact that Tagore's translations of his own works into English did them no justice. Tagore himself diagnosed the problem in a letter to Ezra Pound, which Radice quotes in a footnote to his introduction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then again I do not know the exact value of your English words. Some of them may have their souls worn out by constant use and some others may not have acquired their souls yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is somewhat cryptic. I think it means that Tagore knew that English was always a second language to him. He did not have an instinctive sense for the exact word that would capture his meaning; he was in danger of lapsing into cliché (&amp;quot;souls worn out by constant use&amp;quot;) or newfangled strangeness (&amp;quot;may not have acquired their souls yet&amp;quot;). Anybody who has studied a second language can sympathize. It is a lot easier to translate &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; the second language into the first rather than vice-versa. And while expository prose might be easy enough to translate, translating creative works requires deftness in the target language. Tagore's Bengali originals are revolutionary in their use of language—his diction and inventiveness transformed Bengali literature. He lacked the capacity for the same deft originality in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Exacerbating the issue was the slapdash way in which he went about his translations. He found the task of translation tedious; but demand for his work was high, and he was under pressure to deliver work to his publishers. In 1913 itself, only a few months after the publication of the English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, he complained to Rothenstein:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it is a mere business and it tires me. This cold blooded literary craftsmanship, this weighing of words and expressions is utterly wearisome. I am pining for the touch of life ... (Quoted in Radice's introduction)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For Tagore, translation was mere craftsmanship, dull and lifeless. It seems fair to say that his command of English, while fluent enough for transactional interactions, was not good enough to spark a creative impulse. His letter to Indiradevi Chaudhurani mentions that he set about translating his poems into English as a way to recapture the joy he had felt and had been able to express in Bengali. As such, he was able to proceed pretty unselfconsciously with that experiment. But once that experiment succeeded, and once he was tasked with translating more of his work in short order, his self-consciousness kicked in. At that point, whether he found any joy in English itself, whether he had any desire to explore the possibilities of that language as a literary medium, is open to question. The unfortunate combination of haste and lack of interest probably accounts for the poor quality of his own translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagore, Rabindranath. &amp;quot;Genesis of English &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. Letter to Indiradevi Chaudhurani, 6 May 1913. Trans. Indiradevi Chaudhurani. &lt;em&gt;Indian Literature&lt;/em&gt; 2:1 (1958–1959): 3–4.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali: Song Offerings&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. and intro. William Radice. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-20T13:16:45.737" LastActivityDate="2020-11-20T13:16:45.737" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16402" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16403" CreationDate="2020-11-21T01:54:21.997" Score="7" ViewCount="1213" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quote from &lt;em&gt;Seabiscuit: An American Legend&lt;/em&gt; by Laura Hillenbrand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The horseless carriage was just arriving in San Francisco, and its debut was turning into one of those colorfully unmitigated disasters that bring misery to everyone but historians. Consumers were staying away from the “devilish contraptions” in droves. In San Francisco in 1903, &lt;strong&gt;the horse and buggy was not going the way of the horse and buggy.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know horse and buggy literally means horse carriage, so in this case, does it mean carriage had special status at the time, which is different than what we commonly comprehend? But I think this should have something to do with automobiles since this chapter is mainly focusing on how people repelled cars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T08:27:06.197" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T08:28:13.297" Title="What does &quot;the horse and buggy was not going the way of the horse and buggy&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;laura-hillenbrand&gt;&lt;seabiscuit-an-american-legend&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16402" CreationDate="2020-11-21T02:12:18.640" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that the horse and buggy was not yet obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/go+the+way+of+the+horse+and+buggy&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Going the way of the horse and buggy&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; implies becoming outmoded and useless, because cars have replaced horse-drawn carriages. But in 1903, when I was but a wee lad, the horse and buggy was still the prevalent mode of transport. It had not yet been replaced by the &amp;quot;horseless carriage&amp;quot; (cars). As the passage says, cars were just beginning to be seen in Frisco at the time. They were far from displacing horse-drawn carriages for transportation. Hence the last sentence: &amp;quot;In 1903, the horse and buggy was not [yet] going the way of the horse and buggy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T08:28:13.297" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T08:28:13.297" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16404" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15993" CreationDate="2020-11-21T10:04:41.450" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The boundaries of expectation set by a story's narration fall under the general heading of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narration#Narrative_point_of_view&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;point of view&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. In itself, point of view is a simple concept: what is the relationship of the narrator to the narrative? Or more simply still, who's telling the story, and when? This simplicity itself reveals the foundational nature of point of view to the unfolding of a story. Writing in 1921, Percy Lubbock &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.207865/page/n265/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that narrative technique comes down entirely to point of view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view — the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story.  (p. 251)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer's choice and deployment of point of view determine how the reader is situated vis-à-vis the world of the story. Point of view is what sets the boundaries of expectation for the reader. For example, a story told from the point of view of an omniscient narrator engenders the expectation that this narrator is trustworthy and represents the author's own point of view. A story told from a first-person perspective can be used to engender either sympathy for the narrator or, by portraying the narrator as unreliable, ironic distance. By switching points of view within a narrative, as in an epistolary novel, the writer can ensure that the reader has access to multiple perspectives on a single situation, and perhaps to information that the characters themselves don't all know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Point of view allows the writer to not only control what information the reader has about the action, but also manipulate the reader's response. One of the most celebrated of such manipulations occurs in Agatha Christie's &lt;em&gt;The Murder of Roger Ackroyd&lt;/em&gt; (1926).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel is narrated in the first person by Dr James Sheppard. Sheppard tells the reader that he has been to a dinner party at Roger Ackroyd's place, and that following the dinner, he had a private conversation with Ackroyd. He further narrates how later that evening, he receives a phone call asking him to return to Ackroyd's home as Ackroyd's murdered body has been discovered. At the end of the novel, we learn that Sheppard himself murdered Ackroyd during their conversation, then returned home. Sheppard has just omitted that part from his narration until the detective, Hercule Poirot, uncovers the truth and taxes him with it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Christie superbly manipulates the expectations set by the first-person narration. Sheppard is presented as intelligent and kindly, and even as Poirot's collaborator in solving the crime. His own culpability comes as a huge shock simply because there has been no hint in the narration that he is an unreliable or untrustworthy narrator. This plot twist was considered very controversial in its day, and its effect on first-time readers of the novel remains powerful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie's novel exemplifies the importance of point of view in not only telling a story, but also shaping the reader's response to it. Point of view engenders certain expectations in the reader; a large part of the effect of a narrative depends upon the writer's conforming to or subverting those expectations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lubbock, Percy. &lt;em&gt;The Craft of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;. London: Jonathan Cape, 1921, rept. 1963.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T10:04:41.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-21T15:20:52.087" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's novel &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt; makes a few references to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankim_Chandra_Chatterjee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's&lt;/a&gt; novel &lt;em&gt;Vishabriksha&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;The Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt;, which was first published in 1873. (The passages below are quoted from Sukhendu Ray's translation, which is included in &lt;em&gt;The Definitive Tagore&lt;/em&gt;, published by Rupa Publications, 2017.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 12, we find the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mahendra gave a dry laugh. &amp;quot;Have I given any thought to Binodini? A jolly good question. In fact, you can say I am literally obsessed with her thoughts so much so that she has driven away everything else from y mind.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Behind her veil, Asha made a gesture of silent admonition to her husband.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Really, is it so?&amp;quot; Bihari said, &amp;quot;Is it another enactment of Bankimchandra's novel &lt;em&gt;Brishabriksa&lt;/em&gt;?&#xA;&amp;quot;Absolutely,&amp;quot; said Mahendra, &amp;quot;Chuni can't wait to get rid of her.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 28, the same novel is mentioned again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Binodini promptly hid the book under her sari. Mahendra tried to grab the book, and after a tussle he succeeded in beating Binodini down. The book turned out to be Bankimchandra's &lt;em&gt;Bishabriksha&lt;/em&gt;. Binodini was left fuming with rage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Bankimchandra is also mentioned in Chapter Seven (&amp;quot;volumes of works by Bankimchandra and Dinabandhu next to his [Bihari's] bed&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since a large part of the novel is about the adulterous relationship between Mahendra and the widow Binodini, the references to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's &lt;em&gt;Bishabriksha&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Vishabriksha&lt;/em&gt; could be more than just coincidence. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out what that novel is about. Is Tagore alluding to something in that novel that might illuminate what is going on in &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T12:56:49.310" Title="Does Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Vishabriksha have a special meaning in Tagore's Chokher Bali?" Tags="&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;chokher-bali&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16406" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16407" CreationDate="2020-11-21T16:07:17.373" Score="1" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book I of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856), the eponymous narrator describes the experience of reading poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                But the sun was high&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When first I felt my pulses set themselves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For concords; when the rhythmic turbulence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of blood and brain swept outward upon words,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As wind upon the alders, blanching them&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By turning up their under-natures till&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They trembled in dilation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a simile in which the reader corresponds to the wind and the words of the poem to the alders. But how exactly does the simile work? How does reading a poem “blanch” the words? How does wind “blanch” the alders? What are the “under-natures” of words and of trees? In what way do trees and words “tremble” and “dilate”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T09:37:41.007" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T09:37:41.007" Title="What does Elizabeth Browning mean by &quot;turning up their under-natures&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16407" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16406" CreationDate="2020-11-21T16:07:17.373" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let’s take the trees first. The “under-natures” are the undersides of the leaves, which are “turned up” (made visible) by the wind, and since the undersides are paler than the upper surfaces of the leaves, this makes the whole tree appear paler, “blanching” it. The leaves “tremble” (vibrate) in the air currents, and the whole tree “dilates” (spreads out, widens) as its branches are bent by the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the words. The “under-natures” are the hidden meanings, nuances, connotations and allusions of the words, which are “turned up” (discovered, identified) by the reader. The words of the poems “tremble” (come alive) with “dilation”, that is, the expansion or enlargement of meaning produced by these discoveries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How exactly this “blanches” the poem I am not entirely sure. The word “blanch” normally has negative connotations—to bleach, make pale, whitewash—but those senses do not seem right in this context. It seems that Browning uses “blanch” to mean “whiten” in the sense “to make morally or spiritually pure” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Here’s another use of the word, from book VII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No sun could die, nor yet be born, unseen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By dwellers at my villa: morn and eve&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Were magnified before us in the pure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Illimitable space and pause of sky,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Intense as angels’ garments &lt;strong&gt;blanched&lt;/strong&gt; with God,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Less blue than radiant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word “white” is also used elsewhere in the poem to mean “pure, good”, for example a portrait of the narrator’s deceased mother is described as “swan-like supernatural white life” (book I), and Marian’s “whiteness” (goodness) is “to be found / through all dark facts” (book VI).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-21T17:28:37.243" LastActivityDate="2020-11-21T17:28:37.243" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16408" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10837" CreationDate="2020-11-22T01:25:01.000" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It refers to a person who sees, say, a beautiful landscape painting and chooses to sneer that the painter obviously doesn't like people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is corrupt -- he's ascribing evil motives on insufficient evidence -- and repulsive rather than charming.  Wilde is being witty here and saying that being charm is enough to mitigate being corrupt, but these people don't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T01:25:01.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16409" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-22T03:10:24.767" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m looking to find some books I read as a child: a collection of stories about a young boy involved with motocross or dirt biking. This was in the UK in the 90s. One of the stories featured a rival putting sugar in the protagonist’s petrol tank. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11427" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T03:10:24.767" Title="Children’s stories about motocross" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16410" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3264" CreationDate="2020-11-22T03:42:29.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am a NZ poet who knew Hone. Here is the answer you seek from Auckland University, NZ: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/06/ka_mate06_deloughrey.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elizabeth DeLoughrey, &amp;quot;Solar Metaphors: ‘No Ordinary Sun’&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;ka mate ka ora: a new zealand journal of poetry and poetics&lt;/em&gt; 6 (2008)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although this poem does not once mention nuclear weaponry, ‘No Ordinary Sun’is universally interpreted as an allegory of atomic apocalypse. [...] Readers have often assumed that the poem reflects Tuwhare’s vision of the destruction caused by the two atomic weapons, ‘Little Boy’and ‘Fat Man,’dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945. This is understandable because barely a year later, Tuwhare was stationed in Japan withthe New Zealand division of the British Commonwealth Occupational Force and travelled through Hiroshima, witnessing first-hand the ongoing devastation of the city (see Hunt 49). [...] In his commentary on ‘No Ordinary Sun’Tuwhare explained that ‘the main theme is[...] the horror and desolation that an H-bomb would bring, something I feel very strongly[ ...] I am aware all the time of the threat that is hanging over our world’(Hunt 49).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The citations to &amp;quot;Hunt 49&amp;quot; refer to the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1869620259&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Janet Hunt, &lt;em&gt;Hone Tuwhare: A biography&lt;/em&gt;, Auckland: Godwit, 1998&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11428" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T09:58:38.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T09:58:38.030" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16405" CreationDate="2020-11-22T11:32:32.710" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore's progressive take on the plight of widows rebukes Chatterjee's retrograde portrayal of widow remarriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Rabindranath Tagore's &lt;em&gt;চোখের বালি / chokher baali&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;A Speck of Sand in the Eye&amp;quot; (1903), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel &lt;em&gt;বিষবৃক্ষ / viShavR^ikSha&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;The Poison Tree&amp;quot; (1873)  takes as its subject the position of widows in Bengali Hindu society. The central situation of the novels is similar: a married man falls in love with a young widow living in his household. That is why, when Mahendra says that he is obsessed with Binodini, Bihari asks him whether he is reënacting &lt;em&gt;Bishabriksha&lt;/em&gt;. This subject matter also explains Binodini's embarrassment and humiliation when Mahendra catches her reading Chatterjee's novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chatterjee was one of the pioneers of the novel in India. His works were both tremendously popular and hugely influential. Tagore's examination of the plight of a young widow of necessity grappled with Chatterjee's earlier treatment of the same subject. The scholar Sudhir Chandra &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4377663&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So seminal and continuing became the influence of [Chatterjee's] fictional depiction of widows that no subsequent Bengali novelist of note ... could feel free from its weight while dealing with this theme. For example, in his &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt; (1902), the first work to surpass Bankim's depiction of widows, Tagore alludes to &lt;em&gt;Vishabriksha&lt;/em&gt; more than once as an aid to characterization, using it symbolically to denote and in the course of the narrative neutralize a particular attitude towards widows.  (p. WS-56)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore uses &lt;em&gt;The Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt; as a foil to his own novel. He develops his progressive stance on the status of widows in explicit contrast to Chatterjee's reactionary one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Historical Background&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 18th and 19th C. India, girls were often married off very young, even before reaching puberty. Typically their husbands were much older. After her marriage, a girl would continue to live with her parents until menarche, after which she was sent to live with her husband. Given the disparity in age between the spouses, a considerable number of girls were widowed even before reaching puberty, and an even greater number of young women lost their husbands while still in their teens. Social custom prevented a widow, even one who had never lived with her husband as a wife, from remarrying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through the efforts of the social reformer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishwar_Chandra_Vidyasagar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar&lt;/a&gt;, widow remarriage was explicitly legalized in 1856. The action of Chatterjee's novel, written 17 years after the passage of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Widows%27_Remarriage_Act,_1856&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act&lt;/a&gt;, demonstrates the gap between the putatively legal and the socially acceptable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Plot summary of &lt;em&gt;The Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wealthy and handsome Nagendra is married to Suryamukhi. As an act of charity, he also provides a home for a young widow, Kunda. Nagendra and Kunda fall in love. The self-sacrificing Suryamukhi encourages Nagendra to take Kunda as his second wife, but runs away from home immediately after the marriage. This causes Nagendra to realize how much he loves Suryamukhi, and he sets out to find her and bring her back home. The two are reunited, and feeling guilty at having come between them, Kunda commits suicide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Relevance to &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt;, Suryamukhi is depicted as a devoted wife entirely subservient to her husband. While Kunda's bleak life as a young widow is depicted sensitively, Kunda herself is rather wet; Sudhir Chandra comments that she &amp;quot;lacks even the will to want her own welfare&amp;quot; (p. WS-56). Tagore's portrayal of the wife and the widow inverts Chatterjee's: Mahendra's wife, Asha, is practically illiterate and relatively placid. Binodini, on the other hand, is intelligent, lively, and talented. Her zest for life makes her position as a young widow even more poignant. These contrasts point to a deeper difference between the two novels' portrayal of the social situation of widows and the legitimacy of their desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though Nagendra in &lt;em&gt;The Poison Tree&lt;/em&gt; is already married, his second marriage to Kunda would have been legal; in India, polygamy among Hindus was not barred by law until 1956. But marriage does not bring Kunda any happiness. It also blights the life of her husband and co-wife. Chatterjee casts a remarried widow as a poison tree who is unfaithful to the memory of her first husband, and incapable of being a good wife to her second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore, on the other hand, portrays Binodini with great sensitivity and psychological insight. Dependent on Mahendra's family for her material needs, she makes herself indispensable to them. Asha lacks the skill to manage the household, so all those tasks fall to Binodini. Blind to risk, Asha urges her husband to get to know Binodini better. Mahendra's sexual desire for Asha has played itself out, and he has nothing else in common with her. He finds himself drawn to the vivacious and spirited Binodini. Binodini eventually carries on a half-hearted affair with him, but she is quite clear in her own mind that the man she really desires is his friend Bihari. She even lets Bihari know of her desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While Chatterjee does portray the state of widowhood with sympathy, the widow herself is not presented as a complex human being. Furthermore, Kunda's desire is presented as dangerous, poisoning those around her. The only antidote is for her to poison herself. That is to say, Chatterjee's novel presents widows as passive; treats their desire as dangerous and illegitimate; and indicates that they are better off dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore reacts to this deeply reactionary portrayal. He is no less sympathetic to the state of widowhood—Binodini is as wretchedly dependent on Mahendra as Kunda is on Nagendra. While Chatterjee blames Kunda for harming Nagendra's and Suryamukhi's marriage, Tagore shows that Mahendra and Asha are culpable for the failure of their relationship. The selfish, spoiled Mahendra pursues Binodini only because he has tired of his vapid wife. Tagore also skillfully underlines the power differential between Mahendra and Binodini. Even though she accedes to the affair, the disparity in their situations and her dependence on him makes the question of her consent moot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the novel, Binodini turns down Bihari's proposal of marriage, since there is no living down the scandal that has erupted after her name has been linked with Mahendra's. She also makes it clear that she does not wish Bihari to marry her only out of charity, as a way of making an honest woman out of her. Instead, she accepts a job he offers her at a distant place, as an attendant at a medical sanatorium. The job is beneath her talents, but it affords her independence, a vanishingly rare commodity for widows in that society and era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paradoxically, although Chatterjee's novel shows an actual widow remarriage and Tagore's does not, &lt;em&gt;Chokher Bali&lt;/em&gt; espouses the more progressive ideals. For Chatterjee, widows, particularly those who remarry, are a poison tree. Tagore shows that the poison tree isn't so much the widow and her desires; rather, the poison stems from the social norms that circumscribe Binodini's possibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sanskrit /v/ being assimilated to Bengali /b/, the Bengali script does not differentiate between the two letters. Likewise, the inherent or default vowel of Sanskrit, /ə/, becomes /o/ in Bengali. Hence the title of Chatterjee's novel is transliterated, interchangeably, &lt;em&gt;Vishavriksha&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Bishabriksha&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Bishabriksho&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Bishavriksha&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Vishobriksha&lt;/em&gt; or, you get the idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chandra, Sudhir. “Conflicted Beliefs and Men's Consciousness about Women: Widow Marriage in Later Nineteenth Century Indian Literature.” &lt;em&gt;Economic and Political Weekly&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 22, no. 44, 1987, pp. WS55–WS62. JSTOR, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4377663&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/4377663&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 22 Nov. 2020.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T12:56:49.310" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T12:56:49.310" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16413" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-22T13:54:03.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T13:54:03.597" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T13:54:03.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16414" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-22T13:54:03.597" Score="0" Body="For questions about the US author Laura Hillenbrand (born 1967) or about any of her literary works." OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T15:01:08.993" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T15:01:08.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16415" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-22T13:55:00.367" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T13:55:00.367" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T13:55:00.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16416" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-22T13:55:00.367" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 2001 book Seabiscuit: An American Legend, the debut of American author Laura Hillenbrand. Use in conjunction with [laura-hillenbrand]." OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T15:01:18.380" LastActivityDate="2020-11-22T15:01:18.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16417" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16428" CreationDate="2020-11-22T14:53:14.783" Score="2" ViewCount="249" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have an assignment where I have to write a Shakespearean sonnet for my professor (who is very strict about the formatting of the assignment). Are there any ways/tricks in which I can figure out if my poem is in iambic pentameter (which is the format Shakespeare used) besides just having to sound it out?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And just speculation: If Shakespeare wrote all of his sonnets in iambic pentameter, then why are the words 'Shakespearean Sonnet' not in an iambic rhythm?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11431" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-22T21:48:30.173" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T07:41:27.297" Title="How to figure out if something is iambic pentameter?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16418" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16419" CreationDate="2020-11-22T16:47:21.927" Score="3" ViewCount="185" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/shakespearean-sonnet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespearean sonnet&lt;/a&gt; is frequently used for sonnets with a particular verse pattern and rhyme scheme, namely ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. But from what I can find with a little reading online, this style of sonnets in English was not pioneered by Shakespeare (others had used it before him). I'm not sure whether all of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_sonnets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's sonnets&lt;/a&gt; were written in this style, although I suspect the answer is yes. So my question, trying to understand the connection between this style of sonnets and the specific author Shakespeare, is in three parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Where did this style of sonnets really originate? Are they at least genuinely &amp;quot;Elizabethan sonnets&amp;quot;, or do they predate the Elizabethan period too? Was the same verse/rhyme scheme used in other languages previously, or are they genuinely &amp;quot;English sonnets&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were all of Shakespeare's sonnets actually &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnets&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is this style of sonnet referred to as Shakespearean? Did he popularise it so much more than other writers, was he the first person to write &lt;em&gt;successfully&lt;/em&gt; (by some measure) in that style, or what?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T11:53:57.727" Title="Why are Shakespearean sonnets called Shakespearean sonnets?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16419" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16418" CreationDate="2020-11-22T22:55:40.813" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As already discussed &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14748/2191&quot;&gt;elsewhere on this site&lt;/a&gt;, Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1516-1547) introduced the sonnet into English literature. While doing so, they also introduced a few changes, which are probably due to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the lower number of rhyming words in English,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a tendency towards pointed arguments, as exemplified earlier in Chaucer's &amp;quot;rhyme royal&amp;quot; (Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador, in Schabert 2009, page 572).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyatt introduced the rhyming couplet at the end of the sonnet; Surrey replaced the Petrarcan sequence of octave and sestet with three quatrains that use the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF.[1] The &amp;quot;volta&amp;quot; now came after the third quatrain instead of after the second. Wyatt and Surrey introduced the sonnet and their innovations during the reign of King Henry VIII, so the English sonnet form predates the Elizabethan era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare used the English sonnet form for his own sonnets, or at least most of them. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45093/sonnet-33-full-many-a-glorious-morning-have-i-seen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 33&lt;/a&gt;, for example, the volta comes after the eighth line (see also Post, page 11-12). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 18&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45090/sonnet-29-when-in-disgrace-with-fortune-and-mens-eyes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 29&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/sonnet-44/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 44&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45100/sonnet-94-they-that-have-power-to-hurt-and-will-do-none&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 94&lt;/a&gt; are also &amp;quot;Petrarcan&amp;quot; in the sense that the volta comes after line 8.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50649/sonnet-126-o-thou-my-lovely-boy-who-in-thy-powr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sonnet&amp;quot; 126&lt;/a&gt; is unusual in two ways: it entirely written in rhyming couplets and is only 12 lines long instead of 14.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above deviations show that Shakespeare used the English sonnet form less consistently than the term &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot; suggests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The publication of Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophel_and_Stella&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Astrophil and Stella&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1591 started a fashion for sonnet sequences, such as Edmund Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; (1594), Samuel Daniel's &lt;em&gt;Delia&lt;/em&gt; (1592) and Michael Drayton's &lt;em&gt;Idea's Mirror&lt;/em&gt; (1494). This shows that Shakespeare was definitely not the first poet who used the English sonnet form successfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fashion for sonnet sequences had probably already passed by the time Shakespeare's sonnets were published in 1609. However,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The greatest of the succeeding sequences [i.e. succeeding &lt;em&gt;Astrophil and Stella&lt;/em&gt;] was undoubtedly Shakespeare's, (...).&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;(Wynne-Davies, page 260)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is probably why the term &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot; is more common than &amp;quot;English sonnet&amp;quot;.[2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. H. W. Crossland (&lt;em&gt;The English Sonnet&lt;/em&gt;, page 38) makes a more radical claim (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This form of sonnet was&#xA;written before Shakespeare, but Shakespeare&#xA;appropriated it to himself, and every one of&#xA;his sonnets is so rhymed. Even in Sonnet 145&#xA;the rhyme scheme is maintained, and the&#xA;sonnet &amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot; to Romeo and Juliet is&#xA;similarly rhymed. The form is usually known&#xA;as the Shakespearean. We call it the English&#xA;sonnet pure and simple, because it was the&#xA;first perfect form of sonnet to take root in the&#xA;language. &lt;strong&gt;It is doubtful whether since the&#xA;time of Shakespeare a really satisfactory&#xA;sonnet in that form has been written.&lt;/strong&gt; All&#xA;manner of poets have tried their hands and&#xA;their wings. Perhaps, with the single exception&#xA;of Michael Drayton, they have failed, and&#xA;Drayton may be said to have succeeded in&#xA;only one sonnet. In a sense, possibly, &lt;strong&gt;we may&#xA;regret that Shakespeare handled this beautiful&#xA;form with such mastery; for after him, flight&#xA;in it seems not only vain but presumptuous,&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;and the most self-reliant poet will think twice&#xA;before obeying an impulsion which seems&#xA;likely to result in &amp;quot;four quatrains clinched by&#xA;a couplet.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This implies that the English sonnet is often called the Shakespearean sonnet because no one has mastered the form like Shakespeare, neither before nor after him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Crossland, T. H. W.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924079605592&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Sonnet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Martin Secker, 1917.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Post, Jonathan F. S.: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schabert, Ina (editor): &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Handbuch. Die Zeit - Der Mensch - Das Werk - Die Nachwelt&lt;/em&gt;. Fifth revised edition. Kröner, 2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wynne-Davies, Marion (editor): &lt;em&gt;The Renaissance. A Guide to English Renaissance Literature: 1500–1660&lt;/em&gt;. Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 1994 [1992].&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] This should not be taken to imply that Surrey consistently used this rhyme scheme, as Peter Shor pointed out in a comment. For example, Surrey's sonnet &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/inever.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I never saw my Lady lay apart&lt;/a&gt; uses the rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFFE GG. It is also worth comparing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dorthonion.com/drmcm/english_lit/supplementary/petrarch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wyatt's and Surrey's translations of Petrarch's sonnet 140&lt;/a&gt;: Surrey's translation uses the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF, whereas Wyatt's translation &lt;em&gt;attempts&lt;/em&gt; to follow the rhyme scheme ABBA CDDC EFFE GG but deviates from it in the third quatrain (assuming that &amp;quot;die&amp;quot; in the last couplet rhymed with &amp;quot;faithfully&amp;quot; according to the rules of Early Modern English).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] So far, I have been unable to find out who coined the phrase &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T11:53:57.727" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T11:53:57.727" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16420" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T00:32:18.693" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;The large majority of poems in the English version of Tagore's &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; address a supreme being. Tagore uses the pronouns &amp;quot;thou&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;thee&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;thy&amp;quot; in almost all of these 103 poems. However, a few use &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/49&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;49: You came down from your throne and stood at my cottage door&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the poems that use &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; appear to have a different addressee, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/45&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;45&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;62&lt;/a&gt;, where the addressee seems to be a normal human being. However, poem 49 is not addressed at an ordinary human being but at the same supreme being that is addressed in most of the poems. Does this reflect a variation in pronouns in the Bengali texts that Tagore translated. (Some of these were not from the Bengali &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;.) Or does it have a different reason that I have failed to notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:22:45.873" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:22:45.873" Title="Why does Tagore not consistently use ‘thou’ when addressing the supreme being in Gitanjali?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;gitanjali&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16421" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-23T01:44:36.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T01:44:36.467" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T01:44:36.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16422" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-23T01:44:36.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel Chokher Bali (চোখের বালি / chokher baali &quot;A Speck of Sand in the Eye&quot;), published in 1903 in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore. Should also be tagged with [rabindranath-tagore] and [bengali-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T05:51:32.927" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T05:51:32.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16423" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T04:46:39.963" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;Towards the very end of her novel, Avni portrays a scene where the protagonist Antara is together with all the characters introduced in the novel (except Kali Mata). They are having a family get together. Towards the very end, her mother again starts behaving erratically. At the same time, Avni paints a picture, which can be perceived as Antara was dreaming about this whole scene. That this is not reality. For example, all the family members are singing in a language which is foreign to Antara. She is screaming and no one can hear her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is Avni Doshi trying to convey here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11440" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T07:30:14.300" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T07:30:14.300" Title="What did Avni Doshi try to convey towards the very end of &quot;Girl in White Cotton&quot; / &quot;Burnt Sugar&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;avni-doshi&gt;&lt;girl-in-white-cotton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16424" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T04:50:31.563" Score="5" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Story of Doctor Dolittle&lt;/em&gt;, the author writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the Cat’s-meat-Man wasn’t very rich and he only got sick once a year—at Christmas-time, when he used to give the Doctor sixpence for a bottle of medicine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the implication that the man gets drunk every Christmas and is given treatment for his hangover?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11438" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T05:46:13.233" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T07:00:30.067" Title="In &quot;The Story of Doctor Dolittle&quot;, why does the cat's meat man get sick every Christmas-time?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;doctor-dolittle&gt;&lt;hugh-lofting&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16425" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T08:41:09.380" Score="4" ViewCount="90" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's 1886 collection of verse &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/KariOKomal/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;কড়ি ও কোমল&lt;/a&gt; / ka.Di o komal&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Sharps and Flats&amp;quot;, includes a set of 15 or so poems under the general heading &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/KariOKomal/page/n58/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;বিদেশী ফূলের গুচ্ছ&lt;/a&gt; / videshii phuuler guchchha&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;A Bouquet of Foreign Flowers&amp;quot;. The poems lack titles. Instead, each is preceded by the name of a poet from whom Tagore is translating: &amp;quot;Shelley&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Mrs Browning&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Ernest Myers&amp;quot;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the poems are well-known enough that the translation rings a bell. For example, the first poem, marked &amp;quot;Shelley&amp;quot;, begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;মধুর সূর্জ্যর আলো, আকাশ বিমল,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;সঘনে উঠিছে নাচি তরঙ্গ উজ্জ্বল।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     মধ্যান্হের স্বচ্ছ করে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     সাজিয়াছে থরে থরে&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ক্ষুদ্র নীল দ্বীপগুলী, শুভ্র-শৈল-শির&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;madhur suurjyer aalo, aakaash vimal&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;saghane uThichhe naachi tara~Nga ujjwal.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     madhyaanher svachchha kare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     saajiyaachhe thare thare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;kShudra niil dviipagulii, shubhra-shail-shira&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soft sunlight, a clear sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dancing, bright waves have oft risen.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     In midday's clean hands&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     have been arranged, layer by layer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;tiny blue islands, and white, rocky summits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is recognizably Shelley's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45140/stanzas-written-in-dejection-near-naples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sun is warm, the sky is clear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          The waves are dancing fast and bright,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     Blue isles and snowy mountains wear&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     The purple noon's transparent might&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, the poem headed &amp;quot;Mrs Browning&amp;quot; that begins &amp;quot;ওই আদরের নামে ডেকো সখা মোরে / oi aadarer naame Deko sakhaa more&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Call me by that pet name, my love&amp;quot; is obviously &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetpoem.com/elizabeth-barrett-browning/sonnet-33-yes-call-m-poem/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 33&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;Sonnets from the Portuguese&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;Yes, call me by my pet name!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, throughout the series, the lack of titles and the absence of any information about which specific poem is being translated makes it difficult to identify the originals from which Tagore is translating. Some of the poets, too, have faded into (relative) obscurity. It is unlikely that a mention of &amp;quot;Moore&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Hood&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Augusta Webster&amp;quot; will bring any of their poems immediately to mind, even to an English major.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, some of the poems Tagore translates were themselves not originally in English. For example, Tagore includes a translation from Victor Hugo, presumably working from an English translation of Hugo's French original. And the last poem, or subset of poems, is headed &amp;quot;কোন জাপানী কবিতার ইংগ্রাজী অনুবাদ হইতে / kon jaapaanii kavitaar i.ngraajii anuvaad haite&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;From the English translation of some Japanese poems&amp;quot;. No information is given about which poets or translations Tagore is referencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poems in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/KariOKomal/page/n58/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;বিদেশী ফূলের গুচ্ছ&lt;/a&gt; / videshii phuuler guchchha&lt;/em&gt; read well enough in Bengali, but the absence of specific information about the originals is frustrating. Is there any source that provides comprehensive information about which English poems Tagore was translating? For the poems that themselves had been translated into English from another language, is there any information about what the originals were, and which English translations Tagore was using?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The usual disclaimer applies: All translations from the Bengali are my own, and my Bengali is pitiful, so rely on them AYOR&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Transliterations from Bengali follow the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; schema.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-23T23:11:20.033" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T23:11:20.033" Title="What are the originals of the poems Tagore has translated from English into Bengali?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="10" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16417" CreationDate="2020-11-23T11:06:30.983" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the comments to your question have noted, the most reliable way to figure out whether a given line is iambic pentameter is to sound it out. But if you're not confident of your ear, there are certain techniques you can use to help you identify how a line scans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's necessary to understand how stress works in English. When any sequence of English words is spoken or read out loud, certain &lt;strong&gt;syllables&lt;/strong&gt; are &lt;strong&gt;accentuated&lt;/strong&gt; (emphasized) by being spoken relatively louder and/or being articulated more distinctly, while others are unstressed by being spoken relatively softer and/or slurred. This holds true regardless of whether said sequence comprises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Conversation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A prose passage being read aloud&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A poem being read aloud.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All spoken English exhibits this pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Native speakers tend to think of this pattern as &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot;. It is, of course, no such thing; different languages have different stress patterns, and what seems natural is just convention, in the same way that grammar is. Other languages have other stress patterns that feel equally natural to speakers of those languages. For example, French tends to emphasize the last syllable of words and phrases; Indian languages lack stress within words entirely, relying instead on a sing-song stress pattern within phrases. What native English speakers discern as &amp;quot;a foreign accent&amp;quot; derives from non-native stress patterns being applied to English about as equally as from mispronunciation of phonemes per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically with regard to poetic meter, this &lt;strong&gt;accentual-syllabic&lt;/strong&gt; nature of English means that to scan a line and identify its metrical pattern, one counts two things: the accents and the syllables. That is, &lt;strong&gt;English meter is determined by how the &lt;em&gt;accents&lt;/em&gt; (stresses) are distributed over the entire set of &lt;em&gt;syllables&lt;/em&gt; in a given line.&lt;/strong&gt; So when we say that a line is &lt;em&gt;iambic pentameter&lt;/em&gt;, we're saying that the line has five stressed syllables, each preceded by an unstressed syllable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syllables that are emphasized in everyday spoken English, and therefore in English poetry, are fairly predictable grammatically. With monosyllabic words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nouns, main verbs, adjectives, adverbs, negations, and interjections are stressed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Articles, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions are not.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in a sentence like &amp;quot;The cat sat on the mat and played with the rat&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;sat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;mat&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;played&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;rat&lt;/em&gt; will be spoken relatively louder&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;On&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;, and all three &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt;s will be softened.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the latter set of words will be spoke relatively quicker and less distinctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With polysyllabic words, things are a bit trickier. Each polysyllabic word has its own stress pattern; one of the syllables in the word receives the stress. In most cases, a native English speaker will &amp;quot;just know&amp;quot; where the emphasis goes. For example, we say &lt;em&gt;ENG-lish&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;eng-LISH&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;re-CEIVES&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;RE-ceives&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the most part, stress in polysyllabic words is a matter of &amp;quot;just knowing&amp;quot;. But even here, there are certain guidelines that hold true:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If a word has a suffix, such as &amp;quot;-tion&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;-ed&amp;quot;, the syllable &lt;em&gt;before the suffix&lt;/em&gt; receives the stress. Consider: &lt;em&gt;MO-ti-vate&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;mo-ti-VA-tion&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;ED-u-cate&lt;/em&gt;, but &lt;em&gt;e-du-CAT-ed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In words of more than three syllables, a syllable that's &lt;em&gt;at least&lt;/em&gt; two away from the primarily stressed syllable sometimes receives a secondary stress. Take the examples above: &lt;em&gt;MO-ti-VA-tion&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;E-du-CA-tion&lt;/em&gt;. In both those words, the first syllable is also stressed, though not to the same degree as the third.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Negating prefixes receive stress. &lt;em&gt;SYM-met-ry&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;A-sym-met-ry&lt;/em&gt;. Note that &lt;em&gt;met&lt;/em&gt; would receive secondary stress here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The suffix guideline trumps (eek) the prefix guideline. &lt;em&gt;UN-kind&lt;/em&gt; but &lt;em&gt;un-KIND-ness&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homographic nouns and verbs with a common root are distinguished by stress: &lt;em&gt;RE-bel&lt;/em&gt; is one who rebels; to &lt;em&gt;re-BEL&lt;/em&gt; is to rise up against something.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are observations, not rules. Trust your ear over these guidelines if the two come into conflict. If you're not a native English speaker, well, the magic of the internet means that every dictionary allows you to hear the word, so you can figure out where the stress goes in polysyllabic words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's put it all together. Since I'm a mean old cuss, I won't make it too easy for you by demonstrating iambic pentameter. Instead, here's the first verse of Ben Jonson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44451/cynthias-revels-queen-and-huntress-chaste-and-fair&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;song from &lt;em&gt;Cynthia's Revels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Queen and huntress, chaste and fair,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now the sun is laid to sleep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seated in thy silver chair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;State in wonted manner keep:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hesperus entreats thy light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Goddess excellently bright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick aside to explain the meaning: &lt;em&gt;Cynthia&lt;/em&gt; is another name for Diana, goddess of the moon, the virgin huntress. &lt;em&gt;Hesperus&lt;/em&gt; is the evening star, aka Venus. &lt;em&gt;Wonted&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;customary&lt;/em&gt;. The sitch is that the sun has set, the evening star has risen, and said star is formally asking (&amp;quot;entreats&amp;quot;) the moon to rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on to the scansion. Let's begin with the monosyllables. Line 2 is all monosyllables, so it's a good place to start. Here's how the stresses divide up:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stressed: &lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; (adverb), &lt;em&gt;sun&lt;/em&gt; (noun), &lt;em&gt;laid&lt;/em&gt; (main verb, and get your mind out of the gutter), &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt; (main verb)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Unstressed: &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; (article), &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; (auxiliary), &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; (preposition).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Using ‘ to mark a stressed syllable and x for an unstressed one, the line looks like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;  ‘  x   ‘   x   ‘   x  ‘    &#xA;Now the sun is laid to sleep&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see a pattern: alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, beginning with a stressed syllable. The line can be divided into &lt;em&gt;feet&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., units of stressed and unstressed syllables that come together to form the overall pattern. Let's use bars | to demarcate each foot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|  ‘   x  |  ‘  x  |   ‘   x |  ‘    | &#xA;| Now the | sun is | laid to | sleep |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A foot that has one stressed and one unstressed syllable is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochaic&lt;/a&gt;. Since there are four stresses in the line, that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tetrameter&lt;/a&gt;. And since the last foot is missing its last syllable, the line is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalectic&lt;/a&gt;. So it looks like the line is in catalectic trochaic tetrameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do the other lines fall into the same pattern? Let's give it a whirl, again marking off the stressed and unstressed syllables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The monosyllables are easy: QUEEN (noun), CHASTE (adjective), FAIR (adjective), CHAIR (noun), etc. The unstressed words are all pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, auxiliaries, or articles: and, in, thy, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The polysyllables are pretty easy too. HUNT-ress, because &amp;quot;-ess&amp;quot; is a suffix. SIL-ver, just because nobody says sil-VER. WONT-ed, because &amp;quot;-ed&amp;quot; is a suffix. How about &amp;quot;excellently&amp;quot;? Well, &amp;quot;ly&amp;quot; is a suffix, so that gives us &amp;quot;ex-cel-LENT-ly&amp;quot;. But it's a sesquipedalian word, so we have a secondary stress. The only syllable that's more than one syllable away is &amp;quot;ex&amp;quot;. So that gives us &amp;quot;EX-cel-LENT-ly&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting it all together, we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|  ‘     x  |  ‘     x   |   ‘     x  |  ‘   | &#xA;| Queen and | hunt-ress, | chaste and | fair |&#xA;&#xA;|  ‘   x  |  ‘  x  |   ‘   x |  ‘    | &#xA;| Now the | sun is | laid to | sleep |&#xA;&#xA;|  ‘   x  |  x  x  |  ‘   x  |  ‘    | &#xA;| Sea-ted | in thy | sil-ver | chair |&#xA;&#xA;|  ‘    x  |  ‘    x |   ‘  x  |  ‘    | &#xA;| State in | wont-ed | man-ner | keep: |&#xA;&#xA;|  ‘   x   |  x  x  |  ‘      x  |   ‘   | &#xA;| Hes-per- | us en- | treats thy | light |&#xA;&#xA;|  ‘    x  | `   x   |   ‘   x |  ‘      | &#xA;| God-dess | ex-cel- | lent-ly | bright. |&#xA;&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yup, going through the poem line-by-line and marking out the stressed and unstressed portions of each using the guidelines above confirms that the rest of the lines match the second, and the poem is indeed catalectic trochaic tetrameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems rather more tedious than simply sounding out the lines. But it's actually a really good check. As @PeterShor said in his comments, with a little practice, sounding out poems quickly makes scansion second nature. So does marking out syllables in this way; it very quickly becomes second nature as well. Personally, when I'm scanning a poem, I do both those things so instinctively that I couldn't even tell you whether I'm relying more on sounding out or on marking syllables, because they both happen simultaneously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In poetry that approximates speech—as in all Shakespeare's blank verse—I actually find that marking syllables helps me see the pattern better. Particularly when delivered at breakneck speed by actors untrained in Shakespearean English, his speeches come across as an undifferentiated mass of prose. Marking up the syllables and paying attention to where the stresses fall restores the poetry of the lines. With difficult passages, that's a help to semantics as well, because when I see the stress pattern in a sentence, I know how to sound it out, and that clues me into the meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So try both approaches. If sounding out leaves you puzzled or ambivalent about the scansion of a particular line, use the guidelines to see what they suggest. Or if marking out syllables doesn't immediately reveal a pattern, read out the line and see what your ear tells you. Between your ear and these (far from exhaustive) guidelines, working out the required prosody should be fairly straightforward. Good luck on your sonnet!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T07:41:27.297" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T07:41:27.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16429" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T12:33:33.510" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a book that contains English translations of all the prose and poetry in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenian_Cycle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fenian Cycle&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10863" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T19:47:04.900" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T19:47:04.900" Title="Is there a complete anthology of the Fenian Cycle?" Tags="&lt;myths&gt;&lt;gaelic-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16430" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-23T12:44:28.187" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Little Stranger&lt;/em&gt; is a gothic-style novel by Sarah Waters in which a fading aristocratic family appears to be haunted by a presence in their crumbling estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Minor spoilers for the book follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The initial signs of presence are easily interpreted with rational explanations. As the plot goes on, however, it becomes increasingly hard to assign the malevolent goings on to mere circumstance. Nevertheless, the ending appears ambiguous on the matter and critics are divided on whether this is valuable or disappointing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, it seemed to me that on at least one occasion, this ambiguity is resolved. When Faraday is walking in the garden with Mrs Ayres, we see the following paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tugged down the blouse's collar and saw beneath it, on her bare skin, a scratch, quite deep, evidently freshly made, still rising, still beading red.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'What have you done?' I said in horror. 'How did you do this?' I looked over her gown for a pin or a brooch. I caught up her hands, examined her gloves. There was nothing.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The injury, then, has arisen spontaneously. Mrs Ayres blames it on the ghost and Faraday can find no alternative explanation. Since scratches do not arise by themselves, when reading I took this as confirmation of the supernatural nature of the haunting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits with the novel's theme of male entitlement: Faraday always presumes he is correct in his rational perception and refuses to accept the testimony of the three women who live in the house. If they are, in fact, correct, it would re-enforce the toxic nature of his presumptions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has Waters, or any critic, or a close reading ever confirmed whether or not the author intended the reader to be certain one way or the other? If we are supposed to believe in the haunting explanation, why does Waters throw it back into doubt at the conclusion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T14:44:30.440" Title="Is there any ambiguity about the supernatural in Sarah Water's The Little Stranger" Tags="&lt;sarah-waters&gt;&lt;the-little-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16424" CreationDate="2020-11-23T19:15:49.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand this as the Cats' Meat Man giving Dr Dolittle a Christmas present, disguised as a purchase of medicine that he doesn't need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="1032" LastEditDate="2020-11-24T06:48:18.113" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T06:48:18.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16433" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12140" CreationDate="2020-11-23T23:29:51.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.literarydevices.com/paradox/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;. As the linked Literary Devices page says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When used as a literary device, a paradox is the juxtaposition of a set of seemingly contradictory concepts that reveal a hidden and/or unexpected truth. The paradox may be hard or even impossible to believe, yet usually the contradiction can be reconciled if the reader thinks about the juxtaposition more deeply.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T23:29:51.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16434" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5166" CreationDate="2020-11-23T23:48:49.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think the book ever answers what the question was, so I'd like to take a shot at your more subjective question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what might it have been?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a question that is asked a number of times throughout the book by the heroes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;By what right?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What motive moved them?—what was their knowledge?—which one of them,&#xA;unaided, could bring a chunk of ore out of the earth? . . . Destroyed&#xA;at the whim of men whom he had never seen and who had never seen those&#xA;tiers of metal . . . Destroyed, because they so decided. By what&#xA;right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Dagny, by what right?” Eddie Willers had asked her, his voice quiet,&#xA;but the words sounding like a cry. &amp;quot;By what right are they all doing&#xA;it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You, who've kept them all alive, have been called an exploiter. You,&#xA;the purest and most moral man among them, have been sneered at as a&#xA;'vulgar materialist.' Have you stopped to ask them: by what right?—by&#xA;what code?—by what standard?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I believe it's plausible that Galt may have asked &lt;em&gt;By what right?&lt;/em&gt; when he began to see the world taken over by looters and began to see men of the mind suffocated by pull peddlers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2020-11-23T23:48:49.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16435" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4993" CreationDate="2020-11-24T00:01:07.623" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just did a quick scan of the book (online PDF) and I'm of the opinion that it's impossible to know for certain. I think we can know the sequence of the first and the last, but not most in the middle, because that information is never stated in the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The First:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Galt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ragnar, Francisco (maybe Hugh?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Midas Mulligan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Last (in reverse order):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dagny&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hank&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(And here my memory gets murky, but perhaps the Utah guy and Dannager)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But for those in the middle, the timeline is very murky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3075" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T00:01:07.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12437" CreationDate="2020-11-24T04:03:27.450" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The caged bird’s “shadow” is “screaming”. This is in vain, as shadows cannot scream. The most the bird’s shadow can do is extend beyond the cage. So, let’s look at the description of the bird’s cage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a bird that stalks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;down his narrow cage&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;can seldom see through&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;his bars of rage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cage is “narrow”, and the bird “can seldom see through” it. The bird is trapped inside, but its shadow can slip out and scream. Scream helplessly, yes, but the very fact that the bird is shadow-screaming in the first place indicates that it knows its situation is unfair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, there’s a qualifier to the scream - it is a “nightmare” scream. This is important for two reasons. First, it indicates the bird has dreams. Its screams may be prompted by nightmares, but the existence of dreams means it still clings to a hope of a better place. Second, this is more evidence that the bird knows how its situation is wrong, unnatural, unfair. It can acknowledge that it is living in a “nightmare” while simultaneously entertaining dreams of a change for the better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chorus of the poem explains what the bird’s dreams are for:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caged bird sings&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;with a fearful trill&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of things unknown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but longed for still&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and his tune is heard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on the distant hill&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for the caged bird&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;sings of freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The caged bird is singing of “freedom”. This is what it is dreaming of, what it so desires while it whiles away its life trapped in a “nightmare”. Yet it does not know what freedom is. The concept of freedom, of flying out of the cage as the other bird does, is “unknown / but longed for still”. So the caged bird is calling out for an escape that it desperately wants but can’t articulate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To directly answer your question - the line “his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream” means that the caged bird is calling out, using its shadow as a method of reaching beyond its cage. The scream still indicates that the bird nurses a dream of freedom. But without the ability to properly articulate its dreams, the bird’s shadow is left to fruitlessly, soundlessly reach out of its cage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All quotes from the poem linked in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources of inspiration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shaalaa.com/question-bank-solutions/in-caged-bird-what-does-line-and-his-shadow-shouts-nightmare-scream-mean-writing_83557&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.shaalaa.com/question-bank-solutions/in-caged-bird-what-does-line-and-his-shadow-shouts-nightmare-scream-mean-writing_83557&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/caged-bird-what-line-his-shadow-shouts-nightmare-662741&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/caged-bird-what-line-his-shadow-shouts-nightmare-662741&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://englicist.com/questions/explain-his-shadow-shouts-on-a-nightmare-scream&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://englicist.com/questions/explain-his-shadow-shouts-on-a-nightmare-scream&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T04:03:27.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-24T12:04:38.567" Score="6" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;So far, we have had at least two questions about the early history of the English sonnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/14748/2191&quot;&gt;Who introduced the sonnet to English literature? Wyatt or Shakespeare?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16418/2191&quot;&gt;Why are Shakespearean sonnets called Shakespearean sonnets?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While researching and writing answers to both questions, I found that many critics use the phrase &amp;quot;the English sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot;. Some of them clearly prefer the term &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot;. What I have not been able to find so far, however, is who first used the term &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot; (or perhaps &amp;quot;Shakespearian sonnet&amp;quot;). Did this happen in the wake of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/david-garrick-jubilee/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769&lt;/a&gt; or later, say, during or after the Romantic period?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The term &amp;quot;Shakespearean sonnet&amp;quot; here refers to the &lt;em&gt;sonnet form&lt;/em&gt; employed by Shakespeare and many others, i.e. a sonnet written in iambic pentameters using the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The term is not used here as a synonym for &amp;quot;Shakespeare's sonnets&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T00:17:17.317" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T00:17:17.317" Title="Who coined the term ‘Shakespearean sonnet’?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16437" CreationDate="2020-11-24T13:23:07.823" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest use of the phrase in this sense that I can find is from &lt;strong&gt;1873&lt;/strong&gt;, in a school textbook by &lt;strong&gt;William Smith&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;Theophilus Hall&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shakspearian Sonnet&lt;/strong&gt;.—In its less proper form the Sonnet is simply a poem of fourteen Heroic† lines, rhymed alternately and ending with a Couplet. The Sonnets of Shakspeare belong to this class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Smith and Theophilus D. Hall (1873). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/aschoolmanualen00hallgoog/page/n188/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A School Manual of English Grammar&lt;/em&gt;, p. 168&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† “Heroic” in the sense “traditionally used in poetry with mythological or historical heroes as its subject matter” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), so that a “Heroic line” means “iambic pentameter” in the context of English poetry.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Textbooks normally collect common knowledge rather than inventing new terms, suggesting that the phrase ought to have been in circulation with this meaning prior to 1873. But if it was, I have not been able to find any examples. I did find one near miss:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am aware that many strict critics object to the term “Sonnet” being applied to any poems but those written in the exact Italian measure; unjustly, as I think, since the rich cadences and extreme facility of rhyming which make the Petrarchian stanza so easy and so beautiful in the original, do not exist in English. […] Milton,—whose taste was formed in the Tuscan schools, adhered closely to the Italian model. But Shakspeare—master of no melody but that of his native tongue, in which he reigned, and still reigns, without a rival—has left us upwards of one hundred and fifty “Sonnets,” in the simple measure of three alternate quatrains, closed by two heroic lines; evidently considering the title generally applicable to all poems which follow Petrarch so far as to consist of a single thought carried through fourteen lines, however their rhythm may be modified to suit the necessities of our language. I am inclined to think the &lt;strong&gt;Shakspearian stanza&lt;/strong&gt; a better English model than that adopted by Milton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Norton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caroline Sheridan Norton&lt;/a&gt; (1841). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dreamandotherpo02nortgoog/page/n298/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dream, and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 281&lt;/a&gt;. London: William Clowes.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It took a few years after Smith and Hall’s textbook for the term to catch on. I’ll give a selection of early uses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this jubilant little fragment came a sonnet, “Written before re-reading King Lear,” and a &lt;strong&gt;Shaksperean sonnet&lt;/strong&gt; (“When I have fears that I may cease to be”) which reads to me like an exercise of fancy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;R. H. Stoddard (1878). ‘After Many Days: A Study of Keats’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tennyson_Turner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scribner’s Monthly&lt;/em&gt;, January 1878, p. 409&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an obituary notice† of the late &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tennyson_Turner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Turner&lt;/a&gt;—Alfred Tennyson’s elder brother—I find the following description of his character as a poet. ‘He had a very considerable gift of tender fancy and of plaintive elegiac melody, but he was lacking in a sense of style; his writings are chiefly sonnets, and they are mostly very incorrect in form.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As to his gift of fancy and melody, everybody who has read any of his poems will agree. But in saying that his sonnets are ‘&lt;em&gt;incorrect&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;form&lt;/em&gt;’ the writer can only have meant that the rhymes do not follow the order prescribed either by the Miltonic or the &lt;strong&gt;Shakespearian sonnet&lt;/strong&gt;; and in imputing to him a lack of the ‘sense of style’ he must, I suppose, have meant the same thing; for otherwise it would be hard to say what he can have meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spedding&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Spedding&lt;/a&gt; (1879). ‘Charles Tennyson Turner’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/nineteenthcentu00knowgoog/page/n393/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Nineteenth Century&lt;/em&gt;, September 1879, p. 461&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/TheAcademy15/page/n427/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Academy&lt;/em&gt;, 10 May 1879, pp. 412–413&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spedding in the quote above uses the phrase “Shakespearian sonnet” in the sense “sonnet employing the same rhyme scheme as Shakespeare” without feeling the need to gloss it. But this sense of the phrase must not have been commonplace in 1879, for one of Spedding’s readers was sufficiently puzzled to write a sharp response questioning whether the phrase is appropriate at all:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Spedding’s notice of “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Tennyson_Turner&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Tennyson Turner&lt;/a&gt;” […] contains some oddities. Mr. Spedding is very angry with the criticism on the late Charles Turner, that his sonnets are “incorrect in form,” and that he was “lacking in the sense of style.” He thinks this can only mean that the sonnets do not “follow the order prescribed either by the Miltonic or the Shaksperian sonnet.” &lt;strong&gt;Does Mr. Spedding imagine that Milton and Shakspere invented the sonnet?&lt;/strong&gt; We should have supposed that in adopting a decidedly artificial system of verse it might be thought not altogether superfluous to follow its form exactly. A quatorzain of any arrangement may be an admirable poem, no doubt; that no one denies. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9ophile_Gautier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gautier&lt;/a&gt;’s remark, “Write sonnets properly, or don’t write them at all,” remains applicable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1879). ‘Magazines and Reviews’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/TheAcademy16/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Academy&lt;/em&gt;, 6 September 1879, p. 176&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the sonnets are very, I must say unpardonably, licentious in form. I recognise stricter and looser forms and the &lt;strong&gt;Shakespearian sonnet&lt;/strong&gt;, though it is a sonnet only &lt;em&gt;in genre&lt;/em&gt; and not one if by sonnet you mean the Italian sonnet, which is the sonnet proper—but this is a question of names only—the &lt;strong&gt;Shakespearian sonnet&lt;/strong&gt; is a very beautiful and effective species of composition in the kind. But then, though simpler, it is as strict, regular, and specific as the sonnet proper. Moreover it has the division into the two parts 8+6, at all events 4+4+4+2. Now it seems to me that this division is the real characteristic of the sonnet and that what is not so marked off and moreover has not the octet again divided into quatrains is not to be called a sonnet at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_Manley_Hopkins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gerard Manley Hopkins&lt;/a&gt; (12 October 1881). Letter to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Watson_Dixon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard W. Dixon&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.182361/page/n103/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard W. Dixon&lt;/em&gt;, p. 71&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contemporaneously with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_%28poet%29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wyat&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_Earl_of_Surrey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Earl of Surrey&lt;/a&gt; produced poems constructed upon the model subsequently known as &lt;strong&gt;Shakspearean&lt;/strong&gt;; and, following Surrey, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Spenser&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser&lt;/a&gt; wrote a series similar in scheme and scope, but with a variation in the arrangement of rhymes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall_Caine&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hall Caine&lt;/a&gt; (1882). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sonnetsthreecen01caingoog/page/n14/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonnets of Three Centuries&lt;/em&gt;, p. x&lt;/a&gt;. London: Elliot Stock.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is styled the &lt;strong&gt;Shakespearian sonnet&lt;/strong&gt; is so called only out of deference to the great poet who made such noble use of it: in the same way as Petrarca is accredited with the structural form bearing his name. As “the sweete laureate of Italie”† had predecessors in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guittone_d%27Arezzo&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guittone d’Arezzo&lt;/a&gt; and Amalricchi, so Shakespeare found that the English sonnet—as it should be called—having been inefficiently handled by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_Earl_of_Surrey&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Surrey&lt;/a&gt;, discarded by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Spenser&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser&lt;/a&gt;, taken up and beautified by Sir &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Sydney&lt;/a&gt; (who seemed unable to definitely decide as to what form to adopt), was at last made thoroughly ready for his use by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Daniel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daniel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Drayton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drayton&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Sharp (1886). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/afw1577.0001.001.umich.edu/page/XLIV/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sonnets of this Century&lt;/em&gt;, p. xlv&lt;/a&gt;. London: Walter Scott.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Petrarch&lt;/a&gt;, as described in the ‘Prologue to the Clerk’s Tale’ in Geoffrey Chaucer’s &lt;em&gt;Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;: “Francis Petrarc, the laureate poet, / Highte this clerk, whose rhetoric so sweet was called / Illumin’d all Itale of poetry”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T13:23:07.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16439" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9024" CreationDate="2020-11-24T13:24:46.270" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic meters are the most common of all classical and modern meters generally, and iambic pentameter is closest to the natural patterns of English speech. Plus, it was a successful conspiracy cooked up by Marlowe, Sidney, and the Great Vowel Shift.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;iamb&lt;/em&gt; comes from an ancient Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambus_(genre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genre&lt;/a&gt; of invective poetry. The metrical term takes its name from the genre with which it was associated. Deriving from this Greek origin, a foot of one short and one long syllable was called an iamb in Latin poetry as well.  The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/prpoetry/iambic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic was thought in antiquity to be the rhythm nearest to common speech. Throughout Gr. and Lat. poetry, iambic in trimeter and tetrameter is the standard meter for recitation forms, esp. dramatic dialogue.... The same claim has been made in mod. times about Eng. as was made by the ancients about Gr. (Aristotle, &lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt;, bk. 3)—namely, that iambic is the rhythm of common speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, even though English prosody is accentual-syllabic, i.e., based on stressed and unstressed syllables, whereas classical prosody is quantitative, i.e., based on long and short syllables, the tendency to see iambic rhythms as nearest to common speech prevails in both.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to English poetry specifically, we could begin by asking why spoken English falls into iambic patterns. We could then explore how poets exploit these patterns, and ask why pentameter is the most common meter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Iambic as the natural pattern of English speech&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Prosody Handbook&lt;/em&gt;, Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum write that in English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;intensity of expression is nearly always accompanied by an abundance of stress. Now, in English prose the ratio of nonstresses to stresses ranges from about 2:1 to 3:1. This means that in the rather more intense language of poetry, one should expect the ratio to be closer to 1:1, and we find that in fact 9:7 is a common figure. Clearly, then, a balance or near balance between troughs and crests is called for.    (p. 34)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shapiro and Beum argue that iambs are common in English speech because stressed monosyllables are typically preceded by unstressed articles, prepositions, or conjunctions. In words of two syllables, the stress more commonly falls on the first syllable rather than the second, and since these too would be introduced by unstressed articles or the like, speech patterns tend to default to iambic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An earlier edition of the &lt;em&gt;Princeton Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; provides a couple of examples (slightly modified here):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|   x    ‘  | x   ‘   |  x    `  | x   ‘  |  x   ‘    |&#xA;| I'll take | a Whop- | per, and | a med- | ium Coke. |&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;| x    ‘  |  x    ‘  |  x   ‘      x    `     x    ‘&#xA;| k, when | you find | the ans- | wer, let | me know. |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Iambs in English poetry&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course poets do not merely transcribe ordinary speech. Transforming everyday language into poetry involves, inter alia, manipulating its stress patterns. How did poets turn to iambic meter as the default for English poetry?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Thompson's &lt;em&gt;The Founding of English Metre&lt;/em&gt; provides a synopsis of how the naturally occurring iambic patterns of English were standardized as the norm between the publication of the first printed anthology of English poetry, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tottel%27s_Miscellany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tottel's Miscellany&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; in 1567, and the circulation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Sidney&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophel_and_Stella&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Astrophil and Stella&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; poems in the 1580s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that Chaucer and Wyatt, among others, had used iambic meter earlier. But the 15th and 16th centuries were a time of tremendous change in the English language. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt;, which separates Middle English from its modern counterpart, was underway through this period. Chaucer's late 14th C. poetry was firmly in Middle English, and Sidney's late 16th C. poetry just as firmly in Modern English. The very different pronunciation the phrase &lt;em&gt;pale knight&lt;/em&gt; would have between Chaucer and Sidney immediately calls into question any easy statement such as &amp;quot;Chaucer used iambs, so English poetry followed Chaucer in that regard&amp;quot;. Chaucer would have pronounced &lt;em&gt;pale knight&lt;/em&gt; as an amphimacer &lt;code&gt;(‘ x ‘)&lt;/code&gt;; Sidney as a single spondee &lt;code&gt;( ‘ ‘ )&lt;/code&gt;. As for Wyatt, nobody tf knows how to pronounce, let alone scan, Wyatt. There's a wonderful Lit SE question to be asked about that, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/14762/289&quot;&gt;as I've said before&lt;/a&gt; (see Note 2 in that answer).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thompson's argument is that as modE pronunciation and the conventions of English poetry began to be more or less standardized, iambic meter began to predominate because iambs are the natural pattern of English. Thompson credits Sidney with establishing iambic pentameter as the default for English poetry because he exploited the principle of &lt;em&gt;tension&lt;/em&gt;. Tension is the difference between the abstract structure of a metrical pattern, and the actual stresses that prevail when a line of verse is spoken aloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, a poem in iambic pentameter would by definition have this pattern:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;| x ‘ | x ‘ | x ‘ | x ‘ | x ‘ |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, few poems would conform unvaryingly to this pattern throughout. In fact, doing so would yield a rigid and stilted work. Sidney's achievement was to play natural speech rhythms against the abstract framework of iambic pentameter so that the tension between the two could be manipulated for poetic effect. Thompson discusses poem 5 of &lt;em&gt;Astrophel and Stella&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|  x  x |   ‘    ‘  |   x    ‘  |  x     ‘   |  x    ‘  |&#xA;| It is | most true | that eyes | are formed | to serve |&#xA;&#xA;|  x   ‘  |   x     ‘   |  x    x  |  x     ‘    |  x   ‘  |&#xA;| The in- | ward light, | and that | the heav'n- | ly part |&#xA;&#xA;|   ‘    x |  x   ‘  |&#xA;| Ought to | be King |&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The deviations from the abstract pattern puts extra emphasis on phrases such as &amp;quot;most true&amp;quot;. The deferred stress of the pyrrhic &amp;quot;It is&amp;quot; makes &amp;quot;most&amp;quot; emphatic in a way that reinforces Sidney's meaning. An equally long deferral of stress also highlights &amp;quot;heaven&amp;quot;, as is appropriate. And the inverted first foot, trochaic rather than iambic, of &amp;quot;Ought to&amp;quot;, emphasizes what Sidney is saying: &amp;quot;this OUGHT to be the case [but is not]&amp;quot;. These effects are possible not only because the natural stress patterns of English would emphasize those words, but because the abstract metrical pattern is manipulated to generate tension that puts those words in greater relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort manipulation requires a flexible substructure. The reason iambic pentameter works so well is not simply that it mimics the natural rhythms of English speech; it's that iambic rhythms, at least in English, reassert themselves even when they're not rigidly adhered to. By contrast, patterns of trochees, anapests, and dactyls tend to be fragile. Take Blake's famous trochaic lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|  ‘ x   |  ‘  x  |  ‘  x   |   ‘    |&#xA;| Tyger! | Tyger! | burning | bright |&#xA;&#xA;|  x  x  |   ‘  x  |  x  x  |   ‘   |&#xA;| In the | forests | of the | night | &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That second line could so easily be scanned as anapestic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;|  x  x      ‘   |  x  x    ‘   |&#xA;| In the for'sts | of the night | &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only the fact that it's surrounded by fairly regular trochaic lines allows us to scan this line as trochaic as well. But this regularity is a necessity; a trochaic poem of any length that attempts the sort of tension that iambs allow would soon be very difficult to sustainedly hear as trochaic. As a result, iambs predominate in English poetry. Shapiro and Beum estimate that some 70% of English poetry is iambic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One possible reason we hear alternating patterns of unstressed and stressed syllables as iambic rather trochaic is that generally, there is a brief pause after a stressed syllable. In trochaic meters, the pause after the stress works against the pattern of the whole line, as the pause occurs in the middle of the foot. In iambic meters, on the other hand, the pause of the stress works naturally with the pause between feet. This makes iambic meter supple and flexible in a way that other patterns aren't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Pentameter? Part I: Strictly Formal Considerations&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45152/astrophil-and-stella-1-loving-in-truth-and-fain-in-verse-my-love-to-show&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first sonnet&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Astrophil and Stella&lt;/em&gt; is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrine#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;alexandrines&lt;/a&gt;. Yet the default meter of English poetry is pentameter rather than hexameter or tetrameter. Why? Because pentameter is long enough to be flexible, yet short enough not to fall naturally into divisions. Sidney's poem itself has strong caesuras in most lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loving in truth || and fain in verse my love to show&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That she, dear she || might take some pleasure of my pain&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic trimeters would be rather choppy. They can, of course, be used to great effect precisely for that reason, as in Theodore Roethke's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43330/my-papas-waltz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;small masterpiece&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whiskey on your breath&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Could make a small boy dizzy;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I hung on like death:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Such waltzing was not easy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the trimeters work only because of the context: a waltz. The deviations from regular meter capture the drunken missteps well, as in the hypermetric endings &amp;quot;dizzy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;easy&amp;quot;. It's hard to imagine this working as a default to hold capacious variations the way pentameter does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambic tetrameter does give iambic pentameter a run for its money. One of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44675/the-passionate-shepherd-to-his-love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;most justly celebrated poems in the language&lt;/a&gt; is in iambic tetrameter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come live with me and be my love,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And we will all the pleasures prove,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Woods, or steepy mountain yields.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another iambic tetrameter is simply a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marvell&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had we but world enough and time,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This coyness, lady, were no crime.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We would sit down, and think which way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To walk, and pass our long love’s day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of why pentameter feels more natural than tetrameter is hard to answer definitively. The fact that pentameter is by definition more capacious probably has something to do with it. Both Marlowe's and Marvell's poems are urgent invitations to love, and pentameter would probably feel too languorous. But a relatively shorter line, while working great when the poet is eagerly soliciting the favors of his inamorata, is somewhat less effective as an all-purpose solution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Pentameter? Part II: Historical Considerations, aka the Real Answer&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The popularity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_sequence#List_of_English_sonnet_sequences&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet sequences in the 16th century&lt;/a&gt; also boosted pentameter over tetrameter, because the ten-syllable pentameter line more closely approximated Petrarch's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hendecasyllable&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hendecasyllables&lt;/a&gt;. And of course, &lt;a href=&quot;https://wwnorton.com/college/nrl/english/nael71/Period2Sixteenth/CourseSessions2/MarloweMighty.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marlowe's mighty line&lt;/a&gt; firmly established &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blank verse&lt;/a&gt;, i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter, as the default for the Elizabethan stage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come Helen, come, give me my soul again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaucer and Wyatt are, frankly, too remote and too hard to scan, respectively, to claim that their influence established iambic pentameter as the default for English poetry. But Sidney and Marlowe are not. They provided enduring exemplars of what English poetry should sound like, and they established iambic pentameter as the default.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question of what English poetry should be like was a real one during the 16th C. Poets such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Campion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Campion&lt;/a&gt; argued that English should use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/37735446/Thomas_Campions_iambic_and_quantitative_Sapphic_Further_evidence_for_phonological_weight_in_Elizabethan_English_quantitative_and_non_quantitative_meters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quantitative meter&lt;/a&gt;. Poets such as Sidney (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Apology_for_Poetry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Apology for Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) and Samuel Daniel (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Daniel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Defense of Rhyme&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;) countered that accentual-syllabic, rhymed lines were more natural to the language. It was not a given that English poetry would end up with iambic pentameter as the default. It just so happened that the 16th C. was a time that lent itself to the establishment of a default:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was a time of tremendous change in the language itself, thanks to the Great Vowel Shift.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The establishment of printing allowed a certain degree of standardization as well.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The great success of Spain in establishing New World colonies, alongside the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rivalries&lt;/a&gt; between England and Spain, led to an upsurge of nationalist sentiment that made it imperative to establish a cultural poetics for England; this caused poets to explicitly discuss questions about what an English poetry and poetics would look like.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When Sidney and Marlowe established successful examples of what English poetry could accomplish, the meter they used quickly became the standard that subsequent poets adopted.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs to be stated that poets didn't consciously set out to imitate Sidney and Marlowe in choosing iambic pentameter for poetry and drama respectively. Iambic pentameter in English has a well-documented history before those poets. The point here is that iambic pentameter has certain built-in advantages for poetic effects in English. These poets were writing when Modern English was in the late stages of its emergence as something drastically different from Middle English. As English poets sought appropriate vehicles for poetic expression in the wake of the Great Vowel Shift, Marlowe and Sidney showed that iambic pentameter was an assertive, flexible, and supple pattern that allowed poetic achievement of a high order in what was practically a new language. Their example made that meter the default for English poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We tend to think of Shakespeare as the default poet for English. And indeed, his achievements in iambic pentameter are better-known (some might argue &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;tout court&lt;/em&gt;) than those of Sidney and Marlowe with that same meter in poetry and drama respectively. But Sidney and Marlowe were those who first showed the tremendous possibilities that iambic pentameter offered English poetry, and they established it as the default that endured until &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ezra Pound&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54320/canto-lxxxi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To break the pentameter, that was the first heave&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Edit based on comments: Continuity between Middle English and Modern English meters&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @PeterShor points out, entirely correctly, in the comments, Middle English poets such as Chaucer and Gower used iambic pentameter extensively. The practice of iambic pentameter could have continued throughout the Great Vowel Shift that marks the transition from ME to ModE. Poets could have imitated what they saw Chaucer doing, even if Chaucer's own scansion became impenetrable to them as the shift occurred. This argument deserves more consideration than is practical in this already overlong answer, but there is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16449/289&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; on this site that takes up the issue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brogan, T. V. F. &amp;quot;Iambic.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan. 3rd ed. New York: MJF Books, 1993.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brogan, T. V. F., and S. S. Bill. &amp;quot;Iambic&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. R. Green, S. Cushman, and C. Cavanagh. 4th ed.  Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/prpoetry/iambic/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/prpoetry/iambic/&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shapiro, Karl, and Robert Beum. &lt;em&gt;A Prosody Handbook&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thompson, John. &lt;em&gt;The Founding of English Metre&lt;/em&gt;. London: Routledge, 1966.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T07:39:48.440" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T07:39:48.440" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16440" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-24T13:44:06.967" Score="3" ViewCount="400" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Toni Morrison's novel &lt;em&gt;Beloved&lt;/em&gt;, Sethe's husband Halle never came back to Baby Suggs' house after planning to run away from Sweet Home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Paul D arrives, he later blurts out to Sethe of what he saw of Halle, who had butter in his mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He couldn't get out the loft.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Loft? What loft?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The one over your head. In the barn.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He saw.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He told you?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The day I came in here. You said they stole your milk. I never knew what it was that messed him up. That was it, I guess. All I knew was that something broke him. Not a one of them years of Saturdays, Sundays and night time extra never touched him. But whatever he saw go on in that barn that daybroke him like a twig.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He saw?&amp;quot; Sethe was gripping her elbows as though to keep them from flyingaway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He saw. Must have.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He saw them boys do that to me and let them keep on breathing air? He saw? He saw? He saw?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hey! Hey! Listen up. Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax.Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside.&amp;quot;Sethe was pacing up and down, up and down in the lamplight.&amp;quot;The underground agent said, By Sunday. They took my milk and he saw it and didn't come down? Sunday came and he didn't. Monday came and no Halle. I thought he was dead, that's why; then I thought they caught him,that's why. Then I thought, No, he's not dead because if he was I'd know it,and then you come here after all this time and you didn't say he was dead,because you didn't know either, so I thought, Well, he just found him another better way to live.Because if he was anywhere near here, he'd come to Baby Suggs, if not tome. But I never knew he saw.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What does that matter now?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If he is alive, and saw that, he won't step foot in my door. Not Halle.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It broke him, Sethe.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul D looked up at her and sighed. &amp;quot;You may as well know it all. Last time I saw him he was sitting by the chum. He had butter all over his face.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You told me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the inference here is that seeing his wife getting raped and being helpless, Halle went mad and catatonic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But why did &amp;quot;They&amp;quot; take Sethe's milk ,and churn it into butter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why did Halle have his wife's butter[technically speaking] all over his face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Halle does never return. Is it due to shame of watching Sethe getting raped or guilt of having her butter on his face?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11449" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T13:00:38.973" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T13:00:38.973" Title="Why did Halle have butter all over his face" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;beloved&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4993" CreationDate="2020-11-24T14:07:23.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoiler alerts&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's the order I could reconstruct (please feel free to edit with changes if I got anything wrong):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;John Galt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ragnar, Francisco, and possibly Hugh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Midas Mulligan and Judge Narragansett (both related to Judge Narragansett's ruling in the Lee Hunsacker lawsuit being overturned)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;William Hastings quit about a year John Galt. (He worked for a different company in the interim after quitting at the 20th Century Motor Company, but his wife noted to Dagny that he seemed conflicted, and that he eventually retired to join the strike, although she was not aware of that because he asked her not to ask him why).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Richard Halley evidently quit somewhere in that general timeframe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Owen Kellogg quit towards the beginning of the book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dick McNamara quit right before starting work on the John Galt Line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Andrew Stockton quit before he could deliver new engines for the John Galt Line&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ellis Wyatt&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;McNeil (only mentioned briefly as having quit in the aftermath of Directive 10-289; not mentioned anywhere else in the book)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I may have the order wrong on this, but Ken Dannager quit the night before his trial for making &amp;quot;illegal&amp;quot; transactions with Hank Rearden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roger Marsh&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ted Nielson quit after the John Galt Line got shut down&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Quentin Daniels&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hank Rearden, Gwen Ives, his mills superintendent, his company doctor, and numerous other individuals from his firm&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dagny Taggart (following the arrest of John Galt and destruction of the Taggart Bridge)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dan Conway's company was ruined by the Anti-Dog-Eat-Dog Rule and quit, but he never joined the strike. It's unclear whether any of the strikers ever attempted to contact him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was unable to classify Lawrence Hammond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following characters I don't believe that the book gave enough information on to know (and correct me if I'm wrong): Kay Ludlow, Dr. Hendricks, the Fishwife, Dwight Sanders&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-11-24T14:07:23.987" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16471" CreationDate="2020-11-24T19:15:15.877" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;What exactly is the message that George Orwell tried to communicate through Animal Farm? What exactly did he mean by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and&#xA;from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was&#xA;which.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, what was he trying to communicate with how the name &amp;quot;Manor Farm&amp;quot; was restored?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he try to convey with the slow death of democracy and feelings of rebellion?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like some other questions suggest, was this just an allegory of the Soviet Revolution or &lt;strong&gt;something greater transcending generations&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some previous questions and references on Literature Stack Exchange:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/3661/does-animal-farm-explicitly-state-anywhere-in-the-text-that-it-is-in-fact-a-po&quot;&gt;Does &amp;quot;Animal Farm&amp;quot; explicitly state anywhere in the text that it is in fact a political allegory?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/688/what-does-mrs-jones-represent-in-animal-farm/701#701&quot;&gt;What does Mrs. Jones represent in Animal Farm?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9203/animal-farm-silent-protest&quot;&gt;Animal Farm — silent protest?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11440" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T17:25:06.347" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T23:23:53.157" Title="What did George Orwell try to communicate with &quot;Animal Farm&quot;?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;animal-farm&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16443" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16444" CreationDate="2020-11-25T00:03:52.987" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book I of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56621&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the eponymous narrator describes the process of forming her values and beliefs out of a throng of &lt;em&gt;idées reçus&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                            All this anguish in the thick&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of men’s opinions … press and counterpress,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now up, now down, now underfoot, and now&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Emergent … all the best of it, perhaps,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But throws you back upon a noble trust&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And use of your own instinct,—merely proves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Pure reason stronger than bare inference&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At strongest. Try it,—fix against heaven’s wall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your scaling ladders of high logic—mount&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Step by step!—Sight goes faster; &lt;strong&gt;that still ray&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which strikes out from you&lt;/strong&gt;, how, you cannot tell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And why, you know not—(&lt;strong&gt;did you eliminate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That such as you, indeed, should analyse?&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Goes straight and fast as light, and high as God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some difficulties in understanding this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What are “pure reason” and “bare inference” and why is the former stronger than the latter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is “that still ray which strikes out from you”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why is it a mistake to “eliminate” rather than “analyse”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T00:03:52.987" Title="Why is it a mistake to “eliminate” rather than “analyse” in &quot;Aurora Leigh&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16443" CreationDate="2020-11-25T00:03:52.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;First, the “still ray”. The theory that sight works by rays that are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory_(vision)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;emitted from the eye&lt;/a&gt; was held by some ancient philosophers, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For [the gods] caused the pure fire within us, which is akin to that of day, to flow through the eyes in a smooth and dense stream; and they compressed the whole substance, and especially the center, of the eyes, so that they occluded all other fire that was coarser and allowed only this pure kind of fire to filter through. So whenever the &lt;strong&gt;stream of vision&lt;/strong&gt; is surrounded by midday light, it &lt;strong&gt;flows out&lt;/strong&gt; like unto like, and coalescing therewith it forms one kindred substance along the path of the eyes’ vision, wheresoever the fire which streams from within collides with an obstructing object without […] and brings about that sensation which we now term “seeing”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Plato&lt;/a&gt; (c. 360 BCE). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Plat.+Tim.+45&amp;amp;fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0180&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Timaeus&lt;/em&gt; 45&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb (1925).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, “pure reason” is a reference to the philosophy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Kant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Immanuel Kant&lt;/a&gt;, in whose &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Critique of Pure Reason&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1781) the phrase is used in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;reason, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 5.c.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;Philosophy.&lt;/em&gt; A faculty transcending understanding, by which first principles are grasped &lt;em&gt;a priori&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these lines from &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; give us a metaphor in which Kant’s “pure reason” (glossed as “noble trust” or “instinct”) strikes out from you towards the truth, as fast and straight as Plato’s “stream of vision”, while “bare inference” (that is, practical reasoning and deduction) lags behind, so that you cannot explain logically how you came to your conclusion (“how, you cannot tell”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, “elimination” and “analysis” are two kinds of operation in logical reasoning. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analysis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Analysis&lt;/a&gt;” is the philosophical technique of breaking a concept down into its components to reveal its logical structure and assumptions, and “elimination” is a principle of inductive logic corresponding roughly to the modern idea of rejection of a hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phenomena may be invariably concomitant and therefore be known to have a fixed connection, as antecedent and consequent, but the order of the sequence may not at once appear. Now, inasmuch as the causal influence acts through the antecedent to the production of the consequent, it follows that a consequent can be made to disappear, or be modified only by the &lt;strong&gt;elimination&lt;/strong&gt; or modification of the antecedent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry P. Tappan (1844). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/elementslogicto03tappgoog/page/n305/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elements of Logic: Together with an Introductory View of Philosophy in General and a Preliminary View of the Reason&lt;/em&gt;, p. 287&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Putnam.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the parenthetical “did you eliminate, / That such as you, indeed, should analyse?” is a guess as to how you were unable to reach the truth through “bare inference”: that is, you made a mistake in your reasoning by wrongly ruling out a hypothesis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could Browning have come by this sense of the word “eliminate”? (It seems doubtful that she, or anyone, read Tappan’s turgid prose.) Perhaps she got it from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Stuart Mill&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two methods which we have now stated have many features of resemblance, but there are also many distinctions between them. Both are methods of &lt;strong&gt;elimination&lt;/strong&gt;. This term […] is well suited to express the operation […] which has been understood since the time of Bacon to be the foundation of experimental inquiry: namely, the successive exclusion of the various circumstances which are found to accompany a phenomenon in a given instance, in order to ascertain what are those among them which can be absent consistently with the existence of the phenomenon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Stuart Mill (1843). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/asystemlogicrat22millgoog/page/n478/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive: Being a Connected View of the Principles of Evidence, and the Methods of Scientific Investigation&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 456&lt;/a&gt;. London: John W. Parker.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Browning read at least some works of Mill’s because she mentions him in a letter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert and I shall like much to see anything of John Mill’s on the subject of Socialism or any other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning (c. 1850). Letter to Isabella Blagden. In Frederic G. Kenyon, ed. (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/letterselizabet00kenygoog/page/n493/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 467&lt;/a&gt;. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T00:03:52.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T06:06:59.343" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ok I think this was a short story I read, but it may have been a novel or even a tv show or movie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a man in jail for murder and a lady is there asking him to write in a journal or something and show regret for killing his victim(s)? And he doesn’t show regret so the family of the victim come in and kill him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11452" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T06:06:59.343" Title="Man is in jail for murder, gets killed by victims family" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15175" CreationDate="2020-11-25T11:19:17.370" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depends on how and what you count, yo. Do non-sonnets count?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background (can be safely skipped)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petrarch worked on his sequence to Laura, variously referred to as &lt;em&gt;Il Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;The Songbook&amp;quot;), &lt;em&gt;Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Fragments of Common Things&amp;quot;), and &lt;em&gt;Rime Sparse&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Scattered Rhymes&amp;quot;), throughout his poetic career. The Wikipedia entry on the sequence &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Canzoniere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Petrarch's meticulous dating of his manuscripts has allowed scholars to deduce that the poems were written over a period of forty years, with the earliest dating from shortly after 1327, and the latest around 1368. The transcription and ordering of the sequence itself went on until 1374, the year of the poet's death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's tempting to think that perhaps Liszt's numbering of the sonnets he set to music reflects some version of Petrarch that was superseded by a later ordering. However, there is no evidence for this in the manuscript tradition; none of the mss. have Poems 61, 134 and 156 ordered as Liszt numbers them, 47, 104, 123.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest known manuscript of the poems is &lt;a href=&quot;https://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Chig.L.V.176&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vat. Chigi L. V. 176&lt;/a&gt;. The manuscript includes poems by Dante and others; Dante's &lt;em&gt;Life of Bocaccio&lt;/em&gt;; and 215 of the 366 poems in the &lt;em&gt;Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt;. In the introduction to his &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books/about/Petrarch_s_Lyric_Poems.html?id=5iOL0HMQapsC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of Petrarch, Robert M. Durling says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This version of &lt;em&gt;Rime Sparse&lt;/em&gt; consists of 215 poems (1–120, &amp;quot;Donna mi vene,&amp;quot; 122–156, 159–165, 169–173, 184–185, 178, 176–177, 189, 264–304; in that order).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In later manuscripts, Petrarch reordered the poems from 157–366 a fair bit, adding new poems and occasionally excising existing ones. But he made only one change to any poem from among the first 156: to replace &amp;quot;Donna mi vene&amp;quot; with a different, newly composed poem, &amp;quot;Or vedi, Amor&amp;quot;. He was working on a new ordering of 336–366 when he died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of poems in the sequence 1–156 in the Chigi manuscript stayed in that order through all the different versions of the &lt;em&gt;Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt;. Since all three of Liszt's songs are from poems within that set, it's safe to assume that they weren't reordered. In that case, why does Liszt have the sonnets numbered as he does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The answer you've been waiting for&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because the &lt;em&gt;Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt; is not just sonnets.&lt;/strong&gt; Alongside its 317 sonnets, it includes ballads, sestinas, canzoni/songs, and madrigals. &amp;quot;Benedetto sia 'l giorno&amp;quot; is indeed &lt;em&gt;Sonetto&lt;/em&gt; 47 in the sequence. But it has been preceded by four &lt;em&gt;ballate&lt;/em&gt;, two &lt;em&gt;madrigali&lt;/em&gt;, two &lt;em&gt;sestinas&lt;/em&gt;, and six &lt;em&gt;canzoni&lt;/em&gt; in addition to 46 &lt;em&gt;sonetti&lt;/em&gt;. That's fourteen poems that are not sonnets before Sonnet 47. Math is hard, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO0cvqT1tAE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;as Barbie said&lt;/a&gt;, but let's try to add those numbers: 47 + 14 = 61. &lt;em&gt;Ecco&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it all depends on what you're counting. The 47th &lt;em&gt;sonnet&lt;/em&gt; in the sequence is &amp;quot;Benedetto sia 'l giorno&amp;quot;. But that sonnet is the 61st &lt;em&gt;poem&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt;. If you look through your edition of the &lt;em&gt;Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta&lt;/em&gt;, you can clear up the other two anomalies in the same way as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The information in the answer given over at &lt;a href=&quot;https://music.stackexchange.com/a/103907&quot;&gt;Music SE&lt;/a&gt; to this selfsame question is misleading and/or wrong. There's nothing &lt;em&gt;erroneous&lt;/em&gt; about either numbering, and scholars didn't reorder the poems either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Reference&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Durling, Robert M., trans. and ed. &lt;em&gt;Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The&lt;/em&gt; Rime Sparse &lt;em&gt;and Other Lyrics&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1976.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T12:16:09.467" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T12:16:09.467" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T11:40:18.793" Score="4" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Petrarch's celebrated sequence of 366 poems to Laura goes by three different titles. As far as I can tell, they're used interchangeably:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Il Canzoniere&lt;/em&gt;, The Songbook&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta&lt;/em&gt;, Fragments of Common Things&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rime Sparse&lt;/em&gt;, Scattered Rhymes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scholarly as well as popular editions or translations of Petrarch slap on one of these three titles on the cover and the end-papers without, as far as I've seen, explaining why they chose that title over the alternatives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;what is the textual history of these disparate titles being attached to the same collection?&lt;/strong&gt; Do they derive from different mss., or from different early editions? Is one of them Petrarch's and the others editorial?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T11:40:18.793" Title="Why does Petrarch's sequence of poems to Laura have three different titles?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;francesco-petrarca&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T12:23:23.347" Score="20" ViewCount="3095" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Great Vowel Shift&lt;/a&gt; was a series of changes in the pronunciation of English vowel sounds, marking the dividing line between Middle English and Modern English. A wholesale shift of sounds took place during the fifteenth century, including (most significantly for this question) the silencing of the terminal &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; sound in words like “ale” and “name”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-known piece of linguistics humour exaggerates the rapidity of the shift:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May 5, 1403: The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door.†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James D. McCawley (1978). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.specgram.com/LP/10.mccawley.may.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dates in the Month of May that Are of Interest to Linguists&lt;/a&gt;’. In Tom Ernst and Evan Smith, eds. (1978). &lt;em&gt;Lingua Pranca: An Anthology of Linguistic Humor&lt;/em&gt;. Indiana University Linguistics Club.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† The barmaid speaks pre-Shift English, so she pronounces “ale” as /a:le/ and “eel” as /e:l/, but Giles speaks post-Shift English, where “ale” is pronounced as /e:l/ and “eel” as /i:l/, hence when he says “ale” she hears “eel”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if the process was not quite as rapid as this, it must have made it difficult for people post-Shift to scan the poetry written before it. Geoffrey Chaucer, writing in the late fourteenth century, has many lines that scan in Middle English but not in Modern English, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And smale foweles maken melodye&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1400). General Prologue to &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/ellesmere-manuscript&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ellesmere Manuscript&lt;/a&gt;, folio 1, line 9.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where you need the &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; sound at the end of “smale” to scan it as iambic pentameter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my question is, to what extent were the poets and scholars of the sixteenth century onwards aware that a change in English pronunciation had taken place? If not, how did they explain the prosody of Chaucer? Did they think that he was incompetent, or that he was writing in some other form and not in iambic pentameter?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George Saintsbury writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;old and long prevalent idea that Chaucer could not scan&lt;/strong&gt; was based upon, or rather was but another form of, the idea that he could not count; and this [was] partly the result of mere ignorance of the value of syllables, especially of the final &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Saintsbury (1906). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.205101/page/n181/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A History Of English Prosody&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, page 170&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately he does not give any references. Who were the critics who thought that Chaucer could not scan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T23:09:42.257" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T23:09:42.257" Title="Were English poets of the sixteenth century aware of the Great Vowel Shift?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="13" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16450" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16452" CreationDate="2020-11-25T12:45:09.100" Score="2" ViewCount="532" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/44363340?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;My Glove&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Katherine A. Powers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I walked around (out of sight of the house) with the glove tucked under my arm, wishing I could shove it in my back pocket like boys did in books, but of course my pants, when I was allowed to wear pants, had no pockets because my mother had made them. I wished I knew where to get neat’s-foot oil, not available at Woolworth’s, but no one I could confide in knew anything about that. Another thing I could not do, I might as well confess, &lt;strong&gt;was spit in my glove.&lt;/strong&gt; I could direct the occasional &lt;strong&gt;spitting&lt;/strong&gt; noise at the pocket, yes. But shoot &lt;strong&gt;a gob of spit&lt;/strong&gt; right in there and work it in like you read about? No, I couldn’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't believe &amp;quot;spit&amp;quot; is literally spit, which doesn't make sense to me. So what's the meaning beneath?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T15:55:00.933" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T03:35:01.903" Title="What does spit mean in &quot;spit in my glove&quot; from the memoir by Powers? Literally spit?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;katherine-a-powers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-25T13:54:05.897" Score="3" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was a student, many years ago, in the mid 1990s, I remember reading a fascinating piece about traditional African poetry. If I remember correctly, it was a scholarly article reprinted an anthology that we were assigned in high school --but I don't know if that's accurate or not. I graduated in 1993, so this was pre-internet. If it wasn't an anthology, it would have been a photocopied handout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It mentioned a style --maybe from West Africa, maybe related to the griots --where each line of the poem is basically an elliptical allusion to a well-known proverb. So the poem stands as a kind of index of all the proverbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance if the proverbs were &amp;quot;it takes a village to raise a child&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;teach a man to fish and he eats for life&amp;quot; the poem might say something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The village is raising me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They have taught me to fish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't ever been able to locate either the original essay or any corroborating version. Can anyone help me track down what this style is, and some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T20:13:32.640" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T20:13:32.640" Title="Poems collecting African proverbs" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16452" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16450" CreationDate="2020-11-25T14:10:20.417" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning is literally 'spit':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spitting for baseball players is like blinking; it's going to be a tough habit to break. It's not even just spitting on the ground. You know, a lot of us have routines and habits — you know, you spit a little bit in your glove before a pitch. It's got to be a conscious effort from everyone. And, you know, we're going to have to do our best.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-july-22-2020-1.5658469/spitting-is-part-of-baseball-tradition-and-will-be-tough-to-quit-historian-says-1.5658473&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Current&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saliva is also used as a lubricant to break in a stiff new baseball glove. Though studies prove that the practice is bad for the glove, both pros and amateurs continue to spit into their glove to soften the leather.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-a-ban-on-spitting-is-tough-to-swallow-for-baseball-players-6496036/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Indian Express&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T14:10:20.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16449" CreationDate="2020-11-25T16:10:11.110" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;One person who believed that Chaucer could not count syllables, and possibly the most prominent one, was the poet John Dryden. Certainly, Dryden was of the opinion that Chaucer's poetry did not scan properly. In the preface to his book &lt;em&gt;Fables, Ancient and Modern&lt;/em&gt; (1700), that contains translations of poems by Chaucer and Ovid, Dryden writes that Chaucer's poetry was defective.  But we can see from Dryden's quote below that, even then, there were scholars who realized that Chaucer had indeed written in iambic pentameter. Dryden simply refused to believe them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And John Dryden attributed Chaucer's deficiency not to a deficiency in Chaucer himself, but to the general state of English poetry at that time. This makes sense; if you don't realize that silent e's were pronounced, no English poetry written in the 14th century or before will scan (let me note that I don't know when English stopped pronouncing silent e's, and it seems difficult to find the information on the web; further, it may have happened much earlier in some dialects than in others).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Dryden wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaucer's Meter Defective&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Tis true, I cannot go so far as he who publish'd the last Edition of him; for he would make us believe the Fault is in our Ears, and that there were really Ten Syllables in a Verse where we find but Nine: But this Opinion is not worth confuting; 'tis so gross and obvious an Errour, that common Sense (which is a Rule in everything but Matters of Faith and Revelation) must convince the Reader, that Equality of Numbers, in every Verse which we call Heroick, was either not known, or not always practis'd, in Chaucer's Age. It were an easie Matter to produce some thousands of his Verses, which are lame for want of half a Foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no Pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he liv'd in the Infancy of our Poetry, and that nothing is brought to Perfection at the first. we must be Children before we grow Men. There was an Ennius, and in process of Time a Lucilius, and a Lucretius, before Virgil and Horace; even after Chaucer there was a Spencer, a Harrington, a Fairfax, before Waller and Denham were in being: And our Numbers were in their Nonage till these last appeared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T11:53:38.247" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T11:53:38.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16454" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:21:46.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:21:46.030" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:21:46.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16455" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:21:46.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Avni Doshi (born 1982) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:54:05.577" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:54:05.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16456" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:23:20.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:23:20.353" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:23:20.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16457" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:23:20.353" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel Girl in White Cotton by Avni Doshi. Should be tagged with [avni-doshi]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:54:26.403" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:54:26.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16458" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:24:31.023" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:24:31.023" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:24:31.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16459" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:24:31.023" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English author Hugh Lofting (1886-1947) and or life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:54:02.657" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:54:02.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:27:33.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:27:33.790" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:27:33.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:27:33.790" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book series &quot;Doctor Dolittle&quot; by Hugh Lofting. Should be tagged with [hugh-lofting]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:54:18.513" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:54:18.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:35:17.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:35:17.787" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:35:17.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:35:17.787" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters. Should be tagged with [sarah-waters]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T03:50:37.907" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T03:50:37.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16464" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16449" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:36:17.960" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: As late as the beginning of the 17th century, the editor &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Speght&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Speght&lt;/a&gt; claimed that it was possible for a skillful reader to scan Chaucer. But he modernized Chaucer’s spelling, making it hard for anyone after him to do the same!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that in the mid-16th century, some people still knew, or thought they knew, how to scan Chaucer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Douglas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gavin Douglas&lt;/a&gt;, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poeticalworksofg02doug/page/14/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to his translation of Virgil’s &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;, published 1533&lt;/a&gt;, praised Chaucer as “horleige and reguleir” (that is, as regular as a clock), and the antiquarian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Stow&lt;/a&gt;, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/woorkesofgeffrey00chau/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface to his 1561 edition&lt;/a&gt; of Chaucer’s works, wrote without further comment that the poet possessed “soche perfection in metre”. But by the end of the 16th century the skill must have fallen into desuetude, for Thomas Speght, the editor of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofourancie00chau/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Workes of Our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, felt the need to justify the claim that Chaucer could be scanned. In his preface to the second edition (1602) he wrote thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for his verses, although in divers places they may seeme to us to stand of unequall measures: yet a skilfull Reader, that can scan them in their nature, shall find it otherwise. And if a verse here and there fal out a sillable shorter or longer than another, I rather aret it to the negligence and rape of &lt;em&gt;Adam Scrivener&lt;/em&gt;,† that I may speake as Chaucer doth, than to any unconning or oversight in the Author: For how fearfull he was to have his works miswritten, or his verse mismeasured, may appeare in the end of his fift booke of &lt;em&gt;Troylus and Creseide&lt;/em&gt;, where he writeth thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for there is so great diversitie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In English and in writing of our tongue,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So pray I God that none miswrite thee,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tongue, &amp;amp;c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, whereas in the explanation of the old words, sundry of their significations by me given, may to some seeme conjectural, yet such as understand the Dialects of our tongue, especially in the North, and have knowledge in some other languages, will judge otherwise […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Speght (1602). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofourancie00chau/page/n11/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface to &lt;em&gt;The Workes of Our Ancient and learned English Poet, Geoffrey Chaucer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Adam Islip.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Chaucer’s scrivener (copyist), to whom he wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/britishpoetsinc17swifgoog/page/n198/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;short complaint in verse&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage implies that Speght knew that the pronunciation of words had changed, and that Chaucer’s verse had scanned in the original. And he indicates that at that period there existed regional dialects which preserved old pronunciations and vocabulary, so that a skilful reader familiar with these dialects could make out Chaucer’s scansion. (Sadly Speght gives us no other clues as to how much he knew about the change in pronunciation—he was more concerned with explaining Chaucer’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofourancie00chau/page/n801/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;old and obscure words&lt;/a&gt;”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, lacking knowledge of Middle English, Speght’s readers must have had difficulty in making out these implications. And sure enough, less than a century later, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dryden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dryden&lt;/a&gt; read Speght’s claim that Chaucer could be scanned by a skilful reader and &lt;em&gt;did not believe it&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;’Tis true, I cannot go so far as he who publish’d the last Edition of him; for he would make us believe the Fault is in our Ears, and that there were really Ten Syllables in a Verse where we find but Nine: But this Opinion is not worth confuting; ’tis so gross and obvious an Errour, that common Sense (which is a Rule in everything but Matters of Faith and Revelation) must convince the Reader, that Equality of Numbers, in every Verse which we call &lt;em&gt;Heroick&lt;/em&gt;, was either not known, or not always practis’d, in &lt;em&gt;Chaucer&lt;/em&gt;’s Age. It were an easie Matter to produce some thousands of his Verses, which are lame for want of half a Foot, and sometimes a whole one, and which no Pronunciation can make otherwise. We can only say, that he liv’d in the Infancy of our Poetry, and that nothing is brought to Perfection at the first. We must be Children before we grow Men. There was an &lt;em&gt;Ennius&lt;/em&gt;, and in process of Time a &lt;em&gt;Lucilius&lt;/em&gt;, and a &lt;em&gt;Lucretius&lt;/em&gt;, before &lt;em&gt;Virgil&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Horace&lt;/em&gt;; even after &lt;em&gt;Chaucer&lt;/em&gt; there was a &lt;em&gt;Spencer&lt;/em&gt;, a &lt;em&gt;Harrington&lt;/em&gt;, a &lt;em&gt;Fairfax&lt;/em&gt;, before &lt;em&gt;Waller&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Denham&lt;/em&gt; were in being: And our Numbers were in their Nonage till these last appear’d.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Dryden (1700). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mdu-rare-075246/page/n23/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface to &lt;em&gt;Fables ancient and modern: translated into verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, &amp;amp; Chaucer: with original poems&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason that Dryden did not believe Speght, I think, is that the latter had &lt;em&gt;modernized the spelling&lt;/em&gt;, thus erasing many clues to the Middle English pronunciation of the words! It is ironic because this is the very thing that Chaucer had prayed should not happen in the passage that Speght quoted from &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Creseyde&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see the problem clearly a couple of pages &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mdu-rare-075246/page/n25/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;later in Dryden’s Preface&lt;/a&gt;, where he quotes a passage from Chaucer’s General Prologue to &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; (in Speght’s spelling) and complains that “you have likewise more than one Example of his unequal Numbers”. For example, in Speght’s spelling, the line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or feine things, or find words new&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;appears to have only eight syllables. But if we look at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofgeffrayc00chau/page/n21/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1542 edition of &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the spelling is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or feyne thynges, or fynde wordes newe&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and with this spelling, there is little difficulty in finding ten syllables that scan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that Speght modernized Chaucer’s spelling casts some doubt on the possibility that he personally was able to scan Chaucer, for if he had known of the importance of the terminal &lt;em&gt;e&lt;/em&gt; he would surely not have been so diligent in removing it. This suggests to me that Speght and his contemporaries in the late 16th century were still aware that Chaucer &lt;em&gt;ought to&lt;/em&gt; scan, but no longer knew how to do it. Here’s a passage from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gascoigne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Gascoigne&lt;/a&gt; giving a similar impression:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also our father &lt;em&gt;Chaucer&lt;/em&gt; hath used the same libertie in féete and measures that the Latinists do use: and who so ever do peruse and well consider his workes, he shall finde that although his lines are not alwayes of one selfe same number of Syllables, yet beyng redde by one that hath understanding, the longest verse and that which hath most Syllables in it, will fall (to the eare) correspondent unto that whiche hath fewest sillables in it: and like wise that whiche hath in it fewest syllables, shal be founde yet to consist of woordes that haue suche naturall sounde, as may séeme equall in length to a verse which hath many moe sillables of lighter accentes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Gascoigne (1575). ‘Certayne notes of instruction in English verse’. In Edward Arber, ed. (1869). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofourancie00chau/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;English Reprints: George Gascoigne&lt;/em&gt;, p. 34&lt;/a&gt;. London: 5 Queen Square, Bloomsbury.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same year as Dryden, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Wesley_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Wesley&lt;/a&gt; published a similar account:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of Chaucer’s Verse we scarce the &lt;em&gt;Measures&lt;/em&gt; know,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So &lt;em&gt;rough&lt;/em&gt; the &lt;em&gt;Lines&lt;/em&gt;, and so &lt;em&gt;unequal&lt;/em&gt; flow;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whether by Injury of &lt;em&gt;Time&lt;/em&gt; defac’d,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or &lt;em&gt;careless&lt;/em&gt; at the &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt;, and writ in &lt;em&gt;haste&lt;/em&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or &lt;em&gt;coursly&lt;/em&gt;, like old &lt;em&gt;Ennius&lt;/em&gt;, he &lt;em&gt;design’d&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What After-days have &lt;em&gt;polish’d&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;refin’d&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Wesley (1700). &lt;em&gt;An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry&lt;/em&gt;, p. 12. London: Charles Harper.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comparison of Chaucer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennius&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ennius&lt;/a&gt;, the “father of Roman poetry”, was a commonplace, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aston_Cockayne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aston Cokayne&lt;/a&gt; called Chaucer “our true Ennius, whose old book / Hath taught our Nation so to Poetize” (‘A Remedy for Love’, 1658). Wesley, unlike Dryden, does realize that the difficulties may be due to “injury of time” (that is, to change of language) rather than incompetence of the poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A couple of decades after Dryden and Wesley, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Urry_(literary_editor)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Urry&lt;/a&gt; repeated Speght’s claim but affirmed Dryden’s skepticism. Chaucer’s pronunciation must have been truly lost at this point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is thought by some that his Verses every where consist of an equal number of feet; and that if read with a right accent, are no where deficient; but those nice discerning Persons would find it difficult, with all their straining and working, to spin out some of his Verses into a meafure of ten Syllables. He was not altogether regardless of his Numbers; but his thoughts were more intent upon solid sense than gingle, and he tells us plainly that we must not expect regularity in all his Verses.†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Urry (1721). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/TheWorksOfGeoffreyChaucerUrry/page/n33/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface to &lt;em&gt;The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Bernard Lintot.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/workesofgeffrayc00chau/page/n643/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The House of Fame&lt;/em&gt;, book III&lt;/a&gt;: “Yet make it somwhat agreable / Though some verse fayle in a syllable.”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(With thanks to Peter Shor, who found the passage from Dryden.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T17:07:51.647" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T17:07:51.647" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16465" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:37:31.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T22:37:31.013" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T22:37:31.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16466" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T22:37:31.013" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. Should also be tagged with the [toni-morrison] tag. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T08:31:48.263" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T08:31:48.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T23:05:24.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T23:05:24.457" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T23:05:24.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T23:05:24.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Old English language. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T03:50:42.257" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T03:50:42.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-25T23:07:13.590" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-25T23:07:13.590" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T23:07:13.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-25T23:07:13.590" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Katherine A. Powers or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T03:50:27.773" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T03:50:27.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16471" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16442" CreationDate="2020-11-25T23:23:53.157" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Tsarist system, there was an upper class of aristocracy that controlled the country and had a standard of living much higher than the general population. Then there was a revolution that overthrew that system, and then the revolution was hijacked by the Bolsheviks, who claimed to be taking the country over on behalf of the people to destroy the class system and institute an egalitarian society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Communist Party became the new ruling class, with the upper echelons enjoying a standard of living much higher than the general population. So while they destroyed the old system of Tsarist aristocracy exploiting the working class, they replaced it with a system that also exploited the working class, just with a different set of people doing the exploiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The humans in animal farm represent the capitalists/bourgeoisie/aristocracy. The pigs represent the Communists in general and the Bolsheviks, especially the upper echelons, in particular (the dogs also represent Bolsheviks, but enforcement arms such as NKVD rather than the ruling elite).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pigs took on much of the attributes of the humans (wearing clothes, walking on two legs, etc.) and began exploiting and oppressing the rest of the animals, just as the humans did. The pigs have taken on the role of the humans, and the farm is run much as it was before the revolution, except with different people running it. This parallels how the USSR and Tsarist Russia were run by different sets of people, but the USSR was just as exploitive and oppressive, and the main difference between the two was just who was ruling, and not how they ruled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10427" LastActivityDate="2020-11-25T23:23:53.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16473" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16474" CreationDate="2020-11-26T10:47:20.770" Score="3" ViewCount="355" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from essay by Marita Golden in the book &amp;quot;three minutes or less: life lessons from America's greatest writers &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Writers are always headed or looking for home. Home is the first &lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt;, questing into the craggy terrain of imagination. Home is the final &lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt;, polished, perfected, nailed down. I am an American writer, and so my sense of place is fluid, ever shifting. The spaciousness of this land reigns and pushes against the borders of self-censorship and hesitation. I have claimed at one point or other everyplace as my home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the meaning of &amp;quot;sentence&amp;quot;(the punishment given by a court), though it obviously would not fit in this case, I think &amp;quot;sentence&amp;quot; still holds a negative connotation. &amp;quot;Home,&amp;quot; however, in the passage is what the author seek for.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So what's the other meaning of &amp;quot;sentence&amp;quot; here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T10:27:58.887" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T10:27:58.887" Title="What's the implied meaning of &quot;sentence&quot; in &quot;Home is the first sentence&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;marita-golden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16473" CreationDate="2020-11-26T11:11:22.203" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means “sentence” in the grammatical sense, i.e., a self-contained unit of language comprising:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;either an interjection by itself, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a verb at minimum, usually with a subject, objects, and modifiers being linked to it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer is saying that writing is an act of claiming a place of one’s own and feeling at home in it. Every time one starts to write, one is headed into uncharted territory, claiming it as home. By the time one finishes what one is writing, one is at home in that territory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the writer is American, she’s drawing on the mythology of homesteaders striking out West to explore and settle down in a new place. Since a writer writes many works, each work is a new act of such territorial conquest, and so she says she has at one time or another made every experience home by writing about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nothing to do with sentence in the sense of a prison term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T11:21:47.250" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T11:21:47.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-26T12:26:46.510" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from essay by Marita Golden in the book &amp;quot;three minutes or less: life lessons from America's greatest writers &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like their creator, my fictional characters reject the notion of life lived on automatic pilot. The most important people in my books see life as a flame, something that when lived properly bristles and squirms, even as it glows. In the autobiography Migrations of the Heart, the heroine, who just happened to be me, came of age in Washington, D.C., and began the process of becoming an adult person everywhere else. If you sell your first piece of writing in Manhattan, give birth to your only child in Lagos, experience Paris in the spring with someone you love, and return to Washington after thirteen years of self-imposed exile to write the Washington novel nobody else had (and you thought you never would), &lt;strong&gt;tickets, visas, lingua franca will all become irrelevant&lt;/strong&gt;. When all places fingerprint the soul, which grasp is judged to be the strongest? In my novel A Woman's Place, one woman leaves America to join a liberation struggle in Africa. In Long Distance Life. Naomi Johnson flees 1930s North Carolina and comes up south to Washington, D.C., to find and make her way. Thirty years later her daughter returns to that complex, unpredictable geography and is sculpted like some unexpected work of art by the civil-rights movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the connection that the writer is managing to make between the preceding context and &amp;quot;tickets, visas...&amp;quot;? And especially what does she want to convey through &amp;quot;tickets, visas, lingua franca will all become irrelevant&amp;quot;? Irrelevant to what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="11043" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T03:21:43.360" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T03:21:43.360" Title="What does &quot;tickets, visas, lingua franca will all become irrelevant&quot; mean in a context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;marita-golden&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16475" CreationDate="2020-11-26T13:37:57.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The writer is describing herself and her characters as citizens of all places, and of none. The barriers between places are irrelevant to them, and therefore so are the tools traditionally required to cross those barriers: tickets (plane, train or bus), visas and lingua franca (commonly understood language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I'm a bit skeptical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="101" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T13:37:57.300" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16477" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16484" CreationDate="2020-11-26T16:32:53.450" Score="8" ViewCount="429" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;, Vin and Slowswift have this conversation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cett is one of the finest poets I know, child,&amp;quot; said Slowswift, waving her toward a chair. &amp;quot;We shared our work with one another for a good decade or so before politics stole him away. He didn't like stories either. To him, everything had to be gritty and 'real,' even his poetry. Seems like an attitude with which you'd agree.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Vin shrugged, sitting in the indicated chair. &amp;quot;I suppose.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I find that ironic in a way you shall never understand,&amp;quot; the old man said, smiling.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 27 of &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have trouble understanding irony in general, and I am quite confused over this quote. My two questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why does Slowswift find Vin's remark ironic?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why couldn't Vin understand the irony?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T20:36:51.647" Title="Why does Slowswift find this remark ironic?" Tags="&lt;brandon-sanderson&gt;&lt;mistborn&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-26T16:58:56.770" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800311h.html#chap17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 17 of The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing a conversation between an old uncle and his nephew, who was an assistant-commissioner of police. In a previous passage, the old lord said, revealing the real identity of his nephew:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I thought it was,&amp;quot; said the wounded man quietly. &amp;quot;You had better get on to Southampton. He'll probably pick up Fellowe&amp;quot;—he smiled through his mask—&amp;quot;I suppose &lt;strong&gt;I ought to call him Lord Francis Ledborough now. He's a nephew of mine and a sort of a police-commissioner himself.&lt;/strong&gt; I wired him to follow me. You might pick up his car and go on together. Manfred can stay with me. Take this mask off.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the mentioned conversation was as such:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black was hanged at Pentonville gaol on the 27th of March, 19—, and Lord Francis Ledborough, sitting by the side of &lt;strong&gt;an invalid uncle's&lt;/strong&gt; bed, read such meagre descriptions as were given to the press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Did you know him, sir&lt;/strong&gt;?&amp;quot; he asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old earl turned fretfully.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Know him?&amp;quot; he snarled. &amp;quot;Of course I knew him; he is the only friend of mine that has ever been hanged.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Where did you meet him?&amp;quot; persisted &lt;strong&gt;a sceptical A.C. of Police&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I never met him,&amp;quot; said the old man grimly, &amp;quot;he met me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So my question is: Was it normal for someone to call his uncle &amp;quot;sir&amp;quot;? And why the conversation was very formal as such,  why the author used &amp;quot;a &amp;amp; an&amp;quot;, although they know each other??&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T18:51:06.343" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T18:51:06.343" Title="Was it normal in 1917 for someone to call his uncle &quot;sir&quot; in England?" Tags="&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16479" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-26T19:47:32.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T19:47:32.010" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T19:47:32.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16480" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-26T19:47:32.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about the &quot;Exeter Book&quot;, also known as the &quot;Codex Exoniensis&quot;, which is a compilation of poems in Old English." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T14:11:20.847" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T14:11:20.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16481" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-26T19:48:42.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-26T19:48:42.443" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T19:48:42.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16482" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-26T19:48:42.443" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Martia Golden (born 1950) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T14:11:25.510" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T14:11:25.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16477" CreationDate="2020-11-26T20:36:51.647" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found a theory about this, which at first seems far-fetched, but, &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; it's true, would make this one of the most interesting lines in the whole of the Mistborn trilogy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, here's a tidbit which doesn't answer your question but is definitely true. &lt;strong&gt;Slowswift is intended to be a character based on Tolkien&lt;/strong&gt; - a little nod from Brandon Sanderson to the master of fantasy. Sanderson said this himself in his annotations to &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt; chapter 27:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similarly amusing cameo (I must have been in a cameo mood) we have Slowswift—who is based on Grandpa Tolkien. (See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brandonsanderson.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/jrr-tolkien.jpeg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this picture&lt;/a&gt;.) The name itself comes from his love of wordplay and of names that are inherently self-contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m no Tolkien scholar—I don’t know the man’s personality or how he would have reacted to this situation. I’m just a layman and a fan—who for some reason felt like sticking in a tiny side character in imitation of the master. We authors do strange things like that occasionally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same chapter, immediately after her meeting with Slowswift, Vin was supposed to meet another informant named Hoid. But she didn't: she had a bad feeling about the meeting, and left before seeing the man, based on trust of her instincts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's venture outside the original Mistborn trilogy. &lt;a href=&quot;https://coppermind.net/wiki/Hoid&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hoid&lt;/a&gt; is a recurring character in the Cosmere, the multiverse which connects together almost all of Brandon Sanderson's fantasy worlds and stories. He's a lot more than just a one-off non-character in &lt;em&gt;The Hero of Ages&lt;/em&gt;, although his true nature is not yet understood even from all of the Cosmere works published so far (2020); his backstory will be revealed in the as-yet-unwritten &lt;a href=&quot;https://coppermind.net/wiki/Dragonsteel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dragonsteel&lt;/a&gt; series. In the companion novella &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistborn:_Secret_History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mistborn: Secret History&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, it turns out that the spirit of Kelsier was the one who warned Vin away from Hoid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what about Slowswift's irony? Well, if we allow for a little fourth-wall breaking, Vin's preferring realistic stories over fantastical ones is a little ironic since &lt;strong&gt;she herself is a character in a fantasy story&lt;/strong&gt;, and this irony is something she'll never understand. The only outstanding question is how &lt;em&gt;Slowswift&lt;/em&gt; could understand it - isn't he also a character in a fantasy story? The &lt;a href=&quot;http://twg.17thshard.com/index.php?topic=5475.msg135171#msg135171&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;theory I found&lt;/a&gt; is that Slowswift is Hoid and that Hoid (a mysterious travelling storyteller common to all the Cosmere worlds) is Brandon Sanderson himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's some serious fourth-wall breaking, of course. But the above explanation for the &amp;quot;irony&amp;quot; would still work even if we don't directly identify Slowswift with Hoid with Sanderson. Since Slowswift is definitely intended to be a representation of Tolkien, we could understand his sentence as that of a fantasy author speaking to a fantasy character - still somewhat fourth-wall-breaking but less so than inserting Sanderson explicitly into the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not claiming this as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; answer. But it's one interpretation, which seems consistent with the Mistborn trilogy, Sanderson's external commentary, and the Cosmere as we know it so far. Take it or leave it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-26T20:36:51.647" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15500" CreationDate="2020-11-27T08:56:30.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The technique where an author gives us direct access to what a character is thinking is called &lt;em&gt;interior monologue&lt;/em&gt;. The passage you quote above tells us what the governess is saying in her own mind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I wish it wasn't night time. I wish there was another woman in the carriage. I'm frightened of the men next door.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice that this is set off from the surrounding text by quotation marks. You're probably familiar with the distinction between direct and indirect speech, but just for the sake of clarity, here's a primer. Suppose I ask a friend whether he likes &amp;quot;The Little Governess&amp;quot;, and he responds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I like all Mansfield's stories very much.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In relating this exchange to a third party, I could use direct speech, quoting my friend's first person words verbatim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend said, &amp;quot;I like Mansfield's stories very much.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or I could put his words in indirect speech, replacing his first-person perspective with third person and recasting into past tense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend said he liked Mansfield's stories very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interior monologue isn't &lt;em&gt;speech&lt;/em&gt; per se, but the same principle of direct quotation versus indirect reporting applies. In this story, Mansfield switches between giving us direct and indirect access to the governess's thoughts. The quotation marks setting off the passage about how the governess wishes it weren't nighttime indicate that Mansfield is quoting the thoughts of the governess directly; those words are the governess's interior monologue. As you mention in the question, it's what she's saying to herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere, as you notice, the narration is indirect, even when it's reporting what the governess is thinking and feeling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A franc! Did he imagine that she was going to give him a franc for playing a trick like that just because she was a girl and travelling alone at night? Never, never!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mansfield could just as easily have written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A franc! Does he imagine that I'm going to give him a franc for playing a trick like that just because I'm a girl and travelling alone at night? Never, never!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mansfield switches between direct and indirect reporting of the governess's thoughts quite seamlessly, as in this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I never could have dared to go to sleep if I had been alone,&amp;quot; she decided. &amp;quot;I couldn't have put my feet up or even taken off my hat.&amp;quot; The singing gave her a queer little tremble in her stomach and, hugging herself to stop it, with her arms crossed under her cape, she felt really glad to have the old man in the carriage with her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through almost the entire story, the narration switches back and forth between direct and indirect reporting of the governess's thoughts. This accomplishes a number of effects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Variety. Alternating direct quotation and indirect reporting ensures that we're not looking at long stretches of third-person narrative that could get monotonous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Clarity. If the governess's thoughts were all in direct speech, there could be confusing switches between the governess's interior monologue and the dialogue she has with others.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Immediacy. Third-person narrative does distance the reader from the character. The inclusion of direct quotes of the governess's interior monologue gives us the illusion of immediate, unfiltered access to her thoughts, and keeps the story's pace quicker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An interesting feature of the story is that the point of view isn't limited to the governess's. At two moments in the story, we see things from other points of view. One brilliant manipulation of narrative point of view is in this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How kindly the old man in the corner watched her bare little hand turning over the big white pages, watched her lips moving as she pronounced the long words to herself, rested upon her hair that fairly blazed under the light. Alas! how tragic for a little governess to possess hair that made one think of tangerines and marigolds, of apricots and tortoiseshell cats and champagne! Perhaps that was what the old man was thinking as he gazed and gazed, and that not even the dark ugly clothes could disguise her soft beauty. Perhaps the flush that licked his cheeks and lips was a flush of rage that anyone so young and tender should have to travel alone and unprotected through the night. Who knows he was not murmuring in his sentimental German fashion: &amp;quot;Ja, es ist eine Tragoedie! Would to God I were the child's grandpapa!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another is the very last paragraph of the story, when we see things from the perspective of the waiter who has a grudge against the governess:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the little governess reached the hall of the Hotel Grunewald the same waiter who had come into her room in the morning was standing by a table, polishing a tray of glasses. The sight of the little governess seemed to fill him out with some inexplicable important content. He was ready for her question; his answer came pat and suave. &amp;quot;Yes, Fräulein, the lady has been here. I told her that you had arrived and gone out again immediately with a gentleman. She asked me when you were coming back again–but of course I could not say. And then she went to the manager.&amp;quot; He took up a glass from the table, held it up to the light, looked at it with one eye closed, and started polishing it with a corner of his apron. &amp;quot; . . . ?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Pardon, Fräulein? Ach, no, Fräulein. The manager could tell her nothing–nothing.&amp;quot; He shook his head and smiled at the brilliant glass. &amp;quot;Where is the lady now?&amp;quot; asked the little governess, shuddering so violently that she had to hold her handkerchief up to her mouth. &amp;quot;How should I know?&amp;quot; cried the waiter, and as he swooped past her to pounce upon a new arrival his heart beat so hard against his ribs that he nearly chuckled aloud. &amp;quot;That's it! that's it!&amp;quot; he thought. &amp;quot;That will show her.&amp;quot; And as he swung the new arrival's box on to his shoulders–hoop !–as though he were a giant and the box a feather, he minced over again the little governess's words, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Gehen Sie. Gehen Sie sofort.&lt;/em&gt; Shall I! Shall I!&amp;quot; he shouted to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two deviations from the governess's point of view are brilliantly handled, and a full discussion of what they accomplish could be the topic of another question on this site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One last point: as the comments to your question noted, the part of the question when you report that some Google sites &amp;quot;said, 'we don't include dialogue in third person narration'&amp;quot; is unclear. Which sites? Who is &amp;quot;we&amp;quot;? What does &amp;quot;include dialogue&amp;quot; mean? Please clarify. On the face of it, there's nothing that stops a writer from including dialogue with a third person narrative. In fact, it would be more rare to find a work of fiction written in third person that &lt;em&gt;doesn't&lt;/em&gt; include dialogue. Please clarify, ideally by linking to the sites in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T08:56:30.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T09:55:39.763" Score="1" ViewCount="170" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book III of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56621&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator, who has published some popular poems, reads her fan-mail, which includes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… rarer tokens from young bachelors,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who wrote from college (with the same goosequill,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Suppose, they had just been plucked of) and a snatch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From Horace, ‘Collegisse juvat,’ set&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon the first page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of difficulties here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Why does she suppose that the bachelors wrote with “the same goosequill they had just been plucked of”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance of the Horatian tag? “Collegisse juvat” means “delights to have gathered” and is from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://la.wikisource.org/wiki/Carmina_(Horatius)/Liber_I/Carmen_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dedication of Horace’s first book of &lt;em&gt;Odes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. What does the use of this tag imply about the writers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T15:54:58.417" Title="What's the significance of “Collegisse juvat” in Aurora Leigh's fan-mail?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16487" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16491" CreationDate="2020-11-27T12:33:11.570" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0800311h.html#chap17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 17 of The Just Men of Cordova&lt;/a&gt; (1917) by Edgar Wallace, the author is describing a captured man who had been led to a building:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sight he saw was a remarkable one. &lt;strong&gt;He was in a chapel&lt;/strong&gt;; he saw the stained-glass windows, but in place of the altar there was a low platform which ran along one end of the building. It was draped with black and set with three desks. It reminded him of nothing so much as a judge's desk, save that the hangings were of purple, the desks of black oak, and the carpet that covered the dais of the same sombre hue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three men sat at the desks. They were masked, and a diamond pin in the cravat of one glittered in the light of the huge electrolier which hung from the vaulted roof. Gonsalez had a weakness for jewels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining member of the Four was to the right of the prisoners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the stained-glass windows, the raftered roof, and the solemn character of the architecture, &lt;strong&gt;the illusion of the chapel ended.&lt;/strong&gt; There was no other furniture on the floor; it was tiled and bare of chair or pew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black took all this in quickly. He noted a door behind the three, through which they came and apparently made their exit. He could see no means of escape save by the way he had come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The central figure of the three at the desk spoke in a voice which was harsh and stern and uncompromising. &amp;quot;Morris Black,&amp;quot; he said solemnly, &amp;quot;what of Fanks?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black shrugged his shoulders and looked round as though weary of a question which he found it impossible to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What of Jakobs, of Coleman, of a dozen men who have stood in your way and have died?&amp;quot; asked the voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still Black was silent. His eye took in the situation. Behind him were two doors, and he observed that the key was in the lock. &lt;strong&gt;He could see that he was in an old Norman chapel&lt;/strong&gt; which private enterprise had restored for a purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It's already said at first the he was in a chapel, so does the author meant here that Black firstly guessed that he was in a chapel, then he became totally sure of that?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T13:46:01.837" Title="What's meant by &quot;the illusion of the chapel ended&quot; in The Just Men of Cordova?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-just-men-of-cordova&gt;&lt;edgar-wallace&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T13:12:37.803" Score="3" ViewCount="179" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I have to find one &amp;quot;flaw&amp;quot; about The Lord of the Rings, it may be the fact that Sam is more or less the slave of Frodo, albeit a willing servant. This fundamentally bothers me, for some reason. Perhaps because I'm essentially Sam in terms of social status, if even that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although he ends up being extremely heroic and important, and (spoiler warning) eventually becomes the long-time mayor of Hobbiton, during the entire epic journey, he is always somehow &amp;quot;below&amp;quot; Frodo, and Frodo is always the &amp;quot;obvious&amp;quot; leader, even though he barely seems to have any more wits than Sam in most situations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's heavily implied that Sam isn't the sharpest individual, but I mostly don't notice any of this supposed stupidity. Perhaps I'm failing to see it just because I &lt;em&gt;want&lt;/em&gt; him to be &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; or on &amp;quot;equal terms&amp;quot; with Frodo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, is there any particular reason that Tolkien decided to not just make Sam Frodo's close and trusty friend, who might do work for him but isn't in any way a &amp;quot;servant&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;slave&amp;quot;? Would this really have changed the story in a major way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some specific point in making Sam play the role he has? Could it be that it's simply his (perhaps largely imagined) low intelligence that makes him so submissive toward Frodo? As in, &amp;quot;good ol' Frodo is so smart, so he'd better call the shots&amp;quot;? Low self-esteem, perhaps as a result from being talked down to all his life in Hobbiton by the older hobbits?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not at all ignorant about actual history, and I know that until very recently, this kind of relationship was extremely common. Especially here in Europe. And it even makes perfect sense. Still, there's something about it which makes me uncomfortable. Since Hobbits are fictional entities, it wasn't strictly &lt;em&gt;necessary&lt;/em&gt; for Tolkien to have such as &amp;quot;master/slave&amp;quot; tradition included in the story, at least among Hobbits. Hobbits seem like they all mostly live in peace and harmony, with not many power struggles and things of that nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps Tolkien made Sam a &amp;quot;slave&amp;quot; specifically for there to be a maximum contrast once he has been through all the trials and comes back as a leader? Although, even then, he still seems like he looks up to Frodo, in spite of basically carrying Frodo to Mount Doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire character of Sam basically confuses me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T19:30:20.937" Title="Is it known why Tolkien made Sam be Frodo's servant rather than very close and trusty friend &quot;on equal terms&quot;?" Tags="&lt;j-r-r-tolkien&gt;&lt;the-lord-of-the-rings&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16489" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16486" CreationDate="2020-11-27T13:46:46.737" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the suggestion is that in their letters the bachelors declare that her writing has given them gooseflesh/goose bumps:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rough, pimply condition of the skin, resembling that of a plucked goose, produced by cold, fear, etc. [per OED]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/music-gives-goosebumps/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A recent study into brain differences in people who get the 'chills' from music&lt;/a&gt; may be interesting in this regard. Although focused on music, the PDH student carrying out the work says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“People who get the chills have an enhanced ability to experience intense emotions,” Sachs said. “Right now, that’s just applied to music because the study focused on the auditory cortex. But it could be studied in different ways down the line,” he pointed out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that there is a side order of Aurora regarding the bachelors as geese, in the sense of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A foolish person, a simpleton. [per OED]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This gives a picture of Aurora Leigh having a good understanding of the overwrought nature of a teenage fan who not only experiences intense emotions in response to art, but feels moved to act upon in by writing to the creator because they feel the connection to be intense and personal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A characteristic which still pertains today, currently under the term 'stanning'. &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/aSLZFdqwh7E&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://youtu.be/aSLZFdqwh7E&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given this I would interpret the use of the snatched words from Horace as being indicative of that same overwrought and somewhat pompous nature. Teens like 'deep' quotes, then as now they crib lines from 'meaningful' works of poetry, not always with a great understanding of their meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full quote is &lt;em&gt;Curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat&lt;/em&gt;; that is: &lt;em&gt;It's a pleasure to have collected the dust of Olympus on your carriage-wheels.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line seems to be often used in publication but seldom interpreted. &lt;em&gt;Translation&lt;/em&gt; is common, but not explanation of what we are to take from its deployments. It is often used as a standfirst in chapters of memoirs related to travel, sometimes in reference to horseracing, but I've also found reference to it being used on the front cover of books of collected botanical specimens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd hazard that one objective with its use is to demonstrate the erudition of the writer to his audience and that this is the point Aurora is making about her correspondents: they take themselves very seriously and wear their learning heavily, as teens are wont to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T15:54:58.417" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T15:54:58.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16490" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16488" CreationDate="2020-11-27T14:21:26.140" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure I can satisfactorily answer your question; if you really 'want him to be &amp;quot;normal&amp;quot; or on &amp;quot;equal terms&amp;quot; with Frodo' I'm not going to try to convince you :) That said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sam is Frodo's gardener; even though gardeners (and cooks) were probably held in high esteem in the hobbit society, that still makes Frodo Sam's employer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frodo is from the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Brandybuck&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brandybuck family&lt;/a&gt;, so he has a bit of hobbit nobility in him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sam is twelve years younger than Frodo. When their journey begins, he is 38, which is only 5 years after 'coming of age'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frodo is rather 'experienced' for a hobbit, growing up very close to Bilbo. Hobbits didn't travel much and seldom left the Shire. My impression is that Sam simply &lt;em&gt;trusts&lt;/em&gt; Frodo to make the right decisions in the 'exotic' situations they end up in.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T14:21:26.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16487" CreationDate="2020-11-27T15:26:37.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The writer is playing with definitions a little, the room has the form of a chapel and has been a chapel in Norman times, but has now been restored to meet a non-ecclesiastical purpose and no longer has the &lt;em&gt;function&lt;/em&gt; of a chapel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why it has the built features of a chapel, but not the furnishings of one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This causes a dissonance where the form is initially recognised, then the impression is over-ridden by closer observation then the fact of its adapted and original functions mesh to an understanding of the rooms changes over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T15:35:33.867" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T15:35:33.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-27T18:20:19.867" Score="3" ViewCount="182" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for any insight on the poem &amp;quot;Walking to Work&amp;quot; (1952) by Frank O'Hara. I feel like the meanings are just escaping me, and I can't find any analysis on the Internet to support/challenge my ideas. Here is the poem in full.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's going to be the sunny side&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from now&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    on. Get out, all of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my traffic over the night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and how&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    should I range my pride&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;each oceanic morning like a cutter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if I&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  confuse the dark world is round&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;round who&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     in my eyes at morning saves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nothing from nobody? I'm becoming&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the street.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Who are you in love with?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;me?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  Straight against the light I cross.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11475" LastEditorUserId="12702" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T20:56:18.003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T20:56:18.003" Title="&quot;Walking to Work&quot; by Frank O'Hara" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;frank-o-hara&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16495" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-27T21:51:46.370" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-27T21:51:46.370" LastActivityDate="2020-11-27T21:51:46.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16496" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-27T21:51:46.370" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Frank O'Hara (1926-1966) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T20:25:59.513" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T20:25:59.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16497" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-28T04:27:11.693" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was in elementary school (from 2013-2018), I read a picture book I saw on the classroom shelves. It was a short picture book where a black cat would walk through an abandoned castle/manor of some sort. The only specific detail I remember was a children’s room with old toys in it. I specifically remember a jack-in-the-box and a small toy car, and there may have been some alphabet blocks as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What picture book is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7662" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T05:07:48.040" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T05:07:48.040" Title="Trying to find a creepy children’s book I read in elementary school" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12532" CreationDate="2020-11-28T07:53:47.857" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is called &amp;quot;Let's Go Home.&amp;quot; It's by Kewlian Sio, an Indian author of Sikkimese and Chinese parentage. The story was published in 1960 by Writer's Workshop, Calcutta, in Sio's collection &lt;em&gt;Let's Go Home and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wasn't able to find a copy of the story online, but I happen to have a print copy, so here's the first paragraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It started when they were going to school in the school-bus. Someone started to talk about marbles, and he was always so interested in marbles that, as he listened, he began to forget. At first only a little, but as the fervour of the discussion increased, he joined in the talk and it was then that he forgot completely. And afterwards, he did not know how he could have forgotten like that. But perhaps it was not so strange after all; everyone had always said he was &amp;quot;too sensitive&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;so absent-minded at this age&amp;quot;. Perhaps it was he who was strange.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very moving and well-told story, albeit somewhat slight. Since the point of view is that of a ten year old boy, the vocabulary and prose style is fairly simple. Probably for this reason, it's widely anthologized in English textbooks in India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As proof whereof, here is somebody named Prakritee Kapoor with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An51og3aWJs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion&lt;/a&gt; of the story and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hqBJQfpKPI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;question and answer session&lt;/a&gt; about it. Most of the discussion is in Hindi, which I think is an odd pedagogical choice if the idea is to teach English, but ‍♂️. Kapoor says the story is &amp;quot;Chapter 6 of class 8&amp;quot;, so evidently it's still being used in a middle-school textbook, but I have no idea in which Indian school system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kewlian Sio was born in 1936 in Calcutta and attended school in Darjeeling. Sikkim was an independent kingdom until 1975. I have not been able to ascertain what citizenship Sio had for the first 39 years of his life. There is a large, long-established Chinese community in Calcutta and a large Sikkimese one in Darjeeling. Sikkim always had special status as an Indian protectorate, so whether his citizenship was Indian or Sikkimese probably didn't make much difference. And in any case the matter became moot after Sikkim joined the union.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sio was one of the founders of Writer's Workshop, Calcutta. A blurb from the founding publisher, P. Lal, on the organization's website &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writersworkshopindia.com/1955-2004/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conceptual genesis of WRITERS WORKSHOP was in 1955. Immediately on passing M. A. in English Literature from Calcutta University in 1953, I joined St Xavier’s College, Calcutta, as Lecturer in the Department of English. Among my students in the 1st year B. A. were Kewlian Sio and Deb Kumar Das, both writing poems and stories. I decided to form a writers’ group. The plan materialised in 1958 when Pradip Sen, Jai Ratan, Amita [sic; should be &amp;quot;Anita&amp;quot;] Desai and William Hull joined, and a fromal “constitution” was drafted by Deb Kumar Das. A next-door Lake Gardens neighbour, P. K. Aditya, installed a hand-operated treadle printing machine, and the first books of WW writers began appearing, with I, Kewlian Sio, and D. K. Das as the three pioneer authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book Sio published as one of the first three was &lt;em&gt;A Small World&lt;/em&gt;, with &lt;em&gt;Let's Go Home and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt; appearing two years later. Writer's Workshop became one of the most well-known and influential publishers of English-language literature by Indian authors, as well as of English translations from languages ranging from Latin to Manipuri.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sio was publishing with Writer's Workshop as recently as 2010 (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.writersworkshopindia.com/books/poetry/redbird/bugged-and-other-poems/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bugged and Other Poems&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), but I have not been able to ascertain whether he is still alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: Meenakshi Mukherjee edited an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26118411-let-s-go-home-and-other-stories&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anthology of short stories&lt;/a&gt; for use as, you guessed it, a textbook. That 1975 collection is also called &lt;em&gt;Let's Go Home and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;, but it's not the same as Sio's 1960 collection. Sio's &amp;quot;Let's Go Home&amp;quot; is just the first story and the remainder are by other hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T08:14:21.423" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T08:14:21.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16486" CreationDate="2020-11-28T11:57:46.653" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The bachelors are described as having written “from college”, suggesting that “plucked” is being used with an eye to this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;pluck, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 8.a.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;transitive.&lt;/em&gt; Originally in Oxford University: to reject (a candidate) as not reaching the required standard in an examination (now historical). Later in extended use: to reject (a candidate for any examination, for office, etc.); (more generally) to call to account, to reprimand. Frequently in passive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1837   J. R. McCulloch &lt;em&gt;Statist. Acct. Brit. Empire&lt;/em&gt; II. v. i. 461   Those who fail in showing such an amount of proficiency as, in the opinion of the examiners, entitles them to their degree, are said, in the language of the place, to be ‘plucked’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication being that her correspondents showed little evidence of academic merit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly “goosequills” implies a character of fustiness or being out of date. Steel nibs, much more durable than quills, had been mass-produced since the 1820s, with sales reaching hundreds of millions annually by the 1840s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a couple of thoughts about “Collegisse juvat”. First, this phrase is from the fourth line of the first Ode in the first book, and perhaps the suggestion is that this might be as far as the correspondents had got in their reading of Horace: that is, their scholarship is shallow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the choice of tag fails to be appropriate to the circumstance. For in this first ode, Horace elaborates on the commonplace idea of “to each his own taste”: that is, it pleases the politician to be elected to office, it rejoices the farmer to fill his granary, it excites the hunter when his dogs scent a deer, and first of his examples,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;sunt quos curriculo pulverem Olympicum&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;collegisse iuvat metaque fervidis&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;evitata rotis&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are those whom it delights to have gathered Olympic dust in a chariot, and the turning-post having been shaved with fiery wheels&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Horace (23 BCE). &lt;em&gt;Odes&lt;/em&gt;, book 1, ode 1, lines 3–5.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “meta” was the pillar at each end of the “circus” or racecourse, and the charioteer who shaved it closest, without striking it and overturning, took the shortest path. In the context of &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;, this seems quite the wrong example for the fans to have picked, for what does Aurora care about chariot-racing? A few lines later there is a much more appropriate pair of lines from which to pick a tag when writing a fan-letter to a poet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quod si me lyricis vatibus inseres,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;sublimi feriam sidera vertice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you will include me with the lyric poets, I would touch the lofty stars with my head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Horace, lines 35–36.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-11-28T12:06:12.630" LastActivityDate="2020-11-28T12:06:12.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-28T21:25:22.587" Score="2" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gitanjali/52&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poem 52&lt;/a&gt; of Tagore's English version of &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt;, a female persona speaks of a gift that a man or lover left her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What token left of thy love? It is no flower, no spices, no vase of perfumed water. It is thy mighty sword, flashing as a flame, heavy as a bolt of thunder. (...) No, it is no flower, nor spices, nor vase of perfumed water—it is thy dreadful sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is ashamed to wear it but she has no place to hide it either. However, the sword also has positive aspects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy sword is with me to cut asunder my bonds, and there shall be no fear left for me in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean that this sword symbolises emancipation? Or is that too superficial because the sword symbolises something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T17:22:21.233" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T17:22:21.233" Title="What does the sword represent in poem 52 of Tagore's English Gitanjali?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;gitanjali&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16503" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16487" CreationDate="2020-11-29T01:46:58.593" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The stained-glass windows, raftered roof, and solemn character of the architecture gave the &lt;em&gt;illusion&lt;/em&gt; of being a chapel. But that was all.  Nothing else about the room looked like a chapel.  The illusion ended after those three things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastEditorUserId="10684" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T13:46:01.837" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T13:46:01.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16504" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16505" CreationDate="2020-11-29T10:41:58.453" Score="5" ViewCount="599" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, when the eponymous hero is hesitating to kill Duncan, Lady Macbeth urges him forward to the murder. She memorably &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/macbeth/page_42/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     I have given suck, and know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would, while it was smiling in my face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have done to this.     (I.vii.54–59)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since she has suckled a baby, it strongly indicates that she has given birth at some point and is therefore a mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible, of course, that Lady Macbeth has been merely a wet nurse for someone else's baby. As the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_nurse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article on &amp;quot;Wet nurse&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; makes clear, a baby's suckling can elicit lactation in a woman even if she is not herself a mother. But for two reasons, I think it is more probable that she has had a child:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The same Wikipedia article explains that breastfeeding was not considered fashionable among the upper classes, and that wet nurses were relatively inexpensive to hire. Since Lady Macbeth is nobility, it does not seem very likely that she would have ever worked as a wet nurse.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Admittedly, even members of the nobility could fall on hard times, so I suppose it's possible that Lady Macbeth needed the money. However, her personality does not seem like a good fit for the job of wet nurse, and I imagine she would have had difficulty getting hired.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the quoted speech does say &amp;quot;the babe that milks me&amp;quot;, not &amp;quot;my babe&amp;quot;, so it's of course possible that the baby being suckled was not Lady Macbeth's own. It is plausible that perhaps Macbeth's first wife had died in childbirth and Lady Macbeth was the hired wet nurse, whom he subsequently fell in love with and married. That would make the suckling baby Lady Macbeth's stepson. Perhaps Shakespeare was merely using the unfair stereotype of the wicked stepmother in portraying Lady Macbeth's willingness to kill the baby she was suckling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the play does not mention the Macbeths' children anywhere that I recall. Banquo's son Fleance, Macduff's son, and old Siward's son are all onstage at various points, but we do not hear any more about the child or children Lady Macbeth has suckled. Perhaps this is a clue that the Macbeths themselves had no children, but Lady Macbeth had been a wet-nurse at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility that Macbeth is her second husband. Perhaps the child she is referring to was one by her first husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: &lt;strong&gt;how many children had Lady Macbeth?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zero, because she had been only a wet-nurse?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One, because her speech refers just to one baby, in the singular?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if the answer is nonzero, are the children Macbeth's or from a previous relationship? It would be good if the answer gave evidence by quoting the play. But I'll settle for secondary sources or even wild speculation if that's all that's on offer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In researching this question, I did look at L.C. Knights's 1933 essay called &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215175/page/n17/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but although I was very excited to find it, I was quite disappointed because the title is misleading and he does not answer the question at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T12:58:52.180" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T12:58:52.180" Title="How many children had Lady Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16504" CreationDate="2020-11-29T12:04:57.313" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's play differs very substantially from actual events (the historical Macbeth reigned for about 17 years).  However, according to Wikipedia the historical  &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruoch&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Macbeth&lt;/a&gt; had a son &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lulach&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lulach&lt;/a&gt; from her first marriage to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gille_Coemg%C3%A1in_of_Moray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gille Coemgáin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know whether Shakespeare was aware of this history, but presumably some of his contemporaries were.  I understand that Shakespeare's main source for Macbeth was Hollinshed's chronicles.  From a quick scan of what I can find on-line, I don't see any reference to his wife, but I might have missed something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T12:04:57.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-29T13:11:41.393" Score="4" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Mary Norton's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Borrowers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Borrowers&lt;/a&gt; series, the Borrowers are tiny people who live secretly among humans. There are or were several families of Borrowers living in one large house, with family surnames according to where in the house they lived (Clock, Overmantel, Harpsichord, etc.) Their first names are also &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they imagined they had their own names—quite different from human names—but with half an ear you could tell they were borrowed. Even Uncle Hendreary's and Eggletina's. Everything they had was borrowed; they had nothing of their own at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The major characters in the series include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pod#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pod&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/homily&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homily&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spiller#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spiller&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aglet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eggletina&lt;/a&gt;, and the main protagonist &lt;strong&gt;Arrietty&lt;/strong&gt;. If her name too is &amp;quot;borrowed&amp;quot; from something in the human world, then what? Where does this name come from? Or is she the unique Borrower with an original name (perhaps symbolically explaining her attraction to humans)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:23:56.723" Title="Where does Arrietty Clock's name come from?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-borrowers&gt;&lt;mary-norton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16508" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-11-29T18:05:52.180" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a short poem by Ko Un that, when translated, goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very middle of the road&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;two dogs are coupling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I take another route&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2017/07/13/shooting-stars-brief-poems-by-ko-un/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;; translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does the narrator take a different path? Are they repulsed by the sight, don't want to interrupt, or what? How can this be interpreted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T20:57:21.900" Title="In Ko Un's short poem &quot;In the very middle of the road&quot;, why does the narrator take a different path?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16509" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:15:05.020" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T20:15:05.020" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T20:15:05.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16510" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:15:05.020" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Korean poet Ko Un (born 1933) or his life as a writer. For questions about specific poems use [poetry] and [korean-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T00:00:14.020" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:00:14.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16511" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:20:26.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T20:20:26.193" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T20:20:26.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16512" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:20:26.193" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mary Norton (1903-1992) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T20:41:03.057" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T20:41:03.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16513" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:21:01.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T20:21:01.290" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T20:21:01.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16514" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-11-29T20:21:01.290" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Borrowers' (1952) by Mary Norton. Should also be tagged with [mary-norton]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-11-29T20:41:52.387" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T20:41:52.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16515" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16516" CreationDate="2020-11-29T21:58:55.170" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camus's novel &lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; begins with the news of the death and the funeral of Meursault's mother. Meursault smokes cigarettes during the wake, doesn't weep before, during or after the funeral, and on the next day goes swimming, meets a young woman and goes to the cinema with her. This behaviour is used against him during the trial in the second half of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Camus have a known source of inspiration for Meursault's behaviour after his mother's death or is this aspect of the novel his own invention?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:34:20.110" Title="Did Camus have a known source of inspiration for Meursault's behaviour during and after his mother's funeral?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16516" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16515" CreationDate="2020-11-29T22:34:20.110" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Looking for The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; (University of Chicago Press, 2016), Alice Kaplan points out (on page 11) that Camus received his philosophy degree at the University of Algiers&#xA;with a thesis on Plotinus and the early Saint Augustine. There is a specific detail in Saint Augustine's &lt;em&gt;Confessions&lt;/em&gt; that finds a parallel in Meursault's behaviour:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;miserable over the death of his mother, Augustine refuses to weep at her funeral, and looks for a cure to his sorrow by going to the baths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are a few relevant passages from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/confessionsofsta00augu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Augustine's &lt;em&gt;Confessions&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chap. XII. — How he mourned his dead mother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;29&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I closed her eyes; and there flowed a great sadness into my heart, and it was passing into tears, when mine eyes at the same time, by the violent control of my mind, sucked back the fountain dry, and woe was me in such a struggle! But, as soon as she breathed her last, the boy Adeodatus burst out into wailing, but, being checked by us all, he became quiet. In like manner also my own childish feeling, which was, through the youthful voice of my heart, finding escape in tears, was restrained and silenced.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;32&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(...) So, when the body was carried forth, we both went and returned without tears. For neither in those prayers which we poured forth unto Thee when the sacrifice of our redemption was offered up unto Thee for her,— the dead body being now placed by the side of the grave, as the custom there is, prior to its being laid therein,— neither in their prayers did I shed tears; (...)&#xA;It appeared to me also a good thing to go and bathe, I having heard that the bath [&lt;em&gt;balneum&lt;/em&gt;] Took its name from the Greek &lt;em&gt;βαλανεῖον&lt;/em&gt; because it drives trouble from the mind.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/confessionsofsta00augu/page/180/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book IX, Chapter XII&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, Camus did not copy Augustine's behaviour one-to-one: we know more about Augustine's reasons for withholding his tears than about Meursault's, even though both the &lt;em&gt;Confessions&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Strange&lt;/em&gt; are first-person narratives. Augustine goes to the baths on the same day as the funeral, whereas Meursault goes swimming on the next day. Augustine didn't meet a former colleague and did not go to the cinema, let alone watch a film with Fernandel. However, the parallels are close enough to make the plausible claim that Camus took inspiration for this from Augustine's &lt;em&gt;Confessions&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-29T22:34:20.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16517" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16520" CreationDate="2020-11-30T00:40:45.080" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, one of the rabbits is named Dandelion. The explanation given for the name in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Dandelion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fandom wiki&lt;/a&gt; is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is a yellow-furred rabbit, hence his name [Dandelion].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But while that answers why he has such a name in-universe, I'm still confused on the out-of-universe part. Dandelion is a storyteller and joke-cracker, a strong and hardy rabbit. When I think of dandelions, I think of the weed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PNtSh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PNtSh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a fragile-looking white furred dandelion in a field of yellow dandelions&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plant is fragile, breaking apart easily to drift with the wind, or crushed by the slightest pressure. This seems incongruous with how reliable Dandelion the rabbit is. There are other plants which have yellow as a prominent color, and some of the rabbits in the book are not named after plants at all. So why is Dandelion specifically named after &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; tiny, fragile plant?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T00:46:13.510" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T11:22:00.187" Title="Why is Dandelion named so?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16518" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16519" CreationDate="2020-11-30T09:35:25.280" Score="4" ViewCount="217" Body="&lt;p&gt;The standard edition of Rabindranath Tagore's song lyrics, &lt;em&gt;গীতবিতান / giitabitaan&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;A Canopy of Songs&amp;quot;, classifies the lyrics under six headings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;পূজা / puujaa, &amp;quot;Worship&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;স্বদেশ / swadesh, &amp;quot;Patriotic&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;প্রেম / prem, &amp;quot;Love&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;প্রকৃতি / prakR^iti, &amp;quot;Nature&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;বিচিত্র / vichitra, &amp;quot;Miscellaneous&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;আনুষ্ঠানিক / aanuShThaanik, &amp;quot;Occasional&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the &lt;em&gt;Gitabitan&lt;/em&gt; also has other sections that include songs from Tagore's musical plays, dance dramas, etc., but those sections occupy only the latter third of the single-volume edition, or the third volume of the three-volume edition. The major section of the work comprises his song lyrics, arranged under these headings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The web has conflicting information on the origin of this classification. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindra_Sangeet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article on Tagore's songs&lt;/a&gt; in the English-language Wikipedia says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tagore never made these divisions. Only after his death was the need felt to categorize, compile and thus preserve his work, and the genre-classification system was born out of this need.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contradicting this, the portal &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.geetabitan.com/lyrics/parjaay/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;geetabitan.com&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Classification of songs was done by Rabindranath Tagore himself according to the subject of the songs and can be seen in the collection, the book 'Geetabitan'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is correct? Was the classification Tagore's own, or a later editorial decision? If the former, when did the poet classify his lyrics in this sixfold way? If the latter, who was the editor who classified the songs in this way and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference: My single-volume version of the &lt;em&gt;Gitabitan&lt;/em&gt; has the following publication data:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tagore, Rabindranath. &lt;em&gt;giitabitan: akhanta sa.nskaraN / Gitabitan: Complete Edition&lt;/em&gt;. Kolkata: Punascha, 2002, rpt. 2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T10:11:06.140" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T10:11:06.140" Title="Who classified Rabindranath Tagore's lyrics into the six standard categories?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;music&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16518" CreationDate="2020-11-30T09:35:25.280" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English-language Wikipedia is wrong. The classification was Tagore's own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://bn.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A6%97%E0%A7%80%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%AC%E0%A6%BF%E0%A6%A4%E0%A6%BE%E0%A6%A8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bengali-language Wikipedia entry&lt;/a&gt; for &lt;em&gt;গীতবিতান / giitabitaan&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;১৯৩১ সালে (আশ্বিন, ১৩৩৮ বঙ্গাব্দ) এই গ্রন্থের প্রথম সংস্করণটি দুই খণ্ডে প্রকাশিত হয়। ... প্রথম সংস্করণে গীতবিতান গ্রন্থের বর্তমান পর্যায়বিন্যাস করা হয়নি। পরবর্তীকালে এই সংস্করণের সকল গান কবি ‘পূজা’, ‘স্বদেশ’, ‘প্রেম’, ‘প্রকৃতি’, ‘বিচিত্র’ ও ‘আনুষ্ঠানিক’ পর্যায়ে বিন্যস্ত করেন। এই বিষয়ানুক্রমে সজ্জিত হয়ে রবীন্দ্রনাথের মৃত্যুর পর ১৯৪২ সালে (মাঘ, ১৩৪৮) গীতবিতান গ্রন্থের দ্বিতীয় সংস্করণ দুই খণ্ডে প্রকাশিত হয়। র্তমানে এই সংস্করণটিই প্রচলিত। ১৯৫০ সালে (১৩৫৭ বঙ্গাব্দ) কবির যাবতীয় গীতিনাট্য-নৃত্যনাট্য, ও অন্যান্য গ্রন্থের অসংকলিত গান নিয়ে গীতবিতান সংকলনের তৃতীয় খণ্ড প্রকাশিত হয়।&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first edition was published in two volumes in 1931 (Bengali era Ashwin 1338). ... This first edition did not have the current song classification. Later, the poet divided all the songs in this collection into the categories &amp;quot;Worship&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Patriotic&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Love&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Nature&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Miscellaneous&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Occasional&amp;quot;. The second edition of &lt;em&gt;Gitabitan&lt;/em&gt;, enhanced with this thematic organization, was published in two volumes in 1942 (Bengali era Magh 1348), after the poet's death.  This is the prevalent version. In 1950 (Bengali era 1358), the third volume of &lt;em&gt;Gitabitan&lt;/em&gt;, comprising all the poet's musical plays and dance dramas as well as uncollected songs from his various other works, was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Notes&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Bengali language Wikipedia provides the following print source to back up the claims made in the portion quoted above. The title translates to &amp;quot;Tagore, A Biography&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt; Mukherjee, Prabhat Kumar. *rabindrajiivan_katha*. Kolkata: Anand &#xA; Publishers, 2007 (Bengali Era Baisakh 1414). &#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;All translations from the Bengali are my own, and ipso facto suspect. Rely on them AYOR.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Transliteration of the Bangla script is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T10:27:12.737" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T10:27:12.737" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16520" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16517" CreationDate="2020-11-30T11:22:00.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let me preface this answer by mentioning that I'm not convinced Richard Adams intended any particular significance or symbolism in the character names of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;. As I've written about &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/959/17&quot;&gt;before&lt;/a&gt;, the story started off as a road-trip tale for his children, so he may not have put much thought into the names if he was creating many of them on the spur of the moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This called for spontanaiety, it had to, and I just began off the top of my head: 'Once upon a time there were two rabbits, called eh, let me see, Hazel and Fiver, and I'm going to tell you about some of their adventures'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2007/03/16/richard_adams_interview_feature.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, we can set aside the author's intent (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/608/17&quot;&gt;that's far from the only way to understand the story&lt;/a&gt;) and analyse the text by itself, devoid of external considerations. Perhaps the author had subconscious reasons for choosing particular names even if he did so on the spur of the moment, or we can discuss some possible interpretations even if they never entered any level of his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Dandelion is &lt;strong&gt;optimistic&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;hardy&lt;/strong&gt;, properties symbolised by dandelions.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;language of flowers&lt;/a&gt;, which has a millennia-long history in traditional folklore, and was especially popularised during 19th-century England and America. However, the dandelion &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.almanac.com/content/flower-meanings-language-flowers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;does not appear&lt;/a&gt; in this list, as it is a weed which is not considered as a &amp;quot;flower&amp;quot; by many people, so we must look elsewhere for its symbolism and interpretations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://flowermeanings.org/dandelion-flower-meaning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dandelion flower&lt;/a&gt; represents healing, emotional intelligence, the sun, happiness, and surviving through difficulties. Many of these symbolic connections make sense from real properties of the flower: it has health benefits, it's round and yellow like the sun, it has a bright happy colour, and it can thrive in almost any conditions (hence why it's often considered a weed).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The character of Dandelion is generally a happy and optimistic rabbit, retaining his energy even in difficult situations. He's also the fastest runner and the best storyteller among the character, although I can't see how those features factor into the flower symbolism. But his cheeriness and emotional strength are certainly consistent with  the symbolic representations of dandelions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T11:22:00.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16521" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16526" CreationDate="2020-11-30T13:57:56.853" Score="5" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter VII of &lt;em&gt;My Boyhood Days&lt;/em&gt;, Tagore describes how the narrator as a child became interested in music and singing. The &amp;quot;family friend Srikantha Babu was absorbed in music day and night&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He never &lt;em&gt;taught&lt;/em&gt; us songs, he simply sang them to us, and we picked them up almost without knowing it. When he could no longer restrain his enthusiasm, he would stand up and dance, accompanying himself on the &lt;em&gt;sitar&lt;/em&gt;. His big expressive eyes shone with enjoyment, he burst into the song, &lt;em&gt;Mai chhoro brajaki basari&lt;/em&gt;, and would not rest content till I joined in too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find any &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=mai+chhoro+brajaki+basari&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;information about this song&lt;/a&gt;. Is this a traditional song or does it have a known author and composer? What does it mean and what is it about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T06:47:33.443" Title="What song is mai chhoro brajaki basari?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16522" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10862" CreationDate="2020-11-30T16:20:55.603" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: I don't know any Greek (ancient or modern), so trust this answer at your own risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/dramaturge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dramaturge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; comes from Greek &lt;em&gt;dramatourgos&lt;/em&gt;, which breaks down into &lt;em&gt;drama&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ourgós&lt;/em&gt; (worker). Similarly for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/thaumaturge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;thamaturge&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;thamatourgos&lt;/em&gt;, which breaks down into &lt;em&gt;thamato&lt;/em&gt; (wonder) + &lt;em&gt;ourgós&lt;/em&gt;. So &lt;em&gt;egourgos&lt;/em&gt; (or &lt;em&gt;egoourgos&lt;/em&gt;), which isn't a real Greek word, would presumably be &lt;em&gt;ego&lt;/em&gt; + &lt;em&gt;ourgós&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given James Joyce's facility at languages and his proclivity for inventing new words, this seems like a reasonable derivation for &lt;em&gt;egourge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2020-11-30T16:29:26.760" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T16:29:26.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3246" CreationDate="2020-11-30T21:52:46.043" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is the text as given in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/LLL_F1/scene/4.2/index.html#tln-1215&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prayfull Princesse pearst and prickt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a prettie pleasing Pricket,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some say a Sore, but not a sore,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;till now made sore with shooting.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Dogges did yell, put ell to Sore,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;then Sorell iumps from thicket:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or Pricket-sore, or else Sorell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the people fall a hooting.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If Sore be sore, then ell to Sore,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;makes fiftie sores O sorell:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of one sore I an hundred make&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;by adding but one more L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pricket, as already mentioned in the question, means &amp;quot;male deer in its second year, whose antlers have not yet branched&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pricket&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say a Sore, but not a sore,&#xA;till now made sore with shooting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines contain a play on two meanings of &amp;quot;sore&amp;quot;: (1) a buck in its fourth year (which may be an allusion to &amp;quot;haud credo&amp;quot; at the beginning of the scene) and (2) the buck being made &amp;quot;sore&amp;quot; (having pain) by the princess's arrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Dogges did yell, put ell to Sore,&#xA;then Sorell iumps from thicket:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;L&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;ell&amp;quot; in the Folio) was &amp;quot;pronounc[ed] with a prosthetic 'y' by the Elizabethans, so that it sounded like 'yell'&amp;quot; (Kerrigan, page 191). Hence, &amp;quot;ell&amp;quot; is involved in two word plays: (1) with the dogs' &amp;quot;yell&amp;quot; (i.e. bay) and (2) adding &amp;quot;ell&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;sore&amp;quot; gives &amp;quot;sorell&amp;quot;, i.e. a buck in its third year (see Hibbard, page 155).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or Pricket-sore, or else Sorell,&#xA;the people fall a hooting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Regardless whether it was a sore/wounded sore or a sorel(l), the people started shouting. (Kerrigan mentions that they might have shouted, &amp;quot;Sola, sola&amp;quot;, without explaining why that is relevant here.) Kerrigan thinks that &amp;quot;Pricket-sore&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Sorell&amp;quot; may be bawdy without explaining how. Eric Partridge's &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Bawdy&lt;/em&gt; has no entries for &amp;quot;sore&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;sorel&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pricket&amp;quot;; it has an entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prick#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;prick&lt;/a&gt;, which does not require an explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Sore be sore, then ell to Sore,&#xA;makes fiftie sores O sorell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is a sore (a buck in its fourth year) that is sore (wounded), then adding L (Roman numeral 50)/ell to sore, makes (both) fifty sores and sorell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of one sore I an hundred make&#xA;by adding but one more L.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Adding one more L (50) to L gives a hundred; but &amp;quot;more L&amp;quot; may also be a play on &amp;quot;moral&amp;quot; (i.e. the story's moral).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt; (other than Wiktionary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by G. R. Hibbard. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 1990.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love's Labour's Lost&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by John Kerrigan. The New Penguin Shakespeare. [1982] Reprinted with revised Further Reading. London: Penguin, 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Partridge, Eric: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Bawdy&lt;/em&gt;. London: Routledge &amp;amp; Kegan Paul, 1968.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-11-30T21:52:46.043" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16524" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16525" CreationDate="2020-12-01T00:57:08.920" Score="-1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.hk/books?id=jBE2aPZAyr4C&amp;amp;pg=PT17&amp;amp;lpg=PT17&amp;amp;dq=The%20nerve%20of%20Murali,%20they%20thought.%20In%20love?%20These%20were%20not%20words%20they%20were%20used%20to%20saying.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=CzvzScKrzZ&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1hYQSoV9hN5hM901N0P14Ai6NqJw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjosaTByKvtAhVQM94KHTbaBC8Q6AEwAHoECAEQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=The%20nerve%20of%20Murali%2C%20they%20thought.%20In%20love%3F%20These%20were%20not%20words%20they%20were%20used%20to%20saying.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Love Marriage&amp;quot; By V.V. Ganeshananthan&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nerve of Murali, they thought. In love? These were not words they were used to saying.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who are the &amp;quot;they&amp;quot;? So &amp;quot;nerve and in love&amp;quot; is not what they were used to say, then what was it that they were used to say.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This sentence just feels like too abrupt and sudden to connect it to the preceding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T01:35:58.987" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T02:15:57.573" Title="What does &quot;These were not words they were used to saying. &quot; mean in the context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;love-marriage&gt;&lt;v-v-ganeshananthan&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16524" CreationDate="2020-12-01T02:29:56.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The nerve of Murali!&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;What a nerve!&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;How dare he!&amp;quot; They are amazed at his audacity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know who Vani, Kumaran and Murali are, but if the '&lt;strong&gt;she&lt;/strong&gt;' in the excerpt is Vani, then I think '&lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt;' refers to her family, including Kumaran.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;strong&gt;used to&lt;/strong&gt;' (in the context) means 'accustomed to'. They are not accustomed to hearing or using the words '&lt;em&gt;In Love&lt;/em&gt;'. (I'm not sure why there is a capital 'L' in the original.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That story looks terribly difficult to read. Without inverted commas (quotation marks) it's hard to tell when someone starts speaking and when they stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T02:29:56.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16526" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16521" CreationDate="2020-12-01T06:04:41.723" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line of the song quoted is too fragmentary to identify the song with any specificity, at least not without some fairly intensive research. But it's evidently a song about Krishna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Bengali original of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.33953/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My Boyhood Days&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagoreweb.in/Essays/chhelebela-153/chhelebela-4082/7&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ছেলেবেলা&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Tagore gives the first line of this song as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ময় ছোড়োঁ ব্রজকী বাসরী / may chho.Do.N bR^ij_kii baasarii&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is not Bengali. It is likely the dialect of Hindi called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braj_Bhasha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Braj Bhasha&lt;/a&gt;, spoken in the Braj region where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Krishna&lt;/a&gt; spent his childhood, roughly transliterated into the Bengali script. A grammatical Braj Bhasha sentence that could be the original of that transliteration could be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;मैं छोड्यो बृजकी बाँसुरी / mai.n chhoDyo bR^ij_kii baa.Nsurii&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means &amp;quot;I have left the flute of Braj&amp;quot;. The power of Krishna's flute to enchant listeners is a common theme in the Indian tradition. It is said to enrapture not just all human listeners, but also animals and birds. Without more of the lyrics, it's hard to narrow down exactly which song this could be, because there are literally thousands of songs about Krishna and his flute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More specifically, there are many songs that take as their theme the lover's quarrels, or sometimes just the teasing, between Krishna and his consort &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Radha&lt;/a&gt; around the flute. In the 16th century, both &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meera&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meera&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surdas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Surdas&lt;/a&gt; wrote poems on this theme, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;राधा प्यारी, दे डारो ना बंसी मोरी / raadha pyaarii, de Daaro naa ba.nsii mori&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Radha my love, do give me back my flute&amp;quot; (Meera);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;कान्हा तोरी बंसरी नेक बजाऊँ / kaanhaa torii ba.nsarii nek bajaauu.N&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Krishna, let me play your flute&amp;quot; (Surdas).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both these poems have been set to music any number of times through the centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &amp;quot;mai.n chhoDyo bR^ij_kii baa.Nsurii&amp;quot; could be the beginning of a song where Krishna placates Radha, asking her not to be jealous of or angry about his flute because it's at his lips, which means he's kissing the flute and not her; or because it attracts other women to him; or because his entrancing playing keeps her from her work. He's mollifying her by saying, &amp;quot;Look, I've left off playing the flute&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could also be a lament. At some point Krishna had to leave Braj and childish things and move to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dv%C4%81rak%C4%81&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dwarka&lt;/a&gt;. The adult, royal Krishna isn't particularly associated with the flute, as it's what he used to do to while away the time when he was a cowherd. So the opening line could be that of a song where Krishna is going to Dwarka as an exile from Braj. However, that would be rather an unusual theme for a song, and the likelihood is vanishingly small when compared to that of its being a song on the Krishna-Radha theme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The love of Krishna and Radha was the chief subject of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaishnava_Padavali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vaishnava Padavali&lt;/a&gt; poetic tradition of that flourished around the same time as Meera and Surdas. Tagore was very drawn to this tradition as a young teenager. One of his first poetic works, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhanusimha_Thakurer_Padabali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bhanusingher Padavali&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, was a pastiche in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaishnava_Padavali&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brajabuli&lt;/a&gt; dialect that he passed off as an authentic text from that tradition. So another possibility is that the song Tagore recalls Srikantha singing is a Vaishnav Padavali poem in Brajbuli rather than Braj Bhasha (the two are quite distinct). Without more of the lyrics, one can't tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T06:47:33.443" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T06:47:33.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-01T06:59:39.560" Score="5" ViewCount="596" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, the character of Blackberry is the &amp;quot;clever rabbit&amp;quot; among the original group migrating from the Sandleford Warren. He's the one who comes up with innovative (for rabbits) ideas, such as the floating raft early in the story and many other plans later on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why was this character given the name Blackberry?&lt;/strong&gt; Blackberry plants (brambles) are invasive, thorny, and hard to handle, although their fruits are delicious. How do any of these properties connect with Blackberry the rabbit? Is there any symbolic connection between blackberries and cleverness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T15:00:58.770" Title="What is the significance of Blackberry's name in Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16528" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16527" CreationDate="2020-12-01T09:11:04.813" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Blackberry had black tips to his ears. It is possible that, especially when he was a kit those tips reminded people of two blackberries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may also be an aspect of being tenacious and difficult to eradicate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My thinking is less that as an individual Blackberry singularly embodies tenacity as a quality, but that there are a group of rabbits many of whose whose names are those of tough plants of farm and down land, who form a tenacious group, Hazel, Dandelion, Buckthorn, Holly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since leaving the warren of the snares they had become warier, shrewder, a&#xA;tenacious band who understood each other and worked together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth bearing in mind that the story originally came about as a tale told to children to keep them from getting bored on car journeys and hence may not have been subject of the comprehensive type of character design popular with some fantasy writers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1n3quw/i_am_richard_adams_author_of_watership_down/?utm_source=share&amp;amp;utm_medium=web2x&amp;amp;context=3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;n an Ask Me Anything on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; seven years ago Adams said, in relation to a different question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the key thing to note is that Watership Down was not initially intended to be a published novel. The story came about spontaneously as I told it to my children. It was never meant to be scrutinised as thoroughly as it has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which may suggest that not every name carries a message, though that would not prevent it being the case that he chose the names of hardy plants for hardy rabbits with some deliberation, especially if you contrast them to a character such as Strawberry; named for a soft fruit and who is more of a voluptuary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A question was posed about the name choices in the AMA, but alas, went unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T15:00:58.770" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T15:00:58.770" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16529" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-01T17:29:26.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T17:29:26.473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T17:29:26.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16530" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-01T17:29:26.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book &quot;Love Marriage&quot; by V.V. Ganeshananthan. Should be tagged with [v-v-ganeshananthan]. NOT for general questions related to love and marriage." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T19:26:04.387" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T19:26:04.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16531" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-01T17:30:13.070" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;V.V. Ganeshananthan's website can be found at &lt;a href=&quot;https://vasugi.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vasugi.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T11:32:29.173" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T11:32:29.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16532" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-01T17:30:13.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of the Sri Lankan American writer V.V. Ganeshananthan (born 1980) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T11:30:51.830" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T11:30:51.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="50" CreationDate="2020-12-01T18:48:04.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Often read in my youth, and still collected in my 60s, the first Tom Swift book was published in 1910. The most recent book in the series was published in 2016. That's one hundred and six years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11500" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-01T19:23:41.773" LastActivityDate="2020-12-01T19:23:41.773" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16534" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T01:33:45.700" Score="-2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In what ways can Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Pericles, Prince of Tyre&lt;/em&gt; be classified as a typical romance play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11501" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T15:56:50.780" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T22:15:37.050" Title="In what ways can Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre be classified as a typical romance play?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;pericles-prince-of-tyre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16524" CreationDate="2020-12-02T02:15:57.573" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that they think that Murali has a lot of nerve -- or insolence -- in falling in love, which was not something they were accustomed to his doing, and consequently not something they were accustomed to talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T02:15:57.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15327" CreationDate="2020-12-02T08:20:45.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;This line serves to emphasise the class difference between Charlotte and Katie.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This whole passage of the novel has been about the friendship between the working-class girl Charlotte and the posh girl Katie, who don't really understand each other's lives and problems, but discovered friendship together nevertheless. A few quotes proving this point from above the line you're asking about:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That will never not be funny,’ Katie says, and her eyes shine as she looks at Charlotte. ‘I wish I could steal like you do.’ Charlotte thinks her heart will burst with pride. Sometimes Charlotte thinks Katie is a living breathing doll. She’s three inches shorter than Charlotte and a proper girly girl because her ma dresses her like that, but under the skin they’re both the same. They both hate their lives, even though sometimes Charlotte doesn’t understand quite what Katie has to hate. Katie appeared like a dream, just there one day on the wasteland, and her life is like a dream too. Proper house. Posh car. Both parents. Music lessons, like the one she’s supposed to be at now. Holidays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlotte is growing up in a single-mother family, stealing from shops, suffering from her mother's new men, while Katie has a more privileged upbringing, a full family with a car and a house. &amp;quot;Music lessons&amp;quot; serves to drive home the point about the class barriers: this is something that only a posh family would afford or think worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlotte could listen to Katie talk all day. It’s like music, all posh and polite. Sometimes they try to talk like each other and it’s the funniest thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even their way of speaking is so different from each other. (Accent is one of the strongest class indicators in English society.) We can also see this from their conversation in this passage: Katie refers to her mother as &amp;quot;Mother&amp;quot; while Charlotte says &amp;quot;ma&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘But it’s only two weeks. It feels like forever but it’s only fourteen days.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘One dole cheque,’ I say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Exactly.’ Charlotte knows Katie doesn’t understand dole cheques any more than Charlotte understands music lessons, but she loves her for pretending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This too serves to emphasise the difference in Charlotte's and Katie's outlook on life. For Charlotte, the period of fourteen days makes her think about a dole cheque (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;unemployment benefits&lt;/a&gt;), something which might have kept her alive if her mother was unemployed for some time, while unemployment has probably never been something close to Katie's life in any way. The next paragraph further drives home the point by reminding us that Katie's &amp;quot;music lessons&amp;quot; are as far from Charlotte's working-class life as Charlotte's &amp;quot;dole cheques&amp;quot; are from Katie's middle-class life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the narrative slips into first person for this one line, Charlotte usually being referred to in the third person just like Katie. As far as I can tell, this is a mistake in the novel, rather than something deliberate to make a literary point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T08:20:45.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-02T10:54:57.760" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Each chapter of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; bears an epigraph, a quote from some other source which is relevant to the chapter at hand. In the epilogue (and nowhere else?) there are &lt;em&gt;two&lt;/em&gt; epigraphs, one from Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;All's Well that Ends Well&lt;/em&gt; whose relevance is clear, and one from Lewis Carroll's &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was part of my dream, of course -- but then I was part of his dream, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Through the Looking-Glass&lt;/em&gt;, this refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_King_(Through_the_Looking-Glass)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Red King&lt;/a&gt;, who sleeps throughout the chess game and is said to be dreaming of Alice even while she is dreaming of him, creating a cyclical paradox. What is the relevance of this paradox to &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; or its epilogue?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T10:54:57.760" Title="Why the Alice epigraph in the epilogue of Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;through-the-looking-glass&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16538" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16539" CreationDate="2020-12-02T15:45:49.443" Score="3" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, after the battle with the Efrafans has ended, there is this confusing simile:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It so happened that Bluebell was the first through into the Honeycomb; and for many days afterwards he was still improving upon his imitation of Captain Fiver at the head of his crowd of Efrafan prisoners -- &amp;quot;like a tomtit rounding up a bunch of molting jackdaws,&amp;quot; as he put it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 49: Hazel Comes Home&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm confused on what this simile is trying to convey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is Fiver called &amp;quot;Captain Fiver&amp;quot;? He isn't a captain and wasn't leading any fighting or such.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What would a &amp;quot;tomtit rounding up a bunch of molting jackdaws&amp;quot; look like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the comparison of Fiver's actions to the tomtit's supposed to convey?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-02T16:08:19.940" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T16:35:49.563" Title="What does this simile about Fiver rounding up Efrafan prisoners mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16539" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16538" CreationDate="2020-12-02T16:35:49.563" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're overthinking this quote a bit. Bluebell's joke and simile are just based on the fact that &lt;strong&gt;the runty Fiver is the last rabbit anyone would expect a bunch of burly Efrafans to surrender to.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fiver is one of the smallest rabbits in the story, protected by his brother Hazel (ultimately the Chief Rabbit) and his clairvoyance that sometimes enables him to scare other rabbits even without any physical strength. In the last battle with the Efrafans, he plays a big role in the victory by giving Hazel the idea of loosing the farm dog on the enemy. Shortly before the paragraph you quote, he faces down the savage and feared Captain Vervain of the Efrafan Owsla:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vervain advanced slowly across the floor. Even he could derive little&#xA;satisfaction from the prospect of killing a tharn rabbit half his own size, in&#xA;obedience to a contemptuous taunt. The small rabbit made no move whatever,&#xA;either to retreat or to defend himself, but only stared at him from great eyes&#xA;which, though troubled, were certainly not those of a beaten enemy or a victim.&#xA;Before his gaze, Vervain stopped in uncertainty and for long moments the two&#xA;faced each other in the dim light. Then, very quietly and with no trace of fear, the&#xA;strange rabbit said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I am sorry for you with all my heart. But you cannot blame us, for you came to&#xA;kill us if you could.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Blame you?&amp;quot; answered Vervain. &amp;quot;Blame you for what?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For your death. Believe me, I am sorry for your death.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vervain in his time had encountered any number of prisoners who, before they&#xA;died, had cursed or threatened him, not uncommonly with supernatural&#xA;vengeance, much as Bigwig had cursed Woundwort in the storm. If such things&#xA;had been liable to have any effect on him, he would not have been head of the&#xA;Owslafa. Indeed, for almost any utterance that a rabbit in this dreadful situation&#xA;could find to make, Vervain was unthinkingly ready with one or other of a stock&#xA;of jeering rejoinders. Now, as he continued to meet the eyes of this unaccountable&#xA;enemy -- the only one he had faced in all the long night's search for bloodshed --&#xA;horror came upon him and he was filled with a sudden fear of his words, gentle&#xA;and inexorable as the falling of bitter snow in a land without refuge. The shadowy&#xA;recesses of the strange burrow seemed full of whispering, malignant ghosts and&#xA;he recognized the forgotten voices of rabbits done to death months since in the&#xA;ditches of Efrafa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Let me alone!&amp;quot; cried Vervain. &amp;quot;Let me go! Let me go!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it was not Fiver's clairvoyance and mystic strength of character that made the five Efrafans surrender to him. When the dog came and scattered the Efrafan crowd, these five entered the Watership Down warren to preserve their lives, and surrendered to the first rabbit they met. They knew the battle was over, they'd lost, and they just wanted to surrender and escape alive. It so happens that Fiver was the only one of the Watership Down rabbits present in the Honeycomb, so it was him that they surrended to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only Groundsel, Thistle and three others had the presence of mind to dart&#xA;down the opened run when the dog came. Back in the Honeycomb, Groundsel&#xA;immediately surrendered himself and his fugitives to Fiver, who was still&#xA;bemused from his long trance, and scarcely restored to his senses sufficiently to&#xA;grasp what was toward. At length, however, after the five Efrafans had remained&#xA;crouching for some time in the burrow, listening to the sounds of the dog hunting&#xA;above, Fiver recovered himself, made his way to the mouth of the run where&#xA;Bigwig still lay half conscious, and succeeded in making Holly and Silver&#xA;understand that the siege was ended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's &lt;strong&gt;ironic&lt;/strong&gt; that, of all the rabbits to accept the surrender of a bunch of Efrafans including Captain Groundsel, it should be one of the smallest of the Watership Down rabbits. Had they surrended to Bigwig or Holly or Hazel, there would have been less for Bluebell to joke about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given Fiver's runtiness, and assuming that the Efrafan rabbits Woundwort brought for the battle were generally big and burly, one can imagine a scene where the guard is much smaller and weaker than his prisoners, which would make for an amusing sight, especially to a serial joker like Bluebell. Imagine a sheep guarding a pack of dogs, or a mouse chasing a gang of cats - that's the kind of thing we're looking at here. The image Bluebell chooses to capture the irony is a &lt;strong&gt;tit&lt;/strong&gt; (a small bird) guarding a clattering of &lt;strong&gt;jackdaws&lt;/strong&gt; (larger birds) which are &lt;strong&gt;moulting&lt;/strong&gt; (presumably the Efrafans look somewhat down in the mouth after their humiliation and fear).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Fiver called &amp;quot;Captain Fiver&amp;quot;? He isn't a captain and wasn't leading any fighting or such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the point: Fiver is the last rabbit they'd expect to be taking the role of guarding prisoners or accepting surrenders. That's what makes it funny, and Bluebell gives him the tongue-in-cheek title of &amp;quot;Captain&amp;quot; to emphasise the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-02T16:35:49.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16541" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16543" CreationDate="2020-12-03T01:44:14.890" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IlJxO.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/IlJxO.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The attached picture is a poem by Eric Jarosinski in which he masterfully alluded to some literary and artistic works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transcription of picture:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TWEET&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is not a genre. Rather: it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;is a frame. Containing a pipe.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pretending to be a painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is a message. In a bottle.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In a brown paper bag. On a rush-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;hour commuter train.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is technology's answer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To a question society never asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is the sound of an idiot.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Signifying nothing but the love of&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;one's own fury.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is The Birth of Brevity.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the Spirit of Attention Deficit.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Disorder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is a lonely cloud.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wandering about monetizing its&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;loneliness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is a nascent epic. Singing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a song of its selfie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is a silent prayer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Waiting to be unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is a portrait of a&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;movement. As a young meme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Tweet is an old man walking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;into a bar. Ordering the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;First stanza: Allusion to René Magritte's painting, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Ceci n'est pas une pipe&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Second stanza: I don't know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Third stanza: Perhaps there's no allusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fourth stanza: Perhaps an allusion to Dostoevsky's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Idiot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Idiot&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not sure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fifth stanza: I don't know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sixth stanza: Allusion to Wordsworth's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dltk-holidays.com/SPRING/poem/daffodils.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daffodils&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Seventh stanza: I don't know.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Eighth stanza: I think there's no allusion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ninth stanza: Allusion to James Joyce's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Portrait_of_the_Artist_as_a_Young_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tenth stanza: Allusion to Hemingway's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Man_and_the_Sea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Old Man and the Sea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Can anyone help to identify the missing allusions?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11507" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T08:47:28.900" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T11:54:51.313" Title="Identifying allusions in Eric Jarosinski's poem &quot;TWEET&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;eric-jarosinski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16542" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16547" CreationDate="2020-12-03T09:27:26.520" Score="3" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a series of books, where the two main protagonists are old women, solving crime, much to the dismay of the local police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember properly, they stumble on their first crime by chance (and I think one of the two is not so enthusiastic about solving crime initially, even pretending to have lost the ability to speak/to become crazy to cool down the enthuasiam of her friend at some point - she start writing weird notes to herself so her friend finds them), then actively look for crime. They are retired, and long time friends or sisters (either widows or never married).&#xA;One is extremely extroverted and active (and grumpy?), the other introverted and much calmer (it's this one who pretends to go crazy in one of the stories).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read the series around 2010, but I think it was way older than that. I read it in French, I'm not sure if it has been translated. The series must have worked well enough because I remember reading at least 5 stories with the pair of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11508" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T13:42:51.973" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T21:24:17.423" Title="Looking for a mystery novel series whose protagonists are two old retired women" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16541" CreationDate="2020-12-03T11:15:45.113" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Tweet&amp;quot; has the structure of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/create-a-thread&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twitter thread&lt;/a&gt;, where a tweeter posts a series of linked tweets. Each verse alludes to tropes or specific works in a highly compressed and effective way. The poem's wide frame of reference allows Jarosinski to deepen his explorations of the personal, social, and cultural phenomenon that is Twitter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza doesn't reference a specific literary work as far as I can tell. Since it's typically illegal to drink on public transit,  hiding a bottle of liquor in a brown paper bag is a very common way of getting around this prohibition. Here's a picture demonstrating the trick, albeit not on public transit. That's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Buttigieg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pete Buttigieg&lt;/a&gt; (center), when he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020, along with talk show and podcast hosts &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sho.com/desus-and-mero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Desus and Nero&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BGkH3.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/BGkH3.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Pete Buttigieg drinking with Desus and Nero. The beer bottles are hidden inside brown paper bags.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet blends the gritty idea of drinking out of a bottle hidden in a paper bag with the romantic notion of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_in_a_bottle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;message in a bottle&lt;/a&gt;. Twitter is an odd medium in that by default one's audience is pretty much anybody who is on Twitter, rather than just one's &amp;quot;friends&amp;quot; as on, say, Facebook. So sending out a tweet is rather like sending a message in a bottle, in that you don't know whom it might reach. Yet a message in a bottle is enclosed and contained while a tweet is public. Hence the idea of a paper bag, which allows us to do something ordinarily private, or at least something that takes place in an enclosed space, while out in public. The mirroring and contrast here are skillfully handled. A message in a bottle would of course have paper inside the bottle; the paper bag, by contrast, is outside the bottle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course the danger is that the recipient of the message might not be interested. The third stanza references a very common tweet trope, acknowledging that a tweet is often responding to something nobody asked. Here's an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z3aVH.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Z3aVH.png&quot; alt=&quot;Screenshot of tweet with the text: &amp;quot;Nobody:&amp;quot; on one line and, a couple lines later, &amp;quot;Me: YEAH WELL MY COUSIN'S A LAWYER&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Know Your Meme&lt;/a&gt; explains that this phrasal template is &amp;quot;used to mock people who strive to attract attention and tend to provide unsolicited opinions, as well as for observational humor&amp;quot;. In the tweet above, for example, the tweeter randomly announces her pride in her cousin's achievement to the world (or at least to the Twitterverse), but also wryly recognizes that the announcement isn't one that people would necessarily care about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If nobody cares, then of course Twitter is full of people talking past each other, often very animatedly, but ultimately in a futile way. The enterprise is meaningless. The fourth stanza, as @PeterShor pointed out in a comment to your question, is an allusion to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-5-scene-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That struts and frets his hour upon the stage&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And then is heard no more. It is a tale&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Signifying nothing.       (V.v.27–31)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;@PeterShor additionally points out that the fifth stanza alludes to the title of Nietzsche's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I think there's also an allusion to Polonius's speech in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;       since brevity is the soul of wit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.       (II.ii.97–99)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of madness links this to the previous verse. (&amp;quot;Idiot&amp;quot; in Shakespeare's time denoted much stronger mental impairment than it does today.) The idea of brevity is, of course, definitive for Twitter, which famously has a limit of 280 characters per tweet. And tweets can, in fact, be extremely witty; it's possibly the most irreverent of the social media platforms. The very short format also forces someone visiting the site to skip very rapidly from one tweet to the next in disjointed fashion, enabling a form of ADD.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seventh stanza again links two rather disparate things. As @Mary pointed out in the comments to your question, one is Walt Whitman's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Song of Myself&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I celebrate myself, and sing myself,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what I assume you shall assume,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In stark contrast to Whitman's expansive lyric, the other work alluded to is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nursery rhyme&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sing a song of sixpence,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A pocket full of rye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tweeting out one's random thoughts and selfies when nobody cares could be an act as magnificent and all-encompassing as Whitman's egoism. Or rather than recall a classic poem, perhaps the tweet is as lowbrow as a nursery rhyme, and worth only sixpence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that the eighth stanza refers to two songs: Shanice's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Shanice-silent-prayer-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silent Prayer&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and Garth Brooks's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Garth-brooks-unanswered-prayers-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unanswered Prayers&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. The former is about lovers who are apart praying for each other and looking forward to their reunion, about which they're confident. The latter is about a man's running into his high school sweetheart many years later and realizing that his prayers for the success of their relationship being unanswered actually turned out well. The previous stanza mentions &amp;quot;song&amp;quot;, and the poem does rely on this sort of connection between each verse, where a word in one verse provides a springboard to the next, as in the idea of lunacy linking verses four and five. The contrast between the two songs also continues the series of ironic juxtapositions that the poem is built upon. On the other hand, all the other allusions in the poem are literary, not musical, so I could be wrong about this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remaining allusions are as you have identified them. It's worth pointing out that each stanza is under the 140-character limit that applied on Twitter until late 2017. Jarosinski, aka &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/NeinQuarterly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@NeinQuarterly&lt;/a&gt;, counts as a celebrity on Twitter, his aphoristic observations having earned him over 193,000 followers. His current &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/NeinQuarterly/status/1329197132268507136?s=20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pinned tweet&lt;/a&gt; is apposite both to this poem and the present moment, given the warnings Twitter has been forced to post on the soon-to-be-ex-President's rants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZU7MR.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZU7MR.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T11:54:51.313" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T11:54:51.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16544" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16542" CreationDate="2020-12-03T13:10:53.893" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It could be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Brett#Fethering&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Simon Brett&lt;/a&gt;'s  Feathering series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What matches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two retired ladies solving mysteries.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jude is extroverted, Carole is much calmer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;stumble on their first case by accident.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;series started in the year 2000. I'm not sure if that counts as &amp;quot;way older&amp;quot; than 2010.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've only read one of them, and that years ago.  I don't know about losing the ability to speak. But I've read several of Brett's other mysteries (The Charles Paris series) and that is a plot device he might well use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a description of the first book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/489435.The_Body_on_the_Beach&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Body On The Beach&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Very little disturbs the ordered calm of Fethering, a pleasingly self-contained retirement town on England's southern coast. Which is precisely why Carole Seddon, who has outlived both her husband and her career at the Home Office, has chosen to reside there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the last thing Carole expects to encounter in Fethering is a new neighbour with but one name and an obviously colourful past. 'Jude' was not really Fethering . . . but neither was the body Carole found on the beach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A body, it has to be said, that has disappeared by the time the police arrive. Only Jude is ready to believe what her neighbour says she saw - and from that moment on, the two women are resolved to turn detectives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastEditorUserId="10684" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T13:21:40.703" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T13:21:40.703" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-03T17:37:04.127" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Philip Larkin's poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48410/days-56d229a0c0c33&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Days&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where can we live but days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, solving that question&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Brings the priest and the doctor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;solving&amp;quot; mean here? I assume it could mean the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;looking for the answer (the continuous and unfinished process of trying to find the answer)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the solution itself (the fact of having the question solved)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which of these is the most obvious/natural use of this word, licencia poetica aside?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11511" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T18:51:43.643" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T18:59:25.053" Title="Meaning of &quot;solving&quot; in &quot;Days&quot; by Philip Larkin" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;philip-larkin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16545" CreationDate="2020-12-03T18:59:25.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The answer to “where can we live but days?” is “nowhere”, and so “solving that question” is a metaphor for dying, which “brings the priest and the doctor” to administer the last rites and sign the death certificate. The verb “solve” has a couple of meanings that are appropriate in this context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;solve, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 3.a.&lt;/strong&gt; To explain, clear up, resolve, answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;5.&lt;/strong&gt; To dissolve, put an end to, settle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T18:59:25.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16547" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16542" CreationDate="2020-12-03T20:13:07.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thanks to a friend, I found my book!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's the series of The Bodin sisters, Blanche and Berthe Bodin, written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Pierre_Ferri%C3%A8re&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean-Pierre Ferrière&lt;/a&gt; from 1957 to 1961. I don't think it has been translated to English, though, and, after skimming through the first tome, I think it qualifies more as &amp;quot;roman de gare&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;polar&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two 70 years old women start solving crime in their little provincial city, after stumbling on their first crime by mistake, being almost accused of having done it themselves. After the first tome, they actually annoy the police to no end to help with cases. One is more extroverted and easily annoyed, and the other sister is a bit deaf and more docile (or so it seems at first).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11508" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-03T21:24:17.423" LastActivityDate="2020-12-03T21:24:17.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16506" CreationDate="2020-12-04T00:51:04.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arrietty is most likely a mis-hearing of Harriet, or possibly a human dropping the &amp;quot;H&amp;quot; and adding an &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; when speaking informally. Homily would probably hear human speech through floorboards or walls, because she didn't go out borrowing, so is more likely to hear a muffled version of names and words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Another possibility is Arrietty's mother Homily adding the &amp;quot;y&amp;quot; to echo her own name, but this isn't mentioned in the books so is pure speculation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://nameberry.com/babyname/Arrietty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrietty Origin and Meaning&lt;/a&gt; on Nameberry.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:23:56.723" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:23:56.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16549" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-04T06:25:19.320" Score="5" ViewCount="295" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about the following sentence from &amp;quot;The Three Garridebs&amp;quot; by Conan Doyle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Nathan Garrideb proved to be a very tall, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;loose-jointed&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;round-backed person, gaunt and bald, some sixty-odd years of age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to make sure what this loose-jointed means. Dictionaries say the word means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: supple and easy in movement&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;B: loosely built; with ill-fitting joints&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But aren’t these meanings conflicting each other a bit?&#xA;I don’t understand what exactly Doyle wanted to say about this Garrideb guy by the word. It mentioned earlier in the episode that Mr. Garrideb doesn’t go out often, or rather he stays indoors almost all the time. So maybe Watson (the writer of this memoir) thought he would be meeting a disabled person, but it turned out his body seemed to be just okay. Is this what Watson (or Doyle) wanted to tell readers here? I don’t know.&#xA;Or this passage is to describe Mr. Garrideb looks lanky, even frail, as old man who always in his rooms should be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T07:03:32.747" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T08:33:54.473" Title="What does &quot;loose-jointed&quot; mean in this Sherlock Holmes passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16549" CreationDate="2020-12-04T08:33:54.473" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two meanings seem contradictory if you regard all joints as having the same function.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But think of it this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• the proper function of the joints of living creatures is movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;• the proper function of most joints in things which are ‘built’ is usually to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; move.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a loose jointed &lt;em&gt;table&lt;/em&gt; would tend to be unstable and perhaps prone to collapse, while a loose jointed person would move freely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not familiar with the storyline, but my expectation would be that Doyle wants us to understand that this isn’t an arthritic and creaky individual.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T08:33:54.473" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16534" CreationDate="2020-12-04T15:57:42.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The romances is a category of Shakespeare's plays that includes &lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Tempeest&lt;/em&gt;.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Two Noble Kinsmen&lt;/em&gt; is sometimes also included into this category, even though it has less in common with Shakespeare's &amp;quot;canonical&amp;quot; romances.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Courtly versus pastoral scenes&lt;/strong&gt; (Schmidgall: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic&lt;/em&gt;, 1981, cited on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare%27s_late_romances#Defining_characteristics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: There are scenes at court, but the pastoral is not really represented in the play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: Cymbeline's court versus the cave in Wales where Guiderius and Arviragus grew up.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: Act 4, scenes 2-4 are pastoral, especially the sheep-shearing feast Act 4, scene 4. The other scenes are set at Leontes's court in Sicily.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: Alonso and his courtiers versus the island's residents. See also Gonzalo's speech about a kind of utopia in Act 2, scene 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that this is not a new motif, since Shakespeare also used it in &lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Older men are more prominently featured&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Wikipedia, citing Bieman's &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare: The Romances&lt;/em&gt;). I consider this characteristic questionable for the reasons given below:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: Pericles is still a young Prince at the beginning of the play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: Cymbeline may be considered &amp;quot;old&amp;quot;; his sons Guiderius and Arvirargus were kidnapped twenty years before the events of the play. However, he is not as prominent in the play as Prospero in &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: Leontes is hardly &amp;quot;old&amp;quot; at the beginnig of the play; his son Mamilius is still a child and his wife Hermione is pregnant.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: Prospero is usually represented as old, even though his daughter Miranda is still a teenager.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;The presence of pre-Christian, masque-like figures&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (Wikipedia, citing A. L. Rowse's &lt;em&gt;The Annotated Shakespeare: Volume III&lt;/em&gt;):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: The Roman goddess Diana appears to Pericles in a dream.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: The Roman god Jupiter appears to Cymbeline.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: The Oracle at Delphos (Act 3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: Iris, Juno and Ceres in Act 4, scene 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;long time gap&lt;/strong&gt; between two parts of the play:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: Many years pass between the first three acts (or the first 14 scenes) and the remainder of the play; based on Pericles's story in Act 5, scene 3 (or scene 23), fourteen years have passed since he lost his wife Thaisa.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: No, but twenty years have passed between the abduction of Cymbeline's sons Guiderius and Arviragus and the events in the play (see Act 3, scene 3).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: In Act 4, scene 1, the figure of Time tells us that sixteen years pass between the the end of Act3 and the remainder of the play (Act 4 and 5).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: No, but there is a 12-year gap between Prospero and Miranda's shipwreck (related in Act 1, scene 2) and the beginning of the play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Family members believed dead&lt;/strong&gt;:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: In Act 3, scene 1, Pericles's wife Thaisa seems to die in childbirth. In Act 4, scene 1, (or scene 15) Marina is kidnapped by pirates; in Act 4, scene 4 (or scene 18) Pericles is made to believe that his daughter is dead.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: In Act 4, scene 2, Guiderius and Arviragus believe Innogen/Fidele is dead. When Innogen wakes up, she thinks she sees Posthumus's corpse (it is really the headless body of Cloten, who had disguised himself as Posthumus).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: Leontes believes his wife Hermione has died (Act 3, scene 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: After being separated by the storm, Alonso and his son Ferdinand both assume the other dead. (See e.g. &amp;quot;Full fathom five&amp;quot; in Act 1, scene 2.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that this is not a new motif, since Shakespeare also used it in &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; (Viola thinks her brother Sebastian has drowned).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Forced separations and improbable reunions&lt;/strong&gt; (Dobson &amp;amp; Wells, page 395):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: See &amp;quot;Family members believed dead&amp;quot;. Pericles is reunited with Marina in Act 5, scene 1 (or scene 21) and with Thaisa in Act 5, scene 3 (or scene 23).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: Innogen has married the commoner Posthumus, who is banished in Act 1, scene 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: Leontes and Perdita, Leontes and Hermione; to a lesser extent Leontes and Polixenes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: After the storm, Alonso and his courtiers land on a different part of the island than Alonso's son Sebastian.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Father-daughter relationships&lt;/strong&gt; (Dobson &amp;amp; Wells, page 395):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: Pericles and Marina.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: Cymbeline and Innogen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: Leontes and Perdita.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: Prospero and Miranda.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that this is not a new motif, since Shakespeare also used it in &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt; (Lear and his daughers), &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (Polonius and Ophelia) and &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; (Shylock and Jessica), for example.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shipwreck at sea&lt;/strong&gt; (Dobson &amp;amp; Wells, page 395):&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pericles&lt;/em&gt;: In Act 1, scene 4, Pericles suffers shipwreck near Persepolis. In Act 3, scene 1, there is another storm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;: No scenes at sea, nor a shipwreck.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Winter's Tale&lt;/em&gt;: The ship that brought Antigonus to Bohemia is wrecked by a storm in Act 3, scene 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;: The ship that is taking Alonso, King of Naples, back to Italy is caught in a storm and runs aground in Act 1, scene 1.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Note that this is not a new motif, since Shakespeare also used it in &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Constance Jordan, the four plays have a common subject: &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;the restoration of good government&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (page 1):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plays depict the precarious state of rulers who by their absence invite anarchy or by their presumption threaten tyranny. These rules stand decisively apart from their subjects. (...)&#xA;Chastened by various trials, Pericles, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Prospero submit at last to the constraints that attend mortality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dobson, Michael; Wells, Stanley (editors): &lt;em&gt;The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jordan, Constance: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances&lt;/em&gt;. Cornell University Press, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-04T22:15:37.050" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T22:15:37.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16552" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-04T17:36:07.637" Score="3" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; the bird &lt;a href=&quot;https://watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/Kehaar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kehaar&lt;/a&gt; is written with an accent and poor grammar when talking with the rabbits. A representative excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Meester 'Azel, vat you do? You no stay 'ere?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;They're tired out, Kehaar. They've got to have a rest.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Ees not to rest 'ere. Ees rabbits come.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, but not just yet. We can--&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Ya, ya, ees coming for find you! Ees close!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Conversation between Kehaar and Hazel from Chapter 32: Across the Iron Road&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can roughly make out what Kehaar means to say. However, it is more difficult to understand him as I have to mentally fix up spelling and grammar. I know he is speaking in the general hedgerow inter-species language, but Adams could have chosen to translate his speech into a more understandable form, or to simply give Kehaar less of an accent. So for what reason is Kehaar written with such an accent and poor grammar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T19:11:44.593" Title="Why is Kehaar written with an accent?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16553" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9295" CreationDate="2020-12-04T17:43:52.293" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jonson is distinguishing the new stylistic movement in English poetry--the protoromantic style--more emotional, egocentric, interested in &amp;quot;the mind's operation.&amp;quot; This style develops from the mid Eighteenth Century, and is perhaps best exemplified in Wordsworth. The romantic style is to be contrasted with the neoclassical style, in this passage exemplified in Pope. The regular rhythms and rhymes of the couplet generally convey a logical point. This poetry is more about reason than emotion. Jonson expresses appreciation for both poets and styles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11520" LastActivityDate="2020-12-04T17:43:52.293" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16555" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16567" CreationDate="2020-12-04T20:11:51.647" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Richard Adams's novel &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, the seagull character Kehaar is written with a distinctive accent unlike all other characters. Here's an example of a conversation between him and Hazel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Meester Pigvig, 'e plenty good fella.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, he is.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;'E say you no getting mudders. Ees finish mudders. Plenty trouble for you.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, that's true. We don't know what to do. No mothers anywhere.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Listen. I get peeg, fine plan. I go fine now. Ving, 'e better. Vind finish, den I fly. Fly for you. Find plenty mudders, tell you vere dey are, ya?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Why, what a splendid idea, Kehaar! How clever of you to think of it! You very fine bird.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Ees finish mudders for me dis year. Ees too late. All mudders sitting on nest now. Eggs come.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I'm sorry.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Nudder time I get mudder. Now I fly for you.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;We'll do everything we possibly can to help you.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Kehaar's accent meant to represent, or inspired by, any particular human accent in English?&lt;/strong&gt; I always assumed it was Scandinavian, which would make sense if he came from across the North Sea, but the setting of the novel is closer to the English Channel, although this doesn't seem like a French accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T16:38:06.957" Title="Identification of Kehaar's accent" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16556" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:08:45.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T01:08:45.777" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T01:08:45.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16557" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:08:45.777" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Philip Larkin (1922-1985) or his life as a writer. He used the psuedonym Brunette Coleman for some of his works." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T05:39:06.527" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T05:39:06.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16558" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:26:15.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T01:26:15.293" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T01:26:15.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16559" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:26:15.293" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Eric Jarosinki (born 1971) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T05:38:04.033" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T05:38:04.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16560" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:27:16.550" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T01:27:16.550" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T01:27:16.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16561" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:27:16.550" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Hanns Heinz Ewers (1871-1943) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T05:39:19.390" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T05:39:19.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16562" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:31:52.253" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T01:31:52.253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T01:31:52.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16563" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-05T01:31:52.253" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play &quot;Pericles, Prince of Tyre&quot; by William Shakespeare. Should be tagged with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T05:39:14.663" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T05:39:14.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16564" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17160" CreationDate="2020-12-05T09:04:41.670" Score="1" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;we’re all killers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;we’ve all killed parts of ourselves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we’ve all got blood on our hands.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;something somewhere had to die&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;so we could stay alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if memories could bleed, if dreams could scream | m.a.w&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11402" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T23:40:29.877" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T23:40:17.077" Title="Quote source - &quot;if memories could bleed, if dreams could scream&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16565" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16566" CreationDate="2020-12-05T13:12:00.410" Score="3" ViewCount="114" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this following series of phrases while reading H.G. Wells's &lt;em&gt;Kipps&lt;/em&gt; and I promptly have no idea what they mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were times when Kipps would lie awake, all others in the dormitory asleep and snoring, and think dismally of the outlook Minton pictured. Dimly he perceived the thing that had happened to him—how the great, stupid machine of retail trade had caught his life into its wheels, a vast, irresistible force which he had neither strength of will nor knowledge to escape. This was to be his life until his days should end. No adventures, no glory, no change, no freedom. Neither—though the force of that came home to him later—might he dream of effectual love and marriage. &lt;strong&gt;And there was a terrible something called the &amp;quot;swap,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the key of the street,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;crib hunting,&amp;quot; of which the talk was scanty but sufficient.&lt;/strong&gt; Night after night he would resolve to enlist, to run away to sea, to set fire to the warehouse, or drown himself; and morning after morning he rose up and hurried downstairs in fear of a sixpenny fine. He would compare his dismal round of servile drudgery with those windy, sunlit days at Littlestone, those windows of happiness shining ever brighter as they receded. The little figure of Ann seemed in all these windows now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think these expressions may be retail jargon because retail has been the focus of the book so far. But apart from that, I am stumped. Any insight would be much appreciated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7766" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T14:51:22.960" Title="What do these expressions mean in H.G. Wells's novel Kipps?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;kipps&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16566" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16565" CreationDate="2020-12-05T14:51:22.960" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are references to the condition of homelessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE KEY OF THE STREET&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;IT is commonly asserted, and as commonly believed, that there are seventy thousand persons in London who rise every morning without the slightest knowledge as to where they shall lay their heads at night. However the number may be over or understated, it is very certain that a vast quantity of people are daily in the above-mentioned uncertainty regarding sleeping accommodation, and that when night approaches, a great majority solve the problem in a somewhat (to themselves) disagreeable manner, by not going to bed at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People who stop up, or out all night, may be divided into three classes:- First, editors, bakers, market-gardeners, and all those who are kept out of their beds by business. Secondly, gentlemen and 'gents,' anxious to cultivate a knowledge of the 'lark' species, or intent on the navigation of the 'spree.' Thirdly, and lastly, those ladies and gentlemen who do not go to bed, for the very simple reason that they have no beds to go to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The members of this last class - a very numerous one - are said, facetiously, to possess 'the key of the street.' And a remarkably disagreeable key it is. It will unlock for you all manner of caskets you would fain know nothing about. It is the 'open sesame' to dens you never saw before, and would much rather never see again, - a key to knowledge which should surely make the learner a sadder man, if it make him not a wiser one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.victorianlondon.org/publications2/gaslight-1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaslight and Daylight, by George Augustus Sala, 1859&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can’t find appropriate references for the other two, but as one phenomenon is being described by all three terms, the meaning is certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Crib’ retains the meaning of a rudimentary dwelling or home or confined space, and hunting for such would be desirable if one has no fixed place to sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T14:51:22.960" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16567" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16555" CreationDate="2020-12-05T16:38:06.957" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Kehaar's accent is based on a Norwegian one, and is consistent in itself.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, Kehaar's accent and entire character are &lt;strong&gt;based on a real Norwegian man&lt;/strong&gt; that Richard Adams knew. As he wrote himself (I haven't tracked down the primary source to check it myself, but the  secondary source &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2022/leatherland.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Douglas Leatherland, &amp;quot;The Capacities and Limitations of Language in Animal Fantasies&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Humanimalia&lt;/em&gt; 11(2) (2020)&lt;/a&gt; seems reliable):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kehaar’s character, even his voice, is based on a Norwegian Resistance man I knew in the war, a splendid chap, Johansen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Richard Adams, “To the Order of Two Little Girls: The Oral and Written Versions of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;”, in Charlotte F. Otten and Gary D. Schmidt, eds., &lt;em&gt;The Voice of the Narrator in Children’s Literature: Insights from Writers and Critics&lt;/em&gt;, Greenwood Press, 1989&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, an exhaustive linguistic analysis of the entire text of everything Kehaar says in the novel (a total of 250 &amp;quot;sentences&amp;quot;, of which 182 are simple in structure, 38 are compound, and 31 have complex structure, with an off-by-one error somewhere and the overall mean sentence length being 5.1 words) has been conducted in a paper published in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RELC_Journal&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;RELC Journal&lt;/a&gt;, with the conclusion that &lt;strong&gt;Kehaar's &amp;quot;language&amp;quot; has a linguistically consistent style&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On first reading the book it struck me that Kehaar’s speech was very regular and exhibited features clearly similar to pidgins and other ’simplified’ or ’reduced’ codes. There was furthermore a large enough corpus to make generalizations about the language with some confidence, and yet it was not too large to deal with exhaustively. Ferguson (1971) refers to what he calls a &amp;quot;register of simplified speech&amp;quot; which has been &amp;quot;little studied&amp;quot; although it seems quite widespread and may even be universal. This he calls &amp;quot;Foreigner Talk.&amp;quot; [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of Kehaar exhibits every one of these listed features together with a number of others. It is for this reason that a closer analysis was undertaken. I believe that in it we may have a good example of the register of foreigner-talk in English and that its occurrgnce in a popular book for children is evidence of how this reduced code could be learned in our culture. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although there are many more potentially interesting features of Kehaar’s language not dealt with here, enough has been said, I hope, to show the astonishing degree of regularity and consistency in its grammatical features which this text exhibits. It goes well beyond merely a ‘tendency’ (in Ferguson’s term) to certain processes of simplification. With the exception of the few ’idiosyncratic’ sentences which even an uncritical reading reveals, the grammar is solidly systematic. This can be explained in two ways: either the author is a sophisticated linguist capable of consciously applying a series of reduction rules to the standard grammar, or else he is working intuitively with an ’internalised’ grammer &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; of ’foreigner-talk’. If the former, one may ask: why choose one set of reduction processes rather than another? From a purely linguistic point of view the decision must be arbitrary. However, as an author wishing to communicate effectively - particularly with a children’s audience - he must hit upon just those ’reduction rules’ which will not interfere with his readers’ ability to interpret the text. These must therefore be of the sort found in other registers of the language known to and used by his readership; i.e. they must be conventional in the community.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/003368827700800101?journalCode=rela&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;S. Pit Corder, &amp;quot;The language of Kehaar&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;RELC Journal&lt;/em&gt; 8(1) (1977), pp. 1-12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who knew that there'd be multiple published academic papers about the accent of a seagull in a novel about rabbits!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-05T16:38:06.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16568" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16569" CreationDate="2020-12-05T21:01:57.187" Score="3" ViewCount="984" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain what this quote means and give a little context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You shall find out how salt is the taste of another man's bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/dante_alighieri_390319&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Attributed to Dante Alighieri&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11535" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-05T21:44:59.053" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T13:46:46.853" Title="What is the context and origin of this Dante quote?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16569" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16568" CreationDate="2020-12-05T22:07:47.610" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from Dante's &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt;, more specifically Canto 17 in Paradiso. Dante tells Beatrice that while traversing Inferno and Purgatorio in the presence of Virgil, he had heard grievous things about his future, so he wants to know what is in store for him. Beatrice answers in the following way (quoted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/20/317.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation on Bartleby.com&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contingency, whose verge extendeth not&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beyond the tablet of your mortal mold,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is all depictured in the eternal sight; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But hence deriveth not necessity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;More than the tall ship, hurried down the flood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is driven by the eye that looks on it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From thence, as to the ear sweet harmony&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From organ comes, so comes before mine eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The time prepared for thee. Such as driven out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From Athens, by his cruel stepdame’s  wiles,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hippolytus departed; such must thou &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Depart from Florence. This they wish, and this&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Contrive, and will ere long effectuate, there,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where gainful merchandize is made of Christ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Throughout the live-long day. The common cry,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will, as ’tis ever wont, affix the blame&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unto the party injured: but the truth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shall, in the vengeance it dispenseth, find &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A faithful witness. Thou shalt leave each thing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beloved most dearly: this is the first shaft&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shot from the bow of exile. Thou shalt prove&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How salt the savour is of other’s bread;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How hard the passage, to descend and climb&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By other’s stairs. But that shall gall thee most,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will be the worthless and vile company, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With whom thou must be thrown into these straits.&#xA;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri#Exile_and_death&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exiled from Florence&lt;/a&gt; in 1301 and only started writing the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; while in exile (possibly around 1308); he finished it in 1320, the year before his death. However, the story is set in the year 1300, at which point his exile is still in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point during his exile, he went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo I della Scala, lord of Verona from 1301 to 1304, and later returned there as a guest of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangrande_I_della_Scala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cangrande I della Scala&lt;/a&gt;. At this point, it is worth looking at the Italian text (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://it.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Divina_Commedia/Paradiso/Canto_XVII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tu proverai sì come sa di sale&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Stairs&amp;quot; in the English text is a translation of &amp;quot;scale&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Scale&amp;quot; is the plural of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scala#Italian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scala&lt;/a&gt;, which can mean &amp;quot;ladder&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;stair&amp;quot;, but the word is also an allusion to the &lt;em&gt;della Scala&lt;/em&gt; family, who supported him for many years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T13:46:46.853" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T13:46:46.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16571" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-06T19:14:07.833" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Roald Dahl's families have apologised for anti-Semitic statements he made (without, I think, being specific about where these appeared).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-55205354&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This BBC article&lt;/a&gt; identifies interviews where offensive statements were made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do his published work (either for children or for adults) contain anything that might be considered anti-Semitic?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="179" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T06:57:03.723" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T06:57:03.723" Title="Are there examples of anti-semitism in Roald Dahl's publications?" Tags="&lt;roald-dahl&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16572" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5326" CreationDate="2020-12-07T09:35:07.197" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is rather after the fact, but hopefully the information about other authors with long gaps makes it worthwhile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suzanne Collins's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballad_of_Songbirds_and_Snakes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was published in May 2020. The novel is a prequel to &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt;. It is set 64 years before the events in the latter trilogy. It tells the back story of Coriolanus Snow and a previous District 12 victor of the Hunger Games, Lucy Gray. In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/scholastic-releases-new-interview-with-suzanne-collins-author-of-the-worldwide-bestselling-hunger-games-series-301061632.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interview with publisher David Levithan&lt;/a&gt; that was released on the same day as the book, Collins explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Focusing on the 10th Hunger Games also gave me the opportunity to tell Lucy Gray's story. In the first chapter of The Hunger Games, I make reference to a fourth District 12 victor. Katniss doesn't seem to know anything about the person worth mentioning. While her story isn't well-known, Lucy Gray lives on in a significant way through her music, helping to bring down Snow in the trilogy. Imagine his reaction when Katniss starts singing &amp;quot;Deep in the Meadow&amp;quot; to Rue in the arena. Beyond that, Lucy Gray's legacy is that she introduced entertainment to the Hunger Games.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To my knowledge, Collins has not been asked about the reason for the hiatus between the 2013 &lt;em&gt;Year of the Jungle&lt;/em&gt; and the 2020 &lt;em&gt;Ballad&lt;/em&gt;. However, long gaps between successive works are a fairly common phenomenon. For example, JK Rowling published the first four installments of the &lt;em&gt;Harry Potter&lt;/em&gt; series at a fairly rapid clip, releasing one book per year between 1997 and 2000. However, the fourth volume in the series was released three years later, in 2003. Subsequent volumes were released every other year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A starker example of an author with a long hiatus between publications is Jean Rhys. Her collection of short fiction, &lt;em&gt;The Left Bank and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;, was published in 1927. Her first three novels were published in relatively quick succession: &lt;em&gt;Postures&lt;/em&gt; (1928), &lt;em&gt;After Leaving Mr Mackenzie&lt;/em&gt; (1931), and &lt;em&gt;Voyage in the Dark&lt;/em&gt; (1934). It's worth noting that the time between subsequent publications increased with each work: one year, then two years, then three. A gap of five years followed before her next novel, &lt;em&gt;Good Morning, Midnight&lt;/em&gt; (1939). She then published nothing for over 25 years. Her work was entirely forgotten, and she lived a life of poverty and obscurity. The release of her last novel, &lt;em&gt;Wide Sargasso Sea&lt;/em&gt; (1966), brought her greater acclaim than any of her previous work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some other examples: Junot Diaz's short story collection &lt;em&gt;Drown&lt;/em&gt; (1995) was followed a dozen years later by his first novel, &lt;em&gt;The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao&lt;/em&gt; (2007). Marilynne Robinson took 24 years between &lt;em&gt;Housekeeping&lt;/em&gt; (1980) and the Pulitzer Prize winner &lt;em&gt;Gilead&lt;/em&gt; (2004). George R. R. Martin is also known for taking several years between installments of his &lt;em&gt;A Song of Ice and Fire&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Henry Roth's &lt;em&gt;Call It Sleep&lt;/em&gt; (1934) was followed an astonishing &lt;strong&gt;sixty years later&lt;/strong&gt; by &lt;em&gt;A Star Shines Over Mount Morris Park&lt;/em&gt; (1994), the first volume in a tetralogy called &lt;em&gt;Mercy of a Rude Stream&lt;/em&gt;. Fortunately, the subsequent volumes were published in 1995, 1996, and 1998; the last two were posthumous, but Roth had completed work on them before his death. Twelve years later, and fifteen years after Roth's death, &lt;em&gt;An American Type&lt;/em&gt; (2010), which included some material that had been excised from the tetralogy, was put into final form and published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the grand scheme of things, then, the seven year wait between two Suzanne Collins novels (or even the ten-year gap between novels related to &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; universe) seems quite trivial. Collins has not announced whether she is working on any subsequent novels, and both her own publication history and that of authors' careers in general makes speculation unwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T09:35:07.197" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16573" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16576" CreationDate="2020-12-07T10:38:29.613" Score="5" ViewCount="797" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've always been curious about the precise phrasing of this line from &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, spoken by the First Murderer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most royal sir, Fleance is 'scaped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of this, and as far as I can tell the meter and rhythm, is exactly the same as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most royal sir, Fleance escaped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed it even sounds almost identical when spoken out loud, as would be the intention in a play. So why then does Shakespeare opt for the contraction 'scaped over escaped? It's not a common usage: he chose escaped in many other cases:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That has to-day escaped. I thank you all;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Antony and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder how the king escaped our hands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Henry VI Part III&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does use 'scaped just as commonly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How 'scaped I killing when I cross'd you so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Julius Ceasar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephano, two Neapolitans 'scaped!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But a careful read of these seems to suggest this is to maintain rhythm, because &amp;quot;escaped&amp;quot; is two syllables whereas 'scaped is one. But since &amp;quot;is scaped&amp;quot; is also two syllables, it's not necessary in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other reason why the contraction might be preferred in this instance?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:50:53.810" Title="In Macbeth, why is Fleance 'scaped?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16574" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8584" CreationDate="2020-12-07T11:50:08.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This entire answer is a spoiler; it's impossible to answer the question without it. (Even the question doesn't make sense without the spoiler.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;em&gt;Lorna Doone&lt;/em&gt; has 75 chapters in all. The secret of the eponymous heroine's identity is not revealed until Chapter 53—more than two-thirds of the way through.  When John Ridd first meets Lorna in Chapter 8, the alert reader will probably suspect that this is the little girl he has seen briefly in Chapter 3 at an inn, who in turn is the same little girl he notices being kidnapped by the Doones later in that chapter; otherwise, those are loose strands in the narrative. But the point is not dwelled upon until the spoiler is revealed.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; The lawless Doones exercise tyrannical control over Exmoor. Since Lorna is raised among and by the Doones, everybody assumes that she is one of them. She is also expected to marry another of the Doones, her putative cousin Carver. Additionally, the Doones have murdered John's father. The crux of the novel is that the love between John and Lorna is forbidden precisely because he is a Ridd and she is a Doone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; Even before her true identity is known, John manages to rescue Lorna from the Doones and take her to live with his family. This rescue's narrative force and emotive effect depend on the feud between the two families. If Lorna weren't allegedly a Doone, her running away with John would read very differently. His being a Ridd wouldn't complicate matters for him, as it would be a straightforward act of rescuing a kidnap victim from his enemies, the Doones. There would be no conflict for her either, as she wouldn't be bound by her sense of loyalty to the Doones or love for the man she thinks was her grandfather.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; When Lorna is revealed to be an heiress, it becomes clear that the Doone's insistence that she marry Carver was a ploy to gain legal control of her money. But while this revelation frees Lorna from any family obligation toward the Doones, it also comes in the way of her and John's love, as she is far above his station. The legal formalities of establishing her true identity and, along with it, her claim to her fortune also separate her from John. The unraveling of these tangles occupies the last third of the novel, along with several melodramatic twists (for example, Carver's near-fatal shooting of Lorna when she and John are actually at the altar on their wedding day).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; Given how important Lorna's identification as a Doone is to the entire novel, no other title would make as much sense. Calling the novel &amp;quot;The Doones&amp;quot; would be misleading, as the novel is specifically about Lorna. The Doones matter only insofar as she is taken to be one of them. Calling it &amp;quot;Lorna Dugal&amp;quot; (her actual name) would be a giveaway. Calling it simply &amp;quot;Lorna&amp;quot; would obfuscate the clear distinction between the Ridds and the Doones that drives the plot.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA; Finally, it should be noted that the Doones, John Ridd, and the highwayman Tom Faggus (an important character in the novel) were all legendary Exmoor figures from the 17th C., whose stories R. D. Blackmore drew upon in writing his novel. The title &lt;em&gt;Lorna Doone&lt;/em&gt; would immediately link his novel with those legends. No doubt Blackmore wanted his heroine to be part of the notorious Doone family while still being a blameless figure, and the plot twist about her identity helps him achieve that goal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T13:11:16.097" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T13:11:16.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16575" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9577" CreationDate="2020-12-07T12:29:23.493" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's entirely possible to re-translate books. For example, several of the science fiction books of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky have been retranslated. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hard to be a God,&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_Begins_on_Saturday&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monday Begins/Starts on Saturday&lt;/a&gt; are two of them.) And popular classic books in foreign languages, like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo#English_translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/a&gt;, often have many translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, you need permissions of the copyright holder to publish, if it's still in copyright. And even if it's not, if you don't want to self-publish it, you need to find a publisher willing to print it. This probably means you will need to argue that your new translation is an improvement on previous translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:29:23.493" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16573" CreationDate="2020-12-07T12:50:53.810" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The murderer’s choice of words here is an attempt to deflect or minimize his responsibility for the failure to kill Fleance. He knows that he and his fellows failed Macbeth (“We have lost best half of our affair”) due to their incompetence (“Who did strike out the light?”), and chooses his words to Macbeth carefully to avoid being punished.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrasing “Fleance escaped” would likely be interpreted as saying that Fleance made his escape while the murderers were busy murdering Banquo (that is, what actually happened in III.3). Whereas “Fleance is scaped” suggests, without actually telling a lie, that the escape was a &lt;em&gt;fait accompli&lt;/em&gt;: that is, the murderers arrived on the scene too late and found that Fleance was already gone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strategem works: Macbeth does not inquire into the circumstances of Fleance’s escape, and employs the murderers again in IV.2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T12:50:53.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13668" CreationDate="2020-12-07T13:32:50.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two puns at work here. One is from earlier in the chapter. Lord Anthony Bowling examines allegedly supernatural phenomena to see whether they are real or faked. He is telling his listeners about how, as part of his research, he once spent some time with a spurious medium and her husband, who claim to be vexed by a poltergeist. The husband tells Bowling that the poltergeist communicates via planchette with his wife, telling her what to expect. For example, the poltergeist says &amp;quot;Look out for game!&amp;quot; and later that night throws quail onto the dining table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bowling continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time later Brother Poltergeist permitted himself some allusions to fish – in the best possible taste – and I took my precautions accordingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;In the best possible taste&amp;quot; is a pun here, alluding to the fact that fish can be tasty. Since the poltergeist manifests itself by throwing things onto the dining table, the pun on &amp;quot;taste&amp;quot; gathers additional resonance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The husband tries to convince Bowling that if the poltergeist throws fish on the dining table, it will provide proof of two supernatural phenomena: (1) The wife is really a medium, since the poltergeist communicates to her what's going to happen (2) The poltergeist is real, since fish is mysteriously thrown onto the dining table. When the husband talks about &amp;quot;fish&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;proof&amp;quot;, the &amp;quot;obvious pun&amp;quot; that occurs to Bowling, which he refrains from saying out loud, is this: &lt;em&gt;The proof of the fish is in the eating&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there has already been a pun on fish &amp;quot;in the best possible taste&amp;quot;, and since &amp;quot;the proof of the pudding is in the eating&amp;quot; is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/the+proof+of+the+pudding+is+in+the+eating&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well-known proverb&lt;/a&gt;, the temptation to make this pun is great, and Bowling seeks acknowledgment that he was heroic in eschewing (ha!) said pun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's rather a heavy-handedly arch irony at work in the story Bowling tells about the husband, his fake medium of a wife, and his fake poltergeist. I can't say that the chapter struck me as &amp;quot;surprisingly good&amp;quot; enough to want to read the rest of the work, but (to continue the series of puns) &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;de gustibus non est disputandum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. I mean, I'm vegetarian, so maybe tasty fish just isn't my thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: @Randal’Thor’s comment to the question is on point; there’s also a suggestion that the whole spiritualist setup here is distinctly fishy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T14:27:40.793" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T14:27:40.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16578" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-06T22:59:15.097" Score="5" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the highly popular Netflix series &amp;quot;The Queen's Gambit&amp;quot;, an important character Jolene is portrayed as black. Is she such in the 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, or is there even such a character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11545" OwnerDisplayName="Paul B. Slater" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T15:30:32.267" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T22:46:45.330" Title="In the mini-series &quot;The Queen's Gambit&quot;, the character Jolene is black. Is this also the case in the novel by Walter Tevis?" Tags="&lt;the-queens-gambit&gt;&lt;walter-tevis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16578" CreationDate="2020-12-07T00:13:21.967" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Clearly, the answer is yes--that is, she is black in the novel--from my reading of the last paragraph in &lt;a href=&quot;https://slate.com/culture/2020/11/queens-gambit-book-netflix-differences-true-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SlateReview&lt;/a&gt; . It reads (note phrase &amp;quot;Black orphan&amp;quot; near the end--and repeated &amp;quot;n-word&amp;quot; usage):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most striking change the show makes to the characterization of Beth’s friend Jolene has to do with the girls’ time in the orphanage together. In Tevis’ novel, when Jolene is 13 and Beth is nine, Jolene comes to Beth’s bed in the middle of the night and tries to get Beth to engage in mutual masturbation.  When Beth, “terrified” by the situation, says no, Jolene goes away, but she’s angry about it. For a while, the two are enemies; when Jolene calls Beth “cracker” in the hallway, she means it not as a term of endearment, but a curse. Beth, for her part, responds by hissing the n-word. A Black orphan who tries to seduce her younger friend? A white heroine who uses the n-word as a weapon? None of this is in the show, surely too fraught for the escapist fantasy Netflix has created.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11545" OwnerDisplayName="Paul B. Slater" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T22:46:45.330" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T22:46:45.330" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16580" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-07T15:02:58.413" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;For questions about the 1983 novel 'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis, on which the Netflix series of the same name have been based.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions solely about the series belong on our sister site &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Movies &amp;amp; TV Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;; questions about the chess aspects of the game might be better off at &lt;a href=&quot;https://chess.stackexchange.com/&quot;&gt;Chess Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T15:59:33.350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T15:59:33.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16581" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-07T15:02:58.413" Score="0" Body="For questions about the 1983 novel 'The Queen's Gambit' by Walter Tevis, on which the Netflix series of the same name have been based. Questions solely about the series belong on our sister site Movies &amp; TV Stack Exchange; questions about the chess aspects of the game might be better off at Chess Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="348" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T15:59:38.027" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T15:59:38.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16582" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T16:19:36.220" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a term for stories that act to teach the reader (not the characters) a lesson without the use fantastical elements? For example, take a Raymond Carver short story. His characters are often self-absorbed and incredibly flawed, and a large portion of them do not learn anything by the time the story ends. To me, it feels similar to a fable in that the characters become something of a cautionary symbol for whatever vice they fall to (in the case of Carver: selfishness, alcohol, adultery, etc.), but there are no succinct, parable-ish lessons at the end (and certainly no talking animals). You see the narrator or main character fall deeper into a hole, and they often lose any ability to get themselves out. Through whatever struggle, the characters do not come out on top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a word for this? I don't think the term &amp;quot;gritty realism&amp;quot; is what I'm looking for (although it is applicable to Carver in particular), as not all gritty realism ends on a note of negativity (Take &amp;quot;A Small, Good Thing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Fever&amp;quot; for example). Cautionary Tale seems closer, but that still has some fable-like connotations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11541" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T16:45:51.973" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T11:28:54.730" Title="Is there a term for stories that act to teach the reader (not the characters) a lesson without the use fantastical elements?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;genre&gt;&lt;moral&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16583" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16833" CreationDate="2020-12-07T20:10:29.747" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;em&gt;Streets of Gold&lt;/em&gt; by Needtobreathe contains the following lyrics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I  want you to know&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I'm leaving to let you go&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And someday we'll walk upon&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The streets of gold&lt;br&gt;&#xA;I don't remember seeing fear in your eyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;When you were fading&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The day we said our goodbyes&lt;br&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Running through your veins was a slow-ticking clock&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Counting down the days&lt;br&gt;&#xA;And no one could make it stop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator appears to be referring to someone who is near the end of their life. However, the narrator says that &lt;em&gt;he's&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;leaving to let you go.&amp;quot; Why does the narrator say that he's the one that's leaving?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T18:48:15.980" Title="Why is the narrator the one leaving in &quot;Streets of Gold&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;needtobreathe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16584" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-07T20:25:29.353" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Culler has the following quote in it (in chapter 1 of the 2nd edition):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notations, and further, an attempt to show that what we take fro granted as &amp;quot;common sense&amp;quot; is in fact an historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don't even see it as a theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't actually stated in the book (at least not that I've read so far), but does Culler view theory itself as a historical construction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T14:31:33.357" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T14:31:33.357" Title="Does Jonathan Culler view literary theory itself as a historical construction?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;literary-theory-short-introduction&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16585" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-07T20:26:08.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2020-12-07T20:26:08.620" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T20:26:08.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-07T20:26:08.620" Score="0" Body="For questions about *Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction* by Jonathan Culler. Use in conjunction with [jonathan-culler]." OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T07:04:51.177" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T07:04:51.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16587" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16578" CreationDate="2020-12-07T22:44:44.833" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes&lt;/strong&gt;, in chapter 1 of Walter Tevis's &lt;em&gt;The Queen's Gambit&lt;/em&gt; the character Jolene is first introduced as black:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tallest girl was the black one, Jolene. She was twelve. On her second day Beth stood behind her in Vitamin Line, and Jolene turned to look down at her, scowling. &amp;quot;You a real orphan or a bastard?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/177410/the-queens-gambit-by-walter-tevis/9781400030606/excerpt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1 excerpt available online from the publisher&lt;/a&gt;, and the whole book &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/queensgambit00tevi/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to borrow from the Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-07T22:44:44.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T04:16:33.863" Score="7" ViewCount="3014" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 8 of &lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt; by Jane Austen, Mr. Darcy says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[T]here is a meanness in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Mr. Darcy mean by this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11548" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T09:14:09.120" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T09:32:10.913" Title="In &quot;Pride and Prejudice&quot;, what does Darcy mean by &quot;Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;pride-and-prejudice&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16588" CreationDate="2020-12-08T05:55:22.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mr Darcy means that women sometimes use tactics to attract men. He says that such tactics show a certain cunning on the part of the women using them. He thinks that anything that uses cunning is worthy of contempt; cunning is thought of as sly and underhand. &lt;em&gt;Meanness&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean spite, as it does today. It means something small and unworthy. So Mr Darcy is saying that the tactics women use to attract or entice men should be criticized, because they rely on cunning and are therefore contemptible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T05:55:22.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14630" CreationDate="2020-12-08T07:35:17.843" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, they can be read independently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On the nature of myth (hand-wavy background stuff)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a comment to your question, you note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;these were originally oral traditions rather than written books.... [So] I suspect that the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; doesn't require knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This comment is spot-on, and gets to the heart of the matter. What does &amp;quot;knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; mean? How does one gain knowledge about the stories told in these two epics?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn the stories of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; in the same way that we learn Bible stories. Plenty of people all over the world, including people who are not even nominally Christian, know stories that appear in the Bible: for example, that Jesus was born in a manger, or that he was crucified, or that he raised Lazarus from the dead. Reading the Bible is not a prerequisite for learning these stories. Large numbers of pre-literate children and illiterate adults know them. Prior to the Reformation, i.e., when the Bible had not yet been translated into vernacular languages and literacy was far from widespread, people nevertheless knew these stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's because Bible stories are &lt;em&gt;myths&lt;/em&gt;. Not in the sense of falsehoods, but in the sense of founding narratives a culture tells itself. Myths help a society organize itself by providing ritual and meaning. The Christian myth, for example, is supposed to not only explain the origin, purpose, and goals of human life, but also guide both the personal belief system and the communal or social behavior of adherents. The subject matter of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; played a similar role in ancient Greece. While Greek mythology no longer comprises the dominant belief system and organizing framework of Western society, its power as myth abides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do myths circulate in society? The first canto of the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;, a Hindu epic that has equivalent status in India to that of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; or the Bible in the West, provides the answer. The epic begins thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://bombay.indology.info/mahabharata/text/UD/MBh01.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanskrit text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;नारायणं नमस्कृत्य नरं चैव नरोत्तमम्&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;देवीं सरस्वतीं चैव ततो जयमुदीरयेत्&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTransliteration&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;naaraayaNa.m namaskR^itya nara.m chaiva narottamam&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;devi.m saraswati.m chaiva tato jayamudiirayet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (mine and AYOR):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After bowing to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nara-Narayana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Narayana and Nara&lt;/a&gt; the perfect man, and also to the goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saraswati&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Jaya&lt;/em&gt; must be recited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jaya&lt;/em&gt;, Victory, is an alternative title for the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;. This opening stanza specifies that the epic must be told orally, through &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/recitation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recitation&lt;/a&gt;. Recitation is different from reading aloud in that it relies on memory, not on following words printed on a page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the canto exemplifies the nature of this recitation. A young man, Ugrashravas, joins some sages in a forest. Their leader is Shaunaka. Shaunaka and his followers ask Ugrashravas where he has been. He replies that he was at a gathering where Vaishampayan recited some stories. He says that Vaishampayan had learned those stories from Vyasa, the author to whom the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; is attributed. The sages request Ugrashravas to narrate those stories to them in his turn, and he obliges. The entirety of the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; in its canonical text form embeds the act of recitation, of telling and re-telling stories from memory. Vyasa composes the verses based on his memory of events he has witnessed and participated in; Vaishampayan hears them from Vyasa; Ugrashravas hears them from Vaishampayan; Shaunaka's band hears them from Ugrashravas; the reader of the text is hearing what Vyasa told Vaishampayan told Ugrashravas told Shaunaka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader of an authoritative text fixed by using the best techniques of 20th-century philology and editorial scholarship, in other words, is already at five removes from the events of the &amp;quot;original&amp;quot; story—six removes if the editorial process itself counts. &lt;strong&gt;This is the very nature of myth&lt;/strong&gt;. There is no original story; all we have is stories endlessly &lt;em&gt;retold&lt;/em&gt;, circulating so widely and dispersed so thoroughly throughout a culture that seeking to find a point of origin is entirely beside the point. The myths &lt;em&gt;qua&lt;/em&gt; myths exist because they're constantly told and retold: as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.storyberries.com/category/fairy-tales/greek-myths-and-fairy-tales/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bedtime stories&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/znTLzRJimeY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;movies&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/Song-Achilles-Novel-Madeline-Miller/dp/0062060627/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;novels&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393356256/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pathbreaking new translations of older works&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;http://greekgodsparadise.com/2017/08/14/20-anime-cartoons-and-graphic-novels-inspired-by-greek-mythology/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cartoons&lt;/a&gt;, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://smile.amazon.com/Helen-Egypt-Poetry-Directions-Paperbook-ebook/dp/B00D6AQHMG/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poetry&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mythology, in other words, does not depend on an Ur-text that serves as the ultimate source of authority, and whose version of events is definitive. Even if there is a text accepted as canonical, such as the Bible, that text is a compilation, long after the fact, of various stories that have come down orally. As a result, there is no consensus about which of those stories are actually canonical. Different Jewish and Christian traditions have &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;different canons&lt;/a&gt;. For example, the book of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Judith&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Judith&lt;/a&gt; is not part of the Hebrew Bible; is considered canonical in most Catholic and Orthodox traditions; and is part of the Protestant Apocrypha. And despite its non-canonicity within Judaism, the story of Judith nevertheless influences &lt;a href=&quot;https://momentmag.com/why-feminists-should-eat-dairy-on-hanukkah/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;some Hanukkah observances&lt;/a&gt;. Lack of canonical authority does not deprive a mythological story of its force as it continues to circulate within a culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further more, even when certain stories are universally accepted as canonical—for example, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel#Canonical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gospels&lt;/a&gt; of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John among all Christian traditions—the prior processes of oral transmission and wide diffusion make it almost certain that there will be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_consistency_of_the_Bible#Gospels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inconsistencies within the text itself&lt;/a&gt;. In the Gospels, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2014&amp;amp;version=AKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark 14: 12–16&lt;/a&gt; says that the last supper was a Passover meal, while &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2019&amp;amp;version=AKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 19: 14&lt;/a&gt; says that Jesus was arrested on the afternoon before Passover. Since such inconsistencies don't impede the function of myth as a source of meaning and organization within a culture, seeking to resolve such inconsistencies is also beside the point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to construct a single, definitive, self-consistent narrative out of any given mythology would be akin to taking all the stories that have ever been told about characters in, say, the Marvel comics universe and coming up with a totality that lays out the timeline cleanly, accounts for any and all perceived inconsistencies, and retains ultimate authority. The attempt is doomed to failure. Manage it today, and someone will write a fanfic tomorrow that overturns the beautifully constructed metanarrative, ignoring the hapless cries of &amp;quot;But that isn't canon!&amp;quot; In the world of myth, everything is canon, and nothing is definitive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;On the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; (the answer you asked for)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You've asked four questions about the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Can the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; be consumed independently of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were the original versions more independent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, in its original version, assume or require knowledge of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is all the necessary story background on &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; events provided in the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; itself?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revisiting these questions in the light of this understanding of myth, one might want to examine some assumptions. Two of the questions refer to &lt;em&gt;original&lt;/em&gt; versions of the two epics. But it makes no sense to speak of original versions of myths. One might speak of the oldest surviving written text that has come down to us, or of a transmission history that allows us to posit a text antedating extant scribal recensions, or of the first translation of a given text into a given language; none of those, however, are the original of the myth. They are all particular retellings. As a now-defunct contributor wrote in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/1526/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/1487/289&quot;&gt;closely related question&lt;/a&gt; on this site:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Iliad and The Odyssey are &lt;em&gt;a part of&lt;/em&gt; Greek mythology. They didn't arise from Greek mythology (any more than mythology arises from itself), because in oral tradition mythology, story[,] and history quickly blend together. [Emphasis in original].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nature of myth also problematizes the notion that the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; supplies a particular &lt;em&gt;background&lt;/em&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;Every retelling of a myth is the background to any retelling of the myth&lt;/strong&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; is as much part of the background to the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; as vice-versa. It would be rare to find a reader unacquainted with certain basic information about Greek mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Helen, a Greek queen, was the world's most beautiful woman&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She ran away with, or was kidnapped by, Paris, a prince of Troy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;All the Greek kings waged a long war against Troy to get Helen back&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ultimately, because the Trojans failed to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Greeks won&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Afterwards, one of the Greek heroes took a really, really long time to get home from Troy because he kept being waylaid by the most incredible adventures.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the two epics do is fill in the details to this basic information, with many ancillary stories. Even the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; doesn't provide background information in the sense of a cogent, linear account of what led up to the war; it begins, as epics do, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_medias_res&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in medias res&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. A hypothetical reader who comes to the Iliad with no prior background in Greek mythology would be utterly baffled about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt; these dudes are duking it out in the first place. We can discount such a hypothetical reader, however; someone wanting to read the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;ipso facto&lt;/em&gt; likely to be familiar with Greek mythology to begin with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; doesn't end with any sort of finality either. It ends with the burial of Hector, one of the Trojan heroes. The war is still unresolved at the end of the narrative. As a consequence, someone coming to the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; with just the knowledge from the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, having read the latter as &amp;quot;background&amp;quot; and with no other information about the story of the Trojan war, would be equally baffled about what's going on. Wait, Telemachus is visiting Helen and Menelaus in their palace? She's back in Greece? When did that happen? Did the Greeks win? How? ¡¿A mfing &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;wooden horse&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inconsistencies between the two narratives also show that the events of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; do not flow seamlessly into those of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. A blog post on &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://masculineepic.com/index.php/2019/07/09/iliad-and-odyssey-same-author/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Masculine Epic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lives of Aphrodite and Hephaestus are also inconsistent between the two poems. In the first, Hephaestus is married to a minor goddess, the Grace Charis. In the latter, he is Aphrodite’s cuckolded husband.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As has been argued above, such inconsistencies are taken for granted within a mythological universe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given their circulation as myth, making sense of the narratives of the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; depends heavily on prior knowledge of the stories they retell. The epics amplify and elaborate upon events that are always already known to the reader, albeit not in a unitary or definitive form. The retelling gives this diffuse knowledge a particular expression or shapes it into a particular artifact. That expression or artifact itself goes on to become part of the generalized diffusion of the myth in culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every version of a myth assumes a reader who is familiar with other versions of the myth. Not necessarily in any scholarly, comprehensive, or definitive way, but just by virtue of being part of a culture that has already widely recirculated the myth and continues to do so. This being the case, to call the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;largely a sequel to the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, as the question does, mischaracterizes both those epics. The one isn't anterior to the other, and doesn't provide information that's straightforwardly necessary and useful for reading it. The &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; merely tells a story whose action occurs prior to the action of the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. But that doesn't make the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; in any way dependent on the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. It's perfectly fine to eat on its own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T06:36:56.487" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T06:36:56.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T07:43:12.027" Score="3" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Heteroglossia is an interesting and thoughtful literary term introduced by the Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin in his “Discourse in the Novel” in 1934. Heteroglossia describes the coexistence of varieties within a single “linguistic code”. Bakhtin argues that the power of the novel originates in the coexistence of, and conflict between, different types of speech: the speech of characters, the speech of narrators, and even the speech of the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we see the elements of heteroglossia in the novels with inter-textual references such as the works of Umberto Eco (&lt;em&gt;The Name of the Rose&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Foucault's Pendulum&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11549" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:54:39.557" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:54:39.557" Title="Exploring heteroglossia in the semiotic novels of Umberto Eco" Tags="&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;umberto-eco&gt;&lt;foucaults-pendulum&gt;&lt;the-name-of-the-rose&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16592" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16595" CreationDate="2020-12-08T08:42:51.713" Score="18" ViewCount="2443" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt; by Norton Juster, what does Canby mean by:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he try to associate with 'knowledge' using the imagery of staying 'dry' after a swim?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11162" LastEditorUserId="11162" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T10:16:14.420" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T10:16:14.420" Title="How can you come out dry from the Sea of Knowledge?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16593" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T09:30:09.217" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;Everything in the Lands Beyond teaches Milo something, so his first encounter, the Whether Man, what does he teach Milo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milo confuses the 'Whether' man with the 'Weather' man, when he introduces himself. and then it is followed by a question from the Whether man about the weather, then followed by a cloud raining only on him. Is this just a coincidence or did Norton Juster mean anything by associating a weather reference to the Whether Man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, the Whether Man asks Milo if he thinks it will rain and then rushes in his house and gets an umbrella. Despite it being sunny, Milo witnesses a cloud raining only on the Whether Man, why is that? What does that symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other than this, every kingdom in the Lands Beyond is at fault in some way due to the absence of Rhyme and Reason. Could we say that the Whether Man is also affected by that, keeping in mind his behaviour and way of speech. Has the absence of Rhyme and Reason also affected the Land of Expectations overall?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11162" LastEditorUserId="11162" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T10:03:27.030" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T10:03:27.030" Title="What does the Whether Man teach Milo in &quot;The Phantom Tollbooth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;the-phantom-tollbooth&gt;&lt;norton-juster&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16588" CreationDate="2020-12-08T09:32:10.913" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;In context, Mr. Darcy is replying to Miss Bingley, who has just accused Elizabeth Bennet of employing a “very mean art”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Elizabeth Bennet,” said Miss Bingley, when the door was closed on her, “is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But, in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jane Austen (1813). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1342/1342-h/1342-h.htm#link2HCH0008&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pride and Prejudice&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 8&lt;/a&gt;. Project Gutenberg.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By this “very mean art”, Miss Bingley means Elizabeth’s humorous self-deprecation, which she interprets as a device for attracting the attention of men. So when Mr Darcy replies to her saying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“there is a meanness in &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he intends this as a rebuke to Miss Bingley: that is, he can tell that she also has been employing arts to captivate men, and one of those arts is the deprecation of rivals like Elizabeth Bennet, but this will not work on him. After this rebuke is delivered, the narrator says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to continue the subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is humorous understatement (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;litotes&lt;/a&gt;): Miss Bingley is in fact quite upset, as she has been hoping to win Mr. Darcy for herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T09:32:10.913" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16595" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16592" CreationDate="2020-12-08T11:44:38.857" Score="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: water symbolises knowledge, and all the other correspondences flow&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; from there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the sea is called the Sea of Knowledge, then what is its symbolic significance? Assuming that what's in the sea is literally representing knowledge, then (in the allegorical reading) we can equate &lt;strong&gt;water&lt;/strong&gt; with &lt;strong&gt;knowledge&lt;/strong&gt; or information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then what does it mean to swim in this sea, and what does it mean to get wet? If you're swimming, you're surrounded by the water; I would equate this with being exposed to knowledge on all sides, like reading an informative text or attending a lecture. But getting wet means you actually absorb water and it stays on you; that surely equates with absorbing knowledge, i.e. learning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and still come out completely dry. Most people do.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how can this sentence be interpreted? It should be something along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You can be exposed to knowledge all day and still end up learning nothing. Most people do.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But let's take this allegory further! What happens when Milo, Tock, and the Humbug actually swim through the Sea of Knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They swam and swam and swam for what seemed like hours, and only Tock's firm encouragement kept Milo struggling through the icy water. At last they reached the shore, thoroughly exhausted and, except for the bug, completely soaked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That wasn't bad at all,&amp;quot; the Humbug said, straightening his tie and brushing himself off. &amp;quot;I must visit there again.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milo and Tock swim for hours, and end up soaking wet and tired; the Humbug is dry, comfortable, and quite relaxed about the whole situation; he would be happy to do it all again. Thinking about this with the allegorical interpretation, it's like attending a long lecture or reading a weighty textbook: some people study for hours and end up tired but with a lot of new knowledge, while those who don't learn anything are comfortably relaxed and could happily do the whole thing again (still without learning anything).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the whole passage about the island of Conclusions can be interpreted under the same representation of knowledge as water. Jumping to conclusions is easy, and you can do it without possessing any of the pertinent information; but to get away from a false conclusion you reached, you need to learn something and gain some new knowledge. Norton Juster is masterfully and very subtly depicting this fact of life by the imagery of the island and the sea: you can jump to Conclusions like magic, but it takes a lot of hard work swimming through Knowledge to get back to where you started.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thank you very much for asking this question. Even after a very recent re-read of &lt;em&gt;The Phantom Tollbooth&lt;/em&gt;, I'd failed to grasp the significance of this passage about the Sea of Knowledge until now. (I'm ashamed to admit that on my very &lt;em&gt;first&lt;/em&gt; read, as a child, despite finding the Canby episode very memorable, I even failed to understand the point of his name.) There's always more to notice with this book!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Pun very much intended. Obviously.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T11:44:38.857" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16596" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16597" CreationDate="2020-12-08T13:46:02.280" Score="0" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;An excerpt from &amp;quot;Molecular Evolution&amp;quot; by Tina Hesman Saey:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Inside the lab, a dozen glass flasks containing clear liquid swirl in a temperature-controlled incubator. Although the naked eye can't see them, millions of E. coli bacteria grow in the flasks, &lt;strong&gt;doing what the window exhorts&lt;/strong&gt;. Lenski started the cultures in 1988, intending to follow the course of natural selection for several hundred generations. Now, two decades later, the cultures are still growing and have produced more than 45,000 generations of bacteria each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it doesn't look like a work of literature, the bold text does sounds figuratively. I understand every word, yet I still can't grasp what exactly bacteria do. What does the window exhort bacteria to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T14:34:21.700" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T14:34:21.700" Title="What does the window exhort bacteria to do in &quot;Molecular Evolution&quot; by Tina Hesman Saey?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;tina-hesman-saey&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16596" CreationDate="2020-12-08T14:32:50.970" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The paragraph immediately before the one you quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, is among the scientists hitting the rewind button on evolution. Meter-high letters taped to the windows of his lab spell out the lab's motto: EVOLVE. In the center of the &amp;quot;O,&amp;quot; the face of Charles Darwin peers out toward the football stadium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Molecular+evolution%3A+investigating+the+genetic+books+of+life+reveals...-a0193183053&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freelibrary&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the window exhorts them to Evolve.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="417" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T14:32:50.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16488" CreationDate="2020-12-08T17:45:03.270" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You very much have to remember the world in which Tolkien was writing. Class distinctions were very much stronger then than they are now. If we expected readers to apply their understanding of the British class system to Middle Earth, then Frodo is quite definitely a member of the wealthy class. He owns a house, he throws large parties, he doesn't need to work, he has inherited wealth from Bilbo. If Sam were depicted as his equal he would also be wealthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is stated in many places that Tolkien at least partly wrote LOTR as a parallel to WWI, in which he believed that the doggedness and strength of the ordinary Britisher got them through. The same with the Hobbits and the Ring. But if Tolkien had written all the Hobbits of the Fellowship as wealthy upper-class he could reasonably be accused of portraying a situation in which it is only wealthy upper-class people who get to save the world. That was not what he was trying to say. Having Sam be genuinely &amp;quot;working class&amp;quot; makes his point much better. To portray Sam as &amp;quot;ordinary&amp;quot; by the standards of pre-WW2 Britain then he has to have a job. If he has a job then he may as well work for Frodo. (And the position of &amp;quot;gardener&amp;quot; is a long way from &amp;quot;slave&amp;quot;. A good gardener would be as valued as a good chef.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Rand al'Thor excellently pointed out, this is supported by this quote of Tolkien's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;My 'Samwise' is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You might also look at the answers to this question: &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/6238/did-tolkien-really-explicitly-consider-sam-the-true-hero-of-the-lord-of-the-ring&quot;&gt;Did Tolkien consider Sam Gamgee to be the true hero of the Lord of the Rings.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="83" LastEditorUserId="83" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T19:30:20.937" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T19:30:20.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16599" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-08T17:53:42.873" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edmund Spenser's epic poem &lt;em&gt;The Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt; was published in the years 1590 (books I–III) and 1596 (books I–VI, i.e. complete).&#xA;It is primarily an allegorical work, and allegories were not new in the Renaissance: allegories can also be found in classical literature and medieval literature.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene#Theological_structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; mentions the work's theological structure, especially in book I. But I doubt that literature inspired by theology was new either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except for the date and publication, what characteristics make Spenser's &lt;em&gt;The Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt; an example of Renaissance literature?&#xA;Is there anything else than the relevance of theology mentioned in the Wikipedia article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Periodisation is challenging. Simply claiming that the work was written between year x and year y is insufficient, since that raises the question why those years are considered as constituting a specific literary period in the first place.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-08T17:53:42.873" Title="What characteristics make The Faerie Queene an example of Renaissance literature?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;edmund-spenser&gt;&lt;the-faerie-queene&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16600" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16603" CreationDate="2020-12-08T20:01:46.103" Score="3" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter I.5 [page 124 line 3] of &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; by James Joyce, the &amp;quot;Stop. Please stop. Do please stop. O do please stop&amp;quot; motif is associated with four punctuation marks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly&#xA;understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please&#xA;stop respectively,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These clearly are the punctuation symbols from among {&lt;em&gt;comma&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;semicolon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;colon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;period&lt;/em&gt;}, and certainly &lt;em&gt;comma&lt;/em&gt; is the first and &lt;em&gt;period&lt;/em&gt; is the last, but how are &lt;em&gt;semicolon&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;colon&lt;/em&gt; ordered?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that the text is liberally littered with colons and semicolons, the answer is important to the reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2020-12-08T20:32:45.217" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T15:36:53.100" Title="In chapter I.5 of Finnegans Wake, how are the &quot;paper wounds&quot; ordered?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16603" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16600" CreationDate="2020-12-09T13:34:26.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The clue to this question is in the text itself. By using the word &amp;quot;respectively&amp;quot;, Joyce is telling the reader to take the marks in the order he has listed them. For example the Collins Dictionary definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Respectively means in the same order as the items that you have just mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since each description of the mark extends in length and extremity of instruction (i.e. &amp;quot;o do please stop&amp;quot; is much more desperate than &amp;quot;stop&amp;quot;), they can be associated with the extending length of each pause in punctuation. That is: the comma, the semi-colon, the colon and the full stop.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This rule governing the meaning of these four grammatical marks was set down in a book known as &lt;em&gt;The King's English&lt;/em&gt; by H. W. and F. G. Fowler. It is interesting to note that Joyce appears to have referred to these scholars when constructing Chapter 16 of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. He repeatedly re-uses phrases and obscure words from that book in his chapter often, it appears, in mockery of its formal strictures. For example, he uses the construction &amp;quot;funny, very&amp;quot; which &lt;em&gt;The King's English&lt;/em&gt; decries as childish, and repeatedly makes incorrect use of the word &amp;quot;individual&amp;quot; to refer to a person, which the &lt;em&gt;King's English&lt;/em&gt; states is the mark of writers &amp;quot;without the literary sense&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that the punctuation marks in question are also used as diacritic marks i.e. dots and dashes above letters to influence their pronunciation. Such marks are used extensively in the passage which follows the list of &amp;quot;paper wounds&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that they ad bîn &amp;quot;provoked&amp;quot; ay ^ fork, of à grave Brofèsor; àth é's Brèak&#xA;— fast — table; ; acùtely profèššionally &lt;em&gt;piquèd&lt;/em&gt;, to = introdùce a&#xA;notion of time [ùpon à plane (?) sù ' ' fàç'e'] by pùnct! ingh oles&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course this passage has been extensively &amp;quot;wounded&amp;quot;, as Joyce describes it, by punctuation and diacritical marks. As has the intervening passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the circumflexuous wall of a singleminded men's asylum, accentuated by bi tso fb rok engl a ssan dspl itch ina&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginning of which can be read phonetically as &amp;quot;bits of broken English&amp;quot;. The image conjured by the literal reconstruction, a wall topped with &amp;quot;bits of broken glass and split china&amp;quot; looks rather like a sentence full of diacritical marks, as does the jagged rendering that Joyce has given in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, there are a number of wordplays in this sentence as is typical for &lt;em&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/em&gt;, in this case, to do with punctuation. The wall is &amp;quot;circumflexuous&amp;quot; which sounds like &amp;quot;circumfluous&amp;quot;, i.e. to surround something. But the spelling is redolent of &amp;quot;circumflex&amp;quot; which is the diacritic mark ^. It is &amp;quot;accentuated&amp;quot; by the bits of crockery, which means &amp;quot;make more noticeable or prominent&amp;quot;, but diacritical marks are sometimes known as &amp;quot;accents&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finnegan's Wake&lt;/em&gt; makes many allusions to languages other than English, in which such marks are common. Indeed in referring to the letter as a &amp;quot; Tiberiast duplex&amp;quot;, Joyce is invoking Hebrew. The canonical pronunciation of various Hebrew holy texts, often using diacritics, was established in the city of Tiberias between the 8th and 10th centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Gibson, Andrew. &amp;quot;Joyce through the Fowlers: ‘Eumaeus’, ‘The King's English and Modern English Usage.’&amp;quot; European Joyce Studies, vol. 22, 2013, pp. 225–244.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mecsnóber, Tekla. &amp;quot;A Notion of Joyce’s Time: Interpreting the Diacritics of Finnegans Wake&amp;quot; Genetic Joyce Studies, issue 14, 2014&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T15:36:53.100" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T15:36:53.100" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16605" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:49:38.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:49:38.330" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:49:38.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16606" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:49:38.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Walter Tevis (1928-1984) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:04:00.127" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:04:00.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16607" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:51:20.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:51:20.773" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:51:20.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16608" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:51:20.773" Score="0" Body="Questions about the musical works of American rock band NEEDTOBREATHE. Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:03:48.700" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:03:48.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16609" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:52:33.700" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:52:33.700" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:52:33.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16610" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:52:33.700" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of literary critic Jonathan Culler (born 1944) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:03:56.627" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:03:56.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16611" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:54:19.250" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T16:54:19.250" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T16:54:19.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16612" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T16:54:19.250" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Foucault's Pendulum&quot; by Italian author Umberto Eco. Should be tagged with [umberto-eco] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:04:11.887" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:04:11.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16613" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:06:18.350" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:06:18.350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:06:18.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16614" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:06:18.350" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Name of the Rose' (Italian: 'Il nome della rosa', 1980) by Umberto Eco. Should be tagged with [umberto-eco] and [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:53:47.470" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:53:47.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16615" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:07:57.247" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:07:57.247" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:07:57.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16616" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:07:57.247" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Tina Hesman Saey or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:53:52.877" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:53:52.877" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16617" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:09:55.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:09:55.810" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:09:55.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16618" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:09:55.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about the epic poem entitled 'The Faerie Queene' by Edmund Spenser. Should be tagged with [edmund-spenser]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:54:54.383" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:54:54.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16619" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:12:43.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:12:43.103" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:12:43.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16620" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-09T17:12:43.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Edmund Spenser (1552/1553-1599) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-09T17:52:39.447" LastActivityDate="2020-12-09T17:52:39.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16621" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-09T20:42:01.150" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the developments of the dystopian literary genre? Especially what does the dystopian aspect have on Kazuo Ishiguro' &amp;quot;Never Let Me Go&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11569" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T00:48:55.850" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T00:48:55.850" Title="How does the development of the dystopian literary genre impact the dystopian aspect of Kazuo Ishiguro's &quot;Never Let Me Go&quot;?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;never-let-me-go&gt;&lt;kazuo-ishiguro&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16623" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16624" CreationDate="2020-12-09T23:06:01.320" Score="4" ViewCount="884" Body="&lt;p&gt;I encountered this mystifying aside (bolded) in the text of &lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt;. I assumed it might be a biblical reference, but upon checking, it doesn't seem that the biblical Rebecca was a slave. A quick search doesn't show any other potential references in English literature. I'm not well-read in Russian literature, so I don't know if it is a reference to a Russian-language text. Does anyone know what Tolstoy means?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a Constance Garnett translation, if that helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The below quote is from Chapter 34:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the baroness, [Petritsky] was sick to death of her, especially since she'd taken to offering continually to lend him money. But he had found a girl--he'd show her to Vronsky--a marvel, exquisite, in the strict Oriental style, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;genre of the slave Rebecca, don't you know.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; He'd had a row, too, with Berkoshov, and was going to send seconds to him, but of course it would come to nothing. Altogether everything was supremely amusing and jolly. And, not letting his comrade enter into further details of his position, Petritsky proceeded to tell him all the interesting news.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11574" LastEditorUserId="11574" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T00:41:10.410" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T00:47:33.407" Title="Mystifying reference in &quot;Anna Karenina&quot;" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16623" CreationDate="2020-12-10T00:47:33.407" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I assumed it might be a biblical reference, but upon checking, it doesn't seem that Rebecca was a slave.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is her, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/rebekah#Marriage_to_Isaac&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rebecca&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to these &lt;a href=&quot;https://rvb.ru/tolstoy/02comm/0031_1.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;comments to &amp;quot;Anna Karenina&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (in Russian, search for 'genre' on that page to hit the comment about &lt;em&gt;Ребекка&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Стр. 130. ...в восточном строгом стиле, «genre рабыни Ребекки...» — Имеется в виду библейский тип Ревекки (Ребекки), которую привел из Месопотамии раб Авраама (Бытие, гл. 24).&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.translate.ru&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.translate.ru&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;P. 130.... in the oriental strict style, &amp;quot;genre of Rebecca's slave...&amp;quot; - Refers to the biblical type of Rebecca (Rebekah), which &lt;strong&gt;Abraham's slave&lt;/strong&gt; brought from Mesopotamia (Genesis, chap. 24).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Does anyone know what Tolstoy means?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are Petritsky's words, not Tolstoy's. Apparently, Petritsky is a young and not very educated man - you can read the description of him at the start of the very &lt;a href=&quot;https://ccel.org/ccel/tolstoy/karenina.ii.xxxiv.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;same chapter&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Petritsky was a young lieutenant, not particularly well-connected, and not merely not wealthy, but in debt all around. Toward evening he was always drunk, and he had often found himself in the guardhouse because of sorts of ludicrous and disgraceful scrapes, but he was a favorite both of his comrades and his superior officers.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, my best guess would be that Tolstoy here gives us a hint on the &amp;quot;educational level&amp;quot; of Petritsky, who had probably once heard or read that Rebecca was brought from Mesopotamia by Abraham's slave (Eliezer) but he mixed this all up and believes Rebecca herself was a slave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7659" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T00:47:33.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16626" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9262" CreationDate="2020-12-10T12:39:12.423" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; Stream of consciousness, partly; interior monologue, no.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt; is narrated largely through indirect discourse limited to Stephen Dedalus's point of view. Inasmuch as the narrative technique is third person, the novel does not use interior monologue, which by definition uses first person. However, as the question correctly notes, the narrative point of view develops in tandem with Stephen as he grows from a very young child to a young man. In the first chapter, when the child Stephen has little cognitive self-awareness, Joyce manipulates free indirect discourse to present Stephen's experiences in a way that approximates a child's stream of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The very first words, quoted in the question, are a story Stephen's father tells him. The chapter continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was baby tuckoo. The moscow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Joyce, James. &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt;. 1915. Penguin Great Books of the Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin, 1999. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/summary-and-analysis/chapter-i/chapter-i-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 1&lt;/a&gt;].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The childish diction and the leaps of logic indicate that this is the very young Stephen's way of experiencing the world. Rather than interior monologue, Joyce uses &lt;em&gt;free indirect discourse&lt;/em&gt; here. It's indirect in that Stephen's experiences are narrated in the third person rather than directly quoted. It's free in that there are no markers such as &amp;quot;Stephen's father said&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;Stephen thought&amp;quot;. This technique does serve Joyce well in representing the young Stephen's stream of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a clearer example of Joyce's use of free indirect discourse to represent Stephen's stream of consciousness. Stephen has just heard a schoolmate call another a &amp;quot;suck&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once he had washed his hands in the lavatory of the Wicklow hotel and his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. And when it had all gone down slowly the hole in the basin had made a sound like that: suck. Only louder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To remember that and the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. He felt cold and then a little hot: and he could see the names printed on the cocks. That was a very queer thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the air in the corridor chilled him too. It was queer and wettish. But soon the gas would be lit and in burning it made a light noise like a little song.      [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/summary-and-analysis/chapter-i/chapter-i-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 5&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Memory, sensory experience, emotional state, and cognition are bound up together: Stephen remembers washing his hands, and re-experiences the cold and the heat of the water from the two faucets. The sensations in turn trigger another memory, that of seeing the cold and hot labels. Simultaneously, Stephen finds it queer that he's actually remembering the event so vividly, to the point of remembering the labels. His thoughts then return to the present, because he realizes that the corridor is also &amp;quot;queer&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wettish&amp;quot;, like his memory. He then thinks of the immediate future, when the gas will be lit. The free association between words, images, and sensations; the lack of linearity in the handling of time; the evocation of sense perceptions such as sight, heat and cold, and hearing; and the intermingling of memory and cognition with all of the above, together present Stephen's stream of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as Stephen grows older, Joyce moves away from free indirect discourse to a more traditional third person limited point of view. We still see the world through Stephen's eyes, but the narration is much more straightforward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The priest's face was in total shadow but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull. Stephen followed also with his ears the accents and intervals of the priest's voice as he spoke gravely and cordially of indifferent themes, the vacation which had just ended, the colleges of the order abroad, the transference of masters. The grave and cordial voice went on easily with its tale, and in the pauses Stephen felt bound to set it on again with respectful questions. He knew that the tale was a prelude and his mind waited for the sequel.      [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/summary-and-analysis/chapter-iv/chapter-iv-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 131&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unlike in the first chapter, what Stephen sees and hears is presented quite objectively. Considering this passage in isolation, there would be little that differentiates it from an omniscient narrator point of view. Stephen's thoughts are indicated with words like &amp;quot;he knew&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;felt bound to&amp;quot;. By this point, Joyce's technique no longer approximates stream of consciousness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing section of the novel, a series of diary entries from Stephen, mark yet another change in the narrative technique. We have moved from free indirect stream of consciousness at the opening, through a traditional third person limited point of view for most of the novel, to a first person narrator at the end:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;26 April:&lt;/em&gt; Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;27 April:&lt;/em&gt; Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.      [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/summary-and-analysis/chapter-v/chapter-v-20&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 217&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a neat bit of self-referentiality, Joyce discusses this modulation and development of the technique in the novel itself. Stephen and his friend Lynch are discussing the three modes of literature: lyric, epic, and dramatic. Stephen says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will see easily in that old English ballad &lt;em&gt;Turpin Hero&lt;/em&gt; which begins in the first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist, like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.      [&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/p/a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man/summary-and-analysis/chapter-v/chapter-v-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 184&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first chapter, with its free indirect discourse approximating the child Stephen's stream of consciousness, exemplifies the lyrical mode, with Stephen &amp;quot;more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling emotion&amp;quot;. The bulk of the novel is in third person limited, &amp;quot;when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the centre of an epical event and ... [t]he narrative is no longer purely personal&amp;quot;; this is the epic mode. Finally, at the end, with our reading Stephen's diary entries, it is as though we no longer have an intervening author between us and the character: &amp;quot;The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak&amp;quot;. We have arrived at the dramatic mode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference to &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Jake-bugg-turpin-hero-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turpin Hero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is also noteworthy here. The original version of &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt; was called &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hero&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stephen Hero&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. And whereas the ballad, as Stephen remarks, begins in the first person and ends in the third, &lt;em&gt;Portrait&lt;/em&gt; has the opposite trajectory. Joyce's later novels, &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, are acclaimed for his formal experimentation, particularly in stream of consciousness techniques. But &lt;em&gt;Portrait&lt;/em&gt;, considered a minor work in comparison to the later monuments, nevertheless demonstrates Joyce's interest in and control over narrative form and technique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T13:10:38.713" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T13:10:38.713" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16627" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16628" CreationDate="2020-12-10T12:51:57.050" Score="3" ViewCount="146" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a situation, where a man is going from America to Canada to camp in the forest with his friend, and they were being searched at customs department:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What’s all this tackle?” asked the burly and somewhat red-faced customs officer at Fort Erie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“This,” said Yates, “is a tent, with the poles and pegs appertaining thereto. These are a number of packages of tobacco, on which I shall doubtless have to pay something into the exchequer of her Majesty. This is a jug used for the holding of liquids. I beg to call your attention to the fact that it is at present empty, which unfortunately prevents me &lt;strong&gt;making a libation to the rites of good-fellowship.&lt;/strong&gt; What my friend has in that valise I don’t know, but I suspect a gambling outfit, and would advise you to search him.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And in a previous passage, this american man said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Besides, the empty jar will save trouble at the customhouse. I don’t suppose Canadian rye is as good as the Kentucky article, but you and I will have to scrub along on it for a while. And, talking of whisky, just press the button once again.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He seems to make a sarcastic comment, but I can't get its meaning.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T13:59:21.067" Title="What's meant here by &quot;libation to the rites of good-fellowship&quot;?" Tags="&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16628" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16627" CreationDate="2020-12-10T13:02:47.357" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He's saying he can't offer anyone a drink.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Formally, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;libation&lt;/a&gt; is a religious ritual involving the pouring of liquid (such as alcohol) to appease a god or spirit or as an offering. In a more casual, often humorous, sense, the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/libation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;can&lt;/a&gt; be &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/libation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;used&lt;/a&gt; to refer to any drink of alcohol. In this case, Yates is (somewhat flippantly) partly combining the two meanings: since his jug of alcohol is empty, he cannot offer the customs officer a drink, not even for the ritual (&amp;quot;rites&amp;quot;) of offering a drink to a fellow man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a jug used for the holding of liquids. I beg to call your attention to the fact that it is at present empty, which unfortunately prevents me making a libation to the rites of good-fellowship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More succinctly, and with less of the flippant formality, this could be rewritten as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my alcohol jug, but it's empty, so I can't offer you a drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Peter Shor notes, the &lt;em&gt;other&lt;/em&gt;, more real, consequence of the emptiness of the jug is that he doesn't have to pay any customs duty for his alcohol, as he does for his tobacco. This is not mentioned explicitly, but it's probably the real thing Yates is thinking about while he jokingly refers to being unable to offer a drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T13:59:21.067" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T13:59:21.067" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16630" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-10T16:08:50.773" Score="0" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is Shem dead tonight?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was alerted to this possibility, non-authoritatively,  by &lt;a href=&quot;https://portergirl.com/2016/05/12/and-now-for-something-completely-different/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Porter Girl&lt;/a&gt;, whose name provides further &amp;quot;proof&amp;quot; that Joyce wrote all his significant future readers into &lt;em&gt;Finnegan Wake&lt;/em&gt;. I wish to seek a more authoritative answer. I have done some of my own investigation, which I shall present along that of Porter Girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will accept any answer that can demonstrate this hypothesis false, otherwise any reference to a positive authoritative answer in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Recap&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna lies in bed dreaming, and that tonight her husband Finnegan is long dead (he fell from a ladder), does not stop him living and ghosting Anna's &lt;em&gt;dreamland&lt;/em&gt;, in which &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; takes place. But &lt;em&gt;tonight&lt;/em&gt;, Finnegan is is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I.4 88.5] one of those lucky cocks    for whom the&#xA;audible-visible-gnosible-edible world existed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anna and Finnegan had twin sons, let's call them Shem and Shaun. Shem is well-played by Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce. For example we learn early on that Shem, now archetyped as &amp;quot;Caddy&amp;quot;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I.1 14.16] went to Winehouse and wrote o peace a farce. Blotty words for Dublin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Shem's chapter I.7, we learn that he&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I.7 185.34] wrote over every square inch of the only foolscap available, his own&#xA;body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense&#xA;integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded&#xA;cyclewheeling history&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shem as writer is reinforced in II.1, when a young teen Shem, now Glugg, after failing, in front of his budding half-sister Issy, to guess the colors of her rainbow girl's panties, runs away humiliated, and threatens to write &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[II.1 228.29] He would, with the greatest of ease, ... fire off, gheol ghiornal,&#xA;foull subustioned mullmud,  his farced epistol to the hibruws.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This association seems to make Shem an answer candidate to the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I.5 107.36] Say, baroun lousadoor, who in hallhagal wrote the durn thing anyhow?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of Anna's dreamland characters delivered the &lt;em&gt;text&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; to the real world. They imagined a night in Anna's dreamland and wrote it all down in a novel. Not written &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; dreamland, but here in &amp;quot;Heliopolis&amp;quot;, literaturely speaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely this is Shem? And that might go some way to explaining some of the literary gymnastics of &lt;em&gt;Finnegan Wake&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But isn't Shem dead tonight?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We first meet the twins [I.1 3.7] (page 3 is the first page) as &amp;quot;topsawyer's rocks &lt;strong&gt;by&lt;/strong&gt; the stream Oconee&amp;quot;, which is Anna since she is all rivers (&lt;em&gt;by&lt;/em&gt;, geddit?).&#xA;In the next phrase they again appear as &amp;quot;tauftauf thuartpeatrick&amp;quot;.&#xA;But in the very next phrase, the twins begin merging as &amp;quot;twone nathandjoe&amp;quot;.&#xA;This always puzzled me.  During parts of the text they are often turning into each other. For example, when Anna awakes and takes &amp;quot;young&amp;quot; Finnegan for an interior monologue stroll, she cannot keep the &amp;quot;young&amp;quot; twins apart in her mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[IV.1 620.12] Them boys is so contrairy. ... Galliver and Gellover. Unless they&#xA;changes by mistake. I seen the likes in the twinngling of an aye.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why? Twins as one, yes, I get it, but in my experience Joyce always delivers more. Notice that while &amp;quot;Galliver&amp;quot; lives, &amp;quot;Gellover&amp;quot; is over! If Shem is dead, Anna has to &amp;quot;use&amp;quot; Shaun as both her sons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After Finnegan's fall and wake, and our introduction to Anna, we are&#xA;invited to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[I.1 12.19] take our review of the &lt;strong&gt;two&lt;/strong&gt; mounds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As graves, one mound is Finnegan's grave out back, but what of the other mound? (These mounds&#xA;are also Anna and HCE in bed of course.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone contemplating the hypothesis that Shem is dead, is disappointed when we&#xA;meet Shem in his chapter I.7. We learn that not only does he &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;develop hereditary pulmonary T.B&amp;quot; [172.12], but further&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[172.18] He would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; put fire to his cerebrum;&#xA;he would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; throw himself in Liffey;&#xA;he would &lt;strong&gt;not&lt;/strong&gt; explaud himself with pneumantics;&#xA;he &lt;strong&gt;refused&lt;/strong&gt; to saffrocake himself with a sod.&#xA;With the foreign devil's leave the fraid born fraud diddled even death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And although:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[179.1] he got the charm of his optical life when he found himself&#xA;(hic sunt lennones!)&#xA;at pointblank range blinking down the barrel of an irregular revolver&#xA;of the bulldog with a purpose pattern,&#xA;handled by an unknown quarreler who, supposedly,&#xA;had been told off to shade and &lt;strong&gt;shoot shy Shem&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;should the shit show his shiny shnout out awhile&#xA;to look facts in their face before being hosed and creased&#xA;(uprip and jack him!)&#xA;by six or a dozen of the gayboys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shem appears to have survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But then despite the watch of cook Saunderson, now &amp;quot;Petty constable Sistersen&amp;quot; [186.19],&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[187.12] he was namely coon at bringer at home two gallonts,&#xA;as per royal,&#xA;full poultry till &lt;strong&gt;his murder&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shem is murdered (and by allusion Stephen and James Joyce, although James &lt;em&gt;also&lt;/em&gt; died when Finnegan fell from the ladder). Shem can only appear via&#xA;&amp;quot;Polthergeistkotzdondherhoploits!&amp;quot; [187.15]. This provides Shaun with the perfect opportunity to steal Shem's writings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the next and final chapter of part I, Anna's chapter, Porter Girl observes that when Anna is giving gifts to all the characters that populate &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt;, while she give a gift to Shaun, she does not give one to Shem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... a peduncle for Karmalite Kane;  a sunless map of the month,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;including the sword and stamps,   for &lt;strong&gt;Shemus O'Shaun the Post&lt;/strong&gt;;  a&#xA;jackal with hide for Browne but Nolan;  ... She gave them ilcka&#xA;madre's daughter a moonflower and a bloodvein:  but the grapes&#xA;that ripe before reason to them that devide the vinedress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While a gift for Shaun the Post (here oned with Shem),&#xA;no gift for Shem. But the paragraph continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So on&#xA;Izzy,  her shamemaid,  love shone befond her tears as from Shem,  her&#xA;penmight, &lt;strong&gt;life past befoul his prime&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In part II Shem is present, but only a young Shem, and huge part III is primarily&#xA;foccussed on Shaun. Shem does not appear as a character except as an object under discussion. In III.4 Shem is back, only young again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the kicker is the final chapter IV.1. Day dawns and although Anna is still asleep, the bustle of the house impinges. So who do we hear? HCE trying not to get up and work by complaining he has a stomach ache, as usual. Saunderson bringing medicine and coaxing HCE out of bed. Shaun, in the bath, still masturbating over the rainbow girls, if not Issy herself, and of course not cleaning the bath after him, messy messy. And Issy. But no Shem!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T16:36:12.797" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T16:36:12.797" Title="In Finnegans Wake, is Shem dead tonight?" Tags="&lt;james-joyce&gt;&lt;finnegans-wake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16631" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16641" CreationDate="2020-12-10T16:22:30.007" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading this novel about 5-6 years ago, I think maybe as a recent release at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A woman is found wandering, dazed, having escaped from her crashed car. She claims she had to leave her daughter behind, and a massive search starts until they get ahold of the woman's husband, who informs the police that they don't have a daughter. I don't remember who is doing the investigation (whether it was the woman, a police detective, or just a general inspector), but the bulk of the book is about trying to figure out why this woman was convinced there was a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember there being a plot point about them tracing the woman having bought alcohol on the day of the crash from a store in a town far from where she lived, and the name and description of the &amp;quot;missing&amp;quot; girl matching a missing girl from some decades ago. The husband does some sort of woodworking that requires him to have a building separate from the house and he travels a lot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do remember the resolution of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The woman was prostituted as a child, along with the girl who was a missing person. I think the girls were referred to as &amp;quot;dolls&amp;quot;, and maybe the location as the &amp;quot;dollhouse&amp;quot;? Her husband was a laborer at the house who she fell in love with. The girl escaped because her friend died, and her husband smuggled her out as that girl's dead body (I think wrapped up in a rug). I remember there being a twist involving her name, and switching with the other girl. I don't remember if it was intentional on her part to have the accident to reveal her past or if she had a break.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under random bits of info, I think the woman was blond, and her husband disappears about halfway into the book, putting her under suspicion by the police. I think there's also a scene where the family of the missing girl is interviewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T19:14:53.960" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T19:14:53.960" Title="Crime drama/mystery where a woman suffers a car crash, and searches for a child who doesn't exist" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16649" CreationDate="2020-12-10T16:48:57.180" Score="2" ViewCount="124" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first paragraph of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The primroses were over. Toward the edge of the wood, where the ground became open and sloped down to an old fence and a brambly ditch beyond, only a few fading patches of pale yellow still showed among the dog's mercury and oak-tree roots. On the other side of the fence, the upper part of the field was full of rabbit holes...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 1: The Notice Board&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He reached the top of the bank in a single, powerful leap. Hazel followed; and together they slipped away, running easily down through the wood, where the first primroses were beginning to bloom.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from the Epilogue&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repetition of primroses at the very start and end of the book seems to be somehow important. Is there some symbolic meaning to how the primroses are &amp;quot;over&amp;quot; at the start and &amp;quot;beginning to bloom&amp;quot; at the end? Is there something about primroses in particular which would help explain the repetition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are primroses emphasized at the start and end of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-11T18:25:29.317" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T18:25:29.317" Title="Why are primroses emphasized at the start and end of Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16633" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:03:13.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:03:13.400" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:03:13.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16634" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:03:13.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British author Kazuo Ishiguro (born 1954) or his life as an author." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:16:19.767" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:16:19.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:04:37.953" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:04:37.953" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:04:37.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:04:37.953" Score="0" Body="Questions about the dystopian novel 'Never Let Me Go' (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro. Should be tagged with [kazuo-ishiguro]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:15:46.320" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:15:46.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:11:56.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:11:56.833" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:11:56.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:11:56.833" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Scottish-Canadian author Robert Barr (1849-1912) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:17:03.053" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:17:03.053" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16639" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:15:31.983" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:15:31.983" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:15:31.983" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16640" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:15:31.983" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'In the Midst of Alarms' (1894, 1900, 1912) by Robert Barr. Should be tagged with [robert-barr]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T17:17:43.233" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:17:43.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16631" CreationDate="2020-12-10T17:47:57.053" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crash &amp;amp; Burn&lt;/em&gt; (2015), third book of the &lt;em&gt;Tessa Leoni&lt;/em&gt; series by Lisa Gardner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571612-crash-burn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My name is Nicky Frank. Except, most likely, it isn’t.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nicole Frank shouldn’t have been able to survive the car accident&lt;/strong&gt;, much less crawl up the steep ravine. Not in the dark, not in the rain, not with her injuries. But one thought allows her to defy the odds and flag down help: Vero.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I’m looking for a little girl. I have to save her. Except, most likely, she doesn’t exist.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sergeant Wyatt Foster is frustrated when even the search dogs can’t find any trace of the mysterious missing child. Until &lt;strong&gt;Nicky’s husband, Thomas, arrives with a host of shattering revelations: Nicole Frank suffers from a rare brain injury and the police shouldn’t trust anything she says&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My husband claims he’ll do anything to save me. Except, most likely, he can’t.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is Nicky Frank, and what happened the night her car sailed off the road? Was it a random accident or something more sinister given the woman’s lack of family and no close friends? The deeper Wyatt digs, the more concerned he becomes. Because it turns out, in the past few months, Nicky has suffered from more than one close accident. . . . In fact, it would appear someone very much wants her dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the reviews mentions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a dollhouse (women and children trafficking/prostitution) theme similar to Taylor Stevens' The Doll&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;mystery book car crash missing child prostitute site:goodreads.com/book&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T17:47:57.053" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16642" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-10T18:28:46.130" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the term for substituting a context-specific word into a well-known phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, there's a saying like &amp;quot;Actions speak louder than words&amp;quot;. So I'll, for example, substitute the word &amp;quot;Actions&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;Lowering taxes&amp;quot;, so it would look like this: &amp;quot;Lowering taxes speaks louder than words&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The context would be that the government has promised some time ago than it would lower the taxes, but it didn't, so some person criticizes it with the aforementioned sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11581" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-10T21:36:42.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T04:51:36.183" Title="What is the term for substituting a context-specific word into a well-known phrase?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-04-25T11:04:35.477" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16643" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14630" CreationDate="2020-12-10T20:15:45.937" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16590/4442&quot;&gt;verbose&lt;/a&gt;'s theoretical comments on the nature of myth, there is evidence that the two epics were, in fact, consumed separately in ancient Greece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aelian (&lt;a href=&quot;http://penelope.uchicago.edu/aelian/varhist13.html#chap14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Various History&lt;/em&gt; 13.14&lt;/a&gt;) attests that the ancients sung different sections of Homer, which he names, independently of each other. They were only compiled into the present two poems by Pisistratus. So in their original setting, various parts of the poem were performed independently of each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer's &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; itself depicts the recitation of epic in the character Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard (&lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.8.viii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book 8&lt;/a&gt;). He sings three almost independent stories over the course of the day. If this describes the same &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sitz_im_Leben&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sitz im Leben&lt;/a&gt; as Homer's poems themselves, bards would be singing episodes from the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; (and from outside them as well), not actually reciting them directly from book 1 to 24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Homeric Hymns as well all end with a promise &amp;quot;and now I will sing another song,&amp;quot; seemingly a promise to begin with a Homeric passage. Both of Homer's epics begin with an invocation to the Muses to begin the poem (the Iliad also had another version of the opening invocation in antiquity), but the invocations to the Muses are actually found throughout the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;: in book 2 before the Catalogue of Ships, in book 11 before Agamemnon's fight, in book 14 and 16 when the Trojans fight at the Achaean ships (all of which seem to correspond to sections mentioned by Aelian).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be argued that even if this is true for the history of the text, the post-Pisistratean Homer that we possess should be judged as a complete whole, as later editors arranged it. This is also true. There is no question that each of the two epics was carefully designed as a continuous unit (Gregory Nagy's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/3472.gregory-nagy-homer-the-classic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer the Classic&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; describes how the Homeric poems reflect the culmination of a transformation from Demodocus-like spontaneous song to continuous narratives). But since the question is whether the epics can be consumed independently, their roots in different cycles of stories are relevant, since whatever redactions they went through haven't detached them entirely from their origin as a variety of interdependent narratives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4442" LastActivityDate="2020-12-10T20:15:45.937" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16644" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16872" CreationDate="2020-12-10T22:25:36.870" Score="3" ViewCount="120" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am building an eBook reading service (paid) and I aim to distribute free classics available on Gutenberg Project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gone through all &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/permission.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gutenberg terms&lt;/a&gt; which allows me to do almost anything, but Gutenberg being limited to the US, it doesn't say much beyond that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just came to know that Gutenberg is banned in Germany, because of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lawsuit arising out of the situation&lt;/a&gt; that copyright expiry differs between Germany and the US (where Gutenberg is located).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My questions are:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does this mean I cannot sell any books in Germany? Are there exceptions? (By selling I do not mean to sell one book for €xx - it is rather unlimited books per month sort of, but it is no different from selling)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is there a central place to know how many years old books could be safe to publish, in &lt;strong&gt;every country&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If there is a safer, more copyright-generic source than Gutenberg, I can utilize that too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If at all infringement occurs, what sort of difficulties could arise for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11585" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T08:36:50.173" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T08:36:50.173" Title="Are Gutenberg books illegal to sell in Germany?" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;ebooks&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11428" CreationDate="2020-12-11T10:22:57.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Michael is revisiting in his memory, and perhaps in actuality, the places in Venice that he and Julia have visited together, and imagining an alternative course for their failed relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During their time in the city, Michael and Julia have stayed at an apartment near the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sant%27Elena,_Venice&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;church of Sant'Elena&lt;/a&gt; and have taken walks in that neighborhood as well as in other parts of Venice. The &lt;em&gt;mudflats of subsidence and flood&lt;/em&gt; are the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_Lagoon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lagoons on which Venice is built&lt;/a&gt;, and into which it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.livescience.com/19195-venice-sinking-slowly.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slowly sinking&lt;/a&gt;, making &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cnet.com/features/venices-desperate-50-year-fight-against-floods/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;floods&lt;/a&gt; a common occurrence—including &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/weather/2020/dec/08/venice-floods-as-forecasts-fail-to-predict-extent-of-high-tide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;right meow&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After wandering the city their first evening, they visit Vivaldi's church, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ospedale_della_Piet%C3%A0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pietà&lt;/a&gt;, on their second day. By coincidence, a local ensemble happens to have a concert scheduled in the church that evening, so there's a piano set up. Michael has his violin, so he and Julia play the Largo of Vivaldi's first Manchester sonata together. The &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; in the passage you quote reflects this temporality as Michael remembers and/or recreates the time he and Julia have spent together: first, the walk by the lagoons and canals; &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; the visit to the Pietà.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During their visit, Michael notes the ceiling of the church:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;High above us on the great ceiling is a cartouche of space and light, edged with angels and musicians, at its heart a glorious effusion of pale blue, rosy ochre, and white. The Father, the Son, and the dove-embodied Holy Spirit are crowning the Virgin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's now remembering the Vivaldi sonatas' long journey to the Manchester Central Library where they lay for many years, and then how he and Julia played the largo in the Pietà, where the music floats up to this ceiling. During their visit, Michael has described his and Julia's music-making as &amp;quot;rapture&amp;quot;, hence &lt;em&gt;ecstasy rose unheard to the crowning angels and the dove&lt;/em&gt;. The ecstasy is unheard for many reasons. First, Julia and Michael were alone in the church when they played; there was no audience. Second, the angels and the dove on the ceiling are obviously unable to hear the music, not being sentient. Third, the music is unheard because the chief plot point of &lt;em&gt;An Equal Music&lt;/em&gt; is that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Julia is deaf.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This might impede a musician somewhat. Michael indulges in counterfactuals about what music would be like if other, equally critical attributes for musicians were different: if we, like dolphins, had flippers, playing piano or violin would be out of the question. If we had four arms, perhaps Bach's music, with its intricate counterpoint, would be even more intricate. If our thumbs were differently jointed, we'd hold a violin (or viola, or 'cello, or double bass) bow rather differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part about having baleen, not teeth, is another counterfactual about what links Michael and Julia. Their music-making and lovemaking are entangled, so thinking about alternative means of music-making leads naturally to Michael's remembering their last lovemaking, the day after their visit to the church. He has bitten her rather hard on the shoulder, leaving bruises. Julia is worried about how to explain away the bruises to her husband. Michael speculates that with baleen, he would not be able to bite Julia. Baleen would also make impossible &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weeping_and_gnashing_of_teeth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gnashing of teeth&lt;/a&gt;, a Biblical metaphor for the struggle, anger, and lamentation that mark Julia and Michael's adulterous relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;plankton love might grow&lt;/em&gt; is an allusion to Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My vegetable love should grow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Vaster than empires, and more slow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, Instead of a curtailed and failed relationship, Michael and Julia could have a flourishing and long-lived one. The irony, of course, is that as in Marvell’s poem, all these counterfactuals Michael imagines just drive home the fact that Julia is a very reluctant partner to him in both music and love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-11T11:01:02.617" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T11:01:02.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16647" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-11T14:19:35.993" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;So I'm looking for a name of a book I once read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Action takes place in Spain. I'm 98% sure it was Andalusia. I'm not sure author was spanish, though.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Narrator is a young woman that lives with her spouse in a small Spanish town.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Her story begins when a large (at least 5 people, grandparents included IIRC) family from USA moves in. They're described as loud and the main character doesn't like them so much in the beginning (though I think she gets to like them over the course of the story).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Random details:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Main character has a dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's some scene of Día de Muertos (the day of the dead, or just Halloween it was, idk) taking place, I totally don't know why I remember it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11587" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T14:19:35.993" Title="Looking for a book. Action takes place in Spain" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16648" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-11T15:27:44.150" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a beautifully illustrated book about some children going to live in the woods, when I was younger. The basic plot is that a few boys decide to go live in the woods, and it goes so well, that all of the other kids in the area join them. Kids end up living in tree-houses and underground burroughs, etc... Until the parents beg them all to come home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My guess is that it was written between the 1940's to 1960's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11588" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T15:27:44.150" Title="I'm looking for a book about children who go to live in the woods" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16632" CreationDate="2020-12-11T18:01:43.260" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Primroses symbolise springtime.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primula_vulgaris&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Primroses&lt;/a&gt; are among the first flowers to start blooming in the springtime, sometimes called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thehazeltree.co.uk/2014/03/06/the-primrose-herald-of-spring/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heralds of spring&lt;/a&gt;. Even their name in English comes from &amp;quot;prima rosa&amp;quot;, meaning &amp;quot;first rose&amp;quot;, alluding to the fact that they're one of the first flowers to appear at the start of the season.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, their appearance at the start and end of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; makes a lot of sense. Chapter 1 marks the beginning of the end of Hazel's youth as an outsider in the Sandleford warren, the &amp;quot;springtime&amp;quot; of his life, preceding his growth into authority and the position of Chief Rabbit later in the story. Starting the story with the sentence &amp;quot;The primroses were over&amp;quot;, the writer is planting&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; the idea of an impending life change into readers' heads from the very beginning. The primroses are over, spring is well underway, so what comes next? Let's get this show on the road!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ending of the whole story, meanwhile, is a hopeful one. Even though it ends with the main character's death, he doesn't die painfully but peacefully; he doesn't feel hopeless but ready; he knows that he's created a community that will outlast him, which in the end is the best any of us can hope for when we go. Ending the story with &amp;quot;the first primroses were beginning to bloom&amp;quot;, as well as being a literal reminder of the time of year, also serves as a symbolic reminder that life goes on, lifetimes end just like seasons, and neither the world nor Hazel's warren will end when he does, even though the story does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could get deeper into the &lt;a href=&quot;https://symbolshub.org/flowers/primrose-flower-meaning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;symbolism&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://flowermeanings.org/primrose-flower-meaning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;flowers&lt;/a&gt;, and try to extract some even deeper meaning of primroses in the plot, but I feel like that would be over-analysing. The connection between primroses and springtime, and metaphorically the seasons of one's life, is enough to justify their appearance bookending the &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; story, without need for more advanced symbolic analysis which the author might never have done either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Pun unintended this time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-11T18:01:43.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16650" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-11T22:24:17.513" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a short story about a married couple where a man was always obsessed with the news (I think it was on the radio) until his wife was so exasperated with him she nagged him and drove him away. Much later he was found living a solitary life (I think in the mountains) and now just happy to be left alone to play his cello. Eventually he was talked into returning to a normal life, and he soon goes on a rampage killing people. It is not a recent story, I read this about 50 years ago.&#xA;Does this sound familiar to anyone--who wrote it and the name of the short story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11590" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T18:42:24.327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T18:42:24.327" Title="Short story - man obsessed with news, then lives solitary life, then goes on killing rampage" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16652" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17113" CreationDate="2020-12-12T05:17:50.907" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've seen this attributed to Dorothy Nevill and to Benjamin Franklin, but without a source. Who was it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11593" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T16:31:54.333" Title="&quot;Leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16653" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-12T11:12:29.510" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the exposition of the story, the transformations of the characters as they enter to the adulthood is given in the chapter ten and the reminisces they make are central to the whole story of having babies and how they were not allowed etc, in that what does &amp;quot;the mountain of bedding&amp;quot; symbolize :&#xA;it felt like a mountain of&#xA;bedding was pounding at you, so that half the time you weren't sure if you&#xA;were doing it with the boy or all that stuff.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11575" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-12T12:58:23.743" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T12:58:23.743" Title="What does the &quot;bedding&quot; symbolize in the Hailsham description in &quot;Never Let Me Go&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;never-let-me-go&gt;&lt;kazuo-ishiguro&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16655" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-12T12:25:25.480" Score="3" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Khaled Hosseini states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this qoute is conveyed via Mariam's mother 'Nana', the author of this book is a male. He portrays a controversial view of men accusing women through this quote, eventually directing to the famous stereotype of women being weaker than men and being unable to defend themselves. This especially applies to the introverted relations between a husband and wife in the culturally tied Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading this qoute in the opening chapter of the book, it makes the reader wonder why it was said in the first place, keeping in mind that the author himself is a man. Does this apply only to the men in Afghanistan? If so, he himself along with his family descends from Afghanistan. As he has not made it clear in the book, are we able to say that he is saying that from experience, i.e. he himself or one of the poeple he knows and are close to have done so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It just confuses me because one point of view can be that he is excluding himself from the men who always blame women, because a person wouldn't commit to this accusation himself, or on the other hand he might have done so and there is a hint of realization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, is there a contextual point that he might be trying to make about himself, or is it just about the characters in the book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11162" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T06:24:26.570" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T06:24:26.570" Title="Why did Khaled Hosseini mention this quote in &quot;A Thousand Splendid Suns&quot;?" Tags="&lt;a-thousand-splendid-suns&gt;&lt;khaled-hosseini&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16656" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16657" CreationDate="2020-12-12T15:11:38.100" Score="4" ViewCount="332" Body="&lt;p&gt;Warning: The examples contain some offensive words, but I believe that is not against the rules here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lately I've been listening a lot to a certain hip-hop album, in which almost every track uses a certain lyrical device a lot. Instead of trying to describe it further than I already do in the title, I'll go straight to examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got bars for days, like a custody cell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-intro-tyen-holding-2-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; The rapper is talking about two different types of bars. First his raps, then the physical bars of a jail cell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every fucking album is banging like a Tinder-match&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-smooth-operatr-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; He says his albums are &amp;quot;banging&amp;quot; as in musically pleasing, but in the sense of the Tinder-match, the word means sexual intercourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I jam like a bullet stuck in the barrel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-kan-jeg-fa-et-vitne-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; When he says he jams, he means musically, while the bullet is physically jammed in the barrel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My woman puts on the rubber faster than a pit stop&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-jura-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; In the first sense he means a condom, in the second sense he means rubber tyres on a Formula 1 car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm harder to hit than a porcupine pussy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-per-stale-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; In the first sense he means &amp;quot;hit&amp;quot; as in some sort of attack or aggressive action, in the second sense he means sexual intercourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stay in the hood like Kenny&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Tyen-holding-per-stale-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source.&lt;/a&gt; In his own case, he means his neighbourhood, as in the slang term &amp;quot;hood&amp;quot;. In the latter sense he is talking about hood as the part of a jacket that covers the head, referring to the fictional character from South Park who always wears a hood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that amount of examples (there are countless more from the album, and from other rappers as well) is enough to convey what I mean.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of this lyrical device? I believe it is somewhat common in Hip Hop, and has been for decades. Does it have a name outside of Hip Hop as well, perhaps in poetry or literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="178" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-12T15:57:59.950" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T15:57:59.950" Title="Name of this lyrical device comparing oneself to something that's described by the same word, but in another sense of the word?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16656" CreationDate="2020-12-12T15:22:58.003" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;That rhetorical device is called &lt;em&gt;zeugma&lt;/em&gt;.  Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/zeugma&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; zeugma as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one (as in &amp;quot;opened the door and her heart to the homeless boy&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-zeugma.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yourdictionary.com&lt;/a&gt; provides several examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T15:22:58.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16658" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-12T18:56:03.330" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757&lt;/em&gt; Chingachgook is a romantic character. He lives in harmony with nature and is loyal and brave. However, I am having trouble finding a quotation or example demonstrating this.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Could someone provide me with some examples for why is Chingachgook regarded as a romantic character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-12T19:31:38.143" LastActivityDate="2020-12-12T19:31:38.143" Title="Why is Chingachgook regarded as a romantic character?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;james-fenimore-cooper&gt;&lt;the-last-of-the-mohicans&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16659" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16661" CreationDate="2020-12-12T20:42:09.457" Score="1" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;According &lt;a href=&quot;https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/subject_specific_writing/writing_in_literature/literary_theory_and_schools_of_criticism/structuralism_and_semiotics.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Owl Purdue's page on structuralism and semiotics&lt;/a&gt;, tragics falls under historical criticism and tragedies fall under archetypal criticism. What is the difference between a tragic and a tragedy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I searched for an answer, all I could find was that &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; is a synonym of &amp;quot;tragedy.&amp;quot; However, seeing how Purdue puts them under different labels, this does not work here. Is there another meaning where they are different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11599" OwnerDisplayName="Taf04k" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T11:42:15.520" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T16:10:38.080" Title="&quot;Tragic&quot; vs &quot;Tragedy&quot;" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theory&gt;&lt;tragedy&gt;&lt;northrop-frye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-13T10:09:31.083" Score="2" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the part in italics. Is it saying that Jane's puberty was similar to the menarchal ceremony held by Eskimo and South Sea Island tribes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jane's ritual imprisonment here, and the subsequent&#xA;episodes of ostracism at Gateshead, where she is forbidden&#xA;to eat, play, or socialize with other members of the family,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;is an adolescent rite of passage that has curious anthropological&#xA;affinities to the menarchal ceremonies of Eskimo&#xA;or South Sea Island tribes&lt;/em&gt;. The passage into womanhood&#xA;stresses the lethal and fleshly aspects of adult female sexuality.&#xA;The &amp;quot;mad cat,&amp;quot; the &amp;quot;bad animal&amp;quot; (as John Reed calls&#xA;Jane),31 who is shut up and punished will reappear later in&#xA;the novel as the totally animalistic, maddened, and brutalized&#xA;Bertha Mason; her secret chamber is simply another&#xA;red-room at the top of another house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elaine Showalter, &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=E5j7DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA115&amp;amp;lpg=PA115&amp;amp;dq=%22Jane%27s%20ritual%20imprisonment%20here,%20and%20the%20subsequent%20episodes%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=BqnjYQhwkc&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2E7EvERNz1o0zvgyz87F7X3Ut9EQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjrqb7B1srtAhWSr3EKHRfrDUMQ6AEwAHoECAIQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22Jane%27s%20ritual%20imprisonment%20here%2C%20and%20the%20subsequent%20episodes%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A literature of their own&lt;/em&gt; (1977), page 115&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11603" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-13T21:46:54.860" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T21:46:54.860" Title="Why does Elaine Showalter compare Jane Eyre's being locked in a room to menarchal ceremonies?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;jane-eyre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16659" CreationDate="2020-12-13T11:35:31.033" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distinction between &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tragedy&amp;quot; made on the Owl Purdue page is extremely narrow and very specialized. The terms are used in a technical sense derived from Northrop Frye's &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Criticism&lt;/em&gt; (1957), and the distinction has no wider use or more general application.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Owl Purdue page uses the terms &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tragedy&amp;quot; in reference to Northrop Frye's taxonomy of literature in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Frye_Northrop_Anatomy_of_Criticism_Four_Essays_2000.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anatomy of Criticism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1957). Frye claims that criticism should bear the same relationship to literature as physics does to the natural world: it should be a systematic framework that allows us to examine individual literary works as illustrating the operation of the literary system as a whole. He sees himself as working in the tradition of Aristotle's &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A theory of criticism whose principles apply to the whole of literature and account for every valid type of critical procedure is what I think Aristotle meant by poetics. Aristotle seems to me to approach poetry as a biologist would approach a system of organ­isms, picking out its genera and species, formulating the broad laws of literary experience, and in short writing as though he believed that there is a totally intelligible structure of knowledge attainable about poetry which is not poetry itself, or the experience of it, but poetics. (p. 14)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frye then attempts to provide such &amp;quot;broad laws of literary experience&amp;quot;. He begins with an exploration of literary modes. He says that there are five modes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mythic, where the hero is a divine being&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romantic, where the hero is a human being but with powers that exceed the ordinary laws of nature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;High mimetic, where the hero is a leader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Low mimetic, where the hero is an ordinary human being&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ironic, where the hero is inferior to ordinary human beings in power or intelligence.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then says that in general, plots can be either tragic or comic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]here is a general distinction be­tween fictions in which the hero becomes isolated from his society, and fictions in which he is incorporated into it. This distinction is expressed by the words &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;comic&amp;quot; when they refer to aspects of plot in general. (p. 35)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Frye's terms, for example, Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt; would be high mimetic tragedy, because Othello is a leader and, as the play progresses, is increasingly isolated from society. Austen's &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, would be low mimetic comedy, because Emma is an ordinary person and the novel ends with her marriage to Mr Knightley, marking her reintegration into society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Owl Purdue page is somewhat mistaken in that it lists &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; as a mode. There is no tragic &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt;; when Frye discusses modes, he uses &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; specifically to mean a certain kind of plot that involves the hero's progressive alienation from his society. This tragic fiction can be found in any of the five modes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a later chapter, Frye turns away from a discussion of literary modes to one of archetypes. Modes are historically specific literary categories, whereas archetypes are &amp;quot;narrative pregeneric elements of literature&amp;quot;. He asks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A]re there narrative cate­gories of literature broader than, or logically prior to, the ordinary literary genres? There are four such categories: the romantic, the tragic, the comic, and the ironic or satiric. We get the same answer by inspection if we look at the ordinary meanings of these terms. Tragedy and comedy may have been originally names for two species of drama, but we also employ the terms to describe general characteristics of literary fictions, without regard to genre. ... If we are told that what we are about to read is tragic or comic, we expect a certain kind of structure and mood, but not necessarily a certain genre. The same is true of the word romance, and also of the words irony and satire. (p. 162)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, comedy, tragedy, romance, and irony/satire do not refer just to specific plots or modes, but to archetypal patterns that underlie literary works generally. Frye links these patterns to the seasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Comedy is related to spring&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Romance is related to summer&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tragedy is related to autumn&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Irony/satire is related to winter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tragedy is autumnal because it represents a myth of fall and separation. Frye also associates tragedy with ritual sacrifice, as in the Christian eucharist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone accustomed to think archetypally of literature will recog­nize in tragedy a mimesis of sacrifice. Tragedy is a paradoxical com­bination of a fearful sense of rightness (the hero must fall) and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls). There is a similar paradox in the two elements of sacrifice. One of these is communion, the dividing of a heroic or divine body among a group which brings them into unity with, and as, that body. The other is propitiation, the sense that in spite of the communion the body really belongs to another, a greater, and a potentially wrathful power. (p. 214)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So specifically in Frye, there is a distinction between, on the one hand, the tragic as a &lt;em&gt;modal plot&lt;/em&gt;, which applies to specific literary works; and on the other hand, tragedy as an &lt;em&gt;archetype&lt;/em&gt;, a recurrent literary theme or plot structure based on vast, cyclic patterns. Outside of this very technical context, &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tragedy&amp;quot; do not have distinct denotations, as the former is simply the adjective derived from the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The pertinence, or lack thereof, of the distinction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is probably worth mentioning that Frye's typology of literature has not remained particularly influential for practical criticism. Literary critics no longer speak of tragic modes or the archetype of tragedy. Arnd Bohm &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/30154107&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;observes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it first appeared in 1957, Northrop Frye's &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Criticism&lt;/em&gt; was recognized and hailed as a major theoretical treatise. ... This reputation of the book endures. And yet even an attentive observer of the current state of literary theory and discussion would be hard put to cite specific instances of Frye having any immediate influence on critical practice. Narratologists, who are concerned with problems of taxonomy and hence might be expected to proceed from Frye, choose to ignore him. The widely-used introduction to narratology by Mieke Bal does not even mention Frye. Roger D. Sell's recent and thorough manual for literary criticism, &lt;em&gt;Literature as Communication&lt;/em&gt;, has only one sentence on Frye. ... As with other canonical texts of secondary literature, &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Criticism&lt;/em&gt; seems to be one of those books everyone knows but few have actually read. (p. 310–311)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The highly specialized distinction between &amp;quot;tragic&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tragedy&amp;quot; as Frye uses the terms is not one that is likely to be encountered even within literary studies, let alone outside that field, any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bohm, Arnd. “Northrop Frye: The Consolation of Criticism.” &lt;em&gt;Monatshefte&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 95, no. 2, 2003, pp. 310–317. JSTOR, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/30154107&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/30154107&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 13 Dec. 2020.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Frye, Northrup. &lt;em&gt;Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays&lt;/em&gt;. 1957. With a foreword by Harold Bloom. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T16:10:38.080" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T16:10:38.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16662" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16681" CreationDate="2020-11-06T05:24:20.297" Score="6" ViewCount="924" Body="&lt;p&gt;This statement has been attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albert Camus&lt;/a&gt; in various places on the internet. For example, this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-always-go-too-far-because-that-s-where-you-ll-find-the-truth-albert-camus-37-74-36.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a picture of Camus alongside a black area with &amp;quot;Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth. - Albert Camus - AZ Quotes&amp;quot; written&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Camus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikiquote&lt;/a&gt; page doesn't contain this quote. So did he actually say it? If he didn't, then &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/78843/19487&quot;&gt;who would likely say it?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1015" OwnerDisplayName="Ooker" LastEditorUserId="1015" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T06:28:12.777" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T06:28:12.777" Title="Did Camus ever say “Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth”?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16660" CreationDate="2020-12-13T17:39:58.390" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes.  She is claiming that since both are them involving a period of confinement in which the girl is forbidden to associate with others (a common trait of rites of passage, to be sure), there is a connection between them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a very common trait of many literary critics to argue from association in this manner.  What exactly will be regarded as a comparable point varies widely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T17:39:58.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16664" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-13T18:41:39.293" Score="1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This just popped into my head.  I think I must have read it in the mid 1990s. I remember very little about it. I'm not even certain it was a novel, it could have been a short story. But I think it was probably a novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist finds some old, used but undeveloped rolls of photographic film. She* has them developed and what was on them led her to solve a mystery from years or decades past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A minor twist at the end said that a forensic photographic expert told her that undeveloped film does not survive that long. After X years it is impossible to recover a picture. He couldn't explain how it survived. This was left as a mystery for the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*I think the protagonist was female, but I'm not sure. Maybe written in the first person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit - I am British, and read the book in England. It was probably a British author, and set in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastEditorUserId="10684" LastEditDate="2020-12-14T14:34:53.047" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T14:34:53.047" Title="develop old film, solve an old mystery" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16665" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16666" CreationDate="2020-12-13T19:09:31.110" Score="6" ViewCount="865" Body="&lt;p&gt;I originally asked this on Christianity.SE and later it was moved to Mythology.SE, but it remains unanswered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is actually very easy to find a citation for the quotation's source, the problem is that the commonly published attribution is wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching for &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;evergreen tree which sprang out of a dead tree stump&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; gets nearly 3000 hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ca/books?id=o45NDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA74&amp;amp;lpg=PA74&amp;amp;dq=%22evergreen+tree+which+sprang%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=iR5pDFk7VS&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3B7z2Fx43jVuVCRFyT7gJDj4LgeQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwirxKrgxJ7tAhUIXM0KHdhAAjw4ChDoATAFegQIARAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22evergreen%20tree%20which%20sprang%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Seed of the Woman and the Power of Darkness - Donbor Syiemlieh - Google Books&lt;/a&gt; provides an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;An old Babylonish fable told of an evergreen tree which sprang out of a dead tree stump.&#xA;The old stump symbolized the dead Nimrod, the new evergreen tree symbolized that Nimrod had come to life again in Tammuz!&#xA;Among the Druids the oak was sacred, among the Egyptians it was the palm, and in Rome it was the fir, which was decorated with red berries&#xA;during the Saturnalia!&amp;quot; (Walsh, &lt;em&gt;Curiosities of Popular Customs&lt;/em&gt;, p. 242).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously I didn't check all results, but those that I did check contain that same quotation, and almost all give the same attribution.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is, while page 242 of that book &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; talk about Christmas trees, and the writing style is similar, it doesn't include the above quotation or anything like it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dQXwY.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dQXwY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of page 242&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotation doesn't appear elsewhere in that section or anywhere else in &lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=2PeBAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=GBS.PA242&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the book&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; its origin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T15:29:18.127" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T15:29:18.127" Title="What is the origin of a common Christmas tree quotation concerning an old Babylonish fable about an evergreen tree?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16665" CreationDate="2020-12-13T19:58:44.760" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The direct quotation does not originate with Walsh, and those who attribute the quotation to Walsh are misattributing and/or misquoting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The direct quotation originates with Ralph Woodrow, who &lt;strong&gt;paraphrases&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;cites&lt;/strong&gt;, but does not &lt;strong&gt;quote&lt;/strong&gt;, Walsh. On &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Babylon-Mystery-Religion-Ralph-Woodrow/page/n149/mode/2up?q=%22evergreen+tree+which+sprang+out+of+a+dead+tree+stump%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 152&lt;/a&gt; in chapter 20 of Woodrow's &lt;em&gt;Babylon Mystery Religion&lt;/em&gt;, Woodrow writes (unquoted, so his own words):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Christmas tree, as we know it, only dates back a few centuries, though ideas about sacred trees are very ancient. An old Babylonish fable told of an evergreen tree which sprang out of a dead tree stump. The old stump symbolized the dead Nimrod, the new evergreen tree symbolized that Nimrod had come to life again in Tammuz! Among the Druids the oak was sacred, among the Egyptians it was the palm, and in Rome it was the fir, which was decorated with red berries during the Saturnalia!&lt;sup&gt;10&lt;/sup&gt; The Scandinavian god Odin was believed to bestow special gifts at yultide to those who approacehd [sic] his sacred fir tree.&lt;sup&gt;11&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The footnotes for chapter 20 are on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/Babylon-Mystery-Religion-Ralph-Woodrow/page/n169/mode/2up?q=%22curiosities+of+popular+customs%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 171&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;10&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Walsh, &lt;em&gt;Curiosities of Popular Customs&lt;/em&gt;, p. 242.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Urlin, &lt;em&gt;Festivals, Holy Days, and Saints' Days&lt;/em&gt;, p. 222.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;idea&lt;/strong&gt; came from Walsh, but the &lt;strong&gt;words&lt;/strong&gt; are Woodrow's, so people who are using these exact words and attributing them to Walsh are citing incorrectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Woodrow, R. (1966). Babylon mystery religion: ancient and modern. Ralph Woodrow Evangelistic Association, Inc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T19:58:44.760" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16660" CreationDate="2020-12-13T21:45:01.647" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Showalter is saying that she sees similarities between what Jane experiences and the ceremonies around a girl's first period in some cultures.&#xA;She mentions Eskimo and South Sea cultures, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seclusion_of_girls_at_puberty&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;seclusion of girls at puberty&lt;/a&gt; is not limited to those parts of the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Charlotte Brontë's novel does not mention this aspect of Jane's puberty; in the nineteenth century, this is something that could only be alluded to obliquely, if at all.&#xA;Showalter reads the text as making that allusion; after all, Jane is secluded from the rest and, what's more, in a room that only women enter and that is known as the &amp;quot;red-room&amp;quot;.&#xA;The colour red refers to blood and thereby to the menarche. (After Jane has been in the red-room for a while, she mentions that &amp;quot;[her] blood was still warm&amp;quot;.)&#xA;In addition, the room is also associated with secrets (&amp;quot;Mrs. Reed herself, ..., visited it to review the contents of a certain secret drawer&amp;quot;), which can be seen as symbolising taboo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, since Jane is only ten years old (see Chapter IV), the passage can only exhibit similarities to menarchal ceremonies rather than obliquely alluding to her own menarche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-13T21:45:01.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16671" CreationDate="2020-12-14T12:38:38.430" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a situation, where a young man who's driving an elegant buggy behind an old man who's driving a hayrack in a narrow way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wagon was jogging along where the road was very narrow, and Bartlett kept his team stolidly in the center of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Hello, there, Bartlett!” shouted the young man in the buggy; “half the road, you know—half the road.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Take it,” cried Bartlett over his shoulder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Come, come, Bartlett, get out of the way, or I’ll run you down.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;You just try it&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bartlett either had no sense of humor or his resentment against his young neighbor smothered it, since otherwise he would have recognized that a heavy wagon was in no danger of being run into by a light and expensive buggy.&lt;/strong&gt; The young man kept his temper admirably, but he knew just where to touch the elder on the raw. His sister’s hand was placed appealingly on his arm. He smiled, and took no notice of her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Come, now, you move out, or I’ll have the law on you.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The law!” roared Bartlett; “you just &lt;strong&gt;try it on&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Should think you’d had enough of it by this time&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh, don’t, don’t, Henry!” protested the girl in distress.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There aint no law,” yelled Bartlett, “that kin make a man with a load move out fur anything.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I thought at first that &amp;quot;you just try it&amp;quot; meant &amp;quot;show me if you can&amp;quot;, that is he knew that it was impossible, but the next passage, which say &amp;quot;otherwise he would have recognized that a heavy wagon was in no danger of being run into by a light and expensive buggy.&amp;quot; suggested me that he was talking seriously!!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So 1) What's exactly meant here by &amp;quot;You just try it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 2) Does &amp;quot;You just try it on&amp;quot; have the same meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And 3) Why the young girl protested when he had said &amp;quot;Should think you’d had enough of it by this time&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks in advance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T02:20:50.097" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T02:20:50.097" Title="What's meant here by &quot;just try it&quot; and &quot;just try it on&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16662" CreationDate="2020-12-14T13:31:49.393" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly, this is a misrepresentation of something Camus wrote in &lt;em&gt;L'Homme révolté&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Si l'individu, en effet, accepte de mourir, et&#xA;meurt à l'occasion, dans le mouvement de sa révolte, il montre par là&#xA;qu'il se sacrifie au bénéfice d'un bien dont il estime qu'il déborde sa&#xA;propre destinée.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the individual then accepts to die, and happens to die in the act of revolt, he thereby demonstrates that he sacrifices himself for a good [cause] that he considers as gong beyond his own destiny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote does not mention &amp;quot;truth&amp;quot; but I have been unable to find anything that comes closer to the requested quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-14T13:31:49.393" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16668" CreationDate="2020-12-15T02:17:21.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You just try it&amp;quot; means: see what happens if you try. When the young man jokingly threatens to run down Bartlett and his buggy, Bartlett responds saying: if you try to do that, I'll make things worse for you. He doesn't respond logically by pointing out that a light buggy would not be capable of overturning a heavy wagon, but by countering the joking threat with a serious one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young man is joking again when he says he'll set the law on Bartlett, because there's no real way he could get a representative of the law on the road at that time who could force Bartlett to move. Again Bartlett doesn't see the joke (he &amp;quot;had no sense of humor&amp;quot;) and instead threatens the young man again: if you try to harm me, I will harm you more. Or, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gritty_(mascot)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gritty&lt;/a&gt; says (nsfw):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tPBRZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tPBRZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;meme of Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty, captioned &amp;quot;Fuck around and find out&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl is upset because the situation is getting volatile owing to Bartlett's anger. She is asking the young man not to annoy Bartlett further.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, &amp;quot;you just try it on&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;you just try it&amp;quot; are synonymous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T02:17:21.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9583" CreationDate="2020-12-15T11:03:42.737" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shyam Saran means that there is a disconnect between the mythology of the subcontinent and its current political geography. He argues that most Indians strongly feel the drive to reconcile the two. He says that this drive also underwrites India's foreign policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The following ideas and beliefs illustrate the &amp;quot;cosmic origins of India's geography&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Kailash&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Kailash&lt;/a&gt; is the abode of the god Shiva&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganges&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;River Ganges&lt;/a&gt; was originally a celestial river which came down to earth by way of being trapped in Shiva's matted hair&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_Kush&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindu Kush Himalayan&lt;/a&gt; region which separates subcontinental South Asia from the rest of the continent is a barrier defining and protecting the natural boundaries of India&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vindhya_Range&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vindhya range&lt;/a&gt; is low because they obey a command of the sage &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agastya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agastya&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konkan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Konkan&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malabar_Coast&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Malabar&lt;/a&gt; coasts were created by &lt;a href=&quot;http://westernghats-paimohan.blogspot.com/2008/07/spiritual-mystique.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a single throw&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parashurama#Parasurama_and_origin_of_western_coast(Konkan)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Parashurama&lt;/a&gt;'s axe&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lanka&lt;/a&gt;, identified with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sri Lanka&lt;/a&gt;, is the city where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rama&lt;/a&gt; slew &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ravana&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such myths are what Saran refers to when he speaks of &amp;quot;a geography cosmic in origin but reflected in the physical attributes of the subcontinent&amp;quot;. These examples are all from Hindu mythology, but the sense of a cosmically unified continent is so widespread that even the Muslim &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Iqbal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Muhammad Iqbal&lt;/a&gt;, the poet who was among the first to broach the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-nation_theory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Two-Nation Theory&lt;/a&gt; that led to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Partition of India&lt;/a&gt;, could &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sare_Jahan_se_Accha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;write&lt;/a&gt; of the Himalayas as the guardian of the entire region of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hindustan&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naskh_(script)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naskh&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;پربت وہ سب سے اونچا، ہمسایہ آسماں کا&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;وہ سنتری ہمارا، وہ پاسباں ہمارا&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devanagari&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;परबत वो सबसे ऊँचा, हमसाया आसमाँ का&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;वो संतरी हमारा, वो पासबाँ हमारा&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;parbat vo sab se uu.Nchaa, ham_saayaa aasamaa.N kaa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;vo santarii hamaaraa, vo paasabaa.N hamaaraa&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That tallest mountain, the companion of the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that is our sentry, that our sentinel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saran says that this sense of a cosmically unified region prevails particularly in modern India, and its citizens yearn for a political reunification of the entire subcontinent as well. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irredentism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;irredentist&lt;/a&gt; concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhand_Bharat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Akhand Bharat&lt;/a&gt;, an undivided India, is one example of their wanting to overcome &amp;quot;the fragmentation of this historical and cultural space&amp;quot;. Saran argues that consciously or unconsciously, the desire to reconcile the cosmic unity and political disunity of the subcontinent defines &amp;quot;the sense of being Indian&amp;quot;; and that explicitly or tacitly, it is one of the chief drivers of India's foreign policy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T11:21:00.260" LastActivityDate="2020-12-15T11:21:00.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1743" CreationDate="2020-12-15T15:25:10.240" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;John le Carré explaining his name on a French TV show: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.facebook.com/Ina.fr/videos/4975058485868637/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John le Carré plaisante sur son pseudonyme - 1989&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He doesn't remember why he chose this name :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interviewer&lt;/strong&gt;: D'abord, une chose évidemment assez : ton nom c'est vraiment David John Moore Cornwell, et vous avez choisi comme pseudonyme un nom qui sent plutôt Français—Le Carré—pourquoi ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Carré&lt;/strong&gt;: Alors, je vais vous dire la verité, et puis je vais vous dire un mensonge ! La verité c'est que j'étais, au temps j'ai fait mon début d'écrivain, j'étais encore dans le Foreign Office et on m'a dit c'était l'avis officielle, il faut choisir un nom de plume. Alors, je suis allé à mon éditeur, et il a dit, &amp;quot;alors, choisis quelque chose très simple, très Anglo-Saxon: Jack Smith, Herb Brown, etc.&amp;quot; Et puis, j'ai choisi &amp;quot;John Le Carré&amp;quot;. Et la verité, est que je sais pas d'où vient ce nom. Mais, la verité est toujours tellement ennuyante que pour les journalistes j'ai inventé la fiction que j'étais sur, dans un autobus de Londres, et j'ai vû un magasin de chaussures et il s'appelait le magasin &amp;quot;John Le Carré&amp;quot;, j'ai volé le nom, mais c'est un mensonge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Interviewer&lt;/strong&gt;: First, something obvious enough: your real name is David John Moore Cornwell, but you chose for a pseudonym a name which sounds rather French—Le Carré—why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Carré&lt;/strong&gt;: So, I will tell you the truth, and then I will tell you a lie! The truth is that I was, at the time I made my début as a writer, I was still in the Foreign Office and someone said to me that it was the official view, that it was necessary to choose a pen name. So, I went to my editor, and he said, &amp;quot;so, choose something very simple, very Anglo-Saxon: Jack Smith, Herb Brown, etc.&amp;quot; And then, I chose &amp;quot;John Le Carré&amp;quot;. And the truth, is that I do not know where this name comes from. But, the truth is always so boring that for journalists I invented the fiction that I was on, in a London bus, and I saw a shoe shop and it was called &amp;quot;John Le Carré&amp;quot;, and I stole the name, but it's a lie.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11616" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:34:08.063" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:34:08.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16674" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16687" CreationDate="2020-12-15T21:11:32.380" Score="3" ViewCount="2972" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In the Midst of Alarms&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a conversation between, Yates, who had knocked someone down, and his friend, Stilly, who is usually quite and silent. And in many parts in the story, Yates referred to this knocked man with &amp;quot;1812&amp;quot;, because he was a very obsessed Canadian man with the war of 1812.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young men were shown into a bedroom of more than ordinary size, on the upper floor. Everything about the house was of the most dainty and scrupulous cleanliness, and an air of cheerful comfort pervaded the place. Mrs. Bartlett was evidently a housekeeper to be proud of. Two large pitchers of cool, soft water awaited them, and the wash, as had been predicted, was most refreshing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I say,” cried Yates, “it’s rather cheeky to accept a man’s hospitality after knocking him down.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It would be for most people, but I think you underestimate your cheek, as you call it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Bravo, Stilly! You’re blossoming out. That’s repartee, that is. With the accent on the rap, too. Never you mind; I &lt;strong&gt;think old 1812&lt;/strong&gt; and I will get on all right after this. It doesn’t seem to bother him any, so I don’t see why it should worry me. &lt;strong&gt;Nice motherly old lady, isn’t she&lt;/strong&gt;?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Who? &lt;strong&gt;1812?&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No; Mrs. 1812. I’m sorry I complimented you on your repartee. You’ll get conceited. Remember that what in the newspaper man is clever, in a grave professor is rank flippancy. Let’s go down.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/l2noosq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; that &amp;quot;lady&amp;quot; using for referring to some males has been started in 1912, and the story were published in 1894, so how even the professor mixed it up with the man, i.e 1812?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-15T22:15:46.597" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T13:08:55.317" Title="Was it normal to mix up the word &quot;lady&quot; with a man in Canada in 1894?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T00:27:24.920" Score="2" ViewCount="227" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to remember the name of a short story by Roald Dahl, about a man who systematically got drunk at home every Saturday night. His wife kills him, I think by putting something in his drink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man is a chemist, and his wife puts something in his drink that paralyses and eventually kills him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11618" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T11:34:49.067" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T15:54:46.570" Title="Roald Dahl short story - wife kills drunkard husband by spiking his drink" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;roald-dahl&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16674" CreationDate="2020-12-16T02:32:08.020" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In my reading of the passage, Stilly(?) says “Who? 1812?” because he’s confused by the sudden mention of a motherly old lady—he knows that 1812 is a man and then there’s a sudden mention of a female, thus the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T02:32:08.020" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16677" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2020-12-16T02:56:56.540" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My understanding is it was due to his service in the Colonial Police, in India.&#xA;He loathed the interrogations he took part in where people were tortured and killed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11619" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T02:56:56.540" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16674" CreationDate="2020-12-16T03:56:42.627" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Mrs. 1812&amp;quot; refers to Mrs. Bartlett, the housekeeper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter III, Mr. Hiram Bartlett appears in the bar. After he leaves, the barkeep describes him as obsessed with the War of 1812, thus &amp;quot;1812&amp;quot; is Mr. Bartlett, and &amp;quot;Mrs. 1812&amp;quot; is his wife, the housekeeper Mrs. Bartlett who is mentioned in the passage you quoted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chapter III:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this Bartlett drew his coat sleeve across his mouth and departed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That’s him exactly,” said the barkeeper. “He’s the most cantankerous crank in the township. And say, let me give you a pointer. If the subject of 1812 comes up,—the war, you know,—you’d better admit that we got thrashed out of our boots; that is, if you want to get along with Hiram. He hates Yankees like poison.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And did we get thrashed in 1812?” asked Yates, who was more familiar with current topics than with the history of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Blessed if I know. Hiram says we did. I told him once that we got what we wanted from old England, and he nearly hauled me over the bar. So I give you the warning, if you want to get along with him.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T03:56:42.627" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16679" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16727" CreationDate="2020-12-16T05:03:50.657" Score="1" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;What are the poetic devices (tone, imagery etcetera) used in this poem and how do they contribute to the poem's overall theme? I would appreciate an answer based on a close reading of the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stepping around bales&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of fencing wires and a clutter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of machine parts on my way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To class&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stopped to watch two men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On top of the building next door to mine&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tossing rectangles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of old or damaged asphalt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sheets off the roof and&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the bed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of a red pickup parked&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For floors below on the grass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stopped out of habit to give&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Odds on a miss - one out of ten&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Seemed right - but these two&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never missed. They had&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A rhythm going. Their bandannas&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fastened over nose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And mouth, clipped&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And swung up as their arms did,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The whole torso&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Curving then straightening&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over their braced legs,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And one gold earring,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The taller man’s, flashing out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As if it were itself charged&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With movement&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And music there might have been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Music - a Walkman, perhaps - but I&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Couldn’t hear it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There must certainly have been&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Carcinogens and bitumen scruff&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;floating up from the titles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But I couldn’t see it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From the ground, it was purely&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beautiful. Two men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In silhouette against a noon-blazed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Blue lifting and releasing like blue work&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shirted angels&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clearing the sky of decades of dust, so the day’s&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Work might begin again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was off an image. it's by Lynne McMahon. I can't seem to find any resources online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11620" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T08:37:31.773" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T08:14:59.277" Title="What are the poetic devices used in this poem and how do they relate to its meaning?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16662" CreationDate="2020-12-16T09:50:35.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Almost certainly not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the quotation is attributed to Camus on many sites, two factors make the attribution dubious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No source is ever provided.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The quote is at odds with Camus's well-documented philosophical positions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the absence of a specified source is in itself suspicious. Any quotation attributed to an author should be easy to track down to a source in that author's writings. If the quotation is free-floating, with no specific citation ever provided, the chances of that quotation's actually originating from that author are vanishingly small. Such synthetic quotes are long attested. Here are some well-known examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/and-never-the-twain-shall-tweet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mark Twain never said it&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_fruit_flies_like_a_banana#Other_attributions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Not by Groucho Marx&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is never too late to be what you might have been. (George Eliot? &lt;a href=&quot;https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/11/24/never-too-late/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nope&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These examples predate the internet, but dubious attributions certainly spread thick and fast over that medium. The &amp;quot;Camus&amp;quot; quote, for example, turns up everywhere from Goodreads to Pinterest. Yet the absence of an actual citation to any of his works is a giveaway that the attribution is dubious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Camus resisted philosophical labels, but is generally regarded as an &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/existentialism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;existentialist&lt;/a&gt; and an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absurdism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;absurdist&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/camus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although he forcefully separated himself from existentialism, Camus posed one of the twentieth century’s best-known existentialist questions, which launches The Myth of Sisyphus: “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide”. And his philosophy of the absurd has left us with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Absurdism stresses the gap between human longing for certainty and the contingency of our experience that makes such certainty impossible. In his best-known philosophical work, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Myth of Sisyphus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Camus &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20160912/html.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De qui et de quoi en effet puis-je dire: «Je connais cela!» Ce cœur en moi, je puis l’éprouver et je juge qu’il existe. Ce monde, je puis le toucher et je juge encore qu’il existe. Là s’arrête toute ma science, le reste est construction. Car si j’essaie de saisir ce moi dont je m’assure, si j’essaie de le définir et de le résumer, il n’est plus qu’une eau qui coule entre mes doigts. ... Entre la certitude que j’ai de mon existence et le contenu que j’essaie de donner à cette assurance, le fossé ne sera jamais comblé. Pour toujours, je serai étranger à moi-même. En psychologie comme en logique, il y a des vérités mais point de vérité.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www2.hawaii.edu/%7Efreeman/courses/phil360/16.%20Myth%20of%20Sisyphus.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of whom and of what indeed can I say: &amp;quot;I know that!&amp;quot; This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that is exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. ... Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, &lt;em&gt;there are truths but no truth&lt;/em&gt;.  (p. 7, emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage summarizes Camus's philosophy pretty well. The only certainty is existence, and knowledge ends there. The idea that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existence_precedes_essence&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;existence precedes essence&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is of course definitive of existentialism, but Camus goes further in noting the &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; between the certainty &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; existence and the impossibility of any certainty &lt;em&gt;about&lt;/em&gt; it. Camus rejects outright the possibility that we can escape our limited existence and arrive at any kind of objective knowledge; hence, &amp;quot;there are truths but no truth.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camus goes on to say, with regard to philosophical statements, that &amp;quot;Ils ne sont légitimes que dans la mesure exacte où ils sont approximatifs&amp;quot;; i.e., &amp;quot;They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they are approximate&amp;quot;. This suspicion of any and all truth-claims was fundamental to Camus's outlook. Given this epistemological stance, it is not feasible that he would endorse, let alone utter, a statement as banal as &amp;quot;Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth&amp;quot;. The idea of &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; truth would be ridiculous to Camus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit. OP asks in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just for the sake of the argument, let's assume the quote is actually Camus'[s]. I wonder if we can interpret &amp;quot;the truth&amp;quot; in here as &amp;quot;there are truths but no truth&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;go too far&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;far enough that you see the absurdity of the world&amp;quot;? Would that interpretation be... too far?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camus would not make that argument. Absurdity is the human &lt;em&gt;condition&lt;/em&gt;, not the human &lt;em&gt;truth&lt;/em&gt;. That is to say, we find ourselves trapped in absurdity by virtue of our efforts to make meaning of our existence, by virtue of trying to find the &amp;quot;truth&amp;quot; about it. To say that the absurdity is the truth would reify what is existential to what is essential. Camus had his quarrel with the existential label, but in this case he would likely agree that absurdity is existential rather than essential, and so can't be described as an objective truth. That said, this particular extension of your question is better addressed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://philosophy.stackexchange.com&quot;&gt;Philosophy Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T23:28:12.073" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T23:28:12.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11899" CreationDate="2020-12-16T10:03:03.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree with the others the use of “tropical” is not intended to refer to the (astronomically-defined) tropics, but I would like to add that some parts of Afghanistan are quite hot and humid. Dr. Watson was in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maiwand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Maiwand&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Maiwand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has a dry climate&lt;/a&gt;. But if you look at a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Afghanistan_physical_map.svg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;physical map&lt;/a&gt; you'll see that the area around Jalalabad (Nangarhar Province) is basically an extension of the Punjab, i.e., very hot and humid. Jalabad was an important part of the Second Anglo Afghan War. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalalabad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1878, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the British again invaded and set up camps in Jalalabad but withdrew two years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10434" LastEditorUserId="10434" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T10:10:48.870" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:10:48.870" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16683" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T07:36:45.570" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory,&#xA;groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast&#xA;through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet&#xA;hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the&#xA;ceilings. Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gilt of&#xA;once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and&#xA;animals which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew&#xA;quiet. The dead lay everywhere, men and women and children, struck&#xA;down in attempted flight by the lightnings that had flashed down every&#xA;corridor, or seized by the fires that had stalked them, or sunken into&#xA;stone of the palace, the stones that had flowed and sought, almost&#xA;alive, before stillness came again. In odd counterpoint, colorful&#xA;tapestries and paintings, masterworks all, hung undisturbed except&#xA;where bulging walls had pushed them awry. Finely carved furnishings,&#xA;inlaid with ivory and gold, stood untouched except where rippling&#xA;floors had toppled them. The &lt;strong&gt;mind-twisting&lt;/strong&gt; had struck at the core,&#xA;ignoring peripheral things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This the first paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.torforgeblog.com/2020/05/04/read-part-1-the-eye-of-the-world/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Eye of the World&lt;/a&gt;, Robert Jordan's first book of The Wheel of Time series. What does &amp;quot;mind-twisting&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8217" OwnerDisplayName="Seulgi So" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T10:42:27.203" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:42:27.203" Title="meaning of &quot;mind-twisting&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-jordan&gt;&lt;wheel-of-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16684" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16683" CreationDate="2020-12-16T10:36:12.130" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this context Mr Jordan is referring to an in-universe concept &lt;em&gt;called&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;Mind-Twisting&amp;quot;, which is essentially what it says on the tin - physically twisting things using one's mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7457" OwnerDisplayName="motosubatsu" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T10:36:12.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="931" CreationDate="2020-12-16T13:06:35.910" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;When the rider passing by these  woods he saw  the scenic  beauty of nature. On a snowy  evening  the natural beauty of woods attracted the poet  very much  so he could not go foreward, stopped his horse and started  enjoying the nature of beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11624" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T13:06:35.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16675" CreationDate="2020-12-16T13:06:45.417" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are probably looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_to_the_Slaughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lamb to the Slaughter&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only difference is that the wife, Mary Maloney, kills her husband, Patrick, by hitting him in the back of the head with the frozen lamb leg, and not by poisoning as you seem to remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting Wikipedia,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mary Maloney is the anti-hero of the story. Despite being a very&#xA;loyal and kind wife, she is obsessed with her husband Patrick. As a&#xA;housewife devoted to making a comfortable home for Patrick and&#xA;pregnant with their first child, she awaits his return home from his&#xA;job as a police detective. Mary is very content in her marriage and&#xA;believes her husband to be as well. When he returns, Mary notices he&#xA;is uncharacteristically aloof and assumes he is tired from work. After&#xA;having more to drink than usual, Patrick reveals to Mary what is&#xA;making him act strangely. Although it is not explicitly stated, it is&#xA;suggested that Patrick has asked for a divorce as he states she &amp;quot;will&#xA;be looked after.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly in a trance, Mary fetches a large leg of lamb from the&#xA;deep-freezer in the cellar to cook for their dinner. Patrick, his back&#xA;to Mary, angrily calls to her not to make him any dinner, as he is&#xA;going out. While he is looking out of the window, quite suddenly Mary&#xA;strikes Patrick in the back of the head with the frozen lamb leg,&#xA;killing him instantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T13:06:45.417" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16674" CreationDate="2020-12-16T13:08:55.317" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of the question isn't applicable to the provided example, because as Hosek and shoover point out in their answers, Mr. Barr is never referring to Mr. Bartlett as a &amp;quot;lady&amp;quot; in the provided context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we get a description of the clean, tidy and generally welcoming setting, which of course is thanks to the housekeeper (Mrs. Bartlett) having prepared everything for the guests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young men were shown into a bedroom of more than ordinary size, on the upper floor. Everything about the house was of the most dainty and scrupulous cleanliness, and an air of cheerful comfort pervaded the place. &lt;em&gt;Mrs. Bartlett was evidently a housekeeper to be proud of. Two large pitchers of cool, soft water awaited them, and the wash, as had been predicted, was most refreshing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first topic of the conversation seems to be about the fact that they are guests of someone with whom they were in a fist fight (or whatever), as well as Stilly's communication skills:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I say,” cried Yates, “it’s rather cheeky to accept a man’s hospitality after knocking him down.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It would be for most people, but I think you underestimate your cheek, as you call it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Bravo, Stilly! You’re blossoming out. That’s repartee, that is. With the accent on the rap, too. Never you mind; I think old 1812 and I will get on all right after this. It doesn’t seem to bother him any, so I don’t see why it should worry me. &lt;em&gt;Nice motherly old lady, isn’t she?&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last sentence is a complete change of topic. Here Mr. Barr is turning the subject of his attention away from Mr. Bartlett towards Mrs. Bartlett and praises her indirectly for the hospitable surroundings, that water was prepared for them to have a refreshing wash etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stilly misses this change of topic as well, therefore his question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Who? 1812?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Mr. Barr mockingly points out that of course he wasn't referring to Mr. Bartlett in his last sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No; Mrs. 1812. I’m sorry I complimented you on your repartee. You’ll get conceited. Remember that what in the newspaper man is clever, in a grave professor is rank flippancy. Let’s go down.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11625" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T13:08:55.317" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-16T15:30:46.040" Score="4" ViewCount="188" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opening stanza of Maya Angelou's poem &amp;quot;Alone&amp;quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lying, thinking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Last night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How to find my soul a home&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where water is not thirsty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And bread loaf is not stone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I came up with one thing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I don't believe I'm wrong&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That nobody,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But nobody&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can make it out here alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused about the line &amp;quot;Where water is not thirsty&amp;quot;; obviously, the rest of the poem is talking about finding a home, someplace to not be alone. I'm confused about how this imagery of thirsty water works in, though; how is the water &amp;quot;thirsty&amp;quot; itself and how is this relevant to being alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2020-12-16T16:22:53.243" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:40:29.617" Title="What does &quot;where water is not thirsty&quot; mean in Maya Angelou's &quot;Alone&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16689" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16688" CreationDate="2020-12-16T16:52:51.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If someone is thirsty, it means they &lt;strong&gt;need water&lt;/strong&gt;. To drink, since that's what water is for us - something to drink.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If &lt;em&gt;water&lt;/em&gt; is thirsty, it means it &lt;strong&gt;needs water&lt;/strong&gt;. For companionship, since it is already water itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is my reading of that line of the poem: it's a masterfully succinct way to express the idea of everything needing companionship, even water. Just as people need people for companionship, maybe water needs water (i.e. is thirsty) too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm more confused about &amp;quot;bread loaf is not stone&amp;quot;!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-16T16:52:51.130" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16768" CreationDate="2020-12-17T06:14:06.833" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;rounded streets&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had known him almost all my life, Beniek. He lived around the corner from us, in our neighbourhood in Wrocław, composed of &lt;strong&gt;rounded streets&lt;/strong&gt; and three-storey apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. Our postboxes still said ‘&lt;em&gt;Briefe&lt;/em&gt;’ in German. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. From one day to the next, the continent’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. Granny’s family were forced to leave their land near Lwów. The Soviets took their house and hauled them on the same cattle trains that had brought the Jews to the camps a year or two earlier. They ended up in Wrocław, a city inhabited by the Germans for hundreds of years, in a flat only just deserted by some family we’d never know, their dishes still in the sink, their breadcrumbs on the table. This is where I grew up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this &amp;quot;rounded streets&amp;quot; means.&#xA;Does it mean perhaps curved streets...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:20:53.483" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:20:53.483" Title="Does &quot;rounded streets&quot; mean curved streets in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16707" CreationDate="2020-12-17T06:29:51.793" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;for each flat&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had known him almost all my life, Beniek. He lived around the corner from us, in our neighbourhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-storey apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden &lt;strong&gt;for each flat&lt;/strong&gt;, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. Our postboxes still said ‘&lt;em&gt;Briefe&lt;/em&gt;’ in German. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. From one day to the next, the continent’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. Granny’s family were forced to leave their land near Lwów. The Soviets took their house and hauled them on the same cattle trains that had brought the Jews to the camps a year or two earlier. They ended up in Wrocław, a city inhabited by the Germans for hundreds of years, in a flat only just deserted by some family we’d never know, their dishes still in the sink, their breadcrumbs on the table. This is where I grew up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether the &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; here means each storey in an apartment building, or an apartment building itself. I am confused because the sentence has a description saying that &amp;quot;each flat&amp;quot; had &amp;quot;hedges, wide courtyards with a garden, and cellars and dusty attics.&amp;quot; So I thought, how can a single one-storied &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; can have hedges and gardens and cellars and attics? So I wanted to ask you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T07:31:18.567" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:51:46.953" Title="What does &quot;for each flat&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16692" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16695" CreationDate="2020-12-17T06:37:46.463" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;courtyards&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had known him almost all my life, Beniek. He lived around the corner from us, in our neighbourhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-storey apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. There were hedges and wide &lt;strong&gt;courtyards&lt;/strong&gt; with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. Our postboxes still said ‘&lt;em&gt;Briefe&lt;/em&gt;’ in German. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. From one day to the next, the continent’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. Granny’s family were forced to leave their land near Lwów. The Soviets took their house and hauled them on the same cattle trains that had brought the Jews to the camps a year or two earlier. They ended up in Wrocław, a city inhabited by the Germans for hundreds of years, in a flat only just deserted by some family we’d never know, their dishes still in the sink, their breadcrumbs on the table. This is where I grew up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether the &amp;quot;courtyards&amp;quot; here means a garden/playground located inside an apartment complex.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T07:31:30.350" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T07:31:30.350" Title="What does &quot;courtyards&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16693" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16708" CreationDate="2020-12-17T06:44:56.733" Score="-1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the continent&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had known him almost all my life, Beniek. He lived around the corner from us, in our neighbourhood in Wrocław, composed of rounded streets and three-storey apartment buildings that from the air formed a giant eagle, the symbol of our nation. There were hedges and wide courtyards with a little garden for each flat, and cool, damp cellars and dusty attics. It hadn’t even been twenty years since any of our families had come to live there. Our postboxes still said ‘&lt;em&gt;Briefe&lt;/em&gt;’ in German. Everyone – the people who’d lived here before and the people who replaced them – had been forced to leave their home. From one day to the next, &lt;strong&gt;the continent&lt;/strong&gt;’s borders had shifted, redrawn like the chalk lines of the hopscotch we played on the pavement. At the end of the war, the east of Germany became Poland and the east of Poland became the Soviet Union. Granny’s family were forced to leave their land near Lwów. The Soviets took their house and hauled them on the same cattle trains that had brought the Jews to the camps a year or two earlier. They ended up in Wrocław, a city inhabited by the Germans for hundreds of years, in a flat only just deserted by some family we’d never know, their dishes still in the sink, their breadcrumbs on the table. This is where I grew up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether &amp;quot;the continent&amp;quot; here means the European Continent or simply a continent, a piece of land as opposed to oceans. I am confused because it is not capitalized, but seems to indicate the European continent because the narrator is talking about Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, all of which are European countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T10:33:25.797" Title="What does &quot;the continent&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16694" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16706" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:18:59.553" Score="-1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;Beniek was part of that band of kids, one of the bolder ones.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was on the wide pavements, lined with trees and benches, that all the children of the neighbourhood played together. We would play catch and skip ropes with the girls, and run around the courtyards, screaming, jumping on to the double bars that looked like rugby posts and on which the women would hang and beat their carpets. We’d get told off by adults and run away. We were dusty children. We’d race through the streets in summer in our shorts and knee-high socks and suspenders, and in flimsy wool coats when the ground was covered in leaves in autumn, and we’d continue running after frost invaded the ground and the air scratched our lungs and our breath turned to clouds before our eyes. In spring, on Śmigus-Dyngus day, we’d throw bucketloads of water over any girl who wasn’t quick enough to escape, and then we’d chase and soak each other, returning home drenched to the bone. On Sundays, we’d throw pebbles at the milk bottles standing on the windowsills higher up where no one could steal them, and we’d run away in genuine fear when a bottle broke and the milk ran slowly down the building, white streams trickling down the sooty facade like tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Beniek was part of that band of kids, one of the bolder ones.&lt;/strong&gt; I don’t&#xA;think we ever talked back then, but I was aware of him. He was taller&#xA;than most of us, and somehow darker, with long eyelashes and a&#xA;rebellious stare. And he was kind. Once, when we were running from an&#xA;adult after some mischief now long forgotten, I stumbled and fell on&#xA;to the sharp gravel. The others overtook me, dust gathering, and I&#xA;tried to stand. My knee was bleeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether the sentence means that Beniek belonged to the group of kids, and also to the selected small group composed of bolder kids among them, or that Beniek belonged to the group of kids who were generally bolder. In short, I would like to know whether &amp;quot;that band of kids&amp;quot; is the same concept with &amp;quot;the bolder ones,&amp;quot; or is a larger concept incorporating &amp;quot;the bolder ones.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T07:31:43.230" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:54:33.150" Title="What does &quot;Beniek was part of that band of kids, one of the bolder ones.&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16692" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:30:06.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/courtyard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, the word 'courtyard' means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;an area of flat ground outside that is partly or completely surrounded by the walls of a building&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which fits the text in the paragraph&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were hedges and wide courtyards&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T07:30:06.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16709" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:30:53.563" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a strong neck with a place made out for his Adam’s apple&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is where I saw Beniek again. I was surprised that he was there, because I had never seen him at church. He had changed. The skinny child I remembered was turning into a man – or so I thought – and even though we were only nine you could already see manhood budding within him: &lt;strong&gt;a strong neck with a place made out for his Adam’s apple&lt;/strong&gt;; long, strong legs that would stick out of his shorts as we sat in a circle in the priest’s room; muscles visible beneath the skin; fine hair appearing above his knees. He still had the same unruly hair, curly and black; and the same eyes, dark and softly mischievous. I think we both recognised the other, though we didn’t acknowledge it. But after the first couple of meetings we started to talk. I don’t remember what about. How does one bond with another child, as a child? Maybe it’s simply through common interests. Or maybe it’s something that lies deeper, for which everything you say and do is an unwitting code. But the point is, we did get on. Naturally. And after Bible study, which was on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we’d take the tram all the way to the city centre, riding past the zoo and its neon lion perched on top of the entrance gate, past the domed Centennial Hall the Germans had built to mark the anniversary of something no one cared to remember. We rode across the iron bridges over the calm, brown Odra river. There were many empty lots along the way, the city like a mouth with missing teeth. Some blocks only had one lonely, sooty building standing there all by itself, like a dirty island in a black sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether the boldfaced part means some point of his neck was protruding because of his Adam's apple. In short, I am wondering what &amp;quot;a place made out for his Adam's apple&amp;quot; means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:11:02.593" Title="What does &quot;a strong neck with a place made out for his Adam’s apple&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16697" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16704" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:46:12.293" Score="2" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;wade through its lunar landscape&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the afternoons we were free. Beniek and I and some other boys would go to the beach and swim in the cold and turbulent Baltic. Afterwards, he and I would dry off and leave the others. We’d climb the dunes of the beach and &lt;strong&gt;wade through its lunar landscape&lt;/strong&gt; until we found a perfect crest: high and hidden like the crater of a dormant volcano. There we’d curl up like tired storks after a sea crossing and fall asleep with the kind summer wind on our backs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old. He also went to a trip for his First Communion, where he used to swim and &amp;quot;wade through&amp;quot; the &amp;quot;lunar landscape&amp;quot; on the beach with Beniek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether &amp;quot;its lunar landscape&amp;quot; means the the crescent form of sand dunes on the beach, or the beach's landscape on which moonlight shone. But, it was only afternoon when children swam in the ocean, so I believe it was not dark enough for the moon to shine, though it says &amp;quot;lunar&amp;quot;... so I am confused and wanted to ask you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:45:40.680" Title="What does &quot;wade through its lunar landscape&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16698" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16733" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:52:19.887" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;real food&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next morning we stripped the sheets off our beds and packed our things. The boys were excited, talking about the disco, about the prettiest girls, about home and &lt;strong&gt;real food&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I can’t wait for a four-egg omelette,’ said one pudgy boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone else made a face at him. ‘You voracious hedgehog!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old. He also went to a trip for his First Communion. On the last morning of their stay, boys talked about home and &amp;quot;real food.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I would like to know the meaning of &amp;quot;real food.&amp;quot;&#xA;Does it mean perhaps nutritious food that parents made at home...? (This is just my wild guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T02:51:13.270" Title="What does &quot;real food&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16699" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16700" CreationDate="2020-12-17T07:58:22.123" Score="1" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;It was hard to move in.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead, the day of the Communion arrived. I could hardly sleep the night before, knowing that I would see him again. In the morning, I got up and washed my face with cold water. It was a sunny day in that one week of summer when fluffy white balls of seeds fly through the streets and cover the pavements, and the morning light is brilliant, almost blinding. I pulled on the white high-collared robe, which reached all the way to my ankles. &lt;strong&gt;It was hard to move in.&lt;/strong&gt; I had to hold myself evenly and seriously like a monk. We got to the church early and I stood on the steps overlooking the street. Families hurried past me, girls in their white lace robes and with flower wreaths on their heads. Father Klaszewski was there, in a long robe with red sleeves and gold threads, talking to excited parents. Everyone was there, except for Beniek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old. He and Beniek took classes at church for their First Communion, and the day of the First Communion finally arrived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I would like to know what &amp;quot;move in&amp;quot; means in this context. Does it perhaps mean that it was difficult to move his body &lt;em&gt;inside&lt;/em&gt; the robe...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:08:12.793" Title="What does &quot;It was hard to move in.&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16700" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16699" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:08:12.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the &amp;quot;white high-collared robe&amp;quot; reached all the way up to the ankles of the narrator, moving their body while wearing it was a tough task.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:08:12.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16703" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:08:22.820" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stood in the silent stairwell and felt terror travel from my navel, tying my throat, pinching my eyes. Tears started to slide down my cheeks like melted butter. For a long time I felt nothing but their heat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did you ever have someone like that, someone that you loved in vain when you were younger? Did you ever feel something like my shame? I always assumed that you must have, that &lt;strong&gt;you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out&lt;/strong&gt;. But now I begin to think that not everyone suffers in the same way; that not everyone, in fact, suffers. Not from the same things, at any rate. And in a way this is what made us possible, you and me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to hang out with his friends including his first love Beniek in his hometown of Wrocław when he was nine years old. But Beniek suddenly left Poland to Israel, so Ludwik stood at the staircase of Beniek's house crying, mourning his lost first love. And looking back, Ludwik was assuming that Janusz, his ex-boyfriend, would have experienced the vain love as he had.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what he means. Does it mean that it was not possible that Janusz had lived throughout his whole life in a careless manner, as he had been living?&#xA;I am confused as to the meaning of &amp;quot;go through life&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;made out&amp;quot; especially.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T02:39:41.693" Title="What does &quot;you can’t possibly have gone through life as carelessly as you made out&quot; means here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16698" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:16:56.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;'The boys' don't consider the food they get to eat in USA as real food. Of course, they don't mean this in the literal sense. It's just that they consider the food they used to eat in Poland as being real.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean perhaps nutritious food that parents made at home...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe. Maybe not. The food they used to eat back in Poland may or may not be nutritious. Also it may not necessarily be cooked by their parents, or made at their homes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastEditorUserId="5526" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T09:07:40.307" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:07:40.307" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16701" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:33:28.803" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Carelessly&lt;/em&gt; literally means &lt;em&gt;without any care&lt;/em&gt;. The word &lt;em&gt;care&lt;/em&gt; has a couple of pertinent meanings in this context. Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/care&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 : suffering of mind : GRIEF&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a : a disquieted state of mixed uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  b : a cause for such anxiety&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3a : painstaking or watchful attention&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(example sentences omitted).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most commonly, we use &lt;em&gt;careless&lt;/em&gt; to refer to the third sense: when something is done without proper diligence, leading to sloppy errors, we say it is done &lt;em&gt;carelessly&lt;/em&gt;. In the sense that Jedrowski's translator uses the word &lt;em&gt;carelessly&lt;/em&gt;, however, the first two meanings given above are relevant, not the third.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ludwik's loss of Beniek has caused him &lt;em&gt;suffering of mind, GRIEF&lt;/em&gt;. He imagines that Janusz must also have had some such suffering, some such care. Also, Ludwik experienced feelings of &lt;em&gt;uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility&lt;/em&gt; when he loses Beniek. He asks whether Janusz has experienced such feelings as well. While the dictionary definition does not specify &lt;em&gt;shame&lt;/em&gt; as one of the meanings of care, shame too is a &amp;quot;state of uncertainty, apprehension, and responsibility&amp;quot;, so the sense applies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Ludwik is saying that Janusz too must have had some cares: some grief, some uncertain and scared states of mind, some shame. Janusz too must have had loved in vain as Ludwik has. That's why Ludwik says he cannot believe that Janusz could have gone through life so &lt;em&gt;carelessly&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., so free from all cares.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See also the definition in Merriam-Webster of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/careless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;careless&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;untroubled&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;unconcerned&amp;quot;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/carefree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;carefree&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;having no worries or troubles&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Go through life&amp;quot; means simply &amp;quot;live your life&amp;quot;, pass through the days of your life. &amp;quot;Made out&amp;quot; in this context means &amp;quot;appeared to&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;claimed to&amp;quot;. Ludwik is telling Janusz that Janusz's life can't possibly have been as free from care as Janusz claims it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T02:39:41.693" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T02:39:41.693" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16697" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:35:24.203" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If the sentence was about crescent shapes like the moon, it would have said something like &amp;quot;moon-shaped&amp;quot; instead. If it was about a place on which moonlight shone, it would have said &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/moonlit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;moonlit&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; instead. In this context, &amp;quot;lunar&amp;quot; doesn't mean anything about the moon as we see it from earth - it describes something similar to the landscape of the moon itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of, determined by, &lt;strong&gt;or resembling&lt;/strong&gt; the moon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &amp;quot;Lunar&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/lunar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexico&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the example sentences in the above dictionary source is &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Mountains of rubbish are piled up to form a landscape that is almost lunar in its desolation.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; This shows the use of the word &amp;quot;lunar&amp;quot; in a similar context to the one you found. Some dictionaries also have a special entry for &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/lunar-landscape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lunar landscape&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sY9YZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sY9YZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;example image of an actual lunar landscape&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:35:24.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16697" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:45:40.680" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I reckon this is a clever reference to a lunar crater that usually rises a dune high up until it is met with a hollow that looks &amp;quot;high and hidden like the crater of a dormant volcano&amp;quot;. I find &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt; used in this context as in &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;climb&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;wade&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and the very mention of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;dune&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;crest&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&#xA;After all it is how I would see it and I take it to the appearance of the moon(the moon's dark, cool, calm nature is used here with the afternoon that is a dormant volcano).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11575" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:45:40.680" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16694" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:47:13.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That band of kids&lt;/em&gt; refers to all the children who did the things Ludwik is remembering: playing catch, running about, throwing water on the girls on Dyngus Day, throwing pebbles at milk bottles. Within that band of kids, some are more bold than others. Beniek is &lt;em&gt;one of the bolder ones&lt;/em&gt;. That is, he would probably try things with less fear than most of the other children in the group. So if Ludwik, for example, breaks a milk bottle for the thrill, but feels &lt;em&gt;genuine fear&lt;/em&gt; after doing so, Beniek would probably feel more of the thrill and less of the fear. Also, being bold as well as kind, he will help Ludwik when Ludwik trips and falls while all the children are running away from an angry adult, instead of continuing to run off and leaving Ludwik to face the angry adult by himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T08:54:33.150" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:54:33.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16707" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16691" CreationDate="2020-12-17T08:51:46.953" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Every apartment in the building is a &lt;strong&gt;flat&lt;/strong&gt;. See sense 5 of the noun &lt;em&gt;flat&lt;/em&gt; at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/flat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;chiefly British : an apartment on one floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The courtyards of the building are divided into separate plots. Each apartment in the building has one of those plots as their own garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T08:51:46.953" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16693" CreationDate="2020-12-17T09:04:45.583" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The continent&amp;quot; in this context means Europe. As the narrator says, the borders of Poland shifted greatly during and after the Second World War. Wrocław used to be German territory, with the name Breslau, for hundreds of years; Lwów used to be part of Poland. But as a result of World War II, Lwów became the Soviet town of Lviv, and Breslau became the Polish town of Wrocław. &amp;quot;The continent's borders had shifted&amp;quot; refers to this redrawing of boundaries between territories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, Lviv is now a part of Ukraine, as borders were again redrawn all over Eastern Europe and the USSR after the fall of the Soviet empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:04:45.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16709" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16696" CreationDate="2020-12-17T09:11:02.593" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Beniek is on the cusp of puberty, although if he's only nine he seems to be growing rather faster than the other boys his age. Since he hasn't quite entered puberty, his body has not exhibited all the signs yet. For example, his Adam's apple isn't developed yet. However, his body is beginning to change, so Ludwik can see that his throat is showing signs that there will soon be an Adam's apple there. Hence &amp;quot;a place made out for his Adam's apple.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:11:02.593" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T09:30:43.887" Score="6" ViewCount="442" Body="&lt;p&gt;The opening stanza of Maya Angelou's poem &amp;quot;Alone&amp;quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lying, thinking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Last night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How to find my soul a home&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where water is not thirsty&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And bread loaf is not stone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I came up with one thing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I don't believe I'm wrong&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That nobody,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But nobody&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can make it out here alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a bit confused about the line &amp;quot;And bread loaf is not stone&amp;quot;. Why is the bread stone, first of all, and how is this relevant to being alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T12:57:51.423" Title="What does &quot;and bread loaf is not stone&quot; mean in Maya Angelou's &quot;Alone&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16711" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16688" CreationDate="2020-12-17T09:40:29.617" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem contrasts material needs with emotional ones. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maslow's hierarchy of needs&lt;/a&gt;, after basic needs such as food, water, and safety are met, the individual feels psychological needs like belongingness and love. The speaker here has a home, water, and bread, i.e., all the material necessities. But her emotional needs are still unmet. And following Maslow, it is precisely because her material needs are fulfilled that she longs for something more meaningful in her life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So even though she herself has a home (she's lying down somewhere), her &lt;em&gt;soul&lt;/em&gt; does not seem to have one. Also, she has bread and water, but the water is &lt;em&gt;thirsty&lt;/em&gt; and the bread is &lt;em&gt;stone&lt;/em&gt;, because they don't meet her emotional needs. In fact, they simply make her more aware of how much is lacking in her life. What she's lacking (as @Randal'Thor's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16689/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; says, is companionship: &amp;quot;nobody / Can make it out here alone&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect is that the soul's home is, of course, the body. The poem goes on to talk about people whose material needs are more than adequately fulfilled (&amp;quot;millionaires / With money they can't use&amp;quot;) but whose emotional lives are suffering:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their wives run round like banshees&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their children sing the blues.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angelou says that a surfeit of materialism has led to spiritual death: our souls no longer have homes. Essentially, we have forgone emotional connections just to focus on material success. The poem begins with just the speaker's loneliness, but extends this to the state of the world generally, where economic gains are valorized while spiritual, natural, or human values are not. &lt;em&gt;Where water is not thirsty&lt;/em&gt; could also refer to the impact of economic progress on the environment. As we prioritize economic growth, we overlook the fact that waterways become less and less able to sustain life. That makes water itself thirsty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's paradoxical claim that water can be thirsty lends itself to exploration of that claim's meaning, and that meaning in turn can be several layers deep. All these are explorations of possible meanings of the line, not a definitive statement about what the line means.  Pinning down one meaning for the line would reduce the power of the line as poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:40:29.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16710" CreationDate="2020-12-17T09:45:55.780" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;When bread is left out for several days, it will eventually become stale. When bread is considered stale it is dry, tasteless and hard to bite into, just like a stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is revolving around the idea how everyone needs a companion, and that no one wants to be left out. So a loving home for the soul should be one where even non-living things like water and bread are loved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T09:45:55.780" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16713" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16693" CreationDate="2020-12-17T10:33:25.797" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;the continent&amp;quot; does not need to be capitalised in order to refer to a specific continent. I've rarely seen Europe referred to as &amp;quot;the Continent&amp;quot; with a capital C, except in contexts where the main part of Europe is being distinguished from other parts (e.g. &amp;quot;Britain and the Continent&amp;quot;), and not always then. The word &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; is already enough to indicate that a specific continent is being referred to, and in context it's clearly Europe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;verbose's answer explains what changes in the borders are being referred to; I just wanted to address your confusion about capitalisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T10:33:25.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16710" CreationDate="2020-12-17T12:57:51.423" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;While Maya Angelou did not call herself a Christian, believing that ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://thinkchristian.reframemedia.com/the-unassuming-faith-of-maya-angelou&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;calling yourself a Christian was referring to something that was complete, rather than a work in progress&lt;/a&gt;’ she certainly tried to become one, which may be relevant to the couplets about bread and water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an interview in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-05-17-tv-76-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;LA Times&lt;/a&gt; in 1992 she said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have always tried to find myself a church. I have studied everything. I spent some time with Zen Buddhism and Judaism and I spent some time with Islam. I am a religious person. It is my spirit, but I found that I really want to be a Christian. That is what my spirit seems to be built on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this basis there is a possible spiritual reading of the poem, it doesn’t say so much that we need human company, after all the millionaires have wailing wives and singing children, but that our souls need a home, and she has expressed that hers finds its home in Christianity, with the Christ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific reference to bread may be to verse 4:3 in Matthew&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the devil came to him and said, &amp;quot;If you are God's Son, tell these stones to turn into bread,”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The verse is part of the telling of the temptation of Christ during his 40 days in the desert. Jesus’ response in the story is to tell the devil that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The scripture says, 'Human beings cannot live on bread alone, but need every word that God speaks.'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, when the poem says that her soul needs a home where bread is not stone, it may mean a world where the devil doesn’t win. In God’s house bread is bread (or even the body of christ) and nourishes us, in the devil’s abode the bread is stone and does not nourish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another poem, named - despite her claim elsewhere to not calling herself a Christian - ’I am a Christian’, Angelou writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I say... ‘I am a Christian&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m not bragging of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m admitting I have failed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And need God to clean my mess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reinforces the interpretation of Angelou as a spiritual person who sees the need for God’s infallibility in a world where humans mess up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The water reference is possibly more clouded by poetic use of language, but it &lt;em&gt;may be&lt;/em&gt; that in personifying water, by ascribing it the quality of understanding thirst, she is referring again to biblical verse. A strong candidate would be the reference to ‘living water’ at John 7:38&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this interpretation the overall theme of the poem would be that whatever strife is coming mankind’s way, faith will help us more than wealth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T12:57:51.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16716" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16730" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:01:22.017" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;who spoke and lived in denial, destined&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bus was waiting for more people to arrive. I sat by the window,&#xA;the orange wool curtains drawn to block out the sun, rereading &lt;em&gt;Quo&#xA;Vadis&lt;/em&gt;. I cared less about the religious part than about the love&#xA;story, the heroic turns, the bravery of opposition. This is how I&#xA;lived back then – through books. I locked myself into their stories,&#xA;dreamt of their characters at night, pretended to be them. They were&#xA;my armour against the hard edges of reality. I carried them with me&#xA;wherever I went, like a talisman in my pocket, thinking of them as&#xA;almost more real than the people around me, &lt;strong&gt;who spoke and lived in&#xA;denial, destined&lt;/strong&gt;, I thought, to never do anything worth recounting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). Back then, Ludwik lived inside books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;in denial&amp;quot; means. Does it perhaps mean that they pretended to have not noticed contradictions in this socialist regime...?&#xA;And I would also like to know how &amp;quot;destined&amp;quot; is connected to the previous part. Would it be alright to read it to be connected to &amp;quot;lived,&amp;quot; as in &amp;quot;who lived destined&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T13:59:09.817" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:37:08.083" Title="What does &quot;who spoke and lived in denial, destined&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16729" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:27:50.677" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the expanse between departure and&#xA;arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by&#xA;another kind of time&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bus was almost full now, and the driver climbed in, cigarette&#xA;glued to his lips, and off we went. We vibrated with the rhythm of the&#xA;clattering engine. Sun streamed on to my face and, outside, the spire&#xA;of the city’s symbol – Stalin’s Palace of Culture – reached so high&#xA;into the soft-blue sky it made your neck hurt to look at it. I was&#xA;strangely elated. I had always liked the act of leaving, &lt;strong&gt;the expanse&#xA;between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined&#xA;by another kind of time&lt;/strong&gt;. This journey reminded me of the ride I’d&#xA;taken four years earlier: the day I’d taken the train to Warszawa for&#xA;the first time by myself, to come to the capital, to leave my old self&#xA;behind. I’d stood on the platform with Granny, two large suitcases&#xA;next to us, a handkerchief in her gloved hand dabbing her glassy eyes.&#xA;She didn’t want me to go, but she didn’t say anything. I was eighteen,&#xA;itching to leave. I’d kissed her hastily and got on the train, feeling&#xA;selfish to be leaving her, dragging the suitcases to my compartment,&#xA;passing smoking soldiers leaning out of the window in the narrow&#xA;corridor. I’d settled into my compartment, between men in worn suits&#xA;and women in hats, drinking tea from flasks and peeling apples, and&#xA;eating boiled eggs wrapped in white lace cloths like christened&#xA;babies. The train had moved off, and I’d fallen into a lull, villages&#xA;sunk in forests rushing past. Selfish. Growing into yourself is&#xA;nothing but that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). On the way to the camp, Ludwik remembered his first time going to Warsaw by himself to come to the university, four years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I am not sure whether it is right to see &amp;quot;expanse&amp;quot; as a temporal concept, rather than a terrestrial concept. I had seen &amp;quot;expanse&amp;quot; to mean &amp;quot;a stretch of land,&amp;quot; but this &amp;quot;expanse&amp;quot; is modified by the &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; clause, so I cannot be sure what to make of this &amp;quot;expanse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T13:58:55.090" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:28:56.343" Title="What does &quot;the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time&quot; means here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16723" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:32:31.327" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the dark-blonde&#xA;fringe that framed her unruly eyes&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turned back to Karolina. She was smoking, her wide lips painted&#xA;coral-red and leaving a mark on the mouth of the cigarette. I can’t&#xA;remember ever having seen her without that lipstick, or without &lt;strong&gt;the&#xA;dark-blonde fringe that framed her unruly eyes&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_6.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). On the way to the camp, Ludwik turned to his best friend Karolina, who was sitting next to him on the bus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;framed&amp;quot; here means especially.&#xA;Does it mean that her dark-blonde fringe accentuated her unruly eyes, perhaps...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T13:58:37.510" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T14:24:27.087" Title="What does &quot;the dark-blonde fringe that framed her unruly eyes&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15651" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:37:43.977" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The difference is based in grammar. The capitalised terms fall into two groups. There are the straightforward nouns, 'Rock' and 'River' etc preceded by an indefinite article, 'A' and which can be taken as single examples of their class, but there are also &lt;em&gt;Definite Generics&lt;/em&gt; where the singular noun represents the whole class or category, you can have 'A Rock' is any old rock, 'The Rabbi' is all rabbis.  (it does get slightly ambiguous as to whether 'The Rock' is 'the rock we mentioned a couple of lines ago' of 'the Rock that is the prototype for all rocks'. When we get to people we are on firmer ground!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/000001.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Lawler at Ask a Linguist May 1997&lt;/a&gt; takes 'tiger as an example as he explains Definite Generics&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;Definite Generic&lt;/strong&gt; refers to the &lt;em&gt;Prototype&lt;/em&gt; of a species, roughly the image we associate with tiger. The tiger, as a prototype, has all the properties of anything we would call a tiger, except that it doesn't exist in an individual physical sense, like all real tigers do. This is a very abstract concept, and its use signals that the speaker is theorizing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With 'privileged' and 'homeless', a single individual belonging to the privileged category is not 'a privileged', but 'a privileged &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;', likewise a single individual of the homeless category is not 'a homeless', but 'a homeless &lt;em&gt;person&lt;/em&gt;'. Therefore 'The homeless' is a &lt;em&gt;collective adjective&lt;/em&gt; which encompasses all members of that class.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Collective-Adjectives.htm#:%7E:text=Collective%20adjectives%20are%20a%20subgroup,rich%20should%20help%20the%20poor.%E2%80%9D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Free Dictionary: Collective Adjectives&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Collective adjectives are a subgroup of nominal adjectives, or adjectives that act as nouns. They are used to refer to a group of people based on a characteristic that they share.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Angelou appears to have chosen to capitalise the words which denote the essence what people and things &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; rather than those that merely define a more transient characteristic of where they find themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T17:50:44.847" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T17:50:44.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16720" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16721" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:44:30.737" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I had lived them&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After this, Karolina came back from the ladies’ and we left. I was&#xA;determined to take nothing from this place, not one memory, not one&#xA;conclusion for myself. But like stones thrown into the sky with all&#xA;one’s might, pieces of that night – the boys and the men who wanted&#xA;them, the flirtation, the codes of seduction I could only guess at –&#xA;returned to me with even greater intensity than &lt;strong&gt;I had lived them&lt;/strong&gt;. The&#xA;law of gravity applies to memories too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_7.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he once went to a gay bar with his best friend Karolina when he was a college student. He reluctantly headed towards the bar because Karolina wanted to go there. And he became restless and angry as they sat at the bar sipping the beer, because he did not admit to himself, let alone to his friend Karolina, that he was a homosexual, and he just wanted to leave the place, aghast at flirtations between men. After he had visited the bar, he was determined that he would not bring any memory from the bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;live&amp;quot; means in &amp;quot;I have lived them.&amp;quot; I guess &amp;quot;them&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;pieces of that night,&amp;quot; and by &amp;quot;living&amp;quot; them, would that perhaps mean that the memories returned to him with a greater intensity than he had actually &lt;em&gt;experienced&lt;/em&gt; them &lt;em&gt;in real life&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T13:47:09.687" Title="What does &quot;I had lived them&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16721" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16720" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:47:09.687" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are absolutely correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The memories of the night in question returned to the narrator with an increased intensity than when the night (and all the things that happened at the time) had actually happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T13:47:09.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16722" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16728" CreationDate="2020-12-17T13:56:44.307" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a prophecy I was unable to read&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Belka had finished, we grabbed our bags from the bus and were&#xA;assigned to the different wooden huts scattered around the camp&#xA;grounds. I was in one with three other guys, Wojtek, Darek and Filip.&#xA;They were nice boys, strangely immature and innocent. We shared two&#xA;bunk beds, a table and two chairs. We went to have dinner in the&#xA;canteen, served by an army of women in aprons and deflated paper&#xA;bonnets, standing behind the counter as if someone had left them there&#xA;many years earlier. A large lady with an immobile face served the&#xA;tomato soup with rice, while an ageless-looking girl with reddish skin&#xA;piled on beetroot mash and potatoes. I sat with Karolina and the boys&#xA;from my hut. They spoke easily, joking and jesting. But I wasn’t&#xA;really there. I looked around the canteen, across the long tables and&#xA;through the tangled voices and ringing cutlery, until I spotted you:&#xA;sitting at a table at the other end of the room, deep in conversation&#xA;with a girl, your head turned towards her. In the stark white light of&#xA;the canteen your black hair glistened, and there was something&#xA;strangely focused about you, something light yet unyielding in your&#xA;eyes that stirred both envy and desire in me. It was as if your&#xA;presence already overpowered me, like &lt;strong&gt;a prophecy I was unable to read&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover, and felt strong pull towards him like &amp;quot;a prophecy I was unable to read.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder why the narrator mentioned &amp;quot;prophecy.&amp;quot; As far as I understand, a prophecy is a speaking of a priest/priestess like Cassandra in Greek mythology, but I cannot understand why the narrator chose &amp;quot;prophecy&amp;quot; to describe the pull towards Janusz. Perhaps, although a prophesy could not be read (understood), it often lingers in one's mind and dominates the mind, so would the &amp;quot;prophesy&amp;quot; here imply the mysterious domination of Janusz...? (This is my wild guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:07:05.553" Title="What does &quot;a prophecy I was unable to read&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16718" CreationDate="2020-12-17T14:24:27.087" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is nothing particularly context specific about this. If you look up the verb 'frame' in online dictionaries you can readily find examples such as this from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/frame&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to form an edge to something in an attractive way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Her new hairstyle frames her face in a much more flattering way&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T14:24:27.087" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16725" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T16:43:52.273" Score="0" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a post-apocalyptic novel that switched points of view between a boy from an underground colony and a girl who lived on the surface. The colony had survived underground for a long time, and I think they were trying to find a way to the surface. The girl lived alone but used to live with her father, and she flew around in a muscle-powered wing contraption superior to hang gliders. I don't remember how, but somehow the girl and boy help and/or find each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is in English and was probably written for young adults. I read it in the early 2000s in the USA. I couldn't find it using the search terms &amp;quot;flying girl underground colony novel&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10697" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T16:43:52.273" Title="Book about a flying girl and an underground colony" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16726" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T17:00:42.580" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm having difficulty formulating a problem regarding my thesis. I'm planing to read two books by the same author, they're basically the modern retellings of two stories of Greek mythology, and so I can't formulate a problem which could be relevant to today's reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would you suggest? What should I look for in these novels, and how can I prove such aspect? I thought about finding out to what extent a contemporary author harnessed the various aspects of Greek mythology, how they were presented and whether they have the potential to instill the importance of classic values to an equally contemporary audience, but that's virtually impossible to prove, such proof is intangible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11641" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-17T17:26:37.607" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T04:08:11.000" Title="Literary comparison of modern retellings of Greek myths" Tags="&lt;literary-criticism&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-05-25T07:40:09.400" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16679" CreationDate="2020-12-17T20:45:44.080" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Unbuilding” by Lynne McMahon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title of this poem is “Unbuilding.” If you were to look at the original structure of the poem, you could see that visually, its form is “disjointed” or “disheveled”--that is to say the lines of the poem are NOT typeset justified left… the poem’s structure looks like it what it represents—unbuilding (or deconstruction or unbuilding). So, there is one “poetic device” being used in terms of “form” or “structure”—but you would have to find an original copy of the poem to actually appreciate this. The only copy I was able to find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=JCYWI31NSJAC&amp;amp;pg=PA43&amp;amp;lpg=PA43&amp;amp;dq=Stepping+around+bales+Of+fencing+wires+and+a+clutter+Of+machine+parts+on+my+way+To+class&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=UjJH-XsOzF&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3fkUNp-LaQxLfHkxfV4Ps7QVHGXg&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwik1dfUm9TtAhUMrp4KHW4dCVkQ6AEwB3oECAYQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Stepping%20around%20bales%20Of%20fencing%20wires%20and%20a%20clutter%20Of%20machine%20parts%20on%20my%20way%20To%20class&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here on Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another device is the author’s use of gerunds such as: stepping, fencing, building, curving, straightening, flashing, lifting. One simple effect these gerunds have is to provide kinetic (movement) imagery (in addition to other kinetic imagery used in the poem). The kinetic imagery adds to the “rhythm” of the workers and of the poem itself. While the narrator cannot hear the rhythm, admitting “but I Couldn’t hear it”, she can see the “rhythm” of the workers as they move with regular, systematic “lifting and releasing” motions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McMahon makes good use of enjambment (a continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line) in this poem from stanza to stanza such as “To class / I stopped to watch two men” and “Of old or damaged asphalt / Sheets off the roof”, etc. Every subsequent stanza bleeds into the next . . . this complements the disjointed structure of the poem—as if the poem itself is being “unbuilt” in some way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author also employs alliteration with lines such as “sTopped to waTch Two men / on Top … next door to min / Tossing recTangles / … asphalT” (emphasis mine) (Stanza 2); and “pickup parked / four floors” (Stanza 3); more repeated ‘T’ sounds in stanza 4; “music… might / …Walkman / must (Stanza 8); “floating up from the titles” (Stanza 9); noon-blazed / Blue lifting and releasing like blue work” (Stanza 10); Clearing the sky of decades of dust / … begin again” (Stanza 11).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One theme of the poem seems to be rhythms of life as supported by the rich kinetic imagery, the reference to music and all the alliteration (creating its own rhythmic, sonic imagery). As the narrator (persona) of the poem stops to watch something as banal as roofers (I am assuming) tossing old asphalt tiles off a roof into a bin, speaks to an ending and discarding of the old to make way for the new “Work [that] might begin again.” While the rhythms are taking place in the plot of the poem, they can be also be heard in the poem itself—drawing attention to the poems own construction inviting the reader to “deconstruct” or “unbuild” and thereby appreciate the accoutrements employed in making poetry—or seeing the poetry in everyday life. The fact that the narrator is looking up (presumably) while &amp;quot;watch[ing] two men / On top of a building&amp;quot; who are later described as &amp;quot;shirted angels&amp;quot; is visual imagery adding to the a sanguine tone of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are some very basic observations, but I hope they are helpful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T08:14:59.277" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T08:14:59.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16722" CreationDate="2020-12-17T22:07:05.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that &amp;quot;a prophecy I was unable to read&amp;quot; is somehow similar to &amp;quot;a riddle I could not guess.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase involves the excitement of something unknown that is waiting to be discovered, and that is precisely what aroused the character's attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:07:05.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16717" CreationDate="2020-12-17T22:28:56.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a strictly lexical perspective, it would have been more appropriate to use a term like &amp;quot;period,&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;expanse&amp;quot; sounds more literary and its use may be based on the conception of time as place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand &amp;quot;the expanse between departure and arrival when you’re seemingly nowhere, defined by another kind of time&amp;quot; to mean a period of time when your life is in suspense: you are neither at the source nor at the target, and as a result the time may be perceived as abnormally longer or shorter. It would be, in the author's view, like a different dimension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:28:56.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16730" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16716" CreationDate="2020-12-17T22:37:08.083" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;destined&amp;quot; needs to be interpreted, as @user14111 rightly stated in the comment above, as complementized by the infinitival &amp;quot;to never do anything worth recounting.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase in question shows that the character regarded the people around as mediocre, as incapable of standing out by living a free life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-17T22:37:08.083" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16731" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-17T23:50:40.607" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the last part of Mary Oliver's poem &amp;quot;Her Grave&amp;quot;, honoring the poet's dead dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How strong was her dark body!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How apt is her grave place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How beautiful is her unshakable sleep.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the slick mountains of love break&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;over us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this last line? I'm not sure if I can interpret it as &amp;quot;Finally, our love like slippery mountains fall on us.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11643" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T07:23:32.880" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T08:37:16.763" Title="Finally, the slick mountains of love break over us" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;mary-oliver&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16731" CreationDate="2020-12-18T00:32:05.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;While the word ‘mountain’ suggests the solidity of terrain, the phrase ‘breaks over us’ is more suggestive of waves crashing down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blending these two ideas suggests ‘mountainous seas’, or the rogue waves that form in certain sea states, huge walls of water that build up only to break and crash with devastating power. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xqixT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/xqixT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;https://www.boredpanda.com/wave-photography-ray-collins/?utm_source=google&amp;amp;utm_medium=organic&amp;amp;utm_campaign=organic&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore I would interpret the line as describing how the sea of love they have for the dog is being piled up by the storm of their grief and its crashing and ‘breaking over them’ describes the pain of their loss, but perhaps also the knowledge that this will pass and they will come to calmer seas again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T08:37:16.763" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T08:37:16.763" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16698" CreationDate="2020-12-18T02:51:13.270" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The boys have been on a First Communion trip. It isn't clear what they were given to eat during this trip, but they don't consider it &lt;em&gt;real food&lt;/em&gt;. So presumably they were not given meals of the kind they would usually eat at home. Perhaps they ate food out of cans, or just bread and cheese, or snacks all the time. Now that they are going home, they are looking forward to eating &amp;quot;nutritious food that parents made at home&amp;quot;, as you correctly speculate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T02:51:13.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16736" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16792" CreationDate="2020-12-18T07:37:15.837" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the morning when the darkness would be gone&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That night I lay awake in bed, the other guys fast asleep around me,&#xA;the moon pouring in through the half-open curtain. Sharp memories&#xA;knocked on the door of my consciousness, and what came to me was an&#xA;old nightmare, one I had often dreamt as a child, one that had&#xA;descended upon me with cruel frequency before and after Beniek’s&#xA;departure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it I stood in an endless overgrown field. Everything was still, as&#xA;if petrified, and an overbearing silence reigned. There was no one –&#xA;not just near me or within earshot, but anywhere. With the&#xA;inexplicable logic of dreams, I was certain that I was alone in this&#xA;world, the last member of a forsaken race. I looked around and started&#xA;to see rectangular stones reaching out of the grass. They were blank&#xA;and smooth, and I knew they were tombstones. They were watching me.&#xA;Their stillness made my heart race with panic; standing there was like&#xA;an infinite fall. It all seemed so undeniably real, not like a dream&#xA;but a premonition. I’d feel violated upon waking. Outside, in the&#xA;darkness of the night, the branch of a chestnut tree would sway in the&#xA;wind and scratch against my window like a monster demanding admission,&#xA;and without thinking I’d get out of bed and tiptoe across the cool&#xA;wooden floor to my mother’s room. We would sleep together, her&#xA;enveloping me from behind with her arms around my tummy, her stale&#xA;warm breath above my head, us breathing in unison, small and large,&#xA;breathing in and out until &lt;strong&gt;the morning when the darkness would be&#xA;gone&lt;/strong&gt; and Granny would come to stir us, scolding us as we rubbed&#xA;clusters of sleep from the corners of our eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he lay in his bed at night and slept, which was when his familiar nightmare visited him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether this &amp;quot;morning&amp;quot; here would mean proper (?) morning, like at 8 or 9 a.m., or it would have a meaning close to &amp;quot;dawn,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;near sunrise.&amp;quot; I came to be confused because of the expression &amp;quot;the darkness would be gone&amp;quot; which is in the &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; clause that modifies the &amp;quot;morning.&amp;quot; So I thought, the darkness could be gone at a pretty early hour, even at 5 a.m. in summertime... But then I came to wonder whether &amp;quot;when&amp;quot; here is similar to &amp;quot;after,&amp;quot; meaning &amp;quot;the morning &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the darkness would be gone.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T20:23:57.057" Title="What does &quot;the morning when the darkness would be gone&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16737" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16748" CreationDate="2020-12-18T07:47:48.783" Score="0" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;which welcomed the touch of unknown fingers&#xA;and summer air&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Come on,’ he said, taking the flask from me and letting his hand&#xA;travel along my thigh, ‘let’s go. We’ll be better somewhere more&#xA;quiet.’ He stood without waiting for my reaction, and I followed him.&#xA;I followed him into complete darkness, towards a hole in the bushes so&#xA;black it felt like I was blind. My steps were uncertain. At some point&#xA;he stopped, me bumping into him, the two of us suddenly facing each&#xA;other. The darkness was a comfort: it was as if we’d melted into the&#xA;night and nothing that would happen would be fully real. He began to&#xA;stroke my neck, his fingers rough and calloused, and his sharp breath&#xA;on my face. My heart was threatening to break out of my chest. With a&#xA;hurried but practised hand he loosened the belt of my trousers and&#xA;pulled out my cock, &lt;strong&gt;which welcomed the touch of unknown fingers and&#xA;summer air&lt;/strong&gt;. He knelt down, disappearing from my vision, and&#xA;enveloped me in the warm cave of his mouth. It was the best feeling.&#xA;It felt like I was gliding down a tunnel, or that it was riding&#xA;through me. My head thrown back, I saw the stars in the sky. Then I&#xA;heard his fly unzipping and sensed him masturbating, rapid, urgent&#xA;movements that excited me. And as we rode like this, him panting and&#xA;me gasping, the urgency and abjection rose within me like heat, like&#xA;an irrepressible scream, mounting, pushing, taking over, until the&#xA;lights went off and I closed my eyes and exploded in his mouth, warmth&#xA;and wetness meeting in one great terrible relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_9.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he, who was a teenager unable to suppress his desire towards men, once went to the Staromiejski Park in Wroclaw, which was famous for the place where &amp;quot;inverts&amp;quot; went. There he met an old man, and engaged with him in a sexual intercourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder how his cock &amp;quot;welcomed&amp;quot; the touch of unknown fingers and summer air. And I also wonder whether it would be alright to see that his cock welcomed &amp;quot;the touch of unknown fingers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;summer air&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;the touch of unknown fingers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the touch of summer air.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:56:49.947" Title="What does &quot;which welcomed the touch of unknown fingers and summer air&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16738" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16749" CreationDate="2020-12-18T08:00:00.897" Score="-1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;He told me how he’d been in the war&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to run home straight away, knew I had to get away from this&#xA;place, and remembered Granny, who’d already be worried to death. But I&#xA;didn’t. Because after I had released myself in this stranger’s mouth,&#xA;it almost felt like I no longer had a home. So, after he had finished&#xA;with a low grunt and we’d zipped up, we returned to the bench, where&#xA;we had met on the other side of my life, and began to talk, our&#xA;barriers suddenly removed. He unwrapped story after story, and I kept&#xA;asking him questions, feeling it was my duty to learn. He told me&#xA;about his first time, in the forest with a farmer from his village. &lt;strong&gt;He&#xA;told me how he’d been in the war&lt;/strong&gt; and how he’d almost died, and how&#xA;he’d been raped by Russian soldiers in a prison camp. I nodded and&#xA;said I was sorry, and made myself feel nothing. I couldn’t allow his&#xA;pain to penetrate me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he, who was a teenager unable to suppress his desire towards men, once went to the Staromiejski Park in Wroclaw, which was famous for the place where &amp;quot;inverts&amp;quot; went. There he met an old man (who looked like he could have been Ludwik's father), and engaged with him in a sexual intercourse. After that, they began to talk with each other. The old man told Ludwik how he had been in the &amp;quot;war&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether this &amp;quot;war&amp;quot; means the Second World War, or some other war that I couldn't guess.&#xA;And, would it be alright to understand that &amp;quot;was in the war&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;participated in the war as a soldier&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:50:17.013" Title="What does &quot;He told me how he’d been in the war&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16739" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16793" CreationDate="2020-12-18T08:16:26.320" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;which gradually became the only&#xA;thing we knew&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the first morning of camp they woke us early, storming into the hut&#xA;and blowing a whistle, leaving us just enough time to brush our teeth&#xA;in the washrooms and have some milk soup and tea in the canteen. In&#xA;the coming weeks, I realised the canteen always smelled of cabbage and&#xA;grease no matter what we were having, as if the entire building had&#xA;been soaked in a concoction of the two shortly before our arrival.&#xA;Every day we’d queue for something we didn’t really want, &lt;strong&gt;which&#xA;gradually became the only thing we knew.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After breakfast we were given our uniforms, a pair of green shorts and&#xA;a green shirt, the same for boys and girls. They were made of stiff,&#xA;rough cotton that felt like canvas on my skin. The morning sun was&#xA;cool on our thighs and arms as we left the hut to assemble once again&#xA;in front of the main building. The comrade leader’s eyes hovered over&#xA;us with petty satisfaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_10.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, all students including him would queue for something, which &amp;quot;which gradually became the only thing we knew.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what became the only thing they knew. (Would that be &amp;quot;queuing&amp;quot;? Or &amp;quot;something we didn't really want?&amp;quot;) And I am confused as to what this phrase means, so I would like to ask for your help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T20:39:34.070" Title="What does &quot;which gradually became the only thing we knew&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16740" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16747" CreationDate="2020-12-18T08:23:40.720" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a guy from the year below&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At mealtimes I sat with Karolina and Beata, a friend from lectures.&#xA;She was short and round-faced and busty, quick to laugh and quick to&#xA;be frightened. She told us she was getting married right after the&#xA;camp was over, to &lt;strong&gt;a guy from the year below&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ asked Karolina, looking concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘God, no!’ cried Beata, blushing a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he sat with his friends Karolina and Agata during mealtime. Agata told them that she would marry &amp;quot;a guy from the year below&amp;quot; after the camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this expression means. Would that perhaps mean that she would marry a guy who is a third-year student, because she is currently a fourth-year student? Or would that mean that she would marry a guy who is younger than her by one year...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:52:47.443" Title="What does &quot;a guy from the year below&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16744" CreationDate="2020-12-18T08:30:45.537" Score="0" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;They can’t bear to see us having fun&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At mealtimes I sat with Karolina and Beata, a friend from lectures.&#xA;She was short and round-faced and busty, quick to laugh and quick to&#xA;be frightened. She told us she was getting married right after the&#xA;camp was over, to a guy from the year below.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’ asked Karolina, looking concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘God, no!’ cried Beata, blushing a little.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Because you know you cannot trust condoms,’ Karolina said, pretending&#xA;not to notice Beata’s deepening colour. ‘Some of those old hags in the&#xA;shops pierce them with the tiniest of needles and sell them on like&#xA;that. &lt;strong&gt;They can’t bear to see us having fun&lt;/strong&gt;. So really, you need&#xA;the pill. If you want to, I’ll take you to my doctor. She’s a woman&#xA;and she won’t ask if you’re married.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_12.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he sat with his friends Karolina and Agata during mealtime. Agata told them that she would marry a guy from the year below after the camp.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what Karolina had said. Does she mean that old women in the shops selling condoms pierced them with needles because they wanted to prevent young people from having fun, enjoying? (This is my wild guess.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:51:45.897" Title="What does &quot;They can’t bear to see us having fun&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16742" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16794" CreationDate="2020-12-18T08:39:01.647" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;Like an unwritten piece of paper&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It did me good, this walk. It reminded me of the aimless ones I would&#xA;take in Wrocław, when I could no longer stand being in the same space&#xA;as Granny or at school. There was nowhere I could be without being&#xA;with others, having to interact or to act. Even on my walks around the&#xA;block, neighbours greeted and appraised. There were times when I’d get&#xA;on the tram and ride across the city. I would get off at the last&#xA;stop, in a neighbourhood where no one knew me, and I’d wander, not&#xA;thinking, looking at the unknown streets and houses and people and&#xA;feeling free and anonymous. &lt;strong&gt;Like an unwritten piece of paper&lt;/strong&gt;. I’d&#xA;forgotten the pleasure of this, and then and there, by the river, with&#xA;the fields stretching out before me and the camp far behind me,&#xA;something of that freedom returned. The water was clear and at the&#xA;bottom I could see the bed of pebbles and light-brown mud and small&#xA;fish swimming to and fro.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_13.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he took a walk after the field work was over, and felt anonymous like &amp;quot;an unwritten piece of paper.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;unwritten&amp;quot; means here. Does it literally mean that the paper sheet was blank, with no letters written on it? Or does it perhaps mean that, though some letters were written on the paper, the name of the person who wrote those letters was not written on it, imparting the air of anonymous freedom...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:22:14.073" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:22:14.073" Title="Does &quot;Like an unwritten piece of paper&quot; mean like a paper that is literally blank in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16743" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16746" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:01:34.847" Score="1" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;along a narrow&#xA;arm of the river that snaked its way into the forest&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On our last evening the comrade leader made a speech, thanking us for&#xA;our hard work. Then he ordered us down to the river. We walked in&#xA;little groups, unsure what would happen, filled with excitement tinged&#xA;with dread. But what we came upon were dozens of little boats flopping&#xA;in the water. We got in, six to a boat, me with Karolina and Beata and&#xA;the boys from my hut, and we rowed down the river, not towards our&#xA;spot, but in the other direction, where the forests began. We formed a&#xA;line of boats with Belka at the head. We saw the sun set far behind&#xA;the fields we’d so carefully emptied that month, and &lt;strong&gt;along a narrow&#xA;arm of the river that snaked its way into the forest&lt;/strong&gt;. Tall pine&#xA;trees began surrounding us, fragrant, solemn and seemingly infinite.&#xA;It was cooler there, and utterly dark, and soon the only light came&#xA;from the faint moon above us, barely visible in-between the canyon of&#xA;the treetops, and the distant light of Belka’s torch in front. We&#xA;heard the sound of light paws on the forest floor, and the cracking of&#xA;branches. An owl hooted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_17.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). On the last night of the camp, the comrade leader held a party for students who worked hard on the fields for the past month.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether it would be right to understand the structure of the sentence to be &amp;quot;We saw the sun set (1) far behind the fields we’d so carefully emptied that month, and [we saw the sun set] (2) &lt;strong&gt;along a narrow arm of the river that snaked its way into the forest&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;In short, I wonder whether it would be alright to see that the setting sun was the background of the fields and the river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like to ask you whether &amp;quot;along&amp;quot; implies that the river snaked along (across?) the fields too before coming into the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I would like to ask you whether &amp;quot;snaked its way into&amp;quot; means that the river was curved, and flowed in a hard, not-so-smooth manner to come into the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:46:56.027" Title="What does &quot;along a narrow arm of the river that snaked its way into the forest&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16744" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16741" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:05:36.833" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, Karolina means that the women selling condoms do not like it when people use those prophylactics. This is probably because Poland was, and to a large extent still is, a conservative country. Religious observance in Poland is very high compared to the rest of Europe. Over 92% of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_in_Poland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poles are Roman Catholic&lt;/a&gt;, and about 80% of them still go to Confession at least once a year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tenet of Catholicism is that artificial birth control is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/christianity/christianethics/contraception_1.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;intrinsically evil&lt;/a&gt;. Any sex act that is not &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.catholicmarriageprep.com/resources/164-counselor/dear-ron/684-oral-sex-clarification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;open to life&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, i.e., that forecloses the possibility of conception, is impermissible. Hence, using condoms is against the Catholic faith. The &amp;quot;old hags in the shops&amp;quot; would strongly disapprove of the use of condoms, and they would pierce them with needles so that they will be ineffective as contraception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another tenet is that sex is permitted only within marriage, and only for the purpose of procreation. When Karolina says that the old hags &amp;quot;can't bear to see us having fun&amp;quot;, she is also talking about the prohibition against premarital sex. She says the women in the shops disapprove of unmarried young people having sex, and so they pierce the condoms with needles to increase the likelihood that the woman will get pregnant and so be punished for indulging in sex outside marriage. (Getting an abortion is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Poland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nearly impossible&lt;/a&gt; in Poland.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you note, Karolina is also ascribing envy as a motive for the women's behavior. When she claims &amp;quot;they can't bear to see us having fun&amp;quot;, there is the implication that the &amp;quot;old hags&amp;quot; themselves are just past any enjoyable sex life, and so try to destroy the sex lives of young people by sabotaging the means of having sex safely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T10:51:45.897" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:51:45.897" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16745" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:12:18.900" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chorus of Adam Lambert's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Adam-lambert-there-i-said-it-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;There I Said It&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there, I said it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I won't apologize to you anymore&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause I'm a grown ass man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I won't live again&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I'm sick and tired of livin' in your shadow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So there, I said it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No, I won't apologize to you anymore&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Cause I'm a grown ass man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I don't understand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Why I should be livin' in the shadows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So there, I said it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, looking through the rest of the lyrics to the song, I can't quite figure out what the &amp;quot;I said it&amp;quot; actually &lt;em&gt;refers&lt;/em&gt; to. He doesn't seem to come out and say something explicitly; the whole song is just about saying it, as far as I can tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what does &amp;quot;There , I said it&amp;quot; actually refer to in this song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T05:46:16.977" Title="In Adam Lambert's &quot;There I Said It&quot;, what does he actually say?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;adam-lambert&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16743" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:46:56.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The arm of a river is a branch of a river that flows into the main stream. For example, one may describe the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bukhan_River&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bukhan River&lt;/a&gt; as a arm of the Han River in Korea. (The geographical term is tributary or affluent).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Jedrowski's novel, the &amp;quot;narrow arm of the river&amp;quot; is a tributary that isn't wide at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It &amp;quot;snaked its way&amp;quot; means that it didn't follow a direct course but has many curves, just like a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meander&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meander&lt;/a&gt;. As the river flows in the direction of the forest and then into the forest, it follows a path that is similar to that of the movements of a snake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:46:56.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16740" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:52:47.443" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In schools and many other educational institutions, pupils or students are usually grouped based on age. The UK uses the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_(education)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;form&lt;/a&gt;; the USA uses the term &amp;quot;grade&amp;quot;. So &amp;quot;a guy from the year below&amp;quot; would be someone who began the same type of education one year later than the story's narrator and would typically be one year younger (unless the repeated a year at some point in the past).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:52:47.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16737" CreationDate="2020-12-18T09:56:49.947" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ludwik's cock welcomes &amp;quot;the touch of unknown fingers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the touch of summer air&amp;quot;. His cock feels another person's fingers on it for the first time, so those are &lt;em&gt;unknown fingers&lt;/em&gt;, as it has not known this sensation before. The fact that the old man is a stranger is another sense in which the fingers are unknown—they belong to someone who is unknown to him. Since that touch is pleasurable, it is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/welcome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;welcome&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;; as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/welcome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster definition&lt;/a&gt; (adjective, meaning 2) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;giving pleasure : received with gladness or delight especially in response to a need&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence Ludwik's cock &lt;em&gt;welcomes&lt;/em&gt; the man's fingers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The summer air also feels pleasant on his cock, and so that is welcomed as well. Syntactically, we know that it's specifically the touch of the summer air because that's how parallelism works. Parallel structure requires that the parallel elements have the same grammatical construction. &lt;em&gt;The touch of unknown fingers&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;summer air&lt;/em&gt; are not grammatically parallel constructions; &lt;em&gt;unknown fingers&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;summer air&lt;/em&gt;, both being adjective + noun, are. So the sentence structure makes it clear that Ludwik's cock is welcoming &amp;quot;the touch of unknown fingers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the touch of summer air&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it was just the summer air itself and not its touch specifically that his cock welcomed, the sentence would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;welcomed the touch of unknown fingers and the summer air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The addition of a definite article before &amp;quot;summer air&amp;quot; would make &amp;quot;the summer air&amp;quot; parallel to &amp;quot;the touch of unknown fingers&amp;quot; in the sense that they're both definite article + noun phrase. But since there's no definite article before &amp;quot;summer air&amp;quot;, the grammatical unit is not&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;welcomed ... &lt;strike&gt;the&lt;/strike&gt; summer air&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;welcomed the touch of ... summer air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there were a definite article before &amp;quot;summer air&amp;quot;, the parallelism wouldn't be quite as neat as the sentence as written is, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T09:56:49.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16738" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:05:49.090" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it's WW II that the man is talking about. In the 1980s, that's the most likely war for an old Polish man to have been in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;How he was in the war&lt;/em&gt; is straightforward: it simply means &lt;em&gt;that he was in the war&lt;/em&gt;. See how, conjunction, definition 1b at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/how&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;THAT&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T10:50:17.013" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:50:17.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16759" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:42:55.340" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a country junction&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first car that stopped took us east. The driver, a middle-aged&#xA;man, eyed us from time to time but asked no questions. We drove&#xA;silently along country avenues lined with tall chestnut trees, past&#xA;fields bordered by poppies. I had no idea where we were. We had no map&#xA;and there were few road signs, but even if there had been more the&#xA;names of the places would have meant nothing to me. While I took it&#xA;in, this nameless expanse, you slept with your face against the&#xA;window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some point in the afternoon the driver let us out at &lt;strong&gt;a country&#xA;junction&lt;/strong&gt;. You tore a coupon from your hitch-hiker’s booklet and&#xA;passed it to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Hope you send it in and win a hairdryer or something!’ you cried, and&#xA;swung the doors shut. He nodded and sped off into the horizon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_17.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. So they hitchhiked a car, whose driver let them out at a &amp;quot;country junction.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether this &amp;quot;country junction&amp;quot; means a crossing of roads in the countryside, as in the following picture, or has some other meaning that I couldn't guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SLmfi.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/SLmfi.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:21:55.200" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:21:55.200" Title="Does &quot;a country junction&quot; mean a crossing of roads in the countryside in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16751" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16742" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:44:05.100" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is not used in the literal sense here. When they say life is a blank paper, or an unwritten piece of paper, it signifies that life can be made to take any turn as wanted by our actions, just like a blank paper can be written on with anything we feel like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is telling about their unplanned tram journey across the city and how they used to get down at the last stop and explore a previously unexplored neighbourhood. Being among strangers made them feel free and anonymous, just like a blank paper waiting to be written upon with different life experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T10:44:05.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16752" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16764" CreationDate="2020-12-18T10:55:35.563" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I was paralysed by possibility,&#xA;caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and&#xA;the abyss of uncertainty.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Goodnight,’ you said after you’d switched off your torch. You&#xA;undressed without a trace of self-consciousness, your silhouette in&#xA;the dark crawling into the sleeping bag next to mine. I could hear you&#xA;breathe, like a gentle crashing of waves. And slowly, drop by drop,&#xA;the rain started up again. It pattered on the roof like fingertips&#xA;practising piano chords. We lay on our backs and listened, not saying&#xA;a word. I sensed you near me, your body somehow animated despite its&#xA;stillness. My heart was beating faster than the rain. Suddenly I&#xA;wanted to be close to you, desperately so. I could feel the pull of&#xA;your body, little strings drawing me towards you. But I couldn’t move.&#xA;Heartbeats passed, light years of back and forth in my mind, and just&#xA;when I began to think I would never have the courage, you shifted&#xA;towards me and placed your head on my shoulder. My heart stopped. I&#xA;didn’t dare breathe. Your head was heavy, like warm marble, and your&#xA;hair brushed my cheek. &lt;strong&gt;I was paralysed by possibility, caught&#xA;between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty.&lt;/strong&gt; I&#xA;thought of how rashly I’d acted with Beniek that night so many years&#xA;earlier, at the dance, when the lights had gone out. How painful and&#xA;unforeseeable the consequences had been. Despite that, I had just&#xA;gathered the strength to think about what it would be like to touch my&#xA;hand to your hair, that it was the only right thing to do, that now&#xA;wasn’t then, when you whispered, ‘Goodnight, Ludzio’, and shifted away&#xA;from me. It was the first time you had called me that, you’d changed&#xA;my name affectionately. It made the void on my shoulder even more&#xA;unbearable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_19.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. On the way to the lake district, it rained through the night and they decided to stay the night at a barn of some family living at a farmhouse. When they lay close to each other, Ludwik and Janusz felt pull towards each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;possibility&amp;quot; means here. Does it mean that Ludwik imagined all kinds of possibilities that might come true in this situation, he being close to Janusz?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as for &amp;quot;the vertigo of fulfillment,&amp;quot; would that mean he thought his imagination was fulfilled (came true) because Janusz came towards him, and he felt dizziness because of the realization of his dream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly, I would like to ask about &amp;quot;the abyss of uncertainty.&amp;quot; Would that mean he felt uneasiness, worries as to what happen next, and that it felt like an abyss...? And in this case, would it be alright to understand that &amp;quot;uncertainty&amp;quot; here is the dark side of the &amp;quot;possibility&amp;quot; mentioned earlier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:19:27.157" Title="What does &quot;I was paralysed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty.&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16753" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16755" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:06:57.227" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;suddenly close again in the dark&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We walked out of the barn and into the house. There was a dark&#xA;corridor that smelled of must and soot and earth. Nothing seemed to be&#xA;moving. A few beams of light revealed a world of dust specks floating&#xA;in the air, and on the wall Jesus hung on a cross, muscles and ribs&#xA;defined, naked but for his loincloth. We looked at each other for a&#xA;moment, quizzically,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;suddenly close again in the dark&lt;/strong&gt;. Down the creaking corridor we found the kitchen on the right, where the young girl stood by the&#xA;stove over a pot of steaming milk. She’d taken off her headscarf and&#xA;her long darkblonde hair fell all the way down her back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Come and have a seat,’ said an old woman by the table in the corner.&#xA;‘You must be hungry.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_19.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. On the way to the lake district, it rained through the night and they decided to stay the night at a barn of some family living at a farmhouse. When they lay close to each other in the dark, Ludwik and Janusz felt pull towards each other. But Ludwik didn't have the courage to come close to Janusz, and so the night passed without anything particular happening. Next morning, the two, invited by the daughter of the farmhouse family, went to the farmhouse. But, on the way to the kitchen, they felt &amp;quot;suddenly close again in the dark&amp;quot; in the corridor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this question might be or might not be connected to my other question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/16752/what-does-i-was-paralysed-by-possibility-caught-between-the-vertigo-of-fulfilm&quot;&gt;What does &amp;quot;I was paralysed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty.&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/a&gt;). I am wondering whether it would be right to understand that they felt close again in the dark, just like they had the night before, when they looked at each other in the corridor. But I couldn't be sure, so I wanted to ask you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T11:19:55.223" Title="What does &quot;suddenly close again in the dark&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16754" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16756" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:16:36.240" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;said through a bite of radish&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So you’re students,’ the mother said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, ma’am,’ you &lt;strong&gt;said through a bite of radish&lt;/strong&gt;, looking more at&#xA;ease than I felt. ‘Just finished our studies.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She nodded, as if she was agreeing to something uncertain. ‘Married?’&#xA;she asked, looking at you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No, ma’am,’ you said, shaking your head, smiling at her. ‘Not yet. Am&#xA;still young.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She laughed in her hoarse voice, revealing a set of missing front&#xA;teeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_20.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. On the way to the lake district, it rained through the night and they decided to stay the night at a barn of some family living at a farmhouse. In the morning, after their night stay, they were invited to the family's kitchen for breakfast. At the table, the wife of the farmer asked Janusz some questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;saying through a bite of radish&amp;quot; means. Would that mean he took a bite, swallowed, said, and took another bite? Or would that mean he took a bite and said, the radish still in his mouth?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T11:27:18.867" Title="What does &quot;said through a bite of radish&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16753" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:19:55.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;suddenly close again&amp;quot; means that they felt the same closeness again that they had felt during the night in the barn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;in the dark&amp;quot; is literal, since they are standing in a &amp;quot;dark corridor&amp;quot; (see first sentence in the quoted passage).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T11:19:55.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16754" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:27:18.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bite here means a mouthful. In other words, Janusz still has radish in his mouth while he speaks those words, so he quite literally needs to speak &lt;em&gt;through&lt;/em&gt; it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the author wanted to say that the character had taken a bite, swallowed it, and then spoke those words before taking another bite, he would more likely have written &amp;quot;between two bites&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T11:27:18.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16757" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16791" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:28:55.733" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;letting its current&#xA;take over&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You smelled of water and pines. There was softness, and there was&#xA;hardness. I could sense your tan under my fingertips, and with your&#xA;strong, solid hands you drew me afresh, creating me, the small of my&#xA;back, my inner thighs … and you. Your back, your chest, your stomach,&#xA;your thighs, your cock. Hard and impossibly close beneath the softness&#xA;of your briefs, caressing my palm, obvious, world-shattering,&#xA;demanding. We moved fervently, struggling. There was so much I could&#xA;not get enough of, so much I would never be able to grasp or possess,&#xA;no matter how much I tried. And I tried, we tried. Covering ourselves&#xA;with each other, merging into one, pulling, following the pull,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;letting its current take over&lt;/strong&gt;. Our sighs were shared, refused to release us. The night reminded me of the Easter bonfires I would watch&#xA;as a child in the park nearby, where the pyramid of wood burned from&#xA;top to bottom, chasing the ghosts of winter, bringing a thaw,&#xA;releasing the warmth from the dormant, the resting. The flames would&#xA;hypnotise me. I’d merge with them, with their dancing, destroying, and&#xA;bearing. We played this struggle, breathless and elated, heads light&#xA;and filled and spinning, until exhaustion, until we released ourselves&#xA;on to each other and fell asleep entangled like weeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_21.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. They finally arrived at the lake district, and stayed by the lake for some days after pitching their tent. During their stay, they made love with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; &amp;quot;current&amp;quot; would mean, and what it would mean for its current to &amp;quot;take over.&amp;quot; I understand that, in this sentence, they covered each other with their bodies, unified as one, while pulling one towards the other, and the one letting his body to be pulled towards the other (Am I understanding right till now?). But as for the &amp;quot;current&amp;quot; of the &amp;quot;pull,&amp;quot; (Would it be right to see that &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;pull&amp;quot; here?) I am not sure whether it means the &amp;quot;flow&amp;quot; of the pull, or even the &amp;quot;electric current&amp;quot; of the pull, implying that the pull made them thrilled, electrified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T17:23:45.203" Title="What does &quot;letting its current take over&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16758" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16796" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:35:05.570" Score="2" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;There was so much I could not get enough of, so much I would never be able to grasp or possess, no matter how much I tried.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You smelled of water and pines. There was softness, and there was&#xA;hardness. I could sense your tan under my fingertips, and with your&#xA;strong, solid hands you drew me afresh, creating me, the small of my&#xA;back, my inner thighs … and you. Your back, your chest, your stomach,&#xA;your thighs, your cock. Hard and impossibly close beneath the softness&#xA;of your briefs, caressing my palm, obvious, world-shattering,&#xA;demanding. We moved fervently, struggling. &lt;strong&gt;There was so much I could&#xA;not get enough of, so much I would never be able to grasp or possess,&#xA;no matter how much I tried.&lt;/strong&gt; And I tried, we tried. Covering ourselves&#xA;with each other, merging into one, pulling, following the pull,&#xA;letting its current take over. Our sighs were shared, refused to release us. The night reminded me of the Easter bonfires I would watch&#xA;as a child in the park nearby, where the pyramid of wood burned from&#xA;top to bottom, chasing the ghosts of winter, bringing a thaw,&#xA;releasing the warmth from the dormant, the resting. The flames would&#xA;hypnotise me. I’d merge with them, with their dancing, destroying, and&#xA;bearing. We played this struggle, breathless and elated, heads light&#xA;and filled and spinning, until exhaustion, until we released ourselves&#xA;on to each other and fell asleep entangled like weeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_21.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. They finally arrived at the lake district, and stayed by the lake for some days after pitching their tent. During their stay, they made love with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;so much&amp;quot; means. Does it mean perhaps the narrator felt that there was so much desire that he would not be able to grasp it (fulfill it) forever? Or would that mean he felt the concept of love was so grand that he thought he would not be able to possess it? Or is it probably a talk about possessing one's partner, that one might never possess the other...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T22:08:20.830" Title="What does &quot;There was so much I could not get enough of, so much I would never be able to grasp or possess, no matter how much I tried.&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16759" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16750" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:42:10.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Yes, your interpretation is right.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/junction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;junction&lt;/a&gt; (see meaning 2b) in this context means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2 a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; a place or point of meeting&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; an intersection of roads especially where one terminates&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &amp;quot;country&amp;quot; here is used as an adjective related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/country&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;meaning 4 of the noun&lt;/a&gt;, in the same way as in the phrase &amp;quot;country avenues&amp;quot; in the preceding paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(n.) 4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; rural as distinguished from urban areas&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;(adj.) 1&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; of, relating to, or characteristic of the country&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense in context, since we already know they're driving through the countryside, and the only kind of &amp;quot;junction&amp;quot; to be found there would be a junction of roads (not e.g. an electronic junction).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T11:42:10.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16760" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16763" CreationDate="2020-12-18T11:47:20.927" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;total inconsequence&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You coming?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First I slipped off my sandals, then my shirt. I folded it carefully&#xA;and lay it on a soft spot on the ground. I took off my shorts, and&#xA;then, with a flicker of hesitation, my underwear. You had turned away,&#xA;swum a little way off. I stood there feeling the wind graze my chest,&#xA;tickle me between my legs. I looked at the water. I couldn’t see&#xA;through its body, couldn’t assess its contents. But I stepped in. And&#xA;the water embraced me completely, softly and coolly. I felt myself&#xA;anew, as if something in me had been switched on after a long time. It&#xA;was a sensation of lightness and power and &lt;strong&gt;total inconsequence&lt;/strong&gt;. I&#xA;began to move, and every movement propelled me forward. The sky above&#xA;was lighter than the water, specked with tiny clouds. I was conscious&#xA;of the unknown underneath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_21.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the agricultural camp (which was mandatory for college graduation). At the camp, he met Janusz, who would soon become his lover. After the camp, Ludwik decided to go to a lake district with Janusz. They finally arrived at the lake district, and, as soon as they arrived, they began to swim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;total inconsequence&amp;quot; means. Actually, this expression appears about twice in this novel. The other sentence in which &amp;quot;inconsequence&amp;quot; appears is here, in Chapter 4, when they visited the university swimming pool:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During those weeks, you and I would go to the university pool every&#xA;now and then. It wasn’t far from the Old Town, tucked in below the&#xA;ramparts of the faculty grounds. I remember its large reception hall&#xA;and the strong smell of chlorine – how I liked that smell – and the&#xA;cloakroom where we left our shoes in a shared cloth bag. In the&#xA;changing rooms we undressed amongst other boys, drying themselves,&#xA;joking around, unaware of their nudity, or used to it like something&#xA;that was a given – strong backs and thighs and asses, skin smooth and&#xA;covered in drops like forest leaves after rain. But in a strange way&#xA;this didn’t excite me. When we were naked like that, changing,&#xA;showering amongst them, we weren’t really ourselves. We were lighter,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;without consequence&lt;/strong&gt;. We took off our roles along with our clothes, and&#xA;only belonged to the anonymous world of bodies. And when we swam our&#xA;rounds and I pushed through the water, I felt even lighter. It&#xA;reminded me of our summer together, of the ease with which we’d&#xA;floated across the lake. As I swam I dissolved in the water, and&#xA;something came to me from the depths of my memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_32.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wonder whether these &amp;quot;inconsequence&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;without consequence&amp;quot; mean the same thing. I had guessed from the &amp;quot;without consequence&amp;quot; in Chapter 4 that it might mean &amp;quot;without responsibilites,&amp;quot; but, I think it could mean &amp;quot;without cares/worries/concerns,&amp;quot; so I could not be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:03:03.550" Title="What does &quot;total inconsequence&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16761" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16839" CreationDate="2020-12-18T12:41:58.333" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a young boy in a Canadian village, who was smoking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Young Hiram’s devotion to the Goddess Nicotine had never reached the altitude of a cigar. He had surreptitiously smoked a pipe in a secluded corner behind the barn in days when his father was away. He feared both his father and his mother, and so was in an even more embarrassing situation than old Hiram himself. He had worked gradually up to tobacco by &lt;strong&gt;smoking cigarettes of cane&lt;/strong&gt; made from abandoned hoop-skirts. Crinoline was fashionable, even in the country, in those days, and &lt;strong&gt;ribs of cane&lt;/strong&gt; were used before the metallic distenders of dresses came in. One hoop-skirt, whose usefulness as an article of adornment was gone, would furnish delight and smoking material for a company of boys for a month. &lt;strong&gt;The cane smoke made the tongue rather raw, but the wickedness was undeniable.&lt;/strong&gt; Yates’ wink seemed to recognize young Hiram as a comrade worthy to offer incense at the shrine, and the boy was a firm friend of Yates from the moment the eyelid of the latter drooped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How could the cane be used instead of tobacco in cigarettes? And did the author mean &amp;quot;sugarcane&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bamboo&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And what's meant by &amp;quot;ribs of cane&amp;quot;, are they &amp;quot;the outer crust of cane&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What could be meant by &amp;quot;made the tongue rather raw&amp;quot;? and what's the contradiction in this statement, that made the author use &amp;quot;but&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T08:37:13.240" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T08:37:13.240" Title="How could the cane be used instead of tobacco in cigarettes in the late 1800s?" Tags="&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16763" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16760" CreationDate="2020-12-18T13:03:03.550" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, the author associates lightness with freedom and therefore with inconsequence, or with lack of consequence -- so free you don't have to care about the consequences of your actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:03:03.550" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16752" CreationDate="2020-12-18T13:19:27.157" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was paralysed by possibility, caught between the vertigo of fulfilment and the abyss of uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;describes the psychological state of not knowing what to do. &amp;quot;paralyzed&amp;quot; is semantically linked with &amp;quot;caught&amp;quot;: the character was double-minded between the excitement (vertigo) of going ahead and the panic (abyss) of ignoring how things would turn out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T13:19:27.157" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16765" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16766" CreationDate="2020-12-18T14:07:41.547" Score="5" ViewCount="329" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 43 of Anna Sewell's &lt;em&gt;Black Beauty&lt;/em&gt;, the lady at the hospital mentions &amp;quot;Mary&amp;quot; several times. It seems like Mary is Jerry's wife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, Barker,” she said, “it would be a great pity that you should seriously risk your health in this work, not only for your own but for Mary's and the children's sake; there are many places where good drivers or good grooms are wanted, and if ever you think you ought to give up this cab work let me know.”&#xA;Then sending some kind messages to Mary she put something into his hand, saying, “There is five shillings each for the two children; Mary will know how to spend it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Jerry's wife is Polly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jeremiah Barker was my new master's name, but as every one called him Jerry, I shall do the same. Polly, his wife, was just as good a match as a man could have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So who is Mary? She seems to be mentioned five times in that chapter, but nowhere else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11652" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T14:12:37.823" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:43:16.487" Title="Who is Mary in Black Beauty?" Tags="&lt;black-beauty&gt;&lt;anna-sewell&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16766" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16765" CreationDate="2020-12-18T14:15:00.707" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mary is her real name and “Polly” is her pet name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Polly&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;lt; &lt;em&gt;Poll&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Poll&lt;/strong&gt; originally a rhyming form of &lt;em&gt;Moll&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moll&lt;/strong&gt; pet form of the female forename &lt;em&gt;Mary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lady at the hospital either did not know Mary’s pet name, or, more likely, was not on familiar enough terms with the Barkers to use it. You can see from her addressing Jerry as “Barker” that she was not on first-name terms with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of examples where the correspondence of real and pet name is clearer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Very likely,’ said the Duke, ‘but &lt;strong&gt;Mary&lt;/strong&gt; can’t marry a policeman.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Now, look here,’ said Wimsey, tucking his sister’s arm in his, ‘you leave &lt;strong&gt;Polly&lt;/strong&gt; alone.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dorothy L. Sayers (1930). &lt;em&gt;Strong Poison&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 23. London: Gollancz.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Let me ask her. Just run in and tell her I want her.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Georgiana did so, and soon returned with &lt;strong&gt;Mary&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Polly&lt;/strong&gt;,” said Tom, “I’ve proved that you are to be trusted.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Cockton (1851). &lt;em&gt;The Love Match&lt;/em&gt;, p. 60. London: W. M. Clark.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:43:16.487" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:43:16.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16767" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-18T14:54:00.500" Score="4" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often read that some things are very difficult to translate without losing significant meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance, many Muslims say that the Koran can be understood only in the original Arabic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translating the Quran has always been problematic and difficult. Many argue that the Quranic text cannot be reproduced in another language or form. Furthermore, an Arabic word may have a range of meanings depending on the context, making an accurate translation even more difficult.&#xA;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran#Translations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quran - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I've read that much of Shakespeare, especially &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, doesn't translate well into French, but it falls naturally into Klingon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the other extreme, Samuel Becket wrote some of his works in French and then translated them back into English for publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are untranslatable works simply a mythos that has built up over time, or is there really something intrinsic to some works of literature that binds them to their original language?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that I'm not asking about puns and rhymes, which obviously &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; bound to the language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T21:24:16.867" Title="Are some works of literature almost impossible to translate correctly?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16690" CreationDate="2020-12-18T15:09:15.987" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As verbose pointed out in a comment, &amp;quot;rounded streets&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;curved streets&amp;quot;. Below are a few other examples of the same usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;The neighborhood's Old Norwood Park pocket also breaks from Chicago's typical grid with rounded streets that curve around spacious estates and vintage single-family homes.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neighborhoods.com/neighborhood-guides/il/chicago/northwest/norwood-park&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norwood Park, Neighborhoods.com&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;(...), I exited the diner towards my waiting BMW. Shoving the key into the ignition I made the familiar drive up the curved and rounded streets.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12615265/1/Hello-So-Long&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from &amp;quot;Hello, So Long&amp;quot; by Twinflaming, on fanfiction.net&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Bilbao-a city with curves. Nothing sexy, nothing feminine, but a mesh of glass and brick. Rounded streets of the old town mimic a curved ravine.&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://aboutbasquecountry.eus/2014/08/11/una-joven-viajera-fotografa-y-poetisa-canadiense-en-el-pais-de-los-vascos/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About Basque Country&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T15:09:15.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16769" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T15:36:04.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T15:36:04.617" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T15:36:04.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16770" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T15:36:04.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Swimming in the Dark' (2020) by Tomasz Jędrowski. Should be tagged with [tomasz-jedrowski]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:20:29.297" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:20:29.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16771" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:13:32.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:13:32.110" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:13:32.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16772" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:13:32.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Tomasz Jedrowski or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:21:52.080" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:21:52.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16773" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:14:18.033" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:14:18.033" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:14:18.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16774" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:14:18.033" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Indian diplomat Shyam Saran (born 1946)." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:20:15.840" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:20:15.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16775" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:15:58.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:15:58.457" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:15:58.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16776" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:15:58.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Anna Sewell (1820-1878) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:21:47.117" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:21:47.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16777" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:17:08.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:17:08.467" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:17:08.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16778" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:17:08.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American songwriter Adam Lambert (born 1982) or his life. Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:18:37.260" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:18:37.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16779" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:18:55.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:18:55.090" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:18:55.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16780" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:18:55.090" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:20:21.957" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:20:21.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16781" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:20:04.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:20:04.447" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:20:04.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16782" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:20:04.447" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini (born 1965) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:21:40.867" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:21:40.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16783" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:22:10.790" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:22:10.790" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:22:10.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16784" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:22:10.790" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse' (1877), or more commonly known as just 'Black Beauty', by Anna Sewell. Should be tagged with [anna-sewell]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:32:39.743" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:32:39.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16785" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:23:42.433" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:23:42.433" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:23:42.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16786" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:23:42.433" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book &quot;How India Sees the World&quot; (2017) by Shyam Saran. Should be tagged with [shyam-saran]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:33:37.463" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:33:37.463" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16787" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:25:58.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:25:58.077" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:25:58.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16788" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:25:58.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Last of the Mohicans' (1826) by James Fenimore Cooper. Should be tagged with [james-fenimore-cooper]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:32:56.390" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:32:56.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16789" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:27:29.777" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:27:29.777" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:27:29.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16790" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-18T16:27:29.777" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'A Thousand Splendid Suns' (2007) by Khaled Hosseini. Should be tagged with [khaled-hosseini]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-18T16:32:08.420" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T16:32:08.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16757" CreationDate="2020-12-18T17:23:45.203" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;pull&amp;quot; in this context isn't simply physical; it refers to the boys' attraction to each other and their desire for each other. This feeling can become so strong that it appears to escape control and becomes a force of its own. If two lovers surrender to this force, they are &amp;quot;letting its current take over&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T17:23:45.203" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16792" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16736" CreationDate="2020-12-18T20:23:57.057" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Morning&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;the morning when the darkness would be gone&amp;quot; would be around sunrise, so the darkness would be literally gone. What time of day that is depends on the year, which is not mentioned in the quoted passage. In a city such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://sunsetsunrisetime.com/sun/wroclaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wroclaw&lt;/a&gt;[1] this could be any time between 4:37 and 7:54 a.m. (though the darkness may last longer on very cloudy days).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The interesting thing about the quoted passage, however, is that there is no paragraph break between the sentences &amp;quot;It all seemed so undeniably real, not like a dream but a premonition. I’d feel violated upon waking.&amp;quot; These two sentences make the transition from the dream world to the waking world. However, the absence of the paragraph break may be read as suggesting that the nightmare world somehow persists in the real world. From this point of view, the darkness in &amp;quot;the morning when the darkness would be gone&amp;quot; can also be read as referring to the nightmare's threatening atmosphere. (Of course, if the missing paragraph break is just an error in the question and is not present in the novel, then this whole argument is irrelevant.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I know the story is set in a rural area instead of a city, but the site SunsetSunriseTime.com only provides this type of information for cities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T20:23:57.057" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16739" CreationDate="2020-12-18T20:39:34.070" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entire passage from &amp;quot;I realised the canteen always smelled of cabbage and grease ...&amp;quot; until the end of the paragraph suggests that the food at the camp wasn't very tasty. The author starts building up towards this that the canteen always smelled the same, regardless of the food that was being served there. In other words, when queuing up, the smell from the canteen does not help them guess what will be served there; the cooks somehow manage to make every meal smell the same. (Since this camp is mandatory, the organisers probably try to keep costs down by being cheap ingredients. In addition, the people preparing the food might not be professional cooks.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The unattractiveness of the food is then stressed by describing it as &amp;quot;something we didn’t really want&amp;quot;. The students at the camp have this experience day after day: eating food they don't really want. It is a repeating pattern that &amp;quot;gradually became the only thing we knew&amp;quot;; in other words, the only thing they know about the food is that it is something they didn't really want.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T20:39:34.070" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16742" CreationDate="2020-12-18T20:56:00.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Comparing anonymity with being &amp;quot;like an unwritten piece of paper&amp;quot; strikes me as unusual but it can be explained. An unwritten piece of paper has no names or other words on it and therefore cannot be identified is being part of a specific text or as belonging to a specific person, unlike the &amp;quot;papers&amp;quot; (official documents or an identity card) that you carry with you. An unwritten piece of paper does not have any content that draws attention to itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that this interpretation assumes that &amp;quot;Like an unwritten piece of paper&amp;quot; refers back to the last part of the preceding sentence: &amp;quot;feeling free and anonymous&amp;quot;. This experience is contrasted with the narrator's experience when walking around in his neighbourhood: &amp;quot;Even on my walks around the block, neighbours greeted and appraised.&amp;quot; In his own neighbourhood, he is not anonymous, so he is not like an &amp;quot;unwritten piece of paper&amp;quot; but more like a piece of paper with everything the neighbours know about him written on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T20:56:00.863" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16795" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16767" CreationDate="2020-12-18T21:24:16.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;We use metaphor so much we don't even notice: joining the fray is a metaphor from weaving we apply to battle, when moving we weave from side to side, and shuttle is another weaving term applied to spaceships! Much of this extending of language has come from poetry; the kennings of Darraðarljóð in the Njals saga made me notice the prevalance of weaving metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ecclesiastes is considered a profoundly subversive book of the Old Testament, at odds on many points with the other parts, but I would say the participatory, recitable nature of it explains why it is there, and why it is read both at weddings &amp;amp; funerals, and even became a pop song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare, TS Eliot, Robert Burns &amp;amp; Tolstoy, among many others, reference Ecclesiastes, which would take substantial background to interpret. From Hebrew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'This too shall pass' and 'Know thyself' are aphorisms that have gone on to influence literally millennia of philosophy and literature, so even though they are first recorded in Persian &amp;amp; Ancient Greek respectively, they are woven into our language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Golden Bough is another is another example. Aeneas gave it as an offering to Proserpina to enter the underworld &amp;amp; speak with his father, who&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The seeds of life— fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they&#xA;are weighed down by the bodies' ills or dulled by earthly limbs and&#xA;flesh that's born for death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which is echoed by Yeats' Sailing To Byzantium, which influenced Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men (not to mention Frazer's foundational work of anthropology).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Norse, Hebrew, Greek, Persian. We have cultural continuity with these examples, not only translations but context, set in history &amp;amp; culture. How much is enough, to 'get' these? It depends a lot on what a given era or writer would have read, how deep their references run.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say where a living culture of (human) understanding exists, it is translatable, with enough study and shared experience between cultures &amp;amp; languages. It might require substantial introduction, introducing new words even (from schadenfreude to bungalow this has alwats happened), &amp;amp; awareness of a body of cultural reference. But humans are fundamentally intersubjective in our communicating, we invite others into an experience we have, and vice-versa, and this is the basis by which meaning is transferred, founded from proprioception, to mirror neurons, to conceptualising example-giving given contexts in modes of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dolphins have recently been understood to communicate with hologram-like sound pictures. Though we know their intelligence is somewhere very similar to humans, we are still a substantial way from communicating with them. We need a Rosetta stone, or perhaps more aptly the kind of analysis that led to understanding Linear B Greek (Linear A is still a mystery). We will need cultural context of example-giving, of the kind junior individuals are given, towards building a shared understanding of context, to ensure correct translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There may be qualia unique to dolphin senses and brain structure, but I would argue they can be simulated, and switched between, by both species, to build a shared cultural context that can access the thoughts of both species.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dead languages, and extinct species, we cannot access, if we cannot find continuity of lived understanding, like the Rosetta Stone or Linear B examples of shared experience, or later inheritor &amp;amp; interpreters of that culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even puns &amp;amp; rhymes can be given background, and layers of explanation to how they are experienced by native speakers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dongshan was asked &amp;quot;What is Buddha?&amp;quot;, and answered &amp;quot;Three pounds of flax.&amp;quot; I learned recently this is the amount of fibre to weave a monks robe. Koans are often considered untranslatable, potentially meaningless to the 'unenlightened'. But really, occur set against sophisticated theological debates, as experienced directly by a student. Koans began as 'Transmission Of The Lamp' genre phrases recording the moment a patriarch demonstrated their capacity to inherit that title, and show their ability to keep alive the spirit of Zen, in resolving the contradictions they have encountered.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many texts which have not been translated. There may be very few speakers of both languages across some cultural divides, or scholarly enough in. I see problems with translation as more of these kinds, than as fundamental.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9826" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T21:24:16.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16796" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16758" CreationDate="2020-12-18T22:08:20.830" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two young men have been attracted to each other for some time and are now getting more intimate with each other. I think the bolded sentence describes the feeling of not getting quite &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; enough. A few sentences later, the narrator describes how he &amp;quot;merged&amp;quot; with the flames of the Easer bonfires. Now with his lover, he wants to experience this same feeling, but this time of merging with another person. But this feeling does not quite reach the level he is hoping for; this level expressed through the words &amp;quot;so much I would never be able to grasp or possess&amp;quot;; it is somehow beyond reach, this is why he does &amp;quot;not get enough of&amp;quot; it, he desires more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words &amp;quot;no matter how much I tried&amp;quot; refer to the love making that attempts to achieve this feeling of merging with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-18T22:08:20.830" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16797" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16813" CreationDate="2020-12-19T03:38:04.760" Score="7" ViewCount="374" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter 3 of the second edition of &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, we find the following paragraph:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theory has enormously enriched and invigorated the study of literary works, but... theory is not the theory of &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt;. If you had to say what 'theory' is the theory &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt;, the answer would be something like 'signifying practices', the production and representation of experience, and the constitution of human subjects - in short, something like culture in the broadest sense. And it is striking that in the field of cultural studies, as it has developed, it is confusingly interdisciplinary and as difficult to define as 'theory' itself. One could say that the two go together: 'theory' is the theory and cultural studies the practice. &lt;em&gt;Cultural studies is the practice of which what we call 'theory' for short is the theory.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This paragraph defines literary theory in terms of cultural studies while simultaneously admitting that cultural studies is just as difficult to define as literary theory itself. This left me somewhat confused as to how he's defining literary theory itself: if he's defining it in terms of something else that is equally difficult to define, has that actually clarified what theory actually &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He later goes on to state that &amp;quot;...cultural studies includes and encompasses literary studies, examining literature as a particular cultural practice.&amp;quot; This left me somewhat confused; in the previous paragraph, it seemed like literary theory was also cultural studies theory, and in this paragraph it seems to treat literary studies as merely a subdiscipline of cultural studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, he implies that cultural studies effectively originated as literary theory: &amp;quot;An early work of cultural studies by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This left me somewhat at a loss as to how he's actually defining theory, and how exactly he's claiming that theory and cultural studies are related. Can someone help me understand this? In particular, is literary theory also cultural studies theory? Is literary studies a subdiscipline of cultural studies? If so, how can those two statements be true at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T20:38:16.220" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T02:44:08.473" Title="Is Jonathan Culler saying that literary theory is effectively the same subject as cultural studies?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;&lt;literary-theory-short-introduction&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16826" CreationDate="2020-12-19T08:24:51.087" Score="0" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a long climb, she emerged on a wooded hill, above a Greek-style amphitheater. She was surrounded by golden grasses, whose feathery seeds were borne on the wind. Eucalyptus fronds, giving off pungent odors, swayed in the languorous air rising from the bay. Crescents of dry foliage formed a treacherous ground cover. She climbed slowly, using roots and bare earth for footing. Approaching a eucalyptus tree, she fingered some bark that hung in parchment folds from the soaring trunk. (&lt;em&gt;Playground Zero&lt;/em&gt; by Sarah Relyea)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two places in this passage kind of elude me. &amp;quot;She was surrounded by golden grasses, whose feathery seeds were borne on the wind.&amp;quot; The imagine invoked seems to be wind carrying feathery seeds and the woman surrounded by golden grasses that hold up the seeds in the wind. But since &amp;quot;bear&amp;quot; has tons of other meanings, I thought it could also be describing wind yielding seeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also can't be sure what &amp;quot;she fingered some bark that hung in parchment folds from the soaring trunk&amp;quot; is portraying for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T11:12:14.767" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:50:36.717" Title="&quot;hung in parchment folds&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;sarah-relyea&gt;&lt;playground-zero&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16805" CreationDate="2020-12-19T08:39:01.260" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently I read a couple of books with either of the following mistakes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spelling&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Phrasing&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Scientific errors in equations&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Word duplications&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Other typography errors: formatting, missing colors, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I bother reporting this to the authors? I do not want to be unpolite but some errors are severe and make the reading hard to understand. Would it matter anyway? Some books are in 3rd/4th edition and still contain these kind of mistakes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11659" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T10:03:11.253" Title="Bother to report errors in books to authors?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16800" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16804" CreationDate="2020-12-19T09:19:52.217" Score="1" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;referred from the centre for student accommodation&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I arrived in the flat, it seemed smaller to me than before. The&#xA;kitchen was to the right, as soon as you entered. It was long and&#xA;narrow and only big enough to hold my landlady, Pani Kolecka. This was&#xA;her territory. No matter how scarce the supplies, no matter how harsh&#xA;the rationing, she was always in there, baking. Somehow, there would&#xA;always be sugar and flour and something she’d scrape up or exchange.&#xA;There’d be szarlotka apple tarts or babeczka cakes with cream, or&#xA;layered gingerbread with plum jam. She baked like her life depended on&#xA;it, and maybe it did. I had loved her ever since I’d moved in, fresh&#xA;from Wrocław,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;referred from the centre for student accommodation&lt;/strong&gt;. I loved her warm voice and soft presence, and her small childlike face. She seemed&#xA;so old it almost made her ageless, like a being from another world.&#xA;Usually she’d sleep on the brown couch in the living room, next to the&#xA;table where we ate and the cabinet with the collection of rocks her&#xA;husband had left behind. But in the summer the block heated up like a&#xA;glasshouse, and sometimes, when I got up at night to go to the&#xA;bathroom, I’d see her sleeping there on the tiled floor of the kitchen&#xA;with the door open, large and peaceful like some creature swept up by&#xA;the sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_25.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he stayed at the house of his landlady Mrs. Kolecka to take lessons at the university at Warsaw, whereas his hometown was Wrocław.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what it means to be &amp;quot;referred from&amp;quot; the center. Does it mean perhaps he requested the center about his accommodation in Warsaw, and the center mediated the contract between Ludwik and Mrs. Kolecka, introducing Ludwik to her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T09:51:35.457" Title="What does &quot;referred from the centre for student accommodation&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16801" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16824" CreationDate="2020-12-19T09:30:27.647" Score="0" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a sort of thought-through whisper&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘That’s the right attitude.’ He leaned forward and put his chunky arms&#xA;on the desk, his fingertips touching one another. ‘Because I cannot&#xA;guarantee anything, you see. Ultimately, the board needs to accept&#xA;your proposal, and they’re a tough bunch.’ He turned sideways in his&#xA;chair, bent over, rummaged in a drawer. Finally, he pulled out a thin&#xA;stack of papers. ‘Here, fill these out. And bring me a proposal by the&#xA;end of the week. We’ll look it over together.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before he handed me the papers, he threw a careful look at the door,&#xA;then back to me. He spoke with a lowered voice, &lt;strong&gt;a sort of&#xA;thought-through whisper&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I need hardly tell you what the conditions are. Something that won’t&#xA;be too upsetting, you see.’ He made a wave-like gesture with his hand.&#xA;‘Nothing controversial. Nothing remotely anti-socialist, no whiff of&#xA;pro-Westernism, my dear. Recently they’ve been getting increasingly&#xA;nervous about that sort of thing.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I understand,’ I said, taking the papers from him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_28.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he, now finished his studies at college and searching for his career, visited his literature professor's office and told him that he decided to apply for a doctorate after all. (He had declined his professor's proposal about the doctorate, thinking that the professor would force him to write about a topic foolish yet politically useful.) At this, his professor said &amp;quot;That's the right attitude,&amp;quot; and told him things he should mind in writing his proposal for the doctorate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what a &amp;quot;thought-through&amp;quot; whisper would mean. I looked &amp;quot;think through&amp;quot; up in the dictionary and it said &amp;quot;ponder upon,&amp;quot; but I am not sure whether this meaning is applicable to the &amp;quot;thought-through&amp;quot; in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:08:38.090" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:08:38.090" Title="In this passage from &quot;Swimming in the Dark&quot;, does &quot;a sort of thought-through whisper&quot; mean a pondered-upon whisper?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16802" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-19T09:37:55.813" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;a satisfaction in the forbidden, a challenge&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I walked home slowly. The air was suffocating. The sky was grey, and&#xA;sticky wind blew through the streets, swirling up dust. The few people&#xA;around looked hurried, caught inside their own minds even more than&#xA;usual, their faces like masks. I was relieved to get home. Pani&#xA;Kolecka wasn’t there. I sat and took out the papers the professor had&#xA;given me. My head was empty but I started anyway, placed pen to paper.&#xA;I forced myself to think. I didn’t really want this, but neither did I&#xA;want to let it slip away. I had nothing else, no other path. And there&#xA;was a certain pleasure in doing what I had not allowed myself before,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;a satisfaction in the forbidden, a challenge&lt;/strong&gt;. I knew what I really wanted to write about, the book that had moved me more than anything,&#xA;more than any book before. But I also knew I couldn’t write about&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Giovanni’s Room&lt;/em&gt;. It had never been published in Poland. I wasn’t even supposed to know about it. But I had read Baldwin’s other&#xA;stories. They dealt mostly with the Negro in American society, of his&#xA;discrimination and shunning. I could see its relevance, could see how&#xA;it exposed the double standards of the West, how it showed racism and&#xA;white supremacy behind the liberalism and democracy extolled by the&#xA;capitalist powers. At the same time, of course, I could identify. I&#xA;carried my difference, my shame, on the inside. It wasn’t visible –&#xA;not to everyone straight away, at least – but it was there, and it was&#xA;a danger. That’s what I began to write about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_29.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he, now finished his studies at college and searching for his career, visited his literature professor's office and told him that he decided to apply for a doctorate after all. (He had declined his professor's proposal about the doctorate, thinking that the professor would force him to write about a topic foolish yet politically useful.) At this, his professor told him to write a proposal to be submitted to the board and bring it until the weekend so they can review it together. So he returned home and began writing his proposal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;a satisfaction in the forbidden,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a challenge&amp;quot; mean.&#xA;Does the former perhaps mean that he was satisfactory/fulfilled by doing what was forbidden? And, does the latter perhaps mean that he felt a drive/will/propulsion in doing so...? Or that he found writing the proposal challenging...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:29:14.553" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:29:14.553" Title="Does &quot;a satisfaction in the forbidden, a challenge&quot; mean a satisfaction in doing what is forbidden?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16803" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16837" CreationDate="2020-12-19T09:50:40.313" Score="-1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;mind our own business&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘There’s no law against what we’re doing.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I know that.’ Your voice softened. ‘But we need to act as if there&#xA;were. Do you know what they did to Foucault?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at you blankly. ‘The philosopher?’ You nodded. ‘What’s he got&#xA;to do with us?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You sat up on the bed, your back against the wall. ‘He came to&#xA;Warszawa when he was young to head some French cultural institute, and&#xA;the Secret Service knew about him. So they found a handsome student&#xA;and introduced him into Foucault’s circle and made sure the guy&#xA;charmed him. It worked. One day the two of them took a room at the&#xA;Bristol and &lt;em&gt;boom&lt;/em&gt;’ – you snapped your fingers – ‘in come the agents,&#xA;catching them in bed. They charged Foucault with soliciting&#xA;prostitution. A week later he’d resigned and was back in Paris.’ Your&#xA;voice sounded almost triumphant, as if impressed by their efficiency.&#xA;But for an instant I saw a wavelet of anxiety ripple across your face.&#xA;‘You see?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said nothing. The water pipes churned with a low thud, and I felt a&#xA;heaviness settle over me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And you want to live like that, Janusz, in fear?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You laughed, your confidence in place again. ‘I’m not afraid. We just&#xA;need to &lt;strong&gt;mind our own business&lt;/strong&gt;. Avoid risks, be smart. As long as&#xA;we do that, we’ll be fine. Don’t you think?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shrugged, feeling defeated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_31.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the flat of his lover Janusz, who was recently hired as a worker for the Office of Censorship. At Ludwik's question asking whether he should pick Janusz up after his work was over tomorrow, because tomorrow was Janusz's first day at work, Janusz said no, it would be better not to give his co-workers a reason to be suspicious. Ludwik darkened, wondering whether their relationship has suddenly become a secret, but Janusz explained that they must be careful because the authorities might use information when they learned that they were homosexuals, taking an example of Foucault.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what Janusz had meant by saying that they had to mind their own businesses. I've often heard people saying &amp;quot;Oh, mind your own business!&amp;quot; in an irritated way, but I think this business-minding may have another connotation, another meaning, so I wanted to ask you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:20:22.373" Title="What does &quot;mind our own business&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16800" CreationDate="2020-12-19T09:51:35.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator was &amp;quot;referred [to Ms Kolecka] from the centre for student accommodation&amp;quot;, in other words, the centre that arranges accommodation for students had either (a) given him her address so he could ask whether he could stay at her place, or (b) (more likely in a regime that organises compulsory agricultural camps for students) told him he must stay at Ms Kolecka's pace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This meaning of &amp;quot;refer&amp;quot; does not directly match any of the meanings listed on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/refer#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Reference Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; (1996) lists 10 definitions for &amp;quot;refer&amp;quot;, the closest of which is the fifth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;send or direct (a person) to a medical specialist etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you interpret the &amp;quot;etc&amp;quot; at the end of that definition in a broad sense, it can also refer to a landlord or landlady.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T09:51:35.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16805" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16799" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:03:11.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's impossible to say how the author or the publisher will respond to the reported errors. There are publishers that maintain a list of errata online, including errata reported by readers. See for example the list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oreilly.com/catalog/errata.csp?isbn=9781449369415&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;errata for &lt;em&gt;Introduction to Machine Learning with Python&lt;/em&gt;, published by O'Reilly Media&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an anecdote, I can tell you the story of a colleague's brother, who worked through a textbook, listing all the errors, including suggestions for improvement, and sent that list to the publisher. As a reward, the publisher later sent him the next edition of the book free of charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know to what extent this also applies to publishers of literary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T10:03:11.253" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16802" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:13:44.590" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you have guessed, writing about Baldwin's novel &lt;em&gt;Giovanni’s Room&lt;/em&gt; would provide some satisfaction because that book had never been published in Poland. There would probably be satisfaction in showing that he knew something other people didn't know because they had no access to the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Challenge&amp;quot; can be read in two ways here: (a) challenge in the sense of difficult task, and (b) challenge in the sense of an open confrontation with social norms, as if to defy them by writing about something that is effectively prohibited. The circumstance that writing about &lt;em&gt;Giovanni's Room&lt;/em&gt; would antagonise people (see the second meaning) would increase the difficulty of the task (see the first meaning).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T10:13:44.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16807" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:26:52.213" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;tucked in below the ramparts of&#xA;the faculty grounds&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During those weeks, you and I would go to the university pool every&#xA;now and then. It wasn’t far from the Old Town, &lt;strong&gt;tucked in below the&#xA;ramparts of the faculty grounds&lt;/strong&gt;. I remember its large reception hall&#xA;and the strong smell of chlorine – how I liked that smell – and the&#xA;cloakroom where we left our shoes in a shared cloth bag. In the&#xA;changing rooms we undressed amongst other boys, drying themselves,&#xA;joking around, unaware of their nudity, or used to it like something&#xA;that was a given – strong backs and thighs and asses, skin smooth and&#xA;covered in drops like forest leaves after rain. But in a strange way&#xA;this didn’t excite me. When we were naked like that, changing,&#xA;showering amongst them, we weren’t really ourselves. We were lighter,&#xA;without consequence. We took off our roles along with our clothes, and&#xA;only belonged to the anonymous world of bodies. And when we swam our&#xA;rounds and I pushed through the water, I felt even lighter. It&#xA;reminded me of our summer together, of the ease with which we’d&#xA;floated across the lake. As I swam I dissolved in the water, and&#xA;something came to me from the depths of my memory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_32.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to go to the university swimming pool at Warsaw with his lover Janusz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what the boldfaced expression means. Would that mean the Warsaw University was surrounded by ramparts back then, and that the swimming pool was right under the ramparts when viewed from the sky, on the map? Or would it mean that the height of the swimming pool building was lower than that of the ramparts...? And, by &amp;quot;tucked in,&amp;quot; does it mean that the swimming pool was stuck in below the ramparts? Also, would it be alright to understand that &amp;quot;faculty grounds&amp;quot; means the ground on which the university (for undergraduates) is built, rather than the ground reserved for professors...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T17:23:27.367" Title="What does &quot;tucked in below the ramparts of the faculty grounds&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16808" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16852" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:31:40.987" Score="0" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;her bike&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was very young; Father had just left us and Mother was so distraught&#xA;I was afraid she’d die from grief. She stayed in her room all day. Her&#xA;lips pale, her eyes red. I tried to cheer her up, to distract her with&#xA;my picture books that I’d bring to her bed and read out loud. Then one&#xA;day she came out of her room, her face made up, lipstick on and eyes&#xA;dark with kohl, and she took me outside and lifted me on to &lt;strong&gt;her&#xA;bike&lt;/strong&gt;. We rode all along our street and across the large empty park&#xA;to the pool in the domed Centennial Hall. This is where she taught me.&#xA;This is where we went into the water together, and she, my lifeline,&#xA;held me while I wriggled my legs and arms, exhilarated and free. She&#xA;taught me patiently, to trust my body, to let myself float, to move on&#xA;my own. For years we’d go together, even when I no longer needed her&#xA;to hold me. I wanted her to see me, to be proud of me. To make each of&#xA;us feel important to the other. So when the day came, some years&#xA;later, when they found something in her lungs and I came home from&#xA;school to find the flat empty, with only Granny crying on the couch,&#xA;it never occurred to me to go back to the pool. Not without her. It&#xA;was as if that part of my life had died along with her, as if it could&#xA;never return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_32.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to go to the swimming pool with his mother to learn how to swim, when he was very young (less then 10 years old).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether &amp;quot;her bike&amp;quot; here means her motorcycle, or her bicycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:20:42.177" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:12:59.863" Title="Does “her bike” refer to a motorcycle or a bicycle in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16827" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:41:09.347" Score="2" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;Behind it lay the nuns’ convent, their&#xA;cloister with its orchards and grazing cows, and new&#xA;residential blocks towering just above.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We climbed a set of narrow stairs lined by a large stone wall.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Behind it lay the nuns’ convent, their cloister with its orchards and grazing cows, and new residential blocks towering just above.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A group of boys in tight jeans came towards us, walking down the&#xA;narrow passageway. One held a small, heavily made-up girl around the&#xA;waist, while another, with a sharp face and gelled-back hair, looked&#xA;you up and down with curious eyes. You noticed him and your face&#xA;seemed to harden; you looked away. We reached the top of the bridge&#xA;and waited at the traffic lights. To our right lay the city, the neon&#xA;lights of the tall buildings glistening, advertising clubs and&#xA;restaurants, to our left the Wisła and the dark shore of Praga. I&#xA;thought I could sense your restlessness. You looked at me from the&#xA;side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_34.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he used to stroll on the streets with his lover Janusz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether it would be right to understand that &amp;quot;cloister&amp;quot; here is in the &amp;quot;nuns' convent,&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;cloister&amp;quot; has &amp;quot;orchards and grazing cows,&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;new residential blocks&amp;quot; were above the convent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am confused because of the fact that the cloister is preceded by &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; and orchards are preceded by &amp;quot;its.&amp;quot; Because of these I came to doubt whether the cloister and orchards all really belonged to the convent. Would &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; perhaps indicate the &amp;quot;nuns,&amp;quot; whereas &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; the &amp;quot;convent&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I also wonder where the new residential blocks were towering, because the object seems to be missing after &amp;quot;just above [*]&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T14:01:55.097" Title="What does &quot;Behind it lay the nuns’ convent, their cloister with its orchards and grazing cows...&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16810" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16834" CreationDate="2020-12-19T10:51:12.337" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;It made me&#xA;think that throughout my life, up to this point, everything&#xA;I’d done had felt either irrelevant or replaceable.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I went to a student cafe near campus and prepared for my interview&#xA;with the board that would take place if I passed into the next round.&#xA;I’d come to like my topic on Baldwin’s analysis of racism in America.&#xA;Professor Mielewicz had praised it too, saying I’d be the first in the&#xA;country to examine it. &lt;strong&gt;It made me think that throughout my life, up&#xA;to this point, everything I’d done had felt either irrelevant or&#xA;replaceable.&lt;/strong&gt; Here, for the first time, was something wholly mine,&#xA;something that needed me in order to exist. I was expecting news from&#xA;the professor any day now. I tried to remain hopeful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_34.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he submitted his proposal for a doctorate to the board after he had finished his studies at the university and was waiting for the result, preparing for the interview just in case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I am confused because there are two seemingly similar verbs, &amp;quot;think&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;feel.&amp;quot; Would it be alright to understand that his topic for the doctorate made him think, &amp;quot;Oh, this is why everything I did in my life felt irrelevant or replaceable at that time&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, I find it difficult to understand the past perfect tense of &amp;quot;had felt&amp;quot; here. Would it mean that he thought (now) he had felt (at that time, when he was doing things) that his actions were irrelevant or replaceable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T19:14:09.340" Title="What does &quot;It made me think that throughout my life, up to this point, everything I’d done had felt either irrelevant or replaceable.&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16811" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16825" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:03:31.327" Score="0" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I heard her shoving the brooms up&#xA;against it, heard running in other parts of the office, and&#xA;then the sound of her heels on the wooden floor of the&#xA;corridor.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Citizen,’ we heard a voice boom in the other room, ‘a suspect is&#xA;hiding in this building. Have you seen him? A young man with light&#xA;hair and a brown rucksack?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘There is no one here apart from myself and my secretary,’ said the&#xA;man calmly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Then you will let us search the space.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their boots crossed the threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woman and I looked at each other in the tiny kitchen. Right behind&#xA;the door was another, very narrow, door, painted the same colour as&#xA;the wall. Pani Waleszka opened it quickly, took out some brooms that&#xA;were inside and pushed me in. I fit sideways, and she closed the door.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I heard her shoving the brooms up against it, heard running in other parts of the office, and then the sound of her heels on the wooden&#xA;floor of the corridor.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Is there anyone in that other room, citizen?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No, officer,’ said her voice, betraying no tension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_40.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he was frustrated by the reality of this socialist regime that he couldn't even get the doctor's appointment when his dear landlady was sick (She was like a grandmother to him). That was why he decided to collect flyers he saw on the streets and scatter them on the street from a building when the strikers and the police were clashing. At the sight of him throwing the flyers through the window, the police climbed the stairs of the building and began searching for him. But luckily, Ludwik was admitted to one office of the building, where a man and a woman were working, and was able to hide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;shoving the brooms up against&amp;quot; means. Does it mean that the woman pushed/threw the brooms against the small door in a rough manner?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I would also like to ask you whether it would be right to understand that the subject of &amp;quot;running in other parts of the office&amp;quot; is the police officers. I am confused because this part is sandwitched in-between the woman's actions, shoving the brooms against the door and sounding her heels on the wooden floor of the corridor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:42:10.257" Title="What does &quot;I heard her shoving the brooms up against it, heard running in other parts of the office...&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16812" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16797" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:21:32.710" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First of all, it doesn't have to be just a merely subset of cultural studies. We can theoretically assume for now that the set theory allows for having a common part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That would mean there are some parts that both have in common but at the same time there are parts that differ from each other or at least are independent. Is that justified? We cannot escape from the cultural aspect when talking about literature. This does not come only to theory but also to other fields - like history e.g. Literature is a product of an entity entangled in their culture. Everything that happens in literature is a given cultural mirror. We cannot create anything in isolation from the world we know and live in. The same goes with some theoretical concepts - especially today when many conceptions mingle with each other and seem to have impact on theoretical contructs (like gender studies e.g.). But at the same time there might be some aspects that do not really bother with cultural studies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we talk e.g. about semiotics without knowing anything about our culture? Can we talk about semiotics without knowing anything about literature. Nope. Maybe. But this is something really not clear enough. Anyway that understanding would be impoverished. At the same time, literature can exist in its own world and would not be necessarily interested in taking part in any clearly visible social discussion as it is enough for literature to tell a story of one individual being entangled in their inner and outer world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it also comes down to the inner world placement. This is just a huge field of interconnections as I see it and I think this can be the reason for your confusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the part about origins pretty simple. First, people started creating. All the reflections about their works came much later. So at first only literary pieces in isolation were analysed and probably no cultural impact was taken in consideration at that point. But then it started to go deeper and deeper. Basically a view that literature theory is cultural studies is a product of... cultural studies. If we change our point of observation there might be no culture at all but the very piece of literature only. Our cultural conscioussness today however tells us that might not always be the thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure if that helps you anyhow :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11661" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T11:21:32.710" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16797" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:27:33.657" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl;dr&lt;/strong&gt; No. Cultural studies are focused on specific cultural phenomena, including literature. Theory is at a level of abstraction from those phenomena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler makes the following statements here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Culture, broadly defined, is &amp;quot;'signifying practices', the production and representation of experience, and the constitution of human subjects&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cultural studies is the study of culture thus defined.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Theory is an abstraction that draws upon insights and techniques from a wide range of fields to discuss the mechanisms of signification, cultural production and representation, and subject-formation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We could map the relationships and explain them with this analogy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;theory : cultural studies : culture ::&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;theoretical sciences : applied sciences : nature&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the term &amp;quot;applied sciences&amp;quot;. We know roughly what the term means, and how those sciences differ from theoretical sciences. But is it easy to define &amp;quot;applied sciences&amp;quot; exactly? At best, we could come up with a broad definition that would tell us very little about what exactly is entailed in the actual practice of an applied science. Even the subject of study is not particularly well-defined: &amp;quot;nature&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;culture&amp;quot; are extremely wooly terms. If &amp;quot;applied sciences&amp;quot; is difficult to define, so is &amp;quot;cultural studies&amp;quot;, and for the same reason. They're umbrella terms that cut across disciplinary boundaries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literature is, of course, a cultural phenomenon, in the sense that Culler defines culture. That is to say, it involves &amp;quot;signifying practices&amp;quot;; &amp;quot;the production and representation of experience&amp;quot;; and &amp;quot;the constitution of human subjects&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As a linguistic expression, literature is a signifying practice. Insofar as literary language is thought of as a special use of language, literature is even its own signifying practice. As a very basic example, a poet who writes a sonnet is relying on a whole tradition of sonnet-writing. The meaning of her sonnet depends on the fact that it is a sonnet, and readers know what to look for: is it a Shakespearean or a Petrarchan sonnet? Something else? Where is the volta? Is there a couplet at the end? Is it a stand-alone sonnet or part of a sequence? These sorts of questions arise simply because the choice of this particular form &lt;em&gt;signifies&lt;/em&gt; something. It's not arbitrary, but it makes meaning for the writer and the reader.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literature depicts aspects of experience, and the act of reading itself is an experience. So literature is involved with &amp;quot;the production and representation of experience&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;The constitution of human subjects&amp;quot; is difficult to explain easily. One example might be that if a child reads a book about someone in a wheelchair who leads a full life, or about another child who has two parents of the same sex, that child becomes a certain sort of person—one who does not see disability as a limitation, or who accepts same-sex parents as being as unremarkable as opposite-sex parents. Literature shapes what kind of person we are. A more sophisticated way of thinking about this is to consider the &lt;em&gt;reading subject&lt;/em&gt;. Let’s say someone asks two people how they're spending their time in quarantine. If one person says, &amp;quot;I've been watching a lot of TV&amp;quot; and the other says &amp;quot;I've been reading a lot of poetry&amp;quot;, we draw certain conclusions about the kind of person each of those individuals is. More tellingly, the speakers might present themselves as specific sorts of individuals: for example, “I’m just not a poetry person”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These are all very reductive ways of explaining literature as a cultural practice in Culler's sense, but they're at least a starting point. To study literature in this way—as a signifying practice, as producing and representing experience, as constitutive of the human subject—is to make literary studies a part of cultural studies. This approach breaks down the barriers between the &amp;quot;literary&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;non-literary&amp;quot;. Someone studying, say, Charlotte Brontë's &lt;em&gt;Shirley&lt;/em&gt;, which deals with the Luddite revolt, from a cultural perspective might spend as much time on these as on the specifics of Brontë's novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the representation of craftsmanship as opposed to mass production in the Victorian era&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the way in which “women’s work” such as spinning and weaving became part of men’s labor in the factories&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;what was said about the Luddites in sermons, newspapers, or pamphlets&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the government’s response to the Luddites.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shirley&lt;/em&gt; becomes, in this sort of reading, a cultural artifact that responds to and shapes the discourse around the Industrial Revolution. Its value lies in how it illumines its specific historic moment rather than on some aesthetic criteria peculiar to literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is to study literature from a perspective &lt;em&gt;informed&lt;/em&gt; by theory. It isn't theory per se, which involves a layer of abstraction from the object of study. For example, a theoretically informed reading of &lt;em&gt;Shirley&lt;/em&gt; might say that its characterization of textile workers laid off due to industrialization as &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bad&amp;quot; individuals permits systemic causes of inequality to be disguised as character defects. (Note: I'm not making this argument, I'm saying it &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be made about that novel.) A theoretical argument, on the other hand, would be something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dominant cultural discourses represent the dispossessed in a way that disguises social iniquities as character flaws. They do so by positioning the subject as an autonomous agent capable of moral choice rather than as a constrained position determined by economic forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Again, I'm not making this argument, I'm saying it theoretically &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; be made.) Such an argument would require insights from economics, particularly Marxist-inflected; psychology; moral philosophy; and semiotics, or the study of representation. None of these far-ranging fields is specifically literary. Just as there is no barrier between literary studies and cultural studies, there is no specifically &lt;em&gt;literary&lt;/em&gt; theory that can be set off from wider theoretical arguments about cultural forces generally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Roland Barthes, calling him a &amp;quot;literary theorist&amp;quot; simply acknowledges that the focus of some of his best known writings (e.g., &lt;em&gt;The Death of the Author&lt;/em&gt;) was literature. However, Barthes's writings do not assume that the literary is a separate realm. They work to undermine the tenets of traditional literary criticism, such as the notion that the author's intention determines the meaning of the work. Barthes is a transitional figure whose work marks the movement from a purely literary theory to the broader realm that we now call simply &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: Cultural studies is an applied field, where theoretical insights are brought to bear on specific cultural phenomena. Literary works, both individually and collectively, are among the phenomena that fall under the remit of cultural studies. They do not have a special status within cultural studies. Theory is a more abstract field. It draws upon insights and techniques from a wide range of subjects: philosophy, economics, psychoanalysis, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, for example. There is no specifically literary theory that is set apart from this amorphous and flexible set of insights and techniques that fall under the umbrella of &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T02:44:08.473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T02:44:08.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16814" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16816" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:27:44.283" Score="0" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;searching the flats&#xA;and offices, returning to interrogate the man and&#xA;the woman and to take down their details&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a scratching on the door.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You can come out now,’ said the woman’s voice. I don’t know how long&#xA;I had been in there, listening to the sound of the policemen&#xA;thundering through the building, banging on doors, &lt;strong&gt;searching the&#xA;flats and offices, returning to interrogate the man and the woman and&#xA;to take down their details&lt;/strong&gt;, and the commotion outside, the screams&#xA;of the crowds, and then, gradually, the dying down of any sound except&#xA;for the wailing of sirens. Finally I’d heard cars honking, and the&#xA;buzzing of the trams, and then this scratching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The door to my cell opened. They both stood there, a light bulb&#xA;hanging above their heads, night in the street behind them. I forced&#xA;my body out of its hiding place, dusted myself off, aware of their&#xA;eyes on me. They had their coats on, and both wore a look of&#xA;exhaustion and curiosity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_40.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he was frustrated by the reality of this socialist regime that he couldn't even get the doctor's appointment when his dear landlady was sick (She was like a grandmother to him). That was why he decided to collect flyers he saw on the streets and scatter them on the street from a building when the strikers and the police were clashing. At the sight of him throwing the flyers through the window, the police climbed the stairs of the building and began searching for him. But luckily, Ludwik was admitted to one office of the building, where a man and a woman were working, and was able to hide. After the police officers retreated, the man and the woman told Ludwik that he could come out now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether &amp;quot;flats and offices&amp;quot; mean residential areas such as houses and offices in companies. I came to wonder this because the police officers were searching the single building, and it seemed less likely--personally--that residential areas and offices would be situated at the same building. So I wanted to ask you whether &amp;quot;flat&amp;quot; here has a different meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, I would like to know what &amp;quot;details&amp;quot; mean here. Does it mean perhaps their personal details, including their names, occupations, addresses, telephone numbers and so on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T11:50:19.227" Title="What does &quot;searching the flats and offices, returning to interrogate the man and the woman and to take down their details&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16817" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:39:12.417" Score="0" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;pact you’ve made with yourself&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Did you hear?’ he said with his smoker’s voice, almost immediately&#xA;after picking up the phone. ‘The ZOMO killed nine miners in Katowice.&#xA;They were protesting the martial law. Can you believe it? First they&#xA;lock our people in our country, then they jail them, now they shoot&#xA;them in the street. Sons of bitches. This time they’re gonna pay for&#xA;it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A shiver ran down my back and across my lips. ‘Are you sure?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spat out his words like bullets. ‘Sure as fuck. This is serious.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought of the miners, and it struck me that they could have been&#xA;the same people I saw a year ago from that window where I threw the&#xA;flyers. Or it could have been me. But then, I had been a coward&#xA;compared to them. I had hidden under window ledges, in kitchen&#xA;closets; I had not been in the streets demanding my right to be heard.&#xA;Now I was an ocean away, wearing a new suit. I wondered about your&#xA;role in all this, what kind of &lt;strong&gt;pact you’ve made with yourself&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Because we all make one, even the best of us. And it’s rarely&#xA;immaculate. No matter how hard we try.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_41.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 4&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he was frustrated by the reality of this socialist regime and threw away flyers from a building. And now, in the USA, he thinks of his lover Janusz still in Poland, as to what pact he would have made with himself, who had been defending the Party, after hearing the news that miners were killed by the police in Poland while protesting the martial law.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;pact&amp;quot; means here. Would that mean &amp;quot;concession&amp;quot;? Or &amp;quot;agreement&amp;quot;? Actually, &amp;quot;pact&amp;quot; appears three times in this novel, and the other times are in the following quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the bus leaving with the others, and you and I staying&#xA;behind. It was an overcast day. Rucksacks on our backs, hands around&#xA;the straps, we walked up the country road, hoping to hitch a ride. I&#xA;was nervous and we talked little, but somehow the silence between us&#xA;was &lt;strong&gt;a pact&lt;/strong&gt;. I felt like a small bird set loose, scared and&#xA;exhilarated by the void before me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 3&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking back, I’m surprised I didn’t hurl myself off the bridge. I was&#xA;terrified, saw no way out. But I suppose that right then, in the midst&#xA;of despair, I felt the stirring of instinct again, the murmur of that&#xA;voice. I brushed the dirt off my clothes and walked home with a rising&#xA;fever. Somehow I knew that something would occur to me, &lt;strong&gt;a pact&lt;/strong&gt; I&#xA;could try to live with.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chapter 7&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wonder these &amp;quot;pacts&amp;quot; all mean the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:20:48.800" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:20:48.800" Title="Does &quot;pact you’ve made with yourself&quot; refer to a concession or agreement in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16814" CreationDate="2020-12-19T11:50:19.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;offices&lt;/em&gt; could be used in one of two ways here. First, it's entirely possible that the building where Ludwik is hiding is a mixed-use space that has both business offices and residential apartments. For example, some buildings have offices on the lower floors and apartments on the upper floors. The police, searching the entire building, would search &lt;em&gt;the flats and the offices&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another meaning of &lt;em&gt;offices&lt;/em&gt; is given by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/offices&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;offices&lt;/strong&gt; plural, chiefly British : the apartments, attached buildings, or outhouses in which the activities attached to the service of a house are carried on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apartment buildings have separate service areas. For example, boilers, laundry facilities, garbage rooms, electrical rooms would be found in many apartment buildings. Those would be &lt;em&gt;offices&lt;/em&gt; as opposed to &lt;em&gt;flats&lt;/em&gt;. A &lt;em&gt;flat&lt;/em&gt; is simply a residential unit that is all on one level with no interior stairs. Without more information from the story, it is not clear from this excerpt which is the case: whether the building is a mixed-use one with both flats and offices, or whether offices simply means the utility rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes, the police would ask the man and the woman for their personal details, such as their names, addresses, and so on. They ask repeatedly because if the man or the woman are lying, then they might make a mistake in repeating the details and so betray themselves. This is quite a common technique. Once, when I was returning to the US from Canada (in the before times, when it was possible to cross the Canada-US border), I was pulled over for &amp;quot;special processing&amp;quot;. That means, basically, that the US border guard didn't believe my story and wanted to interrogate me. He asked what I had been doing in Canada, and I told him that I had been visiting my mother-in-law. Over the next hour or so, he kept saying, &amp;quot;so, your mother is in Vancouver?&amp;quot; And I kept replying, &amp;quot;my mother-in-law&amp;quot;. He would repeat other details from my story slightly wrong as well, and I would keep correcting him. It was obvious that he was simply trying to see if I would change any details of my story, which would be a clue that I was lying. The police are following the same technique with the man and the woman: making them repeat their details over and over, so that if they make a mistake, they can be investigated for lying to the police.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T11:50:19.227" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16817" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16815" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:24:09.620" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, all the instances of &lt;em&gt;pact&lt;/em&gt; mean the same thing: a formal agreement that has the force of a promise. If I tell myself that I will eat salad for lunch every day so that at the end of the week I can indulge in a pint of ice-cream without any guilt, then that's a &lt;em&gt;pact&lt;/em&gt; I've made with myself. If I tell you that I'll answer the questions you post on here to the best of my ability and in return you say you'll upvote my answers, that's a &lt;em&gt;pact&lt;/em&gt; we've made with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first quote, Ludwik is wondering what sort of bargain Janusz has made with himself that would allow him to continue to defend the Party in the face of the news about the miners. Janusz's conscience would trouble him about this incident, so he must have made some kind of pact with himself to alleviate this. For instance, he could have convinced himself that the end justifies the means, and killing the miners was actually the correct thing to do. The pact in this case would be that he will always defend the Party's goals. Or he could have made a pact that he will defend the Party until there is bloodshed, in which case at this point the pact would require him to leave the Party. Or he could have made a pact that he will leave the Party as soon as he can do so without danger to himself. Ludwik is wondering what pact exactly Janusz must have made. No pact will be perfect, as someone will always suffer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the quote from Chapter 3, Ludwik is nervous because of his feelings for Janusz, but it seems that Janusz and Ludwik have made a pact that they won't discuss their feelings for each other. This is quite a common pact among young men who have yet to come to terms with their homosexuality: &amp;quot;I know and you know, but as long as we don't talk about it, we can pretend nothing is going on&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 7, Ludwik has made a pact with himself that he will continue to live because he feels sure something will occur to him. Without more context, I'm not quite certain what this refers to—it seems he's in some kind of serious trouble, but convinces himself that it will turn out okay, and so makes the bargain that he won't throw himself off the bridge: &lt;em&gt;If things were really hopeless, I would kill myself&lt;/em&gt; is the unstated pact here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't read the novel, although it's on my to-read list. So all these are just my best guesses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T12:24:09.620" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16818" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16828" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:25:44.350" Score="0" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;came through to the corridor with me&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No, thank you,’ you said, waiting for her to stop. ‘I won’t trouble&#xA;you for long. Ludwik told me you haven’t been well. I managed to get&#xA;you a doctor’s appointment. Tomorrow at ten.’ You handed her a card.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She looked at it, squinting, reaching for her glasses. ‘But &lt;em&gt;Pan&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;Janusz, this is a &lt;em&gt;private&lt;/em&gt; doctor,’ she muttered, looking concerned. ‘I&#xA;don’t think I can—’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘He won’t accept payment,’ you said. ‘Don’t worry.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She considered you for a moment, very seriously. ‘&lt;em&gt;Pan&lt;/em&gt; Janusz, how can&#xA;I accept this?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It’s nothing. A favour being returned, that’s all.’ You glanced at me&#xA;for a moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pani&lt;/em&gt; Kolecka’s face broke into an involuntary smile. ‘I don’t know how&#xA;to thank you. Please, stay for lunch.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Thank you, but I have to go, and you need to rest. Another time. When&#xA;you feel better.’ You got up and shook her hand, and &lt;strong&gt;came through to&#xA;the corridor with me&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to thank you but I couldn’t.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_42.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel, which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he was frustrated by the reality of this socialist regime that he couldn't even get a doctor's appointment when his dear landlady was sick. (She was like a grandmother to him). But days later, his lover Janusz came to give her the ticket for a doctor's appointment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;come through to&amp;quot; means. Would that mean that they came out through the room to the corridor...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:03:00.153" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:03:00.153" Title="In this passage from &quot;Swimming in the Dark&quot;, does &quot;came through to the corridor with me&quot; mean they came out through the room to the corridor?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16819" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16829" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:28:40.413" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;Your arched back defined&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Afterwards you got up and switched on the radio, sitting on your&#xA;haunches, turning the tune button.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Your arched back defined&lt;/strong&gt;, your ass resting on your heels. Your tan had faded, I realised, and so had mine. Finally you found a station, a&#xA;piano concerto, maybe Mozart. You lit a cigarette and came back to&#xA;bed, the smoke gently floating, caressing the air. I felt weightless,&#xA;again like one of the leaflets I had released into the air. I closed&#xA;my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_43.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the flat of his lover Janusz. After lovemaking, Janusz got up and switched on the radio, with his &amp;quot;arched back defined.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this boldfaced expression means. Does it mean that his muscles at the back are defined, because his back was arched...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:09:03.133" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:09:03.133" Title="In this passage from Swimming in the Dark, what does &quot;arched back defined&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16823" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:33:08.383" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I need to check on somebody.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We followed him through a wood-panelled corridor into a large room&#xA;filled with smoke and people. Music blasted throughout the place, hot&#xA;and loud, rockingly hypnotic. Couples danced in the middle of the room&#xA;or lay spread out on a white yeti carpet. The only light came from&#xA;lamps on the floor, one by a large television, another behind a pair&#xA;of giant palm trees in pots. Maksio led us to the end of the room,&#xA;where grand bay windows looked out on to the dark and seemingly&#xA;infinite treetops of the park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Help yourself,’ he said, pointing to a table covered in bottles and&#xA;plates. ‘&lt;strong&gt;I need to check on somebody.&lt;/strong&gt;’ He winked at us and&#xA;disappeared in the crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were vodkas and whiskies and gins and vermouths, and bottles I&#xA;had never seen before, and colourful plates of aspic meats and&#xA;pineapple rings and cheese cubes. I wanted to taste everything. I ate&#xA;some grapes and downed some whisky, feeling the liquid’s journey&#xA;through my body, earthy and sweet and unburdening. The music and the&#xA;laughter of the people all merged in my mind, spinning me into its&#xA;net. I didn’t recognise anyone in the dim light of the room, every&#xA;silhouette seemed equally important and glamorous: girls in dresses&#xA;and clogs and hair piled high, boys in high-waisted blue jeans and&#xA;tight shirts and jackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_43.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania. When they rang the doorbell, Hania's brother Maksio came out of the house and led them into the party room. After that, Maksio left them alone, saying he &amp;quot;needed to check on somebody.&amp;quot; (Afterwards he was seen with a blond girl on the dance floor.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I would like to know what he meant. Does he mean he must return to a person who was waiting for him? Or that he must look after somebody...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T13:00:46.997" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:00:46.997" Title="What does &quot;I need to check on somebody&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16821" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16822" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:35:54.967" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;bottles&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We followed him through a wood-panelled corridor into a large room&#xA;filled with smoke and people. Music blasted throughout the place, hot&#xA;and loud, rockingly hypnotic. Couples danced in the middle of the room&#xA;or lay spread out on a white yeti carpet. The only light came from&#xA;lamps on the floor, one by a large television, another behind a pair&#xA;of giant palm trees in pots. Maksio led us to the end of the room,&#xA;where grand bay windows looked out on to the dark and seemingly&#xA;infinite treetops of the park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Help yourself,’ he said, pointing to a table covered in bottles and&#xA;plates. ‘I need to check on somebody.’ He winked at us and disappeared&#xA;in the crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were vodkas and whiskies and gins and vermouths, and &lt;strong&gt;bottles&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;I had never seen before, and colourful plates of aspic meats and&#xA;pineapple rings and cheese cubes. I wanted to taste everything. I ate&#xA;some grapes and downed some whisky, feeling the liquid’s journey&#xA;through my body, earthy and sweet and unburdening. The music and the&#xA;laughter of the people all merged in my mind, spinning me into its&#xA;net. I didn’t recognise anyone in the dim light of the room, every&#xA;silhouette seemed equally important and glamorous: girls in dresses&#xA;and clogs and hair piled high, boys in high-waisted blue jeans and&#xA;tight shirts and jackets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_43.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania. When they rang the doorbell, Hania's brother Maksio came out of the house and led them into the party room. After Maksio left, they enjoyed the drinks and food on the tables.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder whether these &amp;quot;bottles&amp;quot; merely mean bottled drinks such as coke, or alcoholic drinks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T17:13:29.660" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T17:13:29.660" Title="Does &quot;bottles&quot; refer to alcoholic drinks in this passage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16822" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16821" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:51:48.793" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you guessed, &amp;quot;bottles I had never seen before&amp;quot; refers to bottled drinks with which the narrator had not been familiar until that moment. It is not obvious whether those bottles contain alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks. However, whisky, gin and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vermouth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vermouth&lt;/a&gt; are all alcoholic drinks, so some of the other ones might be as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T12:51:48.793" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16823" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16820" CreationDate="2020-12-19T12:59:21.700" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;To check on somebody means to make sure that someone is safe. In this context, it may just mean to make sure that the person in question is feeling fine. At least, that would be the expected literal meaning. However, Maksio might be using the expression as a polite excuse to get away from the two guests to join someone whose company they enjoy more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T12:59:21.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16824" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16801" CreationDate="2020-12-19T13:26:40.717" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What the literature professor tells Ludwik &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; as if he had thought thoroughly about what sort of thesis subjects are still acceptable in 1980s Poland. He has noticed that the board that approves the PhD proposals responds increasingly negatively to proposal that looks vaguely anti-socialist or pro-western.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication of &amp;quot;thought-through&amp;quot; is slightly ambiguous here. On the one hand, the professor may think that potential PhD students need such a warning, so he had prepared one. On the other hand, he may worry that even giving such a warning might have negative consequences (if everyone were a convinced socialist, such warnings would not be necessary, so the warning implies that not everyone is in line with the Polish United Workers' Party), which would explain why he lowers his voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:26:40.717" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16811" CreationDate="2020-12-19T13:42:10.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Ms Waleszka &amp;quot;shoves&amp;quot; the brooms against the door, she pushes them against the door with a quick, violent movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ludwik says he &amp;quot;heard running in other parts of the office&amp;quot;, the subject is left out because there is no way for him to know. That's part of the tension of being stowed away in a small broom closet, unable to see what is going on outside and hoping that the police won't find you. Of course, the fact that he then hears &amp;quot;the sound of her heels on the wooden floor&amp;quot; suggests that other people were running into or around in the office.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:42:10.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16826" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16798" CreationDate="2020-12-19T13:50:36.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The grass seeds are feathery enough to be carried easily on the wind.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective &amp;quot;feathery&amp;quot; helps us to understand what kind of seeds are being talked about: it's not tough hard seeds like those of grapes, but something more like the seeds of dandelions, fluffy and light, carried by the wind for long distances as part of the plants' spreading strategy. Such seeds are most famously seen on dandelions, but also on various types of &amp;quot;golden grasses&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DT8zIm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DT8zIm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QGmRVm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/QGmRVm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Eucalyptus bark really does hang in folds like parchment.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tree being described at the end of the quoted passage is not just any tree but specifically a eucalyptus tree. These are very distinctive, especially in their colour and their bark, and they do indeed have a shape that could be described as &amp;quot;parchment folds&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wMbWEm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/wMbWEm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij4Rgm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ij4Rgm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T13:50:36.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16827" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16809" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:01:55.097" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A convent is a religious community whose members live by certain rules and vows. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/convent&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;word also refers to&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The buildings and pertaining surroundings in which such a community lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, &amp;quot;their&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;their cloister&amp;quot; refers back to the nuns. However, &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;its orchards and grazing cows&amp;quot; grammatically refers back to &amp;quot;cloister&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cloister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cloister&lt;/a&gt; can mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A covered walk with an open colonnade on one side, running along the walls of buildings that face a quadrangle; especially (...) such an arcade in a monastery; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, cloister is here used as a synonym for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/convent#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;convent&lt;/a&gt;, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The buildings and pertaining surroundings in which such a [religious] community lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;new residential blocks towering just above&amp;quot; refers to building that are visible above the convent from the point of view the narrator; these buildings are presumably on a hill or a hillside behind the convent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T14:01:55.097" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16828" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16818" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:16:43.773" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of this passage, Janusz leaves the room and walks into the corridor. The preposition &amp;quot;through&amp;quot; is used here because Janusz walks through the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/doorway&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doorway&lt;/a&gt; that separates the room from the corridor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T14:16:43.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16819" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:24:46.120" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the meanings of the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/define#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;define&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To demark sharply the outlines or limits of an area or concept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, Janusz's arched back (arched because he is sitting on his haunches) may be clearly outlined against the background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In bodybuilding, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/definition#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition&lt;/a&gt; can mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The degree to which individual muscles are distinct on the body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the muscles need to be thoroughly warmed up for good definition to be visible in the back. One muscle group that may be visible without warming up is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erector_spinae_muscles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;spinal erectors&lt;/a&gt; on both sides of the spine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T14:24:46.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16862" CreationDate="2020-12-19T14:33:43.440" Score="4" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the difference between Symbolism and Romanticism as literary movements. As I understand it, the symbolists explicitly wanted to distance themselves from the romantics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if I compare Stephane Mallarme's &amp;quot;Afternoon of a Faun&amp;quot; (founder of Symbolism) with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's &amp;quot;Kubla Khan&amp;quot; (founder of Romanticism), both poems seem to embody the same literary philosophy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both poems are about painting an imaginary, pastoral scene that has little connection to reality for the sake of the beauty of the poem itself. Both are concerned with dreams and visions and the creative imagination. Obviously, the poems are very different in many ways, but not in any way that relates to the philosophies of Romanticism and Symbolism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare excerpts from the poems below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Mallarme.php#anchor_Toc223495077&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Afternoon of a Faun&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So bright&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their crimson flesh that hovers there, light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the air drowsy with dense slumbers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Did I love a dream?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends extreme&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In many a subtle branch, that remaining the true&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I too&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the false ideal of roses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O Sicilian shores of a marshy calm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My vanity plunders vying with the sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Silent beneath scintillating flowers, RELATE&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;‘That I was cutting hollow reeds here tamed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By talent: when, on the green gold of distant&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Verdure offering its vine to the fountains&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An animal whiteness undulates to rest:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And as a slow prelude in which the pipes exist&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This flight of swans, no, of Naiads cower&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or plunge ...’&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kubla Khan: Or, a Vision in a Dream: A Fragment&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Xanadu did Kubla Khan&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A stately pleasure-dome decree:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where Alph, the sacred river, ran&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through caverns measureless to man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down to a sunless sea.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So twice five miles of fertile ground&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With walls and towers were girdled round:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And here were forests ancient as the hills,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11662" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T20:46:53.870" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T16:26:57.513" Title="Symbolism and romanticism as literary movements" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;samuel-taylor-coleridge&gt;&lt;stephane-mallarme&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:46:32.997" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you give me some examples to explain what is the reason for the significance of the Riverside Miming Theatre for Jake, in Iris Murdoch's novel &lt;em&gt;Under the Net&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10141" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T15:49:47.480" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T15:49:47.480" Title="In 'Under The Net', what is the significance of the Riverside Miming Theatre?" Tags="&lt;iris-murdoch&gt;&lt;under-the-net&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16832" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-19T15:47:31.943" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the interesting features of Richard Adams's novel &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; is his invented language &amp;quot;Lapine&amp;quot; spoken by rabbits in the story. Mostly, of course, the rabbits are shown speaking in English, but we do get a fair few words of their vocabulary (&lt;em&gt;hrair&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;thlay&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;yona&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;pfeffa&lt;/em&gt;, and so on) as well as a few hints at grammar or at least word construction (e.g. the usage of &lt;em&gt;-rah&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;-roo&lt;/em&gt; as suffixes). Some editions of the book contain a vocabulary list at the back, although I think the edition I read as a child &lt;em&gt;didn't&lt;/em&gt; have such a list printed in the book, being equipped instead with a handwritten list provided by a family member who'd read it before and left a sheet of paper inside the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was this language ever developed beyond a short list of words and phrases?&lt;/strong&gt; I know Adams wasn't an accomplished linguist like Tolkien, but he seems to have put some thought and effort into creating at least pieces of a fictional language which wasn't strictly necessary for the storytelling. I'm primarily asking about whether Adams himself designed more of the language than is shown in the novel, but would also be interested if there's any fan-made extension, a fuller Lapine language designed by others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T15:47:31.943" Title="Was Lapine ever developed beyond the small glossary in Watership Down?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;fictional-languages&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16583" CreationDate="2020-12-19T18:19:26.680" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The narrator is leaving to let his loved one die peacefully&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;For the purposes of this answer, “narrator” refers to the singer and “loved one” refers to the subject of the song.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator knows that his loved one isn’t afraid of death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember seeing fear in your eyes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When you were fading&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The day we said our goodbyes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His loved one is ready to die - there is no &amp;quot;fear in [their] eyes&amp;quot; while they are &amp;quot;fading&amp;quot; away or saying &amp;quot;goodbyes&amp;quot;. The narrator sings about his difficulty coming to terms with this inevitability:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to say that there's a reason for this&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Much harder to know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That what we say is true&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everything we hold could someday slip away&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator acknowledges that simply saying “there’s a reason for this” is easy to say but harder to take comfort in. It’s difficult to believe that such comforts are true when a loved one is dying in front of you. He realizes how “[e]verything we hold could someday slip away”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet, even though letting go is hard, the narrator sings about how he believes his loved one will go to a better place:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got a feeling I'm gonna find you again&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Just in a place where love can’t die&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the narrator resolves not to try to keep his loved one in this world. He realizes that even though it is hard, he must let his loved one go. Therefore he is  “leaving to let [them] go” . This is explicitly outlined in the chorus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want you to know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm leaving to let you go&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And someday we'll walk upon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The streets of gold&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is leaving, allowing his loved one to go to a better place. “Someday” the narrator will join them there, in that better place with “streets of gold”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, the narrator specifically is leaving to allow his loved one to pass peacefully to a better place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All quotes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Needtobreathe-streets-of-gold-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-19T18:48:15.980" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T18:48:15.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16810" CreationDate="2020-12-19T19:14:09.340" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a grammatical point of view, I think it is the position of &amp;quot;throughout my life&amp;quot; that calls for the use of the past perfect, the meaning being that, now that he had been entrusted with a special mission, he recalled the futility of his past achievements.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the realization had taken place at that moment, then the author would have said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It made me think that everything I’d done throughout my life &lt;strong&gt;felt&lt;/strong&gt; either irrelevant or replaceable.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand &amp;quot;it made me think&amp;quot; not as a realization at the time of narration but as a recognition of something he had already felt in the past. In the past he had done unimportant things, which he had perceived as such when doing them, and only now did he feel that he was really necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2029" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T19:14:09.340" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16835" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16797" CreationDate="2020-12-19T20:36:46.637" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came away from reading that chapter with the idea that literary studies and cultural studies are two different but overlapping fields and that &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot; is a feature that both have in common.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reasons why I think Culler seems to resist the idea that literary studies may be a subset of cultural studies can be found in the same chapter. (I am quoting the first edition from 1997).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Culler writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cultural studies dwells in the tension between the analyst's desire to analyse culture as a set of codes and practices that alienates people from their interests and creates the desires that they come to have and, on the other hand, the analyst's wish to find in popular culture an authentic expression of value.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literary studies is not simply the literary counterpart of this, neither in my own perception, nor in Culler's, who points out on the next page that literary studies has never been unified in this or a similar way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, in the subchapter &amp;quot;Models of analysis&amp;quot;, Culler points to a difference in methods, e.g. cultural studies' reluctance to use methods such as close reading. Culler writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Freed from the principle that has long governed literary studies—that the main point of interest is the distinctive complexity of individual works—cultural studies could easily become a kind of non-quantitative sociology, treating works as instances or symptoms of something else rather than if interest in themselves, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To someone who studied literature at a university where literary studies were still taught as if cultural studies had had no influence on literary studies, this sounds like a big, yawning gap between the two disciplines. (I studied literature in the 1990s.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Culler does not deny the value of cultural studies but points out that we would lose something if we abandoned methods such as close reading for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a socio-political analysis, in which all the serials of a given era have the same significance, as expressions of the social configuration.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, literary studies approach their subject in a different way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The suspension of the demand for immediate intelligibility, the willingness to work at the boundaries of meaning, opening oneself to unexpected, productive effects of language and imagination, and the interest in how meaning and pleasure are produced—these dispositions are particularly valuable, not just for reading literature but also for considering other cultural phenomena, though it is literary study that makes these reading practices available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if one claims that &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot; is the theory of signifying practices and that literature is one such signifying practice, it turns out that literary studies and cultural studies approach their respective objects of study in different ways. They may share certain socio-politically oriented theories, e.g. feminist theory, Marxist theory, post-colonial theory and queer theory, but if ideas about how objects of study should be analysed are considered are considered to be an essential part of &amp;quot;theory&amp;quot;, one must conclude that the theory of literary studies and the theory of cultural studies do not overlap entirely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-19T20:36:46.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16836" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T04:58:44.550" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tried to google it, I searched in libraries and can't find it. But 15 years ago I read a poem by Charles Bukowski where he describes how every morning he wakes up and tries to be a poet/writer. Any Bukowski fans that can help me find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11664" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T08:13:44.590" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T08:13:44.590" Title="Charles Bukowski's poem about waking up every morning and trying to be a poet/writer" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;charles-bukowski&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16837" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16803" CreationDate="2020-12-20T05:31:24.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Janusz is arguing that they should treat their homosexuality as a private thing. He says that if they come out of the closet, then they will attract the attention of the police, who will try to entrap them. Even if homosexuality is not per se illegal, homosexuals can be prosecuted, and persecuted, in one way or another. For example, in Foucault's case, he was arrested not for homosexual behavior (legal) but for soliciting prostitution (illegal). The possible repercussions of being a known homosexual make it better to keep quiet about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Ludwik says that staying in the closet is living in fear, Janusz counters that it's just prudence to keep private matters private. Coming out forces others to acknowledge your homosexuality. It is an avenue to change society: being public about one's homosexuality makes others examine, and perhaps change, their own attitudes. Janusz says that if they mind their own business instead of trying to change society in this way, they will be fine. By &amp;quot;mind our own business&amp;quot;, he means something like: &amp;quot;Let's not look into other people's affairs, and they won't look into ours&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T10:20:22.373" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:20:22.373" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16745" CreationDate="2020-12-20T05:46:16.977" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a song about coming out of the closet. Specifically, it's about refusing to be in a relationship with someone who is still closeted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lambert is openly gay and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Lambert#LGBT_advocacy_and_social_activism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocal about LGBTQ+ causes&lt;/a&gt;. The lyrics of the song say that the speaker won't settle for a relationship if the partner won't publicly acknowledge it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a double-edged sword you're givin'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I can't see the truth in livin'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When we hide behind a wall of fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So while keeping their relationship on the DL allows the addressee to continue to pass as heterosexual, this is &amp;quot;a double-edged sword&amp;quot; because it means living in fear. By rejecting this, the speaker refuses to accept the terms that the addressee is setting for their relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the speaker says is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a twisted dream you believe in&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what's the use in pretendin'?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let's make the smoke and mirrors disappear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He has told his partner that the idea of being in a relationship while still closeted is a &amp;quot;twisted dream&amp;quot;, and he has issued an ultimatum: come out and we can stay together, otherwise we're done. He says he &amp;quot;won't apologize&amp;quot; for this ultimatum because he's too old to live life on somebody else's terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether this song is autobiographical or just an imagined scenario, I don't know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T05:46:16.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16839" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16761" CreationDate="2020-12-20T06:22:04.360" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sugarcane is a known substitute for tobacco. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In India, a tobacco alternative made from sugarcane and called &amp;quot;Soex&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3407543/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;marketed for use in waterpipes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mexico has banned vaping, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fdli.org/2020/02/you-can-smoke-tobacco-sugar-cane-or-newspapers-but-you-cannot-vape/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;smoking sugarcane is fine&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's a &lt;a href=&quot;https://patents.google.com/patent/US4201228A/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;US patent&lt;/a&gt; for a tobacco-free smoking product that includes sugarcane.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In North America, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amscl.org/industry-info/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sugarcane plantations in Louisiana&lt;/a&gt; supplied both sugar and the cane for the ribs of hoop skirts. &lt;em&gt;Ribs&lt;/em&gt; does not refer to any specific part of the sugarcane. It means simply the stiff framework that gives the crinoline skirt its shape. Cane was one of the materials used for the ribs, but whalebone, steel, and nylon were also common. We still use the term &amp;quot;ribs&amp;quot; for the metal framework of an umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the ribs of a skirt would be made from the stiff outer husk of the sugarcane, its smoke would not be juicy or flavorful, but harsh. This would cause the tongue to dry out, &lt;em&gt;but&lt;/em&gt; the allure of doing something forbidden would overcome this discomfort. That is why Barr writes &amp;quot;but the wickedness was undeniable&amp;quot;. The word &amp;quot;deny&amp;quot; here is used in sense 3c given on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deny&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster page&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to restrain (oneself) from gratification of desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: &amp;quot;cane&amp;quot; is sugarcane. &amp;quot;Ribs&amp;quot; is the framework of the crinoline. &amp;quot;But&amp;quot; indicates the contrast between the discomfort caused by a dry, somewhat scorched tongue, and the thrill of smoking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T06:22:04.360" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16840" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16845" CreationDate="2020-12-20T08:53:44.090" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I pressed her against me&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We had another drink and had just started to move to the music when an&#xA;arm snaked itself around my waist from behind, orange fingernails and&#xA;dangling bracelets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I almost didn’t recognise you with that hair, handsome,’ said a mouth&#xA;by my ear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was Karolina. Lips the colour of pomegranates, lashes large and&#xA;thick and heavy with mascara like clotted spider legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘What are you doing here?’ &lt;strong&gt;I pressed her against me&lt;/strong&gt;, relieved to see a&#xA;familiar face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I was invited, I swear!’ she cried, taking my head in-between her&#xA;hands, kissing me on the mouth. I could feel her lipstick rubbing off,&#xA;the petrol smell of her breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_45.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he once went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania. At the party room, he met Ludwik's best friend Karolina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;I pressed her against me&amp;quot; means. Would that mean that he hugged/embraced Karolina tightly...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastEditorUserId="4253" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T09:03:57.443" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:25:32.283" Title="What does &quot;I pressed her against me&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16841" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16846" CreationDate="2020-12-20T08:58:30.473" Score="0" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;At once a string of&#xA;quick, light beats prepared the room, gathered our&#xA;attention, ecstatic, simple and single-minded.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then the music stopped. The record had come to an end; the low&#xA;crackle of the speakers could be heard between the suddenly naked&#xA;chatter of the crowd. We looked at each other, bemused, in&#xA;anticipation. A new record was placed on the deck by a gangly boy in&#xA;green bell-bottoms. &lt;strong&gt;At once a string of quick, light beats prepared&#xA;the room, gathered our attention, ecstatic, simple and&#xA;single-minded.&lt;/strong&gt; And before we knew it, Blondie’s siren voice had&#xA;filled the room, sending a rush through us. We didn’t know the words,&#xA;not a single one, but we understood everything about ‘Heart of Glass’&#xA;– all its elation, its decadence, the pleasure of self-indulgence. We&#xA;made our way through the crowd to the middle of the room, where we&#xA;dissolved ourselves in her voice, in its high flight, in the rising&#xA;and falling melody, in the motif of the beat, the beat that was there&#xA;from beginning to end and begged to be followed. Our heads spun along&#xA;with the record. Our bodies became instruments of the song, extensions&#xA;of it, and we formed as one, dancing in a triangle, swaying from side&#xA;to side as if possessed. When the song had ended, another one began to&#xA;play, one just as good and catchy and seductive, and we gave ourselves&#xA;to it. It was as if someone had taken us all and placed us on a&#xA;platform on top of the world. We danced until sweat ran down our backs&#xA;and foreheads and we could no longer catch our breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_45.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania. In the party room, quick and light beats filled the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what &amp;quot;At once a string of&#xA;quick, light beats prepared the room, gathered our&#xA;attention, ecstatic, simple and single-minded.&amp;quot; means. What does it mean that the beats &amp;quot;prepared the room&amp;quot;? (Is it close to a warm-up?) And, does &amp;quot;ecstatic, simple and single-minded&amp;quot; modify the people at the party, or the beats themselves? And what would it mean...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:27:17.523" Title="What does &quot;quick, light beats prepared the room, gathered our attention, ecstatic, simple and single-minded.&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16842" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:09:58.763" Score="3" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I wished it could be&#xA;us out there.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Goodness,’ sighed Karolina, rolling her eyes, ‘doesn’t he tell you&#xA;anything? Maksio and Hania are siblings.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was taken aback, without quite knowing why. ‘That makes sense, I&#xA;suppose.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, it does,’ she said, looking at Maksio, who was now kissing the&#xA;blonde. ‘The same sense of entitlement. Did you see how she dragged&#xA;Janusz away from us?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shrugged, trying to keep my mind at bay. ‘They’re friends. Why&#xA;shouldn’t she dance with him?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A slow song was playing now, a dark, profound voice singing in&#xA;English, lamenting something bygone. And the dancing couples turned&#xA;and swayed in their own orbits, their own planetary paths. I couldn’t&#xA;see you on the crowded dance floor. &lt;strong&gt;I wished it could be us out&#xA;there.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So how are you?’ asked Karolina, seeing me look for you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I shrugged, feeling my head spin again. ‘Good, I guess. I’m seeing&#xA;Mielewicz next week. I think he’s read my proposal.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_45.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania with his lover Janusz. In the party room, they met Ludwik's best friend Karolina. So the three danced together till they were out of breath. Afterwards, when they were resting, Hania, who was the daughter of some high Party officer and was in love with Janusz, came towards them and suggested Janusz to dance with her. So Hania and Janusz left, leaving Ludwik with Karolina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this boldfaced sentence means. Does it mean that Ludwik wanted the three of them (Karolina, Janusz, Ludwik) to dance as they had before? Or that Ludwik wanted the two of them (Karolina and Ludwik) to dance at the floor so that they could see Janusz and Hania dancing...?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T18:08:59.230" Title="What does &quot;I wished it could be us out there.&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16843" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16848" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:18:45.800" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;You look a little … something.&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You and Maksio reached her just as the song came to an end, a storm of&#xA;cheers and congratulations raging through the air, boys whistling with&#xA;fingers in their mouths. Hania bent over the cake. In the darkness of&#xA;the room the candles were the only source of light. They lit her face&#xA;from below. She took a large breath and blew out the little flames,&#xA;her eyes half-closed, her painted face strained with effort. I told&#xA;myself that she looked like a witch but I hardly believed it. I&#xA;couldn’t bring myself to hate her. The applause was deafening. Hania&#xA;kissed Maksio on the cheek and then threw her arms around your neck.&#xA;Someone called out a toast, to which the whole room lifted their&#xA;glasses. And then the low lights came back on and the music started up&#xA;again. I sat down, finished my drink and resolved to leave. That is&#xA;when I saw you making your way towards me through the crowd with a&#xA;piece of cake in each hand. You were smiling at me, but I couldn’t&#xA;bring myself to smile back. Sitting down next to me, you passed me a&#xA;piece of cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Are you alright? &lt;strong&gt;You look a little … something.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I’m OK,’ I lied. The cake was a layered chocolate and cream affair,&#xA;surprisingly heavy and wet. I could feel it through the flimsy,&#xA;Bible-paper-thin napkin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Have some,’ you said, biting into your piece. ‘It’s good.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I don’t feel like it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_45.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 5&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he went to the birthday party of his rich friend Hania with his lover Janusz. In the party room, they met Ludwik's best friend Karolina. So the three danced together till they were out of breath. Afterwards, when they were resting, Hania, who was the daughter of some high Party officer and was in love with Janusz, came towards them and suggested Janusz to dance with her. So Hania and Janusz left, leaving Ludwik with Karolina. During the party, Hania's brother Maksio and her friend Janusz took a birthday cake for her, and Hania threw her arms around Janusz's neck like he was her boyfriend. Seeing this, Ludwik came to feel complicated emotions including jealousy, and began to &amp;quot;look a little something.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this boldfaced sentence means. What would it mean that he looked &amp;quot;a little something&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:40:16.963" Title="What does &quot;look a little … something.&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16844" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16842" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:20:46.130" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'us' in the boldfaced text refers to the narrator and the person who they are thinking about at the time (referred to as 'you' in the previous sentence &amp;quot;I couldn’t see &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; on the crowded dance floor.&amp;quot; It is unclear to me from the quoted passage exactly who that person is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator wishes that they could dance with that person just like the other couples were doing in that moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:20:46.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16845" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16840" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:25:32.283" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your deduction is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator was relieved to see Karolina (someone they knew beforehand) and therefore embraced her tightly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5526" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:25:32.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16841" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:27:17.523" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;quick, light beats&amp;quot; at the beginning of Blondie's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGU_4-5RaxU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heart of Glass&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; prepare the room to be filled by Deborah Harry's &amp;quot;siren voice&amp;quot;. The partygoers, surprised by music's having stopped, are waiting to hear what comes next. So they pay particular attention to the beats. Hence the beats &amp;quot;gathered our attention&amp;quot;. The partygoers themselves are described as &amp;quot;bemused, in anticipation&amp;quot;, so it is not they who are &amp;quot;ecstatic, simple and single-minded&amp;quot;. Those adjectives describe the beats that propel the song into Harry's voice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:27:17.523" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16847" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16850" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:34:23.537" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;And it won’t&#xA;be weird with Hania? Coming on to you?&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You stopped and looked at me with a consolatory smile. ‘Don’t worry,&#xA;this one is easy. You can ask Hania this weekend. At her house.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A flash of opportunity raced through me. After that night, the&#xA;restaurant, anything seemed possible. ‘Are you sure?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You nodded. ‘She likes you. And I’m sure she can have some strings&#xA;pulled for you. She and Maksio always had all the exam questions in&#xA;advance, you know. That’s why I never needed to go to lectures. And at&#xA;the camp neither of them lifted a finger.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at my shoes, my head racing. ‘&lt;strong&gt;And it won’t be weird with&#xA;Hania? Coming on to you?&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You smiled and shook your head lightly. ‘Did you see her tonight?&#xA;She’s not desperate. Besides, she falls for guys so easily. She’s&#xA;probably into &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; right now.’ You laughed again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘OK, then,’ I said, still anxious. ‘This weekend.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_50.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he, after having finished his studies at university, applied for a doctorate. But his proposal was rejected because he lacked &amp;quot;contacts.&amp;quot; So Ludwik asked his lover Janusz for advice. At this, Janusz suggested that Ludwik could ask a favour of Hania about the doctorate, who was in love with Janusz and was the daughter of some high Party officer (that was why Janusz was leading her on, trying to get what he wanted from this girl with power under this socialist regime). But Ludwik worried whether &amp;quot;it won’t be weird with Hania? Coming on to you?&amp;quot;. At this, Janusz said that Hania was not in love with him desperately, and Ludwik could take a chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder what this comment means. Is Ludwik worried that his relationship with Hania would become weird/awkward, because he asked a favour of Hania when she was really &amp;quot;coming on to (=flirting with/sexually interested in)&amp;quot; Janusz? Or is he worried that Hania would think weird of Ludwik, because he would ask a favour of her when the one she was interested in was Janusz?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I wonder whether Janusz here was perhaps suggesting that Ludwik might try to forge a romantic relationship with Hania, and Ludwik was feeling awkward towards such a suggestion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:52:50.733" Title="What does &quot;And it won’t be weird with Hania? Coming on to&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16848" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16843" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:40:16.963" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Something&lt;/em&gt; refers to an unspecified negative feeling. Janusz does not know how to interpret the expression he sees on Ludwik's face. Janusz either really does not understand how Ludwik is feeling, or is pretending not to. So he says simply that Ludwik looks &amp;quot;a little ... something&amp;quot;. This &amp;quot;something&amp;quot; could be unhappy, ill, jealous, tired, angry, or a mixture of some or all of those things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Janusz really doesn't understand how Ludwik is feeling, then to say &amp;quot;you look a little jealous&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a little angry&amp;quot;, etc., would be ascribing feelings to Ludwik. So a vague word like &amp;quot;something&amp;quot;, simply implying that Ludwik doesn't appear to be his usual self, is probably all that comes to mind for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, if Janusz does understand how Ludwik is feeling and is simply pretending not to, then to ask outright &amp;quot;you look a little unhappy&amp;quot; would mean admitting that he knows how Ludwik is feeling. So to protect himself (to give himself plausible deniability), Janusz uses a vague word that allows him to keep up the fiction that he doesn't understand how Ludwik feels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:40:16.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16849" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16851" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:45:28.840" Score="0" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the&#xA;gigantic gates and lines of soldiers that protected the&#xA;castle that was the Soviet embassy&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We whizzed off, speeding seamlessly and effortlessly along Ujazdowskie&#xA;Avenue. We passed the run-down palaces of the long-forgotten&#xA;aristocracy, the Łazienki Gardens with my hidden deer, and &lt;strong&gt;the&#xA;gigantic gates and lines of soldiers that protected the castle that&#xA;was the Soviet embassy&lt;/strong&gt;. After that the city turned sparse. We passed&#xA;endless stretches of identical blocks, &lt;em&gt;blokowisko&lt;/em&gt; upon &lt;em&gt;blokowisko&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;with mud fields in-between, where riotous hordes of children played.&#xA;We passed factories, smoking behemoths, big and solemn like sooty&#xA;churches. The radio was on, playing something by the Velvet&#xA;Underground. Nico sang in her low, litanic voice, bells ringing and a&#xA;guitar jittering, like a flickering mirage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_51.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he decided to spend some days at the country house of Hania's family with his lover Janusz, Hania's brother Maksio, and Maksio's girlfriend Agata. So they (the five of them) drove towards the country house in the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder it would be right to understand that what protected the castle that had once been the Soviet embassy were the gigantic gates &lt;em&gt;and&lt;/em&gt; the lines of soldiers, or that only the lines of soldiers protected the castle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:57:22.957" Title="What does &quot;the gigantic gates and lines of soldiers that protected the castle that was the Soviet embassy&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16850" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16847" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:52:50.733" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ludwik means that since Hania is romantically interested in Janusz, and since he and Janusz are lovers, it would be weird for him (Ludwik) to ask her for a favor. The weirdness is not a judgment of any one character. That is, Ludwik is not claiming Hania, Janusz, or he himself would be weird. He says the &lt;em&gt;situation&lt;/em&gt; would be weird. He would be asking a favor of someone who does not know that he is actually the lover of the man she desires.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Janusz responds that Hania is not in earnest when she flirts with him. He says that she does not yearn for him, and that she actually moves on quite easily from one man to another. He jokingly says that Hania's roving eye has probably landed on Ludwik. He is not serious about this, saying it only to emphasize the point that Hania falls in and out of love pretty easily, and not in a way that would cause her any heartbreak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It doesn't seem to be the case that Janusz is suggesting that Ludwik should try to get romantically involved with Hania. He is simply saying that the situation is not as awkward as Ludwik thinks, because if Ludwik understood Hania's general behavior around men, he would understand that matters between Janusz and Hania are not serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:52:50.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16851" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16849" CreationDate="2020-12-20T09:57:22.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since both the &lt;em&gt;gates&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;lines of soldiers&lt;/em&gt; are security measures, they both protect the Soviet embassy. The syntax of the sentence shows that too. If it were only the soldiers that protected the embassy, &amp;quot;the gigantic gates&amp;quot; would not fit into the sentence. The gigantic gates of what? The sentence would need to be rewritten as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We passed the run-down palaces of the long-forgotten aristocracy, the Łazienki Gardens with my hidden deer, the gigantic gates of the castle that was the Soviet embassy, and the lines of soldiers that protected it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T09:57:22.957" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16852" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16808" CreationDate="2020-12-20T10:12:59.863" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally, the meaning &amp;quot;motorcycle&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;bike&amp;quot; depends on prior context. If I know that you own a motorcycle, then when you say &amp;quot;I rode my bike to the lake yesterday&amp;quot;, then it's clear that you mean your motorcycle. But typically, if someone says &amp;quot;I rode my bike to the lake yesterday&amp;quot;, the default assumption is that it's a bicycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, for a woman to be riding a motorcycle, especially with a very young child, would be rather unusual even in the US today, let alone in Poland in the 1980s. If Ludwik's mother was a motorcyclist, that would be a rather salient fact, revealing something about her character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can safely assume the &amp;quot;bike&amp;quot; in question is a good old pedal-propelled push cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:12:59.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16853" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16854" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898), who was a major representative of French Symbolism." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T10:48:54.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16855" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T11:14:38.383" Score="4" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yesterday, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/793/&quot;&gt;EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica&lt;/a&gt; asked &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16797/2191&quot;&gt;Is Jonathan Culler saying that literary theory is effectively the same subject as cultural studies?&lt;/a&gt; The question was based on the second edition of Culler's &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. My &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16835/2191&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; was based on the book's first edition and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/289/&quot;&gt;verbose&lt;/a&gt; commented, &amp;quot;What do you make of the fact that Culler pulled this distinction out from the 2e? It seems he changed his mind?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; was not Culler's last book on literary theory, so I wonder if those other works shed some light on how Culler conceived the relationship between literary and cultural studies in other books after 1997, the year of the first edition of &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. Do other publications by Culler after 1997 reflect a change of mind about the relationship between literary and cultural studies?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T11:14:38.383" Title="How did Culler define the relationship between literary studies and cultural studies after ‘Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction’?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;&lt;literary-theory-short-introduction&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16857" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16858" CreationDate="2020-12-20T12:37:04.217" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;the&#xA;same faces&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That afternoon Hania said she was preparing a surprise for us; after&#xA;lunch she and Agata went out with two empty baskets. The three of us&#xA;stayed behind in the house. You and Maksio played billiards downstairs&#xA;and I went up to our room. Upstairs it was completely quiet. Before I&#xA;reached our room my eyes fell on the double door at the end of the&#xA;corridor, and a dark curiosity overcame me. I listened out for a sound&#xA;– there was nothing. I moved towards the door and pushed down the&#xA;handle. It wasn’t locked. My heart beating hard, I slipped in. It was&#xA;a large room with a fantastic view over the park. There was a&#xA;fourposter bed, perfectly made, the air around it strangely solemn and&#xA;untouchable like the bed of someone recently deceased. I walked to the&#xA;window, took in its view over the forest. Right by the window stood a&#xA;shiny round table covered in framed photos: Hania and Maksio as&#xA;children, chubby and small, but &lt;strong&gt;the same faces&lt;/strong&gt;, eating ice cream;&#xA;their parents – the father like an older, fatter version of Maksio,&#xA;though with a different mouth, almost lipless, and the mother, tall&#xA;and elegant, with Hania’s dark eyes. A more recent one of the four of&#xA;them standing and smiling with the Eiffel Tower behind them. And then&#xA;my eyes fell on the photograph beside that one, and for a moment I saw&#xA;without comprehending. My mind jarred. In it, their father was dressed&#xA;in a military uniform, covered in honours and medals. My own hands&#xA;were shaking as I took the photo from the table and looked at it up&#xA;close. I felt nauseous, dirty even. Hania’s father and Gierek, shaking&#xA;hands, smiling at one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_53.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he decided to spend some days at the country house of Hania's family with his lover Janusz, Hania's brother Maksio, and Maksio's girlfriend Agata. So when they (the five of them) were staying at the country house, Ludwik happened to enter the room of Hania's parents and saw the family's pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder the &amp;quot;same faces&amp;quot; means that they, Hanio and Maksio, had similar faces as they were siblings, or their younger faces were similar to their current faces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T12:47:23.587" Title="What does &quot;the same faces&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16857" CreationDate="2020-12-20T12:47:23.587" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means that Hania and Maksio have recognizably the same features as adults as when they were children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are no longer chubby, but they have “the same faces”, i.e., they still look the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T12:47:23.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16859" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-20T12:51:43.933" Score="-2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;I’d&#xA;lost you&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We walked back to the veranda, and I couldn’t look at you, only at the&#xA;ground, not sure what had just happened. I was hot. I was burning. I&#xA;was entirely aflame. Then it was the next round, and my turn to be&#xA;blindfolded. I laughed and laughed as they spun me, despite myself,&#xA;and I counted to thirty, cold and dizzy when I opened my eyes, and you&#xA;were all gone. I walked into the forest and there were Maksio and&#xA;Agata, kissing in a clearing. I tapped them on the shoulder. They&#xA;looked up, smiled, and continued their embrace. ‘I’ll find the other&#xA;two!’ I cried, running further into the forest, over fallen trunks and&#xA;little valleys. I ran until I was lost, until I was sure &lt;strong&gt;I’d lost&#xA;you&lt;/strong&gt;. I tried to find my way back. The forest had started to close in&#xA;on me, to turn from enchanting to threatening. It felt like a&#xA;nightmare, and I knew my mind wasn’t working clearly. I stopped, tried&#xA;to calm myself. Then an owl hooted somewhere behind me and I turned.&#xA;Whiteness glowed behind a tree, like a luminescent stone in the sea. I&#xA;walked towards it, fast, my heart beating with imminent success. And&#xA;then I saw the different shades of white – darker white on lighter&#xA;white, matted marble on chalk. Two bodies on the forest floor, legs&#xA;entwined. I stood, watching your feet move over one another, soles&#xA;black with earth and leaves, writhing, struggling. There was cruelty&#xA;in those round forms on top of one another – you over her, your chest&#xA;over hers, her closed eyes lit by the moonlight. I turned back and&#xA;ran. I ran and started to shiver all over, like a child who’s broken&#xA;through ice and fallen into a lake and only just managed to crawl out.&#xA;I ran and ran, becoming completely and utterly numb, not feeling a&#xA;thing. Not feeling the cold, not feeling my lungs, only terror&#xA;propelling me forward. It felt like, if only I ran fast enough, all&#xA;this would not be true – that the further I ran, the further I would&#xA;be from what I’d seen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_54.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he decided to spend some days at the country house of Hania's family with his lover Janusz, Hania's brother Maksio, and Maksio's girlfriend Agata. On the second night of their stay, Hania prepared &lt;em&gt;Zupa&lt;/em&gt;, the Polish heroin, and they all drank it and took off all their clothes and began playing hide-and-seek. Ludwik became the finder, while the rest of the people hid in the forest. Ludwik found Agata and Maksio, and was going further into the forest to find Hania and Janusz, when he saw that the two were entangled on the forest floor, making love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I wonder &amp;quot;I lost you&amp;quot; is somehow connected to the fact that he was literally lost (he could not grasp where he was in the forest), or is trying to deliver the meaning that he lost his lover Janusz, or is just describing that he couldn't find Janusz and Hania hiding in the forest. In short, I wonder who &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; would be here. Would &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; be just Janusz? Or Janusz and Hania?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am an English learner from South Korea, so thank you for your patience in advance as I may not know obvious things. I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T14:49:53.230" Title="What does &quot;I’d lost&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2020-12-29T14:13:11.800" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16860" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16870" CreationDate="2020-12-20T13:46:21.803" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to know what &amp;quot;an appeal, a right violated and invoked&amp;quot; means in the following sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I need to go,’ I said, knowing it was true. Your face, your limbs –&#xA;it was as if your entire being was trying to hold itself together,&#xA;almost shaking from the effort of it. I couldn’t bear to see it. I&#xA;averted my eyes and slid to the door like some retreating thief,&#xA;stopping in my tracks when you called my name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It sounded like &lt;strong&gt;an appeal, a right violated and invoked&lt;/strong&gt;. My hand&#xA;on the door handle, my back to you, heart pulsing in my temples. I&#xA;could sense the word throbbing in the air. My name, claiming me. It&#xA;wrapped its fingers around my shoulders and tried to hold me back.&#xA;With a terrible jolt I thrust open the door and hurried down the dark&#xA;of the stairs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.booker6.com/book/202006/842_60.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tomasz Jedrowski, &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 7&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this novel which is set in the 1980's in Poland under the socialist regime, where homosexuality was socially unacceptable, the protagonist Ludwik (a university graduate) left Poland in 1981 to live in the United States of America. And he remembers what it was like back then in Poland, where he decided to leave the country after staying hard to stay in the country. And he went to the flat of his lover Janusz to report his decision. Just when Ludwik was leaving, Janusz called his name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this part, I would like to know what the boldfaced expression means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would very much appreciate your help. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4253" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T12:14:33.693" Title="What does &quot;an appeal, a right violated and invoked&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16861" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16859" CreationDate="2020-12-20T14:49:53.230" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'd lost you&amp;quot; is past perfect, meaning &amp;quot;I had lost you&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tense &amp;quot;past&amp;quot; refers to events that have happened.&#xA;The &amp;quot;perfect&amp;quot; aspect refers to events that have a result at heart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus this means, that the lyrical I has lost someone and is focussing on the effects of having lost somebody. This happened in the past and it had an effect on a past event which may no longer have a relevance towards the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the excerpt I do believe it is the actual losing of somebody since the lyrical I runs into the forest, although it might also contain that the distance meant that (s)he has lost whomever (s)he has left behind in a more metaphorical sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8518" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T14:49:53.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16862" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16830" CreationDate="2020-12-20T16:41:33.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think just comparing two poems to try to figure out the difference between Romanticism and Symbolism is very misleading. I believe that Symbolist poets wrote poems which spanned the whole spectrum from Romanticism to Symbolism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/symbolist-movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; describes Symbolism as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They rejected their predecessors’ tendency toward naturalism and realism, believing that the purpose of art was not to represent reality but to access greater truths by the “systematic derangement of the senses,” as Rimbaud described it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, a pure Symbolist poem will not depict any actual realistic events, but will use language to evoke a &amp;quot;greater truth.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you may not see much difference between Mallarmé's poem &amp;quot;Afternoon of a Faun&amp;quot; and Coleridge's &amp;quot;Kubla Khan,&amp;quot; Mallarmé wrote poems that were much closer to the ideal of Symbolism than &amp;quot;Afternoon of a Faun.&amp;quot; One of these was &lt;em&gt;Quand l'ombre ménaça de la fatale loi.&lt;/em&gt; Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://davidbowles.us/poetry/when-with-fatal-law-the-shadow-threatened-me-by-stephane-mallarme/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one translation&lt;/a&gt;. Here is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/Mallarme.php#anchor_Toc223495088&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another one&lt;/a&gt;. And I quote the first four lines of a different translation below:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the shade threatened with the fatal decree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that old Dream, my bones' craving and their blight,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pained to die under the funereal height&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;it bowed its doubtless plumage deep in me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Splendour — ebony hall where, to allure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a king, illustrious wreaths writhe in their doom —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you are merely a pride lied by the gloom&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to the faith-dazzled solitary viewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translated by E.H. and A.M. Blackmore)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, unlike Coleridge's &lt;em&gt;Kubla Khan&lt;/em&gt;, it's not at first apparent what the poem is describing, and to me it certainly doesn't seem to be describing things naturalistically or realistically, but much more impressionistically and symbolically. And while Romantic poems often have deeper meanings hidden behind a surface meaning, they generally have surface meanings; for this poem it's very difficult to divine a surface meaning at all. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/stephane-mallarme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Poetry Foundation's article&lt;/a&gt; on Mallarmé says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It exhibits the same sudden transition from the dark and funereal confines of a closed room to the huge expanse of the night sky, although it occurs this time much earlier in the poem, at the beginning of the second quatrain,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;while other critics claim that Mallarmé is talking about the the night sky in the first quatrain. (I'm with these other critics; I don't see why his &amp;quot;funereal ceiling&amp;quot; in the first quatrain aren't the dark night sky.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all poems written by Romantic poets have a surface meaning where things are described reasonably naturalistically, even though many of them also have a metaphorical meaning that is harder to decipher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T16:26:57.513" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T16:26:57.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16863" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16842" CreationDate="2020-12-20T18:08:59.230" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If I understand the sentence &amp;quot;he went to the birthday party (...) with his lover Janusz&amp;quot; correctly, it means Ludwik and Janusz are lovers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in context, the &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;I couldn’t see you on the crowded dance floor&amp;quot; refers to Ludwik hoping to catch a glimpse of Janusz on the dance floor, and &amp;quot;I wished it could be us out there&amp;quot; refers to Ludwik wishing that it could be him and Janusz who were the ones out there dancing together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8749" LastActivityDate="2020-12-20T18:08:59.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16865" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16866" CreationDate="2020-12-21T01:04:28.160" Score="15" ViewCount="2112" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 1960s, my grammar school (grades 1-8) encouraged us to buy cheap kids books; they had lists and we checked off what we wanted and paid for them. They were cheap; these were not new releases, and they were paperbacks (a bit taller and wider, and thinner, than standard paperbacks). Not a lot of pictures as I recall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one I want to i.d. is about a young boy in a small (maybe rural) town. There is nothing supernatural going on, certainly no violence, it's just him and some amusing local characters. The only part I remember is a container, or maybe it's invisible dust, that is supposed to improve everything. The joke is that the container is empty - or the 'dust' is nonexistent - so people just think it works. In the end someone adds water, and says it was the best, wettest water ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm pretty sure there were multiple stories in the book, and other books with the same boy and characters. I'd like to i.d. this so I can buy it for my grand-nephews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11669" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T23:12:02.120" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T23:12:02.120" Title="1960s kids book with &quot;invisible&quot; dust which people think improves everything but doesn't actually exist" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16866" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16865" CreationDate="2020-12-21T07:30:32.430" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're thinking of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Price&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homer Price&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Robert McCloskey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically, the story &amp;quot;Ever-so-much-more-so&amp;quot;, in which a traveling salesman sells the people a can of oderless, invisible dust that makes everything ever so much more so like itself. Homer does indeed add water to the can.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other stories involve giant ragweed that someone grows from some mysterious seeds, and a jukebox that plays a song that nobody can stop dancing to or get out of their heads unless a specific other song is sung.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I stole this book from my grandparents' basement about ten years or so ago, so I recognized the story :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T07:30:32.430" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16902" CreationDate="2020-12-21T08:49:44.167" Score="3" ViewCount="224" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Guardian&lt;/em&gt; article from summer 2020, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/07/covid-novels-warning-future-generations-first-world-war-spanish-flu-1918&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Covid novels are arriving. And they'll be a warning to future generations&amp;quot; by Laura Spinney&lt;/a&gt;, includes some discussion of the (apparently minimal) impact of the 1918 &amp;quot;Spanish flu&amp;quot; pandemic on European and North American literature. It says, however, that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can also be argued that the 1918 flu &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; find its way into Anglophone literature, just not explicitly. It’s there, perhaps, in a certain anxiety, a pessimism and melancholy that infuse the literature of the 1920s – in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), for example, parts of which he wrote in London at the height of the pandemic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this supposed connection, between the tone of &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot; and the context of an ongoing pandemic, analysed by any literary critics? Or is it just a non-expert guess, marked as such by the weasel word &amp;quot;perhaps&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the ongoing pandemic influence the style of &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T12:23:18.133" Title="Can the influence of the 1918 &quot;Spanish flu&quot; pandemic be seen in T.S. Eliot's &quot;The Waste Land&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;the-waste-land&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16868" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16830" CreationDate="2020-12-21T09:03:05.707" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The thing is this choice can be misleading. And we can also view Romanticism as two different things. In general Romanticism &amp;gt; Symbolism. There're some researchers who track romantic symbolism and they claim Coleridge was the one. So you can be right in this one, however this doesn't prove it's one and the same. As it was already stated above between the lines (I believe), symbolists wanted to evoke some emotions and uncover psychological truths whereas naturalism only depicts what can be seen. On the first ground they might seem the same but the devil's in the detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11661" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T09:03:05.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16869" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T06:32:34.713" Score="4" ViewCount="291" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was enjoying a song &amp;quot;Butterflies&amp;quot; by Kacey Musgraves and in the lyrics there is &amp;quot;Stealing my heart 'stead of stealing my crown&amp;quot;.&#xA;What does &amp;quot;steal my crown&amp;quot; mean? I am not a native English speaker, and I think that not anybody has a crown to steal, unless he is a king. So why does it say &amp;quot;steal my crown&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="huanah" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T10:28:35.670" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:41:16.820" Title="What does &quot;steal my crown&quot; mean in Kacey Musgraves's Butterflies?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16870" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16860" CreationDate="2020-12-21T12:14:33.693" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an unusual way to refer to calling someone's name, which requires context from the story to understand it properly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This passage is from Chapter 7, after the scene in Chapter 6 when Ludwik sees his lover Janusz, in the forest, making love with the girl Hania. Now Ludwik comes to Janusz's room, confronts him with what he saw, and tells Janusz that he's leaving the country. The whole conversation is about &lt;strong&gt;the two lovers drifting apart&lt;/strong&gt;, Ludwik trying to convince Janusz to come with him, but both of them realising that their life paths are going in different directions. Both of them are emotional, almost breaking down, as we can see in the paragraphs you quoted in this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this conversation, &lt;strong&gt;Ludwik is showing more determination than Janusz&lt;/strong&gt;. He's sure that he will leave; the only question is whether Janusz will come with him or not. Even though he's having difficulty coping with the conversation, feeling full of a mental fog from their words and thoughts, he clings tight to what he knows he must do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, Janusz calling Ludwik's name is like an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/appeal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;appeal&lt;/a&gt; (a plea or entreaty). He can't say what he is feeling, but that word &amp;quot;Ludwik&amp;quot; encodes thoughts like &amp;quot;please don't go&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;let's talk more&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, between lovers, this would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/right#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;right&lt;/a&gt; (a moral entitlement). Janusz should have the right to call Ludwik's name and to be heard and listened to. But Ludwik feels that Janusz has &lt;strong&gt;violated&lt;/strong&gt; that right, through his betrayal with Hania, yet still &lt;strong&gt;invokes&lt;/strong&gt; it with his appeal now. Ludwik still feels the &amp;quot;claim&amp;quot; of Janusz calling his name, the &amp;quot;hold&amp;quot; it has over him, but he resists the temptation to stay and flees the room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T12:14:33.693" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16871" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11020" CreationDate="2020-12-21T12:46:07.623" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and its contemporaries&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is one of a cluster of similar plays that were tremendously popular on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage that are now grouped as revenge tragedies. These plays draw upon the works of the Stoic philosopher and playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seneca&lt;/a&gt;, whose blood-soaked tragedies feature the revenge motif, a ghost, and rhetorical excess. Some examples of revenge tragedy on the English Renaissance stage include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kyd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Kyd&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35330&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (date uncertain, some time between 1582 and 1592)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kyd (probably), the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Hamlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (c. 1587)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Marston_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Marston&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45209&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antonio's Revenge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1600)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1601)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Chettle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry Chettle&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/tragedyofhoffman20chetuoft&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tragedy of Hoffman&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1602)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Middleton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Middleton&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/reven.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Revenger's Tragedy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1606); this play was formerly attributed to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Tourneur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cyril Tourneur&lt;/a&gt;, but is now accepted as Middleton's&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tourneur, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55625/55625-h/55625-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Atheist's Tragedy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1609)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chapman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Chapman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20890&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1610).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of these plays, the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is lost, but its existence is known because &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lodge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Lodge&lt;/a&gt; alludes to it in his tract &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n4/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wit's Misery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1596). Lodge says of a man who resents another man's success:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he walks for the most part in black under colour of gravity, and looks as pale as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserally at the theatre like an oyster-wife, &lt;em&gt;Hamlet, revenge&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n71/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 62&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Lodge, we know that even the idea of a ghost urging Hamlet on to revenge was not original to Shakespeare, but had made its way to the stage some years before Shakespeare's own play. Given this, it is unsurprising that the plot, situations, style, and characterization of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; have much in common with other revenge tragedies of the period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Tropes of Revenge Tragedy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The elements of revenge tragedy as a genre were first identified by Ashley H. Thorndike in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/456606&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1902 article&lt;/a&gt;. The tropes Thorndike enumerates are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The ghost of a murdered man urges his son to seek revenge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The revenger hesitates in his task. Elaborate soliloquies often provide both the medium of and the justification for his procrastination.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One or more characters, typically including the revenger, are or pretend to be mad.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both the revenger and his enemies make use of intrigue. Characters plot against each other and traps are laid for the unwary.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The body count is very high; few characters are left standing at the end.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These elements, all present in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, are found in revenge tragedies both preceding and succeeding that play. Not every play has all these elements. For example, &lt;em&gt;The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois&lt;/em&gt; is about a murdered brother rather than father. But the plays clearly form a group that draw upon a shared set of tropes. Let's look at some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; is the earliest extant play of the revenge tragedy genre. Hieronimo, the protagonist, is driven mad by the murder of his son, Horatio. After much soliloquizing, he exacts his revenge on the killers by staging an elaborate play-within-a-play. The ghost of Hieronimo's best friend, Andrea, who has been killed in battle prior to the action of this play, is onstage throughout, as is another character who is the personification of Revenge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Antonio's Revenge&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harold Jenkins's introduction to the Arden edition of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (1982) summarizes the parallels between Shakespeare's play and Marston's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In each a son is visited by the Ghost of his father, who reveals that he has been poisoned, laments that his wife has yielded to the murderer, and calls on his son for revenge. The son, already separated from his beloved, whose chastity is put in question, becomes melancholy and impersonates a fool or madman. He forgoes an opportunity to stab the murderer for the sake of a fuller revenge later, and the Ghost appears to him again in his mother's chamber. (p. 7)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jenkins also lists several &amp;quot;incidental similarities&amp;quot; between the two plays, for example both heroes' wearing black and appearing onstage reading a book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The Atheist's Tragedy&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tourneur's play features a wicked uncle, D'Amville, who murders his brother Montferrers. Montferrers' ghost tells his son Charlemont about the murder, but specifically instructs him to leave revenge to God, who will surely punish the  avowed atheist D'Amville. (Get it? Damn-ville?) In a neat inversion of the usual vacillating revenger trope, Charlemont wants to avenge his father, but the ghost himself has counseled inaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similar parallels and contrasts can be drawn between &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; and every other revenge tragedy of the period. From this, it is clear that Shakespeare's play does not deviate from the conventions of revenge tragedy. Whatever accounts for the popularity of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; (and that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/9330/289&quot;&gt;a whole 'nother question altogether&lt;/a&gt;), none of its structural or thematic features make it unique among revenge tragedies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Why Revenge Tragedies?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps instead of focusing on the popularity of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; specifically, we could examine why revenge tragedies in general were so popular on the English Renaissance stage. Katharine Eisaman Maus has &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/four-revenge-tragedies-9780199540532&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argued&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies explore the particular stresses and incongruities produced by the highly stratified society of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. ... Overt displays of dominance and submission marked degrees of rank: and everyone, of course, except the monarch at the apex of the pyramid, had to humble himself before someone else. Renaissance revenge tragedy taps the repressed frustration of such situations, presenting the delicious spectacle of subjects hoodwinking and finally annihilating their superiors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revenge tragedy, reflects, however, not merely the predictable strains of life in a hierarchical society, but the less calculable effects of a hierarchy in the process of transformation.   (p. xi–xii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maus points out that as the older, fixed hierarchies gave way to new forms of social organization, individuals could no longer rely on established norms or processes of justice. One might consider the effects of the Reformation in dismantling certainties. As established norms crumbled, individuals found themselves having to act alone in situations where they would previously rely upon systems. Maus writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revenge tragedies feature someone who prosecutes a crime in a private capacity, taking matters into his own hands because the institutions by which criminals are made to pay for their offenses are either systematically defective or unable to cope with some particularly difficult situation. Such plays testify to an apparently ineradicable yearning for justice—a yearning that abides even, or especially, in the most unfairly victimized persons. But at the same time, they register a troubling discrepancy between the desire for equity and the means of fulfilling that desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually the deficiencies of the world presented in the play antedate the action we see on stage. Indeed the defectiveness of the status quo is virtually a precondition of the genre; for by definition revenge occurs after a crime has been perpetrated, as a response to some previous outrage. ... The importunate ghosts who haunt revenge tragedies remind characters and audiences of constraints the past places upon the present, of obligations the living bear to the departed. (p. ix)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the social order crumbles around him, how is Hamlet to seek justice for his murdered father? He can hardly go to the king; the very situation forecloses that avenue. He can't even trust his mother. All he can do to fulfill his obligations to his father and to achieve some measure of equity is to wreak revenge by acting on his own. The figure of Hamlet, alongside the other haunted, lonely, and mad avengers of this period, epitomizes the emergence of the early modern subject during the Renaissance as an autonomous actor, an individual unmoored from the fixities of the vanished feudal system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lodge, Thomas. &lt;em&gt;Wit's Misery and the World's Madness&lt;/em&gt;. 1596. In &lt;em&gt;The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge&lt;/em&gt;, v. 4. Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maus, Katharine Eisaman, ed. and intro. &lt;em&gt;Four Revenge Tragedies.&lt;/em&gt; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. 1601. Ed. Harold Jenkins. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1982.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thorndike, Ashley H. “The Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays.” &lt;em&gt;PMLA&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 17, no. 2, 1902, pp. 125–220. JSTOR, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/456606&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/456606&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T13:48:57.193" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T13:48:57.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16872" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16644" CreationDate="2020-12-21T13:01:05.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Court Order to Block Access from Germany&lt;/a&gt; explains, the blocking has to do with &lt;strong&gt;differences between the EU and the USA related to the rules governing copyright&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in Germany, copyright lasts until 70 years after the author's death;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;in the USA, for &lt;em&gt;works published before 1978&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;the maximum copyright duration is 95 years from the date of publication, if copyright was renewed during the 28th year following publication&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Works_created_before_1978&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quoted from &amp;quot;Copyright in the United States&amp;quot; on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the rule that applies in Germany applies in all of the EU because it follows from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Duration_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Duration Directive&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Directive&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Copyright Term Directive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain works by &lt;strong&gt;Heinrich Mann (who died in 1950), Thomas Mann (who died in 1955) and Alfred Döblin (who died in 1957)&lt;/strong&gt; were still copyrighted in the European Union when they entered the public domain in the USA, where Project Gutenberg is based. The German publisher S. Fischer Verlag, who published these authors' works, sued Project Gutenberg, so they would remove eighteen books by these authors [1] from their archive. Project Gutenberg did not want to remove those books; this resulted, in February 2018, in blocking access to Project Gutenberg for all persons located in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What this implies is that you can't sell ebook versions of those eighteen books in Germany (unless you get a licence from S. Fischer Verlag). The lawsuit does not make it illegal to sell ebook versions of works that are in the public domain in the European Union. In other words, &lt;strong&gt;it is not the availability on Project Gutenberg that makes specific books illegal to sell in Germany, it is the copyright protection that still applies to certain books in the European Union&lt;/strong&gt;. If you find other books on Project Gutenberg whose copyright has expired in the EU, it should be perfectly legal to sell them as ebooks in Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1]  The lawsuit concerns the following books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flöten und Dolche: Novellen&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Heinrich Mann&lt;/strong&gt; (1905),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Professor Unrat, oder, Das Ende eines Tyrannen&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Mann (1906),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Flaubert und die Herkunft des modernen Romans&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Mann (1917),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Vater&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Mann (1917),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Untertan&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Mann (1918),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Ehrgeizige: Novelle&lt;/em&gt; by Heinrich Mann (1920),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der kleine Herr Friedemann: Novellen&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Thomas Mann&lt;/strong&gt; (1897),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1901),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Königliche Hoheit: Roman&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1901),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gladius Dei; Schwere Stunde&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1903),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tristan&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1903),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tonio Kröger&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1903),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Tod in Venedig&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Mann (1912),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Ermordung einer Butterblume und andere Erzählungen&lt;/em&gt; by &lt;strong&gt;Alfred Döblin&lt;/strong&gt; (1913),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun: Chinesischer Roman&lt;/em&gt; by Alfred Döblin (1916),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Lobensteiner reisen nach Böhmen: Zwölf Novellen und Geschichten&lt;/em&gt; by Alfred Döblin (1917),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wallenstein. 1 (of 2)&lt;/em&gt; by Alfred Döblin (1920),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wallenstein. 2 (of 2)&lt;/em&gt; by Alfred Döblin (1920),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and the above is not legal advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update, March 2021&lt;/strong&gt;: The works of Heinrich Mann are now in the public domain (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://netzpolitik.org/2021/public-domain-day-viele-neue-werke-sind-ab-diesem-jahr-gemeinfrei/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viele neue Werke sind ab diesem Jahr gemeinfrei&lt;/a&gt; by Anna Biselli, 05.01.2021), but Project Gutenberg still blocks visitors from Germany and will probably continue to do so until the works of Alfred Döblin enter the public domain in 2028.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T13:21:01.460" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:21:01.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16869" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:41:16.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song's lyrics include these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now you're liftin' me up, 'stead of holdin' me down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stealin' my heart, 'stead of stealin' my crown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Untangled all the strings, round my wings, that were tied&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now I remember what it feels like to fly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just as the singer isn't a queen to have a crown, she isn't likely to have wings and be able to fly either. Those are metaphors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The singer says that before she met the person she has fallen in love with, people would steal her crown rather than her heart. To &lt;em&gt;steal someone's heart&lt;/em&gt; means to have them fall in love with you. But to steal a crown means to usurp power that isn't rightfully yours from the legitimate king or queen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This means that the singer says that the man she is in love with has treated her with respect, unlike the people she has been around before. Stealing her crown means that they never let her feel powerful; instead, they took away the power she should have had. They have held her down, i.e., made her powerless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, her wings represent her freedom. Earlier, she had strings tied around her wings, meaning that her freedom was taken away. The man she is in love with makes her feel powerful and free by not stealing her crown and by disentangling the strings that tied down her wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T14:41:16.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11020" CreationDate="2020-12-21T14:41:48.240" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Kyd's &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; was immensely popular; not only was it printed ten times between 1592 and 1633 (although only one copy of the 1592 edition has survived), it was also quoted, alluded to and reworked by other authors.&#xA;Thomas Kyd is also attributed an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, which is now lost. &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; borrowed certain elements from Seneca's &lt;em&gt;Thyestes&lt;/em&gt; and other sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &amp;quot;induction&amp;quot;, in which the ghost of a murdered person (Andrea in &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;) is brought back to the world of the living by a Revenge figure (the Fury in &lt;em&gt;Thyestes&lt;/em&gt;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the rhetorical language, the long monologues and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stichomythia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stichommythia&lt;/a&gt; (from Seneca),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the machiavellian villain (from Italian novellas that treated revenge stories) which acts as a foil to the main character,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feigned madness (from Italian novellas),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the avenger's suicide (from Italian novellas).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in contrast with Seneca, violent acts are shown on stage instead of merely reported.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above characteristics and motifs were combined with other ones, such as delaying the revenge, a play within the play, madness caused by great emotional stress, and often imitated in other plays. The success of the revenge tragedy in Elizabethan times was not exclusively based on the audience's predilection for violent and bloody action but also on an interest in the issue of revenge as a social and ethical problem. Private revenge was prohibited both by Christian ethics and by law, but this prohibition conflicted with a code of honour that required revenge for a murdered father, son or brother. This conflict explains several features of the revenge tragedy: hesitation to execute the revenge, soliloquies, and the suicide after the act of vengeance (see Schabert pages 67-70).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; exhibits mnay of the above features:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the ghost of a murdered father (in this case merged with the revenge figure, rather than separate),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;feigned madness, possibly verging on real madness,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a play within the play,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;delaying the act of vengeance,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;soliloquies discussing the inner conflict caused by the demand for the revenge on the one hand and ethical or philosophical concerns on the other,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the avenger's death (in this case not suicide).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the entry &amp;quot;Revenge tragedy&amp;quot; in Wynne-Davies's &lt;em&gt;The Renaissance&lt;/em&gt; distinguishes between three types of revenge tragdies depending on how the play deals with the state of inner conflict mentioned above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;tragedies offering a straightforward treatment of the theme of revenge: &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;, Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt; (and &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt;), &lt;em&gt;The Revenger's Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; by Cyril Tourneur or Thomas Middleton, and &lt;em&gt;Women Beware Women&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Middleton;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a kind of &amp;quot;anti-revenge&amp;quot; tragedy, &amp;quot;in which the hero is too enlightened to seek revenge&amp;quot;, for example &lt;em&gt;The Atheist's Tragedy&lt;/em&gt; by Cyril Tourneur and &lt;em&gt;The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois&lt;/em&gt; by George Chapman;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a kind of &amp;quot;tragedy of retribution&amp;quot;, in which &amp;quot;a crime is avenged but the drama is not centred on a specific avenger&amp;quot;, for example &lt;em&gt;The White Devil&lt;/em&gt; by John Webster, &lt;em&gt;The Duchess of Malfi&lt;/em&gt; (also by Webster) and &lt;em&gt;The Changeling&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Middleton.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text goes on to say that &lt;strong&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; sits between the first two types &amp;quot;inasmuch as the hero both accepts the obligation to revenge and has to fight against his revulsion for it&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;This implies that there may be no such thing as a single convention for Elizabethan revenge tragedy, let alone that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; would represent an example of a single convention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The inclusion of &lt;em&gt;Richard III&lt;/em&gt; in the first category may seem controversial. It seems that Wynne-Davis is using broader definition of &amp;quot;revenge tragedy&amp;quot; than what one might call &amp;quot;Kydean revenge tragedy&amp;quot;, which would represent of subset. She is not the only one. For example, Marjorie Garber writes in &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare After All&lt;/em&gt; (page 490):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;revenge play&amp;quot; was a popular part of the early modern repertoire, and Shakespeare reworked this genre throughout his career, even in as late a play as &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Garber is not saying that &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a revenge play; it &amp;quot;is one of Shakespeare's most compelling 'revenge tragedies,' turned, at the last moment, toward forgiveness&amp;quot; (page 853).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, vengeance is much more obvious, even it is not in the tradition of &lt;em&gt;The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Garber, Marjorie: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare After All&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Anchor Books, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Schabert, Ina (editor): &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare-Handbuch. Die Zeit. Der Mensch. Das Werk. Die Nachwelt&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Stuttgart: Kröner, 1992. (See pages 67-70: &amp;quot;Kyds Spanish Tragedy und die elisabethanische Rachetragödie&amp;quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tydeman, William (editor): &lt;em&gt;Two Tudor Tragedies. Norton and Sackville: Gorboduc. Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy&lt;/em&gt;. London: Penguin, 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wynne-Davies, Marion (editor): &lt;em&gt;The Renaissance. A Guide to English Renaissance Literature: 1500–1660&lt;/em&gt;. Bloomsbury Guides to English Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 1994&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T16:45:37.117" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T16:45:37.117" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16877" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16878" CreationDate="2020-12-21T17:23:28.460" Score="4" ViewCount="108" Body="&lt;p&gt;I first read C. S. Forester’s &lt;em&gt;Beat to Quarters&lt;/em&gt; as a teenager in the mid-1970s.  I remember it as having been included in a Readers’ Digest Condensed Book, but the Wikipedia listing of these books doesn’t seem to back that up.  Could the list on Wikipedia be incomplete?  (Doesn’t seem likely.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anybody know whether or not &lt;em&gt;Beat to Quarters&lt;/em&gt; was ever published in a Readers’ Digest edition?  Or maybe as part of some other anthology?  Would have to be something published before circa 1978.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11674" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T23:37:14.083" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T23:37:14.083" Title="Horatio Hornblower book as part of anthology?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;c-s-forester&gt;&lt;horatio-hornblower&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16878" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16877" CreationDate="2020-12-21T18:05:03.163" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it have been a ‘cadet’ edition? These are listed on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Hornblower&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hornblower page of Wikipedia &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Four &amp;quot;Cadet Editions&amp;quot; were released by Little Brown and later by Michael Joseph, each collecting two Hornblower novels and edited for younger readers: Hornblower Goes to Sea (1953, 1954), from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and Lieutenant Hornblower; Hornblower Takes Command (1953, 1954), from Hornblower and The Atropos and Beat To Quarters; Hornblower in Captivity (1939, 1955), from A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours; and Hornblower's Triumph (1946, 1955), from Commodore Hornblower and Lord Hornblower.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Failing that, there is this edition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reader's Digest Best Loved Books For Young Readers: Vol. 3: Captain Horatio Hornblower; Jane Eyre; My Friend Flicka; Alone&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=22893790443&amp;amp;cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-tile1&amp;amp;searchurl=sortby%3D20%26tn%3Dreader%2527s%2Bdigest%2Bbest%2Bloved%2Bbooks%2Bfor%2Byoung%2Breaders%2Bvol%2B3%2Bcaptain%2Bhoratio%2Bhornblower%2Bjane%2Beyre%2Bmy%2Bfriend%2Bflicka%2Balone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per Wikipedia again&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three novels written, &lt;em&gt;The Happy Return&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;A Ship of the Line&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;Flying Colours&lt;/em&gt; were collected as &lt;em&gt;Captain Horatio Hornblower&lt;/em&gt; (1939) by Little Brown in the US&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;NB. &lt;em&gt;Beat to Quarters&lt;/em&gt; is the US title for &lt;em&gt;The Happy Return&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have found an eBay listing for the RD edition, with an incomplete photograph of the copyright page, which includes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beat to Quarters&lt;/em&gt;, copyright 1937, (c) 1965, by Cecil...(text runs out of image)&#xA;is part of the trilogy &lt;em&gt;Captain Horatio Hornblower&lt;/em&gt;, published at $5 by Little, Brown &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gF5NL.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;transcription above&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T21:44:17.170" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T21:44:17.170" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16879" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T19:49:03.137" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find the English name of the memoirs by Leo Tostoy titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28479288&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Without love, It's easier to live&lt;/a&gt; (original Russian title &lt;em&gt;Без любви жить легче&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find any mention of it neither in English, nor in Russian Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this memoir ever translated into English? If yes, what is it English title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11676" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-21T20:16:50.967" LastActivityDate="2020-12-21T20:16:50.967" Title="What is the English title of Tolstoy's memoirs &quot;Without love, It's easier to live&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16880" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-21T21:12:56.950" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sorry if this is off-topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I was a child (around 10 so early 90's), my grandparents gave me a book about the history of Santa Clause/Saint Nicholas/other alternate names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I recall about the book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The images were red, black and white. The pages were white, and the text black. There &lt;strong&gt;may&lt;/strong&gt; have been some exceptions to this, where the text was red.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The text was in English&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was illustrated inside, with Scandanavian-style artwork&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It appeared quite dark/sinister, at least for a young boy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was a hardback&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was relatively thin, at &amp;lt; 100 pages&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It was slightly smaller than A4 in size&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It talked about what Santa would be called in various countries, particularly focused on Scandinavia and Europe. I don't &lt;strong&gt;recall&lt;/strong&gt; anything about Santa in North/South America.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to find this book, and ideally acquire a copy, however, I've no idea what it is called.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know of a book which meets (and likely exceeds) the above criteria?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11679" LastEditorUserId="11679" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T08:24:20.090" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T08:24:20.090" Title="Looking for a Christmas/Saint Nicholas book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16881" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10946" CreationDate="2020-12-22T00:23:55.140" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;C.S. Lewis's &lt;em&gt;Studies in Words&lt;/em&gt; has more on this, but basically this point in time was when it was turning toward a pure insult and dropping the social implication entirely -- but not quite.  It was a lengthy process, taking over centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an insult, it still meant &amp;quot;someone who acts like a villain rather than in noble manner expected of nobles.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T00:23:55.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16882" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16887" CreationDate="2020-12-22T01:02:26.730" Score="4" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story a long time ago in one of our class readings. It keeps coming back to my mind but none of my Internet searches return a story except for news articles. The story goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of children from poor families are playing together. A rich couple gets down from a cart, approaches the first family asking if they would let one of their children be adopted in exchange for a handsome amount of money; the offer gets rejected.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then they approach the second family, where they readily agree. This family gets repeatedly scorned at by the mother from the first family for long time who continues to say, &amp;quot;I did not &lt;em&gt;sell&lt;/em&gt; my child&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After many (20 or so?) years, while the now grown up non-adopted child is returning from heavy laborious work, the same cart returns and now the adopted child, well groomed, gets down to bring presents to his biological parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enraged that what should have been his life, the non-adopted son gets angry with his parents, yells at them and while the mother still repeats &amp;quot;I did not sell my child&amp;quot; and leaves them (permanently or temporarily? I'm unsure since the story we had was supposedly just an excerpt).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this ring any bells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11680" LastEditorUserId="11680" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T13:28:01.560" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T13:28:01.560" Title="Help identify the story &quot;I did not sell my child&quot;; ends with the grown up child deserting parents" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16883" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2638" CreationDate="2020-12-22T05:05:31.210" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a modern tradition of Antonio and Bassanio, and the rest of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, being interpreted in queer terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common starting point for this is the first line of the play. &amp;quot;In sooth, I know not why I am so sad&amp;quot;, says Antonio. We don't either. He's rich, he has close friends, he seems to have no desire to marry. He goes to great lengths for his friend Bassanio though, putting his wealth and even life at risk. At the end of the play Antonio is still making extravagant promises on Bassanio's behalf, now to his wife: &amp;quot;My soul upon the forfeit, that your lord / Will never more break faith advisedly&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's all a bit much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a serve of cross-dressing, if you remember, with Portia and Nerissa dressing as men so Portia can be the lawyer for Antonio, and jokes about Bassanio sleeping with the (male) lawyer she pretends to be. There's plenty of other secret identities, concealments and revelations throughout the play, too: like Jessica converting to Christianity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An early reference for the queer tradition is WH Auden's essay &lt;em&gt;Brothers and Others&lt;/em&gt;, from 1948, which notes Antonio's obsession with Bassanio, and the Renaissance association of sodomy with usury. &amp;quot;It can, therefore, hardly be an accident that Shylock the usurer has as his antagonist a man whose emotional life, though his conduct may be chaste, is concentrated upon a member of his own sex.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The RSC website has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-merchant-of-venice/about-the-play/stage-history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1965 production&lt;/a&gt; with &amp;quot;the unmistakeable suggestion of a homosexual dimension to the relationship between Bassanio and Antonio&amp;quot;. I wouldn't be surprised if a less institutional company got there even earlier. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-12-29/was-the-merchant-of-venice-gay/609696&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Radford film starring Al Pacino&lt;/a&gt;, also uses the text to make Antonio and Bassanio's relationship ambiguous. It could be showing them as gay or bisexual, or it could just be showing the difference in male friendships across different places and times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More direct discussion of queerness - or just biting the bullet and showing the characters as gay - seems to start in the late 1970s, going by Joseph Pequiney's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.1111/j.1475-6757.1992.tb01038.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Two Antonios and Same-Sex Love in Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice (PDF)&lt;/a&gt;. This 1999 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2902109?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;journal article by Steve Patterson&lt;/a&gt; goes so far as to describe it as a &amp;quot;modern cliche&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lastly there's an excellent poem on the queerness of &lt;em&gt;Merchant&lt;/em&gt; and the openness of Shakespeare in general to interpretation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://aprweb.org/poems/the-sadness-of-antonio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sadness of Antonio&lt;/a&gt;, by Jason Schneiderman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastEditorUserId="11437" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T22:38:54.400" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T22:38:54.400" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16884" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16085" CreationDate="2020-12-22T05:28:18.960" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found this question while reading the same story, but I was puzzled at what &amp;quot;go for lost&amp;quot; meant instead. Anyway, I think I might be able to help you. For context, I'm from the Philippines and my native language is Filipino.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;Kung mapatay 'di madedeadball.&amp;quot; is in colloquial Filipino. Here's the breakdown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kung = if; mapatay = is/gets killed; 'di (short for edi) = then; madedeadball = die, 'deadball' is just slang for dying&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So all together the sentence means &amp;quot;If [one] is/gets killed, then [they] die. In context it's basically alluding to the fatalistic and carefree ways of the real rugged man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11682" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T09:11:43.370" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T09:11:43.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16885" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-22T10:19:06.293" Score="7" ViewCount="396" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google has not helped me figure this out. This is from the first or second page of the book (I'm not sure exactly since my electronic copy of the book doesn't seem to have page numbers):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I saw very little of my father during the war, and in his long absences I used to build up a more or less immaculate conception of him, which he generally – a bad but appropriate pun – shattered within the first forty-eight hours of his leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm guessing there is some kind of informal meaning to &amp;quot;shattered&amp;quot; here? Maybe it has something to do with &amp;quot;immaculate conception&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11685" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T10:30:49.400" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T11:04:23.673" Title="What is the pun in Fowles' The Magus?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;john-fowles&gt;&lt;the-magus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16886" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16885" CreationDate="2020-12-22T10:28:11.800" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's a double pun on &lt;em&gt;immaculate conception&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt;. The Roman Catholic dogma of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;immaculate conception&lt;/a&gt; says that Mary is free from original sin right from the moment of her conception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is saying that during his father's wartime absences, he would come up with an idealized image of him. This is a &lt;em&gt;conception&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of &amp;quot;a complex product of abstract or reflective thinking&amp;quot; (sense 2c on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conception&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster page&lt;/a&gt;). It was &lt;em&gt;immaculate&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., spotless, because the narrator would attribute all good qualities to the picture he built up of his father in his mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This idealized picture would be shattered by his father's actual behavior upon his returning home for leave. His father is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigadier_(United_Kingdom)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brigadier&lt;/a&gt;, which in the British army is the lowest-ranking of the generals. Directly after the passage you quote, the narrator goes on to say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like all men not really up to their job, he was a stickler for externals and petty quotidian things; and in lieu of an intellect he had accumulated an armoury of capitalized key-words like Discipline and Tradition and Responsibility. If I ever dared—I seldom did—to argue with him, he would produce one of those totem words and cosh me with it, as no doubt in similar circumstances he quelled his subalterns. If one still refused to lie down and die, he lost, or loosed, his temper. His temper was like a red dog, and he always had it close to hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So within a couple of days after his father's return, the narrator would see him as he really was: an incompetent, unintelligent, bad-tempered man. His father would behave toward him in the same way that he, in his capacity as general, would behave toward his subordinates in the army. So he would &lt;em&gt;generally&lt;/em&gt; shatter the &lt;em&gt;immaculate conception&lt;/em&gt; that the narrator has built up. In this context, &amp;quot;generally&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;wholly&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;entirely&amp;quot; (from definition 1 of entry 1 on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/general&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; page), but it also means &lt;em&gt;in the manner of a general&lt;/em&gt;, referring to his father's rank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Tsundoku mentions in the comments, the immaculate conception is not the same as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_birth_of_Jesus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;virgin birth&lt;/a&gt;. Jesus's being born of a virgin (because Mary bore the child of God without sexual intercourse) is a different Catholic doctrine from the immaculate conception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T11:04:23.673" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T11:04:23.673" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16887" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16882" CreationDate="2020-12-22T12:31:11.753" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This perfectly matches the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aux_champs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aux champs&lt;/a&gt; by Guy de Maupassant, which was published in the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Contes de la bécasse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (Unfortunately, the English Wikipedia has no entries for these publications.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a summary, freely translated from the summary in the French Wikipedia article. It turns out that what you read was the entire story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two poor families, named Tuvache and Vallin, live in two cottages next to each other. One day, they are visited by Mr. and Mrs. Hubières, who have no children and want to adopt the son of the Tuvache family for a large sum of money. The mother refuses this proposal, which she regards as inhuman. The couple than offers the same contract with a higher sum of money to the Vallin family, who accept.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a consequence of this &amp;quot;deal&amp;quot;, the Tuvache and Vallin families stop communicating with each other. Mrs. Tuvache looks down on her neighbours and considers herself an exemplary mother; as a consequence her son Charlot starts feeling superior because he has not been sold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twenty years later, the Vallin family's son, now a rich young man, visits his parents again, who celebrate his visit. Charlot Tuvache becomes envious and is so angry at his parents for not having sold him that he insults them and leaves the house.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For an English translation, see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/maupassant/188/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Adopted Son&lt;/a&gt; on Online-Literature.com.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T13:09:01.300" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T13:09:01.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-22T17:38:41.577" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In comments below the question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16680/2191&quot;&gt;What style are Kafka's novels?&lt;/a&gt;, Peter Shor said,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kafka has been characterized as &amp;quot;magical realism&amp;quot;. On the other hand, there are lots of people who disagree with that. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is The Metamorphosis magical realism? It depends on how you define magical realism. If you define it as &amp;quot;fiction that contains supernatural events which are unexplained,&amp;quot; it most certainly is. On the other hand, if you define it as &amp;quot;fiction where the supernatural events are an objective correlative to the characters' emotions or to other events in the book,&amp;quot; which describes the archetypical magical realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (along with many other magical realist novels), then The Metamorphosis is arguably not magical realism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What arguments have scholars used to characterise Kafka's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metamorphosis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metamorphosis&lt;/a&gt; as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_realism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;magic realism or magical realism&lt;/a&gt;? Based on the examples of magical realism that I have read in the past (e.g. Alain-Fournier's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Meaulnes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Grand Meaulnes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Hubert Lampo's &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_komst_van_Joachim_Stiller_(boek)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De komst van Joachim Stiller&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Johan Daisne's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Had_His_Hair_Cut_Short&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; were presented to me as examples of magical realism when I was at school) and the works by Kafka that I read at university and later, I had the impression that Kafka represented an entirely different type of world, without ever actually putting my finger on that difference. Peter Shor pointed out that it has to do with how one defines &amp;quot;magical realism&amp;quot;. How have scholars defined magical realism in a way that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;excludes Kafka's work, notably &amp;quot;The Metamorphosis&amp;quot;, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;includes &amp;quot;The Metamorphosis&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I intentionally insist on definitions from academic papers and books, not Wikipedia or websites that help students do their homework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T17:38:41.577" Title="What arguments have scholars used to characterise Kafka's The Metamorphosis as magical realism?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;franz-kafka&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16889" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16997" CreationDate="2020-12-22T21:44:46.277" Score="7" ViewCount="202" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16871/17&quot;&gt;excellent verbose answer&lt;/a&gt; that the existence of the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, on which Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is presumed to have been based, is known from a throwaway line of Thomas Lodge, published in 1596 some years before Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he walks for the most part in black under colour of gravity, and looks as pale as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserally at the theatre like an oyster-wife, &lt;em&gt;Hamlet, revenge&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- Thomas Lodge, &lt;em&gt;Wit's Misery&lt;/em&gt; (1596), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n71/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 62&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is known about the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, and how has this knowledge changed over the centuries?&lt;/strong&gt; Did scholars of Shakespeare always know about the existence of this previous Hamlet story, or was it assumed at some point that Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was more original? Is the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; known only from the above Lodge quote, or are there other conclusive proofs of its existence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T11:13:15.947" Title="How has knowledge of the Ur-Hamlet evolved over the centuries?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-kyd&gt;&lt;ur-hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16890" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16891" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British and Irish novelist Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999) or her life as a writer. She is best remembered for novels such as 'Under the Net' (1954) and 'The Sea, the Sea' (1978)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" LastActivityDate="2020-12-22T22:09:38.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-22T23:11:49.283" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recall a story, written in English, about a British or American WW1 or WW2 soldier who has to cross enemy lines to deliver a message which he was not to read. In the rain and mud, fearing the ink would run (or fearing imminent capture, I forget which) the soldier reads and memorizes the message and destroys the paper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He survives to deliver the message. Why did the general (or colonel, I forget) trust the messenger’s word about the contents of the message in the absence of the official notepaper? He trusted it because the message was either “shoot the messenger” or “kill the messenger” or a variant. Surely no spy or double agent would deliver such a message!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the name of this story? Who wrote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To help narrow down the time, I read this story sometime in the 1970’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story may have been in a public school textbook. I attended school in New York State.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11688" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T07:47:25.617" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T07:47:25.617" Title="What short story has a soldier deliver a secret message like “shoot the messenger”?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16893" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16894" CreationDate="2020-12-23T07:50:47.213" Score="4" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of Ko Un's very short poems, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and available on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/tag/ko-un/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brief Poems blog&lt;/a&gt;, goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some say they can recall a thousand years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some say they have already visited the next thousand years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On a windy day&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am waiting for a bus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any connection, ironic or otherwise, between the first two lines and the last two lines? Is the point of the poem just to create a contrast, between people who say they can time travel through millennia and the mundane (in)activity of waiting for a bus? Why waiting for a bus specifically? Is it a wry comment that the bus is so slow it may take a thousand years to arrive?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T11:55:06.743" Title="What's the connection between millennia of time travel and waiting for a bus?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16894" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16893" CreationDate="2020-12-23T08:58:38.743" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your speculations in the question about what the contrast might mean are on point. Specifically, the poem moves from grandiose claims to mundane reality. The claims are about the past (&lt;em&gt;recall&lt;/em&gt;) or the future (&lt;em&gt;next thousand years&lt;/em&gt;); the reality is the present (&lt;em&gt;am waiting&lt;/em&gt;). That the day is &lt;em&gt;windy&lt;/em&gt; underlines the contrast between reality (cold wind) and the claims (hot air). Or perhaps there's a continuity rather than a contrast between the bluster of the time travel claims and the windiness of the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker's waiting for a &lt;em&gt;bus&lt;/em&gt; also brings the claims of traveling through time with traveling through space. While others claim to have mastered time travel, the speaker is trying merely to get from one place to another, and hasn't even begun the bus journey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T10:25:12.917" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T10:25:12.917" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16893" CreationDate="2020-12-23T11:55:06.743" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Standing at a bus stop waiting for your bus to come is one of the most frustrating and boring activities known to man. The author is saying that it can seem like a thousand years pass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T11:55:06.743" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16897" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-23T14:47:02.833" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/16865/1960s-kids-book-with-invisible-dust-which-people-think-improves-everything-but&quot;&gt;Daniel’s question a few days ago&lt;/a&gt;  -  about the 1960s kids’ book with “invisible dust” -  got me thinking.  I remember the grammar school book-buying program Daniel mentions - I think that may have been where I found the book I’m looking for here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the title was “I was a Teenaged Millionaire” or something similar.  The narrator was a young teenaged boy.  I’m pretty sure the stories were set in the 1930s, because I remember the narrator’s dad encouraged him to “invest” in the stock market, but the boy really just bought stocks because he thought the stock certificates looked cool.  He would pin the certificates up on the walls of his bedroom.  After the stock market crash, his dad gets angry and says (paraphrasing) “You &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; a small fortune here, but now these certificates aren’t even worth anything as wallpaper!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s another story about the narrator’s  confrontation with a bully.  He says (paraphrasing again) “I knew eventually I was going to have to fight (character name).”  He ends up digging a pit and setting it as a trap for the bully.  The bully falls into the pit - possibly full of mud or slime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the book was a collection of stories like this - all based on the narrator's adventures - but this is all I can remember. I either bought it in the book program Daniel describes, or maybe I borrowed it from the school library. In either case, this would have been in the very early 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think it’s Robert McCloskey, but from what I remember the style is similar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought I was fairly certain about at least the gist of the title, but a Google book search for this (and several variations) turned up nothing.  Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit/Update&lt;/strong&gt; As I think more about it, I suppose it's possible that &amp;quot;Teenage Millionaire&amp;quot; might have been the title of one of the stories, and not of the book itself. I also think it was probably intended facetiously, maybe referring to his failed stock market adventure. He doesn't seem well-to-do in the other stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not the book's title, of course it gets a lot harder to track down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update/&lt;strong&gt;Bounty&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;  As the bounty tag says, I want to call attention to this question.  It's possible the only way to identify this is to reach someone else who read it way back when and has a better memory than I do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11681" LastEditorUserId="11681" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T18:17:01.573" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T03:01:35.143" Title="Young-readers book of short-stories from 1960s or 70s - &quot;Teenaged Millionaire&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16899" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16900" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" Score="0" Body="Questions about Iris Murdoch's 1954 novel 'Under the Net'. Use this tag with the [iris-murdoch] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T16:19:21.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16901" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-23T21:17:16.013" Score="4" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70163/translators-note-three-poems-by-ko-un&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Translator’s Note: Three Poems by Ko Un&lt;/a&gt; from the Poetry Foundation and came across this excerpt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We translated “명사도  동사도  다” (“all nouns and verbs”) as “all words,” which sounds less awkward in English, and decided not to isolate “there” (“거기”) on its own line, the way it’s isolated in the original, since it would sound overemphatic in English, especially as an ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first part of this sentence makes sense. Indeed, all of the other noted changes in the larger paragraph make sense to me. However, I'm not sure about the part about not isolating &amp;quot;there&amp;quot;. I'm also not sure exactly what it's referring to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are links to the poem in &lt;a href=&quot;https://hocopolitso.org/2015/11/10/manas-musings-lost-and-gained-in-translation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Korean&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57524/taklamakan-desert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English&lt;/a&gt;. I'm not excerpting because I'm not sure which parts are relevant, and I don't want to just dump the full text into this question. I see that &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; is on multiple lines by itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What effect does isolating &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; on its own line have in the original Korean?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why would preserving &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; on its own line sound &amp;quot;overemphatic&amp;quot; in English?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How does combining &amp;quot;there&amp;quot; with another line preserve the original poetic intent?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-23T22:44:25.610" LastActivityDate="2020-12-23T22:44:25.610" Title="Why does isolating &quot;there&quot; on its own line sound less emphatic in Korean than English?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16867" CreationDate="2020-12-24T05:02:30.100" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Several scholars have investigated the relationship between the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic on modernist writers including T. S. Eliot. Most such analysis has taken place in the past 25 years. The most visibly prolific researcher on this subject is Dr. Elizabeth Outka at the University of Richmond. She proposes that the pandemic influenced &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt; in multiple ways, but the influence may be overshadowed by, or confused for, the influence of the recent war.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.richmond.edu/faculty/eoutka/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dr. Elizabeth Outka&lt;/a&gt;, professor of English at the University of Richmond (Virginia, USA), studies early twentieth-century literature through the lens of culture and contemporary events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a 2014 article, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0099&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Wood for the Coffins Ran Out': Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; she discusses the effects of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic on the writings of four authors. That article's abstract is here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article examines the relationships between the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919, World War I, and modernism. Particular focus is given to literary depictions of death, trauma, mourning, and corpses. Details on accounts of the epidemic by writers Katherine Anne Porter and Thomas Wolfe, and on the novel &amp;quot;Mrs. Dalloway&amp;quot; by Virginia Woolf and the poem &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot; by T. S. Eliot are presented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article, she notes that the pandemic is overshadowed by World War I in literature and literary discussion. In the background section, she describes the progression of the pandemic's three waves and how the growing death toll affected people away from the war front, who had largely been shielded from reminders of death because the war dead were not brought home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having provided the background, she considers Porter's &lt;em&gt;Pale Horse, Pale Rider&lt;/em&gt; and Wolfe's &lt;em&gt;Look Homeward, Angel&lt;/em&gt;, both of which prominently feature influenza. She then addresses Woolf, who initially downplayed the pandemic. Finally, she writes about Eliot's &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;, written in 1922, three years after Eliot and his wife caught and recovered from influenza. She comments that the 1918-1919 strain of influenza often left its survivors with mental and nervous aftereffects, and that Eliot himself remarked that his mind did not seem right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She quotes a section of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That corpse you planted last year in your garden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! (Eliot, 1922, lines 71-75)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She explains that this passage applies equally well to the recent war as to the influenza pandemic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On a broader level, no one knew, in 1922, whether the flu would return, as virulent as ever, or whether another war with Germany would unfold. More corpses were always possible. Eliot here participates in a kind of modernist mourning/anti-mourning: he records the desire to push the dead away, to bury grief and move on, and at the same time he insists that the memory of these bodies will always return. (Outka, 2014, p. 956)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She concludes by reiterating that there is a dearth of analysis of the effect of the influenza pandemic on modernist writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2019, Outka published &lt;em&gt;Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature&lt;/em&gt;, which expands the ideas of &amp;quot;Wood for the Coffins&amp;quot; into a full-length book. Chapter 5 of this book, titled &amp;quot;A Wasteland of Influenza,&amp;quot; centers on T. S. Eliot's &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. She draws on Eliot's letters to his family during the 1918-1922 period, and she observes how the death surrounding him, both globally and personally (his aunt and his father died within a month of each other), affected his mental state and his writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka herself summarizes this chapter thusly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I divide my pandemic reading of The Waste Land into two sections. In &amp;quot;Outbreak,&amp;quot; I read the poem as a record of the sensory experiences of acute infection, including the reality-bending delirium, the fever, the dehydration, and the threat of drowning. I move, in &amp;quot;Aftermath,&amp;quot; to the ways the poem evocatively captures three widespread experiences that came in the pandemic's wake: death, reflected in the bones, corpses, rats, and insecure burials; viral resurrections, including perpetual states of living death and barren tropes of sacrificial renewal; and finally, the arrival of silence and the breakdown of communication in the face of so much suffering. Throughout my reading, I remain attentive to the many influences that shape these elements, including the war, and I do not propose that the pandemic is the key to all mythologies, to borrow George Eliot’s phrase. I do, however, argue that the miasmic residue of the pandemic experience infuses every part of the poem, in ways we have been missing all along. (Outka, 2019a, p. 145)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka has also written related articles for popular publications and literary magazines such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://theconversation.com/zombie-flu-how-the-1919-influenza-pandemic-fueled-the-rise-of-the-living-dead-123960&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Conversation&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Paris Review&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem itself is available from Project Gutenberg. Outka's 2014 article may require an academic subscription, but I was able to access Outka's 2019 book through my public library's subscription to ProQuest Ebook Central.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other scholars in the past 25 years have also studied the connection between the influenza pandemic and &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Goldstein (2018) also addresses the effect of the pandemic on the literature of T. S. Eliot and others, but I was not able to access this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Buttram (1995), a doctoral dissertation, delves deeply into the specifics of the ailments of Eliot and his family in the 1917-1922 period and how his health affected his writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Woods (2007), another dissertation, promises to be a goldmine of primary source material (if you can find it), with its abstract claiming:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This dissertation presents, in publication date order, the 167 articles published by T. S. Eliot from 1915 to 1922, most of which have never been reprinted. They include literary criticism, book reviews, poetry, philosophical essays, humorous dialogues, and other items. This edition includes annotations, which translate foreign language passages, note sources of quotations, record changes made to the original article in any reprints overseen by Eliot, and provide other information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If you're interested in comparisons of the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic with today's COVID-19 pandemic and how they intersect with literature, there are some more articles in the references below:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nichols et al. (2020) is a roundtable discussion of six scholars that includes Dr. Outka.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hovanec (2011) examines several authors of the early twentieth century, but mentions Eliot only in passing.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Buttram, C. (1995). &lt;em&gt;T. S. Eliot and the human body: The corporeal concerns of his life, prose, and poetry&lt;/em&gt; (Order No. 9533522) [Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University]. ProQuest Dissertations &amp;amp; Theses Global.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot, T. S. (1922). &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1321&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1321&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Goldstein, B. (2018). &lt;em&gt;The world broke in two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the year that changed literature&lt;/em&gt;. Bloomsbury Publishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hovanec, C. (2011). Of bodies, families, and communities: Refiguring the 1918 influenza pandemic. &lt;em&gt;Literature and Medicine, 29&lt;/em&gt;(1), 161-81. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2011.0314&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1353/lm.2011.0314&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nichols, C. M., Bristow, N., Ewing, E. T., Gabriel, J. M., Montoya, B. C., &amp;amp; Outka, E. (2020). “Reconsidering the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic in the Age of COVID-19”. &lt;em&gt;The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 19&lt;/em&gt;(4), 642-672. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537781420000377&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1017/s1537781420000377&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka, E. (2014). &amp;quot;Wood for the Coffins Ran Out&amp;quot;: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic. &lt;em&gt;Modernism/Modernity, 21&lt;/em&gt;(4), 937-960. &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0099&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2014.0099&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka, E. (2019a). &lt;em&gt;Viral modernism: The influenza pandemic and interwar literature&lt;/em&gt;. Columbia University Press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka, E. (2019b, October 28). Zombie flu: How the 1919 influenza pandemic fueled the rise of the living dead. &lt;em&gt;The Conversation&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://theconversation.com/zombie-flu-how-the-1919-influenza-pandemic-fueled-the-rise-of-the-living-dead-123960&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://theconversation.com/zombie-flu-how-the-1919-influenza-pandemic-fueled-the-rise-of-the-living-dead-123960&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outka, E. (2020, April 8). How pandemics seep into literature. &lt;em&gt;The Paris Review&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Woods, R. J. (2007). &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Prufrock&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;The Waste Land&amp;quot;: T. S. Eliot's periodical publications, 1915–1922&lt;/em&gt; (Order No. 3255920).  [Doctoral dissertation, Northwestern University]. ProQuest Dissertations &amp;amp; Theses Global.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T05:02:30.100" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16905" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-24T09:38:23.540" Score="7" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second line of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;God's Grandeur&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found on the Internet regarding the analysis of this line was rather complicated. I have to present this poem in front of my classroom and I am still just a high school student. Could anyone give me the easiest explanation , something that everyone will be able to understand please?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11695" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-24T09:50:21.067" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T11:48:27.027" Title="The second line of &quot;God's Grandeur&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;gerard-manley-hopkins&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16906" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16905" CreationDate="2020-12-24T09:58:56.180" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When you take a sheet of metal foil and shake it vigorously, the metal sparkles as the light catches it. Here is an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://images.app.goo.gl/cCVVDiVXLLYSLhAU8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;gold foil being shaken&lt;/a&gt;. The left edge of the foil in particular is reminiscent of flames:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZUEV9.gif&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ZUEV9.gif&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, the light glitters and shines off the foil in an active way. That's what Hopkins means: God's grandeur is actively reflected in the world, as light is actively reflected when foil is shaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-24T11:48:27.027" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T11:48:27.027" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-24T17:56:39.847" Score="3" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57527/asking-the-way&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Asking the Way&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is a short poem by Ko Un, addressing &amp;quot;You fools who ask what god is&amp;quot; and telling them to ask about life instead, illustrating the principle with examples about lemon trees and drinkers in a port. The main point of the poem is clear, but I wonder if there's any significance to the specific examples chosen to illustrate it? &lt;strong&gt;Why lemon trees and drinkers, in particular, rather than anything else?&lt;/strong&gt; E.g. would these words have some significance wordplay-wise in the original Korean, or do lemons symbolise something in Korean culture, or anything like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-24T17:56:39.847" Title="Is there any significance to the lemons and the port in Ko Un's &quot;Asking the Way&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16908" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16909" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English-American author Charles Bukowski (1920 –  1994) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:53:35.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16910" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16911" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist John Fowles ( 1926 – 2005) or his life as a writer. He is best known for the novels 'The Collector' (1963), 'The Magus' (1966) and 'The French Lieutenant's Woman' (1969),&#xD;&#xA;." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:56:31.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16912" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16913" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" Score="0" Body="Questions about John Fowles's novel 'The Magus', which was first published in 1965 and revised in 1977. Use this tag with the [john-fowles] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T00:58:29.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16914" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8803" CreationDate="2020-12-25T06:32:49.627" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johnson is just saying that he knows everyone will criticize him for the choices he made in defining the words in the dictionary, because people are apt to disagree about these things. He uses the introduction to get in front of the criticism. And by lower employments he means &lt;em&gt;writers&lt;/em&gt; (tongue in cheek), as opposed to like military generals, clergy, or other more respected professions. It's obvious if you just read the actual passage in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11286" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T06:32:49.627" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16915" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16916" CreationDate="2020-12-25T12:04:55.347" Score="9" ViewCount="782" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a short story (about 20 - 30 pages long) I read a couple of years ago. Here is what I recall:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The central idea is that a [catholic] priest creates (and writes) a very short (about 4 pages long) proof of the existence of God just before he dies [or is killed]. The proof, besides of being very short has several special characteristics: it is written in simple language that anybody can read and understand, it convinces beyond any doubt anybody who reads it, and nobody can explain or recreate it afterwards [something in the line of &amp;quot;it was so obvious when I read it, but I can't recall what I read&amp;quot;].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There is a search for the written proof by [I think] the police and some priests.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At the end, the proof is found and finds its way to the pope, who, after reading it and making sure that there are no copies, put it in a safe so nobody reads it and the Vatican can stay in business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The nature of the proof is not revealed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No theology involved&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the events take place mostly in France&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Possibly by a French author, late XXth century or early XXI&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translated into Spanish&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The word &amp;quot;secret&amp;quot; was probably part of the title&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11701" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T12:58:04.153" Title="Identification of a short story about a short irrefutable self-evident proof that God exists that is kept secret" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16916" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16915" CreationDate="2020-12-25T12:58:04.153" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This would seem to fit the bill:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-684-84667-5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Corner of the Veil&#xA;by Laurence Cossé&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paris. May 24 1999, 8.32pm: Father Bertrand Beaulieu of the venerable Society of Casuists, holds in his trembling hands six handwritten pages that prove the existence of God. Instantly, the secular and spiritual powers move to suppress the news, certain that it signifies their own demise.&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/522810.A_Corner_of_the_Veil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source: Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T12:58:04.153" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16917" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-25T14:06:06.073" Score="10" ViewCount="1110" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Epic_of_Gilgamesh&amp;amp;oldid=995778007#Advice_from_Ecclesiastes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several scholars suggest direct borrowing of Siduri's advice by the author of Ecclesiastes.&lt;sup&gt;[41]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A rare proverb about the strength of a triple-stranded rope, &amp;quot;a triple-stranded rope is not easily broken&amp;quot;, is common to both books.&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the Standard Babylonian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh dates back to the eleventh century B.C., while Sumerian Gilgamesh stories probably date back to the 18th century B.C., I assume they predate (most of) the Bible. (This appears to be the case for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13588/2191&quot;&gt;flood myth&lt;/a&gt; that can be found both in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the Bible.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article does not explicitly say that the Bible borrowed the proverb from the Epic of Gilgamesh although the preceding statement about Siduri's advice might lead readers to think that this is actually the case. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nosweatshakespeare.com/literature/most-influential-fiction/epic-gilgamesh/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;NoSweatShakespeare&lt;/a&gt; claims,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An unusual saying about the strength of a triple-stranded rope (&lt;em&gt;a triple-stranded rope is not easily broken&lt;/em&gt;) in Ecclesiastes comes from the Epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22triple-stranded+rope%22+ecclesiastes&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Many other websites&lt;/a&gt; repeat Wikipedia's claim (though usually without claiming that the proverb was borrowed) without providing evidence to support it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article does not state where the proverb can be found in Ecclesiastes and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Is the claim even correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T15:22:42.267" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T15:22:42.267" Title="Do the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh really contain the same rare proverb about the strength of a triple-stranded rope?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;&lt;akkadian-literature&gt;&lt;epic-of-gilgamesh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16919" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16917" CreationDate="2020-12-25T18:58:38.707" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The relevant passsage in the Bible is easy enough to find: it is &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/4-12.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ecclesiates 4:12 (see Bible Hub)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (King James Bible)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Findng the (possibly) corresponding passage in the Epic of Gilgamesh took a bit more effort.&#xA;Apparently, there is a close verbal parallel in Maureen Gallery Kovacs's translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Stanford University Press, 1989),&#xA;which can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;http://dustoffthebible.com/blog-archive/2018/01/26/the-epic-of-gilgamesh-text-translation-tablets/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dust off the Bible&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Academy of Ancient Texts&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;(Since Kovacs's translation was published just over 30 years ago, I assume it is still copyrighted and that the owners of those websites cannnot legally reproduce the text without the translator's permission or a licence from Stanford University Press, but I am unable to check whether these conditions were met.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab4.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kovacs's translation of Tablet IV&lt;/a&gt; contains the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Strangers ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'A slippery path is not feared by two people who help each&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;other.'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Twice three times...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'A three-ply rope cannot be cut.'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'The mighty lioness cubs can roll him over.&amp;quot;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab5.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kovacs's translation of Tablet V&lt;/a&gt; contains the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Strangers ...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'A slippery path is not feared by two people who help each other.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Twice three times...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'A three-ply rope cannot be cut.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'The mighty lion--two cubs can roll him over.&amp;quot;'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to confirm Wikipedia's claim, but the repetition of the same text on two different tablets looks odd; moreover, the ellisions suggest that the tablets are very damaged here, so the translator may have made extrapolations to fill in gaps in the original text. For this reason, I also checked three other, more recent, translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Andrew George's translation (&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction by Andrew George. London: Penguin, 1999. Reprinted with minor revisions in 2003) does not contain a corresponding passage in Tablet IV and presents the following passage from Tablet V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Two] garments, however, ......, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;even a glacis-slope two [&lt;em&gt;climbing can conquer.&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Two ..........&#xA;a three-ply rope [&lt;em&gt;is not easily broken&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Even] a mighty lion two cubs [&lt;em&gt;can overcome&lt;/em&gt;.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The italics inside the square brackets are from George's translation; they indicate &amp;quot;restorations&amp;quot; that are not certain or simply conjectural. Regular text between square brackets is less conjectural because based on parallel passages that can be found elsewhere.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benjamn R. Foster's translation (&lt;em&gt;The Epic of Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt;. Translated and edited by Benjamin R. Foster. Second Edition. Norton, 2019) similarly does not contain a corresponding passage in Tablet IV and presents the following passage from Tablet V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though one be weak, two [together are strong]. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If one cannot scale a slippery slope, two [can do it together].&#xA;A three-strand rope [is stronger when doubled],&#xA;Two cubs are [stronger] than a mighty lion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Foster does not use italics between square brackets to indicate a higher level of uncertainty about the content of the source text.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stefan Maul's translation (&lt;em&gt;Das Gilgamesch-Epos&lt;/em&gt;. Neu Übersetzt und kommentiert von Stefan M. Maul. München: C. H. Beck, 2005. Sixth edition, 2014) does not contain anything that corresponds with the above passages. Presumably, the German assyriologist found the Akkadian text too fragmentary to translate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What can be seen from George's and Foster's translations is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the statement about the &amp;quot;three-strand rope&amp;quot; is based on a conjectural restoration,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;both restorations differ from Kovacs's translation, and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kovacs reused a passage from Tablet V to fill a gap in Tablet IV.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My conclusion: to the extent that the Epic of Gilgamesh and Ecclesiastes 4:12 have a proverb in common, this appears to be based on a conjectural translation of a damaged passage the Epic that translators formulated (whether consciously or not) to echo a passage from the Old Testament.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T18:58:38.707" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16920" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:18:44.287" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:18:44.287" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:18:44.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16921" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:18:44.287" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Sarah Relyea (born 1958) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:35:56.797" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:35:56.797" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16922" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:27:56.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:27:56.320" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:27:56.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16923" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:27:56.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary work 'The Cure at Troy' (1990/1991) by Seamus Heaney. It is a verse adaptation of Sophocle's play 'Philoctetes'. Should be tagged with [seamus-heaney]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:36:50.827" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:36:50.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16924" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:30:49.467" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:30:49.467" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:30:49.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16925" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-25T22:30:49.467" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Playground Zero' by Sarah Relyea. Should be tagged with [sarah-relyea]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-25T22:35:44.670" LastActivityDate="2020-12-25T22:35:44.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16927" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16726" CreationDate="2020-12-26T03:19:44.477" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think one of many interesting points in comparing greek origins in modern novels is to take a look at how the authors interpret its meaning in various settings.&#xA;The problem I see, however, is to find out which „original“ they are talking about as there are many variations of the Greek „originals“.&#xA;The questions that remains are: What was the source and how does the author deviate from it and in doing so, why does (s)he do that?&#xA;It might be a good idea to limit your analysis right from the start as an extensive analysis could go on forever. :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8518" LastActivityDate="2020-12-26T03:19:44.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16928" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-26T19:21:18.000" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Stephen King's novel &lt;em&gt;The Shining&lt;/em&gt;, there seems to me to be a &lt;em&gt;correlation&lt;/em&gt; between &lt;em&gt;the weather&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;sanity&lt;/em&gt; of Jack Torrance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Namely, as the Torrance family becomes more isolated (i.e. people from the hotel are leaving), the closer Jack gets to &lt;em&gt;insanity&lt;/em&gt; and the more &lt;em&gt;powerful and violent the storm is&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This has reminded me of the literary movement known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Naturalism&lt;/a&gt;, where even known there's no &lt;em&gt;causation&lt;/em&gt; there is a &lt;em&gt;correlation&lt;/em&gt; of the external &lt;em&gt;outside weather&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;internal state of affairs&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is the stormy weather in the novel an element of naturalism, or am I interpreting things wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11707" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T12:52:57.647" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T16:04:55.860" Title="Is the stormy weather an element of Naturalism in The Shining by Stephen King?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;stephen-king&gt;&lt;the-shining&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16929" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16930" CreationDate="2020-12-27T00:21:35.877" Score="6" ViewCount="183" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rabindranath Tagore's novel 1916 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Home_and_the_World&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Home and the World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; consists of chapters told from the point of view of varying characters.&#xA;One of these is Sandip, who is a militant nationalist and an active participant in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swadeshi_movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swadeshi movement&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;In the third chapter, which is narrated from Sandip's point of view, there is a discussion between Nikhil's old tutor Chandranath and Sandip.&#xA;(Nikhil is one of the novel's main character and refuses to take part in Swadeshi.)&#xA;The passage that is relevant to this question is the following (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chandranath Babu began to talk about Swadeshi. I thought I would let him go on with his monologues. There is nothing like letting an old man talk himself out. It makes him feel that he is winding up the world, forgetting all the while how far away the real world is from his wagging tongue.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But even my worst enemy would not accuse me of patience. And when Chandranath Babu went on to say: &amp;quot;If we expect to gather fruit where we have sown no seed, then we . . .&amp;quot; I had to interrupt him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Who wants fruit?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; I cried. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;We go by the Author of the Gita who says that we are concerned only with the doing, not with the fruit of our deeds.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Gita is obviously the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Gita&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is attributed to Vyasa.&#xA;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#Chapters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter summaries on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, Sandip is most likely alluding to something from Chaper 3.&#xA;Is this correct and what are the exact lines that Sandip is alluding to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T19:52:36.473" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T19:52:36.473" Title="What are the lines in the Bhagavad Gita that Sandip is alluding to?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;rabindranath-tagore&gt;&lt;bengali-literature&gt;&lt;sanskrit-literature&gt;&lt;mahabharata&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16930" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16929" CreationDate="2020-12-27T00:46:06.017" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bhagavad-gita.us/bhagavad-gita-2-47/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; 2:47&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Source of Sandip's allusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage Sandip alludes to is indeed from the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt;. The exact source is Chapter 2, verse 47:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन ।&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;karmaNyevaadhikaaraste ma phaleShu kadaachana&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;maa karmaphalaheturbhuurmaa te sa~Ngo.ostavakarmaNi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have control over action alone, none whatsoever over its fruits. Neither consider yourself the cause of the fruits of action, nor be attached to inaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context of this, the best-known verse from the &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt;, is as follows: Arjuna, the most skilled warrior on one side of an epic battle, loses heart just before the battle begins. He finds himself ranged against his cousins, his gurus, and his elders. Since bonds of affection and gratitude bind him to them, he feels unable to take up arms as he is required to. He considers renouncing the battlefield. Arjuna's close friend Krishna, who has agreed to be his charioteer in the war, counsels him that since the war is just, participating is the only viable option. When Arjuna says that he does not want to cause the death of his kinsmen, and adds that winning the kingdom would not be worth that price, Krishna responds with this verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word translated here as &lt;em&gt;control&lt;/em&gt;, अधिकार / adhikaar, has a wide range of meaning that includes &lt;em&gt;authority&lt;/em&gt; as well as &lt;em&gt;right&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;entitlement&lt;/em&gt;. Arjuna should not see his actions as the &lt;em&gt;cause&lt;/em&gt;, हेतु / hetu, of their outcome. Krishna counsels Arjuna that he must act responsibly, but without any expectation regarding the consequences. Action is within his control, so he is both entitled and obligated to act. However, he is not entitled to any specific results, nor are they within his control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While regularly treated as a stand-alone text, the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is a small part of a much longer Sanskrit epic, the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;. It comprises chapters 23-40 of Book 6, the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhishma_Parva&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book of Bhishma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is considered a late interpolation into the epic. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata#Accretion_and_redaction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;earliest written references&lt;/a&gt; to the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; date back to the 4th C BCE, with an oral tradition going back to the 8th or 9th C BCE. By contrast, the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; likely &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita#Date&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dates&lt;/a&gt; to the 2nd C BCE. In the context of the larger epic, the source of Sandip's allusion would be &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; 06:24:47 rather than &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; 2:47.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Attributed Authorship of the &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question mentions that the &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is attributed to Vyasa. That is certainly true, in that the entire &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; is considered Vyasa's. Nevertheless, as touched upon in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16590/289&quot;&gt;answer to another question&lt;/a&gt; on this site, the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt; is told through a series of narrative frames. The action on the battlefield is related in real time to the blind king &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhritarashtra&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dhritarashtra&lt;/a&gt; by his charioteer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanjaya&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sanjaya&lt;/a&gt;, whom the gods have granted divine sight so that he can see the entire battle in real time. Putting this together with the overall narrative frame of the &lt;em&gt;Mahabharata&lt;/em&gt;, what we read is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a text that represents what&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ugrashravas said to Shaunaka, that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vaishampayan said to Ugrashravas, that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vyasa said to Vaishampayan, that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sanjaya said to Dhritarashtra that&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Krishna said to Arjuna.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These narrative frames notwithstanding, a good Hindu would attribute the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; to Krishna rather than Vyasa. The &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Geeta&lt;/em&gt; literally translates to &lt;em&gt;The Song of God&lt;/em&gt;. Sanjaya uses direct speech to narrate Krishna's words to Dhritarashtra. So the chief speaker of the &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is Krishna, with Arjuna and Sanjaya getting some words in edgewise. Krishna's speeches are marked with श्रीभगवानुवाच / shriibhagavaanuvaacha, &amp;quot;the Lord God says&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nikhil's challenge to Chandranath is therefore pretty audacious, relying as it does on the words of God himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Note on Transliteration&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first vowel in &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is a long [ i ]. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt; convention would represent गीता as &lt;em&gt;Gītā&lt;/em&gt;. Strict &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRANS&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iTrans&lt;/a&gt; would represent it as &lt;em&gt;giitaa&lt;/em&gt;. Since IAST is hard to type on an ASCII keyboard, and iTrans specifically designed for such a keyboard, I tend to use the latter. Unlike IAST, however, iTrans is case-sensitive; G and g represent two different sounds. This makes it awkward to use for titles when capitalization would ordinarily be desirable. &lt;em&gt;Geeta&lt;/em&gt; is probably the most common conventional, if nonstandard, transliteration of गीता, and I've defaulted to that for the title. The same is true for proper names: Krishna is conventional and nonstandard; IAST would be kṛṣṇa (or Kṛṣṇa); iTrans, kR^iShNa. Direct quotations from the text use iTrans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T06:56:15.503" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T06:56:15.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16931" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16936" CreationDate="2020-12-27T02:52:59.393" Score="-1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there any instance of a hero who, after having killed his enemy, rues having had to do so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a specific instance from epic literature (but willing to accept answers from outside that genre) of a warrior who doesn't rejoice over his defeated foe nor drag him around the city walls. Instead, he says something along the lines to his dead foe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admire your spirit and you were a fine warrior. It is a sad destiny that led you to find me on the battlefield. You could have prevailed against a lesser man, but of course I'm the greatest. I am sad for you and your family that such an otherwise fine warrior would be cursed to come across me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, I'm searching for an example of a warrior who is the best at what he does but has a certain tragic view of life that leads him to honor his foes, even though he defeated them fairly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11711" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T05:30:29.687" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T01:40:59.853" Title="Is there any example of a hero saluting his fallen adversary and regretting the need to vanquish him?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ClosedDate="2021-05-16T20:17:26.893" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16932" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9449" CreationDate="2020-12-27T03:19:40.617" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest surviving Robin Hood tales are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gest_of_Robyn_Hode&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Gest of Robyn Hode&lt;/a&gt;, between 1492 and 1534, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_and_the_Monk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robin Hood and the Monk&lt;/a&gt; written  after 1450, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Hood_and_the_Potter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robin Hood and the Potter&lt;/a&gt;, about 1503.  There is no evidence that the tales were written down prior to that.  Although the first literary reference to Robin Hood was in 1370-ish (in &lt;em&gt;Piers Plowman&lt;/em&gt;), it does not require the tales be written -- a drunken priest confesses he does not know his prayers, but he knows &amp;quot;rymes&amp;quot; of Robyn Hood and Randolf earl of Chester.  Likewise, although &lt;em&gt;Gest&lt;/em&gt; is clearly a compilation of tales fit together (sometimes quite awkwardly), there is no necessary reason to believe that the author used any written sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no particular written version that defined the legend, which altered quite substantially over the years.  (For instance, Alan-a-Dale did not appear until the 17th century; the whole &amp;quot;Saxon vs. Norman&amp;quot; element was introduced by Sir Walter Scott; and the idea of Robin's assisting with the raising of Richard's ransom didn't appear until 20th century movies.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T03:25:19.640" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T03:25:19.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-27T10:35:08.337" Score="3" ViewCount="573" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for an explanation as to what the phrase &amp;quot;oxygen seeped out of the room&amp;quot; means, in &lt;em&gt;The Kite Runner&lt;/em&gt; by Khaled Hosseini in the following passage. For example, I can write that it means, &amp;quot;Amir was uncomfortable&amp;quot;, but I need a slightly more elaborate explanation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hassan milled about the periphery of my life after that. I made sure our paths crossed as little as possible, planned my day that way. Because when he was around, the &lt;strong&gt;oxygen seeped out of the room&lt;/strong&gt;. My chest tightened and I couldn’t draw enough air; I’d stand there, gasping in my own little airless bubble of atmosphere. But even when he wasn’t around, he was. He was there in the hand-washed and ironed clothes on the cane-seat chair, in the warm slippers left outside my door, in the wood already burning in the stove when I came down for breakfast. Everywhere I turned, I saw signs of his loyalty, his goddamn unwavering loyalty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11714" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T17:45:54.653" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T17:45:54.653" Title="When Hassan was around, ‘the oxygen seeped out of the room.’ What is happening here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;khaled-hosseini&gt;&lt;the-kite-runner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16935" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16934" CreationDate="2020-12-27T11:30:51.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/suck_the_air_out_of&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; cites &lt;em&gt;suck the oxygen out of&lt;/em&gt; as a variant of &lt;em&gt;suck the air out of&lt;/em&gt;. The definition is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alternative forms&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suck all the air out of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;suck the oxygen out of&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Verb&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;suck the air out of&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;third-person singular simple present&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sucks the air out of&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;present participle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sucking the air out of&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;em&gt;simple past and past participle&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;sucked the air out of&lt;/strong&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see suck,‎ air,‎ out&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To dominate or overwhelm, preventing anything or anyone else from receiving attention.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To destroy; to cause to become lifeless and empty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Amir says that Hassan's presence overwhelms him and captures all his attention, He treats the metaphor of sucking oxygen out of the room literally, saying that the guilt he feels toward Hassan makes it hard for him to breathe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My chest tightened and I couldn't draw enough air; I'd stand there, grasping in my own little airless bubble or atmosphere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even when Hassan isn't in the room, the services he does for Amir make Amir aware of his presence. Just as a person in a room low on oxygen would not be able to focus on anything except trying to breathe, Amir can't focus on anything except his feeling of guilt and discomfort centered around Hassan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T13:28:51.893" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T13:28:51.893" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16936" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16931" CreationDate="2020-12-27T14:55:21.397" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a famous episode from the Táin Bó Cúailnge, or Cattle-raid of Cooley, demigod Cú Chulainn - the most terrifying creature in Irish mythology - and his foster-brother Ferdiad find themselves on opposite sides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Medb, queen of Connacht, launches the raid in order to steal a renowned stud bull, but Cú Chulainn has invoked the right of single combat at fords and is single-handedly defending Ulster from her army. Mebd knows Ferdiad is the only warrior capable of defeating Cú Chulainn, but Ferdiad doesn't want to fight his best friend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then did Medb despatch the druids and the poets of the camp, the&#xA;lampoonists and hard-attackers, for Ferdiad, to the end that they&#xA;might make three satires to stay him and three scoffing speeches&#xA;against him, that they might raise three blisters on his face, Blame,&#xA;Blemish and Disgrace, if he came not with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They set about goading him and plying him with alcohol to persuade him to fight, even offering him the Queen of western Erin. And eventually, reluctantly, he goes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After three days of gruelling combat in a ford, using every weapon imaginable, Cú Chulainn is almost beaten. He signals to his charioteer, who floats the Gáe Bulg down the stream to him. Throwing a spear at Ferdiad's chest to distract him, Cú Chulainn catches the Gáe Bulg in the fork of his foot and lets fly from underneath into his best friend. Its barbs open, spreading throughout his body and killing him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the charioteer cuts and hacks the weapon free from the dead man's body (I can almost hear him whistling as he works!), Cú Chulainn laments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, Ferdiad, betrayed to death.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Our last meeting, oh, how sad!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Thou to die I to remain.&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ever sad our long farewell!&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All was play, all was sport,&lt;br&gt; Till came Ferdiad to the ford!&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Dear the shaft of gold&lt;br&gt; I smote on the ford.&lt;br&gt; Bull-chief of the&#xA;tribes,&lt;br&gt; Braver he than all! &lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole episode is &lt;a href=&quot;http://adminstaff.vassar.edu/sttaylor/Cooley/Ferdiad.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Cú Chulainn is similarly grief-stricken after killing his son Connla, but that is a story of the &lt;em&gt;Sohrab and Rostam&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Arjuna and Babruvahana&lt;/em&gt; type, in which the identity of the son is only revealed as he dies.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A1in_B%C3%B3_C%C3%BAailnge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Táin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%BA_Chulainn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cú Chulainn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdiad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ferdiad&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A1e_Bulg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gáe Bulg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastEditorUserId="7816" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T15:05:06.637" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T15:05:06.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16937" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16938" CreationDate="2020-12-27T16:18:47.707" Score="5" ViewCount="1074" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a man who was trying to make a friendly conversation with a rural young woman:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes,” Yates laughed uneasily. He had manifestly missed fire. “I notice by your tone that you evidently think my equipment meager. You should not judge by appearances, Miss Howard. Most of us are better than we seem, pessimists to the contrary notwithstanding. Well, as I was saying, the camping company consists of two partners. We are so different in every respect that we are the best of friends. My partner is Mr. Stillson Renmark, professor of something or other in University College, Toronto.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first time Margaret exhibited some interest in the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Professor Renmark? I have heard of him.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Dear me! I had no idea the fame of the professor had penetrated beyond the precincts of the university—if a university has precincts. He told me it had all the modern improvements, but I suspected at the time that was merely Renny’s brag.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frown on the girl’s brow deepened, and Yates was quick to see that he had lost ground again, if, indeed, he had ever gained any, which he began to doubt. She evidently did not relish his glib talk about the university. He was just about to say something deferentially about that institution, &lt;strong&gt;for he was not a man who would speak disrespectfully of the equator if he thought he might curry favor with his auditor by doing otherwise&lt;/strong&gt;, when it occurred to him that Miss Howard’s interest was centered in the man, and not in the university.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand why he chose &amp;quot;the equator&amp;quot; in particular to give an example. Did &amp;quot;equator&amp;quot; have a different meaning from its common one in 19th-century English literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T17:47:40.633" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T14:38:40.670" Title="Did &quot;equator&quot; have a different meaning from its common one in 19th-century English literature?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16938" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2020-12-27T18:16:17.070" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nothing in the passage suggests it means anything but the ordinary meaning of &amp;quot;equator.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significance of the sentence is to explain how servile and obsequious he is being.  Is there any reason to speak with particular respect of the equator?  But he would do so if he could win Miss Howard's approval and regard -- and without concern for his own actual views.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choosing the &amp;quot;equator&amp;quot; is exactly because it's absurd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T18:16:17.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16939" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2020-12-27T18:32:39.897" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Barr is using the noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/equator#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;equator&lt;/a&gt; in its geographical sense. However, the Equator contrasts with Professor Stillson Renmark and University College in Toronto, in two ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;from a Canadian point of view, the Equator is far away, and when making inconsiderate or even disrespectful comments about something far away, you are much less likely to offend the person you are talking to than when making the same type of comments about someone or something in the same country; the likelihood that your conversation partner has some connection with the subject of conversation is much smaller;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the Equator is just an imaginary line, not a person or an institution, so you cannot offend it anyway.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, making disrespectful comments about the Equator, e.g. to make someone laugh, would be a very low-risk contribution to the conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T18:32:39.897" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16940" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16941" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" Score="0" Body="Questions about the ancient Sanskrit epic 'Mahabharata', most of which was probably compiled between the 3rd century BCE and the 3rd century CE. Use this tag also for questions about the 'Bhagavad Gita' (or 'Bhagavad Geeta'), which is part of it. Use this tag with the [sanskrit-literature] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" LastActivityDate="2020-12-27T19:55:53.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16942" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16931" CreationDate="2020-12-28T01:40:59.853" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, what have I done,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I killed the wabbit,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Poor little bunny,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Poor little wabbit&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elmer Fudd&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What's Opera Doc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T01:40:59.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16943" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-28T01:45:49.803" Score="3" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The English Wikipedia article about Dante's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Divine_Comedy&amp;amp;oldid=996635037&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/a&gt; contains the following paragraph, which contains a statement that has no source (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The work was originally simply titled &lt;em&gt;Comedìa&lt;/em&gt; (pronounced [komeˈdiːa]; so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472), Tuscan for &amp;quot;Comedy&amp;quot;, later adjusted to the modern Italian &lt;em&gt;Commedia&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;strong&gt;The adjective &lt;em&gt;Divina&lt;/em&gt; was added by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1360,&lt;sup&gt;[citation needed]&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; due to its subject matter and lofty style,&lt;sup&gt;[18]&lt;/sup&gt; and the first edition to name the poem &lt;em&gt;Divina Comedia&lt;/em&gt; in the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce,&lt;sup&gt;[19]&lt;/sup&gt; published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=G%C3%B6ttliche_Kom%C3%B6die&amp;amp;oldid=206657098#Form_und_Titel_des_Werks&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Göttliche Komödie&lt;/a&gt; gives the same unsourced statement about the origin of &amp;quot;Divina&amp;quot; and adds that more recent critical editions of the text avoid using the adjective:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante hat die &lt;em&gt;Commedia&lt;/em&gt; im &lt;em&gt;Paradiso&lt;/em&gt; zwar auch als &lt;em&gt;sacrato poema&lt;/em&gt; (‚heiliges Gedicht‘) bezeichnet, das Titelbeiwort &lt;em&gt;Divina&lt;/em&gt; (‚Göttliche‘) stammt jedoch nicht von ihm selbst, sondern wurde erst später von Boccaccio geprägt, als Ausdruck der Verehrung für die übermenschliche Inspiration und dichterische Qualität dieses Werkes. Seit dem 16. Jahrhundert hat sich dieses Beiwort in den gedruckten Ausgaben als fester Bestandteil des Titels etabliert, während kritische Ausgaben in jüngerer Zeit den Zusatz als spätere Hinzufügung wieder vermeiden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Spanish Wikipedia article &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Divina_comedia&amp;amp;oldid=131764813&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Divina comedia&lt;/a&gt; does not provide a source either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fue el escritor y humanista Giovanni Boccaccio quién añadió el adjetivo &amp;quot;divina&amp;quot; durante la época en la que se encargó de leerla y comentarla públicamente por diferentes ciudades italianas, también por ser un poema que canta a la cristiandad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that the attribution is not in doubt, where did Giovanni Boccaccio refer to Dante's best known work as &lt;em&gt;Divina Comedia&lt;/em&gt; (or, in modern Italian, &lt;em&gt;Divina Commedia&lt;/em&gt;)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T11:18:26.993" Title="Where did Boccaccio refer to Dante's Comedia or Commedia as the Divine Comedy?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;italian-literature&gt;&lt;dante-alighieri&gt;&lt;divine-comedy&gt;&lt;giovanni-boccaccio&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16944" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16943" CreationDate="2020-12-28T02:10:57.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Boccaccio used the title &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; for the first time in a work that has variously been called &lt;em&gt;Vita di Dante&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Life of Dante&amp;quot;) or &lt;em&gt;Trattatello in laude di Dante&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Short Treatise in Praise of Dante&amp;quot;). I quote below the relevant section from G. R. Carpenter's translation &lt;em&gt;Boccaccio's Life of Dante&lt;/em&gt; (New York, The Grolier Club, 1900):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iacopo and Piero, sons of Dante, each of whom was a writer of verse, on the persuasion&#xA;of some of their friends, had resolved, so far as they could, to finish their father's work, that it&#xA;might not go imperfect, when to Iacopo, who was much more in earnest than the other, appeared a marvelous vision,&#xA;which not only destroyed his foolish presumption, but showed him where were the thirteen cantos which were&#xA;lacking to the &lt;em&gt;Divine Comedy&lt;/em&gt; and which they could not find.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Carpenter's translation, the word combination &amp;quot;Divine Comedy&amp;quot; does not occur anywhere else, accept in the title of the chapter (Chapter XIV) which I quoted above: &amp;quot;Some Accidents that Happened with Regard to the Divine Comedy&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Earliest_Lives_of_Dante_(Smith_1901)/Life_of_Dante_(Boccaccio)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Robinson Smith's of &lt;em&gt;The Life of Dante&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (New York: Henry Holt, 1901), which can be found on Wikisource, renders the same chapter title as &amp;quot;On Certain Incidents Relating to the Divina Commedia&amp;quot;, but does not use the adjective &amp;quot;divine&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;divina&amp;quot; in the passage about Iacopo and Piero:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante's two sons, Jacopo and Piero, both of whom were poets, being persuaded thereto by their friends, resolved to complete their father's work, so far as in them lay, that it might not remain unfinished. But just at this time Jacopo, who was much more fervent in this matter than his brother, saw a remarkable vision, that not only put an end to his foolish presumption, but revealed to him where the thirteen cantos were that were missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth pointing out that Boccaccio substantially reworked his &lt;em&gt;Vita&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;Trattatello&lt;/em&gt; twice, but English translators seem to prefer the first and longest version [Armstrong, 2004, page 3]. The chapter titles found in English translations of the &lt;em&gt;Life of Dante&lt;/em&gt; are an artefact of these translations; in fact, Boccaccio's text did not even have chapter divisions [Armstrong, 2004, page 3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is the relevant passage from the Italian text, made available on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.mauronovelli.it/Boccaccio%20-%20Trattatello%20in%20laude%20di%20Dante.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mauro Novelli's website&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eransi Iacopo e Piero, figliuoli di Dante, de' quali ciascuno era dicitore in rima, per persuasioni d'alcuni loro amici, messi a volere, in quanto per loro si potesse, supplire la paterna opera, acciò che imperfetta non procedesse; quando a Iacopo, il quale in ciò era molto più che l'altro fervente, apparve una mirabile visione, la quale non solamente dalla stolta presunzione il tolse, ma gli mostrò dove fossero li tredici canti, li quali alla &lt;strong&gt;divina Comedia&lt;/strong&gt; mancavano, e da loro non saputi trovare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the adjective &amp;quot;divina&amp;quot; is not capitalised, and adding that adjective to the title was the work of publishers, as mentioned in the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boccaccio, Giovanni: &lt;em&gt;Life of Dante&lt;/em&gt;. Translated with an introduction and a note on the portraits of Dante by G. R. Carpenter. New York: Grolier Club, 1900.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Boccaccio, Giovanni: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Earliest_Lives_of_Dante_(Smith_1901)/Life_of_Dante_(Boccaccio)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Dante&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; In: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Earliest_Lives_of_Dante_(Smith_1901)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Earliest Lives of Dante&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Translated from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio and Lionardo Bruni Aretino by James Robinson Smith. Yale Studies in English. New York: Henry Holt, 1901.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Armstrong, Guyda: &lt;a href=&quot;http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&amp;amp;context=heliotropia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Giovanni Boccaccio. Life of Dante. J. G. Nichols, trans. (100 pages). London: Hesperus Press, 2002. (...)&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Heliotropa - An online journal of research to Boccaccio scholars&lt;/em&gt;. Volume 2, Issue 2 (2004), article 2.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T11:18:26.993" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T11:18:26.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16945" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-28T09:32:18.337" Score="0" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;The literary device I'm thinking of is when you say something, then you say it again using different words, or words which are equivalent in meaning. For example, in Psalm 137&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I forget you, Jerusalem,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;may my right hand forget its skill.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &amp;quot;may my right hand forget its skill,&amp;quot; is roughly equivalent to &amp;quot;May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in the MLK speech he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a dream that one day&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every valley shall be exalted (Yes),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;every hill and mountain shall be made low,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the rough places will be made plain (Yes),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and the crooked places will be made straight (Yes),  and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed [cheering], and all flesh shall see it together.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lines 1-4 are more or less equivalent. I looked up all of the literary devices that I was unfamiliar with at &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://literarydevices.net/&lt;/a&gt;, but then I realized that I was only looking at a list of the popular literary devices, and that the complete list would take too long to browse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T10:17:47.330" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T12:19:10.153" Title="What is the name of the literary device where successive lines paraphrase each other?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16946" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16897" CreationDate="2020-12-28T10:08:30.433" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This might be &lt;strong&gt;Jean Merrill's &lt;em&gt;Toothpaste Millionaire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;. From the blurb on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/137491.The_Toothpaste_Millionaire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sixth-grader Rufus Mayflower doesn't set out to become a millionaire. He just wants to save on toothpaste. Betting he can make a gallon of his own for the same price as one tube from the store, Rufus develops a step-by-step production plan with help from his good friend Kate MacKinstrey. By the time he reaches the eighth grade, Rufus makes more than a gallon -- he makes a million! This fun, breezy story set in 1960s Cleveland, Ohio contains many real-life mathematical problems which the characters must solve to succeed in their budding business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Searching in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?redir_esc=y&amp;amp;id=pRWrb28PsHkC&amp;amp;q=certificate#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=certificate&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; gave a few snippets about stock certificates; it seems that the boy millionaire Rufus had a &amp;quot;game&amp;quot; called Stock Market in which he paid his helpers with real money but didn't use real stock certificates. He got investigated by the authorities for this, but they found he hadn't cheated anyone or done anything wrong:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rufus's toothpaste had in it exactly what he said it did. And every stockholder had been paid his fair share of the profits, even if the stock certificates weren't the real thing. So Rufus couldn't be found guilty of fraud. Only of not filling out certain forms in a certain way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An image from the book, in case it helps to jog your memory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nSBMW.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nSBMW.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The viewpoint character of the story is not Rufus himself but his friend Kate. It was first published in 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching the web for &lt;code&gt;short story &amp;quot;teenage millionaire&amp;quot; bully&lt;/code&gt; which directed me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_Afterschool_Special&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; for a &lt;em&gt;television&lt;/em&gt; series, with one episode based on this eponymous Merrill story. It aired on 27 November 1974.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T10:08:30.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16947" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-28T12:38:48.520" Score="2" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ko Un's poem &amp;quot;Around Unmun Temple at Ch'Eongdo&amp;quot; can be read, in its English translation by Sunny Jung (and Hillel Schwartz?), at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56544/around-unmun-temple-at-cheongdo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt; website. There's a lot to unpack in this poem, so I'm making an &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/interpretation&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;interpretation&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;interpretation&lt;/a&gt; question asking for general/overall analysis of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmunsa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Unmunsa&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheongdo_County&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cheongdo&lt;/a&gt;, but what is &amp;quot;the holy mountain&amp;quot;, and holy in which religion? Why is the narrator's &amp;quot;body covered with shame&amp;quot;, and why do they feel themselves &amp;quot;unable to go&amp;quot; forward or back? What difference would a barking dog make to their situation? What does it mean that the temple has no &amp;quot;grand sounds&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;great thoughts&amp;quot;, and why is this? Why are the nuns and priestesses identified with cabbage heads &amp;quot;all the same size&amp;quot;? What's the significance of comparing their faces to &amp;quot;dew&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;hoarfrost&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically, what is this poem all about?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T12:38:48.520" Title="Ko Un's &quot;Around Unmun Temple at Ch'Eongdo&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16948" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16945" CreationDate="2020-12-28T14:54:00.077" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/litany#:%7E:text=Initially%20a%20prayer%20or%20supplication,mimicking%20call%2Dand%2Dresponse.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Litany&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;That link gives this definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially a prayer or supplication used in formal and religious processions, the litany has been more recently adopted as a poetic form that catalogues a series. This form typically includes repetitious phrases or movements, sometimes mimicking call-and-response.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and this as an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Equestrian Monuments (A Litany)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;BY LUIS CHAVES&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TRANSLATED BY JULIA GUEZ AND SAMANTHA ZIGHELBOIM&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out-of-focus photographs in front of equestrian monuments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this we arrive at our 40s and we shouldn’t be ungrateful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58368/equestrian-monuments-a-litany&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Equestrian Monuments (A Litany) by Luis Chaves | Poetry&#xA;Magazine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T14:54:00.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16949" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2020-12-28T15:21:53.533" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could it just be a non-standard use by this author in this passage to achieve a bit of a poetic feel?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't help but thinking about &amp;quot;equate&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;equation&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;equative&amp;quot; which have the meaning of making equal, and I wonder if this is used in the sense of &amp;quot;one who equates&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;one who is equal&amp;quot;, or even &amp;quot;partner&amp;quot;. (If professor Renmark is a professor of mathematics, he might also be an &amp;quot;equator&amp;quot; in the sense of working with equations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when this passage speaks of &amp;quot;equator&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;auditor&amp;quot;, maybe the non-standard usage is to make the &amp;quot;...or&amp;quot; verbal parallel. Though I would have used &amp;quot;inquisitor ... equator&amp;quot; if I were trying to do that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10295" LastEditorUserId="10295" LastEditDate="2020-12-28T15:27:21.497" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T15:27:21.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16950" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16951" CreationDate="2020-12-28T17:56:20.933" Score="5" ViewCount="492" Body="&lt;p&gt;My copy of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; has many asterisks in the text to direct the reader to footnotes. Some of these footnotes are definitions of Lapine words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*Nearly all warrens have an &lt;em&gt;Owsla&lt;/em&gt;, or a group of strong or clever rabbits — second-year or older — surrounding the Chief Rabbit and his doe and exercising authority. Owslas vary...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 1: The Notice Board&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can understand why this footnote is important. It defines a term that the reader would be unfamiliar with, but which the characters would have no reason to explain. That term is important to understand the book. Therefore the temporary distraction from the main text at least serves a purpose to the story. The kind of footnotes I'm confused by are the ones that just have pronunciation guidelines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[about the mythic rabbit hero El-ahrairah] *The stresses are the same as in the phrase, &amp;quot;Never say die.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 5: In the Woods&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[about the warren Efrafa] *The first syllable is stressed and not the second, as in the word &amp;quot;Majesty.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 27: &amp;quot;You Can't Imagine It Unless You've Been There&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[about a character's name] *Thethuthinnang: &amp;quot;Movement of Leaves.&amp;quot; The first and last syllables are stressed as in the phrase &amp;quot;Once in a way.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 35: Groping&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I'm sure there are more; these are the ones I found by randomly flipping through the book.) Why is it so important that when I pronounce these words in my head, I have the correct stresses? If I use the &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot; stresses for these names, does it detract from the story? The footnotes, as they are not part of the main text, pull me out of the story a bit. Given that, &lt;strong&gt;why would simple pronunciation guides be put in the footnotes?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T05:05:40.793" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T05:05:40.793" Title="Why do some Lapine words have pronunciation guidelines as footnotes?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16951" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16950" CreationDate="2020-12-28T19:10:35.583" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book originated as stories that the author told to his daughters to while away long travelling hours. Being an oral tale, Adams would know the pronunciations he used and it is likely that he included the information for the sake of helping the reader hear the words as he originally intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While he did not specifically address this question in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1n3quw/i_am_richard_adams_author_of_watership_down/?utm_source=share&amp;amp;utm_medium=ios_app&amp;amp;utm_name=iossmf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;AMA in Reddit &lt;/a&gt;seven years ago, he did say this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lapine just occurred really. The point was that as the story was told, certain things that hadn't got a word for them came up, so a word had to be invented to cover them, to mean what they meant. Owsla is a good example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, as I have quoted previously&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the key thing to note is that Watership Down was not initially intended to be a published novel. The story came about spontaneously as I told it to my children. It was never meant to be scrutinised as thoroughly as it has been.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T19:10:35.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16952" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16950" CreationDate="2020-12-28T19:39:10.707" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;English is one of the languages where &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stress&lt;/a&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;very important to pronunciation&lt;/strong&gt;. This is in contrast to many other languages where stress is either not an important feature of the language at all (e.g. French and Arabic don't really have well-defined stresses) or is always in the same place in each word (e.g. always on the first syllable in Hungarian, always on the penultimate syllable in Polish).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In languages like English and Russian, changing the stress in a word can greatly change its pronunciation. Consider the words &amp;quot;photograph&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;photography&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;photographic&amp;quot;: they're all forms of the same root word, but the pronunciations are wildly different, purely because of differing stress positions: PHOtograph, phoTOGraphy, photoGRAPHic. I'm told that fluent Russian speakers can make a pretty good guess at where stresses will be even without being told beforehand, so that most dictionaries don't bother to indicate it although dictionaries for beginners do. But in English, even a native speaker may need to be told where the stress is when learning a new word. Like many things in the crazy English language, it's &lt;strong&gt;not predictable from the spelling&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the above, if you want to know the &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; or intended way of pronouncing words like El-ahrairah, Efrafa, or Thethuthinnang, &lt;strong&gt;knowing where the stress is makes a lot of difference&lt;/strong&gt;. And in a written medium such as a novel, you need to be told the stress locations explicitly. Try to sound out in your head EFrafa, efRAfa, efraFA. They sound very different indeed. As for El-ahrairah and Thethuthinnang ... well, even as a connoisseur of fantasy novels with their weird and wacky names, I count myself lucky that I first consumed &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; as an audiobook. Why Adams chose to use such difficult names for some of his characters would be a whole other question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speaking of fantasy novels, the practice of putting pronunciation guides for certain names is hardly restricted to &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;. It's &lt;strong&gt;a common thing in many fantasy series&lt;/strong&gt; nowadays to include pronunciation guides: usually in endnotes or an appendix, but footnotes aren't unheard of.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; There are even some relevant TV Tropes pages (obligatory warning: clicking these links may send you down a rabbit hole&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; of interlinked pages): &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NoPronunciationGuide&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;No Pronunciation Guide&lt;/a&gt; (the situation where a pronunciation guide &lt;em&gt;isn't&lt;/em&gt; included is noteworthy enough to merit its own trope page!) and perhaps &lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcCENTUponTheWrongSylLABle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AcCENT upon the Wrong SylLABle&lt;/a&gt; (emphasising the importance of placing stresses).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some readers, &lt;strong&gt;they really want to know&lt;/strong&gt; how to pronounce these new words, stresses and all. Presumably Adams included footnotes for the benefit of those readers. If you don't care, skip them, and you can still appreciate the story while pronouncing the names &amp;quot;wrong&amp;quot;, although you might come a cropper if you try to discuss it verbally with other fans. If the slight fourth-wall-breaking ruins your immersion ... well, there's some of that in the main text of the story too, Adams slightly breaking character to explain to human readers some of the details of Lapine culture, like when El-ahrairah is mentioned for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;If you want to see &lt;em&gt;in-character&lt;/em&gt; usage of footnotes, which don't detract from the story or spoil your immersion at all, I highly recommend Jonathan Stroud's &lt;em&gt;Bartimaeus&lt;/em&gt; series.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Pun unintended this time.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-28T19:39:10.707" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16953" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-28T23:35:33.000" Score="3" ViewCount="91" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mortimer Adler's book &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Book&lt;/em&gt; (I have the revised 1972 edition) states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the rule for Inspectional Reading II: Superficial Reading.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I choose the goal of reading books that pose a challenge to me or seek to increase my understanding on a subject, wouldn't those books always require a superficial reading? For example, should I give a superficial reading to Adler's own book &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Book&lt;/em&gt; given I'm new to the subject matter that he is covering?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I judge what is &amp;quot;difficult&amp;quot; without first reading superficially? And if it's not difficult, does it deserve anything other than a superficial reading? In other words, is it best to always take a first quick superficial read through the book and then a second pass to read at the analytical level?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11729" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T22:13:23.353" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:13:23.353" Title="How can I determine if a book should be read superficially?" Tags="&lt;reading&gt;&lt;how-to-read-a-book&gt;&lt;mortimer-adler&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16954" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16953" CreationDate="2020-12-29T00:16:58.810" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to judge whether the book as it the right level for you, you should tackle the stage &amp;quot;Inspectional Reading I: Systematic Skimming or Pre-reading&amp;quot; with this question in mind. Adler and Van Doren's sixth suggestion for that step says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, turn the pages, dipping in here and there, reading a paragraph or two, sometimes several pages in sequence, never more than that. [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the authors advise to do this, among other things, as a way of &amp;quot;looking for signs of the main contention&amp;quot;, it is important to also check the book's level of difficulty. Since this type of inspectional reading also involves looking at the table of contents, you can look for chapters about topics that you are least familiar with and read a few paragraphs in those. If the book uses some kind of formal language, such as formulas, check whether those formulas assume knowledge that you already have. So you don't need to read the entire book superficially to judge whether it is at the right level; you should establish this before you read the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Strictly speaking, Adler's advice also applies to his own book, but of course you need to find out what his guidance is before you can apply it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] This quote is from the edition co-authored with Charles Van Doren, which was first published in 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T00:16:58.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16955" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16953" CreationDate="2020-12-29T02:01:43.050" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some books are impossible to write in a way that they can be understood if read linearly (dictionaries and encyclopedias are extreme examples).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other books could be written so that they are very easy to follow, but they make poor reference books (most of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction books and essays are like this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other books, especially technical reference books, need to be organized into topics, and there will almost certainly be circular dependencies among those topics (Computer language books are like this).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I learn a new computer language for instance, I start at the beginning and quickly read through to the end.&#xA;But I'll often see concepts that I don't understand, and sometimes I'll have to give up half way through a chapter and skip to the next because I'm totally lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when I'm reading like this, I don't try to learn anything specific.&#xA;What I do is remember the concepts, ideas, and keywords, without necessarily understanding them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, I'll read it again, but this time when the book refers to some new concept, I'll already have some idea about it from having seen it later in the book.&#xA;Not everything will make sense yet, but each pass through the book will become easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually I'll decide I've got a good handle on what is there, even though I don't yet understand everything.  Then I'll try to use what I've learned (i.e. write a program), and I'll use the book as a reference to look up the important details that I didn't learn.  But what I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; learn is that the details &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; in the book, and I have a good idea where.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could compare the process to getting a quick look at a painting.&#xA;The first time you learn that it's a forest scene.&#xA;The second time, you recognize pine and birch trees, and you see a clearing with something in it.&#xA;The third time you get more details about what that something is.&#xA;And so on.&#xA;Eventually you'll be studying the details of the artist's brush strokes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But to answer the question, if a book &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; be read superficially, you'll &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; it; almost every time you start a new chapter you'll find yourself struggling to understand what it's talking about.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Of course &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; books will be impossible to understand no matter how many times one reads them.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T02:01:43.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16959" CreationDate="2020-12-29T08:47:28.150" Score="5" ViewCount="665" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &amp;quot;The Wind&amp;quot; by 14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57511/the-wind-56d23b188f238&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;can be read online&lt;/a&gt; in an English translation by Gwyneth Lewis, mostly consists of an ode to the wind, described poetically in many different ways according to its nature and effects. Only in the last two stanzas does the poet turn to his main point of asking the wind to go and find the girl he loves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few things in this poem confused me, but I've managed to resolve most of them: a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cwm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;cwm&lt;/a&gt; is a geographical feature (an English word that's so clearly borrowed from Welsh), and &amp;quot;Upper Aeron&amp;quot; presumably refers to the Aeron Valley in Wales. The only thing that still baffles me is this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Be lovely and cool, stay in clear tune.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Don’t hang about or let that maniac,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Litigious Little Bow, hold you back,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He’s poisonous. Society&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And its goods are closed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who is Litigious Little Bow and what are these lines about?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T11:14:42.007" Title="What is Litigious Little Bow in the Welsh poem &quot;The Wind&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;dafydd-ap-gwilym&gt;&lt;welsh-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16957" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16956" CreationDate="2020-12-29T12:06:11.433" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This seems to be a reference to a person, also translated, less poetically, as ‘little hunchback’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first reference I found was in ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=xqINAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA54&amp;amp;lpg=PA54&amp;amp;dq=%22rys%20gwgan%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=mqAJtN9fkb&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0eA4P72hxaxKALm2ozrq14wdmj5Q&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiL8frVj_PtAhWFiVwKHb_eAakQ6AEwBnoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bardic museum of primitive British literature and other admirable rarities &lt;/a&gt;’ which translates the poem as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell me never resting friend, of the journey on some northern blast, over the dale. Ah, friend, go from Aeron brightly fair, with a clear note; stop thou not, or gossip; fear not because of little Hunchback. A complaint of impeachment serving ill-nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And footnotes ‘little Hunchback’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally, the little bow, the common epithet which the poet gave to his fortunate competitor for fair &lt;em&gt;Morvadd&lt;/em&gt;; his real name was Rys Gwgan, who was a captain in the English army at the celebrated battle of Cressy’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T12:06:11.433" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16958" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16945" CreationDate="2020-12-29T12:13:39.787" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The device of repeating the same idea in different words is called &lt;strong&gt;restatement&lt;/strong&gt;. It's used to provide emphasis and clarity to the idea being expressed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address (1933) furnishes an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Nature still offers her bounty&lt;/strong&gt; and human efforts have multiplied it. &lt;strong&gt;Plenty is at our doorstep&lt;/strong&gt;, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.  (emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Patrick Henry also used restatement extensively in his 1775 &amp;quot;give me liberty or give me death&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/coretexts/_files/resources/texts/1775%20Patrick%20Henry%20Liberty%20or%20Death.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;speech&lt;/a&gt; to the second Virginia Convention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of these sentences restates the idea that war is underway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples you give, however, are not merely restatements. The rhetorical devices in those passages have specific terms associated with them. Repeating the same words at the beginning of a phrase is called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_(rhetoric)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;anaphora&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;may my right hand forget its skill.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or looking at the same psalm in the Authorized King James Version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I forget thee, O Jerusalem,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;let my right hand forget her cunning.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repetition of &amp;quot;If I&amp;quot; at the start of three phrases and &amp;quot;let my&amp;quot; at two is an example of anaphora. The first two conditionals are also an example of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(rhetoric)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;parallelism&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dr King also uses both anaphora and parallelism in the excerpt you have quoted. Additionally, there's another rhetorical device in this set of opposed ideas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;every valley shall be exalted,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;every hill and mountain shall be made low&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;antithesis&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, when a contrast is used for rhetorical effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T12:19:10.153" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T12:19:10.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16956" CreationDate="2020-12-29T12:14:51.843" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bwa Bach (“Little Bow”) was a nickname for Morfudd’s husband Cynfrig Cynin, referring perhaps to his crooked or hunched back. His jealousy of Dafydd led to the latter being exiled from his home in Ceredigion (“society and its goods are closed to me”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines quoted in the question are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yn glaer deg, yn eglur dôn.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nac aro di, nac eiriach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nac ofna er Bwa Bach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cyhuddgwyn wenwyn weini.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Caeth yw’r wlad a’i maeth i mi.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some nuances here that Lewis’s translation did not capture: “wenwyn” means “jealousy” as well as “poison”; the primary meaning of “wlad” is “land” or “homeland”, with “society” secondary; and “maeth” means “sustenance” or “nurture” which are not well-conveyed by “goods”. Here are three other translations of these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bright and handsome, clear of tone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do not linger, do not spare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do not fear despite Y Bwa Bach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of accusing complaint, serving poison;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Closed is the land and its fostering to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translated by Richard M. Loomis (1982). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dafyddapgwilympo00dafyuoft/page/220/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 221&lt;/a&gt;. Center for Medieval &amp;amp; Early Renaissance Studies.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nice and gently, a clear song.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Don’t wait, don’t restrain yourself,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;don’t be afraid despite Bwa Bach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[he who] serves a malicious accusatory complaint.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The land and its nurture is closed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translated by Dafydd Johnston (2007). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dafyddapgwilym.net/eng/3win.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym.net&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;be gentle and kind, with voice easily heard.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Do not stop, do not hold back&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;nor fear, inspite of the Bwa Bach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;—that whining accuser, serving jealousy—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that land which nourished her is closed to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translated by Rachel Bromwich (1982). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dafyddapgwilymse0000dafy/page/104/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym: Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 104&lt;/a&gt;. Llandysul: Gomer Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name “Morfudd” appears in thirty-six of Dafydd’s poems, and most commentators believe that she represents a real person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we can assemble from the Morfudd poems this conjectural portrait of her: She was blonde and, before she aged, beautiful (passim), tall (96), well-born (102), possibly born in Eithinfynydd (57) in Merionethshire, her father’s name being Madog Lawgam (93). Dafydd’s courtship of her was public (108), and he celebrated her in poems that became famous throughout Gwynedd (34). A religious girl, she had scruples about returning his love (57), but at last pledged her love to him (43). This pledge may have been part of a ritual marriage, though not a marriage sanctioned and witnessed by the church. In any event, a canonical marriage with another man was arranged for Morfudd by her family, leading Dafydd (in a poem, 86, that does not name Morfudd but fits the circumstances of his love for her) to declare that he would have no other wife. Morfudd’s husband, named Cynfrig Cynin (73), bore the nickname “Bwa Bach” (131), meaning “Little Bow,” that is, “Little Hunchback.” His home in Uwch Aeron (117) was in Dafydd’s own home country (the parish of Llanbadarn in north Ceredigion). Morfudd bore Bwa Bach children, but did not cease to love Dafydd (79). Dafydd’s love for her lasted, as I have noted above, until she grew old (139). After her marriage, he sought (and sometimes won) secret trysts with her, in the woods (successfully in 53) or by night at her home (unsuccessfully in 89). But her husband’s jealousy was savage enough that Dafydd was virtually exiled from his native territory in Uwch Aeron (117), his covert incursions involving a risk to his life. Of this risk he speaks in commissioning animals to bear his love messages; their fleet natures should enable them to evade the jealous husband’s attacks (as in 117). It is, doubtless, of this dangerous little man that Dafydd speaks in 75, a poem wishing death on Eiddig (“the jealous one”). Eiddig’s very breath, Dafydd charges in 81, has spoiled the face of the wife whom we may take to be the same Morfudd whose loss of beauty from age is mourned in 139.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dafyddapgwilympo00dafyuoft/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loomis, p. 38&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines which say that “Bwa Bach” was married to Morfudd are from the poem ‘Yesterday’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Da y gwnâi Forfudd â’i dyn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O’r diwedd, hoen eiry dywyn.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Iawn y gwneuthum ei chanmawl,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On’d oedd iawn, f’enaid i ddiawl!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nos da i’r ferch anerchglaer,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A dydd da am nad oedd daer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hi a orfuum haeach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Aha! wraig y Bwa Bach!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Morfudd&lt;/strong&gt; would be good to her man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At last, the color of snow’s radiance.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I did right to praise her;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If it was not right, my soul to the devil!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Good-evening to the girl of bright greeting.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And good-day because she was not in earnest.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She whom I almost subdued&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is aha! the &lt;strong&gt;wife of Y Bwa Bach&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym (C14). ‘Ddoe’ (‘Yesterday’). Translated by Richard M. Loomis (1982). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dafyddapgwilympo00dafyuoft/page/240/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 241&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The jealous husband’s real name appears in the poem ‘Morfudd’s Hair’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bun a gafas urddasreg;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bu ragor dawn briger deg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cannaid rhag Cynwrig Cinnin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fab y pengrych, flawrfrych flin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Llwdn anghenfil gwegilgrach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Llwm yw ei iad lle mae iach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lledweddw, rheidus, anlladfegr,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lletben chwysigen chwys egr.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Annhebig, eiddig addef,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fulwyllt, oedd ei foelwallt ef,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Llariaidd ddifeth y’i plethwyd,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’r llwyn ar ben Morfudd Llwyd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl received a noble gift;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Better was the quality of the fine hair&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the bright girl than that of &lt;strong&gt;Cynfrig Cynin’s&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Crude calf with a neck of scabby nape.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His skull is bare where healthy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Drunken, needy, wanton beggar,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His cheek a blister of sour sweat.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not similar (known to be &lt;strong&gt;jealous&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wild and foolish) was his bald head&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(Gentle and abundant was it braided)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To the grove on &lt;strong&gt;Morfudd Llwyd’s&lt;/strong&gt; head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym (C14). ‘Gwallt Morfudd’ (‘Morfudd’s Hair’). Translated by Richard M. Loomis (1982). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dafyddapgwilympo00dafyuoft/page/163/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dafydd ap Gwilym: The Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 163&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, “Uwch Aeron” does not refer only to the upper Glyn Aeron: it was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantref&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cantref&lt;/a&gt;, a medieval administrative division akin to an English “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_(county_division)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hundred&lt;/a&gt;”, consisting of land north of Glyn Aeron up as far as Afon Ystwyth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T11:14:42.007" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T11:14:42.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16961" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16963" CreationDate="2020-12-29T16:54:10.347" Score="0" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;In the Midst of Alarms&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a man who couldn't make a friendly conversation with a girl, although he was usually a good talker:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It flashed across the mind of Yates that this was intended as an intimation that he might see many things outside to interest him. He felt that his visit had not been at all the brilliant success he had anticipated. Of course the quest for bread had been merely an excuse. He had expected to be able to efface the unfavorable impression he knew he had made by his jaunty conversation on the Ridge Road the day before, and he realized that his position was still the same. &lt;strong&gt;A good deal of Yates’ success in life came from the fact that he never knew when he was beaten.&lt;/strong&gt; He did not admit defeat now, but he saw he had, for some reason, not gained any advantage in a preliminary skirmish. He concluded it would be well to retire in good order, and renew the contest at some future time. He was so unused to anything like a rebuff that all his fighting qualities were up in arms, and he resolved to show this unimpressionable girl that he was not a man to be lightly valued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't understand this bolded phrase, or does &amp;quot;know&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;admit&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T17:05:42.750" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T18:23:51.480" Title="How could someone be beaten without knowing that?" Tags="&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16962" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8225" CreationDate="2020-12-29T17:10:55.403" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m not sure that the use of ‘gruel’ sustains deep scrutiny into the history of the dish or the term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although many sources state that it was a ‘thinner’ porridge, which leads to a general, ‘Oliver Twist’ influenced perception that gruel is always penitential in character, in fact it could be a very rich dish, &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/LuVjjF-c7K0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;such as this example &lt;/a&gt; with dried fruit, egg yolks, wine and sugar. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/gruel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scottish Language Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; also just gives the meaning as ‘porridge’, with no distinguishing characteristic of ‘thinness’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I take to be it’s significance in the short story is that it is being referred to as a dated or obsolete usage to emphasise how long Caliban has been in the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now&lt;/em&gt; porridge is called ‘oatmeal’, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; it was called ‘gruel’. So the point is not that porridge used to be nastier, only that it used to have a different name. Times change.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T17:55:58.970" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T17:55:58.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16961" CreationDate="2020-12-29T17:55:14.477" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a difference between not knowing you are beaten and not &lt;em&gt;admitting&lt;/em&gt; it, if the denial includes not admitting it to oneself. This is the difference between a literal and figurative usage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While ‘refusing to admit one is beaten’ can be lauded as a strength and being seen to ‘never give up’, there usually comes a point at which admitting defeat is prudent, as the character here discovers. The description of him ‘never knowing he is beaten’ is therefore figurative, as the passage demonstrates that he does, in fact, know when he’s beaten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Literally&lt;/em&gt; rather than figuratively, not knowing one is beaten, can be a very negative thing.  In &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hASwCwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;dq=%22not%20to%20know%20when%20one%20is%20beaten%22&amp;amp;source=gbs_navlinks_s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Butler and the Meaning of Chiasmus by Ralf Norrman&lt;/a&gt; we read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;On not knowing when one is beaten&lt;/em&gt;: This is all very well, but one of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten and to leave off fighting at once. Not to know when one is beaten is made an excuse for some on the most unjustifiable conduct that can be imagined&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-29T18:23:51.480" LastActivityDate="2020-12-29T18:23:51.480" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10988" CreationDate="2020-12-30T09:40:24.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1927:&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?2049512&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Prince's Birthday Present&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Armstrong_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anthony Armstrong&lt;/a&gt;, first published in &lt;em&gt;The Strand Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, December 1927 and reprinted in Armstrong's 1932 collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?583987&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Prince Who Hiccupped and Other Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, seems to be the earliest known example of this theme, according to the &amp;quot;Time Loop&amp;quot; entry in &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/time_loop&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction&lt;/a&gt;, from which I quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . .] The present entry discusses the form of time loop in which, typically, periods of time are repeated and re-experienced by a character's consciousness: there is often some hope of breaking out of the useless cycle of repetition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not so in Anthony &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/armstrong_anthony&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Armstrong&lt;/a&gt;'s early comic-fantasy example &amp;quot;The Prince's Birthday Present&amp;quot; (in &lt;em&gt;The Prince Who Hiccupped and Other Tales&lt;/em&gt;, coll &lt;strong&gt;1932&lt;/strong&gt;), whose ungrateful recipient of three wishes – multiplied by recursive wishing to an indefinite number – is finally unwise enough to ask that he may relive the last, particularly enjoyable half-hour; the replay of course includes this fatal wish. A &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/mad_scientist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mad Scientist&lt;/a&gt; entraps his victim and indeed the whole world in a reiterated New Year's Eve in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/shadow_the&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shadow&lt;/a&gt; radio segment &amp;quot;The Man Who Murdered Time&amp;quot; (1 January &lt;em&gt;1939&lt;/em&gt;). [. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T09:40:24.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16966" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="16968" CreationDate="2020-12-30T15:25:58.757" Score="10" ViewCount="711" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the El-ahrairah stories told in &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; features someone called King Darzin, but it's not clear what sort of animal (or even human?) he's supposed to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, King Darzin ruled over the biggest and richest of the animal cities in the&#xA;world at that time. His soldiers were very fierce and his lettuce garden was&#xA;surrounded by a deep ditch and guarded by a thousand sentries day and night. It&#xA;was near his palace, on the edge of the city where all his followers lived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What kind of creature is King Darzin?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any evidence in the novel, or any extratextual information from the author, to indicate what exactly King Darzin might be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T21:12:33.913" Title="What is King Darzin?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16967" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16966" CreationDate="2020-12-30T18:27:02.043" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the story we read:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next night Rabscuttle, who had been told by El-ahrairah what he had to do, went to the garden and dug a scrape. He hid in the scrape all night; and the next morning, when the children were brought to play, he slipped out and joined them. There were so many children that each one of the mothers and nursemaids thought that he must belong to somebody else, but as he was about the same size as the children and not much different to look at, he was able to make friends with some of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Rabscuttle was Captain of Owsla for   El-ahrairah, he must be a full sized rabbit. So the children of King Darzin and his followers are similar in size and appearance to full grown rabbits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some fandom sites suggest that this means the King must be a Hare. However, we also read that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Now, as soon as Rabscuttle got inside the King’s palace, he scurried off and went into one of the dark burrows; and here he hid all day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hares don’t burrow, so this probably rules that out as an option.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In The Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé we learn that the King’ soldiers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;couldn’t get down the rabbit holes. Some tried, to be sure, but they soon came out again, because they met El-ahrairah and the other rabbits. They were not used to fighting in narrow places in the dark and they got bitten and scratched until they were glad to come out tail-first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This confirms that they are bigger than rabbits, and have tails, but that they are not used to rabbit style ’in-burrow’ fighting, despite having burrows of their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El-ahrairah believes that King Darzin and his troops will be susceptible to the diseases that afflict rabbits as he tries to infect himself with ‘the white blindness’ (I assume myxomatosis) from the holes where&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;lie all the plagues and diseases that come to rabbits&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end however, when the Black Rabbit and his shadow owsla come down upon King Darzin and his troops&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They turned and fled. They vanished in the night; and that is why no rabbit who tells the tales of El-ahrairah can say what kind of creatures they were or what they looked like. Not one of them has ever been seen, from that day to this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the tellers of the tales don’t know themselves what manner of animals they were, then we mere readers of the tales can hardly be more sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best we can say is that they are bigger than rabbits, like them in some ways but unlike them in others. (Unless there is other information in the Tales from Watership Down book, which I’ve never read.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T18:32:29.027" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T18:32:29.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16968" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16966" CreationDate="2020-12-30T21:12:33.913" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some fan sites, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://watershipdown.fandom.com/wiki/King_Darzin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watership Down Wikia&lt;/a&gt;, have speculated or even presumed that King Darzin and his followers are &lt;strong&gt;hares&lt;/strong&gt;, but without providing much evidence to support this conclusion, and in spite of evidence against it such as the fact that the rabbits have supposedly never seen the type of creature that Darzin was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fan asked Richard Adams this very question in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1n3quw/i_am_richard_adams_author_of_watership_down&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ask Me Anything session on Reddit&lt;/a&gt; seven years ago, in 2013. He replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I always imagine him as a kind of beaver creature - gregarious, constructive (he and his associates have to construct things like dams to get fish for sustenance). They had no enemies, but they did have disputes among themselves. A gregarious animal, living in packs and living by constructing bridges and dams. Exploiting running water for their living&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, although evidence from the text itself is inconclusive, we have some extratextual material to say that the author's intent was for Darzin to be &lt;strong&gt;something like a beaver&lt;/strong&gt;. This somewhat makes sense in that Darzin is said to have a &amp;quot;city&amp;quot;. Animals don't really build cities, but beavers are certainly more accomplished builders than most. Other details which don't exactly fit could be chalked up to embellishment over the years that the stories have been retold among rabbits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T21:12:33.913" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16969" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:29:53.067" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:29:53.067" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:29:53.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16970" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:29:53.067" Score="0" Body="Questions about the horror novel 'The Shining' by Stephen King. Should be tagged with [stephen-king]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:55:46.263" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:55:46.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16971" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:32:36.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:32:36.277" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:32:36.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16972" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:32:36.277" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Sanskrit language, regardless of where it was published. &#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:55:07.207" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:55:07.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16973" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:39:03.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:39:03.373" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:39:03.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16974" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:39:03.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:55:28.503" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:55:28.503" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16975" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:42:42.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:42:42.497" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:42:42.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16976" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:42:42.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Mortimer Adler (1902-2001) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:57:32.903" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:57:32.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16977" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:44:37.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:44:37.573" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:44:37.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16978" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:44:37.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'How to Read a Book' by Mortimer Adler (1940) and revised on co-operation with Charles Van Doren (1972). Should be tagged with [mortimer-adler]. Questions reading a book should be tagged with [reading] instead. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:57:22.303" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:57:22.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16979" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:45:07.173" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:45:07.173" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:45:07.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16980" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:45:07.173" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Welsh language, regardless of where it was published. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:55:13.423" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:55:13.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16981" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:46:15.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:46:15.307" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:46:15.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16982" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2020-12-30T23:46:15.307" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym (1340-1370) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [welsh-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2020-12-30T23:57:40.900" LastActivityDate="2020-12-30T23:57:40.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16897" CreationDate="2020-12-31T02:58:37.777" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It might be helpful to have a list of things that it is probably NOT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It Isn't Easy Being a Teenage Millionaire&lt;/em&gt;, by Joan L. Oppenheimer (1978, Scholastic). &amp;quot;At the beginning of the book, life is a big bore for Lissa. Nothing exciting ever happens and there's nothing much to look forward to. Then she wins a million dollar lottery and she thinks life will be great, but it's not...&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/472030594/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/472030594/&lt;/a&gt;) Note: Scholastic is/was a publisher of paperback books for kids; the books are/were sold primarily through schools and book fairs. There was also an Afterschool Special with this same title and plot: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206835/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206835/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Teenage Millionaire&lt;/em&gt;, a 1961 movie: &amp;quot;A teenager whose father is a millionaire radio station owner secretly records a song and plays it on one of his father's stations. It becomes a hit. Then he falls in love with a girl...&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056563/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056563/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Teenage Millionaire,&amp;quot; a 1966 song (words Bruce Morgan, music Art Guy). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/catalogofco1966320512lib/page/2038/mode/2up?q=%22teenage+millionaire%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/catalogofco1966320512lib/page/2038/mode/2up?q=%22teenage+millionaire%22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Teen-age Millionaire,&amp;quot; a 1962 &amp;quot;farce comedy in three acts by Robert St. Clair&amp;quot;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/catalogofcopyrig31634libr/page/98/mode/2up?q=%22teen-age+millionaire%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/catalogofcopyrig31634libr/page/98/mode/2up?q=%22teen-age+millionaire%22&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;A Boy Stock Broker, or From Errand Boy to Millionaire,&amp;quot; published in &lt;em&gt;Fame and Fortune Weekly&lt;/em&gt; on May 22, 1908. Bob Bradshaw is a teenaged errand boy for a Wall Street firm who keeps overhearing traders discussing hot stocks. He buys some stock on margin, the stock goes up, Bob sells at the right time and makes a little money, and this cycle repeats until Bob is worth over a million dollars. Bob doesn't have a father but a guardian, who is keeping two stock certificates that Bob inherited in his (the guardian's) safe. Bob doesn't lose money in this story, and there's no mention of certificates good only for wallpaper. &lt;a href=&quot;https://digital.lib.usf.edu/SFS0050196/00125&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://digital.lib.usf.edu/SFS0050196/00125&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tomswift.info/homepage/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tom Swift&lt;/a&gt; is a boy inventor whose dad is a millionaire, and the Tom Swift stories are about the right vintage (1954–1971), but I didn't find one with stock certificates.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One remote possibility is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32374/32374-h/32374-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dick Hamilton's Fortune: The Stirring Doings of a Millionaire's Son&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published around 1910. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/98899-dick-hamilton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dick Hamilton&lt;/a&gt; is another millionaire's son who featured in a series of books for young people. In &lt;em&gt;Dick Hamilton's Fortune&lt;/em&gt;, Dick has inherited some wealth from his late mother. He attempts to invest in land, but loses money, and later attempts to purchase stock certificates but they turn out to be fake. His father gives him advice, but there's no mention of wallpaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T02:58:37.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1671" CreationDate="2020-12-31T08:35:57.540" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the questioner implies, I too can't help but think there is more to choosing George Orwell as a pen name than has come to light. To think it arbitrary goes against the grain. Eric Blair never wrote anything arbitrarily. He always placed himself in the writing. His feelings, his history, his ideas and his anger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The younger George Orwell was supposedly something of a prankster and I wonder if there is an element of &amp;quot;find me if you can&amp;quot; within his pseudonym.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So here is an idea. One that I may get around to exploring one day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes Orwell is after the river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could George be after George Gissing his favourite author and his favourite source for ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If, on a map, you look north of the river Orwell there is the village of Gissing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible that water flows as a tributary from Gissing to the River Orwell as did ideas from George Gissing to Eric Blair?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have google mapped it as much as I can and can not see that it does. There is the river Gipping (I so wish this was spelt Gissing) that is a tributary to the river Orwell and does get us closer to the village of Gissing - but I am lost from there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It needs someone to drive out to the village of Gissing, get their wellies on to see if there is any water tributary from Gissing to Orwell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if there isn't - and Eric Blair knew nothing of the village of Gissing, I like the idea that he would take some relish in my surmise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chris&#xA;Northampton UK&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11738" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T08:35:57.540" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16985" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17039" CreationDate="2020-12-31T11:10:31.030" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56545/keumgang-gul-diamond-cave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This short poem by Ko Un&lt;/a&gt; is entitled, in its English translation by Sunny Jung, &amp;quot;Keumgang-Gul / Diamond Cave&amp;quot;. I'm assuming that Keumgang-Gul is the original Korean title and it translates to Diamond Cave? Does this refer to a known location, or is the poet speaking more abstractly about a cave of diamonds? I've read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57524/taklamakan-desert&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; similar &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56544/around-unmun-temple-at-cheongdo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;poems&lt;/a&gt; by Ko Un which do refer to real locations, but searching the internet for &amp;quot;Keumgang-Gul&amp;quot; just gave me references to this poem. Maybe someone who knows Korean would be able to search better, or indeed would know the answer directly if this is a famous place in Korea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T00:50:20.260" Title="Where is &quot;Keumgang-Gul / Diamond Cave&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;korean-literature&gt;&lt;ko-un&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16987" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2020-12-31T14:02:15.957" Score="3" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a book I read sometime about 2008-2015, although the book itself is probably older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is a woman who's a nudist but only at home (possibly just because of the weather where she lives).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She has a sort of short dance she calls the 'question mark', which she performs for another character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;She is disappointed that he doesn't understand it, and leaves him tied to the bed in an abandoned house.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Some time later a parachutist encountering some difficulty falls on the roof of the house&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This may have led to the discovery and rescue of the tied-up character, but I think it more likely caused their death from the ceiling collapse&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Therefore there was a confusing scene for the police to find.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The woman &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have a distinctive or interesting job that she nonetheless thinks of as 'just a job'.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not impossible that I'm conflating two characters here, a mother and daughter, for the woman character&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a long shot because they may very well be different books, but I also remember a book from the same sort of time featuring a passage about the benefits of sex with gas masks and rubber sheets. The cover was light blue or white with a blurry naked woman. But like I say, I'm not at all sure that's the same one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11739" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2020-12-31T21:32:21.070" LastActivityDate="2020-12-31T21:32:21.070" Title="Character doesn't understand &quot;question mark&quot; dance, left tied up and a parachutist collapses the ceiling" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16988" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16867" CreationDate="2021-01-01T02:27:33.423" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Evidence that a certain event influenced a specific literary work &lt;em&gt;that does not explicitly mention that event&lt;/em&gt; requires that two conditions are fulfilled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The event took place before the literary work was completed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ideally, there is biographical information, such as letters or diary entries, that mention the influence of the event on the work in question.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This may sound obvious, but without these conditions being met, the presumed influence is a matter of interpretation, hence strictly hypothetical.&#xA;A claim about influence bases solely on interpretation does not have the same force as a claim that meets the two conditions mentioned above.&#xA;For example, it is possible to provide a Marxist interpretaton of Wordsworth's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud&lt;/a&gt; [1], which was first published in 1807.&#xA;Such an interpretation would not count as evidence of Marx's influence on Wordsworth; it would not meet the two conditions mentioned above because Marx was born in 1818, a decade after the poem's publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For these reasons, I have gone through &lt;em&gt;The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922&lt;/em&gt; to see what the author's private writings have to say about the &amp;quot;Spanish influenza&amp;quot;. The book's introduction, by Valerie Eliot, quotes a private paper that T. S. Eliot wrote in the 1960 and that comments, among other things, on his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To her the marriage brought no happiness ... to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came &lt;em&gt;The Waste Land&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The issues that most frequently cause Eliot worries during World War I are his wife's health and his financial situation. During the early years of his marriage, almost every other letter that mentions Vivien also mentions illness or other health issues (neuralgia, migraine, stomach trouble, influenza, etc.). Eliot also received financial support from his parents until some time after the end of World War I. (For an example during the war: in a letter dated 22 November 1917, Vivien explains in detail to her mother-in-law on what sort of clothes for T. S. Eliot she has spent the money that Charlotte Eliot had sent her; the letter even says, &amp;quot;I enclose receipts.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another source of stress for T. S. Eliot was the preparations for his teaching jobs. On 21 March 1917 he writes to Charlotte Eliot Smith that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;under war conditions it is impossible to make an all-year-round living by writing and lecturing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, he is happy about getting an introduction to Lloyds Bank that same month. He would not want to return to school teaching again; &amp;quot;it is altogether too exhausting&amp;quot; (letter to J. H. Woods, 23 March 1917). But the salary at the bank is not high enough to make him independent, so Eliot teaches evening classes in English literature to working class people. These also cost him a lot of time and energy. However, Eliot's health improves after he starts working at the bank (Vivien's letter to Charlotte C. Eliot dated 8 April 1917).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where do the letters of T. S. Eliot or his wife mention influenza?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vivien's letter to Charlotte C. Eliot, 8 March 1917:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom sleeps about 7 or 8 hours — he did not get over that influenza for &lt;em&gt;weeks&lt;/em&gt; — in fact, I can say that it is only for the last 5 or 6 &lt;em&gt;days&lt;/em&gt; that he has seemed like himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vivien's letter to Charlotte C. Eliot, 22 October 1917:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, after I got back from Bosham, I had only been at home a week when I got a very severe attack of influenza, from a germ. The doctor said there was a slight epidemic of it just then, and you know what I am when influenza is about!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to his mother, 6 February 1918:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not only been very busy and tired, but a slight touch of influenza made it impossible for me to do anything for several days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to his mother, 7 July 1918:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have been living on quietly and trying to escape the &amp;quot;Spanish influenza&amp;quot; so called. A good many men — and women — have been away from the office lately, with that curious malady, and as a result I have had more to do, helping out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vivien to Henry Eliot, 21.11.1918:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the morning I was to go and have this done [i.e. a tooth extracted] Tom started to have the flu, so I went with a heavy heart. He has not been very bad, so far, I am glad to say. I think we took it in time - he is up, but not out, today. Tom takes cold &lt;em&gt;very&lt;/em&gt; much more easily than I do. Most of &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; colds are caughy from him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to his mother, 8 December 1918:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First Vivien had her tooth out and I at the same time had a light attack of what I think must have been influenza, as it left me so very weak afterwards. As soon as I was out again V. caught it in earnest from a friend, was in bed for over a week, and has not been out of doors yet. (...)&#xA;Today I thought I was going to have influenza again, having all the symptoms including a splitting head. However, it has quite left me this evening, (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vivien to Charlotte C. Eliot, 15.12.1918:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tom started with influenza, and although he had it extremely slightly it left him very weak. I got it about a week later, and had such a persistent fever that I was kept in bed for a week, and indoors for a fortnight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to Henry Eliot, 27.02.1919:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There has been a great deal of pneumonic influenza about and if one of us got it he would have to go to a hospital. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to his mother, 27.02.1919:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had a little bit of a collapse and did not go out on Monday, (...). We were afraid it might be influenza at first, but it appears to have been only exhaustion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;T. S. Eliot to his mother, 23.04.1919:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vivien unfortunately came down with a mild attack of influenza and was in bed the whole time. She is much better now, but weak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colds and coughs are also mentioned in letters that don't mention influenza, i.e. on 22.11.1917, 30.12.1917, 16.07.1919, 03.09.1919 (bronchitis) and 16.12.1919 (bronchial cold). However, the above quotes are all that is said about influenza in the letters, i.e. the letters do not continue discussing the disease after the quoted passage, nor do other letters discuss it. When shoover writes, presumably based on Elizabeth Outka's publications, that Eliot's aunt and father died within a month of each other, one should add that Aunt Marian died of &amp;quot;a haemorrhage in the brain&amp;quot;, not flu (Eliot's letter to his mother dated 29.12.1918). The cause of his father's death is not mentioned in the letters and is not mentioned in the footnote on page 267 in Valerie Eliot's edition of the letters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When on 7 November 1918 T. S. Eliot writes about why 1918 has been the most exhausting year he has ever known, the reasons he gives are (1) Vivien's health, (2) material discomforts, which are mainly due to the war, and (3) his failure to get into government work (for the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army or Intelligence). Influenza is not mentioned in that letter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her paper &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/566471&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Wood for the Coffins Ran Out”: Modernism and the Shadowed Afterlife of the Influenza Pandemic&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Modernism/modernity&lt;/em&gt;, 21.4, November 2014), Elizabeth Outka writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the autumn of that year [1918], dead bodies were suddenly everywhere in Britain, in America, and across the globe; some neighborhoods had streets so full of corpses that no one was left alive to bury them. Death came swiftly and with such little warning that mass graves had to be prepared, and as one witness wrote, “Wood for the coffins ran out.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In T. S. Eliot's correspondence from the years 1915—1919, however, these dead are no more visible than the victims of World War I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In her article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Pandemics Seep into Literature&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Paris Review&lt;/em&gt;, 8 April 2020), Outka writes that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. S. Eliot, who along with his wife caught the flu during the pandemic, felt weighed down by what he termed the “domestic influenza” of his health and home life, and his worries that his mind had been affected by his illness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find this confirmed in the correspondence up to the end of 1919.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] This example is not hypothetical. See for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnVAPhHvWek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Marxist Interpretation of Wordsworth's &amp;quot;I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; on the YouTube channel &amp;quot;The Nature of Writing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 1: 1898-1922&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Valerie Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1988.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T12:23:18.133" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T12:23:18.133" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16989" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17023" CreationDate="2021-01-01T04:23:48.113" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a copy of &lt;em&gt;The Crucible&lt;/em&gt; by Arthur Miller which alternates between the dialogue of the play and extended notes (by the author) on the nature of the characters and the meaning of what's transpiring and its universality and continued relevance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is not, as best I can tell, a &amp;quot;critical&amp;quot; version of the play, or in any way anything other than a plain and simple ordinary edition of &lt;em&gt;The Crucible.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I was a bit bamboozled by this sentence in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/crucibleplayinfo0000mill/page/36/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one such passage&lt;/a&gt; in Act I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One cannot help noting that one of his lines has never yet raised a laugh in any audience that has seen this play; it is his assurance that &amp;quot;We cannot look to superstition in this. The Devil is precise.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This stood out to me because here he's now referencing performances of the play within the text of the play. To reiterate, these notes are by the author and seem to be part of the text of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how can the text of the play reference the play's performances and yet still be part of the original text?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The copy I have is Penguin Plays. Nothing and its jacket information or forward indicates that there's anything different about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11744" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T09:44:15.410" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T10:24:04.253" Title="Whence come the self-referential historical notes in &quot;The Crucible&quot;?" Tags="&lt;arthur-miller&gt;&lt;the-crucible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16991" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T06:11:06.310" Score="2" ViewCount="2253" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I first saw this quote on p. 139 in  National Geographic's photo book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1426213018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sublime Nature: Photographs That Awe and Inspire&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, I interpreted &amp;quot;nature&amp;quot; to mean flora and fauna.  I interpreted this quote to mean something like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.webmd.com/balance/features/nature-therapy-ecotherapy#1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ecotherapy that &amp;quot;can have regenerative powers, improving mood and easing anxiety, stress, and depression.&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/bc-doctors-nature-prescription_ca_5fd2657ac5b68ce171864cef&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;B.C.&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sciencealert.com/doctors-in-scotland-are-literally-prescribing-nature-to-patients-shetland-gps-pilot-benefits-health-mental&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UK&lt;/a&gt; doctors are prescribing it. Was I wrong?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Brainly.in, &lt;a href=&quot;https://brainly.in/question/4019093&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;khushipar&lt;/a&gt; writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the famous speech of Ulysses in the third act of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; occurs this line, &amp;quot;One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Nature&amp;quot; is taken as meaning fellow-feeling, one touch of which makes us all brothers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same page, Serinus writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;One touch of nature makes the whole world kin&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line has been spoken by Ulysses in the third act of &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt; written by William Shakespeare. Through these lines, he wants to state that the bond of brotherhood or bond of relations are because everyone possesses the same nature. Similar feelings make the people of the world as a community as a whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Copying and pasting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/path/v04n06p176_one-touch-of-nature.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;One Touch of Nature — K. H.&lt;/a&gt; will make this post too long, and I quote just the footnote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare wrote: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;One&lt;/em&gt; touch of nature makes the &lt;em&gt;whole&lt;/em&gt; world kin.&amp;quot; We read instead: &amp;quot;One touch of &lt;em&gt;nature&lt;/em&gt; makes the whole world &lt;em&gt;kin.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/path/v04n06p176_one-touch-of-nature.htm#t1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;return to text&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;nature&amp;quot; mean in &amp;quot;One touch of nature makes the whole world kin&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11647" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T20:29:02.547" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T20:29:02.547" Title="What does &quot;nature&quot; mean in &quot;One touch of nature makes the whole world kin&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;troilus-and-cressida&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16993" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T06:53:52.253" Score="2" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lit upon this quote on p. 177 in  National Geographic's photo book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1426213018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sublime Nature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, that I riffled through based on recent posts. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7231854-lose-yourself-in-nature-and-find-peace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads has it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know any philosophy, and don't understand &lt;a href=&quot;https://redd.it/9xngam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;these comments&lt;/a&gt;.  &lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/9xngam/what_did_heraclitus_mean_by_this_qoute/e9ts1y2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The first one explains my bewilderment&lt;/a&gt;. How can a human expect the unexpected?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It contains within it the standard sort of paradoxical reasoning that Heraclitus usually employs - we can expect and encounter the unexpected, and yet we cannot search for it? What on earth this means is a bit bewildering. You might think, after all, that the unexpected is exactly the thing you can't expect, and this must be Heraclitus' more general point. You can try to expect the unexpected &lt;em&gt;as such&lt;/em&gt;, but unexpected as it is you can't go looking for it (by definition) in the particular.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T09:52:02.570" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T01:50:49.843" Title="What does Heraclitus mean by &quot;if you do not expect the unexpected&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;heraclitus&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16994" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T07:06:34.380" Score="2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Supposedly, Aristotle &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/aristotle133094.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;said&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The secret to humor is surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does Aristotle reckon that the secret to humor is surprise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T23:23:28.403" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T23:23:28.403" Title="Why does Aristotle reckon that the secret to humor is surprise?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;aristotle&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16995" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T07:46:40.323" Score="1" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;From p. 105 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20697512-national-geographic-stunning-photographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;National Geographic Stunning Photographs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6821368-it-is-only-when-we-are-aware-of-the-earth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“It is only when we are aware of the earth and &lt;strong&gt;of the earth as poetry&lt;/strong&gt; that we truly live.” ― Henry Beston  &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you become aware &amp;quot;of the earth as poetry&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T20:29:39.827" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T10:06:55.743" Title="How do you become aware &quot;of the earth as poetry&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;henry-beston&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16996" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16991" CreationDate="2021-01-01T11:32:05.740" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Kenneth Muir's edition of &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressia&lt;/em&gt; (The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, 1982) does not comment on this line. Kenneth Palmer's edition of the play (The Arden Shakespeare, second series, Routledge, 1982), glosses &lt;strong&gt;touch of nature&lt;/strong&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;natural trait or characteristic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines spoken by Ulysses mean the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One natural trait shows humanity's kinship:,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that all unanimously praise new trivialities,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;even though they are (merely) old wine in new bottles, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nature#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nature&lt;/a&gt; does not mean &amp;quot;the natural world&amp;quot; but an &amp;quot;innate characteristic&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kenneth Palmer points out,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This line is always misrepresented when quoted out of context (as if it meant that any 'natural' human act emphasized the kinship of mankind). Significantly, Ulysses means that mankind shows its kinship in acting discreditably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The context of the entire speech is a scene in which the Greeks ignore Achilles in spite of his past heroic actions. By ignoring him and pretending they now admire Ajax, they hope to make Achilles envious and thereby lure him back into the war against the Trojans. Hence Palmer's comment that they are acting discreditably. The trick is Ulysses's idea.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T11:32:05.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16997" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16889" CreationDate="2021-01-01T11:57:55.997" Score="9" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Introduction&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was first used by Frederick S. Boas in the introduction to his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53878/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1901 edition&lt;/a&gt; of the works of Thomas Kyd. Discussing a hypothetical play on the Hamlet story predating Shakespeare’s, he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have adopted the convenient German title, which tersely distinguishes the &lt;em&gt;Ur&lt;/em&gt;, or original, Hamlet-tragedy from Shakespeare’s play. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53878/page/n47/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. xlv, n.1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The existence of this earlier play was posited by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmond_Malone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmond Malone&lt;/a&gt; in 1790. However, no such work is extant, and so all scholarship on the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; has been and remains conjectural. Very little is known about the work, and still less is agreed upon. Most scholars claim that it is the chief source on which Shakespeare based his play, but a minority disputes even its existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Background Information&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand why Malone argued that there must have been a play on the &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; theme anterior to Shakespeare's, some background information is necessary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sources of the Hamlet story.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The date ascribed to Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at these to see how and why the idea of an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; arose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Sources of the Hamlet Story&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As with nearly all his plays, the plot of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was not original to Shakespeare. The story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amleth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amleth&lt;/a&gt; goes back to medieval Scandinavian legend. The first written source is the early 13th C. Latin &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesta_Danorum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gesta Danorum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;Deeds of the Danes&lt;/em&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxo_Grammaticus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saxo Grammaticus&lt;/a&gt;. Part of the third and fourth books of the &lt;em&gt;Gesta Danorum&lt;/em&gt; tell the story of a prince named Amleth. In broad outline as well as various details, Shakespeare’s play parallels Saxo’s narrative of Amleth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A Danish ruler is murdered by his brother, who usurps both his realm and his wife, Gerutha.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The murdered man’s son, Amleth, feigns madness to protect himself from his uncle/stepfather.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Intrigues ensue, including attempts to involve Amleth romantically with a young girl and to send him to England to be killed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Amleth eventually kills his uncle, but dies soon after, and a Norwegian king takes over the throne.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1570, the French author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_de_Belleforest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;François de Belleforest&lt;/a&gt; retold Amleth’s story in volume 5 of his &lt;em&gt;Histoires Tragiques&lt;/em&gt;. Belleforest’s version greatly expanded Saxo’s, doubling its length. Some features important to &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; but not in Saxo derive from Belleforest: for example, Hamlet’s melancholy nature, or the adulterous relationship between Gertude and Claudius prior to the murder. Belleforest’s narrative was anonymously translated into English in 1608 as &lt;em&gt;The Hystorie of Hamblet&lt;/em&gt;, but this translation postdates Shakespeare’s play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relevant portions of Saxo's &lt;em&gt;Gesta Danorum&lt;/em&gt;, in a dual Latin/German edition, as well as Belleforest's French narrative and its anonymous English translation, can be found in Robert Gericke's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013138288/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare's Hamlet-Quellen&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Date of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Internal evidence shows that Shakespeare’s play was written some time between 1599 and 1601. The &lt;em&gt;terminus post quem&lt;/em&gt; of 1599 is established by an exchange between Hamlet and Polonius:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; My lord, you played once i’ th’ university, you say?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;POLONIUS&lt;/strong&gt; That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; What did you enact?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;POLONIUS&lt;/strong&gt; I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-3-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.ii.104–110&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scholars such as Harold Jenkins have pointed out that this is an inside joke (p. 294, n. 103). Shakespeare’s own &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is dated 1599. The actors from Shakespeare’s company, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/topic/Lord-Chamberlains-Men&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Chamberlain’s Men&lt;/a&gt;, who played Caesar and Brutus in that play played Polonius and Hamlet respectively in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. This and other allusions to &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; prove that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; can be no earlier than 1599 (Jenkins p. 428, n. to I.i.117–123).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;terminus ante quem&lt;/em&gt; of 1601 is established by a speech of Rosencrantz’s. When Hamlet asks why the Players are traveling rather than performing in the city, Rosencrantz replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; Do they hold the same estimation they did when I was in the city? Are they so followed?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; No, indeed are they not.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; How comes it? Do they grow rusty?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; Nay, their endeavor keeps in the wonted pace. But there is, sir, an aerie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for ’t. These are now the fashion and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-2-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.ii.355&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rosencrantz says that the Players no longer remain in the city because a recent &lt;em&gt;innovation&lt;/em&gt; has inhibited their success there. This innovation, he explains further, is the use of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_player&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;child actors&lt;/a&gt;, who are &lt;em&gt;now the fashion&lt;/em&gt;. This alludes to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blackfriars Theatre&lt;/a&gt;’s staging of plays acted entirely by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_the_Chapel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Children of the Chapel&lt;/a&gt;. This practice began in 1600. Since Rosencrantz calls this innovation &lt;em&gt;late&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., recent, it means that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; must have been completed soon after child actors became fashionable, i.e., no later than 1601.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These intertextual allusions establish quite clearly that Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, in the form that it is best known today, dates to the turn of the 17th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Earlier References to a Play about Hamlet&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dating of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; to 1599–1601 is complicated by the existence of three, possibly four, prior references to a play that shares its subject matter: a preface by Thomas Nashe, a diary entry by Philip Henslowe, an allusion by Thomas Lodge, and some marginalia by Gabriel Harvey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thomas Nashe, 1589&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first printed reference we have to any play based on the Hamlet story is in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nashe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nashe&lt;/a&gt;'s 1589 preface to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Greene_(dramatist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Greene&lt;/a&gt;’s prose romance &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/menaphoncamilas00greegoog/page/n19/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Menaphon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Nashe criticizes the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11020/289&quot;&gt;contemporary vogue&lt;/a&gt; for tragedies in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Senecan&lt;/a&gt; mold. Beginning in the 1550s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_the_Younger&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seneca&lt;/a&gt;’s plays had been translated into English and served as a model for English dramatists. Nashe says that incompetent translators rely on these English translations to come up with melodramatic plots and speeches:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yet English &lt;em&gt;Seneca&lt;/em&gt; read by candlelight yields many good sentences, as &lt;em&gt;Blood is a beggar&lt;/em&gt;, and so forth, and if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole &lt;em&gt;Hamlets&lt;/em&gt;, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/menaphoncamilas00greegoog/page/n27/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 9&lt;/a&gt;; spelling modernized)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nashe specifically cites &lt;em&gt;whole &lt;strong&gt;Hamlets&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, then pretends to correct himself by saying &lt;em&gt;handfuls&lt;/em&gt;. This is evidently a sideswipe at some Seneca-inspired play entitled &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Philip Henslowe, 1594&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Henslowe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henslowe&lt;/a&gt; was a theatrical entrepreneur whose &lt;a href=&quot;http://dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/PDFs/300031873.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;diary&lt;/a&gt;, noting his expenses on and receipts from various productions, is one of the chief sources of information about the English theatre of Shakespeare’s day. One diary entry reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;9 of June 1594, Rd. at hamlet ………… viij&lt;sup&gt;s&lt;/sup&gt;   (p. 35)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rd&lt;/em&gt; is an abbreviation for &lt;em&gt;Received&lt;/em&gt;. Henslowe is recording that he has received eight shillings, or approximately US $147 in 2021 dollars, as proceeds from a staging of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; at the Newington Theatre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thomas Lodge, 1596&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As noted in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16889/289&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt;, Lodge alludes to a &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; play in his 1596 tract &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n10/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wit's Misery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Lodge says of a man who resents another man's success:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he walks for the most part in black under colour of gravity, and looks as pale as the visard of the ghost which cried so miserally at the theatre like an oyster-wife, &lt;em&gt;Hamlet, revenge&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n71/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 56&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The theatre&lt;/em&gt; here probably refers to the Shoreditch &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theatre&lt;/a&gt;, arguably the first purpose-built theatre in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Gabriel Harvey, 1598?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The writer and scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Harvey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harvey&lt;/a&gt; had a habit of making copious notes in the margins of books he had purchased. In his copy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Speght&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Speght&lt;/a&gt;’s 1598 edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chaucer&lt;/a&gt;, Harvey praises Shakespeare as one of England’s finer poets. He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeare's Venus, and Adonis: but his Lucrece, &amp;amp; his tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, have it in them, to please the wiser sort. Or such Poets: or better: or none.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is a facsimile of the note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VziQN.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/VziQN.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Page from Gabriel Harvey's copy of Speght's 1598 Chaucer edition, showing marginalia that references Shakespeare's Hamlet&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This marginal note is the earliest documented evidence of a specifically &lt;em&gt;Shakespearean&lt;/em&gt; Hamlet. The Speght edition being issued in 1598, the note might suggest that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; had been in performance before the accepted date of 1599–1601. However, we have no way of knowing when Harvey wrote this note. He might have written it a year or two after purchasing the book. For this and other reasons, dating this note precisely or using it to determine a date for &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is difficult. Jenkins has a detailed discussion of the problem (pp. 3–6).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between them, these four references (particularly the first three) are critical in making the argument for an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. If Shakespeare's play can be firmly dated to 1599–1601, how does one account for a &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; play being mentioned nearly ten years prior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Postulating an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the evidence of Nashe, Henslowe, and Lodge, Edmund Malone argued that there must have been an earlier, pre-Shakespearean play that told the same story. Malone was the first scholar to attempt a systematic chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. His &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written” was part of Samuel Johnson and George Steevens's magisterial 1778 edition of Shakespeare's complete works. In this, the first version of the essay, Malone assigns &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; the year 1596, assuming that the play Lodge mentions must have been Shakespeare’s. However, he argues that Shakespeare probably revised the play later:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the general air of the play itself, which has not, it must be owned, the appearance of an early composition, might induce us to class it five or six years later than 1596, were we not overpowered by the proof … The piece however, which was then exhibited, was probably but a rude sketch of that which we now possess. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n304/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 292&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In an &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill11shak_0/page/261/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;expanded version&lt;/a&gt; of his essay, included in his own 1790 edition of Shakespeare, Malone first introduces the idea of an older play on the Hamlet story that was based on Saxo and/or Belleforest. Discussing the passage in Nash, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is manifest from this passage that some play on the story of Hamlet had been exhibited before the year 1589; but I am inclined to think that it was not Shakespeare’s drama, but an elder performance, on which, with the aid of the old prose History of Hamlet, his tragedy was formed. The great number of pieces which we &lt;em&gt;know&lt;/em&gt; he formed on the performances of preceding writers renders it highly possible that some others also of his dramas were constructed on plays that are now lost. Perhaps the original &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was written by Thomas Kyd.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill11shak_0/page/305/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 305&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, at this point he still maintained the 1596 date for &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, relying on the mention of a specifically Shakespearean play of that name in Harvey’s marginalia in his copy of the 1598 Speght Chaucer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some time later, Malone changed his view on the date of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Malone died in 1812, but a revised, 21-volume edition of Shakespeare that he had left incomplete was published posthumously in 1821. This edition, completed by James Boswell the younger with the help of Malone’s papers and directions, included the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill02shak_0/page/288/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;third version of his essay&lt;/a&gt;. In this version Malone asserts, based on the reference to the child actors, that &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was written in 1600. He points out that the Harvey marginalia could have been written any time after Harvey acquired his book, and so does not establish that Harvey had seen Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; by 1598:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been favoured by the Bishop of Dromore [Dr. Percy], the possessor of the book referred to, with an inspection of it; and, on an attentive examination, I have found reason to believe, that the note in question may have been written in the latter end of the year 1600. Harvey doubtless purchased this volume in 1598, having, both at the beginning and end of it, written his name. But it by no means follows that all the intermediate remarks which are scattered throughout were put down at the same time. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill02shak_0/page/369/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 369–370&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone’s work set the parameters for the discussion of the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is not earlier than 1600 or 1601&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The print references to a &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;-like play prior to that date must refer to an earlier play that used material from Saxo and/or Belleforest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare drew upon this earlier play in writing his own &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This play was probably by Thomas Kyd.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All subsequent discussion about the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; has been conducted on Malone's terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Taking the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; for Granted&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone did not postulate an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; until 1790, nearly a century and three-quarters after Shakespeare’s death. In later Shakespearean scholarship, his hypothesis has achieved the status of fact. The &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; has become so naturalized that Jenkins, writing in 1982, can say:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is reasonably and inevitably supposed that the immediate source of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was an earlier play on the same subject, which scholars have come to call the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. This play is not extant and was apparently never printed, but that it did exist is well known from a number of contemporary references. (p. 82)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Without needing to citing Malone, Jenkins can simply assert that the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;must&lt;/strong&gt; have existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the quote from Jenkins shows, scholarly discussion of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; takes Malone’s conclusions for granted. His conclusions are not uniformly accepted as settled. For example, some argue that the grounds for his claim that the earlier play are shaky. But the assumptions that (1) an &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; existed, and (2) Kyd wrote it, are so pervasive that even scholars challenging either of those assumptions engage in combat with Malone, whether or not their arguments explicitly invoke him by name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;Note&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer focuses only on narrow pieces of the question as asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did scholars of Shakespeare always know about the existence of this previous Hamlet story?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; known only from the above Lodge quote?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A full answer to the question &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;What is known about the Ur-Hamlet, and how has this knowledge changed over the centuries?&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; must provide additional information and argument. Some of the questions that it would need to address are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the print history of Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why did Malone identify Kyd as the likely author of the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Since the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is not extant, are there any other dramatic sources from which we can imagine or reconstruct what it must have been like?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is the current state of scholarly discussion about the &lt;em&gt;Ur-Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since this answer is long enough already, I do not intend to go into these issues here. In any case, if I were to try, I'd run into the character limit for Stack Exchange answers. But these are all good questions for Literature Stack Exchange, if anybody cares to ask follow-ups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h1&gt;References&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Boas, Frederick S., ed. &lt;em&gt;The Works of Thomas Kyd&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1901. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53878/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.53878/page/n5/mode/2up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gericke, Robert, compiler. &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Hamlet-Quellen: Saxo Grammaticus (Lateinisch und Deutsch), Belleforest, und The History of Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. Leipzig: Barth, 1881. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013138288/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/cu31924013138288/page/n3/mode/2up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Henslowe, Philip. &lt;em&gt;The Diary of Philip Henslowe, from 1591 to 1609&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. J. Payne Collier. London: Shakespeare Society, 1845. &lt;a href=&quot;http://dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/PDFs/300031873.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dbooks.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/books/PDFs/300031873.pdf&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jenkins, Harold, ed. &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;. By William Shakespeare. 1601? The Arden Shakespeare, Second Series. London: Methuen, 1982.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lodge, Thomas. &lt;em&gt;Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse&lt;/em&gt;. 1596. &lt;em&gt;The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 4. Glasgow: Hunterian Club, 1883. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n5/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/completeworksth00unkngoog/page/n5/mode/1up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone, Edmond. &amp;quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written”. In &lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 1. Ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. 2nd ed. London: Bathurst et al., 1778. pp. 261–346. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281/mode/1up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone, Edmond. &amp;quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written”.  In &lt;em&gt;The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 1, part 1. Ed. Edmond Malone. London: J. Rivington and Sons, 1790. pp. 261–386. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill11shak_0/page/261/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill11shak_0/page/261/mode/1up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Malone, Edmond. &amp;quot;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written”. In *The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare”, vol. 2.  London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1821. pp. 288–471. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill02shak_0/page/288/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/playspoemsofwill02shak_0/page/288/mode/1up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nashe, Thomas. “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities”. In &lt;em&gt;Menaphon&lt;/em&gt;. 1589. By Robert Greene. Ed. Edward Arber. Westminster: Constable, 1895. pp. 5–18. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/menaphoncamilas00greegoog/page/n4/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/details/menaphoncamilas00greegoog/page/n4/mode/2up&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T11:13:15.947" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T11:13:15.947" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16998" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16994" CreationDate="2021-01-01T12:21:00.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most likely sources of that Aristotle quote (if it is one) would be the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt;. Searching the &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; for &amp;quot;humo[r]&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;secret&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;surprise&amp;quot; (individually) in the translations by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poetics_translated_by_S._H._Butcher/Whole_text&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Henry Butcher&lt;/a&gt; (1922) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poetics_(Bywater)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ingram Bywater&lt;/a&gt; (1898) turns up nothing that looks relevant. Then again, since &lt;em&gt;The Name of the Rose&lt;/em&gt; every man and his dog knows that the second book of Aristotle's &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt; is lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Aristotle's &lt;em&gt;Rhetoric&lt;/em&gt; say? In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Rhetoric_(Freese)/Book_3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 3, chapter 11&lt;/a&gt;, we find the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what Theodorus calls “novel expressions” arise when what follows is paradoxical, and, as he puts it, not in accordance with our previous expectation; just as humorists make use of slight changes in words. The same effect is produced by jokes that turn on a change of letter; for they are deceptive. These novelties occur in poetry as well as in prose; for instance, the following verse does not finish as the hearer expected:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And he strode on, under his feet—chilblains,”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above comes fairly close to the claim that &amp;quot;the secret to humor is surprise&amp;quot; but I have not found evidence that Aristotle used that terse formulation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T12:21:00.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="16999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16991" CreationDate="2021-01-01T12:56:12.287" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare explains the meaning of this line in the subsequent four lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One touch of nature makes the whole world kin:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That all with one consent praise new-born gauds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Though they are made and moulded of things past,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And give to dust that is a little gilt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare. &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;, act III, scene 3.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“touch” means “a small quantity of any substance deposited as if by a light touch” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“nature” means “innate disposition or character”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“makes the whole world kin” means “demonstrates that everyone is alike”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“gauds” are toys or shiny ornaments.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“laud” means “praise”.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“dust that is a little gilt” is a gloss on “gauds”: that is, something worthless (“dust”) that has been made showy or ornamental (“gilt” = gilded).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“gilt o’er-dusted” is a gloss on “things past”: that is, something valuable (“gilt” = gold) that has become dusty with age. Compare “Wipe off the dust that hides our sceptre’s gilt” (&lt;em&gt;Richard II&lt;/em&gt;, act II, scene 1).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The juxtaposition of “dust that is a little gilt” with “gilt o’er-dusted” is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimetabole&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;antimetabole&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the meaning of “one touch of nature makes the whole world kin” is that one small characteristic is common to everyone in the world: they like flashy novelties and disdain worthy antiquities, although the former are often merely reworkings of the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T12:56:12.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17000" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16994" CreationDate="2021-01-01T14:31:21.287" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest occurrence of this quotation that I can find is from 2004:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The secret to humor is surprise” —Aristotle&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;The Bathroom Readers’ Institute, ed. (2004). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/unclejohnscoloss00bath/page/22/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Uncle John’s Colossal Collection of Quotable Quotes&lt;/em&gt;, p. 22&lt;/a&gt;. Oregon: Bathroom Readers’ Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffice it to say that the “Bathroom Readers’ Institute” is not a scholarly or reliable source, and either one of the contributors to this volume invented the quotation, or else they took it from some other, equally unreliable, source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aristotle actually says (roughly speaking) that the secret to &lt;em&gt;tragedy&lt;/em&gt; is surprise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again, &lt;strong&gt;Tragedy&lt;/strong&gt; is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events terrible and pitiful. &lt;strong&gt;Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise&lt;/strong&gt;; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow from one another.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aristotle. &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, IX.11. Translated by S. H. Butcher (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poeticsaristotl02butcgoog/page/n66/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poetics of Aristotle&lt;/em&gt;, p. 39&lt;/a&gt;. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T14:31:21.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17001" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16995" CreationDate="2021-01-01T15:14:05.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poetry doesn't have to rhyme or scan or have any of the attributes that we conventionally associate with a &amp;quot;poem&amp;quot;.  True poetry is something that conveys ideas and feelings that can't be attributed directly to the words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance a poem can describe an experience without ever mentioning the author's feelings; yet the reader will end up feeling those same emotions, just as if they had personally experienced the same situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this, from Leonard Cohen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a baby stillborn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like a beast with his horn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have torn everyone who reached out for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those three lines can invoke very strong emotions in some people, without ever mentioning what the author himself is feeling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A well-taken photograph of a glorious sunrise, or a vast expanse, or anything that caused a strong emotional response in the photographer, can similarly bring out emotions in the people that view it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine what Constantine felt when he saw something like this sundog, which caused him to use that symbol for the new religion he was formalizing:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKkCc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/gKkCc.png&quot; alt=&quot;Sundogs: a central cross with with secondary crosses at the top and sides.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This of course is only a second-hand view.  The &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; poetry was nature itself, which the photograph attempts to pass on to the people that see it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T15:14:05.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17002" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8917" CreationDate="2021-01-01T16:56:04.050" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Imagery&lt;/strong&gt; is a very broad term that refers to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience.&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;(Cuddon, page 442-443)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Different books define different distinctions between literary terms. For example, Cuddon makes a distinction between literal, perceptual and conceptual imagery, using lines from Robert Lowell's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.poetryatlas.com/poetry/poem/2486/our-lady-of-walsingham.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Our Lady of Walsingham&lt;/a&gt; as illustration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There once the penitents took off their shoes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And then walked barefoot the remaining mile;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the small trees, a stream and hedgerows file&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Slowly along the munching English lane,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like cows to the old shrine, until you lose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Track of your dragging pain.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The stream flows down under the druid tree,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shiloah’s whirlpools gurgle and make glad&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The castle of God. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first two lines use a &lt;strong&gt;literal image&lt;/strong&gt;, in this case a visual one.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The third line presents a &lt;strong&gt;perceptual image&lt;/strong&gt;: trees, a stream and hedgerows don't literally &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/file#Verb_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;move in a file&lt;/a&gt;, they happen to be arranged in what looks like a file to the casual observer.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the last line, the &amp;quot;castle of God&amp;quot; is a &lt;strong&gt;conceptual image&lt;/strong&gt;: one can't really visualise it &amp;quot;but one may have an idea of it&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagery is very often conveyed using &lt;strong&gt;figurative language&lt;/strong&gt;, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simile&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;simile&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomatopoeia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;onomatopoeia&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;Images needn't be visual, such as the one from Lowell's poem, above, but may also be olfactory, tactile, auditory, gustatory or abstract.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peter Redgrove's poem &amp;quot;Lararus and the Sea&amp;quot; combines many examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tide of my death came whispering &lt;strong&gt;[auditory]&lt;/strong&gt; like this &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Soiling &lt;strong&gt;[tactile, olfactory or both]&lt;/strong&gt; my body with its tireless voice. &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I scented the antique moistures when they sharpened &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The air of my room, made the rough wood of my bed &lt;strong&gt;[tactile]&lt;/strong&gt;, (most dear), &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Standing out like roots in my tall grave. &lt;strong&gt;[visual]&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;symbol&lt;/strong&gt; is more specific, even though its definition appears to have evolved over time (see e.g. Arnold and Sinemus, pages 193, 369). Simply put, a symbol is (a reference to) an object whose meaning goes beyond its material aspect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the most basic level, symbols can be subdivided into conventional symbols and private symbols (Klarer, page 55). Examples of &lt;strong&gt;conventional symbols&lt;/strong&gt; include the the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stars and Stripes&lt;/a&gt; (which is not simply a colourful piece of fabric), the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_cross&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cross&lt;/a&gt; (not just two pieces of wood) and scales (to represent justice). An example of a &lt;strong&gt;private symbol&lt;/strong&gt; is the albatros in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/a&gt;. The Stars &amp;amp; Stripes, the cross and the albatros are all visual and examples of imagery, but they point to something beyond themselves that the reader must somehow decode. This is relatively straightforward for conventional symbols generated by one's own culture, though by no means always. For example, in the visual realm, medieval viewers were presumably familiar with the symbol of the lily in paintings such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annunciation_(van_Eyck,_Washington)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jan Van Eyck's &lt;em&gt;Annunciation&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; but modern viewers tend to see the lily as irrelevant until told what it represents. [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below are a few other examples of symbols.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;It was the nightingale, and not the lark&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.3.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, scene 5&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The nightingale is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bto.org/develop-your-skills/bird-identification/videos/bto-bird-id-nightingale-and-other-night-singers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;night singer&lt;/a&gt; and here symbolizes the night, whereas the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lark_in_the_Morning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lark represents the morning&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the medieval morality play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyman_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Everyman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the main character symbolises the sinful Christian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In John Keats's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn&lt;/a&gt;, the urn's round shape has been said to symbolise the closedness of the ideal poem (at least for the New Critics, see Klarer, page 21).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &amp;quot;I am trying to plunge into the whirlpool of challenges&amp;quot;, the phrase &amp;quot;whirlpool of challenges&amp;quot; is a perceptual image. However, if the text said that you fell into a whirlpool and the reader had to figure out that the whirlpool represents the many challenges you are facing, we would call it a (private) symbol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin, 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Klarer, Mario: &lt;em&gt;Einführung in die anglistisch-amerikanistische Literaturwissenschaft&lt;/em&gt;. Darmstadt: Wissenschftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arnold, Heinz Ludwig; Sinemus, Volker (editors): &lt;em&gt;Grundzüge der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaft. Band 1: Literaturwissenschaft&lt;/em&gt;. Sixth edition. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fricke, Harald; Zymner, Rüdiger: Einübung in die Literaturwissenschaft: Parodieren geht über studieren*. UTB 1616. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1991.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] I am leaving it unexplained on purpose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T17:19:57.013" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T17:19:57.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17003" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:51:28.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:51:28.887" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:51:28.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17004" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:51:28.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of Henry Beston (1888-1968) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:55:14.620" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:55:14.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17005" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:52:24.513" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:52:24.513" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:52:24.513" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17006" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:52:24.513" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Crucible' (1953) by Arthur Miller. Should be tagged with [arthur-miller]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:54:36.700" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:54:36.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17007" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:53:16.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:53:16.193" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:53:16.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17008" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:53:16.193" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare. Should be tagged with [william-shakespeare]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:54:42.393" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:54:42.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17009" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:54:58.040" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:54:58.040" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:54:58.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17010" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-01T19:54:58.040" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Greek philosopher Heraclitus or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-01T19:55:23.167" LastActivityDate="2021-01-01T19:55:23.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T22:57:11.847" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I lit upon this quote on p. 108 in  National Geographic's photo book &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1426213018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sublime Nature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/353303-if-you-will-stay-close-to-nature-to-its-simplicity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads has it&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;― Rainer Maria Rilke, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1208289&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letters to a Young Poet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T12:39:11.777" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T12:41:39.210" Title="What does Rainer Maria Rilke mean by &quot;the small things hardly noticeable&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;rainer-maria-rilke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17013" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-01T23:41:45.953" Score="2" ViewCount="97" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came upon this on p. 167 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20697512-national-geographic-stunning-photographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;National Geographic Stunning Photographs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://mysteryscenemag.com/index.php?option=com_content&amp;amp;view=article&amp;amp;id=2770:gm-malliet-on-james-thurber&amp;amp;catid=68:writers-on-reading&amp;amp;Itemid=191&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mystery Scene&lt;/a&gt;, because G.M. Malliet has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gmmalliet.com/bio.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a B.A. in journalism and an M.A. in psychology; she also received an M.Phil. degree from the University of Cambridge (psychology of education) and did graduate study in sociology at Oxford University.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thurber’s is a subversive style of writing I associate with the British, so gifted at making us laugh by taking an ordinary scene and piling occurrence upon happenstance, leading us toward a somehow inevitable and happy, if goofy, outcome. &lt;strong&gt;As Thurber said, “Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.&lt;/strong&gt;” First posit a ridiculous, Python-esque setup, then coax the reader until he accepts the implausible as real. Add fantastic, startling touches, until your Walter Mitty is thoroughly entrenched in a mad world spinning out of his control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does James Thurber mean by &amp;quot;Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T09:20:23.647" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T11:19:45.717" Title="What does James Thurber mean by &quot;Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;james-thurber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T01:30:07.427" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.” - Arthur Machen&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I lit upon this on p. 23 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20697512-national-geographic-stunning-photographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;National Geographic Stunning Photographs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I thought this meant &lt;a href=&quot;https://math.stackexchange.com/q/617625&quot;&gt;going down the rabbit hole&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/116473&quot;&gt;defined on ELL&lt;/a&gt;) which causes hitches like &lt;a href=&quot;https://medium.com/useless-knowledge-daily/history-of-the-idiom-down-the-rabbit-hole-fe044ff96fde&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paralysis analysis&lt;/a&gt;. Am I correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if &lt;a href=&quot;https://old.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/2icsb2/every_branch_of_human_knowledge_if_traced_up_to/cl16uur/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the interpretation below&lt;/a&gt; is correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every &amp;quot;branch&amp;quot; of knowledge is a fraction of philosophy; ideas about certain types of truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Living in the bubble allows you to ignore massive amounts of irrelevant data. BUT, a broader perspective is critical for making revolutionary advancements; change the bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why philosophy majors make the best lawyers, they are better trained to adapt to the frequent changes; they continue to perceive it as a consistent rational system.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rarely can quotes do anything but resonate with things already believed. The best quotes just sum up those beliefs elegantly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T11:56:25.210" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T15:21:33.980" Title="How does &quot;every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanish into mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-machen&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17017" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T03:39:23.110" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each situation, each moment, is of infinite worth; for each represents a whole eternity. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lit upon this on p. 395 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20697512-national-geographic-stunning-photographs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;National Geographic Stunning Photographs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. I can't even guess what this means. Logically speaking, each situation and moment logically is FINITE. How can it  represent a whole infinity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T13:34:47.110" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T12:38:45.037" Title="What did Goethe mean by &quot;each situation, each moment, is of infinite worth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17018" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T04:20:47.120" Score="1" ViewCount="422" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote &amp;quot;Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it&amp;quot; is found in the final passage of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1990-08-03-9003050117-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Norman Maclean&lt;/a&gt;'s autobiographical novella &lt;em&gt;A River Runs Through It&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many fly fishermen in western Montana where the summer days are almost Arctic in length, I often do not start fishing until the cool of the evening. Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am haunted by waters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he mean by &amp;quot;Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T10:37:40.113" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T16:31:21.867" Title="What does Norman Maclean mean : &quot;Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through it.&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;norman-maclean&gt;&lt;a-river-runs-through-it&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T05:01:28.783" Score="0" ViewCount="164" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;― Victor Hugo, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3208463&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether &amp;quot;the interior of the soul&amp;quot; &amp;quot;is one spectacle grander than the sky&amp;quot; ― doesn't this depend on the soul and the morality of a person? Would Hugo's quotation still apply to evildoers?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I lit upon this quotation on p 261 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38395374-national-geographic-spectacle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spectacle: Rare and Astonishing Photographs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/512939-there-is-one-spectacle-grander-than-the-sea-that-is&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads quotes it too.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11334" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T16:32:08.927" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T19:15:15.580" Title="Why did Victor Hugo write that &quot;the interior of the soul&quot; is &quot;grander than the sky&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17022" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17045" CreationDate="2021-01-02T09:35:25.250" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a book in which there seems to be another person on the opposite side of their mirror. Its a children's book, and it is one of the books of a big series. I can't seem to recollect which book it is. Could someone help me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11754" OwnerDisplayName="Math_Whiz" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T10:20:47.373" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T07:23:46.087" Title="Children's book in which there seems to be another person on the opposite side of their mirror" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17023" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16989" CreationDate="2021-01-02T10:24:04.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The solution, of course, is that Miller &lt;em&gt;revised the text of the play&lt;/em&gt; between the original theatre production and the publication of the Penguin edition, and this revision included the addition of the long character notes, so that “any audience that has seen this play” means “any audience that has seen the play &lt;em&gt;so far&lt;/em&gt;”, that is, up to the date of the revision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Revision of drama is commonplace: a script has to be modified to fit the constraints of the theatre, budget, cast, and so on. In rehearsal, problems are discovered and have to be solved: a line does not get a laugh, a scene goes on too long, a character’s motivation is not clear to the audience, and so on. Typically the playwright is closely involved with the first production and can revise the text and help the actors with line readings. When the text of a play is prepared for publication, a playwright might add directions and notes to assist future productions when they will not be present. (Or they might not—some playwrights prefer to leave the text open to interpretation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This process of revision is usually hidden and we only get to see the finished product. But in the case of &lt;em&gt;The Crucible&lt;/em&gt;, we can trace some of the revisions by comparing a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/crucibledramaint00mill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reprint of the 1953 edition of the play&lt;/a&gt; with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/arthurmillerscol00mill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1957 edition of Miller’s collected plays&lt;/a&gt;. In the 1953 edition, the play opens like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TITUBA. My Betty be hearty soon?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS. Out of here!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TITUBA. My Betty not goin’ die …&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS. Out of my sight! Out of my … &lt;em&gt;(Tituba exits hurriedly. He kneels again. He is overcome with sobs.)&lt;/em&gt; Oh, my God! God help me! &lt;em&gt;(Quaking with a bodyful of fear, and uttering undecipherable syllables of sobs.)&lt;/em&gt; Betty. Child. Dear child. Will you wake, will you open up your eyes! Betty, little one … &lt;em&gt;(Abigail Williams, 17, enters. A strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling. Now she is all worry and apprehension and propriety.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ABIGAIL. Uncle? Susanna Walcott’s here from Doctor Griggs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS. Oh? The doctor. &lt;em&gt;(Rising.)&lt;/em&gt; Let her come, let her come.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ABIGAIL. Come in, Susanna. &lt;em&gt;(Susanna Walcott, a little younger than Abigail, enters.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS: What does the doctor say, child?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the 1957 collected plays, &lt;em&gt;The Crucible&lt;/em&gt; opens like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TITUBA, &lt;em&gt;already taking a step backward&lt;/em&gt;: My Betty be hearty soon?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS: Out of here!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;TITUBA, &lt;em&gt;backing to the door&lt;/em&gt;: My Betty not goin’ die …&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS, &lt;em&gt;scrambling to his feet in a fury&lt;/em&gt;: Out of my sight! &lt;em&gt;She is gone.&lt;/em&gt; Out of my— &lt;em&gt;He is overcome with sobs. He clamps his teeth against them and closes the door and leans against it, exhausted.&lt;/em&gt; Oh, my God! God help me! &lt;em&gt;Quaking with fear, mumbling to himself through his sobs, he goes to the bed and gently takes Betty’s hand.&lt;/em&gt; Betty. Child. Dear child, will you wake, will you open up your eyes! Betty, little one …&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;He is bending to kneel again when his niece, Abigail Williams, seventeen, enters—a strikingly beautiful girl, an orphan, with an endless capacity for dissembling. Now she is all worry and apprehension and propriety.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ABIGAIL: Uncle? &lt;em&gt;He looks to her.&lt;/em&gt; Susanna Walcott’s here from Doctor Griggs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS: Oh? Let her come, let her come.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ABIGAIL, &lt;em&gt;leaning out the door to call to Susanna, who is down the hall a few steps&lt;/em&gt;: Come in, Susanna.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Susanna Walcott, a little younger than Abigail, a nervous, hurried girl, enters.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;PARRIS, &lt;em&gt;eagerly&lt;/em&gt;: What does the doctor say, child?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dialogue is very little changed—in this passage, only Parris’ superfluous “The doctor” has been cut—but the later edition has much more detailed stage directions, for the benefit of future productions without Miller being available to supply them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other changes between the two editions are a revision to the act structure (the 1953 edition has two acts, the 1957 revision has four), and the addition of the long character notes. In the 1953 edition, Hale’s entrance is given as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PUTNAM. I’ll have my men on you, Corey! I’ll clap a writ on you! &lt;em&gt;(Enter John Hale, 35, a ruddy bright young man. He is loaded down with heavy books.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HALE. Pray you, someone take these! &lt;em&gt;(Putnam crosses to Hale’s L., helps him.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the detail of “Putnam crosses to Hale’s L[eft]” in the stage direction—this kind of precise &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_(stage)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blocking&lt;/a&gt;, which appears in many places in the 1953 edition, has been completely removed from the 1957 edition. Directors of new productions of the play need to work out their own blocking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T10:24:04.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17024" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17013" CreationDate="2021-01-02T11:19:45.717" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: This quotation is the result of a kind of collaboration between William Wordsworth, James Thurber, and Leonard Bacon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s Thurber’s original version, or at least the version as quoted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Eastman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Max Eastman&lt;/a&gt;—I have not been able to find the original, but presumably it was one of Thurber’s columns in the &lt;em&gt;New Yorker&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think humor is the best that lies closest to the familiar, to that part of the familiar which is humiliating, distressing, even tragic. &lt;strong&gt;Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.&lt;/strong&gt; There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar. If a play is going on on the stage, a love scene, say, and from the wings a Scotty should wander on, with muddy paws, having got away from its owner’s dressing room, and if the Scotty should jump up on the best sofa and lie down, it would be funnier than if a kangaroo popped in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Thurber, quoted in Max Eastman (1936). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/enjoymentoflaugh00east/page/342/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Enjoyment of Laughter&lt;/em&gt;, p. 342&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Simon and Schuster.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thurber clearly meant to allude to Wordsworth’s famous description of poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from &lt;strong&gt;emotion recollected in tranquillity&lt;/strong&gt;: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, similar to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Wordsworth (1800). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lyricalballads00unkngoog/page/n38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt;, second edition, volume I, p. xxxiii&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the allusion is rather clumsy: perhaps Thurber was relying on his memory of Wordsworth. The critic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bacon_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonard Bacon&lt;/a&gt;, in a 1936 review of &lt;em&gt;Enjoyment of Laughter&lt;/em&gt;, spotted the allusion, and proposed an improvement:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is what he [Thurber] says: “Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.” The phrasing is careless, but “emotion recollected in tranquillity” meant poetry to Wordsworth. Would “&lt;strong&gt;emotional chaos recollected in tranquillity&lt;/strong&gt;”—or anything else have meant humor to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Leonard Bacon (1936). Review of &lt;em&gt;The Enjoyment of Laughter&lt;/em&gt; by Max Eastman. In &lt;em&gt;Saturday Review of Literature&lt;/em&gt;, volume 15, p. 10.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The substitution of “remembered” for “recollected” must have taken place some time between 1936 and 1956, for the quotation appears in this form (attributed, wrongly, to Thurber) in a review in &lt;em&gt;The Publishers Weekly&lt;/em&gt;, volume 190, p. 63.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T11:19:45.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17015" CreationDate="2021-01-02T12:29:04.067" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The interpretations given in the question are both wrong. The trouble that you are having with your questions about quotations is that &lt;em&gt;words have meaning in a context&lt;/em&gt;, and so you cannot reliably determine the meaning of a sentence on its own: it might be fictional, or metaphorical, or figurative, or ironic, or sarcastic; it might use unusual senses of some of the words; and it very likely refers to concepts and ideas that are clarified in the surrounding context. So the first thing you need to do is to &lt;em&gt;identify the source of the quotation&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the quotation comes from the short story ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/threeimpostorsor00machuoft/page/148/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Recluse of Bayswater&lt;/a&gt;’, a work of supernatural horror. The narrator, Helen Leicester, reads a report by Dr Chambers containing the following passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps this confession will not wound you so sharply as it would have done twenty years ago; for I think you cannot have failed to notice that for some time hypotheses have been advanced by men of pure science which, are nothing less than transcendental, and I suspect that most modern chemists and biologists of repute would not hesitate to subscribe the dictum of the old Schoolman,† &lt;em&gt;Omnia exeunt in mysterium&lt;/em&gt;, which means, I take it, that &lt;strong&gt;every branch of human knowledge if traced up to its source and final principles vanishes into mystery&lt;/strong&gt;. I need not trouble you now with a detailed account of the painful steps which led me to my conclusions; a few simple experiments suggested a doubt as to my then standpoint, and a train of thought that rose from circumstances comparatively trifling brought me far. My old conception of the universe has been swept away, and I stand in a world that seems as strange and awful to me as the endless waves of the ocean seen for the first time, shining, from a Peak in Darien.‡ Now I know that the walls of sense that seemed so impenetrable, that seemed to loom up above the heavens and to be founded below the depths, and to shut us in forevermore, are no such everlasting impassable barriers as we fancied, but thinnest and most airy veils that melt away before the seeker, and dissolve as the early mist of the morning about the brooks. I know that you never adopted the extreme materialistic position: you did not go about trying to prove a universal negative, for your logical sense withheld you from that crowning absurdity; yet I am sure that you will find all that I am saying strange and repellent to your habits of thought. Yet, Haberden, what I tell you is the truth, nay, to adopt our common language, the sole and scientific truth, verified by experience; and the universe is verily more splendid and more awful than we used to dream. The whole universe, my friend, is a tremendous sacrament; a mystic, ineffable force and energy, veiled by an outward form of matter; and man, and the sun and the other stars, and the flower of the grass, and the crystal in the test-tube, are each and every one as spiritual, as material and subject to an inner working.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Arthur Machen (1895). ‘The Recluse of Bayswater’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/threeimpostorsor00machuoft/page/172/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Three Imposters&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 173–175&lt;/a&gt;. Boston: Roberts Bros.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† See below. ‡ An allusion to the sonnet ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_First_Looking_into_Chapman%27s_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On First Looking into Chapman's Homer&lt;/a&gt;’ (1816) by John Keats.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context makes it clear that the meaning of the quotation is that &lt;em&gt;if you take a scientific phenomenon and explain it, and explain the explanation, and so on, eventually you will reach a point where no further explanation is possible&lt;/em&gt;, the word “mystery” being used in the sense “something inexplicable or beyond human comprehension” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Dr Chambers concludes that all phenomema ultimately have a supernatural or spiritual cause, but we are not obliged to agree with him: the story is, after all, a work of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “old Schoolman” with his Latin tag comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coleridge&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Omnia exeunt in mysterium&lt;/em&gt; says a Schoolman: i.e., &lt;em&gt;There is nothing, the absolute ground of which is not&#xA;a Mystery.&lt;/em&gt; The contrary were indeed a contradiction in terms: for how can that, which is to explain all things, be susceptible of an explanation? It would be to suppose the same thing first and second at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1810). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/friendliterarymo03cole/page/332/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Friend&lt;/em&gt;, p. 332&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “schoolman” in this sense was “a philosopher or theologian teaching or employing the scholasticism of the European universities, characterized especially by the use of dialectic reasoning and subtle argument” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). I have not been able to identify the schoolman or further trace the tag, and I suspect that Coleridge invented him and it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T15:21:33.980" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T15:21:33.980" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17026" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17017" CreationDate="2021-01-02T13:28:03.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quotation comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fuller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margaret Fuller&lt;/a&gt;’s translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Peter_Eckermann&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johann Peter Eckermann&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;em&gt;Gespräche mit Goethe&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Conversations with Goethe&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We then talked of the papers relating to his [Goethe’s] journey into Switzerland in 1797. […] I mentioned how pleased I was to see how various were the interests called into action by his journey; how he saw every thing; shape and situation of the mountains, their geology and mineralogy; earth, rivers, clouds, air, wind, and storm; then the cities, the history of their origin and growth, architecture, painting, theatre; police of cities, trades, economy, laying out of the streets, human race, manner of living, individual peculiarities; then again, politics, warlike adventures, and a hundred other things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Herr Canzler came in for a few moments, and then went to the ladies. When he had left us, Goethe praised him, and said, “All these excellent men, with whom you are now placed in so pleasant a relation, make what I call a home,—a home to which one is always willing to return.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said that “I already perceived the beneficial effects of my present situation; for I found myself able to set aside my ideal and theoretic tendencies, and make use of the present moment more and more.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It would be pity,” said Goethe, “if it were not so. Only persist in your present view, and hold fast by the present. &lt;strong&gt;Each situation—nay, each moment—is of infinite worth; for each represents a whole eternity.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a short pause, I turned the conversation to the best mode, of treating the subject he had proposed to me, that of Tiefurt.† “This subject,” said I, “is complex; and it will be difficult to give it proper form. It seems to me it would be best treated in prose.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It is not in itself,” replied Goethe, “an object of sufficient significance for that. The didactic, descriptive form, would be the one I should choose; but even that is not perfectly appropriate. Perhaps you would do well to write ten or twelve little poems, in rhyme, but in various measures and forms, such as the various sides and views demand, on which light must be thrown to do justice to the subject.” This idea struck me favorably.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Johann Peter Eckermann (1836). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/conversationswi00eckegoog/page/n92/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 60–62&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Margaret Fuller (1839). Boston: Hilliard, Gray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiefurt_House&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Schloss Tiefurt&lt;/a&gt;, the summer residence of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchess_Anna_Amalia_of_Brunswick-Wolfenb%C3%BCttel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Duchess Anna Amalia&lt;/a&gt;, who patronized the arts and culture.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear from the context that Goethe was trying to encourage Eckermann to experiment with his poetry, by emphasizing the &lt;em&gt;infinite number of ways in which a single situation can be expressed in art&lt;/em&gt;. In just this way, Goethe had been able to make use of his journey into Switzerland as launching points for so many avenues of thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T12:38:45.037" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T12:38:45.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17027" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17018" CreationDate="2021-01-02T16:31:21.867" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence you are asking about starts with “Eventually,” which indicates that it is a continuation of the action in the previous sentence. So we have:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River […] Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a double meaning here. First, as the twilight deepens, everything in the canyon disappears into the gloom (“all existence fades”) until the only things that the fisherman can sense are himself and the river (which he can hear). Eventually, “all things merge into one [thing]” (that is, into darkness), and a river runs through the darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, the fisherman becomes so deeply absorbed in his activity that he loses all awareness of anything other than himself and the river. This deep absorption is indicated by the odd expression “a being with my soul and memories” instead of “myself” (indicating a kind of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dissociation&lt;/a&gt; or out-of-body experience) and by the phrase “all things merge into one” (indicating that in his mind, there is no distinction between himself and the canyon and the activity of fishing). Hence when “the river runs through it” it runs (metaphorically) though the fisherman as well as (literally) through the canyon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T16:31:21.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17028" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T18:53:48.913" Score="1" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://hellopoetry.com/poem/68119/the-radiant-dark/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Radiant Dark&amp;quot; by George Eliot - Hello Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Should I long that dark were fair? Say, O song.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lacks my love aught that I should long?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dark the night with breath all flow'rs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And tender broken voice that fills&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With ravishment the list'ning hours.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whis'prings, wooings,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dark the night, yet is she &lt;strong&gt;bright&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For in her dark she brings the mystic star,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Trembling yet strong as is the voice of love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From some unknown afar.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O &lt;strong&gt;radiant&lt;/strong&gt; dark, O darkly foster'd ray,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou hast a joy too deep for shallow day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Literally, dark and night can't be &amp;quot;bright&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;radiant&amp;quot;. What does Eliot mean? I don't know if she was an night owl. If she just loved night time, why not use other adjectives to praise night time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What &amp;quot;joy too deep for shallow day&amp;quot; does night have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11751" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T19:11:19.107" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T11:25:40.637" Title="Why does George Eliot call night &quot;bright&quot; and &quot;radiant&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;george-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17029" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:08:01.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:08:01.050" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:08:01.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17030" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:08:01.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of American cartoonist James Thurber (1894-1961) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:52:11.763" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:52:11.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17031" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:08:56.663" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:08:56.663" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:08:56.663" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17032" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:08:56.663" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American author Norman Maclean (1902-1990) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:52:19.270" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:52:19.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17033" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:09:42.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:09:42.010" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:09:42.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17034" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:09:42.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Arthur Machen (1863-1947) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:52:43.590" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:52:43.590" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17035" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:12:44.640" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:12:44.640" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:12:44.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17036" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:12:44.640" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;A River Runs Through It&quot; by Norman Maclean. Should be tagged with [norman-maclean]. It is a semi-autobiographical book comprising of three stories, &quot;A River Runs Through It&quot;, &quot;Logging and Pimping and 'Your pal, Jim'&quot; and &quot;USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky&quot;." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:52:39.140" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:52:39.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17037" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17038" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:20:37.463" Score="5" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a specific term for a novel (or poem, or any other artwork) whose content is concerned with writing or creating a similar art? Some examples of the kind of novels I'm thinking of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Proust's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Search of Lost Time&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a novel that ends up being about the process just before writing a novel);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woolf's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_Lighthouse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;To the Lighthouse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a novel about completing a painting).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11752" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-02T20:39:23.133" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T09:25:29.570" Title="Terminology for a novel about writing a novel" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17037" CreationDate="2021-01-02T20:51:55.820" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The closest term is the somewhat more general term &lt;strong&gt;metanarration&lt;/strong&gt;, a terms that is related to &lt;strong&gt;metafiction&lt;/strong&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/node/50.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metanarration and Metafiction&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;the living handbook of narratology&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metanarration and metafiction are umbrella terms designating self-reflexive utterances, i.e. comments referring to the discourse rather than to the story. Although they are related and often used interchangeably, the terms should be distinguished: metanarration refers to the narrator’s reflections on the act or process of narration; metafiction concerns comments on the fictionality and/or constructedness of the narrative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many resources on metafiction don't discuss metanarrative as a separate term, however (even though many mention &amp;quot;metanarrative devices&amp;quot;). See for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.geneseo.edu/%7Ejohannes/Metafiction.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metafiction&lt;/a&gt; by Jeff Johannes;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/postcolonialstudies/2014/06/21/metafiction/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metafiction&lt;/a&gt; by Victoria Orlowski (Spring 1996);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-546&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metafictionfree&lt;/a&gt; by Jerome Klinkowitz in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://litreactor.com/columns/thats-so-meta-writing-a-story-about-writing-a-story&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;That’s So Meta: Writing A Story About Writing A Story&lt;/a&gt; by Taylor Houston on LitReactor (December 2011).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;metanovel&lt;/strong&gt; has been used in a few academic papers but does not to appear to be in wide use. See for example&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;David Henry Lowenkron: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/376420?&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metanovel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;College English&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 343-355;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alwin L. Baum: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/302351&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Metanovel: Robbe-Grillet's Phenomenal Nouveau Roman&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;boundary 2&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter, 1978), pp. 557-576.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-02T20:51:55.820" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16985" CreationDate="2021-01-02T21:31:46.967" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The place you seek is actually better transliterated as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geumganggul_Cave&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Geumgang-Gul&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geumganggul Cave is a cave located in Seoraksan National Park, in Sokcho, South Korea... It was once a place of worship and contains a Buddha stone. - Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's located very far northeast of the country. &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NKUGH.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NKUGH.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Location of Geumganggul Cave shown via Google Maps&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can walk there from a famous temple called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinheungsa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sinheungsa Temple&lt;/a&gt; also located in Sokcho, via a route called Biseondae. Sinheungsa is famous for having a massive Buddha statue there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some transliteration/translation &lt;s&gt;rants&lt;/s&gt; notes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned, the &lt;s&gt;correct&lt;/s&gt; better way to transliterate this is Geumgang-Gul. I genuinely have no clue why it's spelled as &amp;quot;Keumgang-Gul&amp;quot;, especially because the &amp;quot;k&amp;quot; sound in &amp;quot;keum&amp;quot; is the same sound as the &amp;quot;g&amp;quot; sound in &amp;quot;gang&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;gul&amp;quot;. It was genuinely confusing for me the first time. This is also why you won't get any results when you look up &amp;quot;Keumgang-Gul&amp;quot; into Google.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also don't know why they translated it as &amp;quot;Diamond&amp;quot; Cave. Geumgang-Gul can be broken down into &amp;quot;sub&amp;quot; words if you will:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Geum&amp;quot; (금) means gold in Korean. Diamonds didn't (or doesn't) exist in Korea, so the most common translation of &amp;quot;diamond&amp;quot; is just a transliteration of the word (다이아몬드, pronounced something like da-ee-a-mon-deu).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Gang&amp;quot; (강, should be pronounced like &amp;quot;gahng&amp;quot;) is the common term for &amp;quot;river&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Gul&amp;quot; (굴, urm, this is really hard to transliterate into English, but something like goorl) literally means oyster, but can generically mean like a &amp;quot;burrow&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;den&amp;quot; or the like, because, I guess they look like an oyster? ¯\__(ツ)_/¯&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, I'm not sure what the etymology behind &amp;quot;gang-gul&amp;quot; (강굴) is, because that's beyond my Korean skills, but maybe like a &amp;quot;river den&amp;quot; or something? 동굴 (dong-gul) is the common term for cave, though someone more experienced than me in Korean might be able to explain the &amp;quot;gang-gul&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is 금 translated as &amp;quot;diamond&amp;quot;? I don't understand the translation thought behind that. Not that searching &amp;quot;gold cave Korean&amp;quot; gives you anything, but I'm just confused.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyhow, those are the reasons why searching &amp;quot;diamond cave&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;keumgang-gul&amp;quot; into Google doesn't give you any results, because it's doesn't mean &amp;quot;diamond&amp;quot; nor is it transliterated correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T00:50:20.260" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T00:50:20.260" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17040" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-02T21:44:16.103" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/farewell/quotes/page/4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Farewell to Arms&lt;/em&gt;: Important Quotations Explained, page 4 | SparkNotes&lt;/a&gt;. Sparknotes doesn't actually explain what are these &amp;quot;things&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, &lt;strong&gt;that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist&lt;/strong&gt;, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These musings from Chapter XXXIV, when Henry lies in bed with Catherine after their reunion in Stresa, cast a long shadow from which the couple cannot escape. Henry’s thoughts here are initially positive, focusing on how Catherine’s presence alleviates his feelings of loneliness. He stresses an important aspect of their relationship: together, they manage to overcome the great sense of fear and loneliness that they feel in the presence of other people. Henry’s rapturous thinking about Catherine, however, disconcertingly switches to a dark philosophy that maintains that the world was designed to kill the good, the gentle, and the brave—all terms that Henry has used or will use to describe Catherine. This unforced glide from contentedness into pessimism seems to reflect the inevitable inability of such positive forces as love to neutralize the grim reality of life. Indeed, from this point on, Henry and Catherine seem to be running from a force that means them harm and that, soon enough, catches up with them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11751" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T14:14:21.293" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T14:14:21.293" Title="What does Hemingway mean by &quot;things of the night cannot be explained in the day&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;&lt;a-farewell-to-arms&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17041" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-03T00:46:06.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T00:46:06.987" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T00:46:06.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17042" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-03T00:46:06.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of C.S. Forester (1899-1966) or his life as a writer. He is best known for the Horatio Hornblower series of novels." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T01:07:51.183" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T01:07:51.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17043" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-03T01:11:51.490" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T01:11:51.490" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T01:11:51.490" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17044" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-03T01:11:51.490" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book series &quot;Horatio Hornblower&quot; by C.S. Forester. Should be tagged with [c-s-forester]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T01:12:17.347" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T01:12:17.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17045" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17022" CreationDate="2021-01-03T01:29:08.670" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is Zack Files by Dan Green. This is not an individual book but a series of books. The book is Through The Medicine Cabinet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11754" LastEditorUserId="11754" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T07:23:46.087" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T07:23:46.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17046" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16564" CreationDate="2021-01-03T01:51:55.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The good news is that googling that line gets a thousand hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bad news is that they are almost all quotations posted without credit, as if written by the poster, that so many people seem to enjoy throwing around at each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Excluding tumblr and pinterest sites, there are fewer than a hundred hits.&#xA;Unfortunately all the ones I checked seem to be just as illiterate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the largest such quotation I could find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we’re all killers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;we’ve all killed parts of ourselves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to survive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we’ve all got blood on our hands.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;something somewhere had to die&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;so we could stay alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if memories could bleed, if dreams could scream | m.a.w&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://kingofthewindblog.wordpress.com/type/quote/#post-417&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote – kingofthewindblog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastEditorUserId="11606" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T04:19:39.067" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T04:19:39.067" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17048" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T09:45:37.897" Score="1" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a children's book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There was a little boy who was a genius.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He invents a very thin and sharp sword which can cut on an intramolecular level.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He then slices his fishbowl, along with the fish, in half.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the end he builds a spaceship out of cardboard (I think) and goes to space.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think that the kid's name was Alex.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At one point he talks about getting low marks in his social science test, and how he wanted to keep his secret of being a super genius.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He also has an annoying little brother, I think&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone identify this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11754" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T16:24:18.953" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T16:24:18.953" Title="Children's book - genius kid makes intramolecular level sword, builds spaceship out of cardboard" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17049" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17028" CreationDate="2021-01-03T11:19:32.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There seems to be a basic misconception in the question: namely, that the narrator of the poem is Eliot herself (or else, why would it be relevant whether Eliot “was an night owl”?). I feel that you wouldn’t make this mistake if it were prose: you wouldn’t read the first sentence of &lt;em&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/em&gt; and ask “why is Melville asking us to ‘call him Ishmael’ when his real name is Herman?” But in this respect there is no difference between prose and poetry: the narrator of a poem is just as much of a fictional character as the narrator of a novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s have a look at the context. This poem comes from Eliot’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spanishgypsyapo02eliogoog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Gypsy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1868), a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closet_drama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;closet drama&lt;/a&gt; in blank verse. In the opening scene, in a tavern in Bedmár in Andalusia during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reconquista&lt;/a&gt; of the 15th century, the company are discussing the forthcoming marriage of Duke Silva to his foster-sister Fedalma. When the soldier Lopez reports that “the Duke stoops, they say, in wedding her”, the minstrel Juan fiercely defends Fedalma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s a poor poet (poor, I mean, in coin)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Worships Fedalma with so true a love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That if her silken robe were changed for rags,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And she were driven out to stony wilds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Barefoot, a scorned wanderer, he would kiss&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her ragged garment’s edge, and only ask&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For leave to be her slave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Eliot (1868). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spanishgypsyapo02eliogoog/page/n38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Spanish Gypsy&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 29–30&lt;/a&gt;. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “a poor poet” we understand Juan to mean himself. At this point Lopez calls for a song, and Juan sings the song quoted in the question (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spanishgypsyapo02eliogoog/page/n40/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 31–32&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, it’s straightforward to interpret the song. The dark has a “joy too deep for shallow day” because it is at night that the speaker meets his lover. “Bright” and “radiant” are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypallage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transferred epithets&lt;/a&gt;: it’s the lover who is “radiant”, meaning “bright or beaming (as with joy or love)” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). The description of night as “bright” creates a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;paradox&lt;/a&gt;, “an apparently absurd or self-contradictory statement, which investigation may nevertheless prove to be well-founded” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). The apparent contradiction creates a striking effect and requires the reader to figure out what the poet could have meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that just as we shouldn’t mistake the narrator of the song for Eliot, we shouldn’t mistake the narrator for Juan either. No doubt Juan, in the drama, has chosen this song as a way of expressing his feelings for Fedalma, but that doesn’t mean that he has actually been wooing her by night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T11:25:40.637" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T11:25:40.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17050" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17053" CreationDate="2021-01-03T12:51:45.927" Score="3" ViewCount="261" Body="&lt;p&gt;I understand a &lt;em&gt;hypotext&lt;/em&gt; to be a text (a sort of &lt;em&gt;urtext&lt;/em&gt;, or at least foundational text) that influences the &lt;em&gt;hypertext&lt;/em&gt; that comes afterwards. For example, the Song of Songs is the hypotext to Elizabeth Smart's &lt;em&gt;By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept&lt;/em&gt;'s hypertext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also understand an &lt;em&gt;intertext&lt;/em&gt; to be a text that refers to another text via quotation or allusion (in this regard, the reference &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; be retroactive, whereas a hypotext can't make reference to its hypertext by definition). For example, &lt;em&gt;By Grand Central Station&lt;/em&gt; makes intertextual allusions to The Song of Songs, but the opposite cannot be true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If my premises are correct and examples valid, then are the hypotext and hypertext both forms of intertext, or is only the hypertext a form of intertext?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1323" LastEditorUserId="1323" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T19:33:04.723" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T19:50:25.917" Title="What is the relationship between the hypotext and the intertext?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17051" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17052" CreationDate="2021-01-03T12:56:33.857" Score="5" ViewCount="456" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a journalist at the &lt;em&gt;Argus&lt;/em&gt; newspaper,  who used to read the opposition sheets in a feverish way, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had feared that he would find life deadly dull so far from New York, without even the consolation of a morning-paper, the feverish reading of which had become a sort of vice with him, like smoking. He had imagined that he could not exist without his morning paper, but he now realized that it was not nearly so important a factor in life as he had supposed; yet he sighed when he thought of it, and wished he had one with him of current date. He could now, for the first time in many years, read a paper without that vague fear which always possessed him when he took up an opposition sheet, still damp from the press. Before he could enjoy it his habit was to scan it over rapidly to see if it contained any item of news which he himself had missed the previous day. The impending “scoop” hangs over the head of the newspaper man &lt;strong&gt;like the sword so often quoted. Great as the joy of beating the opposition press is, it never takes the poignancy of the sting away from a beating received.&lt;/strong&gt; If a terrible disaster took place, and another paper gave fuller particulars than the Argus did, Yates found himself almost wishing the accident had not occurred, although he recognized such a wish as decidedly unprofessional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's meant by this bolded phrase, and does &amp;quot;so often quoted&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;in many of times in which the word &amp;quot;scoop&amp;quot; is mentioned&amp;quot;?!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T13:00:35.797" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T16:57:35.583" Title="What does &quot;it never takes the poignancy of the sting away from a beating received&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17052" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17051" CreationDate="2021-01-03T16:57:35.583" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is ‘the &lt;em&gt;sword&lt;/em&gt; so often quoted’ and refers to the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.history.com/.amp/news/what-was-the-sword-of-damocles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sword of Damocles&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which in turn refers to the:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;moral parable popularized by the Roman philosopher Cicero in his 45 B.C. book “Tusculan Disputations.” Cicero’s version of the tale centers on Dionysius II, a tyrannical king who once ruled over the Sicilian city of Syracuse during the fourth and fifth centuries B.C. Though rich and powerful, Dionysius was supremely unhappy. His iron-fisted rule had made him many enemies, and he was tormented by fears of assassination—so much so that he slept in a bedchamber surrounded by a moat and only trusted his daughters to shave his beard with a razor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Cicero tells it, the king’s dissatisfaction came to a head one day after a court flatterer named Damocles showered him with compliments and remarked how blissful his life must be. “Since this life delights you,” an annoyed Dionysius replied, “do you wish to taste it yourself and make a trial of my good fortune?” When Damocles agreed, Dionysius seated him on a golden couch and ordered a host of servants wait on him. He was treated to succulent cuts of meat and lavished with scented perfumes and ointments. Damocles couldn’t believe his luck, but just as he was starting to enjoy the life of a king, he noticed that Dionysius had also hung a razor-sharp sword from the ceiling. It was positioned over Damocles’ head, suspended only by a single strand of horsehair. From then on, the courtier’s fear for his life made it impossible for him to savor the opulence of the feast or enjoy the servants. After casting several nervous glances at the blade dangling above him, he asked to be excused, saying he no longer wished to be so fortunate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase ‘sword of Damocles’ is used in English to refer an ill-fate which could befall a person at any moment. In this instance, the fate is ‘being scooped’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A ‘Scoop’ in this sense is the act of securing a story for a newspaper ahead of rival titles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these in mind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great as the joy of beating the opposition press is, it never takes the poignancy of the sting away from a beating received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Means that while it is a joyous thing to beat the other papers to a story, that joy never entirely erases the wounded feelings that arise from being beaten to a story by the other papers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T16:57:35.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17050" CreationDate="2021-01-03T16:58:30.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;intertextuality&lt;/strong&gt; was introduced in the 1960s by members of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Quel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tel Quel&lt;/a&gt; group, who collectively published the volume &lt;a href=&quot;https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb374300924&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Théorie d'ensemble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1968 [1]. In this volume, Philippe Sollers criticises the conception of the (literary) text as something fixed and closed, and proposed the concept of &lt;em&gt;intertextualité&lt;/em&gt; (intertextuality) [2]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tout texte se situe à la jonction de plusieurs textes dont il est à la fois la relecture, l'accentuation, la condensation, le déplacement et la profondeur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each text is located at the confluence of several texts which it simulaneously rereads, accentuates, condenses, shifts and deepens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia Kristeva applied this concept to her analysis of the medieval novel &lt;em&gt;Jehan de Saintré&lt;/em&gt; and stated that intertextuality refers to a textual interaction inside the same text and that it allows one to grasp&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;les différentes séquences (ou codes) d'une structure textuelle précise comme autant de &lt;em&gt;transforms&lt;/em&gt; de séquences (de codes) prises à d'autres textes. Ainsi la structure du roman français du xve siècle peut être considérée comme le résultat d'une transformation de plusieurs autres codes (...)&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;(Quoted in &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia Universalis&lt;/em&gt;; italics from the encylopedia)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[intertextuality allows one to graps] the different sequences (or codes) in a specific textual structure as &lt;em&gt;transforms&lt;/em&gt; of sequences (of codes) taken from other texts. Thus, the structure of the 15th-century French novel can be seen as the outcome of a transformation of multiple other codes (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon (who mentions neither Bakhtin nor Sollers in the entry on &amp;quot;intertextuality&amp;quot;) points out that Kristeva's concept refers to&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the interdependence of any literary text with all those that have gone before it. Her contention was that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the &amp;quot;absorption and transformation of another&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon also points out that &amp;quot;transposition&amp;quot; is a Freudian concept and that for Kristeva &amp;quot;intertextuality&amp;quot; &amp;quot;is part of a wider psychoanalytical theory which questions the stability of the subject&amp;quot;. This view on intertextuality is very different from that of other theorists such as Roland Barthes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;strong&gt;hypotext&lt;/strong&gt; was introduced by Gérard Genette in his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsestes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Palimpsestes — La littérature au second degré&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1982) and is one of five types of &lt;strong&gt;transtextualité&lt;/strong&gt; (transtextuality). These five types of relationships between texts are the following [Gröne and Reiser, pages 212–213]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Intertextuality&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;intertextualité&lt;/em&gt;) refers to the &amp;quot;actual presence of one text in another one&amp;quot;. This can take different shapes, for example explicit as quotations from another text, or implicit as plagiarism or allusions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Metatextuality&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;metatextuality&lt;/em&gt;) refers to the critical examination of another text, one might say from a metalevel.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Hypertextuality&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;hypertextualité&lt;/em&gt;) refers to the (not explicitly stated) transformation of a &lt;strong&gt;hypotext&lt;/strong&gt;, for example by reworking the same subject, reusing an existing motif or theme, or other types of transformation such as those in parodies and adaptations.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Architextuality&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;architextualité&lt;/em&gt;) refers to literary characteristics that several texts have in common, such as genre characteristics or stylistic characteristics, which document only a very general categorisation of specific works under basic literary forms of expression.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Genette also defines &lt;strong&gt;paratextuality&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;paratextualité&lt;/em&gt;), which refers to the relationship between the main text and the (para)texts that &amp;quot;frame&amp;quot; it, for example, the title, the genre identification, the preface, notes, comments and the afterword. (Genette distinguishes several types of paratext; see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/11316/2191&quot;&gt;What is the difference between spatial and temporal paratext?&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above shows that the hypotext does not need to be a &amp;quot;foundational text&amp;quot; in the sense of having an elevated status in a specific culture; it can be any text that chronologically precedes the &amp;quot;hypertext&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the OP's specific questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;[A]re the hypotext and hypertext both forms of intertext?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;Based on Genette's concepts, the answer is &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;; hypotextuality, hypertextuality and intertextuality are distinct types of transtextuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;[O]r is only the hypertext a form of intertext?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;Based on Genette's concepts, the answer is again &amp;quot;no&amp;quot;, for the reason given above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Kristeva's concept of intertextuality is broader than Genette's and &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted as encompassing Genette's concept of hypertextuality. However, I would advise against mixing Kristeva's and Genette's definitions of intertextuality in this way.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Gröne, Maximilian; Reiser, Frank: &lt;em&gt;Französische Literaturwissenschaft. Eine Einführung&lt;/em&gt;. Fourth, revised and expanded edition. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/theorie-de-l-intertextualite/1-genese-du-concept/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Théorie de l'intertextualité, Genèse du concept&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia Universalis&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] See the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pileface.com/sollers/spip.php?breve1354&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;table contents of &lt;em&gt;Théorie d'ensemble&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on Pileface, a site about Philippe Sollers. The book was published by Seuil but appears to be out of print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] I am sceptical about Wikipedia's claim that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Julia Kristeva was the first to coin the term &amp;quot;intertextuality&amp;quot; (intertextualité) in an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics—his study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text—with Bakhtin's dialogism—his theory which suggests a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors—and his examination of the multiple meanings, or &amp;quot;heteroglossia&amp;quot;, in each text (especially novels) and in each word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T19:50:25.917" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T19:50:25.917" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17054" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17062" CreationDate="2021-01-03T17:43:21.803" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a man, who had gone to camp in the woods of Canada, was talking about his longness to New York, then he persuaded himself that the camp is a good place, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ah, well,” said Yates under his breath, and suddenly pulling himself together, “I mustn’t think of New York if I intend to stay here for a couple of weeks. I’ll be city-sick the first thing I know, and then I’ll make a break for the metropolis. This will never do. The air here is enchanting, it fills a man with new life. This is the spot for me, and I’ll stick to it till I’m right again. Hang New York! But I mustn’t think of Broadway or I’m done for.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He came to the spot in the road where he could see the white side of the tent under the dark trees, and climbed up on the rail fence, sitting there for a few moments. The occasional call of a quail from a neighboring field was the only sound that broke the intense stillness. The warm smell of spring was in the air. The buds had but recently broken, and the woods, intensely green, had a look of newness and freshness that was comforting to the eye and grateful to the other senses. The world seemed to be but lately made. The young man breathed deeply of the vivifying air, and said: “No, there’s nothing the matter with this place, Dick. &lt;strong&gt;New York’s a fool to it&lt;/strong&gt;.” Then, with a sigh, he added: “&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; I can stand it for two weeks. I wonder how the boys are getting on without me.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;there’s nothing the matter with this place&amp;quot; is the main clause of &amp;quot;if&amp;quot;, but they are separated by &amp;quot;New York’s a fool to it&amp;quot;, so what does &amp;quot;a fool to it&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The possible meanings of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/hcio6by&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a fool to it&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T08:20:45.557" Title="Where is the main clause of &quot;if&quot; here?" Tags="&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17019" CreationDate="2021-01-03T17:44:31.010" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at the totality of Hugo's quotation in French, it clearly encompasses evil-doers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a misleading translation of a sentence taken out of context. They have translated the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/french-english/grand&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;grand&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (which means &lt;em&gt;big, great, tall&lt;/em&gt; in French) as &lt;em&gt;grand&lt;/em&gt;, which in English has positive connotations that the word does not have in French. And they have left off the previous sentences, which clarify Hugo's intent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I notice that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/355803-the-mind-s-eye-can-nowhere-find-anything-more-dazzling-or&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; has a different quote which includes the previous sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is my translation (aided by Google and Bing translate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowhere can the mind's eye find more radiance or more darkness than in man; it cannot gaze on anything that is more intimidating, more complicated, more mysterious, or more infinite. There is a spectacle greater than the sea, it is the sky; there is a spectacle greater than the sky, it is the interior of the soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L’œil de l’esprit ne peut trouver nulle part plus d’éblouissements ni plus de ténèbres que dans l’homme ; il ne peut se fixer sur aucune chose qui soit plus redoutable, plus compliquée, plus mystérieuse et plus infinie. Il y a un spectacle plus grand que la mer, c’est le ciel ; il y a un spectacle plus grand que le ciel, c’est l’intérieur de l’âme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T19:15:15.580" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T19:15:15.580" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17056" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T18:08:10.433" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;While journeying to Watership Down, the Sandleford refugees encounter the warren of the snares. This warren has some distinctly odd ways of living, all stemming from how they accept that, in exchange for as much good food as they could ever want, some of their number are snared and disappear forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They transport food to the main warren by carrying it in their mouths&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They have their own practices/traditions, and don't follow the rabbit god&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't have a leader&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They don't allow asking after a rabbit's location&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, they act in ways that tip-toe around the snaring. They all know that some will be snared and die, but they don't speak of it and try to not think about it. Fiver (who acts as a voice of reason) soundly denounces this way of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fiver criticizing the specific practice of carrying food by mouth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'll have nothing to do with it,&amp;quot; answered Fiver in a low voice. &amp;quot;Dogs -- you're like dogs carrying sticks.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 14: &amp;quot;Like Trees in November&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fiver criticizing the warren as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The warren? You're going to the warren? You fools! That warren's nothing but a death hole! The whole place is one foul elil's larder!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from Chapter 17: The Shining Wire&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After that second quote, Fiver goes on a much longer rant tying together all the strange details of the warren into a neat explanation, all while criticizing each little detail. It's unfortunately far too long to quote here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The specific strangeness of the warren, and Fiver's strong criticism of it, leads me to believe that the warren is a pointed critique.  I know that Adams didn’t intend for the story to have a deeper meaning, but he has biases, and a life background, and like any human this colors his thoughts and ideas. Could he have been unconsciously critiquing a group or behavior that he found unacceptable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the warren of the snares function as a critique of a specific group or behavior?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T18:08:10.433" Title="Does the warren of the snares function as a critique of a specific group or behavior?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12454" CreationDate="2021-01-03T21:01:54.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cited passage is not simply an example of a thought or idea that is given physical traits; what is happening here is more complex. Below is Romeo's speech as given in the First Quart of 1597:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By loues light winges did I oreperch these wals,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For stonie limits cannot hold loue out,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what loue can doo,that dares loue attempt,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Therefore thy kinsmen are no let to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line refers to &amp;quot;love's light wings&amp;quot;, which is an allusion to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cupid&lt;/a&gt;, who is traditionally portrayed as a winged boy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second line says that walls cannot stop &amp;quot;love&amp;quot;. One way of reading this is that walls can't stop Cupid. However, it is Romeo, not Cupid who managed to get into the Capulets' orchard (see the fourth line), so a second reading suggests itself: Romeo is in love, and he uses the word &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; to refer to himself, which &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; be interpreted as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pars_pro_toto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pars pro toto&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three additional comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If &amp;quot;Love&amp;quot; had been capitalised in order to denote the god of love, the line would have been an example of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonomasia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;antonomasia&lt;/a&gt;.(See also &amp;quot;antonomasia&amp;quot; in Cuddon.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The terms &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reification or concretism&lt;/a&gt; can be used to refer to treating an abstraction or an abstract concept as if it were a concrete event or a physical entity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia's discussion of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Metonymy&amp;amp;oldid=997035094#Meaning_relationships&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonymy&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Synecdoche&amp;amp;oldid=996518620#Definition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt; is confusing. Possibly, instead of stating &amp;quot;X means ...&amp;quot;, those articles should limit themselves to describing how various theorists have defined those terms instead of presenting them as if they had a generally agreed upon meaning in literary theory.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin, 1992.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:01:54.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17058" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-03T21:16:08.350" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for what I think is a short story that I read approximately 8-10 years ago. I read it in French, but I think it was a translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember that the story is set in a oriental-like city (with sand, desert, merchants, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story, a man (rich and powerful, or at least from a &amp;quot;noble&amp;quot; family) learns to play a string instrument (some kind of oud maybe?).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To this end, he pays a boy to teach him. At the end, the story goes along the lines of the boy going into the man's office, the man closing the door, and his wife making noises with the instrument, clearly suggesting that the man abuses the child and that she &amp;quot;pudically&amp;quot; covers for him by making noise so that the other people in the house would not have suspicions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11759" LastEditorUserId="11759" LastEditDate="2021-01-03T21:57:39.643" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:57:39.643" Title="Short story in orient-style city, man abusing the children who teaches him to play an instrument, covered by his wife" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17059" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16582" CreationDate="2021-01-03T21:36:17.223" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This type of literature is known as &lt;strong&gt;didactic literature&lt;/strong&gt;; the term refers to any work of literature that aims to instruct the reader. Hesiod's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_and_Days&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Works and Days&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an early Greek example; Lucretius's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;De rerum natura&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and Virgil's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Georgica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; are two Latin examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Middle Ages produced a lot of didactic literature, most of it in verse. Examples in Middle English include Robert Manning's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handlyng_Synne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Handlyng Synne&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (early fourteenth century), which contains stories illustrating the ten commandments, the seven deadly sins and the seven sacraments. John Gower's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessio_Amantis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Confessio Amantis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (late fourteenth century) contains instruction both in the frame story and in the digressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The genre of didactic literature was revived in the 18th century. Examples include &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Philips#Poetical_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Philips's &lt;em&gt;Cyder&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1708), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Armstrong_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Armstrong's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Art of Preserving Health&lt;/em&gt; (1744), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dyer#Poems&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dyer's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;The Fleece&lt;/em&gt; (1757) and Erasmus Darwin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Botanic_Garden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Botanic Garden&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1791).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been argued that all poetry is, by implication, didactic; that it should and does instruct as well as delight. Horace's &lt;em&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/em&gt;, Boileau's &lt;em&gt;Art Poétique&lt;/em&gt;, in imitation of Horace, and Pope's &lt;em&gt;Essay on Criticism&lt;/em&gt; were intended to instruct poets in their craft.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In &lt;em&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/em&gt; Horace defines the aim of poetry as to instruct and to delight: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Aut_prodesse_volunt%2C_aut_delectare_Po%C3%ABtae&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare Poetae&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-03T21:36:17.223" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17061" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16928" CreationDate="2021-01-04T03:06:00.520" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In 1856, John Ruskin coined the term &lt;strong&gt;pathetic fallacy&lt;/strong&gt; (in &lt;em&gt;Modern Painters&lt;/em&gt;, Volume III, Part IV) to denote the attribution of human feelings to inanimate objects. One of the examples he gave comes from the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/360/9/35.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Sands o' Dee&lt;/a&gt; by Charles Kingsley:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They rowed her in across the rolling foam,—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The cruel, crawling foam,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The cruel, hungry foam,—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruskin commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The foam is not cruel, nor does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by grief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ruskin called this literary device a fallacy because the attribution of human feelings to inanimate objects or to nature is &amp;quot;false&amp;quot;; he called such passages &amp;quot;morbid&amp;quot; (Cuddon, page 692–693). Today, &amp;quot;pathetic fallacy&amp;quot; is no longer used to describe a flaw or weakness in a literary text.[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A common example of a pathetic fallacy is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the attribution of bad weather to a deliberate intention on the part of nature, as in Hardy's &lt;em&gt;The Return of the Native&lt;/em&gt; where the difficult conditions on Egdon Heath are for Eustacia Vye a result of deliberately hostile nature, whereas for the down-to-earth Thomasin they are merely the impartial actions of nature.&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;(King &amp;amp; King, page 125)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not a device that I would associate with Naturalism; it seems more strongly associated with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gothic fiction&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (even though the device is much older), since it can serve as a supernatural element. For example, the destruction of an oak tree in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mary-shelley/frankenstein/text/chapter-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;second chapter of Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; can be read as an example of pathetic fallacy (see Kilgour, page 211).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Naturalism emphasises is the strong influence of social conditions and social forces (and human nature) on people's behaviour, rather than the influence of nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kilgour, Maggie: &lt;em&gt;The Rise of the Gothic Novel&lt;/em&gt;. Routledge, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;King, Neil; King, Sarah: &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Literature in English&lt;/em&gt;. Taylor &amp;amp; Francis, 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ruskin, John: &lt;em&gt;Modern Painters. Volume III, containing Part IV: Of Many Things&lt;/em&gt;. London: George Routledge, 1856. See specifically &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.42809/page/n203/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XII: &amp;quot;Of the Pathetic Fallacy&amp;quot;, pages 166–188&lt;/a&gt; (on Archive.org).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] As far as I know, the pejorative meaning intended by Ruskin derives from the noun &amp;quot;fallacy&amp;quot;, not from the adjective &amp;quot;pathetic&amp;quot;, which is derived from the noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pathos#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pathos&lt;/a&gt;. The meaning &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pathetic#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;arousing scorn or contempt, often due to miserable inadequacy&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is more recent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T16:04:55.860" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T16:04:55.860" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17062" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17054" CreationDate="2021-01-04T08:20:45.557" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;New York's a fool to it&amp;quot; means &lt;em&gt;New York is a foolish thing compared to this place&lt;/em&gt;. At the link you provided, Green's Dictionary of Slang gives &amp;quot;a stupid or foolish thing&amp;quot; as the slang meaning of &lt;em&gt;fool&lt;/em&gt; that was prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century, right around when this story was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If I can stand it for two weeks&amp;quot; is not related to the earlier clause. It stands by itself as a fragment that reflects Yates's conflicted thought process. It means some combination of these three things:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Let's see if I can stand it for two weeks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;I don't know if I can stand it for two weeks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;It will be good if I can stand it for two weeks&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The passage gives the back-and-forth of Yates's mind as he tries to persuade himself that he will have a good time in the camp. Immediately after an attempt to convince himself that the camp is superior to New York, he finds himself wondering about his ability to stand it for two weeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T08:20:45.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17063" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16582" CreationDate="2021-01-04T10:04:27.533" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;You have actually used the word in your question: such tales are &lt;em&gt;parables&lt;/em&gt;. The term &lt;em&gt;parable&lt;/em&gt; often is given narrow application that refers to specifically a story from the Gospels that illustrates a specific moral teaching, such as the parable of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Good_Samaritan&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Good Samaritan&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But more broadly, the term is used in non-Biblical contexts too. For example, the stories of the 19th C Hindu teacher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramakrishna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ramakrishna Paramahamsa&lt;/a&gt; are also called parables, as can be seen at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rkmpune.org/readings/srk_parables.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the website of a monastery of the order he founded&lt;/a&gt;. Here, in its entirety, is one of Ramakrishna's parables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once a man went to a certain place to see a theatrical performance, carrying a mat under his arm. Hearing that it would be some time before the performance began; he spread the mat on the floor and fell asleep. When he woke up all was over. Then he returned home with the mat under his arm!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Quoted by Mayank Bhatt in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.generallyaboutbooks.com/2015/02/parables-of-sri-ramkrishna-paramhans.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Generally About Books&lt;/em&gt;, entry for 28 February 2015. Accessed 4 January 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Eastman distinguishes between such brief, pointed narratives and more complex ones of the sort the question mentions (e.g., Carver). He says that Bible stories are &lt;em&gt;closed parables&lt;/em&gt;. Discussing the Good Samaritan story, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As itself—a parable, a brief and plausible allegory, a concrete analogue of a general ethical situation—Jesus' story stands single and unburied, a &amp;quot;closed&amp;quot; image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When consistently expanded to include some complexity of incident, distinctness o characterization and fullness of setting, the closed parable becomes a story with its own narrative appeals. A list of examples would include Dickens' &lt;em&gt;A Christmas Carol&lt;/em&gt;, George Eliot's &lt;em&gt;Silas Marner&lt;/em&gt;, [etc.] ... In all, however, the ethical analogy which is the animating idea of the parable remains clearly distinguishable beneath a consistent narrative surface. (p. 17)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Eastman, Richard M. “The Open Parable: Demonstration and Definition.” &lt;em&gt;College English&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 22, no. 1, 1960, pp. 15–18. &lt;em&gt;JSTOR&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/373858&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/373858&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 4 Jan. 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eastman contrasts closed parables with modern works by writers such as Kafka and Beckett, which he calls &lt;em&gt;open parables&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a small genre of modern narrative brought to high intensity by such writers as Kafka and Beckett. Its difficulties arise from the misapplication of conventional reading attitudes, usually abetted by the logical refusal of its authors to explain &amp;quot;intention.&amp;quot; (ibid.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says that in an open parable, the ethical point of the narrative is not straightforward, but needs to be worked out by the reader. Furthermore, different readers may reach different conclusions about what that ethical point is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like a kind of literary Rorschach blot, the open parable apparently puts it up to the reader to perform the creative act, to take his own direction so that he may find, in the general richness of theme, an ethical pattern which speaks most directly to him. This is the first pleasure of the genre. But the open parable is a controlled and controlling art-work, not a random blot. ... The attentive reader will discover that no one expression will prove out as &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; meaning.  (p. 18)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James Champion argues for a similar definition of &lt;em&gt;parable&lt;/em&gt; without making the distinction between open and closed parable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the parable is unusual not because of its great variations in length, but because it is a form in which substance is warranted to break through form. Parabolic form in both ancient and modern cultures is determined by the reach of substance.  (p. 35)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Champion, James. “The Parable as an Ancient and a Modern Form.” &lt;em&gt;Literature and Theology&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 3, no. 1, 1989, pp. 16–39. &lt;em&gt;JSTOR&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/23926661&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/23926661&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 4 Jan. 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By &lt;em&gt;substance&lt;/em&gt; Champion means the narrative elements that force existential and philosophical reflections on the reader's part.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;parable&lt;/em&gt; is used not just by academic scholars, but also by creative writers themselves. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Patrick_Shanley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Patrick Shanley&lt;/a&gt;'s best-known play is the Tony- and Pulitzer-winning &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=9Jg55OUsecYC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PA13&amp;amp;dq=parable&amp;amp;ots=gO1SQZ6dXR&amp;amp;sig=xHzmjNCEAKvQdiQqlHnn6wAolhY#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doubt: A Parable&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which tells the story of a priest whom a nun accuses of molesting one of his (male) teenage charges. The ethical dilemma that the play presents is not clearly resolved, but the spectator is left to ponder upon the story and draw out lessons. The action is structured such that spectators will differ on exactly what the lesson is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These works, however, have a complexity that seems somewhat antithetical to the sort of story the question focuses on. It seems that you're interested specifically in stories where the character ends badly and thereby serves as a cautionary symbol. I'm not sure Carver's tales are as clearcut as that in their moral. But if you believe they impart straightforward moral lessons about alcoholism, adultery, etc., you could adopt Eastman's term and call them &lt;em&gt;closed parables&lt;/em&gt;. Or you could simply refer to them as &lt;em&gt;object lessons&lt;/em&gt;, which Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/object%20lesson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;something that serves as a practical example of a principle or abstract idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or you could use another term included in your question: &lt;em&gt;cautionary tales&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/cautionary-tale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; provides a broad and simple definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a story that gives a warning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Her story is a cautionary tale for women traveling alone.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cautionary tales aren't restricted to folklore, nor to animal characters. On the contrary, stories like &amp;quot;The Fox and the Grapes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;The Ant and the Grasshopper&amp;quot; are always called fables, rarely if ever cautionary tales. Cautionary tales typically involve human beings who come to unfortunate ends due to their own foolish actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T11:28:54.730" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T11:28:54.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17037" CreationDate="2021-01-04T11:12:44.113" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A novel that concerns artistic development is termed a &lt;em&gt;Künstlerroman&lt;/em&gt;. The word combines the German word for artist, &lt;em&gt;Künstler&lt;/em&gt;, with the word for novel, &lt;em&gt;Roman&lt;/em&gt;. The Künstlerroman is a specific variant of the more general term &lt;em&gt;Bildungsroman&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;novel of education&amp;quot; or coming-of-age novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Künstlerroman&lt;/em&gt; is specifically a novel about the coming of age of an artist:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Kunstlerroman [sic] is a novel that depicts the development of novelists or other artists into the stage of maturity in which they recognize their artistic destiny and achieve mastery of their artistic craft. Examples of this type of novel are James Joyce's &lt;em&gt;A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man&lt;/em&gt; and Marcel Proust's &lt;em&gt;Remembrance of Things Past&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;quot;Kunstlerroman&amp;quot;. In &lt;em&gt;Companion to Literature: Facts on File Companion to the American Short Story&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Abby H. P. Wenlock. New York: Infobase, 2009. p. 387.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Roberta White discusses &lt;em&gt;To The Lighthouse&lt;/em&gt; specifically as a künstlerroman. She says such a discussion &amp;quot;allows for a sharper focus on the many and varied transactions between the sister arts of painting and fiction&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrast between Woolf's hard-won confidence as a novelist and Lily's timidity as a painter reflects the historical fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was more difficult for women to be accepted as painters or composers than as writers. (pp. 13–14)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study of One's Own: Fictional Women Painters and the Art of Fiction&lt;/em&gt;. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2005&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since your question asks about novels that take painting, writing, and other artistic pursuits as their general theme, rather than about novels that focus on the process of their own writing, &lt;em&gt;metanarrative&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;metafiction&lt;/em&gt; seem misapplied here. A metafictional novel is one that foregrounds the process by which it is written and draws attention to the fictionality of the narrative. Either as a fictionalized version of the author, or as an invented persona, metafiction includes the narrator as a character. Examples include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Sterne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lawrence Sterne&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Opinions_of_Tristram_Shandy,_Gentleman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1759–1767), where the eponymous narrator has great difficulty in telling his own story, which he believes should begin with an account of his conception&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Everett&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Percival Everett&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;Percival Everett by Virgil Russell: A Novel&lt;/em&gt; (2013), where a man (Percival) visits his father (Virgil) in a nursing home, who proceeds to write a novel about his son, incorporating stories from the other residents of the home&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kurt Vonnegut&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_of_Champions&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Breakfast of Champions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1973), which includes Kurt Vonnegut as a character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But if you're asking about works that specifically focus on artistic endeavor as a theme, rather than on novels that are to some degree self-reflexive or self-referential, then the broader category is &lt;em&gt;Künstlerroman&lt;/em&gt;. The latter term covers novels that thematize artistic development. The protagonist of a künstlerrroman does not have to be a writer, but could be any sort of artist: a painter, a musician, a dancer, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T09:25:29.570" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T09:25:29.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17067" CreationDate="2021-01-04T12:13:35.603" Score="5" ViewCount="192" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/177/96.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this English translation&lt;/a&gt; of Theodor Fontane's poem &amp;quot;Die Brücke am Tay&amp;quot; (here translated as &amp;quot;The Bridge by the Tay&amp;quot;, elsewhere also as &amp;quot;The Tay Bridge&amp;quot;), I noticed a couple of lines which are clearly intended, &lt;em&gt;at least in this English translation&lt;/em&gt;, to evoke thoughts of older literature:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“When shall we three meet again?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The opening line of the poem, also the opening line of Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the hand of man hath wrought!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Repeated twice in the poem, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_hath_God_wrought&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;seems to be&lt;/a&gt; a reference to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Job-12-9/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Bible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English translation, these are obviously references to well-known quotes. &lt;strong&gt;Were these references equally clear in the original German version, or are they an invention of the translator?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.railscot.co.uk/articles/A_German_View_of_the_Tay_Bridge_Disaster/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another translation&lt;/a&gt; which preserved the Macbeth quote exactly, but gives the Bible quote as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man’s handiwork is dust and ash.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this could mean either that the original German has no such biblical reference, or that &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; translator wasn't well-versed enough in German biblical quotes to recognise it as such. So it's not conclusive evidence in answering my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T22:01:32.230" Title="Does the original German version of Fontane's Tay Bridge poem contain the same literary references?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17066" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17012" CreationDate="2021-01-04T12:41:39.210" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This quotation comes from a letter to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_Kappus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franz Xaver Kappus&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I feel that there is nowhere a human being who can answer you those questions and feelings which have a life of their own within their depths; for even the best men go astray with words, when these are to express something very gentle and almost unutterable. But I believe nevertheless that you need not be left without some solution, if you hold to things similar to those on which my eyes now take their recreation. &lt;strong&gt;If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless&lt;/strong&gt;; if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory, not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, but in your innermost consciousness, wakefulness and knowing. You are so young,† you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one day live right into the answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Rainer Maria Rilke (16th July 1903). Letter to Franz Xaver Kappus. Translated by Reginald Snell (1945). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/letterstoyoungpo0000rilk/page/20/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Letters to a Young Poet&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 20–21&lt;/a&gt;. London: Sigwick and Jackson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Kappus (born 1883) was only seven years younger than Rilke.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We don’t have the text of the letter from Kappus which Rilke is answering here, but we can guess that Kappus was asking for advice about his poetry, and that the questions he was asking were difficult and metaphysical, perhaps along the lines of “what philosophy of life should I try to express in my poetry”? Rilke responds that these questions can’t be solved by pure cogitation: instead, one has to find the answers through lived experience. He suggests that Kappus pay attention to small concrete things, such as the details of Nature, in his poetry, instead of abstract concepts. From these small details, he says, you can draw out great works of art, if you pay attention to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rilke’s advice to Kappus here is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17026/3003&quot;&gt;Goethe’s advice to Eckermann in your other question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Only persist in your present view, and hold fast by the present. Each situation—nay, each moment—is of infinite worth; for each represents a whole eternity.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Johann Peter Eckermann (1836). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/conversationswi00eckegoog/page/n94/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life&lt;/em&gt;, p. 62&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Margaret Fuller (1839). Boston: Hilliard, Gray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T12:41:39.210" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17067" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17065" CreationDate="2021-01-04T12:48:10.553" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original German text begins with the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;»Wann treffen wir drei wieder zusamm'?« &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    »Um die siebente Stund', am Brückendamm.« &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;       »Am Mittelpfeiler.« »Ich lösche die Flamm'.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Compare this with the opening lines of the translation by Dorothea Tieck, first published in 1832 (in: &lt;em&gt;Shakspeare's dramatische Werke&lt;/em&gt;. Übersetzt von August Wilhelm Schlegel. Ergänzt und erläutert von Ludwig Tieck, Bd. 9. Berlin: Georg Andreas Reimer, 1832):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wann kommen wir drei uns wieder entgegen, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Im Blitz und Donner, oder im Regen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first line asks, &amp;quot;When will the three of us meet [each other] again?&amp;quot; Fontane's &amp;quot;zusamm'&amp;quot; (a shortened form of &amp;quot;zusammen&amp;quot; that rhymes with &amp;quot;Brückendamm&amp;quot;) is strictly speaking redundant but linguistically correct; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/zusammentreffen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;zusammentreffen&lt;/a&gt; in Wiktionary. Dorothea Tieck's &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; translation uses &amp;quot;entgegen&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/entgegenkommen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;entgegenkommen&lt;/a&gt; in Wiktionary) instead of &amp;quot;zusammen&amp;quot; to achieve a rhyme with &amp;quot;Regen&amp;quot; (rain). [0]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a translation that uses the same rhyme as Fontane's poem, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.at/books?id=j4xMAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA6&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;source=gbs_toc_r&amp;amp;cad=3#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilhelm Jordan's translation&lt;/a&gt;, first published in 1865:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wann kommen wir Dreie wieder zusammen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bei Regen, Donner und Wetterflammen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even for readers who weren't familiar with Wilhelm Jordan's translation, the reference to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; should have been clear to German readers, especially since the lines that follow carry on the allusion, although less directly.[1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines &amp;quot;“A bauble, a naught, / What the hand of man hath wrought!” correspond with the following German lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;»Tand, Tand, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ist das Gebilde von Menschenhand.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Tand#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tand&lt;/a&gt; means &amp;quot;trifles, trinkets&amp;quot;. The word appears to come from the phrase &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spielzeug#Industrie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nürnberger Tand&lt;/a&gt; (literally &amp;quot;trinkets from Nürnberg&amp;quot;), which referred to toys produced and sold in Nürnberg, where the &amp;quot;toy industry&amp;quot; took off in the fifteenth century. The translation as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bauble#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bauble&lt;/a&gt; does not appear to preserve this connection with toys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Job 12:9 (in German: Hiob 12:9) reads as follows in &lt;a href=&quot;https://newchristianbiblestudy.org/bible/german-luther-1545/job/12/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luther's Bible translation of 1545&lt;/a&gt; [2]:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wer weiß solches alles nicht, daß des HERRN Hand das gemacht hat,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally: &amp;quot;Who does not know that the LORD's hand made all this.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What remains from this line from Job/Hiob is &amp;quot;Hand&amp;quot;. If the line in the poem was intended as an allusion to Job, Fontane's &amp;quot;Tand&amp;quot; contrasts strongly with God's creatures in the Bible book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[0] For comparison, here are a few other German translations that existed during Fontane's lifetime.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/shakespr/macbeth/macbth11.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Christoph Martin Wieland&lt;/a&gt; (1760s):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wenn kommen wir drey uns wieder entgegen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Donner, Blizen oder Regen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=-WsHAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;hl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gottfried August Bürger&lt;/a&gt; (1783):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Na! sagt, wo man sich wiederfind't&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Donner, Bitz o'r Schlackerwind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;By &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/shakespr/macbeth2/mac2101.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friedrich Schiller&lt;/a&gt; (1801),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wann kommen wir drei uns wieder entgegen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Donner, in Blitzen oder in Regen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Several online versions of the poem even cite &amp;quot;When shall we three meet again (Shakespeare: Macbeth)&amp;quot; as a kind of motto, e.g. on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.martinschlu.de/kulturgeschichte/neunzehntes/vormaerz/fontane/balladen/brueckeamtay.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.martinschlu.de&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://online-lernen.levrai.de/deutsch-uebungen/balladen/bruecke_am_tay/01_ballade_brueck_am_tay.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Levrai.de&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://handmann.phantasus.de/g_brueckamtay.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Phantasus.de&lt;/a&gt; but not on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.deutschland-lese.de/index.php?article_id=541&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Deutschland-Lese&lt;/a&gt;. If that quote was part of the version that Fontane published, the reference would have been blatantly obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] For comparison I also cite a modern version of the same line in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bibleserver.com/LUT/Hiob12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Luther 2017&amp;quot; translation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wer erkennte nicht an dem allen, dass des HERRN Hand das gemacht hat,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literally: &amp;quot;Who does not recognise in all of this [the animals and plants in the preceding lines] that the hand of the LORD made them&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T22:01:32.230" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T22:01:32.230" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17068" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-04T23:38:55.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T23:38:55.563" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T23:38:55.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17069" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-04T23:38:55.563" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of German author and journalist Theodor Fontane (1819 – 1898) or his life as a writer. He is best known for his novels, which have a skeptical view of German society. Use with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-04T23:42:51.107" LastActivityDate="2021-01-04T23:42:51.107" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17070" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-05T08:50:35.333" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Richard Adams's novel &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; has a memorable episode in a warren full of big, healthy rabbits (&amp;quot;Cowslip's warren&amp;quot;) who are kept in good shape by a man leaving food for them, have many strange un-rabbitty habits (carrying food in their mouths, storing it underground, making pictures, having no Chief Rabbit, not caring about the tales of El-ahrairah, laughing), won't answer any question beginning &amp;quot;Where&amp;quot;, and are ultimately revealed to be living one step from death, some of their number constantly being snared and killed by the man, the unspoken truth that they never acknowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the midst of this peculiar atmosphere, in which Fiver is the only one to be creeped out and see the place for what it is, a poet called Silverweed gives them a song as a reply to Dandelion's storytelling:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wind is blowing, blowing over the grass.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It shakes the willow catkins; the leaves shine silver.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where are you going, wind? Far, far away&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over the hills, over the edge of the world.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take me with you, wind, high over the sky.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-wind,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the sky, the feathery sky and the rabbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stream is running, running over the gravel,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through the brooklime, the kingcups, the blue and gold of spring.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where are you going, stream? Far, far away&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beyond the heather, sliding away all night.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take me with you, stream, away in the starlight.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-stream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down through the water, the green water and the rabbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In autumn the leaves come blowing, yellow and brown.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They rustle in the ditches, they tug and hang on the hedge.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where are you going leaves? Far, far away&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into the earth we go, with the rain and the berries.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take me, leaves, O take me on your dark journey.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will go with you, I will be rabbit-of-the-leaves,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the deep places of the earth, the earth and the rabbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frith lies in the evening sky. The clouds are red about him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am here, Lord Frith, I am running through the long grass.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O take me with you, dropping behind the woods,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Far away, to the heart of light, the silence.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For I am ready to give you my breath, my life,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The shining circle of the sun, the sun and the rabbit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, like several of their other habits, seems more human-like than rabbit-like. Hazel's band have never heard such a thing as poetry before and are quite mystified - all except Fiver, who seems to feel a sort of kinship with Silverweed. He wants to get closer to the poet-rabbit to get a good sense of him, but then flees in panic when the poem ends. Later he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You felt it, then? And you want to know whether I did? Of course I did. That's&#xA;the worst part of it. There isn't any trick. He speaks the truth. So as long as he&#xA;speaks the truth it can't be folly -- that's what you're going to say, isn't it? I'm not&#xA;blaming you, Hazel. I felt myself moving toward him like one cloud drifting into&#xA;another. But then at the last moment I drifted wide. Who knows why? It wasn't&#xA;my own will; it was an accident. There was just some little part of me that carried&#xA;me wide of him. Did I say the roof of that hall was made of bones? No! It's like a&#xA;great mist of folly that covers the whole sky: and we shall never see to go by&#xA;Frith's light any more. Oh, what will become of us? A thing can be true and still be&#xA;desperate folly, Hazel.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly Fiver sees some deep significance in Silverweed's poem, perhaps something that explains the mystery of that warren. To me it's just a poem, and I can't see the connection with the real situation of those rabbits. Maybe Fiver is using his usual psychic instinct and seeing what's in Silverweed's mind more than what's in his song, or maybe there &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; something to be gleaned from the song, some poetic indirect reference to the snares, which I'm missing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does Silverweed's poem have any connection to the situation of the rabbits of his warren?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it just a poem and Fiver's talk just the usual apparently-nonsensical-but-later-revealed-to-be-insightful Fiverishness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T10:54:30.343" Title="What does Silverweed's poem signify?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4017" CreationDate="2021-01-05T11:44:04.327" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No canon information, but comparing it to Chemistry or cookery in real life, even in industry, a lot of times once a procedure is 'good enough' it gets used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There might be a lot of ways to improve it, but nobody has ever tried because the first way it was done works well enough. Then for some reason (methods change, or you can no longer get one of your ingredients) you start looking again at the method. It's why lots of companies might have a &amp;quot;Process Improvement Department&amp;quot; or an equivalent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To take your example with the stirring, perhaps Snape stirred it three times by accident, so tried to 'reverse' it with a stir. He found that that worked, so he played around with the numbers of clockwise and anticlockwise stirs (7 clockwise and one anticlockwise is equivalent to 1.75 clockwise and 0.25 anticlockwise, so still mainly anticlockwise stirs).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And if that sounds unlikely, there are reams of scientific discoveries that have been made by accident! Penicillin from somebody not washing his petri dishes up, nitrocellulose by Schönbein using his wife's apron to mop up spilt chemicals...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the spells, they're often based around Latin words, and we know that changes in pronunciation leading to different words can change the effect of a spell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;...And saying the magic words properly is very important, too - never forget Wizard Baruffio, who said 's' instead of 'f' and found himself on the floor with a buffalo on his chest.&amp;quot; Professor Flitwick &lt;em&gt;Hallowe'en, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We also know from the same source that wand movements can cause a spell to work or fail. Flitwick has presumably been telling this story to his first year classes for years (not mentioned directly in the books, but practically every teacher has pet stories or tricks e.g. McGonagall becomes a cat every year because she notes that she usually gets applause for it in &lt;em&gt;CoS&lt;/em&gt;), so for somebody as clever as Snape, with an inventive streak, he could easily have picked up on the implications and played around with a dictionary and his wand movements until he got the effect he was after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11809" LastEditorUserId="11809" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T13:14:32.870" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T13:14:32.870" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17072" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16993" CreationDate="2021-01-05T16:25:16.747" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: No-one knows exactly what Heraclitus meant. The trouble is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Nature_(Heraclitus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heraclitus’ book&lt;/a&gt; has been lost and all that remains are fragments that survived through being quoted by other authors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a selection of translations of this fragment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you do not hope, you will not win that which is not hoped for, since it is unattainable and inaccessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ingram Bywater (1889). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/fragmentsworkhe00bywagoog/page/n100/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Fragments of the Work of Heraclitus of Ephesus on Nature&lt;/em&gt;, p. 86&lt;/a&gt;. Baltimore: N. Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find [truth], for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Philip Wheelwright (1959). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/heraclitus0000whee/page/20/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Heraclitus&lt;/em&gt;, p. 20&lt;/a&gt;. Princeton University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If 〈he〉 doesn’t expect 〈the〉 unexpected, 〈he〉 will not discover 〈it〉; for 〈it〉 is difficult to discover and intractable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T. M. Robinson (1987). &lt;em&gt;Heraclitus: Fragments&lt;/em&gt;, p. 94. University of Toronto Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoever cannot seek&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the unforeseen sees nothing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for the known way&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;is an impasse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Brooks Haxton (2001). &lt;em&gt;Fragments: the Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus&lt;/em&gt;. Viking Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fragment was preserved by the second-century Christian philosopher &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_of_Alexandria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clement of Alexandria&lt;/a&gt; in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/writingsofclemen02clem/page/10/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stromata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (miscellanies). In book II, chapter 4, Clement is discussing whether faith is the foundation of knowledge:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now to hear is to understand. If, then, faith is nothing else than a preconception of the mind in regard to what is the subject of discourse, and obedience is so called, and understanding and persuasion; no one shall learn aught without faith, since no one [learns aught] without preconception. Consequently there is a more ample demonstration of the complete truth of what was spoken by the prophet, “Unless ye believe, neither will ye understand.”† Paraphrasing this oracle, &lt;strong&gt;Heraclitus of Ephesus says, “If a man hope not, he will not find that which is not hoped for, seeing it is inscrutable and inaccessible.”&lt;/strong&gt;‡&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Clement of Alexandria (c. 200). &lt;em&gt;Stromata&lt;/em&gt;, book II, chapter 4. Translated by William Wilson (1867). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/writingsofclemen02clem/page/10/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ante-Nicene Christian Library&lt;/em&gt;, volume XII, p. 11&lt;/a&gt;. Edinburgh: T. &amp;amp; T. Clark.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/isaiah/7-9.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isaiah 7:9&lt;/a&gt;. ‡ “ἐὰν μὴ ἔλπηται ἀνέλπιστον οὐκ ἐξευρήσει, ἀνεξερεύνητον ἐὸν καὶ ἄπορον.”&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that Clement has interpreted Heraclitus as if he were paraphrasing Isaiah, and expressing the idea that you have to make a leap of faith in order to understand the truth. Of course this is anachronistic—Heraclitus could have known nothing of Isaiah or Christianity—but it is in keeping with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism_and_Christianity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neoplatonist project&lt;/a&gt; to make Christianity acceptable to the Greeks and Greek philosophy acceptable to Christians. Maybe Heraclitus really meant something along these lines, but since the context has been lost we can’t be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s a modern interpretation, for contrast:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two slightly different interpretations of this fragment are possible, depending on whether one understands ἔλπηται to mean ‘expect’ or ‘are hoping for’ (both are in theory possible). […] Heraclitus’ point seems to be the straightforward one that life after death is different from what people expect and imagine; further discussion of the matter, as so often, he tantalizingly avoids. One inference can, however, fairly be drawn from this and other fragments: his conviction of the misleading nature, if not downright falsity, of the detailed accounts of the afterlife prevalent in contemporary Orphism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;T. M. Robinson (1987). &lt;em&gt;Heraclitus: Fragments&lt;/em&gt;, p. 94. University of Toronto Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t find Robinson’s interpretation at all compelling, because there’s no indication in the fragment that Heraclitus is referring to the afterlife, and Clement (who, even if he is motivated to shoehorn Heraclitus into the Christian point of view, has the advantage of having read Heraclitus in context) doesn’t seem to take him that way; because we don’t know that Heraclitus avoided further discussion, but only that Clement did not quote it; and because if you take “he doesn’t expect the unexpected” to mean “life after death is different from what people expect” then what does “he will not discover it” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T09:48:07.777" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T09:48:07.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17073" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17075" CreationDate="2021-01-05T16:31:49.847" Score="3" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-personal.umich.edu/%7Ejlawler/dones.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Otro poema de los dones&lt;/a&gt; by Jorge Luis Borges, there is a line which refers to 1955. Is Borges, being Argentine, referring to the military coup to unseat President Juan Perón of Argentina? Or what is the reference?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Original line in Spanish:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Por ciertas vísperas y días de 1955,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For certain eves and days of 1955,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T17:37:25.603" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T17:37:25.603" Title="1955 in Otro poema de los dones by Jorge Luis Borges" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;jorge-luis-borges&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17074" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17080" CreationDate="2021-01-05T16:51:47.553" Score="2" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his novel &lt;em&gt;The Plague&lt;/em&gt;, Albert Camus wrote among others:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So everyone comes down into the streets, they deafen each other with&#xA;talk, argue or lust after one another - and the town, under the red&#xA;July sky, filled with couples and noise, drifts towards breathless&#xA;night. (...) In the beginning, when they thought that it was a&#xA;sickness like any other, religion had its place. But when they saw&#xA;that it was serious, they remembered pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this context, as well as in the context of the whole book, what does he mean by the quote &amp;quot;they remembered pleasure&amp;quot;? I cannot seem to find a way to correctly interpret this. What does the seriousness of the disease have to do with the remembrance of pleasure, lust, etc that he mentions? How does pleasure contrast with religion (&amp;quot;But&amp;quot;) when taking into account the seriousness of the illness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="user11813" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T17:00:35.490" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T04:07:29.197" Title="What does Albert Camus mean with &quot;they remembered pleasure&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-plague&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17075" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17073" CreationDate="2021-01-05T17:27:51.453" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I assume it is indeed a historical reference. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.borges.pitt.edu/bibliography/1955-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;year 1955&lt;/a&gt; was double relevant to Borges:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He had been an anti-Peronist [1], so he welcomed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revoluci%C3%B3n_Libertadora&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Revolución Libertadora&lt;/a&gt; of 16 September 1955. In fact, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Luis_Borges#Anti-Peronism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia about Borges notes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to [Borges biographer] Williamson, Borges shouted, &amp;quot;Viva la Patria&amp;quot;, until his voice grew hoarse. [2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After the &amp;quot;Revolución Libertadora&amp;quot;, Borges was named director of the National Library [3] and he stayed in this position until the return and re-election of Juan Perón, when Borges resigned from his post. [4] [5]&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[1] Tomas, Maximiliano: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lanacion.com.ar/cultura/jorge-luis-borges-razones-antiperonismo-feroz-nid2437640/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jorge Luis Borges: las razones de un antiperonismo feroz&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;La Nacion&lt;/em&gt;, 02.09.2020.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[2] Williamson, Edwin: &lt;em&gt;Borges: A Life&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Viking, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[3] Baldertson, Daniel: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.borges.pitt.edu/bibliography/1955-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1955&lt;/a&gt;. Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[4] Baldertson, Daniel: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.borges.pitt.edu/bibliography/1973-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1973&lt;/a&gt;. Borges Center, University of Pittsburgh.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[5] Borges, Jorge Luis: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=68R9VS3WHPwC&amp;amp;pg=PT139&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Last Interview: and Other Conversations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Melville House, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T17:27:51.453" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1977" CreationDate="2021-01-05T19:00:07.353" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Collodi starts from the idea of ​​a wooden puppet, therefore without a soul, and leads him on an initiatory path that leads him to a profound metamorphosis that involves both his inner world but also the outer one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pinocchio is unmatched in popular culture: no story has produced a more unforgettable parable about the dangers of telling a lie. Generations of children have grown up with the words of the Blue Fairy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Lies, my dear boy, are easily recognized. There are two types: those&#xA;with short legs and those with long noses. Your species has a long&#xA;nose. &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, according to Collodi, the lies that have short legs are those that are the lies that are easily discovered and do not lead far. The long-nosed lies are the ones that ridicule those who tell them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T19:00:07.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15312" CreationDate="2021-01-05T19:25:57.767" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cantos do not have a regular duration, but some elements in the story allow us to create a chronology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several sources in Italian, I tried to translate the one provided by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ladante.it/dantealighieri/hochfeiler/dante/viaggio.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dante Alighieri Society&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante's journey into the three otherworldly realms covers a span of seven days, with a clear reference to the biblical seven days of the world's creation. Dante gets lost in the &amp;quot;dark forest&amp;quot; at nightfall and manages to emerge from it at the first light of dawn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1st day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;From the beginning of the morning&amp;quot; (Inf. I, 37), at about 6, Dante meets the loin, the first of the three fairs, and at the &amp;quot;fall of the night&amp;quot; (Inf. II, 1) the journey begins with Virgil, to arrive at midnight in circle IV (VII, 98).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;2nd day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At 7 am the poet talks to the devil Malacoda (circle VIII, bedlam 5).&#xA;He affirms that their conversation takes place &amp;quot;one thousand two hundred with sixty-six / years&amp;quot; and exactly five hours after Christ's death, which based on the Gospel of Luke, Dante knew had taken place at the sixth hour, that is at noon. At about one o'clock he finds himself in bedlam 9 and at sunset, he reaches the center of the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;3rd day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very first hours of the third day, Dante and Virgil pass the center of the earth, and, having traveled the &amp;quot;passage&amp;quot;, they find themselves on the beach of Purgatory to see the Angel who ferries appear against the suffused sky of dawn. The souls of purgatives.&#xA;At the end of the day Dante is in the Antipurgatory and for the whole night, he stops in the Valley of the Princes (Valletta Dei Principi).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;4th day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At dawn on the fourth day, the ascent of Mount Purgatory begins, which stops with the fall of light before the ascent to the fourth frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;5th day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From sunrise to sunset on the fifth day, the poet climbs from the fourth to the seventh frame of Purgatory and in the evening he stops with Virgil and Statius to rest before going up to the Earthly Paradise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;6th day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From dawn to midday Dante stops in the Earthly Paradise, where he performs the rites that make him &amp;quot;pure and willing to climb to the stars&amp;quot; (Pg. XXXIII, 145).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;7th day:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From noon of the sixth day to noon of the seventh Dante's ascent from the First Heaven to the vision of God with which the journey ends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10837" LastEditorUserId="10837" LastEditDate="2021-01-05T21:57:14.913" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T21:57:14.913" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17079" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-05T22:13:42.997" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book V of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator asks herself what she expects to achieve in her poetry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                          Shall I hope&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To speak my poems in mysterious tune&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With man and nature,—with the lava-lymph&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That trickles from successive galaxies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Still drop by drop adown the finger of God,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In still new worlds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a description of the power and magnitude of God’s creation, but the idea of flowing material trickling from galaxies and creating worlds is striking and specific. (“Lava” is the molten rock flowing from a volcano, and “lymph” is a poetic term for water, as well as various biological fluids.) Was Browning alluding to a particular theory of cosmogony in these lines? Are there passages in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/allgemeinenaturg00kant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kant&lt;/a&gt;, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/expositiondusys05laplgoog&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laplace&lt;/a&gt;, or another author, that could have suggested this description to her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-05T22:13:42.997" Title="What inspired the “lava-lymph” in Elizabeth Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17080" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17074" CreationDate="2021-01-06T04:07:29.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The contrast with religion is the key to it.  At the beginning, they thought it was an ordinary sort of sickness and turned to prayer in hopes of warding it off.  When that does not work, though, and the sickness would continue unabated regardless of their prayers, they threw them aside and turned to pleasure -- one last fling before death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T04:07:29.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17081" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17082" CreationDate="2021-01-06T10:21:11.080" Score="1" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book V of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator makes an elaborate simile between the condition of the Earth in the interval between the Fall and the Incarnation, and a magician's stunt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                              Earth, shut up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By Adam, like a fakir in a box&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Left too long buried, remained stiff and dry,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A mere dumb corpse, till Christ the Lord came down,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unlocked the doors, forced open the blank eyes,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And used his kingly chrisms to straighten out&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The leathery tongue turned back into the throat:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Since when, she lives, remembers, palpitates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In every limb, aspires in every breath,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Embraces infinite relations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did 19th-century magicians have themselves buried alive (in the manner of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blaine#Buried_Alive_(1999)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Blaine&lt;/a&gt;)? Was there a particular stunt that could have brought this to Browning’s notice?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T19:00:20.750" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T19:00:30.213" Title="What inspired the &quot;fakir in a box&quot; in Elizabeth Browning's &quot;Aurora Leigh&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17082" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17081" CreationDate="2021-01-06T10:21:11.080" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browning alludes here to the biblical account of the raising of Lazarus in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/John#Chapter_11&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John 11&lt;/a&gt;. But the details don’t come from John, in whose account Lazarus’s tomb is closed with a stone (11:38), not a locked door; Jesus calls Lazarus forth (11:43) instead of anointing him with “chrism” (consecrated oil); and there is no mention of Lazarus’s eyes or tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are, however, some striking similarities between Browning’s choice of words in this passage, and an 1845 account by British officer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Martin_Wade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Claude Wade&lt;/a&gt; of the disinterment of a fakir at the court of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjit_Singh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ranjit Singh&lt;/a&gt; in Lahore in 1837. I’ve highlighted in bold words and phrases which have echoes in Browning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was present at the Court of Runjeet Singh when the &lt;strong&gt;Fakeer&lt;/strong&gt; mentioned by the Honourable Captain Osborne was &lt;strong&gt;buried&lt;/strong&gt; alive for six weeks; and, although I arrived a few hours after his actual interment, and did not, consequently, witness that part of the phenomenon, I had the testimony of Runjeet Singh himself, and others the most credible witnesses of his Court, to the truth of the Fakeer having been so buried before them; and, from my having myself been present when he was disinterred, and restored to a state of perfect vitality, in a position so close to him as to render any deception impossible, it is my firm belief that there was no collusion in producing the extraordinary fact which I have related. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I accompanied Runjeet Singh to the spot where the Fakeer had been buried. […] When the door was thrown open, nothing but a dark room was to be seen. Runjeet Singh and myself then entered it, in company with the servant of the Fakeer; and a light being brought, we descended about three feet below the floor of the room, into a sort of cell, where a wooden &lt;strong&gt;box&lt;/strong&gt;, about four feet long by three broad, with a sloping roof, containing the Fakeer, was placed upright, the &lt;strong&gt;door&lt;/strong&gt; of which had also a &lt;strong&gt;padlock&lt;/strong&gt; and seal similar to that on the outside. On opening it we saw a figure enclosed in a bag of white linen, fastened by a string over the head […] the Fakeer’s servant, putting his arms into the box, took the figure out, and closing the door, placed it with its back against it, exactly as the Fakeer had been squatted (like a Hindoo idol) in the box itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The servant then began pouring warm water over the figure; but, as my object was to see if any fraudulent practices could be detected, I proposed to Runjeet Singh to tear open the bag, and have a perfect view of the body before any means of resuscitation were employed. I accordingly did so; and may here remark, that the bag, when first seen by us, looked mildewed, as if it had been buried some time. The legs and arms of the body were &lt;strong&gt;shrivelled and stiff&lt;/strong&gt;, the face full, the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a &lt;strong&gt;corpse&lt;/strong&gt;. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The servant then recommenced bathing him with hot water, and gradually relaxing his arms and legs from the rigid state in which they were contracted, Runjeet Singh taking his right and I his left leg, to aid by friction in restoring them to their proper action; during which time the servant placed a hot wheaten cake, about an inch thick, on the top of the head,—a process which he twice or thrice renewed. He then pulled out of his nostrils and ears the wax and cotton with which they were stopped; and after great exertion opened his mouth by inserting the point of a knife between his teeth, and, while holding his jaws open with his left hand, drew the tongue forward with his right,—in the course of which &lt;strong&gt;the tongue flew back several times to its curved position upwards, in which it had originally been, so as to close the gullet.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then rubbed his eyelids with &lt;strong&gt;ghee&lt;/strong&gt;† (or clarified butter) for some seconds, until he succeeded in &lt;strong&gt;opening&lt;/strong&gt; them, when the &lt;strong&gt;eyes&lt;/strong&gt; appeared quite motionless and glazed. After the cake had been applied for the third time to the top of his head, the body was violently &lt;strong&gt;convulsed&lt;/strong&gt;, the nostrils became inflated, when &lt;strong&gt;respiration&lt;/strong&gt; ensued, and the &lt;strong&gt;limbs&lt;/strong&gt; began to assume a natural fulness; but the pulsation was still faintly perceptible. The servant then put some of the ghee on his tongue, and made him swallow it. A few minutes afterwards, the eyeballs became dilated, and recovered their natural colour, when the Fakeer, recognising Runjeet Singh sitting close to him, articulated, in a low, sepulchral tone, scarcely audible, “Do you believe me now?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Claude Wade (13 September 1845). ‘Replies to Dr. Braid’s Queries Regarding the Fakeer who Buried Himself Alive at Lahore in 1837.’ In James Braid (1850). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/observationsont01braigoog/page/n12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Observations on Trance, or, Human Hybernation&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 10–14&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Churchill.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† ghee is a type of oil, and corresponds to Browning’s “chrism”, meaning consecrated oil.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most striking of the similarities is the detail of the tongue being turned back in the fakir’s throat, and this convinces me that Wade’s account was the source for Browning’s simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Browning had missed Braid’s &lt;em&gt;Observations on Trance&lt;/em&gt;, she had another chance to read Wade’s account in November 1854, when it was published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/northbritishrev32unkngoog/page/n227/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The North British Review&lt;/em&gt; 22:43, pp. 211–212&lt;/a&gt;. (In an abridged version, but including most of the words and phrases I highlighted.) This was during the composition of &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-06T19:00:30.213" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T19:00:30.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17083" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17085" CreationDate="2021-01-06T15:08:36.040" Score="15" ViewCount="931" Body="&lt;p&gt;The UK’s Royal Mint announced in January 2021 a commemorative £2 coin “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.royalmint.com/our-coins/ranges/annual-sets/2021-annual-coin-sets/celebrating-the-life-and-work-of-hg-wells/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Celebrating the Life and Work of H. G. Wells&lt;/a&gt;”. The coin design (depicted below) suggests that no-one involved in the project had much in the way of expertise on Wells. As Alison Flood &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/05/hg-wells-fans-spot-numerous-errors-on-royal-mints-new-2-coin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;writes in &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observant fans of H. G. Wells have questioned how a new coin from the Royal Mint commemorating &lt;em&gt;The War of the Worlds&lt;/em&gt; author could be released with multiple errors, including giving his “monstrous tripod” four legs. […] Science fiction novelist and professor of 19th-century literature Adam Roberts, who is author of a biography of Wells and vice president of the H. G. Wells Society, also criticised the depiction of the Invisible Man, shown in a top hat; in the book he arrives at Iping under a “wide-brimmed hat”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flood also &lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.twitter.com/alisonflood/status/1346786896492580864&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;reports on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just heard back from the press office at the Royal Mint. The inscription on the edge of the coin is indeed “&lt;strong&gt;GOOD BOOKS ARE THE WAREHOUSES OF IDEAS&lt;/strong&gt;”. I shall ask where they got it from!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where does the quotation “Good books are the warehouses of ideas” come from and how did become associated with H. G. Wells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbrf5.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/dbrf5.png&quot; alt=&quot;Obverse of £2 coin, depicting: a Martian vehicle resembling a table lamp with a tentacle, supported on four spindly legs; an invisible man, wearing a bow tie and a top hat; Roman numerals from IX to III around the top half of the rim; and &amp;quot;2021 H. G. WELLS&amp;quot; around the bottom half. The design is signed “CTC” for “Chris Costello”&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-07T11:11:19.430" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T15:13:30.313" Title="Origin of “Good books are the warehouses of ideas”, attributed to H. G. Wells on commemorative £2 coin?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17085" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17083" CreationDate="2021-01-06T17:37:00.277" Score="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: It’s a typographical error: for “ideas” read “ideals”!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ideals!” said my uncle; “certainly Ideals. Of course one must have ideals, else life would be bare materialism. Bare fact alone, naked necessity, is impossible barren rock for a soul to root upon. Life, indeed, is an unfurnished house, an empty glass in a thirsty land good and necessary for foundation, but insufficient for any satisfaction unless we have ideals. Or, again, ideals are the flesh upon the skeleton of reality, and it cannot live without them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It always appears to me,” said my uncle, &amp;quot;that the comparison of ideals to furniture is particularly appropriate. They are the draperies of the mind, and they hide the nakedness of truth. Your fireplace is ugly, your mere necessary shelves and seats but planks and crudity, all your surroundings so much office furniture, until the skilful hand and the draperies come in. Then a few cunning loopings and foldings, and behold softness and delicacy, crudity gone, and life well worth the living. So that you cannot value ideals too highly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yet at the same time—” My uncle became meditative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I would not have a man the slave of his ideals. Hangings make the room comfortable, but, after all, hangings are hangings. Perhaps, now and then of course, I would not suggest continual inconstancy a slight change, a little rearrangement, even a partial replacement, might brighten up the dear old dwelling-place. An ideal may be clung to too fondly. When the moth gets into it, or the dust did not Carlyle warn us against this, lest they ‘accumulate and at last produce suffocation’? I am exactly at one with him there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And that, as any Cabinet Minister explains every time he opens a public library, is why we have literature. &lt;strong&gt;Good books are the warehouses of ideals.&lt;/strong&gt; Does it strike you your furniture is sombre, a bit Calvinistic and severe try a statuette by Pope, or a classical piece out of Heine. Too much white and gold for every-day purposes then the Reverend Laurence Sterne will oblige. Urban tone may be corrected by Hardy, and Lowell will give you urbanity. And, however well you match and balance them, remember there is a time for ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;H. G. Wells (1895). ‘The Use of Ideals’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/selectconversati00welluoft/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Select Conversations with an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 18–19&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Lane.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reference was spotted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://mobile.twitter.com/EleanorFitz/status/1346849187791564800&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eleanor Fitzsimons on Twitter&lt;/a&gt;. I’ve quoted so much of the context to demonstrate that the context is satirical—when the narrator’s uncle says that “good books are the warehouses of ideals” he means that you can leave the ideals in the books and not have to think about them, until the time comes when it might be expedient or convenient to get them out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a terrible quotation to use when you are intending to commemorate a writer: it says that the writer’s ideals can safely be ignored and forgotten, in the warehouse of his books, until the day when you might take them out and use them for background decoration, like a wall-hanging. But perhaps the choice is in keeping with the four-legged tripods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who turned “ideals” into “ideas”? The earliest instance I was able to find is from 1999:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good books are the warehouses of ideas. — H. G. Wells (1866–1946)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ben Jacobs and Helena Hjalmarsson (1999). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/quotablebooklove0000unse/page/4/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Quotable Book Lover&lt;/em&gt;, p. 4&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Lyons Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-06T17:37:00.277" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17086" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16993" CreationDate="2021-01-07T01:50:49.843" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's straight forward to me, without any paradox.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip Wheelwright's translation (taken from Gareth Rees's answer) seems to say it most clearly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find [truth], for it is hard to discover and hard to attain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are searching, if you look at only those facts and ideas that fit with what you already know, you'll never find the truth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider the current US political situation.&#xA;Suppose a Democrat/Republican is searching for proof that the Republicans/Democrats somehow managed to rig the election.&#xA;They expect to eventually find the proof, and will almost certainly only follow leads that confirm what they already know.&#xA;It would be a very unexpected event if they were to encounter something potentially indicating that their own party cheated.&#xA;Their closed minds might not even be aware that it is there, and they'll almost certainly not follow that path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Thomas Jefferson  wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead — &lt;a href=&quot;https://tjrs.monticello.org/letter/387#:%7E:text=Jefferson%20Quotes%20%26%20Family%20Letters,-Monticello&amp;amp;text=27.,left%20free%20to%20combat%20it.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Extract from Thomas Jefferson to William Roscoe, 27 Dec. 1820&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find the truth one must be prepared to be surprised by it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T01:50:49.843" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17087" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17112" CreationDate="2021-01-07T13:38:43.207" Score="5" ViewCount="174" Body="&lt;p&gt;In every site I've seen that analyzes Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt;, they all agree that in the following stanza the &amp;quot;Pilgrim of Eternity&amp;quot; refers to Byron. &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemanalysis.com/percy-bysshe-shelley/adonais-an-elegy-on-the-deaath-of-john-keats/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here is one example&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From stanza 30 to 35, Shelley says that contemporary poets, in the guise of mountain shepherds with “garlands sere” and “magic mantles rent”, come to pay their tribute. The poet chooses Byron and Moore as the first two mourners. It is to be noted here that Byron and Moore did not really feel the sentiments that Shelley attributes to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't quite see how this is entirely certain. Even more uncertain is why they believe Thomas Moore is referred to.  I suppose you could say, well, we know who attended Keats' funeral, and Byron best fits the description.  Looking at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats#Death&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Keats' biography on Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; it seems that Joseph Severn, Leigh Hunt and Charles Armitage Brown also attended his funeral, so how do we know they are not the ones in question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are the stanzas in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;30.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thus ceased she: and the mountain shepherds came,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over his living head like Heaven is bent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An early but enduring monument,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In sorrow, from her wilds Ierne sent&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;31.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Midst others of less note, came one frail Form,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A phantom among men, companionless&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As the last cloud of an expiring storm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose thunder is its knell, he, as I guess,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Actaeon-like, and now he fled astray&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And his own thoughts, along that rugged way,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T14:49:31.360" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T14:49:31.360" Title="How do we know that Shelley's &quot;Adonais&quot; refers to Byron and Moore?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;&lt;adonais&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17088" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17089" CreationDate="2021-01-07T17:41:44.550" Score="0" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a man was talking about a self-sufficient people in a Canadian village, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why, that this is the proper way to live. Old Hiram has an anvil and an amateur forge. He can tinker up almost anything, and that eliminates the blacksmith. Howard has a bench, saws, hammers, and other tools, and that eliminates the carpenter. The women eliminate the baker, the soap boiler, and a lot of other parasites. Now, when you have eliminated all the middlemen, then comes independence, and consequently complete happiness. &lt;strong&gt;You can’t keep happiness away with a shotgun then&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I know the literal meaning of &amp;quot;You can’t keep happiness away with a shotgun then&amp;quot;, but what does it have to do with being self-sufficient?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-07T21:10:38.177" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T21:19:56.047" Title="What does &quot;keep happiness away with a shotgun&quot; mean here in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17089" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17088" CreationDate="2021-01-07T21:19:56.047" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that the passage means that &amp;quot;happiness will surely follow&amp;quot;. A shotgun is a rather fearsome weapon, which would be sufficient to ward off most things. However, once one has achieved self-sufficiency and independence, one cannot keep from being happy. Happiness here is personified somewhat as something that comes to you, but you could not keep it away even if you had a shotgun to ward it off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1574" LastActivityDate="2021-01-07T21:19:56.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T03:37:48.600" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am currently reading &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shortenedhistory00geor/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Shortened History of England&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by G.M. Trevelyan. There are some words/phrases I do not understand. If anyone can explain them to me, I would highly appreciate it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is indeed in the Middle Ages that we must seek the origin of Parliament, and of the English Common Law which the ultimate victory of Parliament over the Royal power has made supreme in all English-speaking lands. The political merit of the Medieval period lay in its dislike of absolutism in the Temporal sphere, its elaborate distribution of power, its sense of corporate life, and its consultation of the various corporate interests through their representatives. (p. 13–14)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Trevelyan, George Macaulay. &lt;em&gt;A Shortened History of England&lt;/em&gt;. 1942. London: Penguin, 1959.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;Temporal sphere&amp;quot; in the last sentence mean? Is it a period in history?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever, then, be our chief interest in the past—whether material progress and racial expansion, the growth of political and social institutions, or pure intellect and letters—it is the last four hundred years in British History which stand out. (p. 14)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third sentence, it says &amp;quot;or pure intellect and letters&amp;quot;. I know the word &lt;em&gt;unlettered&lt;/em&gt; means poorly educated or illiterate. But the dictionary didn't define &lt;em&gt;letters&lt;/em&gt; other than mail and the alphabet. So I'm guessing it just means the opposite of &lt;em&gt;unlettered&lt;/em&gt; and means someone who is well educated and can read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11748" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T08:12:23.717" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T08:14:46.203" Title="Meaning of phrase/word in History of England by G.M. Trevelyan" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;a-shortened-history-of-england&gt;&lt;g-m-trevelyan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17092" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17100" CreationDate="2021-01-08T12:25:58.217" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a man was talking about some of dime novels, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The young man went into the tent, and shortly returned with an armful of yellow-covered, paper-bound small volumes, which he flung in profusion at the feet of the man from Toronto. They were mostly &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beadle’s Dime Novels&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which had a great sale at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There,” he said, “you have quantity, quality, and variety, as I have before remarked. ‘The Murderous Sioux of Kalamazoo;’ that’s a good one. A hair-raising Indian story in every sense of the word. The one you are looking at is a pirate story, judging by the burning ship on the cover. But for first-class highwaymen yarns, this other edition is the best. That’s the ‘Sixteen String Jack set.’ &lt;strong&gt;They’re immense, if they do cost a quarter each&lt;/strong&gt;. You must begin at the right volume, or you’ll be sorry. You see, they never really end, although every volume is supposed to be complete in itself. They leave off at the most exciting point, and are continued in the next volume. I call that a pretty good idea, but it’s rather exasperating if you begin at the last book. You’ll enjoy this lot. I’m glad I brought them along.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I found that such novels usually cost five- and ten-cent, so I think that their mentioned price, i.e &amp;quot;quarter&amp;quot;, makes them expensive, so does &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;although&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T15:04:19.500" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T15:04:19.500" Title="Does &quot;if&quot; here mean &quot;although&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T12:51:22.170" Score="3" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an (untitled) short story: the first chapter of 《听你的》 (full text is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.douban.com/review/9366600/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), and I don't feel I fully understand the plot.  Here's my summarization:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; (unnamed) is generally happy with mediocrity.  You work a simple job with all of your family members.  At work, you develop a friendship with your workmate &amp;quot;glasses&amp;quot;.  As your work improves, you are sent on a business trip for three months.  When you return you hear about a promotion and you think you will get it, but you don't get the promotion: &amp;quot;glasses&amp;quot; gets the promotion because of his schmoozing while you were away.  You are hurt, accept your mediocrity, and slowly lose contact with &amp;quot;glasses&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I&amp;quot; (unnamed) would be regarded as having a more interesting life, and would be safe from backstabbing like with &amp;quot;glasses&amp;quot;, but it also feels full of loneliness, so I envy your life's simplicity.  Indeed, most people are unhappy with their lives.  After graduation, you stayed and I went to Beijing; I enjoy my life, but I would also enjoy your life.  Whether something brings happiness or pain, it's part of life's journey, and we cannot control it.  But we still compare our lives with others and we want to &amp;quot;win&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if everyone in the world abandons you, I love you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what the message here is, perhaps it's something like: bad things happen, but it's part of life's journey.  I'm not a native Chinese speaker, so I feel like my reading is too literal (A happens. Then B happens.).  I hope someone can help me understand the &amp;quot;take home&amp;quot; message here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Question&lt;/strong&gt;: What is the underlying message of the first story of 听你的?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8342" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-07T02:07:03.880" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T02:07:03.880" Title="What is the underlying message of the first story of 听你的 (&quot;Up To You&quot;)?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;moral&gt;&lt;zhang-haochen&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17083" CreationDate="2021-01-08T15:13:30.313" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;War of the words: HG Wells coin also features false quote&#xA;The new coin is inscribed: ‘Good books are warehouses of ideas’ – but digging reveals the quote to be both wrong and expressing a different sentiment&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source : &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jan/08/war-of-the-words-hg-wells-coin-also-features-false-quote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It looks like the Royal mint might have messed up somewhat in choosing an applicable quote !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Author Eleanor Fitzsimons solved the mystery. She tried searching Wells’s writing for a quote with “warehouses” in it, and found an approximation in his obscure work Select Conversations With an Uncle (Now Extinct) and Two Other Reminiscences. That quote, however, is not what appears on the coin: it reads, “Good books are the warehouses of ideals.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately for the Royal Mint, not only is the Wells quotation inaccurate, the actual sentiments expressed are likely to be far from what the author intended. The words are spoken by a character who believes that ideals should be hidden away in books, and goes on to say that “there is a time for ideals, and a time when they are better out of the way”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="203" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T15:13:30.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17095" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T17:19:16.573" Score="3" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book starts with the protagonist, a shop owner, who gets falsely arrested for murder. While he's being taken away in a police car, he manages to escape and runs off into the woods, which happens to be a national park. He lives in a cave near the top of a hill. At some point in the book, he finds 2 wolf cubs and ends up raising them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't recall much of the middle of the book, but this man does end up making trips to town a few times to get some supplies and befriends someone who doesn't judge him for his past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the book, the man learns that his name was cleared for murder and that he could stop hiding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe the whole plot takes place in Michigan, USA, but I'm not 100% sure about that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I discovered the book first at a garage sale. It was a light blue paperback cover. I think it was written in the late 70s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any help would be greatly appreciated, as I misplaced this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11830" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T21:37:09.233" Title="Paperback book about a falsely arrested man living in the wilderness who raises wolf cubs" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17096" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-08T18:47:41.197" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;Enrique Villasis is a Filipino poet, and every poem of his that I've found is something to do with birds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/september-2020-poetry-contest-birds-in-flight-1965-enrique-villasis-bernard&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Birds in Flight, 1965&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/november-2019-philippines-birds-of-paradise-1965-enrique-villasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Birds of Paradise, 1965&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://exchanges.uiowa.edu/issues/iterations/two-poems-by-enrique-villasis/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Birdman, 1973, and White Bird Dark Shadow, 1962&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(all links are to webpages including English translations of these poems originally in Filipino)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are birds a significant theme in the poetry of Enrique Villasis? If so, then why? Do they have some personal significance to him, or does he find them a natural &amp;quot;medium&amp;quot; for channelling ideas and emotions, or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T18:47:41.197" Title="Are birds a theme of Enrique Villasis's poetry, and why?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;motif&gt;&lt;enrique-villasis&gt;&lt;filipino-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17095" CreationDate="2021-01-08T20:37:36.810" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Self answer. I was doing some research calling up friends and a few librarians. The book I was looking for was &lt;em&gt;Shadows of the Wolf&lt;/em&gt; by Larry Koesling. From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Shadows_of_the_Wolf.html?id=2xRUYAAACAAJ&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books summary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Convicted but innocent man for robbery and murder escapes on his way to prison. The wilderness becomes his refuge . He comes across a cave with a dying she wolf and her pups. When she ends up buying the farm, he raises the pups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looks like I was quite off with the year I thought it was written. It was authored in 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11830" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T21:37:09.233" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T21:37:09.233" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17098" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17099" CreationDate="2021-01-08T21:51:56.780" Score="0" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book V of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the narrator says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                there’s not a flower of spring,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That dies ere June, but vaunts itself allied&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By issue and symbol, by significance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And correspondence, to that spirit-world&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Outside the limits of our space and time,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whereto we are bound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Browning mean by a “correspondence” between the “flower of spring, that dies ere June” and the “spirit-world”, and where does this idea come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-08T22:44:02.427" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T22:44:02.427" Title="What is the correspondence of flowers with the spirit-world in Elizabeth Browning’s “Aurora Leigh”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17099" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17098" CreationDate="2021-01-08T21:51:56.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browning is alluding here to the philosophy of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Swedenborg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emanuel Swedenborg&lt;/a&gt;, a mystical Christian philosopher, who propounded the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correspondence_(theology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;doctrine of correspondence&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover, there is no one thing existing in the created world, which has not correspondence with the things existing in the spiritual world, and which does not thereby, in its manner and measure, represent somewhat in the Lord’s kingdom; hence are derived the existence and subsistence of all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emanual Swedenborg (c. 1752). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksswedenborg13swed/page/56/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcana Cœlestia&lt;/em&gt;, volume IV, p. 57&lt;/a&gt;. London: Swedenborg Society (1879).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Browning was familiar with Swedenborg as she mentions him many times in her letters, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think, if you will allow of my saying so, that you apprehend Swedenborg’s meaning very accurately always. If Swedenborg saw sin and danger in certain communications, for instance, why did he consider it privilege on his own part to live in the world of spirits as he did. True, he spoke of ‘danger,’ but it was to those who, themselves weak and unclean, did not hold ‘by the Lord.’ He distinctly said that in the first unfallen churches there was incessant communion, and that the ‘new church,’ as it grew, would approximate more and more to that earlier condition. There is a distinct prospect given in Swedenborg of an increasing aptitude in the bodies and souls of men towards communication with the Disembodied.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Elizabeth Barrett Browning (c. January 1861). Letter to E[uphrasia] F[anny] Haworth. In Frederic G. Kenyon, ed. (1897). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.93731/page/n435/mode/2up?q=swedenborg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, pp. 424–425&lt;/a&gt;. London: Smith, Elder.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the passage from &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; the correspondence is that the bloom and death of flowers symbolizes our own journey through life to the spirit-world. Is there a particular passage in Swedenborg that that Browning is alluding to? In Swedenborg’s scheme of correspondence he takes the blossoming of flowers as a symbol of spiritual growth, for example in his commentary on &lt;a href=&quot;https://biblehub.com/genesis/40-10.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Genesis 40:10&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man who is born anew, that is, who is regenerated by the Lord, is especially called a heaven; for in this case lie is implanted in good and truth Divine which is from the Lord, consequently he is implanted in heaven; for the man who is re-born, in like manner as a tree, begins from seed; wherefore in the Word seed signifies the truth which is from good: also in like manner as a tree, he first produces leaves, next flowers, and finally fruit: for he first produces such things as are of intelligence, which also in the Word are signified by leaves, next &lt;strong&gt;such things as are of wisdom, which are signified by flowers&lt;/strong&gt;, and finally such things as are of life, namely, the goods of love and charity in act, which in the Word are signified by fruits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emanual Swedenborg (c. 1752). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/SwedenborgTheWorksVolXVISwedenborgSocietyBritishForeignLondonCollectionPub1854/page/n101/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arcana Cœlestia&lt;/em&gt;, volume VII, p. 92&lt;/a&gt;. London: Swedenborg Society (1879).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched the Swedenborg corpus for “flower” and didn’t find anything that quite matches Browning’s correspondence in &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;, so I conclude that it does not come from Swedenborg, but is rather a Swedenborgian presentation of the metaphor of the flower’s short life, of which there are many examples, for instance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This carol they began that hour,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How that a &lt;strong&gt;life was but a flower,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        In the spring time&lt;/strong&gt;, the only pretty ring time,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sweet lovers love the spring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Shakespeare (c. 1599). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1523/1523-h/1523-h.htm#A5S3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As You Like It&lt;/em&gt;, act V, scene 3&lt;/a&gt;. Project Gutenberg.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-08T21:51:56.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17092" CreationDate="2021-01-09T01:34:37.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not necessarily perfect grammar.&#xA;People often speak elliptically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider it like &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;These chocolate chip cookies are amazing, even if they&lt;/em&gt; do &lt;em&gt;cost three dollars each.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he's saying: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;They're immense, [and so are worth it even] if they do cost a quarter each&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-09T01:34:37.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17102" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-09T13:11:16.483" Score="1" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act III of the play &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3618/3618-h/3618-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by George Bernard Shaw,  Sergius says to Louka,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If these hands ever touch you again, they shall touch my affianced bride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those words reminded me of Shakespearean dialogues where characters speak very poetically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is, was it deliberate by Shaw or did he actually allude to Shakespeare an style when he made Sergius to speak like that because the dialogues of Shaw's characters speak quite normally and not poetically? Was Shaw influenced by Shakespeare (although it is obvious that Shaw must have read him and he was the most celebrated playwright after him) and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11832" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:57:55.393" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:57:55.393" Title="Was Shaw's &quot;Arms and the Man&quot; inspired by Shakespeare?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17087" CreationDate="2021-01-09T13:42:06.183" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is partially explained in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/10119&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg edition&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt;. I believe you've misidentified the sections of the poem that refer to Byron and Moore, respectively.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron is described in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over his living head like Heaven is bent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An early but enduring monument,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In sorrow,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Moore by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                 from her wilds Ierne sent&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Love taught Grief to fall like music from his tongue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we be sure of this identification? The poem says (by &amp;quot;midst others of less note&amp;quot;) that these were the two most famous people (let's leave Shelley aside) who attended the funeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron is quite famous, and was then. Thomas Moore was a very popular poet then (although Leigh Hunt may be more famous today).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Describing Byron as a &amp;quot;Pilgrim&amp;quot; is a big hint, since he had traveled extensively, and one of his long poems (whose main character shares some traits with Byron) was titled &lt;em&gt;Childe Harold's Pilgrimage&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word that gives away that the next lines refer to Thomas Moore is &amp;quot;Ierne&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ierne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ierne&lt;/a&gt; is either Ériu, the goddess of Ireland, or a metonym for Ireland itself. Moore is not only Irish, but his poetry is very much identified with Ireland—his most famous book of poetry is &lt;em&gt;Irish Melodies&lt;/em&gt;, the first part of which was published in 1808, over a decade before Keats' funeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanzas 31–34 are identified by the Project Gutenberg edition of &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt; as describing Shelley himself, and Stanza 35:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What softer voice is hushed over the dead?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In mockery of monumental stone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The heavy heart heaving without a moan?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If it be he who, gentlest of the wise,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Taught, soothed, loved, honoured, the departed one.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let me not vex with inharmonious sighs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;as identifying Leigh Hunt. The reasons they give for believing Stanza 35 refers to Hunt are rooted in the relationships between Hunt, Keats, and Shelley, and do not seem to be tied to any specific words of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also believe you're mistaken about who actually attended Keats' funeral in real life. Byron didn't. In a Project Gutenberg collection of Byron's letters, he writes to Shelley on April 26, 1821:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am very sorry to hear what you say of Keats—is it actually true? I did not think criticism had been so killing. Though I differ from you essentially in your estimate of his performances, I so much abhor all unnecessary pain, that I would rather he had been seated on the highest peak of Parnassus than have perished in such a manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had I known that Keats was dead—or that he was alive and so sensitive—I should have omitted some remarks upon his poetry, to which I was provoked by his attack upon Pope, and my disapprobation of his own style of writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know which of the other people you list were there, either.&#xA;Using poetic license, of course, Shelley is able to bring whomever he wants to Keats' funeral.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain some of the puzzling sentences in Byron's letter, Shelley had written to Byron that Keats died of an attack of rage after reading a bad review of his poetry; this belief of Shelley's is also given in the poem &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt;.  Keats' death was actually caused by tuberculosis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T13:09:10.120" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T13:09:10.120" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17104" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-09T18:25:48.920" Score="3" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;My Face for the World to See&lt;/em&gt; (1958) by Alfred Hayes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah! she said, triumphantly: the little boy hurts, doesn't it? I said, stonily, it might be a good idea if, instead of a psychiatrist, she stopped off one afternoon at &lt;strong&gt;a delousing station&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I (with her eyes widely open) really think so?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yes: I thought so. A delousing station might, after all, be ever so much more helpful than some poor doctor trying, in a scheduled hour, to disentangle that &lt;strong&gt;soul&lt;/strong&gt; of hers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How nice to say she had one.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had one. Oh stained a little and dirtied a little and cheap a little. But she had one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White and fluttery?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;White and fluttery and from the hand of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was delighted. A &lt;strong&gt;soul&lt;/strong&gt;: an actual &lt;strong&gt;soul&lt;/strong&gt;. No one, in years, had used the word. Were souls coming back, like &lt;strong&gt;mahjong&lt;/strong&gt;? But it was such a waste, wasn't it, to have bothered giving her &lt;strong&gt;one&lt;/strong&gt;. so superfluous. It was one of the least necessary things. A &lt;strong&gt;soul&lt;/strong&gt;, how silly. Of what possible use could it be, except to get in the way and trip her, at critical moments, like a nightgown that was a bit too long?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was smiling, with her head somewhat to one side, tracing the rim of the martini glass with her finger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was the trouble: &lt;strong&gt;they&lt;/strong&gt; kept giving you things you didn't need. They never gave you quite what you really needed. Enough guts, for example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Didn't she have her share?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sadly, no. No she didn't. she didn't have nearly enough. &lt;strong&gt;she could use more and more&lt;/strong&gt;. she could use scads of it for what she wanted to do. she'd trade it in: one &lt;strong&gt;soul&lt;/strong&gt;, slightly damaged, for its equivalent in &lt;strong&gt;guts&lt;/strong&gt;. Did I know a buyer? someone interested in second-hand &lt;strong&gt;souls&lt;/strong&gt;? someone who'd care to exchange? Really: she was serious. She was perfectly serious. She'd love to get rid of the damn thing; it was such a nuisance having one, and being expected to take care of it, when really there wasn't time, and there were so many other more important things which needed her constant attention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was I still brooding about the little boy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't get the meaning of the whole context clearly and I think it is because the meaning of the &amp;quot;soul&amp;quot; is unclear to me. Does &amp;quot;soul&amp;quot; in this context mean &amp;quot;one person&amp;quot; or does it mean &amp;quot;her spirits&amp;quot;? it is somehow unclear to me. I think it means &amp;quot;person&amp;quot;, but in the phrase: &amp;quot;to disentangle that soul of hers&amp;quot;, I thought it means &amp;quot;spirits&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of some other words or phrase in this context that I wrote in bold is also unclear to me and maybe because the meaning of the word &amp;quot;soul&amp;quot; is unclear to me. Does &amp;quot;delousing station&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;somewhere without bad people&amp;quot;? Does &amp;quot;guts&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;courage&amp;quot; and the writer is saying &amp;quot;some man who the girl become friend with give her courage&amp;quot;? The meaning of &amp;quot;did she have her shire?&amp;quot; is really unclear to me. Does it mean &amp;quot;some courage that she get&amp;quot;? I don't know whom &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; refers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Could you interpret this for me?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I asked this question in ell.stackexchange with another title and they guide me to ask my question in this forum)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11834" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-09T19:02:50.610" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T23:15:13.267" Title="What does &quot;soul&quot; mean in &quot;My Face for the World to See&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;my-face-for-the-world-to-see&gt;&lt;alfred-hayes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17105" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T04:46:02.453" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T04:46:02.453" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T04:46:02.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17106" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T04:46:02.453" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature which were originally written in the Filipino language, regardless whether they were written or published in the Philippines or elsewhere." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T07:17:56.667" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T07:17:56.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17107" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T05:00:48.773" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T05:00:48.773" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T05:00:48.773" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17108" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T05:00:48.773" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book &quot;A Shortened History of England&quot; by G.M. Trevelyan. Use with [g-m-trevelyan]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T11:42:46.363" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T11:42:46.363" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17109" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T05:04:42.293" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T05:04:42.293" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T05:04:42.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17110" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T05:04:42.293" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;My Face for the World to See&quot; by Alfred Hayes. Use with [alfred-hayes]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T11:42:53.477" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T11:42:53.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17111" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17090" CreationDate="2021-01-10T07:54:16.243" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Temporal sphere&lt;/em&gt; means secular matters as opposed to the &lt;em&gt;spiritual sphere&lt;/em&gt;, which concerns religious ones. Trevelyan is contrasting the absolutist spiritual sphere, where the Roman Catholic church was the only dogma and the Pope the highest authority, with the relativist temporal one. In medieval England, the monarchy was not absolute. The barons had asserted their power and forced King John to sign of the Magna Carta in 1215. The balance of power between the king and the barons asserted in the Magna Carta meant that the king could not, for example, levy taxes against the barons without their consent, and in turn the barons were obligated to support the king. Unlike in the spiritual sphere, temporal power was thus &lt;em&gt;distributed&lt;/em&gt; over the kingdom, with the king's court and various barons exercising it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;You are on the right track with &lt;em&gt;letters&lt;/em&gt;, but it means more than just the ability to read. It involves a literary education and encompasses all the liberal arts: philosophy, history, and rhetoric, for example. Many universities in the US, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://al.nd.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Notre Dame&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://cal.sdsu.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;San Diego State University&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://cal.msu.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michigan State University&lt;/a&gt; have a &lt;em&gt;College of Arts and Letters&lt;/em&gt;. Arts and Letters would typically cover the studio and performing arts as well as the humanities—anything other than social sciences, pure sciences, mathematics, engineering, or medicine. So when Trevelyan references &lt;em&gt;pure intellect and letters&lt;/em&gt;, he is speaking of what we would call an intellectual history, studying either the state of the arts and sciences within a particular historical period or their evolution over time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T08:14:46.203" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T08:14:46.203" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17112" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17087" CreationDate="2021-01-10T10:15:56.223" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17103/3003&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt;, Peter Shor has set out the wording in the text of &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt; that suggests the identification of the mourners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But we don’t have to rely only on the &lt;em&gt;text&lt;/em&gt;: there is also the &lt;em&gt;epitext&lt;/em&gt;, the “textual materials that derive from a published work, e.g. reviews, interviews, etc., that contextualize the work and shape its public reception” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). In the case of &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt; there is a tradition of interpretation that we can look at: in particular, as soon as the poem was published, reviewers were confident in identifying Byron and Moore:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the course of the poem some living writers are introduced, among whom Lord Byron is designated as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pilgrim of Eternity, whose fame&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Over his living head like Heaven is bent&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An early but enduring monument!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet of Ireland† is called, with equal brevity: and felicity,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1822). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sim_examiner-a-weekly-paper-on-politics-literature-music_1822-07-07_757/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Mr Shelley’s New Poem, Entitled Adonais&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Examiner&lt;/em&gt;, number 757, 7th July 1822, p. 420.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† See below for evidence that “poet of Ireland” refers to Moore.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This shows that Shelley’s hints in &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt; were sufficiently clear for his contemporary readers, even if these hints seem obscure at a distance of two centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shelley himself confirmed that Byron is mentioned in the text, though he did not say explicitly where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Byron—I suppose from modesty &lt;strong&gt;on account of his being mentioned in it&lt;/strong&gt;—did not say a word of “Adonais”, though he was loud in his praise of “Prometheus Unbound”: and, what you will not agree with him in, censure of “The Cenci.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Percy Bysshe Shelley (26th August 1821). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.54181/page/n443/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Leigh Hunt&lt;/a&gt;. In Roger Ingpen, ed. (1914). &lt;em&gt;Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 910. London: G. Bell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other writers took up “pilgrim of eternity” as a sobriquet for Byron, indicating that they too understood Shelley to be referring to him in &lt;em&gt;Adonais&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Byron&lt;/strong&gt;, had I met him, instead of sending Finlay, would have been at Salona now. His name was the means chiefly of raising the loan in England. Thousands of people were flocking here: some had arrived as far as Corfu, and hearing of his death, confessed they came out to devote their fortunes, not to the Greeks or interest in the cause, but to the noble poet; and the &lt;strong&gt;pilgrim of eternity&lt;/strong&gt; having departed, they turned back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edward Trelawny (29th April 1824). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.35400/page/330/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Leicester Stanhope&lt;/a&gt;. In Leicester Stanhope (1824). &lt;em&gt;Greece in 1823 and 1824: Being a Series of Letters and Other Documents on the Greek Revolution&lt;/em&gt;, p. 331. London: Sherwood, Jones and Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In our days it [Corinth] has still been a scene of contest: “Corinth is taken, and the Greeks have gained a battle in the Archipelago,” says Lord &lt;strong&gt;Byron&lt;/strong&gt;, in a letter to Mr. Kinnaird, written in Greece a few months only before the warrior poet had become the “&lt;strong&gt;Pilgrim of Eternity&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Brockedon (1833). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/findensillustra03brocgoog/page/n158/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Finden's Illustrations of the Life and Works of Lord Byron&lt;/em&gt;, volume I&lt;/a&gt;. London: John Murray.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can I be confident that by “poet of Ireland” the anonymous reviewer in &lt;em&gt;The Examiner&lt;/em&gt;, quoted above, meant “Thomas Moore”? Well, this phrase was a common sobriquet for Moore, meaning that he put the national sentiments of Ireland into verse. There was even a minor critical controversy over whether he deserved this name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This piece [‘The Tear’], which were we to call merely beautiful, it would reflect little credit on our poetical taste, is from the pen of &lt;strong&gt;Thomas Moore&lt;/strong&gt;, the celebrated living &lt;strong&gt;poet of Ireland&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Peter Forbes (1816). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pocketencyclope00songgoog/page/n48/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Pocket Encyclopedia of Scottish, English, and Irish Songs&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 37&lt;/a&gt;. Glasgow: Andrew &amp;amp; James Duncan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like you I admire the lively and graceful genius of this man; like you I appreciate the amiable temperament and dispositions which lend a charm to his verses, more touching than any thing which liveliness, grace, and genius alone could confer; but I cannot consent for a moment to class Mr &lt;strong&gt;Moore&lt;/strong&gt; with the great poets of England—no more can I persuade myself that he is likely to go down to posterity as the national &lt;strong&gt;poet of Ireland&lt;/strong&gt;. The claim which has lately been set up for him† is one of no trifling import, it would not only assign to him a share of the same magnificent honours which have of right descended to Byron, Wordsworth, and Campbell, but mingle with his laurels another wreath such as the grateful affection of your own country has already woven for Scott and Burns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‘Baron von Lauerwinkel’‡ (1818). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.68198/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Remarks on the Poetry of Thomas Moore&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, October 1818, p. 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† That is, although the critic objects to the sobriquet, he admits that it is widely applied to Moore. ‡ A pseudonym of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gibson_Lockhart&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Gibson Lockhart&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He [Pierre-Jean de Béranger] has been compared to &lt;strong&gt;Moore&lt;/strong&gt;, which is doing much injustice to the national &lt;strong&gt;poet of Ireland&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1823). ‘French Poets of the Present Day’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.30749/page/n519/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, May 1823, p. 514&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T15:44:34.450" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T15:44:34.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17113" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16652" CreationDate="2021-01-10T16:31:54.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;It comes from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Dorothy_Nevill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Dorothy Nevill&lt;/a&gt;'s book &lt;em&gt;Under Five Reigns&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This book was edited by her son Ralph Nevill and first published in 1910. The &amp;quot;Introductory Note&amp;quot; establishes the purpose of the book: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;further notes&#xA;and letters connected with the social life of the Victorian and Edwardian eras&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. The full text is &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/underfivereigns00neviuoft/underfivereigns00neviuoft_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available from the Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; and can also be read &lt;a href=&quot;https://forgottenbooks.com/it/download/UnderFiveReigns_10194203.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in PDF form from Forgotten Books&lt;/a&gt;. Here is the quote you seek, in its original setting with the context of the paragraphs immediately before and after it, from the section &amp;quot;Conversationalists&amp;quot; in Chapter V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As regards conversation in general, there is a good&#xA;deal more of it than formerly, though the quality&#xA;has, I think, deteriorated. In old days a number&#xA;of people kept practically silent and listened ; now&#xA;every one talks, or tries to talk, and no one seems&#xA;to devote any particular attention to what is said,&#xA;their main endeavour being to get in a word them-&#xA;selves. At the same time it must be acknowledged&#xA;that the range of subjects discussed is far wider, and&#xA;people have a greater number of interests than in&#xA;old days, when collecting and artistic tastes, now so&#xA;popular, were looked upon, more or less, as being&#xA;highly eccentric fads.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real art of conversation is not only to say&#xA;the right thing in the right place, but, far more&#xA;difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at&#xA;the tempting moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The professional conversationalist of the past&#xA;was at best rather a contemptible figure — when&#xA;I say professional conversationalist, I refer to people&#xA;who were asked out to dine on the tacit understanding&#xA;that they should amuse the other guests. I am not&#xA;speaking of conversationalists of the type of Bernal&#xA;Osborne, whose flow of talk sprang from his own&#xA;natural vivacity. Up to about forty or fifty years&#xA;ago there still survived a class which somewhat&#xA;approximated to the jesters of the Middle Ages,&#xA;who were expected to amuse the company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was eventually lucky enough to find this, after searching through full texts of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60178/60178-h/60178-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Leaves from the Note-Books of Lady Dorothy Nevill&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/lifelettersoflad00neviiala/lifelettersoflad00neviiala_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life &amp;amp; Letters of Lady Dorothy Nevill&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; without success. Exeter University's &lt;a href=&quot;http://hardyandheritage.exeter.ac.uk/2016/08/the-real-art-of-conversation-is-not-only-to-say-the-right-thing-at-the-right-place-but-to-leave-unsaid-the-wrong-thing-at-the-tempting-moment-d-nevill/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hardy and Heritage&lt;/a&gt; site attributes the quote to Nevill during a page about her correspondence with Thomas Hardy. Ultimately, the web search which led me to the correct source &lt;em&gt;Under Five Reigns&lt;/em&gt; was &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;nevill&amp;quot; &amp;quot;hardy&amp;quot; to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment -quote&lt;/code&gt; but that might have been pure luck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T16:31:54.333" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17114" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16327" CreationDate="2021-01-10T16:59:19.407" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've found something almost exactly identical to the quote you're looking for, but it's much newer than the US Founding Fathers; it comes from &lt;strong&gt;Aldous Huxley's &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;, Chapter II:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, this quote has a very dark meaning: hypnopædia (sleep-teaching) is being used to indoctrinate young children with the &amp;quot;correct&amp;quot; beliefs and norms of the society, such as that people from different castes shouldn't mix together. The very next paragraph emphasises the meaning of the metaphor about water and wax:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too--all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides--made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!' The Director almost shouted in his triumph. 'Suggestions from the State.' He banged the nearest table.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that Huxley took this idea from some writings of the Founding Fathers, and made a dark twisted version of it for his Brave New World, but I couldn't find any earlier quote or reference to this exact idea (water versus wax dripping on a rock).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T16:59:19.407" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17115" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15256" CreationDate="2021-01-10T17:18:10.750" Score="2" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The source is Joseph Conrad's &lt;em&gt;Notes on Life and Letters&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of this work, published in 1921 a few years before Conrad's death, is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1143/1143-h/1143-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; and also at Online-Literature.com; the relevant section is entitled &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/conrad/notes-life-and-letters/5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Anatole France—1904&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the 5th section of &amp;quot;Letters&amp;quot;, the first half of the book. I quote the full paragraph here for context, with the relevant part bolded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dignity will suffer no diminution in M. Anatole France’s hands.  He is worthy of a great tradition, learned in the lessons of the past, concerned with the present, and as earnest as to the future as a good prince should be in his public action.  It is a Republican dignity.  And M. Anatole France, with his sceptical insight into an forms of government, is a good Republican.  He is indulgent to the weaknesses of the people, and perceives that political institutions, whether contrived by the wisdom of the few or the ignorance of the many, are incapable of securing the happiness of mankind.  He perceives this truth in the serenity of his soul and in the elevation of his mind.  He expresses his convictions with measure, restraint and harmony, which are indeed princely qualities.  &lt;strong&gt;He is a great analyst of illusions.  He searches and probes their innermost recesses as if they were realities made of an eternal substance.  And therein consists his humanity; this is the expression of his profound and unalterable compassion.&lt;/strong&gt;  He will flatter no tribe no section in the forum or in the market-place.  His lucid thought is not beguiled into false pity or into the common weakness of affection.  He feels that men born in ignorance as in the house of an enemy, and condemned to struggle with error and passions through endless centuries, should be spared the supreme cruelty of a hope for ever deferred.  He knows that our best hopes are irrealisable; that it is the almost incredible misfortune of mankind, but also its highest privilege, to aspire towards the impossible; that men have never failed to defeat their highest aims by the very strength of their humanity which can conceive the most gigantic tasks but leaves them disarmed before their irremediable littleness.  He knows this well because he is an artist and a master; but he knows, too, that only in the continuity of effort there is a refuge from despair for minds less clear-seeing and philosophic than his own.  Therefore he wishes us to believe and to hope, preserving in our activity the consoling illusion of power and intelligent purpose.  He is a good and politic prince.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching Google for &lt;code&gt;joseph conrad &amp;quot;analyst of illusions&amp;quot;&lt;/code&gt;. The top result was this question on Literature SE; the second result was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/24634080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article about Conrad and France&lt;/a&gt; citing the quote to &amp;quot;NLL, 33&amp;quot;; the fourth result was the above Online-Literature.com link with the sourced quote and context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T17:18:10.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17116" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17294" CreationDate="2021-01-10T19:43:09.700" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this somewhere in the early 90s, from a paperback book, in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would have sworn that this was one of the stories in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1581696.Alfred_Hitchcock_s_Sinister_Spies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Hitchcock's &lt;em&gt;Sinister Spies&lt;/em&gt; collection&lt;/a&gt;, as I remember it being in a Hitchcock collection and that's the only anthology I've found of spies, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1391173484?book_show_action=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;none of the summaries&lt;/a&gt; look familiar. The basic premise is that a code book (military, I think) is being kept in a securely locked safe so that spies can't get at it. At some point, the protagonists hear a series of clunking sounds from the room with the safe, but when they check, the safe is still safely locked. It transpires that they discover that the spy got into the room above and was using an electromagnet to turn the pages of the book while they used an X-Ray camera to photograph the pages inside the safe, and they get away with it. The kicker is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The codebook pages were in the form of photographs which were erased by the X-Rays, making the theft worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I remember from the other stories is something involving a walking stick and a grenade on a door-handle to hamper pursuit, the idea being that the grenade's pin had been pulled, and the grenade lodged in a way that opening the door would set it off, with the protagonists instead escaping through a window.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T21:18:45.493" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T05:38:59.057" Title="Spy story involving a strong magnet, a ludicrously precise X-Ray machine, and a code book" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17117" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17104" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:22:39.683" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the excerpt, it seems an argument could be made that &amp;quot;soul&amp;quot; refers to some sort of ethicality - (moral) cleanliness and purity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mention of a psychiatrist suggests some manner of mental illness. This could be from trauma or psychological disorder. White is a colour that generally represents purity and goodness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally, the mention of God, combined with the talk of a &amp;quot;delousing station,&amp;quot; suggests that we might turn to biblical interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Exo 8:16-19, one of the Plagues of Egypt was lice. On a basic level we can assume this further supports some kind of manifestation of evil. Lice are also small and difficult to find; this suggests that the woman is plagued by some sort of indeterminate evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems overall as though the woman is struggling internally with &amp;quot;good and evil.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if the part about the &amp;quot;gut&amp;quot; has anything to do with biblical sayings related to consumption, gluttony, and material desire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11835" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:22:39.683" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:32:51.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:32:51.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:32:51.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:32:51.780" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Joyce Rachelle or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:45:43.870" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:45:43.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17120" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:38:14.050" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:38:14.050" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:38:14.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17121" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:38:14.050" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of G.M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:45:40.253" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:45:40.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17122" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:41:21.780" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:41:21.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:41:21.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17123" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-10T21:41:21.780" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of poet Enrique Villasis or his life as a writer. Questions about his works originally published in Filipino should be tagged with [filipino-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-10T21:45:47.867" LastActivityDate="2021-01-10T21:45:47.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17124" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-11T01:08:07.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T01:08:07.397" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T01:08:07.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17125" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-11T01:08:07.397" Score="0" Body="Questions about the poem &quot;Adonais&quot;, a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Should be tagged with [percy-bysshe-shelley]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T19:34:21.520" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T19:34:21.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17126" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17102" CreationDate="2021-01-11T11:45:36.420" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Shaw was inspired by Shakespeare specifically in writing this line.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shaw on Shakespeare&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shaw's opinion of Shakespeare, in general, is somewhat complicated. He's well known for being openly critical of the immense prestige given to Shakespeare in the field of English literature, and has written as negatively about him as the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are moments when one asks despairingly why our stage should ever have been cursed with this “immortal” pilferer of other men’s stories and ideas, with his monstrous rhetorical fustian, his unbearable platitudes, his pretentious reduction of the subtlest problems of life to commonplaces against which a Polytechnic debating club would revolt, his incredible unsuggestiveness, his sententious combination of ready reflection with complete intellectual sterility, and his consequent incapacity for getting out of the depth of even the most ignorant audience, except when he solemnly says something so transcendently platitudinous that his more humble-minded hearers cannot bring themselves to believe that so great a man really meant to talk like their grandmothers. With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him, knowing as I do how incapable he and his worshippers are of understanding any less obvious form of indignity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shaw coined the term &amp;quot;Bardolatry&amp;quot; to describe those afflicted with an excessive hero-worship of Shakespeare and his writing. Some of his works attempt to improve on Shakespeare's, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_and_Cleopatra_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Caesar and Cleopatra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymbeline_Refinished&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cymbeline Refinished&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. He even wrote a comical puppet play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakes_versus_Shav&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Shakes versus Shav&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in which the characters of Shakespeare and Shaw meet each other and engage in a fistfight followed by a debate in which Shaw tries to diminish the value of Shakespeare's contribution to English literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Shaw also campaigned for the creation of a Shakespeare National Theatre, along with the London Shakespeare League, and even wrote a short play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Lady_of_the_Sonnets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Lady of the Sonnets&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, featuring Shakespeare as a character, in support of this campaign. It's noted by &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2018/05/01/george-bernard-shaw-on-shakespeare/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trey Graham writing for the Folger Shakespeare Library&lt;/a&gt; that Shaw's negative views on Shakespeare may have been exaggerated for provocative effect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shaw was also famously a bombastic old curmudgeon (even in his youth), a genius gadfly given to making outrageous claims to get an audience’s attention, then using his peerless wit and erudition to make a watertight case for the more measured position he’d actually come to argue. (Or the opposite position: Shaw is forever giving equal time to the opponents of his own ideas.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeed he would over the course of his long life shower much praise on Shakespear, to use the spelling Shaw preferred, and would even lend his name and pen to the earliest efforts to establish a national theater in England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Shaw wasn't afraid to directly cannibalise Shakespeare plays, but what about taking inspiration from Shakespeare in terms of language style? Well, the master's thesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.meu.edu.jo/libraryTheses/5adc59f9407d6_1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eman Mahmud Ayesh El-Abweni, &amp;quot;Syntactic Changes in English between the Seventeenth Century and the Twentieth Century as Represented in Two Literary Works: William Shakespeare's Play &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt; and George Bernard Shaw's Play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (Middle East University, Jordan, 2018&lt;/a&gt; shows in detail that there was a noticeable difference between the writing of Shakespeare and Shaw in terms of syntax and English style. That's natural, but how about specific passages written in a more flowery style? Shaw wasn't a fan of Shakespeare's &amp;quot;rhetorical fustian&amp;quot;, but would he make his own characters employ it in specific circumstances?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The evidence you've provided in your question is pretty thin for any connection between Shaw and Shakespeare in the quoted line. You suggest that character &amp;quot;speak[ing] poetically&amp;quot; suggests the influence of Shakespeare, but he was hardly the only writer in the history of English literature to use poetic flowery language! Why would you guess at inspiration from Shakespeare specifically, rather than any other English playwright, poet, or writer? In fact, even Shaw's usual language that you describe as &amp;quot;quite normal&amp;quot; is still more flowery and poetic than what we commonly see in most literature published today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're right that the &amp;quot;affianced bride&amp;quot; line is written in a much more formal and poetic style than most of the dialogue in &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;, but it's not the only time in the play that Sergius speaks in such a style. For example, earlier in the play (to Raina):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have gone through the war like a knight in a tournament with his lady looking on at him! [...] Let me be the worshipper, dear. You little know how unworthy even the best man is of a girl’s pure passion!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He speaks of having found &amp;quot;the higher love&amp;quot; with Raina, and even though in the end he falls out of love with her, the &amp;quot;knight in a tournament&amp;quot; line may suggest a possible source of inspiration for his poetic style of speaking to the girl(s) he loves: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivalric_romance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chivalric romance&lt;/a&gt;, which pre-dates Shakespeare both in origin and in setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of the word &amp;quot;affianced&amp;quot; is what strikes me the most as being archaic in that line. This word is used three times in &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;, but a quick &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=affianced&amp;amp;year_start=1590&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams search&lt;/a&gt; (from the start of Shakespeare's writing career to the present) indicates that the time of greatest popularity of this word was actually in the 19th century, during Shaw's lifetime. It might not have seemed like such an archaic term to him - or if it did, more as in &amp;quot;a word like my parents/grandparents would have used&amp;quot; than &amp;quot;a word Shakespeare would have used&amp;quot;. (On a side note, apparently &amp;quot;affianced&amp;quot; is growing in popularity again in the 2010s, to a level not seen since the 1910s. I've no idea why.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite natural for characters to adopt a more flowery and poetic style when they're speaking to the target of their romantic affection. It happens even in the real world. Why do you think so much poetry is about love? Why do so many people even today make a big special occasion to propose to their partner, the kind of thing that might look over-the-top and silly if it was done for any other occasion? It makes sense that Sergius would speak more poetically when he's talking to Raina (earlier) or Louka (later) about his love for her. Occam's razor would suggest this as the simplest and most likely explanation for the flowery language in the line you quote. Inspiration from chivalric romance or even from Shakespeare is also possible, but there's no particularly compelling evidence for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T11:45:36.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17127" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17128" CreationDate="2021-01-11T14:46:01.910" Score="1" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a man was talking about the library of a Canadian rural township:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, the township can select the books if it likes, or it can send a committee to select them; but they didn’t think it worth the trouble and expense. People grumbled enough at wasting money on books as it was, even if they did buy them at half price. Still, others said it was a pity not to get the money out of the Government when they had the chance. I don’t believe any of them cared very much about the books, except father and a few others. So the Government chose the books. They’ll do that if you leave it to them. And a queer lot of trash they sent, if you take my word for it. I believe they shoved off on us all the things no one else would buy. Even when they did pick out novels, they were just as tough as the history books. ‘Adam Bede’ is one. They say that’s a novel. I tried it, but I would rather read the history of Josephus any day. &lt;strong&gt;There’s some fighting in that, if it is a history&lt;/strong&gt;. Then there’s any amount of biography books. They’re no good.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't get the meaning of this whole statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T15:04:37.647" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T15:26:38.123" Title="What does &quot;There’s some fighting in that, if it is a history&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17128" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17127" CreationDate="2021-01-11T15:26:38.123" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It seems that Howard finds it entertaining to read stories that include fighting.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is that the speaker, a young man named Howard, is speaking to Renmark, a stranger to the area, about their local library and its selection of books. He is evidently not much of a connoisseur of literature, judging from his remark &amp;quot;They say that's a novel&amp;quot;. He disdains books such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Bede&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Adam Bede&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (a pastoral novel of George Eliot set in rural England) - for him it's &amp;quot;as tough&amp;quot; as a history book, and indeed he would prefer to read some history books such as those of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Josephus&lt;/a&gt;, since at least they contain &amp;quot;some fighting&amp;quot;. Like many young men, perhaps, he finds it more interesting to read about ancient battles and wars than about countryside love affairs. This is the intent of the sentence you've bolded: it directly follows &amp;quot;I would rather read the history of Josephus any day&amp;quot; and is intended as an explanation of that: at least a history book will have &amp;quot;some fighting in [it]&amp;quot;, unlike novels such as &lt;em&gt;Adam Bede&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T15:26:38.123" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9701" CreationDate="2021-01-11T15:38:50.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;What makes Sammy think: &amp;quot;Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn't help it&amp;quot; has nothing to do with his own reaction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't only Sammy and McMahon that were entranced by the situation.&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Everyone&lt;/em&gt; in the store was too, male or female:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sheep [other customers] pushing their carts down the aisle […] were pretty hilarious.&#xA;You could see them, when Queenie's white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed.&#xA;I bet you could set off dynamite in an A&amp;amp;P and the people would by and large keep reaching and checking oatmeal off their lists and muttering &amp;quot;Let me see, there was a third thing, began with A, asparagus, no, ah, yes, applesauce!&amp;quot; or whatever it is they do mutter.&#xA;But there was no doubt, this jiggled them.&#xA;A few house-slaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A&amp;amp;P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[…] our town is five miles from a beach, with a big summer colony out on the Point, but we're right in the middle of town, and the women generally put on a shirt or shorts or something before they get out of the car into the street.&#xA;And anyway these are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs and nobody, including them, could care less.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girls are &lt;em&gt;so&lt;/em&gt; out of place here that it's impossible for anyone not to notice and react.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In particular, the Manager finally notices them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He comes over and says, &amp;quot;Girls, this isn't the beach.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;But this isn't the beach.&amp;quot;&#xA;His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it had just occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A&amp;amp;P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling — as I say he doesn't miss much — but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Queenie's blush is no sunburn now,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;That makes no difference,&amp;quot; Lengel tells her, and I could see from the way his eyes went that he hadn't noticed she was wearing a two-piece before. &amp;quot;We want you decently dressed when you come in here.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;We are decent,&amp;quot; Queenie says suddenly, her lower lip pushing, getting sore […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sammy feels sorry because of the &amp;quot;they couldn't help it&amp;quot; aspect, their being so clueless about the situation they had created.&#xA;That is why, despite their naïvely causing embarrassment to everyone in the store, he reacts when the Manager deliberately causes embarrassment to them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now here comes the sad part of the story, at least my family says it's sad but I don't think it's sad myself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T15:38:50.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17130" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-11T16:25:09.127" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T16:25:09.127" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T16:25:09.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17131" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-11T16:25:09.127" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alfred Hayes (1911-1985), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-11T19:34:17.380" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T19:34:17.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17132" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14955" CreationDate="2021-01-11T17:20:24.377" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the last paragraph of chapter 3 (of the 1823 edition), when Frankenstein was on the verge of completing his work, he was “oppressed with a slow fever” making him “nervous to a most painful degree”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The leaves of that year had withered before my work drew near to a close, and now every day showed me more plainly how well I had succeeded. But my enthusiasm was checked by my anxiety, and I appeared rather like one doomed by slavery to toil in the mines, or any other unwholesome trade than an artist occupied by his favourite employment. Every night I was &lt;strong&gt;oppressed by a slow fever&lt;/strong&gt;, and I became &lt;strong&gt;nervous to a most painful degree&lt;/strong&gt;; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime. Sometimes I grew alarmed at the wreck I perceived that I had become; the energy of my purpose alone sustained me: my labours would soon end, and I believed that exercise and amusement would then drive away incipient disease; and I promised myself both of these when my creation should be complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mary Shelley (1823). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/frankensteinorm00brangoog/page/n112/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, pp. 94–96&lt;/a&gt;. London: G. and W. B. Whittaker.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first paragraph of chapter 4, the creature came to life in the early morning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/frankensteinorm00brangoog/page/n114/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shelley, pp. 97–98&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankenstein fled from the creature, and “wretchedly” passed the remainder of the night “in the courtyard”. Too afraid to return to his apartment, he wandered the streets, where he met Clerval descending from a coach. With Clerval’s moral support he plucked up the courage to brave the ascent, and found the creature was gone. The “nervous fever” which Frankenstein then succumbed to was presumably a continuation or worsening of the “slow fever” from chapter 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to adequately explain the paragraph quoted at the head of the question. “Date” means “determine or specify the date or time of an event” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), and “the time that I dated my creation” means “the time, that I determined [to be] the date of my creation”, not (as wrongly interpreted in the question) “the time &lt;em&gt;at which&lt;/em&gt; I determined the date of my creation”, so Frankenstein means that he was seized by the “nervous fever” on the same day that the creature came to life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Normally one would use “dated &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt;” if this were the meaning, but Shelley has structured the sentence with a relative clause (“the time that I dated my creation [to]”) and it is common to omit the preposition in a relative clause after “time” (and some other words, such as “manner” and “way”), for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the time that the unjust man doth thrive [in] (William Shakespeare, &lt;em&gt;The Winter’s Tale&lt;/em&gt; IV.4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T10:18:04.210" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T10:18:04.210" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17134" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17136" CreationDate="2021-01-11T19:48:03.343" Score="3" ViewCount="208" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second quatrain of William Cowper's poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://markandrewholmes.com/solitude-selkirk.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O Solitude! where are the charms&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That sages have seen in thy face?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Better dwell in the midst of alarms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than reign in this horrible place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Selkirk#In_other_literary_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;well known&lt;/a&gt; for giving rise to the common English phrase &amp;quot;monarch of all I survey&amp;quot;, but the lesser-known phrase &amp;quot;in the midst of alarms&amp;quot; has also inspired the titles of at least two other works: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Barr's novel&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://academic.oup.com/jah/article/95/2/522/708390&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dianne Graves's historical study&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was this particular phrase used? What about this choice of words appealed to the writer or made the poem more impactful? Specifically, the word &amp;quot;alarms&amp;quot; seems like a strange choice from a modern point of view: nowadays, it gives an impression of cacophonous noise (alarm clocks, car alarms, burglar alarms), but at the time of Cowper's writing, perhaps it was more commonly used, even as a count noun, in the sense of a feeling of danger. What exactly does &amp;quot;alarms&amp;quot; mean here, and why was this word chosen (apart from rhyme and metre) rather than something like &amp;quot;fear&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;danger&amp;quot; etc.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T23:35:20.660" Title="Why &quot;in the midst of alarms&quot; in William Cowper's poem &quot;The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;william-cowper&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17135" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17104" CreationDate="2021-01-11T23:15:13.267" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A delousing station would generally be a place that gets rid of your &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/louse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lice&lt;/a&gt; (small insects that live in your hair). However, in this extract, it seems to means a place that will stop you from being a louse (a contemptible or unpleasant person) yourself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;em&gt;delousing station&lt;/em&gt; is wordplay on the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;louse.&lt;/em&gt; The same thing is true for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/soul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;soul&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; — the various usages of the word &lt;em&gt;soul&lt;/em&gt; mean different things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One meaning of &lt;em&gt;soul&lt;/em&gt; is the part of a person that lives on after death, as opposed to their body (and either goes to heaven or to hell). This is often represented as a &amp;quot;white and fluttery thing.&amp;quot; In folklore, people sometimes &amp;quot;sell their soul to the devil&amp;quot;; this is a deal where they go to Hell after they die in exchange for getting something they want in this life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another meaning is a person's emotional nature — this is presumably what the psychiatrist is treating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a third meaning, if you are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/soulless&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;soulless&lt;/a&gt;, you lack compassion or other human feelings. This is implicit when she talks about getting rid of her soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And guts means courage here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mahjongg means the game ... it presumably went out of fashion, and then was coming back into fashion around the time this was written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For some of your other questions, &amp;quot;how nice to say she had one&amp;quot; refers to her soul; &amp;quot;didn't she have her share&amp;quot; refers to guts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T23:15:13.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17136" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17134" CreationDate="2021-01-11T23:35:20.660" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: William Cowper’s “dwell in the midst of alarms” is a re-working of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wilkie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Wilkie&lt;/a&gt;’s “dwell amidst alarms”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wilkie’s &lt;em&gt;Epigoniad&lt;/em&gt; (1757) was an epic poem in heroic couplets telling the story of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigoni&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epigoni&lt;/a&gt;, the sons of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_against_Thebes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven against Thebes&lt;/a&gt;. The phrase “dwell amidst alarms” appears twice. In book III, the Argive hero &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diomedes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Diomedes&lt;/a&gt; has challenged Leophron, eldest son of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Creon&lt;/a&gt;, king of Thebes, to single combat, and boasted that he will send the Theban prince “to mingle with the dark infernal gloom.” Leophron replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your fear in vain, by boasting, you disguise;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Such vulgar art a novice oft confounds,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To scenes of battle new and martial sounds;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tho’ lost on me, who &lt;strong&gt;dwell amidst alarms&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And never met a greater yet in arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Wilkie (1757). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/epigoniadapoemi01wilgoog/page/n105/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Epigoniad&lt;/em&gt;, p. 59&lt;/a&gt;. Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, &amp;amp; Neill.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leophron means that Diomedes’ boasts have no effect on him, as he is well-accustomed to battle. “Alarm” is used here in one of these senses (both are appropriate to the context):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;alarm, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; B.I.1.&lt;/strong&gt; The call to arms sounded when battle is imminent, either by calling out ‘alarm’ (see sense A.), or by some other signal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;alarm, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; B.II.7.b.&lt;/strong&gt; A moment of emergency or crisis, (in early use) esp. in which a group of soldiers, citizens, etc., are under attack and must rally to defend themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In book IV, Nestor, king of Pylos, appeals for a truce to hold funeral rites for the slain, and employs the phrase with a similar meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well have you heard the various ills that wait&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On strife prolong’d, and war’s disastrous state:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And they who choose to &lt;strong&gt;dwell amidst alarms&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The rage of slaughter and the din of arms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Know little of the joys, when combats cease,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That crown with milder bliss the hours of peace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/epigoniadapoemi01wilgoog/page/n157/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilkie, p. 111&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cowper’s ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.461665/page/n313/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Verses supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk During His Solitary Abode in the Island of Juan Fernandez&lt;/a&gt;’ was first published in 1782, some 25 years after the &lt;em&gt;Epigoniad&lt;/em&gt;. Cowper had to re-work the phrase for metrical reasons: the &lt;em&gt;Epigoniad&lt;/em&gt; is in iambs, but ‘Alexander Selkirk’ is in anapests.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-11T23:35:20.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17137" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11835" CreationDate="2021-01-12T14:35:00.723" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The 'ceremony of innocence' is baptism, the ceremony that takes place at the baptismal font, a time of rejoicing. At this baptism, however, it is anything but a joyous occasion as the baptism of innocence is itself 'baptized&amp;quot;, drowned in the blood-dimmed tide of mere anarchy that has been loosed upon the world. Powerful imagery, and regrettably, all too appropriate for our time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11846" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T14:35:00.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-12T16:33:12.870" Score="2" ViewCount="79" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a34491780/the-witches-roald-dahl-antisemitism/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; which suggested that Roald Dahl's &lt;em&gt;The Witches&lt;/em&gt; is basically a work of anti-Semitism. Now I am aware of Roald's own apparent/alleged anti-Semitism but this is a question specifically about &lt;em&gt;The Witches&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the whole story is founded on deeply antisemitic tropes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading through the article, the links seem very tenuous. The evidence presented is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A global conspiracy of child murderers&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wigs&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Big noses&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wealth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me this seems like a ridiculous attempt to link a few mild coincidences: wealth global conspiracies and child murder are pretty generic horror / dystopian-world tropes as well. Big noses? As far as I remember, the witches are described as having slightly odd-looking nostrils, not big noses, and the wigs thing appears to be grasping at straws (e.g. I don't recall a stereotype of a Jewish bald woman).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Granted the article appears to be more about the movie than the book, but it puts the blame squarely on Roald Dahl, to the extent of almost excusing Robert Zemeckis, so the implication is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it a commonly held interpretation that Witches are a hint at Jews? Or, has Dahl himself, or anyone connected to him admitted or suggested it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7907" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T16:28:56.870" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T16:28:56.870" Title="Is there an anti-semitic subtext in Roald Dahl's The Witches?" Tags="&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;roald-dahl&gt;&lt;the-witches&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17141" CreationDate="2021-01-12T17:30:09.330" Score="2" ViewCount="265" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a man was afraid of riding a horse for the first time in his life, but he was eventually convinced to do that with some worry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates mounted with some difficulty, and the two went trotting down the road. He managed to hold his place with some little uncertainty, but the joggling up and down worried him. He never seemed to alight in quite the same place on the horse’s back, and this gave an element of chance to his position which embarrassed him. He expected to come down some time and find the horse wasn’t there. The boy laughed at his riding, but Yates was too much engaged in keeping his position to mind that very much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;D-d-dirt is s-s-said to b-b-be matter out of place, and that’s what’s the m-m-mat-matter w-w-with me.&lt;/strong&gt;” His conversation seemed to be shaken out of him by the trotting of the horse. “I say, Bartlett, I can’t stand this any longer. I’d rather walk.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Does it mean, in this situation, that &amp;quot;the person suffers when he is out of his comfort/knowledge zone&amp;quot;, because he didn't use to ride horses?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-12T21:07:18.187" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T11:43:15.247" Title="What does &quot;Dirt is matter out of place&quot; mean in this situation?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17140" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-12T18:33:59.573" Score="1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, a young boy was describing the place of blacksmith’s shop, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, a couple of miles or so; down at &lt;strong&gt;the Cross Roads&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he said later in another passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We’ll keep it up until we come in sight of &lt;strong&gt;the Corners&lt;/strong&gt;, then we’ll slow down to a walk. There’s sure to be a lot of fellows at the blacksmith’s shop, so we’ll come in on them easy like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was it common in the late 19th century to write normal places, like &amp;quot;cross roads&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;corners&amp;quot; in capital letters?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T07:26:06.390" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T07:26:06.390" Title="Was it common in the late 19th century to write normal places, like &quot;cross roads&quot; and &quot;corners&quot; in capital letters?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17141" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17139" CreationDate="2021-01-12T21:06:54.957" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot; is a phrase apparently originating from Lord Palmerston, but nowadays associated more with Mary Douglas who cited it to Lord Chesterfield.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The origin of this phrase is a fascinating topic! Perhaps much more so than you realised when you asked the question. It's &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/2uGAz.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;commonly attributed&lt;/a&gt; nowadays to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Douglas&lt;/a&gt; and her 1966 anthropology book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_and_Danger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Purity and Danger&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but since Douglas was born decades after the publication of &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;, clearly we must dig deeper. Douglas wrote in her book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since she refers to it as an &amp;quot;old definition&amp;quot;, even without the evidence of &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt; we'd know that this is not a concept original to her. In a volume of field notes compiled during her second trip to study the Lele people in the Belgian Congo in 1953, she attributes a very similar idea to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Stanhope,_4th_Earl_of_Chesterfield&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Chesterfield&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast: idea of dirt, with “good clean mud” etc. Chesterfield “Dirt is any matter displaced” e.g. hair, crowning glory etc. and hair in the soup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And she later attributed her own exact quote, &amp;quot;dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot;, to Chesterfield, in her 1968 essay &amp;quot;Pollution&amp;quot; for the &lt;em&gt;International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences&lt;/em&gt;, later anthologised in the collection of her essays entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PsCYWrGa3qEC&amp;amp;pg=PA109&amp;amp;lpg=PA109&amp;amp;dq=%22Lord+Chesterfield+defined+dirt+as+matter+out+of+place%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Implicit Meanings&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1975)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English-speaking cultures, the key word is the ancient, primitive, and still current 'dirt'. Lord Chesterfield defined dirt as matter out of place. This implies only two conditions, a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This source would certainly pre-date &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;, but in fact Chesterfield too is not the real origin of the idea! A detailed investigation into the origins of &amp;quot;dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot; was done by Richard Fardon, Mary Douglas’s literary executor, in his article &lt;a href=&quot;https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8322.12007&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Citations out of Place&amp;quot; published in &lt;em&gt;Anthropology Today&lt;/em&gt; 29(1) (2013)&lt;/a&gt;. He concludes that Chesterfield did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; write &amp;quot;dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Chesterfield ever write that dirt was matter out of place? Short of reading his every word, I cannot be sure he did not, but it seems unlikely. The &lt;em&gt;Letters to his son on the art of becoming a man of the world and a gentleman&lt;/em&gt; opine that personal cleanliness was a common decency, but he does not do so with the generalizing force, or in the precise terms, that Douglas suggests. While he could not be certain the phrase occurred nowhere in Chesterfield, as a scholar of the eighteenth-century writer, Colin Franklin could not recall it (personal communication).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest written source that Fardon was able to find for this idea was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_John_Temple,_3rd_Viscount_Palmerston&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Palmerston&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), recently Foreign Secretary, soon to be Home Secretary and later Prime Minister, had spoken about urban dirt, ‘During an address to the Royal Agricultural Society in 1852, he said “I have heard a definition of dirt. I have heard it said that dirt is nothing but a thing in a wrong place. Now, the dirt of our towns precisely corresponds with that definition” (Anon 1852, 8).’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is not the exact phrasing &amp;quot;dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot;, but it expresses the same notion, even though Palmerston himself doesn't claim to be the original inventor of the phrase. He did, however, continue using and adapting the phrase in the following years:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Palmerston must have been pleased with both the immediate reaction to his witticism and to its literary uptake, since he used it more than once, and doing so brings his remark half-way closer to the version we know from Douglas when ‘a thing in a wrong place’ becomes ‘matter ... in the wrong place’. The ditty “Our filth and our felons” published in Punch on 3 January 1857, cited it in this form,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Lord Palmerston once, with that off-hand felicity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which belongs to his lordship in stating a case,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To a new definition of “dirt” gave publicity,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As “nothing but matter left in the wrong place.”...’ (1857: 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A year later, Punch for 30 January 1858 reported, ‘Lord Palmerston was the other day repeating the saying which gained him so much approbation in the sewerage debate, namely, that “Dirt was only matter in the wrong place.” The Lord Privy Seal said that it was the rudest speech he had ever heard’ (1858: 47).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fardon's further investigation finds at least a possibility for the origin of dirt being matter &amp;quot;out of place&amp;quot;, rather than Palmerston's &amp;quot;in the wrong place&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William James’s &lt;em&gt;The varieties of religious experience&lt;/em&gt; (the 1901-2 Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh) featured on Mary Douglas’s course outline for ‘Religion, morals and symbolism’ in the early 1970s when I attended her lectures, though I can only guess how much earlier she had read it. James adapts Palmerston’s aphorism (albeit unattributed) in a passage in which he is discussing the ‘gospel of healthy-mindedness’ in its optimistic rejection of the essential character of evil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...] Here we have the interesting notion fairly and squarely presented to us, of there being elements of the universe which may make no rational whole in conjunction with the other elements, and which, from the point of view of any system which those other elements make up, can only be considered so much irrelevance and accident – so much ‘dirt,’ as it were, and matter out of place. (James 1902: 107)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;James’s use of the redolent adjective ‘excrementitious’ to qualify the noun ‘stuff’ leaves no doubt that he was attuned to Palmerston’s original context. Here, finally, we find the canonical Douglas phrasing of the aphorism that ‘dirt is [as it were] matter out of place’. Indeed, this ‘splendid passage’ is quoted in the concluding chapter of Purity and danger (1966 [1984]: 165). So perhaps Douglas absorbed her maxim from James but this fact escaped her when writing the article on ‘Pollution’ (1968) around the same time? A 1952 edition of James’s book is referenced in Purity and danger which might mean a copy of this work was in her possession before she wrote the entry in her 1953 field-notes mentioned at the outset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the history of this phrase is a long and tortuous one: starting perhaps from an unknown pre-Palmerston source (or Palmerston just used &amp;quot;I have heard it said&amp;quot; to make his own phrase sound wise and well-accepted), popularised and adapted by Palmerston, further adapted by James, further popularised by Douglas but misattributed by her to Chesterfield.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What about this phrase's usage in &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the passages quoted above make clear the meaning of &amp;quot;Dirt is matter out of place&amp;quot;: anything can be considered dirty if it's in an inappropriate place, and so &amp;quot;dirt&amp;quot; can be defined as a thing that's &amp;quot;out of place&amp;quot;, not where it's supposed to be. Yates is applying this aphorism, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way, to himself: he is completely &amp;quot;out of place&amp;quot; riding a horse in the countryside, and worth as much as dirt in that situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T21:06:54.957" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17142" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-12T21:21:42.390" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://kiriakakis.net/comics/mused/a-day-at-the-park&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Day at the Park&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is an excellent philosophical comic by Kostas Kiriakakis, featuring two rather odd-looking creatures discussing the merits of questions and answers. (It applies very well to some discussions on Stack Exchange, notably &lt;a href=&quot;https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/11/13/were-rewarding-the-question-askers/?cb=1&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;We're Rewarding the Question Askers&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.) The two main characters, the young one with his questions and the old one with his answers, are almost always the focus of the comic, but a few frames pull out to focus on a passerby, a tall figure with hooved feet &amp;quot;walking&amp;quot; a fish on a leash:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezWsU.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ezWsU.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a small frame zoomed in on the Answerer, another small frame featuring a fish on a leash; a wide frame with the Asker and Answerer in the background and a pair of hooves in the foreground; a small frame with the Asker and Answerer in the foreground and a tall horned figure in the background, a small frame zoomed in on the Answerer&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Do these extra character(s) signify anything?&lt;/strong&gt; Is the figure with horns and hooves supposed to be demonic? What does it mean that the fish is floating in mid-air? Is there any meaning to this beyond an extra feature of the world drawn around the Asker and the Answerer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-12T21:21:42.390" Title="What's the significance of the hoofed figure walking a fish in &quot;A Day at the Park&quot;?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;kostas-kiriakakis&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17140" CreationDate="2021-01-13T02:44:35.677" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't know about this specific book, but they could simply be actual place names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For instance: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_Roads,_Pennsylvania&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cross Roads, Pennsylvania&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nytimes.com/1861/09/01/archives/the-skirmish-near-balls-cross-roads-news-of-the-rebellion-eb.html?auth=login-google&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1861 NYT news article&lt;/a&gt; reports that &amp;quot;The skirmish took place about one mile in advance of the Cross Roads, just this side of the railroad&amp;quot;, referring to a place properly known as &amp;quot;Ball's Cross Roads&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, &amp;quot;The Corners&amp;quot; could be another small settlement, or perhaps the name of a tavern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T02:44:35.677" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17144" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17139" CreationDate="2021-01-13T10:17:17.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this answer I’ll give a possible further antedating of the phrase “dirt is matter out of place”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the speech by Palmerston. As reported by Richard Fardon (&lt;a href=&quot;https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1467-8322.12007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anthropology Today&lt;/em&gt; 29:1, p. 25&lt;/a&gt;), it was given to the Royal Agricultural Society of England on 15th July 1852, and a report published in &lt;em&gt;The Farmer’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt; for August of that year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The toast having been cordially drunk, Lord Palmerston rose, and was received with vociferous applause, which was renewed several times after silence had been established, and when he was about to speak. He said […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But, gentlemen, I cannot but think that the progress of chymical science, and the application of that science to practical agriculture, may lead you to something which will render you less anxious and solicitous about this same guano, and that instead of sending to the other end of the world for more manure for our fields, we shall find something nearly, if not quite, as good within a few hundred yards of our dwellings. (“Hear, hear,” and cheers). Now, gentlemen, I have heard a definition of dirt. &lt;strong&gt;I have heard it said that dirt is nothing but a thing in a wrong place.&lt;/strong&gt; (“Hear,” and laughter). Now, the dirt of our towns precisely corresponds with that definition. (Hear). The dirt of our towns ought to be put upon our fields, and if there could be such a reciprocal community of interest between the country and the towns—that the country should purify the towns, and the towns should fertilize the country (laughter)—I am much disposed to think the British farmer would care less than he does, though he still might care something, about Peruvian guano (Hear, hear, and cheers).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1852). ‘The Great Annual Dinner’. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/farmersmagazine3252lond/page/136/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Farmer’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, August 1852, p. 137&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Palmerston uses “dirt” here as a euphemism for human excrement, and possibly some discomfort with the subject matter was responsible for the variations introduced as the phrase was repeated, according to the delicacy of the writer and their audience. Charles Pearson, for example, used “nuisance” instead of “dirt”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lord Palmerston is reported to have said, “that what is called a nuisance is but matter in a wrong place.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Pearson (1857). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/What_is_to_be_Done_with_Our_Criminals/dw1FAQAAMAAJ?gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PA28&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What is to be done with our criminals?&lt;/em&gt;, p. 28&lt;/a&gt;. London: Arthur Hall.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, a possible source for Palmerston is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Locke&lt;/a&gt;’s translation of an essay by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Nicole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pierre Nicole&lt;/a&gt; on the frailty of man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le moindre vaisseau qui se rompt, ou qui se bouche, interrompant le cours du sang &amp;amp; des humeurs, ruïne l’œconomie de tout le corps. Un petit épanchement de sang dans le cerveau, suffit pour boucher les pores par où les esprits entrent dans les nerfs, &amp;amp; pour arrester tous les mouvemens. Si nous voyions ce qui nous fait mourir, nous en ferions surpris. Ce n’est quelquefois qu’une goute d’humeur étrangere, &lt;strong&gt;qu’une grain de matiere mal placé&lt;/strong&gt;, &amp;amp; cette goute ou ce grain suffit pour renverser tous les delleins ambitieux de ces Conquerans &amp;amp; de ces Maistres du monde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The least vessel cracked, or the smallest passage stopped, hindering the course of the blood and humours, is enough to ruin the whole economy. A little effusion of blood upon the brain, serves to intercept the communication of spirits, and deprive us of motion. If we saw how little a thing puts an end to our lives, we should stand amazed at it. ’Tis no more, sometimes, than a small drop of a disagreeing liquor—&lt;strong&gt;a little grain of matter in a wrong place&lt;/strong&gt;. And yet this drop, this grain, is sufficient to overturn the mighty designs of those great conquerors, those masters of the world—to lay them flat in the dust—make them food for worms;—and, in respect of other men, reduce them to nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Pierre Nicole (1679). ‘De la faiblesse de l’homme’. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essaisdemoraleco00nico/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Essais de morale, contenus en divers traités sur plusieurs devoirs importans&lt;/em&gt;, 5th edition, volume I, p. 18&lt;/a&gt;. Paris: Guillaume Desprez. Translated by John Locke (c. 1680; published 1828). In &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/discoursestransl00nicouoft/page/40/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Discourses: Translated from Nicole’s Essays&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, pp. 40–41. London: Harvey and Darton.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “matter” here would seem to be any substance fatal in a small dose: poison, infection, blood clot, etc. If Locke was not Palmerston’s source, then it may nonetheless have influenced later writers like Pearson in altering “thing” to “matter” as the phrase was repeated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T11:43:15.247" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T11:43:15.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17145" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:34:11.073" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T19:34:11.073" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T19:34:11.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17146" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:34:11.073" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;The Witches&quot; by Roald Dahl. Should be tagged with [roald-dahl]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T21:42:34.243" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T21:42:34.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17147" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:35:20.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T19:35:20.863" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T19:35:20.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17148" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-13T19:35:20.863" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Kostas Kiriakakis or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T21:42:39.270" LastActivityDate="2021-01-13T21:42:39.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17149" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17150" CreationDate="2021-01-13T22:08:28.480" Score="3" ViewCount="107" Body="&lt;p&gt;What kind of sonnet is Sonnet 24 of Philip Sidney's &lt;em&gt;Astrophel and Stella&lt;/em&gt;? Here is the sonnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rich fools there be, whose base and filthy heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lies hatching still the goods wherein they flow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And damning their own selves to Tantal’s smart,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wealth breeding want, more blest, more wretched grow.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet to those fools heaven such wit doth impart,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As what their hands do hold, their heads do know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And knowing, love, and loving, lay apart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As sacred things, far from all danger’s show.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But that rich fool, who by blind fortune’s lot&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The richest gem of love and life enjoys,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And can with foul abuse such beauties blot,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let him, deprived of sweet but unfelt joys,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Exiled for aye from those high treasures which&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He knows not, grow in only folly rich!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like an English sonnet by rhyme scheme, but the last two lines seem like a part of a longer stanza and not a couplet. So is it more like a Petrarchan sonnet?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11859" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-13T22:28:27.083" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T12:51:13.467" Title="What kind of sonnet is Sonnet 24 of Sidney's &quot;Astrophel and Stella&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;astrophel-and-stella&gt;&lt;philip-sidney&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17149" CreationDate="2021-01-13T22:37:39.903" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;rhyme scheme&lt;/strong&gt; is ABAB ABAB CDCD EE, which, superficially at least, corresponds to three quatrains and a couplet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet uses two &amp;quot;closed quatrains&amp;quot; for the first eight lines and typically goes ABBA ABBA CDC CDC or ABBA ABBA CDE CDE (with other variations for the sestet).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rhyme scheme of an English or Shakespearean sonnet typically uses three &amp;quot;open quatrains&amp;quot; followed by a rhyming couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of the rhyme scheme, sonnet 24 looks like a Shakespearean sonnet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the &lt;strong&gt;volta&lt;/strong&gt; comes after the eighth line, like in a Petrarchan sonnet, instead of the twelfth, as in a Shakespearean sonnet. For this reason, the form is somewhere in between the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T12:51:13.467" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T12:51:13.467" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17151" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17155" CreationDate="2021-01-14T08:02:00.303" Score="16" ViewCount="1793" Body="&lt;p&gt;When I was young I used to love Michael Rosen. Don’t put mustard in the custard and lots of silly ones like that. I also remember that there was a darker poem in one of the poem compilation books set on the underground about a boy who fell between the tracks and couldn’t get back up. The train was coming and no one would help him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it’s strange as I can remember a fair bit of the poem (not the name but some of the verses) and I am sure it was Michael Rosen but I can’t find the actual poem anywhere when searching using these specific terms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Down down on the underground&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They can’t see me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I’m down between the tracks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the train is coming&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not in the right order but they get more and more panicked as the trains lights get brighter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the picture of the poem was a tunnel with shadow grownups on the platform and train lights in the distance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it was in a poem compilation so I would ideally like to find the compilation title it was included in as well as the title of the poem itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For reference I would have been reading this approximately 20-25 years ago, in English, in the UK.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T11:16:57.567" Title="Children’s poem about a boy stuck between the tracks on the underground" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17152" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17154" CreationDate="2021-01-14T08:48:37.637" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, a blacksmith, Macdonald, did an embarrassing trick to break the conceit of his New Yorker client in front of the crowd in his smithy, but he failed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macdonald saw there was no triumph over him among his crowd, for they all evidently felt as much involved in the failure of Sandy’s trick as he did himself; but he was sure that in future some man, &lt;strong&gt;hard pushed in argument&lt;/strong&gt;, would &lt;strong&gt;fling the New Yorker at him&lt;/strong&gt;. In the crisis he showed the instinct of a Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, boys,” he cried, “fun’s fun, but I’ve got to work. I have to earn my living, anyhow.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates enjoyed his victory; they wouldn’t try “getting at” him again, he said to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Macdonald strode to the forge and took out the bar of white-hot iron. He gave a scarcely perceptible nod to Sandy, who, ever ready with tobacco juice, spat with great directness on the top of the anvil. Macdonald placed the hot iron on the spot, and quickly smote it a stalwart blow with the heavy hammer. The result was appalling. An instantaneous spreading fan of apparently molten iron lit up the place as if it were a flash of lightning. There was a crash like the bursting of a cannon. The shop was filled for a moment with a shower of brilliant sparks, that flew like meteors to every corner of the place. Everyone was prepared for the explosion except Yates. He sprang back with a cry, tripped, and, without having time to get the use of his hands to ease his fall, tumbled and rolled to the horses’ heels. The animals, frightened by the report, stamped around; and Yates had to hustle on his hands and knees to safer quarters, exhibiting more celerity than dignity. The blacksmith never smiled, but everyone else roared. The reputation of the country was safe. Sandy doubled himself up in his boisterous mirth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There’s no one like the old man!” he shouted. “Oh, lordy! lordy! He’s all wool, and a yard wide.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates picked himself up and dusted himself off, laughing with the rest of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If I ever knew that trick before, I had forgotten it. That’s one on me, as this youth in spasms said a moment ago. &lt;strong&gt;Blacksmith, shake! I’ll treat the crowd, if there’s a place handy&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1- &lt;strong&gt;I found that &amp;quot;hard pushed&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;face a great difficulty in doing something&amp;quot;. However, I'm having difficulty understanding the full meaning of the phrase in this context&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2- &lt;strong&gt;What did he exactly mean by &amp;quot;I’ll treat the crowd, if there’s a place handy&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T15:46:09.707" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T15:46:09.707" Title="What does &quot;hard pushed in argument&quot; mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17154" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17152" CreationDate="2021-01-14T09:34:31.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of &amp;quot;hard pushed&amp;quot; is correct. &amp;quot;hard pushed in argument&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;facing great difficulty in putting his side of the argument&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;fling the New Yorker at him&amp;quot; is a bit more difficult to explain. Imagine that the Blacksmith is having a heated argument with another individual. It's common in this situation to bring up embarrassing or difficult incidents for the other party in order to put them on the back foot. What the Blacksmith fears is that, in the future, someone will remind him of this incident (&amp;quot;fling&amp;quot; it at him) to gain the upper hand in a dispute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'll treat the crowd, if there's a place handy&amp;quot; is an invitation. Pleased with the outcome, Yates is offering to buy everyone in the crowd a treat - most likely an alcoholic drink. That's implied by &amp;quot;this one's on me,&amp;quot; a phrase often used when someone is offering to buy a round of drinks at a bar. &amp;quot;If there's a place handy&amp;quot; is a rider: he can only buy everyone a drink if there's a bar (a &amp;quot;place&amp;quot;) nearby (i.e it is &amp;quot;handy&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T14:59:17.020" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T14:59:17.020" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17155" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17151" CreationDate="2021-01-14T11:16:57.567" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Michael Rosen's poem &amp;quot;Nightmare&amp;quot;, found in his book &lt;em&gt;Mustard, custard, grumble belly and gravy&lt;/em&gt;, which is available to borrow on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/mustardcustardgr0000rose/page/n45/mode/2up?q=%22down+between+the+lines%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm underground&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm down the Underground&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waiting&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waiting for a train&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's the platform&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's the lines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's the tunnel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There's the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll wait down there&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down between the lines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Waiting for the train&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down between the lines.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll climb down there&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down between the lines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and wait for the train&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;down there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm between the lines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and the train's coming.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can't you see?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm still down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can't anyone see me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;down between the lines?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/whElX.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/whElX.png&quot; alt=&quot;image from the book&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/8/childrens-books/articles/other-articles/a-poet-in-school&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article about Mike Rosen's visit to a school&lt;/a&gt; where he mentioned this very scenario as a recurring boyhood nightmare (probably, based on &amp;quot;I used to have&amp;quot;) of his:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Nightmares… do you have nightmares? I used to have one about the underground in London. I'm in the underground, down between the lines. And the platform's getting higher and coming to squeeze me. And I can see a train coming, nearer and nearer. And I'm shouting, &amp;quot;I'm here. Down between the lines. Can't somebody see me?&amp;quot;… '&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was quite a tricky one to find, since Google doesn't index this poem at all. I found the above school-visit quote by searching for variants of your phrases, such as &amp;quot;between the rails&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;between the lines&amp;quot; as well as &amp;quot;between the tracks&amp;quot;. The query &lt;code&gt;poem rosen &amp;quot;between the lines&amp;quot; train is coming&lt;/code&gt; got me to that page, but no sign of any poem on the same theme. I was about to post my answer just mentioning that school-visit story, and speculating that maybe you misremembered it as a poem. But if that really was a nightmare of his, it's plausible that he'd turn it into a poem! So I gave up on Google and searched the Internet Archive for the phrase &amp;quot;down between the lines&amp;quot;, which got me to the right source finally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T11:16:57.567" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17158" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17159" CreationDate="2021-01-14T20:20:15.270" Score="3" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the opening chapter of Thomas Hardy's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/2057/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Withered Arm&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the following passage is found (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The discussion waxed so warm that the purr of the milk streams became jerky, till a voice from another cow's belly cried with authority, &amp;quot;Now then, &lt;strong&gt;what the Turk do it matter to us&lt;/strong&gt; about Farmer Lodge's age, or Farmer Lodge's new mis'ess? I shall have to pay him nine pound a year for the rent of every one of these milchers, whatever his age or hers. Get on with your work, or 'twill be dark afore we have done. The evening is pinking in a'ready.&amp;quot; This speaker was the dairyman himself, by whom the milkmaids and men were employed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this phrase? It seems like &amp;quot;Turk&amp;quot; is being used as an oath, in the same way we might say &amp;quot;what the hell&amp;quot; or other profanities. Was this phrase commonly used (in rural England) at the time this story was written? Does it suggest some view of Turks among the English people, or is it a bowdlerism of something else, or what? Searching the web for &amp;quot;what the Turk&amp;quot; didn't give any useful results, simply places where these three words appeared together naturally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some typos / OCR errors in the version of the story that I've linked above (such as &amp;quot;homeward-hound&amp;quot; at the start of Chapter 2), but I've checked the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3056/3056-h/3056-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg version&lt;/a&gt; and it also has &amp;quot;what the Turk&amp;quot; and the correct &amp;quot;homeward-bound&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T22:16:08.920" Title="&quot;What the Turk do it matter to us&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17158" CreationDate="2021-01-14T22:08:00.900" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a couple of other occurrences in Hardy of “Turk” as an imprecation or mild oath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Come to that, is it? &lt;strong&gt;Turk!&lt;/strong&gt; won't thy mother be in a taking! Well, she's ready, I don't doubt?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Hardy (1872). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/undergreenwoodtr02hard/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Under the Greenwood Tree; a Rural Painting of the Dutch School&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 19&lt;/a&gt;. London: Tinsley Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Well, why shouldn't the man hang up her birdcage? &lt;strong&gt;Turk&lt;/strong&gt; seize it all, what’s that got to do wi’ it? Dick, that thou beest a white-lyvered chap I don't say, but if thou beestn’t as mad as a cappel-faced bull, let me smile no more.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/undergreenwoodtr02hard/page/22/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hardy, p. 23&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ulla Baugner wrote that although there are many south-west dialect words recorded only by Hardy, nonetheless he is considered a trustworthy source, who “regarded dialect with great seriousness”. She commented:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &lt;strong&gt;turk&lt;/strong&gt; in imprecations is not recorded by E[nglish] D[ialect] D[ictionary] or O[xford] E[nglish] D[ictionary], but according to N[otes] &amp;amp; Q[ueries] 1936 similar expressions are current in So[merset].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ulla Baugner (1972) &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/studyonuseofdial0000baug/page/n451/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study on the Use of Dialect in Thomas Hardy's Novels and Short Stories with Special Reference to Phonology and Vocabulary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Stockholm University.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reference in &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt; is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Turk.&lt;/em&gt; Used in mild oaths. “Why, what the Turk have ’ee got there!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;W. W. Gill (1936). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CLXX.mar21.201&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Glossary of Somerset Dialect&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Notes and Queries&lt;/em&gt;, 21 March 1936, p. 202.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither of these sources presents a theory as to the origin of the term. The assonance with “fuck” suggests that it might have originated as a minced oath, but perhaps there was an influence from another dialect sense of “turk” meaning “a great amount”. This appears twice in Hardy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Owing to your coming a day sooner than we first expected,’ said John, ‘you'll find us in a &lt;strong&gt;turk&lt;/strong&gt; of a mess, sir’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Hardy (1873). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pairofblueeyesno02hard/page/210/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Pair of Blue Eyes&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 210&lt;/a&gt;. London: Tinsley Brothers.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“My mis’ess out yonder,” replied the rural landlord, nodding sideways, “is coming home with her fancy-man. They have been a-gaying together this &lt;strong&gt;turk&lt;/strong&gt; of a while in foreign parts.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Hardy (1881). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/alaodiceanorcas00hardgoog/page/n252/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys&lt;/em&gt;, volume III, p. 245&lt;/a&gt;. London: Sampson Low.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ralph Elliott comments on this sense of the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turks were considered to be cruel and savage, a hangover from the Middle Ages, so that the word came to denote anyone or anything big and formidable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ralph W. V. Elliott (1984). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/thomashardysengl0000elli/page/228/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thomas Hardy’s English&lt;/em&gt;, p. 229&lt;/a&gt;. Basil Blackwell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-14T22:16:08.920" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T22:16:08.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17160" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16564" CreationDate="2021-01-14T23:40:17.077" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;@dvoyd from tumblr here. 'Quote' source (it's more of poetry than a quote) is myself. It's freelance poetry that I have written and posted on tumblr for 5+ years now. If the quote ends with 'm.a.w' (those are my initials, yes) and it shows up in my writing tag on tumblr (&lt;a href=&quot;https://dvoyd.tumblr.com/tagged/skyler+scribbles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;) then it's my work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11877" LastActivityDate="2021-01-14T23:40:17.077" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17161" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17162" CreationDate="2021-01-15T07:41:08.090" Score="6" ViewCount="211" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Hardy's short(ish) story &amp;quot;The Withered Arm&amp;quot;, one of his descriptions of the Wessex countryside features the following cryptic allusion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was a long walk; thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the slopes of the heath - not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick search showed me that there really was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ine_of_Wessex&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Ina of Wessex&lt;/a&gt; (the real Wessex of the mid-first millennium, not the &amp;quot;Wessex&amp;quot; that Thomas Hardy created as a semi-fictional setting for his nineteenth-century novels). But his Wikipedia page doesn't mention Lear at all, nor anything about agony on a heath; it seems that Ina died peacefully in Rome after abdicating his kingdom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably &amp;quot;Lear&amp;quot; refers to Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lear&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Lear&lt;/a&gt;, who was indeed in agony on a heath. But it seems that Shakespeare's story was based on that of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leir_of_Britain&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leir of Britain&lt;/a&gt;, a legendary king whose Wikipedia page again makes no mention of King Ina/Ine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Trying to search the internet for anything mentioning King Ina and King Lear in the same breath, I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.proz.com/kudoz/english/general-conversation-greetings-letters/6904163-ina.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;forum thread&lt;/a&gt; which relates again to Thomas Hardy, but this time to the 1892 preface of his &lt;em&gt;Tess of the d'Urbervilles&lt;/em&gt;, where he mentions &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Glo’ster in Lear, otherwise Ina, king of that country&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. This is interpreted by the forum posters as identifying Glo'ster with Ina, which would contradict Hardy's identification in &amp;quot;The Withered Arm&amp;quot; of Ina with Lear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where does the identification of the historical King Ina with character(s) in Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;King Lear&lt;/em&gt; originate?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there, or was there in Hardy's time, any theory among Shakespeare scholars (or Geoffrey of Monmouth scholars) that the story of King Lear/Leir was based on anything involving King Ina? Did Hardy come up with this idea himself, or was he referring to some known historical literary theory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T09:46:52.177" Title="Historical King Ina and Shakespeare's King Lear in the writings of Thomas Hardy" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;king-lear&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17161" CreationDate="2021-01-15T09:24:39.407" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is little doubt that Shakespeare's play is based on the British King Leir, as the OP states. However, a similar story is also attached to King Ina. Indeed, it may have started there, been transferred to Lear with whom it has stuck in the popular imagination due to Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;English History and Antiquarian William Camden released a book of essays entitled &lt;em&gt;Remaines Concerning Britain&lt;/em&gt; around 1605. In the &amp;quot;Wise Speeches&amp;quot; chapter, he related the following tale:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ina, King of West Saxons, had three daughters of whom, upon a time, he demanded whether they did love him, and so would do during their lives, above all others; the two elder sware deeply they would; the youngest but the wisest, told her Father without flattery, &amp;quot;That albeit she did love, honour, and reverence him, and so would whilst she lived, as much as nature and daughterly duty at the uttermost could expect, yet she did think that one day it would come to pass that she should affect another more fervently&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would transcribe more but I'm having to do it by hand - you can &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Remains_Concerning_Britain/aqcMAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;read a scan of the book here&lt;/a&gt; here, page 255.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly the passage ends &amp;quot;One referreth this to the Daughters of King Leir.&amp;quot; Indeed in The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare Vol 10, Edmond Malone claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camden, in his &lt;em&gt;Remains&lt;/em&gt;, tells a similar story to this of Leir or Lear, of Ina king of the West Saxons; which, if the thing ever happened, probably was the real origin of the fable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I cannot prove that Hardy read William Camden, it seems likely this is the source of the quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897. Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 1898.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T09:46:52.177" LastActivityDate="2021-01-15T09:46:52.177" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17163" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17374" CreationDate="2021-01-15T14:11:33.263" Score="5" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Paul Celan's poem &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;, available e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/corona&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; in both the original German and an English translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is time that the stone took the trouble to bloom&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That an unrest’s heart started to beat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is time to be time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No matter how many times I read this poem, I have not yet been able to understand the content Celan is talking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is it time for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11850" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-15T14:19:14.147" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T05:27:56.733" Title="What is it time for in Paul Celan's &quot;Corona&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;paul-celan&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17167" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17170" CreationDate="2021-01-15T22:12:35.490" Score="2" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In April Daniels's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/series/190950-nemesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nemesis series&lt;/a&gt;, the character Valkyrja/Karen has an unusual, very specific array of powers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can sense where things that open the way are...  Also people who are about to die, and any serious violence within a hundred miles. Plus ravens, swans, horses, and alcohol. Technically, it's not a hundred miles, it's twenty-seven leagues.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Karen, from Chapter Nine of &lt;em&gt;Sovereign&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Karen gains powers when Valkyrja, her mother, dies. Karen also gains Valkyrja's memories, and initially feels as if her mother is try to take over Karen's mind. By the end of  &lt;em&gt;Sovereigm&lt;/em&gt; Karen has embraced the name and legacy of Valkyrja, and Valkyrja's personality has almost completely taken over. Karen/Valkyrja then leaves to have her own child to secure the legacy of the powers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Somehow I forgot to mention that Valkyrja has wings that allow her to fly. Karen's wings grow in overnight, and her memories and powers follow close after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;If any of that was confusing, please tell me and I'll try to make it more clear&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The variety of Valkyrja's powers seems random to me. Her character is Old-Norse flavored, and some of the power (ravens, alchohol) seem to have some connection to Norse mythology. But some of the others seem completely random, such as “things that open the way”. Is there some connection between this disparate powers? Do the specific items listed have a deeper significance? For that matter, does the number 27 mean anything important? Or the manner in which the powers pass on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a significance to Valkyrja's powerset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-16T16:27:54.963" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T14:03:54.930" Title="Is there a significance to Valkyrja's powerset?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;april-daniels&gt;&lt;nemesis-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17169" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-16T06:03:49.447" Score="0" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Seven of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (published 1816), I saw the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale &lt;strong&gt;otherwise&lt;/strong&gt; so utterly improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This use of &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; may seem unusual in contemporary English, and would be rewritten with &amp;quot;already.&amp;quot; I'd like to know if her use was common in the 19th century, or if it was unique to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1162" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T04:21:55.097" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T04:41:46.480" Title="&quot;otherwise&quot; in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;frankenstein&gt;&lt;mary-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17170" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17167" CreationDate="2021-01-16T09:29:40.590" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't read this series, but it's clear at a glance that the name Valkyrja is related to the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;valkyries&lt;/a&gt;, the warrior women of Norse mythology best known for choosing fallen warriors in the field of battle and bringing them to Valhalla. A quick look on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; reveals that &amp;quot;valkyrja&amp;quot; is actually the original Old Norse name, and also notes connections with ravens, swans, horses, and alcohol:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Norse mythology, a valkyrie ([...] from Old Norse valkyrja &amp;quot;chooser of the slain&amp;quot;) is one of a host of female figures who choose those who may die in battle and those who may live. Selecting among half of those who die in battle (the other half go to the goddess Freyja's afterlife field Fólkvangr), the valkyries take their chosen to the afterlife hall of the slain, Valhalla, ruled over by the god Odin. There, the deceased warriors become einherjar (Old Norse &amp;quot;single (or once) fighters&amp;quot;). When the einherjar are not preparing for the events of Ragnarök, the valkyries bear them mead. Valkyries also appear as lovers of heroes and other mortals, where they are sometimes described as the daughters of royalty, sometimes accompanied by ravens and sometimes connected to swans or horses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mythology.net/norse/norse-creatures/valkyrie/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mythology.net&lt;/a&gt; confirms these connections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Valkyries’ nobility is reflected in their appearance. They have lily-white skin and statuesque figures. Their hair can be gold as the sunlight or black as the night. During times of peace, these women wear elegant costumes made from swan or raven feathers, but when war draws near, they don their armor: gracefully carved helmets and shields and chain mail corsets. They might continue wearing a feather cape, or, according to some stories, they might sprout wings of their own to help them soar above the battlefields. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First and foremost, the Valkyries influenced the fate of warriors and battles (with Odin’s approval, of course). Some stories describe them working at magical looms—with intestines for threads, heads for weights, and swords and arrows for beaters—where they wove the destiny of each fighter into a tapestry that would determine the outcome of the whole battle. Other stories describe them riding horses through the clouds above an active battle. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the Valkyrie are well-known for serving and brewing mead. Not only is their mead delicious, it has magical properties that can make men stronger, improve their memory, or heal their wounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_in_Norse_mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;significant numbers&lt;/a&gt; in old Norse culture all seem to be powers of 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The numbers three and nine are significant numbers in Norse mythology and paganism. Both numbers (and multiplications thereof) appear throughout surviving attestations of Norse paganism, in both mythology and cultic practice. While the number three appears significant in many cultures, Norse mythology appears to put special emphasis on the number nine. Along with the number 27, both numbers also figure into the lunar Germanic calendar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- Wikipedia, cited to Rudolf Simek's &lt;em&gt;Dictionary of Northern Mythology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now almost all the powers of Valkyrja make sense in terms of what she is, a valkyrie (valkyrja) from Norse mythology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sensing people who are about to die. That makes sense since the whole purpose of a valkyrie is to find dying warriors and choose which ones should be taken to Valhalla.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sensing serious violence. That again makes sense: valkyries are essentially spirits of the battlefield.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ravens, swans, and horses. All of these have some kind of thematic connection to valkyries, as noted above: they may wear the feathers of ravens or swans, and they may ride horses or have (like their boss Odin) raven companions.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Alcohol. That again makes sense since valkyries were known for the mead they made and served in Valhalla. (Ties into the stereotype of Viking men spending all their time either fighting or drinking! The battles were worthwhile for them if it meant they had a chance to spend eternity drinking and surrounded by beautiful women.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Twenty-seven leagues. That's eighty-one miles, close enough to a hundred, assuming we go by the standard definition of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_(unit)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;league&lt;/a&gt; as three miles, and twenty-seven was considered a significant number in the culture that produced the valkyrie stories.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wings. That again makes sense since valkyries are meant to &lt;em&gt;fly&lt;/em&gt; over battlefields.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only thing I can't figure out is &amp;quot;things that open the way&amp;quot;, and in fact I'm not really sure what that &lt;em&gt;means&lt;/em&gt;. Like doors and gates? In that case, maybe it could be a reference to the doors and gates of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valhalla&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Valhalla&lt;/a&gt;, meant to be opened at Ragnarök to let the warriors out. (You can read a translated version of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.voluspa.org/grimnismal21-25.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grímnismál&lt;/a&gt; to see a description of Valhalla with its gate Valgrind and many doors.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T14:03:54.930" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T14:03:54.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17172" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17174" CreationDate="2021-01-16T17:46:46.070" Score="6" ViewCount="575" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Thomas Hardy's short story &amp;quot;The Withered Arm&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/2057/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available to read online&lt;/a&gt;), Gertrude Lodge and Rhona Brook go together to see a man named Trendle, often called Conjuror Trendle, who is reputed to have some knowledge or ability with magic. He's the one who tells Gertrude that her affliction comes from Rhona, and also the one who tells her a possible way to get rid of it. After Gertrude's second, lonely, visit to him, we have the following paragraph from the start of Chapter VII:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The communication sank deep into Gertrude's mind. Her nature was rather a timid one; and probably of all remedies that the white wizard could have suggested there was not one which would have filled her with so much aversion as this, not to speak of the immense obstacles in the way of its adoption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is he referred to as a &amp;quot;white wizard&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; It surely doesn't mean his complexion, since he's described at their first meeting with him as &amp;quot;a grey-bearded man, with a reddish face&amp;quot;. Was the phrase &amp;quot;white wizard&amp;quot; used in rural England at those times to denote a &amp;quot;conjuror&amp;quot; such as him? I've tried searching the internet, but of course nowadays most references to &amp;quot;white wizards&amp;quot; are from fantasy and the search results are full of those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T18:02:17.037" Title="Why is the country conjuror referred to as a &quot;white wizard&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17173" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17169" CreationDate="2021-01-16T17:50:52.760" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is no dictionary meaning of the word &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;already.&amp;quot; A &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=otherwise&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;case_insensitive=on&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Cotherwise%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Botherwise%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BOtherwise%3B%2Cc0#t4%3B%2Cotherwise%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Botherwise%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BOtherwise%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams search&lt;/a&gt; of the usage of &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; for the years 1800–1820 does not reveal any examples of the word &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; in that sense. (Click on the 1800–1820 option next to &amp;quot;Search in Google Books&amp;quot; under the graph.) Occam's razor therefore suggests that rather than Shelley's using the word in an idiosyncratic way, the interpretation of &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;already&amp;quot; is mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fuller &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.shmoop.com/frankenstein/chapter-7-full-text-5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contextualization&lt;/a&gt; of the sentence makes the meaning clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I paused when I reflected on the story that I had to tell. A being whom I myself had formed, and endued with life, had met me at midnight among the precipices of an inaccessible mountain. I remembered also the nervous fever with which I had been seized just at the time that I dated my creation, and which would give an air of delirium to a tale otherwise so utterly improbable. I well knew that if any other had communicated such a relation to me, I should have looked upon it as the ravings of insanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frankenstein is planning to tell his family about the monster he has created. He realizes that the story is so improbable that he will not be believed. He also remembers that he had fallen ill with fever right around the time he created the monster. He says that his family will attribute his story to delirium caused by fever; &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt;, they will not be able to account for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, &amp;quot;otherwise&amp;quot; here doesn't mean &amp;quot;already.&amp;quot; It has one of its ordinary adverbial meanings, which Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/otherwise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 : in different circumstances&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// might &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; have left&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// The test helps identify problems that might have &lt;em&gt;otherwise&lt;/em&gt; gone unnoticed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To his family, Frankenstein's feverish delirium would explain away why he thinks he created a monster. Delirium is the only plausible explanation. &lt;em&gt;Otherwise&lt;/em&gt;, they would find no other probable explanation for his story, because his having actually created the monster is, to them, wildly improbable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T04:41:46.480" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T04:41:46.480" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17172" CreationDate="2021-01-16T18:02:17.037" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;white wizard&amp;quot; is used in the context of the white magic / black magic distinction. Black magic is malevolent, used for harmful or evil purposes; white magic is benevolent, used for good and selfless ones. The site Wicca Living &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiccaliving.com/black-magic-white-magic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;explains&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If people believed they were the victim of a curse, they would seek out a “white witch,” also known in some places as “cunning folk,” who would work a counter-spell to lift it. Any kind of bad luck, including illnesses and injuries, might be the result of someone else’s black magic and thus required white magic to reverse it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&amp;quot;What's the Difference between Black Magic and White Magic?&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https://wiccaliving.com/black-magic-white-magic/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiccaliving.com/black-magic-white-magic&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Gertrude has gone to see Trendle to understand why she has been afflicted and what she can do to reverse it, Trendle is therefore a &lt;em&gt;white wizard&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T18:02:17.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17175" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17169" CreationDate="2021-01-16T19:10:36.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Otherwise&amp;quot; does not mean &amp;quot;already&amp;quot; in this circumstance. He means that the only instance in which talking about his creation would seem acceptable comprehensible to others is &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they could convince themselves that he was insane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mad man telling crazy stories is believable, because he's mad and bound to come up with anything. A sane person telling insane stories, on the other hand, is not logical and therefore unacceptable to others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11835" LastActivityDate="2021-01-16T19:10:36.247" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17176" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17330" CreationDate="2021-01-16T21:57:09.040" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Follow-up to: &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/16797/is-jonathan-culler-saying-that-literary-theory-is-effectively-the-same-subject-a&quot;&gt;Is Jonathan Culler saying that literary theory is effectively the same subject as cultural studies?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From chapter 3 of the second edition of &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; by Jonathan Culler:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theory has enormously enriched and invigorated the study of literary works, but... theory is not the theory of literature. If you had to say what 'theory' is the theory of, the answer would be something like 'signifying practices', the production and representation of experience, and the constitution of human subjects - in short, something like culture in the broadest sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my previous question, I asked about how theory related to cultural studies and whether Culler thinks that they're the same topic. I would now like to ask about the definition of theory: is Culler saying that literary theory is the study of the background (cultural background and/or other background) that we bring to the text? Or am I missing the mark here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T11:05:02.723" Title="Is Jonathan Culler saying that theory is the study of the background we bring to the text?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;&lt;literary-theory-short-introduction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17177" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17203" CreationDate="2021-01-17T05:20:29.193" Score="3" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;This was one of those things that popped into my head earlier today, and I keep flashing back to it. I read this as a library book when I was in Ashland, KY, probably around the mid-90s. I think it was a paperback whose cover was primarily blue, with the girl depicted on the front, staring off to one side. I don't think the book was long, maybe under a hundred pages, and was in English. Early in the book, four boys (I think members of one of the sports teams?) corner her in a deserted part of school, maybe under construction, and sexually assault her. It's not described in detail, but rather as a series of somewhat disconnected moments, I think from the perspective of the protagonist, who is one of the boys assaulting her. I don't remember if they get caught and punished for it, but one of them is consumed with guilt over it, and befriends the girl in his attempt to come to grips with having done it. As I remember it, the assault was not premeditated, but more of a matter of them coming upon her in the deserted section of the school, and what starts out as teasing escalates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl might have been named &amp;quot;Wendy&amp;quot;, because I have this vague memory of conflating the character with the title character of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windy_(The_Association_song)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the song by The Association&lt;/a&gt;. She was Caucasian, and had long hair. I think the boys were also Caucasian, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:42:39.190" Title="Book about a mentally retarded girl being sexually assaulted by boys at her school, and one of them coming to grips with what he's done" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17178" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17256" CreationDate="2021-01-17T08:16:11.280" Score="3" ViewCount="152" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Myrmidons, the soldiers from Achilles's homeland of Thessaly who are under his command in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, get their name from &lt;em&gt;myrmex&lt;/em&gt; or ants. Achilles himself is the arch-Myrmidon. In Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/troilus-and-cressida/act-1-scene-3/?search=myrmidon/#line-1.3.385&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, Ulysses refers to him as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;          the great Myrmidon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who broils in loud applause   (I.iii.386–387).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are at least two legends about the origins of the Myrmidons. The first is referenced by the 2nd C. theologian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_of_Alexandria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clement of Alexandria&lt;/a&gt; in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Exhortations to the Greeks&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What else of the Thessalians? They are reported to worship ants, because they have been taught that Zeus, in the likeness of an ant, had intercourse with Eurymedusa the daughter of Cletor and begat Myrmidon. (Book 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second says that Myrmidons were the descendants of ants on the island of Aegina, whom Zeus transformed into human beings. This legend can be traced as far back as Hesiod, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fragment 76&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And she conceived, and bare knightly Aiakos. But when he came to the measure of lovely youth, he chafed because he was alone. And the Father of men and gods made all the ants that were within the pleasant island men and deep-girdled women. And these were the first who benched curved ships, and the first who set sails as wings of the seafaring ship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This legend is elaborated in Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses7.html#5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 7&lt;/a&gt;. Juno, jealous because the island of Aegina was named after one of Jupiter's lovers, sent a plague that killed all the men there save the king, Aeacus, and his three sons. Aeacus prayed to Jupiter asking for the island to be repopulated, and Jupiter turned its ants into men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Myrmidons retain the industriousness, discipline, and martial valor of their ant forebears. Matthew Sears has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40599925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argued&lt;/a&gt; that these qualities, attributable to their mythological origins, make them the elite infantry of the Iliad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some two thousand years after Ovid, contemporary mythology also furnishes an example of ant-like heroes. Three individuals in the Marvel Comics universe are identified with the superhero &lt;a href=&quot;https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Ant-Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ant-Man&lt;/a&gt;, a founding member of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Avengers_(Earth-616)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avengers&lt;/a&gt;. They are &lt;a href=&quot;https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_Pym_(Earth-616)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hank Pym&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Scott_Lang_(Earth-616)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Scott Lang&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://marvel.fandom.com/wiki/Eric_O%27Grady_(Earth-616)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eric O'Grady&lt;/a&gt;. The first originated this superhero identity. The latter two later serially usurped that identity by stealing the Ant-Man costume. Within the universe, each has his own back story and adventures. However, all use a cybernetic helmet, part of the Ant-Man costume, to communicate with and control ants. In this way, Ant-Man is like a latter-day Achilles commanding his army of Myrmidons.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other parallels between the story of Achilles and the contemporary Ant-Man mythology. For example, Pym becomes Ant-Man to avenge the death of his beloved wife Maria Trovaya, while Achilles enters the Trojan war only after his lover Patroclus is killed. Additionally both Lang and O'Grady lead rather less than heroic lives before assuming the mantle of Ant-Man, while Achilles spends some time disguised as a woman in an attempt to evade joining the Greek heroes gathering for war (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/StatiusAchilleid1B.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Statius, Book 1, ll.590 ff&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the absence of specific allusions, such parallels are tenuous and could be explained away as coincidence. So the question is: &lt;strong&gt;Is there any evidence that Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby, the creators of Ant-Man, deliberately associated that superhero with Achilles and his fellow Myrmidons?&lt;/strong&gt; Do plot lines or allusions within the comics explicitly make this connection? Does a knowledge of the mythological Myrmidons deepen our understanding or enjoyment of the Ant-Man stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clement of Alexandria. &lt;em&gt;Exhortation to the Greeks&lt;/em&gt;. Loeb Classical Library. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hesiod. &lt;em&gt;The Poems and Fragments&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. and Intro. A. W. Mair. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;archive.org/stream/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog/hesiodpoemsandf00mairgoog_djvu.txt&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer. &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. A. S. Kline. 2009. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Greek/Ilhome.php&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ovid. &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Brookes More. Boston: Cornhill, 1922. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.theoi.com/Text/OvidMetamorphoses1.html&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sears, Matthew. “Warrior Ants: Elite Troops in the Iliad.” &lt;em&gt;The Classical World&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 103, no. 2, 2010, pp. 139–155. JSTOR, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/40599925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/40599925&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 17 Jan. 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;em&gt;Troilus and Cressida&lt;/em&gt;. 1602. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/troilus-and-cressida/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/troilus-and-cressida/&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Statius. &lt;em&gt;Thebaid, Achilleid&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. J. H. Mozley. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1928. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoi.com/Text/StatiusAchilleid1A.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.theoi.com/Text/StatiusAchilleid1A.html&lt;/a&gt;. Retrieved 16 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T21:07:06.887" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T07:07:01.610" Title="Is Ant-Man a Myrmidon?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;marvel-comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17179" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T08:46:39.330" Score="1" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Heather Christle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.kr/books?id=PDmRDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT11&amp;amp;lpg=PT11&amp;amp;dq=Perpendicular+lines+are+Chekhovian;+the+introduced+gun+goes+off.+Parallel+lines+are+Hitchcockian;+the+present+bomb+is+enough.&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=NiHQa4XGB1&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2y992JyuloKp-QhoVX2GF-5vBwbA&amp;amp;hl=ko&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiNgd21yKLuAhWUyosBHQd6DiwQ6AEwAnoECAUQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=Perpendicular%20lines%20are%20Chekhovian%3B%20the%20introduced%20gun%20goes%20off.%20Parallel%20lines%20are%20Hitchcockian%3B%20the%20present%20bomb%20is%20enough.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Crying Book&lt;/a&gt;. I do not know much about either Chekhov or Hitchcock. What does this comparison mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8217" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T17:07:22.993" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:34:03.943" Title="What does this comparison between &quot;Chekhovian&quot; and &quot;Hitchcockian&quot; lines mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;&lt;alfred-hitchcock&gt;&lt;heather-christle&gt;&lt;the-crying-book&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T12:33:54.047" Score="1" ViewCount="326" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second stanza of the poem Childhood, written by Markus Natten:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When did my childhood go?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Was it the time I realised that adults were not&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;all they seemed to be,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;They talked of love and preached of love,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;But did not act so lovingly,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was that the day!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?kehb1=6-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Source&lt;/a&gt; (Page 58)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the poet trying to explain in the aforementioned (bold) lines? Is he saying that all adults are hypocrites? If that's the case, the poet sounds judgemental. I feel that the lines have a deeper meaning which I'm unable to understand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10691" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T15:09:33.090" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;They talked of love and preached of love, But did not act so lovingly&quot; in 'Childhood'?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;markus-natten&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17181" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17182" CreationDate="2021-01-17T13:27:39.717" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.03348/133?r=0&amp;amp;s=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, someone was talking about a man who doesn't like attending protracted meetings for converting the sinners:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He never wants to go to a protracted meeting, yet he can’t keep away. He’s like a drunkard and the corner tavern. He can’t pass it, and he knows if he goes in he will fall. Macdonald’s always the first one to go up to the penitent bench. &lt;strong&gt;They rake him in every time.&lt;/strong&gt; He has religion real bad for a couple of weeks, and then he backslides. He doesn’t seem able to stand either the converting or the backsliding. I suppose some time &lt;strong&gt;they will gather him in finally&lt;/strong&gt;, and he will &lt;strong&gt;stick&lt;/strong&gt; and become a class leader, but he hasn’t stuck up to date.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; here refer to the meetings or the people around him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what's exactly meant by &amp;quot;he hasn't stuck up to date&amp;quot;, while it's already said that &amp;quot;they rake him in every time&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T22:30:30.163" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T22:30:30.163" Title="Who is &quot;they&quot; that &quot;rake him in&quot; or &quot;gather him in&quot; in this passage from In the Midst of Alarms?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17182" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17181" CreationDate="2021-01-17T14:07:03.630" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;From a grammatical point of view, the only plural antecedent is &amp;quot;protracted meetings&amp;quot; in the discussion that precedes the quoted passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What's the matter with MacDonald? Doesn't he like protracted meetings? And, by the way, what are protracted meetings?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;They're revival meetings—religious meetings, you know, for converting sinners.&amp;quot;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt;(…)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, this antecedent is too far away and as a consequence the distinction between the meetings as such and their participants becomes blurred. To &amp;quot;rake in&amp;quot; means to &amp;quot;gather&amp;quot; or, in this context, draw into the religious community. It is a verb that typically expects a human subject, not a series of meetings, but no human subject (i.e. the meeting participants) is mentioned. This results in a kind of &amp;quot;anonymous they&amp;quot; that seems to work as an unidentified force that &amp;quot;will gather him in finally&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far, the meetings' effect on MacDonald has not &amp;quot;stuck&amp;quot;, i.e. not remained permanent, but the speaker thinks it eventually will. What the speaker means here is that MacDonald will eventually remain loyal and stop backsliding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T14:07:03.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17183" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17180" CreationDate="2021-01-17T15:09:33.090" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/love#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Love&lt;/a&gt; is a very ambiguous word. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Greek philosophy&lt;/a&gt;, for example, distinguished several categories of love, including the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_(concept)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;érōs&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: desire; sensual or passionate love (etymological source of the adjective &amp;quot;erotic&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agape&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;agapē&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: unconditional love; also, especially in a Christian context, &amp;quot;the love of God for man and of man for God&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;philia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: brotherly love (also the opposite of &amp;quot;phobia&amp;quot;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philautia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;philautia&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: self-love.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English language, like many other languages, often uses the word &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; to indiscriminately refer to different types of emotions and attitudes. For this reason, there are many ways to &amp;quot;talk of love&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;preach love&amp;quot; and at the same time &amp;quot;not act lovingly&amp;quot;. For example, one may preach unconditional love (&amp;quot;agape&amp;quot;) while at the same time failing to provide that; this may be perceived as hypocrisy. At the same time, it is possible to preach one kind of love while failing to provide another type of love; based on the above distinctions, one can argue that this is not hypocrisy but failing to pass a much higher bar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For this reason, hypocrisy is rather narrow as an interpretation, even though it is valid. It is also possible to argue that the poet discovered that his parents were not the idealised people he took them for as a child but that they also have their failings, i.e. more general failings than just hypocrisy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also tried to find information about the poem's background, but data about the poet appear to be very scarce. For example, a certain prajwalhs12 on &lt;a href=&quot;https://brainly.in/question/8268451&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brainly.in&lt;/a&gt; claims that Markus Natten was a Norwegian poet. A pseudonymous user on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.answers.com/Q/When_and_where_was_Markus_Natten_born&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Answers.com&lt;/a&gt; makes the same claim. A certain &lt;a href=&quot;https://aswinav.blogspot.com/2014/02/childhood-markus-natten-reading-and.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aswin&lt;/a&gt; claims on his blog that the poem is a translation. None of these pages provide sources for these claims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I was trying to find is not so much information about the poet's relationship with his parents but whether he grew up during the age of &amp;quot;love, peace and rock 'n' roll&amp;quot;, when people listened to song such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_You_Need_Is_Love&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;All You Need Is Love&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (The Beatles, 1967). If this had been confirmed, the poem's second stanza might be interpreted additionally as disillusionment with that period in the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T15:09:33.090" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17184" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17179" CreationDate="2021-01-17T15:20:33.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chekhov's gun … is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed.&#xA;…&#xA;&amp;quot;One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.&amp;quot;&#xA;…&#xA;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov's gun - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://valerynorth.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/chekhovs-gun-chandlers-gun-and-hitchcocks-bomb/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov’s Gun, Chandler’s Gun, and Hitchcock’s Bomb | Valery North – Writer&lt;/a&gt; discusses the difference between them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chekhov’s Gun&lt;/strong&gt; Which goes, if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third act. Sometimes people use the term for the inverted, which is to say, if a gun is fired in the third act, you should introduce it in the first act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The essential features of a &lt;strong&gt;Hitchcock’s Bomb&lt;/strong&gt; are therefore:&#xA;Some significant event (either catastrophic or positive) is set up, and then fails to happen. The manner of its failing is such that the event remains potentially imminent but it is now unpredictable or chaotic. Eventually, either it happens or the threat is averted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Chandler’s Gun&lt;/strong&gt; Or the “Guy-with-a-gun move”. Apparently, Raymond Chandler used to say that if his story ever got bogged down, he’d send in some guy with a gun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full context of the quotation is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak to Lisa and Lisa speaks of parallel crying, the crying that comes alongside art but not precisely from it. Plot does not jerk the tears from you; some other force corresponds. This pleases me, as I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire paragraph is self contained, assuming that the reader is familiar with the terms and would therefore understand the allusion.&#xA;Perhaps such writing should be called &lt;strong&gt;Christel's Gun&lt;/strong&gt;, whereby an author introduces an item in a way that most readers will have no idea what it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the door closed, Jones caught a glimpse of a FAVS Stradivari mounted on the wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and it's not until many chapters later, or perhaps never, that readers find out it is a single-shot carbine rifle, and not a violin as they had thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for how Chekhovian and Hitchcockian relate to &amp;quot;parallel&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;perpendicular&amp;quot; I can only speculate.&#xA;Parallel lines never meet, so they are like plot lines that one expects to lead to an inevitable conclusion but don't.&#xA;Perpendicular lines are an (unnecessarily extreme) example of plot lines that &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; inevitably meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T15:20:33.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17185" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T15:22:20.700" Score="22" ViewCount="4575" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading the Penguin Edition of &lt;em&gt;Impatience of the Heart&lt;/em&gt; by Stefan Zweig - also known as &lt;em&gt;Beware of Pity&lt;/em&gt; in other translations. The reverse of the title page states that the book was first published in &amp;quot;Germany as &lt;em&gt;Ungeduld des Herzens&lt;/em&gt; by S Fischer Verlag 1939&amp;quot;. Why would one of Germany's leading publishers be publishing a novel by one of Europe's leading Jewish writers in 1939? There's nothing in the book itself to explain this apparent anomaly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11892" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:02:51.620" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T09:02:51.620" Title="Why would one of Germany's leading publishers publish a novel by Jewish writer Stefan Zweig in 1939?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;publishing&gt;&lt;stefan-zweig&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17186" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17214" CreationDate="2021-01-17T15:42:30.617" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;After Hamlet returns from speaking with the Ghost, he initially resists questioning about it, then suggests he will reveal what it said if the others can keep a secret,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How say you then? Would heart of man once think it? But you'll be secret? &lt;br /&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; Act 1 Scene 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean? I have read that one can translate it as &amp;quot;can you keep a secret, Horatio/Marcellus?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is meant by &amp;quot;heart of man&amp;quot;? To &amp;quot;once think it&amp;quot; is meant to refer to what the ghost has said, but why is this relevant to the &amp;quot;heart of man&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="9885" LastEditorUserId="9885" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:34:13.137" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:56:19.873" Title="&quot;How say you then? Would heart of man once think it?&quot; Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17187" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17230" CreationDate="2021-01-17T16:27:25.820" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I feel like this is a common story element. Someone has a negative view about a person/group of people, and their worldview is changed after they are forced to spend time with that person/group. This happens in Disney's Pocahontas (and by extension, Avatar), and I have seen a webcomic where it is the focus. But I feel like there has to be a long history of this idea in literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am interested in the history of this plot device. Does anyone know if there is a single story or event from which this originates?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11893" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T08:43:29.320" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T08:43:29.320" Title="What is the origin of the plot device where a character changes negative views about someone after spending time with them?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;&lt;plot-element&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17188" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17364" CreationDate="2021-01-17T16:52:14.610" Score="8" ViewCount="181" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a middle English poem, written in the 13th-15th centuries, which I only have in translation (to Hebrew).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The translated poem is found in a chapter that contains three additional poems, and one of them is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_lay_ybounden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adam lay ybounden&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Here is the English &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrans.org/%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%92%D7%99%D7%94_%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%AA#/media/%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A5%3AZand_ant_ang_305.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;index page&lt;/a&gt; of the book. Note that it's listed under Geofrey Chauser, but most probably he didn't write this poem (nor Adam lay ybounden).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translated back to modern English (by me, pardon the style and grammar), it goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mock Song&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have you left? Welcome!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have you arrived? Goodbye!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Indeed there is no prettier woman than you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pure as a scarlet strawberry.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I crave to be near you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of all girls.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I feel so sad when you come,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And once you're gone - my face brighten up!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you're away five hundred miles,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll pray, for sure,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that no man, nor horse or mare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;would get you back here.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your beauty I will not praise,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for what will everyone say? have pity!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Farewell, I despise you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But please don't mock this song!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that though some words here seem to look promising (i.e., Googling them should have resulted in helpful results), like &amp;quot;strawberry&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;mare&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;five hundred miles&amp;quot;, I couldn't find anything.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is also the Hebrew translation (added Nikkud only where needed):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;שיר-לעג&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;הָלַכְתְּ? - ברוך בואךְ!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;בָּאת? - להתראות!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;הן אין אישה יפה ממך,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;בָּרָה כְּתוּת בָּרֹד.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;אני חושק בקרבתך&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;מכל הנערות.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;כל-כך עצוב לי בבואךְ,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;הלכתְּ - פניי אורות!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;כשאת נוסעת ת&amp;quot;ק פרסה,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;לָךְ אתפלל, מובן,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ששום אדם, סוס או סוסה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;לא יחזירוךְ לכאן.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;את רוב יופייךְ לא אקלסה,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;כי מה יאמרו? לִצְלַן!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;שלום, עליי את מאוסה,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;אך אל נא תלעגי לשיר דְּנָן!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;EDIT:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;To make it clear: the title &amp;quot;Mock Song&amp;quot; is my own translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I discovered that the poem was republished, and probably retranslated (can't confirm, because I don't have a copy of it) by the same Hebrew translator, under the name &amp;quot;A Song of Scorn&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrans.org/%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A8_%D7%90%D7%94%D7%91%D7%94&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Although the Hebrew translation has a rhyme scheme (1st verse is ABAB, 2nd is CDCD), and is written in the Common Meter. I'm not sure at all that the original has these as well, since the translation for Adam lay ybounden has an AABB CCDD rhyme scheme, while the original is completely different in that manner. This is why I didn't bother to rhyme my English &amp;quot;translation&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the Hebrew wordage is very close to the English for Adam lay ybounden, except for maybe three times where a &amp;quot;non-immediate&amp;quot; word was chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The following are my &amp;quot;translations&amp;quot; (titles and content) for the other two poems that appear alongside that &amp;quot;Mock Song&amp;quot; and Adam lay ybounden (denoting a line break with &lt;code&gt;\&lt;/code&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A song of complaint&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ho! Hey! Have no doubt:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Listen, young man, beware,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;An old woman do not take.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have, therefore I know what's it like.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once I'm back from the field&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She'll serve a stew in a punctured pot,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have no courage to ask for the tiniest thing.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If from the lady I'll demand a bread,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She'll break my head with a stick,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Under the bed I'll go.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If for a meat I will call,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She'll break my head with a cauldron,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;You worth less than a barley!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some cheese I'll crave,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She, calmly: &amp;quot;Listen, you toddler,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You're just a weared dust!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She: &amp;quot;Quiet!&amp;quot; - And I shut up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once my eyes weaken&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once my eyes weaken,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my ears deteriorate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my nose frozen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my tongue folden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my face blanched,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my lips blacken,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my mouth distorted,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my saliva drooling,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my hair bristled,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my heart trembled,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my hand shaken,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my leg stiffen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;late, late&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the coffin at the gate;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;then I'll step down from a bed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;lay down,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;wrapped in shrouds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;onto the coffin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;from a coffin to grave,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and the grave will be covered.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Above my nose my home shall rise,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and this world will be nothing for me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T00:30:47.907" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T22:05:47.287" Title="Identify a poem entitled Mock Song, written in middle English in the 13th-15th centuries" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17189" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:32:50.443" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:32:50.443" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:32:50.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17190" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:32:50.443" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English poet Philip Sidney (1554-1586) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:10:35.383" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:10:35.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17191" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:33:40.907" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:33:40.907" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:33:40.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17192" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:33:40.907" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Heather Christle (born 1980) or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:10:03.930" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:10:03.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17193" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:34:40.610" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:34:40.610" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:34:40.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17194" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:34:40.610" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary work &quot;The Crying Book&quot; by Heather Christle. Should be tagged with [heather-christle]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:12:27.577" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:12:27.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17195" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:36:16.030" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:36:16.030" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:36:16.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17196" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:36:16.030" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Markus Natten or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:12:33.580" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:12:33.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17197" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:37:47.397" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:37:47.397" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:37:47.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17198" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:37:47.397" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:09:51.580" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:09:51.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17199" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:40:21.083" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:40:21.083" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:40:21.083" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17200" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:40:21.083" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso, more commonly known as Ovid (43 BC-17/18 AD) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:12:20.973" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:12:20.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17201" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:41:55.457" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:41:55.457" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:41:55.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17202" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:41:55.457" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Greek poet Hesiod (born and died between 750 BC - 650 BC) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:09:59.060" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:09:59.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17177" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:42:39.190" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fair Game&lt;/em&gt; by Erika Tamar looks like possibility.&#xA;From the Publishers Weekly's review (copied from &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0152270655&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amazon.com&lt;/a&gt;) :&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With frankness, insight and imagination, Tamar translates a&#xA;headline-making New Jersey crime into a thoughtful and gripping novel&#xA;about a mildly retarded girl in a Long Island community who is&#xA;gang-raped and otherwise molested by a group of high school athletes,&#xA;all-American boys with bright futures. Three diverse yet equally&#xA;credible characters alternate as narrators: Cara Snowden, the boys'&#xA;victim, a special-ed student who wants nothing more than to be a&#xA;&amp;quot;regular girl&amp;quot;; Laura Jean Kettering, girlfriend of one of the&#xA;rapists, blinded by loyalty and unable to acknowledge the horrific&#xA;truth until it almost literally stares her in the face; and Julio&#xA;&amp;quot;Joe&amp;quot; Lopez, an athlete who refuses to take part in the assault on&#xA;Cara.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:42:39.190" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17204" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:45:54.807" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:45:54.807" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:45:54.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17205" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:45:54.807" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of April Daniels or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:10:29.850" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:10:29.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17206" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:46:36.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:46:36.460" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:46:36.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17207" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:46:36.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Nemesis book series by April Daniels. Should be tagged with [april-daniels]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:11:04.500" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:11:04.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17208" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:47:53.520" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:47:53.520" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:47:53.520" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17209" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:47:53.520" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the poet Paul Celan (1920-1970) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:12:11.863" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:12:11.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17210" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:48:39.390" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:48:39.390" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:48:39.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17211" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:48:39.390" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American poet Russel Edson (1935-2014) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:08:55.900" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:08:55.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17212" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:50:36.677" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T19:50:36.677" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T19:50:36.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17213" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-17T19:50:36.677" Score="0" Body="Questions about the sonnet sequence 'Astrophel and Stella' by Philip Sidney. Should be tagged with [philip-sidney]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-17T20:09:39.900" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:09:39.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17214" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17186" CreationDate="2021-01-17T20:56:19.873" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Once&amp;quot; here means &amp;quot;ever&amp;quot;, so Hamlet is asking, &amp;quot;Would the heart of man ever think it or imagine it / this?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;the heart of man&amp;quot; may refer to a conception of the heart as &amp;quot;the seat of intelligence, motion, and sensation&amp;quot;, which goes back to Aristotle [1]. (Aristotle also held that &amp;quot;the heart as being the hottest of all the bodily parts, is the counterpoise of the brain.&amp;quot; [2])&#xA;Based on this theory of anatomy, Hamlet's question means, &amp;quot;Would man's intelligence ever think it / this?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Galen's theory of physiology was also very influential. According to Galenist medicine, &amp;quot;[r]eason is located in the brain, emotion (particularly anger) in the heart, and desire in the liver&amp;quot; [3]. With this in mind, one may paraphrase Hamlet's question as asking how his emotions would deal with this. His anger about what the ghost has revealed is very clear, for example in lines such as &amp;quot;O villain, villain, smiling damnèd villain!&amp;quot; earlier in the same scene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Paula Findlen: &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.stanford.edu/class/history13/earlysciencelab/body/heartpages/heart.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A History of the Heart&lt;/a&gt; (History Department, Stanford University)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] Aristotle: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Sense_and_the_Sensible/Section_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Sense and the Sensible&lt;/a&gt;, translated by John Isaac Beare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] Amy M. Schmitter: &lt;a href=&quot;https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/emotions-17th18th/LD1Background.html#HipGalMed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Theories of the Emotions&lt;/a&gt;. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T20:56:19.873" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17185" CreationDate="2021-01-17T21:37:45.903" Score="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;Samuel Fischer, who founded the S. Fischer Verlag in 1886 was also Jewish. After his death in 1934, his son-in-law &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Bermann_Fischer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gottfried Bermann Fischer&lt;/a&gt; took over management of the publishing house, but in 1936 he left Germany with Samuel Fischer's widow. They first went to &lt;strong&gt;Vienna&lt;/strong&gt;, taking part of the catalogue with them, and there continued publishing under the name &amp;quot;Bermann-Fischer Verlag&amp;quot;. After the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschluss&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anschluss&lt;/a&gt; in March 1938 he fled Austria and eventually ended up in the Swedish capital, &lt;strong&gt;Stockholm&lt;/strong&gt;, where he continued the publishing house. This is where Stefan Zweig's &lt;em&gt;Ungeduld des Herzens&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1939. Thomas Mann's novel &lt;em&gt;Lotte in Weimar&lt;/em&gt; was also published there in the same year; the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotte_in_Weimar&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia article about the novel&lt;/a&gt; shows the book's original cover, which says, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Bermann Fischer Verlag. Stockholm&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, &lt;strong&gt;Peter Suhrkamp&lt;/strong&gt; continued the original publishing house in Frankfurt am Main, but was forced to rename it to &amp;quot;Suhrkamp Verlag, ehem. S. Fischer&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Suhrkamp publishing house, formerly S. Fischer&amp;quot;) [Saur, page 9]. Suhrkamp kept the business going, even though it cost him time in concentration camps. After World War II, Gottfried Bermann Fischer returned to Germany and wanted to resume his management of the publishing house. Suhrkamp refused, and after long negotiations, Fischer and Suhrkamp decided to let the authors decide: they wrote to the authors whose works they had published, explained the situation to them and asked whether in future they wanted to have their works published by Fischer or by Suhrkamp. Thomas Mann and Carl Zuckmayer were two of the most prominent authors who chose S. Fischer, whereas Hermann Hesse and Bertolt Brecht preferred Suhrkamp. [Saur, page 9-10] Stefan Zweig had died in 1942, so he was never confronted with this choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source (besides the German Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saur, Klaus G. (ed.): &lt;em&gt;Verlage im „Dritten Reich“&lt;/em&gt;. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T11:28:36.967" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T11:28:36.967" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17216" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17179" CreationDate="2021-01-18T12:34:03.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences can be explained with the help of the fuller context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I speak to Lisa and Lisa speaks of parallel crying, the crying that comes alongside art but not precisely from it. Plot does not jerk the tears from you; some other force corresponds. This pleases me, as I have always preferred parallel lines to perpendicular ones. Perpendicular lines are Chekhovian; the introduced gun goes off. Parallel lines are Hitchcockian; the present bomb is enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Ray Butterworth says in &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17184/289&quot;&gt;his answer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_gun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chekhov's gun&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is the well-known principle of dramatic economy: a work of art should have no extraneous elements. Anton Chekhov often used the metaphor of a gun to express this idea. For example, in an 1889 letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Quoted and cited by Isiah Berlin, &lt;a href=&quot;http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/quotations/quotations_by_ib.html&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 18 January 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In contrast to Chekhov, Alfred Hitchcock often spoke of the effectiveness of a threat that &lt;em&gt;doesn't materialize&lt;/em&gt;. In his series of interviews with François Truffaut, Hitchcock contrasts suspense and surprise:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise,” and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.&#xA;We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let us suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware that the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions this same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There’s a bomb beneath you and it’s about to explode!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second case we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Truffaut, François. &lt;em&gt;Hitchcock/Truffaut&lt;/em&gt;. With the Collaboration of Helen G. Scott. 1966. Revised Ed. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. pp. 181–182.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the book, Hitchcock emphasizes that having the bomb actually go off is a mistake. Speaking of his movie &lt;em&gt;Sabotage&lt;/em&gt; (1936), Hitchcock says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I made a serious mistake in having the little boy carry the bomb. A character who unknowingly carries a bomb around as though it were an ordinary package is bound to work up great suspense in the audience. The boy was involved in a situation that got him too much sympathy from the audience, so that when the bomb exploded and he was killed, the public was resentful.   (pp. 273–274)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Heather Christie says that in the Chekhovian case, the audience's emotions are engaged because of &lt;em&gt;what actually happens&lt;/em&gt;: someone picks up the gun and shoots. The audience's reactions intersect those of the characters in the play: they are shocked and distressed at the shooting. The crying comes from the plot itself. In the Hitchcockian scenario, on the other hand, the action is almost irrelevant. The mere presence of the bomb, whether or not it goes off, is enough to engage one's emotions. The audience's emotions are on a parallel track to those of the characters, and the two sets of emotions do not intersect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Christie is making a broader point about how art works generally. We assume that art elicits emotions; that what moves us is a quality of the artwork itself. Christie argues, however, that what &amp;quot;jerk[s] the tears&amp;quot; is not the artwork itself, but &amp;quot;some other force.&amp;quot; That force is the emotions &lt;em&gt;we&lt;/em&gt; invest in a work of art. Christie is contrasting tear-jerkers, which seek to manipulate the audience's emotions through melodramatic plot elements, with more authentic artworks that engage the spectator's or reader's emotions without manipulating them. Chekhov's gun is predictable, Hitchcock's bomb unpredictable. The latter's unpredictability opens up possibilities. A true work of art allows engagement without dictating the terms of that engagement &amp;quot;precisely.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While her broader point is well taken, I do not necessarily agree with Christie that in Chekhov's case, the crying comes from the art and in Hitchcock's, alongside it. After all, the presence of the gun is also suspenseful, and the unexploded bomb is also a plot element. Hitchcock's skillful deployment of suspense seems no less intended to elicit certain reactions from the audience than Chekhov's. Predictable art being perpendicular and the art of possibilities parallel is a good metaphor, but whether Chekhov and Hitchcock themselves fall squarely into those respective camps is debatable. Given Christie's highly compressed expression of a complex aesthetic argument, however, Chekhov's gun and Hitchcock's bomb work well enough as shorthand—with the caveat that the argument should not be taken as a summary judgment on Chekhov's art or Hitchcock's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T12:34:03.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-18T16:31:42.100" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a German book from which I read an excerpt when I was in high school studying German (between 1997 and 1999). In that book a manager at a company is reviewing applications for an opening at his companies when he finds one sent by his former bully. At least on paper, his former bully seems perfect for the job so the manager is confronted with the decision of hiring him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story takes place in the 20th century, probably after the Second World War. I don't have any more information about that book, I am just hoping it will remind something to a user here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11899" LastEditorUserId="11899" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T23:30:17.710" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T23:30:17.710" Title="German book where a hiring manager hires his former bully" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-18T20:46:39.937" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad-i-cant-answer-these_b_586d5517e4b0c3539e80c341&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; about a writer who was asked about the interpretation of one of his books, and he had a hard time coming up with something that would be aligned with the expectations of the jury. This was an American article about some kind of state-wide standardized tests all children must pass and being French I did not really understand what they were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This led me to wonder &lt;strong&gt;whether there were studies about how the interpretation of contemporary literature matches the interpretation of the author of the book&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was always amazed by how much my French teacher managed to squeeze out of a piece of literature and it sometimes seemed borderline (although these interpretations were probably aligned with the official curriculum)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2369" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-18T21:15:32.070" LastActivityDate="2021-01-18T21:15:32.070" Title="Do literature interpretations actually reflect what the author had in mind?" Tags="&lt;authorial-intent&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-01-19T23:28:27.227" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17221" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17376" CreationDate="2021-01-18T21:58:17.573" Score="2" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Hardy's short story &amp;quot;The Withered Arm&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/hardy/2057/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;freely available to read online&lt;/a&gt;) revolves largely around two female characters, Rhoda Brook and Gertrude Lodge, the two &amp;quot;viewpoint&amp;quot; or central characters throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The first half of the story is told from the viewpoint of Rhoda Brook, showing first her jealousy and enmity against Gertrude and then their budding friendship which is destroyed by Conjuror Trendle's revelation.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The second half of the story is told from the viewpoint of Gertrude Lodge, showing her suffering under the unwitting &amp;quot;curse&amp;quot; of Rhoda and ultimately trying to cure herself using the body of Rhoda's dead son.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is either of these women portrayed as a negative character?&lt;/strong&gt; Rhoda did great harm to Gertrude, but it seems that, even though she disliked the other woman, she never intended to cause her real harm. Gertrude seemingly cut the friendship without waiting for any explanation (perhaps understandable given the betrayal she must have felt?), and her action at the end of the story can also be seen as callous, but she was desperate and again unaware of who the young man was. Should we interpret either character negatively, or are they both victims of cruel misfortune?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T10:28:07.330" Title="Is either Rhoda Brook or Gertrude Lodge portrayed negatively in &quot;The Withered Arm&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17222" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T00:00:16.217" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.phys.unm.edu/%7Etw/fas/yits/archive/jeffers_hurthawks.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Hurt Hawks&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Robinson Jeffers is about a red-tailed hawk whose wing is so badly hurt that he'll never be able to fly again. Two lines of this poem are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The curs of the day come and torment him&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why &amp;quot;death the redeemer&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; What does it mean to call death a &amp;quot;redeemer&amp;quot; in this context? Why was this particular word chosen - is it a reference to something else, like Christ the Redeemer for example?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T09:05:15.490" Title="Why is death a redeemer in Robinson Jeffers's &quot;Hurt Hawks&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;robinson-jeffers&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17223" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T00:59:00.940" Score="0" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a one shot about a girl (I think wearing glasses) who can't speak loudly, and whose English is bad.  Even her teacher has a hard time with her. A guy who sees her get bullied helps her.  I remember the guy being good at fighting. At the end, there was a competition the teacher arranged. The competition for English speaking or similar. There was some penalty if the female lead couldn't speak well. The guy (or the girl, not sure) confessed their feelings on stage. I also remember the girl gave the guy a Band-Aid when he got hurt. I read it in KM. What shoujo/romance manga is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5997" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-19T01:54:06.133" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T01:54:06.133" Title="Manga one-shot, guy helps bullied girl and competition with penalty for not speak well" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;manga&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17224" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-19T03:50:53.767" Score="3" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;Rose Justice, the main character of &lt;em&gt;Rose Under Fire&lt;/em&gt;, writes several poems that appear in various places in the book. This is the second verse of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rose_Under_Fire/DKA4yDSB5JEC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;bsq=KITE_FLYING%20(by%20Rose%20Justice)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Kite-Flying&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope waits stubbornly,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;watching the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for turmoil, feeding on&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;things that fly:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;crows, ashes, newspapers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;dry leaves in flight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;all suggest wind&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that could lift a kite.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;In the section starting &amp;quot;April 30, 1945/Paris&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some symbolic significance to the specific items listed? I highly doubt they are random. This poem comes up twice in the book, both important times. But I'm unsure what connection &amp;quot;crows, ashes, newspapers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;dry leaves in flight&amp;quot; have to each other. Or how they're connected hope and what it takes to sustain hope (a major theme of the poem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why these specific &amp;quot;things that fly&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Kite-Flying&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T20:29:40.850" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T20:29:40.850" Title="Why these specific &quot;things that fly&quot; in &quot;Kite-Flying&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;rose-under-fire&gt;&lt;elizabeth-wein&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17225" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17222" CreationDate="2021-01-19T08:44:52.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's quite intentional that redeemer echoes &amp;quot;Christ the Redeemer&amp;quot;, when two lines later the poem states &amp;quot;The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful&amp;quot;. Redeem in the Christian religious sense usually means salvation (eg &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/redemption&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;), ie, to save. The narrator saves the hawk from pain and misery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem has its basis in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://peterlevine.ws/?p=11666&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;real injured hawk&lt;/a&gt; looked after by Jeffers' son in the 1920s. Coincidentally, that means the poem was being written at the same time the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_the_Redeemer_(statue)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cristo Redentor&lt;/a&gt; was being built.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastActivityDate="2021-01-19T08:44:52.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17227" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17232" CreationDate="2021-01-19T16:11:11.433" Score="3" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45160/astrophil-and-stella-39-come-sleep-o-sleep-the-certain-knot-of-peace&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sonnet 39&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Astrophil and Stella&lt;/em&gt;, also known as &lt;em&gt;Come Sleep! O Sleep&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Come Sleep! O Sleep, &lt;strong&gt;the certain knot of peace&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;The indifferent judge between the high and low.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With shield of proof shield me from out the prease&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O make in me those civil wars to cease;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I will good tribute pay, if thou do so.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A rosy garland and a weary head:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And if these things, as being thine by right,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What figure of speech is used in the lines in bold? Are these different descriptions of sleep epithets or metaphors?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11859" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T11:41:46.827" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T08:03:12.497" Title="Sonnet 39 of Astrophil and Stella: Are these epithets or metaphors?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;philip-sidney&gt;&lt;astrophil-and-stella&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17228" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17344" CreationDate="2021-01-19T18:09:27.043" Score="1" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;What was Tara Westover trying to imply when she compared the accident her family suffered in her childhood with this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Educated/OusUEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;dq=Choices,+numberless+as+grains+of+sand,+had+layered+and+compressed,+coalescing+into+sediment,+then+into+rock,+until+all+was+set+in+stone.&amp;amp;pg=PT45&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35133922-educated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Educated&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11440" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T21:49:12.680" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T22:55:18.917" Title="What did Tara Westover mean by comparing her childhood family accident with &quot;choices coalescing into sediment&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;tara-westover&gt;&lt;educated&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17229" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-20T06:31:47.010" Score="4" ViewCount="430" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about the sentence in The Red Circle by Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;of a&#xA;not unusual pattern&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is uttered by Holmes when he saw some pencil-written writings on pieces of paper.&#xA;I’m not sure what the underlined part refers to, namely whether to pencil or to words themselves.&#xA;In light of sentence structure, it seems the part refers to simply the word before, pencil. But I thought even Holmes, who can tell the brand of tobacco by looking at its ash (flakes), can’t tell types (shapes) of pencil just by looking at words with which they are written.&#xA;So I thought in this case that the words are written in(/of) a font which is not unusual for printing, hence, the above sentence’s word order can be changed as..&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words are written of a not unusual pattern with a broad-pointed violet-tinted pencil.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I wrong? Could someone enlighten me?  Thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="8492" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T13:10:09.280" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T13:10:09.280" Title="Which does this part refer to, a pencil or the words?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17230" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17187" CreationDate="2021-01-20T07:33:58.200" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It goes back at least to Biblical times, if not earlier. St Paul, also known as Saul, was a persecutor of early Christians. But while traveling on the road to Damascus he was struck blind. Some Christians took care of him until his sight was restored. Then he was converted to Christianity, and became their leader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T07:33:58.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17231" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17229" CreationDate="2021-01-20T08:16:26.637" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pencil. Holmes is saying that the &amp;quot;broad-pointed, violet-tinted&amp;quot; nature of the pencil is not an unusual pattern for pencils, so Holmes can't identify anything sufficiently unique about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contrast this with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/108/108-h/108-h.htm#chap09&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Adventure of the Three Students&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; involve an unusual pencil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The pencil was not an ordinary one. It was above the usual size, with&#xA;a soft lead, the outer colour was dark blue, the maker’s name was&#xA;printed in silver lettering, and the piece remaining is only about an&#xA;inch and a half long. Look for such a pencil, Mr. Soames, and you have&#xA;got your man. When I add that he possesses a large and very blunt&#xA;knife, you have an additional aid.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Soames was somewhat overwhelmed by this flood of information. “I&#xA;can follow the other points,” said he, “but really, in this matter of&#xA;the length——”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes held out a small chip with the letters NN and a space of clear&#xA;wood after them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You see?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No, I fear that even now——”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Watson, I have always done you an injustice. There are others. What&#xA;could this NN be? It is at the end of a word. You are aware that&#xA;Johann Faber is the most common maker’s name. Is it not clear that&#xA;there is just as much of the pencil left as usually follows the&#xA;Johann?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might think, then, that a violet tint or a broad point might be interesting characteristics, but in this case it seems they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T08:16:26.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17227" CreationDate="2021-01-20T09:11:11.923" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are epithets. Specifically, they are stand-alone epithets termed antonomasia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;epithet&lt;/strong&gt;, according to the &lt;em&gt;Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A modifier specifying an essential characteristic and appearing with a noun or a proper name to form a phrase. (p. 452)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Greene, Roland, et al., eds. &lt;em&gt;The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics&lt;/em&gt;. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key idea here is that an epithet denotes something essential to the person or noun it accompanies. The usual examples are &lt;em&gt;grey-eyed Athena&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;wine-dark sea&lt;/em&gt;, both from Homer. Athena is inseparable from being grey-eyed; it is an immutable characteristic. Such characteristics need not be physical. Epithets such as &lt;em&gt;Honest Abe&lt;/em&gt; for Abraham Lincoln or &lt;em&gt;Mahatma Gandhi&lt;/em&gt; for Mohandas Gandhi furnish examples wherein non-physical characteristics are treated as essential to those individuals, to the point of being considered immutable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When an epithet is used in place of aname it ordinarily modifies, it becomes an &lt;em&gt;antonomasia&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Princeton Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; defines antonomasia as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Gr., “naming instead”). A figure in which an epithet or appellative or descriptive phrase is substituted for a proper name (e.g., “The Bard” for Shakespeare; “It was visitors’ day at the vinegar works / In Tenderloin Town” [W. H. Auden, &lt;em&gt;For the Time Being&lt;/em&gt;]) or, conversely, in which a proper name is substituted for an individual, a class, or type (“the English Diana” for Queen Elizabeth; “Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest” [Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”]).  (p. 59)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples of the first sort of antonomasia, where a descriptive phrase stands in for a noun or proper name, include &lt;em&gt;the Father of the Nation&lt;/em&gt; for George Washington, or &lt;em&gt;the Light of the World&lt;/em&gt; for Jesus Christ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Sidney follows up his direct naming of Sleep with additional descriptors, any of those descriptors could be used by itself to mean &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;Sleep&lt;/em&gt; isn't a proper name, of course, but Sidney is &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/personification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personifying&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/literary-devices-and-terms/apostrophe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;apostrophizing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; it, which is what allows these phrases to be seen as antonomasiae. Shakespeare uses the same device in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Chief nourisher in life's feast.  (&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.ii.38–40&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since phrases such as &lt;em&gt;the balm of woe&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Balm of hurt minds&lt;/em&gt; are complete noun phrases in themselves, they aren't ordinary epithets, which need both the adjectival and the noun they modify to be complete: &lt;em&gt;Simple Simon&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;beautiful downtown Burbank&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that the phrases Sidney uses are metaphorical: sleep isn't literally a &lt;em&gt;knot&lt;/em&gt; of any kind. But antonomasia often are metaphorical. Washington did not literally beget the United States upon the mother country (another antonomasia). Christ is not literally a source of illumination. A camel is not literally a ship. While they are of course all metaphors, they are specifically antonomasiae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason they are better described as antonomasiae than as metaphors is that antonomasia is the specific term for the use to which these metaphors are being put. Consider the term &lt;em&gt;fair Ophelia&lt;/em&gt;. Here &lt;em&gt;fair&lt;/em&gt; is an adjective, to be sure, but in context of its specific link to Ophelia, it is an epithet. So also with Sidney's addresses to Sleep: in the general case, yes, they are metaphors, but he is using them specifically as antonomasiae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being metaphorical is not, however, a requirement for antonomasiae. Chicago is literally a &lt;em&gt;Windy City&lt;/em&gt;, because of the winter winds off Lake Michigan. Interestingly, there is an argument that the city is called that because its denizens are considered bloviators, and not because of the prevailing weather conditions; so perhaps that's not the best example. A better example is &lt;em&gt;Maid of Orleans&lt;/em&gt;, unmistakably literal: Joan of Arc was a maid and from Orleans. It's worth noting that &lt;em&gt;Joan of Arc&lt;/em&gt; is an epithet as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is sometimes asserted that antonomasiae are formulaic, in the sense that their referents are generally understood. &lt;em&gt;The City of Brotherly Love&lt;/em&gt; is widely recognized to be Philadelphia, or &lt;em&gt;the Bard of Avon&lt;/em&gt; to be Shakespeare, to the point that the city or the poet themselves need not be explicitly named if these formulae are used instead. That would not be true of &lt;em&gt;the prisoner's release&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;the baiting-place of wit&lt;/em&gt;, which aren't commonly-used phrases for sleep. If Sidney had not mentioned sleep, the argument goes, we could not say for sure what &lt;em&gt;the prisoner's release&lt;/em&gt; signified; it could just as well be merely a key. So how can that not universally understood phrase be an antonomasia for sleep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The answer is this: rhetoric is a matter of &lt;em&gt;technique&lt;/em&gt;, not semantics. Any rhetorical tool is defined not by what it means, but by what it does. An epithet is defined as an adjectival phrase that specifies some constant characteristic of the noun or name it is attached to. An antonomasia is defined as a noun phrase that stands in as an epithet for another noun or name. Those definitions do not require that the epithet or antonomasia make sense regardless of context. On the contrary, like any other rhetorical device, those techniques make meaning only in context-delimited ways. For example, in the US, &lt;em&gt;the Father of the Nation&lt;/em&gt; refers to George Washington. In India, the same phrase refers to Mohandas Gandhi. In Pakistan, to Muhammad Ali Jinnah. An epithet or antonomasia depends for its meaning on a context shared between the speaker or writer and the audience; it is not a contextless utterance. So in the context of Sidney's poem, he has established that the referent is sleep, and the remaining phrases are antonomasiac regardless of their non-formulaic nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Sidney does specify &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot; just before the series of noun phrases that (in this context) mean sleep, it could be argued that the phrases Sidney uses are not antonomasiae, but part of an epithet. The 1st century CE Roman rhetorician Quintilian says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some, however, who think that the epithet is not a trope, because it produces no change. Their reason is that an epithet, if it be separated from the word to which it belongs, must (if it be a trope) have some signification by itself, and form an antonomasia. Thus if we say, by itself, He who overthrew Numantia and Carthage, it is an antonomasia; if we add Scipio, an epithet; and an epithet, consequently, must always stand in conjunction with something else.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://trisagionseraph.tripod.com/Texts/Institutes4.html#VIII&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VIII.vi.43&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Quintilian. &lt;em&gt;Institues&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://trisagionseraph.tripod.com/Texts/Institutes1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trisagionseraph.tripod.com/Texts/Institutes1.html&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 20 Jan 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quintilian says that some rhetoricians do not believe that epithets are figures of speech, because they mention their referents directly rather than figuratively. &amp;quot;Joan of Arc*, for example, directly names Joan. Antonomasiae, however, are figurative because they allude indirectly to their referents: &lt;em&gt;the Maid of Orleans&lt;/em&gt; stands in for Joan. If I say &lt;em&gt;Joan, the maid of Orleans&lt;/em&gt;, however, I am directly naming Joan and so I'm no longer using antonomasia, but epithet. In this context, then, Sidney names sleep and then goes on to use various descriptors for sleep. So the entire first quatrain, barring the first three words, could be considered an epithet; or less strictly, since each phrase such as &lt;em&gt;the poor man's wealth&lt;/em&gt; can stand on its own and isn't tied to the referent &amp;quot;sleep&amp;quot;, the individual phrases can be considered antonomasiae.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;. Thanks to users Rand al'Thor and Chappo Hasn't Forgotten Monica for pressing me on certain claims so that I had to dig deeper to improve this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T08:03:12.497" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T08:03:12.497" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17233" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17234" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" Score="0" Body="Questions about the sonnet sequence 'Astrophil and Stella' (or 'Astrophel and Stella') by Philip Sidney. Should be tagged with [philip-sidney]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T11:41:57.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17235" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17239" CreationDate="2021-01-20T13:18:52.817" Score="1" ViewCount="125" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, Miss Kitty was a rural Canadian carefree girl, Renmark was a professor, and Yates was that young man from New York:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miss Kitty Bartlett probably would not have denied that she had a sincere liking for the conceited young man from New York. Renmark fell into the error of thinking Miss Kitty a frivolous young person, whereas she was merely a girl who had an inexhaustible fund of high spirits, and one who took a most deplorable pleasure in &lt;strong&gt;shocking&lt;/strong&gt; a serious man. Even Yates made a slight mistake regarding her on one occasion, when they were having an evening walk together, with &lt;strong&gt;that freedom from chaperonage which is the birthright of every American girl&lt;/strong&gt;, whether she belongs to a farmhouse or to the palace of a millionaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found that chaperonage was somehow a restrict on girls, so how could it be a birthright of them, or did the author mean a birthright of their families, or it was &amp;quot;that freedom&amp;quot; which is their birthright?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;shocking a serious man&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;provoking him&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-21T04:38:09.457" LastActivityDate="2021-01-21T04:38:09.457" Title="How could &quot;chaperonage&quot; be the right of a girl?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17235" CreationDate="2021-01-20T14:51:47.233" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's the New World and the 20&lt;sup&gt;th&lt;/sup&gt; Century is less than a decade away.&#xA;North American girls now felt it was acceptable to not be chaperoned all the time.&#xA;By saying &amp;quot;birthright&amp;quot;, the author is expressing this idea in an exaggerated way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar vein, girls now thought they could say things that would be considered forward or even risqué by a gentleman of the times. In this case, the girl was amused by the reaction of the gentleman, and likely continued the practice simply for that effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T14:51:47.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17237" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-17T20:33:02.760" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from the book named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice:_What%27s_the_Right_Thing_to_Do%3F&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Justice&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Michael Sandel. I would like to know the meaning of &amp;quot;much less regard&amp;quot; and the meaning of the sentence (the second part of the sentence). How can we rewrite it simply?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some pleasures are worthy and others are low, why should society&#xA;weigh all preferences equally, much less regard the sum of such&#xA;preferences as the greatest good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Harry" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-20T21:41:02.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T21:41:02.780" Title="Meaning of &quot;much less regard&quot; in Justice by Michael Sandel" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17237" CreationDate="2021-01-20T21:39:10.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this sentence, &amp;quot;regard&amp;quot; is a verb. One might rephrase the sentence as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some pleasures are worthy and others are low, why should society weigh all preferences equally, let alone regard the sum of such preferences as the greatest good?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If we transform the question into a declarative sentence (and reword it a bit), we get the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If some pleasures are worthy and others are low,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[then] society should not weigh all preferences equally,&lt;br /&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and it should certainly not regard the sum of such preferences as the greatest good.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dictionary references:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/much_less&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;much less&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/much%20less&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;much less&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/much-less&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;much less&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Cambridge English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/much-less&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;much less&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;Collins English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T21:39:10.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17235" CreationDate="2021-01-20T22:57:15.983" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;American girls were, indeed, much less chaperoned than their European counterparts and regarded this as their right. This would give them freedoms, such as going for a walk with a gentleman, or going on a row boat out on a lake, without a third party hanging about watching.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Shocking&amp;quot; does not necessarily mean &amp;quot;provoking&amp;quot; though overlap is possible; it merely requires surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-01-20T22:57:15.983" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17900" CreationDate="2021-01-21T19:32:03.133" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; by Richard Adams, the band of rabbits face a number of ordeals during their journey from Sandleford Warren to Watership Down: crossing a river while there's a dog loose in the woods, fighting off an attacking crow, crossing an unappealing heath during fog, and of course the trial of Cowslip's warren. After Bigwig survives the wire and Strawberry joins them at the end of Chapter 17, the story cuts directly to their arrival at the base of Watership Down more than 24 hours later. The second paragraph of Chapter 18 describes briefly their experiences since the story broke off, including their final ordeal of fighting rats in a barn:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They had splashed through two brooks and&#xA;wandered fearfully in the deep woodlands west of Ecchinswell. They had rested in&#xA;the straw of a starveall, or lonely barn, and woken to find themselves attacked by&#xA;rats. Silver and Buckthorn, with Bigwig helping them, had covered the retreat&#xA;until, once all were together outside, they had taken to flight. Buckthorn had been&#xA;bitten in the foreleg, and the wound, in the manner of a rat bite, was irritant and&#xA;painful. Skirting a small lake, they had stared to see a great gray fisher bird that&#xA;stabbed and paddled in the sedge, until a flight of wild duck had frightened them&#xA;away with their clamor. They had crossed more than half a mile of open pasture&#xA;without a trace of cover, expecting every moment some attack that did not come.&#xA;They had heard the unnatural humming of a pylon in the summer air; and had&#xA;actually gone beneath it, on Fiver's assurance that it could do them no harm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this part of their journey not covered in detail?&lt;/strong&gt; It seems no less challenging or noteworthy than their adventures &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; reaching Cowslip's warren. Their fight with the rats is even mentioned again later, in Chapter 23:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bigwig and Silver had a good opinion of themselves. Apart from Holly, they&#xA;were the only survivors of the Sandleford Owsla and they knew that their&#xA;comrades looked up to them. The encounter with the rats in the barn had been no&#xA;joke and had proved their worth. Bigwig, who was generous and honest, had&#xA;never for a moment resented Hazel's courage on the night when his own&#xA;superstitious fear had got the better of him. But the idea of going back to the&#xA;Honeycomb and reporting that he had glimpsed an unknown creature in the&#xA;grass and left it alone was more than he could swallow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it wasn't just a minor scuffle not worth covering in detail: indeed, it was a tougher ordeal than some of those that &lt;em&gt;were&lt;/em&gt; covered in detail in earlier chapters, such as their encounter with the crow. Why then was it skipped over and only referred to in flashbacks?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T14:57:11.283" Title="Why is the encounter with the rats not covered in detail?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17244" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17245" CreationDate="2021-01-21T22:23:34.760" Score="2" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, Renmark was a typical quiet and respectful professor, but something made so crazy to swear, saying &amp;quot;Damn!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His use of the word given above is not to be defended; still, as it was spoken by him, it seemed to lose all relationship with swearing. He said it quietly, mildly, and, in a certain sense, innocently. He was astonished at himself for using it, but there had been moments during the past few days when &lt;strong&gt;the ordinary expletives used in the learned volumes of higher mathematics did not fit the occasion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could the volumes of higher mathematics contain expletives?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T04:56:00.750" Title="How could the volumes of higher mathematics contain expletives in the late 19th century?" Tags="&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17244" CreationDate="2021-01-22T04:56:00.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;expletive&amp;quot; is commonly understood to mean a swear word, but that is not, in fact, its oldest meaning. Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/expletive&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; expletive as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1 a&lt;/strong&gt; : a syllable, word, or phrase inserted to fill a vacancy (as in a sentence or a metrical line) without adding to the sense&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; : a word (such as &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; in &amp;quot;make it clear which you prefer&amp;quot;) that occupies the position of the subject or object of a verb in normal English word order and anticipates a subsequent word or phrase that supplies the needed meaningful content&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;    &lt;strong&gt;b&lt;/strong&gt; : an exclamatory word or phrase&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;especially&lt;/em&gt; : one that is obscene or profane&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2&lt;/strong&gt; : one that serves to fill out or as a filling&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Expletive&lt;/em&gt; in the sense of a swear word has been common since at least the 1930s. The quotation from &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt; demonstrates that it was definitely prevalent even before then, but the primary meaning would be &amp;quot;filler&amp;quot;. Since swear words are fillers that don't add to the literal meaning of the phrase, using &lt;em&gt;expletive&lt;/em&gt; for swear word is appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This latter sense of the term became the most recognized one after the Watergate scandal. When the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_White_House_tapes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nixon White House tapes&lt;/a&gt; were released in 1973 and 1974, transcripts substituted &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_deleted&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;expletive deleted&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; for every obscenity on the recordings. Since then, we tend to assume that &lt;em&gt;expletive&lt;/em&gt; must mean &lt;em&gt;swear word&lt;/em&gt;. But in 1874, when Barr was writing, &lt;em&gt;expletive&lt;/em&gt; would have had the primary meaning of &lt;em&gt;filler&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator is making a kind of pun. On the one hand, &lt;em&gt;damn&lt;/em&gt; is an expletive in the sense of a swear word. On the other hand, mathematics books would not contain swear words. It's a subtle, deadpan joke that relies on increasingly shifting attributions of meaning: the narrator is equating the ordinary words with which maths books are filled with &lt;em&gt;filler&lt;/em&gt; and then, with a pun on the dual meaning of &lt;em&gt;expletive&lt;/em&gt;, with swear words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-01-22T04:56:00.750" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17246" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-22T09:02:05.333" Score="5" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;On &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/washingtonscross00fisc/page/324/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 324&lt;/a&gt; of David Hackett Fischer's book &lt;em&gt;Washington's Crossing&lt;/em&gt;, there is an epigraph (quotation at the beginning of the chapter &amp;quot;The Battle at Princeton&amp;quot;) by Horace Walpole on George Washington's leadership at Princeton:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Washington the dictator has shown himself both a Fabius and Camillus. His March through our lines is allowed to have been a prodigy of generalship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe this is a reference to Roman history, and I would like to confirm my understanding of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Fabius was a Roman general who fought a defensive, delaying style against Hannibal in the Second Punic War. Second, Camillus was a Roman (general?) whose decisive action saved Rome from the Gauls around 390 BCE.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, if I understand Walpole correctly, he is praising Washington as someone who knew when to play defensive (the Fabius reference), and knew when to strike decisively (the Camillus reference), and perhaps also that he saved his country (the Camillus reference again)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11685" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-22T09:28:23.407" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T01:03:25.200" Title="What does it mean for George Washington to be &quot;a Fabius and Camillus&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;horace-walpole&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17248" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-23T12:54:08.487" Score="5" ViewCount="387" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to many accounts, Frederick B. Warde performed a play entitled &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt; in 1897-1897 season in many country theatres such Lancaster PA, Chicago, Illinois, Columbus Ohio and so on. The play was adapted for stage, based on Benjamin Disraeli's novelette &lt;em&gt;The Rise of Iskander,&lt;/em&gt; by William Dunseath Eaton in 1897. Does anyone know if such a play exists and where to find it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11928" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T09:22:34.267" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T09:22:34.267" Title="Is William Dunseath Eaton's play Iskander still extant?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17249" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17248" CreationDate="2021-01-23T13:51:20.493" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a hard one to track down!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The journal article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3206179?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alan Woods, &amp;quot;Frederick B. Warde: America's Greatest Forgotten Tragedian&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Educational Theatre Journal&lt;/em&gt; 29(3) (1977), pp. 333-344&lt;/a&gt; mentions Frederick B. Warde appearing in the play &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt;, but doesn't mention who wrote it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Significantly, Warde's efforts to add to his repertory were not attempts to broaden his range: he did not act in modern domestic drama at any point in his career after 1881. All the new plays he performed - and most were commissioned either by or for him - were cast in the old romantic style. He performed leading roles in such new plays as Celia Logan's &lt;em&gt;Gaston Cadol&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Cadet of France&lt;/em&gt;, H. G. Carleton's &lt;em&gt;The Lion's Mouth&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Runneymede&lt;/em&gt; (William Harrison's version of the Robin Hood story), &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt; (from the Disraeli novel), Espy Williams's &lt;em&gt;The Duke's Jester&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Horatius&lt;/em&gt;, and Stanislaus Stange's &lt;em&gt;Salambo&lt;/em&gt;. Of these, only &lt;em&gt;The Lion's Mouth&lt;/em&gt;, a revenge tragedy with a happy ending set in Renaissance Venice, proved popular with audiences and remained in Warde's repertory longer than a single season.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The news article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.botasot.info/amerika-diaspora/756285/skenderbeu-ne-literaturen-anglo-amerikane-ne-shba/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beqir Sina, “Skënderbeu në literaturën anglo-amerikane, në SHBA”, 7 September 2017&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;written in Albanian&lt;/strong&gt;, includes information on &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt; and its author:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Një tjetër dramë e titulluar “Iskander”, përshtatur nga Uilliam Dunseath Eaton më 1896 sipas romanit të Benjamin Disraelit, është vënë në skenë në Lankaster, Pennsylvania, me 1897 nga Frederick B. Warde, një aktor mjaft i famshëm i asaj kohe. Por tekstet e melodramës të Thomas Dibdin-it dhe dramës së Uilliam Eatonit nuk gjenden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another play entitled &amp;quot;Alexander&amp;quot;, adapted by William Dunseath Eaton in 1896 based on the novel by Benjamin Disraeli, was staged in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1897 by Frederick B. Warde, a very famous actor of the time. But the texts of Thomas Dibdin's melodrama and William Eaton's drama are not found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;text=Nj%C3%AB%20tjet%C3%ABr%20dram%C3%AB%20e%20titulluar%20%E2%80%9CIskander%E2%80%9D%2C%20p%C3%ABrshtatur%20nga%20Uilliam%20Dunseath%20Eaton%20m%C3%AB%201896%20sipas%20romanit%20t%C3%AB%20Benjamin%20Disraelit%2C%20%C3%ABsht%C3%AB%20v%C3%ABn%C3%AB%20n%C3%AB%20sken%C3%AB%20n%C3%AB%20Lankaster%2C%20Pennsylvania%2C%20me%201897%20nga%20Frederick%20B.%20Warde%2C%20nj%C3%AB%20aktor%20mjaft%20i%20famsh%C3%ABm%20i%20asaj%20kohe.%20Por%20tekstet%20e%20melodram%C3%ABs%20t%C3%AB%20Thomas%20Dibdin-it%20dhe%20dram%C3%ABs%20s%C3%AB%20Uilliam%20Eatonit%20nuk%20gjenden.%20&amp;amp;op=translate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Translate from Albanian to English&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is confirmed by William Dunseath Eaton's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spiritlifeordowe00eato&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spirit Life, or Do We Die?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, available on the Internet Archive, which lists some of his other works under his name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;WILLIAM DUNSEATH EATON&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Founder and first Editor of the Chicago Herald. Author of &amp;quot;The True Plans&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;The White Crows&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Iskander&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;The Parson o' Dunford&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Joshua Whitcomb&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;All the Rags&amp;quot;, A History of the World War, and other books and plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;No other information appears to be available about Eaton's play &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt;. Neither &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22William+Dunseath+Eaton%22+%22iskander%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google search&lt;/a&gt; nor the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22William+Dunseath+Eaton%22+Iskander&amp;amp;and%5B%5D=collection:%22books%22&amp;amp;sin=TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; have any information beyond what's already mentioned above. As the Albanian article says, the text seems to have been lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The only other possibly relevant thing I was able to track down, thanks to the above-linked Internet Archive search and a result which can also be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bxIDAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA1138&amp;amp;lpg=PA1138&amp;amp;dq=%22published+several+years+ago,+under+the+title+of+Iskander%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt;, is a reference to Marshall Monroe Kirkman's &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Monroe_Kirkman&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published in 1903&lt;/a&gt; and available to read online &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.loc.gov/resource/dcmsiabooks.iskanderromanceo00kirk/?st=gallery&amp;amp;c=160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;from the Library of Congress&lt;/a&gt;. Perhaps this may have been partly inspired by or based on Eaton's &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: Frederick B. Warde appeared in William Dunseath Eaton's &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt; in 1897, but its text appears to have been lost. The best we have is Marshall Monroe Kirkman's &lt;em&gt;Iskander&lt;/em&gt; published a few years later.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T13:51:20.493" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2021-01-23T19:02:34.097" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's better not to know whats coming than to know and worry about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example: If you were in Custer's Battle of the Little Big Horn Would you rather go into the fight thinking it was &amp;quot;just a few warriors&amp;quot; or know you were outnumbered 100 to 1 and still had to go.  You have no chance to change the outcome so why spend anytime worrying about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11929" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T19:02:34.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17251" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17248" CreationDate="2021-01-23T20:22:56.973" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not found the play &amp;quot;Iskander&amp;quot; on the Internet Archive, but I did find the memoirs of Frederick B. Warde, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924027099740/page/n323/mode/2up?q=%22w+d+eaton%22&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fifty Years of Make-believe&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which gives the backstory of the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The age of materiality was approaching and however lofty the sentiment or intense the emotion, it must be expressed in terms that could be readily understood or the acting, however perfect, would lose much of its effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With these conditions in view, I approached Mr. W. D. Eaton, of Chicago, a dramatic writer and a master of modern English, to write for me or suggest a romantic play that would conform to these conditions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Romance though dormant is still attractive, but the knight errant and wandering troubadour must have some more definite purpose than moonlight serenades and random chivalry. Mr. Eaton suggested Benjamin D'Israeli's story, &amp;quot;The Rise of Iskander.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I reread it and found it admirably adapted for dramatic purposes. Mr. Eaton completed the adaptation and called it &amp;quot;Iskander.&amp;quot; I gave it an elaborate setting and rehearsed it carefully, but a series of unfortunate circumstances delayed its production, which was finally made at Lancaster, Pa., on October 14, 1897.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The part of Iskander, Prince of Epirus, seemed especially suited to me; the supporting cast was excellent and included William Redmond, a fine impressive actor; Charles D. Herman, my leading man for many years; B. W. Wallace, an admirable comedian, and Miss Beatrice Lieb, in the leading parts. But the play was not successful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Eaton, a practical student of the drama for many years, had constructed something splendid that appeared to me, to my literary and professional friends and to all of the company, to have every essential for popular interest. Time, money, research and study had been lavishly given to its accurate and effective presentation. A very efficient company had acted their parts with earnestness and ability. The public said it was a very good play—but—, and —but— was the rock on which Iskander was wrecked. It was another instance of the fact that the only sure test of the approval of a play is a public performance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am reminded of an incident reported in the experience of the late Mr. A. M. Palmer, when he was the manager of the Union Square Theatre, New York. He had produced a play that was a flat failure. A friend said to him: &amp;quot;I am surprised that a man of your experience, culture and intelligence should have accepted such a play. Even if its reading interested you, surely the rehearsals must have shown you how worthless it was.&amp;quot; To which Mr. Palmer replied: &amp;quot;If you can find me a human being who can, by reading a manuscript play, watching or taking part in the rehearsals, tell me positively whether it will be a success or failure, I am willing to guarantee that individual an income of fifty thousand dollars a year as long as I remain in management.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had I been wise I should have at once withdrawn the play, but I liked the part of Iskander, I believed the piece had possibilities, and I was loath to acknowledge a failure; so we amended, curtailed, reconstructed and patched up the manuscript in the hope of final success; but all to no purpose. After struggling along for nearly three months I was compelled to close the season, which I did in Chicago, and having no material in reserve, disbanded the company. (pp. 259-261)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Iskander, told in 1.5 newspaper columns of prose by playwright W. D. Eaton, can be found on page 15 of the Sunday, July 5, 1896, issue of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://newspapers.library.in.gov/cgi-bin/indiana?a=d&amp;amp;d=IJ18960705.1.15&amp;amp;e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indianapolis Journal&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="512" LastEditorUserId="512" LastEditDate="2021-01-23T20:51:08.700" LastActivityDate="2021-01-23T20:51:08.700" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9502" CreationDate="2021-01-24T09:24:41.463" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gray alludes in these lines to the biblical story of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fall of man&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Genesis&lt;/em&gt; 2–3, presenting an extended comparison between the innocent play of the boys at Eton, and the sinless existence of Adam and Eve in Eden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adam and Eve&lt;/a&gt; lived in “paradise” (the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;garden of Eden&lt;/a&gt;), in “bliss” (without toil or “sorrow”), in “ignorance” of sin, until they ate the forbidden fruit of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tree of knowledge of good and evil&lt;/a&gt; and became “wise”. But this was “folly” because God expelled them from paradise and condemned them to “labouring”, “suff’rings” and “death”: “cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (3:17).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-24T10:27:54.523" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T10:27:54.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17254" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T10:35:19.570" Score="2" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Candide/Chapter_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Candide novel starts&lt;/a&gt; with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old servants of the house suspected [Candide] to have been the son of the Baron's sister, by a very good sort of a gentleman of the neighborhood, whom that young lady refused to marry, because he could produce no more than threescore and eleven quarterings in his arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the numbers of quarterings of Candide is 71 from his father and an unknown number of quarterings from his mother, which is a total minimum of 72 quarterings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cunégonde, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Candide/Chapter_10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 10&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Add to this, though born a baroness, and bearing seventy-two quarterings, I have been reduced to the station of a cook-wench.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, the numbers of quarterings of Cunégonde is 72. Therefore, Candide is as noble as Cunégonde, maybe more because we can except to the sister of the baron to prove more than 1 quarterings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Candide/Chapter_15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 15&lt;/a&gt;, the brother of Cunégonde refuses Candide to marry her because he is not noble enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You! you have the impudence to marry my sister, who bears seventy-two quarterings! Really, I think you have an insufferable degree of assurance to dare so much as to mention such an audacious design to me.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did I miss something? Is Candide really more noble than Cunégonde?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11933" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-24T12:03:34.403" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T12:03:34.403" Title="Is Candide more noble than Cunégonde?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;voltaire&gt;&lt;candide&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17255" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17188" CreationDate="2021-01-24T11:58:50.140" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't find it mentioned anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bridgett Begg's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YivKfgK_POMJ:https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217004894.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Medieval Nonsense Verse: Contributions to the Literary Genre&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; doesn't mention anything like it. (It's an honors thesis but it includes poems found in plays.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His publishers' website says you can contact the author through them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shimon Sandbank&lt;br&gt;&#xA;c/o Schocken&lt;br&gt;&#xA;1745 Broadway&lt;br&gt;&#xA;New York, NY 10019&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T11:58:50.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17256" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17178" CreationDate="2021-01-24T13:44:00.490" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not call Ant-Man a Myrmidon because he is not actually descended from ants, nor does he come from them in any way. He is able to command ants by using his ant-antennaed helmet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11935" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T07:07:01.610" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T07:07:01.610" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17257" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T18:41:05.753" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;(I've italicized the things that I know are facts. The rest is possibly confabulated memories.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I read this book in the 90's, I don't remember the actual storyline. &lt;em&gt;I do remember that the main character was a man and that there was mention of cocaine use and hookers.&lt;/em&gt; I remember this because I was fairly young and it fascinated me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I'm assuming it was a mystery of some sort, where the protagonist was a police officer, or private detective or something of that nature&lt;/em&gt;, because that's usually the only type of books I read for pleasure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The cover was red&lt;/em&gt; with mostly black text and graphics, from what I remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author's first name might have been Michael, but I could be completely wrong about that, or that may have been the protagonist's name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The title might have included the word &amp;quot;stone&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;snake&amp;quot;, but I believe that the title was only one word, so I'm not so sure about that one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I'm assuming it was a newer book at the time and that &lt;em&gt;it was written in the early 90's, but it's possible that it was from the late 80's.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I googled a variety of keywords and browsed several lists, before I threw in the towel. Can someone else help me out here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11938" LastEditorUserId="168" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T09:52:48.573" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T09:52:48.573" Title="90's paperback, red cover, kind of racy for the times" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17258" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T20:39:25.820" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a comment on a disaster, someone quoted orally in German from Faust. They explained the quote as: one should be careful with calling upon bad spirits. The German verb &amp;quot;mahnen&amp;quot; was used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where and how is this expressed in Faust?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11939" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T09:00:30.543" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T16:21:38.603" Title="Identify a Faust quote about being careful when calling upon bad spirits" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;&lt;faust&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17259" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17260" CreationDate="2021-01-24T20:59:38.227" Score="39" ViewCount="8674" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Funny/GoodOmens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TVTropes says&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In real life: Gaiman and Pratchett did a radio interview when the book came out, and slowly realized that the interviewer wasn't aware that the book was fictional, and thought they were a couple of religious kooks writing about what they thought would be the real apocalypse. They spent the rest of it viciously trolling him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sounds hilarious, but there's no citation for it. Is it true, and, if so, who, when, and where? Is a recording or transcription of this interview available?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T12:54:59.630" Title="Did Gaiman and Pratchett troll an interviewer who thought they were religious fanatics?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;neil-gaiman&gt;&lt;terry-pratchett&gt;&lt;good-omens&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17260" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17259" CreationDate="2021-01-24T21:09:30.033" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I haven't found a transcript or recording of the interview itself, but I did find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.locusmag.com/2006/Issues/1991_Gaiman_Pratchett.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;transcript&lt;/a&gt; of a different interview where the two spoke about this interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neil Gaiman: &amp;quot;The first radio interview we did in New York, the interviewer was asking us 'Who is Agnes Nutter? What is her history? Is Armageddon happening?&amp;quot; and so on and so forth. After a while, we twigged he hadn't realized this was fiction. He thought he'd been given two kooks who'd come across these old prophecies and were predicting that the world was going to be ending.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terry Pratchett: &amp;quot;Once we realized, it was great fun. We could take over the interview, since we knew he didn't know enough to stop us.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit, later. Here are some more links confirming that this occurred (stolen from this &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/225279&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to a very similar question on SF&amp;amp;F.SE): &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/goodomens00neil_2/page/383/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a mention of the interview in a reprinted edition of *Good Omens&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2002/08/so-i-did-minneapolis-public-radios-all.asp&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a mention of the interview on Neil Gaiman's blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, here's a quote from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/23/neil-gaiman-remembers-terry-pratchett-michael-chabon-interview&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neil Gaiman interview in 2015&lt;/a&gt; (which I found in the SF&amp;amp;F duplicate):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“[Terry] said ‘Well, you remember we were on the Good Omens author tour in February 1990’ … He said ‘We were in New York and we went to that ABC affiliate radio station, and the interviewer had not actually read the book … so when we started telling him about Agnes Nutter … we started explaining about this 17th century witch who all of her predictions were true … He did not realise this was fictional. We realised he had not read the book, and the engineers in the control room behind the glass panel who we could see and he could not, were lying on their backs kicking their legs against the walls.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I said, ‘Of course I remember. I was willing to let that go on for the entire interview’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To answer the title question: Yes, this interview occurred. No transcript or recording appears to be available, however. (Also, go upvote &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17262/11259&quot;&gt;Jos's answer&lt;/a&gt; - they got confirmation from  Gaiman himself!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T16:21:45.843" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T16:21:45.843" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17262" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17259" CreationDate="2021-01-25T12:05:31.117" Score="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;I asked Mr Gaiman on Twitter to respond, and he did, as well as another person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aliza &amp;quot;I think and I vote.&amp;quot; (@alizatw):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To summarize: it's reported but not authoritatively confirmed that&#xA;@neilhimself and @terryandrob did a radio interview with someone who&#xA;thought they were religious zealots and #GoodOmens was talking about&#xA;the real Armageddon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1353670551710130176&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself)&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are dozens of interviews with us about this and it's even&#xA;mentioned in the afterword to one of the current editions. He didn't&#xA;think we were religious looks, just that we believed in Agnes and her&#xA;prophecies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7T9vs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/7T9vs.png&quot; alt=&quot;transcription above&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1799" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T12:54:59.630" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T12:54:59.630" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17263" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15301" CreationDate="2021-01-25T12:12:03.347" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on his family background, the grammar school curriculum of the Elizabethan era, and some scenes in his plays, we can conclude that Shakespeare had training in classical rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Did Shakespeare attend school?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are no documentary records that Shakespeare attended school at all. However, his family background makes it very improbable that he would have had no formal education. William's father John Shakespeare was a respectable citizen of Stratford. In 1557 he was elected Town Bailiff, which corresponds roughly to mayor. Shakespeare would have been three years old at the time. Children typically began their schooling at age four or five at a &amp;quot;petty school,&amp;quot; where they learned to form their letters and to read English. After two years, they went on to grammar school. The local grammar school's charter specified that it was a &amp;quot;Liberam Scolam Grammaticalem,&amp;quot; i.e., a free school where students paid no fees (Baldwin Vol. I p. 464). So while a poor family might need the child's labor or might not be able to afford school materials, children from middle-class families would attend school as a matter of course. Samuel Schoenbaum sums up the situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The parchment registers for Stratford pupils of this period have also, not surprisingly, perished. More than a century later in 1709, Nicholas Rowe remarked that John Shakespeare had bred his poet son &amp;quot;for some time at a Free-School, where 'tis possible he acquir'd that little &lt;em&gt;Latin&lt;/em&gt; he was Master of&amp;quot;. This is our earliest allusion to Shakespeare's formal education, and may either record a tradition or reflect Rowe's natural inference. If an inference, it seems valid enough: we need not doubt that Shakespeare received a grammar-school education, and the only likely place for it was the King's New School of Stratford-upon-Avon. The schoolroom stood in Church Street, behind the Gild Chapel, and only a quarter-mile distant from the family house in Henley Street.   (pp. 62–63)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare is unlikely to have attended university. Beginning around 1576, John Shakespeare fell into financial difficulties that lasted about ten years. Since schoolboys typically attended grammar school until age fourteen, Shakespeare would have been eligible to enter university around 1578, but it would not have been affordable for his family at that time. So his education would have been confined to the grammar school curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Grammar school curricula in Elizabethan England&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would that curriculum have been? While not entirely standardized, it was nevertheless quite similar across schools. Schoenbaum says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The curriculum of Stratford grammar school has not come down, but we can reconstruct it with some confidence on the basis of what we know of similar foundations in other parts of England. (p. 62)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;T. H. Baldwin provides further details:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[B]ecause of the general uniformity of curricula and methods at the time, the particular school in which Shakespeare received his training is not for our present purpose of great importance. It was the conscious purpose of the authorities so to regiment schools and texts that transfers in teachers and schools would not retard the progress of the pupils. Because of this regimentation, the curricula had a certain common denominator of uniformity. (Vol. I p. 557)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The curriculum consisted more or less exclusively of training in Latin. After spending the first couple of forms learning the rudiments of grammar and vocabulary, students went on to read classical authors. Baldwin quotes statutes for a school in York, too long to be reproduced in their entirety here; however, here is a sample:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third forme shalbe placed all Schollars that have profitablie passed through and learned y&lt;sup&gt;e&lt;/sup&gt; premisses before prescribed And the M&lt;sup&gt;r&lt;/sup&gt; shall teach to them the Latin Grammar as it is set forth &amp;amp; used in this realme. &lt;em&gt;Terence&lt;/em&gt; Esopes fables virgill Tullies epistles or so many of them as he shall thinke fit for the capacitie &amp;amp; profit of his schollars in the same &amp;amp; as he shall percieue them profit in Learning so hall he place them in the 4 forme——&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And euery day he shall giue them an English to be made in Latine &amp;amp; teach unto them there placed Salust, Ovid, Tullies offices, the commentaries of Caesar, Copia verborum et Rerum Erasmi; or so many of the said Bookes or or other as he shall thinke expedient for their Capacities and also he shall teach the art &amp;amp; rules of versifieing (if he himself be experte therein)... (Vol. I p. 431)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The standard textbook was &lt;em&gt;Lily's Latin Grammar&lt;/em&gt;. In 1542, Henry VIII proclaimed that this two-part book would be the only authorized and obligatory text that schoolteachers could use (Lily vii). The first volume, &lt;em&gt;Introduction of the Eyght Partes of Speche&lt;/em&gt;, was in English, and provided basic grammar drills, with sample sentences from classical authors. The second volume, &lt;em&gt;Brevissima institutio&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Brief Introduction&amp;quot;), used after the first couple of years, was in Latin. It provided lessons in advanced grammar, composition, versification, and rhetoric. Students were also encouraged to read Latin authors in a specific, four-fold way. Peter Mack explains the approach:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his instructions for reading, which were included in Lily's &lt;em&gt;Brevissima institutio&lt;/em&gt;, Erasmus suggested that pupils should re-read texts four times: at first straight through to record the general meaning more thoroughly; then word by word noticing vocabulary and constructions; thirdly for rhetoric, picking out figures, elegant expressions, sententiae, proverbs, histories, fables, and comparisons; and finally ethically, noting exemplary stories and moral teachings. (pp. 14–15)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once the students had learned the rudiments, then, they would be reading actual Latin authors, not just in order to translate, but also to study rhetoric. An orator whose works were an integral part of this curriculum was &amp;quot;Tully,&amp;quot; i.e., Marcus Tullius Cicero. Students would be expected not only to read and translate Cicero's speeches, but also to render English passages into Ciceronian Latin. An study of rhetoric would be inextricably linked to these exercises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some grammar schools did teach Greek to students in the highest forms. However, Greek did not form part of the curriculum at every school, and it is unclear whether Shakespeare would have studied any Greek texts on rhetoric at the King's New School.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Evidence for Shakespeare's Schooling in the Plays&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldwin thoroughly documents instances where Shakespeare's plays show evidence of his having undergone the standard grammar school curriculum. A famous scene from &lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt; shows a young schoolboy named William being drilled in elementary Latin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SIR HUGH That is a good William. What is he, William,&#xA;that does lend articles?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;WILLIAM Articles are borrowed of the pronoun and be&#xA;thus declined: &lt;em&gt;singulariter&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;nominativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hic&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;haec&lt;/em&gt;,&#xA;&lt;em&gt;hoc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SIR HUGH &lt;em&gt;Nominativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hig&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;haeg&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hog&lt;/em&gt;. Pray you, mark:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;genitivo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;huius&lt;/em&gt;. Well, what is your accusative case?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;WILLIAM &lt;em&gt;Accusativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hinc&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SIR HUGH I pray you, have your remembrance, child. &lt;em&gt;Accusativo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hung&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hang&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;hog&lt;/em&gt;. (IV.i.38–47)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldwin gives several such instances where Shakespeare's debt to the first volume of Lily is clear: not only in drills, but also in quotations of tags included therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldwin also provides instances of Shakespeare's use of the second volume of Lily. One famous example is the quotation from Horace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Integer vitae, scelerisque purus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Non eget Mauri iaculis, nec arcu  (&lt;em&gt;Odes&lt;/em&gt;, I.xxii.1-2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man clean of life and pure of wickedness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Needs neither the arrows nor the bow of the Moor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;, Titus sends his daughter's rapists this note, along with some weapons. On reading it, Chiron, one of the rapists, remarks:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, 'tis a verse in Horace, I know it well:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I read it in the grammar long ago. (IV.ii.22–23)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quotation is indeed in &lt;em&gt;Brevissima institutio&lt;/em&gt;. As Pramit Chaudhuri points out (pp. 789-790), Chiron and his brother Demetrius recognize the quotation, but fail to understand its meaning in this context. Shakespeare takes a standard tag from the Latin textbook, but uses it to great dramatic effect. Sending weapons to the rapists while claiming that upright men have no need of them simultaneously positions Titus as an upright man, since he is giving away his weapons, and marks the brothers as villains.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition to such direct quotations from the grammar, Shakespeare's plays also show indirect evidence of training in rhetoric. Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney says, for example, that the playwright &amp;quot;very often appropriated classical form without necessarily  borrowing the content itself&amp;quot; (p. 214). She says &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; shows Shakespeare using the techniques of classical rhetoric without any direct borrowing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare extrapolated rhetorical questions and ad hominem argument—two formulas of persuasive oratory from the works of Quintilian and Cicero. When he found no exact source in Plutarch for the orations of Brutus and Antony in &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; he embodied what he made Brutus and Antony say in these two formulas. Actually, &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; is full of other persuasive speeches: Marullus haranguing the Plebeians in the  street; Cassius wooing Brutus towards conspiracy;  later, Cassius doing  the same to Casca; Portia pleading with Brutus in their orchard, and so on. These speeches, too, made use of the two rhetorical devices Shakespeare thought of as the orator’s stock in trade. (p. 215)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldwin too provides examples of Shakespeare's using rhetorical forms to structure dialog. For example, the &lt;em&gt;Rhetorica ad Herennium&lt;/em&gt;, attributed to Cicero, discusses a way of conducting a judicial inquiry by conjecture: the examining judge entertains various conjectures as to what might have happened before hitting upon the truth by coming up with the one conjecture that will fit all the facts. Baldwin says that the trial scene in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; (V.3), where Friar Laurence is suspected of murder before the facts come to light, follows the pattern of conjectural investigation laid out in the &lt;em&gt;ad Herennium&lt;/em&gt; (Baldwin Vol. II p. 76–81). Baldwin's second volume contains several such instances of Shakespeare's plays using rhetorical techniques from various classical texts that would have been part of the grammar school curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there is no direct evidence that Shakespeare attended school at all, the circumstantial evidence of his having done so is overwhelming. A boy of his family background would have been sent to the local grammar school. Similarly, while there is no direct evidence of the curriculum at the Stratford school, the standardization of education that began with Henry VIII and prevailed throughout Shakespeare's schooldays and beyond provides sufficient grounds for confidence regarding what he would have learned. He would have had a thorough grounding in Latin grammar and rhetoric, and would have been expected to both identify rhetorical techniques, and use them in composition. His plays provide ample evidence of the use of such techniques. From this, we may safely conclude that Shakespeare had training in classical rhetoric.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldwin, T. W. &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke.&lt;/em&gt; 2 vols. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1944. On Archive.org: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/williamshakespea0001bald/page/n5/mode/2up%5D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume I&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/williamshakespea0002bald/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volume II&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 25 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaudhuri, Pramit. &amp;quot;Classical Quotation in Titus Andronicus.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;ELH&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 81 no. 3, Fall 2014: pp. 787–810.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horace. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/carm1.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Q. Horati Flacci Carminum Liber Primus (Odes, Book I)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 25 January 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kujawińska-Courtney, Krystyna. &lt;a href=&quot;http://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/files/Collectanea_Philologica/Collectanea_Philologica-r1999-t3/Collectanea_Philologica-r1999-t3-s207-215/Collectanea_Philologica-r1999-t3-s207-215.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Controversies over Shakespeare's Classical Education&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Collectanea Philologica&lt;/em&gt; 3 (1999): 207–215. Accessed 25 January 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lily, William. &lt;em&gt;Lily's Grammar of Latin in English: An Introduction of the Eyght Partes of Speche, and the Construction of the Same&lt;/em&gt;. 1542. Ed. and Intro. Hedwig Gwosdek. Oxford: OUP, 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mack, Peter. &lt;em&gt;Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Schoenbaum, S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/williamshakespea00schorich/page/n5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Abridged ed. of &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life&lt;/em&gt; (1975). New York: Oxford, 1977. Accessed 18 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-merry-wives-of-windsor/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. 1597. The Folger Shakespeare. Accessed 25 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;———. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/titus-andronicus/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Titus Andronicus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. 1594. The Folger Shakespeare. Accessed 25 Jan 2021.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T12:54:16.920" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T12:54:16.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17264" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15301" CreationDate="2021-01-25T15:10:46.057" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One more echo of Shakespeare's grammar school education is Hamlet's famous soliloquy, &amp;quot;To be or not to be.&amp;quot; Its form is a rhetorical exercise, the &lt;em&gt;questio&lt;/em&gt;, as noted by Colin Burrow in his &amp;quot;Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity&amp;quot;, Oxford, 2013, p.42&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pupils in the higher forms of grammar school were encouraged to argue on both sides of a complex question. This was intended to provide training in how to marshal evidence and present a case. It had the secondary and unintended consequence of developing students' ability to engage in what would now be called imagining a different point of view. By arguing on either side of a question they would effectively be learning to dramatize the state of mind of people who are suspended between different and equally forceful arguments. The sceptical Hamlet's meditation whether ‘To be or not to be’ is more or less a textbook piece of such classically inspired debate, in which he sets out both sides of the question with perfect crispness. This kind of debate was called a 'quaestio', and of course Hamlet, a good student at Wittenberg, tells us that he knows just what he is doing: 'that is the question', he says, as though he is underlining the title of his rhetorical exercise. Beneath the English word 'question' he expects his audience to hear the Latin word &lt;em&gt;quaestio&lt;/em&gt;: the greatest soliloquy in English has its origins in classically inspired debating techniques.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8370" LastEditorUserId="8370" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T19:21:51.023" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T19:21:51.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17265" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17272" CreationDate="2021-01-25T17:03:02.747" Score="2" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a novel called &lt;em&gt;Persepolis&lt;/em&gt; for my English course, and it's about a girl named Marji that grows up during the 1979 Revolution. The author's intention with the novel is to break Western stereotypes of Iran and to show what it was like growing up during that time period. Marji is a fictional character, but she is supposed to represent the younger version of the author (Marjane Satrapi), who actually lived in Iran during the revolution. What would this technique of representing yourself as a character be called? I found out through Google that it's called &amp;quot;self-insertion&amp;quot;, but I don't know if that's right because the whole book revolves around Marji.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11948" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T17:20:26.267" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T23:11:32.840" Title="What literary term/device is used when a character in a novel represents the author?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17266" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17267" CreationDate="2021-01-25T19:44:17.603" Score="7" ViewCount="742" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've seen a number of examples of poetry, where &amp;quot;nor&amp;quot; appears without a preceding negative. In these examples, I'm unsure of whether I'm meant to understand the sentence as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;neither&amp;quot; is elided, so it's really a hidden &amp;quot;(neither) ... nor&amp;quot; sentence&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;nor&amp;quot; is an abbreviation for &amp;quot;and not&amp;quot;, so the first part actually has a positive meaning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, we find the following lines (about Napoleon):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There sunk the greatest, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;nor the worst of men, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose spirit antithetically mixt &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One moment of the mightiest, and again &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On little objects with like firmness fixt,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we meant to understand this as Napoleon being &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt; the greatest &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; the worst? Or are we meant to understand it as meaning Napoleon &lt;em&gt;was&lt;/em&gt; the greatest and definitely &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; the worst?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly Dylan Thomas' poem &amp;quot;I see the boys of summer&amp;quot;, there's a stanza that goes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But seasons must be challenged or they totter &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Into a chiming quarter &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars; &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There, in his night, the black-tongued bells &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sleepy man of winter pulls, &lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are we meant to read the last three lines as meaning, the &amp;quot;sleepy man of winter&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt; pulls the black-tongued bells &lt;em&gt;nor&lt;/em&gt; blows back moon-and-midnight? Or are we meant to understand them as saying that the sleepy man of winter &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; pull the black-tongued bells, &lt;em&gt;but does not&lt;/em&gt; blow back moon-and-midnight?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11662" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-25T22:34:58.557" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T22:34:58.557" Title="The grammatical function of &quot;Nor&quot; without &quot;Neither&quot; or &quot;Not&quot; in poetry" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;dylan-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17267" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17266" CreationDate="2021-01-25T21:39:01.163" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Byron’s use of “nor” is sense 2b in the &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, where the examples make it clear that “neither” is indicated. Note the 1813 quotation showing that Byron was familiar with this sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nor, &lt;em&gt;conj.&lt;/em&gt; 2.&lt;/strong&gt; Without immediately preceding (negative) correlative (such as &lt;em&gt;neither&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;b.&lt;/strong&gt; Without other negative expressed. Now &lt;em&gt;rare&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1594   C. Marlowe &amp;amp; T. Nashe &lt;em&gt;Dido&lt;/em&gt; v. ii   Though thou nor he will pity me a whit.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1621   M. Wroth &lt;em&gt;Countesse of Mountgomeries Urania&lt;/em&gt; 532   The most ignorant proud woman liuing, caring for, nor respecting any but her selfe and hers.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1678   J. Bunyan &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim’s Progress&lt;/em&gt; 127   They threatned that the Cage nor Irons should serve their turn.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1813   Ld. Byron &lt;em&gt;Bride Abydos&lt;/em&gt; i. xii. 366   A heart his words nor deeds can daunt.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1872   Ld. Tennyson &lt;em&gt;Last Tournament&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Gareth &amp;amp; Lynette&lt;/em&gt; 103   Great brother, thou nor I have made the world.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1954   W. Faulkner &lt;em&gt;Fable&lt;/em&gt; 348   A world such as caesar nor sultan nor khan ever saw, Tiberius nor Kubla nor all the emperors of the East ever dreamed of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Childe Harold&lt;/em&gt;, Byron makes the sense clear by elaborating the same idea in different words: Napoleon was neither the greatest nor the worst of men; rather, his character contained a mixture of greatness and smallness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, Thomas’s use of “nor” is sense 5a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nor, &lt;em&gt;conj.&lt;/em&gt; 5.&lt;/strong&gt; And — not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;a.&lt;/strong&gt; Following an affirmative clause, or in continuing narration. Now chiefly &lt;em&gt;poetic&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1697   J. Dryden tr. Virgil &lt;em&gt;Georgics&lt;/em&gt; iii, in tr. Virgil &lt;em&gt;Wks.&lt;/em&gt; 101   His Age and Courage weigh: Nor those alone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1822   Ld. Byron &lt;em&gt;Heaven &amp;amp; Earth&lt;/em&gt; i. iii, in &lt;em&gt;Liberal&lt;/em&gt; 1 198   Away! nor weep!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1871   R. Ellis tr. Catullus &lt;em&gt;Poems&lt;/em&gt; lxi. 205   Come nor tarry to greet her.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;2006   C. McCarthy &lt;em&gt;Road&lt;/em&gt; 71   The snow fell, nor did it cease to fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ‘I see the boys of summer’, it works best if the “sleepy man of winter” is pulling the “black-tongued bells”, because this is one of the things that makes winter the “chiming quarter” that the seasons are prone to “totter” into.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-25T21:39:01.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17269" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17271" CreationDate="2021-01-25T22:13:00.793" Score="-2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;Johannes Gutenberg used a wine press to press paper against the metal type. Was this the only technological option available to him or were there any other options available at the time? It just makes some sense to me because there has to have other devices that could have done the job of inspiring him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T23:00:46.117" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T20:56:44.533" Title="Gutenberg's press by different design" Tags="&lt;publishing&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17270" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17258" CreationDate="2021-01-25T23:44:41.020" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It must be the following from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Zauberlehrling_(1798)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Der Zauberlehrling&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;The Sorceror's Apprentice&amp;quot;, 1797):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ach, da kommt der Meister!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Herr, die Not ist groß!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Die ich rief, die Geister&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;werd ich nun nicht los.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, he's coming! see,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠⁠⁠⁠Great is my dismay!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠⁠⁠Spirits raised by me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;⁠⁠⁠⁠Vainly would I lay!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Translated by &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemsofgoethe00goet/page/132/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Alfred Bowring&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;mahnen&amp;quot; was not in it, but the idea is very clear and corresponds with the one which was brought up in the conversation I related in the question or sub-question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;German Wikipedia takes you to &amp;quot;Der Zauberlehrling&amp;quot;, and translations are available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the idea is that the apprentice of the necromancer is defeated by the spirit he summoned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11939" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T16:21:38.603" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T16:21:38.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17271" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17269" CreationDate="2021-01-26T03:16:03.490" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There has been speculation that the design of the Gutenberg press may have been inspired by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.philobiblon.com/suppliers.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;binder's nipping press&lt;/a&gt; since the codex form was well-established before the arrival of Gutenberg's press.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T20:56:44.533" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T20:56:44.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17265" CreationDate="2021-01-26T15:19:11.250" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are several related terms and it's not clear what applies without knowing the novel. There's a difference between representing your life story and representing your opinions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An &lt;strong&gt;autobiographical novel&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobiographical_novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;) is a fictionalised version of an author's life, possibly with names and other details changed. A &lt;strong&gt;semi-autobiographical novel&lt;/strong&gt; is similar, but more heavily fictionalised (probably with incidents that never happened but generally approximating reality). &lt;strong&gt;Autobiographical fiction&lt;/strong&gt; is a similar term for works in genres other than the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Autofiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is another term for blending autobiography and fiction; according to Wikipedia it typically refers to more experimental writing and is generally written in the third person while an autobiographical novel is in the first person. (There are other similar terms too, but a lot are the invention of a small number of writers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Self-insertion would refer to inserting yourself in a larger narrative; the other terms above generally refer to a narrative centred on the author-character. Similar to this an &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_surrogate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;author surrogate&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; is a character based on the author, who doesn't necessarily live out the author's actual life or experiences, but is used to express the author's point of view. A difference is that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-insertion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-insertion&lt;/a&gt; is often more pejorative, often referring to an idealised version of the author (sometimes called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Sue&lt;/a&gt;), and it is often associated with fan fiction. (Wikipedia's article on self-insertion is short but refers to an &amp;quot;idealized character&amp;quot; who represents the author.) I don't think either author surrogate or self-insertion is the best term here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5213" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T15:19:11.250" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17273" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17277" CreationDate="2021-01-26T17:20:51.047" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the title of a sci-fi book I read a while ago that I simply cannot remember the name of, nor where I read it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In it the main character lives a relatively happy life with his wife. One day he is abducted and dumped in a remote location; he eventually makes it back to his house only to find that his life doesn't exist any more (either his wife is long dead or has been with another man for years, I can't remember).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He starts investigating and it turns out that he's been taken to a parallel universe by another version of himself--who has found some technology to travel between these universes--so that this doppelganger can steal the original's version of his life and be with his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main characters eventually finds the people who have made this technology, composed of a door-like portal, and goes on a bit of a tour (I think with another woman?) and ends up in an alternate Earth that's completely frozen and the two of them almost freeze to death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that's about all I can remember about the book itself...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it perhaps two years ago. I am pretty sure that it's quite a recent book (probably after 2010). It was in English (in the UK, if that helps).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11965" LastEditorUserId="11965" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T18:15:24.057" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T18:58:37.823" Title="Book with a series of parallel Earths and a version of the main characters replaces him" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17293" CreationDate="2021-01-26T18:02:56.607" Score="2" ViewCount="134" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;1984&lt;/em&gt;, does Winston Smith die in the traditional sense of death, or just figuratively?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11964" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T18:07:09.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T10:37:04.707" Title="Does Winston Smith die at the end of 1984?" Tags="&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17273" CreationDate="2021-01-26T18:58:37.823" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dark Matter&lt;/em&gt; by Blake Crouch (2016)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27833670-dark-matter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jason Dessen is walking home through the chilly Chicago streets one night, looking forward to a quiet evening in front of the fireplace with his wife, Daniela, and their son, Charlie—when his reality shatters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Are you happy in your life?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. [..] In this world he's woken up to, Jason's life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife.&lt;/strong&gt; His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it this world or the other that's the dream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fictionunbound.com/blog/dark-matter-spoiler-review&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this review&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel breaks out into three narrative arcs. The first is where we meet Jason, he is kidnapped by another version of himself (but he doesn’t realize this till a very frustrating amount of time later), and kicked out of his world. The famous physicist Jason, the one who built the box, has decided that he has had enough of fame and the culmination of his life’s work. He wants in on that lovely family our Jason has created, so he trades places with him. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jason and Amanda, the nice lady who saved him, then go into the box and have quite the time of trying to find their way back to Jason’s world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found with the Google query &lt;code&gt;scifi book kidnapped alternate self life site:goodreads.com/book&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T18:58:37.823" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17278" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:26:00.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:26:00.070" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:26:00.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17279" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:26:00.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about the author Tara Westover (born 1986) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:47:46.410" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:47:46.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17280" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:27:23.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:27:23.720" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:27:23.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17281" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:27:23.720" Score="0" Body="Questions about the memoir 'Educated' by Tara Westover. Should be tagged with [tara-westover]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:46:57.600" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:46:57.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17282" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:28:31.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:28:31.407" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:28:31.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17283" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:28:31.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about the literary works of English author Horace Walpole (1717 – 1797) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:47:40.820" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:47:40.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17284" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:31:44.930" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:31:44.930" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:31:44.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17285" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:31:44.930" Score="0" Body="Questions about the comic book brand Marvel Comics, and all associated characters, series, and comics. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:47:04.780" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:47:04.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17295" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:32:29.303" Score="10" ViewCount="115" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this English-language thriller novel in 2017 or 2018 (publish date unknown) at a local library in the Western United States. It's been bugging me for a while. I remember a lot of details but I'm terrible at searching... long question incoming!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character (MC from now on) lives in a rural area, and their family doesn't have much money. &lt;strong&gt;MC wants to go to a prestigious medical school run/funded (I can't remember which) by a large drug-making company.&lt;/strong&gt; The school has free tuition and its own entrance test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC studies very hard and then goes to take the entrance test, along with a friend who isn't very serious about medicine. The school requires prospective test-takers to stay for a night, ostensibly to equalize the environment under which the test is taken. &lt;strong&gt;While most of the questions are normal and MC can answer them, there are 2 or 3 that are strange.&lt;/strong&gt; MC can't figure out the answers and inwardly remarks that this is odd - they studied so hard! MC cheats off a nearby test for one of the strange questions and leaves the rest blank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on it is revealed that the strange questions are &lt;strong&gt;a test to see if the school's brainwashing equipment works&lt;/strong&gt;. Some devices in the rooms where the test-takes slept send information into their heads while they sleep. During the night before the test, these devices give the answers to the strange questions. The devices don't work on all people, so the strange questions allow school administrators to see if the knowledge was properly received.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC goes home to wait for results. They check the mailbox every day. Eventually, a notice comes that &lt;strong&gt;MC was put on the waitlist&lt;/strong&gt;. MC is devastated, and is forced to seriously consider other options. (I don't remember the specifics of the other options, it may have been community college or a job or something else). MC's friend, however, gets in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC's friend realizes that they don't really want to go to the medical school. MC and friend devise a plan to get MC into school. MC strikes up a correspondence with the &amp;quot;front-desk&amp;quot; people. On the orientation day, or some other day where students must present themselves, &lt;strong&gt;MC's friend does not show up and MC hangs out in the office with the front-desk people&lt;/strong&gt;. When it becomes clear that the friend won't show up, and therefore a spot is open, the front-desk people push hard for MC to get in. The leaders of the school debate over whether this is safe, as MC left 1 or 2 of the strange questions blank, (they only want brainwash-able students) but eventually allow MC in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From here on I don't remember the order in which the plot progressed, so information will be scattered around. There are two classes that I remember with great detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In one, about bioethics, MC is disturbed when the teacher speaks of humans as disposable. The teacher talks about how sometimes you have to let people die, and that some people should be used for  gruesome experiments in the name of the greater good. While the MC is horrified, and some of the other students initially agree, &lt;strong&gt;eventually (due to the brainwashing devices) the others start parroting the teacher's talking points.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other, the students learn about anatomy by dissecting a cadaver. The students are told to not try to learn about their cadavers, but eventually &lt;strong&gt;MC finds a tag of sorts with their cadaver's name&lt;/strong&gt;. Later MC does research into the cadaver and discovers something shady relating to the insurance company. I think this may have been about unethical experiments, as argued for by the bioethics teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A more fuzzy detail) There may have been a tradition among the students of holding a 24/7 medicine/ethics discussion. People join or leave as they have time. This is where the brainwashing becomes most obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC also makes a new friend (NF from now on), who is affected by the devices. I think NF has a photographic memory and was disturbed that they couldn't remember where they learned the information from the devices. NF could normally recall the specific page. &lt;strong&gt;MC and NF investigate and find the devices, though they have no idea what they mean initially&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC and NF at some point, during a break or weekend, go to a Trump casino and gamble. NF tries to teach MC some rudimentary card-counting, but MC is confused. &lt;strong&gt;NF instead sets up a hand signal that will tell MC when to switch from playing as normal to playing in a different way.&lt;/strong&gt; I think the hand signal may have been connected to surfers. MC and NF win lots of money at the casino, which NF says isn't stealing because Trump/the &amp;quot;house&amp;quot; has a lot of money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC gets an internship/research assistant position with a kindly scientist (KS from now on) developing an anesthetic. &lt;strong&gt;The anesthetic is medically interesting because it has no known LD50&lt;/strong&gt; - that is, no known 50% lethal dose. I don't remember how MC helps KS.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The building that KS works in has a special room that people are told to stay away from. &lt;strong&gt;According to the company, they are helping some severe burn victims there&lt;/strong&gt;, and any sort of interference would be damaging. The treatment involves skin grafts onto the burned areas. I think that KS's anesthetic was being used, but I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Approaching the end, I am more sure of the order of events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC and NF do some more research. &lt;strong&gt;NF discovers something big (maybe with MC, maybe not) so the school whisks NF away&lt;/strong&gt;. The official story being that they died from a car accident. (Believable to most students, as NF was quite reckless)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now NF is taken to the special room. When they wake up, they discovered that &lt;strong&gt;they have been purposefully burned&lt;/strong&gt;. They are also paralyzed with medicines that drain their energy and make it impossible to move. Someone tells NF that they will be more severely burned once the treatment's effectiveness can be evaluated for the current one. NF's large amount of healthy skin is noted as useful for the experiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC is devastated at losing their friend. When going to KS's lab/office, they pass the special room and see a new patient (NF, though MC does not know) all wrapped up in gauze. The first time MC looks they are hurried away, but eventually MC is in front of the window long enough for NF to signal. &lt;strong&gt;NF makes the hand gesture set up for gambling&lt;/strong&gt;, and this allows MC to realize that the new patient is NF.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From NF's perspective, they saw MC in front of the window but couldn't do anything. NF grows depressed trapped in their head. Another one of the &amp;quot;patients&amp;quot; in the special room is another former student who supposedly had died. &lt;strong&gt;The other student has very little skin left and has gone insane from being, frankly, tortured for years.&lt;/strong&gt; NF realizes that they don't want to go like that. They start keeping sane by moving/exercising the little that they can, waiting until the latest dose of paralyzing-medication is wearing off. NF is able to signal because there was some mix-up or delay that led to their paralyzing-medication dose being late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MC may have tried to contact their other friend (the one who gave up going to the school) at this point, but I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The school/company at some point realizes that MC knows as well. MC frees NF (I'm pretty sure, though MC may have just tried.) There is sneaking around and KS gets alerted somehow. &lt;strong&gt;In the lobby of KS's building, there is the Big Confrontation&lt;/strong&gt;. This confrontation at least involves MC and some company representatives, and I believe that the police may come in and save the day. MC's other friend is perhaps involved, though I can not remember very well if so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am unsure if the unethical experiments were revealed to the public, or what became of the company. I also can't remember what happened to MC or NF. The only part of the conclusion that I remember involves KS. &lt;strong&gt;KS is found dead by suicide, with a note along the lines of &amp;quot;If this works out, then that will prove the anesthetic has an LD50 after all&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. KS couldn't bear the knowledge of what the company they worked for had done.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A key part of the unethical experiments was unethical gathering of patients&lt;/strong&gt;. I don't remember how exactly this was unethical, nor when/how the characters learn of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was fairly thick. (Which should be evident, given that I've forgotten some of the plot and still managed to fill 8k characters) I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; the cover was fairly simple but I am bad at remembering covers. I do not remember any names, genders, etc. for the characters. Hopefully the above is enough to identify this book - it was a wonderful thriller and I'd love to read it again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T12:55:37.380" Title="Medical school that brainwashes students, run by drug company that does unethical experiments" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17287" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:32:55.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:32:55.617" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:32:55.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17288" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:32:55.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:44:40.710" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:44:40.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17289" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:35:01.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:35:01.940" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:35:01.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17290" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-01-26T23:35:01.940" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá (عبد البهاء‎,1844 – 1921) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-01-26T23:44:33.030" LastActivityDate="2021-01-26T23:44:33.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17293" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17276" CreationDate="2021-01-27T05:00:41.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;He does not literally die at the end of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The concluding paragraphs make it clear that his death is metaphorical. Winston is in the Chestnut Tree Café, listening to the news of the victory over Eurasia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ah, it was more than a Eurasian army that had perished! Much had changed in him since that first day in the Ministry of Love, but the final, indispensable, healing change had never happened, until this moment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voice from the telescreen was still pouring forth its tale of prisoners and booty and slaughter, but the shouting outside had died down a little. The waiters were turning back to their work. One of them approached with the gin bottle. Winston, sitting in a blissful dream, paid no attention as his glass was filled up. He was not running or cheering any longer. He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody. He was walking down the white-tiled corridor, with the feeling of walking in sunlight, and an armed guard at his back. The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the text says, Winston is &lt;em&gt;sitting in a blissful dream&lt;/em&gt;. A few minutes earlier, he had been considering the possibility that Oceania might be defeated in the war, but when he hears the news of Eurasia's defeat, he realizes that just as Oceania's control over Africa is complete, so also is Big Brother's control over him. The idea that he could ever go against Big Brother or imagine any alternative life is no longer viable. Just as he has confessed his prior mistakes to the Ministry, he is now confessing to himself that the idea that Oceania might be defeated was a thoughtcrime. Once he sees that as a thoughtcrime, the punishment is the death of his capacity for independent thinking: &lt;em&gt;The long-hoped-for bullet was entering his brain&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last paragraph tells us that this is not a literal death, as he is still sitting in the café, gazing up at Big Brother on the telescreen. Whereas Winston had longed for literal death during his interrogation and torture at the Ministry of Love, when the death does come, it is actually the death of his capacity for any struggle against Big Brother. His rebelliousness now seems to him only a &lt;em&gt;self-willed exile from the loving breast&lt;/em&gt; of Big Brother, and it is now over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T10:37:04.707" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T10:37:04.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17116" CreationDate="2021-01-27T05:33:38.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have managed to acquire a copy of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3394129-alfred-hitchcock-s-sinister-spies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Hitchcock's Sinister Spies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; and it is Edgar Wallace's &amp;quot;Code No. 2&amp;quot;. I was incorrect in my memory of there being an X-Ray camera involved. Instead, it is a clockwork box, with the pretense that it is an invention for wireless transmitting, to be stored in the same safe as the eponymous &amp;quot;Code No. 2&amp;quot; for safekeeping.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Immediately beneath the box was Code 2, enclosed in a leather binder, the edges of which were bound, for durability's sake, with the thin ribbon steel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, slowly the cover of the book was rising. It jerked up a little, then fell, leapt again and fell back, as though there were something inside which was struggling to get free. Then, of a sudden the cover opened and remained stiffly erect, forming, with the contents, the letter L, the upright of which was the cover.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a &amp;quot;click,&amp;quot; and the interior of the safe was illuminated with a soft greenish radiance. It threw a glow upon the top page of the code which lasted for nearly a minute. Then it died away and the cover of the book fell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Half of the box was taken up by accumulators. They supplied the current which, operating through a powerful magnet lifted the cover of the code-book. They gave the light to the wonderful little mercurial-vapor lamps, which afforded the concealed camera just enough light to make an effective exposure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The resolution of the story was different from my memory as well. The code is almost entirely made off with (the conceit is that the contents of the book are in loose-leaf, and are often returned in random order after usage, so after many operations, only three pages were unknown by scanning that first page for many days). After the spy is eliminated, the ultimate revelation is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; The code is hidden in his room as Braille on the wallpaper, as Schiller's father, a former watchmaker, had gone completely blind in his old age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For what it is worth, the story with the grenade trap is &amp;quot;The Uninvited&amp;quot; by Michael Gilbert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You have not, perhaps, seen one of these before? It works on the same principle as a Mills grenade, but is six times as powerful and is incendiary as well as explosive. When I shut this door, I shall bolt it and hang the grenade from the upturned bolt. The least disturbance will dislodge it. It is powerful enough to blow the door down.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; &amp;quot;If I'm meant to look after you, I ought to look after you properly,&amp;quot; said Mr. Behrens. &amp;quot;Not let myself get jumped by an amateur like that. I hadn't reckoned on him blocking the door with a grenade. I had to break out of the window, and it took me nearly half an hour.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-01-27T05:38:59.057" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T05:38:59.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17295" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17286" CreationDate="2021-01-27T12:55:37.380" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;This is &lt;em&gt;The Select&lt;/em&gt; by F. Paul Wilson.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Select&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; (which has a very brief description) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/477272.The_Select&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;, from which I quote the description and some of the reviews as follows, with emphasis added by me. (All typos are &lt;em&gt;[sic]&lt;/em&gt; - I copy-pasted this rather than transcribing by hand.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quinn Cleary has always wanted to be a doctor. Yet the only way she can afford it is to win acceptance to &lt;strong&gt;The Ingraham, an exclusive, privately funded medical school and reasearch center reputed to be the nation's finest&lt;/strong&gt;. The few selected students chosen by The Ingraham receive a completely free medical education: tuition, room. board, and lab fees all paid by the school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once accepted to the school of her dreams, Quinn dives into her studies and into a steady realationship with a classmate. At last, her life seems perfect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it? Quinn begins to notice subtle changes in her classmates: the way they act, the way they think -- &lt;strong&gt;all seem to be falling eerily into line with the messanic verison of the school's director&lt;/strong&gt;. She confides her concerns to her boyfriend, who laughs them off -- until he finds a suspicious electronic monitoring device in his room.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then he disappears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...Alone on the deserted campus during midyear break, Quinn finally encounters the dark truth about The Ingraham -- the true purpose of the institute's seemingly humane medical research, the motives that have determined the school's policy, and the secret mission of the hospital's intimidating security force, a small private army that is drawing an ever tighter net around her with each passing minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The applicants are given a tour and they have to spend the night in the dorms; the following day they are given a long exam as the final step in the admission process.&lt;/strong&gt; Flash forward a few months and Quinn is broken hearted, but not down and out. Quinn is a fun character- a strong woman in contrast to his typical 'damsel in distress'. &lt;strong&gt;She is on the wait-list at The Ingraham&lt;/strong&gt;, with a back up to join the Navy to pay for med school. Her new buddy Tim (friend of a friend) who did get in to The Ingraham, concocts a plan to get Quinn in, and it works! School is hard, but Quinn crams and gets by...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We begin to suspect more and more that something is off about the school, however. The nightly 'bull sessions' among the students largely concern medical ethics, especially who should be given care given medical rationing. &lt;strong&gt;Quinn seems to be on the outs with the rest of the student's opinions, which are strangely uniform on the issue.&lt;/strong&gt; We also learn that all the dorms are bugged, as are all the phones, etc. What exactly is going on at The Ingraham? As the plot unfolds, things go from bad to worse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sinister events taking place at The Ingraham weren't exactly shrouded in mystery as there were numerous clues given early on in the story - &lt;strong&gt;Ward C was dedicated to burn victims who were injected with a solution that was still in the works&lt;/strong&gt;, the students were starting to have the same mindset despite their initial differences, the Chief of Security was constantly in Quinn's room, et cetera. Although the mystery (using the term loosely here) wasn't unpredictable nor suspenseful, it was engaging because the author crafted such believable characters and conveyed the sense of imminent danger throughout the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Certain interesting bits were mentioned yet never followed up on such as &amp;quot;the Sheedy thing&amp;quot;, &lt;strong&gt;the identity of the cadaver Quinn had for class&lt;/strong&gt; and Matt's feelings for Quinn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Highly recommended, but not as casual reading in between procedures next time you're hospital-bound, or even in the Doctor's waiting room. Seriously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After a few failed attempts, the search terms that finally did the trick for me to find this were &lt;code&gt;novel about medical school hypnosis  waiting list torture&lt;/code&gt;. One of the results was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/163983-solved-private-medical-school-torture-death-s&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this solved Goodreads question&lt;/a&gt;, where the OP described:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story is about a medical school that selects the highest honors students to attend. Upon coming to the school, one or two students learn that the cadavers they are working on actually come from a secret ward of the school where they are being tortured and killed and then are provided to the medical students to study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-01-27T12:55:37.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11910" CreationDate="2021-01-28T00:28:21.257" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It stands for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Commission&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atomic Energy Commission&lt;/a&gt;, commonly known as A.E.C. In the real world, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Teller&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Teller&lt;/a&gt; was an early member of the Manhattan Project, sometimes called &amp;quot;the father of the hydrogen bomb&amp;quot;, and he was involved with the Atomic Energy Commission including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chariot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;proposing projects&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppenheimer_security_hearing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;testifying against Oppenheimer in their security clearance investigation&lt;/a&gt;. I looked into the history of this poem in high school over 2 decades ago and have only what facts have stuck in my brain over that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11978" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T10:52:29.747" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T10:52:29.747" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17297" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17302" CreationDate="2021-01-28T02:05:06.443" Score="4" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Culler's &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: a Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; contains the following slightly puzzling quote in chapter 7:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In principle at least, the performative [utterance] breaks the link between meaning and the intention of the speaker, for what act I perform with my words is not determined by my intention but by social and linguistic conventions. The utterance, Austin insists, should not be considered as the outward sign of some inward act which it represents truly or falsely. &lt;strong&gt;If I say ‘I promise’ under appropriate conditions, I have promised, have performed the act of promising, whatever intention I may have had in my head at the time.&lt;/strong&gt; Since literary utterances are also events where the intention of the author is not thought to be what determines the meaning, the model of the performative seems highly pertinent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What circumstances is he referring to here? In particular, when could you make a promise without intending to do so? Admittedly, making a promise does not require the intention to actually carry out the promise, but doesn't it necessarily entail the intention to make the promise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is he merely referring to making a promise with no intention of carrying it out? If so, in what sense does this support the idea that the meaning of a literary work can be unrelated to the author's intentions (given that making a false promise entails deliberate deception whereas writing a novel presumably doesn't)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T13:48:13.347" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:20:00.730" Title="Under what circumstances could you make a promise without intending to?" Tags="&lt;theory&gt;&lt;jonathan-culler&gt;&lt;literary-theory-short-introduction&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17298" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-24T22:33:07.760" Score="2" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;Chaucer's &amp;quot;The Miller's Tale&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt; is a weird story about an older Miller, his young, beautiful wife who sleeps with a young Oxford student, and an admiring young clergyman involved in a strange sexual relationship. In &amp;quot;A Whiter Shade of Pale&amp;quot;, is the miller's tale a reference to the Miller's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="John Sands" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T08:55:44.500" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:25:34.003" Title="In A Whiter Shade of Pale, is the miller's tale a reference to the Miller's tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17299" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17298" CreationDate="2021-01-24T22:40:01.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The lyrics are on record as not being philosophically meaningful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I would &lt;em&gt;presume&lt;/em&gt; that all would think like me, that indeed, &amp;quot;as the miller told his tale&amp;quot; was a direct reference to the Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. But apparently I'd be wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyricist probably did it deliberately to make the song sound literary and highbrow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, the &amp;quot;older&amp;quot; man in the Miller's Tale was in fact not himself a miller, but a &amp;quot;reeve&amp;quot; (that is, a sheriff of some sort). The Miller told the story deliberately to ridicule the Reeve. (The Miller and the Reeve were enemies, and spent the journey sniping at each other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a similar way, the Reeve's Tale is about a pair of feckless students who play a similar bawdy prank on a miller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11980" OwnerDisplayName="Prime Mover" LastActivityDate="2021-01-24T23:06:51.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17298" CreationDate="2021-01-24T22:49:07.990" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the following, it was not deliberate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Procol Harum's lyricist Keith Reid wrote the words to this song...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyric, &amp;quot;As the miller told his tale&amp;quot; sounds like a reference to&#xA;&amp;quot;The Miller's Tale,&amp;quot; from Chaucer's English novel The Canterbury&#xA;Tales...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reid, however, disproves this theory. He told us: &amp;quot;I'd never read The&#xA;Miller's Tale in my life. Maybe that's something that I knew&#xA;subconsciously, but it certainly wasn't a conscious idea for me to&#xA;quote from Chaucer, no way.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.songfacts.com/facts/procol-harum/a-whiter-shade-of-pale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procol Harum&lt;/a&gt; (Songfacts).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10741" OwnerDisplayName="chasly - supports Monica" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:25:34.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:25:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17301" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T08:15:03.093" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a vague memory of a story where a tribe of some sort lives in a cave for generations, and never leaves because they have access to food and water. One time, someone (it may have been a child; not sure) leaves the cave and sees the world, and returns and tells everyone they need to leave the cave and experience the world, which was full of wonders that would have improved everyone's lives, but everyone else disagrees because the cave has their essentials, and they don't want to &amp;quot;waste&amp;quot; resources exploring a dangerous unknown while they have their own problems to worry about in the cave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again, this story is just a vague memory and I definitely could've misremembered large parts of the story, but the &amp;quot;lesson&amp;quot; for me had always been that you cannot use &amp;quot;we have our own problems to worry about here&amp;quot; as an excuse to not explore the unknown, because the unknown can (and has) done a lot to improve the quality of life for humanity (I usually used this story to explain why space exploration is important).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After some research I thought I may just be thinking about Plato's Allegory of the Cave, but, although there are a lot of similarities, there are also a couple differences (i.e a large group of people, instead of prisoners), and the &amp;quot;moral&amp;quot; of the story seems to be quite different from that of the Allegory of the Cave (which, from what I can gather, is more about perspectives shaping your view of the world).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I honestly may have just warped the Allegory of the Cave into my own interpretation after many years, so if no one can find an alternative, I'll just assume that. If not though, what story is behind my vague memory?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11981" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T15:22:26.667" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T15:22:26.667" Title="Story about people living in a cave and not wanting to leave and explore" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;allegory&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17302" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17297" CreationDate="2021-01-28T08:59:04.393" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Culler's point here (well, Austin's point) is that a promise is performative: the act of saying &amp;quot;I promise&amp;quot; itself constitutes the promise. If I make a promise without intending to keep it, I have nevertheless made a promise. So &lt;em&gt;whatever my intentions&lt;/em&gt;, saying &amp;quot;I promise&amp;quot; means I have promised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example: If, under conventionally appropriate conditions, I say: &amp;quot;I promise that on February 1, I will repay you the $100 I owe you,&amp;quot; I have made a promise. Even if I keep my fingers crossed behind my back while saying those words. My intention is irrelevant. And if on February 1 I tell you, &amp;quot;No, I never intended to repay you; the promise was just words,&amp;quot; I am &lt;em&gt;still breaking my promise&lt;/em&gt;. I cannot claim that I never &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; promised to repay you simply because I never &lt;em&gt;truly&lt;/em&gt; intended to do so. The promise is not merely an outward form of words that represents or misrepresents my inner intentions; the act of saying &amp;quot;I promise&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the promise, whatever my intentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: for certain speech acts, such as promising (or apologizing, or making a bet), my intentions are irrelevant. It isn't so much that I make the promise &amp;quot;without intending to&amp;quot;; it's that my saying &amp;quot;I promise&amp;quot; constitutes the promise, whatever my intentions may have been when I said that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(As an aside: my then four year old niece, who was just beginning to learn to read, saw me reading Austin's &lt;em&gt;How to Do Things with Words&lt;/em&gt; and remarked, &amp;quot;I know how to do things with words! You spell them!&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-01-28T16:36:53.697" LastActivityDate="2021-01-28T16:36:53.697" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17303" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-28T20:08:56.207" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to get a grasp of a poetical image of being &amp;quot;packed in furnace&amp;quot;, found in Ted Hughes' Crow's opening poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/18633438&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Two Legends&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two Legends&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Black was the without eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black the within tongue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black was the heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black the blood in its loud tunnel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black the bowels &lt;strong&gt;packed in furnace&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During my Googling, I came across &lt;a href=&quot;http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1483/1/1483.pdf?DDD11+EThOS%20(BL)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this work&lt;/a&gt;, which suggests:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'packed in furnace' recalls Thomas' sea, 'tumbling in harness'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is from Dylan Thomas' &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/refusal-mourn-death-fire-child-london&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Never until the mankind making&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bird beast and flower&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fathering and all humbling darkness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tells with silence the last light breaking&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the still hour&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is come of the sea &lt;strong&gt;tumbling in harness&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have no idea in what way does the &amp;quot;packed in furnace&amp;quot; image can recall the &amp;quot;tumbling in harness&amp;quot; image.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Can this analogy make sense in some way?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T04:13:54.690" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T04:13:54.690" Title="In what way can the image of bowels &quot;packed in furnace&quot; recall an image of a sea &quot;tumbling in harness&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;&lt;dylan-thomas&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17304" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17320" CreationDate="2021-01-28T20:45:34.170" Score="2" ViewCount="88" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16439/17&quot;&gt;excellent verbose answer&lt;/a&gt; says that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Etymologically, the word &lt;em&gt;iambos&lt;/em&gt; is related to the Greek word for &lt;em&gt;cripple&lt;/em&gt;, with the short syllable representing the lame leg and the long the strong one. Deriving from this Greek origin, a foot of one short and one long syllable was called an iamb in Latin poetry as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the same answer also mentions that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambus_(genre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambus&lt;/a&gt; was originally a &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt; of Ancient Greek poetry, not a metrical style in which it could be written. Clearly, the &amp;quot;cripple&amp;quot; connection works much better when considering the iamb as a type of metre, so &lt;strong&gt;how did this etymological basis make sense in terms of the original meaning of iambus as a genre?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it possible that it's just a coincidence that the &amp;quot;cripple&amp;quot; connection fits so well with the modern meaning of &amp;quot;iamb&amp;quot;? Is it a back-formation based on a noticed similarity?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For that matter, I couldn't find any evidence for the etymological basis for the &amp;quot;cripple&amp;quot; connection, but I only did a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&amp;amp;q=iamb+cripple&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;brief search&lt;/a&gt; rather than a detailed etymological investigation. That issue would probably be better asked on a language site than here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T13:51:51.427" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T07:52:54.597" Title="Etymology of &quot;iamb&quot;, as a genre and a type of metre" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17305" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17303" CreationDate="2021-01-29T00:36:09.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the meanings of “furnace” is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;furnace, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 3.&lt;/strong&gt; A closed fireplace for heating a building by means of hot-air or hot-water pipes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This apparatus is more commonly known as a “boiler”.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Hughes’ image is of intestines being packed in the abdomen like hot water pipes in a boiler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the most plausible way to make sense of “tumbling in harness” is to use this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;harness, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, 4.a.&lt;/strong&gt; The trappings or accoutrements of a horse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and take Thomas’s image to be the waves of the sea breaking on the shore like “white horses” in harness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Owen Johnson thought that the one phrase recalled the other in his 1991 Ph.D. thesis, I do not know. Perhaps it is just that both are three-word participial phrases with “in” as the second word, like Shakespeare’s “flourishing in arms”. The comparison with Thomas appears in the middle of a list of “echoes” of other poets that Johnson found in Hughes, and not all of these echoes are particularly convincing, so perhaps he had simply come to the bottom of his barrel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-29T00:44:04.213" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T00:44:04.213" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17306" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17427" CreationDate="2021-01-29T09:22:23.780" Score="3" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brexit promise: frictionless trade. Brexit reality: tradeless friction&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This often appears in the internet discussions on Brexit. Is there a more specialized term to describe this specific kind of wordplay?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10947" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T16:15:30.760" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T22:12:48.037" Title="Term for wordplay: frictionless trade vs tradeless friction" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17307" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="70" CreationDate="2021-01-29T18:04:25.783" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are some examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Early Pushkin was heavily influenced by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Ch%C3%A9nier&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Andre Chénier&lt;/a&gt; and tried to &lt;a href=&quot;http://feb-web.ru/feb/pushkin/serial/is8/is8-090-.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;master his style through translation&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;here and elsewhere computer translation with my editing&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first translation from Chénier was made by Pushkin in 1823. This&#xA;is a translation of the first twenty-five verses of Chénier's idyll&#xA;&amp;quot;L'aveugle&amp;quot;, and remains in Pushkin's papers in a rough, unfinished&#xA;form.  Russian translation of &amp;quot;The Blind Man&amp;quot; was for Pushkin a kind&#xA;of study in the field of stylistics and a study of new poetic&#xA;meter, not only an experience of transmitting the French alexandrine&#xA;into Russian hexameter, but also the first experience of studying&#xA;Russian hexameter, the properties of which - expressiveness, richness&#xA;and diversity - aroused the poet's admiration&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Inspired by Chénier’s imitations of ancient poets, Pushkin wrote some imitations of his own: for example, &lt;strong&gt;On the Recovery of Lucullus&lt;/strong&gt; (“&lt;em&gt;На выздоровление Лукулла. Подражание латинскому&lt;/em&gt;”) imitated Horace, and &lt;strong&gt;From Anacreon&lt;/strong&gt; (“&lt;em&gt;Из Анакреона&lt;/em&gt;”) – well, Anacreon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pushkin &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/11/01/why-shakespeare-is-an-honorary-russian_644097&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;tried to translate&lt;/a&gt; Shakespeare and used a lot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/4203920?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespearean elements in &lt;strong&gt;Boris Godunov&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; The poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Godunov_(play)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote of the play&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I imitated Shakespeare in his broad and free depictions of characters,&#xA;in the simple and careless combination of plots&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In 1836 he wrote a poem &lt;strong&gt;Imitation of the Italian&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ru/books?id=tn-CBi71L1MC&amp;amp;pg=PA343&amp;amp;lpg=PA343&amp;amp;dq=pushkin%20imitation%20italian&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=lkEihTfSa0&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U2iTiXXxHLazMvxojOXc5NuYgdWgw&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOmvmq0MHuAhVHr4sKHcmbCEM4ChDoATAGegQICRAC#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=pushkin%20imitation%20italian&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;imitating a sonnet by Francesco Gianni&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pushkin's narrative poems &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D1%85%D1%87%D0%B8%D1%81%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%84%D0%BE%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%BD&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fountain of Bakhchisaray&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prisoner of the Caucasus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; are considered “&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%BC&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Byronic&lt;/a&gt;”, and not only were some of his extravagant acts considered by contemporaries an impersonation of Byron, there are &lt;a href=&quot;https://muse.jhu.edu/article/745668/summary&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;assumptions&lt;/a&gt; that he tried to copy Byron physically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He extensively imitated folk poetry in his verse fairy tales and some other poems. Example given in Roman Jacobson's &lt;a href=&quot;https://philology.ru/literature2/jakobson-87a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pushkin's imitations of the forms of folk poetry date to the years of&#xA;exile in the village of Mikhaylovskoye, from where in the autumn of 1826, after&#xA;receiving Czar’s pardon, Pushkin brought to Moscow his &amp;quot;Songs about&#xA;Stenka Razin&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Vinogradov&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Viktor Vinogradov&lt;/a&gt;’s book &lt;strong&gt;Pushkin’s Style&lt;/strong&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://feb-web.ru/feb/pushkin/critics/vin/vin-001-.htm?cmd=p&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Стиль Пушкина&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, 1941) sums up the matter of imitation this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pushkin comes into possession of the most diverse styles of Russian&#xA;and Western European literature through parody…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…by the mid-twenties, Pushkin's mastery of styles, demonstrated by the&#xA;original &amp;quot;imitations&amp;quot; of Batyushkov, Parny, Chénier, Ovid, Byron, the&#xA;Koran, the Bible, acquires extraordinary acuteness and variety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pushkin creatively used the style of the Russian folk poetry, the style&#xA;of the chronicles, the style of the Bible, the Koran. Styles of&#xA;Tredyakovsky, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, V. Petrov, Derzhavin, Khvostov;&#xA;styles of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Vyazemsky, Kozlov,&#xA;Yazykov, V. Küchelbecker, Den. Davydov, Delvig, Gnedich; the styles of&#xA;Byron, Chenier, Horace, Ovid, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Musset,&#xA;Béranger, Dante, Petrarch, Hafez, and other writers of the world&#xA;literature served as raw material for his original work. Pushkin proved&#xA;the ability of the Russian language to master creatively and&#xA;independently and to reflect in the distinctive way all the verbal and&#xA;artistic culture of the West and the East, accumulated over many&#xA;centuries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastActivityDate="2021-01-29T18:04:25.783" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17308" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-29T23:09:11.177" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;What's the oldest book written by a Native American? In a language created by a Native American, of course. Specifically I mean any written publication in a invented written alphabet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2455" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-01-31T05:15:05.443" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T05:15:05.443" Title="Oldest Native American book?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17309" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11902" CreationDate="2021-01-30T01:42:14.540" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo&lt;/em&gt;, ©1950 by Twayne Publishers, has this definition for &amp;quot;silk&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(Especially among loan sharks) Money, especially paper currency.&#xA;&amp;quot;That rabbit (usury victim) sure gets the silk up (manages to pay on time).&amp;quot;&#xA;2.(Scattered, South) A swindler.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And for &amp;quot;brace&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To solicit. &amp;quot;Step over and brace the tipster (tip-off man) for some work (criminal activity).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &amp;quot;take a dive&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Hobo, far West) To accept &amp;quot;salvation&amp;quot; at revival meeting or mission, usually to secure food, lodging, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether any of these definitions match Chandler's usage, I can't say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastEditorUserId="11606" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T14:01:45.807" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T14:01:45.807" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17310" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17311" CreationDate="2021-01-30T09:38:08.037" Score="4" ViewCount="519" Body="&lt;p&gt;Extract from Pope's translation of &lt;em&gt;the Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, Book XI, describing Agamemnon's rampage during the third battle:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wide o’er the field with guideless fury rolls,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Breaking their ranks, and crushing out their souls;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;While his keen falchion drinks the warriors’ lives;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;More grateful, now, to vultures than their wives!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless the meaning of the bolded line is idiomatic, it's lost on me. Is the poet implying that the warriors' souls would like their vanquished corpses, by the action of vultures, to disappear from the battlefields? Wouldn't a burial (or rather, a cremation) serve the purpose more honorably?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T09:57:48.310" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T17:35:00.697" Title="Vultures and wives? What does this expression mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;alexander-pope&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17310" CreationDate="2021-01-30T10:04:46.600" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pope uses “grateful” in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;grateful, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt;, 1.&lt;/strong&gt;  Pleasing to the mind or the senses, agreeable, acceptable, welcome.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and not in the more usual sense of “feeling gratitude”. So the meaning of the line is that Agamemnon’s massacre is pleasing to vultures, who will feast on the corpses, and not to wives, who will mourn their dead husbands.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other lines in Pope’s &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; in which he uses this sense include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sable fumes in curling spires arise,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And waft their &lt;strong&gt;grateful&lt;/strong&gt; odours to the skies. (I.416–417)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swift-gliding mists the dusky fields invade,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To thieves more &lt;strong&gt;grateful&lt;/strong&gt; than the midnight shade (III.17–18)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jove bids at length the expected gales arise;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The gales blow &lt;strong&gt;grateful&lt;/strong&gt;, and the vessel flies. (VII.7–8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T17:35:00.697" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T17:35:00.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17312" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T13:53:28.913" Score="-1" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a photo of Charles Stearns which appears in the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sutori.com/story/theatre-for-young-audiences-a-timeline--8hWoa1VzoyAc1wAiN6TKfHrF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theatre for Young Audiences: A Timeline&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t know if this a true photo of Charles Stearns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know where to find a photograph of Charles Stearns (1753-1826), of Lincoln Liberal School, MA?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11928" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:29:06.853" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:29:06.853" Title="Charles Stearns (1753-1832) Photograph" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-01-30T18:28:35.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17313" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T14:56:26.757" Score="4" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to identify who George H. Murphy is? He wrote a poem entitled &amp;quot;Iskander at the Bridge&amp;quot; in 1903 in The News &amp;amp; Observer, [Raleigh, N.C.] November 01, 1903, p. 3.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11928" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T08:45:19.357" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T14:11:38.263" Title="Who is George H. Murphy, author of &quot;Iskander at the Bridge&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17312" CreationDate="2021-01-30T15:36:46.993" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You photograph seems to be of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Luther_Stearns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Luther Stearns&lt;/a&gt; (1809-1867).  The &lt;a href=&quot;https://exhibits.tufts.edu/spotlight/john-brown-tufts/catalog/9-618&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original&lt;/a&gt; seems to be in the West Virginia State Archives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As mentioned in comments by Gareth Rees and myself, your Charles Stearns died  (in 1826 according to his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/38082853/charles-stearns&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;grave stone&lt;/a&gt;) before commercial photography and portrait photographs existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastEditorUserId="1892" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T23:41:44.683" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T23:41:44.683" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17315" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17297" CreationDate="2021-01-30T19:48:20.453" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;What Culler is describing is based on J. L. Austin's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin#How_to_Do_Things_With_Words&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;How to Do Things With Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which introduced a distinction between constative and performative utterances. Constative utterances are descriptive, whereas performative utterances perform actions rather than stating facts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Performative utterances cannot be judged as true or false (unlike constative utterances) but are measured in terms of &lt;strong&gt;felicity&lt;/strong&gt;. Felicity refers to the appropriateness of the utterances and is based on circumstances in which the utterance is made; these aspects determine the utterance's success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austin distinguished three types of &lt;strong&gt;felicity conditions&lt;/strong&gt;; infringement of these conditions causes &amp;quot;infelicity&amp;quot; (quoted from Drid's paper):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a. There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect&#xA;b. The particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The procedure must be executed&#xA;a. correctly&#xA;b. completely&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Often&#xA;a. The persons must have the prerequisite thoughts, feelings and intentions as specified in the procedure&#xA;b. If consequent conduct is specified, the participants must do so (follow the conduct)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austin even distinguishes five types of performative verbs (examples added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Verdictives&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, a judge says, &amp;quot;I hereby &lt;strong&gt;sentence&lt;/strong&gt; you to six years in state prison.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exercitives&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, &amp;quot;I &lt;strong&gt;advise&lt;/strong&gt; you to leave the bar before a fight breaks out.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Commissives&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, &amp;quot;I'll &lt;strong&gt;bet&lt;/strong&gt; you dollars I can't bit my right eye&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/btvdbj/a_man_walks_into_a_bar_and_says_to_the_bartender/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;joke from reddit&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Behabitives&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, &amp;quot;I &lt;strong&gt;apologise&lt;/strong&gt; for such a late response&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Expositives&lt;/strong&gt;: for example, &amp;quot;I &lt;strong&gt;argue&lt;/strong&gt; that Hamlet is a misogynist but that Shakespeare was not.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another example of a performative using a commissive verb is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_office_of_the_president_of_the_United_States&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;oath of office of the president of the United States&lt;/a&gt;, which begins with the words &amp;quot;I do solemnly swear ...&amp;quot;. It is an &amp;quot;accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect&amp;quot;. It is an interesting example because the words of the oath are not only spoken by the president elect (and the vice president-elect) but also by Chief Justice. The Chief Justice speaks the words of the oath and the president elect repeats them after him. However, at the end of the process, only the president-elect and not the Chief Justice is considered president of the USA. The Chief Justice does not speak the words under the &amp;quot;appropriate circumstances&amp;quot;, i.e. he was not chosen by the electoral college. (Hence the distinction that the president elect &lt;em&gt;takes&lt;/em&gt; the oath, whereas the Chief Justice merely &lt;em&gt;administers&lt;/em&gt; it.) In addition, the taking of the oath must be executed correctly and completely: when Chief Justice John Roberts flubbed the words at Obama's inauguration in January 2009, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_DjaN4BHKU&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the oath was re-delivered at the White House on the next day&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, when a priest says during a wedding ceremony, &amp;quot;I hereby declare you husband and wife&amp;quot;, he does this under appropriate circumstances: two people came to him to get married, etc. If I were to speak the same words to two random people in the street, the statement would be infelicitous in more than one way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a similar issue with the word &amp;quot;promise&amp;quot;. For example, when Taylor Swift sings &amp;quot;I promise that you'll never find another like me&amp;quot;, she isn't referring something she can actually perform. We understand that the singer's statement does not attempt to follow an accepted conventional procedure and the action (rather than strict &amp;quot;conduct&amp;quot;) it specifies is not under her control.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if I say, &amp;quot;I promise I will pay you tomorrow&amp;quot; under the &lt;em&gt;appropriate felicity conditions&lt;/em&gt;, the utterance is interpreted as performative. In this specific example, it is probably sufficient that someone asked, &amp;quot;When will you pay me?&amp;quot; and that this person assumed (a) the amount is not too big for someone of my means, (b) I actually &lt;em&gt;intend&lt;/em&gt; to pay it. If, for the other person, my statement meets the felicity conditions, I have actually made a performative utterance and I will be in some sort of trouble if I don't fulfil my promise because (for example) I never intended to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austin later discarded his constative-performative dichotomy but others used his work as the starting point for the development of speech act theory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The OP also asked &lt;strong&gt;in what sense does this support the idea that the meaning of a literary work can be unrelated to the author's intentions (...)?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several issues when applying speech act theory to literature, especially literary criticism. Before discussing these, it is necessary to explain another contribution from Austin's &lt;em&gt;How to Do Things with Words&lt;/em&gt;, namely the distinction between locution, illocution and perlocution. The locutionary act is &amp;quot;the act of saying something and its basic content&amp;quot;, the illocutionary act refers to &amp;quot;what you're trying to do by speaking&amp;quot; and the perlocutionary act is &amp;quot;the effect of what you say&amp;quot; (informal definitions quoted from R. L. Trask).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One issue concerns the scope of speech act theory: Austin's speech act theory cannot cope with literature because it is too narrow in scope: it is based on a sentence grammar, whereas literature (and discouse in general) needs to be understood in terms of a text grammar (see Garcia Landa, p. 96; Garcia Landa is talking about Searle here but identifies something that appears to apply to early speech theory in general).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue concerns how you define locution, illocution and perlocution in a literary context or, more specifically, where you locate these type of acts. One way of looking at it goes as follows: the narrative as a whole is a &amp;quot;locution&amp;quot;, its transmission from the narrator to the reader (or narratee) is a fictional illocution, and &amp;quot;the composition of a novel or a story by the author is a real illocution&amp;quot; (Garcia Landa, page 92). But what does it mean to say that the composition of a literary work by an author is an illocution? According to Garcia Landa, a work of fiction can be seen as (derived) illocutionary act: &amp;quot;in order to count as fiction we must recognise it as such&amp;quot;. (See also Culler's emphasis on the cooperative principle in his discussion of the definition of literature in Chapter 2.) He later add that what some critics &amp;quot;do not see is that &lt;em&gt;writing a poem&lt;/em&gt; is the illocutionary act performed by the author in writing a poem.&amp;quot; This type of illocution is something very different from the concept of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/authorial-intent&quot;&gt;authorial intent&lt;/a&gt; in intentionalist approaches to interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Speech act theorists who equate the meaning of a literary work with its illocutionary intent or its illocutionary force neglect perlocutions. Garcia Landa even gives an example of a perlocution that conflicts with the author's illocutionary intent: a reader may find a Barbara Cartland novel very funny even though the author did not intend it to be. The effects of literature are not confined to illocutionary intent. (Perlocutionary intentions can also be important, notably in literary hoaxes; see Garcia Landa, pp. 98-99).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another issue is that in literary texts (and discourse in general) the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions becomes blurry. The elasticity of the conventions that work at the discourse level makes &amp;quot;the uptake of macro-illocutions (...) fuzzy-edged, probabilistic and approximative&amp;quot;. As a consequence, the relationship between illocutions and perlocutions &amp;quot;is constantly being negotiated&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A text, and most of all a literary text, is always redefining the codes that allow us to understand it, escapting automatism and convention, and therefore redefining the play of illocution and perlocution. Each phase of the sender's utterance has a corresponding activity in the reader if communication or understanding is to take place. The author's speech act must be complemented by the reader's interpretive act (cf. Harris, 1988, x).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This does not imply that there are no authorial intentons that are worth retrieving; decoding symbols is an example of this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Interpreting Interpreting&lt;/em&gt; (1979) Susan R. Horton made a distinction between reading and interpreting: &amp;quot;reading is a temporal, sequential activity, and as such is opposed to interpretation, which consists in building a 'spatial' pattern of relationships out of the matter furnished by this activity&amp;quot; (Garcia Landa, p. 100). Reading &amp;quot;should refer to the retrieval of codified meaning; interpreations is concerned with the retrieval of partially codified meaning&amp;quot; (p. 101). Since authors both use exiting codes and create new ones and since the creation of new codes involves the transformation of existing ones, there is no sharp boundary between between codified and partially codified meaning. Garcia Landa argues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what is fundamental is recognizing that there are two poles, that of the undisputably intentional and that of the undisputably unintentional, that this this situation seems to be the right one for both literature and criticism to thrive on. The lack of a clear boundary between intentional and unintentional features will not invalidate the relevance of authorial intention to the creative or interpretive process (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this view of the relationship between speech act theory and literary criticism, authorial intent is not necessarily irrelevant but its retrieval is so uncertain that it can hardly define the boundaries of interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Drid, Touria: &amp;quot;Language as Action: Fundamentals of Speech Act Theory&amp;quot;. Praxis International Journal of Social Science and Literature, Volume 1, Issue 10 (December 2018).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Garcia Landa, Jose Angel: &amp;quot;Speech Act Theory and the Concept of Intention in Literary Criticism&amp;quot;. Review of English Studies Canaria, Vol. 24 (1992), pp. 89-104. Available at &lt;a href=&quot;https://ssrn.com/abstract=1615111&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SSRN&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trask, R. L.: &lt;em&gt;Language and Linguistics: The Key Concepts&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Edited by Peter Stockwell. Routledge, 2007. (See the entries &amp;quot;performative&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;speech act&amp;quot;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T21:20:00.730" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:20:00.730" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-30T21:12:13.003" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I read this in an anthology, probably in the 1980s or 1990s, possibly one of the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies. At the beginning, a man is transporting a dead dog to a field to bury it. I'm not certain if it was a family pet, or one that he hit on the road. As a result of transporting the dog, he winds up with blood all along the inside of his van (and my brain keeps wanting to say it was a domestic van rather than a passenger car) and on his hands. Sometime shortly thereafter, the police pick him up on suspicion of murder, maybe of his wife, with part of the evidence being all of the blood. He explains about the dog, but when he takes them to the field, he can't find the dog. I'm not certain why they didn't test what sort of blood was in the car... maybe it was an older story, or maybe there was a twist where he was getting framed and there really was human blood in his car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the exact resolution, but I think it turns out that the dog wasn't as dead as he thought it was, and had managed to dig its way out and stagger a distance before finally dying, and his innocence is proven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-01-30T21:12:13.003" Title="Short story - Man transports a dead dog to a field, but gets accused of murder with the blood in his van considered to be evidence" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17317" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17318" CreationDate="2021-01-30T21:16:34.850" Score="9" ViewCount="395" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the beginning of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1934/1934-h/1934-h.htm#page33&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Introduction&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; from William Blake's &lt;em&gt;Songs of Experience&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hear the voice of the Bard,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who present, past, and future, sees;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose ears have heard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Holy Word&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That walked among the ancient trees;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Calling the lapséd soul,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And weeping in the evening dew;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That might control&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;starry pole&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And fallen, fallen light renew!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reading analysis, the &amp;quot;starry pole&amp;quot; is supposed to represent reason, but what is it? An actual pole? Something like the earth's poles? I can't visualize this and can't find a dumbed-down enough explanation for me. I feel like I'm missing something really obvious here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11999" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-01-30T21:22:39.187" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T09:43:44.493" Title="What is the &quot;starry pole&quot; in Blake's &quot;Songs of Experience&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;songs-of-experience&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17318" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17317" CreationDate="2021-01-30T22:34:29.117" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase “starry pole” is a quotation from Milton’s &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, whose book IV describes the life of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, at their shady lodge arrived, both stood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Both turned, and under open sky adored&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which they beheld, the moon’s resplendent globe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And &lt;strong&gt;starry pole&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Milton (1674). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/100/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, IV.720–725&lt;/a&gt;. Spelling modernized.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By “starry pole” Milton means the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;celestial pole&lt;/a&gt;, the part of the sky about which the stars appear to revolve, containing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pole_star&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pole star&lt;/a&gt;, which appears fixed in the sky. In Milton’s cosmology, the  “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyrean&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;empyrean&lt;/a&gt;”  or “heaven of heavens” lies above the pole, and he sometimes uses “pole” as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metonym&lt;/a&gt; for heaven (for example in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/170/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VII.215&lt;/a&gt;, “with the centre mix the pole”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this quotation in mind, we can see that Blake is alluding to the biblical story of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fall of man&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Bible_(King_James)/Genesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Genesis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; chapters 2 and 3. Blake’s “ancient trees” are the garden of Eden; the “Holy Word” is the voice of god who spoke there to Adam and Eve; and “lapsed” (meaning “fallen, sinful”) refers to the state of mankind after the fall. Blake’s bard tells the lapsed soul to “control the starry pole”: that is, to change the direction of rotation of the heavens, and turn back time, until the fall is reversed, and “light”, that is, innocence, is renewed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Fallen light” might also refer to the hero of &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, that is, to Lucifer, whose name means “light-bringer”, and who “fell from noon to dewy eve” in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/22/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.743&lt;/a&gt;. (Compare Milton’s “dewy eve” to Blake’s “evening dew”.) If time were turned back, that might reverse not only the fall of man, but the fall of the angels too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Geoffrey Keynes thought that the “starry pole” represented “Reason” I do not know: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/songsofinnocence00blak_2/page/142/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in context&lt;/a&gt; he provides no further details or explanation. It is true that Blake was interested in the contrast between reason and imagination (see extract from one of his letters below), but I do not see how this led Keynes to his interpretation of ‘Introduction’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that This World Is a World of imagination &amp;amp; Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, &amp;amp; a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some See Nature all Ridicule &amp;amp; Deformity, &amp;amp; by these I shall not regulate my proportions; &amp;amp; Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, &amp;amp; I feel Flatter’d when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil &amp;amp; Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible more Entertaining &amp;amp; Instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual Sensation, &amp;amp; but mediately to the Understanding or Reason? Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks &amp;amp; the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says: “Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, &amp;amp; Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.”†&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Blake (23 August 1799). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lettersofwilliam002199mbp/page/n41/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Dr. Trusler&lt;/a&gt;. In Geoffrey Keynes, ed. (1956). &lt;em&gt;The Letters Of William Blake&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 35–36. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Franics Bacon (1605), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/twoobookesoffran00baco/page/n187/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane&lt;/em&gt;, book II, p. 47&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T09:43:44.493" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T09:43:44.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17319" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17431" CreationDate="2021-01-31T10:53:09.590" Score="2" ViewCount="86" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to find a fable I read a long time ago (some 40 years ago, maybe), probably in a collection of short stories / fables, probably in Spanish.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From what I have been searching so far, it seems it isn't one of the classic Greek-roman fables, though it was written in Aesop's fables style - rural setting, countrymen,  small village, nothing &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the story the problem was that there were born several pigs with human heads and nobody could explain the reason or what it meant - until somebody suggested a solution (and indirectly the cause): let the men who take care of the pigs in the fields have their women with them (when they go to the fields).&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The story stuck me because it was the first reference I read that pointed to zoophilia  (I'm not saying it is the earliest reference to zoophilia there is, but the first I came across while growing up).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11701" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T02:01:49.343" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T02:01:49.343" Title="A fable in which pigs with human heads are born because the swineherds had no women with them" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17320" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17304" CreationDate="2021-01-31T11:39:36.510" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;A Prosody Handbook&lt;/em&gt;, Karl Shapiro and Robert Beum claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin &lt;em&gt;iambus&lt;/em&gt; derives from a Greek word meaning &amp;quot;a cripple.&amp;quot; The short syllable represents the lame foot, the long one descending with normal strength, perhaps with the added strength of the cane. (p. 35)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Shapiro, Karl, and Robert Beum. &lt;em&gt;A Prosody Handbook&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shapiro and Beum get a couple of things wrong. First, a person uses a cane to add strength to the &lt;em&gt;lame&lt;/em&gt; foot, not the foot with normal strength. Second, as Peter Shor noted in a comment to your question, &lt;em&gt;iambus&lt;/em&gt; does not come from &lt;em&gt;cripple&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/iambic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymology Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; provides this origin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in prosody, 1570s (n.) &amp;quot;a foot of two syllables, the first short or unaccented, the second long or accented;&amp;quot; 1580s (adj.), &amp;quot;pertaining to or employing iambs,&amp;quot; from Late Latin &lt;em&gt;iambicus&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;iambikos&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;iambos&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;metrical foot of one unaccented followed by one accented syllable; an iambic verse or poem,&amp;quot; traditionally said to be from &lt;em&gt;iaptein&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;to assail, attack&amp;quot; (in words), literally &amp;quot;to put forth, send forth&amp;quot; (in reference to missiles, etc.), but Beekes says &amp;quot;doubtless of Pre-Greek origin.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beekes&lt;/em&gt; here refers to the Dutch linguist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._P._Beekes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert S. P. Beekes&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%B4%CE%B1%CE%BC%CE%B2%CE%BF%CF%82#Ancient_Greek&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; also mentions the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Greek_substrate&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pre-Greek&lt;/a&gt; origins of the word:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably of Pre-Greek substrate (Illyrian/Phrygian) origin; the OED suggests a derivation from ἰάπτω (&lt;em&gt;iáptō&lt;/em&gt;, “to assail, attack verbally”), literally &amp;quot;send forth&amp;quot;, cognate with ἵημι (&lt;em&gt;híēmi&lt;/em&gt;, “I throw, hurl”), as iambic verse was first used by satirists, but this could just be folk etymology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has also been suggested that the term is related to the minor goddess &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iambe&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iambe (Greek: Ἰάμβη) in Greek mythology was a Thracian woman, daughter of Pan and Echo, granddaughter of Hermes, and a servant of Metaneira, the wife of Hippothoon. Others call her a slave of Celeus, king of Eleusis. The extravagant hilarity displayed at the festivals of Demeter in Attica was traced to her, for it is said that when Demeter, in her wanderings in search of her daughter, arrived in Attica, Iambe cheered the mournful goddess with her jokes (Horn. Hymn, in Cer. 202; Apollod. i. 5. § 1; Diod. v. 4; Phot. BibL Cod. 239. p. 319, ed. Bekker; Schol. ad Nicand. Aleodph, 134.) She was believed to have given the name to iambic poetry, for some said that she hanged herself in consequence of the cutting speeches in which she had indulged, and others that she had cheered Demeter by a dance in the Iambic metre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the origins of the terms are uncertain, it is true that the iambus was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambus_(genre)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;genre&lt;/a&gt; of Greek &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invective#The_genre_of_invective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;invective&lt;/a&gt; poetry. Since it was insulting in nature, it tended to use simple metrical forms close to natural speech rhythms. It defaulted, therefore, to iambic meter, which then as now was considered closest to natural speech—cf. the quote from the Princeton Encyclopedia in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16439/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; your question links to. By association with the genre, the metrical foot began to be called &lt;em&gt;iambus&lt;/em&gt; as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shapiro and Beum conflate this term with &lt;em&gt;choliambus&lt;/em&gt;, which does translate to &lt;em&gt;limping iamb&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/choliamb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster definition&lt;/a&gt; of choliamb provides this etymology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Late Latin &lt;em&gt;choliambus&lt;/em&gt;, from Greek &lt;em&gt;choliambos&lt;/em&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;chōlos&lt;/em&gt; lame + &lt;em&gt;iambos&lt;/em&gt; iamb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A choliamb is a satiric poem that has six feet to the line, with the last foot being a spondee or a trochee rather than an iamb. Hipponax, the originator of this metrical form, apparently chose this imperfect meter to symbolize human imperfections. The term &amp;quot;limping&amp;quot; was chosen because each line ends awkwardly and heavily on the wrong foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When I wrote the answer that your question asks about, I took Shapiro and Beum's mistaken etymology of &lt;em&gt;iambus&lt;/em&gt; as correct; it was only in researching this answer, and after seeing Peter Shor's comment, that I realized it was wrong. I have edited the previous answer to rectify the mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T07:52:54.597" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T07:52:54.597" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-01-31T14:54:41.123" Score="2" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 80s, I have read a children's book about a boy riding in a caravan which is joint by a traveler who is a story-teller and invents a story together with the boy. At the end, this story turns out to be essentially true and the story-teller is the hero of this invented story who rejoins his love who he previously lost after valuing gold higher than water to irrigate the desert.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book was from the youth section of a public library (that does not exist anymore) and it was in German. However, it is very likely that it was translated because most books in that section were and googling phrases from the book in German gives nothing. It is quite likely that it was translated from English, but this is not certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would be happy to find this book again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12001" LastEditorUserId="12001" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T09:18:12.717" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T09:18:12.717" Title="Story about boy riding with a caravan and inventing a story which turns out to be true" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17265" CreationDate="2021-01-31T23:11:32.840" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's simply called the Author's Alter Ego - the alternative me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be a character inspired in the writer with add-ons, generally positive traits.&#xA;Or simply can be a fanciful character which the writer desires to be&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the time such operation suffers from a psychological limit: &lt;strong&gt;you portray yourself not exactly how you are but pretty generally as how you would like to be seen by others&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;It's somehow a mark for the posterity, or at least what you would like people in general would talk of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such choices are generally driven by inner needs most of them developed yet on childhood. Not trustable at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12003" LastActivityDate="2021-01-31T23:11:32.840" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17323" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16995" CreationDate="2021-01-31T23:18:13.317" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do you become aware “of the earth as poetry”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It shouldn't be taken literally. He's riffing off the emotive associations of poetry. He may also be reaching back to the tradition of lyrical pastoral poetry which extolled the wonders of nature against the corruptions of the city life. It's no accident either, that in &lt;em&gt;Genesis&lt;/em&gt;, man was exiled from the garden of Eden, nor that the word paradise is descended from the Avestan &lt;em&gt;pairidaēza&lt;/em&gt;, meaning park or garden. Nor that in Islam, the word &lt;em&gt;jannah&lt;/em&gt;, which occurs in the Qu'ran for paradise, also derives from the Arabic word, &lt;em&gt;janna&lt;/em&gt;, meaning garden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T09:19:14.757" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T09:19:14.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17246" CreationDate="2021-02-01T01:03:25.200" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that Horace Walpole is making a comparison with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintus_Fabius_Maximus_Verrucosus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Furius_Camillus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Marcus Furius Camillus&lt;/a&gt;. Both were at some point &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_dictator&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;dictator&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. &amp;quot;entrusted with the full authority of the state to deal with a military emergency or to undertake a specific duty&amp;quot; (Wikipedia).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marcus Furius Camillus's achievements as a dictator are described in Livy's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;From the Founding of the City&lt;/em&gt;, book 5&lt;/a&gt;, especially chapters 19-32.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quintus Fabius Maximus's strategy of avoiding an open battle with Hanibal's troops is described in Livy's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/From_the_Founding_of_the_City/Book_22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ab Urbe Condita&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;From the Founding of the City&lt;/em&gt;, book 22&lt;/a&gt;. His own &lt;em&gt;magister equitum&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;master of horse&amp;quot;) M. Minucius Rufus criticised the dictator for this, contrasting the strategy with what Marcus Furius Camillus had done:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If M. Furius Camillus had chosen this method of wandering over mountain heights and passes to rescue the City from the Gauls which has been adopted by this new Camillus, this peerless Dictator who has been found for us in our troubles, to recover Italy from Hannibal, Rome would still be in the hands of the Gauls, and I very much fear that if we go on dawdling in this way the City which our ancestors have so often saved will only have been saved for Hannibal and the Carthaginians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_career_of_George_Washington#Victory&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Avoiding decisive battles&lt;/a&gt; was one of the strategies used by George Washington; on the whole, the comparison with Camillus looks more appropriate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T01:03:25.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17325" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17326" CreationDate="2021-02-01T07:38:16.343" Score="1" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When admirals, extoll’d for standing still,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or doing nothing with a deal of skill&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this quote on a loading screen in &lt;em&gt;Empire: Total War&lt;/em&gt; (a video game), and after searching I found that it's from William Cowper's poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/47790/47790-h/47790-h.htm#Page_501&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Table Talk&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;. What's he trying to say? Is it that he compliments the expertise and confidence of the admirals, or that he is being sardonic about certain affairs of the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12008" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T09:51:17.503" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T17:52:02.293" Title="Meaning of this William Cowper quote about admirals?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-cowper&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17326" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17325" CreationDate="2021-02-01T09:33:50.910" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's seems a strange quote to place in a video game, which tend to be either about acquiring treasure or a shoot 'em up frenzy. The poem opens up, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You told me, I remember, glory, built&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On selfish principles, is shame and guilt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The deeds that men admire as half divine, all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stark naught, because corrupt in their design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is pretty explicit, and should need no paraphrasing. He is reminding everyone that 'glory' that governs by counting on 'selfish principles' is no glory at all. Given he was writing on the very outset of the industrial revolution in England, and the mobilising of Capitalism as the power in the land, his criticism is apposite. After all, John Ruskin also said that England would have to chose between Capitalism or Christianity. When we look around us today we can see which route was chosen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two lines in question occur further along the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To themes more pertinent, if less sublime.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When ministers and ministerial arts;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Patriots, who love good places at their hearts;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When admirals, extoll’d for standing still,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or doing nothing with a deal of skill;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Generals, who will not conquer when they may,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Firm friends to peace, to pleasure, and good pay;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This again is apposite, when we recall how the military, buttressed by Capitalism, changed war into the industrialised killing fields of World War I and World War II. They could have fought for 'peace' and be firm friends to it. But crazed by militarism they ruined most of Europe. We see this now in hindsight, but William Cowper was able to foresee this from the mid 1700's. A similar sentiment is explored by Kubrick's anti-war film, &lt;em&gt;Paths of Glory&lt;/em&gt;, where the French General in charge and the entire military command is shown to be corrupt and in thrall to militarism. In fact, right at the end, at the climax of the film, just after General Mireau is seen crowing with his superior over the murder by firing squad, at his instigation, of three men for &amp;quot;cowardice in the line of duty&amp;quot; and who he descibes as &amp;quot;having died wonderfully&amp;quot; and which we know to have been brave men in the preceding court martial, Colonel Dax, the protagonist of the film, calls General Mireau, &amp;quot;a degenerate, sadistic old man.&amp;quot; And that is Kubrick's comment on the then military high command. And could just as well be Cowpers poem, put in a single sentence about the leadership of his day and what he saw coming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T17:52:02.293" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T17:52:02.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17327" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17356" CreationDate="2021-02-01T10:12:23.237" Score="4" ViewCount="77" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 1 of Tomasz Jedrowski's &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, set in the late sixties or early seventies, the protagonist Ludwik describes his childhood crush on a friend, Beniek. The boys become close while attending the preparatory lessons for First Communion together. Each is nine years old at the time. They usually hang out at Ludwik's. During his only visit to Beniek's house, Ludwik notices the absence of crucifixes. Later, because he wants to be with Beniek all the time, he asks his mother if Beniek can move in with them. The following dialogue ensues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You know, Beniek is different from us,&amp;quot; she said with a sneer. &amp;quot;He couldn't really be part of the family.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What do you mean?&amp;quot; I asked, puzzled. Granny appeared by the kitchen door, holding a rag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Drop it, Gosia. Beniek is a good boy, and he is going to Communion. Now come, both of you, the food is getting cold.&amp;quot;  (p. 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A few days later, when the boys take a bath together, Ludwik notices that Beniek is circumcised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His nipples were larger and darker than mine; his penis was bigger, longer. But most confusingly, it was naked at the tip, like the acorns we played with in autumn. I had never really seen anyone else's, and wondered whether there was something wrong with mine, whether this is what Mother meant when she said Beniek was different.  (p. 9–10)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beniek undergoes all the preparation for First Communion alongside Ludwik, but fails to show up at the rite itself. Confused, Ludwik later goes to Beniek's house to look for him. The woman who opens the door says, unkindly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Those Jews don't live here anymore. Understood?&amp;quot; (p. 15)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A kinder lady tells Ludwik that Beniek's family has moved to Israel. Beniek drops out entirely from the narrative after this chapter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Beniek's parents don't have any crosses in the house, are known to be Jewish, and move to Israel, it doesn't seem likely that they are preparing for a conversion to Christianity. So then &lt;strong&gt;Why does Beniek attend catechism?&lt;/strong&gt; Have I missed something in the narrative? Or does the social and cultural situation of Polish Jewry in the late 1960s explain why Beniek's parents send him to the preparatory classes for First Communion? What would that explanation be?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T11:14:05.173" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T08:08:19.870" Title="In Swimming in the Dark, why does Beniek go through the preparations for First Communion?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17328" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17327" CreationDate="2021-02-01T10:12:23.237" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can think of a few explanations, but none seems particularly likely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Perhaps Beniek does want to convert due to peer pressure, and his parents indulge his wish to attend the preparatory classes, but when the actual sacrament of communion nears, they hastily move to Israel to head off the conversion. This isn't very satisfactory, as we are never told anything about Beniek's baptism, which would need to take place before the First Communion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poland was and remains a very conservative Catholic country. Perhaps it was just taken for granted that all children would attend catechism irrespective of their religious identity. But that too seems unlikely for a Communist country, where social pressure on non-believers to conform would be offset by an atheist political ideal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Antisemitism was strong in postwar Poland. The few survivors of the Holocaust still faced hostility and discrimination after the war's end. Poland was a satellite state of the USSR, which had supported the Arab side during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Six Day War&lt;/a&gt; in 1967. Consequently, the Polish Communist Party moved in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anti-Jewish direction&lt;/a&gt;, which led to a mass migration of Jews from Poland to Israel in 1968–1969. Beniek's family's departure is evidently part of this migration. Perhaps Beniek's parents send him to catechism in the desperate hope that he will avoid the worst of antisemitic discrimination? This seems somewhat far-fetched as well, as the Polish government's actions made very clear that people of Jewish origin, even those who were secularized, were unwelcome. Assimilation was no longer a viable pathway to remain in Poland.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I am hoping someone with a better understanding of Polish and/or Jewish history during this period, or who has picked up on something in the novel that I have missed, will be able to provide a convincing explanation for Beniek's attendance at the preparatory classes for First Communion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T10:12:23.237" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17329" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17297" CreationDate="2021-02-01T11:47:07.453" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems that Austin is tending towards a contractual theory of speech, rather than performative. After all, if I sign a contract, then it matters not one whit if I was signing it whilst crossing my fingers behind my back or making faces to signify what I really thought of the contract. The contract is signed and that is that. If I tried to contest it in court, then the court would throw out the case unless I could prove that &lt;em&gt;false representations&lt;/em&gt; were made by the other party, or that I was &lt;em&gt;forced&lt;/em&gt; to sign against my will. In which case, the court would quite rightly throw the contract out of court, and so we see quite directly intentions matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Performative speech&lt;/a&gt;, is speech that aren't prescribed a truth value. In fact, Austin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;defines &amp;quot;performatives&amp;quot; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(1) Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; instead when something is wrong with them then they are &amp;quot;unhappy&amp;quot;, while if nothing is wrong they are &amp;quot;happy&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(2) The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action (Austin later deals with them under the name illocutionary acts), the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as just &amp;quot;saying&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;describing&amp;quot; something&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus Cullers should describe what he terms 'performative' as an 'illocutionary act' and not performative per se. As for the performative aspect of 'promise', a highly pertinent exchange is recorded in an essay at the Nobel Prize for Literature site between Tagore and Gandhi (and which, incidently Tagore won for is book of poems, &lt;em&gt;Gitanjali&lt;/em&gt; in 1913):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On one occasion when Mahatma Gandhi visited Tagore’s school at Santiniketan, a young woman got him to sign her autograph book. Gandhi wrote: “Never make a promise in haste. Having once made it fulfill it at the cost of your life.” When he saw this entry, Tagore became agitated. He wrote in the same book a short poem in Bengali to the effect that no one can be made “a prisoner forever with a chain of clay.” He went on to conclude in English, possibly so that Gandhi could read it too, “Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T11:47:07.453" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17330" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17176" CreationDate="2021-02-01T14:13:44.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Even though Culler writes that theory is roughly the theory of &amp;quot;signifying practices&amp;quot; or of &amp;quot;something like culture in the broadest sense&amp;quot;, theory cannot be reduced to &amp;quot;the study of the background (...) that we bring to the text&amp;quot;.&#xA;This is clearly not the case with a number of older theories he describes in the book's appendix on theoretical schools and movements (pages 123-132 in the first edition).&#xA;For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8374/2191&quot;&gt;Russian Formalism&lt;/a&gt; studied poetic language not so much to uncover a text's meaning but to learn about the mechanisms that constitute literariness.&#xA;New Criticism in the USA and &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werkimmanente_Interpretation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;werkimmanente Interpretation&lt;/a&gt; in post-war Germany focused on the work as such, isolating it from its cultural and historical context. (German professors of literature who had been involved with Nazism had &amp;quot;good reasons&amp;quot; to do this, i.e. avoiding drawing attention to their recent past.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Culler's comment is mostly about the sort of theory that is not primarily about literature and draws on ideas from psychological, political and philosophical texts. But even the theories that have emerged since the 1950s cannot all be said to study the cultural or other background that readers bring to the text. Structuralism, for example, focuses on binary oppositions and other patterns in literary texts, i.e. patterns that vary in scope from the sentence level to the narrative as a whole and even intertextual connections. Post-structuralism in a sense &amp;quot;reads the text against itself&amp;quot;, i.e. it reads a text as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying on the surface (see Barry p. 74-75).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are a number of reader-oriented approaches to literature, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Robert_Jauss&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hans Robert Jauss's&lt;/a&gt; aesthetics of reception (&lt;em&gt;Rezeptionsästhetik&lt;/em&gt;) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reader-response_criticism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reader-response criticism&lt;/a&gt; in general. There are also a number of theories that focus on forces and patterns that are at work in society or in people's minds (or both) and how these forces and patterns can be retrieved in literary texts. These theories include feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis and post-colonial theory. Even though the &amp;quot;forces&amp;quot; I mentioned can be said to be at work in both readers and authors, the focus of such criticism tends to be directed at the text rather than either the reader or the author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much of the above needs to be qualified by the observation that criticism often doesn't rely on a single theory but combines concepts from two or more; for example, feminist criticism may draw on concepts from structuralism, psychoanalysis and Marxism (see the Introduction to Wolfreys &amp;amp; Baker). In addition, theory is never &amp;quot;finished&amp;quot;, let alone as pure or straightforward as summaries in introductory works may suggest, so a specific type of criticms can always draw in concepts from theories that focus on cultural or other aspects when the need arises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we bring to the text may play a role in the background. In Russian Formalism, for example, a text's literariness would be hard to define without knowing the conventions of ordinary language from which the literary text deviates. But most theories in Culler's appendix don't seem to fit the description that they study &amp;quot;background (cultural background and/or other background) that we bring to the text&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Barry, Peter: &lt;em&gt;Beginning Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Fourth edition. Manchester University Press, 2017.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Culler, Jonathan: &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wolfreys, Julian; Baker, William (editors): &lt;em&gt;Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance&lt;/em&gt;. Macmillan, 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T14:13:44.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17331" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6787" CreationDate="2021-02-01T15:26:43.423" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;CJ Sheu suggested in a comment that the reason may be 'because the founders of these &amp;quot;movements&amp;quot; just happened to be Shakespeare scholars'. I checked this hypothesis by looking up the doctoral dissertations of the scholars listed in my question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stephen Greenblatt&lt;/strong&gt;'s doctoral dissertation, submitted in 1969, was about Sir Walter Ralegh and was revised and republished in 1973 as &lt;em&gt;Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles&lt;/em&gt; (Pallardy).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jonathan Dollimore&lt;/strong&gt;'s thesis was &lt;em&gt;Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries&lt;/em&gt;, submitted at the University of London in 1985 (available for registered users at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.704670&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library's EThOS&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;John Drakakis&lt;/strong&gt;'s PhD was awarded by the University of Leeds in 1988 based on the dissertation &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&amp;amp;uin=uk.bl.ethos.329457&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Plays of Shackerley Marmion (1603-39): A Critical Old Spelling Edition&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Catherine Belsey&lt;/strong&gt;'s PhD was awarded by the University of Warwick in 1973, based on the dissertation &lt;a href=&quot;https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&amp;amp;uin=uk.bl.ethos.595007&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Patterns of Conflict in the English Morality Plays&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Alan Sinfield&lt;/strong&gt;'s DLitt was awarded by University College London in 1987 (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Sinfield#Education&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;), but his dissertation is not listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/year/1987.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;UCL Discovery&lt;/a&gt;, nor in the British Library's EThOS.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three out of five theses about Elizabethan or Jacobean literature is not too bad, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morality_play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;morality plays&lt;/a&gt; (see Belsey's dissertation) were still being performed in early Tudor times. Based on this, the hypothesis that the founders of New Historicism and Cultural Materialism started out as Shakespeare scholars is not quite confirmed but studying other  Elizabethan or Jacobean literature puts one in a good position to study Shakespeare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources (besides the British Library's EThOS / e-theses online service):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pallardy, Richard: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Greenblatt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Stephen Greenblatt&amp;quot;, in &lt;em&gt;Britannica&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T15:47:19.997" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T15:47:19.997" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17332" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6770" CreationDate="2021-02-01T16:50:01.260" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Before Brexit, sales of European and international authors had increased in the UK: Paula Erizanu wrote in September 2016,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;according to Nielsen, which undertook research for the International Man Booker prize this year, the number of translated books bought in Britain increased by an astounding 96% between 2001 and 2015. Translated fiction sells better, overall, than English literary fiction and made up 7% of all UK fiction sales in 2015.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The increase looks impressive, but Erizanu adds that &amp;quot;only 1.5% of all books published in the UK are translations&amp;quot;, which is a considerably lower percentage than the book market for translations in Germany (12.28%), France (15.9%) or Italy (19.7%).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blogger Ann Morgan, who &lt;a href=&quot;https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/what-on-earth-am-i-doing/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;read one book from each of the world's independent countries&lt;/a&gt; in 2012, said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;at school in the UK we don’t really read translations, we just don’t develop that habit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above article was published in September 2016 but was based on data that predate the referendum. So what happened after the referendum?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Alison Flood, who consulted research commissioned by the Man Booker International,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;overall sales of translated fiction in the UK were up last year [2018] by 5.5%, with more than 2.6m books sold, worth £20.7m – the highest level since Nielsen began to track sales in 2001.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;French literature accounted for 17% of these sales; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le%C3%AFla_Slimani#Lullaby/The_Perfect_Nanny&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leïla Slimani's novel &lt;em&gt;Lullaby&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; alone was sold around 100,000 times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other literatures were often represented by authors that sold particularly well, for example, Jo Nesbø (Norwegian literature), Jonas Jonasson (Swedish literature), Olga Tokarczuk and Andrzej Sapkowski (Polish literature) and Liu Cixin (Chinese literature). (Porter's article for Publishing Perspectives contains a list of the top 20 translated fiction works sold in the UK in 2018.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson Porter's article also mentions that there was a significant growth in sales of translated short stories and anthologies between 2017 and 2018, i.e. 96 %.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Flood's article concludes with a comment by Charlotte Collins, co-chair of the Translators Association, who said that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the amount of international fiction now available for sale in the UK has almost doubled in recent years, now accounting for 5.63% of all published fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, Brexit has had no negative impact on sales of foreign-language literature in the UK. (Since this trend already existed before the Brexit referendum, I don't see a causal relationship, though.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carr, Lucie: &lt;a href=&quot;https://theboar.org/2019/03/translated-texts-boom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The boom in translated texts&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, The Boar, 24.03.2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Erizanu, Paula: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/30/translated-book-sales-are-up-but-britain-is-still-cut-off-from-foreign-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Translated book sales are up, but Britain is still cut off from foreign literature&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, 30.09.2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Flood, Alison: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/06/translated-fiction-enjoys-sales-boom-as-uk-readers-flock-to-european-authors&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Translated fiction enjoys sales boom as UK readers flock to European authors&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt;, 06.03.2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Porter, Anderson: &lt;a href=&quot;https://publishingperspectives.com/2019/03/nielsen-reports-translated-literature-in-uk-grows-5-percent-in-2018-booker/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Nielsen Reports Translated Literature in the UK Grew 5.5 Percent in 2018&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Publishing Perspectives, 06.03.2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T00:35:45.817" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T00:35:45.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17333" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-01T18:02:50.797" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the (rather good) progressive rock album &amp;quot;Thick as a Brick&amp;quot; by the British band Jethro Tull in 1978, there are some lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So! Where the hell was Biggles When you needed him last Saturday?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And where were all the sportsmen Who always pulled you though?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They're all resting down in Cornwall Writing up their memoirs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For a paper-back edition Of the Boy Scout Manual&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a vague memory that there is a Latin saying, equivalent to this in some sense, perhaps involving Horatio Cocles, but I can find no trace of this online. Can anyone help please? I have tried hard to find this, but cannot. If no-one has a direct hit, is there an online compendium of Latin epigrams which might contain this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the point of the Tull quote is that a person (particularly a boy) can't rely on fictional or historical characters, sportsmen or other celebrities: but must make his own decisions in this world. Since &amp;quot;there is nothing new under the sun&amp;quot; (Ecclesiastes and various earlier equivalent sayings) it's not surprising if there was an earlier equivalent of this observation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10241" LastEditorUserId="10241" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T10:53:20.773" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T10:53:20.773" Title="Is there a Latin saying equivalent to a line in Jethro Tull's &quot;Thick as a Brick&quot;?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17335" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6787" CreationDate="2021-02-01T18:35:53.050" Score="-2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this impression correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. Both the New Historicism and Cultural Materialism were informed  by cultural Marxism and were in revolt against the text-based orthodoxy of the time. They viewed a text in the crucible of its time: the life of the author, and the intellectual, social and cultural ideologies he would be embroiled in as well of those of his audience, or readers. Given that Shakespeare is so often said to be the most universal genius that Britain has produced, it's perhaps no surprise that these critics focused on him to discover what it said about Britain and it's literature and politics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also pertinent, that in the New Historicism, they took into account the critics own views and beliefs as informing the interpretation of the text. Personally, whilst this can be freely acknowledged, I don't see how a critic can be so wholly objective that he can lift himself or herself away from his or her times to give that kind of judgement. To my mind, these are judgements that critics at some, much later date (to give them critical distance) can make.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T11:02:12.300" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T11:02:12.300" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17336" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-01T20:25:04.017" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm seeking a Greek-English translation of Oribasii Collectiones Medicae. I'm specifically looking for the section describing the setting of a dislocated limb where an interesting Greek verb (καταρτίζω) is used by Oribasius [AD 325–397]. I've found a Greek/Latin work but as yet I haven't found a Greek/English work. Is anyone aware of such a work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12011" LastEditorUserId="12011" LastEditDate="2021-02-01T20:49:02.253" LastActivityDate="2021-02-01T20:49:02.253" Title="Oribasii Collectiones Medicae in Greek/English" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;oribasius&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3722" CreationDate="2021-02-02T07:32:34.840" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well the nose has also something to say here. It is something of the man's pride that they were standing and gossiping on. The first ant pointed out the nose (pride) as most barren. Second ant metaphorically said that there is nothing grows on the nose (man's pride), it is a lifeless thing, according to his tribe. Third one went further and describe more intensely. It is something we cannot see, voice we cannot hear (because it is LOUD), and it is omnipresent. Then they laughed on ant and nose virtue. Scratching and crushing shows that man's pride is challenged and destruction took place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12014" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-02T15:16:51.593" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T15:16:51.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17340" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6684" CreationDate="2021-02-02T10:10:15.547" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He doesn't have children so there will be no one to leave it to once he's dead. I don't think he'd waste his time building it if he was just gonna kill himself right after because what then would be the point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12017" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T10:10:15.547" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17341" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17342" CreationDate="2021-02-02T14:19:13.983" Score="2" ViewCount="176" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates is flirting with a rural Canadian girl in her kitchen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No such motive drew me into the kitchen. But I will tell you. You shall have it from my own lips. That was the reason!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He suited the action to the word, and kissed her before she knew what was about to happen. &lt;strong&gt;At least,&lt;/strong&gt; Yates, with all his experience, thought he had taken her unawares. &lt;strong&gt;Men often make mistakes in little matters of this kind.&lt;/strong&gt; Kitty pushed him with apparent indignation from her, but she did not strike him across the face, as she had done before, when he merely attempted what he had now accomplished. Perhaps this was because she had been taken so completely by surprise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I can't get what's the significance of &amp;quot;at least&amp;quot; here. &lt;strong&gt;And was his mistake that he didn't expect her anger?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T09:54:15.117" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T09:54:15.117" Title="What's the significance of &quot;at least&quot; here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17341" CreationDate="2021-02-02T15:12:21.890" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;At least&amp;quot; here qualifies a statement from the preceding sentence, namely &amp;quot;kissed her before she knew what was about to happen&amp;quot;. That statement at first looks like a statement from the author's point of view, but it turns out that it is Yates who thinks he kissed Kitty &amp;quot;before she knew what was happening&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates appears to be mistaken, since the authors then clarifies that &amp;quot;Men often make mistakes in little matters of this kind.&amp;quot; This mistake is stressed further by Kitty's &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;apparent&lt;/em&gt; indignation&amp;quot;. A bit further down, after Yates's &amp;quot;flippant refrain&amp;quot;, Kitty's reaction does not suggest that she is actually offended by what Yates had done: &amp;quot;Kitty should not have smiled, but she did; she should have&#xA;rebuked his levity, but she didn't.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later on, Margaret Howard bursts into the kitchen, tells Kitty about the stolen horses and then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Margaret reddened as she realized, from Kitty's evident embarrassment,&#xA;that she had impulsively broken in upon a conference of two.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably, Yates had not taken Kitty completely by surprise by &lt;em&gt;what&lt;/em&gt; he had done but just with his &lt;em&gt;timing&lt;/em&gt;. This would explain the comment &amp;quot;Perhaps this was because she had been taken so completely by surprise.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T15:12:21.890" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17343" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17661" CreationDate="2021-02-02T21:07:29.387" Score="6" ViewCount="173" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm doing a re-read of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, and it seems that the action of the story is taking place over much less time than I remembered: e.g. from the start of the story to Hazel and Bigwig meeting Holly under Watership Down (two strands of the tale coming together) is only a few days, rather than the weeks I'd imagined. There's quite a lot of mentions of days and continuity throughout, so do we have enough information to figure out exactly (or even approximately!) how long the whole story takes? A detailed timeline of what happened when would be brilliant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T19:48:04.007" Title="How long does the story of Watership Down take?" Tags="&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;timeline&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17228" CreationDate="2021-02-02T22:55:18.917" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;She is describing the accumulation of choices, imagined as little bits of sediment, that layer upon one another to create something definite and predetermined: the accident imagined as a formation of sedimentary stone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12024" LastActivityDate="2021-02-02T22:55:18.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17346" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8208" CreationDate="2021-02-03T00:48:21.183" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that Anne Frank's family were refugees from Germany into Netherlands and lived within a German-Jewish refugee community within Amsterdam. It's quite possible that 'dussel' was a word that this migrant community used in Dutch to describe an 'awkward/ inept/unintelligent' person, the word having slipt from German usage into Dutch. Anne may have heard her own family and other adults use it in Dutch - after all, they were learning the language. To her, given she was four months away from her fifth birthday  when they  fled Germany, and just how rapidly children assimilate to a new language, Dutch would have been her native language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my own community, a British-Bangladeshi community (I&amp;quot;m second geberation and born in Britain),  I recall people using the word 'bastor' in Bengali to describe an unpleasant person. It's not in any Bengali dictionary and it's obviously been imported from the English word, 'bastard'. The parallels with the case you suggest is obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastEditorUserId="2001" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T13:50:03.920" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:50:03.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17349" CreationDate="2021-02-03T02:58:34.337" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for the name of a book about a video game that makes its players do cruel acts in real life in order to be able to continue playing the game. The main character is a teenage boy. The game is distributed using CDs, and for some reason the other students try to avoid giving a copy of the game to the main character, but he does somehow end up getting one. The climax is when the game makes a player try to kill someone in real life. The game was originally one where the players had to do kind things in real life, but something that I can't remember happened that involved the target of the game's assassination attempt, so the creator changed the game in order to cause the death of this person. If I remember correctly, the book had a red cover and the title was one word. Any help would be appreciated!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12013" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T06:49:37.160" Title="Book about a video game that makes its players do cruel things in real life" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17348" CreationDate="2021-02-03T06:49:37.160" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;That's &lt;em&gt;Erebos&lt;/em&gt; (2010) by Ursula Poznanski.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7748743-erebos&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When 16-year-old Nick receives a package containing the mysterious computer game Erebos, he wonders if it will explain the behavior of his classmates, who have been secretive lately. Players of the game must obey strict rules: always play alone, never talk about the game, and never tell anyone your nickname.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curious, Nick joins the game and quickly becomes addicted. But Erebos knows a lot about the players and begins to manipulate their lives. When it sends Nick on a deadly assignment, he refuses and is banished from the game.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now unable to play, Nick turns to a friend for help in finding out who controls the game. The two set off on a dangerous mission in which the border between reality and the virtual world begins to blur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Red cover indeed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X6Oga.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X6Oga.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;black eye on a red book cover&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a good book, definitely worth a read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5473" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T06:49:37.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17341" CreationDate="2021-02-03T08:59:43.557" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;At least&amp;quot; qualifies the subsequent clause: &amp;quot;with all his experience&amp;quot;. The author is implying that Yates was trying to take Kitty  &amp;quot;unawares&amp;quot;, that is surprise her - but he didn't. But it seems that the author, Robert Barr, is all at sea here, because the extract ends with him stating, &amp;quot;perhaps, this was because she had been taken so completely by surprise.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wouldn't dwell on this mistake, authors can make mistakes; after all, they're not omniscient.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T08:59:43.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14945" CreationDate="2021-02-03T13:21:42.063" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;'Defeat' is the result of the resistance that an artist encounters when proposing the 'new'. A defense mechanism of society to the 'danger' that the artistic/poetic project poses. An indication of a successful artistic project and a great artist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12036" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:21:42.063" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17352" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14945" CreationDate="2021-02-03T13:41:14.350" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means &lt;em&gt;despite&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;defeats&amp;quot; his spirit still carries up and onward, this is what he means by none shall hear &amp;quot;the beating of wings&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;urging of seas&amp;quot; and of &amp;quot;mountains burning bright in the night&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not because of &amp;quot; only in our defeat that we understands can we really understand the depths of our being&amp;quot;, it's *despite * it. This os because the fight he's interested in is not won in a single day, but is the same fight that Zarathrustha came down amongst the Persians burning with the fire of truth almost two and half millenia ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2001" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T13:41:14.350" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17353" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-03T15:02:26.520" Score="8" ViewCount="323" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Act 4 begins with a courtroom scene. During this scene, the contract between Antonio and Shylock is discussed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But why is there a courtroom scene at all? Was every contract executed via a courtroom discussion? Antonio indicates no interest in fighting the terms and if the play records things accurately, the contract was signed in front of a notary. So who convenes a court and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5524" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-03T15:05:28.500" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T23:45:08.270" Title="Why is there a courtroom scene?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;&lt;plot-element&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-03T15:43:40.013" Score="2" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, the word &amp;quot;spoilers&amp;quot; is frequently used to describe a twist, major plot point, or anything which, if known beforehand, might spoil the experience of reading a story. This whole concept &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2525/17&quot;&gt;hasn't always been much of a thing&lt;/a&gt;, and I'd assume that the word &amp;quot;spoiler&amp;quot; itself in this meaning is an even more recent invention. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/spoiler&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EtymOnline&lt;/a&gt; says this meaning of the word &amp;quot;spoiler&amp;quot; goes back to (at least?) 1982, but it doesn't provide any citation for this claim nor say &lt;em&gt;where&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;spoiler&amp;quot; was used in 1982.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When and where was the term &amp;quot;spoiler&amp;quot; in this meaning first used/introduced?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a duplicate of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/2536/17&quot;&gt;History of Spoilers&lt;/a&gt; which is about the history of the &lt;em&gt;concept&lt;/em&gt;; this question is about the history of the &lt;em&gt;term&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T04:03:25.587" Title="How and when did the term &quot;spoilers&quot; originate?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17355" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17353" CreationDate="2021-02-03T16:27:53.497" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shylock acted pre-emptively to get Antonio arrested.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act III, Scene I, Tubal brings assorted news to Shylock, of Antonio's bad luck with his ships and of Jessica spending her father's wealth. From the following quote (emphasis mine), it seems that at this point Antonio is not yet in a state of bankruptcy, but it's certain that he will reach that point and be unable to pay back the money owed to Shylock:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TUBAL: There came divers of Antonio's creditors in my company to Venice, that swear &lt;strong&gt;he cannot choose but break&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shylock's immediate response is to try to get hold of an &amp;quot;officer&amp;quot; (presumably an official of the state of Venice, who could have Antonio arrested or imprisoned as a debtor as soon as necessary). Shylock wishes to &amp;quot;fee&amp;quot; (pay for) and &amp;quot;bespeak&amp;quot; (reserve) his services even two weeks in advance. It seems he doesn't trust Antonio not to flee Venice instead of staying to face his situation and pay his debts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SHYLOCK: Nay, that's true, that's very true. Go, Tubal, fee me an officer; bespeak him a fortnight before. I will have the heart of him, if he forfeit; for, were he out of Venice, I can make what merchandise I will. Go, go, Tubal, and meet me at our synagogue; go, good Tubal; at our synagogue, Tubal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next time we see Antonio (in Act III, Scene III), he's in the custody of a Gaoler, who has allowed him out of prison to walk the streets briefly, and Shylock is insisting that he must receive his bond and telling the Gaoler he is too soft on Antonio:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SHYLOCK: Gaoler, look to him: tell not me of mercy;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is the fool that lent out money gratis:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gaoler, look to him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...] I do wonder,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou naughty gaoler, that thou art so fond&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To come abroad with him at his request.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that Shylock made sure Antonio was arrested and held in custody as soon as it was legally possible to do so, not trusting him to pay the bond he owed no matter how much willingness he professed. (Actually, it seems his resignation to his fate came later - in this scene he is still trying to ask Shylock for mercy - but we never see any indication that, as Shylock implied, he would have fled Venice to escape the law and the paying of this bond.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Others, even the duke, were fighting on Antonio's behalf.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Antonio himself became resigned to his fate, never fighting the terms on his own behalf even in the courtroom, others were willing to take up the legal and moral battle on his behalf: both people who cared about him, such as Bassanio and Portia, and people who simply disliked the brutality of Shylock's bond, up to and including the duke of Venice himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Act III, Scene II, the reactions of the duke and other officials are described at second or third hand by Salerio, as we see in the following lines (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SALERIO: Besides, it should appear, that if he had&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The present money to discharge the Jew,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He would not take it. Never did I know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A creature, that did bear the shape of man,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So keen and greedy to confound a man:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He plies the duke at morning and at night,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And doth impeach the freedom of the state,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If they deny him justice: &lt;strong&gt;twenty merchants,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The duke himself, and the magnificoes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of greatest port, have all persuaded with him&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But none can drive him from the envious plea&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of forfeiture, of justice and his bond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The courtroom is not a criminal one with a jury of citizens; it is a civil trial, presided over by the duke of Venice, who it seems has the right to throw out the case or to make a final decision. His human side, not wishing to see Antonio bloodily killed, is tempered by his knowledge that failing to give Shylock his due will be bad PR for his state. As Antonio says in Act III, Scene II:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;SALARINO: I am sure the duke&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will never grant this forfeiture to hold.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ANTONIO:  The duke cannot deny the course of law:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the commodity that strangers have&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With us in Venice, if it be denied,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will much impeach the justice of his state;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Since that the trade and profit of the city&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Consisteth of all nations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps it was he, as head of state, who allowed the case to come to an open court. Shylock was demanding his bond despite many others (even after Antonio himself gave up) pleading with him not to insist upon it. Probably the duke could have allowed this to go ahead as a private transaction between two individuals, without a public court case; but, since he himself was one of the people asking Shylock not to insist on receiving his pound of flesh, perhaps he felt that this was the best way to shame Shylock into backing down. The evidence for this is in the duke's first words to Shylock after opening the court in Act IV, Scene I:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DUKE: Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy malice&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To the last hour of act; and then 'tis thought&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou'lt show thy mercy and remorse more strange&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than is thy strange apparent cruelty;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And where thou now exact'st the penalty,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which is a pound of this poor merchant's flesh,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou wilt not only loose the forfeiture,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But, touch'd with human gentleness and love,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Forgive a moiety of the principal;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Glancing an eye of pity on his losses,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That have of late so huddled on his back,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Enow to press a royal merchant down&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And pluck commiseration of his state&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From brassy bosoms and rough hearts of flint,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From stubborn Turks and Tartars, never train'd&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To offices of tender courtesy.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, later in the same scene, he makes clear that he has the power to dismiss the court if the case cannot be decided clearly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DUKE: Upon my power I may dismiss this court,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unless Bellario, a learned doctor,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whom I have sent for to determine this,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come here to-day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He couldn't simply dismiss Shylock's claim out of hand, because of the PR reasons mentioned above, but he could certainly do his best to tip the scales (pun unintended) in favour of Antonio, trying to shame Shylock into backing down and rescinding his claim. This would explain why he, as the head of state, convened the whole court instead of simply allowing the pound of flesh to be taken since Antonio had given up objecting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-03T16:27:53.497" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17356" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17327" CreationDate="2021-02-04T00:32:57.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;To &amp;quot;fit in&amp;quot; and hide that he is a Jew&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I haven't read the book and I don't know the exact circumstances, the OP in his own answer was right that since the late 1950s there was a steady grow of anti-Semitism in Poland, which indeed has culminated in the forced emigration of Polish citizens with Jewish roots after the events in the March of 1968.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Historical background:&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the 1950s, the Polish culture was very open towards the Jewish minority: Poland was one of the biggest source of Jewish books and the Cultural Society of Polish Jews was very active. The death of Stalin in 1953 and the events of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_October&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polish October&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1956) was promising the democratic changes including greater autonomy from USSR and reduction of censorship. The promise didn't last long and the quickly gained freedoms were being reversed over the next few years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Already in 1956, the Cultural Society sent a letter to the Party (the Polish United Workers Party) presenting their concerns that &amp;quot;there are elements within the Party that are trying to blame the Jews for the terror committed during Stalin's rule&amp;quot;. Initially, the Party has responded by declaring that there is no place for such anti-Semitism since Poland is a home for many cultural minorities and none of them should be discriminated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1960 a new, informal faction was created within the Party (called &amp;quot;The Partisans&amp;quot;) made mainly from the ex-soldiers (both from the regular army as well as from the partisans fighting during WW II). They were pointing that while they were fighting the Nazis, lots of the &amp;quot;old Party members&amp;quot; (which included many Jews) were hiding in USSR and were later supporting Stalin's terror. The Partisans were controlling the Ministry of Internal Affairs (which included the secret police) and they have started invigilating Jewish organizations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the 5th of June 1967, Israel has started the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Six-days war&lt;/a&gt;. In response, the Soviet Union has broken diplomatic relations with Israel and in Poland started organizing protests against the &amp;quot;Imperialistic Zionists&amp;quot;. The First Secretary of the Party accused Polish Jews of working against Poland, comparing them to the infamous &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_column&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fifth Column&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, conspiring with Germany to reverse the post-war Polish western border changes (while Poland has lost large regions on the east, it has gained important previously German lands like Eastern Prussia and Lower Silesia). People with Jewish descent were getting removed from important positions within the army, police and universities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the 25th November 1967, the National Theatre presents a play based on probably most important Polish poem - &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dziady_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dziady Part III&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Adam Mickiewicz, written in the XIX century and dedicated to the students persecuted after the failed 1830 Polish uprising against tsarist Russia. Polish government declares it as &amp;quot;anti-Soviet&amp;quot; (contrary to the initial positive reviews in the Russian &lt;em&gt;Pravda&lt;/em&gt;) and started pressuring the theatre to reduce the number of plays, banning it finally on 30th January. Students and writers started protesting, demanding freedom of speech - those protests were violently attacked by &amp;quot;workers&amp;quot; (plainclothes police) and by the anti-riot police. In response, the Party has created its own &amp;quot;spontaneous workers demonstrations&amp;quot; which were demanding that &amp;quot;students should go back to schools and Zionists to Zion&amp;quot;. According to the speech by the First Secretary, Jewish students and teachers were responsible for the protests - afraid that this will turn into another &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Prague Spring&lt;/a&gt;, the government decided to find the scapegoat and punish them harshly. Those with Jewish heritage were the perfect fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the aftermath of the events (called often &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Polish_political_crisis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;March 1968&lt;/a&gt;), the Party has forced between 13 to 20 thousand Poles with Jewish heritage first to quit their jobs, then, after stripping them from the Polish citizenship, to leave the country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Now, what has this to do with the characters from the novel?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Beniek was a Jewish boy growing in the increasingly anti-Semitic country, he would try to fit-in hiding his Jewish culture (the anti-Semitism has much more to do with the culture than with the religion). This would include going to the preparation for the First Communion - while Poland was indeed a Communist (so in theory - atheistic) country, the Party wasn't openly fighting with the Catholic Church, noticing its important cultural role. So while a prominent party member would be asked to &amp;quot;stop believing in the Church nonsense&amp;quot;, the average citizen was free to go to church and send kids to First Communion/Confirmation etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a great poem/song called &amp;quot;The story of one emigrant&amp;quot; that describes a story of a Jew in post-war Poland&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmuJPYycX-A&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmuJPYycX-A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1291" LastEditorUserId="1291" LastEditDate="2021-02-04T08:08:19.870" LastActivityDate="2021-02-04T08:08:19.870" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17363" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-04T05:50:27.470" Score="6" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;http://taybridgedisaster.co.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tay Bridge Disaster&lt;/a&gt; is one of the most famous bridge collapses. It inspired a universally reviled (yet nevertheless wildly (in)famous) poem from William McGonagall, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk/gems/the-tay-bridge-disaster&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Tay Bridge Disaster&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The poem secured his place in history as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;the world's worst poet&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McGonagall's is not the only poem which came out of the disaster. The German poet and novelist Theodor Fontane was also moved to write a poem, translated &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/177/96.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;The Bridge by the Tay&amp;quot;. This poem is less well-known. Part of that is probably being written in Germany, in German, as opposed to English in the UK, where the disaster took place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With my (admittedly limited) search abilities I found an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.railscot.co.uk/articles/A_German_View_of_the_Tay_Bridge_Disaster/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; comparing the two poems:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of the contrast between the respective authors, it is interesting to note some parallels between the poems; the anticipation of seasonal festivities; viewpoints alternating between the occupants of the train and the observers onshore; technological achievements thwarted by malign supernatural agents. Both poems specifically mention that the train came from Edinburgh...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(c) RAILSCOT 2021.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made me curious whether &lt;strong&gt;any comparison of this sort occurred at the time.&lt;/strong&gt; Is there evidence that the two poems were discussed together when the disaster was still fresh? Or evidence against this happening? I realize that one poem is in German and from Germany, while one is in English from UK - but the tragedy was reported widely, so perhaps the poems were distributed widely and shown alongside each other? Or perhaps they were not. If they were discussed together, I would appreciate some examples/excerpts from that discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Fontane's Tay Bridge poem compared to McGonagall's at the time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T04:35:08.097" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T04:35:08.097" Title="Was Fontane's Tay Bridge poem compared to McGonagall's at the time?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;william-mcgonagall&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17364" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17188" CreationDate="2021-02-05T00:05:10.243" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;After spending way too much time on this, I finally found it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Welcom be ye whan ye go,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And farewell whan ye come;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So faire as ye there be no mo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As brighte as bery broune.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I love you verrily at my to,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nonne so moche in all this toune;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am right glad when ye will go,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sory when ye will come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And whan ye be other fare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I pray for you sertaine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That never manner horsse ne mare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bringe you to town agein.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To praise youre beute I ne dare,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For drede that men wille seyn;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Farewelle, no more for you I care,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But pray you of my songe have no desdein&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So as it turns out, &lt;em&gt;strawberry&lt;/em&gt; was a red (scarlet?) herring. I’m not quite sure what it means to be “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bro4.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;brown as a berry&lt;/a&gt;”, but this expression was used twice in Chaucer’s writing as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the list of all the poems in your book are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Adam lay ybounden&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/henpecked-husband&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Henpecked Husband&lt;/a&gt; (original may have been untitled like the others)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.maldura.unipd.it/dllags/brunetti/Medievale/lyrics_09.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Whan mine eyen misten&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Welcom be ye whan ye go&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found it in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.googleusercontent.com/books/content?req=AKW5QacmMmpGSJpZydaCY2q7W1NTpvWr6Rhm18QH6og3gE7723KM0t31f4xzqqjGPKCPOfLBB2TVGt_qA7KfmZZjWCdyoS5LLxLmynK1Ep_SEaSerI0p2ff3hL_1u3YmeAG7mLzbJoT1e8LbH9pTuTX-jGB0lvsQtKVIBxO5X15SYvgFBVdOs1BDt8OWvSR_tRTMDfEIrPrahGqIO2v4a-tjF_RnQLtwdBHw4TKaHSRSbo63igjZCp-Y6OMcakr3lFN9uKJjyCnf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Early English Lyrics&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T00:05:10.243" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T05:36:17.880" Score="11" ViewCount="2052" Body="&lt;p&gt;How do these lines in Shakespeare's Sonnet 151 mean what they're supposed to? Here's the sonnet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Love is too young to know what conscience is,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then, gentle cheater, urge not my amiss,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lest guilty of my faults thy sweet self prove:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For, thou betraying me, I do betray&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My nobler part to my gross body's treason;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My soul doth tell my body that he may&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Triumph in love; flesh stays no farther reason,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But rising at thy name doth point out thee,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He is contented thy poor drudge to be,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;No want of conscience hold it that I call&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the online analyses I have read so far, the last two lines mean that Shakespeare does not believe he should be accused of being without a conscience just because he &amp;quot;rises and falls&amp;quot; for the woman he calls &amp;quot;love&amp;quot;. I do not understand how anyone arrived at this meaning. I also do not understand the syntax of these lines. Could someone please rephrase these lines in a way I can understand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11859" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T23:43:30.480" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T23:43:30.480" Title="How do these lines in Shakespeare's Sonnet 151 mean what they're supposed to?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17367" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17365" CreationDate="2021-02-05T09:19:48.503" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's Sonnet 151 is one of his most difficult sonnets. The meaning and logic of the poem are unclear even to scholars. It is also one of the most bawdy poems, not just of the sequence, but in the entire corpus of canonical English literature. As a result, it is hard to explain without some frank terminology. &lt;strong&gt;Be warned: this answer has some NSFW content and swear words.&lt;/strong&gt; If you are easily offended, please do not read beyond the horizontal rule.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The couplet can be paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though I call the woman who arouses and satisfies my lust &amp;quot;Love,&amp;quot; do not assume that I have no conscience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines have a surface meaning that is fairly easy to understand through this paraphrase: just because the speaker is in an illicit sexual relationship, it doesn't follow that he is without conscience. Or to put it differently, the sexual nature of the relationship doesn't preclude its being true love. And vice-versa: its being true love doesn't preclude a sexual relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of this answer is R-rated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This harmony between sex and love might seem obvious to us in the 21st century. But until fairly recently, men would maintain a misogynist distinction between &lt;em&gt;girls you fuck&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;girls you marry&lt;/em&gt;, with the former deemed &amp;quot;loose.&amp;quot; Women with whom men had a sexual relationship outside marriage were not considered worthy of love and marriage—they were just vehicles for satisfying lust. The persistence of the game &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuck,_Marry,_Kill&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fuck, Marry, Kill&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; demonstrates that this split between lust and love is not entirely a thing of the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Particularly in the context of the 16th C., then, Shakespeare is making quite a radical claim by saying that lust and love are not in opposition, and that it's possible to have a relationship that's both lustful and in keeping with the dictates of one's conscience. Considering that in Christian belief lust is one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Deadly Sins&lt;/a&gt;, its being compatible with conscience is quite a claim.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the couplet is even more complicated than that. A fuller explanation involves disentangling the intricate relationship between love and conscience that the sonnet sets up from the very first line, &lt;em&gt;Love is too young to know what conscience is&lt;/em&gt;. This line deploys various puns on both &lt;em&gt;love&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;conscience&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; is Cupid, the god of love, represented as a baby. Cupid shoots his arrows indiscriminately; being a baby, he has no sense of how to weigh right and wrong in his actions, i.e., he is without conscience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; simply means romantic love as we usually understand the term. Romantic love too is a force which overpowers conscience.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt; is a euphemism for &lt;em&gt;lust&lt;/em&gt;. Shakespeare often blurs the distinction between the the two, for example in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; with a pun on &lt;em&gt;prick&lt;/em&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is love a tender thing? it is too rough,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/romeo-and-juliet/act-1-scene-4/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.iv.25–26&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conscience&lt;/em&gt; means moral awareness, as we typically understand the term.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Conscience&lt;/em&gt; also has a bawdy meaning: &amp;quot;experience or knowledge of sex.&amp;quot; The word &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.richardbeard.info/2009/09/translating-french-swear-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French slang for a woman's private parts&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;science&lt;/em&gt;, which etymologically means &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminousgroup.net/2013/05/on-etymology-of-science.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;having knowledge&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. In the Oxford Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's poems, Colin Burrows has a note to this line that says:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French &lt;em&gt;con&lt;/em&gt; or &amp;quot;cunt&amp;quot; might be heard in the word,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;giving a quibble on &amp;quot;carnal knowledge&amp;quot;. (p. 682)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous sonnets have related that the Dark Lady, the addressee of this sonnet, has cheated on the speaker with someone else. Although this act of betrayal would be against &lt;em&gt;conscience&lt;/em&gt;, it can be explained away because in matters of love or lust, conscience in the sense of moral awareness is irrelevant; it is pertinent only in the sense of sexual experience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through such puns, this first line sets up multiple contradictory meanings of both &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;conscience.&amp;quot; The entire poem switches back and forth between the contradictory meanings, so that each line and each verse can be interpreted in multiple ways. A thorough explanation can be found on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/151&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;shakespeares-sonnets&lt;/a&gt; site.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The closing couplet brings home these different meanings in a rich and playful way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No want of conscience hold it that I call&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker has already mentioned his &lt;em&gt;flesh ... rising at thy name&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Rise and fall&lt;/em&gt; also have an obvious sexual connotation. So there is an implied pun on &lt;em&gt;the prick of conscience&lt;/em&gt;. Using this bawdy sense, the speaker is saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just because I call this woman &lt;em&gt;Love&lt;/em&gt;, it doesn't mean that I am a virgin. She arouses me physically and I have known her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reinforces the surface meaning discussed above which uses the straightforward sense of &lt;em&gt;conscience&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though this woman causes me to tumesce (by arousing me) and detumesce (after the sex act is completed), this lust does not preclude my love for her being morally justified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rise and fall&lt;/em&gt; also has a non-sexual meaning: like a soldier, the speaker will rise up to defend the woman he loves, and will die to protect her if necessary. These words participate in Shakespeare's layering of various meanings, some ordinary and some bawdy, to provide a many-sided perspective on his love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To sum up: The couplet exploits polysemy to make a complex, witty statement about the nature of his relationship with the Dark Lady. It is the climax to a poem that undoes conventional distinctions between lust and love, or morality and sinfulness. The difficulty of the poem underscores the impossibility of summing up this complicated relationship in an easy, facile, or glib way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Reference&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;em&gt;The Complete Sonnets and Poems&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. Colin Burrow. The Oxford Shakespeare, general ed. Stanley Wells. Oxford World Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T21:41:25.350" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T21:41:25.350" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17368" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17365" CreationDate="2021-02-05T10:01:52.050" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Just glossing the last two lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No want of conscience hold it that I call&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her love, for whose dear love I rise and fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main difficulty is with “No want of conscience hold it”. This is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastrophe&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anastrophe&lt;/a&gt;—a figure of speech in which the normal word order of subject, verb, and object, is changed. Rearranged into the usual order, it becomes an instruction to the reader: “Do not hold it [to be] a want of conscience”. Here “hold” means “believe” and “want” means “lack”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, “I call her love”. This could be understood as “I call her my love”—that is, the speaker offers her endearments—or as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;personification&lt;/a&gt;—that is, the speaker calls her the incarnation of Love (the abstract emotion, or the goddess of love). In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespearesson01shakgoog/page/n142/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original 1609 edition&lt;/a&gt; there was a comma after “call”, but no-one has been able to make sense of this, so it’s always been considered to be the compositor’s mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, “for whose dear love I rise and fall”. The speaker says that his efforts, to rise in position and wealth, and fall if he fails, are only for the sake of winning her love. But there is a sexual double entendre here: it is also his “flesh” (that is, his penis) that rises and falls.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T14:06:48.420" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T14:06:48.420" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17369" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9696" CreationDate="2021-02-05T14:48:12.030" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;If those three lines were spoken in a completely different voice or manner, as if spoken by someone other than the person performing the rest of the poem, it might be called a &amp;quot;voice over&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Voice-over is a production technique where a voice—that is not part of the narrative —is used in a radio, television production, filmmaking, theatre, or other presentations. The voice-over is read from a script and may be spoken by someone who appears elsewhere in the production or by a specialist voice talent.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice-over&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Voice-over - Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not enough context here to say for sure, but in this case, the person telling the story might suddenly stop, pause, directly face the audience and speak those lines in a normal, non-poetic, non-performing voice. Then another pause. Then back to the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, a completely different person might step in, stop the action, say the lines, and then allow the poem to resume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T14:48:12.030" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T15:48:53.170" Score="3" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/2024/why-are-haiku-usually-of-17-syllables&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; but not exactly the same. I have seen haikus in the following formats:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The traditional / which is in five-seven-five / and is most common&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;But I have also read that some&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;USA writers / encourage using formats / such as three-five-three&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Have seen / two-three-two / confused&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this correct / and can there be multiple / formats for haikus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thanks @Shoover for Haiku corrections.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11431" LastEditorUserId="11431" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T22:15:35.530" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T22:15:35.530" Title="Are there different formats of haikus?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;haiku&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17372" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-05T17:18:20.117" Score="2" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does Muriel Barbery's title &lt;em&gt;The Elegance of The Hedgehog&lt;/em&gt; reflect knowledge of Archilochus' aphorism? Is there information or proof that Barbery had Archilocus' aphorism in mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12049" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-05T21:25:56.837" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T21:25:56.837" Title="Does Muriel Barbery's title &quot;The Elegance of The Hedgehog&quot; reflect knowledge of Archilochus' aphorism?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;muriel-barbery&gt;&lt;the-elegance-of-the-hedgehog&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17365" CreationDate="2021-02-05T23:16:02.823" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/sonnet-151/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 151&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;gentle&amp;quot; Shakespeare equivocates on the meanings of &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;conscience&amp;quot;, which results in a poem that is unsuitable for readers with Victorian sensibilities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The equivocation begins in the first two lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Love is too young to know what conscience is;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet who knows not conscience is born of love?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Love&amp;quot; in the fist line is Cupid, the god of desire and erotic love, who is represented in art as a young boy. He is, according to the poet, too young to know what conscience is, i.e. conscience in a moral sense, knowing right from wrong. In the second line, &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; means the experience or the emotion of love and leads to a &amp;quot;con-science&amp;quot; in a different sense, namely &amp;quot;knowing&amp;quot; what the French call &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/con#Noun_10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;con&lt;/a&gt;: the female genitalia. The poet is here saying that love leads to carnal knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two lines can be paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, kindly deceiver, do not invoke fault/misbehaviour&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For fear that you [thy sweet self] turn out to be guilty of the same faults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The quarto edition of the Sonnets reads &amp;quot;Least&amp;quot; instead of &amp;quot;Lest&amp;quot; but editors reject this as an error. Shakespeare used the &amp;quot;... is ... amiss&amp;quot; rhyme also in &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/sonnet-59/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 59&lt;/a&gt; and used &amp;quot;amiss&amp;quot; also in &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/sonnet-35/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 35&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;Myself corrupting salving thy amiss,&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sonnet continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since, you revealing my moral faults, I betray&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My nobler part (controlled by &amp;quot;conscience&amp;quot; in a moral sense) to my body's impulses and thus treason/betrayal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In line 5 &amp;quot;thou betraying me&amp;quot; can also mean &amp;quot;you cheating on me&amp;quot; (see &amp;quot;gentle cheater&amp;quot; in line 3), so there are two types of &amp;quot;betrayal&amp;quot; here: (1) revealing the poet's faults to the world and (2) being unfaithful to the poet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two lines expand on &amp;quot;my gross body's treason&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Flesh stays no farther reason&amp;quot; means that the sexual appetites don't wait for (&amp;quot;stay&amp;quot;) extra justification to spring into action. The next two lines describe this graphically:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But becoming erect at [hearing] your name it [my &amp;quot;flesh&amp;quot;, euphemistically] points (its point or tip) at you,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as a splendid prize. Proud if this pride,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(For another example of &amp;quot;triumphant&amp;quot; in the sonnets, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/shakespeares-sonnets/sonnet-33/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet 33&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;With all-triumphant splendor on my brow,&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eric Partridge's &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Bawdy&lt;/em&gt; has the following entry for &amp;quot;pride&amp;quot; (page 167):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Sonnet&lt;/em&gt; 151, the lines 'Flesh stays no farther reason; But, rising at thy name, doth point out thee As his triumphant prize. Proud of this pride, He is contented thy poor drudge to be, To stand in thy affairs, fall by thy side' clearly shows that, as 'flesh' here denotes 'penis', so 'pride' denotes 'insurgent penis'; compare the modern euphemism, &lt;em&gt;morning pride&lt;/em&gt;; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this in mind, &amp;quot;rise&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;fall&amp;quot; in the remaining lines are self-explanatory. The last two lines can be paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Don't think it shows a lack of conscience that I call&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that woman &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; for the heartfell love of whom I rise and fall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Kerrigan's and Burrow's editions put &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; in the last line in quotation marks, which clarifies the syntax a little.&#xA;&amp;quot;Conscience&amp;quot; is again ambiguous here. In addition to the meanings explained above, there may be other ones at work here, quoted from Onion's &lt;em&gt;Glossary&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sound judgement, reasonableness (...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Matter about which scruples are or should be felt (...)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet seems to be saying that he knows quite well what is meant by &amp;quot;love&amp;quot; (i.e. not just the feelings but also the carnal aspect) when he says he becomes erect and flaccid for it. But he is also alluding to a sense of duty that motivates him, just like a solder who &amp;quot;rises at thy name&amp;quot; and who chooses an opponent in battle (&amp;quot;point&amp;quot; in line 9).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Onions, Charles Talbut: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. Enlarged and Revised Throughout by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Partridge, Eric: &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Bawdy: A Literary &amp;amp; Psychological Essay and A Comprehensive Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. Revised and enlarged. London: Routledge &amp;amp; Kegan Paul, 1968.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;The Complete Sonnets and Poems&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Colin Burrow. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;em&gt;The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by John Kerrigan. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Penguin, 1986.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-05T23:16:02.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17374" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17163" CreationDate="2021-02-06T05:27:56.733" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Readers should know at least two things about &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it alludes to Rainer Maria Rilke's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gedichte-zitate.com/rilke/herbsttag.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Herbsttag&lt;/a&gt; [1] and&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;it is a love poem about Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several echos and parallels between between Rilke's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/rilke/rilke4.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Herbsttag&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;Autumn Day&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; and &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;. The most obvious one is the words &amp;quot;es ist Zeit&amp;quot;. However, Celan's &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot; puts these words in the last stanza and leaves out &amp;quot;Herr&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;Lord&amp;quot;. Two world wars took place between the composition of &amp;quot;Herbsttag&amp;quot; in 1902 and the publication of &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot; in 1952 in the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohn_und_Ged%C3%A4chtnis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mohn und Gedächtnis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (The collection took its title from a line in &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;.) Of course, there is also Celan's personal history. Celan was Jewish and was away from home when Nazi troops came to his hometown Czernowitz in 1941 and deported his parents. His parents died in the following year and Celan never forgave himself for having &amp;quot;abandoned&amp;quot; his parents. (See for example another poem from *Mohn und Gedächtnis&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/aspen-tree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Aspen Tree&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which contains the line &amp;quot;Meiner Mutter Haar ward nimmer weiß&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;My mother's hair ne'er turned white&amp;quot;.)&#xA;In addition to the phrase &amp;quot;es ist Zeit&amp;quot;, there are other parallels between the two poems: both are set in autumn and both want certain things to happen now rather than later. The autumn leaves that Rilke mentions in the last line of his poem appear in the first line of Celan's poem. In both poems, restlessness is mentioned at the end (&amp;quot;unruhig&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Herbsttag&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Unrast&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas Rilke's poem lists processes that the poet wishes to happen, especially in the first two stanzas, two first two stanzas in &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot; appear to describe statis or the impossibility to make progress. Time is set free from its shell but returns to it; Sunday is a day of rest (at least in Western Europe); the dream is not about anything interesting or unusual but only brings more sleep. [2]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ingeborg Bachmann met Celan for the first time in 1947. She also visited him in Paris in the autumn of 1950 and stayed in Celan's hotel room for a month, but living together didn't see to work. Both authors kept their relationship secret, and knowledge about it transpired only gradually after their deaths. Their correspondence was published for the first time in 2008 and shed new light on some of Celan's poems. (See Böttiger's review.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third stanza might be read as alluding to the chasm between the lovers. Celan was a Jew and Bachmaan a Christian. &amp;quot;Geschlecht&amp;quot; can be read as &amp;quot;(genealogical) lineage&amp;quot; (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschlecht_(Genealogie)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Geschlecht&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia) or even &amp;quot;race&amp;quot; (in a biological sense, see Wikipedia discussion of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasse#Begriffsgeschichte,_Etymologie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;vague boundaries of the term &amp;quot;Rasse&amp;quot; in German&lt;/a&gt;). These meanings suggest a distance between the two lovers, whereas the translation &amp;quot;[my lover’s] sex&amp;quot; doesn't, or not in an obvious way. This distance might explain the gazing (which you can do at a distance) and the &amp;quot;dark things&amp;quot; they speak of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth stanza raises more questions. What does it mean to &amp;quot;love each other like poppy and memory&amp;quot;? We know from the poet's biography that he had painful memories as a consequence of World War II. If these are relevant here, the poppy, which can relieve pain, counteracts those memories. But from that point of view, poppy and memory don't &amp;quot;live together&amp;quot;, let alone love each other, unless we interpret the lover as the pain killer that makes living with those memories bearable. This interpretation, however, seems unable to make sense of the tercet's two other lines, which read like surreal images induced by an opium dream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fifth stanza, the lovers are together and perhaps it is time now to realise what the poet warned about in Rilke's &amp;quot;Herbsttag&amp;quot;: build a house (perhaps metaphorically for building a family) so as not to stay alone, instead of restlessly wandering, as Celan had done to some extent after World War II, when he mover from the work-camp to Czernowitz/Cernăuți, then to Bucharest, then to Vienna and finally to Paris. So perhaps it is time that the &amp;quot;Unrast&amp;quot; (restlessness) get a &amp;quot;Herz&amp;quot;, which may refer both to a regular heartbeat (contrasting with restlessness) and a loved one (as reminiscent of the phrase &amp;quot;[du bist] mein Herz&amp;quot;). This would allow time to progress again (contrasting with the statis in the first two stanzas) and bome a normal organising principle again. Hence, the penultimate line may be saying, &amp;quot;It is overdue that time can run its normal course.&amp;quot; The last line then appears to collapse both these meanings of &amp;quot;time&amp;quot;; the difference doesn't matter any longer.[3]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Felstiner writes about stanzas four and five (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=xsOSQhLuVPEC&amp;amp;pg=PA54&amp;amp;dq=paul+celan+corona&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiJpciihtTuAhUFPuwKHWbIAmoQuwUwAnoECAcQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=paul%20celan%20corona&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 54&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They [&amp;quot;we&amp;quot; from line 10] both must forget and remember their pasts, maybe because one of the is Christian and the other not. Also divided, the word &amp;quot;corona&amp;quot; suggests Christ's crown of thorns and a new time come round. The lovers' union has a civic dimension—&amp;quot;it's time people knew=&amp;quot;—and a prophetic one as well: &amp;quot;It's time the stone consented to bloom.&amp;quot; For Celan, who shoveled stones at forced labor and could not give his parents a gravestone, &amp;quot;stone&amp;quot; already stood for mute grief. If a stone is to bloom, there there must come—to borrow from &amp;quot;Late and Deep&amp;quot;, written shortly before—a &amp;quot;wind blast of conversion.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hugo Bekker has more to say about &amp;quot;it is time&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=fxzFY4diwAYC&amp;amp;pg=PA203&amp;amp;dq=paul+celan+corona&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiJpciihtTuAhUFPuwKHWbIAmoQuwUwB3oECAMQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=paul%20celan%20corona&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 203&lt;/a&gt;; bold text from the original):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When, having trekked through &lt;strong&gt;Corona&lt;/strong&gt; until its final &amp;quot;Es ist Zeit&amp;quot; and wanting to believe that it is indded time to make an important acknowledgement, we do not quite succeed. Already heralded by &amp;quot;es ist Zeit, daß du kommst und mich küssest!&amp;quot; of &lt;strong&gt;Die Hand voller Stunden&lt;/strong&gt; (162), &lt;strong&gt;Corona&lt;/strong&gt;'s final strophe may relay a shrinking back from &amp;quot;es ist Zeit, daß man weiß&amp;quot;, particularly if that impersonal &amp;quot;man&amp;quot; refers to the speaker himself rather than to the public in the street. (...) We therefore yield to the temptation to read the final &amp;quot;Es ist Zeit&amp;quot; as &lt;em&gt;Est ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird, daß es Zeit ist&lt;/em&gt;. The 'impossible' motif of the stone coming into bloom—representing the speaker himself—thus receives its motivation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] According to a survey held in Germany in 2000, &amp;quot;Herbsttag&amp;quot; is the third best-loved poem among Germans. See &lt;em&gt;Die Lieblingsgedichte der Deutschen&lt;/em&gt;, 11th edition, Artemis &amp;amp; Winkler, 2011. Rilke was well represented in this top 100; Celan also had a poem that reached the top 100, namely &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/death-fugue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Todesfuge&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;Death Fugue&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, at number 16.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] The line &amp;quot;the mouth speaks true&amp;quot; doesn't fit this pattern, but this answer does not attempt to provide a full interpreation of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] The last stanza of Ingeborg Bachmann's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/de/Bachmann,_Ingeborg-1926/Das_erstgeborene_Land&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Das erstgeborene Land&amp;quot; / &amp;quot;The first-born land&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1956, may be read as alluding to and possibly a coded answer to the stone image in &amp;quot;Corona&amp;quot;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Nbe9yVdupDEC&amp;amp;pg=PA193&amp;amp;dq=paul+celan+corona&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiJpciihtTuAhUFPuwKHWbIAmoQuwUwA3oECAkQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=paul%20celan%20corona&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Huml, page 193&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bekker, Hugo: *Paul Celan: Studies in His Early Poetry&amp;quot;. Rodopi, 2008.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Böttiger, Helmut: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ich-habe-ihn-mehr-geliebt-als-mein-leben.700.de.html?dram:article_id=83739&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;„Ich habe ihn mehr geliebt als mein Leben!“&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; [Review of Ingeborg Bachmann / Paul Celan: &lt;em&gt;Herzzeit. Der Briefwechsel. Mit den Briefwechseln zwischen Paul Celan und Max Frisch sowie zwischen Ingeborg Bachmann und Gisèle Celan-Lestrange&lt;/em&gt;. Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Bertrand Badiou, Hans Höller, Andrea Stoll und Barbara Wiedemann. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main. 399 Seiten.] Deutschlandfunk, 17.08.2008.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Buch, Hans Christoph: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.welt.de/kultur/literarischewelt/article207194289/Paul-Celan-Als-Corona-noch-ein-Himmelszeichen-war.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Als Corona noch ein Himmelszeichen war&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Welt&lt;/em&gt;, 11.04.2020.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Felstiner, John: &lt;em&gt;Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew&lt;/em&gt;. Yale University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Huml, Ariane: &lt;em&gt;Silben im Oleander, Wort im Akaziengrün. Zum literarischen Italienbild Ingeborg Bachmanns&lt;/em&gt;. Wallstein, 1999.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T05:27:56.733" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17221" CreationDate="2021-02-06T10:28:07.330" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neither Rhoda nor Gertrude is presented entirely negatively. Nor is either presented entirely positively. All Hardy's characters are fully drawn individuals who, like most people in real life, are a mixture of good and bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhoda, for instance, is portrayed sympathetically as the jilted woman. Farmer Lodge has fathered her child but refused to marry her. She has become a &amp;quot;thin worn milkmaid&amp;quot; who supports herself and her son with arduous labor. At least some of her co-workers find her plight pitiable: upon Farmer Lodge's marriage, one whispers to another that &amp;quot;'Tis hard for she.&amp;quot; At the end of the story, we learn that she insists on remaining independent and not taking the money Farmer Lodge has left her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, Rhoda has her flaws. Her curiosity about Gertrude, Farmer Lodge's new wife, amounts practically to obsession. While refusing to meet Gertrude, she insists that her son take every opportunity to do so and makes him relate every detail about the bride. When the son first sees Gertrude, she is sitting down, and so he is unable to ascertain her height. Rhoda immediately insists he find out:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Then do you go to Holmstoke church tomorrow morning: she's sure to be there. Go early and notice her walking in, and come home and tell me if she's taller than I.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Very well, Mother. But why don't you go and see for yourself?'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I go to see her! I wouldn't look up at her if she were to pass my window this instant.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's something almost comic about Rhoda's wanting to know every single thing about Gertrude while simultaneously asserting that she wouldn't care enough even to look at her. This is a deeply human portrait: her anger at and obsession with her rival are at once understandable, pathetic, and reproachable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gertrude is depicted in a similarly complex fashion, as both a sympathetic and a blameworthy figure. To begin with, she is an innocent wife who loves her husband and wants to retain his love. Her naïve, good-hearted nature makes even Rhoda warm to her when, despite Rhoda's best efforts, the two inevitably meet. When Gertrude's arm is afflicted, her desperate efforts to set it right seem, on the one hand, to indicate her vanity—she wants to retain her beauty at any cost. On the other hand, one reason her beauty matters so much is that Farmer Lodge values it, and without it, she loses his love. The following exchange between Gertrude and Rhoda makes this clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I shouldn't so much mind it,' said the younger, with hesitation, 'if - if I hadn't a notion that it makes my husband dislike me - no, love me less. Men think so much of personal appearance.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Some do - he for one.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Yes; and he was very proud of mine, at first.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Keep your arm covered from his sight.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Ah - he knows the disfigurement is there!' She tried to hide the tears that filled her eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At some later point, Gertrude learns that Rhoda is Farmer Lodge's cast-off lover, and that Rhoda's son is his. But she neither attempts to make common cause with Rhoda, nor encourages her husband to acknowledge the boy's paternity, even when Lodge says that he had at one point considered adopting the child. On the other hand, Gertrude has also discovered that Rhoda is in some sense the cause of her disfigurement. This mitigates Gertrude's blame: it is hard to act benevolently toward someone who has wished, and perhaps caused, you to be harmed. Besides, by this time, Rhoda and her son have left the village for parts unknown. So even if Gertrude wished to help them, it is not feasible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hardy suggests that both women are in fact victims of forces beyond their control. These are in the first instance social forces, such as the classism and sexism that allow Farmer Lodge to seduce Rhoda, then abandon both her and his own child, then marry the better-positioned Gertrude, and finally spurn the latter when she loses her health and beauty. Secondly, the story could be seen as a psychological allegory, where the overt friendliness between Rhoda and Gertrude masks unconscious hostility that damages their relationship.  However, the story ultimately resists any simplistic analysis along sociological or psychological lines. The supernatural streak running through the narrative points to a larger, more elemental entrapment: to be human is to be at the mercy of ill-understood, uncontrollable forces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gertrude's withered arm is the central symbol that Hardy uses to depict the complexity of the situation in which the women are trapped. The precipitating act occurs even before the two meet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rhoda Brook dreamed—since her assertion that she really saw, before falling asleep, was not to be believed—that the young wife, in the pale silk dress and white bonnet, but with features shockingly distorted, and wrinkled as by age, was sitting upon her chest as she lay. The pressure of Mrs Lodge's person grew heavier; the blue eyes peered cruelly into her face: and then the figure thrust forward its left hand mockingly, so as to make the wedding-ring it wore glitter in Rhoda's eyes. Maddened mentally, and nearly suffocated by pressure, the sleeper struggled; the incubus, still regarding her, withdrew to the foot of the bed, only, however, to come forward by degrees, resume her seat, and flash her left hand as before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gasping for breath, Rhoda, in a last desperate effort, swung out her right hand, seized the confronting spectre by its obtrusive left arm, and whirled it backward to the floor, starting up herself as she did so with a low cry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'O, merciful heaven!' she cried, sitting on the edge of the bed in a cold sweat; 'that was not a dream - she was here!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gertrude too relates a similar, simultaneous dream, where she has been grasped by the arm and flung to the floor by some unknown force.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the narration of Rhoda's dream, Hardy is careful to depict her as the wronged individual. Gertrude sits on Rhoda's chest and taunts her by flaunting her wedding ring. Rhoda acts in self-defense and within a dream, and so her hurting of Gertrude can't be attributed to actual malice. And at this point, outside the dream world, Gertrude is unaware even of Rhoda's existence, let alone that she has herself supplanted Rhoda's rightful place. All Gertrude has done is marry Lodge because she loves him. Both women are victims of a situation not of their making, and one they can't control. When they hurt each other, it is unknowingly and without volition. As Rhoda thinks to herself when she and Gertrude are on the way back from Conjurer Trendle's: &amp;quot;their lives had been antagonized by other influences than their own.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T10:28:07.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17377" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18254" CreationDate="2021-02-06T17:33:17.123" Score="4" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theodor Fontane, a German poet, wrote &amp;quot;Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan&amp;quot; (translated &lt;a href=&quot;http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2010/01/the-tragedy-of-afghanistan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as &amp;quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&amp;quot;) in 1847. It's about the aftermath of a massacre suffered by a British force in 1842. The poem is certainly a good read, and the historical event certainty compelling. &lt;strong&gt;What I'm unsure of is why Fontane chose to write about this event specifically.&lt;/strong&gt; Why was he drawn to highlight a old-ish incident concerning the British army, as opposed to something closer to home? Is there something about the whole affair that drew Fontane to compose his poem? I would appreciate answers that have evidence directly from Fontane, or other sources which could be absolutely sure, but well-backed up speculation would be fine as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Fontane choose to write &amp;quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T17:51:09.077" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T17:12:21.433" Title="Why did Fontane choose to write &quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17378" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:14:27.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T19:14:27.170" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:14:27.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17379" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:14:27.170" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish poet William McGonagall (1825-1902) or his life as a writer. He is widely regarded as one of the worst poets in English literature. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:17:03.710" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:17:03.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17380" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:18:03.187" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T19:18:03.187" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T19:18:03.187" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17381" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-06T19:18:03.187" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Elegance of the Hedgehog' (L'Élégance du hérisson) by Muriel Barbery. Should be tagged with [muriel-barbery] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:16:50.113" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:16:50.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17382" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:12:29.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:12:29.637" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:12:29.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17383" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:12:29.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the French author Muriel Barbery (born 1969) or her life as a writer. Questions about her works should be tagged with [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:37:52.153" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:37:52.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17384" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:13:47.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:13:47.850" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:13:47.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17385" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:13:47.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Greek doctor Oribasius (320-403) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:39:17.767" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:39:17.767" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17386" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:15:15.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:15:15.003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:15:15.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17387" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-06T20:15:15.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'The Madman: His Parables and Poems' by Kahlil Gibran. Should be tagged with [kahlil-gibran]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-06T20:38:44.007" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T20:38:44.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17388" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17389" CreationDate="2021-02-07T14:31:03.097" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’d like to ask about the following sentence from &amp;quot;The Illustrious Client&amp;quot; by Conan Doyle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A butler, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;who would have adorned a bench of bishops&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, showed me in and…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know what impression the author wanted to give to the readers with the underlined metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part doesn’t mean like the butler would adorn (decollate) the attire of a benchful of bishops or some, right? It was meant to say the butler himself looked like a bishop, so much so that it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he were sitting on a bench with bunch of bishops.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If so, at the end of the day, did the butler look old or something. Or had much air of dignity, or what he wore was like the one would have normally worn by bishops maybe?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8492" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T14:55:36.847" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T16:43:38.357" Title="What did Conan Doyle mean by saying the butler would adorn a bench of bishops?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17388" CreationDate="2021-02-07T16:43:38.357" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are right.  The meaning is that if the butler appeared among the bishops on a bench, he would add dignity to their appearance, thus adorning them -- since bishops should be dignified.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-02-07T16:43:38.357" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17390" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17432" CreationDate="2021-02-07T19:46:54.627" Score="4" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book to my cousin two years ago which I would like to revisit. It was a book about a girl whose mother goes to jail after being accused of stealing drugs from the pharmacy she worked at.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think the girl's name was Lucy, or maybe Lucy was her dog's name, but I'm not quite sure. After her mom is sent to jail, she is sent to live with this woman who cares for her. At the woman's house (forgot her name), she gets fed more food than she got with her mother (her mother doesn't get much pay).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucy also has a dog. I think that the name was Lucky, but I'm not quite sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The cover is the back view of Lucy hugging a dog with black and brown fur. They are staring outside a window, and Lucy is wearing a green shirt. The book was published by Scholastic in 2016-2018, but I think that it was most likely published in 2018. The targeted audience is probably 2nd grade to fourth grade, my cousin was in third grade when I read it to her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word count: 20,000-40,000 words. The book was about half-inch to a full inch thick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, forgot to add something! Lucy and her mother liked to say something like this at bedtime:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I love you.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I love you too.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I love you three.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I love you four.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I love you more.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is written in English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12065" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T03:32:06.877" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T18:06:54.210" Title="Children's book - girl's mother sent to jail for theft, dog and girl on cover" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17391" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17394" CreationDate="2021-02-07T20:21:41.023" Score="13" ViewCount="3285" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Adventures of Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt; by Mark Twain, it's mentioned that the schoolteacher had an anatomy book in his desk due to wanting to be a doctor at one point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The master, Mr. Dobbins, had reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition. The darling of his desires was, to be a doctor, but poverty had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious book out of his desk and absorbed himself in it at times when no classes were reciting. He kept that book under lock and key. There was not an urchin in school but was perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance never came. Every boy and girl had a theory about the nature of that book; but no two theories were alike, and there was no way of getting at the facts in the case. Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood near the door, she noticed that the key was in the lock! It was a precious moment. She glanced around; found herself alone, and the next instant she had the book in her hands. The titlepage—Professor Somebody’s &lt;em&gt;Anatomy&lt;/em&gt;—carried no information to her mind; so she began to turn the leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did &amp;quot;poverty decree&amp;quot; that he couldn't he become a doctor? What kinds of things could have prevented him from doing that? Was medical school difficult to get in to at that point?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-07T20:58:10.920" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T20:16:46.040" Title="Why couldn't Mr Dobbins become a doctor in &quot;Tom Sawyer&quot;?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;mark-twain&gt;&lt;adventures-of-tom-sawyer&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17392" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17391" CreationDate="2021-02-07T21:07:42.453" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Attending medical school would have required him to pay tuition and living expenses.  Furthermore, earning income while attending medical school would have been difficult if not impossible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You didn't have to attend college to become a teacher. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Ingalls_Wilder#Young_teacher&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laura Ingalls&lt;/a&gt; was certified to teach by passing a test, and she wasn't even sixteen at the time, and had not even attended high school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T15:06:40.490" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T15:06:40.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17394" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17391" CreationDate="2021-02-08T06:28:48.947" Score="26" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Teachers didn't require any training or licensure at this time.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The U.S. Department of Education has published a brief paper on the history of teaching in the U.S. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www2.ed.gov/admins/tchrqual/learn/preparingteachersconference/ravitch.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Since &lt;em&gt;Tom Sawyer&lt;/em&gt; takes place in the 1840s, there is really no chance that a college education would have been required, except in some extraordinary local circumstances. Mr. Dobbins may have wanted to become a doctor, but couldn't afford the necessary and expensive medical training.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the 19th century, no formal educational requirements were in place for teachers. Teacher certification was inconsistent, but there was no &amp;quot;teaching profession&amp;quot; and no formal education was required. You just needed to persuade your local government that you were good enough to be a teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Teacher certification in the nineteenth century was irregular and diverse. There was no single pattern, and there was no teaching profession as such.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first half of the nineteenth century, the requirements for entry into teaching were modest: new teachers had to persuade a local school board of their moral character, and in some districts, pass a test of their general knowledge. In 1834, Pennsylvania became the first state to require future teachers to pass a test of reading, writing, and arithmetic. By 1867, most states required teachers to pass a locally administered test to get a state certificate, which usually included not only the basic skills, but also U.S. history, geography, spelling, and grammar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At this point in history, some states had required basic skills tests. However, more than likely any requirements would be imposed by the local district and not by the state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It wasn't until the 20th century that formal teacher's certifications appeared in the United States. During this time there was an increasing professionalization of teachers. Pedagogy degrees (like a bachelor's degree in education) appeared, and eventually became the norm for teacher certification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Physician's training was expensive and needed in practice.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Physicians' training on the other hand, was both expensive and required in practice (though perhaps not formally required).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001936.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;U.S. National Library of Medicine&lt;/a&gt;, medical licensure in the U.S. dates back to the colonial period (that is, prior to the American Revolution). By the 1800s medical societies (essentially professional organizations) were regulating medical practice and certifying physicians. Your regional medical society would be responsible for certifying you as a doctor. Universities and medical societies both offered medical degrees.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2156587211427404&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Slawson(2012)&lt;/a&gt; summarizes medical training in the United States throughout this period. Medical degrees typically consisted of 2 years of lecture and 3 years of apprenticeship. This cost about between about $790 - $1,250 in total, at a time when the annual income for a factory laborer was about $360 a year - half that for rural labor. Unless your family already had money, it would be difficult to afford this education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems that actually having a medical degree was often not necessary for practice. Perhaps only 40% of practitioners had medical degrees (though they may have attended lectures and had some apprenticeship before their own practice). Nonetheless, affording this education at all would have been difficult for a laborer's family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12002" LastEditorUserId="12002" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T04:23:37.953" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T04:23:37.953" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17395" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16164" CreationDate="2021-02-08T07:05:07.943" Score="7" Body="&lt;h2&gt;No&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's tough to prove a negative, but I don't believe there to be any extant organization that matches your description.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a real theological thing referred to as the &amp;quot;Order of Melchizedek&amp;quot;. Wikipedia provides a nice cross-denominational summary under the name &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priesthood_of_Melchizedek&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Priesthood of Melchizedek&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but at least in my denomination we refer to it as an &amp;quot;order&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In essence, it refers to someone being a legitimate priest even though they are not a son of Aaron. This matters because in the Old Testament there is a requirement that only male descendants of Aaron be priests. So the priesthood of Melchizedek is something of a legitimizing force which allows people outside of the Old Testament covenants to be a priest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Jesus was not descended from Aaron, this gets picked up by Christian churches today. Part of the book of Hebrews is dedicated to contrasting the two kinds of priesthood, and explaining why the order of Melchizedek is better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;But the author is picking up an another historical occurrence.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are right that the author is riffing on a real historical occurrence, but it isn't the order of Melchizedek - it's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.npr.org/2012/10/10/162573716/why-is-vatican-ii-so-important&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vatican II&lt;/a&gt;! The Second Vatican Council was an important event to the Catholic world. The last ecumenical council was 100 years ago. The calling of more than 2,000 people to this council was a surprise to many.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Overall, Vatican II focused on a kind of reconciliation of catholicism to the modern world. One of the first outcomes was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrosanctum_Concilium&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy&lt;/a&gt;, which encouraged lay people to participate in services. Mass no longer needed to be in Latin; it was encouraged to use local language and vernacular to make church more accessible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second part of Vatican II was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaudium_et_spes&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;shift toward interacting with the world&lt;/a&gt;. Prior to Vatican II, there was a belief that the church was a kind of spiritual bulwark which resisted the world around it. Vatican II pushed for a more dynamic interaction, where the church and modern world interact.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I am unfamiliar with this story, in your quote it seems clear that the author is having some fun with the changes which stemmed from Vatican II. Public participation and modern aesthetics are taken to a more extreme degree than happened in reality, so perhaps this reflects some fears or anxieties about what was to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12002" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T07:05:07.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17396" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14840" CreationDate="2021-02-08T07:55:15.560" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Obama is referring to there significant intellectual or artistic figures. Each one had previously believed in the power of their conviction and what they could accomplish, but with time they were worn down by focusing on the negative aspects of being African American, rather than a strong and empowering sense of identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Placing this within the context of Obama's life at this point, he is searching for a way to understand his own social (and racial) identity. He turns to these famous texts to understand himself, but finds they focus on the &lt;em&gt;problems&lt;/em&gt; of being African American (the &amp;quot;corrosive force&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;self-contempt&amp;quot; that he mentions), rather than the positive sense of strength that he needs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James Baldwin&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was a famous African American and gay author. Many of his stories include themes of self acceptance in the face of strong social forces. Eventually, he left the United States to live in France to avoid the racism and homophobia had experienced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Langston Hughes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was a poet. He grew up in the midwest (Kansas) and spent his younger  years traveling. Many of his poems and other works are based on his travels, as well as his cosmpolitan interest in the Black experience across the world. Later he would life almost entirely in Harlem as a part of the Harlem Renaissance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._E._B._Du_Bois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Du Bois&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; was an intellectual and social scientist who, among many other things, helped found the NAACP. Especially in his early speeches and writings, he emphasizes the need for full civil, social, educational, economic, and other rights for African Americans. Later in life, he would leave the NAACP and instead advocate for compromises, but not authentic acceptance of African Americans in society (such as &amp;quot;separate but equal&amp;quot; policies). Near the end of his life he left America entirely to live in Ghana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obama contrasts all three with Malcolm X, who he felt embraced this identity as a positive creative force:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only Malcolm X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer will.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12002" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T07:55:15.560" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17397" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6504" CreationDate="2021-02-08T15:54:24.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first edition of V does indeed contain the V of Vs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not quite a proof, but here is a Pinterest image of what is claimed to be the Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 edition. This image can now be found on Google images.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ccv0o.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ccv0o.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have also obtained the following image from an academic paper, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Poetics-at-the-Interface-%3A-Patterns-of-Thought-and-Bj%C3%B6rninen/ea717e80a2969e2fbe49cb7494675cd186caf422&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetics at the Interface : Patterns of Thought and Protocols of Reading in Studies of Thomas Pynchon’s V.&lt;/a&gt; by Samuli Björninen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G6glS.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/G6glS.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real clincher is thanks to Gareth Rees who has found a J. Lippincott first edition, fourth impression (1963), on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/vnovel0000pync/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;, with the V of Vs. This image is identical to that of the previous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2397" LastEditorUserId="2397" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T16:20:46.847" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T16:20:46.847" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16807" CreationDate="2021-02-08T17:23:27.367" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first meaning of the verb &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tuck_in#English&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tuck in&lt;/a&gt; (Wiktionary) is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To pull the blankets or duvet up over (someone in bed); to put (someone) to bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is obviously not the intended meaning in the novel, but in the context of architecture, &amp;quot;tucked in&amp;quot; can be used to suggest that something is below something else. For example, the article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2014/feb/07/cool-cottages-the-gower-wales-in-pictures&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cool cottages in the Gower, Wales – in pictures&lt;/a&gt; contains the following example of &amp;quot;tucked in below&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upstairs, tucked in below stripped wooden beams, is a galleried bedroom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(You can see the &amp;quot;stripped wooden beams&amp;quot; when you look at the ceiling.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is another example, which I found on the website of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cosmos.co.uk/tours/athens-7-night-eclectic-aegean-islands-cruise/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cosmos Tours&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tucked in below Mount Pelion, land of the mythical centaurs, Volos embraces the Pagasetic Gulf to one side and the dramatic, mountainous Pelion Peninsula on the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The city of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volos&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Volos&lt;/a&gt; is situated at the foot of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Pelion&lt;/a&gt;. Similarly, the swimming pool is probably at the foot of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_(fortification)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ramparts&lt;/a&gt;. Since the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Warsaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;University of Warsaw&lt;/a&gt; was established in 1816, I'm not sure why it would be fortified with &amp;quot;ramparts&amp;quot;; the author may be referring to imposing walls, like those in the black-and-white photograph of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa%C5%82ac_Uruskich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pałac Uruskich&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-08T17:23:27.367" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17399" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-08T21:28:01.990" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tolstoy's letter to Gandhi (&lt;a href=&quot;http://raoinseattle.com/library/06%20Ganesha/Tolstoy%20Leo%20and%20Gandhi%201909%20correspondence.pdf#page=12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Letter to a Hindu&lt;/a&gt;), Tolstoy quotes extensively from Krishna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On page 12 above, Gandhi asks for the reference: &amp;quot;In the letter in question, you have quoted largely from Krishna and given reference to passages. I should thank you to give me the title of the book from which the quotations have been made.&amp;quot; Tolstoy replies: &amp;quot;The Moscow people&#xA;will let you know the title of the book on Krishna,&amp;quot; but the reference is never made explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has anyone located the source of these quotes?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12075" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-08T21:58:56.857" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T11:04:16.527" Title="Tolstoy's &quot;A Letter to a Hindu&quot; - Krishna Quote References?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17400" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T00:55:36.197" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;Following links from &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/20774/why-do-trees-break-at-the-same-wind-speed#comment48904_20777&quot;&gt;another SE site&lt;/a&gt;, I ended up on the Wikipedia page for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Ironsides_(poem)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the poem &amp;quot;Old Ironsides&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; about the eponymous ship of the US Navy. Wikipedia tells us (with sources) about how this poem came to be written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In September 1830, [the author] read an article in the &lt;em&gt;Boston Daily Advertiser&lt;/em&gt; about the Navy's plans to dismantle the historic USS &lt;em&gt;Constitution&lt;/em&gt;. Startled, he was moved to write &amp;quot;Old Ironsides&amp;quot; to express his opposition to the scrapping. The poem was published in the &lt;em&gt;Advertiser&lt;/em&gt; the next day and was soon reprinted by papers in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, reading the poem itself, the context doesn't seem clear to me purely from the text of the poem. It's clear that it concerns &lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; famous naval vessel, and that the poet feels &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt; is a fate worse than being sunk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meteor of the ocean air&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shall sweep the clouds no more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, better that her shattered hulk&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should sink beneath the wave;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;When this was first published, how were readers meant to know what it was about?&lt;/strong&gt; Am I just being dense and it would've been clear to contemporary readers that the poem must be about that particular ship and the particular fate of being dismantled? Was it originally published with a note to say it was a response to the previous day's article? Was it obvious from context since readers would remember the previous day's article?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mostly I'm curious about whether in-text evidence alone was meant to be enough to make clear the theme of the poem, or whether extratextual clarification was always needed (like I needed the extratextual detail of the Wikipedia page to understand what the poem was about)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T02:35:31.907" Title="How was the context of &quot;Old Ironsides&quot; clear at its first publication?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;oliver-wendell-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17401" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17400" CreationDate="2021-02-09T02:35:31.907" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google Books search for &amp;quot;Old Ironsides&amp;quot; shows the term was in frequent use before 1829 in America  to refer to the USS Constitution, but also in Britain to refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Britannia_(1762)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HMS Brittania&lt;/a&gt;. And as a nickname for Oliver Cromwell.   And a character in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brothers_(Cumberland_play)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;play&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1892" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T02:35:31.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T04:20:11.663" Score="6" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently discovered an interesting type of poetry. When read one way, it says one thing and when read a different way, the opposite, all with the same words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A sub-type of these is known as the punctuation poem. Apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://libguides.bernardsboe.com/c.php?g=701044&amp;amp;p=4974432&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;reverse poem&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is the term used for another sub-type (read top line to bottom and then bottom to top), though I think it's fitting as an umbrella term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I know of &lt;em&gt;carmen cancellatum&lt;/em&gt;, another interesting type of poetry, but it's not what I'm looking for here because it doesn't use the same words in both messages, nor are the messages opposite each other.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the earliest example of a &amp;quot;reverse&amp;quot; poem?&lt;/strong&gt; (The date to beat is somewhere in the 1400s and I would appreciate if you can include the original text and a Modern English translation of your suggestions.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the following (circa 15th century) Middle English poem (&amp;quot;Punctuation Poem&amp;quot;), there are two sets of punctuation, one in the middle of the lines, one at the end. If the middle set are ignored and the end set are periods, the poem takes on one meaning (people do what's right). If you do the reverse, then it says the opposite, that people are horrible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nowe the lawe is ledde by clere conscience .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ffull seld . Couetise hath dominacioun .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In Every place . Right hath residence .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Neyther in towne ne feld . Similacion .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ther is truly in euery cas . Consolacioun .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The pore peple no tyme hase . but right .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Men may fynd day ne nyght . Adulacioun .&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nowe reigneth treuth in euery mannys sight .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem from 1655 (&amp;quot;The Jesuit's Creed&amp;quot;) follows a similar premise. Read across the rows, it's pro-Protestant, anti-Catholic. Read down the columns, it's the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;div class=&quot;s-table-container&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;table class=&quot;s-table&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;th&gt;&lt;/th&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/thead&gt;&#xA;&lt;tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;I HOLD as faith&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What England’s church alows&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;What Rome’s church saith&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;My conscience disavows&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Where the King’s head&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;That church can have no shame&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;The flocks misled&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;That holds the Pope supreame.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Where the altars drest&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;There’s service scarce divine&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;The peoples blest&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;With table, bread, and wine.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;He’s but an asse&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Who the communion flies&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Who shuns the masse&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;td&gt;Is catholick and wise.&lt;/td&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tr&gt;&#xA;&lt;/tbody&gt;&#xA;&lt;/table&gt;&#xA;&lt;/div&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nether of these poems has an &amp;quot;official&amp;quot; title, and the wording used here for the Jesuit's Creed is quoted from the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/649/649-h/649-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ancient Poems&lt;/a&gt;. Both these poems are translated into Modern English and explained in more detail on the blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.purplemotes.net/2018/09/18/punctuation-poems/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Purple Motes&lt;/a&gt;, with some other examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T04:20:11.663" Title="What's the first &quot;reverse&quot; poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17403" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T11:51:51.253" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In John Updike's short story &amp;quot;Should Wizard Hit Mommy?&amp;quot;, is Jack's wife Claire a white woman? Are there any clues in the lesson that suggest that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12080" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T15:06:02.250" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T15:06:02.250" Title="In &quot;Should Wizard Hit Mommy?&quot; is Claire white?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;john-updike&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-10T23:20:11.133" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17404" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-09T15:08:30.120" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently came across this lovely poem whilst watching the (excellent) TV show &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake_(Australian_TV_series)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rake&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song will have it&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That those that we have loved got their long fingers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From death, and wounds, or on Sinai's top,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or from some bloody whip in their own hands.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They ran from cradle to cradle till at last&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their beauty dropped out of the loneliness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of body and soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which the show attributes to Yeats. I'm afraid I don't know much about Yeats but as far as I can understand it's from a poem called The Phases of the Moon, which seems to be within a book called The Wild Swans at Coole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I have a few questions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Long fingers - Specifically regarding the above piece, what does long fingers represent?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What does the poem mean? As best I can understand it its about life and what happens to a person shaping them until at last they get old and their beauty fades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The phases of the moon appears to be a larger story or play of some sort, is this Yeats' style? Is this a common style?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The wider poem or story the phases of the moon, is there somewhere I can study what is going on? I'll admit to being somewhat clueless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12081" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T18:07:27.730" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T18:07:27.730" Title="Understanding and interpreting Yeats phases of the moon" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17405" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17585" CreationDate="2021-02-09T17:50:26.643" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;At one point in &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, Dagny Taggart is in a meeting with various government officials. At one point during the meeting, the book remarks that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Dagny Taggart] noticed that Clem Weatherby, &lt;strong&gt;their technical expert on railroads&lt;/strong&gt;, was the man of least influence among them, and Cuffy Meigs - of most.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is Clem Weatherby described as a &amp;quot;technical expert on railroads&amp;quot;? Is the book attributing genuine knowledge to him, or is this merely relative to the other characters' lack of knowledge?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T03:18:46.430" Title="Why is Clem Weatherby described as a &quot;technical expert on railroads&quot; in Atlas Shrugged?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17406" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17391" CreationDate="2021-02-09T18:54:01.140" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I note that George Armstrong Custer was a school teacher for a while when age 17, and Laura Ingals Wilder became a school teacher while still fifteen and still a high school student.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So no long educational process was necessary to become a school teacher in a 19th century elementary school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But medical doctors usually had to attend at least a few years of medical school, which was expensive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12083" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T20:16:46.040" LastActivityDate="2021-02-09T20:16:46.040" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17407" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17411" CreationDate="2021-02-09T22:01:01.753" Score="3" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book VI of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the heroine collides with a man in the streets of Paris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A gentleman abstracted as myself&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Came full against me, then resolved the clash&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In voluble excuses,—obviously&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some learned member of the Institute†&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon his way there, walking, for his health,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While meditating on the last ‘Discourse;’‡&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pinching the empty air ’twixt finger and thumb,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From which the snuff being ousted by that shock,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Defiled his snow-white waistcoat, duly pricked&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At the button-hole with honourable red;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;‘Madame, your pardon,’—there, he swerved from me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A metre, as confounded as he had heard&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That Dumas would be chosen to fill up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The next chair vacant, &lt;strong&gt;by his ‘men &lt;em&gt;in us&lt;/em&gt;.’&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_de_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Institut de France&lt;/a&gt;, containing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Académie Française&lt;/a&gt;. ‡ “Discours” = “lecture”. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A learned member might well be surprised to find &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexandre Dumas&lt;/a&gt;, a writer of popular romances, elected as an “immortel” of the Academy, but what does “men &lt;em&gt;in us&lt;/em&gt;” refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T01:50:13.717" Title="What does “men in us” refer to in “Aurora Leigh”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17408" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17421" CreationDate="2021-02-09T22:39:31.810" Score="3" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book V of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56621/56621-h/56621-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sir Blaise claims that in former days men chose their wives for their virtue and not for their décolletage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“My dear young friend, if we could bear our eyes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like blessedest St. Lucy,† on a plate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They would not trick us into choosing wives,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As doublets, by the colour. Otherwise&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our fathers chose,—and therefore, when they had hung&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their household keys about a lady’s waist,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sense of duty gave her dignity:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She kept her bosom holy to her babes;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, if a moralist reproved her dress,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;’Twas, ‘Too much starch!’—and not, ‘Too little lawn!’”‡&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lucy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucia of Syracuse&lt;/a&gt;, whose eyes were gouged out before she was martyred. ‡ &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn_cloth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lawn&lt;/a&gt;, a type of cloth.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A “young man with the German student’s look” replies with an elaborate metaphor comparing the ideals of Sir Blaise’s forefathers with the burning of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rushlight&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rushlight&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I ask you,—have we leisure, if we liked,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To hollow out our weary hands to keep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your intermittent &lt;strong&gt;rushlight&lt;/strong&gt; of the past&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From draughts in lobbies? Prejudice of sex,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And marriage-laws … &lt;strong&gt;the socket drops them through&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While we two speak,—however may protest&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some over-delicate nostrils, like your own,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;’Gainst odours thence arising.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the metaphor, the antiquated ideals (sex-prejudice and marriage-customs) are compared to drops of tallow from the rushlight that fall to the floor, and “the socket drops them through” seems to be an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastrophe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;anastrophe&lt;/a&gt; for “they drop through the socket”. But how exactly does this work? What little I know of rushlights is they were not planted in a socket like a candle, but held horizontally (or at an angle) by a clip, as in this 1867 painting by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassily_Maximov&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vassily Maximov&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%9C%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%B2_%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%B1%D1%83%D1%88%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%8B_%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%BA%D0%B8_1867.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/uFlVw.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Painting of the interior of a peasant’s cottage by night, with an old woman telling a story to her family sitting around her. She is illuminated by a rushlight, about a metre long, held out horizontally, the unlit end clipped to a wooden pole.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-09T23:09:36.240" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T09:17:34.413" Title="How does “the socket drop them through” in “Aurora Leigh”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;elizabeth-barrett-browning&gt;&lt;aurora-leigh&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17409" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17415" CreationDate="2021-02-10T06:29:52.367" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does this quatrain of Goethe's (&amp;quot;Gesang der Geister über den Wassern&amp;quot;) mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seele des Menschen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wie gleichst du dem Wasser&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Schicksal des Menschen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wie gleichst du dem Wind&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Soul of man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How like to the water you are&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fate of man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How like to the wind you are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12087" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T01:15:16.897" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T01:15:16.897" Title="What does this quatrain of Goethe's (&quot;Gesang der Geister über den Wassern&quot;) mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17410" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17414" CreationDate="2021-02-10T07:36:17.873" Score="6" ViewCount="604" Body="&lt;p&gt;The scene: Zeus and Apollo have just revived Hector who received a near-fatal blow from a boulder thrown by Ajax. Apollo and Hector then lead a refreshed Trojan onslaught on the Greeks, compelling them to retreat to their ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On rush’d bold Hector, gloomy as the night;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Forbids to plunder, animates the fight,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Points to the fleet: “For, by the gods! &lt;strong&gt;who flies&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Who dares but linger, by this hand he dies;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No weeping sister his cold eye shall close,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;No friendly hand his funeral pyre compose.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, translated by Pope, Book XV&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought Hector was menacing the Greeks, most of whom were flying and others 'daring to linger'. But the monologue continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who stops to plunder at this signal hour,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;The birds shall tear him, and the dogs devour.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So he was threatening his own soldiers; which leaves me in doubt concerning the meaning of &lt;em&gt;who flies&lt;/em&gt; - were some Trojans deserting their army even when they were gaining the ascendancy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T11:26:16.617" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T12:46:49.087" Title="Meaning and addressees of Hector's threats" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;&lt;alexander-pope&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17411" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17407" CreationDate="2021-02-10T09:05:31.107" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's a literal translation of the French idiomatic construction &lt;em&gt;hommes en nous&lt;/em&gt;, which would typically be translated, simply, &lt;em&gt;men&lt;/em&gt;. In French it implies a congregate body, so &lt;em&gt;fellow members&lt;/em&gt; would also be a sensible, if not literal, translation. There is a certain sense of mutuality and group identity: &lt;em&gt;amongst ourselves&lt;/em&gt; is part of the implication. The question in the learned member's mind is: &lt;em&gt;How on earth did my guys elect this yahoo to be a part of this august body?&lt;/em&gt; Clearly, Dumas's election to the Académie would not be universally approved by its membership.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not equally clear that the Dumas in question is Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;, though. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0140434127&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penguin Classics edition of Aurora Leigh&lt;/a&gt; glosses this line with a simple reference to Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;, providing no details about why he is likelier meant. I believe you're right in assuming it's the father, because he was more celebrated at the time, and because the stuffy Academician's recoil at the idea fits better. The rest of this answer delves into the question: &amp;quot;Which Dumas did Barrett Browning mean?&amp;quot; without resolving it, so feel free to give it a miss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Membership of the Académie Française was, and remains, by &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/de-la-candidature-la-reception&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;election&lt;/a&gt;. The Académie is restricted to 40 members, which means that before anybody can be admitted, a member has to die, resign, or be expelled. When a vacancy occurs, potential members can self-nominate or be nominated by any of the remaining members. Election requires an absolute majority, i.e., 20 votes (out of the 39 surviving members). This makes admission to the Académie difficult even for renowned authors. Even if Académie members are well-disposed toward an eminent author, a vacancy might never arise before that author's demise. So while being a member of the Académie is undoubtedly an honor, the inverse is not true: no conclusions about the Académie's attitudes can be drawn from a given author's not being a member. For example, Sartre, Descartes, and Molière were never members.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, Barrett Browning definitely makes clear that the particular Académie member Leigh encounters has Opinions™ on the suitability of Dumas as a candidate for membership. As the question says, the popularity of the elder Dumas was itself a stumbling block to his admission to the Académie, as was the prolific nature of his output. Fulminating against the fact that neither Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt; nor Balzac (another very productive author) had been elected, the contemporary literary light &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_de_Girardin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Delphine de Girardin&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C’est donc un inconvénient que d’être célèbre ? C’est donc un crime que d’avoir des droits ? Balzac et Alexandre Dumas écrivent quinze à dix-huit volumes par an ; on ne peut pas leur pardonner ça. Un trop fort bagage est un empêchement ; à l’Académie la consigne est la même qu’au jardin des Tuileries : on ne laisse point passer ceux qui ont de trop gros paquets...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Quote from André Maurois, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-dumas-et-lacademie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Dumas et l'Académie&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1956).&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (all translations mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it's a disadvantage to be famous? So it's a crime to have rights? Balzac and Alexandre Dumas write fifteen to eighteen volumes a year; we can't forgive them that. Too much baggage is a barrier; at the Académie, the instructions are the same as in the Tuileries garden: those with large packages are not permitted to enter ... &amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One sentence here captures attention: &lt;em&gt;C’est donc un crime que d’avoir des droits ? / So it's a crime to have rights?&lt;/em&gt; What rights is de Gerardin referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s likely that she means simply copyright, or royalty. But she might also mean human rights. Alexandre Dumas was mixed-race. His grandfather was a French nobleman who fathered a child on an Afro-Caribbean slave. That child, Dumas’s father, was freed on being taken to France from Barbados. As such, Alexandre was legally entitled to all the rights and privileges of any French citizen. His literary achievement also brought him into contact with aristocracy and even members of the royal family. Nevertheless, Dumas often encountered racial hostility. Even his phenomenal success did not shield him from overt racism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wore flamboyant waistcoats, green as the sea, purple cloaks, and massive golden chains. Once when &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Nodier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nodier&lt;/a&gt; saw Dumas arriving he sighed: “Ah, Dumas, my poor fellow, what a lot of baubles! Will you Negroes always be the same and forever be delighted by glass beads and corals?”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Phillips, Mike. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/pdf/dumas.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Black Europeans: A British Library Online Gallery feature&lt;/a&gt;, p.4.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in addition to the snobbery about Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;'s unabashedly popular oeuvre, a &lt;em&gt;de facto&lt;/em&gt; though not &lt;em&gt;de jure&lt;/em&gt; color bar would make at least some members of the Académie hostile to his admission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But given the date of &lt;em&gt;Aurora Leigh&lt;/em&gt; (1856) it is by no means certain that the Dumas being referred to here is Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;. By that time, the younger Dumas had made a name for himself. His most famous novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Dame_aux_Cam%C3%A9lias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Dame aux Camélias&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, known in English as &lt;em&gt;Camille&lt;/em&gt;, had been published in 1848. A hugely successful stage adaptation had premièred in 1852. The father was, of course, a literary lion, but the son's reputation was also well-established.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt; died in 1870. Five years later, Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt; did win entry into the prestigious institution. One reason the younger Dumas was successful where his father had not been was his relatively puritanical outlook. Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt; led a scandalous life. He had, apparently, 40 mistresses and fathered several illegitimate children (including his namesake). With regard to the son, Wikipedia &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas_fils&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In almost all of his writings, he emphasized the moral purpose of literature; in his play &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=WsgaAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;pg=GBS.PA3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Illegitimate Son&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1858) he espoused the belief that if a man fathers an illegitimate child, then he has an obligation to legitimize the child and marry the woman (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimacy_in_fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Illegitimacy in fiction&lt;/a&gt;). At boarding schools, he was constantly taunted by his classmates because of his family situation. These issues profoundly influenced his thoughts, behaviour, and writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maurois makes a similar observation, contrasting the father and son and explaining why it was easier for the latter to make it into the Académie:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;En 1870, le vieux dieu faunesque avait « désempli » le monde. À sa place le public trouvait une noble figure, hautaine et impérieuse, qui héritait cette gloire. Le sentiment populaire rapprochait Trois Mousquetaires de la Dame aux Camélias et cet instinct était juste : les héros du fils comme ceux du père sont des redresseurs de torts. Aramis en redingote se nomme Olivier de Jalin. Mais Aramis était plus aimable. Dumas père, romantique, pardonnait tout aux passions ; Dumas fils, moraliste, en montrait les funestes effets. Les malheurs de sa mère, sa propre jeunesse, si difficile, lui avaient inspiré deux idées fixes : défense des filles honnêtes contre les coquins ; défense des hommes honnêtes contre les coquines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Maurois, &lt;em&gt;op. cit.&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1870, the old faun god [&lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;] had &amp;quot;vacated&amp;quot; the world. In his place the public found a noble figure [&lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;], haughty and imperious, who inherited this glory. Popular sentiment reconciled &lt;em&gt;The Three Musketeers&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;Camille&lt;/em&gt;, and this instinct was accurate: the heroes of the son and the father are likewise righters of wrongs. Aramis in a frock coat is called Olivier de Jalin. But Aramis was more kind. Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;, romantic, forgave all that arose from passions; Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;, a moralist, showed their disastrous effects. His mother's misfortunes and his own difficult youth had inculcated two fixed ideas in him: defending honest girls against rakes; defending honest men against vamps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dumas &lt;em&gt;père&lt;/em&gt;'s exclusion from the Académie was felt unjust by at least some of his contemporaries—de Girardin, for example. However, his flamboyant lifestyle, his embrace of unabashedly lowbrow writing, and his race comprised too high a bar to clear. Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;, on the other hand, led a relatively austere life, worked hard to assimilate the values of the middle class, and expressed those attitudes in his work. Barrett Browning suggests, correctly, that his race and his illegitimate birth would still cause some to recoil in horror at his candidacy. But he presented a sanitized enough alternative to his father that the Académie could salve its conscience for excluding the elder by letting his glory redound onto the younger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Newly elected Académie members take the seat of the writer whom they have replaced. Quite literally so; the chairs are numbered 1 through 40, and each member is given the specific chair of his predecessor at that position. Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt;, Maurois points out, exploited this situation to honor his father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lorsqu’on demandait à Dumas fils : « À qui succéderez-vous à l’Académie ? » il répondait : « À mon père. »&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Dumas &lt;em&gt;fils&lt;/em&gt; was asked: &amp;quot;Whom did you succeed at the Académie?&amp;quot;, he used to reply: &amp;quot;My father.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Maurois, &lt;em&gt;op. cit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whichever Dumas Barrett Browning had in mind, a variety of reasons could in either case account for the raised eyebrow of the learned member she satirizes here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T01:50:13.717" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T01:50:13.717" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17412" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-10T09:14:16.733" Score="10" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to remember a YA novel I read back in the 80s/90s (in English) about a teen girl who goes to spend a summer with her grandmother or other older relative, something weird timeslippy happens, and she's able to slip between present day and the 60's I'm guessing [?], and becomes friends with a murdered relative [I think grandmother, but maybe older relative]. Along the way she changes some stuff [an elderly neighbor is blind in present day, but when she goes back she stops the fireworks accident from happening to him on the beach when he's a child], in fact at the end she discovers she now has an extra family member and some houses are painted different colors now. Anyhow, she also ends up stopping the murder. Ring any bells?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12089" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T08:58:35.650" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T12:06:48.077" Title="A timeslip murder mystery from the 70s/80s" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17413" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17410" CreationDate="2021-02-10T09:39:57.593" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hector is urging his men to attack the Greek ships bravely, but without plundering them afterwards. He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you run away from the battle, or if you lag behind so that you’re not on its front lines, I will make sure you die a dishonorable death anyway. So don’t try to save yourself. Likewise if you stop to plunder the ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit based on comment from OP:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hectors goal is to maximize the destruction of the Greeks. So he’s threatening three types of soldiers who could undermine that goal:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who run away (“fly”)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who lag behind and don’t push forward to the front lines of the battle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who do get to the front lines, kill enough Greeks in their vicinity so that they aren’t in immediate danger themselves, and then dawdle to pick out trophies instead of moving on to wherever else the battle is ranging.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two sorts of men are cowards, with the second sort trying to disguise their cowardice. The third sort is greedy, more interested in enriching themselves with the spoils than with helping the entire Trojan army win.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T11:31:09.237" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T11:31:09.237" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17410" CreationDate="2021-02-10T10:02:41.703" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hector is indeed threatening his own men. These lines are a translation of &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; XV.343–351.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ὄφρ᾽ οἳ τοὺς ἐνάριζον ἀπ᾽ ἔντεα, τόφρα δ᾽ Ἀχαιοὶ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;τάφρῳ καὶ σκολόπεσσιν ἐνιπλήξαντες ὀρυκτῇ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα φέβοντο, δύοντο δὲ τεῖχος ἀνάγκῃ.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ἕκτωρ δὲ Τρώεσσιν ἐκέκλετο μακρὸν ἀΰσας&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;‘νηυσὶν ἐπισσεύεσθαι, ἐᾶν δ᾽ ἔναρα βροτόεντα:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ὃν δ᾽ ἂν ἐγὼν ἀπάνευθε νεῶν ἑτέρωθι νοήσω,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;αὐτοῦ οἱ θάνατον μητίσομαι, οὐδέ νυ τόν γε&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;γνωτοί τε γνωταί τε πυρὸς λελάχωσι θανόντα,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ἀλλὰ κύνες ἐρύουσι πρὸ ἄστεος ἡμετέροιο.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of other translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While these stood spoiling of the slain, the Greeks found time to get&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beyond the dike and th’undik’d pales; all scapes they gladly gain’d,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Till all had pass’d the utmost wall; Necessity so reign’d.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then Hector cried out: “Take no spoil, but rush on to the fleet;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From whose assault, for spoil or flight, if any man I meet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He meets his death; nor in the fire of holy funeral&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His brother’s or his sister’s hands shall cast within our wall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His loathéd body; but, without, the throats of dogs shall grave&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His manless limbs.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Chapman (1616). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/iliadshomerprin03taylgoog/page/n60/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliads of Homer&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 57&lt;/a&gt;. London: Charles Knight (1843).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While they were spoiling these heroes of their armour, the Achaeans were flying pell-mell to the trench and the set stakes, and were forced back within their wall. Hector then cried out to the Trojans, “Forward to the ships, and let the spoils be. If I see any man keeping back on the other&#xA;side the wall away from the ships I will have him killed: his kinsmen and kinswomen shall not give him his dues of fire, but dogs shall tear him in pieces in front of our city.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Butler (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924026468417/page/n265/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad of Homer&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 246–247&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the Trojans tore the war-gear off the bodies&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Argives clambered back in a tangled mass, scrambling back&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;through the sharp stakes and deep pit of the trench.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;fleeing left and right, forced inside the rampart.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So Hector commanded his Trojans, sounding out,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Now storm the ships! Drop those bloody spoils!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any straggler I catch, hanging back from the fleet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Right here on the spot I’ll put that man to death.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No kin, no woman commit his corpse to the flames—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the dogs will tear his flesh before our walls!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Fagles (1990). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/iliad00home/page/398/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, p. 399&lt;/a&gt;. Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the original, Hector is not accusing the Trojans of running away, but only of stopping to plunder the slain. He says that &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; they run away, or fail to press forward with utmost effort, then he will slay them, and see that they are denied the funeral rites due to brave warriors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when reading Pope’s translation we have to infer a hypothetical in “who flies”, by taking it to mean, “whoever flies (if anyone does)”. But we have to allow Pope some latitude, because of the constraints of his chosen form, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_couplet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;heroic couplet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-10T12:46:49.087" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T12:46:49.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17409" CreationDate="2021-02-10T22:55:21.920" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quatrain is the last stanza of the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesang_der_Geister_%C3%BCber_den_Wassern&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gesang der Geister über den Wassern&lt;/a&gt;, which Goethe wrote in 1779 during a stay in Switzerland. The poem was inspired by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staubbach_Falls&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staubbach Falls&lt;/a&gt; near the village of Lauterbrunnen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order to understand the comparisons in the last stanza, it is helpful to discuss what the poem is about. The first stanza compares the human soul with water; the soul has a heavenly or godly origin, so that where it eventually strives to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza describes water coming down from an overhanging cliff and turning into a spray, much like the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iCIEr-QreA&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staubbach Falls&lt;/a&gt;. Instead of a thunderous cascade, the result is more like a mist that gently lands at the bottom, representing a life without much struggle or suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third stanza contrasts with the preceding one: rocks at the bottom cause the water to foam, representing a life with more challenges and struggles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fourth stanza the water ends in a placid lake which probably represents tranquillity in later life. However, the fifth stanza describes how the wind can be a soft breeze that merely ripples the water (creating a parallel with the easy life in the second stanza) or a force that moves even the deeper waters and causes foaming waves (creating a parallel with the fourth stanza).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sixth stanza uses the word &amp;quot;Seele&amp;quot; again. However, while translating this noun as &amp;quot;soul&amp;quot; makes sense in the first stanza, it is important to bear in mind that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seele#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seele&lt;/a&gt; can also mean &amp;quot;mind&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;spirit&amp;quot;, which is more closely associated with emotions. For example, when Faust says (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Faust_-_Der_Trag%C3%B6die_erster_Teil&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Faust I&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;), &amp;quot;Zwey Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust&amp;quot;, this is usually translated as &amp;quot;Two souls [reside in my breast]&amp;quot;. However, he is not referring to souls in a Christian sense but expressing an inner conflict. Similarly, the human mind can be placid or stormy (like water) depending on how strongly fate (the wind) moves it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources (besides Wikipedia):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Georg Frick: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=6bpAAAAAYAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Epische und lyrische Dichtungen erläutert für die Oberklassen der Höheren Schulen und für das deutsche Haus&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Hofmann, 1895.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Carl Leo Cholevius: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=co1RAAAAcAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dispositionen und Materialien zu deutschen Aufsätzen über Themata für die beiden ersten Klassen höherer Lehranstalten. Band 1&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Teubner, 1864.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T22:55:21.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17416" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17418" CreationDate="2021-01-17T14:14:59.427" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am translating the book &lt;em&gt;Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life&lt;/em&gt; by Adam Phillips.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It has this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what might we find ourselves doing if not getting it was the project, not the problem? Not, of course, promising with jokes, which seems to persuade us that there is an 'it' to get, but more promising with works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;promising with&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12758" OwnerDisplayName="Mey" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T00:52:04.853" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T05:42:40.127" Title="&quot;promising with&quot; meaning" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;missing-out-in-praise-unlived-life&gt;&lt;adam-phillips&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17417" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17416" CreationDate="2021-01-17T14:41:51.040" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am translating a book&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be able to do that, you need context, yet you have not given us any context. What is the author discussing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;With&lt;/strong&gt; has a few meanings - the most probable are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;promising &lt;em&gt;by using&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;in conjunction with&lt;/em&gt; jokes, which seems to persuade us that there is an 'it' to get, but more promising &lt;em&gt;by using&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;in conjunction with&lt;/em&gt; works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10831" OwnerDisplayName="Greybeard" LastActivityDate="2021-01-17T14:41:51.040" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17418" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17416" CreationDate="2021-02-06T11:17:23.007" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an English or Irish translator, I feel your pain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems like the author is using the two 'promising with's' to create a comparison between the two.&#xA;Exactly the way he does in the previous sentence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what might we find ourselves doing if not getting it was the&#xA;project, not the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So for me, the translation might read like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not, of course, &lt;strong&gt;using&lt;/strong&gt; jokes, which seems to persuade us that there is an 'it' to get, but more &lt;strong&gt;like&lt;/strong&gt; works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Kevin B Leigh" LastActivityDate="2021-02-06T11:17:23.007" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17420" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17416" CreationDate="2021-02-11T05:36:23.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what might we find ourselves doing if not getting it was the project, not the problem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phillips's question here posits that perhaps there are some cognitive activities where the goal is to stay with ambiguity, uncertainty, or a lack of finality. The &lt;em&gt;project&lt;/em&gt; or undertaking of such activities is &lt;em&gt;not getting it&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., remaining in a state that lacks rational certainty. Such an approach would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not, of course, promising with jokes, which seems to persuade us that there is an 'it' to get, but more promising with works of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With jokes, &lt;em&gt;not getting it&lt;/em&gt; would be non-ideal. A joke has a point that we need to understand. Otherwise the joke has failed: either the listener feels stupid for not getting the joke, or the teller feels stupid for the joke's not landing. Even explaining the joke so that the listener &amp;quot;gets it&amp;quot; typically makes the joke not funny at all. So this approach of remaining in a state of non-finality would not be promising if the project is a joke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, works of art are the sort of project where not being certain about what's going on, and therefore enjoying the ambiguity as enriching the work of art, is precisely the point. If a question like &amp;quot;but what does this poem mean?&amp;quot; can be answered straightforwardly with a right and complete answer, it's probably not a very good poem. If what the poem means always eludes our grasp, such that the poem is evocative but does not definitively resolve to a single meaning, it's a more &lt;em&gt;promising&lt;/em&gt; poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also true for creating works of art, not just for interpreting them. Good artists express themselves in such a way that even they cannot fully explain the &amp;quot;meaning&amp;quot; of their artwork. Alternatively, an artwork created with a single, specific message in mind that the audience is supposed to readily understand is more propaganda than art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T05:42:40.127" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T05:42:40.127" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17421" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17408" CreationDate="2021-02-11T09:17:34.413" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There were indeed some devices that held rushlights vertically. In &lt;em&gt;A Handbook for East-Bourne and Seaford, and the Neighbourhood&lt;/em&gt; (1885), G. F. Chambers provides the following figure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YwK1B.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YwK1B.png&quot; alt=&quot;Two rushlight holders designed to hold rushlights upright. Both look like candlesticks.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Figs. 3 and 4 represent relics of bygone ages, still occasionally seen in Sussex. ... The rude iron frame has a still under-spring, which keeps the rush in an (approximately) upright position. (p. 19)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Chambers, George Frederick. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://*A%20Handbook%20for%20East-Bourne%20and%20Seaford,%20and%20the%20Neighbourhood*&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Handbook for East-Bourne and Seaford, and the Neighbourhood&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Edward Stanford, 1885.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the illustration shows, there is plenty of scope for debris to fall to the floor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;W. M. Thackeray also mentions a particular type of nightlight that would allow dripping on the floor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It consisted of a long spiral of iron wire. ... The spiral coil would prevent the lanky rushlight from falling over and out of the lamp, but not the red-hot dock from spluttering on to the carpet or boards of the floor.  (p. 490)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Thackeray, William Makepiece. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=uekLAQAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA490&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Striking a Light&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The Cornhill Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, n.s. vol. 15 (July–December 1890). pp. 489–495.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotation from Thackeray clarifies that it is not tallow, but &lt;em&gt;dock&lt;/em&gt; that falls to the floor. Merriam-Webster &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dock&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;defines&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;dock&lt;/em&gt; (noun 4) as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 : any of a genus (&lt;em&gt;Rumex&lt;/em&gt;) of coarse weedy plants of the buckwheat family having long taproots and sometimes used as potherbs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 : any of several usually broad-leaved weedy plants (as of the genus &lt;em&gt;Silphium&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably it is not the scent of the tallow that is offensive, since the tallow on the rush itself would have the same odor. It is the acrid smell of the burnt plant material once it is no longer covered over by the tallow's aroma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T09:17:34.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17422" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17423" CreationDate="2021-02-11T14:01:03.087" Score="4" ViewCount="225" Body="&lt;p&gt;My textbook defines &amp;quot;tone&amp;quot; as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The voice or level of feeling, closely linked to the mood created&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find the phrase &amp;quot;level of feeling&amp;quot; ambiguous in this context and I wasn't able to find any relevant definitions on Google either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12097" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T14:24:51.157" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T14:53:29.237" Title="What is meant by the &quot;level of feeling&quot; with respect to the tone of a text?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17423" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17422" CreationDate="2021-02-11T14:53:29.237" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The entry for &amp;quot;tone&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt; by Chris Baldick provides the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a very vague critical terms usually designating the mood or atmosphere of a work, although in some more restricted uses it refers to the author's attitude to the reader (e.g. formal, intimate, pompous) or to the subject-matter (e.g. ironic, light, solemn, satiric, sentimental).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;level of feeling&amp;quot; in the textbook may refer to what Baldick describes as &amp;quot;more restricted uses&amp;quot;. The noun &amp;quot;level&amp;quot; is potentially misleading since it might be mistaken for strength of feeling. While the strength of the author's feeling in a literary work may be relevant, &amp;quot;feeling&amp;quot; itself is the more misleading term: a formal attitude, an ironic attitude or a sarcastic attitude are not in themselves feelings, even though they may be prompted by certain specific emotions. To illustrate this, I will quote an example from &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_T.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L. Kip Wheeler's glossary of literary terms&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;two different novelists might write stories about capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in which an impoverished but hard-working young lad pulls himself out of the slums when he applies himself to his education, and he becomes a wealthy, contented middle-class citizen who leaves his past behind him, never looking back at that awful human cesspool from which he rose. Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty street-rat skulks his way out of the slums by abandoning his family and going off to college, and he greedily hoards his money in a gated community and ignores the suffering of his former &amp;quot;equals,&amp;quot; whom he leaves behind in his selfish desire to get ahead. Note that both author #1 and author #2 basically present the same plotline. While the first author's writing creates a tale of optimism and hope, the second author shapes the same tale into a story of bitterness and cynicism. The difference is in their respective tones--the way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that both Baldick and Wheeler use the term &lt;strong&gt;attitude&lt;/strong&gt; rather than feeling to explain what &amp;quot;tone&amp;quot; means. For comparison, see also &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/tone&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation's&lt;/a&gt; definition of tone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet’s attitude toward the poem’s speaker, reader, and subject matter, as interpreted by the reader. Often described as a “mood” that pervades the experience of reading the poem, it is created by the poem’s vocabulary, metrical regularity or irregularity, syntax, use of figurative language, and rhyme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This definition also relies on the term &amp;quot;attitude&amp;quot;. For the emotional state in a literary work, L. Kip Wheeler uses the term &lt;a href=&quot;http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_M.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mood&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T14:53:29.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17425" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10844" CreationDate="2021-02-11T16:57:23.470" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Myopia is not a literary term; it is more like a slight or a slur due to the term's negative connotations. If we transferred the meaning implied in the example about Chopin, it might be used, for example, for a poet who is adept at rhyme and metre but much less competent at composing a poem that has a consistent meaning, or for a novelist who writes great sentences or even great scenes but doesn't know how to construct a good plot.[1] I have not seen this term in any of the glossaries of literary terms I have used or consulted, including van Gorp, Cuddon and Baldick (see references).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Incidentally, &amp;quot;Myopia&amp;quot; is the name of &amp;quot;a visualization tool in support of close reading&amp;quot;. Close reading is a technique or approach popularised by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Book%3A_Creating_Literary_Analysis/2%3A_Writing_about_Form_-_Developing_the_Foundations_of_Close_Reading/2.02%3A_New_Page&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Criticism&lt;/a&gt; and focuses on features of the text as such (imagery, character, symbols, point of view, rhyme, metre, etcetera). The tool's name, &amp;quot;Myopia&amp;quot;, is obviously an allusion on the adjective &amp;quot;close&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;close reading&amp;quot; (imagining a reader with their nose close to the page).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The visualization tool was developed at Miami University (but &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&amp;amp;q=Myopia+Visualization+Tool+Close+Reading+site%3Amuohio.edu&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no longer available on the university's website&lt;/a&gt;) and relies on texts that are tagged based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://tei-c.org/guidelines/p5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;guidelines by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)&lt;/a&gt;. Following these guidelines, you can mark up, for example, a poem's stanzas and lines. Since the markup is XML-based, the tags can be extended to add annotations for, for example, metaphors, ambiguities and connotations. These can then be visualised using &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.w3.org/Style/styling-XML.en.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;CSS stylesheets&lt;/a&gt; (simply in a web browser, for example). However, the same poem can be encoded in various different ways, wich creates the need for a tool that makes comparing different encodings easier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/PoetryVisualizationTool&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PoetryVisualizationTool&lt;/a&gt;, TEIWiki.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_0001.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt;. (4,600 literary terms, in Dutch)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chaturvedi, Manish; Gannod, Gerald; Mandell, Laura; Armstrong, Helen; Hodgson, Eric: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/myopia-a-visualization-tool-in-support-of-close-reading/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Myopia: A Visualization Tool in Support of Close Reading&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Digital Humanities&lt;/em&gt; 2012. (The conference paper is also available in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/ab-315.xml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;TEI-encoded XML format&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Singer, Kate: &lt;a href=&quot;https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/digital-close-reading-tei-for-teaching-poetic-vocabularies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Digital Close Reading: TEI for Teaching Poetic Vocabularies&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy&lt;/em&gt;, issue three (May 2013).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;van Gorp, H. (et al.): &lt;em&gt;Lexicon van literaire termen&lt;/em&gt;. Leuven: Plantyn, 1991.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] (The quote about Chopin is probably unfair to the composer. For example, Robert Schumann considered Chopin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_Sonata_No._2_(Chopin)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Piano Sonata No. 2&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;structurally inferior&amp;quot; (Wikipedia's words) and thought that Chopin &amp;quot;could not quite handle sonata form&amp;quot; (apparently Schumann's words), but this criticism has not withstood time. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.laphil.com/musicdb/pieces/3528/sonata-no-2-in-b-flat-minor-op-35-funeral-march&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article about the sonata&lt;/a&gt; on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's website states that although &amp;quot;Chopin is regarded primarily as a peerless miniaturist&amp;quot;, he &amp;quot;also scaled the heights in larger forms&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-11T21:02:00.733" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T21:02:00.733" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17427" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17306" CreationDate="2021-02-11T22:12:48.037" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to Baldick's and Cuddon's dictionaries of literary terms, this is an &lt;strong&gt;antimetabole&lt;/strong&gt;. Cuddon's definition goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The repetition of words in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon provides the following example from Samuel Johnson's &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jacklynch.net/Texts/rambler156.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rambler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (156, emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It ought to be the first endeavour of a writer to distinguish nature from custom, or that which is &lt;strong&gt;established&lt;/strong&gt; because it is &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt;, from that which is &lt;strong&gt;right&lt;/strong&gt; only because it is &lt;strong&gt;established&lt;/strong&gt;; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldick points out that antimetabole is a sub-type of &lt;strong&gt;chiasmus&lt;/strong&gt; and gives the following example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All for one, and one for all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_02007.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt; (in Dutch) points out that the antimetabole expresses an &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antithesis&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;antithesis&lt;/a&gt; by means of a chiasm. The phrases &amp;quot;frictionless trade&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tradeless friction&amp;quot; are antithetical; so are the terms &amp;quot;promise&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;reality&amp;quot; in the context of the given quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dbnl: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt; (containing 4,600 terms, in Dutch).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-11T22:12:48.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17428" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4009" CreationDate="2021-02-12T10:08:31.383" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The OP writes that &amp;quot;La Fontaine was a critic of French society to say the least&amp;quot;. Sweetser describes him as &amp;quot;a loyal but lucid subject of a king eager to concentrate the power and the glory in his own person&amp;quot; (page 135).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sweetser goes on to say that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The individual men and women praised by free spirits like Théophile and La Fontaine were patrons with whom they felt a personal bond, (...). Always aware of the taste of his public, the poet managed to renew a genre often very circumscribed by its conventions by seeking subtle correspondence between his topic and the traits and qualities of his dedicatees. Thus, when he dedicated &amp;quot;Le Pouvoir des Fables&amp;quot; to his friend, Paul de Barillon, French ambassador to the court of Charles II of England, he links the power of the fables that can influence people through the spell they cast on their listeners to the power of persuasion that a skillful envoy can exert on a sovereign whose friendship and support are necessary to the French king in order to ensure peace. He avoids an emphatic and pompous encomium, invoking M. de Barillon's modesty, characteristic of the perfect gentleman, to stress what is vital in his view for the good of France and its people: war should be avoided at all costs, peace should be saved through diplomacy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regnier does not say why La Fontaine dedicated &amp;quot;Le Pouvoir des Fable&amp;quot; to Barillon but notes that the ambassador did not foresee the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Glorious Revolution&lt;/a&gt; of 1688 even though the count d'Avaux, ambassador in Holland, had predicted it every day.  However, &amp;quot;Le Pouvoir des Fable&amp;quot; was published in 1678, ten years before the Glorious Revolution, so Barillon's lack of political foresight does not appear to be relevant here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regnier identifies several connections between the dedication and the fables, i.e.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between line 11 (&amp;quot;Toute l'Europe sur les bras&amp;quot;) and Fable XIV in Book VII, &amp;quot;L’ingratitude &amp;amp; l’injustice des hommes envers la Fortune&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99ingratitude_et_l%E2%80%99injustice_des_hommes_envers_la_Fortune&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fable XIII on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/FontaineFables/page/n169/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fable XIV in Wright's translation&lt;/a&gt; and in Regnier's edition);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between line 11 (&amp;quot;Toute l'Europe sur les bras&amp;quot;) and the epilogue Fable XVIII in book VII, &amp;quot;Un animal dans la lune&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Un_Animal_dans_la_Lune&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fable XVII on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/FontaineFables/page/n175/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fable XVIII in Elizur Wright's translation&lt;/a&gt;) and in Regnier's edition);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;between lines 31-32 (&amp;quot;Sur les éloges que l'envie / Doit avouer qui vous sont dus&amp;quot;) and lines Fable II in Book VII, &amp;quot;Le mal marié&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Cur%C3%A9_et_le_Mort&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fable II on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/FontaineFables/page/n153/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in Wright's translation&lt;/a&gt;); this is merely a grammatical similarity, however.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Louis XIV needed an ambassador at the court of Charles II. Charles Athanase Walckenaer notes in &lt;em&gt;Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de J. De La Fontaine. Tome Premier&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pour ces négociations délicates, Louis XIV choisit Barillon, homme d'un esprit vis, aimable, ami intime de madama de Sévigné, de madame de Grignan, sa fille, de madame de Coulanges, et de toute la société que la Fontaine fréquentait le plus habituellement, et où il se plaisait davantage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.lafontaine.net/lesFables/afficheFable.php?id=150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean-Marc Bassetti&lt;/a&gt; notes in a footnote on his website that regularly visited the &lt;em&gt;salons&lt;/em&gt; in Paris, including Mme de la Sablière's, where La Fontaine met him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(There are plenty of sources that mention in a footnote that La Fontaine dedicated &amp;quot;Le Pouvoir des Fables&amp;quot; to Barillon without mentioning why; see for example in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=SiZFm2Rk5WcC&amp;amp;pg=PA119&amp;amp;dq=le+pouvoir+des+Fables+Paul+Barillon&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjemtC1peXuAhXwA2MBHfT5Cd0QuwUwBnoECAAQCA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=le%20pouvoir%20des%20Fables%20Paul%20Barillon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letters of Madame de Sévigné&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=GpoA9OkGmEwC&amp;amp;pg=PA7&amp;amp;dq=le+pouvoir+des+Fables+Paul+Barillon&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi3rMDXpeXuAhUN6OAKHZFpBCI4ChC7BTAAegQIBhAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=le%20pouvoir%20des%20Fables%20Paul%20Barillon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letters of Madame de Maintenon&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=xxBEAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA89&amp;amp;dq=le+pouvoir+des+Fables+Paul+Barillon&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi3rMDXpeXuAhUN6OAKHZFpBCI4ChC7BTABegQIBBAJ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=le%20pouvoir%20des%20Fables%20Paul%20Barillon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Memoirs of de La Rochefoucauld&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=83lgE1zFHOMC&amp;amp;dq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oeuvres de Jean de la Fontaine&lt;/em&gt;. Volume 2&lt;/a&gt;. Edited by Henri Regnier. Hachette, 1884.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sweetser, Marie-Odile: &amp;quot;The Art of Praise from Malherbe to La Fontaine&amp;quot;. In: Birberick, Anne Lynn; Ganim, Russell (editors): &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=ikGt9gkXv74C&amp;amp;dq&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shape of Change: Essays in Early Modern Literature and La Fontaine in Honor of David Lee Rubin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Rodopi, 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Walckenaer; Charles Athanase: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=BpQUAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de J. De La Fontaine. Tome Premier&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Librairie de Firmin Didot Freres, Fils et Cie, 1858.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T21:34:54.293" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T21:34:54.293" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17429" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17430" CreationDate="2021-02-12T17:54:01.100" Score="1" ViewCount="197" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44262/dust-of-snow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dust of Snow&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by Robert Frost:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has given my heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A change of mood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And saved some part&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of a day I had rued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What figure of speech, or poetic device, is used in the line, &amp;quot;A change of mood&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2341" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T19:52:31.533" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T20:18:20.677" Title="What figure of speech is &quot;change of mood&quot; in Robert Frost's &quot;Dust of Snow&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17430" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17429" CreationDate="2021-02-12T18:52:01.137" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There’s a straightforward double meaning (ambiguity) in this line. The word “mood” can mean something internal to a person:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mood, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, 3.a.&lt;/strong&gt; A person’s humour, temper, or disposition at a particular time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or external to them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;mood, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, 3.c.&lt;/strong&gt; The pervading atmosphere or tone of a particular place, event, or period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can read the line two ways: the “dust of snow” shaken down by the crow has changed the atmosphere of the place, and also changed the speaker’s feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ambiguity does not fall under the remit of “figure of speech”, which usually encompasses devices in which words are not to be taken literally. But it is an important poetic device nonetheless:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Empson (1930). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/seventypesofambi0000emps_y3p0/page/2/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/em&gt;, p. 3&lt;/a&gt;. London: Chatto and Windus (1947).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T20:18:20.677" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T20:18:20.677" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17431" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17319" CreationDate="2021-02-12T19:03:55.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you be misremembering pigs instead of lambs? If so, it appears Phaedrus has such story attributed to Aesop:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25512/25512-h/25512-h.htm#riley_III_III&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ÆSOP AND THE FARMER&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T19:03:55.280" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17432" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17390" CreationDate="2021-02-12T19:32:22.837" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The names are different but the cover and plot appear to match: &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36127483-strays-like-us&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strays Like Us&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Cecilia Galante:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the moment Fred (never Winifred!) spots a scruffy little mutt&#xA;with sad eyes, she knows she's in big trouble. Toby's in bad shape,&#xA;and Fred longs to rescue him from the old man with the mile-long mean&#xA;streak who lives next door. But Margery—the straight-talking woman who&#xA;is fostering Fred—says going over to their house is against the rules.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And since Fred will only be around until her mother comes to grips&#xA;with her dependence, Fred can't let herself care too deeply. Not about&#xA;Toby or Margery or Delia, a new classmate whose insistent friendship&#xA;surprises Fred at every turn. Because the more Fred lets this loveable&#xA;band of misfits into her heart, the harder it'll be to leave them all&#xA;behind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story of loss and love, acclaimed author Cecilia Galante&#xA;examines life's difficult choices and how a girl plus the dog she&#xA;loves can add up to finding family in the most unlikely places.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8LWMs.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/8LWMs.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;front cover (source: Goodreads)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T19:39:35.790" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T19:39:35.790" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17433" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-12T20:03:22.317" Score="2" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would love your take on a section I am currently reading about, Sun Tzu’s description of grounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Place your army in deadly peril, and it will survive; plunge it into desperate straits, and it will come off in safety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He does this, as I understand it, at just the right moment. However, this seems to disagree with his earlier counsels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what I understood he said to attack when there is no possibility for defense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do these ideas square together?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12102" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T02:00:48.940" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T02:00:48.940" Title="In what way does Sun Tzu square &quot;put your soldiers in desperate straits&quot; with his earlier chapter" Tags="&lt;chinese-literature&gt;&lt;sun-tzu&gt;&lt;the-art-of-war-sun-tzu&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17434" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-12T17:48:55.943" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am after a poem/story that has no repetitions in words, further, is this a type of writing style? Are there any famous examples where this is the case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://examples.yourdictionary.com/repetition-examples-in-writing.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Repetition is the act of repeating or restating&lt;/a&gt; something more than once. In writing, repetition can occur at many levels: with individual letters and sounds, single words, phrases, or even ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Harry Rogers" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T22:34:31.790" LastActivityDate="2021-02-12T22:34:31.790" Title="Poems or stories with no repeated words?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17435" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17588" CreationDate="2021-02-12T23:15:42.570" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walter de la Mare's short poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/napoleon/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Napoleon&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the world, O soldiers?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is I:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I, this incessant snow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This northern sky;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Soldiers, this solitude&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through which we go&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the literary device which identifies the world, snow, sky, and solitude with the speaker?&lt;/strong&gt; Given the title, I assume that &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; refers to Napoleon, not the actual world etc., but what is it called when a poet identifies the surroundings with a person like this? I think it's not exactly personification, since all those things are identified with a &lt;em&gt;specific&lt;/em&gt; person. Is there a name for what's going on here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-12T23:33:21.540" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T02:43:49.453" Title="What literary device is Walter de la Mare's &quot;It is I&quot; in &quot;Napoleon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;walter-de-la-mare&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17436" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17433" CreationDate="2021-02-13T01:21:06.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The second quotation is about when to look for and initiate a battle.&#xA;His advice is not to do so until there are obvious paths to victory.&#xA;Thinking about what &lt;em&gt;should&lt;/em&gt; have been done in order to win leaves it too late.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first quotation is about the behaviour of an army.&#xA;The men will fight better when their lives are at risk, but with the possibility of saving them, than they do in training or when the situation is hopeless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One could combine the two to say that one can expect an army to be more likely to win if it is first shown a path to victory than if it is simply told to fight with no obvious plan or hope of success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T01:21:06.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17437" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T07:29:10.190" Score="4" ViewCount="449" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a photo of a&#xA;family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s&#xA;dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s boy&#xA;who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces; though he is holding&#xA;his father’s hand, he is separate from the group, &lt;strong&gt;and light shows between&#xA;his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is somehow unclear to me. Does it mean: There is light between&#xA;his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it mean: There is something between&#xA;his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg that light shows that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source: &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T07:40:46.253" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:12:33.177" Title="Meaning of &quot;and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17438" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17437" CreationDate="2021-02-13T09:04:40.427" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context of the quoted passage is that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dexter found, in a magazine, a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So we can be confident that this is the photo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alfred_Tennyson,_1st_Baron_Tennyson_and_family.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qeIgv.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces; though he is holding his father’s hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was taken c. 1862 at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farringford_House&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Farringford House&lt;/a&gt; on the Isle of Wight, and from left to right shows &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallam_Tennyson,_2nd_Baron_Tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hallam Tennyson&lt;/a&gt; (1852–1928), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Tennyson&lt;/a&gt; (1809–1892), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Tennyson,_Lady_Tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emily Tennyson née Sellwood&lt;/a&gt; (1813–1896), and Lionel Tennyson (1854–1886).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There appears to be a shaft of light passing between Hallam and his father, but the way that this crosses the elder Tennyson's leg suggests that it is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_leak&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;light leak&lt;/a&gt;, an artefact of the photography process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T14:10:24.797" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:10:24.797" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17439" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17441" CreationDate="2021-02-13T09:57:57.483" Score="7" ViewCount="707" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have been reading the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; in the Penguin Classics edition (translated by Emile Victor Rieu and Martin Hammond), and in the second book, when Homer is naming the groups of Achaeans and Trojans, the translation keeps adding &amp;quot;branch of Ares&amp;quot; to different peoples names, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polypoites was not alone, but partnered by Leonteus, &lt;strong&gt;branch of Ares&lt;/strong&gt;, son of proudhearted Koronos, Kaineus' son. With them there followed forty black ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find anything online that explains this naming. Does it form part of the poem's rhythmic scheme in ancient Greek, in the same way that Athena has descriptors added to her name depending on the position within the verse, or is this a translation specific to this book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12105" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T02:19:46.380" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T02:19:46.380" Title="What does &quot;branch of Ares&quot; mean in book II of &quot;The Iliad&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17441" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17439" CreationDate="2021-02-13T11:45:13.530" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Branch of Ares” is a literal translation of “ὄζος Ἄρηος”, for example in the passage quoted in the question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οὐκ οἶος, ἅμα τῷ γε Λεοντεὺς &lt;strong&gt;ὄζος Ἄρηος&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;υἱὸς ὑπερθύμοιο Κορώνου Καινεΐδαο:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;τοῖς δ᾽ ἅμα τεσσαράκοντα μέλαιναι νῆες ἕποντο.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Homer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0133%3Abook%3D2%3Acard%3D734&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, book II, lines 745–747&lt;/a&gt;. Oxford University Press (1920).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Branch” here means “descendant”: it is a metaphor of a family tree, with Ares being the trunk and his descendants being boughs, branches, or twigs. Here are some other translations of the phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor did he lead them alone, but Leonteus, &lt;strong&gt;descendant of Ares&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Aided him, son of Coronos the high-soul’d, offspring of Cœneus:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These then two score dark-hull’d good ships followed in order.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;James Inglis Cochrane (1867). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/homersiliadtrin00homegoog/page/n55/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Homer’s Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, p. 43&lt;/a&gt;. Edinburgh.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                                nor went alone Polypoites:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With him in joint command was Leonteus &lt;strong&gt;scion of Ares&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Even Coronus’ son the high-souled offspring of Caineus.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Forty the dark-hulled ships that sailed with these to command them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Smith Wright (1885). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/iliadhomer00wriggoog/page/n52/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad of Homer&lt;/em&gt;, p. 39&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Polypœtes was not sole in command, for with him was Leonteus, &lt;strong&gt;of the race of Mars&lt;/strong&gt;, who was son of Coronus, the son of Cæneus. And with these there came forty ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Butler (1898). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924026468417/page/n53/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad of Homer&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 35–36&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longmans, Green.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether Leonteus is literally descended from Ares, or whether his warlike prowess is such as to give him metaphorical kinship to the god of war, is not clear: we can read the phrase either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer frequently employs set phrases like “branch of Ares” that fit the rhythm of the poem (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactylic_hexameter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dactylic hexameter&lt;/a&gt;). In this rhythm, the fifth foot of the line is usually a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dactyl_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dactyl&lt;/a&gt; and the last foot nearly always a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochee&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spondee&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;spondee&lt;/a&gt;, so a phrase like “ὄζος Ἄρηος”, which scans as a dactyl and a spondee (“ōzŏs ă-|rēōs”), can be conveniently placed at the end of any line. Repeated phrases fitting the rhythm are known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithets_in_Homer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Homeric epithets&lt;/a&gt;, and are characteristic of orally transmitted poetry. In the quoted passage, “ὑπερθύμοιο” meaning “high-sprited, daring” is another such epithet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T14:04:27.190" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:04:27.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17442" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17439" CreationDate="2021-02-13T11:55:53.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;For comparison, see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad_(Murray)/Book_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Augustus Taber Murray's translation (1924)&lt;/a&gt;, which also mentions Ares:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[738] And they that held Argissa, and dwelt in Gyrtone, Orthe, and Elone, and the white city of Oloösson, these again had as leader Polypoetes, staunch in fight, son of Peirithous, whom immortal Zeus begat—even him whom glorious Hippodameia conceived to Peirithous on the day when he got him vengeance on the shaggy centaurs, and thrust them forth from Pelium, and drave them to the Aethices. Not alone was he, but with him was Leonteus, scion of Ares, the son of Caenus' son, Coronus, high of heart. And with them there followed forty black ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not every translation mentions Ares in this context. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad_of_Homer_(Buckley)/BOOK_THE_SECOND&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodore Alois Buckley's translation (1860)&lt;/a&gt; doesn't:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those who possessed Argissa, and inhabited Gyrtone, and Orthe, and Elone, and the white city Oloosson: these the stout warrior Polypœtes, son of Pirithous, whom immortal Jove begat, commanded. Him renowned Hippodamia brought forth by Pirithous, on the day when he took vengeance on the shaggy Centaurs, and drove them from Mount Pelion, and chased them to the Æthiceans. He was not the only leader; with him commanded warlike Leonteus, son of magnanimous Coronus, the son of Cœneus. With these forty dark ships followed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going further back in time, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Iliad_of_Homer_(Pope)/Book_2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Pope's translation (1715)&lt;/a&gt; does not mention Ares either:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thy troops, Argissa, Polypœtes leads,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Eleon, sheltered by Olympus' shades,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gyrtonè's warriors; and where Orthè lies,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Oloösson's chalky cliffs arise.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sprung from Pirithoüs of immortal race,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fruit of fair Hippodamè's embrace,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That day, when, hurled from Pelion's cloudy head,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To distant dens the shaggy Centaurs fled,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With Polypœtes joined in equal sway,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Leonteus leads, and forty ships obey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonteus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonteus&lt;/a&gt; is the name of several characters in Greek mythology. The Leonteus in the Iliad is one of the commanders of the Lapiths. One of the kings of the Lapiths was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ixion&lt;/a&gt;, who may have been the son of Ares (or of a certain Leonteus according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Julius_Hyginus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hyginus&lt;/a&gt;). &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapiths#List_of_Lapiths&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikpedia&lt;/a&gt; lists one other Lapith who may have been a son of Ares (or of the Titan &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iapetus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iapetus&lt;/a&gt;) namely Dryas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neither Leonteus's father &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronus_(mythology)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Coronus&lt;/a&gt; or his grandfather &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caeneus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Caeneus&lt;/a&gt; are said to be descended from Ares.&#xA;The reference to Ares is consistent with Ares promise to fight on the side of the Greeks during the Trojan war. (At least that is what he did at the start; he later switched to the Trojan side.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T20:49:56.210" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T20:49:56.210" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9040" CreationDate="2021-02-13T13:06:07.050" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the foreword (&amp;quot;Avant-propos&amp;quot;) to &lt;em&gt;La pensée indeterminée I. De la Renaissance au romantisme&lt;/em&gt;, the Belgian critic &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Poulet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Georges Poulet&lt;/a&gt; describes the goal of his three-volume work (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;L'ensemble de petites études que voici, consacrée à une assez longue série de penseurs et de poètes depuis l'avènement du christianisme jusqu'à nos jours, vise à mettre en valeur dans toutes ces pensées une inflexion négative, souvent presque imperceptible, mais extraordinairement efficace. Elle tend à montrer que, derrière les déterminations particulières, se dissimule &lt;strong&gt;quelque chose qui n'a pas de nom et qui est presque inexprimable. C'es la pensée indéterminée&lt;/strong&gt;. On la reconnaît, parfois facilement, par exemple dans la rêverie. Mais son domaine est infiniment plus vaste, et ne se contente pas d'abriter simplement les idées vagues, les sentiments indistincts, si fréquents dans une certaine poésie. A l'autre extrémité de la pensée indéterminée, il y a le silence intérieur, la prise de connaissance d'un moi indépendant et l'impression d'un pouvoir illimité, tenu en suspens, en attendant qu'il nous pousse dans telle direction ou dans telle autre. C'est ce suspens qui importe. Il jou un rôle inappréciablement important en retardant le moment inévitable où la pensée s'engagera, bon gré mal gré, à fonds perdu, en direction de quelque objet déterminé.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The collection of short studies presented here, devoted to a rather long series of thinkers and poets from the advent of christianity to the present day, aims to highlight in all these thoughts a negative shift, often almost imperceptible but extraordinarily effective. These studies tends to show that, behind the specific determination &lt;strong&gt;something is hiding which has no name and which is almost inexpressible. This is the indeterminate thought&lt;/strong&gt;. One can sometimes easily recognise it, for example in daydreams / reveries. But its realm is infinitely more vast and does not satisfy itself with simply sheltering the vague ideas or indistinct sentiments that are so common in a certain kind of poetry. On the other extreme of indeterminate thought, there is the inner silence, the realisation of a independent &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; and the impression of limitless power, kept in suspense and waiting until it pushes us in a certain direction. It is this suspense / being on hold that counts. It plays an incredibly important role by delaying the inevitable moment when thought commits itself, willingly or unwillingly, towards some determinate object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Indeterminate thought thus contrasts with determinate thoughts or explicit ideas, which are what history of literature usually discusses. According to Poulet, indeterminate thought is not limited to a few rare works but is present almost everywhere, behind the more obvious explicit thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T14:23:05.510" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:23:05.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4191" CreationDate="2021-02-13T13:50:26.457" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jeffrey Archer's novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_the_Crow_Flies_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;As the Crow Flies&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, originally published in 1991, fits the description fairly well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;a poor young man&amp;quot;: this is implicit in &amp;quot;one man's rise from rags to riches&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7201.As_the_Crow_Flies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;pushcart&amp;quot;: Wikipedia: &amp;quot;barrow costermonger&amp;quot; (i.e. a street merchant);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;son of Jewish immigrants&amp;quot;: Wikipedia mentions several Jewish characters but does not mention whether the main character is Jewish; neither do the descriptions by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/jeffrey-archer/as-the-crow-flies/9780330518697&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pan Macmillan&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7201.As_the_Crow_Flies&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; or on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/jeffrey-archer/as-the-crow-flies/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kirkus Reviews&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;become a prosperous businessman&amp;quot;: Charlie Trumper manages to build a business empire;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;first sexual experience&amp;quot;: ?;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;very much an 80's book&amp;quot;: &lt;em&gt;As the Crow Flies&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1991, which seems close enough, but the events span over sixty years, beginning before World War I.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T13:50:26.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:07:22.283" Score="3" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;Hans Christian Andersen was a nineteenth-century Danish writer who wrote fairy tales about various events. In his short fairy tale &amp;quot;What the Moon Saw&amp;quot;, in the part named &amp;quot;First Evening&amp;quot; he writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Last night”, I’m quoting the Moon’s own words, “I was gliding through the cloudless Indian sky. My face was mirrored in the waters of Ganges, and my beams strove ….&#xA;Forth from thicket tripped a Hindoo maid, light as gazelle, beautiful as Eve. Airy and and ethereal as a vision, and yet sharply defined amid the surrounding shadow, stood this daughter of Hindustan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the reason for Hans for specifically choosing India for this story? In the nineteenth century, the Dutch didn’t have any colonies in India; a few centuries ago they agreed with British on a deal and left India to take up Indonesia and some parts of Malay Archipelago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He even mentions a very little know custom of India:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She knew that if the lamp continued to burn so long as she could keep it in sight, her betrothed was still alive; but if the lamp was suddenly extinguished, he was dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He mentions one of the main Hindu Gods:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She thought only of Bramah and of her betrothed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for facts of how Andersen knew so much about India.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T09:22:14.090" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T09:22:14.090" Title="How did Hans Christian Andersen know so much about Indian culture and geography?" Tags="&lt;hans-christian-andersen&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17446" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:08:37.407" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;The plot of &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; involves more than 500 characters. More than 200 of them are real historical figures put to life on the pages of Tolstoy’s novel. The novel is set 60 years before Tolstoy's day, but he had spoken with people who lived through the 1812 French invasion of Russia. He read all the standard histories available in Russian and French about the Napoleonic Wars and had read letters, journals, autobiographies and biographies of Napoleon and other key players of that era.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Britannica has to say this on the general characteristics of an epic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An epic may deal with such various subjects as myths, heroic legends, histories, edifying religious tales, animal stories, or philosophical or moral theories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And according to my perspective Tolstoy’s &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; have almost all those subjects which are mentioned above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tolstoy said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is &amp;quot;not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, why is &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; not called an epic in the strict sense of literature? In what respects does it not qualify as an epic and why are  those merits only attributed to older works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T18:35:51.330" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T19:09:26.943" Title="Why is War and Peace not considered an epic?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17447" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:11:37.153" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pierre’s friend Andrei was shown to have great respect for Napoleon, as his view on historic events being the will of a few important people is embodied best by Napoleon. While lying wounded on the Austerlitz battlefield, Andrei meets Napoleon and realizes the true nature of his hero, who is excited by the carnage on the battlefield. For Pierre, Wikipedia writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His madcap escape into the city of Moscow and his subsequent obsessive belief that he is destined to be Napoleon’s assassin show his submission to irrational impulses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pierre and Andrei were friends, Andrei respected Napoleon (although he was an invader or bringer of democracy in Russia by means of war) but Pierre was so much against him. What exactly was Pierre’s mind when he wanted to be Napoleon’s assassin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T15:14:54.537" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:14:54.537" Title="Why did Pierre want to assassinate Napoleon?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;war-and-peace&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17448" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:14:08.863" Score="-2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I often hear people using the words “stanza” and “verse” interchangeably, the small quotes of The Holy Bible are also called verses, and even the non-chorus part of songs are also called verses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m in need of an explanation of the actual meaning of verse and what can be and what cannot be called a verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T15:15:18.683" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T12:21:12.240" Title="What is the actual meaning of verse?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:15:32.697" Score="3" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across this quote of T.S. Eliot&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are a large number of people… who believe that all ills are fundamentally economic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m craving to know Eliot’s view on it and for that I need to find the source and full quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T20:34:04.500" Title="Identify the source of this quote by T.S. Eliot" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17450" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:18:06.440" Score="0" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45146/to-a-skylark&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To a Skylark&lt;/a&gt;” discusses human nature as compared to the “blithe spirit”. Shelley all throughout the poem is sure that Skylark was in joy, he was not in dilemma as Wordsworth when he saw a highland lass and said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Will no one tell me what she sings?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For old, unhappy, far-off things.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Battles long ago:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is it some more humble lay,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Familiar matter of to-day?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Same natural sorrow, loss or pain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that has been, and may be again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shelley was so sure of Skylark’s happy song that he even that far as to say&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sound of vernal showers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On the twinkling grass,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rain-awaken’d flowers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All that ever was&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Joyous and clear and fresh thy music doth surpass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the poem progresses, Shelley starts to compare the human qualities with that of “blithe spirit”. And just a little later he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, if we could scorn&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hate and pride and fear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If we were things born&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not to shed a tear,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I know not how thy joy we ever should come near.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did Shelley want to scorn fear? What kind of fear does Shelley want to scorn?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T22:04:18.567" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T22:04:18.567" Title="What does Shelley mean by &quot;if we could scorn fear&quot; in &quot;To a Skylark&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17451" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:19:33.650" Score="0" ViewCount="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shelley was admiring the “profuse strains” of the “blithe spirit” and when he compares human songs with the skylark’s&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Waking or asleep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thou of death must deem&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Things more true and deep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Than we mortals dream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was of strong view that Skylark’s song was much better than any poet’s song ever, and not only this, humans are quite unable to sing like that. After few line he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above line is a kind of contradiction. This very song is one of the sweetest but it doesn’t tell of saddest thought. Some may argue that sadness is implicit in it as Shelley asserts that poets cannot produce a song of that much joyousness fraught in it. Was this contradiction deliberate?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T14:22:48.857" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:22:48.857" Title="Is &quot;Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought&quot; a deliberate contradiction by Shelley?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:20:34.683" Score="0" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The two funny characters, Stephano and Trinculo, in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, fight with each other when Ariel was speaking behind Trinculo when Caliban and Stephano were talking. I want to know what was the relation between Stephano and Trinculo? Was Stephano more powerful just in matter of bodily strength or was there something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Caliban was lying on the ground to save himself from the &lt;em&gt;torment&lt;/em&gt;, Trinculo hid himself with same cloth considering Caliban dead. But Trinculo recognized Stephano’s voice when he came and spoke to Caliban. How Trinculo and Stephano know each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:20:34.683" Title="What was the relation between Stephano and Trinculo?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17453" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:23:25.590" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shakespeare’s play &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt;, when Ferdinand was carrying up the logs, Miranda came up to him and tried to help him. They talked a little and then the conversation went as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ferdinand:&lt;/em&gt; What is your name?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Miranda:&lt;/em&gt;                                     Miranda. Oh my father,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;         I have broke your hest to say so!         (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/act-3-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.i.44–46&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was Miranda commanded not to tell her name to Ferdinand?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T10:48:59.147" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T10:54:04.347" Title="Why was Miranda prohibited from telling her name to Ferdinand in &quot;The Tempest&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-tempest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17454" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:24:46.980" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/ModMil.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Model Millionaire&lt;/a&gt; is a short story about a young man, named Hughie Erskin, who although does not have much money himself, is moved to pity by the sight of an elderly beggar who is posing as model for his artist friend. Although, he can barely afford to do so, the young man gives the beggar the largest denomination coin that he has in his pocket. The young man’s act of kindness earned him ten thousand pounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old beggar was Baron Hausberg, and it was him who sent Hughie the sum of ten thousand pounds. But at the last of story the Baron made this speech&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Millionaire models are rare enough but model millionaire are rarer still.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I really cannot understand what he wanted to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T01:24:07.303" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T01:35:01.180" Title="Understanding the last lines from Oscar Wilde’s The Model Millionaire" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;oscar-wilde&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17455" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:26:01.313" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;Norman McKinnel’s play &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bishopscandlesti00mckiiala&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bishop’s Candlesticks&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is an adaptation of volume one, book second, of Victor Hugo’s novel &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The play is based on the concept that no man is a born offender. It is the circumstances that force him to be so. Punishment or conviction is not the way to reform an offender or a convict. It is charity, faith, hope sympathy and forgiveness that are needed to regain the ‘lost soul’ in a man. In the play, the Bishop does the same with the Convict. But when the Bishop and the Convict were talking the conversation went like this (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bishopscandlesti00mckiiala/page/12/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 12&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CONVICT: D’you know what I am?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BISHOP: I think one who has suffered much&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;CONVICT: Suffered? Suffered? My God, yes. But that’s a long time ago. Ha! Ha! Ha! That was when I was a man. Now I’m not a man; now I’m a number: number 15,729 and I’ve lived in Hell for ten years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did the Convict mean by “now I’m a number: number 15,729”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T14:23:35.363" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T14:23:35.363" Title="What did the convict mean by “I’m a number: number 15,729” in &quot;The Bishop's Candlesticks&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;victor-hugo&gt;&lt;les-miserables&gt;&lt;norman-mckinnel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17457" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:28:53.387" Score="0" ViewCount="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;“The Silver Box” was a play produced by John Galsworthy in 1906 and it gained huge popularity. It is not about comedy, Livens dialogues shows so much of reality of how big shots keep judges in their pockets. It is a three act play, and the author called it “A Comedy in Three Acts”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Dear Departed” is a play, produced in 1908, in which the author, Stanley Houghton, satirizes the degradation of moral values in the British middle-class. In trying to grab the things belonging to grandfather the children completely disregard modesty, decency and filial obligation. This is one act play and the author calls it “A Comedy in One Act”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the authors gave the secondary names to these plays? Is there a relation between these two plays?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:28:53.387" Title="“The Dear Departed” is “A Comedy in One Act” and “The Silver Box” is “A Comedy in Three Acts”. Is there some relation?" Tags="&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;william-stanley-houghton&gt;&lt;the-dear-departed&gt;&lt;the-silver-box&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17458" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:30:09.477" Score="0" ViewCount="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Honore de Balzac’s masterpiece “Father Goriot” tells the story of a father who loves his two beautiful daughters as forms of God. The daughters, Delphine and Anastasie, didn’t ever truly cared for their father and all they wanted was money.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his play ‘’The Dear Departed”, Houghton satirizes the degradation of moral values in the British middle-class. In trying to grab the things belonging to grandfather the children completely disregard modesty, decency and filial obligation. The materialistic attitudes of Mrs. Slater and Mrs. Jordan come in for better criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seeing the similarity between the main theme of thee two works, can we say “The Dear Departed” was influenced by “Father Goriot”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T14:30:09.477" Title="Was “The Dear Departed” influenced by Balzac’s “Father Goriot”?" Tags="&lt;honore-de-balzac&gt;&lt;le-pere-goriot&gt;&lt;the-dear-departed&gt;&lt;william-stanley-houghton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17459" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:31:23.500" Score="-2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;The play &lt;em&gt;The Dear Departed&lt;/em&gt; (1908) by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Houghton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Stanley Houghton&lt;/a&gt; is about the essencelessness of love by the daughters for their old father. In the play, there is an old man named Abel who one day slept few hours more than usual to which his daughters, Mrs. Slater and Mrs. Jordan, thought him dead. They were dividing every inch of property when suddenly Abel walks down from his room and Victoria, Mrs. Slater’s ten years old daughter, exclaimed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh Grandpa, I’m so glad you’re not dead&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abel was astonished and asked who was dead; Mrs. Slater replied&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one you know, father. A relative of Ben’s”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ben was husband of Mrs. Jordan. Abel asked of what relation of Ben’s and Mrs. Slater said “His brother”. Ben jumped up and said to Mrs. Slater&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hang it, I never had one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does “Hang it” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T17:02:16.080" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T17:12:20.817" Title="What does the expression “Hang it” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-dear-departed&gt;&lt;william-stanley-houghton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-02-22T15:07:21.437" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17461" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:33:31.657" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a blog, which was shared to me on a virtual platform, where it was written that “XYZ called Shelley as ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel’”. I don’t remember who was that XYZ but that blog was quite reliable because the other profuse informations which in it were quite of intellectual level and hence the blogger wouldn’t just said anything and signed anybody’s name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why Shelley was called “beautiful and ineffectual angel”? The beautiful part could be understandable as his songs surpassed all the limits of beauty that were previously prevailing. But what the person meant by “ineffectual”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:04:56.093" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T00:49:08.380" Title="Who and for what called Shelley “beautiful and ineffectual angel”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17462" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:34:40.117" Score="1" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act IV, Scene I of &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Portia says to Shylock these lines (rendered in blank verses)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality of mercy is not strained&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;….&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His scepter shows the force of temporal power,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The attribute to awe and majesty,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But mercy is above the sceptred sway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the line “But mercy is above the sceptred sway” mean? Sceptre is a kind of long stick with cross at its ends, but its role in the line is quite hard to guess.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T15:28:20.050" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:42:55.720" Title="Meaning of “But mercy is above this sceptred sway” from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17464" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:40:15.670" Score="0" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sarojini Naidu was an Indian poetess. By chance I came upon one of her poems, which was titled &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/The-Soul%27s-Prayer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“The Soul’s Prayer”&lt;/a&gt;. The last stanza of the poem goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, bending from sevenfold height&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will teach thee of My quickening grace,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Life is a prism of My light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And death the shadow of My face&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The capital “m” in “My” shows that it was the Lord who spoke those words and even the last line made it quite clear. Prisms disperse white light into its constituent colors, and in some Hindu scriptures and Indian cultures, God is associated with light too (the divine light). I still can't fully comprehend the line “Life is a prism of My light”. What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T22:11:17.903" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T22:11:17.903" Title="Meaning of “Life is a prism of my light” in Sarojini Naidu’s poem “The Soul’s Prayer”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;sarojini-naidu&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17465" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:41:30.133" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maximillian Robespierre was one of the revolutionary of French Revolution of 1789, he was a lawyer (by profession) from Arras. Eugene De Rastignac was also moved to Madame Vaquer’s house in order to study Law. Maximillian Robespirre had sisters and a younger brother, so did Balzac’s Rastignac had two sisters and a younger brother.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is often said and was observed that Robespierre was not revolutionary from very childhood, after the death of their father and mother Maximillian became the head and responsible man of his family. It is said that he was a student who wanted to educate himself, he was once selected by the school to read the poem before King Louis XVI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rastignac was also a normal student who wanted to educate himself in the field of Law, he moved from country to Madame Vaquer’s apartment so that he could be near to Paris and be in good society for education.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rousseau and The Revolution changed Robespierre forever, he let himself to be changed and became what he or others could never even think of. Rastignac let himself to be changed by the flamboyant lifestyle of Paris, the thing to be noted over here is both were young. Rastignac after learning about the reality of Father Goriot became so much sympathetic and care some for him the way Robespierre became a Jacobin for the uplift-ment of the Third Estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Honore De Balzac mention the events of Revolution a few times in the novel, the way Father Goriot earned money and condition of Vautrine. I’m quite inclined that Rastignac was inspired from Robespierre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:09:10.500" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:09:10.500" Title="Was character of Eugene De Rastignac in Balzac’s Father Goriot inspired by Maximillian Robespierre?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;honore-de-balzac&gt;&lt;le-pere-goriot&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:43:13.057" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a grammar book in which the discussion was going on about whether to treat “none” as singular or plural, then the book gave this quote by T.S. Eliot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And observed that Eliot regarded “none” as singular. But the quote struck me; did Eliot really mean what he said? I’m looking for an analysis and full content of that quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T17:19:13.157" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T12:25:10.333" Title="What did Eliot mean when he said “I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a meaning”?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17467" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:44:28.343" Score="0" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a book on advanced English Grammar and among the various quotes this one caught my eye:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— E.M. Forster&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could a “chance word” mean? The whole quote is almost incomprehensible to me because I do not know the context of it, so I’m seeking for the source of this quote as well as its interpretation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T10:35:22.793" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T10:35:22.793" Title="What's the source of this E.M. Forster quote, and what did he mean by a “chance word”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;e-m-forster&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17469" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:46:52.433" Score="-2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m a big fan of P.G. Wodehouse, his novels have a very different way of humoring the readers and the narrative style is almost awesome. But his vocabulary and especially the conversational part of his books are quite uneasy to comprehend. It could be because he used many colloquial phrases of UK and his way of writing was very much English in its whole sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His opening lines are have strange adjectives and they always pose problems for me. I was reading &lt;em&gt;Thank You, Jeeves&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/thankyoujeeves0000wode/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;very first line of the book&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the meaning of &amp;quot;perturbed&amp;quot;, the one suitable here, is “Thrown into a state of agitated confusion”, okay so far but what does “shade perturbed” mean? &amp;quot;Shade&amp;quot; means relative darkness or some allusion to ghosts. And same matter is with “spot concerned”. Are these phrases common in the UK?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T00:33:01.637" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T00:33:01.637" Title="Meaning of &quot;shade perturbed&quot; in &quot;Thank You, Jeeves&quot; by P. G. Wodehouse?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;p-g-wodehouse&gt;&lt;thank-you-jeeves&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17470" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T14:48:10.303" Score="1" ViewCount="122" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;Thank You, Jeeves&lt;/em&gt; by P.G. Wodehouse, Bertie was telling Jeeves that he saw J. Washburn Stoker and his daughter Pauline along with Sir Roderick Glossop. To this Jeeves asked him if he entered into conversation with them but Bertie replies&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who, me? No, Jeeves. I was out of the room like a streak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does “I was out of the room like a streak” mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T16:21:34.663" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T08:49:42.710" Title="What does “out of the room like a streak” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;p-g-wodehouse&gt;&lt;thank-you-jeeves&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17474" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17449" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:06:30.290" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of the quote is one of the last paragraphs in T. S. Eliot's essay &amp;quot;Religion &amp;amp; Literature&amp;quot;, which was based on a lecture and published in the collection &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essaysancientmod0000elio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Essays Ancient and Modern&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1936.&#xA;On the page preceding the quote, Eliot says that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[what he believes] to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything else that we read must be tested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, most literature comes from people who are not Christians, so Christians need to remain &amp;quot;conscious of the gulf fixed between ourselves [i.e. Christian readers] and the greater part of contemporary literature&amp;quot; in order to be &amp;quot;protected from being harmed by it&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This then leads to the paragraph about the influence of economics (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;There are a very large number of people in the world to-day who believe that all ills are fundamentally economic&lt;/strong&gt;. Some believe that various specific economic changes alone would be enough to set the world right; other demand more or less drastic changes in the social as well, changes chiefly of two opposed types. These changes demanded, and in some places carried out, are alike in one respect, that they hold the assumptions of what I call Secularism: they concern themselves only with changes of a temporal, material, and external nature; they concern themselves with morals only of a collective nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the essay's final paragraph, Eliot rejects a morality that has no higher ideal than defining the relationship between the individual and the state or nation. Similarly, he objects to modern literature that &amp;quot;repudiates, or is wholly ignorant of, our most fundamental and important beliefs&amp;quot; and that encourages readers to focus narrowly on the here and now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T20:34:04.500" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T20:34:04.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17475" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:12:05.243" Score="0" ViewCount="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;The metrical feet like Iamb, Trochee and others are based on the sound made when someone utters those words, for example a trochee is a two-syllable metrical pattern in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable, e.g. :- “Garden”, “highway”. An Iamb which is the most common metrical foot is just opposite of trochee, it consists of an unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable, e.g. :- “Define”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the thing to notice is that who would have decided to pronounce “Define” like that, who came up with the rule to stress “De” and not to stress “fine” that much, I think it all boils down to how the native speakers evolved in speaking the English words. But when and how these things took this actual shape which we are using it now? Did Homer or Horace had something like this “stressed” and “unstressed” thing in their Latin?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:12:05.243" Title="Was metrical feet decided by the native English speakers?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;latin-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-14T21:05:40.290" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17437" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:12:33.177" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees found the photo itself, which answers your question about the meaning, but let's also clear up any doubt about grammatical ambiguity of the phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You asked whether &amp;quot;light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg&amp;quot; could mean either of the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is light between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is something between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg that light shows that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the latter meaning (2) were intended, then &amp;quot;shows&amp;quot; here would be used in a &lt;em&gt;transitive&lt;/em&gt; sense, in which case this verb would need an &lt;strong&gt;object&lt;/strong&gt;. For example, it might be &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;light shows &lt;strong&gt;grass&lt;/strong&gt; between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; or even &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;light shows &lt;strong&gt;a gap&lt;/strong&gt; between his tightly buttoned torso and his father’s leg&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, but in this case an extra noun (or pronoun or noun phrase) is required. Since there isn't one in the given sentence, &amp;quot;shows&amp;quot; must be used in the &lt;strong&gt;intransitive&lt;/strong&gt; sense, which brings us to the first meaning (1) among the two you suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/show&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Definition of show&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1: to cause or permit to be seen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;intransitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1a: to be or come in view&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:12:33.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:13:27.077" Score="0" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;Once I was writing a “Preface” for my friend’s college assignment book, I wanted to make it attractive so I thought of some quote related to prefaces of books. I consulted on an online forum and someone there said&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Write anything you like, mark it Mark Twain’s name and no one would object.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may say it was just his opinion but it’s not entirely true. People do have understanding that a quote by Mark Twain can’t be analyzed for its source. Why is that? Is it because Twain wrote about a large number of topics? Or is it because he was humorous and people have tendency to accept him easily?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T16:04:20.633" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T17:03:50.327" Title="Why do we say “write any quote and sign by Mark Twain’s name and no one would object”?" Tags="&lt;mark-twain&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17478" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:14:53.407" Score="1" ViewCount="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Malczewski&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antoni Malczewski&lt;/a&gt; was a Polish romantic poet, known for his only work, “a narrative poem of dire pessimism, Maria (1825). Wikipedia writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Maria&lt;/em&gt; was also influential on later Polish poets, especially Adam Mickiewicz, and on writer Joseph Conrad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Conrad was not a romantic writer I’m unable to digest that Antoni Malczewski’s work influenced him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T08:54:45.507" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T08:54:45.507" Title="In what way was Joseph Conrad influenced by Antoni Malczewski?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;joseph-conrad&gt;&lt;antoni-malczewski&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17479" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:17:23.713" Score="-1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade”'s last stanza is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When can their glory fade?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oh, the wild charge they made!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All the world wondered.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Honor the charge they made!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Honor the Light Brigade -.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Noble six hundred!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brigade means army, what would “Light Brigade” refer to? As the “l” is capital in “Light”, could to refer to something heavenly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:45:13.200" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:08:26.820" Title="What does “Honor the Light Brigade” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17480" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:19:59.030" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jude was in his Aunt’s room, he was a little heavy with his head due to Arabella’s leaving, and on a table he found a photo of a beautiful little girl. Upon inquiring with his Aunt, he came to know that she was his cousin, Susanna Bridehead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know only this much that Sue’ father and mother had to leave the village because of their marriage and they moved to London. Now, there are few things which are quite unclear: was Sue Jude’s paternal or maternal cousin? And who was Sue’s mother?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that Jude’s Aunt was Sue’s mother because Sue was not living with her, and Aunt’s last advice to Sue about marriage was not motherly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T11:21:16.040" Title="Who was Sue’s mother?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17481" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:21:14.963" Score="0" ViewCount="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Little Father Time was son of Jude Fawley and Arabella Donn in the novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Jude went to Donn’s for the first time, he met with Arabella on the first floor of the house. Arabella’s friends suggested her to compel Jude to marry her by getting pregnant. Arabella’s trick was the action of that idea only, she fakes the pregnancy and compelled Jude to marry her. But later it cam out that Arabella didn’t really get pregnant and that was just a foul trick to trap Jude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, much later in the novel Arabella informed Jude that she really got a child. When she got little Jude? As we know she left him just after the few weeks of their first marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:21:14.963" Title="When Little Father Time was actually born?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:22:37.257" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; was one of the most controversial novels of Thomas Hardy, and people even go as far as calling it “Jude the Obscene”. It’s quite a complex novel: we cannot simply say what actually caused the problems in Jude’s life (I don't like to call them problems but rather God’s doom); the seemingly strange nature of Sue is very evasive as the reader’s view on her changes drastically when she accepts Little Father Time as her and Jude’s son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read books which are divided into parts; one of the most exemplary examples could be &lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt;, but Thomas Hardy in his &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; adds some very little known quotes before starting each &lt;strong&gt;Part&lt;/strong&gt;. Before beginning the &lt;strong&gt;Part First&lt;/strong&gt; – “At MaryGreen” – he quotes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yea, many there be that have run out of their wits for women, and become servants for their sakes. Many also have perished, have erred, and sinned, for women… O ye men, how can it be but women should be strong, seeing they do thus? — Esdras&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And similarly, just to give one more example, before &lt;strong&gt;Part Fourth&lt;/strong&gt; – “At Shaston” – he quotes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee. — J. Milton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What could be the reason for Hardy to quote these things before every part? Is it just to give an introduction to the coming events? I doubt the reason could be that mundane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T01:04:26.490" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T01:04:26.490" Title="Why there are quotes before every part in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17483" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:23:46.923" Score="2" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have recently completed the novel &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Hardy and as always the title left me baffled. In the whole novel it was Sue who seems (if one just uses one's own viewpoint and judges her on the basis of the society she lives in) to be obscure; Jude was a fine plain man with all those characteristics which saints have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even Phillotson could be called obscure for once, since he wanted Sue but also wanted her pure and was quite strange when he let her go and even when he accepted her (again a deep analysis wouldn’t term as obscure). Arabella was one of the most straightforward creatures in the novel. How was Jude obscure? In what way he was obscure?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T13:05:32.627" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T13:18:14.240" Title="How was Jude obscure in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17484" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17510" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:24:55.520" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Martin Luther’s auspicious life on earth began in 1483 A.D. and he got salvation in the year 1546 A.D. John Milton’s scared life began in 1608 and he went to God’s abode in the year 1674 A.D.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know, Mr. Luther’s ideas were very much accepted and celebrated, as of evangelists themselves, in his own lifetime. Mr. Milton wrote his “On his being arrived at the age of twenty three” when he was 23 years old so the year would have been 1631, and that poem showed clearly the love of Milton for God. Mr. Luther’s “The 95 Theses” were found hanging in the year 1517. Now, what I conjecture is if Mr. Luther was accepted so much in his own life time then he would have been much more accepted after more than 100 years and even that in England. Mr. Milton loved God, Mr. Luther made teachings of Christ clearer, so what I think is that how Mr. Luther’s ideas could’ve affected those of Mr. Milton? Did Mr. Milton made any allusion to him directly or indirectly? All I can find is that Milton used the word &lt;em&gt;Protestant&lt;/em&gt; in a para (quoted by Thomas Hardy) which goes like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whoso prefers either Matrimony or other Ordinance before the Good of Man and the plain Exigence of Charity, let him profess Papist, or Protestant, what he will, he is no better than a Pharisee. — J. Milton&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:12:23.890" Title="Did John Milton ever mention Martin Luther directly or indirectly?" Tags="&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;martin-luther&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17485" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:26:24.963" Score="1" ViewCount="312" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is a speech of Polonius from Shakespeare’s &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, act 1, scene 3:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give every man thine ear; but very few thy voice:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Take each man’s censure: but reserve thy judgement:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Costly thy habits as thy purse can buy;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the &lt;strong&gt;apparel oft proclaims the man&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And they in France of the best rank and station&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are of a most select and generous chief in that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is meant by the phrase, “apparel oft proclaims the man”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:18:41.237" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:18:41.237" Title="Meaning of &quot;apparel oft proclaims the man&quot; in Shakespeare’s &quot;Hamlet&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17486" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:27:28.627" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Francis Bacon wrote formal essays and Joseph Addison wrote periodical essays. (Periodical essays refers to essays that are written to be published in a periodical publication.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The style of periodical essays is different from that of the formal essays of Bacon and Montaigne, which are almost philosophical. In Bacon the style is close-knit and aphoristic to match the concentration of thought. The journalistic essays are written in loose-knit, easy-paced and discursive style. Addressed to ordinary people, a periodical essay attempts a synthesis of experience, and allows of digression into whatever by-paths seem to answer the writer’s mood. On the other hand, formal essays are generally meant to be for professionals even though they consider the normal topics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the main aim of formal essays is to present one’s own thoughts on something as opposed to narration, can they be considered as part of literature?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T15:16:28.043" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T15:47:33.257" Title="Can formal essays be considered as a literature in strict sense?" Tags="&lt;definition-of-literature&gt;&lt;essays&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17487" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:28:36.043" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;Although Pliny the Younger is regarded as the first author of a ghost story,  I think these stories underwent a 360-degree turn during 19th century when Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde started writing humorous ghost stories. Charles Dickens’ many stories are quite humorous (it may or may not involve the ghost doing funny things exclusively) and Wilde’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Canterville_Ghost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Canterville Ghost&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; involves a very &lt;em&gt;weak&lt;/em&gt; kind of ghost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know how and when ghost stories started to become humorous rather than scary? Can it be answered the way Pliny the Younger is credited with ghost stories or Edgar Allan Poe is regarded to have started the detective stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T12:49:21.903" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T00:32:19.593" Title="Who was the first author of humorous ghost stories?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;genre&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17488" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:29:53.967" Score="0" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ever since I began reading Thomas Hardy the thing that quite struck me is his titles for his works. In the novel &lt;strong&gt;Far from the madding crowd&lt;/strong&gt; (usually called his first major literary success), Gabriel Oak (the main male character, I shouldn’t say it as the novel is too complex to say who is main and who is passive but in soft sense we can regard him as the main male character) fell in love with a proud beautiful woman named Bathsheba Everdene but Bathsheba never accepted him for marriage and went on her proud tour of captivating every men. Bathsheba saw that almost every men were infatuated with her except one middle-aged man named Boldwood whom she jested by sending a marriage proposal. The coming of Sergeant Troy and the tragedy of his lover Fanny and his death by Boldwood is outlined in the novel. The arrest of Boldwood finally made Bathsheba to marry Gabriel Oak. In the whole novel, the title seemed quite out of topic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, Wikipedia has to say a little about the title but what it says is not clear and not very helpful too. At one point wikipedia writes (for Thomas Gray’s Elegy)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Madding” here means “frenzied” or, actually, “maddening”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I thought really that madding would have meant the same.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it raises another question: What’s the relation between Gray’s Elegy and the story of Gabriel, Bathsheba, Boldwood, Troy and Fanny?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is actually &lt;em&gt;far&lt;/em&gt; among the Gabriel, Bathsheba, Boldwood, Troy and Fanny and from which crowd (madding?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T17:22:28.057" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T17:22:28.057" Title="Justification of the title of “Far from the madding crowd” by Thomas Hardy" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;far-from-the-madding-crowd&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-13T17:23:06.917" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17489" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:31:00.613" Score="1" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a book and there appears something like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A reader or auditor is at liberty to remain passive.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— Ezra Pound&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to understand the full meaning of this quote and want to know its source (the book or poem or essay where it has been said by Pound). My try at the meaning is: A reader can just read the idea, he is at liberty to believe or not to believe it but the writer has to believe something before writing it else he shall not be able to write it with full originality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The auditor part is completely dark for me. The word “passive” there have a very strong part to play, I think. I would appreciate a full analysis of this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T23:12:40.860" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:28:34.047" Title="Meaning and source of this quote by Ezra Pound" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;ezra-pound&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:32:39.117" Score="0" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a school book it is written&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dramatic Irony or Irony of situation&lt;/strong&gt;: It involves a situation in a play or story in which the audience knows the reality which the speaker or character is ignorant of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth and Hamlet abound in scenes which provide good examples of dramatic irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as my reading of Macbeth is concerned, I couldn’t find anything like “which the audience knows the reality which the character is ignorant of”. The scene where Macbeth hallucinates and sees Banquo sitting at the feast could be called “which the audience knows the reality ….” but it isn’t that ironical (because for me something is ironical if it involves the opposite of what is being said or expected) and Lady Macbeth and others quite aware of &lt;em&gt;reality&lt;/em&gt;. Can someone please explain what the book’s author had in mind when he made such a statement that Macbeth was a good example of dramatic irony?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:31:50.050" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:59:32.163" Title="Where is dramatic irony present in &quot;Macbeth&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17491" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:33:40.170" Score="-1" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Wordsworth’s poem &amp;quot;The Daffodils&amp;quot; contains the following lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For oft, when on my couch I lie,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In vacant or in pensive mood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They flash upon that inward eye&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which is bliss of solitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect that soul is called as “inward eye”. What does he mean by “inward eye”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T21:02:49.413" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:16:29.387" Title="What does “inward eye” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:34:50.330" Score="2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading a book and in that it was written&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare has used this poetic form (the blank verse) skillfully in his dramas because it is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, and can be adopted to various levels of discourse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A simple Google search showed me that blank verse can be composed in any meter and with any amount of feet per line. The four standard feet for blank verse are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;iamb&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;trochee&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;anapest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dactyl&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of these the iamb is generally the predominant foot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But how is it closest to the natural rhythms of English speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:23:25.493" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:23:25.493" Title="How blank verse is “closest to the natural rhythms of English speech”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-02-14T10:29:19.117" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17493" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:35:50.057" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;A while ago I got this quote on an online social platform:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humans have progressed so much, now they can even fly like a bird in the sky. The only thing remaining for the humans is to live with each other like humans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this quote was signed as Bernard Shaw. I’m not claiming the verbatim, but it was like that. I’m looking for the book in which Bernard Shaw said it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T01:56:37.910" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T00:09:06.603" Title="Source of a quote by Bernard Shaw about flying versus living with each other like humans" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:36:51.703" Score="0" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;Can Edgar Allan Poe’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46477/alone-56d2265f2667d&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alone&lt;/a&gt; be analyzed in the light of Existential Loneliness? The very first lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From childhood’s hour I have not been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As others were—I have not seen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As others saw—I could not bring&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My passions from a common spring—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems to suggest the very symptom of Existential Loneliness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Existential loneliness is the result of a broader separation related to the nature of existence and, in particular, a lack of meaning in life. An individual may be in the company of others but experience existential loneliness (Larsson et al., 2019)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although, it is hard to say whether these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My heart to joy at the same tone—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;were just for literary purpose or was he in fact in a &lt;em&gt;clinical&lt;/em&gt; loneliness?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T20:43:30.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T20:43:30.283" Title="Can Edgar Allan Poe’s Alone be analyzed in the light of Existential Loneliness?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-02-15T03:59:07.667" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17495" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:37:55.343" Score="2" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wussu.com/poems/alttb.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Brook&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Tennyson speaks about the journey of a small brook which later joins a mighty river. The poem is narrated in the first person by the small brook:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I come from haunts of coot and hern,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I make a sudden sally,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sparkle out among the fern,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To bicker down a valley.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was pondering why it is written in first person by the brook? What does this choice of narrative style add to the poem? Is there any reason, apart from the obvious one that it was simply Tennyson's style, for him to write like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T17:12:55.677" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:12:28.683" Title="Why did Tennyson write &quot;The Brook&quot; from the brook's first-person perspective?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17496" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:39:12.783" Score="0" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;strong&gt;A Lament&lt;/strong&gt; by P.B. Shelley goes like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O world! O Life! O Time!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On whose last steps I climb,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Trembling at that where I stood before;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When will return the glory of your prime?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more, —O never more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the day and night&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A joy has taken flight&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more — O never more!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Shelley wrote “A joy has taken flight” was he making allusions to the skylark whom he called a “blithe spirit”? In his ode “To a Skylark” he called the bird as very joyful and a source of joy for him quite a times. So, it is quite obvious to take that line literally, but if we take it as referring to the &lt;em&gt;blithe spirit&lt;/em&gt; the whole poem “A Lament” takes a new luster, but the question is: can we take it like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T02:01:30.163" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:18:51.537" Title="Is this line from Shelley’s A Lament an allusion to his Skylark?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;percy-bysshe-shelley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17498" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17462" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:42:55.720" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In order to understand &amp;quot;scepter&amp;quot;, one should first look at the few lines that have been left out (quoted from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/merchant.4.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MIT Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The throned monarch better than his crown;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Portia says that the quality of mercy is strongest (or has the strongest effect) in the mightiest and that it suits a king better than his crown. The lines that follow develop a contrast between temporal or earthly power and heavenly power. The theme of heavenly power has already been introduced by the words &amp;quot;[the quality of mercy] droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven&amp;quot;. The king's sceptre here represents earthly power and as something that can inspire &amp;quot;dread and fear&amp;quot;. To sway the sceptre means to wield power. In a worldview that sees God as above the king, mercy, coming from heaven, is almost literally above the king's earthly power, represented by the sceptre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T15:42:55.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17500" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:55:18.477" Score="0" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the essay “Dream Children: A Reverie” by Charles Lamb, the last few lines by the children read&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side - but John L (or James Elia) was gone for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was James Elia? Bartrum was the father of the children of Alice W—-n, and Charles was a rejected lover of Alice W—-n.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T00:57:41.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T00:57:41.003" Title="Who was James Elia?" Tags="&lt;essays&gt;&lt;charles-lamb&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17501" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:56:11.187" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 12th paragraph of “Dream Children: A Reverie,” written when Charles Lamb was 44 years old, we find:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I told how for seven long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W—-n&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why didn't Lamb write the original name? And was the name Alice W—-n inspired by something else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T08:31:44.073" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T08:31:44.073" Title="Why did Charles Lamb not preserve the real name of his lover?" Tags="&lt;essays&gt;&lt;charles-lamb&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T15:57:17.930" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the 9th paragraph (according to the version I’m reading) of Charles’ Lamb’s essay “Dream Children: A Reverie” it is written&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I told how, though their great-grandmother Field loved all her grand-children, yet in an especial manner she might be said to love their uncle, John L ---&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is ‘Lamb’ not written fully? Why three hyphens? Is it done by the publishers or the author himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T17:02:27.000" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T17:02:27.000" Title="Why did Charles Lamb write his brother’s name as John L---?" Tags="&lt;essays&gt;&lt;charles-lamb&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:01:09.220" Score="0" ViewCount="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Charles Lamb is famous as the Prince of English essayists. After studying for seven years at Christ’s Hospital, where he earned the friendship of Coleridge, Lamb obtained clerkship in South Sea House. But soon he left his job and joined the East India Company.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lamb’s life span was from 1775 unto 1834 and at that time the Company was mostly cruel with the people of East Indies, and as Lamb’s essays are mostly autobiographical I was thinking if inhumane nature of the Company affected his themes of writing and how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:01:09.220" Title="How does Charles Lamb’s working in East India Company affect his writing themes?" Tags="&lt;theme&gt;&lt;charles-lamb&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17507" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:03:22.257" Score="1" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Anna Karenina&lt;/em&gt;, the first novel of Count Leo Tolstoy is about the life of Anna (mainly) and her lover Vronsky (I know it is not possible to say what the novel is about but for this particular discussion we can assume that the novel is about Anna and Vronsky).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the earlier parts of novel (earlier means those early chapters when the readers don’t know for sure if Anna and Vronsky has fallen in love with each other) we, the readers, automatically take Vronsky as an immoral man, Why? Tolstoy never mentions the immoral side (if there existed any) of Vrosnky, we don’t find any history of debauchery or infidelity, all we find is that he is being compared to a hard working man, Levin. And he fell in love with a mother of child, Anna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:21:37.283" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T08:34:50.460" Title="Why do readers dislike Vronsky in the early part of the novel?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;leo-tolstoy&gt;&lt;anna-karenina&gt;&lt;reception&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17484" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:12:23.890" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Milton commented on Luther's influence on him (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1507549.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Opinion of Luther&lt;/a&gt;, quoting Milton's &lt;em&gt;An apology for Smectymnuus&lt;/em&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Milton confesses that he &amp;quot;had not examined through&amp;quot; Luther's works, and was certainly not deeply indebted to him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Milton mentions Luther by name several times in his works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://ir.ua.edu/bitstream/handle/123456789/3022/file_1.pdf?sequence=1&amp;amp;isAllowed=y&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reason, Republic, Regicide&lt;/a&gt;, in Milton's &lt;em&gt;The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the most significant addition to the second addition was the inclusion of extensive “testimonies” of Protestant divines, appended to the end of the work.&#xA;Ranging from Luther to Thomas Cartwright, the citations represent a broad swath of orthodox theology seemingly at odds with the radical proposals of the first edition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce&lt;/em&gt;, Milton quotes Jacobus Verheiden of Grave's opinions on Bucer and Luther. Other works in which Milton briefly mentions the name &lt;em&gt;Luther&lt;/em&gt; include &lt;em&gt;Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defence&lt;/em&gt;, and &lt;em&gt;in answer to Salmasius's Defence of the king&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All these examples can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/griswold-the-prose-works-of-john-milton-2-vols&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Prose Works of John Milton&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:12:23.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17455" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:15:34.377" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;, Jean Valjean spent nineteen years in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagne_of_Toulon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bagne de Toulon&lt;/a&gt;, a notorious prison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nineteen years. In October, 1815, he was released; he had entered there in 1796, for having&#xA;broken a pane of glass and taken a loaf of bread.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Victor Hugo (1862). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.55305/page/n37/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;, book 2, chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by Isabel Hapgood.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the prison he was referred to by his number, not by his name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At Toulon he was clothed in the red cassock. All that had constituted his life, even to his name, was effaced; he was no longer even Jean Valjean; he was number 24,601.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being stripped of one’s name is dehumanizing and degrading, and this is what makes the convict say, “I’m not a man”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why McKinnel changed “24,601” to “15729” and “nineteen” to “ten”, I find it hard to imagine. Perhaps McKinnel wanted to establish some distance from his source material? But I am not impressed with his dramatic choices. In every case his change from Hugo’s original reduces the dramatic impact. For example, in &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt;, Valjean does not steal the candlesticks, but rather “six sets of silver forks and spoons and a ladle”. Instead, the bishop &lt;em&gt;gives him&lt;/em&gt; the candlesticks in addition to the silverware that he stole—it is this act of supererogation, going above and beyond what was needed, that wins Valjean’s soul so that he “no longer belongs to evil, but to good.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:15:34.377" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17514" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17485" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:15:50.480" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Polonius advises his son to buy clothes (&amp;quot;habits&amp;quot;) which are as good as he can afford but to avoid buying clothes that are showy (&amp;quot;gaudy&amp;quot;). The phrase &amp;quot;the apparel oft proclaims the man&amp;quot; means that the type of clothes one wears tell a lot about the wearer; showy clothes may suggest that the wearer is a superficial type of person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Early Modern English, the verb &amp;quot;proclaim&amp;quot; could also mean &amp;quot;denounce&amp;quot;, as in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.1.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;, Act I, scene 1&lt;/a&gt; where Iago says about Othello:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Proclaim him in the streets; incense her kinsmen, (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The intransitive meaning of &amp;quot;proclaim&amp;quot; was &amp;quot;make a public announcement&amp;quot; (see C. T. Onions: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. Enlarged and Revised Throughout by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:15:50.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17515" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:16:21.710" Score="0" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poets of the Fall is a Finnish musical band who mainly releases the philosophical romantic songs. The song “Moonlight Kissed” was released on YouTube on 22nd September 2017. The song is marvellous and admirable both vocally and lyrically.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I don’t get the central meaning of the song. According to music video, Marko (the singer) is seen to be in a room with a girl and he is playing piano for her. After sometime, few men came with baseball bats and did all kinds of violence with Marko but doing nothing to the girl, this may suggest that they were girl’s kins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lyrics of the song seems to be saying something else, to be honest I don’t even understand what does “Moonlight Kissed” mean. As far as I could get, I think the lyrics say something about their happy moments,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summer’s scent still lingers in your hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But again I find it contradictory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a non-contradicting explanation of the video and the lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T11:34:13.923" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T11:34:13.923" Title="What’s the central meaning of song “Moonlight Kissed”?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;poets-of-the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:17:34.847" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poets of the Fall released their song &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Poets-of-the-fall-moonlight-kissed-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Moonlight Kissed”&lt;/a&gt; on 22nd September 2017 along with a video. However, the very first line of the song&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I see shadow and light stroking the mist&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is quite poetic and I’m unable to comprehend it fully. What does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T14:32:12.237" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T19:02:32.100" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;I see shadow and light stroking the mist&quot; from “Moonlight Kissed”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;poets-of-the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17517" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:18:40.327" Score="0" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;Poets of the Fall have this wonderful song named &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJqdp2xdk8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Illusion and dreams”&lt;/a&gt; and in the last verse they sing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So can you name your demon?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Understanding its scheming&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I raise my glass and say “Here’s to you”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those are some strange lines regarding the whole theme of the song. What they mean and how are they consistent with the central theme?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T17:21:11.420" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T17:21:11.420" Title="Meaning of “So can you name your demon? Understanding its scheming”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;poets-of-the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17518" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:19:46.427" Score="1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqJqdp2xdk8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Illusion and Dreams”&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Poets-of-the-fall-illusion-and-dream-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyrics&lt;/a&gt;), by Poets of the Fall, has these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stone will not need you to guess if,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You’re still going to drown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the above lines in the context of the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T21:46:04.237" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T05:32:42.153" Title="What does &quot;A stone will not need you to guess if, / You’re still going to drown.&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;poets-of-the-fall&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17519" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:21:03.423" Score="0" ViewCount="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act II of G. B. Shaw's play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;, when Paul sees Bluntschli through the library window he at once asks him to stay with him and Sergius, who also seems to be acquainted with Bluntschli. How do they know him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:14:29.253" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:14:29.253" Title="How did Paul and Sergius know Bluntschli?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:22:32.347" Score="1" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;‘After Apple-Picking’&lt;/a&gt;, collected in &lt;em&gt;North of Boston&lt;/em&gt; (1914), is a well-known poem on man’s encounter with the natural world, probing the dilemma of his existence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first two lines of the poem are&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Towards heaven still,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do those lines contain a biblical reference? Are they related to some particular verse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T16:10:13.913" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T20:26:01.933" Title="Do the opening lines of Frost’s poem “After Apple-Picking” contain a biblical reference?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17521" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:24:22.493" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m hoping someone will be able to tell me the name of a Alfred Hitchcock story I read part of a long long time ago.&#xA;It was about a guy who would see movement out of the corner of his eye, but when he looked there was nothing there. Spoiler alert: It tuned out he was seeing creatures. I don’t remember the name of the the creatures, but I’m sure their name started with a P.&#xA;That’s all I can remember.&#xA;I hope someone can tell me the name of this story so I can finish it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:55:19.630" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:55:19.630" Title="Alfred Hitchcock story with a man seeing creatures out of the corner of his eye" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;alfred-hitchcock&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17522" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:25:37.043" Score="2" ViewCount="94" Body="&lt;p&gt;I've started reading &lt;em&gt;The Grapes of Wrath&lt;/em&gt; and I've run into some old-time phrases that I'm not sure of the meaning. I suppose these must date from the 1920s-1940s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My dogs was pooped out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From context I take it to mean his feet are tired from walking, but I'm curious as to the origin of this phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He just done it for ducks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean he's doing it for show?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wasn't puttin' on no dog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No idea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is anyone familiar with these? Were they actually real phrases, or turns of phrase invented by Steinbeck?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T16:30:45.520" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T11:57:22.817" Title="Meaning of some phrases in The Grapes of Wrath" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-steinbeck&gt;&lt;the-grapes-of-wrath&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17523" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:26:53.853" Score="0" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m having a lot of trouble comprehending one particular line from &lt;em&gt;The Shadow Over Innsmouth&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second sentence just does not compute for me. Can anyone clarify?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T05:31:58.767" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T07:05:20.580" Title="Clarifying a line from “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-p-lovecraft&gt;&lt;the-shadow-over-innsmouth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:27:58.777" Score="0" ViewCount="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Raina went upstairs, Sergius started flirting with the maid, Louka. When Sergius was just about to kiss her, she said (no verbatim claimed) that Raina might be doing the same thing behind him what he is doing behind her. After hearing that, Sergius at once got changed and didn’t kiss Louka. What happened? How those words affected him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:27:58.777" Title="Why didn’t Sergius kiss Louka?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17525" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:29:17.277" Score="0" ViewCount="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shaw's play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt; Raina iss informed that there will be shootings on the street and she should close all doors and windows. She leaves the main balcony window unlocked and suddenly a Serbian/Swiss soldier (Bluntschli) comes in. In fact he was seen by the Bulgarian/Russian soldiers and they come into Raina’s room searching for him. Raina for some reason hides Bluntschli but forgets about his pistol. Louka, Raina’s maid, sees the pistol but doesn’t say anything to anybody. Why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:12:49.723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:12:49.723" Title="Why does Louka not inform anyone when she sees the pistol in Raina’s room?" Tags="&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17526" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:30:22.293" Score="2" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;Anton Chekhov was a famous Russian short story writer and dramatist. Early in his career, he mastered the form of the one-act play and produced several masterpieces of this genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember I borrowed a book from one of my friends (it was a miscellaneous book of proses and poetries) and in that book it was written something like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He [Anton Chekhov] was the earliest to use the stream-of-consciousness technique in his works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know if it true. Is it possible in literature to attribute someone as ‘the earliest’ of some technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T23:41:49.750" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T00:30:54.647" Title="Was Anton Chekhov the earliest to use stream-of-consciousness technique in his works?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;anton-chekhov&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17527" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:32:08.713" Score="1" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51001/lines-written-in-early-spring&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Lines Written in the Early Spring”&lt;/a&gt; is English Romantic poet William Wordsworth’s meditation on the harmony of nature and on humanity’s failure to follow nature’s peaceful example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in the very first stanza, the following lines occur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;bring sad thoughts to the mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T16:25:47.430" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:48:11.660" Title="How can pleasant thoughts bring sad thoughts to the mind?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17528" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:33:15.980" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/prayer-my-daughter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“A Prayer for My Daughter”&lt;/a&gt; is a poem written by W.B. Yeats on the birth of his daughter. One of the themes of the poem is contrasting the future he desires for his daughter with the life of Maud Gonne, his lover. In the last stanza these lines occur&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How but in custom and in ceremony&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are innocence and beauty born?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain these lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T15:09:45.483" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T15:09:45.483" Title="Comprehending “how but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17529" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:34:18.930" Score="1" ViewCount="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;The Mayor of Casterbridge&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Hardy, Michael Henchard auctioned his wife in a bar and sold her to a sailor named Newson for five guineas along with his infant daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as critics are concerned, Henchard sold his wife because he got drunk and lost control of himself. But it seems quite too much to sell one’s wife just by drinking spirits. Hardy didn’t tell us about the psychopathical conditions of Henchard, so we cannot deduce how much his conscience got weakened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Hardy want to tell us about human nature by that act of Henchard? Did he want to tell us that humans can get as ugly as they want and weakening the conscience is gradual but attainable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T17:51:19.130" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T17:51:19.130" Title="Did Henchard sell his wife in &quot;The Mayor of Casterbridge&quot; only because he was drunk?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;the-mayor-of-casterbridge&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17530" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:35:32.170" Score="0" ViewCount="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel ‘The Sword and the Distaff” by William Gilmore Simms and Joseph De Maistre, this line occurs&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The brow of Colonel Moncrieff clouded as he read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As far as I know it is the eyes that do get cloudy, but how the brows? What’s the meaning behind that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:35:32.170" Title="How can brows get clouded?" Tags="&lt;william-gilmore-simms&gt;&lt;the-sword-and-the-distaff&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-14T10:27:07.677" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17469" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:35:51.987" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Both &amp;quot;shade&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;spot&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;a little bit&amp;quot; here&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: you appear to have quoted the passage slightly incorrectly here. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16241200-thank-you-jeeves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; preview has the opening lines as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was a shade perturbed. Nothing to signify, really, but still just a spot concerned&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sentence is using colliquial meanings of &amp;quot;shade&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;spot&amp;quot;. For &amp;quot;shade&amp;quot;, I'll quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/shade?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;, definition 14:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a little bit; touch, especially of something that may change the color of or lighten or darken something else&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being &amp;quot;perturbed&amp;quot; is a metaphorical darkening of one's mood. Using this defintion, &amp;quot;a shade perturbed&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;a little bit perturbed&amp;quot;. (I'm not sure if the colliquial sense would still work without the &amp;quot;a&amp;quot;) Some more synonyms would be &amp;quot;slightly pertubed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a touch perturbed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &amp;quot;spot&amp;quot;, I'll quote &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, defintion 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a small quantity or amount&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being &amp;quot;a spot concerned&amp;quot;, then, is being &amp;quot;a little concerned&amp;quot;. Again, some synonyms would be &amp;quot;slightly concerned&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;a touch concerned&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bringing this all together, here's the opening lines with English that may be more familiar to you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was slightly troubled. Nothing important, really, but still just a little concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I replaced &amp;quot;pertubed&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;to signify&amp;quot; as well, just to make the English a bit easier) I'm not sure if these are British-isms, but they made perfect sense to me, an American with English as her first language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:45:06.157" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:45:06.157" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17532" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:36:45.613" Score="0" ViewCount="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Frost stopped by a wood on a snowy evening and thought whose woods they were, he thought he knew, the owner lives in his village. Then in the poem he talks about how the woods look with snow on them and their dark color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then suddenly he remembered that he had miles to go before he could go to sleep, I wonder why he stopped by the woods? I mean why he set up his poem like that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:56:01.360" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:56:01.360" Title="Did Robert Frost stop to see the beauty of woods or for some philosophical thinking?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-frost&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-13T16:56:06.370" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17533" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:38:23.193" Score="-2" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Keats, in his ode &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To Autumn&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is the close bosom-friend of the maturing sun?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T17:27:21.530" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:24:35.960" Title="Who is “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17535" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:41:53.037" Score="1" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Keats, in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.91859/page/n11/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface to &lt;em&gt;Endymion&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Knowing within myself the manner in which this poem has been produced, it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did he express regret in the very first lines of the book? What was the reason for his regret?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T16:45:45.787" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:25:08.560" Title="What did Keats mean by “it is not without a feeling of regret that I make it public” in his preface to &quot;Endymion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;endymion&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17537" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:46:50.523" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the novel &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; by Thomas Hardy, Sue was broken after the death of her children. She went to their graves and wept even on the insistence of Jude to go back to the lodge. Jude was broken too, but he understood that he had to care for Sue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after these events Jude thought that he could now live with Sue with the sorrow of his and her dead children but Sue had some other moral and religious principles in her mind. She decided to leave Jude [to die?] and to have a full marital relation with Phillotson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is what were her thoughts behind leaving Jude and living with Phillotson again? Did she think that that way will provide her some consolation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T05:59:43.243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T05:59:43.243" Title="Why did Sue want to go back to Phillotson?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17538" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:47:55.100" Score="1" ViewCount="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Jude Fawley was living in Marygreen and went to Chirstminster, Christminster was a place of wisdom for him and due to some other details we infer that Hardy’s Chrisminster was intact Oxford.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far From the Madding Crowd is set is Wessex, an imaginary city in Southwest England. The Mayor of Casterbridge is set in rural England named Casterbridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the fictional lands and their fictional names?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T16:47:55.100" Title="Why Thomas Hardy set up his novels in cities of imaginary names?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ClosedDate="2021-02-13T16:54:10.537" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17539" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:49:44.187" Score="2" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem ‘Gerontion’ by T.S. Eliot is about an old man and his life. The very first lines if the poem are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here I am, an old man in a dry month,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They show  clearly that the narrator of the poem is the old man himself. In some of the well-known poems of T. S.  Eliot it is unclear about who the speaker is, but in this poem it is very clear and above all in first person. Is there a particular reason why Eliot did this? How does it affect the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:09:06.590" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:09:06.590" Title="How is the poem “Gerontion” affected by being told in the first person?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;t-s-eliot&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:51:06.687" Score="0" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading A.G. Gardiner’s &lt;em&gt;On Umbrella Morals&lt;/em&gt; and in the second paragraph occurs these lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact he is a thoroughly honest man who allows his honesty the benefit of the doubt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want an explanation of the above lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:21:09.827" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:39:15.297" Title="What does “who allows his honesty the benefit of the doubt” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;a-g-gardiner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:52:13.903" Score="5" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Canto XI of Lord Byron’s magnificent work &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt;, romantic poet Keats is mentioned as a poet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;who was kill’d off by one critique.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why he was referred to like that? And which critique was it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T04:21:39.350" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T04:21:39.350" Title="Why was John Keats called a poet “who was kill’d off by one critique”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;don-juan&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17542" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:53:19.153" Score="0" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was listening to Franz Schubert’s musical concert of &amp;quot;Erlkönig&amp;quot;, and the music was perfect. The lyrics were quite plain and simple, but why is it so famous? I read the poem, heard Schubert and to me it seems to be meant for children, but that contradicts my thoughts that such a fine piece of music was developed for a children’s poem and also the event of ‘death’ is generally omitted in children’s poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some hidden depth in ‘Erlkönig’? If yes, then present its central summary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T22:23:47.023" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T22:23:47.023" Title="What is the central summary of &quot;Erlkönig&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;johann-wolfgang-von-goethe&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17543" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:54:26.133" Score="1" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;George Bernard Shaw, in Act I of his play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;, gives this introduction of Catherine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catherine Petkoff, a woman over forty, imperiously energetic with magnificent black hair and eyes, who might be a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer, but is determined to be a Viennese lady, and to do that wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What’s the meaning of “a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer”? Is it a compliment or a joke on her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:47:26.430" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T17:15:06.103" Title="Meaning of “a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer”" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17544" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:55:28.657" Score="2" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Act III of G. B. Shaw's play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt; everyone gets to know each other’s doings. Louka got engaged to Sergius, and Catherine agreed with Bluntschli’s and Raina’s relationship. But then Bluntschli spoke these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why, look at our ages! I’m thirty four. I don’t suppose the young lady is much over seventeen. All that adventure which was life or death to me, was only a schoolgirl’s game to her chocolate creams and hide and seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did he mean from “All the adventure which was…”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T22:21:46.767" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T01:39:51.610" Title="What’s the meaning of these lines spoken by Bluntschli?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17545" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:56:31.597" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;The title of Bernard Shaw’s &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt; is a reference to Virgil’s work, but why the reference? What similarity do they have?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title seems quite consistent if it is seen through the events of play: the play involves dialogues about wars, Raina’s father himself was a Major and her fiancé was an eminent soldier. So, that much accounts for the word “Arms” and as Bluntschli was the major cause of all upheavals caused in the house, so, maybe “the man” part would have been put for him. Is this explanation correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T22:00:45.743" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T22:00:45.743" Title="Justifying the title of Shaw’s play “Arms and the Man”" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17546" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17646" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:57:58.763" Score="4" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a short story but can't remember the name of the story or author. It is about alien/robotic beings that have been hunted to the edge of extinction because they are an exceptional fuel source. Fairly certain the hunters are us (humans), though they hardly appear in the story.  However their fuel is both how the beings communicate and their life force. They only say “toot toot” to each other. And it means I love you, but also anything else you could really say when all you can say is &amp;quot;toot toot&amp;quot;. It’s a story about the last two (or few) in the species and how they want very badly to say “toot toot” but are afraid. I believe it is written either from the POV of the beings/aliens/robots or from third person impersonal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm fairly certain I read this in a school text book in the 90s or early 2000s, but if could have also been an anthology of sci-fi stories. It might have been in a Ben Bova anthology or a Year's Best Science-Fiction and Fantasy if it wasn't a text book. I have found at least 1 other person who remembers the story, but can't recall the author or the name either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though it’s got Sci-Fi elements it had a very speculative fiction feel. It had a style similar to Harlan Ellison, but I don’t think it was him. I have a vague recollection that it might have been written by a women (but I'm definitely not sure on that).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Disclaimer, I probably have some details wrong. So the word &amp;quot;toot-toot&amp;quot; might be a little different but the major elements will likely be the same (I have an excellent memory for fiction).  I have already tried googling &amp;quot;toot-toot&amp;quot; and any basic combo you might try and also looking at best of lists etc.  I also tried to crowd source it through my friend group which includes many intense sci-fi readers and even some well known editors.  So there is a possibility this could be more on the literary end of things and less known in sci-fi circles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can anyone help? I feel like someone else has to have read it and will rememeber the name or author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12108" LastEditorUserId="12108" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T17:03:04.377" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T11:30:31.207" Title="Robot Beings who are hunted for fuel who say &quot;Toot Toot&quot; to each other" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T16:58:12.267" Score="1" ViewCount="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Shaw's play &lt;em&gt;Arms and the Man&lt;/em&gt;, Louka, Raina’s maid, had somewhat bitter feelings for her mistress Raina. Why? From the first Act the dialogues of Louka do show her resentment (although it is subtle) for her. It’s my personal observation that in the whole play Raina never treated Louka badly unless she started it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to know the psychological reason of the hatred of Louka for Raina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:06:05.580" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:06:05.580" Title="Why did Louka despise Raina from the very beginning of Shaws Arms and the Man?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;george-bernard-shaw&gt;&lt;arms-and-the-man&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17548" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T17:03:43.877" Score="0" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was reading William Butler Yeats's “A Prayer for My Daughter”. The book which I was reading had a box named “Aid to Comprehend the poem” and in that box were written these lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem [A Prayer for My Daughter] was written soon after the birth of his [W.B. Yeats's] first daughter Annie, is to be read in the background of his poem “The Second Coming” which the poet had composed a month before the birth of his first daughter, on February 26 1919&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to understand how the two poems are related to each other and how the latter forms the background for the former.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8723" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T10:58:32.607" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T10:58:32.607" Title="How does “The Second Coming” form the background for “A Prayer for My Daughter”?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;william-butler-yeats&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17541" CreationDate="2021-02-13T17:17:34.287" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Shelley wrote, in his &lt;a href=&quot;http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=36385&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;em&gt;Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats&lt;/em&gt;, that the critique directed against Keats's poem &lt;em&gt;Endymion&lt;/em&gt; was enough to bring about his sudden death at the age of 25:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The genius of the lamented person to whose memory I have dedicated these unworthy verses, was not less delicate and fragile than it was beautiful; and where cankerworms abound, what wonder, if it's young flower was blighted in the bud? The savage criticism on his Endymion, which appeared in the Quarterly Review, produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgments from more candid critics, of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wantonly inflicted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be well said, that these wretched men know not what they do. They scatter their insults and their slanders without heed as to whether the poisoned shaft lights on a heart made callous by many blows, or one, like Keats's composed of more penetrable stuff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found reference to this in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/27939384?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;George M. Rosa, &amp;quot;Stendhal et Keats&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Romanische Forschungen&lt;/em&gt; 97(1) (1985), pp. 47-49&lt;/a&gt;, a journal article in French, which also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron, qui avait été averti de la perte de Keats par Shelley lui-même, mit en vers le jugement de celui-ci sur la cause de cette perte dans l'onzieme chant de &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt; (chant publié en août 1823)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Byron, who had been informed of Keats's death by Shelley himself, set in verse the latter's judgment on the cause of said death in the eleventh canto of &lt;em&gt;Don Juan&lt;/em&gt; (canto published in August 1823)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(translation mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T17:17:34.287" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17550" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17467" CreationDate="2021-02-13T17:21:46.167" Score="3" Body="&lt;h3&gt;A &amp;quot;chance word&amp;quot; is something heard by luck or happenstance&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's look at two definitions from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chance&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Defintion 1a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;something that happens unpredictably without discernible human intention or observable cause&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then a definition of &amp;quot;by chance&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in the haphazard course of events&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here's a third defintion, this time the 2a one for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/word&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;word&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a brief remark or conversation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting these together, a &amp;quot;chance word&amp;quot; is a &amp;quot;brief remark&amp;quot; heard by chance, or &amp;quot;unpredicatably&amp;quot;, without &amp;quot;intention or observable cause&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Imagine just walking around randomly, and you hear someone saying &amp;quot;I love puppies&amp;quot;. There was no intention for you to hear this; it was heard unpredicatably. It was a &amp;quot;brief remark&amp;quot;. Therefore this was a &amp;quot;chance word&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote can therefore be reworded as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A brief remark hear unpredicatably or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder. — E.M. Forster&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a quick Google (&lt;code&gt;a chance word or a sigh e.m. forster&lt;/code&gt;) I found &lt;a href=&quot;https://longreads.com/2015/02/13/e-m-forster-on-the-novel-and-why-aristotle-was-wrong-about-character/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt; with a fuller version of the quote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Character,” says Aristotle, gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse.” We have already decided that Aristotle is wrong and now we must face the consequences of disagreeing with him. “All human happiness and misery,” says Aristotle, “take the form of action.” We know better. We believe that happiness and misery exist in the secret life, which each of us leads privately and to which (in his characters) the novelist has access. And by the secret life we mean the life for which there is no external evidence, not, as is vulgarly supposed, that which is revealed by a chance word or sigh. A chance word or sigh are just as much evidence as a speech or a murder: the life they reveal ceases to be secret and enters the realm of action.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They cite his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/18373675-aspects-of-the-novel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aspects of the Novel&lt;/a&gt;. Now with a fuller context we can understand the quote better. Here &amp;quot;action&amp;quot; means actions taken in the world, which others can see. This contrasts the &amp;quot;secret life&amp;quot; which is internal to a character. Random words or body language (&amp;quot;a sigh&amp;quot;) can move this internal life into the external realm. They're &amp;quot;just as much evidence&amp;quot; as a more obvious external action, such as a &amp;quot;murder&amp;quot;, when it comes to developing character. So when demonstrating to a reader what a character is like (moving the secret, internal life into the external world), random words and body language are as effective as more obvious external actions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T17:21:46.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17480" CreationDate="2021-02-13T17:51:26.650" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Jude's father and Sue's mother were siblings. The Aunt who raised Jude was his maiden great-aunt.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's easy to miss, but the very first mention of Sue, long before she became a major character, was way back in Chapter 2 when Jude's Aunt Drusilla mentioned her as his cousin:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I’m sure he couldn’t ha’ took a better one. The boy is crazy for books, that he is. It runs in our family rather. His cousin Sue is just the same—so I’ve heard; but I have not seen the child for years, though she was born in this place, within these four walls, as it happened. My niece and her husband, after they were married, didn’ get a house of their own for some year or more; and then they only had one till—Well, I won’t go into that. Jude, my child, don’t you ever marry. ’Tisn’t for the Fawleys to take that step any more. She, their only one, was like a child o’ my own, Belinda, till the split come! Ah, that a little maid should know such changes!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;My niece and her husband&amp;quot; suggests that Sue's mother is the one who was a blood relative to Jude and Drusilla. In Chapter 11, we get a little more information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Going to ill-use me on principle, as your father ill-used your mother, and your father’s sister ill-used her husband?” she asked. “All you be a queer lot as husbands and wives!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Aunt—did my father ill-use my mother, and my aunt her husband?” said Jude abruptly, sitting down by the fire.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“It was the same with your father’s sister. Her husband offended her, and she so disliked living with him afterwards that she went away to London with her little maid. The Fawleys were not made for wedlock: it never seemed to sit well upon us. There’s sommat in our blood that won’t take kindly to the notion of being bound to do what we do readily enough if not bound. That’s why you ought to have hearkened to me, and not ha’ married.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sue is, presumably, &amp;quot;her little maid&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, Aunt Drusilla is referred to as a &amp;quot;maiden aunt&amp;quot;, and also as his &amp;quot;great-aunt&amp;quot; and as an aunt to both him and Sue. She is presumably the sister of one of Jude and Sue's shared grandparents, and certainly not the mother of either Jude or Sue, although Sue was born in the house where she lived, since her parents weren't able to get a house of their own at that time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T11:21:16.040" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T11:21:16.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17466" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:10:39.233" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The source of the quote is Eliot's &lt;a href=&quot;https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6714376M/Shakespeare_and_the_stoicism_of_Seneca.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca&lt;/a&gt;, an address to the Shakespeare Association in 1927 that was reprinted in the collection &lt;em&gt;Selected Essays (1917-1932)&lt;/em&gt; (Faber and Faber, 1932).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The address begins by discussing various studies of Shakespeare's work by critics such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Middleton_Murry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Middleton Murry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyndham_Lewis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wyndham Lewis&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, 1927) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_Strachey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lytton Strachey&lt;/a&gt;. Some studies or essays tried to identify influences on Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have had Shakespeare explained by a variety of influences. He is explained by Montaigne, and by Machiavelli. I imagine that Mr. Strachey would explain Shakespeare by Montaigne, though this would also be Mr. Strachey's Montaigne (for all of Mr. Strachey's favourite figures have a strong Strachey physiognomy) and not Mr. Robertson's. I think Mr. Lewis, in the intensely interesting book mentioned, has done a real service in calling attention to the importance of Machiavelli in Elizabethan England, though this Machiavelli be only the Machiavelli of the &lt;em&gt;Contre-Machiavel&lt;/em&gt;, and not in the least the real Machiavelli, a person whom Elizabethan England was as incapable of understanding as Georgian England, or any England, is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Machiavelli's &lt;em&gt;The Prince&lt;/em&gt; was banned in Elizabethan England but Elizabethans knew the gist of his works, or at least what they thought was the gist of his works, from other sources.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot does not believe that Shakespeare was &amp;quot;influenced&amp;quot; by Machiavelli's works; instead, he says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Shakespeare, and other dramatists, used the popular Machiavellian idea, for stage purposes; but this idea was not more like Machiavelli, who was an Italian and a Roman Christian, than Mr. Shaw's idea of Nietzsche—whatever that is—is like the real Nietzsche.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot than makes the following suggestion:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I propose a Shakespeare under the influence of the stoicism of Seneca. But I do not believe that Shakespeare was under the influence of Seneca.  I propose it largely because I believe that after the Montaigne Shakespeare (not that Montaigne had any philosophy whatever) and after the Machiavelli Shakespeare, a stoical or Senecan Shakespeare is almost certain to be produced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot believes that Shakespeare may have read some of Seneca's tragedies at school but not his prose, so if Shakespeare was influenced by Seneca, it was probably through memories from school and the works of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Peele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George Peele&lt;/a&gt; (1556 – 1596) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kyd&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Kyd&lt;/a&gt;. Eliot then goes on to discuss how Shakespeare's play display a new attitude that is &amp;quot;derived from Seneca&amp;quot; even though it is &amp;quot;not the attitude of Seneca&amp;quot;, namely &amp;quot;the attitude of self-dramatization assumed by some of Shakespeare's heroes at moments of tragic intensity&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliot then expresses disagreement with critics such as Wyndham Lewis who see Shakespeare as representing a specific philosophy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I cannot see in Shakespeare either a deliberate scepticism, as of Montaigne, or a deliberate cynicism, as of Machiavelli, or a deliberate resignation, as of Seneca. I can see that he &lt;em&gt;used&lt;/em&gt; all of these things, for dramatic ends: you get perhaps more Montaigne in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, and more Machiavelli in &lt;em&gt;Othello&lt;/em&gt;, and more Seneca in &lt;em&gt;Lear&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lewis sees Shakespeare and Chapman as dramatists who think. Eliot disagrees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet who 'thinks' is merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought. But he is not necessarily interested in the thought itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyndham Lewis wrote, &amp;quot;We posses a great deal of evidence as to what Shakespeare thought of military glory and martial events.&amp;quot; Eliot responds (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do we? Or rather, did Shakespeare think anything at all? He was occupied with turning human actions into poetry.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;I would suggest that none of the plays of Shakespeare has a 'meaning', although it would be equally false to say that a play of Shakespeare is meaningless.&lt;/strong&gt; All great poetry gives the illusion of a view of life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to discuss the example of Dante:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[We think] Dante has a 'philosophy', therefore every poet as great as Dante has a philosophy too. Dante had behind him the system of St. Thomas, to which his poem corresponds point by point. Therefore Shakespeare had behind him Seneca, or Montaigne, or Machiavelli; (...). I can see no reason for believing that either Dante or Shakespeare did any thinking on his own. The people who think that Shakespeare thought, are always people who are not engaged in writing poetry, but who are engaged in thinking, and we all like to think that great men were like ourselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Summary&lt;/strong&gt;: &amp;quot;none of the plays of Shakespeare has a 'meaning'&amp;quot; means that Shakespeare's plays are not the expression of philosophical ideas, since Shakespeare was a poet, not a &amp;quot;thinker&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T12:25:10.333" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T12:25:10.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17553" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:13:40.930" Score="7" ViewCount="144" Body="&lt;p&gt;I discovered something quite interesting today in John Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;. Here is Milton (this is the Archangel Raphael relating to Adam and Eve the creation of the world):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                  the Swan with Arched neck&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Between her white wings mantling proudly, Rowes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her state with Oarie feet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/178/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, Book 7: Lines 438-440&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here is the second stanza of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poetical_Works_of_John_Keats/Imitation_of_Spenser&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Imitation of Spenser&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by John Keats, with the similar passage in bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There the king-fisher saw his plumage bright&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Viewing with fish of brilliant dye below;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose silken fins, and golden scales' light&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cast upward, through the waves, a ruby glow:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There saw &lt;strong&gt;the swan his neck of arched snow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And oar'd himself along with majesty;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sparkled his jetty eyes; his feet did show&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beneath the waves like Afric's ebony,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And on his back a fay reclined voluptuously.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone see the similarity between the two passages?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milton has &amp;quot;arched neck&amp;quot;, Keats has &amp;quot;neck of arched snow&amp;quot;. Milton has &amp;quot;mantling proudly&amp;quot;, Keats has &amp;quot;with majesty&amp;quot;. Milton has &amp;quot;Rowes/Her state with Oarie feet&amp;quot;, Keats has &amp;quot;oar'd himself along&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Keats was a great reader of John Milton, and yet I could not find this echo of John Milton mentioned anywhere. Editions of Keats's works only ever mention his reading of Edmund Spenser (obviously) and also especially the Irish poet Mary Tighe (1772-1810) who wrote a work called &amp;quot;Psyche&amp;quot; (1805) in the style of Edmund Spenser. Mary Tighe was a very big influence on Keats's early works. Tragically she also died of tuberculosis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does everyone else think? A clear influence? I have read Keats far more often than I have Milton. But when I was reading the abovementioned Milton passage I thought that I had read something similar elsewhere. I wracked my brains, and then finally found the Keats passage in &amp;quot;Imitation of Spenser&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11832" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T21:17:14.777" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T22:01:02.440" Title="Is Keats' swan with &quot;neck of arched snow&quot; an allusion to Milton's &quot;swan with arched neck&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;john-keats&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17554" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:22:36.037" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:22:36.037" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:22:36.037" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17555" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:22:36.037" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:24:52.653" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:24:52.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17556" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:23:20.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:23:20.690" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:23:20.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17557" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:23:20.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (born 1954) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:23:55.823" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:23:55.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17558" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17535" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:25:08.560" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As an explanation, it's worth including the next few lines of the introduction as well:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What manner I mean, will be quite clear to the reader, who must soon perceive great inexperience, immaturity, and every error denoting a feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished. The two first books, and indeed the two last, I feel sensible are not of such completion as to warrant their passing the press; nor should they if I though a year's castigation would do them any good; - it will not: the foundations are too sandy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Keats was under the impression that his work - that was being published here - was written with &amp;quot;inexperience, immaturity, and every error&amp;quot;. He is saying that his own writing displays a lack of experience and maturity, and was full of mistakes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He says that the finished work is more of a &amp;quot;feverish attempt, rather than a deed accomplished&amp;quot;; saying that it's not so much a completed work as a delusional, incomplete attempt to write something.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Keats continues to disparage his own writing, saying that they're not really good enough to be printed, and that even a year of editing wouldn't help, because the &amp;quot;foundations are too sandy&amp;quot; - the base of the work (again, his own writing) was too &amp;quot;sandy&amp;quot; - the metaphor being that it's not a firm enough base to improve on, since the original work wasn't of good enough quality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's basically a long-winded way of saying that, as is the case with every single writer on Earth, he doesn't think much of his own work. It's a lot of big words to use on being self-deprecating.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:25:08.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:27:28.657" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:27:28.657" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:27:28.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:27:28.657" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work 'Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life' by Adam Phillips. Should be tagged with [adam-phillips]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:59:48.750" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:59:48.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17561" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:31:23.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:31:23.950" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:31:23.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17562" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:31:23.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet, short story writer and novelist Walter de la Mare (1873-1956) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:55:41.063" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:55:41.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17563" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:35:15.987" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:35:15.987" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:35:15.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17564" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:35:15.987" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Helen Garner (born 1942) or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:00:04.910" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:00:04.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17565" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:37:33.140" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:37:33.140" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:37:33.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17566" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:37:33.140" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Danish language, regardless of where they were originally published. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:59:55.903" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:59:55.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17567" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:40:07.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:40:07.263" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:40:07.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17568" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:40:07.263" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) or his life as a writer. Andersen is best know for fairy tales such as &quot;The Emperor's New Clothes&quot;, &quot;The Little Mermaid&quot; and &quot;The Ugly Duckling&quot;. Questions about his works should be tagged with [scandinavian-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T02:42:13.190" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T02:42:13.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17569" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:41:20.697" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:41:20.697" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:41:20.697" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17570" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T18:41:20.697" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novella &quot;The Children's Bach&quot; by Helen Garner. Should be tagged with [helen-garner]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T18:56:18.380" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T18:56:18.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:05:06.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:05:06.867" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:05:06.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:05:06.867" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner (born 1951), more commonly known as &quot;Sting&quot;, English musician and songwriter. Questions about his songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:22:51.760" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:22:51.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17573" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17479" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:07:02.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&amp;quot;Light Brigade&amp;quot; refers to a specific brigade&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade was a real-world event. Quoting from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Charge of the Light Brigade was a failed military action involving the British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem was about this event:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The events were the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem &amp;quot;The Charge of the Light Brigade&amp;quot; (1854), published just six weeks after the event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the brigade had light cavalry, it is the Light Brigade. To indicate that a specific, special brigade is being talked about, a defining trait (&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;light&lt;/strong&gt; cavalry&amp;quot;) is capitalized and used as a descriptor. This is a general pattern used in other situations. A book club that contained mainly old ladies might be called the Old Ladies Book Club. A section of a zoo devoted to birds might be called the Bird Section. The capitalization is used to indicate specialness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's the question in the body. Now to address the title. One note before I do: you've misquoted the poem. Tennyson uses British spellings for words, and as this Poetry Foundation &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;copy of the poem&lt;/a&gt; shows, he spells it &amp;quot;honour&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/honor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, definition 1b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to give special recognition to : to confer honor on&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson wants the Light Brigade to be honored, or given special recognition. In other words he wants acts of remembrance for the Light Brigade; he wants people to talk about them with importance and not simply forget that the event occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore &amp;quot;Honour the Light Brigade&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;Confer special recognition on this specific light-cavalry brigade&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T21:08:26.820" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:08:26.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17574" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:08:09.567" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:08:09.567" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:08:09.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17575" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:08:09.567" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of German Protestant reformist Martin Luther (1483-1546) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [latin-literature] or [german-literature] depending on the language of the work in question." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T19:22:36.763" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:22:36.763" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17576" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17542" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:36:49.417" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's not a hidden sub-text as far as I'm concerned. Just because it's a &amp;quot;children's poem&amp;quot; doesn't mean good music can't be made out of it! For other examples, check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZ5WMZUbKy4&amp;amp;t=1s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Peter and the Wolf&lt;/a&gt; by Sergei Prokofiev, or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXmL55DwuaQ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Little Red Riding Hood&lt;/a&gt; by Sergei Rachmaninoff.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the lyrics of the poem were written by Goethe, who's known for his dark imagery and poetry. With that being said, &amp;quot;Erlkönig&amp;quot; isn't really &lt;em&gt;meant&lt;/em&gt; for children. It was originally written to be a part of a broader &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singspiel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;singspiel&lt;/a&gt;. The summary of the song is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A child and a father are riding in the middle of the night. The father asks the child why he looks so afraid, and the child responds by saying that Erl-King is chasing them. The Erl-king speaks to the child and the child repeatedly tells his father, telling him the Erl-King is speaking to him, and asking why the father does not see the Erl-King. The father dismisses them as natural phenomenons like fog, wing, and the willow tree. The Erl-King attempts to take the child by force, and the child dies in his father's arms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's not really much else sub-text. This is also further exemplified by the time period in which this was written. Written in the 1780s, and put to composition by 1815, this time period was a period of music known as the &amp;quot;Classical Era&amp;quot;. One of the key focuses of the classical era was an emphasis on simplicity, elegance, and balance, as well as short well-balanced melodies and clear-cut question and answer phrases (known as the &amp;quot;antecedent&amp;quot; and the &amp;quot;consequent&amp;quot;). It would, therefore, make sense why such a piece of poetry would be just &amp;quot;simple and plain&amp;quot; - it fits within the context of the era. Classical-era music was a focus on making good music for the sake of good music, without overtly fancy or unnecessarily flourishes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T20:54:59.290" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T20:54:59.290" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17577" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17540" CreationDate="2021-02-13T19:39:15.297" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;To fully understand this line, there is some necessary context. I have found a full copy of the essay &lt;a href=&quot;http://fullonlinebook.com/essays/on-umbrella-morals/rmac.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Gardiner is speaking of what he calls an &amp;quot;umbrella conscience&amp;quot;. He provides an example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps he takes your umbrella at random from the barber's stand. He knows he can't get a worse one than his own. He may get a better. He doesn't look at it very closely until he is well on his way. Then, &amp;quot;Dear me! I've taken the wrong umbrella,&amp;quot; he says, with an air of surprise, for he likes really to feel that he has made a mistake. &amp;quot;Ah, well, it's no use going back now. He'd be gone. &lt;em&gt;And I've left him mine!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;benefit of the doubt&amp;quot; is an idiom. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/the%20benefit%20of%20the%20doubt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the state of accepting something/someone as honest or deserving of trust even though there are doubts&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now let's work through the example provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps he takes your umbrella at random from the barber's stand. He knows he can't get a worse one than his own. He may get a better.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a &lt;em&gt;dishonest&lt;/em&gt; action. A proper person should check to make sure they are taking their umbrella, especially if any mistake would likely mean stealing someone's better umbrella from them. However...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He doesn't look at it very closely until he is well on his way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This part is important because it introduces the possiblity, &lt;em&gt;in his head&lt;/em&gt;, that he has made an honest mistake. Perhaps he truely meant to take his own, ratty umbrella. But by a complete accident (even one that he should have avoided in the first place) he now has someone else's umbrella. Now we turn to what the man thinks to himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, &amp;quot;Dear me! I've taken the wrong umbrella,&amp;quot; he says, with an air of surprise, for he likes really to feel that he has made a mistake. &amp;quot;Ah, well, it's no use going back now. He'd be gone. &lt;em&gt;And I've left him mine!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, out, the man is surprised to himself that he has the wrong umbrella. Starting from the assumption that he is an honest man, and giving this assumption (honesty) the &lt;em&gt;benefit of the doubt&lt;/em&gt; leads him to the conclusion that he has made an honest mistake. Not giving his &amp;quot;honesty&amp;quot; the benefit of the doubt would mean questioning whether his &amp;quot;accident&amp;quot; was truly an accident, or if it was an &lt;em&gt;intentional, dishonest&lt;/em&gt; theft of a better umbrella.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, a man who allows his honesty the benefit of the doubt would, when considering his own actions, start from the assumption that he is a good, honest man and not question that assumption much at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T19:39:15.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17578" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17491" CreationDate="2021-02-13T21:16:29.387" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &amp;quot;inward eye&amp;quot; is suggested by the other lines: when the poet is lying on his couch, alone, and begins to daydream, the daffodils become visible again in his imagination. In a sense, this is also true from a biographical point of view. In his edition of Wordsworth's major poems, Stephen Gill notes that the poem was composed in the period March 1804 – April 1807 (in other words, it is hard to date precisely) but it appears to be based on something the Wordsworths saw in April 1802. Dorothy Wordsworth's diary entry for 15 April 1802 says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I never saw daffodils so beautiful, they grew among the stony mosses about and about them, some rested their heads on these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness  and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing and ever changing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In Stephen Gill's notes, there are several other examples of experiences that led to the composition of poems several years later.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reference:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wordsworth, William: &lt;em&gt;The Major Works, including The Prelude&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Stephen Gill. [Revised edition] Oxford University Press, 2008.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:16:29.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17579" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17542" CreationDate="2021-02-13T21:22:57.723" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Erlkönig is not a children's poem. In the poem, a boy is assaulted and killed by a supernatural specter, while his father cannot even perceive the threat and is thus unable to defend him. That would be quite unsettling for children. Also the poem is mostly dialog, and the son, the father, and the eponymous Erlkönig speak in turns, with no indicator whose turn it is. I don't think many children would understand that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I learned this in school (precisely because it was not considered a children's poem, but an example of great literary achievement that we should aspire to) 40 years ago; back then the naive interpretation was that the son fell sick while traveling with his father and suffered from delirium and hallucinations.  The father was comforting his son, while trying to get him home for rest and medical care, but the son dies before they arrive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Other interpretations focus more on the different perspectives of children and adults. The son is more susceptible to a more animistic world view; nature is alive and conscious, and speaks to him in voices both tempting and threatening. The rational father only hears the wind and the weather, and thus cannot understand what frightens his son that much.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even other interpretations are build on the most unsettling lines from the poem, &amp;quot;Mein Sohn mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt // und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;I love thee, I'm charm'd by thy beauty, dear boy! And if thou'rt unwilling, then force I'll employ&amp;quot;, which is definitively not something you would write in a children's poem ). There are three speakers (father, son, Erl King), but only two persons present (father and son), and some people take this as a sign of the double nature of the father, as both the protective adult and the pedophile threat (who, it is implied, might have killed his own son).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You do not have to buy into any of these interpretations, but the fact that they are supported by the text means that this is not a naive children's rhyme, but an abyss that gazes also; whatever fear you bring with you will be reflected back upon you by the lines of the poem, and that is the reason why it is famous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastEditorUserId="1205" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T21:43:06.223" LastActivityDate="2021-02-13T21:43:06.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17581" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-13T21:59:46.987" Score="1" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;broads&amp;quot; in Hemingway's short story Fifty Grand? Here's the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three of us, Jack Brennan, Soldier Bartlett, and I were in Hanley’s. There were a couple of &lt;strong&gt;broads&lt;/strong&gt; sitting at the next table to us. They had been drinking.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“What do you mean, kike?” one of the &lt;strong&gt;broads&lt;/strong&gt; says. “What do you mean, kike, you big Irish bum?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Sure,” Jack says. “That’s it.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Kikes,” this &lt;strong&gt;broad&lt;/strong&gt; goes on. “They’re always talking about kikes, these big Irishmen. What do you mean, kikes?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Come on. Let’s get out of here.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are they women? Or is there another meaning? Somehow it sounded weird to me that two women were drinking at a bar at that time and started arguing with these boxers&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12110" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-13T22:47:30.140" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T08:32:56.577" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;broads&quot; in Hemingway's short story Fifty Grand?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;ernest-hemingway&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17582" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17526" CreationDate="2021-02-14T00:30:54.647" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Simon Karlinksy notes in an edition of Checkhov's letters that the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Witch_and_Other_Stories/Gusev&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gusev&lt;/a&gt;, published in December 1890, uses &amp;quot;the device of subtly intermingling the soldier's speech patterns and his stream of consciousness with the authorial voice&amp;quot; (page 183).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;J. A. Cuddon writes that the term &amp;quot;stream of consciousness&amp;quot; was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;coined by William James in &lt;em&gt;Principles of Psychology&lt;/em&gt; (1890) to denote the flow of inner experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon adds that something resembing stream of consciousness or interior monologue&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is discernible in Sterne's &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt; (1760–67), and long self-communing passages to be found in some 19th c. novels (e.g. those of Dostoievski) are also akin to interior monologue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to Cuddon and several other sources,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it seems that it was a minor French novelist, Edouard Dujardin, who first used the technique (in a way which was to prove immensely influential) in &lt;em&gt;Les Lauriers sont coupés&lt;/em&gt; (1888). James Joyce, who is believed to have known this work, exploited the possibilities and took the technique almost to a point &lt;em&gt;ne plus ultra&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt; (1922) (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon also cites Dorothy Richardson's &lt;em&gt;Pilgrimage&lt;/em&gt; (1915–67) and Marcel Prousts's &lt;em&gt;A la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt; (1913–27) as examples that showed an interest in the technique and concludes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that several original minds had been working, independently, towards a new method of writing fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon does not mention Checkhov. Whether Sterne's technique can be called stream of consciousness is debatable. A. D. Nuttall writes (pages 59–60),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, according to the basic sense of the words, he [Sterne] very nearly is just this [i.e. a stream of consciousness writer]. In so far as we can claim that the second-by-second ticking over of the mind is as much a matter of ratiocinative windings, associative caprice, of flashback and prolepsis, as it is of imagery and impressions, so far might we extend the description 'stream of consciousness' to &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt;. The trouble is that the course of literary history has given the phrase a technical meaning, (...). I believe my own mind rattles on in a manner more aking to &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt; than to &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. But James Joyce and Virginia Woolf have been allowed to define the terms. They have achieved a more-than-Baconian receptivity to the flow of images and impressions only by the very un-Baconian exclusion of the ordering intellect. (...) The stream of consciousness novelist (in thise sense) must begin his quest for the truly open mind by locking up the intellect, (...). There is a higher pathos in the would-be coherent incoherence of &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt; than in the licensed flux of &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. Our question has now answered itself. Sterne is not a stream of consciousness novelist because he admists the stream of ratiocination.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldick points out that the term &amp;quot;interior monologue&amp;quot; is often loosely used as a synonym for &amp;quot;stream of consciousness&amp;quot; (which is what Cuddon seems to do), while other critics try to make a distiction. Baldick identifies two types of distinctions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;taking &amp;quot;stream of consciousness as the larger category, embracing all representations of intermingled thoughts and perceptions, within which interior monologue is a special case of 'direct' presentation&amp;quot;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;taking &amp;quot;interior monologue as the larger category, within which stream of consciousness is a special technique emphasizing continuous 'flow' by abandoning strict logic, syntax, and punctuation&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the latter definition, even Robert Browning's &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/soliloquy-spanish-cloister&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister&lt;/a&gt; (1842) can be seen as an early example. However, the term usually refers to prose passages such as the last chapter of James Joyce's novel &lt;em&gt;Ulysses&lt;/em&gt;. (Baldick adds that &amp;quot;Joyce acknowledged Édouard Dujardin's novel &lt;em&gt;Les Lauriers sont coupées&lt;/em&gt; (1888) as a precedent in the use of interior monologue&amp;quot;.)&#xA;Based on the first definition, Proust's &lt;em&gt;A la recherche du temps perdu&lt;/em&gt; is about the stream of consciousness (i.e. the subject matter) but does not use the technique of interior monologue.&#xA;dbnl's lexicon of literary terms defines &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03044.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stream of consciousness&lt;/a&gt; as the actual content and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_03087.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;monologue intérieur&lt;/a&gt; as a technique for representing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: it seems that Anton Chekhov's short story &amp;quot;Gusev&amp;quot; was not the first to use a stream-of-consciousness technique since Dujardin's novel &lt;em&gt;Les Lauriers sont coupées&lt;/em&gt; predates it by two years. Below is an example from the first chapter of Dujardin's novel, which shows that he went much further in the direct representation of a character's thoughts than Chekhov:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… Et c’est l’heure ; l’heure ? six heures ; à cette horloge six heures, l’heure attendue. La maison où je dois entrer : où je trouverai quelqu’un ; la maison ; le vestibule ; entrons. Le soir tombe ; l’air est bon ; il y a une gaîté en l’air. L’escalier ; les premières marches. Ce garçon sera encore chez soi ; si, par un hasard, il était sorti avant l’heure ? ce lui arrive quelques fois ; je veux pourtant lui conter ma journée d’aujourd’hui.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich: &lt;em&gt;Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary&lt;/em&gt;. Translated from the Russian by Michael Henry Heim in collaboration with Simon Karlinksy. Selection, introduction, and commentary by Simon Karlinksy. Northwestern University Press, 1973, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dbnl: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt; (containing 4,600 terms, in Dutch).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nuttal, A. D.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=gfnnDwAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Common Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. University of California Press, 2021. (Originally published in 1974.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T00:30:54.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17583" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17461" CreationDate="2021-02-14T00:49:08.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote originates from Matthew Arnold's &lt;em&gt;Essays in Criticism: Second Series&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1888, shortly after the author's death. The quote's context goes as follows (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=njBaAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA168&amp;amp;dq=shelley+%E2%80%98beautiful+and+ineffectual+angel%E2%80%99&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwierdCVkOjuAhUKUcAKHV56AIgQuwUwAnoECAMQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=shelley%20%E2%80%98beautiful%20and%20ineffectual%20angel%E2%80%99&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 168&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I for my part can never even think of equalling them [Byron, Wordsworth and Keats] any other of their contemporaries;—either Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or Shelly, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=njBaAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA168&amp;amp;dq=shelley+%E2%80%98beautiful+and+ineffectual+angel%E2%80%99&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwierdCVkOjuAhUKUcAKHV56AIgQuwUwAnoECAMQBw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=shelley%20angelic&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 204&lt;/a&gt;), Arnold says of Shelley:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is his poetry, above everything else, which for many people establishes that he is an angel. (...) But let no one suppose that a want of humour and a self-delusion such as Shelley's have no effect upon a man's poetry. The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley's poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is &amp;quot;a beautiful &lt;em&gt;and ineffectual&lt;/em&gt; angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T00:49:08.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17584" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17454" CreationDate="2021-02-14T01:35:01.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question is wrong about who makes that speech at the end. It is not the Baron, but the best man at Hughie's wedding to his fiancée Laura:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When they were married Alan Trevor was the best-man, and the Baron made a speech at the wedding-breakfast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Millionaire models,' remarked Alan, 'are rare enough; but, by Jove, model millionaires are rarer still!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alan is the artist who painted the picture of a beggar using the millionaire as the model. He has told Hughie that models make &amp;quot;a shilling an hour&amp;quot; for posing. This is obviously not something that a millionaire would find lucrative. So it would be rare to have  millionaire model—someone who would find it worth the bother to pose for a picture just to earn one shilling an hour. Hence, &lt;em&gt;millionaire models ... are rare&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Baron's behavior shows him to be a generous person who also has a sense of humor and who can appreciate the good in others. Instead of being offended for being mistaken for a real beggar, he rewards Hughie for his generosity and even attends his wedding. This makes his behavior exemplary, i.e., he shows what all millionaires should be like; he models the behavior other millionaires should display. Hence he is a &lt;em&gt;model millionaire&lt;/em&gt;. Since most millionaires are not like that, they are &lt;em&gt;rarer still&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, what Alan is saying is that one is less likely to find a generous, witty, and appreciative millionaire than to find a millionaire willing to pose for a picture. The Baron is two very rare things, a millionaire model and a model millionaire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T01:35:01.180" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17585" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17405" CreationDate="2021-02-14T03:03:37.397" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;He's a &amp;quot;technical expert on railroads&amp;quot; because he is what passes for an &amp;quot;expert&amp;quot; among the ruling gang - he knows at least the basics (what the lines are, what the basic uncomplicated blocks of running railroads are - from the same discussion as below quotes). Mostly, &lt;strong&gt;he's in the position of telling railroads what to do&lt;/strong&gt;. There do not necessarily need be any qualifications, and by his own admission, he has no pretentions to having any:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But listen, Clem, you know-you know just as well as I do-that we can't afford it!&amp;quot; Mr. Weatherby shrugged. &amp;quot;That's a problem for you to work out.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How, for Christ's sake?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I don't know. &lt;strong&gt;That's your job, not ours. You wouldn't want the government to start telling you how to run your railroad, would you&lt;/strong&gt;?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, of course not! But-&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Our job is only to see that the people get fair wages and decent transportation. It's up to you to deliver. But, of course, if you say that you can't do the job, why then-&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His job is basically policy, not technology:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Right,&amp;quot; said Mr. Weatherby. &amp;quot;That's what you ought to be-practical. Now we offer you a trade. You do something for us and we'll do something for you. You give the unions their wage raises and we'll give you permission to close the Rio Norte Line.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a common practice in totalitarian collectivist states (and happens even in modern democracies); the party apparatchik is appointed for their connections and ability to get the state desires &lt;em&gt;properly communicated&lt;/em&gt;. Not a specific professional expertise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="31" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T03:18:46.430" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T03:18:46.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17586" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Vedas are considered definitive of Hinduism: to be Hindu, one nominally accepts the Vedas as revealed scripture. The four Vedas are the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda. The earliest, the Rig Veda, dates back to 1500 BCE. The language used in the Vedas is Vedic Sanskrit, reflecting a version of the language prior to the standardized form of classical Sanskrit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each of the four Vedas consists of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ritual invocations to deities (the Vedas proper, or &lt;em&gt;Samhita&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commentaries on sacred ritual (&lt;em&gt;Brahmanas&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Philosophical explorations of sacred ritual (&lt;em&gt;Aranyakas&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Texts that engage more esoteric philosophical themes (&lt;em&gt;Upanishads&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As generally used, the term &amp;quot;Vedas&amp;quot;  refers collectively to that entire corpus of texts: all four Vedas with all the component parts of each.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on Literature SE's tag policy on &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1511/289&quot;&gt;composite works such as the Bible&lt;/a&gt;, this single tag likewise covers the entire corpus of Vedic literature. No separate tags are maintained for each of the Vedas or their components.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17587" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" Score="0" Body="For questions relating to any of the four Hindu scriptures, the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Atharva Veda, and Sama Veda, including their ancillary components such as Brahmanas, Aranyakas, and Upanishads." OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T04:44:13.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17588" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17435" CreationDate="2021-02-14T10:45:37.280" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct that this is not personification. Personification is when an abstract or inanimate entity is represented as a human figure, for example the embodiment of &amp;quot;Rumor, painted full of tongues&amp;quot; that opens Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=henry4p2&amp;amp;Act=0&amp;amp;Scene=1&amp;amp;Scope=scene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;2 Henry VI&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. To the best of my knowledge, there is no specific rhetorical device that involves the reverse: identifying a person with something inanimate. The more general trope that involves identifying two otherwise disparate entities is, of course, &lt;em&gt;metaphor&lt;/em&gt;. Just as the camel is the ship of the desert, the world, the snow, the sky, and the solitude are all Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To understand the import of these metaphors, we need to look at two other rhetorical devices. The first is &lt;em&gt;hyperbole&lt;/em&gt;, or poetic exaggeration. Napoleon's identification of the entire world with himself is certainly hyperbolic. Through this hyperbolic identification, the world, the snow, the sky, and the solitude represent, in a sympathetic reading, Napoleon's power. Louis XIV could say &amp;quot;L'état, c'est moi&amp;quot;, but Napoleon was commander not just of the state, but of the world; he could claim that the entire natural world was himself. A less sympathetic, and historically more accurate, reading would see this as a metaphor for Napoleon's ego. He thought he commanded the world, but ended up defeated by it. The setting of the poem—bleak winter—recalls the first major defeat of his career, his retreat from Moscow in the harsh Russian winter. The reason the soldiers face the inhospitable landscape is indeed Napoleon; the landscape might as well be Napoleon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other rhetorical device at work here is &lt;em&gt;irony&lt;/em&gt;. The contrast between the two readings of this hyperbolic identification provides this irony. Seeking to control the entire world, Napoleon finds himself humiliated, and the entire world becomes an emblem of his humiliation. This is the same sort of device Shelley employs in &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ozymandias&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nothing beside remains. Round the decay&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The lone and level sands stretch far away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ozymandias intended those who see the statue to feel awe and to despair at his might; instead, his statue has crumbled into the desert. The despair it evokes now stems not from Ozymandias's achievements, but from their futility and impermanence. Similarly, the solipsism that lets Napoleon claim the entire world as himself devolves from being an expression of grandeur to one of existential loneliness, of &lt;em&gt;solitude&lt;/em&gt;. Napoleon's hyperbolic identification with the landscape could have been a symbol of his power, but instead signifies his powerlessness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T02:43:49.453" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T02:43:49.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17589" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T11:19:40.840" Score="4" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a book I read about 20 years ago, in which one of the main characters explained to somebody else the way Japanese factories operated and the difference with US. He stated something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After WWII the USA government wanted to help Japanese economy to recover, so they decided to put some orders in Japanese factories. Once they ordered a huge number of screws [a million?] with the clear indication that there was a tolerance limit of [something like] 0.1% defective units, which was a tight limit in the US at that time. Some time later the package arrived to the US with a note stating that they (the Japanese manufacturers) didn't understand why the US wanted defective screws, but they had produced them anyway and had packed them separately from the non-defective ones so they didn't get mix.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The anecdote was to show that the Japanese manufacturers produced always perfect screws (or whatever they had to), without defective units. And that they did it always looking for cheaper and more efficient ways, in contrast to US manufacturing process.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additional information:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I read the book about the year 2000&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I am almost certain it was a Spanish translation of an English (probably USA) text&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is not Michael Crichton's &lt;em&gt;Rising Sun&lt;/em&gt; nor Tom Clancy's &lt;em&gt;Debt of Honor&lt;/em&gt;, the two only books I can think of that &lt;em&gt;could&lt;/em&gt; have such a passage that I have read.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I don't remember anything else from the plot: the part I remember is just this anecdote.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11701" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T14:01:05.587" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T14:01:05.587" Title="Story with an example of perfection of Japanese manufacturing processes" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17448" CreationDate="2021-02-14T12:21:12.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are three basic meanings of &amp;quot;verse&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A line of metrical writing. Strictly speaking, this term should refer to a single line. To avoid confusion with the second meaning (below), &amp;quot;it is preferable to call a line a line and a stanza a stanza&amp;quot; (Baldick, page 271).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A stanza, especially in a hymn or a song. This may cause confusion with the preceding meaning.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Poetry in general, as opposed to prose. The advantage of the term &amp;quot;verse&amp;quot; over &amp;quot;poetry&amp;quot; is that the former suggest technical requirements regarding rhythm and metre (and possibly rhyme) rather than suggesting poetic merit. From a technical point of view, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_verse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;free verse&lt;/a&gt; as a special case.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A stanza is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;A group of lines of verse&amp;quot; (Cuddon, page 915).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;a group of verse lines forming a section of a poem and sharing the same structure as all or some of the other section of the same poem in terms of lengths of its lines, its metre, and usually its rhyme scheme&amp;quot; (Baldick, page 242).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above definitions of verse don't take the Bible into account. As Peter Shor pointed out in a comment, the 16th-century French printer and scholar &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-I-Estienne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Estienne&lt;/a&gt; was the first to print the New Testament with a subdivision into verses that has become standard. For the Old Testament, Estienne used the verse numbering introduced by Santes Pagnino's translation, which was published in 1528 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bibliorama.org/la-bible-presentation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliorama&lt;/a&gt;). &amp;quot;Verset&amp;quot; was translated into English as &amp;quot;verse&amp;quot;, thereby adding another meaning to those listed above.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bibliorama: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bibliorama.org/la-bible-presentation/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Présentation de la bible&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T12:21:12.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17591" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T12:33:59.437" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘At night, because of the noise of people laughing, they turned up the&#xA;treble on the jukebox. But in the early mornings, in the peaceful shift when&#xA;customers on their way to work were reading the papers, you could clearly&#xA;hear the trip and run of the bass lines. Some people came alone, with a&#xA;library book, dressed in clean clothes of sober cut and colour. Others&#xA;brought their children and taught them, with smiles and soft words, how to&#xA;behave in a public place. The clever children read aloud to their parents&#xA;from the Situations Vacant, the Houses to Let. The big windows of the cafe&#xA;faced east. People sat with their backs to the sun, &lt;strong&gt;and the iron bars of night&#xA;softened in their shoulders&lt;/strong&gt;. On the other side of the road, which sparkled&#xA;with passing cars, &lt;strong&gt;a deep garden overflowed its iron fence.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;and the iron bars of night&#xA;softened in their shoulders&amp;quot; means: Iron bars of window that were cold at night now because of the sun light were warm and customers felts its warm in their shoulder? (This sentence was really unclear to me.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;a deep garden overflowed its iron fence&amp;quot; means: A fence of a deep garden was damaged? (I have never heard &amp;quot;deep garden&amp;quot; Does it mean: A garden like an valley?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T19:16:08.287" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T03:35:33.403" Title="Iron bars and iron fence - literal or metaphorical?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17487" CreationDate="2021-02-14T13:56:54.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;An earlier example of a humorous ghost story is &amp;quot;The Rival Ghosts&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brander_Matthews&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brander Matthews&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=hktOAQAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Harper's Magazine&lt;/em&gt; volume 68&lt;/a&gt; (pages 905–913), in 1884, i.e. just three years before &amp;quot;The Canterville Ghost&amp;quot;. It is a frame story in which a certain Uncle Larry tells a story about a certain Eliphalet Duncan who inherits a house that is haunted by two rival ghosts. Here is a taste from the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You see, while in a way he was fond of ghosts, yet he liked them best one at a time. Two ghosts were one too many. He wasn't bent on making a collection of spooks. He and one ghost were company, but he and two gosts were a crowd.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eliphalet Duncan eventually gets rid of the ghosts, or at least their apparitions, by convincing them to marry each other in spite of an age disparity of almost 250 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on how one defines &amp;quot;humorous&amp;quot;, there is a much older example in the works of the satirist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucian of Samosata&lt;/a&gt; (second century AD), namely the story of the haunted sandal in the story known as &lt;a href=&quot;http://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki/doku.php?id=home:texts_and_library:dialogues:the-liar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Liar&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T13:56:54.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17486" CreationDate="2021-02-14T15:47:33.257" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The short answer to this question is, &amp;quot;Yes, they can. It simply depends on how we define literature.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon defines literature as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A vague terms which usually denotes works which belong to the major genres: epic, drama, lyric, novel, short story, ode.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further down he adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, there are many works which cannot be classified in the main literary genres which nevertheless may be regarded as literature by virtue of the excellence of their writing, their originality and their general aesthetic and artistic merits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then goes on to list works such as Aristotle's &lt;em&gt;Poetics&lt;/em&gt;, Descartes's &lt;em&gt;Discourse on Method&lt;/em&gt;, Gibbon's &lt;em&gt;Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire&lt;/em&gt;, Darwin's &lt;em&gt;On the Origin of Species&lt;/em&gt; and Lytton Strachey's &lt;em&gt;Queen Victoria&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What Cuddon does not mention that the concept of literature changed around the beginning of the 19th century. In Chapter 2 of &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt; points out that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to 1800 &lt;em&gt;literature&lt;/em&gt; and analogous terms in other European languages meant 'writings' or 'book knowledge'. (...) And works that today are studied as literature in English or Latin classes in schools and universities were once treated not as a special kind of writing but as fine examples of the use of language and rhetoric. (...) Students were not asked to interpret them, as we now interpret literary works, seeking to explain what they are 'really about'. On the contrary, students memorized them, studied their grammar, identified their rhetorical figures and their structures or procedures of argument.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this approach to literature, it would be perfectly normal to study the essays of Montaigne, Bacon and even Addison in what we now call a literature class, even though they don't fit the definition of literature given by Cuddon at the start of this answer. That definition reflects a concept of literature that originated in early 19th-century romanticism and that is restricted to imaginative writing. Culler cites &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Sta%C3%ABl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madame de Staël's&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;On Literature Considered in Its Relations with Social Institutions&lt;/em&gt;, published in 1800, as an influential source of this conception, even though its roots go back to late-18th-century German romantics. [1] Based on this more restrictive definition of literature, essays would not be considered literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Baldick mentions an even more restrictive definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more restrictive has been the academic concentration upon poetry, drama, and fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, he immediately adds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until the mid-20th century, many kinds of non-fictional writing—in philosophy, history, biography, criticism, topography, science, and politics—were counted as literature; implicit in this broader usage is a definition of literature as that body of works which—for whatever reason—deserve to be preserved as part of the current reproduction of meanings within a given culture (unlike yesterday's newspaper, which belongs in the disposable category of ephemera). This seems more tenable than the later attempts to divide literature—as creative, imaginative, fictional, or non-practical—from factual writings or practically effective works of propaganda, rhetoric, or didactic writing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above definitions of literature attempt to use inherent characteristics as criteria for inclusion or exclusion but can't get around the observation that this is not always consistent with what we &lt;em&gt;treat&lt;/em&gt; as literature (see e.g. Baldick's &amp;quot;works which ... deserve to be preserved ...&amp;quot;). As I discussed in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15758/2191&quot;&gt;related answer&lt;/a&gt;, the definition of literature is something like the definition of &amp;quot;weed&amp;quot;: weed is not a biological category, it is just a range of unrelated plants that we don't want in our gardens or our agricultural fields. So the question boils down to the following: &lt;strong&gt;Whether essays are literature or not depends on what types of text a specific culture &lt;em&gt;treats&lt;/em&gt; as literature during a specific era&lt;/strong&gt;. What we treat as literature has varied over time. During my school and university education, the essay has always been of secondary importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Culler, Jonathan: &lt;em&gt;Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford University Press, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] It would be an interesting question whether Germaine de Staël was influenced by those German romantics &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; 1800. During her &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germaine_de_Sta%C3%ABl#German_travels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;exile&lt;/a&gt; she lived in Germany for some time and &amp;quot;travelled on to Berlin, where she made the acquaintance of August Schlegel who was lecturing there on literature&amp;quot;, but that was after 1800.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T15:47:33.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17520" CreationDate="2021-02-14T16:19:57.077" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The most famous ladder in the Bible is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob%27s_Ladder&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jacob's ladder&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Genesis&lt;/em&gt; 28 (here quoted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+28%3A10%E2%80%9319&amp;amp;version=NKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;New King James Version&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now Jacob went out from Beersheba and went toward Haran.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So he came to a certain place and stayed there all night, because the sun had set. And he took one of the stones of that place and put it at his head, and he lay down in that place to sleep.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And behold, the Lord stood above it and said: “I am the Lord God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and your descendants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem later also mentions dreaming, just like the above passage about Jacob.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, even without this passage from Genesis, it would be possible to interpret the ladder as a symbol of a longing for transcendence. Ironically, the poet's gaze is not upwards but towards things such as &amp;quot;a barrel&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;the drinking trough&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hoary grass&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;he cellar bin&amp;quot;, and he mentions that the apple-picking made him tired. In spite of the longing for transcendence, physical things and physical exertion bring him down to earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T20:26:01.933" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T20:26:01.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17595" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17596" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Scottish actor and playwright Norman McKinnel (1870 – 1932) or his life as a writer.  As a playwright he wrote 'The Bishop's Candlesticks', an adaptation of part of Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables'." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T17:35:37.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17494" CreationDate="2021-02-14T17:41:45.343" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here is my analysis of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This 22-line poem is constructed in iambic tetrameter rhyming couplets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyone who has studied Shakespeare will know the structure of his iambic pentameter and its biological association with a heartbeat. Poe’s use of iambic tetrameter is similar in nature and fitting structure for a poem that is, arguably, about life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With negatively charged diction woven with chaotic weather patterns establishes his hallmark gothic tone—but does not reach the full eerie register of his later poems such as “The Raven.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The title “Alone” denotes ‘apart’, ‘separated’, ‘isolated’ carrying the negative connotations associated with such synonyms. However, the notion of “separation” might also convey “set apart” (or holiness). So even the concise title, in addition to his trademark gothic tone— gives us metaphysical possibilities—another hallmark of Poe’s work.  Connection to life and weather–his being stormy–is yet set apart as if for some sacred purpose. In Hebrew the word קֹדֶשׁ qodesh denotes not only “apartness” but also “holiness” and “sacredness” (Davidson 654). Taking this notion deeper, one could say Poe had premonitions of a deeper purpose to his life–the source or outcomes of which could prove to be holy (or unholy)—but he is set apart, i.e. “alone”, by design nonetheless. This notion being “set apart” for some special fate is framed the title and by the end line “Of a demon in my view” (line 22) denoting the supernatural at work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might read the poem as the normal adolescent struggles of the speaker’s (or Poe’s) acceptance into society—trying to fit in, as it were, or find one’s place in the world. But another possibility is that the speaker (or Poe) KNOWS early in life and is indeed set apart (i.e. alone) for some special purpose. He is different from others—for better or worse as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen&#xA;As others saw—I could not bring My passions from a common spring&#xA;(lines 1-4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The enjambment of these lines denotes the continuity of theme of his separation, aloneness,&#xA;Because he “[sees]” what others do not (line 3) and his “passions” (4) (i.e. desires and cravings) come from a different source (“spring”) entirely (4). Even in his youth (“childhood”) Poe recognizes that he is drinking from a different well than his peers (or perhaps choses to do so). The word ‘spring’ as a source denotes gustatory imagery of imbibing something peculiar, “uncommon”, and begs the question of what source is he then partaking? With this question in mind, the line registers as delightfully ambiguous. He drinks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the same source I have not taken  My sorrow—I could not awaken&#xA;My heart to joy at the same tone—  And all I lov’d—I lov’d&#xA;alone—(lines 5-8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Partaking  of the same source as his “others” (arguably his peers) would not bring him joy—shifting from gustatory to sonic imagery—‘tone’—is to say that listening to what others hear would not bring him joy either—even though his own “source” (line 5) seems to bring him “sorrow” (line 6). What he loves (even though sorrowful) he loves “alone” (8)—denoting his mournful, yet “preferred” separation from others. Again, as to whether this is physical, metaphysical, or intellectual separation is not defined—yet registers his uniqueness or individuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Reflecting backward in time with the transition,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then—in my childhood—in the dawn (line 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;with “dawn” denoting very early stage—his genesis, Poe draws on potent meteorological imagery of a “stormy life” (10) conjuring images of a wild, unpredictable, or unstable existence—over which he has no control. And for better or worse “good or ill” (11) he is [“bound”] (12) to this stormy, unpredictable, fate even as an adult and also signifies the ambiguity—the “mystery” (line 12)—of the source of his fate to which he is assigned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Poe’s anaphoric use of ‘from’ in the subsequent lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the torrent, or the fountain—  From the red cliff of the&#xA;mountain—  From the sun that ’round me roll’d  In its autumn tint of&#xA;gold—  From the lightning in the sky  As it pass’d me flying by—  From&#xA;the thunder, and the storm (lines 13-19)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;catalogue a plethora of natural elements: “torrent” (denoting perhaps rain); “fountain”; “mountains”; the “sun”; the “lightening”; “thunder”; and “storm” notably all natural (notably non-sentient sources) FROM which his fate originates. They additionally serve as a crescendo to the final lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the cloud that took the form  (When the rest of Heaven was blue)&#xA;Of a demon in my view— (lines 20-22)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “cloud” (20), yet another meteorological element, stands itself alone (like Poe) contrasted against the “blue” of “Heaven” registers with more ominous portent. One might think of the proverbial “dark cloud” hanging over Poe’s young head. The fact that ‘Heaven’ (21) is capitalized might carry fifth dimensional connotations as it is associated with the afterlife. It also contrasts with the word “demon” in final line which registers as conflict in the supernatural realm—the struggle between the forces of Heaven and Hell, as it were. The personification of the cloud as a demon breaks opens numerous metaphysical possibilities. The term ‘demon’ from the classica Greek δαίμων (daimon) can denote “gods” and “divine powers”—thus signifying supernatural powers at work (Kittle 2: 2). It can also, of course, carry more nefarious connotations—as found in the New Testament (Kittle 2: 17) and other places—where they are beings to be avoided. The demon itself is merely a personification of the cloud—but this personification speaks to unseen forces at work and is distinguished from the natural elements catalogued the previous lines—and itself alone (set apart)—in Poe’s Heavenly gaze. The duality of the possible nature of the demon—by definition being either good or bad— punctuates Poe’s motif of ambiguity leaving us to ponder who or what is ultimately responsible for Poe’s fate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Sources&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidson, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lust, J. et. al. &lt;em&gt;Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 2009.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kittle, Gerhard. &lt;em&gt;Theological Dictionary of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt; (10 Volumes). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1980.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T17:41:45.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17598" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17446" CreationDate="2021-02-14T19:09:26.943" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The obvious reason why &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is usually described as a novel and not as an epic is that verse is one of the defining characteristics of the epic. Applying the descriptor &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; to novels is a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of literature. Since the question cites &lt;em&gt;Britannica&lt;/em&gt; in support of the claim that &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is an epic, let us look at the beginning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/epic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that Britannica article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;long narrative poem recounting heroic deeds, although the term has also been loosely used to describe novels, such as Leo Tolstoy’s &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;, and motion pictures, such as Sergey Eisenstein’s &lt;em&gt;Ivan the Terrible&lt;/em&gt;. In literary usage, the term encompasses both oral and written compositions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder of the article discusses characteristics and examples of epic poetry, rather than novels, although the author points out that (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Novels and long narrative poems written by such major authors as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Morris, and Herman Melville were patterned, to some extent, on the epic. Their fidelity to the genre, however, is found primarily in their large scope and their roots in a national soil; &lt;strong&gt;their distance from the traditional oral epic tends to be considerable&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon's dictionary of literary terms presents the following definition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An epic is a loong narrative poem, on a grand scale, about the deeds of warriors and heroes. It is a polygonal, 'heroic' story incorporating myth, legend, folk tale and history. Epics are often of national significance in the sense that they embody the history and aspirations of a nation in a lofty or grandiose manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon's seven-and-a-half page article about the epic discusses many examples, moving from the Sumerian &lt;em&gt;Gilgamesh&lt;/em&gt; to the the 1960s. At the end of the article, he points out that,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the last hundred years or more the novel, the cinema and, to a lesser extent, the theatre have been much favoured media for narratives on an epic scale. In retrospect it seems fairly logical that as the novel developed so the novelist would find it an increasingly suitable vehicle for a grandiose treatment of individual and national destiny. Indeed, there has been an impressive number of novels which can fairly be described as epic in their range and magnitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The examples Cuddon gives include &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Finnegans Wake&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Dr Zhivago&lt;/em&gt;. Note that Cuddon writes &amp;quot;described as epic&amp;quot; (i.e. using the adjective &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot;), not &amp;quot;... as epics&amp;quot; (using the noun); these novels are &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; an epic rather than epics in the original sense of the word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chris Baldick defines the epic as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the entry, Baldicks adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The action of epics takes plae on a grand scale, and in this sense the term has sometimes been extended to long romances, to ambitious historiical novels like Tolstoy's &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; (1863–9), and to some large-scale film productions on heroic or historical subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, the term &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_00620.php?q=epos#hl1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epos&lt;/a&gt; is a synonym for &amp;quot;heldendicht&amp;quot;, which literally means &amp;quot;poem about a hero or heroes&amp;quot;. The entry for &amp;quot;epos&amp;quot; in dbnl's lexicon for literary terms does not even mention novels or any other genres that are not written in verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: Strictly speaking, the epic is written in verse, whereas &lt;em&gt;War and Peace&lt;/em&gt; is not. From this perspective, the novel is &lt;em&gt;like&lt;/em&gt; an epic due to the grandiose scale of its action, not an epic per se.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atsuhiko Yoshida: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/art/epic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epic&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Britannica&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;dbnl: &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt; (containing 4,600 terms, in Dutch).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T19:09:26.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17599" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17639" CreationDate="2021-02-14T19:22:49.490" Score="7" ViewCount="413" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Who_list_his_wealth_and_ease_retain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Who list his wealth and ease retain&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Wyatt&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who list his wealth and ease retain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Himself let him unknown contain.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Press not too fast in at that gate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Where the return stands by disdain&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For sure, circa regna tonat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of the phrase in bold? The word return probably means &amp;quot;going back through the same gate&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;disdain&amp;quot; probably means &amp;quot;the person who goes back from this gate earns contempt&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what is &amp;quot;the return stands by disdain&amp;quot;? I looked up the meanings of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stand_by&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;stand by&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; and I cannot understand what it means here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can &amp;quot;stand by&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;equal&amp;quot;, as in the phrase &amp;quot;go by the name of&amp;quot;? &amp;quot;Return goes by the name of distain&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;return equals disdain&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="462" LastEditorUserId="462" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T01:33:47.200" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T03:58:36.177" Title="Meaning of &quot;Where the return stands by disdain&quot; in a poem by Thomas Wyatt" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;thomas-wyatt&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17599" CreationDate="2021-02-14T19:31:14.877" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lines three and four can be paraphrased as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not hasten too fast at that gate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where, returning through it, you will get other people's disdain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the meanings of &amp;quot;stand&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;stand by&amp;quot; in &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions (revised by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford University Press, 1986) seem to match the intended meaning. The above paraphrase is based on the following glosses for the fourth line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;stands by disdain&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;exposes you to disdain&amp;quot;. (&lt;em&gt;Sixteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Gordon Braden. Blackwell, 2005. Page 58.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Where ... disdained&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;From which your forced exit will be disdained&amp;quot;. (&lt;em&gt;The Broadview Anthology of British Literature: Concise Edition, Volume A&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Joseph Black, et al. Third edition. Broadview Press, 2017. Page 614)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Where the return stands by disdain&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Where, forced to exit, you experience others' disdain&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Carolyn Forché and Duncan Wu. Norton, 2014).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T19:57:48.720" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T19:57:48.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17601" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17591" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:10:53.003" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;iron bars&amp;quot; is metaphorical -- after night, their backs were stiff as if they had iron bars in them, but the morning eased them.  The windows need not have iron bars, and if they had, they would not have softened in light.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the garden is &amp;quot;deep&amp;quot; because it is compared to a flood, &amp;quot;overflowing&amp;quot; its literal iron fence -- by having plants grow through.  This would engulf but probably not push over the fence.  (It doesn't tell what the plants are, but I would expect unspecified plants in a garden to be flowers, though I would not be too surprised at trees or bushes.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T03:35:33.403" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T03:35:33.403" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17602" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:46:33.787" Score="4" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;While writing up the wiki excerpt for &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/william-mcgonagall&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;william-mcgonagall&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;william-mcgonagall&lt;/a&gt; a couple of weeks back, I came upon a rather surprising remark about him in Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next line down, it says the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wrote about 200 poems, including &amp;quot;The Tay Bridge Disaster&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The Famous Tay Whale&amp;quot;, which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia goes to further claim that critics &amp;quot;argue that his inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing dramatic poetry in the English language.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this accurate? What makes his poems so terrible? Is this a fair and objective evaluation of his works?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note: I am not asking for someone's &lt;em&gt;opinion&lt;/em&gt; on his works. I am asking for the scholarly citations and evaluations of why scholars consider him to be so bad. Specific examples of meter (or rather, lack thereof) and/or analysis of his works would also be appropriate).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T20:47:57.530" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T20:47:57.530" Title="Why are William Mcgonagall's poems considered so terrible?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-criticism&gt;&lt;william-mcgonagall&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17603" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:56:06.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T20:56:06.077" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T20:56:06.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17604" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:56:06.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1939) by John Steinbeck. Should be tagged with [john-steinbeck]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:19:41.560" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:19:41.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17605" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17652" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:58:35.720" Score="2" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates, who was a reporter for Argus newspaper in US and was camping in Canada, was negotiating with a telegraph boy who demanded one hundred dollars to deliver his article to Argus office in Buffalo.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates said: “Quite so. I think you will be able to take care of yourself in a cold and callous world. Now, look here, young man; I’ll trust you if you’ll trust me. I’m not a traveling mint, you know. Besides, I pay by results. If you don’t get this dispatch through, you don’t get anything. I’ll give you an order for a hundred dollars, and as soon as I get to Buffalo I’ll pay you the cash. I’ll have to &lt;strong&gt;draw on&lt;/strong&gt; the Argus when I get to Buffalo; if my article has appeared, you get your cash; if it hasn’t, you’re out. See?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think, from the context, that &amp;quot;draw on&amp;quot; here means &amp;quot;visit&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;go to&amp;quot;, but I didn't find such a meaning in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/draw_on&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it mean &amp;quot;take money from Argus&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T18:38:20.050" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:38:20.050" Title="What does &quot;draw on&quot; mean in &quot;In the Midst of Alarms?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17606" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:59:04.237" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T20:59:04.237" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T20:59:04.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17607" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T20:59:04.237" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Polish poet Antoni Malczewski (1793-1826) or his life as a writer. Questions about his works should be tagged with [polish-literature]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:17:14.873" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:17:14.873" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17608" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:01:25.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:01:25.473" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:01:25.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17609" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:01:25.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Charles Lamb (1775-1834) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:10.160" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:10.160" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17610" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:02:40.933" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:02:40.933" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:02:40.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17611" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:02:40.933" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Arms and the Man' by George Bernard Shaw. Questions about this work should be tagged with [george-bernard-shaw]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:16:24.020" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:16:24.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17612" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:04:53.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:04:53.950" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:04:53.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17613" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:04:53.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:04.780" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:04.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17614" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:06:10.320" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:06:10.320" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:06:10.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17615" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:06:10.320" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Alfred George Gardiner (more commonly known as A.G. Gardiner; 1865-1946) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:17.587" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:17.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17616" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:09:24.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:09:24.110" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:09:24.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17617" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:09:24.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Sword and the Distaff' by William Gilmore Simms. Should be tagged with [william-gilmore-simms]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="348" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T17:10:29.567" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T17:10:29.567" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17618" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:10:46.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:10:46.860" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:10:46.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17619" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:10:46.860" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of rock band Poets of the Fall. Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:31.940" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:31.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17620" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:12:01.867" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:12:01.867" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:12:01.867" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17621" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:12:01.867" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Questions about this book should be tagged with [thomas-hardy]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:42.933" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:42.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17622" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:13:42.090" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:13:42.090" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:13:42.090" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17623" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:13:42.090" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Thank You, Jeeves' (1934) by P.G. Wodehouse. Should be tagged with [p-g-wodehouse]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:17:08.673" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:17:08.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17624" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:14:50.200" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:14:50.200" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:14:50.200" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17625" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:14:50.200" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English playwright William Stanley Houghton (1881-1913) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:15:37.900" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:15:37.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17626" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:16:32.733" Score="4" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first half of Maya Angelou's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Woman-Work&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Woman Work&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; details the extremely busy life of the narrator, ranging from taking care of a baby to mending clothes to picking cotton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second half longingly describes how she needs a rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last verse, however, goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sun, rain, curving sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mountain, oceans, leaf and stone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Star shine, moon glow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You're all that I can call my own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the shine of the stars and the glow of the moon the only thing the narrator can call her own? How does the rest of the poem indicate that she doesn't &amp;quot;own&amp;quot; anything else?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:04:52.720" Title="What does the line &quot;You're all that I can call my own&quot; mean in Maya Angelou's &quot;Woman Work&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17627" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:17:20.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:17:20.710" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:17:20.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17628" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:17:20.710" Score="0" Body="Questions about the work 'The Dear Departed' by William Stanley Houghton. Should be tagged with [william-stanley-houghton]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:19:11.143" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:19:11.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17629" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:18:36.720" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:18:36.720" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:18:36.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17630" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:18:36.720" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Silver Box' (1906) by John Galsworthy. Should be tagged with [john-galsworthy]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:20:24.913" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:20:24.913" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17631" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17543" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:26:53.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This line captures how Catherine, while being quite exceptional in her surroundings, longs to be fancier and more &amp;quot;desirable&amp;quot; than she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text describes her as &amp;quot;a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer&amp;quot;.&#xA;Farmers are not generally known for their beauty (Buttercup and Westley aside); farmers being generally more occupied with making sure that the work gets done rather than preening in mirrors. This line indicates that Catherine is quite good-looking for her surroundings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this line continues and gives the impression that, unfortunately, Catherine is also rather vain and not satisfied with where she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but is determined to be a Viennese lady, and to do that wears a fashionable tea gown on all occasions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She's shown to constantly wear a fancy dress (rather impractical on a farm, to be frank) - dressing up so as to present like someone of a higher class - and wants to be at a class that's high above her current station.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All in all, this line describes a vain, dissatisfied woman who wants to be greater than she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T21:54:36.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:54:36.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17632" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17527" CreationDate="2021-02-14T21:48:11.660" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's plenty of ways how a pleasant thought can bring sad thoughts to mind but in this context, Wordsworth is grieving the condition of humanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the proceeding lines below state,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To her fair works did Nature link&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The human soul that through me ran;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And much it grieved my heart to think&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What man has made of man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And again, at the last stanza, Wordsworth writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this belief from heaven be sent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If such be Nature’s holy plan,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have I not reason to lament&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What man has made of man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly is this &amp;quot;Nature's holy plan?&amp;quot; The poem seems to suggest pleasure, joy, and rest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wordsworth remarks that he believes &amp;quot;that every flower // enjoys the air it breathes&amp;quot;. He notices the birds around him &amp;quot;hopped and played&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;the least motion they made // it seemed a thrill of pleasure&amp;quot;. He writes,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The budding twigs spread out their fan,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To catch the breezy air;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I must think, do all I can,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That there was &lt;em&gt;pleasure&lt;/em&gt; there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the poem, we see the repetition of words relating to beauty (&amp;quot;fair&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sweet&amp;quot;) as well as the word &amp;quot;pleasure&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;pleasant&amp;quot;. This is contrasted by the realization of &amp;quot;what man has made of man&amp;quot;. The poem seems to lament the fact that nature around him is so beautiful and peaceful, but the world around him - humanity as a whole is destroying the natural beauty of the world and ultimately destroying each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pleasantry of the environment around him made him realize that what he had around him was simply not realistic to the real-world he lived in, and that's why it brought him sad thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T21:48:11.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17633" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17636" CreationDate="2021-02-14T22:16:05.940" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These old folks, you must know, were quite poor, and had to work pretty hard for a living. Old Philemon toiled diligently in his garden, while Baucis was always busy with her distaff, or making a little butter and cheese with their cow’s milk, or doing one thing and another about the cottage. Their food was &lt;strong&gt;seldom anything but&lt;/strong&gt; bread, milk, and vegetables, with sometimes a portion of honey from their beehive, and now and then a bunch of grapes, that had ripened against the cottage-wall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is from &amp;quot;The Miraculous Pitcher&amp;quot; by Nathaniel Hawthorne, derived from the Greek myth of Philemon and Baucis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is that &amp;quot;seldom anything but&amp;quot; seems to be meant for &amp;quot;just only&amp;quot;.&#xA;It is a double negative form, I believe, and could it be replaced by 'nothing but'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is written in 1851, a long time ago, but is it a proper expression without any grammatical error?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not a native English speaker, so I've never come across with 'seldom anything but' kind of expression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8033" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T22:21:41.173" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T22:30:58.943" Title="Meaning of &quot;seldom anything but&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;nathaniel-hawthorne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17634" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17635" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T22:20:52.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17636" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17633" CreationDate="2021-02-14T22:30:58.943" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence means that they rarely had anything else than bread, milk and vegetables, with sometimes some honey and sometimes also a bunch of grapes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word sequence &amp;quot;seldom anything but&amp;quot; can also be found in other 19th-century publications. Here is an example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=S7IEAAAAQAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA50&amp;amp;dq=%22seldom+anything+but%22+rarely&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi84urCteruAhUPnhQKHU5-DJ0QuwUwAHoECAAQCA#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22seldom%20anything%20but%22%20rarely&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Work and Leisure, the Englishwoman's Advertiser, Reporter and Gazette. Volume 8&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1883):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one school, (...), this supper consisted of dry bread and water, with one glass to the tableful. Elsewhere, it was seldom anything but bread and cheese, or perhaps, rarely, a piece of cold pudding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-14T22:30:58.943" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17637" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9114" CreationDate="2021-02-15T00:30:07.133" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Narratology uses the terms prolepsis and analepsis to refer to two types of discrepancies between the order in which events are told and the order presented in the plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Prolepsis&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a so-called &amp;quot;flash-forward by which a future event is related as an interruption to the 'present' time of the narration&amp;quot; (Baldick, page 205).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cuddon gives the following example from stanza 27 of Keats's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Isabella&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isabella&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the two brothers and their &lt;strong&gt;murder'd man&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rode past fair Florence, to where Arno's stream&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gurgles through straiten'd banks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Analepsis&lt;/strong&gt; refers to a chronological discrepancy &amp;quot;by which some of the events of a story are related at a point in the narrative after later story-events have already been recounted&amp;quot;. This is often referred to as retrospection or flashback.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gérard Genette distinguishes homodiegetic and heterodiegetic analepsis or prolepsis, depending on whether the chronological discrepancy concerns something in the narrative's primary foreground or not (quoted from Herman &amp;amp; Vervaeck):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the analepsis or prolepsis concernt the element in the foreground of the primary narrative, Genette calls them homodiegetic. For instance, if a dying man remembers a moment from his own life, this would constitute a homodiegetic analepsis. If, however, he remembers something about a person who does not appear or has only a minor role in the primary narrative, then the analepsis is heterodiegetic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Herman, Luc; Vervaeck, Bart: &lt;em&gt;Handbook of Narrative Analysis&lt;/em&gt;. University of Nebraska Press, 2005. (Translation from the Dutch &lt;em&gt;Vertelduivels. Handboek verhaalanalyse&lt;/em&gt;. Vantilt, 2005.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T00:30:07.133" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17638" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17641" CreationDate="2021-02-15T02:44:24.787" Score="3" ViewCount="213" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cease, cows, life is short&amp;quot; is a quote from &lt;em&gt;One Hundred Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt; by Gabriel García Márquez. It is a phrase that Aureliano Segundo says in Chapter 17, and is later written on his coffin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any thoughts on what the phrase (specifically, the word &lt;em&gt;cease&lt;/em&gt;) could mean in the context? Some translators used a context of procreation to translate this phrase (&lt;em&gt;Multiply, cows...&lt;/em&gt;), but the English word &amp;quot;cease&amp;quot; doesn't seem to share that view. Knowing the original phrase from the Spanish version would have helped.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12118" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T03:30:26.350" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:16:28.550" Title="&quot;Cease, cows, life is short&quot; - what does it mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;gabriel-garcia-marquez&gt;&lt;one-hundred-years-of-solitude&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17639" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17599" CreationDate="2021-02-15T03:58:36.177" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;A standard meaning of &lt;em&gt;stand by&lt;/em&gt; is &lt;em&gt;accompany loyally&lt;/em&gt;. This is the only definition provided for the transitive use of that compound verb in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/standby&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;transitive verb&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: to remain loyal or faithful to : DEFEND&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// &lt;em&gt;stood by his decision&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line in question uses the phrase transitively: &lt;em&gt;return stands by disdain&lt;/em&gt;. It can be explained: Do not follow a path to glory too hastily, because &lt;em&gt;your return along that path will accompany disdain like a loyal companion.&lt;/em&gt; I.e., be circumspect when you seek recognition, because even if you get it, you are always at risk of losing your glory and encountering scorn instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A line-by-line reading of the quoted excerpt shows how this meaning is applicable here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who list his wealth and ease retain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Himself let him unknown contain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Those who want to retain an easy life should stay inconspicuous and not draw attention to themselves.&lt;/em&gt; This is easily relatable to the historical circumstances of Wyatt's times, and even specifically to his own life. Wyatt was born into comfortable circumstances, but was a relatively unknown quantity until he was singled out to be a diplomat for Henry VIII. Being close to the king was of course a great opportunity, but given Henry's mercurial temperament, also perilous. Many who had served Henry admirably, including &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Cromwell&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Cromwell&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas More&lt;/a&gt;, ended up beheaded when they fell out of favor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyatt himself came very close to meeting this fate. It is generally believed that &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renlit/wyattbio.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wyatt was a lover&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Boleyn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anne Boleyn&lt;/a&gt;, Henry's second wife, for whom he divorced Catherine of Aragon and precipitated the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Reformation&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English Reformation&lt;/a&gt;. Wyatt had known Anne for several years prior to her marriage to the king. When Anne herself fell out of favor with Henry, the king accused her of adultery. Since adultery against the king also constituted treason, Anne was convicted of a capital crime. Several men rumored to be her lovers, including Wyatt, were arrested around the same time. Wyatt was in the Tower of London when Anne was executed, and it is said that this poem was written after he witnessed her beheading from a window in his cell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the next two lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Press not too fast in at that gate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where the return stands by disdain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Do not be too hasty to go through the gate where, when you return by it, you will be inevitably accompanied by scorn.&lt;/em&gt; This sentiment applies to Anne Boleyn just as much as it does to Wyatt. Anne was well-born and could have had the typical life of a noblewoman of her day: marriage to a courtier and a comfortable, if relatively obscure, life. Instead, she came to the king's notice. This got her the glory of being England's queen, but it was also her downfall. Having &lt;em&gt;pressed ... in at that gate&lt;/em&gt; of fame and fortune, her &lt;em&gt;return stood by disdain&lt;/em&gt;. She was called an adulteress and a whore when probably her only real crime was that she bore Henry a daughter instead of the male heir he longed for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wyatt narrowly escaped Anne's fate. Not only did he come very close to losing his own life; those convicted of treason also had their wealth confiscated, so his family would have lost their money as well. Wyatt's expert diplomatic skills, both personal and professional, allowed him to evade this outcome. He was able to regain the king's favor and was in fact not only released from the Tower, but also restored to his diplomatic missions on behalf of the king. His tumultuous experience informs the last line of this verse:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For sure, circa regna tonat.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Latin phrase translates to &lt;em&gt;Thunder encircles the throne.&lt;/em&gt; As the idea of being a loyal companion to &lt;em&gt;disdain&lt;/em&gt; itself indicates, Wyatt is a master of irony. This line has two levels of meaning ironically played off against each other. The first straightforwardly continues the philosophical exhortation of the previous lines: if you achieve any kind of splendor, such as a throne, danger is all around you. The second refers to Henry VIII's mercurial temperament. Henry is metonymically the throne, and his raging temper the thunder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From this historical and biographical explanation, we can understand why Wyatt counsels the reader to beware of seeking fame. People whom Henry favored could achieve great splendor, but only by risking their reputation, money, and lives. Generalizing from this specific situation, Wyatt says in this poem that it is better to be comfortable rather than to gamble that comfort for the sake of greater glory. The loss of that glory is almost certain, and disdain is always standing by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T03:58:36.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17641" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17638" CreationDate="2021-02-15T12:06:39.687" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Spanish text, the context is as follows: while living with his mistress Petra Cotes, Aureliano Segundo is faced with the issue that his rabbits proliferate wildly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fue en esa época que el dio a Petra por rifar conejos. Se reproducían y se volvían adultos con tanta rapidez que apenas daban tiempo para vender veder los números de la rifa. Al principoi, Aureliano Segundo no advirtió las alarmantes proporciones de la proliferación. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was around this time that it occured Petra to raffle off rabbits. They reproduced and grew up so quickly that they barely had time to sell the tickets for the raffle. At first, Aureliano Segundo did not notice the alarming proportions of the proliferation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, one night there is a lot of noise by the courtyard door and when Aureliano Segundo opens the door and sees the courtyard is full of rabits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Estos son los que nacierion anoche — dijo [Petra Cortes].&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— ¡Qué horror! —dijo él—. ¿Por qué no pruebas con vacas? Pocos días después, tratando de desahogar su patio, Petra Cortes cambió les conejos por una vaca, que dos meses más tarde parió trillizos. Así empezaron las cosas. De la noche a la mañana, Aureliano Segundo se hizo dueño de tierras y ganados, y apenas si tenía tiempo de ensanchar las caballerizas y pocilgas desbordadas. Era une prosperidad de delirio que a él mismo le causaba risa, y no podía menos que asumir actitudes extravagantes para descargar su buen humore. &amp;quot;Apártense, vacas, que la vida es corta&amp;quot;, gritaba.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— These are the ones that were born last night — she [Petra Cortes] said.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— How horrible!, he said. Why don't you try it with cows? A few days later, trying to clean out the courtyard, Petra Cortes exchanged the rabbits for a cow, which two months later gave birth to triplets. That's how things began. Overnight, Aureliano Segundo became the owner of land and cattle, and he hardly had time to expand the overflowing barns and pigpens. It was a delirious prosperity that made him laugh, and he couldn't help doing extravagant things to vent his good humour. &amp;quot;Desist, cows, life is short,&amp;quot; he shouted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the context, these famous words appear to mean: &amp;quot;Stop procreating so quickly, cows, because [my / a man's] life is short&amp;quot;, i.e. too short to dedicate so much of it to livestock breeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T09:16:28.550" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:16:28.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17642" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12440" CreationDate="2021-02-15T17:09:44.263" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A Face in the Dark&amp;quot; is a very short story, around one page long. It is told from a &lt;strong&gt;third-person point of view&lt;/strong&gt; by an omniscient narrator. The following sentences, which are not spoken by a character in the story, are the narrator's only intrusion into the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And that's where the story should end. But for Mr Oliver it did not end here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator's intrusion may remind one of &lt;strong&gt;metafiction&lt;/strong&gt;, however that term&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is normally used for works that involve a significant degree of self-consciousness about themselves as fiction, in ways that go beyond occasional apologetic addresses to the reader. (Baldick, page 151)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator may intrude into the narration by drawing attention to the story itself or even by addressing the reader without necessarily turning the narrative into metafiction. This is a device that can also be found in many other works. Below are a few examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Unfinished_Story&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;An Unfinished Story&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by O. Henry:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Do you belong with that bunch?&amp;quot; the policeman asked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Who are they?&amp;quot; was my answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why,&amp;quot; said he, &amp;quot;they are—&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicholas_Nickleby/Chapter_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 1 of &lt;em&gt;Niholas Nickleby&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1838–1839) by Charles Dickens:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From what we have said of this young gentleman, and the natural admiration the reader will immediately conceive of his character, it may perhaps be inferred that he is to be the hero of the work which we shall presently begin. To set this point at rest for once and for ever, we hasten to undeceive them, and stride to its commencement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Bondage_and_My_Freedom_(1855)/Chapter_XVI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XVI of &lt;em&gt;My Bondage and My Freedom&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1855) by Frederick Douglas:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You have, dear reader, seen me humbled, degraded, broken down, enslaved, and brutalized, and you understand how it was done; now let us see the converse of all this, and how it was brought about; and this will take us through the year 1834.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ben-Hur:_A_Tale_of_the_Christ/Book_4/Chapter_15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Book 4, Chapter 15 of &lt;em&gt;Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1880) by Lew Walace:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On this faith, dear reader, the Pharisees or Separatists—the latter being rather a political term—in the cloisters and around the altars of the Temple, built an edifice of hope far overtopping the dream of the Macedonian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wheels_of_Chance:_A_Bicycling_Idyll/Chapter_29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXIX of &lt;em&gt;The Wheels of Chance&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1913) by H. G. Wells:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Dear me!&amp;quot; said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind. &amp;quot;How did you find out that?&amp;quot; (the man was born in a London suburb, dear Reader.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T17:09:44.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17643" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-15T17:55:40.407" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They laughed. Vicki watched them closely, ready to be included in their&#xA;amusement, to roll her shoulders in scepticism as they did, but they&#xA;pretended not to see her and turned back to their contemplation of the street&#xA;outside. In a minute one of them would come over and tell Vicki to stop&#xA;handling the clothes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vicki knew what her retort would be: ‘Don’t be silly.’ She would turn her&#xA;mouth down, and her eyes would become cold, glittering slits. And if a&#xA;waiter said anything to her about going straight through to the toilet without&#xA;being a customer of the cafe, she would put her hand on her hip and say,&#xA;‘First I piss, then I eat – do you mind?’ And then she would order&#xA;something really cheap, like one donut or a packet of CCs. In this frame of&#xA;mind, savage with homesickness and loneliness, she roamed the city, &lt;strong&gt;daring&#xA;it to tackle her. It paid her no attention&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does in the sentence in bold &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; refer to &lt;em&gt;in this frame of mind&lt;/em&gt;? I mean &lt;em&gt;the way of her thought&lt;/em&gt; and the whole sentence in bold mean: she wanted by strengthening this type of her thought to deal with her difficult situation but her thought was not helpful?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T18:06:52.490" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:51:47.267" Title="Meaning of &quot;daring it to tackle her. It paid her no attention&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17644" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17643" CreationDate="2021-02-15T18:14:03.177" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronoun &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;daring it to tackle her&amp;quot; refers to &amp;quot;the city&amp;quot;. Vicky has made up her mind intimidated or discouraged by the people she meets in the city; that is what &amp;quot;frame of mind&amp;quot; refers to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;daring it to tackle her&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;challenging it [the city] to face her / deal with here&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tackle#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tackle&lt;/a&gt; here means &amp;quot;to face or deal with, attempting to overcome or fight down&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people she encounters are just &amp;quot;the city&amp;quot; because they remain anonymous. They also ignore her; hence &amp;quot;It paid her no attention.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-15T21:51:47.267" LastActivityDate="2021-02-15T21:51:47.267" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17645" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11267" CreationDate="2021-02-16T01:06:38.927" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I think I've finally found the answer to my original question. Today while randomly reading V.S. Naipual's Wikipedia page, I came across the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At University College, Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability and calling, he became depressed. In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he quickly spent all he had saved. He called his impulsive trip 'a nervous breakdown.' Thirty years later, he called it 'something like a mental illness.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Seemingly, what he had done that was terrible was to go to Spain on a foolish impulse and blow all his hard-earned money. This makes sense, since for Naipaul—a man who was very concerned with financial independence—such irresponsibility with money was a mortal sin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7366" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T08:56:28.023" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T08:56:28.023" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17646" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17546" CreationDate="2021-02-16T01:07:54.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A friendly Redditor ialmostguaranteeit found the answer for me. So I am posting here in case anyone else wonders in the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Zog-19: A Scientific Romance&amp;quot; by Pinckney Benedict? A couple places in which it can be found are the anthology &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.press53.com/short-fiction/miracle-boy-and-other-stories-by-pinckney-benedict&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Miracle Boy and Other Stories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Pinckney Benedict (Press 53, 2010), the magazine &lt;em&gt;Zoetrope: All Story&lt;/em&gt; (Vol. 4, No.1), short-story collection &lt;em&gt;Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All-Story 2&lt;/em&gt; (Harvest Books, 2003), edited by Adrienne Brodeur and Samantha Schnee and the collection &lt;em&gt;Prize Stories 2001: The O. Henry Awards&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Larry Dark (Anchor Books, 2001).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quote from the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On Zog's planet, 'Toot Toot' means 'Don't worry.' It also means 'I love you' and 'Everything is A-okay, Everything is just peachy keen.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12108" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T11:30:31.207" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T11:30:31.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17647" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17648" CreationDate="2021-02-16T02:15:36.227" Score="4" ViewCount="352" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sentence appears in Milton's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Emilton/reading_room/areopagitica/text.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Areopagitica&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall&#xA;utter, that we are already in good part arrived, and yet from such a&#xA;steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our&#xA;principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery, it will be&#xA;attributed first, as is most due, to the strong assistance of God our&#xA;deliverer, next to your faithful guidance and undaunted wisdom, Lords&#xA;and Commons of England.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Milton refer to when he says &amp;quot;and yet from such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A general explanation will be helpful as well as a particular explanation of the &amp;quot;manhood of a Roman recovery&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12120" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T04:17:45.130" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:52:32.280" Title="What is the &quot;manhood of a Roman recovery&quot; in John Milton's Areopagitica?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;essays&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17648" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17647" CreationDate="2021-02-16T05:23:02.200" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Areopagitica&amp;quot; (1644) was written to argue against the Licensing Order of the previous year, which required that works had to be pre-approved by a censor before they could be printed. Some historical background is necessary to fully understand the passage. Until 1640, the Catholic monarch Charles I had claimed to be above parliament. During his absolutist rule, he had mandated that his Star Chamber would pre-censor documents before allowing them to be legally printed. By 1642, Parliamentarians had managed to place curbs on Charles's power. However, in 1643, Parliament too passed a similar licensing order requiring pre-censorship. Milton's essay is addressed to Parliament, urging them to reconsider.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milton argues that true freedom consists not in being free &lt;em&gt;from&lt;/em&gt; grievances, but being free &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; air them. He says that England has come very close to achieving true freedom. He says that his being able to circulate a pamphlet arguing against the government proposal itself demonstrates this true freedom that prevails in England: &lt;em&gt;To which if I now manifest by the very sound of this which I shall utter, that we are already in good part arrived.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes on to say that this freedom was hard-won, because it had to contend against &lt;em&gt;such a steep disadvantage of tyranny and superstition grounded into our principles as was beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery.&lt;/em&gt; This refers to the underpinnings of Charles's rule: the more or less absolute monarchy that he insisted upon (&lt;em&gt;tyranny&lt;/em&gt;) and his Catholic faith (&lt;em&gt;superstition&lt;/em&gt;). The overthrow of his personal rule and reinstatement of Parliamentary checks on his power had led to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_English_Civil_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;civil war&lt;/a&gt; that was still underway as Milton was writing. Under Charles's absolute rule, liberty had been impossible. Publishing an anti-government tract would have been considered an act of treason. That Milton was now able to do so showed that with great difficulty, tyranny and superstition had finally been overthrown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So deep was the disadvantage this tyranny and superstition placed upon champions of liberty, that it was &lt;em&gt;beyond the manhood of a Roman recovery.&lt;/em&gt; The term &lt;em&gt;manhood&lt;/em&gt; is a literal rendering of &lt;em&gt;virtue&lt;/em&gt;, which traces back to &lt;em&gt;man&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/virtue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Online Etymological Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c. 1200, &lt;em&gt;vertu&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;moral life and conduct; a particular moral excellence,&amp;quot; from Anglo-French and Old French &lt;em&gt;vertu&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;force, strength, vigor; moral strength; qualities, abilities&amp;quot; (10c. in Old French), from Latin &lt;em&gt;virtutem&lt;/em&gt; (nominative virtus) &amp;quot;moral strength, high character, goodness; manliness; valor, bravery, courage (in war); excellence, worth,&amp;quot; from &lt;em&gt;vir&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;man&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milton says that the typical Roman private virtues of moral excellence, strength, ability, etc. had not been enough for liberty to prevail under the tyranny and superstition of Charles's rule. Only God's deliverance allowed liberty to finally flourish. Milton flatteringly adds that the Parliamentarians to whom his tract is addressed were as responsible as God for this happy state of affairs as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Roman recovery&lt;/em&gt; is double-edged, though. On the one hand, it does literally mean that the Roman &lt;em&gt;manhood&lt;/em&gt;, human and specifically male virtue, was insufficient; God's grace was needed to restore liberty. On the other hand, &lt;em&gt;Roman&lt;/em&gt; is also a broadside against Charles's Catholicism. Manhood/virtue by itself was not enough to recover liberty from the constraints placed on it by the tyranny and superstition of Roman Catholicism. This is also a theological argument. Unlike Catholicism, where adherence to the sacraments of the Church are sufficient for salvation, in Milton's Protestant theology, salvation and deliverance are in the hands of God and not determined by individual virtue. The association of virtue with &lt;em&gt;manhood&lt;/em&gt; also has connotations of the etymologically related &lt;em&gt;virility&lt;/em&gt;. Milton is casting the Protestant/Catholic distinction in gendered terms, with the former being masculine and the latter feminine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Milton has a sophisticated conception of liberty, and his complex rhetoric here brings that out. Liberty does not entail doing what one wants without opposition; rather, it means having the freedom to dissent. Liberty is not a natural condition; to achieve liberty, one has to actively fight against forces of tyranny and superstition. The fight requires manliness, but such virtue is not sufficient; God's deliverance is necessary as well. Milton contrasts the Roman Catholicism of Charles's regime with the Puritanism of the parliamentarianists, and cautions them against replicating the same error of placing undue constraints on liberty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T12:52:32.280" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:52:32.280" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17649" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17548" CreationDate="2021-02-16T09:53:00.013" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Much has been written about these two poems, to the extent that many scholarly publications nowadays simply take it as a given, not needing justification, that &amp;quot;A Prayer for my Daughter&amp;quot; is a follow-up to &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot;. For example, the opening paragraph of &lt;a href=&quot;https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1600-0730.1971.tb00661.x&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beryl Rowland, &amp;quot;The Other Father in Yeats's “A Prayer for My Daughter”&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Orbis Litterarum&lt;/em&gt; 26(1) (1971), pp. 284-290&lt;/a&gt;, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yeats’s “A Prayer For My Daughter”’ is rightly regarded as a companion piece to “The Second Coming”, written  a few weeks earlier. It offers, on a personal level, a  pattern of living which will withstand the onslaught  of the monstrous sphinx-like creature threatening to destroy the cultural values of the Christian world. The tempestuous scene  in the opening stanza is a  microcosm of the larger violence let loose in “The Second Coming”, and within the smaller com- pass the poet describes a  means  of escape from the “blood-dimmed  tide” that will drown the “ceremony  of  innocence”. Decades replace the centuries,  the imminent life of his new-born daughter, the anonymous generations, and from this  rocking  cradle comes, not the  nightmare, but happiness, innocence, and permanence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comparisons between the two poems can also be drawn in their differing portrayals of birds:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The relationship between the tree and the tenacious singing birds contrasts with the famous bird images of &amp;quot;The Second Coming,&amp;quot; where the falconer loses control of the falcon which has been gyrating above him in ever-widening circles and which, in the' second verse paragraph, generates the desert birds that angrily reel over a slouching monster. The motif of hunting, associated with the falcon, is in &amp;quot;A Prayer for My Daughter&amp;quot; replaced by the playful &amp;quot;chase&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Nor but in merriment begin a chase&amp;quot;); the &amp;quot;indignant&amp;quot; cries of the desert scavengers cheated of their prey are replaced by the linnet's &amp;quot;magnanimities of sound.&amp;quot; The linnet's generous, magnanimous song is pitted against the howling of the storm, the prophetic &amp;quot;frenzied drum&amp;quot; of the future cataclysms, and the &amp;quot;angry bellows&amp;quot; for which Maud Gonne is accused of having bartered her birthright. Maud Gonne, Yeats's Helen of Troy, is invoked as a negative example, almost a control group: her passionate commitments left no place for liberalist irony.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.connotations.de/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/toker00901.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leona Toker, &amp;quot;W B. Yeats's &amp;quot;A Prayer for My Daughter&amp;quot;: The Ironies of the Patriarchal Stance&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Connotations&lt;/em&gt; 9(1) (1999), pp. 100-110&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also in their treatment of innocence as linked with ceremony: cf. the following lines from &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;A Prayer for my Daughter&amp;quot; respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The ceremony of innocence is drowned;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And may her bridegroom bring her to a house&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For arrogance and hatred are the wares&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Peddled in the thoroughfares.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How but in custom and in ceremony&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are innocence and beauty born?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And custom for the spreading laurel tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further discussion of the concepts of innocence, anarchy, etc. shown in these lines of the two poems can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/docview/198418704&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John R. Harrison, &amp;quot;What rough beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and historical rhetoric in &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot;&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Papers on Language and Literature&lt;/em&gt; 31(4)  (1995), 362&lt;/a&gt;, including some previous versions of the &amp;quot;ceremony of innocence is drowned&amp;quot; line from earlier drafts of &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that in his &lt;em&gt;Collected Poems&lt;/em&gt; (1912) Yeats included &amp;quot;A Prayer for my Daughter&amp;quot; immediately after &lt;em&gt;The Second Coming&lt;/em&gt;, further indicating the connection between them. Of course, the compositions of these two poems was also close together in time, as you've already indicated in your question: the powerfully mysterious &amp;quot;The Second Coming&amp;quot; written shortly &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the birth of his daughter, and the more hopeful and optimistic &amp;quot;A Prayer for My Daughter&amp;quot; written shortly &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the birth of his daughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A more detailed comparison between these two poems can be found in &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanbaghdad.com/the-second-coming-and-a-prayer-for-my-daughter-samples/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt;, but take it for what it's worth, with its references to &amp;quot;Earnest Hemmingway&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;T. S. Elliott&amp;quot; [sic].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T09:58:56.840" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T09:58:56.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17650" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17626" CreationDate="2021-02-16T12:04:52.720" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Woman Work&amp;quot; depicts women's unpaid labor as a form of slavery. Slaves by definition are dispossessed of the right to own anything. The poem's word choice and imagery are carefully deployed to show how and why the woman can call only the stars and the moonlight her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first stanza, the speaker lays out a litany of chores that are typically associated with women's physical and emotional labor: childcare, grocery shopping, cooking, serving food, sewing, housecleaning, tending the sick, etc.:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've got the children to tend&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The clothes to mend&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The floor to mop&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The food to shop&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then the chicken to fry&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The baby to dry&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I got company to feed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The garden to weed&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I've got shirts to press&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The tots to dress&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The cane to be cut&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I gotta clean up this hut&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then see about the sick&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the cotton to pick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet in no case does the speaker claim that these tasks are personal to her. She does not speak of tending &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; children, just &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; children. She presses &lt;em&gt;shirts&lt;/em&gt;, not &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; shirts. She cleans &lt;em&gt;this&lt;/em&gt; hut, not &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt; hut. The use of articles or demonstrative adjectives instead of the possessive adjective &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; suggests that Angelou's speaker represents not only one specific woman who is enumerating the tasks she has to undertake through her day, but &amp;quot;woman work&amp;quot; in general. This is the burden society places on &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; women, expecting them to do unpaid labor as a matter of course.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last listed task, &lt;em&gt;the cotton to pick&lt;/em&gt;, stands out from the rest. By including this in the list, Angelou achieves two ends. First, she dismantles the distinction between housework and paid employment and shows that it is artificial, not natural. Women from white-collar or landed-property families might have the luxury, or until fairly recently even the expectation, of devoting themselves solely to housework. But for working-class women, particularly women of color, employment has always been a necessity. Even if they have their own homes and children to look after, they have to work for money. In many cases, they are paid for the same tasks outside the home that they would do for free within their families: childcare, cleaning, nursing, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the speaker has not said that she is caring for her own children, ironing her own shirts, etc., the poem shows that nothing inherent to these tasks makes them unworthy of payment. By connecting these tasks to picking cotton, which would in fact typically entail receiving wages nowadays, Angelou causes us to rethink our assumptions about the economic value of women's work. Further, picking cotton is not a gender-specific task, which also prompts the reader to question the blithe assumption that the other tasks are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More trenchantly, in American history picking cotton is associated with slave labor. Slaves were forced to labor unpaid, and we expect women's work to be unpaid. Angelou depicts the burden of emotional and physical labor imposed on women as a form of slavery. Slaves of course had no property of their own. They did not even own their bodies, or have any claim to their children. The careful avoidance of the possessive adjective thus leads up to this depiction of women's work as a form of slavery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a slave, the speaker of course does not own anything else. The only things that are hers are those that belong to all humankind: natural features and phenomena like the rain, the ocean, and the sun. The movement from the highly particularized list of tasks in the first stanza to the universalized images of the conclusion reinforces that this condition of slavery is not something that is restricted to the particular woman who speaks this poem, but is common to women in general.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T12:04:52.720" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17651" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-16T15:19:34.617" Score="3" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world and many people's lives in countries all over the world in 2020. Much &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/01/no-pubs-no-kissing-no-flying-how-covid-19-is-forcing-authors-to-change-their-novels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;has been written&lt;/a&gt; about how writers of fiction have needed to change or shelve their manuscripts to reflect the new state of the world, or to avoid the temporal setting of their stories being &lt;a href=&quot;https://xkcd.com/2384/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;impossible to place&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since so many of these changes have happened so quickly, in the future it may be very hard to pin down a timeline or to figure out who was the first person to get a book published which was really set during the Covid-19 pandemic. I'm hoping that, by asking this question now in 2021 when it should be easier to answer, I'm creating something which will be of value to future historians of literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What was the first-published fiction story, in any language, set during Covid-19 lockdown?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clarifications (more may be added if necessary):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any type of story counts, but it must be formally &lt;strong&gt;published&lt;/strong&gt;, not just a blog post or the like which a good writer could do in a day. (For bonus points I'd also be interested in the first &lt;em&gt;novel&lt;/em&gt;, or similarly lengthy piece of literature.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Any Earth setting is OK, even fictional countries, but there must be a &lt;strong&gt;lockdown&lt;/strong&gt; which affects the lives of the characters. A casual mention of a news story about a virus in far-off China doesn't qualify.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T02:37:27.603" Title="What was the first published book set during a Covid-19 lockdown?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17652" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17605" CreationDate="2021-02-16T15:24:31.320" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fullbooks.com/In-the-Midst-of-Alarms3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XVI&lt;/a&gt; Yates had received a telegraph from his employer that ended with the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Draw on us for cash you need; and don't spare expense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though he was on vacation, the newspaper wanted him to report on the Fenian raids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The telegraph boy in Chapter XVIII still remembers the phrase &amp;quot;Spare no expense&amp;quot; and he is the only one who can take Yate's telegraph message across the border. So Yates promises him a hundred dollars, which he will need to get from his employer, Argus. &amp;quot;Draw on&amp;quot; here (and in Chapter XVI) means &amp;quot;use as a source of money&amp;quot;. (To &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/draw#Verb&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;draw&lt;/a&gt; money from a bank&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;to take from a deposit at a bank&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T15:24:31.320" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17477" CreationDate="2021-02-16T16:17:23.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;People do have understanding that a quote by Mark Twain can’t be&#xA;analyzed for its source&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't think that's the issue. I have never heard that particular witticism, but I found myself nodding in agreement - Mark Twain is such a towering giant in American literature that is is easy to imagine how people would find no need to think about anything attributed to him (because how could it be wrong, if it was said by such an esteemed figure as Mark Twain). Although I would say that this is a bit tongue in cheek, and meant to poke fun some slightly snobbish members of the educated middle class, who would pretend to know any made-up quote as long as it's attributed to Mark Twain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1205" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T16:17:23.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17651" CreationDate="2021-02-16T16:30:55.103" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wuhan-diary-fang-fangmichael-berry?variant=32205368295458&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Fang Fang (translated by Michael Berry was published in e-book format by HarperCollins in 15 May 2020. (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.harpercollins.com/products/wuhan-diary-fang-fangmichael-berry?variant=32291831185442&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hardcover edtion&lt;/a&gt; is dated 24 November 2020.) This is obviously set during a lockdown but is not fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several of the earliest novels that are explicitly set during a lockdown in Europe are self-published:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.fr/COVID-19-ROMAN-GLOBAL-DANS-MONDE/dp/B088B6WLMK/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;COVID-19: UN ROMAN GLOBAL DANS UN MONDE GLOBAL&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Dr. Joseph Adrien Emmanuel DEMES M.D. M.P.H. Ph.D. (obviously a very serious author): published on &lt;strong&gt;30 April 2020&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.fr/AMOUR-CONFINEMENT-H%C3%A9l%C3%A8ne-TAVELLE/dp/B08BDRB37J/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;UN AMOUR DE CONFINEMENT&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Hélène Tavelle: published on 17 June 2020 (&amp;quot;confinement&amp;quot; can mean quarantine or lockdown);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Lockdown-Liebe-Zeiten-von-Corona/dp/B08KH3QMCP/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lockdown: Liebe in Zeiten von Corona&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Agnes Bonus is a short-story collection published on 29 September 2020;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.fr/Futur-proche-Fran%C3%A7ois-Morin/dp/B08KGQTP4N/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Futur proche&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by François Morin: published on 30 September 2020 (set in a country &lt;em&gt;after&lt;/em&gt; the Covid-19 pandemic and where liberty has been seriously reduced and the health system has failed);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plandemic-John-Reizer/dp/B08H6RVX3R/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plandemic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Reizer was published on 1 September 2020; the summary on Amazon.co.uk does not explicitly mention a lockdown but says &amp;quot;While most people in the world remain paralyzed by fear&amp;quot;; the novel capitalises on conspiracy myths;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.co.uk/Plandemic-Matthew-Burlington/dp/B0892HQTLF/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Plandemic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Matthew Burlington was published on 23 May 2020 but is about a &amp;quot;deadly plague epidemic&amp;quot;, not Covid-19, and therefore does not count);&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Covid-19-Roman-10-10-20-Romanovelle-Sars-Al-Klausens/dp/375262678X/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Covid-19-Roman [10.10.20]&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; published on 19.10.2020 under the pseudonym Sars Al-Klausen; the cover says &amp;quot;An einem Tag geschrieben&amp;quot;, i.e. written on a single day.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not self-published but not explicitly set during a lockdown:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://keinundaber.ch/de/autoren-regal/martin-meyer/corona/1160&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Corona&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the Swiss author Martin Meyer was published by Kein &amp;amp; Aber in May 2020 and reviewed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/der-erste-corona-roman-martin-meyers-erzaehlung-corona/25913182.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Tagesspiegel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on 15 June 2020. The novel is about a bookseller who has symptoms of a Covid-19 infection and who therefore lives in quarantine. What I could find about this novel does not explicitly mention a lockdown.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://steffen-verlag.de/buecher-trainingskarten/bestseller/923/das-corona-ende&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Das Corona-Ende&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by  Dorit Biel and Matti Sund, published by Steffen Verlag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Das-Corona-Ende-Roman-Matti-Sund/dp/3957990971/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;12 May 2020&lt;/strong&gt; according to Amazon.de&lt;/a&gt;; this novel is about a woman who is involved in the development of Corona medication (not a vaccine) while her husband is infected and therefore urgently needs the medication; the authors wrote the book during a &lt;strong&gt;self-imposed two-week quarantine&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.debehr.de/buch.php?id=702&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Als mein Leben verrückt spielte und dann auch noch Corona kam&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Anke Ernst, published by DeBehr on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/mein-Leben-verr%C3%BCckt-spielte-Corona/dp/395753786X/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;27 July according to Amazon.de&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aufbau-verlag.de/index.php/das-baby-ist-meins.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Das Baby ist meins&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Oyinkan Braithwaite, published by Aufbau-Verlag on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.de/Das-Baby-ist-meins-Roman/dp/3351050895&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;18 January 2021&lt;/a&gt; is described as the &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;first real lockdown novel&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in the blogpost &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.wdr.de/nollerliest/der-erste-echte-lockdown-roman-das-baby-ist-meins-von-oyinkan-braithwaite/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Der erste echte Lockdown-Roman: “Das Baby ist meins” von Oyinkan Braithwaite&lt;/a&gt; on the blog of WDR (&amp;quot;West-German Broadcast&amp;quot;) (3 February 2021). The justification for this description is that the lockdown is not simply used as in a diary but is used as a &lt;strong&gt;major plot element&lt;/strong&gt; (&amp;quot;strukturell und dramaturgisch alles entscheidend&amp;quot;).&lt;br /&gt;The English edition, &lt;em&gt;The Baby Is Mine&lt;/em&gt;, by &lt;a href=&quot;https://atlantic-books.co.uk/book/the-baby-is-mine/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Atlantic Books&lt;/a&gt; is scheduled for publication on 27 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T17:29:37.317" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T17:29:37.317" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17655" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17656" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book-length essay 'The Rebel' (French: 'L'Homme révolté', 1951) by Albert Camus. Use this tag with [albert-camus] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T17:54:10.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17657" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="826" CreationDate="2021-02-16T18:35:06.310" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wodehouse wrote in a letter to William Townend dated 6 March 1932,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...) It's not all jam writing in the first person. The reader can know nothing except what Bertie tells him, and Bertie can know only a limited amount himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This letter is quoted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=jgmUDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT39&amp;amp;dq=wodehouse+%22in+the+first+person%22&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwj06JO6_u7uAhWaHOwKHf8BBYEQuwUwAnoECAYQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=wodehouse%20%22in%20the%20first%20person%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;P.G. Wodehouse in His Own Words&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, edited by Barry Day (Abrams, 2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of Wodehouse's early novels was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Among_the_Chickens&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Love Among the Chickens&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, first published in 1906 (almost a decade before his first Bertie Wooster story), and revised in 1921. According to the editor of &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=xMQWEAAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT541&amp;amp;dq=wodehouse+%22in+the+first+person%22+novel&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjUyoScgO_uAhXODuwKHa6uAX4QuwUwAnoECAQQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=wodehouse%20%22in%20the%20first%20person%22%20novel&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Delphi Collected Works of P. G. Wodehouse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1921 Wodehouse revised the book, rewriting the first five chapters so they were narrated in the first person and making some changes in the ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of what he wrote to Townend in 1932, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughing_Gas_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Laughing Gas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1936, is told in the first person from the point of view of Reginald (&amp;quot;Reggie&amp;quot;) Swithin, third Earl of Havershot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T18:35:06.310" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1970" CreationDate="2021-02-16T18:59:30.387" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Probably, Jules Verne’s mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://arzamas.academy/materials/2192&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to local historian&lt;/a&gt; (Professor &lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%B7%D0%BD%D1%91%D0%B2,_%D0%A4%D1%91%D0%B4%D0%BE%D1%80_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fedor Seleznev&lt;/a&gt;'s lecture &lt;em&gt;История Нижегородской ярмарки&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arzamas_(website)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arzamas&lt;/a&gt;) the trade fair lasted for just one day before &lt;em&gt;1641&lt;/em&gt;, four weeks after that, and about six weeks from &lt;em&gt;1822&lt;/em&gt;, when new place was chosen, and new facilities were built:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since then, the Nizhny Novgorod Fair has always opened on July 15, and&#xA;ended on August 25 with the lowering of flags.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://zen.yandex.ru/media/unknownhistory1917/nijegorodskaia-iarmarka-ekspocentr-xix-veka-5ebbc16c32c6750fba840360&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Other sources&lt;/a&gt; (anonymous Yandex Zen web channel &lt;em&gt;неизвестная история&lt;/em&gt;) specify that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;officially, the fair was held from July 15 to August 25, but in fact&#xA;the trade continued until the beginning of September&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastEditorUserId="10619" LastEditDate="2021-02-16T19:42:41.413" LastActivityDate="2021-02-16T19:42:41.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17660" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17651" CreationDate="2021-02-17T02:37:27.603" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wheelers.co.nz/browse/series/743663-the-staying-home-series/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Staying Home series&lt;/a&gt; of picturebooks explaining the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions was published in New Zealand 21 May 2020, but may have been produced overseas earlier than this. Unfortunately I am unable to find any other information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="271" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T02:37:27.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17343" CreationDate="2021-02-17T05:58:03.170" Score="13" Body="&lt;h1&gt;Making some reasonable assumptions, ~95 days&lt;/h1&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that 95 days is for what I consider the &amp;quot;main story&amp;quot; - from when Fiver has his first vision to when the Efrafan attackers are defeated. There's some stuff after that but the timing gets fuzzy. &lt;strong&gt;If you just want the timeline, skip past the &amp;quot;Timeline discussion&amp;quot; section.&lt;/strong&gt; (Though you may want to peek at my list of timeline variables)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Timeline discussion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are some time segments of unclear length. I've assigned these lengths variables. They're the reason I have to make assumptions about how long the story takes. Nevertheless, with some handwaving and math-ing, it's possible to make educated guesses about how long each time period is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Timeline variables&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a = number of days after the rainstorm and before Kehaar agrees to fly, “a few days”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;b = number of days Kehaar is scouting, “several days”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;c = number of days at the home warren before Dandelion tells &amp;quot;Rowsby Woof&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Timeline Math-ing&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s jump straight in, shall we? Day 5 is “May” and Day 7 is “June”. Therefore either Days 5 or 6 is the last day of May. Without losing much accuracy, let’s assume Day 5 is. About “six weeks later” from Day 41 + a + b + c (the last day) is “mid-October”. Day 41 + a + b + c, therefore, is late August. There are 30 days in June, 31 days in July, and 31 days in August. Late August would be ~90 days after May ended (which we assumed was Day 5). Therefore Day 95. Hey, round numbers are nice!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we estimate the values of the timeline variables? Unfortunately there’s no way to disentangle a from b; not enough information is given between Kehaar agreeing to fly and returning from scouting. On Day 28 + a + b the narration remarks that “June was moving towards July”, which perhaps means “the last days of June”. Again taking Day 5 as the last day of May, the last day of June would be Day 5 + 30 = Day 35. We know that a = “a few days” and b = “several days”. Eyeballing that, let’s say a + b = 7 days, a nice round week. Then Day 28 + a + b = Day 35 - hey look, that matches! Turning back to our estimate of Day 41 + a + b + c = Day 95, we find 41 + 7 + c = 95, or c = 47 days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So with copious handwaving and some educated guesses, we can say that a + b = ~7 days and c = ~47 days. For even more handwaving, “several days” (b) seems more than “a few days” (a), and therefore let’s say b = 4 days and a = 3 days. There. We’ve done math in English class and it made a modicum of sense! Moving on...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Timeline!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, first some explanation of the timeline. Each set of events is headlined with a “Day X” heading. &lt;strong&gt;I split days by when I estimated midnight was.&lt;/strong&gt; Some nighttime travelling was split over multiple days. When multiple timelines occur on the same day, there are headers for each timeline’s section of events, clarifying who is doing what. Absolute-timing indicators (months, mostly) are placed on the same line as the “Day X” they appear in. I have tried to pare this timeline down to the important events. Some less-important events were left in for the sake of having something for every day that was possible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 1&lt;/strong&gt; (“May”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiver gets a premonition of doom “half an hour to twilight”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 2&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Fiver &amp;amp; Hazel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiver and Hazel visit the Threrah “a little after ni-Frith, or noon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They gather a group and leave “into the dim, moonlit night”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Sandleford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That “night” the Owsla do an initial search, give up&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 3&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“It was morning” when Bigwig says they must cross the stream due to a dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They trade off sleeping, eating, and watching “through the day” in a safe field&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Sandleford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There are rumors, lots of talking, more dismissing of Fiver’s warning “the next day”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 4&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“As the sun rose” they finally reach the meadow after travelling through Newton&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“A little while after ni-Frith” Cowslip invites them over, and in “the late afternoon” they go&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Sandleford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“The next day in the afternoon” Holly sights men smoking by the notice board&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 5&lt;/strong&gt; (“May”)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Strawberry takes them to get flayrah “some time after sunrise”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dandelion and Silverweed tell a story and a poem, at “nightfall”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Sandleford&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“[Not] long before ni-Frith” Holly returns from lettuce-hunting and sees men gassing the warren, escapes with Bluebell and some others&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 6&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig is trapped in the “first sunlight”, the refugees leave soon after&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They cross the river, at “night” learn of Cowslip’s warren&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 7&lt;/strong&gt; (“June”)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“In the twilight” “of the following day” the refugees finally arrive on the downs proper&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s refugees&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holly’s group wakes, surrounded, “some time before ni-Frith”, and fight their way out&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 8&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel’s refugees spend much of the rest of the day digging for the new warren&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“In the faint starlight” they find Holly (who had been journeying with Bluebell the day)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 9&lt;/strong&gt;  (&amp;quot;full moon&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More digging while Hazel consults Strawberry about warren layout&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Silver points out a field mouse, Hazel saves it in the “late afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holly &amp;amp; Bluebell tell their tale at “night”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 10&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar is found in the “early morning”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;More digging in the Honeycomb, including making an area for Kehaar&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar moves in “As darkness began to fall”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 11&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During evening silflay, the need for does is discussed&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 12&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It rains on Kehaar’s “third night in the warren”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 12 + a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar tells Hazel that he is willing to fly and look around for does “one afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 13 + a&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar makes a few short flights the “next day”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 16 + a&lt;/strong&gt; (“June”)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar sets out for real “three days later” in the “morning”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 16 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar arrives with news of the farm and another warren (Efrafa) “late one afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 17 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The down rabbits' mood gradually shifts towards a strong desire to go to the other warren&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 18 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They plan an excursion to the strange warren&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 19 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s explorers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They set out for Efrafa “early in the morning”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back on the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel decides to scout the farm with Pipkin “in the midsummer night”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 20 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s explorers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They set out again, as morning rain had lightened up “after ni-Frith”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They arrive at Efrafa and speak with Hyzenthlay, Woundwort in the “early evening”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back on the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel and Pipkin find the hutch rabbits and talk up freedom “before dawn”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel and Pipkin return to the Honeycomb in the “evening”, as it rained in the morning&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 21 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s explorers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They run from Efrafa during silflay at “night” in the rain&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back on the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel tells Fiver “some time before dawn”, and the rest “next morning”, about the farm*&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They plan the raid, and it rains at night&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 22 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Holly’s explorers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They travel “for a day and a night” (the full day)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back on the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Farm-raiding group reaches the sheds “in the twilight after sunset”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 23 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Farm-raiding group returns “at first light” and Holly’s returns “[l]ater that morning”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiver convinces Blackberry to help him get Hazel “a fair time after ni-Frith”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel is helped into the bottom-of-the-hill ditch “just before dark”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;That “evening” Holly tells the story of Efrafa, and later Blackberry announces Hazel’s survival&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 24 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar removes shotgun pellets from Hazel’s haunch “before dawn”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 25 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt; **&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holly tells Hazel about Efrafa&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 26 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel and Holly discuss Efrafan does, Holly starts back up the hill&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 27 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fiver and Hazel arrive during morning silflay “[j]ust before sunrise”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hazel tells the warren that he intends to go to Efrafa “late in the afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 28 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt; (“June was moving towards July”)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The raiding-party sets out “the next morning”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They encounter the fox under “the last of the setting sun”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Efrafa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Efrafra sends out some fruitless patrols to look for the fox intruders&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 29 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The raiding-party crosses the road very early morning, sleeps during the day&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They reach the bridge at “sunset” and cross “just before darkness fell”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 30 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the “afternoon” Hazel explores with some others and finds the boat&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig arrives at Efrafa with Campion at “dusk”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 31 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig is shown around the Mark’s area “that afternoon”, talks with Chervil about Efrafa policies/rules&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He meets Blackavar and the troublesome does during “evening” silflay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He calls Hyzenthlay to his burrow when “it was moonlight outside”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 32 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig speaks with Kehaar during “dawn” silflay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woundwort calls for Bigwig during “evening” silflay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 33 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rescue group agrees that Hazel should wait by the boat “late in the afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bigwig &amp;amp; Efrafan does&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig and Chervil sing at Kehaar “a little before dawn”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigwig is forced to run, with the does and Blackavar, during “evening” but “early” for silflay&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The rabbits exit the boat “as darkness fell”; Bigwig last at “fu-Inlé” (midnight)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Efrafa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woundwort plans what to do about the escaped rabbits “that night”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 34 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kehaar leaves them “soon after daylight”, and the travelling back begins in earnest&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Efrafa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“The following day” Woundwort holds a Council meeting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woundwort leads the first watch-patrol out to the fox place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 36 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“After two days” Vervain relieves Woundwort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 37 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt; ***&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The escapees rest and silflay that “evening”, stop and make some scrapes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 38 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Campion relieves Vervain “two days later”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 39 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Travelling restarts after “the second morning” of resting&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The group is confronted by Campion in the “early afternoon”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back at Efrafa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Campion comes back with news of meeting the others “the next evening”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 40 + a + b&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After “a day and a half”, Hazel arrives back “that night” and the rest “by sunset”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 40 + a + b + c&lt;/strong&gt; (“August”)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;On the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Holly and Blackavar check out a mouse’s tip and report Efrafan attackers at “sunset”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“As the sun set” Hazel goes to speak with Woundwort&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Efrafan attack party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They set out “before dawn” and make camp “early evening”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Various attack attempts are made during “sunset”, digging begins “as the moon rose”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Day 41 + a + b + c&lt;/strong&gt; (“Thursday”)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Hazel’s farm-party&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In “the small hours” Fiver makes a terrible sound, inspiring Hazel’s dog plan&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They reach the farm when “the first light was clear”, Hazel releases the dog&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lucy finds Hazel “early morning”,  drives him out about “twenty minutes” after “ten”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Back on the downs&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There is fighting in the tunnel, Woundwort retreats from Bigwig under “dim… daylight”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The dog arrives in the “morning”, Woundwort fights it, the Efrafans lose&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Efrafan survivors&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Campion starts taking survivors back to Efrafa “some time before ni-Frith”&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Some later dates:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The survivors return to Efrafa “the afternoon of the following day” (Day 42 + a + b + c)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;On an “evening in mid-October, about six weeks later [from Day 41 + a + b + c]” the warren rabbits converse among themselves, admire the litters&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;“One chilly, blustery morning in March” Hazel dies&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Various footnotes&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* I am making the assumption that “some time before dawn” and “the next morning” are on the same day. If they are, then the timeline (and even weather!) for Holly’s group lines up nicely with the warren group. Plus I think it’s more likely that Hazel wouldn’t wait a full day to share his discovery of the does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;** Some complicated timeline math. Hazel arrives at the ditch on Day 23 + a + b, night. He “stayed three days” there, so Days 24, 25, and 26 (all + a + b, of course). During the “one evening” when he and Holly discuss the need for Efrafran does, Hazel remarks that he’ll leave “tonight”, placing that conversation on Day 26 + a + b. Holly telling Hazel of Efrafa is “on the previous day” from the “one evening” conversation, which means Day 25 + a + b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;*** More timeline math! Introduce a variable e for “number of days journeying back from Efrafa before making scrapes” (“two or three days”). Then scrape-making is Day 34 + a + b + e, and the group meets Campion “on the second morning” after, or Day 36 + a + b + e. But from the specific staggering of patrols we know that Campion meets the main group on Day 39 + a + b. Therefore e = 3 days, and scrape-making is on Day 37 + a + b.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T19:48:04.007" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T19:48:04.007" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9559" CreationDate="2021-02-17T08:50:58.267" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;For Eliot, &lt;em&gt;emotion&lt;/em&gt; refers to a relatively enduring psychological state, &lt;em&gt;feeling&lt;/em&gt; to a relatively transient sense perception. He argues that the act of poetic creation is a catalyst that helps transform both psychological states and sense perceptions into a work of art. He says that great variety is possible in the degree to which any given artwork depicts emotions, feelings, or both. Some artworks focus almost exclusively on emotions, others on feelings. Looking at two examples he cites, from Dante and Keats, can help clarify Eliot's meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Emotions&lt;/em&gt; is easy enough. Eliot says of Dante's &lt;em&gt;The Divine Comedy: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.owleyes.org/text/dantes-inferno/read/canto-5#root-422364-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Inferno, Canto V,&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; that &amp;quot;the episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion.&amp;quot; The language of the canto makes this quite explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No greater grief than to remember days&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of joy, when mis'ry is at hand!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or in Allen Mandelbaum's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     ... There is no greater sorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;than thinking back upon a happy time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in misery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dante invokes several other emotions by name: for example, the love and lust that Paolo and Francesca felt, or the pity the narrator feels for the sinners. But all these emotions are subsidiary to the very intense central emotion of being tormented by regret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Feelings&lt;/em&gt; doesn't seem quite as straightforward. The difficulty lies in the imprecision with which Eliot uses the term. He says that these feelings may be &lt;em&gt;inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images&lt;/em&gt;. It is not clear how a feeling can &lt;em&gt;inhere&lt;/em&gt; in a word. What Eliot means is that certain words convey certain sense impressions which may not in themselves be connected to larger emotions, but which may still link up associatively with certain states of mind and with other sense impressions. He writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza of Keats's ode illustrates Eliot's point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tasting of Flora and the country green,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O for a beaker full of the warm South,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;          With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;               And purple-stained mouth;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;      That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;           And with thee fade away into the forest dim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The image of a glass of wine in turn brings up associated images in the speaker's mind: a cellar, flora, country dance, song, etc. As Eliot pointed out, none of these have anything to do with the nightingale. For the speaker, the glass of wine just &lt;em&gt;feels like&lt;/em&gt; the experience of dancing to Provençal song on a green, and in the process of writing, Keats connects such feelings to the nightingale. But these feelings don't by themselves express any specific emotion, such as love, or anger, or despair, that can be pinpointed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps &lt;em&gt;associations&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;sensory images&lt;/em&gt; would have been a better term than &lt;em&gt;feelings&lt;/em&gt; in this context. However, a close look at the examples Eliot uses to illustrate his conception of poetic creation does make the distinction between emotions and feelings, as he is using those terms, clear enough. It bears mention that for Eliot, the point of the poem is not to &lt;em&gt;express&lt;/em&gt; those emotions or feelings. Rather, the creative process is meant to catalyze them into something impersonal, to transform them into an objective work of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T08:58:25.223" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T08:58:25.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15670" CreationDate="2021-02-17T09:50:37.353" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is both wordplay on the word &amp;quot;yisa&amp;quot; (travel / bear) and a reference to the people becoming sick as a result of ignoring COVID-19 restrictions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;מי יחנה ומי יסע&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who will stay and who will travel&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As we should know by now, traveling and meeting with people is &lt;em&gt;heavily&lt;/em&gt; discouraged in the middle of a pandemic; meeting with people can get them sick, as even if you're not symptomatic you can still be an asymptomatic carrier. This line refers to who will make the responsible decision to stay home and who will ignore the restrictions and travel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially significant when we take the previous line in this stanza into consideration:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;אסתר פורים משתה שמחה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ester, Purim, feasting, joy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song is referring to the time of the holiday of Purim, when traditionally people will travel to all their friends' houses and deliver gifts (called Mishloach Manot), and give donations to the poor (Matanot L'Evyonim). In addition, there's a religious requirement to hear the scroll of Esther read - which usually means going to a synagogue full of people, which, again, isn't the best idea during a pandemic. So: Who will follow the restrictions, or who will ignore them for the sake of the traditional celebration of the holiday?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ומי ישא בתוצאה&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And who will bear the consequences&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When people ignore the pandemic precautions, there are going to be consequences - people getting ill, and possibly even dying. The song asks, who's going to suffer because of the people who ignored the COVID guidelines? So often it's not going to be the people who broke the restrictions, but the elderly and ill who get exposed by them visiting their house to deliver these gifts, or exposed after a relative or similar visits a place where they get exposed - such as a synagogue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who is going to be irresponsible, and who's going to wind up paying the price for it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also driven home by the words &amp;quot;יסע&amp;quot; (travel) and &amp;quot;ישא&amp;quot; (bear / suffer). These two words are pronounced the same way (as &amp;quot;yisa&amp;quot;), and using these specific words right after each other implies a connection: It's the traveling that's going to make people suffer the consequences. The song emphasizes that these two concepts - traveling and suffering - are directly linked in this scenario.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T09:50:37.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17664" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17665" CreationDate="2021-02-17T10:38:13.230" Score="1" ViewCount="385" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Billy drew a breath and started to scream in short, sharp cries. He flung&#xA;himself back on Dexter’s lap; he clapped his left hand over his ear, and bit into the heel of his right hand, held it against his large crooked teeth and pressed, pressed. &lt;strong&gt;He went ‘Eeeeee!’ high up in his skull&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean: He made a sound like &amp;quot;Eeeeee!&amp;quot; that echoed in his head?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or does it mean: the sound like &amp;quot;Eeeeee!&amp;quot; that he made was deafening?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T20:13:59.227" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T20:13:59.227" Title="Meaning of &quot;He went ‘Eeeeee!’ high up in his skull&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17665" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17664" CreationDate="2021-02-17T11:57:32.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It means the former: he screamed &amp;quot;Eeeee!&amp;quot; in a high voice that echoed in his skull. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.emmadeanssings.com.au/uncategorized/what-is-vocal-resonance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;six main areas of vocal resonance&lt;/a&gt; in the human body. Of these six, one is the upper skull. In speaking or singing, the skull cavity is used to produce very high vocal pitch. Billy's shriek is therefore &lt;em&gt;high up in his skull&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T11:57:32.057" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17666" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17675" CreationDate="2021-02-17T15:05:59.073" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She made him, and dragged him away across the&#xA;grass. They turned a corner, rounded a thick hedge, and the wind hit them.&#xA;He stopped struggling. &lt;strong&gt;Air rushed over the ground like a flood of water at&#xA;blood temperature&lt;/strong&gt;, and he pulled himself free of her and went into it pacing&#xA;slowly like a dancer, his arms spread out and his face tipped back, his eyes&#xA;closed and his mouth melting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this sentence does &amp;quot;air&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;wind&amp;quot;, and does &amp;quot;blood temperature&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;very high temperature&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched about &amp;quot;blood temperature&amp;quot; but I found nothing reasonable and I guess it as very hot air.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T15:10:19.633" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:31:55.860" Title="Meaning of &quot;Air rushed over the ground like a flood of water at blood temperature&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6611" CreationDate="2021-02-17T16:13:32.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the very first line of the story, the story is presenting a contrast between the colors black and white:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Outside, the quarantine train was unblemished white.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the story, the color white is presented along with the plague - associating them together. The word &amp;quot;white&amp;quot; appears 14 times in the story, and almost every time it is associated with the plague, including the quarantine train being called the White Train.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The barracks for those infected with the plague are white:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, as the train chugged through Mariposa Compound, it passed rows of white barracks with slatted pitch roofs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The IN MEMORIAM monument and its surrounding courtyard are also white:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the setting sun at their backs, their shadows stretched ahead of them and parted the light that fell against the glittering white stones in the circular courtyard. A pillar—white marble, nine feet high—jutted from the belly of the courtyard. Its bronze plaque read: IN MEMORIAM. Already, several names had been etched into the base of the pillar, but there remained room for thousands on its blank faces: one canvas that Tulli hoped would remain empty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a mention of the bright moon being an &amp;quot;obnoxious&amp;quot; white:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The moon was full and high, its light spilling into the alley between barracks. When the radio preacher concluded, “. . . to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth,” Tulli pressed the turkey vulture feathers over her eyes, blocking the obnoxious white globe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Through all this, we can see that in the context of the story, white=plague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the flip side, black is consistently portrayed in association with comfort and healing. For instance, tea and a blanket:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During breakfast, Tulli and Moraine hovered over Kristi, prepared to steady trembling hands as she drank lukewarm black tea. Full-body shakes were a late-stage plague symptom, but they begin with subtle tremors, and Kristi shivered when she choked down the dregs in her cup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It’s just chilly,” Moraine said, wrapping a black Pendleton blanket around Kristi’s shoulders. “We need sunlight. Open the curtains.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And later on, of course, they dress in black and meet the Plague Eater:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ground crumbled, and darkness enveloped their world, a darkness so absolute, even phosphenes vanished. As if drawn together by organic magnetism, Tulli, Moraine, and Kristi found each other and linked arms as they fell. “Are we dead?” Moraine hollered.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Children,” a hoarse, tooth-rattling voice said, “I enjoyed the performance.” It came from everywhere, as if the void spoke.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth keeping in mind that the Apparently Siblings are a &amp;quot;neoclassical alt-metal fusion&amp;quot; band... or, as Nurse Jon, puts it, &amp;quot;goth&amp;quot;. The Plague Eater is a fan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Because,” the void said, “I am your &lt;em&gt;biggest&lt;/em&gt; fan. Apparently Siblings, when you scream in dim places, I listen, and I relish what I hear.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By having this goth, pitch-black entity who enjoys metal music be the one to remove the Big Plague, the story is challenging the &amp;quot;Satanic&amp;quot; association that comes to mind when people think &amp;quot;goth&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;metal&amp;quot;, as well as the trope of &amp;quot;white&amp;quot; = good, and &amp;quot;black&amp;quot; = bad that's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/672/58&quot;&gt;so prevalent in literature&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, the story consistently associates the color black with the Native protagonists of the story. It's the color that they need for their regalia, and, as noted above, it's associated with the Plague Eater figure, who is evidently a Native figure. White is associated with the plague, yes, but also the man-made structures - such as the barracks and the train - that would be associated with the white man on Native land. It's a subtle commentary on the plagues that the (white) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Depopulation_from_disease&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Europeans brought over&lt;/a&gt; when colonizing the Americas, which killed a huge percentage of the population.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, the author, Darcie Little Badger, is a self-proclaimed goth. Quoting from the author blurb at the end of the linked publication:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache scientist, writer, and friendly goth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It'd make sense that she'd want to write a story where the goth lifestyle is portrayed in a positive light - and have the main protagonists be goths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T16:13:32.673" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17672" CreationDate="2021-02-17T16:42:57.850" Score="3" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 1 of Theodor Fontane's novel &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, which I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/220/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;just started reading online&lt;/a&gt;, two friends of Effi are introduced as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of the young girls, plump little creatures, whose freckles and good nature well matched their curly red hair, were daughters of Precentor Jahnke, who swore by the Hanseatic League, Scandinavia, and Fritz Reuter, and following the example of his favorite writer and fellow countryman, had named his twin daughters Bertha and Hertha, in imitation of Mining and Lining.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to be telling readers something about their father's beliefs or politics, but it's a lot less clear to me than it might have been to contemporary German readers. (I don't even know exactly when this novel is set, although it was published in 1894-5.) I learned that a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precentor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Precentor&lt;/a&gt; is a type of church official and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Reuter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fritz Reuter&lt;/a&gt; was a German novelist, but what does it mean to swear by the Hanseatic League and Scandinavia, and who or what are Mining and Lining?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T17:34:59.297" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T19:33:20.837" Title="What is this passage saying about Precentor Jahnke?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17533" CreationDate="2021-02-17T22:21:49.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ode is titled ‘To Autumn’, which means that it is &lt;em&gt;addressed to Autumn&lt;/em&gt;, as if the season were a person capable of listening to the speaker. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;personification&lt;/a&gt; is clearest in the second stanza, where the speaker directly addresses Autumn as “thee”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who hath not seen &lt;strong&gt;thee&lt;/strong&gt; oft amid thy store?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Thee&lt;/strong&gt; sitting careless on a granary floor,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    &lt;strong&gt;Thy&lt;/strong&gt; hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while &lt;strong&gt;thy&lt;/strong&gt; hook&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sometimes like a gleaner &lt;strong&gt;thou&lt;/strong&gt; dost keep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Steady &lt;strong&gt;thy&lt;/strong&gt; laden head across a brook;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        &lt;strong&gt;Thou&lt;/strong&gt; watchest the last oozings hours by hours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Keats (1820). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.35936/page/136/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Autumn&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St Agnes, and Other Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 138. London; Taylor and Hessey.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this stanza Autumn is personified in several guises appropriate to the season. First, as a store-keeper in a granary where the harvest is gathered and the grains are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnowing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;threshed&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;winnowed&lt;/a&gt;. Second, as a reaper sleeping after the hard work of cutting the corn, like the harvesters in “&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Noon,_rest_from_work_-_Van_Gogh.jpeg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Noon, Rest from Work&lt;/a&gt;” by Vincent Van Gogh (below). The “hook” in the poem, that “spares the next swath” because the reaper has fallen asleep, is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sickle or reaping-hook&lt;/a&gt; like the ones in the painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Noon,_rest_from_work_-_Van_Gogh.jpeg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/y5fTo.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Two blue-clad peasants lie asleep in the shade of a hay-rick in a bright orange reaped field under a dark blue sky. Their shoes and reaping-hooks lie beside them. A cart stands idle by another rick and two horses graze nearby.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Third, Autumn is personified as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleaning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gleaner&lt;/a&gt;, wading through a stream with head supporting a bundle of gleanings (that is, crops that had been dropped or scattered by the harvesters). Fourth, as a cider-maker watching the juice drip from the apples in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_press#Cider_press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;cider press&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going back to the first stanza, we can see that it works in much the same way: Autumn is addressed as the “season of mists” in the first line, and as the “close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” in the second. A “bosom-friend” is “a specially intimate or beloved friend” and “maturing” means “bringing something to maturity” (both definitions from the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;), as the sun does to the crops in Autumn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T00:24:35.960" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:24:35.960" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17670" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-17T22:56:06.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T22:56:06.417" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T22:56:06.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17671" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-17T22:56:06.417" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Effi Briest&quot; (1895) by Theodor Fontane. Should be tagged with [theodor-fontane] and [german-literature]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-17T23:08:11.427" LastActivityDate="2021-02-17T23:08:11.427" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17668" CreationDate="2021-02-17T23:59:26.577" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, the corresponding passage (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Fontane,+Theodor/Romane/Effi+Briest/1.+Kapitel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effie Briest&lt;/em&gt; on Zeno.org&lt;/a&gt;) goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Zwei der jungen Mädchen – kleine, rundliche Persönchen, zu deren krausem, rotblondem Haar ihre Sommersprossen und ihre gute Laune ganz vorzüglich paßten – waren Töchter des auf Hansa, Skandinavien und Fritz Reuter eingeschworenen Kantors Jahnke, der denn auch, unter Anlehnung an seinen mecklenburgischen Landsmann und Lieblingsdichter und nach dem Vorbilde von Mining und Lining, seinen eigenen Zwillingen die Namen Bertha und Hertha gegeben hatte.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fellow countryman&amp;quot; in the English translation leaves out the adjective &amp;quot;mecklenburgisch(en)&amp;quot;, i.e. from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Mecklenburg-Schwerin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin&lt;/a&gt;, which was succeeded by the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchy_of_Mecklenburg-Schwerin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin&lt;/a&gt; (1815–1871). &lt;strong&gt;Fritz Reuter&lt;/strong&gt; was not simply a German novelist: he wrote in Low German (Niederdeutsch), as a consequence of which his work remained virtually unknown in the south of Germany for a long time. An older form of Lower German, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Low_German&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Middle Low German&lt;/a&gt;, was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League and &lt;a href=&quot;http://germanic-studies.org/Middle-Low-German-loanwords-in-the-Scandinavian-languages.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;influenced the Scandinavian languages&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mining and Lining Nüßlers&lt;/strong&gt; are two characters from Fritz Reuter's novel &lt;em&gt;Ut mine Stromtid&lt;/em&gt; (1862–64; &amp;quot;From my voluntary-service time&amp;quot;), who make their first appearance in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/reuter/stromtid/strom003.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 2&lt;/a&gt; (The novel was translated into High German as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.manuscriptum.de/das-leben-auf-dem-lande-ut-mine-stromtid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Das Leben auf dem Lande&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;Life in the coutry side&amp;quot;) in 2005. I can easily read Fontane, but for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/reuter/stromtid/stromtid.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reuter's work&lt;/a&gt; I partially rely on my knowledge of Dutch and I still need to guess a number of words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hanseatic League had ceased to exist in the late 17th century, i.e. two centuries before the events in the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to Scandinavia: there is an interesting passage in a dialogue between Effi and Jahnke in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Fontane,+Theodor/Romane/Effi+Briest/34.+Kapitel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXIV&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...); aber zu Jahnke selbst – der nicht bloß ganz Schwedisch-Pommern, sondern auch die Kessiner Gegend als Skandinavisches Vorland ansah und beständig darauf bezügliche Fragen stellte –, zu diesem alten Freunde stand sie besser denn je.  (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Effi:] »Ja, freilich schade. Aber auf Rügen bin ich wirklich umhergefahren. Und das wäre so was für Sie gewesen, Jahnke. Denken Sie sich, Arkona mit einem großen Wenden-Lagerplatz, der noch sichtbar sein soll; (...) «&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Effi:] » (...) Und denken Sie sich, Jahnke, dicht an dem See standen zwei große Opfersteine, blank und noch die Rinnen drin, in denen vordem das Blut ablief. Ich habe von der Zeit an einen Widerwillen gegen die Wenden.«&#xA;[Jahnke:] »Ach, gnäd'ge Frau verzeihen. Aber das waren ja keine Wenden. Das mit den Opfersteinen und mit dem Herthasee, das war ja schon wieder viel, viel früher, ganz vor Christum natum; reine Germanen, von denen wir alle abstammen...«&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Effi:] »Versteht sich«, lachte Effi, »von denen wir alle abstammen, die Jahnkes gewiß und vielleicht auch die Briests.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/434/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;) (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But she found a better friend than ever in old Mr. Jahnke himself, &lt;strong&gt;who considered not only all of Swedish Pomerania, but also the Kessin region as Scandinavian outposts&lt;/strong&gt;, and was always asking questions about them. (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, indeed, a pity. Bit I actually did make a tour of Rügen. You would have enjoyed that, Jahnke. Just think, Arcona with its great camping place of the Wends, that is still to be visible. (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot; (...) And just think, Jahnke, close by the lake stood two large shining sacrificial stones, with the grooves still showing, in which the blood used to run off. Ever since then I have had an aversion of the &lt;strong&gt;Wends&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Oh, pardon my, gracious Lady, but they were not Wends. The legends of the sacrificial stones and the Hertha Lake go back much, much farther, clear back before the birth of Christ. &lt;strong&gt;They were pure Germans, from whom we are all descended.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Of course,&amp;quot; laughed Effi, &amp;quot;from whom we are all descended, the Jahnkes certainly, and perhaps the Briests, too.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wends&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wends&lt;/a&gt; were Slavs, and one of the divisions of the Hanseatic League was known as &amp;quot;Wendish-Saxon&amp;quot; and later as &amp;quot;Wendish and Pomeranian&amp;quot;. The chief city of this division was Lübeck.&#xA;The Wends were not Germanic, and when Effi mistakenly describes the sacrificial stones as Wendish, Jahnke quickly points out that they are Germanic; he does not want to deny even this gory part of &amp;quot;Germanic history&amp;quot;. His fascination for Scandinavia may also be seen in this light: it is purely Germanic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most revealing passage with regard to Jahnke's fascination with Scandinavia can be found in Chapter XXIV (in a passage not included in the English translation on Archive.org; see the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/386/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ellipsis on page 386&lt;/a&gt;): Effi tells Jahnke about her trip to Denmark and about her encounter with Thora von Penz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thora von Penz, die, wie sie nur sagen könne, »typisch skandinavisch« gewesen sei, blauäugig, flachsen und immer in einer roten Plüschtaille, wobei sich Jahnke verklärte und ein Mal über das andere sagte: »Ja, so sind sie; rein germanisch, viel deutscher als die Deutschen.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thora von Penz, whom she described as, for lack of a more apt description, &amp;quot;typically Scandinavian&amp;quot;, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired and always in a red &lt;em&gt;Plüschtaille&lt;/em&gt;, at which Jahnke's face brightened and he said repeatedly, &amp;quot;Yes, that's how they are; &lt;strong&gt;purely Germanic, much more German than the Germans.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jahnke's devotion to Hanseatic League, Scandinavia, and Fritz Reuter appear to be linked through the (Middle) Low German language and a more glorious past for the North-Germanic-speaking world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T19:33:20.837" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T19:33:20.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17666" CreationDate="2021-02-18T00:01:31.247" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;That the air &amp;quot;rushed&amp;quot; meant that it was wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Blood temperature&amp;quot; is another way of saying &amp;quot;body temperature&amp;quot; -- the normal temperature of a human body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:01:31.247" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17674" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17553" CreationDate="2021-02-18T00:09:37.417" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Keats’ debt to Milton in these lines was well observed. But Keats was not the only poet to borrow from Milton’s description of the swan!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Borrowing from Milton&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was probably Milton who first wrote (at any rate in English) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The swan with arched neck&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Rows her state with oary feet;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but Keats has&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The swan, his neck of arched snow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Oars himself along with majesty.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomson says—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Arching proud his neck, with oary feet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bears forward;” †&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and Broome—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“With snowy pride elate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Arch their high necks, and row along with state;” ‡&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and so on, and so on, till the swan, so dreadfully “oary” does it become, might be a quinquereme rather than a bird.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Phil Robinson (1883). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Poets_Birds/tSEXAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PA34&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Poets’ Birds&lt;/em&gt;, p. 34&lt;/a&gt;. London: Chatto and Windus.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† James Thomson (1766). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worksjamesthoms03thomgoog/page/n74/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spring&lt;/a&gt;’ In &lt;em&gt;Works&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 31. London: A Millar.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‡ William Broome (c. 1725). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.14734/page/16/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daphnis and Lycidas&lt;/a&gt;’. In Samuel Johnson, ed. &lt;em&gt;Works of the English Poets&lt;/em&gt;, volume XII, p.17. London: J. Johnson (1810).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can add some more examples to Robinson’s list:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The swan contented with a humbler fate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Low on the fishy river rows in state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Elijah Fenton (c. 1707). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/selectworksofmin02parkuoft/page/166/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Epistle to Thomas Lambard Esq.&lt;/a&gt;’. In Thomas Park, ed. (1819). &lt;em&gt;The Select Works of the Minor British Poets&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 166. London Suttaby, Evance, and Fox.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His Hair transforms to Down, his Fingers meet&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In skinny Films, and shape his oary Feet;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From both his Sides the Wings and Feathers break;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And from his Mouth proceeds a blunted Beak:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All &lt;em&gt;Cycnus&lt;/em&gt; now into a Swan was turn’d&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Joseph Addison (1717). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/OvidsMetamorphosesInFifteenBooksWithTheArgumentsAndNotesOfJohnMinellius/OvidsMetamorphosesInFifteenBooks1717/page/n81/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Transformation of Cycnus into a Swan&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books&lt;/em&gt;, p. 51. London: Jacob Tonson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in state the snowy swans&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Arch their proud necks&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Broome (1739). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Poems_on_Several_Occasions/5RtEAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PR8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems on Several Occasions&lt;/em&gt;, p. viii&lt;/a&gt;. London: Henry Lintot.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                the feather’d fleet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Led by two mantling swans, at ev’ry creek&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now touch’d, and now unmoor’d; now on full sail,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With pennons spread and oary feet they ply’d&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their vagrant voyage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Mason (1778). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/englishgardenap03masogoog/page/n126/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The English Garden&lt;/em&gt;, p. 19&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. Dodsley.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Again rejoicing in his length of neck,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With oary feet the swan divides the stream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And proudly loosens to the coming gale&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His snow-white plumage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Henry Headley (1785). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/fugitivepieces00headiala/page/66/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fugitive Pieces&lt;/em&gt;, p. 66&lt;/a&gt;. London: C. Dilly.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where silver swans, with snowy pride elate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Their tall necks mantling, sail’d along in state.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Francis Fawkes (1752). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/descriptionofmay00douguoft/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Description of May&lt;/em&gt;, p. 19&lt;/a&gt;. London: J. Whiston and B. White.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Borrowing from Douglas?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fawkes’ poem (quoted above) is a loose translation into English of a poem in Scots by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Douglas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gavin Douglas&lt;/a&gt;, whose lines about the swan do not at first sight resemble Milton’s:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Swannis souchis throw out the respand redis,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ouer all the lochis and the fludis gray,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sersand by kynd ane place quhare thay suld lay&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Gavin Douglas (c. 1513). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/descriptionofmay00douguoft/page/18/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Description of May&lt;/a&gt;’. In Fawkes, p. 18.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless Fawkes speculated that Milton had read Douglas and used some of the elements in his description of the creation of birds in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/paradiselostillu00miltuoft/page/178/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, VII.438–446&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That Milton had his eye upon this passage, is plain from his describing the swan, the cock, and peacock, in the order and with several of the attributes, that our author [that is, Douglas] has given them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/descriptionofmay00douguoft/page/20/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fawkes, p. 20&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Borrowing from Donne?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Peter Shor in comments, Milton’s description of the swan has similarities to John Donne’s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must not think me infected with the spirit of Lauder,† if I give you another of Milton’s imitations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                The swan with arched neck&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Between her white wings mantling proudly, rows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her state with oary feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The ancient poets,” says Mr. Richardson,‡ “have not hit upon this beauty; lavish as they have been in their descriptions of the swan. Homer calls the swan &lt;em&gt;long-necked&lt;/em&gt;, δολιχοδείρον; but how much more &lt;em&gt;pittoresque&lt;/em&gt;, if he had arched this length of neck!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For &lt;em&gt;this beauty&lt;/em&gt;, however, Milton was beholden to Donne; whose name, I believe, at present is better known than his writings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                        Like a ship in her full trim,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A swan, so white that you may unto him&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Compare all whitenesse, but himselfe to none.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Glided along, and as he glided watch’d.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And with his arched neck this poor fish catch’d—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;                                &lt;em&gt;Progresse of the Soul&lt;/em&gt;, st. 24.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Farmer (1767). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/playsofwilliamsh01shak/page/n121/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;’. In Isaac Reed (1809). &lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, p. 111. London: Vernor, Hood and Sharpe.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lauder_(forger)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Lauder&lt;/a&gt;, who wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/anessayonmilton00johngoog/page/n9/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; claiming that Milton had plagiarised &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt; from passages in a variety of Latin authors, but on inspection, it turned out that Lauder’s quotations were forgeries.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;‡ Jonathan Richardson (1734). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/explanatorynote00richgoog/page/n528/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, p. 441&lt;/a&gt;. London: James, John and Paul Knapton.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Donne also says of the swan that “It mov’d with state”, which is echoed by Milton’s “rows her state”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Borrowing from Silius Italicus?&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The arching of the neck is unquestionably to be found in Donne, but &lt;em&gt;rowing the oary feet&lt;/em&gt; comes from Silius Italicus:—&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Haud secus Eridani stagnis, ripâve Caystri&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Innatat albus olor, pronoque immobile corpus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dat fluvio, &lt;em&gt;et pedibus tacitas eremigat undas.&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Maginn. In Shelton Mackenzie, ed. (1856). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013520949/page/n263/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Miscellaneous Writings of the Late Dr. Maginn&lt;/em&gt;, p. 259&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Redfield.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maginn is a bit misleading about Silius as a source for Milton, as “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=eremigat&amp;amp;la=la#lexicon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;eremigat&lt;/a&gt;” means “rows” but there is nothing corresponding to Milton’s “oary”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a white swan floats on the still waters of the Eridanus or by the bank of Cayster, and lets the current carry its motionless body, while its feet row on beneath the unruffled stream.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Silius Italicus (c. 90). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/L278SiliusItalicusPunicaII917/page/n297/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Punica&lt;/em&gt;, XIV.189–191&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by J. D. Duff (1961). London: William Heinemann.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T22:01:02.440" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T22:01:02.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17675" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17666" CreationDate="2021-02-18T00:31:55.860" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not possible to understand the full meaning of this sentence by just giving the meanings of the individual words. It's a simile, and a complicated one at that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct in thinking that &amp;quot;air&amp;quot; is wind and &amp;quot;blood temperature&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;high temperature&amp;quot;. As Mary notes, &amp;quot;blood temperature&amp;quot; more specifically connotes &amp;quot;body temperature&amp;quot;, which is fairly high (37°C). The temperature is important because of how it affects the &amp;quot;water&amp;quot; mentioned. Breaking up the sentence into separate parts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Air rushed over the ground) like (a flood of water at blood temperature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is comparing how air moves to how water moves. Specifically, water at a high temperature. The viscosity of water decreases as temperature rises. Here's a graph to demonstrate this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sozOa.gif&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sozOa.gif&quot; alt=&quot;a graph of viscosity on the y axis and temperature on the x axis which shows a downward slowing relationship, labeled &amp;quot;Viscosity vs Temperature for Water&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Sourced from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.quora.com/Fluid-Dynamics-Does-the-temperature-of-water-affect-its-viscosity-Why&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quora&lt;/a&gt;, via Google Images)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liquid that has a low viscosity flows easier and smoother around things in its path. A &amp;quot;flood of water at blood [high] temperature&amp;quot; would therefore flow very smoothly. Saying that the air &amp;quot;rushed over the ground&amp;quot; like this very-smoothly flowing water means that the air (wind) moved easily and smoothly around the characters and scenery. A fast, smooth flow of air can be very pleasant to feel. The male character in the passage appears to be enjoying the feeling of this smooth air rushing onto his face and body.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A final layer to the simile is the specific use of &amp;quot;blood&amp;quot; temperature instead of just saying &amp;quot;high&amp;quot; temperature. Blood is known to flow smoothly and quickly throughout the body, which gives further emphasis to the &amp;quot;smooth, easy flowing&amp;quot; feeling generated by the simile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence could be rewritten as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wind flowed over the ground easily and smoothly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But that's less poetic, which is probably the reason for flowery language to be used in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T00:31:55.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17676" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17678" CreationDate="2021-02-18T02:43:03.323" Score="6" ViewCount="433" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed that at the beginning of &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt; by Charles Dickens that Mr. or Uncle Pumblechook kept calling Mrs. Joe mum. Why is that? I know for sure that Mrs. Joe didn't give birth to him, but I still am confused. Is it because of Victorian lifestyle manners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12129" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T03:16:12.740" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T12:48:19.323" Title="Why does Mr. Pumblechook call Mrs. Joe &quot;mum&quot;?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17677" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-18T04:10:03.510" Score="5" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found &lt;a href=&quot;http://childlit.unl.edu/brownies.192001.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Origin of White Folks&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Annie Virginia Culbertson (it's pretty far down the page) while reading a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/how-w-e-b-du-bois-changed-black-childhood-america/617952/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;news article&lt;/a&gt; and became intrigued by its accent. The poem is clearly written in some dialect:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DE white folks nee-nter putt on airs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;About dem wash'out faces,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De culled folks wuz made de fust,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De oldes' uv de races.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(That's the first four lines; it continues on in a similar fashion) What accent/dialect is this? I don't have the knowledge or skills to identify it. And then, what does it add to the poem? What effect is conveyed by having this specific dialect? There must be some reason to be written like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:16:29.617" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T16:16:29.617" Title="What is the dialect in &quot;The Origin of White Folks&quot; and what does it add to the poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;annie-virginia-culbertson&gt;&lt;dialect&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17676" CreationDate="2021-02-18T09:24:19.423" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Mum” is a dialect spelling of “ma’am”, a shortened form of “madam” that was “formerly the ordinary respectful form of address to a woman” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;). Here are a couple of examples, in both cases a servant addressing a woman of higher social status:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;… for not to be immediately forthcoming when called for, was regarded as a grave and inexcusable offence: not only by my pupils and their mother, but by the very servant, who came in breathless haste to call me, exclaiming, “You’re to go to the schoolroom &lt;em&gt;directly&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;mum&lt;/strong&gt;—the young ladies is WAITING!!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anne Brontë (1847). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights03bron/page/182/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Agnes Grey&lt;/em&gt;, p. 183&lt;/a&gt;. London: Thomas Newby.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At last the gentleman did come, and was shown up with all the ceremony of which Mrs. Bunce was capable. “Here he be, &lt;strong&gt;mum&lt;/strong&gt;.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anthony Trollope (1866). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/beltonestate03trolrich/page/158/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Belton Estate&lt;/em&gt;, volume III, p. 159&lt;/a&gt;. London: Chapman and Hall.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Note in both cases the use of non-standard grammar in the servant’s speech: “ladies is” in Brontë and “he be” in Trollope.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dickens uses dialect spelling to distinguish his characters and place them as to social position and accent. In &lt;em&gt;Our Mutual Friend&lt;/em&gt;, the “ma’am” of the footman Rokesmith is contrasted with the “mum” of the foundling Sloppy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The four members of Council looked at one another, and paused. ‘Shall he be brought here, &lt;strong&gt;ma’am&lt;/strong&gt;?’ asked Rokesmith.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes,’ said Mrs Boffin. Whereupon the footman disappeared, reappeared presenting Sloppy, and retired much disgusted. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘And how is Betty, my good fellow?’ Mrs Boffin asked him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Thankee, &lt;strong&gt;mum&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Sloppy, ‘she do pretty nicely, and sending her dooty and many thanks for the tea and all faviours and wishing to know the family’s healths.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Dickens (1864). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ourmutualfriend02dick/page/186/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our Mutual Friend&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 187&lt;/a&gt;. New York : J. Bradburn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Barnaby Rudge&lt;/em&gt;, the housemaid Miggs is represented as pronouncing “ma’am” as “mim”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Master’s come home, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;,” cried Miggs, running before him into the parlour. “You was wrong, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;, and I was right. I thought he wouldn’t keep us up so late, two nights running, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;. Master’s always considerate so far. I’m so glad, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;, on your account. I’m a little”—here Miggs simpered—“a little sleepy myself; I’ll own it now, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;, though I said I wasn’t when you asked me. It an’t of no consequence, &lt;strong&gt;mim&lt;/strong&gt;, of course.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Dickens (1841). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/barnabyrudge00dickrich/page/38/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Barnaby Rudge&lt;/em&gt;, p. 38&lt;/a&gt;. Philadelphia. T. B. Peterson.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T12:48:19.323" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T12:48:19.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17679" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:05:17.343" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:05:17.343" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:05:17.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17680" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:05:17.343" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Annie Virginia Culbertson or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:07:11.487" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:07:11.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17681" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17687" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:42:53.173" Score="7" ViewCount="479" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Imagine Dragon's song &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Imagine-dragons-polaroid-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polaroid&lt;/a&gt;, there's a certain line that gets repeated throughout the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the color of boom&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of this line? Does it mean like an explosion of color, or like a firework? How does &amp;quot;boom&amp;quot; have a color?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T23:27:18.267" Title="What is the &quot;color of boom&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;imagine-dragons&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17682" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:49:11.583" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:49:11.583" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:49:11.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17683" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:49:11.583" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American rock band Imagine Dragons. Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-18T16:50:29.583" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:50:29.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-18T16:52:52.053" Score="0" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know who said this, or &lt;strong&gt;something like it&lt;/strong&gt;?&#xA;&amp;quot;Love is defiled by its defense.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A friend asked on Facebook and got no answer in several days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I vaguely remember reading a similar idea that included the word “heat,” but don’t remember the source.  I think it also was something other than “love.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2698" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T16:52:52.053" Title="Love is defiled by its defense …" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17685" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17705" CreationDate="2021-02-18T21:12:02.100" Score="9" ViewCount="1967" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the first chapter of Theodor Fontane's &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, which I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/222/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;started reading online&lt;/a&gt;, we are introduced to the character of Baron Geert von Innstetten as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes, compose yourself and I'll begin. We were speaking of Baron von Innstetten. Before he had reached the age of twenty he was living over in Rathenow, but spent much of his time on the seignioral estates of this region, and liked best of all to visit in Schwantikow, at my grandfather Belling's. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But he didn't care to remain here in the neighborhood any longer, and he must have lost all taste for the soldier's career, generally speaking. Besides, it was an era of peace, you know. In short, he asked for his discharge and took up the study of the law, as papa would say, with a 'true beer zeal.' But when the war of seventy broke out he returned to the army, with the Perleberg troops, instead of his old regiment, &lt;strong&gt;and he now wears the cross. Naturally, for he is a smart fellow.&lt;/strong&gt; Right after the war he returned to his documents, and it is said that Bismarck thinks very highly of him, and so does the Emperor. Thus it came about that he was made district-councillor in the district of Kessin.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would it mean for him to &amp;quot;wear the cross&amp;quot;? I'd guess this is some kind of military honour or medal, akin to the British &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Cross&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victoria Cross&lt;/a&gt;, but I'm not even sure which state he would be representing in the military at this time! The mention of Bismarck and the Emperor suggests the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Empire&lt;/a&gt;, but I included enough quotes to fix him in a more specific region of Germany if that's relevant. Or is it another kind of &amp;quot;cross&amp;quot;, something related to religion or politics? Why should being a &amp;quot;smart fellow&amp;quot; (rather than a brave one, for a military honour) make it natural for him to wear the cross?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T09:13:53.550" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T14:41:50.227" Title="What would it mean for a 19th-century German soldier to &quot;wear the cross&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17686" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17685" CreationDate="2021-02-18T21:42:38.917" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The “war of seventy” refers to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franco-Prussian War&lt;/a&gt; of 1870, and this is confirmed by the mention of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Otto von Bismarck&lt;/a&gt;, the Chancellor of the North German Confederation at the outbreak of the war, and from 1871 the Chancellor of the German Empire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the “cross” must be the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Cross&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iron Cross&lt;/a&gt;, a military decoration created in Napoleonic-era Prussia, and revived by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_I,_German_Emperor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;King Wilhelm&lt;/a&gt; at the outbreak of the war in 1870. It was awarded about 40,000 times to soldiers who distinguished themselves in the seven-month war with France.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is some ambiguity in the phrase “for he is a smart fellow”. Perhaps this means that he was smart (keen) enough to distinguish himself in the army and earn the medal. Or perhaps it means that he is smart (well-dressed) because he pays attention to details like the display of medals. Or it means that he is smart (intelligent) enough to know that displaying military medals is a useful way of currying favour with the rulers of Germany.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The original German is “denn er ist sehr schneidig” which is similarly ambiguous.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T21:42:38.917" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17681" CreationDate="2021-02-18T23:27:18.267" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;The singer feels like an unfulfilled promise, or an anticlimax.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In terms of what this lyric means in the song, I think the interpretation is best understood when you examine the lyrical pairings that come after it. The full lyric in question is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am the color of boom / That's never arriving&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, after that, there are two different lyrics that pair with it, one from the first chorus and the other from the second chorus.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...And you are the pay raise / Always a touch out of view (first chorus)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;...And you are the opera / Always on time and in tune (second chorus)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both of these are, lyrically, expressing the idea that while the singer is an unfulfilled anticlimax (a boom that never arrives), the person referenced in the song as &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is a pay raise and an in-tune opera, a satisfying climax who delivers on the promise given. They are the &lt;em&gt;opposite&lt;/em&gt; of  an anticlimax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This interpretation is reinforced by another, fairly straightforward line from the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a head case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also pairs with the meaning of the song as a whole, expressing the singer's misfortunes in life and &lt;strong&gt;his frustration that his failings get in the way of his relationships&lt;/strong&gt;. He's singing about how he can never seem to find the picturesque, &amp;quot;Polaroid&amp;quot; romance, a relationship goal that he can never seem to achieve. If you think of the &amp;quot;color of boom&amp;quot; being like a firework, something that would obviously be right at home in a photograph, I think that explains the strange choice of imagery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From all of these lines taken together, we can take the meaning of these lyrics to be that the singer, in comparison to the person he's singing &lt;em&gt;about,&lt;/em&gt; feels like a failure and someone who never delivers on their promises, compared to the person who always delivers what they promise - being in-tune, on-time, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11258" LastActivityDate="2021-02-18T23:27:18.267" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17688" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-19T00:13:24.313" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;When reading Henry David Thoreau's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_David_Thoreau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia page&lt;/a&gt; I found that he has been called an anarchist for his essay &amp;quot;Civil Disobedience&amp;quot;. Reading the &lt;a href=&quot;https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=rtcg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;essay&lt;/a&gt; I can see where these claims are coming from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I heart­ily accept the motto, — “That gov­ern­ment is best which gov­erns least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rap­idly and sys­tem­at­i­cally. Car­ried out, it fi­nally amounts to this, which also I believe, — “That gov­ern­ment is best which gov­erns not at all;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I began to wonder whether Thoreau himself ever responded to these claims/attacks. My poor search skills (Googling variations of &amp;quot;Henry David Thoreau anarchist response&amp;quot;) turned up nothing but other people arguing over whether he was an anarchist or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did Thoreau respond to claims that he was an anarchist?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T00:13:24.313" Title="Did Thoreau respond to claims that he was an anarchist?" Tags="&lt;henry-david-thoreau&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17690" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17693" CreationDate="2021-02-19T05:10:36.443" Score="3" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.3.1.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 3, scene 1 of &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Mercutio speaks the following words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good King of Cats, nothing but one of your nine lives, that I mean to make bold &lt;strong&gt;withal&lt;/strong&gt;, and, as you shall use me hereafter, dry-beat the rest of the eight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oxford dictionary defines “withal” to be “with all”, “in addition”, or “nonetheless”. None of these meanings seem to make sense in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many “modern English” versions of this sentence generally translates it to “that I mean to eliminate boldly”. But how does that connect to the word “withal”?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wonder if anyone can shed some light?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12136" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T15:09:20.367" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T15:09:20.367" Title="What does “withal” mean in a line in Romeo and Juliet?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17691" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17685" CreationDate="2021-02-19T06:16:27.820" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The cross that is been talked about is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Cross#:%7E:text=The%20Iron%20Cross%20was%20awarded%20for%20bravery%20in%20battle%20as,the%20first%20day%20after%20award.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Iron Cross&lt;/a&gt;, established as the military decoration. From the linked Wikipedia page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Iron Cross (German: Eisernes Kreuz, abbreviated EK) is a former military decoration in the Kingdom of Prussia, and later in the German Empire (1871–1918) and Nazi Germany (1933–1945).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Iron Cross was awarded to soldiers during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon. Before a soldier could be awarded with the Iron Cross 1st Class, he needed to have been decorated with the Iron Cross 2nd Class.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emperor Wilhelm II reauthorized the Iron Cross on 5 August 1914, at the start of World War I. During these three periods, the Iron Cross was an award of the Kingdom of Prussia, although—given Prussia's pre-eminent place in the German Empire formed in 1871—it tended to be treated as a generic German decoration. The 1813, 1870, and 1914 Iron Crosses had three grades:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iron Cross 2nd Class (Eisernes Kreuz 2. Klasse, or EKII)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Iron Cross 1st Class (Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse, or EKI)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Grand Cross of the Iron Cross (Großkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes, often simply Großkreuz)&#xA;Although the obverse of the medals of each class was identical, the manner in which each was worn differed.&#xA;The Iron Cross 1st Class employed a pin or screw posts on the back of the medal, and was worn on the left side of the recipient's uniform, like the original 1813 version.&#xA;The Iron Cross 2nd Class, and the larger Grand Cross, were suspended from different ribbons: the Grand Cross from a neck ribbon, the 2nd Class from a ribbon on the chest. The usual display of the 2nd Class version was as a ribbon through one of the button holes in the recipient's tunic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Grand Cross was intended for senior generals of the Prussian or (later) the German Army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12137" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T06:44:01.643" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T06:44:01.643" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17690" CreationDate="2021-02-19T09:21:59.310" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;On the contrary, &lt;em&gt;With all&lt;/em&gt; makes perfect sense in this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker is stating his intention to be bold in all future actions - With all future events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a declaration of self-improvement from now on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="99" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T09:21:59.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17693" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17690" CreationDate="2021-02-19T09:43:12.477" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In this context, &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt; means something very close to &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;. Some context and a paraphrase would be helpful. Mercutio has challenged Tybalt to fight. Tybalt asks what Mercutio wants. Mercutio replies:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good king of cats! All I want is one of your nine lives. I intend to &lt;strong&gt;make bold with&lt;/strong&gt; it. Depending on how you respond to that, I may also beat your other eight lives out of you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Make bold with&lt;/em&gt; means: &lt;em&gt;act daringly with&lt;/em&gt;, or &lt;em&gt;treat freely in any way I please&lt;/em&gt;, as though I have complete right over it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, why &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt; instead of &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; here? Because there is often (though not always) a shade of meaning in &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt; that isn't quite captured simply by &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;. The former has a sense of completeness that is absent in the latter: &lt;em&gt;I see Rosencrantz &lt;strong&gt;with&lt;/strong&gt; Guildenstern&lt;/em&gt; would simply mean I see the two guys together; &lt;em&gt;I see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern &lt;strong&gt;withal&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; would suggest that I'm thinking of the two are a complete unit, each part and parcel of a single whole, or each enhancing the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's explore some further examples. In &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, Portia displays three caskets and instructs her suitor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The one of them contains my picture, prince.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you choose that, then I am yours &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt;.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-merchant-of-venice/act-2-scene-7/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.vii.14–15&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt;  can simply mean &lt;em&gt;in addition&lt;/em&gt;: choose the correct casket, and you get me too. Denotatively, the speech says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you correctly choose the casket containing my picture, then you get me along &lt;em&gt;with that&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But thanks to the shade of completeness or wholeness that is typically found in &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt;, connotatively, Portia suggests that that if her suitor chooses the right casket, she will &lt;em&gt;by the same token&lt;/em&gt; be &lt;em&gt;altogether&lt;/em&gt; his. Choosing the correct casket is inseparable from choosing Portia. They are the same thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, in &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, the prince says to Horatio:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As e’er my conversation coped &lt;em&gt;withal&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-3-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.ii.56–57&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e., literally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horatio, you are as righteous a man as I have ever conversed &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the further idea is that out of all the people he has &lt;em&gt;ever&lt;/em&gt; spoken to, Hamlet has &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; found anybody more reliable or upright than Horatio. There is a sense of completeness here: Hamlet is referencing his &lt;em&gt;complete&lt;/em&gt; conversational history with &lt;em&gt;any and every&lt;/em&gt; person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in Mercutio's speech, he says he will make free &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; Tybalt's life, but he is implying that he will make &lt;em&gt;completely&lt;/em&gt; free with it, without holding back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T09:58:27.833" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T09:58:27.833" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13748" CreationDate="2021-02-19T11:02:25.543" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The passage exploits multiple meanings of various words to make its statement that the power of beauty is dependent on the admiration of those it captivates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Stands&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;is held upright&lt;/em&gt;, in the usual meaning of the term, and contrasts with &lt;strong&gt;Fall flat and shrink&lt;/strong&gt; a couple lines later. But it also suggests &lt;em&gt;has standing&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., maintains a position of some worth. Satan says that beauty matters only as long as it has weak minds to admire it. If beauty is not admired, then it has no standing. It falls flat and means nothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Plumes&lt;/strong&gt; are of course literally the feathers with which a beautiful woman might deck herself, but to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/synonyms/plume_oneself&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;plume oneself&lt;/a&gt; also means to flatter oneself or to take pride in oneself. So beauty might plume itself, but if we &lt;strong&gt;cease to admire&lt;/strong&gt;, then that self-flattery receives a &lt;strong&gt;sudden slighting&lt;/strong&gt;, or unexpected insult, which destroys beauty's pride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Only&lt;/strong&gt; is nicely ambiguous: &lt;strong&gt;in the admiration only of weak minds&lt;/strong&gt; means both:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beauty's power relies solely on admiration&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Only weak minds admire beauty.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So if someone does not admire beauty, then beauty loses its power. And someone strong-minded does not admire beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting all this together, the passage means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beauty has standing only when it is admired. And only weak minds are captivated enough to admire beauty. Beauty's power and pride rely upon holding weak minds in thrall.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The implication is that since Christ's strong mind and lofty spirit are indifferent to beauty, he will destroy Beauty's pride, and a beautiful woman who seeks to tempt him will either find her pride humiliated, or be moved to reverence toward Christ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T11:02:25.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11604" CreationDate="2021-02-19T11:57:39.860" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;De Quincey says that murder singularly focuses the attention on the instinct for self-preservation, which destroys any sense of distinction between human beings and animals:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread on,” exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;During the murder itself, then, everything is unvaried darkness, and there are no distinctions between man and woman, human and devil:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But by moving from Duncan's murder to the knocking on the gate, Shakespeare moves away from this nihilistic moment to one where the human world reasserts itself. When the drunken porter hears Macduff and Lennox knock, his reactions, untinged by any knowledge of the murder, reestablish the everyday world of human interactions. This pulls the spectators out of being swept up in the annihilation of murder. The return of the ordinary world allows them to see how close to the abyss they have been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the reestablishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The knocking on the gate, by reasserting the familiar human world, paradoxically allows us to see how powerful the murder is. We have no vantage point on the &amp;quot;awful parentheses&amp;quot; of annihilation when we are actually in that perfect darkness. We can only recognize it once we are safely out of it. This is why De Quincey says that the knocking of the gate &amp;quot;reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity&amp;quot;: it provides  perspective that allows us to see how terrible a deed the murder is, a perspective not possible during the moment of annihilation itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Quincey explicitly says that what we feel for Macbeth is &amp;quot;a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.&amp;quot; To say this is emphatically not to &amp;quot;admit feeling sympathy &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; Macbeth.&amp;quot; De Quincey himself explains in a footnote that this is a terrible misreading:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word pity; and hence, instead of saying “sympathy with another,” many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of “sympathy for another.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De Quincey says we &lt;em&gt;understand&lt;/em&gt; what is in Macbeth's or Lady Macbeth's mind, and in that sense we are in sympathy &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; them. It does not follow that we feel sympathy &lt;em&gt;for&lt;/em&gt; them in the sense of approving of their deed or even feeling sorry for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obiter dicta, which fortuitously is also relevant to the discussion of sympathy: Explaining De Quincey's stance does not mean I'm in agreement with it. I don't quite buy De Quincey's reading, nor do I agree with the comment to the question that it &amp;quot;is one of the best critical pieces on Macbeth.&amp;quot; It's certainly one of the most celebrated, but it tells us more about De Quincey than about Shakespeare, and it has not aged well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T11:57:39.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17696" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17697" CreationDate="2021-02-19T17:20:16.707" Score="15" ViewCount="1676" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was camping with his unkind friend in Canada, when the police issued a warrant against Yates.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Stilly,” cried the reporter cheerily, “there’s a warrant out for my arrest. I shall have to go to-morrow at the latest!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What! to jail?” cried his horrified friend, his conscience now troubling him, as the parting came, for his lack of kindness to an old comrade.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Not if the court knows herself&lt;/strong&gt;. But to Buffalo, which is pretty much the same thing. Still, thank goodness, I don’t need to stay there long. I’ll be in New York before I’m many days older. I yearn to plunge into the arena once more. The still, calm peacefulness of this whole vacation has made me long for excitement again, and I’m glad the warrant has pushed me into the turmoil.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;if the court knows herself&amp;quot; mean? I found the same phrase in a few other stories, but I don't understand its meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T17:22:13.767" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:00:23.083" Title="What does &quot;if the court knows herself&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17697" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17696" CreationDate="2021-02-19T19:10:43.757" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;“If the court knows herself” is a catch-phrase referencing a joke that was popular in mid-19th-century America. The earliest version of the joke that I have been able to find is from 1853:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a Kentucky judge, some years since, was asked by an attorney, upon some strange ruling, “Is that law, your honour?” he replied, “&lt;strong&gt;If the court understand herself, and she think she do, it are.&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;C. Gough (1853). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cruetstandselec00gouggoog/page/n290/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cruet Stand&lt;/em&gt;, volume II, p. 283&lt;/a&gt;. Beddington: J. S. Hiron.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here “the court” is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt; for the judge himself, so that his claim is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tautology_(logic)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;logical tautology&lt;/a&gt;: of course &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; he understands the law correctly, then his ruling is correct. (The judge calls the court “she” because courts are commonly personified as female, after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Justice&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Justitia&lt;/a&gt;, the Roman goddess of justice.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The people of Kentucky were stereotypically portrayed as backward in learning but self-reliant, so the idea behind the joke seems to be that the Kentucky judge has little knowledge of the law, but he has the smarts to not let this affect the way he runs his court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The judge’s claim from the joke became a popular catch-phrase or meme. Here are some examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. ALDRICH. I rise to a point of order. I understand the Chair to say that the question now is upon the motion of the gentleman from New Jersey. That motion has been voted on and decided here three times to-night, [laughter,] “&lt;strong&gt;if the court understand herself, and she think she do.&lt;/strong&gt;” [Renewed laughter.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John C. Rives, ed. (1863). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/congressionalglo7384unit/page/578/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Proceedings of the Third Session of the Thirty-Seventh Congress&lt;/em&gt;, p. 579&lt;/a&gt;. Washington: Congressional Globe.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But as we say, “a miss is as good as a mile,” only that the next time I go to sea I shall take some grub and some water and a compass, and “&lt;strong&gt;if the court know herself, as she think she do&lt;/strong&gt;,” I shall hardly venture in a craft not much bigger than a washing tub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Thomas Kilby Smith (April 26, 1865). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/kilbysmiththomas00smitrich/page/396/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Elizabeth Smith&lt;/a&gt;. In Walter George Smith, ed. (1898). &lt;em&gt;Life and Letters of Thomas Kilby Smith&lt;/em&gt;, p. 397. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The neighbor, adopting these conclusions, tried to dissuade Jackson from burying his money in any hole in those remote woods; but Jackson replied, in the words of the Western judge: “&lt;strong&gt;If this court understand herself, and she think she do&lt;/strong&gt;, coal is certainly coming out of that mountain,”—and set to work, encouraged only by his father, then a very old man, and his brother, a self-taught, practical geologist, who joined hands with him in the undertaking.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. T. Trowbridge (1869) ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/atlanticmonthly00writgoog/page/n459/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Carpet-Bagger in Pennsylvania&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Atlantic Monthly&lt;/em&gt;, April 1869, p. 453–454.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, ’spose you paid me ten dollars for takin’ you over there and back, you don’t think I’d be fool enough to know anything about it, do you? Not &lt;strong&gt;if the court know herself, and she think she do&lt;/strong&gt;, as Esquire Dickens always says when he declines a small marriage fee—because it’s too small!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;C. R. Edwards (1870). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924021992320/page/n165/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Story of Niagara&lt;/em&gt;, p. 160&lt;/a&gt;. Buffalo: Breed, Lent &amp;amp; Co.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I turns to Mr. Holmes, and says I, “Looky here, my fat friend, I’m a-running this shanty, and &lt;strong&gt;if the court knows herself&lt;/strong&gt;, you’ll take whiskey straight or you’ll go dry.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mark Twain (1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/northamreview186miscrich/page/482/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Chapters From my Autobiography&lt;/em&gt;, XXV&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;The North American Review&lt;/em&gt;, number DCXXV (December 1907), p. 483.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in the passage from &lt;em&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/em&gt;, Yates just means that he thinks he is not going to jail, but he makes it into a joke by using the catch-phrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T21:00:23.083" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T21:00:23.083" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17699" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17677" CreationDate="2021-02-19T20:54:55.900" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was doing some research on this poem from the same article. While I don't know much about the author, I do know a bit about dialect poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the mid to late 19th century, both white and black authors produced literature in African American dialect. White authors used this as a way to &amp;quot;other&amp;quot; African Americans, and the subject of the literature often presented enslaved or formerly enslaved characters in reductive and comical roles. This body of literature was prominent after the Civil War and is tied closely to the Lost Cause ideology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;African American authors, on the other hand, wrote black dialect poetry (in some cases) as a subversive posture where they &amp;quot;used the form to abuse the form&amp;quot; and provide subtle commentary on the social condition of African Americans in the mid to late 19th century. There are, however, examples of reductive vernacular verse by African American authors, but this should not be seen much as pandering, but more an example of disenfranchised authors attempting to gain access to the publishing market.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12146" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-19T20:56:43.337" LastActivityDate="2021-02-19T20:56:43.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17700" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-20T05:07:14.417" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sonnet &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;God's Grandeur&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The world is charged with the grandeur of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I found on the Internet regarding the analysis of this line was rather complicated. I have to give a presentation about this poem in front of my classroom and I am still just a high school student. Please explain this line in an easily-understandable way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12148" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T14:48:36.977" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T14:48:36.977" Title="The first line of &quot;God's Grandeur&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;gerard-manley-hopkins&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17701" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17703" CreationDate="2021-02-20T08:33:07.913" Score="3" ViewCount="165" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He would have liked to move around her house and examine all its icons,&#xA;or to hang over the front windowsill with her and make remarks about the&#xA;dress and gait of passing pedestrians; but he wanted also to get her outside and on to his own turf, into public places where no-one was host and no-one guest, where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted, pay for it, and keep moving in long, effortless, curving afternoons unsnagged by obligation or haste: the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as it did to Billy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I’m supposed to be on my way to work,’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I thought you only worked at night.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Something came up.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Are you worried about getting there on time?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No. I’m just worried about being comfortable.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Did you say “comfortable”?’ said Athena.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes, I did. But I didn’t mean it.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was his way of talking. &lt;strong&gt;When she pressed him he was not there.&#xA;Like most women she possessed, for good or ill, a limitless faculty for&#xA;adjustment. She felt him give; she let herself melt, drift, take the measure of&#xA;his new position, and harden again into an appropriate configuration. There&#xA;was something to be got here&lt;/strong&gt;, if only she could . . .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a non-native English speaker, I want to know am I getting well the meaning of this part, because I am not sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;When she pressed him he was not there&amp;quot; mean: when she asked him some question he did not like it his answer was unclear or in a way  to escape the question?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;she possessed a limitless faculty for adjustment&amp;quot; mean: For being as Knowledgeable as he, she urged herself to learn everything?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;She felt him give; she let herself melt, drift, take the measure of his new position, and harden again into an appropriate configuration. There was something to be got here&amp;quot; mean: she felt him generous; she wanted to know carefully about his new position (his new attitude) and then became less strict and less sympathetic to him. There was something mysterious she had to know it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;she felt him give&lt;/em&gt; is really unclear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T10:29:16.447" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:56:43.073" Title="Meaning of &quot;she felt him give&quot; in &quot;The Children's Bach&quot; by Helen Garner" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17702" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-20T08:50:47.240" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;This has bugged me on and off for years. When I was younger (late 80s - early 90s) I'm sure I read a book from the local library in the UK.  I don't remember many details. I think that it was set around the War of the Roses, and was from the perspective of a child protagonist. I remember there being a carved Tudor rose in a bed room, and I think that when pushed it unveiled some kind of secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That's all I remember - and I have never known whether I imagined it, or whether it was a real book. What book was this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12149" LastEditorUserId="12002" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T01:29:57.187" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T01:29:57.187" Title="Children's historical mystery with carved rose pressed to unveil secret" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17703" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17701" CreationDate="2021-02-20T09:49:39.517" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &lt;em&gt;press&lt;/em&gt; someone is to try hard to get a response from them. See sense 6b of the verb &lt;em&gt;press&lt;/em&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/press&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to insist on or request urgently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Athena tries to get an answer from the man, he avoids a straightforward response. All his statements disagree with anything she says, even if they contradict what he himself has said previously. He says works only at night, but then has to go in to work during the day; she asks if he's worried about being on time, he says he isn't; he says he wants to be &amp;quot;comfortable,&amp;quot; then says he didn't mean that. So you are right: she presses him, i.e., tries hard to pin down his position, but his responses are &amp;quot;a way to escape the question.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She possessed ... a limitless faculty for adjustment&lt;/em&gt; means that she had the power to change herself to accommodate whatever his statements and wishes were. No matter what stance he adopted, she could adjust herself to that. Her ability to adjust to his whims is endless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next sentence elaborates on her power (&amp;quot;faculty&amp;quot;) of adjustment. &lt;em&gt;She felt him give&lt;/em&gt; means she noticed a change in his position. See definition 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/give&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2a : to yield to physical force or strain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  b : to collapse from the application of force or pressure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   // The canvas chair &lt;em&gt;gave&lt;/em&gt; under her weight.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;  c : to undergo or submit to change&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   // for the strike to be settled, something has to &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when she &lt;em&gt;presses him&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., puts pressure on him for an answer, he &lt;em&gt;gives&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., he shifts his position. She feels this shift and, using her &lt;em&gt;limitless faculty for adjustment&lt;/em&gt;, herself accepts this new position, and hardens herself into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;There was something to be got here, if only she could&lt;/em&gt; is a comment on Athena's wishful thinking. The man is being evasive, but she seems certain that she can actually get him to commit to something if only she keeps adjusting to whatever new position he adopts. She feels that if she keeps on pressing him, and keeps on adjusting to whatever he says, then eventually she will be able to find out what their real situation is. But he himself wants to be &lt;em&gt;unsnagged by obligation&lt;/em&gt;, i.e., he does not want to commit to anything. He wants to keep everything transactional, &lt;em&gt;where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted, pay for it, and keep moving&lt;/em&gt;. So the entire passage is about how he is trying to evade being pinned down to a relationship, and Athena is convinced that if only she keeps accepting everything he does and says, eventually she'll find some solid ground in that relationship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:56:43.073" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:56:43.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17453" CreationDate="2021-02-20T10:54:04.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prospero forbids Miranda from telling Ferdinand her name for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To keep Miranda's identity and his own secret so that his plan is not revealed prematurely.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To strengthen Ferdinand and Miranda's love by making them overcome some adversity.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, Prospero's plot is to regain the dukedom of Milan from his usurping brother Antonio. The king of Naples, Alonso, had helped Antonio oust Prospero. Ferdinand is Alonso's son. So if Ferdinand and Miranda marry, Alonso will become Prospero's ally rather than Antonio's. But if Miranda tells Ferdinand her name, there is a possibility he may recognize the name and understand who Prospero really is. That would expose his plans before they come to fruition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, when Ferdinand, separated from the rest of his shipmates, meets Miranda for the first time, the two fall in love just as Prospero wants. However, Prospero is worried that if their love is too easy, then they will not value it enough:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are both in either’s powers. But this swift business&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I must uneasy make, lest too light winning&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Make the prize light.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-tempest/act-1-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.ii.543–545&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He wants their love to overcome some difficulties so that they will not take it for granted. He treats Ferdinand harshly so that Miranda will pity him and thereby love him more. That is the other reason why he forbids Miranda from telling Ferdinand her name: to put difficulties in their love and strengthen it withal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T10:54:04.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17705" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17685" CreationDate="2021-02-20T14:41:50.227" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;In German, the corresponding passage (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Fontane,+Theodor/Romane/Effi+Briest/1.+Kapitel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effie Briest&lt;/em&gt; on Zeno.org&lt;/a&gt;) does not mention the type of cross:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kurz und gut, er nahm den Abschied und fing an, Juristerei zu studieren, wie Papa sagt, mit einem ›wahren Biereifer‹; nur als der siebziger Krieg kam, trat er wieder ein, aber bei den Perlebergern statt bei seinem alten Regiment, und hat auch das Kreuz. Natürlich, denn er ist sehr schneidig.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, since it is mentioned in the context of war, the intended meaning is &amp;quot;das Eiserne Kreuz&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;the Iron Cross&amp;quot;). This military decoration was established by Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia, in 1813, in order to boost his people's fighting spirit during wars of liberation (Fontane, ed. Wöhrle, p. 385; Keil). The specific occasion was the war against the French emperor Napoleon (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Campaign_of_1813&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Campaign of 1813&lt;/a&gt;). There were three levels: II. Klasse (2nd class), I. Kasse (1st class) and Großkreuz (Grand Cross). The Iron Cross could not only be awarded to officers but also to ordinary soldiers; in practice, however, 90% of Iron Cross 1st Class decorations in 1813–1815 were awarded to officers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the decoration was created for wars of liberation, it was not awarded again in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Schleswig_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Schleswig War&lt;/a&gt; of 1848 – 1851, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Schleswig_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Schleswig War&lt;/a&gt; of 1864 or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austro-Prussian_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Austro-Prussian War&lt;/a&gt; of 1866. King Wilhelm I renewed it for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franco-Prussian War&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;bei erklärter Gefahr für das Vaterland&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;on manifest danger to the fatherland&amp;quot;) after he had manipulated France into declaring war so Prussia wouldn't be perceived as an agressor by England and Russia. During this war, the Iron Cross 1st Class was awarded around 1.300 times and the Grand Cross only 9 times (ehrenzeichen-orden.de; Militaria Berlin: &amp;quot;Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse&amp;quot;); the Iron Cross 2nd Class was awarded around 48.500 times (Militaria Berlin: &amp;quot;Eisernes Kreuz 2. Klasse&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious which level (1st Class or 2nd Class) of the Iron Cross was awarded to Geert von Innstetten. The decoration is also mentioned in other works by Fontane without mentioning a specific level. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://gedichte.xbib.de/Fontane_gedicht_Einzug+(III).htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Einzug (III)&lt;/a&gt; (a poem written a few months after the Franco-Prussian War), &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/fontane/stechlin/stech05.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 5 of &lt;em&gt;Der Stechlin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/fontane/adultera/adult031.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 3 of &lt;em&gt;L'Adultera&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&#xA;However, an Iron Cross 2nd Class was a precondition for the Iron Cross 1st Class. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;http://prussianmachine.com/korps/hann_b.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benno Hann von Weyhern&lt;/a&gt; was a cavalry officer who received both decorations in the Franco-Prussian War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Effi's description of Geert von Innstetten as &amp;quot;schneidig&amp;quot; can be translated both as &amp;quot;elegant&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;dashing&amp;quot;) or as &amp;quot;spirited&amp;quot; (or &amp;quot;energetic&amp;quot;). In the context of military decorations for courage, the latter seems to make more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;. Mit einem Kommentar von Dieter Wöhrle. Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. Suhrkamp, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Keil, Lars-Broder: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.welt.de/geschichte/article115695555/Das-Eiserne-Kreuz-ein-deutscher-Orden-wird-200.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Das Eiserne Kreuz – ein deutscher Orden wird 200&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;em&gt;WELT&lt;/em&gt;, 29.04.2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://militaria-berlin.de/eisernes-kreuz-1-klasse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse&lt;/a&gt;, Militaria Berlin (accessed 20.02.2021).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ehrenzeichen-orden.de/deutsche-staaten/eisernes-kreuz-1870-1-klasse.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eisernes Kreuz 1. Klasse 1870&lt;/a&gt;, ehrenzeichen-orden.de (accessed 20.02.2021).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://militaria-berlin.de/eisernes-kreuz-2-klasse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Eisernes Kreuz 2. Klasse&lt;/a&gt;, Militaria Berlin (accessed 20.02.2021).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T14:41:50.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17706" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17690" CreationDate="2021-02-20T15:07:49.573" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is the entry for &amp;quot;withal&amp;quot; in Skeat's glossary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;withal = with, as placed at the end of the sentence. As You Like It, iii. 2. 238; used in the sense of likewise, besides, at the same time, Bible, 1 Kings xix. 1; Ps. cxli. 10; Acts xxv. 27; 'Though he be merry, yet withal he's honest', Taming Shrew, iii. 2. 25; Bacon, Essay 58; phr. to do withal, 'They fell sick and died: I could no do withal' (i.e. I could not help it), Merch. Ven. iii. 4. 72; Northward Ho, iv (Doll); Cure for a Cuckold, iv. 2 (Urse). (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;make bold withal&amp;quot; thus means &amp;quot;to make bold with&amp;quot;, so Mercutio is saying he wants to take one of Tybalt's nine lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Make bold with&amp;quot; can also be found in other works by Shakepeare and his contemporaries:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ben Jonson: &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Ben-jonson-volpone-or-the-fox-act-5-scene-51-annotated&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Volpone&lt;/em&gt;, Act 5, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will make bold with your obstreperous aid&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare: &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-merry-wives-of-windsor/act-2-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Merry Wives of Windsor&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Master Brook, I will first make bold with your money; next, give me your hand; and, last, as I am a gentleman, you shall, if you will, enjoy Ford’s wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Withal&amp;quot; as an alternative for &amp;quot;with&amp;quot; can also be found in other passages in &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt;, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/romeo_juliet.1.5.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act 1, scene 5&lt;/a&gt;:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I nursed her daughter, that you talk'd withal;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the end of the same scene:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of one I danced withal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Onions, C. T.: &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt;. Enlarged and Revised Throughout by Robert D. Eagleson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Skeat, Walter W.; Mayhew, A. L.: &lt;em&gt;A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists&lt;/em&gt;. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1914.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T15:07:49.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17707" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17708" CreationDate="2021-02-20T16:34:10.360" Score="2" ViewCount="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates went to propose a girl who wasn't in love with him, but he thought she loved him. He went to her home's garden in the darkness to talk to her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Margaret,” whispered Yates hardly above his breath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The girl advanced toward the fence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Is that you?” she whispered in return, with an accent on the last word that thrilled her listener. &lt;strong&gt;The accent told plainly as speech that the word represented&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;the one man on earth to her&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Yes,” answered Yates, springing over the fence and approaching her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Oh!” cried Margaret, starting back, then checking herself, with a catch in her voice. “You—you startled me—Mr. Yates.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first I thought it means that he is the only man on earth who she loves, but I later found that she refused him and wasn't in love with him, so shouldn't have the author said &amp;quot;it seemed that accent told that he is the one man&amp;quot;? Or did it have another meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:09:44.990" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:09:44.990" Title="What does &quot;the one man on earth to her&quot; in &quot;In the Midst of the Alarms&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17707" CreationDate="2021-02-20T19:35:04.810" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence in bold (&amp;quot;The accent told plainly as speech that the word represented the one man on earth to her.&amp;quot;) appears to describe the point of view of Yates, &amp;quot;her listener&amp;quot;.&#xA;The phrase &amp;quot;the word&amp;quot; refers back to &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; in the preceding sentence. In other words, the intonation with which Margaret says &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; betrays (in Yates's perception) that he was the one man on earth about which she really cared.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The fact that Margaret refuses him does not necessarily prove that she doesn't love him. She may have other reasons to do that.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T19:35:04.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17709" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18488" CreationDate="2021-02-20T19:45:09.993" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;This text is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the street there was a dusty summer wind, a morning not quite hot&#xA;enough. If they walked shoulder to shoulder, if they sat side by side, it was&#xA;in order to become the world’s audience instead of being obliged to perform&#xA;their personalities for each other. They bought tickets, they travelled. Their&#xA;mutual curiosity was intense, but oblique. They watched one another&#xA;witnessing the world: how two fat businessmen examined as merchandise&#xA;the girl who pouted and pretended to read the paper in the café window&#xA;with her skirt up round her thighs; how the waitress in Myer’s mural hall&#xA;crossed the vast room with both arms high above her head and a dirty&#xA;tablecloth hanging from each hand; the hippy boy on the tram who bought a&#xA;ticket to St Kilda and announced to the other passengers, ‘I must go to the&#xA;sea. To the ocean’; the girl whose lips moved as she read a book called&#xA;Tortured for Christ. The world divided itself for them, presented itself in a&#xA;series of small theatrical events. ‘Now,’ said a woman to a man at the busstop,&#xA;‘I’ll tell you the whole story. See the thing was that . . .’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What was the thing? They pointed out these eventlets to each other. They&#xA;did not discuss or pass judgment, &lt;strong&gt;but defined themselves against the&#xA;attitudes revealed by the unwitting characters in these dramas. They wanted&#xA;to know each other less than they wanted to agree. Harmony! To be each&#xA;other&lt;/strong&gt;. They examined clothes in shop windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the whole part in bold mean: &amp;quot;they compared their attitude with other people's attitudes and knew themselves better, and because they wanted to be friendly (to be in harmony) they did not want to know each other very well&amp;quot;? Maybe in this case they came across some differences that made their relationship cold. They need harmony to be with each other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T16:40:41.167" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T14:36:52.393" Title="Meaning of &quot;They wanted to know each other less than they wanted to agree. Harmony! To be each other&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17710" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-20T20:06:46.237" Score="4" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am to translate an extract from John M. Ford's novel &lt;em&gt;The Last Hot Time&lt;/em&gt;. It begins with this passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Her name is Norma Jean?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Around here,&amp;quot; the small man said, &amp;quot;names are something that one keeps to oneself. We &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; people things. He indicated the big man and the elf in turn. &amp;quot;This is Lincoln McCain. And Cloudhunter Who Keeps His Sisters' Counsel, though Cloudhunter will do. I'm called Mr. Patrise.&amp;quot; He spelled it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;call&amp;quot; was typed in italic in the same way I showed. I'm struggling to understand why &amp;quot;call&amp;quot; is highlighted, as well as to figure out the meaning of the sentence with this word (&amp;quot;We call people things&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Initially I thought that its meaning is somewhat close to &amp;quot; We don't use real names but create nicknames instead&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I'm in great doubt now whether it really means what I think it means, because after these words Mr. Patrise introduces the people and the elf and calls them by their names, for Lincoln McCain and Patrise sound more like real names rather than fake or nicknames. This is where my difficulty lies. And I'd like to know if my previous guess regarding the matter was right or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please explain the meaning of that sentence as clear as possible, or rephrase it in an understandable way within this context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12152" LastEditorUserId="58" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T20:15:24.617" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T00:36:38.493" Title="What does the sentence &quot;We call people things&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-m-ford&gt;&lt;the-last-hot-time&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17711" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-20T21:12:36.230" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:12:36.230" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:12:36.230" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17712" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-20T21:12:36.230" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of John M. Ford (1957–2006) or his life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:31:24.893" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:31:24.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17713" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-20T21:14:00.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:14:00.103" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:14:00.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17714" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-20T21:14:00.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the book 'The Last Hot Time' by John M. Ford. Questions about this book should be tagged with [john-m-ford]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T21:31:03.740" LastActivityDate="2021-02-20T21:31:03.740" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17715" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17710" CreationDate="2021-02-20T21:37:11.060" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Judging by my reading of the plot synopsis blurb, I believe your initial suspicion is correct, that the people's &amp;quot;names&amp;quot; are not their &amp;quot;real names&amp;quot;. Think of it less like a nickname and more like a pseudonym or an alias. The plot synopsis has these interesting two blurbs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A violent incident on the road brings Danny the favor of a man known only as Mr. Patrise, who gives Danny a job, a home, and a new identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And this line afterward:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The City is a different world from the one Danny — now called Doc — knew, and literally so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A nickname usually signifies a sort of connection with the person. A sense of familiarity or comfort that allows you to call someone else by another term that's not normally their own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a pseudonym is slightly different. A pseudonym is a fake name (though usually, the term refers to authors) sometimes for humorous reasons, but more often for anonymity. I'm sure you're using an alias or a pseudonym in your username right now: I'm about 99% confident your real name or given name wasn't &amp;quot;user12152&amp;quot; :)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the implication by why the word &amp;quot;call&amp;quot; is italicized. Mr. Patrise is differentiating between a &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; (or if you want to be fancy and mythological, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;true name&lt;/a&gt;) is what you call yourself, what people who know &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; call you. It carries a sense of personal identity, and in this case, an exposure of anonymity. He says, &amp;quot;around here, we &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; people things.&amp;quot; He's implying that the &amp;quot;names&amp;quot; that he gives aren't the real names, but pseudonyms that they make up for themselves. And &amp;quot;fake names&amp;quot; don't have to sound fake - a good example is Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who's more famously known by his pseudonym Mark Twain. A fake name doesn't have to sound fake, a fake name is simply a name that isn't your real name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR:&lt;/strong&gt; when Mr. Patrice says, &amp;quot;We &lt;em&gt;call&lt;/em&gt; people things around here&amp;quot;, he's not saying &amp;quot;We create &lt;em&gt;nicknames&lt;/em&gt; for ourselves&amp;quot;, but rather, &amp;quot;we &lt;em&gt;give&lt;/em&gt; people names&amp;quot;. He's differentiating between associating a name with an identity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T00:36:38.493" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T00:36:38.493" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17716" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-20T22:07:38.753" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's the second-to-last verse from a &lt;a href=&quot;http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2010/01/the-tragedy-of-afghanistan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of Fontane's &amp;quot;Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They played all night and the following day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They played like only love made them play;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The songs were still heard, but darkness did fall.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In vain is your watch, in vain is your call.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the poem is telling a story in third-person point of view. Why, then, does the last line here suddenly switch to second-person (&amp;quot;your watch&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;your call&amp;quot;)? A quick Google Translate of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Trauerspiel_von_Afghanistan_(Fontane)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original verse&lt;/a&gt; confirms that the original also addressed the reader. What effect does this add to the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why does &amp;quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&amp;quot; suddenly switch to second-person in the second-to-last verse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-20T22:13:17.173" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T10:44:08.547" Title="Why does &quot;The Tragedy of Afghanistan&quot; suddenly switch to second-person in the second-to-last verse?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17717" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17725" CreationDate="2021-02-20T23:57:07.023" Score="3" ViewCount="229" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fritz Leiber's short story &amp;quot;A Pail of Air&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/51461/51461-h/51461-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to read online&lt;/a&gt; at Project Gutenberg) is set in a post-apocalyptic world, with a family who believe they are the only survivors after the Earth left the Sun and its atmosphere froze solid. The cause of the apocalypse is said to have been a &amp;quot;dark star&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dark star, as Pa went on telling it, rushed in pretty fast and there wasn't much time to get ready. At the beginning they tried to keep it a secret from most people, but then the truth came out, what with the earthquakes and floods—imagine, oceans of unfrozen water!—and people seeing stars blotted out by something on a clear night. [...] You see, the dark star was going through space faster than the Sun, and in the opposite direction, and it had to wrench the world considerably in order to take it away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it possible to identify this &amp;quot;dark star&amp;quot; in terms of our knowledge of real-world astronomy? Was it a black hole? (It sounds implausible that a black hole would travel through space and snatch just a single planet away from its star, but how much was known about black holes in 1951 when this story was published?) Or is &amp;quot;dark star&amp;quot; just a sufficiently sci-fi and scary sounding term to suit the purposes of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T04:31:04.553" Title="What is the &quot;dark star&quot; in Fritz Leiber's &quot;The Pail of Air&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;fritz-leiber&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17718" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-21T00:35:17.743" Score="1" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;So the first two lines of the pre-chorus of &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Smash-mouth-all-star-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;All-Star&lt;/a&gt; by Smash Mouth the song goes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, the years start coming and they don't stop coming&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Smash Mouth mean when he writes &amp;quot;fed to rules&amp;quot;? The analysis in Genius says that &amp;quot;'Fed to the rules' is reminiscent of the saying 'fed to the wolves,' implying that society attempted to sacrifice his individuality for the sake of maintaining their social order.&amp;quot; I don't know if it's correct though since the full answer given on Genius feels contradictory. They go onto say &amp;quot;Instead of giving in, the speaker’s immediate reaction was to “run” and escape this typical life and all its rules&amp;quot; which doesn't make sense given the phrase &amp;quot;hit the ground running&amp;quot; doesn't mean to run &lt;em&gt;away&lt;/em&gt;. Can someone explain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3066" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T00:35:17.743" Title="What does Smash Mouth mean when he writes &quot;fed to the rules&quot; in All-Star?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;smash-mouth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17719" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-21T00:37:54.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T00:37:54.330" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T00:37:54.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17720" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-21T00:37:54.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Fritz Leiber (1910-1992), or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T09:57:11.650" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T09:57:11.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17721" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-21T00:39:30.280" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T00:39:30.280" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T00:39:30.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17722" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-21T00:39:30.280" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American rock band Smash Mouth. Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T09:57:06.777" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T09:57:06.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17723" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2497" CreationDate="2021-02-21T02:35:53.347" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Below is a list of the 24 official Tintin albums with notes on revisions they underwent, where applicable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin au pays des Soviets&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin in the Land of the Soviets&lt;/em&gt; (1930): this album was never redrawn by Hergé and not published in colour during his lifetime. In fact, the album was long out of print before its reprint in 1981 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.casterman.com/Bande-dessinee/Catalogue/les-aventures-de-tintin-les-albums-de-tintin/tintin-au-pays-des-soviets&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Casterman's description, in French&lt;/a&gt;). (Michel Bareau and Nadège Rombaux created a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.casterman.com/Bande-dessinee/Catalogue/les-aventures-de-tintin-les-albums-de-tintin/tintin-au-pays-des-soviets1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;colour version&lt;/a&gt; published by Casterman in 2017.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin au Congo&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin in the Congo&lt;/em&gt; (1931): originally published in black-and-white and &lt;strong&gt;entirely redrawn by Hergé and Edgar P. Jacobs for the colour version&lt;/strong&gt; (Assouline, page 323), which was published in 1946.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin en Amérique&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin in America&lt;/em&gt; (1932): originally published in black-and-white and &lt;strong&gt;entirely redrawn by Hergé for the colour version&lt;/strong&gt; (Assouline, page 323), which was published in 1946.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Cigares du pharaon&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Cigars of the Pharaoh&lt;/em&gt; (1934): originally published in black-and-white and &lt;strong&gt;entirely redrawn by Hergé and Edgar P. Jacobs for the colour version&lt;/strong&gt; (Assouline, page 323), which was published in 1955.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Lotus bleu&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Blue Lotus&lt;/em&gt; (1936): originally published in black-and-white, this album was not redrawn by Hergé, except for a few minor alterations; Edgar P. Jacobs contributed to the colouring (Assouline, page 323); the colour version was published in 1946. (Some fans consider the colour version as a &amp;quot;redrawn album&amp;quot;; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bdgest.com/forum/quels-sont-les-albums-de-tintin-qui-ont-ete-redessines-t50889.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quels sont les albums de tintin qui ont été redessinés ?&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Oreille cassée&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Broken Ear&lt;/em&gt; (1937): originally published in black-and-white, this album was not redrawn by Hergé, except for a few minor alterations; the colour version was published in 1943, i.e. before Hergé's collaboration with Edgar P. Jacobs, which began in January 1944 (Assouline, page 323).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Île Noire&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Black Island&lt;/em&gt; (1938): originally published in black-and-white, with a colour version following in 1943, &lt;strong&gt;Hergé redrew this album on request of his British publisher Methuen&lt;/strong&gt;, who had reported that the album contained 131 errors and imprecisions. For this project, Hergé sent his assistant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_de_Moor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bob de Moor&lt;/a&gt; on a trip to London, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardrossan_Castle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ardrossan&lt;/a&gt;, Glasgow and Edinburgh (Assouline, pages 608–612). The revised version was published in 1965, making this album the only one that appeared in three versions. (The three versions were also published together by Casterman in 2005: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bedetheque.com/BD-Tintin-Dossier-Tome-71-L-ile-noire-52332.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tintin - Dossier -71- L'île noire&lt;/a&gt;, which can no longer by found on Casterman's website. Some comparisons can be found in the forum discussion &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bdgest.com/forum/tintin-originaux-ou-redessines-t50734.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tintin originaux ou redessinés ?&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Sceptre d'Ottokar&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;King Ottokar's Sceptre&lt;/em&gt; (1939): originally published in black-and-white, this album was &lt;strong&gt;redrawn by Hergé and Edgar P. Jacobs&lt;/strong&gt; for the colour version (see Assouline, page 323, who mentions the &amp;quot;balkanisation of the backgrounds and costumes&amp;quot;), which was published in 1947.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Crabe aux pinces d'or&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Crab with the Golden Claws&lt;/em&gt; (1941): originally published in black-and-white, followed by a colour version in January 1944. The French version of this album was not redrawn, but American publisher Simon &amp;amp; Schuster wanted Hergé to remove all black people (who were not supposed to exist in the USA at the time), all images that display the consumption of alcohol (this album introduced the alcoholic Captain Haddock and 27% of the images make at least some reference to alcohol) and modifications of the strong language (another characteristic of Captain Haddock) (Assouline, pages 473–476).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Étoile mystérieuse&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Shooting Star&lt;/em&gt; (1942): from title onwards, all albums were published in colour versions. Hergé did not redraw this album except for replacing the Blumenstein to Bohlwinkel and replacing the American flag of the antagonists with a fictional flag.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Secret de La Licorne&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Secret of the Unicorn&lt;/em&gt; (1943).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Red Rackham's Treasure&lt;/em&gt; (1944).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Sept Boules de cristal&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Seven Crystal Balls&lt;/em&gt; (1948).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Temple du Soleil&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Prisoners of the Sun&lt;/em&gt; (1949).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin au pays de l'or noir&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Land of Black Gold&lt;/em&gt; (1950). British publisher Methuen suggested alterations for the British market. Hergé replaced the conflict between Jewish terrorists and British soldiers in Palestine with a conflict between the partisans of sheikh Bab el Ehr and the army of emir Ben Kalish Ezab, removed the character Goldstein (Assouline, pages 615–617). Certain pages are partially or entirely redrawn. The revised version was published in 1971.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Objectif Lune&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Destination Moon&lt;/em&gt; (1953).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;On a marché sur la Lune&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Explorers on the Moon&lt;/em&gt; (1954).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Affaire Tournesol&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Calculus Affair&lt;/em&gt; (1956).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Coke en stock&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Red Sea Sharks&lt;/em&gt; (1958): originally published in colour and slightly revised in the second half of the 1960s (after the revision of &lt;em&gt;The Black Island&lt;/em&gt;) to remove anything that might cause accusations of racism (Assouline, pages 612–614). Hergé also made a minor correction after someone pointed out that the staircase before the entrance of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marlinspike_Hall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moulinsart / Marlinspike Hall&lt;/a&gt; had only 8 steps instead of the usual 9 (Assouline, 566).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin au Tibet&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin in Tibet&lt;/em&gt; (1960).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Bijoux de la Castafiore&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Castafiore Emerald&lt;/em&gt; (1963).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vol 714 pour Sydney&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Flight 714 to Sydney&lt;/em&gt; (1968).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin et les Picaros&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin and the Picaros&lt;/em&gt; (1976).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tintin et l'Alph-Art&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;Tintin and Alph-Art&lt;/em&gt; (1986): unfinished and published posthumously, hence never redrawn after publication.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary: Only 5 albums were redrawn by Hergé (and assistants): &lt;em&gt;Tintin au Congo&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Tintin en Amérique&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Les Cigares du pharaon&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;L'Île Noire&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Le Sceptre d'Ottokar&lt;/em&gt;, with several others (comparatively) undergoing minor revisions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Assouline, Pierre: &lt;em&gt;Hergé&lt;/em&gt;. Édition revue et corrigée par l'auteur. Gallimard, 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T02:35:53.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17724" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3703" CreationDate="2021-02-21T03:02:53.523" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song is about the resilience of Jewish community and tradition even in the face of the Holocaust. The degree to which the Holocaust destroyed European Jewry is hard to fathom. In 1939, there were &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/09/europes-jewish-population/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9.5 million Jews in Europe&lt;/a&gt;; as of 2020, that figure is only &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/25/europes-jewish-population-has-dropped-60-in-last-50-years&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1.3 million&lt;/a&gt;. The staggering difference demonstrates enduring effects of both the Nazi's brutal attempt to exterminate all Jews, and the anti-Semitism the survivors still face on the continent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite this, the Jewish community has endured and even thrived. The zaidy's surviving the Holocaust is itself a sign of strength. But it signifies not only his personal fortitude, but the endurance of the Jewish people as a whole:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Klal Yisroel, growing stronger&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rebuilding again and again and again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the zaidy is standing beside his great-grandson is a symbol of that endurance. Six million perished, but there are still new generations being born, and there always will be. The image of the Holocaust survivor next to his great-grandson shows that God is with the Jews. He will not forsake them, and even when the community undergoes great calamity, He will ensure that the &amp;quot;lasting chain&amp;quot; linking all Jewish peoples together will not be broken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The persistence of this chain depends on both genealogy and historical memory. What makes the Jewish people a community is not just the fact of parentage, but their shared history. The zaidy is not just a progenitor in the lineage that the great-grandson belongs to. He is a repository of the cultural memory of Jewishness, a memory that is ineluctably marked by the Shoah. The four generations celebrating the Sabbath ritual together are not just the individual story of this family, but form part of the chain that links together all generations of Jews back to Abraham. The movement from the opening verse to the chorus makes that linkage explicit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T03:02:53.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17717" CreationDate="2021-02-21T04:22:11.853" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;dark star&amp;quot; was coined by John Michell in 1783. Maria Popova's blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/27/mapping-the-heavens-natarajan-black-holes/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mapping the Heavens: How Cosmology Shaped Our Understanding of the Universe and the Strange Story of How the Term “Black Hole” Was Born&lt;/a&gt; on Brain Pickings (27 June 2016) quotes the following passage from  Priyamvada Natarajan's book &lt;em&gt;Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos&lt;/em&gt; (Yale University Press, 2016):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1783, when an English country parson, John Michell, first proposed the idea of a “dark star,” he could never have imagined that we would one day detect them.  (...) In a letter to Henry Cavendish dated November 27, 1783, Michell anticipated that such “dark stars” would be observable only by the impact they had on bodies revolving around them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last sentence matches the description in the short story very well. The term &amp;quot;black hole&amp;quot; was coined in the 1960s, a few years after the publication of Leiber's short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strictly speaking, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio-quiet_neutron_star&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;radio-quiet neutron star&lt;/a&gt; could have the same impact as that described in the story. However, even though the existence of neutron stars had already been proposed in the 1930s, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star#History_of_discoveries&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;no neutron starts were detected until the 1960s&lt;/a&gt;, years after the publication of The Pail of Air&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(A &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/17717/what-is-the-dark-star-in-fritz-leibers-the-pail-of-air/17725#comment27342_17717&quot;&gt;comment by user14111&lt;/a&gt; mentions that it might have been a black dwarf. However, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_dwarf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;black dwarf&lt;/a&gt; appears to be a &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;theoretical&lt;/em&gt; stellar remnant&amp;quot; that has not been observed yet.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T04:31:04.553" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T04:31:04.553" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17726" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14510" CreationDate="2021-02-21T04:41:04.743" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur Conan Doyle was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://arthurconandoyle.co.uk/spiritualist&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;foremost defender of spiritualism&lt;/a&gt; during his lifetime. He saw séances as a way to provide both comfort and guidance: comfort to the survivors, as they could communicate with their departed loved ones; guidance to all humankind, as the spirits could provide information about the hereafter. The spirits invoked at the séance are like a minister in a church, providing help, comfort, and guidance to the attendees. The spirits are the &lt;em&gt;angels&lt;/em&gt; who &lt;em&gt;minister&lt;/em&gt; to the living. Hence, to Conan Doyle, spiritualism was &lt;strong&gt;the ministry of angels&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conan Doyle defends spiritualistic practices against mainstream Christian belief. The Church itself had very mixed feelings about spiritualism, and many condemned it as contrary to Christianity. For example, a &lt;a href=&quot;http://psychictruth.info/C_of_E_and_Spiritualism.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1937 report of some Church officials&lt;/a&gt;, unpublished until the 1960s, said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We cannot avoid the impression that a great deal of Spiritualism as organised has its centre in man rather than in God, and is, indeed, materialistic in character. To this extent it is a substitute for religion, and it not in itself religious at all. We were impressed by the unsatisfactory answers received from practising Spiritualists to such questions as, &amp;quot;Has your prayer life, your sense of God, been strengthened by your Spiritualistic experiences?&amp;quot; This explains in great part the hesitancy of many Christians to have anything to do with it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to traditional Christian belief, the dead rest until the day of Resurrection. Spiritualism could easily be seen as going against this because it involved &lt;em&gt;waking the dead&lt;/em&gt;. Conan Doyle says that a newspaper &lt;em&gt;piously&lt;/em&gt; called it exactly that, thereby encouraging hooligans to disrupt séances. The word &lt;em&gt;pious&lt;/em&gt; has connotations of hypocrisy. Here are excerpts from the definition at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pious&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;: marked by conspicuous religiosity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// a hypocrite—a thing all &lt;em&gt;pious&lt;/em&gt; words and uncharitable deeds&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;— Charles Reade&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;: marked by sham or hypocrisy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: marked by self-conscious virtue : VIRTUOUS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Conan Doyle says that the newspaper hypocritically called spiritualism an &lt;em&gt;unholy act&lt;/em&gt; whereas in reality it is the Ministry of Angels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T13:01:09.260" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T13:01:09.260" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17581" CreationDate="2021-02-21T08:32:56.577" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;Broad&amp;quot; in this sense is a young woman (&amp;quot;Old broad&amp;quot; being the extension) from a working class background.  Such a woman was considered forthright and independent.  It is a slang term which would not, for instance, be applied to a high-society woman, unless in a sarcastic sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Broad&amp;quot; is, in this sense, American slang dating from the very early twentieth century.  It is from a vernacular associated with the Greater New York area, primarily, and, later, with other, generally Eastern, urban centers, such as Chicago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Noir crime fiction, either in books or in film, often makes use of the term &amp;quot;broad&amp;quot;, as do comedies ranging from Damon Runyon to Bugs Bunny and the Three Stooges.  It is now generally used as homage to the noir genre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12159" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T08:32:56.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17728" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-21T09:54:03.530" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the book was from the 80’s or 90’s. Plot was about a brother and sister. Their stepfather or father tries to molest the sister and the kids escape and end up finding an abandoned(or so they thought) Catskills hotel where they decide to hide out. An older man or woman still resides at the hotel and the three form a bond. I think the dad/stepdad eventually tracks them down.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12160" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T09:57:56.263" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T19:07:24.287" Title="Book from the 80s or 90s set in an abandoned Catskills hotel" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17729" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13886" CreationDate="2021-02-21T12:13:27.443" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the devices mentioned in the other answers, the phrase &amp;quot;milk of human kindness&amp;quot; also deploys two other devices:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/paronomasia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paronomasia&lt;/a&gt;, or more simply, a pun. &lt;em&gt;Kindness&lt;/em&gt; typically means gentleness, generosity, and/or helpfulness, which is the most readily accessible sense here. But &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; can also mean &lt;em&gt;category&lt;/em&gt;, as in:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What kind of books do you like to read?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So when Lady Macbeth says &lt;strong&gt;human kindness&lt;/strong&gt;, one sense of the term is that Macbeth is too much of a human being, too firmly in the category of humanness, to just pursue his own interests at all costs (&lt;strong&gt;catch the nearest way&lt;/strong&gt;) the way a wild animal might. Tsundoku's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13916/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; touches upon this sense, but does not explicitly mention the punning nature of this phrase, hence this follow-up.&lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Merriam-Webster also mentions that the word &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/humankind#examples&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;humankind&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; has been used in the sense of all human beings or humanity in general since 1560, i.e., it was current when &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was first performed around 1606. This adds to the pun. Macbeth's imbibing his mother's milk has made him a member of the human race, which has made him too categorically human, too humane, too kind, too much a member of humankind, to be the cold-blooded murderer Lady Macbeth would like him to be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We think of puns as low humor, and Samuel Johnson criticized Shakespeare for using them so liberally:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5429/pg5429.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Preface to Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But Johnson gets hold of the wrong end of the stick and proceeds to beat Shakespeare with it. In Shakespeare's hands, such quibbles (i.e., puns) are not just facile wordplay. They bring together a complex set of meanings that provide unexpected insights into character and situation. The polysemy adds to the intensity and dramatic force of Shakespeare's language and here as elsewhere, contribute tremendously to the texture of his plays. The fact that four paragraphs and a footnote can be devoted to this single pun itself attests to that.&#xA; &lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The use of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literarydevices.net/motif/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;motif&lt;/a&gt;, a recurrent image that takes on symbolic meaning. Babies and milk are a motif in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. North Læraðr's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/13905/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; mentions how Lady Macbeth has invited spirits to &lt;strong&gt;take her milk for gall&lt;/strong&gt;. Elsewhere, she tells Macbeth that she would kill her own suckling child:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;          I have given suck, and know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I would, while it was smiling in my face,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And dashed the brains out ...     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-1-scene-7/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.vii.62–66&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Still later in the play, Malcolm tests Macduff's sincerity by claiming he is temperamentally unsuitable to be king. The image Malcolm uses for bad governance again that of milk:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nay, had I power, I should&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Uproar the universal peace, confound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All unity on earth.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV.iii.113–116&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This replicates the idea that even milk and breastfeeding are untrustworthy in the unnatural world of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Having or giving milk are not good things, and can be put to &lt;em&gt;unkind&lt;/em&gt; purposes. The images of babies throughout &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; are beyond the scope of this answer (and perhaps would make for a good question on this site), but they intersect with the images of milk to deepen this motif.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth noting that both these devices, paronomasia and motif, are akin to each other: they act by layering meanings. In the first, the mechanism is verbal. Many disparate senses of &lt;em&gt;human kindness&lt;/em&gt; work together to build a complex network of meaning. In the second, the mechanism is that of the image. Through strategic repetition, the image accretes a cluster of meanings and associations. The phrase &lt;strong&gt;the milk of human kindness&lt;/strong&gt; brings both these devices together in a highly compressed way, in a remarkable example of Shakespeare's rhetorical dexterity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Note&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     &lt;sup&gt;1&lt;/sup&gt; Shakespeare famously uses this exact same pun on &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; (gentle, category) in Hamlet's very first words onstage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A little more than kin and less than kind. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-1-scene-2/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.ii.67&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Claudius is doubly related to Hamlet, being his uncle as well as his stepfather, so he is &lt;em&gt;more than kin&lt;/em&gt;. But of course Claudius is &lt;em&gt;less than kind&lt;/em&gt;, both because he is a ruthless murderer and because he's not the same kind of man as Hamlet's father. Hamlet's line could also be taken to refer to himself. He is &lt;strong&gt;more than kin&lt;/strong&gt; to Claudius, being both nephew and stepson. But since he is not actually Claudius's son, he is &lt;strong&gt;less than kind&lt;/strong&gt; as in the German sense of &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt;: child. The contemporary pronunciation of &lt;em&gt;kind&lt;/em&gt; would also make the pun clearer. See ivanhoescott's &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/202511/37040&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on ELU, including Peter Shor's comment and Mick's answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T12:46:30.257" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T12:46:30.257" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17730" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17731" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, aka Hergé (1907 – 1983), or his life as a cartoonist. Hergé is best known for the Tintin series of comics. Use this tag with [french-literature] and [comics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T15:32:27.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17732" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17459" CreationDate="2021-02-21T17:12:20.817" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Archive.org has an &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/deardepartedcome00houg/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition of &lt;em&gt;The Dear Departed&lt;/em&gt; from 1910&lt;/a&gt;, in which the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/deardepartedcome00houg/page/20/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;relevant passage&lt;/a&gt; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ABEL. Why, Ben, you're in mourning! And Lizzie too. And 'Medlia, and Henry and little Vicky! Who's gone dead? It's some one in the family. (&lt;em&gt;He chuckles.&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;MRS. S. No one you know, father. A relation of Ben's.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ABEL. And what relation of Ben's?&#xA;MRS. S.: His brother.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;BEN (&lt;em&gt;to MRS. S.&lt;/em&gt;) Dang it, I never had one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hang it&amp;quot; in the edition cited by the OP is probably a euphemism for &amp;quot;Dang it&amp;quot; (or a typesetting error).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T17:12:20.817" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17733" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-21T17:17:02.967" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's only one named character in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/177/96.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; of Fontane's &amp;quot;Die Brück’ am Tay&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;The Bridge by the Tay&amp;quot;): &amp;quot;Johnnie&amp;quot;. Johnnie shows up twice in the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, mother, away with bad dreams, for, see,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our Johnnie is coming!—He’ll want his tree.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There’s the bridge still,” says Johnnie. “But that’s all right:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We’ll make it surely out of spite!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peeking at a copy of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCck%E2%80%99_am_Tay&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;original German text&lt;/a&gt;, the same name comes up - &amp;quot;Johnie&amp;quot;. It seems there must be some significance to this name, because everyone else in the poem is either referred to in general terms (the &amp;quot;bridgekeeper&amp;quot;) or simply not given identifiers (the speakers at the start and end of the poem).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the significance of the name &amp;quot;Johnnie&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;The Bridge by the Tay&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T17:17:02.967" Title="What's the significance of the name &quot;Johnnie&quot; in &quot;The Bridge by the Tay&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17734" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14679" CreationDate="2021-02-21T21:55:33.303" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Goldmann explains &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; and how this concept fits into his view on society and literature in the first chapter of &lt;em&gt;Le Dieu caché&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;Le tout et les parties&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;The whole and the parts&amp;quot;). He cites one of Pascal's &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es/%C3%89dition_de_Port-Royal/XXXI&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pensées&lt;/a&gt; as an example of a turn towards dialectical thinking:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Donc toutes choses étant causées et causantes, aidées et aidantes, médiatement et immédiatement, et toutes s’entretenant par un lien naturel et insensible qui lie les plus éloignées et les plus différentes, je tiens impossible de connaître les parties sans connaître le tout, non plus que de connaître le tout sans connaître particulièrement les parties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation (from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/thoughtsonreligix00pasc/page/350/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Thoughts on Religion and Other Subjects&lt;/em&gt;. Translated from the French. London, 1704&lt;/a&gt;, page 350–351):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All things, then, being in different Regards, Effects and Causes, Dependents and Assistants, near and remote, holding communication with each other by a Natural, tho' imperceptible, Line, which unites the most distant in place, and most repugnant in kind, I see no possibility either of knowing the Parts without the Whole, or of knowing the whole, without a distinct apprehension of the Parts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Similarly, according to Goldmann, a specific work by a specific author cannot be understood in isolation but needs to be seen as part of the author's entire writings. However, criticism should also look at an author as an individual who is a member of a social group and a social class. The &lt;em&gt;subjective&lt;/em&gt; meaning that a specific work has for its author does not always coincide with the &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; meaning that work has for a historian-philosopher. For example, Descartes was religious but cartesian rationalism is atheistic. For this reason, a scholar needs to situate a work in the whole of historical development and social life in order to understand a work's &lt;em&gt;objective&lt;/em&gt; meaning. (&lt;em&gt;Le Dieu caché&lt;/em&gt;, pages 15–17)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a social group, there is a tight correspondence between thought and behaviour. In order for a social group to constitute a social class, two requirements need to be fulfilled: (1) its interests need to be oriented towards a global transformation of social structure and (2) it needs to &amp;quot;express itself on the ideological level by means of a global vision on contemporary man—his qualities, his shortcomings—and by means of an ideal, regarding humanity's future, about what people's relationship should be towards other people and towards the universe&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;Le Dieu caché&lt;/em&gt;, page 26, my translation). Goldmann then goes on to define &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Une vision du monde, c'est précisément cet ensemble d'aspirations, de sentiments et d'idées qui réunit les membres d'un groupe (le plus souvent, d'une classe sociale) et les oppose aux autres groupes.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;C'est, sans doute, une schématisation, une extrapolation de l'historien, mais l'extrapolation d'une tendance &lt;em&gt;réelle&lt;/em&gt; chez les membres d'un groupe qui réalisent tous cette conscience de class d'une manière plus ou moins consciente et cohérente.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A worldview (vision du monde) is precisely this set/totality of aspirations, feelings and ideas that unite the members of a social group (most frequently a social class) and set them against other groups.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This is doubtlessly an oversimplification, an extrapolation by the historian, but it is the extrapolation of a &lt;em&gt;real&lt;/em&gt; tendency in the members of a social group who realise/fulfil this class conscience in a more or less conscious and coherent way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How is this relevant to the study of literature? Goldmann explains (on page 28):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;toute grand oeuvre littéraire ou artistique est l'expression d'une vision du monde. Celle-ci est un phénomène de conscience collective qui atteint son maximum de clarté conceptuelle ou sensible dans la conscience de penseur ou du poète. Ces derniers l'expriment à leur tour dans l'oeuvre qu'étudie l'historien en se servant de l'instrument conceptuel qui est la vision du monde; appliqué au texte, celle-ci lui permet de dégager:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a) L'essentiel dans les ouvrages qu'il étudie.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) La signification des éléments partiels dans l'ensemble de l'oeuvre.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ajoutons enfin, que l'historien de la philosophie et de littérature doit étudier non seulement les visions du monde, mais aussi et surtout leurs expressions concrètes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;each great literary or artistic work is the expression of a worldview. This (worldview) is a collective consciousness phenomenon that reaches it highest conceptual or significant clarity in the thinker's or poet's consciousness. The thinker or the poet express this in the work that the historian studies using the conceptual instrument that constitutes &amp;quot;worldview&amp;quot;; applied to the text, this concept allows the historian to uncover:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a) The essence of the works he studies.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;b) The meaning of the parts in the oeuvre as a whole.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let us add that the historian of philosophy or literature must study not only the worldviews but also and above all their concrete expressions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; is a translation of the German term [Weltanschauung], which had been used by philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Wilhelm Dilthey. Goldmann integrates it into a method influenced by the marxist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gy%C3%B6rgy_Luk%C3%A1cs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;György Lukács&lt;/a&gt; (Löwy &amp;amp; Sayre).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has been pointed out, for example by Peter Zima, that defining the critic's work as uncovering the worldview in a work of literature or an oeuvre has drawbacks. For example, it ignores a work's potential polysemy, and Goldmann's method may therefore by too reductive to approach Avant-garde works that rejected the classical demand for coherence and harmony (Zima, page 46–47).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Goldmann, Lucien: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Tel/Le-Dieu-cache&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Dieu caché. Étude sur la vision tragique dans les «Pensées» de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Gallimard, 1956.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Löwy, Michael; Sayre, Robert: &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.openedition.org/contextes/8502&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Lucien Goldmann et la vision romantique du monde&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Contextes&lt;/em&gt; 25 (2019).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pascal, Blaise: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es/%C3%89dition_Brunschvicg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pensées&lt;/em&gt;. Texte établi par Léon Brunschvicg, Hachette, 1925&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Pascal, Blaise: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es/%C3%89dition_de_Port-Royal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, qui ont esté trouvées après sa mort parmy ses papiers&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Guillaume Desprez, 1670, seconde édition (orthographe modernisée).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Zima, Peter V.: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.springer.com/de/book/9783476101907&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Textsoziologie: Eine kritische Einführung&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Springer, 2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;PS: Goldmann's concept of &amp;quot;vision du monde&amp;quot; predates his genetic structuralism, which is something I was not aware of when I formulated the question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T15:23:44.650" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T15:23:44.650" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-21T22:14:28.473" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question is a follow-up to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16889/17&quot;&gt;How has knowledge of the Ur-Hamlet evolved over the centuries?&lt;/a&gt; in which we learned about how it first came to be postulated that Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; was based on an earlier story of the same name by a different writer. Another question naturally arising out of this is, given the assumption that there &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; an Ur-Hamlet, whose text is now lost, &lt;strong&gt;what can be deduced or at least solidly guessed about its content?&lt;/strong&gt; Even though the text itself is lost, references to it remain in other pieces of literature, and perhaps there's more evidence to be found in other &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;-like stories from around the same time. I don't need certain proof, but clear evidence based on serious studies would be good, not just pure guesswork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-02-21T22:14:28.473" Title="What is known about the content of the Ur-Hamlet?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;ur-hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17736" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-22T02:44:43.523" Score="3" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;Susan Coolidge is the pen name of Sarah Chaucey Woolsey (1835–1905). Beginning in 1872, Coolidge published a series of stories about the Carr family. The chief character in most of them is the oldest Carr sibling, Katy. The series comprises:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8994&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Katy Did&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1872)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5141&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Katy Did at School&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1873)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;Curly Locks&amp;quot; in the story collection &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27678&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nine Little Goslings&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1875).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8995&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;What Katy Did Next&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1886)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15798&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clover&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1888)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28724&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the High Valley&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1890).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most of the stories are set in Coolidge's birthplace of Ohio and the series was a huge success in America. But the books were popular in Victorian England as well. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015046352483&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Victorians and their Reading&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1935), Amy Cruse writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the gift from America was received by English children with exuberant gratitude. ... [T]he girls of England loved them; and they introduced into this country a class of schoolgirl heroine whose popularity has never waned.     (pp. 256–257)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to know more about this &amp;quot;exuberant gratitude&amp;quot; with which the Katy series was received in Britain. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What did contemporary reviewers or readers in Britain have to say about the books?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;How did sales figures in Britain for the Katy books compare to those for similarly-targeted books by British authors?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were the books considered valuable windows into the differences between American and British ways of life?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, part of &lt;em&gt;What Katy Did Next&lt;/em&gt; is about Katy's visit to England. What was the reaction to the portrayal of England in that novel?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Answers need not comprehensively cover all the books in the series or all the above questions. I'm looking just for a general overview of how the Katy books were received and read in Britain, backed by evidence from contemporary sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T13:15:50.813" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T13:15:50.813" Title="How were Susan Coolidge's Katy novels received in Victorian Britain?" Tags="&lt;reception&gt;&lt;susan-coolidge&gt;&lt;what-katy-did-series&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17716" CreationDate="2021-02-22T10:30:50.847" Score="2" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quick Google Translate of the original verse confirms that the&#xA;original also addressed the reader&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe I'm totally missing something here but as a german native speaker, I'd doubt that the narrator adresses the reader here. Contextually, the remaining soldiers of the story are still on focus. It's a rhetorical device, bringing the reader from a quite objective point of view a bit more into the scene. So one can say, the narrator somehow speaks to the soldiers/involved protagonists of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What effect does this add to the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At least a minor effect is the emphasis of an ongoing scene (with unknown result for the narrator as well up to this point) that is been observed more actively by the narrator and the reader both, comparable maybe a bit to a war coverage done by a quite active observer. Without the transition from an objective point of view to a more subjective layer, the aspect of tension might get lost a bit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, a further aspect of this rhetorical device can sometimes be an identification or even an &amp;quot;anti-identification&amp;quot; with a protagonist or relevant group of the story. With focus on Fontane's poem, that might be the emphasis, that this kind of war coverage is created by a member of the fractions involved here (the british soldiers). The opposite, i.e. the &amp;quot;anti-identification&amp;quot; emphasis is sometimes observable within columns in news papers for instance, namely when authors want to emphasize their opposition to fascistic tendencies for instance. Within quite objective articles, you can sometimes observe phrases like &amp;quot;You will never prevail!&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11905" LastEditorUserId="11905" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T10:44:08.547" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T10:44:08.547" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17738" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17399" CreationDate="2021-02-22T11:04:16.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Letter_to_a_Hindu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;A Letter to a Hindu&amp;quot; (also known as &amp;quot;A Letter to a Hindoo&amp;quot;) was a&#xA;letter written by Leo Tolstoy to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarak_Nath_Das&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tarak Nath Das&lt;/a&gt; on 14 December 1908...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The letter caused the young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to write to&#xA;the world-famous Tolstoy to ask for advice and for permission to&#xA;reprint the Letter in Gandhi's own South African newspaper, Indian&#xA;Opinion&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%8C%D0%BC%D0%BE_%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%83%D1%81%D1%83&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russian Wiki&lt;/a&gt; elaborates further&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Материалы переписки Толстого и Ганди позволили исследователям установить, что все эти&#xA;афоризмы на самом деле принадлежали кришнаитскому гуру Премананде&#xA;Бхарати (1857—1914) и были взяты из его книги «Шри Кришна: Господь&#xA;Любви» (1904)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The correspondence between Tolstoy and Gandhi allowed researchers to&#xA;establish that all these aphorisms actually belonged to the Krishna&#xA;guru Premananda Bharati (1857-1914) and were taken from his book &amp;quot;Sree&#xA;Krishna. The Lord of Love&amp;quot; (1904)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source cited is vol. 80 of The Complete Works of Tolstoy, &lt;em&gt;Moscow&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;1955&lt;/em&gt;. This volume is &lt;a href=&quot;http://tolstoy.ru/online/90/80/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;put online&lt;/a&gt;. The edition mentioned is Baba Premanand Bharati, «Shree Krishna. The Lord of Love», New York, 1904.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Recent edition is &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1372775161&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available on Amazon&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T11:04:16.527" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2021-02-22T11:49:23.977" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Baldick defines &lt;strong&gt;Georgian poetry&lt;/strong&gt; as (emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a body of English verse published in the first half of George V's reign (1910–36) in five anthologies edited by Edward Marsh as &lt;em&gt;Georgian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; (1912–22). (...) &lt;strong&gt;The term Georgian is only rarely applied to the literature of the period of the first four Georges (1714–1830)&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Applying the term &amp;quot;Georgian&amp;quot; to literature published under George I–IV is so rare that Cuddon's dictionary of literary terms, which is more exhaustive than Baldick's, does not even mention it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Braithwaite writes in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofgeorgianve00brai/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;preface&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This anthology, according to the editor's intention, includes those poets born under the four Georges, who seem to represent the rise and development of a distinct poetical epoch. It does not include such poets as Tennyson, Browning, Rosetti, and Arnold (born under George IV.), who formed by the growth of a new temper in their work from 1840 onwards, the Victorian school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Today, Rosetti is typically described as a representative of the Pre-Raphaelites. Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and the Pre-Raphaelites are still considered as Victorian authors; the term &amp;quot;Victorian &lt;em&gt;school&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is rare today, as far as I know.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small part of what Braithwaite calls the Georgian period is now referred to as the &lt;strong&gt;Augustan age&lt;/strong&gt;, during which authors such as Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith and Steele imitated the style of poets such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Tibullus (the original Augustan poets, who were active during the reign of Roman emperor Augustus). This period began around 1700 (either with the publication of Dryden's Virgil translations in 1697 or with the accession to the throne of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne,_Queen_of_Great_Britain&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Queen Anne&lt;/a&gt; in 1702) and ended with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively (see Cuddon's and Baldick's entries on &amp;quot;Augustan Age&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another part of the period covered in Braithwaite's anthology is now referred to as the &lt;strong&gt;Romantic era&lt;/strong&gt;. In a narrow sense, this refers to the period between the publication of the publication of &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt; by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 and 1832, the year in which Walter Scott and J. W. Goethe died and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Reform Act&lt;/a&gt; was passed (see Cuddon's entry on &amp;quot;romantic revival&amp;quot;). Braithwaite's concept of romanticism appears to be wider (see page xiv in his preface), since he situates the roots of romanticism in the early eighteenth century, even though he considers the &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt; as a landmark publication that heralded in a &amp;quot;splendid period of song&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The differences between Augustan and Romantic literature are significant enough for modern scholars to regard them as different periods, rather than lumping together as Braithwaite did (let alone applying the label &amp;quot;Georgian&amp;quot; to them).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baldick, Chris: &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt;. Second edition. Oxford University Press, 2001. (280 pages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cuddon, J. A.: &lt;em&gt;The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Penguin 1992. (1051 pages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T11:49:23.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17740" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8979" CreationDate="2021-02-22T13:02:12.920" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Introduction: Braithwaite's nonce definition of &amp;quot;Georgian Verse&amp;quot;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his preface to the book you're asking about, &lt;em&gt;The Book of Georgian Verse&lt;/em&gt;, the anthologist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Braithwaite&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Stanley Braithwaite&lt;/a&gt; explains what he means by the term &amp;quot;Georgian&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This anthology, according to the editor's intention, includes those poets born under the four Georges, who seem to represent the rise and development of a distinct poetical epoch.     (p. xiii)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;four Georges&lt;/em&gt; are the British monarchs between George I, who ascended the throne in 1714, and George IV, who died in 1830. The poets Braithwaite saw as belonging to this Georgian epoch ranged from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/thomas-gray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Gray&lt;/a&gt; (1716–1771) to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Keats&lt;/a&gt; (1795–1821).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;strong&gt;Braithwaite's use of the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian verse&lt;/em&gt; here is highly problematic&lt;/strong&gt;. There are two excellent reasons to &lt;strong&gt;avoid using the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian&lt;/em&gt; in Braithwaite's sense&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Literary historians do not consider the poets from Gray to Keats to represent a distinct era.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;Georgian verse&lt;/em&gt; now has another meaning altogether in literary history, as Braithwaite himself acknowledged later.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let's examine each of these reasons in turn.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Braithwaite's nonstandard periodization of literary history&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braithwaite compiled this anthology as part of a projected four-volume series collecting English poetry from the Renaissance to the Victorian period. Each volume was to represent what he saw as a distinct period of the literary history of England:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of Elizabethan Verse&lt;/em&gt;, covering roughly the period 1557–1660 and including such poets as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-shakespeare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Shakespeare&lt;/a&gt; (1564–1616) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Donne&lt;/a&gt; (1572–1631)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of Restoration Verse&lt;/em&gt;, covering the late 17th and early 18th centuries and including such poets as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-milton&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Milton&lt;/a&gt; (1608–1674) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alexander-pope&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alexander Pope&lt;/a&gt; (1688–1744)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of Georgian Verse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Book of Victorian Verse&lt;/em&gt;, covering the era of the eponymous monarch (1837–1901) and including poets such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alfred-tennyson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred, Lord Tennyson&lt;/a&gt; (1809–1892) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/matthew-arnold&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Arnold&lt;/a&gt; (1822–1888). Although Braithwaite completed work on this volume, it was never published as he could not obtain copyright permission to reprint poems by Tennyson, Arnold, and some others (Szefel p. 582 n. 19).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This periodization of literary history that Braithwaite asserts, particularly in the middle two volumes, appears to be unique to him. He was aware that his view was unorthodox. In the preface to &lt;em&gt;Georgian Verse&lt;/em&gt;, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This grouping of British poetry seems, to the present editor, to furnish a very definite classification. With the first and fourth books in the design stated, there seems little or no difference from the accepted classification of literary history; the division between the second and third books, he realizes, suggests the acceptance, on his part, of a theory in literary interpretation about which many are certain to discover matter for discussion. Some critics are likely to find fault with the scope of a period to which he has applied the designation &amp;quot;Georgian&amp;quot; ...     (ibid.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thoughtco.com/british-literary-periods-739034&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;more standard view of English literary history&lt;/a&gt; during the period Braithwaite covers would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Renaissance (1500–1660). Milton is typically placed here rather than among the Restoration poets, where Braithwaite has him.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Neoclassical period (1660–1789), comprising the Restoration, the Augustan Age, and the Age of Sensibility. Poets from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-dryden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Dryden&lt;/a&gt; (1631–1700) to Gray are included here.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Romantic period (1789–1832), which includes poets from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-blake&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Blake&lt;/a&gt; (1757–1827) to Keats.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Victorian period (1832–1901), where Braithwaite's periodization tracks the standard.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not entirely clear why Braithwaite chose a nonstandard periodization. An African-American poet and critic, Braithwaite faced discrimination and poverty. Needing to support his family after his father's death, he began working as a very young boy and never received any higher education. He determinedly set out to educate himself, eventually becoming a major figure in American letters during the early years of the twentieth century. Perhaps the self-taught nature of his scholarship allowed him to break past traditional views and reconsider literary history with fresh eyes. But the fact remains that the periodization he lays out has not been widely accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The typically understood meaning of Georgian poetry&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In English literary history, the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian poetry&lt;/em&gt; has taken on another meaning. It refers to a group of poets who were influential during the early part of the reign of George V, who had come to the throne in 1910. The Georgian poets included &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-masefield&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Masefield&lt;/a&gt; (1878–1967) and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/walter-de-la-mare&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter de la Mare&lt;/a&gt; (1873–1956). They are considered transitional between the Victorians and the modernists such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/t-s-eliot&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;T. S. Eliot&lt;/a&gt; (1888–1965). Five &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=georgian%20poetry&amp;amp;submit_search=Go%21&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;anthologies&lt;/a&gt; entitled &lt;em&gt;Georgian Poetry&lt;/em&gt; were published between 1912 and 1922, showcasing the work of these poets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As these Georgians arrived on the literary scene, Braithwaite himself came to recognize that the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian verse&lt;/em&gt; could no longer be used to refer to pre-Romantic and Romantic poets, as he had done in his 1909 anthology. In 1919, he published &lt;em&gt;The Book of Modern British Verse&lt;/em&gt;, writing in the foreword:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This little collection is intended to present to American readers the character of contemporary British verse. The period has now definitely assumed the name of &amp;quot;Georgian.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Braithwaite does not explicitly acknowledge that this nomenclature supersedes his prior deployment of the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian&lt;/em&gt; to refer to an earlier era, but the implication is clear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the preceding, it should be clear that while the specific book the question asks about uses the term &lt;em&gt;Georgian verse&lt;/em&gt; to refer to English poetry written from the mid 18th to the early 19th century, this terminology is idiosyncratic and not shared by other critics or literary historians. Instead, the phrase typically covers poetry written in the second decade of the twentieth century. It is readily understood in the latter sense; using it in the former sense would be ill-advised.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Braithwaite, William Stanley. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofelizabetha02brai/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of Elizabethan Verse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Boston: Turner, 1907. Archive.org. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofgeorgianve00braiuoft/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of Georgian Verse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Brentano's, 1909. Archive.org. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofmodernbrit00brai/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of Modern British Verse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Boston: Small, 1919. Archive.org. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofrestoratio00brai/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of Restoration Verse&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Duckworth, 1909. Archive.org. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Szefel, Lisa. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805632&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beauty and William Braithwaite&lt;/a&gt;.” &lt;em&gt;Callaloo&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 29, no. 2, 2006, pp. 560–586. JSTOR. Accessed 22 Feb. 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T13:02:12.920" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17741" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17743" CreationDate="2021-02-22T19:02:11.137" Score="5" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar_Allan_Poe/Volume_1/The_Thousand-and-Second_Tale_of_Scheherazade&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” (link to full text)&lt;/a&gt; has this curious sentence.  This is about Scheherazade volunteering to marry the king, despite knowing that the king would kill her on the morning after the wedding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, and although we do not find it to be leap-year, (which makes the sacrifice more meritorious,) she deputes her father, the grand vizier, to make an offer to the king of her hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't understand how leap years are relevant at all.  What is the significance of leap years?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T21:49:47.677" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T22:55:41.907" Title="What's the significance of leap years in Poe's “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-22T19:40:21.250" Score="4" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;The Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt;, virtually all of the characters are named after their character (e.g. Mr. Pliable, Mr. Honest, Mr. Worldly Wise-Man, Mercy, etc.). However, Christian's children all have Biblical names (e.g. Matthew, Joseph, Samuel). Why is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-22T20:46:02.813" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T20:46:02.813" Title="Why are Christian's children in &quot;The Pilgrim's Progress&quot; given Biblical names instead of character-based names?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;pilgrims-progress&gt;&lt;john-bunyan&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17743" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17741" CreationDate="2021-02-22T22:55:41.907" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Normally, the American practice was that a man asked a woman to marry him, not for the woman to ask the man.  For a woman to ask was very forward and unfeminine of her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a practice imported from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.timeanddate.com/date/leap-day-february-29.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ireland&lt;/a&gt; that women could ask men to marry them in a leap year.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scheherazade is not only asking the king to marry her, she is doing it when it might be regarded as a flaw in her character.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-02-22T22:55:41.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17744" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-23T07:47:10.023" Score="25" ViewCount="3837" Body="&lt;p&gt;In theatrical superstition, Shakespeare's play &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is considered to be unlucky, to the extent that even saying its name more than necessary may bring bad luck: hence the tradition of actors referring to it as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;the Scottish play&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. According to Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One hypothesis for the origin of this superstition is that Macbeth, being a popular play, was commonly put on by theatres in financial trouble, or that the high production costs of Macbeth put theatres in financial trouble, and hence an association was made between a production of Macbeth and theatres going out of business.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How far back does this idea go?&lt;/strong&gt; I'd guess it doesn't go anywhere near as far back as Shakespeare's lifetime, but what is the first recorded instance of the idea of this particular play or its name being considered unlucky?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T13:51:49.990" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T14:54:01.293" Title="Since when has Shakespeare's &quot;Scottish play&quot; been considered unlucky?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17745" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17748" CreationDate="2021-02-23T09:01:40.030" Score="4" ViewCount="459" Body="&lt;p&gt;If every chapter of a novel has as its narrator a different character, is it an example of a metafictional novel? I presume it is not specific to metafiction to have multiple narrators, but can a metafictional novel have multiple narrators?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T15:29:09.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T01:53:11.597" Title="If a novel has different narrators for each chapter, is it metafictional?" Tags="&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;metafiction&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17746" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17744" CreationDate="2021-02-23T11:27:22.253" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/about-the-play/the-scottish-play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Royal Shakespeare Company&lt;/a&gt; themselves anecdotally refer to legends regarding the first showing of the play, where Shakespeare had to take the part of Lady Macbeth, and the actor playing Duncan was stabbed, and killed, by a real dagger instead of a prop one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site also refers to a riot in 1839 where 10 people died following animosity between two rival productions playing Macbeth at the same time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also mentioned are other accidents or near accidents including one where Laurence Olivier narrowly escaped injury in the 1930's.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12180" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T15:57:40.857" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T15:57:40.857" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17747" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17744" CreationDate="2021-02-23T13:49:57.797" Score="31" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The superstition that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is unlucky and must not be named is often supposed to date from the very first performance, or very shortly thereafter. However, a documented belief in this alleged curse can be traced back only as far as the early 1970s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Background: What is the alleged curse on &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Royal Shakespeare Company provides some &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/about-the-play/the-scottish-play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;background&lt;/a&gt; on the attributed origins of the superstition:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to folklore, Macbeth was cursed from the beginning. A coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations, so they put a curse on the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legend has it the play’s first performance (around 1606) was riddled with disaster. The actor playing Lady Macbeth died suddenly, so Shakespeare himself had to take on the part. Other rumoured mishaps include real daggers being used in place of stage props for the murder of King Duncan (resulting in the actor’s death).    (&amp;quot;Curse of the Scottish&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sometimes this fable is embellished with the claim that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was first performed before King James, who was so displeased by its presenting witchcraft on stage that he banned the play for five years. For example, a 1998 &lt;em&gt;Washington Post&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/01/28/macbeth-curse-of-the-stage/b80659e4-369d-4ef4-b772-edee79d75d5a/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;story&lt;/a&gt; by David Berre says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the first performance in 1606, before King James I, the boy actor who was to play Lady Macbeth came down with a fever, and the author himself had to take the part at the last minute.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Shakespeare's attempt to please the king, who was both a Scot and a published expert on witchcraft, sorely misfired. The play was immediately banned for five years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no historical or scholarly evidence whatsoever for any of these claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the play uses real spells&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the actor cast as Lady Macbeth fell ill or died during the first performance&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that Shakespeare ever played Lady Macbeth&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the play was first staged before James I&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that the play displeased the monarch, or&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;that he banned the play.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor is there any evidence that in the play's long &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbeth#Performance_history&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;performance history&lt;/a&gt; from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, actors thought of the play as unlucky or cursed in any way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Curse? What curse? 1606–1898&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Shakespeare's time until the turn of the 20th century, performers and audiences do not appear to have regarded &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; as a cursed play. Any mention of this alleged curse is conspicuously absent even where one would expect it to take center stage: in accounts of disasters that accompanied performances of the play. Recent retellings of such events, however, put the curse trappings on full display, misleading readers into believing that the disasters were attributed to the curse when they occurred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in 1849, supporters of two rival actors playing Macbeth, the American &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Forrest&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edwin Forrest&lt;/a&gt; and the English &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Macready&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Charles Macready&lt;/a&gt;, famously clashed to the point of causing &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astor_Place_Riot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;riots in New York City&lt;/a&gt;. Yet a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/accountofterrifi00hmra/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;contemporary pamphlet&lt;/a&gt; describing the event has not even a whisper suggesting that the play itself is considered unlucky (&amp;quot;Account&amp;quot;). Nigel Cliff's 2007 &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespeareriots00clif/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book&lt;/a&gt; on the Astor Place Riots, however, milks the legendary curse for all its worth:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the curse that had long ago attached itself to Shakespeare's story of ambition prompted by darkness to ruin, it was an intrepid choice at the least. &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was known as the Scottish play, because even to speak its name was enough to invoke the black magic of the weird sisters and and compel all sorts of long-winded recantations. Leaving the theatre, swearing, and spinning around three times was the favored purgative; variations included spitting over your shoulder, petitioning Shakespeare while quoting Hamlet, or just cursing like crazy. As superstitions went, this one had an impressive track record. The first Lady Macbeth, the leading boy actor of Shakespeare's company in 1606, supposedly died on the opening night, leaving Shakespeare to don drag and finish the part. James I, whom the play was designed to flatter, hated it and banned it for several years. In Amsterdam, one Macbeth switched a stage dagger for a real one and killed not just King Duncan but the actor playing him Troops were called in one night in 1721 when the actors started attacking the audience with their swords. Just the year before, Covent Garden had opened its season with the black natured thing, and seven nights later the theatre went up in smoke.    (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespeareriots00clif/page/36/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 36&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cliff's breathless litany of disaster is farrago served up as fact. His assertion that actors and producers universally considered &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; unlucky even before 1849 is not tethered to reality by so much as a footnote. By contrast, Alexander Leggatt, in &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare's&lt;/em&gt; Macbeth: &lt;em&gt;A Sourcebook&lt;/em&gt; soberly notes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So far as we can tell earlier actors—David Garrick, W. C. Macready, Henry Irving—produced the play with no sense that they were courting any special danger.    (p. 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leggatt's inclusion of Macready among the actors mentioned is noteworthy in this context, since he was one of the principals of the Astor Street Riots. So where did the notion that the play itself was unlucky come from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Origins of the curse legend: 1898–1926&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story that the boy actor playing Lady Macbeth died unexpectedly just before (or partway through) the first performance is believed to have originated from the fertile imagination of novelist and theatre critic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Beerbohm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Max Beerbohm&lt;/a&gt;. In the &lt;em&gt;Saturday Review&lt;/em&gt; for October 1, 1898, he wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Aubrey the play was first acted in 1606, at Hampton Court, in the presence of King James. It is stated that Hal Berridge, the youth who was to have acted, the part of Lady Macbeth, &amp;quot;fell sudden sicke of a pleurisie, wherefor Master Shakespere himself did enacte in his stead.&amp;quot;    (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/saturdayreviewof8618unse/page/434/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 434&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Aubrey&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aubrey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John Aubrey&lt;/a&gt;, the 17th C. biographer who wrote &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brief_Lives&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brief Lives&lt;/a&gt;. However, the quotation Beerbohm supplies is found nowhere in Aubrey's work, and is the former's own invention. In &lt;em&gt;30 Great Myths about Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aubrey's anecdote about Hal Berridge's illness is the origin of the myth that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is unlucky in the theatre. The boy-actor's name has a nicely Shakespearean flavor, sharing its first part with Henry IV's wayward son. The actor, however, is entirely fictional. So too is the incident—no actor was taken ill, and Shakespeare was never forced to setp into the role. Aubrey made no such comment as the one quoted.    (p. 150–151).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in the review, Beerbohm makes up from whole cloth an equally synthetic quotation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Pepys&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pepys&lt;/a&gt;. Beerbohm's deplorable inventiveness aside, it is worth noting that he makes no mention of any curse around &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. On the contrary, he points out that &amp;quot;Of all Shakespeare's plays, 'Macbeth' is, perhaps, the most often enacted.&amp;quot; The idea that a curse attaches itself to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; does not, then, appear to have been in circulation even as late as 1898. There is no record of this notion prior to the 20th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maguire and Smith go on to claim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so Beerbohm inaugurated a tradition in which it is unlucky to play in, or even be associated with, a production of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Actors consider it bad luck even to refer to the play by name, preferring instead the descriptive euphemism &amp;quot;The Scottish Play&amp;quot;.    (p. 151)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legatt, editor of the &lt;em&gt;Sourcebook&lt;/em&gt;, concurs with Maguire and Smith that the legend postdates Beerbohm:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though there are unsupported legends of the curse at work even in the play's first production, including a story that at the first performance the boy actor playing Lady Macbeth fell ill and Shakespeare himself took over, the verifiable stories of misfortune, and the superstition itself, cannot confidently be traced before the 1920s. The sense that evil forces are at work in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; may be a product of the aftermath of the First World War, whose horrific death toll produced a new interest in the spirit world, as those who had lost loved ones tried to contact them through ouija boards and table-tapping. Those beliefs have faded (though not vanished); the belief in the &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; curse remains.    (p. 1–2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Legatt illustrates this belief by quoting an anecdote about a 1926 production of the play starring the real-life married couple Ian Casson and Sibyl Thorndike. The production was plagued with mishaps, and at one point Casson told Thorndike:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sybil, the Devil does work in this play—there is horror behind it—we must do something positive against it.&amp;quot;    (p. 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The couple then proceeded to read the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2091&amp;amp;version=AKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;91st Psalm&lt;/a&gt;, which invokes God's protection:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one anecdote is hardly dispositive, since it could show only that Casson thought this particular production marked by misfortune. Curiously, Leggatt does not provide any other sources from the 1920s or thereafter that show the growth of this curse myth, simply saying in a footnote, &amp;quot;I owe this observation to Russell Jackson.&amp;quot; No further information is provided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The mystery of the missing curse, 1926–1973&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Leggatt's claim notwithstanding, documentary records attesting to the superstition during the period 1930–1970 are hard to come by. A search through the Google Books corpora causes one to question whether &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was regarded as unlucky and fearfully called &amp;quot;the Scottish play&amp;quot; prior to the 1970s. The Google Ngram for &amp;quot;Scottish Play&amp;quot; shows that the phrase was barely used prior to the late seventies, and has seen a spike in usage since then:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNeeu.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/eNeeu.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram for &amp;quot;Scottish Play&amp;quot;, case-insensitive, showing low usage of the phrase until a sharp spike &quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The usage of &amp;quot;Scottish play&amp;quot; prior to the 1970s appears to be merely descriptive, referring indifferently to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; or any other play set in Scotland. Beginning around 1973, however, references crop up that mention the superstition. An issue from that year of &lt;em&gt;Broadside&lt;/em&gt;, the newsletter of the Theatre Library Association, includes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Because of the number of mishaps and tragedies connected with it over the four hundred years of its existence, actors never refer to it by name or even quote it offstage. It is usually referred to as &amp;quot;that play,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;the Scottish play.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And paranormal researcher Peter Underwood writes in 1975:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The curse of bad luck is firmly believed by many actors, and no play is considered to be more unlucky than &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, a play that seems always to have had a curse on it. More than one actor has thrown things at a visitor who quoted from the play, especially in a dressing room of a theatre where the play is being performed. So powerful is the apparent curse (the origin of which I have not discovered) that many actors maintain that bad luck will follow if the play is even mentioned by name and old actors usually refer to Macbeth as &amp;quot;the Scottish play&amp;quot;.    (p. 65–66)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Subsequent references to the superstition and the alleged curse lie thick and fast in the literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even accounting for a lag between its origin in theatre lore and its being reflected in print sources, it seems unlikely that the superstition regarding &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; dates back to the 1920s, with a fifty-year gap before it is documented. It is far more plausible that the superstition itself arose some time in the late 1960s or early 1970s. At any rate, there is no solid evidence of this superstition's being widely held prior to then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A negative piece of evidence can be found in Dennis Bartholomeusz's excellent study of performances of the play down the ages, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/macbethplayers0000bart/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth and the Players&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Bartholomeusz analyzes the documentary record of the play onstage from Shakespeare's time down to his day. He interviews many performers about their experiences and their interpretations of the play. One assumes that if the play were considered notoriously unlucky, this would have come up in the performers' conversations with Bartholomeusz. However, none of the players so much as mention the curse. Published in 1969, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth and the Players&lt;/em&gt; provides a &lt;em&gt;terminus post quem&lt;/em&gt; of sorts for the origin of this belief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There remains the question of why this superstition should have attached to this play. &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; lends itself to a curse legend for many readily understandable reasons. The play itself is a powerful representation of supernatural forces and their ability to let evil loose upon the world. Legatt writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yet the superstition about &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, even if it is more recent than legend would have it, embodies a truth about the play. There is no work of Shakespeare's, and arguably no work of Western art, that evokes such a powerful sense of evil. The dialogue is full of invocations of the powers of darkness ... and one can sympathize with the belief current among actors that those invocations are genuine, and actually work.    (p. 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, since &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is among the most performed plays of the most performed playwright in the world, the law of numbers ensures that instances of performances running into bad luck abound. A feature in Penguin UK's October 2018 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/oct/the-curse-and-superstition-of-shakespeare-s-macbeth.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;newsletter&lt;/a&gt; quotes Anjna Chouhan of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It tends to run for longer than, say, &lt;em&gt;Cymbeline&lt;/em&gt;. When you have more performances, it's statistically more likely that things will go wrong.&amp;quot;    (&amp;quot;Curse of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the spooky nature of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; allows those mishaps to be attributed to the play itself. Contrast this with &lt;em&gt;Henry VIII&lt;/em&gt;. Andrew Dickson narrates how a stage cannon set off during the third or fourth performance of the play's initial run at the Globe in 1613 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/globe-theatre-fire-london-shakespeare-william-facts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;set fire to the roof and caused the theatre to burn down to the ground&lt;/a&gt;. Yet nobody refers to it as &amp;quot;the Tudor play.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Coda: &amp;quot;Music, and a song&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-3-scene-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.v.sd&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the &amp;quot;Scottish play&amp;quot; superstition is not well attested before the 1970s, user Andrew pointed out in the comments to this answer that there is a tradition of considering some music associated with the play unlucky. An 1888 issue of the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000098/18880114/002/0001?browse=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pall Mall Gazette&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; carried a feature asking actors about superstitions. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_O%27Connor_Terry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Terry&lt;/a&gt; replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old stagers used to consider the whistling or singing of Locke's music in &amp;quot;Macbeth&amp;quot; unlucky.    (&amp;quot;Signs&amp;quot; p. 1)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terry began his career in 1863. &amp;quot;Old stagers&amp;quot; for him would have been those performing in the 1850s or earlier, so this belief goes back to at least the mid-nineteenth century. More details concerning this belief are provided in a 1913 story in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000273/19130130/138/0005?browse=False&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yorkshire Evening Post&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dread of Macbeth Music&lt;/strong&gt;. Another superstition of the old days which still survives in a measure was the actors' dread of Locke's music for &amp;quot;Macbeth,&amp;quot; and anyone caught humming, whistling, or singing any of it was immediately threatened. Indeed, very few actors dared to transgress, fearing the consequences, not so much of their colleagues' wrath, but rather of the certain disaster that would follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An exception was young Amery Sullivan, son of the famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sullivan_(stage_actor)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Barry Sullivan&lt;/a&gt;, who deliberately whistled the music whenever he chanced to be in the presence of an abnormally superstitious old member of his fathers' stock company. But Amery at times deemed it safer to keep out of the old man's way.    (&amp;quot;Stage&amp;quot; p. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Locke with the unfortunate music is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.allmusic.com/artist/matthew-locke-mn0001188958/biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Locke&lt;/a&gt; (1621–1677). He is known to have composed the music for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Davenant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Davenant&lt;/a&gt;'s Restoration era rewrite, along operatic lines, of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Roger Fiske &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/732069&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;notes&lt;/a&gt; that while some of Locke's music for the play has indeed come down to us, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lockesmacbethand00addi/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;complete score formerly attributed to him&lt;/a&gt; is now accepted as being by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Leveridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Leveridge&lt;/a&gt;. Aside from the two references provided by Andrew, I have been unable to find any documentation about why this music for Macbeth was considered unlucky, or what the dire consequences of singing, humming, or whistling it were. Of course, as Marc Bonanni explains, whistling is itself &lt;a href=&quot;https://theatrenerds.com/9-theatre-superstitions-explained/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another theatrical superstition&lt;/a&gt;, only with a rather more plausible backstory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It bears mention, however, that the stories about the &lt;em&gt;music's&lt;/em&gt; being unlucky do not encompass the &lt;em&gt;play&lt;/em&gt; as a whole. The 1913 &lt;em&gt;Yorkshire Evening Post&lt;/em&gt; article mentions several other stage superstitions, including not singing &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW-RMQLWDG0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Francesco Paolo Tosti's &amp;quot;Good-bye&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; onstage, not signing contracts on a Friday, etc. But when it specifically cites &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, it does so only in the context of the music. There is no suggestion that the play itself is cursed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Acknowledgments&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Comments upon a prior version of this answer spurred an extensive revision. Thanks to Gareth Rees, Andrew, ShadowRanger, and IMSoP for their feedback, and for providing additional information and resources to help improve this answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (other than Wikipedia links)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/accountofterrifi00hmra/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Account of the Terrific and Fatal Riot at the New-York Astor Place Opera House on the Night of May 10th, 1849&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; New York: H. M. Ranney, 1849. Archive.org. Accessed February 23, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Addison, John. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lockesmacbethand00addi/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Locke's Macbeth [and other pieces]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Goulding and D'Almaine, n.d. Archive.org. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2091&amp;amp;version=AKJV&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Authorized King James Version&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. BibleGateway. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bartholomeusz, Dennis. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/macbethplayers0000bart/page/n6/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth and the Players&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969. Archive.org. Accessed February 23, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Beerbohm, Max. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/saturdayreviewof8618unse/page/434/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Macbeth' and Mrs. Kendal&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art&lt;/em&gt; October 1, 1898: p. 434. Archive.org. Accessed February 23, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Berre, David. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1988/01/28/macbeth-curse-of-the-stage/b80659e4-369d-4ef4-b772-edee79d75d5a/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Macbeth' Curse of the Stage.&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The Washington Post&lt;/em&gt; January 28, 1998. Accessed February 23, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bonanni, Marc. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://theatrenerds.com/9-theatre-superstitions-explained/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;9 Theatre Superstitions Explained&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; 2017. Theatre Nerds. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Broadside/SMvgAAAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Broadside&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Vols. 1–11. United States: Theatre Library Association, 1973. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cliff, Nigel. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shakespeareriots00clif/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Random House, 2007. Archive.org. Accessed February 23, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2018/oct/the-curse-and-superstition-of-shakespeare-s-macbeth.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Curse of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;: is it more than superstition&lt;/a&gt;?&amp;quot; October 2018. Penguin UK. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/about-the-play/the-scottish-play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Curse of the Scottish Play&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Royal Shakespeare Company. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dickson, Andrew. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.historyextra.com/period/elizabethan/globe-theatre-fire-london-shakespeare-william-facts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Globe Theatre Fire of 1613: When Shakespeare’s Playhouse Burned Down&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; 2018. History Extra. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Roger Fiske. “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/732069&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The 'Macbeth' Music&lt;/a&gt;.” &lt;em&gt;Music &amp;amp; Letters&lt;/em&gt; vol. 45, no. 2 (1964), pp. 114–125. JSTOR. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leggatt, Alexander, ed. &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0415238250&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare's&lt;/em&gt; Macbeth &lt;em&gt;: A Sourcebook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lewis, Uncle Dave. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.allmusic.com/artist/matthew-locke-mn0001188958/biography&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Matthew Locke&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; AllMusic. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Maguire, Laurie, and Emma Smith. &amp;quot;Myth 23: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is Jinxed in the Theater.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;30 Great Myths about Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;. Pp. 150–155. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1606. The Folger Shakespeare. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000098/18880114/002/0001?browse=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Signs and Omens on the English Stage&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Pall Mall Gazette&lt;/em&gt; 14 January 1888. Pp. 1–2. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www1.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/BL/0000273/19130130/138/0005?browse=False&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stage Superstitions: Many Artistes Dread the Present Year. Strange 'Thirteen' Stories&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Yorkshire Evening Post&lt;/em&gt; 30 January 1913. Accessed March 1, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YW-RMQLWDG0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tosti: Good-bye&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Jose Carreras - Topic. YouTube. November 30, 2018.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Underwood, Peter. &lt;em&gt;Deeper into the Occult&lt;/em&gt;. London: Harrap, 1975.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T14:54:01.293" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T14:54:01.293" CommentCount="18" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17748" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17745" CreationDate="2021-02-23T16:03:03.667" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, the mere presence of multiple narrators does not make a novel metafictional. Nor do metafictional novels necessarily confine themselves to just a single narrator. While metafiction depends on the manipulation of narrative point of view, the number of narrators has no bearing on whether or not a given work is metafictional. Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Metafiction&lt;/em&gt; is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/metafictiontheor0000waug/page/2/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p.2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The defining characteristic of metafiction is that the work itself foregrounds its status as a fictional artefact in a self-reflexive way. Having multiple narrators is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a work's being metafictional. A quick look at two early English novels, and at one from the 1960s, can illustrate the complex relationship between narrative point of view and metafiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are multiple narrators sufficient for metafiction? Richardson's &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novel often credited with being the earliest in the English language, Samuel Richardson's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/novelsofsamuelri09rich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1740), uses multiple narrators. The mechanisms by which the story is told include:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letters from Pamela to her parents&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Letters from either or both of her parents in reply&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Entries from Pamela's journal&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Insertions from an &amp;quot;editor&amp;quot; that supply incidents not otherwise covered.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite these different narrators and narrative mechanisms, the actual fictional world is never broken: we are never made aware that we are watching a fictional world being constructed, and the author does not comment on that world in a way that reveals its status as a constructed fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;editor&amp;quot; who supplies the incidents missing from the letters and journal entries speaks in the voice of an omniscient narrator. This presence within the work, however, still does not tip &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt; over into the realm of metafiction. The interpolated omniscient voice still advances the narrative in a linear fashion and tells the story straightforwardly. It does not hold the fictionality or constructedness of the narrative itself up for examination, and the fictional world itself appears stable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt; therefore shows that multiple narrators and even an authorial persona intruding on the text are not sufficient to make a work metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Are multiple narrators necessary for metafiction? Sterne's &lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conversely, neither multiple narrators nor an authorial presence are necessary to make a work metafictional. Laurence Sterne's &lt;em&gt;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&lt;/em&gt;, published in installments between 1759 and 1767, has only a single narrator: the eponymous and hapless Tristram. Tristram is not a stand-in for the author. Yet the self-reflexive way in which he narrates the story makes the work metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, at one point, Tristram discusses the rules he will follow in telling his story. In &lt;em&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/em&gt;, the Roman poet Horace counseled that epic poets should not relate their narratives linearly, beginning &lt;em&gt;ab ovo&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;quot;from the egg&amp;quot;; rather, they should plunge &lt;em&gt;in medias res&lt;/em&gt;, into the middle of things (ll. 147–148). Tristram declares that he will flout Horace's edict and tell his story &lt;em&gt;ab ovo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[R]ight glad I am that I have begun the history of myself in the way I have done; and that I am able to go on, tracing every thing in it, as Horace says, &lt;em&gt;ab ovo&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Horace, I know, does not recommend this fashion altogether: but that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem, or a tragedy—(I forget which;) besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace's pardon; for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man's rules that ever lived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To such, however, as do not choose to go go far back into these things, I can give no better advice than that they skip over the remaining part of this chapter; for I declare beforehand, 'tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lifeopinionstri00stergoog/page/n20/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 18&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hilariously literalizing &lt;em&gt;ab ovo&lt;/em&gt;, Tristan makes pretty clear that he will begin by narrating the story of his conception. He then says, in effect: &lt;em&gt;well, if you're upset that I'm not following Horace's rule, just skip the rest of the chapter&lt;/em&gt;.  Sterne knows full well that it would be a very unusual sort of reader who would be concerned enough about the rules of narrative structure to pass up an invitation to read about sex. This performative play between the content of a narrative (Tristram's conception) and its constructed nature (the choice to begin &lt;em&gt;ab ovo&lt;/em&gt;), as staged by a self-reflexive narrator (Tristram himself), is by definition metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tristram Shandy&lt;/em&gt; therefore shows that neither multiple narrators nor an authorial persona within the text are necessary to make a work metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Can a metafictional narrative have multiple narrators? Johnson's &lt;em&gt;Albert Angelo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of multiple narrators itself is not inherently metafictional, as &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt; shows. However, it is possible for an author to manipulate narrative point of view such that some or all the narrators comment upon the world created by one or more of the other narrators, foregrounding the narrative's status as a created artefact. Such a technique would be metafictional. One example is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._S._Johnson&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;B. S. Johnson&lt;/a&gt;'s 1964 novel &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Angelo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albert Angelo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The novelist Ariel S. Winter &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.flavorwire.com/314828/11-meta-novels-that-will-blow-your-mind&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;describes&lt;/a&gt; the novel as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let’s get it said up front: &lt;em&gt;Albert Angelo&lt;/em&gt; has holes cut in its pages. It also has text in two columns, the left as dialog, the right as the interior thoughts of the eponymous protagonist. It also has reproductions of an advertisement, and sections in the form of a play, and multiple narrative viewpoints. The story is of a young struggling architect working as a substitute teacher in a bad neighborhood while brooding about his ex-girlfriend. But it’s really about novels and writing, and it is alternately funny and very serious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Part of the narrative is told in the form of assignments turned in by Angelo's students at his substitute teaching job. These assignments allow us to see Angelo and his problems from the  pupils' perspective, providing ironic comment on his own. The holes cut out in some of the pages let the reader see incidents that happen further along in the story, undermining the narrative through a juxtaposition of future events with the narrative present. Finally, the novel ends in Johnson's own voice, in a coda where he asserts: &lt;em&gt;Telling stories is telling lies&lt;/em&gt;. The authorial voice intruding to highlight the fictional nature of the narrative is metafictional. The presence of these multiple narrative voices in &lt;em&gt;Albert Angelo&lt;/em&gt; shows that it is possible to have multiple narrators in a metafictional novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the very early history of the English novel, the works of pioneers such as Richardson and Sterne (and, one might add, those of the intervening Henry Fielding) demonstrate that there is no relationship between the number of narrators in a novel and whether or not the novel is metafictional. This is true regardless of whether the novel in question includes a narrator who is identified as the author's surrogate. The more recent example of Johnson shows that multiple narrators can be compatible with a metafictional narrative. But as the other two examples show, multiple narrators are neither necessary nor sufficient for a text to be metafictional.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus). &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/arspoet.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ars Poetica&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. c. 19 BCE. The Latin Library. Accessed 23 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Johnson, B. S. &lt;em&gt;Albert Angelo&lt;/em&gt;. 1964. New York: New Directions, 1987.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Richardson, Samuel. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historyofpamelao00rich/page/n5/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The History of Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1740. New York: W. C. Borradaile, 1830. Archive.org. Accessed 23 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sterne, Laurence. &lt;em&gt;The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman&lt;/em&gt;. 1759–1767. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lifeopinionstri00stergoog/page/n4/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Works of Laurence Sterne&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Derby &amp;amp; Jackson, 1857. Archive.org. Accessed 23 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Waugh, Patricia. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/metafictiontheor0000waug/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Methuen, 1984. Archive.org. Accessed 23 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T01:53:11.597" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T01:53:11.597" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17749" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="67" CreationDate="2021-02-23T17:19:55.213" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The allusions mentioned above are true in some regard; although, some clarity could be made about the Christian idea of sin. Christianity affirms that each individual has the choice of, even the propensity to, sin; but that sin is always a product of choice, even when tempted by the devil (in our story, &amp;quot;The Lord of the Flies&amp;quot;). Therefore, Simon's recognition that, &amp;quot;Maybe the beast is us,&amp;quot; affirms the Christian idea that evil is put forward by and from us and that human beings need a savior. That is why &lt;em&gt;Lord of the Flies&lt;/em&gt; is considered to have Christian allegories rather than, say, Buddhist allegories since other religious traditions teach that goodness can be achieved within our own doing. Christianity teaches that there must be a savior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In addition, Simon holds many, &lt;em&gt;many&lt;/em&gt; Biblical and Christ-like allusions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He is gentle with children.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He knows the Truth about human nature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He confronts The Lord of the Flies (as mentioned above, Satan).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He confronts &amp;quot;the beast&amp;quot; in a cave like Jesus confronted sin in his cave/tomb.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When he talks with &amp;quot;the beast,&amp;quot; it tries to tempt Simon to ignore the truth--the truth that he needs to convey to the other boys. This is similar to the devil tempting Jesus in the desert to give up his mission.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He travels up the mountain at the end of the novel and receives knowledge of the pilot, just as the Bible uses mountains to signify places of receiving knowledge.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He faints and falls three times in the novel (when we first meet him, when he first see's the sow head, after he talks to the Lord of the Flies), just as Jesus fell three times on his journey to the cross.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;After this, he travels to his death at the hands of corrupted humans, even though Simon holds the truth that should set them all free from the idea of &amp;quot;the beast.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many allusions that make Simon a Christ figure in this novel. Additionally, there are a few lines of exposition, characterization, and imagery that also add to the religious or Christ-like reading of Simon. One example is when Ralph and Jack argue about the ship getting away because the fire went out. Jack releases his anger on Piggy, and his propensity for violence becomes clear. Piggy's glasses hit the rocks, breaking one lens,  and, &amp;quot;Simon, who got there first, found them for him. Passions beat about Simon on the mountain-top with awful wings.&amp;quot; Subtle characterization such as this elevates the reading of Simon to an almost supernatural state. Another example would be Simon's death when,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The water rose farther and dressed Simon’s coarse hair with brightness. The line of his cheek silvered and the turn of his shoulder became sculptured marble. The strange attendant creatures, with their fiery eyes and trailing vapors, busied themselves round his head.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stark imagery of light surrounding Simon's hair alludes to the halo of Christian imagery. The &amp;quot;attendant creatures&amp;quot; detail brings forth the biblical story of angels attending to Jesus after his temptation by Satan. The marble imagery evokes pure white: a color often symbolizing purity, or, in many cases, Jesus Christ's purity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12183" LastEditorUserId="12183" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:32:52.653" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:32:52.653" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17750" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17788" CreationDate="2021-02-23T18:14:57.793" Score="7" ViewCount="129" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question started when I noticed a curious aside in Fontane's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Fontane#Death&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fontane was plagued by health problems during his last years but &lt;strong&gt;continued to work until a few hours before his death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being a slightly* morbidly curious person, I tried to find more information about this work. The first place I looked was the citation offered by Wikipedia, which amounted to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Otto Drude: Theodor Fontane. Insel Verlag, Frankfurt, 1994. p. 176&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That was an effective dead end for me - I kept running into German-language books (and am pretty sure the cited work is in German, though I can't find it to confirm) which are useless to monolingual me. Insel Verlag is a mostly-German-language publishing house, Otto Drude appears to have written German-language books, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next thing I found was another aside, in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/54302/theodorfontanesn00fish.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt; (page 35) this time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly before his death he [Fontane] had planned another historical novel, Die Ligedeler, which was to deal with certain bold, half-mythical pirates of the fourteenth century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, this was another dead end. Googling &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Die+Ligedeler%22+theodor+fontane&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sxsrf=ALeKk03_tN3LIhpyaDsJj9TD4hxW9h_rnA:1614058920151&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=0ahUKEwiE09OEpv_uAhWBGM0KHcqKAZQQ_AUICigA&amp;amp;biw=1280&amp;amp;bih=616&amp;amp;dpr=1.5&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;Die Ligedeler&amp;quot; theodor fontane&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/a&gt; gave me three Google Books results, all in German. I also can't figure out the source for the PDF's claim. After trying a few other variations of previous search terms (both in regular Search and in Google Books), I gave up and wrote this question. Probably someone who can read German, or has better search skills, can find some more useful sources.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is simple: what is known about this book Fontane was working on before he died? Have I identified the correct title? What about the plot? Characters? Really, I would be interested in any information available.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is known about the last book Theodor Fontane worked on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* more than slightly&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I've included all of the above to 1) prove this isn't a no-effort &amp;quot;look up something I found on Wikipedia&amp;quot; and 2) perhaps provide answerers someplace to start. The German-language books, while an impediment to my progress, may contain just the information I am after.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:55:07.577" Title="What is known about the last book Theodor Fontane worked on?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17751" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17758" CreationDate="2021-02-23T21:07:23.880" Score="3" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chaucer's &lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whan that Aprill with his &lt;strong&gt;shoures soote&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaucer wrote in Middle English which, to my knowledge, was influenced by French in many ways. French adjectives are usually postpositive, so did this kind of anastrophe (with an adjective following the noun it modifies) start being used in English verse only after the arrival of the French language in England (i.e. the medieval period)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12046" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T21:25:39.080" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T06:54:24.353" Title="Did anastrophe in English poetry have to do with French influence?" Tags="&lt;geoffrey-chaucer&gt;&lt;the-canterbury-tales&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17752" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-23T21:26:36.110" Score="3" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from the beginning of the third chapter of &lt;em&gt;After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie&lt;/em&gt; by Jean Rhys.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;THE NAME of the dark young man was George Horsfield. Half an hour afterwards he came out of the Restaurant Albert, thinking that he had spent a disproportionately large part of the last six months in getting away from people who bored him. (The last six months had been his kick of the heels.) The habit of wanting to be alone had grown upon him rather alarmingly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched Google for the precise expression &amp;quot;kick of the heels&amp;quot; and didn't come up with much. I looked at Wiktionary and saw that &amp;quot;kick one's heels&amp;quot; means to wait, while &amp;quot;kick up one's heels&amp;quot; means to dance or relax. But I don't know what kick &lt;em&gt;of&lt;/em&gt; the heels means.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only interpretation I can come up with is that Mr. Horsfield had spend the last six months partying and living it up, and now he finds himself wanting to be alone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is a &amp;quot;kick of the heels&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11685" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T21:48:22.337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T20:46:44.583" Title="What is a &quot;kick of the heels&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;after-leaving-mr-mackenzie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17753" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-23T21:42:02.013" Score="2" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to understand, in English, two French phrases from the Jean Rhys book &lt;em&gt;After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie&lt;/em&gt;. I am reading this novel within the &lt;em&gt;Jean Rhys: The Complete Novels&lt;/em&gt;. The quote below is from page 256 of the omnibus volume.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting is an evening in a café somewhere around Paris in the 1920s or 1930s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An old chap at the next table was holding forth about Anglo Saxons, and the phrase, '&lt;em&gt;cette hypocrisie froide&lt;/em&gt;' came back and back into what he was saying. The word 'froide' sounded vicious and contemptuous. Mr Horsfield wanted to join in the argument, and say, 'Look here, you're quite wrong. Anyhow, you're not altogether right. What you take to be hypocrisy is sometimes a certain caution, sometimes genuine—though ponderous̛childishness, sometimes a mixture of both. '&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'&lt;em&gt;Ça vous écoeure à la fin&lt;/em&gt;, ' jabbered the old chap. Rather a nice-looking old chap, too. All the more a pity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;cette hypocrisie froide&lt;/em&gt; means something like &lt;em&gt;this cold hypocrisy&lt;/em&gt;, while &lt;em&gt;Ça vous écoeure à la fin&lt;/em&gt; means something like &lt;em&gt;They (the Anglo Saxons) disgust you (vous) to the end&lt;/em&gt;. That's probably a bad translation, but Google Translate says &amp;quot;It sickens you at the end&amp;quot;, which doesn't seem much better to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11685" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T09:09:11.890" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T04:33:12.390" Title="Translating into English two French phrases from &quot;After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jean-rhys&gt;&lt;after-leaving-mr-mackenzie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17754" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-23T22:29:22.800" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T22:29:22.800" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T22:29:22.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17755" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-23T22:29:22.800" Score="0" Body="Questions about the fictional autobiographical novel &quot;After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie&quot; (1931) by Jean Rhys. Use with [jean-rhys]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T08:39:38.940" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T08:39:38.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17750" CreationDate="2021-02-23T23:34:12.620" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;When adapting the book title you name a little and spelling it &amp;quot;Likedeeler&amp;quot;, together with the statement &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;which was to deal with certain bold, half-mythical pirates of the fourteenth century.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; from your question, it seems quite apparent that the novel was to be &lt;strong&gt;focused on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victual_Brothers&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victual Brothers&lt;/a&gt; who later called themselves &amp;quot;Likedeeler&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; (equal sharers), a group of pirates who, together with their most famous member/leader &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_St%C3%B6rtebeker&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klaus Störtebeker&lt;/a&gt;, enjoy somewhat of a mythical status in German folklore, especially in the northern areas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most links point to a book called &amp;quot;Theodor Fontanes letzter Romanentwurf:&#xA;Die Likedeeler&amp;quot; by Hermann Fricke from 1938, which I don't have access to, however. But I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://theodorfontane.de/2018/08/31/auf-den-spuren-theodor-fontanes-und-klaus-stoertebekers-an-der-ostfriesischen-kueste/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German article on a Fontane-centred blog&lt;/a&gt; that details a cultural journey by the Fontane Kreis Hannover, an apparent subsection of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fontane-gesellschaft.de/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft (Theodor Fontane Society)&lt;/a&gt;, so there seems to be some credibility to it. They went to follow Fontane's traces during his research for the project and they have to say about the issue (translated by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The view back into the adventure and play world of the adolescent Theodor Fontane with street kids from Swinemünde at the Baltic beach in Heringsdorf, which the poet gives his readers in his autobiographical novel &amp;quot;Meine Kinderjahre&amp;quot;, shed a light on &amp;quot;Störtebekers Kul&amp;quot; as poetical source of inspiration for his historical novel &amp;quot;Die Likedeeler&amp;quot;. Had Fontane completed the poetical shaping of these childhood experiences, it would have created a literary work of &amp;quot;highest poetic degree&amp;quot; as to Thomas Mann. The livelong feeling attempt to tackle the Störtebeker myth - intendes as &amp;quot;reconciliation (...) between my oldest and most romantic ballad style and my most modern and realistic novel writing&amp;quot; - was given up by Fontane despite instensive local research (in Norden, Marienhafe and Emden) in 1895 in favour of the political novel &amp;quot;Der Stechlin&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They then go on details about visiting the aforementioned locations from Fontane's research and supposedly Störtebeker's life. They also mention:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite [the scarcity of known facts] the legends are rich, which the poetic side of the story-teller Fontane surely appreciated, as the symbol figure Störtebeker who has been stylized into a maritime hero suggests justice and charity, which fits to Fontane's ethics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems clear to me, &lt;strong&gt;the Likedeelers and specifically Störtebeker would have been the topic of his novel&lt;/strong&gt; and it seems to have been intended as somewhat of an &lt;strong&gt;application of Fontane's modern style of realism to a topic with historical but even more so mythical relevance&lt;/strong&gt; and for that alone it would sure have been an interesting work. Would it have been a romanticization of piracy and Robin Hoodery or a look at the reality of Hanseatic endeavours in the 14th century? An embrace or a deconstruction of a beloved maritime myth? A historical documentary or a political parable? We don't quite know, but possibly any and all of that. ;-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the article says that Fontane abandoned the idea for &amp;quot;Die Likedeeler&amp;quot; in favour of &amp;quot;Der Stechlin&amp;quot;, which was finished and published before his death (Wikipedia says he died in the month of its publishing, so it ought to have been finished for some time) and is thus his actual last novel, it is made quite apparent by the article as well as the title of Fricke's book, that &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;Die Likedeeler&amp;quot; is seen as his last unfinished project&lt;/strong&gt;. In fact it's even suggested that he might have worked on it over quite some time. If he picked up the idea right before his death again and if it is what he worked on last I admittedly don't know, though.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="50" LastEditorUserId="50" LastEditDate="2021-02-23T23:47:59.003" LastActivityDate="2021-02-23T23:47:59.003" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17757" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17753" CreationDate="2021-02-24T07:06:21.253" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your interpretation of the first phrase is correct. &lt;em&gt;Cette hypocrisie froide&lt;/em&gt; does mean this cold or cold-blooded hypocrisy. The stereotype here is that of the cold, reserved British against the warm, open French. The Frenchman sees the British stiff upper lip as a sign of hypocrisy. Mr Horsfield thinks, instead, that it indicates either a fear of being too open about emotions (&lt;em&gt;caution&lt;/em&gt;), or an immaturity preventing their being handled in an adult way (&lt;em&gt;childishness&lt;/em&gt;). The idea of cold British reserve was of great thematic importance in Rhys generally. The contrast between the warmth of her birthplace, Dominica, and the cold of England is at issue both literally and metaphorically in her novels and stories, including &lt;em&gt;After Leaving Mr Mackenzie&lt;/em&gt;. This episode is one of many that evokes this contrast.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second phrase is correctly translated by Google. &lt;em&gt;Ça&lt;/em&gt; is singular: &lt;em&gt;it disgusts you&lt;/em&gt;. It would not be translated &lt;em&gt;they&lt;/em&gt;. It's also doubtful it would be used to refer to Anglo-Saxons generally; &lt;em&gt;ils&lt;/em&gt; would be more natural, as &lt;em&gt;ceux&lt;/em&gt; (the plural form of &lt;em&gt;ça&lt;/em&gt;) would be very specific, &lt;em&gt;these (indicated) people&lt;/em&gt;, not a general set of people. The antecedent of &lt;em&gt;ça&lt;/em&gt; is the British reserve or hypocrisy, or British behavior. Also, as Tsundoku mentioned in a comment to your question, &lt;em&gt;to the end&lt;/em&gt; is not an accurate rendition of &lt;em&gt;à la fin&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;To the end&lt;/em&gt; suggests &lt;em&gt;all along&lt;/em&gt;, while the French phrase means &lt;em&gt;ultimately&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;eventually&lt;/em&gt;, or as Google has it, &lt;em&gt;at the end&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T04:33:12.390" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T04:33:12.390" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17758" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17751" CreationDate="2021-02-24T08:32:42.080" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;No&lt;/strong&gt;. Such constructions were the norm in Old English and there's no reason to assume French influence was necessary for them to be available to Chaucer's Middle English versification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middle English, the flavor of English used by Chaucer, has deep continuities with Old English, the version of the language that &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; is written in. Old English is a highly &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;inflected&lt;/a&gt; language, where number, person, gender, case, etc. all affect the morphology of nouns. In highly inflected languages, since a word's form does reveal its grammatical function, word order itself does not matter very much. Consequently, Old English poetry has plenty of examples of word order we would find unusual in Modern English. E.g., here are some lines from the account in &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt; of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norse_funeral#Ship_burials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ship-burial&lt;/a&gt; of the king Scyld Scēfing:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;      ...       him on bearme læg&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;mādma mænigo,       þā him mid scoldon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on flōdes ǣht       feor gewītan.       (ll. 40–42)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Slade, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://heorot.dk/beowulf-rede-text.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beowulf: diacritically-marked text and facing translation&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. heorot.dk. Accessed 23 Feb 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Word-for-word translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;      ...       him on breast lay&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;treasures many,       that him with should&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on flood's domain       far go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Idiomatic translation (mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On his breast lay many treasures that would travel far out on the sea along with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quotation has many examples of word order that are unusual in Modern English: &lt;em&gt;him mid / him with&lt;/em&gt;; &lt;em&gt;feor gewītan / far go&lt;/em&gt;;  and the specific example you're asking about, with adjective following the noun it modifies, &lt;em&gt;mādma mænigo / treasures many&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/medieval-literature/articles/old-english#&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;David Crystal notes&lt;/a&gt;, the transition from Old English to Middle English did involve a loss of inflection, and consequently, a valorizing of word order rather than morphology to determine semantics. And it is true that Middle English vocabulary and syntax was heavily influenced by Norman French. That said, Middle English still is English; its progenitor is Old English, not French. To Chaucer, the word order &lt;em&gt;shoures soote&lt;/em&gt; would be available because of the enduring influence of Old English and not solely dependent on the more immediate presence of Norman French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, word order in poetry is a matter of craft as much as of syntax. Even if Old English had not had flexible word order, it's not unreasonable to attribute Chaucer's anastrophe to his desire for a rhyme with &lt;em&gt;roote&lt;/em&gt; in the next line rather than to the influence of French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T06:54:24.353" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T06:54:24.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-24T09:01:30.897" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Breton folk song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwerz_Santes_Enori&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gwerz Santes Enori&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; has survived for centuries as an oral tradition combining storytelling with music. Its story, quoting Wikipedia's summary, begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem's story concerns the youngest of a king's three daughters (the king of Brest, or Brittany, or Spain, depending on the version), who sacrifices herself when her father is bitten by a snake. Only a virgin breast can save him, and Enori, the youngest, neglected daughter, offers herself up after her two sisters refuse. When she goes to help him a snake jumps onto one of her breasts, and her father cuts off the breast, after which he is miraculously cured (Mary-Ann Constantine identifies this as a &amp;quot;Celtic theme&amp;quot;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwerz_Santes_Enori#cite_note-constantine-1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[1]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;); the daughter is rewarded by an angel who brings her a golden breast, and she gets a husband as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which element of this story is said to be a &amp;quot;Celtic theme&amp;quot;? The cited source goes to a Google Books version of &lt;em&gt;Celtic Culture: A-Celti&lt;/em&gt; edited by John T. Koch, but I tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com.cy/books?id=f899xH_quaMC&amp;amp;pg=PA163&amp;amp;redir_esc=y#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=%22Celtic%20theme%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;searching it&lt;/a&gt; for the phrase &amp;quot;Celtic theme&amp;quot; and didn't find anything relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T21:41:08.267" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T22:39:06.677" Title="Which element of an amputated virgin breast healing a snakebite is a &quot;Celtic theme&quot;?" Tags="&lt;theme&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;breton-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17760" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17759" CreationDate="2021-02-24T09:37:52.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The footnote in the citation goes to the sub-heading &lt;strong&gt;Breton&lt;/strong&gt; within the entry for &lt;strong&gt;Ballads and Narrative Songs&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt;, ed. John T. Koch (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005), vol. 1: &lt;em&gt;A-Celti&lt;/em&gt;. The sub-heading includes the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A small number of songs have notably Celtic themes: the &lt;em&gt;gwerz&lt;/em&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Santes Enori&lt;/em&gt; (Saint Enori), which tells the story of a princess who saves her father by sacrificing her breast to a snake, contains elements of a narrative complex identifiable in a Latin saint's life, a Welsh triad (see TRIADS), a Scottish Gaelic folk tale (see FOLK TALES) and a medieval French romance. (p. 163)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;triad&lt;/em&gt; is a bardic narrative that is built around three names and summarizes a larger tale. Presumably an extant Welsh triad, as well as some Scottish folk tale, involves elements also found in the story of Enori, such as a sick king, or a self-sacrificing daughter, or a snakebite. Perhaps the triad and/or folk tale in question specifically refer to Enori. Unfortunately the associated entries under &lt;em&gt;Triads&lt;/em&gt; (in Volume V) and &lt;em&gt;Folk Tales&lt;/em&gt; (in Volume II) do not appear to mention this particular song specifically, so I have been unable to identify these elements more precisely. However, it appears that the narrative material of the song includes some elements that are also found in Welsh and Scots Gaelic, hence &lt;em&gt;Celtic themes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T22:39:06.677" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T22:39:06.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-24T10:55:52.690" Score="4" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;Answers to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/17744/289&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; about the superstition surrounding &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; linked to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rsc.org.uk/macbeth/about-the-play/the-scottish-play&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Royal Shakespeare Company web page&lt;/a&gt; that claimed:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to folklore, &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was cursed from the beginning. A coven of witches objected to Shakespeare using real incantations, so they put a curse on the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The witches appear in only four scenes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act I, scene i&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act I, scene iii&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act III, scene v&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act IV, scene i&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These scenes contain only two actual spells. Act I scene iii has the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Weïrd Sisters, hand in hand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Posters of the sea and land&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thus do go, about, about,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And thrice again, to make up nine.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Peace, the charm's bound up.       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-1-scene-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.iii.33–38&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Act IV, scene i has the much longer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Round about the cauldron go;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the poison'd entrails throw.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Toad, that under cold stone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Days and nights has thirty-one&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Swelter'd venom sleeping got,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Boil thou first i' the charmed pot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Double, double toil and trouble;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fillet of a fenny snake,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the cauldron boil and bake;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eye of newt and toe of frog,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wool of bat and tongue of dog,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For a charm of powerful trouble,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Double, double toil and trouble;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fire burn and cauldron bubble.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Witches' mummy, maw and gulf&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Root of hemlock digg'd i' the dark,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Liver of blaspheming Jew,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gall of goat, and slips of yew&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Silver'd in the moon's eclipse,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nose of Turk and Tartar's lips,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Finger of birth-strangled babe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ditch-deliver'd by a drab,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Make the gruel thick and slab:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Add thereto a tiger's chaudron,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the ingredients of our cauldron.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Double, double toil and trouble;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fire burn and cauldron bubble.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cool it with a baboon's blood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then the charm is firm and good.       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV.i.4–38&lt;/a&gt;, speech headers omitted)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth mentioning that the latter was possibly written not by Shakespeare, but by his collaborator &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Middleton&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Middleton&lt;/a&gt;, who is known to have recycled songs and other material from his play &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Witch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How close are these incantations to those actually used by those professing witchcraft in the 17th C.? Do we have any historical records documenting spells common among witches of the time, and if so, how do the conjurations in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; map to those?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This question is purely about the scholarly record. I have also asked a &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/17762/289&quot;&gt;different question&lt;/a&gt; about witchcraft practices in the present day vis-à-vis &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T14:58:08.793" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T14:58:08.793" Title="How close to actual incantations are the witches' spells in Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;the-witch&gt;&lt;thomas-middleton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17762" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-24T11:22:42.960" Score="2" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/17761/289&quot;&gt;recent question&lt;/a&gt; asks whether the portrayal of witchcraft in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; can be related to actual practices of those professing to be witches during Shakespeare's day. This companion question asks about neo-pagan practice in our own time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neo-pagan religions such as Wicca rely on reconstructions of pre- or non-Christian European traditions that went underground due to the ascendancy of the Church and subsequent persecution both before and after the Reformation. Wicca looks to historical traces of such suppressed practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; includes a group of witches as important characters. Scenes attributed to Thomas Middleton that derive from his own play &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Witch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; also bring onstage the figure of Hecate as queen of the witches. Hecate is an important figure in contemporary Wicca.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do contemporary neo-pagan practitioners regard Shakespeare and Middleton as reliable historical sources for their belief and ritual? For example, is their view of Hecate influenced by how she is portrayed in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;? And do the incantations in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; find echoes in chants or spells current in Wicca?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T11:22:42.960" Title="Do contemporary neo-pagan practices such as Wicca regard the portrayal of witchcraft in Shakespeare and Middleton as reliable sources?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;the-witch&gt;&lt;thomas-middleton&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17763" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17764" CreationDate="2021-02-24T14:40:07.070" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Raymond, Meursault, and Marie went to visit Raymond's friend, Masson, they decide to go to swim after a brief time but Masson's wife and Raymond refuse the idea and rather stay at the bungalow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first time, perhaps, I seriously considered the possibility of me marrying her.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Masson wanted to have a swim at once, but his wife and Raymond were disinclined to move. So only the three of us, Marie, Masson, and myself, went down to the beach.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-The Stranger, chapter VI.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am bewildered because earlier, in chapter III, when Raymond is first introduced to us, he is presented as a pimp(*).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Just then another man who lives on my floor came in from the street. The general idea hereabouts is that he's a pimp. But if you ask him what his job is, he says he's a warehouseman.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;-The Stranger, chapter III.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always wondered if Masson's wife and Raymond were having an affair. Is anything mentioned about this, anywhere?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* The words used in the translation I read even reinforce more that idea. I do not posses an original copy of the book where, perhaps, I could find some enlighten in French.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8540" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-24T15:17:12.460" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T18:08:12.573" Title="Is Raymond having an affair with Masson's wife?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;albert-camus&gt;&lt;the-stranger&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17764" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17763" CreationDate="2021-02-24T18:08:12.573" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The corresponding passage from Chapter VI in the French text goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pour la première fois peut-être, j'ai pensé vraiment que j'allas me marier.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;br /&gt; Masson voulait se baigner, mais sa femme et Raymond ne voulaient pas venir. Nour sommes descendus tous les trois et Marie s'est immédiatement jetée dans l'eau.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;ne voulaient pas venir&amp;quot; literally means &amp;quot;did not want to come [with us]&amp;quot;, whereas the English translation quoted in the question reads &amp;quot;were disinclined to move&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Disinclined&amp;quot; sounds less direct and sounds more formal than Meursault's language in the rest of Part 1 (compared to the French text, at least).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, after the swim, Meursault tells us nothing about any unusual interaction between Raymond Sintès and Masson's wife. And later, Meursault, Masson and Raymond go for a walk on the beach while Marie and Masson's wife wash the dishes. During that walk, Meursault tells us that Raymond and Masson have known each other for a long time and had even lived together for some time. This would be a good moment to suggest that their might have been some cheating or a ménage à trois, but we hear about nothing of the sort. It would also have been a good moment to suggest an affair during this walk, since this is also when the three men encounter the two &amp;quot;Arabs&amp;quot;, one of which had been beaten up by Raymond because he had suspected him of cheating him with his mistress; if Raymond had been having an affair with Masson's wife, the dramatic irony would have been particularly strong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The corresponding passage from Chapter III in the French text goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Juste à ce moment est entré mon deuxième voisin de palier. Dans le quartier, on dit qu'il vit des femmes. Quand on lui demande son métier, pourtant, il est &amp;quot;magasinier&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Instead of using a noun, the French text uses a verb construction: &amp;quot;vivres des femmes&amp;quot;.) Meursault also says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Je trouve que ce qu'il dit est intéressant. D'ailleurs, je n'ai aucune raison de ne pas lui parler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think [literally: I find] that what he says is interesting. Besides, I have no reason not to speak with him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elsewhere in the novel, Meursault never expresses a negative opinion about Raymond. (The most critical comment we get is in Part II, where Meursault says that Céleste is &amp;quot;better&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;vaut mieux&amp;quot;) than Raymond.) After Raymond has beaten up his mistress, Meursault is even willing to serve as his witness at the police station. During the trial in Part II of the novel, the public prosecution says that Raymond is a procurer and Meursault was his accomplice and friend; his main function in this part of the novel seems to allow the prosecution to present Meursault as a &amp;quot;moral monster&amp;quot;. Masson is also called as a witness. However, even during his long time in prison, Meursault never speculates about an affair between Raymond and Masson's wife. Based on this, I have no reason to assume that such an affair existed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T18:08:12.573" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17765" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3154" CreationDate="2021-02-25T10:00:19.657" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The description of the Pardoner's hair forms part of his overall depiction as effeminate. There are strong hints that he is homosexual or possibly even a eunuch. The poet suggests that he and the Summoner are lovers. Chaucer has already said of the Summoner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And hot he was and lecherous as a sparrow.       (l. 626)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pardoner is then introduced as the lecherous Summoner's friend:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With him there rode a gentle Pardoner&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Rouncival, his friend and his compeer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That straight was comèn from the court of Rome.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Full loud he sang &amp;quot;Come hither love to me.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This Summoner bore to him a stiff burdoun.       (ll. 669–674)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;stiff burdoun&lt;/em&gt; is the bass refrain of the song. But in addition, &lt;em&gt;bourdon&lt;/em&gt; can also mean &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourdon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pilgrim's staff&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. The implications of the Summoner bearing a stiff staff to the Pardoner while they sing a love duet are obvious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pardoner, like the Summoner, is also linked to promiscuity. His eyes are said to be like a hare's, and his voice small as a goat's (ll. 684, 688). Both those animals were, and still are, emblems of lechery. However, Chaucer also indicates that the Pardoner is less than a man:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No beard had he nor never should he have;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As smooth it was as it were late y-shave.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I trow he were a gelding or a mare.       (ll. 689–691)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Pardoner's small voice, his inability to grow a beard, and his being either castrated (&lt;em&gt;gelding&lt;/em&gt;) or female (&lt;em&gt;mare&lt;/em&gt;), all mark him as effeminate. The way he wears his hair fits this overall picture. He lets his smooth blond locks grow out long and arranges them in strands about his head and shoulders. He wears a cap rather than a hood in order to show off his hair better, despite the fact that it is thinning. Chaucer uses the Pardoner's hairstyle to depict his personal vanity and lack of self-awareness. The Pardoner's hair thus is used to associate him with negative stereotypes of femininity and/or homosexuality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T10:00:19.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17766" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17793" CreationDate="2021-02-25T11:35:37.573" Score="4" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tennyson's famous poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Lotos-eaters&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a group of mariners find themselves on an island inhabited by &amp;quot;Lotos-eaters&amp;quot;, and themselves decide to stay after eating lotos has had its effect on them. One passage is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And round about the keel with faces pale,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dark faces pale against that rosy flame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The mild-eyed melancholy Lotos-eaters came.     (ll. 25–27)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why are the Lotos-eaters described as &amp;quot;mild-eyed&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;melancholy&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; What does this alliterative description suggest about their characters, and how does it fit in with the general way they're portrayed in the poem? I'm not even sure exactly what mild-eyed means, and aren't they contented, rather than melancholy, in their drug-induced state?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T10:01:50.163" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T13:40:44.703" Title="Why are the lotos-eaters &quot;mild-eyed&quot; and &quot;melancholy&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;alfred-tennyson&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17768" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:25:18.430" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:25:18.430" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:25:18.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17769" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:25:18.430" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature which were originally written in the Breton language, regardless where they were published." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:28:20.313" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:28:20.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17770" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:27:20.283" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:27:20.283" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:27:20.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17771" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:27:20.283" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Witch', a tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton between 1613 and 1616. Use with [thomas-middleton]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:28:53.113" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:28:53.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:31:29.400" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:31:29.400" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:31:29.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:31:29.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Katy series of novels, starting with &quot;What Katy Did&quot;, written by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey under the pen-name Susan Coolidge, or about any individual book in the series. Use with [susan-coolidge]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:34:37.140" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:34:37.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:34:30.910" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:34:30.910" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:34:30.910" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-25T15:34:30.910" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English playwright and poet Thomas Middleton/Midleton (1580 – 1627) or his life as a writer. One of the most prolific Jacobean playwrights, he found success in both comedy and tragedy." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-25T15:34:52.823" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T15:34:52.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17776" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17728" CreationDate="2021-02-25T19:07:24.287" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/481430.Someone_Watching&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Someone's Watching&lt;/a&gt; by Andrew Neiderman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marty, age seventeen, and Judy, age fourteen, become stepbrother and&#xA;stepsister when their parents marry. When Marty’s father attempts to&#xA;attack Judy, Marty beats him off. The pair flee to a nearby, seemingly&#xA;deserted old resort in the Catskills, where they discover the owner&#xA;still living as if the hotel were about to open. They participate in&#xA;the old man’s fantasy to keep themselves safe, carrying on a Romeo and&#xA;Juliet romance, unaware they are constantly being watched…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2746" LastActivityDate="2021-02-25T19:07:24.287" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17778" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17780" CreationDate="2021-02-26T11:04:47.820" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;This context is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They all walked out on the summer afternoon. The men took Arthur to bowl and bat, deep in the park near the drinking fountain, but the women kept going, with Billy between them, as far as the big cemetery and in through&#xA;the turnstile. Billy’s hands sweated in theirs. Inside the railings the world opened out. The horizon widened and dropped away, and the sky rose until there was nothing above them but dry air: they crept along a plateau that&#xA;tilted slightly to the southeast, in which direction lay many suburbs and a low mountain, very far.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs Fox’s discourse ceased while she took account of this immensity of air, lowness of ground, distantness of landmarks. &lt;strong&gt;Then it began again, and wound on and on through the afternoon, stupefying in its pointlessness and&#xA;yet as soothing, as voluptuous as the murmuring of a dressmaker, the warmhanded whisperer who kneels in contemplation before the hem, who pats and strokes, bunches and gathers, in whose presence nothing is required but perfect passivity.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the sentence &amp;quot;Then it began again, and wound on and on&amp;quot; does &lt;em&gt;it&lt;/em&gt; refer to &amp;quot;Mrs Fox’s discourse&amp;quot; and mean &amp;quot;Mrs Fox’s discourse began again and wound on and on&amp;quot;? (wound= past tense of wind and it is used methaphorical meaning &amp;quot;her speech was confusing&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does the rest of the part in bold mean: her pointlessness speech was confusing but still soothing and voluptuous like the murmuring of a dressmaker when she is sewing the hem with careful attention and pats and strokes the clothes and bunches and gathers them. In presence of ones who she should only do their orders and nothing else is needed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wanted to know if I understand the whole part in bold correctly. But the last sentence &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;in whose presence nothing is required but perfect passivity.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is really unclear to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T15:25:29.980" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T15:25:29.980" Title="Meaning of &quot;in whose presence nothing is required but perfect passivity.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17779" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17789" CreationDate="2021-02-26T13:59:16.430" Score="0" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was listening to Dan Bull and The Stupendium's rap battle about the game Frostpunk and I heard this sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each shiver will deliver us deliverance in time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Burn the innocents for penitence if we preempt the crime&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does that even mean? Deliverance in time? I thought &amp;quot;deliver&amp;quot; meant to provide or hand over something, like food or cargo. And burning the innocent? For more context, these words are spoken by a cult leader, so it's probably related to religion. If you want to hear the song, &lt;a href=&quot;https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ADwUlpdR_PA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here is its YouTube video&lt;/a&gt;. (If you don't want to waste time, skip to 2:14).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12211" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T21:14:04.027" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T21:55:07.120" Title="Meaning of &quot;deliverance in time&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;dan-bull&gt;&lt;the-stupendium&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17780" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17778" CreationDate="2021-02-26T14:26:10.777" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pronoun &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;Then it began again&amp;quot; refers back to &amp;quot;Mrs Fox’s discourse&amp;quot;, which is the grammatical subject of the preceding sentence. This discourse&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is very long (since it &amp;quot;winds on and on through the afternoon&amp;quot;),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;does not have a guiding idea,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;is as soothing or calming as the soft speech of a dressmaker.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The determiner &amp;quot;whose&amp;quot; refers back to dressmaker. The narrator is saying that in the presence of a dresssmaker who is busy tailoring or retailoring your clothes, you don't need to do anything except remain passive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T14:26:10.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17781" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18202" CreationDate="2021-02-26T14:29:59.797" Score="2" ViewCount="74" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 3 of Theodor Fontane's novel &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, which I've started reading online, there seems to be some kind of foreshadowing when Effi's future husband Baron von Innstetten is talking with (or being talked at by) her father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He turned his gaze again and again, as though spellbound, to the wild grape-vine twining about the window, of which Briest had just spoken, and as his thoughts were thus engaged, it seemed to him as though he saw again the girls' sandy heads among the vines and heard the saucy call, &amp;quot;Come, Effi.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He did not believe in omens and the like; on the contrary, he was far from entertaining superstitious ideas. Nevertheless he could not rid his mind of the two words, and while Briest's peroration rambled on and on he had the constant feeling that the little incident was something more than mere chance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;saucy&amp;quot; about the two words &amp;quot;Come, Effi&amp;quot;, spoken between girl friends playing together? What is &amp;quot;the little incident&amp;quot; which Innstetten feels is somehow portentious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I wonder if this lost something in translation, and there's some German wordplay which doesn't come out as clearly in English. (I realise &amp;quot;come&amp;quot; can have a sexual meaning, but it's hardly what one would think of in this context. Is that really what entered Innstetten's mind?) So, for completeness, here is the original German text, which I &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/fontane/effi/effi003.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;also found online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dieser nickte mechanisch zustimmend, war aber eigentlich wenig bei der Sache, sah vielmehr wie gebannt immer aufs neue nach dem drüben am Fenster rankenden wilden Wein hinüber, von dem Briest eben gesprochen, und während er dem nachhing, war es ihm, als säh' er wieder die rotblonden Mädchenköpfe zwischen den Weinranken und höre dabei den übermütigen Zuruf: »Effi, komm.«&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Er glaubte nicht an Zeichen und ähnliches, im Gegenteil, wies alles Abergläubische weit zurück. Aber er konnte trotzdem von den zwei Worten nicht los, und während Briest immer weiterperorierte, war es ihm beständig, als wäre der kleine Hergang doch mehr als ein bloßer Zufall gewesen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T20:23:10.273" Title="What is the significance of &quot;Come, Effi&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17783" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-26T18:20:11.847" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T18:20:11.847" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:20:11.847" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17784" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-26T18:20:11.847" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, known better by her pen name Susan Coolidge (1835-1905), or her life as a writer. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T18:22:48.963" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T18:22:48.963" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17785" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6556" CreationDate="2021-02-26T19:08:05.490" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have since remembered the book that I talked about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Firstly, apologies on my side because this book is definitely not of the 21st Century. It was in fact published in 1963.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, the name of the author isn't quite a pseudonym but he does use different names for different books. The author, in question, is James Hadley Chase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the detective was Steve Harmas, also found in other works of Chase (Double Shuffle, There's always a price tag, etc).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The name of the book is &lt;strong&gt;Tell it to the Birds&lt;/strong&gt;, also a well-known phrase meaning a lie or an untrue statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/521125.Tell_It_to_the_Birds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt; writes a brief summary of the book as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When a &lt;strong&gt;small-time clerk insures his life for $50,000&lt;/strong&gt; and then suddenly&#xA;dies ten days later, it doesn't take a genius to work out something&#xA;suspicious is going on. So when &lt;strong&gt;Maddox, the top man in the insurance&#xA;business, finds out, he is determined to get to the bottom of it&lt;/strong&gt;. And&#xA;this means trouble for someone. In fact, it means trouble for the&#xA;beautiful, auburn-haired &lt;strong&gt;Meg Barlowe, a woman with a serious past&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meg Barlowe is the shady woman in question, Maddox hires Steve Harmas to investigate the death of the Clerk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="390" LastEditorUserId="390" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T19:33:07.433" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T19:33:07.433" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17786" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-26T19:19:01.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T19:19:01.017" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T19:19:01.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17787" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-26T19:19:01.017" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of African-American author William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite (1878–1962) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-26T19:32:40.753" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T19:32:40.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17788" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17750" CreationDate="2021-02-26T19:22:36.113" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Fontane was working on several projects when he died. As mantioned in Cahir Mawr Dyffryn æp Ceallach's answer, one of these was &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;Likedeeler&amp;quot; was the Low German name of the &amp;quot;Vitalienbrüder&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victual_Brothers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Victual Brothers&lt;/a&gt;, a group of late 13th-century privateers). One of the most famous names associated with them was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_St%C3%B6rtebeker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Klaus Störtebeker&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fragments or drafts for &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; were published for the first time in Hermann Fricke's study &lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontanes letzter Romanentwurf: Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; (Verlag der Rathenower Zeitungsdruckerei) in 1938, using manuscripts available at the Theodor-Fontane-Archiv.[1] (The Theodor-Fontane-Archiv had been established just three years earlier in Potsdam in 1935.)&#xA;Fricke wrote that there were 240 manuscript pages in folio or quarto size, part of which had text on both sides, and 6 single-sided manuscript pages with notes about trips to Emden and Bremen.&#xA;The scholar noted that the manuscript pages had gone through many hands, so their original order had not been preserved.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fragments were published again in a larger volume entitled &lt;em&gt;Fragmente und frühe Erzählungen, Nachträge&lt;/em&gt; (Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung) in 1975 and in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110473193/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fragmente. Band 1: Texte&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (De Gruyter) in 2016, edited by Christine Hehle and Hanna Delf von Wolzogen and published on behalf of the Theodor-Fontane-Archiv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 2016 edition is now the authoritative edition of Fontane's unfinished works: it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;contains approximately 170 unfinished stories and essays by Fontane that were not published during his lifetime and which only exist as drafts. Approximately 90 of the texts are being published here for the very first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fragments of &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; can be found in the section &amp;quot;Historische Erzählungen&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;historical stories/narratives&amp;quot;). With a length of 58 or 59 pages, it is the longest of the eight narratives of that section in the book and one of the longest one in the entire book (&lt;em&gt;Eleonore&lt;/em&gt; is just 5 pages shorter; &lt;em&gt;Allerlei Glück&lt;/em&gt; is 70 pages long).&#xA;Since most fragments in the 2016 edition are at best a handful of pages long, &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; is among those projects that had advanced furthest at the time of Fontane's death&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In mid July 1880, Fontane came up with the idea to write Frisian novels with the titels &lt;em&gt;[Die] Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Quade Foelke&lt;/em&gt;[2] (see Roland Berbig's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110215601/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane Chronik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (De Gruyter, 2010), who uses Fricke as a source).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eight years later, more specifically on 8 May 1888, Fontane had finished his draft for &lt;em&gt;Frau Jenny Treibel&lt;/em&gt; but had not yet started working on &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With this story [&lt;em&gt;Frau Jenny Treibel&lt;/em&gt;] I conclude the cycle of my Berlin novels, which amount to 6 in total, and, if a few more years are granted me, I intend to finish with a very ballad-like historical novels that is situated around the year 1400.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We know that Fontane wanted to include poems into the novel. Roland Berbig's &lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane Chronik&lt;/em&gt; notes for the year 1893 (my translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Plan/outline (&amp;quot;Entwurf&amp;quot;) for &lt;em&gt;Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; — F especially gives thoughts avout the poems he wants to include in &lt;em&gt;Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt;; titles for the envisaged titles are &amp;quot;Storm on St. Vincent&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Storm on Bergen or Drontheim&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;A Song that includes their 'agenda'&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Then a song celebrating storm and sea&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Berbig's entry for 16 March 1895 tells us that Fontane wanted to base the novel on the most exact historical knowledge; he asked both Hanz Hertz and the historian &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Holtze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friedrich Holtze&lt;/a&gt; for help in researching the novel's historical background.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the same day, Fontane also writes (my translation):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I want to work on a new novel (whether it will be completed does not matter), a splendid  novel that deviates from everything I have written until now and that deviates from everything that has been written so far, even though some will probably tend to put it in the same category as &amp;quot;Ekkehart&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Die Ahnen&amp;quot;. But it will deviate from these by being a reconciliation between my earliest and most romantic balad style and mmy most recent and most realistic novelist scribblings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Zum Geschichtsdenken Theodor Fontanes und Thomas Manns, oder, Geschichtskritik in &amp;quot;Der Stechlin&amp;quot; und &amp;quot;Doktor Faustus&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; (Königshausen &amp;amp; Neumann, 2004), Birger Solheim, using he above passage, writes (my translation; italics from the German text):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plans for &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; suggest in what direction the old Fontane was going. He emphasises that he does not plan to write a typical historical novel like &lt;em&gt;Ekkehard&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Ahnen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Ahnen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;quot;It [&lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt;] deviates from it, in that it should be a reconciliation between my earliest and most romantic ballad style and my most modern and realist novelistic scribblings&amp;quot; (IX: 25). So Fontane definitely had a conception of how a historical should be modelled from a narratological point of view, namely like a &lt;em&gt;ballad&lt;/em&gt; with an &lt;em&gt;ethically&lt;/em&gt; oriented &lt;em&gt;hero&lt;/em&gt; and, as far as &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; is concerned, with a &lt;em&gt;hero&lt;/em&gt; oriented towards &lt;em&gt;socialism&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Die Ahnen&lt;/em&gt; was a cycle of historical novels in sechs volumes that Gustav Freytag published in the years 1872–1880. &lt;em&gt;Ekkehard&lt;/em&gt; was a historical novel—based on the life of the monk &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekkehard_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ekkehard II&lt;/a&gt;—by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Victor_von_Scheffel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Victor von Scheffel&lt;/a&gt; that was published in 1855.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hanz Hertz writes in a letter to Fontane dated 3 April 1895 that he is busy with books related to &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; and with a song about Störtebeker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In spite of these plans, Fontane first focused on other works, such as the novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Stechlin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Der Stechlin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (written between 1895 and 1897 and published in book format in October 1898), his autobiographical &lt;em&gt;Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig&lt;/em&gt; (published in 1898) and the novel &lt;em&gt;Mathilde Möhring&lt;/em&gt;, which remained &amp;quot;unfinished&amp;quot; at the time of his death but was published posthumously in 1906 [3].&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Fricke, Fontane first started working on a Likedeeler novella but got stuck fairly soon. His original outline for the chapters turned out to be insufficient when he started addding historical information.&#xA;In a second attempt, Fontane drafted both an opening and a closing chapter, but the remaining chapters still raised many questions. Fricke assumes this second attempt still lies before 4 April 1995.&#xA;The third, fourth and fifth bundles of manuscript pages seems to represent a phase in which Fontane had access to more historical sources. Fontane also wrote the first version of chapters two, three, four, seven and eight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fontane's main source was &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/historischestas34unkngoog/page/n11/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Johannes Voigt's treatise &amp;quot;Die Vitalienbrüder&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;em&gt;Historisches Taschenbuch. Neue Folge, zweiter Jahrgang&lt;/em&gt;, edited by Friedrich von Raumer (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1841). In addition, he also used book about the history of East Frisia and about Klaus Störtebeker. Fontane also visited East Frisia in August 1882. (As mentioned above, &lt;em&gt;Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt; was not the only novel related to East Frisia that he wanted to write.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] Based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3ATheodor+Fontanes+letzter+Romanentwurf+Die+Likedeeler&amp;amp;qt=advanced&amp;amp;dblist=638&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WolrdCat search results&lt;/a&gt;, this book is probably hard to find outside university libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[2] The 2016 edition of Fontane's fragments and drafts contains a fragment of 2–3 pages for &lt;em&gt;Quade Foelke&lt;/em&gt;. This would have been a novel inspired by the Frisian noble &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foelke_Kampana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Foelke Kampana&lt;/a&gt; or Foelke the Cruel, who lived from 1355 – c. 1418 and was a contemporary of the Likedeeler.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[3] I write &amp;quot;unfinished&amp;quot; in quotation marks because Fontane had already offered both &lt;em&gt;Mathilde Möhring&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Frau Jenny Treibel&lt;/em&gt; for publication to two periodicals in July 1891, even though he didn't finish the first draft of &lt;em&gt;Mathilde Möhring&lt;/em&gt; until late August or early September of the same year. Fontane reworked the novel in the winter of 1895–1896, after finishing &lt;em&gt;Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Berbig, Roland: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110215601/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane Chronik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. De Gruyter, 2010. (3905 pages. See snippet view on Google Books.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;em&gt;Fragmente und frühe Erzählungen, Nachträge&lt;/em&gt;. Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1975.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110473193/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;*Fragmente. Band 1: Texte&lt;/a&gt;. Eeited by Christine Hehle and Hanna Delf von Wolzogen. De Gruyter, 2016.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fricke, Hermann: &lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontanes letzter Romanentwurf: Die Likedeeler&lt;/em&gt;. Verlag der Rathenower Zeitungsdruckerei, 1938. (See snippet view on Google Books.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Solheim, Birger: &lt;em&gt;Zum Geschichtsdenken Theodor Fontanes und Thomas Manns, oder, Geschichtskritik in &amp;quot;Der Stechlin&amp;quot; und &amp;quot;Doktor Faustus&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Königshausen &amp;amp; Neumann, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:55:07.577" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:55:07.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17789" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17779" CreationDate="2021-02-26T21:55:07.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The song is a rap battle between Dan Bull and The Stupendium representing different strategies in the game &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostpunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Frostpunk&lt;/a&gt;. The goal of Frostpunk is to build a city during a volcanic winter. The Wikipedia page for the game explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the player also has the option to increase the citizens' support either by &amp;quot;Order&amp;quot; which includes buildings and laws to enforce security, or by &amp;quot;Faith&amp;quot;, which includes buildings and laws that implement a religion. These two paths can be continued to the point of fanaticism, with the &amp;quot;Order&amp;quot; path leading to a militaristic autocracy, while the &amp;quot;Faith&amp;quot; path leads to a total theocracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song's two rappers represent Faith and Order. The speaker of these lines is the chief of the Faith path. Since the entire earth is caught in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volcanic winter&lt;/a&gt;, everybody is shivering, but the rapper says &lt;em&gt;Each shiver will deliver us&lt;/em&gt;. This refers to the first meaning of &lt;strong&gt;deliver&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deliver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1 : to set free&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    // and lead us not into temptation, but &lt;em&gt;deliver&lt;/em&gt; us from evil&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    — Matthew 6:13 (King James Version)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea is that inescapable physical discomfort indicated by shivering will force the believers to seek spiritual consolation, which will ultimately (&lt;em&gt;in time&lt;/em&gt;) be beneficial as it will draw the believers closer to God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The followers of the Order path believe that anybody who steps out of line should be harshly punished. Earlier in the song, the Order leader says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To keep the fire alight, we need to stamp all defiance out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, those who follow Faith rather than Order need to be exterminated &lt;em&gt;to keep the fire alight&lt;/em&gt;. The implication here is that members of the Order will burn alive members of the Faith, which will not only remove their enemies but also provide light and warmth in the winter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Faith leader is saying that the followers of his cult could &lt;em&gt;pre-empt&lt;/em&gt; the Order by &lt;em&gt;burn[ing] the innocents for penitence&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;innocents&lt;/em&gt; are members of the Faith. They can &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-immolation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;self-immolate&lt;/a&gt; as an act of defiance against the Order. This would also be &lt;em&gt;penitence&lt;/em&gt; because it would be amends for having sinned against God. The Faith leader has spoken earlier of grace and the ark. God flooded the world for its sinfulness but spared Noah through his ark. The theology here is that humans are inherently sinful and deserve punishment, but are saved only by God's grace. Self-immolation would be a way to repent for the sins against God that have caused the persistent winter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-26T21:55:07.120" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17790" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2644" CreationDate="2021-02-27T03:39:24.230" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have a cynical view on this verse: The man is entranced/captivated by the woman (line 3 above); and even as she is ruining him (line 4 and especially line 5), he ends up &lt;em&gt;thanking&lt;/em&gt; her (line 6). So sounds like an abusive-dependent relationship.  Later in the song he does get angry, but to no avail (&amp;quot;all I ever learned from love is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11669" LastEditorUserId="11669" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T18:35:23.043" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T18:35:23.043" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17791" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17523" CreationDate="2021-02-27T06:47:05.617" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the second sentence could be summarised as saying 'There's going to be no harm to the public from hints about what was found, besides some repulsion'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12218" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T06:47:05.617" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17792" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17794" CreationDate="2021-02-27T08:24:31.083" Score="10" ViewCount="2095" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 3 of Theodor Fontane's novel &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, which I've recently started reading online, Effi and her mother are spending some days in Berlin before her marriage, accompanied by her cousin Dagobert. The following paragraph puzzled me:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Every day passed according to program, and on the third or fourth day they went, as directed, to the National Gallery, because Dagobert wished to show his cousin the &amp;quot;Isle of the Blessed.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;To be sure. Cousin Effi is on the point of marrying, and yet it may perhaps be well to have made the acquaintance of the 'Isle of the Blessed' beforehand. &amp;quot; His aunt gave him a slap with her fan, but accompanied the blow with such a gracious look that he saw no occasion to change the tone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the &amp;quot;Isle of the Blessed&amp;quot;, and what is the meaning of Dagobert's comment connecting it to marriage?&lt;/strong&gt; Searching online, I found only references to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortunate_Isles&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Isles of the Blessed&lt;/a&gt; in Greek mythology, or in more modern literature even newer than &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, but nothing about an artwork with this name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T20:23:41.907" Title="What is the &quot;Isle of the Blessed&quot; and why should a girl see it before marriage?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17793" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17766" CreationDate="2021-02-27T09:56:48.943" Score="4" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tennyson depicts the Lotos-Eaters as having the melancholic personality type described in the four-humor theory of ancient Greek and Persian medicine&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;They are mild-eyed because they are passive introverts bearing no ill will toward the visitors to their island&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Their &amp;quot;mild-eyed melancholy&amp;quot; infects the visitors as well, so that the latter fall into &amp;quot;mild-minded melancholy&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;This identification between native inhabitants and adventurous visitors allows the poem to be read as a critique of Victorian imperialism.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lotos-Eaters&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; expands upon a brief episode from the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. In Homer, the passage describing Odysseus' adventures upon the island of the &lt;em&gt;Λωτοφάγοι / lotophagoi&lt;/em&gt; is very brief, fewer than 25 lines. Here is the entire episode with interlinear translation, from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://homer.library.northwestern.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicago Homer&lt;/a&gt; website:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἔνθεν δ' ἐννῆμαρ φερόμην ὀλοοῖς ἀνέμοισι&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nine days I was carried by baneful winds&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;πόντον ἐπ' ἰχθυόεντα: ἀτὰρ δεκάτῃ ἐπέβημεν&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;over the fishy sea, but on the tenth we landed&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;γαίης Λωτοφάγων, οἵ τ' ἄνθινον εἶδαρ ἔδουσιν.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in the land of the Lotus Eaters, who eat a flowery food.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἔνθα δ' ἐπ' ἠπείρου βῆμεν καὶ ἀφυσσάμεθ' ὕδωρ,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We went ashore there and drew water,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;αἶψα δὲ δεῖπνον ἕλοντο θοῇς παρὰ νηυσὶν ἑταῖροι.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and my comrades soon took dinner beside our swift ships.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ σίτοιό τ' ἐπασσάμεθ' ἠδὲ ποτῆτος,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then after they partook of food and drink,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;δὴ τοτ' ἐγὼν ἑτάρους προΐειν πεύθεσθαι ἰόντας,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I then sent comrades to go and find out&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οἵ τινες ἀνέρες εἶεν ἐπὶ χθονὶ σῖτον ἔδοντες&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who the men were who ate bread upon the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἄνδρε δύω κρίνας, τρίτατον κήρυχ' ἅμ' ὀπάσσας.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I chose two men, and sent a third with them as a herald,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οἱ δ' αἶψ' οἰχόμενοι μίγεν ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισιν:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who went and soon mingled with the Lotus Eater men,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οὐδ' ἄρα Λωτοφάγοι μήδονθ' ἑτάροισιν ὄλεθρον&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and the Lotus Eaters did not intend destruction&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἡμετέροις, ἀλλά σφι δόσαν λωτοῖο πάσασθαι.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for our comrades, but gave them lotus to partake of.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;τῶν δ' ὅς τις λωτοῖο φάγοι μελιηδέα καρπόν,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whoever of them ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οὐκέτ' ἀπαγγεῖλαι πάλιν ἤθελεν οὐδὲ νέεσθαι,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;no longer wished to report or come back,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἀλλ' αὐτοῦ βούλοντο μετ' ἀνδράσι Λωτοφάγοισι&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but wanted to stay there among the Lotus Eater men&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;λωτὸν ἐρεπτόμενοι μενέμεν νόστου τε λαθέσθαι.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to feed on lotus and forget return home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;τοὺς μὲν ἐγὼν ἐπὶ νῆας ἄγον κλαίοντας ἀνάγκῃ,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I brought them by force, weeping, to the ships, then,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;νηυσὶ δ' ἐνὶ γλαφυρῇσιν ὑπὸ ζυγὰ δῆσα ἐρύσσας.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;dragged them in the hollow ships and tied them under the benches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;αὐτὰρ τοὺς ἄλλους κελόμην ἐρίηρας ἑταίρους&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then I ordered the rest of my trusty comrades&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;σπερχομένους νηῶν ἐπιβαινέμεν ὠκειάων,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to board the fast ships in a hurry,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;μή πώς τις λωτοῖο φαγὼν νόστοιο λάθηται.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;lest by chance anyone eat lotus and forget return home,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οἱ δ' αἶψ' εἴσβαινον καὶ ἐπὶ κληῗσι καθῖζον,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;then they went aboard at once and sat down at the oarlocks,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἑξῆς δ' ἑζόμενοι πολιὴν ἅλα τύπτον ἐρετμοῖς.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and, seated in rows, beat the gray sea with their oars.     (9.82–104)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The life of the Lotos-Eaters is antithetical to the heroic norms by which Odysseus lives. Instead of striving to attain some ideal of a conqueror who returns in triumph, the lotophagoi prefer to stay on their island in a lotus-induced stupor. Tennyson relates their lifestyle to the melancholic personality as described in the ancient medical typology of humors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term &lt;em&gt;humors&lt;/em&gt; refers to fluids or secretions in the human body. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocrates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hippocrates&lt;/a&gt;' son-in-law &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybus_(physician)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Polybus&lt;/a&gt; first presented a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;four-humor theory&lt;/a&gt; in his 5th C BCE medical text, &lt;em&gt;De Natura Hominis / On the Nature of Man&lt;/em&gt;. Polybus claimed that good health depended on blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile being in proportion within the body. The 2nd C CE physician &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Galen&lt;/a&gt; extended this theory by suggesting that a person's temperament depended on which of these four humors predominated. The theologian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Damascus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;John of Damascus&lt;/a&gt; (c. 650–750) summarizes Galen's view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Συνίσταται δὲ ἐκ τεσσάρων στοιχείων, ἤγουν ἐξ αἵματος, φλέγματος, χολῆς ξανθῆς καὶ χολῆς μελαίνης ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Καὶ ὅσοιμὲν ἐξ &lt;em&gt;αἵματος&lt;/em&gt; καθαροῦτ υγχάνουσιν, οὗτοί εἰσι πάντοτε χαίροντες καὶ παίζοντες καὶ γελῶντες, καί εἰσιν ἀνθηροί, καὶ καλόχρωοι&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὅσοι δὲ ἀπὸ &lt;em&gt;χολῆς ξανθῆς&lt;/em&gt; τυγχάνουσιν, εἰσὶ γοργοὶ καὶ εὔτολμοι, ὀργίλοι καὶ πικροὶ καὶ ἀλλόχρωοι&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὅσοι δὲ ἀπὸ &lt;em&gt;χολῆς μελαίνης&lt;/em&gt; τυγχάνουσιν, εἰσὶ ῥᾴθυμοι καὶ ὀλιγόψυχοι, φιλάσθενοι καὶ ὀκνηροὶ καὶ δειλοί&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;ὅσοι δὲ &lt;em&gt;ἀπὸ φλέγματος&lt;/em&gt; τυγχάνουσιν, εἰσὶ λυπηροί, καὶ μὴν καὶ ψυχροί, ἀμνήμονες καὶ διαλελησμένοι, τὰ πολλὰ κοιμώμενοι, καὶ λευκόχρωοι.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Man comprises  four  elements,  blood,  phlegm,  yellow  bile  and  black bile ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who are composed of pure blood are always joyous, joke and laugh; and they have a flowery complexion and nice skin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who are composed of yellow bile are passionate, courageous, quick-tempered, and have hair that changes colour.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those  who  are  composed  of  black  bile  are  indolent,  pusillanimous,  sickly, hesitant, and cowardly.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Those who are composed of phlegm are despondent and also cold, forgetful with a short memory, sleep a lot, and have white skin.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(quoted and translated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w76vxr.21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jouanna&lt;/a&gt; 343–344; translation here is lightly modified for clarity and punctuation.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These four personality types have come to be called, respectively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;sanguine&lt;/strong&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;sanguis&lt;/em&gt;, the Latin word for blood&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;choleric&lt;/strong&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;χολῆς / cholīs&lt;/em&gt;, the Greek word for (yellow) bile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;melancholic&lt;/strong&gt;, from the Greek &lt;em&gt;μελαίνης χολῆς / melaīnis cholīs&lt;/em&gt;, the Greek for black bile&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;phlegmatic&lt;/strong&gt;, from &lt;em&gt;φλέγματος / phlegmatos&lt;/em&gt;, the Greek word for phlegm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lotos-Eaters are &lt;em&gt;melancholy&lt;/em&gt; because they represent the melancholic temperament. An article on Persian medicine by Seyed Mahdi Mirghazanfari in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/415397/Melancholic-temperament-Specifications-and-lifestyle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tehran Times&lt;/a&gt; elaborates on the personality traits of melancholic types:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From mental point of view people with melancholic temperament tend to be introspective and introvert. They act and speak unhurriedly and might need more time to accomplish a task but they do it perfectly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They might have negative thoughts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is easy to see that Tennyson ascribes melancholic traits to the Lotos-Eaters. Furthermore, eating the lotos makes the mariners share these antiheroic attributes. They begin to introspect and &amp;quot;have negative thoughts&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why are we weigh'd upon with heaviness,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And utterly consumed with sharp distress,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While all things else have rest from weariness?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All things have rest: why should we toil alone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We only toil, who are the first of things,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And make perpetual moan,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Still from one sorrow to another thrown.     (ll. 57–63)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It might seem far-fetched that a 19th C. poem would draw upon a theory that went back more than 1,700 years. However, the entry &lt;em&gt;humoralism&lt;/em&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=t8UfI3BH78wC&amp;amp;lpg=PA204&amp;amp;dq=medical%20dictionary%20humorism&amp;amp;pg=PA204#v=onepage&amp;amp;q&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webster's New World Medical Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; says that the theory of humors &amp;quot;was not definitively demolished until 1858&amp;quot; (p. 204). Tennyson published an early draft of this poem in 1832, and the final version a decade later, so this typology of humors was available to him. Indeed, Mirghazanfari's Tehran Times article is from 2017, and the author has both MD and PhD degrees, so at least in some circles the theory is considered relevant, perhaps metaphorically rather than literally, even today.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson calls the Lotos-Eaters &amp;quot;mild-eyed&amp;quot; because they are gentle, either by nature or because eating the Lotos makes them so. Unlike the actively hostile entities Odysseus's crew will soon meet elsewhere, Circe for example, the lotophagoi have no malevolent intent. All they do is hospitably offer Odysseus's men the lotus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the Lotus Eaters did not intend destruction&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;for our comrades, but gave them lotus to partake of.       (ll. 92–93 above)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translators of Homer emphasize this mildness through their various renderings. E.V. Rieu (1946):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now these natives had no intention of killing my comrades; what they did was to give them some lotus to taste.     (p. 112)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richmond Lattimore (1965):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor did these Lotus-Eaters have any thoughts of destroying&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;our companions, but they only gave them lotus to taste of.     (9.92–93, p. 139)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Robert Fagles (1996):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they mingled among the natives, Lotus-Eaters, Lotus-Eaters&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who had no notion of killing my companions, not at all,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;they simply gave them the lotus to taste instead ...      (9.103–105, p. 214)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stanley Lombardo (2000):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They headed out and made contact with the Lotus-Eaters,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who meant no harm but did give my men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some lotus to eat.     (9.91–93, p. 127)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emily Wilson (2018):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The scouts encountered humans, Lotus-Eaters,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who did not hurt them. They just shared with them&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;their sweet delicious fruit.     (9.91–93, p. 243)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lotophagoi are well-disposed toward the sailors. In contrast to Polyphemus, who will soon after this episode punish the sailors for eating his cheeses, or Circe, who will offer Odysseus's men a soothing drink laced with sedatives so that she can turn them into swine, their hospitality is not malign by intent. But it is nevertheless destructive, turning the sailors into Lotos-Eaters themselves and sapping their desire to continue homeward. They too begin to feel &amp;quot;the influence of mild-minded melancholy&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With half-shut eyes ever to seem&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Falling asleep in a half-dream!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To hear each other's whisper'd speech;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eating the Lotos day by day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And tender curving lines of creamy spray;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To lend our hearts and spirits wholly&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To the influence of mild-minded melancholy.     (ll. 99–109)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tennyson uses practically the same phrase (&lt;em&gt;mild-eyed melancholy / mild-minded melancholy&lt;/em&gt;) to describe both the Lotos-Eaters and the sailors. Through this identification between the two, Tennyson lays bare some of the anxieties around the Victorian imperial project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Lotos-Eaters” was first published in 1832, at a time when the British Empire was undergoing a rapid expansion and consolidation. In the context of Victorian empire-building, Odysseus, who travels far and wide, encountering savages, enduring severe hardships, and amassing fortunes, can readily be recast as the imperial hero. The expansion of the British empire was driven largely by commercial imperatives, but the overt justification was always that of a civilizing mission—what Rudyard Kipling was later to call &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/19-american-empire/rudyard-kipling-the-white-mans-burden-1899/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the white man’s burden&lt;/a&gt;. But the mariners in Tennyson’s poem refuse to bear this burden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let us alone. What pleasure can we have&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To war with evil? Is there any peace&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In ever climbing up the climbing wave?     (ll. 93–95)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As good imperialists, the mariners are under an obligation “to war with evil,” to reform the savage ways of their colonial subjects. In abandoning their journey back home and choosing to stay with the Lotos-Eaters, the mariners in Tennyson’s project are abandoning their civilizing mission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sailors are not only neglecting their duty, they have in fact succumbed to the worst temptation faced by a colonizer: the temptation to go native. Underpinning the imperial project was the assumption of the superiority of the colonizer’s culture over that of the colonized. A key aim of the imperial project was to transform the colonized subjects so that while they remained natives “in blood and color,” they became “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” as Macaulay’s infamous &lt;a href=&quot;https://surajit.substack.com/p/macaulays-minute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Minute on Indian Education&lt;/a&gt; put it. Rather than influencing the hearts and spirits of the Lotos-Eaters, though, the seafarers here have yielded to the customs, habits, and world-view of the dark-faced, mild, melancholic colonial subjects.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It would be simplistic to say that Tennyson consciously intends “The Lotos-Eaters” as a critique of imperialism or a parable about the dangers inherent in the imperial undertaking. That is not the claim being made here. The point here is merely that as a product of its time, “The Lotos-Eaters” reflects the concerns of the Victorian age. Since imperialism was the era’s chief concern, the poem lends itself to a reading that situates it within the context of imperialist ideology. When the &lt;em&gt;mild-eyed melancholy&lt;/em&gt; of the Lotos-Eaters infects the sailors so that they too cherish &lt;em&gt;mild-minded melancholy&lt;/em&gt;, the tensions within that ideology are exposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fagles, Robert, trans. &lt;em&gt;Homer: The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. Intro and notes Bernard Knox. Penguin Classics Deluxe ed. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homer. &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://homer.library.northwestern.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chicago Homer&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; Eds. Ahuvia Kahane and Martin Mueller; technical eds. Craig Berry and Bill Parod. Northwestern U. Accessed 26 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jouanna, Jacques. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w76vxr.21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Legacy of the Hippocratic Treatise the Nature of Man: The Theory of the Four Humours&lt;/a&gt;.” Chapter 16 of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctt1w76vxr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Jacques Jouanna and Neil Allies, Ed. Philip van der Eijk. Leiden: Brill, 2012. pp. 335–360. JSTOR. Accessed 27 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kipling, Rudyard. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/19-american-empire/rudyard-kipling-the-white-mans-burden-1899/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The White Man's Burden&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; 1899. The American Yawp Reader. Accessed 27 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lattimore, Richmond, trans. and intro. &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey of Homer&lt;/em&gt;. 1965. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lombardo, Stanley, trans. &lt;em&gt;Homer: Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. Intro Sheila Murnaghan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Macaulay, Thomas Babington. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://surajit.substack.com/p/macaulays-minute&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Macaulay's Minute&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; surajit.substack.com. Accessed 28 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mirghazanfari, Seyed Mahdi. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/415397/Melancholic-temperament-Specifications-and-lifestyle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Melancholic temperament: Specifications and lifestyle&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Tehran Times&lt;/em&gt; 26 July 2017. Accessed 26 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rieu, E. V., trans. &lt;em&gt;Homer: The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. 1946. Revised trans. D. C. H. Rieu. 1991. Intro Peter Jones. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2003.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tennyson, Alfred. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lotos-Eaters&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; 1832, rev. 1842. Poetry Foundation. Accessed 27 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=t8UfI3BH78wC&amp;amp;lpg=PA204&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webster's New World Medical Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2008. Google Books. Accessed 26 February 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wilson, Emily, trans. &lt;em&gt;Homer: The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Norton 2018.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T13:40:44.703" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T13:40:44.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17794" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17792" CreationDate="2021-02-27T16:19:13.197" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The comment doesn't need to reference a real painting to make sense in the context of the novel, but some searching shows that Fontane had a particular painting in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since Hesiod, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elysium&lt;/a&gt; has also been known as the &amp;quot;Isles of the Blessed&amp;quot; or the &amp;quot;Fortunate Isles&amp;quot; and there are several paintings and artworks that have been inspired by this mythological concept. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89n%C3%A9e_retrouvant_son_p%C3%A8re_aux_Champs-%C3%89lys%C3%A9es_(S%C3%A9bastien_Vrancx)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Énée retrouvant son père aux Champs-Élysées&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Aeneas meeting his father again in Elysium) by the Flemish painter Sébastien Vrancx (1573–1647),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Goethe_Elysium_crop.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Goethes Arrival in Elysium&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by the German painter &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Nadorp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franz Nadorp&lt;/a&gt; (1794–1876),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arnold_B%C3%B6cklin_-_Die_Gefilde_der_Seligen.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Gefilde der Seligen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;The Fields of the Blessed&amp;quot;) (1877) by the Swiss painter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_B%C3%B6cklin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arnold Böcklin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Böcklin's painting &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Die Gefilde der Seligen&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; is currently in the &lt;a href=&quot;http://kmw.zetcom.net/de/collection/item/15439/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kunst Museum Winterthur&lt;/a&gt; in Switzerland, which acquired the painting in 1926. (akg-images sells reproductions of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.akg-images.de/archive/Die-Gefilde-der-Seligen-2UMDHU0B5GE.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Ölskizze für das Gemälde in der Nationalgalerie in Berlin&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, i.e. an oil sketch for the painting in the National Galery in Berlin.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Böcklin also painted &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:B%C3%B6cklin_-_Die_Lebensinsel_-1888.jpeg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Lebensinsel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (&amp;quot;The Island of Life&amp;quot;, 1888), which actually shows an island, whereas &lt;em&gt;Die Gefilde der Seligen&lt;/em&gt; doesn't, so Fontane &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; have combined two real paintings into a fictional one named &amp;quot;Insel der Seligen&amp;quot;. However, Wolf-Rüdiger Wagner writes in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://roman-als-zeitbild.blog/page/3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog&lt;/a&gt; about his book &lt;a href=&quot;https://kopaed.de/kopaedshop/?pid=1173&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effi Briest und ihr Wunsch nach einem japanischen Bettschirm&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (2nd edition, kopaed, 2019),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Der Vetter Briest besucht mit ihnen bei dieser Gelegenheit die Nationalgalerie, um ihnen Arnold Böcklins Bild „Die Gefilde der Seligen“ (im Roman ist von der „Insel der Seligen“ die Rede) zu zeigen. Das von der Nationalgalerie in Auftrag gegebene Gemälde wurde 1878 kurz ausgestellt, aber aufgrund der öffentlichen Proteste wieder abgehangen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On that occasion Cousin [Dagobert von] Briest visits the National Gallery with them to show them Arnold Böcklin's painting &amp;quot;The Realm of the Blessed&amp;quot; (the novel talks of the &amp;quot;Isle of the Blessed&amp;quot;). This painting, commissioned by the National Gallery, was &lt;strong&gt;briefly exhibited in 1878 but was taken down because of public protests&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not obvious that readers in 1895 would remember this about the painting. Fontane himself, however, still remembered the painting: on 25 June 1889 he sends a letter from Berlin to his daughter Martha Fontane saying,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mama macht mir stille Vorwürfe darüber und mitunter auch laute, als ob ich die Sache ändern und durch eine Nachmittagsfahrt nach Treptow oder Stralau die Insel der Seligen wieder herstellen könnte. Doch höchstens eine wie die Böcklinsche, die noch langweiliger wirkt als der Potsdammerstraßen-Alltagszustand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mama makes silent and sometimes not so silent reproaches, as if I would be changing the issue and restore the isle of the blessed by afternoon trips to Treptow or Stralau. But at best &lt;strong&gt;an isle of the blessed like Böcklin's, which is even more boring than the workaday life on the streets of Potsdam&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it is more than likely that Fontane had Böcklin's painting in mind when he let Dagobert mention the &amp;quot;Isle of the Blessed&amp;quot;. Dagobert's comment is just banter, and that is how Effi's mother interprets it. On the one hand, he wants Effi to see a painting that scandalised people in the late 1870s because of the nudity of the nymphs. On the other hand, he may be &lt;strong&gt;ironically teasing Effi with the idea that marriage does not lead to a blessed or happy state, so she should at least get a glimpse of it before she gets married&lt;/strong&gt;. Effi's mother knows better than to exaggerate the happiness brought by marriage: at the start of chapter III, the narrator had given us the following insight into her own marriage (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/228/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 229 in &lt;em&gt;The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries&lt;/em&gt; on Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For one could live with von Briest, in spite of the fact that he was a bit prosaic and now and then showed a slight streak of frivolity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that Effi says in Chapter IV that she does not want boredom in her marriage (although that is exactly what she gets most of the time while living in Kessin). &lt;strong&gt;One should not overstate the erotic allusion or undertone in Dagobert's comment&lt;/strong&gt;, which would probably have provoked a sterner response from Effi's mother. Fontane is so indirect about anything remotely erotic in the novel that even Effi's pregnancy comes as a surprise: the most intimate thing that Effi and her husband do with each other is giving each other a kiss; it is as if they never share the same bed (the only persons who are described as spending the night in the same room as Effi are two female servants); and even the words &amp;quot;pregnancy&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;delivery&amp;quot; are carefully avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References (besides the links in the answer):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.suhrkamp.de/buecher/effi_briest-theodor_fontane_18847.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Mit einem Kommentar von Dieter Wöhrle. Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek, 47. Suhrkamp, 2004.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor; Fontane, Martha: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110857825/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane und Martha Fontane - Ein Familienbriefnetz&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Edited by Regina Dieterle. Schriften der Theodor Fontane Gesellschaft, 4. De Gruyter, 2002.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T20:23:41.907" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T20:23:41.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17795" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-02-27T16:25:05.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T16:25:05.190" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T16:25:05.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17796" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-02-27T16:25:05.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' (1936), a horror novella written by H. P. Lovecraft. It is part of his Cthulhu Mythos and is Lovecraft's only story published as a book while he was alive. Use with [h-p-lovecraft]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-27T17:19:24.637" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T17:19:24.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17797" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17792" CreationDate="2021-02-27T19:43:53.973" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;@Tsundoku writes: &amp;quot;He is teasing Effi with the idea that marriage does not lead to a blessed or happy state, so she should at least get a glimpse of it before she gets married.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not quite. Dagobert is teasing Effi with a reference to a painting that has been taken down later because it was thought obscene. So there is an erotic undertone in his comment, and that is what the mother reacts to: the slight streak of frivolity that the later quote mentions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12222" LastActivityDate="2021-02-27T19:43:53.973" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17798" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17802" CreationDate="2021-02-27T21:55:27.583" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was talking to his old friend Professor Stillson Renmark (whom he calls &amp;quot;Stilly&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, then, Stilly, let’s talk business. You’re not married, I take it, or you wouldn’t have responded to my invitation so promptly.” The professor shook his head. “Neither am I. You never had the courage to propose to a girl; and I never had the time.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Lack of self-conceit was not your failing in the old days, Richard&lt;/strong&gt;,” said Renmark quietly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates laughed. “Well, &lt;strong&gt;it&lt;/strong&gt; didn’t hold me back any, to my knowledge. Now I’ll tell you how I’ve got along since we attended old Scragmore’s academy together, fifteen years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does Renmark mean that he himself was in a lack of self-conceit in the old days?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what does &amp;quot;it&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;it didn't hold me back any&amp;quot; refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T02:16:21.397" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T04:37:52.903" Title="Does Renmark mean that he himself did not lack self-conceit in the old days in &quot;In the Midst of the Alarms&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17799" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17800" CreationDate="2021-02-27T22:40:02.290" Score="1" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was talking to his old friend about another old friend that had caused Yates to be expelled from the academy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what I detested was the way the principal worked the thing. He allowed that villain Spink to turn evidence against us, and Spink stated I originated the affair, whereas I could claim no such honor. It was Spink’s own project, which I fell in with, as I did with every disreputable thing proposed. Of course the principal believed at once that I was the chief criminal. Do you happen to know if Spink has been hanged yet?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I believe he is a very reputable business man in Montreal, and much respected.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I might have suspected that. Well, you keep your eye on the respected Spink. &lt;strong&gt;If he doesn’t fail some day, and make a lot of money&lt;/strong&gt;, I’m a Dutchman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How can he &amp;quot;fail while making a lot of money&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;might have suspected&amp;quot; = &amp;quot;perhaps I should have guessed&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T01:31:08.493" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T15:08:01.720" Title="How can someone &quot;make a lot of money and fail&quot; in the same time?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17800" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17799" CreationDate="2021-02-28T01:07:38.600" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To the first question: the intended meaning is indeed &amp;quot;fail + make a lot of money&amp;quot;. Yates is not a Dutchman, so he is saying that he expects Spink (a) to &amp;quot;fail&amp;quot; and (b) to make a lot of money. How that might work is illustrated by the example of Brown, who had also been expelled from the academy, just like Yates. Yates says to Renmark,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, Brown, by his own exertions, became president of the Alum&#xA;Bank in New York, wrecked it, and got off to Canada with a clear half&#xA;million. Yes, sir. I saw him in Quebec not six months ago. Keeps&#xA;the finest span and carriage in the city, and lives in a palace.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates has a similarly low opinion of Spink and expects him to do something similar, which is why he asks Renmark whether he has been hanged yet and later adds, &amp;quot;you keep your eye on the respected Spink&amp;quot; (in which &amp;quot;respected&amp;quot; is presumably spoken in an ironic tone). His low esteem of Spink is a consequence of being expelled from the academy because evidence from Spink that got Yates expelled from &amp;quot;Scragmore's academy&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the second question: your interpretation is basically correct. It is something Yates could have expected (hypothetically) but apparently didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T15:08:01.720" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T15:08:01.720" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17801" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17798" CreationDate="2021-02-28T02:32:56.780" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Professor Stillson Renmark does not say how he was in the old days, but he does not deny Yates's comment that he lacked the courage to propose to a woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Courage is something different than self-conceit, which &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/self-conceit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; defines as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conceit of oneself; an overweening opinion of one's own powers or endowments; vanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renmark is saying that Yates overestimated his importance, abilities or value (or all of these combined). Due to the overestimation of his own value, Yates thinks that finding a wife would not have been difficult for him; it was only a matter of finding time for it. Yates responds to Renmark's comment that his self-conceit (&amp;quot;it&amp;quot;) has not in any way been an obstacle in his life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Probably, Yates did not fear his marriage proposal being turned down, whereas Renmark did. Renmark needed more courage, i.e. the ability to overcome this fear, whereas Yates, in his self-conceit, didn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T02:32:56.780" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17802" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17798" CreationDate="2021-02-28T04:37:52.903" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No, Renmark is not saying that he himself did not lack self-conceit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates says that he and Renmark are both single, but for different reasons. He says Renmark was too diffident to propose to anybody, while he himself just did not have the time to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renmark adroitly pushes back against this characterization by saying Yates is just being conceited. Yates's remark shows his self-conceit in many ways:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's implying that unlike Yates, he was always busy with stuff more important than courtship&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's saying that Renmark is a coward, lacking the courage to propose, whereas he himself had courage, just not time&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He's also assuming that if he had had the time to propose to anyone, he would have been accepted and so no longer single.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Renmark refuses to defend himself on the terms Yates sets. That is, he does not fight back with: &amp;quot;What are you talking about? I had plenty of courage. I just never met the right person. Besides, I too was just as busy as you were.&amp;quot; Instead, he ironically agrees that Yates himself was not a coward, in the sense that as a young man, the latter would indeed have not lacked the self-conceit to propose. This implicitly turns the tables on Yates: it's not that Renmark lacked courage; its that Yates was too conceited. In other words: &amp;quot;Your opinion of yourself was certainly high enough for you to believe that while my problem was lack of courage, i.e., my own personal failing, yours was lack of time, i.e., a sign of important things you were involved with.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;It&lt;/em&gt; in &amp;quot;it didn't hold me back any&amp;quot; refers to Yates's self-conceit. Yates sportingly agrees with Renmark that vanity is in fact a failing of his, and says that his big opinion of himself has not proved a handicap.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T04:37:52.903" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17803" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14114" CreationDate="2021-02-28T05:10:08.407" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately I can't read French, so this answer will be based on secondary research.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;tl:dr&lt;/strong&gt; - At this time (and the recent past) there was simply no idea that a single set of laws applied to everyone. French citizens had a set of laws; native Algerians had another. Constitutional law protected a seperation of French and Algerian law. At various times, it actually was legal for a European to kill an indigenous Algerian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;1942: Vichy Law is Nonsense&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Stranger&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1942. During this time France was governed by the Vichy State, essentially a Nazi puppet government.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curran (1998) summarizes key features of the Vichy government and legal system. If we assume that Camus is talking about contemporary law, then both metropolitan France and Algeria are (on paper) subject to the same governance. However, a key feature of Vichy law is that it is entirely paradoxical. France choose to disguise Nazi conquest through a series of legislative maneuvers that themselves were illegal. French law was essentially a smoke and mirrors show.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marie's comments could be read as a reflection of this state. On one hand, she may be literally correct that in the racist political and juridical system of Vichy France that a European may not face capital punishment for killing one of the native Algerians. On the other hand, perhaps the nonsense apparent in her statement reflects the paradox underlying Vichy Law in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curran also notes that the basic machinery of existing French law was still in place under Vichy rule, though in practice the judiciary and administration did whatever the legislature directed them to. We'll talk more about those in the next section. A common strategy employed by Vichy France was to keep existing laws in place, but redefine words like &amp;quot;citizen&amp;quot; so that existing laws no longer applied to minorities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Before 1942: Algeria is Subject, Not an Equal&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benton (1999) describes comparative colonial law prior to Vichy rule. French colonial law was essentially a tapestry of different kinds of law all operating in the same area. The two main groups are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;French metropolitan law applied to French citizen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Indigenat (&amp;quot;native&amp;quot;?) law applies to non-French citizens.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legal rights and crimes for French citizens and indigenous people is simply different. Without getting into details, Benton also says that the French intentionally kept this system ambiguous. It was intended to help them rule a subject territory, not be just.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grandmaison(2006) characterizes this as two entirely different worlds. It almost defies our modern understanding of law, but rests on a primordial notion that some people are just inherently better (more civilized, more worthy of legal protection) than others. The legal systems reflect a real sense of values and world-view of French government at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the most heinious examples seem to have been removed from law by this time, there are some pretty striking things which support the idea that a French citizen may not have faced any meaningful punishment for murdering an indigenous person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/French_Constitution_of_1848&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Article 109&lt;/a&gt; of the French Constitution of 1848 provided for Algeria to follow a different set of laws than the rest of France. In the constitution of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/French_Constitution_of_1852&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1852&lt;/a&gt;, the French legislature is empowered to regulate Algerian law. It's still entirely separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although I haven't found a better source, Wikipedia's article on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indig%C3%A9nat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indigenat&lt;/a&gt; describes the system of &amp;quot;native&amp;quot; law. There were French courts and local courts. Meursault's crime would have been governed by the French judge, but their decision was effectively not constrained by legal advice. Additionally, for a set of 34 infractions a European could institute summary punishment (including execution) without a court proceeding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summary execution was apparently removed from law in 1924, but the same article notes that decisions were still handled by local judges and may have continued on a local basis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Other Themes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marie's comments may not reflect any historical reality. Camus purposefully takes his characters out of context and provides only minimal facts. They exist without any inherent meaning. Similarly, Marie's statements perhaps reflect a thematic reality rather than a historical one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Benton, Lauren. 1999. &amp;quot;Colonial Law and Cultural Differences: Jurisdictional Politics and the Formation of the Colonial State.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Comparative Studies in Society and History&lt;/em&gt; 41:3. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/179440.pdf?casa_token=vY9yW2DYwJIAAAAA:Zb9QsmSedEQfqr2FhQnRn_ueL7ZZOyk8WVygfYQcJbKFBA4Z6Um_el496lUzcSRn3P6_fbX5ayrSj0laMmvNQIPKfVRmf_5HWYPceKncGuHQqHd1HFE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curran, Vivian. 1998. &amp;quot;The Legalization of Racism in a Constitutional State: Democracy's Suicide in Vichy France&amp;quot;. &lt;em&gt;Hastings Law Journal&lt;/em&gt; 50: 1. &lt;a href=&quot;https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3343&amp;amp;context=hastings_law_journal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Grandmaison, Olivier Le Cour. 2006. &amp;quot;The Exception and the Rule: On French Colonial Law.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Diogenes&lt;/em&gt; 212. &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0392192106070346?casa_token=nBF_ufzRg6MAAAAA:jWK2eZxQQgY8lIz_XJnrXxsYuBV7cTR5xoBPibSNTDcEJ1x-T9HSpu4FEIMzu9redlMVqnvnIKr8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;PDF&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12002" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T05:10:08.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17804" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17792" CreationDate="2021-02-28T10:42:15.153" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of the 19th century Arnold Böcklin was a well-known painter. &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/25/Arnold_B%C3%B6cklin_-_Die_Gefilde_der_Seligen.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Die Gefilde der Seligen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, apparently the painting the book refers to, had been commissioned in 1876 by the National Gallery. After its exhibition caused a &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=bQGLGz0pONUC&amp;amp;lpg=PA673&amp;amp;ots=UXkAw1iCKk&amp;amp;dq=b%C3%B6cklin%20gefilde%20der%20seligen%20skandal&amp;amp;pg=PA673#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=b%C3%B6cklin%20gefilde%20der%20seligen%20skandal&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;public scandal&lt;/a&gt; it was quickly removed: The female nudity in the foreground, the provocative wild virility of the centaur carrying the nymph and even the &amp;quot;provocative steepness&amp;quot; and conspicuous contrast of the swans' necks in front of the dark water were at odds with the public sentiment at that time. (As an aside, it is an example for Foucault's recurrent theme that nothing obsesses the human mind more than the forbidden.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was, after all, the outgoing Victorian age. But the times changed, and with them the perception of Böcklin and his painting; by the time Fontane wrote that novel, in 1895, the image (or maybe an oil sketch) was hanging in the museum again. But of course the scandal was still known, also to Fontane, and it's safe to assume that it was still seen as daring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The figure of Dagobert, Effi's cousin, is somewhat of a counterpart to her boring fiancé: Young, full of ideas, a natural entertainer, funny, and with an open interest in Effi. The occasion on which Dagobert suggests to see the picture is a shopping visit. It takes them from their provincial home town into the metropolis Berlin which at that time undergoes in an extremely dynamic phase of urban development and expansion. Dagobert is the Ladies' guide and entertainer on this trip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking them to the somewhat famous painting is, I would think, first and foremost part of his commitment to entertain the two ladies. Its daring nature makes it a little more interesting, a little tease, even more so because of his interest in Effi. Perhaps he means that it is time to introduce her to the facts of life; or, because he knows that her fiancé is 20 years older, he means to show her what passion and virility look like since she will likely not see it in her marriage; but in the end, this is all speculation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="777" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T10:42:15.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17805" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-02-28T11:28:31.223" Score="2" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Last Lesson&amp;quot; is a short story by Alphonse Daudet (&lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?lefl1=1-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link to the English translation&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the significance/symbolism/meaning of the following aspects of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The watcher's words &amp;quot;Don’t go so fast, bub; you’ll get to your school in plenty of time!&amp;quot;: what is pointed out by these words?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Hauser: what role does he have in the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The sentence &amp;quot;Will they make them  sing in German, even the pigeons?&amp;quot;: what does this symbolise?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12114" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T16:09:39.597" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T16:09:39.597" Title="In the short story &quot;The Last Lesson&quot; by Alphonse Daudet, what do the following signify?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;alphonse-daudet&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17806" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17805" CreationDate="2021-02-28T14:10:13.220" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story is set during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871&lt;/a&gt;, when the Germans occupied a large part of France.&#xA;People in Alsace, where the story is set in Alsatia, mainly speak the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsatian_dialect&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alsatian dialect&lt;/a&gt;, which belongs to the Germanic branch (like German), not to the Romance branch (like French) of the Indo-European languages. The names of the charactes are also predominantly German, not French: Frantz, Wachter, Hauser and Rippert. Hamel is a French name, but even the Old French noun &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/hamel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;hamel&lt;/a&gt; has a Frankish and therefore Germanic root.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alsace has long been a bone of contention between France and Germany, but &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsace#German_Land_within_the_Kingdom_of_France&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;since 1639 (by military force) or 1648 (by treaty)&lt;/a&gt; Alsace had been part of France. As the story shows, in the 230 years that had passed by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, the Alsatians had begun to feel French, not German. The story illustrates the (French) patriotism that several characters feel when confronted with the consequences of the German occupation. (As a consequence of the war, France ceded more than 90% of Alsace to Germany; the region remained German until the First World War.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the point of view of the blacksmith Wachter (not &amp;quot;watcher&amp;quot;), a school that teaches German instead of French does not represent the culture he (and several generations of his ancestors) grew up with, so there is no need hurry towards school. Of course, he cannot know what Mr. Hamel is up to during his final day as a teacher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of Hauser and the other adults in the classroom (including a former mayor) reinforces the idea that the Prussian decision regarding teaching in German does not only concern the school children and their teacher but also the adults. It signals that the entire society resents this measure. The symbolism of the three-cornered hat or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tricorne&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tricorne&lt;/a&gt; is less obvious: it had once been widespread in France, both among civilians and as military wear, but by 1870 the folk song &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Hat,_It_Has_Three_Corners&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;My Hat, It Has Three Corners&lt;/a&gt; was also popular in Germany. If Daudet was aware of this, this would subvert Hauser's wearing it as a symbol of French patriotism (assuming that this was his intent in the first place).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Frantz's dismal thought &amp;quot;Est-ce qu'on ne va pas les obliger à chanter en allemand, eux aussi?&amp;quot; widens the scope of the German occupation from humans to nature. Frantz fears that even the animal world cannot escape the consequences of the Prussian occupation, which stresses his unease about the occupation and makes it even more unpalatable to the reader. It is no coincidence that the trumpets of the Prussians interrupt the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Angelus&lt;/a&gt;, a catholic rite, thereby highlighting a religious opposition between the predominantly Catholic French and the predominantly Protestant Germans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T14:10:13.220" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17807" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8394" CreationDate="2021-02-28T16:57:57.453" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Thelwall was an 18th century British parliamentary and social reformer. He worked primarily as a journalist and editor, but was also a teacher of rhetoric and elocution. He was involved in some of the earliest modern speech therapy interventions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He delivered a lecture titled &lt;em&gt;The Distresses of the Industrious Population&lt;/em&gt; in March of 1795. You can find the text &lt;a href=&quot;https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/thelwall-the-tribune#lf1651_head_004&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although Thelwall is probably not well-known outside of the United Kingdom, searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&amp;amp;as_sdt=0%2C5&amp;amp;q=%22John%20Thelwall%22&amp;amp;btnG=&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google scholar&lt;/a&gt; reveals thousands of books and articles which mention him. He may be well-known enough to mention alongside the other works and for Reynold's readers to understand what is meant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other possibilities. In a comment, Spagirl mentioned a parliamentary debate with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1827/jun/14/distress-of-the-commercial-and&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;somewhat similar title&lt;/a&gt;. Friedrich Engels published &lt;em&gt;The Condition of the Working Class of England&lt;/em&gt; in 1844 (the same year &lt;em&gt;Mysteries of London&lt;/em&gt; was published). However, the other works in the quote are all direct titles. It seems unusual that only this one title would be paraphrased, so I think Thelwall is the most likely choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12002" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T16:57:57.453" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17809" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17810" CreationDate="2021-02-28T18:41:32.577" Score="12" ViewCount="2064" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, Yates was defeated in a friendly fight by his friend, professor Renmark, and he was astonished by the fighting skill of this quiet educated professor&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Oh, I say, Renny, that wasn’t fair. That was a kick.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No, it wasn’t. It is merely a little French touch. I learned it in Paris. They do kick there, you know; and it is good to know how to use your feet as well as your fists if you are set on by three, as I was one night in the Latin Quarter.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates sat up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Look here, Renmark; when were you in Paris?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Several times.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yates gazed at him for a few moments, then said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Renny, you improve on acquaintance. I never saw &lt;strong&gt;a Bool-var&lt;/strong&gt; in my life. You must teach me that little kick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does a &amp;quot;Bool-var&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T13:38:06.163" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T13:38:06.163" Title="What does &quot;Bool-var&quot; mean in &quot;In the Midst of Alarms&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17810" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17809" CreationDate="2021-02-28T19:26:15.713" Score="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;The spelling &amp;quot;Bool-var&amp;quot; is an attempt to render the French pronunciation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boulevard#Pronunciation_4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;boulevard&lt;/a&gt;, in which the 'e' in the middle and the 'd' at the end are silent: &lt;code&gt;/bul.vaʁ/&lt;/code&gt; (in IPA). In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boulevard#English&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English pronunciation&lt;/a&gt;, the 'e' and the 'd' are not silent: &lt;code&gt;/ˈbuː.ləˌvɑːd/&lt;/code&gt; or &lt;code&gt;/ˈbʊləvɑɹd/&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are many well-known &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevards_of_Paris&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;boulevards in Paris&lt;/a&gt;, such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_Haussmann&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boulevard Haussmann&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulevard_des_Italiens&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boulevard des Italiens&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T19:26:15.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17811" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8239" CreationDate="2021-02-28T19:47:12.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the quote I was thinking of was the ‘John Galt Pledge’ from Part Three, Chapter I of &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits the criteria of ‘renouncing control over another in exchange for them doing the same’ and of being a ‘political or philosophical work, perhaps an anarchist or libertarian text’, but lacks (a) the multiple examples and (b) the specific mention of a whip that I stated in my original question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, from the exact wording of having the ‘whip hand over’ another in my original question my best guess is that I may have been conflating the quote I was looking for with UK MP Enoch Powell's completely unrelated and rightly infamous 1968 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivers_of_Blood_speech#Speech&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;“Rivers of Blood” speech&lt;/a&gt;, which includes with the following line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another potential knock against this answer is that I have never read &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;, however I feel that the ‘John Galt pledge’ is exactly the kind of phrase that one would be likely to run into independent of the original source (e.g., &lt;a href=&quot;http://go-galt.org/Galt_Pledge/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;), and so this is less salient of a point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any other more compelling answers in the two and a half years since I asked the question, I am assuming that the &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt; quote is the answer I was seeking, and that the mention of whips was a misremembered red herring.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4940" LastEditorUserId="4940" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T08:12:53.087" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T08:12:53.087" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17812" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17813" CreationDate="2021-02-28T21:13:42.093" Score="6" ViewCount="689" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9263/9263-h/9263-h.htm#link2HCH0013&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;In the Midst of Alarms&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1894) by Robert Barr, the author was describing the wife of a Canadian farmer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As he rose the door from the main portion of the house opened, and there entered a woman hardly yet past middle age, who had once been undoubtedly handsome, but on whose worn and faded face was the look of patient weariness which so often is the result of a youth spent in helping a husband to overcome the stumpy stubbornness of an American bush farm. &lt;strong&gt;When the farm is conquered&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;the victor is usually vanquished&lt;/strong&gt;. It needed no second glance to see that she was the mother from whom the daughter had inherited her good looks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How could the victor be vanquished at the same time?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-02-28T21:55:51.560" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T21:55:51.560" Title="How could the victor be vanquished at the same time?" Tags="&lt;in-the-midst-of-alarms&gt;&lt;robert-barr&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17813" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17812" CreationDate="2021-02-28T21:54:33.380" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;Making land suitable for farming can require a lot of work. Examples of this can be found in other literary works. For example, the father in Federico García Lorca's  play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Wedding&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Blood Wedding&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; / &lt;a href=&quot;https://usuaris.tinet.cat/picl/libros/glorca/gl003900.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Bodas de sangre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1932) says about his land,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;En mi tiempo, ni esparto daba esta tierra. Ha sido necesario castigarla y hasta llorarla, para que nos dé algo provechoso.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In my time, this land did not even give &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esparto&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;esparto (grass)&lt;/a&gt;. It was necessary to punish/castigarla even to the point of weeping before it gave us anything profitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Marcel Pagnol's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Water_of_the_Hills&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'eau des Collines&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Water of the Hills&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/a&gt; Jean de Florette even works himself to death in an attempt to benefit from the land he has inherited, but he fails because others have interrupted the water supply to his land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point is that making land profitable can require hard work. In the example from Robert Barr's novel, the farmer has succeeded in reaching his goal (hence &amp;quot;the victor&amp;quot;), but he has sacrificed his health for it and in that sense he has been &amp;quot;vanquished&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-02-28T21:54:33.380" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17815" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17816" CreationDate="2021-03-01T13:31:20.543" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;This context is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘How did you know where to find me?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Morty told me.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was thinner. He stood without baggage in the ugly lobby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Come home.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No. I haven’t finished yet.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Come home.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I can’t.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Let’s go home.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I’ll never forgive you if you make me.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Make you? How could I make you? I love you.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She shrugged. ‘At home I was half dead.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He began to cry. His face twisted, his mouth was lumpy. He gritted his&#xA;teeth. &lt;strong&gt;He would not use the children against her, he would not.&#xA;She saw him sob. She did not step closer. If he mentioned them, if he&#xA;spoke their names, she would splinter&lt;/strong&gt;. He was afraid of her. She had the&#xA;stance and the expression of an idiot struck dumb, but an idiot who was&#xA;holding an axe. He turned and shoved out the door and on to the street.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;He would not use the children against her, he would not&amp;quot; mean: He did not want to make the children hate her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or he did not want to say to her that because of their children she had to come back home?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot; If he mentioned them, if he spoke their names, she would splinter&amp;quot; mean: If he talked about their children and said to her that because of them she had to come back home she would be very annoyed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say &amp;quot;she would splinter&amp;quot; means: She would die?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T14:34:59.777" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T14:34:59.777" Title="Meaning of &quot;He would not use the children against her, he would not. If he mentioned them, if he spoke their names, she would splinter&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17816" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17815" CreationDate="2021-03-01T13:46:50.883" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He would not use the children against her, he would not&lt;/strong&gt; means that he will not manipulate her into returning by saying the children miss her, or the children need her, or she is abandoning her children. He wants her to return of her own free will, because she loves him and their life together; not because she feels guilty about the children. So your second interpretation is correct: he does not want to say that she should come home for the sake of the children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;She would splinter&lt;/strong&gt; means that her strength and resolve would shatter. She is determined to stay away from him, their children, and their home. But to do that, she has to overcome her guilt about the children. If he mentions the children, then her guilt will be overwhelming and she will no longer feel strong enough to stay away. It does not mean that she will be annoyed or that she will die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T13:46:50.883" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17817" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-01T15:00:54.943" Score="1" ViewCount="580" Body="&lt;p&gt;The extract is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, from one thing to another, M. Hamel went on to talk of the French language, saying that it was the most beautiful language in the world — the clearest, the most logical; that we must guard it among us and never forget it, because when a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language it is as if they had the key to their prison. Then he opened a grammar and read us our lesson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a translation given to us from  Alphonse Daudet's &lt;em&gt;La Dernière Classe&lt;/em&gt; (translated as &lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook.php?lefl1=1-14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Last Lesson&lt;/a&gt; in an NCERT textbook).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me to identify the literary device  in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;from one thing to another&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12114" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T15:53:26.783" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T10:57:37.617" Title="What literary device is used in from &quot;one thing to another&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;alphonse-daudet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17818" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17817" CreationDate="2021-03-01T15:30:51.627" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the French text (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Les_Contes_du_lundi/La_Derni%C3%A8re_classe&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Dernière classe&lt;/a&gt; on Wikisource), we find the same type of construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alors &lt;strong&gt;d'une chose à l'autre&lt;/strong&gt;, M. Hamel se mit à nous parler de la langue française, ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is missing here is a verb, as in &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;moving&lt;/em&gt; from one thing to the next&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ellipsis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ellipsis&lt;/a&gt; is a poetic device that can be used when leaving out a word does not impede understanding of the text, but it is hard to argue that leaving out the verb is done here for poetic effect.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What we see here is an &lt;a href=&quot;https://glossary.sil.org/term/elliptical-construction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elliptical construction&lt;/a&gt;, which SIL's Glossary of Linguistic Terms defines as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An elliptical construction is a construction that lacks an element that is recoverable or inferable from the context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phrase &amp;quot;from one thing to another&amp;quot;, we can easily infer a verb such as &amp;quot;move&amp;quot; but the phrase is still understandable without it. This is a normal linguistic phenomenon rather than a literary device.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Response to one of Karthik's comments: there is no example of  metaphor, personification, allusion or hyperbole in this phrase. Mr. Hamel's description of the French language as &amp;quot; the most beautiful language in the world — the clearest, the most logical&amp;quot; is an example of excessive praise. And as verbose pointed out in a comment, &amp;quot; they hold fast to their language it is &lt;strong&gt;as if they had the key to their prison&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is a metaphor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T10:57:37.617" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T10:57:37.617" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17819" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17817" CreationDate="2021-03-01T15:34:31.553" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is not a literary device. It means exactly what it says. M. Hamel has been telling Franz that he should not blame himself for slacking in his schoolwork. The story continues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, passing from one thing to another, Monsieur Hamel began to talk to us about the French language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is literally changing the subject, from Franz’s lack of diligence to the French language, so he is “passing from one thing to another.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your question leaves out the word &lt;em&gt;passing&lt;/em&gt;. I am not sure whether you misquoted, or whether you are looking at a different translation from the one at Bartleby, but in any case, the meaning is straightforward and literal, not metaphoric or rhetorical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T15:34:31.553" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17820" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17825" CreationDate="2021-03-01T16:40:18.097" Score="9" ViewCount="219" Body="&lt;p&gt;In verbose's question &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/17761/how-close-to-actual-incantations-are-the-witches-spells-in-macbeth&quot;&gt;How close to actual incantations are the witches' spells in Macbeth?&lt;/a&gt; he says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is worth mentioning that the latter [the witches' incantation from Act IV scene i] was possibly written not by Shakespeare, but by his collaborator Thomas Middleton, who is known to have recycled songs and other material from his play &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;em&gt;Macbeth.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And &lt;a href=&quot;https://oxfraud.com/taxonomy/term/23&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this website&lt;/a&gt; says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton is conjectured to have written 3.5 and much of 4.1; the only scenes which feature Hecate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do people think Middleton wrote much of Act IV Scene i? I've seen the conjecture that somebody told Middleton &amp;quot;the audience really loves this witch stuff ... write in more of it.&amp;quot; And so we get two songs from Middleton's play &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; added to Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; (it seems certain that Shakespeare didn't write these).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another reasonable conjecture is that the character Hecate was added, as she seems unnecessary to the action of the play. If this is the case, Act III Secne v was added in its entirety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in Act IV, scene i, Hecate comes on, speaks five lines, and retires — this isn't &amp;quot;much of&amp;quot; the scene. Most of the scene is necessary for the action of the play.&#xA;Even removing the witches' spell at the beginning of the scene would detract from the play.&#xA;It seems plausible to me that only the first part of the witches' spell is due to Shakespeare, and that it was lengthened in this revision; but that still doesn't encompass &amp;quot;much of&amp;quot; the scene.&#xA;Further, if the reason for the changes is that the audience wanted to see more of the witches, does it make sense for Middleton to have deleted any of Shakespeare's material?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how much of the scene do people think Middleton wrote, and why?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T15:00:25.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T16:45:24.967" Title="Do we have any solid evidence for how much material Middleton contributed to Macbeth?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;macbeth&gt;&lt;thomas-middleton&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17821" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-01T18:45:21.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T18:45:21.170" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T18:45:21.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17822" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-01T18:45:21.170" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;The Long Song&quot; (2010), a historical novel by Andrea Levy, about the final years of slavery in Jamaica and the transition to freedom. Use with [andrea-levy]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T19:17:46.613" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T19:17:46.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17823" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-01T18:52:08.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T18:52:08.730" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T18:52:08.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17824" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-01T18:52:08.730" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840 – 1897) or his life as a writer. He is remembered for stories about southern French provincial life. Use with [french-literature]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-01T19:17:57.853" LastActivityDate="2021-03-01T19:17:57.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17825" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17820" CreationDate="2021-03-01T23:02:10.773" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The composition of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is usually dated to 1606, i.e. some time after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_Plot#Aftermath&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gunpowder Plot&lt;/a&gt; of 5 November 1605, to which it contains an allusion (see e.g. Braunmuller, page 6). (Arguments for an earlier date, even as early as 1601, has not been convincing. See Muir page xviii.) The earliest eyewitness account of a performance dates from 1610 or 1611 [1] and can be found in Simon Forman's manuscript &lt;em&gt;The Bocke of Paies and Notes therof per Formans for Common Pollicie&lt;/em&gt; (cited in Muir xv–xvi and Miola 225–227). The only available text is that included in the First Folio of 1623, i.e. the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays. The availability of just one text, instead of both quarto and folio editions, &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt; make an editor's work easier (i.e. fewer choices to make) but Dover Wilson called &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;a difficult play to edit* (page vii).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Kenneth Muir (page xxxii), a long list of passages or scenes have been considered &amp;quot;spurious&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;dubious&amp;quot; or interpolations by another author:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act I scene 1: attributed to Middleton (according to Henry Cunningham, editor of the first Arden edition (1912)),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act I scene 2: attributed to Middleton (according to Cunningham (1912) and the 1869 Clarendon edition),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act I scene 3 lines 1–37: attributed to Middleton (by Cunningham (1912) and the 1869 Clarendon edition),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the porter scene at the beginning of Act II scene 3 (according to Alexander Pope and S. T. Coleridge),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act III scene 5: spurious, probably by Middleton (according to many critics),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act IV scene 1 lines 39–43 and 125–132: probably by Middleton (according to many critics),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act IV scene 2 lines 30–63: interpolation (Cunningham),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act IV scene 3 lines 140–146: interpolation (Clarendon edition),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act V scene 2: dubious (Clarendon edition),&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Act V scene 4: &amp;quot;evident traces of another hand&amp;quot; (Clarendon edition).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1, 2, 3, 4 and 10 were no longer attributed to other authors by the time of Muir's Arden edition (first published in 1951). 7 and 8 are probably interpolations from Shakspeare's hand. Scene 9 &amp;quot;contains examples of Shakespeare's characteristic imagery and is certainly his&amp;quot; (Muir page xxxii). This leaves numbers 5 and 6, which are usually attributed to Thomas Middleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Dover Wilson wrote in his Cambridge edition of 1947 (pages xxiii–xxiv):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most extravagant theories of Middleton's interferences with other scenes [i.e. other than III.5 and IV.1] have been advanced from time to time, but the majority of serious students  will to-day subscribe to Edmund Chambers's verdict that his interpolations are in the main&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;confined to three passages (3.5; 4.1.39–43; 4.1.125–32) in the witch-scenes, which can be distinguished from the genuine text by the introduction of Hecate, by the use an iambic instead a a trochaic metre, and by prettiness of lyrical fancy alien to the main conception of the witches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Dover Wilson (page xxvii), Muir (pages xxxii–xxxv), Braunmuller (pages 255–259) and Miola (pages 295–296), this theory is supported by the presence of &lt;strong&gt;two songs&lt;/strong&gt; in Middleton's comedy &lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;) that are &lt;strong&gt;verbally similar to fragmentary stage directions in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The stage direction near the end of Act 3, scene 5 (quoted from the First Folio](&lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Mac_F1/scene/3.5/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Mac_F1/scene/3.5/index.html&lt;/a&gt;) says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sing within. Come away, come away, &amp;amp;c.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;similar text&amp;quot; in &lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html#a3s3&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; Act 3, scene 3&lt;/a&gt; says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[WITCHES]: Come away, come away,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hecate, Hecate, come away.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: I come, I come, I come, I come,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With all the speed I may,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With all the speed I may,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where's Stadlin?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[STADLIN]: Here.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: Where's Puckle?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[PUCKLE]: Here.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[WITCHES]: And Hoppo, too, and Hellwain, too;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We lack but you, we lack but you.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come away, make up the count.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: I will but 'noint, and then I mount.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Mac_F1/scene/4.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, Act 4, scene 1&lt;/a&gt; we find the following stage direction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Musicke and a Song. Blacke Spirits, &amp;amp;c.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html#a5s2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;, Act 5, scene 2&lt;/a&gt;, we find the following passage, which begins with a song by Hecate:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;HECATE: Black spirits and white, red spirits and grey,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mingle, mingle, mingle, you that mingle may.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Titty, Tiffin, keep it stiff in.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Firedrake, Puckey, make it lucky.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Liard], Robin, you must bob in.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Round, around, around, about, about,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All ill come running in, all good keep out.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRST WITCH: Here's the blood of a bat.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: Put in that, oh, put in that.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SECOND WITCH: Here's libbard's bane.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: Put in again.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRST WITCH: The juice of toad, the oil of adder.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;SECOND WITCH: Those will make the younker madder.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;HECATE: Put in; there's all, and rid the stench.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;FIRESTONE: Nay, here's three ounces of the red-hair'd wench.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ALL: Round, around, around, about, about,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All ill come running in, all good keep out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that these songs were not included in the First Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. The second song wasn't added to the text until the 1673 quarto edition of the play (Muir page 109). However, the songs fit well into &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;, whereas they don't fit well into Shakespeare's play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton's &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; wasn't printed until 1778, more than 150 years after the publication of the First Folio and a century after the publication of the quarto editon of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; has also survived in a manuscript by Ralph Crane, a scribe who also worked for Shakespeare's theatre company the King's Men. W. W. Greg conjecturally dated Crane's transcript to 1620–1627 and the manuscript itself says the play was &amp;quot;long since acted by His Majesty's Servants at the Blackfriars&amp;quot; (i.e. the King's Men). Since the King's Men probably didn't use the Blackfriars Theatre before 1609, Dover Wilson concluded that &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; was not performed there before that year (Dover Wilson xxvii). A date of 1610 would put the comedy close in time to the performance of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; witnessed by Simon Forman (Dover Wilson xxvii).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The similarities the stage directions in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; and the songs in &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; appear to be more than the result of pure chance (Braunmuller page 255) and they have been explained in various ways. One play may have borrowed text from the other play (Shakespeare may have revised &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; after the first performance of &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;, or the borrowing went into the opposite direction), both plays used a common source that is now lost, or Middleton revised &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 2007, Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino went so far as to include &lt;em&gt;The Tragedy of Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; into &lt;a href=&quot;https://global.oup.com/academic/product/thomas-middleton-the-collected-works-9780199580538&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works&lt;/a&gt;,&#xA;&amp;quot;arguing that Thomas Middleton adapted the 1623 Folio &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; in about 1616&amp;quot; (Miola, page 295). Markus Dahl, Marina Tarlinskaya and Brian Vickers responded to this in 2010, arguing that the stage directions are no evidence for revision by Middleton and that the evidence from some other stage directions is ambivalent. According to Vickers, the Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; shows evidence of revision, but it was revised by Shakespeare, not Middleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] The date Forman gives is Saturday 20 April 1610 but that date was not actually a Saturday.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Chambers, Edmund K.: &lt;em&gt;William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Volume 1&lt;/em&gt;. (Cited by John Dover Wilson.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dahl, Markus; Tarlinskaya, Marina; Vickers, Brian: &lt;a href=&quot;https://thomasmiddleton.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/enquiry.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Enquiry into Middleton’s supposed “adaptation” of Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;, 2010. (PDF)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Kenneth Muir. The Arden Shakespeare: Second Series. [Methuen, 1951] London: Routledge, 1984, 1989.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by A. R. Braunmuller. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Robert S. Miola. Norton Critical Editions. [W. W. Norton &amp;amp; Company, 2004] Second Edition. New York; London: W. W. Norton &amp;amp; Company, 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William: &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by John Dover Wilson. The New Shakespeare. [Cambridge University Press, 1947] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T00:23:59.630" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T00:23:59.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17826" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-02T17:58:36.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T17:58:36.263" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T17:58:36.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17827" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-02T17:58:36.263" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American Benjamin Alire Sáenz (1954) or his life as a poet, novelist, and writer. His award-winning novels include &quot;Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe&quot;." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T20:28:28.750" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T20:28:28.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17828" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-02T19:29:42.070" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;The chorus of the song &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Mono-inc-the-heart-of-the-raven-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Heart of the Raven&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by the German band MONO INC. goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But here in the raven's heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your heart is beating on&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I ween that you are better where you are&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You're here in the raven's heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No matter where you've gone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm sure that you are there among the stars&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line &amp;quot;I ween that you are better where you are&amp;quot; struck me as odd. First off, I wasn't familiar with the word &amp;quot;ween&amp;quot; so I looked it up. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ween&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; defines it as an archaic word meaning &amp;quot;think&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definition of ween&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;transitive verb&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;archaic&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;: to hold as an opinion : SUPPOSE, BELIEVE&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But... what does that mean here in context? Why use such an archaic and unknown word here, instead of a word found in more people's lexicons? How does this affect the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T21:52:28.697" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T21:52:28.697" Title="What does &quot;I ween that you are better where you are&quot; in &quot;The Heart of the Raven&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;mono-inc&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17829" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16937" CreationDate="2021-03-02T20:04:54.673" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Googling revealed the same phrase used by O. Henry in &amp;quot;A Cosmopolite in a Cafe&amp;quot; (published in &lt;em&gt;The Four Million&lt;/em&gt;, 1906 — i.e., after your quotation).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My cosmopolite was named E. Rushmore Coglan [...] He took the great, round world in his hand, so to speak, familiarly, contemptuously, and it seemed no larger than the seed of a Maraschino cherry in a table d'hôte grape fruit. &lt;strong&gt;He spoke disrespectfully of the equator,&lt;/strong&gt; he skipped from continent to continent, he derided the zones, he mopped up the high seas with his napkin. With a wave of his hand he would speak of a certain bazaar in Hyderabad. Whiff! He would have you on skis in Lapland. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it was a set phrase at the time. Further Googling reveals that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/100/330.3.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;it's in &lt;em&gt;Bartlett's Familiar Quotations&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, attributed to the Reverend Sydney Smith:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one minds what Jeffrey says: [...] it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is actually &lt;strong&gt;the punch line of a funny story&lt;/strong&gt; told in Lady Saba Holland's memoir of her father (the aforementioned Rev. Sydney Smith). &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=s6kvAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA17&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here's the whole story:&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reigning bore [circa 1797] in Edinburgh was ——; his favourite subject, the North Pole. It mattered not how far south you began, you found yourself transported to the north pole before you could take breath; no one escaped him. &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/17830/my-father-declared-he-should-invent-a-slip-button&quot;&gt;My father declared he should invent a slip button.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Jeffrey,_Lord_Jeffrey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeffrey&lt;/a&gt; fled from him as from the plague, when possible; but one day his arch-tormentor met him in a narrow lane, and began instantly on the north pole. Jeffrey, in despair and out of all patience, darted past him, exclaiming, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/356721/30146&quot;&gt;D—&lt;/a&gt; the north pole!&amp;quot; My father met him shortly after, boiling with indignation at Jeffrey's contempt of the north pole. &amp;quot;Oh, my dear fellow,&amp;quot; said my father, &amp;quot;never mind; no one minds what Jeffrey says, you know; he is a privileged person; he respects nothing, absolutely nothing. Why, you will scarcely believe it, but it is not more than a week ago that I heard him &lt;strong&gt;speak disrespectfully of the equator!&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;TLDR: The literal meaning is exactly what &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16939/720&quot;&gt;Tsundoku said&lt;/a&gt;; but a sufficiently literary reader at the time might have derived some pleasure from recognizing this comical phrase as a (random, essentially further-meaning-less) allusion to an earlier literary work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="720" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T14:38:40.670" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T14:38:40.670" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17830" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17832" CreationDate="2021-03-02T20:18:19.437" Score="13" ViewCount="4167" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=s6kvAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Saba Holland's memoir of her father the Rev. Sydney Smith&lt;/a&gt;, published circa 1855:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reigning bore at this time in Edinburgh was ——; his favourite subject, the North Pole. It mattered not how far south you began, you found yourself transported to the north pole before you could take breath; no one escaped him. &lt;strong&gt;My father declared he should invent a slip button.&lt;/strong&gt; Jeffrey fled from him as from the plague, when possible; but one day his arch-tormentor met him in a narrow lane, and began instantly on the north pole. Jeffrey, in despair and out of all patience, darted past him, exclaiming, &amp;quot;D— the north pole!&amp;quot; My father met him shortly after, boiling with indignation at Jeffrey's contempt of the north pole. &amp;quot;Oh, my dear fellow,&amp;quot; said my father, &amp;quot;never mind; no one minds what Jeffrey says, you know; he is a privileged person; he respects nothing, absolutely nothing. Why, you will scarcely believe it, but it is not more than a week ago that I heard him speak disrespectfully of the equator!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's fairly clear that the meaning of the bolded sentence is &amp;quot;My father said that my father fantasized about inventing a physical device for slipping away from that boring person.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, what exactly &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; a &amp;quot;slip button,&amp;quot; or what would the circa-1855 reader have understood the circa-1797 Rev. Smith to have meant by the phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google tells me that a &amp;quot;slip button&amp;quot; may be some part of a drill assembly, such as in an oil well, which coincidentally is also something which &lt;em&gt;bores&lt;/em&gt;; but I'm not sure that a clergyman in the 1790s would be making oil-well jokes. I expect the answer to be something about clothing, somehow, but I can't find any textual support for that idea. Anyway, I'd still appreciate an explanation of what a &amp;quot;slip button&amp;quot; is in the borehole context, because I can't make head or tail of the few references I found!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Most Google results for &amp;quot;slip button&amp;quot; these days are about the button that turns on all-wheel drive mode in your car when it's icy out. That's clearly unrelated to the reverend's meaning here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T10:20:17.903" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T10:20:17.903" Title="&quot;My father declared he should invent a slip button&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;a-memoir-reverend-sydney-smith&gt;&lt;saba-holland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17831" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-02T20:44:23.033" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the main idea behind Thomas Carlyle's &lt;a href=&quot;https://pdcrodas.webs.ull.es/anglo/CarlyleSignsOfTheTimes.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Signs of the Times&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; (1829)? What is the literary and sociopolitical background of the essay? Is he just mirroring the 19th century sentiments or there is something beyond what is obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12269" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-02T20:46:05.620" LastActivityDate="2021-03-02T20:46:05.620" Title="What is the main idea behind Thomas Carlyle's &quot;Signs of the Times&quot;?" Tags="&lt;essays&gt;&lt;thomas-carlyle&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-03-03T13:15:32.017" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17832" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17830" CreationDate="2021-03-02T21:33:35.910" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Kentucky Age&lt;/em&gt; for 10th February 1857 contains a short story which opens as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A celebrated wit once said he had found out a patent “&lt;strong&gt;slip button&lt;/strong&gt;,” so that when a bore laid hold of him, and was detaining him with a long story, he had only to slip the button, leaving it in the bore’s fingers, and make his escape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contrivance was an ingenious and valuable one, and had the inventor, as threatened, taken out a patent, many would doubtless have adopted the useful article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Anon (1857). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/xt7cnp1wf216/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Bachelor’s Button&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Kentucky Age&lt;/em&gt; (10th February 1857), p. 1.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “celebrated wit” must be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Smith&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sydney Smith&lt;/a&gt; himself: Lady Holland’s memoirs, published two years previously, supplying the inspiration for the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think this story makes it clear how contemporary readers would have understood the phrase “slip button”. The bore is imagined to be grasping a button on the coat of the victim,† who makes an escape in the manner of a ship that “&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/slip_the_cable&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;slips the cable&lt;/a&gt;” and leaves its anchor on the seabed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;† This was a common figure of speech. The &lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt; has:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;button-hold, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; To accost (a person) and detain him or her in conversation as if by taking hold of a button on his or her clothing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As pointed out by Peter Shor in comments, “buttonhole” has a similar meaning, except that it is the hole that is imagined as being grasped rather than the button.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T11:27:11.610" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T11:27:11.610" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17833" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2021-03-03T02:18:26.727" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quotation in question:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king if thou wilt also perform thy part[.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monster says that he [the monster] is Frankenstein's &amp;quot;creature.&amp;quot; This is a mildly archaic usage — &amp;quot;creature&amp;quot; as the antonym of &amp;quot;creator.&amp;quot; (We still see the word &amp;quot;creature&amp;quot; used this way in the sense of &amp;quot;product&amp;quot; — e.g. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/scalia-our-political-system-is-designed-for-gridlock/246257/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[In Europe, the] Chief Executive is the creature of the legislature&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; (Oddly enough, the other usage among my first ten Google hits was &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/brooks-and-capehart-on-covid-relief-cpac-and-president-bidens-nominees&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;[Biden] is a creature of the Senate&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;!) Anyway, the monster meant, and might just as well have said, &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;You are my creator,&lt;/strong&gt; and I will be even mild and docile...&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore, the monster's sentence uses parallel construction:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I will&lt;/strong&gt; [be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king] &lt;strong&gt;if thou wilt&lt;/strong&gt; [also perform the part thou owest me.]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, &amp;quot;I [Adam] will fulfill my duties to you [Frankenstein], if and only if you [Frankenstein] will fulfill your duties to me [Adam].&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further further, the monster has just finished saying,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I will not be tempted to set myself in opposition to thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monster will not &lt;em&gt;oppose&lt;/em&gt; his creator; rather, he will be mild and docile towards him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: The &amp;quot;natural lord and &lt;s&gt;master&lt;/s&gt; king&amp;quot; of a created being is that being's creator. In the case of Frankenstein's monster, his creator — and thus his natural lord — is Victor Frankenstein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="720" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T02:18:26.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17834" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5519" CreationDate="2021-03-03T02:52:17.153" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Studies in Words&lt;/em&gt;, C.S. Lewis has an entire chapter on &amp;quot;natural&amp;quot; -- which does discuss &amp;quot;natural lord&amp;quot; -- but a short version is that a &amp;quot;natural lord&amp;quot; is someone whose claim to being a lord (or ruler) is by birth, or (by analogy to the first) someone whose claim to rule is thoroughly just and legitimate.  (I note here that the usage is older than the theory of the divine right of kings.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monster is saying that because Frankenstein made him, Frankenstein has the legitimate right to command him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T02:52:17.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17835" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17865" CreationDate="2021-03-03T06:21:48.303" Score="8" ViewCount="110" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this story in English in the 2000s (although it was probably much older), in a collection or anthology of several short stories by different authors; I think the collections may have been called something along the lines of &amp;quot;Tales of Mystery and Horror&amp;quot;. It also included Roald Dahl's &amp;quot;The Hitch-Hiker&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A girl is walking along the street when a man in a car tries to entice her to get in with him, offering her sweets and begging her. She's been warned by her parents not to get into cars with strangers, even if they offer sweets, so she easily spurns his offers. But this man is different: he seems helpless, he doesn't even know how to drive a car, and he's begging for her help. He tells her that he's an alien from another planet, stranded on Earth without knowledge of its norms and technologies. Finally she sympathises and gets into the car with him to help him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm vague on the middle part of the story, but it turns out that he &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; an alien, but one sent to Earth to entrap humans and take them back to his planet for investigation. She ends up among other captured humans on an alien planet. They're given food and kept healthy, but not allowed to leave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the story, the girl manages to escape from the human enclosure, in an alien vehicle which is sort of like a bubble. The catch is that she doesn't know how to drive the vehicle, so she ends up helpless in the streets outside. She tries to ask for help from some alien children, even offering them some of the food which she kept in her pocket after the prisoners' last meal. But they laugh at her expecting them to be so gullible, &amp;quot;offering us &lt;em&gt;sweets&lt;/em&gt;!&amp;quot; - they too have been taught by their parents not to get into vehicles with strangers. She remains there, helplessly, until her captors come to collect her and bring her back to the human enclosure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mirroring at the start and end of this story were memorable, even if most of the other details are forgotten.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T00:17:37.173" Title="Sci-fi short story about not getting into cars with strangers" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17836" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17838" CreationDate="2021-03-03T07:59:47.963" Score="1" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She turned round with her arms full of stinking sheets. He had not heard a word. His eyes had gone out of focus, his pitch was up, his pace was accelerating, his smile was the one-sided, manic grimace of the born raver: he was away on the high seas of narrative. &lt;strong&gt;In the wide planting of his feet, his blithe assumption of an audience, she saw Dexter&lt;/strong&gt;, oh poor Dexter, gone away on a plane to try and pull the sword out of the stone. Her insides quivered with what she thought was laughter. She pushed the chattering boy aside: he turned to follow her, pointed his rapt, jabbering face in her direction, but she stepped out into the passage and closed the door on him. He took no notice: as she walked away his chipmunk voice rattled on without interruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean: she saw him in the place where there were the big footprints of Dexter and his footprints reflected his calmness to someone who was seeing his footprints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dose planting of his feet mean his footprints?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T02:09:14.717" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T02:09:14.717" Title="Meaning of &quot;In the wide planting of his feet, his blithe assumption of an audience, she saw Dexter&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17837" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17846" CreationDate="2021-03-03T08:20:39.303" Score="1" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading Kristin Hannah's &lt;a href=&quot;https://kristinhannah.com/books/firefly-lane/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Firefly Lane&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There's a scene when Kate (one of two main characters) saw Tully (the other main character) wearing fashionable elephant bells and wished her jeans weren't Sears Rough Riders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is &amp;quot;Sears Rough Riders&amp;quot;? Is it tight jeans?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8217" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T14:54:08.073" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T20:10:53.577" Title="What kind of jeans are Sears Rough Riders?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;kristin-hannah&gt;&lt;firefly-lane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17838" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17836" CreationDate="2021-03-03T09:00:11.060" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentence means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the way he stood with his feet placed widely apart, and in his belief that people would naturally want to listen to what he had to say, the boy reminded her of Dexter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not read the novel, but I would assume Dexter is the boy's father who is not with them at this point. The boy's body language and mental attitude appears to bring his father to mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It has nothing to do with physical footprints.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T11:48:45.283" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T11:48:45.283" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17839" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17840" CreationDate="2021-02-24T02:57:34.300" Score="1" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;Could you please help me understand the meaning of a poem by Ivor Gurney, an Englishman who fought in the First World War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From his &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57254/laventie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laventie&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For bread, the pure thing, blessed beyond saving.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I highly appreciate your assistance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Suzie8" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T12:14:42.813" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T02:55:09.810" Title="What do these lines mean in Ivor Gurney's &quot;Laventie&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ivor-gurney&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17840" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17839" CreationDate="2021-02-24T03:42:49.313" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maconochie#:%7E:text=Maconochie%20was%20a%20stew%20of,trenches%20during%20World%20War%20I.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maconachie&lt;/a&gt; was a tinned stew named after the company which made it; &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.tommyspackfillers.com/showitem.asp?itemRef=RL555&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;T G Tickler&lt;/a&gt; was a Lincolnshire company who made tins of jam and marmalade, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2018/jul/08/fray-bentos-uruguay-not-just-a-meat-pie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fray Bentos&lt;/a&gt; was and is a brand of tinned (&amp;quot;corned&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;bully&amp;quot;) beef named after the Uruguayan town where it was originally produced; &lt;a href=&quot;https://glamarchives.gov.uk/2018/01/26/spillers-bakers-ltd-cardiff/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spillers and Baker's&lt;/a&gt; was a big, British milling company originally from Bridgewater but then with a large mill in Cardiff which is now luxury flats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All those names were industrial food producers, I can't find any reference to Paxton's or Stephens (although Gurney was once a chorister in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-gloucestershire-26800146?print=true&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gloucester cathedral&lt;/a&gt;) but from the context it would seem that they were large suppliers of tinned or otherwise preserved and packed food to the army.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suppose that there may be a connection to Spillers dog biscuits and Baker's Complete tinned dog food but I don't really know!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="BoldBen" LastActivityDate="2021-02-24T04:07:14.040" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17842" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T19:40:08.447" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T19:40:08.447" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T19:40:08.447" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17843" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T19:40:08.447" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Firefly Lane&quot; (2008) or any later books in the series by Kristin Hannah, NOT the Netflix show. Use with [kristin-hannah]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T20:04:07.170" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T20:04:07.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17844" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T19:43:35.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T19:43:35.950" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T19:43:35.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17845" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T19:43:35.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith&quot;, written by Sara Holland. Use with [sara-holland]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T20:02:53.943" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T20:02:53.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17846" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17837" CreationDate="2021-03-03T20:10:53.577" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can see a picture and description of the jeans at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etsy.com/listing/773643477/vintage-70s-sears-roebuck-rough-riders?show_sold_out_detail=1&amp;amp;ref=nla_listing_details&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this etsy listing&lt;/a&gt;. They were unfashionable jeans, designed to be durable rather than attractive. Precisely what sensible parents would buy over their children’s objections. Sears was not (and is not) a prestige brand for clothing which is why Kate wished her jeans weren’t Sears Rough Riders.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T20:10:53.577" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17847" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4064" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:19:33.470" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would call it &lt;em&gt;trochaic tetrameter with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes.&lt;/em&gt;  Even though it a fairly common meter, I don't know a better name for it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you leave out the last syllable of a trochaic line of poetry, it's called a &lt;em&gt;catalectic&lt;/em&gt; line. So if all the lines of your poem had trochaic feet with the last foot reduced to one syllable, this would be called &lt;em&gt;catalectic trochaic tetrameter&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But saying &lt;em&gt;trochaic tetrameter with catalectic alternate lines&lt;/em&gt; is much too cumbersome a phrase, whereas &lt;em&gt;alternating feminine and masculine rhymes&lt;/em&gt; is easier to understand (if not shorter).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;feminine ending&lt;/a&gt; of a line of iambic poetry ends on an unstressed syllable, while a masculine ending ends on a stressed syllable. It is fairly common to alternate feminine and masculine endings in English poetry. Another example of this meter is Housman's poem &lt;em&gt;Reveillé&lt;/em&gt;, which begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wake: the silver dusk returning&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Up the beach of darkness brims,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the ship of sunrise burning&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Strands upon the eastern rims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wake: the vaulted shadow shatters,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   Trampled to the floor it spanned,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the tent of night in tatters&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   Straws the sky-pavilioned land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are also poems where only the lines with masculine endings rhyme. You can describe these by the phrase &amp;quot;with alternating feminine and masculine endings.&amp;quot; A good example of these is Maya Angelou's poem &lt;em&gt;Equality&lt;/em&gt;, containing the following stanza:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take the blinders from your vision,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;take the padding from your ears,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and confess you've heard me crying,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and admit you've seen my tears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T16:47:54.693" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T16:47:54.693" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17848" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17849" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:22:56.293" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nD82Y.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/nD82Y.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Tweet, see transcription below&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;#Belarus 66-year-old Halina Huliankova was sentenced to 20 days in prison for reading books of Belarusian authors. She was on a train together with other pensioners. She is being held at Akrescina. In Belarus, you can end up in prison for reading a book.&#xA;– &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/HannaLiubakova/status/1367035943912415232&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hanna Liubakova (@HannaLiubakova) at 5:55 pm, 3 Mar 2021&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I just heard that you can enter prison for reading in Belarus: there is a 66-year-old woman who was sentenced to prison for 20 days in Belarus for reading books of Belarusian authors. Why are books of Belarusian authors banned or forbidden to read in Belarus?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12281" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T15:59:29.550" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T15:59:29.550" Title="You can enter prison for reading in Belarus, why?" Tags="&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;belarusian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17849" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17848" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:42:11.927" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This probably belong in politics.se rather than here, but here's what I was able to determine. The original coverage is in Belarusian &lt;a href=&quot;https://nn.by/?c=ar&amp;amp;i=269033&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; which Google translate renders as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A pensioner with books by Belarusian writers was raided in a Minsk train. Up to 14 people were detained&#xA;According to human rights activists, on the morning of February 26, people in civilian clothes detained and searched pensioners at the Minsk-North, Masykovshchyna, and Zhdanovichy railway stations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Today at 10.45 a group of pensioners was detained at the exit of the train at the Minsk-North station. People in mufti were detained. Pensioners read Belarusian books on the train - it was an action in support of the Belarusian language. The detainees were taken to the Zavodski and Partyzanski police departments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Human rights activists managed to find out the names of some detainees: Natalia Ivanisava (1946), Svetlana Lazebnikova (1961), Irina Novik (1961), Galina Gulyankova, Natalia Ageychik (1960), Elena Vasilyeva (1955), Oksana Karatova (1954), Tatiana Shiman (1964). ), perhaps also Raisa Aletskaya, Inna Zhakovich, Elena Zastenchik, Lyubov Kuchinskaya, Elena Lebedinskaya, Vera Parshak.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Natallia Leonidovna, 75, is on the list of detainees from Viasna today. She was stopped at Zhdanovichy station, put in a minibus, taken to the police department, and then to the Zavodski district court of Minsk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was fined 25 basic units (725 rubles) under Article 23.34 of the Administrative Code and released.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In court, the woman said that she did not ride the train, did not take part in the action, was returning from home outside the city where she lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Literature of Belarusian writers was in her bag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There were seeds for seedlings and books of Belarusian writers and poets: Neil Gilevich, Vasily Vitko, Artur Volsky. An officer of the police department said that all this was opposition literature. Asked why I was interested in her. I said that I live in Belarus - why can't I be interested in her?” she told Tut.by.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to the woman, the report states that the pensioners were in white-red-white clothes, shouted &amp;quot;Long live Belarus&amp;quot; and took part in an unauthorized event.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belarus has two official languages, Russian and Belarus with the latter being a minority language. There have been protests since the last presidential election in September because of the intensified Russification under Alyaksandr Lukashenka (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rferl.org/a/speaking-up-for-the-belarusian-language-amid-anti-government-protests/30900978.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;). This was, if not part of these protests, interpreted by the authorities as being part of the protests,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T21:42:11.927" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17850" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:55:04.750" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T21:55:04.750" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T21:55:04.750" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17851" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:55:04.750" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Belarusian language, regardless of where they were originally published." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:13:44.547" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:13:44.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17852" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:59:53.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T21:59:53.627" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T21:59:53.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17853" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T21:59:53.627" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Englishman Ivor Gurney (1890 – 1937), or his life as a poet and composer. He set some of his poems to songs, such as &quot;Severn Meadows&quot;, and is regarded as one of the great WWI poets." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:13:29.800" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:13:29.800" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17854" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:02:12.327" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:02:12.327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:02:12.327" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17855" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:02:12.327" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Lady Saba Holland (1802 – 1866) or her life as a writer. She is best known for writing a memoir of her father, Sydney Smith." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:13:22.703" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:13:22.703" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17856" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:05:02.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:05:02.600" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:05:02.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17857" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:05:02.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American Kristin Hannah (1960) or her life as a writer. Some of her best-known novels are &quot;The Nightingale&quot;, &quot;Winter Garden&quot;, &quot;Night Road&quot;, and &quot;Firefly Lane&quot;." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T22:13:36.443" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T22:13:36.443" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17858" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4064" CreationDate="2021-03-03T22:29:33.360" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find a name for this in the literature on poetic forms that I consulted in English, German or Dutch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The English-language sources I have consulted include the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trochaic_tetrameter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Trochaic tetrameter&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia, which gives examples in various languages without mentioning a named form that alternating eight-syllable and seven-syllable lines.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalectic&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Catalectic&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia, which gives examples of catalectic and acatalectic lines, including tetrameters, without mentioning a literary term that might describe this verse form. The seven-syllable trochaic tetrameters are catalectic (ending with an incomplete foot); the eight-syllable ones are acatalectic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculine_and_feminine_endings&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Masculine and feminine endings&lt;/a&gt; on Wikipedia, which points out that '&amp;quot;Masculine ending&amp;quot; refers to a line ending in a stressed syllable. &amp;quot;Feminine ending&amp;quot; is its opposite, describing a line ending in a stressless syllable.' The article gives examples of this that use tetrameters (e.g. from Longfellow's &amp;quot;A Psalm of Life&amp;quot;, also discussed below), but no specific name for this verse form is mentioend.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://poetscollective.org/poetryforms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Forms Index&lt;/a&gt; on Poets Collective, which even includes recently invented forms and lists various forms that rely on tetrametres.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Q3ECAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Grammar of English grammars; or Advanced manual of English grammar and language&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Jacob Lowres (1863) gives examples of trochaic tetrameter from Addison and Pope on page 294 and adds an observation about syllable counts:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This last measure is seldom used by itself, being generally found alternately with lines of seven syllables. This variety froms on of the commonest trochaic measures in use.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=j2FLAAAAcAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Handbook of English Literature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Joseph Angus (1865) discusses tetrameter on page 280–281. The entry &amp;quot;Tetrameter hypermetrical&amp;quot; lists examples of several variants, including the following:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of &lt;em&gt;eight lines&lt;/em&gt; mixed, with verses of seven syllables, and &lt;em&gt;three&lt;/em&gt; rhymes (1,5: 2, 4, 6, 8: 3, 7), Jonson's &lt;em&gt;Drink to me only&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With verses of seven syllables, without stanzas, Milton's &lt;em&gt;L'Allegro, Il Penseroso&lt;/em&gt;, part of &lt;em&gt;Comus, Epitaph on Marchioness of Winchester&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=_q0SMAacruAC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Year; or, Hymns for Sundays, holydays, and daily use&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; compiled by Christopher Wordsworth (sixth edition, 1872) discusses a type of hymn that relies on the trochaic tetrameter on pages xxxii–xxxiii:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But it may well admit of a doubt, whether this trochaic measure is appropriate at such solemn seasons as that of Advent, when the Church is meditating on the awful transactions of the Day of Judgment. And yet the Hymn on the Second Advent, which is most familiar to English ears, is composed in a tetrameter trochaic broken into two parts, and rendered more joyful by double rhymes,— (...). The mention of this Hymn may introduce the remark that the magnificent ancient tetrameter trochaic of fifteen syllables, to which reference must be made, has now unfortunately, but almost universally, been broken into two parts, the former consisting of eight, the latter of seven syllables. The bi-section of the verse,—which seems to have been occasioned by the exigences of Printing, not being able to include the fifteen syllables in narrow double columns,—has been a serious evil to Hymnology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=vTIDAAAAQAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A catechism for the harmonium&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by John Hiles (1877) provides the following definition:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;em&gt;Sevens&lt;/em&gt; hymn consists of stanzas of four lines, of seven syllables each—or four troachic feet, wanting the unaccented syllable in the last.&#xA;A footnote adds that &amp;quot;And hence the seven's measure is called in poetic metres teh &lt;em&gt;trochaic tetrameter catalectic&lt;/em&gt; measure.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=VQsZAAAAYAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Elements of Composition&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Virginia Waddy (1889) discusses trochaic verse on pages 344–345. It states that&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most common form of trochaic meter is the &lt;em&gt;tetrameter&lt;/em&gt;, in alternate lines of eight syllables and seven. The line of seven syllables is denominated catalectic; (...). This forms a favorite hymn measure; the usual 8's and 7's of our hymns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=1H5OAQAAMAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Orthometry: A Treatise on the Art of Versification and the Technicalities of Poetry, with a New and Complete Rhyming Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Robert Frederick Brewer (1895) discusses tetrameter on pages 132–134:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But besides these [licences], there is another licence very generally extended to the trochaic; viz. that of cutting off part of the concluding syllable. This is allowed in every species of the trochaic verse, whether of two, three, or four feet; so that we have lines of three, five, and even seven syllables, and many specimens of them have been given already.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=W-T2DAAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Study Guide for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's &amp;quot;A Psalm of Life&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Gage, Cengage Learning, 2016, snippet view on Google Books) discusses meter, focusing on the two lines &amp;quot;Art is long, and Time is fleeting // And our Hearts, though stout and brave&amp;quot;, adding the following comments:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is written in trochaic tetrameter. (...) Consider, for example, the first line of the fourth stanza. When we scan the line, or identify its stresses, it appears as follows: (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As you can see, this line has four trochees; the line as a whole contains eight syllables. If you scan the next line, however, you'll notice that it has only seven syllables: (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The line has four stresses, but only three complete trochees, because Longfellow has eliminated the final unstressed syllable. This dropping of the final syllable in a line of verse is called caTatexis. Throughout the poem, the first and third lines of each stanza have eight syllables, but the second and fourth lines have only seven: they are caTatectic. By leaving off the final unstressed syllable, Longfellow requires the reader to take a brief pause. This short pause slows the pace of the poem, adding to this somber tone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not incidentally, the stanza form that &amp;quot;A Psalm for Life&amp;quot; uses—two eight-syllable lines alternative with two seven-syllable lines—is also used in many Protestant hymns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What the above sources, especially those from the 19th century, show is that authors of literature manuals are very familiar with the form, even pointing out that it is &amp;quot;one of the commonest trochaic measures in use&amp;quot; (Lowres) but never mention that it might have a name of its own, except as a type of hymn. The Longfellow example shows that even in a discussion that introduces technical terms such as &amp;quot;caTatexic&amp;quot; (with a capital T in the third position; of course, the intended meaning is &amp;quot;catalectic&amp;quot;), no name is given to this specific verse form, even though that may be reasonably expected here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The situation is similar in German-language sources, where is trochaic tetrameter is known as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troch%C3%A4ischer_Dimeter#Troch%C3%A4ischer_Vierheber&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;trochäischer Vierheber&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=29S2YKBYfJMC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Vorschule der Dichtkunst&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Heinrich Viehoff (1860) lists a number of metrical froms on page 16, including (2) &amp;quot;ein vollständiger trochäischer Dimeter&amp;quot; (literally &amp;quot;a complete trochaic dimeter&amp;quot;, i.e. what is know in English as a complete trochaic tetrameter) and (11) &amp;quot;ein einsilbig verkürzter trochäischer Dimeter&amp;quot;, i.e. a trochaic tetrameter shortened by one syllable. In the discussion that follows, there is no mention of a name for a type of stanza that uses alternating acatalectic and catalectic trochaic tetrameters.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=xbk_AQAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Jahresbericht über die Fortschritte der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1885) discusses, among other things, metrical aspects of Roman drama:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;8&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Andere kretische Versarten dagegen, wie die Verbindung der katalektischen trochäischen Tripodie und eines kretischen Dimeters, also die Umkehrung des soeben besprochenen Verses, sowie Dimeter mit akatalektischer trochäischer Tripodie und katalektische Tetrapodien und akatalektische Dipodie sind unzulässig; (...).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=Y8c9AAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beiträge zur Geschichte und Erklärung der ältesten Kirchen-hymnen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Johann Kayser (1886) discusses acatalectic and catalectic trochaic tetrameters on page 79, stating:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mithin zählt der Vers in der Regel acht, respective sieben Silben. Ich sage in der Regel; denn nach seinem Vorbilde erlaubt sich Thomas zuweilen eine freiere Behandlung der Verse. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.friedrich-schiller-archiv.de/inhaltsangaben/an-die-freude-schiller-interpretation-inhaltsangabe/3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;discussion of Schiller's Ode an die Freude&lt;/a&gt; on the webiste of the Friedrich Schiller Archiv in Weimar (Germany) mentions that the poem uses the vierhebiger Trochäus and alternating masculine and feminine rhymes but does not mention that there might be a specific term for this verse form.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Dutch, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/index.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algemeen letterkundig lexicon&lt;/a&gt; defines over 4,600 literary terms but its entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://dbnl.org/tekst/dela012alge01_01/dela012alge01_01_02889.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;tetrameter&lt;/a&gt; mentions no names of specific variants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above findings, I doubt that there is a specific terms for a trochaic tetrameter with alternating lines of eight and seven syllables. In order to describe this type of verse form, it appears to be necessary to rely on terms such as catalectic and acatalectic (with reference to meter) or masculine and feminine rhyme (of that applies to the rhyme).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T12:52:02.677" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T12:52:02.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17859" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:23:15.760" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T23:23:15.760" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T23:23:15.760" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17860" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:23:15.760" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of rapper Dan Bull (born 1986) or his life. Questions about his music should be tagged with [song-lyrics]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T06:06:03.467" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T06:06:03.467" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17861" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:26:11.243" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T23:26:11.243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T23:26:11.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17862" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:26:11.243" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of British Youtuber Greg Holgate (also known by his channel &quot;The Stupendium&quot;). Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T06:06:10.713" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T06:06:10.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17863" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:30:54.533" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-03T23:30:54.533" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T23:30:54.533" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17864" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:30:54.533" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of German rock band Mono Inc. Questions about their songs should be tagged with [song-lyrics].&#xD;&#xA; " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T06:05:54.243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T06:05:54.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17865" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17835" CreationDate="2021-03-03T23:32:07.570" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?770281&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Sweets from a Stranger&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, a short story by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Fisk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nicholas Fisk&lt;/a&gt;, reprinted in the 1993 anthology &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?358918&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tales of Horror and Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; which can be borrowed from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/talesofhorrormys0000unse/mode/2up?q=tina&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You said you read it in an anthology of stories by different authors, with a title something like &lt;em&gt;Tales of Mystery and Horror&lt;/em&gt;, and that it included &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roald Dahl&lt;/a&gt;'s story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1160973&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Hitch-Hiker&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. The ISFDB's list of compilations containing that Dahl story includes three multi-author anthologies, one of which has a title similar to your recollection. Scanning the contents of &lt;em&gt;Tales of Horror and Mystery&lt;/em&gt;, the title &amp;quot;Sweets from a Stranger&amp;quot; seemed the most likely candidate. I had no information about the story, but you found some online reviews, and the text of the story at the Internet Archive, from which you were able to confirm the identification.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1087762.Sweets_from_a_Stranger&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Little children know not to accept sweets from a stranger, but do they know why? Wicked, inquisitive Tina couldn't resist finding out what would happen - and found herself held hostage on an alien planet light years away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://vector-bsfa.com/2010/02/08/sweets-from-a-stranger/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vector-BSFA&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So how about those discussion questions? I'm going to take the suggested starting points first, then come back to the main question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Write a short summary of the story&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Girl meets alien; alien tricks girl; girl fails to trick aliens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Note down what you think the sci-fi elements in the story are&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In order: an alien; space travel (imagined technology); another planet; aliens. A nice bag of tropes. Is it a story that could not have happened without its speculative content? I think so; the intended real-world reference is explicit, but without the sf I don't see how you'd get the reversal of Tina's position to be so effective.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Draw character profiles of Tina and Talis&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tina: relatively unusually for Fisk, a girl-protagonist. That's her all solarized on the cover, I think. Less unusually, she's sharp — knows what story she's in, at the start; isn't fazed by the change in scenery; comes up with a proactive plan — but overconfident. &amp;quot;Tina, knowing she was behaving foolishly, went closer to the car.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talis: deceptive in appearance and in manner, but not about his true purpose. Everything we seem to learn about him in the first half of the story — his haplessness, his friendliness (his loneliness) — must be a lie for the second half to stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[. . .]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="277" LastEditorUserId="277" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T00:17:37.173" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T00:17:37.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17866" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-04T05:46:03.487" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;The poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/ncerts/l/lefl112.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Stephen Spender is given below&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cloudless at dawn, &lt;strong&gt;civilized dome riding all cities&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Children, these windows, not this map, their world,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Where all their future's painted with a fog,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal —&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All of their time and space are foggy slum.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This map becomes their window and these windows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That shut upon their lives like catacombs,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Break O break open till they break the town&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And show the children to green fields, and make their world&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Run naked into books the white and green leaves open&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;History theirs &lt;strong&gt;whose language is the sun&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not understand what the following lines mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;whose language is the sun&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;civilized dome riding all cities.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Break O break open till they break the town&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Please help me understand the meanings of the above three lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12114" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T06:02:57.500" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T06:02:57.500" Title="Meaning of three phrases from &quot;An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;stephen-spender&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17867" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17869" CreationDate="2021-03-04T08:24:28.453" Score="7" ViewCount="512" Body="&lt;p&gt;The well-known children's song &amp;quot;Old MacDonald had a Farm&amp;quot; has lyrics in the following format:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old MacDonald had a farm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And on that farm he had {article} {singular or plural creatures}&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With a {creature-appropriate sound} {creature-appropriate sound} here&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And a {creature-appropriate sound} {creature-appropriate sound} there&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here a {creature-appropriate sound}, there a  {creature-appropriate sound}&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everywhere a {creature-appropriate sound} {creature-appropriate sound}&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Old MacDonald had a farm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;where:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{article} is &amp;quot;a&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;some&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{singular or plural creatures} is any farmyard animal or bird, such as dog, duck, hen, cat, cow, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;{creature-appropriate sound} is the sound associated with the farmyard animal in question, such as woof, quack, cluck, meow, moo, etc. respectively&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the song would go something like the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old MacDonald had a farm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And on that farm he had some ducks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With a quack quack here&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And a quack quack there&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Here a quack, there a quack&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everywhere a quack quack&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Old MacDonald had a farm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;continue with new creature&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While most of the lyrics are self-explanatory, I'm wondering about the vowel sequence &lt;em&gt;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;/em&gt; What is the origin and significance of this particular sequence? Why not, say, &lt;em&gt;A-E-I-O-U !&lt;/em&gt; instead? Is there a historical, linguistic, or semantic explanation of why the song ended up with &lt;em&gt;E-I-E-I-O !&lt;/em&gt; as the climax of the refrain?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T14:06:43.337" Title="Origin and significance of E-I-E-I-O in the Old MacDonald song" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;nursery-rhyme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17869" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17867" CreationDate="2021-03-04T17:33:28.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As with any folk song, the origins of the lyrics can be a bit murky, but given transcriptions collected by folklorists in the early part of the twentieth century of this or related songs, we see that the E-I-E-I-O isn't meant to refer to the letters but is rather just a vocalization to continue the melody. An Ozarks version from 1922 has &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_MacDonald_Had_a_Farm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lyrics&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Old Missouri had a mule, he-hi-he-hi-ho,&lt;br/&gt; And on this mule there&#xA;were two ears, he-hi-he-hi-ho.&lt;br/&gt; With a flip-flop here and a&#xA;flip-flop there,&lt;br/&gt; And here a flop and there a flop and everywhere&#xA;a flip-flop&lt;br/&gt; Old Missouri had a mule, he-hi-he-hi-ho.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vwml.org/record/PG/5/155&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;related song from England&lt;/a&gt;, there is a shorter bit of vocalization which the transcriber notated as “ī ō” (note the macron to indicate a long sound). So the answer to why not “AEIOU” is that those aren’t actually letter names being sung but simply an abstract vocalization.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastEditorUserId="8758" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T14:06:43.337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T14:06:43.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17872" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17874" CreationDate="2021-03-04T19:41:44.583" Score="8" ViewCount="832" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things, Morty,’ he said, ‘strain a person’s sense of humour.’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He swept through the room. The three of them sat foolishly, with fading smiles. It was dark, and the rain had stopped. Vicki stood up and switched on the lamp in the corner: the disorder of the room, its stuffiness and neglect, would have made her feel guilty had she not been already half drunk: &lt;strong&gt;as it was, she witnessed minor twinges of the appropriate emotions occurring distantly, as if to some other girl in a similar circumstance.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;as it was&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;because she was half drunk&amp;quot;? Does the whole part in bold mean, because she was half drunk she felt some real emotions (a sense of pain) that she imagined it is occurring to a girl far from her and in a situation like her and not to herself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-04T19:54:47.263" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T21:20:18.327" Title="Meaning of &quot;as it was, she witnessed minor twinges of the appropriate emotions occurring distantly, as if to some other girl&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17873" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17872" CreationDate="2021-03-04T19:53:34.607" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, your understanding is correct. If she had not been half-drunk, she would have felt guilty about the untidiness of the room. But because the drink subdues her ability to feel emotions clearly, she experiences that guilt only vicariously, as though she was observing somebody else feeling guilty rather than feeling it herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T19:53:34.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17874" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17872" CreationDate="2021-03-04T19:56:41.353" Score="11" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The meaning of &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;as it was&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; has been asked about on the English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange site in 2013: &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/114325/87724&quot;&gt;Meaning of “as it was” in context&lt;/a&gt;. In short, &amp;quot;as it was&amp;quot; is the past tense of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/as%20it%20is&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;as it is&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, here used in the second of the two senses given by Merriam-Webster:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 : with the situation that exists now&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have enough to do as it is without your latest orders!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd paraphrase it as something like &amp;quot;in the actual circumstances (as opposed to previously mentioned hypothetical ones)&amp;quot;, or more succinctly perhaps &amp;quot;in fact&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In context, &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;the appropriate emotions&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; refers to what was mentioned in the previous clause, the feeling that she &lt;em&gt;would&lt;/em&gt; have felt if she'd been in a more normal mental state. The state of her room &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;would have made her &lt;strong&gt;feel guilty&lt;/strong&gt; had she not been already half drunk&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (emphasis mine), so the &amp;quot;appropriate emotions&amp;quot; would be ones of guilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The bulk of the sentence is &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;she witnessed minor twinges [...] occurring distantly, as if to some other girl in a similar circumstance&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. As you surmised, this means that her drunken state caused her to feel a disconnect from herself and her emotions. Minor twinges of guilt did affect her somehow, as they would have done if she'd been sober, but her disconnected mental state allowed her to feel them as if from the viewpoint of a third-party observer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of words makes this clear, as well as the direct meaning of the sentence: normally one wouldn't &amp;quot;witness&amp;quot; one's own emotions, but instead feel or experience them. Vicki's drunkenness makes her sufficiently distant from herself to feel that she's &amp;quot;witnessing&amp;quot; her own emotions, as if they're someone else's emotions - specifically, those of &amp;quot;some other girl in a similar circumstance&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T19:56:41.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17875" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17752" CreationDate="2021-03-04T20:46:44.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is probably a variant of the more widely used phrase &amp;quot;kick up one's heels&amp;quot;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/kick+up+her+heels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Free Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kick up one's heels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Enjoy oneself, as in &lt;em&gt;When she retires, she plans to kick up her heels and travel.&lt;/em&gt; This expression originated about 1600 with a totally different meaning, &amp;quot;to be killed.&amp;quot; The modern sense, alluding to a prancing horse or exuberant dancer, dates from about 1900.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kick up your heels&lt;/em&gt; [BRITISH]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If you kick up your heels, you enjoy yourself a lot, for example at a party. &lt;em&gt;Lucia was spotted kicking up her heels in the Tangiers Club. After years of working hard and raising all those children, I could kick up my heels and go entirely where I wanted to.&lt;/em&gt; Note: This refers to a horse that has been released into a field, as horses commonly do this as they gallop off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kick up your heels&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;have a lively, enjoyable time. &lt;em&gt;chiefly North American&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kick up your heels&lt;/em&gt; (informal, especially American English)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;be relaxed and enjoy yourself: &lt;em&gt;Now that he’s more confident in his job, perhaps he can kick up his heels and stop looking so worried all the time.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;kick up (one's) heels&lt;/em&gt; [Informal]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To cast off one's inhibitions and have a good time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of your quote, it seems the first one of the definitions quoted above may fit the best. I haven't read this story, but it sounds like George Horsfield has spent his last six months on something like a gap year - enjoying himself, kicking up his heels, and getting away from people who bored him. What would be the noun form of &lt;em&gt;kicking up one's heels&lt;/em&gt;? Perhaps, to be precise, &lt;em&gt;a kick up of one's heels&lt;/em&gt;; but &lt;em&gt;a kick of one's heels&lt;/em&gt; would also fit well enough, I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-04T20:46:44.583" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17876" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17877" CreationDate="2021-03-04T21:48:11.657" Score="26" ViewCount="3222" Body="&lt;p&gt;Many articles around the internet explain the general reason why six books were removed from publication in March 2021 and some even detail specific examples from 1-2 of the books (for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/02/six-dr-seuss-books-cease-publication-racism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Guardian&lt;/a&gt; describes some elements from &lt;em&gt;And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street&lt;/em&gt; and&#xA;&lt;em&gt;If I Ran the Zoo&lt;/em&gt;) but I haven't seen a list that explains the issues with all six books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cat's Quizzer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;McElligot’s Pool&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Beyond Zebra&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scrambled Eggs Super!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;If I Ran the Zoo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not trying to debate the correctness of this decision and I'm not asking for images from the books but I grew up loving &lt;em&gt;On Beyond Zebra&lt;/em&gt; and don't remember specific issues with it (from 30 years ago) and can't find an explanation - and I no longer have the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since there's six books, I figured a single question on the subject might be a valuable resource for others with this question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="42" LastEditorUserId="5747" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T03:23:55.763" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T03:37:11.117" Title="What were the parts of each of the six Seuss books that ceased publication in March 2021 that were problematic?" Tags="&lt;dr-seuss&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" FavoriteCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17877" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17876" CreationDate="2021-03-05T03:37:11.117" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The decision seems to have been made primarily because the books contained stereotyped, caricatured characters of color.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Cat's Quizzer&lt;/em&gt; includes the offensive term &amp;quot;a Japanese&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;How old do you have to be to be a Japanese?&amp;quot; which accompanies a caricatured Japanese man in a rice paddy hat.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;McElligot’s Pool&lt;/em&gt; has a caricatured &amp;quot;Eskimo&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Eskimo Fish from Beyond Hudson Bay&amp;quot; who look like fish versions of the Eskimo caricature&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;On Beyond Zebra&lt;/em&gt; contains two characters that are (Middle Eastern?) caricatures wearing turbans and pointy shoes.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Scrambled Eggs Super!&lt;/em&gt; has similar 2 caricatures (men with turbans and pointy shoes) and also a group of Eskimo-like caricatures (the Fa-Zoal).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;And to Think I Saw it on Mulberry Street&lt;/em&gt; has a Chinese caricature wearing Japanese geta (shoes), labeled with the line &amp;quot;...A Chinese man Who eats with sticks…&amp;quot;. This is a revision to the original, which had him with a bright yellow face and read &amp;quot;a yellow-faced chinamen who eats with sticks&amp;quot;. It also shows a &amp;quot;Rajah&amp;quot; who is another turban-wearing caricature.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And lastly &lt;em&gt;If I Ran the Zoo&lt;/em&gt;, which involves a number of the characters being in subservient roles to the main character, a (white) boy who is trying to assemble a zoo:&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's many Asian-stereotyped characters such as the &amp;quot;helpers that all wear their eyes at a slant&amp;quot; (that's an exact quote and three of them carry a caged animal with the boy atop carrying a gun), more &amp;quot;in countries no one can spell&amp;quot;, and yet some more &amp;quot;from the island of Gwark&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's another turban-wearing caricature (the &amp;quot;chieftain&amp;quot;) who the boy thinks would be good to have at the zoo, like the animals he's collecting: &amp;quot;A Mulligatawny is fine for my zoo and so is a chieftain, I'll bring one back too.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;8 Persian princes will carry the basket, but what their names are I don't know so don't ask it&amp;quot;: these men are also turbaned caricatures&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;And then there's the two characters that are explicitly labeled as African. There is no kind way to capture exactly how they look... it's maybe the most accurate to say that they are depicted as round monkeys wearing only grass skirts and jewelry, with a plume of hair that matches the bird they're carrying.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer was sourced mainly from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.pragmaticmom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FINALNEAReportDr.SeusssRacismandRAA.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rethinking Dr. Seuss for NEA's Read Across America Day&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/here-are-the-wrong-illustrations-that-got-six-dr-seuss-books-cancelled&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here are the 'wrong' illustrations that got six Dr. Seuss books cancelled&lt;/a&gt;. Between the two you can see most of the objectionable images. The first article examined Dr. Seuss's top 50 books and is well worth the read. It found that 2% (or 45/2240) of the human characters were non-white and 100% of those depictions were racist. It also covers the context of Seuss's life before he became a children's author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, here's some &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/64IYy.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mental insecticide&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5747" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T03:37:11.117" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17878" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17879" CreationDate="2021-03-05T05:12:51.713" Score="5" ViewCount="80" Body="&lt;p&gt;I had a niece (age 8) who was recently diagnosed with dyslexia. As a good Lit.SE member, I tend to like to give books as gifts, but want to make sure that I'm getting books that she can actually read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have seen &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/books/best-kids-books-dyslexic-dyslexia-reluctant-readers-a7345621.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists of books&lt;/a&gt; that are supposedly friendly for dyslexics. I was having trouble understanding how they actually assemble lists like this, though, and the list I link to was a little thin on justification of why the individual books are more &amp;quot;dyslexia-friendly&amp;quot; than other books. Occasionally, publishers will also make claims about their books being &amp;quot;dyslexia-friendly.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When selecting books, what kind of things should I look for to make sure that the books really are &amp;quot;dyslexia-friendly&amp;quot;? Is there any way that I can verify/evaluate this kind of claim? How would I tell how &amp;quot;dyslexia-friendly&amp;quot; a book was that wasn't specifically designed to be dyslexia-friendly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T16:08:49.560" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T15:58:27.647" Title="What should you look for when deciding whether a children's book would be &quot;dyslexia-friendly&quot;?" Tags="&lt;physical-books&gt;&lt;accessibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17879" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17878" CreationDate="2021-03-05T12:56:17.637" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.independent.co.uk/extras/indybest/books/best-kids-books-dyslexic-dyslexia-reluctant-readers-a7345621.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;12 best kids' books for dyslexic and reluctant readers&lt;/a&gt; from &lt;em&gt;The Independent&lt;/em&gt; may be lumping a few things together because, as the article points out,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While you’ll probably know if your child isn’t keen on reading, it’s not always so easy to tell if they are dyslexic, acknowledges Sue Flohr, national helpline and policy manager at the British Dyslexia Association.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the WHO's International Classification of Diseases or ICD, we would be looking at category &lt;a href=&quot;https://icd.who.int/browse10/2019/en#/F81.0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;F81.0: Specific reading disorde&lt;/a&gt;, where developmental dyslexia can be found.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One aspect is &lt;strong&gt;reading level&lt;/strong&gt;, which may actually be affected by factors unrelated to dyslexia. This is what the five-finger test in the article is designed to figure out. Similar techniques are also relevant to foreign-language learners. For example, if you want to expand your vocabulary through extensive reading, 95% of the words in a text should already be familiar (see Nation 1997). The handout &amp;quot;Determining Reading Levels of Texts&amp;quot; by the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas describes a test to help determine whether a text is appropriate for a specific child or learner. It defines three levels: independent level, instructional level and frustration level. For children who are reluctant readers or who are at risk (not necessarily due to dyslexia) one would want to avoid texts below the &amp;quot;independent level&amp;quot; (unless you really know how to teach reading).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another aspect mentioned in the article is children &amp;quot;finding a white background too glary&amp;quot;. This &lt;em&gt;might&lt;/em&gt; be related to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irlen_syndrome&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Irlen syndrome&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which is not to be found in the WHO's International Classification of Diseases (ICD). It is sometimes presented as linked to dyslexia, though some web resources present it as a clearly distinct cause of reading difficulties from dyslexia. See for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.irlensyndrome.org/irlen-vs-dyslexia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irlen vs Dyslexia&lt;/a&gt; by the Irlen Syndrome Foundation, &lt;a href=&quot;https://irlen.com/the-difference-between-irlen-syndrome-and-visual-dyslexia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Do I Have Dyslexia or Irlen Syndrome?&lt;/a&gt; by the Irlen Institute and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.irlendyslexia.com/dyslexia-and-irlen-syndrome/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dyslexia and Irlen Syndrome&lt;/a&gt; by Irlen Diagnostic Clinic Newcastle. Irlen syndrome is defined as a visual processing difficulty that can be alleviated by using coloured lenses or overlays. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://irlen.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Irlen Institute's website&lt;/a&gt; allows you to change the site's background colour, and thereby make reading if you have Irlen syndrome easier, by clicking on one of the glasses pictograms at the top of the page. This is rather difficult to transfer to printed books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, there are books printed in &lt;strong&gt;dyslexia-friendly fonts&lt;/strong&gt;. Several such fonts have been developed over the years, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dyslexiefont.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dyslexie Font&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://opendyslexic.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OpenDyslexic&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dafont.com/lexia-readable.font&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lexie Readable&lt;/a&gt;. These fonts are designed so specific letters become less confusable, i.e. they are less similar to other letters when mirrored or flipped upside down, such as 'd', 'b' and 'p'; they also make sure the uppercase 'I' can be clearly distinguished from a lowercase 'l', etcetera. Books printed in such fonts are available, for example from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dyslexicbooks.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;DyslexicBooks.com&lt;/a&gt; and the query &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/dyslexic-font-books/s?k=dyslexic+font+books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dyslexic font books on Amazon.com&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly, there is no convincing evidence that dyslexia-friendly fonts significantly increase reading speed or significantly reduce error rates in young learners with dyslexia. Findings regard error reduction are mixed. &lt;strong&gt;Other aspects of typography&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;may&lt;/em&gt; have a bigger impact but require further study. These are the following (see Bigelow):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;larger type size&lt;/strong&gt; may help children with dyslexia reach their optimum reading speed. Type size cannot be increased in printed books, but there is no such limitation on the web (press &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; &lt;kbd&gt;+&lt;/kbd&gt; to zoom in, and &lt;kbd&gt;Ctrl&lt;/kbd&gt; &lt;kbd&gt;-&lt;/kbd&gt; to zoom out again), on tablets, smartphones and e-readers.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;shorter line length&lt;/strong&gt; can also help. Text should then be left-aligned, since &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographic_alignment#Justified&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;justification&lt;/a&gt; can nullify the positive effect of a shorter line length.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Increasing letter spacing&lt;/strong&gt; has also been researched but the results have not been unequivocal.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liz Dunnon's article &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dyslexiadaily.com/blog/recommended-books-for-dyslexic-children-elementary/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Recommended Books For Dyslexic Children – Elementary&lt;/a&gt; on DyslexiaDaily (05.08.2014) lists a number of books &amp;quot;written and created with struggling readers in mind&amp;quot; but it is not clear from the article what specific features in the books distinguish them from &amp;quot;regular&amp;quot; books. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfwp.com/series/books-printed-in-dyslexia-friendly-font&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dyslexia-Friendly Books&lt;/a&gt; by Royal Fireworks Press use the font OpenDyslexic. Some series from this publisher have QR codes in the books that link to audio recordings of narrated versions, which is always helpful for people with dyslexia. (Learners with dyslexia often rely on software that reads aloud content of web pages or office documents, in some cases highlighting the sentence being read in one colour (e.g. yellow) and the word being pronounced in another colour (e.g. lime).)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References (in addition to links in the text):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bigelow, Chuck: &lt;a href=&quot;https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2014/11/typography-dyslexia.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Typography &amp;amp; Dyslexia&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bigelow &amp;amp; Holmes&lt;/em&gt;, November 2014.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk, University of Texas: &lt;a href=&quot;https://buildingrti.utexas.org/instructional-materials/fluency-text-reading-levels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fluency: Text Reading Levels&lt;/a&gt;. See the downloadable PDF &amp;quot;Determining Reading Levels of Texts&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nation, Paul: &lt;a href=&quot;https://jalt-publications.org/tlt/articles/2134-language-learning-benefits-extensive-reading&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Language Learning Benefits of Extensive Reading &lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;The Language Teacher&lt;/em&gt;, Issue 21.5; May 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T15:58:27.647" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T15:58:27.647" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17880" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17881" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" Score="0" Body="Questions related to accessibility for people with disabilities, including, but not limited to, reading disabilities. Accessibility is not to be confused with the mere availability of resources." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T14:19:43.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17882" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T15:59:55.847" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember some years ago listening to a recording of a speech by Martin Luther King Jr, in which he says something like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even if Jewish leaders told me &amp;quot;No, we do not need your help fighting anti-Semitism,&amp;quot; I would still speak out against anti-Semitism because it is wrong, it is evil, and it is unjust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could be mangling the quote, but that was the gist. I've googled as best I can but I can't figure out what speech it's from. I would appreciate any help in identifying the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12315" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T16:07:49.157" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T16:07:49.157" Title="MLK Jr. quote about speaking out against anti-Semitism even if Jewish leaders say they don't need the help" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;martin-luther-king&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17883" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T16:41:17.193" Score="3" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 48 of Charles Dickens's &lt;em&gt;Great Expectations&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Mr. Jaggers was for her [Molly, Mr. Jaggers's maidservant],” pursued Wemmick, with a look full of meaning, “and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a desperate case, and it was comparatively early days with him then, and he worked it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be said to have made him. He worked it himself at the police-office, day after day for many days, contending against even a committal; and at the trial where he couldn’t work it himself, sat under counsel, and—every one knew—&lt;strong&gt;put in all the salt and pepper&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.271834/page/n61/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1933 OED&lt;/a&gt; oddly does not mention 'salt and pepper' but does contain the following entry for&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;salt, &lt;em&gt;sb.&lt;/em&gt;, 3.c.&lt;/strong&gt; That which gives life or pungency to discourse or written composition ; poignancy of expression ; pungent wit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Jaggers is depicted as being quick to punish ill-applied usages of words and other such minute discrepancies with noticeable vehemence, so could 'put in all the salt and pepper' refer to his imparting a certain flamboyance to the legal proceedings?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="10367" LastEditDate="2021-03-05T16:53:37.743" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T16:53:37.743" Title="Meaning of &quot;put in all the salt and pepper&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;great-expectations&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17884" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-05T20:20:34.693" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's no secret that Howard Roark was loosely inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interestingly enough, on a recent tour of Frank Lloyd Wright houses in Oak Park, IL, I encountered a park named after &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_W._Austin_Sr.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Henry W. Austin&lt;/a&gt;, a prominent Oak Park businessman and politician who was, at a minimum, still alive at the time when Frank Lloyd Wright started working in the area.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of Howard Roark's major allies is, of course, Austen Heller.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have been unable to ascertain how much of a connection there was between Henry Austin and Frank Lloyd Wright (beyond having lived in the area).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, is there any evidence that the names were in any way connected, or is the resemblance likely a coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastActivityDate="2021-03-05T20:20:34.693" Title="Was Austen Heller's name inspired by Henry W. Austin?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;the-fountainhead&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17887" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18614" CreationDate="2021-03-06T06:14:31.637" Score="7" ViewCount="87" Body="&lt;p&gt;The usage of dashes to obscure personal/place names and dates in Victorian literature has been widely noted, but I don't feel that the reasons that are usually given help me understand this case. I'm curious what people make of a specific redaction in Chapter 36 of &lt;em&gt;Villette&lt;/em&gt;, particularly because there's an initial substitution as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A fly-leaf bore in small, but clear and well-known pencil characters: 'From P. C. D. E. to L—y.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is it that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paul Emanuel wrote L—y rather than 'Lucy' (as abbreviation or more deliberate redaction)? Did people abbreviate names like this at the time (I know of the Biblical name abbreviations)?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lucy's name (and maybe M. Emanuel's) is being anonymised as a stylistic choice (&lt;em&gt;Villette&lt;/em&gt; is narrated by an old Lucy Snowe reflecting on her youth, and it might be that she, out of modesty or tact, elides her own name when quoting the message?)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It's just being done because it's quoting a written context, and it adds verisimilitude, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know if case 1 is a conceivable thing someone might do, even with poetic license - my impression it was more commonly a literary device (e.g. Austen omitting real names and places; dates being obscured). Is it possible that M. Emanuel would have avoided writing Lucy's given name? I've never encountered this usage before, but it seems possible to me he might use this substitution alongside his own initials. Maybe it's an abbreviation or represents missing letters in his own hand? I'd run with this explanation, but I don't actually know if it's a reasonable expectation wrt. historical context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for case 2, it strikes me as really strange, even for Lucy, because she gives full names of people when it's relevant, and it's not some withheld fact that Lucy Snowe is Lucy Snowe (even if Lucy Snowe were meant to be a pen name on the part of the narrator, why redact it here and only here?). But this is a sensitive context (the document trying to persuade her to convert to Catholicism), so maybe it's different?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for case 3, a letter from Ginevra Fanshawe is reproduced later on in the book, replete with uncensored names.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why it matters - well, I don't know if M. Emanuel or Lucy did it, and it seems to me the reasons would be different either way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12320" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T15:53:15.867" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T12:48:24.440" Title="Meaning of dash and initial substitution in Charlotte Brontë's Villette" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;style&gt;&lt;charlotte-bronte&gt;&lt;villette&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17888" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-06T08:28:28.827" Score="1" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the film ended a Greek man explained in his native tongue the details of the government’s health scheme. It took him fully ten minutes, with diagrams, and then an Italian came on and &lt;strong&gt;repeated the performance in his&#xA;language&lt;/strong&gt;. Elizabeth watched and listened. She recognised a word here and there. It was soothing, &lt;strong&gt;this patient setting out of facts and services&lt;/strong&gt;. She picked up Poppy’s legs and arranged them across her lap. The tendons behind the girl’s knees tightened like wires. ‘You smell nice,’ murmured Poppy. ‘This lovely smell.’ A choir of old people in blue robes sang to close down the station. It was a Jewish choir. ‘In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia Fair!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all does &amp;quot;an Italian came on and repeated the performance in his language&amp;quot; mean: an Italian person came and explained again what a Greek man had explained in Greek language&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two understanding about the meaning of &amp;quot;this patient setting out of facts and services.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;this program that was about protecting against being patient was based on facts and was about government services?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;this slow and carefully made program that was about health facts and government services?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T01:51:21.987" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T01:51:21.987" Title="Meaning of &quot;this patient setting out of facts and services.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17889" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3148" CreationDate="2021-03-06T09:23:40.130" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;A 2020 research paper published in the Journal of Marlowe Studies claims that Barrett Emerson is &lt;strong&gt;purely fictional&lt;/strong&gt;, with some justifications of why such a character might be invented for the TV show and how he would fit in with the characterisation of Marlowe therein.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;In this paper, Emerson is first mentioned as an &quot;invented character&quot;, with parallels drawn between Marlowe's life with him and the story of Doctor Faustus:&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the very end of Episode 5, he enters the bedchamber of a fine house and lies down alongside an older man who is dying of a consumptive disease. This figure, we find out at the end of the season, is an invented character named Barrett Emerson, who was once Marlowe’s lover. [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerson believes that, like Faustus, he has sold his soul, but instead of 24 years of perfect knowledge, he receives in exchange Marlowe’s love. After Emerson dies in the next episode, Marlowe toasts his corpse with an admission that he has made a similar trade:“If your love cost me my soul, then here’s to damnation, darling. I shall see thee in hell.” Emerson’s warning, “Repent yet, and God may pity thee,” anticipates an admonition that Faustus will receive from the Good Angel—“Faustus, repent yet, God will pity thee” (2.3.12)—but Marlowe, like Faustus, refuses to repent and beg God’s forgiveness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contribution of Emerson to the play &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; actually diverges from what real-life experts believe another writer may have contributed to this play, which is further evidence for Emerson being a &amp;quot;purely fictional&amp;quot; character invented to support the conception of Marlowe built up in this TV show:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Emerson has served Marlowe as a type of muse, collaborating with him on the composition of his most recent play. Modern scholars generally accept that Marlowe worked with some other playwright on Doctor Faustus, but according to editors David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, “Marlowe wrote the serious and tragic portions” of the drama while “a collaborator took responsibility for the comic horseplay.” Consistent with Pearce’s conception of authorship as a reflection of biography, the play produced by his fictional Marlowe concerns only the “serious and tragic” story of a man who sells his soul to the devil and is damned for it, not the “comic horseplay” of the promising scholar who wastes his considerable abilities. Pearce endeavours to align his portrayal of Marlowe with the mythographic image of the tragic playwright, which requires him to ignore the play’s middle scenes and replace the anonymous comic collaborator with a purely fictional muse, Barrett Emerson, who provides Marlowe with material only for the tragic sections of the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also suggested in the TV show that Emerson painted a portrait of Marlowe as a young man, but again this diverges from the likely reality, since although the portrait does exist, and has been identified with Marlowe in &amp;quot;the public consciousness&amp;quot;, there is evidence that it's unlikely to actually have been Marlowe:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The painting in Emerson’s room is recognizable as a representation of the portrait found in 1953 during construction on the Master’s lodge at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where Marlowe was once a student (see Figure 3). Dated 1585, the portrait identifies its subject as being twenty-one years old, and Marlowe was that age in that year. Of course, there would have been many twenty-one-year-olds at Corpus Christi at that time, and nothing in the portrait indicates that the young man was a student in the college. Moreover, J. A. Downie points out that the appearance of the sitter does not match the known facts of Marlowe’s circumstances in 1585: “As the lavishness of the costume attests, the portrait is evidently of a wealthy young man. Marlowe was a cobbler’s son, at Corpus Christi as a Parker scholar; he is therefore highly unlikely to be the subject of the controversial portrait.” Despite this contrary evidence and the lack of any positive support, “the identification of the figure in the portrait with Marlowe was simply too tempting to resist,” and this likeness has entered the public consciousness as a representation of the playwright’s dashing countenance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems that Barrett Emerson didn't actually exist, nor is he based on any real character (one can't count the other contributor to &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt;, since that real person's contribution was evidently quite different from what the fictional Emerson contributed). But Emerson's role in the TV show ties in to the way Marlowe's character is portrayed and built up there, so it makes sense that such a character would be invented.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.7190/jms.v1i0.31&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael D. Friedman, &amp;quot;The God-Haunted Atheist and the Posh Boy: Christopher Marlowe in &lt;em&gt;Will&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Upstart Crow&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;, &lt;em&gt;Journal of Marlowe Studies&lt;/em&gt; 1 (2020), pp. 32-54&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T09:29:45.700" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T09:29:45.700" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17890" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-06T09:30:13.100" Score="2" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The haiku I'm looking for is probably of an anonymous author. I got a hint on a Japanese message board that it's maybe Musashi's one and I should find it in Eiji Yoshikawa's famous novel, but it's not there. I have only the Russian translation of the haiku. In English it's like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chain wrapped around a [tree] trunk and immediately&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the noblest blade has struck [a blow]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The master demonstrated his skills&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone remember something like that or give me another hint?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12323" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T09:31:05.330" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T09:31:05.330" Title="I'm looking for a certain haiku about kusarigama in Japanese" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17891" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17888" CreationDate="2021-03-06T18:25:08.207" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Your understanding of the &amp;quot;repeated the performance in his language&amp;quot; is correct. The word &amp;quot;performance&amp;quot; is being used in sense 4 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/performance?s=t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a particular action, deed, or proceeding&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the Italian repeats the Greek's actions, probably using the same diagrams, to describe the &amp;quot;government’s health scheme&amp;quot;. The only change being the language used. The word &amp;quot;performance&amp;quot; comes with the connotation that this act is special, and has some sort of spectacular quality. Perhaps it is elaborate or interesting to watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Your second interpretation of &amp;quot;this patient setting out of facts and services&amp;quot; is closest to correct. I will break up the sentence for clarity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this [patient] [setting out] of [facts and services]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, what is &amp;quot;facts and services&amp;quot; referring to? It's the information in the presentation itself. The presentation consists of facts about the health scheme and the services it provides.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this [patient] [setting out] of [information about the government health scheme]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for &amp;quot;setting out&amp;quot;. This is an idiom, used in the second sense of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/setout&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster definition&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;set out&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to state, describe, or recite at length&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is also a description of the presentation. For ten minutes, a decently long length of time, the presenters talks about the government health scheme. They &amp;quot;state&amp;quot; facts and &amp;quot;describe&amp;quot; it in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this [patient] [stating] of [information about the government health scheme]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, &amp;quot;patient&amp;quot; is used as an adjective, modifying all that comes after it. Quoting from sense 6 of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/patient&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dictionary.com definition&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;quietly and steadily persevering or diligent, especially in detail or exactness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presenters are &amp;quot;patient&amp;quot; in explaining the government health scheme. They steadily work through all the necessary information, in &amp;quot;detail&amp;quot;, without appearing upset or annoyed at having to explain what they probably find obvious. They don't try to rush speaking, but instead carefully, at a comfortable pace, explain each detail. Such a kind explanation would certainly be &amp;quot;soothing&amp;quot;, as the narrator describes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final re-wording then is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;this [unannoyed, carefully detailed] [stating] of [information about the government health scheme]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T18:25:08.207" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17892" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-03T17:36:13.917" Score="1" ViewCount="68" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the following passage from &lt;em&gt;Lonely Man Full of Love&lt;/em&gt; by Mauro Mevlud Martino, what does &amp;quot;mirror in my bathroom&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: ‘’Are you quieter and lonelier than me, Rachel?’’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B: ‘’Perhaps, Martin. Perhaps. I want to be good to myself. &lt;strong&gt;I have a&#xA;mirror in my bathroom.&lt;/strong&gt;’’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A: ‘’I think the main character in my novel Weeping Willow Trees was&#xA;you.’’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it literally mean that she (B) has a mirror in her bathroom? Or does it mean that she spends most of her time looking at the mirror? Or does it have a connotation that she (B) suffers from narcissism?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12329" OwnerDisplayName="Aseel" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T23:30:03.600" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T00:02:15.217" Title="What does &quot;mirror in my bathroom&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;mauro-mevlud-martino&gt;&lt;lonely-man-full-of-love&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17893" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17892" CreationDate="2021-03-03T18:13:49.753" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;My simplest interpretation is that Rachel mentions the mirror as providing a literal second person that she can meet, because that is being 'good to myself' compared to her previous experiences with real people; &amp;quot;...if I feel lonely I can alway talk with my reflection&amp;quot;.&#xA;This seems a tragic-comedy, sarcastic expression overall, perhaps ironically hiding an appeal to Martin to help her try a relationship again.&#xA;I also feel that this mirror-idiom is so bleak that it emphasises the degree of loneliness that she really feels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="OookLout" LastActivityDate="2021-03-03T18:13:49.753" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17894" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-06T21:55:31.563" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a 19th century short story. I thought it was written by Guy de Maupassant, but didn't find it. A French country priest starts having vivid dreams that he is a diabolical courtier in hell. The dreams become ever more intense and elaborated. The last line is something like: &amp;quot;One night, one of the devil's courtier's had a strange dream, that he was a French country priest.&amp;quot; The basic idea seems to be borrowed from Zhuangzi's 'The Butterfly Dream'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10832" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T22:03:29.647" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T22:03:29.647" Title="Short story, 19th century: French country priest and devil exchange subjectivities" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17895" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9779" CreationDate="2021-03-06T22:09:30.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Generally speaking, the Count seems to embody several of the anxieties of the people living through The Victorian era.  For example, they were very anxious about homosexuality, especially after the Oscar Wilde Trial. By having Dracula bite, and suck the blood of, Harker, Stoker seems to be tapping into this particular anxiety.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Victorians were also anxious about immigration and the “Other,” or foreigners, who might corrupt the British population.  This may have been particularly aimed towards women who may have been attracted to foreign, tall, dark, and powerful, men. After all it is only British women, in Britain, who are bitten by a Transylvanian Dracula.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Victorians also seemed to have been anxious about the subconscious and, particularly, of losing control, through someone tapping into their minds. They seem to have feared mesmerism and hypnotism, powers akin to those Stoker assigns the Count.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also seem to have feared the possibility of the supernatural, and any evil aspects inherent in the pursuit of “contacting” the dead. As Materialism was displacing Religion, people in the Victorian Era still seem to have believed in the immortality of the soul or the existence of spirits.  This, in addition to the possibility of electricity animating severed frog legs, (or human monsters, such as that in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), some Victorians probably feared the possibility of somehow animating the dead, thus Stoker’s “undead.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-06T23:44:45.867" LastActivityDate="2021-03-06T23:44:45.867" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17896" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11740" CreationDate="2021-03-07T01:08:28.917" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The great doubter Hamlet is never certain regarding the identity of the Ghost.  At least two possible choices are available to him, the Devil or the ghost of his father. By orchestrating The Mousetrap, Hamlet settles on at least determining whether the Devil/ghost is telling the truth about Claudius’s guilt. Therefore, the Prince does not have direct proof of a person’s return from “the undiscovered country.” This, in addition to God’s “canon 'gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.135), would make suicide a very dangerous option indeed for Hamlet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T01:08:28.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17897" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12478" CreationDate="2021-03-07T03:29:29.790" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Among Shakespeare's contemporaries, the motif of a woman disguising as a man had been used before, for example by George Peele in his play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_Clyomon_and_Sir_Clamydes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which was written around 1570 and by John Lyly in his play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallathea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gallathea&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (around 1588). (See my &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5105/2191&quot;&gt;related question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In his diary, John Manningham had noted similarities between Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;Twelfth Night&lt;/em&gt; and the Italian play &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deceived_Ones&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gl'ingannati&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Deceived Ones&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which dates from 1531, predating Peele's and Lily's plays. (There is no hard evidence that Shakespeare knew this play, though.) The play introduces Lelia, dressed as a boy. According to Yasuo TAMAIZUMI, &lt;em&gt;Gl' Ingannati&lt;/em&gt; contains the earliest example of a female page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, the motif of cross-dressing is much older than the Renaissance. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilles_on_Skyros&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Achilles on Skyros&lt;/a&gt; is a story available in Publius Papinius Statius's unfinished &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achilleid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Achilleid&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in which Achilles disguises himself as a girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In summary, Shakespeare may have found inspiration in sources from Antiquity, from the Italian Renaissance or from contemporary works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Accademia degli Intronati: &lt;a href=&quot;https://emothe.uv.es/biblioteca/textosEMOTHE/EMOTHE0136_TheDeceived.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gl'Ingannati&lt;/em&gt; / &lt;em&gt;The Deceived&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/gl-ingannati-an-italian-play-about-twins-and-mistaken-identity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gl’Ingannati&lt;/em&gt;, an Italian play about twins and mistaken identity&lt;/a&gt;, British Library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-festival-of-twelfth-night-in-john-manninghams-diary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The festival of Twelfth Night in John Manningham's diary&lt;/a&gt;, British Library.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yasuo TAMAIZUMI: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/tja/74/3/74_131/_article/-char/en&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On Shakespeare's Twelfth Night&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Transactions of the Japan Academy&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 74 (2020) Issue 3.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T03:29:29.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17898" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15646" CreationDate="2021-03-07T12:10:50.333" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Google provides quite a few links (if you search for “glass tambourines” instead of “crystal”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, contrary to the recent popular opinion, not everything is to be interpreted, to be determined by the judgment of certain masters of the hidden meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lorca didn’t exactly mean anything – instead, he composed an image that provides a reader/listener with associations and feelings. See the essay &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://americanghazal.com/2018/06/07/the-duende-of-divan-del-tamarit/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Duende of Lorca’s Diván del Tamarit&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by E.A. Melino:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lorca’s images are not symbols to be decoded or metaphors whose&#xA;parallels can be puzzled out. Hecho poético doesn’t live in the head.&#xA;Like flamenco music, it is experienced in the body, particularly the&#xA;belly and hips. The question is not “What does the poem mean?” but&#xA;“What do you feel?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is why explanations deal more with the associations of some kind. Here’s an essay &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.andalucia.com/accounts/lorca.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorca, poet of Granada&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Lawrence Bohme:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As they ascend, the light from &amp;quot;tiny tin lamps&amp;quot; - of the sort gypsy&#xA;craftsmen make – flickers on the village houses, and &amp;quot;a thousand&#xA;tambourines&amp;quot; – an instrument the gypsies play – &amp;quot;of glass&amp;quot; (perhaps&#xA;symbolising the stars and the early morning frost) &amp;quot;wound the dawn&amp;quot;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or consider &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ru/books?id=ZTg5AAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA68&amp;amp;lpg=PA68&amp;amp;dq=lorca%20glass%20tambourine&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=Rr3jBZAH7t&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U3Ab8TM0X-wnxRbU_4qNsh5hvSD1Q&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiv-5zMkJ7vAhUw-yoKHcBFBMo4ChDoATADegQIBRAD#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=lorca%20glass%20tambourine&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Generation of Spanish Poets 1920-1936&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by C. B. Morris:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;he associated tambourines, glass and the dawn to record an original&#xA;vision of dew glittering at daybreak&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By linking and interlocking the five senses in his ballads, Lorca&#xA;brought the reader's own senses into play, involved him in a complex&#xA;of new sensations that are as strange to experience as they were to&#xA;create&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last thing. What about Lorca’s own statements? Did he say that he didn’t mean anything at all about this poem and about exactly the same verse? Would it be a strange coincidence?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Metaphor, Lorca insisted, must give way to the hecho poético the&#xA;&amp;quot;poetic event&amp;quot;-a phenomenon at once illogical and incomprehensible, as&#xA;miraculous as “rain from the stars.” In a subsequent version of his&#xA;lecture, he cited a passage from one of his own Gypsy poems, the&#xA;&amp;quot;Sleepwalking Ballad,&amp;quot; as an example of an hecho poético. &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;If you ask&#xA;me why I wrote 'A thousand glass tambourines / were wounding the&#xA;dawn,' I will tell you that I saw them, in the hands of angels and&#xA;trees, but I won't be able to say more than that, much less explain&#xA;their meaning. And that's how it should be&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He regarded the hecho poético as one of several means of reaching the&#xA;purest plane of poetry, the &amp;quot;poetry of escape.” The surrealists sought&#xA;to achieve &amp;quot;escape&amp;quot; through dreams and the unconscious, a method Lorca&#xA;found pure but unclear. “We Latins want sharp profiles and visible&#xA;mystery. Form and sensuality.” As much as he admired Dalí and&#xA;respected the artist's views on surrealism, Lorca refused to subscribe&#xA;to any such movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(From &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ru/books?id=sSPQXJGRt6oC&amp;amp;pg=PT184&amp;amp;dq=lorca%20glass%20tambourine&amp;amp;hl=ru&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwi4pJ6kkZ7vAhXjs4sKHZ12B2oQ6AEwAXoECAkQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=lorca%20glass%20tambourine&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lorca - a Dream of Life&lt;/a&gt; by Leslie Stainton, boldface mine)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T12:10:50.333" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17899" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-07T13:30:45.603" Score="1" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, in the Epilogue covering&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Hazel's peaceful death,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;just before this happens, he has a final dream which is something about &amp;quot;rain and elder bloom&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One chilly, blustery morning in March, I cannot tell exactly how many springs&#xA;later, Hazel was dozing and waking in his burrow. He had spent a good deal of&#xA;time there lately, for he felt the cold and could not seem to smell or run so well as&#xA;in days gone by. He had been dreaming in a confused way -- something about rain&#xA;and elder bloom -- when he woke to realize that there was a rabbit lying quietly&#xA;beside him -- no doubt some young buck who had come to ask his advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What, if anything, does this signify?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there some symbolism in elder bloom or in rain, something to make either of them a particularly apt thing to appear in the last dream of Hazel's life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T13:30:45.603" Title="Do &quot;rain and elder bloom&quot; signify anything in Hazel's last dream?" Tags="&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17900" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17241" CreationDate="2021-03-07T14:45:35.127" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here's my interpretation of how the story is changed by not covering that segment of the rabbits' journey in detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Off-stage character development enables the plot to proceed more swiftly.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the beginning of the story, when the band of 11 rabbits start their journey from Sandleford, they're essentially a bunch of misfits, not having much in common, many of them not even knowing each other well. By the end of the story, when against all odds they are able to triumph against the mighty Woundwort and the efficient machine that is the Efrafan Owsla, they must be able to work together perfectly, trusting and respecting each other, knowing and relying on the unique abilities of each one of their number.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How do they change from one state to the other? In reality, this would be a continuous process, as the rabbits slowly learn about each other and their abilities. But it makes for more efficient storytelling to &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; show every bit of the process in detail. By streamlining and skipping over some parts of their development, the story is able to refer to some of the incidents that caused them all to respect each other and hold together firmly, without needing to describe all those incidents in detail. A vaguely described incident creates a point of reference that can be referred back to more freely in order to justify some knowledge or relation between the rabbits, without the author needing to rewrite the incident to make sure it really does justify that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might call this lazy storytelling, and indeed it would be if &lt;em&gt;all&lt;/em&gt; character-building incidents were skipped over and then referred back to. But this is not the case. We see several of the rabbits' ordeals described in detail which help to build up the characters and relations between them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In the woods in chapter 5, Hazel takes the risk of breaking cover first, and Dandelion, the first to join him, compares him to El-ahrairah. This is an early sign of Hazel's leadership and also Dandelion's speed.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;At the river, Bigwig returns to warn Hazel about the dog, Hazel refuses to cross without Pipkin, and Blackberry figures out how to use the wood. This establishes Bigwig's loyalty, Hazel's responsibility, Pipkin's devotion to Hazel, and Blackberry's cleverness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;One of their biggest tribulations was their time in Cowslip's warren. Here they were almost divided, but events proved that they could rely on each other and nobody else. Every single one of the Sandleford rabbits came to help Bigwig, and none of the warren rabbits.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The development of their group after these events is described clearly in the third paragraph of Chapter 18:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since leaving the warren of the snares they had become warier, shrewder, a tenacious band who understood each other and worked together. There was no more quarreling. The truth about the warren had been a grim shock. They had come closer together, relying on and valuing each other's capacities. They knew now that it was on these and on nothing else that their lives depended, and they were not going to waste anything they possessed between them. In spite of Hazel's efforts beside the snare, there was not one of them who had not turned sick at heart to think that Bigwig was dead and wondered, like Blackberry, what would become of them now. Without Hazel, without Blackberry, Buckthorn and Pipkin -- Bigwig would have died. Without himself he would have died, for which else, of them all, would not have stopped running after such punishment? There was no more questioning of Bigwig's strength, Fiver's insight, Blackberry's wits or Hazel's authority.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incident with the rats in the barn serves as one more event to &lt;em&gt;illustrate&lt;/em&gt; these changes. The sentences immediately following the above quote are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the rats came, Buckthorn and Silver had obeyed Bigwig and stood their ground. The rest had followed Hazel when he roused them and, without explanation, told them to go quickly outside the barn. Later, Hazel had said that there was nothing for it but to cross the open pasture and under Silver's direction they had crossed it, with Dandelion running ahead to reconnoiter. When Fiver said the iron tree was harmless they believed him. [...] Yet [Bigwig] himself had become less overbearing. The snare had left him weak and overwrought. It was he who had given the alarm in the barn, for he could not sleep and at the sound of scratching had started up at once. He would not let&#xA;Silver and Buckthorn fight alone, but he had felt obliged to leave the worst of it to them. For the first time in his life, Bigwig had found himself driven to moderation and prudence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The incident doesn't need to be described in detail in order to serve the purpose of illustrating how the rabbits now rely on each other, even Bigwig relying on others to do the fighting when necessary. Not providing all details about some events allows them to be used as evidence for any piece of character development not specifically illustrated by other events described in more detail - such as Silver and Buckthorn's value as fighters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not describing it in detail also helps to build &lt;strong&gt;contrast&lt;/strong&gt; between the before and after states, between the rabbits who bickered about what to do or where to go and the rabbits who rely on each other's abilities unquestioningly. If all their character-building moments were covered in detail, there would be a lot more chapters between the before and after, and the change would be as hard for readers to observe as perhaps it was for the characters themselves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-07T14:57:11.283" LastActivityDate="2021-03-07T14:57:11.283" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17902" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="805" CreationDate="2021-03-08T00:00:02.747" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's important to note that one of the most important &amp;quot;Rules&amp;quot; must be &amp;quot;the asker must propose the riddle and it must be accepted by the askee&amp;quot;. This is the only reason Bilbo's &amp;quot;riddle&amp;quot; worked, as it was not a traditional riddle and would otherwise be considered cheating. Though there could be many answers, Gollum accepted the riddle by stating that he must be given three guesses, which Bilbo accepted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12332" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T00:34:10.760" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T00:34:10.760" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17904" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17905" CreationDate="2021-03-08T08:56:12.040" Score="2" ViewCount="791" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On his way through the kitchen he screwed up the pizza boxes and tried to force them into the stuffed bin, but they would not go so he left them standing in the corner. He shuffled the newspapers into a pile and his fingers slid across the cold surface of a photo. He picked it up and looked at it with dull eyes. Green. The boy, the young man was smiling in the garden, and &lt;strong&gt;the father was walking away&lt;/strong&gt;. ‘&lt;strong&gt;The blushing apricot, and woolly peach&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Dexter, ‘&lt;strong&gt;Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First of all, is &amp;quot;the father was walking away&amp;quot; metaphorical? Does it mean &amp;quot;He was at the edge of the frame?&amp;quot; Some pages earlier, when Vicki sees the photo, it is written:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The older man, Vicki saw, stood side-on, as if about to slip out of frame.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the phrase &amp;quot;The blushing apricot, and woolly peach,&amp;quot; does &amp;quot;The blushing apricot&amp;quot; refer to Dexter himself, and &amp;quot;woolly peach&amp;quot; refer to his father?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach&amp;quot; mean you should protect your photos and everything that belongs to you, otherwise every child may take it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or that you should not allow everybody see your photo?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;walls&amp;quot; here refer to photos? Or does it refer to your privacy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T05:40:29.417" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T05:40:29.417" Title="Meaning of &quot;The blushing apricot, and woolly peach. Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17905" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17904" CreationDate="2021-03-08T09:32:06.750" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The sentences you quote appear to be straightforwardly literal rather than metaphorical. &lt;em&gt;The father was walking away&lt;/em&gt; simply means that in the picture, the older man is walking while facing away from the child. &lt;em&gt;Side-on&lt;/em&gt; from Vicki's description means he's in profile. Yes, Vicki imagines that since the man is walking away from the child, he could keep moving until he is out of the picture frame. But again, this is not metaphorical, it is quite literal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blushing apricot and woolly peach&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;literally mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apricots and peaches grow against the walls of the orchard, and the branches are so heavily laden with these fruit that they hang low enough for a child to pluck them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apricots are &lt;em&gt;blushing&lt;/em&gt; because ripe apricots have pink spots on their orange skin. The peaches are &lt;em&gt;woolly&lt;/em&gt; because of their fuzz.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines are a quotation from a well-known poem, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50674/to-penshurst&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To Penshurst&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-jonson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ben Jonson&lt;/a&gt;. The poem describes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penshurst_Place&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Penshurst Place&lt;/a&gt;, the birthplace of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-sidney&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Sidney&lt;/a&gt;, and idealizes both its beauty and its residents. In Jonson's poem, the lines are literal: Penshurst's gardens are abundant with fruit which can be readily picked even by children. This abundance, Jonson implies, mirrors the wealth and generosity of the Sidney family, who are equally liberal in sharing their bounty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, Dexter's quoting Jonson simply comments on what he sees in the picture: a garden scene, presumably with fruit trees, and a child in that garden. The picture reminds Dexter of the lines from the poem, so he recites them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines do not appear to sustain the weight of the various metaphorical implications you are reading into them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There does not appear to be any metaphorical implication that the blushing apricot is Dexter himself, or that the wooly peach is his father.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hang on thy walls&lt;/em&gt; is not in imperative mood, it is simply declarative. That is, it merely describes the fruit: &amp;quot;Apricots and peaches hang on the walls.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There does not appear to be any suggestion that protecting one's photographs or one's privacy is at issue in this scene.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not read this novel, so perhaps the photograph does play a symbolic role in depicting the relationship between Dexter and his father; but the lines from &amp;quot;To Penshurst&amp;quot; cannot be read in the ways that you suggest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T09:41:09.967" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T09:41:09.967" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17906" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-08T19:51:43.463" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for source of a quote about being better not to give something than to take away. It's been many years, so I can't recall much more about the quote. I thought it would be from the book Shogun by James Clavell. It was oriented around a king deciding whether to reward princes and the idea that being a miser is better than giving something and then potentially needing to take it back later... Unfortunately, google searches aren't super helpful -- too many unrelated hits.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also seems like something that Machiavelli would have said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12338" LastEditorUserId="12338" LastEditDate="2021-03-08T20:21:23.160" LastActivityDate="2021-03-08T20:21:23.160" Title="Quote about being better not to give something than to take away" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;james-clavell&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17907" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-09T01:54:32.003" Score="5" ViewCount="113" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The butler did it&amp;quot; is a common trope indicating a hackneyed solution to a mystery. I have read several classic mysteries from the 1920s and earlier (Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, Sayers, etc.) but do not recall a single instance of the butler's actually being the criminal mastermind, let alone enough such stories to justify the phrase's use as a cliché. The one example I can think of, Agatha Christie's 1925 short story &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/The_Listerdale_Mystery_(short_story)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Listerdale Mystery&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; plays with the trope rather than using it straightforwardly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheButlerDidIt&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;TV Tropes&lt;/a&gt; claims that the idea of the butler as perp was already clichéd by 1928. But the page gives no little evidence for this. The page discusses two origins for the phrase, both dubious:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is often attributed to Mary Roberts Rinehardt's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.71058&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Door&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1930). But the page also says that the phrase does not actually occur in the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It is part of rule #20 in S. S. Van Dine's 1928 essay &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://gadetection.pbworks.com/w/page/7932401/Van%20Dine%27s%20Twenty%20Rules%20for%20Writing%20Detective%20Stories&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; But criminal butlers are not mentioned in that rule, nor anywhere else in the essay as far as I can see.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, TV Tropes treats the idea of &amp;quot;the butler did it&amp;quot; as cliché rather than discussing what led to its being seen as a cliché in the first place. &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+butler+did+it&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;case_insensitive=true&amp;amp;direct_url=t4%3B%2Cthe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20Butler%20Did%20It%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTHE%20BUTLER%20DID%20IT%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20Butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthe%20Butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0#t4%3B%2Cthe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bthe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20Butler%20Did%20It%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BTHE%20BUTLER%20DID%20IT%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BThe%20Butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bthe%20Butler%20did%20it%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Ngrams&lt;/a&gt; shows that the phrase was practically unknown before the 1920s and then jumped in usage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q1G5C.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/q1G5C.png&quot; alt=&quot;Google Ngram showing great increase in usage of phrase &amp;quot;the butler did it&amp;quot; after 1920. The phrase is unknown before then.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But what led to this increase in the phrase's use? &lt;strong&gt;What mystery books or stories from the early days of the genre had the butler as the perpetrator of the crime, leading to this plot device becoming a cliché?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: this is not off-topic as asking for a list, because I'm not asking for recommendations. This is more along the lines of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/search?q=earliest&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;What is the earliest example of X?&amp;quot; questions asked on this site before. The only difference is that I'm asking for a series of early examples rather than just one, because the sheer number of examples evidently led to this becoming an undesirable way to structure a mystery plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T02:07:03.197" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T10:25:10.180" Title="What classic mystery novels and stories led to &quot;the butler did it&quot; becoming a cliché?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17908" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17904" CreationDate="2021-03-09T02:30:28.103" Score="3" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The blushing apricot, and woolly peach. Hang on thy walls, that every&#xA;child may reach.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This presumably refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espalier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;espaliered&lt;/a&gt; fruit trees, which are trained to grow flat against a wall, tied to a trellis; the lowest branches would be low enough for a small child to reach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quoting Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Espalier as a technique seems to have started with the ancient Romans.&#xA;In the Middle Ages the Europeans refined it into an art. The practice&#xA;was popularly used in Europe to produce fruit inside the walls of a&#xA;typical castle courtyard without interfering with the open space and&#xA;to decorate solid walls by planting flattened trees near them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1212" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T02:30:28.103" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17909" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-09T04:19:37.647" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not able to understand William Ernest Henley's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://poets.org/poem/invictus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Invictus&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; properly, except the last two lines. Can someone explain in detail the meaning of this poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the night that covers me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black as the Pit from pole to pole,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I thank whatever gods may be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For my unconquerable soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fell clutch of circumstance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have not winced nor cried aloud.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Under the bludgeonings of chance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My head is bloody, but unbowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this place of wrath and tears&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Looms but the Horror of the shade,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet the menace of the years&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It matters not how strait the gate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How charged with punishments the scroll,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am the master of my fate:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am the captain of my soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12349" OwnerDisplayName="ajayramesh" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T05:49:06.377" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T06:36:45.170" Title="William Ernest Henley's &quot;Invictus&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;william-ernest-henley&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17911" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17909" CreationDate="2021-03-09T06:36:45.170" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Invictus&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;undefeated&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;unconquered.&amp;quot; The poem's narrator says that he is not daunted by the circumstances in which he finds himself. Here is a paraphrase.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of the night that covers me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Black as the Pit from pole to pole,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I thank whatever gods may be&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For my unconquerable soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker says that even though it's a very dark night, black as hell everywhere, he still is grateful to the gods for the strength of his soul. The night could be literal, but the fact that he's comparing to hell (&lt;em&gt;the pit&lt;/em&gt;) and saying it covers the entire earth (&lt;em&gt;from pole to pole&lt;/em&gt;) suggests that he is talking metaphorically about some dark situation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the fell clutch of circumstance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have not winced nor cried aloud.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Under the bludgeonings of chance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My head is bloody, but unbowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Despite the fact that he is in a dire plight, he has remained undaunted. &lt;em&gt;Fell clutch of circumstance&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;dire grasp of bad fortune.&lt;/em&gt; The word &lt;em&gt;chance&lt;/em&gt; also emphasizes that his circumstances are not deserved, but due to bad luck. Even though he has been wounded, he still hangs on to his dignity, not bowing his head to fate: &lt;em&gt;My head is bloody but unbowed&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Beyond this place of wrath and tears&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Looms but the Horror of the shade,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet the menace of the years&#xA;Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking past his immediate circumstances, he can see only death in his future. Nevertheless, despite the threat he is facing at this time, he is not afraid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It matters not how strait the gate,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How charged with punishments the scroll,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am the master of my fate:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I am the captain of my soul.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Strait&lt;/em&gt; means &amp;quot;narrow.&amp;quot; There's also an echo of &lt;em&gt;straits&lt;/em&gt; which metaphorically means &amp;quot;difficulties.&amp;quot; The &lt;em&gt;scroll&lt;/em&gt; that is &lt;em&gt;charged with punishments&lt;/em&gt; is the record of his destiny, which is full of tribulations. No matter how difficult it will be to escape these circumstances, he is still stronger than they are, because he still is &lt;em&gt;the master of [his] fate&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;the captain of [his] soul&lt;/em&gt;. That is, he has the ability to stand strong even when fate seems against him. He can still choose to be brave in the face of adversity and not concede defeat. In this way, he controls his fate rather than letting his fate control him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T06:36:45.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17912" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:26:29.563" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:26:29.563" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:26:29.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17913" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:26:29.563" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Villette&quot; (1853) by Charlotte Brontë. Use with [charlotte-bronte]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:45:42.243" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:45:42.243" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17914" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:28:51.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:28:51.233" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:28:51.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17915" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:28:51.233" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Lonely Man Full of Love' (2018) by Mauro Mevlud Martino. Use with [mauro-mevlud-martino]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T19:59:43.720" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T19:59:43.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17916" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:31:22.263" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:31:22.263" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:31:22.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17917" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:31:22.263" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 1994 novel &quot;The Land of Green Plums&quot; (German: Herztier) by Herta Müller. Use with [herta-muller] and [german-literature]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:45:47.727" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:45:47.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17918" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:35:02.850" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T15:35:02.850" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T15:35:02.850" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17919" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-09T15:35:02.850" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of British poet William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903) or his life as a writer. His best-known poem is &quot;Invictus&quot;. Having lost a leg to tuberculosis as a child, he served as the inspiration for the character of Long John Silver. " OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T20:00:17.277" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T20:00:17.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17920" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-09T16:53:40.167" Score="1" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, Harry was talking with his neighbour about his ill old father and the possibility of his death at anytime:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, I must go,” the neighbour said. “You’ll be sure to let me know if there’s anything I can do? But you say Sir Anthony’s not in immediate danger?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not immediate,” replied Harry. “But—any time. And, as &lt;strong&gt;he’s fidgety about not being left&lt;/strong&gt;, you’ll excuse me if I go back to him? If he seems a bit stronger tomorrow, I’ll tell him you’re home again, and no doubt you can see him when you look in. You’ll come again soon?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it have been &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;fidgety about being left&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; to show that he gets nervous when he has been left alone?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-09T17:05:57.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T10:26:32.217" Title="Shouldn't &quot;fidgety about not being left&quot; have been &quot;fidgety about being left&quot; in &quot;The Markenmore Mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17921" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17920" CreationDate="2021-03-09T17:04:40.707" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Both ways work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not being left [alone]&amp;quot; is what the father is fidgety about. He is fidgety about this &lt;em&gt;not happening&lt;/em&gt;. When he is &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; not left alone, he is fidgety. This communicates the same meaning, in perhaps a more complicated way, as &amp;quot;he's fidgety about being left [alone]&amp;quot;, where the father would be fidgety about this &lt;em&gt;happening&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-09T17:04:40.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17923" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6506" CreationDate="2021-03-10T04:12:35.390" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Pope was not saying that humans make their own morality, but that whatever is, simply is.  That what is right is right, and what is wrong, is wrong. We should open our eyes and look for Reality, &amp;quot;what ls&amp;quot;, instead of our own selfish wishes and fantasies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reflects one notion of his time, that the universe as it stands is the best world possible, the best &amp;quot;of all possible worlds&amp;quot;.  The way things work, the way GOD has created it, is the way it should be, and it is only our misunderstandings and flawed perceptions that cause us to think otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12344" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T04:12:35.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17925" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17920" CreationDate="2021-03-10T10:26:32.217" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fidgety about not being left&lt;/em&gt; in the sense that Harry is using it means something like &lt;em&gt;he nervously insists that he not be left alone&lt;/em&gt;. You are correct that this is an unusual way to describe Sir Anthony's feeling. It would be more typical to say &lt;em&gt;He's fidgeting at being left [alone]&lt;/em&gt;. But from Harry's point of view, his father would fidget and say something like &amp;quot;Don't leave me,&amp;quot; so the way in which he describes it is fine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's also a nuanced difference in meaning between the two phrasings. &lt;em&gt;Fidgety about not being left&lt;/em&gt; puts the emphasis on what Sir Anthony is insisting nervously upon: his not being left. &lt;em&gt;Fidgety about being left&lt;/em&gt; would put the emphasis on his feeling nervous when he is left. Harry's way of putting things emphasizes what Sir Anthony does and why, i.e., he fidgets because he doesn't want to be left. The other would foreground how Sir Anthony feels when he is alone: restless and nervous. We expect the latter phrasing, but the former is perfectly fine, if unusual, in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-10T10:26:32.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17926" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-10T13:30:59.323" Score="6" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Blake's lines of verse &amp;quot;Jerusalem&amp;quot;, which appear in the &amp;quot;Preface&amp;quot; to his poem &amp;quot;Milton&amp;quot;, were written c.1804 and first printed c.1808.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They also appear, but with the phrase &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; dark Satanic mills&amp;quot; (present tense) altered to &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;those&lt;/em&gt; dark Satanic mills&amp;quot; (by implication from context, past tense) in the well-known hymn for which the first musical score was written by Hubert Parry for &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_Right_Movement&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fight for Right&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, an organisation which sought to build support for the British state's war effort during WW1.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines had previously appeared in 1915 in &lt;em&gt;The Spirit of Man&lt;/em&gt;, an anthology of poetry and philosophy collected by the poet laureate Robert Bridges, dedicated to the monarch of Britain and similarly intended to boost support for the war. In the edition I have, the title page states that the anthology was &amp;quot;made&amp;quot; in 1915; the date of the &amp;quot;First Edition with India Paper&amp;quot; is given as January 1916; and no earlier edition printed on any other kind of paper is mentioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is known that it was Bridges who approached Parry and asked him to set the lines to music, that Parry wrote the music on 10 March 1916, and that &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/music/from-the-archive-blog/2016/mar/10/jerusalem-anthem-centenary-parry-1916&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the song was first performed publicly on 28 March 1916&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was expecting Bridges's anthology to contain the altered version of Blake's words. But in fact it doesn't. It has the words that Blake actually wrote: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;these&lt;/em&gt; dark Satanic mills&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Prior to the 28 March 1916 performance, although it could not have been before 10 March, the Curwen publishing house published sheet music containing both Parry's tune and the words for singing along to it. This had the altered word &amp;quot;those&amp;quot;, not Blake's original &amp;quot;these&amp;quot;, so the first appearance of the alteration was certainly no later than 1916 - for example it was not as late as Edward Elgar's rescoring of Parry's music for orchestra in 1922.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a record of who changed the words (or &amp;quot;asked&amp;quot; Parry to), when exactly they did it and in what exact circumstances, what aims they expressed, or any discussions they had about making the alteration?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8097" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T07:56:34.727" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T07:56:34.727" Title="When and how was the phrase &quot;these dark Satanic mills&quot; in Blake's &quot;Jerusalem&quot; first altered to &quot;those dark Satanic mills&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17927" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17928" CreationDate="2021-03-11T00:59:24.730" Score="1" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;I may have read this in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology somewhere in the mid 1990s. An up and coming starlet is about to head off on her honeymoon with her new beau when her ex-husband and former agent shows up, threatening to blackmail her for her more adult entertainment history if she doesn't pay him off, I think with an implication that he still considers himself to have marriage rights with her. His identifying trait is a lazy wink that I remember her referring to as making her feel sleazy. A scuffle ensues, perhaps involving the new husband, and the ex is killed, which leaves her in the awkward position that being found with a dead body will sink her career, so they decide to stash the body in the trunk of the car, hoping to dispose of it during their honeymoon. Unfortunately, they're stopped, I think by the police, and forced to open the trunk, revealing the body, whereupon the body performs the same lazy wink despite being dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T00:59:24.730" Title="Murder thriller short story where a starlet kills her former agent and husband, who compulsively winks in a &quot;sleazy&quot; manner" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;alfred-hitchcock&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17928" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17927" CreationDate="2021-03-11T00:59:24.730" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it. &amp;quot;Getting Rid of George&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/Robert_Arthur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert Arthur&lt;/a&gt;. The plot summary from the TV adaptation, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://the.hitchcock.zone/wiki/The_Alfred_Hitchcock_Hour_-_Good-Bye,_George&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Good-Bye, George&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Academy Award hopeful Lana Layne's past comes back to haunt her on the eve of her marriage. She was once known as Rosemary &amp;quot;Peaches&amp;quot; Cassidy and was married to an ex-convict named George. George thought she was dead, but has tracked her down. He wants to stay her husband and tells her that if they divorce, he will get half of everything she owns. Lana does want him as her husband but also does not want a divorce. She hits him on the head and kills him. Lana and her fiance Harry Lawrence decide to bury George's body during their honeymoon. They also try to keep the location of their honeymoon a secret. Unfortunately, a gossip columnist tracks them down to get an exclusive story about their honeymoon. She surprises them just as they unpack George's corpse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a copy of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/myfavoratesinsus0000unse/page/307/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Alfred Hitchcock presents My Favorites in Suspense&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; on the Internet Archive and confirmed it's a very similar story to the above, and what I remember. It's a bit more lurid, with her having formerly been part of a burlesque act with her husband. It's a &amp;quot;long, slow, obscenely knowing wink&amp;quot; that he does when revealing his identity, and at the end, rigor mortis causes his eye to open and close in &amp;quot;a lewd and knowing wink&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What got me there was a search for &lt;code&gt;&amp;quot;alfred hitchcock&amp;quot; starlet ex-husband wink&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="96" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T00:59:24.730" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17930" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-11T05:15:28.833" Score="1" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/levt101.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Third Level&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Jack Finney, does the third level in the Grand Central Station really exist or, is it just in Charley's imagination? Does Sam Wiener really go to 1894, or is the letter some sort of imagination of Charley?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12114" LastEditorUserId="12114" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T15:46:29.830" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T15:46:29.830" Title="In &quot;The Third Level&quot;, does the third level really exist or is it a mere hallucination?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;jack-finney&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17934" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-11T18:23:14.413" Score="0" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;We are learning about dystopian societies in my English 2, and I learned that dystopian societies have government control, meaning the government watches their citizens closely. Also, in dystopian societies there is a loss of individualism. Are these things in Harry Potter? Is there textual evidence for the Wizarding World being a dystopian society?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12272" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T18:29:00.680" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T18:29:00.680" Title="Is the Wizarding World a dystopian society?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17935" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-11T18:55:27.737" Score="6" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much as Virgil's &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; was for the Ancient Romans, or Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; for the Ancient Greeks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article has a source for this information but says nothing about when people started to describe &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; as Portugal's national epic. I checked the corresponding articles in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Lusiaden&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;German Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_lusiadas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Lusiades&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dutch Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, none of which provide a source for such a claim (if they mention it at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French Wikipedia article says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;À l’instar de l’&lt;em&gt;Iliade&lt;/em&gt; ou de l’&lt;em&gt;Odyssée&lt;/em&gt; pour la Grèce Antique ou l’&lt;em&gt;Énéide&lt;/em&gt; pour Rome, &lt;em&gt;Les Lusiades&lt;/em&gt; est une œuvre destinée à raconter et à glorifier la naissance et le destin de la nation et de l’Empire portugais.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, the epic describes the birth and the destiny of the Portuguese nation and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;empire&lt;/a&gt;, which explains why it would come to be regarded as the national epic. But did the epic gain this status soon after its publication or only much later, e.g. after much of the empire had already been lost and people looked back on it with nostalgia?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T18:55:27.737" Title="Since when do the Portuguese regard The Lusiads as their national epic?" Tags="&lt;reception&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17936" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17937" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German poet, translator and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767 – 1845) or his life as a writer. He contributed to the Schlegel-Tieck translation of Shakespeare's plays, published sonnets, ballads and plays, and several volumes of criticism. Use this tag with [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" LastActivityDate="2021-03-11T19:30:26.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17940" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14114" CreationDate="2021-03-12T00:35:10.930" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The legal status of the Algerian &amp;quot;Arabs&amp;quot;, as they are called in &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt;, in the 1930s was the result of various laws, decrees and &lt;em&gt;ordonnances&lt;/em&gt; that had come into force since the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Ordonnance royale du 24 février 1834&lt;/em&gt; (Royal ordonnace of 24 February 1834) had declared Algeria as annexed to France; as a consequence, the indigenous Muslims and Jews became French subjects, however, without enjoying the rights of French citizenship (Weil: 95). Starting in 1830, the French introduced punishments for Muslims that did not exist in French law, such as the sequestering of property (Weil: 96). By 1874, there was a list of 27 &lt;em&gt;infractions&lt;/em&gt; that applied only to native Algerians; this list was further expanded in 1876, 1877 and 1881 and included meetings without permission, leaving the district without a travel permit, refusing to accept French mony and disrespectful acts (Weil: 96; &amp;quot;Le code de l'indigénat ...&amp;quot;, 2006; Merle, 2005). There were also collective punishments in the case of setting fire to a forest (Weil: 96). In mixed districts (&amp;quot;communes mixtes&amp;quot;), punishments were applied by the colonial administrator, i.e. by the executive instead of the judiciary branch of government, which constituted a direct violation of French law (Merle, 2005). (In the other communities, the &lt;em&gt;juge de paix&lt;/em&gt; or justice of the peace spoke the verdicts. See Weil: 96). The executive branch enjoyed a lot of freedom for its verdicts; in addition, a simple accusation could suffice for a fine or a conviction (Merle, 2005). The following anecdotes illustrates the arbitrariness of punishments: when in 1909, a legislator wanted to propose a law abolishing administrative internment, he was told that it was not possible to propose a law that would repeal a text that did not exist (Thénault, 2012).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The law of 28 June 1881 consolidated a number of legal practices that already existed, such as power of administrators to condemn native Algerians in mixed districts. This is what became known as the &lt;em&gt;Code de l'indigénat&lt;/em&gt; (roughly &amp;quot;civil code for the indigenous); it came down to a sort of slavery for indigenous populations (&amp;quot;Le code de l'indigénat ...&amp;quot;, 2006). Strictly speaking, the 1881 law was only temporary, i.e. valid for seven years, but the duration of its validity was extended again and again, until well into the 20th century. (It was also gradually adopted in other French colonies. See Funes, 2019).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By 1914, these administrators had pronounced around 20,000 convictions; between 1890 and 1914, around 600,000 days of forced labour had been inflicted by administrators on native Algerians (Thénault 2012). Since more than 100,000 native Algerians served in the French army during the First World War, the French state owed them some sort of compensation. In 1919, 400,000 native Algerians, all men, were exonerated from the application of most of the  &lt;em&gt;indigénat&lt;/em&gt; penal code and the administrators lost the power to pronounce verdicts by 1927. However, the &lt;em&gt;indigénat&lt;/em&gt; legal code did not disappear until the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Committee_of_National_Liberation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French Committee of National Liberation&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;ordonnance&lt;/em&gt; of 7 March 1944 (Thénault).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since citizenship determined whether one was subjected to the &lt;em&gt;Code de l'indigénat&lt;/em&gt; or not, the access to full French citizenship is relevant to penal code. The sénatus-consulte of 14 July 1865 determined the conditions under which indigenous Muslims (Article 1), Algerian Jews (Article 2) and foreigners (article 3) can become French citizens through a process called &amp;quot;naturalisation&amp;quot; (as if Algerian Muslims and Jews weren't actually French subjects but foreigners). At the time, there were 3 million Muslims, 30,000 Jews and 250,000 foreigners in Algeria. However, on 24 October 1870 (some time after Emperor Napoleon III had been captured in the Franco-Prussian War) the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_National_Defense&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Government of National Defense&lt;/a&gt; grants the French nationality to the Algerian Jews (Weil: 97–98; see also the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cr%C3%A9mieux_Decree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Crémieux Decree&lt;/a&gt;). The sénatus-consulte of 1865 remained applicable to Muslims who wanted to acquire French citizenship. Few benefited from it. One reason is that the requirements included respecting the French &lt;em&gt;Code civil&lt;/em&gt; and thereby abandoning five Muslim practices that were incompatible with it (for example, polygamy; see Weil: 100). Even a conversion to Catholicism did necessarily help; in fact, the appellate court of Algiers ruled in 1903 that the term &amp;quot;musulman&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Muslim&amp;quot;) was not a purely religious term but essentially an ethnic one, so the &lt;em&gt;indigénat&lt;/em&gt; rules still applied to Muslims who had converted to Catholicism (Weil: 101). In addition, the colonial administrators were opposed to the naturalisation of Muslims, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Ferry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jules Ferry&lt;/a&gt; noted in 1892 and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albin_Rozet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albin Rozet&lt;/a&gt; in 1913 (Weil: 103). Between 1865 and 1915, only 2,396 Algerian Muslims were naturalised (Weil: 104). The law of 4 February 1919 created a new naturalisation procedure; as a result, 1,204 Algerians Muslims were naturalised between 1919 and 1930, which wasn't much of an improvement (Weil: 106).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was Albert Camus aware of the social and legal inequality of the &amp;quot;Arabs&amp;quot; in Algeria? Evidence from the years before the publication of &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt; (1942) shows that he was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1936, the proposed law Blum-Viollette would have granted suffrage to 20.000 Arabs but it met with strong resistance among the Pieds-Noirs and came to nothing. According to Spiquel (2009), Camus had taken the initiative for a &amp;quot;Manifesto by Algerian intellectuals in favour of the proposed law Viollette&amp;quot;. (Vircondelet does not mention this manifesto; see pages 206 and 300.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Between 5 and 15 June 1939, Camus published a series of articles in &lt;em&gt;Alger républicain&lt;/em&gt; about the poverty and misery in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabylia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kabylia&lt;/a&gt; (Vircondelet: 239; Spiquel 2009). Earlier that year, he had also published various articles about the repression against Algerian nationalists and the demands of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_People%27s_Party&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Algerian People's Party&lt;/a&gt; (Spiquel 2009). Several years later, in May 1945, Camus published another series of six articles about Kabylia and other areas of Algeria, this time for the resistance publication &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_(French_Resistance)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Combat&lt;/a&gt;. This was another series in which he expossed the abuses of colonialism (paradoxically perhaps, without demanding the end of French colonialism) (Vircondelet: 295; Spiquel 2009). In 1958, Camus collected political publications about Algeria in the volume &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/GALLIMARD/Blanche/Actuelles3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;* Actuelles. Écrits politiques, tome III : Chroniques algériennes 1939-1958*&lt;/a&gt;, published by Gallimard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;El Aziz Kessous, one of Camus's friends, reported an anecdote from 1934 or 1935, according to which a policeman dragged an Algerian to the police station with one end of a rope around the man's legs and the other end tied to the saddle on the policeman's horse. Camus later used this as a source of inspiration for his novella &lt;em&gt;L'Hôte&lt;/em&gt; (inluded in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_and_the_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Exil et le royaume&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1957). (&lt;em&gt;Théâtre, récits, nouvelles&lt;/em&gt;, 1967: 2048–2049; Vircondelet: 402–403; in Vircondelet's version, the man was a trade unionist; the anecdote does not say what the Algerian was accused or suspected of.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, Agnès Spiquel (2012) notes that in &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt; Meursault kills an &amp;quot;Arab&amp;quot;, whereas in &lt;em&gt;La Mort heureuse&lt;/em&gt;, written a few years earlier, Mersault kills a European. She adds,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;s’il s’était agi simplement de faire courir au meurtrier le risque de la peine de mort, il aurait été plus plausible que la victime fût un Européen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if it was simply about making the murderer risk capital punishment, it would have been more plausible if the victim [in &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt;] had been a European.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also suggests that it is easier for a French citizen to get away with murdering an Algerian Muslim than with murdering another Frenchman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: The French-language sources I consulted (see below) don't mention the Vichy regime as making a difference with regard to the &lt;em&gt;Code de l'indigénat&lt;/em&gt;. The novel &lt;em&gt;L'Étranger&lt;/em&gt; itself does not mention that a war is going on, even though there would have been a perfect opportunity to mention it in the passsage in which Meursault tells us his boss offered him a position in Paris. Either Camus considered the war irrelevant to the novel or he imagened it was set in a period before the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;[anonymous]: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/le-code-de-l-indigenat-dans-l.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le code de l'indigénat dans l'Algérie coloniale&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 13.02.2006.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Camus, Albert: &lt;em&gt;Théâtre, récits, nouvelles&lt;/em&gt;. Préface par Jean Grenier. Textes établis et annotés par Roger Quilliot. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sénat (Second Empire): &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/S%C3%A9natus-consulte_du_14_juillet_1865_sur_l%27%C3%A9tat_des_personnes_et_la_naturalisation_en_Alg%C3%A9rie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sénatus-consulte du 14 juillet 1865 sur l'état des personnes et la naturalisation en Algérie&lt;/a&gt;, Wikisource.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;République française (IIIe République): &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Loi_du_28_juin_1881_qui_conf%C3%A8re_aux_administrateurs_des_communes_mixtes_en_territoire_civil_la_r%C3%A9pression,_par_voie_disciplinaire,_des_infractions_sp%C3%A9ciales_%C3%A0_l%27indig%C3%A9nat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loi du 28 juin 1881 qui confère aux administrateurs des communes mixtes en territoire civil la répression, par voie disciplinaire, des infractions spéciales à l'indigénat&lt;/a&gt;. Wikisource.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;République française (IIIe République): &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k214125m/f777.image&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Loi sur la nationalité du 26 juin 1889&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Bulletin des lois de la république française&lt;/em&gt;, N° 1247 (on Gallica).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Funes, Nathalie: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nouvelobs.com/monde/afrique/20190221.OBS0653/code-de-l-indigenat-dans-les-colonies-un-siecle-de-repression.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Code de l'indigénat dans les colonies : un siècle de répression*&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;L'Obs&lt;/em&gt;, 21.02.2019.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sahia Cherchari, Mohamed: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-droit-constitutionnel-2004-4-page-741.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Indigènes et citoyens ou l'impossible universalisation du suffrage&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Revue française de droit constitutionnel&lt;/em&gt;, 2004/4 (n° 60).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marçot, Jean-Louis: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/Jean-Louis-Marcot-comment-est-nee.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Comment est née l’Algérie française&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 2012.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Merle, Isabelle: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/un-code-pour-les-indigenes.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Un code pour les indigènes&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;L’Histoire&lt;/em&gt;, October 2005; republished on the website Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spiquel, Agnès: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/Albert-Camus-et-l-Algerie-par.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Albert Camus et l'Algérie*&lt;/a&gt;, Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 22.11.2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spiquel, Agnès: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/Albert-Camus-parle-des-Arabes-par.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Albert Camus parle des Arabes&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 2012.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spire, Alexis: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.cairn.info/revue-geneses-2003-4-page-48.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Semblables et pourtant différents. La citoyenneté paradoxale des « Français musulmans d'Algérie » en métropole&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Genèses&lt;/em&gt;, 2003/4 (no53).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sprecher, Jean: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/Le-statut-de-l-Algerie-et-de-ses.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le statut de l’Algérie et de ses habitants&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale, 2003.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Surkis, Judith: &lt;a href=&quot;https://journals.openedition.org/rh19/4041&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Propriété, polygamie et statut personnel en Algérie coloniale, 1830-1873&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle&lt;/em&gt;, 41 (2001).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Thénault, Sylvie: &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/le-regime-penal-de-l-indigenat-dans-l-Algerie-coloniale-par-Sylvie-Thenault.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le régime pénal de l’indigénat dans l’Algérie coloniale&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. Republished from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.senat.fr/ga/ga105/ga1051.html#toc10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le régime pénal de l'indigénat algérien, au coeur de la discrimination coloniale&amp;quot; on the website of the French senate, 2021&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vircondelet, Alain: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fayard.fr/pluriel/albert-camus-fils-dalger-9782818503256&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Albert Camus, fils d'Alger&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Fayard / Pluriel, 2013.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The website &lt;a href=&quot;https://histoirecoloniale.net/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Histoire coloniale et postcoloniale&lt;/a&gt;, which hosts several of the above sources, was created and maintained by a group of French historians.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T00:35:10.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17941" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:44:15.863" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T05:44:15.863" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T05:44:15.863" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17942" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:44:15.863" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Canadian Italian Turkish writer Mauro Mevlud Martino (1953–) or his life as a writer. He believes in a diverse world with different approaches to life which nevertheless originate from the same source. He is also active in Turkish film and television." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T08:45:10.307" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T08:45:10.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17943" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:49:34.277" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T05:49:34.277" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T05:49:34.277" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17944" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:49:34.277" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of English journalist and writer J. S. Fletcher (1863–1935) or his life as a writer. A contemporary of Conan Doyle, he is one of the most prolific English authors of detective fiction, with many novels starring Ronald Camberwell." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T08:43:37.420" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T08:43:37.420" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17945" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:51:56.460" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T05:51:56.460" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T05:51:56.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17946" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T05:51:56.460" Score="0" Body="Questions about the mystery novel &quot;The Markenmore Mystery&quot; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher. Use with [j-s-fletcher]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T08:45:20.337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T08:45:20.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17947" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:01:43.193" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T06:01:43.193" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T06:01:43.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17948" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:01:43.193" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American author Walter Braden &quot;Jack&quot; Finney (1911–1995) or his life as a writer. He is best known for his science fiction (&quot;The Body Snatchers&quot;) and thrillers, and has written novels, short stories and plays.&#xD;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T09:45:53.657" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T09:45:53.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17949" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:06:14.070" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T06:06:14.070" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T06:06:14.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17950" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:06:14.070" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Portuguese poet Luís Vaz de Camões (1524 or 1525–1580), or his life as a writer. He is considered the greatest Portuguese-language poet, and his best-known work, &quot;Os Lusíadas&quot; (&quot;The Lusiads&quot;), is held as Portuguese's national epic. Use with [portuguese-literature]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T08:44:01.623" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T08:44:01.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17951" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:08:22.197" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T06:08:22.197" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T06:08:22.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17952" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-12T06:08:22.197" Score="0" Body="Questions about the epic poem &quot;Os Lusíadas&quot;/&quot;The Lusiads&quot; (1572), considered Portuguese's national epic, written by Luís Vaz de Camões. The poem celebrates Vasco da Gama's discovery of a sea route to India. Use with [luis-vaz-de-camoes] and [portuguese-literature]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T09:19:25.993" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T09:19:25.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17954" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-12T14:30:34.007" Score="5" ViewCount="96" Body="&lt;p&gt;From his farewell to his wife Andromache in Book VI to the splendid description of his funeral with the which the epic concludes, Hector exhibits many of the hallmarks of the archetypal protagonist of a modern novel or comedy: he has a legitimate, productive relationship with Andromache, in contrast to that of Paris and Helen; his fatal engagement with Achilles despite knowing the foregone conclusion is one of many incidents that attest to his immense courage and bravery; even the rashness that characterises his slights of wise Polydamas' augury are redeemed by penitent reflections such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Shall proud Polydamas before the gate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Proclaim, his counsels are obey’d too late,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Which timely follow’d but the former night,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What numbers had been saved by Hector’s flight?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That wise advice rejected with disdain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I feel my folly in my people slain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt; Alexander Pope (1715). &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.org/files/6130/6130-h/6130-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Iliad of Homer&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Book XVIII.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, the epic begins with &amp;quot;Achilles' rage&amp;quot;, and indeed rage, sulk, and sorrow all but sum up the emotions that animate Achilles' acts throughout, at times to such an extent as to incur divine displeasure. At other times, it is largely his sheer proficiency in warfare and the entreaties of Thetis that recommend him to the gods.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it appears to me that in designating a principal character considered in terms of importance to the story, let alone merit, Achilles is usually  preferred to Hector. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iliad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, for example, contains no mention of Hector in its introduction. The film &lt;em&gt;Troy&lt;/em&gt; could perhaps serve as an example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rather than attempting to encompass every opinion ever expressed about the subject, the answer should reference a few arbitrarily chosen examples written by well-known authors, such as may be expressed in discussions of the characters in prefaces to translations, or in (parts of) poems that may be entitled &lt;em&gt;An Ode to Hector&lt;/em&gt;, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T12:46:08.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T15:56:46.570" Title="Has any writer claimed that Hector, not Achilles, is the true hero of the Iliad?" Tags="&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;homer&gt;&lt;the-iliad&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17955" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-12T15:12:07.457" Score="1" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his 1PM radio broadcast on 12 May 1926, John Reith, managing director of the BBC, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/nick-robinson-s-battle-for-the-airwaves&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recited William Blake's &amp;quot;Jerusalem&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; to celebrate the end of the General Strike which had lasted for nine days and which the BBC had opposed throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which version did he use - the one with Blake's original words &amp;quot;these dark Satanic mills&amp;quot;, or the one with the altered words &amp;quot;those dark Satanic mills&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This information is not included in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/strike/id/349/rec/339&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;summary of that broadcast&lt;/a&gt; which is available in Warwick University's collection.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/17926/when-and-how-was-the-phrase-these-dark-satanic-mills-in-blakes-jerusalem-fi&quot;&gt;another question&lt;/a&gt; which asks about the first usage of the altered words.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8097" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T15:16:14.113" LastActivityDate="2021-03-12T15:16:14.113" Title="Which version of William Blake's &quot;Jerusalem&quot; did John Reith recite to celebrate the end of the General Strike?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17956" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18013" CreationDate="2021-03-12T15:45:58.067" Score="4" ViewCount="141" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read most of Brian Jacques's &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; books in the 2000s, and one of the things I always noticed was how seemingly every book has at least one major character die: for example,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Piknim in &lt;em&gt;The Pearls of Lutra&lt;/em&gt;, Finnbarr Galedeep in &lt;em&gt;The Bellmaker&lt;/em&gt;, Skarlath in &lt;em&gt;Outcast of Redwall&lt;/em&gt;, Rose in &lt;em&gt;Martin the Warrior&lt;/em&gt;, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Am I right in saying that every single &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; book includes the death of a major character?&lt;/strong&gt; Specifically I mean, not an antagonistic character like a vermin chief, but one of the &amp;quot;good&amp;quot; characters, either one of the main protagonists or one of their sidekicks/confidant(e)s/close friends - someone that readers could grieve for. I remember thinking that this seemed like a deliberate choice on the part of the author, perhaps to add pathos to his stories, and would be interested to get a confirmation that it was indeed a consistent pattern throughout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T00:49:52.933" Title="Do ALL of the Redwall books include the death of a major character?" Tags="&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17957" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17959" CreationDate="2021-03-12T18:54:19.157" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dexter found, in a magazine, a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments. Eye-lines: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father’s hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother’s, and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn: they have just taken a step. Tennyson’s hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife’s face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman’s dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father’s &lt;strong&gt;boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dose &amp;quot;drama&amp;quot; in this phrase mean &amp;quot;the way his parents are looking&amp;quot;? Is drama here metaphorical; does the whole sentence mean &amp;quot;It is like that the boy is looking at the drama that his parent are playing&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-12T19:07:21.567" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T05:51:22.327" Title="Meaning of &quot;the boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17959" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17957" CreationDate="2021-03-13T05:45:16.640" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The photograph is this one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OM1oY.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/OM1oY.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Photograph of Alfred Tennyson with his family. The photo shows four individuals standing in a row on a lawn in front of an old ivy-covered house. Tennyson and his wife Emily are flanked by their sons Hallam and Lionel. Emily's face is turned toward Alfred. Hallam is seen in profile, looking up at his parents' faces.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hallam is looking up at his parents' faces as though he is trying to understand what their expressions convey. He is thus like a spectator watching the actors in a drama. That is why Garner describes him as the &lt;strong&gt;boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents’ faces.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T05:51:22.327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T05:51:22.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17960" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17961" CreationDate="2021-03-13T06:08:51.743" Score="6" ViewCount="307" Body="&lt;p&gt;While doing some research for an answer, I discovered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Redwall_Books&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/a&gt; book &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Marlfox&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. At the end of the book, there is a meta-note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Curtain!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This narrative has been edited by Florian Dugglewoof Wilffachop, Actor Manager Impresario. Who insists that the entire tale is a drama, which he will be later performing as a play, hence the three parts being named as acts rather than books. We crave your indulgence for this deviation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... did anything in the book actually occur? I'm inclined to believe that it did, and only small details were changed - otherwise why would this be a book released as part of the series? The &amp;quot;play&amp;quot; bit would then just be a framing device to tell a true story. However, not having access to the book (or many other &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; novels) I can't tell for sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any textual evidence, from &lt;strong&gt;other books&lt;/strong&gt; (assuming that perhaps &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt; can't be trusted), that the events in &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt; occurred? Do any other &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; books refer to events (preferably multiple events) that happened in &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt; as fact?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T06:46:26.610" Title="Is there evidence that &quot;Marlfox&quot; actually occurred?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17961" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17960" CreationDate="2021-03-13T06:46:26.610" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yes, &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt; is a solid part of the Redwall chronology.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the (chronologically) next book, &lt;em&gt;The Taggerung&lt;/em&gt;, one subplot of the story revolves around a few Abbey creatures deciphering messages left by the late Abbess Songbreeze, a.k.a. Song, one of the main protagonists of &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;. She was an old friend of Cregga (a recurring character through so many Redwall stories thanks to her great age) and daughter of Janglur Swifteye, just as in &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Badgermum knew. &amp;quot;The Abbess's real name was Songbreeze. Her sign was the S with breezes blowing through it. Can you see properly, Mhera? The light in here means nothing to me. Gundil, run and fetch a lantern, please. Hurry!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Clearing the tray from the table, they placed both lantern and scroll upon it. Cregga felt the seal with her sensitive paws. It had stuck to both scroll and ribbon.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;What a pity to break this lovely thing. I would have liked to keep it, as a memento of my old friend Abbess Songbreeze.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I, Song, daughter of Janglur Swifteye and Mother Abbess of Redwall, do leave these thoughts of mine to be read by the creature who is chosen to rule the Abbey in my stead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The note at the end of &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt; seems to be a purely stylistic addition. Many of the &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; books are told as &amp;quot;stories&amp;quot; in-universe with some framing device, such as &lt;em&gt;The Bellmaker&lt;/em&gt; narrated by two old Abbeybeasts in the frame story who turn out to be young characters in the main story. In this one, the conceit is that Florian turned a (true) story into a play, which is in keeping with his character. It doesn't mean that he created the story as fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T06:46:26.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17962" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T10:04:33.740" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both The Kid and Blevins are not evil but at the same time extremely dangerous young men (of roughly the same age) on their own due to the death of their fathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems pretty likely that if Blevins had been transported to the less-civilized time of almost exactly a century before the time of &lt;em&gt;All the Pretty Horses&lt;/em&gt; (1840s vs 1940s) he might have ended up in a group like Glantons. The Kid was murderous, even before joining Glanton and Blevins also showed the same quick temper and murderousness in roughly the same part of the world where The Kid ended up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would say that The Kid was much more reserved and self-contained than Blevins but he lived in a time when that was more necessary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Blevins in All the Pretty Horses the modern-day version of Blood Meridian's The Kid?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="5052" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T16:02:34.663" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T16:02:34.663" Title="Is Blevins in All the Pretty Horses the modern-day version of Blood Meridian's The Kid?" Tags="&lt;cormac-mccarthy&gt;&lt;blood-meridian&gt;&lt;all-the-pretty-horses&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17963" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17483" CreationDate="2021-03-13T13:18:14.240" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR: you're getting the wrong meaning of &amp;quot;obscure&amp;quot;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be assuming that &amp;quot;obscure&amp;quot; means something like &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;difficult to understand&amp;quot;, but the more common (in my experience) meaning of the word is something more like &amp;quot;unknown&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;not famous&amp;quot;. Indeed, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/obscure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cambridge English Dictionary&lt;/a&gt; lists two meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obscure &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt; (NOT KNOWN)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;not known to many people:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;an obscure island in the Pacific&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;an obscure 12th-century mystic&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;obscure &lt;em&gt;adjective&lt;/em&gt; (NOT CLEAR)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;not clear and difficult to understand or see:&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Official policy has changed, for reasons that remain obscure.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His answers were obscure and confusing.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes more sense in terms of the character of Jude: he spends so much time trying to enter into one of the colleges of &lt;s&gt;Oxford&lt;/s&gt; Christminster, to achieve an education, to study theology, even to &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/5592/17&quot;&gt;become an academic clergyman&lt;/a&gt;, but in the end he remains a stonemason and labourer, his &lt;em&gt;obscurity&lt;/em&gt; in the world upper-class academia guaranteeing his rejection from every college he approaches. In the end he dies unknown, unheard of, without qualifications, none of his dreams achieved - in a word, in &lt;strong&gt;obscurity&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's even one passage in the story where the word &amp;quot;obscure&amp;quot; is used by Jude himself, in reference to his and Sue's divorces. It's a throwaway usage of the word, not hugely significant, but it emphasises the point that poor people such as they are considered &amp;quot;obscure&amp;quot; by society, not worth paying much attention to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same concluding incident in Jude’s suit against Arabella had occurred about a month or two earlier. Both cases had been too insignificant to be reported in the papers, further than by name in a long list of other undefended cases.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“One thing is certain, that however the decree may be brought about, a marriage is dissolved when it is dissolved. There is this advantage in being poor obscure people like us—that these things are done for us in a rough and ready fashion. It was the same with me and Arabella. I was afraid her criminal second marriage would have been discovered, and she punished; but nobody took any interest in her—nobody inquired, nobody suspected it. If we’d been patented nobilities we should have had infinite trouble, and days and weeks would have been spent in investigations.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T13:18:14.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17964" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T15:44:30.443" Score="3" ViewCount="140" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an English translation of the &lt;em&gt;Onomasticon&lt;/em&gt; by Julius Pollux of Naucratis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12011" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T15:49:12.023" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T16:50:32.947" Title="Translation of Onomasticon by Julius Pollux of Naucratis" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;julius-pollux&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17965" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17964" CreationDate="2021-03-13T16:11:28.027" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently it exists, but you might have a hard job finding a copy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.worldcat.org/title/onomastikon-iouliou-poludeukou-the-onomasticon-of-julius-pollux-an-introduction-to-translation/oclc/37870057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WorldCat&lt;/a&gt; has an entry with the following description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Onomastikon Iouliou Poludeukou = the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux : an introduction to translation&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Author:   Julius Pollux; Leland A Hall&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Publisher:    1960.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Edition/Format:    Manuscript  Archival Material : English&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With notes which seem to confirm that it's an English translation (in case you might think the &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; above is an archiver's error):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Prepared as an Honors Thesis for the Department of English, University of Oregon ... May 15, 1960.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Typescript (carbon copy)--with handwritten corrections.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Translation of various sections of the Onomastikon.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;The translation has been made from the Lexicographi Graeci series, volumes IX and X, edited by Eric Bethe (Leipzig, 1932).&amp;quot;--Page iv.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, the manuscript is &lt;a href=&quot;https://alliance-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo-explore/search?tab=default_tab&amp;amp;search_scope=everything&amp;amp;vid=UO&amp;amp;fn=search&amp;amp;query=lsr02,contains,37870057&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;available to borrow from University of Oregon libraries&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I tried to find a Leland Hall who studied in the University of Oregon, and came across &lt;a href=&quot;https://en-gb.facebook.com/leland.hall.4019&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this fellow&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Studied at University of Oregon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;School year 1960&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a Facebook account to see any more info about him, but it's possible he might respond to an interested reader about his work of sixty years ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original &lt;a href=&quot;https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0542.tlg001.1st1K-grc1:2.157-2.158/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Greek text&lt;/a&gt;, as well as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10314556_00001.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Latin translation&lt;/a&gt;, are readily available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-13T16:50:32.947" LastActivityDate="2021-03-13T16:50:32.947" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17966" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T17:32:33.937" Score="3" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Inkdeath&lt;/em&gt;, the third book in the &lt;em&gt;Inkheart&lt;/em&gt; trilogy by Cornelia Funke, Resa uses seeds that turn the user into an animal. In Resa's case, she turns into a swift:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was easy to fly, so easy. The skill of it came with the body, with every feather and every delicate bone. For the seeds had turned Resa into a bird. The transformation caused painful spasms, which had terrified Lazaro the Strong Man, but she hadn't turned into a magpie like Mortola. &amp;quot;A swift!&amp;quot; the Strong Man had whispered when she flew to his hand, dizzy to find everything suddenly much larger.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inkdeath&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 61: &amp;quot;Clothed and Unclothed&amp;quot;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Inkheart&lt;/em&gt;, the animal that the user of the seeds turns into reflects the user; for instance, Mortola turned into a magpie, and apparently a boy that Mortola experimented on turned into a dog. How does the fact that Resa turned into a swift reflect on Resa's character?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T22:45:17.823" Title="How does Resa becoming a swift reflect on her character in &quot;Inkdeath&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;inkheart&gt;&lt;cornelia-funke&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17968" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-13T23:28:47.687" Score="5" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia describes &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem_and_Zin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a Kurdish classic love story written down in 1692 (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, it was written down roughly two-and-a-half centuries after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. With this in mind, it may seem silly to ask when the &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt; was first printed. However, its author &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Khani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ahmad Khani&lt;/a&gt; lived in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do%C4%9Fubayaz%C4%B1t&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Doğubayazıt&lt;/a&gt; in what is now &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%C4%9Fr%C4%B1_Province&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ağrı Province&lt;/a&gt;, an area that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_Iran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Safavid Empire&lt;/a&gt; lost to the Ottomans after the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Chaldiran&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Battle of Chaldiran&lt;/a&gt; in 1514. A few decades earlier, in &lt;strong&gt;1483&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press#Ottoman_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sultan Bayezid II had &lt;strong&gt;prohibited printing in Arabic script in the Ottoman empire&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; on penalty of death. Printing in &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ausbreitung_des_Buchdrucks#Naher_Osten&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;other scripts, such as Greek and Armenian&lt;/a&gt;, was still allowed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I am not mistaken, Kurdish (or the Kurdish languages) was written in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdish_alphabets#Sorani_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sorani alphabet&lt;/a&gt; at the time. The Sorani alphabet is derived from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_alphabet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Persian alphabet&lt;/a&gt;, which is itself derived from Arabic script. Based on this, I assume that the prohibition legislated by Sultan Bayezid II also applied to &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_press#Ottoman_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; points out that it wasn't until 1727 that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sultan Achmed III gave his permission for the establishment of the first legal print house for printing secular works by Muslims in Arabic script (Islamic religious publications still remained forbidden), but printing activities did not really take off until the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, it is far from obvious that &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt; would have appeared in print before 1727, or even before the beginning of the 19th century. So when was the work first printed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T20:07:01.360" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T11:20:53.457" Title="When was Mem and Zin / Mam û Zîn first printed?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17969" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17970" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'Republic' or 'Politeia', a Socratic dialogue by Plato written around 375 BC. Use with the tags [plato] and [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T01:46:51.113" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17972" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17973" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature which were originally produced in Kurmanji, the northernmost and most widely spoken of the Kurdish languages. For stories in other Kurdish languages, use instead [kurdish-sorani-literature] etc." OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T06:28:29.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17974" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T07:15:53.600" Score="10" ViewCount="1663" Body="&lt;p&gt;Maya Angelou's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/they-went-home/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;They Went Home&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; opens like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They went home and told their wives,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;that never once in all their lives,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;had they known a girl like me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But... They went home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end of the second verse also ends &amp;quot;But... They went home&amp;quot;, and the third ends &amp;quot;But...&amp;quot;, clearly hinting the same thing - they went home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean &amp;quot;they went home&amp;quot;, though? What's the significance that these &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; obviously think of the narrator as something special, but go home? What's this implying?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T03:20:30.513" Title="What does &quot;But... They went home&quot; mean in Maya Angelou's &quot;They Went Home&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;maya-angelou&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17975" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T07:23:04.213" Score="3" ViewCount="143" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brian Jacques's Redwall stories contain a huge number of songs: marching songs, drinking songs, campfire songs, feast songs, all of them different and none repeated from one book to another (as far as I can remember). And they're not simple or hastily written: they're &lt;em&gt;good&lt;/em&gt; songs, always fitting to the occasion in the story, rhyme and rhythm that make sense, some of them long with many verses, pleasing to the ear, and &lt;em&gt;memorable&lt;/em&gt;. It must be over a decade since I touched &lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;, but I can still recite &amp;quot;Seven Seasons Gone&amp;quot; word for word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did the author have any kind of inspiration, basing his songs on specific real-world ones?&lt;/strong&gt; Obviously they're not direct transcriptions of real songs, since many of them include references to things or people specific to the Redwall world, but they might still be strongly based on songs Jacques heard in real life, maybe during his time as a sailor. If they're truly original and penned from scratch by Jacques himself, then he deserves credit as a poet/lyricist as well as a novelist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T16:55:49.270" Title="Were all the Redwall songs created by Brian Jacques, or based on some real songs?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17976" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17974" CreationDate="2021-03-14T07:42:43.870" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;The speaker in the poem is a single woman who entertains married men. Comparing her position as &amp;quot;the other woman&amp;quot; to the men's domestic life, the speaker imagines that they probably praise her to their wives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This praise could be the men's justification for their affair, claiming that they were carried away by the speaker's charms and also denigrating their wives' housekeeping in comparison to hers:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They said my house was licking clean,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;no word I spoke was ever mean,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I had an air of mystery,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But... They went home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Alternatively, they might not be admitting to the affair but just praising the speaker as a double bluff to deflect suspicion. In either case, while the men are happy to have a fling with her, they ultimately return to their wives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;they liked my smile, my wit, my hips,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;they'd spend one night, or two or three.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is a commentary on the asymmetrical power relations between the sexes. On the one hand, as &amp;quot;the other woman,&amp;quot; the speaker has no claim on the men: &amp;quot;They went home.&amp;quot; On the other hand, the wives they go home to either have no idea that their husbands are breaking their marriage vows, or have to deal with the knowledge that their husbands find them inadequate and the fallout of the affair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shift in the addressees of the men's words also show that Angelou does not pit mistress against wife, but rather sees them both as situated within these asymmetric gender relations. In the first verse, the men are praising the mistress to their wives. The second verse is ambiguous; the men could be either praising the speaker to their wives, or complimenting her directly. In the third verse, the addressee is the mistress as they praise her hips while spending a couple nights with her. This skillfully handled shift, where both the wives and the mistress are spoken &lt;em&gt;to&lt;/em&gt; by the men, places the women in solidarity with each other even as their relationship is not direct, but mediated through the speaking men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether as wife or as mistress, then, the women Angelou depicts in this poem find their social and self-worth dependent on their relationship to unreliable men. The poem thus critiques social norms that evaluate women largely, if not solely, in terms of whether they have a man, while simultaneously allowing men to treat the women as disposable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T06:16:57.853" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T06:16:57.853" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17977" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17984" CreationDate="2021-03-14T08:30:08.147" Score="2" ViewCount="61" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does the “justness of characters” mean? In the dedication of his play &lt;em&gt;The Way of the World&lt;/em&gt; William Congreve says the following about the ancient Roman playwright Terence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The purity of his style, the delicacy of his turns, and the &lt;strong&gt;justness of his characters&lt;/strong&gt;, were all of them beauties which the greater part of his audience were incapable of tasting.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I posted a &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/562500/what-does-justness-mean-in-the-following-literary-examples&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; on English Language &amp;amp; Usage Stack Exchange about the meaning of the word &lt;em&gt;justness&lt;/em&gt; in similar literary examples. The best answer clarified most of it for me, but I still don't fully understand how characters can be &lt;em&gt;just/apt&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12046" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T05:01:34.917" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T05:01:34.917" Title="What does the “justness of characters” mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-congreve&gt;&lt;the-way-of-the-world&gt;&lt;terence&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17978" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17820" CreationDate="2021-03-14T14:48:15.317" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Introduction&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The accepted date for &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is 1606. This date, first proposed by the 18th C scholar and editor Edmund Malone, has never been seriously challenged. Yet the earliest surviving text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is that of the 1623 First Folio, published seven years after Shakespeare's death. There is good reason to believe that the text did not remain stable in the seventeen years between first performance and first publication, but underwent some revision. Most scholars agree that the revisions were undertaken not by Shakespeare himself, but by Thomas Middleton. Both external and internal evidence support this. External evidence consists in the conditions of authorship and performance in the Jacobean era; internal evidence can be found within the play's text itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;External evidence that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is not entirely Shakespeare's work&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We tend to assume that a writer is a solitary genius, relying on imagination to create works that are largely self-contained. However, this belief is at odds with the realities of theatrical production and performance in Shakespeare's day. Playwriting was largely a collaborative enterprise. When a company wanted to put on a new play or revive an old one, a writer or a team of writers was assigned to come up with a script. Scripts for new plays typically retold a story already in circulation. Scripts for revivals augmented elements that had proven popular in previous stagings, removed less successful elements, and updated any topical references. Gary Taylor points out that Shakespeare would not be excluded from this process of having his scripts adapted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Theater historians have demonstrated that adaptation was, like collaboration, a routine practice in the early modern theater industry. Adaptation was particularly likely to affect plays that remained in the theatrical repertoire. Because Shakespeare produced more staples of that repertoire than any other playwright, we would certainly predict that at least some of his plays were adapted.     (p. 241)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see this process at work by comparing two texts of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;: the Second Quarto of 1604 (Q2), and the First Folio of 1623 (F). Act II scene ii in the Folio text has some 15 prose lines where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern explain to Hamlet why the Players are down on their luck:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; How comes it? Do they grow rusty?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; Nay, their endeavor keeps in the wonted pace. But there is, sir, an aerie of children, little eyases, that cry out on the top of question and are&#xA;most tyrannically clapped for ’t. These are now the fashion and so berattle the common stages (so they call them) that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose quills and dare scarce come thither.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; What, are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escoted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players (as it is most like, if their means are no better), their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; Faith, there has been much to-do on both sides, and the nation holds it no sin to tar them to controversy. There was for a while no money bid for argument unless the poet and the player went to cuffs in the question.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; Is ’t possible?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;GUILDENSTERN&lt;/strong&gt; O, there has been much throwing about of brains.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;HAMLET&lt;/strong&gt; Do the boys carry it away?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;ROSENCRANTZ&lt;/strong&gt; Ay, that they do, my lord—Hercules and his load too.  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/act-2-scene-2/#line-2.2.360&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.ii.360–385&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16997/289&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; to a different &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/16889/289&quot;&gt;question&lt;/a&gt; describes, this passage, alluding to the new fashion for child actors that arose in 1600, is important in dating &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; to 1601. Yet the passage is cut from the Q2 text of 1604, and is found only in F some nineteen years later. Harold Jenkins has convincingly argued that this passage is not a late addition to the F text, but an excision from Q2 (pp. 2–3, 470–473).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of this passage in F and its absence from Q2 reveals much about the textual transmission of Shakespeare's plays generally. It is unlikely that Shakespeare prepared any of his plays for publication, and his plays have not come down to us in stable, final forms. Plays were printed not from a final manuscript put together by the dramatist, but from whichever acting script was at hand. It seems that with &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, a commentary on a 1600 innovation was out of date by 1604, and therefore excised; the Q2 version of the play therefore omits the passage. But when Shakespeare's friends collected his plays and for posthumous publication, the script they used was one that included the passage, so it found its way into F.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who was tasked with making such changes to the acting version of a play? Then as now, the task of preparing a script for publication tended to be ad hoc. Scenes were cut, rewritten, or even added based on strictly expedient concerns: the topicality or popularity of a certain theme, the availability of certain actors, the amount of time a performance would take, the construction of the theatre where the play was to be staged, etc. None of this would be surprising to any working actor even today. The idea that a playscript is somehow sacrosanct—that altering lines or deleting entire scenes is a violation of the integrity of a work of art—would not have occurred to performers in Shakespeare's day any more than it does to theatre hands today. So when changes were made to any of Shakespeare's plays as they were being readied for performance, there is no reason to assume that Shakespeare alone made them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even though we have just one text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, then, we cannot assume that the First Folio faithfully reproduces just what Shakespeare wrote. It merely represents one of the many possible acting scripts of the play that could have existed at the time. &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is also among the shortest of Shakespeare's plays, suggesting that it might represent a trimmed playscript. Nicholas Brooke says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text is a good one, overall, which needs very little verbal emendation, and since it is well supplied with stage directions it is usually thought to derive from the theatre prompt-book, probably via a copy omitting any passages that had been cut in performance.       (p. 49)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions under which plays circulated in Shakespeare's day, both in print and onstage, thus make it unlikely that the Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; reproduces exactly and only what Shakespeare wrote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Internal evidence for &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;'s being a collaborative play&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The text shows internal evidence of non-Shakespearean revisions as well. Brooke points to various problems with the Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, particularly between Act III scene v and Act IV scene i:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What distinguishes 3.6 and 4.1 is that they cannot be performed as they stand, and so with 3.5 form a unit that differs from any other part of the play.... It seems as though the material available for those three scenes consisted of a revision not finally tidied up for performance.     (p. 52)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most noticeable sign that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was altered in some way is a glaring inconsistency between III.vi and IV.i. In the earlier scene, Lennox reports to an unnamed lord that Macduff is in Macbeth's bad books for speaking too plainly and refusing to attend the latter's feast. Lennox then asks the lord if he knows where Macduff is hiding. The lord replies that Macduff has gone to England, where Duncan's son has taken refuge with the English king. The following dialogue ensues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LORD&lt;/strong&gt;               And this report&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hath so exasperate the King that he&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Prepares for some attempt of war.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;LENNOX&lt;/strong&gt; Sent he to Macduff?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;LORD&lt;/strong&gt; He did, and with an absolute “Sir, not I,”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The cloudy messenger turns me his back&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And hums, as who should say “You’ll rue the time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That clogs me with this answer.”         (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-3-scene-6/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.vi.41–49&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines make clear that Macbeth has sent for Macduff; that Macduff has refused the summons, and has fled for England to join forces with Malcolm; and that knowing this, Macbeth is preparing for war. But confusingly, in IV.i, Macbeth is shocked when Lennox tells him that Macduff is in England:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;LENNOX&lt;/strong&gt; Macduff is fled to England.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;MACBETH&lt;/strong&gt;                                                         Fled to England?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;LENNOX&lt;/strong&gt; Ay, my good lord.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;MACBETH&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;(aside)&lt;/em&gt; Time, thou anticipat’st my dread exploits.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The flighty purpose never is o’ertook&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unless the deed go with it.         (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV.i.161–165&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This contradiction suggests that at some point, some scenes of the play were rearranged, and that the Folio text is based upon some manuscript where that rearrangement was underway, but not yet finalized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another clue to the not yet finalized nature of the text is the presence of two songs indicated only by their first lines. In III.v, the scene where Hecate first appears onstage, she exits to a song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;(Music and a song)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hark! I am called. My little spirit, see,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sits in a foggy cloud and stays for me.  &lt;em&gt;(Hecate exits.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sing within “Come away, come away,” etc.)&lt;/em&gt;          (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-3-scene-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.v.sd, 34–35&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Likewise, in IV.i, a stage direction indicates another song marking Hecate's exit from the stage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Music and a song: “Black Spirits,” etc. Hecate exits&lt;/em&gt;)         (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV.i.sd after line 43&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be entirely accurate, the Folio text does not actually say &lt;em&gt;Hecate exits&lt;/em&gt; here. However, the editorial emendation in the text at the Folger website makes sense; Hecate has no more lines in a scene that continues for considerably longer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That &amp;quot;Come away, come away&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Black Spirits&amp;quot; are indicated only by their opening words is extremely unusual. Every other play in the First Folio includes songs in full. Brooke says that such contradictions and omissions in the text&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could quite easily be the result of a late decision to alter this part of the play, chiefly no doubt to introduce Hecate, but not exclusively for that.       (p. 52)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brooke's speculation here reflects the scholarly consensus, which accepts that the scenes from III.v to IV.i inclusive represent a revision of a prior version that did not include Hecate. And the likeliest candidate for the dramatist who worked to revise the play script is Thomas Middleton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Thomas Middleton as the collaborator&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like Shakespeare, Middleton was a consummate theatre professional. He is known to have written portions of at least two other plays that are largely Shakespeare's, &lt;em&gt;Measure for Measure&lt;/em&gt; (1604) and &lt;em&gt;Timon of Athens&lt;/em&gt; (1606). His role in adapting some scenes of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; has been known since the 18th C, largely due to the overlap between one of his plays, &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;, and the Hecate scenes in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, probably written around 1613–1616, was first printed only in 1778. The same year, Edmund Malone and George Steevens pointed out that the witch scenes in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; were derivative of Middleton's play. Malone's essay &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; was part of Steevens and Samuel Johnson's magisterial 1778 edition of Shakespeare's complete works. In a footnote to that essay, Steevens noted many verbal similarities between Shakespeare's play and Middleton's. In the body of the essay, Malone himself argued that Middleton's play must have preceded Shakespeare's:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Steevens has lately diſcovered a Mſ. play, entitled THE WITCH, written by Thomas Middleton, which renders it queſtionable, whether Shakſpeare was not indebted to that author for the firſt hint of the magic introduced in this tragedy. The reader will find an account of this ſingular curiosity in the note [superscript numeral indicating Steevens' footnote].—To the observations of Mr. Steevens I have only to add, that the ſongs, beginning, &lt;em&gt;Come away&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp;c. and &lt;em&gt;Black ſpirits&lt;/em&gt;, &amp;amp;c. being found at full length in &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;, while only two firſt words of them are printed in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, favour the ſupposition that Middleton's piece preceded that of Shakſpeare; the latter, it ſhould ſeem, thinking it unneceſſary to ſet down verſes which were probably well known, and perhaps then in the poſſeſſion of the managers of the Globe theatre. The high reputation of Shakſpeare's performances (to mention a circumſtance which in the course of theſe observations will be more than once inſiſted upon) likewise ſtrengthens this conjecture; for it is very improbable, that Middleton, or any other poet of that time, ſhould have ventured into thoſe regions of fiction, in which our author had &lt;em&gt;already&lt;/em&gt; expatiated.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n336/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 324&lt;/a&gt;–330; most of each page is taken up by Steevens' lengthy footnote)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the time that &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; was rediscovered, then, scholars have accepted that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; includes contributions from Middleton. The full versions of &amp;quot;Come away, come away&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Black spirits&amp;quot; being found in &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; is a compelling piece of evidence in this regard. But other parts of the play have been attributed to Middleton as well. Tsundoku's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/17825/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; has gone over the various attempts to attribute specific passages and scenes in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; to Middleton, and the shifting arguments over the years about the extent of the  contribution. Until fairly recently, those arguments were based on scholarly judgments regarding verbal correspondences. R. V. Holdsworth, for example, notes that stage directions of the form &lt;em&gt;Enter X meeting Y&lt;/em&gt; are not unusual in Middleton, but rare in Shakespeare's plays (Brooke p. 58). In &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, that formulation occurs in I.ii and III.v. Both of those scenes have been attributed to Middleton by other scholars as well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Instead of relying on scholarly judgments alone, more recent stylometric approaches use computer-aided analysis to confirm or rebut  attributions of the sort at issue here. In 2014, Gary Taylor compared parts of IV.i and all of III.v across a wide corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama found in the databases Literature Online (LION), Oxford Scholarly Editions Online (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;OSEO&lt;/a&gt;), and Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (&lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EEBO-TCP&lt;/a&gt;). His paper is in part a response to the paper by Markus Dahl, Marina Tarlinskaya, and Brian Vickers that Tsundoku discusses in his answer Those scholars contend that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is entirely Shakespeare's work. Taylor, however, argues on the basis of his computer-aided analysis that III.v and two passages from IV.i are far more likely Middleton's than Shakespeare's. The passages from IV.i are these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;HECATE&lt;/strong&gt; O, well done! I commend your pains,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And everyone shall share i’ th’ gains.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And now about the cauldron sing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Like elves and fairies in a ring,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Enchanting all that you put in.       (ll. 39–43)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;FIRST WITCH&lt;/strong&gt;  Ay, sir, all this is so. But why&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stands Macbeth thus amazedly?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Come, sisters, cheer we up his sprites&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And show the best of our delights.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I’ll charm the air to give a sound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While you perform your antic round,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That this great king may kindly say&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our duties did his welcome pay.       (ll. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-4-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;141–148&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taylor's paper does not consider other passages in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; that have been ascribed to Middleton at various times. Even I.ii, a point of contention discussed at length in the Dahl, Tarlinskaya, and Vickers paper, is ignored. In 2020, Vickers published a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/infecting-the-teller-essay-brian-vickers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;rebuttal&lt;/a&gt; of Taylor's paper in the Times Literary Supplement. I am not able to read that paywalled essay; however, Vickers and his co-authors are outliers in insisting upon the integrity of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; as entirely Shakespeare's. Most scholars and editors accept that the play shows Middleton's hand. Disagreements remain over exactly which passages are to be attributed to Middleton, but that he was involved in revising the play is rarely disputed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact date of this revision is also disputed. Brooke claims, somewhat unusually, that Middleton revised &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; some years before he wrote &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suggest that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was revised in 1609–10, and &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; written in 1615.       (p. 66)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two factors work against this claim. First, Middleton is not known to have written  regularly for Shakespeare's company, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King%27s_Men_(playing_company)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;King's Men&lt;/a&gt;, until 1615 or so. Second, since &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; too is dated 1615 or 1616, it seems unlikely that Middleton would incorporate songs from a successful play such as &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; into it. By contrast, &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; itself was not a success. Middleton, in a prefatory note, &lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;called&lt;/a&gt; it &amp;quot;this ignorantly ill-fated labour of mine&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Witches are, ipso facto, by the law condemn'd, and it only, I think, hath made her lie so long in an imprison'd obscurity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;By the law condemn'd&lt;/em&gt; suggests that &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; was censored rather than disliked by audiences. The play is topical, dealing allusively with the divorce of the Earl of Essex, in which King James took an interest. James's own aversion to witchcraft as well as the touchy subject matter probably got the play banned. The majority opinion, that Middleton used material from his &amp;quot;ill-fated&amp;quot; play in his revision of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, seems more likely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;What led to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;'s being adapted by Middleton?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The question remains: what were the specific circumstances under which &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was adapted, and why was Middleton a good choice for the adaptation? One reason was probably to highlight the witchcraft elements. A. R. Braunmuller writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In early modern England, no less than in many societies today, sensational events—accusations of witchcraft, gruesome murders, and the like—were fodder for every available medium (at that time, drama, pamphlet, and ballad), or, as one later contemporary wrote, such events were &amp;quot;Staged, Book'd, and Balleted.&amp;quot;      (p. 258; the internal quotation is from Thomas Taylor, p. 94)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Interest in witchcraft had increased since James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I of England after Queen Elizabeth's death in 1601. James himself believed that storms his ship had encountered when he was returning to Scotland after marrying Princess Anne of Denmark were the result of witchcraft. Several Danish women were tried and convicted of casting spells on her ship. James instituted &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Berwick_witch_trials&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;similar trials&lt;/a&gt; in Scotland as well, several alleged witches being burned at the stake as a result. Witchcraft was thus a topical subject for &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.  The North Berwick witch trials, and James's subsequent book &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/daemonologiekingjamesiengland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daemonologie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1597), are important sources for the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Presumably the Weïrd Sisters had proved popular in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, and expanding their role would have been appealing to the spectators. Since Hecate is the goddess of witchcraft, introducing her was an obvious way of doing so. Macbeth himself has mentioned Hecate in his soliloquy as he approaches the sleeping Duncan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;            Now o’er the one-half world&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pale Hecate’s off’rings, and withered murder,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moves like a ghost.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-2-scene-1/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;II.i.61–68&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A second reason was that &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, originally written for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globe_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Globe&lt;/a&gt;, was being performed in a new space. The King's Men had acquired a controlling interest in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blackfriars&lt;/a&gt; in 1608, and began performing there after 1609. An indoor theatre, the Blackfriars had innovations not available at the outdoor Globe. Artificial lighting was one such; another was having onstage actors raised and lowered using equipment concealed in the flies. Having witches arrive and depart onstage by flying would not have been possible at the Globe; the Blackfriars opened up that possibility. Hecate's exits probably made use of this (Brooke 35). It has been suggested that the songs in III.v and IV.i were added to cover the noise of the mechanism used as Hecate flies off (Braunmuller 257).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hecate's opening speech, where she complains about having been left out, is in fact a metatheatrical commentary both on her newly added role in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; and on the possibilities of the new theatre. She upbraids the Weïrd Sisters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Saucy and overbold, how did you dare&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To trade and traffic with Macbeth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In riddles and affairs of death,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I, the mistress of your charms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The close contriver of all harms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was never called to bear my part&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or show the glory of our art?       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/act-3-scene-5/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;III.v.3–9&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The previous version of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; did not call upon Hecate to &lt;em&gt;bear [her] part&lt;/em&gt;, which was newly written for the adaptation; nor did that version &lt;em&gt;show the glory&lt;/em&gt; of the theatrical art, because that glory depended on the resources of the Blackfriars. When &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; was adapted for performance in that theatre, the new version added the role of Hecate in order to showcase the spectacle possible in the new space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton was ideally placed to undertake the adaptation. A freelancer who (unlike Shakespeare) was not tied to any one company, he had written &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; for the King's Men. The suppression or failure of that play meant that he had material at hand to incorporate into &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;. Perhaps more important, he was adept at spectacle. Middleton had written several &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masque&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;masques&lt;/a&gt; for the court of James I. These allegorical entertainments involved music, dancing, and acting, as well as elaborate stage design and costumes. As such, they were important in the development of opera, which brings together various arts in the same way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Caroline Baird has shown that Middleton's familiarity with masque is key to understanding his plays:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Middleton's intimate knowledge of the Jacobean court masque enabled him to exploit its conventions, iconography, and structural functions in order to experiment innovatively with how masques, or masquing components, might be deployed in the playhouse. Although Middleton was not a prolific masquewright ... he wrote more masques into his plays than any of his contemporaries, and up to 1611 was the only dramatist to take the device outside the repertoire of the children's troupes.       (p. 58)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton's chief contribution to &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; appears to have been the insertion of masque-like elements. Gary Taylor comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton's Hecate brings into Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy the verbal and visual semiotics of civic humanist London pageantry.       (p. 263)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Middleton's contribution was tremendously successful, and &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; became associated with visual and musical spectacle. These spectacular elements were front and center in the revision by William Davenant, which ruled the stage during the Restoration era. Davenant had been with the King's Men in the 1630s. When London theaters reopened after the Puritan interregnum of 1642–1660, he staged his rewritten &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, which Brooke describes as &amp;quot;a spoken verse drama with substantial musical interludes involving some at least of the main characters.&amp;quot; Brooke quotes from the memoirs of John Downes, who was a prompter in Davenant's company:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The tragedy of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;, altered by Sir William Davenant; being dressed to all its finery, as new clothes, new scenes, machines, as flyings for the witches; with all the singing and dancing in it; the first composed by Mr. Lock, the other by Mr. Channell and Mr. Joseph Preist; it being all excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera, it recompensed double the expense; it proves still a lasting play.       (pp. 37–38)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davenant's operatic &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; highlighted and augmented the masque elements that Middleton introduced into the play. It was not until 1744 that David Garrick put on a performance of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; that went back to the Folio text (Braunmuller pp. 61–62; Stone, &lt;em&gt;passim&lt;/em&gt;). While Davenant's redaction of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is lamentable, it does indicate the theatrical appeal of Middleton's contributions to Shakespeare's play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Folio text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is carefully prepared, but appears to be set from a prompt-book that had not been fully revised. The text shows inconsistencies in various scenes, most noticeably in III.v–IV.i, and arguably in I.ii, that are the result of incomplete revision. Computer-assisted stylometric analysis of III.v as well as a couple of passages from IV.i suggests that the adaptation was probably by Middleton. The occasion for the adaptation was likely a revival of the play at the Blackfriars theatre, which as an indoor theatre offered the opportunity for greater spectacle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The case for Middleton's hand in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; is strengthened by the mention of songs from his play &lt;em&gt;The Witch&lt;/em&gt; in a couple of stage directions, as well as by his experience as a masquewright. To my knowledge, a full stylometric analysis of all the disputed scenes and passages in the play has not yet been undertaken. This makes it hard to pinpoint exactly how much of, say, IV.i is Shakespeare's and how much Middleton's. However, with the notable exception of Brian Vickers and some allied with him, most scholars and editors agree that the text of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; cannot be attributed entirely to Shakespeare; that III.v is entirely Middleton's; and that Middleton has contributed other passages, perhaps comprising entire scenes, to the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (other than Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Baird, Caroline. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/77379/1/ET_18-2_7_ART_Baird%20FINAL%20PUBLISHED.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From court to playhouse and back: Middleton's appropriation of the masque&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Early Theatre&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 18 no. 2 (2015), pp. 57–85. centaur.reading.ac.uk. Accessed March 14, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Braunmuller, A. R., ed. &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare. 1606. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brooke, Nicholas, ed. &lt;em&gt;The Tragedy of Macbeth&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare. 1606. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dahl, Markus, Marina Tarlinskaya, and Brian Vickers. &lt;a href=&quot;https://thomasmiddleton.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/enquiry.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Enquiry into Middleton’s supposed “adaptation” of Macbeth&lt;/a&gt;. 2010. thomasmiddleton.org. Accessed March 13, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;James VI of Scotland. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/daemonologiekingjamesiengland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daemonologie&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1597). Archive.org. Accessed March 14, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Jenkins, Harold, ed. &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare. 1601. The Arden Shakespeare, second series. London: Methuen, 1982.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Malone, Edmond. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.512119/page/n281/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare were Written&lt;/a&gt;”. In &lt;em&gt;The Plays of William Shakespeare&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 1. Ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens. 2nd ed. London: Bathurst et al., 1778. pp. 261–346. Archive.org. Accessed March 11, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Middleton, Thomas. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://tech.org/%7Ecleary/witch.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Witch&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Chris Cleary's Middleton site at tech.org. Accessed March 14, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed March 8, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Shakespeare, William. &lt;a href=&quot;https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/macbeth/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed March 10, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Stone, Jr., George Winchester. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/4172546&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Garrick's Handling of &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.” &lt;em&gt;Studies in Philology&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 38, no. 4 (1941), pp. 609–628. JSTOR. Accessed March 14, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taylor, Gary. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/24778582&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Empirical Middleton: Macbeth, Adaptation, and Microauthorship&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare Quarterly&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 65, no. 3 (Fall 2014), pp. 239–272. JSTOR. Accessed March 9, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Taylor, Thomas. &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015080030862&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=395&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Second Part of The Theatre of Gods Judgments&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. London: Richard Herne, 1642. Hathi Trust. Accessed March 9, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vickers, Brian. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/infecting-the-teller-essay-brian-vickers/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Infecting the Teller: The Failure of a Mathematical Approach to Shakespeare’s Authorship&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Times Literary Supplement&lt;/em&gt;, April 17, 2020. Accessed March 31, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T16:45:24.967" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T16:45:24.967" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17979" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17980" CreationDate="2021-03-14T14:51:44.780" Score="0" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Dexter walked with a bandy, rapid gait. They kept pace easily, not touching&lt;/strong&gt;. They covered miles each night in the dark, sometimes heading&#xA;east along the creek across the parklands to where it joined the Yarra River, sometimes north-west as far as the huge &lt;strong&gt;upturned saucer of Royal Park&lt;/strong&gt; where the wild dogs in the zoo howled at the moon and monkeys gibbered behind the wall. Dexter pursed his lips and whistled a curly tune.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dose the sentence &amp;quot;Dexter walked with a bandy, rapid gait.&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Dexter had bandy legs and walked quickly&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;They kept pace easily, not touching.&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;their walking speed did not changed and they walked with regular speed and this was not difficult for them&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;touching&amp;quot; an adjective that means &amp;quot;difficult&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the sentence &amp;quot;huge upturned saucer of Royal Park&amp;quot;. Is something like a huge upturned saucer  in Royal park? I searched but I found nothing. Or is the writer describing Melbourne's Royal park as a huge upturned saucer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T15:10:31.787" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T21:46:53.397" Title="Meaning of &quot;Dexter walked with a bandy, rapid gait. They kept pace easily, not touching.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17980" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17979" CreationDate="2021-03-14T16:36:09.710" Score="6" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yes, it means Dexter was walking quickly, albeit in a bandy or bow-legged fashion.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;To &lt;em&gt;keep pace&lt;/em&gt; means not to fall behind or go ahead of someone you're walking or running with, so it means that they easily were able to keep up with each other without either of them going too quickly or too slowly for the other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think &lt;em&gt;touching&lt;/em&gt; simply means that they walked without bumping/brushing against each other, holding hands, or touching in any other way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The writer is describing the park as an upturned saucer. It's probably a wide, low mound that looks like a big, upside-down saucer. Here are some pictures from Melbourne's Royal Park that look like that.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/peoZUm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/peoZUm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qurMzm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qurMzm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T21:46:53.397" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T21:46:53.397" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17981" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17975" CreationDate="2021-03-14T16:55:49.270" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a partial answer, sourced off an old version of &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwall.org/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;redwall.org&lt;/a&gt; (since I can't find the Q&amp;amp;A section on the up-to-date version of the site).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems Jacques was &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwall.org/faq.php?page=2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;asked this question&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mr. Jacques, I was wondering how you come up with all the wonderful riddles in your books, do you sit down and come up with them, or do other people help you, such as your wife or friends?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I write all my own riddles and poems and songs&lt;/strong&gt;, they are a particular favourite of mine. I love to play with words and one of my spare time hobbies (when I get any spare time) is word games and crossword puzzles.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Formatting a mix of me and the original&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it seems Jacques wrote his own poems and such. This doesn't preclude him taking inspiration from other places as a starting point, but the songs aren't just re-skinnings of stuff he heard before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwall.org/about.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wrote poetry&lt;/a&gt; outside the &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Jacques has written &lt;strong&gt;both poetry and music&lt;/strong&gt;, but he began his writing career in earnest as a playwright.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Bolding mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall#Audiobooks&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; someone else set the poems and songs to music for the audiobook versions of &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; novels:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The audiobooks also feature fully-realized musical performances of the songs that each book contains, composed and performed by Billy Maher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Various caveats: this is just what the author said, I haven't found any other sites which corroborate it (though my search skills are poor), and it is on the old version of the site only (as far as I can tell).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T16:55:49.270" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17982" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-14T17:38:56.823" Score="0" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-the-house-of-death-n05060&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blake-the-house-of-death-n05060&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fnRaf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The House of Death&quot; /&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While I'm asking about a colour print it's as much about Blake's poetry. I haven't been able to find much analysis of this painting for the novice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This print illustrates lines from Book XI of Milton's poem Paradise Lost. The Archangel Michael shows Adam the misery that will be inflicted on Man now he has eaten the Forbidden Fruit. In a vision of 'Death's 'grim Cave' Adam sees a 'monstrous crew' of men afflicted by 'Diseases dire'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The colour print is a reference to  a passage in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;, but in place of Michael is Blake's Urizen. What are the arrows he is throwing and what is the dagger the blue afflicted is holding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I thought Urizen was supposed to embody reason and law so why would he reveal the dangers of knowledge to persuade Adam to avoid it? Didn't he want the fall to happen?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11999" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-14T21:06:55.993" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T21:06:55.993" Title="Symbolism in William Blake's The House of Death is unclear to me" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;william-blake&gt;&lt;john-milton&gt;&lt;paradise-lost&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17983" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17974" CreationDate="2021-03-14T18:38:21.343" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator of he poem seems to be a mistress to married men. Since it's unusual for a mistress to have multiple lovers at the same time, I think she's figuratively representing most mistresses, not just one woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She gives the men sexual pleasure greater than they get from their wives, and she maintains her home cleaner than their homes, and she doesn't ever complain or argue as a wife often does.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet despite all the ways in which she is superficially nicer than their wives, the men still consider her just a dalliance. Their time with her is just an interlude, they still go home to their wives and families -- that's their real lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mistresses (and less so, prostitutes) may sometimes have dreams of stealing men away from their wives, and sometimes men will even claim that they will leave their wives, but these are usually not realized. Hence, &amp;quot;they went home.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1517" LastEditorUserId="1517" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T15:29:10.143" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T15:29:10.143" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17984" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17977" CreationDate="2021-03-14T18:45:30.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other question's answers indicate, &amp;quot;justness&amp;quot; in this case indicates&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quality or state of being right, proper, or correct; conformity to truth or to a required or agreed standard; correctness in amount, proportion, aesthetic quality, etc. Also: exactness, precision, accuracy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What makes a character just is that it actually represents, in the work of fiction, the sort of character that is found in real life.  This can range from a work of fiction portraying Charles I as bravely facing his execution, to an excellent brain surgeon being shown as a dedicated, even driven personality, sufficient to explain how he managed to ascend the heights of his difficult profession, to a character reacting angrily when  victimized by another who then offers to let &amp;quot;bygones be bygones&amp;quot; without making amends.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that writers routinely falsify known historical characters, combine incompatible traits, and have characters react in ways that would be implausible under any circumstances, this is not a minor writing ability.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T18:45:30.577" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17985" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17977" CreationDate="2021-03-14T20:59:38.027" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;William Congreve wrote these words in the preface to his play &lt;em&gt;The Way of the World&lt;/em&gt;. The play is an example of Restoration comedy, which tended to use stock characters (see e.g. Osherow). In the context of the quoted passage, Congreve also compares Terentius with Plautus (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=f78VAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA122&amp;amp;dq=%22justness+of+his+characters%22&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiu7uv_yrDvAhWQDuwKHTzHAVsQuwUwAHoECAYQCQ#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22justness%20of%20his%20characters%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Comedies of William Congreve&lt;/em&gt;, Volume 2, 1895&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Terence, the most correct writer in the world, had a Scipio and a Lelius, if not to assist him, at least to support him in his reputation. (...)&#xA;The purity of this style, the delicacy of his turns, and the justness of his characters, were all of the beauties which the greater part of his audience were incapable of tasting. Some of the coarsest strokes of Plautus, so severely censured by Horace, were more likely to affect the multitude; such, who come with expectation to laugh at the last act of a play, and are better entertained with two or three unseasonable jests than with the artfulness of the fable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congreve is not simply praising Terentius here but also anticipating reception of his play, which we would like to attribute to a lack of sophistication in his audience, which would supposedly not appreciate the subtlety of his work. &lt;em&gt;The Way of the World&lt;/em&gt;, however, also uses stock characters, such as the intelligent and wealhty young hero (Millamant), the amorous elderly lady (Lady Wishfort) and the would-be wit (Witwoud). As it happens, the play's first performance was not very successful; it was only later that the play became Congreve's most famous work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Congreve also discusses one of Terentius's predecessors, namely Menander:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As Terence excelled in his performances, so had he great advantages to encourage his undertakings, for he built most on the foundation of Menander: his plots were generally modelled, and his characters ready drawn to his hand. He copied Menander; and Menander had no less light in the formation of his characters from the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple; (...).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is yet another comparison that involves the quality of an author's characters. Kamm and Graham also discuss Terentius's characters (and his initial lack of popularity; cf. Congreve):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The comedy of manners effectively began with him. He was adept at employing the double plot, especially to illustrate different characters’ responses to a situation, and in developing the situation itself. There is also more purity of language and characterization than in Plautus, which may explain why Terence was not as popular in his own day as he would become later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the above quotes, it appears that &amp;quot;justness of characters&amp;quot; refers to the veracity of the characters in Terentius's plays.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kamm, Antony; Graham, Abigail: &lt;a href=&quot;https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138776685/chapter8.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 8&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;a href=&quot;https://routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138776685/default.php&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Romans: An Introduction&lt;/em&gt;, third edition&lt;/a&gt; (companion website for the book).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Osherow, Michele: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.folger.edu/events/the-way-of-the-world/dramaturgs-notes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Way of the World Dramaturg's Notes&lt;/a&gt;, Folger Shakespeare Library. (Also in &lt;a href=&quot;https://spotlight.folger.edu/2018/01/02/dramaturgs-notes-way-world/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Folger Spotlight&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 02.01.2018.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T20:59:38.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17986" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17974" CreationDate="2021-03-14T21:15:20.830" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is pointing out that whatever they say, they value something else greater than the sum of all of the qualities they praise.  What that is, either isn’t known or isn’t acknowledged, but it must exist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes the praise a consolation prize at best, and active disrespect at worst (as a distraction from the truth, which is that they don’t really appreciate the praised attributes at all).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After praising her, they left her and went home. Their praise is false and worthless, as they are false and worthless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11376" LastActivityDate="2021-03-14T21:15:20.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17987" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17495" CreationDate="2021-03-15T00:12:28.683" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two things I think the choice of first-person adds to the poem: novelty, and a sense of movement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The novelty factor comes from the point of view being, well, novel. Bodies of water can't talk, and they aren't usual narrators, so a reader will likely find a poem written from a brook's perspective novel and interesting. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I chatter, chatter, as I flow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    To join the brimming river,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For men may come and men may go,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    But I go on for ever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here the brook does some unusual, interesting things. It &amp;quot;chatters&amp;quot;, which is a human activity, but then immediately reminds the reader of its non-humanness by noting that it &amp;quot;flow[s]&amp;quot;. The brook says it will &amp;quot;join&amp;quot; the river, which is not something that would happen with a human narrator. Personally, I laughed here, considering how yes, the brook's winding path is just to join a larger river.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next two lines are more explorations of the novelty which can be taken from this point of view. The brook contrasts the normal lives of humans - they &amp;quot;may come&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;may go&amp;quot; - with itself, because it will &amp;quot;go on for ever&amp;quot;. This is another compelling novelty; the brook, in its novel perspective as a natural feature, will go on forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A natural question is why a similar effect couldn't be achieved if the brook was simply described, without the first-person perspective. I would answer that by saying that the use of an &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; pronoun for these novel activities - remember, the brook says &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; go on forever&amp;quot; - adds to the novelty. The &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; claims humanity, and the non-human contrast of what the brook does adds humor and novelty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could go on like this about every stanza of the poem, waxing eloquent about how the first-person perspective adds novelty. However I shall spare you that, dear reader, as I'm running out of ways to say &amp;quot;novel&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;interesting&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do I mean by &amp;quot;a sense of movement&amp;quot;? The brook's narration contains many &amp;quot;movement&amp;quot; words. It &amp;quot;makes a sudden sally&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;bicker[s] down a valley&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;hurr[ies] down&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;slip[s] between the ridges&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;flow[s]&amp;quot;, etc. These phrases create a relentless sense of movement, barreling with the reader through the poem and down the lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Making it an &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; who does these movements is a way of drawing the reader along with the movement. You are more likely to be dragged along by a bubbly, energetic friend than by a description of a bubbly, energetic friend. By declaring an identity with &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;, the brook's movement words are more effective in pulling the reader along for the ride.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:12:28.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17988" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-15T00:12:49.600" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:12:49.600" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:12:49.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17989" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-15T00:12:49.600" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'All the Pretty Horses' by Cormac McCarthy. Questions about this novel should be tagged with [cormac-mccarthy]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:48:47.707" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:48:47.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17990" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-15T00:15:32.560" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:15:32.560" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:15:32.560" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17991" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-15T00:15:32.560" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Ancient Greek scholar Julius Pollux or his life. Questions about his works should be tagged with [greek-literature]. " OwnerUserId="3066" LastEditorUserId="3066" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T00:48:40.193" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T00:48:40.193" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17993" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="17994" CreationDate="2021-03-15T06:04:43.547" Score="19" ViewCount="2499" Body="&lt;p&gt;John Donne's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditation_XVII&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meditation XVII&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; from &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/devotionsuponeme00donn/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Devotions upon Emergent Occasions&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1624) includes the following well-known passage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Devotions&lt;/em&gt; was, and is, a prose work. It was published as prose during Donne's lifetime, and continues to be printed as prose in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0375705481&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;modern scholarly editions&lt;/a&gt;. Currently, however, this passage circulates as poetry. The top results of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://lmgtfy.app/#gsc.tab=0&amp;amp;gsc.q=no%20man%20is%20an%20island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;online search&lt;/a&gt; for &amp;quot;No man is an island&amp;quot; do not include any that have the entire text of Meditation XVII. Instead, they surface several sites that present this one passage as a poem, with the lines broken up as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every man is a piece of the continent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A part of the main.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If a clod be washed away by the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Europe is the less,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontory were:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a manor of thy friend's&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or of thine own were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any man's death diminishes me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Because I am involved in mankind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examples:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/No-man-is-an-island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;All Poetry&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/no-man-is-an-island/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poem Hunter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://qz.com/716088/john-donnes-solemn-400-year-old-poem-against-isolationism-is-resonating-with-brits-today/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quartz&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mensaforkids.org/read/a-year-of-living-poetically/donne-no-man-is-an-island/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mensa for Kids&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a presentation is ahistorical, unmooring the passage from its context as a devotional work. It also misrepresents Donne's own poetry, which was always closed-form, never free verse using arbitrary line breaks that eschew rhyme and meter. Additionally, the passage lacks the &lt;a href=&quot;http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2012/09/metaphysical-wit.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphysical wit&lt;/a&gt; that is a conspicuous, even defining, feature of Donne's poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, &lt;strong&gt;when and why did this passage start being considered, presented, and read as poetry?&lt;/strong&gt; I suspect that this is a relatively recent development attributable to the proliferation of websites. I'm hoping someone adept at trawling the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; will, with some research, be able to answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T20:06:32.100" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T20:06:32.100" Title="When and why did &quot;No man is an island&quot; start being regarded as a poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;essays&gt;&lt;john-donne&gt;&lt;devotions-upon-emergent-occasions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17994" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17993" CreationDate="2021-03-15T11:31:27.760" Score="16" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Independent versifications&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The versification of this passage from Donne predates the widespread use of the Internet, as you’ll see from the earliest examples below. Moreover, it looks as though multiple editors have independently decided to format the passage as verse. The evidence for this is that different editors have chosen different ways to break up the passage into lines. We would not expect this to happen if they were copying from some shared source. Here are two  different eight-line versifications:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;it tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Myrna Grant, ed. (1997) &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/poemsforgoodhapp00gard/page/84/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Poems for a Good and Happy Life&lt;/em&gt;, p. 104&lt;/a&gt;. Garden City: CrossAmerica.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontory were,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Mehmet Basci, ed. (2008). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/worldleadersfavo0000unse/page/6/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;World Leaders’ Favourite Poems: a Book of Peace&lt;/em&gt;, p. 7&lt;/a&gt;. Cardigan: Parthian.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two different nine-line versions:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontory were;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any man’s death diminishes me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Because I am involved in mankind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jackie Morris, ed. (2006). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/barefootbookofcl00morr/page/103/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Barefoot Book of Classic Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p.104&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge: Barefoot Books.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everyman is a piece of the Continent, part of the main;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Europe is the less;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontary were;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a manor of thy friends, or of thine own were;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu (1989). &lt;em&gt;Because I am Involved&lt;/em&gt;, p. 111. Spectrum Books.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A seven-line version with an excision, identified by Peter Shor in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island, entire of itself;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;every man is a piece of the continent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    a part of the main;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;… any man’s death diminishes me, because&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    I am involved in mankind;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;it tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Sarah Anne Stuart (1996). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/treasuryofpoemsc0000unse/page/220/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Treasury of Poems&lt;/em&gt;, p. 221&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Galahad Books (1999). Ellipsis in original.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Manner of thine own&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is hard to trace the origin of these versifications because available search tools tend not to have any way of searching for line breaks, so that the rare versified versions of Donne’s text are buried among the common prose versions. However, if an editor happens to introduce a corruption at the same time as the versification, then the search tools become much more helpful. Here’s an example of such a corrupted text in the form of a fourteen-line versification:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Entire of itself.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Each&lt;/strong&gt; is a piece of the continent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A part of the main.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Europe is the less.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontory were.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a &lt;strong&gt;manner&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;thine own&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or of &lt;strong&gt;thine friend’s&lt;/strong&gt; were.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any man’s death diminishes me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Because I am involved in mankind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, send not&lt;/strong&gt; to know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For whom the bell tolls,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Deborah Gaye, ed. (2010). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/oflovehope0000unse/page/152/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Of Love and Hope&lt;/em&gt;, p. 152&lt;/a&gt;. London: Avalanche. Corruptions in bold.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these changes might be defensible, but “manner” for “manor” and “thine friend” for “thy friend” are just embarrassing mistakes. But this version is rare and so more easily traceable. For example, here it appears in a novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sussex shore had been a haunt for smugglers. Towered over by the humps of the Seven Sisters and the knob of Beachy Head, pirates of old had hauled their contraband in through gaps in the cliff. The tales of these buccaneers provided J. M. Barrie with the inspiration for Captain Hook […] Lore like that cluttered Wyatt’s mind as he closed on the lonely cottage ahead. […] His epiphany was to recall John Donne, whose poem took on deeper meaning here at the rim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No man is an island,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Entire of itself.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Every man is a piece of the continent,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A part of the main.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If a clod be washed away by the sea,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Europe is the less.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a promontory were.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As well as if a &lt;strong&gt;manner&lt;/strong&gt; of &lt;strong&gt;thine own&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or of &lt;strong&gt;thine friend’s&lt;/strong&gt; were.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Any man’s death diminishes me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Because I am involved in mankind.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Therefore, send not&lt;/strong&gt; to know&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For whom the bell tolls,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It tolls for thee.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Michael Slade (2008), &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/crucified00mich/page/230/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Crucified&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 230–231&lt;/a&gt;. Sutton: Severn House.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the context of a novel, the errors are excusable, since we are told that the protagonist is recalling this “poem” from memory. In particular, the substitution of “manner of thine own” for Donne’s “manor … of thine own” is just the kind of trick that memory can play, because the protagonist’s recollections of stories of smugglers and pirates could have brought to mind a speech from Charles Kingsley’s &lt;em&gt;Westward Ho!&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it is ordained that thou shouldst advance the ends of the brotherhood by being shark-bitten, or flea-bitten, or bitten by sharpers, to the detriment of thy carnal wealth, or, shortly, to suffer any shame or torment whatsoever, even to strappado and scarpines, thou art bound to obey thy destiny, and not, after that vain Roman conceit, to choose the &lt;strong&gt;manner of thine own&lt;/strong&gt; death, which is indeed only another sort of self-murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Kingsley (1855). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/westwardhoorvoya02kin/page/268/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Westward Ho!&lt;/em&gt;, volume 2, p. 268&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the Internet, this corruption can be traced using the Wayback Machine to &lt;a href=&quot;https://web.archive.org/web/20050703080558/http://www.vibrationdata.com/inspirational_poems.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this capture in July 2005&lt;/a&gt;, and on Google Books to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_Purpose_for_Life/RCzVjMtHPGYC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PT95&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Purpose for Life: Service&lt;/em&gt; (2005) by Alexander Zax&lt;/a&gt;. Whether one of these is the original of the corrupted text, or whether both are copying from some yet older shared source, is impossible for me to say.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T21:09:29.963" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T21:09:29.963" CommentCount="15" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17995" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17996" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Roman African playwright Publius Terentius Afer, also known as Terence (c. 195/185 – c. 159? BC). Terentius wrote six plays. Use this tag with [latin-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:01:57.950" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17997" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17998" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Kurdish writer and philosopher Ahmad Khani or Ahmad-i Khani (1650–1707) or his life as a writer. He is best known for 'Mem and Zin'. Use this tag with [kurmanji-kurdish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T14:04:47.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="17999" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17489" CreationDate="2021-03-15T17:28:34.047" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is the context:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rodolfo Agricola in an edition dating from fifteen hundred and something† says one writes: &lt;em&gt;ut doceat, ut moveat ut delectet&lt;/em&gt;, to teach, to move or to delight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A great deal of bad criticism is due to men not seeing which of these three motives underlies a given composition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The converse processes, not considered by the pious teachers of antiquity, would be to obscure, to bamboozle or mislead, and to bore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reader or auditor is at liberty to remain passive and submit to these operations if he so choose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Ezra Pound (1934). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/abcofreading00poun/page/66/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;ABC of Reading&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 66–67&lt;/a&gt;. New York: New Directions (1960).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodolphus_Agricola&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rodolphus Agricola&lt;/a&gt; (1479). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/deinventionedia00agrigoog/page/n51/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Inventione Dialectica&lt;/em&gt;, book I, prologue&lt;/a&gt;. Coloniae [Köln]: Ioannes Gymnicus (1539).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Auditor” means “listener”. So Pound is saying that passive readers and listeners—people who just accept what they read and hear—subject themselves to the risk of being bamboozled and misled. To defend themselves from liars and propagandists they must read and listen actively, interrogating and criticizing the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T17:28:34.047" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18000" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18011" CreationDate="2021-03-15T17:49:23.253" Score="7" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this children's book about 5 years ago, it was a small, charming little book. It probably was published in the past 10 years. It was in Afrikaans, but I'm fairly certain it was a translation from English (or potentially Dutch).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I got it from a library in South Africa (I've asked the library about it and dug through the kid's section again several times but can't find it!).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since I read the Afrikaans translation I'm not 100% clear what the English translation was like, but here are the key points:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A little girl lives on her own, her parents are collectors (I think?) and are away a lot.  She has all kinds of collections of things. She's a human girl and most of the people in the books are people (unless otherwise mentioned).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Her guardian is called Mr Knuffels (in the Afrikaans translation. This isn't really a proper Afrikaans word, but a dutch one). It means &amp;quot;cuddles&amp;quot; in English. Mr Knuffels is a weird furball creature from the swamps of Norway.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a monster in her basement that she's friends (?) with and she sees when she does laundry down there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She has a pet (a dog?) and there have been dog-nappings in town and she tracks down a dog-napper and solves the mystery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The book is small (A5 size, if not smaller), pretty thick and has charming drawings of the layout of her home with her collections, newspaper clippings, and other cute diagrams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Given the use of the dutch word &amp;quot;Knuffel&amp;quot; and the reference to Norway, it's possible this book had origins in europe, and potentially was originally written in Dutch. Knuffel isn't really used in South Africa very commonly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would love to find this book again and read it to my daughter, if anyone has any ideas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12375" LastEditorUserId="12375" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T10:48:09.213" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T11:14:41.410" Title="Identify a children's story about a little girl who collected items, had a monster in the basement, and solved a dog-napping mystery!" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18001" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-15T19:06:27.700" Score="2" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;The last verse in Hanan Ben Ari's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://mshironet.mako.co.il/artist?type=lyrics&amp;amp;lang=1&amp;amp;prfid=17593&amp;amp;wrkid=48648&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;אלוף העולם&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (Aluf HaOlam / Champion of the World) goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;אני אלוף העולם בלפצות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;להתנצל ולרצות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;לחטוא, להתנקות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;לחשוף, להתכסות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;תגידי, איך כותבים שירים עם אלף ציפיות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;מיליוני צפיות&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm the champion of the world in reconciling&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Apologizing and placating&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sinning and cleaning up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To reveal and cover up&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Say (feminine second person), how do you write songs with a thousand views&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Millions of views&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;(translation by me)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do these last couple lines have to do with the rest of the song (or the rest of the verse)? It doesn't seem to make any sense in context, so... why is it there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="481" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T03:35:18.047" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:34:00.343" Title="What does asking how to write songs with millions of views have to do with the rest of the song in &quot;אלוף העולם&quot;?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;hanan-ben-ari&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18002" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18003" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the German author Cornelia Funke (born 1958) or her life as a writer. Funke writes children's book and is best known for the Inkheart series. Use with the tag [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:16:37.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18004" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17496" CreationDate="2021-03-15T22:18:51.537" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It would be strange to interpret “a joy has taken flight” as referring to the skylark, because the two poems employ different senses of “flight”. In ‘To a Skylark’, it is the noun form of the verb “fly”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pale purple even&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Melts around thy &lt;strong&gt;flight&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.35907/page/201/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;To a Skylark&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Prometheus Unbound&lt;/em&gt;, p. 202. London: C. and J. Ollier.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flight, &lt;em&gt;n.1&lt;/em&gt; 1.a.&lt;/strong&gt; The action or manner of flying or moving through the air with or as with wings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whereas in ‘A Lament’, it is the noun form of the verb “flee”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;flight, &lt;em&gt;n.2&lt;/em&gt; 1.a.&lt;/strong&gt; The action of fleeing or running away from, or as from, danger, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is clear from the context of ‘A Lament’, in which the speaker says that because joy has fled, his heart will never again be moved with delight. So joy flees, but the skylark flies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:18:51.537" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18005" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17490" CreationDate="2021-03-15T22:59:32.163" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Three examples of dramatic irony in &lt;em&gt;Macbeth&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In act I scene VI, Duncan visits Macbeth’s castle at Inverness and shows no signs of apprehension.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Duncan.&lt;/em&gt; This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Unto our gentle senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the audience knows that Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are planning to murder Duncan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In act II scene III, Macduff arrives at the castle and asks Macbeth to take him to the king.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macduff.&lt;/em&gt; Is the King stirring, worthy thane?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macbeth.&lt;/em&gt; Not yet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macduff.&lt;/em&gt; He did command me to call timely on him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I have almost slipp’d the hour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the audience knows that Macbeth has already murdered Duncan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In act II scene IV, Macduff tells Ross that Duncan was killed by his own servants on the orders of Malcolm and Donalbain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ross.&lt;/em&gt; Is’t known who did this more than bloody deed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macduff.&lt;/em&gt; Those that Macbeth hath slain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Ross.&lt;/em&gt; Alas, the day!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What good could they pretend?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Macduff.&lt;/em&gt; They were suborn’d.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Malcolm and Donalbain, the King’s two sons,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Are stol’n away and fled; which puts upon them&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Suspicion of the deed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the audience knows that none of this is true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-15T22:59:32.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18008" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T04:53:52.067" Score="3" ViewCount="106" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thomas Jones, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n06/thomas-jones/oh-you-darling-robot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;writing about the Kazuo Ishiguro novel &lt;em&gt;Klara and the Sun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ishiguro doesn’t get tangled up in the complexities of neural&#xA;networks, machine learning, algorithms or the difficulties of getting&#xA;computers to understand symbolic logic. But it doesn’t matter how&#xA;Klara’s mind works, because she isn’t really a robot. She’s a much&#xA;older form of artificial intelligence, a much older kind of artificial&#xA;friend: she’s a fictional character. It may be inherently impossible&#xA;to write a novel that openly poses such questions as whether robots&#xA;can be said to have souls, or to be conscious, or capable of feeling&#xA;love, or of inspiring and reciprocating sympathy in people. By making&#xA;them characters in a story, you aren’t asking the question: you’ve&#xA;already answered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting argument, with many confirmatory examples: from The Golem, to Pygmalion, to &lt;em&gt;Rossum's Universal Robots&lt;/em&gt;, to &lt;em&gt;2001: A Space Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;, to &lt;em&gt;Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?&lt;/em&gt; (though not all of those are novels). One counter-example is enough to disprove the claim, and the origin of this counter-genre is also interesting: why hasn't it caught on?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, what's the earliest novel including an artificial intelligence as a character, which poses the question of whether it has a soul (or so on), and answers it in the negative?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the closest attempts I can think of is Jo Walton's &lt;em&gt;The Just City&lt;/em&gt;, where non-humanoid cleaning robots obviate the need for slaves in an (alternative) classical era city. They are minor background characters. But as (minor spoilers) they are revealed to not be that dumb, it ultimately confirms Jones' assertion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T00:37:46.197" LastActivityDate="2021-04-17T16:44:54.480" Title="The earliest novel with a robot who isn't &quot;human enough&quot;" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18009" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T05:22:36.527" Score="5" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gore Vidal's &lt;em&gt;Myra Breckinridge&lt;/em&gt; (1968) was perhaps the first major novel in English to have a transgender protagonist. Myra, née Myron, undergoes gender confirmation surgery. In order to retain Myron's assets without being outed as trans, she pretends to be his widow. She lives a flamboyant life fueled by sex, drugs, and alcohol. At the end of the novel, a car accident compels her to have her breast implants removed. In the meanwhile, she has fallen in love with a woman named Mary Ann, so she re-adopts her previous identity of Myron and settles down with Mary Ann.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the one hand, Myra is an engaging, attractive, vivacious character. For the 1960s, Vidal made a bold choice in having an unabashed and fun-loving trans protagonist. On the other hand, Myra is presented as self-destructive in many ways, and the end of the novel, with Myra domesticated and detransitioning, seems regressive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does the trans community read &lt;em&gt;Myra Breckinridge&lt;/em&gt;? As a pioneering but flawed work? As an empowering presentation of trans identity? As a cis-normative pathologizing of trans identities? Any of those readings is defensible, and many others are possible. So I'm wondering how the novel has been seen by trans readers and their allies. I understand that the trans community as a whole might not have a consensus reading of &lt;em&gt;Myra Breckinridge&lt;/em&gt;. I'm hoping for an answer that summarizes representative opinions, not a definitive &amp;quot;trans readers all say this one thing about the novel.&amp;quot; One that includes the opinions of cis scholars such as Judith Butler whose work has informed discussion of trans identities would also be welcomed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems relevant that very unusually for his time, Vidal was himself openly bisexual. His 1948 novel &lt;em&gt;The City and the Pillar&lt;/em&gt; created a firestorm by having a sympathetic gay protagonist who does not die a sad, lonely death at the end of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T05:22:36.527" Title="How does the trans community view Gore Vidal's *Myra Breckinridge*?" Tags="&lt;sexuality&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;gore-vidal&gt;&lt;myra-breckinridge&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18010" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T10:09:44.800" Score="3" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;While researching to answer another &lt;em&gt;Jude the Obscure&lt;/em&gt; question, I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://mseffie.com/assignments/hardy/Jude%20the%20Obscure/Jude%20Whole.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;list of homework assignments&lt;/a&gt; related to this novel, in which the following one caught my eye:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Three times objects are burned -- Jude’s portrait, his ecclesiastical books, and Sue’s embroidered nightgown. There are additional references to “burning” love or kisses, to the Martyrs’ burning place, and to the burning of the body. Considering that fire both consumes and purifies, discuss the significance of these.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read it some years ago and I don't remember noticing &amp;quot;burning&amp;quot; as a recurring theme. &lt;strong&gt;Is it really a significant theme in the novel&lt;/strong&gt;, or has someone just found a word that appears a few times, without special significance, to make an assignment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T10:09:44.800" Title="Is burning a theme in Jude the Obscure?" Tags="&lt;thomas-hardy&gt;&lt;theme&gt;&lt;jude-the-obscure&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18011" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18000" CreationDate="2021-03-16T11:14:41.410" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;I found it!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoline_and_the_Yellow_Cat&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ottoline and the Yellow Cat by Chris Riddell&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm so glad I did, I've been looking for it for ages. The book was published in 2007 in the UK, originally in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia article hits the points pretty well.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her parents are away travelling.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ottoline's parents go on trips to other countries, leaving Mr Munroe to care for her. [...] They have many collections from other countries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Knuffels is Mr Munroe in English!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Munroe is Ottoline's friend and is from a bog in Norway. He is a&#xA;little creature with long, straight hair that Ottoline likes to brush.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The monster in the basement is a bear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Bear is a bear found by Ottoline, stealing clothes from other&#xA;people. He lives in the basement which he says is much cosier than his&#xA;cave.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dog-napping story was actually a thieving ring run by the Yellow Cat. The dogs weren't kidnapped, they ran away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The company's dogs usually run away from their owners and back to the&#xA;Yellow Cat with a map containing information about where the money and&#xA;jewels were.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12375" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T11:14:41.410" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18012" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T15:11:50.697" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a young adult/children's book read some time around 2004, in English. Unfortunately no recollection of the cover. Remembered details are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a boy is on vacation, or perhaps has moved, in a hot, dusty place&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;there is abandoned house&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the boy befriends another child (could also have been an old man with a youthful spirit)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;time jumps to when the house was not abandoned&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a scene with an inexplicable wind inside the house&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;a scarab beetle was important, in some way&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I think the book ended with a scarab beetle scuttling in the sand.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which book is this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12386" LastEditorUserId="12386" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T20:57:51.797" LastActivityDate="2021-03-16T20:57:51.797" Title="What is this children's/young adult book with an abandoned house and a scarab beetle?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18013" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17956" CreationDate="2021-03-16T15:32:13.837" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Yep!&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is based on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall#Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia’s plot summaries&lt;/a&gt; (which I read under the assumption that any major character deaths would be mentioned), cross-checked with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Redwall_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Redwall wiki&lt;/a&gt;. Note that since I haven’t actually read all of these books, and the ones I did read were a long time ago, I’m not sure if all these characters would count as “major”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve listed at least one “major” character death per book. Some deaths have been deliberately left out (for evil characters, or for minor characters), and it’s likely I’ve missed some deaths.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not sure it needs saying, but &lt;strong&gt;every single death listed here counts as a spoiler&lt;/strong&gt; in my book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;“Major” death(s), by book, with books in release order&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Abbot_Mortimer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abbot Mortimer&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Brother_Methuselah&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brother Methuselah&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Boar_the_Fighter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Boar the Fighter&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mattimeo&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Lettie_Bankvole&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lettie Bankvole&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Friar_Hugo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friar Hugo&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Queen_Warbeak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Queen Warbeak&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Log-a-Log_(Redwall)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current Log-a-Log&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mariel of Redwall&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Colonel_Clary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Colonel Clary&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Brigadier_Thyme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brigadier Thyme&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Pakatugg_Treefleet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pakatugg Treefleet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Brother_Hal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brother Hal&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Spriggat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spriggat&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Urthstripe_the_Strong&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Urthstripe the Strong&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Martin the Warrior&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Laterose_of_Noonvale&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laterose of Noonvale (Rose)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Felldoh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Felldoh&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Bellmaker&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Finnbarr_Galedeep&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Finnbarr Galedeep&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Mellus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mother Mellus&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Outcast of Redwall&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Skarlath&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Skarlath&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Pearls of Lutra&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Piknim&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Piknim&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Long Patrol&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Rockjaw_Grang&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rockjaw Grang&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Russa_Nodrey&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Russa Nodrey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Marlfox&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Nutwing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nutwing&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Log-a-Log_(Marlfox)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;current Log-a-Log&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Legend of Luke&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Sayna&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sayna&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Luke_the_Warrior&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luke the Warrior&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Ranguvar_Foeseeker&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ranguvar Foeseeker&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Lord Brocktree&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Jukka_the_Sling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jukka the Sling&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Fleetscut&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fleetscut&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Stonepaw&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lord Stonepaw&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Taggerung&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Lady_Cregga_Rose_Eyes&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Cregga Rose Eyes&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Triss&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Shogg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shogg&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Drufo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Drufo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Loamhedge&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Sarobando&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sarobando&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Bragoon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bragoon&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rakkety Tam&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Butty_Wopscutt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Corporal Butty Wopscutt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;High Rhulain&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Cuthbert_Blanedale_Frunk&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Major Cuthbert Blanedale Frunk&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Eulalia!&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Asio_Bardwing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asio Bardwing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doomwyte&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Friar_Skurpul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Friar Skurpul&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Sable Quean&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Flandor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Flandor&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Brother_Tollum&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Brother Tollum&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Rogue Crew&lt;/em&gt;: &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Swiffo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Swiffo&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember thinking that this seemed like a deliberate choice on the part of the author, perhaps to add pathos to his stories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yep, seems like that's intended. This is made pretty explicit in &lt;em&gt;Pearls of Lutra&lt;/em&gt;. (For context, this is an ending scene; the heroes have defeated their enemies, solved their riddles, and the adventurers have arrived home)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These pearls are said to be rare, precious and beautiful, yet when I look at them now I see only bloodshed, greed and death. There are many creatures lying dead because of them, from the family of Grath down to countless searats and corsairs. But one touched our own lives deeply, a young Abbeymaid who was friend to us all. &lt;strong&gt;Piknim was slain because of these six pearls.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 56&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in this scene of peace, right before the wild celebrations, Jacques takes the time to remind his readers of the price his characters paid for their victory. This excerpt is quite directly evoking pathos to give more weight to the story by emphasizing its consequences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T00:49:52.933" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T00:49:52.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18014" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17487" CreationDate="2021-03-16T16:54:34.713" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Lewis Carroll’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Phantasmagoria_and_Other_Poems/Phantasmagoria&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Phantasmagoria&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, of 1869, should probably be included here. This is quite a long and funny ghost story in poetic form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To give some idea of the humour involved, the poem begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One winter night, at half-past nine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cold, tired, and cross, and muddy,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I had come home, too late to dine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And supper, with cigars and wine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was waiting in the study.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a strangeness in the room,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Something white and wavy.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was standing near me in the gloom—.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I took it for the carpet-broom.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Left by that careless slavey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But presently the Thing began.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To shiver and to sneeze:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On which I said “Come, come, my man!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That’s a most inconsiderate plan.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Less noise there, if you please!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T00:32:19.593" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T00:32:19.593" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18015" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-16T22:38:17.550" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas#Responses&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; tells us that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manuel de Faria e Sousa wrote a commentary about the work in the 17th century. Published after Sousa's death[a], the work was originally written in Spanish and eventually translated into Portuguese in the 19th century.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia article about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_de_Faria_e_Sousa&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manuel de Faria e Sousa&lt;/a&gt; informs us that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;some passages in his enormous commentary upon Portuguese epic &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt;, the poem of Luís de Camões,&lt;sup&gt;[1]&lt;/sup&gt; excited the suspicion of the inquisitors, caused his temporary incarceration, and led to the permanent loss of his official salary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wdl.org/en/item/11198/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt; for the above statement, nobody would expect the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spanish_Inquisition_(Monty_Python)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Inquisition&lt;/a&gt; [b] to make its appearance in the above-mentioned Wikipedia article. But assuming that the above statement is accurate, what were the passages in Manuel de Faria e Sousa's commentary on &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt; that would cause this unpleasant run-in with the Holy Inquisition?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[a] His commentary was printed in Madrid in 1639. The author died in 1649. Did Wikipedia mess up again?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[b] Manuel de Faria e Sousa was Portuguese, but as far as I can tell, he lived in Spain at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-16T22:46:39.037" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:21:59.333" Title="Which passages in Manuel de Faria e Sousa's commentary on The Lusiads caused his temporary incarceration by the Inquisition?" Tags="&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;&lt;manuel-de-faria-e-sousa&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18016" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14592" CreationDate="2021-03-17T03:40:24.030" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;Franklin is using the word &lt;strong&gt;discover&lt;/strong&gt; in a sense that is no longer current. The first meaning in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/discover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; is this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;transitive verb&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1   a : to make known or visible : EXPOSE&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        // &lt;em&gt;discovering&lt;/em&gt; himself … as her adoring and magnanimous lover&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        — T. L. Peacock&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So &lt;strong&gt;Ralph discovered the trick we had plaid him&lt;/strong&gt; means that Ralph revealed the trick he and Franklin had played on Osborne, which is why the latter &lt;strong&gt;was a little laught at&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T10:20:37.767" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T10:20:37.767" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18017" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8695" CreationDate="2021-03-17T04:41:08.517" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Adaptations by nature leave out incidents and nuance, as well as rearrange the order of events in the original. The only principle seems to be to &lt;strong&gt;make the adaptation as appealing to the target audience as possible, while staying as close to the spirit of the original as is compatible with that goal&lt;/strong&gt;. This principle is not very different from what one sees when books are adapted to movies. When popular franchises such as the Harry Potter books or &lt;em&gt;LOTR&lt;/em&gt; are cinematized, incidents are left out, reordered, and even invented. Characters may be presented differently from the way they are presented in the books. The final product is a balancing act between the original, the target audience of the new version, and the constraints of the new medium.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The three changes you note in the Great Illustrated Classics version of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; demonstrate this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The change with regard to how Dantès realizes what Danglars and Fernand have done is probably part of the cuts needed to keep the adaptation down to a manageable length. &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; is a very long work, over a thousand pages in the Penguin Classics edition. The Abbé's leading Dantès to this realization takes about six pages. It's practically a catechism:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Was there someone who stood to gain if you did not marry Mercédès?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, a young man who was in love with her.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Called?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Fernand.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;A Spanish name ... ?&amp;quot; [ellipses in original]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;He is a Catalan.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Do you think him capable of writing the letter?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;No! He would have put a knife in me, quite simply.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Dumas, Alexandre (Père). &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt;. 1844–45. Trans. Robin Buss. London: Penguin, 1996. p. 142&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This sort of interrogation is too elaborate to capture succinctly in a form suitable for an illustrated children's book. It's simpler to just have Dantès realize the villainy on his own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Besides, the Abbé's saying in the children's version that he wanted Dantès to puzzle it out does represent what happens in the book as well. The Abbé does not present Dantès with the conclusion that Danglars and Fernand are at fault, but asks enough questions that Dantès figures it out himself. It's a good way to shorten their exchange while conveying some of its spirit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With regard to the 70 million francs, the change might have been made simply to make the amount more impressive. It seems to be a random choice. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.historicalstatistics.org/Currencyconverter.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;currency converter&lt;/a&gt; at Historical Statistics does not indicate that it's a straightforward conversion to the value 13 million francs would have in 2008, the year of the adaptation. 13 million francs in 1815 money would actually be worth considerably &lt;em&gt;more&lt;/em&gt; than 70 million francs in 2008.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The choice of having the cannon go off before Dantès joins the smugglers is odd. On the one hand, it adds to the drama of his escape. On the other hand, it makes the search for Dantès and his capture more likely to occur before he can join them, and the smugglers might hesitate to take on board someone who is likely to be an escaped convict. On the gripping hand, the captain of the smugglers sees having an escapee among his men as an advantage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;     A second later, the sound of a distant explosion reached the tartan. The sailors looked up and exchanged glances.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     &amp;quot;What does that mean?&amp;quot; the master asked.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     &amp;quot;Some prisoner escaped last night,&amp;quot; said Dantès, &amp;quot;and they are firing the warning gun.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     The master looked at the young man who, as he spoke the words, brought the flask to his lips. He drank the liquid with such calm and satisfaction that, if the master had felt the shadow of a doubt, it would immediately have been dispelled.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     &amp;quot;This rum is devilish strong,&amp;quot; said Dantès, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;     &amp;quot;In any case,&amp;quot; the master thought, looking at him, &amp;quot;even if it is him, so much the better. I have gained a fine man.&amp;quot;       (p. 183)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So there does not seem to be any good reason to have the cannon go off before Dantès is rescued by the smugglers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these three examples, it seems that decisions about these changes are made ad hoc. There's perhaps a specific reason for each change to the original; but those changes are hard to relate to any overall vision apart from the exigencies of the new medium and the desire to reach a new audience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T02:39:36.810" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T02:39:36.810" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18018" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17518" CreationDate="2021-03-17T05:32:42.153" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TW:&lt;/strong&gt; suicide&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lines mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you have a stone, then you no longer need to wonder about whether you're still going to drown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is to say, if there is doubt about whether you're going to drown, then a stone can take away the guesswork. The reference is to the habit suicides have of weighing their pockets down with stones so that they cannot float to the surface but drown. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/03/28/virginia-woolf-suicide-letter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virginia Woolf died in this way&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The song is about how we're manipulated into believing superficialities (&amp;quot;illusion &amp;amp; dream&amp;quot;). The speaker is trying to convince someone else to notice this manipulation and to opt out of the &amp;quot;world of make-believe.&amp;quot; We are already &amp;quot;drifting aimlessly.&amp;quot; The images we are served up, which &amp;quot;dress&amp;quot; dishonesty &amp;quot;in a pretty gown,&amp;quot; are the stones that will ensure that we drown in the sea we're already adrift in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The speaker says we need to stop drifting and confront our demon. Either we chase the demon away, or it will take our freedom. Rather than participate in the noisy and restless world of images, we should strive to break away toward silence, peace, and freedom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With silence comes peace&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With peace comes freedom&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With freedom comes silence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T05:32:42.153" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18019" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-17T06:09:28.237" Score="2" ViewCount="104" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a book that is about a girl who seems to have been rich at one time and has to move in with a family where she learns how to do chores and baking from scratch and making silk out of silk worms. She falls in love with the son of one of the parents. It seems to be a story about the pioneer days because I remembered they used the slang quaker in it and I believe in that book it was to describe a person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I remember the book was a red hardback book but it wasn't a really big size like the &lt;em&gt;Twilight&lt;/em&gt; books are.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Laura A Merchant" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T11:50:29.347" Title="Book about a girl who was rich and moves in with a family where she learns how to bake and make silk" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18020" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18021" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Kurdish love story 'Mem and Zin' or 'Mem û Zîn‎', written down by Ahmad Khani in 1692. Use with the tags [ahmad-khani] and [kurmanji-kurdish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T12:12:18.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18023" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-17T15:30:36.810" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T15:30:36.810" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T15:30:36.810" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18024" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-17T15:30:36.810" Score="0" Body="Questions about the crime novel &quot;Death of a Ghost&quot; (1934) by Margery Allingham. It is the sixth book with the character Albert Campion. Use with [margery-allingham]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-17T21:26:31.930" LastActivityDate="2021-03-17T21:26:31.930" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18025" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3600" CreationDate="2021-03-18T01:48:04.800" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The use of multiple perspectives has been a feature of the English novel from its earliest days. Samuel Richardson's &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pamelaorvirtuere00richiala/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1740), often considered the &lt;a href=&quot;https://daily.jstor.org/why-the-first-novel-created-such-a-stir/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;first novel in English&lt;/a&gt;, itself uses multiple narrators. The first part of the story is told mostly in a series of letters from Pamela to her parents. However, four of those 32 letters are replies from her parents to Pamela. Additionally, between letters 31 and 32, Richardson inserts a section told from an omniscient narrator's point of view:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also to be observed, that the messenger of her letters to her father, who so often pretended business that way, was an implement in his master's hands, and employed by him for that purpose; and always gave her letters first to him, and his master used to open and read them, and then send them on; by which means, as he hints to her, (as she observes in her letter XXX) he was no stranger to what she wrote. Thus every way was the poor virgin beset: And the whole will shew the base arts of designing men to gain their wicked ends; and how much it behoves the fair sex to stand upon their guard against artful contrivances, especially when riches and power conspire against innocence and a low estate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the novel past Letter 32 consists of Pamela's journal entries. While the bulk of &lt;em&gt;Pamela&lt;/em&gt;, then, is told from the limited perspective of the eponymous heroine, the letters from her parents as well as the intrusion of an omniscient narrator at one point shows that multiple perspectives were part of the English novel from its very inception.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richardson further developed this technique of multiple perspectives in his next novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.135856&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clarissa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1748), which is written as a series of letters between several correspondents. Jane Austen too adopted this epistolary technique in her first novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/amemoirjaneaust00leiggoog/page/n4/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Susan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1794?; published 1871).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Austen is, in fact, credited with moving the English novel away from the multiple points of view prevalent in the 18th century to the characteristic third person limited that became the default over the 19th and 20th centuries. John Mullan &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/05/jane-austen-emma-changed-face-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;claims&lt;/a&gt; that Austen's 1815 novel &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463641/page/n3/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;was revolutionary in its form and technique. Its heroine is a self-deluded young woman with the leisure and power to meddle in the lives of her neighbours. The narrative was radically experimental because it was designed to share her delusions. The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind. Though little noticed by most of the pioneers of fiction for the next century and more, it belongs with the great experimental novels of Flaubert or Joyce or Woolf. Woolf wrote that if Austen had lived longer and written more, “She would have been the forerunner of Henry James and of Proust”. In &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt;, she is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Only two chapters in &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; are told from points of view other than Emma's own. For the rest of the novel, the reader shares Emma's perspective and her delusions. As Mullan notes, this is a radical innovation in the history of the novel. That we can take it for granted shows how far its success has obscured the English novel's beginnings, where multiple perspectives were the norm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Austen, Jane. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.463641/page/n3/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emma&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1814. London: Collins, n.d. Archive.org. Accessed March 17, 2021. Archive.org. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/amemoirjaneaust00leiggoog/page/n4/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lady Susan&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1794? In &lt;em&gt;A Memoir of Jane Austen by her Nephew J. E. Austen-Leigh&lt;/em&gt;. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1871. Archive.org. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mullan, John. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/dec/05/jane-austen-emma-changed-face-fiction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;How Jane Austen’s &lt;em&gt;Emma&lt;/em&gt; Changed the Face of Fiction&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The Guardian&lt;/em&gt; December 5, 2015. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Richardson, Samuel. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.135856&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Clarissa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1748. London: Dent, 1922. Archive.org. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/pamelaorvirtuere00richiala/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1740. Oxford: Bartlett and Newman, 1815. Archive.org. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wills, Matthew. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://daily.jstor.org/why-the-first-novel-created-such-a-stir/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Why the First Novel Created Such a Stir&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;JStor Daily&lt;/em&gt;  January 11, 2018. Accessed March 17, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T01:48:04.800" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18027" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-18T09:12:54.947" Score="11" ViewCount="1321" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is perhaps a surprising instalment in my sequence of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; questions, being about human dialect and nothing to do with rabbits at all. Of course, it comes from the chapter &amp;quot;Dea ex Machina&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why don' you do somethin' sensible,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;'stead o' bidin' there 'ollerin' and carryin' on like you was skimmish? You wants go'n get some cloze on, then you c'n go'n put 'im in that old cage what's in shed. One what you 'ad for they budgies.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nearly all the humans with speaking parts in &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; have this kind of rural dialect, but only here is a word I couldn't decipher at all. A more standard representation of Lucy's father's words would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why don't you do something sensible, instead of staying there hollering and carrying on like you were &lt;em&gt;[skimmish]&lt;/em&gt;? You should go and get some clothes on, then you can go and put him in that old cage in the shed. The one you had for those budgies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;skimmish&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:35:27.050" Title="What does &quot;skimmish&quot; mean, in this eye dialect?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18028" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18027" CreationDate="2021-03-18T09:50:47.957" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=5GpLcC4a5fAC&amp;amp;pg=PA1292&amp;amp;lpg=PA1292&amp;amp;dq=skimmish%20meaning&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=2BeTN6lkC6&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0ygC1wudjTL4Ez4Qg0NyB_EbIlMQ&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwjK-sTrw7nvAhVZCjQIHVoDDFoQ6AEwDXoECAUQAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=skimmish%20meaning&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cassell's Dictionary of Slang&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;skimmish&lt;/em&gt; is a variant of &lt;em&gt;skimish&lt;/em&gt;, which means beer or alcohol.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;skimish&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; (also &lt;strong&gt;skimmish&lt;/strong&gt;) [1900s-70s] (&lt;em&gt;mainly tramp&lt;/em&gt;) beer, alcohol; thus &lt;em&gt;skimisher/skimmisher&lt;/em&gt;, a heavy drinker. [Shelta &lt;em&gt;skimis&lt;/em&gt;, to drink, &lt;em&gt;skimisk&lt;/em&gt;, drunk]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780199543700.001.0001/acref-9780199543700-e-4589&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang&lt;/a&gt; agrees:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;skimish /ˈskɪmɪʃ/ &lt;em&gt;noun&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Alcoholic drink. 1908–. J.Curtis He had been drinking all that skimish without having had a bite to eat ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Cassell's dictionary says that the word origin is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Shelta&lt;/a&gt;, a language spoken by Irish Travelers. The word &lt;strong&gt;skimmish&lt;/strong&gt; appears in traveler Maggie Smith-Bendell's 2013 autobiography &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&amp;amp;lr=&amp;amp;id=jZbUf5khu6cC&amp;amp;oi=fnd&amp;amp;pg=PT7&amp;amp;dq=%22skimmish%22%20meaning&amp;amp;ots=BQk7j5pEkQ&amp;amp;sig=6pnkLwdSAWijUEspMVjh66MgcTw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=skimmish&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;After All These Years: Our Gypsy Journey Continues&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, in the meaning &lt;strong&gt;drunk&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Me Dad used to enjoy getting skimmish by visiting the closest kitcherma (pub) and downing pints of brown ale.    (p. 15)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these examples, it appears that Lucy's father is using the word to mean &lt;strong&gt;drunk&lt;/strong&gt;. The alternative suggested in the other answer, that he is calling Lucy &amp;quot;squeamish,&amp;quot; does not seem convincing to me, for two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/squeamish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt; says, &lt;strong&gt;squeamish&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;easily nauseated&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;excessively fastidious&lt;/em&gt;.  The criticized behavior, &amp;quot;hollerin' and carryin' on,&amp;quot; is not characteristic of squeamishness. It is, however, fairly common in drunk people—or in people who are &lt;strong&gt;upset&lt;/strong&gt;, as the quote in the other answer says Lucy is. The fact that Lucy is eleven doesn't preclude her behavior at being upset from being &lt;em&gt;compared&lt;/em&gt; to drunkenness.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lucy's father is telling her to get a cage for the rabbit because he has decided to let her keep it, and is not planning to kill it. Since the rabbit isn't going to be killed, the question of his telling her not to be squeamish at the rabbit's impending death doesn't arise.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is true that Lucy's family are not travelers, but the fact that the word is of traveler &lt;em&gt;origin&lt;/em&gt; doesn't mean that it is used solely by travelers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T00:35:27.050" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:35:27.050" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18029" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18027" CreationDate="2021-03-18T09:54:24.907" Score="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;The context is that Lucy is “’ollerin’ and carryin’ on” (that is, crying) because she is unhappy at the prospect of killing the rabbit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucy began to cry. She had not lived all her life on a farm for nothing and she knew very well that everything her father had said was right. But she was upset by the idea of killing the rabbit in cold blood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Richard Adams (1972). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/watershipdown0000adam_s8h7/page/460/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;, chapter 48&lt;/a&gt;. Penguin.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning must therefore be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;skimmish&lt;/strong&gt; squeamish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;John Downes (1986). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofdevo00down/page/26/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Dictionary of Devon Dialect&lt;/em&gt;, p. 26&lt;/a&gt;. Padstow: Tabb House.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucy must be younger than eleven years old, as her father muses that she “was very likely goin’ to grammar school”, so it seems unlikely that he would compare her behaviour to drunkenness, as suggested in the other answer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A note on “’ollering” since this seems to be a difficulty. The &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; says “holler, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; 1. cry out loud” and although this is usually “cry” in the sense “shout”, it can also be “cry” in the sense “weep and wail”. Two citations for this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man with a baby in his arms wearily drifts to the coffee-stall, waiting for the belated all-night train. And at once this company of nightbirds and homeless populace become absorbed in one overwhelming problem—how to &lt;strong&gt;stop the baby crying&lt;/strong&gt;. […] A “certain old drab,” half-starved, is stuffed with coffee and sardines and promised “tuppence” to &lt;strong&gt;stop the child's “’ollering.”&lt;/strong&gt; She immediately succeeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Charles Masterman (1909). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/conditionofengla00mastiala/page/188/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Condition of England&lt;/em&gt;, p. 204&lt;/a&gt;. London: Methuen.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And when grandfather went down and teened† a candle and oped the door, there was two voices, if you please; for Christian was talking and a &lt;strong&gt;babby was screaming&lt;/strong&gt;! [… Christian said,] “To the stone I went, brave as a regiment of soldiers, but scarce was I beside it when I heard a &lt;strong&gt;child hollering&lt;/strong&gt; and shrieking like a sucking pig being killed.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Eden Phillpotts (1921). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/toldattheplume00phil/page/204/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Told at ‘The Plume’&lt;/em&gt;, p. 205&lt;/a&gt;. London: Hurst &amp;amp; Blackett.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† teen, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; To light, kindle (Joseph Wright (1898), &lt;em&gt;English Dialect Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;, volume VI, pp. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924088038439/page/n65/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;54&lt;/a&gt; &amp;amp; &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924088038439/page/n163/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;153&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T13:34:08.057" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T13:34:08.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18030" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18031" CreationDate="2021-03-18T10:30:43.210" Score="6" ViewCount="198" Body="&lt;p&gt;Os Lusíadas chapter 1 verse 42 mentions a certain Saint Lawrence island in Africa.  But this name doesn't seem to be used in modern times.  What island or other geographical location does this refer to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://pt.wikisource.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas/I&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;relevant text from the original Portugese is&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cortava o mar a gente belicosa, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Já lá da banda do Austro e do Oriente,&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Entre a costa Etiópica e a famosa&lt;br&gt;&#xA;Ilha de São Lourenço; […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Hungarian translation by Hárs Ernő (Luis de Camões, &lt;em&gt;A Lusiadák&lt;/em&gt;, (1997) Mundus Magyar Egyetemi Kiadó, Budapest, ISBN:963-8033-46-0) says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a harcos nép a tengert szelte bátran, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;a Délből már Keletbe lépve jócskán, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;az etióp partvidék vonalában, &lt;br&gt;&#xA;Szent Lőrinc híres szigetét súrolván;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="139" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T08:40:57.010" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T09:12:18.407" Title="Where is St. Lawrence island in Africa, mentioned in Os Lusíadas" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18031" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18030" CreationDate="2021-03-18T11:12:20.647" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;São Lourenço, i.e., Saint Laurence or Lawrence, was the name given to Madagascar by the Portuguese. According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;European contact began on August 10, 1500, when the Portuguese sea captain Diogo Dias sighted the island after his ship separated from a fleet going to India. The Portuguese traded with the islanders and named the island São Lourenço (Saint Lawrence).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In William C. Atkinson's translation, the passage quoted in the question is rendered:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this scene was taking place on Olympus, the Portuguese sailed on and on. They had rounded the Cape now and were heading north again between the mainland and the island of Madagascar.     (p. 74)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So also the 1877 translation by William Julius Mickle at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/32528/32528-h/32528-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whilst thus in heaven's bright palace fate was weigh'd&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Right onward still the brave Armada strayed:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Right on they steer by Ethiopia's strand&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And pastoral Madagascar's verdant land.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mickle's endnote says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And pastoral Madagascar&lt;/em&gt;.—Called by the ancient geographers, Menuthia and Cerna Ethiopica; by the natives, the Island of the Moon; and by the Portuguese, the Isle of St. Laurence, on whose festival they discovered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Canto 10, Camõens mentions this island twice. In verse 39, relating the adventures of Tristão da Cunha, he writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pelo Cunha também, que nunca extinto&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Será seu nome em todo o mar que lava&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As ilhas do Austro, e praias que se chamam&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De São Lourenço, e em todo o Sul se afamam!     (ll. 5–8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atkinson renders this as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is the doing of Tristão da Cunha, a name that will never be forgotten throughout the sea that washes these southern islands and the far-famed shores of Madagascar in particular.      (p. 335)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mickle's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Green Madagascar's flow'ry dales shall swell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His echo'd fame, till ocean's southmost bound&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On isles and shores unknown his name resound.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know why in these earlier instances these English translators have used &amp;quot;Madagascar&amp;quot; in the text. I would imagine that keeping St Laurence and mentioning Madagascar in a footnote would make more sense. Particularly since in stanza 137 Canto 10, Camões identifies the island by both its former and its current name:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;De São Lourenço vê a Ilha afamada,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que Madagáscar é dalguns chamada.      (ll. 7–8)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Atkinson translates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And see here the famous island of São Lourenço, that some call Madagascar.     (p. 364)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mickle's translation of these lines is, well, creative:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And lo, the Island of the Moon displays&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her vernal lawns, and num'rous peaceful bays&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His endnote explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;And lo, the Island of the Moon&lt;/em&gt;.—Madagascar is thus named by the natives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mickle is mistaken. Samuel Pasfield Oliver notes that Arab sailors sometimes called Madagascar &lt;em&gt;jazirat al-qamar&lt;/em&gt; or &amp;quot;Island of the Moon&amp;quot; (p. 3); but there is no indication it was ever called this by its original inhabitants, nor does Camões use this fanciful description. But as Atkinson's more faithful translation shows, Camões was aware that the island he has referred to as São Lourenço was now known by a different name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Atkinson, William C, trans. &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;. By Luis Vaz de Camões. London: Penguin Books, 1952.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Camões, Luís Vaz de. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3333&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 29 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mickle, William Julius, trans. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32528&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. By Luis de Camões. 1776. 5th ed., revised by E. Richmond Hodges. London: George Bell, 1877. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 29 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Oliver, Samuel Pasfield. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/madagascarhistor01oliv/page/n8/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Madagascar: an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Island and its Former Dependencies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Macmillan, 1886. Archive.org. Accessed 29 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T09:12:18.407" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T09:12:18.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18033" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18008" CreationDate="2021-03-18T14:11:00.513" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Isaac Asimov's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bicentennial_Man&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Bicentennial Man&lt;/a&gt; is a novelette (later expanded into a novel) written for the US Bicentennial in 1976.  (Warning: that linked article contains spoilers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's one of his better and most memorable stories, about a robot that wants to become human.&#xA;It ends with a happy (with underlying sadness) ending.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The significant aspect to the story, with respect to your question, is that there was never anything intrinsic to the robot that could ever allow it to be considered human.&#xA;It was only something that happens near the end that grants this wish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you allow for wooden and somewhat magical robots, then&#xA;Carlo Collodi's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Adventures of Pinocchio&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1881,&#xA;is a very early example of an artificial creation that wanted to become human.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastEditorUserId="11606" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T14:16:19.133" LastActivityDate="2021-03-18T14:16:19.133" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18034" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18038" CreationDate="2021-03-18T19:16:21.793" Score="8" ViewCount="758" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't understand the second stanza of &lt;a href=&quot;https://hellopoetry.com/poem/2846/i-am-afraid-to-own-a-body/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am afraid to own a Body—&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emily Dickinson&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Double Estate—entailed at pleasure&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Upon an unsuspecting Heir—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Duke in a moment of Deathlessness&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And God, for a Frontier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My current understanding:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Women are born with a soul and a body that they own (&lt;em&gt;Double Estate&lt;/em&gt;). Being brought to this world is not anybody's fault (&lt;em&gt;unsuspecting Heir&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have read &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mytutor.co.uk/answers/23027/A-Level/English/How-does-Emily-Dickinson-portray-the-body-and-soul-in-I-m-afraid-to-own-a-Body-1090/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this analysis of the poem&lt;/a&gt;, but it does not clear up the last two verses of Emily's writing to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To what duke and to what frontier does Emily refer here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7767" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-18T23:08:12.347" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T02:22:00.753" Title="What might &quot;And God, for a Frontier.&quot; mean in &quot;I am afraid to own a Body—&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;emily-dickinson&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18036" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18034" CreationDate="2021-03-19T00:06:18.917" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;A duke was (and is) normally the owner of large estates, and thus this indicates both the body and soul are valuable properties.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The frontier is what would appear at the boundary of the estate -- hence, beyond the body and soul there is God, immediately.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:06:18.917" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18037" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3487" CreationDate="2021-03-19T00:18:29.863" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe Beatrice puts poison in Eugene’s tea because those “love sips” fed the children metaphorical poison. Eugene excused his abuse by calling it love. He had the children drink the hot tea, calling the burning of their tongues his love. Beatrice feeds him literal poison the same way he fed Kambili and Jaja metaphorical poison.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12409" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T00:18:29.863" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18038" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18034" CreationDate="2021-03-19T02:09:30.663" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;To make sense of the last lines, it might be proper to put them in thematic context of the first lines. This somewhat cryptic poem manages to succinctly weave together three different themes: women’s rights; slavery; and (in terms of Christian theology) the doctrine of man. Some external evidence would be the time period in which Dickinson lived (1830-1886) in which we have the parallel struggles of Abolition and the Women’s rights movement (and/or Women’s Suffrage) couched in the predominantly Judeo-Christian culture in which core values were largely sustained by belief in the Bible as the “Word of God.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line afraid to “own a body” possibly alludes to the repulsive notion of slavery—that no one should own someone else’s body. On that same note—bearing in mind Women’s Rights—women are likewise no one’s property. This idea challenges “old school” notions of women (historically) being chattel and, in some ways, were not much better off than slaves. They were not even allowed to own property in a world “ruled by men.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next line “own a Soul” turns the theme of the poem from mere challenges of distinctiveness and freedom into Christian theology (while not negating the values of the first line). Biblical, Judeo-Christian theology seems to teach that human beings are comprised of at least two parts: body and soul—(some might say body, soul, and spirit—see I Thessalonians 5:23)—but at least body and soul. Both body and soul (and spirit) are the property of God and therefore “precarious Property” (line 3) denoting our body and souls belong to no one but God. In terms of abolition and women’s rights, this signifies that human beings are free agents—to be “owned” by no one as “possession [is] not optional.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The language of property continues with the words “Double Estate” (line 5) denoting the dual nature of humans (body and soul) that is “entailed at pleasure” (line 5)—which is to say bestowed upon us all (us “unsuspecting Heirs” (line 6)) presumably by the will of God. What are we “Heirs” of then? According to the Bible, “heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ” (of the Kingdom of God)(Romans 8:17, KJV). Christians as “heirs” is a major theme in the New Testament; (see also: Rm 4:14; Ga 3:29; Titus 3:7; He 1:14; etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The vernacular of property continues with “Duke” (line 7) notably a male title of a property owner as opposed to “duchess”—(again denoting a predominantly male society in which Dickinson lives)—and in context serves to resonate a sardonic tone; perhaps from a person who has good reason to be critical of her society. In any case, the Duke presides over his property for this “moment of Deathlessness”—which is to say life is short and any property one might own will not be his (or hers) for long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The syntactically challenging enjambment of the last line “And God, for a frontier” denotes that in the end, it is God to whom we all belong and ultimately to his “frontier” (line 8). Again, Dickinson employs the vernacular of land to describe, presumably, the afterlife as a “frontier”—arguably imagery of early America—denoting vastness, wild, and free—unowned by anyone (save God)—where we will all be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kupsh, Charlotte. “The Uncomfortable Self: Emily Dickinson’s Reflections on Consciousness.” Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 11&#xA;Issue 1 Volume 11, Issue 1, Winter 2018, pp. 49-61.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Holy Bible, Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T02:22:00.753" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T02:22:00.753" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18039" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9229" CreationDate="2021-03-19T02:56:05.613" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Gareth Rees's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/9232/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; is of course correct in pointing out that (a) the poem is unlikely to be Herrick's, and (b) the version in the question is truncated and with the punctuation altered. However, the last verse does make meaning in both versions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, the version the question cites:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged, and doth range&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her country; so my heart doth change.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But change the earth, or change the sky&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet will I love her till I die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;em&gt;range&lt;/em&gt; is used transitively. Merriam-Webster says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 a : to rove over or through&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   b : to sail or pass along&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So it means &lt;em&gt;Cupid ranges over her country&lt;/em&gt;. In this case, her country is her body. This refers back to the previous stanza of this version:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her gestures, motions and her smile&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her wit, her voice, my heart beguile;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Beguile my heart, I know not why&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And yet I love her till I die!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid roams over her gestures, her gait, her smile, etc., and each of those in turn beguiles the speaker's heart. So when the speaker watches her gestures, his heart loves her gestures; when he watches her smile, his heart loves her smile, etc. That is why &lt;em&gt;his heart doth change&lt;/em&gt;. I disagree with Peter Shor's comment that the change from &lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt; to &lt;strong&gt;heart&lt;/strong&gt; makes &amp;quot;total nonsense of the poem&amp;quot;. (It made perfect sense to me when I read it.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Next, the earlier version given in Gareth's answer:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged and doth range,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her countrie so my love doth change,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But change she earth, or change she skie,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet will I love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, &lt;strong&gt;range&lt;/strong&gt; is used transitively:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 a : to roam at large or freely&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   b : to move over an area so as to explore it&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the stanza could be interpreted to mean that the lady is moving to a different country. The speaker is saying that since the lady epitomizes winged Love, her moving is understandable. Yet no matter where she is, he will lover her forever.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That said, given how manuscripts circulated in the 16th and 17th C., with neither spelling nor punctuation standardized, I would hesitate to read too much into the presence or absence of a comma as indicating the correct meaning. Editorial choices such as punctuation or even spelling impose unitary meanings on texts, when the manuscript record or even early print records are much more ambiguous. For example, here is the 1623 Folio text of the first few lines of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;'s famous &amp;quot;To be or not to be&amp;quot; soliloquy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be, or not to be, that is the Question:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Slings and Arrows of outragious Fortune,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or to take Armes against a Sea of troubles,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And by opposing end them: to dye, to sleep&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is how a modern editor, Harold Jenkins, normalizes these lines in the Arden edition, second series (1982):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be, or not to be, that is the question:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or to take arms against a sea of troubles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more;       (III.i.56–61)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The insertion of a comma after &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt; (in the last quoted line but one) guides the reader to a specific meaning: &amp;quot;To die is nothing more than to sleep.&amp;quot; However, the Folio text is not as definite as that. A defensible interpretation of the Folio punctuation, which lacks the comma after &lt;em&gt;sleep&lt;/em&gt;, is: &amp;quot;Dying means being unable to sleep any more.&amp;quot; Perhaps Hamlet is saying that our life is something like a sleep, and what we think we experience is just a dream? Perhaps when we die, we wake up and so are free of the illusion that is life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The point here is that the punctuation of early modern texts, being pretty sparse, is not a reliable guide to the intended meaning. The original sources can be open-ended. Later editors modernize the texts and insert punctuation based on their own interpretation of the meaning.  William Empson (mentioned in a since-deleted answer to this question) points to the several possible readings of this last verse, which he punctuates as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cupid is winged and doth range;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her country so my love doth change.&#xA;But change she earth, or change she sky,&#xA;Yet I will love her till I die.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He elaborates on the many ways that the last two lines could be interpreted:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I will love her though she moves from this part of the earth to one out of my reach; I will love her though she goes to live under different skies; I will love her though she moves from this earth and sky to another planet; I will love her though she moves into a social or intellectual sphere where I cannot follow; I will love her though she alters the earth and sky I have got now, though she destroys the bubble of worship in which I am now living by showing herself unworthy to be its object; I will love her though, being yet worthy of it, by going away she changes my earth into desire and unrest, and my heaven into dispair; I will love her even if she has both power and will to upset both the orderly ideals of men in general (heaven) and the system of society in general (earth); she may alter the earth and sky &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; has now by abandoning her faith or in just punishment becoming outcast, and still I will love her; she may change &lt;em&gt;my&lt;/em&gt; earth by killing me, but till it comes I will go on loving.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Empson, William. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.215758/page/n7/mode/1up?q=Cupid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Seven Types of Ambiguity&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1930. 2nd ed. London: Chatto and Windus, 1947. pp. 48–49).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, then, the version of the poem given in the question makes certain editorial choices in order to spotlight a particular meaning. The earlier text we have may or may not be the original. As Gareth says in his answer, it is not known whether the poem was written by Ford. Modern editions treat it as anonymous. So Ford's punctuation too may reflect his own choices. Hence, we cannot say for sure that Ford's version preserves the original meaning of the last stanza and the later, 19th C. version is simply wrong. The textual history of early modern poetry is too complicated for us to be confident about the real meaning of any given poem based simply on its earliest extant appearance in manuscript or print.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T02:56:05.613" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18040" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18194" CreationDate="2021-03-19T07:44:37.510" Score="3" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story &amp;quot;The Fall of the House of Usher&amp;quot; by Edgar Allan Poe contains a poem, &amp;quot;The Haunted Palace&amp;quot;, which starts like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the greenest of our valleys,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    By good angels tenanted,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Once a fair and stately palace—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Radiant palace—reared its head.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the monarch Thought’s dominion—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    It stood there!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Never seraph spread a pinion&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Over fabric half so fair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Banners yellow, glorious, golden,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    On its roof did float and flow;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the yellow banners symbolize?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8540" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T21:20:02.613" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T21:22:37.477" Title="What do the yellow banners in Edgar Allan Poe's &quot;The Haunted Palace&quot; symbolize?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;edgar-allan-poe&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18041" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18042" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'The Way of the World' (1700) by William Congreve. Use with the tag [william-congreve]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" LastActivityDate="2021-03-19T23:09:39.213" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18044" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18053" CreationDate="2021-03-20T02:12:25.447" Score="2" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the author was talking about a solicitor who was summoned to an ancient house, Markenmore Court, where an inquest was to be held after the death of one of its people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two days later, Mr. Fransemmery summoned to discharge the functions of a juror &lt;strong&gt;at that ancient institution, a Coroner’s inquest, found himself&lt;/strong&gt; acting as foreman of twelve good men and true in the old dining-hall of Markenmore Court. That venerable apartment had been specially prepared and fitted up for the occasion; it was the first time, observed Braxfield mournfully, that it had ever been used since the grand state dinner which Sir Anthony had given to his friends and neighbours when Guy came of age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where are the conjunctions and prepositions here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shouldn't it be written as &amp;quot;to discharge the functions of a juror at that ancient institution, &lt;strong&gt;where a Coroner’s inquest was about to be held, and&lt;/strong&gt; found himself acting as foreman&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T05:35:51.573" Title="Where are the conjunctions and prepositions here?" Tags="&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18045" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T03:57:22.170" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T03:57:22.170" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T03:57:22.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18046" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T03:57:22.170" Score="0" Body="Questions about the &quot;Inkheart&quot; fantasy series by Cornelia Funke, consisting of three novels Inkheart, Inkspell (or Inkblood), and Inkdeath. Use with [cornelia-funke] and [german-literature]." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:48:59.087" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:48:59.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18047" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:03:11.497" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:03:11.497" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:03:11.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18048" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:03:11.497" Score="0" Body="Questions about the satirical novel &quot;Myra Breckinridge&quot; (1968) by Gore Vidal. It attacked cultural norms around sexuality through a lense of camp, featuring themes such as feminism and transsexuality. Use with [gore-vidal]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:48:01.173" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:48:01.173" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18049" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:09:58.823" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:09:58.823" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:09:58.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18050" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:09:58.823" Score="0" Body="Questions about &quot;Devotions upon Emergent Occasions&quot; (1624), a collection of 23 &quot;Meditations&quot; by John Donne. It was written while Donne recovered from illness, and reflects on death, life, and sickness. Use with [john-donne] and [essays]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:47:44.970" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:47:44.970" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18051" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:14:17.017" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T04:14:17.017" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T04:14:17.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18052" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T04:14:17.017" Score="0" Body="Questions about the song lyrics (or other works) of Israeli singer-songwriter Hanan Ben Ari (born 1988). Use with [hebrew-literature] and [song-lyrics] if asking about his songs." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T13:25:03.523" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:25:03.523" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18053" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18044" CreationDate="2021-03-20T05:35:51.573" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;institution&lt;/em&gt; in that passage does not refer to Markenmore Court. The &lt;strong&gt;ancient institution&lt;/strong&gt; is the coroner's inquest itself. This is definition 1c in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/institution#synonyms&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a significant practice, relationship, or organization in a society or culture&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// the institution of marriage&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence would perhaps be easier to understand with the insertion of two words:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two days later, Mr. Fransemmery &lt;strong&gt;who was&lt;/strong&gt; summoned to discharge the functions of a juror at that ancient institution, a Coroner’s inquest, found himself acting as foreman of twelve good men and true in the old dining-hall of Markenmore Court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even in the text as it stands, though, I'd've expected a comma after &lt;strong&gt;Fransemmery&lt;/strong&gt;; its absence is surprising.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T05:35:51.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18054" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-20T07:34:04.840" Score="8" ViewCount="304" Body="&lt;p&gt;A popular legend about the parents of Thomas Becket (1118–1170), Archbishop of Canterbury, is retold by Charles Dickens in &lt;em&gt;A Child's History of England&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once upon a time, a worthy merchant of London, named Gilbert À Becket, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and was taken prisoner by a Saracen lord. This lord, who treated him kindly and not like a slave, had one fair daughter, who fell in love with the merchant; and who told him that she wanted to become a Christian, and was willing to marry him if they could fly to a Christian country. The merchant returned her love, until he found an opportunity to escape, when he did not trouble himself about the Saracen lady, but escaped with his servant Richard, who had been taken prisoner along with him, and arrived in England and forgot her. The Saracen lady, who was more loving than the merchant, left her father's house in disguise to follow him, and made her way, under many hardships, to the sea-shore. The merchant had taught her only two English words (for I suppose he must have learnt the Saracen tongue himself, and made love in that language), of which London was one, and his own name, Gilbert, the other. She went among the ships, saying, &amp;quot;London! London!&amp;quot; over and over again, until the sailors understood that she wanted to find an English vessel that would carry her there; so they showed her such a ship, and she paid for her passage with some of her jewels, and sailed away. Well! The merchant was sitting in his counting-house in London one day, when he heard a great noise in the street; and presently Richard came running in from the warehouse, with his eyes wide open and his breath almost gone, saying, &amp;quot;Master, master, here is the Saracen lady!&amp;quot; The merchant thought Richard was mad; but Richard said, &amp;quot;No, master! As I live, the Saracen lady is going up and down the city, calling Gilbert! Gilbert!&amp;quot; Then, he took the merchant by the sleeve, and pointed out of window [sic]; and there they saw her among the gables and water-spouts of the dark, dirty street, in her foreign dress, so forlorn, surrounded by a wondering crowd, and passing slowly along, calling Gilbert, Gilbert! When the merchant saw her, and thought of the tenderness she had shown him in his captivity, and of her constancy, his heart was moved, and he ran down into the street; and she saw him coming, and with a great cry fainted in his arms. They were married without loss of time, and Richard (who was an excellent man) danced with joy the whole day of the wedding; and they all lived happy ever afterwards.      (p. 61)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several other literary works refer to this story. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Lewis Morris's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/songstwoworldsb00morrgoog/page/n144/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; in his &lt;em&gt;Songs of Two Worlds&lt;/em&gt; (second series, 1874), is a narrative poem on this subject.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Agatha Christie's &lt;em&gt;They Came to Baghdad&lt;/em&gt; (1951) also references this legend. Christie's protagonist is Victoria Jones, an intrepid if incompetent typist who leaves London for Baghdad in order to track down a young man named Edward. Her previous interaction with Edward has consisted only of a brief conversation in a park, but she fancies herself in love. Finding herself in Baghdad with a grand total of four pounds and seventeen shillings to her name, she ponders her situation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With a sense of annoyance she realized that she was quite unaware of Edward’s last name. Edward—Baghdad. Very much, Victoria reflected, like the Saracen maid who arrived in England knowing only the name of her lover “Gilbert” and “England.” A romantic story—but certainly inconvenient. True that in England at the time of the Crusades, nobody, Victoria thought, had had any surname at all. On the other hand England was larger than Baghdad. Still, England was sparsely populated then.     (p. 160)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A more recent retelling is Leon Garfield and John O'Brien's 1991 children's book, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/067186646X&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Saracen Maid&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Biographers, however, note that this story has no factual basis. W. H. Hutton writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later centuries, seeking to cradle their hero [Thomas] in wonders, told that [Gilbert] Becket was a knight who had been on Crusade and his wife a Saracen princess, who had followed him alone to England knowing only the words Gilbert and London: but the story belongs to three centuries after his birth.      (pp. 2–3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Three centuries after his birth&lt;/em&gt; indicates that the legend dates back to the turn of the fifteenth century. &lt;strong&gt;What is the earliest reference to this story&lt;/strong&gt;? Is there a Middle English hagiography of St. Thomas Becket that includes it? Or is it alluded to in some other work from the era that we know of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;References:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Christie, Agatha. &lt;em&gt;They Came to Baghdad&lt;/em&gt;. 1951. Ebook. New York: Harper, 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dickens, Charles. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924027972144/page/n8/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Child's History of England&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1851–1853. London: Chapman and Hall, 1906.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Garfield, Leon (author), and John O'Brien (illustrator). &lt;em&gt;The Saracen Maid&lt;/em&gt;. 1991. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hutton, William Holden. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/thomasbecketarch00huttuoft/page/n8/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Pitman, 1910.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Morris, Lewis. &amp;quot;Gilbert Beckett and the Fair Saracen.&amp;quot; Pp. 135–144 in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/songstwoworldsb00morrgoog/page/n4/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Songs of Two Worlds: Second Series&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Henry S. King, 1874.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T16:34:29.450" Title="Origin of the story of Gilbert and the Saracen maid" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;biography&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18055" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18054" CreationDate="2021-03-20T10:16:04.710" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story of Gilbert and the Saracen woman is part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_English_Legendary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;South English Legendary&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a Middle English collection of lives of the saints and martyrs in verse. This work is sometimes attributed to the author of a metrical chronicle of England (known as ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_of_Gloucester_(historian)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robert of Gloucester&lt;/a&gt;’), based on similarities in language and verse form. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;South English Legendary&lt;/em&gt; date to the late 13th century, so that Hutton’s estimate of “three centuries” for the legend to appear is too long by half.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are substantial differences between the manuscripts of the &lt;em&gt;Legendary&lt;/em&gt;. In &lt;a href=&quot;https://medieval.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/catalog/manuscript_6917&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;MS Laud 108&lt;/a&gt; (c. 1300), in the Bodleian Library, the legend begins like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wolle ʒe nouþe i-heore þis englische tale : þat is here i-write&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of seint Thomas of Caunterburi : al-hou he was bi-ʒite&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of londone is fader was : A bordeys hende and fre,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gilbert Bekat was is name : þe bok tellez me.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ake is Moder was of heþenesse. : nov sone ʒe mouwen i-heore&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Al-hou heo cam into engelonde : are heo i-cristned were,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gilebert him bi-þouʒte : þe Croiz for-to fo&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In-to þe holie lond : his penaunce þe bet to do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So þat, þo he þudere cam : he was sone i-nome,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ase A sclaue forth i-lad : and i-don In prisone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And faste was i-gwiued : he and manie mo,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And i-wuet wel sikerliche : þat he ne scholde a-wei go.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In þe Amirales prisone : heo hadden i-beo so longue,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To ʒeres and an half : In bendes swiþe strongue,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So þat god ʒaf þe Amiral : boþe heorte and wille&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;þe more to louien Gilebert : for he was meoke and stille.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eche daie ʒwane þe Amiral : to is mete wolde go,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;he bad, Gilebert to is mete : scholde come also—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;gret auantage, for-soþe, it was : þat he miʒte so gon;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ake euere he hadde ane peire feteres : faste him up-on.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And ofte-siþes þe Amiral : dude for Gilebardes loue&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Auantage to is felawes : þat with him weren In prisone.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;hit bi-fool þat Amiral : Ane faire douʒter hadde—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Childrene of is owene : none mo for-soþe he nadde.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Carl Horstmann, ed. (1887). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/TheEarlySouthEnglishLegendary/page/n165/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Early South-English Legendary&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 106–107&lt;/a&gt;. London: Early English Text Society.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this version of the legend, the heroine is named Alisaundre (Alexandra): see line 141.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?index=2&amp;amp;ref=Harley_MS_2277&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Harley MS 2277&lt;/a&gt; (c. 1300), in the British Library, the legend of “Gilbert patris Sancti Thomae martiris” (“Gilbert, father of Saint Thomas martyr”) begins on the last two lines of folio 195v, shown below. (Click for larger images, or visit the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?index=2&amp;amp;ref=Harley_MS_2277&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;British Library&lt;/a&gt; for the full digitized manuscript.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z3qkB.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z3qkBm.png&quot; alt=&quot;Harley MS 2277 folio 195 verso, running heading &amp;quot;Gilbert patris&amp;quot; in red ink and the first two lines of the poem at the bottom of the page with capital G in green ink, much faded&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JjEt2.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/JjEt2m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Harley MS 2277 folio 196 recto, running heading &amp;quot;Sancti Thomae Martiris&amp;quot; in red ink&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here’s the opening of the legend in this manuscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gilbert was Thomas fader name: that truë was and god,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And lovede God and holi churche: siththe¹ he wit² understod.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The croicĕ³ to the holie lond: in his ʒunghede⁴ he nom⁵,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And mid⁶ on Richard, that was his man: to Ierusálem com.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There hi dude here pelrynage⁷: in holi stedĕs⁸ faste⁹,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So that among the Sarazyns: ynome¹⁰ hi were atte laste,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hi and other Cristene men: and in strong prisoun ido¹¹,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In meseise¹² and in pyne¹³ ynouʒ¹⁴: of hunger and chile¹⁵ also.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In strongĕ swynchĕ¹⁶ niʒt¹⁷ and dai: to ofswynche¹⁸ here metĕ¹⁹ stronge:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In such swynch and hardĕ lyve: hi bilevede (hem thoʒte) longe.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For ful other half ʒer²⁰: greate pyne hi hadde and schame,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the Princes hous of the lawe: Admiraud was his name.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ac²¹ Gilbert of London: best grace haddĕ there,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of the Prince and allĕ his: among alle that ther were.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For oftĕ al in feteres: and in othe[r] bende²²,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Prince he servede atte mete: for him thoʒte hende²³.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And ofte the Prince al so god: in consail him wolde drawe,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And of the manere of Engelond: him eschce²⁴, and of the lawe.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So that me²⁵ wolde his felawes: moche god oftĕ do,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For his love, and hi furde²⁶: the bet²⁷ for him also.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And nameliche²⁸ thurf²⁹ a maide: that this Gilbert lovede faste,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Princes douʒter Admiraud: that hire hurte al upe him caste;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That lovede him in durnĕ³⁰ love: in gret murnynge³¹ and in wo.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For the Princes heir heo³² was: for he nadde³³ children no mo.³⁴&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Henry Black, ed. (1845). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lifemartyrdomoft01unse/page/n21/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life and Martyrdom of Thomas Beket, Archbishop of Canterbury&lt;/em&gt;, p. 1&lt;/a&gt;. London: Percy Society.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;¹since ²reason ³cross ⁴youth ⁵took ⁶with ⁷pilgrimage ⁸places ⁹fixed ¹⁰captured ¹¹put ¹²distress ¹³pain ¹⁴enough ¹⁵cold ¹⁶toil ¹⁷night ¹⁸gain by toil ¹⁹meat ²⁰year ²¹but ²²constraint ²³courteous ²⁴ask ²⁵moreover ²⁶fared ²⁷better ²⁸especially ²⁹through ³⁰secret ³¹pining ³²she ³³had not ³⁴more.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T16:34:29.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T16:34:29.450" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18056" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18060" CreationDate="2021-03-20T12:08:13.290" Score="5" ViewCount="321" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Saki's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/269/269-h/269-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Beasts and Super-Beasts&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; he refers to &amp;quot;Nuts&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Super-Nuts&amp;quot;.  For example, we have&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are not going to be what they call a Nut, are you?” she inquired with some anxiety, partly with the idea that a Nut would be an extravagance which her sister’s small household would scarcely be justified in incurring, partly, perhaps, with the instinctive apprehension that a Nut, even in its embryo stage, would refuse to carry parcels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in &lt;em&gt;The Dreamer&lt;/em&gt; and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a youngish man of ordinary appearance, quiet of dress and unobtrusive of manner, and he could never wholly rid himself of the idea that a fierce light of public scrutiny beat on him as though he had been a notability or a super-nut.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in &lt;em&gt;A Holiday Task&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I suspect this usage would have briefly fashionable, prior to the First World War, when the stories were first published in the &lt;em&gt;Morning Post&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is meant by &amp;quot;nut&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T23:30:57.430" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T23:30:57.430" Title="What are nuts and super-nuts in Saki's &quot;Beasts and Super-Beasts&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;saki&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18057" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18015" CreationDate="2021-03-20T12:33:17.983" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Faria e Sousa was interrogated about the presence of pagan gods in the &lt;em&gt;Lusíads&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Camões and the Pagan Gods&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following the footsteps of predecessors such as Homer and Virgil, Camões had chosen to include gods among the characters of his epic. The chief deities in the &lt;em&gt;Lusíads&lt;/em&gt; are Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus, but Tethys, Neptune, etc. also make appearances. The Counter-Reformation was in full swing as Camões was writing, which made the inclusion of such gods in his poem a dicey proposition. Within his poem, Camões gave an explanation for the presence of these deities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Que as imortalidades que fingia&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A antiguidade, que os ilustres ama,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lá no estelante Olimpo, a quem subia&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sobre as asas ínclitas da Fama,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Por obras valorosas que fazia,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pelo trabalho imenso que se chama&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Caminho da virtude alto e fragoso,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mas no fim doce, alegre e deleitoso:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Não eram senão prémios que reparte&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Por feitos imortais e soberanos&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;O mundo com os varões, que esforço e arte&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Divinos os fizeram, sendo humanos.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que Júpiter, Mercúrio, Febo e Marte,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eneias e Quirino, e os dois Tebanos,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ceres, Palas e Juno, com Diana,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Todos foram de fraca carne humana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mas a Fama, trombeta de obras tais,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Lhe deu no mundo nomes tão estranhos&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De Deuses, Semideuses imortais,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Indígetes, Heróicos e de Magnos.     (9.90–92)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In White's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Those immortals whom men of antiquity&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In their love of great deeds, imagined&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Living there on starry Olympus,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Soaring on fame's happy pinions&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Through brave acts, or through&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mighty labours which were thought&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Virtue's path, rocky and precipitous,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But ending in delight and happiness&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Were enjoying only those rewards&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The world bestows for the superb,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Deathless achievements of heroes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who, though human, become divine;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jupiter, Mercury, Phoebus, and Mars,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Aeneas, Romulus, and the two Thebans,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ceres, Pallas, Diana, Juno, they&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Were all composed of feeble human clay;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But fame, trumpeting their exploits&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everywhere added strange titles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Such as gods, demigods, immortals,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Deities, heroes, and the like.      (p. 195)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explaining away of pagan deities has been treated as unsatisfactory by many critics. A suggestion is often made that Camões inserted these stanzas to get past the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Inquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portuguese Inquisition&lt;/a&gt;. C. M. Bowra writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explanation is worse than an anticlimax; if we treat it seriously, it spoils much of the poem. For Jupiter, who has decided the future destinies of Portugal, and Venus, who has so nobly helped their fulfilment, are of no importance if they are human beings of whom only the glorious names survive. It has been thought, with good reason, that these stanzas are a late addition required by the censor or inserted to placate him. Rather than sacrifice his divinities altogether Camões explains them away.     (p. 117–118)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bowra goes on to argue that the real role of the pagan gods in the &lt;em&gt;Lusíads&lt;/em&gt; is allegorical:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;his divinities are symbols for different activities of the one supreme God, subordinate powers to whom various special functions are allotted.     (p. 118)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bowra cites Canto 10, verse 82, where Venus explains that Jupiter is an emblem for Divine Providence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E também, porque a santa Providência,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que em Júpiter aqui se representa,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Por espíritos mil que têm prudência&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Governa o Mundo todo que sustenta&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In White's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, however, that Sacred Providence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;—Represented here by Jupiter—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Governs the whole world it sustains&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By means of a thousand prescient angels     (p. 213)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... and also verse 85, where the role of the pagan gods as representatives of God's power is made explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Enfim que o Sumo Deus, que por segundas&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Causas obra no Mundo, tudo manda.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In White's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ultimately, one all-powerful God&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Works in the world through His agents.     (p. 214)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two somewhat incompatible explanations for the presence of the pagan gods, first as humans memorialized, second as agents of God's power, were enough to keep Camões safe from the Portuguese Inquisition. The inquisition in Portugal in any case was never as severe as the Spanish Inquisition; it had been set up only as a condition of Manuel I's marriage to princess Maria of Aragon (see Heiple). Additionally, Camões had the imprimatur of the Portuguese king &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_of_Portugal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sebastião I&lt;/a&gt;, who had ordered that the &lt;em&gt;Lusíads&lt;/em&gt; be printed. Camões was, therefore, in relatively little danger from the Inquisition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Faria e Sousa's Commentary and the Spanish Inquisition&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Manuel de Faria e Sousa faced different circumstances. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spanish Inquisition&lt;/a&gt; was considerably more severe than its Portuguese counterpart. As a Portuguese native, Faria e Sousa was considered an outsider in Spain. He had neither the poetic stature nor the royal backing that Camões did. Not surprisingly, his &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.532077429x&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;commentary&lt;/a&gt; on the &lt;em&gt;Lusíads&lt;/em&gt; attracted the attention of the Spanish Inquisition because of the pagan machinery of the poem. Christopher Lund writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The heretical question of attributing blessings or evils experienced by da Gama to mythological figures instead of to God and the devil would be revisited. In 1640, a year after his monumental commentary on &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt; was published, Manuel de Faria e Sousa was called upon by the Inquisition to address the question of the pagan gods. In a thorough and masterful treatise, he offered numerous “proofs” of what he considered to be Camões’s obvious use of allegory. The treatise identified Jupiter as an allegory for Christ—the same Christ who presented himself to the first king of Portugal at the Battle of Ourique, and was now “choosing Portugal to take His doctrine to India” (Faria e Sousa, p. 3; trans. C. Lund). According to Faria e Sousa, Bacchus was the Devil trying to impede the mission. Venus was the embodiment of militant religious doctrine as well as a “Marian” advocate before God of the righteous desires of man. Mars was equated with St. James, and Mercury with one of the good angels. Faria e Sousa’s eloquent response to the Inquisition, written in 15 days, was successful. &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt; would face no more serious Inquisitorial challenges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lund is a bit too sanguine about the success of Faria e Sousa's defense. While it is true that he escaped condemnation as a heretic, he was nevertheless regarded with suspicion and lost the salary he had been receiving from his mentor, the Bishop of Porto.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Faria e Sousa's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_35xyvwk_eDcC/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;response to the Inquisition&lt;/a&gt; is available on archive.com. Sadly, I have been unable to find an English translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (except Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bowra, C. M. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.509731/page/n5/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;From Vergil to Milton&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Macmillan, 1945. Archive.org. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Camões, Luís Vaz de. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3333/3333-h/3333-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1572. Project Gutenberg. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Faria e Sousa, Manuel de. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_35xyvwk_eDcC/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Informacion en Favor de Manvel De Faria i Sovsa&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1640. Archive.org. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———, commentator. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=ucm.532077429x&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=5&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lusiadas de Luis de Camoens&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/em&gt; Madrid: Juan Sanchez, 1639. Hathi Trust. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Heiple, Daniel L. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/475105&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Political Posturing on the Jewish Question by Lope De Vega and Faria e Sousa&lt;/a&gt;.” &lt;em&gt;Hispanic Review&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 62, no. 2, 1994, pp. 217–234. JSTOR. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lund, Christopher C. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/culture-magazines/lusiads&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Encyclopedia.com. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;White, Landeg, trans. and intro. &lt;em&gt;The Lusíads&lt;/em&gt; by Luís Vaz de Camões. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T13:21:59.333" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:21:59.333" CommentCount="9" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18058" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18059" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Portuguese historian and poet Manuel de Faria e Sousa (1590 – 1649) or his life as a writer. Use with [spanish-literature] for works in Spanish or [portuguese-literature] for works in Portuguese." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:27:47.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18060" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18056" CreationDate="2021-03-20T13:28:25.243" Score="10" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;nut, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt; 6.c.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;British slang.&lt;/em&gt; A fashionable or showy young man. Cf. knut &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;, nutty &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; 4. &lt;em&gt;Obsolete.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1904   in &lt;em&gt;Notes &amp;amp; Queries&lt;/em&gt; (1913) 26 July 78/1   I'm one of the nuts, one of the nibs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1913   &lt;em&gt;Punch&lt;/em&gt; 12 Feb. 115/1   Spring socks will be black and Spring ties a quiet blue. A strike of nuts is expected at any moment.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1920   W. J. Locke &lt;em&gt;House of Baltazar&lt;/em&gt; xvii. 205   I've a jolly good mind to set him up regardless, like a pre-war nut—with solid silver boot-trees and the rest to correspond.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search of the British Newspaper Archive finds that “super-nut” had a brief vogue in 1913–1914, and then vanished rapidly with the coming of the war. This cartoon from &lt;em&gt;Punch&lt;/em&gt; for 8th April 1914 gives some idea of what people thought a “super-nut” might look like:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.211333/page/n329/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Xa4Cj.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A nervous young man is being fitted with a striped suit by a shop assistant while a smart young man points at him with a stick. The smart young man wears a top-hat, a tight-waited black jacket, striped trousers, patent leather shoes, and has a monocle on a chain. Caption reads, “A special feature of the gent’s ready-to-wear clothing department will be the attendance, daily of a super-“nut” (from the Gaiety or Daly’s), who will give free advice to each purchaser of Easter outfits.”&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaiety_Theatre,_London&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gaiety&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daly%27s_Theatre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daly’s&lt;/a&gt; were two theatres in the West End of London.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T13:39:36.403" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T13:39:36.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18062" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18073" CreationDate="2021-03-20T16:45:31.413" Score="4" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the fourth stanza of Book I of an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lus/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;William Julius Mickle's English translation&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt; of &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;), the narrator speaks to the &amp;quot;fair nymphs of Tagus&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you, fair nymphs of Tagus, parent stream,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If e’er your meadows were my pastoral theme,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;While you have listen’d, and by moonshine seen&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My footsteps wander o’er your banks of green,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The short summary at the top of the page appears to refer to this bit (and some the following parts) as the &amp;quot;Invocation to the muses of the Tagus&amp;quot;. Why is an invocation needed, and what does it add to the poem/signify? I'm pretty ignorant about the myths/culture that is probably needed to understand this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that the invocation is considered important enough to merit its own section as part of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas#Internal_structure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia section entitled 'Internal Structure'&quot;&gt;internal structure&lt;/a&gt; of the poem:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is made up of four sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An introduction (proposition – presentation of the theme and heroes of the poem)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Invocation – a prayer to the Tágides, the nymphs of the Tagus;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;A dedication – (to Sebastian of Portugal)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Narration (the epic itself) – starting in stanza 19 of canto I, in medias res, opening in the midst of the action, with the background story being told later in the epic.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://voicemap.me/tour/lisbon/contemporary-lisbon-park-of-nations/sites/the-nymphs-of-the-tagus-lusiads-and-the-sculptor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Transcription of voice tour&quot;&gt;voice tour&lt;/a&gt; of Lisbon, the nymphs inspired Camões to write the epic in the first place.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to mythology the nymphs are beings who live in the rivers and seas. The Tágides are to blame for inspiring Camões into writing his masterpiece “The Lusiads” because the poet asked them for inspiration back in the 1500s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this is clearly important, even if I can't understand why. The sources I find on the poem simply note that there's an invocation, but don't explain why it is there or what its purpose is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What's the significance of the &amp;quot;Invocation to the muses of the Tagus&amp;quot;? Why is it there?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T07:54:45.497" Title="What's the significance of the &quot;Invocation to the muses of the Tagus&quot;?" Tags="&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18063" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18064" CreationDate="2021-03-20T20:45:07.360" Score="2" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand this passage in Herodotus's &lt;a href=&quot;https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Herodotus/1D*.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Book 1 chapter 208):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So these opinions contended; and Cyrus set aside his former plan and chose that of Croesus; wherefore he bade Tomyris draw her army off, for he would cross (he said) and attack her; so she withdrew &lt;strong&gt;as she had promised before.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm unsure where exactly Tomyris promises to withdraw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I might be misunderstanding what she says in chapter 206:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cease, king of the Medes, from that on which you are intent; for you cannot know if the completion of this work will be for your advantage. Cease, and be king of your own country; and be patient so see us ruling those whom we rule. &lt;em&gt;But if you will not take this counsel, and will do all rather than remain at peace, then if you so greatly desire to essay the strength of the Massagetae, do you quit your present labour of bridging the river, and &lt;strong&gt;suffer us to draw off three days' journey from the Araxes&lt;/strong&gt;; and when that is done, cross into our country. Of if you desire then to receive us into your country, do you then yourself withdraw as I have said.&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can someone explain where she promises to retreat and what exactly Tomyris means in the last 2 sentences of her message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12422" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T22:38:02.013" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T22:38:02.013" Title="Where does Tomyris promise to retreat?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;greek-literature&gt;&lt;herodotus&gt;&lt;histories-herodotus&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18064" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18063" CreationDate="2021-03-20T21:29:14.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Here’s another translation of I.206:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While he [Cyrus] was busied about this labour [that is, bridging the Araxes], Tomyris sent a herald and said thus: “O king of the Medes, cease to press forward the work which thou art now pressing forward; for thou canst not tell whether these things will be in the end for thy advantage or no; cease to do so, I say, and be king over thine own people, and endure to see us ruling those whom we rule. Since however I know that thou wilt not be willing to receive this counsel, but dost choose anything rather than to be at rest, therefore if thou art greatly anxious to make trial of the Massagetai in fight, come now, leave that labour which thou hast in yoking together the banks of the river, and cross over into our land, &lt;strong&gt;when we have first withdrawn three days’ journey from the river&lt;/strong&gt;: or if thou desirest rather to receive us into your land, do thou this same thing thyself.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Herodotus. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.granth.90780/page/100/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt; I.206&lt;/a&gt;. Translated by G. C. Macaulay (1890). &lt;em&gt;The History of Herodotus&lt;/em&gt;, volume I, p. 101. London: Macmillan.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tomyris thus offers Cyrus a choice: instead of contesting the crossing of the Araxes, she offers to march her army away from the river for three days so that Cyrus can cross unopposed and attack her on her own land; or, if Cyrus so chooses, vice versa. This offer constitutes the “promise” that she carries out in I.208.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In A. C. Godley’s translation (the one quoted in the question), “draw off” is used in the sense “withdraw (troops) from a particular position, or from the scene of action” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T21:29:14.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18065" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18074" CreationDate="2021-03-20T22:42:50.490" Score="2" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there an English translation of &amp;quot;Encargo&amp;quot; by Julio Cortázar? I've not been able to find one online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12423" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T07:49:55.633" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T08:00:50.640" Title="English translation of &quot;Encargo&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;julio-cortazar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18066" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-20T23:01:45.397" Score="0" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Some search results show Amazon displaying Incerto by Nassim Nicholas Taleb as a six book series.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u6DZi.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/u6DZi.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, following the links indicates that Incerto is now a five book series.  I believe I have seen the title of the additional book in the past, but I cannot recall it, and the Wayback Machine does not seem to know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the title of the missing book in the series?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12424" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:02:37.863" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:02:37.863" Title="Incerto by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - What is the Sixth Book?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;incerto&gt;&lt;nassim-nicholas-taleb&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18067" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18068" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC), who is best known for his work 'The Histories'. Use this tag with the tag [greek-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:15:56.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18069" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18070" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Argentine novelist, short story writer and essayist Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) or his life as a writer. Use this tag with [spanish-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" LastActivityDate="2021-03-20T23:18:38.853" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18071" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="13684" CreationDate="2021-03-21T01:05:44.577" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I agree that this wasn’t very clear but this is what I think happened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spoiler Alert&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that Penelope either assumed this via Jorge (her brother) or Miquel may have actually told her to keep her from reaching out to Julian for the same reason Miquel went to the train station and didn’t tell Julian what happened with Penelope (that she was boarded up in her room). I think it is the former because she was never allowed to leave her room and all communication to and from her was cut off.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For completeness I wanted to post both letters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nuria’s Chapter 2&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here we see Miquel’s love for Carax: Miquel sent money books and friendship. Julian would mail letters to Penelope via Miquel which Miquel did mail from different post offices but knew it was useless. Again, this is why I don’t think Miquel actually told anything to Penelope directly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miquel from Jacinta that she was locked and never left. Again evidence that Miquel and Penelope did not speak after the incident. Jorge Aldaya gave the fake letter for Julian via Miquel which was a sheet of paper handwritten by Penelope stating:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Julian,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing to notify you of my forthcoming marriage and to entreat you not to write to me anymore. To forget me and rebuild your life. I don’t bear you any grudge but I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t confess to you that I have never loved you and never will be able to love you. I wish you the best wherever you may be.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Penelope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miquel didn't believe she wrote it willingly because Penelope knew he was in Paris but the letter indicated that she didn’t know where he was. Miquel didn’t send the letter to Julian because he didn’t want to hurt Julian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laura, a servant, was dismissed when it was discovered that she secretly posted a letter from Penelope to Julian. Miquel deduced that the only address she would send it to is his parents’ hoping that it would reach Julian. Miquel went to get the letter from Sophie Carax (Julian’s mother) who he found out no longer lived there. Then he wanted to speak to the Hatter who said he “has no son.” Miquel left without knowing if it would end up in the hands of the caretaker and Julian never received the letter which Daniel found Chapter 15-16.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The real letter written by Penelope Aldaya, discussed at the end of Chapter 16:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;18 October 1919&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dear Julian,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This morning I found out through Jorge that you did in fact leave Barcelona to go in pursuit of your dreams. I always feared that those dreams would never allowed you to be mine or anyone else’s. I would have liked to see you one last time to be able to look into your eyes and tell you things that I don’t know how to say in a letter. Nothing came out the way we had planned. I know you too well and I know you won’t write to me. That you won’t even send me your address, that you will want to be another person. I know you will hate me for not having been there as I had promised. That you will think I failed you. That I didn’t have the courage. I have imagined you so many times alone on that train convinced that I had betrayed you. Many times I tried to find you through Miquel but he told me that you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me. What lies did they tell you Julian? What did they say about me? Why did you believe them? Now I know I have already lost you. I have lost everything. Even so, I can’t let you go forever and allow you to forget me without letting you know that I don’t bear you any grudge. That I knew it from the start, I knew that I was going to loose you and that you would never see in me what I see in you. I want you to know that I loved you from the very first day, and that I still love you now more than ever, even if you don’t want me to.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am writing to you in secret without anyone knowing. Jorge has sworn that if he sees you again he’ll kill you. I am not allowed to go out of the house anymore, I can’t even look out of the window. I don’t think they’ll ever forgive me. Someone I trust has promised to mail this letter to you. I won’t mention the name so as not to compromise the person in question. I don’t know whether my words will reach you, but if they do, and should you decide to return to fetch me here, I know you will find a way to do it. As I write, I imagine you in that train full of dreams and with your soul broken by betrayal, fleeing from us all and from yourself. There are so many things I cannot tell you Julian, things we never knew and it’s better you should never know. All I wish for you is to be happy Julian. That everything you aspire to achieve may come true and that, although you may forget me in the course of time, one day you may finally understand how much I loved you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Always,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Penelope&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12425" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T01:33:33.907" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T01:33:33.907" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18072" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18457" CreationDate="2021-03-21T05:54:41.497" Score="2" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm really hoping my meager description will be enough to ID this book. It was a pretty small book located in the nonfiction section of my local public library, in the US. I read it during 2015/2016, in English. It was in first person from the perspective of the journalist who was staying in Germany, and alternates to third person when describing historical events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an adult nonfiction book about a female journalist who travels to Europe (Germany, I believe), and stays in an apartment while she tries to piece together the life of a woman who lived during WWII. There was a person named Miriam. I can't remember her exact involvement, but she was a major part of the book. It was bittersweet and interesting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I half-remember the ending: the journalist goes to a museum and goes through their archives and artifacts. Also, I remember Miriam (I think) and her husband had a very interesting relationship: they loved each other, but they didn't spend much time together. Oftentimes, because their work was unpredictable, one would be leaving while the other would be arriving home. But, the journalist explained that that kind of relationship worked well for them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spies, maybe? Leaflet distributors? I can't remember anymore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12426" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T18:34:57.220" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T20:44:37.923" Title="Journalist travels to Germany to research a WWII woman, someone named Miriam is involved" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18073" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18062" CreationDate="2021-03-21T07:11:11.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camões invokes the nymphs of the Tagus to be his muse. An invocation where the poet asks the muse to inspire his song is a standard component of epic poetry. Here are examples from the classics:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Homer, &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:     (I.1–2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation by Emily Wilson:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tell me about a complicated man.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy     (I.1–3, p. 105)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Virgil, &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;quidve dolens, regina deum tot volvere casus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;insignem pietate virum, tot adire labores&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;impulerit. Tantaene animis caelestibus irae?     (I.8–11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation by L. R. Lind:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;            Muse, tell me the reasons why&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A wounded power divine, a queen of the gods&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In anger compelled him to go through so many dangers,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A man outstanding for loyalty, and to struggle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So long? Can celestial spirits harbor such wrath?     (I.8–12, p. 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As these examples show, inviting the Muse to sing through the poet is a common trope in epic poetry. Also common, since the time of Virgil, was the idea that epic was the crowning achievement of a poet's career. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Virgilian_Progression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Virgilian progression&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;em&gt;cursus&lt;/em&gt; was the idea that Virgil's trajectory from pastoral lyrics through didactic georgics to the epic provided a model for all poets who aspired to write an epic, allowing them to hone their craft by working on increasingly complex material. Hence Camões alludes to his earlier pastorals (&amp;quot;verso humilde&amp;quot;) in his own invocation to the muses:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E vós, Tágides minhas, pois criado&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tendes em mim um novo engenho ardente,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Se sempre em verso humilde celebrado&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Foi de mim vosso rio alegremente,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dai-me agora um som alto e sublimado,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Um estilo grandíloquo e corrente,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Porque de vossas águas, Febo ordene&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que não tenham inveja às de Hipoerene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dai-me uma fúria grande e sonorosa,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;E não de agreste avena ou frauta ruda,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mas de tuba canora e belicosa,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que o peito acende e a cor ao gesto muda;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dai-me igual canto aos feitos da famosa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gente vossa, que a Marte tanto ajuda;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Que se espalhe e se cante no universo,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Se tão sublime preço cabe em verso.     (I.4–5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Landeg White's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you, nymphs of the Tagus, who&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;First suckled my infant genius,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If ever in my rustic verses&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I celebrated your companionable river,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Return me now a loftier tone,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A style both grand and contemporary;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be to me Helicon. Let Apollo choose&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your waters as the fountain of my muse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fire me now with mighty cadences,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Not a goatherd's querulous piping&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But the shouts of a battle trumpet,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stirring the heart, steeling the countenance;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Give me a poem worthy of the exploits&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of those heroes so inspired by Mars,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To propagate their deeds through space and time&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If poetry can rise to the sublime.       (pp. 3–4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Helicon#Greek_mythology&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Helicon&lt;/a&gt; was the home of the Muses; the Hippocrene, a spring that mountain, was associated with poetic inspiration. As with all post-Virgilian poets, Camões's epic ambitions are also nationalistic ones. Just as the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt; simultaneously told the story of the founding of Rome and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commentary_of_the_Aeneid#Positive_images_of_Augustus_Caesar%27s_rule&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;celebrated the achievements of its current ruler, Augustus&lt;/a&gt;, Camões tells the story of Vasco da Gama to valorize contemporary Portugal. His identification of the nymphs of the Tagus with the muses of the Hippocrene patriotically elevates Lisbon's river and announces the specifically Portuguese nature of his epic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (except Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Camões, Luis Vaz de. &lt;em&gt;The Lusiad&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. William Julius Mickle, 1776, edition of 1877. sacred-texts.com. Accessed March 21, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Camões, Luis Vaz de. &lt;em&gt;The Lusíads&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Landeg White. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homer. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. and trans. A.T. Murray. Harvard: Harvard UP; London: Heinemann, 1919. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;The Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Emily Wilson. New York: Norton, 2018.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]. &lt;em&gt;The Aeneid: An Epic Poem of Rome&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. L. R. Lind. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics Of Vergil&lt;/em&gt;. Ed. J. B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn &amp;amp; Co, 1900. Perseus Digital Library. Accessed March 20, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T07:54:45.497" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T07:54:45.497" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18074" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18065" CreationDate="2021-03-21T07:49:08.410" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;An &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neworleansreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/NOR_6_2.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation&lt;/a&gt; of &amp;quot;Encargo&amp;quot; appeared in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.neworleansreview.org&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;New Orleans Review&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 6 no. 2, p. 105, with the title &amp;quot;Commission.&amp;quot; The translators are Calvin Harlan, Manuel Menan, and Beatriz Varela. The journal is published by the Department of English at Loyola University. Although the issue does not give a specific date, the journal has been published since 1968, so volume 6 is probably from around 1973 or 1974.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same translation, along with Cortázar's original Spanish version and a French version by Silvia Baron Supervielle, is available on Stéphane Chabrières' blog &lt;a href=&quot;https://schabrieres.wordpress.com/2018/09/13/julio-cortazar-commande/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beauty will save the world&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stephen Kessler's selection and translation of Cortázar's poems, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100322940&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Save Twilight&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (expanded edition 2016), also includes both the original Spanish and a different English version of this poem, which Kessler renders as &amp;quot;Assignment&amp;quot; (p. 161).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T08:00:50.640" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T08:00:50.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18075" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-21T07:51:44.633" Score="9" ViewCount="4679" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At night, when they had put the children to bed, Athena and Dexter walked. They were ruthless about going, and would barely even check that the boys were asleep before they set out. They gossiped and reported to each other the day’s residue.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;‘See that house?&lt;/strong&gt;’ said Dexter. ‘Outside there this morning, on my way to work, I unwisely engaged in a conversation with a senile know-all. &lt;strong&gt;I’m glad &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think it’s funny&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; have to be used sarcastically? Or can it also be used literally to say, &amp;quot;I'm glad someone got some enjoyment from it&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it is being used sarcastically. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;see that house&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Did you see that house?&amp;quot; and in this sentence &amp;quot;did&amp;quot; is omitted?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="828" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T17:44:52.063" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T17:44:52.063" Title="Is &quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&quot; meant sarcastically or literally?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="5" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18076" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18075" CreationDate="2021-03-21T08:13:25.883" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're right, &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; is used sarcastically. It is almost always used in that way. For example, if I trip and fall and you start laughing, I might say to you: &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny.&amp;quot; Presumably Athena is laughing at Dexter's having been caught in a tedious conversation, and he is responding to her laughter with this sarcastic statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; could be used literally too, of course. If I wrote a comedy and gave it to you to read, and a couple of days later you returned it saying you laughed a lot while reading it, then I might say &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny.&amp;quot; In the conversation between Dexter and Athena, however, the situation does not suggest that Dexter is saying those words literally.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;See that house?&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; is just a way of pointing out the house. It is an elliptical way of saying &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Do you&lt;/strong&gt; see that house?,&amp;quot; which in turn means simply &amp;quot;Look at that house.&amp;quot; It is not past tense &lt;em&gt;Did you see that house?&lt;/em&gt;, as you suggest. Dexter is indicating to Athena which house he means right now, not asking her whether she has seen that house some time in the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T08:37:02.500" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T08:37:02.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18077" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18078" CreationDate="2021-03-21T09:36:51.530" Score="18" ViewCount="4814" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently there is some kind of running joke about John Donne's famous line &amp;quot;No man is an island&amp;quot;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/17993/17&quot;&gt;prose sometimes quoted as poetry&lt;/a&gt;, being misquoted as &amp;quot;No mayonnaise in Ireland&amp;quot;. It's mentioned &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mayonnaise-ireland-barbara-gangware&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, for example, as a &amp;quot;classic misunderstanding&amp;quot;, and &lt;a href=&quot;https://dammitwecanthavenicethings.wordpress.com/2006/01/30/no-mayonnaise-in-ireland/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; someone mentions a specific source which they can't remember. A couple of people in &lt;a href=&quot;https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/1037/the-reading-room&quot;&gt;Literature.SE chat&lt;/a&gt; are continually riffing off this joke, which is how I first came to be aware of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the origin of this &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;mondegreen&lt;/a&gt;? How did it (or did it) come to be a running meme rather than a one-off joke?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T06:45:49.750" Title="No mayonnaise in Ireland?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;john-donne&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18078" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18077" CreationDate="2021-03-21T11:09:15.780" Score="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase comes from a story by humorist &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Stanton_(author)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Will Stanton&lt;/a&gt; that appeared in the May 1971 issue of &lt;em&gt;Reader's Digest&lt;/em&gt;. The narrator claims that he is subject to &amp;quot;a kind of slip-of-the-ear,&amp;quot; leading to his mishearing things. This is the first example he gives:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was standing next to a woman at one party recently, not paying much attention to what she was saying, when suddenly she came out with the statement that there was no mayonnaise in Ireland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator delivers what he considers an appropriately witty response. The woman then approaches the man's wife, concerned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I'm afraid he's had one too many.&amp;quot; she said; &amp;quot;I was quoting a line of poetry—you know, that bit about 'No man is an island.' Well, your husband gave me a blank look and said there is no ketchup in Australia.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Being practically the Platonic ideal of mondegreens, &amp;quot;no mayonnaise in Ireland&amp;quot; was referenced on many blogs. In early 2012, Stanton's daughter Linda Stanton French commented on a couple of such blog posts, providing source information. This in turn led to the story's being available online. Here is a timeline followed by a link to the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;On February 6, Stanton French commented on a 2011 &lt;a href=&quot;http://kellyskvetchoftheday.blogspot.com/2011/05/theres-no-mayonnaise-in-ireland.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blog post&lt;/a&gt; by Kelly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;There's no mayonnaise in Ireland&amp;quot; is a phrase my father, Will Stanton, made up for a story he wrote that was published in the May 1971 Reader's Digest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A few days later, on February 20, she belatedly replied to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://dammitwecanthavenicethings.wordpress.com/2006/01/30/no-mayonnaise-in-ireland/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;2006 post&lt;/a&gt; from a blogger named Jim:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story quoted in the first two paragraphs of your link is from my father, Will Stanton’s, short story, “There’s No Mayonnaise in Ireland”, that appeared in the Reader’s Digest in May 1971.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several commenters on Jim's post greeted Stanton French with huzzahs, shared their memories of the story, and bemoaned their inability to find it anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Two days later, on February 22, Stanton French set up a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/Will-Stanton-author-197627250345072/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Facebook page&lt;/a&gt; for Will Stanton.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entire text of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=282818488492614&amp;amp;id=197627250345072&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;There's No Mayonnaise in Ireland&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is linked off that page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T11:21:28.860" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T11:21:28.860" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18079" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18075" CreationDate="2021-03-21T13:32:20.953" Score="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;One of the big problems in written English is representing spoken conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When someone speaks, they typically emphasize certain words. HTML even provides a tag for this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The placement of stress emphasis changes the meaning of the sentence. The element thus forms an integral part of the content. The precise way in which stress is used in this way depends on the language. — &lt;a href=&quot;https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/text-level-semantics.html#the-em-element&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;HTML Standard&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider how the meaning changes when the emphasized word changes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;I'm&lt;/em&gt; glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; — even if &lt;em&gt;everyone else&lt;/em&gt; was shocked by your reaction.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'm &lt;em&gt;glad&lt;/em&gt; you think it's funny&amp;quot; — because I'd &lt;em&gt;feel bad&lt;/em&gt; if you didn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad &lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt; think it's funny&amp;quot; — because &lt;em&gt;no one else&lt;/em&gt; does.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad you &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; it's funny&amp;quot; — even though &lt;em&gt;in reality&lt;/em&gt; it isn't.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad you think &lt;em&gt;it's&lt;/em&gt; funny&amp;quot; — because I thought &lt;em&gt;all the others&lt;/em&gt; were boring.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's &lt;em&gt;funny&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; — because I wouldn't want you to &lt;em&gt;feel sad&lt;/em&gt; about it.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is especially a problem when authors assume the reader will somehow know their intent and don't use appropriate typographical conventions.&#xA;Some of the above examples might not fit the rest of the conversation, but several of them do and without more clues the reader can't be sure which was intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great authors of course seldom need to supply the emphasis, because the way everything else is written leaves the reader with no thought that they could have meant anything else other than what was obviously intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But most authors &lt;em&gt;aren't&lt;/em&gt; great though, and they really should indicate emphasis wherever there is a chance of ambiguity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And yes, any of those examples could have a sarcastic meaning.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Again it is up to the author to provide appropriate context so that the reader will naturally know this without having to think about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;UPDATE:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I just looked at the book itself, and interestingly it &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; use italics for emphasis:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DakpY.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/DakpY.png&quot; alt=&quot;Paragraph from published book, showing &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; in italics.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the stressed &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;you&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That makes it roughly correspond to the third example.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stressing this one word makes the meaning a lot clearer.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Athena must have reacted to his story with a laugh or smile, and Dexter is responding sarcastically, indicating that &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; didn't find it funny and doesn't think &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; should either.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11606" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T03:34:10.093" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T03:34:10.093" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18080" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-21T21:34:13.077" Score="3" ViewCount="102" Body="&lt;p&gt;I dug up a copy of &lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt; and noticed something about the cover:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Salamandastron&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Click for source of image&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/r3LVP.gif&quot; alt=&quot;The cover of the U.S. PB edition of &amp;quot;Salamandastron&amp;quot;. At the top is &amp;quot;THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER&amp;quot;, one line down is &amp;quot;In the Tradition of 'Watership Down'&amp;quot;, one line down is &amp;quot;BRIAN JACQUES&amp;quot;, then some animal illustrations, then at the bottom is &amp;quot;SALAMANDASTRON&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;A Novel of Redwall&amp;quot; below.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the U.S. PB cover is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the Tradition of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/in-the-tradition-of-sb-sth&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of &amp;quot;in the tradition of&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;having characteristics similar to a particular person or thing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I've dug through every single cover of &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Redwall_Books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The Redwall wiki's list of books&quot;&gt;every single &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; book&lt;/a&gt;*. I'm 99% percent sure that  this line doesn't show up on any over cover in this series. I'm also 99% sure that this is the only reference to a non-&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; book on a &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; cover; the only other references I saw on covers are to other &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given that, I assume that &amp;quot;In the Tradition of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; is meant to specifically be for &lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt;. I'm just not sure how. It can't just be the talking animals (though that's definitely a part of it), because that would apply to every single &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; book. Another curious part of this cover is it's on a US edition; I'd expect UK readers to know more about &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt; than us ignorant Americans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, how can &lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt; be considered &amp;quot;In the Tradition of &lt;em&gt;Watership Down&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;? What elements of plot/setting/characters combine to make the works similar?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* &lt;sub&gt;Every single cover that's on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Redwall_Wiki&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The Redwall wiki's home page&quot;&gt;Redwall wiki&lt;/a&gt;, which is in general the US and UK covers only, and often just the front cover.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:04:20.920" Title="How can &quot;Salamandastron&quot; be considered &quot;In the Tradition of 'Watership Down'&quot;?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;richard-adams&gt;&lt;watership-down&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18081" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-21T22:45:13.707" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T22:45:13.707" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T22:45:13.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18082" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-21T22:45:13.707" Score="0" Body="For questions about the work on the Greco-Persian wars by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BCE), commonly regarded as the father of history. Use with the tags [herodotus] and [greek-literature]. Do not use for the similarly titled work by the Roman writer Tacitus (which is in Latin)." OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-21T22:55:32.727" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T22:55:32.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18083" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18075" CreationDate="2021-03-21T23:52:57.483" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is Australian spoken English and the phrase is fairly common. I would argue &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; in this context is meant both ways by the character. It's both &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; [because I don't] and &amp;quot;I'm glad you think it's funny&amp;quot; [because at least one person got enjoyment out of it]. They're not outraged, after all ... they were inconvenienced for 10 minutes and it was annoying, but now they're gossiping and laughing with their friend (and partner) about it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastActivityDate="2021-03-21T23:52:57.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18087" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T07:26:13.243" Score="2" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;Back in the mid-2000s, I read two books of Garry Kilworth's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welkin_Weasels&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Welkin Weasels&lt;/a&gt; series, a set of two trilogies about anthropomorphised mustelids, one trilogy set in a version of medieval England and the other set in a version of Victorian England (plus other parts of the world which the characters travel to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tagline printed on the back of each of these books, at least in the editions that I read from the library, was:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As good as Brian Jacques, or your money back!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is of course a reference to Brian Jacques's celebrated &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwall&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Redwall series&lt;/a&gt; which also features anthropomorphised animals, although the stoats and weasels in his books are generally the bad guys whereas in Kilworth's books they're the main characters, both good and bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But &lt;strong&gt;what is the story behind this tagline?&lt;/strong&gt; Were Kilworth and Jacques old friends and this was a joke between them? Did Kilworth see himself as a competitor to Jacques? Did any serious complaints ever happen along the lines of &amp;quot;not as good as Brian Jacques, I want my money back&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Strangely, Google lists &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&amp;amp;q=%22as+good+as+Brian+Jacques+or+your+money+back%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;no results&lt;/a&gt; when I search the exact phrase &amp;quot;as good as Brian Jacques or your money back&amp;quot;. But I definitely remember it on the covers of those books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T16:40:24.737" Title="As good as Brian Jacques or your money back?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;garry-kilworth&gt;&lt;welkin-weasels&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18088" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15338" CreationDate="2021-03-22T07:53:22.073" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As far as I can remember, the name of the story is &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;The Other Side&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;, I read this story as part of the CBSE English curriculum, either in class XI or XII, sometimes in 1999/2000. I have been searching for this story, however, couldn't find it till now. Maybe the name of the story was changed. I tried to get hold of the English textbooks of the time but in vain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12436" LastEditorUserId="12436" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T13:26:06.277" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T13:26:06.277" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18090" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T16:02:01.703" Score="3" ViewCount="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter VI of &lt;em&gt;Bleak House&lt;/em&gt;, Esther Summerson, Ada Clare and Richard Carstone are just arrived at Bleak House and introduced to John Jarndyce. A conversation touching on the Jellybys, the east wind, and Mr. Skimpole is all that time allows before Esther is presented with the housekeeping keys:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our luggage having arrived and being all at hand, I was dressed in a few minutes and engaged in putting my worldly goods away when a maid (not the one in attendance upon Ada, but another, whom I had not seen) brought a basket into my room with two bunches of keys in it, all labelled.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For you, miss, if you please,&amp;quot; said she.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;For me?&amp;quot; said I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The housekeeping keys, miss.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I &lt;strong&gt;showed my surprise&lt;/strong&gt;, for she added with some little surprise on her own part, &amp;quot;I was told to bring them as soon as you was alone, miss. Miss Summerson, if I don't deceive myself?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; said I. &amp;quot;That is my name.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The large bunch is the housekeeping, and the little bunch is the cellars, miss. Any time you was pleased to appoint to-morrow morning, I was to show you the presses and things they belong to.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I said I would be ready at half-past six, and after she was gone, stood looking at the basket, quite lost in the magnitude of my trust. Ada found me thus and had such a delightful confidence in me when I showed her the keys and told her about them that it would have been &lt;strong&gt;insensibility and ingratitude not to feel encouraged&lt;/strong&gt;. I knew, to be sure, that it was the dear girl's kindness, but I liked to be so &lt;strong&gt;pleasantly cheated&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If this was intended to signify and establish her permanence, as it were, at Bleak House, it would come as a pleasant surprise to Esther, who, thus far but little acquainted with Mr. Jarndyce in person, might doubt a long tenure at the house of a non-relative. But, taken more pessimistically, the charge of housekeeping duties could signal that the accommodation of a dependent was not free, and even highlight a difference in status between Ada Clare and Esther Summerson, the former perhaps more likely to be favoured as a cousin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It may be difficult to reconcile the latter view with John Jarndyce's character, which is shown to be unambiguously magnanimous in almost every other respect throughout the novel. Furthermore, Esther never expresses displeasure in these duties. (This attitude could, however, be easily attributed to her obliging and good-natured disposition, the disappointment or excess of her initial expectations notwithstanding.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am therefore puzzled by Esther's apprehension of betraying an &lt;em&gt;ingratitude&lt;/em&gt; and her feeling of being &lt;em&gt;pleasantly cheated&lt;/em&gt; — another way of putting the question: &lt;strong&gt;what does she perceive herself to be cheated of? Did she expect a situation like Ada's (disappointed hopes; bad surprise), or one worse than a housekeeper's?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="10367" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T16:57:20.313" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T16:57:20.313" Title="Was Esther Summerson pleasantly surprised or otherwise at being presented the housekeeping keys of Bleak House?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;bleak-house&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18091" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18080" CreationDate="2021-03-22T16:53:59.847" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes odd lines like that on covers are quotes, even if they aren't attributed. A possible source for this would be the brief review paragraph, by Tynan Laurie, for the 8 cassette recorded book, which appeared in a 1988 edition of Journal called 'Emergency Librarian'. I've not been able to find out much about the journal, but it later became called 'Teacher Librarian' so I'm guessing it was an educational sector publication, as the review notes that the price of the 10 cassette recording will put it out of the reach of many school and public libraries.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anyway &lt;a href=&quot;https://search.proquest.com/openview/d170007f71209bf26f6df855f14380e0/1?cbl=38018&amp;amp;pq-origsite=gscholar&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;that review contained the line&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the tradition of Watership Down and The Hobbit, Redwall is an anthropomorphic story in a which a community of mild-mannered animals pull together to defend themselves from the onslaught of a marauding army of vicious animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This doesn't address why it might be attributed to Salamandastron over other books in the series, but I think it may be possible to read too much into vagaries of book cover design.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T17:04:20.920" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T17:04:20.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18093" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-22T19:27:50.820" Score="0" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How strange it is that in a city the size of Melbourne it is possible for two&#xA;people who have lived almost as sister and brother for five years as students&#xA;to move away from each other without even saying goodbye, &lt;strong&gt;to conduct the&#xA;ordinary business of their lives within a couple of miles of each other’s&#xA;daily rounds&lt;/strong&gt;, and yet never to cross each other’s paths. To marry, to have&#xA;children; to fail at one thing and to take up another, to drink and dance in&#xA;public places, to buy food in supermarkets and petrol at service stations, to&#xA;read of the same murders in the same newspapers, to shiver in the same&#xA;cold mornings, and yet never to bump into each other. Eighteen, twenty&#xA;years may pass! How strange!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;to conduct the ordinary business of their lives&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;to work in a job that they can live on it&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the whole sentence in bold mean &amp;quot;to work in a job that they can live on it and their workplaces were not very far from of their house&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;daily round&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;usual activities that they did around their house&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we say &amp;quot;ordinary business of their live&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;usual activities of their lives&amp;quot;? But in this case it somehow means the same as &amp;quot;daily round&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T19:52:28.437" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T23:27:35.050" Title="Meaning of &quot;to conduct the ordinary business of their lives&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18094" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18093" CreationDate="2021-03-22T22:32:18.017" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;To &amp;quot;conduct the ordinary business of one's life&amp;quot; means to do the ordinary things that one does every day (or almost every day): going to work, return home after work, buying food, possibly walking the dog, etcetera. The text assumes that people habitually follow roughly the same route to work and back, go to the same few shops on a regular basis, etcetera, basically visiting the sample places every day. This what &amp;quot;daily rounds&amp;quot; refers to on a literal level. To &amp;quot;conduct the ordinary business of one's life&amp;quot; does not &lt;em&gt;mean&lt;/em&gt; work, but for people who have finished university it is likely that work is part their daily routine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible for people to live within a few miles' distance from each other without meeting each other on their &amp;quot;daily rounds&amp;quot;, possibly because these routes don't overlap geographically or because they simply use the same routes at different times of the day. This is also expressed by the phrase &amp;quot;never to cross each other’s paths&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T23:27:35.050" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T23:27:35.050" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18095" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18093" CreationDate="2021-03-22T22:32:41.597" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;You are correct, &lt;strong&gt;ordinary business of their lives&lt;/strong&gt; means &amp;quot;usual activities of their lives.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Business&lt;/em&gt; is not restricted to &lt;em&gt;job&lt;/em&gt; here. It means, literally, the things that keep you busy or occupied, or the things that concern you, as in the phrase &lt;em&gt;mind your own business&lt;/em&gt;. Garner specifies the sorts of things she means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To marry, to have children; to fail at one thing and to take up another, to drink and dance in public places, to buy food in supermarkets and petrol at service stations, to read of the same murders in the same newspapers, to shiver in the same cold mornings ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Daily round&lt;/strong&gt; refers to the &lt;em&gt;places&lt;/em&gt; they would ordinarily visit in the course of that ordinary business. So if I drop my children off at school, commute to work, go to the grocery store or the post office, walk down to the park, etc. as part of my routine, then those places are all part of my daily round. If I said &amp;quot;I go to work every day,&amp;quot; it would be very literal-minded to take that as including Saturday and Sunday; similarly, &lt;em&gt;daily&lt;/em&gt; is not to be interpreted literally as &lt;em&gt;every day&lt;/em&gt; here. It simply means &amp;quot;as part of the usual activities of their lives.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T22:32:41.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18096" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18075" CreationDate="2021-03-22T23:12:23.797" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is meant sarcastically. A more accurate word than sarcasm would be &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiphrasis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;antiphrasis&lt;/a&gt;. Antiphrasis is the rhetorical device of saying the opposite of what is actually meant in such a way that it is obvious what the true intention is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12449" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-22T23:28:20.413" LastActivityDate="2021-03-22T23:28:20.413" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18097" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18075" CreationDate="2021-03-23T00:39:14.100" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Its sarcasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It can be broken down/understood this way:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You think its funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This could be a neutral statement, or a criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case it feels like a criticism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notice the phrase &amp;quot;You think&amp;quot;. Not it is funny or isn't, but &amp;quot;you &lt;strong&gt;think&lt;/strong&gt; it is&amp;quot;. They are drawing attention to &lt;strong&gt;the other persons belief/interpretation of it&lt;/strong&gt;, not discussing the subject itself, or whether it is actually funny or not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is very common in English writing and speech, &amp;quot;You think its a good idea&amp;quot; where I appear to differ, implies strongly &amp;quot;I disagree with your conclusion&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the implication of this as a bare statement, would probably be that the speaker doesn't agree and is criticising the other person: &amp;quot;You think it's funny (but I don't).&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you think (something).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you are clearly not glad or impressed at what the other person does, or thinks, but you say you are glad they did this stupid or wrong thing, that's sarcasm. It emphasises the criticism and disapproval.  There is almost no other interpretation of this structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I like how you support the government even though they failed on COVID&amp;quot; - means more likely, I don't like the support, I think you are wrong/stupid/ignorant, and I want you to know exactly that's how I feel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting these together:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm glad you think its funny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending if the 2nd part is criticism or not, the statement is sarcastic or not. It's much more likely the 2nd part is criticism, from the context, so its very likely this is sarcasm.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I want to emphasise that it could be used both ways, in everyday life. Compare these:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;So you spent our child's food money for the week on alcohol? I'm glad you think its a good idea.&amp;quot; - sharply underlining disapproval by using sarcasm.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;So you're applying for jobs after all? I'm glad you think its a good idea.&amp;quot; - could be genuine or sarcasm, hard to tell.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3053" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T00:39:14.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18099" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18101" CreationDate="2021-03-23T03:05:13.187" Score="9" ViewCount="1950" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from Book 2, Chapter 23 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Salamandastron&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Radwall wiki page on the book&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Salamandastron&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Samkin, Arula, and Spriggat are sneaking at night into a vermin camp, planning to steal back the sword of Martin the Warrior.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under a burgeoning &lt;strong&gt;three-part moon&lt;/strong&gt; they set off through the woodland, slipping silently along amid the shadowed tree-trunks and undergrowth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure what a &amp;quot;three-part moon&amp;quot; is. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=three-part+moon&amp;amp;oq=three-part+moon&amp;amp;aqs=chrome..69i57.2581j0j4&amp;amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;amp;ie=UTF-8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Google search results for 'three-part moon', without quotes&quot;&gt;Searching&lt;/a&gt; brings up &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/Search:moon%20phases%203%20part%20cards&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;teachers pay teachers search for 'moon phases 3 part cards'&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;three part moon phase cards&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; for teaching the phases of the moon, and well as everything from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_Goddess_(Neopaganism)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia article on 'Triple Goddess'&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Triple Goddess&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; which includes the moon as an aspect to a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.history.com/news/chinese-spacecraft-lands-on-moon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;History.com article about a Chinese moon mission&quot;&gt;three-part moon mission&lt;/a&gt;. Safely discarding the latter two results, I also doubt that the first one is relevant, since the characters are looking at a single moon - not multiple phases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having exhausted my admittedly limited search skills, I now turn to Literature SE. What is a &amp;quot;three-part moon&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T15:01:02.693" Title="What is a &quot;three-part moon&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18100" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18099" CreationDate="2021-03-23T08:31:13.317" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;A &lt;strong&gt;three-part moon&lt;/strong&gt; is, apparently, just the moon. As the Wikipedia page about the Triple Goddess that the question links to says, modern Pagan usage such as Wicca considers the moon's waxing, full, and waning phases to be three parts of a single deity, usually identified with Hecate. Another reference to the three-part moon goddess is in a post on the confusingly-named and -written blog called &lt;a href=&quot;https://thebiblenet.blogspot.com/2016/07/lilith-lilim.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;thebible.net&lt;/a&gt;, which bills itself as &amp;quot;the most comprehensive collection of non-faith Biblical materials ever assembled&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lilim (ללים) were nocturnal spectres, equivalent to the Greek Empusae, and Lilit (Lilith in English) herself the equivalent of Empusa, or Hecate, was their mother; indeed the mother of what we now call witchcraft but in the ancient world was simply the rites and ceremonies of the cult of the three-part moon goddess: new moon (Sleeping Beauty, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Maid Marian, Mary Magdalene), full moon (Madonna), waning moon (wicked step-mother, Hecate, Snow Queen).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Prashker, David. &amp;quot;Lilit, Lilim.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;TheBibleNet&lt;/em&gt;. thebiblenet.com. Accessed March 23, 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poet named Keenan Kelly uses the same phrase in a poem entitled &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=bLRMSQNzFCEC&amp;amp;q=three-part%20moon#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=three-part%20moon&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I'm here where&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm now where the three part moon glows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The rise of my love now hides behind the large pine tree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And sadness visits me because you are so far from me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The setting of the moon makes distance sing your name     (ll. 1–4)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;em&gt;Breathless: A Journal from the Heart&lt;/em&gt;. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. p. 71. Google Books. Accessed March 23, 2021.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Kelly's poem shows that the phrase &amp;quot;three-part moon&amp;quot; is not restricted to neo-pagan contexts any more but is found in literary contexts as a fancy way of saying &amp;quot;moon.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T08:49:13.153" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T08:49:13.153" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18101" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18099" CreationDate="2021-03-23T08:51:57.883" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Three-part” means “three-quarter”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;three-part, &lt;em&gt;adj.&lt;/em&gt; b.&lt;/strong&gt; = three parts, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;three parts, &lt;em&gt;n.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/strong&gt; Three out of four equal parts, three quarters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Three-quarter moon” means “gibbous moon”, that is, a moon that is more than half but less than fully illuminated. A citation for this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the greater part of the bright side is seen, and it is called “&lt;strong&gt;gibbous&lt;/strong&gt;” and appears as a “&lt;strong&gt;three-quarter moon&lt;/strong&gt;”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Dalziel &amp;amp; Edward Dalziel (1862). &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/A_handy_book_to_the_sky_air_earth_and_wa/F4gDAAAAQAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PA14&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Handy Book to the Sky, Air, Earth, and Waters&lt;/em&gt;, p. 14&lt;/a&gt;. London: Ward and Lock.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jacques’ use of “burgeoning” instead of the more usual term “waxing” for describing a growing moon suggests that he might have been going for a sense of estrangement through unusual word choices, or maybe it was a case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;elegant variation&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Concern was expressed in comments that this sense of “three-part” is ambiguous: how do you know that it means three parts out of four, rather than three out of five or however many? Well, language is often ambiguous, and people have to use context to disambiguate. The examples given by the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt; include&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1843   G. Borrow &lt;em&gt;Bible in Spain&lt;/em&gt; I. vii. 129   He was half-intoxicated, and soon became three parts so.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1871   M. Collins &lt;em&gt;Marquis &amp;amp; Merchant&lt;/em&gt; x   He rides a three-parts thorough-bred.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1878   R. Browning &lt;em&gt;La Saisiaz&lt;/em&gt; 72   There's the stoppage at the inn Three-parts up the mountain.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1887   R. L. Stevenson &lt;em&gt;Memories &amp;amp; Portraits&lt;/em&gt; xv. 250   Conduct is three parts of life, they say; but I think they put it high.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In “three-parts thorough-bred” the listener has to deduce that it is three of the horse’s four grand-parents that are referenced.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T15:01:02.693" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T15:01:02.693" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18103" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18087" CreationDate="2021-03-23T15:41:23.703" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Corgi Childrens paperback editions of Garry Kilworth’s &lt;em&gt;Thunder Oak&lt;/em&gt; (1997), &lt;em&gt;Castle Storm&lt;/em&gt; (1998), &lt;em&gt;Windjammer Run&lt;/em&gt; (1999), &lt;em&gt;Gaslight Geezers&lt;/em&gt; (2001), and &lt;em&gt;Vampire Voles&lt;/em&gt; (2002) all carry the quotation&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘A quicker, slicker read than Brian Jacques’ T.E.S.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Accordingly, I submit that you mis-remembered the tag line! As far as I can tell, the Corgi Childrens paperbacks were the only printed editions of these books, so that there is nowhere else you could have got it from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote comes from a review by Victoria Neumark:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Garry Kilworth ploughs much the same furrow in &lt;em&gt;The Welkin Weasels&lt;/em&gt;, first in a projected &lt;em&gt;Thunder Oak&lt;/em&gt; trilogy.† But with an unusual twist: here, contrary to all the laws of fiction since &lt;em&gt;The Wind in the Willows&lt;/em&gt;, the weasel is the good guy. Stoats are the baddies, ruling the land of the Welkin with an iron paw. Sylver the outlaw determines to find the lost humans and bring them back to restore peace and justice to the Welkin (“Ha!” thinks the cynical human reader).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s &lt;strong&gt;a quicker, slicker read than Brian Jacques&lt;/strong&gt;, with less of the flavour of chivalry and more of the taste of today in its quips and puns. It's also more of a male read, for 11-year-olds and older.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Victoria Neumark (1997). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tes.com/news/animal-cunning&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Animal cunning&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;T.E.S.&lt;/em&gt; (8th August 1997).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Neumark swapped the series and volume titles here: perhaps it was not clear which was which on the proof copy the &lt;em&gt;T.E.S.&lt;/em&gt; was sent.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the paperback editions of volumes 1–3 and 5 the quotation appeared on the front cover under the title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jMV0R.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/jMV0Rm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Thunder Oak&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/erOnB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/erOnBm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Castle Storm&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NAkkC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/NAkkCm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Windjammer Run&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxDum.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fxDumm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Vampire Voles&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On volume 4 it appeared on the back cover instead:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HaQFj.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/HaQFjm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Gaslight Geezers&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T16:40:24.737" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T16:40:24.737" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18104" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18105" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Lebanese-American writer and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb (born 1960)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:40:58.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18106" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18107" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American rocket engineer and Thelemite occultist Jack Parsons (1914 – 1952)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:42:28.410" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18108" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18109" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about any or all of the works in 'incerto', a group of philosophical essays on uncertainty by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The first book in this group was 'Fooled by Randomness', first published in 2001. Use this tag with [nassim-nicholas-taleb]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:46:11.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18110" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18111" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lyrics by the American rock band Toto, which was formed in 1977. Questions about lyrics should also be tagged [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:48:10.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18112" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18113" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" Score="0" Body="Questions about any or all of the books about the anthropomorphic teddy bear Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne. Use with the tag [a-a-milne]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:50:34.003" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18114" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18115" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" Score="0" Body="Questions about any or all of the books in the series of fantasy novels 'Welkin Weasels' (1997–2003) by Garry Kilworth. Use with the tag [garry-kilworth]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:53:09.647" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18116" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18117" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the British science fiction, fantasy and historical novelist Garry Kilworth (born in 1941)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:54:29.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18118" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18119" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer and mountaineer Jon Krakauer (born in 1954) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:55:54.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18120" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18121" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction book 'Into the Wild' (1996) by Jon Krakauer. Use with the tag [jon-krakauer]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T20:56:57.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18122" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18269" CreationDate="2021-03-23T21:09:18.920" Score="3" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Ted Hughes' &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/Examination-at-the-Womb-Door&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Examination at the Womb-door&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (of the &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; collection), Crow's organs are listed with certain kinds of descriptions (bold is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Examination at the Womb-door&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who owns these scrawny little feet? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who owns these still-working lungs? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who owns this &lt;strong&gt;utility coat&lt;/strong&gt; of muscles? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who owns these unspeakable guts? &lt;em&gt;Death&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who owns these questionable brains? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All this messy blood? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;These minimum-efficiency eyes? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This wicked little tongue? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This occasional wakefulness? &lt;em&gt;Death.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given, stolen, or held pending trial?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Held.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I group those descriptions into two*:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Moral/Trial&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some of the descriptions are in accord with the title of the poem, and with that concluding line: they hint about Crow being the subject of a judicial scene, as a result of some morally questionable acts or traits.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Those are the &amp;quot;unspeakable guts&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;questionable brains&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;messy blood&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;wicked tongue&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;occasional wakefulness&amp;quot; (that last one is maybe of a thief awake at nights).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mockery&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The other descriptions are simply mockery, in the spirit of many other &lt;em&gt;Crow&lt;/em&gt; poems.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Those are the &amp;quot;scrawny feet&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;scorched face&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;still-working lungs&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;minimum-efficiency eyes&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;* Though I wish I could explain all descriptions with the &amp;quot;moral/trial&amp;quot; theme of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My question&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;utility coat&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; image doesn't seem to belong to any of these groups.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I considered it may refer to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Utility_clothing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Utility Clothing&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; - but then if Crow's muscles are as practical as utility clothing, then that's a good thing, not a mockery. And if they are as simple in shape, then that's not really mockery, too.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can you help me put it in either of these groups? Or perhaps you have a different interpretation to understand the first verse?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="2432" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T13:38:38.993" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T23:14:22.993" Title="In what way can a utility coat be a mockery in a Ted Hughes' &quot;Crow&quot; poem?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;ted-hughes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18123" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18001" CreationDate="2021-03-23T21:34:00.343" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a small but crucial error in your translation. Correcting it will help us reconcile these lines with the whole song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;תגידי, איך כותבים שירים עם אלף צ&lt;strong&gt;י&lt;/strong&gt;פיות&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Say (feminine second person), how do you write songs with a thousand &lt;strong&gt;expectations&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the song, Ben-Ari speaks about the challenges of relationships (with himself, his wife, children, fans). He sees himself as a champion of enduring these challenges. What matters is not whether he failed or succeeded, but kept going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One such challenge is doing what everyone (including himself, as he declares in the first verse) thinks he's good at: Writing songs, not to say successful, viral songs.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But although he has doubts, he also has certainty that he can bare them and keep going.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2021-03-23T21:34:00.343" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18125" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T03:15:46.430" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;, sky - signs feature a name of a band(?) called The Sixteen Sexophonists. Is the word Sexophonists a play on words by the author, and if so, what is the joke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12129" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T03:33:55.670" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T03:33:55.670" Title="Who are the The Sixteen Sexophonists in Brave New World?" Tags="&lt;wordplay&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18126" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T03:58:37.293" Score="3" ViewCount="482" Body="&lt;p&gt;What do “Háni&amp;quot; and “Sons éso tse-ná” mean in &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt;? I know they sound unreal, but I was curious if there is an actual meaning behind these two phrases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12129" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T13:14:02.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T13:14:02.643" Title="What do “Háni&quot; and “Sons éso tse-ná” mean in Brave New World?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;brave-new-world&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18127" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T07:53:23.807" Score="6" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just finished Don Quixote and I'm confused about the status of &amp;quot;Aldonza Lorenzo&amp;quot; the peasant. Obviously, &amp;quot;Dulcinea of Toboso&amp;quot; is a figment of Don Quixote's imagination, but insofar as she is supposed to be a fantasy version of Aldonza Lorenzo, does she even exist as well, and does she ever appear?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The beginning of Part I suggests that Aldonza Lorenzo is a real peasant woman whom Don Quixote knows, but only distantly. From what I remember, other characters seem to recognise the name and they know her family. It seems everyone is familiar with who Aldonza is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later in Part I, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza repeatedly and adamantly claim that they have never seen &amp;quot;Dulcinea&amp;quot;. They have no idea how to find her nor what she is supposed to look like. When Sancho Panza is tasked with finding her, he suggests that the task is obviously impossible and just makes up an entire story. When Don Quixote wants to see her directly, Sancho Panza immediately starts to worry and wonders how he can find anyone to play the role. This is very odd - if &amp;quot;Dulcinea&amp;quot; is just a renamed and glorified version of the villager Aldonza Lorenzo, whom everyone knows, shouldn't they both know what she looks like and how to find her? Does this mean that the original &amp;quot;Aldonza&amp;quot; doesn't exist after all?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even later, Sancho Panza tricks Don Quixote by claiming that one of three peasant girls on the road is Dulcinea. During the encounter, nobody recognises each other. This suggests that the girl on the road was a complete stranger.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While reading about this book, I've encountered conflicting statements about Aldonza. One site mentioned that the original Aldonza Lorenzo is one of the three peasant girls (then why don't they recognise each other?). A different site mentioned that Aldonza Lorenzo doesn't appear in the story but is still a real character (then why is it impossible for anyone to find her?). Parts of the story  suggest that neither &amp;quot;Dulcinea&amp;quot; nor &amp;quot;Aldonza&amp;quot; exist at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So is Aldonza Lorenzo a real character and does she ever appear? Is she one of the three peasant girls?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12462" LastEditorUserId="12462" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T09:44:58.887" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T09:44:58.887" Title="Does Aldonza Lorenzo appear as a real character in Don Quixote?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;don-quixote&gt;&lt;miguel-de-cervantes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18129" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18126" CreationDate="2021-03-24T13:13:08.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both phrases are borrowed from Frank Hamilton Cushing's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/zuifolktales00cushrich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Zuñi Folk Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1901).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a passage that uses the word &amp;quot;háni&amp;quot; (in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/zuifolktales00cushrich/page/364/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Átahsaia, the cannibal demon&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One bright morning in summer-time, the elder sister called to the younger, &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Háni!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What sayest thou?&amp;quot; said the &lt;em&gt;háni&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, &lt;em&gt;háni&lt;/em&gt; would seem to mean &amp;quot;younger sister&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Below is a passage that uses the phrase &amp;quot;Sons éso tse-ná&amp;quot; (in the introduction to &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/zuifolktales00cushrich/page/398/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;How the twins of war and chance, Áhaiyúta and Mátsailéma, fared with the unborn-made men of the underworld&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Did you hever hear tell of the people who could not digest, (...)?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Nay, never; not even from my own grandfathers,&amp;quot; said I. &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Sons éso&lt;/em&gt; to your story; short be it or long&amp;quot;. [1]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Sons éso tse-ná!&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;Cool your '&lt;em&gt;sons éso!&lt;/em&gt;' and wait till &lt;em&gt;I&lt;/em&gt; begin)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] A footnote explains,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The invariable formula for beginning a folk tale, by the raconteur: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Són ah-tchi!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Let us take up&amp;quot;)--&lt;em&gt;té-la-p'-ne&lt;/em&gt;, or &amp;quot;a folk tale,&amp;quot;, being understood. To this the auditors or listeners respond: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;É-so!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Yea, verily.&amp;quot;) Again, by the raconteur: &lt;em&gt;Sons i-nó-o-to-na! Tem&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; etc. (&amp;quot;Let us (tell of) the times of creation! When,&amp;quot; etc) Again by the listeners &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Sons éso! Te-ä-tú!&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;Yea, let us, verily! Be it so.&amp;quot;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Most readers of &lt;em&gt;Brave New World&lt;/em&gt; would be unfamiliar with the Zuñi language and might therefore conclude that &lt;em&gt;háni&lt;/em&gt; represents an insult or a curse and that &lt;em&gt;Sons éso tse-ná&lt;/em&gt; is another expression of his anger. This would be based on clues such as &amp;quot;with what derisive ferocity!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;it was lucky that Bernard didn't understand Zuñi&amp;quot;. From this point of view, John's reversal to Zuñi may be seen as a symptom of regression.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, there is a form of irony here that readers unfamiliar with Zuñi will not notice: using a kinship term meaning &amp;quot;younger sister&amp;quot; in a society that has abolished the family can be seen as a scornful criticism on that type of society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T13:13:08.790" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18130" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11907" CreationDate="2021-03-24T15:15:25.447" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two comments/pieces of elucidations I would like to add:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &amp;quot;mulberry tree&amp;quot; reference can easily be seen as what The Ecclesiastes means when he says: &amp;quot;There is nothing new under the Sun.&amp;quot; Namely, all human lives are circular and repetitive - &amp;quot;from the cradle to the grave&amp;quot; and everything in between. Therefore, the proverbial (never-ending?) dance called a round/rondo.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Well before this poem, the scientific speculations were obsessed with the question concerning the End of the World - the fiery explosion and immolation, or the eternal ice, as the result of the Second and Third Laws of Thermodynamics, indicating that the &amp;quot;End&amp;quot; is the absolute zero, without any possible reversal. The biblical and other mythologies are also obsessed with this kind of development. The famous Croatian poet S. S. Kranjcevic, 1865-1908 (q.v.) wrote a memorable poem, entitled &amp;quot;The Last Adam,&amp;quot; well before Eliot's use of such a concept, in which the very last human being (another &amp;quot;mulberry tree&amp;quot; concept) dies, surrounded by ice, and his last gesture/&amp;quot;whimper&amp;quot; is scratching a question mark (?), on the ice... &amp;quot;Alas, you, the World, what has this never-ending joke been all about?!&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having gone through a number of images of the miserable post-WWI world (and the individuals living in it - the Hollow People), just like in his &amp;quot;Waste Land,&amp;quot; Eliot tells us clearly that there will be no final and spectacular Bang! - but only a feeble whimper of the dying humans and of the dying/freezing Universe. That's where the two mentioned Laws of Thermodynamics, claiming that the result of Entropy can be only the terminal ice (the hardly audible, human and celestial, whimper), and not the explosive heat (the Bang!) &lt;em&gt;do&lt;/em&gt; play their logical role, in this section of the poem and in this entire &amp;quot;whimpering&amp;quot; poem. One of the previous interpretations suggests that this poem does not have anything to do with religion, apart from some marginal references. I would like to express my disagreement, for the concept of &lt;strong&gt;despair&lt;/strong&gt;, the ultimate hopelessness, which runs constantly throughout this truly religious poem, is a well known and recognized &amp;quot;sin&amp;quot;/moral failure, which is traditionally seen as being even worse that the Seven Deadly Sins, and thus is unforgivable. Namely, it implies that a human being/sinner does not WANT to believe that &amp;quot;God&amp;quot; is forgiving and will offer forgiveness and Salvation. In some powerful poetry, throughout the centuries, this concept is known as The Dark Night of the Soul!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12480" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T09:52:38.193" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T09:52:38.193" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18131" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18143" CreationDate="2021-03-24T15:45:58.437" Score="3" ViewCount="37" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10626594-the-scorpio-races&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Scorpio Races&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; by Maggie Stiefvater is a novel set in Thisby, a fictional island whose main town is called Skarmouth. The whole thing has a very Scottish or Irish feel, and the phrase &lt;em&gt;capaill uisce&lt;/em&gt; (the bloodthirsty water horses) sounds very Gaelic. But, aside from the feel of the setting that anyone familiar with that part of the world can recognise, is there anything to indicate &lt;strong&gt;where in the world Thisby is located within the story?&lt;/strong&gt; (Even given that it is in Scotland or Ireland, which one?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T09:19:30.547" Title="Where is Thisby in The Scorpio Races?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;the-scorpio-races&gt;&lt;maggie-stiefvater&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18132" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18133" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer of Young Adult fiction Maggie Stiefvater (born 1981) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T16:27:03.043" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18134" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18135" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Scorpio Races' (2011) by Maggie Stiefvater. Use with the tag [maggie-stiefvater]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T16:28:14.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18136" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T18:36:07.950" Score="0" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Had Dexter and Elizabeth thought of each other during this time? Of course they had, Dexter more than Elizabeth, &lt;strong&gt;not because of any imbalance of affection&lt;/strong&gt;, but because Dexter was mad about the past. &lt;strong&gt;He believed in it, it sustained him&lt;/strong&gt;, he used it &lt;strong&gt;to knit meaning into the mess of everything.&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;He recited it in anecdotes told always in the same words. He even recalled in detail dreams that other people had had years before&lt;/strong&gt;. Elizabeth disliked the past. It was full of embarrassment. She and Dexter had never been in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is my understanding of the bolded parts correct?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;not because of any imbalance of affection&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Dexter did not love Elizabeth more than Elizabeth loved him&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;He believed in it, it sustained him, he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;He believed the effect of past in his life and it gave him power to live and with the help of past he resolved his problems that he encountered&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;He recited it in anecdotes told always in the same words. He even recalled in detail dreams that other people had had years before&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;He made anecdotes from his past and he told them. He even recalled in detail &lt;strong&gt;wishes&lt;/strong&gt; that other people had told him&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T07:26:18.650" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T22:24:11.883" Title="Meaning of &quot;he used it to knit meaning into the mess of everything&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18137" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T20:21:54.843" Score="4" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;I cannot make much sense of &amp;quot;a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/world#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;world&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; in the following passage from &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moby-Dick&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There’s your law of precedents; there’s your&#xA;utility of traditions; there’s the story of your obstinate survival of&#xA;old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in&#xA;the air! There’s orthodoxy!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror&#xA;to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to &lt;strong&gt;a&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Methinks &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Melville&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Melville&lt;/a&gt; referred to &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; existing world he knew (&lt;strong&gt;the world&lt;/strong&gt; of &amp;quot;traditions&amp;quot;, of &amp;quot;old beliefs&amp;quot;, of &amp;quot;orthodoxy&amp;quot;) and not to &lt;strong&gt;an&lt;/strong&gt; imaginary word (when referring to such a non-existing world the indefinite article &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/198772/imagine-the-world-or-imagine-a-world&quot;&gt;is frequently used&lt;/a&gt;). Therefore, the definite article would make more sense to me in this sentence, like so:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, while in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror&#xA;to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to &lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would such sentence be incorrect in the context of the passage in question?&#xA;Why was the indefinite article chosen by Melville?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7767" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T21:16:47.490" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T22:20:20.457" Title="Why was &quot;a world&quot; used in this sentence of Melville?" Tags="&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;herman-melville&gt;&lt;moby-dick&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18138" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-24T21:40:53.657" Score="5" ViewCount="50" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Edmund Spenser's &lt;em&gt;The Shepheard's Calendar&lt;/em&gt;, which political allegory seems more appropriate in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/shepheardscalend00spenrich/page/32/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May Eclogue's&lt;/a&gt; Fox and Kid fable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to Mary Parmenter, the Fox is Esme Stuart, Duke of Aubigny, the Goat is Elizabeth I and the Kid is James VI &amp;amp; I.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McLane follows the analogy with a key deviation of the Goat being the physically abusive mentor and ward-guardian George Buchanan, to whom King James' deep literary understanding and prowess is attributed. The queen was a distant political mother, in keeping with her godmother relation to King James and all the care and the guardian-like contributions she had in James' upbringing, reign and political understanding. Both Buchanan and the Queen were distant, both had their parts to play, both shaped James in ways they could, I can't find either's contribution in the whole Esme Stuart affair, who advised him against pursuing his obsession with Aubigny? Who played the Mother Goat in this &lt;em&gt;kidd's&lt;/em&gt; life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12360" LastEditorUserId="12360" LastEditDate="2021-03-24T23:46:04.927" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T12:40:19.840" Title="Political Allegory in Shepheardes Calendar" Tags="&lt;allegory&gt;&lt;edmund-spenser&gt;&lt;the-shepheardes-calendar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18139" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18140" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:23:59.503" Score="14" ViewCount="2360" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to determine the meter of &lt;a href=&quot;https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-lik-the-bred&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;i lik the bred&amp;quot; poems&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;i lik the bred&amp;quot; is a series of short poems about a domesticated cow written by British author Sam Garland, better known by his Reddit handle Poem_for_your_sprog&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The original poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my name is Cow,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and wen its nite,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or wen the moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;is shiyning brite,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and all the men&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;haf gon to bed -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;i stay up late.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;i lik the bred.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think it's an alternating stress pattern, but I don't know much about poetry. Perhaps it's iambic tetrameter? But I would like to know for certain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="588" LastEditorUserId="588" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T14:17:52.573" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T14:17:52.573" Title="What meter are &quot;I lik the bred&quot; poems in?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;meter&gt;&lt;sam-garland&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18140" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18139" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:42:16.503" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a very simple type of poetic metre, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamb_(poetry)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;iambic&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimeter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dimeter&lt;/a&gt;. Each line consists of just two feet, and each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my &lt;strong&gt;name&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;Cow&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and &lt;strong&gt;wen&lt;/strong&gt; its &lt;strong&gt;nite&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;or &lt;strong&gt;wen&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;moon&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;is &lt;strong&gt;shiy&lt;/strong&gt;ning &lt;strong&gt;brite&lt;/strong&gt;,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and &lt;strong&gt;all&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;men&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;haf &lt;strong&gt;gon&lt;/strong&gt; to bed -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;i &lt;strong&gt;stay&lt;/strong&gt; up &lt;strong&gt;late&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;i &lt;strong&gt;lik&lt;/strong&gt; the &lt;strong&gt;bred&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wikipedia's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iamb_(poetry)#Dimeter&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;example&lt;/a&gt; of iambic dimeter is Robert Frost's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44262/dust-of-snow&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Dust of Snow&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, although not every line is four syllables:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way a crow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Shook down on me&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The dust of snow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From a hemlock tree&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Has given my heart&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A change of mood&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And saved some part&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of a day I had rued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can see that the rhythm of the four-syllable lines in this poem is the same as in the one that you're asking about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-24T22:42:16.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18141" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:58:56.033" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sam Garland is a British author, also known on Reddit as Poem_for_your_sprog.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="588" LastEditorUserId="588" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T05:14:51.170" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T05:14:51.170" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18142" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:58:56.033" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Sam Garland or his life as a writer. He is a poet who achieved internet fame on Reddit as /u/Poem_for_your_sprog." OwnerUserId="588" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T05:14:13.473" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T05:14:13.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18143" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18131" CreationDate="2021-03-25T09:19:30.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Well, I found the answer myself in an interview with the author. TL;DR: &lt;strong&gt;the location of Thisby is deliberately ambiguous but intended to evoke the idea of Scotland or Ireland.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;That leads me to ask, is your island of Thisby in England? The setting felt vaguely North Atlantic but I couldn’t decide for certain.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thisby doesn’t exist but I was going for quasi-Irish or Scottish. I wanted the reader to bring their own ideas about island culture to it so I left it deliberately vague. My editor [David Levithan] was sure it was off the coast of Maine, but I think that was because he had just been to Maine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's worth noting that not all aspects of the culture of Thisby are inspired by Scotland or Ireland. The annual event of the Scorpio Races quite possibly takes inspiration from the real-life (but much less bloody) annual event of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chincoteague.com/pony_swim_guide.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chincoteague Island Pony Swim&lt;/a&gt;, featured in the award-winning novel &lt;em&gt;Misty of Chincoteague&lt;/em&gt; which Maggie Stiefvater devoured as a child.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T09:19:30.547" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18144" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18146" CreationDate="2021-02-10T13:33:15.117" Score="4" ViewCount="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is excerpted from the forewords of the English translation by John E. Woods of &lt;em&gt;The Magic Mountain&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Der Zauberberg&lt;/em&gt; in German) by Thomas Mann:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It takes place, or, to avoid any &lt;strong&gt;present tense whatever&lt;/strong&gt;, it took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is that “present tense &lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt;” Mr. Woods was trying to avoid? I’m sure it’s some kind of linguistics term. Does anyone have any idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Colawithice" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T13:52:15.287" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T13:52:15.287" Title="What is meant by “present tense whatever” here, exactly?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;thomas-mann&gt;&lt;the-magic-mountain&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18145" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18144" CreationDate="2021-02-10T13:50:43.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It seems he is trying to avoid the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_present&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;historic present tense&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In linguistics and rhetoric, the historical present or historic present, also called dramatic present or narrative present, is the employment of the present tense when narrating past events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;— Wikipedia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="niamulbengali" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T13:50:43.230" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18146" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18144" CreationDate="2021-02-10T16:04:51.557" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The narrator is at great pains to stress that the story happened a long time in the past. Elsewhere in the Foreword, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Diese Geschichte ist sehr lange her, sie ist sozusagen schon ganz mit&#xA;historischem Edelrost überzogen und unbedingt in der Zeitform der&#xA;tiefsten Vergangenheit vorzutragen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This story happened a very long time ago. It is so-to-speak already&#xA;covered in historical rust and must be related in the tense form of&#xA;the deepest past. (&lt;em&gt;my  translation&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The German passage, of which you quote the translation, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sie spielt, oder, um jedes Präsens geflissentlich zu vermeiden, sie&#xA;spielte und hat gespielt vormals, ehedem, in den alten Tagen, der Welt&#xA;vor dem großen Kriege.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation of this is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It (the story) takes place, or in order to deliberately avoid every&#xA;present tense, it took place and has taken place back then, long ago,&#xA;in the old days, the world before the Great War.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the intention of the narrator/author is very clear here. The translator has turned the literal &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;in order to deliberately avoid every present tense&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; into &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;to avoid any present tense whatever&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;. This accurately conveys the tenor of the German by using the intensifier &lt;em&gt;whatever&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Intensifiers include common words such as &lt;em&gt;very, really, awfully&lt;/em&gt; which precede the words they modify. They also include words or phrases which follow the words they modify or qualify such as &lt;em&gt;whatsoever, at all, like anything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator plans to use no present tense whatsoever or at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here is an article discussing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/podcasts/grammar_grater/archive/2008/08/21/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;intensifier whatsoever&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Shoe" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T16:04:51.557" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18147" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18144" CreationDate="2021-02-10T16:25:19.890" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;It takes place, or, to avoid any present tense whatever, it took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, [...] =&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;whatever = at all&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;completely&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's quite simple, really.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This use of whatever has zero to do with &amp;quot;linguistics&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Google dictionary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;adverb&#xA;1.&#xA;at all; of any kind (used for emphasis).&#xA;&amp;quot;they received no help whatever&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Definitions from Oxford Dictionaries [online]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Lambie" LastActivityDate="2021-02-10T16:25:19.890" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18148" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18149" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" Score="0" Body="Questions about the 'The Shepheardes Calender', a poem consisting of twelve eclogues, by Edmund Spenser, first published in 1579. Use with the tag [edmund-spenser]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T10:37:50.217" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18150" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18138" CreationDate="2021-03-25T12:40:19.840" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regardless of whether the goat is identified with Queen Elizabeth or George Buchanan, the claim that the fable of the fox and the kid in the May eclogue of the &lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt; is an allegory of specific events at the Scottish court is not particularly convincing. A generalized reading of the fable as an anti-Catholic allegory seems more credible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;E.K.'s Gloss of the Fable as a Warning Against Catholics&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt; was published in December 1579. It included a prefatory epistle by one E.K., who has not yet been conclusively identified. The epistle is addressed to Spenser's friend and fellow-poet Gabriel Harvey. E.K. also provided explanatory notes to the poem. In the May eclogue, a goat has had to leave her kid alone at home. Disregarding her advice, the kid opens the door to a sweet-talking fox, with predictable results. E.K. explains the moral of the story as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the Kidde may be vnderstoode the simple sorte of the faythfull and true Christians. By hys dame Christe, that hath alreadie with carefull watchewords (as heere doth the gote) warned his little ones, to beware of such doubling deceit. By the Foxe, the false and faithlesse Papistes, to whom is no credit to be giuen, nor felowshippe to be vsed.     (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/maye.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Maye&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thomas Cain points out that E.K.'s notes are not always reliable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These should aim to assist the reader, but often seem to confuse, mislead, or misinform. Some arguments ... take up sides in debates which he poems themselves are at pains to keep unresolved, while others summarize with fair accuracy.     (p. 6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even keeping Cain's statement in mind, though, this fable does lend itself to being read as a warning against Catholic influence. Mary Parmenter's and Paul E. McLane's readings tie this danger of Catholic influence to the specific situation of James VI of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots and heir presumptive to the English throne after Elizabeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Situation in Scotland—and England&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A synoptic view of that situation might be helpful. James was baptized Catholic, but raised Protestant. His tutor, George Buchanan, was himself a convert from Catholicism to Calvinism, and took great pains to inculcate in James the outlook and virtues appropriate to a Protestant monarch. In September 1579, shortly after James assumed full powers as king of Scotland, his father's first cousin Esmé Stuart, Duke of Aubigny, paid him a visit. James fell under the spell of the handsome and charismatic Aubigny. As Michael Young has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/23265594&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argued&lt;/a&gt;, the evidence is strong that the 37 year old duke and the 13 year old king were lovers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aubigny's influence over James alarmed the Scottish as well as English courts. Aubigny's Catholicism stoked fears that James might forgo his Protestant upbringing. His being French also raised the possibility that Scotland would fall under that nation's influence. Adding fuel to the fire, Elizabeth herself was at this same time seriously considering marrying another French Catholic, François, Duc d'Alençon, the younger brother of King Henry III. The idea that both England and Scotland would come under the ascendancy of France and Rome was anathema not just to those with political influence, but also to the people at large.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Mary Parmenter: The Goat is Elizabeth&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Parmenter connects the May eclogue to the situation at the Scottish court only in passing, in an article that otherwise focuses on how individual eclogues fit into the overall structure of the &lt;em&gt;Calendar&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The boy king of Scotland who, in March, 1578, had emerged from the dour tutelage of Buchanan to assume full powers at the age of twelve, had just fallen an easy victim to a Papist &amp;quot;Fox&amp;quot;-his French cousin, Esme Stuart, Duc D'Aubigny, who completely captivated him before the eyes of the indignant &amp;quot;English&amp;quot; or Protestant party in Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1579. It is tempting to see young James as the &amp;quot;Kiddie&amp;quot; whose &amp;quot;wrethed hornes gan newly sprout,&amp;quot; and who was so entranced with the novel joys of the peddler's pack that he let himself get &amp;quot;popt in.&amp;quot; The Queen herself, or her policy of careful &amp;quot;Motherliness&amp;quot; so constantly maintained throughout the 1570's, is the woeful &amp;quot;Gate&amp;quot;; anyone familiar with the records can see how pertinent and how irrestibly [sic] amusing the whole application is. But it is one which would take too much space to work out here.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2871571.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 205&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth was James's godmother, and took what pains she could to ensure his political security and spiritual well-being. However, as monarch of England, her influence over Scottish politics was limited. As such, Parmenter's identification of the queen as the goat who has to leave her kid untended, with the consequence that the kid falls prey to the fox's blandishments, seems to fit. Parmenter, however, does not work out the allegory in any detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Paul McLane: The Goat is Buchanan&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul McLane largely accepts and greatly expands Parmenter's reading, but identifies James's tutor Buchanan rather than Elizabeth as the goat. He points to Buchanan's close connection with the Sidney-Leicester circle of which Spenser was also a member. He also notes that Buchanan's major treatise on government, &lt;em&gt;De Jure Regni apud Scotus&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;The Law of Kingship among the Scots&lt;/em&gt;) was published in Edinburgh in January 1579, and a London edition was being prepared later in the year. McLane argues that the goat's enforced absence from home, resulting in the kid's being alone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;might be a cryptic reference to Buchanan's temporary relinquishing of his duties as tutor in 1579 in order to see the &lt;em&gt;De Jure Regni&lt;/em&gt; through the press.     (p. 89)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McLane buttresses this reading of the allegory with additional points of connection. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;In one line, Spenser uses the Scottish &lt;em&gt;gate&lt;/em&gt; for &lt;em&gt;goat&lt;/em&gt;, alerting the reader that he is referring to Scotland (l. 177)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The fox claims to be a relative of the kid; Aubigny was James's first cousin once removed (l. 269)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Commenting on the kid's fatherlessness, the goat calls him an &amp;quot;orphane&amp;quot; (l. 191), which E.K. glosses as &amp;quot;A youngling or pupill, that needeth a Tutour and gouernour.&amp;quot; This is a reference to Buchanan as James's tutor.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While McLane's argument is interesting, one major flaw makes it less than completely convincing. The same flaw applies to Parmenter's reading as well. Aubigny arrived in Scotland in September, and alarms about his hold over James began circulating in October. E.K.'s prefatory letter is dated April, and &lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt; was published in December. This timeline does not seem to permit a reference to the events in the Scottish court.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McLane argues that Spenser would have known about those events because Buchanan would have sent letters about them to the Leicester-Sidney circle. He also claims, ingeniously, that the April date is a red herring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, of course, the April 10, 1579, date attached to E.K.'s Epistle to Harvey. This date was probably a fiction designed to protect Spenser from the wrath of the Queen for his allegorical portrayal of more recent events.     (p. 9)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As this explanation demonstrates, McLane's reading depends on our accepting a number of probabilities with scant evidence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The April date is probably a fiction&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spenser probably knew about events in Scotland more or less in real time due to hypothetical letters written by Buchanan to his intimates in the Sidney-Leicester circle&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;During September–October 1879, Buchanan was probably neglectful of James while getting his own treatise published.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These claims do not seem well-founded to me. That the May eclogue could have been written entirely in October and November of 1879, such that &lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt; could have been printed in December, seems dubious. Spenser is known to be a slow and careful poet; the apparently effortless sheen of his poetic surfaces is the result of hard work. The long gestation of &lt;em&gt;The Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt; exemplifies the care Spenser took over his work. A 1580 &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/359/8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter&lt;/a&gt; from Gabriel Harvey to Edmund Spenser references the epic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But see how I haue the Arte MEMORATIUE at commaundement. In good faith I had once again nigh forgotten your FAERIE QUEENE: howbeit, by good chaunce, I haue nowe sent hir home at the laste, neither in better nor worse case than I founde hir.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet Spenser did not submit the first three books of that epic for publication until 1589, nearly a decade later. While an epic arguably requires more care than a series of pastoral eclogues, it still is hard to believe that Spenser, who worked on &lt;em&gt;The Faerie Queene&lt;/em&gt; from 1580 until his death in 1599, would want or even be able to push through the May eclogue in a couple of months in response to rapid developments in Scotland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, there is a contradiction in McLane's argument that Buchanan was, on the one hand, neglectful of James's welfare due to the pressures of getting &lt;em&gt;De Jure Regni&lt;/em&gt; published, and on the other, providing detailed accounts of the situation at court via letter to correspondents at Leicester House. These two claims are incompatible with each other. Due to such inconsistencies, the idea that Buchanan was the goat who had perforce to leave her kid unattended stretches credulity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McLane himself points to another weakness of his argument. If Spenser's aim was to depict the danger of the closeness between James and Aubigny, he could have made his allegory much clearer without running the risk of angering any power at the English court:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why the mystery? Surely every true Englishman of the period would be fearful of and condemn Aubigny's influence over the youthful James. Elizabeth, Burghley, Sussex, Leicester, Walsingham, all would be of one mind regarding this development. True enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;McLane goes on to say that the reason Spenser kept the allegory ambiguous is that he was arguing not just against Aubigny in particular, but French Catholicism in general:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spenser was, I think, slyly adverting to other things also. The French Catholic Aubigny could not be trusted, but neither could any other French Catholic—and this meant Alençon also, the French duke Elizabeth was so determined to marry in late 1879.     (p. 89)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since opposing the marriage openly would have landed Spenser in trouble, McLane says, Spenser kept his allegory ambiguous:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;E.K. was hitting home and meant to include Alençon when he wrote that the Fox represented &amp;quot;the false and faithlesse Papistes, to whom is no credit to be given, nor fellowshippe to be used.&amp;quot; ... E.K. was proceeding safely, attaching Catholicism in general rather than Alençon in particular. Spenser did not wish to be too specific in pointing to Aubigny, nor did he wish to take any unnecessary risks in making an open attack on Alençon.     (pp. 89–90)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the very lack of specifics that allow the allegory to refer to Alençon as well as Aubigny call into question the specific reference to the latter that McLane posits. The case for Alençon as the intended target of the allegory is more convincing than that for Aubigny.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Alençon as the Fox&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For many reasons, Alençon is a likelier candidate for the fox than Aubigny. The Alençon courtship had been avidly discussed since late 1596, and his envoy had visited the English court in January 1597 with full powers to negotiate the terms of the marriage. This would have given Spenser an entire year to work on the political allegory of the May eclogue, rather than just a couple of months. The prospect of Elizabeth's marriage to Alençon was a more pressing concern than the intrigues at the Scottish court. Were Elizabeth to marry, James would no longer be her presumed successor on the English throne, rendering the Aubigny affair practically irrelevant to the English. Besides, Spenser's employer, the duke of Leicester, was bitterly opposed to the marriage. Spenser's writing an allegorical fable against it would fit in with his role in the Sidney-Leicester circle. Within a month of the publication of &lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt;, Spenser's friend Philip Sidney wrote a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/editions/sidneyeliza.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;letter&lt;/a&gt; to Elizabeth arguing against the match; he was excluded from the royal presence for a while as a punishment. If the fable of the fox and the kid is to be read as a specific political allegory, then, the longer timeline from January to December the more immediate relevance of the situation to England, and the views of Spenser's own circle make Alençon a likelier candidate for the fox. This would make Elizabeth the kid. Unfortunately, this brings us back to our initial problem: who is the goat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion: A Generalized Anti-Catholic Allegory&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One might of course speculate that the goat's leaving the kid by itself reflects the fact that Elizabeth as monarch was not subject to guidance from anybody. But the difficulty of finding a suitable candidate represented by the goat exemplifies the limitations of allegorical readings that assume a one-one correspondence between the fable and historical personages. There is never a perfect fit. Rather than try to read the May eclogue as a &lt;em&gt;fable à clef&lt;/em&gt;, then, perhaps it is best to read it as E.K. suggests, a generalized warning against succumbing to Catholic influence. In this reading, Aubigny, Avignon, and other Catholics are particular instances illustrating a general allegory, rather than being specific targets of an allegory directed against them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cain, Thomas H. &amp;quot;Introduction&amp;quot; to &lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt;. Pp. 1–10 in &lt;em&gt;The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser&lt;/em&gt;, ed. William A. Oram et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Harvey, Gabriel. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bartleby.com/359/8.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter IV&lt;/a&gt;, Spenser-Harvey Correspondence: Letters on Reformed Versifying, &amp;amp;c. 1579–80.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Elizabethan Critical Essays&lt;/em&gt;, ed. by G. Gregory Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904. Bartleby.com, 2012. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;McLane, Paul E. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spensersshephear00mcla_0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Notre Dame, IN: U Notre Dame P, 1961. Archive.org. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Parmenter, Mary. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2871571.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser *Twelve Aeglogves Proportionable to the Twelve Monethes&lt;/a&gt;*. &lt;em&gt;ELH&lt;/em&gt;, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Sep. 1936), pp. 190-217. JSTOR. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Sidney, Philip. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/editions/sidneyeliza.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Philip Sidney to Queen Elizabeth, Anno 1580, Dissuading Her from Marrying the Duke of Anjou&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Ed. Anniina Jokinen. Luminarium, March 2007. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spenser, Edmund. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/shepheard.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1579. Ed. Risa S. Bear. Renascence Editions, U of Oregon, May 1996. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Young, Michael B. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/23265594&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;James VI and I: Time for a Reconsideration&lt;/a&gt;?” &lt;em&gt;Journal of British Studies&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 51, no. 3, 2012, pp. 540–567. JSTOR. Accessed March 25, 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T12:40:19.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18151" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16062" CreationDate="2021-03-25T21:33:14.790" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Napoleon is absent during the battle of the Cowshed in Orwell's &lt;em&gt;Animal Farm&lt;/em&gt;.  Orwell makes a point to show that though nobody spoke more fiercely about the danger of the humans and their imminent threat of reappearing on the farm, when it came to actually going to war with them, Napoleon left the fighting to the other animals. His political opponent, Snowball, led the charge against the humans and got wounded in the process, earning him great honour/prestige among the animals.  This is another example of Napoleon's hypocritical stance on the farm. He wants all the rewards with no sacrifice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12495" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-25T21:51:23.710" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T21:51:23.710" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18152" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18136" CreationDate="2021-03-25T22:24:11.883" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Exactly.  An &amp;quot;imbalance&amp;quot; would indicate a lack of proportion -- he loved her much more than she loved him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would say -- in view of the &amp;quot;knit meaning&amp;quot; -- that he used the past to interpret his present, so that it did not seem pointless and meaningless.  This may not solve problems but it would lend them significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The anecdotes do not have to be made up, and from the context, I would assume they were accurate.  Likewise, I think the dreams were, indeed, dreams; someone would describe a dream over breakfast, perhaps, and he would still remember the description years later.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-25T22:24:11.883" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18154" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18165" CreationDate="2021-03-26T13:44:17.167" Score="1" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the Father Brown story &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/204/204-h/204-h.htm#link2H_4_0001&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Blue Cross&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was he who had kept up an unaccountable and close correspondence with a young lady whose whole letter-bag was intercepted, by the extraordinary trick of photographing his messages infinitesimally small upon the slides of a microscope.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the &amp;quot;trick&amp;quot; being described here? I don't understand what it is or how it works.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12499" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T13:54:38.230" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T14:51:28.337" Title="In The Blue Cross, what is the mailbag trick?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;g-k-chesterton&gt;&lt;father-brown&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18155" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18158" CreationDate="2021-03-26T17:37:53.207" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from Chapter 31 of Jane Austen's &lt;em&gt;Sense and Sensibility&lt;/em&gt;, where Elinor contemplates the deficiency of sense and sensibility in Marianne, made evident by&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; her violent breakdown following the receival of a letter in which Mr. Willoughby coldly declares himself to have never imposed on her feelings, and the revelation of his engagement to a Miss Grey.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elinor had not needed this to be assured of the injustice to which her sister was often led in her opinion of others, by the irritable refinement of her own mind, and the too great importance placed by her on the delicacies of a strong sensibility, and the graces of a polished manner. Like half the rest of the world, &lt;strong&gt;if more than half there be that are clever and good&lt;/strong&gt;, Marianne, with excellent abilities and an excellent disposition, was neither reasonable nor candid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With the omission of the bolded phrase, the last sentence is perfectly comprehensible; I'm sure it is so regardless, though if I have been able to understand the literal meaning,&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sEItYl.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/sEItYl.png&quot; alt=&quot;an unreasonable diagram which shows 'neither reasonable nor candid' people and 'clever and good' people comprising roughly 50% and 70% of the world population respectively&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;how it (i.e. the meaning of the sentence &lt;em&gt;with&lt;/em&gt; the inclusion of the bolded phrase) bears relevance to the rest of the paragraph, and what it contributes to the reflection on Marianne's personality is foggy.&lt;br&gt; &lt;strong&gt;What is the accurate meaning of &amp;quot;Like half the rest of the world, ... nor candid&amp;quot;, and how does it play into the theme of the introduction of this chapter?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-26T18:30:10.640" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T03:13:09.123" Title="Meaning of &quot;Like half the rest of the world, if more than half there be that are clever and good, Marianne ... was neither reasonable nor candid.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jane-austen&gt;&lt;sense-and-sensibility&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18156" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18154" CreationDate="2021-03-26T18:54:39.360" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The Blue Cross&amp;quot; was the first Father Brown story, published (according to Wikipedia) in 1910.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The technology of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot?wprov=sfla1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;photo microdots&lt;/a&gt; had been known for some decades by then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T18:54:39.360" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18157" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2501" CreationDate="2021-03-27T01:40:07.567" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I tend to think that Neruda is talking about the possibility or potential of the man in the poem engendering a child with the unnamed woman and that, were this to occur, this potential child (or the life flowing through the child’s veins) would then, through her/his existence, “ground”him (a “sailor” who, instead, would like to have a woman waiting at every port). Meanwhile he is likely playing here with the words “amarrar” - “to tie up, to bind” - and “amar” - “to love.” Later in the poem he also seems to play with “a amar” and “a mar” as in “to love” and “to the sea,” probably explaining his introduction of the male lover as a sailor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The line quoted is also full of alliteration and semi-hidden meanings:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Para que nada nos amarre que no nos una nada.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example the word “nada” means “nothing” and “swims,” as in “una nada” or “a female swims.” Moreover, the word “una” means “joins,” which carries the surface meaning of “nothing join (us)” as well as “a nothing(ness)”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastEditorUserId="12327" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T03:43:14.297" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T03:43:14.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18158" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18155" CreationDate="2021-03-27T02:58:18.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A couple of points in the question need clarification. First, Elinor's thoughts are not about Marianne's reaction to Willoughby's letter. They are in response to Marianne's view of Mrs Jennings, their well-intentioned but interfering hostess in London. Marianne is convinced that Mrs Jennings' kindly interest in her situation is simply driven by a desire for gossip. Elinor thinks Marianne shows &lt;strong&gt;injustice&lt;/strong&gt; toward Mrs Jennings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, Marianne does not have a &amp;quot;deficiency of ... sensibility.&amp;quot; On the contrary, she has far too much of it. Here is the definition of &lt;strong&gt;sensibility&lt;/strong&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sensibility&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1 : ability to receive sensations : SENSITIVENESS&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;        // tactile &lt;em&gt;sensibility&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;2 : peculiar susceptibility to a pleasurable or painful impression (as from praise or a slight) —often used in plural&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;3 : awareness of and responsiveness toward something (such as emotion in another)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;4 : refined or excessive sensitiveness in emotion and taste with especial responsiveness to the pathetic&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elinor thinks of Marianne as oversensitive, and says Marianne expects others to be just as sensitive as she. This leads her to be unjust in her judgment of others such as Mrs Jennings who are not as sensitive in their feelings or as refined in their manners.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elinor says that in this, Marianne is &lt;strong&gt;like half the rest of the world&lt;/strong&gt;. The quoted passage goes on:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other words, Marianne expects everybody to see things the same way as she does, and condemns those (like Mrs Jennings) whose feelings differ from her own. Marianne also cannot see beyond herself, and judges people's actions not on intrinsic merit but on how those actions make her feel. This makes Marianne like half the world, which also misjudges people similarly. According to Elinor, this is &lt;strong&gt;neither reasonable nor candid&lt;/strong&gt;. &lt;em&gt;Candid&lt;/em&gt; here is used in sense 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/candid&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;free from bias, prejudice, or malice : FAIR&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;// a &lt;em&gt;candid&lt;/em&gt; observer&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Understanding the passage in this way, we can deduce what &lt;strong&gt;if more than half there be that are clever and good&lt;/strong&gt; means. Elinor thinks that half the world is like Marianne in being &lt;strong&gt;clever and good&lt;/strong&gt;, yet unjust in her judgments of other people. But there are also clever and good people who do &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; judge people unfairly; for example Elinor herself. So if half the world is like Marianne, and additionally there are some people like Elinor, then more than half the world is &amp;quot;clever and good.&amp;quot; We cannot just assume this, so the qualification comes in: &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; more than half are clever and good, &lt;em&gt;then&lt;/em&gt; Marianne is like half the world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is an example of Austen's sharp yet subtle irony. Without flat-out saying that most people are stupid and/or evil, she implies it by saying, &amp;quot;Marianne is like half the world in that despite being clever and good, she still misjudges people. Well, assuming that more than half the world is clever and good.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T03:13:09.123" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T03:13:09.123" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18159" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1486" CreationDate="2021-03-27T04:41:44.437" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest I’ve come across is from Herodotus’s &lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt;, Book IV, Chapters 32–36) where he speaks of Hyperboria, or the land behind the north wind (or the land behind Boreas, the god of the north wind). These &lt;em&gt;Histories&lt;/em&gt; were written in the 5th Century BC.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T15:59:49.643" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T15:59:49.643" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18160" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18177" CreationDate="2021-03-27T09:53:50.667" Score="3" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following verse appears in Book 1 of &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt; (William Mickle's translation, 1877 edition; emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So spoke high Jove: the gods in silence heard,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then rising, each by turns his thoughts preferr’d&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;But chief was Bacchus of the adverse train;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fearful he was, nor fear’d his pride in vain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Should Lusus’ race arrive on India’s shore,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His ancient honours would be known no more;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No more in Nysa should the native tell&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What kings, what mighty hosts before him fell.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The fertile vales beneath the rising sun&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He view’d as his, by right of victory won,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And deem’d that ever in immortal song&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The Conqueror’s title should to him belong.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Yet Fate, he knew, had will’d, that loos’d from Spain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Boldly advent’rous thro’ the polar main,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A warlike race. should come, renown’d in arms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And shake the eastern world with war’s alarms,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose glorious conquests and eternal fame&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In black Oblivion’s waves should whelm his name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A footnote (presumably written by Mickle?) explains Nysa as &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;An ancient city in India sacred to Bacchus.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; As far as I know, the culture that worshipped Bacchus/Dionysus never made it as far as India (Alexander the Great had some campaigns in India but never conquered any significant part of it?) Maybe &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;, or Mickle, uses a different meaning of &amp;quot;India&amp;quot; from what I'm assuming, referring to a broader area in Asia than the present-day country of India, but the ancient cities named Nysa that I can find all seem to be in Greece or Turkey, surely too far west to be called &amp;quot;India&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where is this Nysa, and why was it said to be sacred to Bacchus?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T08:40:49.307" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T08:40:49.307" Title="What is meant by &quot;Nysa&quot; in the Lusiads?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18161" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T13:05:02.880" Score="3" ViewCount="434" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Over the back fence, nearer the creek, lived an old couple whom Dexter and Athena had never seen but whom they referred to as Mister and Missus F****n’. They drank, they smashed things, they &lt;strong&gt;hawked&lt;/strong&gt; and swore and vomited, they cursed each other to hell and back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One meaning of &amp;quot;hawk&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;to sell goods&amp;quot; but I don't think this meaning works in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They hit each other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;They spat?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T15:43:03.883" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T07:30:36.657" Title="What does &quot;hawk&quot; mean in the context below?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18162" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18161" CreationDate="2021-03-27T13:40:43.940" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;In context, it surely means &lt;strong&gt;clearing phlegm from the throat and spitting&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hawk&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few meanings of the word &amp;quot;hawk&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, but just two main meanings (or collections of related meanings) as an intransitive verb, and one of them doesn't really fit here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to hunt birds by means of a trained hawk (see hawk entry 1 sense 1) : to practice falconry&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to soar and strike like a hawk (see hawk entry 1 sense 1)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;birds hawking after insects&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to utter a harsh guttural sound in or as if in trying to clear the throat&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;to make a harsh coughing sound in clearing the throat&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the context of people who are known for their vulgar and impolite behaviour, spitting would fit right in with swearing, drinking, and vomiting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The meaning couldn't be anything to do with selling goods, because in that context &amp;quot;hawk&amp;quot; is a &lt;em&gt;transitive&lt;/em&gt; verb: it has an object. People can hawk their wares, but (in this context) they can't just hawk. Your other suggested meaning, they hit each other, isn't one of the meanings of the word &amp;quot;hawk&amp;quot; as far as I know.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T13:40:43.940" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18163" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11736" CreationDate="2021-03-27T14:32:03.543" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;As in English, the first month of the Spanish year is named after Janus, the Greek double-faced god, who looks behind at the past year and forward toward the new. Janus was also the god of thresholds, liminal spaces and doors, likely accounting for all the back and forth in the narrator’s words and the reference to the “key.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some more information from wikipedia, on Janus, may also clarify some of the questions and comments above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the fundamental nature of Janus is debated, in most modern scholars' view the god's functions may be seen as being organized around a single principle: presiding over all beginnings and transitions, whether abstract or concrete, sacred or profane.[15] Interpretations concerning the god's fundamental nature either limit it to this general function or emphasize a concrete or particular aspect of it (identifying him with light[16] the sun,[17] the moon,[18] time,[19] movement,[20] the year,[21] doorways,[22] bridges[23] etc.) or else see in the god a sort of cosmological principle, interpreting him as a uranic deity.[24]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastEditorUserId="12327" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T23:33:49.593" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T23:33:49.593" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18164" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17445" CreationDate="2021-03-27T14:37:40.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;By the time Anderson wrote, India was already known to Europeans quite well. Earlier poets such as Goethe wrote in one of his poems about the characters of Kalidasa's Shakuntala, who wrote in Sanskrit 1400 years before Goethe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12504" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T14:37:40.777" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18165" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18154" CreationDate="2021-03-27T14:51:28.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;He made very, very, very small letters, on microscope slides.  These were sent to the young lady in question, who used a microscope to read them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T14:51:28.337" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18166" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18160" CreationDate="2021-03-27T15:02:33.957" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nysa_%28mythology%29&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nysa&lt;/a&gt; was a mythological region where Dionysus was said to have been raised.  While it migrated a lot, a city in India -- probably &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagara_(ancient_city)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nagara&lt;/a&gt; -- told Alexander that it had been founded by Dionysus, and he renamed it Nysa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I note that Alexander the Great not only conquered portions of India, he caused enough Greek settlement and influence to produce &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yavanarajya&lt;/a&gt;, which is known as Indo-Greek.  The settlers there continued to practice Greek religion and the worship of the Olympians including Dionysus.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T15:15:38.130" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T15:15:38.130" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18167" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6532" CreationDate="2021-03-27T15:54:20.337" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Neruda’s first two lines seems to set the tone for most of the rest of the poem&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio&#xA;o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “rosa de sal” connotes a beautiful/useful thing that forms on surfaces, while the rest are all showy, outer, things (for “rosa de sal” see wikipedia under “fleur de sel”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These lines lead directly to the opposite of how he loves her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This, along with other parts of the poem, implies that his love is deep or of the depths, so much so that it mirrors the potential of ungerminated plants/seeds and even the ancient conception of Hades, where shadows/sombras and souls/almas wondered, possibly awaiting to rise, like the plants. Neruda may also be recalling the love of Orpheus for a dead Eurydice, and his failed attempt to bring her back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T15:54:20.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18168" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18236" CreationDate="2021-03-27T19:23:35.220" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember a story about a king riding in a boat. It was in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His oarsman is complaining about rowing, and all the hard work he is doing. They get to where they are going, get ready to go to sleep, and a sound wakes everyone up. The king sends the oarsman to check. They are cats. The king asks a bunch of questions, and each time the oarsman has to go back to check, to answer the king's questions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then the king wakes up his advisor, and asks him what's causing the noise. The advisor goes. The king asks the advisor the same questions, and the advisor has an answer, ready, for the king without having to check seven times.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone know what story this is? I have a software development customer that keeps asking questions halfway through the development process, and I'd like to use this story to help him understand different communication patterns. I cannot find the story, and my re-telling isn't as great as the original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bryanthayer.com/tag/endurance/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reproduction of the story&lt;/a&gt;, but this is not the original place I encountered it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12505" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T04:37:09.883" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T11:41:20.907" Title="King on a Boat Ride Hears a Sound, Oarsman vs. Advisor Efficiency in Determining" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18170" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18171" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Indian Hindi-language fiction writer and essayist Krishna Sobti (1925–2019) or her life as a writer. Use with the tag [hindi-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" LastActivityDate="2021-03-27T20:27:13.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18173" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-27T23:31:57.487" Score="6" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Glimpses of Bengal&lt;/em&gt;, a selection of Rabindranath Tagore's letters included in &lt;em&gt;The Definitive Tagore&lt;/em&gt; (Rupa Publications, 2017), Tagore summarises the following story (letter from 24 June 1894):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a Persian story which I was greatly taken with when I read it as a boy—I think I understood, even then, something of the underlying idea, though I was a mere child. To show the illusory character of time, a faquir put some magic water into a tub and asked the King to take a dip. The King no sooner dipped his head in than he found himself in a strange country by the sea, where he spent a good long time going through a variety of happenings and doings. He married, had children, his wife and children died, he lost all his wealth, and as he writhed under his sufferings he suddenly found himself back in the room, surrounded by his courtiers. On his proceeding to revile the faquir for his misfortunes, they said, 'But, sire, you have only just dipped your head in, and raised it out of the water!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to find a &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fakir+king+persia+magic+water+dip+head&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;story that fits this description&lt;/a&gt; on the web. Since Tagore mentions in other letters that he read the stories of Sinbad the Sailor as a child, I cannot exclude the possibility that he is using &amp;quot;Persian&amp;quot; in a loose sense and actually remembering a story from &lt;em&gt;One Thousand and One Nights&lt;/em&gt;. Is anyone sufficiently familiar with either Persian literature or &lt;em&gt;One Thousand and One Nights&lt;/em&gt; to find out which story Tagore was referring to? (I don't recognise the story, but I have never read &lt;em&gt;One Thousand and One Nights&lt;/em&gt; in its entirety. Nor am I familiar with Persian literature.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:30:11.057" Title="What is the Persian story that Rabindranath Tagore summarises in a letter from June 1894?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;persian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18174" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6466" CreationDate="2021-03-28T00:11:37.753" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Given that MacDonald was a proud Scotsman and that he often used the Scots language/dialect in his books, a perusal of a dictionary may prove useful.  Here is part of what &lt;em&gt;The Dictionary of the Scots Language&lt;/em&gt; has on keck:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[O.Sc. kek(k)il(l), v. = 1., from c.1513, = 2., a.1550. A freq. form from Keck, v.3 Cf. also Mid. Du. Kekelen, to cackle.] (online, &lt;a href=&quot;https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/keckle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/keckle&lt;/a&gt; )&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And under Keckle we also find&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To laugh with joy or excitement, to show signs of unrestrained eagerness or delight (Ags. 1849 Brechin Advertiser (22 May)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above Scots definitions we seem to find the direct opposite to Hum-Drum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12327" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T00:11:37.753" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18177" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18160" CreationDate="2021-03-28T02:14:05.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Roman god Bacchus and his Greek counterpart Dionysos have long been associated with Nysa. The names Dionysos and Nysa are said to be etymologically related, though the exact connection is unclear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bacchus / Dionysos was the son of Jupiter and Semele. The pregnant Semele unwisely asked to see Jupiter in his flaming form, the sight causing her to burn to death. Jupiter rescued the embryonic Bacchus by placing him in his thigh to develop until birth. When Bacchus was born, Jupiter turned him over to the Nysiads, Oceanic nymphs, to raise. The Nysiads were associated with the mythic mount Nysa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, Homer refers to Dionysos and associates him with this mountain. The speaker is Diomedes, stating his refusal to fight against any of the gods, as any victory against them is Pyrrhic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;οὐδὲ γὰρ οὐδὲ Δρύαντος υἱὸς κρατερὸς Λυκόοργος&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;δὴν ἦν, ὅς ῥα θεοῖσιν ἐπουρανίοισιν ἔριζεν:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ὅς ποτε μαινομένοιο Διωνύσοιο τιθήνας&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;σεῦε κατ' ἠγάθεον Νυσήϊον: αἳ δ' ἅμα πᾶσαι&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;θύσθλα χαμαὶ κατέχευαν ὑπ' ἀνδροφόνοιο Λυκούργου     (6.130–134)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Stanley Lombardo's translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not even mighty Lycurgus lived long&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;After he tangled with the immortals,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Driving the nurses of Dionysus&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Down over the Mountain of Nysa&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And making them drop their wands&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As he beat them with an ox-goad.     (p. 116)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since the worship of Dionysos entered Greece from either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysian_Mysteries#Early_Dionysus_cult&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asia Minor or neighboring Thrace&lt;/a&gt;, the god was associated with the east. Different mythographers located Nysa in different parts of Asia: Turkey, Arabia, or India. For ancient geographers, India meant the entire subcontinent east of the Hindu Kush and south of the Himalayas; this includes part of present-day Afghanistan as well as all of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Sri Lanka.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mythopoeic impulses during the time of Alexander the Great (356 BCE–323 BCE) associated the conquerer with Hercules, but W. J. Woodhouse &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_of_Religion_and_Ethics_Mun/f5xAAQAAIAAJ?gbpv=1&amp;amp;pg=PA428&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;observes&lt;/a&gt; that as his army moved eastward he began to be equated with Bacchus as well. Alexander made it as far as northwest India, leading to the belief that Bacchus was the conquerer of that land:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The triumphant irresistible bursting of Alexander the Great into the secrets of the Far East naturally appealed to the imagination of his generation as a sort of fabled progress of Bacchus through those same regions. The exploits of Alexander it was that give birth to the legend of the conquest of India and the East by Dionysus, rather than the converse; and the imagination of court flatterers was exercised to provide divine prototypes of Alexander's achievements. Being himself reputed son of Zeus-Ammon, and Dionysos also being, in some stories, a son of Ammon, it was altogether suitable that Alexander should tread literally in the footsteps of his divine predecessor, and at last come upon that very city of Nysa which had existed in the imagination of so many generations as built by Dionysos for his wearied Bacchanals, and upon that same &lt;strong&gt;Mt. Mēros&lt;/strong&gt; on which his troops had refreshed themselves amid its ivy and laurels.     (p. 428, internal citation omitted, emphasis added)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Mēros&lt;/strong&gt; is the ancient Greek for &lt;strong&gt;thigh&lt;/strong&gt;. Mythopoeists of Alexander's time equated Meros with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/mount-meru-hell-and-paradise-one-mountain-00301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Meru&lt;/a&gt;, a mythical mountain that is considered the center of the universe in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain cosmology. The connection between Bacchus' birth from Jupiter's thigh and the name of this mountain proved irresistible. In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anabasis_of_Alexander&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Anabasis of Alexander&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, the 2nd C CE historian &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrian&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Arrian&lt;/a&gt; relates the how Alexander reached Nysa and was greeted by its citizens. Arrian is rather skeptical that the Dionysos referred to is the god:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this country, lying between the rivers Cophen and Indus, which was traversed by Alexander, the city of Nysa is said to be situated. The report is, that its foundation was the work of Dionysus, who built it after he had subjugated the Indians. But it is impossible to determine who this Dionysus was, and at what time, or from what quarter he led an army against the Indians. For I am unable to decide whether the Theban Dionysus, starting from Thebes or from the Lydian Tmolus came into India at the head of an army, and after traversing the territories of so many warlike nations, unknown to the Greeks of that time, forcibly subjugated none of them except that of the Indians. But I do not think we ought to make a minute examination of the legends which were promulgated in ancient times about the divinity; for things which are not credible to the man who examines them according to the rule of probability, do not appear to be wholly incredible, if one adds the divine agency to the story. When Alexander came to Nysa the citizens sent out to him their president, whose name was Acuphis, accompanied by thirty of their most distinguished men as envoys, to entreat Alexander to leave their city free for the sake of the god. The envoys entered Alexander's tent and found him seated in his armour still covered with dust from the journey, with his helmet on his head, and holding his spear in his hand. When they beheld the sight they were struck with astonishment, and falling to the earth remained silent a long time. But when Alexander caused them to rise, and bade them be of good courage, then at length Acuphis began thus to speak: &amp;quot;The Nysaeans beseech thee, king, out of respect for Dionysus, to allow them to remain free and independent; for when Dionysus had subjugated the nation of the Indians, and was returning to the Grecian sea, he founded this city from the soldiers who had become unfit for military service, and were under his inspiration as Bacchanals, so that it might be a monument both of his wandering and of his victory, to men of after times; just as thou also hast founded Alexandria near mount Caucasus, and another Alexandria in the country of the Egyptians. Many other cities thou hast already founded, and others thou wilt found hereafter, in the course of time, inasmuch as thou hast achieved more exploits than Dionysus. The god indeed called the city Nysa, and the land Nysaea after his nurse Nysa. The mountain also which is near the city he named Meros (i.e. thigh), because, according to the legend, he grew in the thigh of Zeus. From that time we inhabit Nysa, a free city, and we ourselves are independent, conducting our government with constitutional order. And let this be to thee a proof that our city owes its foundation to Dionysus; for ivy, which does not grow in the rest of the country of India, grows among us.&amp;quot;     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Anabasis_of_Alexander/Book_V/Chapter_I&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V.1&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pleased that he had reached as far as Dionysos, Alexander granted the Nysians their wish and allowed their city to remain &amp;quot;free and independent.&amp;quot; He then took his army on a picnic to the fabled mountain:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was now seized with a strong desire of seeing the place where the Nysaeans boasted to have certain memorials of Dionysus. So he went to Mount Merus with the Companion cavalry and the foot guard, and saw the mountain, which was quite covered with ivy and laurel and groves thickly shaded with all sorts of timber, and on it were chases of all kinds of wild animals. The Macedonians were delighted at seeing the ivy, as they had not seen any for a long time; for in the land of the Indians there was no ivy, even where they had vines. They eagerly made garlands of it, and crowned themselves with them, as they were, singing hymns in. honour of Dionysus, and invoking the deity by his various names. Alexander there offered sacrifice to Dionysus, and feasted in company with his companions.      (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Anabasis_of_Alexander/Book_V/Chapter_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;V.2&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This city of Nysa has been identified with a couple of sites in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Ptolemy mentions a city named &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagara_(ancient_city)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nagara&lt;/a&gt;, also known as Dionysopolis; both this name and Nagara's location between the Cophen [Kabul] and Indus rivers make it a strong candidate. The exact location of Nagara is not known, but it is associated with an archaeological site known as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aiamilitarypanel.org/profiles/cptraining/afgh05-155.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nagara Ghundi&lt;/a&gt;, about four miles from Jalalabad in Afghanistan. The present-day city of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jatland.com/home/Nisatta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nisatta&lt;/a&gt; in Pakistan, some 100 miles away from Jalalabad, is another viable candidate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some 300 years after Arrian (and 800 years after Alexander's time), the Hellenistic poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonnus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nonnus&lt;/a&gt; wrote an epic poem, the &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysiaca&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dionysiaca&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, which narrates the life of Dionysos, his conquest of India, and his return to the West. Nonnus, however, situates Nysa in Arabia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (except Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Arrian. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Anabasis_of_Alexander&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Anabasis of Alexander&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. E. J. Chinnock. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1884. Wikisource. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ball, Warwick. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.aiamilitarypanel.org/profiles/cptraining/afgh05-155.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nagara Ghundi&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan&lt;/em&gt;, n. 756. 1982. Cultural Property Training Institute, Afghanistan. aiamilitarypanel.org. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Black, John. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/mount-meru-hell-and-paradise-one-mountain-00301&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mount Meru: Hell and Paradise on One Mountain&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; 3 April 2013. ancient-origins.net. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Homer. &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Stanley Lombardo. Intro. Sheila Murnaghan. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;The Iliad&lt;/em&gt;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://homer.library.northwestern.edu&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chicago Homer&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jatland.com/home/Nisatta&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nisatta&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Jatland.com. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Nonnus. &lt;em&gt;Dionysiaca&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. W. H. D. Rowse. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1940–1942. 3 vols: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca01nonnuoft/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca02nonnuoft/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca03nonnuoft/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;three&lt;/a&gt;. Archive.org. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Woodhouse, W. J. &amp;quot;Nysa&amp;quot;. pp. 427–428. &lt;em&gt;Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics&lt;/em&gt;, ed. James Hastings. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_of_Religion_and_Ethics_Mun/f5xAAQAAIAAJ?gbpv=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vol. IX&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Mundas–Phrygians&lt;/em&gt;. pp. 427–428. Google Books. Accessed 27 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T02:37:38.167" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T02:37:38.167" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18179" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18161" CreationDate="2021-03-28T04:58:18.300" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Interesting info on where &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/hawk-a-loogie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;hawk a loogie&amp;quot; might come from&lt;/a&gt;, which answers the original question as well I think.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To hawk a loogie is a slang phrase meaning to expectorate a glob of phlegm from the back of the throat. It comes in many variants. Hawk is often hock or hang, and loogie can be looey, louie, or lunger. The phrase is the coming together of two words, one quite old and the other rather new.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The old one is hawk or hock. It’s probably echoic in origin and dates to the late sixteenth century. From Richard Mulcaster’s 1581 treatise on education, Positions, which also contains medical advice relevant to bringing up young boys:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of all these diuersities in walking the moderate is most profitable, which alone of all, that I rekened, hath no point either of to much, or of to litle, and yet it is both much, and strayning, which be the two properties of an healthfull walke. It is good for the head, the eyes, the throte, the chest, when they be out of frame: so the partie spit not blood. For distilling from the head, for difficultie of breath, for a moyste and and pained stomacke, wherin the nurriture either groweth bitter or corrupteth: for the iaundise, costisnesse, fleeting of the meat in the stomacke, stopping of the vrine, ache of the hippes, and generally for all such, as either neede to prouoke any superfluitie from the vpper partes downward, or to send that packing, which is already in waye to depart. Now to the contrarie it is naught for agues, bycause it encreaseth heat, and so conseque[n]tly the disease: for the falling euill, for hauking vp of blood: and in the time when one is making water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Loogie is of more recent vintage, dating to the latter half of the twentieth century, at least in writing. It appears in Carlo Curti’s 1967 biography of movie mogul Spyros Skouros, Skouras: King of Fox Studios:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Out kid!” he ordered as one of his bodyguards put me in an armlock. I spit a lugey on him and he slapped my face.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase is recorded in student slang in the journal Current Slang from 1970:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hang a louie, v. To spit on someone.—College students, both sexes, Minnesota.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And another example is found in Julian Moynahan’s 1979 novel Where the Land and Water Meet:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the old neighborhood, by Raymond Street Park, to cough up and expectorate heavy phlegm from the back of the throat was to “hawk a lunger.” When you did it, the remark to make was “Go pick the bones out of that one!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not a very pleasant image.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12509" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T07:30:36.657" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T07:30:36.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18180" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T08:22:40.010" Score="15" ViewCount="1684" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Canto 7 of &lt;em&gt;The Lusíads&lt;/em&gt;, when Vasco da Gama and his crew finally land in Calicut, they encounter a Moor named Monsayeed who explains to the former:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are now in India, with its various&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Peoples who prosper and grow rich&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From gold and sweet perfumes and peppercorns&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cardamoms, hot chillies, and precious stones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt; Luís Vaz de Camões, &lt;em&gt;The Lusíads&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Landeg White. Oxford World's Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. VII.31.4–8, p. 145&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mention of &amp;quot;hot chillies&amp;quot; is puzzling. The chilli pepper was unknown in India until the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese themselves brought it to the subcontinent. Chilli peppers are native to the Americas. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_%C3%81lvares_Cabral&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Pedro Álvares Cabral&lt;/a&gt; landed in Brazil in 1500 and claimed it for Portugal. By 1530, the Portuguese had consolidated their hold on Goa, and they &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.firstpost.com/india/how-potatoes-and-chillies-conquered-indian-cuisine-6329111.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;introduced the chilli pepper there around this time&lt;/a&gt;. So at da Gama's landing in 1497, how could Monsayeed say that Indians prospered by trading in &amp;quot;hot chillies&amp;quot;? Is this foreshadowing? An error on Camões' part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T03:22:44.257" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T03:22:44.257" Title="Chilli peppers in fifteenth-century India?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18181" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18180" CreationDate="2021-03-28T08:22:40.010" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an error introduced by the translator. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3333/3333-h/3333-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;original Portuguese text&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sabei que estais na Índia, onde se estende&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Diverso povo, rico e prosperado&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;De ouro luzente e fina pedraria,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Cheiro suave, ardente especiaria.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A literal translation (mine) would be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Know that you are in India, where dwell diverse people, rich and prosperous from bright gold and exquisite gemstones, delicate perfumes, fiery spices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;William Atkinson translates:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You must know that you are now in India, the abode of a diversity of peoples who prosper and grow rich on their gleaming gold and precious stones, their cinnamon and spices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;Luis Vaz de Camões. &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. William C. Atkinson. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 1952. P. 249.&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Richard Burton's much-maligned &lt;a href=&quot;https://burtoniana.org/books/1880-Os%20lusiadas/Os%20lusiadas%20Vol%202.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation&lt;/a&gt; comes closest to Camões' original:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Know, that ye look on Indo wherein extendeth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a world of nations, rich and fortunate&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in lucent gold, and gems of princely price,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and odorif'erous fumes and biting spice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While both Atkinson and White flavor Camões' lines by tossing in spices not found in the original, Atkinson at least gets history and geography right; cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka. White's mention of hot chillies is anachronistic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are other problems with White's translation. The explanatory notes sometimes baffle rather than illuminate. For example, when the Samorin asks da Gama, &amp;quot;What precious gifts do you bring me?&amp;quot; (VIII.62.3, p. 169), the note says: &amp;quot;See canto 4.61–5&amp;quot; (p. 251). But the referenced verses, about João II's sending envoys to explore Eurasia and Africa, contain nothing that seems relevant. Also, while White praises Camões for being &amp;quot;no prude&amp;quot; in describing the carnal pleasures of the Isle of Love, he does not appear to share this frankness, at least not when it comes to same-sex love; he coyly describes Hyacinth (IX.62.3, p. 189) as merely Apollo's &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot; (p. 253). Such infelicities mar what is otherwise an excellent rendition of Camões' ottava rima stanzas into English verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T09:35:37.973" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T09:35:37.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18183" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T14:26:15.437" Score="0" ViewCount="55" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Philip did not turn up with the car. This did not surprise Elizabeth. She took the bus to the airport. Vicki’s plane was late. Elizabeth walked up and down on the shiny tiles. She did not like people to observe that she was being kept waiting, and at least one girl was smiling at her in that shy, &lt;strong&gt;dawning way&lt;/strong&gt; which meant she had seen Elizabeth on TV; but there was no decent coffee to be had, and no civilised place to sit. &lt;strong&gt;She measured her pulse on a tin machine outside the chemist shop. The reading she got was so low that she thought the thing must be out of order&lt;/strong&gt;. She strolled into the shop, stole a twenty-five dollar Dior lipstick and a cheap plastic-covered address book and tried again: the adrenalin rush of petty theft showed. &lt;strong&gt;The address book would do for Vicki, if she hadn’t missed the plane altogether&lt;/strong&gt;. She transferred the stolen items from her sleeve to her bag and went into the cafeteria for a bottle of mineral water.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;dawning way&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;one girl was smiling at her in that shy, dawning way&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;the girl little by little became less shy and smiled more or became more friendly&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is the use of &amp;quot;altogether&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;if she hadn't missed the plane altogether&amp;quot; for emphasis?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;tin machine&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;She measured her pulse on a tin machine outside the chemist shop. The reading she got was so low that she thought the thing must be out of order.&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;a machine made of tin that measure heart pulse rate and other health factors&amp;quot;?&#xA;And her heart rate was so low that she thought the machine must be out of order? I have never heard &amp;quot;tin machine&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T10:14:23.657" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T10:14:23.657" Title="Meaning of &quot;dawning way&quot; and the use of &quot;altogether&quot; in the context below" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18184" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-28T15:44:39.487" Score="3" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Os_Lus%C3%ADadas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is one of the most important works of Portuguese literature, written by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu%C3%ADs_de_Cam%C3%B5es&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Luís de Camões&lt;/a&gt; in the 16th century and describing imaginatively the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_discoveries&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Portuguese voyages of discovery&lt;/a&gt;, mostly the adventures of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vasco da Gama&lt;/a&gt;. Apparently Camões wrote much of his epic while he was in eastern Asia (Macau), having left Portugal in controversial circumstances, so I don't know if he had access to any library or reading materials related to the events he was writing about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Was Camões's &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; based on pre-existing sources?&lt;/strong&gt; Would he have had access to any written accounts, even non-fictional ones, of Vasco da Gama's voyages, on which he might have based his own writing? Or was &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; based more on anecdotal accounts, things well-known to Portuguese people of the time, and Camões's own imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T11:09:34.507" Title="On what sources did Camões base his Os Lusíadas?" Tags="&lt;inspiration&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18186" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10942" CreationDate="2021-03-28T17:05:15.630" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Pythagorean maxim&amp;quot; bit has several meanings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, it's a poetic way of saying that you are much more likely to encounter hardships (headwinds) than ease and comfort (winds from astern).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Second, it's referring to the fact that when sailing, it is possible to sail into a headwind (although its not as fast as having the wind at your back) but your sail has to be at a specific angle to generate lift via Bernoulli's principle, and Pythagoras is well known for his math involving angles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's a fart joke; Pythagoras believed you should not eat fava beans because they cause you to fart (again, winds from astern) and flatulence took away from your precious &amp;quot;breath of life&amp;quot;. Additionally he's saying that when a working sailor on the front deck (forecastle) of a ship farts, it will be blown into the face of his boss on the rear deck.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12528" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-28T17:08:20.673" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T17:08:20.673" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18187" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16361" CreationDate="2021-03-28T17:52:38.787" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Huh. That's a great point. I never really thought about it until now.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Take Pekka Rollin's character: he's regarded as the &amp;quot;king of the Barrel&amp;quot;. He's the wealthiest, most powerful Barrel boss in Ketterdam. And he's the one who someone like Kaz has sworn vengeance on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, Pekka is like a lion. He's aggressive, physically strong, smart, and sits the top of the food chain in the Barrel. I think the &amp;quot;Dime&amp;quot; is symbolic of Pekka's greed for money. It's interesting that you made the connection of a dime being cheap, a small amount of money. I think the dime being cheap is reflective of the extreme greed and significance that Pekka places even on that. I mean, he conjured an entire scam with a complete backstory and other actors to swindle Kaz and his older brother Jordie, who were just kids. The ends Pekka will go through for a bit more coin is analogous to the way a starved lion would chase after anything for the next meal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12529" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T17:52:38.787" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18188" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18183" CreationDate="2021-03-28T18:14:51.547" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;dawning,&amp;quot; in this context, could mean that the smile was growing more friendly, but given the reason, I suspect it means that Elizabeth deduced that the dawning awareness of the girl that she had seen Elizabeth on TV.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;tin machine&amp;quot; does indeed mean that the machine was made of tin.  Such machines are often cheap, compared to more sturdy metals, and fall out of order easily.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vicki, of course, could either miss the plane or not miss it, in which case &amp;quot;although&amp;quot; is redundant and therefore only emphasis.  However, Elizabeth could miss the plane (meaning its arrival) in part so that Vicki took her luggage and the like but collect herself in time to intercept Vicki before she left the airport, and therefore, if she missed all signs of its arrival, she would miss it altogether.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-03-28T18:14:51.547" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18189" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18122" CreationDate="2021-03-29T00:23:55.333" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think Crow is the subject of a judicial scene. The title &amp;quot;Examination at the Womb-Door&amp;quot; suggests that Crow is being tested before he can be born. The last line, &amp;quot;Pass, Crow,&amp;quot; reveals that Crow has passed the test and is able to pass the gate into birth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The questions, then, aren't mocking or moral in nature. They are existential. Before Crow is allowed to pass, he has to be examined to make sure he understands life correctly. His body is the subject of the first stanza. Even though it's a living body, it still belongs to death. A &lt;strong&gt;utility coat&lt;/strong&gt; is a functional garment, just as &lt;strong&gt;muscles&lt;/strong&gt; are functional. It's not an elegant or beautiful piece of clothing, just as nothing else about Crow's body is elegant or beautiful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second stanza says that Crow, or life, is &lt;strong&gt;held pending trial&lt;/strong&gt;. This also works against the interpretation that the scene is a judicial trial, because the trial is still &lt;strong&gt;pending&lt;/strong&gt;. The idea is that Crow's or anybody's life isn't a gift that's given, nor is it something undeserved that we steal. Rather, to be alive is to await death, so we are in a holding pattern.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rest of the poem shows that death is stronger than the natural world (&lt;strong&gt;stony earth&lt;/strong&gt;), the cosmos (&lt;strong&gt;space&lt;/strong&gt;), human emotions (&lt;strong&gt;hope&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;love&lt;/strong&gt;), and even &lt;strong&gt;life&lt;/strong&gt; itself. Despite that, Crow says he is &lt;strong&gt;stronger than death&lt;/strong&gt;, and this is evidently a correct answer, as the response is &lt;strong&gt;Pass, Crow.&lt;/strong&gt;  Accepting life while acknowledging death's strength and inevitability makes Crow stronger than death. The test here is to ensure that Crow is strong enough to get through the womb-door; despite his inadequate (&lt;strong&gt;scrawny&lt;/strong&gt;, &lt;strong&gt;minimum-efficiency&lt;/strong&gt;) body, he passes the examination and passes through the womb-door into life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T00:23:55.333" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18190" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18184" CreationDate="2021-03-29T02:22:10.693" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Camões chief source for the details of Vasco da Gama's voyage was a diary kept by one of his crew members. The diary is anonymous, but is attributed to either &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81lvaro_Velho&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Álvaro Velho&lt;/a&gt; or, according to recent scholarship, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_de_S%C3%A1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;João de Sá&lt;/a&gt;. The record of the voyage is nearly complete, as it covers the entire outward journey and the return as far back as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Guinea&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guinea&lt;/a&gt; (the current country of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea-Bissau&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guinea-Bissau&lt;/a&gt;). The work survives in a single 16th C. manuscript, which is now in the Biblioteca Publica or Public Library in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porto&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Porto&lt;/a&gt;. The diary was published in 1838 from this manuscript:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nnc1.0315316483&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=15&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Roteiro da Viagem que em Descobrimento da India Pelo Cabo da Boa Esperança fez Dom Vasco da Gama em 1497&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Porto: Diogo Kopke, 1838. HathiTrust.org. Accessed 28 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To the best of my knowledge, as of this date, three English translations are available. In alphabetical order from most recent to oldest, these are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ames, Glenn J. En nome de Deus: &lt;em&gt;The Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama to India, 1497–1499&lt;/em&gt;. Leiden: Brill, 2009.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Axelson, Eric, trans. &lt;em&gt;Vasco da Gama: The Diary of his Travels through African Waters 1497–1499&lt;/em&gt;. Somerset West: Stephen Phillips, 1998.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Ravenstein, E. G., trans. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ajournalfirstvo00ravegoog/page/n10/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco da Gama, 1497–1499&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. London: Hakluyt Society, 1898. Archive.org. Accessed 28 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the work was not printed until the 19th century, it must have begun circulating in manuscript soon after da Gama's return. Camões certainly had access to it, as many of the details in &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; precisely parallel those in the diary. For example, the diary says that when the ships stopped at St Helena Bay, da Gama's crew captured one of the native inhabitants:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was going about gathering honey in the heath, for the bees of that land place it at the foot of the scrub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Camões writes that the captured man had been:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;        making his sweet harvest&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of honey from the wild bees in the forest.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This and other parallels are noted by Nicholas Meihuisen (p. 25), who describes the changes Camões makes to his source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Putting the source and Camões side by side, one becomes aware of variances in attitude that might be ascribed, for instance, to the differing aims of the two writers in terms of both ends and means. One is a diarist, recording events in a factual, non-dramatic way. The other is an artist, adapting events in as dramatic a way as possible. The differences between the two works, though, also highlight ... blind arrogance in Camões.     (p. 24)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Meihuisen, Nicholas. “&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.jstor.org/stable/41105178&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Camões: Ambiguous Imperialist&lt;/a&gt;.” &lt;em&gt;Portuguese Studies&lt;/em&gt;, vol. 18, 2002, pp. 24–40. JSTOR. Accessed 29 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are several possibilities to account for Camões' access to this diary:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He took a copy with him when he left Portugal for the East in 1553&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manuscripts of the diary circulated among the Portuguese in Goa and/or Macau, and he encountered one there&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;He revised his epic to make it parallel the diary after he returned to Lisbon in 1570 while preparing it for publication in 1572.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third seems the least likely, as the parallels are sustained enough to suggest the poem must have been composed with the diary at hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such parallels are of course to the specifics of da Gama's voyage. But much of &lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt; comprises narrations of earlier Portuguese history; fabulous incidents, such as the Isle of Love episode in the last two cantos; or parallels drawn between the events being described and various mythological stories. For these, Camões drew upon his knowledge of history, his own imagination, and his study of classical literature, particularly Virgil and Ovid.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T11:09:34.507" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T11:09:34.507" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18191" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18192" CreationDate="2021-03-29T04:25:52.300" Score="6" ViewCount="2294" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; there is a fearsome, hypnotizing serpent called &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Asmodeus_Poisonteeth&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Redwall wiki page&quot;&gt;Asmodeus Poisonteeth&lt;/a&gt;. The name seems pretty obviously from the Biblical demon/devil (Is there a difference? The Wikipedia page doesn't help) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asmodeus&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia page&quot;&gt;Asmodeus&lt;/a&gt;. According to the Wikipedia page, Asmodeus represents/is associated with lust. The name itself is derived from two Avestan words that apparently translate to &amp;quot;wrath&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;demon&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Demon&amp;quot; makes sense. &amp;quot;Wrath&amp;quot; also... sort of makes sense? Asmodeus does get angry when Matthias looks to be stealing the precious sword. I'm not seeing any connection with &amp;quot;lust&amp;quot;, however. Is there some other aspect of the demon/name/character that I haven't considered here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is the snake named &amp;quot;Asmodeus&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T06:47:50.510" Title="Why is the snake named &quot;Asmodeus&quot;?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18192" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18191" CreationDate="2021-03-29T06:47:50.510" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;You might be overthinking it. According to Brian Jacques himself, it seems he didn't go into the depths of exactly what traits the mythological/biblical character Asmodeus represents; he just found it among a list of names of Satan and thought it'd be a fitting one to choose for a snake. I found this information in what seems to be an &lt;a href=&quot;http://rwtv.longpatrolclub.com/reviews/episode8.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;author commentary on a TV series adaptation&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;How do you come up with the [characters'] strange names?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, names you can make up. Names you can find. Eh, if I am traveling on a train I'll take a pencil and a scrap pad and I can invent names. Names are easy for the baddies, y'know? Fattybelly, Snottynose. But, some of the other names you will find. Like the name 'Asmodeus'. I was looking in the Bible... it had the names of Satan... all the names of Satan. It had... eh... Lucifer, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, Prince of Darkness. And then it had 'Asmodeus'. And I thought, 'Isn't that a wonderful name for a snake, with all those S' in it?' Asssssmodeusssss. So, that was a name I found. But, you invent a lot of them yourself.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further analysis can be found in the master's thesis &lt;a href=&quot;https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3057&amp;amp;context=etd&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;From Wanderer to Warrior: Martin’s Journey to Sainthood in Brian Jacques’s Redwall Series&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Marie Bleimeister, Georgia Southern University, 2019), a spiritual (Christian?) analysis of &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is not surprising then when the time comes for Matthias to stand against the adder Asmodeus that his own strength deserts him and is replaced by fear as he stares into the eyes of Asmodeus. In the Bible, the devil goes by many names, one of which is Asmodeus. Jacques comments that “I was looking in the Bible... it had the names of Satan... all the names of Satan. It had..eh...Lucifer, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, Prince of Darkness. And then it had ‘Asmodeus’” (“How Do You Come Up with the Character’s Strange Names?”). In addition, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that Asmodeus means “‘to destroy’: so that the being would correspond to the demon called Abaddon, the Destroyer in the Apocalypse 9:11” (“Asmodeus”). Marian Copeland in her article “Crossover Animal Fantasy Series: Crossing Cultural and Species as Well as Age Boundaries” notes that “careful readers will find Asmodeus also defined as one of nature’s ‘efficient undertakers’” (292). Matthias has entered the lair of a devil and to return to the light, he must retrieve Martin’s sword. At this moment, the spirit of Martin comes to Matthias and says,“I am that is! Matthias, why do you sleep! There is a warrior’s work to be done here! Pick up your sword, Matthias!... Strike out for me now, my brave young champion!” (&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; 320). Martin comes to break Matthias from the power of Asmodeus and to bring him up from the darkness. Martin becomes Christlike and rescues Matthias from the pit of Asmodeus. Asmodeus traps Matthias with his persuasive ways, and Martin must pull Matthias out of his trance into the light to be transformed by Martin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The warrior must be ready to battle those who are considered a threat to the earthly paradise of Redwall Abbey. Blackford notes that “Matthias’s rebirth into a larger-than-life status once he has fought the adder suggests his participation in a cosmic, archetypal battle of good against evil, aligning his triumph with the triumph of God over the adder, who the narrator describes as a pathway to eternity, and the pagan Cluny, ‘God of War’ (&lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; 8)” (98). In other words, Matthias’s victory over Asmodeus is, in fact, a victory over the devil.  Therefore, his defeat of the devil aligns him with God’s righteousness. In addition, Blackford remarks that because Jacques describes Matthias as “larger than life” and “suddenly reborn” that Matthias has in effect “become a divine being, reborn from his travel into the underground (hell) of the adder’s den, suggesting not a wise regard of the sword but an appreciation of his own power to penetrate the very earth with the sharp point of his weapon” (98). Indeed, Matthias does relish his own power, forgetting that the power comes from Martin the Warrior. However, Matthias is not divine, only divinely inspired by Martin, though at this moment, Matthias may believe he is a divine being. As noted before, it is not until Matthias is an adult mouse that he becomes wise in regard to the sword.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a lot of analysis and discussion here, but the relevant part with regard to your question is that Asmodeus is seen as representing the Devil (whom Matthias overcomes, with the divine help of Martin, in order to achieve his new [saintly?] status), and Asmodeus is one of the names for the Devil. Whether or not you buy into this theory of Christian symbolism, at least the character of Asmodeus being named after the Devil is plausible and makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T06:47:50.510" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18194" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18040" CreationDate="2021-03-29T21:16:41.527" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In context in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, the poem ‘The Haunted Palace’ is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceit#Metaphysical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;conceit&lt;/a&gt; (an extended metaphor) in which the palace represents Roderick Usher’s head, and its occupants his thoughts. In the story, the poem is introduced by the narrator in a manner that recommends this interpretation to the reader:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it as he gave it, because, &lt;strong&gt;in the under or mystic current of its meaning&lt;/strong&gt;, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher of the &lt;strong&gt;tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edgar Allan Poe (1839). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/burtonsgentleman1839burt/page/148/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Fall of the House of Usher&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine&lt;/em&gt;, volume V, p. 148.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are thus instructed to interpret the “ruler of the realm” sitting on the throne in the third stanza of the poem as representing Usher’s “reason”: that is, his capacity for rational thought, which is “tottering” as he succumbs to despair, horror, and insanity as described in the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having identified the central metaphor (the monarch of the palace represents Usher’s reason), the other elements of the poem easily fall into place. The palace represents Usher’s head (it “reared its &lt;strong&gt;head&lt;/strong&gt;”); the “ramparts plumed and &lt;strong&gt;pallid&lt;/strong&gt;” represent his features (he has “lips somewhat thin and very &lt;strong&gt;pallid&lt;/strong&gt;”); the “two &lt;strong&gt;luminous&lt;/strong&gt; windows” represent his eyes (Usher’s eyes are “&lt;strong&gt;luminous&lt;/strong&gt; beyond comparison”, and his house has “vacant eye-like windows”); the “spirits moving musically” seen through the windows represent his thoughts when he was well; and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So in this conceit the “yellow, glorious, golden banners” flying from the roof of the palace represent Roderick Usher’s hair.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T21:22:37.477" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T21:22:37.477" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18195" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-29T21:47:33.910" Score="2" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a lot of Victorian/Edwardian fictional novels, mostly books that were geared towards female readers. Often enough, family members are described as kissing each other. Sometimes a kiss on the cheek will be specified, but not often.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am wondering if this a cultural difference that has changed with time? I don’t know anyone in the northeast USA who would think it was normal to kiss a family member on the lips. And, the kissing is described as being affectionate. Family members might “kiss as if they would never let go.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In “Orphans of the Storm,” (1921) the Gish sisters (playing sisters in the movie) can be seen kissing on the lips, especially in a scene where they are reunited after long separation and kiss repeatedly while embracing closely. I feel like it would seem pretty strange to a lot of modern viewers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So was it just common/normal/considered affectionate to kiss your family on the lips in these eras? I feel like there is a cultural divide when I read these old novels, in regards to this aspect. Should I assume that they mean kissing on the lips, as the contemporary reader would have understood?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12536" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-29T22:18:22.763" LastActivityDate="2021-03-29T22:18:22.763" Title="What is the cultural history of family “kissing” in Victorian/Edwardian novels?" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18198" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T05:46:50.103" Score="1" ViewCount="64" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’m looking for a book I read a few years ago. It featured a family with a single mother and three or so children who run away due to financial issues I think. The eldest of the children takes them to a hollow tree in the park and they scab off leftovers from a cafe nearby. At the end of the book she receives a new sketch pad from her mother when they return home. I cannot remember the name and that’s about everything else I can remember.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12540" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T07:54:09.567" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T15:55:40.530" Title="Book about a single-mother family, children go to a hollow tree" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18199" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-30T10:25:08.357" Score="2" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://vtmolo.com/quotes-about-ambition/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What book is this quote from? I know the author is Steven Brust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12541" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-03-30T14:17:40.363" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T15:34:32.947" Title="Which book by Steven Brust has &quot;A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be&quot;?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;steven-brust&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18200" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18173" CreationDate="2021-03-30T13:30:11.057" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;This story is &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/turkishtales/page/n33/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The History of Chec Chahabeddin&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; first printed in an anonymous 1708 volume called &lt;em&gt;Turkish Tales&lt;/em&gt;. The full title of the book reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turkiſh Tales; Conſiſting of ſeveral Extraordinary Adventures with the History of the Sultaness of Perſia and the Visiers. Written Originally in the Turkiſh Language, by Chec Zade, for the Uſe of Amurath II. And now done into Engliſh.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Amurath II&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murad_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Murad II&lt;/a&gt;, the 15th C. Ottoman sultan. I have been unable to identify &amp;quot;Chec Zade,&amp;quot; probably Sheikh Zaïd or Zayed. The preface to &lt;em&gt;Turkish Tales&lt;/em&gt; says he was the tutor to the Sultan:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These Tales, which the Turks call in Deriſion &lt;em&gt;The Malice of Women&lt;/em&gt;, are taken out of Mr. Petis Library, who ſome time ſince made a Tranſlation of them: They are not therefore the bare invention of ſome French-Man, deſigning to recommend his Fictions to the World under the Umbrage of a Foreign Title, but the Work of Chec Zade, Tutor to Amurath the Second.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the preface reveals, this was one of the books written to capitalize on the immense popularity of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Galland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antoine Galland&lt;/a&gt;'s pioneering &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_mille_et_une_nuits&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French translation&lt;/a&gt; of the Arabian Nights, the first into any European language. Galland's twelve-volume edition appeared between 1704 and 1717, but by 1706 his early volumes had already appeared in English translation. The writer clearly attempts to place &lt;em&gt;Turkish Tales&lt;/em&gt; as an authentic work while casting Galland's rendition of &lt;em&gt;One Thousand Nights and One Night&lt;/em&gt; as spurious.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A summary of the first half of &amp;quot;The History of Chec Chahabeddin&amp;quot; appeared in &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator_(1711)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Spectator&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, a daily published by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Addison&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Joseph Addison&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Steele&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Richard Steele&lt;/a&gt; in 1711–1712. In Issue 94, Monday, June 18, 1711, Addison writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is there said, That the Angel Gabriel took Mahomet Out of his Bed one Morning to give him a Sight of all things in the Seven Heavens, in Paradise, and in Hell, which the Prophet took a distinct View of; and after having held ninety thousand Conferences with God, was brought back again to his Bed. All this, says the Alcoran, was transacted in so small a space of Time, that Mahomet at his Return found his Bed still warm, and took up an Earthen Pitcher, (which was thrown down at the very Instant that the Angel Gabriel carried him away) before the Water was all spilt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a very pretty Story in the Turkish Tales which relates to this Passage. ... A Sultan of Egypt, who was an Infidel, used to laugh at this Circumstance in Mahomet's Life, as what was altogether impossible and absurd: But conversing one Day with a great Doctor in the Law, who had the Gift of working Miracles, the Doctor told him he would quickly convince him of the Truth of this Passage in the History of Mahomet, if he would consent to do what he should desire of him. Upon this the Sultan was directed to place himself by an huge Tub of Water, which he did accordingly; and as he stood by the Tub amidst a Circle of his great Men, the holy Man bid him plunge his Head into the Water, and draw it up again: The King accordingly thrust his Head into the Water, and at the same time found himself at the Foot of a Mountain on a Sea-shore. The King immediately began to rage against his Doctor for this Piece of Treachery and Witchcraft; but at length, knowing it was in vain to be angry, he set himself to think on proper Methods for getting a Livelihood in this strange Country: Accordingly he applied himself to some People whom he saw at work in a Neighbouring Wood: these People conducted him to a Town that stood at a little Distance from the Wood, where, after some Adventures, he married a Woman of great Beauty and Fortune. He lived with this Woman so long till he had by her seven Sons and seven Daughters: He was afterwards reduced to great Want, and forced to think of plying in the Streets as a Porter for his Livelihood. One Day as he was walking alone by the Sea-side, being seized with many melancholy Reflections upon his former and his present State of Life, which had raised a Fit of Devotion in him, he threw off his Clothes with a Design to wash himself, according to the Custom of the Mahometans, before he said his Prayers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After his first Plunge into the Sea, he no sooner raised his Head above the Water but he found himself standing by the Side of the Tub, with the great Men of his Court about him, and the holy Man at his Side. He immediately upbraided his Teacher for having sent him on such a Course of Adventures, and betrayed him into so long a State of Misery and Servitude; but was wonderfully surprised when he heard that the State he talked of was only a Dream and Delusion; that he had not stirred from the Place where he then stood; and that he had only dipped his Head into the Water, and immediately taken it out again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Mahometan Doctor took this Occasion of instructing the Sultan, that nothing was impossible with God; and that He, with whom a Thousand Years are but as one Day, can, if he pleases, make a single Day, nay a single Moment, appear to any of his Creatures as a Thousand Years.     (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013337195/page/n397/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 346–348&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More than a century later, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Weil&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gustav Weil&lt;/a&gt;'s 1839–1842 translation of &lt;em&gt;One Thousand and One Nights&lt;/em&gt; into German includes a story called &amp;quot;The Story of Shaykh Shahâb al-Dîn.&amp;quot; I have been unable to track down an English translation, but its description in Marzolph et al.'s &lt;em&gt;The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia&lt;/em&gt; makes clear that this is the same story as that in &lt;em&gt;Turkish Tales&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=EMKSYqUQ4QcC&amp;amp;pg=PA369&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 369&lt;/a&gt;). Ignoring, or perhaps unaware of, this earlier source, the encyclopædists say that this particular story is found only in Weil's translation, and that his manuscript source is unknown.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have not been able to determine where Tagore came across this story. Since Tagore, like Addison, ignores the second half of &amp;quot;Chec Chahabeddin,&amp;quot; wherein the sheikh uses the basin to escape the sultan's wrath and himself leads an alternative existence, it's tempting to assume that Tagore got the story from Addison. Henry Morley's edition of &lt;em&gt;The Spectator&lt;/em&gt;'s entire print run appeared in 1891, three years before Tagore wrote his letter. Tagore may have read Addison's retelling of this story via Morley. On the other hand, Tagore says he read the story &amp;quot;as a boy,&amp;quot; which makes the Morley edition too recent. Versions of the story may have circulated widely in many different languages. Tagore's father, Debendranath, knew Persian and used to read Persian literature to his sons; Tagore may indeed have come across a Persian version of the story when young.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The wide currency of this tale can be gauged by Leo Tolstoy's 1903 fable &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.online-literature.com/tolstoy/2903/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esarhaddon, King of Assyria&lt;/a&gt;,&amp;quot; which connects this to the Biblical king. The night before Esarheddon is to execute his prisoner Lailie, a mysterious old man persuades him to enter a font and pours water over his head, with the result that Esarheddon finds himself living Lailie's life. In his preface, Tolstoy writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The idea of the tale &lt;em&gt;Esarhaddon, King of Assyria&lt;/em&gt;, is not my own, but was borrowed by me from a tale by an anonymous author, printed in the German magazine &lt;em&gt;Theosophischer Wegweiser&lt;/em&gt;, No. 5, 1903, and entitled &lt;em&gt;Das best Du&lt;/em&gt;. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7zEVAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA21&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 21&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;anonymous author&amp;quot; in turn might very likely have got the story from a long article entitled &amp;quot;Dreams&amp;quot; by &lt;a href=&quot;https://theosophy.wiki/en/Charles_Webster_Leadbeater&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;C. W. Leadbeater&lt;/a&gt; that appeared in two parts in the November and December 1895 issues of &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer_(magazine)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucifer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, an English-language publication associated with the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophical_Society&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Theosophical Society&lt;/a&gt;. Leadbeater himself credits his version of the story to Addison (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nv8LAAAAIAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA274&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 274–275&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Marzolph et al. note that &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofthousandni0004unse/page/14/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Tale of The Two Lives of Sultān Mahmūd&lt;/a&gt; closely resembles the first half of &amp;quot;The Story of Shaykh Shahâb al-Dîn.&amp;quot; This story appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._C._Mardrus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;J. C. Mardrus&lt;/a&gt;'s twelve-volume 1898–1904 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_livre_des_mille_nuits_et_une_nuit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;French translation&lt;/a&gt;, which was in turn translated into English by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Powys_Mathers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edward Powys Mathers&lt;/a&gt; in 1923.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (not including Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924013337195/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Spectator: A New Edition&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Henry Morley. Vol. 1. London: Routledge, 1891. Archive.org. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/turkishtales/page/n33/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The History of Chec Chahabeddin&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/turkishtales/page/n7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Turkish Tales&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Pp. 18–48. London: Jacob Tonson, 1708. Archive.org. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Leadbeater, C. W. &amp;quot;Dreams.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=nv8LAAAAIAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lucifer&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, vol. XVII nos. 99–100, November–December 1895, pp. 229–244, 273–287. Google Books. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Mathers, Powys. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bookofthousandni0004unse/page/n4/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Vol. IV. 1923. New York: St Martin's, 1972. pp. 14–19. Archive.org. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Marzolph, Ulrich, Richard van Leeuwen, and Hassan Wassouf. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=EMKSYqUQ4QcC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Arabian Nights Encyclopedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Vol. 1. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Google Books. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Tolstoy, Leo. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=7zEVAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Esarhaddon and Other Tales&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. Trans. Louise and Alymer Maude. New York: Funk &amp;amp; Wagnalls, 1903. Google Books. Accessed 30 March 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T13:30:11.057" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18201" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18199" CreationDate="2021-03-30T15:34:32.947" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The quote is from Chapter Nine of &lt;em&gt;The Paths of the Dead&lt;/em&gt;, the first volume of &lt;em&gt;The Viscount of Adrilankha&lt;/em&gt;, by Steven Brust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Piro shrugged. &amp;quot;I have no such plans, but, whatever the Count's plans for me may be, I have no intention of staying here for-ever.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Ah! My lord is ambitious?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Nearly.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;So much the better.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Oh?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;A young man without ambition is an old man waiting to be.&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Ah. I perceive you are a philosopher.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.ae/books?id=jvMf2NgCcJkC&amp;amp;pg=PT104&amp;amp;dq=A+young+man+without+ambition+is+an+old+man+waiting+to+be.&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwje8IL0qdjvAhWlQEEAHXhgCesQ6AEwA3oECAQQAg#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=A%20young%20man%20without%20ambition%20is%20an%20old%20man%20waiting%20to%20be.&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10367" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T15:34:32.947" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18202" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17781" CreationDate="2021-03-30T20:40:03.007" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;little incident&amp;quot; is nothing more than what is described at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/228/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;end of Chapter II&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;almost at the very  moment when he was approaching her with a friendly bow there appeared at one of the wide open vine-covered windows the sandy heads of the Jahnke twins, and Hertha, the more hoidenish, called into the room: &amp;quot;Come, Effi.&amp;quot;&#xA;Then she ducked from sight and the two sprang from the back of the bench, upon which they had been standing, down into the garden and nothing more was heard from&#xA;them except their giggling and laughing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The exact same words, &amp;quot;Come, Effi&amp;quot;, are repeated in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/432/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XXXIV&lt;/a&gt;, when Effi's father says to his wife:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believe me, Luise, 'society' can shut one eye when it sees fit. Here is where I stand in the matter: If the people of Rathenow come, all right, if they don't come, all right too. I am simply going to telegraph: 'Effi, come.' Are you agreed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that in the German text, the word order is &amp;quot;Effi, komm&amp;quot; in both instances. The translator appears to have overlooked this consistency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, Instetten cannot know whether the &amp;quot;little incident&amp;quot; is a portent or not. The comment can be seen as an example of Fontane's technique of &lt;strong&gt;foreshadowing&lt;/strong&gt;. Another example can be found at the end of Chapter I, where Effi says (emphasis mine),&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Hertha, now your guilt is sunk out of sight,&amp;quot; said Effi, &amp;quot;in which connection it occurs to me, by the way, that in former times poor unfortunate women are said to have been thrown overboard thus from a boat, of course for &lt;strong&gt;unfaithfulness&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The two instances of &amp;quot;Effi, come&amp;quot; are inserted at &lt;strong&gt;two crucial turning points&lt;/strong&gt; in Effi's life. The first instances comes at Effi's engagement, so the &amp;quot;little incident&amp;quot; in Chapter II represents the force or forces that pull away from Instetten, her future husband. It also represents the playfulness and the childlike behaviour that Effi needs to leave behind. (Effi is only seventeen when she gets married to Instetten, who had been turned down by her mother eighteen years earlier.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second instance of &amp;quot;Effi, come&amp;quot; enables her to return to her parents' home, after Innstetten has repudiated her because of her affair with Crampas. A number of aspects from her childhood are repeated in the last few chapters: Effi wears a blue and white striped linen dress again, just like in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/218/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter I&lt;/a&gt;, sits on a swing and enjoys the fresh air outdoors. The words &amp;quot;Effi, come&amp;quot; represent a pivotal point after which she returns to the world of her childhood, which cannot be recovered, however.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;saucy&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; in Chapter III refers back to what the translator rendered as &amp;quot;hoydenish&amp;quot; at the end of Chapter II. (The German adjective at the end of Chapter II is &amp;quot;ausgelassen&amp;quot;, which may also be translated as &amp;quot;high-spirited&amp;quot;.) &amp;quot;Saucy&amp;quot; is here a translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/%C3%BCberm%C3%BCtig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;übermütig&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, an adjective that Fontane uses several times in the novel (e.g. in chapters XI, XIII and XIV), typically as an antonym for shy, timid or embarrassed (German: &amp;quot;verlegen&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T20:23:10.273" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T20:23:10.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18203" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18137" CreationDate="2021-03-30T22:20:20.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since this question was moved over from English Language stack, I'll repost my answer from there, for posterity, if not vanity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All the answers [there] so far focus on the meaning of the word &amp;quot;world&amp;quot;, ignoring the contrasting context in which it was used in the original sentence. I believe &amp;quot;a world&amp;quot; puts emphasis on the difference between a narrow and a wide influence the whale has; on &amp;quot;his (immediate) foes&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;a (whole) world&amp;quot;. In life, the whale only terrified his would-be attackers, while in death its ghost terrifies everyone whoever hears of its story. The &amp;quot;world&amp;quot; is thus a measure of reach, as in, &amp;quot;a person, a family, a country, a world&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12548" LastActivityDate="2021-03-30T22:20:20.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18205" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-31T12:44:52.017" Score="2" ViewCount="85" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Doctor Fox looked at Elizabeth as he chewed, and nodded and smiled. She must be nearly forty now, like Dex. Thank God they were never foolish enough to marry, though no doubt Dexter had poked her when they were students. He felt like laughing. She was quite plainly not the marrying kind. Children out of the question. He saw her wide open eyes, her nervous nostrils, her desire to impress, something fancy and successful about her, and yet he felt sure she was &lt;strong&gt;the kind of woman who’d throw round terms like&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;em&gt;the orthodox feminist position&lt;/em&gt;. He washed down the crumbs with a swig of coffee and waited for her to speak. He guessed what she would say. She did. ‘Isn’t Mrs Fox here?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How sociable. He remembered her at nineteen. She made him an omelette for lunch when his wife was out, &lt;strong&gt;a clumsy act of duty&lt;/strong&gt;, and called him to come and eat it, but he was upstairs &lt;strong&gt;nutting out a score&lt;/strong&gt; and neither answered nor came till the food was cold and flat. She glowered at him from the scullery. The young women liked his wife more than they did him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘No. My wife’s at home. And that’s where I’m going.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His &lt;strong&gt;cultivated vowels&lt;/strong&gt;: mai waife. She longed to whip the serviette out of his collar.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;the kind of woman who’d throw round terms like the orthodox feminist position.&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;the kind of woman who speak like feminist and use words like &lt;em&gt;theorthodox feminist position&lt;/em&gt;. &amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;the orthodox feminist position&amp;quot; the name of group of feminists?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in understanding the other part in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;a clumsy act of duty&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;she had cooked a food without skill and the food was not cooked well&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;nutting out a score&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;maybe he was thinking to find a solution to get rid of her&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dose &amp;quot;score&amp;quot; refer to music?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;nut something out is an ​Australian English, New Zealand English, informal verb and mean &amp;quot;to calculate something or find the answer to something.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does &amp;quot;cultivated vowels&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;his educated way of speaking in pronouncing vowel letters&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T21:40:37.270" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T14:34:02.867" Title="Meaning of &quot;the kind of woman who’d throw round terms like the orthodox feminist position. &quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18206" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-31T15:30:41.887" Score="3" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Os Lusíadas&lt;/em&gt;), considered the national epic of Portugal, was written by Luís Vaz de Camões during the 16th century, a period in which the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions were menacing the Iberian peninsula and beyond. Some parts of the story (at least in the first two cantos) are almost crusade-like, detailing Vasco da Gama's efforts to promote Christianity over Islam in Africa. On the other hand, several deities of ancient Graeco-Roman polytheism (Bacchus, Venus, Jove) play active roles in the story, reminiscent of Homer's &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can the appearances of such &amp;quot;pagan&amp;quot; gods be reconciled with Christianity?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm interested in both the in-story consistency (how is it possible that da Gama and co are committed Christians but also interact directly with Bacchus?) and the real-world reception (how is it possible that Camões could include Greek gods as characters without falling foul of Christian censors?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related previous posts include &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18057/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18073/17&quot;&gt;this answer&lt;/a&gt;, but I think my question is big enough to be not fully covered by those.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-03-31T15:30:41.887" Title="How does ancient Greek polytheism fit with Christianity in The Lusiads?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;portuguese-literature&gt;&lt;the-lusiads&gt;&lt;luis-vaz-de-camoes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18209" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10942" CreationDate="2021-04-01T06:30:23.247" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Not just metaphor. I think he may also be referring to that fact that while sailing you literally feel headwind more than tailwind.  If you are sailing at a given speed you can subtract that speed from a tailwind, or add it to a headwind, and thats how much wind you will feel. I've heard this called 'apparent wind' by sailors.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12560" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T06:30:23.247" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18210" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-01T07:58:39.340" Score="1" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur C. Clarke's short novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_Island_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dolphin Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is set on an island in the Pacific. Although this Dolphin Island itself is fictitious, the novel includes references to real locations such as Tonga. From information about these real locations, or even about the climate or other facts about Dolphin Island, &lt;strong&gt;how much is it possible to narrow down its location?&lt;/strong&gt; I doubt it'll be possible to identify it with a specific real-life island, but can we at least figure out a rough geographical position, whether it'd be nearer Polynesia or Micronesia or Melanesia or what?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T10:15:56.640" Title="Where is Dolphin Island?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;arthur-c-clarke&gt;&lt;dolphin-island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18211" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-01T08:00:56.167" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;The various manuscripts or print editions of literary works often differ from each other. The differences can be minor, such as a misprint that is easily recognizable as such. But there can also be major differences. For example, Marlowe's &lt;em&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/em&gt; has come down to us in two very different forms, called the A text (1604) and the B text (1616). Similarly, the 1603 and 1604 quartos of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; differ greatly from each other and from the 1623 folio text. Establishing a text that best represents what the author actually wrote becomes a challenge in such cases.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In some cases, of course, authors themselves revise their work for a new edition: Tennyson made substantial changes to &amp;quot;The Lotos-Eaters&amp;quot; between its first appearance in 1832 and its republication in 1842. Such changes can illuminate the author's development, or can be in response to external circumstances such as censorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The history of the various texts of a work is therefore an area of inquiry for scholars and students of literature. This tag is for questions about the textual history of literary works, such as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;When was a work first published?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What was the publication format?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Were there illustrations? How were they used?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there manuscript sources for this work? If so, are there discernible differences between the manuscript sources and the print publication?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Are there multiple printed versions / editions that differ significantly?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What accounts for differences between the various manuscript and printed versions of the work? Authorial revision? Censorship? Printing error?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Questions about how folktales or myths that were historically part of an oral tradition transitioned to written form also fall within the scope of this tag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T00:35:30.893" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T00:35:30.893" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18212" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-01T08:00:56.167" Score="0" Body="For questions about the history of the manuscripts, printed texts, or orally transmitted versions of a single work; or when and where a work was first published; or specific features of one or more editions; or how editors establish an accurate or authoritative text, etc. Not to be confused with [tag:publishing], which is about publishing practices generally, or [tag:historical-context], which is about relevant background information." OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T00:50:15.757" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T00:50:15.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18214" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-01T15:25:00.873" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are two scenes in movies that the Joker had interviewed on a TV channel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One in the &lt;em&gt;Joker&lt;/em&gt; (2019 movie) and one in &lt;em&gt;Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Part 2&lt;/em&gt; (2013 animated movie); and in both Joker killed the interviewer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there the same incident in comics too?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10613" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T15:55:58.447" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T10:50:53.937" Title="Is there &quot;Joker interviewing on a talk show&quot; in DC comic books too?" Tags="&lt;comics&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18215" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15227" CreationDate="2021-04-01T23:16:20.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would not recommend the Barnes and Noble editions. To establish a sound version of a text, a good text editor or a reliable translator are essential. B &amp;amp; N does not use either of these, simply reprinting public domain texts and translations instead. This makes their books inexpensive but their texts unreliable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A text editor looks at all the early editions (and at manuscripts, where available) of a given text and assesses the differences between them to try to come up with an authentic, complete version. Modernizing spelling and standardizing punctuation is also part of a text editor's work. The text editor decides, for example, whether Hamlet's soliloquy in &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/hamlet.1.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;I.ii&lt;/a&gt; begins:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, that this too too solid flesh would melt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, that this too too sallied flesh would melt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O, that this too too sullied flesh would melt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15062/289&quot;&gt;this question&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/15063/289&quot;&gt;Tsundoku's answer&lt;/a&gt; for a discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since B &amp;amp; N simply typesets old editions anew, their texts are usually outdated. As of January 1, 2021, works published in 1926 are public domain, so a B &amp;amp; N edition will rely on some text published that year or earlier. If a more reliable edition was published in, say, the 1940s, based on a newly discovered manuscript or simply on a more careful collation of earlier printed versions, that more reliable and often standard text would not be found in the B &amp;amp; N edition because it &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ14.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wouldn't be out of copyright yet&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem is worse with translations. To take a very well-known example, English editions of &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; most often use an anonymous 1846 translation published by Chapman and Hall. One of the reviewers on &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/barnes-noble-leatherbound-classics-the-count-of-monte-cristo-alexandre-dumas/1106658788&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the B &amp;amp; N page for this novel&lt;/a&gt; says that there is no credited translator, which is an indication that it too uses that same anonymous translation. This translation leaves out passages that would offend Victorian sensibilities, for example, three paragraphs that describe a sexual dream Franz D'Epinay has after consuming some hashish at the Count's invitation. Relying on such outdated translations, the B &amp;amp; N editions too often present expurgated versions in an antiquated idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've also found that their paperback editions are not attractive; the paper is cheap and the typeface ugly. Their so-called collectible editions, as in the linked example for &lt;em&gt;The Count of Monte Cristo&lt;/em&gt; in the previous paragraphs, are leather-bound and presumably use better paper. But if I'm going to pay $25 for an edition of that novel, I'd spend it on a reliable, new translation, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0141392460&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Robin Buss's Penguin Classics&lt;/a&gt; edition, which is a much better text at a comparable price.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In your case, since you're specifically looking for the Garnett translation and already have a gift card that can't be spent elsewhere, the B &amp;amp; N version would work fine for you. But in general, I think their editions are best avoided.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-01T23:23:33.910" LastActivityDate="2021-04-01T23:23:33.910" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18216" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18232" CreationDate="2021-04-02T03:51:50.803" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a line by Gonff in &lt;em&gt;Mossflower&lt;/em&gt; that's clearly supposed to be a joke, but I just... don't get it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gonff was conscious of Columbine watching him. Bella had given the little mousethief permission to sing grace, and he stood up boldly and sang aloud,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Squirrels, otters, hedgehogs, mice,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moles with fur like sable,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gathered in good spirits all,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Round this festive table.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sit we down to eat and drink.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Friends, before we do, let's think.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fruit of forest, field and banks,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To the springtime we give thanks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The woodlanders began passing food. As Gonff sat down, he winked at Columbine, showing no sign of modesty.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Good, eh? &lt;strong&gt;That's an ancient chant that has been sung through the ages. I composed it a moment ago for today&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gonff was so pleased with himself that Columbine could not help laughing with him at his outrageous statement.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Chapter 15&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of the two contradictory statements, &amp;quot;I composed it a moment ago for today&amp;quot; is probably the true one, as Gonff makes up a lot of other songs. However I don't see how including &amp;quot;That's an ancient chant that has been sung through the ages&amp;quot; makes a joke? It's obviously wrong, but somehow clever and hilarious, if I understand the Columbine's reaction correctly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this joke (?) of Gonff's work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;I ask with full understanding that explaining jokes usually &amp;quot;ruins&amp;quot; them, but as I'm already confused it can't hurt more.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T13:15:10.900" Title="How does this joke (?) of Gonff's work?" Tags="&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18217" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18227" CreationDate="2021-04-02T04:11:15.433" Score="2" ViewCount="60" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading a book on the collected works of Alexander Pope. Peppered throughout his poems are little superscript circles or degrees symbols, seen in &lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/4U8Dz.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this image  of the text&lt;/a&gt; (transcribed below)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do these mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So by false learning is good sense defaced:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Some are bewildered in the maze of schools,&lt;sup&gt;○&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In search of wit these lose their common sense,&lt;sup&gt;○&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And then turn critics in their own defence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12566" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T04:22:55.663" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T23:16:47.387" Title="What do superscript circles mean in poetry?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18218" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-02T05:41:24.880" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Sherlock Holmes story &amp;quot;The Adventure of the Priory School&amp;quot;, Holmes shows perhaps the most amount of interest in the reward money. Holmes initially confirms the terms of the reward with the Duke who offers it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The fact is, your Grace,” said he, “that my colleague, Dr. Watson, and myself had an assurance from Dr. Huxtable that a reward had been offered in this case. I should like to have this confirmed from your own lips.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Certainly, Mr. Holmes.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“It amounted, if I am correctly informed, to&#xA;five thousand pounds to anyone who will tell you&#xA;where your son is?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Exactly.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“And another thousand to the man who will&#xA;name the person or persons who keep him in custody?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Exactly.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then Holmes requests the appropriate amount of six thousand pounds as his reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My friend rubbed his thin hands together with&#xA;an appearance of avidity which was a surprise to&#xA;me, who knew his frugal tastes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I fancy that I see your Grace’s cheque-book&#xA;upon the table,” said he. “I should be glad if you&#xA;would make me out a cheque for six thousand&#xA;pounds. It would be as well, perhaps, for you to&#xA;cross it. The Capital and Counties Bank, Oxford&#xA;Street branch, are my agents.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, the Duke ends up making out a cheque for twelve thousand pounds, assuming generously that Holmes and Watson both deserve the reward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I must put it plainly, Mr. Holmes. If only you&#xA;two know of this incident, there is no reason why&#xA;it should go any farther. I think twelve thousand&#xA;pounds is the sum that I owe you, is it not?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, it's indicated that Holmes is very happy about the reward money, which is again a little out of character for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Holmes folded up his cheque and placed it care-&#xA;fully in his note-book. “I am a poor man,” said he,&#xA;as he patted it affectionately and thrust it into the&#xA;depths of his inner pocket.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was the cheque actually made out for twelve thousand pounds, and if so, did Watson get his share? Why was Holmes particularly excited about the money in this case?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: In the Granada TV adaptation of this story, the waters are muddied even further, as it is shown that the Duke makes it out to twelve thousand and Holmes is surprised by it, uttering &amp;quot;This is a king's ransom&amp;quot;, and the Duke responds as if to say it is an appropriate amount given the magnitude of Holmes' help. This seems to indicate Holmes received the entire amount himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12567" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T05:51:38.887" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T05:51:38.887" Title="In &quot;Adventure of the Priory School&quot;, what is going on with the reward money and the cheque?" Tags="&lt;arthur-conan-doyle&gt;&lt;sherlock-holmes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18219" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11173" CreationDate="2021-04-02T05:44:15.987" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a supplement to the excellent answers already provided. &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is one of 18 plays which were first published in the 1623 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, so all subsequent editions derive from the Folio text. The differences in the various editions cited in the question all reflect decisions made by the editors of those particular editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;facsimile of the First Folio&lt;/a&gt; is hosted at the Internet Shakespeare site of the University of Victoria, Canada. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/book/SLNSW_F1/28/?work=&amp;amp;zoom=1275&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Folio text&lt;/a&gt; is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But theſe ſweet thoughts, do euen refreſh my labours,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Moſt buſie leſt, when I doe it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Act III Scene i begins on page 10 of the Folio. Here is a cropped image of the Folio page showing this text at the bottom:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eqjfs.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Eqjfs.png&quot; alt=&quot;Image of page 10 of the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare's plays, showing the beginning of Act 3 scene 1 of The Tempest up to the lines asked about in the question.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tsundoku's &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/11174/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; does already quote this text, but I thought the picture and the explanation that the text of &lt;em&gt;The Tempest&lt;/em&gt; is known only from the Folio would be useful.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T05:44:15.987" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18220" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-02T09:54:46.660" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;Arthur C. Clarke's short novel &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_Island_(novel)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Dolphin Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1963. It's clearly set in a somewhat &amp;quot;future&amp;quot; world, probably quite near future, but &lt;strong&gt;can we narrow down its temporal setting any further?&lt;/strong&gt; Is it set in the 20th century or the 21st? When can we start referring to it (or can we already) as being set in an alternate past, from our perspective, rather than in the future?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T16:26:56.660" Title="When is the story of Dolphin Island set?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;arthur-c-clarke&gt;&lt;dolphin-island&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18221" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18210" CreationDate="2021-04-02T10:15:56.640" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;In the Great Barrier Reef, 100 miles east of Queensland, Australia.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dolphin Island isn't so oceanic as I'd thought - it's pretty close (at least by Pacific Ocean standards of closeness) to the Australian continent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From Chapter 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Just a minute,&amp;quot; pleaded Johnny. &amp;quot;Please tell me where I am. Is this Australia?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The nurse took her time in answering as she slowly poured a colorless fluid into a measuring glass.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes and no,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;This is Australian territory, though it's a hundred miles from the mainland. You're on an island in the Great Barrier Reef, and very lucky to have reached it. Here, swallow this—it doesn't taste too bad.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The distance of a hundred miles is confirmed multiple times by details throughout the novel: in Chapter 7 the &lt;em&gt;Flying Fish&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;came scudding out of the west at fifty knots, making the crossing from the Australian mainland in two hours&amp;quot;, and of course towards the end of the novel Johnny travels due west in a hundred-mile journey to the beaches of Queensland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As an addendum, several real-life islands are mentioned which some of the novel's characters originally come from:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 5:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nurse, who had informed him that her name was Tessie and that she came from the island of Tonga&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonga&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tonga&lt;/a&gt; is actually an archipelago with a few dozen inhabited islands, but anyway. Her homeland would then be a few thousand miles east of Dolphin Island.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 6, Mick says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Oh, no, my people come from Darnley Island, up in the Torres Strait. They moved here five years ago, when I was twelve. The pay was good, and it sounded interesting.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darnley_Island_(Queensland)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Darnley Island&lt;/a&gt; is also a real island, one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torres_Strait_Islands&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Torres Strait Islands&lt;/a&gt;, which count as part of Queensland, Australia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mick's family name is Nauru, which is also the name of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;another Pacific island country&lt;/a&gt;. But this one is many thousands of miles away from any of the other islands mentioned, way up to the northeast, so it might be just an Easter egg rather than reflecting any Nauruan heritage of Mick's family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's also worth noting that the story of Mary Watson, which in the novel is a folk tale of Dolphin Island, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Watson_(folk_hero)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;is a true story&lt;/a&gt;, but in reality it took place on what's now called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_Island_(Queensland)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Watson Island&lt;/a&gt;, only about 20 miles off the Australian mainland, rather than the fictional Dolphin Island. Clarke adds a note about this at the end of the novel:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Mary Watson in Chapter 13 is perfectly true, and I have changed neither names nor dates. However, her tragic adventure occurred not on my imaginary Dolphin Island, but on Lizard Island, much nearer to the mainland.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T10:15:56.640" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18223" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18224" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" Score="0" Body="Questions about the children's novel 'Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Sea' (1963) by Arthur C. Clark. Use with the tag [arthur-c-clarke]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T18:59:25.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18225" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18226" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American fantasy and science fiction author Steven Brust (born 1955)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T19:07:52.330" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18227" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18217" CreationDate="2021-04-02T23:16:47.387" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book I am reading is &amp;quot;Alexander Pope: The Major Works,&amp;quot;  published by Oxford World's Classics, with introduction and notes by Pat Rogers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked everywhere in the book but the obvious section near the beginning titled &amp;quot;Note on the text&amp;quot;. This section explains&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Notes at the end are signalled by a degree sign in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the degree sign has nothing to do with poetry but rather is the notation used by Pat Rogers to indicate commentary given at the end of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12566" LastActivityDate="2021-04-02T23:16:47.387" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18228" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-03T00:55:19.077" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the opening paragraph of &amp;quot;Crime and Punishment&amp;quot;, two locations, S-- Lane and K--n Bridge, are identified only by their first and final letters.  My translation has a footnote which says that Dostoevsky refrained from using the actual names, Stolyarny Lane and Kokushkin Bridge, because of censorship.  What sort of censorship was he avoiding?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12572" LastEditorUserId="12572" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T04:11:56.340" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T04:11:56.340" Title="What kind of censorship was Dostoevsky avoiding by obscuring place names?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;censorship&gt;&lt;crime-and-punishment&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18229" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2664" CreationDate="2021-04-03T04:07:07.467" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;One simple and perhaps uninteresting fact to keep in mind is the popularity of the name John in the English-speaking world.  Consider &lt;a href=&quot;http://heraldry.sca.org/names/eng16/eng16mfreq.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this table&lt;/a&gt;.  Granted, it contains statistics for late 16th century England and not early 19th.  However, despite the time difference, it is significant that a full 20% of the surveyed names were John.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore, it’s possible that Clarke was simply making the naming period-specific.  You could be looking for a deeper meaning which isn’t there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12572" LastEditorUserId="12572" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T15:06:39.933" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T15:06:39.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18230" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-03T09:26:29.173" Score="4" ViewCount="119" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's a little poem that goes something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here lies the body of Thomas Grey,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who died defending his right of way.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He was perfectly right as he sped along,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking up this poem reveals many versions, with any number of variations on the name of the dead man (Edward Gray, Mike O'Day, and even Captain May who &lt;em&gt;sailed&lt;/em&gt; along) and sometimes variations on the rest, too.  For instance, &amp;quot;He was right, dead right, the whole way along&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;John's light was green, the other red, John was right but now he's dead&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where's the earliest version of this that can be found, what was it then, and is it known who wrote it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10362" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T09:30:47.920" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T17:27:41.263" Title="What's the first appearance of the rhyme about &quot;He died defending his right of way&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18232" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18216" CreationDate="2021-04-03T09:32:59.763" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it's just that the contradiction is a joke.  The &amp;quot;outrageous statement&amp;quot; is the whole thing - &amp;quot;This is an ancient chant, honestly, even though I've just made it up&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Along the lines of:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One fine day in the middle of the night,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Two dead men got up to fight.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Back to back they faced each other,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Drew their swords and shot each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10362" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-03T13:15:10.900" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T13:15:10.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18233" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-03T16:00:31.847" Score="1" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following quote is frequently attributed &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5504-once-you-have-tasted-flight-you-will-forever-walk-the&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;by the internet&lt;/a&gt; to the famous 15th-16th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's well known that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_on_the_Flight_of_Birds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Leonardo was fascinated by flight&lt;/a&gt;, but true heavier-than-air flight wasn't achieved until centuries after his death. &lt;strong&gt;Did he really say this?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it, like so many famous quotes on the internet, a misattribution?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T19:42:20.107" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T19:44:08.327" Title="Did Leonardo da Vinci really say this quote about flight?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;leonardo-da-vinci&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18234" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18220" CreationDate="2021-04-03T16:26:56.660" Score="1" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Early 21st century, probably the first half of the 2010s.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's a few pieces of information scattered through the novel which allow us to pin down the approximate time period in which it must be set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 1, the opening paragraph of the story sets the scene in the then-distant 21st century:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Johnny Clinton was sleeping when the hovership raced down the valley, floating along the old turnpike on its cushion of air. The whistling roar in the night did not disturb him, for he had heard it almost all his life. To any boy of the twenty-first century, it was a sound of magic, telling of far-off countries and strange cargoes carried in the first ships that could travel with equal ease across land and sea.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 3, we get a more specific fix:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps he might even drift to land, like those men who had ridden the Pacific currents on the famous Kon-Tiki, almost a century ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kon-Tiki_expedition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1947&lt;/a&gt; is &amp;quot;almost a century ago&amp;quot;, that sets an upper bound of 2047 on the setting of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 13, another specific year is mentioned:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet it was only 1881—not yet a century and a half ago.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our upper bound is reduced to 2031. The same 1881 story of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Watson_(folk_hero)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mary Watson&lt;/a&gt; is referred to as &amp;quot;a hundred and thirty years ago&amp;quot; here in Chapter 13, and later in Chapter 19 as &amp;quot;a century and a half ago&amp;quot;. Assuming that &amp;quot;a hundred and thirty&amp;quot; means between 125 and 135, we get a setting of between 2006 and 2016, more probably towards the upper end of this range.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 3, the story is set relative to humanity's first ventures into space:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Above him the sky was ablaze with stars—the ancient ones of the old constellations, the brighter ones that had been put there by man in the fifty years since he had ventured into space.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This puts the setting at roughly 50 years since around the 1960s (first man-made satellite 1957, first man in space 1961, first man on the moon 1969).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;A figure of fifty years is also mentioned in the Note from the Author at the end of the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hovership described in the opening chapters does not yet exist, of course, but the first commercial &amp;quot;Hovercraft&amp;quot; (the VA-3 and the SRN-2) are now operating in Great Britain. In fifty years, such air-supported vehicles may well have grown to the size of the &lt;em&gt;Santa Anna&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This would be written in 1962 or 1963 (the novel was published in '63, and the note mentions an article published in March '62).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As a side note, it seems that &lt;em&gt;Dolphin Island&lt;/em&gt; is set in a future where world peace was achieved some time around the 1970s. From Chapter 17:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You may be quite right,&amp;quot; answered the Professor. &amp;quot;That's what I want to find out. Even if the job's possible at all, it may not be worth doing. And even if it's worth doing, it may take several lifetimes. But one has to be an optimist; don't you remember the history of the twentieth century?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Which bit of it?&amp;quot; asked Steve. &amp;quot;There was rather a lot.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The only bit that really matters. Fifty years ago, a great many people refused to believe that all the human nations could live in peace. Well, we know that they were wrong; if they'd been right, you and I wouldn't be here. So don't be too pessimistic about this project.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suddenly, Steve burst into laughter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Now what's so funny?&amp;quot; asked the Professor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I was just thinking,&amp;quot; said Steve, &amp;quot;that it's been thirty years since they had an excuse for awarding the Nobel Peace Prize. If this plan of yours comes off, you'll be in the running.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Fifty years ago&amp;quot; would be around the time the novel was &lt;em&gt;written&lt;/em&gt;, the early 1960s, when nobody believed world peace was possible. But it seems that it was achieved before the early 1980s, &amp;quot;thirty years&amp;quot; ago, since there was no need for Nobel Peace Prizes since then.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-03T16:26:56.660" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18235" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18214" CreationDate="2021-04-04T10:42:43.917" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Dark Knight Returns&lt;/em&gt; was a comic before it was a movie. The scene with Joker being interviewed on a chat show was part of the original comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxPAI.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/UxPAI.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T10:50:53.937" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T10:50:53.937" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18236" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18168" CreationDate="2021-04-04T11:41:20.907" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's in &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/0684803135&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Moral Compass: Stories for a Life's Journey&lt;/a&gt; by William J. Bennett from 1995, a compilation of parables from around the world. You can read the parable &lt;a href=&quot;http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:3F2oWfPo730J:www.richsletters.com/letters/91college.doc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on this website&lt;/a&gt; which reproduces the actual text from the book (linking a cached text version since it's a Word document).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for the actual origin of this tale, the book calls it a &amp;quot;clever tale from Southeast Asia&amp;quot; and doesn't elaborate, so finding &lt;em&gt;that&lt;/em&gt; might be a bit harder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T11:41:20.907" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18237" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15641" CreationDate="2021-04-04T11:48:50.600" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking for &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1599901242&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Chaos Code&lt;/a&gt; by Justin Richards from 2007 about a kid who discovers his archaeologist dad is missing and tries to stop a villain from using an ancient code. Everything you mentioned (Atlantis, the disc, controlling the Elements, candle flames listening in, the golems etc.) is in there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T11:48:50.600" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18238" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17412" CreationDate="2021-04-04T12:06:48.077" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You're looking for &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Whispers from the Grave&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; by Leslie Rule from 1995 about a girl who discovers an old diary of another girl that suspiciously resembled her and was murdered, and she goes back in time to prevent it. Everything you mentioned is in there (including her preventing her neighbor from using the firecrackers that blinded him), though the murdered girl was not &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; an old relative but rather&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; her twin somehow!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You can find the paperback &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1449429319&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10565" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T12:06:48.077" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18239" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18233" CreationDate="2021-04-04T15:35:16.760" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;As difficult as it is to prove a negative, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/08/the-famous-quote-that-da-vinci-never-said/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Airfacts Journal&lt;/a&gt; seems to make a convincing case of identifying the actual author.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site’s writer has been dubious about the quote for many years and carried out much reading of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and recorded writings trying to find the line, despairing that it may be in some largely unpublished collection of private letters or similar. Eventually his efforts, and those of others, were rewarded:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Well, finally the mystery has been solved, thanks to several patient detectives connected via the internet, using the vast search tools of Google Books and other electronic storehouses. People reached out to book authors and asked where ideas and narrative came from, while others sat through dreadful old copies of films. It all came together in the nerdy discussion page of the Wikiquote entry for Leonardo de Vinci, and now we can reveal the author was… drum roll please…&#xA;John Hermes Secondari. An American TV writer. In 1965.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The article goes on to describe Secondari’s career and a particular project he was involved in, as television series called ‘the Saga of Western Man’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the episodes of The Saga of Western Man was “I, Leonardo Da Vinci.” The credits state it was written, produced and narrated by John H. Secondari, with “the voice of Leonardo da Vinci” played by Fredric March. Its copyright date is 1965 and it was released in 1966 by American Broadcasting. At 16 minutes and 21 seconds into the second reel, after the off-screen Leonardo narration urges people to build his flying machines, claiming after any crash “the hurts will be slight,” over gentle visuals of a wheat field panning up into a clear blue sky, the voice says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you would return.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T19:44:08.327" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T19:44:08.327" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18241" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18242" CreationDate="2021-04-04T21:29:24.143" Score="3" ViewCount="220" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the chief constable was talking to two lawyers about Guy Markenmore who had been murdered two days ago after his meeting with two men at &amp;quot;Sceptre Inn&amp;quot;, to which he had gone after a meeting with his brother and his sister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What puzzles me considerably,” observed the Chief Constable, “is—how did those two men who were with Guy Markenmore at the Sceptre come into and get out of the district unobserved? My men have already made the most exhaustive enquiries at every railroad station in the neighbourhood, and we’ve got hold of—nothing!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Strangers, too!” said Walkinshaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“How do we know that?” demanded Chilford. “There are a tidy lot of men within an area of twenty miles who might have business dealings with Guy Markenmore. &lt;strong&gt;His business here that night might have been just as much with those two men as with his brother and sister.&lt;/strong&gt; Probably it was.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Grimsdale asserts that the first man was an American,” remarked Walkinshaw. “We haven’t a plenitude of Americans in residence about here. I could count them on my fingers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does &amp;quot;His business here that night might have been just as much with those two men as with his brother and sister&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that it's a long phrase, but I can't get the general meaning of it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="10010" LastEditDate="2021-04-04T22:18:56.007" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T02:41:21.313" Title="What does &quot;His business here that night might have been just as much with those two men as with his brother and sister&quot; mean here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18242" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18241" CreationDate="2021-04-04T22:17:40.187" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walkinshaw has just said that the two men who were with Markenmore were strangers. Chilford's response is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You cannot be sure they were strangers. Markenmore might have known them from before, as he has business dealings with a wide range of people. You are assuming that Markenmore came to this area to meet his brother and sister. But it is equally probable that he came here to meet the two men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I.e.: the usual assumption is that Markenmore came to visit his siblings and stopped at the Sceptre Inn as an afterthought. But perhaps it's the other way round: maybe the main reason that Markenmore was in the vicinity of the Sceptre Inn in the first place was for a meeting with the two men, and he visited his siblings just as a blind, or because by chance the chosen meeting place was near them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope that clarifies the meaning a bit!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T02:41:21.313" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T02:41:21.313" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18245" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="8911" CreationDate="2021-04-04T23:28:30.610" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The earliest English types by William Caxton were blackletter types, but the fact that most early printed material in England was written in Latin led to the adoption of Roman types for English typesetting pretty soon after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No serious effort at reintroducing blackletter types for English was contemplated until the nineteenth century when William Morris had a blackletter cut for the use of his Kelmscott press edition of Chaucer. Morris later had a dark Roman type cut (generally called the Golden type after the first book in which it was used) and dropped the use of the Kelmscott Chaucer type.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’m going by memory here as my go-to book on the subject, Updike’s &lt;em&gt;Printing Types&lt;/em&gt;, is a bit inaccessible at the moment but I’m confident in at least the broad outlines of what I’ve written.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8758" LastActivityDate="2021-04-04T23:28:30.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18246" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18247" CreationDate="2021-04-05T02:57:18.697" Score="6" ViewCount="1418" Body="&lt;p&gt;In musical theatre, what does &amp;quot;book by&amp;quot; mean? For example, the Bonnie and Clyde 2012 musical has a book by Ivan Menchell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonnie &amp;amp; Clyde is a musical with music by Frank Wildhorn, lyrics by Don Black and a &lt;strong&gt;book by&lt;/strong&gt; Ivan Menchell.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;Quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_%26_Clyde_(musical)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried Googling it and came up with nothing. I often see this a lot for other plays and musicals too. What book?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4956" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T03:08:38.897" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T18:18:17.890" Title="In musical theatre, what does &quot;book by&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;theater&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18247" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18246" CreationDate="2021-04-05T03:10:11.417" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It refers to the script, as in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/book#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary definition 6&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/book&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster definition 6&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script of a musical or opera.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Looking at the Wikipedia page for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_%26_Clyde_(musical)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bonnie and Clyde musical&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonnie &amp;amp; Clyde is a musical with music by Frank Wildhorn, lyrics by Don Black and a book by Ivan Menchell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Ivan Menchell wrote the script to the Bonnie and Clyde musical, but not the music or lyrics.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T18:18:17.890" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T18:18:17.890" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18248" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18246" CreationDate="2021-04-05T03:13:47.947" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;strong&gt;book&lt;/strong&gt; the element of the musical that consists of plot, characters, and spoken dialogue. The book writer is the person who develops the plot, characters, and dialogue for the stage. These can be original, or an adaptation of an older work (movie, novel, non-musical play, etc.), or based on a historical situation. It is the book writer's responsibility to ensure that the musical has a satisfactory dramatic arc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_writer&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia entry for book writer&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book writer is the member of a musical's writing team who creates the book—the musical's plot, character development, and dramatic structure. Essentially, the book writer is the playwright of the musical, working very closely in collaboration with the lyricist and composer to create an integrated piece of drama.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is a common misconception that the book writer merely writes the dialogue; though the book does include the musical's spoken text, it is much more than that, defining and organizing the dramatic action of the entire piece, including action that is musicalized by the songwriter(s). Even &amp;quot;sung-through,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;operatic,&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;through-composed&amp;quot; musicals, where there is little, if any, spoken text, require as much contribution from a book writer as do musicals with extensive dialogue scenes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book writer is often also the musical's lyricist, composer, or director.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The script for a musical consists of the book as well as the lyrics. Sometimes the book writer also writes the lyrics, and perhaps even the music, e.g., as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin-Manuel_Miranda&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lin-Manuel Miranda&lt;/a&gt; did for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_(musical)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamilton&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. But more typically, those are distinct roles, as with &lt;em&gt;Bonnie and Clyde&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T03:18:54.777" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T03:18:54.777" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18249" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-05T03:16:18.850" Score="4" ViewCount="733" Body="&lt;p&gt;At the end of Chapter Two of &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;, when the Time Traveller provides the brief summary of his journey he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was in my laboratory at four o'clock, and since then... I've lived eight days...such days as no human being ever lived before!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at the beginning of Chapter Three, when telling the story in detail, he says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I TOLD some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it's sound enough. I expected to finish it on Friday; but on Friday, when the putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get re-made; so that the thing was not complete until this morning. &lt;strong&gt;It was at ten o'clock to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career.&lt;/strong&gt; I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second. I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and, looking round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had any-thing happened? For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so past ten; now it was nearly half-past three!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(my emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These two passages seem to provide contradictory accounts of when the time travel journey began. Was it at four o'clock or at ten o'clock?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="4483" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T03:19:32.337" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T03:32:16.550" Title="At what time did the time travel journey begin?" Tags="&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;timeline&gt;&lt;the-time-machine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18250" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18249" CreationDate="2021-04-05T03:32:16.550" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The ten o'clock and the four o'clock are presumably referring to two different events. The first event occurred at ten o'clock when the Time Traveller used the machine for the first time. As described in the paragraph cited in the question, that was just a brief journey where at first he wasn't even sure that he had travelled at all. When he saw the clock reading half-past three he realized that he had travelled several hours into the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As described in the subsequent paragraph, he then began the main journey that the book is about. Given that his first foray had ended at half-past three, even considering that no delay is described before the second journey, it would have been close enough to four o'clock that he could rightfully have said that he was in his laboratory at four o'clock and then spent eight days in the future before returning to the present.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T03:32:16.550" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18252" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18253" CreationDate="2021-04-05T10:50:25.217" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the chief constable was talking to two lawyers about a stranger man who had gone to &amp;quot;Sceptre Inn&amp;quot; and booked a room there, but he never came back to it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Grimsdale asserts that the first man was an American,” remarked Walkinshaw. “We haven’t a plenitude of Americans in residence about here. I could count them on my fingers.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“That’s so,” said the Chief Constable. “If the man was an American—and Grimsdale says he’s met a good many in his time, so he ought to know—he came from somewhere outside our neighbourhood. But what beats me is—how did he and the other man get away, unobserved, on Tuesday morning?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Fransemmery, who, like Blick, had listened attentively, but silently, to these exchanges of opinion and idea, coughed gently, as if deprecating any idea that he wished to interfere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Talking of—of America,” he remarked, “it may be of no importance, and not even relative to the subject under discussion, but I may observe that a mail steamer left Southampton for New York at one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon last. Now, Markenmore is within thirty miles of Southampton by road, and if this man—the first man—was an American, it is possible that he journeyed to Southampton, caught that boat, and was away to sea before hearing of what had befallen the man whom he had entertained to supper. I know about that boat, because I mailed some antiquarian documents to a friend of mine in the United States by it.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Chief Constable twisted his military moustache and considered Mr. Fransemmery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Um!” he remarked. “&lt;strong&gt;Might be a good deal in that&lt;/strong&gt;—he might certainly have taken this place in his way between London and Southampton. But—the queer thing is, we can’t hit on a trace of his coming or going!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why did he never return to the Sceptre—where three pounds fourteen shillings change was due to him?” asked Walkinshaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I found that &amp;quot;a good deal&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;a lot&amp;quot;, so does this sentence mean &amp;quot;there might be a lot of sensible details in that thought&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T12:17:00.177" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T12:17:00.177" Title="What does &quot;Might be a good deal in that&quot; mean in &quot;The Markenmore Mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18253" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18252" CreationDate="2021-04-05T11:25:52.507" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase is essentially an abbreviated version of ‘a good deal of sense’, which online searches will show you is a common phrase in British English (and probably other Englishes as well). It has a slightly dated feel as a phrase, having &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=great+deal+of+sense%2Cgood+deal+of+sense&amp;amp;year_start=1800&amp;amp;year_end=2019&amp;amp;corpus=26&amp;amp;smoothing=3&amp;amp;direct_url=t1%3B%2Cgreat%20deal%20of%20sense%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cgood%20deal%20of%20sense%3B%2Cc0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;increased steeply in popularity between the 1950s and 1980 then dropped away again&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YiWgK.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/YiWgK.png&quot; alt=&quot;NGram screenshot&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T12:00:11.977" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T12:00:11.977" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18254" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17377" CreationDate="2021-04-05T17:12:21.433" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Theodor Fontane did not write &amp;quot;Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan&amp;quot; in 1847/8, as the &lt;a href=&quot;http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2010/01/the-tragedy-of-afghanistan/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berlin Review of Books&lt;/a&gt; erroneously claims, but a decade later.&#xA;By that time, Fontane had been twice been &lt;strong&gt;in London as a foreign correspondent&lt;/strong&gt; for Prussian newspapers: the first time from April till September 1852 (Bemmann: 99-106) and the second time from September 1855 till January 1859. The occasion for the second time was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Crimean War&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in which Prussia did not want to intervene (Bemmann: 113–131).&#xA;(Fontane had developed an interest in England in the 1840s, reading, for example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_England_(Hume)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hume's massive &lt;em&gt;History of England&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the works of Walter Scott. England and Scotland had been important sources of inspiration for his ballads.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By the end of his second stay in England, his &lt;strong&gt;admiration for the British people was at its nadir&lt;/strong&gt;. He described the English as a &amp;quot;money-making Volk&amp;quot; and was especially appalled by the massacres during the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Rebellion_of_1857&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858&lt;/a&gt;. In a letter to the editor-in-chief of the &lt;em&gt;Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung&lt;/em&gt; (his employer), he wrote that, with regard to India, all of England disgusted him; he even described the English as a people of &amp;quot;robbers and pirates&amp;quot;. (In spite of his criticism of English colonialism and English society, he did not condemn the English people as a whole.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is perhaps this historical background and his criticism of colonialism that inpired him to write &amp;quot;Das Trauerspiel von Afghanistan&amp;quot;. (I have been unable to find statements about a specific explicit motivation to write this poem.) According to the entries in his diary, he worked on the poem on 1 and 2 May &lt;strong&gt;1858&lt;/strong&gt;; he recited the poem for the literary society &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_%C3%BCber_der_Spree&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tunnel über der Spree&lt;/a&gt; (in Berlin) on 3 April 1859. It was printed in the magazine &lt;em&gt;Argo&lt;/em&gt; in 1860 (&lt;em&gt;Tagebücher&lt;/em&gt;: 616). Before April 1859, Fontane had already recited the poem in London on 5 August 1858 (Berbig: Theodor Fontane Chronik: 905) and for the literary society &amp;quot;Krokodillen-Gesellschaft&amp;quot; in Munich on 10 March 1859 (Berbig: Theodor Fontane Chronik: 962).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bemmann, Helga: &lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane. Eine preußischer Dichter&lt;/em&gt;. Ullstein, 1998. (440-page biography published on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the author's death; now out of print.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Berbig, Roland: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110215601/html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Theodor Fontane Chronik&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. De Gruyter, 2010. (Day-by-day chronicle of Fontane's life and works, based on the author's correspondence and diaries, and other sources; 3.905 pages.)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;em&gt;Tage- und Reisetagebücher: Tagebücher 1852, 1855-1858&lt;/em&gt;. Edited by Charlotte Jolles, Rudolf Muhs, Gotthard Erler and Therese Erler. Aufbau-Verlag, 1995.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T17:12:21.433" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18255" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-05T18:32:49.990" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;I forgot the title of the short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is about a man who is in court because of his prostheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I remember correctly he was a famous motorbiker.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A company wants all his prostheses back, because of financial stuff (don't remember exactly).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That includes half his brain, which makes loud noises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The end of the story is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; he gets to keep the prostheses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read this story in German in my philosophy class in 2008 or so (but it was definitely older). I don't remember which author it was or whether it was translated from another language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if it was in a book with other stories, because we just got a printout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12581" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T19:32:45.343" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T19:32:45.343" Title="A man is in court because a company wants his prostheses back" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18256" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-05T18:47:56.283" Score="4" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem_and_Zin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Wikipedia article&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a Kurdish classic love story written down in 1692&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;is based on a true story, laid down from generation to generation through oral tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears to be often compared to &lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; (1597). I first saw a reference in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/AhmedKhaniMemAndJinTrans.BySalahSaadalla/Ahmed+Khani-Mem+and+Jin-trans.+by+Salah+Saadalla_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Archived translation&quot;&gt;an English translation's Preface&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the poetical story is more than a tragic Romeo and Juliet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A search to see if this was a common reference (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=mem+and+zin+kurdish+romeo+and+juliet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Google Search link&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;mem and zin kurdish romeo and juliet&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;) brought up &lt;a href=&quot;https://hevalo.wordpress.com/2008/03/10/mem-u-zin-the-kurdish-romeo-and-juliet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quite&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rudaw.net/english/culture/05102018&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a few&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.honorsociety.org/articles/when-poem-works-and-when-it-does-not&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;results&lt;/a&gt; referring to it with variations &amp;quot;Kurdish 'Romeo and Juliet'&amp;quot;. (Admittedly I probably biased this search a bit by putting &amp;quot;kurdish romeo and juliet&amp;quot; in the search string, but the point is still made)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Romeo and Juliet&lt;/em&gt; was first performed before &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt; was written down, but as &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt; originated as an oral tradition it came first. I'm interested to know when the two started being compared to each other. The similarities in the stories are evident on a broad review of the plotlines of both, so it seems a fairly obvious comparison to draw. However any comparison would rely on someone knowing both stories and then wanting to point the connections out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When/where was &amp;quot;Mem and Zin&amp;quot; first compared to &amp;quot;Romeo and Juliet&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T14:30:52.583" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T14:30:52.583" Title="When/where was &quot;Mem and Zin&quot; first compared to &quot;Romeo and Juliet&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;romeo-and-juliet&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18257" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Leonardo was born out of wedlock and his father Piero never seems to have recognised him as an heir; &amp;quot;da Vinci&amp;quot; simply means &amp;quot;from Vinci&amp;quot; (where Leonardo was born) and is not a family name.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18258" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Leonardo (commonly known as Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519). Use with the tag [italian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T19:40:38.150" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18259" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18260" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novella 'The Time Machine' (1895) by H. G. Wells. Use with the tag [h-g-wells]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:34:16.543" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18261" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18262" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English journalist and author Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863–1935)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:35:42.923" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18264" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18265" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" Score="0" Body="Questions about the collection 'Norwegian Folktales', collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe in the 19th century and also known as 'Asbjørnsen and Moe'. Use this tag with [scandinavian-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:43:25.530" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18266" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18267" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Croatian comic book writer and artist Stjepan Šejić (born 1981). Use with the tag [comics] when asking a question about his comics." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T21:45:40.110" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18268" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17966" CreationDate="2021-04-05T22:42:15.920" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, swifts were mostly known for their habit of continuous flight, very rarely touching the ground - they were even believed not to have feet at all, as reflected in their scientific name (Apus apus, meaning without feet). A non-breeding common swift can spend up to ten months continuously flying &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_swift&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Common Swift&lt;/a&gt;. This is reflected in the heraldic form of the swift knows as a Martlet, which often appears on coats of arms. As a bird that was seen to expend continuous effort to stay permanently aloft, it became an allegory for continuous effort, and has also been seen to symbolise a constant quest for adventure &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martlet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martlet&lt;/a&gt;. Common swifts are migratory, and will travel from Europe or Asia to Africa for the winter; thus you can see them as embodying a form of wanderlust.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ever since Resa was read into Inkheart and then kept in Capricorn's village she has striven to return to her family - she keeps a picture of them with her, and celebrates all her daughter's birthdays, as well as attempting to escape multiple times. This constant goal of hers could thus be reflected in her swift form. We also know she is fond of adventure stories, which again could be reflected in her swift's form. Most likely, though, the form tells of an escape from prison - after spending so many years as a prisoner with just her heart yearning for freedom, how body can now follow suit, and is no longer even bound to the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7466" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-05T22:45:17.823" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T22:45:17.823" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18269" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18122" CreationDate="2021-04-05T23:14:22.993" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;I came across an article entitled &lt;a href=&quot;https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&amp;amp;context=phr&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Utility Futility&lt;/a&gt;, which  discusses Britain's WW2 Utility scheme.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The article expands upon the word &lt;em&gt;Utility&lt;/em&gt; and its associated negative meanings which were present &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; the commissioning of the scheme.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It could be that what Hughes had in mind were these negative, mockery meanings, which may had prevailed even after the scheme was abandonned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are a couple of excerpts from the article (bold is mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why was “Utility” such an inadequate label? First, it had&#xA;been used in the clothing industry before to describe a type of&#xA;heavy-duty garment designed to weather tough use, the equivalent&#xA;of what consumers today might think of as blue-collar “work&#xA;clothes.” It appeared with relative frequency in advertisements&#xA;for coats and jackets well before the Utility scheme’s conception,&#xA;proving that consumers already had a preexisting idea in mind&#xA;when they heard the word “Utility,” an idea contrary to the&#xA;reality of Utility scheme clothes. While the world (sic) &lt;strong&gt;“Utility”&#xA;made consumers picture drab, unflattering jumpsuits&lt;/strong&gt;, in actuality&#xA;Utility garments differed little in appearance from non-Utility&#xA;attire. Second, like the word “standard,” “Utility” conveyed a&#xA;degree of standardization to British consumers, or at the very least&#xA;failed to erase the fears that had cropped up while rumors of the&#xA;return of the 1917 ‘standard’ scheme still circulated. Consumers&#xA;were afraid the government would force them all into wearing&#xA;uniforms for the duration of the war.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[T]he Drapers’&#xA;Record, a prominent journal for clothiers and other sectors of the&#xA;clothing industry, released one of the earliest articles surveying women’s&#xA;initial receptions of the Utility scheme. The article began by pointing&#xA;out that since Utility had yet to make a significant appearance in stores,&#xA;many of the women interviewed based their opinions solely on their&#xA;impressions of the word “Utility,” rather than on firsthand experience.&#xA;One interviewee commented that &lt;strong&gt;“Utility” made her think of a&#xA;uniform - “government stuff, sackcloth.”&lt;/strong&gt; Another interviewee&#xA;worried Utility clothing would be &lt;strong&gt;“clumsy and heavy.”&lt;/strong&gt; Still&#xA;another expected colors to be &lt;strong&gt;“dark and uninteresting.”&lt;/strong&gt; The&#xA;reporter even added that these three women had not heard&#xA;about the scheme before being interviewed about it, further&#xA;demonstrating the power of the word “Utility” to produce&#xA;negative first impressions of the entire project.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastActivityDate="2021-04-05T23:14:22.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18270" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-06T00:59:43.767" Score="11" ViewCount="1876" Body="&lt;p&gt;In chapter Four of &lt;em&gt;The Time Machine&lt;/em&gt;, the Time Traveller states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the fruits were very delightful; one, in particular, that seemed to be in season all the time I was there — a floury thing in a three-sided husk — was especially good, and I made it my staple.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, earlier in Chapter Two he had said:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was in my laboratory at four o'clock, and since then... I've lived eight days...such days as no human being ever lived before!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apparently, then, his entire stay in the future only spanned eight days. Now I am no expert in agriculture or botany, but a fruit being in season for eight days doesn't seem to be a big deal. I doubt there are any fruits that are in season for fewer than eight days.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there some other significance here? Am I peradventure missing something obvious?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T13:27:15.487" Title="What is so special about a fruit being in season for eight days?" Tags="&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-time-machine&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18271" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18275" CreationDate="2021-04-06T07:47:36.700" Score="0" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They stopped at the gate lounge. The door opened.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Here she comes,’ said Elizabeth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Which one is she?’ said Dexter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The man walking behind Vicki was talking to his friend, he had a faint&#xA;stammer, not much more than a hesitation. ‘ ’&lt;strong&gt;Mazing guy, Gaz&lt;/strong&gt;. Always&#xA;thinking about his mem, mem, member. &lt;strong&gt;There was something in his brain&#xA;that just went sprong&lt;/strong&gt;. He’d see a good looking chick dancing in front of the&#xA;stage, &lt;strong&gt;he’d go down between sets and find her&lt;/strong&gt;, and he’d be back five&#xA;minutes later doing up his fly.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His story was bodyless. &lt;strong&gt;A mosquito might have been whining it next to&#xA;her ear&lt;/strong&gt;. The footsteps of the hastening passengers beat light and fast. Either&#xA;the windows were tinted or Melbourne was already dark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;he’d go down between sets and find her&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;he’d go down between stages and find her&amp;quot;? Dose &amp;quot;set&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;stage&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And about the phrases &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Mazing&lt;/strong&gt; guy, Gaz&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;There was something in his brain&#xA;that just went &lt;strong&gt;sprong&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; Does he speak like that because of his stammer and he wanted to say &amp;quot;Amazing&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;mazing&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sprung&amp;quot; not &amp;quot;sprong&amp;quot; and Does &amp;quot;There was something in his brain&#xA;that just went sprong&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;There was something that suddenly came to his mind&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;A mosquito might have been whining it next to her ear.&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;The man's speaking to girl's ear was like  whining of a mosquito&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T08:01:34.877" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T09:30:54.390" Title="Meaning of &quot;he’d go down between sets and find her&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18272" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18270" CreationDate="2021-04-06T07:58:14.830" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He's not necessarily suggesting there's anything special about it being in season for 8 days.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The sentence that you quote is part of the time traveller describing day-to-day life in the world of the distant future, what the Eloi wear and how they eat. Since they're eating fruit, one would expect their diet to vary quite a bit depending on the seasons, so his remark about &amp;quot;in season&amp;quot; might be just to clarify that he ate this fruit all the time that he was there but it probably wouldn't be a year-long diet of the future.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This serves as a reminder, both to his audience and to us as readers, that his knowledge of their eating habits is restricted to a short period, and he doesn't know what fruit might be in season at other times of the year. It helps establish some realism in the story, to include the reality check that a fruit diet would be season-dependent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;But there might be something special about exotic fruit being in season &lt;em&gt;at all&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @muru pointed out in comments, for an Englishman at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, exotic fruit would be something he'd rarely seen and maybe never seen fresh. There &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; no season for e.g. oranges or mangoes in Britain; they would've been imported or grown in greenhouses. As such, it would've been a source of wonder for &amp;quot;delightful&amp;quot; fruits to be in season at all, in what's presumably a distant-future version of Britain (after many millennia of climate change, tectonic shift, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can speak to this from my own experience, growing up in Britain (even a century later than Wells's protagonist) and then visiting Mediterranean regions where orange trees are frequent - they didn't lose their wonder for me even after many times seeing them in the wild. Remember that Britain is a country where you'd be lucky to get 8 days in a row without &lt;em&gt;rain&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;It might indicate an earlier draft where his visit to the future lasted longer than 8 days?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is purely speculative, but perhaps this line is left over from an earlier version of the text where Wells had his time traveller spending longer in the future, long enough that some fruits might be expected to go in and out of season. Then the comment &amp;quot;seemed to be in season all the time I was there&amp;quot; would make more sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't go digging to find detailed info on the textual history of this novel, but I did find &lt;a href=&quot;http://community.dur.ac.uk/time.machine/OJS/index.php/Wellsian/article/viewFile/259/250&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;a paper&lt;/a&gt; claiming that &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Despite re-reading and revising, Wells still made no changes to the chronology of the story.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; (That paper proposes a theory, which seems rather far-fetched to me but is supported by evidence, that the time traveller is actually a fraud who went on a bicycle ride rather than travelling in time. You might find it interesting to read - it also mentions, as supporting evidence, the same apparent contradiction that &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/18249/17&quot;&gt;you found in your earlier question&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T13:27:15.487" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T13:27:15.487" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18273" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-03-21T10:14:18.927" Score="2" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a paragraph in Huxley's novel &lt;em&gt;Ape and Essence&lt;/em&gt;, talking about a painting by Piero Della Francesca:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry and throughout the whole we should feel the all-pervading presence of Plato's God, forever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does he mean by: &lt;strong&gt;&amp;quot;the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; in this passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12672" OwnerDisplayName="Hamza Maher Abdurrahman" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T08:17:39.487" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T08:17:39.487" Title="What does &quot;the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;aldous-huxley&gt;&lt;ape-and-essence&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18274" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18273" CreationDate="2021-03-24T22:20:10.777" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is an example of a usage of metaphor to describe contrasts of soft and malleable appearance with an underlying harsh and unyielding reality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have similar examples in &amp;quot;Heart of Stone&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Iron fist in a velvet glove&amp;quot;. Huxley has merely used words appropriate to the linguistic register that he chooses - that of classical thought. The silken folds are soft, the porphyry is hard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The apparent soft nature of the material and its careful depiction as gently enrobing cloth, ready to move with the slightest breath of wind or stir of the body contrasts with the reality that nothing will change once the painting is finished, that the arrangement is set for ever by the rationality of Plato's God (A god of reason, not of randomness), in the same way that a syllogism sets out an indisputable logical trail. (for example, All men are human; all humans die; therefore all men die.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerDisplayName="Anton" LastActivityDate="2021-03-26T13:36:24.027" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18275" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18271" CreationDate="2021-04-06T09:14:15.000" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Set means, assuming these people are in a band, means the group of songs they perform. Rather than take a break after each song, or not take a break at all they take a break between each ‘set’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Mazing’ just represents his pronunciation of ‘amazing’, some people say it that way. The mild stammer may be a factor but that isn’t necessary to explain the pronunciation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Sprong’ I interpret as being a sort of onomatopoeic joke. Imagine it like the sound of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://youtu.be/dDshiu5um9g&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;ruler being twanged&lt;/a&gt;. Since it is obvious from the reference to girls and refastening his trousers that he goes and has sex with girls in the audience (that he spotted from the stage during a set), ‘sprong’ is the metaphorical sound of his brain telling his ‘member’ to spring to attention in readiness when he sees a girl he likes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think you are probably correct with the mosquito reference but can’t be sure in such a limited quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T09:30:54.390" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T09:30:54.390" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18276" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18277" CreationDate="2021-04-06T10:38:18.597" Score="4" ViewCount="123" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the figure of speech used in these lines taken from the Simon Armitage poem &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Cataract Operation&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the olé of a crimson towel.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the cancan of a ra ra skirt,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the monkey business of a shirt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pegged only by its sleeve,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the cheerio&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;of a handkerchief&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, what do the above lines mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T14:05:11.497" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T14:05:11.497" Title="What is the figure of speech used in this part of &quot;Cataract Operation&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;simon-armitage&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18277" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18276" CreationDate="2021-04-06T11:21:41.933" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;These lines are examples of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;metaphors&lt;/a&gt; - a figure of speech that equates two things for the purposes of comparison or symbolism, without the two being literally the same. The towel on the washing line is not literally a matador's cape, but the poem gives us the image that it is moving in the same way, thanks to the wind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The movement in the wind of each piece of clothing pegged on the washing line is being compared to a similar action taken by a similar item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The red towel is fluttering aside in the same way a bullfighter's red cape is twirled aside - olé is used in Spain by the crowds to signify approval of the bullfighter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The skirt is being kicked up in the same way a cancan dancer holds her skirt up.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shirt is jumping up and down by one sleeve like a monkey holding onto a branch with one hand.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The handkerchief is waving like someone waving their hanky to say goodbye/cheerio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7466" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T11:21:41.933" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18278" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="9245" CreationDate="2021-04-06T11:22:47.177" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;While I've been unable to find a source which specifically mentions 'the ROTK Video game' G R R Martin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://grrm.livejournal.com/241386.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LiveJournal from October 1st 2011&lt;/a&gt; includes this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have a history of being swallowed whole by videogames, which is why I don't play much these days. (I swear, I lost a novel to MASTER OF ORION, and at least a novella to BANDIT KINGS OF ANCIENT CHINA and HOMEWORLD).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On May 26th 2014 in a comment on Martin's &lt;a href=&quot;https://grrm.livejournal.com/372179.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;May 20th LiveJournal entry&lt;/a&gt; in the comments pacnic22 asked:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always been curious about the historical source material that influences &amp;quot;Song of Ice and Fire.&amp;quot;&#xA;Though I realize there are many different historical records that influenced your work, I'd like to ask about one particular source from Ancient China, &amp;quot;The Romance of the 3 Kingdoms&amp;quot;&#xA;It could be pure coincidence, but when I read the synopsis for &amp;quot;The Romance of the Three Kingdoms&amp;quot;, -- I apologize for not reading the original, or knowing Chinese for that matter -- I immediately thought about some of the politics that are used as plot devices of a similar manner in your stories. Was there any reference to this source in your work?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Martin replied:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I played the game obsessively once upon a time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That familiarity with the game came up in his discussion with &lt;a href=&quot;https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&amp;amp;tl=en&amp;amp;u=http%3A%2F%2Fent.sina.com.cn%2Fv%2Fu%2F2012-05-25%2Fba3639824.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sina.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Tai and George both like the Three Kingdoms game. George likes Lu Bu the most because he is the fiercest, and Tai hates Lu Bu the most, because he defected as long as others give more money to women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the curiosity he then expresses about the Chinese medieval period doesn't suggest over familiarity with texts set in the period .&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;George was very curious about what Chinese &amp;quot;Middle Ages&amp;quot; and castles were like&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He also discussed with the journalist the future&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;possibility of taking Eastern civilization as the main world view in fantasy novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suggesting that he hadn't already done so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;　&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T13:05:02.830" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T13:05:02.830" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18279" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-06T14:49:44.250" Score="1" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Wren&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cutty Wren&lt;/a&gt;, a traditional English folk song, is the &amp;quot;territorial song&amp;quot; (like national anthem for a British Overseas Territory?) of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_da_Cunha&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tristan da Cunha&lt;/a&gt;, one of the remotest islands on earth with around 250 inhabitants.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why is this?&lt;/strong&gt; Was there a cultural connection between this particular song and the island or its settlers? I tried to search online, but only found the information that it &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; the territorial song there, nothing about &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-06T14:49:44.250" Title="How did the Cutty Wren come to be the national anthem of Tristan da Cunha?" Tags="&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18280" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-06T16:44:58.723" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ncert.nic.in/textbook/pdf/levt106.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the Face of It&lt;/a&gt; by Susan Hill, Lamb says that the gate is always open and he does not like closing things [Dialogues of scene 1]. But then, why does Derry open the gate panting (Scene 3)? What is the significance of this?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12114" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T06:04:13.683" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T11:54:45.487" Title="What is the significance of Derry opening the gate panting despite it being &quot;always open&quot;?" Tags="&lt;susan-hill&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18281" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18282" CreationDate="2021-04-06T21:01:37.773" Score="5" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, Blick, a detective-sergeant, was thinking about the way by which someone had entered and left Markenmore district. Firstly he studied the railways and trains, and then he turned to studying the roads and motor-cars.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And on turning to his time-table, Blick discovered that between four and six o’clock in the morning, there were, taking these four stations altogether, a respectable number of trains going north or south, east or west, and that from two stations, the junction aforesaid and the one to the north, there were at a quarter to six every morning, workmen’s special trains, which doubtless conveyed large numbers of craftsmen, artisans and labourers into the big shipping port a few miles away on the coast. Altogether, he saw that a smart, astute man would have no difficulty in getting away unobserved from the Markenmore district by an early morning train, in any one of at least six separate directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning again to &lt;strong&gt;the question of access and excess&lt;/strong&gt; by the roads, Blick remembered what Walkinshaw had said about the facilities which the district afforded for successfully hiding a motor-car while its owner or occupant paid a visit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The whole context and the previous discussions &lt;strong&gt;spoke of &amp;quot;entering the region and getting away from it&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;, and &amp;quot;access&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;enter&amp;quot;, so can &amp;quot;excess&amp;quot;, by any chance, mean &amp;quot;exit&amp;quot; or something like that? or does it simply mean &amp;quot;crossing the boundaries of the region&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-06T21:20:23.603" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:49:55.073" Title="Can &quot;access and excess&quot; be antonyms in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18282" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18281" CreationDate="2021-04-07T08:49:55.073" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The words &amp;quot;access&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;excess&amp;quot; ultimately derive from Latin. The Online Etymology Dictionary has the following entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/access&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;access&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(...), from Old French acces &amp;quot;onslaught, attack; onset (of an illness)&amp;quot; (14c.), from Latin accessus &amp;quot;a coming to, an approach; way of approach, entrance,&amp;quot; noun use of past participle of &lt;strong&gt;accedere &amp;quot;to approach,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; from assimilated form of ad &amp;quot;to&amp;quot; (see ad-) + cedere &amp;quot;go, move, withdraw&amp;quot; (from PIE root *ked- &amp;quot;to go, yield&amp;quot;). &lt;strong&gt;English sense of &amp;quot;an entrance&amp;quot; (c. 1600) is directly from Latin&lt;/strong&gt;. (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(PIE stands for &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Proto-Indo-European&lt;/a&gt;, the hypothetical common ancestor of Latin, the Romance languages, Germanic languages such as English, and a number of other languages.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note the root &amp;quot;-cedere&amp;quot; in the Latin verb, &amp;quot;accedere&amp;quot;, which we also find in the etymology of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.etymonline.com/word/excess#etymonline_v_14025&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;excess&lt;/a&gt; (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;a going beyond ordinary, necessary, or proper limits; superfluity; undue indulgence of appetite, want of restraint in gratifying the desires; the amount by which one number or quantity exceeds another,&amp;quot; late 14c., from Old French exces (14c.) &amp;quot;excess, extravagance, outrage,&amp;quot; from Latin &lt;strong&gt;excessus&lt;/strong&gt; &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;departure&lt;/strong&gt;, a going beyond the bounds of reason or beyond the subject,&amp;quot; from stem of &lt;strong&gt;excedere &amp;quot;to depart, go beyond,&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt; from ex &amp;quot;out&amp;quot; (see ex-) + cedere &amp;quot;to go, yield&amp;quot; (from PIE root *ked- &amp;quot;to go, yield&amp;quot;). (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While &amp;quot;access&amp;quot; is still used as a synonym for entrance, &amp;quot;excess&amp;quot; is not used for the opposite movement (or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/egress&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;egress&lt;/a&gt;, which also has a Latin root, as it derives from &amp;quot;ex&amp;quot; + &amp;quot;gressus&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, not even &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl01johnuoft/page/n725/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Johnson's dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, which was first published in 1755, lists &amp;quot;egress&amp;quot; as a meaning of &amp;quot;excess&amp;quot;, and the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.websters1913.com/words/Excess&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Webster dictionary of 1913&lt;/a&gt; does not list it either.&#xA;Based on this, it is extremely unlikely that this meaning was in use when J. S. Fletcher published &lt;em&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/em&gt; in 1922. Either the author or the character is being &lt;strong&gt;overly pedantic by basing the meaning of &amp;quot;excess&amp;quot; on an etymology that was irrelevant to actual usage at the time&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T08:49:55.073" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18283" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T12:42:05.617" Score="0" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The hostess at the open door showed her teeth. &lt;strong&gt;Vicki came out into the&#xA;world.&lt;/strong&gt; She saw the man beside Elizabeth and slowed down. That couldn’t&#xA;be Philip. Philip couldn’t possibly look like that. Philip played in a band.&#xA;She whipped off the rhinestone ear-rings and shoved them into her pocket.&#xA;The freeway was dark. Vicki’s toes were so cold that they felt like rows&#xA;of marbles inside her shoes. The strange boy was strapped into his car seat&#xA;beside her. He mooed and murmured to himself. She stopped trying to listen&#xA;to the conversation in the front, and stared out the window. &lt;strong&gt;Low down on&#xA;the sky was a narrow band of apricot, all that was left of the daylight.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;Dexter threw back his head and laughed at something Elizabeth said. Vicki&#xA;experienced the small prickle of power that comes to the one who rides in&#xA;the back seat. &lt;strong&gt;She saw her captors as they would never see themselves&lt;/strong&gt;: two&#xA;silly heads of hair, two sets of shoulders, two unsuspecting napes. She hated&#xA;them. She closed her eyes with hatred. Dexter saw her in the mirror and&#xA;thought she had fallen asleep. &lt;strong&gt;Unresisted now, his tenderness for the whole&#xA;world rushed to envelop her.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;Low down on the sky was a narrow band of apricot, all that was left of the daylight.&amp;quot;  metaphorical? and mean &amp;quot;Vicki is seeing a narrow light in the sky that was like a narrow band of apricot and because the sky was not still too dark&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dose &amp;quot;apricot&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;The light in color of apricot&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in interpreting other parts in bold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;explain: Vicki has just deplaned in Melbourne airport&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;VicKi came out into the world&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Vicki was seeing the new city and came out into the new city (Melbourne)&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;She saw her captors &lt;strong&gt;as&lt;/strong&gt; they would never see themselves&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;She saw her captors &lt;strong&gt;in a way&lt;/strong&gt; they would never see themselves&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;Unresisted now, his tenderness for the whole&#xA;world rushed to envelop her&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;he could not help himself not to feel pity for her and wanted with all of energy to sympathy just for her not for other people&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T18:35:46.363" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T18:35:46.363" Title="Meaning of &quot;Low down on the sky was a narrow band of apricot, all that was left of the daylight.&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18284" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18285" CreationDate="2021-04-07T16:21:13.240" Score="3" ViewCount="29" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a novel by John Galsworthy, &lt;em&gt;A Stoic,&lt;/em&gt; written at the beginning of the XX century (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2684/2684-h/2684-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;), and I've come across a sentence I’m finding quite tricky to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It had a particular ring, that voice, as if coming from beautifully formed red lips, of which the lower one must curve the least bit over; it had, too, a caressing vitality, and a kind of warm falsity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is with “must curve the least bit over”. The use of “the least bit” seems quite peculiar here  (at least for me – I’m not a native), as it is used in an affirmative clause. The novel includes another use of the same expression in an affirmative clause: “I frapped it the least bit, sir.” (a servant is talking about a champagne bottle). Does it mean “minimally”, “the least possible” in these cases?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T16:38:55.910" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T17:02:55.423" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;the least bit&quot; in these affirmative clauses by John Galsworthy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;a-stoic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18285" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18284" CreationDate="2021-04-07T17:02:55.423" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it roughly means something like &amp;quot;a tiny bit&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;minimally&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's an odd case where dictionary definitions aren't very useful since almost all the examples given are in &lt;em&gt;negative&lt;/em&gt; clauses (&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.thefreedictionary.com/the+least+bit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not in the least unfriendly&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/the%20least%20bit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;wasn’t the least bit shy&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;) - it's quite hard to find any examples of its usage in a positive clause. I found a few examples in other literature (all emphasis added by me):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She looked out at the pale desert. The twin white moons were rising. Cool water ran softly about her toes. She began to tremble &lt;strong&gt;just the least bit&lt;/strong&gt;. She wanted very much to sit quietly here, soundless, not moving until this thing occurred, this thing expected all day, this thing that could not occur but might. A drift of song brushed through her mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Ray Bradbury, &lt;em&gt;The Martian Chronicles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major Monkey thanked him again. And then he said:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I'd like to get acquainted with all the neighbors—such as they are. And I would suggest that you give a party and invite me and a lot of people to come to it, so I can meet them.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Old Mr. Crow bit his tongue. It struck him that Major Monkey was &lt;strong&gt;just the least bit&lt;/strong&gt; too forward.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- Arthur Scott Bailey, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18626/18626-h/18626-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Tale of Major Monkey&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;But the rest's a necessity: not that I love new paint or am pining for electric light, but for reasons which I will just breathe in your private ear, Bunny. You must not try to take them too seriously; but the fact is, there is &lt;strong&gt;just the least bit&lt;/strong&gt; of a twitter against me in this rookery of an Albany. It must have been started by that tame old bird, Policeman Mackenzie; it isn't very bad as yet, but it needn't be that to reach my ears. Well, it was open to me either to clear out altogether, and so confirm whatever happened to be in the air, or to go off for a time, under some arrangement which would give the authorities ample excuse for overhauling every inch of my rooms. Which would you have done, Bunny?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[...]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I left him without further parley, reading his impatience in his face. Everything, to be sure, seemed clear enough without that fuller discussion which I loved and Raffles hated. Yet I thought we might at least have dined together, and in my heart I felt &lt;strong&gt;just the least bit&lt;/strong&gt; hurt, until it occurred to me as I drove to count the notes in my cigarette case. Resentment was impossible after that. The sum ran well into three figures, and it was plain that Raffles meant me to have a good time in his absence.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;-- E.W. Hornung, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Thief_in_the_Night/The_Chest_of_Silver&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Chest of Silver&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perhaps from these examples you can understand better the meaning of &amp;quot;the least bit&amp;quot; in a positive context: it basically means &amp;quot;a little bit, a tiny bit, the least possible&amp;quot;. It can also be used as an ironic understatement to mean &amp;quot;very much&amp;quot;, as in the Major Monkey example above, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the example that you've quoted in your question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T17:02:55.423" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18286" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18291" CreationDate="2021-04-07T17:07:42.067" Score="2" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a novel by John Galsworthy, &lt;em&gt;A Stoic,&lt;/em&gt; written at the beginning of the XX century (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2684/2684-h/2684-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;), and I've come across a sentence I’m finding quite tricky to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This'll be your first interest-on six thousand pounds?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is as follows: a man has made a settlement of six thousand pounds at four and a half per cent on a lady (the one who’s being asked here). A solicitor comes to her house and asks her the question above after saying: “I am a solicitor though; came just to ask about a certain settlement that Mr. Pillin tells me you're entitled under.” What is the meaning of “your first interest” here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-07T17:17:46.700" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T14:04:40.323" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;your first interest&quot; in this novel by John Galsworthy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;a-stoic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18287" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-07T17:19:46.033" Score="3" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;, there's a passage where Aslan apparently uses his power to summon up the spirit of Old Narnia, leading to the eventual defeat of the Telmarines with very little bloodshed. A wild party ensues, featuring &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bacchus&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silenus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silenus&lt;/a&gt;, a lot of girls, and a lot of vines and grapes. This nod to ancient paganism within the Christian allegory of the Narnia series could be the subject of a whole other question, but here I'm asking specifically about their call, seen as follows (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She never saw where certain other people came from who were soon capering about among the trees. One was a youth, dressed only in a fawn-skin, with vine-leaves wreathed in his curly hair. His face would have been almost too pretty for a boy’s, if it had not looked so extremely wild. You felt, as Edmund said when he saw him a few days later, “There’s a chap who might do anything—absolutely anything.” He seemed to have a great many names—Bromios, Bassareus, and the Ram were three of them. There were a lot of girls with him, as wild as he. There was even, unexpectedly, someone on a donkey. And everybody was laughing: and &lt;strong&gt;everybody was shouting out, “Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've tried to Google this phrase but found only references to this very passage in the Narnia books. &lt;strong&gt;Does it have any significance in terms of the mythology of Bacchus and Silenus?&lt;/strong&gt; Lewis seems to have taken care over the writing of this passage, including a lot of hints for the educated reader on who these people are (Bromios and Bassareus are old names for Bacchus/Dionysus) before Susan and Lucy come right out and say it. So I wonder if their cry, repeated again a few paragraphs later, is also a reference to something. To me it looks both Greek, with all those vowels, and reminiscent of the traditional British &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oggy_Oggy_Oggy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Oggy, oggy, oggy, oi-oi-oi&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T00:38:21.830" Title="Is there any significance in the cry &quot;Euan, euan, eu-oi-oi-oi&quot; in Prince Caspian?" Tags="&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18288" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18297" CreationDate="2021-04-07T17:54:04.473" Score="2" ViewCount="65" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a novel by John Galsworthy, &lt;em&gt;A Stoic,&lt;/em&gt; written at the beginning of the XX century (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2684/2684-h/2684-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;), and I've come across a sentence I’m finding quite tricky to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are—aren't you?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context is as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Sit down. Isn't washing one's head awful?”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Bob Pillin answered feebly:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Of course, I haven't much experience.”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her mouth opened.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;“Oh! You are—aren't you?”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conversation stops here, and that left me without more context to try and grasp the meaning of the question. My guess is that it could be something ironic like “you are experienced in washing your head, aren’t you?”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastEditorUserId="12613" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T07:13:04.360" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T22:53:17.450" Title="What is the meaning of the sentence “You are--aren't you?” in this novel by John Galsworthy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;a-stoic&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18289" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18283" CreationDate="2021-04-07T18:34:44.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apricot here is a color, the color of the horizon as the sun was setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11201" LastActivityDate="2021-04-07T18:34:44.143" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18290" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18300" CreationDate="2021-04-07T21:50:20.350" Score="2" ViewCount="40" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the William Somerset Maugham short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://kazhomereading.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/the-man-with-the-scar.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Man with the Scar&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the general considers the gesture of the rebel as a noble gesture. I don't understand why. He killed his love, the girl didn't kill herself, so why this murder is considered noble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12614" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T07:43:16.137" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:50:12.370" Title="Why is the gesture of the rebel noble in &quot;The Man with the Scar&quot;?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;william-somerset-maugham&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18291" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18286" CreationDate="2021-04-08T00:16:37.223" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A settlement of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;six thousand pounds at four and a half per cent&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;means that £6,000 has been invested at a return of 4.5% interest on the capital. The interest is paid out to the investor, whoever the person the investor has ‘settled’ it on. In this case it is Mrs Larne who is so ‘entitled’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lady is about to receive the first of her quarterly  instalments of the interest, though by my calculation 1/4 of 4.5% on 6,000 would be £67 and 10 shillings rather than £60. Perhaps the rest gets eaten up in bankers’ charges.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T14:04:40.323" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T14:04:40.323" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18292" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18287" CreationDate="2021-04-08T00:38:21.830" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apparently ’euoi’ is a ‘cry of impassioned rapture in ancient Bacchic revels’, per &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euoi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;wiktionary&lt;/a&gt; and ‘Euan’ or ‘Euhan’ is a Latin name for Bacchus, per &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/lookup.pl?stem=euan&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Notre Dame University&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T00:38:21.830" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18293" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-08T07:22:18.583" Score="11" ViewCount="502" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a novel by John Galsworthy, &lt;em&gt;A Stoic,&lt;/em&gt; written at the beginning of the 20th century  (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2684/2684-h/2684-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;),  and I've come across this peculiar use of the word “drumstick”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is obviously always ringing for &amp;quot;the drumstick,&amp;quot; and saying: &amp;quot;Where's this, Ellen, and where's that?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is clear from the context the author is referring to a servant, but I don’t understand why someone would call someone else a drumstick. Could it be a physical description or something else? The servant is later described as a “little maid”. The quotation marks around “the drumstick” were included in the original text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T17:32:48.500" Title="What is the meaning of “the drumstick” in this novel by John Galsworthy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;a-stoic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18294" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18293" CreationDate="2021-04-08T11:40:55.587" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following definition for 'Drumstick':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Used of a person. Obsolete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The precise implication of this use in the 17th cent. is unclear, although with quot. 1602   cf. drum n.1 2b. Later examples generally have some implication of thinness or tallness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;None of the examples given are as late as the setting of the Galsworthy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are three other examples in the text of people being referred to as 'sticks':&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;His son Ernest—in the Admiralty—he thought a poor, careful stick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Her eyes rested on Bob Pillin. “That young man's a perfect stick of goodness.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Who would dance with a dry stick like that, all eaten up with a piety which was just sexual disappointment?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The maid at the Larne household, whom I assume is 'Ellen' is described several times as being 'little', so it may be possible that there is something of a diminutive implication in 'drumstick'. This may be supported by two of the quotations included in the OED example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1602   T. Dekker &lt;em&gt;Satiro-mastix&lt;/em&gt; sig. Hv   &lt;em&gt;Asi&lt;/em&gt;. Hold Capten Tucca holde... Tuc. What, dost summon a parlie my little Drum-sticke?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1836   T. C. Haliburton &lt;em&gt;Clockmaker&lt;/em&gt; 1st Ser. xxx. 199   Every drumstick of a boy ridicules the belief of his forefathers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though as noted, both of these date from significantly earlier than the text in question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit:&#xA;There is one other possibility which strikes me, which I prefer and which might more account for the use of inverted commas for 'drumstick'. There is a reference later in the paragraph to the tea-tray carrying a liqueur bottle. A glass of the liqueur is drunk by Jock when he is supposed to be pouring it for Heythorp because he pours it into a glass which has already been used.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It isn't clear what the liqueur is, it is only described as being yellow. I wonder if the bottle or decanter is what is being referred to as 'the drumstick', some bottles do have that quality to their shape. Specifically the bottle used for Hock, Reislings Mosels etc which is known in German as 'Schlegelflasche' which translates as 'flail bottle'. A flail in this context is a mallet, which has similarity in form to the kind of drumsticks used for large bass drums of the kind used in military bands. Some sources translate the bottle name as 'drumstick bottle'.&#xA;The bottle style is also used for sweeter dessert wines which may just squeak into the definition of 'liqueur'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T14:53:34.720" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T14:53:34.720" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18295" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18296" CreationDate="2021-04-08T16:33:01.727" Score="8" ViewCount="1623" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, Blick, a detective who had booked rooms at &amp;quot;Sceptre Inn&amp;quot;, which belonged to Grimsdale, was cheerful after reaching an important conclusion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Arrived at this conclusion, Blick felt somewhat cheerful. He refilled and lighted his pipe, put his hands in his pockets, and lounged out of his sitting-room, across the hall, and into the bar-parlour. &lt;strong&gt;This was years before the imposition of those rigorous licensing restrictions which now prevent the free-born Englishman from taking his ease in his inn whenever he feels so disposed&lt;/strong&gt;, and though it was only five o’clock in the afternoon the cosy bar-parlour contained several customers—village idlers who were discussing the inquest and the tragedy that had given rise to it. All and each already knew Blick as the great London detective who had come there to find out who had killed poor young Master Guy, and to hang that same varmint when found, and they stared at Blick’s light hair, blue eyes, chubby countenance, and smart town clothes as if wondering how such a youthful-looking cherub could possibly possess the faculties of a ferret and the persistency of a foxhound. But Blick, beyond giving them a friendly nod, paid no attention to these patriarchs and wiseacres—he fully intended to cultivate their acquaintance at some future time, but just then he wanted a word or two with Grimsdale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know the literal meaning of this bolded statement, but I can't get its connection to the context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-08T16:33:59.043" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T10:19:09.587" Title="How was the free-born Englishman prevented from taking his ease in his inn in 1922?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18296" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18295" CreationDate="2021-04-08T21:17:12.247" Score="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_licensing_laws_of_the_United_Kingdom#History&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After the outbreak of World War I the Defence of the Realm Act was&#xA;passed by Parliament in 1914. One section of the Act concerned the&#xA;hours pubs could sell alcohol, as it was believed that alcohol&#xA;consumption would interfere with the war effort.  It restricted&#xA;opening hours for licensed premises to luncheon (12:00 to 14:40) and&#xA;supper (18:30 to 22:30).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the story is set pre-War and customers are drinking at five o’clock in the afternoon, something that would no longer be legal at the date of publication (a restriction of an Englishman's rights, disapproved by the author).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T21:17:12.247" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18297" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18288" CreationDate="2021-04-08T22:53:17.450" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think the sentence refers back to what was said just a little earlier. Phyllis said &amp;quot;Don't be foolish. Sit down. Isn't washing one's head awful?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think when she says &amp;quot;You are--aren't you?&amp;quot; she means to say &amp;quot;You are foolish, aren't you?&amp;quot;. She's making fun of his feeble answer. I think it makes sense because she was also making fun of him earlier when he was looking in the mirror and it says &amp;quot;A clear, high, mocking voice said 'Oh-h! Conceited young man!'&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12621" LastActivityDate="2021-04-08T22:53:17.450" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18299" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-09T03:40:50.847" Score="3" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; series was originally written by Jacques for the students of the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.rsblind.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The school's official website&quot;&gt;Royal Wavertree School for the Blind&lt;/a&gt;. This is pretty well documented, from the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwallabbey.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The official Redwall and Brian Jacques website&quot;&gt;official website&lt;/a&gt; (click on &amp;quot;About Brian&amp;quot; and scroll down):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brian wrote Redwall for the children at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool, where as a truck driver, he delivered milk. In appreciation of his first audience, he made his style of writing as descriptive as possible, &amp;quot;painting pictures with words&amp;quot; as he termed it, hoping the schoolchildren could engage with his tales in their imaginations. He was to become a long term friend and supporter of the school, serving as a board member and raising funds through a variety of charitable events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/milkman-wrote-redwall-childrens-books/2011/02/10/ABHRqiF_story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Link to paywalled Washington Post article&quot;&gt;Washington Post obituary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I thought, 'What's wrong with a little bit of magic in their [the students'] lives?' &amp;quot; Mr. Jacques said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He spent every night of the following seven months writing a mystical 800-page tale, which he scrawled longhand on recycled paper and kept in a grocery bag.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I haven't been able to find any information on &lt;strong&gt;what the students themselves thought of the book&lt;/strong&gt; or the series in general.* I assume if Jacques would have provided copies or done a reading, especially since it seems he didn't plan to publish the book widely at first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a record of any of the students reading &lt;em&gt;Redwall&lt;/em&gt; (or any later book in the series), and what they thought of the book? Did they enjoy the carefully descriptive writing as Jacques hoped for?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;* I would include that research here except it's a whole lot of nothing. Perhaps I'm using the wrong keywords?&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T03:40:50.847" Title="What did the students at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind think of &quot;Redwall&quot;?" Tags="&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;reception&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18300" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18290" CreationDate="2021-04-09T07:50:12.370" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The revolutionary general's wife is young and beautiful. Since he is about to be executed for treason, her life is going to change a lot. She will likely be imprisoned or tortured to reveal what she knows about her husband's activities—e.g., other conspirators in the rebellion, etc.. As a woman, she is also vulnerable to sexual assault in this situation. To protect her from this harsh life, her husband murders her instead. A sexist and rather antiquated notion of honor, but one that prevailed in the time and place that this story is set.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T07:50:12.370" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18302" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-09T10:19:33.030" Score="1" ViewCount="117" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This verse has been taken from the poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/poem/8619891-Opportunity-by-Walter-Malone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Opportunity&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by Walter Malone.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &amp;quot;a star&amp;quot; symbolize here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Does the &amp;quot;night&amp;quot; in the poem literally mean &amp;quot;night&amp;quot;, or something else?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12625" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T14:44:56.993" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T05:00:11.633" Title="What does &quot;a star&quot; symbolize here?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;symbolism&gt;&lt;walter-malone&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18303" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2579" CreationDate="2021-04-09T11:23:41.767" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sheila = envy - jealous of Eva's looks&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Eric = gluttony - overindulgence in alcohol&#xA;(&amp;quot;squiffy&amp;quot;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mr B = greed - capitalist, sacks Eva for asking for a&#xA;pay rise&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mrs B = pride - refuses to help Eva after using the&#xA;Birlings name, disregards the lower class as&#xA;she thinks she is better than them (&amp;quot;girls of&#xA;that class&amp;quot;)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gerald = lust - adultery with Eva&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12626" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T11:33:19.393" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T11:33:19.393" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18304" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18293" CreationDate="2021-04-09T13:57:00.347" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think that this is intended as a deliberate, humorous mispronunciation of &amp;quot;domestic&amp;quot;, which would be short for &amp;quot;domestic servant&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A possible origin would as a childish &amp;quot;eggcorn&amp;quot;.  In particular, a young child (many of whom have difficulties with &amp;quot;R&amp;quot;) might mistake the word &amp;quot;domestic&amp;quot; for the word &amp;quot;drumstick&amp;quot;.  Rosamund, the widowed mother of two young children might well have entered into the private language of the family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've no evidence that this was ever a common usage but if readers didn't get the joke, the meaning is clear enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="1032" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T17:32:48.500" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T17:32:48.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18307" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18308" CreationDate="2021-04-09T19:18:10.567" Score="3" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am reading &lt;em&gt;The Witcher - The Tower of Swallow&lt;/em&gt; in English and I would like to know what the following phrase means:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He ordered the people who had gathered to bring him a sack of salt&#xA;and a keg of vinegar. And a saw. I didn’t know... I couldn’t understand&#xA;what he meant to do... I still didn’t know what he was capable of. I&#xA;was tied... to the hitching post... He called some servants, ordered&#xA;them to hold me by the hair... and by the eyelids. He showed them how;&#xA;so I couldn’t turn my head away or close my eyes... So I had to watch&#xA;what he was doing. &lt;strong&gt;“You have to take pains so the goods won’t  go&#xA;off,”&lt;/strong&gt; he said. “So they won’t decay...”’ Ciri’s voice cracked,&#xA;stuck dryly in her throat. Vysogota, suddenly realising what he was&#xA;hearing, felt the saliva well up in his mouth like a flood wave. ‘He cut&#xA;off their heads,’ Ciri said dully. ‘With a saw. Giselher,&#xA;Kayleigh, Asse, Reef, Iskra... And Mistle. He sawed off their heads...&#xA;One after the other. In front of my eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Specifically the phrase 'You have to take pains so the goods won't go off'. I am not an English native speaker, but I think that 'You have to take pains' means that he tries really hard, but what does it mean for the goods to 'go off'?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12631" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T19:22:59.487" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T20:20:38.817" Title="&quot;You have to take pains so the goods won't go off&quot; from The Witcher" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;polish-literature&gt;&lt;the-witcher&gt;&lt;andrzej-sapkowski&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18308" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18307" CreationDate="2021-04-09T20:10:50.397" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Both parts of the phrase here are used in their dictionary meaning, but in a sarcastically sadistic manner, as with many things with Bonhart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/take+pains&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;To take pains&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; means to try very hard. One would think Bonhart was referring to having to cut the group's heads off and whatnot, but it's hardly a lot of work for him - he had just killed them all very easily, while everyone else the group had attack prior to that point couldn't.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hence, Bonhart isn't referring to the physical effort necessary to decapitate them, but to the nuisance of having to do so. He's done the crux of his job, which was to kill them and capture Ciri (although he was supposed to kill her as well), but now he's go to go into the trouble of doing this, just to prove to the person who commissioned him that he's done the deed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;go off&amp;quot;, it's once again the &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/go+off&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;dictionary meaning&lt;/a&gt;, in this case &amp;quot;to spoil&amp;quot;, e.g. when speaking of food. This is mainly where the sadistic part kicks in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bonhart has captured Ciri. He wasn't supposed to, but he did, with his own twisted agenda in mind. He disabled her physically, and now he's working to cripple her emotionally in order to prevent her from rebelling against him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He's just killed her friends in cold blood, and she had to watch while he did some of it. Then she failed to avenge them, when she attacked Bonhart and he dispatched her very easily as well, and with what - a single blow to the head with his hand. She even remarks in her inner monologue that he's bested her as if she was an incompetent little girl.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now on top of that, he's decapitating her friends' dead bodies. He doesn't &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; to do that - at this point, by capturing Ciri instead of killing her he's already breached his contract. He's doing this purely to further hurt Ciri emotionally, which is why he has her forcibly watch the whole thing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cutting their heads off solidifies their status as dead. Think of heads displayed on spikes - this is the same logic. However, he goes one step further: he's going to &lt;em&gt;dehumanise&lt;/em&gt; them, by reducing their last remains to &amp;quot;goods&amp;quot;, as if they weren't humans but some common commodity to him, and to something perishable, so that they evoke not only thoughts of death and mortality, but also of decomposition and rot, which is a big turn-off for most people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And he doesn't even have to do that either! When the people who hired him visit him earlier and later it's clear that they're not somewhere too far away. Even if they are, showing the group's dead bodies would be much easier than cutting their heads of to preserve them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He goes into all this &amp;quot;trouble&amp;quot; simply to show off to Ciri what a sadist he is, and he does so in a manner most disrespectful of her comrades.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11" LastEditorUserId="11" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T20:20:38.817" LastActivityDate="2021-04-09T20:20:38.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18309" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18310" CreationDate="2021-04-09T21:46:29.410" Score="3" ViewCount="161" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the author was describing Markenmore village:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Markenmore was a place of tiny thatched cottages, set in gardens and orchards, with here and there a substantial farmstead, set back from the road, in &lt;strong&gt;its&lt;/strong&gt; paddock or home-garth; its main feature stood in its midst—a grey old church, whose tower and spire rose high above the elms and poplars that fenced in the churchyard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think that the bolded &amp;quot;its&amp;quot; refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/farmstead&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the farmstead&lt;/a&gt;, but how can the farmstead, which is the larger thing, be situated in its paddock or home-garth, which is just a part from it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-09T21:53:00.173" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T02:55:08.757" Title="How can a farmstead be situated in its paddock?" Tags="&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18310" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18309" CreationDate="2021-04-10T02:55:08.757" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I believe the &lt;em&gt;farmstead&lt;/em&gt; here refers to the buildings on the farm, while the &lt;em&gt;paddock&lt;/em&gt; refers to the fenced-in land associated with the farm. The definition in the OED is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A plot of farmland and the buildings upon it; a homestead; a farmhouse and its adjacent outbuildings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third of these possibilities seems to limit the definition of &lt;em&gt;farmstead&lt;/em&gt; to just the farm's building, while there could be a lot of additional fenced-in grazing land, which would be the &lt;em&gt;paddock&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T02:55:08.757" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18311" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18302" CreationDate="2021-04-10T04:14:22.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;“Opportunity” by Walter Malone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you might observe from some of my previous posts, I like to keep things in context; so, before addressing your question about the last two lines of this poem, I find it prudent to unpack the previous lines first for sake of continuity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They do me wrong who say I come no more&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;When once I knock and fail to find you in;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For every day I stand outside your door,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The structure of the poem follows a “traditional” pattern of four-line stanzas consisting of abab rhyme scheme and each line having a “regular” ten syllable beat (iambic pentameter). Iambic pentameter—following the beat of a heart—is a fitting formula for themes of life. The first stanza with language such as “I come” (line 1) and “once I knock” (line 2) and “stand outside your door” (line 3) clearly alludes to the Revelation 3:30 which reads: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (KJV). If this is the case, it would essentially make Christ the narrator/persona of this poem. This establishes the themes of redemption, spiritual renewal, and “spiritual warfare” against the theme of remorse or regret for the rest of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The kinetic imagery of “wak[ing]” in the last line such as “fight[ing]” allude to 1 Timothy 6:12 “Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called, and hast professed a good profession before many witnesses” (KJV); and Joel “Prepare war, wake up the mighty men” (3:9, KJV) and depict life (especially the Christian life) as a battle (presumably against sin or against the sin nature—or temptation—or even the Devil). And a second allusion might be from 1 Thessalonians 5:10 which reads: “Who died for us, that, whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with him” (KJV). The Greek word for ‘wake’ here is γρηγορέω grēgoreō denoting: “to watch; metaphorically, give strict attention to, be cautious, active to take heed lest through remission and indolence some destructive calamity suddenly overtake one” (Perschbacher 83), in keeping with one of the themes of the poem—spiritual warfare.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wail not for precious chances passed away,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Weep not for golden ages on the wane!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each night I burn the records of the day-&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At sunrise every soul is born again!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second stanza, the archaic, sonic imagery of  the synonymous words “Wail” (line 1) and “Weep” (line 2)—denoting and emphasizing great remorse or sorrow— registers with biblical piquancy bringing a sorrowful tone of regret for missing “precious chances” (line 1) and the wan[ing] (i.e. diminishing opportunities of the “golden ages” (line 2) of the past) that is countered with the last phrase of the stanza “born again” (line 4)—biblical imagery denoting resurrection, new life, salvation, or a second chance, (see John 3:3: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (KJV)).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;My judgements seal the dead past with its dead,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But never bind a moment yet to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The theme of redemption or spiritual renewal continues the sonic imagery of “Laugh like a boy” (Stanza 3, line 1) conveys the notion a “youthful” or “childlike” response to those “missed opportunities” long gone to which the narrator encourages us to be “blind and deaf and dumb” (line 2) signifying—(without much of a stretch)—forgetting about it—as if we cannot see, or hear, or speak—they are now beyond our senses. The “past” (line 3) is so far gone or dismissed with “My (probably Christ/God) judgment” as they are “sealed”—that is to say locked and so far beyond reach and in fact “dead” (line 3) signifying beyond recovery. It is God in his mercy who makes the final ruling “judgment” (line 3) (ruling or decision) about the past (our past) and does not want us to be bound to the past, nor “bind a moment yet to come” (line 4). The word “bind” denotes being tied up; so that is to say, do not ruin the future, the “moment yet to come”, by being bound up (like a prisoner) to the past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and weep;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I lend my arm to all who say &amp;quot;I Can!&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No shame-faced outcast ever sank so deep,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But yet might rise and be again a man.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The negatively charged visual, kinetic, and sonic imagery of “mire” and “wring[ing]” of “hands” and “weep[ing]” (Stanza 4, line 1) further advances the waxing and waning tone of regret and remorse is again countered by Christ “lend[ing]” his “arm” (line 2) (giving aid) to anyone who “say I Can!” (line 2). The words “I Can” denotes the free agency of humankind—the God given ability to freely reach out for aid, succor, redemption. With reference to “Christian theology”, the gift of salvation is free, but is not forced upon us. The idea is captured in the Greek word for ‘receive’ which is Λαμβάνω (lambano) meaning: “to take; to take with the hand, lay hold of, any person or thing in order to use it”; as found in verses such as “John answered and said, A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven” (John 3:27, KJV). The point is that while the work of salvation is completed by Christ, and is a free gift (see Jn 3:16; Jn 4:10; Rm 5:15, et. al.), it is still left to us to accept it (i.e. receive it).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even the worst of people (or those in the worst condition) the “shamed-faced outcast[s]” (line 3) are redeemable and “might rise” and “be again a man.” The word “rise” again alludes to Christ’s resurrection in which we too might “rise” (that is, be reborn or “born again”). And “be again a man” denotes, in our “rebirth” realizing true humanity through Christ. Again, with reference to Christian theology, it is to say, Christ is the second Adam (the second man) and where the first Adam failed (succumbed to temptation; see Genesis 3) the second Adam succeeds (triumphs over temptation (see Matthew 4:1-11, cf Luke 4:1-13) and thus sets the example of true humanity realizing for us “to be a man again” like the second Adam—the perfect Adam—the quintessential, complete, or archetypical human being.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dost reel from righteous Retribution's blow?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Then turn from blotted archives of the past,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And find the future's pages white as snow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair of rhetorical questions in the fifth stanza again propel the theme of regret and remorse about the past “lost youth” (line 1) which in reflection of the penitent heart one is “aghast” denoting shock and horror (presumably from one’s sins). The term “blotted” (line 3) is replete in the Bible (King James Version) and is often found in context of biblical themes such as spiritual depravation and salvation in passages such as: “And the LORD said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book” (Exodus 32:33, KJV); or “He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels” (Revelation 3:5, KJV). Together with the word “archives” (line 3) (similar to “book”) carries the notion of a tome in which sins are recorded (or a list of the elect to be saved) and serves to solidify the biblical imagery of spiritual depravity and salvation. The final line of the stanza “pages white as snow” (line 4) also gives us significant visual biblical imagery and allusions hard to miss from passages such as: “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool” (Isaiah 1:18, KJV) and perpetuates the salvific theme of the poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The final stanza also begins with two rhetorical questions which nearly register as a sort of liturgical “call and response” in which the negatively charged, rhetorical questions “Art thou a mourner?” and “Art thou a sinner? are answered by the positive imperative “Rouse thee” (stanza 6, line 1) and the redemptive “Sins may be forgiven” (line 2) respectively. To be in mourn[ing] is to be in a state of grief and thus void of joy and is to like being under a “spell” (line 1) denoting under the influence of a curse—that is to say the oppression of sin—and decidedly not a state for one “born again” (i.e. a Christian) to remain. The “spell” is broken or remedied by the forgiveness of “Sins” (line 2) and this forgiveness is like “wings to flee from “hell” (line 3); and a guiding “star.” The significance of the “star” (line 4) is pregnant with biblical allusion. It is the wisemen (the μάγοι magoi) who follow the star to Christ (Mt 2:1) and “worship him” (Mt. 2:2)—and this star which “guide[s] thy feet to heaven” (line 6). Additionally, the “morning” and the “night” complete the cycle of a day (cf Genesis 1:5 “And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day” (KJV). We have the notion of completion—salvation is complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Furthermore 'star' (in Hebrew: כּוֹכָב ko-kawb') conveys: of Messiah, brothers, youth, numerous progeny, personification, God's omniscience (fig.) (Botterweck 7: 75-85). Metaphorically, in the Old Testament, a star represents eternal life awaiting faithful Jews who are “wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Daniel 12:3, KJV) (Botterweck 7: 82). Arguably this blessing is also transferred to Christians as well who are adopted into the family of God.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another sense, since star is light, it is also holy. In Genesis “God divided the light from the darkness” (1:4, KJV). The Hebrew word for divide here is בָּדַל baw-dal' and signifies “to separate; set apart” (Davidson 66). The notion of “set apart” in Hebrew is from the word קֹדֶשׁ ko'-desh denoting holiness (Davidson 674)—hence the light (the star) is made holy by being separated and could be symbolic of Christ (the Holy One) who “guide(s) our feet to heaven.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bauer, Walter, et. al. &lt;em&gt;A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament&lt;/em&gt;. University of Chicago Press, 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Botterweck, G. Johannes. T&lt;em&gt;heological Dictionary of the Old Testament&lt;/em&gt; (16 volumes). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Davidson, Benjamin. &lt;em&gt;Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 1981.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Perschbacher, Wesley. &lt;em&gt;The Analytical Greek Lexicon&lt;/em&gt;. Hendrickson Publishers, 1990.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Holy Bible,&lt;/em&gt; Authorized King James Version, Thomas Nelson, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T05:00:11.633" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T05:00:11.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18312" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5956" CreationDate="2021-04-10T11:42:04.153" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Several of Thomas Hardy's neighbours at Higher Bockhampton were named Keats. One of them was my 4x great grandfather, James Keats. He was orphaned at the age of two, in 1779, along with his six year old brother, Thomas Keats. My essay, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/0952414212Z.00000000011&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;John Keats's Father: A New Theory&amp;quot;, published in &lt;em&gt;The Keats-Shelley Review&lt;/em&gt; vol.26 number 2, September 2012&lt;/a&gt;, theorises that this Thomas Keats was the poet's father, and throws a bit more light on the connection between Hardy and Keats.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12637" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-10T13:19:29.423" LastActivityDate="2021-04-10T13:19:29.423" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18314" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="10898" CreationDate="2021-04-11T03:03:21.680" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Allardyce, he was the skeletor compass. And Darby McGraw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12655" LastEditorUserId="12655" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T03:20:19.200" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T03:20:19.200" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18315" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-11T05:15:14.217" Score="0" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;Was Ewing Klipspringer supposed to be a gay character in &amp;quot;The Great Gatsby&amp;quot;? My theory is that he &lt;strong&gt;is&lt;/strong&gt; gay, considering there is textual evidence, and that he lives in Gatsby's home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here are some quotes that I found that support this theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Klipspringer had played The Love Nest he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is from page 95 of &lt;em&gt;The Great Gatsby&lt;/em&gt;. It states that Klipspringer searched unhappily at Gatsby in the gloom. It also states that Klipspringer turned around the bench, which could indicate some form of romance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More evidence can be found on page 62:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man named Klipspringer was there so often and for so long that he became known as 'the boarder' - I doubt if he had any other home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is really strong evidence that proves Klipspringer is gay, considering even Nick doubts Klipspringer &amp;quot;had any other home&amp;quot; - indicating he has moved into the house and searched for love in Gatsby.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that after Gatsby died Klipspringer only called for a butler to send a pair of tennis shoes and didn't attend his funeral. Despite this, based on the evidence shown, Klipspringer seemed to love him, looking &amp;quot;unhappily at him in the gloom&amp;quot; and having no other home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any other evidence that characterizes Klipspringer as gay? (essays from scholars, etc.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12656" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-11T23:57:06.110" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T06:01:34.127" Title="Was Ewing Klipspringer supposed to be a gay character in &quot;The Great Gatsby&quot;?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;f-scott-fitzgerald&gt;&lt;the-great-gatsby&gt;&lt;sexuality&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18316" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-11T05:27:23.530" Score="1" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the play &amp;quot;On the Face of It&amp;quot;, why did Derry's mother not allow Derry to go back to Mr. Lamb? What had she heard and been warned about Mr. Lamb from others?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12657" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T06:03:42.830" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T06:03:42.830" Title="Why would Derry's mother not allow Derry to go back to Mr. Lamb?" Tags="&lt;susan-hill&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18317" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-11T11:55:37.287" Score="2" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read somewhere that Maupassant wrote ten short stories on the 1870 war between France and Prussia. I know &amp;quot;Boule de suif&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Deux amis&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Un duel&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Madame Sauvage&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Mademoiselle Fifi&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are the five other stories?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12658" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T19:37:22.630" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T19:37:22.630" Title="Which Maupassant short stories are set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18318" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-11T22:26:12.407" Score="4" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;The setting and story of &lt;em&gt;The Chronicles of Narnia&lt;/em&gt; are strongly linked to Christianity: Aslan, who sacrifices himself for a traitor in &lt;em&gt;The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe&lt;/em&gt; before returning to life, represents &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/q/117792/31394&quot;&gt;and literally is&lt;/a&gt; Jesus Christ, and much has been written about the Christian symbolism and allegory in the Narnia books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At one point in &lt;em&gt;Prince Caspian&lt;/em&gt;, the ancient Graeco-Roman god Bacchus (Dionysus) shows up, along with &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silenus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Silenus&lt;/a&gt; and a bunch of others, for what seems to be a full-on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacchanalia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bacchanalia&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this figure of ancient polytheism fit into the Christian story of Narnia?&lt;/strong&gt; Of course, nature spirits like &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dryads&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naiad&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;naiads&lt;/a&gt; are already not very consistent with Christianity, but it does feel consistent with the whole Narnian thing of talking animals. Bacchus, however, isn't a minor unnamed figure in Graeco-Roman mythology - he's one of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ancient.eu/collection/58/the-12-olympian-gods/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;big twelve&lt;/a&gt; Olympian gods! How come he shows up as a minor figure in the Narnian mythos, apparently summoned by Christ/Aslan?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-11T22:26:12.407" Title="How does Bacchus fit into the Christian allegory of Narnia?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;c-s-lewis&gt;&lt;the-chronicles-of-narnia&gt;&lt;religion&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18319" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2765" CreationDate="2021-04-12T01:34:49.587" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sarah Zellaby, the Calculating Priestess, per &lt;em&gt;Imaginary Numbers&lt;/em&gt; (published in 2020) and &lt;em&gt;Calculated Risks&lt;/em&gt; (published in 2021).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Imaginary Numbers&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The Calculating Princess conducts the Rites and Rituals of her Kind,” squeaked a voice next to my ear. I glanced to the side. The Aeslin mouse standing on my shoulder ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12664" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T12:51:47.623" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T12:51:47.623" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18321" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-12T16:09:20.060" Score="4" ViewCount="101" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a short story by Maupassant, a young man is upset by the past infidelities of his mistress, a rather paradoxical situation since he came much later after the infidelities (and somehow benefited himself from them). I would like to identify that short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12658" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-12T18:20:50.257" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T12:15:23.997" Title="Identification of a Maupassant short story where a young man is upset by the past infidelities of his mistress" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;guy-de-maupassant&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18322" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18317" CreationDate="2021-04-12T19:36:43.137" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I have found the following stories by Maupassant that are situation during the Franco-Prussian war:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Mariage_du_lieutenant_Lar%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Mariage du lieutenant Laré&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1878; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Boule_de_Suif_-_Correspondance/Le_Mariage_du_lieutenant_Lar%C3%A9&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le Mariage du lieutenant Laré&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Folle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Folle&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1882; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse_(Havard,_1894)/La_Folle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;La Folle&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Aventure_de_Walter_Schnaffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;L'Aventure de Walter Schnaffs&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1883; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse_(Havard,_1894)/L%E2%80%99Aventure_de_Walter_Schnaffs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;L’Aventure de Walter Schnaffs&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A8re_Milon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Père Milon&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1883; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A8re_Milon_(recueil)/Le_P%C3%A8re_Milon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Le Père Milon&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Antoine_(Maupassant)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Saint-Antoine&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1883; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Contes_de_la_b%C3%A9casse_(Havard,_1894)/Saint-Antoine&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Saint-Antoine&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Rois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Les Rois&lt;/a&gt;, published in 1887; see &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Horla_(recueil,_Ollendorff_1895)/Les_Rois&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Les Rois&amp;quot; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that Maupassant wrote &lt;strong&gt;eleven short stories that are set during the Franco-Prussian war&lt;/strong&gt;, unless I overlooked one (or more).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T19:36:43.137" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18323" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-12T20:05:57.447" Score="12" ViewCount="1326" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Theodor Fontane's &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/248/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;which I'm reading online&lt;/a&gt;, during the wedding of Effi and Innstetten in Chapter V:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The dancing had continued till three o'clock, with the effect that Briest, who had been gradually talking himself into the highest pitch of champagne excitement, had made various remarks about the torch dance, still in vogue at many courts, and the remarkable custom of the garter dance. Since these remarks showed no signs of coming to an end, and kept getting worse and worse, they finally reached the point where they simply had to be choked off. &amp;quot;Pull yourself together, Briest,&amp;quot; his wife had whispered to him in a rather earnest tone; &amp;quot;you are not here for the purpose of making indecent remarks, but of doing the honors of the house. We are having at present a wedding and not a hunting party.&amp;quot; Whereupon von Briest answered; &amp;quot;I see no difference between the two; besides, I am happy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are &amp;quot;the torch dance&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;the garter dance&amp;quot;, in the context of 19th-century Germany? Do these phrases refer to some kind of &amp;quot;indecent&amp;quot; dances, as suggested by his wife's comment? Also, what is the significance of &amp;quot;hunting party&amp;quot;? Does it suggest a men-only gathering where &amp;quot;indecent remarks&amp;quot; might be more rife?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T21:43:54.290" Title="What are the &quot;torch dance&quot; and &quot;garter dance&quot;, in 19th-century Germany?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;cultural-context&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18324" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18316" CreationDate="2021-04-12T21:22:54.063" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The story doesn't say.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In all the conversation between Derry and Mr Lamb, they talk about people's negative reactions to the boy with the burned face, but nothing about people's negative reactions to the old man with the tin leg. Perhaps this reflects the two characters' different outlooks on life. Mr Lamb is relentlessly positive and optimistic: he shows Derry that he can be as successful as anyone else despite his burned face; he loves all of his plants in the same way, whether they're &amp;quot;weeds&amp;quot; or flowers and fruits; he speaks positively about the people he knows too:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MR LAMB: Friends everywhere. People come in.... everybody knows me. The gate’s always open. They come and sit here. And in front of the fire in winter. Kids come for the apples and pears. And for toffee. I make toffee with honey. Anybody comes. So have you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's possible that his optimistic outlook conceals some more negative things as well. Clearly, not everyone likes or trusts him. But he's not the kind of person to care about the negativity of his neighbours. He's fine with everyone, whether they like him or not. He's a person to see the good in everyone, and not to care about the bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since his words are about the only insight we get into his own life, we don't know about the things he doesn't care enough to talk about, like people's negativity towards him. The only hint we get is from the words of Derry's mother:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MOTHER: You think I don’t know about him, you think I haven’t heard things?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;DERRY: You shouldn’t believe all you hear.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;MOTHER: Been told. Warned. We’ve not lived here three months, but I know what there is to  know and you’re not to go back there.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My interpretation is that &lt;strong&gt;closed-minded people don't appreciate open-minded ones&lt;/strong&gt;. People who are open-minded, who think differently from others rather than accepting how society tells them to think, are often spurned or even hated by others around them. Those who don't or can't think for themselves, who live in echo chambers or accept standard views unquestioningly, tend to resent those who think outside the box - envying them, or not understanding them, or not liking to have their own assumptions challenged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derry is in a situation to appreciate Mr Lamb. He's young enough for his mind to be still fairly supple, not fixed in stone by the norms of adulthood. The unthinking assumptions of people around him have generally had a negative effect on him - people who judge him by his face, strangers who say he will never be loved, parents who think he won't be able to manage in the world when they're gone - so challenging those assumptions can only be a positive thing for him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But others who know Mr Lamb may not have been so appreciative of his wisdom. Maybe they kept the same attitude as Derry had at first: angrily refuting the old man's unconvential statements. I could imagine a closed-minded person thinking &amp;quot;everyone knows weeds aren't worth as much as flowers, what is this stupid old man talking about?&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;of course people aren't all equally valuable, why did I work so hard to become an important person in society then?&amp;quot; Challenging people's assumptions, especially those unspoken but unthinkingly accepted, always gets them edgy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Maybe other children came to Mr Lamb's house and enjoyed learning from him and his fresh outlook on the world, but then came back home to their parents with some of those &amp;quot;difficult&amp;quot; views. The only thing more uncomfortable than meeting a stranger challenging your worldview with his open-mindedness would be having that same challenging open-mindedness in your own home from your own children. Families have been estranged over less. It could have been some such parents who &amp;quot;warned&amp;quot; Derry's mother about Mr Lamb and his dangerous influences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possibility is that there really is something bad about Mr Lamb that we never have the chance to discover because he dies before Derry can get to know him better. This &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/8377/17&quot;&gt;tantalising conclusion&lt;/a&gt; to the story leaves so many questions unanswered and unresolved. Like Derry, we're left feeling that here was a fascinating personality that we could've enjoyed getting to know better - but maybe more time with him would've revealed some unexpected negative aspects. This interpretation could be supported by the following line Mr Lamb utters to himself just after Derry leaves promising to come back:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;MR LAMB: There my dears [his bees]. That’s you seen to. Ah....you know. We all know. I’ll come back. They never do, though. Not them. Never do come back.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does this suggest Mr Lamb was lying when he said &amp;quot;Anybody comes&amp;quot; to his home, to sit with him and share his food? It could be interpreted as meaning he has something to hide.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's still consistent with my interpretation, though. Even if nobody comes back to him, it doesn't mean he's not worth coming back to. It could be the same attitude we see from Derry's mother, rather than any real problem with him, that keeps them from coming back. Some of them dislike his open-mindedness and prefer not to be exposed to it; others, such as children, may be prevented from returning by their parents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T21:22:54.063" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18325" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18323" CreationDate="2021-04-12T21:43:54.290" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Torch dance&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is the translation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fackeltanz&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fackeltanz&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.wachsfackeln.de/fackeltanz.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fackeltanz&lt;/a&gt; is similair to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonaise&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;polonaise&lt;/a&gt; but the dancers hold torches or candles in their hands and move according to fixed patterns. There is nothing indecent about this dance. In fact, it was still danced at the wedding of emperor Wilhelms II's daughter Viktoria Luise with Ernst August zu Braunschweig und Lüneburg in 1913 (see &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.welt.de/geschichte/article116156829/Die-letzte-grosse-Adelsparty-vor-dem-grossen-Krieg.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Die letzte große Adelsparty vor dem großen Krieg&lt;/a&gt; by Claudia Becker, 4.05.2013).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The &lt;strong&gt;remarkable custom of the garter dance&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; is the translation of &amp;quot;die merkwürdige Sitte des Strumpfband-Austanzens&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Strumpfband&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;garter&amp;quot;. The literal meanings of &amp;quot;austanzen&amp;quot; that were in use in the 19th century were (according to &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vsEOAAAAYAAJ/page/n245/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Heinsius's &lt;em&gt;Vollständiges Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1828):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(...) bis zu Ende tanzen: einen Walter; 2) (...) aufhören zu tanzen.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation: 1) dance [a dance] to the end (e.g. a waltz); 2) stop dancing. (These literal meanings are not listed in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dwds.de/wb/austanzen&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;DWDS&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dieter Wöhrle's edition of &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt; (Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek. Suhrkamp, 2004) explains in an endnote that the &amp;quot;garter dance&amp;quot; was the final dance of a wedding, which involves a kind of game of forfeits (Pfänderspiel) during which the bride's garter is cut into pieces and given to the guests as a memento.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wöhrle does not suggest that this might be considered &amp;quot;indecent&amp;quot;. The issue is probably that Effi's father has had too much champagne and does not stop talking, so his wife stops him before he makes an ambiguous remark. Note that the German text says &amp;quot;Zweideutigkeiten&amp;quot;, which literally means &amp;quot;ambiguities&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;double entendres&amp;quot;, rather than exclusively &amp;quot;indecent remarks&amp;quot;, which don't have an innocuous primary meaning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-04-12T21:43:54.290" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18326" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T02:56:15.630" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T02:56:15.630" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T02:56:15.630" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18327" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T02:56:15.630" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;Ape and Essence&quot; (1948) by Aldous Huxley. It is a dystopia which satirizes large-scale warfare. Use with [aldous-huxley] " OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T05:50:56.233" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T05:50:56.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18328" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:00:24.010" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T03:00:24.010" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T03:00:24.010" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18329" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:00:24.010" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novel &quot;Childhood's End&quot; (1953) by Arthur C. Clarke. In it, aliens called the Overlords peacefully invade Earth and set off an apparent utopia. Use with [arthur-c-clarke]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T05:50:46.677" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T05:50:46.677" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18330" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:13:26.627" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T03:13:26.627" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T03:13:26.627" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18331" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:13:26.627" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel &quot;A Stoic&quot; (1918) by John Galsworthy, originally released in &quot;Five Tales&quot;. Use with [john-galsworthy]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T05:50:30.337" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T05:50:30.337" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18332" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:19:07.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T03:19:07.403" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T03:19:07.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18333" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T03:19:07.403" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of American poet Walter Malone (1866 – 1915), or his life as a writer. Notable works include &quot;Opportunity&quot; and the epic &quot;De Soto&quot;." OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T05:50:52.197" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T05:50:52.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18334" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T06:16:35.663" Score="2" ViewCount="30" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Theodor Fontane's &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/250/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which I'm reading online&lt;/a&gt;, an exchange between Effi and her mother in Chapter IV seems to betray Effi's lack of love for her fiance Innstetten. Later, in Chapter V, after the wedding is over, Effi's parents are discussing the same incident that we saw in Chapter IV:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Unless I am mistaken, it was just three weeks ago, and we were sitting in the garden, busied with all sorts of things belonging to her trousseau, when Wilke brought a letter from Innstetten. She put it in her pocket and a quarter of an hour later had wholly forgotten about it, till I reminded her that she had a letter. Then she read it, but the expression of her face hardly changed. I confess to you that an axious feeling came over me, so intense that I felt a strong desire to have all the light on the matter that it is possible to have under the circumstances.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Very true, very true.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;What do you mean by that?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, I mean only- But that is wholly immaterial. Go on with your story; I am all ears.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Clearly Effi's father was about to say something, or is implying something with his &amp;quot;very true&amp;quot;. From the way this is written, it seems that the reader is expected to understand the unspoken undercurrent in this exchange, but I can't figure it out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What did he mean by his &amp;quot;very true&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt; Does it signify something about their relationship? Or am I reading far too much into this passage?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T06:16:35.663" Title="What was Briest implying with his &quot;Very true, very true&quot;?" Tags="&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18335" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-13T14:10:30.710" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="-1" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T14:10:30.710" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T14:10:30.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18336" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-13T14:10:30.710" Score="0" Body="Questions about the webcomic series &quot;Sunstone&quot; (launched 2011), written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić. It is an erotic romantic comedy about a group of friends who are mutually interested in BDSM. Use with [comics]" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T20:20:35.607" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T20:20:35.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18337" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18338" CreationDate="2021-04-13T14:47:31.173" Score="5" ViewCount="89" Body="&lt;p&gt;I can't understand this paragraph from &lt;em&gt;Five Children and It&lt;/em&gt;. What does it mean? Please explain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The shadows got longer and longer, and at last there were no separate shadows any more, but one soft glowing shadow over everything; for the sun was out of sight—behind the hill—but he had not really set yet. &lt;strong&gt;The people who make the laws about lighting bicycle lamps are the people who decide when the sun sets; he has to do it too, to the minute, or they would know the reason why!&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12672" LastEditorUserId="12672" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T15:19:39.203" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T00:32:25.023" Title="Explanation of a pargraph from &quot;Five Children and It&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;e-nesbit&gt;&lt;five-children-and-it&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18338" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18337" CreationDate="2021-04-13T15:20:45.897" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;My reading of it is that it is a wry jab at the 'sort of people who make laws about lighting bicycle lamps'. The narrator judges them to be bossy sort of people who like their word to be law. Hence if the sun did not set at its appointed time they would demand that the sun provide them with an adequate explanation of his aberrant behaviour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9yLDS.png&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/9yLDS.png&quot; alt=&quot;20thC Lithograph cartoon of a large woman gripping her browbeaten husband by the arm, telling him 'You vote as I vote or I'll know the reason why'&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The rules surrounding lighting bicycle lamps at that time were to be found in the Local Government Act of 1888 and state:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bicycles, tricycles, velocipedes, and other similar machines are hereby declared to be carriages within the meaning of the Highway Acts ; and the following additional regulations shall be observed by- any person or persons riding or being upon such carriage :-&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(a.) During the period between one hour after sunset and one&#xA;hour before sunrise, every person, riding or being upon such&#xA;carriage shall carry attached to the carriage a lamp, which&#xA;shall be so constructed and placed as to exhibit a light in the&#xA;direction in which he is proceeding, and so lighted and kept lighted, as to afford adequate means of signalling the approach&#xA;or position of the carriage ;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is interesting to note that while current laws require the use of lights 'between sunset and sunrise' the older rules allowed for riding un-illuminated in the twilight for an hour at each end of the day.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T18:00:54.670" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T18:00:54.670" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18339" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T18:13:19.733" Score="2" ViewCount="58" Body="&lt;p&gt;Victor Pelevin is presumably the most best-selling contemporary writer in Russia. Several of his books have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.amazon.com/s?k=pelevin&amp;amp;ref=nb_sb_noss_1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated&lt;/a&gt; to English, but none of them became even slightly popular among the Western audience. Why is it so given that Pelevin's books are extremely popular in Russia? There certainly must be some other reasons apart from simply cultural context because, for instance, S.N.U.F.F. storyline takes place in a quite globalistic intercultural environment.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12674" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T08:28:46.053" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T08:28:46.053" Title="Why did Victor Pelevin's books fail to get such popularity as they had in Russia?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;reception&gt;&lt;victor-pelevin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ClosedDate="2021-04-15T08:15:20.440" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18340" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-13T18:52:01.980" Score="3" ViewCount="344" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dexter emptied his bowl for the last time, then lifted it in both hands and&#xA;licked it out, pushing his face right into it. There was soup on his nose, his&#xA;chin and the front of his hair. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his jumper&#xA;and sat back with a sigh. He was fed: now he could be sociable again.&#xA;Nothing, thought Vicki, could be worse than the way he eats. &lt;strong&gt;Now things&#xA;can only get better.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The soup was thick. The bread was fresh. The stove’s dry heat reddened&#xA;their cheeks. The walls curved in around them. Outside the house, which&#xA;was at the bottom of a neglected street, no cars passed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not late, but in a &lt;strong&gt;starry cold&lt;/strong&gt; that lifted them off their feet, they went out to the car.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;Now things can only get better.&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only from now on his behavior will become better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Only from now on Vicki will feel better sitting there in their  home?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is Vicki thinking that now things can only get better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;starry cold&amp;quot; used metaphorically, meaning: very cold?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-13T20:23:30.097" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T10:55:16.477" Title="Meaning of &quot;Now things can only get better&quot; and &quot;starry cold&quot; in the passage below" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18341" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18340" CreationDate="2021-04-13T22:50:33.180" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Things can only get better’ is a general phrase expressing optimism for the future after bad experiences. Similar to ‘the only way is up’, it expresses the view that the worst is past and improving circumstances are inevitable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a standard phrase with no particular special meaning in context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Edit: Having dug about a bit more at the plot of this novella, without having access to the whole thing to read, I would now say that the &lt;em&gt;use&lt;/em&gt; of the phrase in context is in the nature or foreshadowing, things can indeed, get worse for some of the characters and aspects of Dexter's behaviour will be part of it. Dexter will also be disgusted by his own behaviour)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Starry cold’: clear nights when you can see the stars are colder than cloudy nights.&#xA;Per Wikipedia on &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_cooling&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nocturnal Surface Cooling&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Radiative cooling is commonly experienced on cloudless nights, when heat is radiated into space from the surface of the Earth, or from the skin of a human observer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T10:55:16.477" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T10:55:16.477" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18342" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18340" CreationDate="2021-04-13T22:51:46.587" Score="4" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Vicki observes that Dexter eats in an incredibly sloppy, even disgusting, way.  She thinks that the worst thing about the entire situation is the way he eats; he could not possibly be any more off-putting. Nothing at all could match the awfulness of his table manners. So you are correct: Vicki is thinking that &amp;quot;now things can only get better,&amp;quot; because he has finished eating and the worst is over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Presumably this scene takes place at night. If the stars are visible, it means there are no clouds. &lt;a href=&quot;https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/q/4226&quot;&gt;A clear, cloudless night is colder than a cloudy night&lt;/a&gt;, because the cloud cover prevents the earth's heat from escaping. So the &lt;em&gt;starry cold&lt;/em&gt; is literal; it is extremely cold because the night is cloudless, cold enough to metaphorically lift them off their feet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-04-13T22:51:46.587" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18344" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18337" CreationDate="2021-04-14T00:32:25.023" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you had two people on a plain with a single hill, and one of them was to the east of the hill, that one would cease to see the sun at any earlier time than the other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, an astronomer calculating the sunset for a given longitude and latitude would not take into account such variation but only a mathematical definition of the horizon.  These are the sorts of &amp;quot;sunrise&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;sunset&amp;quot; times you can see in the paper or on various websites.  This is also the sunset that governs when the wishes cease to operate in the story, thus prolonging the children's problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like the laws about bicycle lights, the rules about sunsets are top-down and abstract principles.  Nesbit then pokes some fun by pretending that the astronomers, like the legislators, are giving orders instead of applying an abstract principle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T00:32:25.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18345" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17544" CreationDate="2021-04-14T01:39:51.610" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Bluntschli has spent fifteen years as a soldier, in &amp;quot;barracks and battles&amp;quot;. He has lived a life of adventure, which for him has been a serious business, with his very life frequently at risk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He suggests that Raina, being much younger than he is, has &amp;quot;her imagination full of fairy princes and noble natures and cavalry charges and goodness knows what&amp;quot; -- that while to him a soldier's life is a real, dangerous, muddy, hungry, unglamorous affair, to her it is the stuff of exciting but unrealistic fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A bit of context for the specifics of the quoted text: Raina and Bluntschli met much earlier in the play. He was hiding from enemy soldiers, and she kept him hidden and gave him chocolate creams to eat. (Hence &amp;quot;chocolate creams and hide and seek&amp;quot; -- though of course the way he puts it is also meant to put you in mind of children's food and children's games.) He shocked ber by being prosaic and matter-of-fact about soldiering, contrary to her heroic imagination of that profession.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So: He thinks (or at least professes to think) that her view is childish and foolish, while his is grown up and realistic; that when they met before, &lt;em&gt;he&lt;/em&gt; was trying to save himself from an unpleasant premature death, while &lt;em&gt;she&lt;/em&gt; was just having fun; that all this points up the difference in age and maturity between them. And that, as she is only a child, he can't take seriously any interest she may have shown in him. How seriously he means this isn't made explicit: maybe he means every word, or maybe he's just being provocative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It then turns out that she is 23 not 17, and things turn out as one might expect.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T01:39:51.610" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18346" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-14T04:47:33.970" Score="4" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a &amp;quot;perverse madonna&amp;quot;? In the short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://faculty.weber.edu/jyoung/English%202500/Readings%20for%20English%202500/The%20Boarding%20Houseby%20James%20Joyce.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Boarding House&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; by James Joyce, Polly is compared to a &amp;quot;perverse madonna&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Polly was a slim girl of nineteen; she had light soft hair and a small full&#xA;mouth. Her eyes, which were grey with a shade of green through them, had a&#xA;habit of glancing upwards when she spoke with anyone, which made her&#xA;look like a little &lt;strong&gt;perverse madonna&lt;/strong&gt;. Mrs. Mooney had first sent her daughter&#xA;to be a typist in a corn-factor's office but, as a disreputable sheriff's man&#xA;used to come every other day to the office, asking to be allowed to say a&#xA;word to his daughter, she had taken her daughter home again and set her to&#xA;do housework.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12148" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T04:55:20.737" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T11:47:57.657" Title="What does &quot;perverse madonna&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;james-joyce&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18348" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18386" CreationDate="2021-04-14T08:45:33.257" Score="7" ViewCount="559" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Tomasz Jedrowski's &lt;em&gt;Swimming in the Dark&lt;/em&gt;, set in the early 1980s, the narrator, Ludwik, commutes to midtown Manhattan for work. The text makes clear that he has to cross a river to get there:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This morning, like every morning, I took the subway across to Manhattan.         (p. 121)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or when he is wandering around in his neighborhood:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I walked to the waterfront, to the broken-down piers. Across the foamy river the skyline of Manhattan was drawn against the sky ...          (p. 185)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Where in the New York metropolitan area does Ludwik live?&lt;/strong&gt; There are four possibilities:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brooklyn, across the East River&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Queens, likewise across the East River&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Bronx, across the Harlem River&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;New Jersey, across the Hudson (if &amp;quot;subway&amp;quot; refers to the PATH train, which, although underground, isn't technically part of New York City's subway system).&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Staten Island, across Upper New York Bay, can be discounted, since there's no subway from there to Manhattan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another possible clue is that when calling his friend Jarek from Third and East 43rd, an intersection near his Manhattan workplace, Ludwik says that Jarek works &amp;quot;down in Queens&amp;quot; (p. 121). This perhaps suggests that Ludwik doesn't himself live in Queens. But someone with a better grasp of the geography of New York city and the vocabulary its denizens use to describe the various boroughs and neighborhoods, or someone who has picked up other indications from the novel, might be able to locate the area where Ludwik lives more precisely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T03:14:38.480" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T08:38:17.547" Title="Where in the New York City metro area does Ludwik live?" Tags="&lt;swimming-in-the-dark&gt;&lt;tomasz-jedrowski&gt;&lt;setting&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18349" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18346" CreationDate="2021-04-14T11:47:57.657" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may have a double meaning.&#xA;Perverse can iteslf mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;contrary to the accepted or expected standard or practice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(both definitions from Oxford Languages via Google)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depictions of the Madonna predominantly show her with downcast eyes either in modesty or because all her attention is focused on her child. As in this painting, Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Gerard David in 1510.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qtpmh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Qtpmh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Gerard David 1510&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Upturned eyes may therefore be seen as contrary to the expected pose of someone whose youth and innocence otherwise remind one of a Madonna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Additionally the upturned gaze may be seen as seductive or flirtatious, suggestive of a desire to behave in a way that would be unacceptable in a Madonna.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5sdJT.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/5sdJT.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T11:47:57.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18350" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18280" CreationDate="2021-04-14T11:54:45.487" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;There in no need to suppose that there is a particular significance. Open does not only mean 'not closed' but also 'not locked'&#xA;Oxford English Dictionary&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of a door, gate, window, etc.: having the movable part put aside so that there is access or passage through a wall, fence, etc.; not closed or blocked up; (also) unlocked. Of a doorway, gateway, passage, etc.: allowing access or view, free from obstruction; (also) not locked.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This leaves the options that the gate was 'shut' but unlocked, or that it was only open slightly such that Derry had to open it wider to enter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Derry was panting because he had run back to Mr Lamb's house due to the argument with his mother and his desire to assure Mr Lamb that he was good to his word and was returning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T11:54:45.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18351" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18348" CreationDate="2021-04-14T17:44:58.960" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;This answer is coming from my experience of living and working in the northern NJ/NY area for almost 20 years...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To me the only area where you would have both &amp;quot;broken down piers&amp;quot; and be &amp;quot;across the river&amp;quot; from Manhattan would be &lt;strong&gt;Brooklyn&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brooklyn is where many of the historic &amp;quot;piers&amp;quot; are. These days they are parks and recreation areas but in days gone by they were hubs for passenger liners and cargo ships alike. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-new-york-city-is-reclaiming-its-piers-180976121/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Further reading about the piers and their recent revitalization&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also fits well with the &amp;quot;Manhattan was drawn against the sky&amp;quot; as from Brooklyn one would be looking west to Manhattan and this could provide a sharp relief of the skyline during sunset.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I rule out The Bronx due to the lack of piers and that if one was looking across the river there it would be to Harlem which isn't exactly known for its skyline the was lower Manhattan is. Similarly, I also rule out Queens as it doesn't really have the piers (at least not large famous ones). New Jersey could be another option as it would have the broken down piers and a good view of the skyline from places in Bayonne, Jersey City, or Hoboken, but I think the author would make that known as there is fierce rivalry between the residents of the two states.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for &amp;quot;down&amp;quot; that can really mean anywhere. Down colloquially can mean any direction, expect for perhaps &amp;quot;up-state&amp;quot;. &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/184716/origin-of-new-jersey-idiom-down-the-shore&quot;&gt;Think &amp;quot;down the shore&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, or &amp;quot;down to grandma's house&amp;quot;. So I don't really Queens being East of Manhattan and Brooklyn would really factor into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="56" LastEditorUserId="56" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T18:18:17.140" LastActivityDate="2021-04-14T18:18:17.140" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18352" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-14T20:06:43.123" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Up there under the leafless vine they were talking. Vicki saw their breath.&#xA;From the angles of their bodies she could tell they were arguing. Dexter was&#xA;trying to make Elizabeth do something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘It’s not my job,’ she said. ‘Why the hell should I?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;‘Because no-one else will,&lt;/strong&gt;’ said Dexter. ‘&lt;strong&gt;Because there’s nothing else.&#xA;What else is there? Otherwise we’re all just dry leaves blowing down the&#xA;gutter.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vicki got into the car and kept her face against the side window. She saw&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;sour street lights&lt;/strong&gt;, a house standing in a junk yard: old washing machines,&#xA;tea-chests, a car with no wheels. Elizabeth sat silent with folded arms.&#xA;Dexter sang aloud in a foreign language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the dialog in bold mean &amp;quot;Because no one else will do it. Because we have no other choice, what is the other solution? Otherwise we will become just like dry leaves blowing down the poorest region&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;the gutter&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;the poorest region&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;sour street lights&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;dull looking street lights?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;very bright street light which your eyes become tired by looking at them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-14T20:17:25.817" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T01:33:48.503" Title="Meaning of the dialog in bold and &quot;sour street light&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18353" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18352" CreationDate="2021-04-15T00:19:34.997" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/gutter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gutter&lt;/a&gt; is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a channel at the lower edge of a roof for carrying away rain, or a side of a road that is lower than the center of the road, where water and garbage collects:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is, they become like the leaves, not only after they have fallen off the tree, but when they are clumped up as refuses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Sour&amp;quot;, on the other hand, reads like a metaphor:  she thinks they and their light are unpleasant to see and not (metaphorically) sweet.  It is certainly not a common idiom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T01:33:48.503" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T01:33:48.503" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18354" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T03:21:18.063" Score="1" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Mattimeo_(book)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mattimeo&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Chapter 29, the rescuers' party encounters &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Sir_Harry_the_Muse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sir Harry&lt;/a&gt;, an owl who speaks in poetry for much of his dialogue. For one example, this is how he introduces himself:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Why, pray, do you suppose?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm master of poetry and prose,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No equal have I in field or wood,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;No creature a smidgeon, a fraction as good.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And if you need a poet, why, here's one to choose,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;This Owl. . . . Sir Harry the Muse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both Matthias and Basil Stag Hare try to impress Sir Harry. Here is Matthias's attempt:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Business for goodness sake,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Perhaps we can find some cake.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Maybe, my friend, we will bring to you&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A shrewcake baked by a shrew.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At first Sir Harry looked undecided, then he stamped his talons and clacked his hooded beak in approval.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Not bad, not bad at all.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At least it made me smile.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For a Warrior, I'd say quite good,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You have a certain style.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It appears that Sir Harry approves of Matthias's poem. However, the owl's opinion of Basil's poetry is just about the opposite.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I beg you to listen to me,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'm a fellow spirit, you see.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I was once considered a champion poet.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I just thought you'd like to know it. . . .&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cheek tittered and avoided Basil's paw in the same instant.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sir Harry turned his back and delivered a cutting line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I beg, I implore you, sir,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Stick to being a hare!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why is there such a difference in Sir Harry's reaction to these two poems? Note that I have tagged this &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/character-analysis&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;character-analysis&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;character-analysis&lt;/a&gt;; I'm not looking for just an analysis of the poems, but an analysis of how &lt;em&gt;Sir Harry&lt;/em&gt; would have analyzed the poems, and the reasoning behind his opinions of them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T03:21:18.063" Title="Why does Sir Harry like Matthias's poem and not Basil's?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18355" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18357" CreationDate="2021-04-15T07:10:27.763" Score="10" ViewCount="787" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve noticed a topos in a few epic poems I’ve read where a long list of characters is given, each receiving practically a paragraph of description. In The Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes, Jason’s crew members are introduced like this. In Book 7 of the Aeneid of Virgil, the soldiers going to war are introduced like this. And in Book 1 of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (which is trying to emulate classical epics), the fallen angels are introduced like this.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there a formal literary term for this topos?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12684" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T13:57:30.200" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T23:46:39.770" Title="Is there a term for epic poetry’s detailed, successive introductions of multiple characters?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;tropes&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18356" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T08:15:11.940" Score="2" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;I noticed a similar phrase recurring twice in the conversation between Effi's parents in Chapter V of Theodor Fontane's &lt;em&gt;Effi Briest&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/germanclassicsof12franuoft/page/254/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;which I'm reading online&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miss Hulda had clinked her glass too hard against Lieutenant Nienkerk's.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Of course, half asleep and always has been, and lying under the elder tree has obviously not improved matters. A silly person, and I don't understand Nienkerk.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I understand him perfectly.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;But he can't marry her.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;No.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;His purpose, then?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;A wide field, Luise.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;So now you admit it. In talking with me you have always denied, yes, always denied that the wife is in a condition of restraint.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes, Luise, I have. But what is the use of discussing that now? It is really too wide a field.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first of these passages, the meaning of &amp;quot;A wide field&amp;quot; seems clear to me: their conversation suggests that Nienkerk was flirting with Hulda although he knew that he wouldn't commit to a married relationship with her; the &amp;quot;wide field&amp;quot; means he wanted to keep his romantic options open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the second passage, which occurs at the very end of Chapter V, the meaning of &amp;quot;too wide a field&amp;quot; is more obscure to me. &lt;em&gt;What&lt;/em&gt; field, in this context, is too wide?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any significance in this phrase being repeated twice in quick succession? Does it foreshadow later events in the story, or is it a well-known proverb in German with some meaning that I'm missing from reading a translation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T08:15:11.940" Title="In Effi Briest, what is the meaning and significance of a &quot;wide field&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;effi-briest&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18357" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18355" CreationDate="2021-04-15T08:42:11.723" Score="10" Body="&lt;p&gt;Such introductions and descriptions are called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_catalogue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;epic catalogues&lt;/a&gt;. Barbarians are sometimes known to refer to them as epic catalogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The term catalogue is not restricted to characters. Lists of armies, ships, places, etc. are also covered by the term. As far as I am aware, there is no specific term for any of these; they are all just called catalogues and qualified with the particular thing being described and the epic where it occurs. So we have a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3296106&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalogue of the ships&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt;, or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/637706.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalogue of the Italian forces&lt;/a&gt; in the &lt;em&gt;Aeneid&lt;/em&gt;, or a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2871532&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;catalogue of the fallen angels&lt;/a&gt; in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epic catalogues continue to have not only &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337950293_Epic_catalogues&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;scholarly articles&lt;/a&gt; but &lt;a href=&quot;https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195375688.001.0001/acprof-9780195375688&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whole entire books&lt;/a&gt; written about them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T23:46:39.770" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T23:46:39.770" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18358" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T10:58:55.893" Score="2" ViewCount="67" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm translating a novel by John Galsworthy, A Stoic, written at the beginning of the XX century (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2684/2684-h/2684-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;full text on Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;), and I've come across a sentence I’m finding quite tricky to understand:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crowded street had all that prosperous air of catching or missing something which characterises the town where London and New York and Dublin meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The problem here is with “catching or missing something”. Do you think it has anything to do with catching or missing a bus/tram or any other means of transport? Or is it to be understood more generally (e.g. triumphs and failures)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12613" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T10:20:37.430" Title="What's the meaning of &quot;catching or missing something&quot; in this sentence from &quot;A Stoic&quot; by John Galsworthy?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;john-galsworthy&gt;&lt;a-stoic&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18359" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18358" CreationDate="2021-04-15T12:08:05.197" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think we are to parse the 'something' as belonging with the 'which characterises' rather than being the something that is caught or missed. I imagine that the same sentence written today would have a break of some sort following 'missing'. eg&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The crowded street had all that prosperous air of catching or missing - something which characterises the town where London and New York and Dublin meet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That still leaves unclear the meaning of 'catching or missing'. Searching on Google books does not produce any contemporary meaning which is distinct from literal catching or missing of objects or modes of transport.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the absence of any such clues I would tend to your view that it is to be understood more generally in terms of triumphs and failures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The offices of the The Island Navigation Company are in Liverpool, that town where 'London and New York and Dublin meet' and where fortunes are being made and lost in shipping, in import and export, lives are being changed in ways that pivot around a single moment. That, in combination with the prosperous air makes a reading of triumps and failures of fortune highly plausible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T12:08:05.197" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18360" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-15T13:57:45.250" Score="10" ViewCount="1852" Body="&lt;p&gt;When Theodor Fontane travelled to London in September 1855, the three volumes of his copy of William Makepeace Thackeray's &lt;em&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/em&gt; were confiscated by customs. As far as I can tell, &lt;em&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/em&gt; was not censored or prohibited in England; for example, there is nothing in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vanity_Fair_(novel)&amp;amp;oldid=1016499395#Publication_history&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about the novel&lt;/a&gt; that suggests that it was at one point censored or prohibited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So why were Fontane's volumes seized by customs?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-15T14:04:10.250" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T23:32:41.460" Title="Why was Fontane's copy of Thackeray's Vanity Fair confiscated by English customs?" Tags="&lt;theodor-fontane&gt;&lt;vanity-fair&gt;&lt;william-makepeace-thackeray&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18361" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18360" CreationDate="2021-04-15T18:07:42.047" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;Prior to the Berne convention of 1886 (see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.iprightsoffice.org/copyright_history/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Brief History of Copyright&lt;/a&gt;) there was limited international enforcement of copyright, so foreign publishers were able to print books which would have been in breach of copyright in England.  Importing such books would have been illegal, so they would have been subject to seizure by customs officials.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T23:32:41.460" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T23:32:41.460" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18362" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18360" CreationDate="2021-04-15T18:30:41.833" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;The edition of Fontane's diaries by Charlotte Jolles and Rudolf Muhs mentions the occurrence in the entry for 23 May 1852, when Fontane started reading &lt;em&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/em&gt;. (Fontane's diaries are partly lost, hence the additional information from other sources.) After mentioning that Fontane started reading Thackeray's novel on that day, the editors add the following (my translation, emphasis added):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When Fontane travelled to England again in September 1855, his copy of &lt;em&gt;Vanity Fair&lt;/em&gt; (a three-volume edition that was part of the &amp;quot;Collection of British Authors&amp;quot; published by Tauchnitz in Leipzig) was confiscated by customs as a &lt;strong&gt;continental reprint (&amp;quot;kontinentaler Nachdruck&amp;quot;)&lt;/strong&gt;; &amp;quot;with my wonderful marginalia&amp;quot;, as he wrote regretfully to his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the reason was indeed a copyright issue, as Mikado suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Source:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fontane, Theodor: &lt;em&gt;Tage- und Reisetagebücher: Tagebücher 1852, 1855–1858&lt;/em&gt;. Herausgegeben von Charlotte Jolles unter Mitarbeit von Rudolf Muhs. Second edition. Aufbau-Verlag, 1995.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T18:30:41.833" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18363" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18355" CreationDate="2021-04-15T19:20:16.107" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is not a direct answer to the question in the sense of a &lt;em&gt;general&lt;/em&gt; term, but there is a very well-known term for a specific example: the &lt;strong&gt;teichoskopia&lt;/strong&gt; in Book III of the Iliad, where Helen stands atop the wall and catalogues the Greek chieftans.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Depending on the context and your audience, you may be able to use &amp;quot;teichoskopia&amp;quot; as a general term, as it would be instantly understood by classical scholars. E.g., &amp;quot;Milton presents us with a &amp;quot;teichoskopic&amp;quot; catalogue of fallen angels in &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it's not obvious by my repeated use of the accepted answer's &amp;quot;catalogue&amp;quot;, I agree that that is the best general term.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12693" LastActivityDate="2021-04-15T19:20:16.107" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18365" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-16T03:48:09.320" Score="4" ViewCount="118" Body="&lt;p&gt;I just began reading Verne's &lt;em&gt;Around the World in Eighty Days&lt;/em&gt; and Phileas Fogg had just fired his servant for giving him warm water that was by 2 Fahrenheit degrees off (roughly 1 Celsius degree).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fogg is strict and acts and lives like a robot with a shorted circuit, always repeating behaviour. I would fire a servant (if I had one) if for example he was constantly late or gave me cold water to use for shaving. But not for something as ludicrously meaningless as heating it two degrees too much. I wouldn't even notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see some stereotypical Victorian Englishness here albeit strongly exaggerated. Is Verne admiring this level of discipline or is he mocking it? Or is it open to interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I had read the book before, a long time ago and remember little but I am somewhat familiar with its contents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12699" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T20:08:20.073" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T23:35:40.410" Title="Is Jules Verne making fun of the English in Around the World?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;jules-verne&gt;&lt;around-the-world-80-days&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18366" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18358" CreationDate="2021-04-16T10:20:37.430" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;The setting of the story is Liverpool, &lt;strong&gt;the town where London and New York and Dublin meet.&lt;/strong&gt; Galsworthy claims that Liverpool both &lt;em&gt;catches&lt;/em&gt; something of those cities, and &lt;em&gt;misses&lt;/em&gt; it. The idea is that Liverpool is reminiscent of them in some way, &lt;strong&gt;catching&lt;/strong&gt; something of their atmosphere, but also falls short, &lt;strong&gt;missing something&lt;/strong&gt;. That is to say, Liverpool simultaneously brings to mind more celebrated towns, and somehow seems not to measure up to them. The street being described is typical of Liverpool in that it captures this &lt;strong&gt;prosperous air of catching or missing something which characterises the town.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-04-16T10:20:37.430" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18370" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-18T00:00:50.040" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;Trigger warning: story deals with death, depression, graphic abuse of animals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't been able to find this short story. I don't recall if I heard it as part of a podcast or read it online. I came across it between 2018 and 2020. It was in English.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story features a bear whose mother dies. The bear reacts by seeking sympathy from the forest community instead of taking care of itself. The bear's quality of life dramatically declines, ending with it being horrifically captured and abused as a circus performer for humans. Even then, it's just trying to tell everyone that its mom died.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12710" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T15:28:50.263" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T15:28:50.263" Title="Tragedy About Bear Whose Mom Died" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18371" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-18T09:36:51.957" Score="4" ViewCount="650" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an essay in which I have to outline arguments both for and against the reliability of the governess in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/209/209-h/209-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. There are endless sources arguing that she is unreliable but basically none for the other side. Can anyone provide either sources or reasoned arguments as to why she could be considered reliable?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12711" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T09:45:49.680" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T17:41:33.793" Title="The Turn of the Screw: Arguments in favour of the governess being a reliable narrator" Tags="&lt;narrator&gt;&lt;the-turn-of-the-screw&gt;&lt;henry-james&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18372" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18382" CreationDate="2021-04-18T10:39:04.550" Score="-1" ViewCount="53" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this, thought Vicki. &lt;strong&gt;What is in here?&lt;/strong&gt; It is a warehouse, it has no&#xA;walls or rooms. There is a row of windows, each one shaped like an eye&#xA;with its brow raised. There is a TV, a phone on the floor, a bed like a big&#xA;pink cloud. Where does she cook? Where does she wash herself? Where&#xA;will I sleep? Everybody needs a bed. There are no walls or rooms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth turned round and saw her standing there beside her suitcase.&#xA;She was ashamed. She turned down the music.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I search on net and found:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;In here&lt;/strong&gt; means the room or enclosed area (could be a field or something as was rightly pointed out) we're in&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;What is in here?&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is this enclosed area?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;What is in this place?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T12:04:53.973" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T14:25:47.297" Title="Meaning of &quot;What is in here?&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18373" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18371" CreationDate="2021-04-18T15:02:58.577" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;It is a good idea, when discussing “unreliable” narrators, to be explicit about what exactly is supposed to be unreliable about the narrative. A narrative can be unreliable at different levels. At one extreme the narrator may lie outright (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Baron Munchausen&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;); at the other the narrator may be accurate but mistaken in interpretation or judgement (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Remains_of_the_Day&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Remains of the Day&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;); or it may be unclear where on this spectrum the narrator lies (‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5670/3003&quot;&gt;The Restorer of Reputations&lt;/a&gt;’).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to assume that the interpretation you want to argue against is the ‘hallucination’ theory popularized by Edmund Wilson, who summarizes it like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to this interpretation, the young governess who tells the story is a neurotic case of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_repression&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sex repression&lt;/a&gt;, and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess’s hallucinations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edmund Wilson (1934). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hommagetohenryja0000unse/page/384/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Ambiguity of Henry James&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Hound and Horn&lt;/em&gt; VII:3 (April/May 1934), p. 385.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this theory the governess really did see the figures, but she was mistaken in interpreting them as ghosts. The difficulties with this theory were summarized by Robert Liddell:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ‘hallucination’ theory can then only be held:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we disbelieve Douglas’s estimate of the governess’s character.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we give a very strained explanation of her description of Quint.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we believe she is deluded about the very sense-data experienced in Miles’s room, not only about her interpretation of them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;If we believe, on no evidence, that Miles had got into touch with Flora after the scene by the Lake.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Robert Liddell (1947). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/treatiseonnovel0000lidd/page/138/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The “Hallucination” Theory of &lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;A Treatise on the Novel&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 141–142. London: Jonathan Cape.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Liddell’s points are:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Douglas describes the governess as “the most agreeable woman I’ve ever known in her position; she would have been worthy of any whatever”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The governess’s detailed description in chapter V of the features of the first apparition (“red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair …”) is immediately recognized by Mrs Grose as being Quint, whom the governess can not have seen since he died before she came.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Chapter XVII: “The answer to my appeal was instantaneous, but it came in the form of an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air, and a shake of the room as great as if, in the wild wind, the casement had crashed in. The boy gave a loud, high shriek, which, lost in the rest of the shock of sound, might have seemed, indistinctly, though I was so close to him, a note either of jubilation or of terror. I jumped to my feet again and was conscious of darkness. So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn curtains were unstirred and the window tight.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In chapter XXIV Miles seems to be aware of the apparition of Miss Jessie in chapter XX, even though he was not present on that occasion, and has apparently had no opportunity to learn of it from Flora, who “passed that night […] with Mrs. Grose”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Points (1) and (4) are in my opinion rather weak. The governess could be “agreeable” and “worthy” but still subject to hallucinations; and Miles could know about Miss Jessie from other sources than Flora. Point (3) is better, though the “gust of frozen air” could perhaps be a hallucination and Miles’ shriek an empathetic response to the governess’s terror. Point (2), however, is strong: it is hard to explain this away except by supposing that the governess has had Quint described to her and neglected to mention that in the narrative. But if we suppose that the governess could be dishonest to this extent, what is there left of the story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another objection is that sexual repression does not cause hallucinations: the idea that it does is a kind of pop-Freudianism. Liddell does not include this in his list, I suspect, because in 1947 Freudianism was still respected as a scientific theory of human psychology. Certainly Wilson’s analysis of &lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt; was explicitly Freudian, for example he wrote,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Observe, also, &lt;strong&gt;from the Freudian point of view&lt;/strong&gt;, the significance of the governess’s interest in the little girl’s pieces of wood† and of the fact that the male apparition first appears on a tower‡ and the female apparition on a lake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/hommagetohenryja0000unse/page/386/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wilson, p. 387&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† Chapter VI: “She [Flora] had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment that might figure as a mast and make the thing a boat. This second morsel, as I watched her, she was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten in its place.” ‡ A case of “anything longer than it is wide is a phallic symbol”.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, just as ghosts (which don’t exist either) are a convention in supernatural stories, pop-Freudianism is a convention in psychological thrillers. So one way to look at the debate over &lt;em&gt;The Turn of the Screw&lt;/em&gt; is to think of it as a disagreement about which genre it belongs to: should we interpret it as looking backward to ghost stories like ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://gutenberg.org/files/21932/21932-h/21932-h.htm#link2H_4_0033&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Way It Came&lt;/a&gt;’ and ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/64396/64396-h/64396-h.htm#OWEN_WINGRAVE&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Owen Wingrave&lt;/a&gt;’, or as looking forward to 20th-century psychological thrillers like &lt;em&gt;Rebecca&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Psycho&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T17:41:33.793" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T17:41:33.793" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18374" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-18T15:29:15.660" Score="3" ViewCount="27" Body="&lt;p&gt;Elene Dariani is said to be &lt;a href=&quot;https://feminism-boell.org/en/2014/02/14/elene-dariani-bakradze&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;one of the most mysterious figures in Georgian literary history&lt;/a&gt; - quite an achievement for someone who died in 1979, in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_Georgia_(country)#Literary_and_other_written_works&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;literary tradition over a millennium and a half&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting from the first page linked above:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A collection of 14 poems under the title &amp;quot;Dariani Cycle&amp;quot; is listed among the works of famous poet Paolo Iashvili. Until recently it was thought that Iashvili himself had written the poems, which describe female erotic and romantic thoughts with a transformative precision. However, archive materials discovered later made it clear that the mysterious Elene Dariani was in fact a real person named Elene Bakradze, a contemporary and close friend of the Blue Horns group of avant garde poets.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Iashvili committed suicide at the Georgian Writers' Union in Tbilisi n 1937 amid the purges of artists and intellectuals. After Iashvili's name was formally rehabilitated by the USSR in 1959, a collection of his poems that included the Dariani Cycle was published. Only once, shortly after the publication of this collection, did Elene Bakradze attempt to get her authorship acknowledged.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are those &amp;quot;archive materials discovered later&amp;quot;? What proof or evidence connects Elene Dariani with Elene Bakradze, and why wasn't this connection known about earlier? If Elene Bakradze &amp;quot;attempt[ed] to get her authorship acknowledged&amp;quot; only shortly after Iashvili's collection's publication in 1959, what form did this attempt take and how come it didn't succeed in making clear that Dariani = Bakradze?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've done some searching for information about her, after reading a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/february-2021-georgias-fantastic-tavern-in-search-of-lavrenti-beria-tamta-m&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translated excerpt&lt;/a&gt; from a 2015 novel in Georgian about a young woman in modern Georgia who &amp;quot;is researching Elene Dariani, a mystical poet believed to have had a secret affair with the famous Georgian poet Paolo Iashvili&amp;quot;. But &lt;a href=&quot;https://georgianjournal.ge/culture/32258-elene-dariani-bakradze-georgian-woman-behind-the-famous-erotic-poems.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;every&lt;/a&gt; page I've &lt;a href=&quot;https://womenofgeorgia.ge/en/elene-dariani-bakradze-1897-1979-poet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;found&lt;/a&gt; about Elene Dariani mentions only &amp;quot;archive material&amp;quot;, with a photo (presumably of Elene Bakradze) but no further information.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;On what evidence was it concluded that Elene Dariani = Elene Bakradze? When, and why not earlier?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T15:29:15.660" Title="Where does the known information about Elene Dariani/Bakradze come from?" Tags="&lt;pseudonym&gt;&lt;georgian-literature&gt;&lt;elene-dariani&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18375" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-18T17:57:05.860" Score="9" ViewCount="1100" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is the earliest novel that makes use of second-person narration through the entire book, excluding choose-your-own-adventure books?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T21:16:26.280" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T08:30:07.640" Title="Earliest second-person novel" Tags="&lt;history-of-literature&gt;&lt;narrator&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18376" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18375" CreationDate="2021-04-18T19:56:55.613" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The oldest example of second-person narration I could find is &lt;a href=&quot;https://americanliterature.com/author/nathaniel-hawthorne/short-story/the-haunted-mind&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Haunted Mind&lt;/a&gt; by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was first published in 1835 and later included in volume 2 of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twice-Told_Tales&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twice-Told Tales&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1842). Unfortunately, this is a short story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The oldest example of novel using second-person narration may be &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Serviteur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Serviteur&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, an autobiographical novel by Henri Bachelin, first published in &lt;strong&gt;1918&lt;/strong&gt;. See &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Serviteur&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Le Serviteur&lt;/em&gt; on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A perhaps more famous example is Italo Calvino's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_on_a_winter%27s_night_a_traveler&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;If on a winter's night a traveler&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, a postmodern novel published in 1979.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Related: The oldest German example I have been able to find is Ilse Aichinger's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiegelgeschichte&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Spiegelgeschichte&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, which was written in 1949. In addition using a second-person perspective, the narrator also tells the story of her life an reverse chronological order. Aichinger was awarded the Literature Prize of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_47&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Group 47&lt;/a&gt; for this story in 1952. However, since the question is about a novel, this is only indirectly relevant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note: &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthazar_de_Bonnecorse&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balthazar de Bonnecorse&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;em&gt;Le Montre&lt;/em&gt;, first published in 1666, is not a novel as we know it but some sort of narrative interspersed with poems.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-18T20:56:13.060" LastActivityDate="2021-04-18T20:56:13.060" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18377" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18375" CreationDate="2021-04-18T20:44:59.700" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;A good place to start is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/42946269.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Monika Fludernik’s annotated bibliography&lt;/a&gt; of second-person fiction (up to 1994):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The bibliography has four different sections:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A. a list of those second-person texts that meet my requirements. […] The second-person pronoun refers to a fictional protagonist;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;B. a list of texts noted in the literature as being second-person texts but that do not correspond to my definition. […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. a very short list of a few films with second-person voice-over […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;D. a list of criticism on the second person and address in general, on second-person narrative, and on second-person uses in poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Monika Fludernik (1994). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/42946269.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second-Person Narrative: A Bibliography&lt;/a&gt;’. &lt;em&gt;Style&lt;/em&gt; 28:4, pp. 525–548.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest novel listed by Fludernik in section A is &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthazar_de_Bonnecorse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balthasar de Bonnecorse&lt;/a&gt;’s &lt;em&gt;La Montre&lt;/em&gt; (1666). I can’t find a copy online, but it was translated into English by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphra_Behn&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aphra Behn&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Do not rise yet; you may find thoughts agreeable enough, when you awake, to entertain you longer in bed. And ’tis in that hour you ought to recollect all the dreams you had in the night. If you had dreamed anything to my advantage, confirm yourself in that thought; but if to my disadvantage, renounce it, and disown the injurious dream. It is in this hour also that I give you leave to reflect on all that I have ever said and done, that has been most obliging to you, and that gives you the most tender sentiments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Aphra Behn (1686). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/novelsmrsaphrab00unkngoog/page/n236/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Lover’s Watch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;The Novels of Mrs Aphra Behn&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 203–270. London: Routledge.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This novel has alternating sections of second-person narration and verse. In form it does not much resemble the modern novel, but in the seventeenth century the novel was a new literary form and its constraints and conventions were still being developed.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fludernik’s bibliography shows that second-person narration was rare until the mid-20th century. Another early example of a novel is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are William Barton Sidney. Your entire existence, from childhood through sexual awakening into prosperous middle age, is recounted in these pages. Your life is respectable, normal, prosaic. Yet nobody suspects that you are aware of multiple personalities within your body, and that your head is full of voices.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Rex Stout (1929). &lt;em&gt;How Like a God&lt;/em&gt;. New York: Vanguard.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This novel has alternating sections of second- and third-person narration.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T08:30:07.640" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T08:30:07.640" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18378" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18321" CreationDate="2021-04-19T08:28:20.700" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is very reminiscent of a passage in the middle of Chapter V of &lt;em&gt;Bel-Ami&lt;/em&gt; (admittedly a short novel, rather than a short story). This can be found on &lt;a href=&quot;https://beq.ebooksgratuits.com/vents/Maupassant_Bel_Ami.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;page 182 in the version&lt;/a&gt; of “La Bibliotheque Électronique du Quebec” which is available online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Et Duroy, pour la première fois, songea à tout ce qu’il ne savait point dans la vie passée de cettefemme, et il rêva. Certes elle avait eu des amants, déjà, mais de quelle sorte ? de quel monde ? Une vague  jalousie,  une  sorte  d’inimitié  s’éveillait  en  lui  contre  elle,  une  inimitié  pour  tout  ce  qu’il  ignorait,   pour   tout   ce   qui   ne   lui   avait   point   appartenu dans ce cœur et dans cette existence. Il la  regardait,  irrité  du  mystère  enfermé  dans  cette  tête jolie et muette et qui songeait, en ce moment-là même peut-être, à l’autre, aux autres, avec des regrets.  Comme  il  eût  aimé  regarder  dans  ce  souvenir,    y    fouiller,    et    tout    savoir,    tout    connaître !...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.507341/page/87/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;English translation by Marjorie Laurie&lt;/a&gt; this is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For the first time Duroy was struck by the thought of all that was unknown to him in this woman’s past. She had assuredly had other lovers, but of what description? Of what social standing? A vague jealousy awoke in him, a feeling of hostility towards her, towards everything of which he remained in ignorance, towards whatever in her heart and her existence had not belonged to him. He glanced at her, stung by the mystery hidden within her pretty head, which at that very moment was perhaps thinking with&#xA;silent regret of that other, of those others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How he would have loved to peep and rummage in this memory of hers, and get at the heart of all its secrets!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12714" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T12:15:23.997" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T12:15:23.997" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18379" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="1855" CreationDate="2021-04-19T12:45:55.117" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This matches in almost every detail ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Reginald_in_Russia_and_Other_Sketches/The_Lost_Sanjak&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Lost Sanjak&lt;/a&gt;’ by Saki, published in &lt;em&gt;Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches&lt;/em&gt; (1910).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“a man (a journalist?) visiting a prison inmate”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The prison Chaplain entered the condemned’s cell for the last time, to give such consolation as he might.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“He was incarcerated for a crime he did not commit”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“In ten minutes’ time I shall be hanged by the neck until I am dead in expiation of the murder of myself, which murder never took place, and of which, in any case, I am necessarily innocent.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“it was a case of mistaken identity or insufficient alibi”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“To make matters worse, infinitely worse, an aunt of the really murdered man, an appalling female of an obviously low order of intelligence, identified me as her nephew.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The conviction hinged on the fact that he could not prove that he was really himself”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“I had looked forward apprehensively to the proving of my identity and the establishment of my motives as a disagreeable necessity; I speedily found out that the most disagreeable part of the business was that it couldn’t be done.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“because he could not remember the location of a country he had been to”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The prosecution had made a careful note of the circumstance that the man whom I claimed to be—and actually was—had posed locally as some sort of second-hand authority on Balkan affairs, and, in the midst of a string of questions on indifferent topics, the examining counsel asked me with a diabolical suddenness if I could tell the Court the whereabouts of Novibazar. I felt the question to be a crucial one; something told me that the answer was St. Petersburg or Baker Street. I hesitated, looked helplessly round at the sea of tensely expectant faces, pulled myself together, and chose Baker Street.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The story ended with the journalist leaving the prison making a note to himself to remember things so as to not be in such a situation himself.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When the Chaplain returned to his quarters some fifteen minutes later, the black flag was floating over the prison tower. Breakfast was waiting for him in the dining-room, but he first passed into his library, and, taking up the Times Atlas, consulted a map of the Balkan Peninsula. “A thing like that,” he observed, closing the volume with a snap, “might happen to any one.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T12:45:55.117" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18382" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18372" CreationDate="2021-04-19T14:25:47.297" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As Peter Shor says &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/18372/meaning-of-what-is-in-here#comment28344_18372&quot;&gt;in the comments&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;What is in here?&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;What is in this place?&amp;quot;. This interpretation is confirmed by the next few sentences:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is a warehouse, it has no walls or rooms. There is a row of windows, each one shaped like an eye with its brow raised. There is a TV, a phone on the floor, a bed like a big pink cloud.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the antecedent of &amp;quot;It&amp;quot; is the &amp;quot;here&amp;quot; in the last sentence. Since &amp;quot;It&amp;quot; is the warehouse, and Vicki is &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; the warehouse, &amp;quot;here&amp;quot; clearly means the place that Vicki is in. The next two sentences list various things that are in the warehouse, answering the question &amp;quot;What is in here?&amp;quot;. These sentences are positioned as the answer to the previous question. This is further confirmation that the question was asking about what was &lt;em&gt;in&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;here&amp;quot; (&amp;quot;this place&amp;quot;), not simply what the place was.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a technique that can be applied to other kinds of readings. If you aren't sure how to interpret a sentence, look at the sentences around it. Usually, one interpretation of the sentence will make more sense given the context. Here we saw that a question which is asking about what was &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; Vicki's surroundings made the most sense when considering the next few sentences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T14:25:47.297" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18383" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-19T16:01:08.197" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for a novel by Agatha Christie in which she describes a murder with the water of Convallaria majalis (lily of the valley). Does anyone know the title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12719" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T16:06:58.207" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T16:23:34.097" Title="Lily of the valley used for murder (Agatha Christie)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;agatha-christie&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18384" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18383" CreationDate="2021-04-19T16:16:00.863" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure that it was an Agatha Christie story?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anne Perry's murder mystery &lt;em&gt;Weighed in the Balance&lt;/em&gt; (2010) features a murder using the water of lily-of-the-valley. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://mercy2908.wordpress.com/2020/09/01/weighed-in-the-balance-characters/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this summary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; Princess Gisela (39) is the woman Zorah accuses of killing her husband. Gisela and Frederich were exiled after he renounced the throne to marry Gisela. His family wouldn’t approve of Gisela, and during the trial it is discovered that the reason she wasn’t liked was because she had had a child out of wedlock and tried to have a termination. Then she aborted the baby she expected with Friedrich. In the end Rathbone proves that she did poison her husband with the water of the lilies of the valley she had in the bedroom because she felt trapped in her marriage.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this from the comments on &lt;a href=&quot;https://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com/2010/11/15/q-and-a-lily-of-the-valley-poisoning/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this blog post&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;Q and A: Lily of the Valley Poisoning&amp;quot;, but was unable to find any mention of lily-of-the-valley being used as a murder weapon in an Agatha Christie story. Some Christie stories used other common garden flowers as murderous poisons, such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digitalis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;foxglove&lt;/a&gt;, which has similarly shaped flowers to lily-of-the-valley but is apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_of_the_valley&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;not closely related&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lily of the valley was, however, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.agathachristie.com/en/about-christie/christie-experts/john-curran-75-facts-about-christie&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Agatha Christie's favourite flower&lt;/a&gt; in real life! Maybe your memory conflated this fact about Christie with the novel by Perry, or with another murder mystery featuring lily of the valley?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-19T16:23:34.097" LastActivityDate="2021-04-19T16:23:34.097" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18386" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18348" CreationDate="2021-04-20T08:38:17.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ludwik lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. See the first few pages, &amp;quot;Wanda's Greenpoint Convenience&amp;quot;.&#xA;Thanks for your curiosity.&#xA;Love,&#xA;Tomasz&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12725" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T08:38:17.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18387" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18389" CreationDate="2021-04-20T08:44:12.600" Score="11" ViewCount="1330" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Robert Herrick's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46546/to-the-virgins-to-make-much-of-time&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    Old Time is still &lt;strong&gt;a-flying&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And this same flower that smiles to day,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    To morrow will be dying.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    The higher he's &lt;strong&gt;a-getting&lt;/strong&gt;;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The sooner will his Race be run,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    And neerer he's to Setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is with this &lt;strong&gt;a-&lt;/strong&gt; in &lt;em&gt;a-flying&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;a-getting&lt;/em&gt; above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T09:01:21.057" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T16:29:43.717" Title="What is the &quot;a-&quot; prefix in &quot;a-flying&quot; and &quot;a-getting&quot; in Herrick's &quot;To the Virgins&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;robert-herrick&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18389" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18387" CreationDate="2021-04-20T09:29:15.633" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;Historically, the prefix &amp;quot;a-&amp;quot; derives from a preposition that was used before the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;gerund&lt;/a&gt; form of a verb. Johan Elsness cites an example of this in his paper &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.hit.uib.no/icame/ij18/elsness.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;On the progression of the progressive in early Modern English&lt;/a&gt; from Old English:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... yrstandæ ic wæs on huntune ... . (From Ælfric, Colloquy 68) [1]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the above quote, &amp;quot;huntune&amp;quot; is the gerund of the verb &amp;quot;hunt&amp;quot;; the sentence as a whole essentially means, &amp;quot;Yesterday I was hunting&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The construction &amp;quot;on + gerund / progressive&amp;quot; then evolved into the form with the prefix &amp;quot;a-&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Middle English similar constructions began to be common with just a light a before the main verb, as in ‘He was a-hunting.’, generally seen as a remnant of the full preposition.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If the preposition was not only reduced but dropped altogether, there was no longer any formal difference between the two constructions: that with BE followed by the present participle, and that with BE followed by the gerund, now without any intervening preposition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The uppercase &amp;quot;BE&amp;quot; simply refers to forms of the verb &amp;quot;be&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Based on this, the &amp;quot;a-&amp;quot; prefixed to the -ing-forms in Herrick's poem does not have any special meaning. However, it does help with the metre: we would not have regular iambs if Herrick had written, &amp;quot;Old &lt;strong&gt;Time&lt;/strong&gt; is &lt;strong&gt;still&lt;/strong&gt; &lt;strong&gt;fly&lt;/strong&gt;ing&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;a-&amp;quot; could also be used without a hyphen, for example in the First Folio text of Shakespeare's &lt;a href=&quot;https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Shr_F1/scene/3.1/index.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Taming of the Shrew&lt;/em&gt;, Act 3, scene 1&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lucentio that comes a wooing&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Modern editions of the play typically add the hyphen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. T. Onions notes in &lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; (revised by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford University Press, 1986) that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;a&lt;/em&gt; before a gerund is a reduced form of 'on'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is consistent with what Johan Elseness writes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[1] The linked PDF version of the paper has &amp;quot;ZyrstandæZ ic wæs on huntunZe&amp;quot;, which looks like some sort of conversion error.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T16:29:43.717" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T16:29:43.717" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18390" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-20T18:57:57.540" Score="6" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a poem that I'm relatively certainly was published in The New Yorker. I think I read it around 10 years ago, but definitely a margin of error of a couple of years on either side of that. It was paired with a cartoon illustration of a man with a suitcase that I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; might have been by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/search?q=charles%20barsotti%20cartoon&amp;amp;source=lnms&amp;amp;tbm=isch&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiOk8bZw43wAhUWFVkFHQSLB9UQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&amp;amp;biw=1792&amp;amp;bih=899&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Bursotti&lt;/a&gt;, but the memory is pretty hazy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was written from the perspective of a traveler taking a plane flight, humorously equating the traveler with Odysseus as everything goes wrong for him. Either he or only his luggage is at some point diverted to O'Hare, to his great distress. The line that I remember, as best as I can replicate it, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;O'Hare! The word was like a dagger to my heart. [...] could turn even patient men to savage beasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Long shot, but any chance someone can identify it or the author?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12731" LastEditorUserId="12731" LastEditDate="2021-04-20T19:14:00.233" LastActivityDate="2021-04-20T19:14:00.233" Title="Poem-parody about O'Hare airport, written as though it were the Odyssey" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18393" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T08:44:52.797" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Walter Malone's poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://allpoetry.com/The-World-is-my-Home&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The World is My Home&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is, on the face of it, openly a plea for humanity to come together as one united brotherhood rather than engage in disputes and wars:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Travel to East, I wander to West:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Each land that I see is dear to my breast.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I greet the green hills as I float down the Rhine,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The vineyards of France I love as if mine.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With rapture the castles of England I see,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And Switzerland's peaks are old friends to me;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A freeman of Athens, a tribune of Rome,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All men are my brothers, the world is my home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Let Sultans and Czars make war if they will,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But let their own blood on the battlefield spill;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For none but the Fool will lift up his arm&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To murder the man who has done him no harm.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Let the bigot cry out for a bloody crusade,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To pierce heathen hearts with the sanctified blade;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;From mosque of the Nile to Saint Peter's dome&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All men are my brothers, the world is my home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wherever we meet, on sea or on sod,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We are brethren of Christ, we are children of God.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They may prattle of Codes, or prate of their Creeds--&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I care not for these, but for brotherly deeds.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They may boast of their Church, their Clique or their Clan--&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I but yearn for the touch of a true fellowman.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;So my heart still repeats, wherever I roam,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All men are my brothers, the world is my home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm seeking a more detailed analysis/interpretation of this poem, its literary devices and what it may be saying on a deeper level. For example, addressing questions such as the following.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What countries, religions, or cultures (if any) are being indicated by &amp;quot;Codes&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Creeds&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Church&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Clique&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Clan&amp;quot;, and why the constant C-alliteration? Why are these words capitalised, and also &amp;quot;Fool&amp;quot; in the second stanza, but no others except proper nouns and others that are commonly capitalised? Is there any significance to the differing choice of words &amp;quot;Travel&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;wander&amp;quot; for east and west? Why are almost all the places mentioned in Europe, and why does the poem say &amp;quot;We are brethren of Christ&amp;quot; while speaking of uniting the world from all different cultures and beliefs? (Is it more Eurocentric than its main message suggests?) Is there any significance to choices of words such as &amp;quot;freeman&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;tribune&amp;quot; (choosing specific types of people from Athenian and Roman society?) and &amp;quot;Sultans&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Czars&amp;quot; (from which parts of the world?)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T08:44:52.797" Title="Walter Malone's &quot;The World is My Home&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;walter-malone&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18394" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18395" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" Score="0" Body="Questions about the diary of Anne Frank, written between June 1942 and August 1944 while hiding for the Nazis, and published posthumously in 1947. Its Dutch title is 'Het achterhuis' ('The Secret Annex'); its English translation is known as 'The Diary of a Young Girl' or 'The Diary of Anne Frank'. Use this tag with [dutch-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T09:01:42.220" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18398" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14882" CreationDate="2021-04-21T10:30:22.437" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are many epics in English besides &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;. Technically speaking, the &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; is a narrative &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt; rather than a &lt;em&gt;genre&lt;/em&gt;. What makes a narrative &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; is a distinction between subject and object: the speaker (the subject doing the telling) is not the topic (the object being treated). Compare with the lyric, in which poets write about themselves (i.e. the subject is also the object) or the drama, in which there is no narrative voice (i.e. there is an object being treated but not a subject doing the telling). What makes narrative poems such as the &lt;em&gt;Iliad&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Odyssey&lt;/em&gt; epic is simply the fact that there is a narrator relating events external to his or her own subjective experiences.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these poems also had additional features that became commonly associated with &amp;quot;the epic,&amp;quot; and we find Aristotle, in the &lt;em&gt;Poetics,&lt;/em&gt; briefly enumerating them:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Epics, in addition to being &amp;quot;narrative&amp;quot; (i.e. in addition to including a storyteller), were also long compositions in verse about &amp;quot;higher characters.&amp;quot; Thanks in part to Aristotle's influence, it became conventional in the Renaissance to use the term &amp;quot;epic&amp;quot; to also designate a genre, a type of narrative characterized by a certain length, style, and subject matter. Epics tended to be long poems on grand subjects (the crusades, in Tasso's &lt;em&gt;Jerusalem Delivered&lt;/em&gt;, the age of navigation in Camões's &lt;em&gt;The Lusiads&lt;/em&gt;, or Genesis, in Milton's &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost&lt;/em&gt;). They were commonly distinguished from the tradition of &lt;em&gt;romance&lt;/em&gt;, which were also long verse narratives characterized by a focus on individual stories of courtly love rather than collective military or heroic deeds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, because the epic is above all a &lt;em&gt;mode&lt;/em&gt;, authors like Miguel de Cervantes, in Spain, and Henry Fielding, in England, made the case that epics could be written in prose as well as verse -- and, implicitly, that works like Cervantes's &lt;em&gt;Don Quixote&lt;/em&gt; and Fielding's &lt;em&gt;Joseph Andrews&lt;/em&gt; were epics. From this standpoint, all novels are epic. The usual claim that a novel like &lt;em&gt;Gone with the Wind&lt;/em&gt; is an epic harks back to a Renaissance argument that epics could be written in prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But even if we look at the epic more strictly as being a long heroic poem, there are many epics in English literary history. They just don't happen to be as highly canonical as &lt;em&gt;Paradise Lost.&lt;/em&gt; Less canonical, but still quite canonical, are &lt;em&gt;Beowulf&lt;/em&gt;, James Macpherson's forgery of the Ossian poems, and Keats's &lt;em&gt;Hyperion&lt;/em&gt;; less so are the variety of mock-epics in eighteenth-century satirical verse or serious (but second-rate) epics such as William Wilkie's &lt;em&gt;Epigoniad,&lt;/em&gt; which you can check out &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Epigoniad/Gi9WAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;on Google Books&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12734" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T10:54:43.660" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T10:54:43.660" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18400" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6606" CreationDate="2021-04-21T11:39:41.667" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;It depends on whether you are interested in lifetime editions or posthumous editions. There are, for example, three lifetime editions of Mary Shelley's &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt; (1818, 1823, and 1831); but there are hundreds of posthumous editions, variously based on these three. What makes a lifetime edition preferable is a very different set of factors than what makes a posthumous edition preferable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assessing a lifetime edition involves several subjective and objection considerations. The main subjective consideration is which edition seems to best express what the author was going for. There is general agreement among modern scholars, for example, that the 1802 edition of Maria Edgeworth's &lt;em&gt;Belinda&lt;/em&gt; is a more faithful expression of her intentions than the 1810 edition, from which she eliminated an inter-racial marriage due to critical backlash. Other cases are more ambiguous. Are we interested in the author's original vision or in their more mature re-envisioning of the work? That, again, is subjective and depends on your reasons for reading that particular work. Some scholars prefer the 1818 version of &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, while others prefer the third, 1831 edition. More objective considerations include whether the edition is clean or full of printer errors, whether there is evidence that the author got to see it and revise it, and so on.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assessing a posthumous edition is a completely different affair. When I'm looking for a good modern edition of &lt;em&gt;Frankenstein&lt;/em&gt;, I am interested in the quality of the critical apparatus -- the introduction, the notes, any appendixes. I am also interested in who prepared the edition; was it prepared by a professional scholar on the basis of lifetime editions, or just taken from the internet by the press? A good posthumous edition should explain which lifetime edition it is using, and ideally also explain the differences between lifetime editions as well as the reasons for choosing one over the others. The Oxford World's Classics series, for example, always includes a &amp;quot;Note on the Text&amp;quot; giving an account of the lifetime editions and the editor's decisions. Editions of Shakespeare should be particularly explicit in this regard, as editing Shakespeare's plays often involves combining different existing versions into a compound. A modern edition of &lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; is usually a mixture between three early editions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The best place to identify lifetime editions prior to the 1800s is the English Short Title Catalogue: &lt;a href=&quot;http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&amp;amp;file_name=login-bl-estc&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;http://estc.bl.uk/F/?func=file&amp;amp;file_name=login-bl-estc&lt;/a&gt;. Which edition is best varies by case, and the only way to figure that out is to consult the specialized literature on that particular item.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Determining which is the best posthumous edition involves research of a different type. For many authors there is a &amp;quot;standard&amp;quot; modern edition that scholars tend to prefer. For Austen, that's the Cambridge edition; for Samuel Johnson it's the Yale edition. A good paperback (say, Penguin, Norton, or Oxford) should tell you what the standard edition is. Most readers don't need the standard edition, which is expensive and targeted at academic libraries rather than individual readers. For most of us, a good paperback with an introduction and notes is good enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12734" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T11:39:41.667" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18401" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T15:34:01.353" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;Matthew 25:21 (NIV):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His master replied, &amp;quot;Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Atlas Shrugged&lt;/em&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That's not all,&amp;quot; said Danagger. &amp;quot;There's something you'd want to hear from all of them. I didn't know it, ether , until I saw him for the first time&amp;quot; - he pointed to Galt - &amp;quot;and he said it to me, and then I knew what it was that I had missed all my life. Miss Taggart, &lt;strong&gt;you'd want them to look at you and to say, 'Well done.'&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Was this a deliberate Biblical reference on Rand's part?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T22:17:42.453" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T22:17:42.453" Title="Is this Atlas Shrugged quote a deliberate Biblical reference?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;atlas-shrugged&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;the-bible&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18402" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-21T17:16:54.510" Score="0" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Once upon a time,’ said Philip. ‘There was a wonderful cafe. It opened&#xA;very early in the morning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No. It stayed open twenty-four hours. It never closed. They never turned&#xA;off the machine. That’s why the coffee was perfect.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was easy. He slid into it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘At night, because of the noise of people laughing, they turned up the&#xA;treble on the jukebox. But in the early mornings, in the peaceful shift when&#xA;customers on their way to work were reading the papers, you could clearly&#xA;hear the trip and run of the bass lines. Some people came alone, with a&#xA;library book, dressed in clean clothes of sober cut and colour. Others&#xA;brought their children and taught them, with smiles and soft words, how to&#xA;behave in a public place. The clever children read aloud to their parents&#xA;from the Situations Vacant, the Houses to Let. The big windows of the cafe&#xA;faced east. People sat with their backs to the sun, and the iron bars of night&#xA;softened in their shoulders. On the other side of the road, which sparkled&#xA;with passing cars, a deep garden overflowed its iron fence.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He glanced at her to see if he was getting too fanciful. She was looking at&#xA;the ceiling. ‘Don’t drone,’ she said. ‘You’re starting to drone.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;It was a place that waited&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Philip. ‘&lt;strong&gt;It was a place of reason and&#xA;courtesy&lt;/strong&gt;. On the jukebox they had Elvis Presley. They had Elisabeth&#xA;Schwarzkopf. They had Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “How High the&#xA;Moon’’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Explain: Philip is telling a story to his daughter.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are the sentences &amp;quot;It was a place that waited&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;It was a place of reason and&#xA;courtesy&amp;quot; used metaphorically?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was the place that was waiting for customers&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;It was a place that people inside it behaved reasonably and politely&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It was the place that people in it was waiting and behaved reasonably and politely&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;wait&amp;quot; here mean &amp;quot;serve as a waiter&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T11:41:26.233" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T11:41:26.233" Title="Meaning of &quot;It was a place that waited, It was a place of reason and courtesy&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18403" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18230" CreationDate="2021-04-21T17:22:30.567" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;If you look at Google books, it finds several instances of this rhyme labeled 1917, 1918, and 1919, and a few from earlier years. Looking at these more carefully, the earlier hits are all mislabeled, and the hits labeled 1917 are in bound volumes of periodicals that extend over several years, so they actually appeared in 1918 or later. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Rough_Notes/u44t98mcvMgC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;bsq=maintaining%20right&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Here&lt;/a&gt; is the earliest one I found, from the periodical &lt;em&gt;Rough Notes&lt;/em&gt;. The early ones all have very similar wording, which goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here lies the body of William Jay,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;who died maintaining his right of way.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He was right as he sped along—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;but he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the early versions credits the poem to the &lt;em&gt;Boston Transcript&lt;/em&gt;. If somebody has access to the &lt;em&gt;Boston Transcript&lt;/em&gt; archives, it would be worth checking to see whether their version was earlier.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-04-21T17:27:41.263" LastActivityDate="2021-04-21T17:27:41.263" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18405" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-22T06:36:35.747" Score="3" ViewCount="83" Body="&lt;p&gt;I will give only two examples.  If anybody considers it necessary to see more than two examples, then it should be possible to find more examples.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first example is in Atlas Shrugged, chapter 3 &amp;quot;Anti-Greed&amp;quot; of part 3 &amp;quot;A is A.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(It seems that page numbering isn't standardized for the various printings of Atlas Shrugged.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There's some dialogue about a train carrying grapefruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, the point is that a planned train trip to transport coal is cancelled in order to transport the grapefruit, and it's supposed to be clear that the decision is bad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, it seems that grapefruit is a somewhat specialized kind of fruit.  If we were to look at the quantities of apples, oranges, or bananas consumed in the USA every year, we would probably find that the total mass and total spending for each is greater than for grapefruit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, grapefruit are actually existing fruit, and a more specialized example than something like apples, oranges, or bananas.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The way that grapefruit appear in Atlas Shrugged is as a kind of frivolous thing that intrudes into the story because of government interference with the economy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second example is tennis (a specific sport) in the Fountainhead.  It appears in the context of an architect who had hired Roark partly because he had assumed that Roark played tennis, and he was disappointed to discover that Roark didn't play tennis.  (I'm writing that from memory without consulting the text, so if that's not accurate, then I welcome corrections).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, the point is that Roark is supposed to be a great architect, and tennis has no connection with either his work or his spare time.  In that context, tennis appears to be something ridiculous.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does all of this mean?  I imagine a Quaker dressed very plainly and told to look through a very high-powered telescope.  The Quaker sees that the stars, that ordinarily appear to be plain white, actually have a variety of colors.  The Quaker might cry out, &amp;quot;I hope that God doesn't find out about this!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, I ask the question because of something near the end of chapter 2 &amp;quot;The Aristocracy of Pull&amp;quot; of Part 2 &amp;quot;Either-Or.&amp;quot;  It's a speech by Francisco to Rearden:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They do it, because they want to avoid effort.  You do it, because you won't permit yourself to consider anything that would spare you.  They indulge their emotions at any cost.  You sacrifice your emotions as the first cost of any problem.  They are willing to bear nothing.  You are willing to bear anything. They keep evading responsibility.  You keep assuming it.  But don't you see that the essential error is the same?  Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In that speech, Francisco seems to be speaking for the author (i.e. for Ayn Rand).  However, it seems that the author habituated readers to focus attention on large-scale phenomena and patterns, with specialized things -- regardless of their reality -- serving almost as a kind of comic relief.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There seems to be some tension between that established pattern and the explicit message: &amp;quot;Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Did the author deliberately choose to create that tension?  How should it be resolved?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12746" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T13:48:27.030" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T23:10:40.067" Title="Why do Ayn Rand's novels present specific, real things in a context designed to make them appear frivolous or ridiculous?" Tags="&lt;ayn-rand&gt;&lt;theme&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18407" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-22T14:04:08.703" Score="2" ViewCount="33" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first half of the first stanza of Audre Lorde's &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42584/never-to-dream-of-spiders&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Never to Dream of Spiders&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Time collapses between the lips of strangers&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;my days collapse into a hollow tube&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;soon implodes against now&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;like an iron wall&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All four of these lines indicate that the narrator feels like time is out of whack. However, I'm at a loss as to how even to &lt;em&gt;begin&lt;/em&gt; to interpret the next half of the stanza, which goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;my eyes are blocked with rubble&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;a smear of perspectives&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;blurring each horizon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;in the breathless precision of silence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;one word is made.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So... what exactly is going on here? Why are the narrator's eyes &amp;quot;blocked with rubble&amp;quot; - does this indicate crying? What's the &amp;quot;precision of silence&amp;quot;, and what's the &amp;quot;one word&amp;quot; that is made? And what does all this have to do with the time distortion in the first half of the stanza?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T14:04:08.703" Title="What is going on in the first stanza of Audre Lorde's &quot;Never to Dream of Spiders&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;audre-lorde&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18408" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-22T14:04:42.813" Score="2" ViewCount="36" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading online &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AhmedKhaniMemAndJinTrans.BySalahSaadalla/page/n21/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salah Saadalla's translation&lt;/a&gt; of the Kurdish classic &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;. The early chapters are not even part of the main story: two chapters addressed to God, two to the prophet Mohammed, two about the Kurdish nation, and then a prologue. But even these contain some interesting content and references. From chapter 2, &amp;quot;Appealing and pleading to God&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is your grace that is the ornament of the lovers!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is your envy that is the jealousy of the watchers!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is your inclination that attracts the lovers!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is your malady that aches the hearts!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shirin you made as sugar for Perwiz&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ferhad shed blood as tears&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Layla you made an affliction for Qays&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ramin you entangled with Ways&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why did you show Yousif to Zulaikha?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;How did you lead Wamik to Ezra&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Sheikh, who was old and pious&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;You maddened for the daughter of the impious&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nilufer the tender flower!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That too you made a lover!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You burdened them with affliction&#xA;You shackled them with misfortune&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'd guess that all of these lines and names are references to some stories expected to be well known to the original target audience, perhaps folklore classics of Kurdistan or other nearby cultures. A footnote mentions them as &amp;quot;famous lovers&amp;quot; without any further detail.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Who are all the people/stories referred to in these lines?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T12:48:46.120" Title="What are all the love stories referred to in chapter 2 of Mem and Zin?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18409" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18405" CreationDate="2021-04-22T21:08:23.137" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;WRT the &amp;quot;grapefruit incident&amp;quot;, Cuffy Meigs ordered the Comet taken off the schedule for two days in order to have it pick up some grapefruit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;And he's cancelled a coal train in order to get cars to lug grapefruit?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;Grapefruit?&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;That's right.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Dagny, 'why' is a word nobody uses any longer.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;After a moment, she asked, &amp;quot;Have you any guess about the reason?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;Guess? I don't have to guess. I know.&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;All right, what is it?&amp;quot;&lt;br&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;The grapefruit special is for Smather brothers... The Smather brothers have friends in Washington... We're supposed to pretend to believe that 'public welfare' is the only reason for any decision - and that the public welfare of the city of New York requires the immediate delivery of a large quantity of grapefruit.&amp;quot; He paused, then added, &amp;quot;The Director of Unification is sole judge of the public welfare and has sole authority over the allocation of any motive power and rolling stock on any railroad anywhere in the United States.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The absurdity is the sheer arbitrariness of it. On what basis is grapefruit suddenly more needed than coal or passenger transportation? If you live in a society where virtually all goods and services are in very short supply, would your first thought be &amp;quot;gee, I really need some grapefruit&amp;quot;? What if someone nowadays cancelled a shipment of coronavirus vaccines in favor of, for example, kiwi? (Decisions were, of course, based first and foremost on who happened to have the most political clout at the time, not on reason).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In another incident, train cars that were supposed to transport a bumper crop of wheat were instead used to transport soybeans (which turned out to have been ruined by poor farming techniques) grown by - that's right, someone with political clout.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, I think that this tension was deliberate. The &amp;quot;grapefruit incident&amp;quot; was intended as an almost comical example of the loss of perspective that can happen when decisions are made in such a manner.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="793" LastEditorUserId="793" LastEditDate="2021-04-22T23:10:40.067" LastActivityDate="2021-04-22T23:10:40.067" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18411" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-23T06:54:40.733" Score="1" ViewCount="54" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;em&gt;Les Misérables&lt;/em&gt; musical, there's a song &amp;quot;Master of the House&amp;quot;, in which the inkeeper sings about how he essentially scams all of his customers into paying much more than they expected. There's one section that goes like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody loves a landlord&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everybody's bosom friend&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I do whatever pleases&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jesus! Won't I bleed 'em in the end!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm a little confused as to how to read the last two lines - specifically, where the &amp;quot;Jesus&amp;quot; is supposed to go. In later stanzas, the &amp;quot;Jesus&amp;quot; is used as an exclamation; here, it can be read as the ending of the previous sentence (I do whatever pleases), especially since it seems to leave off in the middle of the sentence without the &amp;quot;Jesus&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, if you read it that way, then it doesn't make much sense in context - why would you juxtapose the two sentences &amp;quot;I do whatever pleases Jesus&amp;quot; and then &amp;quot;Won't I bleed 'em in the end&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can we read these two lines in a way that makes sense?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="58" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:57:18.783" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:57:18.783" Title="How can the &quot;Won't I bleed 'em in the end&quot; line from Les Mis's &quot;Master of the House&quot; be interpreted?" Tags="&lt;song-lyrics&gt;&lt;les-miserables-musical&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18412" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18411" CreationDate="2021-04-23T08:14:29.120" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;A search of the lyrics reveals them to be rendered like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Everybody loves a landlord&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Everybody's bosom friend&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I do whatever pleases&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jesus! Won't I bleed 'em in the end!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And it's noteworthy that there's almost no punctuation in the lyrics as written: listening to the song, there is a pause at the end of most lines. &amp;quot;Jesus!&amp;quot; is also a repeating motif in the song:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How it all increases, all them bits and pieces&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jesus! It's amazing how it grows!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And , as the OP notes, it is always used as an exclamation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As such, it would appear we can presume a full stop at the end of &amp;quot;I do whatever pleases&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Jesus!&amp;quot; thus becomes an exclamation: &amp;quot;Oh my! I'll swindle them in the end!&amp;quot;. The preceding line can be interpreted as &amp;quot;I aim to do what pleases&amp;quot;: this makes sense as a continuity of the preceding lines where the landlord proclaims that he pretends to be &amp;quot;Everybody's bosom friend&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To explain the meaning more fully, look at another repetition of the motif:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But lock up your valises&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jesus! Won't I skin you to the bone!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This essentially means the same thing: &amp;quot;Oh my! Won't I swindle you in the end!&amp;quot;. In both cases, the exclamation is a self-satisfied statement of excitement at the landlord's coming enrichment, and perhaps also a rejection of presumed guilt at ripping off his customers. He's emphasising that he's getting rich at the expense of his customers, and doesn't care.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="129" LastEditorUserId="129" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T08:50:01.477" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T08:50:01.477" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18413" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18415" CreationDate="2021-04-23T12:08:50.453" Score="2" ViewCount="142" Body="&lt;p&gt;In his article &amp;quot;Technique du coup du monde&amp;quot;, published in &lt;em&gt;Internationale Situationniste&lt;/em&gt; no.8 in January 1963 and in English translation as &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.notbored.org/invisible.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi writes&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It used to be said that the British Empire was won on the playing&#xA;fields of Eton. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the British ruling&#xA;class was formed exclusively in such institutions; the deportment they&#xA;conferred on a man was vitally relevant to the growth of England at&#xA;that time. &lt;strong&gt;Unfortunately&lt;/strong&gt;, the situation at &lt;strong&gt;Eton and similar&#xA;establishments&lt;/strong&gt; did not &lt;strong&gt;continue to inspire its own improvement&lt;/strong&gt;.&#xA;Inertia set in. Forms that were &lt;strong&gt;once fruitful&lt;/strong&gt; hardened until they were&#xA;devoid of contemporary relevance.&amp;quot; [emphasis added]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He seems to be ascribing a positive value to both the British Empire and the contribution that Eton College made to training the men who ran it. Eton College is a private English boarding school for boys aged 13-18, attended by 20 pupils who went on to become British prime ministers, including the present incumbent (Boris Johnson) and his most recent male predecessor (David Cameron).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is this: which schools did Trocchi himself attend? Did he go to Eton? Was he at a &amp;quot;similar establishment&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="8097" LastEditorUserId="8097" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T16:20:35.180" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T09:52:30.407" Title="Which schools did Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi attend?" Tags="&lt;alexander-trocchi&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18414" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18408" CreationDate="2021-04-23T12:48:46.120" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Shirin you made as sugar for Perwiz&#xA;Ferhad shed blood as tears&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poet Nizami Ganjavi, who lived in what is now Azerbaijan in the 12th Century, wrote a poem 'Khosrow o Shirin' which is based on a pre-Islamic story from Persian historical epics based on real events.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this story a Persian king, Khosrow II Parviz (I assume this last name is the same name as 'Perwiz) courts the Armenian Princess Shirin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story seems to have farcical elements in that the couple keep missing, or failing to recognise each other as they try to travel to meet up. They finally meet and she agrees to marry him if he reclaims his country from an enemy, his efforts to do that result in him having to marry someone else.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile a sculptor, Farhad falls for Shirin, and so Khosrow sets Farhad impossible tasks in distant places to get him away from her. &lt;em&gt;Then&lt;/em&gt; Khosrow tells Farhad that Shirin is dead, so Farhad throws himself off a mountain to his death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then Khosrow's wife dies , possibly poisoned by Shirin. Before rushing off to marry Shirin, Khosrow takes time out to try and get his leg over with another woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he finally tips up at Shirin's castle he's drunk as a skunk and she tells him to go home.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eventually they marry, but Khosrow's son from that awkward 'other marriage' shows up and falls in love with his step-mother. So he kills his Dad and sends Shirin a note that he's king now and she has to marry him. She goes 'Yeah, right' and kills herself.&#xA;(summarised from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khosrow_and_Shirin#Plot&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; entry)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Layla you made an affliction for Qays&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A poem about Layla and Qays was also written by Nizami Ganjavi, although the story is apparently of Arabic origin, later absorbed into Persian culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dailysabah.com/arts/reviews/4-immortal-love-stories-from-turkish-literature&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Daily Sabah&lt;/a&gt; the story is summarised:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Layla and Qays (Kays) fall in love with each other at first sight in their childhood. Qays is so sure of this love and begins to write love poems for his lover. His fondness for Layla causes people who hear about their love to refer to him as “Majnun,” which means &amp;quot;crazy&amp;quot; in Arabic. As knowledge of their love spreads around the community, it becomes impossible to hide it from their parents. Upon this, Qays finds the courage to ask Layla’s father for her hand in marriage. However, the father refuses by informing the young man that his daughter cannot marry a guy named &amp;quot;crazy.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;With imponderable grief, Majnun disappears in the deserts by living an isolated life among wild animals. In his time in the wilderness, Majnun replaces his material love for Leyla with divine love and becomes a hermit. Layla is also miserable and is forced to marry another guy. After her husband’s death some years later, Layla hopes to be with her only love again and goes to find Majnun. When she finds him, Majnun does not recognize her material being. It is then that Layla understands they will never meet again in this world. Finally, she passes away with a broken heart. Hearing her knell, Majnun comes to her grave and cries over it. Mourning to God to take him as well, Majnun also dies soon after.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One of the loyal friends of Majnun sees the couple in his dream later on. In the dream, they are in the garden of heaven together, symbolizing that the duo reunited outside the confines of time and the material world.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Ramin you entangled with Ways&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vis_and_R%C4%81min&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vis (Ways) and Rāmin&lt;/a&gt; is another classical Persian romance. The poet who composed it as an epic in the 11th Century claimed it was of Sasanian origin (The &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasanian_Empire&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Sassanid Empire&lt;/a&gt; being the last Persian imperial dynasty before the Muslim conquest) though is is now thought to be Parthian in origin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The pair grow up together in the care of a wet nurse. She is the daughter of a ruling family in Western Iran, he is the brother of a king in Northern Iran.&#xA;At adolescence they return to their families.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Vis is married off to her brother (or possibly her Uncle, the wikipedia synopsis is ambiguous) despite having been promised to Rāmin's brother (who had wanted to marry her mother and got offered Vis as a consolation prize).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Much war and killing ensues, during which Vis and Rāmin get around to falling in love. Eventually he ends up with his brother's throne, they marry, she dies when he's been king for 81 years and he mourns at her tomb for 2 years then dies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Why did you show Yousif to Zulaikha?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yousif and Zulaikha as, as Peter Shor notes in comments, appears in the Old Testament where she is the wife of the Pharaoh's Guard, Potipher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She tries to seduce Joseph and accuses him of attacking her when she is rebuffed. In the Old Testament &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potiphar%27s_wife#In_Genesis&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;her version is believed&lt;/a&gt; and Joseph imprisoned. In the Qur'an the evidence reveals that it was her scheme, but as far as I can make out &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potiphar%27s_wife#In_Qur%E2%80%99an&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;he still got imprisoned for being too damn gorgeous&lt;/a&gt; and not doing what he was told.&#xA;Some Jewish interpretations say that Zuleikha was merely confused by an astrologer being one generation adrift in predicting who in the Potiphar family was going to have Joseph's babies. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potiphar%27s_wife#In_Jewish_sources&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;It was Zuleikha's daughter who did that in the end.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How did you lead Wamik to Ezra&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can find references to there being a romance of Wamiq and Azra, but can find next to no information about it beyond that it may have been &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?newbks=1&amp;amp;newbks_redir=0&amp;amp;id=5CNuAAAAMAAJ&amp;amp;dq=wamiq%20azra&amp;amp;focus=searchwithinvolume&amp;amp;q=wamiq%20azra%20shirin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;written in imitation of the poet Nizami Ganjavi's telling of the Khosrow and Shirin tale&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I'm coming up blank on the Sheikh and Nulifer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T12:48:46.120" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18415" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18413" CreationDate="2021-04-23T13:07:54.470" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk/biography/?id=WH25409&amp;amp;type=P&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;According to Glasgow University&lt;/a&gt;, he attended &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillhead_High_School&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;HillHead High School&lt;/a&gt;, which at that time was a grammar school, and later &lt;a href=&quot;https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/0288&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cally House School&lt;/a&gt; while he was evacuated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cally House was wartime evacuation school in Galloway and was Britain's first local authority co-educational boarding school for senior pupils.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The school was based in an 18th-century country house in Kirkcudbrightshire (now part of Dumfries and Galloway).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fact that the Cally House school was a boarding establishment probably doesn't do a great deal to make it 'a similar establishment' to a Public School, though it may have had some similarities of experience in being set in grand old buildings and being on the spartan side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://scotlandonscreen.org.uk/browse-films/007-000-000-061-c&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This film&lt;/a&gt; suggests that there was some attempt to engender some of the civic aspects of the Public School life, but the fact of both Cally and Hillhead being Co-educational will have made a big difference to the character of the places, the English Public schools at that time being single sex, I believe. It is also clear in the film that the pupil-Teacher ratios are typical of State School rather than Public School.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As @Mikado points out in comments, in Scotland our education system has always been different from that of our neighbours to the south. The Scottish curriculum tends to be broader, covering a wider swath of subjects in final exams. This would further have set his education apart from pupils at Eaton, Rugby et al. Though &lt;em&gt;had&lt;/em&gt; he attended a fee-paying school such as Gordonstoun, it is likely he’d have followed an English curriculum.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T09:52:30.407" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T09:52:30.407" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18416" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-23T17:24:33.783" Score="1" ViewCount="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading online &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AhmedKhaniMemAndJinTrans.BySalahSaadalla/page/n31/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salah Saadalla's translation&lt;/a&gt; of the Kurdish classic &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;. The early chapters aren't part of the main story: two chapters addressed to God, two to the prophet Mohammed, two about the Kurdish nation, and then a prologue. But even these contain some interesting content and references. Chapter 5, &amp;quot;Our plight&amp;quot;, is clearly (at least for those who know some of the history of that part of the world) all about the state of the Kurdish people, although this isn't said explicitly until halfway through. An early passage of this chapter goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our retreat is complete&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Is it now likely to cease&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or will it go on further&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Until we all wither?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This follows a request for a glass to be filled with wine (presumably part of the oral tradition that this story originally was) and is followed by lengthy musing on the possibilities that might be available to the Kurdish people if they had a recognised nation and leader. But these two stanzas in particular interest me, as they seem to suggest a particularly low point for the Kurds: their &amp;quot;retreat&amp;quot; being &amp;quot;complete&amp;quot;, with the possibility of their retreat either stopping or continuing until they all &amp;quot;wither&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How does this fit with Kurdish cultural history?&lt;/strong&gt; Was the story created at a time when the Kurdish people, besieged from all sides as this chapter describes, were at a particularly low point and in danger of extinction?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T17:24:33.783" Title="What plight of the Kurds is suggested in Mem and Zin chapter 5?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18418" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18419" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Black Prince' by Iris Murdoch, first published in 1973. Use this tag with [iris-murdoch]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:04:15.997" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18420" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18421" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" Score="0" Body="Questions about works of literature that were originally written in the Georgian language, regardless of whether they were written or published in Georgia (in the Caucasus region) or elsewhere. Do not use this tag for (English) literature written during the reign of George V, king of England." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:08:25.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18422" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18423" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Oil!' by Upton Sinclair, first published in 1926–27. Use this tag with [upton-sinclair]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:11:36.573" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18424" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18425" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the  American writer and political activist Upton Sinclair (1878– 1968) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:12:41.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18426" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18427" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:15:52.353" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18428" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18429" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American writer, feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde (1934–1992) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:17:14.013" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18430" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18431" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of Edward James Corbett or Jim Corbett (1875 –1955) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:25:26.470" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18432" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18433" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" Score="0" Body="Questions about the children's novel 'Five Children and It' by E. Nesbit, first published in 1902. Use this tag with [e-nesbit]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" LastActivityDate="2021-04-23T22:27:19.607" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18435" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-24T09:24:34.280" Score="1" ViewCount="23" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a passage in a book called &lt;em&gt;Missing Out&lt;/em&gt; by Adam Phillips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But the outrageous, pragmatic strong reader in this account reads as&#xA;if he knows what he wants, and not as though he is conflicted about&#xA;what he wants, or indeed is in flight from it (he might, of course,&#xA;discover it through the reading). The strong reader’s belief in his&#xA;reading is such that he does not need to persuade or convert anyone&#xA;else. But by negating the contribution of others, the strong reader&#xA;misses out on being told what his strong reading might be, in the best&#xA;and the worst sense, an attempt to get out of. Rorty’s questions might&#xA;be rephrased as: What is the text good for getting me out of? What can&#xA;I use it to get out of?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What that &amp;quot;in flight from it&amp;quot; mean? Does it mean &amp;quot;away from it&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12758" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T09:57:36.367" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T09:57:36.367" Title="What does &quot;in flight from it&quot; mean in the below text?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;missing-out-in-praise-unlived-life&gt;&lt;adam-phillips&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18437" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18438" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" Score="0" Body="Questions about the lyrics of the English rock band Anathema, which was formed in 1990. Use this tag with [song-lyrics]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:48:41.190" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18439" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18440" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" Score="0" Body="Questions about the musical Les MIsérables, based on Victor Hugo's novel with the same title. The original French lyrics were written by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, the English lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer. Use with [french-literature] when asking a question about the French lyrics. Use with [song-lyrics] regardless of the language version." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T13:59:47.723" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18441" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18443" CreationDate="2021-04-24T15:02:48.497" Score="2" ViewCount="35" Body="&lt;p&gt;The book-review and -recommendation site &lt;em&gt;The Storygraph&lt;/em&gt; allows users to categorise books in various ways such as &lt;em&gt;adventurous, funny, inspiring,&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;reflective.&lt;/em&gt; Some (fiction) books I know have been judged to be reflective by many reviewers while others not at all, so there seems to be some agreement on the meaning of this. However, I fail to see what distinguishes these books, and thus I ask: When is literature categorised as &lt;em&gt;reflective?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can think at least of the following interpretations, at least some of which are clearly distinct:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author discusses the events of the story on page, i.e., the book is the product of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_writing&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reflective writing&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The characters (or the third-person narrator) discuss the events of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The story holds up the mirror to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The author explores real-world questions or events by means of telling a story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Any reasonable Internet search I could come up with yielded primarily information on reflective writing or reflections on literature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="34" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T20:27:43.017" Title="What does it mean for literature to be “reflective”?" Tags="&lt;terminology&gt;&lt;style&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18442" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18453" CreationDate="2021-04-24T15:27:54.477" Score="0" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That night at the studio they finished early. There were no taxis, so he&#xA;walked. He didn’t know what time it was but thought it must be after two.&#xA;The café was still open, &lt;strong&gt;hollow&lt;/strong&gt; as a Hopper painting behind the empty bus&#xA;shelter. Philip passed on the other side of the street, too far away to&#xA;determine the sex of a couple of white-faced students who were sitting at a&#xA;corner table under the neon sign, not talking to each other. He plugged on&#xA;up the rise towards the housing commission flats. By the time he passed the&#xA;first block he was singing to himself, some old Stevie Winwood song with a&#xA;riff that made him think of that small figure, arms outspread, hovering like a&#xA;mosquito between banks of keyboards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were people against the railings of the carpark. Six, or eight. His&#xA;skin stood up. It was dark. He made air go in, and out, and kept walking.&#xA;They stood quietly and let him pass. &lt;strong&gt;He waited for the thump in the back, in&#xA;the neck, the foot stuck out to trip. He wanted something to happen, left&#xA;right left right come on.&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;‘Hey, you.’&#xA;He propped and spun round. The briefcase swung out from his side.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One of the meanings of &amp;quot;hollow&amp;quot; is &amp;quot;without value, or not true or sincere&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we interpret the meaning of &amp;quot;Hollow&amp;quot; in this passage as &amp;quot;meaningless and deceptive&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I looked at Hopper's paintings and I found they reflect sad feelings. Can we interpret the meaning of &amp;quot;hollow&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;The café was still open, hollow as a Hopper painting behind the empty bus shelter&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;sad and deceptive&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can the sentences &amp;quot;He waited for the thump in the back, in the neck, the foot stuck out to trip. He wanted something to happen, left right left right come on&amp;quot;  be understood as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He expected the thump in the back, in the neck, and the foot of one of them stuck out to trip. He liked something to happen, he look at his left and his right several time and wanted something to happen.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T15:41:14.877" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T16:00:18.033" Title="Can &quot;hollow&quot; in &quot;hollow as a Hopper painting&quot; mean &quot;meaningless and deceptive&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18443" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18441" CreationDate="2021-04-24T20:21:38.660" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/RabelaisA11y/status/1385974698299777024&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;asked&lt;/a&gt; @thestorygraph on Twittter:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What exactly are the criteria for the tag/mood &amp;quot;reflective&amp;quot; on &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/thestorygraph&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@thestorygraph&lt;/a&gt;?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Or should I ask &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/nodunayo&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@nodunayo&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/RobFrelow&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;@RobFrelow&lt;/a&gt; ?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Nadia Odunayo and Rob Frelow are co-founders of The Storygraph.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This was the &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/thestorygraph/status/1385992026945204228&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no set criteria for it! Typically a book that is thought-provoking, deliberative, references past memories, etc., would have that tag!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Reflective mood&amp;quot; is otherwise not known to me as a specific literary term. For example, it is not defined in &lt;em&gt;The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms&lt;/em&gt; by Chris Baldick (Oxford University Press, 2001). That doesn't mean Baldick doesn't use the term, but two of the three occurrences of the term are related to Horace; for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Horatian ode, as distinct from the Pindaric ode, is homostrophic&#xA;and usually private and reflective in mood: Keats's odes (1820) are&#xA;English examples of this form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-24T20:27:43.017" LastActivityDate="2021-04-24T20:27:43.017" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18444" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17493" CreationDate="2021-04-25T00:09:06.603" Score="5" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR: he didn't say it&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer is based entirely off a &lt;a href=&quot;https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/08/20/fly-swim/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Quote Investigator&lt;/a&gt; article. They found several instances of the same idea being expressed, just none by Bernard Shaw.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;QI starts off with:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;QI&lt;/strong&gt; has found no substantive evidence that George Bernard Shaw wrote or spoke this statement.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest citation that QI found for this quote is a 1925 book. QI quotes from &lt;em&gt;Social Classes in Post-War Europe&lt;/em&gt; (1925) by Lothrop Stoddard:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gorky relates how, after addressing a peasant audience on the subject of science and the marvels of technical inventions, he was criticized by a peasant spokesman in the following manner: “Yes, yes, &lt;strong&gt;we are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like the fishes; but how to live on the earth we don’t know.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They acknowledge that this is indirect evidence as it is someone else saying that Gorky heard someone else say the quote. However, several other sources quote this one; it is the general source given for this idea. Here are two instances of others referring to Gorky or his peasant as the source.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;C. E. M Joad, a book reviewer from “The Spectator”, about a book &lt;em&gt;Kalki or The Future of Civilization&lt;/em&gt; (1929) by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, as quoted on QI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Professor Radhakrishnan quotes with approval the comment of a peasant upon the marvels of science introduced to him in a lecture by Maxim Gorky. “Yes, &lt;strong&gt;we are taught to fly in the air like birds, and to swim in the water like fishes, but how to live on the earth we do not know.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 1935 PTA meeting speaker, as quoted on QI&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A Russian peasant has said, “Yes, &lt;strong&gt;we have learned to fly through the air like birds and swim under the water like fish; but to live on the earth like men, this we have not learned.”&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;QI's end-note:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, &lt;strong&gt;QI&lt;/strong&gt; would tentatively attribute the saying to a Russian peasant; however, there is considerable uncertainty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More examples and a deeper tracing of this quote/idea through history are present in the QI article.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T00:09:06.603" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18445" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-25T01:42:34.170" Score="2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I remember reading a work of fiction, possibly by a Russian writer (translated into English), in which a character says that the Jesuits (?) write of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness and that he/she thinks it is destroying love in another person. I'm normally good at finding things online but haven't been able to find this passage. The author might be Dostoevsky. Any ideas?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12760" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T14:10:13.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:10:13.353" Title="Who speculated that the sin for which there is no forgiveness is destroying love in another person?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18446" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17470" CreationDate="2021-04-25T02:33:18.533" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Like a streak&amp;quot; is an idiom, as &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/17470/what-does-out-of-the-room-like-a-streak-mean/18446#comment27207_17470&quot;&gt;@verbose says in the comments&lt;/a&gt;. Quoting the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/like-a-streak&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;US&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    &lt;em&gt;Informal&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;    at high speed; swiftly&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As the dictionary indicates, this is an American turn of phrase. It simply means &amp;quot;at a high speed&amp;quot;. So &amp;quot;I was out of the room like a streak&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;I left the room quickly&amp;quot;, which makes sense here as an explanation of why Bertie didn't converse with the group. If someone left quickly they wouldn't be able to talk with those who were left.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for why &amp;quot;like a streak&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;at a high speed&amp;quot;, this is probably a reference to how high-speed movement, such as a fast-moving airplane or a quick swimmer, leaves thin lines in its wake. These lines could be called &amp;quot;streaks&amp;quot;, and as they are associated with fast movement, &amp;quot;like a streak&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;at a high speed&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or, see the streaks in this image (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.comicbookfx.com/result.php?tagexact=1&amp;amp;tags=run&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;courtesy Comic Book FX&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2HHc.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/X2HHc.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a comic panel showing a woman in a white coat running, with streaking lines behind her and &amp;quot;WHIZZZZ&amp;quot; as an onomatopoeia&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T03:30:29.430" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T03:30:29.430" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18448" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18451" CreationDate="2021-04-25T03:39:58.123" Score="5" ViewCount="372" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;No Longer Human&lt;/em&gt; Osamu Dazai attributes the quote below to Guy-Charles Cros:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;…et puis on recommence encore le lendemain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;avec seulement la même règle que la veille&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;et qui est d'éviter les grandes joies barbares&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;de même que les grandes douleurs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;comme un crapaud contourne une pierre sur son chemin…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I could not find a source of this quote and would greatly appreciate if someone could give me directions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12763" LastEditorUserId="12763" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T14:54:41.623" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T14:54:41.623" Title="Guy-Charles Cros quoted by Osamu Dazai: &quot;comme un crapaud contourne une pierre&quot;" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;guy-charles-cros&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18449" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-25T03:41:15.770" Score="4" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt;, the third book in &lt;em&gt;The Hunger Games&lt;/em&gt; series, there is a minor character named Tigris. She is the owner of a shop in which Katniss and her team of soldiers take refuge during the assault on the Capitol. In &lt;em&gt;The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes&lt;/em&gt;, the subsequently published prequel, there is a major character named Tigris. She is Corianolus Snow's cousin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are these two Tigrises actually the same person? In terms of chronology, &lt;em&gt;Ballad&lt;/em&gt; takes place some 65 years prior to &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; (10th Hunger Games and 75th Hunger Games respectively), and Tigris is 21 years old in &lt;em&gt;Ballad&lt;/em&gt;. She would thus have to be something like 87 in Mockingjay. The Tigris described in &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; is certainly not young, but I did not get the impression of someone approaching the age of 90. She is however described as having various surgical procedures to alter her looks, which may be concealing her true age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Katniss does mention that she recognizes Tigris as a stylist from one of the earliest Hunger Games she remembers. Given that Katniss is only 17, this can't have been much more than 10 years previous. If Tigris is indeed Snow's cousin from &lt;em&gt;Ballad&lt;/em&gt; she would have been in her late 70s as a stylist in the Hunger Games. While certainly not impossible, it would seem to be at least out of the ordinary.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, it would be mightily coincidental if they are two different people. As far as I can tell, there are no other names that are reused in the series. Tigris is not exactly a common name that one would expect to appear multiple times. Additionally, in both books Tigris is shown to be someone with  particular sartorial proficiency.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any clear evidence in the books that Tigris in &lt;em&gt;Ballad&lt;/em&gt; and Tigris in &lt;em&gt;Mockingjay&lt;/em&gt; are one and the same person? If not, is there any significance to these two characters having the same name?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T08:11:33.687" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T08:11:33.687" Title="Are Tigris and Tigris the same person?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;suzanne-collins&gt;&lt;the-hunger-games&gt;&lt;the-ballad-of-songbirds-and-snakes&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18450" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16642" CreationDate="2021-04-25T04:51:36.183" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;As &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/16642/what-is-the-term-for-substituting-a-context-specific-word-into-a-well-known-phra#comment25983_16642&quot;&gt;@Gareth Rees&lt;/a&gt; says in the comments, this is an example of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;snowclone&lt;/a&gt;, a&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;linguistic phenomenon of &amp;quot;a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different variants&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of the examples given are &amp;quot;In space, no one can hear you X&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;X is the new Y&amp;quot;. These are such well-known sentence structures that no matter what words go in the blanks, the reference and meaning is immediately understandable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You seem to be using the well-known phrase &amp;quot;X speak louder than words&amp;quot; as a snowclone. At least I understood the reference immediately, so it worked for me. I'm not sure if there is a word for the &lt;em&gt;act&lt;/em&gt; of making/using a snowclone, other than &amp;quot;using a snowclone&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T04:51:36.183" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18451" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18448" CreationDate="2021-04-25T08:17:53.013" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lesftesquotidi00cros/page/n3/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les fêtes quotidiennes&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1912):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Il en est pour qui la vie est chose simple,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;chose facile et de tous les jours;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on fait sa correspondance, on « fait l’amour »,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;on fait, avant tout, « ses affaires »&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;et puis on recommence encore le lendemain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;avec seulement la même règle que la veille&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;et qui est d’éviter les grandes joies barbares&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;de même que les grandes douleurs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;comme un crapaud contourne une pierre sur son chemin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are those for whom life is a simple thing,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;an easy thing, an everyday thing:&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you write your letters, you “make love”,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you do, first of all, “your business”,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and then you start again tomorrow&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;with just the same rule as yesterday,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;which is to avoid great savage joys&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;as well as great sorrows&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;like a toad avoids a pebble in its path.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Guy-Charles Cros (1912). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lesftesquotidi00cros/page/8/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les fêtes quotidiennes&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 9–10&lt;/a&gt;. Paris: Mercure. My translation.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found this by searching the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt; for a short distinctive phrase from the poem (I picked “grandes joies barbares”), and selecting the “Search text contents” option. This resulted in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22grandes%20joies%20barbares%22&amp;amp;sin=TXT&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;four hits&lt;/a&gt;: the original publication of &lt;em&gt;Les fêtes quotidiennes&lt;/em&gt; and three quotations via Osamu Dazai. (If there had been many hits I would have sorted by publication date and look at the earliest appearances, but that wasn’t necessary in this case. If the Internet Archive did not have any relevant hits I would have tried &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/services/engine/search/advancedSearch/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Gallica&lt;/a&gt; and discovered an earlier publication, in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.retronews.fr/journal/mercure-de-france/16-juin-1911/118/4093251/43&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mercure de France&lt;/em&gt;, 16 juin 1911, p. 715&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T09:58:31.150" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T09:58:31.150" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18452" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-25T11:46:39.060" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The classical Kurdish story of Mem and Zin (which I'm &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AhmedKhaniMemAndJinTrans.BySalahSaadalla/page/n43/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reading online in Salah Saadalla's translation&lt;/a&gt;) appears to be set in a principality called Botan, whose prince (Zin's brother) rules from the town of Jizir:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;His throne was in Jizir&lt;sup&gt;19&lt;/sup&gt; and his star was rising&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His luck was strong and his position was praisworthy&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He ruled over the Turk, the Arab and the Persian&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;He was famous as the Prince of Botan&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sup&gt;19&lt;/sup&gt; &lt;sub&gt;Jizir: the capital of the principality of Botan. Now a town in South East Turkey.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I've tried to search for Jizir and Botan, but the only references I've found online have been back to the story of Mem and Zin, or like &lt;a href=&quot;http://ensani.ir/file/download/article/1590463669-10222-2020-1-9.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this article&lt;/a&gt; to other pieces of Kurdish literature (&amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;The land of Jizir and Botan, which is the land of Kurdistan&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the setting of &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;strong&gt;Was Botan a real Kurdish principality, and if so where and when?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it something invented for the story, a fictional Kurdish nation to instil pride in Kurdish listeners?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T20:51:37.040" Title="Where is the Kurdish principality of Botan?" Tags="&lt;setting&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18453" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18442" CreationDate="2021-04-25T16:00:18.033" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;Hopper cafe&amp;quot; refers to this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.edwardhopper.net/nighthawks.jsp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;painting&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x8HLm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/x8HLm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The little spot of bright in a dark night could be warm and cosy, but most people see this picture as showing emptiness and loneliness. The people aren't interacting and they just seem surrounded by empty space. The cafe is hollow. Your quote alludes to this as a way to quickly describe the cafe being walked by. Someone who knows the picture will not imagine the walker wanting to go into that cafe, or feeling drawn to it. It's possible you could call this sad; I certainly wouldn't call it deceptive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second paragraph tells us the walker is scared, with goosebumps and having to concentrate on deliberately breathing. He is sure they are going to attack him: a clump of 6 or 8 people hanging around at that time of night. He thinks perhaps someone will thump (punch) him, or trip him. He expects it. He doesn't want to be mugged and beaten, he won't like it if it happens, but he thinks it will because he has come across this group who he feels are up to no good. And if it starts to happen, well that's better than continuing to wait for it to happen. When someone calls out to him he reacts in that jumpy unrestrained way people do when they are scared and something is starting to happen. Again, nothing here is deceptive, and it's not sad either unless you find it sad that the walker is suspicious of this group of people hanging around a parking lot in the middle of night.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="417" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T16:00:18.033" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18454" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18445" CreationDate="2021-04-25T17:12:28.163" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;For sake of clarity and context, the notion of the “unforgivable sin” is found at least three times in the New Testament:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be&#xA;forgiven unto men: but the &lt;strong&gt;blasphemy against the Holy Ghost&lt;/strong&gt; shall not&#xA;be forgiven unto men. (Matthew 12:31, KJV);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Verily I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of&#xA;men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he&#xA;that shall &lt;strong&gt;blaspheme against the Holy Ghost&lt;/strong&gt; hath never forgiveness,&#xA;but is in danger of eternal damnation. (Mark 3: 28-29, KJV);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And whosoever shall speak a word against the Son of man, it shall be&#xA;forgiven him: but unto him that &lt;strong&gt;blasphemeth against the Holy Ghost&lt;/strong&gt; it&#xA;shall not be forgiven. (Luke 12:10, KJV)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, what constitutes “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” is hotly debated among religious folk but some ideas include “deliberate rejection and antagonism [toward the ministry of Jesus], not an attempt to frighten those with a tender conscience” (France 177). And this warning is directed (mainly) against the Pharisees. Others contend it is “those who against their own conscience deliberately blaspheme the Holy Ghost and persecute the faithful” (Geldenhuys 349). The idea of blasphemy also carries the notion of “slander”; so, a paraphrase might be “slander against the Holy Spirit” and the “diametrical opposition to the good purpose of God”—again an indictment directed specifically at the Pharisees (France 482).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In any case, the NT references clearly convey a different idea than Isben’s “The great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The quote (or idea) to which you refer is most likely:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You are a murderer! You have committed the one mortal sin! You have&#xA;killed the love-life in me. Do you understand what that means? The&#xA;Bible speaks of a mysterious sin for which there is no forgiveness. I&#xA;have never understood what it could be; but now I understand. The&#xA;great, unpardonable sin is to murder the love-life in a human soul.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;― Henrik Ibsen, &lt;em&gt;John Gabriel Borkman&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;France, R.T. &lt;em&gt;The Gospel of Matthew&lt;/em&gt; (NIGTC). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;France, R.T. &lt;em&gt;The Gospel of Mark&lt;/em&gt; (NIGTC). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Geldenhuys, Norval. &lt;em&gt;The Gospel of Luke&lt;/em&gt; (NICNT). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ibsen, Henrik, J&lt;em&gt;ohn Gabriel Borkman: A Classic Play From The Father Of Theatre&lt;/em&gt;. Stage Door, 2013.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Holy Bible, (King James Version). Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1972.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10067" LastEditorUserId="10067" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T17:18:00.240" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T17:18:00.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18455" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="11885" CreationDate="2021-04-25T17:42:55.370" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Disclaimer: I have never read &lt;em&gt;Pachinko&lt;/em&gt;; this answer is based on the quotes in the question, the Guardian interview quoted below, and my knowledge of the English language.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;TL;DR&lt;/strong&gt;: the first sentence can be paraphrased as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History has not recorded the lives of common people even though it should have, but this is of no importance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And the second bold bit as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;their own rulers hadn’t been able to protect them, though the rulers should have.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This answer segues into a bit of interpretation and broader context instead of just analyzing meaning, but I believe that this is required for a full understanding.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll start with Lee's explanation of &amp;quot;History failed us, but no matter&amp;quot;, from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/02/min-jin-lee-interview-frederick-douglass-200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Guardian interview&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“History has failed us, but no matter” serves as my thesis statement. I believe history has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world, not just the Korean-Japanese, who are the subject of Pachinko. I am also arguing that the discipline of history has failed. It is not that historians aren’t doing their jobs but rather that the memory of history has been reconstructed by the elite, because the overwhelming majority of ordinary people rarely leave sufficient primary documents; they do not have others recording their lives in real time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase “but no matter” is a statement of defiance. It doesn’t matter that history has failed us because ordinary people have persisted anyway. This idea gives me an enormous amount of strength and hope as a writer because I am an ordinary person. Those of us who may be women of color, immigrants, or working class aren’t often meant to be people who write novels about ideas, but no matter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What has history &amp;quot;failed&amp;quot; to do? It may be helpful to look at the precise definition of &amp;quot;fail&amp;quot; that is used here. I quote from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, definition 1a (transitive):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to disappoint the expectations or trust of&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;History, Lee says, has not lived up to the expectations of humanity. It has not done what it should have done. The key part here is the meaning that something that &lt;em&gt;should have happened&lt;/em&gt; did not happen, or at least did not happen to an acceptable extent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;History has not recorded the lives of common people.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lee brings up several reasons why history has failed to properly remember common people. She says that &amp;quot;history has been reconstructed by the elite&amp;quot;. Our understanding is necessarily biased by who was &lt;em&gt;able&lt;/em&gt; to tell their stories. The &amp;quot;overwhelming majority&amp;quot; of common people are far too busy living to write detailed treatises on their lives.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can see this in the paragraph fragment which appears after &amp;quot;History has failed us, but no matter&amp;quot; (quoted here for context):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the turn of the century, an aging fisherman and his wife decided to take in lodgers for extra money. Both were born and raised in the fishing village of Yeongdo--a five-mile-wide islet beside the port city of Busan. In there long marriage, the wife gave birth to three sons, but only Hoonie, the eldest and the weakest one, survived.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The humans which this novel opens with are resolutely common. They’ve lived their lives together, grown old together. The narration mentions the town they grew up in (tiny), the fact that they had three sons but only one survived (characteristic of poor, common people), and defines them by their common occupations (fishing and taking lodgers). All of these details build a case that &lt;em&gt;these are not the kind of people history writes about&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Their lives are no less worthy of being told and remembered than those of more privileged people, yet, history will not properly do so. The first sentence of the novel sets this up to be read as &lt;em&gt;a failure&lt;/em&gt; of history.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This failure is compounded by the world events happening at this time, or, as your second quote puts it:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;the twentieth century's legacy of colonialism and war that still fuels tensions in North East Asia&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Colonialism and war disproportionally hurt common people. Powerful people can use their privilege to shield themselves to a certain extent. While privileged people write the history books, common people are the ones who struggle to survive, creating stories of resilience and hard work and ingenuity in the face of their world changing. Yet, again, this - this, what history &lt;em&gt;should have recorded&lt;/em&gt;, something that later generations will care about - this is something that history has &lt;em&gt;failed to&lt;/em&gt; record. History has failed the common people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator doesn’t simply say that history has “failed”, but that history has “failed us”. “Us” is a group that includes the narrator and the reader. In using this pronoun, the narrator asserts a group identity - a kinship of less privileged people. Another possibility for the meaning of “us” is the human race as a whole. History’s failing to record commoners’ stories hurts our collective memory, cheating humanity, failing “us”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yet, despite all this, despite all that history has not done when it should, the narrator brushes it aside with “but no matter”. Quoting &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/no-matter&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;, American English definition 1 for “no matter”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;it is of no importance&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Here, the narration declares that history’s failing is of no importance. Even if no one writes history books about common people, that doesn’t affect their lives. They still survive and live and make their own stories even if no one cares to listen. Lee calls this a statement of “defiance”, one of resistance to the privileged history that ignores common stories.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same usage of “fail” is present in the second quote, reproduced here so you don’t have to scroll at the way up again:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;their own rulers had failed them&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the failure here? What expectations have the rulers disappointed, what have they not done which they should have? These questions are answerable by looking at the surrounding context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The men yearn for “another nation to be strong”. Being insufficiently strong, then, is how the rulers have failed. A specific example of this failure is provided&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Korea had been colonized for twenty-two years already. The younger two had never lived in a Korea that wasn't ruled by Japan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“[T]heir own rulers” are the original Korean rulers, who did not live up to the expectation of preventing colonization. (It doesn't make sense, in context, for &amp;quot;their own rulers&amp;quot; to refer to Japanese rulers, because the Japanese rulers have not failed, they have succeeded.) The men believe that if their rulers had been stronger and more powerful, Korea would not have been colonized.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is significant that “own” is used here, instead of (for example) “prior” or “original”. By claiming the previous rulers as their “own”, the failure is compounded. Part of the social contract between rulers and their populace is that the rulers will protect the people to the best of their ability. If a random adult lets a random child they were watching be kidnapped, that is a failure and a dereliction of the general duty to keep those under one's care safe. However, if a &lt;em&gt;parent&lt;/em&gt; lets &lt;em&gt;their child&lt;/em&gt; be kidnapped, that is seen as an even worse failure, because parents have a special obligation to protect their children.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The ability of Japan to colonize Korea is a failure of the Korean rulers. The Korean rulers disappointd expectations by not being sufficiently strong to protect their people. Then, not recording the experiences of common people under colonialism and war is a failure of history. History has disappointed expectations by not sufficiently remembering the important stories of common people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T18:20:58.280" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T18:20:58.280" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18456" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18198" CreationDate="2021-04-25T18:34:20.950" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think I’ve found this. ‘Lily Alone’ by Jacqueline Wilson.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Pulling quotes about the book from various sources:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://jacquelinewilson.fandom.com/wiki/Lily_Green&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;JaquelineWilson.fandom.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lily, Bliss, Baxter and Pixie run away to the park and camp out in a hollow tree which Bliss found.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, both from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lily_Alone#Plot_summary&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They feed themselves by stealing leftover food from a nearby cafe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story ends, sadly, with Lily drawing a picture of the Green family and writing at the bottom: &amp;quot;We're all going to be together very, very soon.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T15:55:40.530" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T15:55:40.530" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18457" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18072" CreationDate="2021-04-25T20:44:37.923" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;I’ve no great certainty about this, but ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasiland&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Stasiland&lt;/a&gt;’ by Anna Funder may fit the bill.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Per Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stasiland by Anna Funder is a book published in 2003 about individuals who resisted the East German regime, and others who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. It tells the story of what it was like to work for the Stasi, and describes how those who did so now come to terms, or do not, with their pasts.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Funder, an Australian, found that Germans often resorted to stereotypes in describing the Ossis, the German nickname for those who lived in East Germany, dismissing questions about civil resistance. She used classified ads to reach former members of the Stasi and anti-Stasi organizations and interviewed them extensively&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2019/45/stasiland-miriam-speaks-out&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;BBC&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While working in Berlin after the fall of the Wall, Australian Anna Funder became curious about the stories of the former East Germans who had lived under the watchful eye of the Stasi - the former East German ministry of state security.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She was also intrigued about the stories of the Stasi men themselves – tracking them down to talk to them by placing an advertisement in a newspaper.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a series of meetings, Anna pieces together what life was like then and how they are coping with the aftermath.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/lit/stasiland/chapter-2-miriam&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Litcharts.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1996, Funder’s train arrives in Leipzig. There, Funder meets Miriam Weber, a woman in her mid-forties. Miriam explains to Funder that she became an “Enemy of the State” as a teenager. Back in 1968, she was involved in demonstrations against the destruction of the Leipzig University Church. Later, after the police began attacking demonstrators, Miriam and her friend made pamphlets criticizing the police. A few days later, the Stasi&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T20:44:37.923" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18458" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18452" CreationDate="2021-04-25T20:51:37.040" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;By searching online for ‘Botan’ plus ‘Kurds’, I arrived at the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohtan://&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; article:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bohtan (also Buhtan, Bokhti) was a medieval Kurdish principality in the Ottoman Empire&#xA;centered on the town of Jazirah ibn 'Omar (modern Cizre also known as&#xA;Cizîra Botan (Jazira Botan)) in southeastern Anatolia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T20:51:37.040" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18459" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18205" CreationDate="2021-04-25T21:40:06.190" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;the kind of woman who’d throw round terms like &lt;em&gt;the orthodox feminist position&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; does not imply that the woman in question is a feminist, or talks like a feminist, but simply that &lt;strong&gt;she uses words such as &amp;quot;the orthodox feminist position&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. This is a fancy, academic-sounding term. Since the woman has a &amp;quot;desire to impress&amp;quot; and be &amp;quot;fancy and successful&amp;quot;, it makes sense that she'd use fancy terms in her conversation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Talking about &amp;quot;the orthodox feminist position&amp;quot; is also a way to indicate that one is keeping up with current events. In the same way that using technical scientific terms would mark me as part of the scientific community, her use of this term is an attempt to mark herself as part of learnéd high society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for what &amp;quot;orthodox feminist position&amp;quot; means, it is simply &lt;strong&gt;a position/stance taken by a group identified as &amp;quot;orthodox feminists&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I see two possibilities. The first is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthodox_Jewish_feminism&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Orthodox feminism&lt;/a&gt;, a feminist movement within Orthodox Judaism. The other, since &amp;quot;orthodox&amp;quot; isn't capitalized, is using &amp;quot;orthodox&amp;quot; as an antonym to &amp;quot;radical&amp;quot;, so a more generally accepted and less society-shaking form of feminism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &amp;quot;clumsy act of duty&amp;quot; is &lt;strong&gt;one that is done awkwardly (&amp;quot;clumsily&amp;quot;) out of a sense of obligation (&amp;quot;duty&amp;quot;)&lt;/strong&gt;. She probably felt a &amp;quot;duty&amp;quot; to make food as that is a traditional feminine thing to do, cook and care for men. A woman trying to fit into society would fell a sense of &amp;quot;duty&amp;quot; to fulfil this feminine role. This act could also be &amp;quot;clumsy&amp;quot; because she was simply unaccustomed to cooking for others, so she felt awkward doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Nut out&amp;quot; is indeed the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nut_out&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian idiom&lt;/a&gt; (Helen Garner is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Garner&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Australian&lt;/a&gt;) meaning&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To find a solution for, to work out the finer details, especially in a group discussion.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't see anything in the passage to indicate that the man was with a group, but the idiom would also apply to him &lt;strong&gt;working hard to figure out the precise details of a &amp;quot;score&amp;quot;&lt;/strong&gt;. I'm not sure which &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/score&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of &amp;quot;score&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is being used - it could be a record (a tally of money owed, e.g.), sports scores, or a musical score. Nevertheless, the man was &amp;quot;nutting out&amp;quot;, or working on, finding a solution or figuring out the finer details.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Cultivated vowels&amp;quot; does indeed mean &amp;quot;an educated way of pronouncing vowels&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-27T14:34:02.867" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T14:34:02.867" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18460" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18461" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" Score="0" Body="Questions about novels about Indiana Jones, a fictional professor of archaeology. Questions that are purely about the films should be asked on Movies &amp; TV Stack Exchange." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T22:36:10.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18462" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18463" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French poet Guy-Charles Cros (1879–1956) or his life as a writer. Use in conjunction with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" LastActivityDate="2021-04-25T22:38:44.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18464" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18465" CreationDate="2021-04-26T03:25:40.740" Score="1" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, Mr. Fransemmery, a juryman, went to Mrs. Braxfield, a rural witness, while Mr. Blick, a detective, was in her house:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mrs. Braxfield herself opened the door of Woodland Cottage to Mr. Fransemmery, and making out his identity by the light of the lamp in her hall, &lt;strong&gt;bade him enter in tones of warm welcome&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“&lt;strong&gt;Never rains but it pours!&lt;/strong&gt;” she exclaimed, as she ushered the visitor towards her parlour. “I’ve got one caller already, and now here’s another; glad to see you, Mr. Fransemmery!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Fransemmery stepped into a well-lighted, cosy sitting-room, and found himself staring at Blick. Blick smiled and nodded; he recognized the newcomer as the bland and spectacled gentleman who had acted as foreman of the jury at the recent inquest. Mr. Fransemmery, of course, knew who Blick was. He hesitated on the threshold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“If you’re &lt;strong&gt;talking business matters&lt;/strong&gt;—” he suggested.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Not at all!” exclaimed Mrs. Braxfield. “This young gentleman—too young, I tell him, to have such a job as he has!—simply came to ask me what he calls a pertinent question about my evidence the other morning. I’m a very good-tempered woman, as you well know, Mr. Fransemmery, or I might have given his question another name, and called it impertinent! What do you think he wanted to know, Mr. Fransemmery? If I was certain that the man I saw on the hill-side the morning of the murder was Mr. John Harborough? The idea!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Blick, who looked very much at home in an easy chair, gave Mrs. Braxfield &lt;strong&gt;a whimsical glance&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Well, you haven’t told me yet if you were certain!” he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Actually, I have three questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/it-never-rains-but-it-pours&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Never rains but it pours&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; refers to happening of bad things, if so, how could she welcome him warmly while she regard this visit as a bad thing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Blick was a detective, and Mrs. Braxfield was just a rural witness, so it's impossible that they were talking about &amp;quot;commercial business matters&amp;quot;, so is &amp;quot;business&amp;quot; here just an adjective like &amp;quot;important&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;I found the possible meanings of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.lexico.com/definition/whimsical&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;whimsical&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot;, but I just can't get its exact meaning in this context, so can somebody explain it simpler terms in connection with the context?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T04:18:31.393" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T04:19:57.757" Title="How could somebody welcome his visitor warmly while regarding this visit as a bad thing in &quot;Markenmore Mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18465" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18464" CreationDate="2021-04-26T04:03:10.583" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Never rains but it pours&amp;quot; is not necessarily associated with bad things. The general meaning is simply that when one thing happens, then many things happen at once. If there are lots of visitors/events in this day, the meaning would be that &amp;quot;oh, it's not just one visitor/event, but many!&amp;quot;. Mrs. Braxfield explains her reasons for using the phrase by noting that &amp;quot;I’ve got one caller already&amp;quot;. She didn't just get one visitor, she got two, so it &amp;quot;never rains but it pours&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, someone can offer an outwardly warm welcome, such as by using a welcoming tone, but inwardly dislike the visit. The outward warmness is required by the etiquette of being a polite host.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Business&amp;quot; can mean &amp;quot;the important thing we are working on together&amp;quot;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/business&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster 5a&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;serious activity requiring time and effort and usually the avoidance of distractions&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Mrs. Braxfield is a witness and Mr. Blick is a detective, their &amp;quot;business&amp;quot; together could be the case. &amp;quot;Talking business matters&amp;quot; could mean discussing the case and Braxfield's memories of it, something that is work, requiring time and effort and no distractions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first definition of &amp;quot;whimsical&amp;quot; in your link seems the best one here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Playfully quaint or fanciful, especially in an appealing and amusing way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr. Blick is trying to make Mrs. Braxfield feel comfortable talking to him. Acting at home in her familiar easy chair is one way he demonstrates that he is comfortable. He makes Braxfield feel more comfortable by demonstrating approachability. Glancing in a playful, amusing way could be part of this display of comfort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T04:19:57.757" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T04:19:57.757" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18466" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-26T11:28:38.463" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Andre Aciman's &lt;em&gt;Call Me by Your Name&lt;/em&gt;, while Elio describes the events of the summer, he refers to a quote by Francesca he remembers from Inferno.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Love, which exempts no one who's loved from loving&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does Andre Aciman mean by this line?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11440" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T14:02:54.017" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T14:02:54.017" Title="What did Aciman mean by &quot;Love, which exempts no one who's loved from loving&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;andre-aciman&gt;&lt;call-me-by-your-name&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18467" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18468" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Italian-American author and scholar André Aciman (born 1951)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T20:57:08.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18469" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18470" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Call Me by Your Name' (2007) by André Aciman. Use this tag with [andre-aciman]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" LastActivityDate="2021-04-26T20:58:11.940" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18471" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18480" CreationDate="2021-04-26T21:48:38.187" Score="4" ViewCount="103" Body="&lt;p&gt;Cornelius Fudge was last seen after resigning at Albus Dumbledore's funeral. What happens to him after that?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11158" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-26T22:05:50.830" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T17:24:44.547" Title="What happens to Fudge after he resigns?" Tags="&lt;j-k-rowling&gt;&lt;harry-potter&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18472" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18475" CreationDate="2021-04-27T09:32:20.683" Score="2" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the huge room beyond the partition the phone rang and she heard&#xA;Elizabeth pick it up. Before the caller had a chance to speak, Elizabeth said&#xA;in a slow, low, very distinct voice, ‘Don’t ever ring this number at this hour,&#xA;ever again. Is that clear?’ Vicki turned off the taps and stood in the bath.&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;Sensible plans of action such as ‘Step out on to the floor’ or ‘Call out and&#xA;ask her for a towel’ clicked their wooden sides together without meaning,&#xA;like building blocks.&lt;/strong&gt; She heard bed-clothes rustle, then a stillness. If she&#xA;stood there long enough the drops of water would dry on her. Would her&#xA;whole life be made up of these moments? &lt;strong&gt;The difference between these&#xA;moments and being dead was that live people were always supposed to be&#xA;doing something. Dead people could just shrivel. Her mother was lying on&#xA;her back in a dark box, crabbed and cramped as a bat; her arms and legs&#xA;were drawn up against her torso&lt;/strong&gt; by the hourly drying and tightening of her&#xA;skin which was by now no longer skin but had become cracked leather, dark&#xA;reddish brown and ridged and shiny like what you saw on cooked ducks in&#xA;Chinese food shops. Vicki had an idea that this was not scientifically&#xA;accurate but she preferred this theory to thinking about dampness and&#xA;worms. She closed the fire-escape door as quietly as she could. There was&#xA;no sound from the bed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;wooden&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;... clicked their wooden sides together without meaning, like building blocks.&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;unsensible or silly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;something that is difficult to do?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I do not know why she is comparing these decisions with &amp;quot;building blocks&amp;quot; does &amp;quot;blocks&amp;quot; here mean: &amp;quot;bricks&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and does &amp;quot;without meaning&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;this plans that came to her mind were not logical&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And about the second part in bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is she thinking of herself as dead person because she is standing still in the bath and she think that live people always supposed to be doing something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;crabbed&amp;quot; mean: &amp;quot;sullen&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cramped&amp;quot; mean: &amp;quot;unable to move and feeling uncomfortable&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;her arms and legs were drawn up against her torso&amp;quot; mean: &amp;quot;her arms and legs came closer to her torso&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T20:55:54.707" Title="What does &quot;Sensible plans of action clicked their wooden sides together without meaning,&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18473" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18472" CreationDate="2021-04-27T15:44:04.763" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &lt;em&gt;building blocks&lt;/em&gt; in English generally means a toy: a set of wood blocks, often of various shapes, that children use to build structures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have only a guess about the point of the metaphor: If you have a bunch of building blocks, then there are lots and lots of possible things you can make with them, so you have to decide between them. Here, the heroine is faced with a situation—being in the bath and not having a towel handy—where there are lots of possible solutions (none of them that good) and she has to decide between them. She appears to be paralyzed by indecision, and is possibly recalling situations from her childhood where she was paralyzed by indecision.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In fact, the whole paragraph seems to be about her inability to make decisions. Dead people don't need to decide anything, but live people need to decide what to do and then start doing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T15:44:04.763" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18475" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18472" CreationDate="2021-04-27T20:55:54.707" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sometimes you have to bring a little imagination to your interpretation of a work. This author seems to use a lot of non-standard similes and imagery in her work, so there will not always be a straightforward source to point you at, and any interpretation you read here may not be exactly what the author was thinking of when she wrote it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To &lt;em&gt;me&lt;/em&gt; the line about building blocks makes me think of the way small children will knock their toy blocks together in an aimless fashion, seeming almost hypnotised by the sound, rather than using them to make a purposeful structure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ev3L0.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/ev3L0.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Toddler banging wooden blocks together&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What it makes me think in terms of the character is that she finds herself aware of the useful actions she could take, but in the moment finds herself wielding the ideas aimlessly rather than making a plan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She is not thinking of herself as a dead person, but contrasting her situation with that of a dead person. A dead person doesn't need to assemble the blocks into a plan, she a living person always has to decide, eventually, where to put the next metaphorical block.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When she is talking about her mother, she is talking about a dead person in a coffin or casket 'lying on her back in a dark box'. Dead people may be a bit uncommunicative, but they are not generally regarded as sullen. Another definition of 'crabbed' is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of trees, sticks: Crooked; having an uneven and rugged stem, gnarled, knotted; having cross-grained and knotted wood.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be figuratively applied to the human body, living or dead. It could be that the author wants us to think of Vicki and Elizabeth's mother as being gnarled and knotted like a stick,but the full reference is to her mother's body in her coffin being&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;crabbed and cramped as a bat; her arms and legs were drawn up against her torso&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;could also conjure up Vicki imagining that, as as her mother's body dried out, her arms pulled up tight like a bat folding its wings or possibly even literally like a crab, pulling its claws up perhaps like a hermit crab, both making themselves small with all their limbs pulled in close to their bodies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6I5U.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/M6I5U.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a bat with folded wings&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWl9m.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/LWl9m.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A Hermit Crab&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-27T20:55:54.707" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18476" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17470" CreationDate="2021-04-27T23:44:28.660" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;There is a common, though possibly dated idiom 'like a streak of lightning' which shares precisely the meaning of 'like a streak', and exists in subtle variations 'like a blue streak of lightning', like a greased streak of lightning' or 'like a streak of greased lightning'. Indeed the Oxford Dictionary of Idioms gives the idiom as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;like a streak (of lightning) very fast. informal&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By way of further backing up that Wodehouse himself used the phrase as a shortened version of the full idiom, we can see that he used used the term 'like a streak of lightning' in much the same way in his earlier work '&lt;a href=&quot;http://madameulalie.org/strand/The_Man_Who_Disliked_Cats.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Man Who Disliked Cats&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;' which predates Thank You Jeeves by some 22 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nor did he move, till I ’ad seized the parrot and replaced him in the cage, when he shot upstairs like a streak of lightning. By sheer force of character that excellent bird ’ad won the bloodless victory. I drink to ’im!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and later in &lt;em&gt;Ring for Jeeves&lt;/em&gt;, published almost 20 years after &lt;em&gt;Thank You Jeeves&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve watched the animal run with my own eyes, and it’s like a streak of lightning. All you see is a sort of brown blur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore the full understanding of the term is that he moved not only fast, but as fast as lightning.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T08:49:42.710" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T08:49:42.710" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18477" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-28T01:04:08.290" Score="1" ViewCount="81" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand the use of literary devices, and in particular the literary conventions related to metonymy, metaphor and similar figures of speech.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, in the following sentence, could &amp;quot;women echoed&amp;quot; be regarded as a valid figure of speech?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The women echoed in my daydreaming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm not sure whether &amp;quot;women&amp;quot; can be thought to echo, when it's actually the &lt;em&gt;sound&lt;/em&gt; of the women that causes the echo:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The laughter of women echoed in my daydreaming.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is this a valid figure of speech or is it an error to call it that? More specifically, is using &amp;quot;women&amp;quot; to represent the sound of laughter an example of &lt;strong&gt;metonymy&lt;/strong&gt; (and is metonymy a subset of metaphor)? If not, can &amp;quot;women echoed&amp;quot; be interpreted as some figure of speech other than metonymy or metaphor, and does it occurring in a daydream affect that interpretation?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12780" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T09:28:05.353" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T09:28:05.353" Title="Can &quot;women echoed&quot; be considered a figure of speech?" Tags="&lt;literary-device&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18478" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18479" CreationDate="2021-04-28T13:50:25.400" Score="7" ViewCount="254" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for a Swedish literary novel, published 2013, set in the Pårtetjåkko observatory in the Sarek mountains in Sweden.  In the book, the (fictional) main character is alone in the remote mountain summit observatory, and contemplating his (real) predecessor Axel Hamberg.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the same year, the documentary book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789197892834/axel-hamberg-och-sarek/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Axel Hamberg och Sarek&lt;/a&gt; was published.  This is NOT the book I am looking for; I'm looking for a work of fiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to various transliterations between Sami and Swedish, the mountain may be called pårtetjåkka, pårtetjåkko, pårte, bårddetjåhkkå, boarek, or similar variations.  The observatory is called pårteobservatoriet in Swedish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/P%C3%A5rtetj%C3%A5kk%C3%A5_Axel_Hambergs_observatorium.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Photo of the observatory&quot; /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Setting of (much of) the novel.  Source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P%C3%A5rtetj%C3%A5kk%C3%A5_Axel_Hambergs_observatorium.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;SibFreak, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't remember the author or the title of the book, and I didn't manage to find it with a web search.  Would anyone know what book this may be or have suggestions how I can search for it in a more targeted way (such as limiting to all works of fiction published in Sweden in 2013)?  I know I read it in 2013 and I know it was new at the time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="542" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T14:06:40.030" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:37:34.307" Title="Swedish novel from 2013 on a researcher in the isolated Pårte observatory in the Sarek Mountains, Sweden" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;scandinavian-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18479" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18478" CreationDate="2021-04-28T14:01:39.880" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This sounds like &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.albertbonniersforlag.se/bocker/181455/observatoriet/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Observatoriet&lt;/em&gt; by Mats Söderlund&lt;/a&gt;, published in 2013 by Albert Bonniers Förlag. The Nordin literary agency &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nordinagency.se/portfolio-item/observatoriet-the-observatory/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;blurbed the books as follows&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Observatory&lt;/em&gt; is a merciless novel that gets under the skin and lingers on the mind for a long time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Erik is alone in the mountains on a scientific mission to observe and record the wind, the air pressure and temperature levels. While a snowstorm turns into a hurricane Erik is shivering inside the cabin’s shaking walls, haunted by his memories. He no longer wants to be alone and he longs for Kristine, a fellow student that he fell in love with but is afraid to open up to. Afraid that she will see trough his intellectual surface and discover the coward who never fought back and defended himself from his boundless and abusive mother. Erik is vulnerable and fragile and feels trapped inside the isolated cabin which feeds his anxiety and childhood memories. The reader is given a harrowing portrayal of a small northern village, where the bullied Erik lives among insensitive adults and their constant breaches of privacy, at home and in the village school.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mats Söderlund tells the story from the boy’s perspective and it’s cleverly done with psychological insight, speaking directly to the reader. And although this is a love story or a tale of tentative love and self-destructive behaviour, it is above all a poignant coming-of-age story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Observatory&lt;/em&gt; is Mats Söderlund’s first novel, a story with the same linguistic responsiveness and power that characterizes his poetry.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Observatoriet/0FBgAgAAQBAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Google Books&lt;/a&gt; for the first few pages:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Det är ingen som saknar mig, ingen som undrar vart jag tagit vägen. Jag kan lika gärna ruttna här uppe. Ettusenåttahundratrettiofyra meter över havet. Det är natt. Kylan kommer i korta pustar. Jag kan inte ligga längre. Öppnar blixtlåset. Kall luft rusar in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one misses me, no one wonders where I have gone. I might as well rot up here. One thousand eight hundred and thirty-four meters above sea level. It’s night. The cold comes in short breaths. I can’t lie down anymore. Open the zipper. Cold air rushes in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Search confirms that “pårteobservatoriet” and “Axel Hamberg” appear in the text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-04-28T14:37:34.307" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T14:37:34.307" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18480" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18471" CreationDate="2021-04-28T17:24:44.547" Score="5" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We don't know.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last time Cornelius Fudge is seen in the Harry Potter books is at Dumbledore's funeral at the end of book 6. That's a whole book after his resignation as Minister for Magic (after seeing Voldemort at the end of book 5), but we hardly see him at all in the rest of book 6: I think the only sight of him there is in book 6 chapter 1, narrated from the viewpoint of the Muggle Prime Minister, when he's revealed to still have at least some role in Scrimgeour's Ministry, acting as a liaison between the new Minister for Magic and the Prime Minister.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(In the Harry Potter &lt;em&gt;films&lt;/em&gt;, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/harrypotter/images/c/cb/Daily_Prophet_Prime_Minister.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Daily Prophet&lt;/em&gt; article&lt;/a&gt; suggests that Scrimgeour met personally with the Muggle Prime Minister, so it could be that Fudge eventually lost this liaison role. But a newspaper seen briefly in a film adaptation cannot be used as very conclusive evidence for what happened in the books.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's unknown what happens to Fudge when Voldemort takes over the Ministry in book 7. Scrimgeour dies, but other Ministry figures such as Umbridge don't, so we can't conclude anything about Fudge's fate. It seems unlikely that he'd become so eager a collaborator as Umbridge - his character as Minister was more incompetent and ambitious than wantonly evil - but he might have escaped, or been Imperiused, or been able to continue some harmless Ministry duties. (Did he continue liaising with the Muggle Prime Minister? As far as I know, it's never mentioned what happens to the Ministry of Magic's connection with him during its time under Voldemort's control. Given Voldemort's attitude towards Muggles, it's unlikely that the connection between his puppet Minister of Magic and the Muggle Prime Minister is maintained. Perhaps Fudge found himself without a job.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;inspiration&lt;/em&gt; for Fudge's character, specifically his actions throughout book 5, was Neville Chamberlain, as the author said in a 2008 interview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;About the relationship between September-11 and Harry Potter, Rowling denied any influence and recognizes who was the true inspiration for the Minister Cornelius Fudge: &amp;quot;My model of the world after Voldemort's return was, directly, the government of Neville Chamberlain in Great Britain during the Second World War, when he tried to minimize the menace of the Nazi regime for political convenience.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;(translated from Spanish; original &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bloghogwarts.com/2008/02/03/nueva-entrevista-de-jkr-en-suplemento-dominical-espanol/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, translation &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.snitchseeker.com/harry-potter-news/j-k-rowling-talks-cornelius-fudge-in-new-interview-53897/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Admittedly J.K. Rowling is often somewhat less than believable as a source about her own stories, but this seems very plausible, as there are much-discussed parallels between Voldemort and Hitler, and both Fudge and Chamberlain were leaders who refused to acknowledge the imminent threat of war before being replaced by warlike ministers.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what happened to Chamberlain after war broke out? Well, he died naturally in 1940, a few months after leaving office, and there's no indication that this happened to Fudge; indeed, a year after his resignation he's certainly still alive for Dumbledore's funeral. However, the parallels between Hitler and Voldemort in terms of British governmental reaction rather break down in book 7, as Hitler never took over the British government, so we may be barking up the wrong tree here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Answer partly inspired by &lt;a href=&quot;https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/64254/31394&quot;&gt;alexwlchan's answer&lt;/a&gt; to a similar question on another SE site, but with other information as well.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-28T17:24:44.547" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18481" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18491" CreationDate="2021-04-29T02:48:37.020" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is a series of novels by François Rabelais, originally published in the 16th century. The Wikipedia article notes this about &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel#Illustrations&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;illustrations&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most famous and reproduced illustrations for Gargantua and Pantagruel were done by French artist Gustave Doré and published in 1854. Several appear in this article. Over 400 additional drawings were done by Doré for the 1873 second edition of the book. An edition published in 1904 was illustrated by W. Heath Robinson. Another set of illustrations was created by French artist Joseph Hémard and published in 1922.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's been illustrated several times, based on this. I was interested, though, if there were any illustrations in the original publications. Googling brings up references to the illustrated editions (or reprints) that were already in the Wikipedia article. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and I quite honestly have no idea where to look for this kind of information. For this reason I'd appreciate if answers explained how and where they got their information from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Did &lt;em&gt;Gargantua and Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt; originally have illustrations?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T01:47:16.637" Title="Did &quot;Gargantua and Pantagruel&quot; originally have illustrations?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;francois-rabelais&gt;&lt;gargantua-and-pantagruel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18482" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-29T05:56:46.580" Score="1" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading online &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/AhmedKhaniMemAndJinTrans.BySalahSaadalla/page/n57/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Salah Saadalla's translation&lt;/a&gt; of the Kurdish classic &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt;, and I've reached the part where the eponymous lovers, along with their respective siblings, meet each other at &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Nowruz&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newroz_as_celebrated_by_Kurds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Newroz&lt;/a&gt;) festivities.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In chapter 13, Mem and Tajdin disguise themselves as girls for Newroz:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Except only Mem and Tajdin&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Who were as girls disguising&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The reason they were disguising&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Was to avoid any formal undertaking&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While there, in chapter 14, they meet Zin and Siti, who are disguised as boys, and the two pairs of young people fall in love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What I don't understand is &lt;strong&gt;why were they disguised, the boys as girls and the girls as boys?&lt;/strong&gt; Of course it makes for a more interesting and entertaining story, but what was the characters' in-story motivation for disguising themselves? I can't find any statement of the reason for Zin and Siti, in the chapters focusing more on them, and the explanation given for Mem and Tajdin is obscure to me: what does &amp;quot;to avoid any formal undertaking&amp;quot; mean in the quote above?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T07:39:23.380" Title="Why did Mem/Tajdin and Zin/Siti disguise themselves for Nowruz?" Tags="&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18483" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18484" CreationDate="2021-04-29T06:27:44.810" Score="9" ViewCount="1040" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read a book a while back (probably just before 2010) that I'm trying to find again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's set in a somewhat surreal library, and I recall that the story line was very strongly based on Jaws, with similar characters and a shark-like creature roaming the library.  One distinguishing feature was a long series of pages that were just ASCII art of a shark approaching.  Anyone remember what book this is?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12784" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T14:02:36.210" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T20:18:23.483" Title="Pre-2010 book: &quot;Jaws&quot; in a library" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18484" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18483" CreationDate="2021-04-29T07:19:38.340" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_Shark_Texts&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Raw Shark Texts&lt;/a&gt;’ by Steven Hall seems to mesh with your description, the Wikipedia plot summary states:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plot of Jaws is referenced extensively and fully acknowledged by the characters in the book, who view it through the device of the conceptual becoming real. The climax of the novel follows the events in the film in detail, highlighting the sense of determinism and post-modern self-awareness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The publication date is also about right, and it has this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Several pages form a flip book animation of a shark attack made out of text.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edit: Thank you to user @GarethRees for adding the final clincher in comments:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Internet Archive has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rawsharktexts00stev&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;copy for loan&lt;/a&gt;, confirming that &amp;quot;We were on the edge of the shadowy stacks of a huge library&amp;quot; (p. 233) and the flip-book starting on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/rawsharktexts00stev/page/334/mode/2up?q=library&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 335&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T20:18:23.483" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T20:18:23.483" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18485" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18482" CreationDate="2021-04-29T07:39:23.380" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://kurdistantribune.com/mem-u-zin-analytical-study-iii-4-mem-u-zins-dramatic-plot/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Kurdistan Tribune&lt;/a&gt; Dr Kamal Mirawdeli writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mem and Tazhdin, two young friends from nobility, decide to disguise in women’s dresses to give themselves a better chance of enjoying the beauty of Botan women and possibly finding suitable fiancés. By coincidence or act of destiny, the Mîr’s two sisters, Zîn and Stê, use the same strategy. So here we have the first dramatic puzzle of the story: two beautiful young women appear in Newroz as two handsome men, and two handsome young men appear as two young women. They meet by the perceived factors of possibility and perhaps a deeper factor of divine necessity.  Beauty and love are necessarily interconnected. The two pairs meet, talk, feel attracted to each other, and surprise themselves by falling in love, apparently, homosexually.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The effect of the sudden striking love thunder is devastating for all the four.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/10/state6542.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;EKurd Daily&lt;/a&gt; the same author also writes of the episode:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both couples wish to obtain extra liberty to indulge in Newroz’s celebrated beauty and benefit from the traditional opportunity it provides for pinpointing a potential spouse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these, I would understand that the ‘formal undertakings’ the characters wish to avoid would be betrothals, engagement or expectations of such, arising from any meetings at the festival.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T07:39:23.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18486" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17968" CreationDate="2021-04-29T11:20:53.457" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.kurdipedia.org/files/relatedfiles/2015/85247/0001.PDF&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Martin van Bruinessen, 'Ehmedî Xanî's Mem û Zîn and its role in the&#xA;emergence of Kurdish nationalism'&lt;/a&gt; (PDF):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The appearance of the first Kurdish journal, Kurdistan, was such an&#xA;important moment.  Miqdad Midhat Bedirkhan, who published the first&#xA;issues in Cairo in 1898 [...] In the second and following issues of Kurdistan he published&#xA;sections from Mem û Zîn to show that literature of high quality can be&#xA;written in Kurdish&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Miqdad Midhat announced his intention to publish the entire text of&#xA;Mem û Zîn as a  book, but he never got the opportunity to do this. The&#xA;first complete edition is associated with the next phase in the&#xA;Kurdish movement [...]&#xA;Following the ceasefire of 1918 and the occupation of Istanbul by  the&#xA;British and French, Kurdish aristocrats and intellectuals established&#xA;the nationalist  association, Kürdistan Teali Cemiyeti. This&#xA;association had several affiliated organizations,  one of which was&#xA;the Kürd Tamim-i Maarif ve Neşriyat Cemiyeti, which took care of&#xA;educational and publishing activities. The first book published by&#xA;this association, in 1919, was Ehmedê Xanî's Mem û Zîn&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So 1919 it is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T11:20:53.457" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18487" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17313" CreationDate="2021-04-29T14:11:38.263" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;With so little to go on, it is difficult to be certain. It is possible that the person in question was a Consul General at Large of the United States.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href=&quot;https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042104/1903-11-01/ed-1/seq-3/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;published poem&lt;/a&gt; gives his location as Washington DC. which makes the &lt;em&gt;diplomatic&lt;/em&gt; George H Murphy the more likely candidate of those individuals thrown up by internet searches.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This reference to him in a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/2212482?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;List of Consular Officers of the United States Corrected to July 23, 1907&lt;/a&gt; gives his place of birth as North Carolina, which may tie in with his submitting a work to a newspaper 200 plus miles away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;if this is the correct &lt;a href=&quot;https://politicalgraveyard.com/bio/murphy4.html#832.74.08&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;George H Murph&lt;/a&gt;y, he got around a bit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Murphy, George Herbert (1860-1924) — also known as George H. Murphy — Born in Scuppernong, Washington County, N.C., September 28, 1860. School teacher; U.S. Vice &amp;amp; Deputy Consul in Chemnitz, 1886-89; Bremen, 1899-1900; Magdeburg, 1900; U.S. Deputy Consul General in Berlin, 1889-90; U.S. Vice &amp;amp; Deputy Consul General in Berlin, 1890; Frankfort, 1900-04; U.S. Consular Agent in Hanover, 1890-93; SAINT Catherines, 1905-06; U.S. Vice Commercial Agent (Vice Consul) in Luxembourg, 1893-96; U.S. Vice Consul in Colón, 1898; U.S. Consul General in , 1906-14; Cape Town, 1914-20; Zurich, 1920-24. Died in Zurich, Switzerland, October 16, 1924 (age 64 years, 18 days). Interment at St. Matthew's Episcopal Churchyard, Hillsborough, N.C.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T14:11:38.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18488" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17709" CreationDate="2021-04-29T14:36:52.393" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;These characters care more about surface-level, outward agreement than true understanding of each other. They want to feel as if they are together and in harmony with each other. They want this even if they must inwardly pretend that the other thinks exactly like them, instead of having an honest conversation about their ideas and values.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They travel and watch the world. More importantly, they watch each other watch the world, and they describe what they see to each other. (&amp;quot;They pointed out these eventlets to each other&amp;quot;). In their descriptions, they create an &amp;quot;us vs. them&amp;quot; situation. The &amp;quot;them&amp;quot; are the other people, who are positioned as different than &amp;quot;us&amp;quot;, the two main characters. Our characters define themselves &amp;quot;against&amp;quot; the people they watch.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, no &amp;quot;us vs. them&amp;quot; is absolute. There are not two completely different groups who are completely uniform within themselves. However, the idea of an &amp;quot;us&amp;quot; who are in perfect harmony is comforting. So the characters choose to believe in this perfect &amp;quot;us&amp;quot;. They care more about agreement, harmony, &amp;quot;us&amp;quot; - than understanding each other on a deeper level, talking through their differences and being honest with each other.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bringing this back together with a paraphrase of your section in bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... they defined themselves as a group together, and different than the people they observed. They wanted to truly understand each other less than they wanted to have surface-level agreement with each other. Oh, such wonderful harmony, to be with each other, and pretend to have someone else who is perfectly alike!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-04-29T14:36:52.393" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18490" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-29T20:44:05.467" Score="1" ViewCount="41" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was looking back at &lt;em&gt;Ready Player One&lt;/em&gt; by Ernest Cline and I wondering the following:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How did James Halliday die? Was it related to his creations?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11158" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-29T21:17:00.760" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T17:42:13.683" Title="In &quot;Ready Player One&quot;, how does Halliday die?" Tags="&lt;ready-player-one&gt;&lt;ernest-cline&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18491" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18481" CreationDate="2021-04-30T00:43:27.160" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;The original edition of the first novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, was most likely published in 1532 by Claude Nourry in Lyon and only one copy of this edition has survived. This copy is in the archives of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF), where it is identified as RES-Y2- 2146 (&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Defaux: 19). A &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86095855.r=Rabelais%20pantagruel%20%202146?rk=21459;2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scanned version of this 1532 edition&lt;/a&gt; can be browsed online. It has an illustration on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86095855/f11.double.r=Rabelais%20pantagruel%20%202146&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;title page&lt;/a&gt; and decorated initials at the start of each chapter. Some words have been crossed out by one of its earlier owners, possibly as a form of censorship (&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Defaux: 19); see for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86095855/f75.double.r=Rabelais%20pantagruel%20%202146&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this page&lt;/a&gt;. This edition does not have any other type of illustrations. (This edition also has two chapters IX. (&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Defaux: 13).) &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt; was very successful; it was reprinted several times between 1532 and 1542 (&lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, ed. Defaux: 15).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A scanned version of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040324q.r=Rabelais%20gargantua?rk=64378;0&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1533 edition of &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; can also be found on the BNF site. This edition also has decorated initials at the beginning of each chapter but no other illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The second novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gargantua&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was first published in 1534. A scanned version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8609588d.r=Rabelais%20gargantua?rk=42918;4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1534 edition of &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; is also available on the BNF website. This edition has an illustration on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8609588d/f15.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;title page&lt;/a&gt; and decorated initials, but no other illustrations.&#xA;The BNF also has a scan of &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8609586k/f5.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;another edition, dated 1534 in the search results&lt;/a&gt;, with narrower (or higher) pages. This edition does not have an illustrated title page (to me, it looks like the original title page was lost and replaced with one that was printed later; it just says &amp;quot;Gargantua&amp;quot;).&#xA;There is also a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000209.r=Rabelais%20gargantua?rk=107296;4&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1535 edition of &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which has a decorated title page and decorated initials, but no other illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BNF also has a scan of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040342n/f23.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1542 edition of &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; that even mentions the year of publication on its title page. This edition has an illustration on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040342n/f25.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first page of the &amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040342n/f41.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first page of chapter III&lt;/a&gt; and on the first pages of some later chapters (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1040342n/f101.double.r=Rabelais%20gargantua&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BNF also owns a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b2200059z.r=Rabelais%20gargantua?rk=150215;2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;set of pages with illustrations dating from 1537&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third book, known today simply as &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Tiers livre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, was published after a long break, namely in 1546, printed by Chrestien Wechel in Paris. A scanned version of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8624647t/f5.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1546 edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Tiers livre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (with the year of publication on the title page) is also available on the BNF website.&#xA;Its title page does not have an illustration; it uses decorated initials only on the first page of the &amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot; and the first page of the actual narrative. (I assume this is intentional; otherwise, it would give the impression that the creation of decorated initials had been abandoned early in the printing process.) There are no illustrations.&#xA;The BNF's search results also contain a link to a version available at the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr/Consult/index.asp?numfiche=61&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes&lt;/a&gt;. (This is another copy of the edition printed by Chrestien Wechel in Paris. Lazard points out that &lt;em&gt;Le Tiers livre&lt;/em&gt; was printed several times in 1546; see Lazard: 84.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600026s/f7.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1547 printing of &lt;em&gt;Le Tiers livre&lt;/em&gt; by Claude La Ville&lt;/a&gt; is also available at the BNF. This edition does not have an illustrated title page but it has illustrations on the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600026s/f8.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first page of the &amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600026s/f22.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;first page of the first chapter&lt;/a&gt;, the start of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600026s/f28.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;second chapter&lt;/a&gt; and each of the other chapters.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BNF has an edition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8600026s/f28.double.r=Rabelais%20tiers%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Quart livre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; printed in Lyon in 1548&lt;/a&gt; (the date is on the title page).&#xA;This edition has an illustration at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f3.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the prologue&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f21.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the first chapter&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f31.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the second chapter&lt;/a&gt;, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f35.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the third chapter&lt;/a&gt;, and the beginning of later chapters. (Decorated initials are not used consistently. For example, chapter VII begins with a simple drop cap. Where decorated initials are used, they vary in size: compare, for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f75.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter VIII&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86000276/f83.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter IX&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The 1548 edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Quart livre&lt;/em&gt; was actually an unfinished work (Lazard, 138). The &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86095870/f9.double.r=Rabelais%20quart%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1552 edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Quart livre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; was published by Michel Fezandat in Paris. It has an illustration on the title page, decorated initials, but no other illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last novel, &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Le Cinquième livre&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/em&gt; was published posthumously in 1564. Some scholars have questioned its authenticity but it is reasonable to assume that it was based on an unfinished draft by Rabelais. Archive.org has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/8D9983RES_P2&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;scan incorrectly dated 1550&lt;/a&gt;. It has decorated initials but no illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The BNF also has a &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1075184p/f9.double.r=Rabelais%20cinqui%C3%A8me%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1564 edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Cinquième livre&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (dated 1564 on the title page). This edition uses decorated initials at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1075184p/f11.double.r=Rabelais%20cinqui%C3%A8me%20livre&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;beginning of the &amp;quot;prologue&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;; the chapters begin with ordinary drop caps. The book contains no illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The set of early illustrations that is probably best known to modern readers is that in &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Songes_drolatiques_de_Pantagruel&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which Richard Breton published in 1565 and attributed to Rabelais. Present-day scholars don't believe Rabelais created these illustrations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Conclusion&lt;/strong&gt;: The very first editions of &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Gargantua&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Le Tiers Livre&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Le Cinquième livre&lt;/em&gt; were not illustrated (except for decorated initials and/or an illustration on the title page). However, later editions sometimes added illustrations.&#xA;If the 1548 edition of &lt;em&gt;Le Quart livre&lt;/em&gt; at the BNF is indeed a copy of the very first edition of that novel, that book had illustrations when published for the first time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sources (besides BNF):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lazard, Madeleine: &lt;em&gt;Rabelais&lt;/em&gt;. Pluriel, 2012.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Rabelais: &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt;. Edition critique sur le texte de l'édition publiée en 1534 à Lyon par François Juste. Introduction, variantes et notes par Gérard Defaux. Livre de poche, 1994.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T01:47:16.637" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T01:47:16.637" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18492" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-30T14:41:47.963" Score="1" ViewCount="43" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She stood at the tramstop opposite the long railed side of the cemetery.&#xA;Someone had written in black texta on the lamp-post &lt;strong&gt;DARREN WAR&#xA;LOURD&lt;/strong&gt;. No tram was in sight, but she saw an orange campervan coming&#xA;fast down the street, heading south. It had neat curtains and a sink, and a&#xA;lone man at the wheel. He and Athena &lt;strong&gt;exchanged&lt;/strong&gt; a friendly look and she&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;got in&lt;/strong&gt; and he &lt;strong&gt;turned&lt;/strong&gt; the van round and &lt;strong&gt;drove&lt;/strong&gt; the other way, on to the&#xA;freeway and out past the turn-off to the airport and the Italian houses with&#xA;white porticos and palm trees, past the city limits and the wreckers’ yards&#xA;and the paddocks where broken-winded horses stood patiently at the wire&#xA;and out on to the great basalt plains with their tall thistles nodding, and&#xA;further and further until it was desert with a sky so dry and high that they&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;slept&lt;/strong&gt; out on the ground at night with never a drop of dew.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was still no tram coming. It was lazy to wait when she could be&#xA;walking, and only three-quarters of a mile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;in this passage Athena is standing at tram station and she see a campervan coming. Did she imagine that, and never actually get in that van? In the last paragraph it is said that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was still no tram coming. It was lazy to wait when she could be&#xA;walking, and only three-quarters of a mile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we add &amp;quot;would&amp;quot; before the verbs in bold? For example: she &lt;strong&gt;would&lt;/strong&gt; get in or they &lt;strong&gt;would&lt;/strong&gt; sleep?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And what is the meaning of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Darren War Lourd&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;? I found nothing about it on the net.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T15:27:50.720" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T15:27:50.720" Title="Can authors use past tense in fiction works to refer to an unreal situations without using &quot;if&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18493" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18490" CreationDate="2021-04-30T17:42:13.683" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The same question has been &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/a/87855/27759&quot;&gt;asked and answered&lt;/a&gt; on another Stack Exchange site. I can't do much more than provide the same quotes given over there, from Chapter 1 of the book (emphasis mine):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halliday now stands at the front of a funeral parlor, next to an open casket. A second, much older Halliday lies inside the casket, his body emaciated and ravaged by cancer. Shiney quarters cover each of his eyelids.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, from earlier, hinting at why the cancer had been able to emaciate and ravage his body rather than being treatable:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He had died a sixty-seven-year-old bachelor, with no living relatives, and by most accounts, without a single friend. He'd spent the last fifteen years of his life in self-imposed isolation, during which time - if the rumors were to be believed - he'd gone completely insane.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that he may not have cared to seek treatment, knowing that he was going to die and not having anything left to live for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T17:42:13.683" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18494" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-04-30T19:05:26.007" Score="2" ViewCount="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mem_and_Zin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/a&gt; is a classic tale of traditional Kurdish storytelling, passed down through oral tradition for centuries, but also written down in 1692 by the Kurdish poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Khani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ahmad Khani&lt;/a&gt;. In the process of fixing and recording the story, it's quite possible that Khani included some elements which are recognisably &amp;quot;his&amp;quot;, rather than simply recording the tale as it was told orally. But some elements, such as the instructions to a &amp;quot;cupbearer&amp;quot;, still seem like something out of oral tradition.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How much was changed, either in form or content, between the oral &lt;em&gt;Mem and Zin&lt;/em&gt; and Khani's written version?&lt;/strong&gt; Has anyone made a study of the oral forms to be able to do a careful comparison?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-04-30T19:05:26.007" Title="How does Ahmad Khani's Mem and Zin differ from the pre-existing oral tradition of the story?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;oral-tradition&gt;&lt;ahmad-khani&gt;&lt;kurmanji-kurdish-literature&gt;&lt;mem-and-zin&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18495" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18496" CreationDate="2021-04-30T19:19:27.610" Score="2" ViewCount="149" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am under the impression Mishani doesn't write in English. &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dror_Mishani&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Haish sheratza ladaat hakol (2015; To be published in English during 2016: The Man who wanted to know)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://internationalcrimefiction.org/2015/09/26/israeli-crime-fiction-judgment-and-illustration-by-dror-mishani/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;This source&lt;/a&gt; claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two of his three Inspector Avraham novels have been translated into English: The Missing File (2013) and A Possibility Of Violence (2014). A third, The Man Who Wanted To Know, appeared in Hebrew in May this year and has not yet been translated.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't have a copy of &lt;em&gt;The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything: An Inspector Avraham Avraham Novel&lt;/em&gt; so I'd like to know who did the English translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-04-30T19:31:07.577" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T06:19:47.540" Title="Who is the English translator of &quot;The Man Who Wanted to Know&quot; by Dror Mishani if it is a work of translation?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;hebrew-literature&gt;&lt;dror-mishani&gt;&lt;the-man-who-wanted-to-know&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18496" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18495" CreationDate="2021-04-30T19:40:58.203" Score="6" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Todd Hasak-Lowy&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;According to &lt;a href=&quot;https://d-a-mishani.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dror Mishani's own website&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;– 11 / 2016: “The Man who wanted to know everything” out in the US – and is on PW’s books of the week list with a starred review!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third Avraham novel, “The Man who wanted to know everything”, is published today in the US (HarperCollins; translated from Hebrew by Todd Hasak-Lowy) – and is on PW’s books of the week list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And confirmed by a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ellisshuman.blogspot.com/2017/02/review-of-man-who-wanted-to-know.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reviewer and blogger&lt;/a&gt; who read the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We meet Inspector Avraham Avraham for the third time in The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything by D.A. Mishani, translated by Todd Hasak-Lowy (Harper Paperbacks, November 2016).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_Hasak-Lowy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Todd Hasak-Lowy&lt;/a&gt; is a writer, translator, and professor of creative writing and literature. His website is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.toddhasaklowy.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, with a detailed biography on his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.toddhasaklowy.com/new-page-2&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;About Me page&lt;/a&gt;, and a list of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.toddhasaklowy.com/translation&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;works he's translated&lt;/a&gt; which includes &lt;em&gt;The Man who wanted to know everything&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T06:19:47.540" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T06:19:47.540" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18498" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18552" CreationDate="2021-04-30T21:56:23.187" Score="-1" ViewCount="70" Body="&lt;p&gt;Doctor Marigold is the titular &amp;quot;cheap-jack&amp;quot; in Dickens' &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1415/1415-h/1415-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Doctor Marigold&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Is &amp;quot;Marigold&amp;quot; his real name, with &amp;quot;Doctor&amp;quot; an addition, or is &amp;quot;Doctor Marigold&amp;quot; a nickname?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12614" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T00:26:29.693" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T22:39:30.777" Title="Is &quot;Doctor Marigold&quot; the nickname of the cheap-jack, or is &quot;Marigold&quot; his real name?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;charles-dickens&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18499" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18501" CreationDate="2021-05-01T01:55:08.907" Score="6" ViewCount="234" Body="&lt;p&gt;From Act I Scene II of the play &lt;em&gt;Julius Caesar&lt;/em&gt; by William Shakespeare:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;BRUTUS&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would not, Cassius, yet I love him well.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But wherefore do you hold me here so long?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;What is it that you would impart to me?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;If it be aught toward the general good,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Set honor in one eye and death i’ th’ other&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And I will look on both indifferently;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For let the gods so speed me as I love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The name of honor more than I fear death.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What do the lines in bold mean? Line 6 makes it sound like honour, like death, means nothing to Brutus, but that cannot be right. I'm also having trouble making much sense of line 7. It would be great if someone could explain to me what it means and why - by which I think I mean the syntax.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12046" LastEditorUserId="12046" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T19:51:48.543" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T08:50:37.807" Title="Julius Caesar: &quot;If it be aught toward the general good, Set honor in one eye and death i’ th’ other...&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;julius-caesar&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18500" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15545" CreationDate="2021-05-01T04:01:38.437" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a callback to a metaphor introduced in the first verse.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I used to believe&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;In the days I was naïve&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That I'd live to see&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;A day of justice dawn&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And though I will die&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Long before &lt;strong&gt;that morning comes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I'll die while believing still&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It will come when I am gone&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Esmerelda wants to live to see &amp;quot;A day of justice dawn&amp;quot;, until the metaphorical coming of justice. She acknowledges that it might be a long way off, but hopes and believes in &amp;quot;that morning&amp;quot; (the sun/justice) coming at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last verse can best be understood with this metaphor in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We all share...&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Someday&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Our fight will be one then&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We'll stand in the sun then&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That bright afternoon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Till then&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;On days when the sun is gone&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Hope lives on&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Wish upon the moon&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Change will come&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last verse, sung by everyone, explicitly calls back to the metaphor of justice dawning. Standing in the &amp;quot;sun&amp;quot; is basking in the metaphorical rays of justice. A &amp;quot;bright afternoon&amp;quot; is a place full of justice, the world that Esmerelda believes in and hopes for in the first verse. The group paints a picture of this wonderful scene which will happen &amp;quot;then&amp;quot;, at some point later. Their &amp;quot;fight&amp;quot; for justice will be &amp;quot;one&amp;quot; with the wider world once justice comes, once the sun comes out.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Until &amp;quot;then&amp;quot;, when the sun (or justice, in the metaphor) has not yet come and is not there, they vow to &amp;quot;hang on&amp;quot; and stick together. They'll &amp;quot;wish upon the moon&amp;quot;. The moon is there when the sun is not, still casting light. Wishing on it is an expression of hope even in the absence of the sun, in the absence of true justice. They declare that &amp;quot;Change &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; come&amp;quot; - the sun &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; rise eventually, justice &lt;em&gt;will&lt;/em&gt; come if they wait long enough and work hard enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T04:01:38.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18501" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18499" CreationDate="2021-05-01T08:04:31.200" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Brutus is saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What are you trying to tell me? If it is something that will advance the general good, then it makes no difference to me whether it brings me honor, death, or neither; I will do it regardless. If it is true that I love honor more than I fear death, may I have the blessings of the gods for that endeavor!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A line-by-line explanation of the lines in bold:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If it be aught toward the general good&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If what you are trying to urge me to do benefits humankind; if it is for the greater good of humanity. &lt;strong&gt;Aught&lt;/strong&gt; means &lt;em&gt;anything&lt;/em&gt;, and its ambiguous placement here make the sentence mean both “If anything you are suggesting will advance the greater good” and “If what you are suggesting will do anything for the common good.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Set honor in one eye and death i’ th’ other&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then put honor and death equally in front of me, as though out of one eye I can see honor before me, and out of the other I can see death before me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I will look on both indifferently;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And I will regard them both equally; I will not care about one more than the other; I will not let the fear of death keep me from acting honorably; I will not act dishonorably to escape death; I will act to benefit humankind irrespective of whether my action brings honor, death, both, or neither. This line is very tightly packed because of the double meaning of &lt;strong&gt;indifferently&lt;/strong&gt;, which means both &lt;em&gt;equally&lt;/em&gt; (not giving more weight to one over the other) and &lt;em&gt;stoically&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;unemotionally&lt;/em&gt; (without having any personal stake in the matter). The word &lt;em&gt;impartially&lt;/em&gt; is probably a good equivalent, since it captures both these senses.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For let the gods so speed me&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;May the gods set me up to succeed in this endeavor (the endeavor for the public good). &lt;strong&gt;Speed&lt;/strong&gt; is used as a transitive verb in sense 2 in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/speed&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;: “to further the success of” or “to cause or help to prosper.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                                    ... as I love&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The name of honor more than I fear death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;... to the extent that my love for honor outweighs my fear of death. &lt;em&gt;So ... as&lt;/em&gt; means &lt;em&gt;to the extent that.&lt;/em&gt; See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2015/10/so-as-so-that.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this Grammarphobia article&lt;/a&gt; that says &amp;quot;'so … as' constructions indicate extent or degree.&amp;quot; See also this &lt;a href=&quot;https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/26942/2143&quot;&gt;question in English Language Learners&lt;/a&gt; and the accepted answer, which says &amp;quot;the so... as ... construction is used ... to introduce a measure of the extent to which the preceding assertion is true.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To further clarify the last two lines: In the earlier lines Brutus has said that if it's a matter of acting in the public interest, he will do that regardless of whether he gets honor, death, both, or neither as a result. In this last line he is emphasizing that his love of honor is indeed greater than his fear of death by swearing on that fact: &amp;quot;If it is true that my love of honor is greater than my fear of death, then I pray that the gods support me in my attempt to act for the greater good, regardless of the consequences to myself.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Edit&lt;/strong&gt;. OP asks in a comment:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;what’s still troubling me is the word “for” at the start of line 7. It makes it sound like, BECAUSE Brutus loves honour more than he fears death, he will look at both with indifference - which doesn’t make sense to me!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Brutus is saying that &lt;em&gt;even though&lt;/em&gt; he loves honor more than he fears death, when it's a question of the public welfare, he will act without regard for either. &lt;strong&gt;For&lt;/strong&gt; here doesn't mean &lt;strong&gt;because&lt;/strong&gt;; it is introducing a prayer or an oath being sworn, not a reason. See meaning 5 listed in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.dictionary.com/browse/for&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;definition of &lt;strong&gt;for&lt;/strong&gt; at dictionary.com&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(used to express a wish, as of something to be experienced or obtained):&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;O, for a cold drink!&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A longer paraphrase of the last two lines, drawing on what Brutus has said before, would be something like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Since it is true that &lt;strong&gt;I love the name of honor more than I fear death&lt;/strong&gt;, then to the extent that it is true, I pray that when it comes to public welfare, the gods grant me aid and success (&lt;strong&gt;speed me&lt;/strong&gt;) in my endeavor to act without regard (&lt;strong&gt;indifferently&lt;/strong&gt;) toward both death and honor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two points are noteworthy:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brutus is speaking paradoxically here, admitting that he loves honor more than he fears death, yet asking the gods to let him treat them both with equal disregard. The prayer swears upon something while simultaneously asking for that thing to be destroyed. This makes the passage difficult to understand. The crux is that Brutus is saying: &amp;quot;I love honor. I fear death. But if I have to undertake an action for the good of Rome, I will do it with equal disregard for both.&amp;quot; And then he is praying to the gods to let him be successful at acting in this way.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Brutus specifically says &lt;strong&gt;&lt;em&gt;the name of&lt;/em&gt; honor&lt;/strong&gt;, not just &lt;strong&gt;honor&lt;/strong&gt;. His point is that truly acting for the greater good is honorable whether or not the act gets us renown. Doing something simply to &lt;em&gt;gain&lt;/em&gt; honor could be a dishonorable act—another paradox. So he is saying: &amp;quot;Yes, I like renown and I fear death. But I hope the gods will give me the ability to put both of these aside if and when I have to act for the public welfare.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, a really simple way of looking at the last two lines could be merely that &lt;em&gt;because&lt;/em&gt; Brutus likes honor and fears death, he is praying to the gods to give him the strength to act objectively, so that what motivates him is the good of Rome rather than his own desire or fear.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T08:50:37.807" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T08:50:37.807" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18502" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-01T09:02:38.803" Score="7" ViewCount="339" Body="&lt;p&gt;I read this novel somewhere around 2010 (2006-2016, can't be much more precise than that). It was in English, probably an American writer. It might have been the first in a series, probably for young adults.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character is a young woman who's a somewhat skilled/notorious assassin. Somehow she ends up in the hands of the prince and a military officer (captain of guards?), both of whom are sympathetic characters although the prince's father the king isn't. I don't remember if the story starts with her capture, or if she was in prison and they get her out, or what. Anyway, they want her to take part in a contest, which most of the book is about.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contest involves 24 people competing in various physical feats: speed, strength, endurance, etc. People are eliminated one by one as they lose (or die), and the eventual winner is promised some kind of position (royal bodyguard? leading an expedition? something prestigious). Our heroine takes part under a false name, since nobody is supposed to know that she's this famous assassin. She's already capable enough that she could easily win every competition, but the prince and officer tell her to play herself down, end up in the middle rankings each time: not at the bottom to be eliminated, nor at the top to draw attention to herself. The other competitors don't take her seriously (maybe because she's a woman?) There's a massive guy who wins most of the competitions and is thought to be a favourite to win overall, but he might be using some underhand tactics. Sort of Hunger Games vibe, with 24 competitors and the underdog female heroine vs the giant a'hole guy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some kind of love triangle begins to develop between the assassin, the prince, and the officer. (Sigh, YA fiction.) I remember it being unclear which of the two men she really had feelings for. Also some complications arose during the contest - some competitors being mysteriously murdered? Maybe the giant guy ended up being responsible.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At the end of the contest, when there's only two competitors left, of course it's the heroine and the giant guy. They fight a duel in front of everyone, and he uses some kind of dirty trick against her (poisoned sword? drugged drink?) so that he's about to win even though she's better. I don't remember how it ended: maybe the prince or officer stepped in to kill the giant guy? Anyway, he died and she won, but the story more or less ended there. That's why I feel it might have been the first in a series, although I didn't read any more. I think there was some unresolved plot arc involving the king as well: he was portrayed as really evil, and maybe even his son was against him. Maybe the whole idea of this assassin enrolling incognito in the contest was a hope of bringing down the king from her new position.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That should be enough detail for someone to find the story ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T18:57:09.240" Title="Fantasy novel with a skilled female assassin enrolling in a contest" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18504" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-01T13:08:52.603" Score="2" ViewCount="72" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm an avid reader of cozy detective fiction (C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, &amp;amp;c.) and noticed naturally that certain categories exist (or that's the notion I have) even within that single subgenre (my preferred genre is: cozy quaint traditional golden age detective fiction, I'm no expert for anything contemporary).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But when searching for recognized categories all I can turn up is the well known &amp;quot;locked room mystery&amp;quot;. I'm not aiming at the distinction that is made by realism/brutalness/viewpoint/period; i.e. this is not about &amp;quot;hardboiled vs cozy&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;historical vs contemporary&amp;quot; or the like.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My own categories I identified up until now are thus:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Locked room mystery&lt;/strong&gt;: something happened (usually a murder) in a locked room or otherwise inaccessible place. The case is therefore impossible, yet it happened.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: Auguste Dupin: &lt;em&gt;The Murders in the Rue Morgue&lt;/em&gt;, Poirot: &lt;em&gt;Murder at Styles&lt;/em&gt;, Father Brown: &lt;em&gt;The Wrong Shape&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Remote detective&lt;/strong&gt;: The detective solves the case without personally investigating the crime scene solely by using the information that was provided to him second-hand, usually sitting in his armchair. The detective may be remote regarding space and time, i.e. may solve a crime that happened long ago.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: Father Brown: &lt;em&gt;The Broken Sword&lt;/em&gt;, Auguste Dupin: &lt;em&gt;The Mystery of Marie Rogêt&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Treasure hunt&lt;/strong&gt;: The detective is literally on a treasure hunt.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: Sherlock Holmes: &lt;em&gt;Musgrave Ritual&lt;/em&gt;, E. A. Poe: &lt;em&gt;The Gold-Bug&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;One after another&lt;/strong&gt;: A group of people happen to be stranded together, they are killed off one by one. Usually the murderer is among the group.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: A. Christie: &lt;em&gt;And Then There Were None&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Death Comes as the End&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Spooky story&lt;/strong&gt;: the story contains elements that are aimed to suggest scary supernatural/preternatural agents are involved, like ghosts, animated wax works, hell-hounds and werewolves. Usually to be debunked in the conclusion.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: Sherlock Holmes: &lt;em&gt;Hound of the Baskervilles&lt;/em&gt;, Father Brown: &lt;em&gt;The Ghost of Gideon Wise&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Well hidden object&lt;/strong&gt;: the detective has to find out through his ingenuity the hiding place of some well hidden object.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Examples: Sherlock Holmes: &lt;em&gt;A Scandal in Bohemia&lt;/em&gt;, Auguste Dupin: &lt;em&gt;The Purloined Letter&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have to re-read some stories and maybe add further entries to the list.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there any texts/resources available online or in print that deal with this kind of (rather academical) categorization?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4295" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-01T21:41:07.663" LastActivityDate="2021-05-01T21:41:07.663" Title="What other recognized detective story categories are there beyond the &quot;locked room mystery&quot;?" Tags="&lt;genre&gt;&lt;mystery-novels&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ClosedDate="2021-05-02T02:52:03.027" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18505" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18502" CreationDate="2021-05-01T14:20:22.827" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;&lt;em&gt;Throne of Glass&lt;/em&gt;, by Sarah J. Maas&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Quotes are from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://throneofglass.fandom.com/wiki/Throne_of_Glass&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Fandom wiki's plot summary/synopsis&lt;/a&gt;, and are [sic] as I copy-pasted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Name glossary for the below, because YA names are weird:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Celaena Sardothien is the main character&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Prince Dorian Havilliard is the prince&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Captain Chaol Westfall is the captain of the guard&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cain is the massive guy&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The main character is a young woman who's a somewhat skilled/notorious assassin. Somehow she ends up in the hands of the prince and a military officer... they want her to take part in a contest, which most of the book is about.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;After serving out a year of hard labor in the salt mines of Endovier for her crimes, 18-year-old assassin Celaena Sardothien is dragged before the Crown Prince. Prince Dorian offers her her freedom on one condition: she must act as his champion in a competition to find a new royal assassin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The contest involves 24 people competing in various physical feats: speed, strength, endurance, etc.... There's a massive guy who wins most of the competitions and is thought to be a favourite to win overall, but he might be using some underhand tactics.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Twenty-three other men in the king’s court were allowed to choose a competitor, and Celaena realizes that while many are inconsequential, several will be stiff competition, especially the giant and brutal Cain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her opponents are men: thieves, assassins, and warriors from across the empire, each sponsored by a member of the king's council. If she beats her opponents in a series of eliminations, she'll serve the kingdom for four years and then be granted her freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Our heroine takes part under a false name, since nobody is supposed to know that she's this famous assassin.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She finally agrees to compete and also agrees to use the alias Lillian Gordaina to try to keep her infamous identity hidden.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;She's already capable enough that she could easily win every competition, but the prince and officer tell her to play herself down, end up in the middle rankings each time: not at the bottom to be eliminated, nor at the top to draw attention to herself.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Chaol tells Celaena to stay in the middle of the pack.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Some kind of love triangle begins to develop between the assassin, the prince, and the officer.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Celaena finds her training sessions with the captain of the guard, Westfall, challenging and exhilirating. But she's bored stiff by court life. Things get a little more interesting when the prince starts to show interest in her... but it's the gruff Captain Westfall who seems to understand her best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Also some complications arose during the contest - some competitors being mysteriously murdered?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Evil things are happening in the castle as the contests ensue. One champion is turning up dead before each contest. They are being murdered and mutilated in a way that seems brutal and out of the ordinary. No one can turn up clues as to whom or what may be doing this, and Celaena starts quietly investigating on her own.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;At the end of the contest, when there's only two competitors left, of course it's the heroine and the giant guy. They fight a duel in front of everyone, and he uses some kind of dirty trick against her (poisoned sword? drugged drink?) so that he's about to win even though she's better.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Celaena competes very well and ends up in the final contest against Grave and then Cain. At Duke Perrington’s and the king’s request, Kaltain spikes Celaena’s drink before a required toast with the king between the two fights. Celaena unknowingly ingests this poison before the final battle against Cain. This dulls her senses and makes it seem like it’s going to be an easy win for Cain.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I think there was some unresolved plot arc involving the king as well:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book closes as Celaena signs the contract with the king. He threatens to hurt Chaol, Nehemia, or even Nehemia’s family if she does not fulfill the contract. But if she serves him well for four years, then she will be free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Found by Googling &lt;code&gt;assassin contest book&lt;/code&gt;, which brought me to &lt;a href=&quot;https://bookriot.com/ya-books-about-assassins/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this list of YA books about assassins&lt;/a&gt;, of which &lt;em&gt;Throne of Glass&lt;/em&gt; seemed promising. I then checked the wiki for confirmation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T18:57:09.240" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T18:57:09.240" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18506" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-01T23:55:18.267" Score="3" ViewCount="66" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&amp;quot; the poet William Carlos Williams uses &lt;em&gt;enjambment&lt;/em&gt; to great effect (or so I have read):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;so much depends&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;upon&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a red wheel&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;barrow&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;glazed with rain&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;water&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;beside the white&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;chickens.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the effect of enjambment in this poem? Why did Williams use this technique?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T09:00:14.803" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T09:00:14.803" Title="Effect of enjambment in &quot;The Red Wheelbarrow&quot; by William Carlos Williams" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;literary-device&gt;&lt;william-carlos-williams&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18507" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18508" CreationDate="2021-05-02T02:17:06.190" Score="14" ViewCount="6314" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the beginning of Chapter Four of &lt;em&gt;King Solomon's Mines&lt;/em&gt; we are given the distance travelled:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now I do not propose to narrate at full length all the incidents of our long travel up to Sitanda's Kraal, near the junction of the Lukanga and Kalukwe Rivers, &lt;strong&gt;a journey of more than a thousand miles from Durban&lt;/strong&gt;, the last three hundred or so of which we had to make on foot, owing to the frequent presence of the dreadful &amp;quot;tsetse&amp;quot; fly, whose bite is fatal to all animals except donkeys and men.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the very next paragraph we are told how long it took to travel this distance:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We left Durban at the end of January, and it was in the second week of May that we camped near Sitanda's Kraal.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, at the end of Chapter Three we were given the speed that the oxen could travel at:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then I bought a beautiful team of twenty salted Zulu oxen, which I had kept my eye on for a year or two. Sixteen oxen are the usual number for a team, but I took four extra to allow for casualties. These Zulu cattle are small and light, not more than half the size of the Africander oxen, which are generally used for transport purposes; but they will live where the Africanders would starve, and with a moderate load &lt;strong&gt;can make five miles a day better going&lt;/strong&gt;, being quicker and not so liable to become foot-sore.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These facts seem inconsistent. Even if we liberally interpret &amp;quot;the end of January&amp;quot; to include a full week of January, and &amp;quot;the second week of May&amp;quot; to be the end of two full weeks, the entire period would only be 110 or 111 days (7 days in January + 28/29 days in February + 31 days in March + 30 days in April + 14 days in May). At a speed of 5 miles per day, though, it would take 200 days to traverse 1,000 miles.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now it was stated in the first passage cited that the last 300 miles would be travelled on foot, in which case it is possible that they could cover much more ground than the oxen could. But even so, it should still take 140 days to travel the 700 miles with the oxen, so there is at least a full month unaccounted for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How can this be reconciled?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T15:21:38.687" Title="How did they cover 1,000 miles in 110 days at a speed of 5 miles per day?" Tags="&lt;king-solomons-mines&gt;&lt;h-rider-haggard&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18508" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18507" CreationDate="2021-05-02T02:35:10.827" Score="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;The phrase &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;can make five miles a day better going&lt;/strong&gt;.&amp;quot; does not refer to the absolute speed of the &amp;quot;Zulu cattle&amp;quot;.  It is saying that they can go five miles further a day than the &amp;quot;Africanders&amp;quot; can.  We would first need to know the speed of the &amp;quot;Africanders&amp;quot; to be able to estimate the speed of the &amp;quot;Zulu&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nonetheless your calculations are admirable.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10026" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T02:39:59.890" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T02:39:59.890" CommentCount="10" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18509" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18510" CreationDate="2021-05-02T09:27:41.093" Score="7" ViewCount="686" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://gutenberg.org/files/963/963-h/963-h.htm#link2HCH0024&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter 24 of &lt;em&gt;Little Dorrit&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, in one of the last scenes, Mr Merdle asks for a penknife. When Mrs Sparkler hands him the knife he asks if he could have one with a &amp;quot;darker&amp;quot; handle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘So I am off,’ added Mr Merdle, getting up. ‘Could you lend me a penknife?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was an odd thing, Fanny smilingly observed, for her who could seldom prevail upon herself even to write a letter, to lend to a man of such vast business as Mr Merdle. ‘Isn’t it?’ Mr Merdle acquiesced; ‘but I want one; and I know you have got several little wedding keepsakes about, with scissors and tweezers and such things in them. You shall have it back to-morrow.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Edmund,’ said Mrs Sparkler, ‘open (now, very carefully, I beg and beseech, for you are so very awkward) the mother of pearl box on my little table there, and give Mr Merdle the mother of pearl penknife.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘but if you have got one with a darker handle, &lt;strong&gt;I think I should prefer one with a darker handle&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Tortoise-shell?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Thank you,’ said Mr Merdle; ‘yes. I think I should prefer tortoise-shell.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shortly afterwards (&lt;a href=&quot;https://gutenberg.org/files/963/963-h/963-h.htm#link2HCH0025&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter 25&lt;/a&gt;), we see the scene where he has killed himself in the bathtub.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There was a bath in that corner, from which the water had been hastily drained off. Lying in it, as in a grave or sarcophagus, with a hurried drapery of sheet and blanket thrown across it, was the body of a heavily-made man, with an obtuse head, and coarse, mean, common features. A sky-light had been opened to release the steam with which the room had been filled; but it hung, condensed into water-drops, heavily upon the walls, and heavily upon the face and figure in the bath. The room was still hot, and the marble of the bath still warm; but the face and figure were clammy to the touch. The white marble at the bottom of the bath was veined with a dreadful red. On the ledge at the side, were an empty laudanum-bottle and a tortoise-shell handled penknife—soiled, but not with ink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My question is: why did Mr Merdle ask for a penknife with a darker handle?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Reposted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/113497/merdles-asks-for-a-knife-with-a-darker-handle?noredirect=1#comment195797_113497&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; as a commenter suggested.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12799" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-02T09:34:07.903" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T10:37:49.943" Title="Why does Mr Merdle ask for a penknife with a darker handle in &quot;Little Dorrit&quot;?" Tags="&lt;charles-dickens&gt;&lt;little-dorrit&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18510" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18509" CreationDate="2021-05-02T10:37:49.943" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;A man may have a fancy as to the particulars of how he takes his own life, but here are a couple of things which may have informed his choice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He may have found the shimmering, iridescent paleness of Mother of Pearl to have some heavenly quality which would make it a more jarring tool for the commission of an act of suicide, considered at that time to be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_views_on_suicide&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;blasphemous act or a mortal sin&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Such a view may be reinforced by consideration of the Bible verse Matthew 7:6&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he is given the tortoiseshell knife Mrs Sparkler says&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I will forgive you, if you ink it.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggests that the staining of pen knife handles with ink is not uncommon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I'll undertake not to ink it,' said Mr Merdle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As your own later quote makes clear, he does stain the knife, though with his blood rather than with ink.  So it is possible that he was considering that blood might stain the handle of the Mother of Pearl knife, which was - after all - only on loan.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T10:37:49.943" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18511" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-02T16:17:14.940" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter Five of &lt;em&gt;King Solomon's Mines&lt;/em&gt; the narrator, Allan Quatermain, acts as a translator during a conversation between Sir Henry and Umbopa:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sir Henry nodded. &amp;quot;I was sure of it,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;If George set his mind upon a thing he generally did it. It was always so from his boyhood. If he meant to cross the Suliman Berg he has crossed it, unless some accident overtook him, and we must look for him on the other side.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Umbopa understood English&lt;/strong&gt;, though he rarely spoke it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;It is a far journey, Incubu,&amp;quot; he put in, and I translated his remark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; answered Sir Henry, &amp;quot;it is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross, save a mountain and a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or lose it as Heaven may order.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;I translated.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(My emphasis)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is understandable that Quatermain needs to translate Umbopa's remarks into English so that sir Henry can understand them, but why does he need to translate Sir Henry's English remarks if Umbopa already understands English? Indeed, he does not translate what Sir Henry says in the first paragraph, so why does he then translate Sir Henry's next statement?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T16:17:14.940" Title="Why does Quatermain (the narrator) translate for Umbopa if Umbopa understands English?" Tags="&lt;h-rider-haggard&gt;&lt;king-solomons-mines&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18512" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3933" CreationDate="2021-05-02T20:58:53.513" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;They are original.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sim_godeys-magazine_1845-02_30_2/page/60/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The text of the first publication&lt;/a&gt; (&lt;em&gt;Godey's Lady's Book&lt;/em&gt;, February 1845, pp. 61-67) shows them.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DURf.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/3DURf.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T05:42:29.397" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T05:42:29.397" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18513" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5535" CreationDate="2021-05-02T21:26:09.020" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;You can't prove a negative, but I will (tentatively) declare&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Frost didn't say that&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As evidence, I present yearbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No, seriously, my evidence is going to be mostly yearbooks here. High school/university students like cynical, smart-sounding, pithy, contrary, or otherwise amusing quotes to put next to their yearbook pictures. I guessed that they'd like this quote and went searching &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Internet Archive&lt;/a&gt;'s text-contents storage to find some yearbooks with this quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As expected, a bunch of the results of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22If%20we%20couldn%27t%20laugh%20we%20would%20all%20go%20insane%22&amp;amp;sin=TXT&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the search&lt;/a&gt; were yearbooks. (Lots of yearbooks have been scanned into the archive, people like saving them). The earliest year with any results for the phrase was &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22If%20we%20couldn%27t%20laugh%20we%20would%20all%20go%20insane%22&amp;amp;sin=TXT&amp;amp;and%5B%5D=year%3A%221978%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1978, with 3 hits&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Result 1: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/echo1978gree/page/114/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1978 Greensboro College yearbook&lt;/a&gt;. The phrase pops up in a rendition of the lyrics to &lt;a href=&quot;https://genius.com/Jimmy-buffett-changes-in-latitudes-changes-in-attitudes-lyrics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Jimmy Buffet song&lt;/a&gt;. The students must've really liked the music; the yearbook's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/echo1978gree/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;title page&lt;/a&gt; is designed to be obviously reminiscent of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/Buffettchanges.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;album cover&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Result 2: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/departmentofnurs1978colu/page/24/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1978 Columbia University Department of Nursing yearbook&lt;/a&gt;. Someone used this line as their yearbook quote, and attributed it to &amp;quot;J. Buffet&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Result 3: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wachusettregiona1978unse/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1978 Wachusett Regional High School yearbook&lt;/a&gt;. Someone used this line as their yearbook quote, and attributed it to &amp;quot;J. B.&amp;quot;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All of that fits with young adults getting obsessed with a song and referencing the new cool lines it in their yearbooks. If the quote was from Frost, and around before then, I would expect students in prior years to have used this quote in their yearbooks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To be more sure, I searched for this quote alongside &amp;quot;frost&amp;quot;. This should pick up any archived version of the quote when it's attributed to Robert Frost. With a lot of false positives, annoyingly. All of the results attributing it to Frost were much more recent: &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/belmonthighschoo2015belm/page/38/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane+frost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2015&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wachusettregiona2011unse/page/56/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane+frost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2011&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/the-great-book-of-best-quotes-of-all-time/page/144/mode/2up?q=If+we+couldn%27t+laugh+we+would+all+go+insane+Robert+frost&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2010&lt;/a&gt;. (There was even one attributing it to James Taylor!)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This fits with &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/5535/where-did-the-robert-frost-quote-if-we-couldnt-laugh-we-would-all-go-insane#comment10881_5535&quot;&gt;@kimchi lover's comment&lt;/a&gt; (bolding by me, italics by them):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I agree with Joshua Engel: it's too dumb to be Frost. Google books didn't know of &lt;em&gt;anybody&lt;/em&gt; writing this until about 2000, then Bill Watterson (author of &lt;em&gt;Calvin and Hobbes&lt;/em&gt;) said something like it, then in about 2005 Buffet used it and &lt;strong&gt;in about 2010 people began attributing it to Frost.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If anyone can point to where Frost said this, I'd be happy to admit to being wrong, but seeing how long this question's been up I think that's unlikely.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Conclusion: as the snarky young adults can show us, this quote first showed up as a Jimmy Buffet lyric, and was only decades later misattributed to Robert Frost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-02T21:26:09.020" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18516" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-03T13:59:33.977" Score="6" ViewCount="157" Body="&lt;p&gt;Edna St. Vincent Millay's very short poem &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/14095/first-fig&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Figs from Thistles: First Fig&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; goes as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My candle burns at both ends;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   It will not last the night;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;   It gives a lovely light!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/a/566288/87724&quot;&gt;recent answer on English SE&lt;/a&gt; mentions an interpretation of this as being about the poet's sexuality, which strikes me as a very non-obvious reading of the poem. However, it's very short and un-detailed, which lays it open to a wide variety of different interpretations: the &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemanalysis.com/edna-st-vincent-millay/first-fig/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;page&lt;/a&gt; linked from that English SE answer mentions life, sex, literature, and career as possible fields of interpretation of this poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;How can this poem be interpreted?&lt;/strong&gt; I'm looking for sensible well-reasoned interpretations, either which have already been posed by critics (in which case, please include sources and citations in your answer) or which can be properly supported by any kind of arguments (authorial intent, context of the poem within her corpus or as relevant to her life, wording choice in the poem itself, ...), not just thoughts and ideas without backup.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-03T19:51:37.897" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T22:12:33.730" Title="Edna St. Vincent Millay's &quot;Figs from Thistles: First Fig&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;edna-st-vincent-millay&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18519" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15443" CreationDate="2021-05-04T03:38:15.097" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;TL;DR&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The blue pill is likely an addictive prescription drug like a benzodiazepine or oxycodone. The blue hands are a likely reference to heroin overdose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A SiriusXM blog post &lt;a href=&quot;https://blog.siriusxm.com/halsey-explains-the-meaning-of-her-hit-song-colors/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;quotes Halsey&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My song &amp;quot;Colors&amp;quot; [released in 2016] is about being in a relationship with someone and kind of watching the vibrancy slowly start to leak out of them ... whether they’re falling victim to drugs or ....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Further, an &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.capitalfm.com/artists/halsey/dating-relationship-history-boyfriends/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;article published by the UK's Capital FM&lt;/a&gt;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Halsey and Matty Healy from The 1975 dated in 2015 and it's widely suspected her song 'Colors' was written about him while her debut EP, 'Room 93', was named after a hotel room the pair had spent a night in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The site &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.songmeaningsandfacts.com/meaning-of-colors-by-halsey/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;SongMeaningsAndFacts indicates that&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is noteworthy that Halsey and Matty Healy were in relationship in 2015. Around that same time, Healy was battling heroin addiction.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.crestviewrecoverycenter.com/heroin-overdose-symptoms/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Regarding heroin addiction&lt;/a&gt;, the Crestview Recovery Center says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When there is too much heroin in the body, there can be a lack of oxygen in the blood. Therefore, blue skin and nails can be a clear sign of a heroin overdose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A 2018 article in Rolling Stone &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-1975-matty-healy-interview-brief-inquiry-760583/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;describes Healy's drug abuse&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Healy was sinking deeper into abusing opiates and anxiety meds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And Billboard contains &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/magazine-feature/8468029/matty-healy-the-1975-billboard-cover-story/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;additional information in that regard&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He found himself ranting over dinner one night, under the influence of benzodiazepine....&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Both benzodiazepines (generally) and oxycodone (specifically — a likely candidate for an opiate addiction) come in blue pill form.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fqyUn.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fqyUn.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of blue benzodiazepine pill (Alprazolam)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drugs.com/imprints/b-7-0-7-27663.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IMAGE SOURCE&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2EDI.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/z2EDI.png&quot; alt=&quot;Example of a blue oxycodone bill&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.drugs.com/oxycodone-images.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IMAGE SOURCE&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12811" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T03:38:15.097" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18520" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-04T04:44:58.180" Score="3" ViewCount="153" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;Re Judicial&lt;/em&gt; by Baticuling (Jesús Balmori) in &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/el-libro-de-mis-vidas-manilenas/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;El libro de mis vidas manileñas&lt;/em&gt; (1928)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aaw4K.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/Aaw4K.png&quot; alt=&quot;A photo of Re Judicial by Baticuling (Jesús Balmori)&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the first stanza, the author begins with a little message: &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;Antonio Manipula, juez ... y falsificación.&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot; This provides the reader with some background on what the poem is about: some judge named Manipula condemned for embezzlement and fraud. The first two lines say &amp;quot;these days, that who doesn't rob is a mule and those who don't embezzle are fools&amp;quot;, and goes on in how such crimes are &amp;quot;ordinary&amp;quot; (&lt;em&gt;corrientes&lt;/em&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper term for such a message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This isn't limited to &lt;a href=&quot;/questions/tagged/spanish-literature&quot; class=&quot;post-tag&quot; title=&quot;show questions tagged &amp;#39;spanish-literature&amp;#39;&quot; rel=&quot;tag&quot;&gt;spanish-literature&lt;/a&gt; because I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that there are English poems with such a feature, although I can't find any.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12812" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T04:57:20.903" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T12:09:36.517" Title="What do you call the &quot;message&quot; written before a poem?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="7" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18521" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18507" CreationDate="2021-05-04T05:26:22.890" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;In addition to the other answer, the text claims that only 300 is by foot, so maybe the slower speed (relative, as described in the accepted answer) does not apply for the other methods of transportation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12813" LastEditorUserId="12813" LastEditDate="2021-05-08T15:21:38.687" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T15:21:38.687" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18522" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18523" CreationDate="2021-05-04T06:18:53.197" Score="0" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spring came. In the mornings, when the first person opened the back door,&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed&lt;/strong&gt;. Women sighed in&#xA;expensive dress shops, as if even to contemplate fine stuffs were too much&#xA;to bear. Dexter took Arthur to the National Gallery. On the way he spoke to&#xA;the boy in magisterial tones about the lives of artists: Dexter loved tales of&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;exalted suffering&lt;/strong&gt;, of war and failure and unsympathetic wives and&#xA;alcoholism. Arthur loitered in front of an etching called Se Repulen: two&#xA;devils, one wielding a huge pair of scissors with which he was about to cut&#xA;the other’s toenails. ‘Looks like me and Mum,’ said Arture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;exalted suffering&amp;quot; mean&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;sufferings with good results&amp;quot; I mean &amp;quot;when someone try a lot to achieve something, and in the end she or he becomes successful&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;pleasure that we feel after overcoming difficulties in our life?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;the whole dull and breathless air of house replace with fresh and warm air of outside&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T14:04:34.060" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T14:04:34.060" Title="What does &quot;exalted suffering&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18523" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18522" CreationDate="2021-05-04T06:45:42.483" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Exalted suffering&lt;/strong&gt; means suffering that is held in high regard, because it is considered noble in some way. If we hear about how an artist led a life of brutal poverty, spending what little money she had on paints and canvases, and finally dying sick and alone, but who was heralded as a genius after her death, then we are telling a story of exalted suffering: the person who sacrificed everything for the sake of her art and produced masterpieces. The stories Dexter tells Arthur are of this sort.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You are correct, &lt;strong&gt;the whole bulk of air in the house shifted and warmed&lt;/strong&gt; means that the warm air from the outside freshened the colder air inside the house. In the spring, when the air at night can be quite cool, a house with all its windows and doors shut will retain cooler air in the early morning while the sun warms the outdoors. Opening a door will let light and warmth in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T09:46:38.113" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T09:46:38.113" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18524" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-04T15:25:54.567" Score="7" ViewCount="615" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Among the principal works and stories in the Mahābhārata are the Bhagavad Gita, the story of Damayanti, the story of Savitri and Satyavan, the story of Kacha and Devyani, the story of Ṛṣyasringa and an abbreviated version of the Rāmāyaṇa, often considered as works in their own right.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I know that the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bhagavad Gita&lt;/a&gt; is often treated as a separate text, not just an integral part of the Mahabharata, but the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramayana&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ramayana&lt;/a&gt;, as far as I know, really is a different piece of Sanskrit epic poetry, separate from the Mahabharata. The same Wikipedia page quoted above even mentions them as &amp;quot;the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India&amp;quot;. Then in what sense can the Ramayana be seen as &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; the Mahabharata? Is it retold within the Mahabharata, or has it sometimes been published as part of the Mahabharata, or what? (I would've guessed this might be Wikipedia talking nonsense again, but this is a fairly prominent claim, near the top of an article about a very well-known piece of literature, so surely it would've been spotted and corrected by now if it was mistaken.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T08:23:38.383" Title="Is the Ramayana contained in the Mahabharata?" Tags="&lt;intertextuality&gt;&lt;mahabharata&gt;&lt;sanskrit-literature&gt;&lt;ramayana&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18525" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="359" CreationDate="2021-05-04T17:17:08.550" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;It may not be accurate to say that his style became associated with her work, per se. It seems more that it was associated with a range of authors in that period.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Before the war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Youngman Carter became a prolific graphic artist, distinguished particularly in the undervalued field of dustwrapper design for books. His designs enhanced the work of many of the most celebrated writers of the day: H.G.Wells, G.K.Chesterton, Eden Phillpotts, Margaret Kennedy, Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca West, John Steinbeck, J.B.Priestley, Georgette Heyer and Graham Greene.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and after the war&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He continued to design dustwrappers, including a long series for Simenon, and in the early sixties produced paperback covers for several of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Wimsey novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The source of both quotes is the &lt;a href=&quot;https://margeryallingham.org.uk/philip-youngman-carter/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Margery Allingham Society website&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More generally publishers make a habit of refreshing artwork for books which remain in publication for extended time. If you consider books which have remained popular over several generations, it would be unrealistic to expect the books to remain wedded to unaltering cover art when the style of all the new books around them, for which them must compete for sales, are up to the minute and modish.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For books which have remained popular for so long, the original cover art might &lt;em&gt;now&lt;/em&gt; be considered elegant and appropriately 'period', but ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago it may just have looked dated, dowdy and tired.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An article on the BBC entitled 'What makes and Iconic Book Cover' speaks to several people in the industry on the topic:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Jon Gray, who over a 20-year career has designed covers for authors including Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney, Salmon Rushdie and David Foster Wallace, says there’s more pressure than ever to get covers right. “Bookshops are such a riot,” he says. “It’s like a big crowded party and you’re trying to get your face to stand out in the crowd. To make an impact and get someone to pick up a book and turn it over is getting harder and harder.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It’s not just in shops that books need to stand out, but online too – whether that’s on social media or the sites people buy from – and that’s had an impact on how they look, says Gray. “Online marketing and media has led to a trend for brighter, super-saturated covers in print. The use of fluorescent and special colours and saturated imagery with white-out text. Print is being asked to match the brightness of screen.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Donna] Payne, [creative director at Faber &amp;amp; Faber] claims that designing a new cover for a classic novel is also a chance to bring out an aspect of the book that hasn’t been explored before. “You have so many books published every day, it’s important to get those classic titles back on the table in front of store, and a new jacket will help to do that,” she says.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T17:17:08.550" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18526" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18532" CreationDate="2021-05-04T17:28:46.207" Score="9" ViewCount="2812" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading &lt;em&gt;Hearts of Three&lt;/em&gt; written by Jack London. Right in Chapter I, I found the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, red drama and tragedy of the primitive and the medieval melodrama of sentiment and passion of the New World Latin, Francis Morgan was destined to be that man, and Destiny was very immediate upon him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand the whole sentence but I can't catch the meaning of the phrase &lt;strong&gt;across time into the raw&lt;/strong&gt;. What meaning does &lt;em&gt;raw&lt;/em&gt; have in the phrase?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12824" OwnerDisplayName="Stepan Yarovoy" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T09:35:36.877" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T09:35:36.877" Title="Meaning of the phrase &quot;If ever a man leaped across time into the raw...&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;jack-london&gt;&lt;hearts-of-three&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18527" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18528" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Hearts of Three' (1920), written by Jack London in co-operation with the playwright Charles Goddard. Use in conjunction with the [jack-london] tag." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" LastActivityDate="2021-05-04T18:52:06.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18530" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18524" CreationDate="2021-05-05T00:39:53.957" Score="8" Body="&lt;p&gt;The Mahabharata does not contain the Ramayana (an epic work 24000 verses long). It does, however, contain the so-called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramopakhyana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Ramopakhyana&lt;/a&gt; which (like the Ramayana) tells the story of Rama and Sita but (unlike the Ramayana) is only about 700 verses long. This is the &amp;quot;abbreviated version of the Ramayana&amp;quot; referred to in the Wikipedia article on the Mahabharata.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Ramopakhyana obviously contains much less material than the Ramayana, and it differs in other ways; for instance, in the Ramayana Rama is an avatar of Vishnu, but in the Ramopakhyana he is an ordinary human being. [EDITED to add:] ... At least, that's what I had read, but in comments below user &lt;em&gt;also ran&lt;/em&gt; points out a place near the beginning where it does seem to be being stated that Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, so it seems this isn't so clear-cut a difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Wikipedia page I linked above quotes one W J Johnson as saying that &amp;quot;most current scholarship believes [the Ramopakhyana] to have been derived from a memorized version of the story drawn from the northern recension of the Rāmāyaṇa prior to the completion of that text as we now have it&amp;quot;. If this is so, then there is a family relationship between what's in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana itself, but it's certainly not at all true that the Mahabharata contains the Ramayana.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="35" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T16:29:44.127" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T16:29:44.127" CommentCount="7" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18531" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18526" CreationDate="2021-05-05T00:47:37.373" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think you're parsing the sentence a little bit wrong. It's not &amp;quot;leaped across time into the raw&amp;quot;, it's &amp;quot;leaped across time into the raw, red drama and tragedy of ...&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Raw&amp;quot; is applied to the &amp;quot;red drama and tragedy&amp;quot;, and I think the specific imagery here is of an untreated open wound: the drama and tragedy are shocking, painful, direct, alive, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So our narrator is saying that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;the &amp;quot;New World Latin&amp;quot; was liable to have a life full of passion and sentiment ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;so much so as to be like a primitive or medieval melodrama ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;whose drama and tragedy were &amp;quot;raw and red&amp;quot; like an exposed wound ...&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;and, in a manner of speaking, Francis Morgan was destined to &amp;quot;leap across time&amp;quot; into that world.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T00:47:37.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18532" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18526" CreationDate="2021-05-05T01:04:41.343" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The meaning is a little clearer if we parse and excerpt the phrase a little differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;across time into the raw, red drama&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The adjective &lt;em&gt;raw&lt;/em&gt; modifies &lt;em&gt;drama&lt;/em&gt;, it's not a noun in this case. London, narrating, draws a connection between primitive vs civilized societies and raw vs cooked meat. And of course there are all kinds of colonialist implications to that.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is echoing an old Chinese imperial distinction &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarian#Cultural_and_racial_barbarianism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;between &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;cooked&amp;quot; barbarians&lt;/a&gt;, ie, ones who have adopted less or more of Chinese metropolitan culture. The distinction goes back to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Rites&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liji&lt;/a&gt;. A similar metaphor organizes Levi-Strauss's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Raw_and_the_Cooked&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Raw and the Cooked&lt;/a&gt;, which post-dates London. Whether the Liji, Jack London, and Levi-Strauss's uses of the terms are connected is another question.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11437" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T01:04:41.343" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18533" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18526" CreationDate="2021-05-05T04:08:29.313" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's an interesting read. I agree with the other answers about the parsing.  The consonance of &amp;quot;red&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot; enforce the relationship.  Even so, Jack London has likely evoked the response he wanted from you, the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &amp;quot;leap into the abyss&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;leap into the great unknown&amp;quot;,  &amp;quot;leap of faith&amp;quot;, all share a similar sentiment with &amp;quot;leaped across time into the raw,...&amp;quot; of leaving the rational behind.  The rest of the sentence nearly works as a delineation of that &amp;quot;raw&amp;quot;.  Let's give it a try:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;If ever a man leaped across time into the raw, Francis Morgan was destined to be that man.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The use of &amp;quot;If&amp;quot; adds nicely to the hyperbole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Consider this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Growing up in Virginia, I had no idea what a cannibal sandwich was&#xA;until recently. Rachel was reading a short article on Jack London’s&#xA;favorite foods out loud to me, which mentioned that raw ground beef&#xA;and onion sandwiches were a favorite of his.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://elevatedwild.com/elevatedwildblog/jack-london-sandwich&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://elevatedwild.com/elevatedwildblog/jack-london-sandwich&lt;/a&gt; .&#xA;Unfortunately, the article referenced is not cited.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, we have Jack London's own Tales of &lt;em&gt;Cannibals and Headhunters.&lt;/em&gt;  Can there be any doubt about the London's affection for the word?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10026" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T04:08:29.313" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18534" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18524" CreationDate="2021-05-05T04:28:40.053" Score="10" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A section of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; narrates the story of Rāma. This section, called the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt;, is far shorter than the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; which, as you correctly note, is a different epic altogether. The story as told in the &lt;em&gt;Ramopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt;  also differs in some details from the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. The exact textual relationship between Valmiki's &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is not settled. The latter could perhaps be &amp;quot;an abbreviated version of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;,&amp;quot; for some definition of &amp;quot;version.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;The Story of Rāma in the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Book 3 of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; covers a period when the epic's heroes, the Pāṇḍavas, are exiled to the forest. The book is thus called the Āraṇyaka Parva or the Book of the Forest. Lamenting his plight, Yudhiṣṭhira, the eldest Pāṇḍava, asks the hermit Mārkaṇḍeya:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;अस्ति नूनं मया कश्चिदल्पभाग्यतरो नरः&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;भवता दृष्टपूर्वो वा श्रुतपूर्वोऽपि वा भवेत्       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://bombay.indology.info/mahabharata/text/UD/MBh03.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3.257.10a–10c&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;asti nūnaṃ mayā kaścidalpabhāgyataro naraḥ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;bhavatā dṛṣṭapūrvo vā śrutapūrvo'pi vā bhavet&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there any man less fortunate than I that you have seen or heard of earlier?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mārkaṇḍeya responds with a quick summary of the story of Rāma:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;प्राप्तमप्रतिमं दुःखं रामेण भरतर्षभ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;रक्षसा जानकी तस्य हृता भार्या बलीयसा&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;आश्रमाद्राक्षसेन्द्रेण रावणेन विहायसा&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;मायामास्थाय तरसा हत्वा गृध्रं जटायुषम्&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;प्रत्याजहार तां रामः सुग्रीवबलमाश्रितः&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;बद्ध्वा सेतुं समुद्रस्य दग्ध्वा लङ्कां शितैः शरैः       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://bombay.indology.info/mahabharata/text/UD/MBh03.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3.258.1a–3c&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;prāptamapratimaṃ duḥkhaṃ rāmeṇa bharatarṣabha&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;rakṣasā jānakī tasya hṛtā bhāryā balīyasā&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;āśramādrākṣasendreṇa rāvaṇena vihāyasā&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;māyāmāsthāya tarasā hatvā gṛdhraṃ jaṭāyuṣam&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;pratyājahāra tāṃ rāmaḥ sugrīvabalamāśritaḥ&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;baddhvā setuṃ samudrasya dagdhvā laṅkāṃ śitaiḥ śaraiḥ&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rāma underwent unmatched sorrow, O bull among the Bharatas! His wife Jānaki was seized by a mighty demon. Rāvaṇa, king of the demons, took her away from the hermitage through the skies, deceitfully, swiftly, having slain the vulture Jaṭāyu. Then Rāma, with the help of the powerful Sugrīva, rescued her after building a bridge across the sea and destroying Lanka with his sharp arrows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Yudhiṣṭhira asks for details and Mārkaṇḍeya obliges with a longer version of Rāma's story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This section of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt;, called the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramopakhyana&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; or &amp;quot;the Tale of Rāma,&amp;quot; comprises chapters 257–275 of the Āraṇyaka Parva and totals 704 verses or just above 1400 lines. While reasonably long in itself, the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is rather brief compared to the 24,000 verses of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. Like the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Gītā&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Ramopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is self-contained, but unlike the former, it has never been in wide circulation as a stand-alone text, perhaps because the story is told in such greater detail in the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. Vernacular retellings of Rāma's story are also considerably longer than the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt;. For example, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsidas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Tulsidas&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramcharitmanas&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rāmacharitamānas&lt;/a&gt;, the best-known Hindi retelling of Rāma's story, is 10,902 verses long; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kambar_(poet)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Kamban&lt;/a&gt;'s Tamil version, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramavataram&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Rāmāvatāram&lt;/a&gt;, is approximately 12,000 verses long.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Is the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; an Abbreviated &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;?&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Rāma circulates as myth and as such &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/16590/289&quot;&gt;exists in being retold&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; is the longest and most celebrated of these retellings. But other retellings such as Tulsidas's or Kamban's, or even the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt;, do not merely summarize or abridge that epic. They are different versions of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This can be demonstrated by noticing how some of the details of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; are different from those in the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. For example, the parentage of Rāvaṇa and his half-brother Kubera varies between the two texts. Also, in the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;, Rāma kills Rāvaṇa's brother Kumbhakarṇa, whereas in the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; the killer is Rāma's brother Lakṣmaṇa. Such variances suggest that the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is something other than a simple summary of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is, however, a tendency in popular culture to conflate all stories about Rāma with the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. The &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; are considered holy books, and many if not most Hindus treat the stories they tell as literally true. Consequently, academic distinctions are moot. A scholarly question such as &amp;quot;How old is the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt;?&amp;quot; gets treated as an historical one: &amp;quot;When did the events described in the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; take place?&amp;quot; And a textual question like “Is the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; a part of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; in the same way that the &lt;em&gt;Bhagavad Gītā&lt;/em&gt; is?&amp;quot; is not distinguished from the very different question, &amp;quot;Does the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; tell the story of Rāma?&amp;quot; The answer to the former is no; to the latter, yes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Scholarly Considerations about Dating and Textual Recensions&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The presence of the story of Rāma in the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; raises a question of textual scholarship: &amp;quot;Is the text of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; related to the text of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; as we have it?&amp;quot; That is to say, can we relate the two texts in a way that demonstrates conclusively whether or how either one is based on the other?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is difficult to answer with any certainty. Both the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; and the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; were &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/a/35056&quot;&gt;compiled over several overlapping centuries&lt;/a&gt;. Being about four times longer than the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;, the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; took longer to be compiled as well. Several facts conspire to muddy the waters:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The earliest versions of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; story probably predate the earliest versions of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;, but the text as we currently have it is later than the current text of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; is set some centuries prior to the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt;. This makes sense, given that Mārkaṇḍeya tells Rāma's story in the latter.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Yet the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; includes details about &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/29av5n/which_epic_was_written_first_R%C4%81m%C4%81ya%E1%B9%87a_or/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the diffusion of Indo-Aryan culture over a wider geographic span&lt;/a&gt; than the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; does; that suggests a later composition period than that of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Both epics have come down to us in several different manuscript versions grouped under &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/41692082&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;two&lt;/a&gt; major &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/a/24329&quot;&gt;recensions&lt;/a&gt;, the Northern and the Southern. The various mss. of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; in particular vary quite widely from each other.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Due to the complex textual history of both epics, it is very hard to state authoritatively whether or not the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; derives directly from the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;. Verbal echoes between the two texts abound, however. The repetition of exact phrases implies that the two are not independent works, but related in some way. Richard Lariviere, following the scholar Albrecht Weber, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/602865&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lists four possibilities&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is the source for the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It summarizes an early version the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;It derives from the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;, with the compiler of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; making changes to suit his own purposes&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The two stories are independently derived from a prior, unknown source.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lariviere himself leans toward the third possibility. As Gareth McCaughan says in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18530/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt;, this view is now the most widely held; scholarly opinion tends toward the belief that the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; is a memorial reconstruction of some version of the northern recension of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;, though it cannot be definitively linked to any extant text of that recension. (I obviously have no ability to judge the scholarship on the textual history of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmopākhyāna&lt;/em&gt; as it relates to the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt;; nevertheless, it seems worth noting that at least in the field of Shakespearean textual scholarship, it is a matter of dispute whether &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_reconstruction&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;memorial reconstruction&lt;/a&gt; can be considered a viable explanation for textual variations.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Conclusion&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; posits itself as a repository of every story, every adage, every character, every situation, and every human reality:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;यदिहास्ति तदन्यत्र यन्नेहास्ति न तत्क्वचित्       (&lt;a href=&quot;https://bombay.indology.info/mahabharata/text/UD/MBh01.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1.56.33c&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;yadihāsti tadanyatra yannehāsti na tatkvacit&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The things within this may be found elsewhere; those not herein are found nowhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story of Rāma is indeed found in this encyclopedic work, but to claim that the entirety of the &lt;em&gt;Rāmāyaṇa&lt;/em&gt; is therefore contained within the text of the &lt;em&gt;Mahābhārata&lt;/em&gt; would be mistaken.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Notes&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The proper names of the poets Valmiki, Tulsidas, and Kamban are not transliterated. Otherwise, Sanskrit quotations, words, and names are transliterated using &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Alphabet_of_Sanskrit_Transliteration&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IAST&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Translations from the Sanskrit are my own and I am not qualified to translate Sanskrit. So YMMV, AYOR, etc.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T08:23:38.383" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T08:23:38.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18535" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18520" CreationDate="2021-05-05T04:55:02.420" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Epigraph&lt;/strong&gt; has already been mentioned in the comments.  An example in a language other than Spanish was asked for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al&#xA;mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma penciocche gammai di&#xA;questo fondo Non torno viva alcun, s'i'odo il vero, Senza tema&#xA;d'infamia ti rispondo&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This excerpt is from Dante's &lt;em&gt;Inferno&lt;/em&gt;.   T, .S. Elliot uses it to preface his poem &lt;em&gt;The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock&lt;/em&gt; Many critiques of the &lt;em&gt;Prufrock&lt;/em&gt; call the Dante excerpt an epigraph.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10026" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T04:55:02.420" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18536" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18520" CreationDate="2021-05-05T05:48:49.567" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;A prologue or prolog (from Greek πρόλογος prólogos, from πρό pró, &amp;quot;before&amp;quot; and λόγος lógos, &amp;quot;word&amp;quot;) is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prologue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prologue&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While the above statement is prologue for a story, I found a statement that exactly matches your guidelines, in poetry itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'A prologue is a separate introductory section that comes before the main body of a poem, novel, or play, and gives some sense as to what's to come. ... The definition of prologue is opposite to that of the epilogue, a separate section of the text that provides a conclusion and answers questions.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the proper term for such a message?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So that would be a prologue.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An epigraph meanwhile, is a poem before a story/novel selected by the author because of interest to the story that is to come.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And you are right, it is extremely tough to find a prologue in a poem. The closest I got what this -- &lt;em&gt;(Which is entirely a prologue, acknowledging the comment by Peter Shor)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hr5lY.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/hr5lY.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this helps.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11850" LastEditorUserId="-1" LastEditDate="2021-05-07T14:11:53.947" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T14:11:53.947" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18537" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18526" CreationDate="2021-05-05T07:22:58.697" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As the other answers have suggested, you are parsing the sentence wrongly, although I disagree with them on how to group it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Suffice it to say, this is a tricky sentence!  It is heavily &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;recursive&lt;/a&gt;: multiple concepts are grouped together, then those wrapped-up groupings are themselves grouped together, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;To undo the recursion, it's easiest to work from the outside in.  I'm going to leave parts that we haven't yet figured out in ⟨angle brackets⟩ and direct quotes in &lt;strong&gt;bold&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The sentence is about &lt;strong&gt;Francis Morgan&lt;/strong&gt;, and it combines two thoughts.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;⟨Something is true⟩ &lt;strong&gt;and Destiny was very immediate upon him&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does that last phrase mean?  Here, &lt;strong&gt;him&lt;/strong&gt; refers to Morgan.  I would gloss &lt;strong&gt;immediate&lt;/strong&gt; as roughly synonymous with &amp;quot;imminent&amp;quot; here.  Putting it together, Morgan is about to encounter his destiny.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What destiny?  To answer this, we turn to the first thought: &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If&lt;/strong&gt; ⟨some condition⟩ is true, then &lt;strong&gt;Francis Morgan was destined to be that man&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;  We still don't understand this, because we're still missing referents, but we know there is some unique person (&lt;strong&gt;that man&lt;/strong&gt;), and Morgan is &lt;strong&gt;destined&lt;/strong&gt; to embody said person.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is &lt;strong&gt;that man&lt;/strong&gt;?  To answer this, we now fill in the &amp;quot;if&amp;quot; condition: &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;strong&gt;If ever a man leaped across time into&lt;/strong&gt; ⟨something⟩&lt;/blockquote&gt;  So that man has leapt &lt;strong&gt;across time&lt;/strong&gt;: he is anachronistic, ill-suited to his surroundings.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Why is he anachronistic?  Now we fill in the last unspecified part of the sentence: he leapt into &lt;blockquote&gt;&lt;strong&gt;the&lt;/strong&gt; ⟨something⟩ &lt;strong&gt;of the primitive and the&lt;/strong&gt; ⟨something⟩ &lt;strong&gt;of the New World Latin&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;  OK, so now we know his surroundings: something London believes characteristic of indigenous peoples (&lt;strong&gt;the primitive&lt;/strong&gt;), and something characteristic of South Americans (&lt;strong&gt;the New World Latin&lt;/strong&gt;).  Without context, I can't tell if London thinks these are two ways of describing the same thing or two different things.  Nevertheless, I can guess as to why Morgan is different from either: he is &amp;quot;civilized.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is characteristic of the &lt;strong&gt;New World Latin&lt;/strong&gt;?  &lt;blockquote&gt;the medieval melodrama of sentiment and passion&lt;/blockquote&gt;  Notice that this is a unitary concept (it's a single &lt;strong&gt;medieval melodrama&lt;/strong&gt;), but the melodrama in question is composed of two parts: &lt;strong&gt;sentiment and passion&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What is characteristic of the &lt;strong&gt;primitive&lt;/strong&gt;?  &lt;blockquote&gt;the raw, red drama and tragedy&lt;/blockquote&gt;  This is the part that's confusing you.  Unlike the &lt;strong&gt;New World Latin&lt;/strong&gt; case, here there are two things characteristic: &lt;strong&gt;drama&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;tragedy&lt;/strong&gt;.  Note that while we colloquially describe all plays (including &lt;strong&gt;tragedies&lt;/strong&gt;) as &lt;strong&gt;dramas&lt;/strong&gt; (via &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;synecdoche&lt;/a&gt;), a more recent definition is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drama_(film_and_television)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;a specific genre&lt;/a&gt; of play, and that is almost certainly what London is alluding to here.  But, of course life as a &lt;strong&gt;drama&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;tragedy&lt;/strong&gt; is not unique to the indigenous.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Finally, we can address what makes indigenes' &lt;strong&gt;drama and tragedy&lt;/strong&gt; unique: it is &lt;strong&gt;raw&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;red&lt;/strong&gt;.  As Gareth McCaughan adeptly points out, these are both adjectives used to describe bleeding wounds; London is almost certainly trying to invoke a notion of &lt;em&gt;brutality&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;violence&lt;/em&gt; that he believes characteristic of indigenes' feuds.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12823" LastEditorUserId="99" LastEditDate="2021-05-05T09:27:40.837" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T09:27:40.837" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18538" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18019" CreationDate="2021-05-05T11:50:29.347" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;'They Loved to Laugh' by Katheryn Worth appears to have all the features mentioned.&#xA;From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/596355.They_Loved_to_Laugh&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Goodreads&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;16-year-old orphan Martitia Howland has been transplanted into a Quaker farm family of five intimidating sons and one disapproving daughter. As Martitia runs their gauntlet, she suffers their teasing but finally begins to bloom. Valiantly she acquires the skills they expect of her, and discovers other gifts all her own. Her achievements earn respect in the end and more, her heart's true love.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also on Amazon, &lt;a href=&quot;https://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/com/1883937167&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;reviewer eldeberryjam comments&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The main character in this book - the orphan - takes over the family silk production and weaving because the daughter who had learned this job had married and left home. There is a significant Quaker historical element to this story. Silk was a &amp;quot;free labor&amp;quot; fiber, an alternative to cotton, prior to the Civil War. Quakers were admonished by their meetings if they kept slaves, so they usually attempted to do all of their own labor. Many raised and processed their own fibers - wool from sheep, linen from flax, and silk from moth larvae eating mulberry leaves. This young woman learned how to raise, process and weave silk in North Carolina.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-05T11:50:29.347" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18539" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18543" CreationDate="2021-05-05T13:02:12.610" Score="0" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Elizabeth used the presence of Vicki at her place as an excuse for sleeping nearly every night at Philip’s. He did not mind: he was not the kind of person who could be bothered minding. But he stayed out later, fell into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg; he excited pointless passions in girls who knew no better than to sprawl for hours among empty pizza boxes at the studio and wait for somebody to notice them. He came home at that hour when light is not yet anything more than the exaggerated whiteness of a shirt flung against a bookcase, a higher gloss on the back of a kitchen chair. &lt;strong&gt;Poppy left her writings on the table&lt;/strong&gt; and he read them eagerly: her happy flights of fancy, her visions of an adult world, her lists of invented names: the endless ingenuity of the only child. ‘Finn and Angela have arrived on Dasnin,’ he read in the light of the open refrigerator, ‘to find an abandoned and desertous planet completely devoid of any living form.’ &lt;strong&gt;If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. She had already been out for a jog around the park.&lt;/strong&gt; She was clean and bright. She read as she ate; some great work or other, Norah of Billabong, The Once and Future King. &lt;strong&gt;She did not leap up and swamp him with greetings&lt;/strong&gt;: she raised her face to him with her composed, modest smile. All about her was the order which she had created. &lt;strong&gt;God, the joy of her, the pleasure!&lt;/strong&gt; He put down his guitar case. Will anyone ever love her as much as he does?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;God, the joy of her, the pleasure!&amp;quot; mean: &amp;quot;her father is thinking about what things makes his daughter happy&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Am I right in understanding this part:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. She had already been out for a jog around the park.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does it mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If he came home late enough he found her sitting up to her solitary breakfast. She had cleared the table and placed before her a cup of tea and a plate of toast and bacon. Sometimes she was not home and she had already been out for a jog around the park and he did not saw her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And do the sentences &amp;quot;Poppy left her writings on the table&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;She did not leap up and swamp him with greetings&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;Poppy always left her writings on the table&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;She never did leap up and swamp him with greetings&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T08:50:27.987" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T09:09:12.150" Title="Meaning of &quot;God, the joy of her, the pleasure!&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18540" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-05T23:49:31.050" Score="4" ViewCount="62" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 21 of &lt;em&gt;Catcher in the Rye&lt;/em&gt;, Phoebe tells Holden about a movie she saw at the &amp;quot;Lister Foundation&amp;quot;. No other mention of the Foundation appears in the text. Was it a real organization when Salinger wrote &lt;em&gt;Catcher&lt;/em&gt;? If not, is it based on another organization, or is it a product of Salinger's imagination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12832" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T00:03:26.307" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T16:08:18.163" Title="Is the &quot;Lister Foundation&quot; in &quot;Catcher in the Rye&quot; a real organization?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;&lt;j-d-salinger&gt;&lt;catcher-in-the-rye&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18541" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-06T06:44:08.050" Score="4" ViewCount="51" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's been a long time, so my memory of the details is fuzzy. But I remember reading a book in which unicorns were the main characters; this is not a book about humans befriending unicorns in our world, but about a whole different unicorn society. The plot centered around music, something like the unicorn straying from the upper-class or 'normal' parts of society where everything was 4/4 time to the subclass/underworld and getting introduced to other time signatures like 6/8 time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This wasn't a children's illustrated book - it was an adult book, or at least a long, young-adult chapter book (pretty sure it was adult though).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12836" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T06:44:08.050" Title="Book with unicorn protagonist who plays music" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18542" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17507" CreationDate="2021-05-06T08:34:50.460" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because Levin appears first.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin/Lyovin is the main character of the novel: it is not just about Anna and Vronsky! See &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.litcharts.com/lit/anna-karenina/characters/konstantin-kostya-dmitrich-levin&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LitCharts&lt;/a&gt;, for example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin, the other main protagonist of the novel (besides Anna)…&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Screenwriting guru &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.storymastery.com/category/love-stories/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Michael Hauge&lt;/a&gt; in his article on romcom structure pointed out (it seems it’s not on the web anymore, Russian translation is &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cinemotionlab.com/stati/Kak_napisat_romkom/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The protagonist must appear on the screen before his opponent. Script&#xA;readers and the audience instinctively identify themselves with the&#xA;first character to appear. If Pierce Brosnan had appeared in Mrs.&#xA;Doubtfire earlier than Robin Williams […] then we would have perceived&#xA;these movies very differently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[&lt;em&gt;my re-translation&lt;/em&gt;]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(So it’d have been something like “Responsible office worker must defend his love from a vengeful cross-dresser from the past!” - I don’t know?)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The same mechanism seems applicable here. How is Vronsky introduced? Earlier, we meet Levin; we see how he interacts with his pals, with Kitty, with his brother; we find out that he’s in love. We get connected to his experience. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1399/1399-h/1399-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Then Stiva says&lt;/a&gt; (Part 1, Ch. 11)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“There’s one other thing I ought to tell you. Do you know Vronsky?” [...]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“No, I don’t. Why do you ask?” […]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Why you ought to know Vronsky is that he’s one of your rivals.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And then...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Vronsky is […] Fearfully rich, handsome, great connections, an&#xA;aide-de-camp, and with all that a very nice, good-natured fellow. But&#xA;he’s more than simply a good-natured fellow, as I’ve found out&#xA;here—he’s a cultivated man, too, and very intelligent; he’s a man&#xA;who’ll make his mark.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Levin scowled and was dumb.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Vronsky is his rival, and Levin is not happy. And we neither – even before we learn that Vronsky is not honest with Kitty. Why good aspects of Vronsky do not count, though?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Psychologist Jordan Peterson in his &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RudKmwzDpNY&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2017 lecture “Story and Metastory”&lt;/a&gt; shows a video from a famous &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invisible_Gorilla_Test&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Invisible Gorilla experiment&lt;/a&gt;. Subjects who’re trying to count the passes of the ball often didn’t notice something supposedly prominent – a person in a gorilla costume. Professor explains that to pay attention to everything around is too overwhelming for us. So our value structures and our goals limit the possible information creating a certain frame of reference. We make most of the things that don’t correspond to our goals irrelevant. We see everything else as either an obstacle or something facilitating our success.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And stories work similarly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That is a model, obviously something can be built upon it; and when Levin meets Vronsky in person, he tries to find good in him – but the initial emotions are negative.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We identify with our protagonist and his goals, and our emotions track the progress towards the goal. And when something that complicates that progress arises – we don’t like it! So there are good and beneficial aspects of Vronsky’s personality, but they are no more visible than the gorilla in the famous test.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So readers immediately dislike Vronsky.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10619" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T08:34:50.460" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18543" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18539" CreationDate="2021-05-06T09:09:12.150" Score="1" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;God, the joy of her, the pleasure!&lt;/strong&gt; is what Philip thinks when he looks at Poppy. It represents his interior monologue, i.e., what is going on in his mind. He loves his daughter and is proud of her. The passage mentions various reasons why he likes her so much: she is creative, writing out stories of her own; she is self-reliant, able to make her own breakfast without needing adults like Elizabeth or Philip himself to look after her; and she keeps herself healthy by jogging in the mornings. For these reasons, and probably simply because he is her father, Philip finds his daughter a very appealing personality. So seeing her brings him joy and pleasure.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;No. It means Poppy was eating her breakfast after having returned from a run around the park.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The simple past tense can be used for habitual actions just as the simple present can. If I say &lt;strong&gt;I leave for work at 7:30 a.m.&lt;/strong&gt;, I mean that I &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; leave at 7:30 a.m. There may be occasional days when I leave earlier or later than that, but as a matter of routine, I leave at 7:30 a.m. Put that in the past tense, and it becomes &lt;strong&gt;I left for work at 7:30 a.m.&lt;/strong&gt; Ordinarily one would expect some sort of adverbial of time there, such as &lt;strong&gt;When I worked at the factory, I left for work at 7:30 a.m.&lt;/strong&gt;, but such a qualifier is not required and can be derived from context. Here, the simple past means that Poppy &lt;em&gt;frequently&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;typically&lt;/em&gt; or &lt;em&gt;habitually&lt;/em&gt; left her writings at the table and did not leap up to swamp Philip with greetings. It doesn't mean she &lt;em&gt;always&lt;/em&gt; left the writings on the table or &lt;em&gt;never&lt;/em&gt; greeted Philip enthusiastically; it specifies what her actions were in the ordinary course of things.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T09:09:12.150" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18545" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18540" CreationDate="2021-05-06T16:08:18.163" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;No obvious organisation of building of that name is found in online searches, though the world is apparently full of Lister Foundations charitably giving grants and drilling wells etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I did find a book by Grace Elizabeth Hale called &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=koM8DwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;lpg=PA312&amp;amp;ots=_MsBOi8onv&amp;amp;dq=%22the%20lister%20foundation%22%20New%20York&amp;amp;pg=PA312#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22the%20lister%20foundation&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Nation of Outsiders: How the White Middle Class Fell in Love with Rebellion in Postwar America&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;which contains the following snippet from a page not included in the Google Books preview:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Lister Foundation may refer to the Lister Institute in the UK, which is a medical research charity founded in 1891. I cannot find any reference to a film fitting Salinger's description of &lt;em&gt;The Doctor&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible that Salinger had used materials referencing the Lister Institute when researching for Allie's leukaemia and had the name in mind, or it may have been pure invention.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T16:08:18.163" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18546" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16508" CreationDate="2021-05-06T16:57:38.670" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Thinking about this poem and the emphasis on the dogs being in the 'very middle' of the path, I picture the coupled dogs not like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTvT1.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/fTvT1.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;polite dog couple courting&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;or even like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwDjZ.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/RwDjZ.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;goofy dogs having monkey sex&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but like this&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tbR7k.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/tbR7k.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Sheepish dogs in copulatory tie&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this situation the dogs can't separate until everything 'subsides' and can get hurt if they try to pull apart:&#xA;(this is a more detailed explanation from &lt;a href=&quot;https://dogs.lovetoknow.com/wiki/Dogs_Mating#:%7E:text=The%20Tie,are%20delivered%20into%20the%20canal.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;LovetoKnow.com&lt;/a&gt;, spoilered just in case anyone is offended by canine genital talk)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote class=&quot;spoiler&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt; In just a few moments, two glands on either side of the penis will begin to swell inside of the vulva, producing a clamping response from the bitch that results in a tie. During the tie, the majority of the sperm are delivered into the canal. The male may choose to remain on top of the bitch, or slightly off to her side. He may also twist around so the two are facing in opposite directions. The important thing is to calmly keep them from pulling on one another so neither dog's genitals are injured. The tie typically lasts from ten to thirty minutes, and then the swelling subsides and the dogs can separate.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the third scenario, the dogs are not only stuck like that for up to half an hour, but there's a head at each end! Which way do you go around them, in the very middle of the road, with least risk of getting bitten for your trouble?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Going a different way seems like less risk than chancing a bite, and faster than waiting until it’s all over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It also makes me think about how many of the multi-headed guard dogs of mythology began with a pair of dogs in a copulatory tie being tricky to get past.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-06T20:57:21.900" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T20:57:21.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18547" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-06T23:33:47.333" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to understand Roethke's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43333/the-waking-56d2220f25315&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Waking&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and one of my problems is that I'm not sure who &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is. Most of the poem uses &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;my&amp;quot;, etc.. There are a few instances where other pronouns are used:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First instance of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; (line 7):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of those so close beside me, which are &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This verse (the 5th) seems to be addressed to &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;? At least, I think the person addressed by &amp;quot;lovely&amp;quot; is meant to be the same as &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Great Nature has another thing to do&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To &lt;strong&gt;you&lt;/strong&gt; and me; so take the lively air,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And, lovely, learn by going where to go.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Then, there are a few times that collective pronouns are used. Do these include the &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; from elsewhere? If so, do they include more than the speaker and &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Line 4:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;We&lt;/strong&gt; think by feeling. What is there to know?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Line 10:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Light takes the Tree; but who can tell &lt;strong&gt;us&lt;/strong&gt; how?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Who &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;? Is it the same for both instances of &amp;quot;you&amp;quot;? Is the speaker addressing someone offscreen? Are they talking to the reader? How do the instances of &amp;quot;we&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;us&amp;quot; fit in to this? I'm not sure where my problem is coming from: am I just not familiar enough with villanelles, or Roethke, or some convention of poetry? Regardless, I still am unsure. &lt;strong&gt;Who is &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; in &amp;quot;The Waking&amp;quot;?&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-06T23:33:47.333" Title="Who is &quot;you&quot; in &quot;The Waking&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;theodore-roethke&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18548" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17543" CreationDate="2021-05-07T12:06:39.293" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The introduction of Catherine tells us that she is a hearty and robust woman, unlike the epitome of elegant delicacy and cosmopolitan sophistication represented by Viennese women of fashion,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turn-of-the-century Vienna, with a population of nearly two million, was the political, cultural and fashion center of the multi-national Austro-Hungarian empire. Viennese women enjoyed an international reputation for elegance and taste.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wagener, Mary L. “Fashion and Feminism in ‘Fin De Siècle’ Vienna.” Woman's Art Journal, vol. 10, no. 2, 1989, pp. 29–33. JSTOR, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/1358209&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;www.jstor.org/stable/1358209&lt;/a&gt;. Accessed 7 May 2021.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'Might be' in the quoted text 'who might be a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer,' makes more sense if it is interpreted as indicating 'looks as though she could be' rather than 'is'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Major Petkoff is not a mountain farmer, but a professional soldier and provincial gentleman. As Raina states&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I belong to the family of the Petkoffs, the richest and best known in our country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given Patkoff's relatively modest rank of Major, their home being in a small town and the self evident pride he has in his possession of a library, see intertext parenthetical in Act II - '(He cannot mention the library without betraying how proud he is of it.)'; it is easy to assume that they are not half so grand as Raina claims, perhaps they are not the most prosperous branch of a grander family, but farmers they are not.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We learn that Raina and her mother read Pushkin and Byron, attend the opera in Bucharest where they have spent at least one season, and they are referred to as gentlefolk by their maid Louka when she is being propositioned by Sergius:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Gentlefolk are all alike — you making love to me behind Miss Raina's back, and she doing the same behind yours.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Taking all this into account, we can read the meaning of “a very splendid specimen of the wife of a mountain farmer” as a means of describing her physicality, personality and deportment as being more evocative of a farmer's wife than the cosmopolitan Viennese ladies whose dress and sophistication she assumes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And to address the dress, it is useful to note what manner of garment a ‘tea dress’ was at that time:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A tea gown or tea-gown is a woman's dress for informal entertaining at home. These dresses, which became popular around the mid-19th century, are characterized by unstructured lines and light fabrics. Tea gowns were intended to be worn without a corset or assistance from the maid; however, elegance always came first. During the 19th century, it was not appropriate for women to be seen in public wearing a tea gown. They were intended to be worn indoors with family and close friends during a dinner party. Although tea gowns were meant for midday wear, they could be worn into the evening. Women started wearing tea gowns in the evening for dinner or certain events at home with close friends and family by 1900.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.antique-gown.com/en/1900-1919/muslin-tea-gown,-ca-1903.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Antique-gown.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So choosing to wear such a dress on ‘all occasions’ may mean that at times she is &lt;em&gt;under&lt;/em&gt; rather than &lt;em&gt;over&lt;/em&gt;dressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Bear in mind that the information about Catherine is contained in the &lt;em&gt;scene setting&lt;/em&gt; text of the play and does not form part of the script as voiced to the audience. The purpose of this scene setting is to inform the director and scenery designers how the stage is to be presented. The description of Catherine is intended to convey to the director how the character of Catherine should &lt;em&gt;appear&lt;/em&gt;, as such it is neither a compliment to the author's creation or a joke at her so much as it is communication with those who will stage the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If Shaw had only described Catherine's habit of dress the director may try to have the actor portray her with the manners of a Viennese lady, rather than the more robust character intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-07T17:15:06.103" LastActivityDate="2021-05-07T17:15:06.103" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18549" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18520" CreationDate="2021-05-07T17:08:47.650" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;These are very rare in English (I don't know how common they are in Spanish); I've identified two poems that have them. A word fr them is &lt;em&gt;headnotes&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of these are &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;arguments&lt;/a&gt;. From &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_(literature)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An argument  in literature is a brief summary, often in prose, of a poem or section of a poem or other work. It is often appended to the beginning of each chapter, book, or canto. They were common during the Renaissance as a way to orient a reader within a large work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For example, &lt;em&gt;Around the World in Eighty Days&lt;/em&gt; has an argument at the beginning of each chapter, the first one being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Chapter I&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;IN WHICH PHILEAS FOGG AND PASSEPARTOUT ACCEPT EACH OTHER,  &#xA;THE ONE AS MASTER, THE OTHER AS MAN&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you need a name for a message at the beginning of a poem which is not an argument, you could use the word &amp;quot;headnote&amp;quot;. The definition in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/headnote&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Collins Dictionary&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;is&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a brief explanatory note prefacing a chapter, poem, story, legal report, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which seems to fit.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They are probably not “epigraphs” — The &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/epigraph#:%7E:text=A%20quotation%20from%20another%20literary,or%20section%20of%20a%20poem.&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Poetry Foundation&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;defines &lt;em&gt;epigraph&lt;/em&gt; as:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A quotation from another literary work that is placed beneath the title at the beginning of a poem or section of a poem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is a poetry-centered definition. You can have epigraphs before chapters and stories as well. However, they generally have to be quotes from some other work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also wouldn't call them prologues. There are some famous poems that have prologues:&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The Canterbury Tales&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;Piers Plowman&lt;/em&gt;, Robert Browning's &lt;em&gt;the Two Poets Of Croisic.&lt;/em&gt; All of these are actually parts of the poem, written in poetry and not prose.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One poem I found with a headnote is Coleridge's &lt;em&gt;The Rime of the Ancient Mariner&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article979&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the original version&lt;/a&gt;. It starts out as follows, with what Coleridge calls an &lt;em&gt;argument&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;THE RIME OF THE ANCYENT MARINERE &lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ARGUMENT.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by&#xA;Storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole;&#xA;and how from thence she made her course to the&#xA;tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the&#xA;strange things that befell; and in what manner the&#xA;Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other poem I found with a headnote is by Richard Wilbur. It starts:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Ballade for the Duke of Orléans&lt;/h3&gt;  &#xA;&lt;i&gt;who offered a prize at Blois, circa 1457, for the best ballade employing the line &amp;ldquo; Je meurs de soif auprès de la fontaine.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/i&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem, despite containing the line “I die of thirst, here at the fountain-side” is not a translation of one of the dozen or so Middle French poems we know containing that line, but a new ballade written by Wilbur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T12:09:36.517" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T12:09:36.517" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18550" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18551" CreationDate="2021-05-08T15:24:00.510" Score="-1" ViewCount="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the author was describing someone:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He was a very meek and mild young man, thought Blick, as far as appearance went; an intellectual of some sort, evidently. He had a very high, broad forehead; a mass of long and untidy hair brushed back from it; a pair of large, somewhat brilliant eyes; a wide, sensitive mouth, and a generally high-strung aspect. Blick’s sharp eyes took all this in at a glance; he also observed that the young man’s black coat was very much stained in front, as though he was in the bad habit of spilling things on it, and that his long, &lt;strong&gt;delicately-fashioned fingers&lt;/strong&gt; were also stained—his hands, in fact, from wrists to finger-tips were disfigured with odd patches of green, purples, and scarlets. A queer-looking chap, thought the detective, and yet, no ordinary one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found that &amp;quot;delicate&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;sickly weak and fragile&amp;quot;, and the author said that he usually spills things; and this may suggest that he can't hold the the things strongly, so is that the exact meaning here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T20:02:55.240" Title="What does &quot;delicately-fashioned fingers&quot; mean in The Markenmore Mystery?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18551" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18550" CreationDate="2021-05-08T16:37:49.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;‘Fashion’ means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;to form, mould, shape&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and ‘delicately’ means&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way that is exquisitely fine, soft, graceful, etc.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(All definitions taken from the Oxford English Dictionary)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Therefore fingers which have been  ‘delicately fashioned’ will have a shape that is elegant and probably slender.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For a body part to be delicately made does not, absent other context, mean that the person is of delicate health. ‘Delicate’ in that sense is an adjective, ‘delicately’ is an adverb and does not carry a connotation of sickliness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-08T20:02:55.240" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T20:02:55.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18552" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18498" CreationDate="2021-05-08T22:39:30.777" Score="4" Body="&lt;h3&gt;His given name is &amp;quot;Doctor Marigold&amp;quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The manner of how Marigold got his name is explained in the first two paragraphs:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am a Cheap Jack, and &lt;strong&gt;my own father’s name was Willum Marigold&lt;/strong&gt;.  It was in his lifetime supposed by some that his name was William, but my own father always consistently said, No, it was Willum. On which point I content myself with looking at the argument this way: &lt;strong&gt;If a man is not allowed to know his own name in a free country, how much is he allowed to know in a land of slavery&lt;/strong&gt;? As to looking at the argument through the medium of the Register, Willum Marigold come into the world before Registers come up much,—and went out of it too.  They wouldn’t have been greatly in his line neither, if they had chanced to come up before him.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was born on the Queen’s highway, but it was the King’s at that time.  A doctor was fetched to my own mother by my own father, when it took place on a common; and in consequence of his being a very kind gentleman, and accepting no fee but a tea-tray, &lt;strong&gt;I was named Doctor, out of gratitude and compliment to him&lt;/strong&gt;.  There you have me.  Doctor Marigold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Doctor&amp;quot; is his given (first) name. &amp;quot;Marigold&amp;quot; is his family (last) name. The explanation for &amp;quot;Doctor&amp;quot; is referred to later, when Marigold relates his interactions with the gentleman from the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We saw the gentleman four times in all, and when he took down my name and asked how in the world it ever chanced to be Doctor, it come out that he was own nephew by the sister’s side, if you’ll believe me, to &lt;strong&gt;the very Doctor that I was called after&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And here again, he emphasizes that he is not an actual doctor:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The most difficult explanation I had ever had with her [Sophy] was, how I come to be called Doctor, and yet was no Doctor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He is sure of how his name came to be and asserts in the first paragraph that a man should be allowed to &amp;quot;know his own name&amp;quot;. A scan of the text gives me no reason to suspect anything other than Marigold's explanation of his own name. It might not be a normal kind of name, but then Marigold isn't a normal kind of person.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;All quotes are [sic] and bolding is mine&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-08T22:39:30.777" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18553" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18555" CreationDate="2021-05-09T00:20:09.067" Score="0" ViewCount="92" Body="&lt;p&gt;Recently, &lt;em&gt;The New Yorker&lt;/em&gt; came out with Thomas Mcguane's short story &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/balloons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Balloons&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;. It is a short piece of fiction, really. However, it wasn't clear to me what the author intended to convey through this short story. All I could make out of it was that it takes the reader through a good relationship gone sour.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I searched the internet for interpretations of the story, but since it's published only very recently I couldn't find much of help.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the story intend to convey, other than the shallow interpretation of a troubled relationship?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="12179" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T00:38:36.853" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T10:47:09.367" Title="Analyzing Thomas Mcguane's &quot;Balloons&quot;" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;thomas-mcguane&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18554" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-09T02:04:19.633" Score="3" ViewCount="116" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter One of &lt;em&gt;King Solomon's Mines&lt;/em&gt; we have the first reference to one of the main antagonists of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Stop, though! there is Gagaoola, if she was a woman, and not a fiend.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Throughout the rest of the book, however, her name is Gagool. For example, in Chapter Nine:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“White people,” he said, “it passes in my mind to kill you. Gagool has spoken strange words. What say ye?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I found but one instance where her name is not Gagool, but in that case it is not Gagaoola either; instead it is Gagoola. From Chapter Seventeen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Enter white men from the stars,&amp;quot; said Gagool, advancing into the doorway; &amp;quot;but first hear your servant Gagoola the old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus, we now have three different versions of her name, two of them being used just once apiece.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The above is all based on the Dover Thrift Edition of the book. In case this was merely the result of editorial errors in this edition, I checked two editions available online as well — Wikisource and Project Gutenberg. Notably, neither one of them had the variant Gagoola in Chapter Seventeen. However, the Gutenberg edition had Gagaoola in one additional instance, in Chapter Nineteen:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Tell me, when thou wast little, didst thou know Gagaoola the witch doctress?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Also, the Wikisource edition  &lt;em&gt;did not&lt;/em&gt; have Gagaoola in Chapter One. Apparently it maintained the the name Gagool throughout the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So what is the explanation of these variations? Is it the result of multiple editorial mistakes across multiple editions? Is it the result of an original authorial mistake (which was then either maintained or corrected in different editions)? Or is it deliberate and the character is actually meant to have variations in her name (which might either have some meaning in her native language or may be a form of endearing nicknames like Tom/Tommy)?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4483" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-09T20:08:41.390" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T20:08:41.390" Title="Gagool, Gagoola, or Gagaoola?" Tags="&lt;textual-history&gt;&lt;h-rider-haggard&gt;&lt;king-solomons-mines&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18555" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18553" CreationDate="2021-05-09T10:47:09.367" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;McGuane talks, in the New Yorker, about his writing of the story:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I often write until a story strikes some impasse, which can be terminal. That was nearly the case with “Balloons.” But I was helped by a dream in which the married woman, Joan, was dead. It changed everything and greatly enlarged the prospects for making a story out of something that had baffled me, without causing me to lose interest in it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This statement suggests that McGuane follows a story where it leads him, rather than setting out on the undertaking with a clear end in sight.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the article he goes on to say, when asked about the fact that a number of his recent stories have explored the ups and downs of marriages and relationships in small towns in Montana and whether he is writing a series:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I hope not. Thinking about marriages has a retrograde quality, since it’s been a long time since it made sense to get married at all. I belong to this fading cohort, so I go on wondering about such hopeful arrangements. In fact, any outcome of hope interests me, in marriage or otherwise.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From these responses my own interpretation would be that McGuane writes about what interests him, but not with a strong view at the outset of what the finished story will be. This makes it unlikely that he is setting out with the idea of having a deeper message to ‘convey’.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The narrator makes an apparently scathing reference to Benjamin Franklin’s ‘obscure dictum’ on the use of venery ( the pursuit of sexual gratification), the full Franklin line being:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the narrator makes that reference  early in his relationship with Joan, the dictum seems, in the end, to have been good advice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to read this as part of a larger theme of hope, we hope we will be happy, we hope our partners will be loyal, that our good fortune will be ‘tightly held’, that we can be wiser than Old Ben Franklin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But this is my personal thinking on the story, if you want the view of the literary world at large, you may need to wait more than a week from publication.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T10:47:09.367" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18556" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18554" CreationDate="2021-05-09T19:54:24.000" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;The name “Gagaoola” appears in Haggard’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924028746968/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cetywayo and his White Neighbours&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1882), a journalistic account of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Zulu_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anglo–Zulu War&lt;/a&gt; of 1879 and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Boer_War&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Boer War&lt;/a&gt; of 1880–1881. Appendix III describes a case of assault and robbery committed by Boer farmers against Indabezimbi, a Zulu man, and his family, including transcripts of testimony by Indabezimbi and his wives Nongena and Gagaoola:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Gagaoola&lt;/strong&gt;, also wife of Indabezimbi, states:—“I have heard all that Nongena has told you. Her words are true; I was present when the assault and robbery took place.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These statements were made to us at Hilldrop, Newcastle, Natal, on the Twenty-second of August, Eighteen hundred and eighty-one. A. H. D. Cochrane. H. Rider Haggard.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;H. Rider Haggard (1882). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/cu31924028746968/page/n277/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Cetywayo and His White Neighbours; or, Remarks on recent events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal&lt;/em&gt;, p. 250&lt;/a&gt;. London: Trübner.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Turning to &lt;em&gt;King Solomon’s Mines&lt;/em&gt;, the Internet Archive does not have a copy of the original 1885 Cassell edition, but it does have an &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.15919/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;1887 reprint&lt;/a&gt; by the same publisher, and in this edition, the spelling “Gagaoola” appears three times, in chapters 1, 17 and 19:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am going to tell the strangest story that I know of.  It may seem a queer thing to say that, especially considering that there no woman in it—except Foulata. Stop, though! there is &lt;strong&gt;Gagaoola&lt;/strong&gt;, if she was a woman and not a fiend. But she was a hundred at least, and therefore not marriageable, so I don’t count her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;H. Rider Haggard (1885). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.15919/page/7/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;King Solomon’s Mines&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 8–9&lt;/a&gt;. London: Cassell.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Enter, white men from the stars,” said Gagool, advancing into the doorway; “but first hear your servant, &lt;strong&gt;Gagaoola&lt;/strong&gt; the old.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.15919/page/271/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haggard (1885), p. 272&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Tell me, when thou wast little, didst thou know &lt;strong&gt;Gagaoola&lt;/strong&gt; the witch doctress?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.15919/page/n305/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Haggard (1885), p. 303&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, given the facts that Gagaoola was a Zulu woman whom Haggard had met, and that “Gagaoola” is how the fictional character names herself in chapter 17 of the 1887 edition of &lt;em&gt;King Solomon’s Mines&lt;/em&gt;, the most plausible explanation is that “Gagaoola” represents her real name, and “Gagool” represents a nickname or a form that is easier for non-Zulu-speakers to pronounce; and that the Dover, Wikisource and Project Gutenberg editions quoted in the question have typographical or editorial errors in chapters 1, 17 and 19.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-09T19:54:24.000" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18557" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-09T21:58:22.620" Score="4" ViewCount="69" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mariem Mint Derwich's poem &amp;quot;You Will Tell Them&amp;quot;, available &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/may-2021-writing-from-mauritania-you-will-tell-them-mariem-mint-derwich-emm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in English translation from Words Without Borders&lt;/a&gt;, appears to be about a Mauritanian woman, perhaps &amp;quot;the&amp;quot; woman of Mauritania representing (metonymously?) the whole Mauritanian culture and people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A number of pronouns are used throughout the poem. There is the first-person narrator, referred to just at the start and end (&amp;quot;my&amp;quot; country and &amp;quot;my&amp;quot; name); the second-person addressee (the word &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; appears throughout); a third-person plural audience (the word &amp;quot;them&amp;quot; also appears throughout); and of course the third-person singular subject (the &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; being referred to throughout). I &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; that &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is the country Mauritania, &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; is the representation of a woman of that country (possibly a particular woman?), &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; might be the people of the country (?), and I'm not sure who is meant by &amp;quot;I&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short: in the poem &amp;quot;You Will Tell Them&amp;quot;, who is &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; and who is &amp;quot;them&amp;quot;, and who is the narrator and who is the subject?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T22:29:55.553" Title="Who are the pronouns referring to in the Mauritanian poem &quot;You Will Tell Them&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;mariem-mint-derwich&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18558" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18702" CreationDate="2021-05-10T11:10:00.573" Score="5" ViewCount="78" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm trying to find a comic strip that originally appeared in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_(magazine)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Mad&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and was reprinted in a paperback collection of material from that magazine. I read it in the paperback collection. The strip shows a young man, high school or college age, alone in his bedroom. He is pondering existence. His thoughts are something along these lines: &amp;quot;Descartes says 'I think, therefore I am.' But how can I be sure? Maybe I only &lt;em&gt;think&lt;/em&gt; I'm thinking.&amp;quot; As he is pursuing this line of thought, his mother calls from downstairs: [Boy's name], dear, are you up in your room?&amp;quot; And the young man, irate, yells back: &amp;quot;HOW SHOULD I KNOW?&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm sure about the wording of the punchline, but the rest is paraphrase. The art was black and white line drawings. The paperback would probably have appeared some time in the 1970s. I think the strip was by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Berg_(cartoonist)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dave Berg&lt;/a&gt; and was reprinted in one of the many &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighter_Side_of...&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;collections of his &lt;em&gt;Lighter Side&lt;/em&gt; series&lt;/a&gt; for the magazine, but I cannot be sure.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'm afraid I can't remember any more about the strip. Nor do I remember the cover of the paperback I read it in. But it would be good to know where and when it was published, which paperback it was reprinted in, and if it has been republished online.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T06:18:44.433" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T06:18:44.433" Title="Mad Magazine comic strip about a boy pondering over existence (and &quot;I think, therefore I am&quot;)" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;mad-magazine&gt;&lt;dave-berg&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18559" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href=&quot;https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BC%A0%E7%9A%93%E5%AE%B8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;张皓宸&lt;/a&gt; in the Chinese Wikipedia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18560" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Chinese author Zhāng Hàochén (张皓宸, born 1990) or his life as a writer. Use in conjunction with [chinese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:43:12.400" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18561" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18562" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" Score="0" Body="Questions about the Ramayana, one of the major Sanskrit epics of ancient India, traditionally ascribed to Valmiki and dated from 500 BCE to 100 BCE. Earlier stages of the epic might date from the 7th century BCE, while later stages might date from 3rd century CE. Use in conjunction with the tag [sanskrit-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:48:46.597" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18563" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18564" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American science fiction novelist, slam poet and screenwriter Ernest Cline (born 1972) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:50:10.480" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18565" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18566" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" Score="0" Body="Questions about the science fiction novel 'Ready Player One' (2011), Ernest Cline's debut novel. Use in conjunction with the tag [ernest-cline]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:51:21.500" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18567" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18568" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) or her life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:52:41.840" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18569" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18570" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Israeli crime writer, translator and literary scholar Dror Mishani (born 1975) or his life as a writer. Use with the tag [hebrew-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:54:16.690" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18571" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18572" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Man Who Wanted to Know' (2015)  by Dror Mishani. Use with the tags [dror-mishani] and [hebrew-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:55:59.383" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18573" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18574" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English novelist H. Rider Haggard (Sir Henry Rider Haggard; 1856–1925) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:58:12.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18575" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18576" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'King Solomon's Mines' (1885) by H. Rider Haggard. Use with the tag [h-rider-haggard]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T20:59:35.273" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18577" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18578" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American poet, novelist and literary critic Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989) or his life as a writer. As a scholar, he was one of the founders of New Criticism." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:01:59.303" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18579" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18580" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Pygmalion' (1913) by George Bernard Shaw. Use with the tag [george-bernard-shaw]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:03:29.403" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18581" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18582" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author Thomas Francis McGuane (born 1939) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:04:55.973" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18583" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18584" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'La Comédie humaine' ('The Human Comedy'), a series of interlinked novels, short stories and essays by the French author Honoré de Balzac. Use with [honore-de-balzac] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:08:23.620" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18585" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18586" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" Score="0" Body="Questions about the American humour magazine 'Mad' (or 'MAD')." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" LastActivityDate="2021-05-10T21:10:27.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18588" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T00:00:24.767" Score="20" ViewCount="3758" Body="&lt;p&gt;The online description of Rüdiger Safranski's book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/ruediger-safranski-wieviel-wahrheit-braucht-der-mensch-9783596109777&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Wieviel Wahrheit braucht der Mensch?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; begins with the following sentence:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In einem berühmten chinesischen Märchen verschwindet der Maler in seinem eigenen Bild.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Translation:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a famous Chinese fairy tale, the painter disappears into his own painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=chinese+%22folk+tale%22+painter+disappears+painting&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Searching online&lt;/a&gt; what that fairy tale (or perhaps folk tale) this might be made me none the wiser. I stumbled again upon the Chinese artist &lt;a href=&quot;https://liubolinstudio.com/fine-arts/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Liu Bolin&lt;/a&gt;, who also creates works into which he &amp;quot;disappears&amp;quot;, but this painter was unknown in 1990, when Safranski's book was first published, and he is obviously not the subject of a famous fairy tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is this fairy tale? Is it part of a well-known collection? Is anything known about when it was first recorded?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2500" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T07:19:16.833" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T07:19:16.833" Title="In what Chinese fairy tale does a painter disappear into his own painting?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;folk-tales&gt;&lt;chinese-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="2" FavoriteCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18589" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2626" CreationDate="2021-05-11T01:26:29.993" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The forum post link seems to be dead now, but an entry on the &lt;a href=&quot;http://thisisnotabook.baldurbjarnason.com/Transmedia/Unchapters.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thisisnotabook&lt;/a&gt; site discussing the entry gives a fuller version of the text than either OP’s post or Wikipedia:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For each chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there is, or will be, an un-chapter, a negative. &lt;em&gt;If you look carefully at the novel you might be able to figure out why these un-chapters are called negatives.&lt;/em&gt; Not all the negatives are as long as a full novel chapter - some are only a page, some are only a couple of lines.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I’ve emphasised the section which is additional to OP’s quote.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The entry goes on to discuss whether the unchapters are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.teachthought.com/the-future-of-learning/the-definition-of-transmedia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;transmedia&lt;/a&gt; and says:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hall’s suggestion that a careful look at the novel explains their existence can be interpreted as meaning the unchapters are the echoes of Eric’s story in our world (the book is acutely aware of its existence as a medium for story to take place in, down to the textual rendering of the shark’s appearances) and an extra-textual reification of the events of the text. They exist—and it does not matter whether we have read all or none of them—as a set of negatives from which the positive prints of the book are fashioned.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hall himself says, of the unbook and whether it was part of the original plan for the novel, in an interview with &lt;a href=&quot;https://structomagazine.co.uk/interviews/steven-hall/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Structomagazine&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was conceived alongside it. Towards the end of writing Raw Shark, and really understanding the kind of book I was trying to write and what I wanted it to do. One of the big things in the book is about loss and incompleteness and about some things that a person can move heaven and earth to get hold of but will slip through your fingers. I just loved the idea that the book is not quite complete; that there are some things you don’t know, some things that would help you understand the book, but which are lost.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.academia.edu/23864918/Dissociation_in_The_Raw_Shark_Texts_Steven_Hall_?source=swp_share&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dissociation in the Raw Shark Texts (Stephen Hall)&lt;/a&gt;’, Magrieta Wever writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author has applied many ways of showing a dissociative state, also in the&#xA; way the book is shaped. Apart from the visuals aspects mentioned in the former&#xA;chapter,&#xA;The Raw Shark Texts &#xA; looks like a rather normal novel, still it has a special&#xA;note to it; There is a large part missing, equal to the memory of Eric Sanderson. An&#xA;inattentive reader might not notice, unaware of missing texts, but Hall has written&#xA;some un-chapters which are not in the book, however very significant to emphasize the&#xA;typical situation for a person that is infested with memory loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These un-chapters serve as a metaphor for the memories lost; One does not know that these chapters are missing, as one is in the belief that everything one can read is right there in the book. The un-chapters were found in different places, both online and offline, at different moments in time, some still unfound. A metaphor for memory and memory loss.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Apart from the un-chapters, there is an un-dex, serving as an index that is not contained in the novel. It contains the things a regular index does: names or definitions structured and organized neatly from A to Z, with the mentioning of the pages they appear on. This is a way of showing that if you take the book as a metaphor for Eric’s  world, this part, the retrieval cue, is missing. He is not able to sort out things well, he has no recollection, no association, so he has no index to start his memory search from.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the end All of these perspectives are slightly different ways of saying the same thing, that a lack of completeness, or ability to completely understand the book in one neat package, is baked in by the use of unchapters, leaving the reader to share the uncertainties of the protagonist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T01:26:29.993" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18590" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18588" CreationDate="2021-05-11T09:42:12.643" Score="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;Seems to be referring to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Daozi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Wu Daozi&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (680 – c. 760,  a Chinese painter of the Tang dynasty), as depicted in the following &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.shine.cn/sunday/now-and-then/%E5%90%B4%E9%81%93%E5%AD%90-Wu-Daozi-AD-680759-Painters-death-a-tall-tale/shdaily.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;text&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Wu's death was a myth. One story says that after painting a mural&#xA;about a natural scene in the palace one day, Wu drew a door on the&#xA;mural in the side of a hill. Then he clapped his hands and the door&#xA;opened. After entering, Wu invited the emperor to follow. But the door&#xA;suddenly shut, he disappeared inside his own painting and was never&#xA;seen again.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2432" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T13:05:36.270" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:05:36.270" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18591" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2342" CreationDate="2021-05-11T13:28:45.023" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Piercy makes no mention of such direct experience in the potted biography on her &lt;a href=&quot;https://marge-piercy.squarespace.com/faqs&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;own website&lt;/a&gt;. She does, however, say in the FAQ:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Basically I get to exorcise my autobiographical impulses in poetry. I explore other people’s lives in my fiction. Often for me fiction embodies the choices I did not make, the paths I did not follow.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fiction to me is an art of empathy and imagination. Each novel is like a small world I inhabit for a period of two or three years, and then move on to another small world. The way the I work, I learn each time about different things – areas I would never have studied for my own life.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Which suggest that she does not draw explicitly from her own biography in her novels.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:28:45.023" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18592" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18588" CreationDate="2021-05-11T13:46:19.170" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Sounds like &lt;em&gt;The Painted Wall&lt;/em&gt; from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Stories_from_a_Chinese_Studio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio&lt;/a&gt;. It's a collection of Chinese folk stories written around 1740. It's been a while since I've read it, but if its not the painted wall it's probably still in the collection.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12881" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T13:46:19.170" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18593" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18588" CreationDate="2021-05-11T14:07:42.080" Score="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;As identified &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18590/3003&quot;&gt;in the answer by HeyJude&lt;/a&gt;, this could be the story of the disappearance of Tang dynasty painter &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Daozi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wu Daozi&lt;/a&gt; (吴道子; variously transliterated as Wu Tao-tsz’, Wu Tao-Tsu, or Go Doshi). The earliest version of this story to appear in English was that of art collector &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Anderson_(collector)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Anderson&lt;/a&gt; (1842–1900):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The legend, which celebrates the disappearance of the artist from the worldly stage, has a strong Taoist flavour. “In the palace of Ming Hwang,† the walls were of great size, and upon one of these the Emperor ordered Wu Tao-tsz’ to paint a landscape. The artist prepared his materials, and concealing the wall with curtains commenced his work. After a little while he drew aside the veil, and there lay a glorious scene, with mountains, forests, clouds, men, birds, and all things as in nature. While the Emperor gazed upon it with admiration, Wu Tao-tsz’, pointing to a certain part of the picture, said, ‘Behold this temple grot at the foot of the mountain—within it dwells a spirit.’ Then clapping his hands, the gate of the cave suddenly opened. ‘The interior is beautiful beyond conception,’ continued the artist, ‘permit me to show the way, that your Majesty may behold the marvels it contains.’ He passed within, turning round to beckon his patron to follow, but in a moment the gateway closed, and before the amazed monarch could advance a step, the whole scene faded away, leaving the wall white as before the contact of the painter’s brush. And Wu Tao-tsz’ was never seen again.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Anderson (1886). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/gri_33125008953156/page/n547/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of a Collection of Japanese and Chinese Paintings in the British Museum&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 484–485&lt;/a&gt;. London: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Xuanzong_of_Tang&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Emperor Xuanzong of Tang&lt;/a&gt; (ruled 713–756).&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson did not give his source, but the earlier history of the story was given by Jan Cao:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anderson’s English is, in fact, translated from Edo painter Tachibana Morikuni’s illustrated book, &lt;em&gt;Ehon Tsūhōshi&lt;/em&gt; [Illustrated Book of All Treasures]. Published in Osaka in 1729, this book was a popular iconographical model for Japanese illustrators, with its ten volumes depicting famous figures and everyday objects. The word “Tsūhō” in the title literally means “ready money,” which suggests that users of this book should treat everything in this book as ready-to-use materials. This book had a wide circulation, and many scenes were reproduced by artists of later generations. […] Therefore, we could argue that popularity of Wu Daozi’s legend was partially due to the fame of Morikuni.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Morikuni was also not the first person to record this legend in written form. His story was translated from a Chinese source, Wang Yunpeng’s &lt;em&gt;Liexian quanzhuan&lt;/em&gt; (1600) […] [Illustrated Comprehensive Biographies of All Immortals], a Taoist hagiography that includes biographies of 581 immortals. […] In &lt;em&gt;Liexian quanzhuan&lt;/em&gt;, Wu Daozi’s disappearing is only one of the three legends recorded in his biography; the other two stories both claim that the animals—first a donkey, then a dragon—that Wu Daozi painted on the wall became alive. The story of his disappearing is the longest of the three:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There were some white walls in the palace, and upon one of them the Emperor Minghuang ordered [Wu Daozi] to paint a landscape. Daozi mixed some ink and spread the entire bowl of ink on the wall. He covered the wall with a piece of cloth, and unveiled it again after a brief moment. Then he invited the Emperor to look at the painting. Mountain, water, forest, trees, men, birds, and beasts, everything was included in the painting. The emperor looked throughout the picture, praised and admired it to the point that nothing could be added. Daozi slowly walked over, pointed at the picture and said, “there is a little hole under the rocky mountain. There is a Xian† in the hole, if you knock on it, he will definitely answer.” Then he knocked, suddenly the door opened, and there was a child servant standing on the side. Daozi said to the Emperor, “it is very beautiful in the hole. Please let me enter first, and I hope your majesty could enter after me.” Then Daozi walked into the mountain, and gestured at the Emperor with his hands. The Emperor could not enter; the door immediately closed, and nobody knew where Daozi went. The wall he painted is again white and bright as before, with no ink left on it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† “Xian” in this context refers to a Taoist immortal.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Jan Cao (2019). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.1080/00168890.2018.1548423&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Benjamin’s Chinese Painter: Copying, Adapting, and the Aura of Reproduction&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;The Germanic Review&lt;/em&gt; 94, pp. 39–56.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Cao says that the story was popularized in Germany by the critic &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Benjamin&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Walter Benjamin&lt;/a&gt;, who briefly alluded to it in his best-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Der vor dem Kunstwerk sich Sammelnde versenkt sich darein; er geht in dieses Werk ein, wie die Legende es von einem chinesischen Maler beim Anblick seines vollendeten Bildes erzählt&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Walter Benjamin (1935). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Kunstwerk_im_Zeitalter_seiner_technischen_Reproduzierbarkeit_(Dritte_Fassung)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit&lt;/a&gt;’. Wikisource. English translation by Harry Zohn.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and who gave a longer version in his memoir:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sie stammt aus China und erzählt von einem alten Maler, der den Freunden sein neuestes Bild zu sehen gab. Ein Park war darauf dargestellt, ein schmaler Weg am Wasser und durch einen Baumschlag hin, der lief vor einer kleinen Türe aus, die hinten in ein Häuschen Einlaß bot. Wie sich die Freunde aber nach dem Maler umsahen, war der fort und in dem Bild. Da wandelte er auf dem schmalen Weg zur Tür, stand vor ihr still, kehrte sich um, lächelte und verschwand in ihrem Spalt.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The story comes from China and tells of an old painter who showed his friends his latest picture. It depicted a park with a narrow path through foliage by a stream, that led up to a small door that gave admittance to a little house. But when the friends looked around for the painter, he had gone into the picture. Then he walked up the narrow path to the door, stopped at the threshold, turned around, smiled and vanished inside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Walter Benjamin (1938). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/GesammelteSchriftenBd.4/page/n259/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Gesammelte Schriften&lt;/em&gt; volume 4, p. 262–263. Tillman Rexroth.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly Safranski got the story via Benjamin.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T22:02:37.070" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T22:02:37.070" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18594" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17522" CreationDate="2021-05-11T15:06:56.563" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;em&gt;(I'm doing these slightly out of order for reasons of convenience)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;My dogs was pooped out.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Dogs&amp;quot; was &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/spiffy-1920s-slang-words/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;slang for &amp;quot;feet&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, originally from &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=Iz2CDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PT153&amp;amp;lpg=PT153&amp;amp;dq=1913+T.+A.+Dorgan+dog+feet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;journalist T. A. Dorgan in 1913&lt;/a&gt;. &amp;quot;Pooped out&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poop%20out&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an idiom meaning&lt;/a&gt; that someone/something is exhausted. Thus &amp;quot;My dogs was pooped out&amp;quot; is an informal way of saying &amp;quot;My feet are very tired&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He wasn't puttin' on no dog.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Put on the dog&amp;quot; is &lt;a href=&quot;https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/put+on+the+dog&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an idiom meaning&lt;/a&gt; to to behave self-importantly/ostentatiously. Thus, &amp;quot;He wasn't puttin' on no dog&amp;quot; would mean &amp;quot;He wasn't acting self-important&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;He just done it for ducks.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This one is trickier. I found a &lt;a href=&quot;https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/cause-he-just-done-it-for-ducks.3403912/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forum thread&lt;/a&gt; speculating on the same line, and they  weren't sure:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;From the context, it seems to mean that he just did it for a joke, or for fun. I can't recall having heard this expression before.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't find any other instance of its use, but I suspect Barque [the previous poster] is correct. Note that &amp;quot;ducks&amp;quot; rhymes with &amp;quot;yucks,&amp;quot; which is slang for laughs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The context from the book:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, it makes you mad to hear a guy use big words. 'Course with a preacher it's all right because nobody would fool around with a preacher anyway. But this guy was funny. You didn't give a damn when he said a big word 'cause he just done it for ducks. He wasn't puttin' on no dog.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Well, it makes you upset when someone uses big, fancy words. Of course it's okay with a preacher, because no one would dare mess with a preacher anyways. But this guy was funny. You didn't care when he used big, fancy words because he &amp;lt;just done it for ducks&amp;gt;. He wasn't acting self-important.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, it makes sense in context that &amp;quot;just done it for ducks&amp;quot; would mean &amp;quot;just did it for fun&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(The most relevant duck-related idiom I found was in another &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/54/messages/1016.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;forum post&lt;/a&gt;, which said that &amp;quot;just for ducks&amp;quot; meant &amp;quot;just for the hell of it&amp;quot; - but no one else knew it, and the post said it was from the 1970s which doesn't fit the timeline here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T15:06:56.563" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18595" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-11T15:50:23.797" Score="8" ViewCount="905" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://shakespeare.mit.edu/comedy_errors/comedy_errors.3.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Act III Scene II&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: In what part of her body stands Ireland?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is funny to me as it plays on the double meaning of &amp;quot;bog&amp;quot; as a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;habitat well known in Ireland&lt;/a&gt; and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.insider.com/british-slang-that-will-confuse-anybody-who-didnt-grow-up-in-the-uk-2017-11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;British slang word for toilet&lt;/a&gt;. The latter meaning, however, feels to me like something relatively modern, and it doesn't &lt;em&gt;exactly&lt;/em&gt; fit the context since one's buttocks wouldn't &lt;em&gt;contain&lt;/em&gt; bogs/toilets, as barrenness might be found &amp;quot;in&amp;quot; her hands in the next exchange (although being laid open to pedantic nitpicking might be a price Shakespeare was willing to pay for such witty repartee). Did the slang meaning of &amp;quot;bog&amp;quot; as toilet exist in the late 16th century, or was Shakespeare playing on a different (perhaps etymologically related) slang meaning of &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What would viewers in Shakespeare's day have made of this line in the play?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T18:03:07.207" Title="&quot;Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.&quot;" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;the-comedy-of-errors&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18596" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18595" CreationDate="2021-05-11T16:42:03.523" Score="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Stanley Wells's edition of the play (The New Penguin Shakespeare, 1972) has the following gloss for &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;bawdy; it is not certain whether &lt;em&gt;bog&lt;/em&gt; meant &amp;quot;privy&amp;quot; in Shakespeare's time&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;R. A. Foakes's edition of &lt;em&gt;The Comedy of Errors&lt;/em&gt; (The Arden Shakespeare, Routledge, 1962) does not gloss &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot; at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Shakespeare Glossary&lt;/em&gt; by C. T. Onions (revised by Robert D. Eagleson, Oxford University Press, 1986) has no entry for &amp;quot;bog&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Eugene F. Shewmaker's &lt;em&gt;Shakespeare's Language: A Glossary of Unfamiliar Words in His Plays and Poems&lt;/em&gt; (Facts on File, 1996) has the following entry for &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;ref. to the bogs in Ireland; here in poss. wordplay with slang sense of &amp;quot;latrine&amp;quot;: &amp;quot;Marry, sir, in her buttocks; I found it out by the bogs.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Errors&lt;/em&gt;, III, ii, 115-116.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, W. W. Skeat's &lt;em&gt;A Glossary of Tudor and Stuart Words, Especially from the Dramatists&lt;/em&gt; (completed by A. L. Mayhew and published at the Clarendon Press in 1914) has the following entry for &amp;quot;bog&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a privy, latrina, Shirley, &lt;em&gt;Witty Fair One&lt;/em&gt;, iv. 6 (end).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And, indeed, James Shirley's play &lt;em&gt;The Witty Fair One&lt;/em&gt; contains the following lines (quoted from &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/books/edition/The_Best_Plays/zo9iDiLJTGUC?gbpv=1&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Best Plays&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, 1888):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[A cry within] A Teague! a Teague! Make way, for shame!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Mis. Bonavent&lt;/em&gt;: I think they are started.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;The two Runners cross the stage, followed by Lord Bonavent, Venture and others.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;[Exeunt all but Mis. Bonavent and Mis. Carol.]&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Mis. Bonavent&lt;/em&gt;: He may be in the bog anon.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;em&gt;Mis. Carol&lt;/em&gt;: Can they tell what they do in this noise?&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Pray Heaven it do not break into the tombs&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;At Westminster, and wake the dead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Witty Fair One&lt;/em&gt; dates from 1628, just over a decade after Shakespeare's death and it is not entirely obvious that &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot; here means &amp;quot;latrine&amp;quot;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Following a hint from Gareth Rees, I found &amp;quot;boggard&amp;quot; in the Huloet's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/abcedariumanglic00hulo/page/n49/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Abcedarium anglico latinum, pro tyrunculis Richardo Hulœto exscriptore&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, printed in 1552, but I found that entry too difficult to decipher (except for the last word &amp;quot;Siege&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=eebo;idno=A03825.0001.001&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Huloets dictionarie newelye corrected, amended, set in order and enlarged ...&lt;/em&gt; by Richard Huloet&lt;/a&gt;, printed in London in 1572 has the following entry for &lt;a href=&quot;https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A03825.0001.001/1:10.153?rgn=div2;view=fulltext&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;siege&lt;/a&gt;, which lists &amp;quot;bogard&amp;quot; as a synonym, making it plausible that Shakespeare used &amp;quot;bogs&amp;quot; also in this sense:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Siege, iacques, bogard, or draught&lt;/em&gt;. Latrina, ae, Fo∣rica, ae. f. g. &lt;em&gt;Vn priue&lt;/em&gt;, ou &lt;em&gt;retraict. S&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-11T18:03:07.207" LastActivityDate="2021-05-11T18:03:07.207" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18597" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18588" CreationDate="2021-05-12T00:47:35.140" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since you specifically mentioned that it is a fairy tale, it is possible that it stems from &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.coreknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/G4_U6_The-Wonderful-Chuang-Brocade_FE1.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Wonderful Chuang Brocade&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot;  Unlike the tale of Wu Daozi, it does not feature a painter disappearing in his painting.  Instead, an old woman makes a marvelous brocade; some magical beings steal it to copy it; when her son tracks them down, they agree to give it back because the copy is almost done; and then the woman who is copying it embroiders herself into the original brocade.  (Then, when the son returns with the brocade, which depicts a castle, it becomes real, so he marries the weaver, and she and he live happily with his mother in the castle.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, on one hand, a brocade and embroidering herself into another woman's work, and on the other hand, it is a fairy tale.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that the tales were confused at some point.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T00:47:35.140" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18599" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18557" CreationDate="2021-05-12T11:21:13.093" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Most of this is answered by the poem itself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the repeated line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will tell them, my country,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which implies that &amp;quot;you&amp;quot; is a country, clearly Mauritania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We have the lines:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will say to them, to your people,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you will say to them, the encampments,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;you will tell them, her people,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;which mean that &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; are the people of Mauritania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's not quite as clear who &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; is. But I think &amp;quot;she&amp;quot; is a representative of all Mauritanian women. The line:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you will say to them that she bears your name, your names, your incantations,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;seems to imply that she has many names. And I don't see how she can be one woman if she &amp;quot;sleeps under cemetery stones&amp;quot; while simultaneously being &amp;quot;born and born again,&#xA;with each dawn,&#xA;in each song from the mosques.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And with even less evidence, I would assume that &amp;quot;I&amp;quot; is the poet, who is of course also a Mauritanian woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T11:27:03.507" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T11:27:03.507" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18600" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17522" CreationDate="2021-05-12T11:57:22.817" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Green's Dictionary of Slang gives three examples of &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/cbmc6ba#3qonmly&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for ducks&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; before the Steinbeck one:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1900&lt;/strong&gt; F.V. Fisher Transformation of Job 13: &lt;em&gt;‘Gracious sakes, boy! what did you scare me for?’ [...] ‘Oh, just for ducks!’.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1913&lt;/strong&gt; J. London Valley of the Moon (1914) 520: &lt;em&gt;I passed young Chavon [...] an’ – I don’t know why – just for ducks, I guess – I up an’ asked ’m if he thought the old man would lease the hundred an’ forty.&lt;/em&gt; [US]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1931&lt;/strong&gt; L. Steffens Autobiog. 276: &lt;em&gt;‘But what are you doing it for?’ ‘Oh, just for ducks.’&lt;/em&gt; (context 1890s)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1939&lt;/strong&gt; J. Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath (1951) 12: &lt;em&gt;He just done it for ducks. He wasn’t puttin’ on no dog.&lt;/em&gt; [US]&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1962&lt;/strong&gt; E. Shepard Press Passes 219: &lt;em&gt;They’re never happier than when pounding newsmen with their rifle butts, just for the ducks of it.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Jonathan Lighter's Historical Dictionary of American Slang was Green's source for the 1931 and 1962 examples.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7816" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T11:57:22.817" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18601" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-12T12:05:08.817" Score="2" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;The following is an excerpt of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa's novel &lt;em&gt;The life of a fool&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He read a book by Anatole France, his head propped up by a pillow of skepticism exuding a rosy fragrance; the presence in that same pillow of a &lt;strong&gt;centaur&lt;/strong&gt; quite escaped his notice.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having read some novels written by France, I trust I understand the first part that comes before the semicolon, but this reference to a centaur just escapes my understanding. As far as know centaurs were considered to be symbols of wisdom (apart from some other qualities).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12886" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T13:41:29.240" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T13:41:29.240" Title="What is the meaning of Akutagawa's reference to a centaur?" Tags="&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;ryunosuke-akutagawa&gt;&lt;the-life-of-a-fool&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18603" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18604" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" Score="0" Body="Questions about 'The Life of a Fool' or 'A Fool's Life' (Japanese: 或阿呆の一生 Aru Ahō no Isshō, 1927) by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. Use with the tags [ryunosuke-akutagawa] and [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T15:15:59.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18605" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-12T17:09:54.580" Score="3" ViewCount="46" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read Katherine Anne Porter's &lt;a href=&quot;http://fullreads.com/literature/he/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;He&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;, and, after reading it twice, am still left in the dark about one thing. It is said that &amp;quot;Rolls of fat covered Him like an overcoat&amp;quot;, and he is portrayed as being physically larger than the average boy his size, remarkably strong and agile, yet slow to recover, and mentally limited. This might sound insensitive, but who is He, and what is going on with Him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12889" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T00:14:26.393" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T00:14:26.393" Title="Katherine Anne Porter's &quot;HE&quot;: What is He?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;katherine-anne-porter&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18606" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17516" CreationDate="2021-05-12T17:12:08.807" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;From &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.atoptics.co.uk/rayshad.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;AtmosphericOptics.com&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dust, small aerosols and moisture droplets scatter light to make the&#xA;sun's rays visible&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This obviously applies to the moon's rays as well, so the water droplets that form the mist, scatter the light making it visible in the air, where objects block the light they cast shadows in the illuminated mists creating rays.&#xA;'Stroking' may mean that the writer percieves the light falling on the mist as though it was lightly touching it, or it may be more metaphorical and be intended to evoke paintstrokes with the light painting the canvas of the mist.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KAEtK.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/KAEtK.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T19:02:32.100" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T19:02:32.100" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18607" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18608" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American essayist, short story writer, novelist and journalist Katherine Anne Porter (–1980) or her life as a writer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for 'The Collected Stories' (1965)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" LastActivityDate="2021-05-12T20:55:13.373" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18609" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18613" CreationDate="2021-05-13T03:28:14.020" Score="3" ViewCount="57" Body="&lt;p&gt;What does &lt;em&gt;Speed-the-Plow&lt;/em&gt; mean in David Mamet's play? I know that it is a traditional song that farmers sang to ask God to bless their crops. But I can't figure out the relationship between the meaning of that song and the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The play is about two film producers. They want make a movie for the summer, but an artistic novel comes to their office, and their boss ask them to give a courtesy read. A girl is fascinated by the book, and by seducing one of them she wants to get his permission to make a film from book instead of a moneymaker movie. At last the other guy slaps the man and humiliates him and his weakness that led him to let the girl take charge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;At last the girl is kicked out, and everything goes back to normal. Is there a sexist metaphor, or a theological meaning is the song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12893" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T03:39:49.370" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T09:57:37.417" Title="What does &quot;speed the plow&quot; mean in David Mamet's play?" Tags="&lt;title&gt;&lt;david-mamet&gt;&lt;speed-the-plow&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18610" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18612" CreationDate="2021-05-13T03:34:38.390" Score="3" ViewCount="44" Body="&lt;p&gt;According to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://redwall.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Moles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Redwall fandom wiki's category page for moles&quot;&gt;Redwall wiki page on moles&lt;/a&gt;,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The mole dialect is derived from the region of Somerset, England. Brian Jacques frequently tales the story of how when he was a truck driver, he drove through this part of the country and encountered the men speaking with this accent.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I can't find an &lt;strong&gt;original interview&lt;/strong&gt; or other event for where Jacques said this story. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://myhero.com/BJacques_FMES_07_ul&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;My Hero essay on Brian Jacques&quot;&gt;many&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://theredwallrecorder.tumblr.com/post/108603706694/wren-writes-brian-jacques-was-an-english-writer&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;The Redwall Recorder Tumblr post&quot;&gt;other&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.stellabooks.com/featured-book/the-redwall-library-brian-jacques&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Stella &amp;amp; Rose's Books article&quot;&gt;places&lt;/a&gt; which repeat the same general idea: that the mole accent is derived from the Somerset area, specifically due to Jacques truck-driving through.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some things I have found, but which are not quite enough.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.redwallabbey.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;Redwall site homepage&quot;&gt;redwall.org&lt;/a&gt; &amp;quot;About Brian&amp;quot; page:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Like many of his generation Brian finished school early, at the age of fifteen. Though he frequented the local Public Library to continue his love of reading, he was very soon employed as a Manual Labourer. He spent time as as a railway fireman, a longshoreman, &lt;strong&gt;a long-distance truck driver&lt;/strong&gt;, a bus driver, a postmaster, and a stand-up entertainer.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This only confirms that he was a long-distance truck driver, not the specific story about driving through Somerset and hearing the accent of the locals.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.penguin.com/static/pdf/teachersguides/redwall.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot; title=&quot;PDF of Penguin interview transcript&quot;&gt;Penguin interview&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;P&lt;/strong&gt;: It’s been very interesting to me how young people love the accents in your books. When we first did them, we were a little nervous about how much sanitizing of those accents we might need to do for American children. But the children here love the accents, &lt;strong&gt;they love imitating the foremoles,&lt;/strong&gt; the shrews.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;B&lt;/strong&gt;: It gives me so much pleasure when you hear students in the schools in America trying to imitate &lt;strong&gt;the Somerset burr of old men in little English villages&lt;/strong&gt;. I remember a time that I was in a school and a little lad came up to me just as the bell rung, and he said, “Hullo, old chap and how are you doing, what? what?” I said, “I’m doing just fine.” And he said, “How was that for an English accent?” and I said, “Pretty dreadful!” He said, “Oh, rats!” and ran away!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This seems to confirm that the moles are supposed to have a Somerset accent. Again, though, it does not have the story of driving through the countryside.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I am seeking somewhere in which Jacques &lt;em&gt;himself&lt;/em&gt;, or someone speaking for him, states that the moles' accent is based upon Jacques' Somerset truck-driving days. Not just people repeating other people, or assuming this story is correct. Currently I am assuming that such an original statement exists, since everyone agrees on where the mole accent came from and the wiki page says he &amp;quot;frequently&amp;quot; told the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Where did Jacques tell this story of how the mole accent was from truck-driving through Somerset?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T22:02:01.043" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T22:02:01.043" Title="Where did Jacques tell this story of how the mole accent was from truck-driving through Somerset?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;redwall-series&gt;&lt;brian-jacques&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18612" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18610" CreationDate="2021-05-13T09:36:57.063" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not exactly an interview, but I found this claim directly from the horse's mouth in a &lt;em&gt;letter&lt;/em&gt; from Brian Jacques to a then-young fan, Joshua Bishop, in 1996 (&lt;a href=&quot;https://storywarren.com/a-letter-from-brian-jacques/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;link&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I give my characters accents chosen from British dialects, there are so many of them. [M]oles speak like the old men of Somerset, it is a charming old fashioned rural place. I remember it from my travels as a long distance lorry driver.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Possibly the reason you failed to find this is that, as an American, you'd probably use the search term &amp;quot;truck driver&amp;quot; rather than &amp;quot;lorry driver&amp;quot;. When I searched for &lt;code&gt;brian jacques lorry driver somerset moles&lt;/code&gt;, some results did say truck rather than lorry, but I also got &amp;quot;lorry&amp;quot; results including this one.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I haven't found any other primary sources for this claim, though, so &amp;quot;frequently&amp;quot; may be an exaggeration. Or maybe he used to tell this story at book-signing events which weren't recorded or written down and haven't made it onto the internet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T09:36:57.063" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18613" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18609" CreationDate="2021-05-13T09:37:15.183" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Mamet seems to have not been referencing a song itself so much as an aphorism derived from  its presentation on items of crockery.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He relates the origin of the play's title in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1989-02-19-8903060771-story.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chicago Tribune in 1989&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Finally, on a hunting trip in East Texas, Mamet got the title for his play. ''We were at a forge, watching a friend of mine pound out the steel for a hunting knife, and I remembered the saying that you see on a lot of old plates and mugs: &lt;code&gt;Industry produceth wealth. God speed the plow.&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;''This, I knew, was a play about work and about the end of the world, so&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;code&gt;Speed-the-Plow&lt;/code&gt; was perfect, because, not only did it mean work, it also suggested having to plow under and start over again.''&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you observe, Speed the Plow/Plough' is a Traditional song. There are (at least) two songs which use the phrase 'God speed the plough'.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One is an early 16th-century poem which borrows heavily from Geoffrey Chaucer's Monk's Tale and is described in Wikipedia as&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a short, satirical complaint, listing the various indolent members of the clergy who will demand a share of the ploughman's harvest, rendering his work futile.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    &amp;quot;The kyngis purviours also they come,&#xA;    To have whete and otys at the kyngis nede;&#xA;    And over that befe and mutton,&#xA;    And butter and pulleyn, so God me spede!&#xA;    And to the kyngis courte we moste it lede,&#xA;    And our payment shal be a styk of a bough;&#xA;    And yet we moste speke faire for drede. 1&#xA;    'I praye to God, spede wele the plough.'&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The other, which seems more relevant to the Mamot source is an early 19th century song which is known under various titles: The Farmer's Toast, Success to the Farmer, Jolly Farmer, and God Speed the Plough. This song, unlike the earlier, is not a complaint at those claiming a share of farmers' profits, though it recognises the reliance of others on the farmers' work, the whole is more of a statement of content with the speakers lot:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    Were it not for my seeding you'd have but poor feeding&#xA;    I'm sure you would all starve without me&#xA;    But I am content when I paid my rent&#xA;    And I'm happy when friends are about me.&#xA;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full phrase Mamot quotes doesn't appear in the song, but as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jockjenantiques.com/god-speed-the-plough-mug-success-to-the-farmers-cider-tankard-circa-1840-antique&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this image&lt;/a&gt; of an antique cider tankard shows, when part of the song was reproduced on plates and mugs, a line about industry might be added as a sort of caption, which suggests that it is items bearing this later verse that Mamot was referencing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cp23E.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/cp23E.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;God Speed the Plough on mug&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="333" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T09:57:37.417" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T09:57:37.417" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18614" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17887" CreationDate="2021-05-13T12:48:24.440" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;As you note in the question, it makes no sense for “L—y” to represent an editorial redaction, because Lucy’s name appears hundreds of times elsewhere in the novel. So the only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Paul wrote the name like this on the fly-leaf of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we imagine a reason for him to write “L—y” rather than “Lucy”? I think we can. The context is that at the end of chapter XXXV Lucy and Paul declared their love for each other, or came as close to declaring it as their characters and situation allowed. But at the beginning of chapter XXXVI, Lucy found Paul reserved and distant (“I expected a smile, if not a word; I got neither: to my portion fell one nod—hurried, shy”). She “swallowed whatever other feelings began to surge” and waited for their private lesson in the hope of getting an explanation. But when the day came, Paul snubbed her completely: he spent the time allocated for their lesson watering the garden and petting a spaniel. After this humiliation, Lucy finds in her desk “something new, this pamphlet in lilac”. It is a tract by Père Silas (a priest, and Paul’s tutor and mentor) which sets out to persuade the reader to convert to Catholicism.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A mortal bewilderment cleared suddenly from my head and vision; the solution of the Sphinx-riddle was won; the conjunction of those two names, Père Silas and Paul Emanuel, gave the key to all. The penitent had been with his director; permitted to withhold nothing; suffered to keep no corner of his heart sacred to God and to himself; the whole narrative of our late interview had been drawn from him; he had avowed the covenant of fraternity, and spoken of his adopted sister. How could such a covenant, such adoption, be sanctioned by the Church? Fraternal communion with a heretic! I seemed to hear Père Silas annulling the unholy pact; warning his penitent of its perils; entreating, enjoining reserve, nay, by the authority of his office, and in the name, and by the memory of all M. Emanuel held most dear and sacred, commanding the enforcement of that new system whose frost had pierced to the marrow of my bones.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Paul has been told by his priest that he must not marry Lucy unless she converts to Catholicism. This places him in a bind: he accepts the authority of his religion, but he feels that telling Lucy to deny her own conscience would be contemptible. Thus, out of shame, he avoids her, until finally he comes up with the idea of planting the tract in her desk.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the reason that Paul writes “From P.C.D.E. to L—y” and not “From Paul to Lucy” is that he is ashamed of his behaviour, and the elision of their names is a kind of psychological defence or semi-denial of what he is doing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-13T12:48:24.440" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18616" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-13T23:01:44.820" Score="1" ViewCount="63" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm learning about the different hero archetypes. As far as I know, Byronic heroes are charismatic, passionate, and flawed, among others. But can they be humorous? I can't think of any examples off of the top of my head from books or popular culture, so I'm not sure whether having a sense of humor fits that archetype.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12451" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-13T23:02:38.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T04:12:59.037" Title="Can Byronic heroes be funny?" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;terminology&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18618" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3787" CreationDate="2021-05-14T03:28:44.230" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;From no less an authority than &lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.2.2.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aristotle&lt;/a&gt;, we are assured&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The fourth case is when some one is about to do an irreparable deed through ignorance, and makes the discovery before it is done. . . . The last case is the &lt;strong&gt;best&lt;/strong&gt;, as when in the Cresphontes Merope is about to slay her son, but, recognizing who he is, spares his life. So in the Iphigenia, the sister recognizes the brother just in time. Again in the Helle, the son recognizes the mother when on the point of giving her up. (Emphasis mine.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the originator of the use of &amp;quot;peripeteia&amp;quot; in literary context not only regards positive changes as an example, but thinks they are best.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I also add that when he wrote, &amp;quot;tragedy&amp;quot; meant what we would now call &amp;quot;drama&amp;quot; -- it included tales with happy endings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T04:04:22.047" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T04:04:22.047" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18619" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18616" CreationDate="2021-05-14T03:34:00.690" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The pure Byronic archetypical characters, such as Byron wrote, are noted for their sullen, defiant, arrogant, passionate, miserable, and withdrawn character.  In particular, self-obsessed and lacking a sense of perspective -- which makes it difficult to see the humor in things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is possible to imagine leavening the character with a sense of humor, albeit a dark, sardonic one.  However, even that much would result in a character that could be a Byronic hero but not an archetypical one. And too much would start to make him not one at all (though he might have commonalties).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Humor is a coping mechanism.  Byronic heroes do not have good coping mechanisms.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastEditorUserId="10061" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T04:12:59.037" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T04:12:59.037" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18620" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18622" CreationDate="2021-05-14T19:46:26.357" Score="4" ViewCount="127" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=hamlet&amp;amp;Act=3&amp;amp;Scene=1&amp;amp;Scope=scene&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt; [III, 1]&lt;/a&gt;, Hamlet tells Ophelia (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/search/search-results.php?link=con&amp;amp;works%5B%5D=*&amp;amp;sortby=WorkName&amp;amp;pleasewait=1&amp;amp;msg=sr&amp;amp;numresults=999&amp;amp;keyword1=nunnery&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lines 1814,27,34&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Get thee to a nunnery! […] Go thy ways to a nunnery. […] Get thee to a nunnery. […] To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. […] To a nunnery, go. &lt;em&gt;Exit.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I understand that &amp;quot;nunnery&amp;quot; means a religious convent of nuns, or it can be a slang word for brothel, but why does Hamlet say this to Ophelia several times?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12900" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T19:57:53.950" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T09:14:53.953" Title="Why did Hamlet tell Ophelia: &quot;Get thee to a nunnery!&quot;?" Tags="&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;wording-choice&gt;&lt;religion&gt;&lt;hamlet&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18622" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18620" CreationDate="2021-05-14T23:10:31.837" Score="2" Body="&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Benjamin Lockerd, “&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/1/19/htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Hamlet the Heretic: The Prince’s Albigensian Rhetoric&lt;/a&gt;,” &lt;em&gt;Religions&lt;/em&gt; &lt;strong&gt;10&lt;/strong&gt;, no. 1 (January 2019): 19&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;argues that&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some of Hamlet’s speeches reflect a &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05169a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dualistic&lt;/a&gt; view of the world and of humanity, echoing in particular some of the heretical beliefs of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01267e.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Albigensians&lt;/a&gt; in southern France some centuries earlier [or the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Manicheans&lt;/a&gt; before that]. The Albigensians thought that the evil deity created the human body as a trap for the souls created by the good god, and Hamlet repeatedly expresses disgust with the body, a “quintessence of dust” (II.ii.304–305). Because they regarded the body as a soul trap, the Albigensians believed that marriage and procreation should be avoided. “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” Hamlet demands of Ophelia, adding that “it were better my mother had not borne me” (III.i.121–24). He sounds most like a heretic when he goes on to say “we will have no more marriage” (III.i.147). Though Hamlet continues with dualistic talk nearly to the end, there is some turning toward orthodox Christianity.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Albigensians also thought that fasting/starving oneself to death (suicide, which they called the &amp;quot;&lt;em&gt;endura&lt;/em&gt;&amp;quot;) was a very virtuous, noble act.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Catholic vs. Protestant theology in the play:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The setting of the play is medieval and Catholic. The original telling of the Hamlet story by Saxo Grammaticus places the events in medieval (hence Catholic) Denmark. David Beauregard has demonstrated in overwhelmingly convincing detail that the play assumes a Catholic milieu (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pRYCe4zXK5AC&amp;amp;lpg=PA87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Beauregard 2008, pp. 86&lt;/a&gt;–108). He is right to conclude that “contrary to some recent critical claims, Hamlet does not appear to be a very Protestant play” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.com/books?id=pRYCe4zXK5AC&amp;amp;lpg=PA87&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 87&lt;/a&gt;). Yet the anachronistic fact that Hamlet and Horatio have been studying at the university in Wittenberg (which was not founded until 1502) offers a tantalizing and unmistakable allusion to Luther and the Reformation, indicating that Protestant theology must somehow impinge on the play.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Regarding &amp;quot;Get thee to a nunnery!&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in the next scene that Hamlet speaks most like an Albigensian. In his most famous soliloquy, he continues to contemplate suicide, though his fear of the dreams that might come “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” (III.i.67) is orthodox. The “coil” refers to the turmoil and disturbance of our mortal life, which the melancholic and the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03435a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cathar&lt;/a&gt; [Albigensian, puritan] view as being the whole of it. In the following conversation with Ophelia before the play, Hamlet condemns procreation: “Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” (III.i.121–22). His play on the slang meaning of a nunnery as a brothel makes the situation even more hopeless, associating even celibacy with carnality (as did many Puritan preachers as well). Curiously, the Albigensians were sometimes reported by their Catholic critics (whether accurately or not is hard to tell) as rejecting marriage but practicing sodomy as a way of satisfying their carnal desires while avoiding producing children. The word “breeder” emphasizes the animality of sexual love, and this passage echoes the earlier reference to breeding maggots. It is, of course, perfectly traditional to say that when one begets children one brings into the world human beings who will certainly be sinners, but the implication that children are completely defined by their sinfulness is shockingly heretical in its denial of redemption and grace. Hamlet refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312a.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Original Sin&lt;/a&gt; moments earlier, proclaiming that “virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it” (117–18). To deny the efficacy of virtue might be simply a Protestant rejection of works theology, but the tone here is one of complete hopelessness: there is nothing that can overcome the evil of a world created by an evil god. Only the death of the body can release the soul.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;Hamlet continues his diatribe against procreation: “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me …” (122–23). Even though he is fairly honest, it would be better had he never been born; it would be better if no one were born. Here he comes close to Lear’s demand that the storm should “Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once, / That makes ingrateful man” (III.ii.8–9), but where Lear is expressing misanthropy, Hamlet couches his rejection of procreation in Christian terms. What he says runs contrary to the divine injunction in Genesis to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen. 1.28). To avoid breeding more sinners, Hamlet decrees, people should practice celibacy (or the anti-procreative sexuality of the brothel), and marriage must be rejected: “I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are married already—all but one—shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery, go” (147–49). This renunciation of marriage is neither Protestant nor Catholic. The Protestants insisted that even ministers should be free to marry, and for Catholics marriage was one of the seven sacraments. For both, one of the essential purposes of marriage was begetting and raising children. In denouncing both procreation and marriage, Hamlet sounds very much like an Albigensian.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12900" LastEditorUserId="12900" LastEditDate="2021-05-14T23:26:27.870" LastActivityDate="2021-05-14T23:26:27.870" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18623" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12209" CreationDate="2021-05-15T05:29:52.910" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The only thing that stands out to me with regard to the concept of the Trinity is from &lt;em&gt;Little Men&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When it ceased at last, and Mrs. Bhaer went to take away the lamp, Demi was gone and Nat fast asleep, lying with his face toward the picture, as if he had already learned to love the Good Man who loved little children, and was a faithful friend to the poor.'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This in reference to Christ seems to imply a rejection of coequality.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In general, the books rarely touch on specific aspects of Protestant beliefs. Major moments I can think of that deal with religious themes are Amy's flirtation with Catholicism in &lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; (which doesn't really touch on Protestant denominations at all), Jo's experience with atheists in the second part of the book, and the &lt;em&gt;Pilgrim's Progress&lt;/em&gt; interweaving. Notably, while Mr. March and Meg's son John/Demi are presented as good and wise through their piety and Meg even wants Demi to become a minister, there aren't really theological discussions.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I think there are maybe inferences to be made about how the Marches are portrayed to practise and think about religion, though, whether it's the &lt;em&gt;relative&lt;/em&gt; de-emphasis of reading the Bible compared to other texts (although it is frequently quoted), absence of formal church worship (despite Mr. March's profession)--Dan does go to chapel in &lt;em&gt;Jo's Boys&lt;/em&gt;, but it's in prison, and solitary or within-family worship is a fixture of the series--or passages like this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety. It shows itself in acts rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations. Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come. She did not rebuke Jo with saintly speeches, only loved her better for her passionate affection, and clung more closely to the dear human love, from which our Father never means us to be weaned, but through which He draws us closer to Himself.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(&lt;em&gt;Little Women&lt;/em&gt; pt. 2)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this seems distinctly Transcendentalist in various ways and implies a supremacy of the Lord as the Father alongside the Mother (nature), it's not explicitly Unitarian. This is generally the pattern, where Louisa May Alcott's Transcendentalist beliefs seem to influence her mentions of God, Heaven, or the ability/need for people to strive towards Heaven. However, all the books contain references to the Father in these contexts, and I can't find a single reference to the Son, Christ, etc. except when Amy becomes interested in the Madonna and the Child (which is presented in the Catholic context). Of course, this could also be a function of the political and religious ambiguity of a lot of the text; Alcott would probably be mindful of this in relation to theology.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Returning to 'Father and Mother of us all', this is interesting to me because of the ideas of Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, who corresponded with Alcott's father and (as far as I can tell) Alcott herself. Neither of them were Christian Scientists, but I can imagine the concept of God encompassing maternal traits appealing to Alcott. It's probable however that Alcott is alluding to Mother Nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12320" LastEditorUserId="12320" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T08:50:06.223" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T08:50:06.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18624" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2474" CreationDate="2021-05-15T06:55:01.240" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Peter Shor, in a comment, suggests &lt;em&gt;The Invention of Hugo Cabret&lt;/em&gt; (2007).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The author, Brian Selznick, describes it as 'not exactly a novel, not&#xA;quite a picture book, not really a graphic novel, or a flip book or a&#xA;movie, but a combination of all these things.' Does it count? I&#xA;believe it was &lt;em&gt;sui generis&lt;/em&gt; when it was published.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can give a slightly awkward example a few years earlier than that, with the chapter-book editions of the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W.I.T.C.H.#Chapter_books&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;W.I.T.C.H.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;manga&lt;/em&gt; series, beginning with &lt;em&gt;The Power of Five&lt;/em&gt; (2004).  &lt;em&gt;W.I.T.C.H.&lt;/em&gt; started life as a straightforward &lt;em&gt;manga&lt;/em&gt; comic, but then when it became a success, the publishers decided that they'd also release adaptations of the comics as chapter books.  Each book is mainly a story told in writing in the usual way, and then, at the climax of the adventure, it switches to several pages in comic format, taken from the original &lt;em&gt;manga&lt;/em&gt;.  Odd history, but, whatever the reason, it did end up being a book that was part text and part comic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems surprising to me if nobody had ever done something of that kind much earlier than 2004, though.  Maybe somebody else can beat my record.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10362" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T06:55:01.240" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18625" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18626" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" Score="0" Body="For questions about any or all the books in the series by American novelist Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888): *Little Women* (1868); its second volume published as *Good Wives* (1869) in the UK but not titled separately in the US; *Little Men* (1871); and *Jo's Boys* (1886). Use in conjunction with [louisa-may-alcott]." OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T07:18:24.860" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18627" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18620" CreationDate="2021-05-15T09:14:53.953" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Readers who think that Hamlet is sincerely expressing his own thoughts and feelings in this scene tend to interpret his cruelty to Ophelia as arising out of his disgust with his mother Gertrude for marrying her husband’s murderer, which he has generalized to the whole of her sex (“Frailty, thy name is woman!”).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As editors rarely fail to note in gloss, ‘nunnery’ was Elizabethan slang for ‘brothel’, so Hamlet &lt;em&gt;really&lt;/em&gt; tells Ophelia to go to a whorehouse, where, he believes, she belongs. Why does the virtuous Ophelia belong, in Hamlet’s judgement, in a whorehouse? A frequent answer has been that Hamlet so relegates her because of his disillusionment with women resulting from the revelation of his mother’s lustfulness; &lt;em&gt;Gertrude&lt;/em&gt; belongs in a whorehouse, since she has been ‘whor’d’ by Claudius (V. ii. 64). Because Gertrude has become a whore, so will Ophelia—and so, in fact, will all women, in the estimation not only of Hamlet but also of those many men of various generations who have quoted—I would say prostituted—the line for the purpose of smugly concurring (and implying Shakespeare’s concurrence) with Hamlet’s estimation of woman’s whorish nature.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Kay Stanton (1994). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/newessaysonhamle0000unse/page/166/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;’s Whores&lt;/a&gt;’. In Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, eds. &lt;em&gt;New Essays on Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, p. 167. New York: AMS.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in reading the “nunnery” scene, we have to remember the context, which is that Claudius and Polonius have told Ophelia to engage Hamlet in conversation so that they may eavesdrop, and so discover whether Hamlet is really mad.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;KING. Sweet Gertrude, leave us too,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;For we have closely sent for Hamlet hither,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That he, as ’twere by accident, may here&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Affront Ophelia.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Her father and myself, lawful espials,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Will so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;We may of their encounter frankly judge,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And gather by him, as he is behav’d,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;If’t be th’affliction of his love or no&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That thus he suffers for.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our interpretation of Hamlet’s words in the scene is therefore going to depend on whether we think Hamlet guesses that he is being spied on, and there are a couple of hints that he &lt;em&gt;does&lt;/em&gt; guess: his questions “Are you honest?” and “Where’s your father?” could be interpreted in this way. So if we think that Hamlet has guessed that he is spied upon, then everything he says has to be interpreted under the constraint of his need to dissemble for the benefit of the eavesdroppers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So a possible interpretation of the scene is that Hamlet “must be cruel, only to be kind”: that is, he knows that violence is portending, and in order to persuade Ophelia to break her association with him and so get out of harm’s way (while not able to say so plainly due to the constraint of being spied on), he abuses her cruelly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;[Ophelia] is most deject and wretched, but without even a suspicion of being badly treated. Nor &lt;em&gt;is&lt;/em&gt; she badly treated. The resentment of neglected love may inflame his dazzling satire, but under the circumstance, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’ was the best and only advice he could give her. A nunnery was her best and only refuge from the impending storm. Destruction for himself and all else around him; but, for her the cloisters’ timely shelter. There is no telling when the fierce wrath may seize him: when he may shake down the pillars of that guilty palace. But not if he can help it, on her fair head shall the ruin fall! Since the grave is opening for &lt;em&gt;him&lt;/em&gt; let the Convent open for &lt;em&gt;her&lt;/em&gt;. Not his, but never another’s! O wonderful poet! Could she not guess, had she not some shadowy perception of the jealous, selfish, masculine love, which despite their fell divorce, would wall her from the world, and mark her with the seal of God, to save her from the violation of man?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;George Henry Miles (1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/reviewofhamlet00milerich/page/102/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;A Review of Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 101–102&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Longmans.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, I have to say that I don’t find Miles’ interpretation at all plausible. There are two problems: first, if Hamlet’s intention is to get Ophelia to safety, then he completely bungles it; and second, if Hamlet guesses that he is being spied on by Polonius, then it is likely that he also thinks that Ophelia is complicit in her father’s plot.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Dover Wilson considered this last possibility in detail in his book &lt;em&gt;What Happens in Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, starting from the theory that Hamlet might have overheard Polonius plotting with Claudius in II.1:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;POLONIUS. At such a time I’ll loose my daughter to him.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Be you and I behind an arras then,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Mark the encounter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is only a few lines before Hamlet’s entrance so it would be easy to stage him overhearing it. Polonius’ use of “loose” here is significant: he means “set free” in the sense of a hunter with a hawk, but the word also has the sense “unchaste, wanton, dissolute, immoral” which suggests that Polonius is pandering his daughter to sexually entrap the prince. Wilson goes on to consider the “nunnery” scene in the light of this theory:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But now [Hamlet] is thoroughly awake, and sees it all. Here is the lobby and the decoy, playing a part, only too unblushingly; and there at the back is the arras […] Everything he says for the rest of the scene is intended for the ears of the eavesdroppers. As for the daughter who has been “loosed” to him, she will only get what she deserves. For play-acting has completed her downfall in his eyes. First the abrupt breaking-off of all intercourse between them, without any reason given, then the failure to meet his last appeal, then the overhearing of the plot in which she was to take a leading part, and last this willing and all too facile participation: is it surprising that to an imagination “as foul as Vulcan’s stithy” such things should appear in the worst possible light, or that he should treat her from henceforth as the creature he believes her to be? He puts her to one final test before the scene is over; but the dice are loaded against her. Thus, through a chain of misconceptions, due to nothing worse than narrowness of vision and over-readiness to comply with her father’s commands, Ophelia blackens her own character in her lover’s eyes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;J. Dover Wilson (1960). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/whathappensinham00wils/page/130/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;What Happens in Hamlet&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 130–131&lt;/a&gt;. Cambridge University Press.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T09:14:53.953" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18628" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18630" CreationDate="2021-05-15T13:37:09.430" Score="3" ViewCount="135" Body="&lt;p&gt;My question is about Byron's &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Giaour&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Giaour&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and the &lt;strong&gt;opening apostrophe&lt;/strong&gt; at the beginning of a stanza. For example:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'His floating robe around him folding,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Slow sweeps he through the columned aisle;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With dread beheld, with gloom beholding&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The rites that sanctify the pile&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But when the anthem shakes the choir,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And kneel the monks, his steps retire;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;By yonder lone and wavering torch&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;His aspect glares within the porch;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;There will he pause till all is done -&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And hear the prayer, but utter none&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Why do some stanzas begin with an apostrophe, whereas others don't?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10553" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T14:40:13.987" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T14:41:17.287" Title="Apostrophes at the beginning of stanzas in Byron's &quot;The Giaour&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;lord-byron&gt;&lt;the-giaour&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18630" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18628" CreationDate="2021-05-15T14:18:08.977" Score="7" Body="&lt;p&gt;It's not an apostrophe but an opening quotation mark, paired with a closing quotation mark at the end of the stanza. If I am understanding rightly, this stanza is spoken by a monk into whose monastery the Giaour has come, and he is describing the Giaour's behaviour. (Hence e.g. his invocation of St Francis later in the stanza.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In at least &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/giaourfragmentof13byro/page/44/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;one early edition&lt;/a&gt; the typographical convention is different and more explicit, with every single line of the stanza preceded by a quotation mark.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(This isn't something you asked about but may also be worth mentioning: Some lines in this poem do in fact begin with apostrophes -- there are several beginning &amp;quot;'Tis&amp;quot;. This is just an abbreviated version of &amp;quot;It is&amp;quot;.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="35" LastEditorUserId="35" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T14:41:17.287" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T14:41:17.287" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18632" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18661" CreationDate="2021-05-15T18:44:26.697" Score="29" ViewCount="4701" Body="&lt;p&gt;As a child I remember enjoying the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babar_the_Elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babar&lt;/a&gt; picture books about the eponymous elephant and his escapades. Now, many years later, it occurs to me to wonder what kind of elephants Babar and his people were: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;African elephants&lt;/a&gt; or &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asian elephants&lt;/a&gt;. The Wikipedia page mentions Africa a few times, but also &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiitake&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;shiitake mushrooms&lt;/a&gt; which are native to Asia. Other animals featuring in the stories, such as rhinoceri and monkeys, are also found both in Africa and in Asia. I don't have any Babar book to hand any more to check its text (and more importantly illustrations) for clues as to the setting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Is it clear from the original books whether they're meant to be set in Africa or Asia?&lt;/strong&gt; Or is it kept more vague and general, just a civilisation of elephants without regard to real-world geography?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T07:51:31.617" Title="Is Babar an African or Asian elephant?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;setting&gt;&lt;jean-de-brunhoff&gt;&lt;babar-the-elephant&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18633" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="15817" CreationDate="2021-05-15T19:58:27.263" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: Heathcliff’s ethnicity is ambiguous. To the other characters, his appearance strikes them as foreign, but they cannot say with any certainty where he appears to be from. Mr Earnshaw’s unsatisfactory account of Heathcliff’s origins, together with his preference for the boy, lead us to suspect that Heathcliff may be his illegitimate mixed-race son.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Descriptions&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Lockwood says that Heathcliff is “a dark skinned gypsy, in aspect” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/6/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;chapter I&lt;/a&gt;). Several other characters also call him a “gipsy”: Mrs Earnshaw (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/78/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;), Hindley (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/84/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;), Mrs Linton (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/108/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VI&lt;/a&gt;), Joseph (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/194/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IX&lt;/a&gt;), and Edgar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/210/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nelly describes him as a “black-haired child” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/78/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;) with “dark face and hair” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/206/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X&lt;/a&gt;) or “black hair, and eyes” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights02bron/page/116/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XX&lt;/a&gt;) and likens his eyes to a “couple of black fiends” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/124/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VII&lt;/a&gt;). She advises him, “A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad, if you were a regular black” (the implication being that he is not one) and says playfully, “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/124/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VII&lt;/a&gt;). When he returns after making his fortune, “the cheeks were sallow, and half covered with black whiskers” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/206/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;X&lt;/a&gt;). When he is ill, she is disturbed by “Those deep black eyes! That smile, and ghastly paleness!” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights02bron/page/396/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XXXIV&lt;/a&gt;). After he dies, she “combed his black long hair from his forehead” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights02bron/page/410/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XXXIV&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Linton says he is “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/108/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;VI&lt;/a&gt;). (A lascar is a sailor from south or south-east Asia. The implication, I think, of “castaway”, is that his complexion is dark as if sun-tanned.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Isabella says that when Heathcliff prayed, “God was curiously confounded with his own black father” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights02bron/page/42/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;XVII&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don’t think we can take any of the racial epithets literally: none of the characters have certain knowledge of Heathcliff’s background, so all that they can be saying is that he seems foreign in appearance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Origins&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Mr Earnshaw’s story about how he found Heathcliff is given as follows by Nelly:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/78/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter IV&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But is this a credible explanation? A couple of aspects of the episode are suspicious. First, why did he choose to walk all the way to Liverpool and back—“sixty miles each way, that is a long spell!” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/76/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;)—when he could have ridden? We know that Mr Earnshaw owned horses, since Cathy can ride—“she was hardly six years old, but she could ride any horse in the stable” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/76/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;). Perhaps he walked in order to be incognito—if he had ridden, he would have had to stable his horse at his destination, where he might be recognized. Second, what was his business in Liverpool? It must have been of short duration, since he was back in only three days, and it is hard to imagine that walking a hundred and twenty miles (half of it carrying the child) in that time left much spare for errands. But whatever his business was, it was urgent enough to leave the harvest in the hands of others.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So I think a plausible idea is that Mr Earnshaw was summoned to Liverpool specifically to collect Heathcliff, but he was unwilling to admit this to his family, preferring to tell the foundling story instead. Why was he unwilling? William Empson considered the following possibility:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems clear what Emily would have added to the plot if she had not wanted to avoid shocking the public. Old Earnshaw sets off to Liverpool on foot because a letter has told him that his younger brother’s son, by a lady of mixed race in the Port of Liverpool, has been left destitute. He avoids scandal by not saying that this is his nephew, and leaves telling the secret until too late. This is all that is needed to explain the assumptions of the story.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Empson (1966). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/argufyingessayso0000emps/page/492/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to &lt;em&gt;Paunch&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. In &lt;em&gt;Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture&lt;/em&gt;, pp. 493–494.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But I think a better theory is that Heathcliff is Mr Earnshaw’s own mixed-race son. We can imagine that on previous trips to Liverpool he has maintained a mistress, but she has died leaving their son to his care. This would explain more convincingly why he was unwilling to tell the truth to his wife and family. It would also explain why Mr Earnshow “took to Heathcliff strangely, believing all he said […], and petting him up far above Cathy, who was too mischievous and wayward for a favourite” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/80/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;), and why “they had christened him “Heathcliff”: it was the name of a son who died in childhood” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/wutheringheights01bron/page/80/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;IV&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Earnshaw […] gives a vague and illogical report of finding the homeless and starving child in the Liverpool gutters. Earnshaw’s rationalization of the adoption seems weak […] Even in an eighteenth-century provincial slum, the waif must have had &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; protector. Mrs. Earnshaw considers her husband to be mad, and the narrator, tart Nelly Dean, expresses doubts through her manner of recounting the tale. […] The brief picture of Mrs. Earnshaw presented here would certainly supply an added motive for concealment of a child who could possibly be Earnshaw’s illegitimate offspring. She “was ready to fling it out of doors”; she grumbles and berates the exhausted traveler. How would such a woman have reacted to any honest admission of sinful adultery? Earnshaw could only bring a by-blow into the family by devious means, as long as his wife was still alive.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Eric Solomon (1959). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/twentiethcentury0000unse_h9y1/page/110/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Incest Theme in &lt;em&gt;Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;’. In Thomas A. Vogler ed. (1968). &lt;em&gt;Twentieth Century Interpretations of Wuthering Heights&lt;/em&gt;, p. 111. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T19:58:27.263" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18634" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="2187" CreationDate="2021-05-15T20:32:52.227" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Let's look at the full quote describing Lafcadio's self-portrait here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It showed the same face which smiled so proudly from Sargent, but there was a great difference.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;John Lafcadio's famous beard was here only suggested, and the line of his chin, a little receding, was viciously drawn in. The lips were smiling, their sensuous fullness overmphasized. The flowing locks were shown a little thin and the high cheekbones caricatured.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eyes were laughing, or at least one of them laughed. The other was completely hidden in a grotesque wink.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It was cruel and revealing, the face of a man who was, if half genius, also half buffoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Belle Turned it over. Written across the back in the painter's enormous hand was a single phrase:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Your secret, Belle darling.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So John Lafcadio has painted a very unflattering self-portrait which pictures him as a buffoon. In fact, he and Belle both knew that he &lt;strong&gt;was&lt;/strong&gt; in fact, partly a buffoon, and this is the secret. This aspect of his personality is what led indirectly to most of the novel's troubles — although I won't go into detail here to keep this answer relatively spoiler-free.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:32:52.227" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18635" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18636" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American essayist, short story writer, novelist and journalist Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) or her life as a writer. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for 'The Collected Stories' (1965)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:49:13.310" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18637" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18638" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American playwright, film director and screenwriter David Mamet (born 1947) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T20:51:24.827" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18639" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18640" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" Score="0" Body="Questions about the tragedy 'Andromache' (Ancient Greek: Ἀνδρομάχη) by Euripides, written in the fifth century BCE. Use with the tags [euripides] and [greek-literature]. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:12:04.417" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18641" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18642" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American author, comic book writer and screenwriter Chuck Wendig (born 1976)." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:17:06.093" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18643" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18644" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" Score="0" Body="Questions about the trilogy 'Star Wars: Aftermath' (2015–2017) by Chuck Wendig. Use with the tag [chuck-wendig]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:18:52.177" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18645" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18646" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" Score="0" Body="Questions about the play 'Speed-the-Plow' (1988) by David Mamet. Use with the tag [david-mamet]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:21:07.617" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18647" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18648" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" Score="0" Body="Questions about the poem 'The Giaour' (1813) by George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron. Use with the tag [lord-byron]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:24:00.333" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18649" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18650" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff (1899–1937), who is best remembered as creator of the Babar series of children's books. Use with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:26:17.060" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18651" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18652" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" Score="0" Body="Questions about the series of children's books about Babar, a fictional elephant, by the French writer and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff. Use with the tags [jean-de-brunhoff] and [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" LastActivityDate="2021-05-15T21:27:59.473" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18653" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18632" CreationDate="2021-05-15T22:38:28.580" Score="32" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the original story &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96582907/f29.item.zoom#&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;L'histoire de Babar: le petit éléphant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (translated and published as &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/storyofbabarl00brun/page/28/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Story of Babar&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;), his companion's absence is communicated by a '&lt;em&gt;vieux marabout&lt;/em&gt;' (an old &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marabou_stork&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;marabous [bird]&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qjAdm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qjAdm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A two-page illustration from &amp;quot;L'histoire de Babar: le petit éléphant&amp;quot; showing a marabou stork communicating with the elephants.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a subsequent book, &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/babarhischildren1938brun&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babar and his Children&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;, his son is saved from a grisly fall by a giraffe.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kqVSh.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/kqVSh.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A two-page illustration from &amp;quot;Babar and his Children&amp;quot; showing a giraffe interacting with the elephants.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As both marabous and giraffes are, as we all know, only found in sub-Saharan Africa, this would indicate that Babar's point of origin is Africa and hence that he is an African elephant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="12702" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T14:47:52.637" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T14:47:52.637" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18654" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18632" CreationDate="2021-05-16T05:27:37.963" Score="16" Body="&lt;p&gt;I submit that Babar is an Asian elephant on the basis of the artwork.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asian elephants differ from African elephants in a few ways, most prominently in the sizes of their ears: Asian elephants have smaller, rounder ears, whereas African elephants have larger, fan-shaped ears.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asian elephant on the left; African elephant on the right:&#xA;&lt;a href=&quot;https://cdn.britannica.com/94/191994-050-097585EE/Asian-side-elephant-African.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://cdn.britannica.com/94/191994-050-097585EE/Asian-side-elephant-African.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Asian vs. African elephants, a side-by-side front view comparison.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sup&gt;© SunnyS/Fotolia; © john michael evan potter/Shutterstock.com&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Asian and African elephants also differ in their head shape: Asian elephants have twin-domed heads, so you can see a ridge running up the middle, whereas African elephants have rounded heads. You can easily spot this difference in the above picture, too.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another difference is in the number of toes: Asian elephants have five toes on their front legs and four toes on their back legs, whereas African elephants have four toes on their front legs and three toes on their back legs.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One can compare these facts with the illustrations in the Babar picture books. I don't have the books at hand, so I'll borrow an image from &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/users/262/valorum&quot;&gt;Valorum&lt;/a&gt;'s &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18653&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to make my point:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qjAdm.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/qjAdm.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;A two-page illustration from &amp;quot;L'histoire de Babar: le petit éléphant&amp;quot; showing many elephants assembled in a semi-circle facing towards the viewer. The ears (small), head shape (ridged), as well as the toes (5 on the front, 4 on the back) of these elephants are all clearly visible in the illustration.&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Smaller, rounder ears? Check!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Twin-domed head, with ridge running along the middle? Check!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Five toes on the front legs, four toes on the back? Check!&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It seems we have a winner!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the other images I could find, the number of toes are not prominently visible, but the ears are always drawn smaller and distinctly &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; fan-shaped, and the head seems to be consistently drawn with a ridge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Ergo, Babar is an Asian elephant. Possibly settled in Africa, based on the other pieces of evidence! But, he is genetically an Asian elephant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;h3&gt;Resources for my elephant facts&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Animal Corner: &lt;a href=&quot;https://animalcorner.org/elephant-anatomy/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Elephant Anatomy&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Encyclopedia Brittanica: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.britannica.com/story/whats-the-difference-between-asian-and-african-elephants&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;What’s the Difference Between Asian and African Elephants?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;African elephant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Wikipedia: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asian elephant&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12702" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T20:36:28.477" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T20:36:28.477" CommentCount="11" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18655" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18656" CreationDate="2021-05-16T06:03:13.347" Score="7" ViewCount="1981" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a particular word here that's the &amp;quot;German loan word&amp;quot; or what's the intended meaning?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When you think about the textured histories of the teams&#xA;and the faith and passion of the fans and the way these forces are entwined&#xA;citywide, and when you think about the game itself, live-or-die, the third game in a&#xA;three-game playoff, and you say the names Giants and Dodgers, and you calculate&#xA;the way the players hate each other openly, and you recall the kind of year this has&#xA;turned out to be, the pennant race that has brought the city to a strangulated&#xA;rapture, an end-shudder requiring a &lt;strong&gt;German loan-word&lt;/strong&gt; to put across the mingling&#xA;of pleasure and dread and suspense, and when you think about the blood loyalty,&#xA;this is what they're saying in the booth—the love-of-team that runs across the&#xA;boroughs and through the snuggled suburbs and out into the apple counties and the&#xA;raw north, then how do you explain twenty thousand empty seats?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is from Don DeLillo's &lt;em&gt;Underworld&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="286" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T07:42:54.777" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T10:56:57.123" Title="What is the German loan word?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;don-delillo&gt;&lt;underworld&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18656" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18655" CreationDate="2021-05-16T09:52:47.430" Score="20" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not sure if there is a concrete loan word that applies here. I think DeLillo alludes to the fact that there is a certain group of German loan words (&lt;em&gt;angst&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;em&gt;unheimlich&lt;/em&gt; etc) that are used when dealing with certain complex or even existential issues. It seems necessary that the complexity of a &amp;quot;mingling of pleasure, dread and suspense&amp;quot; would require such a loan word if one were to compress these feelings into a single word.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12849" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T09:52:47.430" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18657" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18659" CreationDate="2021-05-16T14:50:32.190" Score="28" ViewCount="8542" Body="&lt;p&gt;The first three sentences of O. Henry's &lt;em&gt;Gift of the Magi&lt;/em&gt; are as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it&#xA;was in pennies.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've always wondered about this. This implies that $1.27 is in nickels, quarters and dimes, which is impossible on the surface, since 127 is not divisible by 5, but any combination of nickels, quarters and dimes is always divisible by 5.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Can we figure which of these is the case:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some mysterious literary device here e.g. O Henry knows he's wrong and is winking at the reader?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Is there some sort of currency back 100+ years ago? I would assume if there were half-pennies, they'd be mentioned.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Did O. Henry and his editor just miss it?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7399" LastEditorUserId="12968" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T00:57:57.247" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T00:57:57.247" Title="How could sixty cents of $1.87 be in pennies?" Tags="&lt;short-stories&gt;&lt;o-henry&gt;" AnswerCount="4" CommentCount="8" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18658" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18657" CreationDate="2021-05-16T15:28:27.250" Score="15" Body="&lt;p&gt;A quick look at Wikipedia lists a few &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_United_States_dollar#Obsolete_and_canceled_coins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;obsolete coins&lt;/a&gt; which could be involved here, beyond the half cent:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Two-cent bronze: 2¢, 1863–1873&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Three-cent nickel: 3¢, 1865–1889&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Trime (Three-cent silver): 3¢, 1851–1873&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Given the story was published in 1905, the three cent nickel could have been still in use. As I understand it, all of these are &lt;em&gt;still&lt;/em&gt; legal tender in the US, so it wouldn't be surprising if some of these were still in circulation 15-30 years after they stopped being issued.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="168" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T15:28:27.250" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18659" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18657" CreationDate="2021-05-16T15:39:19.827" Score="49" Body="&lt;h2&gt;There used to be a three-cent piece.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Assuming that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gift_of_the_Magi&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;The Gift of the Magi&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is set in the US at around the time of its publication in 1905, there was a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_piece&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-cent piece&lt;/a&gt; which was still minted until 1890. That's the closest non-multiple-of-five-cents coin to the period, although there was also a two-cent coin which stopped being minted a little earlier, according to the following helpful chart from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.usmint.gov/learn/history/us-circulating-coins&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;US Mint&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bWFvB.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/bWFvB.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;Timeline-graph showing which years various coin denominations were being issued by the U.S. Mint. A &amp;quot;Three Cent&amp;quot; coin has a start year of 1851 and an end year of 1889&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If the story is set around 1905, then three-cent pieces might well still have been regularly in circulation, even if they weren't being minted any more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Or the &amp;quot;sixty cents&amp;quot; might not have been a precise figure.&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It makes sense for Della to count up the total precisely, down to the cent - hence the exact figure of one dollar and eight-seven cents - so that she'd know how much she had and what she might be able to buy with it. But there's no particular reason for her to remember if it was exactly fifty-seven cents or sixty-two cents that were in pennies: around sixty cents of her total being in pennies would be a precise enough figure to get the point across.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T15:41:33.470" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T15:41:33.470" CommentCount="12" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18660" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-16T20:12:19.450" Score="13" ViewCount="3063" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the blog post &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagehat.com/famous-poems-rewritten-as-limericks/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks&lt;/a&gt; on LanguageHat.com (2 April 2018), a certain Trond Engen posted &lt;a href=&quot;http://languagehat.com/famous-poems-rewritten-as-limericks/#comment-2894763&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;the following limerick&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earth, like an orange, is blue.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your love and your smile — yes, you do!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The window, the bee,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;the sun, la-dee-dee…&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I wish I were sure it was true.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He asked whether anyone knew this but nobody seems to have provided an answer. &lt;a href=&quot;https://duckduckgo.com/?q=earth+orange+blue++site%3Agoodreads.com&amp;amp;t=ffab&amp;amp;ia=web&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;My own searches&lt;/a&gt; have led to nothing. Can anybody else do better?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T20:43:22.880" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T20:50:51.617" Title="What literary work is being referred to in this limerick in which &quot;The earth, like an orange, is blue&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="2" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18661" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18632" CreationDate="2021-05-16T20:27:54.807" Score="25" Body="&lt;p&gt;Inasmuch as Babar is from a specific continent, he's either from Europe or from Africa-as-perceived-by-Europeans-in-the-1920s. Which is not exactly Africa, but definitely not Asia.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Babar's adventures spanned many books and had multiple authors and illustrators over decades, starting with &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9cile_de_Brunhoff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Cécile&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_de_Brunhoff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jean de Brunhoff&lt;/a&gt; and continuing with their son &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_de_Brunhoff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Laurent&lt;/a&gt;. They started out as bedtime tales that Cécile told to her children, which her husband Jean elaborated on and turned into illustrated books. As they are children's tales, they do not necessarily take place in the real world and they do not have the kind of internal continuity that you can expect from some science-fiction franchises.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the first book, &lt;em&gt;Histoire de Babar&lt;/em&gt;, Babar lives happily in a forest (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=8&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 4–5&lt;/a&gt;) until his mother is killed by a hunter (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=10&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 7&lt;/a&gt;). Other animals in the “forest” include not only monkeys but also a giraffe (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=11&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 11&lt;/a&gt;). The depiction of the forest is clearly not realistic (it's more of a savannah with palm trees), but inspired from imagery of Africa, with animals gathering around a water hole. The hunter is a stereotypical safari hunter with a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pith_helmet&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;pith helmet&lt;/a&gt;. This is definitely happening in Africa as seen by its colonizers.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Out of story, Laurent notes that the stories may have been partly inspired by tales from cousins who lived in Kenya, and by visits to a zoo which had animals from France's colonies in Africa. (Granted, the zoo also had animals from elsewhere around the world.) (source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.rfi.fr/fr/france/20111209-80-ans-babar-histoire-bande-dessinee-bd-musee-arts-decoratifs-Jean-Laurent-Brunhoff-tintin-congo-colonialisme&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;80 ans de Babar – quelle histoire ?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, via RFI)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Later, when Babar comes back to his native land, we get to see many other animals (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=40&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 41&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=41&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 42&lt;/a&gt;), most of which are native to parts of the African savannah (lion, gazelle, hippopotamus, dromedary, …). Babar becomes king of his village (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=42&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 43&lt;/a&gt;), an African social structure (as seen through the eyes of Europeans).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In between, Babar is in the city. The city has French architecture (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;ff.&lt;/em&gt;) and is home to white-skinned humans with a dress code similar to contemporary France (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=13&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 10&lt;/a&gt; &lt;em&gt;ff.&lt;/em&gt;). This is a European city, but Babar could walk to it. In a later book, &lt;a href=&quot;https://hachette-jeunesse.com/babar-et-ce-coquin-darthur-9782010025488&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Babar et ce coquin d'Arthur&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, Arthur crosses overland from a kangaroo tribe to his homeland. This shows that the world of Babar does not have clearly defined continents as such. It does, however, have an America with specific features of the United States (&lt;a href=&quot;https://hachette-jeunesse.com/babar-en-amerique-9782010025532&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Babar en Amérique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Although the city is depicted as European, it has an African interpretation: the city represents the European civilization (humans, clothes, buildings, shops, books, etc.) which has reached the savage lands where Babar was born (animals, no clothes, no buildings, etc.). In the minds of a 1930s French reader, colonization evokes first and foremost Africa.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The depiction of elephants is more &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;African&lt;/a&gt; than &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_elephant&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Asian&lt;/a&gt;, as all adult elephants have tusks, not just males (Babar's mother &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=7&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 3&lt;/a&gt;, Celeste &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=26&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 25&lt;/a&gt;, mothers &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 30&lt;/a&gt;). They have large ears which are not the rounded ears of Asian elephants (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=9&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 6&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=12&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 9&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=30&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 30&lt;/a&gt;, …). The head is usually drawn as twinned-domed with a ridge at the top which is characteristic of Asian elephants (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=17&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 14–15&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=29&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 28–29&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=35&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 35&lt;/a&gt;), but not always (Babar &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=14&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 11&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=36&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 36–37&lt;/a&gt;). The lack of indent may either be due to a lack of detail in some images or due to the fact that the illustrator did not consider it significant. Jean de Brunhoff was likely working from multiple models, some African, some Asian. From what I can tell, Laurent kept the tusks and ears (which are how the French public expects elephants to look) but not the head ridges (which most readers would not pay attention to).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I don't know why the English Wikipedia page mentions shiitake mushrooms. This is either something that was added in the English translation or a plain mistake. In the original (&lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Fichier:Brunhoff_%E2%80%93_Histoire_de_Babar,_le_petit_%C3%A9l%C3%A9phant_(1931).djvu&amp;amp;page=34&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;p. 34&lt;/a&gt;), the species of the mushroom is not mentioned in the text (it's just a “bad mushroom”), and the picture is a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;fly amanita&lt;/a&gt; which probably &lt;em&gt;the&lt;/em&gt; stereotypical poisonous mushroom in French culture (and perceived to be more deadly than it really is).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="12923" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T07:51:31.617" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T07:51:31.617" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18662" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18660" CreationDate="2021-05-16T20:44:36.123" Score="14" Body="&lt;p&gt;This an adaptation of a poem by &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_%C3%89luard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Éluard&lt;/a&gt;. I’ve bolded the elements that appear in the limerick.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;La terre est bleue comme une orange&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Jamais une erreur &lt;strong&gt;les mots ne mentent pas&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ils ne vous donnent plus à chanter&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Au tour des baisers de s’entendre&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Les fous et les &lt;strong&gt;amours&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Elle sa bouche d’alliance&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tous les secrets tous les &lt;strong&gt;sourires&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Et quels vêtements d’indulgence&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;À la croire toute nue.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Les &lt;strong&gt;guêpes&lt;/strong&gt; fleurissent vert&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;L’aube se passe autour du cou&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Un collier de &lt;strong&gt;fenêtres&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Des ailes couvrent les feuilles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tu as toutes les joies solaires&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Tout le &lt;strong&gt;soleil&lt;/strong&gt; sur la terre&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Sur les chemins de ta beauté.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Paul Éluard (1929). &lt;em&gt;L’Amour la poesie&lt;/em&gt;. Paris: Gallimard.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Guêpes” (wasps) have become the “bee” in the limerick (for reasons of rhyme) and “I wish I were sure it was true” satirizes “les mots ne mentent pas” (the words do not lie).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T20:50:51.617" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T20:50:51.617" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18663" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18660" CreationDate="2021-05-16T20:45:58.080" Score="13" Body="&lt;p&gt;The key phrase is “blue like an orange”. This is from a poem by French &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;surrealist&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_%C3%89luard&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paul Éluard&lt;/a&gt;, published in &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Amour_la_po%C3%A9sie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;L'Amour la poésie&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The poem is somewhat well known in France, and has been analyzed by many, but I've never read it. It may be less well-known in English, although “blue like an orange” does seem to be a somewhat well-known phrase in English as well. Here is my translation of the first stanza. (This is a very literal translation which likely misses some subtext. The original does not rhyme.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earth is blue like an orange&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Never an error words do not lie&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;They no longer give you something to sing&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;It is the kisses' turn to come to agree&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The mad and the loves&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;She her alliance mouth&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All the secrets all the smiles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And what indulging clothes&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;As if she were wholly naked&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The next stanza features wasps, the sun and windows.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T20:45:58.080" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18664" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18665" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'Underworld' (1997) by Don DeLillo. Use with the tag [don-delillo]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T22:18:33.117" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18666" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18557" CreationDate="2021-05-16T22:29:55.553" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;A bit of knowledge about the author and the history and sociology of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritania&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mauritania&lt;/a&gt; provides some important context. Mariem Mint Derwich was born and grew up in Mauritania, then studied and worked in France (source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/506751/la-nostalgie-d-un-islam-apaise-en-mauritanie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Devoir&lt;/a&gt;). She considers her plural identities to be very important. She does not relate to France in the same way that she relates to Mauritania: she says she “sleeps in France, but lives in Mauritania” (source: &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jeuneafrique.com/381770/culture/mauritanie-marieme-derwich-poete-metissage/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Jeune Afrique&lt;/a&gt;). To put it another way, she spends most of her time in France, but she is most emotionally attached to Mauritania.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Her mother was French and the grand-daughter of a Calatan immigrant, and the author herself was “raised by a mixed &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moor&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambara_people&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bambara&lt;/a&gt;” (&lt;a href=&quot;https://traversees-mauritanides.com/articles/afficher/96&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;source&lt;/a&gt;.) Note that Mauritania has a deeply rooted tradition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mauritania&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Moors enslaving darker-skinned people&lt;/a&gt;, so being mixed Moor-Black is highly significant.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This poem is about her attachment to Mauritania. The narrator is the author. “You” is the country, Mauritania: “my country” (or “country mine” to be closer to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/may-2021-writing-from-mauritania-you-will-tell-them-mariem-mint-derwich-emm&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;French original&lt;/a&gt;) in the opening line is the person that the narrator is speaking to (it would be a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;vocative&lt;/a&gt; in languages that have one; French does not have a vocative, but there's no other way to interpret that clause). This is explicit in the last line: “you will become a country within”¹. It is fairly common for poems glorifying a land to be grammatically addressed to that land (for example &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Canada&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“O, Canada”, Canadian national anthem&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Braban%C3%A7onne&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“&lt;em&gt;Ô Belgique&lt;/em&gt;” (&lt;em&gt;La Brabançonne&lt;/em&gt;, Belgian national anthem)&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douce_France_(chanson)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;“&lt;em&gt;Douce France&lt;/em&gt;”&lt;/a&gt; (song by Charles Trénet), …).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The third person singular (“she”, “her”) is “your daughter, daughter among your daughters, daughter among your men”. This is clearly a Mauritanian woman, but not necessarily a generic or idealized Mauritanian woman: there are also references to the author, making the poem a request for the country to tell the story of the author. There are references to intimate details, most of them rather generic if intimate (“the scent of her mother”, “daughter of clouds”, “she has eyes open, your eyes”), but some more specific (“she offered her hands to the cliffs of Amogjjar”, “she is the daughter of encounters, mixed daughter”). I don't know if Amogjjar has any particular cultural or personal significance. “Mixed daughter” has a clear personal significance: it is a reference to the author's plural identities. Having at least French, Moorish and Bambara roots, the author is a “daughter of encounters” in a way most people are not. On the other hand, near the end, she writes “you will tell them, her people, that she sleeps under cemetery stones, in the prayer of those who rest and hope”. This is clearly not a reference to the author. My interpretation — but at this point it is a subjective interpretation, not something I can unambiguously deduce from the text and context — is that the author is projecting her own plural identities onto all Mauritanians, and Mauritanian women in particular, in a message of tolerance and plurality: there isn't a single Mauritanian identity, every Mauritanian should accept other ethnicities and cultures as equally Mauritanian. This would be consistent with the author's message of religious tolerance (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/506751/la-nostalgie-d-un-islam-apaise-en-mauritanie&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Le Devoir&lt;/a&gt;), in favor of freedom for women (&lt;a href=&quot;https://adrar-info.net/?p=50981&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Adrad Info&lt;/a&gt;), and in favor of multiculturality (Moor, subsaharan and French):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If I had one priority, it would be for Mauritania to accept its multiculturality, its role in a Subsaharan and Maghrebi Africa that has eyes set upon it. And France has been there too. Colonization is over, but the legacy is there.   (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jeuneafrique.com/381770/culture/mauritanie-marieme-derwich-poete-metissage/&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in &lt;em&gt;Jeune Afrique&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As for “them”, there are a few places where this is more explicit:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will say to them, to your people,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;you will tell them, her people,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You will inscribe in their blazing gazes, your name,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;my name,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;their names&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Them” is the people of Mauritania, both described as “your people” and “her people” (again highlighting how the author's own diversity should be considered an intrinsic part of the Mauritanian identity).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;¹ &lt;sub&gt; The original French is “&lt;em&gt;tu deviendras pays intime&lt;/em&gt;”, literally “you will become [an] intimate country”. The connotations of &lt;em&gt;intime&lt;/em&gt; are fairly similar to the English “intimate”, and I don't get the English translation. Mind you, I don't really understand the original either. &lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T22:29:55.553" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18667" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18365" CreationDate="2021-05-16T23:31:54.080" Score="9" Body="&lt;p&gt;The interaction between Fogg and Passepartout is based on their contrasting personalities: one is rigid, the other carefree and careless. This contrasts exists regardless of any national stereotype.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fogg's personality has some positive aspects. He's the hero, Passepartout is (in modern terms) the sidekick, the foil. Fogg's accomplishment is the point of the book, and Fogg could have done it without Passepartout (Passepartout helped, but not really more than any of the other people that Fogg paid to help). But no matter how effective Fogg is, he is not portrayed as likable. Passepartout is relatable, Fogg isn't. Obviously that's a matter of subjective perception by the reader, but I don't see how Fogg can be seen to be portrayed in an admiring way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;A semi-textual hint that shows that Fogg's stereotype is not fully positive is that he is English. Verne's national stereotypes are pretty consistent, and fairly mainstream for the France of his time. French people are good, smart and adventurous (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Begum%27s_Fortune&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Begum's Fortune&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, ) if sometimes distracted (Passepartout, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Castaways&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Paganel&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_of_the_Golden_Meteor&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Zéphyrin Xirdal&lt;/a&gt;). Americans are also generally good and industrious if often eccentric (&lt;em&gt;Around the Earth in 80 Days&lt;/em&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;From the Earth to the Moon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;…) (except for Confederates: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Mysterious Island&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texar%27s_Revenge,_or,_North_Against_South&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;North against South&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;).  Russians are good (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Strogoff&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Michel Strogoff&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Scottish people are good or at least normal (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Castaways&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;In Search of the Castaways&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (Ayrton is evil but eventually redeems himself), &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Ray&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Green Ray&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). On the other hand, English characters are generally not wholly positive, although there are exceptions (at least Samuel Fergusson and Joe in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Weeks_in_a_Balloon&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Five Weeks in a Balloon&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). England is France's enemy, after all — I think that in Verne's eyes, it's England, more than the English, that is the enemy (and England itself, not any particular English character, is the enemy in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty_Thousand_Leagues_Under_the_Seas&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). English characters are generally not unambiguously bad, however: the English are rivals of the French rather than evil. In contrast, Germans and Austrians are bad (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Begum%27s_Fortune&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Begum's Fortune&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathias_Sandorf&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Mathias Sandorf&lt;/a&gt;) (but Swiss German are good: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castaways_of_the_Flag&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Castaways of the Flag&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;). Non-Europeans can be diverse: subservient, quaint, cruel but they are almost systematically inferior (Nemo being the only exception I can think of).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Fogg's portrayal is definitely intended as mildly unsympathetic, but only mildly. Whether that's how it comes out is up to the reader.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-16T23:35:40.410" LastActivityDate="2021-05-16T23:35:40.410" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18668" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18669" CreationDate="2021-05-16T23:54:23.837" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, two men were talking about that whoever commits a crime by chance doesn't have a reason to incriminate himself&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Ain’t no ’casion as I knows on for any man or woman to go for to accuse theirselves o’ terrible doings. Wouldn’t be a common-sense thing for anybody as that happened to come for’rard and say as they done it! Ain’t Christian conduck for anybody to walk into a trap wi’ his eyes open, I do reckon.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“’Tis very true!” assented another wiseacre. “Noo—I don’t count as how any &lt;strong&gt;well-disposed&lt;/strong&gt;, law abiding citizen have any call to ’criminate his-self—’tis agin religion and nature, which is &lt;strong&gt;powerful commodities&lt;/strong&gt;. Noo!—I reckon that if Mistress Braxfield done this, accidental like, wi’ that pistol what Bill Carver refer to, she say to herself ‘Well,’ she say, ‘this here is a sad misfortune to happen to me, but I ain’t no call to tell about it,’ she say, and then, of course, she say nothing. That be the way of it—common-sense, like. And we all knows that accidents does happen to the meekest of us!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I have two questions here:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;What does &amp;quot;powerful commodities&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I found that &amp;quot;well-disposed&amp;quot; may mean &amp;quot;friendly, helpful or sympathetic&amp;quot;, so what is the connection between this particular adjective and this attitude? I can, for example, understand the connection between &amp;quot;having a common sense&amp;quot; and this attitude, but I can't get that connection that I ask about. Can it mean &amp;quot;behave well in different situations&amp;quot;?&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T03:25:23.187" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T04:26:48.233" Title="What does &quot;powerful commodities&quot; mean in The Markenmore Mystery?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18669" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18668" CreationDate="2021-05-17T04:26:48.233" Score="2" Body="&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the definitions of &lt;strong&gt;commodity&lt;/strong&gt; is &amp;quot;something useful or valued.&amp;quot; See meaning 2a at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/commodity&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, where the example given is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;that valuable &lt;em&gt;commodity&lt;/em&gt;, patience.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Even more than patience, &lt;strong&gt;religion&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;nature&lt;/strong&gt; are significant forces highly valued in society, so they are &lt;strong&gt;powerful commodities&lt;/strong&gt;. It is worth mentioning that &lt;strong&gt;agin ... nature&lt;/strong&gt; here refers to human nature rather than flora, fauna, and the landscape.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Disposition&lt;/em&gt; means &amp;quot;temperamental makeup&amp;quot;—see definition 1b at &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disposition&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;. The friendliness and helpfulness of &lt;strong&gt;well-disposed&lt;/strong&gt; people is attributed to psychological and emotional soundness. Someone who is well-disposed would not, therefore, voluntarily incriminate themselves, because they'd have too much common sense to do so.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T04:26:48.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18671" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14462" CreationDate="2021-05-17T06:19:53.633" Score="-2" Body="&lt;p&gt;phonetically &amp;quot;Meursault&amp;quot; is the same as &lt;em&gt;meurt sot&lt;/em&gt; meaning &lt;em&gt;dies stupid&lt;/em&gt;. Quite fitting for both stories&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12920" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T06:19:53.633" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18672" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="4840" CreationDate="2021-05-17T06:53:08.280" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is a reference to 1936 (strikes &amp;amp; front populaire) and 1968 (mai 68) social upheavals in France. These 2 dates are commonly referred by the left along 1789 (also mentioned in the song with Robespierre), 1848, 1870.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Qu'elle monte des mines descende des collines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Celle qui chante en moi la belle la rebelle&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Elle tient l'avenir, serré dans ses mains fines&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Celle de trente-six à soixante-huit chandelles&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Ma France&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The French idiom is &amp;quot;voir 36 chandelles&amp;quot; when being hit in the head. But Ferrat's lyrics is about holding the candles, not seeing them, so it's not clear cut. &amp;quot;Chandelles&amp;quot; could also be understood as candles on a birthday cake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Moreover the word &amp;quot;Celle&amp;quot; if singular means the candles refers to France itself (Ma France in the following line), and goes in favor of the anniversary interpretation. If &amp;quot;Celles&amp;quot; was plural (and the ending &amp;quot;s&amp;quot; isn't pronounced in French, so we don't know from the song) the candles would represent the fine hands (fingers) of France (weird and unusual).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I believe both the hit in the head (of the bourgeoisie) and the anniversary are the most likely interpretations of this ambiguous line. Probably both were intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12920" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T04:53:36.427" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T04:53:36.427" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18673" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18655" CreationDate="2021-05-17T08:29:10.063" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;I think it is not referring to a specific German loanword or even an existing loanword. It's rather the requirement of some German loanword that is not an existing loanword in the English language yet (or even in the German language).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The process of achieving this loanword would be then to first find/invent a German word that discribes the feeling of &lt;em&gt;pleasure and dread and suspense&lt;/em&gt; and then make this a loanword to the English language.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This is out of the common conception that the German language is very deep and universal in having a word for even the weirdest combination of feelings, which the English language lacks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The definition of &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/require&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;require&lt;/a&gt; in the Merriam-Webster dictionary has the meaning of &lt;em&gt;to demand as necessary or essential&lt;/em&gt; at 2a. If we then replace &lt;em&gt;require&lt;/em&gt; with &lt;em&gt;need&lt;/em&gt; in the original phrase &lt;em&gt;requiring a German loan-word&lt;/em&gt; the meaning will be more clear. The English language would need a loanword from German that would describe this mixture of feelings.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12925" LastEditorUserId="12925" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T10:56:57.123" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T10:56:57.123" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18674" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-17T08:42:45.233" Score="-3" ViewCount="205" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the ‘Foreword’ to &lt;em&gt;Beloved&lt;/em&gt;, Toni Morrison writes that:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietude of everyday life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must get out of the way.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this novel approach the inadequacy of language for describing the experience and history of enslavement? I'm interested in answers in terms of both form and content, supported by actual passages from the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12926" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T08:49:12.627" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T18:38:50.307" Title="How does Toni Morrison's Beloved approach the inadequacy of language for describing the experience and history of enslavement?" Tags="&lt;toni-morrison&gt;&lt;beloved&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18675" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-17T10:16:51.133" Score="4" ViewCount="49" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Wordsworth’s ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ he describes a “presence”:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                                And I have felt&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A presence that disturbs me with the joy&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of something far more deeply interfused,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the round ocean, and the living air,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;A motion and a spirit, that impels&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;All thinking things, all objects of all thought,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;And rolls through all things.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;William Wordsworth (1798). ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lyricalballads00unkngoog/page/n260/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798&lt;/a&gt;’. In &lt;em&gt;Lyrical Ballads&lt;/em&gt; (2nd edition), volume I, p. 206. London: Longman.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What did Wordsworth mean by this “presence”, “motion” or “spirit”? Did he mean the Christian god? If so, why did he use such oblique language? Or was he alluding to some other philosophical or religious idea?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T10:16:51.133" Title="What is the “presence” in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;william-wordsworth&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18676" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="16675" CreationDate="2021-05-17T11:19:12.640" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;Are you sure it's by Roald Dahl?  That description makes it sound oddly like &amp;quot;They Never Get Caught&amp;quot;, but that's by Margery Allingham and is from 1936.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harold Brownrigg, the villain of the piece, is a chemist and has the strange habit of lying down on his couch every Saturday evening and drinking brandy until he literally cannot move (not because anyone's poisoned him, just because he is so drunk).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I'll quote bits of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://sammicox.wordpress.com/2019/03/26/short-story-review-they-never-get-caught-by-margery-allingham/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;book review by Sammi Cox&lt;/a&gt; for the rest:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Harold Brownrigg is a chemist with a few money problems and a wandering eye.  His wife, Millie, is just dull and stupid, nothing like some of the pretty girls that come into his shop.  But none are so captivating as Phyllis, a young woman half his age.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, Phyllis feels guilty about what they are doing even if he does not, and so decides to end it.  This is too much for Harold, especially when he hears that Phyllis has been seen about town with a younger chap in a flashy car.  It is becoming more and more obvious for Harold that Millie is just a problem he needs to get rid of.  Once he has got rid of her, not only will it clear the way for him to be with Phyllis but he will also be able to get his hands on the money left to Millie by her father.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And so begins the intricate planning of a murder.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It's Harold who is planning to poison his wife.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Favourite Quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Over-dark, round, hot eyes had Mr Brownrigg; not at all the sort of eyes for a little, plump, middle-aged chemist with a placid wife like Millie.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I felt very sorry for poor Millie as I moved through the story.  Harold was extremely cold, even when he felt unnerved by what he was trying to do.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The twist in the tale – which I won’t mention – was very good.  I didn’t expect it, probably because I was too preoccupied by the callous nature of Harold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course, you know what the twist is.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10362" LastEditorUserId="12702" LastEditDate="2021-05-17T15:54:46.570" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T15:54:46.570" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18677" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18678" CreationDate="2021-05-17T19:37:16.583" Score="1" ViewCount="73" Body="&lt;p&gt;In book I of &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sordelloapoem00browgoog/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Sordello&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1840) by Robert Browning, the speaker addresses a group of spirits,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Summoned together from the world’s four ends,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Dropped down from heaven or cast up from hell,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To hear the story I propose to tell.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But one spirit he rejects (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sordelloapoem00browgoog/page/n10/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pp. 3–4&lt;/a&gt;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;                stay—thou, spirit, come not near&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Now—not this time desert thy cloudy place&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;To scare me, thus employed, with that pure face!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;I need not fear this audience, I make free&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;With them, but then this is no place for thee!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The thunder-phrase of the Athenian, grown&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Up out of memories of Marathon,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Would echo like his own sword’s griding screech&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Braying a Persian shield,—the silver speech&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Of Sidney’s self, the starry paladin,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Turn intense as a trumpet sounding in&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;The knights to tilt,—wert thou to hear!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In later editions of the poem (&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/sordellostraffo01browgoog/page/n24/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;for example, the 1864 edition&lt;/a&gt;) Browning added the note “Shelley departing” to this passage, making it clear who is intended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But in the first edition, which lacks the note, how were we intended to guess that the rejected spirit is the poet Shelley?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T19:37:16.583" Title="In &quot;Sordello&quot;, how do we know the rejected spirit is Shelley?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;allusions&gt;&lt;robert-browning&gt;&lt;sordello&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18678" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18677" CreationDate="2021-05-17T19:37:16.583" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Browning gives us two, or maybe three, clues:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“The Athenian” is the Greek playwright &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeschylus&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Aeschylus&lt;/a&gt;, who fought the Persians at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of Marathon&lt;/a&gt; in 490 BCE. Shelley’s verse drama &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/prometheusunboun00shelrich/page/xviii/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prometheus Unbound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1820) takes the title of a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Unbound_(Aeschylus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;lost play&lt;/a&gt;, attributed to Aeschylus, a sequel to the extant &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_Bound&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Prometheus Bound&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. (There is now some doubt over the authorship of &lt;em&gt;Prometheus Bound&lt;/em&gt;, due to differences in vocabulary and theme from the more securely attributed plays of Aeschylus such as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oresteia&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oresteia&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; trilogy, but Browning in 1840 could not have anticipated this.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;The Elizabethan poet &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Sidney&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Philip Sidney&lt;/a&gt; is “starry” because of the pseudonym “Astrophil” (star-lover) he used for his &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrophel_and_Stella&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;sonnet sequence&lt;/a&gt;, and a “paladin” because he was a soldier, dying at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Zutphen&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;battle of Zutphen&lt;/a&gt; in 1586. Shelley’s essay ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/essayslettersfro01shelrich/page/n35/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;A Defence of Poetry&lt;/a&gt;’ (1821) takes its title and subject from Sidney’s &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Defense_of_Poesy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Defense of Poesy&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (1580).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;“Thy cloudy place” perhaps alludes to Shelley’s poem ‘&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/prometheusunboun00shelrich/page/196/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Cloud&lt;/a&gt;’ (1820).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So Browning is referring to the fact that Shelley took models from Aeschylus and Sidney, and suggesting that he &lt;em&gt;improved on them&lt;/em&gt;, making Aesychlus’s original verse seem “griding” (&lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;: “gride, &lt;em&gt;v.&lt;/em&gt; To cut, scrape, or graze … with a strident, grating, or whizzing sound, or so as to cause intense rasping pain”), and Sidney’s elegant prose seem “intense as a trumpet”. Browning’s narrator fears that Shelley would do the same to &lt;em&gt;Sordello&lt;/em&gt;, if he heard it. This is a kind of humblebrag—sure, Browning is saying, I may not be as good as Shelley, but I am in the same class as Aeschylus and Sidney!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T19:37:16.583" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18679" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18657" CreationDate="2021-05-17T20:28:45.110" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;Technically, It doesn't state that the sixty pennies were the only pennies.  There could have been 187 pennies, and &amp;quot;sixty cents of it was in pennies&amp;quot; would be true.  If this assumption is removed, we don't have to spin our wheels over the composition of the other $1.27.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12936" LastActivityDate="2021-05-17T20:28:45.110" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18680" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18682" CreationDate="2021-05-17T23:56:16.473" Score="4" ViewCount="95" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59818/59818-h/59818-h.htm#toc1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Markenmore Mystery&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; (1922) by J. S. Fletcher, the chief constable was talking to a rural woman, saying:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“Now, Mrs. Braxfield, listen to me; we know certain things. You’ve been in the habit of going to that spinney, or round about it, very early of a morning, to have a shot at foxes; the foxes, we hear, have given you trouble about your fowls. Is that so?”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“What if it is?” demanded Mrs. Braxfield. “Do you think I’m going to have my valuable fowls and chickens carried off by foxes? I’m not!—&lt;strong&gt;not for all the hunting men in the country!&lt;/strong&gt; So there! I wish I could shoot every fox that’s running about! As it is, all I’ve done has been to frighten them.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“You can settle your affairs about the foxes with the Master of Foxhounds, Mrs. Braxfield,” said the Chief Constable good-humouredly. “&lt;strong&gt;It’s a truly awful crime to shoot a fox, in the opinion of hunting people&lt;/strong&gt;, but it’s one that doesn’t come within police regulations. But now, Mrs. Braxfield, what did you use in shooting at the foxes? Was it a rifle, or a sporting gun, or a revolver? Or—was it an automatic pistol? Come!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I read in Wikipedia that &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_hunting&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fox hunting&lt;/a&gt; is an activity involving the tracking, chase and, if caught, &lt;strong&gt;the killing of a fox&lt;/strong&gt;, so, how can a hunting man consider that shooting a fox is an awful crime while he himself kills them?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10010" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T00:12:20.450" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T21:18:24.487" Title="How can a hunting man consider that shooting a fox is an awful crime while he himself hunts them?" Tags="&lt;j-s-fletcher&gt;&lt;the-markenmore-mystery&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18681" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="5604" CreationDate="2021-05-18T04:29:00.880" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The assumption in other answers is that &amp;quot;ban&amp;quot; refers to censorship or prohibitions, but it probably refers to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banns_of_marriage&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;marriage bans&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This explains the last line's reference to the marriage hearse, which is, &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/5655/4758&quot;&gt;as suggested by @Peter Shor&lt;/a&gt;, very connected: Blake was an early supporter of open marriage/polyamory. He considered monogamous marriage as legalized prostitution, which relates to the &amp;quot;Harlot's curse.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This also explains &amp;quot;Runs in blood down Palace walls&amp;quot; which could be a reference to the queens killed by King Henry XVIII. Just as Henry wanted to get divorced to produce a male heir, William Blake wanted an open marriage partly because he and his wife were childless.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How does this relate to crying infants? A few possibilities come to mind. First, they might be illegitimate children being raised in poverty or as foundlings. Second, they could be legitimate yet unwanted children who exist due to traditional religious beliefs against birth control. Third, they could be a frustrating reminder to childless couples of their own ability to conceive. This last possibility, of course, could be the truest yet most subconscious one for Blake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12942" LastEditorUserId="4758" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T09:09:09.307" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T09:09:09.307" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18682" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18680" CreationDate="2021-05-18T05:27:27.637" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Because hunters want the joy of the hunt. They want to experience the thrill of the chase, with horses and hounds.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Shooting a fox deprives them of their fun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10684" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T05:27:27.637" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18684" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-18T15:27:57.743" Score="2" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babar_the_Elephant&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babar&lt;/a&gt; is a fictional elephant, featuring in stories by Jean de Brunhoff and later his son. The name &amp;quot;Babar&amp;quot; is similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baba_(honorific)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;baba&lt;/a&gt;, a word originally meaning &amp;quot;father&amp;quot; but used as an honorific in many Asian countries, and also similar to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babur&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Babur&lt;/a&gt;, a Mughal emperor whose name is sometimes transliterated as Babar (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/18632/is-babar-an-african-or-asian-elephant/18661#comment28734_18653&quot;&gt;apparently&lt;/a&gt; the predominance of the name Babur is to avoid confusion with the elephant!), but both of these are names originating in Asia while &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18661/17&quot;&gt;evidence&lt;/a&gt; points (&lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18654/17&quot;&gt;mostly&lt;/a&gt;) to Babar being an African elephant. Slightly less similar to &amp;quot;Babar&amp;quot; is the word &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berbers&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Berber&lt;/a&gt;, used for an ethnic group in parts of Africa that were colonised by France, who prefer to be known as Amazigh people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is the origin of Babar's name?&lt;/strong&gt; Is there any word from the author on how he came up with the name, or evidence from the books or historical/cultural context on what likely inspired it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T20:50:03.470" Title="What inspired Babar's name?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;babar-the-elephant&gt;&lt;jean-de-brunhoff&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18685" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18684" CreationDate="2021-05-18T16:53:24.403" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;First &lt;em&gt;&lt;strong&gt;bébé&lt;/strong&gt; éléphant&lt;/em&gt; (baby elephant), then &lt;em&gt;Babar&lt;/em&gt;, presumably as a corruption.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So captivated was Jean de Brunhoff by the story &lt;strong&gt;his sons related to him that he immediately began to sketch the animal that the family at first called simply bebe elephant. The name Babar came out of nowhere, de Brunhoff said,&lt;/strong&gt; but soon his father was filling a big spiral notebook with whimsical stories and pictures.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1989/12/25/babar-reborn-in-the-usa/af53c4d5-5866-44a4-aa47-69a45d3fd770/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;WaPo - BABAR, REBORN IN THE U.S.A&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;She told us about a little elephant whose mother is killed and he&#xA;escapes to the city, dresses as a human being, and then returns to the&#xA;forest. The next day we repeated the story to my father - a painter at&#xA;that time - he was very excited and started to do a book for us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;He developed the story, added the character of the Old Lady &lt;strong&gt;and&#xA;invented the name Babar because in my mother's story it was Bebe.&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;Sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3602754/Elephants-and-old-masters.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Telegraph Online - Elephants and old masters&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/Sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T20:50:03.470" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T20:50:03.470" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18687" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18680" CreationDate="2021-05-18T19:54:49.530" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Because it's considered unsporting&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Fox hunters don't shoot foxes; they allow foxhounds to chase down the fox and kill it. The fox therefore has a good chance at escaping—at least in theory. It can evade the dogs by going underground or by running into private land whose owner does not permit hunting.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the other hand, a fox has little chance against a gun. This gives fox hunters a rationalization for letting themselves off the hook. Convinced that what they are doing is fair and &amp;quot;sporting,&amp;quot; fox hunters project their own cruelty on to people who shoot foxes for harming chickens, etc.: &amp;quot;See, we're not the criminals! Foxhounds are natural predators of the fox, so what we are doing is just natural! It's the people who &lt;em&gt;shoot&lt;/em&gt; foxes that are cruel and unnatural!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-18T20:14:28.900" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T20:14:28.900" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18688" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18680" CreationDate="2021-05-18T21:18:24.487" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;In the Victorian and Georgian periods, the killing of a fox other than by hunting was considered by many to be tantamount to a crime, de facto, if not de jure (and referred to semi-seriously as 'vulpicide'). Shooting a fox mid-hunt would, in particular, deprive the hunt of its raison d'être and ruin a perfectly good afternoon for a hundred or more people.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that foxes in this period were almost taken to extinction by trapping, poisoning and shooting whereas the huntsmen would often intentionally breed foxes and have them left alone, better to allow the hunt to take place. Without the hunt, the wild fox would be extinct at this point in time.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;An 1862 report of one such incident appeared under the heading ‘Atrocity In The Hunting Field’ as a correspondent who signed himself ‘Bullfinch’ related:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Duke of Rutland’s hounds met on Saturday, the 27,h inst. at Croxton Park and drew Coston Cover where they found a fox starring him towards Buckminster ... but a hard fate awaited him as an individual (it would be libel on the name to call him a man) shot him within two fields of the cover just as the hounds had warmed to their work.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The noble master rode up to the infidel who had hidden the murdered fox in a barn and demanded that poor Reynard should at once be given up, but the assassin, gun in hand, placed his back to the door and swore he would shoot the first man attempting to enter. However, his cowardly threat was held at its worth and the Duke, dismounting, managed to wrest the gun from him...&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was told the fellow’s name is Marshall occupying a farm in the neighbourhood of Buckminster. Such an outrage cannot but obtain for him an unenviable notoriety and I would suggest that every honest man should forthwith ‘send him to Coventry’ ... and thus, by drawing the attention of the sporting world to the outrage, banish the creature from civilised society.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=bJcbd-7pYlkC&amp;amp;pg=PA140&amp;amp;lpg=PA140&amp;amp;dq=%22victorian%22%20%22shooting%20a%20fox%22&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=pG58cTRn04&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U0_uE335NFQSfFfs8s_5pNTwSW6jw&amp;amp;hl=en&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiEvvaij9TwAhVfBGMBHW1MDSkQ6AEwEnoECBAQAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=%22victorian%22%20%22shooting%20a%20fox%22&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Story of Your Life: A History of the Sporting Life Newspaper (1859-1998)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As foxhunters took to breeding foxes, a clear contradiction in the&#xA;rationale of the sport emerged. The hunt was ostensibly there to serve&#xA;the needs of the farmers: it existed to kill the vermin that plagued&#xA;their farms. But the foxhunters also insisted that they alone were&#xA;entitled to kill foxes and woe betide any farmer who dared to take the&#xA;destruction of foxes into his own hands. In the 1820s, a new word&#xA;entered the English language. In that decade, the Sporting Magazine&#xA;began referring to ‘vulpicides’ - by which it meant people who killed&#xA;foxes with utilitarian, rather than sporting, intentions.91 In the&#xA;absence of any legal sanction prohibiting the killing of foxes, a&#xA;social convention emerged, and as the foxhunters assiduously imported,&#xA;bred and reared a new population of foxes, so did they successfully&#xA;implant the notion that vulpicide was a despicable act. The American&#xA;novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, visiting England in the 1850s,&#xA;observed, ‘It seems that killing a fox except in the way of hunting is&#xA;deemed among hunters an unpardonable offence.’ Her observation was&#xA;entirely correct.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;Sub&gt;&lt;sup&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Tc7U15Ab8DwC&amp;amp;q=vulpicide#v=snippet&amp;amp;q=vulpicide&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain Since 1066&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/Sub&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2021-05-18T21:18:24.487" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18689" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-19T06:34:35.140" Score="1" ViewCount="47" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question pertains to Annie Le Brun's &lt;em&gt;Soudain un bloc d'abîme, Sade&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;suddenly a block of abyss, Sade&amp;quot;, published in English translation as &lt;em&gt;Sade: A Sudden Abyss&lt;/em&gt;). What justifies its title?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12506" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T09:12:48.233" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T10:40:45.653" Title="Why is the Marquis de Sade &quot;suddenly a block of abyss&quot;?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;title&gt;&lt;annie-le-brun&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18690" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18689" CreationDate="2021-05-19T10:33:12.663" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Le Brun writes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But since everything begins with &lt;em&gt;The One hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom&lt;/em&gt; and since Sade has chosen to to begin with something that defies all justification, I shall begin by recalling this work – and recalling it insistently.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For it is with this text […] that there first appears that stupefying crystallisation of the blackest possible perspectives which constitutes the universe of Sade. Everything that Sade would subsequently write has elements of this, although nothing previously predicted the appearance, in the mid-Enlightenment, of this block of abyss, even in the intellectual trajectory of the rebellious young Marquis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We do know that in 1785, Sade had already been in prison for seven years – and for the second time – for reasons of “extreme debauch.” We also know that, as early as 1782, he had already given violent expression and firm exposition to his atheistic views in his &lt;em&gt;Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man (Dialogue entre un prêtre et un moribund)&lt;/em&gt;. But none of this can adequately explain the sudden advent of a world which would henceforth disrupt the field of consciousness, and disrupt it absolutely. Nor does it explain the extraordinary discretion of Sade’s critics as to the significance of this event. Maurice Heine mentions it , of course; so does Gilbert Lely. They mention it more often, and much better than the others. But as one gets to know Sade’s thought as one sees it developing – if only chronologically around the mysterious kernel of &lt;em&gt;The One Hundred and Twenty Days&lt;/em&gt;, one cannot help but wonder about the reluctance shown by all his critics when evaluating the real importance of this text in the overall body of his work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And also&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Our horror at reading &lt;em&gt;The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom&lt;/em&gt; further derived from a dizzying derealization accomplished at the cost of an implacable objectification, this objectification in turn being accomplished at the cost of an absolute derealization. Suddenly, we have nothing left to hold onto, not even the uncertain parameters of self-awareness, which has disappeared unnoticed. Sade hurls us into the abyss we naively thought existed between the real and the imaginary, but which turns out to be the unbearable infinity of freedom.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This abyss is a space which fills all space, and from which we cannot ever emerge, since it consists of all that is real being negated by the imaginary, and all that is imaginary, negated by the real. It is an infinite space from which we can never withdraw since we are perpetually present at its mobile center. It is a space infinitely enclosed, or it is an infinity consisting of closed spaces. Either way it is a space into which Sade will never now stop dragging us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So, it is clear that the ‘block of abyss’ is not Sade himself, even if he is the route by which we reach the abyss. The ‘block of abyss’ is the work &lt;em&gt;The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom&lt;/em&gt;. From these quotes it seems that Le Bruin does not regard &lt;em&gt;The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom&lt;/em&gt; as ‘the abyss’ itself, but as an essential artefact by which Sade conveys is to the abyss itself, it is a representation of the whole.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note that the English translation of Le Brun’s book is called &lt;em&gt;Sade: a Sudden Abyss&lt;/em&gt;, while the French original is titled &lt;em&gt;Soudain un bloc d'abîme&lt;/em&gt;. In conflating the two titles into &lt;em&gt;Sade: a Sudden Block of Abyss&lt;/em&gt; you have created an identification of Sade &lt;em&gt;as&lt;/em&gt; the block of abyss which does not precisely appear in either the original title or that if the translation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="333" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T10:40:45.653" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T10:40:45.653" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18691" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18692" CreationDate="2021-05-19T12:28:17.627" Score="0" ViewCount="76" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &amp;quot;Stuart Little&amp;quot; by E.B.White, Stuart was having a conversation with the attendant of a gas station:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Five, please,&amp;quot; said Stuart to the attendant.  The man looked at the&#xA;tiny automobile in amazement. &amp;quot;Five what?&amp;quot; he asked.  &amp;quot;Five drops,&amp;quot;&#xA;said Stuart. But the man shook his head and said that he couldn't sell&#xA;such a small amount of gas.  &amp;quot;Why can't you?&amp;quot; demanded Stuart. &amp;quot;You&#xA;need the money and I need the gas. Why can't we work something out&#xA;between us?&amp;quot;  The filling station man went inside and came back with a&#xA;medicine dropper. Stuart unscrewed the cap of the tank and the man put&#xA;in five drops of gasoline. &amp;quot;I've never done anything like this&#xA;before,&amp;quot; he said.  &amp;quot;Better look at the oil, too,&amp;quot; said Stuart.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does the last sentence &amp;quot;Better look at the oil, too&amp;quot; mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12959" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T12:36:16.063" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T12:41:02.713" Title="What does the last sentence &quot;Better look at the oil, too&quot; mean?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;e-b-white&gt;&lt;stuart-little&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" FavoriteCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18692" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18691" CreationDate="2021-05-19T12:41:02.713" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;This question belongs in mechanics.stackexchange, not literature.stackexchange. :-)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In 1945, when this book was written, cars needed their motor oil filled up every so often, and when you stopped at a gas station to ask the attendant to fill your tank, you sometimes asked them to check the oil to see whether it was low and you needed to buy another quart (or in this case, another drop). I don't know the details ... this is something I remember my father doing when I was a kid in the 1960s.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T12:41:02.713" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18694" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18516" CreationDate="2021-05-19T22:07:08.607" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;“To burn (or light) the candle at both ends” is a metaphor meaning “to consume or waste in two directions at once”, according to the &lt;em&gt;OED&lt;/em&gt;, which gives the citations:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;1736   N. Bailey et al. &lt;em&gt;Dictionarium Britannicum&lt;/em&gt; (ed. 2) (at cited word)   The Candle burns at both Ends. Said when Husband and Wife are both Spendthrifts.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1753   J. Hanway &lt;em&gt;Hist. Acct. Brit. Trade Caspian Sea&lt;/em&gt; II. xlii. 281   Apt to light their candle at both ends; that is to say, they are apt to consume too much, and work too little.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;1848   C. Kingsley &lt;em&gt;Saint’s Trag.&lt;/em&gt; iii. i. 140   To double all your griefs, and burn life's candle, As village gossips say, at either end.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Millay adds a twist to the well-known phrase by pointing out that the doubly lit candle burns twice as brightly. This makes the burning of the candle into a metaphor for any kind of wasteful or self-destructive behaviour &lt;em&gt;which is nonetheless glorious&lt;/em&gt;, if only briefly. The “foes” and the “friends” of the third line both object to this behaviour, the foes out of disapproval, and the friends out of concern, but the speaker ignores them both to pursue her own “ends”.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The candle is thus a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;floating signifier&lt;/a&gt;—there’s nothing in the poem to pin down what it signifies. You can take it as a metaphor for over-work, or drug abuse, or high living, or love affairs, or any kind of spectacular and risky behaviour. And no doubt we could find things in Millay’s own life to which the metaphor applies (though in seeking such correspondences we risk committing the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biographical_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;biographical fallacy&lt;/a&gt;). But I don’t see how the candle can work as a metaphor for bisexuality (as in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://poemanalysis.com/edna-st-vincent-millay/first-fig/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;interpretation by Emma Baldwin&lt;/a&gt; mentioned in the question), because &lt;em&gt;bisexuality is not a kind of wasteful or self-destructive behaviour&lt;/em&gt;. If the idea of bisexuality is present as a result of the wording “both ends”, it’s there as a nuance or subtext.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T22:12:33.730" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T22:12:33.730" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18695" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18657" CreationDate="2021-05-19T22:50:49.800" Score="5" Body="&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Gift of the Magi&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1905. As others have already identified, the US had a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-cent_piece_(United_States)&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;two-cent piece&lt;/a&gt; until 1872 and a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cent_piece&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;three-cent piece&lt;/a&gt; until 1889 (but with much lower production after 1875). The US does not demonetize coins: those coins are still legal for payment today (though I expect that they're worth a lot more than faith value to collectors). A total of 127 cents in non-pennies is possible if it involves two- or three-cent pieces in addition to perhaps higher-value coins.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Two-cent_piece_(United_States)&amp;amp;oldid=1019334858#:%7E:text=withdrawn&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt;, with citations of &lt;em&gt;The Numismatist&lt;/em&gt; &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=PpAUAAAAYAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA239&amp;amp;redir_esc=y&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 1909&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Two-cent_piece_(United_States)&amp;amp;oldid=1019334858#CITEREFFreeman&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;in 1954&lt;/a&gt;, indicates that about one third of the two-cent coins had been repurchased by the treasury by 1909, and that by 1954 “few alive could remember using a two-cent piece”. So in 1905, two-cent pieces would have been somewhat rare already, and this is likely true to some extent of three-cent pieces.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now that we have the context, let's look at the text. This is the opening of the short story, so I expect the author was especially careful when writing it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time (…). Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We're told the amount twice. There's no room for errors or imprecision. There were definitely 60 pennies, not one more.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And apart from the pennies, some of the coins must be of a type that hasn't been minted in a couple of decades. This would have been apparent to a contemporary reader. Della has either been saving for a long time (perhaps not, since later the author tells us that “She had been saving every penny she could for months”), or she's trading with people who've been using small-value coins for a long time. She's not the kind of person who gets crisp notes from the bank.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The explicit and implicit information about the kind of coins Della has participates in making the reader understand that she's poor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="57" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-19T22:56:37.513" LastActivityDate="2021-05-19T22:56:37.513" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18696" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="17070" CreationDate="2021-05-20T10:46:10.350" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;(tl; dr answer at the bottom)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The plight of the rabbits in Cowslip's warren is one of the things that really hit home with me in the book and the adaptations, and the poem helps especially much. I think that yes, it does have very direct connotations to the life in this warren. Here's why:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you said yourself, the rabbits in the Warren of Snares have developed a very specific culture. While Frith, the Sun, is still revered, the values that work for wild rabbits and are embodied by El-Ahrairah - such as free-spiritedness and resourcefulness to avoid death - are forsaken. They are replaced with stoicism, fatalism and dignity to &lt;strong&gt;accept&lt;/strong&gt; death, which make more sense for those in-limbo bunnies that are neither domesticated nor really free. That is why the traditional myths are frowned upon and replaced by other habits, such as the creation of shapes, dancing - and poetry. (In one of the adaptations this is explained by the fact that they &lt;em&gt;“have more time to think&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;. Abstract poetry as means of expression is also the only way the taboo can be addressed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now for the poem. As mentioned, Frith is still revered and El-Ahrairah - still remembered. The poem is not 100% about seasons/circle of life but it does start with spring, progress into autumn and end with death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The first three stanzas are all about longing – we can speculate that it’s longing for freedom and leaving the Warren of Snares. The character of the poem speaks to three of the elements – wind, water and earth – asking to be taken with them and become (free as) them.&#xA;It’s worth noting that all of those dream-escapes are also by death:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;First stanza: &lt;em&gt;“over the edge of the world”, “high over the sky”;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Second stanza: &lt;em&gt;“away in the starlight” “down through the water”;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Third stanza: &lt;em&gt;“into the earth we go, with the rain and berries”&lt;/em&gt; – this is different from the digging into the ground that living rabbits do; the &lt;em&gt;“dark journey”&lt;/em&gt; of the leaves in autumn is the most direct allusion to the rot of a dead body, basically, the poem gets progressively sombre.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The last stanza, for the last element (fire/Frith), encompasses the whole philosophy of dignified fatalism in Cowslip’s warren, where instead of running away from danger, they choose to “live” with it. They mask it as divine will and tell themselves they are happy to abide by it (&lt;em&gt;“For I am ready to give you my breath, my life”&lt;/em&gt;). There is also no more running away or longing for escape (&lt;em&gt;“I am here, I am running through the long grass”&lt;/em&gt;). There is just the acceptance and it’s also implied that this stoic stance elevates the rabbit from a &lt;em&gt;“dropping behind the woods”&lt;/em&gt; to &lt;em&gt;“the shining circle of the sun&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, where both become one - &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;the sun and the rabbit.”&lt;/em&gt;&#xA;To make it even more directly related to the day-to-day life of Cowslip, Silverweed and the rest, we can speculate even further:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that &lt;em&gt;“to give you my breath, my life”&lt;/em&gt; is about suffocating from a snare;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;that &lt;em&gt;“running through the long grass”&lt;/em&gt; is about accepting  death (as&#xA;the long grass can hide a snare);&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;and, that’s quite far-fetched, but still: that the &lt;em&gt;&amp;quot;shining circle&#xA;of the sun&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt; can be compared to the shining circle of a wire.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Obviously, this Frith, “lord Frith” with red clouds about him, is quite different from the one that could take a joke and who blessed El-Ahrairah with the means to run away from death.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hope this makes sense.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The TL; DR answer is: The poem signifies the omnipresent death in the warren and how the rabbits try to view it as a blessing, in order to keep relative sanity. It seems like complete insanity to the outsiders.&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12971" LastEditorUserId="12971" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T10:54:30.343" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T10:54:30.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18697" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-20T12:41:50.330" Score="3" ViewCount="42" Body="&lt;p&gt;The story based in Britain is, as far as I can remember, about a boy who falls asleep on an inflatable tube at sea while on a family holiday to the beach.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He then drifts to a mysterious island whose inhabitants don't know about, or come into contact with, the outside world; he is adopted by the island's chief and his family.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The chief is the main fisherman as the island's hierarchy revolves around fishing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However the chief's son cannot swim, which leads him to bully the boy as he sees the inflatable tube as the answer to his swimming problem.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The book is at least 40 years old.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12975" LastEditorUserId="96" LastEditDate="2021-05-20T13:29:55.277" LastActivityDate="2021-05-20T13:29:55.277" Title="Looking for a children's book about a boy who drifts to a mysterious island on an inflatable tube after being washed out to sea" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18698" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-20T17:58:03.143" Score="-2" ViewCount="82" Body="&lt;p&gt;Ancient Indian cookbooks draw from Ayurvedic scriptures and apply it to everyday cooking. This is very important from the viewpoint of preservation of both health and culture.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are four available such books:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Manollasa 1130 AD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Paka Darpana 1200 AD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Soopa Shastra 1508 AD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Bhojana Kuthuhala 1675 AD&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Are there online PDF English translations of these above books? If so, please provide links to such translations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Note this a crosspost from &lt;a href=&quot;https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/q/46418&quot;&gt;Hinduism Stack Exchange&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12977" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-21T04:07:49.543" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:09:38.313" Title="Are there online ebooks of English translations of these ancient Indian cookbooks?" Tags="&lt;sanskrit-literature&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18700" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18701" CreationDate="2021-05-21T02:22:18.470" Score="3" ViewCount="147" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am researching the light novel series &lt;em&gt;Baccano!&lt;/em&gt; authored by 成田良悟 &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ry%C5%8Dgo_Narita&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;(Narita Ryōgo)&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't been able to find out who the translator(s) is/are. Especially for  &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Baccano_Vol_5_light_novel/1veWDgAAQBAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=0&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Vol. 5 (light novel): 2001 The Children of Bottle&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2500" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-21T03:25:32.607" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T04:00:13.583" Title="Who translated the Baccano! series into English?" Tags="&lt;translation&gt;&lt;japanese-literature&gt;&lt;narita-ryogo&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18701" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18700" CreationDate="2021-05-21T03:53:28.760" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;Taylor Engel&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The official translations of the series are done by &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.novelupdates.com/series/baccano/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Taylor Engel&lt;/a&gt;. Here are &lt;a href=&quot;https://baccano.fandom.com/wiki/2001_The_Children_of_Bottle&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/people.php?id=112877&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.theoasg.com/reviews/light-novel/baccano-2001-children-bottle-review/6462&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://englishlightnovels.com/2016/06/01/baccano/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;4&lt;/a&gt; more supporting links, since I'm not sure what would count as proper/official evidence. Everyone I've found agrees on this. Engel is the only official translator for the series, which includes the fifth light novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, note I did say &lt;em&gt;official&lt;/em&gt; translations. There are &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.reddit.com/r/Baccano/comments/bc0tai/do_you_guys_prefer_the_fan_or_official/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;fan translations&lt;/a&gt; of the series, of varying quality, different in some ways from the official ones. The linked Reddit post has a list of various pros/cons. I've quoted three here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The official translations are less liberal with profanity/curse words than the fan translations are--which is to say, the fan TLs are more sweary. This is just an observation on my part, not a 'for' or 'against'; the JP language doesn't really 'do' swearing, you see, so it's usually up to a translator's discretion when it comes to using them.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;I really appreciate Engel's efforts to incorporate period slang/vernacular; yes, it's something you'd expect at minimum for anything w/a period setting, but if people can praise the 2007 anime English dub for its use of slang than so can I this.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;There's only one thing so far for which I'll never accept the official translation version, and that's Ronny's catchphrase (maa, iie in Japanese). Engel translates it as &amp;quot;Well, never mind,&amp;quot; but &amp;quot;Well, no matter&amp;quot; is forever superior and YP can pry it from my cold dead hands.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Not all the light novels are officially translated yet, as far as I can tell. They've at least translated 15, according to the link numbered &amp;quot;4&amp;quot; in my list at the top.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-21T04:00:13.583" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T04:00:13.583" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18702" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18558" CreationDate="2021-05-21T16:19:22.267" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;There's an &lt;a href=&quot;https://comics.ha.com/itm/original-comic-art/panel-pages/dave-berg-mad-s-dave-berg-looks-at-modern-thinking-panel-page-original-art-group-of-4-signet-books-1969-everything-wa/a/15124-16377.s&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;old auction listing for the original art&lt;/a&gt; at  which gives the book as &amp;quot;Mad's Dave Berg Looks at Modern Thinking&amp;quot;, 1969, p.122-125. It appears to suggest the art was created for the book rather than previously appearing in a magazine.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mxM2p.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/mxM2p.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;The scene described in the question, ending &amp;quot;How should I know?&amp;quot;&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12983" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-21T16:38:01.573" LastActivityDate="2021-05-21T16:38:01.573" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18703" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T06:18:18.590" Score="3" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;After the unexpected success I had with my &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/18558/289&quot;&gt;previous identification question regarding a Mad cartoon by Dave Berg&lt;/a&gt;, I feel emboldened to ask another. I remember very few details, but it's something like this: Two men are having a conversation. One man is complaining to the other that the neighborhood is being taken over by hippies and damn foreigners. The other man tries to reason with the first, quoting &amp;quot;Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher&amp;quot; as an authority. The first man shoots back: &amp;quot;Greek? Another damn foreigner!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All I'm really sure of is the punchline: that Aristotle is a damn foreigner. I may have gotten the details of the setup wrong. For example, the man might have been complaining about something other than the shift in neighborhood demographics. The art was simple black and white drawings as in the previous cartoon.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The strip, like the one I asked about earlier, was from a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Berg_(cartoonist)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Dave Berg&lt;/a&gt; Lighter Side &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lighter_Side_of...&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;collection&lt;/a&gt; that probably appeared in the late 60s or 1970s. I read it in the early 80s. I had assumed that those strips originally ran in Mad magazine, but even though they had the magazine's logo prominently on the front cover, the paperbacks were actually original collections, as the &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/a/18702/289&quot;&gt;answer&lt;/a&gt; to my earlier question noted.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T07:41:38.097" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T07:41:38.097" Title="Mad Magazine comic strip about the philosopher Aristotle being a &quot;damn foreigner&quot;" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;comics&gt;&lt;dave-berg&gt;&lt;mad-magazine&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18704" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12150" CreationDate="2021-05-22T07:15:35.673" Score="3" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;epilogue&lt;/strong&gt;: From &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/epilogue&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Merriam-Webster&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;a concluding section that rounds out the design of a literary work.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;More than you wanted to know&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Anything that follows the main portion of a text is called &lt;strong&gt;end matter&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;back matter&lt;/strong&gt;. My understanding is that the former term is more prevalent in the UK, the latter in the US.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;End matter can include one or more of the following, usually in this order:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Postface&lt;/strong&gt;, explanatory material about a book's purpose, plan, or editorial history; akin to a &lt;em&gt;preface&lt;/em&gt; but placed at the end rather than the beginning, and sometimes called an &lt;strong&gt;author's note&lt;/strong&gt; or &lt;strong&gt;afterword&lt;/strong&gt; (cf. &lt;em&gt;foreword&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Appendices&lt;/strong&gt; that provide additional information; for example, the data sets used for the analysis that forms the main portion of the book&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Endnotes&lt;/strong&gt;, comments placed at the end of the book rather than as &lt;em&gt;footnotes&lt;/em&gt; at the bottom of the page.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Glossary&lt;/strong&gt;, an explanation of difficult or unusual words such as technical terms or words taken from a foreign language&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Bibliography&lt;/strong&gt; or a list of references used&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Index&lt;/strong&gt; or a list of topics with page references to where those topics can be found in the main portion of the book.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Of course a graphic novel or comic is unlikely to have endnotes, a glossary, a bibliography, or an index. With regard to the specific examples you have given, the pages which expand on the lore would be a postface or an appendix, depending on whether the author is explaining some details in the first person (postface) or whether the material is a non-essential expansion of the story (appendix). Since a graphic novel is a creative work rather than an academic or scholarly one, this kind of appendix is more specifically called an &lt;strong&gt;epilogue&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Author biographies, on the other hand, are simply author biographies and may appear in any number of places: cover flaps for hardcover books, back cover, at the end of the book, on the verso page behind the title page, etc. There is no special term for them if they appear at the end rather than elsewhere. Where they are placed depends on the book design and/or the convention followed by the  publisher.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The terms end matter and back matter correspond to the term used for the preface, table of contents, etc. that appear before the main portion of the book: &lt;strong&gt;front matter&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T07:33:06.273" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T07:33:06.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18705" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T10:04:13.477" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;Robert Ronnow has a lot of poetry on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;his website&lt;/a&gt;, and this question is about &amp;quot;East Harlem to the Grand Tetons&amp;quot;, a poem from his collection &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.ronnowpoetry.com/BDf.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Brother Death&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, which the poet makes freely available online while reserving copyright. (I won't reproduce the whole poem here, but you can see it at the link above: it's just 15 lines long.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is this poem about?&lt;/strong&gt; The specific locations mentioned are all in the US (&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Harlem&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;East Harlem&lt;/a&gt; in New York City, the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nps.gov/grte/index.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Grand Tetons&lt;/a&gt; a mountain range in Wyoming, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triborough_Bridge&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Triborough Bridge&lt;/a&gt; again in New York City), but the poem also mentions two famous figures of Japanese and Chinese literature: &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matsuo_Bash%C5%8D&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bashō&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bai_Juyi&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Po Chü-i&lt;/a&gt;. Is the narrator using these poets as inspiration for their own life, and what is the connection or significance of these particular figures? The first stanza says &amp;quot;Desperate to get out and never return&amp;quot;, but the last stanza says &amp;quot;You can leave [and] return without being seen&amp;quot; - is this a contradiction or character development? The second stanza says &amp;quot;my death, I did it my way&amp;quot; - does this suggest the narrator is dead and looking back on their life? What is the meaning of &amp;quot;freedom to have never been&amp;quot; at the end of the poem?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T10:04:13.477" Title="Robert Ronnow's &quot;East Harlem to the Grand Tetons&quot;" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;interpretation&gt;&lt;robert-ronnow&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18706" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18708" CreationDate="2021-05-22T15:22:14.777" Score="4" ViewCount="2218" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘She was wearing these daggy flares,’ said Elizabeth, ‘with embroidered&#xA;insets.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I got my hand jammed between two speaker boxes,’ said Philip. ‘My&#xA;finger burst like a sausage.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You know?’ said Vicki. ‘One of those horror movies where she drives up&#xA;to this house and gets dismembered?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I got to Reno on the bus at eight o’clock in the morning,’ said Philip.&#xA;People were stumbling about the streets in full evening dress.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘&lt;strong&gt;She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip&lt;/strong&gt;,’ said Elizabeth. ‘&lt;strong&gt;You&#xA;could not by any stretch of the imagination drum up feelings of sisterhood&#xA;for her.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I search on the net about the meaning of &amp;quot;parsnip&amp;quot; and I find this:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;To have a parsnip&lt;/strong&gt; mean &amp;quot;something that gives you much happiness&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does the whole phrase in bold mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She was very happy and active that you never feel sorry for her?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;She could make a good and happy friend that being with her make you happy and because of that you never feel pity for her and never thought of her as if she is your sister?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T15:33:08.400" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T16:01:48.623" Title="Meaning of &quot;She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18707" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T15:26:01.287" Score="2" ViewCount="39" Body="&lt;p&gt;A fact frequently mentioned about Jeff Nuttall's book &lt;em&gt;Bomb Culture&lt;/em&gt; (1968) is that it was the subject of a discussion in Parliament, e.g. in &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.staffnet.manchester.ac.uk/news/events-activities/display/?id=16982&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;an article announcing a Nuttall exhibition at a library&lt;/a&gt;&#xA;or in &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.de/books?id=tYpWDwAAQBAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA90&amp;amp;lpg=PA90&amp;amp;dq=nuttall%20%22bomb%20culture%22%20parliament&amp;amp;source=bl&amp;amp;ots=t2yWbyHbta&amp;amp;sig=ACfU3U1c3IQ2YdMWaV_AkZ5q_6k6yAmKcw&amp;amp;hl=de&amp;amp;sa=X&amp;amp;ved=2ahUKEwiBvs29yt3wAhVGh_0HHSRiCzEQ6AEwEXoECAcQAw#v=onepage&amp;amp;q=nuttall%20%22bomb%20culture%22%20parliament&amp;amp;f=false&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;British Terrorist Novels of the 1970s&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hansard's records of the debates from the House of Commons and the House of Lords can be &lt;a href=&quot;https://hansard.parliament.uk/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;viewed and searched online&lt;/a&gt;. I haven't been able to find a debate where Nuttall's book is mentioned. I'd be grateful for any help finding the debate that discussed &lt;em&gt;Bomb Culture&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12849" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T15:59:47.140" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T15:59:47.140" Title="Where was Jeff Nuttall's &quot;Bomb Culture&quot; discussed in Parliament?" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;bomb-culture&gt;&lt;jeff-nuttall&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18708" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18706" CreationDate="2021-05-22T15:53:27.067" Score="31" Body="&lt;p&gt;I don't think &amp;quot;to have a parsnip&amp;quot; is at all related to the meaning here. Rather, this is figurative language. These are parsnips:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g1r4em.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/g1r4em.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;white, long, vaguely cone-shaped parsnips&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;As you can see, parsnips do not have any color. They aren't particularly interesting or &amp;quot;dynamic&amp;quot; either. Since parsnips have no color or dynamism, &amp;quot;all the color and dynamism of a parsnip&amp;quot; is precisely none. A re-write of the sentence which adds in the implied meaning:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip, that is to say, none at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/color&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;color&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is used figuratively. Instead of in the sense of &amp;quot;a phenomenon of light (such as red, brown, pink, or gray)&amp;quot; (definition 1a), it is in the sense of &amp;quot;vitality, interest&amp;quot; (definition 9). Someone who &lt;em&gt;lacks color&lt;/em&gt; would be someone who has a boring personality, and is uninteresting to be around. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dynamic&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Dynamic&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is used in the sense of &amp;quot;energetic, forceful&amp;quot; (definition 1b). Someone who &lt;em&gt;lacks dynamism&lt;/em&gt; would be someone who does not exhibit/have energy or force of personality. All together, this describes &amp;quot;She&amp;quot; as a person who is boring and dull.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This makes sense when considered with the other part of the description:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You could not by any stretch of the imagination drum up feelings of sisterhood for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Someone who is &lt;em&gt;that boring&lt;/em&gt;, who lacks &amp;quot;dynamism&amp;quot; and the metaphorical &amp;quot;color&amp;quot; of life and personality, would be someone who is hard to love, as there is nothing interesting about them to appreciate. This sentence is emphatically saying that it is &lt;em&gt;impossible&lt;/em&gt; (&amp;quot;not by any stretch of the imagination&amp;quot;) to produce, even with effort (&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/drum%20up&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;drum up&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt;) a feeling of affection or sisterhood for her.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11259" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-22T16:01:48.623" LastActivityDate="2021-05-22T16:01:48.623" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18709" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-22T17:35:53.853" Score="6" ViewCount="84" Body="&lt;p&gt;Why are the sonnets 35 and 83 the same in Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;? I was on &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html&quot; rel=&quot;noreferrer&quot;&gt;luminarium.org&lt;/a&gt; when I spotted it. Except the italicized &amp;quot;Narcissus&amp;quot; in 35 and the regular font of the same in 83 and poor being spelled as &lt;em&gt;pore&lt;/em&gt; in the former and &lt;em&gt;poore&lt;/em&gt; in later and maybe a few minor things, I am sure that they're the same. I checked on a few other sites by the sonnet numbers and they're the same and no information about, nor reason behind the &lt;em&gt;why&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I didn't mention anything about whether putting 35 in 83's place actually goes, it sort of does, but this is my first sonnet cycle.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12360" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T02:34:20.980" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T07:58:17.777" Title="Why is Sonnet 35 of Spenser's Amoretti repeated as Sonnet 83 later in the sequence?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;edmund-spenser&gt;&lt;amoretti&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="8" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18711" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-23T16:08:16.457" Score="-1" ViewCount="48" Body="&lt;p&gt;What is a good translation of Dostoevsky's &lt;em&gt;The Brothers Karamazov&lt;/em&gt;? I mean one which is generally preferred and taught in most universities the world over.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If even that doesn't make things clear, imagine a great American writer (could be anyone, but let's say Thomas Pynchon) walking into a bookstore. Which translation would he prefer?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12179" LastEditorUserId="12179" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T17:37:16.170" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:37:16.170" Title="Which is the best translation of The Brothers Karamazov?" Tags="&lt;russian-literature&gt;&lt;translation&gt;&lt;fyodor-dostoyevsky&gt;&lt;the-brothers-karamazov&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="6" ClosedDate="2021-05-23T18:35:40.993" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18712" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="6102" CreationDate="2021-05-23T17:05:25.657" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;As I mentioned in a comment, answering this question basically involves &lt;strong&gt;spoiling&lt;/strong&gt; most of the plot - presumably you've long since finished reading the book, so I mention this for the sake of anyone else reading this post. Basically the answer is &lt;strong&gt;yes&lt;/strong&gt;, although some closely related issues, on which follow-up questions could be asked, are possibly more interesting and reliant on deeper readings of the book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;When he takes the book and starts reading it, Bastian assumes the title means it's a story that he can keep reading forever. We've all heard about gripping stories that &amp;quot;pull us in&amp;quot; as readers, but Bastian could hardly have expected that this story would &lt;em&gt;literally&lt;/em&gt; pull him in, that he'd become a key part of the world it describes, and even responsible for rebuilding that world from his own imagination. That's how it's really a Neverending Story: &lt;strong&gt;the reader gets pulled into the world of the story, becomes a part of it&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In Bastian's case, one might say that the story does end, just like the book that you and I read: he comes out of Fantastica and resumes his life outside of the story. But even the story that we read is &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/6055/17&quot;&gt;not completely finished&lt;/a&gt; - there are many loose strands which could be picked up to weave entire new stories. Perhaps, for a sufficiently motivated and creative reader, the book that we read is itself a Neverending Story that could suck us in to finishing those unfinished parts of the story, contributing to creating some parts of Fantastica ourselves, in a sort of &lt;a href=&quot;https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/6154/17&quot;&gt;metaphorical version&lt;/a&gt; of Bastian's literal journey into the world of Fantastica. Also, on a darker note, many of the people like Bastian inside the story - people from our world who came to Fantastica by entering the Neverending Story - really do find it neverending: they reach the City of Old Emperors and never manage to escape from Fantastica, losing their memories and becoming wrecks.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So yes, the title of the book means more than Bastian realises at the beginning. The book he's reading has the power to draw him physically (or metaphysically?) into another universe, and the potential to leave him trapped and insane in that universe forever. Perhaps the same title of the book that we read means more than we realised too ...&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T17:05:25.657" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18713" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-23T17:10:43.803" Score="4" ViewCount="75" Body="&lt;p&gt;Apart from being triply alliterative (BBB), what is the significance of the name &lt;strong&gt;Bastian Balathazar Bux&lt;/strong&gt; (or &lt;strong&gt;Bastian Balthasar Bux&lt;/strong&gt; in the German original), the protagonist of &lt;em&gt;The Neverending Story&lt;/em&gt;? &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balthazar_(magus)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Balthasar&lt;/a&gt; was one of the biblical Magi (Three Wise Men), Bastian reminds me of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;bastion&lt;/a&gt; which is apparently &lt;a href=&quot;https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the same word in German&lt;/a&gt;, and I've no idea about Bux. Surely, in a story as carefully crafted and multiply layered as this one, the main character's name will be carefully chosen to have some special significance.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T19:27:57.210" Title="What is the significance of the name Bastian Balthazar Bux?" Tags="&lt;name-significance&gt;&lt;german-literature&gt;&lt;michael-ende&gt;&lt;the-neverending-story&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18714" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-23T19:21:55.733" Score="1" ViewCount="59" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I got my hand jammed between two speaker boxes,’ said Philip. ‘&lt;strong&gt;My finger burst like a sausage.&lt;/strong&gt;’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You know?’ said Vicki. ‘One of those horror movies where she drives up to this house and gets dismembered?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I got to Reno on the bus at eight o’clock in the morning,’ said Philip. ‘People were stumbling about the streets in full evening dress.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘She had all the colour and dynamism of a parsnip,’ said Elizabeth. ‘You could not by any stretch of the imagination drum up feelings of sisterhood for her.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘We’ve got a rabbit in a cage,’ said Arthur.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I walked in to our first gig,’ said Philip, ‘and they were sticking red cellophane over the lights. I thought, Oh no.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘I went through centuries of torture,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I’d emerge exhausted from the Crusades and the Black Death only to realise that &lt;strong&gt;I still had to drag myself through the entire Spanish Inquisition. I never touched it again&lt;/strong&gt;.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;My finger burst like a sausage&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;My finger became rounder and bigger than normal and like fried sausage after became bigger it was cut&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And does &amp;quot;I still had to drag myself through the entire Spanish Inquisition. I never touched it again&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;I still had to drag myself through the movies that was about Spanish Inquisition. And I gave such works up for ever&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Or is &amp;quot;Spanish Inquisition&amp;quot; used figuratively and the sentence means: I still had  to respond a lot of questions?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-23T20:03:18.570" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T02:11:12.580" Title="Meaning of &quot;My finger burst like a sausage&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="5" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18715" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-23T20:50:13.727" Score="0" ViewCount="24" Body="&lt;p&gt;There are a number of projects collecting out of copyright literary works and making them available for download, e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.bibebook.com/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bibebook&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Many of these books would benefit from annotation (e.g. footnotes clarifying details that would have been obvious to contemporary readers, but which would be obscure to most people nowadays).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Is there an internet project, somewhat akin to &lt;a href=&quot;https://wikipedia.org&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia&lt;/a&gt; where readers can collaborate to provide annotations and explanations to classic texts?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1032" LastActivityDate="2021-05-23T22:30:50.810" Title="Is there a project for annotating e-books?" Tags="&lt;historical-context&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18717" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18714" CreationDate="2021-05-24T02:11:12.580" Score="2" Body="&lt;h3&gt;Sausages explode open when overcooked. Their finger was torn open and mangled.&lt;/h3&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Sausages are composed of ground meat stored inside a tube-shaped casing; historically this was animal intestine, but modern-day sausages are often cooked inside artificially-produced casings, instead. When a sausage gets overcooked, often the meat within will expand until the casing ruptures, and the insides of the sausage spill forth. A fairly straight-forward way to see this happen is to take some hot dogs (precooked sausages) and drop them in boiling water until their casings burst.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By saying that their finger &amp;quot;burst like a split sausage&amp;quot;, they're saying that their finger was mangled and crushed, with lots of gory chunks of meat exposed.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7450" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T02:11:12.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18718" PostTypeId="1" AcceptedAnswerId="18719" CreationDate="2021-05-24T03:29:06.160" Score="7" ViewCount="754" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm reading a book out loud and it sometimes uses &amp;quot;f.&amp;quot; and other times &amp;quot;ff.&amp;quot; during references like: &amp;quot;(Harding, 274f.)&amp;quot; and other times there would be an &amp;quot;ff.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I've learned that that is an abbreviation from the Latin &amp;quot;folio&amp;quot; meaning pages that follow. And &amp;quot;f.&amp;quot; means specifically a given section or chapter or what have you. And &amp;quot;ff.&amp;quot; is less specific, meaning any number of pages that follow. Also, they are no longer recommended. Exact page number ranges should be used instead.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I would like to differentiate between the two in the audio format. Do you know of any way of pronouncing the difference? If there is no difference I'll just say the letter names instead of folio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12994" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T22:53:28.250" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T22:53:28.250" Title="What is the difference in pronunciation between the two types of folio abbreviations: f. and ff.?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;" AnswerCount="3" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18719" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18718" CreationDate="2021-05-24T04:33:59.600" Score="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;Since &lt;strong&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt; is singular (referring to one chapter or section) while &lt;strong&gt;ff&lt;/strong&gt; is plural (referring to multiple pages), you could try &lt;strong&gt;folio&lt;/strong&gt; for the former and &lt;a href=&quot;https://english.stackexchange.com/q/348532/37040&quot;&gt;&lt;strong&gt;folios&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/a&gt; for the latter. But it would be easier for the listener if you would say &amp;quot;Section/Chapter beginning on page [whatever]&amp;quot; for the former and &amp;quot;Page [whatever] and following&amp;quot; for the latter.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Think of it by analogy with &lt;strong&gt;e.g.&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saying the letters &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; would be like spelling out &amp;quot;e.g.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saying &amp;quot;folio&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;folios&amp;quot; would be like saying &amp;quot;exempli gratia&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Saying &amp;quot;Section/Chapter beginning on page [whatever]&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Page [whatever] and following&amp;quot; would be like saying &amp;quot;for example.&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Either of the first two would be odd and confusing. The last is what the listener of the audiobook would expect. After all, &lt;strong&gt;f&lt;/strong&gt; and &lt;strong&gt;ff&lt;/strong&gt;, like &amp;quot;e.g.,&amp;quot; are typographical conventions, not representations of the sound of words.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T04:33:59.600" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18720" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14149" CreationDate="2021-05-24T07:49:05.710" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The origin of &amp;quot;Angel of Music&amp;quot; as pertaining to the Phantom are back in Christine's childhood. The references are all to the original Gaston Leroux's novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;Chapter V &amp;quot;The Enchanted Violin&amp;quot;&lt;/em&gt;, we first learn that Christine have beend told the tales of the The Angel of Music from her father:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun's rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to her doll, took great care of her frock and her little red shoes and her fiddle, but most of all loved, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;and&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The Angel of Music played a part in all Daddy Daae's tales; and he maintained that &lt;strong&gt;every great musician, every great artist received a visit from the Angel at least once in his life&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him. He often comes when they least expect him, when they are sad and disheartened. Then their ears suddenly perceive celestial harmonies, a divine voice, which they remember all their lives. Persons who are visited by the Angel quiver with a thrill unknown to the rest of mankind. And they can not touch an instrument, or open their mouths to sing, without producing sounds that put all other human sounds to shame. &lt;strong&gt;Then people who do not know that the Angel has visited those persons say that they have genius&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;More importantly, her father told her:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;You will hear him one day, my child! When I am in Heaven, I will send him to you!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This made an impression on her, and when Erik started teaching her, &lt;strong&gt;she assumed he was the Angel her father promised her before he died&lt;/strong&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Listen, Raoul. I have decided to tell you something serious, very serious ... Do you remember the legend of the Angel of Music?&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;I do indeed,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I believe it was here that your father first told it to us.&amp;quot;&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&amp;quot;And it was here that he said, 'When I am in Heaven, my child, I will send him to you.' Well, Raoul, my father is in Heaven, and I have been visited by the Angel of Music.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Now, as to why he calls Christine &amp;quot;Angel&amp;quot; in the musical, there are two reasons:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;First, he sees Christine as angelic, from the source book (Chapter XXVI &amp;quot;The End of the Ghost's Love Story&amp;quot;):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You're crying, too, daroga ... and she cried also ... &lt;strong&gt;the angel cried&lt;/strong&gt;! ...&amp;quot; Erik sobbed aloud and the Persian himself could not retain his tears in the presence of that masked man, who, with his shoulders shaking and his hands clutched at his chest, was moaning with pain and love by turns.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Additionally, she inspired his music, just like the &amp;quot;Angel of Music&amp;quot; of the tales&lt;/strong&gt; - which is probably the significance you seek.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T07:43:01.727" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T07:43:01.727" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18721" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-24T07:54:22.977" Score="3" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;How many people did the Phantom of the Opera kill?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How many people were confirmed as killed by Erik explicitly, either through narration or explicit witness testimomy?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;How many people were there whose deaths were attributed to Erik without evidence proving his innocence (or word of god doing so), like Joseph Buquet.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;I am only interested in events around Opera House - the question's scope excludes his earlier life before he became the Opera Ghost. Also, Leroux's book only - I'm not interested in the musical or other derived works.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="31" LastEditorUserId="17" LastEditDate="2021-05-24T08:02:17.367" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T08:02:17.367" Title="How many people did the Phantom of the Opera kill?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;the-phantom-of-the-opera&gt;&lt;gaston-leroux&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18722" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18709" CreationDate="2021-05-24T12:33:41.307" Score="8" Body="&lt;h2&gt;tl;dr&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Believing that the &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; is very carefully constructed, Spenser scholars argue that the repetition recontextualizes Sonnet 35 such that what was merely lust in that sonnet is transformed to divine love in Sonnet 83. But if you ask me, it's probably just a printing mistake.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;Deets&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Edmund Spenser published his sonnet sequence &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; in 1595. The printer was &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Ponsonby_(publisher)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;William Ponsonby&lt;/a&gt;. The &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858009575899&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;volume&lt;/a&gt; also contained &lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858009575899&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=112&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;nine brief poems&lt;/a&gt; that have come to be called &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anacreontics&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Anacreontics&lt;/a&gt; and the much longer marriage poem &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858009575899&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=121&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Epithalamion&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; Right from that first printing, Sonnet 83 in the sequence has repeated Sonnet 35 with only one notable difference, a single changed word in Line 6:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For lacking it they cannot life sustain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;having&lt;/em&gt; it they gaze on it the more:         (35.5–6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;For lacking it they cannot life sustain,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;and &lt;em&gt;seeing&lt;/em&gt; it they gaze on it the more:         (83.5–6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aside from this one change, the variations between the two sonnets are minor.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The simplest explanation is that the sonnet was inadvertently repeated, either because Spenser mistakenly included it twice in the manuscript sent to the printer, or because of a printing error. J. W. Lever &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/elizabethanloves00leverich/page/99/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;argues&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whatever Spenser's intentions were, there are unmistakable signs of haste and botching in the little 1595 volume containing &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;Epithalamion&lt;/em&gt;. Spenser was in Ireland at the time, and Ponsonby was given far too much of a free hand. The edition abounded in printer's errors, both of spelling and punctuation. ... Most striking of all was the printing of two versions of the same sonnet, differing in only one word, as nos. XXXV and LXXXIII. Perhaps the &amp;quot;hasty accidents&amp;quot; mentioned at the end of &lt;em&gt;Epithalamion&lt;/em&gt; had something to do with this muddle; perhaps the manuscripts were disarranged in transit. Certainly we are not obliged to treat the printed edition as definitive or immutable.          (p. 100–101)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The assumption that the repetition was unintentional has led some editors to &lt;a href=&quot;https://fullonlinebook.com/poems/amoretti-sonnet-83/luiz.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;leave out Sonnet 83&lt;/a&gt; from the sequence, renumbering the original sonnets 84–89 accordingly. However, this view is not widely shared. Many scholars hold that &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; is a carefully patterned sequence that models the liturgy. For example, Kenneth J. Larsen claims:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The eighty-nine sonnets of the &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;, as numbered in the 1595 octavo edition, were written to correspond with consecutive days, beginning on Wednesday, 23 January 1594 and running, with one interval, through to Friday 17 May 1594: they correspond with the daily and sequential order of scriptural readings that are prescribed for those dates by the liturgical calendar of the Church of England.         (p. 3)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;On the basis of such numerological sequencing of the sonnets in &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;, critics have argued that the repetition of Sonnet 35 as Sonnet 83 cannot be accidental, and that Spenser must have intended readers to reinterpret the sonnet in a new context.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conventions of Petrarchan sonnets furnish this context. Over the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Canzoniere&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Rime Sparse&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, the 14th C. collection that served as the pattern for sonnet sequences in the English Renaissance, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Petrarch&lt;/a&gt;'s love for Laura moves from the physical to the spiritual plane. His desire for Laura becomes a desire for union with the divine. Laura's unattainability after her death becomes both the spur for the turn to the divine, and an emblem of the difficulty of achieving this union. Petrarchan conventions become a way to ascend what is called the Neoplatonic ladder. As Alexander Dunlop explains:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Neoplatonists held that as all beauty emanates from the One, with Whom the soul longs to reunite, earthly love may lead us upward to a contemplative or angelic love.         (p. 588)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Scholars therefore claim that Sonnet 35 deals with earthly love, while Sonnet 83 lifts that love up into the realm of the divine. Reed Way Dasenbrock &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/462199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;says&lt;/a&gt; that in &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;, the bridge between these two realms is holy matrimony:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spenser in the way he ends the &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; is recovering ... Petrarch's ideal of a transcendent rest at the end of love and at the end of a cycle of love poems. Both locate that ideal in the Lady and Heaven, and they seek to fuse the two. The only way Petrarch can fuse them is in death, whereas Spenser fuses them in marriage.         (p. 46)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Spenser's sequence is typically interpreted as marking the poet's courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, with their marriage celebrated in &amp;quot;Epithalamion.&amp;quot; The sacrament of marriage transforms sexual desire from mere lust to the emblem and fulfillment of a sacred bond. Sonnet 35 represents the poet's desire when he is unenlightened and his lady unattainable. Over the course of the sequence, though, the lady educates the poet in the ways of holy love, and the two are betrothed. Carol Kaske &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/43446925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;states&lt;/a&gt; that the repeated sonnet 83 captures the unique nature of the state of betrothal, where courtship has been successful, but desire not yet fulfilled. She points out that the phrase &amp;quot;plenty makes me poor&amp;quot; (line 8) is a direct translation of Narcissus's words in Ovid's &lt;em&gt;Metamorphoses&lt;/em&gt;: &amp;quot;Inopem me copia fecit&amp;quot;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Thus the proverb &amp;quot;Inopem me copia fecit&amp;quot; is wittily apt for the frustrations of the betrothed who sees but cannot see, possesses yet cannot possess his intended. The promise exacerbates the desire; to dramatize how anticlimactic this is, he actually repeats a pre-betrothal sonnet.         (p. 276)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, William Clarence Johnson &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spensersamoretti00john/page/235/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;maintains&lt;/a&gt; that Sonnet 83 represents the poet's reëvaluation of the purely physical desire of Sonnet 35 as it is transformed the more disciplined desire for a union in marriage:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The lover's assessment of the real value of his experiences surfaces through the substance of reverie or memory, and in 83 the poet provides a virtual microcosm of the entire sequence. The poem maintains the Petrarchan idiom (now transformed), the autobiographical elements, the vanity theme, shadowy Neo-Platonism, and the contrasts between sterile and nourishing love. But in 83 the lover is no longer the &lt;em&gt;voyeur&lt;/em&gt; but the &lt;em&gt;voyant&lt;/em&gt;; what he sees is the experience of the past through new eyes, allowing him to see the present face to face.         (p. 235–236).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These various intentional repetition arguments do have their strengths. One could also claim that Sonnet 83's reflection of Sonnet 35 is apt because of the Narcissus metaphor central to the pair—an argument I have not seen made, and which could probably be elaborated. But Johnson, Kaske, Larsen, and others notwithstanding, I do not find the claim that Sonnet 83 deliberately repeats and recontextualizes Sonnet 35 entirely convincing.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There is no gainsaying that calendars and numerological patterns play an important role in Spenser's structuring of his works; after all, his major early work is &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shepheardes_Calender&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The Shepheardes Calendar&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. And certainly there are links between some of the &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; sonnets and specific liturgical dates. But the idea that the entire sequence covers a specific three-month period where the poet goes from various stages of wooing to  eventual betrothal seems rather far-fetched. G. K. Hunter has &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;identified&lt;/a&gt; some of the weaknesses of this viewpoint:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Two sonnets refer to spring. One (70) falls on 2 April, which has a general appropriateness, but no numerical exactitude; the other (19) falls on 10 February, which no normal English year allows to be spring-like. ... Moreover, Sonnet 89 (21 April) suggests winter as clearly as the others suggest spring. Why should we say that this winter is only metaphorical, when other dates are &amp;quot;real&amp;quot;?         (p. 40 and &lt;em&gt;passim&lt;/em&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Another weakness of the intentional repetition arguments is the way in which critics account for the shift in line 6 between &amp;quot;having&amp;quot; in Sonnet 35 and &amp;quot;seeing&amp;quot; in Sonnet 83. If the sequence is meant to represent the progression of a courtship, with Sonnet 83 being part of the set of poems representing betrothal, then &amp;quot;having&amp;quot; seems more apt for this sonnet, and &amp;quot;seeing&amp;quot; for Sonnet 35. Yet the actual sequence has the opposite. Johnson argues that &amp;quot;the change from 'having' to 'seeing' also denotes the movement from Petrarchan unenlightenment to spiritual enlightenment&amp;quot; (p. 235). It seems strained to claim that &amp;quot;having&amp;quot; one's object in view is unenlightened but &amp;quot;seeing&amp;quot; it is enlightened, particularly when in both cases the effect is to &amp;quot;gaze on it the more.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The conditions under which poetry circulated in the 16th C. offer a more plausible explanation for the &amp;quot;having/seeing&amp;quot; variation. L. Cummings's &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/449332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;detailed examination of Sonnet 8&lt;/a&gt; demonstrates that versions of Spenser's sonnets circulated in manuscript before their inclusion in &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;. The variations among the manuscripts of Sonnet 8 are similar to those between Sonnets 35 and 83, including altered words as well as differences in punctuation and spelling. The replacement of &amp;quot;seeing&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;having&amp;quot; might indeed be a Spenserian revision, but an earlier draft of the sonnet might simply have been mistakenly included in the manuscript sent over to Ponsonby. I hesitate to attribute the inclusion of essentially the same poem twice to authorial deliberation rather than simply to the vagaries of scribal and manuscript transmission.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also likely that Ponsonby did not receive Spenser's imprimatur over the final form in which &lt;em&gt;Amoretti and Epithalamion&lt;/em&gt; was printed. In a footnote, Cumming points to a couple of reasons for doubting that the sequence was published with Spenser's entire approval:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I say &amp;quot;seemingly&amp;quot; approved because there is no dedicatory letter by Spenser, an aberration from his practice, and because Ponsonby in his letter to Sir Robert Needham writes that &amp;quot;I do more confidently presume to publish it in his absence&amp;quot; because of Needham's patronage.         (p. 129 n. 5)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I find Cummings' suggestion that Ponsonby perhaps did not have Spenser's imprimatur for his printing of &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; reasonably persuasive, so I incline more toward Lever's view that the repetition is an error. The arguments that the repetition is deliberate seem apophenic to me.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;h2&gt;References (except for Wikipedia)&lt;/h2&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Cummings, L. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/449332&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt; VIII: New Manuscript Versions&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;Studies in English Literature 1500–1900&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 4, No. 1, The English Renaissance (Winter 1964), pp. 125–135. JSTOR. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dasenbrock, Reed Way. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/462199&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Petrarchan Context of Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;PMLA&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 100, No. 1 (January 1985), pp. 38–50. JSTOR. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dunlop, Alexander. &amp;quot;Introduction to &lt;em&gt;Amoretti and Epithalamion&lt;/em&gt;.&amp;quot; In &lt;em&gt;The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser&lt;/em&gt;, ed. William A. Oram et al. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989. Pp. 585–597.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Hunter, G. K. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3507169&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;'Unity' and Numbers in Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;The Yearbook of English Studies&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 5 (1975), pp. 39–45. JSTOR. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Johnson, William C. &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/spensersamoretti00john/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Spenser's&lt;/em&gt; Amoretti: &lt;em&gt;Analogies of Love&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1990. Archive.org. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Kaske, Carol V. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/43446925&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Spenser's &lt;em&gt;Amoretti and Epithalamion&lt;/em&gt; of 1595: Structure, Genre, and Numerology&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; &lt;em&gt;English Literary Renaissance&lt;/em&gt; Vol. 8 No. 3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 271–295. JSTOR. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Larsen, Kenneth, ed. &lt;em&gt;Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition.&lt;/em&gt; Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Lever, J. W. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/elizabethanloves00leverich/mode/1up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Elizabethan Love Sonnet&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1956. University Paperbacks. London: Methuen, 1966. Archive.org. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Spenser, Edmund. &amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://fullonlinebook.com/poems/amoretti-sonnet-83/luiz.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amoretti: Sonnet 83&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;quot; FullBookOnline. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=iau.31858009575899&amp;amp;view=1up&amp;amp;seq=13&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long ſince by Edmund Spenſer.&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt; Printed for William Ponſonby, 1595. Hathi Trust. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;———. &lt;em&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/amoretti.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Amoretti and Epithalamion&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/em&gt;. 1595. Luminariam.org Renascence Editions. Accessed 24 May 2021.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T07:58:17.777" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T07:58:17.777" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18725" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18713" CreationDate="2021-05-24T18:59:35.920" Score="-3" Body="&lt;p&gt;Possibly, Bastian is the sun going through the Mazzeroth. B in Hebrew is Bet. House of Satan, House of Lazurus, &amp;amp; The House of God. Ba-stian Ba-lthazar B-ux.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="12998" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T18:59:35.920" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18727" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18718" CreationDate="2021-05-24T20:43:43.557" Score="1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Similarly to verbose's answer, I think the best option is to paraphrase the abbreviation: even a listener who would recognise the meaning of &lt;em&gt;f.&lt;/em&gt; in text may well not recognise it spoken. A good option which doesn't require rearranging the rest of the sentence would be &lt;strong&gt;page XX onwards&lt;/strong&gt;, for example &amp;quot;Harding, page 274 onwards&amp;quot;. You could leave out the word &amp;quot;page&amp;quot; for brevity but I think it's a little clearer with it in.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10803" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T20:43:43.557" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18728" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18718" CreationDate="2021-05-24T22:53:17.380" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;The question does not mention the language in which that specific book is written. However, in German academic writing, the reference &lt;code&gt;(Harding, 274f.)&lt;/code&gt; would refer to pages 274–275 in a publication by Harding listed in the bibliography or references. (The publication may be a book or an article, but there would be only one by &amp;quot;Harding&amp;quot;, otherwise, the year of publication or some other information would need to be added to disambiguate the reference.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;By contrast, &lt;code&gt;(Harding, 274ff.)&lt;/code&gt; would refer to pages 274, 275 and 276, whereas a reference to a larger number of consecutive pages tends to be written as, e.g. &lt;code&gt;(Harding, 274-77.)&lt;/code&gt;. (Admittedly, conventions can vary a bit.) The &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; stands for &amp;quot;und folgende [Seite]&amp;quot; (literally &amp;quot;and following [page]&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; for &amp;quot;und folgende [Seiten]&amp;quot; (literally &amp;quot;and following [pages]&amp;quot;).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the English-speaking world, &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; are sometimes also used, in which case &amp;quot;ff&amp;quot; may refer to an unspecified number of pages rather than just two. For example, the ACS style guide (by the American Chemical Society) writes (in chapter 14):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;You may also indicate pagination in reference citations by “f ” or “ff ”, which&#xA;mean “and following” page or pages, respectively. The f or ff is set in roman type&#xA;and is spaced from the preceding number:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;60 f (indicates page 60 and the page following—pages 60 and 61)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;60 ff (indicates page 60 and pages following)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;58–60 ff (indicates pages 58 through 60 and pages following—essentially the&#xA;same as 58 ff except that the three pages enumerated contain the most pertinent&#xA;information and other relevant information is scattered on the rest of the pages)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;There are contexts in which &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; may stand for &amp;quot;folio&amp;quot; in the sense of &amp;quot;folio-size edition&amp;quot;. For example &amp;quot;F1&amp;quot; can stand for (Shakespeare's) &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;First Folio&lt;/a&gt;, &amp;quot;F2&amp;quot; for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Folio&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Second Folio&lt;/a&gt;, etcetera, but in Shakespeare's case, this went up to &amp;quot;F4; there definitely weren't 274 of them. The first &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson_folios&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;folio edition of Ben Jonson's works&lt;/a&gt; was published in 1616 and probably inspired the first Shakespeare folio.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In other contexts, &amp;quot;f&amp;quot; can stand for &amp;quot;leaf&amp;quot; (i.e. the size of leaf that the &amp;quot;folio editions&amp;quot;, above, are named after). For example, Eugene Giddens's &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Shakespearen Play Tex&lt;/em&gt; contains the following example of a speech heading from Ben Jonson's &lt;em&gt;Poetaster&lt;/em&gt; followed by a reference (page 87):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Hora. Tibv. Gall. Mecoe. Virg. And thanks to Caesar,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;That thus hath exercis'd his patience.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(1616: Ff6)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Ff6 refers to the sixth leaf (6f) in Ben Jonson's Folio edition (F) of 1616.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, in references such as &amp;quot;(Harding, 274f.)&amp;quot;, I assume the intended meaning is page numbers, not folio editions or folio leaves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;hr /&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;References&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Coghill, Anne M.;  Garson, Lorrin R. (editors): &lt;em&gt;The ACS Style Gudie: Effective Communication of Scientific Communication&lt;/em&gt;. Third edition. Washington: American Chemical Society, 2006.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Giddens, Eugene: &lt;em&gt;How to Read a Shakespearean Play Text&lt;/em&gt;. Cambridge University Press, 2011.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-05-24T22:53:17.380" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18729" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-25T08:02:33.413" Score="0" ViewCount="45" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Sing something,’ said Poppy to Elizabeth. ‘Sing ‘‘Breaking Up Is Hard&#xA;To Do’’.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Oh, not that,’ said Philip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘You do the come-ah come-ah,’ said Elizabeth to Philip.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;They sang. Billy flung himself about in Dexter’s arms, loopy, with rolling&#xA;eyes. Their rhythm was solid, they slid their eyes sideways to meet, and&#xA;smiled as if to mock each other for their unerring harmonies. Athena saw&#xA;they were professionals. The piano is such a lonely instrument, she thought:&#xA;always by yourself with your back to the world. The music, thought Dexter&#xA;irritably, is American music. He remembered Dr A.E. Floyd’s quavering&#xA;voice on the radio: ‘Some people pronounce it Purcell: that’s an&#xA;Ameddicanism.’ The song ended. ‘Now we’ll sing,’ said Dexter. He put&#xA;down Billy, who wandered away; he made Arthur come and stand beside&#xA;his chair, and they sang ‘The Wild Colonial Boy’. Arthur had the long song&#xA;word-perfect. He stood to attention and threw back his head on the high&#xA;notes. Vicki watched with a cold eye. ‘I suppose,’ thought Elizabeth, ‘that&#xA;&lt;strong&gt;he is trying to keep something alive.’ It embarrassed her to see the righteous&#xA;set of Dexter’s mouth between verses&lt;/strong&gt;: she looked away.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Drunk on performance, Dexter hardly let a pause fall before he cried&lt;/strong&gt;,&#xA;‘And now I’ll sing ‘‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’’ . . . And pour&#xA;contempt on awhaw-hawl my pride,’ &lt;strong&gt;he bawled&lt;/strong&gt;. He drew breath and looked&#xA;around him, smiling, with tear-filled eyes, his right arm still extended in its&#xA;melodramatic curve. No-one spoke. Poppy turned a page.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Mind if I sing another stanza?’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Yes,’ said Vicki. ‘I do. Hymns are boring.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a) Does &amp;quot;He is trying to keep something alive&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He is trying to draw their attention toward himself?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;He is trying to draw their attention toward something?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b) Does &amp;quot;righteous set of Dexter's mouth between verses&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;the posture of Dexter's mouth after reading each verse that seemed he was very satisfied of himself&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;And&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;c) Does &amp;quot;Drunk on performance, Dexter hardly let a pause fall before he cried&amp;quot; mean:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because he was drunk in performance, after he sang a song he cried immediately that he want to sing another song?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Because he was drunk in performance when he wanted to increase his voice during singing he could not fall pause before it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T13:48:25.567" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T13:48:25.567" Title="Meaning of &quot;he is trying to keep something alive.&quot; and &quot;righteous set of Dexter's mouth...&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18730" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-25T13:47:34.893" Score="-2" ViewCount="52" Body="&lt;p&gt;I recently read &lt;em&gt;The Mill on the Floss&lt;/em&gt; by George Elliot. To research and explore more, I need some alternate readings of the text. So far I know of Feminist, Modern or Victorian Romantic readings of the book but couldn't find any suitable text in this regards.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I was hoping to find the best readings for these or any other alternate perspectives of the novel.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13007" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-25T15:24:43.927" LastActivityDate="2021-05-25T15:24:43.927" Title="Readings from 'The Mill on the Floss'?" Tags="&lt;george-eliot&gt;&lt;the-mill-on-the-floss&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ClosedDate="2021-05-25T20:05:55.250" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18733" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="75" CreationDate="2021-05-26T01:43:17.417" Score="-4" Body="&lt;p&gt;I would like to offer an addendum to the speculation of said authorship.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;While this William S. Sadler may have been a contributor or perhaps co-author, he is a man (in the gender sense, not his mortality).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;If you are studied in psychology and are well versed in the intrinsic behavior of the human psyche. You should have already determined that a woman (female mind) has heavily contributed to the overall theme and infrastructure of this book.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is also possible that William S. Sadler was a ghost author for the true female mind behind this work.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Having stated my belief to the form of the author based on personal academia. It is my professional opinion and conclusion that either the whole work or the major part was authored by a woman.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The remainder can only be addressed in the realm of fiction and fantasy. And though it does depend on conjecture, I offer that any hypnotical construct is sustainable without proof. This book as well as my opinions are mutually hypothetical.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What then was this author(s) purpose remains unknown. However, as much as the depiction of  Satan was historically male it is possible Satan's personality and character is actually female. Not in a reproductive sense but in the form and mind of the creature. Just as the character Satan was portrayed as female in the Mel Gibson movie. Although Mel Gibson likely had an ulterior motive for depicting Satan as a women.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I admit the book offers good fiction and it would also make a good science fiction novel. Perhaps a movie trilogy could be extrapolated from it. Just leave out the religious content. The women that wrote this was talented to be sure. But in the modern era we know fiction when we read it. Reality has rejected this book but the realm of fiction would welcome it with arms wide open.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13011" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-26T02:43:39.490" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T02:43:39.490" CommentCount="4" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18735" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-26T15:45:21.020" Score="1" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;Tiel Aisha Ansari's poem &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.soul-lit.com/poems/V17/Ansari/Dervish%20Lion.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;Dervish Lion&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; is in four parts, the narrator speaking to the wind, a mountain, the tide, and a lion. (Possibly corresponding to four elements, if the lion can be interpreted as fire?) The wind, mountain, and tide reply in largely expected ways: the wind is &amp;quot;nothing but the hot breath of the sun&amp;quot;, the mountain is &amp;quot;nothing but the stillness of the earth&amp;quot;, and the tide is &amp;quot;nothing but the cold dance of the moon&amp;quot;. The lion, on the other hand, is much more aggressive, leaping at the narrator and roaring:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I AM NOTHING, NOTHING&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;nothing but the hunger of your heart for Allah!&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;What is this lion, or what does it represent?&lt;/strong&gt; It's called a &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dervish&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;dervish&lt;/a&gt;, but so are the more placid wind, mountain, and tide. It has &amp;quot;ozone crackling in his mane&amp;quot;, which strikes me as odd imagery, and maybe relates to the fire connection that I conjectured above. Why is the lion &amp;quot;the hunger of your heart for Allah&amp;quot;? (Ansari is described as a &amp;quot;Sufi warrior poet&amp;quot;, and she presumably knows what she's talking about when it comes to Islam and Sufiism and dervishes. There might be some deeper connection or significance here.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-26T15:45:21.020" Title="What is the lion in Tiel Aisha Ansari's &quot;Dervish Lion&quot;?" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;tiel-aisha-ansari&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18736" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="3347" CreationDate="2021-05-26T23:22:06.740" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;The identities of nominating bodies are a strictly held secret.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The statutes of the Nobel Foundation restrict disclosure of information about the nominations, whether publicly or privately, for 50 years. The restriction concerns the nominees and nominators, as well as investigations and opinions related to the award of a prize.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That being said, looking at the &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/list.php?prize=4&amp;amp;year=1960&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;released Nobel nomination archives&lt;/a&gt; (from 1960-1966), we have a few examples to guide us.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Authors%27_Union&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Norwegian Authors Union&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEN_International&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Pen Club&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Netherlands Writers Association (evidently a local chapter of Pen International)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Peruvian Writers Association (another chapter of Pen International)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croatian_Writers%27_Association&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Yugoslav Writers´ Association&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://pen-international.org/centres/danish-centre&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;The Danish PEN-Club&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Dutch PEN-Club&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Austrian PEN-Club (Österreichischer PEN-Klub)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Swiss Writers Association (Schweizerischer Schriftstellerverein)&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Polish PEN-Club&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Portuguese Author´s Society&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Brazilian PEN-Club&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;The Greek Authors´ Union&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ul&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In short, the bulk of these associations appear to be those with a direct relation to Pen International or where their current president was a significant member of Pen, prior to becoming the leader of their country's writer's organisation.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Whether that remains true today is anyone's guess. Ask again in 50 years.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastEditorUserId="262" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T18:20:34.253" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T18:20:34.253" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18737" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="14071" CreationDate="2021-05-26T23:38:53.117" Score="-1" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is this what you want? I don't think you're going to find a text for free. I only just found this like 10 minutes ago. It appears to be complete.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ScottHermeticaVolOne/page/n1/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;https://archive.org/details/ScottHermeticaVolOne/page/n1/mode/2up&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13029" LastEditorUserId="289" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T06:01:01.353" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T06:01:01.353" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18738" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-26T23:44:57.067" Score="3" ViewCount="71" Body="&lt;p&gt;Is there a Latin version of the &lt;em&gt;Crater Hermetis&lt;/em&gt; by Ludovico Lazzarelli available online?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13029" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T00:04:57.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T03:22:29.510" Title="Online Latin version of the &quot;Crater Hermetis&quot;" Tags="&lt;latin-literature&gt;&lt;crater-hermetis&gt;&lt;ludovico-lazzarelli&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18739" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18738" CreationDate="2021-05-27T03:22:29.510" Score="4" Body="&lt;p&gt;Yes, it is available on &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/ita-bnc-mag-00000928-001/page/n132/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Archive.org&lt;/a&gt;. It is part of a volume printed in 1505 with this long title:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Contenta in hoc volumine. Pimander. Mercurij Trismegisti liber De sapiential et potestate dei. Asclepius. Eiusdem Mercurij liber De voluntate diuina. Item Crater Hermetis a Lazarelo Septempedano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;That translates to:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The contents of this volume. Pimander. Mercury Thrice-Majestic's Book of the Wisdom and Power of God. Asclepius. The same Mercury's book On the Free Will of God. Also Crater Hermetis by Lazarelo Septempedano.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(Translation mine, so iffy.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I guess Hermes Trismegistus is &amp;quot;Mercury Thrice-Majestic&amp;quot; and the book is an anthology of works about or attributed to him?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="289" LastActivityDate="2021-05-27T03:22:29.510" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18740" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T05:15:58.290" Score="5" ViewCount="56" Body="&lt;p&gt;From the beginning of part 2, chapter 2:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Winston picked his way up the lane through dappled light and&#xA;shade, stepping out into &lt;strong&gt;pools of gold&lt;/strong&gt; wherever the boughs&#xA;parted. Under the trees to the left of him the ground was misty&#xA;with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second&#xA;of May. From somewhere deeper in the heart of the wood came&#xA;the droning of ring-doves.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What is the meaning of &amp;quot;pools of good&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13031" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-27T07:27:55.787" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T16:00:03.087" Title="What is the meaning of &quot;pools of gold&quot; in &quot;Nineteen Eighty-Four&quot;?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;george-orwell&gt;&lt;nineteen-eighty-four&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18741" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T11:18:50.593" Score="2" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;em&gt;100 Years of Solitude&lt;/em&gt;, it is apparent that Rebecca kills Jose Arcadio, her husband.&#xA;What mythology or post-colonial meaning does this event hold generally? How do you understand it emotionally, spiritually, or from Rebecca's life particularly?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13033" LastEditorUserId="13033" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T12:59:30.660" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T12:59:30.660" Title="Why does Rebecca kill Jose Arcadio in 100 Years of Solitude?" Tags="&lt;spanish-literature&gt;&lt;gabriel-garcia-marquez&gt;&lt;one-hundred-years-of-solitude&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18742" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-27T13:25:53.043" Score="1" ViewCount="38" Body="&lt;p&gt;I was once solving a test passage on Khan Academy last year. It contained a story of a boy who fooled a newspaper-boy to tell all the other residents of a village that a man was marrying a woman. It was an excerpt from a novel that was so very hilarious. What novel is this from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13035" LastEditorUserId="13035" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T10:11:42.507" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T10:11:42.507" Title="Boy fooled a newspaper-boy to tell the other villagers of a marriage" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18743" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18744" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" Score="0" Body="Questions about the novel 'The Mill on the Floss' (1860) by George Eliot. Use with the tag [george-eliot]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:53:32.977" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18745" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18746" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" Score="0" Body="Questions about the narrative poem 'Sordello' (1840) by Robert Browning. Use with the tag [robert-browning]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:57:43.407" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18747" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18748" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" Score="0" Body="Questions about the sonnet cycle 'Amoretti' (1595) by Edmund Spenser. Use with the tags [edmund-spenser] and [poetry]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T14:59:25.927" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18749" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18750" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French poet and critic Annie Le Brun (born 1942). Use with the tag [french-literature] unless the question is specifically about the author's literary criticism or literary theory." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T15:01:23.580" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18751" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-28T15:46:58.330" Score="0" ViewCount="34" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;How fresh and pretty he looked, sitting at her piano in his clean white&#xA;shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the top button fastened! She said, ‘You&#xA;look gorgeous!’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He laughed and looked down. ‘What was that you were listening to?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Haydn. It’s in C major. Isn’t that supposed to be the optimistic key? I&#xA;could never understand why I always felt so cheerful after I’d heard that&#xA;concerto, till I thought what key it was in.’ She blushed: what an idiotic&#xA;generalisation. Surely musicians were beyond such crassness. Nerves cause&#xA;chatter. Least said soonest mended.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Let’s go somewhere?’ he said.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Where?’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Just out. Look at things.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘Wait till I get my bag.’&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;She stood in the middle of the bedroom and looked at the rows of books.&#xA;She read novels fast, lying for hours on her side holding the book open on&#xA;the other pillow; &lt;strong&gt;they blurred into one another and were gone&lt;/strong&gt;. Great&#xA;passions are ridiculous, she thought, &lt;strong&gt;although it is terribly cathartic to have&#xA;felt&lt;/strong&gt;. She imagined that Philip had indulged in sexual perversions with&#xA;strangers. Every man she met was inferior to Dexter, but only, perhaps,&#xA;because she had chosen that this should be the case.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;a:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;they blurred into one another and were gone&amp;quot; refer to &amp;quot;she and her books&amp;quot; and the sentence mean she became immersed in reading?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;does &amp;quot;they&amp;quot; refer to &amp;quot;books&amp;quot; and the whole sentence mean &amp;quot;because she quickly read the novels and these books very soon were forgotten&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;b:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;although it is terribly cathartic to have felt&amp;quot; in the sentence &amp;quot;passions are ridiculous, she thought, &lt;strong&gt;although it is terribly cathartic to have&#xA;felt&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot; mean &amp;quot;although it is too soothing to have great passion&amp;quot;?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11836" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T16:36:13.303" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:21:14.187" Title="meaning of &quot;they blurred into one another and were gone&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="6" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18752" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18740" CreationDate="2021-05-28T16:00:03.087" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;In terms of explicit imagery, Orwell is referring to the yellow sunlight passing between the trees and making bright patterns on the ground, thusly.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zvgIc.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/zvgIc.png&quot; alt=&quot;enter image description here&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;These similes and metaphors reflect a fairly simple &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;'pathetic fallacy'&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, where Winston's mental state change and improvement (in terms of his journey from the grim city into the beautiful countryside where he will be meeting his lover) are demonstrated to the reader by showing them some idyllic &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.nps.gov/museum/exhibits/landscape_art/exb/Eminent_Americans_At_Home/Pastoral_Landscapes/lgImages/LONG4306.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;pastoral scenes&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="262" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T16:00:03.087" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18754" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-28T20:19:36.340" Score="1" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am trying to identify a short story originally published in the 1970s in a British horror anthology. It concerns the invention of a selective memory eraser, and the story concludes with everyone in Britain having been fitted with one of the helmet-like devices by the government, and watching the same episode of the same soap opera every night and eating the same meal, before having their memory of the day wiped so they can live it all over again. I feel sure that the anthology was published by New English Library.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13040" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-28T22:14:48.880" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:14:48.880" Title="Short British horror story about a selective, helmet-like memory eraser" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18755" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18751" CreationDate="2021-05-28T22:21:14.187" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;They&amp;quot; refers to the novels.  She is reading them quickly -- so quickly that she doesn't notice the details that distinguish them from each other, so they all blur together in her memory, insofar as she remembers them at all.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;cathartic&amp;quot; is not &amp;quot;soothing&amp;quot; but purgative.  It refers to Aristotle's theory of literature by which a work of literature produces strong emotions and lets you release them, to your psychological benefit -- although, in this case, she is thinking of the real-life passions she felt for men, not the novels she read, because she didn't read them deeply enough for catharsis.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:21:14.187" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18756" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="12462" CreationDate="2021-05-28T22:52:48.143" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;Reverence is a deep respect shown to someone or something.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Usually, when you revere something, you know why you do so, and it is colored by that knowledge.  One reveres a mountain for its majesty, or a perfect rose for its beauty.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In this case, Smith does not really understand why it is singing, but he knows it's not for a specific audience.  This is particularly sharp because his own life is, and he knows it is, under constant surveillance, making just about everything he does being for the  watcher.  He does not articulate this difference (perhaps he can't bring himself to?), but the result is that his reverence is therefore vague -- he does not know exactly why he reveres it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="10061" LastActivityDate="2021-05-28T22:52:48.143" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18757" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T07:45:06.407" Score="4" ViewCount="22" Body="&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Under these baffling conditions there is no thorough discussion of the world outlook whatever, anywhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—&lt;em&gt;The New World Order&lt;/em&gt;, by H.G. Wells&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I interpret the &amp;quot;world outlook&amp;quot; as &amp;quot;world state&amp;quot;. Am I right? Or what does the author mean by it?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My other question is, what does &amp;quot;whatever&amp;quot; mean here?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The full text of the paragraph (with the above sentence highlighted) is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Publishers publish for nothing but safe profits; it would astound a&#xA;bookseller to tell him he was part of the world's educational&#xA;organisation or a publisher's traveller, that he existed for any&#xA;other purpose than to book maximum orders for best sellers and earn&#xA;a record commission—letting the other stuff, the highbrow stuff&#xA;and all that, go hang.  They do not understand that they ought to&#xA;put public service before gain.  They have no inducement to do so&#xA;and no pride in their function.  Theirs is the morale of a&#xA;profiteering world.  Newspapers like to insert brave-looking&#xA;articles of conventional liberalism, speaking highly of peace and&#xA;displaying a noble vagueness about its attainment; now we are at&#xA;war they will publish the fiercest attacks upon the enemy--because&#xA;such attacks are supposed to keep up the fighting spirit of the&#xA;country; but any ideas that are really loudly and clearly&#xA;revolutionary they dare not circulate at all. &lt;strong&gt;Under these baffling&#xA;conditions there is no thorough discussion of the world outlook&#xA;whatever, anywhere.&lt;/strong&gt;  The democracies are only a shade better than&#xA;the dictatorships in this respect.  It is ridiculous to represent&#xA;them as realms of light at issue with darkness.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;—From &lt;a href=&quot;http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks04/0400671.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Project Gutenberg&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13042" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:01:18.077" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:01:18.077" Title="What does “world outlook” mean in this context?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;h-g-wells&gt;&lt;the-new-world-order&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18758" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T09:06:48.003" Score="0" ViewCount="26" Body="&lt;p&gt;In William Shakespeare's &lt;em&gt;The Merchant of Venice&lt;/em&gt;, the Prince of Morocco opens Portia's golden casket and finds a scroll, which reads:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;All that glisters is not gold,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Often have you heard that told.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Many a man his life hath sold&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;But my outside to behold.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Gilded tombs do worms infold.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Had you been as wise as bold,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Young in limbs, in judgment old,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Your answer had not been inscroll’d,&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;Fare you well, your suit is cold.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;What does this imply about the character of the Prince of Morocco?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13043" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T12:54:46.707" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T12:54:46.707" Title="Implications of the scroll in the golden casket in &quot;The Merchant of Venice&quot;" Tags="&lt;character-analysis&gt;&lt;william-shakespeare&gt;&lt;the-merchant-of-venice&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18759" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T12:46:21.100" Score="3" ViewCount="28" Body="&lt;p&gt;In a 1907 letter to Walt Whitman’s biographer &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_Perry&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Bliss Perry&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Gosse&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Edmund Gosse&lt;/a&gt; wrote:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I came across your really delightful volume on Walt Whitman,† and read it with such pleasure that I had to &lt;em&gt;review&lt;/em&gt; it also, to try and share my pleasure with others. But I don’t believe in those “children”! &lt;strong&gt;For reasons, of course, precisely opposite to those put forward by the servers of pillows to all armholes.&lt;/strong&gt; The real psychology of W W would be enormously interesting. I think the keynote to it would be found to be a staggering ignorance, a perhaps wilful non-perception, of the real physical conditions of his nature. But the truth about him (the innermost truth) escapes from almost every page for those who can read.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Edmund Gosse (6th March 1907). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.184381/page/n309/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Letter to Professor Bliss Perry&lt;/a&gt;. In Evan Charteris, ed. (1931). &lt;em&gt;The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse&lt;/em&gt;, p. 302. London: Heinemann.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;† &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/waltwhitmanhisl00perr/page/n5/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Walt Whitman&lt;/em&gt; (1906)&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The “children” in which Gosse did not believe are the “six children” that Whitman claimed to have fathered, in an &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/waltwhitmanhisl00perr/page/44/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1890 letter to John Addington Symonds&lt;/a&gt; quoted by Bliss. Gosse presumably did not believe in them because he knew, or suspected, that Whitman was gay. But what did Gosse mean by “precisely opposite to those put forward by the servers of pillows to all armholes”? This is an allusion to Ezekiel 13:18:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Woe to the women that sew pillows to all armholes, and make kerchiefs upon the head of every stature to hunt souls!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(I suspect that Gosse actually wrote “sewers” and whoever transcribed the letter mis-read the word as “servers”.) But what is the connection between Gosse’s belief in Whitman’s homosexuality and Ezekiel’s criticism of fashionable clothing?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T12:46:21.100" Title="What did Edmund Gosse mean by “servers of pillows to all armholes”?" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;walt-whitman&gt;&lt;edmund-gosse&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18760" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T13:46:41.460" Score="5" ViewCount="105" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am looking for the source of the quote&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;allegedly by F. de La Rochefoucauld.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The only French version I could find was&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nous sommes plus intéressés à faire croire que nous sommes heureux qu’à essayer d’être heureux nous-mêmes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;but I cannot find it in maxims or elsewhere.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Would anyone know where it comes from?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSTFC.jpg&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;img src=&quot;https://i.stack.imgur.com/PSTFC.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;a picture of Rochefoucauld with the English version of the alleged quote&quot; /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="7759" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T14:34:58.393" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T21:55:20.273" Title="Is this F. de La Rochefoucauld's quote authentic?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;francois-de-la-rochefoucauld&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18761" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T14:37:27.043" Score="0" ViewCount="12" Body="&lt;p&gt;This passage is from &lt;em&gt;The Children's Bach&lt;/em&gt; by Helen Garner&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;He would have liked to move around her house and examine all its icons,&#xA;or to hang over the front windowsill with her and make remarks about the&#xA;dress and gait of passing pedestrians; but he wanted also to get her outside&#xA;and on to his own &lt;strong&gt;turf&lt;/strong&gt;, into public places where no-one was host and no-one&#xA;guest, where everything had a price, where he could get what he wanted,&#xA;pay for it, and keep moving in long, effortless, &lt;strong&gt;curving afternoons&lt;/strong&gt;&#xA;unsnagged by obligation or haste: &lt;strong&gt;the idea of destination meant almost as&#xA;little to him as it did to Billy&lt;/strong&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Is &amp;quot;curving afternoons&amp;quot; used metaphorically, and means afternoons that you feel relaxed?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does &amp;quot;the idea of destination meant almost as&#xA;little to him as it did to Billy.&amp;quot; mean: He had not got any idea about destination and he kept walking and where ever was his destination?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;And I think &amp;quot;turf&amp;quot; here mean the places that he went in his free time. Am I right?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="11836" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T15:02:15.400" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T15:02:15.400" Title="Meaning of &quot;curving afternoons&quot; and &quot;the idea of destination meant almost as little to him as...&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;the-childrens-bach&gt;&lt;helen-garner&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18762" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18763" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" Score="0" Body="Edmund Gosse (1849–1928), English poet, author and critic, known for his autobiography &quot;Father and Son&quot; (1907)." OwnerUserId="3003" LastEditorUserId="3003" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T15:09:52.887" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18764" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T16:52:24.877" Score="1" ViewCount="18" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an article about cycling and I want to include a well know quote from the professional cyclist Greg LeMond (the first American to win the Tour de France).  The quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The key is being able to endure psychologically. When you're not riding well, you think, why suffer? Why push yourself for four or five hours? The mountains are the pinnacle of suffering.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is all over the Internet, but I'm having trouble finding the original source.  I would like to properly attribute it in my citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4860" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T16:55:59.793" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T17:06:06.820" Title="Source of Greg LeMond's quote, &quot;The mountains are the pinnacle of suffering.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;greg-lemond&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18765" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T16:57:47.243" Score="1" ViewCount="21" Body="&lt;p&gt;I am not actually sure if this is a story I have watched, or read, or both. Certainly I have watched it as I have pictures on my mind. Anyway, the plot is: The wife is (I guess) abused by her husband. One day when he came back from work, he brought a meat (I don't remember what specifically) and it seems to be that this meat is her husband's favourite. After the wife cooked the food, she tried to taste or took a bite from the meat. The food was so delicious that she didn't notice that she has eaten all of the now-cooked meat. She panicked and rushed outside to think of a solution (for the husband has not yet arrived)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(this is the part where I am not sure)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So she goes outside and saw a funeral going on, with a body on a casket. After that she took home a meat, cooked it, and watched her husband eat someone's organ.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13045" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T17:08:40.573" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T17:08:40.573" Title="What's the title of the short story about wife accidentally eating all of her husbands food so she cooked &quot;something&quot; instead?" Tags="&lt;identification-request&gt;&lt;short-stories&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18766" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T17:01:40.197" Score="-1" ViewCount="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm writing an article about cycling and I want to include a well know quote from the professional cyclist Greg LeMond (the first American to win the Tour de France).  The quote is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It never gets easier; you just go faster.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote is all over the Internet, but I'm having trouble finding the original source.  I would like to properly attribute it in my citations.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="4860" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T17:07:37.187" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T17:07:37.187" Title="Source of Greg LeMond's quote, &quot;It never gets easier; you just go faster.&quot;" Tags="&lt;quote-source&gt;&lt;greg-lemond&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18767" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18764" CreationDate="2021-05-29T17:06:06.820" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;This is from &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Abt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Samuel Abt&lt;/a&gt;’s book &lt;em&gt;LeMond&lt;/em&gt; (1990):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“The key is being able to endure psychologically,” LeMond explained. “When you’re not riding well, you think. Why suffer? Why push yourself for four or five hours? The mountains are the pinnacle of suffering. You don’t know when you’re going to explode, when you have to back off. You’re pushing yourself almost to your maximum; then you recuperate and do it again. You might do it ten or fifteen times in a race. When you don’t have the conditioning or if you’ve been away from it a long time, you forget how much cycling hurts. You really forget.”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;sub&gt;Samuel Abt (1990). &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/lemondincredible00abts/page/n19/mode/2up&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;LeMond: The Incredible Comeback of an American Hero&lt;/em&gt;, p. 4&lt;/a&gt;. New York: Random House.&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Abt was a sports journalist who covered professional cycling, so the quote probably comes from an interview LeMond gave to Abt or a colleague.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="3003" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T17:06:06.820" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18768" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18757" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:00:32.237" Score="2" Body="&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;outlook&amp;quot; has several meanings, but the ones that are most relevant here are the third and fourth meaning in &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/outlook#Noun&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;3&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;An attitude or point of view.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;Expectation for the future.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can find examples of the third meaning in phrases and book titles such as &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/books/edition/The_Early_Buddhist_World_Outlook_in_Hist/cWnYAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;bsq=%22world+outlook%22&amp;amp;dq=%22world+outlook%22&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the Buddhist world outlook&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.jstor.org/stable/3747851?seq=1&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;the scientific world outlook&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/books/edition/Soviet_World_Outlook/eCk0lD8V-74C&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Soviet World Outlook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.de/books/edition/The_World_Outlook_of_the_Bible/oUq5oQEACAAJ&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;The World Outlook of the Bible&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;. This describes a specific way of looking at the world or a specific attittude towards it.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We can find an example of the fourth meaning in the title of the book &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9780860104766&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Oil Substitution: World Outlook to 2020&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (published in 1983).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In a way, Wells compares two world outlooks in the paragraph cited in the question: one that is oriented towards profit versus one that cares about the public interest. Wells argued for the establishment of a socialistic and scientifically planned world government, which would stand in stark contrast to the profit-oriented world that he criticises. Based on this, &amp;quot;world outlook&amp;quot; can be interpreted as a way of looking at the world that allows people to see that a change in the social and political order is necessary. See especially the phrase &amp;quot;any ideas that are really loudly and clearly revolutionary they dare not circulate at all&amp;quot;, which seems to refer to the kinds of ideas that would be necessary to create the &amp;quot;new world order&amp;quot; he has in mind.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;The New World Order&lt;/em&gt; was published in 1940, inspired by the outbreak of outbreak of World War II. Wells may also be thinking about what the (then) dominant world outlook was leading to, in the sense of Wiktionary's fourth meaning of &amp;quot;outlook&amp;quot;. This meaning cannot be entirely discarded here.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The phrase, &amp;quot;no (...) discussion (...) whatever&amp;quot; means &amp;quot;no discussion at all&amp;quot;. The addition of &amp;quot;whatever&amp;quot; is intended to strengthen the statement. See the second meaning of &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whatever#Adjective&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&amp;quot;whatever&amp;quot; in Wiktionary&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;ol start=&quot;2&quot;&gt;&#xA;&lt;li&gt;(dated, postpositive) At all, absolutely, whatsoever.&lt;/li&gt;&#xA;&lt;/ol&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:00:32.237" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18769" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18770" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" Score="0" Body="Questions about the non-fiction book 'The New World Order' (1940) by H. G. Wells. Use with the tag [h-g-wells]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:02:28.437" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18771" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18760" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:03:43.383" Score="6" Body="&lt;p&gt;The version you found on the internet was translated from English back to French. The real quote, which is due either to &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_de_La_Rochefoucauld_(writer)&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;La Rochefoucault&lt;/a&gt; or to the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Vichard_de_Saint-R%C3%A9al&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Abbé de Saint-Réal&lt;/a&gt;, is:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Nous nous tourmentons moins pour devenir heureux que pour faire croire que nous le sommes.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;My translation (as literal as I could grammatically make it):&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;We torment ourselves less to become happy than to make others believe that we are happy.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The earliest I could find it in Google books is &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Apologie_de_monsieur_De_La_Bruyere_ou_R/Y2c7xPx-MGwC?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;dq=%22Nous+nous+tourmentons+moins+pour+devenir+heureux+que+pour+faire+croire+que+nous+le+sommes%22&amp;amp;pg=PA282&amp;amp;printsec=frontcover&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;in this 1701 book&lt;/a&gt; which quotes it, and attributes it to La Rochefoucauld (1638–1680).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is in this &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Reflexions_ou_Sentences_et_Maximes_moral/FS1cAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;bsq=%22Nous%20nous%20tourmentons%20moins%20pour%20devenir%20heureux%20que%20pour%20faire%20croire%20que%20nous%20le%20sommes.%22%20rochefoucauld&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;1705&lt;/a&gt; edition of La Rochefoucauld's &lt;em&gt;Maxim's&lt;/em&gt;, where it the sixth in  a list of 50 maxims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;However, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.google.com/books/edition/Oeuvres/cFxJAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&amp;amp;gbpv=1&amp;amp;bsq=%22Nous%20nous%20tourmentons%20moins%20pour%20devenir%20heureux%20que%20pour%20faire%20croire%20que%20nous%20le%20sommes%22&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; is a link on Google books to a 1722 edition of &lt;em&gt;Oeuvres de M. L'Abbé de Saint-Réal&lt;/em&gt; (1633-1692) which contains the same list of 50 maxims.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So the list of 50 maxims also seems to have been incorporated into editions of La Rochefoucauld's &lt;em&gt;Maxims&lt;/em&gt; after his death, but it wasn't in editions published when he was alive (at least, it's not in &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_3VqoeF0bIjUC&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;this edition&lt;/a&gt; that Tsundoku found, which is a reproduction of the 1668 edition, in which the editor's note claims is the last one published before La Rochefoucauld's died in 1670.)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;So this maxim is probably by one of two 17th century writers, and has been attributed to both of them in posthumous collections of their work in the 18th century. Who is the real author? I don't know whether it is possible to determine this from the resources we have—and probably not from works in Google books.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="1152" LastEditorUserId="1152" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T21:55:20.273" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T21:55:20.273" CommentCount="2" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18772" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18773" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the French moralist and author François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680) or his life as a writer. Use with the tag [french-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:04:34.223" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18774" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18775" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the English poet, publisher, actor, painter, sculptor, jazz trumpeter and social commentator Jeff Nuttall (1933–2004) or his life as a writer." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:06:43.233" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18776" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18777" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the Japanese Narita Ryōgo (成田 良悟, born 1980) or his life as a writer. Use with the tag [japanese-literature]." OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:10:33.787" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18778" PostTypeId="5" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" Score="0" Body="" OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18779" PostTypeId="4" CreationDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" Score="0" Body="Questions about the works of the American cartoonist Dave Berg (1920–2002) or his life as an artist. Dave Berg is best known for his contributions to 'Mad'. " OwnerUserId="2191" LastEditorUserId="2191" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T18:20:15.687" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18780" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T19:57:30.303" Score="1" ViewCount="17" Body="&lt;p&gt;In Chapter 2 of his novel &lt;em&gt;Pantagruel&lt;/em&gt; François Rabelais writes (quoted from the &lt;a href=&quot;https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pantagruel/%C3%89dition_Nourry,_1530&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;edition on Wikisource&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Le philosophe racompte en mouvant la question, pourquoy cest que leau de la mer est sallee ? quau temps que Phebus bailla le gouvernement de son chariot lucificque à son fils Phaeton : Ledict Phaeton mal apris en lart, et ne scavant ensuyvre la ligne eclipticque entre les deux tropicques de la sphere du Soleil, varia de son chemin : et tant approcha de la terre, quil mist a sec toutes les contrees subiacentes, bruslant une grande partie du ciel, que les philosophes appellent via lactea : et les Lifrelofres nomment le chemin sainct Jacques. &lt;strong&gt;Adonc la terre fut tant eschauffee, quil luy vint une sueur enorme, dont elle sua toute la mer, que par ce est sallee&lt;/strong&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pantagruel/Chapter_II&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;translation by Thomas Urquhart and Peter Antony Motteux&lt;/a&gt;, this passage reads as follows:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;The philosopher reports, in moving the question, Wherefore it is that the sea-water is salt, that at the time when Phoebus gave the government of his resplendent chariot to his son Phaeton, the said Phaeton, unskilful in the art, and not knowing how to keep the ecliptic line betwixt the two tropics of the latitude of the sun's course, strayed out of his way, and came so near the earth that he dried up all the countries that were under it, burning a great part of the heavens which the philosophers call Via lactea, and the huffsnuffs St. James's way; although the most coped, lofty, and high-crested poets affirm that to be the place where Juno's milk fell when she gave suck to Hercules. &lt;strong&gt;The earth at that time was so excessively heated that it fell into an enormous sweat, yea, such a one as made it sweat out the sea, which is therefore salt, because all sweat is salt&lt;/strong&gt; (...)&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Rabelais writes &amp;quot;the philosopher&amp;quot;, as if it would be obvious who he has in mind. However, I could not find anything about the sea's salinity in the &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaethon&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Wikipedia article about Phaeton&lt;/a&gt;, even though the text cites several versions of the story: Plato, Ovid, Clement of Alexandria, Suetonius, Euripides and Lucian. Among these, only Plato and Clement of Alexandria are known as philosophers. I checked Clement of Alexandria's &lt;a href=&quot;https://archive.org/stream/writingsofclemen01clem/writingsofclemen01clem_djvu.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Stromata&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, but this text mentions Phaeton only briefly (though several times). Assuming that Rabelais is not leading us up (or down) the garden path, who is the philosopher he is referring to?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T22:51:37.623" Title="Which ancient philosopher claimed that the sea's salinity was connected with the fall of Phaeton?" Tags="&lt;french-literature&gt;&lt;francois-rabelais&gt;&lt;gargantua-and-pantagruel&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18781" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T20:05:26.693" Score="3" ViewCount="19" Body="&lt;p&gt;This excerpt is from &lt;em&gt;Five Children and It&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 2.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;“She’s not mad; it’s true,” said Anthea; “there is a fairy. If I ever see him again I’ll wish for something for you; at least I would if vengeance wasn’t wicked—so there!”&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;“Lor’ lumme,” said Billy Peasemarsh, “if there ain’t another on ’em!”&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't understand the last sentence, what does it mean?&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13046" LastEditorUserId="11259" LastEditDate="2021-05-29T20:07:56.790" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T21:16:02.343" Title="Meaning of &quot;Lor’ lumme if there ain’t another on ’em!&quot; from &quot;Five Children and It&quot;" Tags="&lt;meaning&gt;&lt;e-nesbit&gt;&lt;five-children-and-it&gt;" AnswerCount="1" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18782" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18781" CreationDate="2021-05-29T21:16:02.343" Score="3" Body="&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lumme&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Lor' lumme&lt;/a&gt;&amp;quot; is a contraction (eye dialect) of &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;Lord love me&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;: an exclamation, like many in English, which is religious in origin but not necessarily so in usage (compare with &amp;quot;oh my God&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;for God's sake&amp;quot;, which many people use casually in speech nowadays, whether they're religious or not).&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;another on 'em&amp;quot; is a colloquial way of saying &amp;quot;&lt;strong&gt;another of them&lt;/strong&gt;&amp;quot;. I couldn't find any dictionary reference for this, but there are other usages of this phrase, admittedly predating &lt;em&gt;Five Children and It&lt;/em&gt;, in which the meaning is more clear:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;‘She has no brother or sister.’&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;‘Niece, nevy, cousin, serwant, young ‘ooman, greengrocer.—Dash it! One or another on ‘em,’ said the turnkey, repudiating beforehand the refusal of all his suggestions.&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gutenberg.org/files/963/963-h/963-h.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Charles Dickens, &lt;em&gt;Little Dorrit&lt;/em&gt;, Chapter 6&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Tyb.&lt;/em&gt; That's one of the fellows who beat me last night. [...] There's another on 'em!&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;&lt;sub&gt;-- &lt;a href=&quot;https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=4l5gAAAAcAAJ&amp;amp;pg=PA59&amp;amp;lpg=PA59&amp;amp;dq=%22another+on+em%22&amp;amp;source=bl&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Thomas Egerton Wilks, &lt;em&gt;The King's Wager&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sub&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;In context, then, it seems that Billy Peasemarsh is assuming Anthea, like Jane, to be &amp;quot;[t]ouched in the head&amp;quot; and talking apparent nonsense about a furry fairy that grants wishes:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;'I tell you we did,' Jane said. 'There's a fairy there - all over brown fur - with ears like a bat's and eyes like a snail's, and he gives you a wish a day, and they all come true.'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Touched in the head, eh?' said the man in a low voice, 'all the more shame to you boys dragging the poor afflicted child into your sinful burglaries.'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'She's not mad; it's true,' said Anthea; 'there is a fairy. If I ever see him again I'll wish for something for you; at least I would if vengeance wasn't wicked - so there!'&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;'Lor' lumme,' said Billy Peasemarsh, 'if there ain't another on 'em!'&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Peasemarsh, and also the policeman who arrives shortly afterwards, both seem to assume that the boys are thieves and the girls are not quite sane: the policeman expects that the magistrate will ultimately &amp;quot;[s]end the afflicted ones to a home, as likely as not, and the boys to a reformatory&amp;quot;. So Peasemarsh's remark about &amp;quot;another on 'em&amp;quot; presumably means, from his point of view, another poor crazy girl being dragged into crime by her brothers. A simpler paraphrase of his sentence might be:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Good Lord, here's another of them!&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="17" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T21:16:02.343" CommentCount="1" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18783" PostTypeId="1" CreationDate="2021-05-29T21:22:44.840" Score="2" ViewCount="11" Body="&lt;p&gt;I'm looking for an elegy-style poem in which the narrator recounts ignoring the beautiful flowers around them, instead attending to a single flower that had yet to bloom. They thought this one flower would grow to become more spectacular than the rest, but it instead shriveled and died, causing the narrator great dismay.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;I can't recall the exact format, but it was most likely a prose poem of a couple hundred words. The style seemed to be of European origin in the 19th or 20th century. I read this a couple weeks ago on a literature exam; the question that used this passage was scheduled to be released, but has not been to the best of my knowledge.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Some poems I ruled out are &amp;quot;Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;Elegy IX: The Autumnal&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;Elegy Before Death&amp;quot;. I've tried searching for various combinations of &amp;quot;elegy&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;flower&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;eulogy&amp;quot;, etc. to no avail. I've tried everywhere I could think of, but this particular piece eludes me. Any help would be fantastic.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="13047" LastEditorUserId="13047" LastEditDate="2021-05-30T02:52:09.923" LastActivityDate="2021-05-30T02:52:09.923" Title="Looking for an elegy poem about a flower the narrator cared for (at the cost of enjoying life), which died and left him devastated" Tags="&lt;poetry&gt;&lt;identification-request&gt;" AnswerCount="0" CommentCount="3" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
  <row Id="18784" PostTypeId="2" ParentId="18780" CreationDate="2021-05-29T22:51:37.623" Score="0" Body="&lt;p&gt;In &lt;a href=&quot;https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Fragments_of_Empedocles&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;&lt;em&gt;Fragments of Empedocles&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;, translated by John Burnet (hosted on Wikisource), I found the follwing statements:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;(55) Sea the sweat of the earth. (...)&lt;br /&gt;&#xA;(56) Salt was solidified by the impact of the sun's beams.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;But these fragments don't mention Phaeton. Phaeton is not mentioned either on the page &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.philosophy.gr/presocratics/empedocles.htm&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Empedocles of Acragas&lt;/a&gt;, which also contains the above fragments.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:2008.01.0404:book=3:chapter=16&amp;amp;highlight=sweat&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Chapter XVI of &lt;em&gt;Placita Philosophorum&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; (by &amp;quot;Pseudo-Plutarch&amp;quot;) says,&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Empedocles [affirms], that the sea is the sweat of the earth burnt by the sun.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;This quote does not mention Phaeton either, or at least not directly: Phaeton's inability to steer the horses of the sun chariot brought the sun too close to the earth.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Aristotle rejected Empedocles's claim in &lt;a href=&quot;http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow noreferrer&quot;&gt;Part II of his &lt;em&gt;Metereology&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;It is equally absurd to suppose that anything has been explained by calling the sea 'the sweat of the earth', like Empedicles. Metaphors are poetical and so that expression of his may satisfy the requirements of a poem, but as a scientific theory it is unsatisfactory.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;&lt;/blockquote&gt;&#xA;&lt;p&gt;Phaeton is not mentioned here either. I assume Rabelais added the story of Phaeton based on the statement &amp;quot;the sea is the sweat of the earth burnt by the sun&amp;quot; from &lt;em&gt;Placita Philosophorum&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;&#xA;" OwnerUserId="2191" LastActivityDate="2021-05-29T22:51:37.623" CommentCount="0" ContentLicense="CC BY-SA 4.0" />
</posts>